Short story from The Proper Painting by Fabio Rivas, translated from Galician by Jonathan Dunne.
*
It was a familiar pain, the brambles scratching me on the toes, the tips of my feet, the ankles. It was a warning pain – one more step, and soft grass; three, and I would be treading on damp earth. With the seventh, if my calculations were correct, the water of the stream would calm the ardour of my wounds.
Winter was dying and the sun was warming my nape with a sunny caress, a respite from rain, a perennial ray. The waters took pity on my feet, which sank slowly into the mud of the shore as I lifted up my dress, bit by bit, until I was naked.
I knew this part of the river well. It was a still bowl where the current slowed down after several drops and jumps, great tits twittered happily and beech martens rummaged in their nests, while being watched over by buzzards. Pinecones opened with tardy explosions.
I waded out until my knees were wet – and then, once I was used to the chill of the water, my hips. I hugged myself with my arms and felt my serrated skin. I continued to my chest and my whole body went rigid. I wet my forehead and nose carefully before immersing myself fully. During the seconds I waited underwater, I was deaf. I could feel some unknown fish brushing past my legs. I pushed my feet against the bottom, curling up my toes to cling to the earth more tightly. For a moment, we were one single being. I was the river and the river was in me. House and guest, visit and host. The order didn’t matter.
I came up for air, breaking the surface in two, dressing myself in its sweet, protective transparency. Mosquitoes and dragonflies – silent butterflies as well, perhaps – began to buzz around me. I licked my lips and was immediately invaded by the taste of rust. Without realizing, down below, I must have bit myself in the heat of the moment.
I woke up from my sleep on the shore, with the dress draped over me, not wearing it. Something was moving sluggishly in the undergrowth, seemingly crushing everything underfoot, not worrying whether it was discovered or not. It couldn’t have been a small animal, mammals in the forest moved with mute expertise.
“I told you she would be here,” declared a male voice. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen her.”
I jumped to my feet and tried to put on my dress, but as I was about to insert my head in the bottom, I felt a shove. I flew at least two metres through the air and fell on my buttocks in the exact place where land and water became one.
“That can’t be a fairy,” they replied. “She’s very beautiful.”
“Look at those white eyes – don’t they just give you the heebie-jeebies?”
The first to speak sounded much deeper than the others. I identified the latter as adolescents because of their uneven voices. I crawled along as best I could, mounting the riverbank, scratching my back, my legs, everything, on the sticks and stones.
“Don’t injure yourself, we’ll do plenty of that ourselves.”
He grabbed me by the hair, which was still soaking, and yanked me to my feet. It wasn’t hard for him, the hands he used to seize me seemed made for that. It might not have been the first time he had done this. He turned me around with the same ease and brought me to my knees with a kick on my calf muscle.
“Stop!” I begged. “Don’t harm me, please!”
“Harm you? Don’t worry, after this you’ll be asking us to come back another day,” he gave me another shove and my face collided with the ground. “I’ll go first and, if there’s time for leftovers, then perhaps you’ll get a go, my lusty lads.”
I felt cold and fear and trembled, though I couldn’t have said which one made me do this. I could hear him clearly fiddling with the buckle of his belt before he threw himself on top of my naked body. He prised my legs apart with his own. I could discern his ragged breathing in my ear.
The rotten stink in the sky of his mouth.
“Stay still and it won’t hurt all that much.”
The others snickered behind him.
I screamed like a wounded animal and tried to push him off, but the battle was lost before it had started. I was trapped by his weight, everything within me was immobilized.
I felt it between my legs, hard and hot like a firebrand. He tried to subject me one, two times. At the third attempt, he entered. Something seemed to rip my innards asunder, as if someone had slit me open and torn out all my organs. The pain seared me inside like fire. I knew I was dead.
He began to thrust in and out of me. He was just getting ready to do it again when I heard her.
“That’s enough!” she shouted. “Leave her alone!”
A female voice, broken and brave. Hoarse, like that of an old, but vigorous woman who still has plenty to shout about.
“Nobody asked you, Darkie,” he replied without getting off me. “Or were you wanting to join in?”
“You hear fireworks and think there’s a party!” said another.
“Clear off before I call the authorities!”
When he let me go, I turned around and sat up as best I could. With swollen hands, I felt each crevice of my body. A sticky liquid oozed between my legs.
“The authorities!” he exclaimed wildly. “Call them, they’ll probably want to join us. How about you lift that skirt of yours and show us if you’re black all over?”
For a brief, conciliatory moment, there was silence.
“Put the knife away, Darkie, you’ll hurt yourself.” Silence. “You wouldn’t…”
And a colossal roar.
Followed by the thumping of a centipede’s feet hitting the ground in retreat.
“That’s it, they’ve gone,” she said, just as weak and broken as I was. “Calm down, take it easy.”
She sat beside me and put her trembling arms around me. With my head pressed against the stranger’s chest, I could hear the thumping of her heart, which beat impassively. Every time she talked to me, I could discern the aroma of warm milk.
She helped me delicately to get dressed, making sure I didn’t have any deep wounds. It was she who wiped away the blood between my legs. When she asked about my shoes and I said I didn’t have any, she declared she would try to get me a pair.
“You don’t understand. I don’t wear shoes,” I explained and realized she was surprised. “I’m blind.” Without being able to see her, I knew her eyes were fixed on my white ones. “I work out my location by treading on the ground. I can recognize the texture of each place. Cuts and corns on my feet are the price I pay for finding out where I am.”
The woman ran her hands over my feet and I experienced a sense of relief. She pressed down on the hard skin and squeezed her way along to my heels. Nobody had ever done this before.
I had so many questions I wanted to ask her I didn’t know where to start. Fortunately, she decided to answer some of them without my needing to voice them aloud:
“I was entering the mill when I heard the shouts. For a moment, I thought they were bandits, so was planning to shut myself in the mill and not come out until nightfall. But something told me they weren’t, it was another matter entirely. I approached in silence, being careful not to make any noise, just in case, and there they were. There you were.”
“Who are those people?” I asked in tears. “Why did they want to injure me?”
“My dear, they are not people. They are beasts, predatory animals without a heart. All the ill you know is stored within them. It was from them I learnt to carry this with me at all times.”
She took my hand and, though I resisted to begin with, I let her. On the tip of my thumb, I could feel the cold of metal and a soft, but sharp pain. I recognized the blade of a knife. She dragged my hand to her legs and I realized they bore the relief of scars and wounds along their entirety. A geography of suffering.
“This is what I pay for the colour of my skin.” I stroked her face. The thin eyebrows and small forehead. The budding of hair like two symmetrical bays. The straight nose and thick lips. “My father says I have Havana skin. Like my mother.”
“That’s why they called you Darkie…” I reflected, hurt and withered.
“Or Blackie, Monkey, Little Shit… But you’re not going to call me that,” she quickly interrupted me. “To them, we’re just a couple of crippled girls. The black one and the blind one, poor things. They think we’re defenceless, weak creatures. Leaves at the mercy of the wind. Incomplete works of God. But we’re not going to let them carry on like this. What we are has taught us how to survive in a world made to their measure. The effort you and I have had to make all our lives is something they don’t know about. It’s time we took back what is ours.”
She was right. When I was a little girl, after bacteria had already deprived me of my sight, one St John’s Eve a group of children invited me to go gate-stealing with them. According to tradition, we had to remove gates from the entrances to enclosures and hide them on the hillside, throw them in the river or lodge them in the crowns of trees. Make them disappear and let the cattle go free.
I went with them happily, so I did, but the first enclosure we reached they shut me in with the horses, howled like wolves, banged frying pans with sticks and fired airguns into the air. The horses inside the pen went crazy. My eyes itched because of the earth they kicked up, my tongue tasted of manure and, in a panic, I crouched down, waiting for the end to come quickly. As the stallions and mares trotted over me, brushing me on one side and the other, I hoped they would put me to sleep with a kick and I wouldn’t wake until the following morning.
And yet the kick I received was given me by the animals’ owner, a horse dealer my father knew from the local markets, when he discovered me lying stiff and small in the middle of the rumpus. Me. Only me.
I also got three lashes from my father: one for escaping from the house, another for getting him out of bed at such an unearthly hour and a third “to see if you learn your lesson”. I most certainly did.
“What can we do, then?” I asked her.
“First of all, you can call me Mariña.”
“I’m Adela.”
We walked next to each other, listening to the river all the time, which grew bolder and more graceful. We climbed a wooded path and that was when I realized. I couldn’t hear her. We walked quickly without making any noise, without treading on the leaves on the ground, without sticking our feet into puddles. She, Mariña, was also used to passing unnoticed.
“What’s it like to be blind?” she asked unexpectedly, without shame, with the confidence of someone who was there when I was born. “Is everything black, like when I close my eyes?”
“If you teach me how the mill works, I’ll teach you how to be blind.”
The silence confirmed that she accepted the deal.
The mill was named A Collona after the person who, in the time of my great-grandparents, donated the part of the valley where the river diverted its course artificially. As heir, Mariña’s father had the right to use it for eight hours every eight days. Accustomed as they were to taking turns, the other users grew angry with him when he came back from Cuba and many refused to greet him.
She told me to wait while she got the key, which was hidden under the tiles. She then opened and led me inside by the wrist. We climbed two steps, with me leaning against the wall, and I made out what felt like the profile of a cross etched in the granite with my fingers.
“The most important parts of the mill are all hidden down there, in what we call the inferno. There’s a water wheel which turns with the force of the water and a shaft that makes this round stone, the runnerstone, move.” She displaced my hand, holding it gently. “Between the runnerstone and the bedstone is where the grinding takes place.”
“How come you know so much?”
“My father’s a blacksmith. He makes many of the pieces that work down there.”
I went from noticing the stone to the refined wood which indicated the hopper, a kind of gigantic funnel into which the grain was poured so it could then gradually pass along the shoot and, from there, into the hole in the runnerstone. The eye, she called it. Attached to the hopper was an iron cam that connected with the millstone. As the millstone turned, the cam juddered, moving the shoot, and the grain fell down on its own, without needing someone to wait and keep an eye on it.
She placed my hand on a stick and said:
“If you now lift this lever, you will open the sluice that lets out the water and the millstone will start turning, like a spinning top.”
I followed her instructions and, despite her warning, reached out to touch the millstone. Even though it was turning slowly to start with, the contact with the stone chafed my fingers. I jumped back.
“When it’s finished grinding, I separate the flour from the bran, which we keep for the animals, and make sure to collect the oil. The oil is the part I like best. We use it to make porridge.”
Mariña said she would be back at nightfall with a wick in a lantern and a broom to sweep up the mill dust.
I still felt terror in my mind, and so I asked:
“Aren’t you afraid to be here alone?”
“Afraid?” she replied. “Adela, you more than anybody ought to know that all dogs bite the same.”
The cut was clean and sonorous. Mariña put away the knife and offered me half the apple. When I took a large bite, the juice ran down my chin, making a mess. I recalled the moment when the river’s sweet water swilled around my mouth, with me unable to move because of the thrusts of that beast in human form, and the lump didn’t want to go down my throat. I took another bite with my mouth full and carried on chewing.
Having finished the flesh, I crushed the pips, knowing the bitter taste would sit on my tongue and stay there for a while. And bring me back to reality.
“You probably won’t understand, it’s not easy to explain,” I started. “Blind people don’t see a black colour, complete darkness, because that would mean we see. The best way to understand it is to think of your shoulder. Your shoulder – it doesn’t matter which one – doesn’t have the ability to see. It cannot see. Well, it’s the same with my eyes. My eyes cannot see, either. Anything at all. My eyes see the way your shoulders, ears or legs see.”
Suddenly, she got up and her voice reached me from above.
“You’re right. I don’t understand,” she didn’t seem to mind all that much. “Shall we go? We have lots of things to get ready.”
I don’t know how far we walked, but I do know my liver was coming out of my mouth by the end. I felt the trunks of the trees that surrounded us. From their abundant roughness – an oak-wood.
“Up ahead is where I live. I cannot see my father in the workshop, but the forge is still lit. Hide here,” she took hold of me and made me crouch down, “and don’t get caught. I won’t be long.”
She wasn’t long, she came back quickly and we set off again. Even so, there was something different about the way she walked. We advanced more slowly and, every couple of steps, she started panting. We kept having to stop and I had no choice but to ask her what she was carrying, since the metallic clang of her footsteps sounded rhythmically.
“The tools we’re going to need,” she said.
“What for?”
She didn’t reply until we reached our destination.
“You’ll see.” She dumped the tools on the ground and they clattered crazily.
I needed to concentrate, to focus on each of my senses, and this time I knew where I was. There were two details that situated me: the stink of the new eucalyptus plantation, the only one in the village at that time, and further away the barking of my dog, which anyone would have thought was calling to me.
“I haven’t been completely sincere,” she said, interrupting herself with the noises she kept making. “I know something about those individuals. The ones who forced you.”
“Who raped me.”
Out loud, separated from the fleeting intimacy of my inner network, it was more difficult to understand. It hurt almost as much as the blows had hurt me, his organ as it hollowed me out. It hurt through repetition and permanence. This is what I would always be: a blind girl who had been raped. Blind, girl and raped. Or did you cease to be a girl when you were raped?
Above all, I needed to get rid of that stigma. So when she suggested the vengeance she had in mind, I didn’t hesitate a second before accepting.
It turned out the three individuals were related. The two younger ones were brothers; the older one, who deprived me of my humanity by force, was their cousin. Mariña didn’t know their names, but she did know where to find them.
“They always hang out in the tavern. If I’m not mistaken, they belong to one of those societies that watch football, do the lottery together, drink – that kind of thing. They’re called the Bingers. It’s a good name for them.”
Mariña put her plan together in two parts. The first part consisted in teaching the young’uns a lesson and convincing them of the consequences that behaving like their cousin – being like him – might bring. We would smoke them. Let them shout and cry until they understood why there were in that situation. We wanted their entreaties, their pardon, before setting them free. She didn’t want to explain the second part to me, all I knew is it would be a fitting act of revenge.
We were at an old house with twisted foundations and an old, wooden granary. It had been uninhabited for a long time. Mariña described it as “abandoned”, but I knew the story of that house and didn’t think that was entirely true. “Left” would have been a better word. The previous owner, a man who died before the war, didn’t stop until he killed his wife. The children, knowing a similar fate awaited them, scattered across the globe as soon as they had the chance. I suppose the heirs preferred not to know about the house when they learnt of their father’s death, victims, as they were, of dark memories. Nobody ever came back to claim it.
“I’m going to change the granary lock while you collect firewood. Can you do that?”
“I may be blind, but I’m not stupid.”
A few armfuls later, I had made a pile of scrub beneath the granary, which the tiniest spark would set alight, together with some damp, green eucalyptus branches. What I couldn’t understand was how we would get the two younger Bingers to make their way to the house, but Mariña assured me she would take care of everything.
She did it well. At sunset the next day, they were both in place.
“We’re here,” I heard one of them saying from the hiding place Mariña had chosen for them. “You didn’t have to make us come so far… The reward had better be worth it!”
“Apart from showing them to us, you could let us touch them as well…”
“You’ll be able to touch them and do whatever you like to your heart’s content,” replied Mariña without a trace of fear. “But first let’s go to the granary, I don’t want people spying on us and talking about it.”
“How right you are, Darkie. There are some bad people about.”
The voices became muffled as they moved away, but were soon vigorous enough for me to be able to decipher every word. Mariña was asking them please not to tell anybody and they were promising to keep it a secret. They asked if they could suck on them and she said they could, but inside. The girl invited them to go ahead of her. I heard their footsteps on the metal ladder, the wooden door slamming against the threshold and Mariña locking the door in a single movement.
“You can come out now, Adela.”
I followed the sound of her voice and, with interlocked hands, we approached the granary. Those two souls, who still didn’t know they were in purgatory, had time to joke around.
“Where are you, Blackie? It’s so dark in here we can’t see you.”
“We’re blind, just like that little friend of yours.”
I grabbed a eucalyptus branch and Mariña switched on the lighter. It didn’t take long for a fire to start beneath the granary. The thin smoke made us cough. Inside the granary, they must have been in a smoking inferno.
“I wish you could see it. The smoke is so white it’s almost invisible, like dew that evaporates at dawn. It’s beautiful.”
Meaningless shouts. Fists punching the laths and hitting the floor of the granary. A few requests aimed at God and us. The entreaties we had wanted so much. Remorse. They came to blows, blaming each other for what was happening. From “how could you trust a black girl?” to “I thought she wanted to fuck us”. And “she’s done that, sure enough”. Laments. Nails scratching the wood.
We heard all this, but none of it seemed on a level with the pain I had experienced. When Mariña thought it was enough, she headed towards the door. I stopped her.
A little more, and then a little more.
The flames must have been so tall the wood started crackling. But nothing could be heard inside. The same silence they laid hold of when their cousin was raping me.
“Let them burn,” I ordered Mariña. She didn’t reply.
The bells struck eight, breaking the silence we had grown used to. The heat of the flames, coming from purgatory, didn’t even bother us. The granary turned into a bonfire on St John’s Eve.
In less than an hour, we were at the mill. The night had grown cold and standing there wasn’t helping me keep warm. The biting wind sifted my hair and my teeth started chattering in graceless percussion. The next day, I would wake up with chilblains on my feet.
I didn’t know why we had gone there. Mariña had insisted and I had been easily persuaded. I needed her company. And yet she had disappeared. In a flash, light and silent as she was, she was no longer there.
And so there I was, on the verge of hypothermia, not knowing what I was waiting for, uncertain what would happen next. Not even the memory of the heat being given off by the granary enabled me to warm up. The blood running through my veins was frozen. To kill time, I tried to recall a song Mariña had taught me during the milling, but I could only reconstruct part of the lyrics. The trees whistled and the river sang along.
I don’t know what happened at the mill,
I don’t know what can have happened.
Ever since Maruxiña has been sad,
ever since she hasn’t stopped crying.
Engrossed in the song, I didn’t notice his approach. He surprised me as much as the betrayal. I knew who that dark, disagreeable breath belonged to. I could have run away. I probably knew the hills better than he did, especially at night. I was used to feeling my way, indifferent to the light in the sky. I had an advantage, he would lose track of me after a couple of metres.
But I was paralyzed by fear. Not again, I thought. Not again.
“I knew we would be seeing each other sooner or later,” his laughter was like a clap of thunder. “Or I would be seeing you. Darkie told me you were after more, you would be waiting for me. I fancied you might want another try!”
With those Cyclopean hands, he tore off my outer clothes and, with a single jerk, made the buttons on my shirt come flying off, revealing my torso. He seized my breasts and squeezed the nipples roughly.
I considered wetting myself. Perhaps he wouldn’t want to touch me, he would be so disgusted. Perhaps, only perhaps. But I couldn’t even do that. Except for my head, which kept coming up with machinations and confused possibilities, inside and out I was frozen.
As he touched me more and more quickly, he kissed me. I still don’t know whether that’s the word to explain how he profaned the far reaches of my molars with his tongue. I never got rid of his taste.
He grew tired of my mouth and started to lick my neck over and over. He stopped for a moment and I heard him spitting on one hand. As he placed my nipples in his mouth, he slid his hand into my trousers and felt around until touching my genitals.
I gave everything up as lost. I gave myself up as lost.
Then I heard a blow and he fell right on top of me. I waited for a stroke that never came.
“Forgive me,” said Mariña, lifting the boy off me. “If I’d told you what I was going to do, you would never have agreed. Using you as bait was the only option left to me.”
Betrayal.
She succeeded in transporting the body into the mill, with me clinging on frantically.
I sat on the ledge and she rested next to me. We both stayed silent. The ashes of our conversations had evaporated together with the saliva on my neck.
The moans of the boy lying on the ground shook us out of our stupor. Mariña breathed a sigh of relief and headed towards him. There was no struggle, she handled him like a puppet at the theatre. His head seemed to explode when it collided with the millstone.
Mariña pulled the lever and, as the sluice gate opened, the water started rushing down the mill race. The millstone, jealous of the river’s voices, began its own rotation. The murmur increased progressively until becoming a roar.
“Stick your tongue out,” Mariña ordered.
When he didn’t do this, she accepted without reproaches.
“You had it coming.”
I was forced to cover my ears with my hands. There was no name for this – the name has not been invented. Mariña wouldn’t stop until she had finished him off, and I didn’t care about his death. His teeth were ground down like an axe on a whetstone, followed by his gums. Mariña cried out, but he was louder.
Everything came to an end when the millstone stopped turning. Or almost everything. There was still one person for whom I would always be a blind and raped girl.
“Darkie,” I said.
Mariña didn’t see the shaft coming, as it smashed into her face.
My mouth tasted rotten.
