Read Online Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal - Free Book Online Page A

sit up with or buy a coffin for or accompany to the grave with freshly-picked flowers and weep over gently. He’d gone as quickly as a rose cut from the bush and I’d no last memory of him except a little spark as he looked at me during our strange goodbye. I knew he was dead and I would never again have him at my side, because war is an evil that drags itself over theearth and leaves it sown with vipers and fire and knives with points upright. And I was barefoot with my children, and I had nothing apart from still being alive. I didn’t even have a mourning dress because his death wasn’t like others, it was a murder that had to be forgotten immediately. His name was to be entombed behind eyelids and mouths with thick cement. I knew he was one of the ones they’d killed because they were taking me in the lorry of sorrow to Aragón. Because they had to take us wretches away from the only thing left to us: our misery, with our scrap of sky and our vale of tears.
    When I realized that we were alone, like a flock without a shepherd, perhaps with the wolf circling, a great sense of abandonment came over me. It broke my heart that I didn’t feel I had the strength to be a mother. I was stunned behind a wall of sadness and since I couldn’t scream or lose control, I wanted to stay still, unmoving, unthinking. Focused on sorrow and without hope. The girls had to keep on living and I wanted to die. I felt that if I just stayed still with that hell inside, I was bound to explode and then it would be goodbye Conxa. But abandoning the girls to their fate tormented me and when Elvira told me to eat, after I’d refused any food for two days, I did as she said. I had to force the bread down my throat, which wasn’t allowing anything to pass,like a reed stalk that hasn’t been cleaned through properly… all under the watchful eye of my eldest daughter, roles reversed for the first time. I wanted so much to shout, Enough!
     

     
     
    Elvira adapted to her new life. The young can do anything. Even though she was knocked back many times. Because she moved around, spoke to everyone, wasn’t ashamed of anything. They called us Reds. They’d also killed men from where we were staying. Many others had gone to France. Even entire families, people said.
    The camp we stayed in was beside a village a little smaller than Montsent. One day a girl of about the same age insulted Elvira because she said the Reds had killed her boyfriend. Luckily, Elvira was accompanied by a boy from Aragón who defended her, poor boy. There were those who wanted us not only to suffer but to feel guilty as well. Why do hundreds of stones always fall at once?
    Six people were sleeping crossways on our mattress. There were lice and, as much as we tried to wash ourselves conscientiously, we couldn’tavoid them completely. We ate badly but they didn’t starve us. We worked: cleaning, in the infirmary, sewing… It was full of Italians. They scared us, we stayed away from them as much as we could.
    The days weighed on my heart like flagstones. The endless tears had dried, everything seemed like a nightmare that had to end, one day or another. Beyond the nightmare, I thought I could make out hope. The hope of going home. Maybe they’d lied. It couldn’t be true that they killed him, so full of life, without any proof. They couldn’t just have said: You, you and you… Maybe they were in prison or evacuated like us. What could a soldier know? I didn’t share any of these thoughts with the girls. I kept them to myself like a secret that, soon, when they became reality, would fill the girls with joy. Silence calmed me and gave me strength. Keeping quiet, daydreaming about the way the hours of a day turn out. Any old day, a normal day or a bad day. Of the day when a bolt of lightning killed a cow and you were annoyed by it, and the day that everything seemed to fall into place. The hay in the haystack, the chickens roosting, the cows quiet in the stable, and