Mercè Rodoreda

Martha Tennent

The narrator, a fourteen-year-old boy, describes the cruel customs of a village, including the horrible death of his father, and spends time with a prisoner who explains the strange events in the village.

A Novel

Death in Spring

Stas

In front of me lay the forest, where the elderly went from time to time, and when they did, they locked us children inside wooden cupboards in the kitchen. We could only breathe through the stars on the cupboard walls, empty stars, like windows in the shape of a star. 

When mother was dead and had been buried for some time, I - I alone heard her crying out beneath my father's window the first day he and my stepmother slept together. It lasted until the first taste of light appeared.

When someone is born, I make their ring and plaque right away. Don't tell anyone I told you. All of us have our ring, our plaque, and our tree. And at the entrance to the forest stand the pitchfork and the axe.

I stopped by the edge of the river and covered my ears with my open hands so I would not hear the quiet. 

All the things you truly believe occur. You'll see, he said.

He explained that when the villagers came to gaze at him, exhibiting him to their children, they all said he's a prisoner, but he wasn't a prisoner, he said, he lived differently from others, only that. He'd grown accustomed to living that way, and when they removed the cage because they thought he was no longer a person, it was all the same to him. So he stayed. Nothing mattered to him, living behind bars or with no bars. He was his own prison. Everyone bears their own prison, nothing changes, only habits, from listening so long to the coursing river, he said, and from seeing so much water drift past. What drifted past was him. I flow past, he said, everything else remains. Man lives between earth and air, is made of water, and lives imprisoned like the river that has earth beneath it and air above. The river is like a man. Always along the same appointed path, and if at times the river overflows, like a man's heart when he can no longer bear it, a law returns it to its course. 

i fear this section might’ve cemented a 5 star rating (pardon my puns)

The watchmen are on guard, but what they guard against is nowhere to be seen. They continue to mutilate men because they say two shadows once joined together. It's fear. They want to be afraid. They want to believe, and they want to suffer, suffer, only suffer, and they choke the dying to make them suffer even more, so they'll suffer till their last breath, so that no good moment can ever exist.

Death in Spring quotes

Join the club