Egyptian vultures — he always remembered how his father had told him at this same spot, impressing him to the point of awe, when he was still very small — were the first to arrive where there was carrion, at times even to the point that one might think they had gotten to the victim while it was still in its death throes or that they had somehow prepared the ground and even created the opportunity. But the fineness of their beaks, their slightness, or, if you like, their delicacy, only allowed them to slurp down the soft part of the carcasses; the soft parts, his father would repeat, oddly pensive, thinking, most likely, about other things, the soft parts, like eyes and tongues. That’s why they need the larger vultures, the black vulture and the griffon vulture and the bearded vulture — he would explain — to rip apart the carcasses beforehand, so that they could then enjoy the victims’ soft remains. It’s the preeminence of savages, he would conclude, the privilege of the shrewd. The high-handed agreement among scavengers, Felipe Díaz Carrión would think later, the tacit, instinctive, and at the same time highly rational agreement of the great, black vultures of terrifying wingspan, greater even than that of eagles, and the elegant, white, Egyptian vulture that devours victims’ entrails and leaves them with no eyes, and no tongue.
He also remembered his father telling him on several occasions that even though it wasn’t at all inconceivable for a person to mistake an Egyptian vulture at first glance for a stork, a scavenger that devours carcasses for the avian symbol of fertility and good omens, you need only look beyond the similar coloring of the plumage and focus closely, even if only for a moment, on the neck and the feet to see right away that the Egyptian vulture’s were much shorter and less slender than the stork’s. Of course, you had to look closely.
It was like everything in life, he told him, some things are and some things aren’t, but those things, the one’s that aren’t, sometimes end up doing much more than the things that are. The mysteries of life, he concluded — and at this point it always seemed to him that he could hear the whispering of the wind in the leaves of the poplar trees or the babbling of the water in the river — the mysteries of life and the state of things.
That’s why you always have to try to identify everything in the exact place and form you come across it, he would often insist, and to identify things without prejudging them, without absolutes and without thoughtlessness and without rhetoric, and without shrinking from this responsibility, because confusion — or an inflexible position — doesn’t generally lead to anything good or clear, and the people who always benefit from it are generally the least desirable.
He didn’t understand, he would listen to the murmuring of the air in the leaves and the shrubs along the road when his father spoke to him, but he didn’t understand it, despite the fact that he got the vague feeling, although he didn’t know why, that buried within this non-understanding of his was a particular form of comprehension that now, many years later, he could plainly see had been bearing fruit. It all depends on how you walk over and over again along that road, he thought.
14
With the crag of Pedralén now behind him, the road back grew progressively but imperceptibly wider and ceased to be a mere bridle trail. On the left-hand side, on the return route, the low, mortarless stone walls, often crowned with brambles, marked the boundaries of the different plots, or sometimes it was a line of black poplars or elms, once more struggling to overcome Dutch elm disease. Beyond these walls — a few pomegranate trees, heavy with fruit this year, poked up from behind one of them — the fields stretched as far as the river; meanwhile, on the right, as if the overwhelming fertility of the other side of the road had wanted to display there its exact opposite, just the way things often do, changing from one minute to the next into their adverse, isolated sections of dry hills populated by gorse and thyme jutted up, the path the only break between them. The road skirted slowly around those slopes, around the hillsides and mud-filled gullies, until it came to the old abandoned mill, where the packed-earth that had been gradually widening then became an asphalt roadway no longer fit only for pack animals and men walking on foot — and probably, although it would be hard to say why, in silence — and led over and old, stone bridge and into the sprawling outskirts of the village.
As he reached the first streets — the sky had been impeccably blue but had given way again, just like that afternoon twenty years ago, and you might say almost just as suddenly, to a cottony landscape of ever more threatening clouds — a hurricane-force wind suddenly began sweeping everything up and sending everything haywire, as if it could no longer bear to have things where they were. Little whirlwinds of dust and dirt were kicked up everywhere and every which way; tumbleweeds and gritty particulates like multiple BB blasts stuck like tiny needles in his cheeks and forehead, and the dust, the dust everywhere, as if everything had been turned into to dust, it got into the corners of your eyes as if to ensure that nothing at all, least of all your sight, could remain safeguarded from that vortex.
How difficult it is to always imagine, before something throws everything into a frenzy, all the many things that could fall at any moment, that could suddenly totter and break into pieces or become instantly shut down forever, all the things that could possibly go wrong. Only the plastic bags, inflated and puffy, had a hard time falling; they were full of the very thing that was sending everything else out of control, and so they remained airborne for a long time, tossed capriciously back and forth.
Then suddenly — just like the other time, there was no one left out on the streets, rushing cars, closing doors — the first isolated drops began to fall, giant, fat drops, of a girth so incomprehensibly fat that they pounded into the dust that had piled up on the sides of the roads with a muted sound, damped out, as if they were smothering something spread out and thin. For a moment it seemed that everything was suspended, the water, the dust, the blades of grass, and the plastic bags in the air, and that everything was anticipation or fear, imminence and lying in wait, but in a flash — as if the sky had ripped open, as the phrase on many people’s lips in such cases goes — a torrential rain accompanied by colossal thunderclaps that echoed with strange, evocative power suddenly began to shake everything, to soak everything and overflow everything and spill out everywhere. The storm drains couldn’t keep up, and in no time at all there formed great torrents of water that swept everything in their paths — sticks, grass, plastic scraps, and cans — along newly-formed streams that rounded up water from drain pipes and sloshing gutters as if hoping to encompass it all, engulf it all, and inundate it all. The worst thing, Felipe, Felipe Díaz Carrión, had repeated many times over the course of those twenty years, perhaps recalling these end-of-summer storms, might not be so much what’s happening now, no matter how dreadful that may be, but that the particulates and dust that get in your eyes blind you and prevent you from seeing it beforehand, and then anything can happen, anything.
15
At the beginning of October, the first October he spent back in the village, his son Felipe announced he was paying him a surprise visit. I’ll get there at around dinnertime, he’d said, before hanging up the phone in what seemed to him a brusquer manner than usual. Plus, it was Saturday, and like all Saturdays and holidays, assuming he hadn’t been fired from the restaurant or something else had happened, he thought, he was supposed to be working. That weekend job of his allowed him to underwrite part of his room, board, and tuition in Madrid, and he was very proud of it, so this visit, as happy as it made him, couldn’t but seem odd to him. Something’s going on, he conjectured. But beyond this first moment of suspicion, which had been affixing itself to his character like lichen to the bark of a tree, the joy of seeing his son again quickly prevailed; he must want a weekend away to relax, he thought, what’s so strange about that, or maybe he even wants to go foraging for mushrooms to bring back to the restaurant.