The Butterfly’s Curse when you weren’t much more than a little nobody so innocent and so serious with those Moorish eyes of yours and that blue shawl She asked you straight out if you’d ever been with a woman and you said no with a gesture saying only with men not adding that you had loved one and bought the rest She replied that you shouldn’t be ashamed of what she called your inclinations because one comes as one is to this vale of tears and you were as responsible for coming out queer as you were for being born for in neither case were you asked if you wanted to be a macho man or simply be since the ideal my boy would be if they didn’t bother to have us or at least didn’t do it without our permission when we suffer afterward the way we do Then as now it was impossible for you to reply because the words burned like embers before turning into dust into nothing and your heart seemed to split open with each beat or turn into porous worn stone like the fossilized birds trapped in amber before man walked the earth that you saw once in Edem Mills the night before the aurora borealis You couldn’t tell her you loved her more than your own life though it was true but could never go to bed with her or any woman because in the shredded depths of your being you would have felt you were committing incest with your own mother You fled down the stairs with the words petrified behind your palate and pursued by the shouts of la Argentinita That night she called you again to reiterate her dejection and despair far from Ignacio but never tried to comment on what occurred in her house or what never happened there that afternoon And now the doors of the palace open and Trescastro returns holding his pistol but with a hurried step and bowed head as if he had just received orders to put an end to this farce or been reprimanded for his part in so absurd a burlesque He gets into the Buick and slams the door shut The car pulls away and on the left the olive trees continue but thick pine groves stand on the other side of the highway You feel lost because you’d never left Víznar through this countryside Never until this incredible dawn The sound of water on the side of the olive groves disconcerts you but Galadí as if reading your forehead says “It’s the Ainadamar irrigation channel that comes from Fuente Grande” and Cabezas observes in the most indifferent tone “It sounds full even though it wasn’t a very rainy winter” “I told you once to shut up” Trescastro repeats without looking at us “Hell no!” shouts Galadí “The one who ought to shut up is you so you can kill us once and for all if you have the balls to do it!” Trescastro lowers his eyes and his gaze is lost in his lap where he still holds the forgotten pistol At each curve in the road his knees push against yours They’re round and hard like the knobs that indicate the landings on staircases Suddenly as if two hands pulled away the stray clouds the full moon appears in the sky It whitens the irrigation channel and Cabezas’s smooth face The water restores the scent of jasmines and morning glories Nothing however is excessive in this countryside A sense of suitable calm governs heaven and earth though they seem to burn in white-hot fire on all four sides In no time the same measured prudence will constrain even a monster like Trescastro He’ll put the pistol in his pocket and give the order to return to the Civilian Government building (“The mercy of the governor is infinite and this time he decided to give you the gift of life … ”) Even a satanic farce like the one devised to destroy three defenseless creatures by pushing them to the brink of eternity only to hold them back at the edge of the abyss must respect certain limits (“even though you’ll spend the rest of it in prison contemplating through the bars the most pious and very military flowering … ”) You know that between one person and another love extends spider’s threads that would shine like the light of this moon if they were visible When death separates them it leaves something like a thread of blood at the loose end of each strand You’re convinced you won’t die because the spider web between you and your mother in the Huerta de San Vicente is unbreakable The same moon turns different trees white you’d almost say now altering a line of Neruda’s You were a boy in the Huerta before you had carnal knowledge of man and fled la Argentinita before you came across the witches of Albaicín before you found in open pianos wordless romanzas sleeping since autumns crossed with stagecoaches and old mirrors before discovering your power to create another universe precisely constructed of words with their Route to Santiago their Gypsy pilgrims their homosexual saints covered in lace their honeysuckle and knives from Albacete long before Alberti dazzled you by saying that blazing feathers fell to earth and a bird could be killed by a lily Before Before Before You were a sleepwalking boy and in the Huerta de San Vicente Without waking you another full moon carried you to those fields illuminated by the open window of your bedroom You were aware of living asleep and also of walking through a dream that was a world of platinum The fountain in the courtyard where a sobbing fish twisted sounded the way the Ainadamar irrigation channel sounds tonight while other morning glories and other jas-mines identical to these merged their scents in the motionless air You thought you’d pass among smiling dead people barely outlined in the radiance who would open a path for you as the multitude of murderers stepped aside now happy to know it will be the lot of all of you to go on living You reached the fishpond filled with water lilies and went into the water naked You lost your footing and drowned without waking slipping into a more profound dream where the world resplendent with moonlight turned all to gold Old gold next to hammered copper Gold of wheat fields stirred by the wind Innocent gold of virgin decks of cards Gold of wedding rings lost beneath the lilies Gold of thirteen coins stamped with your profile and your mother’s as if you were a king and a queen Gold of cut lemons that many years later would be reborn intact in your poem on the arrest of Antoñito el Camborio Gold of another sun the reflection of the one in the sky at the bottom of the water You were going to the center of that fire when an arm plunged into the water took you by the hand and returned you to the air as in a parody of that miracle this dawn Trescastro will give all of you the gift of existence It was your mother naked and sleepwalking too holding on to you by the spider web of threads that would be silver if love were visible She held you to her breasts and the two of you remained there sobbing very quietly so as not to awaken yourselves Today you have the retrospective certainty of having foreseen on that night in the pond that you weren’t going to die because the silvery net though invisible joined you to life as now it binds you again to the person who will give you your being The Buick stops at a building beside the road It is a two-story villa with three doors and several French windows “I know that place” Galadí exclaims “They call the house the Colony because in the summer school children would come here to the country I suppose nowadays you use it as a slaughterhouse” he concludes turning toward Trescastro He doesn’t answer gets out of the car and slams the door with a dry sound Then what happened at the archbishop’s palace is repeated almost point for point Trescastro talks with two men who guard the Colony and one of them opens the door with no great courtesy “Now or never” Galadí says to the Assault Guards “Start the car and the four of us can get the hell away from here” They look at each other and seem to hesitate for long moments They probably aren’t involved in Valdés’s scheme because the driver shakes his head sadly “Don’t torture us like this I already told you my friend is married and I am too with two children All we’d need is to let you run away or escape with you!” “It’s impossible” the one with the Mauser agrees “Don’t torment us any more In no time they’d catch us and finish off all of us” “Drop it Galadí” advises Cabezas “You’d convince a couple of vipers sooner than these wretches Beg their pardon for having wounded their delicate sensibilities and let’s hope they give us the coup de grâce as if we never offended them” “You’re right” says Galadí resigned “This one’s kids must be sons of a bitch on their father’s side” The Guards pretend not to have heard them and Galadí faces you “I admire you because without being made for danger like this you bear it with so much dignity Cabezas and I are different because we’re banderilleros In the bullring you get used to seeing death close up and in the end you almost forget about it In time being butted and knocked down scares you more than the chance of a fatal goring” “It’s true” Cabezas agrees “The señor bears everything with more dignity than we do because he responds to them with his contempt and his silence We ought to do the same” Then he turns toward you and says “Don’t worry this will take only an instant if our police friends know how to do their job and are used to killing the right way I was with Granero’s cuadrilla in the twenty-second year of this century when the bull Pocapena gored him in Madrid You see how things are Granero who was a señor too like you and even had studied the violin he played it like an angel and seemed begging your pardon a queer Nobody ever heard him talk about women or saw him looking at them If they were mentioned in his presence he’d blush like a novice But in the bullring he was the toughest man in the world With more control over himself and the bull than Joselito and courage colder and more measured than Sánchez Mejías’s He had the death he deserved in two seconds with no time to suffer Pocapena caught him in the thigh and tossed him against the barrier He gored him there three times and in one sank his horn into his eye and split open his brain He was unconscious when we picked him up but dead when he went into the infirmary” You wanted to tell them that death is the only thing there’s no need to fear in this sinister burlesque to the greater glory of the governor’s presumed derangement (“You’re too rational and you’ll never be able to hide it from the eyes of God”) But your voice is still petrified in your throat Vestiges of words from other times before the disaster before the God who’ll judge Valdés scorched Sodom and Gomorrah with the fire of His wrath to ravage this land of the unthinking and the rabble where only the executioners preserve their sanity to the greater mockery of all the victims Words like reason moral virtue justice dignity (“The señor bears everything with more dignity than we do because he only responds to them with his contempt and his silence”) honor fellow man nation religion law progress culture revolution which here took on a meaning completely different from and opposed to the one they have in any other country An entire vocabulary devised for dealings among human beings fossilized now in your throat transformed into outlines of scorpions spiders vipers extinct species of fish To tell them we won’t lose our lives but may lose our reason in this ordeal To tell them that perhaps starting tomorrow the three of us will be exhibited in a glass cage as specimens of perfect madmen by the grace of Valdés in this land where good sense is the exclusive inalienable privilege of murderers But your voice has been silenced perhaps forever As in those nightmares where your legs sink up to the knees in a desert that holds all of you and prevents you from walking to a mirror in order to throw you into a chasm that first stifles your shouts between the walls of a pit and then crushes them between its teeth or at the back of its tongue As for the rest they don’t seem to expect answers from you either as if they could read in your eyes exactly the opposite of everything you’re thinking and feeling (“I admire you because without being made for danger like this you bear it with so much dignity”) Can the inability to understand one another while they breathe in this world be the fate of all men? You say this to yourself in your mute despair And now the main door of the Colony opens again and Trescastro returns with the pistol in his pocket Another man his hands tied behind him like the three of you comes limping beside him He’s stout broad-shouldered the front of his head is almost bald and he’s well into his fifties As he approaches and in the headlights of the Buick you see that his shirt is stained with blood on the front and his lips are disfigured as if blows to his teeth had split them “Slide toward Cabezas this guy has to fit in next to you” Trescastro says to you now in a tone that’s almost polite The newcomer struggles to obey him after you’ve moved over next to Cabezas He tries to get into the car sideways but all his efforts are in vain He has an artificial leg his own perhaps amputated above the knee and he can’t flex it to bend over “I can’t get in if you don’t untie me” he states in a very serene tone not addressing anyone personally and as if he had called on heaven to witness his inability “Try it again” Trescastro insists “I’ve already tried and it’s impossible” the timbre of his voice is almost as strong as his shoulders even though a strange whistle like that of someone not yet accustomed to expressing himself with broken incisors slipped among his words Trescastro hesitates but takes a penknife from his pocket and cut