While he was having dinner he vaguely pondered the last page he had read. To receive in oneself the other’s form without his substance. Later, as he sat facing the sea, he was again consumed by anguish. He soon rose and made his way back, stopping for a while to observe the house from the low wall. He entered and immediately approached the mirror and planted himself squarely before it. After waiting for a few minutes that seemed interminable, he began to perceive those eyes. They came forth slowly, questioning and sad, not on the right side of the mirror as they had the first time, but centered on his own eyes, those eyes that should have been his but were another’s. A smudge, milky at first, then slowly becoming clearer, began to acquire the contours of a shape which he soon recognized as an arm covered with chain mail, at the end of which was a hand with long fingers like his own, the palm open, a wound in the center. Some letters began to form to the side of the arm: Stigmata. He turned his back to the mirror. When he wanted to turn around again, he found that he could not. Until the bell tower in the village struck one o’clock. He then looked in the mirror and found the usual mollifying objects: part of the coat rack, the lightbulb, and himself. Stigmata. Where had that word come from? He had never used it. In his adolescence there had been that knife wound on Baixeres’s hand. . He looked up the meaning of the word. Stigmata: Mark or brand, particularly one made with a hot iron as a sign of infamy or, possibly, slavery. Senyor Ardèvol wrote that a saint — Augustine — had helped him take his mind off the mirror. “I had sunk far away from Thine eyes. In Thine eyes, there was nothing more repugnant than I.”
He looked out onto the garden from the railing at the kitchen window. The moon was golden. He had chosen a book from the library, which he now started to read while making himself a pot of coffee. One of the characters in the book — he couldn’t recall which — had said that those who allow their souls to be populated by terror see things that do not exist. Senyor Ardèvol wrote that he had laughed so hard he had almost choked. He had allowed himself to be frightened by the mottled mirror and by those eyes as he might have been by a lion or giraffe-shaped cloud munching on the blueness of the sky. With the book under his arm and the coffee pot filled to the brim, he marched up to the mirror and stood before it, defiant. His own true self and nothing other than that was what he saw in the mirror, and poorly reflected at that: the right side on the left, the left on the right. He had bid farewell forever to those eyes, to whatever he had been able to glimpse in that mirror. He went upstairs feeling as though he had just been released from prison after years of confinement. He took another book, an essay about Saint Thomas. The human soul begins. . I can’t recall everything Senyor Ardèvol wrote. . through the door. . the embryo. . The father does not create the soul. . reading those papers, written in a handwriting that, more than read, had to be deciphered, it took me some time to understand that the embryo is the beginning of a person. The father creates the bones and the blood, the body. A soul desiring to live again in this world awaits the infant’s first cry, then slips inside him. . It wasn’t altogether clear whether the soul entered at the child’s first cry or when the child was still surrounded by water. . Senyor Ardèvol put down the book and walked to the balcony. The moon glowed golden. Old preoccupations stirred within him: the wound on Baixeres’s hand, the dream in which he had been stabbed with a dagger with a five-hole blade so the wound would stay open. It had been a while since the church bell had chimed midnight, that time of day when the hidden sun slows the flow of blood and turns sleeping men into creatures that invite death. Suddenly, as though ejected from his chair, he sprang up and headed to the foyer. He dragged one of the stools before the mirror and sat down. Motionless. He gazed into the mirror with a steady heart and not a trace of fear, and saw appearing within it those eyes that looked at him and he at them. And that night the face took shape. The face of someone who had suffered greatly. The lips were full, those of someone who had reaped life’s pleasures. Despite the mouth, the face conveyed a deep asceticism that is only attained over the course of an intensely-lived existence. On the bottom edge of the mirror something gleamed that he could not quite recognize. . Here the writing ended.
I went to the cemetery and stayed there a while. As I was returning home along the road, I spotted a bicycle propped against the front door and, standing next to it, a man. He immediately told me his name: Esteve Aran. He explained that, on his way from Arenys, when he was halfway here, a checkpoint patrol had confiscated his car and given him a bicycle by way of compensation. I led him into the house and explained everything that had happened. I spoke about my affection for his friend and, as I had not yet destroyed the papers, I allowed him to read them. The following day I showed him the will and told him I did not wish to keep anything for myself. I already had a house; I wanted to give everything to Senyora Isabel, who was old and poor. He listened, had me write down my wishes and assured me that he would make certain everything was taken care of. Shortly after his departure I, too, left, having first handed a weeping Senyora Isabel the key to the house. She produced a tiny box from her apron pocket: Look inside. Pinned to a piece of cork slept a yellow butterfly with spread wings. As soon as I recovered from the surprise, I asked her who had given it to her. One of the girls who sometimes helps me at night at the castle. She knows you. What is her name, what is she like? She knows you, she has long hair, very long. . she’s a good girl. Her name is Isabel, like mine.
XXV I RETURNED
I HAD ONLY BEEN WALKING FOR A SHORT WHILE WHEN I DECIDED to turn back. I stopped in front of the house: The balcony light was on, as it had been before. The door to the kitchen was unlocked, as before. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and called out a couple of times, Senyora Isabel, Senyora Isabel! There was no answer. I did not understand why I had returned. I inspected the entire house, from top to bottom. The ashes of the papers Senyor Aran and I had burned were still in the fireplace in the library. I took out the tiny box, which I had almost forgotten was in my pocket. I grasped the butterfly and caressed its wings with a finger, turning them to dust. I suddenly felt the desire to wait for dawn so I could return to the crab-infested rock, find Isabel and choke her. Why had she made me believe she wanted to kill herself? Was it worth it to see her again? What was it, in life, that was truly worthwhile? Everything I had experienced in that house had somehow shackled me, everything had the whiff of the man who had taken me in even though he had caught me stealing a piece of bread. Never again would I live in a house such as that by the sea, with the old man still locked inside with his fear. I saw the lightbulb reflected in the mirror. I tapped it so it would swing. Planted in front of the mirror was my own being: the dark shirt, the loose threads where a button had fallen off, the trousers that were a bit short. . The light was swinging back and forth. I held my breath; in the mirror, something seemed to be struggling to emerge. . I bounded up the stairs four steps at a time and jammed the backrest of a chair under the doorknob. Trucks full of men singing war tunes rolled by along the road. Lying on the tiles in front of the hearth, as I had that first night in the house, I finally managed to fall asleep. I awoke at daybreak. I went down the stairs slowly and, without thinking twice, I banged the stool against the mirror until it shattered.