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Full confession: We recorded the podcast about this section weeks ago, and my thinking about Death in Spring as a whole has evolved over the recording of the last two episodes. Given my limited brain capacity, it’s hard for me to go back and remember what it was exactly about this section that I wanted to write about. So I’m going to keep this rather brief, and just try to do some recapping while calling attention to things that will come up in the podcasts (and posts) for the last two parts of the book.

Part One left off with the narrator’s dad failing to evade the village’s ritual of having cement poured down your throat before dying (can’t let your soul escape!) and the narrator violently wrecking the nature that seemed so very pleasant in the opening paragraph.

[Opening Paragraph]: The sun-dappled light was different now that spring had arrived, reborn after living beneath the earth and within branches. [. . .] As soon as I passed the stables and the horse enclosure, I realized I was being followed by a bee, as well as by the stench of manure and the honey scent of blooming wisteria.

[Final Paragraph of Part One]: A dead bee was trapped in a spider web suspended between two tall bushes. I broke the web and shoved it into the ground with the tip of my foot, bee and all.

OK then! If Part One was all about world building—describing and naturalizing the village’s rituals, constructing a sense of timelessness that’s both familiar and weird—then this section is about the young boy entering the world fatherless, independent for the first time, and trying to make his way through these myth-spawned rituals that trend toward the violent. Coming into this section, I wondered about how this strange world would impact him. How would he adapt? Would he just get sucked in, becoming the biggest, baddest cement stuffer in the village, or would he rebel? Or something else?

This core idea is somewhat reinforced in the opening bit of Part Two—an almost surreal depiction of the birthing, life, and death of the village’s birds. There’s some interplay between the birds and the horses and the bees and the people and it’s all one big cycle of life that’s both intricate and balanced, and almost unstoppable. As natural or unstoppable as the narrator becoming close friends with his stepmother, who is only a couple of years older than him and a bit odd?

There’s no real way around the weirdness of the narrator getting attached (well, SPOILER, married to) his stepmother, but to give it a bit of a try, there is this paragraph about her relationship with the narrator’s father:

Not much was known about her father. Her mother hanged herself. The old men at the slaughterhouse took her in, but when she had grown up a bit, she began following my father like a shadow. Father finally brought her home with him. She would fall asleep on top of the table, and father would pick her up in his arms and carry her to bed. Some nights I would reflect on things and sneak down to listen to them sleeping. I would steal down the stairs, keeping close to the wall because one of the steps creaked. Standing in front of their room, I would imagine she wasn’t sleeping with father.

Not really the sort of stepmother found in fairy tales. (Of which Death in Spring isn’t really one, but it kind of is.) Although maybe that’s wrong . . . She’s not the sort of stepmother who badgers her husband’s offspring and is evil and trying to fuck their lives up as part of some competition for the man of the household. But she does tempt the narrator, both in terms of desire (as you’ll see) and to do things that are socially disruptive.

Before we get to that, let’s look a bit closer at how the stepmother is described:

My stepmother was shorter than me; she came to just above my shoulder. Her hair was straight and black, her eyes vaguely green. The corner of her eyes fanned out into thin lines, the same lines she had on both sides of her forehead and round her mouth. Like a little old woman.

She would settle in a corner on the days she was happy, from time to time laughing a howl-like laughter that gave a glimpse of the roof of her open mouth and her lizard-thin tongue. Little lizard arm, little lizard tongue. Her dresses fell straight from the shoulder, trailing the ground. In winter her feet and hands turned purple. She said they hurt. She was always cold.

I caught her one day eating a bee. When she realized I was watching, she spit it out, saying the bee had flown into her mouth. But I knew she ate bees.

However it happens, the two of them end up spending a lot of time together. And, one could argue, she ends up helping our narrator leave his childhood behind. First off, she coerces him into doing some rather disruptive things that sometimes seem like the playful actions of children, and at other times seem to be pointed rejections of this town’s belief system.

For instance, they go into the cavern where the red dust is gathered every spring to paint the town’s houses, and throw all the powder into an underground river. Fun times! Where does it go? Will the water look like blood? Who doesn’t like throwing handfuls of rock and sand into the water? (Don’t ask.) But then, when the springtime comes, there’s no red dust to collect, which is not very good.

More unsettlingly, there’s the scene where they go into the forest of the dead and rip open all the trees and steal all the bones and stack them up in a huge pile. Even in a bizarre-ass place like this, grave robbing (or grave remodeling?) isn’t very cool.

As alluded to above, there are really two strands at play in this section: the emotional growth of the narrator, and the village’s way of reinforcing all their rituals.

Let’s take one second to look at two moments of narrator’s growth. First up is this bit from when they go into the cave with the red powder. Not only does it show the narrator overcoming his fear, but it indicates how the stepmother is really the driving force here.

When I reached the bottom I was stiff and felt like crying. I felt I would never again be able to leave the well; I would smother to death because the entrance would be closed off, or the rope would break . . . She descended slowly, blocking the little bit of sky I could see. She pushed me further inside, then clasped my hand again, telling me she had been afraid the first time, but she had killed the fear because it was bad for you. Her heart had almost run away.

And then, when they’re standing on the kind-of-broken sundial, acting as its pin (and right before a bunch of kids attack them verbally and physically), the narrator has a much grander realization that directly points to his emotional growth.

The sun dispatched a trail of misty haze over the slopes of Maraldina and Senyor’s mountain. And while we were Time, a strange force arose within me, as though my guts had been made of iron, as though my mother, behind the forge, had moulded me from iron as she merged with the blacksmith. At that moment I understood what it meant to experience the force of the boy leaving childhood behind.

He’s really going to leave that childhood behind in, like, twenty-one pages, but I’ll wait till the next post to spoil the ending of this section.

In terms of the village reinforcing its rituals, there’s one key section that I want to point out.

A woman died in childbirth, and when they went to bury her, they discovered the forest had been ravaged. The weather that afternoon was troubled. The sky was sulphurous, not a leaf stirred. The unrest that had commenced at the cave returned. Between young and old. For some time the young from the wash district had been saying that people should be left to die their own death. The old men from the slaughterhouse argued that everything should continue as before. The middle-aged men were inclined to side with the elders, except for a few that no one heeded. One elderly man lamented the sad affair of mixing bones and stuffing grass in eye-wells, it should never have happened.

Just like with the never-ending cycle of life, there’s the never-ending cycle of who knows best. The young are ready to upend all traditions, burn the past (as Kylo Ren would say?), whereas the olds want it all to remain the same because goddammit that’s just the way things are, and those in the middle are inclined to side with those in power (or be ignored). And so we have a system that benefits a few instead of the many, and a large group of people who use the social media to try and upwrench age-old institutions, which doesn’t always play that well, since youngsters don’t know shit yet and watch too much YouTube, but what if . . .

There’s also a bit in here about Senyor, who comes down from his house on the hill to reassure everyone: “Senyor kept telling them not to worry.” (I imagine him delivering these lines like Tommy Wiseau in The Room, “Oh hai! Don’t worry about it!”)

And there’s the bit about the prisoner. Which is really too close to our real world for anyone to feel comfortable with. (What exactly is our end goal with prisons? Rehabilitation or dehumanization?) Which brings up my final point—although this book initially seems super crazy and symbolic and almost surreal, it’s really not that weird if you frame it as a young boy trying to find his way amid a series of violent, nearly superstitious, rituals. That’s like everyday life?

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At 7pm at (52 Prince St.) we’ll be joined by María Cristina Hall of the Ramon Llull Insitut to go over the final section of Rodoreda’s amazing last novel.

After the formal conversation—which will be as varied and fun as the normal episodes, but also with questions from the audience—we will have some Spanish wine to drink while you do your holiday shopping.

See you next week!

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This week’s podcast—the first to dig into Rodoreda’s final novel, Death in Spring—is one of the most informative ones we’ve recorded to date. This isn’t to dismiss anything that came before (I love all my baby podcasts equally), but given Meg Berkobien’s background both as a translator and academic, she was able to bring the knowledge. You’ll have to listen to the whole thing to get all the goods, but here are a few choice bits that provide some background.

First things first, although this book was published posthumously, a few years after her passing, it’s by no means incomplete. There’s a mention on the Mercè Rodoreda Foundation website about how she submitted it for a literary prize back in the 1960s. It lost, she was greatly disappointed, she spent twenty years refining and honing it. That’s committment! And god damn does it show. This is one of the most carefully crafted novels I’ve ever read. No word is out of place (special shout-out to Martha Tennent), every image is layered throughout, every sentence feels twice as long as it is. This book is magical. So, although it was “unfinished” in the sense that she never approved the final proofs, but it’s not incomplete. It’s a full novel with a satisfying ending. As you’ll see.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the village in which the novel takes place is unlike any village you’ve ever visited. Outside of time, home to a very unique set of myths and rituals, this place is a bit bewildering and disturbed. (Or a slightly exaggerated and twisted version of the myths and rituals in our lives?) Although the geography doesn’t seem nearly as unsettled, the layout of the village can be hard to visualize. But, thanks to Mercè (via Meg), we have this sketch of the village:

There’s a lot more that could be said about the background to this novel, but I think that’s best left to the podcast. Also, I kind of want to provide a bit of an overview to this section, but, well, I’m afraid that it will scare some of you off since it will sound absolutely batshit. Still, it can be useful for understanding the set of quotes below, so here goes:

In part one we’re introduced to our main character, a fourteen-year-old boy who lives in a village that is bound by strange beliefs and rituals. One of those rituals involves what happens to a dying body—something that the boy sees firsthand in the opening pages of the novel when his dad passes away. Freed from his parents, he serves as the reader’s lens onto the village in which he lives. In this first part, a lot of the world building is set forth. We learn about some of the major characters (the Blacksmith, the stepmother, Senyor), and some of the annual events that organize the lives of the villagers. At the start of this section, a bee is following the boy, at the end he crushes a bee. That happens as well.

As you can probably tell, the plot itself—though there, though compelling—is secondary to the way in which Rodoreda creates this almost alien environment. Although “world building” is a term usually used more in connection with Game of Thrones than modernist literature in translation, it’s very apropos here, for this part.

Rather than ramble on about this, I want to give you a taste of Rodoreda’s writing, which is absolutely phenomenal. And to tie her prose to the idea of world building, I’d like to look at three things that run throughout this section: myths, rituals, and fears. I’m more or less just going to piece together quotes from the book that fit into those respective categories. This will also give you an immediate sense of how weird this book is, and will probably (hopefully) make you want to read it. It’s wild! There’s nothing quite like Death in Spring and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

This post and these lists will likely serve as building blocks for trying to create a larger understanding of what Rodoreda’s up to in this book as we go along. Not that there’s a single reading or way to understand this book—not by any means. The ways in which interpretations of images and motifs shift throughout the novel is one reason why this is so rich, so engrossing, and so lasting. Let’s dig in.

Myths

The old men explained that the low wind on Maraldina blew through the brush when no one was on the mountain. It carried souls that wandered the mountain with the sole purpose of creating fierce winds whenever we went in search of powder, rendering our work more arduous. The wind was telling us that ours was a senseless job, something that was better left undone. Souls have no mouths, so they spoke to us through the voice of the wind.

Souls and shadows show up a lot in this book. Usually tied together. Shadows take on a real physical presence in this novel, even if it is a presence that works on the edges of existence. They’re also responsible for a lot of the beliefs held by the villages, including this creation myth:

On a slope, man met shadow and they never parted. They established the village. The man, the shadow by his side, planted the first wisteria. But that’s not exactly how it was. A long time ago when the oldest of the old men in the village was young, he witnessed the birth of everything. The village was born from the earth’s terrible unrest. The mountain was cleaved and it collapsed into the river, scattering the water through the fields. But the river wanted to flow with all of its water gathered together and began burrowing beneath the crumpled mountain, emptying it little by little. The river never rested until all the water could flow happily together again, although at times it grew furious when it hit the rock ceiling. They say that one night, not at the bottom of the slope, but on the ground, on the rocks hurled from the cliff, the moon showed two shadows joined at the mouth. And it rained blood. That is how it all began.

Yep. As Meg mentions on the podcast, Rodoreda was very interested in cosmogony, which is quite evident in this book. There’s one more myth that I want to share—one that also crosses over into the section about the village’s rituals:

Near the canes where I was hiding, a group of dirty, disheveled women were sitting on the ground away from the fire, their eyes blindfolded. They were the pregnant ones. They covered their eyes because if they gazed at other men, the children they were carrying would also take a peek and begin to resemble the men. They said a woman fell in love with every man she saw, and the longer she was pregnant, the faster she fell in love. So, what with women falling in love and children looking, what shouldn’t happen, happened.

This is an example of how these unusual beliefs—how genetics are influenced by love—end up creating a series of rituals that keep this society functioning. In this case, all pregnant women are blindfolded, which, though cruel and misguided (although some flat-earther out there would probably buy into this “science”), is not as violent and messy as what happens when you die.

Rituals

Again, I don’t want to give away too much (read the book!), so I’ll just quote this passage about what happens when someone is dying and why without any larger context:

Don’t kill him, shouted the cement man. The mortar trough, filled with rose-colored cement, lay at this feet. Don’t kill him before he has been filled. They pried his mouth partially open, and the cement man began to fill it. First with watery cement so it would slide far down inside him, then with thick cement. When he was well cemented, they stood him up and put him back inside the tree. They replaced the cross and left to prepare the Festa. [. . .] I would end my days locked in that tree, my mouth full of cement that had been mixed with crimson powder, my entire soul within. Because, you see, the blacksmith used to say that with the last breath, without anyone realizing, your soul flees. And no one knows where it goes.

Cement to keep your soul in. Otherwise maybe it will be part of the fierce winds that make the search for powder more difficult. OK. Got it. And speaking of that powder, the men and boys gather this special pink powder every spring so that they can repaint all of the houses in the village. Every year. Like clockwork. As if it’s part of nature.

For a funeral Festa, they killed horses and pregnant mares. First, they ate the soup, then the horse or mare, and then a morsel—but only a small piece because there wasn’t much to go round—of the little ones the mares were carrying inside them. They made a paste with the brains; it helped digestion.

If you think that’s gross, wait till you read about the stepmother snacking on balls of fat . . .

Fear

Most, if not all, rituals exist because a group is afraid of what would happen if they don’t perform the ritual. Their mythic beliefs contain a bit of danger (don’t let the souls out!), so they create a particular set of actions to stave off the threat. They’re afraid of something.

There are a variety of normal fears sprinkled throughout the first couple parts of this book, but one thing that I want to track as we read and talk about this is the role of Senyor. Here’s how he’s introduced:

All of the houses were pink except one: the house that belonged to Senyor. He lived at the top of the small mountain that was cleaved by a cliff and overlooked the village, protecting and menacing. The cliff, topped by Senyor’s house, was covered with ivy that blazed in autumn and died soon after.

Innocent enough, I suppose. But then there are a few lines that, taken together, bring in a slightly more ominous tone:

When I had finished planting the grass, I thought again about Senyor’s house. I could see the side of it, the side without windows. It was topped by a spire. I could see Senyor, in my thoughts, coughing and eating honey, waiting always for the river to carry away the village. [. . .]

When we burned [the leaves], we would look up because Senyor’s head would appear through the long, narrow, middle window, and we would stick out our tongues at him. He would remain motionless, as if made of stone, and when the blue smoke disappeared, he would close his window, and that was it until the following year.

We’ll see more of Senyor soon enough, but I think I’ll leave it there for now. This is a much easier book to talk about (just wait till you hear the podcast) than it is to write about. Granted, I’m sort of holding back because part of the joy of reading this first section is finding yourself in a strange new world that you slowly come to understand—something I don’t want to take away from anyone. But even putting that aside, there’s just so much here. So many approaches to take. In future weeks, I hope to get more into the actual craft of her sentences and paragraphs, talk a bit more about how an element (like the bee in this section) is introduced early on and then weaves through the chapter accruing significance as it goes along. There’s also the issue of what sort of bildungsroman this really is, and if there’s a different world that this village maps on to (such as Franco’s Spain).

This is a good start though—especially if you listen to Thursday’s podcast. That really puts things in motion.

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I don’t know if it’s the winter weather setting in (it’s dark outside here in Rochester at 4:30pm), the combined bleakness of all of Rodoreda’s stories, the fact that it’s time for the “Best Books of 2017” lists to start crushing my hope and joy list-by-list, or that it’s simply difficult to write about a short story collection week after week, but regardless, I don’t have it in me to write one of my normal, long, rambling posts about Rodoreda’s Selected Stories. (I do have a really good thing planned for next week’s Death in Spring intro post though, so stay tuned.)

Instead, now that we’re done reading this entire collection, I thought I would pull a FlavorFeed and just rank all the stories from my most favorite to my least. So here goes!

1. “Carnival”
2. “The Salamander”
3. “The Thousand Franc Bill”
4. “Happiness”
5. “Friday, June 8”
6. “The Mirror”
7. “Paralysis”
8. “Orléans, Three Kilometers”
9. “The Bath”
10. “Before I Die”
11. “Nocturnal”
12. “The Beginning”
13. “Summer”
14. “It Seemed Like Silk”
15. “In a Whisper”
16. “Guinea Fowls”
17. “Ice Cream”
18. “On a Dark Night”
19. “The Red Blouse”
20. “Engaged”
21. “Threaded Needle”
22. “Ada Liz”
23. “Night and Fog”
24. “White Geranium”
25. “The Fate of Lisa Sperling”
26. “Departure”
27. “Blood”
28. “Afternoon at the Cinema”
29. “Love”
30. “On the Train”

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