I am with you, I am here. I have come just as I promised you! You wanted to go with me someplace to be alone together. Let us go then now, let us go!”
The body, like a rag doll, fell back on the pillow. I thought of my first doll, which I transformed into my mother, how it floated of its own accord in the bath while one piece of cloth after another emerged from its belly. I thought of my father in his coffin, of my grandfather, my aunt, my stepfather, my mother. Why did everyone abandon me? At that moment I understood why my grandfather had married me off so young. He sensed that everyone would abandon me and had looked for someone who would protect me. He could have found no man better than José, I am sure of it. José, who admired me at a distance and in his generosity, wished me to have my amusements. How I would like to be with him now, to hear him play the harpsichord and the piano—one was an instrument of the past, the other an instrument of the future, he used to say. We would have gone together to visit Joseph Haydn. José would have been proud of me, and I would have been proud of his talent. But nothing was possible any longer. The time you have not lived is dead forevermore.
Some time earlier, in the period when my roe deer died, my life became full. It was able to become full because until then it had been empty. It was in the eyes of the tender animal, full of tears, that I learned to see the world in vivid colors. Now, when José’s deer eyes closed, life became empty once more and the world, empty of meaning. And now I was alone. An orphan, abandoned. All living beings were against me.
“José you can’t do this to me!”
“Madame!” The icy voice of José’s mother, up until then my only ally, interrupted my lament. “Madame, your mourning clothes are ready. It is time that you changed and prepared yourself to receive the condolences of visitors.”
The next day I had another dream. I remember it quite clearly. It was the day that they took the coffin to Monasterio de Jerónimos de San Isidro del Campo. No one went up to the deceased; the decomposition had started and, in the Andalusian July heat, was simply dreadful. I wished to melt into that smell, to impregnate myself with it. The Marquess of Villafranca said to me, in an icy voice I had never heard her use before, “You are a true witch, and you provoke horror.” She herself looked like a dead woman; her face and hair and skin had taken on an ashen hue. She did not want to live after the death of her son. That is love. Yes, that day I knew what love was. I, a witch.
That night, I had a curious dream. The roe deer of my childhood came to see me. It dragged itself up to me with the last of its strength. It was full of scratches, with one mortal wound next to the other. I was absolutely astonished: I suddenly realized that it was I who had caused those wounds. I embraced it and helped it, but it died in my arms. Miguelito got ready to bury it; the animal had its eyes wide open and in those globes full of tenderness I read an accusation.
“Miguel, I don’t want you to bury my roe deer!” I shouted.
But the boy continued as if he had not heard me.
“Miguel, no!” I wanted to yell, but I couldn’t. My voice could not leave my throat.
I cut off my legs, put them into a sack, and set about burying them. And then the other parts of my body. Miguelito looked at me questioningly, while caressing the animal’s head.
“Miguel, if you go on, I will bury all of myself!” I said in a hoarse voice.
Miguelito smiled and went on burying the roe deer, while I cut off one part of my body after another, and, wrapping them in sackcloth, I buried them. When only the neck and the head were left, I looked around and in the nearest mountains I saw all kinds of people. No, in fact they weren’t people but rather human mouths that laughed like crazy people with a noisy echo. When they stopped laughing, each of those figures beat its wings and took off.