When I Sing, Mountains Dance

by Irene Solà

Domènec had come to reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain. To see what flavor and what sound they had, because when a man is alone there’s no need to whisper.

But what a weight, for the everlasting love of God and Satan, how heavy that house could be! Folks should have more time to get to know each other before they marry. More time to live before making children.

But sometimes a woman feels like giving up on life. When lightning goes straight through a man like a rabbit. When a branch pokes a hole in her heart but doesn’t kill her.

And she stops being a wife and she becomes a widow, a mother.

She stops being the center of her own life, she’s no longer the sap and the blood, because they’ve forced her to renounce everything she ever wanted.

Throw out your soul and hugs and kisses and your marriage bed. You must, you must. And now get up and look at yourself on this morning, so thin and so blue. Go down to the kitchen, and put food inside your mouth, and put it inside the children’s mouths, and inside the old man’s mouth, then inside the mouths of the cows and the calves and the sow and the hens and the dog.

You don’t know how to do anything! he shouted. What was I thinking when I married a girl from town instead of a mountain girl?

And I could scarcely manage to abide the pleasure in silence. To grind my teeth together hard when the wolf-fart puffball exploded inside me. To hurry to make it grow and make it explode before Domènec was finished.

"the wolf-fart puffball?" excuse me? Haha

This house and this cold and these cows and the noises these mountains make at night. Love is a deceitful venom.

And the children, who don’t understand a thing, who can’t keep still, or bring peace. Children should bring peace, should be a balm, consolation, compensation.

blind with rage and with grief

CW: Child abuse

And the loneliness.

And the withered love that is nowhere to be found.

Spores that have known every man and woman and every thunderclap and every boar and the pots and the baskets and the rabbits.

*sporror

The light is deep yellow. And the whole scene, the church, the old people, the dark coffin, the wreath of flowers, the two horses on the slope, the mountain backdrop, now it looks more like a postcard than ever. Lovely. If I were a painter, I would come up here and paint these kinds of paintings. Rural scenes. The old men and women, the berets, the scarves. The sunlight falling on the church, on the wooden box. The bell tower. It’s so pretty I can’t stay angry.

Life up here is really tragic.

I sing to the slope, the peak, the meadow, To the stinging nettle, to the wild rosebush, to the bramble. I sing like someone plowing a garden, Like someone carving a table, Like someone raising a house, Like someone climbing a hill, Like someone eating a walnut, Like someone lighting a fire. Like God creating animals and plants. When I sing, mountains dance.

I love this so much