Aldeia da Luz by C. D. Rose / Fiction / Untitled Books

Ten funerals in one day would have been a dream too strange even for Don Alberto.

Aldeia da Luz by C. D. Rose

The baker couldn’t get the dough to rise, the water was different, the light was different, the very gravity was different, he claimed. The chickens stopped laying eggs and the goats wouldn’t milk.

On the day they finished moving the cemetery, Dona Josephina went to ten funerals. After eighty-eight years she full knew the strangeness of this world, yet knew also that attending ten funerals in one day was strange even by its standards, especially as they were funerals she had already attended. She should go again, she told herself, if only to show that the dead had not been forgotten. As she stood by the side of the repeated tombs, Dona Josephina thought of her neighbour Don Alberto, who always insisted on telling her all of his outlandish dreams, even though she begged him not to, and covered her ears when he spoke. Ten funerals in one day would have been a dream too strange even for Don Alberto. Don Alberto told her he had stopped dreaming now, anyway. He hadn't had a single dream since they had moved the village.

They had uprooted the oak tree that grew in the main square and replanted it in the new one. Some of its low heavy branches had been lost during the brief journey up the side of the valley, so the tree no longer had quite the same shape, even though it was the same tree, in almost the same place.
When they opened the new village the mayor had a ribbon put around the tree which he then ceremoniously cut, declaring the new village open. Everybody looked at one another and wondered what they should do now the village was officially open. Shortly after, as they went home, they were thinking of the mayor cutting the ribbon, of the gates opening and the water pouring into the valley, drowning what remained of their homes. They thought of their old walls collapsing under the weight of the water coursing onwards, devouring everything until it hit the wall of the new dam at the bottom of the valley. From where they were now, they could have watched the water plough its murderous path, standing on the hillside to where they had all been moved, after their village had been rebuilt, exactly as it had been.

Exactly as it had been, brick for brick, stone for stone, tree for tree and scrubby bush for scrubby bush. Exactly as it had been, only not quite; better, they said: the new village would no longer be the worn-out old place it had been, the place where all the young people had been leaving for generations because there was nothing to do, but a place where the old people could stay, and the few children still born in the village might not feel the urge to flee as soon as they could walk. The new village would be brighter, more spacious, healthier. The old village had suffered from damp, they said, and it was true: the old walls ached to the point of collapse, the old wooden beams were being eaten away by worms, the old white paint was stained by eternal mildew. The new village was damp-proofed, double-glazed and insulated. There was no space in the old houses, they said, they're too small for modern families. Nobody should have to go outside to get water nowadays, they said, no one should have to urinate in a field. So they built the new houses a little bigger than the old ones, a few feet more space on the ground, the ceilings a few hands higher. All the new houses were given a quintal, a tiny plot of land. Houses that were supposed to be exactly the same now sprouted small gardens, flushing toilets and taps with running water.

Down in the valley they had suffered from gloom, damp, mosquitos. In the winter there was a clammy cold which grew like mould on their bones. They forgot what warmth meant. In the summer the heat which burned on the hills would slide down the sides of the valley like butter and coagulate in the town. They forgot what cold meant. The new village was only a few kilometres away, up on the shoulder of the hill which leaned down into the valley. Here, they said, it was much healthier, protected from strong winds but open to healthy breezes, warm winds in the winter and cool ones in the summer. There was more light up here. It was drier. There was no danger of flooding. Their window frames and their bones wouldn't freeze in the winter and rot in the spring; their plants wouldn't die of heatstroke in the barren summer.

The new village was so almost exactly as the old village that when Luis came back he didn't even notice. It had been twenty years since he had taken the bus as far as Evora then the train as far as Lisbon, then other trains and boats and planes which had taken him everywhere, except here, back to where he had been born. Luis hardly remembered leaving for the last time. Then, he had been thinking of nothing but the journey ahead, deliberately ignoring what lay behind. As he made the journey again, this time in the opposite direction, he didn't notice that instead of slinking down the side of the valley to stop at the rusty sign and wooden bench, the bus made its brief stop further up the side of the hill. He had arrived sooner than expected, though no one expected him. No one told him Aldeia da Luz had moved.

The oak tree died after a few months. They'd cut too many of its roots off. Don Alberto noticed that Vasco da Gama's outstretched arm now pointed to the mountains instead of towards the sea. People stopped going to the fountain to collect water: nothing came out of it. They had put the fountain exactly where it had been, but they couldn't move the source. It didn't matter, people said, we all have running water in our homes now. Ana Maria, who had lived each and everyone of her 57 years in Aldeia da Luz, found herself getting lost as she came home from the shops in the main square. She didn't understand why, but she couldn't find the right streets anymore. The baker couldn't get the dough to rise, the water was different, the light was different, the very gravity was different, he claimed. The chickens stopped laying eggs and the goats wouldn't milk. Dona Josephina continued going to more funerals she had already been to, and Don Alberto hadn't had a dream since he moved into the new village, exactly the same and completely different to the place where he had lived his life before.

Luis wasn't surprised to find the fountain not working. In the town he had left, nothing worked, the people above all. He wasn't surprised to find the oak tree had died, only to see it still there, its corked branches still extended, asking for help. He remembered the tree and the fountain perfectly, places they'd played as children, then hung out as teenagers, then sat and schemed escape as young adults. As he wandered in search of the exact spot he was looking for, while trying to avoid anyone who may have recognised him, he found other places he remembered: the school, the patch of sand between the houses where they'd played football, the clump of trees where he'd first kissed her, the close behind the church where he'd asked her to marry him.

Old men sat outside the bar in the town and agreed it was a good thing for the village. They didn't suffer from rheumatism anymore. They had gardens to tend, gardens in which they could grow things: the soil was more fertile here, the light gentler, the air healthier. And better this than what happened in Francavilla. In Francavilla, every rainstorm caused a landslide, sometimes one big enough to carry away entire buildings in slathes of mud. Every time a slide stole someone's house, they built another one on the other side of the town, higher up. Eventually the new part of town was bigger than the old one, so they gave it a new name: Nuovalba di Francavilla. A new dawn.

Luis wasn't surprised to find how little had changed. The town he left had been shabby, dirty, poor and old. The town he came back to still smelt of poverty and the people were all still old. Some would remember him, he thought, so he avoided the headscarved women and the old men outside the bar. But no one recognised him, and he recognised no one. He wondered if he had really changed so much in twenty years. Perhaps he had, and this was why other things looked strange to him, why they weren't how he remembered them. Some of the buildings seemed newer than they had done when he left. He looked down the hillside at the lake which he couldn't remember having been there before. No, perhaps there had been a lake, though he remembered more of a pond. He had swum in it, his feet touching the bottom. The whole village, strangely, looked bigger now. That's normal when you come back to a place, he thought. Or isn't it that things are supposed to look smaller? Because you've grown. He felt he was now getting smaller, and the world around him bigger.
The new walls were bereft of graffiti, and of the scratches and marks and signs that time leaves. Everything must have been whitewashed or painted out, thought Luis. He looked for the names he'd carved in trees and on benches and found nothing. Everything had been erased, nothing had been remembered. He stopped at the memorial to those who had given their lives in the wars and realised that nobody knew who those people were anymore. The memorial remembered nothing but itself. As he walked around searching, Luis felt the past hadn't happened, not knowing the town he was looking for lay under the water below, holding its memories and dreaming all the dreams Don Alberto no longer could.
As he searched, he remembered things he thought he would never have remembered, things he thought he'd never even noticed until the memory of them struck him now; the angle of the climbing sun, the distant sound of water, his shadow falling in different positions at different times of the day. All these things were different now. He sat on the edge of the low wall at the corner of the park and remembered that moment, how their shadows had stretched out to the side, whereas now it lay directly in front of him, blankly looking back. Perhaps it looked different now because there was only one shadow, he thought.
He sat there until it got dark, watching his shadow grow longer and less distinct until it vanished entirely, swallowed by the dark around. And then he started to dig. This, he was sure, this was the place. This was the last place he'd seen her, and the place where he'd buried what he kept of her memory, the thing he'd come back to find.

In the summers when the rain stopped for months on end, the level of the lake dropped perceptibly. Shards of pottery, cloudy bottles and old pictures stuck out from the caked mud along with washed-up fish and dead weed. Sometimes Dona Josephina looked down at the shrinking lake and wondered how long it would be before the spire of the church or the peaks of the biggest houses poked up from the surface of the water. In times of drought, fire blazed on the hills around them, sometimes reaching as far as the shore, threatening the lake, threatening to destroy their village again. Once by water, once by fire.

Luis filled in the hole after having spent a fruitless hour sifting through the dry dirt to find what he had buried twenty years before. Only then did he admit to himself this wasn't the place he'd last seen her. There had been another time, later, on the corner by the bus stop. He was leaving for somewhere else, didn't even think she was still in town. He remembered the brief look of surprise on her face, his own horror. He didn't know if she was coming back or leaving. Not the time by the lake when their shadows had mingled, a squalid bump at the bus stop was the last time he'd seen her, and he hadn't said goodbye. She'd said his name; he said nothing before running. It could've been her ghost, he had thought.

Dona Josephina did and didn't believe in ghosts and wondered what happened to the ghosts who lived in Aldeia da Luz. Did they move with the town, did they get lost somewhere on the way, or were they still there, wandering around under the water? Perhaps it was their voices the villagers thought they could hear some nights, perhaps it was their dreams which Don Alberto no longer dreamt. Sometimes, on days when it was so quiet they could hear themselves think, the inhabitants of the new village could still hear the bells of their old church ringing under the water.

Luis dug by the corner near the bus station. He found nothing. He thought about going to the cemetery to see if her name was there, but was scared to go at night. He dug under the oak tree, where he'd first met her, then by the fountain: nothing. He dug a dozen holes, and found nothing. Only when he remembered would he be able to forget.
As the sun came up he walked to the edge of the lake and looked at the washed up debris. He combed through jug handles, bottle tops and chair legs, wondering where it had all come from, as if there were a village submerged under the water. The muddy sand at the edge of the lake was not a memory itself, but a physical trace of action, a trace of something that had passed and would pass again, like a memory, always the same and always different.
He brushed his hand across his face to ward off the tiredness he felt and found someone's perfume on his hand. He wondered where it could have come from. Was it the water of the lake, a plant, or his own aftershave that suddenly smelled different? Someone whose hand he had shaken or brushed past. Whose perfume was it? Where had it come from? Could he really remember who it actually reminded him of? How strange that such a delicate thing should make him remember so clearly.
Perhaps this was what he had been looking for, he thought as he sifted through the junk on the shore, nothing more than the trace of a memory, and then, his senses renewed, he found it. Uncertain at first, he forced himself to think. Yes, he told himself, this must be it, this was what he had been looking for: the ring he'd given her when he'd asked her to marry him. It must have been here, after all, not under the tree or by the fountain or at the bus stop, but here where she'd said no, and refused the ring, and right here where he'd made the decision to leave Aldeia da Luz and never come back, burying the ring and swearing to come back to find it only when he knew he was in love again.

C.D. Rose has published short stories in New Writing 14 and Parenthesis.

Monday, 8 December, 2008

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Untitled Books

Issue 24 / August - September 2010

Ten funerals in one day would have been a dream too strange even for Don Alberto.