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CHAPTER 1

The first blood

On the patio, old Francisca was scrubbing her daughter's shift and sheet in the wooden basin. Frasquita Carasco, my mother, then a very young girl, stood waiting, naked, on that night at the height of summer, trying with a flannel to stem the blood that was streaking her thighs.

The red-stained water lapped around the old woman's words. "From now on, you will bleed every month. When Holy Week comes, I'll initiate you. Go back to bed now, and don't ruin your other shift!"

Frasquita covered her straw mattress with the hessian sheet her mother had given her and lay down in the silence of the night.

Even though the blood was flowing, she did not feel the slightest pain. Would she still be bleeding when she woke up? What if she emptied completely during her sleep like a cracked pitcher? Her thighs already looked so white ... She preferred not to sleep, to feel herself die ...

The dawn shook her. So, she was still alive!

Through her little window, she could already make out the other houses below in Santavela, slightly pink in the timid caress of a new sun that would gradually become more confident. Soon they would have to hold their breaths, live on their reserves of coolness, and remain hidden behind the whitewashed stone until late afternoon. Only then would they be able to enjoy the light of the dying sun, to watch it impale itself on a horizon as sharp and dry as a blade and disappear slowly behind the great knife of the mountains, turned blood-red in an enormous death rattle of colors. Then the night would glide from east to west, black, almost moth-eaten in places, and a breath might perhaps come to stir the burning air, a breath laden with wet, salty aromas. The whole village would start to dream of that vast stretch of water, blue from all the skies reflected in it, whose outbursts, rages and beauty had been described to them by the few travelers who had strayed onto the winding lanes that led to Santavela.

Frasquita, my mother, looked at the forest of loose stones and dry trees that surrounded her world and thought how good it was to be alive, even here, and although her blood continued flowing, her only anxiety now was that she might stain herself.

"Don't eat figs or blackberries during your period, it'll show on your face." "Take care not to touch meat during that week, or hair will grow on your chin!" Don't drink this, don't touch that: there was no lack of advice.

Of course, it didn't kill you, but life had been simpler before.

During the eight months that preceded Lent, Frasquita was unable, despite all her efforts, to escape her mother's perceptive eye: her mother could sense the blood coming even before the first drop appeared, and she would immediately come running, brandishing the latest taboos gleaned in the past three weeks from every old hag in the village.

What Frasquita dreaded above all was the first night of her period. Then, without fail, her mother would come into her room in the dead of night, throw a blanket over her shoulders, and lead her to a field of stones where, whatever the season, she would wash her, muttering mysterious prayers as she did so.

And the next day she had to do her share as if everything was normal: wake up at dawn to milk the goats, take the milk to the neighbors, make the bread, do the housework, then set off through the hills with the animals and find them something to graze on in the middle of all those stones. All the while, of course, avoiding eating the best that nature could offer because everything that seemed good in normal times suddenly turned deadly when the blood flowed.

Unlike the other girls she talked to on the hills, who would announce to all and sundry that they were now women, Frasquita hated her new condition: all she could see in it was the inconvenience, and she would happily have stayed a child.

But nobody ever mentioned nightly prayers or initiations during Holy Week. Frasquita had not forgotten her mother's words on the night of the first blood and she sensed that she was to say nothing about it to anyone.

In whom could she have confided anyway?

She was an only daughter. Her mother's family had been decimated by a mysterious illness, along with half the village, and, at the age of forty-five, Francisca, her mother, who had become resigned to the idea that she would never have children, had suddenly, against all expectation, seen her belly swell.

Mother and daughter seemed inseparable, as if bound together by the miracle of that belated birth. For a long time, they had advanced side by side at the same pace along the lanes. At first, Francisca had adjusted her step to her daughter's, then Frasquita's strides had grown much longer until her mother could not keep up and the child had to submit to the limitations of the weary body walking beside her. Young as she was, Frasquita knew she was too frail to withstand the eyes of the village alone, and as for her mother, she had to keep her child by her side or she might have doubted her very existence.

Their bodies would move, driven by the same current, and it was impossible to say which of the two was imposing her movement on the other.

Frasquita did not betray her mother's eccentricities. The questions stayed with her, and accumulated.

From the first day of Lent, the future initiate was fed exclusively on unleavened bread, milk and fruit. She left the house only to attend Sunday mass. The tiny olivewood cross that she clutched in her right hand as soon as she walked out the door of her house and the small angular stones with which her mother decorated her shoes gave her the appearance of a saint.

Thanks to all this ritual and mystery, Frasquita finally got caught up in the game. It was of no consequence to her that the soles of her feet hurt, nor did she mind the closed shutters in her room, or the darkness, or the silence in which her mother shut her away, she was focused on that ultimate goal, that initiation that would make her a woman. She could almost touch it, and she prayed to God and the Virgin with a fervor increased tenfold by fasting and solitude. There were even days when she felt certain that Mary and her Son were present at her side. Overcome with a kind of ecstasy, she would throw herself to her knees, wild-eyed. In those blessed moments when it seemed to her that the room was suddenly filled with their presence, Frasquita would disappear into the prayers she offered up to them with the fervor of a twelve-year-old child who has been starved for several weeks. Entirely contained within those words she had learned, those poems recited and offered, she was nothing more than lips absorbed in something unfathomable.

Then her heart would beat at the same rhythm as the world that suddenly filled her dark little room. It entered in procession through the slits in the shutters, through the cracks in the walls. It spilled into the closed space of the bedroom, gathered in it, pressed in on her from all sides. She felt it beating in her ribcage, throbbing behind her eyelids. First came the sky, with its winds and clouds, then the mountains paraded past, one after the other, like the pearls of a necklace that had been thrown in under her door, then came the high sea, which made the walls warp like blotting paper. The whole of creation would gather around her, within her, and she would become the sky, the mountains and the sea. She would come to the world and the world would come to her.

But then her mother would open the door and everything would disappear.

On the night of Holy Tuesday, Frasquita is asleep, exhausted from too much waiting.

Her mother stands erect in the darkness by her daughter's bed. She throws cooking salt as she chants. There is a strong smell of garlic. Her bony hands move above the young face already swollen with sleep. The dreams flee. The white fingers move over her features. The voice squeals suddenly in the black dryness of the night.

A stillborn cry.

They must not wake father. Silence.

Her mother's gestures become more rapid.

Frasquita is torn between laughter and fear. But she does not laugh, and she follows her mother's small figure out into the night. Barefoot, steps weighed down by the silence. Their shadows follow lightly after them.

They both walk along the path leading to the cemetery. As soon as they are surrounded by graves, Francisca starts praying again. Her voice flows out of her like water, in great gushes. It rises to her mouth and overflows. There is always more to spit out.

A woman screams, and a half-undressed couple who have come there to be out of earshot of the living and enjoy the silence of the dead run off as fast as their legs will carry them. Frasquita shudders as her mother addresses her female ancestors, her voice and language no longer recognizable.

Two black headbands suddenly appear in her mother's empty hands.

"I have to blindfold you now. All the prayers you are about to hear, you will have to remember. They come from before the first book, and are passed down from mother to daughter. They can only be taught during Holy Week. You will have to learn them all, and, in your turn, you will bequeath them to those of your daughters who will show themselves worthy. These prayers cannot be written or thought. They are said aloud. That is the secret. You will accompany some of them with gestures I will teach you later."

Frasquita is blindfolded and her mother makes her turn around several times. She has lost her bearings. The ground falls away. She feels dizzy. Her eyes search for the light. She wants to run away.

Then a voice rises in the night. Not her mother's.

A voice that seems to come from the bowels of the earth, a voice from beyond the grave, a huge voice that whispers, at once close and distant, at once outside Frasquita and beneath her skin, at once clear and muted. She will have to repeat everything. Remember everything. She has only four nights to absorb a body of knowledge that goes back a thousand years.

Terrified, Frasquita does as she is told. In the darkness, she repeats what is whispered to her and the heavy words batter her, imprint themselves on her as she says them.

During that first night, my mother learned by heart prayers to shade the head from the sun, prayers for cut skin, for burned skin, for sick eyes, prayers for warts, prayers to get to sleep, and so on. For every small human misery, there was a prayer.

There were fewer prayers on the second night, and she found them harder to understand, utter and retain. They were prayers to cure people of the evil eye and protect them from spirits, from the white lady, from the creatures of the night.

On the third night, the voice taught her two prayers so complicated, so hermetic, that Frasquita could not even grasp who they were addressed to. She did what she could to utter these inarticulate, almost inexpressible sounds. A mysterious language filled her mouth like a thick substance that she had to chew for a long time. As she said the words, it seemed to her that there was a strange flavor flooding her palate and tickling her taste buds.

These were incantations to make the damned rise like cakes, to build bridges between the worlds, to open graves, to restart what is finished.

Finally, on the last night, the now-familiar voice emerging from the shadows gave her a gift.

"You now know how to cure the small ills of the body with the help of the saints, you know how to free souls with the help of the one who is called Mary here, but who has many other names, and I have taught you to hear the laments and lessons of the dead. But take care! You will have to employ your power sparingly. You will be able to use the prayers of the first night whenever you see fit, but those of the second night, if you do not want to lose them, you will have to use only when a stranger asks for your help and it will be of no advantage to your family. As for the invocations of the third night, those that summon spirits, they can only be used once every hundred years. As soon as you utter one, you will forget it. But beware, appealing to the other world is not without its dangers: the dead are not always benevolent and these last incantations have a will of their own. Remember that there are living words that burn the minds that they possess. I am entrusting you with this box. You must only open it in nine months' time, nine months to the day, not before. If you do not resist the temptation, you will lose everything I have taught you until now, just as your mother lost it before you. Farewell."

The box

Even as a child, Frasquita had liked to sit in a corner and sew. It had not taken long for her mother to notice the girl's surprising speed and dexterity with the needle. She laughed to see the child replacing a button or mending a cuff with such extreme meticulousness.

Frasquita had started out by darning the seats of pants, and from one pair of pants to the next the trajectory of the thread had become more confident, the stitches finer, her hand movements faster, and her eye sharper.

During the Lent when she was initiated, she had been deprived of her sewing. That in itself had been a great sacrifice. So, immediately after Easter, she got back to work with renewed ardor.

In her mending, Frasquita had so far tried to imitate the weave of the material, to reconstruct it, and she succeeded so well in this that her work became invisible. Her father would search in vain for some trace of wear and tear on the knees or in the crotch of his pants: his clothes seemed to him brand-new. But after that Holy Week, weary of so much humility, she let her skill shine through increasingly often. Tiny white flowers started appearing on the sheets, and a few birds frolicked unobtrusively on the faultlines, closing the torn lips of the fabrics. White on white, black on black, her repairs were an initiation into embroidery, and little motifs multiplied on her mother's shawls.

Only her work helped Frasquita resist the terrible temptation represented by the box sitting on the ground in a corner of the room.

The massive black cube — made of rough wood but with a surface soft to the touch due to the patina of time — was waiting.

Of course, the centuries had smoothed its corners, but no worm had ever taken the liberty of eating into that dark flesh.

At first, Frasquita would sit down facing the box and look at it for hours on end, trying to melt into its black substance. She soon knew every knot. She would concentrate so hard on the object that she would feel dizzy.

But the box resisted. The box would not give up its secret.

Frasquita could now leave her room whenever she felt like it. She would roam the area with her little flock and, as soon as she returned, help her mother with the housework, then start darning, darning with passion, trying to forget the box.

She thought at first that she would never be able to resist for nine whole months that obsessive desire to open it. Several times, she was on the verge of lifting the lid, which had no lock to guard it. But then she remembered her mother, who had made that mistake before her, and the thought stayed her hand.

On the tenth Sunday after Easter, in the kitchen, Francisca began to teach her the gestures.

"You see, I know the music but I've forgotten the words: I can't recite the prayers, but each of those you have been taught must be accompanied by these gestures I am going to teach you. Today, we will do carne cortada. To treat cut flesh, all you will have to do is utter your incantations while performing these gestures you are about to see me perform."

She took two fine white eggs, cracked them against the edge of a bowl, scrambled them, then poured them into a cast-iron cooking pot.

"Take them out of the fire, they're going to burn!" Frasquita cried anxiously.

"They must burn, you see, and once they're quite black, you soak a cloth in olive oil and blacken it with what remains of the eggs. Then with it you draw three crosses on the injured person's cut so that it heals more rapidly."

At that moment, Frasquita, who was watching her mother with great attention, noticed how white her hair had become lately, how withered her hands. She realized that her mother had turned into an old woman.

"Mother, how did you lose the gift?"

"At your age, I received the same box you were given. But three months before the end of the trial, I opened it, thinking that nobody would ever know. The box was empty and I immediately forgot all the prayers I had been taught."

"But if you forgot them, who was it who taught them to me? Wasn't that your voice I heard among the graves?"

"No. When I opened the box, it was as if I was opening my own skull. All the words that had been locked in it a few months earlier escaped at once. I immediately closed the lid again. I only recalled one prayer, one of those from the third night. You heard me recite it in the cemetery. We've lost it for a hundred years."

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Excerpted from "The Threads of the Heart"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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