The Clean Feet

In Valdecubo, a village in the Asturian mountains, Granny Celsa went over the rules of the Güestia every autumn, the way you remind yourself where you keep the keys. “On the Night of the Dead, the dead walk past in a line, dressed in white and carrying candles. At the front walks a living person with the cross, condemned to lead them until someone else takes it from them. If you meet them, draw a circle on the ground and step inside. Accept nothing: not a hand, not a candle. And look at their feet, because the dead bring the graveyard earth with them on their feet.”

Lino was thirteen, and that night it was his job to bring the cows down from the hills, because a storm was threatening. He was coming back along the mill path, his crook in his hand, when he saw the lights.

It was a line of white figures moving in silence, each holding a candle that didn’t flicker even though the wind was blowing. At the front, a man from the next village was carrying a wooden cross, staring into nothing. Lino stepped aside into the ditch and, with the tip of his crook, drew a circle in the mud. Then, as his grandmother had taught him, he looked at their feet.

All of them were stained with dark earth up to the ankles, the man with the cross too. All except the last figure: her feet were white and clean, as if they had never trodden on a path. When the candlelight fell on her face, Lino recognised her. It was Rosario, the miller’s daughter, who had disappeared exactly a year before, on another Night of the Dead, on her way back from the mill. All they ever found was her headscarf, caught on the edge of the millpond.

Lino felt such joy that he forgot to be afraid. If Rosario had no earth on her feet, she wasn’t dead. The Güestia was taking her along, like the man with the cross, and he could save her. “Rosario!” he shouted from inside the circle. “Stop! You’re following the dead!”

The procession halted. Rosario slowly turned her head and smiled at him with a sadness that chilled his blood. “I know, Lino. I’ve been waiting a whole year for someone to take my place.” She held out her candle, which didn’t shed a single drop of wax. “Hold it for me a moment, will you? My hands are frozen.”

Lino had already reached half his arm out of the circle when his grandmother’s voice flashed through his mind: not a hand, not a candle. He threw himself face down on the ground, inside the line, eyes shut, his heart pounding against the earth. He heard footsteps that made no sound. As they passed the mill, Rosario’s light tilted for an instant towards the millpond and went on its way. When Lino raised his head, there was nobody left. In the mud there wasn’t a single footprint.