Half a tablespoon a day.
That was the dose Voter Luis took to stop the pain. His stump felt the seasons, the damp, impending rain. It itched like hell.
But it wasn’t for his stump that Voter Luis used poppy.
The pain that made him beg his son to hurry up with that verfluachtn Monbluam came from the part of the leg that was gone, which would send out shooting pains that turned his prayers to screams. Sometimes, they were so strong that Simon had to prepare an infusion with three times the usual dose.
Within a few weeks, Voter Luis started telling him to bring just the seeds. He would chew them and calm down. Tears in his eyes, he would thank him and fall asleep. Or sometimes, after the poppy, Voter Luis would recite passages from the Bible. Staring into space, his mind clouded over, lips moving frantically, his voice mechanical, flat, with no variations in volume.
Voter Luis started drinking. When drunk, he would curse and beat his son, though he was never quick enough or strong enough to shut that damned little girl’s mouth.
One day, he tore the little bells off both of them and threw them away. The sound was driving him mad, he cried.
Sim’l found them and hid them. They became his most precious treasure, and he would shake them whenever he felt scared, whenever Voter Luis was drunk. The supply of wine and grappa had diminished. Whenever he drank, Voter Luis would turn into an unrecognisable monster.
Sim’l feared his father’s rages as much as he feared snakes hiding in the long grass.
Voter Luis loaded the bulk of his work onto his son’s slight shoulders, which meant that the food supplies were diminishing, too. In order to prosper, the maso needed a Voter, not a beardless boy. Despite all Sim’l’s efforts, the Kellers began to experience hunger.
The days went by, all identical.
The pain. The screams. The blows.
The opium.
And the misfortunes did not end there. It was as if, with the death of Simon and Elisabeth’s mother, a curse had befallen the Keller family maso.
The hens were decimated by buzzards. One after the other, the cows died from a mysterious illness. The barn was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The maso only narrowly escaped the fire. Voter Luis did not bother to rebuild the barn.
There was no point, he said. We won’t keep cows anymore, only pigs. Because the pig, Voter Luis said with a snigger, is the most sacred of animals. The pig was the clay out of which He created man.
Don’t you believe me, son? he screamed, laughing.
“Look at the pig and admire His masterwork. At the dawn of time, He took the pig, blessed it and changed it. He replaced its legs with fir and yew branches. The yew is solid enough for walking, because He knew men would be travellers, and the fir tree is slender enough to provide agility but not strong enough to spare man having to build tools for his work. Too strong a man would have been arrogant, whereas work makes him humble. Man had also to speak and pray, so He squashed the pig’s snout so that man’s mouth could invent the alphabet and use it to sing His praises. Then, using pebbles from the streams to remind His new creation that life had emerged from water, he changed the shape of its ears. Finally, he tore the wings off an eagle and inserted them into the pig’s head, to enable man to think. But for all His infinite wisdom, He forgot to remove from man the pig’s hunger. That is why the eagle’s wings are of no use to man. His thoughts cannot fly because hunger is a boulder that keeps him pinned to the ground. Man is His Vulpendingen. His damned joke.”
Less than a month after uttering this terrible sermon, Voter Luis killed Elisabeth.