TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Franca Mancinelli

The Butterfly Cemetery

A little girl would chase butterflies through an alfalfa field, with her hands open like a net in the air or she would catch them by their wings when they stopped on flowers. Held between the thumb and forefinger, they were like colored sugar coatings that she might have eaten. But it was enough for her to talk to them, barely moving her lips or murmuring in her mind, until the butterflies, resting on her shoulder, no longer fluttered off: they had become attached to her. And yet not long afterwards, they would be inert, enfeebled leaves. After playing some games in which they responded, as if tame or drowsy, to all her desires, the little girl understood that the time had come to bury them in a place, beneath a staircase, where, inside a corolla of white pebbles, crisscrossed twigs, and flaccid flowers, she had created a small cemetery. Then someone told her about the powder that makes one fly. Or maybe she said this to herself, in the same way that she came to know that the butterflies, out of affection, would alight on her instead of flowers. The powder would remain on the fingers of whoever touched the butterflies, whichwould lose their weightlessness, sadden, and soon afterwards fall asleep forever. As soon as she understood this, she stopped playing the game and the cemetery beneath the staircase disappeared, covered over by grass. One afternoon, however, she seemed to see, in light taut like a clothesline, a little girl in the alfalfa field who was stealing the powder from the sky-blue wings and then sprinkling it on the palms of her hands, on her wrists, along her arms and up to her shoulders, and then she started running fast, leaping from time to time, like a small airplane trying to take off. Like rainbows, butterfly wings could not be touched. One day, 128