When we accompanied the priest and the Superior up to the alcove, we found Cry-Baby sunk in Grandmother’s big bed, the whole room full of the vapours and scents from infusions and every small table and chest of drawers strewn with glasses and jugs of herbal waters and boxes of medicine.
Cry-Baby looked frightened, her face wan and pale, her eyes damp and feverish surrounded by dark bluish circles, her hair a dishevelled mess over the huge pillow, her nose peeping out from beneath the turn of the sheet. Cry-Baby was so timid, so impressionable and susceptible that she believed everything she was told and never doubted for a moment: when we said she’d got very thin, every bit of food began to disgust her, if we said she seemed deaf, she made us repeat what we’d said three or four times, and when people said she was ill, her temperature immediately rocketed as if it had been waiting for the order to do just that.
“We’ve no news of her parents, I suppose?” the priest asked, staring at the girl hidden under her sheets, keeping well away, as if afraid he might catch something.
“Nothing at all,” Ció replied curtly.
“That’s another reason not to rush into doing things on a grand scale…” Grandmother Mercè took the opportunity to add. “Without her parents, we don’t know what we should do.”
“Her parents can’t complain,” interjected the priest. “If they’d responded as they should, they’d not be able to find the words to thank us.”
A very loud noise came from the sitting room, as if something had fallen on the floor or the ceiling had collapsed. We all looked round in the direction of the door, and Ció went off to see what had happened. She came back immediately and said: “It’s nothing. A copper pot fell on the floor. A cat must have been getting up to its tricks.”
“This house is full of goblins,” laughed Grandmother. “Looks like the scattering of hyssop and holy water at Easter didn’t rid us of all our evil spirits.”
The two clerics exchanged shocked glances, not knowing how to react to what Grandmother had said.
“As we were saying, without her parents and with this illness…” resumed Father Tafalla, leaving the alcove. “We must come to a decision.”
“The parents are not a problem,” retorted the parish priest. “It’s our responsibility.”
“I mentioned them because they are important factors that count in the village,” persisted the Saint Camillus Superior, “Nobody will be surprised if the ceremony is a quiet affair…”
The priest muttered to himself until, on his way to the door, he retorted: “If they at least came to take the sacraments more often, mass at the very least… Reprobates, they’ll end up reprobates or worse if they don’t change their ways.”
Father Tafalla turned to the women as if to explain or translate a sentence that had been uttered in Latin: “He’s referring to Núria’s parents. They were vicious priest-baiters. Quite shocking.”
“The whole lot of them!” insisted the priest as he walked through the doorway.
“That’s precisely why the uncles, aunts and Grandmother want the girl to do her duty,” the friar stood next to the priest and took his arm, trying to persuade him. “They are caught in an uncomfortable position, and we must take that into account. And they’re doing their best to please everyone.”
The priest said nothing. He stood stock still in the middle of the big sitting room and looked around to find the reason for the big din they’d heard a moment ago.
“When the girl recovers a bit, the entire family will accompany her to communion in our chapel,” the Saint Camillus friar added, trying to get him to swallow the pill. “And then she can quietly continue convalescing. That will also help to bring us all together a bit. It will be a step forward for the parish.”
We went silently downstairs. In the porch, before he left, the priest held out his hand for us two nippers to kiss, and Ció and Grandmother followed suit.
“You do what you must do,” he finally conceded, as they walked off, “but be aware that we must get the Bishop’s permission.”
Father Tafalla gave us a knowing look before they disappeared into the distance.
12
Mr. Madern, the master, Clever-Clogs, as Grandmother had nicknamed him, asked after Cry-Baby’s health day in day out and seemed the one most worried by the slowness of her recovery. The ex-nun, Pepita, Miss Silly, on the other hand, never inquired about her, as if she’d forgotten her the moment she switched class, as if she meant nothing to her anymore, wasn’t even an acquaintance.
The night before First Communion Sunday, the three women in the house summoned us to Grandmother’s room to try on the clothes we’d wear to the ceremony on the following day. Aunt Enriqueta had made a new dress for Núria and two sets of trousers for Quirze and me. They were long trousers, the first I had worn since my own First Communion.
They gave us our trousers to go and try on in our bedroom, while they inspected Cry-Baby’s dress to see how well it fitted.
Quirze pulled his trousers on in a flash and said nothing. Those long trousers unleashed a stream of thoughts in my head, as I pulled them on, a strange feeling, a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and excitement. I saw myself in that small factory town, next to Mother, on the day they said should be the happiest day in one’s life, in the theatre in the Parish Centre that had been changed into a church, because the reds had burnt down the church that was a little farther up the street and hadn’t yet been rebuilt, even though the owners of the riverside textile factories had given buckets of money to that end and even had had some to spare to pay for a new building in Vic, a seminary that would be one of the biggest ever built. However, while they finished rebuilding the parish church, they held mass and other ceremonies in the theatre in the Parish Centre, where a huge cross and Sacred Heart had been luridly painted on the wall at the back of the stage, and an altar placed in the middle with candles and clerics distributed around, as if it were a theatrical performance without a curtain or scenery.