I had worn long trousers for the first time on my First Communion day in the small factory town by the river. They were plus-fours made from long trousers they’d found somewhere or other, which the tailor and Aunt Enriqueta had bamboozled my mother into thinking were the latest big fashion: a young boy was only polite and well brought up if he wore plus-fours and they tried to convince us of that by showing us magazines with adults and young men modelling Prince-of-Wales-style check jackets and plus-fours. And as the tailor was Aunt Enriqueta’s friend and it was a way to make those old trousers new because they only came down to the calf and people wouldn’t see the worn bottoms, Mother acquiesced, I suspect to save money rather than to follow fashion. A few months later the tailor and Aunt Enriqueta realized I couldn’t wear those trousers around the village, not even on Sundays, and they cut and converted them into short trousers with bottoms almost at knee level.
“We made them like girls’ skirts that can grow, but in reverse,” laughed Aunt Enriqueta. “Trousers that can grow, except that rather than having cloth to let down, we’ve shortened them.”
In other words, Aunt Enriqueta’s long trousers were the first properly long trousers I ever wore, that is, down to the ankle, not chopped at the calf and tied up with a shirt collar like those golf plus-fours that looked like bloomers worn by Falange girls, dubbed the Daisies, in their gym classes with the nuns and on parade through the town preparing the way for the arrows, the flechas in metallic blue shirts and red berets, on Caudillo Day, on Victory Day, on the Day of the Race, on the Day of Unification…days for fortifying the nation, so they said.
On that day in the Parish Centre in the small factory town I sensed there was an invisible presence on everybody’s mind: that of my father in prison, who was far away yet somehow present. Mother was wearing a simple, if pretty, dress, with a small blue flower pattern that matched her eyes on a purple background, and her hair combed back, though not at all flirtatiously, in a way I thought really suited her. In my view, Mother was very beautiful; she was so slim, her eyes huge and lilac like two huge olives, her lips unpainted, her head erect and defiant, and her stance silent and stubborn.
“Nobody will force me to bow my head!” she said, as she combed her hair in the small bathroom, and I tried to walk along the corridor in my plus-fours. “They won’t be seeing me cower. The person has yet to be born who can make me bow my head.”
She went out into the passage and looked at me while I strutted in my new trousers like a preening peacock.
“And the same goes for you,” she said. “No sad or sour looks. I’ve already killed a rabbit and afterwards I’ll make rice with peas that will make you lick your lips. You’ll have a banquet, like the best of them. Don’t let them see us looking sad; your father wouldn’t like that. Head held high, because we’ve never hurt a soul. They are the fascists.”
Before we left to go the Parish Centre, she cast an eye over me from head to toe: white shirt, trouser belt properly tied, clean shoes, socks to within two centimetres of the bottoms of my bloomers, a handkerchief pointing up from my jacket top pocket, a bow tie, a white missal with ivory covers and mementoes in the form of a print with a ring and a Baby Jesus on one side and my name, the date and a prayer on the other.
“That mending tailor has done a good job, guided by Aunt Enriqueta,” Mother nodded approvingly and then tittered to herself: “They’ll never guess where I got that new outfit from! That’ll be one in the eye for the four bigwigs, as Grandmother calls them. Let it be an end to poverty for one day. The person has yet to be born who can keep me down. If we have to perform, then so be it! Off you go, my lad, and hold your head high.”
I could feel the eyes of the whole parish locking on us throughout the ceremony, and Father’s invisible presence, like an empty void not even my mother’s serene defiance could blot out. A kind of ghost, like the huge cross and heart painted on the wall at the back of the stage.
When I tried on my long trousers in our bedroom alongside Quirze, I thought of myself alone, at a loss, in the town’s streets, after mass, because when Mother got home and we had breakfast — a good cup of hot chocolate with the wafer biscuits she’d prepared beforehand — she said she had to get lunch ready, and I should go by myself to pay a visit to friendly families, ones that had helped us or that she reckoned were on her wavelength, together with some who were not so friendly but who now fawned over us as if attempting to apologize for their secret collaboration in our downfall. I should give them all mementoes of my First Communion.
“They know where your father is. They stuck him there,” she said as if trying to raise her own spirits, “Don’t be afraid! Let them see the situation they’ve landed us in, and that we’re not on our knees.”
The other communicants paid these polite visits accompanied by their parents, but I had to call on all my resources and remember my mother’s words so I didn’t go bright red with embarrassment.
I didn’t know what ties my mother had to the families she had me visit: the Querols, with the husband who was a turner at the foundry and always wore his blue overalls and must have been a colleague of my father; the Teco family were pastry-makers in one of the town’s bakeries, and so devout they’d lost three brothers in the war, one of whom was a priest; the young women from Can Triadú, two dowdy spinsters who loved me like a son; the Pratsdesalas, from the grocery store where we always shopped; Tuietes and Carolina, Mother’s workmates on the same shift at the factory, in the same section, on the nonstop machines, the most gruelling work, like the men’s, where you earned the best rates; Ca la Filosa, with Mrs. Dolors whom people nicknamed Napkin Lolita and the kids, Fatibomba, because she was so fat, who always wore black because she was a widow and she owned the town’s smallest factory, a mere ten or twelve workers, a close friend of Mother’s; the neighbours, obviously, the Boixassas and Ferriols, who lived in the top and bottom in our cheap housing…
They all gave me a kind welcome, stared at me, and some even made me spin round so they could see my outfit from every angle, admiring the daring modernity of my plus-fours, though they couldn’t tell whether they were apt or not for a First Communion; they accepted the memento that they stowed away somewhere or other, and most gave me a little something, cèntims or sweets I pocketed, and everyone praised my overall appearance, sent their regards to my mother and congratulated her on the way she’d dolled me up. Whenever they gave me cèntims, I grasped why Mother was so keen on my paying these visits. Mother had acted as if it were Holy Week when she’d tell me and a couple of my friends from town to learn some ditties which we then sang with a small flute accompaniment outside the houses of small farmers who lived on the outskirts and we carried a well-padded basket decorated with ribbons and bows for the eggs, cold sausage and odd small change they gave us. She warned us off joining the parish choir, saying we’d have a much better time by ourselves, we’d get to the farmhouses before the big choir, and would collect more money, because priests gave their choristers nothing, priests were tight-fisted and only took them on an excursion to the coast at Pentecost. So we spent every evening before Holy Week rehearsing these ditties that she invented:
This house’s master