is a very kind fellow,
he’ll fill our basket,
and live for many an Easter.
If the lady of the house came to the door we only had to change master to lady or young man, or son-in-law and the rest didn’t change:
This house’s lady
is a very kind…
In the evening we’d come home with our basket loaded with eggs and sausage and our pockets full of small change. She divided it up and we had a supply of snacks and lunches for a few weeks.
And she did exactly the same on the day of my First Communion, by insisting I call on friends and acquaintances.
“Poor Florència has really made an effort!” they said. “I don’t know how she has managed. You’re turned out like a little model. Congratulations and many happy returns.”
Mrs. Dolors, Napkin Lolita, Fatibomba, was the only one who ignored my clothes and she gave me the most money, a wad, that she told me to put in my pocket, not show anyone, and give to my mother.
Though nobody ever told me, I gathered that the garment the old-fashioned tailor had adapted with Aunt Enriqueta’s help, was one Mrs. Dolors had preserved that used to belong to her dead son, and that’s why it was on the old side, straight out of Little Lord Fauntleroy, said the girls in Can Triadú, a film about a boy they liked a lot and thought very handsome and distinguished, one they’d just shown in the village cinema.
Mother and I had lunch by ourselves, seated at opposite ends of the table.
“It’s better without guests,” she said. “It’s such a lot of work cooking for six or seven! The family can do that; we’re not in a fit state for parties. Isn’t that so, Andreu?”
And she sat there with a spoonful of rice hanging in mid-air, gazing out beyond the balcony windows, and didn’t say another word, as if she’d forgotten she was eating or had lost her appetite.
I imagined the sadness that was overwhelming and paralyzing her but I resisted succumbing. I always thought of the future, of that same afternoon, tomorrow or the day after, when the cheerfulness I associated with cars and mechanics would return, and my father would throw me up in the air like a ball, and catch me with a shout before we collapsed on the bed where we romped, laughed and hugged each other.
Perhaps that was the day when the invisible seed of an idea was planted in my head that grew over the years, though I was quite unaware; namely, that God was about solitude, isolation and silence. God is man’s weak spot, I heard the Saint Camillus Superior remark one day to Grandmother, though I hadn’t a clue what they were talking about. That was why he appeared to us when we most needed him, in sickness, poverty and moments of suffering. I couldn’t remember what Grandmother said, but I was surprised by the friar’s response, as if he was saying that God was like the doctor who came as the last resort, or something similar. Those empty streets when families were eating lunch, my mother’s vacant stare, those endless boring, lethargic afternoons, all that must be God’s way, God’s tortured joy that was sadness on the outside and hid unknown joy inside. Sometimes, when I took communion again with my school, when I still lived in Mother’s town, I shook with fear when approaching the altar, and experienced the same feeling I’d felt that afternoon after my First Communion, fear of a step leading to a mystery that became more alien with every forward step I took, like someone repeating a piece of mischief, who feels a twinge of repentance that he immediately represses so he can relapse again. Once the host was inside me, I felt nothing. I tried to feel things, to hear voices, to speak to somebody, and was overcome by the absurd sense that I could only recognize my own inner voices that were unfolding in a kind of lunacy. Man’s weak spot. The world’s silence, Father Tafalla could have added, as he seemed to know all there was to know about such matters.
Quirze had to shove me in the back to stir me out of my daydreams.
“Come on, they’re waiting for us!” he said.
Soon after, when Aunt Enriqueta cut my plus-fours and turned them into short trousers, Mother gave a sigh of relief. She had no more time to waste washing and ironing, she said. From that day on I didn’t have to wear those long pants, or whatever those ridiculous bloomers were.
Cry-Baby wore a white dress just below the knee, with an ample skirt, a transparent belt round her waist, white gloves, socks and shoes, and a white veil over her face. She looked like an enchanted princess. Sleeping Beauty.
13
The Saint Camillus monastery chapel was small, narrow and dark. It had choir stalls, a small harmonium and side balconies level with the centre of the stalls, that for Sunday mass would be filled by novices in white habits and the infirm wrapped in white sheets lying on chairs or stretchers. From down below that whiteness melded the novices and the infirm into a kind of angelic host or limbo replete with pure spirits, innocent little black or white stillborn babes, who’d never tasted life, phantom penitents.
Dad Quirze accompanied us as far as the door, went into the chapel for a moment, but soon walked out on the excuse that he was going for a smoke. The men did that in every parish, they poked their head inside and then spent mass outside having a drag and exhaling smoke through their noses and mouths.
Cry-Baby walked between Ció and Enriqueta like a sick princess. Her white dress made her resemble the novices and TB patients in the choir balconies, like a blessed soul who’d come down to earth.
Quirze and I sat on the bench at the back behind them. Early that morning my mother had rushed at top speed from town to bring me my all-white missal and rosary beads. Núria didn’t have mementoes to give or visits to make to show off her dress or collect presents, because Dad Quirze said that kind of fancy behaviour wasn’t for country folk, that such ceremonies were for city dwellers, and he criticized the fact that townsfolk copied everything the nincompoops in Vic and Barcelona did, and the workers too, who were people with their feet on the ground, like farmer labourers, but had been infected by the bad habits of factory owners and shopkeepers who lived far from the land and shamelessly aped the habits of city bosses and phoneys, thinking that was the way to clean off the dung still sprinkling their backs, upstarts, as Father Tafalla called them.
When we got back to the farmhouse, Cry-Baby refused to play with us while we waited for lunch. She said she might get her white dress dirty. The grownups had let her wear it the whole day and she walked through the upstairs and attic galleries scaring off any dog that came near and gripping her missal and rosary beads like a novice.
Quirze and I called to her from the plum tree, but she never deigned to answer. It was as if she had rediscovered herself, as if she’d seen herself in her Sunday best, all la-di-da, to the manner born, as if she now only heeded the inner voices she must have heard that morning for the first time. I imagined she must have experienced those things someone taking First Communion was supposed to feel, the kind of spiritual ecstasy the clergy spoke about in catechism classes, celestial voices and a sensation of joyous fulfilment that transformed one into a species of archangel protected against the mire of sin by the goodness of God. I was rather envious of Cry-Baby because of that touch of grace she’d apparently experienced and that I’d never tasted. In contrast, Quirze ignored his cousin’s strange behaviour. He remarked in his surliest tone: “That lunatic thinks she’s turned into a nun. She’s not right in the head. The least thing drives her crazy,” and he shouted, “Come here! Climb up the plum tree, you blessed charmer, or we’ll take over your branch. If you don’t come today, you’ll never be able to climb up here again. Even if you stay inside, you’ll still dirty your clothes.”