Moreover, ever since Father had been imprisoned, she was forced to do all the haggling with those in power in local government, the Movimiento (that had seized premises right opposite the Town Hall they’d confiscated from the Left Republican party during the war and that displayed on its balcony a flag that was divided diagonally, half red, half black with the letters CNS, which was why they were also called the Sindicato or people in the Falange, the JONS) and in the church, and she often went to Vic to talk to the lawyer to prepare the paperwork, present recourses and help the defence. We’d been waiting a long time for the trial to start and didn’t know whether it would be held in Vic or Barcelona.
“I don’t know how you manage all by yourself,” I’d often heard Ció commiserate.
When I lived in town, before Father went into prison, I’d see Mother run off her feet the whole day, but happy and even singing. In the early morning, when the cold was so sharp it was frightening because you stuck your nose outside the top of the eiderdown and you felt your skin was being lacerated, I’d be woken up by the voices of the girls from nearby farms walking past our house and calling to my mother from the road, two or three times, and they’d wait a couple of minutes for her to rush out with her esparto lunch basket and a large woollen scarf wrapped round her from head to waist like a shawl.
“Florència!” they shouted.
“Come on, Florència, or we’ll be late!”
“Better late than never!” they laughed. “No more dilly-dallying!”
As she left the house, Mother replied: “I’m coming. Just wait a second.”
She was afraid to go all alone. We lived on the outskirts of town, in a small two-storey house with a garden, that people called one of President Macià’s little houses, because they’d been built in the era when Grandfather Macià implemented his policy of building “the little house with a garden” that every citizen should have.
She’d never been late or overslept, let alone not gone to work because she was sick or exhausted. Mother was never sick. I felt she was indestructible, the kind of woman that defied the laws of nature and didn’t feel the same cold or sleepiness, the same tiredness or hunger that we did. I had never heard her complain about toothache. Even when she started stealing, I felt unable to accept fully that what she was doing was wrong. I decided she was the one who laid down the law, so she couldn’t possibly break it, and as I gradually saw strange objects appearing round the house that she sold on the side to people we hardly knew — rag-and-bone men, farm women — who came to our house at peculiar hours with big baskets or capacious bags, I put it all down to the business skills of an entrepreneurial woman who knew how to overcome all manner of obstacles and run a household because her husband was having such a hard time.
Shortly after my father was jailed, Grandmother and Ció persuaded Mother to let me spend some time on the farm with my cousins so she’d not have so much housework to do, wouldn’t be so stressed and could go more freely to Vic or Barcelona to pick up certificates, endorsements, references and whatever paperwork she required on Father’s behalf.
That was how I came to spend almost three years going to and from the factory town and farm, particularly at Christmas, and every two or three months, because, as Grandfather Hand said: “If the lad doesn’t get a whiff of his own house now and then, he’ll never know how to go back, won’t find the path, and won’t even know where he has come from.”
Mr. Madern, the teacher at the Novíssima, and the priest at the town parish school agreed to let me come and go, because as they said, I was more advanced than pupils of my year in either school, particularly in reading and arithmetic that, they insisted, were the two keystones, “reading, writing and the basics.”
My appearances and disappearances added to my prestige in both classes, as did the rumours about my father in prison. Whenever I came to one of the schools, especially over the first few days, my mates observed me with a respect and consideration they didn’t feel towards each other, as if I was a disturbing apparition, and should be bringing them news from another planet, or I was enjoying an adventure in freedom that they envied, trapped as they were in a fossilizing routine. That also allowed me to view the world of the farmhouse and my home with fresh eyes every time — as well as the people inhabiting them — it created a distance that made me a stranger in both places, as if another person were living in my shoes. A fragmented life I now observed more carefully than I used to when I didn’t live a fractured existence, and each fresh encounter with my cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents or Mother was like an addition of new knowledge, a discovery of new features that changed my perspective on all of them. This was true in regard to everyone, especially my mother.
She had always deeply admired her friend the factory owner Dolors Cerdà, Napkin Lolita or Fatibomba, who’d been able to save a small factory as tiny as a clenched fist that she now ran by herself, after her husband and son had been killed at the start of the civil war, and she managed that factory her husband had bequeathed her in the teeth of silent opposition from the bigger factory owners who, for some reason, couldn’t stand her and put every possible hurdle in her way to try to make her business go bust, so they could take it over. Perhaps because its tiny size had spared it the requisitions other firms had suffered at the hands of the revolutionary factory committees? Mother and Napkin Lolita — whom I had to call Mrs. Dolors — were friends and I think my mother would have liked to own a factory like her. She admired the success and freedom economic well-being brought. That was why I wasn’t surprised by their discreet exchanges. I would wonder how she’d managed to find such pretty items of clothing or the boxes of balls of thread that smelt of the garden or metal spare parts, small wheels, little cogs, spanners, hammers, tool boxes and so on. Nevertheless, in a period when a bar of chocolate or fresh white loaf was a surprise treat, when we’d manage to eat something every day at home, even though there was a difficult period when we were forced to ration everything and divide the bread three ways, one chunk per member of the family, eking it out as best we could and asking for more two or three days later when there’d be more rations available or the basket of provisions arrived from the grandparents’. At first the presence of those rare items, that turned up at the bottom of the dirty clothes basket or the most secret drawer in the bedroom wardrobe, seemed like symptoms of Mother’s efficient management, products of her absolute power, small miracles of chance like the ones she worked every day so we could keep the pot on the boil, as she’d put it.
I watched those transactions from afar in my bedroom, and their everyday normality granted an air of homely legality, like selling a rabbit or chicken from the coop to the woman next door. A diffuse, unconscious thought attributed those manoeuvres and items to help from Napkin Lolita or one of Mother’s other friends. In the end perhaps she was even doing them a favour by relieving them of damaged goods they couldn’t sell to shops. However, those scenes became etched deep in my brain where I knew I could find them some day. There were episodes I stored away unlabelled, with no judgment passed, though I knew that at some stage, in some measure, they might help protect me against that miracle woman’s harshness, a life-buoy to ensure I didn’t drown in the sea of the demands made by her feelings.
Father was different. Too good, said Mother. Too handsome, I heard Aunt Ció, his sister say. Too political, said Dad Quirze. Mother adored him. Literally adored him. Mother wouldn’t lift a spoon at the meal-table until Father had tried and approved each dish and wouldn’t start eating until he’d swallowed his first mouthful. After each meal that she cooked and served him up so lovingly, she’d sit and watch him take out a packet of tobacco and cigarette paper and slowly roll himself a smoke, very aware of the power of attraction he wielded over his wife and son for quite different reasons.