Before he was jailed and fell ill, he looked like a movie actor disguised as a worker. He was conceited and I never saw a single hair on his head out of place. He never used brilliantine or cream, but it was always beautifully combed with a parting on the left, above a smooth, shaven neck. Even when he wore a mechanic’s blue overall he retained the elegant details that distinguished him, like his immaculate white scarves, shiny polished shoes and black socks—“Your socks must always be black, my boy,” he’d tell me, “you can never go wrong with black, black goes with everything, because other colours stand out a lot and a colour must really match your shoes and suit if you’re not going to look like a clown”—and perhaps a dapper little neckerchief.
He worked as a mechanic in a repair workshop in Vic and no factory manager in our town would take him on, least of all the textile factory where nearly all the men worked, because, according to Mother and Grandmother, “he stood out too much” before and after the war. My parents opened a small grocery store years before the war, just after they married and set up in the small factory town, having departed the farmhouse they’d left in the hands of his sister Ció and her husband, Dad Quirze. The character of my paternal grandfather, a man I never knew, had been instrumental in my father’s decision to give up life on the farm. It seems my dead Grandfather was a fiendishly difficult man, prickly as a hedgehog, who insisted that his sons do a farmhand’s work without pay, on the excuse that they were working for themselves, that they were the masters and that everything they saved today they would reap on the day in the future when they inherited the farm.
Father and son didn’t get on at all. Perhaps if my prickly grandfather had died earlier, they’d have got on better with Grandfather Hand, who was an easygoing fellow, and wouldn’t have left the land. Mother said my father was dead set on finding other work, on doing something else. Father didn’t want to spend his whole life on the land, he wanted to go to night school and learn to repair and drive cars and get involved in the political and social movements that were organizing in the villages around the farm. Father “had ideas,” as Mother put it, and joined a left-wing party unbeknown to everyone, though they never said which it was.
Mother was the second of twelve children in a farming family, from the most remote, sparse area of Les Guilleries. By the age of nine or ten she was working in the Boixets’ factory, in the small town where she later went to live with Father. They worked a ten-hour day and some of the working girls were so small they had to stand on bobbin boxes so they could tie the threads on the spinning machines. Ten hours labouring until the eight-hour day was imposed and a day of rest on Sunday. And a ban on children under ten working. However, by that time she was fourteen or fifteen and people were dreaming of what they called “the English week”—“anglesa” on her lips — so as not to work on Saturdays. It was over an hour to go and come back from the factory, carrying the basket with our supper. She met two other girls more or less her age on the way, one from La Bruguera and the other from El Pradell, at a spot called “the Rock of Light” because the people in the nearby El Pradell farm placed an oil lamp on a boundary stone at night to guide the girls returning home from the night shift. Mother told us about the pranks the three girls got up to on the way there and back, from crossing barefoot the stream that flowed into the River Ter to scrumping in the orchards of the wealthy. When she reminisced about those times, my mother smiled with an inner contentment as if she was describing the happiest days of her life.
“That’s how I met Lluís,” she said, as if that daily walk was justified by the encounter with her young man.
They’d meet twice a week by the spring that had the salamanders. And her two girlfriends went on ahead, as if they were walking separately or had fallen out. After a few weeks of courting Father began to accompany her to the farm. My mothers’ parents were pleased such a handsome lad came with her to their door, or at least to the spot where the dogs started barking threateningly at night. On the other hand, they weren’t so pleased he wasn’t the heir to a farm, but merely the son of tenant farmers. However, as they had so many children to bring up and feed, or so my mother said, they had no time to be too choosy.
They were married and looked like children, so much so that when they boarded the train in Vic to go to Barcelona and Montserrat for a weekend honeymoon, a civil guard arrested them because people thought they must be underage kids who’d run away from home.
And they soon fell out with my grandfather and left the farm to try their luck in the factory town. The grocery store was beginning to make money when my father got involved in politics. “Right up to his neck,” according to Mother. Even though he was married and ran the store, he went to night classes in the national school where his teacher was far more revolutionary than any turner in a foundry. That was when other shop-owners began to see him in a bad light, spread slander and incite the conservative population to boycott his shop.
“He’s another bright spark who wants to organize a consumer co-op among the workers and plunge the lot of us into poverty,” they railed, because they’d heard him make the occasional speech calling for fairer ways of trading and distributing foodstuff.
Their shop started to go downhill at a vicious turning point in the war when the FAI had just murdered the parish priest on the side of the road to Vic, and the three brothers from Can Teco — one being a priest who’d said mass not long before — were found early one morning by an out-of-the-way track, shot in the back of the neck at a time when many property owners and church-going folk were going into hiding or fleeing across the mountains into France. Father spent all his time at rallies, meetings and on his political commitments. They were forced to shut their shop and Mother had to go back to working in the Boixets’ factory so she could bring home a daily wage.
My memories of that time in the war are very hazy. I was too young and didn’t really know what was going on. I have a clear recollection of the ample, welcoming skirts of Beneta, and the backyard of her house, a cool, luminous garden with a large cistern under a fig tree that acted as a roof. Mother left me with Beneta, who was very old, while she went to the factory. She was on the afternoon shift at the time and left me at midday and picked me up, asleep and in nappies, just before midnight.
When the war finished, Mother moved heaven and earth to get into the good books of the victors. In private, at home, she called them “the fascists” and “that handful of bigwigs.” They were shopkeepers, falangistes, rich Catholics, priests, factory owners, except for Napkin Lolita, who had a foot in both camps. Initially, they enrolled me at the parish school the new priest had opened in the ground floor of the rectory, rather than taking me to the public school — called a national school — where Father had once become acquainted (my mother’s word) with that revolutionary red teacher executed in the first days of the new regime.
I don’t how long it was from the end of the war to the jailing of my father. All I recall is that one afternoon when I got back from class, I found the stairs full of civil guards blocking my way. I took refuge in the house of neighbours who took me in.
“Don’t worry,” they said. “It’s only a raid. They won’t find anything.”