By the time I was allowed back into the house, my tearful Mother was trying to put order into the mess from the wardrobes they’d emptied, the open drawers and clothes strewn everywhere and the wool scattered over the floor like curdled streams of white blood.
“We couldn’t do anything to stop them…” Mother said. “We won’t be able to get him out. He was too prominent. Blasted politics! Why did he have to get involved? So now you know, politics always ends badly. Don’t you ever get involved!”
I gathered she was talking about Father. He wasn’t there. He’d escaped into the woods, perhaps to Can Tupí or the maternal grandparents’ farmhouse. But he’d not escaped to France like his brother, Fonso, Cry-Baby’s father, because he said he had never killed anyone, he hadn’t even fought at the front, all he’d done was work for the people, and that was exactly why they had let him stay behind, because nobody else wanted to take responsibility for anything.
“Don’t say that,” Mother gestured, trying to cover his mouth when he made this kind of excuse. “Say that they pulled the wool over your eyes, that the teacher who seemed so courteous and well-behaved filled your head with ideas that were never yours, that you only went there to learn and he hijacked you…”
But Father was stubborn. He was convinced he was innocent and had a right to think as he pleased as long as he didn’t hurt anyone. They’d sabotaged his grocery store, what else could they do to him?”
“They left a summons for him to go urgently to the civil guards’ barracks,” said Mother, downcast. “They were looking for him. They’d come to get him. They turned everything upside down because they were angry when they didn’t find him here. They know only too well we have nothing compromising here.”
She now spoke to me as if I had suddenly grown up. She spoke to me as you speak to adults. And that, rather than the brutal police raid, made me realize how serious the situation was. Suddenly, that despondent woman had no warmth of feeling left to see me as the child I still was; overnight she stopped holding my hand, that she put elsewhere, and no longer carried me around her neck so I had to walk by myself; now there was no time for singing and hugging because all her attention was required for someone in a much more fragile state than I was, and at a stroke I felt exposed and unprotected. I understood in a vague, confused way that she was simply feeling a new, acute pain, that the wife now predominated over the mother, and a wife’s harshness and tension overrode a mother’s loving inclinations.
That was when the frantic days of wandering and self-vilification started. That very night when Mother left me alone with supper ready on the stove I simply had to warm up and ran to Can Tupí to tell the family about the tragedy on the horizon. I didn’t go to sleep until she returned in the early hours. I stood by the windowpanes and glued my eyes to the stretch of road bordered by plane trees, lit only on the way out of town, scrutinizing every movement I could discern, inspecting every black shape that approached, recognizing a familiar form in every pattern the branches and leaves made, feeling a new kind of oppressive sadness, as if Mother had abandoned me and my happiness could only resume when she returned, with her presence.
After that first anxious wait, similar scenes of lonely afternoons and cold evenings were often repeated, when I pressed my face hard against the windowpanes and scrutinized that winding track, waiting for her dark, slender, slightly stooping figure to reappear with her burden of baskets and bundles. She came from the prison, from the farmhouse where she had gone for food, from Vic or Barcelona where she’d been asking for all kinds of certificates… I’d see her approaching exhausted, edgy, bags under her eyes, always half a smile on her lips and mentally inexhaustible. She would slump on the chair and say nothing. I sat next to her or in a corner of the dining room, asked no questions, listened to her panting breath and tried to decipher the signals she gave out, indications from the world of prisons or places she had visited, influential people, old friends, distant relatives, lawyers and doctors she’d been recommended, her hair messed up by the hand my father stuck through the bars, her glass beads and the bits of chaff stuck to her woollen shawl that Cío and Grandmothers’ embraces had left, the folded documents in her pocket alongside the funds powerful friends had given her. Mother’s return to that cold, silent house brought with it invisible images of dark, dank prisons, farmhouses yellowing with corn and ripened fruit, fine houses with carpets and heating and running water in the kitchen and bathroom, and as a backdrop the huge factory that awaited her early every morning with its vast, frosted windows that only sucked light from their workspace and shut out the rays of the sun and good cheer from the world outside.
After resting quietly for a moment, Mother got up a changed woman, as if she’d sloughed her old skin on the chair and went over to light the stove, asking me if I’d taken the buckets and pitchers to get water from the spring, and then she began to peel potatoes and fill the pot so she could put dinner on to boil, and only then would she slowly begin to unwind and tell me of all the manoeuvres she’d been attempting: “We’ll get over this, Andreu,” she repeated, as if she was trying to convince herself. “Everything can’t possibly turn sour on us now. It would be a really big step if we got him out of prison. And even better if we could get him out in a healthy state! I know Lluís: he’s not the kind for that sort of carry on. He’s a man who needs people around him who love him. You know, he needs people to love him. I can get by without lots of things, I’m made differently, but he will fall ill if he can’t leave that hell soon. We are what we are and some people possess hearts that freeze to death when they are abandoned to their own devices.”
She never treated me like a child again. She spoke to me from the kitchen as if I wasn’t there, and didn’t wait for a single reply, comment or reaction. She spoke to get it out of her system, to relieve tension, to listen to the sound and warmth of her own words. As if cheering herself up after a hectic day.
She almost always went out visiting on a Sunday. And very occasionally when she asked me to go with her, she chose the trousers and shirt I had to wear, always the most worn and mended, and made me repeat what I had to say if I was ever asked anything, told me how I should greet people and focus my eyes when she spoke to the well-to-do folk we visited so my expression would be sufficiently forlorn and pitiful. I didn’t need her to spell out that it was my role to inspire pity. Initially, I saw it as a piece of play-acting, but then I felt more of a con-man or trickster, and felt bad for a couple of days after the trauma, a migraine brought on by the obligatory change in my personality, the shame and degradation at being forced to inspire compassion like a beggar in a church doorway who had to act poor and seem poverty-stricken in his every gesture; it wasn’t enough to be poor, a beggar had to express through theatrical mannerisms, clothes and submissive patter the social abasement he embodied and the alms he deserved. I couldn’t accept that truth wasn’t the only path to victory. If there was no justice worthy of the name in this world, one that was immune to deceitful flattery and hypocritical fawning, why didn’t the vanquished accept their role as lifelong slaves and quietly adapt to the rule of their masters while, out of sight, they created their own realm of shadows, their avenging justice and secret order? Were adults incapable of doing what we children did at school, couldn’t they build a silent, parallel life behind the backs of those who wielded power?
I never forgave my mother for exposing my childhood to that humiliating abasement out of love for my father, a tenderness she transformed into a saviour’s passion. It was only a tad less embarrassing than the exhibitionist displays and charity-seeking forays in my First Communion suit or the self-interested spontaneity of our Easter Monday singing.