We paid our first visit to one of the factory managers, on a Sunday afternoon, in our town. Then to Vic and a chocolate manufacturer, an acquaintance from the days when we ran the grocery store. He lived in a mansion on the outskirts, in the middle of a garden, that seemed to have been designed by an artist’s pen, with stained glass windows like a house in a fairy story. We weren’t invited inside. The smiley, fair-haired woman I thought belonged to another world received us in the lobby and didn’t even offer us a chair. Our visit must have been very inopportune because even a child like me could tell her attitude was contemptuous. In the air of that mansion I savoured a subtle aroma of chocolate that went gently to my head and made me feel pleasantly queasy. It was as if every door hid a cake shop full of delicious pastries. Nonetheless, my mother persisted with her refrain: “He’s not done anything,” “He’s a good man who wouldn’t harm a fly,” “The other shopkeepers bear him a grudge, they won’t forgive him for bringing competition or joining the town hall and all those fools whose heads had been turned by politics,” and other such comments. Now and then she looked down at me, as if she’d just noticed I had a mark on my cheek or a hole in my pants, and then she’d rub my cheek or pull my shirt down so it fitted tighter over my trousers. Then she’d whimper, “Poor child, it’s not his fault,” “I’m not sure I can be a father and a mother to him,” “a child needs a father by his side to keep him on the straight and narrow,” and she always ended up asking for “a reference,” “a bit of pressure,” because “you, sir, have influence and the authorities take heed of you whenever…”
We visited a couple more acquaintances in similar vein: Mr. and Mrs. Manubens, the owners of Can Tupí, who welcomed us affably enough and were more interested in me than in my father, and an old priest who lived in a home and had been recommended to us by the priest, the head of the parish church school I went to who’d taken pity on my mother. The home where that skeletal cleric lived, with its vast freezing corridors, wooden benches and mean-faced nuns, seemed as sinister as the prison. One Sunday we even went down to Barcelona to see a lawyer recommended to us by the Saint Camillus Superior. We went bearing a letter of recommendation from Father Tafalla and the man invited us into his home on a day of rest and was the most agreeable of the lot. While he was talking to Mother in his office, he left me in a white, luminous kitchen where an old, smiley servant prepared breakfast for me the like of which I’d never tasted before: milk, biscuits, toast, mountain and York ham, jam, butter and hot chocolate… When we left, Mother seemed in good spirits and I’d surveyed the photos of the Generalíssim and of the lawyer in a soldier’s uniform next to other comrades, all holding weapons, and concluded that we had at last knocked on the right door: one belonging to the real winners. A centre of power. In my vague, distant way, I grasped that, given the status of losers we’d assumed, the best way to survive was to keep our own convictions, even our personal dignity, to ourselves and willingly kneel down and lick our masters’ boots. The winners didn’t expect the defeated to think we were on their level, all they asked was for us to respect and obey them. Why did they dress differently if it wasn’t to indicate in the clearest way possible that they wanted to be seen and treated differently? Was that so hard to grasp? Why did they wear blue shirts, black soutanes or tobacco-coloured uniforms if it wasn’t to distinguish themselves from the rest of us mortals? Women factory workers and engineering workers also wore a kind of uniform, dirty, greasy overalls and housecoats, work clothes that were nondescript, just as rubbish carts were different to the tilburies and automobiles of the well-to-do, and the victors’ uniforms weren’t work clothes, they were garments to show off, to parade, to impress, another notch on the list of merits of society’s upper echelons. Even a boy like me could understand such things and that was why I went along with the obedient, obsequious sheep fleece my mother had donned anew, and if I had any opinion about her performance, it was simply that she didn’t need to abase herself as much as she did — or in particular made me do — to prove her acceptance of the new order. It sufficed for the victorious side to know that we accepted their victory, their power and their rule. That we weren’t disputing any of their achievements or dogmas. Didn’t grownups, Grandmother’s rogues, know that the meek and the frail must always hide, must seek out hiding places “so they don’t show their faces,” and build huts in tree branches hidden by foliage, in places where nobody lives, so as not to disturb those people living in their mansions? It wasn’t necessary to be so abject, to sink two or three degrees below the normal, as she did, to show we didn’t question their authority and accepted their power without demurring for a moment. I felt that Mother’s abject self-immolation before the powerful wasn’t to the liking of those wealthy bigwigs; it made them uneasy because they wanted to enjoy their privileges as perfectly normal, not as anything exceptional, as if they’d been earned without trampling on anyone, and Mother’s submissive behaviour reminded them of the attitudes of victims, of the suffering they had caused to climb up to the heights they now relished. I was always under the impression they felt her begging ways were overwrought, prompted more by the passion she felt for her husband than by any belief in his innocence. And that extra detail simply fuelled the repulsion they felt towards her behaviour, a woman so critical of those who “showed their faces” that she hated as much as the folk who “gave themselves airs,” she who kept telling Father and me “never to draw attention to ourselves,” how could she forget her own principles and so shamelessly display the passion, madness and thirst for love she felt for that man, my father? Only blindness and a sickly obsession with her husband, like a raging fever a patient incubates unawares, could have made her lose her senses like that. And I reacted quite spontaneously to her excess of love by rejecting all feeling and being afraid to show any tender, emotional attachment to another person. The lesson I’d learned taught me to flee emotional commitment: the more you loved, the more dangers you faced on every side. Keep well away and you won’t get burnt. Love burns. Love destroys. Love kills.
15
What did Ció and Mother talk about in the course of those long goodbyes on a Sunday evening?
Obviously, they talked about Father. About him in prison and the consequences of the pressure they were exerting and the influence they could bring to bear, this man who knows that man who is a friend of the other fellow we met that day, and so on with a string of names vital to reach the key individual, the one who, in their opinion, could resolve everything.
I sat in the meadow and waited for the moment to give my mother a farewell kiss and go back to my cousins who were expecting me up the plum tree or by the pond. I couldn’t understand how they could be so chatty. Now and then they let a phrase or new expression slip that to my ears didn’t square with whatever they were pursuing so single-mindedly. I took no notice; they weren’t talking for my benefit; I decided I didn’t really understand what they were saying or that it was gossiping about more trivial matters, but gradually I gathered that they were referring to another problem they found upsetting, a delicate, secret subject, judging by how they cloaked it in veiled, oblique terms, as adults do, especially when discussing the mysteries of sex.
“Oh, no, no, no!” shrieked Ció, putting her hand to her forehead as if to chase off a fly or a thought. “If Dad Quirze finds out, you bet he’ll kill them!”