“Like a dog’s.”
“And what did she say?”
“She burst out laughing.”
“She burst out laughing?”
“Yes. She laughed for a good while, so much so she had to loosen her small scarf — she was choking.”
“What was making her laugh?”
“Later, when she stopped laughing and coughing, she said she thought that was funny, she’d never thought a goblin could have a face like a dog’s. And she started laughing again, saying, ‘A dog’s face! A dog’s face! If the goblins knew you’d caught them with a dog’s face…!’”
Cry-Baby believed in goblins and witches and all those invisible, magical worlds. I did and I didn’t, depending on the time and the place — I was very influenced by the people around me, if they believed, I made an effort to believe; if they didn’t, I too thought they were idiotic. Grandmother was a total believer but in a different way. We both believed in them because it was a world we were discovering and found frightening; on the other hand, Grandmother Mercè believed because she knew that world and in some mysterious way had had dealings with it — in her own words — and now seemed rather tired of them and was slowly distancing herself all that. Grandmother herself said that growing old meant becoming rather tired of everything, that old people had seen it all before and nothing held any surprises anymore, they could find nothing new in life and that’s why so many old people looked bored out of their minds.
“When I was a youngster,” she’d say, “I’d never have thought these last years would be so hard. I’m tired, I mean, I feel tired when I’ve done nothing, I get easily tired and find everything more and more boring. What can we do about that? Luckily I take no notice and don’t harp on it.” However, she’d then react immediately and encourage us in a livelier vein: “It all starts with ‘if it weren’t…’ When you reach the age of ‘if it weren’t for my back, if it weren’t for my legs…’ that means something is going wrong, you have to make an effort to ignore the ailment, whatever it is, and rush around more than ever. I try to, dear children, but find it harder by the day. I think I’ll soon reach the age of ‘if it weren’t…for the whole caboodle,’ ‘if it weren’t for the total disaster…’”
How could Cry-Baby and I not believe in goblins and magical wonders, if that’s all we had? That fantastical world was the only thing of beauty we had. We could find solace only in our imaginations. Grandmother’s stories and amazing experiences, Mother’s songs and her ruses to put something on the table every day, the memories of my father and the phantoms conjured up by his painful absence…all that predisposed us to enter a space that was warmer and friendlier than everyday life.
Quirze was different. He was more like his Father: surly, taciturn, scheming, suspicious, blunt and brutal… But Cry-Baby and I were strangers in the farmhouse that was his lair. The first-born and young heir. Even Uncle Bernat respected him, and Quirze never deferred to Uncle Bernat, as if they both knew the young’un would one day be boss, would occupy the top place birth assigned him. Quirze was going to have to live there, that space would be his life until he died, and he seemed to accept that quite naturally. We were only guests who one day, we didn’t know when, would have to depart, banished from that paradise that had welcomed us, where we found ourselves as a result of what grownups called “the circumstances of life.” Quirze was like a clod of earth from those fields, he himself was part of nature; in contrast, we were simply distant spectators, temporary guests, and everything was more of a spectacle in our eyes, a novel experience as harsh and exhausting as reality itself. Quirze set no great store by what he saw around him and we saw everything with hopeful eyes, and that was why we embraced Grandmother’s fantasy world and the ones we ourselves invented with such joy and excitement. They were a party in the mind Quirze didn’t share, or did so with diminishing enthusiasm, as if the passing years rooted him more in the land and moved him far away from birds of passage, visiting guests, the second-born and his relatives from town.
“Rubbish! Always beating the same drum!” Quirze would say, when Cry-Baby and I repeated bits of Grandmother’s stories up in the tree, that we always began with a “And what about if…?” “And what if the bailiffs or the phantoms from the war years drove up now, wanting to take you for a ride or extract your blood to give to the rich with TB who’d pay a fortune for it, what would you do?” “And what if the man who carried off children in a sack that he chopped into bits and roasted in the oven were to come out of the woods…?” “It’s hard to believe you swallow this kids’ stuff, big as you are! With all the work we have on! I’d rather break up sweetcorn or fill pitchers with water from the well!”
16
One day after lunch the Saint Camillus Father Superior spoke of the pleasure imagination brings — he actually said “appearances” because the subject of conversation was seamstresses and elegance prompted by Aunt Enriqueta’s work, the fashion magazines she brought from her Vic workplace and the photographs in a film magazine of hers, but I understood him to have meant imagination — and when the friar spoke of the pleasure of contemplation I translated that into our act of sitting at the top of the plum tree and contemplating from that high vantage point whatever was happening in the house, or whoever was approaching along the paths.
“That is the sum total of the liturgy,” harangued Father Tafalla, animated by the coffee and his tot of sweet anisette while he smoked the Havana cigar Dad Quirze had offered him before he’d left him in the gallery holding forth to the women and children: “Appearance, sign, form, the outward shape of a presence, a coin that hides one side and reveals the other… When we lay out a splendid spread on the table we assume we’re expecting guests…in a way the guests are already there even though they’re not there in person.”
Grandmother kept on with her needles and wool and said nothing. Aunt Enriqueta looked at Xavier, his young Saint Camillus companion, as if to ask him to stop Father Tafalla’s patter, that it was no time for sermons.
“Every day people want to be more fashionable,” commented Ció, as she put a plate of biscuits on the table, a selection of tidbits, she said, reading the labels: “I don’t know where they find the money. Of course, Vic isn’t a village… It has powerful households who can live without the ration card, and get what money can buy on the black market. I’ve heard that the morning train to Barcelona is full of black-marketeers, women in particular, who hide bread, flour, everything they carry, under their skirts and before reaching the station in Plaça de Catalunya, the moment they hit the Meridiana, they throw their bundles out of the window to someone who is waiting between the tracks, so the police by the station exits don’t catch them.”
“And it’s the same at the hairdresser’s,” said Aunt Enriqueta, “women spend more and more time there and want ever more extravagant hair-dos, a perm, an Arriba España or a French-style close crop.”
“But this is worldly liturgy, in a manner of speaking,” continued the friar, “mirages conjured up by the devil. Most temptations come to us through the eyes. That’s what I meant, we sometimes allow ourselves to be duped by evil appearances. Why, say, do these women need to doll themselves up like that if they already have a husband at home? Some go without food so they can dress fashionably.”
“Perhaps it’s all they have…” whispered Grandmother, bemused, as if she was speaking for herself, “A hairdo is the only entertainment they have.”
“What do you mean, Mercè?” the Father Superior looked round, half taking offence. “They’ve a screw loose, that’s what they have. They could find their entertainment at the cinema, where there are lots of suitable films, and at the festes that seem to be held all the time, with concerts and good orchestras… The Bishop has even been forced to intervene and ban dancing cheek to cheek because people were going too far.”