“I must have got it wrong,” responded Grandmother in the same tone of voice. “As I never leave home…”
“It’s dangerous to let the imagination stray, to trust in appearances. There are deceitful images, as well benign ones. That’s why you must make the right choices and listen to the right masters. Now you tell me who would dare to wear the swooping necklines you can see in this magazine, for example, if they weren’t already damned and couldn’t or didn’t know how to go beyond the crust of things?”
The crust of things. Did Cry-Baby and I go beyond that hard surface by dint of our belief in invisible worlds and swallowing Grandmother’s stories as if they were true, or when we were scared out of our wits walking across dark, solitary places and saw goblins in every cranny, or were always being accompanied by a shadow, the presence of our missing parents?
In my case, and I expect in Cry-Baby’s too, there was also the life we’d discovered in the countryside, the infinite nature of the woods, our bonding with animals, the serene presence of the mountains, the soulful life of trees… Compared to the precise order of machines and punctual, factory time-tables, the pleasant lack of order on the farm and the flexibility of time in the countryside were a joy as far as we were concerned. Grey hours existed in the country, chiaroscuro hours, that came like a gift from daytime, between sunset and the pitch-black of night, and didn’t exist in the factory town. They were magical hours when you couldn’t tell whether day or night ruled, hours when it seemed that anything went, that anything might happen, livestock could get lost, birds might abandon their nests forever, trees could lose their leaves or change colour, flowers fade, water disappear into the earth and people switch to another mood and adopt a character opposite to the one they’d displayed in the light of day. In the factory town everything turned on a siren blast or a bell’s chimes. On occasions when I’d had to take Mother her mid-morning breakfast wrapped in a red-striped napkin at the bottom of a basket, and went into the factory that was as huge as a cathedral, with machines in straight lines and that large, round clock presiding over the hangar like a sun, next to the cross and two photos of the Generalíssim and the blue-shirted young man from the Falange either side, over the doorway, I felt I was visiting Mother in a prison. The siren blasted, the machines stopped and the women all had half an hour to eat their mid-morning breakfast. There was never enough bread at the farm and Mother would leave her basket ready in the kitchen and I only had to go to the baker’s, on my way to the factory, just before it was time to go to school, take our ration of black bread or cut a few slices and stick it inside. Mother’s companions liked to joke and fuss over me. The charge-hand was a fat, oily man, with a huge pointed moustache — so many long hairs sprouting impossibly above that lip — and he too came over to have a word with me. Thirty minutes exactly, clocked up precisely, to eat breakfast. On the other hand, on the farm, they had all the time in the world to eat and drink; nobody was clock-watching.
I felt strange in the factory — like a caged bird — and when I was leaving, carrying my school satchel, and the machines cranked back into action and filled the hangar with a din that drowned out all speech, Mother had to shout her goodbye which I could hardly hear, a couple of metres and no voice was audible, there was only that implacable din, and I’d come away determined I’d never work in a factory or in the mechanics’ workshop I’d never visited, but which I imagined must be the same, if not worse. I thought that if they forced me to, I’d run away and live like a gypsy, like a charcoal burner who lived freely in the woods, or a rag-and-bone merchant, a thousand times better the life of a ne’er-do-well going from town to town shouting on street corners, “Rag-and-bone man! Bolsters, carpets, pots and pans for sale!” than that living death shut up in that arsehole of a factory, which was what Mother always called “that arsehole of a factory,” saying “anything rather than turning into fodder for that arsehole of a factory,” and I don’t know if she wanted to pass on to me her loathing for the job she had, a dog’s life as she called it, or else was underlining the way she was sacrificing her own life to sustain the family she now headed. At the time I never wondered why she hadn’t escaped as I was thinking I would, but years later I began to understand the emotional or existential trap she’d fallen into and couldn’t abandon. An arsehole of a factory or a dog’s life were her words, and such language led me to decide it was a life sentence she’d not wanted.
I’d begun to savour the freedom of the woods when Mother sent me to the grandparents’ farm years ago on a good three hours round walk to fetch food. I went alone, she’d shown me the way, we’d often gone together, and I had my favourite spots, the views I liked and the stretches of path where I quickened my pace, even ran, because I didn’t like them; they scared me. The moment came when I’d let my legs go and start imagining things: the shapes of trees, the secrets of ants or crickets, the footprints on the track, the fate of birds… I learned to listen to the silence and value its grandeur. Would I bump into a thief? Generous bandits like Joan de Serrallonga or good-for-nothing tramps like the Kid from Sau were long gone. If I did come across a thief, how would I react? Would I stand my ground or would I run away calling out to anyone who heard me to come to my aid? And what if I got lost and didn’t return home? I started imagining what lay behind the mountains, beyond those crags. On many a night I dreamt of fantastic landscapes hidden on the other side of the horizon, beyond the point my eyes could reach. A bright green country with dense, dark forests, and the highest trees…a land I longed for that I’d never seen, an ideal place that’s never left my mind, that always appears when I’m in need of consolation, a friendly landscape where I can rest when I’m tired, meadows welcoming like clean, sweet-scented sheets that greet me without any ifs or buts… A gleaming, magical, unique wood of my own that is both hospitable and wild. Losing myself deep in the wood was my road to freedom.
Cry-Baby and I also needed to grow within ourselves, unlike Quirze who was happy with the outside world and proud of his own skin, of the ever stronger muscles he showed off to us like a circus performer, flexing his biceps or feeling his thighs, as if his body was the only territory he trusted. The crust of things. The world’s bark. The skin.
On early mornings from spring to autumn, when the cold forced us to curl up at the bottom of our beds and tuck our noses in, when our feet felt for the hot stone Mother put in the stove for a while before we went to sleep and then wrapped tightly in an old pillowcase or a piece of jersey, before the cold invaded the house like an invisible flow of ice that seeped everywhere…when the weather started to be friendlier, sometimes, before daybreak, after the girls from the surrounding farmhouses had called on Mother and she’d gone to the factory, Father wasn’t there, Father was rarely there — it was always a party when Father was at home, his body in the adjacent bedroom gave off a wave of warm, scented air, that dissipated the cold and loneliness, but in my memories Father was never there, he was always in prison, in the prison infirmary, working away — and in those hours when the air was as soft as silk, I’d take out of my night-table the toy theatre I myself had made from sheets of card and figures I’d cut and painted copying from the comics we swapped with our mates at the parish school, and invent the most amazing plays that inflamed my imagination, scenarios with dream-like palaces, castles and landscapes. A real ball.