It was the same difference that existed between Siscu, our schoolmate, and everybody else. We were interested in Siscu because his courting or rather larking about — in our village the first stage of courting was “larking about”—with Oak-Leaf had endowed him with flirtatious or seductive skills that surprised us, that we wanted to observe, just as we admired a hiker who goes on ahead on an excursion and opens up the path we will follow later. Conversely, our other schoolmates had yet to take that step forward and remained much of a muchness in the usual routine of the herd, in limbo.
So what did we want to find out about the adults evoked in our nonsense game that became a kind of magic spell? The fact that their names appeared with swear words that weren’t a hundred percent insulting but that couldn’t be mentioned outside our private circle, already pointed up, in our eyes, the hidden, sexual nature of the curiosity driving us on.
And so I began to get to know those people who on first sight seemed unsullied, and just as we thought it funny that Pere Màrtir was good for nothing or Mr. Madern was useful for opening the mouths of people with toothache, Cry-Baby and I didn’t understand the shrieks of laughter prompted by the piece of nonsense that said, for example, that Canary, the blond civil guard on a short fuse, was good for letting the sparrow out of the cage. Cry-Baby and I had to intuit what lay behind the jokes and incongruities that made Oak-Leaf and Quirze laugh so much. In a similar vein we couldn’t join in the laughter when it turned out that Father Tafalla was good for filling Grandfather Hand’s shepherd’s pouch or that Xavier the novice was good for catching butterflies in a cornet, Grandmother Mercè’s goblins were good for carrying chamber pots to the lavatory and the Saint Camillus patients for spreading out clothes in the sun to dry. But most surprising of all was the combination that said Aunt Enriqueta was good for opening monastery doors to those who wanted to opt out, or, as they said in an expression that reminded me of Judas’s betrayal, hang their habits on a fig tree.
After we’d squeezed all we could out of our nonsense game, Oak-Leaf started telling us what Siscu said and did to her when nobody was watching, and I felt her disclosures meant we were leaving our childish games behind forever and embarking on dark, unknown paths, that were more for adults, far from where we’d begun with our exchange of nonsense.
I was quite frightened — awed — by that adult world I glimpsed through the words of Oak-Leaf and Quirze, a world made of silent flesh and acts quick as the thrust of a knife, which I thought represented a threat and challenge to life at the farmhouse, as if a new, silent and invisible war was endangering our refugee status.
I knew things about sex from the dirty comments made by my schoolmates and a few scenes I’d observed by chance, apart from what the workings of nature in the countryside had revealed, like a mare or a ewe giving birth or dogs coupling, and it was a fascinating yet repugnant world. I viewed these adult goings-on as a spectator, as someone who knows that one day he will have to go to work somewhere, learn a trade, but who still doesn’t know what kind of work that will be or whether he will choose it driven by a vocation or by more down-to-earth considerations.
And my short-lived experiences as a spectator told me that those things always bring unhappiness, or at the very least are linked to all kinds of chaos. Aunt Mariona, Mother’s sister who’d run away with a married man, had been forced into shameful exile in a strange, distant city. And her seducer had suffered a public belling and a beating at the hands of his wife with the pole she used for washing, and that made him the village laughingstock, a cuckold and doormat they dubbed him, along with other choice insults. I found it the height of embarrassment when my mates in the parish school exposed themselves in the lavatories and compared sizes or when the big kids stopped thinking of us as “wet blankets” and let us listen to their conversations when they described the rude tricks couples got up to at night, what they do, how they do it, who does it best, what I would do, what I saw them doing, who told me and how he knew it for sure… In comparison, I found the boys in the Novíssima healthier, perhaps because in those first few years after the war we were still taught with the girls, and their presence imposed a different kind of behaviour and language.
The clearest demonstration of how adults in the grips of feverish love or sex — at the time I didn’t distinguish between the two and stored all that information in a hodgepodge hard to unpack — went overboard was when Mother used me as a spy to check on whether Father was going out with other women.
Mother must have thought I was too young to really understand the mission she was charging me with, and the fact is I initially thought of it as an adventure, as Mother wanting to do me a favour and give me something amusing to do at an unusual time of day. It was precisely that element, the unlikely hour, unsuited to a child, which first alerted me to the real role I was being asked to perform. Later, after my second or third sally, when she began to ask me what my father and I had done, which girl had sat on the seat next to him, where he’d stopped and what he’d said, and whether so-and-so was in the coach, I started to see what she was after, or rather to intuit the blind fury that was getting to her, that I interpreted as a form of envy or rivalry, a forlorn longing for Father’s company.
When the war was over and factories were restored to their lifelong owners, who’d returned from the national camp, from the other side, as they said, and who now managed them from offices in Barcelona through executives, directors, foremen, clerks…and the whole strict hierarchy of bureaucracy they delegated power to, a time came when there weren’t enough women workers in town to feed the constant expansion of the textile factories — the dyeing, starching and other tasks. So the directors organized coaches to pick up women from local hamlets and bring them home after the night shift ended. Later on they were forced to bring more people in, sometimes whole villages from Andalusia led by their mayor, who they housed in blocks of flats that were like matchboxes, as Mother called them, built expressly to accommodate them and built on the cheap.
A few months before the Civil Guard arrested and jailed him in Vic, carrying out the instructions of a judge or prosecutor who’d taken all that time to set him up, a coach firm hired my father. That’s how he came to be a driver of one of those coaches full of women that drove to and fro from the textile settlements on the Ter, near our small town, and as far away as my grandparents’ hamlet.
It all started one evening, when Father was about to jump in the coach he parked in front of our house, and Mother asked me in front of him: “Andreu, wouldn’t you like to go for a ride with your father for a bit?”
I looked at them both, rather taken aback. It was the first time anyone had suggested I should go out after dark.
“Go on, tell him you’d like to keep him company and would love to go with him!” And staring at my father she went on: “Why don’t you take him with you? In the meantime I’ll wash up and mend clothes while I’m waiting for you to get back. Then he won’t get in my way here. Go on, take him with you.”
The expression on Father’s face was half amused, half anxious: “What on earth do you think the boy’s going to do in a coach filled with women who are filthy and sweaty after a day’s work? Kids his age should be well into the land of Nod by this time.”
“He can keep you company and you won’t have to drive home all by yourself. He’s got nobody to play with here. He just loves riding in a coach, don’t you, Andreu?”
“But sometimes I have to stop off at the company repair shop in Vic that they only open late at night for us.”