I imagined Mother sitting up in bed, spitting on the floor and screwing her face up, like she did when she talked to me about Gracieta Rossic, Aurora Maions and those other cheeky bitches, as she called them: “Ugh, those hussies…!” she’d scowl. “They all want the same thing!”
Until they started arguing for real.
“We’ll get nowhere,” said Mother in a louder voice, “can’t you see we’ll get nowhere with that lot?”
“So what do you expect me to do, run after the Bible-punchers and lick their arses, after all they’ve done to us? They sank our business and did us as much damage as they could.”
“That’s not the way to get back on your feet, Lluís. That lot have never done us any good and they never will.”
“What do you expect me to do? They’re workmates, I have to get on with them…”
“But they never put their neck on the line like you. We all thought everything could change, that we were going to put an end to poverty. But now I realize my brain’s too small to get round all that, that something’s not quite right. I see things I don’t like.”
Dad paused a while, then piped up: “You women don’t really understand.”
Mother’s retort came quickly, as if she’d been waiting for him to say that before she jumped and let loose: “Well, it looks as if Gracieta Rossic and those other bitches do. Far too well. Especially when you’re the one doing the talking.”
Battle was joined. The exchange of responses became so violent I could hardly hear what they were saying: “You’re a jealous devil, that’s your problem!”
“And your problem is that you’re so weak-kneed. You don’t stand firm anywhere: at work, with your family or with your wife… A bum on the run, that’s what you are!”
“I only ever moved to get the best for you and the boy! Did you really want us to stay on like peasants, toiling from dawn to dusk, slaves to the boss and at your father’s beck and call?”
“If I’d have known, I’d have preferred that to seeing you chasing after every bit of skirt. Don’t tell me you were still at work at this time in the morning? What good’s our boy going to get out of any of that?”
I heard noises and then Mother’s voice, a voice rent by sadness and regret, a voice I only had to hear to feel queasy as if it were scouring my chest: “Where do you think you are you going?”
“…”
“What are you doing, Lluís?”
“…”
“Stop, for heaven’s sake! Come here! Come back!”
I heard footsteps in the passage. I cowered in bed, frightened, pricking my ears up to try and hear what was going on. It was as if my parents had suddenly turned into dolls someone had put a match to. I imagined them going up in flames, burning in a strange fire.
Now their voices came from the bottom of the passage, from opposite the dining room.
“Don’t do that, for Christ’s sake!” Mother sobbed. “Please don’t…!”
Dad’s silence was like a bottomless pit.
“Please stop!” she implored.
There was a soft sound I couldn’t identify, chairs being moved or a box being dragged along the floor, the friction from two forces in conflict, and their struggle to overcome resistance. I got up, shivering with cold, tiptoed to the bedroom door that was ajar and squinted through the crack into the passage
I could see into the ill-lit dining room thanks to the light from the kitchen and my dad brandishing a knife in the air. The knife blade gleamed like a broken mirror, shone much brighter than the miserable, yellow kitchen light. Then I heard Mother still sobbing and imploring: “No, Lluís, no…!”
That scene shocked me, like a mouthful of strong wine that goes to your head and burns your brain out. I shut my eyes and instinctively leaned on the door as if all my energy had drained away. The door closed the second I heard Mother shouting: “Shut the door, Andreu, shut the door!”
Then more chairs sliding and steps running towards me. I pushed the door bolt, but I can’t remember if I managed to shift it. I hurriedly slumped into bed, curled up and pulled the eiderdown over my head, but kept listening out for shouting and noise in the passage.
“Your father has gone mad! Don’t move,” she said, “you stay put.”
I heard a loud bang, like a fist hitting the wall, and then silence. After that, whimpering and footsteps in the room next door. Words being whispered. A brittle silence.
Early in the morning, when I’d half got to sleep, Mother paid me a visit. She was wearing a woollen scarf round her neck and a white, wrinkled knee-length nightdress. Her hair was dishevelled and her hands were shaking. She sat on the side of my bed, put her hand on my head and asked: “Are you asleep?” I said nothing, just moved my head, opened my eyes and looked at her. “Did you hear? Father had a fit. It’s over now. Understand? It was nothing to worry about. He’s resting now. He’s ground down by work and all the problems he’s got. If he can rest for a few days, he’ll soon get better.” She leaned over, gently tucking me in, while she whispered, “Promise me one thing. When you see him tomorrow, don’t say a thing about what happened. Not a word. Don’t ever mention it to him. As if you’d heard nothing. He’d be really embarrassed if he knew you knew. And it was only a dizzy attack, a fit, a bad turn. It sometimes hits men like that…they get hot flushes, and flail out, strike blindly.”
I nodded and lowered my eyes to avoid my mother’s watery gaze.
Mother was right. Mother was always right. Without her good sense, Father’s lunacy would have sunk our home long before they took him off to prison. And who kept our home going now, when he was rotting in a dingy prison, as she said, confiding in Aunt Ció when they said their goodbyes. The glinting blade Father had flourished at the back of the dining room, the braggadocio gesture of the man taking his belt off and shaking it gleefully like a whip before stepping inside Cal Set, the two male dogs sniffing each other’s tails, the cheeky gestures of Oak-Leaf and Quirze when they burst out laughing when dirty words or references cropped up in our nonsense games…all that proved to me that my mother was right; emotional outbursts and intrigues of the flesh only brought unhappiness, chaos, headaches, separations, misery, longings, sickness and sadness in their wake.
Sex and its various manifestations were to blame for the fact that the world was one gigantic game of nonsense.
20
Some deed, some act, some mystery of nature precipitated events and shortened days as if there was no time left to waste. In a way, I felt a strange, unexpected conjunction of stars had ensured that that nonsense, that mess, those secrets, that adult world that was at once incomprehensible, opaque and fascinating, and so far had only revealed itself in short bursts, was now starting to pour down upon me like a storm bringing with it floods, avalanches and landslides. A downpour that caught me away from home, exposed and without shelter. A remote, concealed, fitful world I’d occasionally glimpsed, an apparently innocuous animal dormant deep inside me, now suddenly aroused by the scent of a hearty meal, ready to pounce with all its repressed hunger and hidden savagery.
The first time I saw Pere Màrtir, it was before lunch, when he was talking to Ció under the elder tree behind the farmhouse. I was off to the well with buckets and caught them whispering, just like Ció and Mother. He was tall, brawny, blond, blue-eyed and pale-skinned. He wore an unbuttoned greenish shirt, dark braces and well-cut black trousers. He looked at me for a second, then averted his gaze so I wouldn’t see he was crying. I guessed he was because he kept wiping his eyes with his fist, eyes that sparkled like two glasses. Ció turned her back to me as if she wanted to shield him from my gaze. I turned my back when I bent over the well to hook a bucket on the pulley. Then I watched them out of the corner of my eye as I walked home with the buckets full. Neither budged, Ció with her back turned and Pere Màrtir, head down, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles.