I immediately recognized him. I’d never seen such a fair-haired, well-built fellow. And it could only have been him. The youngsters with TB and pliable bones who stripped off in the monastery’s heartsease garden hoping the sun would restore their lost energy shared similar touches of nobility but some were emaciated, their pallid skin suffused by a sickly yellow and their elegance often marred by one woeful feature, premature baldness, a violently sunken chest, a swollen belly…that gave their naked bodies a hint of pathos and suggested they were in an endgame, that they couldn’t hide the fire consuming their lungs or stomachs. In contrast, Pere Màrtir glowed with health, and his chest, arm and neck muscles seemed ready to flex, jump, swell and take flight. And just as the TB patients’ wretchedness isolated them from others and inspired pity or disgust, rather than compassion, Pere Màrtir’s tears and troubled face inspired admiration, surprise and even a kind of satisfaction in one’s acknowledgement that perfection was vulnerable. He was like a god descending to weep like a mortal, and the TB sufferers in Saint Camillus were a gang of youths under sentence of death corroded within by a curse of destiny.
The word “martyr” somehow forged a link in my imagination between the white, ghostly figures of the young men with TB and the Pere Màrtir I’d just discovered whimpering under the branches of the elder tree. I immediately intuited something else: that his body belonged to the same species of muscular animal that possessed luminous, exultant, firm flesh like my Aunt Enriqueta. It was an identically heavy, dense bodily presence drawing every gaze with its harmony of movement and the magnetic allure of his eyes. In contrast, I realized that most of the other bodies I knew preferred darkness, concave spaces, voids, camouflage and erasure. Pere Màrtir and Aunt Enriqueta demanded light, exposure, ripeness, plenitude, adoration even.
The bodies of the tubercular youth in the Saint Camillus monastery, naked under the sun, lying on the grass, recklessly yielding to secret, curious gazes, had so far revealed a rather shamefaced nudity that could also seem placid, humble and fragile. Only the body of the youngest boy, an adolescent whose movements were precise and elegant, stood out from the rest in its low-key perfection. Generally, they were nudes that aroused respect and pity, like naked saints in church side-chapels or on religious prints: Saint Sebastian transfixed by arrows; old Saint Jerome, half-naked in a cave with a book resting on a rock; Saint John the Baptist, the waters of a river flowing over his feet and a sheep’s fleece round his waist, holding a conch shell in the air and pouring water over the heads of gentiles; Saint Andrew, bearded and naked, nailed upside down on a cross; Christ himself crucified naked… I realized for the first time that Aunt Enriqueta and Pere Màrtir belonged to a different race: the race of radiant, gleaming, luminous bodies that spontaneously, involuntarily, radiated magnetic flows of energy and perhaps harmony. We other organisms were vulnerable to the actions of that radiation which captivated, destroyed or deactivated us. Weakened us.
The boy with TB in the Saint Camillus garden and even Cry-Baby participated in both worlds to an extent, one emanating solar rays, the other, a piety in peril. He sent out light and energy and called for no outside intervention; she was turned inwards, silently demanding compassion and warmth, loving looks and care. The tubercular youth and my cousin seemed to have been struck by an overlong, undimmed exposure to the rays of a beauty that had weakened, almost lulled them, but at any moment a strange hand or strange eyes might break the spell and restore them to their pristine plenitude.
Ció came for lunch by herself and sat in silence at the table. The men gradually arrived and took up their places without saying a word.
“Where’s Enriqueta?” asked Grandmother when Ció placed the pot of stew on the tablemats.
“She’s not feeling at all well,” said Ció matter-of-factly. “She had a big sewing job last night. She arrived back in the early hours. She’s exhausted and has stayed in bed. She isn’t hungry.”
Dad Quirze gave his wife a shifty look, which meant suspicion, or cunning in his way of communicating.
“She’d better stay upstairs,” he said, “and not say anything until all the fuss has died down.”
Cry-Baby and I stared into our dishes of stew. Quirze, on the other hand, kept grinning to himself. Bernat seemed worried, like Grandmother, and said nothing. Jan, the old hand, who often ate lunch with us, didn’t let a single wrinkle mark his sunburnt face.
Halfway through the meal Grandmother plucked up the courage to speak: “Well, we really ought to do something about that lad! It was all pledged and he’d brought the rings and everything. This time it looked as if the wind was blowing kindly…”
A glance from Dad Quirze shut her up. After a while, when everybody had respected the silence, Dad Quirze started to mutter, as if he was talking to himself though he was clearly intent on replying to Grandmother, his mother-in-law: “It was blowing so kindly it’s made a real mess of it! It’s all gone pear-shaped. Fucking hell, we’ll have to put a bomb under someone to save their bacon!”
Then he stared into his plate until the meal was over.
When we walked back from school that evening, Oak-Leaf went on ahead with Quirze and left Cry-Baby and me by ourselves.
“I told you,” we heard Oak-Leaf repeat. “You see how right I was! You refused to believe me and now you’ve seen it for yourself!”
“What I didn’t believe was that you’d seen it with your own eyes,” replied Quirze spitefully. “And I still don’t.”
“I never said that,” Oak-Leaf protested, “I said Maria from the Rock of Light had told me, she walks a long way home through the woods by herself from the crossing where the coach drops her off.”
“It’s always the same story…”
“So why do you say I didn’t spell it out to you? Maria from the Rock of Light has been working for months now and…”
“I know all that. Get to the point!”
“I told you that when she was walking by herself, she heard a noise by a bend in the path, took fright and hid behind some bushes, and it was then she saw two civil guards appear laughing their heads off…”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m telling you exactly what Maria told me. Maria’s no liar. And she told me and nobody else.”
“Oh, you don’t say? Is that why there’s so much gossip in the village? It’s even reached Pere Màrtir’s ears.”
Oak-Leaf stopped and looked alarmed.
“Did you say Pere Màrtir?”
Cry-Baby and I had got so close to our two friends we only needed to stretch a hand out to touch them and we’d been listening to everything they said for some time. Apparently they hadn’t realized because they didn’t stop talking for a second and the moment Oak-Leaf bent down, gave Quirze such an alarmed look and put her hand over her mouth, she must have seen us right behind but she said nothing, nor did our cousin. And when they resumed their conversation, they went on just the same, as if they weren’t worried whether or not we heard what they were saying.
“Yes, Pere Màrtir. He came to our place this morning to clear the air and Aunt Enriqueta refused to see him.”
“You must be kidding…?”
Oak-Leaf reacted in a similar horrified manner and her voice rasped like a hoarse old woman’s.
“And that’s all because somebody tipped the wink to that idiot.”
“You can’t say a word. You can’t say a word in these villages. I promise you Maria from the Rock of Light swore and swore by God and all the saints that she’d only told me and not another soul. Villages are hotbeds of gossip; they’re full of nosy parkers. Maybe it was the civil guards who spread it around. Canary likes to blab. They do say he loves to spend the whole day chatting in the village café.”