“Oh, you don’t say! Don’t tell me they’d go blabbing to all and sundry!” joked Quirze. “Come on, tell me how many of them there were. How many?”
“She saw two. Two putting those belts with their weapons back on, that kind of strap they wear. One was Canary, for sure, because everybody knows him. And she says that fair hair looks white at night and they were both fair. But one came out first and then Canary, arm in arm with her.”
“Did she see her as well?”
“At that time of night on that precise day she couldn’t be certain it was her. It was a woman, for sure, but not necessarily her. However later, whenever she walked by that stretch of path, by day or night, she’d slow down or stop to see if she could catch them at it again. And at midday she did see them again a couple of times and the woman was her. Once she heard noise and giggling and she left the path and saw them lying down among the trees. And on another occasion she saw them walking along the path arm in arm and she let them go on, keeping way behind so they wouldn’t see her, until they turned down the track to your house, towards Can Tupí.”
“During the day?” asked Quirze, shocked. “In broad daylight?”
“Yes, she walked arm in arm with Canary, I’d told you that. But on these two occasions they were alone, there was nobody else, no other civil guard.”
Quirze looked rather anxiously round at us.
“And you two, keep your traps shut,” he said threateningly. “Not a word about this or I’ll cut your tongues off. It’s only stupid gossip. People in the village are envious of the good match she’s made with Pere Màrtir and have done all they can to break up their courtship.”
Oak-Leaf said nothing, didn’t even look at us, as if what Quirze had said was an order aimed at us that was in no way determined by the truth of what had happened.
They mentioned a few more trivial details. Xavier, the novice from Navarre, was mentioned, but I couldn’t see what that friar had to do with any of all that; I expect I didn’t understand the ramifications. I was surprised by a comment Oak-Leaf made that I could only relate to Aunt Enriqueta’s work as a seamstress: “According to Maria from the Rock of Light, she adores uniforms.”
On the small path through the woods, Oak-Leaf asked us to accompany her as far as the clearing and play for a bit, but Quirze had gone all taciturn and said he didn’t want to today, he’d got work to do at home, though we could do whatever we wanted. He said it in such a way we knew he couldn’t imagine for one moment we might leave him all on his own, and for our part we didn’t feel like staying alone with Oak-Leaf, so we followed him back to the farmhouse.
“So don’t go gossiping now, right?” were Oak-Leaf’s parting words from off the path. “Or you’ll be to blame for anything that might happen. Quirze, you swore you’d not say a thing.”
That left me with divided feelings, on the one hand, disgust at people’s capacity for evil, their ability to invent anything whatsoever to hurt someone, and on the other, a strange fascination for what I’d been imagining — the sun-bathed tossing and turning in the grass of the luminous bodies of Aunt Enriqueta and the blond civil guard and the other two nighttime guards I couldn’t really fit into the picture. It was a gloriously sunny scene, with laughter and cries of ecstasy in the background, and gently moving arms and thighs that entwined in an improvised, impetuous, sensual dance. I also evoked that scenario at night, swathed in shadows, when their luminous bodies shone in the dark and lit up the night, like the light from the rock, from the Rock of Light, bodies of light. Pink flesh gleefully vaunting far from the pitch-black bedrooms and depths of night where I’d imagined these couplings taking place. I marvelled at the daring of the performers, their shameless unleashing of secret pleasures, the way they waylaid the sun over a clearing in the woods to illuminate their partying. The scene I imagined was based solely on fragments of what Oak-Leaf had said. It was forever imprinted on my imagination and throughout my life it continued to be acted out with joyous bliss, a rapturous dance of unknown bodies, like an array of classical nudes exhibited on a museum’s walls, and it represented a first ray of illumination and soothing serenity amid the brutal, disturbing revelations people used in their various ways to talk about the facts of life.
21
It was a few days before Aunt Enriqueta joined us for a meal again. She went to Vic in the morning and returned at midday or in the evening, depending on the work she had on, went straight to her room and never came down to the kitchen for anything. We all assumed that Aunt Ció left her something to eat on her chest of drawers or bedside table.
“Women’s ailments…” muttered Dad Quirze, chortling slyly, whenever Bernat was quick to comment on my aunt’s strange behaviour.
Sometimes he’d add spitefully, “The monthly do. You can’t trust animals that piss blood. An animal that bleeds every month and never dies…”
Ció said nothing and Grandmother simply nodded anxiously and came out with an expression we thought was a kind of short imprecation: “God help us…!”
Or else: “When God wishes, it rains whatever the weather. At least God created us.”
Nobody mentioned Pere Màrtir and we didn’t see him for quite a while. Father Tafalla and the novice were the ones who did come more often now, and always together, “Like the lovers of Teruel; where he goes, she’s in tow,” laughed Grandmother and no one knew where she’d got that saying from or who that couple were. The two friars were the only people Enriqueta wanted to see and she allowed them to go to the upstairs sitting room or first gallery, where she’d come out and chat for a time. The two friars always visited mid-afternoon on a Sunday or a holiday, after lunch, when the men went for a walk or a spot of fresh air or Dad Quirze had a snooze or took the opportunity to call on a neighbour or to go to the village café to play card games for a while—la brisca, el truc, la botifarra, el burro, el set i mig—and the farmhouse was almost deserted. We littl’uns were already playing in our plum tree den and we watched them come out on to the gallery and sit on chairs or the bench and begin a conversation enlivened by grand flourishes of arms and nods galore, while Aunt Ció moved cheerily among them pouring out lemon water with sugar or pop mixed with a drop of red wine. That pop was our holiday drink, because on work days we drank effervescent water in which little sachets of powder had been dissolved, that tasted just like pop and was much cheaper. The fact that pop was being served showed how important these polite visitations were and Quirze commented one day: “I wonder if Aunt’s caught TB and one of these days will cough up blood like the noodles next door.”
When we were bored, we jumped down and ran over to the hazel tree spinney, by the pond, from where you could see the meadow, what the monks called their kitchen orchard, the place where the sickly youths lay on towels as broad as bedsheets or curled up on deck chairs, like hammocks, half-naked and swathed in a pile of white sheets. A dozen skinny young men, and a couple of friars who flitted from one patient to another helping them to swallow a spoonful of syrup, adjusting their towels or sheets, or simply sat next to them and conversed for a while. Sometimes they were left alone, and that was when the silence of the afternoon and the stillness of the patients transformed the meadow into a kind of cemetery, a carpet of green grass strewn with white sepulchres.