Cry-Baby took my hand again and placed it back on her sex, and then stretched out her own hand to touch me. We both immediately burst out laughing as if we were tickling each other. She sat up, legs splayed open towards me. I did the same and felt a rush of blood to my belly.
The sheet of the sickly boy lying by the elm tree seemed to envelope the air in our hideout with its serene luminosity and distant warmth. I felt everything was within hand’s reach and yet I anticipated a long wait. We gazed at each other as if we both possessed secret wonders hidden between our thighs. The sickly adolescent’s dark tuft of hair, barely concealed by the end of his white sheet, heralded the next secret, the final mystery, the most intimate adventure. An unexplored continent hovered above the hazel trees, as far as the monastery garden, next to the skeletal elm.
“The schoolteacher says this is my nightingale’s nest…” my cousin declared in a deadpan tone, gaze averted, as if she was talking to herself, while she placed her free hand on top of mine that was resting on her pubis and pressed it down.
I had to repeat what she’d just said two or three times, though I still didn’t get it.
“What did you say the schoolmaster says…?”
“That there’s a nightingale’s nest down here,” she repeated in a more animated voice. “Sometimes he also says it’s a sparrow’s refuge or a rabbit’s burrow.”
“You mean our schoolteacher…? Mr. Madern…?”
I turned my head to look at her and she did likewise. Her watery eyes glinted, as if she had a temperature, and little drops of sweat began to bead her forehead.
“Yes…” she answered, nodding to back up what she’d said, staring hard into my eyes.
“I don’t believe you. You’re making it up.”
“Ask Oak-Leaf, and see what she says,” she responded firmly.
It was a repeat of what happened previously, but I had to think through what I’d just heard several times. Did she mean that Oak-Leaf…? I replied forcefully: “I won’t ask Oak-Leaf a thing. She’s a gossip. She’d spread it all round the village. I don’t want anyone to know.”
We didn’t say or do anything else that day. Before my cousin could say a word more, we heard Quirze’s voice summoning us from the gallery with Aunt Ció joining in. We put our clothes on and ran off.
“We won’t tell a soul,” she repeated, from behind. “Not even Oak-Leaf will find out.”
I turned round for a second to say: “But one day you must tell me how Oak-Leaf comes to know all these things.” As I didn’t hear Cry-Baby who was running a few steps behind me say anything in reply, I turned round a second time and asked: “And how come you know that hideout among the hazel trees?”
I thought she nodded, but now we were focused on the gallery from where Quirze was signalling to us to put a move on.
As we went in, we could tell from the way the dogs were behaving that we had visitors upstairs. Aunt Ció came from the kitchen to welcome us: “Where were you two rascals hiding? We’ve been looking for you for ages.” She ushered us into the downstairs kitchen and handed us two pitchers and a bucket: “Quick. We need some really cold water from the spring by the stream. Andreu, you take the pitchers and you, love, take the bucket to the well. And sharp about it.”
It looked like important people were about. The kitchen table was full of tasty bites in the making to eat upstairs in the gallery, dining room or sitting room. Neatly folded party napkins, towels, the best glasses, bottles of wine, cold sausage and ham, cheese and nuts, slices of white bread, plates and knives…
“And what about Quirze?” I asked, because I wasn’t at all keen to hump those pitchers to the spring all by myself.
“You leave Quirze in peace. He’s got work to do upstairs,” replied Aunt Ció nervously, as if she was not in a mood to stand any nonsense. “Quirze’s been doing what he has to do for some time. Off you go!”
We ran out. On the way to the spring I reflected on what had happened under the hazel trees with Cry-Baby. It all seemed perfectly normal, something that had to happen one day or another. I was more surprised by the fact she’d taken the initiative than by any sight of her fanny. On the other hand, my strange fascination for the youth with TB or whatever it was lying under the elm tree, the delicacy of his movements, the harmony of his features, the mystery of everything he kept hidden under his sheet, that shouldn’t have been a mystery to me at all, or even the aloof, rather elegant scorn with which he treated the other patients and the sense of rejection of him I felt I detected within the group…every detail that I could grasp, was etched on my brain, and made a much more powerful, more decisive impact on me than my adventure with Cry-Baby.
At the time I wasn’t worried by these different experiences. I simply thought it confirmed the double life beginning to open up before me. Grownups, I’d observed, all had a secret life they never pursued in the light of day or in the presence of others. It wasn’t just their sexual activities that they shrouded in darkness, it was also money matters, murky business deals, many of the connections between the Church and God, say, the confessing of sins and the confidences and guidance from that figure who simultaneously stood as a symbol of distinction, moral subtlety and lofty social status and many other questions that belonged to the secret side of this double world which all adults inhabited. Father Tafalla acted as spiritual director to two or three ill farmers’ wives, and more than once he’d laughed and let slip that we too could do with a spiritual director in ours, and that would put an end to a lot of the squabbles and suspicions, and that he was volunteering himself to point the souls in our house towards the straight and narrow road, particularly the women’s, those who were better disposed, but nobody took up his offer. And now I was becoming aware, quite unconsciously, that Cry-Baby had already entered the duplicitous realm of grownups and easily navigated their sinuous maze of deceit.
Even on that issue the adult world was difficult to understand and interpret. And I grasped that if I was growing up, it wasn’t because I had learned how to comport myself outside the home, far from my parents, but because I sensed that I was taking ever more confident steps forward into that slippery, ambiguous world.
22
When I got back from the spring, I found Quirze idling under the elder tree behind the house. The moment he saw me, he said: “Hurry up, they’re waiting for you! You look as if those pitchers have brought you to your knees, as if they were a couple of saucepans. They’re not that heavy!”
I ignored him. I was surprised to find him there. “What are you doing down here? Don’t you have anything better to do?”
He leaned back on the trunk of the elder tree, arms folded and one leg doubled under him with his foot resting on the tree and laughed. “And what business of yours is it what I do or don’t do? Hurry up inside or they’ll be mad at you!”
“Are you expecting more people? Who are you waiting for?”
I hadn’t stopped. I talked as I walked and was just about to go round the corner.
“Who do you think I’m waiting for, you idiot? I’m not waiting for anyone, that’s why I’m here. You think you’re so clever, the first in the class, see if you can work that one out,” he laughed, delighted by his turn of phrase, and repeated: “I’m here because I’m not waiting for anyone.”
I was surprised he was so talkative. Quirze was usually as surly and short on words as his father; that night he seemed to want to talk sixteen to the dozen.
Aunt Ció relieved me of the pitchers the second I walked into the kitchen, tight-lipped, as if she was at her wits’ end.