“What was Quirze doing back there under the elder tree?”
Ció was too busy to answer my question. Grandmother, who was sitting by the table washing glasses, answered after a while when she realized Aunt Cío was taking no notice: “The four bigwigs from the village are in a meeting upstairs with Dad Quirze and Uncle Bernat and don’t want anybody disturbing them. Young Quirze is keeping an eye out, in case the flocks come back early, to make sure they don’t create a din. And if the men come back late, he’ll have to lead the animals to the mangers as well.”
It didn’t seem a very satisfactory explanation because Quirze could do all that from elsewhere. I must have looked puzzled because Grandmother added, as if it was an afterthought: “It’s best if nobody comes near the house while we’ve got strangers here.”
And she cheerily asked, as she would do when she wanted to get us to do something: “I thought you could do something fun now. Can you guess what?”
I gave her a cheeky look as we all did when she inflected her voice in that way, as if she were a young girl once again, to persuade us that the job she wanted us to do was easy enough, a winning tone we couldn’t refuse.
“The light’s gone again. The power’s gone. I expect there are cuts and nobody bothered to tell us. They leave us in the dark every two or three days. It would really help if you went up to the sitting room, so as not to disturb the meeting in the dining room, and lit a candle to stop the mosquitoes flying up there at this time of day. They might zing into the meeting and upset our gentlemen visitors.”
I stood and stared at her trying to guess whether or not she was being serious.
“Come on, do it!” she insisted. “When it’s late in the afternoon, the mosquitoes fly upstairs because there’s only stale air, the day’s fug, when the animals go out to the trough and those creatures fly to wherever new lights come on. If you don’t, they’ll go straight for the oil lamp they’ll light in the dining room as soon as it’s dark and irritate the big cheeses. Take a candle and matches from the chest in the entrance. That will be fun and give you something useful to do.”
“And what should I do after that?”
“After what…?”
“He means, when they’ve stopped talking,” chipped in Ció, who had now got all the trays ready for upstairs and hadn’t seemed at all interested in our conversation up to that point. “Come with me and I’ll tell you where best to stand to attract the mosquitoes. When you hear them winding up the meeting, you must run downstairs and tell us, so we can show up and give them a hand. And all the better if they don’t see you.”
A question came to my lips quite spontaneously: “What’s Núria doing? Where is she?”
“You leave that girl in peace!” shouted Ció, angrily, as I’d rarely seen her.
“She’s doing the same as you,” said Grandmother as cheerily as before. “She’s in the attic with a candle scaring off insects.”
“She went up to the attic to get a basket of potatoes,” Ció corrected her, though no longer aggressively. “She’ll be down in a moment.”
Ció helped me get the candle and matches from the chest in the entrance and we both went upstairs to the sitting room.
The afternoon now seemed more expansive and tranquil. The blue of the mountains melded into the blue of the sky, a fusion creating the lightest shade of blue that wasn’t sure whether to thicken into darker hues or fade into dirty greys and whites. The breeze was cool and soft like a clean pillow that had just been ironed. Ció made me stop in the centre of the sitting room and told me to wait there until she came back. She walked into the gallery and I heard her open the dining-room door, and the sound of chairs greeted her entrance with the trays of refreshments.
“They haven’t lit the oil lamp yet, or even a candle,” she whispered when she returned. “They’ll light up when they find their words are getting nowhere and they need to see people’s faces. You should light up now. The more mosquitoes, the better, and the more that fly near the flame, the better, and the more that singe their wings or burn to a cinder, even better.”
While I stood rooted to the centre of the sitting room, Ció went up and downstairs three or four times with fresh dishes and whenever she walked by she smiled and was once again the pleasant, friendly Ció I’d always known, as if finishing her chores and receiving the visitors’ thanks had restored her usual poise.
I now wondered who the visitors were that merited so much attention. Perhaps the owners, I conjectured. Bored but intrigued, I gradually eased my way towards the gallery door. The candlelight was weak and flickered whenever I peered outside. The voices in the dining room got louder and louder as if the initial conversation was degenerating into an out-and-out argument.
At first I paid no attention to the voices because I knew I wouldn’t understand what they were saying and I was happy in my role as the frightener away of mosquitoes and I let myself be carried away momentarily by the feeling of calm, lightness and fulfilment that suffused my body, as if I’d been transformed into a transparent, aerial, invisible being, like the goblins Grandmother said inhabited the farm, the surrounding woods and above all her stories, that were as real as anything else, as far as we were concerned. I detected in my unusual state of bliss a point of pride because I was alone, abandoned by everyone, far from home, practically without a family, and the fact that they burdened me with those negligible, even dispensable tasks, a matter of routine courtesy, like holding a candle in the centre of the empty sitting room to fend off insects, was proof I too was dispensable, and was a bother, although they never said as much, and that I was alien with respect to the close family that had always lived in that farmhouse. I was a Johnny-come-lately, a hanger-on, a refugee, as some villagers said and Oak-Leaf repeated. And the approaching silence of night already falling over the gallery helped me to see myself as an outsider who’d come to that house by chance, who realized that nothing there belonged to him, a quite fortuitous presence, who after time—“and whatever had to pass, had come and passed,” or, as Mother and lots of people were always saying, “we can do nothing, it’s out of our hands, what will be, will be”—would leave that place and that family; consequently, when they left me alone and my thoughts wandered off in whichever direction boredom or nostalgia took me, I had fun imagining myself as that outsider, a gypsy or charcoal burner in the woods, and roamed far from my immediate surroundings and escaped to places that were unknown, fantastical and inaccessible…
A loud thump on the dining-room table brought me back to reality. It must have been a fist crashing down. And after the ensuing silence, a familiar voice that wasn’t Dad Quirze or Uncle Bernat, remarked in a tone that now rang out more loudly and directly than before: “Don’t try to persuade me that the horse rode out of the woods by itself, as if by magic, that it was reared without a mother or a master and never bedded down in any stable?”
A different, tense silence followed, and then I heard Dad Quirze’s voice. It was the voice he adopted on special occasions, obsequious, almost gentle, smarmy even, a quiet voice unlike his usual sullen, prickly tone, and it immediately seemed fake, his way of mocking his interlocutor or showing that whatever he said and heard went in one ear and out the other.
“You know only too well that Grandfather Hand is the one who drives the flocks up and down the valleys, a long way from here, and that he doesn’t recognize the dead horse. We’ve never traded in horses on this farm or had dealings with the people further up who take them to graze in the Pyrenees.”
“So how do you explain the appearance of the disembowelled body of an unknown horse on the bend in the road? We have our own ideas about how it got there. And why it got there.”