Aunt Ció pushed me back, whispering, as she strode out into the gallery: “Go downstairs and get rid of the mosquitoes in the porch and don’t snuff the candle out until you hear them walking downstairs.”
Now the men’s voices were audible in the gallery and seemed animated as if it had all been a friendly conversation. I went slowly down the stairs and stood holding my candle in the doorway where I felt stupid and ridiculous yet again as I peered into the night from where the two dogs eyed me in amazement. I could still hear voices up behind the balustrade. Aunt Ció had joined the conversation. When they were walking downstairs, I put out the candle and went into the orchard, climbed up the plum tree and stayed there until the big cheeses had left.
23
Sprawled in the plum tree I could see the house’s black façade and the gaps made by the two galleries, repeated like a frieze. A candle flickered in one of the attic gallery arches. It must have been Cry-Baby doing what she’d been told. Aunt Ció was holding an oil lamp in the entrance and the civil guard and mayor waited a minute for Uncle Bernat to get the colt from the stable, harness it to the trap and light the lamp by the side of his seat. The two big cheeses got in through the little rear door while Bernat jumped on in front, flourishing his whip. Dad Quirze and Aunt Ció stood by the door for a moment dutifully waving them goodbye as the trap disappeared behind the house and along the path to the hamlet.
The moment I entered the kitchen, I could feel a storm brewing. Dad Quirze was sat at the table frowning, Aunt Ció was bent over the sink washing glasses and plates, Grandmother half-sat on her pew and nobody was saying a word. I shut up too. I sat down at one end of the table and soon after Cry-Baby and Aunt Enriqueta walked in with a basket of potatoes they put on the floor by the kitchen range and then started tidying the kitchen. A little later Quirze showed his face, grabbed an empty bucket and announced without looking at anyone: “I’ll make a start on milking the cows as Bernat’s not back.”
Dad Quirze swayed his head a fraction as if he wanted to tell him something but then said nothing and sat taciturn and scowling across the table again.
Grandmother spoke up: “Don’t worry your heads about this… We just have to let time go by and all this will slowly go to the dogs. One day the allies will sort this lot out and that will wipe the smiles off their faces. We just need to be a bit more careful, that’s all.”
But nobody took any notice of what she’d said and the heavy, unpleasant silence redescended.
Dad Quirze suddenly slammed his fist on the table and swore: “The fucking…!”
The women looked round from the range or their chores to see what happened next. But Dad Quirze got up in a temper and walked out of the kitchen shouting: “You can’t say what you think — not even in your own home!”
The women stood there in silence and resumed their chores. Only Grandmother commented eventually: “Their visit has really got to him badly. He couldn’t tell them what he wanted to say because the people at the top don’t want to hear certain things. They only want to be flattered and soft-soaped.”
When it was dinnertime, we heard the sound of the trap coming back and Dad Quirze went out. He was back in a flash followed by his son and Uncle Bernat. They all sat down in silence while Aunt Ció and Aunt Enriqueta lay the table.
“How did it go?” Aunt Ció asked Uncle Bernat.
Bernat nodded as if to say they could imagine how it had gone. How did you expect it to go? he seemed to be implying. It was obvious that Dad Quirze and Bernat had had words in the entrance, perhaps when they were taking the halter off the colt and putting the trap in the shed, because Dad Quirze didn’t react as if he was interested in finding out the answer, and Ció didn’t repeat her question.
They ate dinner in silence, glancing, gesturing and uttering monosyllables, and that helped reintegrate Aunt Enriqueta into the group, since it was the first time she’d stayed for a whole meal since the rumours about her had been rife in the village.
“This mayor is a wet blanket and a rank fool,” said Grandmother almost at the end of the meal, when the heavy silence was too painful and the bleeding inflicted by the strangers’ visit to house seemed to have been staunched. “I’ve known him since he was a nipper, he was a skinny little piece of shit. They’ve always been church-goers in his house; they couldn’t survive without the whiff of a sacristy. That’s why they put him in charge of the town hall. He’s got only one idea in his head and he doesn’t want to lose that. His brain is pure mush. He’s his master’s perfectly trained dog. He does what he’s ordered. He’s an arse-licker who wields no power. They told him to take a sniff around the farm, so here he came. Of course, the Civil Guard is another kettle of fish. They belong to another race and I don’t get what they’re after.”
“What do you mean?” asked Aunt Enriqueta, and we all assumed she’d said that to stop Grandmother probing any further, to stave off danger. Or perhaps she wanted to show she wasn’t afraid of talking about whatever and was simply saying she wasn’t guilty of the accusations against her; it was her way of saying it was slander. It seemed like a kind of victory that the boss of the Civil Guard and the mayor had come to the farm, after the uproar there’d been in the village, and she wasn’t implicated.
“It’s like the friars next door, the ones in the Saint Camillus monastery. What are that lot doing here so far from their own land? I can’t understand why someone would leave their village and family to look after sick castaways, administer the last rites to the dying and dress the dead. It’s just like the civil guards, what’s the point of watching the borders if all those who wanted to escape have already made it to France? And what are they supposed to do in the village if they killed off all those who didn’t think like them at the front or on the road? They’re not even any use when it comes to stopping the starving entering a field of potatoes at night to dig up the land and get a good bag of spuds.”
“They’re like the priests and the military,” said Aunt Ció, making an effort to string out the conversation, because what Grandmother had said had changed the atmosphere in the kitchen, had made it lighter and more relaxed, as if the previous silence had started to sour things and their voices now cleansed the air of any invisible bad or rotten bits, “they don’t belong to the village either, and do their work and don’t cause any strife. Nobody finds that odd.”
“It’s different. Priests and clergy don’t come from so far away, are often from the locality, particularly priests. But these civil guards, for example, come from the other end of the earth and live imprisoned in their barracks, a kind of castle on the outskirts of the village, with that notice on the door that says: Todo por la Patria, as if it was an enclosed order of nuns. There’s one of those convents in Vic, and just through the door you can see a notice that says: Hermanos, una de dos, /o no entrar o hablar de Dios/ que en la casa de Teresa/ esta ciencia se profesa,more of the same, some are all for the Fatherland and the others for God and Santa Teresa, but it makes no difference, what I mean is that these people, friars or monks, military or Civil Guard, don’t fit anywhere, no land is theirs, they’re like birds of passage oranimals with nowhere to graze…”
“I don’t see why that’s so peculiar,” said Aunt Enriqueta in more of a whisper, as if she didn’t dare join in or was apologizing for speaking now we all felt more spirited after Grandmother’s sparky words and even Dad Quirze’s eyes had brightened and he now raised his eyebrows wondering what other amazing things might be simmering in his mother-in-law’s brain. “People like that have always existed. There’s work that nobody else would do, if people from away didn’t do it.”