Cry-Baby and I looked at her as if we expected her to tell us what the secret was. Aunt Enriqueta started to grin.
“It must have been the goblins,” she went on, taking the basket out of Cry-Baby’s hands. “These goblins are cocky little devils and turn everything upside down. Goblins go mad when there’s a full moon. Isn’t there a full moon today?”
We all went out into the gallery to watch the round coin of the moon move across the waxen sky, big as the top of an Easter candle.
“It’s Salut’s basket, the girl from La Bruguera’s. She left it at the tailor’s because she wanted me to teach her to do some thick knits she’d seen in a fashion magazine,” said Aunt Enriqueta half apologetically. “She wants to knit a winter jersey for her fiancé. I left it upstairs so it didn’t get in the way down here and I didn’t lose any skeins. I must have brought it down earlier on and left it here so I don’t forget to take it with me in the morning, when I’ll be seeing her.”
Aunt Enriqueta picked up the basket and, when she was giving us a kiss before retiring to her room, Grandmother said: “I’m sure that’s what it was. Tell Salut to knit some bright and cheerful jerseys for the children as she does every year. Good night.”
However, I could not get to sleep. I tossed and turned in my bed as if I had a temperature. For the first time I felt that room was a prison and Quirze’s presence was annoying. I couldn’t stop thinking about Cry-Baby’s sex yet something else, like the white veils of the sick youths in the monastery garden, prevented that image from really gelling. My curiosity about Cry-Baby’s body had aroused an interest in my own, that had been almost dormant till then. I remembered the older lads’ dirty talk in the school in town. Big and little were all lumped together in the same class, “unified” they called it, and it was difficult to avoid the displays the big boys put on under their desks, away from the eyes of the teacher-priest, or not to hear their conversations about their latest discoveries, or ignore their precocious remarks — if you didn’t want to be called a ninny or a coward — that they threw out as a kind of challenge to see who could say the rudest things, or to pay no heed to the things they insinuated to tell you grownups’ secrets, teach you to be a man, or go with them to their get-togethers in local caves where they’d take tobacco and nobody could spoil their fun.
I’d always kept on the periphery of such goings-on. My more childish appearance and the fact that they were older than me created a kind of protective barrier. And being there but not joining in was fine by me. I sometimes registered the insalubrious stuff they talked about and the bragging by the biggest boys was too raw and crude for my delicate stomach, but I’d put on a brave front and take it as right, as gospel, the umbilical cord connecting me to a knowledge of the facts of life. However, I always thought that my time had yet to come, that maybe all that was perhaps not for me, and in any case I intended to dodge most of the quagmires and hurdles where I saw my older companions come a cropper.
That night in my room I realized I had got it all wrong.
24
I began to suspect I’d never thought about my teachers the way I did then. Before, that is, before Cry-Baby’s revelation, I accepted the presence of teachers in the classroom as naturally and unthinkingly as I contemplated statues of saints in a church. A church was unthinkable without those images in altar niches, but saints never assumed dimensions that were more impressive than the church itself, except for miraculous or highly venerated images. We were called after saints and also had them on prints and illustrated pages in our only reference book, the Enciclopèdia Universal published by Casa Dalmau Carles Pla S.A. from Girona, and the images or saints were a humble, useful, commonplace presence, like that of teachers in schools.
What Cry-Baby had told me assigned Mr. Madern, the schoolmaster in the Novíssima, to the category of the miraculous or highly venerated because of a quality I couldn’t pin down. Strange new thoughts buzzed round my head. Thoughts that created feelings of repulsion and envy and in my delirium I even decided one of their professional tasks was perhaps to open our eyes to sexual matters, in the same way that teachers, in their pedagogic enthusiasm, often tackled subjects they apparently should never tackle, out of an excess of devotion to their pupils, like going to mass with us every Sunday, as they did now, or visiting the Eucharist chapel of an afternoon, or arranging excursions on the last Thursday before Lent or making us sing patriotic hymns and raising the flag every day and beginning class with the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary, all things that went beyond teaching us to read and write, the basics we needed to be accepted in the adult world, “the day after tomorrow,” as they all called it, or “useful knowledge to open up the path in life that awaited us,” as if our school years weren’t part of our lives and only represented an approximation to the real life we’d live later on, in years to come, when we’d know about living, when we’d discover what real life was about, which was something everybody kept saying, “What do you know about life?” “You’ll know what life is soon enough,” “Life will teach you,” it was always life, another life, never this life, as if we were human larvae encased and entangled in the threads of a silken chrysalis drowsily waiting for life to burst out for real, the genuine, definitive article.
Don Eladio Madern, Senyor Madern, the teacher at the Novíssima, unlike the priest at the small town parish school, never hit anyone, didn’t even have a pointer — we called it a stick — like the priest had to rap you on the hands or the tips of your fingers as they tried to wriggle away. Mr. Madern was a nice man and that was obvious when he explained a subject close to his heart or did so out of duty, under compulsion. He gave us tasks, such as problem solving, filling our exercise books with beautiful calligraphy — Roman, Gothic, italic script…we learned a dozen different styles — or wrote dictations, while he played chess. However, he’d also spend an hour every day telling us about something, mostly lessons from history, particularly Alexander the Great, Pericles, Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus. On the other hand, when he had to explain religion or sacred history he did so reluctantly, dutifully, and never missed a chance to introduce a note of skepticism we, his pupils, never quite grasped. I once commented on the number of animals of different species that had to cohabit in Noah’s Ark and wondered how was it possible for tigers and lions not to eat the deer and rabbits, or even more prosaically, how could a wolf and a chicken, or a fox and a hare, coexist in a state of hunger, and he’d give me an intrigued look and answer as if talking to a drinking friend: “Well, that really isn’t so crucial. If you can accept that the ark and all the paraphernalia around its construction, sailing and final salvation existed, you can swallow the minor detail.”
At the time I didn’t see what he was insinuating. I didn’t say anything, but I felt he’d not only not addressed my question but had treated me like young innocent abroad who requires an adult to teach him different kinds of “truths about life.” One sort of truth I guessed went much further than the mysteries about sex. What I was learning from the big kids and bad boys about sex was all about curiosity, and the movements and perversions of the flesh. What the teacher posed related to doubt, the perplexities and mysteries of thought. I was frightened by the idea that perversions of the mind might be even more fascinating than those of the body.
Our teacher made such remarks on a number of occasions over time and when he did so I understood he was establishing a kind of complicity with me, that by only addressing me he was treating the rest of the class with open contempt. For example, when he stopped in the middle of a history lesson, changed his tone of voice, looked me in the eye and launched into,