I nibbled the bread but didn’t touch anything else. Grandmother’s knitting needles were going at a quicker rate than ever and now and then she took her glasses off and wiped her eyes, as if to complain her eyes were weary. Aunt Enriqueta arrived and went over to Ció and whispered in her ear, as if she didn’t want to disturb the order and silence reigning over the kitchen. Then she walked over to Grandmother and sat next to her. Bernat also came in for a moment, before rushing out like Dad Quirze.
Death was like that, I reflected: the sudden quiet, the unravelling of life, usual routines turned upside down so no one knew how to react, what to say, or where to put themselves in order to find the comfort zone in the house or the world. It was a radical dislocation, a displacement from the world one had known hitherto. A mysterious force that threw everything into chaos and burst invisibly upon the scene like cold snaps in the first days of winter, transforming everything, though everything appeared to be intact… It shrouded in anguish and sadness those who noted its presence.
The tranquillity and silence were broken by a crashing sound. The clean, piercing noise of glass. Cry-Baby, sitting at the table, had moved an arm without thinking and had knocked the decanter onto the floor. We all looked at her, taken aback. Then after a moment of confusion, Cry-Baby burst into tears, as if something baleful had happened, as if she wanted to take the blame with her tears and avoid recriminations.
“That’s nothing to worry about,” said Aunt Ció, arriving with a cloth and broom to clean up the mess.
“That’s right, it’s only wine,” smiled Grandmother, “we’ve got more than enough! Come on, no need to cry!”
But Cry-Baby cried disconsolately. Aunt Enriqueta sat next to her and gave her a loving hug until the tears became whimpers muffled by my aunt’s bosom, almost imperceptible shudders. And we all knew the weeping wasn’t simply about a smashed decanter, that the clatter of glass was a focus for something broader and more diffuse, a brittle, rarefied atmosphere of dire omens and repressed fear now fighting their way to the surface, unleashed by the dramatic crash to the floor.
Aunt Enriqueta helped Cry-Baby to her feet and led her out of the kitchen.
“Just lie down in your bed for a bit and rest,” she said, “till it’s time for dinner.”
“Andreu, you should do likewise,” said Grandmother. “Go on, the two of you, upstairs and lie down for a bit, till you get over the upset.”
“You’ve hardly eaten a thing,” said Aunt Ció when I got up to accompany Aunt Enriqueta and my cousin. “It will be all for the best, you’ll be ravenous at dinnertime.”
We both walked out into the pitch-black entrance.
Dad Quirze and my mother were whispering by the foot of the stairs next to the door. Mother was carrying an old bag, a kind of clothes basket, crammed to the brim with parcels wrapped in newspaper.
Aunt Enriqueta stopped for a second, as if wondering whether to turn tail, but the moment she saw she couldn’t hide my mother’s presence, she glanced quickly and silently my way. Then she gave Cry-Baby a push and vigorously swept upstairs, leaving me behind.
I stood there still and tense because I was afraid of Dad Quirze. My mother came over and silently put her free arm round my back and squeezed me against her tummy. I shut my eyes and let myself luxuriate in the sweet smell of clean clothes and cheap soap impregnated with factory oils and crates of industrial cotton that my mother’s body exuded. A homey smell that took me far away from that farm and reminded me of where I came from. An invisible path returning me home.
“We can go and see your father tomorrow,” she said wistfully, after standing silent and stock-still for a few seconds.
26
Vic Prison was a ramshackle ruin on the corner of an outlying street. If it hadn’t been for two or three turrets with lookout slits and battlements on either side, like a castle transplanted from the mountain to the plain, you could have mistaken the building for one of the many convents for enclosed orders scattered across the city.
We had arrived at the prison entrance early in the morning, my mother carrying the basket of parcels and me gripping her hand tight, as if the place threatened danger. Outside, the roadside was packed with people, relatives of the prisoners, all holding bundles and crumpled sheets of paper and looking harassed, waiting for a signal or the time to go in, peering at the closed windows on both levels and the movements and suspicious glances of the civil guards walking round the turrets, trying to work out what was happening inside the jail. Now and then shadows filled the long slits and people assumed a line of prisoners or civil guards must be parading behind. The glinting to-and-fro of bare bayonets that stood out like knives raised above the battlements were threats that even filtered down to us.
That night my mother and Aunt Ció had stayed alone in the kitchen chatting late into the night. Before falling asleep, I heard the two women come up the stairs, and even then they went on talking for a good long time in the sitting room. I imagined them, as I’d seen them so often on the path by the cherry tree, amid the oak trees, heads bent, two shadows blacker than the surrounding gloom, confiding in each other, arm in arm or holding hands, nodding or shaking their heads, but above all, downcast, as if oppressed by the weight of the words they uttered. Now and then a deep sigh, a muffled lament, interrupted their conversation, suffusing it with tragic resonances.
Mother and I positioned ourselves by the crowd of people waiting on the roadside. Most were women wearing black dresses and headscarves. There was the odd young lad like me, with patched trouser bottoms and messy hair, and we looked at each other timidly, almost on the sly, as if to acknowledge that we belonged to the same race of losers, were abandoned and stranded on the roadsides of a city that was progressing without us.
After so much waiting, I noticed people were stirring, straining their necks, moving their hands, lifting their arms, taking one or two steps forward so as to be in the middle of the street. Mother grabbed my hand and, as she looked up, she stared into my eyes and said: “Look… They’re walking in single file. Watch out for him.”
They’d opened the shutters to the first-floor windows and you could see a line of men filing past, shapes that were repeated from one window to the next. A group of women crossed to the other side of the road and some even shouted out a name two or three times, though the line of prisoners never came to a halt.
“Can you see him? Can you see him?” Mother asked, and I noticed how nervous she was from the way her hand clasping mine shook.
One or two prisoners turned their heads in our direction, and that led people to move back towards the ramshackle prison building. When the men under sentence had disappeared, the group outside seemed deflated, plunged into a kind of disappointment that made them bow their heads, shut their eyes and stoop their shoulders. A gloomier than ever silence descended over everyone.
Mother gripped my hand tighter and said nothing.
They didn’t open the prison door for what I felt to be a very long time, and the whole crowd pushed and shoved their way inside as if it was the New Year sales. Mother still held onto my hand, quietly but firmly defending the place we took in the queue that the civil guards forced everyone to join.
In the entrance, police in dark grey uniforms were opening every parcel and rummaging in every one. They took the packets Mother was carrying. They tried to calm her down by telling her not to worry, that it would all make its way to the inmate’s hands. They said inmate, as if they’d stripped my father of his name.
The inside of the building seemed icy cold. The whole edifice seemed freezing and deserted. Stone stairs, flaking walls, passages without a stick of furniture, bars everywhere. We entered a large rectangular room full of people. The women were crammed against an iron bar that separated most of the room from a series of large, barred windows that formed an empty passageway, guarded by two policemen with guns over their shoulders who strode up and down, keeping at bay anyone who tried to walk through and approach the big windows.