Prisoners were on the other side of the barred windows, two for every opening, one on each side. Mother and I walked up and down looking in every window to find my father and when we’d tracked him down, my mother elbowed her way through to the front row that was leaning against the iron bar. I stood next to her. The bar came up to my chin.
Father’s eyes were large and shiny, his face pale and gaunt; his bones, cheeks and jaw jutted out, trapped between the two thick bars of the grille, as he grasped the iron further down. When he saw us, he got up, still clinging to the bars. He tried to smile, and I thought his yellow teeth looked rotten or false.
Mother and he had to shout so their voices rose above the incessant din that seemed driven by a machine. I only caught the occasional sentence like: “How are you? Have you been back to the infirmary? Don’t worry, I’m knocking on doors every day, and lots of people have put themselves about to help you. I’ve brought you clothes and food. Your mother and everyone send you lots of kisses. Don’t give up hope now, bear up. We’ll find a way… You just see how we will.”
Father nodded while one hand fell away from the bar, then he gripped it again, and his face and eyes lit up strangely, like a hollow pumpkin with a dismally flickering candle inside. At one stage he must have said something important I didn’t catch, he moved his lips in my mother’s direction and I didn’t hear him, they must have been talking about me because my mother put her hand on my shoulder and lowered her head slightly so I could hear: “Don’t you worry about that. Andreu is keeping up with his schooling, both the teacher in the Novíssima and the priest at the parish school are being very good with him and say he’s doing well, that if he goes on like that, he’ll be able to do whatever he wants…”
Then Mother looked down both sides of the passage and when she saw that both guards had their backs turned, she pushed me under the iron bar and said: “Run, go and give him a kiss…!” as she put a handkerchief in my hands, adding: “Give him this, if you can…!”
A couple of big strides and I was opposite him and my speed helped me to stick my hand through the bars and Father grabbed the handkerchief and leaned down to give me a kiss. I felt how bristly his cheek was because he’d not shaved, and his skin was bluish, almost transparent, and his hair grey and sparse. He didn’t look at me, but quickly said: “Look after your mother! Make sure you look after her!”
I beat my retreat before one of the police could come and yank me away. When the policeman was level with my mother, he stood in front of her and said it was forbidden to go close up to the booths, I then learned that they weren’t windows, but locutorios as the Civil Guard put it in Spanish, and that she shouldn’t play the fool anymore if she didn’t want those inside to suffer as a result, and that our visit was at an end, other relatives were waiting.
We walked away reluctantly, and Father looked at me two or three times and lifted up a hand with a single finger sticking out as if to remind me of what he’d asked me to do. Mother and he looked into each other’s eyes right to the last moment, and it seemed their eyes would never separate.
The police ushered everybody out of the waiting room, the booths emptied, and we slowly walked downstairs, as if we’d left our eyes behind.
Once outside, we walked on in a haze, and my mother asked me things as if she was talking in her sleep, and never waited for my reply, as if they were questions she was asking herself: “How did you find him? He looked better, didn’t he?”
Mother had forgotten I’d not seen him for over a year. The last time I’d seen him in prison was in the infirmary, in a clean bed, after the operation, only a week after he’d left hospital. Mother kept walking and her questions were contradictory. She said: “He seemed a bit the worse for wear, downhearted, don’t you think?”
We stopped in a front of a café full of the same people who’d been in the prison visiting room and on the road outside. Mother asked: “Are you hungry or thirsty? Do you want anything? I don’t remember if we had any breakfast or not at Grandmother’s.”
I said nothing and followed her in. We went up to the counter and she ordered: “A cup of coffee for the boy!”
The waiter asked her what she wanted and Mother said she didn’t want a thing. Some people sitting at a nearby table got up and Mother made me sit down. She stayed standing by my side. I pointed to the empty chair and the waiter also suggested she sat down, saying it cost the same standing or sitting, but she said not to bother, it wasn’t worth sitting down, she was fine standing.
I quickly drank my coffee, uneasy at the presence of my mother rooted there, as if she wasn’t worthy of the luxury of a seat and a drink.
As if her earnings didn’t permit such expenditure.
I felt my mother was withdrawing into a zone of darkness, was refusing to join in the futile round of social life, was absenting herself from any activity that wasn’t factory and housework, and that from now one she’d exist only for me, the family at Can Tupí and the memory of my father.
She had to get back to work on the afternoon shift. She had switched her morning shift with a colleague and would have to run to get there on time. She left me on the bus that went from Vic to my grandparents’ hamlet, the stop by Saint Camillus monastery, where I’d get off. She repeated, as if instinctively: “Remember, remember…”
But I didn’t know what I was supposed to remember and later on I thought she might perhaps have said, “Remember him, remember him.” She ran her dry lips over my cheek and went off to the station where the bus to town stopped.
I travelled back to the farm, pressing my cheek against a window in that half-empty coach. I was tired, though I’d not done anything requiring physical effort. I was overcome by a feeling of powerlessness, alienation and moral collapse. I don’t know why but my head was full of the faces of the priests who taught the catechism, the priest at the parish school and the Camillus friars from the monastery, who preached forgiveness, forgiveness, repentance and forgiveness, mercy, providence…and what else? And of the three theological virtues, charity was the most hallowed, the most prized, the most vaunted, but I could see forgiveness or mercy nowhere. Why didn’t people notice? Even I could see that clearly enough and Quirze and Dad Quirze as well, and all the men I knew, from Uncle Bernat to the teacher at the Novíssima, Mr. Madern, knew the score as well, and perhaps that’s why they always seemed grave, surly, unfeeling, and immune to the fun and jokes that bring cheer to life, that seemed as brutal as the thud of an axe. They all knew mercy and forgiveness didn’t exist in this world and that everything priests said was like Grandmother’s fireside fairytales, pleasant, cheery chatter to pass the time, entertainment for our leisure time, but totally nonexistent.
In fact, that was the source of the intangible beauty and virtue of Grandmother’s imaginary characters that were as evanescent as a dream.
27
Days passed and we all felt we were in a state of vigil. On the surface everyone went on living normal lives, followed the necessary routines, but from the moment I got back from the visit to my father, I felt I was surrounded by a bubble of cold air that isolated and protected me. From Grandmother to Uncle Quirze and my two cousins, everybody treated me with a barely perceptible extra degree of consideration I easily missed if I wasn’t really on the alert. It was the sum of small details that made that subtle distancing quite tangible.