Ció put more on my plate than on others’ and insisted I ate heartily; Dad Quirze avoided giving me orders or any kind of work; Cry-Baby looked at me gone out as if she were seeing me for the first time or had noticed a pimple on my face; Jan, the old hand, smiled whenever he bumped into me, that enigmatic smile of his that wrinkled his face and shrank his eyes, transforming them into closed slits that hid his two dots of light; like his father, Quirze never addressed me, though he never ignored my presence and always let me climb into the plum tree first; Oak-Leaf hummed songs or told dirty stories the whole way back from school, but never suggested new games or told us anything new; Grandmother Mercè stopped knitting or mending and sat staring out of the kitchen window at the cherry tree path, as if expecting a piece of news, her eyes languid, blank, and drowned in dampness.
One night, at dinnertime, I noticed that Aunt Enriqueta had yet to come and that Ció was doing everything early as if she’d some reason to be in a hurry. Grandmother, on the other hand, seemed more cheerful and took me and my cousins to the sitting room upstairs immediately after dinner because she wanted to tell us some new stories, some of which would make us laugh and others that would have us shaking with fear, and Quirze listened, head down and silent, as if relieved he didn’t have to help the men for a while as he usually did day in, day out.
Grandmother Mercè sat on a chair by the gallery door, in the shadows, and we stretched out over the floor on sacks, close to her voluminous black skirt. A blue light shone in from outside outlining every shape like a low mist and a cool, pleasant breeze blew in the new season’s scents.
To begin with, Grandmother’s voice seemed to tremble but she soon warmed to the task and was the first to laugh at the stories she told. That woman who went to confession at the Saint Camillus monastery saying she wanted to see the face of God, that if she didn’t see the face of Our Lord, she would be unable to repent for her sins, like Saint Thomas the Apostle, who had to see in order to believe, and her confessor told her she could never see the deity, that was the privilege of saints, maybe later on if she persevered in her devotion and penitence she might see the sacred face, but maybe if she came back on another day at such and such a time, as a special favour, she might be able to touch, that’s right, touch the divine countenance, and the woman returned on that day at the assigned time and kneeled by the confessional and asked through the screen whether she could touch the face of God, and her confessor said yes, she could, that she should stretch her hand out into the front of the confessional, lift up the curtain and feel the holy face, and there the confessor was waiting for her, soutane lifted and trousers dropped, bum in the air and when she touched his plump rump, she exclaimed in astonishment: “By the Holy Virgin of Monserrat, what a lovely face and such a flat snout!”
We laughed our heads off and repeated the punchline, “By the Holy Virgin of Monserrat, what a lovely face and such a flat snout!” when we told the story to Oak-Leaf; we pissed ourselves laughing in the middle of the woods.
Grandmother was irrepressible. The story of the Countess of Tornabous, from Tornabous Castle, not far from us — the richest woman in the realm — the realm being an imaginary terrain that didn’t fit the district or national boundaries or any other of the administrative specifications we were taught at school, but was where Grandmother located her fantastic stories. The Countess of Tornabous was the richest, sweetest-toothed woman in the realm, and as she was a widow and her husband the count had left her everything upon his death, land, property, everything, and an instruction to do whatever she wished with it, she, the Countess of Tornabous, spent her entire fortune, land, goods and everything she had and could borrow on banquets and gourmet food and drink she ordered from afar, delicious liqueurs and titbits — Grandmother was the only person who ever used that word, titbits — and it came to pass that as the Countess of Tornabous spent her life eating and never bothered to manage her wealth or keep an eye on her servants, one day she realized that all her doubloons had gone — another word that only cropped up in Grandmother’s stories, doubloons were the legal currency in all her yarns — she was ruined and forced to abandon Tornabous Castle as poor as a church-mouse and set about begging, in gypsy dress, with a tatty little basket. Now you saw the poor Countess of Tornabous on byways and street corners asking for alms for the love of God, who’d have thought it, the haughty Countess of Tornabous, once the grand lady and mistress of the entire realm, now transformed into a beggar who survived thanks to handouts from her former servants and vassals, all because she’d stuffed her guts and frittered away her whole wealth on lavish feasts and fancy new dishes that cost an arm and a leg, and hark ye now — magical words we only heard in these stories, hark ye now, like “once upon a time there was a king…” were the warning bell, the fanfare, the call to attention that heralded the long-awaited ending, the miracle, words from the world of fables that we never found elsewhere — and hark ye well, for one day when the Countess of Tornabous was asking for a crust of bread for the love of God in a farmhouse doorway, the farmer’s wife gave her a linen bag with a crust of white bread and a handful of walnuts, and the countess walked off so happily and on a bend in the track she calmed her hunger on that gift from the farmer’s wife and found the bread and nuts to be so good, so tasty, so really delicious, that she bawled out: “If I’d have known that bread and walnuts were so scrumptious, I’d still be the Countess of Tornabous!”
We would repeat the punchline: “Bread and walnuts are so scrumptious, if only I’d known, I’d still be the Countess of Tornabous!” that were a wonder in words, summing up the whole fable with a couple of lines that would be etched on our brains for evermore, the moral and poetic lesson, the beautifully closed world of Grandmother’s fireside tales that left no margin for doubt, a rounded-out world where everything fitted, that left a taste of perfection in our mouths, the image of a more complete, more fully finished planet than the one we inhabited and one which we could only reach through words, an imaginary world the door to which only her words could open.
Like the goblin in the shape of a monk who guarded the space in the attic where hams, sausages, apples and grapes were hung to dry, and if you dared to go in without permission from a grownup, he’d appear and push you outside, saying:
I’m a monk big and fine,
who gobbles in a flash
all who cross that line.
Or the one about the knight who had to go on a journey and he leaves a chickpea with a neighbour to keep it safe, and on his return, when he asks for it back, he’s told the hen ate it, so he says, then give me the hen, a hen for a chickpea? they go to the judge and he’s granted the hen, and on another trip he leaves the hen in another house, on his return, a pig had eaten it, and so it goes with the pig an ox eats, and the ox is eaten in a girl’s wedding, so give me that lass, that lass for an ox? I got a hen for the chickpea, a pig for the hen, an ox for the pig, that lass for the ox! And the knight, in an act of amazing lunacy that can only be understood in terms of the mystery of those tales, rides up to a crag and throws that lass over, saying:
The lass will rise,
look at her writhe!
We repeated the words though we didn’t understand their meaning, aware they hid a secret, wondering at the crazy act committed by the knight and the lass’s miraculous writhing, a fantastic end, only possible in a world of storytelling that could transform cruelty into happiness, laughter and hope. Death, into life.