“Yes, you could… You just see. We’ve all gone through that, you little silly.”
“I sometimes think I’m too old for some things and too young for others. I don’t think I even know myself.”
“Now you are being silly! Nobody knows what they’re like till the time comes…, right to the very last moment.”
“And what if it doesn’t work out? Look at you and Lluís.” Aunt Felisa immediately regretted mentioning the deceased’s name. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that! I’m sorry, please, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to make you feel miserable.”
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter…that’s all memories now. And the best were of our first years together. It seems that was only yesterday, but it was over as quickly as a gust of wind.”
“Were you sure right from the start?”
“We were two young kids and from the first time I saw him at the salamander spring, there was never anyone else for me. I saw right away he’d follow me to the end of the world if I asked him to.”
A silence ensued I imagined was full of tears and cuddles.
“I shouldn’t have mentioned that.”
“Yes, you should, I want to remember… They say memories also die but I think I’ll carry him inside me till the day I die.”
“I wanted to hear you say that, so I could finally persuade myself… I don’t feel I’m capable of what you felt. Or that I could jump through all those…hoops as you called them.”
“Didn’t Mother ever tell you?”
“Mother, poor dear, you know as well as I do, was more into the next world than this when I was beginning to worry about such things.”
“Of course, but you shouldn’t worry your head. Men know what to do, know only too well… Don’t be afraid, they’re good teachers.”
Suddenly, after a mysterious silence, they seemed to burst into an uncontrolled spate of sobbing. I thought it was Mother, but when I heard her voice consoling Aunt Felisa, I realized the tears were my aunt’s. She cried like a young child.
“No, no…” she repeated, as if they were dragging her to the slaughterhouse. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to, don’t let him take me away. I don’t want him, I don’t want him!”
“Nobody is going to let him take you away, if you don’t want it to happen. Calm down. It’s nothing to worry about. You’re afraid, and that’s normal. It’s always a bother to leave one’s house to take charge of another. But men are easy to keep happy if you give them what they want. You’re younger than he is and you’ll soon get him used to what you want. You’ll get over it, you mark my word. You’ll get used to it in the first few days and then it will be plain sailing, nothing to it, like getting rid of a bad cold. Shush, shush, my sweet child.”
The tears kept streaming.
“If it’s not him, it will be someone else, it’s bound to happen one of these days. Don’t you see that if Feliu brings another woman into the house, he’ll cast you aside like an old broom. And you’re used to being top dog, you’ll find it hard to buckle down to orders given by a stranger. You’ll be very unhappy. On the other hand, a house that’s only yours, whatever headaches it brings at the start, will be a different life. Feliu must have thought that when he met…”
“Josep.”
“…when he met Josep and decided that he’d do for you.”
More silences and sighs. Mother kept insisting, and I began to find her insistence rather distasteful. I felt sorry for Aunt Felisa, I felt she ought to understand, in the translation I always had to make of adult conversations, that she was being driven out, with the best of excuses, from her own house, far from the woods, driven out to ugly factory towns, to a wasteland of superficial exchanges with people who meant nothing to her and who she didn’t care a fig for, accustomed as she was to living in the middle of silent, protective woods, surrounded by family and acquaintances. Tree of life, tree of Paradise, white poplar, Judas tree, alder tree, herb of the host, tree of love… And her instinctive fear of marriage seemed a very proper protest against the exile they were sentencing her to, swept off by that man with the big hands and head of grey hair. Aunt Felisa, whom I’d always thought as a wild, cunning, silent, untamed animal, with a fox’s fearful eyes and awkward gait, now seemed very akin to me, a vulnerable victim of the injustice of life.
30
The “injustices of life” was a phrase I’d heard hundreds of times on everyone’s lips that I adapted to my situation by applying it to the punishments meted out by the parish priest who hit us with a small cane or ruler on the palm of the hand or on the knuckles in the most serious cases, or to my resigned acceptance of Mother’s refusal to give me money to go to the cinema or buy comics — that she called Smurfs—from the town’s only newsagents-cum-bookshop. Now, as I listened to Aunt Felisa sobbing in the dining room, I realized that greater injustices existed, like being driven from one’s house and family to make a new life far from the woods in the company of unpleasant strangers. I don’t know why but Cry-Baby came to mind, as distanced as Aunt Felisa or I myself were from all our familiar landscapes.
While Aunt Felisa continued to moan and Mother to advise and cuddle, I stumbled around my pitch-black bedroom looking for a cranny where I could absorb the latest victim of life’s injustices, and then another word suddenly came to me that I’d heard on the grandparents’ farm, in Can Tupí, and only ever used by men, I don’t recall whether it was Dad Quirze or Father Tafalla, in a conversation about the war that must have gone completely above my head, from which I’d only retained a single word: infiltrator. Infiltrator. For a long time I hadn’t known when to use this word, and now, suddenly, I grasped that Aunt Felisa, like Cry-Baby, Aunt Mariona in Barcelona and myself, had infiltrated the places where we lived. We didn’t belong to the families or homes that had taken us in, we were no more than infiltrators, like little animals rescued from the woods and lodged in cages in the stables or kitchen, or domestic pets, tolerated as long as we behaved well and didn’t cause too many headaches. Infiltrators could be dispossessed at any moment of everything they had and expelled from the places where they lived; it all depended on chance, on the injustices of life that were extending their domain, on a man who went after a woman to marry and bring into his home, on the outcomes from a war we’d not been involved in, but had, willy-nilly, to suffer the consequences of, on Father’s imprisonment and death…, everything took us away from the original woods of our childhood, from the safe haven of its foliage, the welcoming silence of its depths, the intense greens of its leaves and grasses and the thickets that carpeted the ground.
I thought my father’s death was something that went beyond one of the injustices of life that I’d faced and kept facing. To an extent, one could fight against those, offer resistance, alleviate the pain. For example, my classmates who were obliged to hold out their hands to receive their punishment from the priest-teacher would previously wipe them with garlic, as if they were slices of toast; they reckoned that way the pointer or ruler slipped and the blows didn’t hurt as much, or else, to resist being expelled from your home, you could run away and refuse marriage, or to avoid staying at your grandparents you could hide in the woods or escape over the mountains to France, like those who’d lost the war, and become a tramp without roof or family. In other words, the injustices of life depended on the will of someone else, on an enemy or person in authority, a schoolmaster, a parish priest, a suitor…but how could you dodge death? Death was much worse than any of life’s injustices, death was the negation of life, the antipodes of life, the contrary of life, nothingness, non-life. It was more horrendous than any other injustice because nobody could offer resistance, nobody could run away or hide from such an act because it didn’t come from outside, you carried it within, death turned you into your own enemy and executioner, it was a mountain that crumbles and collapses or a wood ablaze that turns to cinder. It was the great injustice, the unique injustice, on which all the others depended.