Death, I thought, was the unique injustice for the moment, but perhaps there were others, however few, that were as monstrous and inevitable as death. I felt my chest shudder at my gradual discovery of these inevitable, unique Great Injustices, when I realized how my scant experience had already extended the list of the common injustices of life. And when that thought struck me, I shuddered again, because the image of the boy with TB came to mind, with his pallor and lethargy, lying on the grass, like a church angel whose wings had changed into white sheets. I didn’t know why I most remembered him from all those sickly bodies stretched out in the monastery’s garden of heartsease, I thought it must be because he seemed the youngest, the frailest or sickliest, something made him special, as if his body wasn’t irradiating a light that made him almost transparent. My father’s death had triggered the image of the living dead, as Dad Quirze described them, and that was why the figure of the sickly youth lying on the lawn now appeared, like a Saint Sebastian who’d been humiliated, thrown to the ground, broken in two, his lungs gouged by wounds that bloodied his lips and ribs. But one source of sorrow lingered at the back of my brain, like an almost imperceptible blemish, which only worried me when it erupted into my consciousness, namely, the presentiment of another unique, grandiose injustice like death, another source of emotional devastation, like Father’s death, and that couldn’t be death in general, the death of everyman, or illness, because incurable illnesses belonged to the same category of great injustices as death, to which it was merely the prelude, a warning and anticipation, and if it was only a passing illness it didn’t merit consideration as a common injustice, it was a mere accident of life, something familiar, when an injustice should be a sudden, unexpected event, that annihilated hope, and the presentiment I felt whenever the memory of the languishing, tubercular youth appeared wasn’t connected to death, that I’d almost taken on board, but to a dark side of life, to an injustice even more punishing than death, one I had yet to discover, which is why the vision of that luminous, sickly body preyed on me and fascinated me so.
Aunt Felisa finally departed. It was pitch-black by now and she and Mother, on their way to the door, stopped in the passage opposite my bedroom to see if I was asleep. I acted as if I was completely out of it, tucked up in bed, a pillow over my ears, and they went up the passage resuming their whispered conversation: “What will you do with him?” asked Aunt Felisa, and I felt I was being treated as an alien, as an obstacle, and anxiously waited for my mother’s reply.
“I haven’t decided yet,” she answered, rather limply. “For the time being he’ll go back to the farm with my mother-in-law. Lluís wanted him to continue his schooling, but I don’t know whether I can take him very far by myself. I’ll have to find someone to give him a helping hand.”
They moved away down the passage. Aunt Felisa said something I didn’t catch and Mother commented: “Don’t do anything, don’t commit yourself. But try not to get rid of him until you’re really sure. Much better a good man you’re not wild about than being sold on a man who’s worthless. Infatuation and rapture are short-lived, last only a few days, and a family has to pull together for a lifetime. And, you know, the crazy pangs of courting and infatuation are for young people, for people in their first youth, I mean.”
“But you…” Aunt Elisa tried to protest.
“Don’t look to me. If you only knew what I have suffered! But I’m a special case, and I recognize I am special and that not all women have to do what I did. Everything I’ve done I’ve done because I wanted to. I wouldn’t wish what I’ve suffered on anyone.”
Their muttering turned into the distant sound of voices in the porch, until I heard the key turn in the lock and the door open. They must have stood outside for a while, because the door didn’t shut for some time.
Mother was moving around the house and I couldn’t think what she might be doing at that time of night. Finally all the lights went out and silence descended. But it didn’t last very long; I’d just fallen asleep when I felt someone get into my bed, and push my side to make space. I thought for a moment that I must be back in the grandparents’ house and that Quirze or Cry-Baby was fooling around. It was my mother, and I guessed as much from her smell, that mixture of cheap soap and bleach, factory oil and the usual scent from her skin that reminded me of the bushes that flowered in the woods, rosemary, thyme, broom…as if she used scented water, though in fact she rarely used any kind of perfume.
“I can’t sleep in such a big bed…” she whispered, as if that was her excuse, “Go on, make room for me. I’m not a bother, am I?”
I didn’t reply but quite spontaneously gave her a hug. We hugged for a while, until I felt my chest was shivering as if I was cold and I thought I must be holding back my tears. I couldn’t cry; I was quite empty in that respect. I also thought I must have caught a chill and hugged her even more tightly.
I felt responsible. I wanted to remember my father’s precise words in prison, when he asked me to look after my mother, but I sensed they weren’t the exact words he had used. And then I thought how that was the first time I’d slept with her, and I was suffused with a kind of regret from some of my earliest memories, fleeting moments, lightning flashes that briefly lit up the void of that era of unconsciousness, and I saw myself forlorn in the house of the kind old babysitter, Beneta, while my mother went to work, and then, at night, when she came to fetch me after finishing her shift, and my father whom I never saw, absent, remote, alien, like a shadow you couldn’t distinguish from the black of night.
I felt that Mother’s coming to my bed that night was a kind of making amends for the way she’d neglected me in my first years. She owed me days and days of her presence. Could she make up now for those solitary afternoons on the terrace at Beneta’s, my only distraction being the sight of nearby orchards and distant mountains? I don’t remember any toy next to me, while I longed for the presence and woodland scent of my mother who never came, who always appeared later than my hopes of ever seeing her again lasted and my terror at staying the night with Beneta, that always meant much more to me, because nighttime was a huge, impenetrable universe as far as I went. She owed me something else, but I wasn’t sure exactly what.
And that debt, that my mother was probably unaware of, made me keep aloof from her. Quite unintentionally, driven by the injustices of life we all suffer, she’d taught me to do without love. I suspected, in some way or other, that she could have avoided that, and also, that my father could have looked after her rather than roaming the streets and spending hour after hour trying to put the world to rights, and then she wouldn’t have had to leave me with Beneta, but she’d not done that. My father preferred to spend his time solving other people’s injustices of life and thus brought injustice into his own home. Those injustices fell in turn, like a row of dominoes, so nobody was ever left standing, ever, anywhere.
That’s why I didn’t cry over my father’s death, or at least that was how I justified myself. And at the same time I also withdrew from my mother’s embrace and turned my back on her.