31
When I returned to Can Tupí I got the impression I was even more of a temporary resident. The first day everybody treated me like a convalescent who’d just survived a serious illness, but the day after everything went back to normal, as before, as if nothing had happened. The only thing that jarred was that nobody mentioned Father’s death and the effort not to do so forced everyone to be careful with their words, or perhaps I only imagined all that. Before going off to spend a few days with Mother, Aunt Enriqueta gave me four items of clothing that had been dyed black and a waistcoat and a brightly coloured jacket with a large band of black cloth sewn on the top of the sleeve, a kind of official strip for those plagued by misfortune, as if I’d suddenly signed up to the sad brotherhood of the relatives of the dead.
Mr. Madern, the teacher, shook my hand very formally, uttered a polite formula of condolence and made no other comment. Miss Pepita, Miss Silly, greeted me at playtime and said she was very sorry there’d been so much pain, I didn’t know whether she was referring to my father or me. My schoolmates said nothing, gave me curious looks, as if I’d undergone an experience none of them wanted to live through and had come out of it too well, like winning a fight with friends or surviving an accident unscathed.
“So your father died,” Oak-Leaf said the first day we walked down the path home, in a neutral tone, as if commenting on some everyday occurrence. “I thought they’d execute him, he’d been sentenced to death. I didn’t know he was ill.”
I simply nodded and agreed in a feeble, feigned matter-of-fact voice. My cousins said nothing.
“Did he die from lung failure, like the TB patients in the monastery?” she went on in the same vein. “They say there are lots of sick people in prison, and they infect each other and nobody gets out healthy. And they’re so cold and hungry, their lungs get into a real mess.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied equally limply.
I didn’t know which sickness had killed my father. I imagined it was the one they’d had to operate on in a rush a couple of years before, stomach cancer, and I remembered Mother explaining the details to Aunt Ció at the crossroads where they always said their final farewells and the way my aunt scowled and screwed up her face when Mother described the wires and needles they stuck in him to “take a sounding,” a new word that was to horrify me for evermore, and I shut my eyes and distracted myself by sitting on the ground, uprooting grass and herbs or hunting crickets while I listened to their conversation, and Mother went on, “It’s more difficult for men, it’s such a small hole, it’s terrible, it makes you grit your teeth,” and I imagined the details that appalled me and told myself that what I was thinking couldn’t be true, “and they can do nothing,” they repeated as if they couldn’t resign themselves, “they can do nothing,” “it’s a tricky illness,” “a nasty illness.”
“What will you do now?” asked Oak-Leaf with her usual lack of tact. “Will you go back to your town or stay in Can Tupí? If you stay on, they’ll soon make a farmhand of you, that’s what the men do.”
“And why are you sticking your nose in?” interrupted Quirze angrily. “What business of yours is it what he does or doesn’t do?”
Oak-Leaf stared at him defiantly. The irritation in their voices led me to suspect they’d had a bust-up. Cry-Baby continued walking along the path, as if she wasn’t listening.
“There’s no harm in asking,” said Oak-Leaf, all meek and mild. “Everybody is saying that Andreu will go back to his town, because you let him stay in your house to help his mother while his father was in prison.”
“And what’s that got to do with you?” Quirze was getting more and more aggressive. “Do we stick our noses in what you do or don’t do in your house? You shouldn’t interfere in what we do in ours.”
Oak-Leaf shrugged her shoulders and replied by pointing at her ears: “Everything you say goes in one ear and out the other, just so you know how much notice I ever take of you.”
“So why did you ask me, clever-boots? Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.”
“I wasn’t asking you. I was asking Andreu and Núria.”
Quirze looked at us both, at me by his side, and at Cry-Baby, who’d stopped a few yards farther on and was playing on the grass verge with her foot, amusing herself, while she waited for us to stop bickering.
“All right, ask them, and see what that twosome has to say,” replied Quirze in a defiant tone that was also telling us to act belligerently towards Oak-Leaf.
“I’ve asked him and he knows nothing,” said Oak-Leaf, turning to me, “or acts as if he knows nothing.”
Oak-Leaf took a step towards Cry-Baby, who was still playing with her foot as if she didn’t know what was going on, and said: “And she won’t open her mouth. You won’t tell me anything, will you?”
Cry-Baby lowered her eyes further, avoiding her gaze, and moved her foot more intensely, as if she was trying to flatten every single blade of grass.
“And she doesn’t even know where her father is. And her mother fled over the mountains to look for him, and right now we still know nothing, they’ve both vanished, as if the earth had swallowed them up, like an enchanted prince and his princess.”
“Shut up, you spiteful bitch!” rasped Quirze. “You’re the devil’s own kind, everybody says you’re the devil’s own. And a lot more besides.”
“They can say what they want! As if I took one blind bit of notice!”
Oak-Leaf shrugged her shoulders again. We stood rooted there for a moment and I was convinced the three of them must have squabbled or had a really bad falling out while I’d been at home in town, an obstacle now stopping them from moving on. In the end, Oak-Leaf turned tail and headed along the path across the woods, bawling: “She refuses to talk to me, so that shows who’s the one behaving badly! Did she think I was going to chase her? I’d never chase after that lump of beetroot, I don’t need that rotten walnut one bit. She’s the one that needs me, you bet she does, because I know all there is to know about her and she only knows what I decided to tell her about myself, which was all lies!”
Quirze stooped down to pick up a couple of big stones which he threw angrily at her. Oak-Leaf retaliated, and the rocks fell next to us, and sent us scattering. Suddenly Quirze ran after her, caught her, pushed her to the ground and started pummelling her, while he screamed: “Shut up, you vicious swine, don’t say another word about us if you don’t want me to smash your face in, and I’ll bash your head in too if you don’t shut up…!”
Oak-Leaf whimpered on the ground and said things we could barely hear: “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll tell everything! Leave me alone, or I’ll spread it round the village! You idiot, you animal, you savage, leave me alone!”
Quirze left her on the ground and walked back to us. Oak-Leaf silently pulled herself to her feet, shaking the dust from her dress. I thought she was crying. Quirze strode past us and shouted, as if it was an order: “On our way!”
Cry-Baby and I followed him without glancing back once. A good way on, when we were within sight of the farm, I asked Cry-Baby, who was walking next to me, two or three yards behind Quirze: “What ever happened? Did you fall out over something?”
A moment later, Cry-Baby answered almost inaudibly: “It’s them two…”
“What on earth did they do to you? Why are those two so angry?”
“They squabbled the other day as well. Oak-Leaf repeated that she’d seen Aunt Enriqueta in the woods with blond Canary, and he didn’t believe her, he said she was making it all up to get at us.”
I didn’t know what to say. A few more steps later Cry-Baby added: “She said I’d do the same.”