Neither Cry-Baby nor I reacted; the idea of meeting death before you’ve tasted life was too outrageous and Quirze was in the habit of saying gross things about childbirth: he said it was like cows, sheep, rabbits or pigs giving birth — which we’d all seen — but we couldn’t understand or accept that childbirth was the same. Quirze must have been right, right in a simple, brutal, basic way, as usual. That was the only explanation for a secret burial; it was a baby who’d not breathed even a second of life. However, Cry-Baby and I lived in the hope that things weren’t as Quirze said and we trusted that the world would suddenly change for us, like the holidays or Sunday clothes that broke weekday routines and showed us that life could be different.
“Our folk” were other words they repeated. Our folk, pronounced in a special way, our folk, not like when they said our plates or our glasses, but as if it were a more prized, more private possession, like private property only the owner knows about. The outside world was divided up between our folk and the others we guessed were enemies. We gradually discovered that the others were also the fascists. Initially we didn’t know what this word referred to. But it didn’t take us long to understand that the others and the fascists were one and the same: the enemy. They sometimes used different names, particularly Grandmother, who spoke of the “four bigwigs” and other such, but Grandmother’s language was so idiosyncratic that soon we only had the others or the fascists against us. For example, Grandmother never referred to the pairs of civil guards who poked their noses into the house now and then, as anything but “scoopers,” because of the three-cornered helmets they wore, which from behind looked like the implement we used to collect up grain or straw in the barn: the scoop. Scoopers.
Each proper name the adults uttered immediately fell into one of the two categories: our folk, or the others, the fascists. And one thing we worried about was allotting each new name we got to know to the right side. With each name, we had to listen carefully and try to catch every detail so we could decide on its moral location, whether that person was good or bad, our folk or alien, upstanding or fascist. All kinds emerged from that dark bevy of strangers, and each word or insinuation added a trait to their personality, until one day, as if miraculously, the names showed up at home in flesh and blood and then we’d stand and stare, in a state of shock, comparing the ideal image we’d invented with the real presence and making the necessary amendments, in favour or against.
The names that most cropped up in conversation, apart from family and friends, were Filthy-Face, Mad Antònia from Can Tona, Freckly Fair or Canary and Curly Lettuce, a pair of civil guards who always went together, “in tandem” said Grandmother, “those two always go in tandem,” Father Tafalla, the Superior at the Saint Camillus monastery and his companion, the novice from Navarra, Mr. and Mrs. Manubens, the masters, naturally, and Brunet Who Never Stops because he was the local head of the Movimiento in the village and that’s why Grandmother had given him that nickname, Mr. Madern, the schoolmaster and Miss Pepita, Miss Silly, the ex-nun at the Novíssima, and Pere Màrtir, who was a big surprise…to mention but a few.
From one day to the next they would put in an appearance on the track that went round the house; they all had another air about them, different to the one inside the house, and as far as we kids were concerned, they opened doors to strange and terrible worlds we had never imagined until their visits lit them up in a searing, sulphurous light from hell.
5
In winter we went to school well wrapped up with scarves and caps, our toes, hands and ears covered in chilblains. Quirze always wore fewer over-garments than us and called us wimps. He also said chilblains could be cured by a good dose of piss in the morning and evening.
“Yuck!” Cry-Baby and I screamed in horror.
“That’s right,” he mocked, “what an idea, right! As if you two have never pissed on yourselves!”
The track from home to the Novíssima was short and full of bends. We had to skirt round the house, walk past the lumps of rock salt, the well and elder tree and then head up the track to the woods and the monastery.
It was a cart track that crossed a clearing in the woods, pitted by big wheel marks, that snaked towards the main road across a mixed terrain of arable land and animal pastures. The monastery was on the left, on the Vic side, and the Novíssima on the right, near the village. The Novíssima was a modernist mansion straight out of a fairytale, in fin-de-siècle style, with lots of Valencia tiling, lots of pointy doors and windows with stained glass, elaborate patterns, exposed brick, friezes and designs embossed on white walls, lots of twisted, wrought-iron grilles in the shape of vegetables… Before the war, when the village filled up with summer residents who came to take the sulphurous, medicinal waters in a spa that has since closed, it was the newest, most modern mansion — La Novísima. It was now a school, we said “classes,” and brought together all the kids from local farms who didn’t want to go to the village school. Farming folk had a different town hall to the village and a right to their own national school.
During the war it had been used as a hospital or convalescent home, when the monastery was emptied out and requisitioned, like all the factories and estates of the rich. After the war a defrocked nun established herself there and reopened the primary school. During the war young kids were forced to go to the village school, much to the disgust of the farming folk who refused to accept the amalgamating of the two town halls. The authorities had allowed the ex-nun to set up while they were preparing the competition to appoint national schoolmasters, because they weren’t mere schoolmasters any longer, they were national, with a job for life. There were two classes, the one with the youngest, taught by Miss Pepita, nicknamed Miss Silly or the Ditherer, because she gave the impression she wasn’t quite right in the head, had a screw loose, as people said, and the class for big kids, taught by a man also reputed to have a murky past, who’d made the most of the confusion of the post-war situation to get appointed to the job without sitting any competitive exams, Mr. Madern, a middle-aged, sprightly, tense man, with a shock of white hair, bright eyes and white skin covered in horrible blotches, reddish patches that sometimes turned purple, depending on the weather, and caused by heaven knows what. He was a pleasant, if rather absent-minded, man who always seemed to have his mind on his own inner demons, but not like the schoolmistress — she made you laugh because when people spoke to her, she’d stand still for a while as if she were searching for a pot of ready-made answers from a shelf in her mind and didn’t know what to say or do until she’d found it, unlike Mr. Madern the schoolmaster, who, when spoken to, seemed to descend from another world, though he soon came to and found an answer to whatever he’d been asked; he was very fond of chess and his voice sounded hoarse, weary and rough.
When we walked along the track round the woods, we looked warily up at the mass of trees, a dark enigma confronting us, the light, majestic movements of foliage, the changing shapes and colours that faded and died in the heart of winter, and if we weren’t in a big rush, we stopped in the places we had made our own: the clearing among the wild climbing plants with little flowers like green and white candles where we threw stones, the hollow in the middle where we hunted for mushrooms and medicinal herbs that we took to Grandmother, like rustyback fern that cured stomachache, watercress or parsnip for salads, rockrose to light the fire in the bread oven, galingale to decorate altars and balconies in Corpus Christi, cattails with small white flowers, honeysuckle with yellow and red flowers and a lovely scent, sheep sorrel that was a kind of spinach Grandmother cooked with haricot beans or that could also be eaten raw…or the start of the shortcut along the stream to look for traces of animals or people who’d forded the water to go straight to the village or the other side of the woods, as far as the crags overlooking the river. It would take something extraordinary to waylay us in the morning—“Careful with the brambles,” Grandmother would say when we left, “they’re enchanted and if you stop to look at them, they’ll turn you into stone,” but on our return in the afternoon, after Christmas, when the days were slowly lengthening, we sometimes plucked up courage and dared head deeper into the woods, and enjoy feeling surrounded by the greenness and marooned between a circle of tree trunks and a sky of branches, a kind of compensation for the plum tree house we so missed. We’d sit in silence for a while in the place we’d chosen, whichever seemed the most mysterious or gloomy, and let time pass us by, listening to the sounds surging from the depths of the forest. It was like entering into Grandmother’s fantastic stories, as if horror, any sort of horror — the murderous axe, the beast on the rampage, the wild man or the apparition from the grave — might appear at any moment, from anywhere, proving with their presence that it was a scenario as authentic as her stories.