“What’s that? You mean he was the owner of the Reguer de Pruit and they mistook him for…”
“That’s what I said. The man clearly put his hand to his chest to get his papers from his wallet, his pass or whatever, the papers he was carrying in his inside jacket pocket, and the guards thought he was armed and was going for his pistol.”
“Of course, I expect he stayed the night in the hotel so he could catch the first train to Barcelona.”
“That’s right.”
“So how come we only just got to find out? It must be the day we’ve had… But Brunet Who Never Stops and the civil guards were here and they never said a word.”
“And they won’t, if they can help it. We’ll see if it comes out in the newspapers. And if they do ever mention it, it’s because they can hardly hide what has happened from the people of Pruit and the whole district, but I’d be interested to see if they mention it further afield.”
“How did you find out?”
“Canary told me. They put all the barracks round-and-about on alert and ordered all the civil guards to patrol the woods in case infiltrators were about. It’s a joke, because no group has crossed the border… The Pyrenees aren’t up the road here as they are in the Vall d’Aran.”
“So perhaps that’s why they came here today…”
“I don’t think so. They’d planned this raid in advance, according to Canary.”
Aunt Ció looked down, as if embarrassed by what Pere Màrtir was saying or didn’t want to hear; the young man clammed up immediately.
“We were very lucky…” mumbled Aunt Ció keeping her head down, and then she looked up again, stared at Pere Màrtir and said: “You realize you and Enriqueta have given us some bad turns, but know what? if we get out of this unscathed I’ll forgive you all those headaches and sleepless nights.”
Pere Màrtir smiled shyly, his half-rabbit grin that made him seem so vulnerable, that transformed a sturdy, compact, perfectly proportioned man into a defenceless child.
“How can we repay you?” asked Aunt Ció, walking over to us, but focusing her head and conversation on the visitor.
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Pere Màrtir, shaking his head. “If everything turns out all right, don’t you worry.”
“Let’s hope so… We’ve got more tricky business coming up.”
Pere Màrtir shrugged his shoulders, signalling that he was powerless.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?” asked Aunt Ció, putting the cloth on the table, but not unfolding it, waiting for our visitor to decide. “Come on, stay for dinner. You’ll be able to talk to the men.”
“I don’t think I will. We’ll meet up later, if everything turns out…”
“I hope God’s listening to you, my love…”
Pere Màrtir bid us farewell with a nod in our direction and Aunt Ció accompanied him to the front entrance. As they left the kitchen, she said: “Shall I tell Enriqueta you came, when she gets back?”
We didn’t hear what he replied. Perhaps he didn’t say anything. They both stood and talked by the door for a time. What could they have to talk about that was more terrible or more exciting than the accidental murder of the owner of Reguer?
When Aunt Ció came back, she scolded us because we’d not gone to help the men with the animals, as if she’d only just noticed we’d been there for heaven knows how long. She grabbed Cry-Baby and said: “And you can go upstairs to keep Grandmother company.”
Quirze and I walked to the stable but I sat halfway down the stairs and watched my cousin flex his muscles and fork up the hay, spread it over the ground and divide it out before putting it in the mangers.
Dad Quirze and Jan, the hand, let him get on with it, didn’t say a word. Bernat wasn’t around. I was afraid Uncle Quirze would start baiting me; he often did when I tried to help the men, he made comments about weak-kneed students that shattered with the slightest effort they made as we were made of glass, or my particular clumsiness that he said came from “being born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” or from “being all mind and no muscle,” and such like, that were surprising from a hulking man as taciturn as he was. His comments, nevertheless, came wrapped in a film of irony, that distanced them, as if he was talking about someone else, and that made them less hurtful, as if rather than insulting me he was indirectly praising my ability to study.
“This young man,” he’d say, looking at me askance, “when he arrived here, couldn’t tell a mule from a gelding, or a filly from a foal. They don’t teach you that at school, do they? You had to learn that here. Townsfolk don’t even know what hoofers are.”
“Animals that hoof,” I repeated, joining in the game and touching my ears to show I did remember what the difference was between mules and geldings, foals and fillies. He liked bantering with me, and I sensed it was his way of getting closer to me, and I was glad he didn’t force me to help his son, or compete with him over the tasks in the stables or on the land.
At dinnertime, while she was serving up, Ció explained blow by blow what Pere Màrtir had told her about the mistaken murder of the owner of Reguer de Collsacabra. Dad Quirze, Bernat and Jan, the hand, listened carefully, didn’t raise an eyebrow, only grunted now and then, which was their way of approving or booing according to the level of sound they emitted, just like mardy children.
“The rats!”
“The swine!”
“The evil beasts!”
Cry-Baby went down to the kitchen to get Grandmother’s food and also her own, so they could both have supper in her bedroom.
When we’d finished eating, Quirze and I went up to see Grandmother. We found her in bed, leaning back against a pile of pillows Cry-Baby had put in place, and their plates and glasses of milk were on the sideboard and the bedside table. Cry-Baby sat by her side on the turn of the sheet.
“I don’t feel like doing anything,” Grandmother wheezed. “I feel everything I’ve suffered over the years has come back to haunt me. As if it all happened today… I reckon this war will never ever come to an end.”
Her exhausted eyes glanced lovingly at us and then she added, cracking one of her jokes, no doubt to make sure what she’d just said seemed more tolerable: “I don’t even feel like telling stories! Such shocking things happen, I lose interest in my stories. Right now, I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t remember a single one. When the war was going at full tilt, I felt exactly the same; with all that blood and gunfire outside, my stories evaporated inside me, as if they’d no strength of will or were afraid to show their faces.”
33
Oak-Leaf stopped going to classes at the Novíssima. Mr. Madern, the teacher, gave us no explanation why. When she’d not been for two or three days, somebody asked after her and the teacher replied most matter-of-factly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “She’s been put to work in a local factory.”
And we all thought that was an explanation with substance, as definitive as the cold of winter or heat of summer arriving. All the boys and girls accepted their fate in the factory, on the land or in a small family business with a kind of meek resignation, a fate they couldn’t escape; the oldest even gleefully anticipated the end of their schooling. They could see no possible way to dodge that burden, let alone to rebel against it. They had no other horizons and didn’t long for a different outcome. It was the future destined for them. There was no other.
My heart was somewhat sickened by their complicit acceptance of a tediously predictable adult life. Those schoolmates of mine — in both schools — seemed to think they lived in a rounded, orderly universe where everybody sooner or later found their slot; they simply had to slot into the gaps that were produced in society in clockwork fashion, as if the way one generation relieved another was a precise law of nature that couldn’t be defied. Their only aspiration was that their minimal presence should perpetuate an established order that from some superior, hidden place made the world revolve smoothly. They let themselves be swept along by the movement of things — society, the universe, destiny — and only tried to ensure it never sped up or braked to a halt. They had learned from the “defeated” generation that they were only pawns in the game of life, and they viewed the world above them, shaped by the bosses, the powers-that-be, the church, the enemy, the law, with respect, and found it quite normal to jump to their orders because bosses were the only people who understood how to pull the strings that governed the world.