My experience of prison made me see them as the defeated, and the defeated were different to those in prison; they were the defeated who hadn’t even put up a fight, as far as I was concerned. I was under the impression they would have submitted to any flag, the only proviso being that it should come with victory on a plate, one they could take on board without taking the slightest risk.
I felt I was different, though not necessarily more courageous or superior. Deep down perhaps I even envied them their submission and the way they bowed their heads before the superior forces of society and nature, which, I thought, made them happier. I’d seen the faces of relatives waiting to visit those under sentence in prison, the gestures of insubordination that made them clench their fists on the pretext that it was a cold morning, eyes that spat fire as they reviewed a brutally hostile world and sparse, pointed words that wounded like sharpened knives. I’d seen there was another world of simmering rage, of constrained violence, perpetually on the alert, waiting for the moment to rise up. I didn’t consider myself to be either strong or courageous enough to be like them, but I had learned that the providential, orderly universe that my agricultural-labourer or factory-worker schoolmates intended to inhabit was an illusion, and that if I wanted to survive, I should only trust in myself, that my strength lay in my powers of dissimulation, my inner struggle, my partial, oblique adaptation to the moment and the concealment of my true intentions; my weapons were treachery, sleight-of-hand and deceit, if need be.
Oak-Leaf had absconded with her secret concerning puppetmaster Mr. Madern, and Cry-Baby also lived a hidden, secret, elusive life, and I suspected Aunt Enriqueta led a dark life in the depths of the forest, and all that only reinforced me in the option I had chosen. Nobody told the truth, everybody lived double lives, one on the surface, one in secret. Only Mad Antònia walked naked through the woods, openly declaring the secret behind her sickness. I’d have to be mad like her to expose my inner state. What did I know of the life Pere Màrtir lived and all his hidden crevices and crannies? And the adolescent with TB in the heartsease gardens, with his archangel face and body branded by all manner of obscure sin, what did I know about them? Only my fascination with the shadow their lives projected over mine, and that alone.
And I now imagined Oak-Leaf crossing the woods in the early morning, when it was still pitch-black, coming out onto the road at some point to catch the coach, and making that journey every day with her colleagues on that shift, joking and singing the whole way or praying Hail Marys and Our Father in remembrance of the girl murdered years ago on the path to Cós in the days when the factory girls walked through the woods — they still called them factory girls in the country, contemptuously, just as they sang ditties dubbing them “steam bugs” and “tramps and pigs” when they saw them walk past with their lunch baskets. Grandmother knew a stack of insulting limericks invented by country folk who didn’t want their girls to abandon work on the farms — I imagined Oak-Leaf chained for life to the line of women who had joined the sad, brutalizing factory routine, like my mother, hard labour that stole away their good cheer, their good health and their time, and sent them home in a bad temper, tired and unhappy, like a river returning to the surface the bodies of the drowned, eyes gaping but lifeless.
My memory would get entangled with my imagination, and sometimes the mixture played tricks on me and I was afraid I couldn’t remember things properly, say, for example, the memory of my father, the last image I clung to, of him behind prison bars, separated by that empty space I’d run across, his wan face, the bags under his eyes, his two- or three-day-old stubble, his sallow, emaciated skin smelling of dank cells and the lukewarm sweat of caged men; all I remembered about him began to fade so quickly, and sometimes I could only see a hazy outline of him, as if my picture of him was disappearing, and I took that to herald a second death, the death of his memory; the dead fled my mind, were erased, turned to shadows, to ashes, to oblivion, to non-things, and it was horrible not to be able to evoke those beloved images, as if they’d never existed, and that was the greatest injustice ever, a pit deeper and darker than death itself, the death of memory, the death that was definitive.
And so Oak-Leaf had left us too, and I could still see her in the clearing in the wood where we used to play and argue, I remembered words I’d heard at my father’s funeral, when somebody had spoken incomprehensibly about him “passing on to another life,” and those words now came back to me and I felt they were more appropriate to this situation because Oak-Leaf had changed her life and passed on to adult life. We were all fated to pass on to another kind of life. Even the mischievous brats sitting behind desks in my class would one day pass on to adult life, quite unawares, from one day to the next, they’d be transformed into grownups, young adults, old people and would behave like the genuine article, would smoke for real in the café in front of everybody, not hiding in the lavatories or playground as they did now, and court a girl, spending their Sundays strolling together round the main square, making public his emotional commitment to that girl who would be his fiancée, his legal wife for life, his widow…rather than swapping information about sex and exposing themselves in secret.
Quirze was the second to leave school, even though it was a temporary measure, or so they said. That happened when the farm was invaded by reapers, gangs of reapers who’d come from all over, mature men and young men, strong and bare-chested, who slept in the barn or woods and gathered on the threshing-ground every morning to be divided into groups and share out the corn fields; they made sheaves in the crook of their arm which they then heaped into stooks, everyone with a scythe in one hand and a wooden half-glove on the other, and the women would come later to pick up the ears of corn left among the stubble; they were women from the village and sometimes Aunt Ció, Cry-Baby and I joined in on days when there weren’t classes, and Aunt Ció and Cry-Baby brought them a drink mid-afternoon in a basket covered by a napkin, and when the reapers saw the basket coming they’d whistle and laugh, stop working and sit down on the edges of the field to eat and drink, they called it having a swig and wetting their dry throats, and they were sweaty, dripping in sweat, and gave off a tepid smell that was a mix of corn, grass and their own brawn. Quirze had to help them that year, by his father’s side or Bernat’s and the hands’, he had to learn, they said, and it was high time he started, school could wait, he’d be back when the harvest was over. However, after the reaping came the threshing and for days the whole farm was transformed into a beehive when the carts came with sheaves of reaped corn, the threshing machine was set up in the middle of the threshing-floor, and we thought it was huge as a steam engine, and the shouting and the sound of baskets and mounds of corn and large sacks of grain filling the barn and the granary even reached as far as the entrance to the house, full of chaff, chaff like drops of dry dusty rain that impregnated everything. From the gallery Cry-Baby, Grandmother and I watched the men moving and the most exciting moment in the threshing was when the straw started to stream nonstop from the spout of the machine which they directed to one side with straw streaming out that they shaped into a haystack, what would stay a haystack for the whole of next year, next to the pond, by the hazel tree spinney.