All those men from elsewhere radiated an energy that was felt throughout the house; the women didn’t stop for a minute, were always on the go, and women from the village came to help because Aunt Ció by herself couldn’t cope with even half what had to be done, and the men didn’t come into the house for a single meal, didn’t stop the whole day, we never saw them, and Grandfather Hand never appeared on such days, because he’d been told he wasn’t of an age to help, that he’d be more of a nuisance than a help.
Cry-Baby and I rushed home from class every afternoon because we knew we’d find something new in the farmhouse, new reapers who’d found quail or partridge nests among the corn or undergrowth and brought them home where the haystack got higher and higher and was almost finished. Aunt Enriqueta washed their shirts and patched their trousers, and we listened to Grandmother’s news about what had happened during the day. We never played on the path like we used to, we never dawdled, as Grandmother put it, and without Oak-Leaf or Quirze we felt lonely, orphaned, and ran so as to be back at the farm early.
Afternoons were drawn out and mid-afternoon was what midday used to be. Mr. Madern, the teacher, hadn’t kept back Cry-Baby or me, as if he understood with all that hustle and bustle we had no time for him or anybody else. And deprived of Oak-Leaf’s brazen lack of shame and Quirze’s coarseness, neither Cry-Baby nor I dared to begin a round of the nonsense games that had once filled our conversations.
The men didn’t even stop on Sundays, they only stopped if it rained, because they said the rain made the straw stick to the machine. Then they crammed into the barn or the pen, perching their bums on rocks, itching to return to work, with cigarettes on their lips and a jug of wine that was always being passed around, and they told stories about the peculiar people in their or another gang, and that made them burst into loud, belly-shaking guffaws, like the one about the day-labourer who never washed and when they scolded him and said he’d soon start breeding lice, and didn’t he feel ashamed to be always so filthy? and he replied “Nobody knows me here, I go as I please,” and when the gang came to his village to work, he didn’t wash there either, because, or so he said, “They all know me here, they know what I’m like,” and other cases that became famous like the one about the man who didn’t do up his fly and when people told him it was open, he retorted he would never button it up, that once a woman with the hots for him had cooled down in the time it had taken him to unbutton, the laughter was even louder and people slapped their knees.
When the gangs departed, the farm seemed to relax for a few days. At siesta time on Sundays, when the house went quiet because the reapers had gone and it seemed bereft, when the sun was motionless in the sky and the yellow light burned like a red-hot brand-iron, Cry-Baby and I went to play in the hazel tree spinney. We made our escape from everyone on the excuse that we were going to play hide-and-seek. It was the signal for us to go and sleep under the low, deep shadow from the hazel trees. Mother, who’d arrived that morning, stayed in the kitchen to help Aunt Ció and they’d chatted until it was time for her to go. Quirze took a nap, like the grownups. And without him, without the tension he created with his older knowing ways — Grandmother said that Quirze was our troublemaker who sowed seeds of discord — we weren’t so keen on climbing the plum tree. Our new life now belonged to the shadowy arbours in the hazel tree spinney.
We never said a word. Núria stretched out in the depths of the spinney and waited for me to follow. I lay by her side and we stayed still for a while, as if we were expecting something to happen. She sometimes said, “Do you want to play at teachers?”
And she let me put my hands on her and explore her whole body. She hardly ever moved, and only occasionally showed any interest in my displaying myself. We held each other tight, as tight as we could, and after a while, as if disappointed that our embrace hadn’t melded us into a single body or that the two opposing forces had only produced exhaustion and tensed muscles, we separated out with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration, like a schoolboy who has done homework that his teacher then doesn’t bother to read or mark.
We’d run off at speed to poke our heads over the wall at the end of the spinney and spy on the sickly figures lying in the heartsease garden. We grinned and pointed out the most naked, the sickest, the hairiest, the most emaciated… I don’t know why but Cry-Baby never mentioned the boy lying under the elm tree, the boy who seemed the youngest and as lithe and white as a river of silver. Perhaps Núria also felt he was a special case, that he didn’t fit in that whole scenario, as if his sickness wasn’t the same as the one affecting the others who seemed to lack something… conversely, the boy — whom I already considered to be mine, ours — seemed to suffer from an excess, from an abundance, the others had neither colour nor flesh, didn’t look well or at all special, yet I felt that chosen boy had just the right colour, body weight and gaze, the right tout ensemble and exuded a warmth, a sheen, that attracted every eye. Each small gesture he made was just right, not a single millimetre too much or too little; the others, on the other hand, moved awkwardly, slovenly, as if they weren’t in control of their limbs. It was obvious that all the TB sufferers, except for him, had lost a vital, irrevocable struggle, unlike our young man, who acted as if he was resting after a prophetic skirmish with a divine saviour who had entrusted him with the mission of salvaging perfection in a world full of all manner of mutilation.
One afternoon, he wasn’t there and the garden seemed deserted. I felt a void in my chest, as if I’d lost something crucial that I needed in order to live, a pint of blood or half a rib, and the wound was sore. I didn’t understand why I felt all that or why those things happened. I felt guilty because that sense of loss hit me more than my father’s death. It was different, my father represented the disappearance of a being I’d once had and now lacked, the young TB sufferer represented the appearance of someone I hadn’t been expecting, didn’t know, and was a revelation of something strange and disturbing.
Luckily, he appeared on another day as if that had only been a blip, a rise in temperature or medical advice not to take so much sun. That re-encounter filled me with joy; I experienced a new, hitherto unknown fulfilment.
Days before, shortly after my father’s death and the civil guards’ raid on the farmhouse, when Grandmother had been out of sorts and didn’t leave her bed the whole day and declared that all her goblins and fireside stories would disappear from our land, annoyed by so many deaths and unable to breathe air so full of hatred, resentment and revenge, Grandmother summoned the three of us to her bed, to her side, for a while, and said she didn’t have the strength of will or oomph to tell us a tale or recall a comic or horror story, she just wanted us near her because she hadn’t seen us for days and was now starting to feel better and wanted us to keep her company for a bit.
Cry-Baby and I climbed onto her bed immediately, half-undressed, but Quirze felt mardy, said he wasn’t in the mood for all that baloney, and Aunt Ció had to insist he stood next to us, barefoot, he didn’t have to get in bed if he didn’t want to, and that’s how the three of us came to be next to Grandmother, and from where she lay she laughed and told us to get some sleep, that she was going down to the kitchen to prepare a herbal drink that would help us to dream some lovely dreams.