The three of us sank into the soft mattress and laughed as we remembered the prim little princess, the crème de la crème of all true princesses, who couldn’t get to sleep if she found there was a pea or pebble under the ten or twelve mattresses she’d been placed on. Grandmother didn’t come back and we fell asleep.
I suddenly woke up sensing that somebody was looking at us. At the very first when I opened my eyes I saw it was much darker in the room, as if night had turned a jet black. But immediately, my half-open eyes saw Grandmother with a small oil-lamp at the foot of the bed staring at us, with a strange man by her side who was smiling at me, a friendly, trusting, motionless presence. It only lasted a moment because Grandmother and somebody in the sitting room were hurrying him up, the man smiled and said nothing; his smile wasn’t the same as Grandmother’s. Hers was a forlorn, weary grimace, his was cheerful, determined, and very, very loving. He was dressed for deep winter and his head was wrapped in something like a hood or sack turned inside out, which gave his face a cheeky, facetious, fantastical aspect because it looked quite solitary, amid the shadows, a stray face that had come to the foot of that bed to spy on how we slept, like a character from a fairytale, a denizen of the depths of the forest. The man carried something in his hands or under his arm, bundles or bags, which were hidden and made him stand really straight, a stiffness that only emphasized even more dramatically the sense of unreality.
Grandmother whispered something, then someone muttered in the sitting room, hurrying him up. His was the smile of someone who is observing a miracle. It only lasted a second because Grandmother tugged his arm and they both suddenly disappeared. It was so quick and so fantastical I thought it must have been a dream or mirage. Before falling back into a deep sleep, I felt the flickering light disappear into the sitting room and melt into the pitch-black night. I didn’t have the courage to check whether Grandmother was in bed or not, or to look at the face of Cry-Baby who was by my side, or Quirze who was farther away, to confirm they’d seen what I’d seen.
Next morning when I woke up with Grandmother on the other side of the bed, I remembered hardly anything, and a voice inside me urged me to say nothing and ask nothing, first because it had surely been a dream and everybody would laugh at me, and second, because my heart told me it was a grownups’ secret, that unwittingly I had glimpsed a secret from the adult world, just like when you are older and discover it is your parents who organize the presents on the night of the Three Kings and they don’t tell you because they simultaneously want you to open your eyes yet also preserve the illusion, and they banter about whether you do or don’t know, and now I felt in a similar situation and needed time to decide if I wanted to cross that border or not and insist on the truth that would bring me closer to their world or stay quiet and maintain the fiction of prolonged innocence that allowed them to tiptoe over our dreams at night.
“You slept like logs all night!” said Grandmother when we got up.
“I thought somebody stroked my hair,” said Cry-Baby suspiciously, “or that people were caressing my face.”
“The goblin,” laughed Grandmother, and now her smile was happy and relaxed like the nighttime visitor’s, “it must have been the goblin who came to say goodbye. I bet it was him.”
“Rubbish!” said Quirze, storming out of the bedroom. “I never want to sleep here again, I’m much better in the hands’ room. These two never stop tossing and turning and, Grandmother, you got up at least two or three times during the night.”
34
At the start of summer, when we had to decide whether I was to stay on at the farmhouse or go and spend the holiday months in town with Mother, Mr. and Mrs. Manubens, the landowners, said they would pay a visit.
Days before, Mr. Madern, the teacher, bid farewell to all his pupils because, as he said, he’d won promotion to a city school on the fringes of Barcelona, a permanent post, and wouldn’t be returning the next school year. Miss Pepita, the ex-nun, the infant class’s Miss Silly, as he also told us, wouldn’t return either because she was going back to the convent, though she only informed us much later, because she stayed on at school throughout the summer for all those infants and juniors who wanted help with their summer homework or to learn how to type on the two typewriters the Rural Town Hall put at the disposition of the class.
Mr. Madern seemed in a good mood on that last day of school and organized games in the playground, even though he was the one who never showed his face at break-times, preferring to remain hunched over his chess game; that was a special day when he helped lead games like world flags, hundred-metre sprints, shot-putting, jumping… We did nothing the whole day, and suddenly, after the games, at lunchtime, he produced bottles of fizzy pop and wine and gave out small glasses he filled with a mix, either only wine or pop depending on the age of the pupils. He invited Miss Pepita too, and she came in, all smiley and embarrassed, and drank only fizzy pop, not a drop of wine.
“I told them you’re going back to the convent,” he announced in front of everybody.
She blushed and replied: “It’s still not decided. I spoke to the Mother Superior at the Clarissa’s and I spend Sundays with them. I think it will be best for me. In these missionary times, lots of sacrifices, lots of vocations are needed to clean up the country and make it Christian once again.”
The class was creating a racket and almost nobody listened to what she was saying. I’d walked over to the dais because a moment before I’d seen Mr. Madern speaking to Cry-Baby, I didn’t know what he said to her, and I felt anxious, driven towards them, as if I had a right or a need to know what they were saying.
Miss Pepita talked to herself, because the class didn’t take a blind bit of notice and Mr. Madern listened for a second and then called to someone or busied himself tidying exercise books on the table. When I went over, before returning to her infants, the ex-nun told Mr. Madern: “I feel increasingly at a loss, I’ve told you that more than once. Inside, in the convent, I mean, there is order, discipline, a path…”
The master laughed and responded quietly: “Yet more order…! But the country is like a millpond compared to what it was. We’ll die of disgust and boredom if things don’t soon change. I’m hoping that in my new post, I’ll be able to slip off to Barcelona every now and then and let my hair down.”
“You’re different,” she frowned, “you men are different… I drown in a glass of water, I even lose myself in this tiny village I find too big for my liking… I’ve got my religion, you’ve got your politics.”
“Politics!” scowled Mr. Madern. “Can you call this politics? It’s the death of politics. I’ll be able to look up my old comrades in Barcelona and find out whether the Provincial Delegates have sold out as people say they have. According to the rumours…”
Cry-Baby stood next to me but said nothing. I listened to the teachers’ conversation and was surprised by Mr. Madern’s disillusioned attitude, and found him, by my lights, to be as disenchanted as Dad Quirze on the farm, as if the world appalled him, as if he wanted to isolate himself from it differently to the way silly Miss Pepita was hoping to: both wanted to shut themselves up inside a secure, impregnable fortress, both were seeking a safe bolthole, she, I felt, in renunciation, and he, in action, a self-imposed prison and barracks, both dissatisfied with the life they led, disappointed by something they’d been expecting from life that had failed to materialize. What on earth could they have expected from life that they’d yet to find? I didn’t really understand whether life had betrayed them — one of the words I’d heard repeated on so many lips, starting with my mother, when she was at her lowest ebb, and that I was always astonished to hear, like when someone in Barcelona or any big city said they’d been bamboozled on the street by con men or tricksters, something I found ridiculous and pathetic, because they could have avoided such deceit if they’d gone about their own business and not been distracted by anything or anybody, particularly by the first stranger who waylaid them in the middle of the street — or that they themselves had been betrayed by life as a result of bad luck or lack of savoir-faire. They were both teachers, couldn’t they guide and advise us so we could avoid the dangers they’d not managed to sidestep themselves? I reckoned that grownups who complained of such ephemeral discontent were ridiculous and pathetic. Mother, for example, would be more than happy and fulfilled, if only they returned her husband to her. Her workmates, another example that came to mind, would jump with joy if only they could get up at eight or nine every morning, and not have to spend half their lives standing by a machine, slaving like animals. So what did that couple of puppeteers have to moan about? That they didn’t have everything they’d wanted?