“They must have met up somewhere else, in the woods…”
“I began to have my suspicions when she was so quick to agree to go to your house in town and keep you company.”
“You caught a whiff…?”
“Do you mean…? I don’t think so. She always arrived at the same time, on the dot. On the coach.”
“Heavens knows what she told them at the seamstress’s in Vic. She had the whole day to herself. To herself and to do whatever she liked, clearly. I’d bet my right hand she didn’t go to the seamstress’s at midday or on many an afternoon.”
Aunt Ció, her back turned, made a gesture of resignation, as if to say that must be right, that there could be no other explanation. I acted the innocent but hung on each word and gesture, trying to extract some sense to work it all out. I thought they were referring to Canary, the blond civil guard, and his colleague, since they always went about together.
“Dad Quirze lost his rag. You can’t imagine how furious he was. We didn’t get any sleep all night. We had a huge row! It made my poor mother ill, and she doesn’t know the half of it.”
Once again, my mother’s presence introduced the enclosed world of adults, with its language of hidden meanings and knowing references, to events only they knew, interpreted and evaluated. I felt excluded from that world and my exclusion removed any responsibility for the fates of those people, whether present or absent, as if they were saying I didn’t belong to their kind, wasn’t party to their worries, their interests, their dangers, their blood, and their prerogatives, as Grandmother Mercè would say. Each hour that passed I felt cast farther adrift. Was this one way to force me gradually into the world of Mr. and Mrs. Manubens?
“So then, there’s nothing we can do, right?”
“Now we must let time go by… It’s all we can do.”
“And what will you do? I mean to cover it up, when what must be, must be… Have you tried…?” Mother asked, insinuating something or other. “King’s crown works wonders in these cases. It really does the business. And there’s a woman in Vic you can rely on…”
Aunt Ció made that resigned-to-fate gesture once again. Now she turned round, rubbed her hands on her apron and said: “You know what these people are like. They don’t want a hue-and-cry, or anything putting them in a bad light. And you know that we owe them a lot of favours. They’ve done deals with Dad Quirze on both sides of the mountains, and Grandfather Hand acts as their messenger boy though he’s not a clue what he’s carrying. It seems they need to send lots of things over the other side on the quiet, no people, just things, papers, banking stuff, that is, all underhand. That lot trust nobody, not even their own. Fonso couldn’t have escaped without their help. We owe them too many bits of help. We can’t do a thing without their blessing.”
“Of course, we went through all that with Mariona and it is a pain. And you haven’t had the gossip yet, we even had a belling of the husband.”
“I never expected all this, I really didn’t. After all we had to go through over Fonso’s plight, it’s not fair we’ve got another disaster to face now.”
Aunt Ció left the kitchen as if she and Mother had planned they would leave us alone, saying: “When the time comes, we shall return to all this.”
“Poor Ció, so many headaches!” Mother exclaimed, squeezing my waist even more tightly, as if I understood everything they’d talked about.
I said nothing. It was the first time Mother and I had met at the farmhouse since Father had died. She removed her arm and I sat at the table, opposite her.
“What do you think about all this carry-on?” she asked, looking into my eyes.
I felt she was thinner, with sunken cheeks, a pointier nose and the bags under her eyes seemed more puffed up. Her hair was combed back, with small curls on her neck like remnants of an old perm, and she was wearing a dress dyed black that left smudges on her nape and wrists. I found the look in her eyes and her attitude in general much less vigorous, as if she was suffering from days of exhaustion.
“I don’t know…” I replied, simply to say something. I couldn’t think what she expected me to say.
“Grandmother still doesn’t know the whole story,” she suddenly added. It was one of those changes I wasn’t sure how to interpret, when I went from being an ignoramus to a confidant, which made me reflect that the grownups, my mother, weren’t sure how to treat us littl’uns, “be careful not to say a word to her, we don’t want her having a stroke.”
I nodded, with little conviction. I found those changes disconcerting.
“They’ve told her Enriqueta had to go to Barcelona for a while for work reasons. However, she knows nothing about the novice from Saint Camillus. She’d not cope with the idea of those two scarpering off in an underhand way. We’ll see what kind of a go they make of it.”
I didn’t react on the outside, in front of my mother. Inside, I felt I was collapsing, as if that would-be monk had gutted me or my heart had switched sides. Xavier, the little friar from Navarra, so silent and unassuming, so well-mannered, with his fragile white face, long pianist’s fingers and green eyes like a couple of olives? Did this mean they could leave the closed order, if they wanted, that anything was allowed, if they dared try it on? In a flash I saw the naked youth with TB lying on the sheet under the elm tree in the heartsease garden. I didn’t know why I was connecting those two right then, what the sick boy was doing next to the Navarrese novice, or what link existed between the two of them apart from the fact they lodged in the monastery, one within the community and the other in the infirmary. There must be a secret connection I couldn’t identify, like the hatred unleashed within me by the teacher in the Alsace-Lorraine school’s last lesson and Mr. Madern, the teacher in the Novíssima, who seemingly weren’t linked, but were like distant twin brothers embroiled in a peculiar mix of politics and education, of war and schooling, and, as I was beginning to grasp ever more clearly, in the kind of seduction they practised over their pupils, sexual in the case of the man in the Novíssima, and political and patriotic in the Frenchman’s. Two forms of violence I found repugnant. That’s why I was at a loss, and didn’t know what to think about the new secret link I was now discovering, but there must have been a reason why the unassuming and seductive novice and the sick adolescent whose fragile nakedness now came into my mind together.
Mother must have noticed something was going on inside me, because she asked: “Hadn’t anybody told you?”
“They told Quirze to run to the Saint Camillus monastery in the pitch-black to fetch Father Tafalla and another friar,” I let slip, following the thread of my own thoughts.
Mother opened her eyes wide and leaned towards me.
“Now let’s talk about you,” she said, in a voice that showed she wanted to move the conversation on. “Let’s talk about what directly concerns us. Mr. and Mrs. Manubens came to see you, didn’t they?”
I nodded, avoiding her gaze.
“And…?” her voice sounded less of sure of itself now.
I looked at her, willing her to help me guess what she was thinking, but I didn’t say a word.
“What did you think? What did they say? Did you come to an agreement?”
“You knew them already, didn’t you? Hadn’t you spoken to them? How did you leave it?”
Mother must have imagined the opposed emotions that were paralyzing me. She explained: “I went to see them in Vic with Aunt Ció. They’d sent me a note to go and see them as soon as I could. They were very nice. Didn’t Aunt Ció tell you?”