In the language of the playground — the only first-hand information we had about sexual matters — when a boy ejaculated for the first time they called it “spurting,” “he’s spurting now,” they’d say, and they’d said “she’s butterflying” for the girls’ arousal, and we extracted unambiguous expressions from the adult conversations between Uncle Bernat and the hands or seasonal labour that filled the house at harvest and threshing time, like “going to give the reed a squeeze” or “rubbing the sparrow” or “carding,” or “he’s well juicy” and many others my schoolmates brought from their respective hamlets. In the velvety shade of the hazel trees, we tried out all the actions suggested by the words that had come to us in an obscene, partial, or rather laboured manner, and with my cousin they became beautiful, serene acts with no sense of guilt, the naturalness of the pleasure erasing any shadow of sin or remorse, they were simply games, experiments, childish experiences and tentative moves that gradually brought us close to the bodily knowhow displayed by grownups, which we would have to master one day.
We also realized that our games were ephemeral, involved no commitment or consequence, and could stop at any moment, just as the wind changes, depending on the other’s mood or taste and that made them more intense and enjoyable, because each game might be the last.
However, during that final summer on the farm, Cry-Baby played our games more passionately and I thought she gave herself up to them with real enjoyment, despite her inertia. It was unconditional, absolute surrender, and that offering in itself satisfied me, after the first moments of mutual exploration. I wondered what else the world of grownups might hold in their adult bedrooms, if I felt we’d already exhausted the content of all the words we knew.
Sometimes, before or after entering our grotto of hazel tree branches, we’d look over the wall around the heartsease garden, to see whether the ill young men were sunbathing on the grass. Depending on the time of day, they’d not yet come or had already gone. When I saw them, I breathed more energetically, as if the air rushing to my lungs was reinvigorating, and the sight of the naked boy brought on a feeling of fulfilment I’d never experienced before. When I was hugging Núria I forgot everything, but there was always a fissure momentarily occupied by that frail, astonishingly beautiful figure, that found strength in its own defencelessness, exactly like my cousin, and the more vulnerable, exposed and helpless he seemed, the more powerfully he struck me, as if his cure, his very life depended on me, exactly what it felt like with Cry-Baby.
This feeling of incompleteness, of imperfection, could be experienced as a kind of mutilation which I interpreted as an aspect of my immaturity, I thought that later on, when I was more experienced I’d know how to fill that gap, that lack, and that adult couples must have managed to do that, to make it whole, without any fissures, because people couldn’t possibly live peacefully with another person for so many years if they were suffering the anguish caused by having one’s body in one place with a person and one’s thoughts in another with someone else.
As I was left alone that summer and on the farm they took care not to burden me with any jobs, even Dad Quirze’s ferrety eyes looked at me more wryly and he thought twice before speaking to me, and I started to fantasize about whether I really was my parents’ child, or if it was simply a coincidence I’d come to be with them. I found the idea I was an adoptive son very appealing, that I was somebody now simply changing direction and going to live with a family that was as fake as his first one, even though some experiences and memories were too vivid and striking to allow me to push my fantasy much further. In a way, those thoughts were a way of punishing my parents, a kind of revenge for the losers’ fate they’d inflicted on me, and the height of satisfaction I reached in these fantasies were greater than the remorse triggered by the potential betrayal they represented. I’d discovered the power of hatred and now developed a liking for betrayal, for the arrogant flourish of pride embodied by the rejection of my family, my roots, of my entire past. I thought how it was like what I’d felt as a child when I really wanted something I was being refused and later when it was allowed, I wouldn’t accept it, as if I’d never wanted it in the first place, as if my final refusal was a deserved pay-off for the initial denial I’d been forced to suffer. “I don’t want it now,” were my exact words, “I don’t want it now! I am the one that doesn’t want it now!”
That summer I spent a week with my mother in town, the week my mother was on holiday, and those few days served as the farewell to my other family landscape. My friends in town and our neighbours already knew I’d be going to study in another city at the start of the next school year, sponsored by some very pious folk, the masters of my paternal grandparents, and they all treated me in the same distant way I’d noted on the farm, that was perhaps even colder and more intense, as if I’d wanted to distance myself from them and their fate, and once again I felt like a traitor and deep down I accepted I was. “I am the one who doesn’t want you now!”
When Mother’s holidays came to an end and she went back to work, I returned to the farm to see out the holidays. Cry-Baby informed me of the big news of what had happened to Pere Màrtir in my absence. They’d not talked about anything else for a couple of days. They seemed very worried about him, evidently he’d been found on a solitary side street in Vic, in the early hours, lying on the ground because he was so drunk he couldn’t stand up. They said he’d left a café where the local first-born and heirs gambled their duros and doubloons away, a café for card sharps — the expression was Grandmother’s — that organized clandestine games behind closed doors, after official closing time, when the usual customers had left. The card sharps played on till the first light of dawn, sometimes till the café opened in the morning and the farmers going to market came in for breakfast. They also commented how Pere Màrtir was on his way to losing his bulls and his bells — another local expression, this time from Aunt Ció—and that Aunt Enriqueta was responsible for the lad’s lunacy. “That joker Enriqueta will lose the lot, whatever she had and whatever she’s got now, because the friar-boy who hung up his habits on a fig tree won’t last her a couple of months!” Dad Quirze cursed, and they talked about going to fetch her from Barcelona to see if she could help the poor lad, Pere Màrtir, pull through, so he didn’t meet a bad end like some stony-broke rake.
The news surprised me because I thought of Aunt Enriqueta and Pere Màrtir as figures from my past, and I now found it a strain to think about them, a bit like Uncle Fonso, who’d fled to France, or Cry-Baby’s mother, who were never mentioned, as if they didn’t exist, like my own father, who, once dead, had turned into a memory, I now had to abandon all these people I’d come across in life, forget those waifs and strays on endless, dark streets in big cities and distant countries, separated from me by the frontiers of age and invisible mountains; I’d exhausted my curiosity about them, they no longer meant anything to me.