However, the detail of the nighttime gambling den in the bishop’s city, with the ever-attractive image of a dejected Pere Màrtir, laid low by misfortune and abandoned in the middle of the street, revived the sympathy he’d always inspired in me and I found room for him in my private oratory, on the altar reserved for hapless heroes, stricken down by sickness, desertion, the death sentence, or sexual offers, alongside the boy with TB in the heartsease garden, Cry-Baby and her white, gently sloping belly, Father striped zebra-like by prison bars with his blue stillborn stare and sunken, unshaven cheeks, Aunt Mariona ravaged by the big city and transformed into a sticky saccharine pudding, Aunt Felisa crossing the woods at midnight to come and cry in Mother’s skirts because she didn’t want to marry the ogre they’d chosen for her, or Mad Antònia from Can Tona walking naked through the woods searching for the ghost of a boyfriend who’d been executed right in front of her eyes.
And apart from that addition of a new image to my private universe, questions came to me like why were they insisting on mixing Aunt Enriqueta up in that episode, if she’d already paired up with the Saint Camillus novice and, as we’d deduced, her belly was even swollen because “she was expecting,” as Aunt Cío and Grandmother said, wasn’t that enough to withdraw her from circulation? This meant Aunt Enriqueta might appear to us as easily as a witch from the woods as a fairy working miracles with her hands on a sewing machine or wherever she was now, hands of gold, everybody said, hands that would never allow her to go hungry, a fairy’s fingers, in fact, and I didn’t understand what powers she possessed to save Pere Màrtir from anything at all. And how come Pere Màrtir couldn’t get Aunt Enriqueta out of his head — he carries her deep in his blood, said Grandmother, and Dad Quirze said she would drive the lad crazy — what had she given him, what kind of love did he harbour for her that he couldn’t disentangle himself from her or couldn’t live without her? The madness of love, like the lunacy of gambling, must be an infection, an illness like tuberculosis that dried out some people’s lungs and conversely let others breathe quietly and peacefully — a mystery. And it was my fascination for this unknown world that brought me close to Pere Màrtir or the boy with TB in the monastery or Mad Antònia or Cry-Baby, my conviction that they were beings fated to carry a burden through life that others were unwittingly freed from — like someone born into an untrammelled existence who thinks his state is perfectly natural, who never reflects that he was born with a drawback — and that’s why the former live their lives more frivolously, more unconsciously, skating over the surface, and struggling to grasp the submerged, melancholy, daydreaming character of those who carry the burden of a ballast of lead.
The latter seemed like beings fated to self-sacrifice, who travelled the world with the air of dogs without a master, starving and battered, but irradiating a mysterious attraction that only other victims destined to similar sacrifices could appreciate. This explained why boys and girls entered seminaries and convents, drawn by the magnetism of figures like Saint Lucia with her empty eye sockets and erect forehead awaiting an invisible light, or Saint Sebastian tied to a tree, his chest and legs full of arrows that pierced his flesh with an array of red flowers, who despite his suffering, held his head high with a strangely happy smile on his face, or Saint Camillus of Lellis in his white habits clawed at by the skeletal hands of the sick and wretched and yet he smiled blissfully and turned his eyes to heaven as if grateful for the suffering strewn on his path and the dozens of crosses bearing the Son of God crowned with thorns, beaten, nailed through his hands and feet, his ribs split open by spears, and transformed by this Calvary into a Redeemer, King and Saviour.
I wondered rather apprehensively whether I too wasn’t fated to join this select group of the chosen few marked out by their difference. On the one hand I was attracted by the idea, on the other, I was afraid I’d be unable to behave like them — my models — with similar dignity and elegance, unable to bear the suffering or hardships with the strength they displayed when they welcomed their pain, like the village lads who on Saint John’s Eve walked barefoot across the embers of fires lit a while before and never complained, always smiled, and never burnt themselves.
Father Tafalla turned up one afternoon after lunch, at siesta time, and they seemed to be expecting his visit, as if he’d been invited a couple of days before. He was accompanied by another old Saint Camillus friar who said hello to us all and then, on the excuse of being behind with his prayers, walked up and down the cherry tree path, gripping his breviary. The Saint Camillus Superior sat down in the kitchen for a minute and then went up to the gallery to the sitting room with Dad Quirze and Uncle Bernat, who helped Grandmother up. Aunt Ció followed. Before leaving the kitchen, Uncle Bernat told Cry-Baby, Quirze and me: “You can go and play in the barn or the fruit orchard, because we’ve got work to do. And let us know if you see anyone coming.”
Quirze muttered, as if to complain about his deliberate exclusion from the meeting they were about to begin: “You want us to go to the barn in this heat!”
“Go wherever you want,” he replied, “but don’t get in our way.”
Cry-Baby and I climbed up the plum tree and Quirze called the dogs and went into the stables. Quirze had stopped playing with us. Cry-Baby and I took over the branch at the top of the tree our cousin had abandoned. It was the highest and strongest and the best place for watching the goings-on of the grownups in the gallery, Dad Quirze, Bernat and Father Tafalla, seated around Grandmother’s armchair and Aunt Ció coming in and out with glasses and jugs of water with honey and lemon. We couldn’t hear a word of what they were saying and their gestures weren’t expressive or dramatic enough for us to guess the subject of their conversation. Cry-Baby and I were quiet, our eyes glued to the gallery, until eventually she said: “They’re talking about Aunt Enriqueta.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Aunt Ció told me this morning that Father Tafalla would come this afternoon and bring regards from my father.”
I was taken aback for a moment. What was the connection between those two things? I sometimes felt my cousin hadn’t a clue.
“What do you mean?”
“Aunt Enriqueta had asked how my father managed to cross the mountains and hide in France. She and her novice want to do the same.”
“How do you know? Who told you?”
“Grandmother told me last night in bed, before we went to sleep.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“That I should be ready too, because depending on how things go, the three of us might go to France, with my father. She says he’s expecting us.”
“The three of us? You mean you, Aunt Enriqueta and the young friar?”
Cry-Baby nodded.
“But she said,” she continued, “it’s more than likely I would cross the border with a…I don’t remember what she said, a mountain ranger or guide or smuggler, a priest who’s a friend of Father Tafalla and Grandfather Hand. During the war the priest learned how to ferry people to the other side, because he had to do it time and again to save the lives of priests and nuns they were planning to execute, though he’s stopped doing it now and is the priest in a small village church near Andorra, but he’d do us this favour out of friendship for Father Tafalla and Grandfather Hand, who’ve become close friends since the war.”
I glanced at Cry-Baby and was intrigued. She knew more than I gave her credit for. We all thought she was gormless when she wasn’t. I was pleased she seemed more alert as I’d already begun to regret I’d be moving a long way from her, especially because I thought she always seemed so hapless, and the notion that she’d learned to cope by herself meant going our different ways didn’t seem so upsetting.