She lapsed into silence for a moment and behind her spectacles her eyes seemed to pierce the horizon and see everything she was telling us.
“In the old days, all us brothers and sisters lived on the land, we were all near the house, and I felt like a mother hen, like a mother hen with all her chicks around her, but youngsters grow up and want to fly off on their own and find shelter in other nests, the whole coop scattered… Now Bernat is the only one left, and he feels out of place and any day now he’ll find a young lass and will fly her a long way away, like all the others. The folk were right who predicted that factories and roads would kill everything, and that cities gobble everything up and are the root of all evil. I won’t live to see it, but I’m sure this place will be a desert in a few years, machines will do labourers’ work and nobody will want land work. The world goes round and round and life goes on, everything changes and nothing stays as it was.”
She let go of our hands and smiled that mischievous smile that was her way of seeing off her bad moods and grumbles: “Crikey! Why am I telling you all this? I wanted to tell you something else, but the nonsense Father Tafalla and the others stuffed my head with this afternoon made me forget. Now what did I want to tell you just now? You’ll be saying my head’s not right and my brain’s gone to pot? Ah, I think I do remember now!”
She took our hands once again but gently now, as if she’d passed on all her energy to us before.
“The allies can’t delay much longer before deciding to intervene. I’d like to see it, but I don’t know if I’ll still be here. Whatever happens, remember that Father Tafalla helped us a lot. Grandfather Hand has been considerate towards him and transported papers across the border, but without Father Tafalla we might never have raised our heads again. When we were ground down, he helped Dad Quirze get going again with livestock and timber and perhaps as a result he may become a master one day. Don’t you ever forget that!”
One Sunday in late summer Mother brought a bundle of clothes for me and said I should get ready because any day now Mr. and Mrs. Manubens would come to take me away.
When it was time for her to leave, I accompanied the two women as far as the place with panoramic views by Can Tona, by the bend that hid the farmhouse out of sight. Aunt Ció and Mother continued chatting away, and I didn’t even try to catch their words now, as if all that no longer belonged to my universe and I wasn’t fired to find out the latest twists and turns in the lives of my relatives and the acquaintances who seemed linked to their existence by knots they couldn’t undo, a thread that was too tight or too loose, broken strings or new cords, links and bonds that frightened them as if stability in their lives depended on them and couldn’t survive without those tensions.
They dropped names and expressions that meant practically nothing outside their conversations and that stung my brain like a bee, creating a welt or wart of suspicion I tried to stroke or squeeze like an annoying pimple you try to remove with your fingers.
“You mean…?” said one, panic-stricken.
“You can be dead sure,” the other affirmed.
“Wouldn’t…!” exclaimed the former.
“Wouldn’t…? You’ll soon see! Remember what I just said.”
“You don’t mean wouldn’t…?”
Occasionally they let slip something more explicit: “You mean he won’t…?”
“Are you sure she…?”
“She won’t put up with him for very long, I know her too well. She’s not made for that.”
“She’s not like us two, that I do know…”
“We’ve been a couple of beasts of burden, that’s what we’ve been…”
“We’ve been two complete asses, let’s be clear about that!”
“Now, they won’t truck any nonsense, they…”
It was like a cobweb, and with patience you caught a detail, a fact, a name to help decipher their language of gestures, grimaces, exclamations, hints and half-words. As far as I was concerned, they always spoke about the same thing; just as once almost the only topic used to be my father’s illness and imprisonment, now conversations were all centred on Aunt Enriqueta’s lunacies and the unhappiness of Pere Màrtir, the boyfriend they preferred, even though they’d huff and puff and complain about the behaviour of the masters, Mr. and Mrs. Manubens, the upsets suffered by my mother’s two sisters, Aunt Felisa and her marriage of convenience to a widower—“She cried all night,” said my mother, “they spent their first night in Barcelona, at the Hotel Jardí, a cheap little hotel, don’t be under any illusions, no big spending, ’cause I reckon he’s so mean he even finds it a strain to give you the time of day, and she cried all night, the poor thing,” and Aunt Mariona, who lived in Barcelona and now missed country life, “The crazy dear says she sometimes runs away to the top of Tibidabo to see if she can catch sight of our woods, and tears come whenever I tell her about the village and farm,” and sometimes about France and the people in France.
“Mariona will tell me everything when I see her,” concluded Mother, as if she possessed an older sister’s right to clear up the chaos in the family. “I’ll keep an eye out to make sure this couple of innocents don’t go barking up another wrong tree.”
If the sun hadn’t set, they’d have gone talking for hours, because they never gave up, it beggared belief that what I thought to be such petty existences could generate such long debates, and I noted the regret in their gripes and reproaches, as if they were lamenting they’d not lived more, that they’d not dared open any closed doors, as if life had slipped through their hands when they still felt it beating in their hearts, as if work had wasted them away and they now had to console each other for the loss of the lives they had once led as girls.
That dusk Mother’s hugs were tighter than usual and she said nothing. I could sense she wanted to but the words wouldn’t come. Her eyes glistened but she didn’t cry and I steeled myself not to shed a tear. Aunt Ció clasped me to her and said: “Come on, there’s nothing to worry about. You’ll see each other all the time.”
Mother only said: “It’s what his father would have wanted.”
I made an effort not to look back when we went our different ways. Nevertheless, I wasn’t sure about my new role as an adult, as an orphan abandoned to his own devices, and knew I couldn’t let myself be swayed by nostalgia or melancholy. Growing up was all about that: breaking with the past and moving forward pitilessly, forcefully, and not looking back, as Quirze used to say, brutally if needs be, because that new world was harsh and only accepted the bravest, the most intelligent or wealthiest.
A few days later Mr. and Mrs. Manubens drove up in a black car. They greeted me with an “Are you ready to go now?” that stunned me, but then they rushed upstairs and went into a conclave with my uncle, aunt and grandmother and said nothing else to me. I was free for the whole day, and Cry-Baby and I ran to the threshing floor, the pond and hazel tree spinney, but we didn’t burrow into our little den because we were both rather apprehensive and weren’t sure what was going to become of us and we went straight to the wall around the heartsease garden and looked over at the meadow but nobody was there, perhaps it was too early or too late, though the green grass gleamed brightly, like a field of alfalfa that nobody has trampled over, and the trees’ shade was pointless because there were no sick boys protecting their heads or bellies and the stunted, dried-out elm tree of my naked young man seemed ugly and flaky without his body beside it, a solitary, old tree with cracked branches and a hollow trunk, practically leafless, a moribund tree of no use to anyone.