I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the chest, as if my heart was warning me I’d been infected with a sickness, a mortal infection. We stayed there a while, our heads looking over the wall, our eyes staring at the empty meadow as if we couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the sickly boys had abandoned us. It was the becalmed silence of a cemetery.
Cry-Baby said nothing, I was sure she was waiting for me to tire of that panorama and start our retreat. She always acted like an appendix to my desires. But I struggled to give up that vista, as if I could fill that desolate space with the memories and images I carried within me. I felt cheated, betrayed, as if the TB patients in the Saint Camillus infirmary had sworn an oath to dupe me. An act of infidelity. I’d never desired anything so vehemently as to gaze yet again at the naked youth lying in the shade from the elm tree. It was a new desire, like the rage I had discovered slumbering within me, a hazy, delicious desire, more languid and remote than any of the urgent desires I’d felt hitherto, a longing for something infinite and immeasurable, that swathed my whole body from the roots of the hairs on my head to my toes, and I was terrified I would lose it far from the contemplation of that pale, slender body, marked by a sinister fate that lent it urgency, an intensity healthy bodies didn’t possess. And a moment came when I felt a stab of pain that brought a bittersweet taste, like the handful of saffron Aunt Ció threw into the rice to tinge it yellow, or the mixture of quince and cream cheese that brought a delicious bitterness to the plate and left a dry, tart taste on the palate that lasted long after the food was gone from the mouth. Cry-Baby’s mute presence at my side, pursuing with her eyes the paths mine were tracing, had just shown me in a diffuse, unconscious way that only sacrifice can dignify that feeling of pleasure, that the mixture of desire and rejection, of desertion and acceptance, of annihilation and vitality, was the secret formula provoking that supreme pleasuring. That was the only way to explain the no-show by the sickly youths that afternoon, the sickly retinue of my adolescent prince and his mantle of a white, blood stained sheet, like the immaculate habits of the Saint Camillus order stained by the red cross, because his refusal to display himself to me for that one last time was the unambiguous mark of the longing he left in my memory, the thrust of the spear that would always remind me of his existence, the indelible memory that would live on within me, an absence hallowed by inner contemplation. It was nothingness, was Cry-Baby demanding nothing beneath the hazel trees; it was my mother’s conversations with Aunt Ció in those long twilight farewells that only made any sense as an evocation of absences, as endless litanies for a stubborn, faithful advocacy that was terrible in its despairing, in its devotion.
We left the hazel tree spinney without doing or saying anything. The emptiness of the monastery garden seemed to have infected me. We returned to the farmhouse listless and aimless as if our legs were powering us, our minds a blank. Cry-Baby followed on behind but I couldn’t feel her presence as on previous occasions. She was like a shadow at my side, without strength or will.
By the time we reached the gallery, Mr. and Mrs. Manubens were already on their feet and ready to go. Aunt Ció had prepared a bundle of my folded clothes. Grandmother rubbed her eyes and spectacles with a handkerchief.
“We’ll come back for anything he’s forgotten,” said Mrs. Manubens. “Nothing at all for you to worry about.”
As sullen as ever, Dad Quirze silently paced from one end to the other of the gallery. Now and then he looked me up and down, because you couldn’t exactly say he looked at me, he ran his eyes over me, registering my presence in a kind of furtive glance, as if he was afraid of being trapped, and he said nothing. Then Mr. Manubens and Dad Quirze started to go downstairs ahead of the others, talking about the farm, the animals, the harvests, the market… Mrs. Manubens walked next to Aunt Ció with the bundle of clothes and my aunt told her what I liked to eat and what I hated, like beans, fresh cheese and the apron of cream on milk that’s just been milked, but she assured her I would eat anything, that I had a good appetite and was very responsive. Before going downstairs with Cry-Baby, I went over to Grandmother, hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled and whispered: “The four bigwigs…”
I didn’t know what to say and she pushed away me with her hand: “Off you go now, don’t keep these people waiting. You’ve got to fly the flag, those people don’t wait even for the king.”
When the car, driven extremely cautiously by Mr. Manubens, juddered off, I looked through the window at the group on the edge of the track, my aunt and uncle and cousins all together, looking at us with that same expression we’d adopt on at school when the photographer came to take a class photo, with the teacher amidst the toddlers, eyes open wide and faces all expectant, waiting for the gadget to click so we could go back to our normal gestures, wanting all that to be immortalized in someone’s memory, in my memory, the memory that freezes us in a few seconds at an exact given time, on a byway of existence, in an ordinary context that only a photo or memory can transform into something exceptional.
40
I lived those first days in Mr. and Mrs. Manubens’ bungalow on the outskirts of Igualada that locals dubbed a “mansion,” by the road heading to Santa Margarida de Montbui, in a passive state, as if they had anaesthetized me.
I tried not to think, feel or be surprised by anything. Even so, I took note of every detail, I registered every change, observed each new feature, storing them in my mind so I would behave in an appropriate fashion. The bungalow had one maid who lived in and another who came on every working day to help her, and a chauffeur who acted as gardener and general handyman. Mrs. Manubens rarely left home, to be driven to mass, in the Holy Christ’s church at the entrance to town, or buy the odd thing from the shops on the main street, never in the market; Mr. Manubens spent the entire day out, in the new factory or visiting his farms.
I was allotted a clean and spacious bedroom, some way from the main sitting room, with a balcony overlooking the garden and an adjacent lavatory with a bath, and it all seemed luxurious and too big for just me. Later on I heard comments on the fashion among the district’s nouveaux riches, also called the arrivistes—a rich man wasn’t the same as an arriviste or a plutocrat that was the highest level of arriviste or nouveau riche with a touch of the black-marketeer — who liked to compare the quantity and quality of the bathrooms they installed in their newly built bungalows, mansions or flats — which they were beginning to call their “residences”—as one indicator of their wealth and standard of living: social success depended on their bathrooms and the fixtures they contained, porcelain bidets, Venetian mirrors, small cabinets with medicine chests and expensive perfumes, baths with a range of taps made of chrome, stainless steel, gold… The first thing farmers of the locality did when luck began to shine on them was to multiply the number of their bathrooms and buy large Seat cars. Mr. and Mrs. Manubens sometimes commented on such behaviour over lunch and had quite a laugh, because they considered themselves to be a longstanding wealthy family and were amused by a competitive hygiene they viewed with highly patronizing disdain. They, or so they claimed, never talked about bathrooms or politics. To talk about such things was to show a lack of breeding, or so they said.