I liked the dry climate and the surrounding wild, but attractive, landscape. The winter sun was warmer and shone for longer than on the plain. The light was more diaphanous. People, when I got to know a few, were more cheerful and gregarious and spoke with a slight emphasis on their vowels that showed how close we were to the territory of Lleida.
The school was in the Escolapian monastery, the same order that owned the church of Holy Christ of which my sponsor was a parishioner, a huge, ramshackle building on the road out of the city, at once dingy and disconcerting, with neo-Gothic pretentions local architects had invented to ennoble the sudden wealth of local landowners. They made a subtle distinction between landowners and small farmers in the conversations that Mr. and Mrs. Manubens allowed me to be present at, the small farmers were a sub-species of nouveaux riches, however much they might have become agricultural entrepreneurs, and the landowners, sometimes described as property owners, who were property owners in their own right — conventions promoted by the religious orders that had spread across the country to reinforce the faith and influence society, starting at the top, with future leaders, in the belief that those on high, the upper class and upper middle class, would project their behaviour and faith over ordinary people.
My classmates accepted me straightforwardly. The Escolapian in charge of the year, the one they called Father Prefect, let it be known, without any prior warning to me, that I was Mr. and Mrs. Manubens’ nephew, and that my father had been killed in the war. He didn’t mention my mother and nobody asked me anything else about my past ever. Most of the pupils were boys from well-off or well-to-do families — that were sometimes dubbed as the comfortably off or moneyed — I never did find out whether the second was a riff on the first: other subtle distinctions existed between a well-off or well-to-do household, a good household and one of high standing, the former were merely acceptable, met the minimum standard to warrant rubbing shoulders, a good household was a notch higher in the pecking order as a result of wealth or tradition, was one that deserved respect and could be treated on equal terms, and a family of high standing was at the pinnacle of the social ladder, the three or four families that weren’t simply good but shared out the chief responsibilities and sinecures in the municipality, be it the Town Hall, the Patronage of the Holy Christ church, the ownership of the small provincial bank or the couple of industries that had been re-established after the war. They were the people who moulded the city’s identity and shaped its future, who had splendid links with the powers-that-be in Barcelona, and, above all, in Madrid; some classmates came from good households but almost none from high-standing families because as soon as the latter — the boys and exceptionally a girl — were ready for secondary school at the age of ten or eleven, they were sent to board with the Escolapians in Sarrià or the Jesuits, some even boarded in La Molina or in Puigcerdà so they could spend their weekends skiing, hoity-toity ladies at their soirées would say they practised white sports to friends hanging on their arms. There were also scholarship holders from small farming communities, but they were older and acted as monitors or ayos—everything was in Spanish and we called them iaios—who watched over us even in the lavatories and timed how long we stayed in a stall, if we dallied, they rudely rapped on the door to warn us we’d been inside too long, because it wasn’t good for us to spend that amount of time on our bodily needs, unless we were ill, and if that was the case, they informed us with a formula the prefect had taught them, it behoved us to pay the doctor a visit.
I immediately befriended a lad of my age in my year who came daily from a nearby village; he lived in a big farmhouse and initially was as reserved and silent as I was. The fact he was from a farm and the way his large, purple eyes bulged when he looked at anyone predisposed me to find him nice and friendly. He spoke sincerely, never spitefully, and described his father as an almighty god of thunder who forced his family to jump to his orders and allowed nobody to answer back. He forced him to study and prescribed the grades he must get. I realized that he lived in fear of his father and that was why he delayed going home as long as he could. Later on in the school year I invited him to the bungalow for a snack and so we could study together, but after two or three visits Mr. and Mrs. Manubens insinuated indirectly during supper, when often the three of us were round the table, that the boy had a long way to walk back to his house and perhaps his family wouldn’t appreciate him staying back with me so often, he seemed a nice enough boy though he was rather slow on the uptake and possibly not as intelligent as he ought to be, and I should be making lots of friends, not just one, and you could be sure there were lots of boys from good households who could help me later on, who knows, life takes many twists and turns, one knows only too well, they become contacts, friendships, relationships, connections, acquaintances, allies, helping hands, old boys’ networks…whatever, because you could never tell what might help in the future, and you never forget your childhood friends.
From my contact with Quim, his deference towards his father, and his life terrorized by the terrible shadow he threw over the farmhouse, I concluded I’d been very lucky with my own father, who was never angry with me, never forced me to do anything and always taught me to be completely free, even of clingy, emotional ties and viscous tears and laments. In this respect, his death was yet more proof of his generosity, of the way he opened up a road to freedom for me, without imposing the least obstacle or hindrance. I wondered how poor Quim would feel if he were ever freed from his father’s powerful grip. I now lived under the shadow of Mr. and Mrs. Manubens, but with every day that passed I understood ever more clearly that when I became tired of them, I would leave, as soon as I felt adult and strong enough to stand on my own two feet.
Quim’s life also affirmed the value of sacrifice, my father’s in the first place, now he’d been transformed into a likable, distant memory I could summon when it suited me. I carried an equally light burden of the faces of Cry-Baby and of Grandmother Mercè when she said, “I’m on my way out now, but you two are still young and have a long way to go,” a pleasant farewell that involved no recriminations or paralyzing promises, or the naked youth with TB in his silent struggle against death who had no idea of the energy he radiated, and besides that he carried in his baggage pain, sacrifice, illness and remoteness, all these acts preached and exalted by the church meant their figures were hooked even more powerfully into my memory, as if blood congealed their influence to us, enabling me to find them at will and seek refuge in the images they projected and to go my way convinced they would accompany us for ever more, that they formed part of us.
During those early days I summoned these idols to the solitude of my huge, austere room, and that made it easier for me to accept the change, the nostalgia, the new routines, and they always appeared against a backcloth of woods, a dark, enclosed wood, a deep, deep green, silent still wood that cloaked every mystery. A mystery needed a signal before it showed itself, and the woods masked the mystery that had to be unmasked.
We knew about these mysteries because of the traces they left, without those telltale signs only nothingness would exist, or so I thought. The woods, that in my imagination included the hazel tree spinney and the heartsease garden with the TB patients and their white sheets, was the shrine that hid and safeguarded the mystery of my entire future, everything that had to happen, everything that awaited me that I still found unfamiliar. The woods were a hideout and salvation that at once revealed and hid itself, that was simultaneously manifest and secret, within the same vision it displayed and camouflaged, enclosing and opening up paths…, like a promise it does and doesn’t exhibit, like a small chest whose contents are unknown but whose mere presence implies secrecy and heralds mystery. Like the crust on black bread, on the desolate altar of the poor, its reality alone pointed to the whole ritual of sacrifice and pain that it nourished.