“You know what they’re like…” she commented as if she was talking about foreigners in exotic garb.
I didn’t want to imagine what those people were like, what that distant world was like, or what anything I’d left behind was like, I strained not to think of that difficult journey and the futile — futile? — efforts made by Mother to come and see me. My heart beat painfully as I imagined her nibbling the bread and cheese or fried sausage she no doubt had carried in her bag so she could have lunch by herself in a forlorn corner of the train station. Something inside me cried out against the invasion of my new world by that skinny, frail, aged, lonely woman who was completely at a loss. An impulse that didn’t surface because it was drowned by a wave of tenderness, warmth, sympathy, affection and melancholy that disappeared in an inner sea of tears. However, those tears wouldn’t come, I refused to let them, I fought to repress and dilute them with that impulse that sustained my quiet, polite, formal behaviour, formal manners that could never be breached in my new universe in that lean and sunny land.
Mother kept repeating: “Are they treating you well?”
“Do you miss us?”
“Do you eat everything up?”
“Do you sleep…?”
Or recommendations like: “Be good…”
“Don’t give them any reason to complain about you…”
“Make the most of everything…”
“Let them see we brought you up properly, that you’re a well-mannered…”
We said hardly anything else. We had nothing else to say. The visit was over in next to no time. I accompanied her to the door and we both walked past the reception counter, where an old Escolapian and a scholarship boy who were filling in forms glanced up and gave us strange looks. Out on the road we kissed on the cheeks and she said that at Christmas she’d ask an old workmate of my father who now drove a small truck taking small jobs from the leather factories in Vic to those in Igualada whether he wouldn’t mind bringing me back to town for the holidays, that the train journey by myself would be too complicated and she wouldn’t be able to come back. I nodded halfheartedly. When she walked off down the grey, sparsely populated road towards the station, I shut my eyes so as not to see her.
I can still see her looking forlorn and lonely in the Escolapians’ cold little waiting room, a room with shabby, monastic furniture, like a waiting room in a hospital for incurable paupers, with her sad smile and that factory smell no washing powder could eradicate and her almost empty garish, tacky bag, I could see her staring at me, her eyes glued to me, her whole bony body without an ounce of fat turned anxiously towards me, waiting for me, hour after hour on wooden benches in third-class compartments just to spend a few minutes with me.
I was stunned for the rest of the day. The two forces my mother’s visit had released within me were fighting a muffled, mute out-and-out war inside me.
When I reached the bungalow — it didn’t take much for me to call and make it my home — Mrs. Manubens and the maid referred to it pleasantly enough, not expecting any reply, as if it had been a trivial run-of-the-mill event.
“Did you see your mother, boy?”
“I expect she was pleased to see you.”
And that was all they said.
That evening the three of us had dinner together and I ate very little. My stomach felt knotted up, in an irritating though not painful way. Mere irritation. Mr. Manubens told us excitedly that the factory business was going full steam ahead, that we’d go to Barcelona next week to meet a big manufacturer, one of the most powerful in the province, who had good contacts and relationships with Madrid and so on…
That night, in bed, I heard nothing of the conversations with the visitors who dropped by for a coffee. I hid my head under my pillow and was on the verge of shedding tears but they wouldn’t come, they were dissolved by that opposing energy unleashed by my rejection of everything I didn’t want to let back into my life. Deep, deep down the light from images of Cry-Baby and the boy with TB lying on a sheet in the monastery garden glowed mournfully. I didn’t know what to do with them. It was like my mother’s visit, I didn’t know how to react to their pull, to the danger posed by their mute cry, to the demands made by their irrational felicity.
The silent, resplendent woods, the backcloth to everything, kept questioning me, like a pledge that wouldn’t fade away.
And then I rediscovered that source of support I’d found on my last day of class at the Novíssima, that deep, persistent, implacable rage unleashed against everything and everybody, and I felt I possessed the strength to stay where I was and root myself in that house and turn my back — albeit politely, ever so politely, their supreme virtue — on my whole previous world.
It was my life, my decision, my future, my road, my body, my feelings, my choice, my experience, my rejection, my desire, my acceptance, my studies, my dreams, my world as new as I could make it, and my books…mine, mine, mine!
As my raging thoughts raised me above everything else in a fascinating dream-like flight, and the woods remained down below, secret, still and inscrutable, intrigued by my transformation, with a mixture of vanity and trepidation, I recognized that I was beginning to change into a monster. Into the monster they had planned I should be. Into a monster able to unite in a single body, in a single life, two different natures, two contrary experiences. A monster I myself hadn’t realized was living within me. A monster.
About the Author
Emili Teixidor was born in 1933 in Roda de Ter, a small town midway between Barcelona and the French border, where he set up a writers’ group with poet Miquel Martí Pol. In 1959 he founded a progressive Catalan school in Barcelona and ten years later started writing children’s literature in the belief that there was a need for good writing in Catalan. His historical novel The Firebird (1972) became a popular classic. His first book for adult readers was a short story collection, Sic transit Gloria Swanson (1979). He edited a French film magazine in Paris in 1976–77. Subsequently Teixidor returned to post-Franco Barcelona where he worked as a publisher, newspaper columnist and television and radio scriptwriter. At the age of 70 he published Black Bread, the first of three novels exploring life in rural Catalonia in the immediate postwar years. The novel met with critical acclaim, won four literary prizes, and was made into a successful film, the first Catalan film ever to be nominated by Spain for an Oscar. The novel is recognized as one of the major works of contemporary Catalan literature.
Emili Teixidor died in Barcelona in 2012.
About the Translator
Peter Bush is a freelance literary translator and scholar who lives in Oxford, England. He has translated novels from the Spanish by Carmen Boullosa, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Carlos Onetti and Leonardo Padura, among others. Since 2007 he has also translated fiction by leading Catalan authors including Najat el Hachmi, Quim Monzo, Josep Pla, Mercè Rodoreda, Joan Sales and his wife, Teresa Solana. His translation of Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook won the 2014 Ramon Llull Literary Translation Prize and his translation of Joan Sales’s Uncertain Glory was named as one of The Economist’s ten best works of fiction for 2014. In 2015 he was awarded the Saint George’s Cross by the Catalan government for his translation and promotion of Catalan literature.