“Have you told anyone at home?”
“No, though they sometimes gossip about things going missing from the farmhouses roundabout, from La Coromina, La Passarella or La Bruguera. They say it might be a fox, farmhands or a thief on the loose in the woods.”
We all had a good laugh, delighted to share that secret that seemed significant and to listen to the innuendo Oak-Leaf used to insinuate things, just like grownups did.
Oak-Leaf craved being the centre of attention and seeing us hanging on her every word. Perhaps that was why she always rounded off her revelations with a sentence full of promise that left our mouths watering; it was her way of retaining her power over us: “And lots of other things I can’t tell…”
That was her parting shot to wind us up further; the woods were still and Oak-Leaf stood up to leave. Protest was futile: “Hey, come on!” we implored.
“You always do that. Tell us what else you’ve seen.”
“Tomorrow, you must start off with that.”
“I promise you I will.”
“Swear on it. If you don’t swear by God or the death of your mother, we won’t believe you.”
“No, it’s a sin to swear an oath.”
“All right then, promise you will by making a pledge to Baby Jesus, turn your fingers into a cross and kiss it with your lips.”
Oak-Leaf crossed two fingers and lifted them to her mouth to kiss the middle of the cross.
“That’s not enough,” protested Quirze. “You didn’t say anything. We’ve all got to hear you.”
“I said it to myself, and that will do,” she replied. “Ugh! I can’t say that!”
“If you can’t, it means you don’t know anything else, and haven’t seen a thing,” Quirze now changed tack and went on the offensive. “You’re a liar. That’s what our teacher told me, you’re always telling lies.”
Oak-Leaf turned a bright red and her eyes glistened. And that was the cue for Quirze to sing and mock her:
The master who teaches me,
fol-de-rol, fol-de-ree,
the master who teaches me,
has fallen in love with me.
Oak-Leaf burst into tears and often threw stones or whatever she could lay her hands on at Quirze. But Quirze never relented and sang the chorus louder than ever:
Has fallen in love with me!
Has fallen in love with me!
Sometimes it became a real catfight, and they’d kick and punch one another, and Cry-Baby and I watched them on edge, not daring to separate them. Of course, Quirze always came out on top, and when he’d beaten her and had her flat on the ground, he kept her still by sitting astride her waist and then sang into her face:
He says, “Don’t you be a nun,”
fol-de-rol, fol-de-rum.
He says, “Don’t you be a nun,
’cos you’re goin’ to marry me.”
When he let her go, Oak-Leaf ran off sobbing, while at the same time she’d threaten us:
“I’ll never ever play with you lousy lot from Can Tupí, never ever, ’cos everybody knows you’re lice-ridden rats. I’ll never tell you anything again. You won’t find out any more of the wood’s secrets. Not even its biggest secret that I’ll tell everyone the day I really want to hurt you and that will serve you right, and everyone will laugh at you and you’ll be the laughingstock of the village.”
While she walked off, Quirze shouted even louder, as if he was chasing her with his voice:
“Cos you’re goin’ to marry me!
Marry me!
Marry me!”
Quirze and Oak-Leaf were the ones who squabbled, and Cry-Baby and I kept well out of it, just spectated, but one day, when Oak-Leaf was fleeing Quirze’s taunts, she turned round all of a sudden and attacked us, accusing us of not defending her, of always siding with the strongest; perhaps she couldn’t think of anything else to bawl at Quirze:
“And you two are a couple of waifs and strays. That’s what everyone says, your house is full of waifs and strays, and nobody knows where your mother and father are, and they were reds, worse than reds, and that’s why they had to scarper. They should take you to the Sisters of Charity because you’re nobody’s children. They keep you on the farm because they took pity on you, they took you in like stray dogs, you don’t have anyone, you are tramps and gypsies, and more pathetic than those degenerates with TB in the Saint Camillus monastery! Waifs and strays, reds and tramps…!”
Quirze clammed up, taken aback. Oak-Leaf ran off. Cry-Baby’s face and mine had gone scarlet, as if our bodies were in the throes of a hot flush. My eyes sank into their sockets and for the first time in my life I realized how poisonous words could be, how they got under your skin even though you didn’t want them to, words other people uttered shamelessly, that made no odds to them, and I understood how we’d never forget that litany of labels and any day they could turn into a flurry of cruel insults we threw into someone else’s face, like a mirror where we were forced to contemplate the ugliness we’d hoped we had concealed. I bit my lip as I stood in that clearing in the woods with no strength to move my limbs, and pledged never to say anything, never to do anything others could store in their heads and throw back in my face the day they felt like it. Never again did I want to be stunned or buried under a load of words that fashioned a portrait of myself drawn by others, one I couldn’t erase.
“Let’s be off!” Quirze snapped, walking off in the direction of the farmhouse. “One of these days that lunatic will get a nasty surprise. Bastard witch!”
Cry-Baby and I followed Quirze, didn’t exchange a glance, and walked tight-lipped along the path.
For two or three days after these squabbles we went home separately, each of us on our own. Oak-Leaf didn’t wait for us after class or took a different route, but by the end of a week or so some excuse or other made us the best of friends again and we’d giggle and play in the woods, and tell more racy stories.
7
Our stories weren’t always about the secrets of the wood Oak-Leaf had discovered: sometimes a glimpse of animal life diverted our conversations down other paths, the surprising lives of animals that occasionally revealed habits that were almost human.
Dogs were closest to us. Birds as well. And horses and cows, though the former inspired mainly respect and grownups treated them with extreme caution, as if they were special, very prized, and rarely let us near them; cows, on the other hand, were contemptible, like pigs, dirty brutes that let you grab their teats without complaining and nobody valued them at all. As far as we were concerned, the only good thing about pigs were the days when a couple were killed, a real party, when the slaughterer arrived with his tools and the offal expert and her helpers who extracted the bloody guts they turned into sausages, raw, and black puddings, cooked. The slaughterer, the offal expert and her helpers arrived in the early morning and laboured all day; Grandmother pitched in cleaning the entrails and the men were splattered in warm, red blood and the stench of flesh rose, singed by burning thistles. They sang:
Six things were ate at Pep’s wedding:
pig and chitterling,
hog and suckling,
swine and scratching.
They shocked us with revelations that demonstrated the cruelty and whims of nature, and worried us no end because they cast doubts over the whole of creation, so much praised by priests and teachers, above all by Father Tafalla, as when they pointed out that sows have eight tits and that was why they nearly always farrow eight piglets, the eighth of the litter being the runt; though they sometimes produce nine or more, and then those surplus sucklers, damned at birth, are fated to die, and are called no-hope piglets, no-hope sucklers. Cry-Baby and I shuddered when we heard those curious details, as if nature had also got it wrong with us, who through lack of tit and lack of parents were also destined to be abandoned and forgotten. No-hope children.