The rattling of the engine made me drowsy, but I was wide awake. I wasn’t dreaming now. On one side Elvira, on the other Angeleta and faces all around me. All unfamiliar, all quiet and withdrawn. No, this was no dream. It was real.
They’d called at midday and asked in Spanish for the wife and children of Jaime Camps. Tia had answered all their questions calmly. I’d just obeyed. I had to get into the lorry with my children. We could snatch a little to eat for the day. Quickly. At the last minute, Tia had given a mattress to Elvira. It seemed unnecessary to me, but I didn’t say anything. I looked at the weapons and those tall strong boys, and they looked at Elvira out of the corners of their eyes. I just went along. Old Mrs Jou came and asked them to have mercy and let the little boy stay with his grandmother because he’s only six and he’s sick. They pushed her away but they didn’t take the boy, who clutched Tia’s black dress like a leaf curled up by the wind against an old tree trunk.
And no news from him, from Jaume. They came for him at daybreak. I was still in bed and so were the girls and little Mateu. I think they didn’t hear anything. Three short sharp knocks on the door. In Spanish: Camps, Jaime… – then all of his names – Justice of the Peace of the town of Pallarès under the Republic… come with us. As I got dressed quickly, I thought the baker had been right the night before. Get out of here Jaume, take my word for it. I’ve heard they want everyone who’s stood out in some way. They’re out for revenge because the guard at the Algorri bridge was killed. And Jaume said, I haven’t done anything wrong and I don’t have to hide from anything.
And then… before he’d even combed his hair, a hug. A goodbye. I didn’t cry, but inside I felt as if they had wrenched my soul from my body. And he just says: Don’t worry… don’t do anything. And seeing him from behind, walking between the guards. He looked much smaller than usual to me. The village seemed deserted. There was nobody on the street. Roseta Sebastià poked her head out onto the balcony. She wasn’t afraid. She gave a twisted little smile as they passed underneath her. The priest’s housekeeper also opened her balcony door but she looked out cautiously, without allowing herself to be seen. I had no doubt: there were eyes watching behind every window.
Now, in the lorry, Mundeta from Sarri comes up to me and I begin to recognize other faces. She tells me they are taking us to Montsent, what will become of us? In the morning they’d come looking for her son too. She’s a big woman, Mundeta. She has white hair and very tired eyes. There are people from Torve, from Sant Damià, from lots of villages in the region. One woman remembers me from Ermita and tells me that my father is very old, but he and my brothers and sisters are well. I hear it all like you hear rain from inside a cave, that doesn’t make you wet or even splash you. I am pleased to hear it but feel no happiness.
They take us to Montsent prison. I didn’t even know where it was. The worst is not knowing anything. Elvira moves around and talks to everyone, even the jailers. Most of them are almost as young as she is. She does what I am not capable of doing. I feel like a stone after a landslide. If someone or something stirs it, I’ll come tumbling down with the others. If nothing comes near, I’ll be here, still, for days and days…
Angeleta doesn’t move either, clinging to my skirts. All of us are women and children. At least fifteen. What we have in common is that someone close to us has been taken. For a while no one says anything. Then, timidly, someone begins to talk.
Our side of the river had already been taken by the nationalists, the Blackshirts. The other side was still in the hands of the Reds. There were families who wanted to cross to the Red side, which you did by the Algorri bridge. After the guard there was killed last night, the way over was clear. They say that they spoke to all the rich families in the valley. A priest gave some names too. That’s how they knew who to take.
Now I feel like I’m out in the open under a light rain that gradually soaks me through to my spine. I shake violently, silently torn to pieces. My God, are we so bad that we deserve to suffer so much?
At dusk they give us each a spoonful of soup in a bowl, without even a drop of oil. My throat’s so dry it’s like swallowing thorns. Angeleta has started to move around a bit. She is playing with a younger girl. Elvira says something to me from time to time. Her serenity calms me. I think, she says, we’re going to spend the night here.
Will it rain? Beyond the grille above our heads, we can see a scrap of sky. How slowly time passes when you have to wait but you don’t know what you’re waiting for!
I see Elvira discussing something with the soldiers at the door. Now they are taking her out. Oh God! What’s going on? People look at me. I can’t tell whether they resent me or pity me. She comes back. She is carrying two blankets. She comes over to me. She has spoken with Tia. Mateu is with Delina, he’s fine. Tia also said that she’s gone to protest to Elvira’s employers, and at the rectory, and wherever she thought people could do something, but with no results yet. How brave of her, poor woman…
It’s already past midday and they haven’t given us anything to eat. Does that mean they’re letting us go?
I am more resigned. We have to get through this, and who knows, perhaps we’ll all be back together again soon, discussing all this anguish as if it were water under the bridge.
We are in the lorry again. I think it’s the same one as yesterday. Elvira chats to the soldiers… They joke. We are going downhill, towards the plain. Everything looks so pretty. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone should have to suffer, however poor and insignificant. The birds are singing all around, the river murmurs on our left, the sun has finally come out from behind the clouds and it’s hot. The pines above, the ashes and the poplars nearby are still. Only we are moving, always downwards. We see no one on the roads or in the villages we pass through, only groups of armed soldiers like those guarding us. We don’t know where we’re going. We are silent. We still have a little bit of food. We share it with the people next to us. Here there are no differences. We are all one family, such an unhappy family. I pick the crumbs from my skirt, one by one. It’s difficult, everything is moving. I’m not hungry but who knows when I will taste homemade bread again?
We have been stopped here for a while. I don’t know what they are discussing among themselves. Elvira comes over and whispers in my ear that for the time being we are going to Noguera. We will certainly spend the night there. I look at her and she seems as pretty as an angel to me. Even with her hair unwashed and uncombed. Of the three, she looks the most like her father… And him? How is he? Poor man. He’ll be thinking about us a lot.
I’d never been to Noguera. It’s big. The capital of the region. Here we see plenty of people. They look at us from a distance as if we’ve got the plague. And we have: fear, uncertainty, suffering… Now they say the prison is full. We have to stay in a warehouse above a garage until tomorrow. Luckily, it’s big. We stay close together instinctively, to support each other. We go to unroll the mattress to rest our heads. But what’s happening? Elvira clutches my neck and squeezes me so tightly that she almost chokes me. She’s crying, she cries without stopping… I can’t make her answer. What’s wrong? What’s wrong, girl? When I begin to tell her in a low voice, Look, all this will pass, maybe tomorrow… she hushes me. Mother, Mother, this morning they killed them all, near the bridge. A soldier I know from Montsent told me, just now… The news spreads through the room. The sound of wailing and crying is broken by names being called out and by periods of silence, by people falling to the ground and by the terror of the children, who don’t know what to do. I feel an axe-blow to the centre of my heart, but not one tear nor cry nor drop of blood comes out of me. I embrace my two daughters, an arm around each and I feel their tears like a stream that cannot wash my wound. Angeleta buries her head in my skirt and I caress her hair with my right hand. I coil a lock around my fingers and I think of Jaume’s face, always smiling. A young woman cries and pulls at her hair. She rolls around on the floor making choking noises. And now at last I notice how my cheeks are slowly getting wet. Instead of a cry escaping, I feel a very strong pain in my throat, as if I am being strangled…
A soldier comes in, his eyes bulging out of his head. He shouts in Spanish, Silencio y a dormir. Shut up and go to sleep.
I’d always been afraid of death. Of death at home. Of having to speak in whispers and look at someone who’ll be carried off feet-first the next day to be buried in a hole. Of being kissed by everyone, of false condolences and sincere condolences and of seeing the reddened eyes of people I love. And now I didn’t even have a dead body. I was more afraid and more anguished not to have seen his body still, not to have seen his beautiful cheeks, once the colour of pomegranate flowers, pale and waxen. I was sad and I had no body with eyes to close, to sit up with or buy a coffin for or accompany to the grave with freshly-picked flowers and weep over gently. He’d gone as quickly as a rose cut from the bush and I’d no last memory of him except a little spark as he looked at me during our strange goodbye. I knew he was dead and I would never again have him at my side, because war is an evil that drags itself over the earth and leaves it sown with vipers and fire and knives with points upright. And I was barefoot with my children, and I had nothing apart from still being alive. I didn’t even have a mourning dress because his death wasn’t like others, it was a murder that had to be forgotten immediately. His name was to be entombed behind eyelids and mouths with thick cement. I knew he was one of the ones they’d killed because they were taking me in the lorry of sorrow to Aragón. Because they had to take us wretches away from the only thing left to us: our misery, with our scrap of sky and our vale of tears.
When I realized that we were alone, like a flock without a shepherd, perhaps with the wolf circling, a great sense of abandonment came over me. It broke my heart that I didn’t feel I had the strength to be a mother. I was stunned behind a wall of sadness and since I couldn’t scream or lose control, I wanted to stay still, unmoving, unthinking. Focused on sorrow and without hope. The girls had to keep on living and I wanted to die. I felt that if I just stayed still with that hell inside, I was bound to explode and then it would be goodbye Conxa. But abandoning the girls to their fate tormented me and when Elvira told me to eat, after I’d refused any food for two days, I did as she said. I had to force the bread down my throat, which wasn’t allowing anything to pass, like a reed stalk that hasn’t been cleaned through properly… all under the watchful eye of my eldest daughter, roles reversed for the first time. I wanted so much to shout, Enough!
Elvira adapted to her new life. The young can do anything. Even though she was knocked back many times. Because she moved around, spoke to everyone, wasn’t ashamed of anything. They called us Reds. They’d also killed men from where we were staying. Many others had gone to France. Even entire families, people said.
The camp we stayed in was beside a village a little smaller than Montsent. One day a girl of about the same age insulted Elvira because she said the Reds had killed her boyfriend. Luckily, Elvira was accompanied by a boy from Aragón who defended her, poor boy. There were those who wanted us not only to suffer but to feel guilty as well. Why do hundreds of stones always fall at once?
Six people were sleeping crossways on our mattress. There were lice and, as much as we tried to wash ourselves conscientiously, we couldn’t avoid them completely. We ate badly but they didn’t starve us. We worked: cleaning, in the infirmary, sewing… It was full of Italians. They scared us, we stayed away from them as much as we could.
The days weighed on my heart like flagstones. The endless tears had dried, everything seemed like a nightmare that had to end, one day or another. Beyond the nightmare, I thought I could make out hope. The hope of going home. Maybe they’d lied. It couldn’t be true that they killed him, so full of life, without any proof. They couldn’t just have said: You, you and you… Maybe they were in prison or evacuated like us. What could a soldier know? I didn’t share any of these thoughts with the girls. I kept them to myself like a secret that, soon, when they became reality, would fill the girls with joy. Silence calmed me and gave me strength. Keeping quiet, daydreaming about the way the hours of a day turn out. Any old day, a normal day or a bad day. Of the day when a bolt of lightning killed a cow and you were annoyed by it, and the day that everything seemed to fall into place. The hay in the haystack, the chickens roosting, the cows quiet in the stable, and everyone having dinner at the table. No, I didn’t say anything to the girls. They needed to move on. What had happened was a huge blow to them but there was no point in thinking about it. You have to keep going. They couldn’t fall back on hoping that it wasn’t true… I, on the other hand, I needed to go back just to be able to breathe a little.
They didn’t tell us anything. How long would they keep us here? What were we doing there? What were women and children good for up there? We barely understood the orders they gave us…
The land there seemed good. There wasn’t plenty of water like we had, true. It was lower and warmer. The people must have lived well, before, but then they didn’t have a normal life either. Only soldiers here and there, orders, shouting and silence.
They made us pray in the morning and at night. I didn’t know the prayers in Spanish and I just pretended by moving my lips. I didn’t want to learn to pray again. Inside I was already praying to God and I spoke to Him for a long time. I explained things to Him and I begged Him. But always on the inside. Like two friends who know each other and can tell each other everything just through their eyes. No need to open your mouth, just find a bit of the pain and pull at it gently like wool from a skein, let it unravel, unravel… until you can’t see colours any more because your eyes have flooded but it’s not tears that fall from your eyes. The wool you were unravelling has turned into a sheet of water slipping down your cheek, and just as you were going to let out a sob, you realize you’re not alone. A knot forms in your throat, causing such a strong pain but you swallow and swallow, until slowly you untangle the knot and you’re left with the skein. A fragment of sorrow, knot and all, has gone down directly to your stomach.
When they entered Barcelona, someone must have said that they could send us home. It had been five and a half weeks. When we got to the chapel at Sant Josep, which meant we were within sight of Pallarès, my legs were still trembling.
Before we left Montsent, they’d sent us to see a lieutenant colonel in his study, four at a time. The three of us went in with Mundeta, who’d become like family by now. He kept us standing by the desk for a while, with a soldier guarding the closed door. He made us give our names and after that he did all the talking, in Spanish. “Our country’s shame is over. Thanks be to God we are saved. We expect your conduct to be impeccable from now on. If you are good Spaniards, then you will have nothing to fear. Now go, and don’t forget what I said.” He had a thick black moustache that didn’t suit his very small nose. I don’t remember his eyes. I’d only given him a quick glance as we went in. The whole time he was speaking, I looked at my skirts, which had a pleat that was fraying more with each passing day, and my toes, poking out of my espadrilles. They tried to make us feel guilty. It was the same old song over and over, and I was afraid for my daughters. We all behaved as if we were mute, and when Mundeta seemed about to open her mouth, I squeezed her hand and luckily the soldier at the door was already opening it for us.
Home on foot, from Montsent, we looked at everything as if for the first time. Clematis was blooming, budding everywhere. It grew among the brambles, fearless of the thorns. White clematis. Clematis, tender but strong. Clematis to tie the sheaves. Clematis to make skipping ropes for the children. I plucked a soapwort bud just coming into flower and the sweetness of its scent made me so happy that I cried. Then in the middle of the road all three of us hugged each other and couldn’t stop crying, our tears starting each other off. I thought I heard something and said: That’s enough, maybe people have heard that we’re back. I felt my cheeks burn as we walked past the first houses. Like the day we left, there was nobody to be seen.
Night was falling. Time to shut the cows into the yard. Time to make dinner. Time to dawdle a moment at the fountain to discuss something, but only as long as it takes to say a quick Lord’s Prayer!
From beside the trough I saw a woman appear. It was Delina, who ran and threw herself into my arms. She kept saying: How awful, Conxa… It was then I understood I wasn’t dreaming and that it was real. Gently, I let go of Delina and walked towards home, my feet heavy. As soon as we came through the door little Mateu grasped my legs and the girls fell into Tia’s arms. It was the second time I’d seen her cry…
And then dragging the mattress up the stairs and sitting on the bench with my little boy in my lap and letting Elvira and Angeleta explain everything, jumbled-up, and Tia asking question after question but giving nothing away herself.
And accepting that Jaume was no longer Jaume. He had gone like a gust of wind, and I didn’t have the heart to breathe or to do anything or be like before. I had one hand on the table he had made, and I yearned for the wood to tear me apart so completely that there wouldn’t be a scrap of me left.
What surprised me most when I went around the house were the cobwebs everywhere. I saw that Tia had become really old. I went into the kitchen and there was shadowy fluff in the corner of the ceiling, like a spy. Going into our bedroom, I mean my bedroom now, and approaching the pillow, small arms resisted mine. Long cobwebs stood guard around the bed…
When I got to the threshold, I would think about the two of you not being there. I would start shaking in sorrow and anger. I haven’t been able to set foot inside, Tia confessed.
I began to remove the cobwebs with a broom. Sometimes the spiders would escape their lodging in a surprised flurry. I would immediately press down once or twice with the broom as hard as I could until nothing was moving underneath, as if the spider was one of my nightmares. I started thinking again that maybe it wasn’t true that Jaume was dead, and now I was back home suddenly I’d hear his voice on the stairs saying, What’s for dinner in this house today?
But when I’d killed several and I was cleaning the broom on the back wall of the haycock, where the stones stuck out and you could remove all the dust, hot tears started to flow without warning, and I tried to stop them even though I was all alone. Because I was sure I would never again hear the voice which had said the nicest things that had ever been said to me. I was thirty-seven and I was sure of it. Then Mateu appeared with a baby rabbit in his arms. He said it was his and we were never to kill it and eat it. I dropped the broom, and hugged him so hard that he became frightened, because I was sobbing more and more desperately. As I grabbed him the rabbit jumped out of his arms and my little boy ran after it and away from me as fast as his legs could carry him.
It was a spring clean I’ll never forget. I didn’t want to leave a corner untouched, as if I was afraid the lice from the camp might have jumped onto the walls. I didn’t want to be spied on as we slept at night, no matter how small the eyes were.
I got angry with the girls because they only wanted to freshen the house up, and I screamed at them that we needed more than just a once-over after what we’d been through. They looked at me with their eyes wide with surprise that I saw turn to compassion. And they ended up saying yes to everything just at the point where I had given up and was about to say that it didn’t matter.
I gave myself the same treatment and scrubbed vigorously from head to toe as if my body was filthy with blood and fear and misery and I could get it all off in the bath. I don’t think I understood at the time that the problem wasn’t in my skin or hair or nails… And when I saw myself, my slim body with its small breasts and striking nipples, I realized that I would never feel joy or pleasure in it again. I thought, people are very little but sometimes we think we really are something.
After the great purge and all the uproar, Tia didn’t let me do anything else and I didn’t want to either. I was relieved. I knew I was another Conxa, as if I’d lived many years in a month and a half.
Whenever someone talked about the war and I was there, people always expected me to have something to say but I never gave them the satisfaction. If everyone fell silent, however, I felt very uncomfortable and sometimes I noticed that my cheeks began to burn. If Soledat was there, she couldn’t stop herself from getting people to ask me what happened to us in the war.
Why did people dedicate themselves to hurting us? Within a few days of our return from the camp they came filing through the house with the excuse that they were worried about us, today one, tomorrow another, and each one said he knew who was responsible for Jaume’s death. They would accuse someone from our very town, sometimes a neighbour, and leave feeling so self-satisfied. My heart was broken and I didn’t dare say that I didn’t want to know. I put up with those denunciations with a great deal of patience, which I found by imagining that the person in front of me was there in good faith.
It was different when they came to find out how we were and see if we were selling the biggest meadows, which were the best, or maybe if we were thinking of getting rid of some cows… And you would say no, humbly, so you wouldn’t have to hear people say to your face, You deserved what happened to you! There came a time when we didn’t know if we were dealing with being unlucky or with being guilty of something. People seemed to expect us to behave as if we’d been defeated and show that we’d learnt our lesson, that we were inferiors who would beg like complete paupers to be treated normally by other people.
Elvira was made to cry many times. As she was the eldest, she had to put up with more. One day she was asked along with some other girls to help out in the Augusts’ kitchen. They had a radio and the national anthem was played. Old Mrs August jumped up and stuck her arm out. The girls did the same. When it finished, she said to our girl in front of everyone: Elvira, your salute wasn’t very enthusiastic, what’s the matter? She never wanted to go back there again.
Delina was the only one who came to us out of pure compassion. She hadn’t wanted to tell us anything. She came when she could and if I was darning, she helped me darn. If I was kneading, we kneaded and sometimes we spent the whole time without saying a word. I enjoyed her company precisely because of this. She knew as much as the others, but she never made an accusation against any person in particular. Only sometimes she would just say, There are bad people, Conxa, who don’t forgive.
There was a lot of work and little food. Together, painfully and with big effort, we all kept the house running. Tia was responsible for the house and Elvira took charge of the land, which I would never have thought I could do. But we all put our backs into it and did what we could.
The days joined one to another in a long rosary without mysteries. Some passed quickly, others slowly. When you counted it up, a lot of time had gone by.
The days passed. Elvira was unmoved by the boys who courted her. It was hard to break the ice in the village, but slowly and sometimes secretly, proposals began to arrive. It was because they had seen her work. She did it like a man, whether it was mowing the grass or raking it, and if necessary, standing her ground like a man too.
One evening after dinner she said that she wished to marry outside Pallarès and renounce her rights to earn a living from the land. Tia predicted it would all end in tears. She would be hungry, since a man who lives only on a wage is lost, and soon enough we would see her walking up to the house clutching her belly in pain… Elvira let her speak, her face composed. I didn’t dare to ruin her plans but I didn’t know how to contradict Tia. I stayed quiet and reproached myself inwardly for it, because I think Elvira expected me to defend her. But when Angeleta began to tease her about the marriage, she went wild. Mateu was already nine years old. He was starting to help out around the house and he didn’t dare say a word because he wasn’t going to bite the hand that fed him. His big sister washed him, parted his hair, and shouted at him when he got dirty. Who would start a fight in his position?
When I went to take the animals to pasture, I would think about all these things. It was the task I liked best. I spent many hours alone with the animals and had time to lose myself thinking about the past and the present. The waving of poplar leaves took me away to my time in Ermita or the first days in my aunt and uncle’s house. I was enchanted by the sparrows and when I had to shout at Fosca or Clapada to guide them back onto the track, my mind was blank. These were the best parts of my day. When I returned with the animals flicking their tails against the flies, I felt comforted.
The day after Elvira told us that she was going to marry a boy who worked in forestry and go to live in Noguera, I thought, walking home, that they didn’t need me any more. It was a new idea, like a ray of sunlight filtering through the branches and blinding me.
Elvira hadn’t married yet but she would. And she’d do well. Angeleta would marry as well. She was quiet, hard-working and sweet. None of that would go unnoticed. Besides, she was pretty. And Mateu had Tia to show him what to do. She would be a mother to him. And at fifteen he would be a young heir. The moment the thought crossed my mind, I felt as if I’d been stabbed. Despite the pain, I repeated to myself: They don’t need me any more.
And I didn’t think of it again until the first night of the Festa Major. I heard the music of the party from my bed, faintly. Like a bird hearing a mating cry, I got up, put on my black dress and slowly, but deliberately, I went to the loft. Under the roof in a corner lay the wooden cradle where my three children had slept when they were small, and which their father had made with his own hands. It was simple, with just a zigzag pattern along the sides. I saw his tools in the open cupboard as well. But I didn’t stop there. I opened the window and put my head out. The noise of the river filled me completely, along with the smell of green and tender foliage. It was far down but I could hear it very clearly and it seemed much more welcoming than the hell of my bed. I dragged the cradle a little way and stood it on its end under the window. As I raised my right foot to get up on it, I heard a soft sound nearby. Tia was looking at me wide-eyed. She said to me: Is it that you can’t bear the noise, child? She put her right arm on my shoulder and like that, close to her body, small yet steady, I went down to my bedroom without a word.
My eldest daughter had been lucky. She already had a beautiful healthy son and instead of coming to beg food, we had to ask her to come up to help us in the summer. Angeleta couldn’t do it because she had married into farming people and had enough work at home. Only the heir needed to marry and even though he was young, Tia and I began to lose patience because he didn’t seem to put any effort into it. He was hard-working and skilful like his father. He’d grown up with a docile character, not the type to shout, still less give orders. He was kind-hearted and happy. He wasn’t bad to look at. Tall, a little too thin perhaps, he had curly chestnut hair and large peaceful eyes, a long nose and a delicate mouth.
But the time had come that young women thought long and hard before settling in a farming household. I asked the girls to see if they could find him someone in Noguera or in Torrent. I thought: You will lose him. But he needed a wife and to keep the house running with children. What was he going to do with two old women?
While all this was bubbling in my head, Tia died. One morning, surprised that she hadn’t already risen, I found her in bed like a shrunken sparrow. She went without giving us the least work. We didn’t even have to make her a tisane. Had it not been for Mateu, her death would have left me completely forsaken. Her small wrinkled face, toothless in recent years, and more than anything her voice had been my sweetest companions on many long nights. To remember her, as if I saw her from a distance, I had the photograph my son-in-law from Noguera took of her in secret, because she didn’t want her picture taken. Sitting in the meadow, with the cart full of grass opposite, she was turning to little Ramon who was listening to her nearby. She is wearing a black scarf low on her forehead and her face can’t be seen clearly.
Now that I was alone, the idea of getting Mateu married began to worry me. If something happened to me, my son would have to leave everything to take care of me. And who would look after him?
I felt no peace until the day he went to Torrent to stay with his sister and go calling on a potential bride. A girl there had been recommended to us. She was the youngest of four, boys and girls. All were married apart from her and the second son. Neither poor nor rich, they earned their living from animals, milking and hunting. The father was a chamois hunter. She was said to be well-versed in running a house and working the land, and she knew how to sew and do arithmetic.
I thought a lot that day, alone at home. Soon it would be milking time. Sitting beside the window I heard Clapada grumbling in the stable. But there was still light and I wanted to finish patching that sheet. A young woman would come into this house where she didn’t know a single room and become the mistress of it. I would give her the keys to all the doors so that those walls which had heard so many voices would shake with joy once again. Songs, children crying, the clatter of plates: all the rough and tumble of life that could bring colour to the shadows.
And this happy thought left me filled, inside, with sweet tears which I didn’t want to explain to myself. I couldn’t see what I was sewing. It had become dark. I had to go milk and little else. Not lay the table nor prepare the meal for the next day.
Remembering it now, I believe that night foretold the beginning of a new era of my life.
The day of the wedding I suffered a lot. We celebrated in Torrent. The girls were there, my two sons-in-law and the three grandchildren – Elvira’s Ramon and Rita and Angeleta’s Agustí. I was with people all day but I couldn’t keep my thoughts from escaping to Pallarès, to Jaume’s and my wedding day. I wanted to stop remembering but that only made my eyes fill with tears as if I was at a funeral. Perhaps that was why my daughter-in-law kept her distance from me, very shy, as if she was afraid to open her mouth to me.
Everything went well. A good dinner, jokes and laughter, and me trying to keep my feet on the ground. I couldn’t believe that these two women with little children and the man marrying that day were my own children. How time had flown! I had to be a middle-aged or even an old woman. I’d never thought about it until that moment. The years after the war were a fixed point, immobile, all the same. I had stopped moving the morning the soldiers had knocked on the door. Maybe I’d lost myself in the camp at Aragon. That’s why it now seemed strange to me that my children had grown up and I’d become old. A slow old woman who didn’t make a sound, carried her weight but who thought of herself as a bit of a halfwit. And who all of a sudden realized that at last death was on its way because she was over fifty and she didn’t want anything now or in the future.
But it’s not we who decide how long we live. We can’t say, I’ve had enough, I’m off now, or I’m happy now, I want to live longer. Of course I knew that, but I didn’t understand it yet.
It makes me laugh to think that now. It’s been my fate to live another thirty years and, although useless, I am still breathing.
The music hadn’t ended – no, there was another song still to come. Some good things: knowing that the grandchildren were growing, seeing them once a year, attending the birth of the others, thinking we needn’t lack anything if we worked, letting time numb bad memories… And on the other hand, the deepest silence. Learning that there is a type of person, people brought up strictly, who don’t know how to respect people who don’t order them around. I had to watch Mateu change, from quiet and happy to restless and surly. Marrying for convenience can turn out like that. You can get everything right except character. What happens when the potential bride and groom visit each other? Some time is spent in the dining room and dowries are discussed, the best sausage and a porró of wine are brought out. Then left alone, the couple say a few things to each other full of timidity and awkwardness.
It’s a purchase like any other, but things that can’t be measured come into it. A person is too much to be bought and too little to live as he pleases…
I contributed more than anyone to my son getting married and they say every sin has its penance. I certainly had mine.
It’s true things weren’t easy for them. Lluïsa did not really recover from the birth of their first child in the clinic at Noguera, and from then on she complained constantly. Mateu, who had hardly travelled in thirty years, was doing so every other minute. First to Noguera, again and again. To see what the doctors would say. Afterwards they headed to Lleida and later to Barcelona.
Appointments, travel and medicines that cost a lot of money. Whole days that the fields were abandoned even when the work couldn’t wait for a day. Hurry, annoyance… I did what I could. I looked after the baby, the animals, the vegetable garden, the poultry, but I couldn’t manage the work outside.
I remember that time of waiting. I knew that something was going to change. Because that dream of mine had not come true. The house was fuller, but not much happier. A sadness that I’d never known had entered it. The sadness of those who find themselves unwell. Apart from the children’s illnesses, or a cold or a bad back, the sicknesses we’d suffered hadn’t lasted long. True, Oncle had been ill, but he was long-suffering and with an old man’s conviction that his time to leave this world had come and that he didn’t really want to get better.
Little Jaume would have taken all my time if I’d known how to arrange it, but his mother kept me away from him with the zeal for bringing up her child that a mother feels for her first-born. Lluïsa and I hadn’t become close and even though I tried to do things as she liked, I never managed it. I think that every time she had to go to the doctor and leave the baby in my care was torture for her. I understood her but I didn’t dare say anything to her because she was very nervous and moody. As if everyone else was to blame that she didn’t feel well.
I watched the rain with little Jaume, and he turned his big black eyes on me when I started some story or other. The little drops chased each other over the glass and he didn’t tire of listening patiently. But at dinnertime, it was the same as usual. He tried a few spoonfuls and there was no way he would swallow any more. I thought that the tension in the house took away his appetite, but I would have bitten my tongue off before saying it.
I think of that rainy afternoon as the closest memory of being with my grandson. As Jaume got older, and his brother Lluís after him, they would live far away from their grandmother, even though they might eat at the same table.
And I accepted it. Perhaps I had turned into a living stone, or it was just that I had never known how to rebel. To say, I am not dead yet or, Here, money is only used for this or that, and other things too. I felt that I was going to need to be strong, but I had no idea why.
One evening, everything outside was covered in snow and it was very cold. Mateu came to see me. He was so sweet, like he’d been before, that I didn’t recognize him. Mother, we’ve looked at a porter’s lodge in Barcelona. We get a salary and they give us a little flat between the ground floor and basement. We’ll be close to the doctors there and we won’t have to worry about the land…
Even if I had dared say, Leave me to stay here, I want to die on this land, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I would have been told that I was mad, and what would I want to do alone in a big house? It would have made even less difference if I’d gone on to say that this was my house and that I’d spent my life on this land…
I didn’t say anything, as if I thought it a good idea, as if the news came as no surprise.
I realized it wasn’t true that I was resigned and didn’t want to live. Now we were leaving, life meant staying close to where I’d been told Jaume was buried, pottering about, getting by without much enthusiasm, letting people say what they liked, keeping up what had cost us so much to get. So much effort, so much saving, so much misfortune. Now we were closing the door and going down the mountain, much further down than Noguera, more than twice as far down.
A house of seven floors, he had said, and I imagined it to be sky high.
I didn’t want to be separated from my son, not at all, but I couldn’t believe his promises that we’d come back when things got better. I remembered what Tia had said to me perhaps ten years before she died. The girls were still at home. I don’t know what we were discussing, but she’d said that we wouldn’t die there in that house, that life was too hard in those villages and that the young people growing up then wouldn’t want to put up with it. I remember that as usual I didn’t contradict her, but I thought she was exaggerating. I thought to myself that this was old age speaking, that it made her see the world as changed. Not long after she was proved right when Elvira gave up her right to inherit. I didn’t see it then because I was counting on all the others and they seemed plenty to poor old me.
A cloud of memories filled every inch of every room. Gradually, all that would remain would be a pale mist, without faces or words. When the cloud dissolved into a slow rain along with my memory, a part of the life of the family would have died. The iron beds and the cheap icons above the headboards, the uneven walls and the big wooden table with two benches which would no longer wait for someone to come and sit on them. It would all get covered in dust and cobwebs until a storm opened the first crack in the walls. A little bit of the story would remain, and if one day someone remembered it and told the tale, people would listen to him with friendly, open eyes.
How time has flown, poor old man! What stories he has to tell today!
Barcelona is a house where the windows don’t look onto the street. They face into the service shaft and the lift inside it.
Barcelona is everything at a set time. Before then, it’s too early. After that, it’s already too late. At half past seven, open the door, at eight, turn on the heating in winter, at ten give the keys to the woman who works for Flat 3, second floor, at twelve sort out the post, at nine in the evening collect the rubbish and at ten close the door again…
Barcelona is having the sky far away and the stars trembling. It is a damp sky and very grey rain.
Barcelona is not knowing anyone. Only the family. And sometimes hearing foreign words spoken. It is losing the memory of the sound of the animals at home as you look at dogs chained at dusk.
Barcelona is a small loaf of bread which is finished every day and milk from a bottle, very white, with no cream and a thin taste.
Barcelona is wordless noise and a thick silence full of memories.
It’s not seeing anyone who could sympathize with me and it’s seeing my grandchildren coming back from school carrying a heap of books and hearing a machine that talks and sings, and another that speaks and stares, but I never know if anyone sees me.
It is learning every day that there is very little work I can do. Sometimes washing the dishes after the meal. But who knows if they’ve been properly cleaned? And when Barcelona in the evening becomes a story from up north, there is no one to tell it to, and it annoys everyone that I want to turn an evening in Barcelona into some remarkable event on a forgotten mountain.
Barcelona is learning to keep quieter and quieter. Until they ask me something.
Every night in Barcelona is an adventure. It starts with a long noise from the lift and gallops through tracks and woods. It stops some place in the neighbourhood and listens to the bells. Festival peal, Rosary peal… I don’t sleep until they ring the bells to announce that someone has died, and then my dreams are long conversations I can’t have while awake. Often I even wake up with a smile or about to burst out laughing because of something we were just saying.
Once in a while Barcelona is someone from Pallarès who comes down to see the doctor, still carrying a whiff of cow dung or hay even though of course he cleaned himself properly. But maybe deep under the fingernails or on a strand of hair he brings the ordinary smells which make me so happy. And then I ask about everyone, about every house that remains in the village and about everything else that I can think of. When someone comes to visit, they don’t interrupt me. Sometimes, they mock me a little. It is a way of being important when you know full well you have become a useless old woman.
Barcelona, for me, is something very beautiful. It is the last step before the cemetery.
