by Maria Barbal
Tia had been almost entirely responsible for everything to do with me and the thought of leaving made me feel guilty. Perhaps deep down I was afraid of losing what I’d learnt to own. Jaume accepted my inability to feel free and he tied himself, with me, to the land and two people who were used to doing as they pleased. But it is fair to say that in those days love made up for any sense of being tied down.
The heat had come again. It was June 1921. The meadows were golden and the poppies were in full bloom. The buzzing of flies looking for food could be heard everywhere. The wild hazel and walnut trees were turning green near the river, like the poplars. The mountain was an ants’ nest of workers moving between yellow and green, of carts on the earthen tracks and of the whistles of tools hacking mercilessly into slender stalks. The earth was becoming spongy from the stream that had to last it a whole year. Only the squeak of the cork from the jug or the barrel raised the farmers’ eyes to the sky briefly.
Mowing left me tired, but I would run home through the meadows with my breasts leaking inside my blouse to feed Elvira. It nearly killed me. I would always be anxious as I ran – she must be crying, I thought – even though if I was late, I knew Tia would give her a bit of bread dipped in milk. But she wanted only her mother – everyone said she cried to be with me, not because she was hungry. She had so little of me in her first summer. So many hours had to be spent working outdoors! Jaume sometimes signalled to me to go home and I did, but I was afraid that Oncle might notice and grumble. And so I went from one place to the other like a fugitive, from Elvira to work and work to Elvira. Looking back now, I see that there was a lot of toing and froing. But Jaume’s constant support gave me strength and pushed me towards the most important thing: our daughter. He would say: people are more important than anything else. I needed help to see this because I had been taught the opposite. When the land and animals were taken care of, then you turned to people.
Jaume was impatient with routine and old habits, but he was careful to steer clear of quarrelling with my aunt and uncle. We’d endured enough before marrying. The desire to avoid scenes made us treat them with greater respect, even if sometimes we had to bite our tongues. I was grateful that Jaume behaved like this. And he was quick to smile and say he was the happiest he’d ever been, happy to be young, in love and a father.
Elvira was born just days before our first anniversary. It was the 18th of November and Jaume had a job in Montsent. As she was born on a Tuesday, he didn’t know about it until Anton Peret went there on Friday. He left everything immediately and as night fell he came up on foot through the snow which had frozen on the roads. No one expected him until Sunday.
How happy it made me to see his red face appear from under his muffler hours after night had fallen! He hugged me tightly, then went straight to look at the little girl sleeping in the cradle nearby. He didn’t say a word but came close to me again and took my hands. The contrast between warm and cold soon disappeared. For a time we couldn’t say anything. I told him all about the birth, though in quite a muddle and with a few tears. He found it strange that he’d lived three days without knowing he had a daughter in the world. He felt a bit cheated. After a while he kissed me and left promising to drink a bowl of warm milk. He wouldn’t allow me to get up and prepare it for him. He walked back to Montsent all night in time to be at work at daybreak.
When I told Tia about this the next day, her face was unmoved but her eyes betrayed her. I think it was then that Jaume began to win her over, but in secret.
The days were flying by. I still hadn’t learnt what it meant to be a mother with Elvira at one year old and I’d already noticed my belly showing the second child was on the way. Maybe this time it would be a boy. I don’t know why that was what everyone worried about most. An heir. And I didn’t know if I wanted a boy because the general feeling was better a boy than a girl, or if I just wanted one. To have a girl and a boy, one of each.
A boy will be a man. And a man has the strength to deal with the land, the animals, to build. But I didn’t see it so clearly. When I thought about the families I knew well, I saw the woman as the foundation stone. If I thought about my home, it was my mother who did all the work or organized others to do it. Not to mention Tia. The woman had the children, raised them, harvested, took care of the pigsty, the chicken coop, the rabbits. She did the housework and so many other things: the vegetable garden, the jams, the sausages… What did the man do? Spent the day doing things outside. When a cow had to be sold. When someone had to be hired for the harvest. It wasn’t obvious that the man did more or was more, but everyone said, What is a farm without a man? And I thought, What is a house without a woman? But what everyone had always said weighed on me. I only knew that I wanted a boy.
It was certainly more difficult doing everything pregnant. Jaume helped me a lot, but he was away a lot, too. In the winter, whole weeks at a time. Elvira and I – she in particular – lived between the joy of seeing him every Saturday and the sadness of seeing him leave every Monday. Since he spent so much time away, he knew many people. Often at home I saw him looking absent, and when I asked him what he was thinking about, I was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t me or Elvira or the new baby about to arrive. He would say: Nothing, or I was thinking of this or that house in Montsent or Sarri where they need such and such done and how little it would cost them to do it if… then he would look at me and stop talking, stroke my hair as if I were a little girl and decide that there was something he needed to do. Just having him present wasn’t enough for me. I wanted satisfaction, to work out his secrets and all that I believed he only half explained, but there was no time for us to be alone. There was always some work to be done, there was always someone to see. Maybe he didn’t feel this way, but I didn’t dare ask him in case he laughed at my worries as silly.
Sometimes I spoke to Delina about it. Our friendship continued despite the fact that her parents had fallen out with my aunt and uncle about when to water the Fontnova vegetable garden. Delina saw things very differently to me. She believed that all men are the same, that when they have a wife safe and secure at home, they forget her. That the illusion of love only lasts two days and there’s no need to make it more complicated. I didn’t see it like that, but I didn’t know how to explain myself, how to argue against her. I only wondered how she could be so sure of herself if she didn’t even have a sweetheart. She seemed to hold a grudge against men because they hadn’t realized what she was: a woman from head to toe, clever, hard-working and more or less as poor as everyone else. She had a point.
But with me, Jaume had made me somebody, and I felt gratitude mixed in with my love for him. Other people often annoyed me, even the children sometimes. Work, yes, it made me feel alive, stopped me complaining and left me unable to think. But when Elvira awoke crying in the night and I’d calmed her, I couldn’t go back to sleep. I would lie thinking, going from my earliest memories as a child in Ermita to Jaume’s face smiling at me for the first time in Montsent from his father’s cart, with the following day’s work passing in and out of my thoughts, muddled and messy. And just when I felt I was dropping off, Tia would wake me, surprised that I hadn’t yet lit the fire.
Our neighbours on one side were the strangest people in the village. The family was made up of a father, more or less Oncle’s age, two daughters and a son-in-law. Soledat was already middle-aged, and Tereseta had married poor Lluís two winters before Jaume and I got married. The mother had long since died, before I came to live with my aunt and uncle. Her name was Trinitat, and while she was alive her husband was as timid as a mouse. People said that she had been a woman of few words and it was even rumoured that she was a witch. She never went outside and she was only ever glimpsed spying from a corner of one of the windows, or from the open balcony when the weather was fine. People were afraid of her, but in desperate cases they’d ask her advice. She would recommend potions and say prayers. Those who had been up the very long staircase to the first floor didn’t want to s
ay anything when they came back out. A good friend of Tia’s had told her that it was as dirty as a farmyard up there – dried herbs hanging everywhere, and when she left she’d seen a raven’s claw stuck to the door that made her blood run cold.
But once Trinitat was dead, the husband began to tell all the people who had nothing to do in the plaza, the old people like him and the children, that his daughters, starting with the eldest, had a claim to the throne of England. You can imagine how this news spread through the village, completely mixed-up, because to begin with few people had the faintest idea where he meant. Instead of accepting that he was mad, his daughters followed their father in everything he did and became furious when children openly mocked Soledat as Queen Soledat. Tereseta, who was one step further away from the crown than her sister, didn’t become quite so angry but tried to set her husband on Soledat’s tormentors, shouting herself hoarse from the street for him to come. This provoked even more riotous mocking. Poor Lluís would suddenly become as deaf as a post and when his father-in-law went out into the street, he would find himself a job far away in the sty or vegetable garden. Then he would come back late for dinner that day too. Not a soul would have denied that he was the hardest-working man in the whole village.
What is certain is that Soledat scared the children and more than once nearly managed to knock one down when she was chasing them. She must have been nearly forty, tall and skinny, with her hair pulled back into a little bun right on top of her head. Her sunburnt face was creased with many wrinkles and she had two small eyes which were constantly alert. When autumn came, she would put on a black scarf which covered her hair and part of her forehead. Nothing in the world would make her take it off until it was summer again. Both she and Tereseta were sullen women who had nothing to do with anybody except to start disputes that ended in a lifelong enmity. When they dug their heels in, no one could budge them.
I was going heavily up the steps with a bundle of grass for the rabbits. Soledat noticed me from the balcony and saw that I was pregnant. I had to listen as she said, Again, already? and that Jaume and I were very busy workers, with a laugh that made the blood rise to my cheeks. And then, fixing me with her magpie eyes as if she were looking inside me, she told me in pained terms: It will be another girl.
She arrived along with the spring of 1923. It was the last day of March, when the ground was still frozen every morning. We called her Angeleta.
Apart from the elder sister’s jealousy of the younger, the next six years at home were good ones. The worry I sometimes felt about Jaume was passing. I don’t know if our daughters united or separated us: certainly it often seemed to me that we loved each other through them. When I took the cows to graze in the Solau meadows, the mad, wild joy of falling in love with Jaume, a paradise lost, would slowly knit back together in my memory, stitch by stitch. I couldn’t imagine heaven as Monsignor Miquel described it. For me, it was just that strange force which changed my world.
Many times Elvira tore me from my thoughts and gave me a fright, something that made her break out laughing. She was growing up small but lively, with an energy that reminded me of Tia. She would come to take over from me so I could go and make dinner. Her teacher said she had a mind like quicksilver. I was delighted to think she would be able to look after herself better than I had in life.
One day in the meadow Elvira brought me some news. A letter had come from the cousins and Tia said she was thinking of going to Barcelona.
My heart jumped. Something terrible must have happened. Going so far away seemed such a dangerous thing to do. I went down the road as fast as my legs could carry me, as if I’d been told that the house was on fire. I’d left Elvira mid-sentence. I couldn’t wait to find out what was going on. On the road I met Delina coming back with her cows. I was lucky to have her to distract me from my thoughts. Lively as ever, she told me that her older brother would soon be a priest, which made her very excited. He had told her that if she still hadn’t agreed to marry someone by the time he had taken orders, she could keep house for him and take care of everything, from the holy vestments to the rectory. She would be well respected as the first lady of his parish. She knew that it would be a while before all this happened, but her life now had a direction, and she’d spent a long time without one. I still dared to say that in the meantime maybe some young man might want to marry her and she said No, God forbid. That she didn’t see herself being any man’s maid and that even the thought of it made her blood boil.
While I pondered what she meant by saying her blood would boil, I found myself threading through the first houses of the village and my former anxiety returned like a gust of wind. I bounded up the stairs three at a time and went to the kitchen. Tia was calmly peeling potatoes and Oncle was sitting by the fire with his pipe in his mouth. I knew then that nothing serious had happened and my first thought was that I wouldn’t say anything of what Elvira had told me in case it annoyed Tia. But she spoke as soon as she saw me. Now, my girl, the Exposition is on in Barcelona and my cousin has asked me if I want to go. I think if I don’t go to the capital now, I’ll never go before I die, so if you can take care of the house and the children, I’m going to go two weeks from now. She added that the Exposition would be like a warehouse of all the best things that were made in lots of the countries of the world. Oncle said: And of course you have to give them your approval. He didn’t say it in anger, but as if he felt envy that his wife was capable of being interested in something so unknown and far away…
All that meant nothing to him. Not that or even what happened in Montsent. Oncle liked the everyday and the routine more than anything else and Tia would often tell him off about it. If it were up to you, we’d all be living in just the one room in this house! She was exaggerating, of course.
Jaume wanted Elvira to go to the school in Montsent where they taught more reading, writing and arithmetic. He was anxious that she should learn as much as possible, and the great progress she had made the previous winter, as well as her teacher saying that she should go, decided it. The only thing holding her back was the hour and a half of walking she would have to do every day.
I told him that it might be good for her to learn to sew as well and he smiled. Of course! We thought it better to wait a little while and when Elvira reached the age of thirteen she could go into service in a nice house in Montsent and in the afternoon go to school for a few hours. That was what we said.
We’d gone out together, Jaume and I, to gather the animals from the side of Sant Damià mountain. It was a bright day and I felt as if I was looking at everything in a huge mirror. The wind was fresh, you could still make out the snow on the mountain tops, even though the new grass had come up some days before. The birches stretched their arms to the sky waiting for their soft foliage. We’d had to return early because I was looking after the house on my own. The girls stayed in the vegetable garden with Oncle while we went to bring the calves and cows back home.
We spent the time walking side by side and chatting. At night I would drop from exhaustion, but now I wanted to jump from one stone to the next to cross a stream or avoid a patch of nettles. The cows followed us, docile except when they found branches with new leaves on to eat. Then we had to tear them away and get them back on the road again. There was no need to worry about vipers, it was still too cold.
We went from speaking about the girls to things in general. Jaume said that he would have done anything to be able to go to Barcelona like Tia, that he was worried about the country’s future, about justice. He said that we were abandoned on the mountain, that no one remembered the sons of the land who lived so far from where everything was decided.
When we talked about such matters the same thing always happened to me. A thick fog came over my brain and from there it passed to my heart. It left me frozen and in the dark. I was made to know what I saw, to speak about what I felt. I didn’t know anything outside of Pallarès or Montsent or Ermita. I’d heard of Barcelona, of the sea, even of Madrid, o
f the King. It all seemed to me like one of the stories my father used to tell round the fire. I didn’t believe all that really existed. I thought it was a trick, like Soledat Estevet having a claim to the throne of England. Perhaps that was why when I saw Jaume’s eyes shining as he spoke of these strange things, the ground beneath me moved and I couldn’t find true north. Instead of me guiding the animals, it felt like they were leading me. At moments like this, Jaume and I were as different as night and day, and that difference made me tremble more than when he left to go away for a whole week’s work.
We arrived before it got dark. Thursday was ending and tomorrow was another day of work. That Sunday Tia would arrive with a face so radiant that I didn’t recognize her. Words couldn’t describe the Exposition and how well her relatives had treated her, especially Ventura, the daughter of her cousin Tomàs, who had walked everywhere with her.
She spoke of the pavilions, the gardens and so many things that couldn’t compare to anything we knew in Pallarès. Only to the mountains and rivers, perhaps.
Oncle became ill in the autumn. It seemed to be because of all the hard work in the summer, but winter was approaching and he didn’t get better. The doctor from Montsent said that if the burning sensations hadn’t eased by Christmas, he would visit again and prescribe something for him. Squatting in a corner, Oncle payed no attention to anything. He hardly spoke and he didn’t complain. He spent the odd while telling stories to the girls, but he did it when the grown-ups were busy far away from the kitchen. I never knew whether he liked doing this with the children or if he just wanted to help us. If he wasn’t well enough to work, then at least he would entertain the children so that we could work.