Stone in a Landslide Read online

  Oncle kept quiet, like that first day on top of the mule, but he wasn’t bad-tempered. I wore myself out helping him. He worked and worked. I learnt to do everything, outside the house as well as in. Exactly as they had shown me, without any touches of my own which they might think showed a lack of respect.

  They liked everything: the chorizo and the black pudding, the cuts of ham. They even liked the bacon. It’s much tastier than the stuff down there, they would say.

  I enjoyed seeing how they kept helping themselves to more and the way they used their knives for almost everything. Tia’s cousin even cut the tiny bit of fat off the ham and left it at the edge of his plate. They eat like kings, Oncle would say. When I took the plates out to the kitchen, I picked it up with two fingers and ate it – the fat I mean. I’d always liked that intense flavour, even more than the lean, and besides, they’d taught me not to waste anything.

  City people are different. They’re a bit picky about food and so they put on airs. As soon as they start working behind a counter, their heads get swollen. That’s what my aunt and uncle said, and I believed every word of it, but I liked the cousins from Barcelona coming up every year. I enjoyed how they filled the house and embraced Oncle and Tia, wiping away the tears and saying, This young lady gets lovelier every time, and what beautiful curly hair! In Pallarès no one says “young lady” nor “lovely”. I understood these words even if I didn’t use them and they pleased me, and I thought that a language is like a tool that each person picks up in their own way, even if it is used for the same purpose.

  They certainly made extra work for us. Sometimes Tia would nearly burst because she wanted everything to be nice, but she also had to tend to the animals and the meadows as well as the kitchen and there weren’t enough hands to do it all. It was because of these visits that I began to cook and Tia became more relaxed. At first she tasted everything and she didn’t trust me at all, but gradually she saw that I had sense and patience and she let me prepare the salads on my own. After that, the omelettes and vegetables, later the stews, and last of all, the soup. For my aunt and uncle, soup was sacred, and it was the badge of their trust in me when they at last let me make it. We had soup every day. Like bread, you had to have it.

  When the cousins from Barcelona came, we would spend a lot more, but they would also bring coffee, a box of biscuits and a slab of chocolate, which we loved best of all. I remember one year they brought a porcelain fruit-stand which certainly looked worth whatever they must have paid for it. It had a pretty basket with a plaited handle and an edge contoured in waves to hold the fruit better. There was a porcelain ribbon round the outside, painted with round blobs which were cherries, a stalk and two leaves on each one. Tia always moaned about that present. It’ll break if you even touch it and then you’ll never be able to fix it – fruit is meant to be kept somewhere cool, not piled up to look nice, and so on and so forth. I saw that the cousins had given it with good intentions and that was what mattered. It was also true that I loved pretty things, but I kept quiet because I didn’t want to make my aunt and uncle angry, especially not Tia, who was so practical. Better a piece of stale bread, she’d say, than something that just looks nice.

  I know now that the happiest period of my life began about then, even if, truth be told, the bad times were just waiting behind all the laughter.

  Very few festivals were celebrated in those years. There was so much work! Sundays were different because we started the day outdoors later, after we went to six o’clock Mass. And that was just the women, since Oncle and most of the men of the village didn’t go. The only ones who did were the old men at the head of the two most important families in the village, the Augusts and the Sebastiàs. From our pew, which was in the last few rows on the right-hand side, I could see almost everyone. Silent, a little shrunken in the cold. The women were like little trees covered in thick black veils. You left with a hurried greeting, and then it was quickly back home to gather tools or light the fire, depending on the time of year and who was at home.

  The best festival by far was the one in the summer: the Festa Major! It was on a Sunday to save time and came towards the end of the really hard work in the meadows. The harvesting and threshing would all have been done days before and if the weather hadn’t been bad the hay would be gathered in. All that was usually left was the second harvest.

  The plaza was decorated with coloured paper bunting but it had to be washed down and swept a number of times throughout the day because the cows still had to go out to graze and they left it covered in dung before the solemn Mass. On the day of the festival, Mass was at ten o’clock, then again at the hour of the procession, and once more before the dance.

  It had taken a long time for the other young people of the village to think of me as truly from there and not as a stranger. That was why they didn’t ask me to carry the plate of basil at the end of mass until I was sixteen. Being asked meant being one of them and helping with all the preparation for the Festa: from searching for musicians to cutting up the cake which was offered from another plate at the same time as the bouquets of basil.

  I don’t know if my shyness came from my nature, my age or just from the bad luck of not being the daughter of the house where I lived. I felt I didn’t belong there and I only dared walk around on tiptoes. I believe I was finally accepted for two reasons: a word from Tia to the parish priest, and, although I don’t like to say it, because it was rumoured that I was brighter than most of the local girls who were in line to inherit. Just hearing that people thought this made me blush to the roots of my hair, and when I left the house the day after I found out, I was convinced that everyone looked at me differently and was spying on me from behind their shutters. I felt more false than ever, as if I had committed a grave sin that no one would forgive me for. Now, at the distance of so many years, I don’t think my instinct was wrong, even though I was very soon to overcome my fears and my timidity. My life was about to change again, enormously. That winter I got to know Jaume.

  Time passed and no one spoke of home. Of my family. In five years I had seen Mother and Maria only once, when they came for the Festa Major during my first year in Pallarès. Another time we met my father and Josep at Montsent fair. There I learnt that my brother Joan had left the seminary, a long time before he was able to say Mass. The roads were long and everyone was needed at home.

  My aunt and uncle said nothing about going back and I didn’t dare mention it. Was I happy there? I had no idea. I’d lived with my heart in my mouth a bit, worried about what they might throw back in my face. Maybe the poverty of my family… But I’d got used to them and their way of doing things. And it’s true, the thought of leaving Pallarès to return to Ermita became stranger every day.

  Everyone else must have been thinking the same thing. And why not see me as a potential match, since the land, the house, the vegetable garden and the four animals could one day be mine?

  Martí, the younger son of the Sebastiàs – the second most important family in the village – started hanging around me. I knew nothing of life, but Tia wasn’t against it. Straighten that apron, girl, boys notice everything! I felt ill at ease and didn’t open my mouth. Martí wasn’t much for conversation either. He didn’t really walk next to me, he just followed and stared at me as if he was about to say something important. People said that his family were brutes who shouted a lot and resorted to their fists if necessary. I felt, I don’t know, more fear than happiness. But no one had ever asked me what I wanted, and I didn’t know how to say no. So, I just did everything to avoid meeting him, even changing the times I went to the fountain and the vegetable garden.

  I’d made friends with Delina Arnau because we shepherded the animals in the Solau meadows together. Her parents had the one next to ours. While the animals were grazing she explained a lot of things to me. You could say I got to know the whole village just by talking to her, house by house and person by person. It seemed almost impossible that she could know so much without
ever setting foot inside the houses! She was a brave and happy girl with nothing to hide, and I was often spared from having to be with Martí by spending my time with her. Send him packing, she would tell me, and I’d laugh at her decisiveness. What should I say to him? Say that you already have a fiancé in your village. I didn’t know how to tell such a big lie, but I thought if he got too much then that’s what I would tell him.

  It wasn’t necessary. That Monday I went down to market with Oncle. We needed to buy something for the house and Tia sent me. When it was time to go back, Oncle said we had a lift from the blacksmith at Sarri. I was glad not to have to do that walk! When I got up onto the cart, my heart leapt into my mouth when I saw a bright smile and heard a voice say: How are the people of Pallarès? It was a young man, maybe the blacksmith’s son, who was making room for me. He was shorter than he appeared at first glance because he was very slim. Dark chestnut hair, a little bit wavy and combed with a side parting, wide forehead and small but lively eyes under finely-drawn eyebrows. A mouth that wasn’t too big but was always about to laugh, so much so that if he wasn’t smiling, the seriousness of his face was striking.

  Oncle preferred to sit beside the driver in case he had to help lead the animals. At first I didn’t dare lift my eyes from my feet, almost hidden under my skirts, but soon I was laughing as I listened to Jaume. He was so open and full of charm that I quickly forgot my shyness. Even so, for the whole journey I couldn’t hold his gaze when he looked me in the eye.

  I don’t know why people called me Conxa. Really my name was Concepció, but since they had to call us so often as children I suppose that was too long. That’s how it started. No one else in the family was called that, even though Assumpció, Encarnació, Trinitat and Concepció were very common names. I became Conxa, and even now I don’t know who began calling me that instead of Concepció. Still, the reason was clear: Conxa was shorter. I was convinced that a Conxa would be fat and beefy and, since I was so thin, when people asked my name I always thought they would burst out laughing and I’d feel bad. But Jaume told me that saying my name was like eating a sweet, that it was the name of something small and delicious that he liked very much. It was as if he’d been born to take away my fears, to bring light where I saw darkness and to flatten what felt like a mountain to me.

  It wasn’t long before I saw him again, but by then between my aunt and uncle and Delina I’d heard the whole story, chapter and verse. All about him and his family. He was indeed from the Sarri blacksmith’s family. He was the second son and he had an older brother who was the heir, married with children. Jaume couldn’t make a living off the land as it was all going to the heir, and so he’d learnt a trade. Or more accurately, two trades. He was a builder and carpenter, and he worked here and there wherever a house needed to be built or repaired. They even said he’d been to the Aran valley. They knew him to be hard-working and quick-witted but, because of the nature of his work, he appeared to be a drifter and freer than most men, who only looked at the ground to work it or to the sky to figure out what the weather will bring. I realized that they saw him as an outsider, someone who’d managed to earn himself a living, but this had more or less divided him from his family. If only he’d learnt to be a blacksmith like his grandfather! I heard them say. All this left me with a heavy heart. I almost felt ill and decided not to think about that journey with him, this man who’d put new colours into my mundane world.

  But he came back that same Thursday, about the time the sun burst into the plaza, and we went outside to take advantage of the good weather with sheets to darn or to make stockings. He was a very good storyteller. The moment we let him speak, we all stopped working, Tia, Delina, the young Melis girl and me. I was worried that he would hear my heart thumping over all the laughter, and that my cheeks would betray me. Before he left, he asked if we could dance together in Pallarès. He wanted to dance and Sarri was quiet as a grave.

  Delina said to him, How unusual that you’ve stayed this long in your village. Before he answered, he looked at me and then replied that at the moment he was repairing his father’s house and had several more days’ work to go. Until Christmas, perhaps.

  Tia showed me a dress of hers which I could make over if I wanted, but I would have to sort it out myself. Darning she could do well, but anything much finer, no. I got over my embarrassment and went to the Esquirols’, where they needed people. They said that Toneta had silver fingers. With her help I managed to do it. In exchange I would go there the day they slaughtered the pigs, to help them make sausage. I used every daylight hour and, once the dress was taken in, lengthening it a little wasn’t too difficult. So there would be no sign of it, I made a little trim from the offcuts. Buttoned from torso to the neck, it was dark green with a sash, and a wide skirt down to my feet.

  I thought it would never come, but at last the day of the dance arrived. I trembled as I went down the stairs of our house, even though Delina was with me. By the time we entered the schoolroom, with the tables all pushed against the walls, the music had already started up. I was surprised by the way people looked at us as we came in. The Augusts were there, so were the Sebastiàs… as if they were in charge of everything. Jaume wasn’t there and I didn’t know how to say no. Soon I was dancing up and down with Martí Sebastià. He was as fat as a pig. I looked at his temples dripping with sweat and his bright, strange eyes. His hand grasped me closer to his body at every turn. I could hardly breathe and felt almost suffocated. I tried very hard to keep him at a distance, this great barrel that might roll onto me and crush me into the ground with his immense weight.

  I could see that I wouldn’t get away from my partner easily. But as soon as he arrived, Jaume made it so simple by laughing as if we’d always known each other and saying: Now it’s the turn of the boys from Sarri to dance with the girls of Pallarès! Martí was taken aback but didn’t have time to answer because I was already spinning around the room with Jaume. His face was so sour that I didn’t dare look at him standing there rooted to the spot.

  We didn’t stop dancing all night. The wind whistled outside and it must have been very cold but the back of my neck was drenched in sweat. When I saw that Old Tonet was packing up his accordion, I stopped. I could hardly breathe. The night was black as pitch and I felt that some kind of miracle had happened. It touched my eyes, my lips… Only when I felt the icy air outside did I wake up and then, as if it was any old thing, he said if I wasn’t against the idea I should tell my family that he wanted to marry me and that he would return on Sunday evening to find out the answer.

  It was six steps from the schoolroom to the door of my home. The walls touched to form one of the corners of the plaza. I was in front of the steps that I’d come down a few hours ago and I didn’t recognize myself. I wanted to force myself to believe that I was the Conxa who’d come to Pallarès to live with my aunt and uncle. But that meant nothing to me. Now I could only be Jaume’s Conxa. The mad joy that I felt didn’t make me run around though. Instead I was very still, unable to move from the bottom step where we said goodbye, however much the freezing handrail made me want to go up the stairs.

  All I longed for was to go a few moments or half an hour or so back in time, to remember. And feel his presence at my side again. I could still hear people talking nearby and instinctively I raised my head. Jaume smiled at me from the other end of the plaza and waved goodbye. Then I ran as fast as my legs could carry me up the steps. I didn’t feel part of this world: it felt as if I was dreaming.

  Part Two

  The tears I cried because they wouldn’t let me marry Jaume became a distant memory. In the end good sense had won out. There was no reason for us not to marry. But behind the few words spoken on the matter, my aunt and uncle had taken a lot of things into account.

  The chance of making a better match with Martí Sebastià or others, the fact they were my guardians, Jaume’s humble position as a tradesman…

  But everyone knew that at the Sebastiàs there was a lot of land
and little inclination to work: the father was an idiot, the mother was bossy and as for the son, he didn’t like to lift a finger. We’ve already talked about the son. He was a bewildered boy, always clutching his mother’s skirts like a little child. And besides all that, they ate like pigs. It would take a very particular young woman to fit into their house. My aunt and uncle understood this. And there was another thing in our favour: I was their ward and would inherit from them, and because Jaume wasn’t going to inherit any land, he could come to live in Pallarès. At first it was a problem that he wasn’t fully devoted to the land, but he got round this by promising my aunt and uncle that he would help with the heavy summer work – the harvesting, reaping and threshing – but would be a builder in the winter, wherever there was work for him. They would take charge of the money he earned and he would also fix up the whole house, which was badly in need of repair.

  As tempers cooled, what had looked like a bad deal at first gradually began to seem more attractive to my aunt and uncle. I think promising to let them handle the money made up their minds. At that time, there was hardly any money in the villages. It was only ever seen when livestock was sold.

  I don’t mean to say that it was a purely commercial arrangement, because I know that my unhappiness and silence after the initial refusal helped to calm the storm. Tia had not married a man much older than her in vain and she must have been sensitive to the love between two young people. Maybe she was cleverer than she let on and could see that with my spirits so low I was capable of going along with Jaume’s desire to set up home on our own.

  But I felt bound by gratitude to my aunt and uncle, especially to Tia. Oncle was a shrewd man, who didn’t say much, good or bad, a man of routine, who seemed content to live with his wife’s lively, enterprising spirit. He left most things to her except overseeing the work in the fields and trading livestock. He was a man of few friends and relations and because he was a hard worker and not in the least conceited, equally had no enemies.