Emili Teixidor - Black Bread

“We can’t see those photos because this is just Grandmother’s nonsense, you donkeys,” Quirze laughed at us good-temperedly, going along with the game.

“Don’t be such a numbskull!” Grandmother retorted. “Silly! You tell me where there’s a camera that could capture this yellow lemon-juice sun, the fug in this room, this pleasant afternoon, you jumping and running around, the women’s laughter and the men’s banter? Only the goblins can catch all that and stick it in our heads so we remember it for evermore — the tiniest detail, the joking around, the anisette aroma of the desserts and the strong wine tickling your noses and your throats… A photo, ugh! All you can do with that is take it to the cemetery and nail it to the door of the niche so everyone knows what the dead man was like. But the people who knew the dead man shut their eyes and don’t look at the photo, because that photo tells them nothing. The real friends of the dead man carry him alive inside their heads, with his voice and his smell, his way of walking and his gestures…even his tantrums and his cheerful moods.”

Grandmother stopped, closed her eyes and stayed silent.

From the gallery Dad Quirze observed the exchange with a grin. He just said: “Ridiculous nonsense!”

We were surprised that a man as surly as he was, without a scrap of patience or sense of humour accepted that larking about and didn’t say a word more.

When we went into the gallery to sit around the table and eat our desserts, Dad Quirze and Xavier, the novice, argued about the rule of three: “Now I’d like to get to the bottom of this mystery,” said Dad Quirze intrigued. “This does seem like the work of goblins.”

So the novice took a piece of paper and wrote down some numbers and examples that we all thought looked like a magic trick. The rule of three, direct, indirect, simple and compound interest…

“That’s more like it,” said Dad Quirze. “This could be a good enough reason to be closeted inside for a while… without a family.”

Later on, Quirze and I persuaded Cry-Baby to change her clothes and climb up the plum tree with us. Dad Quirze and Father Tafalla went out for a stroll and the novice stayed in the gallery helping Aunt Enriqueta to clear the table. When he came back from their stroll, Dad Quirze accompanied them to the door of the monastery, the novice bringing up the rear two or three steps behind, by himself. Ció linked arms with my mother and accompanied her along a stretch of the path back to town. They always followed the same routine: they came out and chatted awhile under the cherry tree, then walked on a bit to the meadow or oak trees always talking, gesturing quietly and nodding as if they were agreed on everything, and then when they decided to walk on because night was falling, they called to me, and I climbed down the tree and walked with them as far as the bend by Can Tona, where Mother stooped down and kissed me on the cheek and I smelled the scented soap smell she always gave off, and then she hugged Ció, her sister-in-law, and walked off by herself, tripping along the path to her small town, her long skirt down past her knees, carrying her bag of supplies — eggs, flour, bacon, milk… that Ció had prepared for her. Her bundle. I turned and watched her blackened, solitary figure disappear round a corner or fade into the darkness and felt a stabbing pain in my heart no fun and games could ever drive away.

What mysterious secrets did the two sisters-in-law discuss during those long goodbyes? They kept up their conversation until darkness fell and almost cloaked the path. Mother visited me every fortnight, on a Saturday or Sunday, depending on whether she had permission to visit Father in prison in Vic. She’d arrive at lunchtime or mid-afternoon, because in the morning she had to do the week’s household chores, and would leave at dusk because the following morning she’d be up at five to go to the Boixets’ factory. She was on the early shift until two p. m., eight hours on the trot not counting the half-hour for breakfast, and as soon as she arrived home, she had to light the charcoal fire, warm up the lunch she’d prepared the day before, gulp it down, clean the house, fetch water from the fountain, wash clothes, mend for a bit and go shopping, by which time it was pitch-black.

Moreover, ever since Father had been imprisoned, she was forced to do all the haggling with those in power in local government, the Movimiento (that had seized premises right opposite the Town Hall they’d confiscated from the Left Republican party during the war and that displayed on its balcony a flag that was divided diagonally, half red, half black with the letters CNS, which was why they were also called the Sindicato or people in the Falange, the JONS) and in the church, and she often went to Vic to talk to the lawyer to prepare the paperwork, present recourses and help the defence. We’d been waiting a long time for the trial to start and didn’t know whether it would be held in Vic or Barcelona.

“I don’t know how you manage all by yourself,” I’d often heard Ció commiserate.

When I lived in town, before Father went into prison, I’d see Mother run off her feet the whole day, but happy and even singing. In the early morning, when the cold was so sharp it was frightening because you stuck your nose outside the top of the eiderdown and you felt your skin was being lacerated, I’d be woken up by the voices of the girls from nearby farms walking past our house and calling to my mother from the road, two or three times, and they’d wait a couple of minutes for her to rush out with her esparto lunch basket and a large woollen scarf wrapped round her from head to waist like a shawl.

“Florència!” they shouted.

“Come on, Florència, or we’ll be late!”

“Better late than never!” they laughed. “No more dilly-dallying!”

As she left the house, Mother replied: “I’m coming. Just wait a second.”

She was afraid to go all alone. We lived on the outskirts of town, in a small two-storey house with a garden, that people called one of President Macià’s little houses, because they’d been built in the era when Grandfather Macià implemented his policy of building “the little house with a garden” that every citizen should have.

She’d never been late or overslept, let alone not gone to work because she was sick or exhausted. Mother was never sick. I felt she was indestructible, the kind of woman that defied the laws of nature and didn’t feel the same cold or sleepiness, the same tiredness or hunger that we did. I had never heard her complain about toothache. Even when she started stealing, I felt unable to accept fully that what she was doing was wrong. I decided she was the one who laid down the law, so she couldn’t possibly break it, and as I gradually saw strange objects appearing round the house that she sold on the side to people we hardly knew — rag-and-bone men, farm women — who came to our house at peculiar hours with big baskets or capacious bags, I put it all down to the business skills of an entrepreneurial woman who knew how to overcome all manner of obstacles and run a household because her husband was having such a hard time.

Shortly after my father was jailed, Grandmother and Ció persuaded Mother to let me spend some time on the farm with my cousins so she’d not have so much housework to do, wouldn’t be so stressed and could go more freely to Vic or Barcelona to pick up certificates, endorsements, references and whatever paperwork she required on Father’s behalf.

That was how I came to spend almost three years going to and from the factory town and farm, particularly at Christmas, and every two or three months, because, as Grandfather Hand said: “If the lad doesn’t get a whiff of his own house now and then, he’ll never know how to go back, won’t find the path, and won’t even know where he has come from.”