Emili Teixidor - Black Bread

After resting quietly for a moment, Mother got up a changed woman, as if she’d sloughed her old skin on the chair and went over to light the stove, asking me if I’d taken the buckets and pitchers to get water from the spring, and then she began to peel potatoes and fill the pot so she could put dinner on to boil, and only then would she slowly begin to unwind and tell me of all the manoeuvres she’d been attempting: “We’ll get over this, Andreu,” she repeated, as if she was trying to convince herself. “Everything can’t possibly turn sour on us now. It would be a really big step if we got him out of prison. And even better if we could get him out in a healthy state! I know Lluís: he’s not the kind for that sort of carry on. He’s a man who needs people around him who love him. You know, he needs people to love him. I can get by without lots of things, I’m made differently, but he will fall ill if he can’t leave that hell soon. We are what we are and some people possess hearts that freeze to death when they are abandoned to their own devices.”

She never treated me like a child again. She spoke to me from the kitchen as if I wasn’t there, and didn’t wait for a single reply, comment or reaction. She spoke to get it out of her system, to relieve tension, to listen to the sound and warmth of her own words. As if cheering herself up after a hectic day.

She almost always went out visiting on a Sunday. And very occasionally when she asked me to go with her, she chose the trousers and shirt I had to wear, always the most worn and mended, and made me repeat what I had to say if I was ever asked anything, told me how I should greet people and focus my eyes when she spoke to the well-to-do folk we visited so my expression would be sufficiently forlorn and pitiful. I didn’t need her to spell out that it was my role to inspire pity. Initially, I saw it as a piece of play-acting, but then I felt more of a con-man or trickster, and felt bad for a couple of days after the trauma, a migraine brought on by the obligatory change in my personality, the shame and degradation at being forced to inspire compassion like a beggar in a church doorway who had to act poor and seem poverty-stricken in his every gesture; it wasn’t enough to be poor, a beggar had to express through theatrical mannerisms, clothes and submissive patter the social abasement he embodied and the alms he deserved. I couldn’t accept that truth wasn’t the only path to victory. If there was no justice worthy of the name in this world, one that was immune to deceitful flattery and hypocritical fawning, why didn’t the vanquished accept their role as lifelong slaves and quietly adapt to the rule of their masters while, out of sight, they created their own realm of shadows, their avenging justice and secret order? Were adults incapable of doing what we children did at school, couldn’t they build a silent, parallel life behind the backs of those who wielded power?

I never forgave my mother for exposing my childhood to that humiliating abasement out of love for my father, a tenderness she transformed into a saviour’s passion. It was only a tad less embarrassing than the exhibitionist displays and charity-seeking forays in my First Communion suit or the self-interested spontaneity of our Easter Monday singing.

We paid our first visit to one of the factory managers, on a Sunday afternoon, in our town. Then to Vic and a chocolate manufacturer, an acquaintance from the days when we ran the grocery store. He lived in a mansion on the outskirts, in the middle of a garden, that seemed to have been designed by an artist’s pen, with stained glass windows like a house in a fairy story. We weren’t invited inside. The smiley, fair-haired woman I thought belonged to another world received us in the lobby and didn’t even offer us a chair. Our visit must have been very inopportune because even a child like me could tell her attitude was contemptuous. In the air of that mansion I savoured a subtle aroma of chocolate that went gently to my head and made me feel pleasantly queasy. It was as if every door hid a cake shop full of delicious pastries. Nonetheless, my mother persisted with her refrain: “He’s not done anything,” “He’s a good man who wouldn’t harm a fly,” “The other shopkeepers bear him a grudge, they won’t forgive him for bringing competition or joining the town hall and all those fools whose heads had been turned by politics,” and other such comments. Now and then she looked down at me, as if she’d just noticed I had a mark on my cheek or a hole in my pants, and then she’d rub my cheek or pull my shirt down so it fitted tighter over my trousers. Then she’d whimper, “Poor child, it’s not his fault,” “I’m not sure I can be a father and a mother to him,” “a child needs a father by his side to keep him on the straight and narrow,” and she always ended up asking for “a reference,” “a bit of pressure,” because “you, sir, have influence and the authorities take heed of you whenever…”

We visited a couple more acquaintances in similar vein: Mr. and Mrs. Manubens, the owners of Can Tupí, who welcomed us affably enough and were more interested in me than in my father, and an old priest who lived in a home and had been recommended to us by the priest, the head of the parish church school I went to who’d taken pity on my mother. The home where that skeletal cleric lived, with its vast freezing corridors, wooden benches and mean-faced nuns, seemed as sinister as the prison. One Sunday we even went down to Barcelona to see a lawyer recommended to us by the Saint Camillus Superior. We went bearing a letter of recommendation from Father Tafalla and the man invited us into his home on a day of rest and was the most agreeable of the lot. While he was talking to Mother in his office, he left me in a white, luminous kitchen where an old, smiley servant prepared breakfast for me the like of which I’d never tasted before: milk, biscuits, toast, mountain and York ham, jam, butter and hot chocolate… When we left, Mother seemed in good spirits and I’d surveyed the photos of the Generalíssim and of the lawyer in a soldier’s uniform next to other comrades, all holding weapons, and concluded that we had at last knocked on the right door: one belonging to the real winners. A centre of power. In my vague, distant way, I grasped that, given the status of losers we’d assumed, the best way to survive was to keep our own convictions, even our personal dignity, to ourselves and willingly kneel down and lick our masters’ boots. The winners didn’t expect the defeated to think we were on their level, all they asked was for us to respect and obey them. Why did they dress differently if it wasn’t to indicate in the clearest way possible that they wanted to be seen and treated differently? Was that so hard to grasp? Why did they wear blue shirts, black soutanes or tobacco-coloured uniforms if it wasn’t to distinguish themselves from the rest of us mortals? Women factory workers and engineering workers also wore a kind of uniform, dirty, greasy overalls and housecoats, work clothes that were nondescript, just as rubbish carts were different to the tilburies and automobiles of the well-to-do, and the victors’ uniforms weren’t work clothes, they were garments to show off, to parade, to impress, another notch on the list of merits of society’s upper echelons. Even a boy like me could understand such things and that was why I went along with the obedient, obsequious sheep fleece my mother had donned anew, and if I had any opinion about her performance, it was simply that she didn’t need to abase herself as much as she did — or in particular made me do — to prove her acceptance of the new order. It sufficed for the victorious side to know that we accepted their victory, their power and their rule. That we weren’t disputing any of their achievements or dogmas. Didn’t grownups, Grandmother’s rogues, know that the meek and the frail must always hide, must seek out hiding places “so they don’t show their faces,” and build huts in tree branches hidden by foliage, in places where nobody lives, so as not to disturb those people living in their mansions? It wasn’t necessary to be so abject, to sink two or three degrees below the normal, as she did, to show we didn’t question their authority and accepted their power without demurring for a moment. I felt that Mother’s abject self-immolation before the powerful wasn’t to the liking of those wealthy bigwigs; it made them uneasy because they wanted to enjoy their privileges as perfectly normal, not as anything exceptional, as if they’d been earned without trampling on anyone, and Mother’s submissive behaviour reminded them of the attitudes of victims, of the suffering they had caused to climb up to the heights they now relished. I was always under the impression they felt her begging ways were overwrought, prompted more by the passion she felt for her husband than by any belief in his innocence. And that extra detail simply fuelled the repulsion they felt towards her behaviour, a woman so critical of those who “showed their faces” that she hated as much as the folk who “gave themselves airs,” she who kept telling Father and me “never to draw attention to ourselves,” how could she forget her own principles and so shamelessly display the passion, madness and thirst for love she felt for that man, my father? Only blindness and a sickly obsession with her husband, like a raging fever a patient incubates unawares, could have made her lose her senses like that. And I reacted quite spontaneously to her excess of love by rejecting all feeling and being afraid to show any tender, emotional attachment to another person. The lesson I’d learned taught me to flee emotional commitment: the more you loved, the more dangers you faced on every side. Keep well away and you won’t get burnt. Love burns. Love destroys. Love kills.