Emili Teixidor - Black Bread

“I never said that.”

“But that’s how you act. Where’s the dank flat in some town in the back of beyond that could take all of us — old’uns, kids, uncles and aunts — the whole tribe? Has it ever crossed your mind how so far everyone has fitted in this place, where you have lived and done whatever you wanted, and how we’ve helped everyone leave who’s come here because they had nowhere else to go and never sent them off without a full basket?”

Grandmother had stood up and Ció accompanied her to the door. Cry-Baby and I followed, not really understanding what was happening. I saw it as yet one more landslide in the slow collapse of that world after Father’s death. Like a change triggering more changes when nobody knows when it will end or what the final landscape will look like. For a second, I thought that Mr. and Mrs. Manubens’s welcoming proposal might offer an escape from a universe that was going under. A bolthole. The soothing calm of an alien abode that could protect me from these people who were changing like the world around them, adults I understood less by the day.

“So I’ve only done what I pleased, have I?” repeated Aunt Enriqueta, becoming increasingly aggressive. “So I’ve only done what I fancied, have I? Haven’t I worked and helped every way I could and for whatever end, haven’t I done my stint at the seamstress’s and in the house when it suited?”

“When it suited you ,” it was now Dad Quirze’s turn to seem calmer and more poised. “You’ve lived your life and gone to and fro doing what you wanted and we never said a word, it was your life and that was an end to it, someday you would marry Pere Màrtir and feather your nest elsewhere, we’ve not interfered in what you earned or what you spent, we helped you save a little on the side because when you leave here Grandmother and us won’t be able to give you a dowry, so you could set up on your own if you wanted, if Pere Màrtir agreed…, but Pere Màrtir is too easygoing, Pere Màrtir has waited too long to put the reins on you, now Pere Màrtir hasn’t a clue which hand to play…, and you’ve fooled around with him, with us, and with the first comer who lifted your skirt up, and if he wore a uniform, better still, you fucking whore…and now you think we should follow advice from you, whether the masters are this or that or beyond the pale, whether we should all move to town, as there’s no future for us here, and now Andreu should say no to the offer they’re making? Are you right in the head? Have you got a screw loose? Aren’t you muscling in where it’s none of your business? What should we have done, in your book, shut the door in the masters’ face the second they showed up our doorstep, pour a bucket of boiling water over them from the gallery when they got out of their car, tell them that we’re fine, that neither we nor Florència would accept anything from them and that the boy can study on his own account because we’ve got more than enough money, we’ve had a good turn up for the books and our pockets are full? Is that what you’re saying we should have done, you little scatterbrain?”

Aunt Ció whimpered silently while she led Grandmother by the arm into the upstairs sitting room. Cry-Baby and I followed them, our ears glued to the kitchen and the words and sounds shooting out from there. We stopped briefly at the foot of the stairs for Aunt Ció to pick up the oil-lamp and light it. They were rationing electricity again. Grandmother said nothing, pretending she couldn’t hear a thing. She kept her head down, held her knitting basket on her arm, and seemed older and more hunchbacked than ever. Aunt Ció spoke quietly, put her head next to Grandmother’s: “This was always going to happen,” Grandmother nodded. Aunt Ció added: “That Enriqueta pushed her luck too far.”

While we walked upstairs extremely slowly, keeping pace with Grandmother, we could still clearly hear the shouting in the kitchen.

“You’re clever enough to know what you should or shouldn’t be doing. How come poor me has to give advice to you, the brain-box?” Aunt Enriqueta seemed quieter now she’d been told a few home truths. “Apparently, there’s nothing you don’t know. You know who I should marry, who I should befriend, who I should be seen out with, perhaps even who I should be courting. You know everything there is to know.”

“As if you ever waited for us to tell you which man was right for you!” Uncle Quirze had lost his temper and seemed more and more annoyed, on the point of losing it completely. “We should have put the leash on you before your goings-on became the talk of the town!”

“What on earth do you mean? Did you want me to spend my whole day sewing and washing like crazy? What about all the times I’ve taken the washing to the fountain, loaded down like a donkey, with baskets of dirty clothing belonging to the reapers, threshers and all that rabble you hire every summer, and you never came once to offer me a single drop of cold water? Don’t tell me that was the kind of toil that suited me! Did you ever worry about who I went out with or was seeing when I was next to that fountain working like a mule? You were as silent as the grave because that’s what suited you , it wasn’t costing you a day-labourer’s wage, everything was wonderful and you turned a blind eye…”

“Forget all this crap! Ció does that all year and never gives a peep.”

“Ció is Ció and I am me. And Mad Antònia is mad Antònia. I don’t want to end up like her. I haven’t married you, or Pere Màrtir, or anyone…yet. And in case you didn’t know, I’m not planning to stay shut up in this place like some dowdy spinster kowtowing to every order and waiting for my bridegroom to be brought to me on a tray, overcooked, tasteless, with lots of gravy and condiments so I can’t tell he’s seconds. I’ll choose my own, thank you very much, and if I don’t like the one who’s chasing me, I’ll find somebody else, and if he knows how to lift up my skirt, that’ll be a big improvement on those dreamy-eyed dolts who can’t make up their minds to ask you for the first dance.”

“Don’t muddy the waters, it won’t do you a scrap of good.”

“And don’t you make me talk about Pere Màrtir, because I know what I know now, and you don’t know if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth or if he’s a Johnny-come-lately. And when it comes to uniforms, you’re on even rockier ground, because you’ll never appreciate the favour Canary did us when he alerted us to everything…”

“Fonso is your brother, in case you’ve forgotten…”

Their voices faded in the sitting room. Aunty Ció sat Grandmother in a chair and before going back to the kitchen she told us stay with her: “I’m going to separate them, they’re like little kids… They’re arguing over nothing, and it won’t solve a blind thing.”

We sat on the floor next to Grandmother’s armchair for a while, with the gallery door open and the dark of night before us. My aunt and uncle’s shouting match reached us from downstairs, now joined by Aunt Ció, but we couldn’t make out a word of what was being said. We stayed silent and still opposite the pitch-black outside. The orchard’s fruit trees were silhouetted against the night and farther away the dense woods melded into the same shadows. A warm breeze blew in, and seemed full of small specks, perhaps dust from the threshing floor.

We were stunned by the presence of Quirze who’d come up to the sitting room unnoticed by us. He stood straight-backed by the side of Grandmother who put her hand around his waist, as if she wanted to lean on him, as if he were a stick or tree-trunk, and she whispered words we strained to hear: “Ay, Quirze, my lad! Lucky you and I are still here to keep this place going. In the end everybody will be off and only you and your parents and the odd hand will stay, if they last out, I’m sure Jan will but I wouldn’t bet on Bernat. Lucky I’ll have you to the end of my days. Who can I rely on, Quirze, if not you, Quirze?”