Maria Barbal - Stone in a Landslide

Night was falling. Time to shut the cows into the yard. Time to make dinner. Time to dawdle a moment at the fountain to discuss something, but only as long as it takes to say a quick Lord’s Prayer!

From beside the trough I saw a woman appear. It was Delina, who ran and threw herself into my arms. She kept saying: How awful, Conxa… It was then I understood I wasn’t dreaming and that it was real. Gently, I let go of Delina and walked towards home, my feet heavy. As soon as we came through the door little Mateu grasped my legs and the girls fell into Tia’s arms. It was the second time I’d seen her cry…

And then dragging the mattress up the stairs and sitting on the bench with my little boy in my lap and letting Elvira and Angeleta explain everything, jumbled-up, and Tia asking question after question but giving nothing away herself.

And accepting that Jaume was no longer Jaume. He had gone like a gust of wind, and I didn’t have the heart to breathe or to do anything or be like before. I had one hand on the table he had made, and I yearned for the wood to tear me apart so completely that there wouldn’t be a scrap of me left.

What surprised me most when I went around the house were the cobwebs everywhere. I saw that Tia had become really old. I went into the kitchen and there was shadowy fluff in the corner of the ceiling, like a spy. Going into our bedroom, I mean my bedroom now, and approaching the pillow, small arms resisted mine. Long cobwebs stood guard around the bed…

When I got to the threshold, I would think about the two of you not being there. I would start shaking in sorrow and anger. I haven’t been able to set foot inside, Tia confessed.

I began to remove the cobwebs with a broom. Sometimes the spiders would escape their lodging in a surprised flurry. I would immediately press down once or twice with the broom as hard as I could until nothing was moving underneath, as if the spider was one of my nightmares. I started thinking again that maybe it wasn’t true that Jaume was dead, and now I was back home suddenly I’d hear his voice on the stairs saying, What’s for dinner in this house today?

But when I’d killed several and I was cleaning the broom on the back wall of the haycock, where the stones stuck out and you could remove all the dust, hot tears started to flow without warning, and I tried to stop them even though I was all alone. Because I was sure I would never again hear the voice which had said the nicest things that had ever been said to me. I was thirty-seven and I was sure of it. Then Mateu appeared with a baby rabbit in his arms. He said it was his and we were never to kill it and eat it. I dropped the broom, and hugged him so hard that he became frightened, because I was sobbing more and more desperately. As I grabbed him the rabbit jumped out of his arms and my little boy ran after it and away from me as fast as his legs could carry him.

It was a spring clean I’ll never forget. I didn’t want to leave a corner untouched, as if I was afraid the lice from the camp might have jumped onto the walls. I didn’t want to be spied on as we slept at night, no matter how small the eyes were.

I got angry with the girls because they only wanted to freshen the house up, and I screamed at them that we needed more than just a once-over after what we’d been through. They looked at me with their eyes wide with surprise that I saw turn to compassion. And they ended up saying yes to everything just at the point where I had given up and was about to say that it didn’t matter.

I gave myself the same treatment and scrubbed vigorously from head to toe as if my body was filthy with blood and fear and misery and I could get it all off in the bath. I don’t think I understood at the time that the problem wasn’t in my skin or hair or nails… And when I saw myself, my slim body with its small breasts and striking nipples, I realized that I would never feel joy or pleasure in it again. I thought, people are very little but sometimes we think we really are something.

After the great purge and all the uproar, Tia didn’t let me do anything else and I didn’t want to either. I was relieved. I knew I was another Conxa, as if I’d lived many years in a month and a half.

Whenever someone talked about the war and I was there, people always expected me to have something to say but I never gave them the satisfaction. If everyone fell silent, however, I felt very uncomfortable and sometimes I noticed that my cheeks began to burn. If Soledat was there, she couldn’t stop herself from getting people to ask me what happened to us in the war.

Why did people dedicate themselves to hurting us? Within a few days of our return from the camp they came filing through the house with the excuse that they were worried about us, today one, tomorrow another, and each one said he knew who was responsible for Jaume’s death. They would accuse someone from our very town, sometimes a neighbour, and leave feeling so self-satisfied. My heart was broken and I didn’t dare say that I didn’t want to know. I put up with those denunciations with a great deal of patience, which I found by imagining that the person in front of me was there in good faith.

It was different when they came to find out how we were and see if we were selling the biggest meadows, which were the best, or maybe if we were thinking of getting rid of some cows… And you would say no, humbly, so you wouldn’t have to hear people say to your face, You deserved what happened to you! There came a time when we didn’t know if we were dealing with being unlucky or with being guilty of something. People seemed to expect us to behave as if we’d been defeated and show that we’d learnt our lesson, that we were inferiors who would beg like complete paupers to be treated normally by other people.

Elvira was made to cry many times. As she was the eldest, she had to put up with more. One day she was asked along with some other girls to help out in the Augusts’ kitchen. They had a radio and the national anthem was played. Old Mrs August jumped up and stuck her arm out. The girls did the same. When it finished, she said to our girl in front of everyone: Elvira, your salute wasn’t very enthusiastic, what’s the matter? She never wanted to go back there again.

Delina was the only one who came to us out of pure compassion. She hadn’t wanted to tell us anything. She came when she could and if I was darning, she helped me darn. If I was kneading, we kneaded and sometimes we spent the whole time without saying a word. I enjoyed her company precisely because of this. She knew as much as the others, but she never made an accusation against any person in particular. Only sometimes she would just say, There are bad people, Conxa, who don’t forgive.

There was a lot of work and little food. Together, painfully and with big effort, we all kept the house running. Tia was responsible for the house and Elvira took charge of the land, which I would never have thought I could do. But we all put our backs into it and did what we could.

The days joined one to another in a long rosary without mysteries. Some passed quickly, others slowly. When you counted it up, a lot of time had gone by.

The days passed. Elvira was unmoved by the boys who courted her. It was hard to break the ice in the village, but slowly and sometimes secretly, proposals began to arrive. It was because they had seen her work. She did it like a man, whether it was mowing the grass or raking it, and if necessary, standing her ground like a man too.

One evening after dinner she said that she wished to marry outside Pallarès and renounce her rights to earn a living from the land. Tia predicted it would all end in tears. She would be hungry, since a man who lives only on a wage is lost, and soon enough we would see her walking up to the house clutching her belly in pain… Elvira let her speak, her face composed. I didn’t dare to ruin her plans but I didn’t know how to contradict Tia. I stayed quiet and reproached myself inwardly for it, because I think Elvira expected me to defend her. But when Angeleta began to tease her about the marriage, she went wild. Mateu was already nine years old. He was starting to help out around the house and he didn’t dare say a word because he wasn’t going to bite the hand that fed him. His big sister washed him, parted his hair, and shouted at him when he got dirty. Who would start a fight in his position?