Maria Barbal - Stone in a Landslide

It’s a purchase like any other, but things that can’t be measured come into it. A person is too much to be bought and too little to live as he pleases…

I contributed more than anyone to my son getting married and they say every sin has its penance. I certainly had mine.

It’s true things weren’t easy for them. Lluïsa did not really recover from the birth of their first child in the clinic at Noguera, and from then on she complained constantly. Mateu, who had hardly travelled in thirty years, was doing so every other minute. First to Noguera, again and again. To see what the doctors would say. Afterwards they headed to Lleida and later to Barcelona.

Appointments, travel and medicines that cost a lot of money. Whole days that the fields were abandoned even when the work couldn’t wait for a day. Hurry, annoyance… I did what I could. I looked after the baby, the animals, the vegetable garden, the poultry, but I couldn’t manage the work outside.

I remember that time of waiting. I knew that something was going to change. Because that dream of mine had not come true. The house was fuller, but not much happier. A sadness that I’d never known had entered it. The sadness of those who find themselves unwell. Apart from the children’s illnesses, or a cold or a bad back, the sicknesses we’d suffered hadn’t lasted long. True, Oncle had been ill, but he was long-suffering and with an old man’s conviction that his time to leave this world had come and that he didn’t really want to get better.

Little Jaume would have taken all my time if I’d known how to arrange it, but his mother kept me away from him with the zeal for bringing up her child that a mother feels for her first-born. Lluïsa and I hadn’t become close and even though I tried to do things as she liked, I never managed it. I think that every time she had to go to the doctor and leave the baby in my care was torture for her. I understood her but I didn’t dare say anything to her because she was very nervous and moody. As if everyone else was to blame that she didn’t feel well.

I watched the rain with little Jaume, and he turned his big black eyes on me when I started some story or other. The little drops chased each other over the glass and he didn’t tire of listening patiently. But at dinnertime, it was the same as usual. He tried a few spoonfuls and there was no way he would swallow any more. I thought that the tension in the house took away his appetite, but I would have bitten my tongue off before saying it.

I think of that rainy afternoon as the closest memory of being with my grandson. As Jaume got older, and his brother Lluís after him, they would live far away from their grandmother, even though they might eat at the same table.

And I accepted it. Perhaps I had turned into a living stone, or it was just that I had never known how to rebel. To say, I am not dead yet or, Here, money is only used for this or that, and other things too. I felt that I was going to need to be strong, but I had no idea why.

One evening, everything outside was covered in snow and it was very cold. Mateu came to see me. He was so sweet, like he’d been before, that I didn’t recognize him. Mother, we’ve looked at a porter’s lodge in Barcelona. We get a salary and they give us a little flat between the ground floor and basement. We’ll be close to the doctors there and we won’t have to worry about the land…

Even if I had dared say, Leave me to stay here, I want to die on this land, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I would have been told that I was mad, and what would I want to do alone in a big house? It would have made even less difference if I’d gone on to say that this was my house and that I’d spent my life on this land…

I didn’t say anything, as if I thought it a good idea, as if the news came as no surprise.

I realized it wasn’t true that I was resigned and didn’t want to live. Now we were leaving, life meant staying close to where I’d been told Jaume was buried, pottering about, getting by without much enthusiasm, letting people say what they liked, keeping up what had cost us so much to get. So much effort, so much saving, so much misfortune. Now we were closing the door and going down the mountain, much further down than Noguera, more than twice as far down.

A house of seven floors, he had said, and I imagined it to be sky high.

I didn’t want to be separated from my son, not at all, but I couldn’t believe his promises that we’d come back when things got better. I remembered what Tia had said to me perhaps ten years before she died. The girls were still at home. I don’t know what we were discussing, but she’d said that we wouldn’t die there in that house, that life was too hard in those villages and that the young people growing up then wouldn’t want to put up with it. I remember that as usual I didn’t contradict her, but I thought she was exaggerating. I thought to myself that this was old age speaking, that it made her see the world as changed. Not long after she was proved right when Elvira gave up her right to inherit. I didn’t see it then because I was counting on all the others and they seemed plenty to poor old me.

A cloud of memories filled every inch of every room. Gradually, all that would remain would be a pale mist, without faces or words. When the cloud dissolved into a slow rain along with my memory, a part of the life of the family would have died. The iron beds and the cheap icons above the headboards, the uneven walls and the big wooden table with two benches which would no longer wait for someone to come and sit on them. It would all get covered in dust and cobwebs until a storm opened the first crack in the walls. A little bit of the story would remain, and if one day someone remembered it and told the tale, people would listen to him with friendly, open eyes.

How time has flown, poor old man! What stories he has to tell today!

Barcelona is a house where the windows don’t look onto the street. They face into the service shaft and the lift inside it.

Barcelona is everything at a set time. Before then, it’s too early. After that, it’s already too late. At half past seven, open the door, at eight, turn on the heating in winter, at ten give the keys to the woman who works for Flat 3, second floor, at twelve sort out the post, at nine in the evening collect the rubbish and at ten close the door again…

Barcelona is having the sky far away and the stars trembling. It is a damp sky and very grey rain.

Barcelona is not knowing anyone. Only the family. And sometimes hearing foreign words spoken. It is losing the memory of the sound of the animals at home as you look at dogs chained at dusk.

Barcelona is a small loaf of bread which is finished every day and milk from a bottle, very white, with no cream and a thin taste.

Barcelona is wordless noise and a thick silence full of memories.

It’s not seeing anyone who could sympathize with me and it’s seeing my grandchildren coming back from school carrying a heap of books and hearing a machine that talks and sings, and another that speaks and stares, but I never know if anyone sees me.

It is learning every day that there is very little work I can do. Sometimes washing the dishes after the meal. But who knows if they’ve been properly cleaned? And when Barcelona in the evening becomes a story from up north, there is no one to tell it to, and it annoys everyone that I want to turn an evening in Barcelona into some remarkable event on a forgotten mountain.

Barcelona is learning to keep quieter and quieter. Until they ask me something.

Every night in Barcelona is an adventure. It starts with a long noise from the lift and gallops through tracks and woods. It stops some place in the neighbourhood and listens to the bells. Festival peal, Rosary peal… I don’t sleep until they ring the bells to announce that someone has died, and then my dreams are long conversations I can’t have while awake. Often I even wake up with a smile or about to burst out laughing because of something we were just saying.