The Catalans: A Novel (3 page)

The round towers, remote and deserted on the high bare peaks, had always been the symbols of homecoming for him, for he had been able to see them from his bedroom window as a boy, and for ever after, when he came back from school or from the university or (as he did now) from foreign parts, it always appeared to him that this was the last of the last steps, for looking up to those far towers his line of sight could be reflected down, through his own window, back into his bedroom.

They had crossed the river, and the richest of the plain was left behind: there were trees and rectangles of market-garden still, but they were islands in the blue-green sea of vines. An ocean of vines, that would make your heart ache to think of the picking of all the grapes. He got up, worked through the legs and the crossing lines of talk and stood in the corridor to watch for the first arrival of the sea on the other side.

Already the plain was finished. They were running through the first hills, the hills that started with such abrupt determination, instantly changing the very nature of the countryside. Now the sandy cuttings were crowned with agaves, some with their flower-spikes thrust twenty feet above, and the sides of the railway were covered with prickly pear, starting out of an acid, bitter-looking soil. And here the round sides of the hills were cut and cut with terraces, terraces everywhere, and on the terraces vineyards, olives, vineyards, cork oaks, pines and more vineyards, vineyards on slopes where a man could hardly stand to work them. Then suddenly there it was, the sea blue and faintly lapping in a little deep-cut bay. A tunnel cut off all light, and he stood in the eddying smoke, suspended: through the tunnel, and there it was again; the same bay, one would have said—it had the same reddish cliffs dropping down to the bright shingle and the waveless sea; but it was not the same, for here on the right was a grove of cork oaks with crimson trunks. Tunnel again, and the bay repeated. Here the difference was a boat drawn up, a bright blue boat with the strange crucifix of a lateen mast and yard.

They passed by Collioure, with its ghastly new hotels and its seething mass of tourists: it had been such a charming little town, he thought sadly, as he peered round the bulk of the latest hotel at the tiny beach where men and women lay tight-packed on the dirty stones and overlapping into the water where a thousand stewed together in the tideless wash. Sad, sad: he thanked God that Saint-Féliu had no clock tower to be painted, no beach for bathing, no drains, no hotel, and hardly a bath at all in the whole town. And no Beaux-Arts to protect it, he added, catching the trite cynicism of the people in his compartment. Collioure, Port-Vendres, Banyuls, Puig del Mas. Now the line was a little farther from the sea, and higher up. The road ran with it, and there was a green bus, racing along to keep up with the train, passengers waving madly, and a faint shrieking audible above the thunder of the rails. At the turn he would catch a glimpse of Saint-Féliu: he opened the window and leaned out, screwing his eyes tight against the wind: there, exactly where his mind had placed it, there it was, a tight, rose-pink swarm of roofs, packed tight within the round gray walls, pressed in by the hills, a full, broad crescent that rose in steep tiers from the pure curve of the bay; and between the seaward wall and the sea, the arc of fishing boats drawn up.

He had just that moment to receive it all, and then the wall of the cutting whipped between. Here was old Bisau’s orange grove; green bronze the oranges. Next would come the brake of tall bamboos, and then the tunnel. He was back in the carriage, standing at his seat to lower his baggage. The train screamed for the tunnel, roared in, and the light was gone. He stood there, swaying in the darkness. When the light came back he would be home.

CHAPTER TWO

W
HEN MADELEINE
was a little girl she was a plain creature, and timid. Her form was the undistinguished, pudgy, shapeless form of most children; there was no feminine delicacy in her face—or very little—and if her hair had been cut short she might have passed for a plain little boy.

Nobody considered her a good-looking child; and even her mother and her aunts, when they had finished scrubbing and frizzing and ornamenting her for her first Communion, could say no more than that the little Baixas girl (a downright ugly one) did not look half so attractive. Madeleine felt the lack of conviction in their voices, and she agreed with them entirely; but for her part she did not mind at all. Indeed, she laughed heartily when her father said what a good thing it was that she had a veil; for in her own family, in the dark room behind the cave-like shop, or in the clear, white, dustless mercery next door, she was a cheerful soul, happy to find humor in the thinnest joke, and brimming over with that
élan
which caused her to talk, chant, and spin about for the greater part of the day. It was only when she was out of her home that shyness came down over her: then she would blush if a stranger spoke to her, and in an unfamiliar house she had no voice at all.

She was plain and timid, then, and even in her own opinion devoid of charm or importance; but this did not prevent her from pursuing Francisco Cortade, her schoolfellow. She pursued him openly, without disguise, and he accepted her attentions, if not with pleasure, at least without repulsion.

She thought he was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen; and without exaggeration he was a lovely little boy—huge eyes, a great deal of black and curling hair, and an absurd complexion. She brought him presents from the shop, rousquilles—the little round dry white-iced cakes the Catalans eat on holidays—twigs of raw licorice from the mountains, nuts, anything that could be concealed under her pinafore; and if she could not bring him anything from the shop she would give him the croissant or the fougasse that she was supposed to eat at eleven. It was a disinterested passion, for although he would take her offerings civilly enough, he would hardly ever let her play with him—he was too old, far too old, he said—and if he ever let her walk with him from school he would desert her instantly for a troop of boys. He treated her very badly, but it seemed just to her, and she was grateful for his kindness in always taking what she brought.

Then occasionally he would be very kind: on Thursdays or in the holidays she would sometimes find him by the boat his father fished in, the red and yellow
Amphitrite
; and then, if he were alone, he would let her come aboard and be the crew or the enemy, or whatever fitted in.

It was some time after her first Communion that the first hint of modesty showed itself in Madeleine. Up until that time she would reply “He has just run away,” or “He is down by the sea” to the question “Where is your sweetheart?”—a question that the people of the street would ask her once or twice a day. Now she would frown heavily and deny him, or she would say that she did not know where he was, and did not care: and now she stopped bringing him rousquilles, and in doing so she saved her conscience many a reproach and her heart many a wild fluttering. It was not that she stole the rousquilles or the licorice, but she took them without explicit leave: she had always felt that there was a great difference, but still she always chose the time when there was nobody in the shop, and more than once, caught standing on a chair beneath the rousquilles’ shelf, or spoken to when the offering was half hidden in her pinafore, she had gone pale with horror, or scarlet red; and afterward it needed a fair amount of argument to convince herself that she had done no wrong. But now this almost daily trial was done, and now at eleven o’clock she ate her roll or cake, and she ate it skipping or howling with the other little girls.

At first Francisco did not notice this change, but after some days it was borne in upon him that he no longer had a devoted follower, and that the stream of rousquilles had dried up, apparently for ever. He was puzzled, worried, at a loss to understand. He could not say how it had happened, nor when it had begun: and then there was no reason; he had not been unkind to her for weeks. After some thought he began to make advances. He left the school quickly and lurked about until she appeared, but when he said that she could walk with him if she liked, she ran fast away to go hand in hand with Carmen and Denise, and he was left sad and foolish behind.

Two days later he bought two croissants and gave her one at break: he waited until she had finished her own before he offered it, and she was glad to take it. In an access of reconciliation he said that he had a dried sea horse for her in the boat, and they shared his second croissant.

It is true that he soon recovered the upper hand, but it was a more even friendship now, and so it continued. In the village school of Saint-Féliu such things could be; elsewhere they might have been mocked and laughed to scorn, but not here. They continued, consecrated now by habit, rising form after form, reaching decimals and long division; they learned the Merovingian kings and passed the gap-toothed stage; by the time they reached the Revolution Francisco was already talking gruff.

It was toward this time that Dominique, Madeleine’s mother, began to look pensive when she saw the two walk down the narrow street together. For a long, long while Madeleine and her sweetheart had been a joke with the street, and Dominique had laughed as much as any. She had called her daughter a hussy, a one for the men, and so on: she had often and often called Francisco into the shop to give him his pick of the squashed peaches, or a caramel or a piece of gingerbread. She was a fat, jolly woman in those days, and she liked to see children pleased and happy around her. In this she was in no way exceptional, in Saint-Féliu or anywhere else, but she was exceptional for Saint-Féliu in that she succeeded—succeeded, that is, in making them pleased and happy when they were with her. It was not that she was clever—far from that. She was rather a stupid woman, and given to long spells of absence, during which she would stare in front of her like a glazed cow, thinking of nothing at all; but by some gift of being she was better at the management of a child than any woman in the quarter. It may have been her plumpness, for fat people are said to be calm of spirit, or it may have been some natural sweetness, but whatever the cause, the house never knew those screaming, tearing scenes that broke out three or four times a day somewhere along the street, those horribly commonplace rows in which a woman, dark with hatred and anger, may be seen dragging a child by the arm, flailing at its head, and screaming, screaming, screaming a great piercing flood of abuse, sarcasm, and loathing right into its convulsed and wretched little face. These scenes were so ordinary in Saint-Féliu that anyone turning to stare would be known at once for a foreigner.

It was not that these things shocked Dominique. And it is possible that the rare foreigner who did stop in dismay made too much of them: after all, the town had been brought up that way, and every mother in her time had been alternately slapped and kissed, spoiled and cowed. Everything was covered by the expression “It is stronger than me,” delivered with a little self-satisfied smirk, or “It makes my hand itch.” No further excuse to public opinion was necessary, and none to themselves: and in fact, though the children screamed, and though some of them grew up rather queer, not many died of their raising. On the other hand, outsiders could say, and say truly, that whereas in some foreign countries parricide is a monstrous crime, scarcely appearing once or twice in a hundred years, a thing to be spoken of with horror, remembered and shuddered upon for genera
tions, yet here, in the local paper, it would not be worth a banner
headline: a parricide would be found on an inner page, squeezed between the daily recipe and a piece on the control of insect pests.

Dominique could not be shocked by what she had seen for all her life—could not react from the normal—but she was exceptional, and she remained exceptional. She did not batter her little girl about, she did not pull her hair, she did not slap her legs and shriek abuse at her—her voice did not even possess the bitter scolding note of the daily shrew. This was something so rare that it would have earned her the dislike of the street (no people are quicker to resent an implied criticism) if it had not been for the fact that Madeleine was, in general, somewhat less irritating than the other children: therefore, of course, there was no virtue in Dominique’s not beating her. Not that Madeleine was what could by any distortion of the term be called a good child, whatever the neighbors might say: she was dirty (when she was a little girl), untruthful, and dishonest. But being less battered, she was less dirty, untruthful, and dishonest than the rest. Certainly she was less irritating, for not only was she endowed with a happy, affectionate nature, but also with a mother who was protected from the smaller vexations of the world by well-ordered nerves and a high degree of mental calm: for in the matter of irritation, it is essential that there should be two people present; the worst-bred ape of a child cannot be irritating alone in a howling wilderness, and Madeleine, even at her worst, could not provoke a mother removed by a boundless expanse of absence, sitting at her counter or leaning on it, with her eyes round, wide open, and fixed upon nothing, nothing whatever.

But still, kind though Dominique was, her kindness recognized a vast difference between those who belonged to her family and those who did not; and now that Madeleine was growing older—old enough now that no one could possibly mistake her for a boy—she looked at Francisco, and wished that her daughter had chosen some other man’s son to appropriate.

The thought was no sooner clear in her mind than she spoke it: this was her way, and unless she were in one of her moods of abstraction it was rare that she let out a breath without some words upon it. It was her comfort to talk: the greater part of her life was passed in a haze of words, and if she had been prevented from talking with her customers, with her neighbors if there were nobody in the shop, or with herself if she were kept in alone by her duties, if she had been cut off from that delight, she would have pined clean away. Without her little gossip, she owned, she would never get through her day; and the life of a small shopkeeper in Saint-Féliu was no slight affair: she was up before it was light in the winter to meet the lorry that brought the milk, and already there would be customers waiting; then from that time she would not shut the door until ten o’clock on an early evening or eleven on a late one. This she did seven days a week for the whole year round. In some manner, too, between opening and closing the door, she fed her family and did her housework, besides selling salt cod, chick-peas, haricots, chicory, wreaths of garlic, bowls, glasses, soap, oil, wine, cheese, peaches, apricots, persimmons, melons, figs, medlars, all the fruit of their garden, all their vegetables, and brooms, sulphur candles, votive candles, ordinary candles, and a hundred other things beyond the list. This was in addition to collecting, arranging, and weighing every scrap of information about the private lives of all the families in the town, collating it with former knowledge and passing it on in a better form.