The South (12 page)

Maria Mataró, the sister, did attend the birth—as you know I think she is treated like dirt over there. Mrs. Fuster says they don’t feed her. I think there’s a screw loose. I think she needs treatment. Her head rocks around on her shoulders when she walks, as if there was a whole set of crucial muscles missing. She watches our house like a hawk. If
there’s any sign of our going out, down to Tirvia, or just out for a walk, we will always look over and find that she has stepped out on the balcony and is glaring over at us.

We have tried to lock the house a number of times. It is so easy to enter from the stables below here, despite Miguel’s barriers. Maria Mataró seems to have no problem getting in. Miguel says she gets under the door like a rat and this indeed may be true. She takes food. She has a particular fondness for high protein food. Cheese—if there is cheese she will devour it—and red meat or even chicken.

She doesn’t seem to take food out of the house preferring, it appears, to consume it within our walls—which makes her chances of being caught much higher. She likes milk as well. Having stuffed herself—and she will eat any amount of cheese—she will go upstairs and root in the presses and the wardrobe. She steals stockings and my underwear. She seems to try things on and if she doesn’t like them she will cast them aside. She never cleans up after herself.

Miguel has tried every method of provoking a row with Mataró. In fact, if I remember well, you and he created a disturbance outside the Mataró headquarters, probably driving his wife and poor daughter into a further state of disarray, on one of your rare visits to these parts. No doubt, now that I have reminded you, you will recall that you roared abuse of a very personal nature about Mataró all night. This is the sort of campaign Miguel has been conducting over the years. Fuster, who is the only sane man in the village, dislikes all of this and I have to listen to him rabbiting on about how Mataró is in with the police. Sometimes I dread meeting him when I know Miguel has been abusive. Then Miguel quietens down for a while. Maybe the moon starts to wane—don’t know why—and I have peace. Then it starts again. Miguel starts to separate Mataró’s sheep from the flock. I don’t know what
else he does. In the meantime, according to Fuster, Mataró is buying up every bit of land he can get his hands on.

I asked Miguel to forget about him, to keep his mind on us, to get on with his work. I said various things to Miguel. His mind is not like mine; he is stubborn and obtuse, he fixes on things. Sometimes this is very funny, for a whole long night he can pretend we are in Mataró’s house, he is Mataró and the three women, and I am a visitor. You know how he can keep this going, and I will encourage him, you know that too. But in the end it makes me feel forlorn, this time misspent.

You couldn’t like Mataró. His bad manners and his mean scowl may have been exaggerated by Miguel, but he does seem unpleasant. His wife and daughter I could also do without and I hate his sister smelling around my bedroom. But they were here first, they own property here. They have a right to be left alone, as long as she stops stealing.

It is unlikely now that she will steal again. We went out for a walk, it must have been three weeks ago, and we saw her watching us from the balcony of Mataró’s house. The hunger must have been eating away at her, poor thing, but we had hidden every single comestible in the house. Miguel said he wanted to go back and I carried on for a while with Isona and we went as far as the stream so she could sail her boat.

When I returned to the house I could hear the screaming and shouting. Miguel had caught Maria, and it only struck me then that he had gone back especially to catch her. He had dragged her back over to Mataró’s house and all the noise was coming from there. He had the key to the door so I waited for him on the steps of the house. Odd shouts still rose from Mataró’s house as time went by. His face was pale when he came back. Mataró will be feeding his own sister in future, he said, or something like that.

Later, when it was dark, he went out again. I thought he was going to Fuster’s house, as he often does. I think I was trying to sew, or wash, or do something unpleasant in the kitchen. When he came back he had a chair, a good strong kitchen chair, which he put in front of me. “Do you know where I got that from?” he said. “No,” I replied. “I stole it from Mataró’s house,” he said.

This is the chair I am sitting on as I write this letter. The other one, which he stole just before he fell ill, is upstairs beside the bed. I rest the tray with the soup on it. Mataró stopped me the other day—in all the years in this village he has never addressed me before or even nodded at me—and asked me if I had seen two chairs which had gone missing from his house. I didn’t reply. He said maybe Lidia had them. I said maybe his sister had them; had he spoken to her? He muttered to himself and walked past me. Maybe in ten years’ time he will speak to me again.

I have told you before that the police in Llavorsi have taken to stopping me to check my driving licence and delay me generally whenever I go down in the jeep. I hope they don’t come looking for the chairs.

I am writing this late at night. Miguel is asleep and has pulled all the blankets over to his side of the bed. I am tired and soon I will have to go upstairs and wake him up to equalise the distribution of our blankets. This is married life, from which you have protected yourself. I have spent three hours pacifying Isona. Every time I moved she cried. When I gave her her food she cried, when I read her a story she cried—she wanted another story, a different one—when I tried to get her to sit on her potty she cried.

Then she discovered that it was time to go to bed. She actually hit me on the face in temper. She kicked me. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. It’s just a phase, Fuster’s
wife tells me it’s just a phase. There was a time when she was a little angel, when she would smile at me at night before she went to sleep. At the end of next summer I will take her down to school in Tirvia every morning and she will have another set of people to think about and kick when she feels bad. Still, she exhausts me. She takes up most of the day.

If her father weren’t so funny and so handsome, he would be a burden with his obsessions, his irrational feeling that he owns this village or has some special rights here, which are not shared by Mataró. At night sometimes, we drink hot wine before we go to bed and he will talk again about what happened after the civil war. I know he has talked to you about this too. I have asked you before if you think he is making any of it up. I know that you told me it was an unfair question. I know it was deeply disloyal. I also know that you believe him. I believe him.

I am putting this in writing now, here, late at night when they are asleep. This war has not ended yet, in his eyes, or in anybody else’s. Do you remember our first night in this room, when I said to you that I hoped Miguel’s disappearance was the worst thing that would ever happen to us here and you became agitated and told me to stop talking like that? It was as though you had seen something. I have seen something too, not a ghost, or anything unearthly. I have not had visions. I just know that I have taken on more than I can deal with.

The twilights are heartbreakingly beautiful. I wait for them, the sun making a red band against the few clouds that have gathered on the horizon, the thick yellow light. I work when I can. Miguel says he will start working again soon. We’d love you to come and visit us, now that we have new chairs.

Yours with love,

Katherine

CARLOS PUIG

In the dead of December that same year Miguel went down to Barcelona and came back with Carlos Puig. Katherine recognised the name as soon as he said it. Miguel had found him in Barcelona, alone, lost, incapable, broken, after eighteen years in Burgos prison. Carlos Puig smiled at her, his eyes searching and eager. He stayed for hours at the window in the room beside the kitchen, a blanket wrapped around him, looking out at the mountains.

Sometimes he seemed like an old man, his hair grey and his teeth yellow, but when he turned to thank her for food she had brought him, or another blanket, she could catch a glimpse for a moment of someone else.

Katherine was frightened by the absences in him. She sat with him sometimes, but never tried to speak. Isona was learning to talk and Miguel moved the playpen into the workroom where Carlos Puig slept. For the first few days the child took no notice of him, talked to herself, cried, or wanted to be lifted by Katherine or Miguel as though Carlos Puig was not in the room. One day Katherine noticed that Isona had let a wooden brick fall beyond her reach and was calling for it to be handed back to her. She watched Carlos Puig move and give it to the child. Isona examined the brick carefully and then searched Carlos Puig’s face. Again she threw the brick out of the playpen. He leant down and lifted it up and handed
it to her. She did it again, laughing this time—she was growing brave. Carlos Puig smiled as he handed it to her.

Isona was two now. When she woke in the morning she would demand to be let down to Carlos’s room with her bricks or toys. She talked to him as though he were a child, and sometimes he answered her. She imposed a strain on him that on occasions he could not bear and he would lie on the bed with his face in the pillow and Isona would go to find Katherine.

What was he like before the war? Katherine imagined him as gentle, refined, quiet. Miguel laughed at her. No, he was a journalist, not a rich journalist or even very famous but, Miguel said, he was nasty. When he wrote for the anarchist newspaper his scorn was special. He knew how to hate, that was why Miguel liked him. He was from an ordinary family in Barcelona and spoke Catalan. He used his pen, until words were no good, Miguel looked at her, and then Carlos used bombs, he explained. And when the war was over, and the Republican leaders had gone into exile, he stayed behind and used more bombs.

“La policía sabe que está aquí?”
she asked. He told her that when the police noticed him, they would come to see what he was doing. There was one man in the police station at Llavorsi who remembered everything: Sust, a Catalan. He knew Miguel, had already questioned him, and knew Carlos Puig. Should we leave, she asked him. Wait, he told her, wait and see!

In the spring Michael Graves came to stay. He put his huge canvas bag on the table and emptied it. Isona watched carefully as he took out a duck that walked when you wound it up. She ran to show it to Carlos. Michael Graves called her back and gave her a mouth organ to give to Carlos as well; they listened in the kitchen to see if he would make a sound
with it, but nothing happened. He brought Katherine paint and brushes.

“You look very happy,” he said to her.

“Do I?” she asked. “Do I?”

They put a bed for Michael Graves in the front room. In a few days Michael Graves had managed to find out a great deal. Michael Graves told them that Carlos still believed that they were going to come after him. He had told Michael Graves that he often saw them around the house. Katherine said there had been no one around the house. Michael Graves repeated what Carlos had said.

She wondered how Michael had found out so much. Her efforts to talk to Carlos Puig had come to nothing and Miguel hardly took any notice of him. As the weather became finer Miguel and Michael Graves went for long walks across the mountains, often disappearing for days at a time. They left Katherine there, as she wanted to be left, to work on drawings and paintings of Isona and Carlos Puig. Katherine had difficulty understanding what Carlos Puig said, and did not know whether he was whispering to himself or trying to talk to her. That day, he was deeply troubled, she could feel a sense of longing in him, he was trying to say something. He continued to whisper and search her face. His eyes were clear and blue and when he spoke now he looked like a younger man, but wasted and worn down. I can’t understand you, she said to him, Carlos, I can’t make out what you’re saying.

He stopped whispering and stared at her in a mixture of wonder and suspicion. She had spoken in Catalan, and she did not know if that was right: maybe he wanted to talk in Spanish. He gestured to her to come closer. When she brought over a chair beside him he gripped her wrist and the whispering started again, words came and then anxious,
heavy breathing. “Carlos,” she said to him, “what do you want to say? I’ll stay and listen, I swear I’ll stay and listen.”

She listened to each word, she listened carefully until she realised what he was asking her, and she understood with horror how difficult it was for him, how desperate he was, and she did not know what to reply. He asked her again, his eyes hard and intent this time. Will I, do you think, am I going to get better, am I going to be normal again, am I going to be all right? The words and phrases came with great difficulty. What do you think?

She told him that every day he was better, that since he came to them he had improved, and soon he would be better, and maybe he would go to Paris, maybe he would find a job there, and they would all help him. After she spoke he was quiet. Later she found him in the same chair, with his eyes closed and his head nodding, and the force of his pain palpable in the room.

*   *   *

The police arrived a few days after Michael Graves left. She saw them walking up towards the front door of the house; two of them had machine-guns. Isona was eating at the kitchen table, Carlos Puig was in his room, remote and quiet, Miguel had been out since early morning.

She went to the door to meet them.

“Dónde está su marido?”

“No sé,”
she said. They pushed in past her and found Carlos Puig in the front room. He didn’t look up at them, he seemed not to notice that they had come in. She told them he was sick. What was wrong with him, they wanted to know. She pointed to her head and they left the room. They found Isona alone in the kitchen. She looked up at them in wonder, three men entering the kitchen unannounced.

“Dónde está su marido,”
the oldest one said again. She
repeated that she didn’t know where her husband was. He asked her what was the name of the man in the other room.