“It’s vice that’s done for them,” commented Quirze as if he was talking to himself. “They’re all rotten inside.”
Cry-Baby and I exchanged glances but said nothing. Perhaps the same thought had passed through our minds, namely that young Quirze, after our nonsense games and his secretive exchanges with Oak-Leaf, had become more mouthy, more aggressive and wilder, as if he wanted the filth and obscenities he voiced ever more freely to erect a wall between him and us, as if he wanted a terrain of dirt and mud to divide us into two opposed territories.
“Rotten?” I repeated, “What do you mean?”
“Are you stupid or what? Rotten means rotten, like apples or pears that have gone mushy inside. They look lovely on the outside, as if they are really lovely, but inside they’ve gone brown and squishy, the fruit is drunk, is full of shit.”
I glanced at the ill boys in disgust. Even the tall spindle of a lad who always lay under the elm tree, by the gate, and looked to my mind like a ballet dancer or circus artiste, a performer on the trapeze or balancing wire, because of his elegant, harmonious movements, suddenly appeared like a haggard ghost, at once hollow and fake.
“I thought they only had shadows on their lungs and that was it,” I replied while I wondered how to interpret what Quirze had just said. “Their lungs were kaput, people said, because they ate so little or were ground down by work.”
“You idiot! Can’t you see what those shrivelled runts down there are like? Do you think any of them has ever lifted a twenty-stone sack of potatoes? They all come from posh families in Barcelona or Vic that pay the friars for their keep so they can rest and breathe fresh air. They’ve got more five-peseta coins than a dog’s got fleas.”
“You mean someone infected them with that illness?”
“Their vices did, more like,” he laughed, ridiculing my ignorance. “Don’t think for one minute they behave any better here than away. Now they seem quiet and peaceful like little angels but you can bet they romp around at night like little devils. I expect they jump from one to the next as friskily as newborn goats.”
“What do you mean? They’re all men!”
“Ah, you’re so wet behind the ears! There are men that act in reverse and play a woman’s role. Or have you never heard of homos?”
I said nothing, as if I was shamed by my own naïveté. I remembered the night I spent in the misty-windowed café with my father and the comments the men made about the dogs that were sniffing each other.
“I’ve heard that people with TB are always hot for it, and that it’s the disease that sends them into a feverish, randy state. They can never calm down and relax,” Quirze enjoyed rubbing in his superior knowledge with these lessons on life. “They’re hotter than we are. And as they have to let off steam more often, they’re more addled with vice than we are.”
Cry-Baby and I said nothing, submissive apprentices before their master. I felt sorry for her, for Núria, because I thought she was too young and couldn’t understand such things.
“They say some die from so much…” now Quirze didn’t find the word, or perhaps Cry-Baby’s silent, humble presence put the brake on him somehow, “from so much…wasting of energy by themselves, because they must spend the whole night long rubbing their wicks.”
“I’d heard a lot choke on the blood from their lungs that they cough up, like a haemorrhage, like a bleeding wound that won’t heal.”
“And because they’ve lost so much spunk their bones dry up.”
He paused for a moment before elaborating, though he didn’t contradict what he’d previously said.
“I’ve heard lots of them haven’t got TB. Too much sun isn’t good for people with TB. But they’ve got similar illnesses, cancer or brittle bones, contagious diseases they’re ashamed of.”
Quirze said that as a kind of definitive conclusion, before jumping off the wall and starting down the track through the hazel trees, hidden by the foliage; later we watched him emerge from the spinney by the side of the pond and walk off across the threshing-floor. He left Cry-Baby and myself all alone, without as much as a by-your-leave.
Núria and I walked silently along the same path, like two puppies following in their master’s footsteps. My eyes still felt dazzled by the whiteness of the ill boys’ clothing and their morbidly luminous bodies, now glowing in the aura of perversity and evil Quirze’s words had bestowed upon them.
In the densest part of the spinney, along a stretch of path where we couldn’t walk side by side because of the thick foliage, Cry-Baby went in front and without warning, as if she deliberately wanted to get lost or start some strange game, she opened a way through by lifting a hand up and moving the foliage aside on her way to a secret place she seemed to know, a hiding place or lair she had discovered. I followed silently, intrigued by the adventure she was initiating me into.
We came to a clearing where the ground had been trampled; the grass, flattened or uprooted, lay dry all around, under a ceiling of branches that was so thick it was like a grotto or natural cabin. The greenish darkness glazed over my eyes and the bittersweet scent of the hazel leaves stung my nostrils.
It was a hiding place I’d never visited before. How had my cousin found it? Was Quirze aware of that spot? From the piece of bare ground, the circle of flattened grass, the lower branches, whose leaves had been chopped off, and the pile of broken twigs, it was immediately obvious somebody else had used that den.
However, Cry-Baby said nothing. She let go of the hand which she’d used to guide me so far and stretched out full length on the ground as if she wanted to sleep or play at being dead. She closed her eyes and I sat down next to her, mainly because the hazel tree branches were very low and if you stood up, you had to stoop so as not to knock into the foliage or to ensure a sharp, pointy branch didn’t gouge an eye out.
We stayed silent like that for a good while, Cry-Baby, her eyes closed, and me, by her side, completely bewildered. I couldn’t imagine what we were waiting for or why we’d come to that unknown hideaway. My mind was a blank and I was filled with a sense of peace, as if we’d come to the end of the world, as if everything ended in that secret den.
Suddenly I noticed Núria was moving her hands. Almost imperceptibly, my cousin gently turned her hands without moving her arms that she kept either side of her body, and her fingers began to ease her skirt up, rucking the material, her hands holding it aloft, two clenched fists raising her skirt on both sides.
Now her legs were naked, she lowered her arms gradually so that the skirt rolled down to her waist, baring her navel, smooth belly and a slit half-hidden in the softest little mound of skin, whiter and more delicate than the rest of her body. She was wearing nothing underneath.
I sat and contemplated that revelation, spellbound. My cousin’s eyes were still shut and she was motionless again, her hands holding her clothes above her waist. I felt my heart throbbing in my gullet as if blood wanted to rush to my head through veins that were too narrow.
I couldn’t think. My cousin lifted my hand off the ground and placed it on her crack. Unconsciously I began playing with my fingers. She opened her eyes and smiled.
All of a sudden my mind was filled with the image of that sickly youth naked under the elm tree, his delicate, bony body, the pinkish pallor of his flesh silhouetted against a clean white sheet, a smile on his lips, as he stared into space. And as if that vision dictated my movements, I quickly stripped off my clothes and stretched out on the ground alongside my cousin.
The ceiling of our leafy grotto swayed slightly, lulled by the breeze. Sounds reached us from the farmhouse, men shouting, dogs barking, and closer by, bees buzzing as if complaining about the sultry afternoon heat.