The Empty Family (16 page)

‘Do you know why your grandmother sold the land?’ her mother asked. ‘So she would have enough cash in the bank to send money to you every month. How we used to laugh as we went to the bank together! You know, even the manager used to laugh as your grandmother would announce that she wanted to send money to her little communist in London.’

‘Montse, shut up!’ her father said.

‘Her lazy little communist, too lazy and useless to work and too lazy and useless ever to finish a course.’

‘Montse, I asked you not to …’

‘How we used to laugh when she said it! The little communist living off her granny. And now the little communist is eating our food. And complaining about the view.’

‘Montse, we are going to need …’ her father seemed angry and agitated.

Carme turned to her father.

‘Need what?’

Her father stood up.

‘Come on,’ Carme said, ‘finish it. Sit down and say what you were going to say.’

‘You know what we need you to do, Carme,’ her father said, sitting down again. His voice was calm. ‘Nuria has told you. I asked her to tell you.’

Carme looked at Nuria, who kept her head down.

‘Who sold the furniture?’ Carme asked.

‘It was rotten,’ her mother said.

‘Rotten, that’s a good word,’ Carme said. ‘Taking land from an old lady, that was rotten. And has your husband grown fat too, Nuria, has he grown fat too on the profits you made from her?’

Nuria got up silently and went into the house.

‘Every stitch you’re wearing was paid for by the poor old lady,’ her mother said. ‘And you phoned once a year, that is what she got in return. And you come back just in time to claim your inheritance!’

‘Just in time, that’s right,’ Carme said. ‘Just in time.’

She stood up and left the table. Upstairs, as she fetched her keys and some money, she passed Nuria in the corridor without speaking to her. As she left the house again, she saw that her parents were still sitting at the table. She walked by them and went to the car and drove into Ciutadella.

There were lines of cars parked on both sides of the narrow road on the way into the city and there was a sound in the distance of firecrackers going off and people shouting. It was pitch-dark as she walked along, but she knew that the dawn was only three or four hours away. It was St John’s Eve. She would already have missed the early part when sacks of hazelnuts were left in the square for people to take and throw at anyone at all, a friend, a lover, a stranger, an enemy. She was amused at the idea that she could have thrown one each at her father, her mother and her sister, and they, in turn, she supposed, could have thrown one with even greater force back at her.

She was still disturbed by one thing her mother had said. She did not mind the part about being called ‘her little communist in London’. It was typical of her grandmother to make such jokes and to tell them to her bank manager if he would listen. But she was wounded by the statement that she had phoned only once a year. It was true. She had often thought of phoning more often, but she never did. She should have got in contact more often, there was no excuse. She had let too many years go by, it was as simple as that. The regret came to her sharply now as she walked into the city centre, the place her grandmother had loved most in the world.

Carme knew how much her grandmother would have loved now to come in alone with her like this for a few hours of the festival, watching the horses parading through the streets. As she turned a street corner and saw the yellow sand spread on the cobbles to keep the horses steady, Carme whispered a few words to her grandmother’s ghost. She said she was sorry. She said it was too late now, she knew. But she was back here and she was sorry. Sorry that she had stayed away so long. And sorry too that she had not been in touch more.

From the doorway of a house a woman stopped her and offered her a
pomada
in a tiny plastic glass from a tray. She laughed as she took the drink and had her first sip. The taste brought her back years; the mixture of lemonade and local gin made her feel that she was in her teens and had come here with Nuria and her friends. At that time she was the youngest of all of them, she remembered, and had to beg her grandmother for permission. And then her grandmother had overseen everything, had ensured that Carme did not look either too young or too sophisticated, and made her promise that she would have just one or two
pomadas
, no more, and that she would stay close to Nuria, and that she would keep away from the boys who ran after the horses. When Carme had promised that they would be home early, she remembered her grandmother saying that that would be a mistake, that no girl on the island had ever come home on St John’s Eve until well after the dawn, and that Carme and Nuria were not to let the family down by breaking that tradition.

It was strange, she thought, to be alone like this in the streets of Ciutadella. In the busy parts of London, even at night, a young woman walking alone, or sitting alone, or going to the cinema alone, would not be unusual. Here, no one was alone. There were even no couples. Young men walked around in large groups, or five or six girls wandered in the streets with five or six boys, or older women walked up and down in groups of three or four. She was, she saw, the only person on her own, and that, she supposed, made her look like a tourist more than anything else. Yet, despite what her parents had said, there appeared to be no real tourists. Maybe because it was after midnight the tourists had all gone to bed, whereas people from the island knew that midnight was the time when things began. And no one seemed like an outsider either; people greeted each other with familiarity and appeared fully at home as they lined the narrow streets now and waited for the horses and their riders to come galloping through.

The horses were bigger than she remembered and they came at speed and were greeted with shouts and cheering. The riders were dressed in medieval costumes and were unflustered as groups of young men moved out into the middle of the street to block their progress; the men placed themselves under the bellies of the horses, using their shoulders as, almost gently, they began to lift the animals so they were standing on their hind legs. The horses had been trained, she knew, not to kick or panic, but still there was a sense of struggle and drama that came from the shouts of encouragement from everyone in the street and from crowds at the upper windows of the houses. The men were trying, as though it were a competition, to hold the horses in the air for as long as they could before lowering them to the ground to stand on all fours.

And now that the horses had been slowed down, women came to the doors of their houses and asked riders to take the horses through the narrow doors to their hallways and into their living rooms for a
botet.
They kept appealing for a
botet
, for the horse to lift its front legs for a second within the building and thus bring luck to the household for the rest of the year. Carme watched as some riders obliged, guiding the horses through the almost impossibly narrow spaces, and, once outside again, looking away as more requests came, and then beginning to move towards the next street.

As she watched them going, she noticed again what she remembered from years before when the horses, having performed their ritual, left the street on St John’s Eve. There was a melancholy that came over everyone, a sort of communal deflation as people realized that the excitement had come and gone. The summer was at its peak; from now on the days would get shorter, the shadows would grow deeper. This feeling lasted only a few minutes, but it brought with it memories of those who had witnessed this night over the years and had died, those who would have loved this night and were gone for ever. As she looked around her, especially at the faces of the women, she saw it, the look of regret, a sudden stillness. And then it lifted just as quickly as it had come. People reached for drinks, which were handed free from the houses, or decided to move on and follow the horses, or turned back and made their way home.

She was planning to return to the car when she saw a group of men coming towards her and found that she recognized some of them from summers on the island in the past. A few of them were islanders, she knew, and a few from Barcelona. She wished she could have slipped by them until she realized, with relief, that none of them seemed to know she had been away. They spoke to her as though they saw her every day. They were surprised that she was alone as she told them Nuria was at home minding her children; and then they insisted that she come with them. She did not bother to ask them where they were going; she knew they were ready to walk the streets and then go to bars and later to the beach as the dawn broke and the jousting began. She loved their easy manners and was amused by their purposeful attitude as they pushed through the crowds at the first corner they came to as though they were organizing the entire festival and were urgently required to be elsewhere. And she loved too that none of them asked her a single question and that none of them tried to make a claim for her or flirt with her in any open way. They took it for granted that she was coming with them; their company and the heat of the night made her feel free to laugh and smile with them as they moved along.

In the first bar they ordered beers and included her without asking her; she had not tasted an Estrella beer in all her years away and the taste uncovered almost limitless sets of feelings and memories – of summers on the island, of drinks with friends and comrades in bars around Plaza Universidad in Barcelona after meetings in the university – all of them mixed in her mind now with pleasure. She closed her eyes and drank the beer down; one of her companions ordered her another before showing her a rolled joint and asking her if she wanted to come around the corner with him and his friend and smoke it. As she looked at the group she was with, she understood that their mixture of speedy determination and mellow humour came from the fact that they were all stoned. It was something, she thought, she should have noticed the second she saw them on the street.

Outside, she was shocked at the openness with which they smoked the joint, the nonchalant way it was passed from one to the other. Although many people went by, no one seemed to care. Her two companions were from Barcelona but she knew them both from the island rather than from the city. The taller one she had known as Nando, but he now was called Ferran, which she thought was funny; the other had always been Oriol. She understood that, by coming out now with them like this into the street, she had at least left it open to one of them to move closer to her and stick with her for the rest of the night. If she didn’t want this, she knew she should move back into the bar soon and leave them there. They would know not to pursue her. She took a few more puffs on the joint and drank the cold beer; she thought about it as she looked at the two of them. They had a lovely way of pretending that this was all nothing, but she knew from the way they stood that they were waiting for her to stay with them or go back in. She shrugged and leaned against the wall and decided to let things happen, to linger here, to make no decisions, to let Ferran and Oriol work it out between them. But if one of them wanted to stay near her as they walked the streets, if one of them wanted to get drinks for her in bars and go to the beach with her when the sun came up, then that, she thought, would be fine.

Once they both seemed to know that she was going to stick with them, she almost laughed out loud at their different ways of being the one who might end up with her. She was tempted to ask them if there was a shortage of women on the island. And she found herself giggling at the thought that every mother in Menorca was keeping her daughters indoors, away from the clutches of Ferran and Oriol. Ferran tried to talk to her, explaining something about the house they were all staying in, his Catalan filled with Spanish slang words and some local terms; she enjoyed how he was barely making any sense. Oriol simply stood by looking cool. His hair was long, his jeans were tight, he was skinny like a rock star. He managed to be part of the conversation without saying anything; she was tempted for a moment to poke him in the stomach and ask him to rescue Ferran, who in mid-story had lost his way. When they finished the joint, they went back into the bar and found the others, who were ready to move on.

In the next bar they ordered gin and tonics; the music was too loud for anyone to speak much, so Ferran and Oriol just hovered, Ferran swaying and smiling, Oriol remaining more mellow and distant. For a second, when Oriol brushed his hair back, she noticed how beautiful his face was. He saw her looking at him and smiled with a look of recognition that was proud, almost self-regarding. And that made her turn towards Ferran and say something to him that she knew he would not be able to hear; they moved closer to each other. And once he let his arm linger around her waist, she brushed against him and then moved away. It was enough to signal that, unless something happened, she would stay with him for the rest of the night.

The next bar they went to had softer music. They found places to sit and were joined by other friends of the group. She liked the way Ferran left her alone and Oriol admitted defeat by keeping away; Ferran did not try to impose himself on her, but talked to the others and went regularly to the bar, but he remained within her orbit and made sure she understood that he was not going anywhere without her. Eventually he came over to tell her that one of the group wanted to go up to the convent and wait outside, that the horses and riders before going to the beach for the jousting were going to visit the nuns, who would be awake before dawn. They were all going to go soon, he said, when they were finished these drinks, or it might be a while more. There was no point in being there too early, he said, as the nuns might not be dressed yet.

She laughed and said that the nuns would, no doubt, be delighted to see them all. He sat beside her. For a moment she thought that he was going to kiss her, but he was distracted by something and instead merely looked at her closely several times, the expression on his face serious. As she sipped her drink, she felt tired and was almost sorry she had stayed out so late; she wondered if she might go. But then, when the music changed and became louder, she settled back in her seat and enjoyed being tired. When Ferran suggested that they go outside and smoke another joint, she stood up and followed him.