Autumn in Catalonia

by Jane MacKenzie

  ‘Come with me then, Avia,’ she said, picking up Grandma’s bag to carry it through to the corridor. ‘Come and help me with the hostel so they don’t take too much money from me when I leave. And come and vet my young man. And I’ll tell you what – if the university stands in my way I’ll send you to see the vice chancellor himself!’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It had been a tough four months but Carla was holding together, and, even better, was forging forward towards her final exams. It was the miracle of family which had got her there, and though her savings were exhausted, by living frugally she knew she could finish the year.

  She had no idea if Sergi was still having her watched. She’d stayed away from all public demonstrations, telling Luc to work twice as hard to represent them both. And as far as the world was concerned, she hoped her relationship with Luc had become invisible. She visited him still, but never heading to his flat directly from home, and always checking that his street was empty before she entered his building. They had the occasional coffee together in the canteen, but no longer went out on their own together in Barcelona.

  Their fellow students seemed to understand – it had long been known that Carla’s father was a threat, after all. No questions were asked, and Carla thought that most of them were quite simply relieved that she’d withdrawn from their activities. She envied them their insouciance.

  When they won the student elections in March she celebrated with them over coffee, safe in the canteen, and stayed at the opposite side of the table to Luc. Luc himself was surrounded by his beloved campaign team, and lost to all else but the joy of success. Manel sat beside him, Manel whom they’d finally succeeded in getting elected to the student union.

  It did feel like democracy, like hope, even to Carla. You could still believe, after all, even if you were straitjacketed. She watched Luc, happy and smiling – that smile which brought his whole knobbly face into harmony and made him, for Carla, the most beautiful man in the world. There was her real hope – it resided with Luc.

  He looked across at her. ‘Catch!’ he said, and tossed half a doughnut across the table. It landed on the edge of her coffee cup, sending splashes of hot, black espresso all over the table. Carla pushed her chair back in a hurry, while across the table Manel was dabbing furiously at his sleeve.

  ‘You oaf!’ he swore at Luc. ‘Look what you’ve done to my shirt!’

  Carla had to laugh. Luc was looking bewildered, as if he couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. But we all know, she thought. You’re a hopeless big lump!

  ‘Amateur!’ she crooned at him, and flicked the flat doughnut expertly back across the table so it landed beside his plate.

  He grinned. ‘Did I splatter you?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Not a stain on me. It’s Manel who caught it. But you spilt my coffee, and I can’t afford another, so you owe me!’

  ‘That’s fine, then. Waiter, another espresso for the lady, please.’

  ‘And my shirt?’ Manel was indignant.

  ‘Chivalry, my boy, have some chivalry! The lady is fine so all is fine! Give it to your landlady to wash. Are you sure you don’t want this half doughnut, Carla? No? Manel, then? It’s not quite your grandmother’s Easter bunyol but it’s the best this canteen can offer.’

  ‘But it’s not even Easter!’ Manel protested. ‘Not for weeks! If you throw bunyols around from now till then I’ll need a whole new wardrobe! And now I’m an official I need decent clothes!’

  Luc waved an oversized hand in dismissal. ‘Do we care about your clothes? We’ve just made history, for heaven’s sake! It’s not just you, Manel. We actually got Roc Pujol elected as regional president! I still can’t believe it, and I doubt if the authorities can either!’

  ‘If they let the result stand,’ a negative voice sounded from the corner.

  Six voices shot him down. Sure they would let it stand! Hadn’t they already won freer access to the library, new books, even won some concessions on the Catalan language? This is a new era – Franco is seventy, for goodness’ sake – and it’s not just us, all over Spain things are changing – have some faith, man!

  Carla sat silent, listening to the exultant voices. They’re right, she thought. Things really are changing and they can’t put the genie back in the bottle now that we’ve let it out. The students were right to feel buoyant. She might have personal worries, but people like her father couldn’t stop the movement of change.

  She looked across again at Luc and caught him winking at her. She smiled back, and a little flare of the old happiness hit her. Life was complicated, but Luc was not. Huge, kind Luc, who took life methodically, and never gave in to irrational fears, or worried about what couldn’t be done, or what might never happen. We’ll have finished our studies by July, she thought, and then we’ll go away, far away, where my father won’t think to look for us. But there was a cloud – something she needed to tell him. Something new, she thought, groaning inwardly, in all the complications I bring to him.

  ‘You coming, Carla?’ Luc asked her, and she realised with a jolt that the others had all stood up, and were preparing to leave. She grabbed her woollen jacket and joined Luc at the door. The whole group burst from the canteen and erupted out of the campus and onto La Rambla, twirling their new delegate Manel around remorselessly between them in the spring sunshine. The trees were putting on leaves now, and even some of the awnings were out in front of the cafés. It was too early in the day for the cafés to be full, but late enough for people to be on the move, and as the students headed down towards the port, and then veered off towards the cathedral, their capering drew smiles from the strolling couples, and frowns from some of the men in grey raincoats, all urgently heading somewhere, their trilbies dipped over their foreheads.

  The destination for the students was a little café on the corner behind the cathedral, where they headed not for the terrace but to the deep inner recesses of the dark, panelled bar, where jazz music played all day, except when owner Andreu brought out his gralla, playing old Catalan tunes while his customers sang along with enthusiastic disdain for official disapproval. Carla went inside hesitantly with the group, hoping that no one was following her.

  Their boisterous entrance brought grizzle-haired Andreu out from his little kitchen. He gave them a forbearing look. ‘A celebration, my little ones? Coffee, perhaps?’

  ‘Cava, Andreu! Bring us cava! This is no ordinary day!’

  A bottle appeared, and glasses, and Luc proceeded to pour. Carla shook her head at him.

  ‘Not for me,’ she muttered, flushing. There was no money for wine, only a few pesetas from her tutoring job to get her to the end of the month, but Luc waved his hand at her. ‘On me,’ he mouthed.

  ‘Again?’ she protested, but he simply grinned and passed her a glass.

  ‘To the new Students’ Union!’ a toast was proposed.

  ‘To our Manel! Our own private union official!’

  ‘You know what your first job has to be, Manel? Stop all this talk of giving an honorary degree to Franco!’

  ‘Yeah, right! What would that be for, I wonder? For reaching the age of senility without any more education than you started with?’

  Around the table flew the seditious chat, and Carla looked around, checking that there was no one who could hear them. Two men sat just inside the doorway drinking coffee. Surely she’d never seen those two here before? Were they known to Andreu? She saw him coming towards them, a slight frown on his face.

  ‘Careful, boys, careful!’ she murmured. Luc looked up at Andreu, smiled irrepressibly, and raised his glass for one more toast.

  ‘To Andreu, who runs the best bar in Barcelona, and who puts up with some of the rowdiest, most nonsensical students in the city!’

  Andreu smiled, and a moment later the two men paid their bill and left. She’d overreacted as usual, Carla thought. But she was relieved, nonetheless, when the party broke up, an hour later, and the students all headed for home. They emerged
into the advancing chill of early evening, and Luc looked invitingly at Carla.

  ‘Coffee at my place?’ he asked, and she nodded.

  ‘I don’t have to be back for dinner for a while. Uncle Josep won’t be home from work for at least an hour.’ She thought about the risk, but there was something she needed to tell Luc, and they needed to be alone.

  ‘Mmm, nice!’ Luc replied. ‘Well my dinner will be whatever the corner café is serving up tonight, so I’m not in any hurry!’

  ‘Not too hungry, after you only ate three bunyettes this afternoon?’

  ‘Less of your cheek – I gave half of one away, remember?’

  Carla insisted that they take separate routes to his flat. No one was following her, she was as sure as she could be of that, but she felt relieved nevertheless when she closed the door of Luc’s room behind her. She stood watching the sun set over the rooftops as Luc made coffee on the gas canister. When he came out to join her she leant back against him, and held his arms around her. A smell of baking bread came up to them from the street below.

  ‘Doesn’t that smell make you hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘Not for food!’ he said, his chin nuzzling into her hair. ‘Remember the three bunyettes!’

  She turned in his arms to face him, and he studied her face, his grey eyes looking deep into hers.

  ‘You’ve been quiet today,’ he said. ‘Not quite with us, if you know what I mean.’

  Her face twitched, and he said, ‘What is it, Carla? Is it your family?’

  She leant upwards to kiss the curved tip of his oversized nose. ‘No, not my family, but …’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Luc, I’m late. My period, I mean. I’ve been waiting and waiting, but nothing. I thought it was just that I’m stressed, but no, it’s more than that.’

  She looked up anxiously into his face, waiting. He said nothing, and his eyes were unreadable, but she was never scared with Luc, never wary. He was too free of fear and convention himself.

  Since she’d met him she’d always wished she could be more like him. But their upbringings were so different. She thought back to the visit to Luc’s parents, which had finally been paid a couple of months ago. If she closed her eyes it all came vividly before her, the run-down old villa on the edge of Terrassa, just a couple of hours’ journey away, with its grounds given over to vegetables, and its faded interior overrun by books and papers, and pottering around inside it, Luc’s easy-going, unhurried parents.

  Luc’s father had worked with the Republicans during the Civil War as an army medic, and had been first imprisoned by the Franco regime, then banned from working as a state doctor. He’d responded by setting up a private practice offering alternative therapies. Harried endlessly through the years by the authorities, he had nevertheless built up a small, faithful clientele, and did rural work to reach villages which no doctor bothered with.

  They’d spent the day trekking through the Sant Llorenç hills, Carla, Luc, his mother, and his equally huge, bear-like brother, picnicking in the winter sunshine and returning to find two neighbourhood policemen on the doorstep, brought by complaints about the leaves drowning the drive. Luc’s mother had sighed. ‘We have no help,’ she’d explained to the policemen, with a conspiratorial smile that almost had them smiling in return. ‘But of course while I have my sons here we will clear the drive and the pavement outside.’

  They’d all cleared the drive together, Luc’s father even emerging from his study to chase swirling leaves in exasperated futility.

  ‘We’ll do all this, my dear, and then when the boys go away more leaves will blow our way, or the neighbours will find some other irritation to complain about.’

  He looked ruefully over his round-rimmed, wire spectacles at Carla. ‘We don’t have many friends here in Spain,’ he explained, rather unnecessarily, ‘but we are blessed by a wonderful group of friends overseas, and some have even been to visit us in the last few years. We bumble along, you know, we bumble along. Nowadays it’s just those harmless, boy policemen who come to see us, not the Civil Guard, like in the old days.’

  Long may it stay that way, thought Carla. She had been less surprised, after that visit, by the casual freedom of thought which characterised Luc, and which made her gulp at times. Right now his reaction could be interesting, but it was unlikely to be orthodox. He’ll handle this a whole lot better than me, she thought, as she scanned his face.

  The silence stretched between them, just seconds perhaps, though it seemed more, and then, without saying a word, Luc drew her to him and led her through to the little room, pulling her down onto the bed beside him. There he curled her and crooked his arms around her from behind, cradling her close, whispering into her ear.

  ‘And my chamois thinks it’s bad news?’ His voice hugged her, reassured her, and defied her, as he always did, to be anything but happy. What to say? He didn’t have her family, her past. She couldn’t be happy-go-lucky like him. Yes, it was bad news because they weren’t free yet. Because she wanted to escape first, and work beside Luc, and build a future, not to burden him with a child when they had nothing. He called her his chamois because she was all brown hair and brown skin, but also because she was slight and svelte and tall and athletic. A woman who was alive, alert, who could work, who could contend with anything. A mountain goat could pass anywhere, skip nimbly through difficulties, leap upwards away from danger. A pregnant human was another thing altogether, it seemed to her, and a baby was something she didn’t have the place to protect, not yet, not till she was free.

  She told him, and he listened, propped on his elbow so he could see her face. He didn’t belittle her fears. He knew how real they were. She had plumped up the pillows behind her so that she was almost sitting up. The bed served as their sofa in Luc’s tiny room. She pulled at a fray in the bedcover and waited for his reply.

  ‘We have to think,’ he acknowledged, after a while. ‘You’re pregnant, and we’re going to have a baby. That’s a given. It’s also a given that I want to marry you, and you know that very well. Even without a baby we were going to marry, vida meva, and if we’re going to go away together in the summer we have to be married anyway before we go, otherwise how would we get lodgings, or register for work?’

  ‘We’ve never talked about how we were going to manage things.’

  ‘I know, we’ve been stupid. It’s March already, and by July we’ll have finished all the exams and hopefully have graduation documents. My brother’s been working on getting me into his company, in their accounts office. It would be a start.’

  ‘Is Lleida far enough away?’ Carla was doubtful.

  ‘Is anywhere far enough away? Talk to me, Carla, now. Tell me really how far your father will go to control your life. If you disappear and change your name, will he really scour Spain looking for you?’

  ‘I wish I knew the answer to that myself,’ she sighed. She cast her mind back to that last meeting with Sergi Olivera. What was it he’d said to her? ‘You’re a shame to my name and I wish you didn’t bear it. But while you’re known to be my daughter you’ll toe the line or I’ll simply make you.’

  Did that mean that if she changed her name and no one knew who she was anymore he’d let her go?

  ‘He needs to be in control,’ she tried to explain to Luc. ‘I think he hates me in a way just for being a girl, since I’m the only child. His brother has a son in the officer corps, and he would have loved that, some fine young man to show off to his political connections. I wasn’t even cute as a child, and that must have disappointed him too, because to him women are there to adorn his life and to caress him, and to keep house and keep quiet. That’s what my mother does. She can be as sharp as hell with everyone else, but when she’s around my father she defers to him all the time, and when he gets angry and hits her she says sorry even when she’s done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Does he hit you too?’

  ‘Oh yes, sometimes.’ Carla stroked her cheek in remembrance. ‘Especially as I got
older and became difficult. I just couldn’t be the frilly little girl he wanted, and I had my nose stuck in a book the whole time. At one time he even banned me from reading, and I had to hide in my room and keep my books under my bed. Even when he agreed, finally, to let me study he made me change my choice of degree from law to history, because no woman could ever make a real lawyer. He’s crude, and basic, and has manipulated his way to the top, and I hate him, Luc. I hate him so much I just can’t hide it, and so he hates me even more, and wants to control me more, and keep me down, and down, and down.’

  Luc shifted his position on the bed so he was beside Carla on the pillows, and took her into his arms.

  ‘Don’t cry, carinyo,’ he said quietly, into her hair.

  ‘No,’ she answered, blinking back the tears, and taking a deep breath. ‘Sorry! That’s why I don’t talk about him, because it gets to me like that.’

  ‘But that doesn’t answer the question,’ he brought her back to the main issue. ‘Will he take his need for control far enough to track you if you disappear? After all, he has already disowned you!’

  ‘It will depend whether he thinks I could damage his name in any way, I guess.’

  ‘Like by marrying the son of an outlawed Republican medic?’

  Carla grinned, and dropped a kiss on the hand that was hugging her close. ‘Exactly, and even more so if he has led a student revolt!’

  ‘I’ve been nothing in the revolt, really, but I do take your point! But you know, your father won’t want you to marry some high-up official either, because from what you’re telling me he would never believe you would behave yourself! I can’t help thinking if you just quietly disappear he would be quite relieved!’

  ‘He might. You’re actually quite possibly right. As long as he doesn’t learn about you, though.’

  ‘There’s no reason why, not when you’ve been so careful. I have to admit I thought all the subterfuge was excessive, but now I can see you were right.’