A Long Petal of the Sea(6)

Victor agreed with his father in principle, but tried to escape his lectures, which were almost always the same. Nor did Victor talk about politics with his mother; he restricted himself to helping her teach the militiamen literacy in the basement of a brewery. A high school teacher for many years, Carme thought education was as important as bread, and that anyone who could read and write had a duty to teach those abilities to others. For her, the classes they gave the militiamen were no more than her usual routine, but to Victor they were torture. “They’re like donkeys!” he would protest, frustrated at spending two hours on the letter A. “They’re no such thing! These boys have never seen an alphabet. I’d like to see how you’d manage behind a plow,” his mother would respond.

It was thanks to Carme, afraid her son might end up as a hermit, that from an early age Victor learned to play popular tunes on his guitar. He had a caressing tenor voice that contrasted with his awkward physique and stern expression. Sheltering behind his guitar, he was able to conceal his shyness, avoid banal conversations that irritated him, and yet appear to be joining in with the others. Girls were unaware of his presence until they heard him sing, but when they did, they crowded around and invariably ended up singing along. Afterward they would whisper among themselves that the older Dalmau boy was quite good-looking, even though obviously he couldn’t hold a candle to his brother, Guillem.



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THE MOST OUTSTANDING PIANIST among Professor Dalmau’s students was Roser Bruguera, a young girl from the village of Santa Fe de Segarra who, had it not been for the generous intervention of Santiago Guzman, would have shepherded goats all her life. Guzman, from an illustrious family that had fallen on hard times thanks to generations of lazy sons who squandered money and land, was spending his last years in an isolated mansion surrounded by mountains and rocks, but full of sentimental memories. He had been a professor of history at the Central University in the days of King Alfonso XII, and remained quite active despite his advanced years. He went out every day, in the fierce August sun and the icy January winds, walking for hours with his pilgrim’s staff, battered leather hat, and hunting dog. His wife was lost in the labyrinths of dementia, and spent her days being cared for inside the house, creating monsters with paper and paint. In the village she was known as the Gentle Lunatic, and that’s what she was: she didn’t cause any problems, apart from her tendency to get lost as she set off toward the horizon, and to paint the walls with her own excrement.

Roser was about seven years old when, on one of his walks, Don Santiago saw her looking after a few skinny goats. Exchanging a few words with her was enough for him to realize that she possessed a lively and inquiring mind. The professor and the little goatherd established a strange friendship based on the lessons in culture he gave her, and her desire to learn. One winter’s day, when he came upon her crouched, shivering in a ditch with her three goats, soaked from the rain and flushed with fever, Don Santiago tied up the goats and slung her over his shoulder like a sack, thankful she was so small and weighed so little. Even so, the effort almost killed him, and after a few steps he gave up. Leaving her where she was, he hurried on and called to one of his laborers, who carried her to the house. Don Santiago told his cook to give her something to eat, then instructed his housemaids to prepare a bath and bed for her, and the stable boy to go first to Santa Fe and find the doctor, and then to look for the goats before someone stole them.



The doctor said the girl had influenza and was malnourished. She also had scabies and lice. Since nobody came to the Guzman house asking after her either on that day or any of the following ones, they assumed she was an orphan, until in the end they asked her directly and she explained that her family lived on the other side of the mountain. In spite of being as frail as a partridge, the young girl recovered rapidly, because she turned out to be stronger than she looked. She allowed them to shave her head to get rid of the lice, and didn’t resist the sulfur treatment they used for the scabies. She ate voraciously and showed signs of having a placid temperament that was at odds with her sad situation.

In the weeks she spent in the mansion, everyone, from the delirious mistress to all the servants, became deeply attached to her. They had never had a little girl in that stone house, which was haunted by semi-feral cats and ghosts from past ages. The most infatuated was the professor, who was vividly reminded of the privilege of teaching an avid mind, but even he realized that her stay with them could not go on forever. He waited for her to recover completely and to put some flesh on her bones, then decided to visit the far side of the mountain and tell her negligent parents a few hard truths. Ignoring his wife’s pleas, he installed her, well wrapped up, in his carriage and took off.

They came to a low muddy shack at the edge of the village, one of many wretched places in the area. The peasants lived on starvation wages, working on the land as serfs for big landowners or the Church. The professor called out, and several frightened children came to the door, followed by a witch dressed in black. She was not, as Don Santiago first thought, the girl’s great-grandmother, but was in fact Roser’s mother. These villagers had never received the visit of a carriage with gleaming horses before, and were dumbstruck when they saw Roser climbing out of it with such a distinguished-looking gentleman. “I’ve come to talk to you about this child,” Don Santiago began in the authoritarian tone that had once struck fear into his university students. Before he could continue, the woman grabbed Roser by the hair and started shouting and slapping her, accusing her of the loss of their goats. The professor immediately understood there was no point reproaching this exhausted woman for anything, and on the spot came up with a plan that would drastically alter the girl’s destiny.