Smells

My mother has just rung the bell of my paternal grandparents' apartment in Barcelona when she spots a smudge of chocolate on my chin. She whips a handkerchief out of her purse, spits on it, and rubs frantically at the spot. As the peculiar smell of her saliva drying on my skin starts to fade, the door opens and my tiny black-clad grandmother, tottering in her high heels, ushers us into the apartment. She gives me a kiss, and I feel the soft, almost invisible down on her cheek, and smell her special smell: toasted almonds. Why my city grandmother should smell of toasted almonds doesn't make sense to me, because it is my country grandmother, my mother's mother, who cracks and toasts the almonds from her trees and sends them to us by train in the fall, to eat along with the raisins that she dries in her attic.

Barcelona smells of diesel, with its citrusy undertones. The fish market smells of fish and wet floors. My parents' bedroom smells of the abominable camphor and menthol salve that my mother rubs on my chest when I suffer one of my endless colds, and of the lavender eau de cologne that she applies to my temples to relieve my frequent stomach upsets.

But I am never sick in the summer. We spend it on my maternal grandparents' farm, which provides an a three-month olfactory orgy.  Guided by my nose, I sniff and snuffle my way from house, to yard, to stable, to fields. There is the hot, dry smell of the chicken coop, and the moister, lower notes of the pig house. There is the metallic smell of the dust on the roads when it begins to rain, and the rancid smell of the sheep as they are driven home from pasture in the late afternoon. 

My  mother and her sisters are forever passing judgment on smells--disgusting! (of the manure pile); delicious! (of the sun-warmed melons from my grandfather's garden). Unlike them, I am an impartial observer of odors, treating them simply as data points to help me navigate the world. The only smell I despise is the acrid stench of the Flit that my grandmother sprays in the dining room to kill flies before each meal.

I am strongly attuned to the individual smells of the grownups in my family. The American devotion to deodorant and daily showers has not yet penetrated European culture, and everybody past puberty possesses copious underarm hair. This gives each of my relatives a signature bouquet that is as much a part of their persona as the shape of their nose or the alignment of their teeth. I do not find it unpleasant.

My olfactory connoisseurship reaches new heights one day when I come across my aunt folding a stack of laundered undershirts belonging to my father, my grandfather, and my uncle. They are all white and  sleeveless, identical but for a red initial sewn inside the neckline. Showing off, I tell my aunt that, if I close my eyes, I can tell which shirt belongs to whom by its smell. 

"But the shirts just came off the clothesline," she says. "They don't have any smell." I assure her that they do. "Go ahead, then" she laughs, and hands me a shirt. I squeeze my eyes shut, sniff, and identify the shirt as belonging to my grandfather.

"That was just coincidence," she says. "Smell this one." I correctly attribute the second shirt to my uncle. The game goes on until we run out of undershirts. My aunt goes to find my mother. "Your daughter," she says, "is part hunting dog."

Other than the undershirt game that I play with my aunt, I keep my olfactory adventures to myself, and ask no questions, especially about one smell that I find puzzling. When I raise my arms to embrace my mother around her waist, and press my face against her belly, I sometimes perceive an odor that reminds me of the smell of fresh sardines, and whose source will remain a mystery for the rest of my childhood.

Drowned Men's Undershirts

Summer, 1947. My grandparents’ farm, in a valley at the foot of the Pyrenees. In the afternoon, after the siesta, which is necessary because being out in the midday sun is considered suicidal, my parents take me along on their walk. 

First, however, we have to find the sailor hat without which I am not allowed to go outdoors. My mother has a complicated relationship to the sun. On the one hand, she thinks it essential to my proper growth, and after one week in the country I turn as dark as a hazelnut, a process that the entire family encourages and applauds. 

On the other hand, going outside without a hat puts me in immediate danger of catching an insolació (sunstroke), believed to cause malaise, fits, and hallucinations. When my mother warns me against insolació, I imagine the hot yellow sun drilling into my skull, gilding my brain and the inside of my face and my throat all the way down to my stomach, making me glow like a lightbulb. 

The fact that my Mediterranean DNA has provided me from birth with an inch-thick thatch of hair to protect me from the rays of our favorite star does not assuage my mother’s fears. When she finds the white sailor hat, she plops it on top of my curls and leads me out the back door. A couple of semi-feral barn cats, alerted to the possibility of bread crusts by the squeaky hinges, scatter when they see my empty hands. 

My parents’ afternoon walks are of two kinds. The short version takes us along the dirt road from the farm house, past a wheat field, up a gentle slope to the threshing floor and the big hay barn. The long walk leads to the irrigation canal that, first envisioned by the Arabs in the 10^th century and completed in the early years of the 20^th, transformed the valley from a semi-arid wasteland into a paradise of green fields and almond, olive, and fruit orchards. 

The canal’s broad swath of brown water runs placidly between high banks bordered by shade trees. My parents and I walk on the narrow path alongside, my father holding my left hand and my mother my right to prevent me from succumbing to a fit of toddler insanity and diving in. 

We’ve been walking a while, and I’m getting bored. I want to go back to the house. “But we can’t go back now,” my father says. “We’re almost at the weir. Don’t you want to see the waterfall?” Long before we reach it, I can hear the water rushing over the top of the weir wall. I can tell that we are getting closer because my mother tightens her grip on my hand, the way she does in Barcelona when we are about to cross the street. At the fall, my father picks me up so I can see the thrilling sight. 

I am both horrified and fascinated by the noise, which is louder even than the thunderstorms that we watch from the covered terrace of the farmhouse. And I am intrigued by the water, which was a dull sepia in the peaceful stretches, but now gradually pales as it plunges until, at the bottom, it forms a roiling, boiling mass of bright white spume. 

“That’s enough, Lluís,” my mother says. “Get away from there. You’re making me nervous.” My father retreats, and puts me down, repeating the lesson I have heard a thousand times, “You know that you must never, ever go near the water, especially here at the weir.” And this time my mother adds something new: “The waterfall is so dangerous, that even grown men have fallen in and drowned.” 

Grown men drowned in the canal! My mind, ever determined to make sense of the world’s weirdness, seizes on this as the obvious explanation for the white froth churning at the bottom of the fall: it consists of the drowned men’s undershirts. 

My parents take my hands and we turn back towards the house, and my afternoon snack (dinner is at 10 p.m.). In the damp, shadowy kitchen, which smells of drains and potato peels, my grandmother drizzles olive oil onto a thick slice of crusty bread. 

“Where did you go on your walk?” she asks. 

“We went to the canal, all the way to the weir, and I saw the undershirts of the drowned men.” 

“The undershirts of…” she echoes, peering at me closely. 

She hands me the bread, wipes her hands on her apron, and goes to find my mother. “Did the child wear her hat when you took her out this afternoon? I ask because she may have caught an insolació . She said she had seen the undershirts of drowned men….” 

My parents and I on the canal path

Baby Carriage

The vehicle in which I rode as an infant was a kind of horseless barouche, black as a hearse, with a large hood that could be folded back to allow for the beneficial effects of sunshine. Set high on its four wheels, it enabled the adult pushing it to maintain uninterrupted eye contact with the infant contained in its depths. It had excellent suspension—I can still feel its comfortable bounce as my mother wheeled me over the cobbled streets of Barcelona. 

Once I was old enough to sit up, my mother removed the middle portion of the carriage bed, which left two small benches at either end. How I loved those benches! The endless possibility of choice they offered--now the front one! Now the back one!--in a life otherwise ruled entirely by others, made me feel powerful, self-reliant, free. 

I owe my earliest memory to that baby carriage. It is the summer before my first birthday—it has to be summer because in the photo the carriage is parked on a dirt road, and dirt roads belonged to summer. Someone is telling me to be still so that I can have my picture taken, but instead of sitting still I plop my bottom back and forth from one of the little benches to the other. With the big head and black hair of a court dwarf by Velázquez, my eyes squinting in the sun and my tongue poking out of my toothless mouth, I am being disobedient, and bursting at the seams with the sheer gloriousness of me. 

There is no question of the identity of the photographer. My father’s camera is as much an expression of his masculinity as his violin, and it would no more occur to my mother to take a picture than he would be inspired to fry a sardine for my dinner. I also know that my father was the photographer because of the certainty, which has remained intact for three-quarters of a century, that my momentary misbehavior is being watched with smiling benevolence, a quality that I associate with my father rather than my mother, who despite her affection is unswerving in the immediate enforcement of her commands. 

My father, summer-brown in his white polo shirt, the only garment that exposed his hairy forearms. My father, who loved the countryside with the fervent passion of the city-dweller and who, freed from the round of rehearsals and performances, would, during the siesta hour when he could neither practice the violin nor compose at the piano, take my grandparents’ horse and cart for a leisurely ride to the next village, feasting his eyes on the orchards, fields, and hedgerows of my mother’s native landscape. My father, the all-but invisible recorder of my childhood, who would suddenly materialize with his camera, saying, “Quick, go outside! I want to take your picture.” 

And I would stand, more obediently with each passing year, my espadrilles sunk in white summer dust, my skin tanned the color of a hazelnut, and my eyes squeezed tight against the glare of the Mediterranean sun.

 

First Communion

“Don’t disturb your mother! She’s embroidering your veil.” It’s August, 1951.There is an old sheet spread on the terrace of my grandparents’ farm house, and my mother sits on a low chair in the center, a billow of white tulle on her lap. She is embroidering a wide border of leaves, tendrils, and flowers around the edge of my First Communion veil, which reaches from my head to my feet. I have been told that in the coming years she will embroider the center, and I will wear this same veil at my wedding.

“Somebody wash this child’s neck, and her feet too. The dressmaker is almost here. She can’t see her like this!” The dressmaker is coming for the final fitting of my white organdy First Communion dress: long sleeves, tiny tucks across the bodice, full gathered skirt all the way to the floor. And, underneath, a long white slip to match.

“Let’s review the Commandments,” my aunt Xin says. “You have your test with Mossèn Ignaci this afternoon.” Mossèn Ignaci, the kindly old priest who married my parents, has acceded to let me make my First Communion early. He has been assured by the family that I am an unusually well-behaved, compliant child, and that I already know my prayers and most of the Catechism, so there is no need to wait for my seventh birthday, which is when, according to the Church, I will attain the age of reason.

In the sacristy, Mossèn Ignaci tests me on the Hail Mary and the Our Father, and also on the commandments about honoring my father and mother, skipping the ones about adultery and coveting my neighbor’s wife. And then we practice the communion itself. He takes an unconsecrated host from a box and puts it on my tongue, explaining that I must let it dissolve instead of chewing it. The little wafer tastes sweet, and before I can swallow it he feeds me another one, and another, as if they were candy, so that I have no choice but to chew them a little bit. 

The day before the ceremony, my father takes me to make my first confession.  I have scoured my brain for sins ahead of time, and have come up with “I have forgotten to say my prayers,” and “I have been distracted at Mass”—sins that will come in handy for something to say during my next fourteen years of weekly confessions.

Mossèn Ignaci is hidden inside the confessional, but I can hear him breathing.  After I finish listing my sins he gives me a penance (three Hail Marys), and absolution. But it’s dark in the confessional, and I can’t tell whether the little door behind the grille is now closed, or still open. Should I leave? I wait patiently until my father, wondering what on earth I could be confessing for such a long while, comes to rescue me.

The next morning, standing in my pristine white shoes, socks, and underpants, I hold up my arms as my aunts slide the chilly, silky long slip over my torso, followed by the crisp white dress which fastens down the back in a row of tiny cloth-covered buttons that look like the mushrooms that come up in the fall after a rain. My hair is arranged in untidy corkscrew curls (“Too much hair!” my aunts exclaim before giving up). Then the magnificently embroidered veil is placed over my head (“It almost cost your mother her eyesight!” they remind me) and secured with a crown of white silk flowers.

My mother’s mother comes in, holding the all-important First Communion medal, a bas-relief ivory Madonna set in gold, hanging from a gold chain which she fastens around my neck. My tiny paternal grandmother totters in on her high heels and gives me my First Communion ring (“a bracelet for your finger”).

Somebody puts white gloves on my hands (“Don’t touch anything!”) and hangs my First Communion bag, filled with little cards commemorating the occasion, from my left wrist. I pick up my First Communion missal, which has mother of pearl covers and a gold-colored clasp, and we are ready to go.

It is a brilliant summer morning, the sun not yet hot. I set out from my grandparents’ house with my parents, my mother’s parents, her two sisters and her brother, my maternal great-aunt and -uncle, and, all the way from Barcelona, my father’s mother and father and his two sisters. We walk solemnly down the dusty road, into the village, past the parish church and the fountain with the seven spigots, then out of the village, past vineyards and wheat fields and garden allotments to the hermitage of Our Lady of the Orchard, where Mossèn Ignaci is waiting.

During Mass, I glance up at the statue of Our Lady of the Orchard, enthroned above the altar. It is a reproduction of the Romanesque original (the one supposedly found up in the elm tree by a shepherd), which was burned during the Spanish Civil War. She sits grave and impassive, her robes arranged in weirdly symmetrical folds, one hand on her Baby and, in the other, the sphere of the world.

I have some trouble managing my outfit: my long skirt catches under my shins when I kneel, and my First Communion bag gets tangled with my veil. At one point, I drop my missal with a clatter onto the stone flags. But the communion itself goes smoothly. I remember not to chew the host and, back in my pew, put my head in my hands as I’ve been taught and try to think about God.

Afterwards we march back to the house, the sun hotter now and everybody hungry because of the pre-communion fast. In the afternoon, the village children arrive and I, still in my long dress, distribute sugar-coated almonds in pale shades of pink, yellow, and blue.

Then comes a special treat: my father’s father, who is part owner of a magic shop in Barcelona, puts on a magic show. The other kids are transfixed as he manipulates playing cards, draws peseta coins out of their ears, and does odd things involving handkerchiefs and red cups and yellow balls. But magic tricks always leave me cold. They remind me of fabric flowers, which only look like the real thing. I’m after genuine magic--the mystery for which there are no words.

At the end of the day, after the children go home and I’m back in my short summer dress and espadrilles, the family sits under the apple tree by the well. I am still high on adrenaline and divine grace, racing around and begging the grownups to play with me. My father’s younger sister, Montserrat, plays hide-and-seek for a while, but then it’s bedtime, and as my mother tucks me in I burst into tears. “What’s the matter? Didn’t you have a wonderful First Communion?” she asks.

“Yes, yes, I did,” I answer.

“Then why are you crying?”

“It’s because I’ll never be able to look forward to making my First Communion, ever again,” I sob.

Which proves that it’s never too soon to learn that the happiest times are those we spend awaiting happiness.

The Madonna in the Tree

That magical summer of 1951 culminated in late August, when I made my first communion in the hermitage dedicated to Our Lady of the Orchards, Nostra Senyora de l’Horta--or, as I thought of her, the Madonna in the Tree. Surrounded by fields, gardens, and fruit trees, the tiny church still stands outside the village where my mother was born.

According to legend, the Madonna was discovered by a shepherd who had been napping under an elm in the middle of the orchard. He woke up and there she was, perched high among the branches. Leaving his sheep behind, the shepherd ran into the village and fetched the priest and the verger who, followed by a crowd of the devout, sped to the orchard, carefully cut down some branches, got the statue down, and carried her in solemn procession to the parish church that presides over the village square.

But the next morning, when the verger went to light the altar candles in preparation for Mass, the statue wasn’t there. Panic ensued. Who had made off with the Madonna—thieves, heretics, the devil himself? The village was searched high and low, from the mansion of the wealthy mule breeder to the hovel of the poorest laborer.

The frantic search continued until, once more, the shepherd arrived panting from the orchard.  “She’s in the tree again, right where I found her yesterday!” he gasped. The priest, the verger, and the congregants hurried to the elm, got the statue down, and returned her to what they believed was the more dignified environment of the village church. But the following morning she was back in her tree.

Worn down by the persistent Madonna, the villagers eventually gave up, and built her a little hermitage in the middle of the orchard, where she has remained ever since.

The orchard stands on ancient Roman soil, and the Romans had inherited from the Greeks the enchanting notion that every aspect of nature—trees, springs, the very air—was inhabited and protected by benevolent deities. Dryads lived in trees, and were said to bleed when the trees were cut down. Oreads haunted the breezes, and naiads swam like minnows in every stream. Even the bees had their special nymphs, the meliae. The earth’s fertility, being especially important, was attended by, among others, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Rhea and Hegemone.

I believe that my Madonna too is a member of that committee of goddesses. She is in charge of fruits and flowers but, in that arid climate, she is especially in charge of water. “Have mercy on us and give us rain, since you have the power,” pleads the old hymn that villagers sing on her feast day.

Compared to her naked pagan predecessors, she appears outwardly tamed and Christianized, but my Madonna, and the many like her who dot the Catalan landscape, is a recurrent manifestation of the eternal Mother, the Old Goddess whose fertility even today keeps the universe going. Our Lady of the Orchard bears witness to the human instinct to regard all of nature as animate, and to revere those aspects—air, water, plants—which give us life.

Today, with our eyes fixed on various screens, our ears connected to disembodied voices, and our skin sheltered from contact with the seasons, we need neither walk nor grow our food. We are in danger of forgetting our physical and spiritual dependence on Nature.

 Like the rest of the developed world, Catalonia is overrun with supermarkets and four-lane highways. But out in the countryside, next to a spring or on the side of a mountain, you can still find stone hermitages housing the local version of the Madonna. The ancient polichromed statues, some with dark faces and hands, look solemn and forbidding. Farmers and shepherds once entrusted them with the fertility of fields and ewes, and couples hoping for children still visit them sometimes. But the churches stand mostly empty now, and the old madonnas stare out at the shrinking fields and listen to the hum of distant traffic. Who heeds their message now?

I didn’t know any of this the summer of my first communion. All I knew was that I felt a kinship with the Madonna in the Tree. Like me, who dreaded the return to Barcelona at the end of every summer, she preferred the orchard and the spring, the sheep and the honeybee to the civilized comforts of the village. In the dark, gray days of winter, as I tunneled by metro between my parents’ apartment and my school, I would think of my Madonna in her silent orchard hermitage, listening to the wind and waiting for summer, like me.

Fetching Water

The summer of 1951, before I turned seven, was the best one ever. The sun shone brighter, the melons were bigger, and the four o’clocks massed against the side of my grandparents’ farm house breathed out clouds of scent during the endless evenings when, after supper, the family congregated under the apple tree by the well.

The well, the apple tree, my father, and me in 1946

 My parents, my grandparents, my mother’s two sisters and her brother, my grandmother’s sister and her husband, and three older cousins sat on the stone benches or on the brittle grass and talked while the stars came out and the frogs croaked by the stream.  When my father took out his pocket watch and said, “It’s time to go to the fountain, don’t you think?” the family, still talking, would process into the silent village, greeting the occasional black-clad woman sitting on the stoop (“bona nit!”).

In the empty square, they filled two enormous càntirs at the fountain that, day and night, disgorged water from an underground spring. The càntirs were large clay vessels shaped roughly like beehives and closed except for two openings at the top, one for filling and another smaller one for drinking. In the dry Mediterranean climate, and thanks to the complex physics of evaporation, càntirs have been used to keep water cold for over four thousand years.

Although the water that came out of the kitchen and bathroom spigots was perfectly drinkable, once you had tasted water from the village fountain you never wanted to drink anything else. The entire family drank out of the same càntir. This was possible because, unlike me, the adults had mastered the skill of lifting the vessel high and tilting the head just right so that the water poured into the mouth without the lips ever touching the càntir. But the càntir was too heavy for me to lift, so when I wanted a drink someone would hold it above my open mouth and trickle the delicious, cold water onto my tongue.

 That summer, I was occasionally allowed to accompany the family on their nightly errand to the fountain. Proud and thrilled to be up so late, I walked along, scuffing my espadrilles on the dusty road, engulfed in the endless stream of talk.

On the way back to the house, the men would carry the full, heavy càntirs on their shoulders while the women entreated them not to spill a single drop. My aunt Xin would show me the Milky Way, known in Catalan as el camí de Sant Jaume (the road of Saint James), because in medieval times it was said to point pilgrims to the shrine in faraway Compostela, on the northwest coast of Spain.

“Look at all those stars!” Xin would say. “They look like clouds, don’t they? But do you know what they really are? They are the dust that Saint James’s white horse kicked up as it galloped towards Compostela.”

I was well acquainted with dust. Every day as I wandered on the dry summer roads, passing flocks of sheep or the occasional motorcycle would leave me dust-covered in their wake. Saint James, I reflected, must have had an enormous horse to kick up an entire galaxy of dust. And, I wondered, did the horse really gallop because it was in a hurry to get to Compostela? It seemed more likely to me, knowing the skittish nature of the species, that it had been frightened by those two bears grazing nearby, Ursa Major and her smaller friend, Ursa Minor.

Back at the house, I would beg someone to give me one last drink from the càntir before I was sent to bed. And I would fall asleep with the feel of dust between my toes, the cool earthiness of the water in my mouth, and the image of Saint James’s great horse cantering and curvetting in the sky.

Of Uncles And Equines

My favorite uncle, the husband of my grandmother's sister, was that rarity: a schoolmaster who adored kids. Early in our acquaintance we cast each other in roles which we never tired of playing: he as a devil (un dimoni!) and I as his intended victim. He only actually chased me once. After that, he merely had to look at me sideways to send me fleeing with terror and delight down the long dark hallway of my parents' Barcelona apartment. But this was just our urban entertainment. In the summer, we had my grandparents' entire farm for our adventures.

One summer my grandfather got a mother/daughter pair of donkeys to work on the farm. I don't remember the daughter's name, but we named the mother La Reverències ("Curtsies") after her habit of suddenly bending one of her knees.

My uncle one day got permission from my grandfather to take my visiting boy cousins from Barcelona and me to ride the donkeys on the threshing floor in front of the barn, which sat far from the house on a slight rise beyond the vegetable garden and the wheat field. A bare flat space, the threshing floor had been baked granite-hard over the centuries by the sun and the enormous stone rollers that crushed the wheat at harvest time.

My grandfather agreed, with the proviso that my uncle ride with me, to prevent accidents. So while my cousins took turns riding the younger donkey, my uncle and I got on La Reverències. The sun was beating down on our heads, the cicadas were going full blast, and the sky was so clear that I could see the Pyrenees in the distance as we made our way round and round the threshing ground.

The sun, the cicadas, and the slow clip-clop of the donkey's hooves had me in a kind of trance when, out of the blue, La Reverències curtsied and my uncle and I tobogganed neatly over her neck and crashed to the ground. It could not have happened faster if the donkey's neck had been drenched in olive oil. I can still feel the hardness of the ground on landing, and hear the laughter of my cousins as my uncle and I dusted ourselves off, while, nearby, the culprit munched serenely on some tufts of summer-dry grass.

La Reverències, left, and her daughter, right. Between them, my cousins and I, in our summer espadrilles. In the background, the back of the barn. Both my cousins and the donkeys seemed like giants to me. When did they shrink so much?

My other uncle, my mother's youngest sibling, was barely out of his teens when I was a toddler. He lived with my grandparents, rode a big motorcycle, hunted partridge and quail in season, and had curly blondish hair and a small straight nose. In the summer, the sun would turn his face bright red.

One evening, he and I were leading the carthorse from the barn back to the stable, which was across the courtyard from the house, for his dinner of oats and hay. As a special treat, my uncle said that I could ride the horse, on the condition that I hold tightly on to his mane. This was a first for me, and I was thrilled by the motion of the great beast, the smell of horse sweat and the prickly feel of his hair on my bare legs. The sun was going down, a cool breeze had come up, and in the pear trees that bordered the path a nightingale began to sing. Inspired by the bird, my uncle also broke into song: Oh Susana, no llores más por mí/Con mi banjo y mi caballo a Alabama me marché...

Then, perhaps carried away by the beauty of the evening and the prospect of dinner, he gave the horse a friendly slap on the rump. The usually lethargic beast misunderstood and broke into a trot. My uncle ran alongside, looking terrified, and I tried to hold on, but the sudden jolting and the sensation of my seat losing contact with the horse were so disconcerting that I lost my head, let go of the mane, and flew through the air and into the arms of my uncle, who fortunately had excellent eye-hand coordination and whose face, I noticed, had turned beet red.

He set me down, caught the horse, stopped to catch his breath, then squatted to look me in the eye and whispered, "Do not ever tell your parents what just happened."

And this, if my parents read this blog somewhere in the cosmos, is the first they'll hear of it.                                                  
                                                     

My Mother Says...continued

Last fall I began retelling here my mother's memories of growing up in a Catalan village in the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War.  You can catch up on those posts here:
http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-mother-says_2.html
http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-mother-says-continued.html
http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-mother-sayscontinued.html

When the story resumes, it is 1936, and my mother is forced to abandon her law studies at the University of Valencia because of the start of the Civil War.  I cannot even begin here to summarize the social, political and economic forces that led to that bloody three-year conflict, widely regarded by historians as a rehearsal for the Second World War.  Suffice it to say that purges, reprisals, summary executions, betrayals, wholesale destruction of centuries of art and architecture, and unspeakable atrocities were committed by both sides--the insurgents led by General Franco, and the communist-backed, democratically-elected Republican government.  If you are interested, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia offers an in-depth, first-hand account of the early months of the war.

I was studying law at the University of Valencia, my mother says.  I was the first girl from my village to leave home to be educated, and I still cannot believe that my mother let me go.  Of course, I was carefully watched.  I stayed in a convent, and every morning one of the nuns walked me to my classes and then back to the convent.

I studied Roman law, canon law, political economy, civil law...but then the war began and the convent was burned and I had to go home.  I was eighteen years old.

The beginning of the war was a time of terror.  As a landowner, my mother continues, my father was at risk of being dragged out at night by anarchists and shot in a ditch, as many were.  But because he had always had liberal ideas, and because as a vet he had often cared without charge for the donkeys and mules of farmers who were too poor to pay, he was always warned when a purge was coming, and he would hide in the fields while my mother stayed in the house to keep it from being burned.  (My mother doesn't explain how my grandmother's presence in the house would cause it to be spared, but perhaps even the most rabid anarchists had a taboo against burning a house with a woman in it.)

I was afraid every minute of the three years the war lasted.  Summer and winter, night and day, when the planes flew over on the way to the front, we ran to hide in a ditch near the house.  We wore a small stick tied to a string around our necks, and we bit on it when the bombs fell close by, to keep the blast from bursting our eardrums.  My parents, my two younger sisters, and my little brother and I sat in the ditch in a fetal position, so that if we were hit we would be killed instead of maimed...The constant noise from the airplanes and the bombs and the anti-aircraft guns made me feel that I was losing my mind. I would gladly have committed myself to a life of poverty if that could have brought about peace.

I learned very early that all nations are capable of cruelty.  I also learned that human kindness is not defined by political allegiance.  As prosperous, middle class landowners, we were in danger from the communist troops on their way to the front, which was close to our village.  They did take our car, and they demanded wine and chickens.  Their espadrilles were soaked in fascist blood.   But those same soldiers shared their bread with us, and on the eve of what was expected to be an especially fierce battle they helped us to dig a shelter out in the field and camouflage it with branches, so we would not be killed by the retreating communists.  We slept in that shelter for a whole week, in December.

You know what was the saddest thing?  Towards the end of the war, the Republican government was running out of men, so they started drafting fifteen and sixteen-year-old boys who barely knew how to fire a gun, and sending them to the front.  People called them la quinta del biberon, the baby-bottle draftees.

All this time, I kept falling in love with Republican soldiers (not that they ever knew it), even though I knew that they would probably soon be killed in battle.  Of course, my mother reassures me, I had not met your father yet.  He was in Barcelona, and for him the war was even worse than it was for me.

(To be continued)

My Mother Says...(continued)

They wanted me to sew! my mother says, but all I wanted to do was read novels.  I hid them under my mattress, and I read them at night.

Didn't your parents see the light in your room?

No, because I didn't turn it on.  I used to kneel by the window, with the book propped on the sill, and read by the street light.  I read many novels that way, and that is why I went to law school.

Because of the novels?

Because of the novels.  I read about lawyers defending poor people against injustice, and I decided I wanted to be like them.  So I went to the University of Valencia to learn to be a lawyer.  Valencia was only a four-hour drive away, but in those days--before the Civil War--it was like going to America.

I still cannot believe that my mother let me go.  I was seventeen, and girls from my village did not leave home except to be married.  But as I've told you, my mother was different.  She was not afraid of what people would say, and even though like most girls of her generation she had no more than a grammar-school education, she was smart.

My mother's mother, my mother says, referring to her grandmother, died young, and left four children behind.  Her husband worried that a new wife would make the children unhappy, so he never married again.  Instead, my mother, who was the oldest girl--about twelve when her mother died--took care of the family.  At one point, when she was about fourteen, she did go away to school, but she cried because she was homesick, and her brothers and sisters cried because they missed her, so finally her father hitched up the wagon and went to fetch her home.

When she was eighteen, a spirited, pretty girl, she met my father, who was from a different village and  had just finished veterinary school in Zaragoza.  This seemed very exotic to her, plus he was handsome, so she married him.  When they came back from the honeymoon to their new house, they found her little brother and sisters already installed there.

 My father was a wonderful veterinarian, very progressive, and the peasants trusted him and loved him.  But he was terrible with money.  He couldn't bear to ask people for what they owed him.  In addition to his practice, my parents owned quite a bit of land which was farmed by sharecroppers, so we should have been well off.  But everybody, the peasants whose mules he cured and the sharecroppers who farmed his land, found it easy to get around Senyor Boque.  They were very good at finding excuses--a child was sick, the harvest had been poor--and he always said "Fine, fine.  Don't worry about it."

I'll explain later how this soft-heartedness of my father's may have saved us all in the worst days of the Civil War, my mother continues, but in the meantime there he was, with a wife and four children and a couple of maids to take care of, and perennially short of cash.  And that is when my mother--remember, she had very little education--decided to take things into her own hands.

She became his administrator, secretary and accountant, keeping track of visits paid and medications administered, payments received and monies owed.  When people didn't pay, she told him not to treat their animals, but, my mother says, softening her voice, he used to sneak out and take care of them anyway. 

She was fair but tough on the sharecroppers, too.  On the day when the wheat was put into sacks and weighed, she was there, making sure everything was fair and square...while my father took off  on a on a pretense to look at the fields, but really so he could avoid any disagreements that might arise.

And so, because of her work and determination, we began to have more money.  But she paid the price.  Everybody in the village said that Senyor Boque was a saint.  "La Senyora Boque, on the other hand...."  Still, she did what she had to do.

(To be continued)

My Mother Says... (continued)

I don't know why my mother was so different from the other people of the village, my mother says, but she was, and so was my father.  This gave me a terrible complex when I was growing up, because I wanted my parents to be like everybody else.


They didn't go to church.  It's not that they were anticlerical, or that they didn't believe in God.  They sent me and my two sisters and my little brother to Mass on Sundays, but they stayed home.  My father didn't like it that at Mass the women and children knelt in the pews at the front of the church and the men stood in the back, by the door.  He thought that they were there just for show.  But I would have given anything to have parents who went to church like everybody else.

And, my mother continues, her voice rising as she recalls yet another mortifying fact, my parents went to the movies!  The mayor, the lawyer, the doctor all stayed home on Sunday evenings, like proper people.  But my father, the vet, without whose work the local farms would have collapsed, he went to the movies.  And he took his wife along!

But what was so bad about going to the movies? my daughter asks.


Only the poor people went to the movies.  They were also the only ones who could dance at the village festivals, as I've told you.  How I used to wish that we were poor....

But the worst thing was--and here she pauses dramatically and lowers her voice--that when my father went to the cafe after lunch, my mother went with him!  In Barcelona women went to movies and to cafes all the time, of course.  But this was a village, and before the Civil War no woman had ever been seen in the cafe, except your grandmother.  

My  mother stops to recall the scandal, and for a moment my daughter and I bask in our ancestress's daring.

The cafe, she explains, was only for men.  Every day after lunch, the men, rich and poor, went to the cafe to smoke and drink coffee and tell stories.   All the women stayed home, sewing.  It was a little bit like Saudi Arabia... You know, she adds, remembering another Saudi-like custom, that in the village it was customary at meals for the wife to stand and serve the family, and wait to eat until everybody had finished.  In our house, of course, my mother sat and ate with us.  This did not embarrass me so much, because other people didn't see it.

Another strange thing, my mother says, is that in winter she used to feed my father breakfast in bed.

She brought him breakfast in bed?

No, she fed it to him.  With her fingers.  My father used to lie flat in bed with the covers up to his chin and she would bring in a tray with a cup of coffee, two pieces of toast, and a piece of chocolate.  She would sit on the bed and give him a sip of coffee, and then she would break a piece of bread and put it in his mouth, and when he had swallowed that, she would give him a bite of chocolate, then some bread, then a sip of coffee...

And after that?


After that he would get up, put on his long underwear, his corduroy pants, his wool jacket and his black beret and hop on his bicycle and go on his rounds, to cure the mules and horses that had gone lame.  And you know what?  All the years they were married--and my mother married him when she was only eighteen, the prettiest girl in the village--she called him by his last name, "Boque," instead of his first, which was "Josep."

(To be continued)

My Mother Says...

After so many years, the boundaries start to blur.  Mothers, granddaughters, daughters, grandmothers--the skein of talk and memory passes from one to the other and grows more tangled with each pass, so that in the end you can hardly tell the threads apart.

I am listening to some recordings that my daughter S made of my mother back when my mother was the age I am now and my daughter had just finished college.  She taped these sessions during one of my mother's visits, and in the background you can hear dishes being rinsed, a dishwasher being loaded.

My mother speaks, and periodically someone interrupts with a question or a remark, and often I can't tell whether that voice is my daughter's, or mine.  There's no mistaking my mother's voice, which  sounds young, like she could be thirty instead of seventy.  Prompted by my daughter, she begins to tell about her own mother and to bring to life a world that no longer exists:  the world of a Catalan village in the 1920s and 30s.  My mother's world as it was "before the war," meaning the civil war that sundered life in Spain into two separate eras:  before 1936 and after 1939.

Before the war, my mother says, life in my village was almost medieval.  The farmers plowed with Roman plows and a pair of mules. Middle class girls weren't allowed to do much besides attend daily Mass and, on Sundays, morning Mass and Rosary in the afternoon.  And visit relatives, of course, and the sick.  The married women all wore black.

At the harvest festival every year a band would come and there was a dance.  But I could never dance because I had to sit with my family in a box high up in the stands, and no boy dared make the trip up all those steps, in view of the entire village, to ask me to dance and risk being turned down.

But the poor people, they were out all night on the dance floor, and they could dance with whomever they pleased.  And they could go to the movies--even the women!--and see things like Mary Pickford and Buffalo Bill.  The poor people had all the fun.  How I envied them!

And you couldn't go to the movies?  my daughter (or is it me?) asks.

Of course not!  my mother says.  But my mother was different...

(to be continued)

Crimes Against Nature: Fig

Any day now, the Angel of the Killing Frost will descend to put an end to the 2013 gardening season.  Vermont gardeners will store away their tools and retire to their wood stoves with a book, tablet, e-reader, laptop or, in the lucky areas that have reception, smartphone.

Usually I can hardly wait for the Icy One to alight on our hill.  The thought of roasting another batch of eggplants or freezing another quart of beans makes me grow faint.  But this year is different.  This year I have a fig tree, with figs on it--seven, in fact.  It used to have nine, but I ate two.  They were so splendid, fat and ripe and warm from the sun, that I resolved to do all I can to bring the rest to, well, fruition.

This means frequent watering--my tree is in a pot--with buckets of fish-manure-enriched water from the goldfish tub.  It means sheltering it from the wind in the corner of the south-facing wall of the house and the enclosed porch, where it can grab every drop of sun and warmth that the waning season has to offer.  And it means going out a couple of times a day to see if there is anything I can do to make it more comfortable.

This way, even with the temperature hovering dangerously low at night, the figs still ripen, one at a time.  And I eat each one mindfully and reverently, amazed that such Mediterranean sweetness can  emerge from this Puritan soil.

It is a crime against Nature, or at least a misdemeanor, to try to grow figs in Vermont.  Figs need long strings of warm, sunny days to ripen, a moderately dry climate to concentrate the sugars in the fruit, and temperate winters.

The label on my tree, a Brown Turkey, assures me that it will be happy in its pot and survive temperatures as frigid as -10F.  People around here say they remember winters when the temperature would stay below zero for weeks on end, and reach twenty- and thirty-below at night.  In my nine winters in Vermont there's been nothing like this.  Occasionally there will be a fifteen-below night, but things soon warm up.  Still, I don't want to take any chances with my little tree, and am researching thermal blankets made especially for tender plants.  The fact that somebody out there actually makes and sells plant blankies tells me that I am not the only crazed gardener on the planet.

Why, you ask, go to all this trouble for just a couple of figs?  The answer lies not in the figs themselves, but in the warm sweet smell of the raspy leaves, which sends me back every time to those long-ago Catalan summers and the buggy rides to la figuera grossa, which was so enormous that the entire extended family, including the horse, could eat their lunch and then nap in its shade.

Fig Tree

It's the skinny thing in the black pot behind the watering can, and you can hardly call it a tree, but my heart swells with pride whenever I look at it.

 What am I doing messing with fig trees in Vermont, you ask?  Well, for one thing, this is a "Brown Turkey" fig, bred to withstand temperatures of -10F.  And for another, I have made careful plans to move it to a sheltered spot in the winter, and cover it with a thermal blanket specially made for plants.

I'm probably starting to sound like a member of the sorority that puts sweaters and raincoats and booties on dogs.  But if you've ever tasted a ripe fig still warm from the sun, or even if you've smelled the sugary scent of fig leaves, you know what devotion a fig tree can inspire.

However, the main reason that I couldn't resist this little tree when I saw it in the nursery was the memory of the annual fig tree picnic in the summers of my Catalan childhood.

My grandparents owned some farm land in Castell del Remei, an area that has since become world famous for its vintages, and on this land was a fig tree as big as a house.  I know that objects remembered from childhood tend to shrink when viewed through adult eyes. But I have objective proof of the hugeness of that tree. 

On the day of the picnic, my grandparents, my great-aunt and -uncle, my mother, father, two aunts, an uncle and I would pile into a horse-drawn wagon and make our way on the summer-dusty roads to Castell del Remei and the big fig tree.

Once we got there, the picnic things were unpacked and a fire was started on which to grill tiny lamb chops.  The tablecloth was spread on the ground, the wine poured, the bread sliced.  The horse was unhitched from the cart.  And the ten of us would arrange ourselves around the food and eat and drink and then nap to the sound of the cicadas and the bells from the distant church.

And all of this--the fire and the family, the tablecloth and the wine, the horse and the cart--fit, with room to spare, under the branches of that one fig tree.  

My grandmother would dry the summer's fig harvest on straw mats.  She would spread these out on the terrace and set the figs on them to dry, covering them with fine netting to keep off the wasps and flies.

Months later in Barcelona, in the dark of winter, I would arrive from school one day and find that a basket had come from my grandparents' farm, bearing home-made sausages and blood-puddings, eggs individually wrapped in newspaper and, best of all, a bag of almonds picked and shelled by my grandmother's hands and a tin box full of dried figs.

If you ever find yourself in possession of a good dried fig--not bone-dry, but still leathery and malleable--and you have an almond handy, push the almond pointed-end first into the fig until it disappears, then take a bite.  And you'll know why I put such stock in my little tree.

Saint John's Eve

My Catalan childhood was rich in ritual, mostly Catholic but enlivened by tinges of paganism. Those tinges were especially evident at the summer solstice, known to me at the time only as Saint John's Eve.

We spent the long summers at my grandparents' farm, and on this night I was allowed to stay up until well after dark, when the fogueres de Sant Joan, the Saint John's bonfires, were lit. There were also fireworks, made all the more exciting by my great-aunt, who used to scream helplessly after every bang.  How, in those tinder-dry summers,  the entire Mediterranean coast did not go up in flames was surely due to the intervention of Saint John himself.

Saint John's Eve had its own special dessert, the coca de Sant Joan, a large rectangular pancake-like bread coated with marzipan and studded with pine nuts and candied fruit.  But the best part was the foguera, and staying up in the dark to watch my  mother and father hold hands and jump over the flames.  I wonder now if they knew that they were enacting an ancient fertility ritual?  After much cautioning by the assembled grandparents, aunts, uncles and older cousins  I was allowed to jump over some embers, then given a slice of coca, a sip of wine, and sent to bed.

Over the coming weeks, the New England landscape will change from the tender greens and barely-there yellows, pinks and violets of spring to the bolder shades of echinacea and black-eyed susans, the rusty pinks of sedums.  It is the time of tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, sunflowers and zucchini.

I, like the lettuces, tend to go into a decline.  I can almost feel the earth's axis shift away from the sun, and my vitality ebbs a little every day, keeping pace with the light.

Tonight I did not light a fire, but I did go out to the edge of the field and watch the sun set in the red sky. The deep Vermont greens all around me didn't look at all like the muted olive tones of my childhood landscapes.  Of all those relatives who cautioned me not to fall into the foguera, few are still alive, much less able to leap laughing over the flames.  And if that espadrille-shod, coca-stuffed, watched-over child still exists, she is hidden deep inside me.

But the sun is still the same.

Zen Buzz

The rain came Saturday afternoon, and it was welcome after this Mediterranean-dry spring.  While the sun was still out that morning, I walked around and discovered that the side yard has been taken over by my former nemesis:  ground ivy, with its pretty scalloped leaves, its tiny purple/blue/lavender blooms, its disgusting smell, and its stems that break compliantly when you pull on them, all the better to keep the roots spreading below ground.  But this time I did not wish I had a canister of Agent Orange at hand, for  at that moment the ground ivy was literally, totally, covered with bees.  Honey bees.

Do you know how extraordinary that is?  Honey bees are far more endangered than elephants, and more crucial to our survival on this planet than any animal you can see with the naked eye.  They are dying by the zillions of unknown things which are our fault.  In the seven springs I have spent on this hilltop, I have never seen more than a single bee at a time.  Yet on Saturday before the rain, there they were, hundreds of them, feasting on ground ivy.

The stories I hear from local beekeepers are almost uniformly tragic.  For example:  three years ago, one woman's single hive gave eighty pounds of honey.  In the last two years, having received the same care and attention, all her bees inexplicably died.  You can see why those hundreds of bees on the ground ivy seemed like a miracle.

I  found a bee-free spot and cautiously knelt down. There were a couple of red and black butterflies with white dots on the wings, and some bumblebees flying around.  But mostly there were bees, fat, honey-colored, hovering not more than an inch above the ground, diving head first into the tiny flowers, and singing softly.  "This is what 'a-buzz' means," I said to myself.

I thought I would kneel there and become immersed in the motion and the buzzing and the bee-ness--an outdoor Zen moment not marked by electronic chimes.  But whom was I kidding?  Before a minute passed, I was fretting.  Just around the corner of the chicken house, the "Liberty" apple tree was blooming its little heart out, but the only pollinators on it were a couple of house flies. What were those bees doing loitering in the side yard?  The rains were supposed to last a couple of days, and pollination doesn't happen in the rain. Time was of the essence. Could I somehow scoop up some of those bees and deposit them on the apple tree? A chime went off in my head, signaling the onset of craziness.  I got up from the ivy, and left the bees to their work.

My attitude to nature, at least the nature around my house, is anything but Zen.  For the last couple of weeks, I have pruned everything in sight, covered trees with sheets at night, uncovered them in the morning, planted seedlings prematurely in the vegetable garden and watered them one by one, clipped the spent blooms off the Pasque flowers, espaliered the apricot tree, planted boxwoods, apples and blueberries, transplanted rhubarb and astilbes, and generally interfered with everything.  Why can't I just leave Nature alone?

I come from a pruning, espaliering, pollarding people.  In my corner of Catalonia, every cubic foot of earth has been plowed, planted, manured, watered and harvested, turned over and over by the human hand for six thousand years.  It's no wonder I can't let go of that.

Now at last the rain has come, and I'm forced to keep away.  I can hear everything outdoors--the bees, the ivy, the seedlings, the apple trees--heaving a sigh of relief.

Old Stones

"I miss old stones" my father used to say after we moved to the U.S. He would mostly say it after we emerged from Mass in some spanking-new church, half soaring A-frame, half brick rambler. He was missing the dark, mysterious churches of Spain, redolent of incense and candle wax, made of stones that had been quarried and carried and sculpted hundreds of years ago.

Even today, in Europe if you trip on a stone it's possible that it was placed there by a Roman building a road or a baron building a castle. Some years ago we co-owned with a group of friends a house in Catalonia, on the foothills of the Pyrenees, just south of the French border. This is Romanesque country, where villages cluster around stone churches built on or before the 12th century.

Hiking through the cork oak woods, or walking by a vineyard, I would sometimes come across a dolmen (a table-like structure made of three enormous stone slabs) tucked among the vines, or a menhir standing straight and still and weird among the trees. How many of my short but determined Stone Age ancestors had it taken to lug that huge stone and heave it until it was perfectly upright? In the village next to ours, smack in the middle of the square, in front of the (what else?) Romanesque church sat a dolmen, surrounded by a ring of scarlet geraniums. That must have been one powerful spot, to attract both a dolmen and a church.

In this country, I too miss old stones--not geologically old, but stones that have been touched by human hand and put to use. That is why I like New England, and rejoice in the crumbling stone wall that delineates our property. Somebody stacked those stones up and made them mean something.

In the last few balmy days I have been working outdoors, carving my piece of slate. When I look up at a certain spot between the lawn and the woods, bare now but soon to become a mess of brambles, I can see a big pile of boulders. Knowing the history of farming in these parts, it is likely that they were dragged out of the field in front of the house sometime in the last couple of centuries (it is also possible that they were dragged out of what became our basement, a mere 15 years ago).

Something in me refuses to let those boulders be. This may be because I lived in Maryland not long ago, where if you wanted a nice stone for your yard you had to go to a nursery and pay a major sum for it. Or maybe it's the same impulse that prompted my Neolithic great-grandparents to heft big stones around. My boulders are way too heavy for me to shift, and too dense for me to carve. I could hire a man with a machine to come and move them--but where?

Perhaps, instead of carving the stones or moving them, I should make a path to them through the brambles, and go and sit there and meditate.

For mere inanimate beings, some stones give off major vibes.