Read Stone in a Landslide for Free Online

three at a time and went to the kitchen. Tia was calmly peeling potatoes and Oncle was sitting by the fire with his pipe in his mouth. I knew then that nothing serious had happened and my first thought was that I wouldn’t say anything of what Elvira had told me in case it annoyed Tia. But she spoke as soon as she saw me. Now, my girl, the Exposition is on in Barcelona and my cousin has asked me if I want to go. I think if I don’t go to the capital now, I’ll never go before I die, so if you can take care of the house and the children, I’m going to go two weeks from now. She added that the Exposition would be like a warehouse of all the best things that were made in lots of the countries of the world. Oncle said: And of course you have to give them your approval. He didn’t say it in anger, but as if he felt envy that his wife was capable of being interested in something so unknown and far away…
    All that meant nothing to him. Not that or even what happened in Montsent. Oncle liked the everyday and the routine more than anything else and Tia would often tell him off about it. If it were up to you, we’d all be living in just the one room in this house! She was exaggerating, of course.
     

     
     
    Jaume wanted Elvira to go to the school in Montsent where they taught more reading, writing and arithmetic. He was anxious that she should learn as much as possible, and the great progress she had made the previous winter, as well as her teacher saying that she should go, decided it. The only thing holding her back was the hour and a half of walking she would have to do every day.
    I told him that it might be good for her to learn to sew as well and he smiled. Of course! We thought it better to wait a little while and when Elvira reached the age of thirteen she could go into service in a nice house in Montsent and in the afternoon go to school for a few hours. That was what we said.
    We’d gone out together, Jaume and I, to gather the animals from the side of Sant Damià mountain. It was a bright day and I felt as if I was looking at everything in a huge mirror. The windwas fresh, you could still make out the snow on the mountain tops, even though the new grass had come up some days before. The birches stretched their arms to the sky waiting for their soft foliage. We’d had to return early because I was looking after the house on my own. The girls stayed in the vegetable garden with Oncle while we went to bring the calves and cows back home.
    We spent the time walking side by side and chatting. At night I would drop from exhaustion, but now I wanted to jump from one stone to the next to cross a stream or avoid a patch of nettles. The cows followed us, docile except when they found branches with new leaves on to eat. Then we had to tear them away and get them back on the road again. There was no need to worry about vipers, it was still too cold.
    We went from speaking about the girls to things in general. Jaume said that he would have done anything to be able to go to Barcelona like Tia, that he was worried about the country’s future, about justice. He said that we were abandoned on the mountain, that no one remembered the sons of the land who lived so far from where everything was decided.
    When we talked about such matters the same thing always happened to me. A thick fog came over my brain and from there it passed to my heart. It left me frozen and in the dark. I wasmade to know what I saw, to speak about what I felt. I didn’t know anything outside of Pallarès or Montsent or Ermita. I’d heard of Barcelona, of the sea, even of Madrid, of the King. It all seemed to me like one of the stories my father used to tell round the fire. I didn’t believe all that really existed. I thought it was a trick, like Soledat Estevet having a claim to the throne of England. Perhaps that was why when I saw Jaume’s eyes shining as he spoke of these strange things, the ground beneath me moved and I couldn’t find true north.