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Instead of me guiding the animals, it felt like they were leading me. At moments like this, Jaume and I were as different as night and day, and that difference made me tremble more than when he left to go away for a whole week’s work.
    We arrived before it got dark. Thursday was ending and tomorrow was another day of work. That Sunday Tia would arrive with a face so radiant that I didn’t recognize her. Words couldn’t describe the Exposition and how well her relatives had treated her, especially Ventura, the daughter of her cousin Tomàs, who had walked everywhere with her.
    She spoke of the pavilions, the gardens and so many things that couldn’t compare to anything we knew in Pallarès. Only to the mountains and rivers, perhaps.
     

     
     
    Oncle became ill in the autumn. It seemed to be because of all the hard work in the summer, but winter was approaching and he didn’t get better. The doctor from Montsent said that if the burning sensations hadn’t eased by Christmas, he would visit again and prescribe something for him. Squatting in a corner, Oncle payed no attention to anything. He hardly spoke and he didn’t complain. He spent the odd while telling stories to the girls, but he did it when the grown-ups were busy far away from the kitchen. I never knew whether he liked doing this with the children or if he just wanted to help us. If he wasn’t well enough to work, then at least he would entertain the children so that we could work.
    By All Saints’, Tia had begun putting an ointment made with snake oil and a blend of herbs on his stomach. I never found out where she’d got the recipe. Oncle let her do it but hedidn’t get better. He barely ate and wasn’t sleeping at night.
    We didn’t need the doctor from Montsent to come again after all. On 8th December, the day of the Immaculate Conception, Oncle abandoned us in the ship that he had helped to sail.
    I don’t know if we always need to miss someone to know that we loved them, but that’s how it happened to me. While he was alive I didn’t have time to work out whether what I felt was love or a mixture of gratitude and concern. When he died, I felt pangs of love for this man who had for so long been a father to me. Maybe he hadn’t done it with enthusiasm, which wasn’t part of his character, but he had certainly shown good will. I promised myself I would make all my family happier and let them know I loved them and lived to make them happy. Above all poor Tia, who had become rather withdrawn despite her strong and active character.
    As they say, sometimes sorrow marks a family for her own. Some months later, in March 1931, the news arrived that my mother had died. Jaume wanted to go with me to Ermita, but Tia wouldn’t allow it. After all she was my mother’s sister. We both hurried there.
    I found my father and brothers and sisters in floods of tears. I couldn’t accept that I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to the woman who hadbrought me into the world. Just then I thought I understood my husband when he said we were so poor… and that it cost so much to go from one place to the other that when we arrived we were often too late.
    Nothing and no one could console me. My father had aged a lot since Angeleta’s baptism. My brothers and sisters were like distant relatives to me. I’d stopped being from there and I belonged elsewhere. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking about my life since I’d left my parents’ house. The days seemed to have flown by, and I wondered if maybe my mother had never got over the pain of giving away a daughter. But that was the past and life went on. When we left Ermita, my eyes were numb from crying and my head heavy, and I thought, Who knows whether I’ll ever come back, and that I’d lost the deepest of my roots there.
    In Pallarès, the house, shrouded in mourning, had become quieter. The noise and uproar of my daughters seemed less jarring, perhaps because they were growing up or because I was