Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales

Author:Joan Sales
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681371818
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

8 JUNE

You came so quickly, the minute you received my letter! If I’d known how you’d react, I’d never have mentioned the wretched sack of potatoes

. . . It’s the third time you’ve appeared unexpectedly with food for the boy. I worried when I thought of the sacrifice the new crates of tinned milk and all the other things you unloaded from the lorry must represent and I was thinking how time slipped by so quickly listening to you that evening and night! If my father knew you had reappeared . . . Days after your second visit I told him you’d been in Barcelona for the few hours that you spent at my house, “from ten at night to four in the morning”. He shook his head in disapproval, saying he was shocked by my solitary night-time conversations with a man who wasn’t my “companion”. According to him, free love, precisely because it is free, must be allied to the purest, most austere acts to avoid the shadow of suspicion of anything unseemly. I burst out laughing: the suspicion of anything unseemly with you! People have such ridiculous notions . . . If he knew that my “solitary night-time conversations” had this time lasted from eight in the evening to six in the morning . . . Time passed so fast, more than fast, it was as if time had been abolished. When you said: “Dawn is breaking over the port; we’re now into the longest days of the year . . .” I couldn’t believe it was half past four on the clock. You’d underlined those words the way you sometimes do, which can be annoying because it shows you couldn’t care less about the feelings of the person you’re talking to. You then added even more emphatically: “I detest these long days, give me the winter solstice with its never-ending nights! And polar nights, even better: let me sleep peacefully for six months on the trot so I can dream of endless nonsense.”

I never dream and don’t like nonsense, but it’s strange how those words stuck in my mind from everything you said. We’d spent ten hours chatting and I recalled that cocaine addict you introduced me to long ago. It was before I’d met Lluís, and you and I used to distribute La barrinada on street corners by ourselves. As we never sold a copy, what we did was wander.

It was drizzling that evening and we’d sheltered under the awning of a big clothes shop on the Rambla, close to carrer de Sant Pau; the Rambla was glistening beautifully in that autumn shower, and we talked about this and that and about drugs and addicts. This was something new as far as I was concerned and I couldn’t believe such people existed. You said: “Come with me and I’ll introduce you to one,” and you took me to a small chemist’s on carrer de Sant Pau, a small, shabby place that you’d have thought was a little herb shop.

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