Joanet sat for a long while next to his mother’s body. As though she had guessed her son might come into her cell, Joana had buried her face in her arms, as if trying to avoid him seeing her like this even after her death.
“Can I touch you?”
The little one stroked his mother’s hair. It was filthy, disheveled, dry as dust.
“You had to die for us to be together.”
Joanet burst into tears.
BERNAT KNEW WHAT to do as soon as he returned home and was met by Pere and his wife, interrupting each other as they tried to tell him that Joanet had not come back. They had never asked him where he disappeared to. They always thought he went to Santa Maria, but nobody had seen him there that afternoon. Mariona raised her hand to her mouth.
“What if something has happened to him?” she said.
“We’ll find him,” Bernat said, trying to reassure her.
Joanet was still sitting beside his mother’s body. First he stroked her hair; then he curled it between his fingers, getting some of the knots out. After that, he got up and stared up at the window.
Night fell.
“Joanet?”
Joanet looked back up at the window.
“Joanet?” he heard once more from beyond the wall.
“Arnau?”
“What’s happened?”
He answered: “She’s dead.”
“Why don’t you ... ?”
“I can’t. I don’t have a crate inside here. The window is too high up.”
“THERE’S A VERY bad smell,” concluded Arnau. Bernat beat on the door of Pone the coppersmith’s house once more. What could the little one have done, shut up in there all day? He called out again, in a loud voice. Why did nobody answer? At that moment, the door opened, and a gigantic figure almost filled the entire doorway. Arnau took a step back.
“What do you want?” the man growled. He was barefoot, and the only clothing he was wearing was a threadbare shirt that came down to his knees.
“My name is Bernat Estanyol, and this is my son,” he said, grasping Arnau by the shoulder and pushing him forward. “He’s a friend of your son Joa—”
“I don’t have a son,” Pone protested, making as though to shut the door in their faces.
“But you do have a wife,” said Bernat, pushing the door open despite Ponc’s efforts. “Well ... ,” he explained to the coppersmith, “you did have one. She has died.”
Pone showed no reaction.
“So what?” he said, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders.
“Joanet is inside the hut with her.” Bernat tried to make his voice sound as threatening as he could. “He can’t get out.”
“That’s where that bastard should have spent his entire life.”
Squeezing Arnau’s shoulder tight, Bernat looked steadily at the other man. Arnau was frightened again, but when Pone looked down at him, he stood defiantly straight.
“What are you going to do?” Bernat insisted.
“Nothing,” the coppersmith replied. “Tomorrow, when they knock the hut down, the boy will get out.”
“You can’t leave a child all night in—”
“I can do what I like in my own house.”
“I’ll go and tell the magistrate,” Bernat said, knowing it was an empty threat.
Ponc’s eyes narrowed. Without another word, he disappeared inside, leaving the door open. Bernat and Arnau waited. He finally came back carrying a rope, which he handed directly to Arnau.
“Get him out of there,” he ordered the boy, “and tell him that now his mother is dead I don’t ever want to see him here again.”
“How ... ?” Bernat began to ask.
“The same way he has been getting in there all these years,” Pone said. “By climbing over the wall. You are not going through my house.”
“What about his mother?” Bernat asked before he could shut the door again.
“The king handed me the mother with orders that I should not kill her. Now that she is dead, I’ll give her back to the king,” Pone quickly replied. “I paid a lot of money as surety, and by God, I have no intention of forfeiting it for a whore like her.”
ONLY FATHER ALBERT, who already knew Joanet’s story, and old Pere and his wife, whom Bernat had no choice but to tell, ever found out about the boy’s terrible misfortune. All three of them paid him special attention, but he still refused to talk. Whereas before he had constantly been on the move, now he walked slowly and deliberately, as if he were carrying an unbearable weight on his shoulders.
“Time is a great healer,” Bernat said to Arnau one morning. “We have to wait and offer him our love and
