The Well

Beside my grandfather’s farmhouse in Catalonia, there was a well. My childhood summers revolved around the house and its courtyard, the  stables, pigsty, and chicken coop, but the heart of the place was el pou, the well. The wellhead was made of crumbling, rosy brick. Next to it were two primitive stone benches, and a small cement frog pond. An ancient apple tree shaded the whole. Once used for drinking water, the well was now reserved for cooling the wine in preparation for the midday meal. I can still hear the grinding of the wheel and the clanking of the chain as my uncle raised the bucket and retrieved the bottles just as lunch was being served.

It was by the well that my veterinarian grandfather, wearing the black beret that protected his baldness, a hand-rolled cigarette hanging eternally from his toothless gums (he waved aside my grandmother’s attempts to persuade him to wear dentures), engaged me in games of corralets. We would gather pebbles and build little corrals, some round, some square, inside which we would confine other pebbles that played the part of donkeys, horses, mules, and pigs. Squatting in dirt, pretending that pebbles were horses—how deprived and pathetic does that sound? Yet not even the little blond Infanta in Velázquez’s Las Meninas can have felt as unique and privileged as I did. After all, she only had servants and courtiers, while I had my grandfather, who smelled of sweat and acrid black tobacco and every day rode off on his bicycle to save the lives of the horses and mules that worked the fertile plain stretching all the way to the foothills of  the Pyrenees.

In the summer, el pou served as an outdoor living room. In the afternoon, having arisen from their obligatory naps, (not even mules and donkeys were allowed to work between 1 and 4 p.m.) my mother and her sisters would sit on the benches and sew, greeting with bona tarda! the occasional peasant passing with his cart on the way to the threshing ground up the road. Those benches are engraved in my brain. One of them had, near its front edge, a shallow crack, and I can still feel the tip of my index finger tracing that crack back and forth.

Every night after dinner the household—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and visiting cousins—would gather by the well. The stone benches were reserved for the elders (I don’t remember anybody ever bringing out cushions to sit on), while the rest reclined on the sparse grass, or sat on the brick edging of the pond. I would be sitting on somebody’s lap, hoping to become invisible so I wouldn’t be sent to bed. I would watch the barn cats congregate under the light at the corner of the house, trying to catch some of the fat moths that scorched their wings and fell to the ground. My grandfather would shoo the cats away, saying that the chitin of the insects’ bodies was bad for their digestion.

And for hours on end, the grownups talked. My uncle speculated on the possibility of rain. My mother and her sisters planned the annual tomato canning. My grandfather wondered whether his melons would soon be ripe. My grandmother worried about her broody hen. And my father gazed at the stars. Although all those people were together every day, somehow they still found stories, gossip, and impressions to share. They were each other’s main entertainment. There was a massive Telefunken radio in the house, but nobody would have thought to stay indoors and listen to it.

In the lulls of the conversation, a frog or two could be heard croaking in the pond. All of a sudden my mother would spring up, exclaiming, “What is this child doing still here at this hour?” And she would cart me off to bed. I would fall asleep to the drone of adult voices around el pou while, somewhere in my grandfather’s grape arbor, the last nightingale of summer decanted his silver notes into the night.