Feud

By Ali Villaverde

It is 1887, and Batiste Borrull and his family are on the brink. They are decent, hard-working folk, and all they want is a home and food on the table. But bad luck has denied them this dream time and time again. Just as things seem hopeless, a lifeline is thrown Batiste's way: a prime piece of farmland on Valencia's plain, where the crops grow in abundance all year round. Best of all, the landlords have waived the rent for two years.

 

What Batiste and his family do not yet know is just how far the peasants of the plain, still fired up by a bloody tragedy that unfolded a decade earlier, will go to make sure that the land Batiste has taken over will never be farmed again. In this Spanish arcadia, what was sown ten years ago is about to be reaped. And it will be a bitter, hateful harvest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merci Beaucs
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201867225

Book preview

Chapter 1

Valencia’s immense green plain stretched out under a blue dawn glow that was rising from the distant depths of the Mediterranean Sea. Although it was the autumn, the night had been so balmy that it felt like spring. Tired from their nocturnal shift of filling the air with their song, the nightingales loosed final notes that sounded almost pained, as though the steely glint of the rising sun had wounded them. Sparrows took flight from the cottages’ thatched roofs like little vagabonds shooed from a doorway, sending the treetops into a shuddering commotion.

The rumbles that had quietly filled the night—the burbling of the irrigation channels that brought the kiss of life to the fields, the whisper of cane thickets, the barking of cottages’ ever vigilant dogs—slowly faded. The plain was awakening with a yawn that was becoming louder and louder. Roosters’ cries rang out in one cottage after another. With violent clangs, the bells of the surrounding villages’ churches echoed the call to Mass first announced by the bell towers of the cathedral and grand churches down in the city. A discordant concert emanated from cottages’ animal pens: horses neighed, cattle bellowed, hens clucked, lambs bleated, pigs grunted.

The roads began to fill with rows of moving black dots, plainsfolk making their way toward the city like ants on the march. Across the plain, wheels clacked on rutted paths, and the idle singing of early risers as they went about their labours mingled with the cries of women and men driving livestock along. From time to time, one of these creatures would let out a furious bray, protesting at another day of the onerous work that they had been born into.

The reddish waters of the irrigation channels that criss-crossed the plain, otherwise as smooth and iridescent as a sheet of stained glass, stirred every now and then from the noisy splashing produced by alighting ducks’ beating wings. The ducks slid down the channels, their serpentine necks cutting through the water as though they were the prows of fantastical galleys from some fable. The frogs fell silent as these fleets glided by.

The morning light brought cottages and farmsteads to life as it flooded the plain. Front doors opened with a creak. Silhouettes emerged from behind them to stand under the shade of vine-wrapped arbours. These figures stretched their limbs, rubbed the backs of their necks, surveyed the glowing horizon. As stable doors were thrown wide open, out poured dairy cows and goats and carthorses, all heading toward the city. Between the curtains of squat trees that shaded the paths, the bells of these creatures tinkled, the jolly tune momentarily drowned out from time to time by hectoring cries of Ya! Come on!

Swift cries of Good morning! and May God bless us with another fine day!—these were always issued in Valencian, never in Spanish—passed back and forth between paths and cottage doorways, between those heading to the city and those staying behind to work the fields. If the person on the path was a stranger, no further words would be exchanged. But if he or she was a trusted friend or relation, the people calling out from their cottages sometimes followed up their greeting with requests for things that they wanted bringing back from Valencia.

By the time the sun had fully hoisted itself above the horizon, the last wisps of mist created by damp fields and rumbling irrigation channels had cleared from the air. In the ruddy furrows of fields and gardens, larks hopped about, filled with the joy of living another day. Their troublemaking counterparts, the sparrows, settled on the sills of cottage windows that were still closed, pecking at the wood of the frames and chirruping away, as though commanding the humans within to stop idling and get to work so that they could finally get their morning meal.

In one of these cottages lived Pepeta and her husband Tòni, a man known all across the plain as Pimentó. Pepeta was in the prime years of her life. There was an industriousness and spirit to her that her anaemia had so far failed to conquer. She may well have been the hardest worker on the plain.

By the time dawn had broken, she had already been to the market in Valencia and back. She would wake up at three o’clock to deliver baskets of vegetables; these Tòni readied the night before, griping and cursing about his terrible life of toil as he did so. Like all the labouring women of the plain, she was able to negotiate the paths to Valencia in the deepest dark of night. Her husband, meanwhile, spent those hours snoring away in bed, snuggly wrapped in blankets.

The market traders in the city who bought vegetables wholesale were all very familiar with this little woman who was already at their stalls before dawn, sitting on her baskets and shivering under her threadbare shawl. As she waited to collect the money for the produce—having already performed complicated calculations of weights and measures and prices, she knew the exact sums owed—with unconscious envy her eyes would follow those who had the luxury of enjoying a cup of coffee to combat the morning chill.

Once her transactions were completed, she hurried back to her cottage; if she was efficient enough in her journeys, she could free up an hour of the day. Back home and with her dealings in vegetables complete, she switched at once to her second line of business: milk. She took to the road once more, this time with a herding stick and tin measuring cup in one hand and a tan-coloured cow called Ròcha—plus her playful calf—in tow.

Ròcha lowed gently and shivered under her sackcloth blanket. As this convoy marched on, the creature kept looking behind, as rueful about being out of bed as any other traveller on the road at this hour. Pepeta had to turn to her stick to drive Ròcha on. It was getting late, and her regulars would start grumbling if she did not make an appearance soon. Receptive to the message delivered by the stick, the cow and the calf trotted down the middle of the muddy, potholed road that connected the village of Alboraya to Valencia.

Along the way, Pepeta, Ròcha and the calf passed by processions of young women who were on their way to their shifts at the tobacco and silk factories. With one arm looped under the handles of their baskets and the other swinging with their stride, the young women walked on top of the banks of the irrigation channels that ran down the sides of the road, their long skirts fluttering behind them.

The sun peeked out behind the trees and homes circumscribing the horizon, throwing out needles of gold that pricked the eyes of those who held their gaze too high. The mountains in the distance and the towers of the city took on a rosy tint; the little clouds that floated across the sky looked like scraps of crimson silk. The sounds of morning cleaning rituals drifted from the cottages along the way: brooms dragged along floors, dishes clanked, water splashed. Dusky-coloured rabbits hopped down paths leading to vegetable patches, sly smiles across their faces, as though the success of their morning raid were already assured.

Pepeta did not pay any attention to these sights of the awakening plain. She had seen them many thousands of times before. With increasing haste, she pressed on, her belly grumbling, her legs aching and her clothes dampened by sweat.

The bridges leading into Valencia were assailed by a tide of people, industrious folk from the city’s outskirts. They had lunch bags hanging from their necks and a long day’s labour ahead of them. After negotiating a way for herself and her bovine train through this mass of people, she made what was always her least pleasurable stop of the day: the duties office. She shelled out the usual few coins to pay the taxes on the goods that she had brought into the city. The receipt that the official issued always stated the sum paid in money, but never the charge’s burden on her soul.

She moved on from this place as swiftly as possible. Having crossed the bridge, the working women and men had dispersed in every direction. The streets were quiet, save for the bucolic melody of Ròcha’s cowbell. Sometimes drowsy-faced city dwellers would peep out of their windows as Pepeta went by, letting the sight and sound of the cow and her calf transport them to the green meadows and idyllic scenes that they imagined this creature and her owner had the good fortune to live their lives in.

Pepeta’s regulars were scattered throughout Valencia. Her rounds were a convoluted pilgrimage through the city’s streets. Stopping at doors here and there, she would rap her knuckles against wood or ring the door chime before summoning a shrill, sharp cry that seemed to defy the lung capacity of such a small and frail physique.

Miiiiiiiiiiilk!

At some stops, the household’s bleary-eyed, dishevelled maid, jug in hand, would come down to receive the milk, her sandals making a soft slip-slap as she descended. At others, Pepeta would be received by the building’s elderly custodian, who more often than not would still be wearing the mantilla that she had put on to go to Early Mass.

The last neighbourhood that Pepeta visited, at around eight o’clock, was the fishermen’s quarter. Its cramped homes were silent. The smell escaping from cracks in their doors and windows—the odour of sweat and drink and obliviating lust left behind by sickly, brutalized bodies—told the story of the souls that dwelled within them. She always felt her stomach turn in this neighbourhood’s dirty, claustrophobic streets. They were no good for someone who fought a battle against ill health every day.

But here too she had customers toward whom she felt a duty, and she had learned to master the dizzy, queasy feeling the area inflicted on her. With well-deserved pride—the pride of a woman who, weak and overwhelmed by misery as she was, knew that she could be counted on to do the right thing—she set about the last leg of her rounds, consoling herself with the small mercy of not having to live like the people in this place did.

Pepeta heard someone call to her.

Here! We need some milk, please!

The voice came from a doorway. There, standing at the foot of the building’s staircase, was a young woman, unkempt and exhausted and made unpretty by the toll of her life. Her eyes were wet; the bun into which she had gathered her hair was coming undone; the previous night’s application of blush was still smeared on her cheeks. She was two caricatures in one: prostitute and dejected clown.

Pepeta, pressing her lips together with a pout of pride and disdain to leave no doubt about the distances between her and this new customer, began to milk Ròcha’s udders into the jug that the young woman handed to her. Glancing over her shoulder every few moments, Pepeta realized she was being scrutinized.

Pepeta? the woman said in a hesitant voice.

Pepeta turned her head again. She looked the woman square in the face for the first time. Now it was her turn to hesitate.

Rosario . . . Is that you?

Yes, it was; the young woman confirmed it with a sad nod of her head. Pepeta could not hide her amazement. Rosario attempted to meet Pepeta’s scandalized look with a cynical smile, the kind given by someone who has seen through and dismissed the moral posturing of others countless times before.

But when Pepeta’s gaze turned to profound sadness, Rosario could not maintain her defiance. She lowered her head. She felt the need to plead her case. She was not a bad person, she explained: since she had left the plain, she had worked in factories, had been in the service of a family. But at last, tired of being hungry, she followed the example set by her sisters. And now here she was, resigned to endure violence as well as what was meant as affection until her body gave out. People had never tired of telling her, seeming to think she could not have worked it out for herself: this is how things turn out when you don’t have a mother or a father. But those people did not know the real truth. It was all the fault of the family’s old landlord, Don Salvador, who was surely burning in hell. She had lost count of how many times she had damned him for robbing her family and then tearing it apart.

Inspired by Rosario’s fury, Pepeta dropped her reserve. It was all true, she told her: Don Salvador, that snake, had destroyed Rosario’s family, and the whole plain knew it. It was an outrage that someone could lose their home and their livelihood like that. And Barret, Rosario’s father, had been such a good man! That he had never been allowed to see Rosario and his other daughters again was one wrong heaped on another. Everyone on the plain had by now heard the news that the girls’ poor father had died two years ago, far from his homeland and across the sea, in a prison in Ceuta. And they knew that Rosario’s mother had lived out her last agonizing days in a hospital bed. The past decade must have been so cruel for Rosario. Ten years ago, who would have imagined that she and her sisters, so used to living in their immaculate cottage like queens of the plain, could have ended up like this? The Lord needed to start answering people’s prayers and deliver them from people like Don Salvador.

Rosario found strength in the sympathy of her childhood friend. A little life sparkled in her eyes as she remembered the past. She wanted to know more: What had happened to her family’s old cottage? And their land? Everything was still abandoned, wasn’t it? She smiled when Pepeta confirmed this. With a bit of luck, the home would sit empty forever, and the fields would never be worked again. It was the least Don Salvador’s offspring deserved; it was the only thing that could bring her comfort. Rosario told Pepeta she was still so grateful to Pimentó and to everyone out on the plain for stopping anyone else working the land that by right belonged to her family. And if someone wanted to try, well, there was an answer to that: bang, a shotgun blast to the head!

Rosario mimed the action, sparks of fury shining in her eyes. She had become so used to being passive, to soaking up the blows of her customers. Now the daughter of the plain within her was born again, the girl who had been raised in a home with a shotgun hanging behind the door. She could almost taste and smell the smoke of the gunpowder from those times it had been jubilantly fired, back when there had been things to celebrate.

The two women’s conversation moved on from Rosario and her family’s woes. Rosario asked Pepeta about all her old neighbours, then about Pepeta’s own life. It was clear to Rosario that she was not the only one who had been suffering. Pepeta’s pale, innocent eyes revealed a woman who was still young yet had aged so far beyond her years. She was little more than a skeleton. Her hair, once as golden as corn, was greying far too soon; she was not even thirty. What sort of a life was Pimentó, that workshy drunk, giving her? Everyone had told her not to marry him. No one could have thought differently now. Yes, he had been a handsome lad, and all the Sunday-afternoon drinkers at Copa’s tavern were awed by the quiet menace in his eyes and his imperviousness to drink as he played hand after hand of truc with the plain’s other big men and thugs. But as a husband, he must have been insufferable. However good looking a man might be, they are all the same: dogs that do not deserve a first glance, let alone a second. And how worn down poor Pepeta was now!

A woman’s gruff, booming voice thundered down the staircase behind Rosario.

Elisa! That milk better be up here soon. The gentleman is waiting.

Rosario began to laugh.

I bet you didn’t expect I’d be called Elisa now!

Changing your name was a must in this trade, she explained—that and speaking with an Andalusian accent. She mimicked the voice of the invisible caller upstairs, exaggerating its rustic accent to make it ridiculous. But her joking about could not hide that she was in a hurry to leave. It was clear she was frightened of those above, feared what the gruff-voiced woman or the gentleman would do if they had to wait any longer for the milk. She hastily told Pepeta to stop by again so they could reminisce some more about their days on the plain together. Then she scurried up the staircase.

Before they finally began the journey back to the plain, Pepeta, Ròcha and the calf spent another hour walking through the streets. The tinkling of Ròcha’s bell drew in customers until her withered udders had yielded the last drop of a milk that was as flavourful as the creature’s miserable diet of cabbage leaves and kitchen waste allowed it to be.

Pepeta walked with her head low, her mind still on her encounter with her old friend. She remembered the dreadful tragedy that had engulfed Barret and his family like it was yesterday. In the ten years since then, the fields that Barret and his ancestors had worked for more than a hundred years had been abandoned. The derelict cottage was slowly disintegrating. Each season brought fresh holes and cracks to its roof and walls, but no one dared to lay a hand on it. It had sat unoccupied and decaying for so long that the locals no longer noticed it when they passed by. Pepeta for one had not paid any attention to it for years. Now it was only of interest to the local boys. Faithful heirs to their parents’ hatreds, they would slip past the nettles growing in the desolate fields around the cottage for the thrills of pelting the abandoned home with stones, smashing anything made from wood and throwing as many big and heavy things as they could find down its well.

But that morning, Pepeta took notice of the ruin, even stopping on the road to have a better look at it. Amid the rich and fertile plain’s well-tilled fields, Barret’s old land was like a patch of black necrosis on a healthy young body. Ten years of dereliction had hardened the earth, and thistles, nettles, rough-backed green lizards, huge beetles, snakes and every local parasite had made Barret’s fields their home. As for Barret’s cottage, it was how a home would surely look if God chose to smite its occupant. The invasive plants and wildlife that lived in the nightmarish miniature jungle surrounding the cottage spent their days busily devouring one another.

Although the neighbours, who kept the fields adjoining it so beautiful and fecund, sometimes found their crops had been damaged by the jungle’s aggressive inhabitants, they treated the place with a certain live-and-let-live attitude. Had