Dark Vales

by Raimon Casellas

  One after the other, the men playing cards in the stone yard outside the sanctuary gathered up the hands they had laid out, certain in their minds that now was the time to settle the score with Aleix. ‘Now or never,’ they were all thinking, ‘It’s now or never.’

  ‘With all these comings and goings, one fine day he will take off for good with his pile of gold coins and we’ll never again see hide nor hair of him.’

  The same thought was in each and every mind:

  ‘First, we get the youngsters to ask him for a hand-out… and then, as soon as his back is turned, one of us must try to jump on him, while the dogs are being clouted with sticks to fend them off.’

  Aleix, meanwhile, was approaching the tables, sneering, as if he could sniff what was in their vindictive minds. The closer he came, the clearer it was to the card players that the old man had no dogs with him. And he looked really down and out, shabby and filthy… The children were just about to ask him for money, like they usually did… but then, as if he wanted to steal a march on them, old Aleix held out his own hand, just like a beggar, and in a pathetic, singsong voice started to plead:

  ‘Good people… good people all… Won’t you spare me a copper or two, for the love of God?’

  Old and young were quite disarmed to hear that. Aleix, poverty stricken? Aleix without his dogs? Aleix without even a decent smock or shirt? Aleix asking them for money? In a trice all their greed was turned into raging anger, anger at being faced once again by a cruel reality.

  ‘Go to Hell, to see if you can scrounge some blazing logs!’ shouted a woodcutter, bursting with rage.

  Still sneering, the old man shuffled off without showing any sign of haste, thinking to himself that his clever bit of play acting had frightened away the scavengers for ever more.

  ‘Nobody will bother me now… No more sleepless nights…’ he kept muttering to himself.

  And then, a short distance on his way, half hidden by some pine trees, he was unable to resist looking back towards the sanctuary and, with a devilish smirk, shaking his clenched fist he growled, gleefully now:

  ‘Bugger the lot of you!’

  Tree cutting in Vallcàrquera.

  (Courtesy of Paquita Dosrius)

  Peasant on horseback in Figueró.

  (Courtesy of the Municipal Archive, Figueró-Montmany)

  II

  The Derelict Church

  The Montmany folk had already been without their own priest for some months.

  The last one to serve there had no alternative but to walk out on his parishioners. Old, sick and unable to fend for himself, he had been left suddenly on his own by the hard-nosed man and wife, both of them getting on in years, who had worked for him as sacristans and also as caretaker-gardeners. They were a grumpy couple who found fault with everything.

  The wife, from dawn to dusk, used to talk endlessly about how she would prefer to die there and then, rather than to be stuck in that great ruin of a house with its scabby, flaking ceilings that were falling in on them. Every few minutes she would swear that she was weary and fed up of cleaning all day long that crumbling, dark church, with so many cracks that the damp got in everywhere, and so dank that the clothing on the holy images was falling to bits and the saints in their niches round the altars were all covered in mould. And her husband also used to moan, exclaiming that he was too old to do what he did… ‘One minute it’s water the vegetable patch and dig over the strip; then it’s serve at Mass and ring the bells; next, go walking for hours at night escorting the holy sacraments up hill and down dale; then go and bring back this corpse or that one, and help dig the hole to bury them in…’

  ‘We slog right enough for the plate of potatoes that we put into our mouths, sure we do!’ the two used to be forever saying to one another, muttering out of earshot or just loudly enough for the poor priest to hear.

  But things came to a head, and one day, full of confidence and guile, they went to see the priest to let him know that they were leaving him… Quite simple… they had been offered work looking after the shrine at Puiggraciós, because the couple doing that job were going off to live in the village… and it was an opportunity they couldn’t afford to miss, because… and God himself could punish them for turning the chance down… Up there, on Sundays and feast days, there is some cash to be made from the people who go to drink in the canteen… And that sort of thing doesn’t turn up every day out of the blue…

  Listening sadly to this, the poor priest felt as though the whole cliffside had come crashing down on his head. Until that moment he had been fighting stoutly against the odds, bearing the heavy burden of ministering to the people in those deep, dark places where sadness reigned. But, on being told that his household companions were leaving him, he felt flattened and depressed, perplexed, as though weighed down all at once by all his previous woes. Seventy years was too long a time to have been going up and down mountain sides, trudging through mud and snow in order to say morning Mass at Puiggraciós and then, the same day, High Mass in the parish church, or to go and give the last rites or attend to the dying wishes of his scattered parishioners ensconced in the deep, wild recesses of that mountainous terrain.

  More dead than alive, he was taken to Figueró, where he had some relatives, and from then onwards the house which had been his home was left deserted, abandoned, becoming just a heap of rubble shrouded in isolation.

  The church building itself also had to be closed. But, before the door was finally locked and bolted, the nearest neighbours gathered at the entrance in order to see who was to look after the keys. In truth, nobody at all particularly wanted to take charge of them. Those denizens of the wooded valleys felt a certain fearful aversion towards anything to do with the temple and its altar… and the idea of being able to go freely in and out of the church, and of being in charge of all its contents, filled them with a kind of dread. From the oldest to the youngest, they all felt in awe of the vestments, of the sacramental ornaments, of the paten and the chalice. They knew that all these things were somehow the tableware and the clothing of God Almighty himself who has the power of life and death over all men, who brings thunder and lightning, who gives the sun its dazzling brightness and who makes it rise each day. There were those among them who would tremble in fright merely on coming close to those accessories of divine service. And so, even though they might have suffered the bleakest poverty and been starving to death, most of them would not have dared to lay a hand on the sacred vessels, for fear of being struck and laid underground by a bolt from Heaven while that sacrilege was being committed…

  But there was more to it than that… for it was no secret to anyone that those poor treasures of the mountain temple were of very little value. It was widely known that the cruet dish was made of lead, that the chalice was copper and that all the vestments were nothing but darns from top to bottom. That is why, when the time came to close perhaps for ever the iron-studded doors of the church, and when someone asked: ‘Who is taking the keys?’ they all shrugged. Finally the people at Uià took charge of them, as this was the nearest house to the church.

  From then on it seemed as though that landscape, with its ravines already drenched in shade and sadness, was finally engulfed in a limbo of gloom. The last peal of the bell marked the rapid fading into oblivion for the ceremonies of the blessed sacrament, the coming together of neighbours at every service of worship, the sermons delivered from the foot of the altar, the men singing up in the choristers’ gallery, the pleasures felt when alms of festive cakes and small loaves were blessed… as though, in the blink of an eye, their last, tiny remnant of soul had flitted away from those surly parishioners of the dark vales.

  If anybody wanted to attend Mass, on a holy day, they had to go to the one which was said at daybreak, up at Puiggraciós, by a priest from the nearby village of Ametlla. When a baby was born, it had to be taken for baptism to Saint Bartholomew’s or to the church at Bertí. When a death occurred, any priest from thereabouts would go to the
house and load the body on to the back of a mule, to carry it in this way to Montmany for burial in hallowed ground.

  How very depressing was all this! Even the most slow-witted peasants felt deprived of something… something they just could not explain. And many of them said that it was a punishment, a spell that had been cast, a curse…

  But the most painful and upsetting thing for them all was not to hear the bells ringing at any time of day. Everybody, however old or young, felt a strange anxiety, a kind of yearning for the voice which used to measure out for them the sad hours of their lives.

  At eight o’clock in the morning, when Mass was announced by those three resounding chimes ding… dong… ding… followed by the final volley of repeated loud clangs, everybody who was out working at different places in the woods or on the cultivated terraces would take from their baskets the hunk of dark bread which was breakfast. At exactly midday, as soon as the twelve strokes sounded from the small belfry, everybody gathered up their tools, making ready to walk home if that was not too far from where they were working, or finding a patch of shade in which to sit and swallow what they had brought with them to bite upon. And then, especially in the evening, when the measured peal calling to prayer sounded out, it seemed as if even the oxen and the sheep recognised what it meant and they began to show signs of chafing to go homewards and into the yard…

  Nobody but nobody could get used to the idea that the voice of the bells had been silenced for ever. When it rained, or when there was mist or low cloud, especially in winter, when the sun seems to hide itself in order not to show how time is passing, when all the land is clothed in gloom, the shepherds and the wood cutters out among the trees lost any instinctive sense of time… and they groped their way around a landscape that was blanketed in the mystery of darkness.

  Weeks and then months went by in this way… and, because privation and misery can inure mankind to anything, there came the day when both shepherds and those who worked on the land became used to the bells’ silence, to that particular silence which seemed to be that of death itself. They saw cracks gradually appearing in the church walls… but they paid no particular heed. They saw a thick mat of nettles and mallow plants, sap-rich and proud, spreading like a crazy dishevelled lawn, overgrowing the narrow strip of the burial ground in the space between the priest’s house and the church… but nobody took any notice. They saw ivy spreading everywhere, clinging like a bloodsucking parasite to the walls of the temple and to the stones enclosing the priest’s vegetable garden, clinging even to the gnarled lower trunks of the cypresses in the cemetery, and nobody bothered about it. They had grown quite used to seeing how, in the early evening, big shadowy birds, wildly screeching, came and went through the windows of the church, as though that were their domain, their palace… The whole spectacle of desolation to which these people’s lives had been condemned made no impression whatsoever upon them.

  Only occasionally, when round by the church apse they glimpsed pairs of buzzards, circling as though in a witches’ dance, in mysterious wheeling movements high in the air, only then did they feel a kind of shudder. Then they crossed themselves, murmuring a strange prayer that they knew by heart, in order to ward off evil. Otherwise, they were indifferent to everything. The slumbering spirit of these people of the wooded hills had become resigned to the dilapidation of the temple and to the silence of the belfry, just as they were resigned to a life of calamities and of grinding poverty.

  Then one day a rumour started to go around, from one house to another, that a new priest was on his way, and the people were all mystified.

  ‘A new priest!’ they said. ‘What must he have done wrong, for him to be sent here to do penance?’

  III

  The New Priest

  And so, one afternoon, some local people out in the woods caught sight of a priest, he looked to be middle-aged, and was coming up from the direction of the Oliveres farmhouse, astride a mare and accompanied by an old man and his wife, who must have been his servants. The news travelled in whispers, from one ear to the next:

  ‘He must have done something really wrong… and he’s been brought up here to purge his sins.’

  Far from being suspicious, the priest was completely ignorant of the mutterings that his arrival was causing. Still less could he guess that the malice of those woodlanders might be so refined when it came to sniffing out badness lying in the deep recesses of any secret.

  He rode painfully on and on, up the arduous mountain route, eager to reach before dark the parish to which he had been appointed.

  ‘The path is long and steep,’ reflected the priest, filled with sad resignation. ‘The path is long and steep… just like the rest of the journey that lies ahead before I find peace in my soul.’

  But the deeper he penetrated into the dense solitude of the woods, the easier and the braver he came to feel. Suddenly, it seemed as if his spirits were being lifted by the view of the centuries-old trees, standing tall and serene before him, and by the invigorating fragrance of their resins that wafted gently over his drawn features. It was as though they were offering him a new life, putting out of sight his previous one, and erasing from his head the burning memory of his dreadful fall into disgrace, all those errors of judgement and all that excessive pride which had filled his heart, the causes of his exile.

  The further he went into the shadowy mystery of the pinewoods, the more he felt his spirit easing. It was as if little by little, with every stretch of track covered, he was also leaving behind the heavy burden of his previous tribulations. He had not experienced such a sweet moment ever since the day of his repentance when, with tears pouring down his face, he had felt that the whole weight of his sorrow and remorse had been lifted from his chest. He was a natural dreamer, so all the contemplative urges embedded in his inner self were satiated now by the sight of the lofty crags and mysterious woods, to such an extent that he forgot the agony he had dragged along everywhere with him ever since that short time of wild delusion which had threatened to draw him into doctrinal revolt and to bring about his ruin.

  ‘This is no exile; this will be my Paradise!’ said the priest to himself, as he turned left from the valley and started up the rough climb to the Uià farm. ‘What else could I ask for, Lord, as I approach old age, other than to be able to hide my afflictions in the peace of the mountains?’

  Then, a thought came into his mind. Maybe the infinite compassion of the Almighty, instead of punishing him for a moment of wrong-headed weakness, wanted rather to reward him for his repentance. From the depths of his heart he felt the swelling of an immense gratitude for the mercy of God who was guiding his steps towards the loneliness of those imposing surroundings.

  ‘How beautiful is everything here, despite all its wildness!’ exclaimed the priest, gazing at the mighty Bertí cliffs on his right, towering above him like an immense rampart built by gigantic arms at the beginning of Time. Admiration was springing abundantly forth deep inside him, bringing biblical words to his lips:

  ‘Wondrous are your works, Lord, and no mouth is worthy enough to praise them.’

  And, as though he could not contain the enthusiasm he felt, he was eager to infect his companions with it, asking them excitedly:

  ‘Isn’t all this admirable, Josep?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ replied the old man, humbly respectful, while guiding the priest’s mare by the halter.

  ‘Don’t you think this is beautiful, Mariagna?’ said the priest, this time addressing the housekeeper who was coming along behind the mare, mounted on a mule carrying all their household goods packed in sacks, bundles and pillow cases.

  And the poor old woman, nodding slightly, muttered respectfully:

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  Facing the dense forest in front of him, the new priest’s eyes opened wide like those of a child, shining at the prospect of living and dying in peace, surrounded by the serenity of those wild, empty ravines. The only thing that slightly tightened his heart was coming acr
oss the occasional local who was going to or returning from Figueró village. He observed their surly demeanour, or the sideways looks they gave as they went by, seeming as they did to be asking how and why strangers were moving into the priest’s house, as though resentful at the arrival of newcomers.

  ‘Good afternoon to you!’ the priest greeted them kindly.

  ‘God be with ye,’ replied the tongue-tied people on the track, with their heads bent and eyes cast down, as though embarrassed to return that greeting. But as soon as they had walked on for a few yards, they would turn their heads with a sly look, squinting to see what they could make of the outsiders, of how they looked or how they were dressed, or whether they were carrying much baggage…

  ‘They are rough and craggy like the mountains they live in,’ thought the priest, trying to make sense of the surly disposition of those people. ‘The continuous struggle with a harsh land that can barely provide them with their daily bread also kills any love for their neighbour, and makes them mistrust everything… But I will win them round, if the Lord helps me… I will soften their hearts.’ And, remembering the sacred text, he added:

  ‘I shall sow seeds of sweetness amongst men.’

  By now, the three of them had followed one another up to where the track levelled out and the black walls of the Uià farmstead were just coming into view. Being a man who knew his way around those parts, Josep went ahead of the other two to enter the property. Once he was in the yard, he heard the dogs barking as he shouted to those inside:

  ‘Hallo, good people! God bless and keep you! I’ve been sent by Father Llàtzer, the new priest, to pick up the church keys.’

  Meanwhile, the priest gently spurred on the mare to go down again towards the house. But before beginning that descent… he took one last look back at the deep, narrow valley which, he thought, was to cut him off for ever from the world of the living. Then, as soon as he had a clear view forwards, his eyes were set anxiously on the drop that suddenly opened up before him… Deep down in the middle of the ravine he sighted the stunted little belfry of the church, and then the badly weathered walls of the house that was to be his home. The moment he identified them, he felt a kind of panic. Everything about that lonely corner looked ruinous, lost and engulfed in murky sadness among the cypress trees and the overgrown grass of the graveyard.