Dark Vales

by Raimon Casellas

  ‘Is this where you are sending me to live, my Lord God?’ thought the priest, his heart gripped with anguish. Meanwhile, from the high windows of Uià, the heads of the people there peered out as if to welcome him and his companions. The owner, a blind old man who was a bit simple minded, limply waved a shaky hand, in a vague greeting. His wife, a woman with protruding jaws, younger than the blind man, merely stared inquisitively at the visitors, as if trying to take them in all at once with her eyes.

  The mien of those outlandish folk who were to be among his closest neighbours, combined with the view of the shadowy ravine, the deep hole of sadness that he was about to enter as though to be buried alive there, everything filled the priest with desolation. His white-haired head dropped forward on to his chest as a feeling of great dismay weighed down upon him.

  Then, making an effort to recover, he said to his aged companions:

  ‘Right, let us be off!’ speaking as though eager to get through once and for all the last stage of the Calvary that, at first, he had taken for Paradise.

  View of L’Ullà 1950

  (Courtesy of the Municipal Archive, Figueró-Montmany)

  La Rovira

  (Courtesy of Josep Vilardebò i Puig)

  IV

  Death’s Dominion

  Josep went in front, as a guide; then came the priest astride the mare; behind him, Mariagna and the bundle with their possessions on the back of the mule. And, somewhat ruefully, they made their way ever further into the shadow-filled ravine where, from that time on, they would be living as exiles from the world of men.

  Then it was that a deep, deep sorrow came upon Father Llàtzer when he saw how, as he drew nearer to their destination, the circle of crags all around seemed to be closing in upon him, cutting off any retreat, as though he were being walled up on every side, until he would finally be buried in those depths! In front of him there reared up the dark northern bluffs of Rovira, crowned by the heights of Puiggraciós. To his right he could see, like a continuous wall reaching skywards, the ghostly rock shapes of the Bertí cliffs. On his left he had the cultivated terraces of Uià, lining the hillside like steps rising up towards the clouds. And at his back, merging gradually into those terraces, there stood out the great shoulder of Romaní, with the Castell dels Moros, the Moors’ Castle, prominently outlined on the very top, like the head of a ghost. Rocks, hillocks, terraces, sheer cliffs, ridges, all joined hands on every side, forming a ring of black mountains that were terrifying to behold.

  Entombed down there, the priest felt chilled to the bone, struck by a vague fear that the rocky pinnacles on every side were about to topple on to him. Completely shut in, he kept glancing around instinctively, as though looking for a way out, or at least to be able to see further. But it was in vain, totally in vain… There were no gaps or openings through which his eyes might range freely… Everything was enclosed, completely blocked off, walled in… Distance was eliminated by the lowering crags that imprisoned him… The word horizon had no meaning there… and he had to bend his neck backwards in order to see any sky above the encirclement of bulky hillsides and high tops.

  The sun was still hovering on the point of dropping down behind the ridge… and great patches of shadow were spreading everywhere. The mystery of twilight was steadily taking possession of those rock clefts, wooded slopes and steep cliffs. Such awful dread struck into Father Llàtzer as he watched darkness advancing rapidly to settle upon the eternal solitude and silence of those hollows, which seemed to be night’s permanent domain!

  There were three or four isolated houses not far away, but their existence only made that sunken, barren place seem even wilder and lonelier. Beyond Uià, the moss-clad walls of the Rovira farmhouse could just vaguely be made out, almost completely concealed in the darkness of a thick clump of holm oaks; further away the smaller dwellings of Can Pere Mestre and Can Pugna were scarcely visible, huddled at the base of the cliff, as though terror-stricken; in the far distance, beneath the Castell dels Moros, it was nigh impossible to detect the shape of the ruined homestead of Romaní, with its remaining walls battered by hard times and by age, bent askew as though slumping with drowsiness.

  Except for those dwellings, tucked into the contours of the land like animals’ lairs, there was no sign of human habitation other than the priest’s house and the church, in the middle of the dismal valley, linked together by the dark, dark green patch which was the cemetery. To come across any other houses scattered thereabouts, one had to climb sharply and nimbly up to the Puiggraciós ridge, or to scramble even more steeply upwards over broken ground to the Can Ripeta col, or to cross over the encircling jagged spurs and then drop through rough terrain into the neighbouring ravines, clattering steeply down to Can Sunyer or through the shady Black Wood to Can Prat below its hillside where the sun never lingered…

  When the priest and his companions reached their new home, the sun had already gone right down behind the cliffs. Darkness was rapidly taking over the ring of rugged mountains. It was as though the air was being filled with black flecks that drifted down from the sky, forming quivering shadows everywhere in the valley.

  ‘Open the door, Josep!’ ordered the priest, while he and the old housekeeper were dismounting on the stone flags outside the doorway.

  From the bunch of keys he was holding, the old man found the one which fitted the lock, fumbling to turn it, then opening the door with a push… and all three of them froze in horror when, having taken one step inside, they became aware of the rubble that lay everywhere. Dislodged blocks of stone, slabs of plaster on the floor, beam ends hanging down, this was the grim state of the house entrance, which seemed to be lamenting all the tragic destitution of buildings left to crumble. The old man and his wife wanted to take the bundle and the animals inside, to get everything under cover and unloaded wherever they could; but everywhere they stumbled over piles of debris. They first had to push heaps of rubble and stones away into corners, in order to be able to move about at all on the floor.

  Such dereliction! Such utter desolation! The poor priest could not have felt more dispirited. With his arms drooping, all he could do was to shake his head slowly as he contemplated that half-ruined hideout which from then on was to be his dwelling. As he reflected that what was happening to him was a kind of burial of the last days of his old age – before he went forever more to the real grave of death itself – he was overcome by a feeling of utter helplessness that made him shudder with dread and anguish.

  ‘No… the hour of eternal peace has not yet come,’ he muttered as though from within a deeply disturbing dream. ‘No… I thought that hour was so close, so close at hand… but now it is going further and further away… because I am still not fully cleansed of earthly concerns…’

  But then, all at once, with a start, he drew himself up, as though goaded by an idea that suddenly brought him out of his trance. ‘What about the church?’ he thought. ‘What kind of state must the poor church be in? Will it be just as tumble-down as this?’

  ‘Josep!’

  ‘Yes, Father…’

  ‘Leave all this for now… and let us go over to the church… I want to see the church before night closes in…’

  On hearing this from the priest, the old couple gave up their noisy efforts to clear the floor of the house, and all three of them now went outside, one after the other, heading together towards the graveyard. But once more they ran into the mysterious obstacles that were everywhere under their feet. The thick, dense tangle of grass covering the whole of the cemetery, overgrowing even the tallest of the funerary crosses, prevented them from reaching the walls of the church. It was as though everything they encountered – vegetation, people or stones – bore them a grudge, as though everything was conspiring to stand against them as outsiders who had come to disturb the silence of dead things and of places in deep slumber…

  Father Llàtzer even thought that he could hear pathetic voices, seeming to come from below the ground, painfully complaining: �
��Don’t make a noise, for pity’s sake! Don’t make such a din! We were sleeping so peacefully… so gently… Why have you come to torment us now, when we had fallen so soundly asleep? And such soft slumber! Don’t disturb people who are sleeping, nor the dead who lie at rest nor the ruins that are dreaming… We do not say anything at all to you… So do not make a disturbance… Don’t wake us from our slumber…’

  But Josep must not have heard these voices and their pained lamentations, as he was doing his utmost to overcome the treacherous vegetation covering the graveyard. Heaving hard, the old man was wrestling to force a way through the tangled growth, or stamping it down with his feet. Thus the priest was able to come along behind him through luxuriant mallow plants that were nourished by the slime oozing from corpses.

  Having gone through the graveyard, they reached the door of the church and immediately tried to unlock it. But they were sorely upset when once again their efforts were thwarted… It was as though centuries of rust had built up inside the lock. The priest, the old man and his wife, all of them strained to free it. But, despite all their efforts, the big bolt could not or would not be moved. And the lock made an angry grating sound, as though saying, ‘So now you want to discover what secrets are sleeping inside here? Now you villains have come to rouse the mysterious spirit of the church, have you? Well, you shall not open the door; you shall not come in…’ But the intruders applied such force that the door, creaking and groaning, finally gave way, at the same time as a terrifying uproar arose inside the nave of the church. It was the great big birds that had been roosting here and there in the building, now creating such a squawking racket upon being disturbed, such a screeching and a wild flapping of wings, as they flew out through the windows, like a throng of evil spirits.

  Terrified by that demonic uproar which caused them great confusion, the three of them, all equally disconcerted, looked anxiously into the nave, without being able to make anything out. It was all in complete darkness, pitch-black darkness. The shadows had thickened so quickly inside there that the altar, the side chapels, the statues of saints and the presbytery were all enveloped in gloom. The faint starlight that could still be made out up by the windows had the effect of concentrating the darkness of their surroundings at ground level. Like souls in torment, the priest and the old couple, groping their way around in that blackness, finally found a piece of taper resting on a candle holder near to the font. The old man lit it and, now holding the tiny flame, was making his way carefully forwards, towards the presbytery, when he noticed that the floor was awash. Over time the rain, dripping in through the cracks in the vaulted roof, had formed a single expanse of shallow water over the uneven slabs beneath his feet…

  ‘Lord! Lord!’ exclaimed Father Llàtzer with his head in his hands. ‘Lord, do not abandon me like this! Do not punish me in this way, for I am still too weak to bear such tribulation!’

  Josep, meanwhile, had reached the high altar and was lighting the candle stubs that he found on the side table… And in the flickering glow they all gazed in horror at the eerie sight of the saints and the statues behind the altar itself. The dust, the damp and the grime covering everything endowed those images and trophies with the faded, repulsive look of things that had been lying buried in the ground… The twisted columns, adorned with sculpted bunches of grapes and with angel heads, all formerly covered with gold leaf, were now clothed in thick mould, as though they were afflicted with a gruesome disease. The stocky figure of Saint Paul, patron saint of the parish, occupying his rightful place in the central niche, was hardly recognisable because it was riddled with woodworm and draped in cobwebs. One of Saint Isidore’s arms was hanging loose… Saint Sebastian was leaning to one side as though about to topple over…

  The priest was beginning to think that, just like the inhabitants of those dark vales, all the saints by the altar were also slumbering in the soporous shadows of the ruins. Could the pitiable images really be asleep? Or perhaps not, perhaps they were not sleeping… Perhaps it was worse than that… Perhaps they were dead, yes… dead and already buried. Because… thinking about it, their clothing, their tunics and mantles, looked like nothing other than shrouds, shrouds that had rotted in the ground and were now falling apart, revealing the wooden carcasses inside…

  The priest was unable to bear that terrible vision any longer. He felt dizzy, a lump came to his throat and his legs were about to give way… He could stand it no longer, no longer… and he staggered outside. He would have called for help… But where would help have come from? The nearest neighbours were far away… and perhaps they were dead as well! He would have tried to flee… but where to? All the tracks and ways were obliterated by the blackness of night… Had he forgotten that he was a prisoner of the cliff faces and the hills around?

  ‘Lord, have mercy!’ he shouted, raising his arms aloft. ‘Lord, have mercy!’

  And, seeing in front of him the ruined house and the weed-infested graveyard… then the ring of black mountains walling him in on every side… he sobbed and broke down in tears…

  V

  Nightmare

  ‘Josep!’

  ‘Yes, Father…’

  ‘Mariagna!’

  ‘Father…’

  ‘Look… I have decided to call the people of the parish to a meeting, here at my house. I need to find out if, despite the coldness in the very core of their being, I can make them blush with shame by showing them the sorry state the church is in. I want to see if God can touch the hearts of the walking dead here in these dismal dark vales, and if He can bring them back to life again… So then, Josep, you will go up to Puiggraciós and tell all the people who live around there; then you will drop down to the next valleys, and tell everybody to come along on Sunday, at mid-morning… Say that I have to speak to them… that I must see them… Is that clear, Josep?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘And you, Mariagna, will go and invite the parishioners from all the houses close by here.’

  ‘Very well, Father.’

  ‘On Sunday, everybody here!’

  That morning Father Llàtzer was feeling better, more positive. He had been battered by his long journey of the day before and by the shocks inflicted on his spirit by the vision of that savage world in ruins where it was his lot to live from now on. In spite of all this, he had awoken that morning in a quite calm and decisive state of mind, feeling infused now and then with that faith which can perform miracles and can move mountains… And yet… he had spent such a dreadful night, long feverish hours of nightmares and morbid visions. Such delirium! Such sinister aberrations!

  He had dreamed that he was being buried alive inside a huge, deep hole in the ground, its sides walled with black mountains. He was shouting as loud as he could, his hair standing on end: ‘Look what you are doing to me, burying me while I’m still alive and breathing!’ ‘It matters not at all,’ came voices from the depths of the abyss. ‘It matters not… It’s the same for everybody down here, we’re buried; all of us here are half corpse, half living thing…’ And so indeed it was, because he had only to look all around his dreamscape to see that the great pit he was in was one immense cemetery, with only darkness and solitude. The houses he could see here and there were nothing but graves and family vaults… and the dejected people who dwelt in them, nothing but lifeless bodies. Through all the hours of night, when silence falls and everywhere is blackness, this spectacle of deadness takes over completely. As soon as the sun has gone down, men, women and children bury themselves in their own houses and, with their bedclothes as shrouds, they lie for hour after hour on the burial mounds which they think are their beds. When day breaks, because brightness comes to their eyes and birdsong to their ears, they think they are returning to life… But all that is fake and deceit… Death continues to reign, still… and as the first rays of light hesitantly appear, the dead leave their houses, some with a hoe on their shoulder, some with a shepherd’s bag on their back. Like spirits from another world, all of them marc
h unhesitatingly in the shade of the woods, as though sure of where they are heading and of which way to go. They eat, they drink, they walk, they stop, they till the earth, they lead their flocks to graze… And all their actions are performed blindly, without any conscious purpose. They do things just because they have seen these things done by other dead beings, their parents or grandparents, in times gone by. The dead do not think, and only from instinct do they follow the half-effaced tracks bequeathed to them from centuries ago… Nor are they touched by anything like love, except love for that quietude in which they are perpetually enveloped… Not to be disturbed is all they want. Not to be troubled or upset… To be left alone…

  ‘What a vision of damnation! Lord, what damnation!’ murmured the priest as he struggled with all the anguish of his dream. ‘But I, what have I got to do with those dumb ghosts? I am alive, I can think, I have the will to struggle, I can love… So why am I being buried alive here?’ ‘They are burying you here as a punishment,’ came the reply from the depths of the abyss. ‘You, in your vanity and presumption, tried to dazzle people with marvellous clever ideas. You wanted to resurrect an ancient philosopher, a wise man from centuries ago, who had been completely forgotten by everybody. It was your vanity that made you pry into the sealed tomb that his writings had become, disturbing the mould on his books, their pages riddled with wormholes and sinful ideas. Out of vanity you claimed that universal truth was to be found there. And as your arrogance became ever stronger, you attempted to turn that heretic into a saint… That is why you have been exiled to this land of the dead, inundated with darkness and sorrow. That is why you must now live rubbing shoulders with the deceased who wander these black woods looking and behaving as though they were living beings possessed of souls.