The first of the woodlanders who eventually reached the church were quite taken aback, and then vexed, when they looked on all the work that had been done.
‘What’s been going on?’ they muttered. ‘What’s all this?’
And torn between surliness and the urge to snoop closer, through dim eyes they inspected all those parts of the building which had been renovated, all those sleeping corners which had miraculously woken up, all those dead things which had now come back to life. Old and young frowned with noses wrinkled, as though they were having difficulty taking in the breath of life and the freshness given off by those lovely surroundings which, until quite recently, had lain neglected and crumbling. They looked here, there and everywhere, as though conducting an investigation; they moved two steps forwards, and then turned and came back again… How they peeked and pried, with snide comments at every end and turn. And the more they looked and the more they snooped, the greater became their peevishness and their sullenness. That once decrepit church, now younger and stronger than ever; that little house where the priest lived, now with its brilliant white walls; that little garden plot, now in such bloom; those paths now so tidily cleared: all these things filled their gaze, affecting them like mockery or taunts. Temple, house, garden, paths, all basked in their own joyful triumph and smiled. And the more they smiled to display their triumph, the more the parishioners were enraged and discomforted, to the point of imagining that they themselves were being scoffed at by everything they beheld, as though everything was making faces at them and saying to taunt them: ‘So there! So you parishioners thought – did you? – that without your help we could never raise our heads again? Well, now you can see… We have had no need at all of you. The new priest, who is a saint of a man, has brought us back to life, all on his own, by himself! What do you think of that, what do you think?’
And the rustic flock, with befuddled heads still turning over and over their misgivings and suspicions, were ever more quickly becoming inwardly and darkly enraged, to the point of bursting. They felt humiliated, ridiculed: and such was their bewilderment, that finally, all the resentment they felt towards the priest showed itself in their eyes and came out through their words.
‘Just look at him, the bleedin’ priestman,’ one of them said, ‘and how he’s managed to get the church repaired!’
‘I don’t know how he’s been able to do it, the sly old scoundrel!’
‘Didn’t I always tell you that this one’s a crafty blighter?’
‘Blast his eyes! I reckon he’s in league with the Devil…’
‘For sure, for bloody sure! All this has the look of black magic about it…’
The conversation ended there, because at that very moment a cry of anguish was heard, a half-choked… ‘My God!’ that silenced them all. Nobody could tell where that pained exclamation came from. The woodsmen turned round, but could not see anyone howling or moaning close to where they were.
It was Father Llàtzer, poor man, who had looked from behind the cypresses in the graveyard to see with his own eyes the working of the miracle of his dead parishioners coming back to life. He it was who had stifled that tortured cry on hearing what was being said.
His hopes of redemption had suddenly melted away, as if they had all disappeared deep underground. The scowling innermost being of his primitive parishioners had been disclosed right in front of him, in all its cragged and brutish nakedness. He had dreamed that they were gloomy presences wandering aimlessly through the woodland shadows, as incapable of doing good as of doing evil… But now he saw that he had indeed been dreaming, merely dreaming such things… He now understood that drowsy simpletons they might be, but they harboured sinfulness behind that dozy exterior. They did evil furtively, neither fully asleep nor fully awake, stealthily and quietly, without drawing attention… They did as much evil as they could, as long as this did not trouble their minds too much or disturb the torpor of their plodding existence… Any fine human quality had been bred out of them all! Bad stock, that’s what they were!
Thereupon Father Llàtzer went and stood before them, with a stern look on his face, gesturing like a prophet possessed by a saintly rage, determined to put them to shame, to execrate them, to lash their faces with harsh words that would decry such great iniquity, such baseness!
But the gathering of peasants dispersed in all directions as soon as they caught sight of the priest carried away by that fury. Some turned and moved towards the apse; others went inside the church, pretending they had noticed nothing. Some looked away so as not to have to greet the new priest… Others eyed him hesitantly, with a look partly of mockery and partly of stupidity… Father Llàtzer walked past all of them and, fighting hard to suppress the holy rage which inflamed his heart, he just murmured to himself, ‘Bad stock!’ He entered the church, crossed the nave and went into the sacristy, struggling all the while to quieten the tumult of indignation that was making his very soul shudder.
‘It is not pious concern,’ he said to himself, ‘it is not compassion that needs to be given to these people who are rougher than the land they work, more darkly treacherous than the black of night… What will yoke them and keep them in submission is a vision of chastisement, the preaching of the message of eternal torment…’ He was going over and over these ideas as he went to the chest where his ceremonial garb was kept.
But as soon as he looked at the holy vestments, he felt terrified by his own thoughts. As soon as he had picked up the amictus robe to place it over his shoulders, he remembered that this cloth was the mystical veil with which Christ’s eyes were covered when he was being mocked and insulted… and he began to feel comforted by that memory of divine patience. Next, when he pulled the tunic over his head, he felt further consoled, reflecting that the white garment was the madman’s clothing in which the Son of Man was dressed on the night of his Passion. When this was done, as he tied the alb ribbon, he had become almost completely calm, because through his mind were passing visions of the ropes that bound His hands in the Garden of Gethsemane and the lashing He received in the praetorium…
But then, suddenly, as he was about to cross over his chest the two ends of his golden stole, the sign of immortality and the majestic attribute of his ministry, the flames of indignation that burnt within him began, without his understanding why, to surge up once more in his head.
‘Bad stock,’ he kept repeating, unable to prevent himself. ‘Bad stock! Like Caesar’s henchmen, they also are mocking Christ and treating him like a madman! They ascribe to the Devil the work of God, and they take miracles for witchcraft! They are just like the old tribes of the Jews, spitting their ingratitude towards Heaven! They want to know nothing of a God of love… they set themselves against the God who performs acts of eternal justice! Instead of a priest administering the law of Grace, what they need is one to dispense the ancient laws, to make them feel the weight of divine ire, to call down on them the fires of Heaven, to damn them even unto the fourth generation!’
Such was the indignation he felt towards the uncouth and benighted peasants that he was on the point of divesting himself of his holy garments, of going to the presbytery and ordering that the church be shut, shouting: ‘Go away, leave this place! You can all go away right now! There will be no Mass for the depraved!’ But, making a supreme effort, he once more reined in his powerful feelings and finished putting on the vestments, ready to go towards the altar. Filled with unction, with a deeply contemplative look, his head bowed and his eyes closed, his lips trembling in prayer, the priest went out of the sacristy, with one hand holding the chalice and the other upon the cloth covering the communion bread and wine.
But once he was in the gaze of his congregation, as he went from the sacristy to the presbytery, he turned his head all of a sudden, as though stirred out of his meditation by the irreverent noise that drifted towards him from the nave. The folk gathered there were creating that confused sound with their shuffling and loud whispers… They were muttering into each o
ther’s ear, making signs one to another, pointing at the freshly painted altars, the restored images and fittings… Then Father Llàtzer stopped for a moment, facing his parishioners, and quickly composing himself, motionless, in a stately severe pose, like a statue of divine majesty, he glared long and hard at the throng, with a look so dazzlingly intense that it brought those men and women to their knees. A sepulchral silence suddenly came over the place… and intoning the celebratory prayer he went up to the altar.
What could there have been in that look and that pose of the priest which so stunned the peasants? Had they seen passing before their eyes the august image of the God to whom offence had been done, of the irate God, in the guise he will surely display when he comes to judge the quick and the dead on the dark day of Last Judgement? Something of this there must have been in their reaction… The fact was that, before seeing him holding the sacred ornaments, whether they had come across him close by his house or met him out in the woods, their attitude towards the new priest was invariably one of rancour and hostility, or else of mockery and disdain! But now, changed to say Mass, dressed in the cassock, with the chalice in his hand, standing at the foot of the altar… now that was something different, something really tremendous! At that moment they looked upon him as the minister of the God who holds in his powerful hands the storm and the hailstones, the snow and the ice, the lightning and the blasting wind, the diseases which afflict flocks and herds, the deaths of men and of animals!
Such insights into the dark spirit of the woodlanders went back and forth in the priest’s head, while he was removing the cover from the chalice and then leafing through the missal.
‘Is not the fear of God the beginning of everything?’ he sighed. ‘So might I still lead them to God through fear…’
And a ray of hope shone in his eyes as he said, now standing before the altar step:
‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’
XI
The Story of the Old Couple
One of the other things which most afflicted Father Llàtzer, among the tragedies besetting him, was to find no consoling refuge in the old couple who were his servants. In them he found abundant, even excessive, respect, humility, veneration, but that was all. What he needed and was missing was affection. He could have done with a little less reverence and a little more emotional closeness. Living as he did in solitude in that mountain wilderness, separated from human contact, he would have welcomed it with heartfelt gratitude, as the best gift that Heaven could bestow, if the old couple, instead of venerating him as their lord and master, could have treated him like a son, or like a brother. A modicum of this kind of family warmth would have done a lot to bring him out of the chilly solitude to which he was condemned by his surly parishioners.
Every time that he returned home pained in mind and spirit by the consistent malevolence shown by the woodlanders – whether by their cutting off from a track in order not to have to greet him, or by putting on a sour face when they could not avoid meeting him – he would have preferred to see a tear of pity in the eyes of his obsequious companions rather than listen to that litany of Yes, Father… No, Father which was never far from their lips. For the priest it would have been real consolation if, whenever they saw him looking sad, downhearted because of the distress caused to him by people in the parish, they could have rushed to ask him what was wrong, what was upsetting him… And he would have told them, in one-to-one confidence, keeping it in the family as it were… the three of them might even have shed tears together, and so they would have done something to help heal the wounds that bled in his very soul… But they did no such thing. They were so obliging, so obedient, so overflowing with subservience that they could never find the kind word that was needed in a moment of affliction.
In order to get necessary things done, to fulfil their duties, both Mariagna and Josep would often go to extreme lengths of self-denial… and the most admirable thing was that they did this without realising it, as though it was nothing, as though what they did had no merit. Whether in household work, or in the service of the church, they never complained at all. They put their backs into every job: not just their backs, but their arms and legs, their physical strength and their senses… But they never put any true feeling into what they did. It was as though their hearts, through showing so much submission and respect, had been reduced to a condition in which any real tenderness of inward emotion had been turned into mere humility.
And thus the poor priest, by his nature so sociable and warm-hearted, found himself condemned to live in perpetual loneliness… Solitary, like an exile, when he walked through the ravines, surrounded by the black mountains; solitary and menacing like God in his divine anger, when he was in church, confronting his sullen congregation; solitary and revered, like a sanctum sanctorum, when he was at home in the company of his two servants. He certainly tried hard to win them round by speaking frankly to them; he did what he could to break down that wall of veneration which prevented the old couple from approaching him freely. But all his efforts were in vain. They, poor things, did not know how to behave any differently. In order to change their attitude they would have had to turn into different people, and they were far too old to become anything other than what they were. A whole life of servitude spent in the shadow of the cloister had moulded their spirit and their bodies according to the rules of the strictest discipline, inculcating in them that faded and withdrawn air of submission. The story of the old couple was a very strange one…
Josep was born and bred in Montmany itself, and he still remembered very well the time when, as a young child, he would roam his local hillsides and vales, one day assisting at Mass in the church and then the next running from house to house to recite psalms and paternosters in order to be able to help provide for his parents, both of them almost invariably afflicted by some illness or other. The poor mite had been born at Can Saborit, a dark and run-down little cottage which stood above the Can Ripeta col, and which was now, and for some years had been, a heap of rubble, totally deserted. It was there that, more often hungry than properly fed, the young lad grew up, passive and glum, watching as the little family home gradually crumbled and seeing how his parents were wilting and growing weaker, worn down by grinding poverty. Indeed, so weakened and ground down were they that eventually they died… And then the youngster, before the house finally collapsed about him, decided to leave those parts to see if he could earn his meagre daily bread in any other place where starvation was less likely. He made his way, with hardly any deviation, south towards Les Planes: and there, after much dogged perseverance, he arrived one day at the door of a large nunnery, where he begged for alms in God’s name.
The poor young lad stood in awe at the sight of that immense religious building, almost as big as an entire settlement and with the look more of a palace than of a convent. Coming as he did from a poky, ruinous hovel, he could hardly take in the grandeur of the row after row of living quarters, all those yards, wine cellars and guest rooms, all so clean and tidy, so spacious, so bright and airy, located all around the enclosed space. But what filled him with even more wonder than anything else was the sight of the abbess walking in the main cloister, followed by her nuns, a magnificent and majestic presence, like a triumphant queen surrounded by a court of princesses in white. The poor little fellow was overcome with wonder, unable to take in all that abundant splendour.
As he was such a lanky, sinewy youth and had such a mystical and benign look about him, the nuns told him that, if he wanted to stay on, they did indeed need a lad to help the gardeners. He agreed to this, and from then on he never left the staff quarters of the convent. He was so obliging, so hard-working and straightforward, that he quickly became everybody’s assistant, messenger or servant. ‘Send for Josep’, ‘Tell Josep to do that’, ‘Get Josep to go there’. And he performed all his duties, humbly, devoutly, respectfully, whether the instructions came from the nuns or from the male servants or the maids in the convent.
From amo
ng the maids he got to know Mariagna, another orphan like himself, as contrite and simple as him, a girl who had also been taken in by the nuns. Among her duties was that of looking after the cattle; but, because she was so young and feeble, very often she was unable, despite all her efforts, to impose her will on the herd which would go wandering off in the gorges and stream beds. But then it was Josep who would rush to help her, and between them they would bring the beast back in, together they would change their bedding and together they would give them fodder. Although they spent so much time in each other’s company, and despite being a couple of young people, they were always politely distant with one another, showing a kind of mutual respect that might have been expected among more civilised individuals. Whether out in the grounds, or in the staff quarters or in the convent itself, whenever they met the greeting was the same:
‘God be with you, Mariagna.’
‘God be with you, Josep’
And all the other servants in the convent were quite bemused and unable to withhold their smiles on hearing how politely that snotty-nosed pair addressed one another.
Then, one day, they found themselves by chance alone in the locutory, where they had gone to be given their orders, and the mother superior, who had noticed how alike they were in both character and bearing, said to them in an absent-minded sort of way:
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