Dark Vales

by Raimon Casellas

  ‘You two would make a good couple… You ought to get married…’

  Whereupon the two young people, who had never ever dreamed of anything of the sort nor had ever exchanged more than the occasional word, replied straight away, in unison:

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ as if taking as a commandment those words that were still hanging in the air.

  And so it came to pass. Shortly afterwards they were married, without their changed state bringing about any change at all in their habitually submissive and self-sacrificing behaviour. As time went on, their lives became even more staid, more taciturn, more devoted to the service of God and to the service of the convent. They treated one another with the same respect as before, with the same reserve and the same formality…

  ‘I say, Mariagna…’

  ‘What can I do for you, Josep?’

  They were so modest and withdrawn in their life together that they seemed not so much husband and wife as brother and sister who had secretly made vows of obedience, poverty and chastity, just like the nuns themselves. The cloistered atmosphere in which they had lived and breathed for so long had instilled in them, over time, a certain way of bearing themselves, certain monkish gestures, that showed through in everything they did… in how they walked, in how they dressed, in how they expressed themselves. Although they were simple country people, they gave the impression of being completely at home in the convent, more like members of a religious order than sons of the soil. And this is how their lives were lived, for countless years and years, until they reached old age… which was when Father Llàtzer got to know them, after he had been ordered by his prelate to spend a month in penance at Les Planes, before undertaking his journey into the backwoods of Montmany.

  ‘That’s where I come from, Father, Montmany is in my part of the world,’ said Josep one day, talking with the troubled priest.

  And Father Llàtzer, on hearing those words, thought that it was a miraculous message which now offered him a way of getting through the adversity of his situation. He was lost in thought for a good while, reflecting that, if the old man were willing to accompany him on his pilgrimage, it would be like having a guide sent to him from Heaven. The part of the country to which he was being transferred was unknown terrain for him, and the idea of going there filled him with anxiety. He had heard it talked about as the back of beyond, a terrifying place all blanketed in mists, shadows and sadness; as a kind of dark limbo where people lived their lives as though in a death-like slumber. ‘If I could at least go there accompanied by a good soul like this old man and a good woman like Mariagna,’ he thought, ‘then exile in those dark vales would perhaps not be so desolate or so cruel…’

  Father Llàtzer was suddenly encouraged by that thought which had shone like a tiny flicker of starlight amid so much darkness in his mind, and he hurried to the nunnery to explain to the mother superior all the anxiety that burdened him and the one last shred of hope that he now had.

  ‘If only I could take the dear old couple with me! If only they would be willing to come with me!’

  And finally taking pity on him in his tribulation, the mother superior called the old couple to her presence. She began with gentle insinuation and then gradually implanted in their minds the priest’s desire. But Josep and Mariagna did not have to be treated with so much delicate precaution: they were so accustomed to perpetual obedience and eternal submission, that as usual, they took her initial insinuation as a fully formed and explicit order, and with one voice they replied:

  ‘Yes, reverend mother. As soon as it pleases your reverence, we shall depart.’

  And from that moment on they set about getting everything prepared for the sad pilgrimage, fully resigned to abandoning the sunlit walls and the flower-bedecked cloisters where their lives had been spent, ready now to set off on the journey into the deep, dark wilderness. During the whole time they were travelling, on a route as rough and steep as Calvary itself, they never gave out a single sigh of sadness or a single moan of regret… And once they had arrived at their destination, once they were holed up in that lonely corner where they were to live as exiles from the world of men, neither of them had any other thought but of moulding to their new situation the habits they had followed in the convent. Absolutely nothing had impinged on the perpetually long-suffering spirits of the old couple. Everything was still done in the same way and at the same rhythm. The unremitting, silent labour; the habitual patience and self-sacrifice; and the God-be-with-you incessantly repeated in the convent: none of this behaviour was interrupted in the slightest. When, at midday or in the evening, their tasks completed, they briefly came together in the house, husband and wife would greet one another with the usual convention:

  ‘May God be with you, Mariagna.’

  ‘And with you forever, Josep.’

  Once these words of greeting had been exchanged, each of them sank back into uninterrupted silence and like shades of persons from centuries past, they meekly went off again to their respective chores. The local people, seeing them coming and going in the vicinity of the church, silent and withdrawn like penitents in the wilderness, stared at them in bemusement and often even made fun of how they looked and behaved. Although the old couple dressed much the same as everybody else, there was something oddly ecclesiastical about how their clothes had been put on and were worn. Josep went about in a black smock which, had it been only a little longer, might have been a cassock; and with his arms crossed in their usual position, with each hand tucked into the opposite oversleeve, he looked strangely, from any angle, like an ordained cleric. And as for Mariagna, it was even more obvious… She had a particular way of fastening under her chin the white scarf she wore as though it were a toque, and of putting on top of this her black hood, tipped forward so that it looked like a veil and so that she had all the appearance of being a real nun.

  Father Llàtzer could not look at them without being struck that they could have been holy people from earlier centuries, forgotten survivors preserved in the here and now, or faded images that had escaped from an ancient reredos. What grieved him was that those quaint altar-saints, so perfectly self-denying and humble, did not bear within their habits a compassionate spirit that might have shown some real feeling for all the suffering he was experiencing. But they offered no such solace… far from it! What they saw in Father Llàtzer, as well as their lord and master, was the clergyman, God’s minister, the priest… and that ministry, the dignity of that office, filled them with reverence and overwhelming respect. The real pity was that they were unable to recognise the man, the man of flesh and blood, who more than anyone else on earth needed to be comforted and to be shown compassionate feeling, there in that sepulchral wilderness in which he lived, condemned to suffer the ill will and the taunts of his scowling parishioners.

  And he needed it there and then… never more urgently now that the silent hostility, the furtive warfare waged against him by the woodlanders from the start, seemed to be building up to a head in open confrontation! Without his knowing how, nor from which direction, he could feel a storm of rancour gathering over his head, about to burst, as impalpable as dark shadows, as basely treacherous as the black of night. He knew that they had a fierce grudge against him, and that the day of their villainy was at hand. The good thing was that he was not afraid, even so, of what lay in store; and encouraged by the mightiness of what his ministry signified, he was standing firm and ready to face the onslaught of his vicious neighbours. Indeed sometimes he even felt impatient for events to take their course, perhaps trusting that out of the very upheaval there would come about change, the new life, the redemption that he longed for…

  Ever since the day when, holding the chalice and robed for saying Mass, he had seen his parishioners trembling from head to foot, terrified by the hard stare of indignation with which he was fixing them, he had harboured the hope of being able to use fear as a means of leading towards God that stubborn herd. So whenever one of them strayed from the straight and narrow and
created an embarrassing scene, he knew how to choose his moment to impose discipline… He waited until the Sabbath and the hour for Mass, and then, when his whole congregation was gathered before the altar…, he would turn to face them and would reprimand the guilty person with angry words: ‘You there, the boy from Ensulsida! Do you not fear God’s punishment? I declare that you are quite heartless to behave as you do, letting your old mother go out begging in order to support you! And you over there, shepherd from Uià! I cannot understand why you don’t crumble with shame for singing those lewd songs of yours when you are out in the woods and someone comes by, with you singing them out loud to be sure that they hear you! Do you not realise that God is also listening, and that with a bolt of his thunderous ire he can silence you for ever?’

  And then they all bowed their heads beneath the weight of the holy wrath. On hearing those reproaches delivered by the priest from the altar step, the parishioners were struck with fear and trembling; all of them, young and old, resolved, at least for a short time, to return to the path of righteousness and to obey God’s command.

  But the really distressing part of all this was that the priest’s own heart bled when he had to chastise those people with such rage. He was all goodness and love, and his heart was rent every time that, from before the altar, he had to hurl at his flock the harsh words of execration. After having uttered his dire warnings like some exasperated prophet, he felt weak and faint. And Father Llàtzer would spend days and days in a state of lassitude and dejection, as though overwhelmed by the terror of his own powerful reprimands.

  It was in those moments of extreme helplessness that the priest would have welcomed on bended knee some solace from his aged servants. To see a tear in their eyes, to hear a sigh coming from them… But it was not to be, not from those two… Always silent, always respectful, always so formally polite, they responded to Father Llàtzer’s exclamations as though saying amen at the end of a prayer.

  ‘You can see what I am going through! You can see my anguish!’ the priest would exclaim with his head in his hands.

  ‘Yes, Father,’ was the only response they made, in a humble tone but one which was so faint and indistinct that they could have been a thousand leagues away.

  The priest simply could not resign himself to the effects of the frosty reverence of that old couple, as faithful as family dogs, as submissive as slaves, but as tightly shut as sepulchres. What he needed was human warmth, the balsam of pity for the wounds he had suffered, comfort against the adversity which was silently hanging over him like an unavoidable spectre whose presence can be felt but not seen.

  And just when his spirits were at this lowest ebb, a piece of news reached him which left him utterly confused and perturbed…

  XII

  Footloose

  When Father Llàtzer received the bad news, he felt as though the black mountain-sides that walled him in had come crashing down upon him. Some women had arrived from the houses beyond the Ocata ridge to inform him of what was going on, and at first he could not make out what was on their minds or what they were talking about.

  ‘A woman called Footloose?’ he asked, quite bemused. ‘But… who is she, this Footloose?’

  Those women knew only too well. Footloose was the incitement to mortal sin: the local prostitute… She was the trollop of the woodlands, who, ranging here and there through valleys and over hillsides, had men old and young running after her, drawn by the enticing smell of fleshly delights. She attracted even some of the most decrepit old men, and even also some sickly youths, who used to come over all queasy at the thought of her… Whenever she turned up at a village or a hamlet, the women round about would be scandalised and say, ‘Don’t you know? Footloose has arrived at such-and-such a place!’ just like people say: ‘In such-and-such a place they’ve got the outbreak, the plague…’ When she was young and frisky she had rarely moved away from the lowlands, because in those days she had it very easy. She could blithely go from one town or village to another, strutting her fine, eye-catching skirts and brightly coloured headscarves. But later, when she lost her following in those places because she was getting wrinkled and the authorities were charging her with indecent behaviour, then she had no alternative but to go up to the hills or go down into a secluded valley, slinking into the woods or hiding in remote gullies, or finding a bolt-hole for a few nights in the strawloft of a local tavern or, on other nights, sleeping out in the open air. However, she had never yet set foot within the bounds of Montmany, perhaps because the terrain was too craggy and steep. That was why the women from Ocata could not come to terms with the idea that Footloose had appeared quite unexpectedly right up there at Puiggraciós. But this was not the strangest thing about the whole occurrence: because what most outraged the poor women, and what most disturbed Father Llàtzer, was that the people in charge of the sanctuary church had put up the harlot in their tavern.

  ‘The shame of it! Oh Lord, the shame of it!’ muttered the priest, deeply shocked to be told this. ‘Who ever heard of such sacrilege? On church property, a place of worship, next door to the little sanctuary itself! Two steps away from the Mother of God, a whore like that, the damnation of men and the perdition of souls!’

  Covering his face with his hands, as though shamed by the sins of others, the priest was pacing back and forth in long strides, until he finally said to the old man:

  ‘Josep! Go up to Puiggraciós and tell the warden to come here at once… say I want to speak to him…’

  An hour later Josep was back, head bowed, crestfallen.

  ‘Up at the sanctuary, Father, they say they’re very busy and they don’t know how long it will be before they can come.’

  The priest, although he was aware that this was just an excuse, waited until the following day. Then, when nobody came, he once again sent his man up to Puiggraciós.

  ‘Go back up there again and tell them not to disobey me… One or other of them must come here immediately… Say that this is an order from me!’

  When Josep returned he said that only the innkeeper’s wife had been in, and that she had told him her husband was ill in bed and she couldn’t leave him there on his own…

  The priest had to struggle very hard to calm the turmoil of indignation raging inside him.

  ‘Then go there for the last time,’ he exclaimed, ‘go in my name and give them the order to send that whore away, with no excuses or backtracking… to put an end to the disgraceful scandal they are creating!’

  Back up the steep hillside he returned, and once more back down he came… The message that the old man bore when he appeared again was most disheartening: he said they had told him that they had no idea why on earth they should send the poor woman away from their hostel… she was not upsetting anybody… she was doing nothing wrong!

  The priest was dumbfounded on hearing that reply. The disobedience of that couple at Puiggraciós was the first sign of the storm that for some time he had felt was brewing around him. The phantom of ill feeling and rancour, previously lurking invisible and impalpable, was beginning to show its face. He now knew on which front hostilities would break out in that war against him which was being quietly and stealthily prepared for by the woodlanders. Open revolt had begun at Puiggraciós… and when he realised that it was more aggressively defiant than he could have imagined, the priest felt a strange shudder run through his body. His fear was now that, despite his resolve to face up boldly to any assault from his glowering parishioners, he would no longer have the power, exercised by him so far, to impose obedience by threatening eternal torment. He realised that henceforth he would be unable to make them quake with his threats uttered from before the altar, or to terrify them with his stares of indignation, or to lead them towards submission through fear of divine wrath. Up to that point the force of evil had shown itself indecisively, remaining bottled up within the deadened spirit of the woodsmen; but now it was beginning to take on a form, to acquire life and colour. Face to face with the power of God, embodi
ed in him, there now rose up the power of Hell, embodied in the wicked woman installed in the sanctuary. The dark ravines, which he had been determined to redeem either through piety or through intimidation, would be torn from then on between two dominions… the dominion of God, in the parish church… the dominion of the Devil, at Puiggraciós.

  ‘But, Lord, what must I do,’ the priest exclaimed in prayer, ‘to vanquish the evil spirit and to free from the base bonds of the flesh those wretched people who cling like ticks to the earth and all its sinfulness?’

  Meanwhile the woodlanders had begun to go out and pry along the paths and tracks leading to the sanctuary at Puiggraciós. They were careful to avoid each other, prowling around while pretending that nothing was really afoot. And, when they got close to the buildings, they hid among the pines or the bushes in order to have a good view of the place. What they were really after was a glimpse, however fleeting, of that Footloose woman. They had heard so much about her that they were now sorely eager to see her; and then, having seen her once, they became impatient to have another look, as though they could not clear from their minds the obsession with the whore.

  The whole Montmany district was now affected by the same never-ending temptation. By day, in the loneliness of the shady woods, young men and old had nothing else on their minds. At night, in silent and dark-filled bedrooms, they all tossed and turned under the blankets, dreaming or fantasising about that woman. Not a moment’s rest did they enjoy, as the exotic image of the harlot preyed on their minds: the red hair like burnished copper; the abundant flesh, as creamy-white as curds; the faintest blemishes on her pale skin, like flecks of gold. To them only witchcraft could explain the fact that neither sunshine nor the cold night air had tanned that face, that neck and those arms to the same sunburned colour as all their faces, necks and arms. But then everything was so out of the ordinary about that woman, that Jezebel!