Dark Vales

by Raimon Casellas

  But before he had even finished saying these words, he suddenly caught sight of the trollop and, pointing a finger at her, he broke the thread of his harangue and asked in a voice like thunder:

  ‘Who is she, tell me, who is that woman over there who dares to come bareheaded into church? Who is that woman who comes to Mass with her head uncovered thus? Is she the one they call Footloose? Is she the harlot? Is she the wicked slut of Puiggraciós? Tell me! Tell me now!’

  A funereal silence reigned everywhere within the church. No one dared breathe; no one dared look up. But what the peasants kept to themselves was made plain by the action of the whore when, rising from her squatting position, she stretched herself up to her full height with a provocative air as though saying: ‘That is me.’ And then there was a skip of delight in the dark heart of every one of the woodlanders, because they thought the moment of delivery had arrived. They all seemed to be joining forces with the evil spirit, urging it to bring down the priest and to lay him in the ground. But he stood firm, with an air that was haughtier, sterner and more majestic than ever.

  ‘So,’ he continued, ‘so you are the woman of doom who replied with sneers and untruths when I called you to repent? So you are the woman in mortal sin who brings sickness to men’s bodies wherever you go, and who extinguishes their souls for ever? So you are the Devil? So you are the way of the flesh?’

  At each question the harlot stiffened, standing there straight and tall, with her body thrust forward and her head high, as though to defy and challenge the priest. It was a posture which could have been of feigned derision or a threat to claw the celebrant with her poisonous, fiendish fingernails: the very enactment of Evil incarnate confronting the might of God. There was a moment when she seemed to be on the point of taking a step towards the presbytery… But at that point the priest let forth a bloodcurdling roar, a noise like the sky being torn asunder. His eyes were flashing violently with the glare of an apocalyptic storm, and he raised his right arm high in the air as though to send forth the unerring thunderbolt of divine justice. He was the exorcist and the excommunicator… he was the priest wishing to drive infernal enemies from the bodies and the souls of the people.

  ‘In the name of God the Father,’ he shouted at the harlot in what was almost a howl, ‘in the name of God the Father, who created the world out of nothingness… in the name of God the Son who gave his own life to save us all… in the name of God the Holy Spirit, who turned the darkness into light… I command you, evil spirit, to leave the church!’

  The whore, who had turned a waxen yellow colour, suddenly staggered, as though her head were reeling, injured by the priest’s incantation. She now looked like a cornered wild animal, with nowhere to turn, nowhere to flee to… In that instant of mortal anguish she turned her eyes towards the men she had been with in the sanctuary tavern, as though pleading for the smallest show of defence. She fixed her gaze on Bepus from Uià, but daft Joe looked the other way. She looked at Cosme from Rovira, and he just lowered his head. She threw a desperate glance in the direction of the young master of Cal Janet, and the young master pretended not to notice.

  Then the trollop, as though there were no firm ground under her feet, began to stagger back down the church, in retreat… but, before she reached the door, the priest bellowed at her:

  ‘Repent! There is still time!’

  But she merely turned her head to let out a devilish shriek of laughter: hee-ya, hee-ya! and then she went out, leaving the whole congregation dumbfounded.

  XIV

  White Mass and Black Mass

  It was the Sunday after the whore had been driven from the temple under a hail of imprecations and anathemas. The tremendous words of excommunication, still echoing within the church, seemed to have stunned poor old Josep, who was there just inside the door, huddled up and somewhat confused, in the chilly darkness of the early morning. Grasping the rope which hung down from an opening beneath the choristers’ gallery, he rang the big bell unhurriedly to call people to Mass: Dong… dong… dong… The more he rang, the more faltering and indecisive the peal sounded, just as if those already trembling hands pulling on the rope had lost the knack of getting a steady rhythm… Didong… didong… dong.

  Each strike of the bell struggled to carry through the gorges and under the cliff faces of the district, as though it dared not climb the slopes to call as usual at the doors of slumbering houses, with its regular Sabbath song: Come, neighbour… the Mass to hear… come neighbour, come! The mist that morning was so thick, so thick and so cold… it really seemed as though the chilly dampness that floated all around had frozen the bell’s voice.

  The old man, although he was generally so long-suffering, every now and then had to let go of the rope in order to rub his hands which were turning numb. ‘A fine start to the winter!’ he muttered. ‘The Lord could send us a better start to the winter!’ And to bring the feeling back into his feet, which were also quickly becoming numb, he shuffled a few painful steps, now inside the nave, then out into the porch and back to his position under the gallery. And then, once he felt a little better, he began pulling the rope again with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, pausing occasionally to make sure he could hear the peals. But he was becoming so senile and so hard of hearing that he could not be certain whether the bell was ringing out or not. ‘God on the cross help me! Perhaps I’m not making any sound,’ he grumbled gloomily.

  And in fact, although he had been at his bell ringing for a good long time, not one man or woman had yet turned up for Mass. ‘Perhaps I’m not doing it properly, and the people can’t hear the sound of the bell,’ old Josep started muttering again. Eventually, in order to find out the truth, he headed outside to ask Mariagna, because she, although weighed down with woes and afflictions, was not as hard of hearing as he was.

  ‘Can’t the bell be heard, Mariagna?’

  ‘I can hear it well enough, Josep.’

  ‘So then… why are they not coming?’

  ‘Oh, it’s certainly time that they were here!’

  And the old couple looked at one another, bemused, unable to fathom what was happening.

  Meanwhile the priest, standing by the escritoire in the sacristy, was donning his vestments for the celebration of Mass. As it was so misty and so dim at that early hour, it had been necessary to light the stub of candle standing on a candle holder, to make it possible for him to see anything as he was robing. The day was one of those when dawn never arrives, the kind of day that begins in grim darkness, like another night coming directly after the preceding one. Through the little slit window which gave a view of the apse there came not a glimmer of light from the sombre sky outside. Everything was gloomily overcast. However, in spite of the depressing emanation that seeped everywhere, Father Llàtzer felt uplifted that morning by the most powerful faith, and on his lips there even flickered a kind of triumphant smile.

  Memory of the victory he had obtained the week before, his triumph over the demon of carnality, filled his heart with confidence in his power as a priest anointed by the agency and grace of the Almighty. He felt that the spirit of God was residing within him, since he had shown sufficient spiritual strength to confound the enemies of the soul. Never before had he understood so well that, adorned in the holy vestments, he was performing the office of Divine Majesty, with the three crowns of Glory upon his head, with the blazing sword in one hand and the chains in the other to subdue and fetter the forces of Hell.

  As he passed the alb over his head, he reflected that his terrifying outburst had been powerful enough to bring down the harlot, to bring down his parishioners, and… why should he not confess it… to terrify himself by unleashing those dreadful words of exorcism. The horror which he had felt then had been so overpowering that he had been unable to find the strength of heart to preach at the woodlanders and to draw out from his moral victory the whole stream of lessons and examples that the situation had presented him with.

  But what he had failed to do the p
revious Sunday, disturbed by a mysterious dread which sprang from the execrations he himself had proclaimed, he would now do forthwith, as soon as the time for the offertory arrived.

  ‘So you can now see, brothers and sisters,’ he would say to them, ‘you can now see how victory belongs always to God, to the Lord of the Heavens and of Earth who has only to lift a finger in order to return this world into nothingness! If you follow the way of the Lord, you will be going arm in arm with the Saints, who triumph eternally. If you go along the path of sin, your own feet will lead you into disaster and death. The pleasures of the flesh last for only the blinking of an eye, and God’s joy endures for endless centuries. In the flesh is where sickness and damnation lie dormant; health and eternal life throb with the spirit of God. Come with me, those of you who wish to live for ever! I shall show you the way of the light that is never extinguished… I shall let you see the tree of life, whose leaves never fall…’

  ‘Father!’ exclaimed at that point a half muffled voice as of someone who dared not interrupt the priest’s exaltation.

  Father Llàtzer turned round, and he saw the old man approaching with a wan look on his face, a look that was truly pitiable.

  ‘What is wrong, Josep?’ the priest asked in a kindly voice, on seeing the dismay of his poor old helper.

  ‘Dear me, Father! I just do not know. I do my best to make the bell ring out… but nobody wants to come.’

  ‘Has no one arrived for Mass yet?’

  ‘Nobody at all, Father, nobody.’

  And as though to reinforce what her husband had just said, behind him appeared Mariagna shaking her head in a show of despondency.

  The priest stared at the old couple for a good while, filled with surprise and alarm, more because of their look of desolation than because of the sad words they muttered. Never so much as then, never before, had he seen them looking so downcast and at the same time so pained. The two of them, who were never usually unsettled by anything at all, now seemed to be consumed with anxiety.

  ‘Don’t you see that because it’s such a bleak morning… they must be waiting until the last moment,’ the priest said benignly, in order to raise their hopes. ‘Start ringing the bell again for a short while… will you? And then you can sound the final fast peal… God does not want us to jump too quickly to negative conclusions, nor to despair about what might be in store for us.’

  As humbly as could be, old Josep began tugging again on the rope with all the eagerness he could summon: Dong… dong… dong… Meanwhile his wife was going back and forth, all restless: into the church she went and then out she came again, peering now towards Uià, now towards Rovira, impatiently looking out for people to appear from the woods. But the combination of the weather, which was very overcast, and her own poor eyesight meant that, however hard she looked up and down the paths leading there, she had not a glimpse of a single human being, not a living soul… until finally, at last, below the narrow terraces of Cal Pugna she thought she could make out a troop of people approaching from that direction. It looked like a shapeless patch in the landscape, some parts of it white and other parts black, which stirred and moved along, going forward through the trees, although it was impossible to recognise clearly what it was.

  In order to be sure, the old woman went to have a word about it with Josep… and peering from beneath the hands which they had each of them stretched over their brows, they stood looking towards the cliff face, both of them straining to see if they could make any sense of that strange phenomenon.

  ‘There are people coming… Don’t you think so, Josep?’

  ‘It looks more like a flock of sheep to me, Mariagna.’

  ‘A flock of sheep? Do you really think so?’

  ‘That’s what I reckon it is…’

  And, while the old couple were doing their best to dispel the painful uncertainty they each felt, the wriggling patch they were looking at disappeared all of a sudden, as if swallowed up behind a ledge on the cliff, leaving no way at all of telling whether what they had seen were woodlanders or sheep. At this point Josep and Mariagna finally lost patience. Although usually so submissive and staid, that Sunday they both looked really perturbed and worried, just as if they were afraid that something dark and nasty was about to happen. Like souls in torment they went back and forth from the sacristy into the church, from the church out to the cemetery, from the cemetery to the paths leading there…

  ‘They’re getting old, poor things… doddery and confused,’ Father Làtzer kept saying under his breath.

  But eventually the agitated behaviour of the old couple began to make him feel anxious. Accustomed as he was to seeing them so steady in their ways, taking everything so calmly, he could not come to terms with how jittery they now were. But what was most distressing and painful for the priest was when he realised that he himself was being affected by the restlessness of his servants.

  ‘And what if my flock weren’t to come down here to Mass?’ he now was thinking somewhat alarmed. ‘What if they were to give up on the church for ever? If they no longer wanted Mass or sacraments any more?’

  A quarter of an hour went by, half an hour, and then a whole hour… and still no sign of life. The priest, fully decked out in his robes and still standing his ground by the escritoire, finally grasped the chalice and then went out resolutely to the altar. As he stepped into the presbytery, he could not refrain from glancing into the nave to see whether the odd parishioner had turned up: but with so many shadows heavily thronging the building, he could make nothing out at all clearly. Only the deathly silence which reigned there disclosed that not a single living being was drawing breath in the place.

  The day itself, instead of becoming brighter, was turning more and more overcast and gloomy. Neither the tiny glimmer of frosty brightness that leaked in through the church windows nor the trembling flicker of the candles on the altar were enough to dispel the darkness that spread everywhere. Only the stronger light that came from the tapers on the credence table was sufficient to project a kind of luminous haze onto both sides of the tabernacle, while the two candle holders placed below the statue of Saint Paul barely managed to bring a slight shine to the sword of the stocky apostle. Everything else was shrouded in a thick limbo-like gloom…

  His heart overflowing with grief, Father Llàtzer was groping by the altar as he put down the chalice and shuffled the pages of the missal which he had taken out of its pouch. The irremediable sadness of that day of gloom was dripping into his soul, as though intent on drowning it in overwhelming darkness. ‘All alone!’ he sobbed. ‘I have been left all alone.’ And such was his distress in this tribulation that he could not keep his mind on the ceremonies he must perform nor on remembering the words of the Mass. The most he could do was to try to retain some serenity and lift his spirit towards God… but at each step he took in this painful effort he felt a new stab and another nail driven into his flesh.

  The first time that he turned towards the church door in order to say ‘The Lord be with you’, it seemed as though his heart was being torn asunder as he saw that the greeting of love was echoing in nothingness… ‘The Lord be with you…’ and yet the pews were empty, all of them empty… ‘But where are you, oh my wretched parishioners?’ the priest asked through clenched teeth. ‘Where can you be, you fugitives from the blessing of Heaven?’ And then, as though it were a mysterious response to his question, he suddenly heard a distant voice which revealed to him the place of damnation in which the woodlanders were at that moment gathering.

  What had happened was that, instead of setting out as usual towards the church, the men of the parish had headed uphill to the high ground at Puiggraciós. The womenfolk were as keen as ever to go down into the hollow where the church stood in order to attend Mass, following the command uttered by the bell… but the men had stopped them from setting foot there. ‘Don’t go down there, do you hear?’ they said to the women, staring hard at them. ‘If you want Mass, go to Sant Segimon, or go to Ametlla, or to B
ertí, or to Figueró… but whatever you do, stay away from the parish church…’

  And then, willy-nilly, the white hoods had set out into the mist on their different ways to the neighbouring places of worship. The men meanwhile, wrapped in their capes, were climbing the steep slopes up towards Puiggraciós.

  With what appalling clarity was everything now making sense to the priest! At that very point in time, with the White Mass about to begin down in the ravine, where there was just emptiness on every side, the Black Mass was beginning up at the sanctuary, with a considerable throng in attendance…

  As though he were blessed with the gift of being able to see distant and hidden things, to the eyes of the priest, as he stood now by the altar table, there appeared quite vividly the bizarre spectacle being enacted inside the building up the hill. He could see the smoke-stained rooms of the tavern filled with people and brightness… and to him they seemed like the nave and the presbytery of that temple of sin where worship of the Devil was being performed. The main fireplace, with flames from bundles of twigs blazing and crackling loudly, looked to his eyes like the high altar of Hell itself, adorned with burning logs and their flames which cast a sinister light upon the dark walls and upon the weather-beaten faces of the peasants. He could make out a vision of a figure like that of a locally venerated saint, there in front of the blazing altar, which was the presence of the spirit of Evil, embodied in the harlot. There, lounging on the fireside settle, Footloose dominated the scene as though occupying a triumphal throne, showing off her vivid red tresses and the starkly white flesh of her neck, her arms and the swell of her breasts. Around her circled anxiously, like worshippers afraid to go up to the altar, the young master from Cal Janet, the lad from Ensulsida and daft Joe from Uià, all those gloomy young men, drained of strength by lecherous thoughts and a deep sadness…