Mortified by that sacrilegious apparition, the priest kept closing his eyes in order not to see it. But the ghastly awareness of events in the sanctuary stayed with him, perfidiously pursuing him throughout his celebration of the Mass. When he came to the consecration, he imagined again who was officiating at the Black Mass being celebrated at Puiggraciós. They were the innkeeper and his wife, that old couple, now appearing partly like sorcerers and partly like those roving songsters who would intone a psalm for a small donation. Coming and going among the tables in the tavern, they were serving food and drink to those present or taking messages to the whore on behalf of farmhands, wood cutters or shepherds. It was as though they were priests in Hell’s service whose duty it was to convey to the Devil the litanies that were inspired by mortal sin.
Father Llàtzer felt that he was moving towards the brink of emotional breakdown, as though he were about to die. When he came to recite the final prayers, he could barely utter a single word nor hold himself upright before the altar. Then he turned round, as usual, to give the dismissal; but, as he was about to pronounce the sacred words ‘You may leave now: ite missa est,’ he suddenly hesitated, refraining from voicing that expression which seemed to chime in with the sacrilegious insult being directed at him by the woodlanders. Instead, he moved directly to the final gospel reading, speaking with a tremulous voice, and then he picked up the chalice in order to return to the presbytery. But he was so pained and affected by such turmoil, having struggled so hard to get through to the end of the holy office, that he felt his legs give way beneath him as he went down the two steps from the altar. His head was spinning, and after stumbling for an instant, he collapsed to the floor as though mortally wounded.
The chalice flew in one direction, the altar linen in another, and the paten hit the ground even further away… Old Josep and Mariagna rushed to his assistance: ‘Father! Father!’ But the church was in such darkness that they could not see where to put their feet in order not to trample on the priest. And also… on the ground where they stepped lay scattered the parts of the sacred service of Mass, and they were terrified to think that their profane hands might touch the chalice cup or the contents of the altar linen, or even the inside of the paten… But, finally overcoming their terrified religious scruples, they moved towards where the priest had fallen, stretching out their arms in the darkness, and they felt the fabric of his chasuble…
‘Father! Father!’ they exclaimed.
‘Father!’ they repeated, ‘Father!’
But the priest showed no sign of regaining consciousness.
Sanctuary church and watch tower at Puiggraciós, 1950.
(Salvador Llobet/the Municipal Archive, Granollers)
XV
Dark Days
Winter had set in relentlessly, with its constant succession of short days, faded sunlight, lowering skies and slack drizzle.
Winter is a sad time everywhere, but nowhere on earth more so than there in those dark vales, always inhospitable and sunk in shade. On days when a cloud trailed a long black patch across that sky hemmed in by the encircling hillsides and summits, the inhabitants might well declare ‘God help us’, because darkness lingered eternally in those ravines, as though it felt snugly at home there… In all the hours of endless, dispiriting gloom people in their houses had to grope their way around. Neither wick lamps nor lanterns gave enough light for the women to go easily about their housework, cleaning and airing the bedchambers, going up into attics or down into cellars.
Some days it seemed as if the already deep ravines had finally sunk down into the very bowels of the earth, and that the woodsmen were living now inside the dense nothingness of limbo.
But even worse was when, on top of the depressing darkness, there came the days of never-ending rain. Sometimes it was a persistent drizzle, treacherous even if not violent, of the sort which, without making any noise, turns field edges into sludge and soaks into every wall, saturating the ground as far down as it can reach. At other times it was a ferocious downpour which swelled to their limit all the cascades and filled every watercourse with a rushing torrent. It seemed that the flood would sweep away everything in its path. And as if it were not satisfied with inundating vegetable gardens and cultivated terraces, it tore stones out of field walls and banking while turning the tracks into flowing streams.
What groaning and cries of anguish could be heard then! What weeping and complaining in the time-worn houses! With the tracks all boggy, with water standing in the fields and the ground ravaged, people were besieged in their homes and threatened with starvation. They needed to eat… yet they could not go outside nor get to their vegetable patches to gather food. They ran out of bread… but they could not go down to the flour mill.
‘It’s all because of that evil wench,’ the women said. ‘It’s because of that trollop up at Puiggraciós: that’s why God is punishing us so!’
‘The parish church and its curses,’ muttered the menfolk, ‘are what have brought about these dire troubles!’
And as the downpours went on endlessly, rain upon unceasing rain… even more tribulations and tragedies were caused. The water exposed the crumbling foundations of houses, or it produced rot in the ends of structural beams, overflowing from the guttering on all sides of the buildings. One day there would be shouts of ‘Come here, quickly!’ because roof tiles over a stockyard were crashing down… Then it was ‘Get a move on, make haste!’ as water rushed between buildings and poured into cellars… Scared to the very core of their being, people hurried to prop up ceilings which were quaking on the point of collapse, or to pack holes and cracks in walls with handfuls of straw, with old rags.
‘Our time is up!’ shouted terrified women.
And the men responded in hoarse voices:
‘God blast us if we can’t all die here and now, so we could have an end to our suffering!’
But, pray as they might or curse as they might… the water was not held back either by oaths or by paternosters. Down it came, incessant driving rain, sometimes in torrential downpours, as though the end of the world was nigh… at other times in a persistent gentle drizzle, as if tired by its own efforts to drench everything, it was no longer in any hurry and could continue to fall until Judgement Day. So that winter the rain-filled hours dragged by and dark days followed dark days… until one morning, above the terraces at Uià, the sun began to show its face very hesitantly. But what a sickly and feeble sun it was! It seemed incredible that broad daylight could show such a poorly face and watch the world with such a deathbed countenance!
The ravines were very soon tinged with a faint shine that was ashen and yellowy, itself evoking thoughts of death…
Old Josep and Mariagna also drank the daily cup of sorrow throughout that period of dejectedness and gloom. All alone and abandoned in their troubles, with no consolation or support from anybody, there were times when they would gladly have commended their spirits to God’s love.
Senile and doddering though they were, the two poor souls had still been forced to defend themselves against the treacherous water which even came in through the roof tiles and through gaps around windows and doors. So as not to be caught unawares by the enemy, they scurried about like ferrets, keeping an eye on doors, windows and openings in the building, and they took turns to keep watch day and night in order not to fall asleep through exhaustion. While Mariagna was on watch, the old man would take a nap: and when they came together at the change of shift, ‘May the crucified Lord help us,’ he would groan, and she would reply, ‘May He help us for ever, amen!’ Those prayers were the old couple’s way of greeting one another, providing mutual support in their distress and their solitude.
Among all the travails they were enduring, what made them most confused and anxious were the leaks, which as time went by, were pouring ever more persistently from all the ceilings. How their nerves were tormented by this! There is nothing on earth as disturbing as hearing in the dark the sound of dripping water: tock, tock…
On some nights the old woman, overcome with fatigue, would flop onto the bed only to feel, before she had even closed her eyes, drops of water falling on her head. ‘God, my Lord, help me!’ poor Mariagna would shout as she was moving to get up. And then there she was, going towards the landing with the lamp in her hand, stopping suddenly in the doorway because she thought she could hear drops falling also inside the adjoining closet. That was where their meagre clothes were kept, so she rushed to take them out of the trunk, fearing that they would get damp and mildewed. Hanging the oil lamp from a peg, she began to gather together her precious garments… But as soon as she had picked up all the clothing, ready to move it to a safer place, she realised that rain was also coming into the storehouse outside… and as that was where the year’s barely sufficient supply of grain was kept, she simply did not know which way to turn or what to salvage first. It was unbearable… a desperation comparable to staring death in the face!
Some days later, when the bad weather lifted slightly, it did seem that the old couple ought also to show signs of pulling through… But this did not happen. For one thing, that pallid sun depressed them deeply… and, moreover, they were continually beset by fresh difficulties and new things to torment them. When it was not calamities caused by the weather, there were other troubles and matters to worry about. Poor things! The older they became, the more their character was changing. Whereas previously they were never unsettled by anything at all, they were now becoming crotchety and fussy, as if they were being gnawed inside by their worries. From the way in which they were losing their grip and becoming ever more fretful, complaining and whimpering all day long, they seemed like souls condemned because nobody prayed for them.
They were forever moaning that the water had made a mess of everything but that they were no longer capable of repairing all the damage. And so they came and went at all hours of the day like agitated goblins, murmuring mysterious worried words into one another’s ear.
Josep would say, under his breath:
‘What will he say when he sees all of this?’
And the old woman would reply pensively:
‘Oh dear me! What will he say?’
Cowed and bemused, they both looked outside and saw that the waters had swept their vegetable plot down into the rushing stream close by, that the paths were now lined with a fresh growth of wild grasses, and that the crosses in the cemetery were lying among the mallow plants, no longer upright because of the downpour and the wind. But most alarming of all was when they went back inside the church for the first time and saw the destruction which had been wreaked there. Water had got in under the door, leaving the stone paving covered in thick sludge; the clothing on the statuary had become infested again with mildew, and spiders once more spun their webs along the altar cornices. What pangs of self-reproach beset the old couple as they contemplated all that filth! They felt guilty and also ashamed for being so old and so powerless to prevent the devastation.
And so they kept crying out:
‘What will his reverence say when he sees all this untidy mess? What will he say when he sets eyes on this?’
And when the priest did come down from his room, grim-faced, sallow, much older-looking, as though years and years had been piled upon him, the couple seemed to want to hide, as if they wished they could melt into the ground.
Bedridden for weeks with fever and delirium, it was to the spectacle of drab skies and grim weather that Father Llàtzer finally opened his eyes and looked once more upon life. How desolate, how sad, how utterly forsaken did everything appear to him, now as before!
In the sinister light of that wan and dingy sun, the circle of dark mountains which walled in his existence had never before seemed to him so funereal. Rather than being born again into the light of day, he felt that what he was doing was merely changing his place of entombment. Thus, just as until then he had been buried deep in his sickbed, henceforth his grave would once more be the blackness of the ravines. His return to the bizarre existence of a man who has been buried alive seemed to him to be the most frightful punishment and, at the same time, the awful sign that he had still not served the full term of the sentence delivered on him by divine judgement. He had imagined the good fortune of never having to see again that forbidding landscape of cliffs and deep gorges nor those patches of thick shade beneath the wooded slopes… He had been dreaming of never having again to hear anything about those sluggish people who hatch wickedness under the cover of sleep and who, enticed by the demon of carnal pleasure, abandon the Mass and the holy sacraments… He had glimpsed the light of the bright star announcing the end of his personal Calvary… He had felt almost cleansed of his previous shortlived transgression and had been looking forward to enjoying celestial forgiveness… And now he was once more a prisoner of darkness, chained to the foot of those cliffs and of those towering mountain sides!
In order to soften somewhat the chastisement of coming back to the life to which he had been condemned, he could find no other consolation than to think back over everything that had come into his dreams during those hours of fever when it seemed that he had already passed over into the next world. With his eyes closed and his head held high, like someone savouring in their mind a pleasing vision… he took such great delight in contemplating again the funereal spectres which had danced for him at the foot of his bed among all the mists of his delirium!
First of all he recalled a great darkness, a deep blackness, like that which the dead must see in the burial places where they repose. But then, all of a sudden, against that background world of nothingness, some tiny sparks of light began to flash, making the dark seem even denser. They were shimmering little lights, moving in all directions, disappearing and then reappearing, skipping here and there before his eyes… ‘Wait a moment! This means that I am dead,’ he thought, ‘dead and buried… and these tiny lights must be the will-o’-the-wisp which flits through the cemetery.’ But the idea was immediately checked: ‘No: that is quite impossible: if I was lying in a grave I would not feel, as I can do now, that rain is falling on me…’ And there was no doubt at all in his mind that he was being rained upon… ‘I could have counted one by one all the drops falling on my head. But how to explain that those little lights kept coming and coming, as though wanting to draw close enough to touch me? So close were they that I finally saw they were not the will-o’-the-wisp. They were wick lamps, the ones carried by Josep and Mariagna when they came to attend to my needs. At first I could not really understand what they were doing when they were moving the bedclothes and turning over the counterpane; but later it became clear to me that what they were trying to do was to grasp the edges of the sheet and between them move me to another place… What I could not work out was if they were taking me out of that room in order to find me shelter from the water that was dripping onto me, or else… if my final hour had indeed come and I had to be buried, were the old man and woman each holding one end of the shroud to carry me to a hole in the ground? It was something which never became clear to me, never…’
In this way, seated inside the entrance to his house, Father Llàtzer called up memories of the disturbed state of mind he had suffered while he was ill, as though trying now to stitch together mentally snatches of dreams and layers of wild hallucination… And then, suddenly he seemed to be awakened from his visions of the grave and to focus on the here and now. In a faltering, trembling voice which betrayed a weakened spirit, he called to the old couple:
‘Josep, Mariagna, come here, please! I need to get some fresh air. Help me to stand up… we are going outside… I want to see the church, and my garden…’
Upon hearing these words both of them seemed to freeze inwardly. The old man looked at his wife, as though exclaiming silently, ‘It is the moment that we so feared!’ And his wife shook her head, as if to say: ‘Oh dear, what shall we do? What will he say when he sees all the damage that has been done?’
One of them walked on each side of the priest, suppor
ting him, and as they went along the couple were thinking, deeply worried: ‘Any moment now, he is going to see what has happened and cry out in anguish.’
The fact is that what made them both fearful was not the thought of being rebuked by Father Llàtzer, but rather the prospect of hearing the quietly pained laments he would utter so often, more hurtful than any reprimand.
Once the priest was outside and he had raised his face towards the circle of hills and cliffs surrounding him on all sides, a taste of bile and vinegar surged up within him as he had never experienced it before, not even in the times of his greatest, most grievous suffering.
The sickly pallor of the sunlight gave the landscape a quivering, tearful lustre, gelatinous and funereal, and the ravines seemed like the realm of eternal stillness on the last day of the earth. A sepulchral silence floated all around and struck a chill into the heart. Frost stiffened any rustling of leaves in the coppices, ice held back the flow of water in the ditches. No breath of life could be heard, no sound of animals, no whisper of a breeze… Everything was silent, as though life had stopped, as though everything in heaven and on earth was about to disappear for all time. Even the impoverished, dilapidated houses scattered here and there on the lower slopes looked as though they were suffering, as if they were seriously ill, even perhaps about to die. At Uià, the winds had bent the chimney on the single-storey kitchen and had knocked down the turret on the oil press, so that the farm as a whole seemed to be lopsided. At Cal Pere Mestre the rush of the water had burst through the stretch of wall between the gateway and the stockyard; and the big gaping hole made the building look as if it were opening wide its mouth in the final throes of death. Can Pugna, its external walls now propped up with beams and big timbers, was like a house with a serious limp, so crippled that it needed crutches. The unstable walls around Romaní, which had been sagging ominously for years, had crumbled away even more, so that they were now teetering precariously over the steep slope below.
Dark Vales Page 12