Dark Vales

by Raimon Casellas

  Father Llàtzer placed his hands in front of his eyes in order not to see such desolation.

  ‘This is death!’ he said to himself. ‘This is death which is surrounding me on every side, pulling faces at me, coming close as though to touch me but never laying a hand on me! The fields are dying, the houses are dying… everything is dying except for me. And how, in my despair, I yearn for eternal peace… The houses will surely collapse in ruins… Without shelter, there will come a time when the peasants here will have to seek refuge in caves while they await the final hour… Then all of this will be turned into an immense graveyard, an unbounded cemetery… while I… I shall still be alive, as though designated by God to watch over the sleep of the dead…’

  But the priest’s black thoughts were suddenly cut short when, as he looked down at the ground, he was surprised and horror-struck at the sight of the garden. Seeing how ravaged was that patch of land, previously so full of abundant plant growth and now completely razed… he seemed to be on the point of heaving a great sigh to give vent to his dismay. The old couple’s heads were already bowed as though they felt in advance the embarrassment they would be caused by the woeful expression they were about to hear. But the priest, in order to spare his servants from such distress, choked back his lament and managed to keep it to himself, merely directing a pained look at that now lifeless site which he had once regenerated through his love.

  Then he took a few steps further, directly towards the church. As soon as he reached the cypresses in the cemetery he was heartbroken to see, along the path edges, weeds growing again, in greater lushness and pomp than ever. ‘He will not be able to avoid moaning now…’ thought his aged companions apprehensively. But the priest, silent still, moved forward with his eyes closed, as if not wishing to see the depressing dereliction surrounding him.

  At last they came to the church itself. They pushed open the door, and they were confronted at once by the desolation which reigned in the holy place… blotches of mould on the garments of the saints’ statues, cobwebs draped along the cornices and in the niches of the altars, a carpet of slime all over the floor, debris and rubble everywhere… At this point the priest’s anguish exploded in a single outburst, while the old couple felt a cold sweat, a sense of deep unease that made them all of a tremble…

  ‘Enough, oh Lord!’ shouted Father Llàtzer. ‘I can bear it no longer! Do not punish me any more, for I declare that I submit to your infinite power!’

  Then he turned to Josep and Mariagna, and pointing at the calamitous condition of the whole church interior, he asked them in a tone of profound sadness:

  ‘But what is this? Tell me! What is all this?’

  The old couple, though, instead of replying began to whimper, with tears running down their faces.

  ‘Are you crying?’ the priest asked the old man.

  ‘I am crying,’ was the reply.

  ‘But, why? Tell me why…’

  ‘Because my strength has gone, Father.’

  ‘And you, Mariagna, Mariagna!’

  ‘Because we are both useless.’

  ‘Oh! You poor things! Do not ever talk like that: you are tearing my soul to shreds!’

  And, as though poleaxed, quite defeated, with his head sunk in his hands and with an intensely disquieting feeling under his skin, the priest reflected that the deathly loneliness of which he had earlier dreamed a vision was nothing like as cruel as the solitude which he now knew was in store for him. He was about to be abandoned by his aged companions: their strength was at an end and they could die at any time… And he, all alone, helpless, would be left to wander without direction, like a drifting phantom, in that valley of the shadow of death.

  XVI

  Howls in the Night

  Father Llàtzer was quite unable to soothe the sharp pain that he felt in his heart from being shunned by his churlish parishioners. How could those perverse people have turned their backs on the church? To think that they had rejected their own place of worship and its pastor! To think that they had spurned the Mass and the sacraments! Not in his brief conversations with the old couple, nor in the long hours of his daily prayers, nor when he stood before the holy altar, never could he rid himself of the sinister memory of the woodlanders and he was constantly tortured by it.

  ‘What a sacrilegious insult!’ he said to himself. ‘What cruel taunting!’

  Obsessed with these thoughts, he spent hours turning them over and over while in his mind’s eye he saw the shadow of the harlot or that of the tavern keepers at Puiggraciós, of the pathetic, lecherous young men who turned the sanctuary into a brothel, or of the decrepit old men of the ravines, spiritually hideous and physically cankered. At times he even felt a kind of shame that his own spirit, having once been endowed with wings on which to soar up to the shining summits of divine contemplation, was now brought down to the level of an insect or worm, incapable of raising its head out of the dirt on the ground. What anguish he suffered, in his lowest moments, when he felt that his soul was now chained to brooding cogitation of this kind!

  ‘Having failed to redeem the rude and untameable people of the hills,’ the priest mused bitterly, ‘all that is left to me is to stay trapped in the meanness of spirit that pervades this harsh land! Oh, Lord! My feelings are of rancour when I am yearning to feel pity and kindness! Instead of anger about everything around me, I wish I could feel love!’

  But, no matter how much he urged his spirit, he was unable to be rid of the acrid taste of the bile which overflowed in his breast. He wished he could be like that loving father who, the more he is disappointed and let down by his son, the more sacrifices he makes for that same son. But he felt that his own heart was not generous enough to take charity to such lengths… The old wounds which he bore, instead of healing over, were festering more and more because of the frequent affronts and taunts insidiously aimed at him by his furtive parishioners.

  And those people of the sad woodlands spared no effort to goad him, pricking his running sores and prolonging his suffering. There was indeed scarcely any malicious ruse they would not resort to, in the dead of night, for the sake of cruelly mocking the priest and his aged servants. Sometimes, after dusk had fallen, they sent a youth to climb up the church tower, take the clapper from the bell and hide it, so that Josep would not be able to call people to Mass the next day. On another night they would dig a hole in the middle of one of the paths near to the priest’s house, covering it over with greenery and brushwood, to see if any of the three people there would be caught unawares and fall into it. Or similarly under the cover of darkness, they would go out to divert the water from the pool which irrigated the osier beds, directing it straight towards the house so that their vegetable garden was flooded and they could not gather food for the kitchen.

  Each of those evil deeds was another sharp sword driven painfully into Father Llàtzer’s heart. And it was not the evil act itself which most tortured the priest, but rather the blind hatred that lay behind it. He himself was such an unworldly and benign individual, and yet he was confronted with the blackest treachery! Love was the dominant instinct in him, but he had come up against the fiercest of hatred!

  ‘What harm have I done to them?’ he sometimes exclaimed. ‘What harm have I done to them, unless it was to offer them life anew, trying to cure them of the ravages of sin?’

  At other times he pondered that there might still be a remedy if he were to make one final sacrifice, one last effort. What was needed, he thought, was for him to take himself up to Puiggraciós at a time when they would all be gathered there to make merry. He would arrive and face up to the farm workers and shepherds, the charcoal burners and the wood cutters; he would confront the innkeepers themselves, and the Footloose woman herself… And there he would preach to them with the greatest fervour, until he had softened their hearts, until he had touched the most tender part of their souls, until he had reduced them to tears… It would be the occasion when, he imagined, he would manage to produce that outp
ouring of sweet words which he had previously never succeeded in finding… ‘My brethren, my dear brothers,’ he would say to them, ‘I am here to bring you salvation, even though you might not want it. I feel pity towards you because you, without knowing it, have been innocently blind since birth… But I have come to open your eyes to the splendours of the heavens and of all things on earth… I pity you because your hearts are shrunken and withered; but I will open your hearts to gladness and to brotherly love.’

  But then he had second thoughts and said to himself: ‘No! It is not for me to go in search of them… I am the shepherd of that flock, God’s anointed one… My appointment is by Divine Majesty… It is they who must come to do penance… It is for them to bow their heads so low that they are covered in dirt…’ But no sooner had his thoughts gone in this direction than his mind was changed again as he recalled the acts of humility performed by Christ in order to bring men to forgiveness and to peace. ‘Was it not He,’ he protested, ‘who stepped forward to confront sinners in order to remove the stains of their guilt? Was it not he who gave himself up to his tormentors who would torture him and then lead him to be sacrificed?’

  In this endless weaving and unpicking of his doubts, so spiritually enervating and physically exhausting, Father Llàtzer’s whole life was draining away…

  The truth is that the same obsession which tormented him by day also kept him wide awake in his bed at night. His head was filled with the restless, nagging phantoms, the remnants of his earlier delirium, and so every night he watched in the darkness the silent procession of the night hours. In the vast stillness that surrounded him, he had become accustomed to distinguishing the faintest, most feeble sounds… and so he spent long hours listening, listening in the dark, as though he were trying to decipher the unknown language of the thousands of beings and things which speak or sigh, which yelp or weep meekly in the great silence of the night.

  The rustling of dry leaves disturbed by tiny creatures on the ground; the stirring of the tree tops when the branches suddenly feel a puff of wind; the gentle trickling sound coming from an irrigation ditch; distant noises made by sheep and cows moving now and then out in the fields; the muffled cry of the invalid turning over in the bed where their life is coming to its close… these were the sounds which combined to form deep in the ravines the chorus of the night, mournful and disturbing, like a murmur coming from the other world. Father Llàtzer’s ears were attuned now to identifying in the dead of night the different calls of the fearsome nocturnal birds which nest in the cracks of cliff faces or in overhanging branches above a chasm. He could recognise the terrifying drawn-out screech of the eagle owl, and he knew the nightjar from its grating cry of complaint. His efforts to penetrate the abysses of silence brought on feverish hallucinations and strange states of exaltation: at times he seemed to hear sobs which came from nowhere and mysterious echoing noises, resounding inside his very being, like the moaning of a soul in torment. At other times it was as though the sound he heard was coming down from the high pass at Puiggraciós, a sound which rang in his ear like a diabolical peal of laughter and made him shudder with indignation.

  ‘They are having a party at the sanctuary…’ he muttered in great anger. ‘They are having a party, making fun of me, mocking me just like they mock the Mass and the sacraments… It is the same devilish laughter which rang out in the church when the excommunication was pronounced.’

  And then he immediately envisaged, as though he were witnessing it directly, the performance that was being staged probably at that very time in the sanctuary tavern. He could see the strumpet, seated on the bench by the fire, trying to excite with her enticing laughter – hee! hee-hee! – the pathetic lasciviousness of the torpid peasants. And, welcomed by the innkeeper or his wife, in wandered the clients: shepherds and labourers, charcoal burners and wood cutters, cowherds and pigmen. One by one they all shuffled inside, like birds with ruffled feathers, looking awkward and with their eyes to the floor. And they all walked past where the whore was sitting, as though paying tribute. It was a silent and glum procession, like a queue of corpses. At its head was the young master from Cal Janet, gazing downwards as if making a solemn vow; a few paces behind him followed the Margaridó lad, as unapproachable as a wild boar; and then Cosme from the Rovira farm, his face jaundiced and his air downcast; behind them came daft Bepus, from Uià, with his red hair and nasty look… And after these four, in traipsed all the other young men from the hillsides and ravines, a troop of youths and lads, all showing the same combination of embarrassment and surliness…

  But the parade of pathetically lecherous figures did not end there, because following along behind, with their capes held up to conceal their faces, one after another came the heads of households and doddery old gaffers, all of them outlandish in appearance or physically impaired. There was Pau Malaric, as gaunt as a mummy; old man Sunyer, with his flabby cheeks and watery eyes, more like an ox than a person; the old buffer from Lledonell, uncannily resembling an owl with his round face, startled eyes and tiny nose; Pere Mestre, with his faltering limp that made him hop like a frog; grandfather Pugna, whose heavy goitre and head covered in lumps gave him a toadish countenance… The postures of these ugly creatures were either stooping or aslant, and they all moved along grim-faced as though going to a burial service… There were only two people at that funereal party whose faces showed any sign of enjoyment. One of them was Aleix the truffle man who, twisted and coiled like a snake, was alone in a corner, with a sneer on his face that seemed to express disdain for that train of lascivious cadavers. The other was pumpkin-faced Carbassot, the swineherd, whose wisecracks and crazy pranks provided entertainment for all the denizens of the dark ravines. That night he had hit on the idea of chanting some lines he had made up in order to amuse the strumpet. He was wearing clogs and before they knew it he was beating out the rhythm of his ditty by banging his feet on the tiled floor:

  ‘Clip, clop, clippety-clop

  Clippety-clippety, clop, clop, clop!

  The priest is out of his job;

  No more preaching from his gob,

  As all his parishioners

  Went off to Puiggraciós.

  Clip, clop,

  Clippety-clop

  Clippety-clippety, clop, clop, clop!’

  And sure enough, the whore broke into a mad cackle of laughter, hee-hee! hee-hee! until she could keep it up no longer… It was so often at this point that Father Llàtzer would wake up from those nightmares that persistently beset him like a charge of alarming apparitions.

  One evening, after finishing his prayers, with the breviary still in his hands, he went into a kind of daydream as he contemplated from the window of his room the strange patches of cold light that the moon was spreading over the landscape outside. With his head pressed against the glass panes, peering at the hazy images of the winter’s night, it was as though he was trying to hold at bay the awakening that he must soon experience.

  There were moments when he was thrilled to observe how the blue-tinged brightness gave an argent hue to the terraced fields and the low-lying patches of land, which looked to him just like silvery pools. At other moments he was fascinated to watch how the same effect of colour melted away, as if swallowed up in an abyss, as soon as it fell upon the thickness of the woods and upon stretches of ground that were overgrown with vegetation… But it sometimes happened that the fantastic light show could be obliterated, when it was blotted out by black clouds coursing through the sky like a flight of crows. The priest was captivated, bewitched, by those mysterious effects of the moonlit night, with all its dreamlike manifestations, shifting between the dominance of darkness or of brightness. It was as if in a dream that his half-open eyes espied the dark patches formed against the marmoreal whiteness of the paths by the black crosses in the graveyard. Lifting his gaze slightly, he could then discern the jagged outline of pinnacles that were traced on the church walls by the slender tops of the cypress trees.

  Father Llàtzer�
��s state of mind had been in a constant fevered turmoil of dreams and brooding anxieties ever since his recent illness. But at this very moment he felt that he was held suspended in ecstasy before the obscure, mysterious spiritual presence of the night… This trance he was in became steadily more overwhelming, and it was as if he must surrender totally to the hypnotic, spellbinding power that was influencing him… But then, quite suddenly, he raised his head and with a kind of start was brought back to his senses…

  A dog had howled: a low, bass howl that resonated through the cliffs and across the hillsides like an agonised groan, ahwoooo! It was one of those eerie cries which produce a shudder in the person who hears it in the dark and alone, for it is a sound which betokens long death throes and croaking last gasps… Ahwoooo! How that poor animal was crying out! How it was moaning! And oh what pity was aroused by that desolate call as it faded away into the peace and quiet of the mountains, into the dappled nightscape! The priest, now suddenly all of a shudder, strained to hear from which direction came that lugubrious portent of a person’s final spasms.

  ‘It seems to be coming from the other side of the cliff…’ Father Làtzer began to think, with some uncertainty, when he heard the distant barks of other dogs responding to the sinister howling. ‘No.’ he then declared, correcting himself. ‘From the other side of the Can Ripeta col, now I think the sound is coming from there… But, wait, that’s not it…’ he changed his mind immediately, ‘the yelping is coming from Puiggraciós.’