Dark Vales

by Raimon Casellas

  As the memory of the accursed woodlanders was re-awakened in him, he again became feverishly agitated, suddenly affected by a sort of delirium, as though he was writhing once more in the nightmare of the insults and the torments he had been made to suffer. He recalled with horror that Sunday when the Footloose woman came down from Puiggraciós to face up to him inside the very temple, as the sacrament was being performed at the altar… Fortunately he was so steeped in the spirit of the Lord that he had been able to bring her down by dint of conjurations and anathemas, to the terrified wonderment of all the people present. But she had her revenge, the nasty trollop… Because she was the embodiment of the evil spirit of carnality, the scent of womanhood about her had the power to allure the peasants… Thus had she bewitched and entranced them, making them abhor the Mass and the sacraments. And from then on their backs were turned completely on the church as though it were a plague hospice… Old and young, they had all made their way up the slopes to hear the Black Mass at Puiggraciós… Up there a sacrilegious offertory was recited, and they chanted psalms of lechery and derision… But… even so, nothing was as appalling as the night of the Lledonell episode… Such shame and such scandal! To contrive deceitfully for the Body of Christ to be carried over those mountain sides, in order to ambush it and insult it with jeering and mockery… He still seemed to hear that infernal laughter, as he was fleeing with Our Lord’s body clutched to his breast… and such wild laughter coming from those diabolical people, ha, ha! hee, hee! then his frantic race down the hill, in order to save the consecrated bread and wine from their gibes… running and running without stopping, until he collapsed senseless, not to be picked up until hours later, when they took the Sacrament from him, and then pulled him towards his bed where they laid him, in the place which was now a deathbed, surrounded by candles like a catafalque.

  ‘Oh, what wicked souls! Oh, what fiends! Devils from Hell!’ the thoughts in the priest’s overagitated mind were spinning around this obsession, when he was suddenly taken by a powerful urge to damn the peasants, to damn them time and again, even though his imprecations would lead to eternal damnation for himself.

  It was in the most violently disconcerting part of his nightmare that the priest heard all at once a sad pealing of bells that began to come from the church tower, a sound that announced his death:

  Dong… ding… donnng… Ding… dang… dannng!

  ‘Ah, Lord!’ he thought in utter terror. ‘Ah, Lord, they are ringing my death knell!’

  The voice of the bells had never sounded so mournful until that time of supreme anguish. Old Josep, with such feeling of condolence, was making them express their tearful, heartrending sadness! Each chime was like a desolate sob, like a cry for mercy struggling heavenwards from that vale of tears.

  ‘Have pity, my God, have pity,’ prayed the priest in his silent death throes. ‘The people from up in the mountains will soon be here, and they will be taking me to the grave before my time and burying me before I have breathed my last…’

  Dong… ding… donnng… Ding… dang… dannng… the bells still called out plaintively, as though accompanying with their sobs the silent tragedy, a dying man’s tragedy which no one at all would ever know about.

  The bitterest part of the priest’s last moments, among so many unknown causes of anxiety, was the profound regret at having been unable to dedicate to God’s glory all the trials and tribulations he had suffered. Now for the first time, he lamented not having tended each one of them like flowers sprung forth out of pain, in order to offer them up to Christ as penitential posies. But no… all the torments and insults inflicted on him would not stand him in any stead… No… He had never felt, not even in his dreams, that his sufferings were the source of that subtle sweetness which the saints declare they tasted in their own excruciating tribulations… The torments he had undergone in the ravines were too rough, too coarse, for them to provide the soul with the slightest suggestion of sublimity or the faintest hint of delectation… His Calvary had been nothing but the misery of the earth and the blackness of night…

  ‘Pity, Lord,’ were the words that kept forming in the consciousness of the dying man, while the bells were being swung with funereal majesty. ‘Have pity, Lord, if I have been unable to lift up my eyes to you and if, instead of redeeming the sheep of your flock, I have been dragged down with them into the dirt and the dust…’

  Then the bells stopped ringing, and Father Llàtzer thought that the hour of his perdition had come.

  ‘Now the woodlanders will arrive down here,’ he thought, ‘and they will carry me to the graveyard!’

  At that very moment footsteps were heard, apparently of someone coming up the stairs, and the dying man supposed that the brutes from the hillsides were arriving to take him away. His mortal anguish increased as he listened to the sound of the steps coming slowly nearer to the room in which he lay. But in the end it was only old Josep who appeared. Crossing himself as he hobbled past the lighted candles, he went to Mariagna and looking at his wife as if in need of advice, said to her:

  ‘Downstairs there are people from the parish who must have come to see his reverence’s corpse…’

  Inside his stiffly frozen body, Father Llàtzer’s heart gave a start when he heard those words.

  ‘My time is up; this is the end!’ he thought. ‘Lord, I now commend to you my spirit. Your will be done, now and always!’

  ‘Perhaps we should tell them to come up,’ the old woman was saying meanwhile to Josep. ‘The sight of death might move their hearts and they might ask forgiveness for the great sins they have committed.’

  And as the old man was going back to fetch the parishioners, the priest on his death bed felt some slight relief in his heart, suddenly moved by poor Mariagna’s words.

  ‘Maybe that is so,’ he thought, ‘perhaps the miracle of redemption will now take place. Perhaps, when they think they are looking at my dead body, I shall soften their hearts and make them feel pity, so that they will come to God through the way of compassion.’

  But then footsteps were heard again and it was the sound of people coming up to the room. They were the familiar troop, as dull and as glum as ever: crocked old men and heads of households, neighbours from closest to the church, most of them covered in sores like worn-out old hacks ready for the knackers yard.

  The first one to show his face was old man Pugna, with his wobbling goitre; then, behind him, Cosme from Rovira, jaundiced and withered; Pere Mestre, with his hopping limp, like a toad; immediately after him, daft Joe Bepus from Uià, ginger-haired and twisted; then Aleix the truffle man, writhing like a snake. Following these near neighbours was another group of parishioners from further away: Pau Malaric, as gaunt as a mummy; old man Sunyer, with his bovine dewlap; Prat from the Black Wood, as hairy as a bear; the old fellow from Lledonell, with a face like an owl’s; young master Janet, grim, despondent; young Margaridó, as unapproachable as a wild boar; the youth from Ensulsida, and Carbassot, the swineherd…

  It had never been known for the peasants to show reluctance about going to pay respects to a corpse and to say a paternoster over it, and so, as soon as those people heard the death knell being rung, they all felt obliged to make their way down the ravine to where the church stood.

  That plaintive sound of the bell, that saddest of all last farewells, was a kind of command that had been obeyed down the generations for countless centuries. Compliance was taken for granted… They just had to bow their heads, resign themselves, and make their way down the mountain side. They had to do as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them, as their remote ancestors had done since time immemorial.

  To begin with they had dragged their feet, hesitant, not knowing quite what to do or how to behave. It was such a long time since they had come anywhere near the church that they did not now feel comfortable about making the journey down there. But their indecision lasted only for a moment because they quickly understood that, like it or not, the law of timeless custom a
nd practice, passed down from their forbears, had to be obeyed. Moreover, there was something else, which was that they had immediately begun to feel a strange curiosity about how the priest would look now that he was dead. He had always seemed to them to be so driven and so self-confident, and now they wanted to see how he would look, with his eyes closed, laid out on the catafalque. It was that, that more than anything else, which had finally decided them to leave their houses. And as the parishioners were heading down into the ravine, some of them still hesitant, still rather scared, nervous about going all the way down to the priest’s house, Pere Mestre said very sarcastically:

  ‘There’s no problem any more… We need not be frightened now about paying him a visit…’

  ‘Too flaming right, ’pon my life! Dead dogs don’t bite…’ responded Aleix the truffle man with a snigger.

  And so they reached the church, quite confident that the priest could no longer confront them like a wrathful God, nor could he use the paten and the chalice to threaten them, nor slander them about their failings and their sins, nor stare at them with that fierce glare of his which pierced their very souls, nor, dressed in his cassock and declaiming from the altar, make them fall to their knees.

  As they entered the room where the priest lay dying, the peasants stayed close to the wall looking awkward and embarrassed. Despite being moved by curiosity and the urge to have a good view, they dared not look up, and with their eyes cast down they surveyed askance every part of the room, fixing on the candles and the lampstands, and then, finally, scrutinising the body in the bed.

  And, lying there, the poor priest was racked with agonising disquiet to feel how those inquisitive gazes were running all over him, with that sinister curiosity which associations with the grave inspire. Rather than just looking, rather than prying, it was as though they were taking an odd pleasure from sniffing the deathly stench that hung in the air there, around that bed. But finally, as if sickened by the smell, they started to look quite drowsy, quite bemused, seemingly now made anxious as they inwardly absorbed the murky spectacle of death. Old and young gawped dumbly at the scene they beheld.

  Although there were so many people gathered in the room, the atmosphere was filled with an unusual stillness and quiet, as though those men were endowed with the mysterious ability to live in complete silence, without ever saying a word or even seeming to breathe, without making any sound whatsoever.

  There were those who, as though bewitched, could only stare fixedly at the candles; others, as if under some kind of spell, just stood there open-mouthed and wide-eyed. But the longer that hushed stillness reigned, the more some of them were becoming restless… It was clear that they were not at ease, that they felt strained or nettled, that some kind of deep anxiety was welling up inside them… One of them stuck a finger in his ear… someone else scratched his head… The atmosphere was growing ever tenser as time passed, and the silence seemed eternal… Even for the dying man in his bed of suffering, every instant turned into a century, every hour into an eternity…

  ‘Very soon they will lift me out…’ he kept thinking, ‘they will wrap me in these sheets… and then take me to the grave…’

  But at this moment old Josep appeared among them, carrying a bowl of consecrated water in one hand and the sprinkler in the other.

  Despite his bad limp, he now displayed again the measured efficiency he used to have when assisting at Mass in his heyday, a manner which transfigured him into all but a proper priest. Quite unhurriedly, with extreme unction, his spirit possessed by the funeral ceremony he was about to perform, he approached the foot of the bed ready to give the last rites. In order to assist in the prayers, Mariagna moved quickly to kneel by his side, with her arms folded across her chest. They looked just like a real officiating priest and his acolyte who had never in their lives done anything other than perform funeral rites for their dead parishioners.

  ‘Grant him, Lord, eternal peace…’ began the old man, as he sprinkled holy water on the catafalque.

  And the old woman responded with great fervour:

  ‘And may perpetual light shine upon him.’

  ‘May he rest in peace.’

  ‘Amen.’

  The peasants were looking more and more doleful as each moment passed, more and more deeply pensive, as if they were gradually coming to feel remorse at the sight of death and from the effects of the old couple’s devotional zeal. Those flames flickering on the candles, the plaintive tone of the couple’s prayers, the sight of the priest, with his pallid lips, with his sunken eyes, his skin ashen and yellowish… everything appeared funereal enough and moving enough to create compassion in the souls of sinners and to bring them to contrition. It was the dreadful vision of the passage from one world to another, with its sequel of eternal glory for those who die in the Lord, or with its accompaniment of eternal suffering and eternal flames for those who die in sin…

  Amid the sepulchral silence which reigned in the room a low gasping sound was heard every now and then, as if one of the rustics gathered there had sighed in distress, on the point of bursting into tears…

  ‘…Oh dear… My God! Oh… God!’

  Those laments, those sighs reached the ears of the dying priest, and they sounded to him like a delightful choral music. With his infinite faith that his parishioners could be redeemed, he now thought that the hour of their repentance had arrived.

  ‘If only I could speak! If only I could make myself understood,’ Father Llàtzer thought, with hope palpitating inside him. ‘If I could just take advantage of this moment, the miracle would be sure to happen!’

  And suddenly burning with a love of God and of his fellow men, as if in a last surge of the life force, he felt an overwhelming urge to raise his hand and as their priest, to bless them all, saying:

  ‘My brothers, my children, I bless you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!’

  Around the bed the woodsmen still stood in a sort of trance, fascinated by the funeral ceremonies which the old couple were performing at intervals. It was as if they were unable to move from where they were, as if they were chained there by some unknown force. There were moments when it seemed that they might be about to show some emotion, to snivel or to burst into tears. It even seemed that, quite unexpectedly, some of them might fall to their knees and join the old couple in reciting the litany…

  But then suddenly, just at that critical moment, a bustling noise came from the direction of the door, as though someone was about to come in there unceremoniously and without any effort to respect the silence.

  The peasants all turned their heads, taken by surprise and vaguely rubbing their eyes, like people coming out of a deep sleep in which they had been submerged. The first of the new arrivals to show their face was the lass from the Puiggraciós tavern; then came her mother, the innkeeper’s wife; and finally, the Footloose woman. All eyes were fixed immediately on the prostitute… and a muttering noise rippled round the room. Footlose looked at the dying man with a repulsive grimace; then she ran her eyes over the rest of the people there, with a look which was both sneering and lascivious… And then she turned tail and left.

  A moment of uncertainty affected them all… What to do? What to say? It was pumpkin-face Carbassot who was the first to break rank, followed by Aleix the truffle man, old man Pugna and Cosme from Rovira and daft Bepus from Uià, and then finally, all of the rest of them, all of them, chasing behind the stench exuding from the body of the whore, in a sort of desperation to spread and perpetuate, in those shadowy ravines, those dark vales, the virulence of lust and of suffering.

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Institut Ramon Llull.

  Copyright

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

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  Publishing History

  First published in Catalan in 1901

  First published by Dedalus in 2014

  Dark Vales translation copyright © Alan Yates 2014

  The right of Alan Yates to be identified as the translator and Eva Bosch as the editor of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Printed in Finland by Bookwell

  Typeset by Marie Lane

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.