Ferran’s world was limited to the school, from the resplendent and theatrical communions to the ball thrown, with perfect bad faith, at the nose of the fattest and stupidest boy during recess. It was precisely in these free periods, more or less devoted to sports, that the Jesuit technique was most pronounced and the spirit of Ignatius of Loyola was most evident. Their purpose was to allow the young man whose head had been swollen for his personal merits, or his place in class, or the esteem in which his teachers held him, to behave like a despot toward the classmate beaten down by bad fortune or bad conduct. You could distinguish the perfect products of Ignatian technique from the incorrigible ones by their way of playing, of kicking each other, or of humiliating a classmate, and Ferran was a prodigy. The father prefect of the school could take great pride in him. Even when he was harming a classmate, he did it with unctuousness, and a phony smile of mercy and impunity. And it wasn’t that he was a hypocrite, or mean, or heartless … On the contrary, he simply believed that this was the normal and proper way to behave, and the only way to be an exemplary student.
When he left school, he ran into the world of the streets and into other boys who came from other atmospheres that had nothing to do with St. Ignatius. That was when Ferran began to understand a bit who his family was. He observed his father’s wretchedness and ineptitude and the economic penury that surrounded them with horror. The Jesuits had inculcated an entirely useless and puerile vanity in him. In his first year at the university, it only took a few underhanded punches to shatter his vanity and bring him down to earth. He was a ductile boy and a quick study. He understood that the false world the Jesuit school had created was pointless. His religious faith was quickly reduced to a bare minimum. He was still chaste, more out of fear than anything else. He would go to exciting shows with other boys like himself, but he didn’t dare breach certain doors. The contacts he maintained with the Jesuits were purely perfunctory; he was even a bit offended when he realized that a former teacher wanted to snare him for a religious vocation that couldn’t have been farther from his mind.
Life in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn became odious to Ferran. He couldn’t abide the air that wafted from his mother’s coiffure or the clerical gesticulations of Grandmother Carreres. He thought that, in time, he could come to be an architect of some originality, a man of good standing and reputation, and this wasn’t with the puerile vanity of high school, but with a pride that was growing in him little by little. Ferran’s pride grew alongside the spirit of family disintegration, the same spirit that drove his sister Maria Lluïsa. After three centuries, Ferran was the first of the Lloberolas to feel absolute contempt for the name he bore and for everything his family had stood for.
Ten months before Ferran found himself face to face with a dead man on leaving a brothel on Carrer de Barberà, he had a crisis that could have traced a definitive trajectory for him.
It had been just over a year since that veneer of faith and moral prejudice he had picked up in school had begun to fade. Ferran was practically indifferent to it all, and on the verge of risking the modicum of shame and the three drops of chastity he still had on the first eyes he came upon around the first corner he turned. If he hadn’t made his move it was because the right opportunity hadn’t presented itself. But just when his religious faith and moral tenacity were at their most tepid, a strange event disoriented him. Ferran believed that a supernatural event had occurred within him, in his innermost life. And this supernatural event turned Ferran’s soul toward a very particular ambition. For a few months he stopped dreaming of being a great architect. What he wanted for himself was the glory of Christ’s shepherd, Saint Paul. He thought he had a right to that glory, because what happened to him seemed analogous to what had happened, according to legend, to that storied apostle on the road to Damascus.
When Ferran told Pare Mainou, of the Company of Jesus, about these innermost impressions, not even he could organize them logically. The fact was that he was never able to give a precise account of what had happened to him. The only thing that was clear was the radical change that took place in his feelings and actions. Ferran imagined that, during a night of erotic turbulence, he must have fallen asleep after assuaging his secret misery, and a few hours later he was awakened by a very unusual light. He couldn’t be sure if it was part of a dream or a real light. He was under the impression, though, that it was a real, physical light that had penetrated his bedroom. By this light, Ferran thought he had distinguished images of an angelic nature, forms in keeping with his purely infantile visual idea of the world of the blessed. The vision he was certain he had had was fleeting, it lasted just a moment, between waking and sleep. But it so impressed Ferran that he didn’t hesitate to imagine that what had happened to him was of transcendent importance. Ferran was certain that God had called him in a way that went beyond the ordinary path, and that what he had seen with his own eyes was precisely what theologians call a miracle.
He stayed in bed for a few hours, unable to sleep, turning over his supposed vision in his mind. The consequences he derived from the event compelled him to get up early, head for the church of the Jesuits, and throw himself like a dog at the foot of Pare Mainou’s confessional.
Pare Mainou listened to him and told him with perfect aplomb that God had worked a miracle to convert him. Ferran was dismayed. He made a horrible confession. With sadistic fruition, he accused himself of every carnal misery, chewing over the tiny details that are the hardest to tell, against which shame most rebels. The child felt the voluptuosity of lowering himself and humiliating himself with all the force of his seventeen year-old blood.
From that day on, Ferran wallowed in a pathological mysticism, with a nervous oversensitivity and a tendency to cry that would have been heartbreaking had he not made every last effort to conceal what was happening to him so that no one would realize what a state he was in, or suspect what he was going through.
He only calmed down during the time he spent with Pare Mainou. In the morning, he would seek him out in the confessional, and in the afternoon, he would plant himself at the door of his cell. There, he could cry and strip bare the puerility of his soul without compunction. Pare Mainou felt edified by his conversion, by that life soft as warm wax flowing through his fingers.
Pare Mainou was a very good person, but in Ferran’s case he was a bit misguided. Not realizing that the whole thing was a childish fantasy, he put too much faith in the boy’s words, and he let himself be carried away on the warm and fascinating wings of the miracle. Pare Mainou didn’t advise calm or serenity. The readings he prescribed for Ferran were like a drug that exacerbated his pathological state. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, in particular, spread like a trail of gunpowder down the entire length of Ferran’s spine. Some people think that no book can produce such acute sensual upheaval in an adolescent as directly erotic reading. Ferran’s case could easily disprove such an unsophisticated opinion. St. Augustine’s Confessions or the Imitation of Christ produced spasms and indescribable sensations in him. People well-versed in the history of the mystics know something about the terrible and monstrous explosions caused by the desire for divine contact. A being who finds himself in Ferran’s situation seeks this contact in any way he can, and the most vivid and sensitive course is almost always through physical pain. To experience such pain and calibrate it to the limit of one’s resistance is to feel an ineffable pleasure, a fruition that cannot be explained, nor can it be understood by a person who has not undergone similar moments. By an entirely different and apparently pure path, one can reach the most vicious masochism, the ruination and shredding of the flesh.
That boy was the victim of this evil, and Pare Mainou, in the greatest of good faith, did nothing but make it worse. Ferran began by analyzing all the things – even the most insignificant things – he found enjoyable, and started forgoing them one after the other. He started depriving himself of everything in such an absurd way that if he was thirsty he would not drink until he c
ouldn’t bear it any longer, valuing the physical torture of his thirst. In any area related to vanity and to the relationship with his classmates he reached extremes of sleight-of-hand to avoid suspicion. Sometimes the puerility of Ferran’s sacrifices would have been laughable if he had not truly been suffering. His nights were tragic. He slept in a bedroom with his brother Lluís, two years younger than he, a soft, unsuspecting child who didn’t imagine a thing.
In bed, Ferran felt a well-being he found offensive. When it became unbearable, he would kneel down on the bare tiles. This position, which quickly progressed from humiliation to pain, soothed him. He managed to remain immobile, and when the pain in his knees began to stab him with an insolent sharpness it seemed as if Ferran’s lungs breathed more joyful breaths. Any boy who was not undergoing such a moral breakdown, could not under any circumstances have withstood two hours of kneeling on a tile floor like Ferran, who reached an unbearable degree of torment. Sometimes his brother would wake up and see him in that position. Naturally, he couldn’t resist a few gibes at Ferran’s expense. Instead of answering back, Ferran would hide in his bed, utterly ashamed, as if he had been caught doing something disgusting. Then he would finally fall asleep, content at having experienced both intense pain and humiliation, in the mockery and sharp words of his brother.
He felt the greatest fruition in the mornings when he received communion. As a child, even in his most tender and celestial years, Ferran had practiced this Catholic ritual in a fairly unconscious, if not completely unconscious, way. Spiritual withdrawal and respect had been the consequence of a fear imposed from without. All the magic of the sacrament escaped him, and ten minutes later, he would happily break his fast, without a single thought for mystery or the supernatural. Having to receive communion irritated him a little, because beforehand he would have to go and confess his sins. Except for this, it was just one of the many events of childhood. Later, he had ended up losing what little respect he had for it. When his “conversion” took place, it had been a little over a year since he’d last approached a confessional. When he began to change, Ferran discovered all the deep force of the sacrament. He came to take communion with a burning, shattering passion, with a shivering sensuality. That act was the only sedative for the irresistible stinging of his soul.
At first, after his conversion, Ferran would occasionally fall into the habit of a solitary vice that, naturally, he wanted to forswear entirely. He reacted with desperation to these lapses, which he could not overcome. Pare Mainou couldn’t find the words to comfort him and make him understand that the flesh is weak and those unfortunate lapses were no cause for him to consider himself the most vile and unhappy of men.
Ferran wanted to bring order to the turmoil of his doubts. He wanted to draw a map of his path and of the direction his life would have to take. Amid all his grand denials, puerile vanity still had him in its grasp. Ferran dreamt of being an apostle of Christ, an awakener of souls, even of becoming a martyr, if need be. A literary proclivity led him to fall in love with the uncomfortable habit of the Capuchin friars. He imagined himself with a beard, wearing a hood, preaching the Gospel in the most inclement climes. When he told Pare Mainou these thoughts, the priest suggested that he would find the greatest renunciation, the maximum humility, and the maximum sacrifice in the Company of Jesus. He told Ferran that no other order had such severe rules and such strict practices as the order of Ignatius of Loyola, and said that for one who was readying himself with all his strength to achieve sainthood, no other institution could offer him greater security than the Jesuits.
Ferran was swayed. From then on in he began preparing for the novitiate. Pare Mainou put him in the hands of Pare Masdeu, the head of novices from Gandia, who by chance was in Barcelona at the time. Pare Masdeu had his feet much more firmly on the ground than Pare Mainou. He examined the young man from head to toe and realized that, in his case, there was at least fifty percent of suggestion and misdirected sensuality.
With Pare Masdeu, Ferran restrained his lyricism. In Ferran’s vocation, there was an element he didn’t dare confess even to himself. This element proceeded from the weakness and cowardice inherited from the Lloberolas. It was passivity and inaptitude for struggle, bred in a depleted family that had not lifted a blade of straw from the ground in two hundred years.
After high school, Ferran understood the failure and destitution of his household, and if he entertained the pride of being a great architect and man of personal value, his enthusiasm soon waned, and in the marrow of his bones he felt the indolence and weakness characteristic of his father, his uncle, and his grandfather, Don Tomàs. Like all the Lloberolas, Ferran was afraid of life, and as soon as he decided to enter a religious order, this problem of life and the struggle to live was solved. The order would provide for him, and would make his decisions for him. Ferran’s vocation was fifty percent egoism, and it is very possible that under the scrutiny of a capable and discerning man such as Pare Masdeu this fifty percent did not go unnoticed.
Despite Pare Masdeu’s misgivings, which at times verged on positive skepticism, the headmaster of the novitiate didn’t want to discourage him. Ferran seemed more and more determined, and Pare Masdeu said that in another month he could go to Gandia, not to join the novitiate, but to have a good look. There he would try to put his vocation to the test, and if it was a true vocation, there would be no reason not to admit him.
Ferran had kept his counsel and not said anything to anyone. He accepted the month imposed by Pare Masdeu, and looked for an excuse to make a trip to Gandia. But one day he lost control, and he told a friend who was older than he, in whom he had utmost confidence, about his situation and all his plans. Ferran’s friend couldn’t believe his ears, but when he realized it wasn’t just a bad joke, he gave him a talking-to. Among other things, he said that his vocation was no such thing, and above all he was being a coward. Ferran cried his heart out. His friend understood the state of weakness and of moral unraveling to which his own suggestibility and the influence of Pare Mainou had reduced him.
Ferran’s friend tried to get him to react. He was intelligent enough to see that Ferran was the victim of a collusion of absurd eventualities and that, in the best of good faith, he was about to commit moral suicide.
His friend sought the aid of a very famous Capuchin priest who was in vogue at the time. The Capuchin father spoke with Ferran and gave him the most sensible advice possible, in the course of which, even so, the spirit of rivalry between Franciscans and Jesuits was not entirely absent. What became clear was that Ferran’s vocation was so shallow that the Capuchin father’s arguments were able to reduce it by half in the first round.
Ferran spent two days meditating and looking at himself in the mirror, without setting foot in the convent on Carrer de Casp. Oddly, all the castles in the air he had built over the past couple of months, along with all his convictions of sainthood and sacrifice, were slowly turning into pale shadows. Still, Ferran had inherited his father’s pride and stubbornness, and it was very hard for him to give in and confess that he had made a mistake.
On his visits to Pare Masdeu, Ferran couldn’t find the words, and it wasn’t long before Pare Masdeu grasped the child’s unhappiness. He told him not to torture himself, not to worry. He could be just as holy and just as perfect living in the world and having a career as wearing on his head the four black peaks of the Jesuit biretta. Ferran didn’t want to give in. He still protested, he tried new experiments in pain, he clung like a man possessed to the pages of the Imitation of Christ, but it was all pure willfulness, pitiful mental masturbation. Pare Masdeu told him not to persist. The provincial head would never admit him to the Company of Jesus, and he should go out in the fresh air and enjoy himself.
Ferran followed his instructions to a tee, and for the first time in his life, he felt all the strength, all the joy of liberation. Ferran felt exactly as if a chain that oppressed his breast and kept him physically from breathing had been broken. He went back to his pu
erile vanities, to the happiness of his classmates, and to giving free rein to his senses. As practical as he was, Pare Masdeu never suspected that such sublime faith would disappear in four months.
Not only did Ferran abandon his saintly projects, he completely abandoned religion. It seemed impossible to him that he had been the victim of those monstrous hallucinations. He felt deeply indignant on remembering the hours he had spent kneeling on the tile floor. He called himself stupid and idiotic. He was truly embarrassed by his unspeakable immaturity. And he extended his indignation to Pare Mainou, who had put the finishing touches on his delusion. True as it was that Pare Mainou was somewhat guilty, he was not nearly as guilty as Ferran liked to think.
In time, his hatred extended to the entire Jesuit Order, the whole Catholic Church, and all of Christianity. The marvelous thing he had found in the Sermon on the Mount and other passages from the Gospels turned into a feeling of disgust. Ferran began to read books he would never before have dared to open. He found these authors just as enthralling as he had found the Confessions of St. Augustine just a short time before. The Antichrist of Nietzsche, translated into Castilian, which he bought for just a ral, a quarter of a pesseta, at the used bookstand on Santa Madrona, revealed a bright new world to him where his ideas could wander.
By hating the doctrine he had learned since childhood, he felt as if he were avenging all the bad dreams and all the sufferings of those months of torture. He considered Pare Mainou, a saintly and dignified man, to be the most abject criminal in the world. One day, in the Sant Sebastià bathhouse, he realized that his first communion medallion was hanging from gold chain around his neck. Ferran whipped off this last sign of slavery. He hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should sell it or pawn it, but he decided to throw it into the sea. An absurd puerility led him to believe he was carrying out an act of heroism by throwing that little medallion away.
Private Life Page 39