Catalina

by Markus Orths

  Catalina got dressed. Mechanically, slowly, without reflecting on what she was doing. She stole through the corridors to the chapel, entered the sacristy, climbed onto a chair, opened the small, unbarred window and clambered through. She crossed the courtyard, to the chestnut tree that grew against the wall, climbed up and jumped down on the other side.

  Chapter five

  The cave of Ekain

  Catalina walked into the darkness, guided by an obscure feeling within her that was no more than a faint twitching, a dying glimmer which she had to protect by cupping her hands round it. No one must come too close to her. When the moon appeared, it shone far too brightly for her liking, but it helped her to find her way. She walked without pause, heading east-south-eastwards and striking a straight course through the vegetation of the Atlantic Basque country. She took paths through fields, crossed almost impassable terrain, pushed undergrowth aside, waded through the small river Oria and covered almost twenty miles that night. Now and then she heard the rustling sounds of animals—voles, startled hares, deer, possibly sheep—and the wing-beats and cries of nocturnal birds. Stars rose and set again. It was a warm August night. Catalina’s legs, wet from wading through the Oria, dried quickly. She crossed another river, and this time she was lucky, for there was a bridge right on her path. The first rays of sunlight appeared. Catalina did not stop. At this early hour there was no risk that there would be people about. It was not that she was afraid, she just did not want to meet anyone and have to talk: she wanted peace and solitude. This was only a dimly-felt impulse, not a conscious thought, for she was not really thinking at all as she walked along. She was simply walking—nothing else. A being devoid of thought, existing only in her muscles: moving, striding forward, fleeing.

  At a certain point she stopped and scanned her surroundings, looking for a cave—dark, deep—looking for anything that would hide her from the eyes and words of other people. By now she had reached the hill known as Ekain, a limestone formation of the Cretaceous period, covered in trees and bushes—the last of the small hills stretching east-north-eastwards from the Agido, in the Deba region, less than a mile from the modern-day village of Zestoa. Catalina saw a sheep. She knew that when sheep spend the night in the open they seek out places that are dry, sheltered from the wind, warm. She followed the sheep as it scrambled up the hill and disappeared behind a clump of hazel and dogwood bushes and ash trees. Pushing her way through these, she found herself facing the entrance to a cave. It was a shallow arch, less tall than she was, but some seven feet wide. Inside, the passage grew slightly narrower. The floor was level. Just a few paces brought her to a dead end, where several sheep were huddled together. Startled by her presence, they bleated anxiously and, in an instinctive flight response, drummed their hooves on the earth floor. There was no sign of the shepherd. But he’s sure to come, thought Catalina, to return these sheep to the flock. Also, the daylight was able to find its way even this far in: it was not dark enough for her. She turned round and went outside again.

  Standing with her back to the cave entrance and looking eastwards, Catalina saw, directly below her, the confluence of two streams, the Goltzibar and the Beliosoerreka, whose waters combined to form the Sastarrain. She felt a draught on the back of her neck and, turning around, saw a small hole just to the right of the entrance. She moved closer and put her hand to it. The current of air was cool and an arm’s width across. As she reached inside, bits of loose rock came away. Using both hands she pulled out further lumps until the opening was big enough for her. Then she wormed her way in, head and arms first, and found herself in a tunnel as low and narrow as a coffin. She would have to crawl on her stomach—so she did. A few yards further on her head still bumped against rock when she raised it. She briefly thought of retreating, but then she saw the darkness ahead of her, and the darkness was so profound, so dense, so stonily black and impenetrable that it beckoned to her, called to her, and Catalina suddenly knew that this was the very place she had been looking for; that all she wanted was to be swallowed up by this darkness, that she was crawling into a velvety, peaceful place far away from the piercing, all-revealing ugliness of the sun.

  She propelled herself laboriously forward. Soon there was more headroom. She raised herself to her knees and continued, now crawling on all fours. Quite soon the passage became high enough for her to stand upright. When she turned to look back, she could only faintly make out the light from the entrance. She dusted herself down, then ran her hands over the cave walls. The rock was perfectly smooth, thanks to some tireless polishing-cloths—the pelts of bears passing in and out, bears whose bones had sunk deep down under the sediment of millennia. Catalina went on further, the layer of sinter crunching beneath her feet. The passageway broadened out. Now she was standing in the first main chamber of the cave, but could not see the paths branching off it. Instinctively she kept following the left-hand wall, and after a while she reached a dead end. The light from the entrance had vanished as if some thirsty maw had swallowed it.

  When Catalina reached what she supposed was the end of the cave as a whole (though in fact she had only penetrated a short way into its stony entrails), she sat down. She thought that exhaustion would send her to sleep immediately, but she was wide awake. In vain her senses tried to resist. The silence and darkness were too strong. Her sense of smell put up a brief fight, but capitulated when she grew used to the musty, cold perspiration from the rock. Then there was nothing to stop the images hailing down on her: Miguel, a dog, the boys, shouts, the word ‘ugly’, a missing right forefinger raised in admonition, the empty harbour, Ursula’s hair, and finally a face thrust close to hers, and once again Catalina felt Beatriz’s hands on her throat, again she was being throttled and punched, again she clenched her hand into a fist, more tightly this time; and now, in her mind’s eye, Catalina hit back, landed a punch on that flat face, and knew that in the long battle in the convent she had not been the winner at all, but quite the reverse.

  Now, swept along by a landslide of violence such as she had never known, and with no means of holding it back, she mentally repaid with blows and kicks every humiliation she had suffered, revelling in the satisfaction of striking back and yet hating herself for finding pleasure in it. Sitting inside her, grinning, was that child, that sweet, pious caricature of herself that she had been for so many years—but why! Suddenly she no longer knew why she had done all that. She heard the prioress singing her praises in words that had become as much a part of her as if she had been branded with them, words that had been her light, her elixir of life. Now she ripped them out of her body. She saw herself from the outside, saw how she had behaved, saw that perpetual smile, that ever-compliant, sweet-natured, meek and modest smile which now metamorphosed into a grin, one that she wished she could cut out of her face.

  A cold, wet cloth wrapped itself around her heart. Who was she? There was nothing left. Nothing inside, nothing outside. She could not even see herself any more. She wanted to take hold of herself, touch herself, wanted to place her hands on her body, but she sat there without moving, as if she were shackled. Wanted to cry out, prove to herself that there was actually still someone there, but she remained mute. Would it not be better if she never left the cave, if she never went outside again but stayed here forever, rotting away until the outermost covering, her skin which she could no longer see, no longer smell, was mouldy and riddled with worm-holes, until even her flesh was eaten away and liquefied, until even her skeleton, her teeth had crumbled to nothing? She uttered a scream. Her voice had found its freedom. Her hands too came to her aid, hands which touched her like hands that did not belong to her, hands which felt her, which confirmed that, yes, this was a human being of flesh and blood, a presence that was really present, a person, a living thing, this was she, she herself, even if she no longer knew who she was, what she was, what she should become, what she should do. She needed something to cling to. Now. At once. The hands that had taken hold of her body must become inner hands to d
rag something that was inside her out into the open. But there was nothing there. And so she reached into that emptiness and drew the void itself towards her, pulled the nothingness by its invisible hair, contemplated the absence, the extinction of all that she had been, and suddenly saw a glimmer. Saw a gleam. It grew strong, it gave her something to hold on to. She clutched the void to her breast and would not let it go. It was not just nothing. It was a physical sense of boundlessness, of openness, she looked at nothing and saw everything. Ways. Possibilities. She could see the back of the void, the far side of the nothingness; she felt as if she were standing on the highest point of the hill, and when she turned round to face in different directions there was always something different, something new to see. She could decide where to go, she could set off in a direction that was not prescribed by anything or anyone.

  She stood up and, feeling the clothes on her body, took them off. Threw aside one garment after another. Wanted not to feel anything on her body any more. Wanted to revel in this new experience, to discard everything, to have the sensation of newness everywhere, all over her body, inside, outside. Naked she stood there in the cave, erect, with open eyes, her blindness turned into a source of strength, her lips parted, her ears intent, breathing and hearing and seeing nothingness. She wanted to draw it into herself, more and more, deeper and deeper. Creatio ex nihilo, she thought. God making the universe out of nothing. This is how He must have felt, how it must have been, standing like this in the blackness, experiencing the irruption of whiteness, the onslaught of emptiness, and transforming it into something.

  Overwhelmed but suddenly lucid and sure of herself, Catalina knelt down on the floor. She felt elated. Before long she started to grope her way forward, and after a brief search found her clothes. As she touched them, she felt a piercing pain in the palm of her hand. It was not a snakebite, but the point of a needle which was in her pocket, together with a coil of thread. Only two days ago she had had to do some sewing for Beatriz, and now the needle and thread were the only things she had with her. To Catalina this was a clear sign, and what she now did took place in utter silence and darkness. Guided only by the invisible beam of her sense of touch, she fingered the various pieces of clothing and did what in those days only a woman could do: she started to sew. She sewed for what must have been several hours, and turned her blue woollen bodice into a pair of breeches and her petticoat into a shirt and stockings; she shortened and tore, sewed and patched, inserted and joined. She knew exactly what she was doing and what she wanted. To start completely afresh, a new person, stitched together by her own hands in the darkness.

  At last she stood up and stretched. The clothes fitted. They were the right size. They hardly pinched at all. Once more she knelt down and felt around on the floor. She could not find what she was searching for. Her hands scrabbled about in the dirt. She crawled back the way she had come, with her right shoulder to the cave wall. Soon she was in the main passage again, could see, some distance away, the point of light that was the entrance. Catalina turned back again and entered the passage leading off to the right, which brought her, in only a few yards, to the vast main gallery. There she finally found what she wanted: a stone. It was a blade, and one of considerable archaeological significance. A flint blade with which, forty thousand years ago, a so-called Cro-Magnon man had not only kindled fire but also split open the skull of another Cro-Magnon man—for a thoroughly scientific reason, as it happens, namely to discover what went on inside a head like that, what there might be floating about in it, to discover the source of those vague stirrings, now brighter, now dimmer, that produced strange fancies inside his own skull too—a Cro-Magnon man who, finding nothing there to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, put the skull, since it was split anyway, to his lips like a goblet and quenched a thirst of a different kind.

  Now Catalina pulled a handful of her hair as taut as she could and used the flint to saw away at it, close to her head, until the hair fell to the floor. She wielded the blade ferociously, off with it, one strand after another, and Catalina became a Samson in reverse, steadily gaining in strength as more of her hair was cropped. At last she ran an exploratory hand over her head and found that she was as bristly as a dog. Her hair lay all around her in a heap which over the next three and a half centuries would turn to dust, as would everything that had really happened in the cave. Layers of deposits would settle on top of the hair, so that there was no chance of Rafael Rezabal and Andoni Albizuri—the two researchers who on 8 June 1969 thought they had discovered Ekain—coming across it, though they did find the flint.

  Catalina still had it in her hand. Before going back she gazed into the darkness one last time. She took a step away from the wall towards the centre of the cave and peered upwards. She wondered how high it actually was. Arching her body, she threw the flint up into the air as high as she could. She strained her ears in the darkness to hear what it would hit; whether it would reach the roof of the cave before falling down. But the stone did not fall down: it was as if it had stopped in mid-air, or were trapped by something, or as if someone had caught it. Catalina waited for a moment. Nothing happened. She recalled stories of the many-shaped god Mari, who lived in caves. But the stone had not been caught by the god Mari, it had landed on top of a fifteen-foot high pillar of rock in the middle of the gallery. Catalina, of course, could not see the pillar. The flint blade, which was found by Rafael and Andoni, is still there today, and is thought to provide strong evidence for the belief that Cro-Magnon man would ritually climb up such pillars, almost to the roof of a cave, to kindle a fire there in homage to the sun-god.

  Outside, someone was approaching the Ekain hill. It was a man called Juan Bautista de Arteaga. He knew the cave, or at any rate the accessible smaller part of it. He felt drawn to its shelter now because the sun, hot as sizzling fat, was beating down from the sky. Juan’s plan was to sleep in the shade for an hour or two, among the sheep if need be, until the worst of the heat was past. He hitched his donkey to a tree and took a few steps into the cave’s dim interior. By now the sheep had gone. Juan spread out a blanket, lay down and closed his eyes. While he was doing all this, Catalina, in the inner tract of the Ekain cavern, was preparing to leave. She went down on her knees, blackened her face with dust, started crawling and finally lay down on her stomach to slither the last few yards back to the entrance.

  Juan heard a sound. He opened his eyes just as Catalina closed hers against the dagger-thrust of the sun. He stepped out of the cave entrance just as Catalina poked her hands and her dazzled head out through the other opening. And Juan Bautista de Arteaga saw something emerge from the rock beside him, a spiky-headed monster, a stone man rolling towards his feet, so that Juan, in his fright, could think of nothing better to do than to draw his sword and let out a loud and terrible yell.

  Chapter six

  Juan Bautista de Arteaga

  I rode out into the gloom of a sunless morning, slumped on the [donkey of myself?], unable to clear my mind of what had happened, unable to engender a single new thought, reduced to a mere [cape?], the world a ghostly presence, the clouds like [bleached ashes of the sky?]‘ So runs—more or less—the not wholly decipherable opening sentence of Juan Bautista de Arteaga’s memoirs. The rather erratic raw text consists of 3,422 closely written pages of manuscript, never published but, as of a few months ago, available for inspection in the archive of the Centre des recherches sur le siecle d’or en Espagne.

  We learn from these memoirs that Juan was born in Vitoria. He was both the first and the last-born of the Arteaga family. At his birth, however, it was not—as so often in the Basque country—his mother who forfeited her life, but his father. For on that same evening he celebrated his child’s birth with some friends and got blind drunk. Singing as he lurched across the stone steps of the church, he lost his balance, fell over backwards and, unable to put out a hand to break his fall, hit his head on one of the steps. He broke the base of his skull and did not get up again. This mishap does not
seem to have cast too much of a shadow over the future of the truncated family, for mother and son lived on, relatively unaffected, in the unmortgaged house that their husband and father had left them.

  Even as a boy Juan Bautista had a passion for collecting, which he was to indulge in different ways throughout his life. He was forever bringing home all sorts of things, regardless of what they were: odd pieces of brass, bits of wood, stones, broken tools or scraps of clothing. Whatever he found, whatever people threw away, he brought home and crammed into his room until it was full to bursting. He would rearrange all these corpses of objects each time he added something new to the collection; perhaps he was trying to make the house he lived in a little less empty. Juan’s mother, Anna Bianca Arteaga, worked hard to support them both, toiling day and night fluting the fashionable ruffs that were then so much in demand. Another reason why she worked so hard was that she shared the passion for ennoblement that was rampant in Spain at the time, and dreamed of giving her son the chance to go to university, for the title of Doctor would mean that he, at least, would be raised to the ranks of the nobility. For the sake of a ‘de’ between his first name and surname, for the status that this conferred and the well-paid positions open to a Doctor, Juan’s mother scrimped and saved, pinched and scraped and hoarded every last crumb of money.

  And at eighteen Juan did indeed go to the university of Alcala de Henares, to study medicine. Anna Bianca had bought him the short black soutane-like student’s gown called a loba and, rather than the square academic cap, the cheaper peaked cap. Like every other freshman, Juan was greeted by the established students with unpleasantly crude rituals: they ‘made him white as snow’, in other words they covered him with their spittle, mocked him for the resplendent newness of his gown and the prim and proper way he wore his cap, jeered and whistled at him, pretended to feel the material of his gown and pulled at it until it tore, and squashed his brand-new cap. However, these trials and tribulations did not go on for days, as they did for most freshers, because Juan quickly realized what was expected of him and stood his tormentors a meal, which immediately won them over so that they accepted him as one of themselves from the very first evening. Of course these were not students of noble birth, who could be recognized by the costly silk of their gowns and above all by the veritable army of servants following in their train: preceptors, tutors, cooks, pages, valets, footmen and grooms; rich students leading a life of luxury in a house bought, or at least rented for them by their parents; students who would ride to lectures on horseback, attended by their retinue of servants, who then waited outside the university, ready to escort their noble lords home again; students who for the most part had been admitted to one of the Colegios Mayores, whose alumni obtained the best appointments in church and state.