Seated in Fernández’s small office in the headquarters of the surveillance patrols unit on Gran Via, between Calàbria and Entença, Ordaz was rummaging through papers and going over matters when suddenly Fernández remembered something and raised his nose like a gladiola reviving: “So, have we heard from those blasted Marist brothers we sent the letter to the other day?”
Ordaz smiled. It was the trump card he had up his sleeve.
“It’s all going swimmingly, according to plan, Aureli. We met with them yesterday afternoon.” He slipped a handwritten note in Liliputian script across the table. “It’s their answer, signed by that Marist from Navarra by the name of Lacunza—says they agree to the meeting on the twenty-fifth.”
Aureli Fernández raised his eyebrows. “Well, that’s just collonut,” and his face complicated into an expression that was probably meant as a smile but seemed more like a grimace of pain. “Truth is I didn’t expect much from this group of friars.”
“They aren’t just friars, but a teaching order,” Ordaz corrected him.
“Imbibers of sacramental wine, strokers of little boys’ willies . . . whatever you want to call them,” said Fernández. “Where did you dig up these birds?”
Ordaz puffed up, reveling in his little triumph. “Well, they haven’t exactly been discreet. Apparently they came by a couple of safe-conducts from Supplies, and with them in hand, they’ve been running all over town knocking on doors, begging to be allowed to leave Barcelona. Seems the Marist Institution, as they call it, originated in France, and they want to head up there . . .”
“Running all over town, huh?”
“Every door they could find, I’m telling you. They even talked to some ministers in the Catalan government: José María España, Ventura Gassols . . .”
“What about Tarradellas?”
“No, not with him. They must not have been able to get through to him; if they had, you can bet they would’ve rushed there. But we’ll need to bring Tarradellas up to speed . . .”
“Sure. I’ll take care of it,” Aureli Fernández volunteered. “But first we should discuss matters with Escorza.” He ran his hand over his face. “So the meeting’s set for the twenty-fifth then . . .”
“Right.”
“Where will it be?”
“At Tostadero, in Plaça Universitat, a joint that has private rooms, good for closing business deals . . . In their letter they say two brothers will come: Plana, who’s our man, and Lacunza, the guy from Navarra who’s been handling the negotiations. Funny they don’t even mention the fellow who is always with them, Gendrau, a brother from Barcelona. But the important thing is that some bigwig will be there, coming down from France expressly, man by the name of . . .” Ordaz searched for a moment. “Adjuntant Émile Aragou. In any event he’s the guy who holds the purse strings.”
“Collonut. You’ll be there of course.”
Antoni Ordaz smiled again.
“Tell Gil Portela that I said he should accompany you. And take along someone else you can trust.”
“Excellent. Thank you so much, Aureli,” said Ordaz.
“But only to shake ’em up. No violence,” warned Fernández. “We want to avoid any snags. We get all we can out of them, allow them to leave—and that’s it. We can’t spend our time filling the streets of Barcelona with dead friars, nuns, and pietists.”
“Why not, Fernández?”
It was Escorza speaking from the door to the office. Antoni Ordaz felt a chill run down his spine. Aureli Fernández swiveled his chair around to face the newcomer and tried to appear nonchalant.
“Collons, Escorza. Because. We need to be careful that things don’t get out of hand, no? And stop eavesdropping on other people’s conversation, will you? You’re going to give someone a heart attack one of these days.”
He immediately regretted his words, but it was too late. Manuel Escorza del Val didn’t need to burst into a meeting in order to frighten someone. His appearance alone was enough to, at the very least, elicit a feeling between compassion and disgust. A bout of polio as a child had left Escorza a cripple and something of a dwarf, with a body folded over itself, a ball of ravaged flesh from which emerged his head, a neckless protuberance with bulging eyes and a disproportionate, bulbous mouth. He used crutches and wore shoe lifts to compensate for his stature, but it only made him appear even more deplorable. At first glance people tended to think he was retarded, but he possessed a keen, pragmatic, methodical intelligence that had served to make him the head of the Department of Investigations. As such, he was Aureli Fernández’s immediate superior, and his subordinate always tried—unsuccessfully—to appear deferential to the authority of the Cripple of Sant Elies. The sobriquet by which he was known was derived from the old convent on Carrer Sant Elies that now housed the FAI’s headquarters and detention center. Under Escorza’s command, systematic assassinations and tortures were carried out there, the tales of which made even the most hardened of revolutionaries go white. The coldness, ruthlessness and, above all, murderous rage of Manuel Escorza—a cripple in body and spirit—had no parallel.
“We were speaking about a . . . how shall I put it? . . . a certain transaction with the Marist order. Comrade Ordaz has located them and made contact.” Aureli Fernández was attempting to sweep his inappropriate comment under the carpet. “They intend to cross the border into France and apparently they are ready to offer us money in exchange, but we don’t know how much yet . . .”
“Please, Comrade Escorza.” Antoni Ordaz rose from his chair and offered it to the cripple.
Escorza shot Ordaz such a withering look that he sat back down. Escorza remained standing in the doorway propped on his crutches, looking as bedraggled as a puppet with a couple of broken strings. But the fragility became ice-cold ferocity when he opened his mouth: “And our Comrade Aureli Fernández believes that these solicitous Marist brothers deserve to be spared a rendezvous with the firing party.”
“I simply find it unnecessary,” Fernández responded nervously. “If they leave the country, it seems to me that we needn’t trouble ourselves about them anymore. Especially if they pay up . . .”
“Aureli Fernández appears to be suffering from a problem of perception,” Escorza said in a hissing tone, separating his words into syllables in an odd system of scansion. “We are the keepers of the revolution, not of some convenience store. If they want to pay, let them pay, but every enemy of the revolution will meet his destiny—that is non-negotiable. We haven’t got seven hundred of our men combing the streets of Barcelona night and day, interrogating and arresting people, so that we can set up shop and start peddling favors and dishing out preferential treatment to the highest bidder. The voice of the people is clear, firm, uncompromising. If we don’t act from this conviction, failure can be our only aspiration.”
Aureli Fernández noticed the white froth forming at the corner of Escorza’s mouth. When his superior ended his diatribe, Fernández said, “A meeting with representatives of the Marists has been arranged for the twenty-fifth in a café in Plaça Universitat. Ordaz and Gil Portela will be there to try to establish what we can get out of this. No matter what emerges, we will be following your orders, Comrade Escorza.”
“If that is all you have for me . . .” Escorza grumbled. The Cripple of Sant Elies adjusted himself on his crutches and disappeared down the corridor. The squeaking sound of the thick shoe lifts being dragged along the tiled floor slowly faded. Aureli Fernández and Antoni Ordaz exchanged a meek, pestilential look, the former lacking even the energy to mutter, “Collons.”
The day after Brother Gendrau’s death was decidedly bleak for Brother Pau Darder: cold, full of anguish and dismay, like the news of an unfavorable diagnosis. Don Pere Gendrau—as many referred to him—had not only been Darder’s teacher and confessor but also his friend and, to the extent that one could say as much, one-half of the father he had not had. T
he other half lived in Palma de Mallorca and was the mayor of the city.
The assassination of Brother Gendrau had prompted Brother Pau Darder to review the last years of his own life, and after a night of bad dreams and a day of grief, the only thing he managed to discover was a radical lack of consistency. The young Marist had been born into one of the most prominent families of Palma, and as such he had always slept—as they said back home—on seven mattresses. In exchange for such coddling, he had never made a decision for himself: as a young boy he had studied, with an acceptable level of achievement, in schools chosen by his father, Master Gabriel Darder, who determined that an ecclesiastical career would be fitting for his second son, having settled on the law for his oldest son. Don Gabriel’s wife—the very wealthy Senyora Joana Serra d’Orfila—never dared to oppose (even in thought!) the decisions made by her husband, and reconciled herself unconditionally to them in the name of an impeccable communion of interests. When faced with events outside her control—which in her mind were those that extended beyond the domestic realm—Doña Joana Serra resorted to an all-purpose maxim that was her trump card, and, perhaps, her talisman:
If God so deems it . . .
Coasting on that open-ended phrase that his mother was so partial to, the young Pau Darder was admitted to the Minor Seminary in Palma, where his studious, dutiful character soon distinguished him as a diligent disciple who earned his teachers’ praise. More than that: rumors circulated of a possible transfer to Rome, where the budding theologian would be better able to develop his potential.
In the end, the city chosen for Pau Darder’s higher education was not Rome but Barcelona. This decision was of course not his own. His Uncle Emili had taken charge of the boy’s education after Don Gabriel died of a stroke. A medical doctor specializing in clinical analyses, a progressive, Catalan nationalist and republican, Don Emili was the counterpoint to his older brother Gabriel, who had never missed the opportunity to declare that Emili would bring shame on the family. Don Gabriel didn’t live long enough to see his shameful brother become the mayor of Palma, running on the ticket of the Balearic Island Republican Left, or to see his son Pau sent off to the Conciliar Seminary of Barcelona, where the flamboyant politician—who, though a Republican, had never abandoned his Catholic faith—had many connections. Between sobs, the respectable widow, Doña Joana Serra d’Orfila, had acquiesced to Pau’s departure: “If God so deems it . . .”
And God must have deemed it thus, for the novice Pau Darder i Serra was admitted to the Conciliar Seminary. Not only were his academic results exceptional, but his intellectual acuity and exalted faith in God—which led him to proselytize to his classmates—soon caught the attention of one his professors, the Marist brother Don Pere Gendrau, who had little trouble convincing him to join the pedagogical ministry. The day he was ordained, Don Pere Gendrau wiped away tears as he stood beside Mayor Emili Darder and Doña Joana Serra d’Orfila, the three of them sharing in the joy of that momentous occasion.
The rest was history—until the appalling death of Brother Gendrau. How was it possible to have come to this? Don Pere Gendrau had been a pedagogue of advanced ideas, a good friend of Pere Vergés, whom he had helped to found the Escola del Mar—the School by the Sea—with little regard for the controversy surrounding the militantly secularist nature of the project. Indeed, Brother Gendrau had always been far more preoccupied with cultivating active, conscientious citizens than with indoctrinating new soldiers of the faith. He trusted that a solid civic education would sooner or later awaken in students an interest in the divine mystery. At the same time, he worked to prevent the more exalted juvenile vocations from calcifying into the bellicose attitude of the priests who populated many parishes that deserved better.
As Darder paced his tiny room at Pension Capell, his eyes on the rosary in his right hand, he thought about Don Pere Gendrau, an educator who had devoted all of his learning to preaching the need for compromise and compassion in that period of fanaticism. Did he deserve the miserable, heartrending death he had suffered, together with the child who had also been so vilely murdered? How had it come to this? Like so many others in the past months, Don Pere Gendrau had paid with his life for his faith in the hereafter. But did the afterlife truly exist? Did infinite mercy exist?
It pained Brother Darder to pose such questions. The fervor he had experienced for many years was gone, and for some time now he had been unable to find a clear, conclusive answer to his questions. How was it possible that, confronted with an act of horror such as the murder of Don Pere, God had not intervened to prevent it? This had occurred, he told himself, precisely because God had bestowed on humanity the gift of free will, so that each of us could freely decide whether to choose good or evil; scores would be settled later, when the moment of reckoning arrived.
But the answers found in catechism no longer satisfied Pau Darder. Theology could not supplant life and life could not find answers in theology: theology could be quite absurd, but life was even more so. Fear superseded life. Brother Darder had observed that, subject to the rule of fear, human life was often revealed as ridiculous and futile, and any intellectual effort to imbue it with meaning almost always seemed grotesque. The claim that a Creator existed—filled with grace and mercy, the keeper of the human kin—became a mockery in light of recent events: the murder of a child, the end of Don Pere Gendrau’s life as a mere statistic in an ongoing massacre. God’s ways might be inscrutable, thought Brother Darder, but he found it more and more difficult to condone God’s indifference toward creation.
A crisis of faith. He had often encountered the term in the biographies of some of the great men of the Church and in the stories of the lives of certain saints. But precisely because exemplary men—models of conduct, guiding lights for all true believers—had stood the test, he had never imagined a day when he, who was nothing and no one, would be similarly tested. This thought soothed him; at least he had identified the evil that was gnawing at him, even as it was disheartening to find he did not know how to combat it. Sometimes he sought refuge in the memory of his mother, who was so proud of her son the priest, but then he would recall the woman’s stolid refrain:
If God so deems it . . .
Just thinking about this filled him with a burning need to rebel against everything that would be pleasing to the foolish, mean-spirited God embedded in the mind of Doña Joana Serra d’Orfila. To counter this feeling, he tried to summon the figure of his Uncle Emili, the respected, charismatic mayor, his other father figure. But instead of the effigy, voice or mannerisms of his uncle, his mind conjured up a strange figure that seemed to be modeled in ice, opaque and ever-changing, indifferent and silent. He then sought solace in his awareness of the Marist institution and the community that upheld it, devoted to educating young people and celebrating the mystery of the Mother of God in accordance with the motto of the order: Ad Iesum per Mariam. And yet, when he looked around him and discovered in the daily lives of his fellow religious defects identical to those that predominated in the lives of laymen, he realized his sense of belonging to the Marist order would not be the source of the repose he needed. Only praying offered him a certain consolation, and that was what he was preparing to do: he would remove the crucifix that he kept hidden in the bedside table and stand it up, and kneeling before the little table as if it were an altar, he would recite once more the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps with tears in his eyes, in the hope that he would again experience the plenitude he had known in happier times but that now appeared lost to his soul, melted away like snow on the cobblestone streets.
“Brother Darder . . . Pardon me . . .”
Brother Darder turned his head to the door, to the voice that had just interrupted his prayer. There he discovered the waxen figure of Brother Plana, a man who, when the sunlight fell on him, seemed on the point of melting. Scheming and obsequious, Brother Plana was a roving calamity, in himself sufficient motive to exacerbate any crisis of faith
. Brother Darder braced himself.
“Yes, Brother Plana.” He cleared his throat. “You must forgive me, I wasn’t expecting anyone. Can I help you with something?”
“You are too kind, Brother Darder,” the intruder said with a rat-like smile. “It’s not about me. You have a visitor.”
Before Brother Darder had the chance to ask who it was, Brother Plana had shifted his glance toward the dark corridor and gestured to someone to draw nearer. Judge Miquel Carbonissa appeared on the threshold, looking rather stiff.
“Good afternoon, Your Honor,” Brother Darder greeted him with surprise. And addressing his fellow religious: “If you wouldn’t mind leaving us alone, Brother Plana . . .”
The sallow-faced Marist slipped away down the hall and was engulfed by the dark, his aquiline nose pointing straight ahead as if tracking something.
“Take a seat, please.” The priest pointed to a small round table with a chair on each side. With an appreciative gesture, the judge pulled out one of the chairs and sat; Brother Darder seated himself opposite him. “How may I be of service?”
The judge rubbed his wrists, nodded as if in agreement, and then spoke: “First of all, brother, forgive me for showing up in this untimely fashion—it is not something I would normally do . . .”
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