by Joan Sales
The old dears dried their eyes on the corners of their black aprons. Meanwhile, the village children crowded around admiring our flashes and sparkling new battle jackets.
If I’m not mistaken, this is the village Soleràs had told me about – in veiled and mysterious terms, as I recall. My landlady in Castel had also put in a word about it when she told me about the Suffering Virgin; Soleràs spoke about mummies in a monastery. I could perhaps kill a few hours paying it a visit, if it really exists, for our stay here is quite soporific. The village, like all in this area, is a disaster; it comprises 280 buildings, what with houses, animal pens and a hundred threshing floors with their respective palisades. The church is brick-built, like the castle that looks down on the cluster of houses. The bricks have blackened over the centuries. The flies will not give us a minute’s rest, especially at lunchtime; there are many more than in Castel, and that’s saying something. It could hardly be otherwise given the quantity of manure – manuwer, say the friendly locals – piled up in the pens.
Before leaving Castel I tried to see Soleràs to say goodbye; a soldier in Supplies told me he had just been transferred to the brigade’s Train Unit and he’d seen him getting into a lorry that morning to go off and join it. He could have put himself out to say goodbye. Bah, perhaps I shouldn’t be so touchy.
The worst of it is that I miss him, because though I sometimes find his conversation irritating, it’s always interesting. I remember one of his wise-cracks from Castel de Olivo: “Seeing the brainless things we lot do, eunuchs have every right to feel superior; it’s the same for you sceptics.” I thought it quite intolerable for him to compare me to a eunuch, and yet
. . . I’m sick to death of all these officers, especially the commander and the doctor, who spend their lives going from cellar to cellar tasting wine from the barrels and pronouncing their verdicts.
8 JULY
We are still doing nothing, just waiting for the recruits to arrive. We have already allotted officers to the future companies: I’ve got the 4th and my captain will be Lieutenant Gallart, the ex-waiter.
The village couldn’t be more dismal: it’s boxed in and you can’t see it until you’re inside. Its boundaries are extensive, it’s mostly barren waste with the large olive trees that account for its name. From what people have told me, the monastery is a long way downstream. I go on long walks and sometimes sit at the foot of an olive tree and am so quiet the crows settle on the ground a few steps from me, as if I didn’t exist. There are hundreds to keep me company. Bare mountains make up the backdrop and the district boundary. A cloud sometimes hangs over them: rock and cloud, permanence and evanescence. The cloud drifts by, looking splendid as it changes with the sunset; the rock stays the same. What are the rock and the cloud in our lives? Which is worth the most? Which part of us must remain unchangeable? Are we so sure it’s more valuable than the part that leaves us at every moment? Or are we entirely ghostlike, clouds whose single hope is to live a moment of glory, one solitary moment, and then vanish?
All our instincts rebel against this idea. “I feel and experience that I am eternal”, wrote Spinoza. I’m familiar with this quotation from Spinoza because of Soleràs. Who, besides him, would be capable of swallowing Spinoza? And how can one begin to explain the mysterious immensity of our desire? How do we even begin to explain that we feel this immense desire when we don’t know why or what we desire?
Everything has an explanation – if we know how to seek it out; for example, this murder of crows that so intrigued me. Wandering at random around the area I suddenly found myself in the middle of a circle of lunar mountains. A most unusual sight: a kind of broad, deep, enigmatic lunar crater. The sun was low in the sky, its slanted light providing the extraterrestrial finishing touch. Not a single tree or bush, nothing but mineral and the play of shadow and light as raw as in the void between planets. It was fascinating. I walked to the crater’s edge and looked down: a pile of bones solved the mystery. It’s the charnel house, what they call the vulture trap. There are more shepherds than farmhands in these parts, shepherds of sheep and goats. Into this they throw diseased animals that have perished. When a mule is sickly and the vet gives up hope, they don’t wait for it to die, it would weigh too much. They drive it to the vulture trap, beating it all the way with a stick, and give it a shove. The mule falls in and if it is lucky dies there and then; naturally, it can take days. The crows and vultures are responsible for keeping the vulture trap clean, and it has to be said that they take their responsibility seriously: anything cleaner than those bare ivory white bones you could not find. Ossa arida, as some prophet or the other describes a great bone-strewn desert – human bones, of course, but what’s the difference? That vulture trap impressed me greatly; the aridity of those bones gave me a huge thirst and reminded me of something Soleràs once said: “Huge thirst, a drop of water to quench it, and that sums it up; the infinitely large and the infinitely small. I don’t know if you’ve heard of atoms . . .” “Sorry,” I interrupted him bad-temperedly, “don’t start on that nonsense. Atoms are a load of shit.”
The dryness of the bones helped me understand the “huge thirst” that Soleràs was referring to. “I must live my life,” I told myself, “live my life before my bones are cast into the bottomless vulture trap that awaits us all. I must live my life, but how do I do that? Live! A year at war, a year of no contact with women – and so few years! I must have used up more than a third of my quota already . . .”
One early evening I was standing at a particularly deserted crossroads for that time of day; I mean intensely deserted, you could feel the forlorn abandon. There was just one cloud, its flame so dull and wan it seemed made of basalt. Beauty is frightening; fortunately, it rarely crosses our path. On an evening like that – I’ve never seen such dramatic twilights outside Aragon – one feels alone before the universe, like a criminal before a court without appeal. What is the accusation? That we are so small, so petty and so ugly; the immensity judges and crushes us . . . I was so engrossed in my thoughts I didn’t hear her footsteps; I didn’t notice her presence until a severe, distant voice jolted me out of my reverie: “A good evening to you.”
It was a woman with a child on one arm and another tucked in her skirt: a tall, well-built woman in widow’s weeds who walked by without giving me a glance. She seemed surrounded by a kind of sorrowful aura as she walked slowly along the path, away from the sunset. Who was she? I’d never seen her in the village. When she went round a bend and out of sight I registered that she’d greeted me in Catalan. A Catalan woman in this village? A mystery: almost a hallucination.
15 JULY
The recruits have started to arrive. I am in charge of instructing these poor youngsters. I spend more time in the village and begin to get to know the houses and people.
I have still not identified the Suffering Virgin of Olivel – that is, the apparition from the other day. Or hallucination? Everything is possible.
As the village is enclosed in a deep ravine, the castle is all you see from a distance. You cannot see the huddle of houses until you’re inside; if it is evening, you see the old dears by their doorways, sitting on stone benches and enjoying the cool. Dressed in black and chattering endlessly, they make you think of magpies. Seen in a snapshot like that, the village seems dirty and primitive.
The commander obliges us to give lectures to the recruits; not each officers to his own section, but each officers to the whole battalion.
We use the main hall in the castle as our base. That’s how I managed to get a look inside: it’s an old manor house that has been terribly neglected. It has a huge hall where the commander had a table placed on the dais: he sits and chairs while the officers stands and lectures.
Commander Rosich is short and fat, sallow and swarthy, with beady black eyes that are bright and sentimental. He’d be a lovely person if it weren’t for his “imbibing” – “dribing and imbibing,” he quips. I’ve already given my first lecture: “Machine guns must
be set up on flat terrain.” While I embroidered my subject – the advantages of skimming crossfire, etc. – I noted his beady eyes light up and glow like embers fanned by a breeze. I was using chalk and a blackboard that I’d improvised to explain the trigonometric principles of machine-gun fire with a curved trajectory when he suddenly stood up and hugged me in front of everyone.
“Such calculations bring glory upon our battalion!”
I confess I couldn’t really fathom the reason for such an emotional outburst, even though I’ve always had a weak spot for sentimental types. That’s why I finally managed to accept Ponsetti, the “billboard man on the street”, a chatterbox. He’s always hooked up with Captain Gallart, who is huge, naturally: tall and fat, ruddy and greedy, and rumbustious. My passionate love for tradition made me feel great respect for this couple, the tall fat man and the short thin man – as sentimental and boozy as the other couple, the commander and the doctor.
I’ve discovered a large pine grove quite close by, north of the village. In the heat of the day thousands of crickets buzz, the pine trees are tall and slender, their frayed tops let through a sun that scorches the earth. The air becomes saturated with the pungent sensuous smell of resin. I stretch out on a warm soft bed of pine needles and surrender to the sadness that attacks me in sudden bursts. Poor Soleràs, who thinks he is so unique: when, oh when did I live my life?
THURSDAY, 5 AUGUST
Teaching the recruits – things both theoretical and practical – takes up little of my time. So, apart from the days when I’m assigned guard duty, I have lots of time to fill. Ponsetti has joined the 4th Company; he and Gallart don’t shift from the village, specifically not from the inn where there is a blonde, la Melitona, who makes them lose their marbles. Commander Rosich and Dr Puig are tipsy most days. The other lieutenants and adjutants don’t move out of the village either: they’re always after the young girls, the ones who put roses in our lapels the day we arrived.
Then there’s Cruells, the nurse-cum-subaltern. He turns out to be a devotee of Baudelaire. He knows large chunks by heart, avoids wine and women – and dirty words: a rara avis! He comes for the occasional walk with me. Not very often: he must keep a firm grip on his work. Four hundred recruits are a lot and when they’re not down with one thing they’re down with another, generally venereal in origin. He is the baby of the battalion, barely twenty, and when he comes for a walk with me he brings along a kind of portable telescope or, perhaps more precisely, a “long-view eyeglass”, the kind used by skippers in the last century, a good thirty centimetres long when extended. He says his aunt gave it to him for his twelfth birthday and he’s kept it with him throughout the war; it takes up little space when collapsed – its sections slot inside each other. This instrument is much more powerful than my officer’s binoculars, and when we go for a stroll together we linger until very late and he makes me take a look at Jupiter through his telescope: you can see the four “satellites of Galileo” quite clearly next to the planet, like four peas next to a plum, three on the left and one on the right. The day after, the one on the right has disappeared, and the day after that you see only two. Then you see all four once again, now two on the right and two on the left. He explained the reasons for these appearances and disappearances, as well as the different phases of Venus – which you can also see using his seafaring telescope – and much more besides; his head is as stuffed with facts about astronomy as mine is empty.
We’d take a nap in the pine grove, the castle looming in the background between the trunks of the pines. Don’t imagine a feudal castle with battlements and barbicans: it’s a square mass of blackish bricks. The village in its hollow is invisible from where we are. A question suddenly sprang to my lips: “So what did you do before the war?”
Half asleep, he looked at me through his tortoiseshell spectacles, which gave him at once the air of a benign owl and a decent person. He seemed to hesitate: “I’ll tell you, but don’t tell anyone else. I was a seminarist.”
“A seminarist?”
It would never have struck me, but now it was clear as daylight. Why couldn’t Cruells be a seminarist? Or rather, what else could he have ever been?
“And what are you intending to do after the war?”
“Finish my studies.”
Days later Cruells gave us a real shock. Naturally, we have a contingent on guard duty at night – several soldiers under an officers doing his shift – which patrols the outskirts of the village. I wasn’t on duty that night, it was an adjutant from the 2nd Company, and he filled me in on the juicy details. It must have been one in the morning, the village was asleep, there was no moonlight and the only sound was the hooting of an owl in the poplar tree by the fountain. Out of the blue the patrol spotted a man by the threshing ground on the edge of the village: it was a soldier taking aim with a weapon that, from a distance, looked like a 50 mm mortar. They were naturally alarmed, thinking he might be a fascist or an anarchist and that there might be others coming behind him to mount a surprise attack. Thank God the duty adjutant had the sangfroid to stop his men shooting their Mausers: it was Cruells with his telescope. His eyes were shut and he was sound asleep while walking along holding up his long-sighted eyeglass as if taking aim. He told me afterwards that he’d had other bouts of sleepwalking, though years ago. We asked Dr Puig whether sleepwalking was at all serious; he shrugged his shoulders and told us it wasn’t and that nobody knows what causes it. Sometimes people never have repeat attacks, they are usually more common in adolescence – “Let’s have no illusions, at the age of twenty Cruells is still an adolescent”; and, “At the end of the day, better not to harp on it; in any self-respecting brigade, and according to highly reliable statistics, for every attack of sleepwalking there are 463 of gonorrhoea.”
On the days – that is, most days – when Cruells is on duty with the medical chest, I go out and about by myself. Now I have a horse and that’s very useful for a promeneur solitaire. A lone walker can seem rather manic; on horseback, he earns general respect. Besides, with the horse, or rather the mare since it is female, I can go further: to the monastery, for example.
But I ought to explain things in the right order.
First: as a consequence of those theoretical and practical lectures of mine I’ve located my hallucination.
It turns out that the master of the castle, the carlan as the locals call him, was murdered by the anarchists. That isn’t at all odd, naturally: it would have been odd if they hadn’t. It seems he lived with a woman, and if she’d been legitimate they would have murdered her too and not thought twice about it, but this happened to be an instance of free love. So they not only did not kill her, they treated her with great respect as the lady of the castle and its estates. She’s still living there with her two children. The old women in the village scornfully refer to her as the carlana, the lady of the castle, and affirm in their homespun Spanish that, as soon as the war is over, some distant cousins of the deceased, the only legal relatives he was known to have, will kick her out of the castle and off its land – “She and the couple of kids born on the wrong side of the blanket.”
She leads a very secluded life and avoids seeing people. When the commander asked for use of the hall she immediately agreed, but when it’s time for a lecture she locks herself out of sight with her two children.
I discovered she had a spare mare in her stables, the favourite steed of the deceased. Nobody rides her because nobody in the battalion or the village is keen on horse riding. I decided to ask if I could; she was doing nothing with the animal – the anarchists had tried to make her plough, to no avail – and she’d be just right for me and my solitary jaunts. The woman received me, standing in that same room where we gave our lectures.
In that guise, without the mysterious allure of twilight, she’s a woman of around thirty-five, serious, distant and polite in manner. Her voice is a velvety contralto that sometimes vibrates with an almost imperceptible tremolo. I told her I was surprised that she sp
oke such good Catalan: “Don’t be surprised. I’ve lived in Barcelona for so many years! I was fifteen when I went there. That was all I ever spoke with him and his mother. His mother was from Barcelona.”
What she and the lord of the castle had done was so out of the way, I thought it best to carefully steer the conversation elsewhere: “I know there’s a monastery within the village boundaries, some fifteen kilometres downstream.”
“The monastery in Olivel, the Order of the Virgin of Mercy. The Virgin of Olivel was much revered in these parts. Many of us are named after her.”
“Ah, so you must be Maria d’Olivel.”
“Maria d’Olivel is my whole name, as written on the certificates of baptism. People usually call me Olivela.”
I felt she seemed distant, if not absent; for a few seconds she looked as unreal as on that evening when I saw her silhouetted against the sunset along the solitary crossroads. Something about her hits you between the eyes: the mark of tragedy. There’s no reason, of course, why a woman who’s lived what she’s had to live shouldn’t bear the mark of tragedy. I’ve gathered she is from a family of modest means; being a kept woman placed her outside her class and family, at once above and below. Then the anarchist scoundrels murdered her carlà in front of her and their children . . . But that’s not the root cause: the mark of tragedy comes from within, not from life. I tried to imagine what her loneliness must be like; she does have her children, but what kind of company do children ever provide?