by Joan Sales
Live, live once and for all, enjoy it in one big gulp before you end up stiff for all eternity!
OLIVEL, 7 AUGUST
A stone staircase leads off from the church, its steps polished by feet that have climbed up over the years to the top floor, where the friars’ cells are located. A large hallway at the top of the stairway is strewn with huge antiphonaries, their parchment pages enclosed between studded wooden covers. There are several abandoned harmoniums – the church doesn’t have an organ – and heaps of books, mostly from the eighteenth century. I found a complete edition, an English first edition, of Cook’s travels with engravings that reproduce the drawings made by the artist who sailed in his frigate. Just the thing for the long hours when I’m on guard duty in the village!
In one of the cells I found a four-volume treatise on the cultivation of flowers, also eighteenth century, with engravings, these having been hand-tinted with watercolours, re-creating the colours of each species with great precision and verve. The flower of the pomegranate is a glorious red – and brought the mistress of the castle to mind. Why? What kind of glory? Glorious sin or glorious tragedy? How melodramatic, my God! The uncertain glory of an April day? It’s strange, but she gave a start when I told her I was intending to visit the monastery. “Keep away from that place . . . the Virgin’s gone . . . it’s terrifying.” She too must have been terrifying years ago; beauty is terrifying when it reaches a certain level; hers is stylised and terrifying even now. Lots of women are attractive, but few are beautiful. I’m unlikely ever to meet another who will make me think of Michelangelo’s La Notte the way she does. She has that disagreeable effect on me that small men must experience when talking to tall women, yet I am taller than her – I’ve worked that out on the sly. I’m a good six inches taller.
Piaceme il sonno e più l’esser de sasso*
Why do I spend so much time thinking about this woman? Because I’m bored out of my mind in this back of beyond! How old is she? Ten years older than me? She gives the impression that she’s faded more than her age warrants, and that’s natural enough given the horrors she has seen. That isn’t what is extraordinary. What is extraordinary is how this premature withering, tinged with melancholy, actually enhances her.
Another cell has a small cupboard set in the thick wall that opens onto the outside but can be opened from the inside as well. I could hear a kind of humming, like the sound of wheat running through a sieve; I heard it from a distance, then right next to me, almost inside my ear. I decided to open the cupboard door. The cupboard was made of worm-eaten wood and measured no more than ten centimetres square. Here was the key to the mystery: it was a hollow space purpose built for bees to make their hives. The little beasts carry on working, indifferent to our ups and downs, without a care in the world – and the cupboard is full of honey! Their buzzing, now I know it’s them, keeps me company over the long hours I spend in the monastery.
The next-door cell holds more surprises: a cramped spiral staircase, also concealed within the thick central wall, which goes up to a small attic that houses a pigeon loft.
The pigeons also carry on without a care in the world; several females are brooding. They’ve become wild. When they hear my steps the males fly off; the females look at me in fear but don’t move from their nest boxes.
I then explored underground, discovering a huge cellar: the monastery’s main product was wine. The miller had told me how the anarchists started sacking the cellar – with a drunken binge on claret and Maccabeus, the two varieties of wine the friars produced. But it appears to have been an orderly binge: the barrels are still in perfect shape and almost full; so they seem to have inspired more respect than the niches. One barrel is enormous: a hogshead, which they call “vessel” in Catalonia, with a capacity for tonnes, as if it were a barge. It is made of oak, its history inscribed on its front with a shield and a date: 1585.
I wish my imagination could reconstruct that long hot night at the end of July last year. An orgy of wine, blood and mummies scorched by the dog days of summer. Were women involved? The miller assures me they were not. Well, the detail of the Easter candle . . . it had struck me as a female idea, the wit of some lusty woman.
The miller is trenchant. The murderers were seven strangers who constituted the “committee”. They dragged along half a dozen wretches from the village to help disinter the mummies. “Six poor fellows . . . we in the village know the lot.” “Do they still live there?” “Yes, you bet, but don’t give them away; all they did was dig out the dead.”
The miller saw them coming and going from the mill, that was the route from village to monastery along the gully, and there wasn’t a woman among them. What’s more, and I find this really intriguing, he says they simply placed the deceased against the wall under the niches. He’s very surprised by what I tell him about the wedding scene.
“But they weren’t like that, I tell you, lootenant. They never were!”
“Are you sure you really remember?”
“The last time I was there, some four months ago, they weren’t like you say, Don Luisico, but as I told you: lined up against the wall. I’m telling you straight, lootenant!”
“And what about the Easter candle?” He looked at me with eyes as big as oranges. He didn’t understand. When he did, he burst out laughing: “Crikey, whoever did that is a filthy fellow! But they didn’t, I swear they didn’t, lootenant. I can tell ’oo they are, but don’t you give them away. One’s Pachorro, the ’unchback, who lives near the fountain; the other, el Restituto, ain’t quite right in the ’ead.”
I should pay the six of them a visit to see if I can get to the bottom of this.
On one of my first visits – I’d go every day, it was a constant lure – I was brought to a halt in the doorway by the din emanating from the cells. Cheerful out-of-tune notes from flutes, violins, double bass, mixed up with childish voices and laughter and footsteps so light they seemed like wings in flight. What was all that about? I went cautiously up the stairs: I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a swarm of cherubim having fun. It was a band of shepherd boys from the area who’d shut their goats in the monastery stable so they could come up and play the harmoniums. The sight of me created panic. They were hilarious as they ran off in their big straw hats, their velvet breeches reaching below their knees, and I was dumbstruck for quite some time.
I took food with me so I didn’t have to return to Olivel at midday and thus had time to investigate the piles of books calmly and methodically. Most were theological and many were in Latin, but there were also lots I found very interesting; that’s where I found the Criticón, a first edition in fact, that later helped me kill so many hours on night-time guard duty. When I felt hungry I went down to the cellar to eat lunch. It’s deep and gloomy; I have to grope my way down well-worn millstone steps. As your foot seeks out the next step, wave after wave of cool air hits you with an aroma of wine. Once among the casks, I lit a small oil lamp that I had to hand, and I ate; I couldn’t have done that upstairs, where the presence of the mummies hung so heavy in the air. The coolness of the cellar and the smell of wine is refreshing. The flickering oil lamp projects shadows from the barrels on walls built from crudely hewn ashlars that are draped with thick cobwebs, some perhaps hundreds of years old. The claret was cold, very dry and fragrant, and tasted slightly of flintstone and sulphur. This was presumably on account of the sulphur matches or straws with which they will have fumigated the insides of the empty casks before transferring the new wine, according to the practice of the best wine growers; the Maccabeus was more like syrup and left a mellow taste between palate and tongue. I blew out the lamp with a puff and retraced my steps. I had to cross the church once more and walk to the cells with the largest heaps of antique books.
On one of these many afternoons, more embroiled than usual in my inspection of abandoned books, I came across an edition of Petrarch’s sonnets printed by Elzevir and a seventeenth-century Summa Theologica with some outstanding vignettes.
I was looking at them when a very loud clap of thunder interrupted my thoughts. I looked up at the window: the sky was darkening in sudden waves, as if a scene changer were switching off the lights behind a backcloth of clouds. Another thunderclap, this time cracked and hollow, broke over the monastery and I felt the lightning must have made a direct hit on the belfry, which had no bell within it.
A deathly glimmer gave the landscape the strangest pallor. The inside of the monastery was in darkness; lightning and thunder ran into each other. The lightning seemed to illuminate the interior more sharply than it did the landscape, presumably because the objects inside were closer to my eyes, but the final effect filled me with anguish. On nights when a dry storm, the most unnerving of all, is raging, I see the Earth more clearly than the sky; the sky is black and stifling, while a faint glow hovers above the Earth. This anguish we bear must be prompted by the feeling that the universe enclosing us is all shadows: shadows beyond.
A summer deluge began and the rain took a great weight off my shoulders: a dry storm is frustrating. The downpour lashed the great roof of the monastery, which resounded like an empty box.
I had to go back to the village, but first I had to get through the church. I walked back, staring hard at the square of brightness that was the open doorway ahead. I was halfway down the nave when the two sides of the door began to swing on their hinges and shut with a moan that rang around the vaults. The shadows had turned to total darkness and I was trapped inside. I was alone with the mummies.
Know what I did? I crossed myself and prayed the Lord’s Prayer: there’s nothing like terror to bring us to our knees. A draught had shut the door, I opened it easily. Outside it was raining cats and dogs. I ran to the elm tree: Acorn had gone. A piece of the reins hanging there said it all: scared by the thunder, the animal had snapped the thongs and made its escape.
Within a second I was drenched as thoroughly as if I’d fallen to the bottom of a pond. What could I do? Go back in and spend the night in one of the cells? Not likely: I would be too terrified. It would be madness to think of reaching the village without my mare, but I could try to make it as far as the mill.
I was a long way from the monastery when I realised that the Parral wasn’t the usual brook but a great river swelling by the minute. I couldn’t walk any further along the gully. I would have to scramble up and spend the night in the open on the slope. Upon reaching the top I spotted a small light – the light from a fairy tale! I made my way through the undergrowth and a blinding curtain of water and finally reached the mysterious brightness, where I found the miller, the miller’s wife and their five or six little millers.
With the aid of an axe they had improvised a small shack from trunks of juniper, with a roof made of branches of rosemary and lentiscus. The wife was crying, her children huddled against her, the oldest staring at her with serious, dark eyes, while the young ones slept. The miller made room for me: “Don Luisico, see what a sad, wretched mess we’re in.”
“My mill’s dead an’ gone!” she wailed. “My litt’l chicks are dead that allus laid me eggs! The sow we bought is dead, and we fed ’er on such lurvely slops!”
He stared at the bottom of the ravine as if looking for the remains of his mill in the pitch dark.
“There’s another mill in the district, upstream from the village. If only they’d rent it to us, but for note until we mill our first flour . . .”
“Whose is it?”
“It’s the dead carlán’s, may he rest in Glory. You get on well with the mistress, I mean Olivela, you could . . .”
“Don’t yer think for one minute, lootenant,” she spoke as she stopped crying, “that I wish ’er ill; I didn’t mean anything ’orrible when I spoke about ’er afore.”
At least better think that now.
Before daylight broke we started our retreat along the ridge. We found the locals out in the street in Olivel: the women screaming and moaning and the men silent. The downpour had swept away their plots of land. Their harvests of hemp and corn were completely ruined. The poor folk’s last hope lay with the saffron that grows on the dry lands outside the ravine, this being the crop that brings most money in good years.
Old Olegària – the old dear in the house where I’m lodged – was upset, wondering what might have become of me. I’ve yet to tell you about this coarse old woman who, with the best intentions in the world, cooks me dishes from hell; they are exactly the same as those she cooked for her grandson. I’ll tell you about him some other day.
I’d received a letter from Trini: “Your little boy is insatiable when it comes to fairy stories. He asks for more, for yet another. ‘Father used to tell me more,’ he protests, and even adds, ‘Father’s were better.’ I’ve started telling him stories about wicked stepmothers and he loves them. He opens eyes as big as oranges when he’s listening and finds it hard to understand the father’s role in the stories: what did the boy’s father do? To soothe him, I say that the stepmother would beat the father too . . .”
Old Olegària knows as much about the state of my boy as I do. She’s illiterate – all the women in the village are – but she always knows when a letter is from Trini by the envelope.
Naturally she thinks we are husband and wife. I see no need to enlighten her, as it would be beyond her. She waits for me to finish reading before asking me for the latest news about Ramonet, taking a lively interest in him – as if she knew no other children.
She is quite ancient and lives with her only daughter, also a widow, who looks as if she’s past fifty. The dishes they cook for me deserve a term: they are horrific. One Sunday they wanted to give me chicken for a treat. They still haven’t mastered the art of roasting in these parts. They drown the chicken in a saucepan filled to the top with oil and then boil it. When I take my first bite, I grimace with the shock of tasting so much oil.
“Isn’t the chicken cooked properly? Don’t you think it’s got enough oil?” She told me the village had given me up for dead when they saw the mare ride up by itself with its reins snapped.
“So where is Acorn now?”
“In ’er castle, Don Luisico, like a flash! Don’ need no ’elp to get to ’er manger. ’er does that by instinct. Beasts ’ave a character of their own.”
Quite unawares, she had defined herself perfectly. Old Olegària is so much a beast and a character!
OLIVEL DE LA VIRGEN, SUNDAY, 8 AUGUST
The Parral is bubbling cheerfully along its usual course, as if it had never gone crazy. The saffron crop on the dry lands looks better than for many a year and the farmers are hoping it will make up for the loss of their hemp and corn harvests.
News from the battalion: we now have a machine-gun company. I was crossing the main street yesterday when I saw an officers well past forty, stout, in hunting boots, with a huge S-shaped pipe in his mouth. His little bright sly Mongolian eyes reminded me of someone, though I couldn’t think who.
“It’s Picó. Don’t you remember me? We went for a swim together . . .”
“So what brings you to Olivel?”
“They’ve put us together with your battalion.” He puffed on his pipe as he closed his little eyes, “And have you been in touch with Soleràs?”
“No, I’ve not seen him since.”
“He’s a cultured young man, but the filthiest in the brigade. We were camping out in the open in January. We slept in heaps of three or four, with all our blankets on top. The officers made separate piles, naturally; one must avoid being too familiar with the troops. Can you believe it, he was too much for me because he stank like a billy goat! ‘Hey, lad, I’d rather you didn’t sleep with us.’ He was forced to sleep by himself, out in the open, in temperatures of six or seven below. You know what he did? He stretched out under the dung from the company’s mules. Then there was a heavy snowfall: ‘That Soleràs,’ we said, ‘on his tod and with just one blanket will be frozen as stiff as a mummy.’ In the morning he assured us he’d been sweating the whole night long.”
/> “I bet he had. Covered by mule turds with a foot of snow would be like sleeping under four eiderdowns! It wasn’t such a bad idea.”
“What can I say? I’d prefer frostbite and gangrene. Culture’s all very well, but without hygiene . . .”
Today I made the obligatory visit to the carlana to apologise for what had happened to the mare. I mentioned the millers: “I’ve no worries about renting them the Albernes mill. I’d like to help them.”
I’m writing this in my bedroom, that is, from old Olegària’s grand-son’s. I’ve taken to it, though not to the grandson, whom I’ve yet to meet. This is a square whitewashed room with eight gnarled reddish juniper beams in a ceiling still reeking of resin. A west-facing window overlooks the main village square. An iron bedstead painted a pale red, a reed chair and pine table comprise all the furniture. For one’s “hygiene”, as Picó would say, there is a hand basin, that is, a washbowl on an iron tripod; old Olegària keeps an eye out so I always have a clean towel and a square of bitter almond soap that perfumes the whole room. See what an improvement this is on Castel de Olivo! I write with the light from the rump end of a candle listening to crickets through an open window. The air’s warm and I’m starting to feel sleepy. I can hear the voices of Gallart and Ponsetti who are crossing the main square. They must be on their way to Melitona’s tavern. While they stay there into the early hours, I’ll be sleeping soundly in bed – which is the best place to be at night. The mattress sags in the middle. Initially, it irritated me so much I couldn’t get to sleep. Now I’ve become so used to it that I would miss it: it’s become familiar and keeps me company. And old Olegària’s grandson must be missing it right now . . .