by Joan Sales
I’m falling asleep and thinking about my conversation with the carlana as if I’d dreamed it.
“Have you known the miller and his wife very long?”
“All my life. We’re from the same village.”
“Of course, from Olivel.”
“No, not Olivel. Castel de Olivo.”
“You aren’t from Olivel?”
“Santiaga and I are first cousins. Some years ago, when her husband was looking for a mill, she asked Enric for ours. But Enric knew she was gossiping about me, so he refused to rent it to them. I’m not spiteful and should help a cousin if I can.”
It’s odd the miller’s wife hadn’t told me they were related. Does she find it embarrassing? Or . . . doesn’t she really believe it to be true? “If she’s turned out so stuck up, must ’ave been some graft or other” – obviously only a hypothesis, but hypotheses could take us a long way . . .
“The Albernes mill pond holds double what the other can take. We used it to water our cultivated plots. If they want, I’ll rent them the land as well so they can get the benefit of both.”
I wasn’t really interested in what she was saying; it was as if she were talking about things very remote: Santiaga and the Albernes mill. I was listening not to the words but to her voice. I’ve woken up some nights with a start, thinking I could hear her voice in my sleep, warm and voluptuous like perfume, serious and thoughtful like a solemn promise . . .
OLIVEL, 10 AUGUST
I spent yesterday in Castel de Olivo. They’d summoned me from brigade headquarters to draw up an indictment: something as complicated as it was trifling. If you only knew how I hate drawing up indictments. I did all I could to postpone it.
I reached Olivel after midnight. I had walked because Acorn still remembers her drenching and won’t budge from her stable, where she’s well wrapped up in burlap sacking. The shortcut from Castel de Olivo runs alongside a broad, barren valley with healthy marshlands beyond. Hundreds, if not thousands, of toads of different kinds live in the valley – big, medium and small. Each lent its distinct, clear, precise note to the chorus: a magic trill of tinkling glass bells. The moonless night made every one of its stars twinkle – as distinct, clear and precise as these notes. I’d been walking for an hour and a half with a similar distance to go and sat down there, completely entranced by the wizardry of the desert, the toads and the night. Sagittarius was flourishing its bow of stars at the very heart of the Milky Way, where it becomes as dense as a cloud of diamond dust. I shivered from time to time, feeling the night-time breeze, or terror, and I thought of her and her voice and told myself: She is the first real woman I’ve ever met.
The world is so lovely, yet we turn our backs on it to manufacture private sordid little hells . . . Poor Soleràs! “The hell I’m manufacturing for my own private use is so cramped,” he’d said, “there’s no room for anyone else.” Why does he avoid me, the only person in the brigade who likes him?
I found him in Castel de Olivo.
I decided to pay my old landlady a visit: “You’re back? That friend of yours is sleeping up in the attic.”
“Soleràs?”
It must have been gone two and he was having a snooze. I walked slowly upstairs to give him a surprise. The attic still silently exhaled the stench of rabbits I knew so well and the shutters were closed. He turned over in his bed. I couldn’t see him, I was still blinded coming in from the light, but I heard him whisper sarcastically: “And what are you doing here?”
I told him how I’d been summoned to draw up an indictment – “as they might have summoned you,” I added, “given that you too have a law degree.”
“If I’d known you were coming to Olivel today, I’d have left for Mont-forte.”
“Thanks very much. We’ve not seen each other for two months.”
“If you had a clearer idea of things, you wouldn’t want to see me.”
“A clearer idea of what?”
“Lluís, you and I should hate each other.”
“Why should I hate you? Because of your so-called perversions? I’ve known you far too long. You like to act the cynic and I know the story by heart. It’s like water off a duck’s back. Your vices are imaginary. You’re hypocritical when it comes to vice: that’s your only virtue. All that morphine business was complete nonsense. I expect you were really drinking lime infusions.”
“I’m not prepared to tolerate your insults,” he growled.
“I’ve even reached the point of doubting your aunt ever had any visions.”
“Do you doubt the existence of Saint Philomena?”
“Her existence is one thing . . .”
“To exist or not to exist, that is the question. One doesn’t get the aunt one asks for, you know; in fact, we get the aunts we deserve. And what about the Innocents?”
“What Innocents?”
“Do you also doubt the existence of the Holy Innocents?” His bass voice was becoming more emphatic. “Do you deny the existence of the llufa?† So many people carry them quite unawares; very important individuals, great men, sublime men,” and he laughed unpleasantly. “They don’t realise and never will; they forget they have a behind, they are so sublime! They don’t even believe in llufas. They are sceptics, didn’t you know, and sceptics are duty-bound not to believe in anything. However, they do believe in themselves and their own importance; Satan, with his fine sense of humour, has stuck his llufa on them. A little portable hell embedded just where they can’t see it. And I’m not only referring to jet-black sceptics; there are light-pink sceptics who are even more startling. They don’t believe in hell, they are so angelical: innocent lilies! It happens particularly with certain ladies; ladies from the best families, didn’t you know, frightful ladies, ladies who go to Saint Vicenç de Paül’s lectures. They don’t believe in the llufa but carry it embedded in their behinds! A portable little hell. As they are ladies of such good breeding, I take particular note. They worry a lot about their faces, but their face is their least interesting feature, indeed, quite the contrary.”
“And why can’t you stop spouting this nonsense?”
He gave me a withering glance: “I suppose you have heard of Easter candles.”
“Easter candles?”
He pointed to the wall full of little figures and stupid graffiti. I had opened the shutters to let in some light and fresh air.
“Let us imagine you’re right, that my vices are purely imaginary,” he went on, as I inspected the wall: it had new drawings which I was sure weren’t there when I had the attic. “I’ll add another adjective: solitary. What an association of adjectives to toy with! A good association of adjectives is a good enough start. Let’s imagine that I hid from everyone simply to take lime infusions . . .”
There evidently were new drawings; one, especially, was very striking. It portrayed a kind of procession of men or women – it was impossible to tell which because their creator had sketched them very roughly. What was striking was that they were each carrying a big candle, lit and dripping molten wax, and a llufa on their back.
“I don’t know if you have ever noticed that the Easter candle is lit on glorious Holy Saturday and extinguished on Ascension Thursday, then see you again next year! We all live in the hope that it will be lit again come glorious Holy Saturday, that is, at the beginning of spring. But there will be a year when it won’t happen. A year when spring won’t return. Have you never thought how April, that month of uncertain glory, escapes our grasp? And uncertain or not, it is the only glory. So, back to our Easter candles . . .”
“Let Easter candles be. I’m an unbeliever but I respect sacred things.”
“I’m the complete reverse. I believe. If I didn’t, why would I take pleasure in mocking them? If only I could stop believing! How I envy you people who don’t believe or think you don’t believe! You, for example, are the luckiest of the lucky. When faith might be a nuisance and get in the way, you lose sight of it; when you need it, it comes back. Don’t deny that�
��s your technique. A technique that couldn’t be bettered! On the other hand, I work the opposite way: faith blocks my path when I’d prefer to forget it and doesn’t come when I call on it.”
“Do you really think this makes the slightest impression on me? We who don’t have any faith wish we did, but the contrary . . . to have faith and wish we didn’t . . . would be absurd . . .”
“Exactly. The absurd has sunk its teeth into us, and we find evil attractive. We’ve been granted so little time to do all the evil we’d like to! We’d do much more, but alas, we don’t have the time. Conversely, do you think doing evil is as easy as some people believe? Not just any old evil, but the evil one really wants to commit, because, you know, doing evil that doesn’t appeal is of no interest . . . That’s the evil to cap all evils, being able to do what is of no interest at all, while in the meantime life rushes by. April is rushing from us, believe me, and this blasted war will spoil it for us. It may last a long time, long enough to bugger us all. You lack imagination; you think this is a summer shower that catches you unawares and that a good thyme broth will shortly appear, a soup steaming by the hearth after you’ve changed your socks and shirt. You’ll be in time for your good thyme broth! Nausea is what will appear, or perhaps you didn’t hear the news? Are you certain that word means nothing to you?”
He said all this without getting out of bed. Then stretched out an arm and took his canteen from the reed chair that doubled as his bedside table.
“Would you like a swig? It’s cognac. I mean that, it’s cognac, not rotgut. And fascist cognac into the bargain! The genuine article from Andalusia! A bottle that has survived . . .”
He drank from the spout, wiped his lips and got back again on his high horse.
“You still haven’t told me how you reacted to the Easter candle in the monastery in Olivel. There’s something quite remarkable in Olivel apart from the mummies. I suppose you must have noticed.”
“What do you mean?”
“The carlana. Don’t miss out on her. She’s remarkable on more than one score . . . but what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, don’t be such an idiot.”
“It’s common knowledge that the carlana . . .”
“That the carlana what?”
“Lets you ride her horse. She wouldn’t let me.”
“So now you’re spying on what I do?”
“You surely realise that news of one’s friends circulates in a brigade. I know that you go to the monastery every day and mount the lady’s beast; don’t be offended, I do mean her horse. I even know that you spend your time salvaging antique books and other portable items of value. I shall reassure you by saying that this is all deemed praiseworthy. Your battalion commander has told the brigade commander as much, praising your attachment to culture to the skies. Everybody in this brigade is in favour of culture and hygiene; it’s not like the ‘flatfooted’ brigade. The whole weight of the brigade is behind your culture and behind you putting a little order into that ‘historic building’ – the whole brigade knows it is ‘historic’ – with a view to returning it to the Friars of the Virgin of Mercy in good shape when circumstances allow. Know what I mean by circumstances, right?”
“Like a book, but no need to be reticent. I find your reticence irritating.”
“So much in life is irritating and we must learn to put up with it . . . Religion, for example, as we’ve mentioned friars and monasteries; religion slots perfectly into this conversation. Why do we find religion so irritating? If it were false, we wouldn’t, it would be great fun. It’s irksome when they poke our sores – the sore that runs the most. And don’t be under any illusion, their aim is deliberate and that’s why they irritate. We’d all like to do the same, with great gusto, but we can’t; April is disappearing fast. They do us and undo us and never ask our opinion. Who? Why? ‘Young fellow, you just mind your own business.’ Fine, if you want to hide the who and the why from us, why not the how as well? Godella is a wonderful estate and the dog days there set me up a secret rendezvous with the most obscure dreams, a rendezvous soaked with salt-laden scents. The sea is nearby. Naturally, my aunt forbade me to go. I was forced to swim hiding from her, not on the beach that you could see from the house but on a cove where you could swim in the nude. My aunt refused to buy me swimming trunks.
“And it was in that cove that . . . I was twelve at the time. I heard voices before I got there; two voices, a woman’s and a man’s, foreigners. I’ve always found foreigners intriguing. I hid among the reeds and fennel in order to spy on them. He was blonde, with a deep tan, and had clearly been sunbathing a lot; tall, broad shouldered, with hair so thick on his chest it ruffled his shirt, hair that glinted like gold on his chocolate skin. He laughed loudly, showing splendid white teeth that gleamed quite offensively, the kind only perfect savages sport. As you know, I’ve had bad teeth from the age of twelve . . . They’d just landed in a motorboat they’d moored on the beach. They were foreigners, I didn’t understand a word they said, and that’s why foreigners have always intrigued me – because I don’t understand them – so I hung on and spied on them. My nose was full of the scent of fennel scorched by the August sun and they were laughing and chatting. I wanted to know what foreigners do. People who speak so strangely must also do strange things, or so I thought. She seemed much bigger than him: one of those well-fed mature Nordic women who are apparently made of a hard elastic substance like solid rubber. They came to the cove every morning in their boat and did so throughout that summer; I’d hear the hum of the motor from Godella and run to my hideout. One day I found a dead donkey that had been abandoned by gypsies halfway along the path. From that moment on I found the donkey more interesting than the foreigners. It didn’t smell the first day, and I’d even say it lay there in a civilised fashion; only a hint on its lips, a cynical expression, as if it had a hidden agenda, betrayed the fact that it held a surprise in store. It was planning – as later developments would testify – to stink to high heaven. The day after it was so swollen it was barely recognisable; I suspected the village butcher of being responsible. The butcher inflated kid goats before skinning them because he said it was easier once they were blown up; that butcher – Pancras by name, for your information – would inflate them through their behinds, using a reed. I was fascinated by my donkey’s swollen paunch and punctured him with the needle-sharp point of a marine bulrush. I extracted the reed and the little hole hissed like a mouth full of saliva as the donkey deflated gradually, like a tyre. Its stink filled the air . . . and I fled. It was unbearable. I fled to my hideout by the cove. The foreigners were there and the man was laughing more outrageously than ever, flashing his savage’s teeth. I threw up. I threw up like a god lamenting his creation. You don’t believe me, as always; you think I invented all this. Well, not one bit: I did throw up. Like so many people, you think we only came into this world to drink lime infusions. Well no, I’m not inventing a thing; I threw up. I must have told Nati: ‘There are foreigners on that cove who say very curious things you can’t understand, and there’s a dead donkey as well . . . They do even stranger things and the donkey swells up and deflates.’ She refused to go; she was more scared by the foreigners and the donkey than by the railway line. I tell you, I’m not fibbing; I speak with my hand on my heart . . . I went every day, expecting the spectacle of putrefaction to begin, but it didn’t. The foreigners stopped coming towards the end of September and the donkey couldn’t make its mind up. I was intrigued and poked it with a stick; an army of rats was scurrying inside its parchmented skin. They’d made a hole in its belly and eaten its insides while respecting its skin, its appearance. I find this respect for appearances that one sees throughout nature quite peculiar, this need to respect appearances and hide away on a solitary cove . . . You refuse to believe me, you never have, yet you don’t want to mistrust me. I hope you don’t think I find it pleasurable to inspire so little mistrust and to have suffered toothache from the age of twelve . . . They do and undo us, th
ey inflate and deflate us, there’s nothing a child likes more than this double mystery: how they both do and undo us. Not that they ask us for our opinion: ‘You just mind your own business.’ ”
“Have you finished?”
“I have for the moment. I felt inspired, Lluís, and had to make the most of you being here to listen. I’ve occasionally tried to speak to myself, I mean out loud; but it’s demoralising. You fantasise about my vices, Lluís; they’re neither as imaginary as you think, nor as solitary. No, solitude isn’t my strong point. I need accomplices, you understand? I get demoralised speaking out loud to myself; I need an accomplice to listen in. It’s like the love that we all know as a crime, but its most unpleasant feature is that we can’t perpetrate love without having an accomplice.”
“You’re being really stupid.”
“No, I’m not. Baudelaire, your beloved Baudelaire, said that first! But didn’t you know that there are people who maintain the universe inflates and deflates like a bellows? That’s right, I said ‘the universe’, why stare at me like that? It inflates, then deflates, and for ever and ever, amen. But why don’t we speak of things that affect us more immediately? I don’t know if you’ve heard that some tins of condensed milk . . . the El Pagés brand to be precise . . . have gone missing.”
“From Supplies? The indictment I have to draw up is all about these missing tins. I’ve deferred it for lack of information. I also find acting the role of prosecutor most annoying.”
He glanced at me in a curious, mocking manner, that short-sighted, spectacle-less stare of his; he grinned and chuckled sarcastically: “What a coincidence! It’s a small world. You should know that the person stealing these tins of El Pagés is yours truly. What a pity you have postponed the indictment! I steal from soldiers on the front line to give to whores in the rearguard. Ever since they assigned me to the Train Corps I go to the rear-guard every so often in a truck. If only you knew what they can give you in exchange for a tin of milk! Some of them have children . . . It’s so sad when a child dies from the lack of a tin of El Pagés milk . . . You see, a mother’s milk is a very sensitive thing, and they’re not rough children, born anyhow. Perhaps you’ll still have time to reverse the postponement and try me. A summary judgement will do: we are troops on a war footing, after all. An execution would break this enervating boredom and the whole brigade would give you a vote of thanks.”