Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  I was in the sacristy in the monastery and the air seemed heavy and dank like stagnant water; I felt absent from the world, as if adrift. The sacristy smells of fine wood, of ancient cedar wood, a dry, rather bitter smell: a smell . . . like hers. She has some grey hair, perhaps four strands; I’ve counted four. I’d got close to her and smelled the cedar scent of her hair; and those four shocking, shameless threads shone like the ones spiders spin in the night that you find in the early morning thanks to drops of dew the sun hasn’t yet evaporated. Fragile, delicate, early morning cobwebs are so brittle, but those four strands . . . She’d turned round to take an item of clothing from the table and I was tempted to kiss her on the neck, under the ear. I didn’t, and still regret it; my lips would have felt her throbbing blood – blood that must be a warm rich red. She’d have turned brusquely and I’d have seen an expression of huge surprise in her eyes – that she would probably have faked – because she must know I’d take the wrong step one day . . . The smell in the sacristy comes, of course, from the large empty cedar-wood cupboard where they must have stored the items and clothes the priests wore. The sacristy looks straight over the main altar, next to the epistle side. In my search for the mysterious certificate I’d examined every inch of that enormous cupboard, and when I turned round, almost fainting from the smell of cedar and incense, I saw the bride and bridegroom, the only two I could see through the narrow sacristy door.

  Is this what she will become one day? Will the rich, warm pomegranate flower, the scent of cedar and incense in her hair be reduced to this stiff, incomprehensible stillness? A kind of robotic action led me out of the sacristy and I found myself face to face with the sly crook that seemed to look into space like someone in on a grotesque secret and pretending. It’s an odd fact that they weren’t accustomed to closing eyes in this monastery; they look at us and don’t see us . . . And the snarling face of that sly crook was there, opposite me, so stiff; I remembered Soleràs, and the things he’d told me that seemed crazy now took on some meaning. Because the mummy stood between my thirst and the forbidden font; not the one I could see here, but mine, the one I will become. And hers . . . A feeling of quiet disdain propelled me towards that cynical face, my mouth filled with saliva . . .

  14 AUGUST

  Picó has just discovered that Rebull is not only a political commissar rather than a Communications officer, but that he’s come from the “flatfooted” brigade to boot. He was their company commissar; now they’ve promoted him to battalion commissar and landed him on us. The party he represents has also been clarified: the Left Federal Nationalist Party of the Ampurdan. However incredible it may seem – and what can we think of as incredible after what we’ve seen and still see? – of the hundreds of parties that exist to sour our lives there is one that actually carries such a name.

  As for the “flatfooted” brigade, I should perhaps tell you about this renowned unit that’s a constant topic of conversation here. It’s the second brigade in the division – ours is the first. They say, and as I wasn’t there I wouldn’t put my hand in the fire, that its commander excused them from involvement in the last round of military operations, “it being the case”, he stated in his communiqué, “that most of the recruits who have joined us are flatfooted despite all the medical checks, and they won’t withstand a long march.” At the present time, this brigade covers the section of the front to our south. As I’ve gradually discovered, a fierce rivalry has existed between them and us from the beginning of the war and it’s mainly to do with political squabbles: they are more hot-headed than we are.

  Ever since we’ve had a political commissar, the commander has been trying to put the fear of death in him by stressing his idea of “restoring order in the monastery”.

  “Our brigade fights for hygiene and culture; it’s not like the ‘flatfooted’ kind,” he says, looking askance at the commissar. “The day will come when we must reinstate the hallowed mummies” – his actual words – “in their niches, with a proper, solemn ceremony: a culture without funerals isn’t worth its salt. We should be discussing right now which funeral march would be most fitting, just as it would be an excellent idea if the same people who disinterred them buried them as a way of absolving themselves in respect of the deceased, because even if they are deceased they still deserve our respect.”

  Needless to say, political commissar Rebull has to act as if he enthusiastically supports the idea. The funeral march has led to endless arguments, and I should tell you we now have a drum and bugle band, hence these frays. We don’t have any accompanying instruments as yet, but we do have drums and bugles. The little detail of the funeral march is the reason why we haven’t yet staged the ceremony. It turns out that, in his heyday in the Foreign Legion, Picó had been trombonist under the flag for a few weeks. Not that he knows his scales, because he doesn’t have a clue; however, he played by ear the “Death of Åse” from Peer Gynt, and that fills him with legitimate pride. He often hums it to us after a meal so we don’t doubt his past musical triumphs. As for the commander, he’s a fanatical Wagnerian and is pushing for Siegfried’s funeral march. It’s been left to Dr Puig to arbitrate: he likes an easy life and washes his hands. He assures us that of the poor lot on offer he prefers Verdi to Wagner: “At least he had more of a sense of humour.” On the days when the band is rehearsing he puts the sickroom under lock and key and closes the shutters so as not to hear. Inside he plays Chopin’s funeral march on the violin.

  16 AUGUST

  As the annual fiestas in Olivel were yesterday, we’d invited the commander and doctor to lunch in our republic. They came at one on the dot, winking at each other. What were they hatching? Picó kept his eye on them throughout lunch and never lifted his foot off the pedal; the great Picó had also invented a device to frighten off the flies: “a practical man”, as Soleràs had told me. It comprises a real table-sized fan that hangs from the ceiling and a frame, made from four sticks of bamboo, which gives it the necessary tautness. The end of the long piece of string that dangles through a small pulley is attached to a pedal. Seated like a patriarch at the head of the table, Picó works the pedal and the fan scatters the clouds of flies. Before he came up with his brilliant invention they dropped into our stew by the fistful.

  General conversation. The doctor tells us he’d been summoned to the castle in Olivo the day before by the brigade’s Health section: “The Health section captain had received a circular from the Army Corps. And it was very alarming too. Just imagine that there is a unit in our division, the ‘flat-footed’ brigade to be precise . . .”

  A sideways glance at the political commissar, a wink in the direction of the commander, a small cough: “Well, doctor, sir,” responds the commissar, “what were you saying about the sadly famous ‘flatfooted’ brigade?”

  “Mictionis caerulea . . . a most rare disease! For the moment, it’s the only known case, but it is one hell of a case! The patient was in no pain, felt wonderfully well; ‘nobody could have anticipated such behaviour’, in the words of one Dostoyevsky. Early one morning, two days ago, when he wakes up and realises his uniform is too tight, he tries to put it on but can’t, he’s swollen up during the night! He can’t do his buttons up; he needs a good extra seven or eight centimetres for the buttons of his fly – Gentlemen, I say ‘fly’ because that is the mot juste – to reach the corresponding holes . . . It isn’t forbidden to talk of flies in this brigade, I presume? As for his urine, well, it comes out blue; it is blue, and keep this in mind, because blue urine is the inevitable symptom. The death agony begins within a few hours and is horrifically painful . . .”

  “What terrible symptoms!” exclaims the commander. “But what else can one expect from the ‘flatfooted’ brigade? I’d always suspected it was plagued. What do you reckon, Rebull? In your status as political commissar, you must surely have swallowed the Complete Works of Hegel.”

  “Hegel went out of fashion some time ago,” the commissar pontificated; and for the moment nothing more was
said on the subject of the lethal Mictionis caerulea because the conversation turned to the influence in Marx’s Capital that can be traced to Hegel, a subtle philosophical matter that, as you can imagine, hardly sparks off our passionate interest.

  Today – naturally – a Rebull in pyjamas appeared at break of day in the battalion’s sickroom, pale, out of sorts and sweating blood.

  “The poor fellow,” Cruells told me, “was a sorry sight. I accompanied him back to his bedroom; the water in his glass, on his bedside table, still bore traces of cerulean, a harmless substance that gives urine a blue colour. And it was obvious someone had unravelled and then re-sewn his trouser fly, and very poorly, that’s for sure . . .”

  17 AUGUST

  One evening I found myself back at the crossroads where I saw her for the first time; it was less than two months and it already seems like an eternity. Two months can plumb the same depths as two thousand years. That evening two months ago feels as distant as the world’s first dawn and the memory of her appearance as deeply submerged as memories of my remote past.

  I stayed there well into the night. A nocturnal bird – perhaps a nightjar – was gliding rather than flying above the ground. It suddenly landed in the middle of the path, as if waiting for me, and when I got nearer it quickly took flight again, silent as a moth. The heat of the day was rapidly fading and the breeze brought a bitter forest-like smell that made me think of her hair. While glimmers of light remained I felt like a bow drawn painfully tight and had a splitting headache; as darkness descended a weight seemed to be lifted from my shoulders, as if the bowstring had slackened.

  After supper I went out to enjoy the cool in the streets. Gallart was standing under the boarding house window with a guitar. Where can he have got that?

  “Melitona, should I sing you a romantic song from my neck of the woods?”

  And he started crooning a profoundly melancholy ditty:

  We want bread and olive oil,

  bread and olive oil we want . . .

  18 AUGUST

  I went to the Albernes mill to see how those good folk were getting on. The mill looks more like a castle than the castle itself; the walls of the dam were built from limestone ashlars that five centuries of sun have gilded – I say “five centuries” because of the date above the entrance. The millers’ house that backs onto the dam, also built of limestone ashlars, is only broken by a mullioned window and an arched doorway. In the front is a large kitchen garden with a fountain half hidden under a thick, tangled vine. Water spurts from a greenish bronze pipe into a red rustic jasper basin, the edges of which have been worn away by the many animal snouts that have drunk there and the many pitchers rested there. I gather that until the Parliament of Cadiz abolished seigneurial rights small farmers within the castle’s jurisdiction were obliged to bring their wheat to be milled here.

  The millers welcomed me with great glee and told me “the laydee” was upstairs, “by the water wheel”. I wasn’t expecting to find her here and didn’t dare go up.

  “The laydee will be upset if you don’t say ’ello . . .”

  They were so keen to do the right thing by the “laydee” and for me to do likewise! Of course, they didn’t know she had forbidden me to go near her and I could hardly explain that now. They pointed to a steep, narrow path that climbed from the orchard to the top behind the pond.

  It is a pretty place and as well kept as a garden: the pond, the “water wheel”, with a reflection of a large weeping willow on this side and a little juniper wood at the back, halfway up the slope. The children were swimming and she was keeping an eye on them, sitting on a rock in the shade of the weeping willow.

  She didn’t notice me because her back was turned to me. She was using the time to mend a garment and was slightly stooped over her sewing. Her two children were screaming hysterically and splashing. Their little bodies covered in pearls of water glinted like copper and the sunbeams filtering through the weeping willow’s leaves wove rainbows on the water they splashed up.

  I drew nearer, treading on the soft grass along the edge of the irrigation channel that bubbled and gurgled along.

  “Good afternoon. I didn’t expect to find you in Albernes.”

  She turned round, astonished.

  “You? Here?”

  Her shadowy eyes seemed to be saying, “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.”

  “Have you brought the certificate?” she whispered when I sat down next to her, visibly making sure the children didn’t hear. The certificate? My mind went blank; what with that night-time forest smell and the lightning flashes from her eyes . . .

  “Why don’t you give me an answer?”

  “What?” I replied like an idiot.

  The certificate? Which certificate? The night-time forest scent she gave off, her eyes blinding me . . .

  “I’ve searched everywhere.” I had to make an effort to concentrate my mind. “I’ve found nothing that looks remotely like a certificate. Believe me, I’m really sorry. Couldn’t you give me more precise indications? You can’t imagine the number of books and papers strewn around in one great mess.”

  Her steely look went from surprise to stupefaction, from stupefaction to sarcasm, then to a mixture of pity and contempt. She responded with a resigned sigh, “I see I can’t rely on you.”

  “But you didn’t give me the faintest idea where I might find this document,” and once again I had that unpleasant feeling of speaking to a taller woman.

  “If you make no effort to understand . . . How can you expect me to be understanding towards you, if you aren’t with me?”

  Her mocking glance had turned into a glint charged by confused promises and blurred complicity. My head went into a spin.

  “I do understand you. I’m beginning to understand you. You’re made of ice, and precisely because you’re made of ice . . .”

  “Don’t go down that path. For the moment I’m only interested in the certificate. The future of my children depends on it. So please leave now; we’ve said all we had to say. You’re a polite, well-bred young man; in that respect I trust you entirely. You won’t betray a poor woman.”

  A poor woman? Anything but! I’m writing in my bedroom – the one that belongs to the grandson of old Olegària, that Antonio López Fernández I’ve never met and probably never will. The setting sun filters one last vinous beam through a crack in the shutter and comes to rest on her letter. A letter written on lined paper, the sort maids in service once used; her writing reveals a hand that’s not accustomed to writing: large, misshapen letters, committed to paper slowly, one by one. But it was never a letter sent by a poor woman! The spelling mistakes on my table silently exhale the cool clean scent of freshly mown grass.

  IV

  Eppur si muove.

  19 AUGUST

  Our eyes sometimes have quite inexplicable lapses. For example, how can I have possibly walked past the cell with the bees so often and not noticed the words inscribed in charcoal on the wall? They’re even in huge letters: Eppur si muove.

  Eppur si muove. Did the anarchists write that to indicate that they were avenging the memory of Galileo? I doubt the anarchists on the Olivel de la Virgen’s committee had ever heard of Galileo or had a clue about astronomical matters. So then, who was amusing himself embellishing the wall with this erudite quotation? I’m at a loss.

  The most extraordinary side to this is that there was a volume beneath the inscription I’d never seen before either – and yet it was very visible, by itself, away from the heaps of books, its studded wooden covers filled with parchment. On the spine, handwritten in Gothic script, it reads: Book of the Deceased. There are entries for the deaths of friars from 1605 to the very eve of the cataclysm: indeed it seems there was even a death by natural causes on 17 July, 1936. Oh happy days in a past when friars died of natural causes!

  How could I not have noticed such a large tome?

  The pages are blank after that last entry – about halfway through the volume – a
nd I’d never have thought to look further if there hadn’t been a strip of red card sticking out near the back. I opened the volume there and found a different frontispiece, “Booke of Holies Matrimonies in which will be wrytten those contracted by the devoute in the church in the monasterie of Our Lady of Mercie of Olibel with the permission of the Ordinarie and seal of the reverend priests of the parish. Anno Domini 1613.”

  My pulse beat like a hammer on an anvil. I suddenly realised the following: The Virgin of Olivel – as my landlady in Castel de Olivo had told me – is much revered in the district and is the patron of happy marriages; it is, in miniature, our Montserrat.* From devotion rather than pious belief some couples sought permission to marry there rather than in the parish of the bride, as laid down by canonical law. The friars kept a register of these marriages that were, in fact, few: fifty-seven from the first they had noted in the year 1613.

  20 AUGUST

  I am invited to dine at the “republic of the baby’s bottle”. Afterwards, when the rest were drinking their coffee, the commander took me off to his bedroom. “Listen, Lluís,” he put his finger on his lips, signalling he was about to reveal a deep secret: his binges usually start like this. “I must tell you about some of the mysteries in my life, terrible mysteries! If the ‘flat-footed’ brigade . . .”

  He staggered over to the door, closed it cautiously and then looked under his bed and each chair in case a spy from the rival brigade was hiding there; finally, reassured on that front, he stretched out on his mattress. All that without letting go of a barn owl he’d “fished”, as he put it, the previous night from its nest in an olive grove.

  “You know it’s an owl of my vintage, but it catches incredibly huge numbers of flies. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it. This lot,” he gestured vaguely towards the dining room, “are a bunch of drunks; they go from one drunken binge to another like butterflies flitting from one flower to another. In a moment you’ll hear them spitting their coffee out. Don’t tell anyone,” and he put his finger back on his lips, “but I filled the sugar bowl with salt.”