by Joan Sales
She looked at me knowingly, darkly, with more than a hint of mischief. “Olivela . . .” I drew nearer to her, could see her four grey hairs, the fragile threads of a cobweb. “I’d like there to be not just one secret between us, but every possible secret, life and death secrets . . .”
The hint of mischief disappeared and gave way to a different, lucid gaze I’d never seen before, as if she were penetrating deep into my soul. I kept moving closer, could hear her breath, but that soon passed and her gaze assumed its usual slant. “No . . .” said her distant voice. “That would be too lovely. There are things that would be so good if they weren’t so bad . . .”
“We could be happy just letting ourselves be swept along by the tide . . . a moment like that can transfigure a lifetime!” I didn’t know what I was saying. “Why waste time on thoughts that only kill off the only thing that matters? We’re linked to each other, let’s be damned together. This lunacy alone makes it worthwhile!”
“Please,” she really seemed scared and to be asking for mercy, “calm down. Can’t you see you’re taking advantage of my situation? Can’t you see it’s an appalling temptation . . . ? Nobody has ever loved me and now you speak to me as nobody ever has; now, when I thought I was an old failure, on the shelf for ever . . . when I wasn’t expecting anything else from this world!”
“We have met, thanks to this blessed war,” and I didn’t know what I was doing but she stopped me. She made another of her disconcerting shifts and said, in the most matter-of-fact tone: “Come back the day after tomorrow and we’ll talk about this.” She shook my hands as if we’d been having a banal exchange about the weather or business: only a damp, grateful gleam deep in her eyes gave a different meaning to her gesture and words.
She acts innately like une grande dame: she knows how to assert her authority effortlessly, comme allant de soi. It’s in her blood. Santiaga’s hypothesis . . . In the end, after the stupid bathtub incident, wouldn’t what Santiaga suspects be an infinitely better explanation?
24 AUGUST
There are repeated rumours of large-scale manoeuvres; the battalion will leave Olivel, probably for good. From my bedroom I can hear the singsong voice of Captain Gallart booming out in the village square; the Publicist is accompanying him on that cracked guitar. It is a monotonous, mournful, enervating song, grimly cloying, like thick, sweet liquor, and underlined by the South American accent that Gallart thinks fitting:
I lurved a girl in Olivel
she didn’t lurve me at all.
Referring to Melitona, naturally.
25 AUGUST
Our marching orders arrived early this morning. Destination unknown; we’ll find out when we get there.
I went up to the castle. She was sitting in a low chair by the foot of the window, making lace.
“We’re leaving the day after tomorrow.”
“You poor things, off into the wilderness yet again . . .” She smiled and handed me a letter. “Here’s your letter. Please burn it. I know you’d be all anxious in the future, wondering whether I kept it.”
I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what she was talking about. A letter? A letter from me? What letter? I suddenly remembered. And I knew what she meant.
I knew what the gesture of giving it back was all about: “But . . . do you realise what it means if we leave? Do you realise we may never see each other again?”
“I wish you good luck.”
“Ever again . . . do you know what ‘ever again’ means?”
“Shush, I beg you . . .”
“For you I have . . .”
“Shush or lower your voice, the children are here, they’re still asleep.”
“I could be in prison . . . and I have a son! Or haven’t you grasped the seriousness of what you made me do?”
“I’m only too clear. Please calm down. I’m very grateful and will be as long as I live.”
“What do I care about your gratitude?”
My hands were shaking. I must have looked absurd. If only I could find a sore spot, as I did the other day, and snap her out of her annoying complacency . . . I watched a chasm open up between a frantically passionate man and an ice-cold woman that invites one to act absurdly. I could see the abyss and took a step forward. I knelt by her side.
“Calm down. You’re really agitated. You don’t know what you’re doing. If my children were to walk in now . . .”
I kissed her hands like a fool: “I do know what I’m doing. We are free; you are a widow . . .”
“But you aren’t.”
“I’m not married, as I told you in my letter.”
“You’re hallucinating. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’ll regret this when you get over all the excitement. Would you leave your wife to marry someone . . . like me?”
She gripped her lace-making cushion between her knees. It shook under the impact of her loud laughter. How could she laugh like that? I felt like the most wretched man on earth.
“Whatever you say, you love your wife; all men love their wives, never mind the nonsense they dream up. Even Enric loved me, in his way; he was terribly bored, but he couldn’t have lived without me.”
“Don’t compare me to him. We have nothing in common!”
“Meaning what? Why don’t you marry Trini? Why don’t you do right by your son? You men are all the same! It’s us women who aren’t at all alike.”
“So which sort are you? A woman who coldly calculates everything, who’s never swayed by feeling!”
“Get up for heaven’s sake. The children will wake any moment now! You’d be horrified if you could see yourself in a mirror! You look so stupid.”
“And why shouldn’t we look stupid once in a while?”
“If you don’t get up, I will. It’s disgusting to see such a well-bred young man like you behaving so brainlessly.”
It’s easy to fall on your knees before a woman who has gone to your head, the difficult bit is getting back up on your feet.
“Now sit and listen.” I obeyed like a puppet. “Put yourself in my shoes. How can you expect me to ruin everything I’ve set up just to please you? The best for me now would be if people stopped talking about me, if they left me in peace in my lair and forgot all about me. You did me a great favour. Don’t destroy all your good work for a passing infatuation. Can’t you understand? Don’t you remember how I told you I was old enough to be your mother? If you were a widower and sixty, with six or seven children from his first marriage still on his hands, I might think you meant it and weren’t raving. Leave your wife for me! Admit that such foolishness had never occurred to you till now and that when you recall this incident in the future you’ll simply be embarrassed by what you said.”
“You’re a woman with a heart of ice. You guessed the impact you were having on me from the start and knew you could profit from it. You’re incapable of love!”
“I love my children. Who do you want me to love? Every officer in the army of Catalonia who happens to pass through Olivel?”
“Who’s thinking about any army or Catalonia? Is that all I am to you, just another officer passing through?”
“No. You are no old run-of-the-mill officer,” and her expression was full of gratitude once again; a tear glinted in her eye but came to nothing. “I realised that from the start, Lluís. But you find it so hard to understand! Believe me, apart from my children, I’ve never loved anyone as much as I’ve loved you.”
“You’re lying.”
“Believe me, Lluís. Why won’t you believe me? Why won’t you trust me? Why do you find it so hard to understand? An intelligent, well-bred young man like you . . . It’s so simple! You’ll find this incredible but I am really happy in this castle.”
“You are —”
“Shush and listen. I am happy. You could only bring me more misery. I’ve had enough of that, and I don’t feel like any more! I don’t like feeling miserable and I say that because some people seem to enjoy it. I’m too aware of the ridiculous si
de of misery. And you shouldn’t deceive yourself: you don’t like tragedies either, you too are afraid of looking silly. Yes, you are.”
“How can you say you are happy?”
“Why can’t I? I love this castle. You said I’m incapable of love. What would you think if I told you I was deeply in love with this castle? This big country house smell,” her expression became as serene and distant as ever, “the smell of well-being, of wardrobes full of linen,” her eyes looked beyond the window, lost in the distance, as if she were dreaming aloud, “the smell of a fine house, of large rooms with high ceilings, of fine wood and linen . . . Naturally, you’re not familiar with the reek of what’s rancid and mouldy; maybe for a few days or hours, when you were in transit, but not for a whole lifetime! There’s nothing like a large, antique sweet-smelling walnut wardrobe full of linen that is clean, dry, starched, folded . . . a smell of lavender and warm bread . . . Winter in this country is so long . . . The north wind blasts and howls eternally, the water freezes in hand basins in bedrooms. If you don’t have a cellar, a pantry, a barn, firewood piled high outside the castle entrance and large wardrobes full of white bedding for the winter . . . Because it’s not like Barcelona, here we don’t wash clothes every three or four days or every week. As we do our washing in the river, we can’t wash clothes in the winter. Here we do two washes in the whole year, at the beginning of spring and autumn. We load it onto one or two carts and take it to the river where village women are paid to wash the lot. They do nothing else for one or two weeks. You must think we have lots of clean clothes in a self-respecting house to do things this way! Well, we change ours every two or three days and pile the dirty clothes in an attic until the day for the big wash comes. I should tell you that we use ash from the hearth to make bleach, old-fashioned style. You can’t imagine what it’s like when the north wind starts to howl, believe me, it howls like a dying animal and makes your heart shrivel . . .”
“But in Barcelona . . .”
“I’d feel buried alive in a flat in Barcelona, as if I were back in my father’s house. The time spent in Barcelona seemed so long from the very moment the lady of the castle told me to pack cases! I was frantic to come back to the castle. This castle . . . which I love much more than if I’d been born here; I love it as if I’d died here! I would feel so lonely without it to keep me company . . . Some feelings are so strange, you can’t explain them because the words don’t exist. This castle’s rooms are so vast, its lands so extensive. I love nothing so much as to walk and wander across these expanses, particularly at twilight; I often take the children with me. That evening when we first saw each other, that you remind me of so often, I’d just walked the length of the Coma Fonda – don’t be surprised by its name, a lot of land and areas within the district boundaries have Catalan names. And the Coma Fonda is but one of the farms that belong to the castle . . . I often take my children, but I prefer to go by myself, as I did before . . . long before . . . You need to experience the north wind howling through this village from early December to early April to understand these peculiar feelings of mine. Some feelings are so peculiar . . . as if one were remembering things from before one was born . . .”
What a great actor she could have been!, I thought; what a great actress! From the very first she’s been performing a role for me, and so naturally! So easily she doesn’t notice she’s doing it! And her voice is such a help! What a contralto! The Liceu would collapse under the applause.
“It’s been a pleasure to talk to you about these peculiar things,” she continued. “That’s why I shall always be grateful to you and love you, because you’re the only person with whom that’s been possible. How can I ever think you are just like all the others? When I can speak to you about that and you coax from me things that are so hard to express . . . There are stretches of land within the boundaries of Olivel that make me feel as if I’d lived many happy, solitary hours there, but when? I first came to Olivel when I was eight years old; they hired the girls in Castel for the grape harvest, to pick olives and harvest saffron. When the day’s work was done I’d leave the gang and go for a stroll by myself across the castle lands. At dusk, a scent rises from the earth like the music the lady used to play, a scent from another world, and I felt I’d known that twilight scent for a long time, but how long? How long, for heaven’s sake? Remember . . . remember what? What does it mean to remember? I have so little interest in the memories of my life, the life of a day labourer, of a maid in service, of a friendly village that once daubed her doors with . . . But there are other memories, another past . . . How could you expect me to leave this castle? They’ve told me so many stories about the place; they’ve told me it was so ancient . . . I was really drawn to it when I came from Castel with the gang of day labourers and saw it in the distance – and I was always the first to see it on the horizon, silhouetted against the sky. If only you understood . . . I could have found love, whatever you think; when I talk to you like this, I realise I could have found love, Lluís, and passionate love at that. Believe me, Lluís, I could; I could have loved Enric, but he hated this castle, he hated these lands. He wasn’t happy here; when he was here, he only thought about Barcelona. After Donya Gaietana died, he even thought of selling up: ‘This land isn’t profitable: I could reinvest the capital in something productive.’ Enric wasn’t the type to strive to build a business; he only killed time in Barcelona. He’d go for a stroll in the port to see the steamers that had docked, or go to the Llotja and listen to the wholesalers raising or lowering the price of corn or barley, or wander off to plaça Reial to listen to the cheapjacks. He spent hours in the Liceu café where he met a man from Reus, an expert in manufacturing socks, who needed a partner with capital. If in the end he didn’t sell up in order to finance a sock factory, it was because the poor fellow lacked energy and commitment . . . He was also shy. Just imagine how he spent his time in Olivel in the cellar, by himself in the dark, sitting hour after hour in the gloom, doing nothing. He hated the castle and its lands, yet I’d have loved him, yes, I would; believe me, I’d have loved him if he’d acted like the heir to these lands, the lord of the castle and master of the village. I’d even have understood if he’d not wanted to marry me; I’d have forgiven him that. The carlà of Olivel . . . But he thought that was a joke: ‘Nobody in Barcelona knows what a carlà is. There’s no point putting it on your visiting card. If you try to explain what it is, you look even more absurd. On the other hand, a manufacturer . . .’ He also said that castles and carlans were past history. So why didn’t he marry me? What was stopping him? If he wasn’t the carlà . . . and he acted as if he wasn’t! He didn’t do anything the carlans who preceded him did. As soon as Donya Gaietana was buried he sent the poor people who lived in the castle off to a workhouse in Saragossa. Of course, you don’t know about this: previously, the poor in the boundaries of Olivel didn’t have to go to the hospice because the castle took them in, the carlans looked after them. The ‘soup kitchen’ still exists where they ate lunch and supper; the fire has not been lit there once since Donya Gaietana died. He even got rid of the ‘village barrel’ – that was a big cask in the entrance, under the staircase arch, it was always full of wine anyone could come in and drink. In those days the castle gates were never closed night or day. Naturally, all the villagers blame me for these changes. After all, there are so few poor in a village like Olivel, where everyone has their house and strip of land! The odd cripple or childless widow . . . It cost so little to look after them! Why send them to the hospice far from everything that was their life? ‘All that belongs to the past,’ he’d say; but if all that was past history, what was stopping him from marrying me?”
I saw hatred for the first time in her eyes, a fire that diminished all other feelings, just as red makes all other colours turn pale.
“The castle . . . I could tell you so many strange stories about the place! But Enric acted as if he’d forgotten everything about it. One evening, Enriquet, who must have been four or five, c
ame down from the attic with a baby owl. ‘Put it back in its hole,’ I told him. ‘If you do, you’ll find a coin.’ I knew nothing about the coin, not even where the owl’s nest was. It was a gold unça: the first I’d ever seen. I could tell you such strange stories . . . There was a face with a wig. One night . . . Why should I tell you? What would it mean to you? I love this castle; it’s a source of great joy for me to think that my children were born and bred here. What do I care what it cost me to get here? I’d like to know how old these unças are? Are they from the grandparents’ time? Or are they older than that? The great-great grandparents? It’s all so very old! So very ancient! One can’t keep track and it keeps you company. It keeps you company to think the great-great grandparents lived here, and that the grandchildren of the grandchildren will still live here. We are so puny. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, that’s real might. Everything doesn’t end with death! My God, don’t let death be the end, or we’d be so petty. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren: they’re born here and grow up here. The castle will always be full of memories for them. After I put them to bed, I go for a prowl round the castle every night. It’s not because I’m afraid of thieves because there aren’t any around here. I do that because I like to. Everything keeps me company: the mare kicking in the stable, the sow grunting, a mouse coming and going in the attic, even a woodworm gnawing in a beam. I like to see geckos on the wall, and I’m pleased to know there’s an owls’ nest in a hole in the attic and that the eaves are full of swifts and martins’ nests . . . So much good company, so much life! A big house like this is like a frigate of stone, people and animals all on board, all sailing together in this huge ship that seems still but is moving across the ocean of time. If you only knew how depressed I was by the flat in Barcelona: it was so tiny, so dead and empty, no swallows’ nests, no owls’ nests, no cellars and no attics. Somebody in Barcelona once asked me if I wasn’t afraid of ghosts at night in such a rambling, solitary mansion. Ghosts? Believe me, if I found one on my night-time jaunt round the house, I’d welcome him as a brother. When I came to live here after the old carlana died, I found a cradle in one of the attics that from its shape looked like a coffin, though the head was too high. They still use this style of cradle in poor houses in the area: they are made of pine, though the head isn’t higher than the sides. That one was made from very beautiful shiny wood and smelled wonderful; the head bore the family coat of arms, an olive tree beneath a cross. Enric told me it was his grandfather’s cradle. I brought it down for Enriquet and sent the modern effort with metal bars up to the attic. I liked the other one because generations of children in the family had slept in it, it was like the cradles the poor use today except for its scent and coat of arms. I also liked its coffin shape . . . Oh to be born in this castle, to die in this castle, to sink your roots deep in this land like an olive tree! I should like Enriquet to belong to this land and never think of selling the castle. I wouldn’t like him to marry anybody but a woman of his rank, from a house with a coat of arms above the door. There is one in Castel that belongs to the baroness who has a daughter his age. Now they are far away, abroad. The baroness is a widow; recently the family has had lots of worries, has had to mortgage farms, but it is such fine stock! As ancient as ours . . . If they didn’t have almost everything mortgaged, I might not have thought of this possibility; I wouldn’t have dared. In no way do I want my Enriquet to marry someone ordinary! He comes from this family, from this castle, from this land . . .”