by Joan Sales
“This is why you wanted the castle, the lands . . . For this and nothing else. You —”
“If I were as you imagine me, I’d not be wishing you good luck.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know my secret. You will all leave the day after tomorrow, many will never return again, to Olivel or anywhere. You could be one of them. In your case, I could feel that a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I can assure you it’s not like that. I swear to God I want you to be lucky. Believe me, love your wife and marry her as soon as you can. Don’t you realise how difficult it is for a single mother? And then you say you’ve nothing in common with Enric!”
“Don’t keep on. The two situations are quite dissimilar. If Trini and I haven’t married, it has to do with our ideas.”
“Say what you like; everything boils down to ideas, if that’s what you mean. Believe me, the end result is the same. I’m fond of you and prefer not to know why you might do something so stupid. I’d feel remorse for the rest of my life! Marry Trini and forget these crazy things that will lead to nothing useful.”
Nothing useful! Her cold words were what hurt most, but there she was, opposite me, her lace-making cushion between her knees; indifferent, magnificent and monstrous like life itself. I remembered a scene I’d witnessed not long ago in a field of stubble on the village outskirts. I was stretched out under an olive tree, trying to nap in the open air in that heat; a praying mantis was advancing through the truncated ears of wheat. It was the giant kind that usually appears after the dog days of summer, an extremely elegant greenish grey, and finger length. Like a stylised body, it gracefully swayed its small head on top of a short, slender thorax that contrasted with its huge abdomen. It advanced slightly, then stooped and looked back, as if something had caught its attention: another, smaller praying mantis, drawing closer with trepidation. I grasped what it was about: the former was the female, the latter the male, and I remembered reading something about that years ago. The male spread its wings with a kind of shudder and mounted her between his legs. I watched the scene with that mixture of curiosity and horror the mystery of life’s renewal provokes. The business went on and on, a good hour had passed and the pigmy was still on the giant. It shuddered almost imperceptibly, as if in ecstasy. I had lit my pipe and was eager, watch in hand, to time how long that ceremony lasted when a Soleràs boutade came to mind: “Love is sublime for the doer and obscene for the observer.” The half hours and quarters of an hour went by. The shudders and shaking continued. I tired of looking at them and went for a walk. I returned to my observatory two hours later: the couple was still at it. The male still seemed to be in ecstasy on top of her, but he’d lost his head. She’d turned her graceful little head round and was gradually devouring him and it was impossible to say whether those last shudders were caused by pleasure, terror, or both things at once.
She suddenly focused her eyes on me; they glinted with that damp, flickering light, a moonbeam to transfigure the depths of an underwater landscape.
“You’re wrong if you think I am horribly cold and ungrateful,” she remarked, as if reading my thoughts. “I don’t want to judge you as you judge me, superficially and reluctant to understand, for I’d form a very poor opinion of you. You must have done all this, not for my children – or for me, if you like, more generously – but with the single aim of getting me to . . . How cheap that would be, for heaven’s sake! Can’t you see that? I prefer to think it was an attack of lunacy, that you don’t know what you’re saying and never wrote me that letter, or ever said what you did. I prefer to think you wanted to help me, to give my children a name and status. I’d like to repay you, don’t you see that? I’m not ungrateful, believe me. You have a son. If I could do anything for him as you did for mine . . .”
“I repeat: the situations are different. I’m annoyed you keep insisting. I’ve recognised him. I’ve made a will in his favour. It’s all by the book and planned. Don’t compare . . . it’s depressing,” and out of the corner of my eye I looked at the sly grocer on the wall.
“Life takes such funny turns! Who knows if one day . . . Although you may never need me, don’t ever hesitate for a second. I’m in your debt; I’ll repay you in the same coin, whenever it’s appropriate.”
The light dampened and flickered more intensely: for a moment I thought it coalesced into a tear. Her usual cold, steely, distant look suddenly reappeared.
*The Black Virgin kept in the monastery in the mountains of Montserrat and a symbol of Catalan nationalism.
V
. . . la griffe effroyable de Dieu
SIERRA CALVA, 28 AUGUST
Back to a life of wandering, marching by night and hiding by day. I hear my captain’s deep, liquor-fired voice from his hovel:
I lurved a girl in Olivel
she didn’t lurve me at all.
Olivel de la Virgen is over and done. It’s one more village sinking into a past of fantasy. Where are the roses the girls put in our lapels the day we arrived? Those dark red roses – “the colour of the cape of the Ecce homo . . .” They all came in their Sunday best with the mayor and the whole council to implore us not to leave; they were afraid that if we went the anarchists would come back. The commander sweated blood to get them to understand that whether we stayed or left didn’t depend on us.
“Aren’t you happy in Olivel?” they kept asking.
And old Olegària? Tears the size of chickpeas rolled down from her bloodshot, bleary little eyes. Gallart was there. When the last threshing floors had vanished from sight, he confessed to me: “The saliva stuck in my throat.”
We take up positions on the crest of mountains as bare as the palm of a hand. The steppes extend before us. I can see the zigzag lines of enemy trenches through my binoculars. La Pobla de Ladron lies behind them.
The main engagement has started fourteen kilometres to our east. Two divisions attack the town of Xilte, quite unknown earlier but now key because it represents an advanced enemy mountain stronghold. La Pobla de Ladron is right on the col and that’s why it’s so vital we take it. Our division advances in a pincer formation: our brigade on the left, and the “flat feet” on the right.
Dawn breaks. Quite unannounced, a line of small cloudlets silently rises from the ground beyond the enemy trench, between it and the outlying houses of La Pobla. I focus my binoculars. Another equally silent and unexpected line springs up right at that moment, but beyond the trench, between it and the barbed wire. The blasts from the first explosions reach me now. They took fifteen seconds. About five kilometres, I calculate. It’s less in fact: I can’t have noted the two reference points on my stopwatch at all exactly. To hell with precision, I’m no artillery officer. A third salvo sends up a string of white mushrooms from the same trench, replicating its zigzags. “A lovely sight,” Picó would say. He professes unbounded admiration for gunners and their trigonometry. Ever since our batteries scored a direct hit, they continue bombing with such continuous fire that the rounds run into each other. I didn’t know that our attack on La Pobla de Ladron was to start today; it is the most concentrated burst of artillery fire I’ve seen from our side since this war began. If they can sustain this pace for an hour, that is, if the guns are up to it, not a soul will be left alive.
The first ray of sunlight slants across the trench and gives me an unusually precise view through my binoculars.
The enemy abandons its trench. They are civil guards: the sun glints on their three-cornered patent leather helmets. Redoubtable civil guards in those three-cornered helmets! But what are they doing? They leave the trench where the grenades keep exploding. They leave their lair but don’t flee to La Pobla, quite the reverse. They go over the top and lie between the parapet and the barbed wire. Dead still in front of the trench, evenly spaced out, you’d think they were crocodiles drowsing along a river bank. The batteries should be warned, they are wasting ammunition on futile salvos: they are bombing an empty trench. They should shorten their aim; a few mo
re metres this way and they’d blow them to smithereens. Damned three-cornered hats! I couldn’t phone the observation point and it’s too late now. Our infantry is already dipping towards the wire and the batteries had to hold their fire. The guards return to the trench all at once. I can now hear their insect, metallic voice, the rat-a-tat of their machine guns. Our men fall among the wire.
I don’t want to watch. I go back to the hovel.
I write by the fireside. The mornings are cold in these desolate heights. I’m accompanied by the dull slurp of the campaign soup that will be our breakfast. The officers’ republics are no more; we all eat the same from the brigadier to the most recent recruit. Hallowed equality endowed by army soup!
SIERRA CALVA, 31 AUGUST
The 4th Company is being held in reserve along these heights while the others attack La Pobla de Ladron. Yesterday the enemy finally abandoned the trenches ravaged by shells and barricaded themselves in houses in the village.
Artillery and air power must have destroyed them. Now I can only see master walls through my binoculars; the empty interiors are visible through the shapeless holes that once were windows. There’s nothing inside and they remind me of the mummies in Olivel.
Night is falling. Until a moment ago you could hear the woodpecker tapping in the pine grove, followed by complete quiet. The occasional crackle of irregular mortar fire and crickets.
Apparently the “flatfooted” brigade has just taken the last bastions of La Pobla de Ladron, those the enemy has abandoned. All in all, the “flat feet” have performed magnificently. But don’t go telling our men that.
SIERRA CALVA, 1 SEPTEMBER
We’re still being held in reserve. The other companies are in combat past La Pobla, to the northeast; the enemy has begun a ferocious counterattack. Softened by distance, the concert of mortar blasts and machine-gun fire sounds like a stew bubbling on a slow fire.
Every night we three lieutenants repair to the captain’s hovel, located in the centre of our position that’s three kilometres long. We tell stories; Gallart’s are inexhaustible. His forte is stories of unrequited love, including the tale of Melitona; if we are to believe him, he has lived a lifetime as a misunderstood lover, a tragic case of misfortune that only a great poet of the Romantic era could have rivalled, though, so he says, the most dramatic disappointments he’d experienced so far pale in comparison with what he suffered at the hands of Melitona: “She used to knock me silly, that lass wields a hell of punch; makes you see stars!” His duel with Commissar Rebull is another bewildering epic, even if they never came to blows. If only one could say the same of all epics!
These moonless nights on a bare mountain are wonderful. Through the dry desert air the stars seem like the brightest of eyes giving us the wisest of looks. I know my constellations and spend hours each night tracking the paths the planets take. Cruells taught me the little I know; at first I was at a complete loss. When I walk back to my hovel all alone, just before dawn breaks, that strange peace fills me with wonder. Men stopped killing themselves some time ago: one can only hear the distant whisper of the night-time breeze and the hoots of mountain owls that seem to mock our sad victories.
SIERRA CALVA, 2 SEPTEMBER
I, who never dream, have had a dream.
It was like an ancient ruined temple on a rocky crag. Someone was walking through the shadowy darkness inside and I could hear the sea swell with the even panting of a sleeping animal. The man walking towards me wore a kind of soutane, his eyes were open but could see nothing. He was looking through a portable telescope but he was sleepwalking. There was a mass of suitcases and huge trunks, double basses, pianos and mummies. The somnambulist with the telescope kept moving across all that, never stumbling though all was invisible to him; Soleràs and other familiar faces were among the mummies; some I now don’t recognise that in my dream seemed strangely familiar. These mummies were as silent as the cases and the trunks; that silence, like the silence of the big suitcases, was disturbing because who knows what they hid? They watched me walk past and didn’t look at me or budge though they were making a supreme effort to tell me something: they all wanted to say the same thing. They couldn’t; they couldn’t speak. The high altar gleamed in the background. The sleepwalker went over and looked at the presiding image through his telescope. It was a Virgin, perhaps a Virgin of Sorrows? Lots of things were stuck into her, but they were bayonets, not daggers. Dressed in stiff silk, she was like one more mummy, so still and so yellow, and the somnambulist walked over to her but never got that far. His soutane kept growing and he was dragging a huge black tail behind him. I felt confused and terrified and wanted to pray, but my voice couldn’t get through my gullet: I was another mummy without a voice, lost among the others, among the suitcases and the trunks. My voice couldn’t be heard, as if a hand were strangling me, and the idol’s eyes shone in the dark like a cat’s. The sides of the temple now sank into the ground. It was like a cavern or a tunnel full of cobwebs and bats that hung downwards in thick bunches. Then the somnambulist made a strange gesture, as if to strike someone with the telescope – or was it an iron bar and no longer a telescope? – someone moving in the darkness – a terrible, hard blow to the skull, someone moving and moaning in the shadows . . .
I woke up mid-dream with a start. In that haze I possessed the lucidity they say belongs to the dying. You float between reality and the beyond and see so clearly. Now I understand nothing in my dream. I only remember it was fascinating, nasty, feverish and sinister – and yet seemed so full of meaning.
SIERRA CALVA, 3 SEPTEMBER
As night fell I was patrolling the three kilometres of bare mountain occupied by the 4th Company: guard duty. I glimpsed a man in the half dark on one of the parapets, tall and lean with his back to me. His clothes, so different to ours, caught the eye: velvet trousers, the shiniest high leather boots with silvery spurs. He was in shirt sleeves, but his shirt was sky blue, not khaki. A sky-blue shirt here? I have seen the most peculiar garb in this long year at war, but a sky-blue shirt beats the lot.
Leaning over the parapet, as if it were a balcony, the stranger was looking at the plain that spreads outwards from the skirts of the Sierra Calva, now flooded by shadows. He seemed lost in his dreams. The splash-splash stew sound of guns was still audible in the distance, hand grenades and machine guns interrupted now and then by the more bass note of a mortar; all with that dying lilt of battles late in the evening, as if overcome by sleep.
He turned round when I shouted “Who goes there?” It was Soleràs. I took him to my hovel for a cognac. I was cold and astonished to come across him in these peaks. And we chatted until just before dawn. We chatted the whole night.
He told me so many things . . . He says he is tired of the Train Corps, of Supplies and chickpeas: “If you only knew the fantastic amounts of chick-peas the idiots in this brigade get through . . .” He’d asked the division to send him to any of the artillery companies, “even the flatfooted brigade”.
“As long as it’s not yours. I never want to be under your orders! Though in the end so what? That might be a brilliant idea: in the ranks under your command!”
“And what brings you to Sierra Calva?”
“I came for the views. You get a glorious view of the battle from here: the enemy positions and ours, the troop movements, the flight paths of the .85 mortars – just like an eighteenth-century engraving: the wretches taking part see nothing. They can’t see the wood for the trees and at the same time have far too many other things on their minds.”
“And how come your extraordinary outfit?”
“Bah, one of my bright ideas. I often go to the rear with the Supplies lorry, as I think you know, and with a flashy uniform and a few tales of battle they take you for a hero. I keep quiet about the chickpeas – and why not? Conversely, with a few tins of El Pagès milk . . .”
“You’re crazy.”
Silence. We were stretched out at the back of the hovel, next to the fire; I had lit an oil l
amp on a hook. In the darkness the dim flickering glow illumined the twisted trunks that supported the ceiling of branches and packed earth. Field mice ran to and fro across the ceiling during the night, attracted by the crumbs and other leftovers from our meals. The cold wind blew through the cracks. A mouse sent the occasional cloud of dust over us; the lamp wick crackled.