by Joan Sales
“Crazy . . . and why not?” he retorted, wiping the cognac from his lips.
“Women always think I’m a man who is ‘different from the rest’. And they tell me their secrets; they think I’m pure,” and he laughed – his unpleasant hen’s cackle – staring me in the eye. “And to think that Saint Philomena appears in person to my aunt and she doesn’t bat an eyelid . . .”
“You’re crazier then ever, Juli. What’s the point of all this idiocy?”
“You’re so naïve. You admire me, you have no choice, and I can tell you quite frankly that I couldn’t care less about your admiration. You and I shouldn’t see each other again. Why do you find that so difficult to grasp, Lluís?”
“This time you came to see me.”
“Yes, true enough. This time I took the initiative. There must be one almighty motive, believe me, or I wouldn’t be here. Let’s think what it might be. Why did I come? It’s so difficult to work out what the motive is when it’s so powerful. Sorry to disappoint you, but we have no idea what the powerful motives driving us are all about. Maybe I’ve come precisely because I shouldn’t have; precisely because we shouldn’t meet up. According to crime novels – that’s all I’ve been reading for some time as I know The Horns of Roland off by heart – criminals will return to the scene of the crime; they find it hard to keep away from the victim’s corpse. Maybe you’re a corpse, maybe I am . . .”
“I’m a corpse? You know I won’t tolerate people being rude.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’ve not come to ask you to tolerate anything at all; on the contrary, I’d ask you not to. A barrier’s been erected between us, Lluís, can’t you see? A barrier. You aren’t a corpse, nothing like, but I can talk to you about corpses; you’re one of the few people I can talk frankly to. The macabre is banned from conversation, as are obscenities. The beginning and the end: totally banned from conversation! But I can talk to you about them as naturally as I might speak about the weather; you’re one of the few people who will listen, so why deny it? Understand? But to get back to what I was saying. What do you think of women who sell themselves, or, rather, rent themselves out? All told, for a very modest price; some are so modest! Some would follow you to the ends of the earth for a tin of El Pagès milk! But they are so terribly passive . . . it’s like lying with a mummy, don’t you think? I sometimes wake up from a deep sleep and think with a jolt: I’m clasping a mummy for eternity . . . We can deny the existence of heaven, even laugh about it as if we were at a Sunday theatre show performed by amateur Daughters of Maria. As for hell, nobody is going to doubt that it exists. It follows us everywhere, like shit that’s stuck to our shoes.”
“Theology isn’t my strong point,” I replied, “but I imagine that if there is another life, justice there must be severe. If we all acted like you, if we poked our worst sores . . . with your cynical bad taste, don’t you think we’d all end up as neurotic as you? Stop dwelling on the idea that you are more perverse than anyone else, can’t you see the crazy pride inspiring you to think that? We all come from mud, Juli; we’re all stuck in a sea of mud up to our necks. I’ve done things that . . . I’m sure you’ve never sunk so low! We just have to make an effort to stop the mud reaching eye level. At least let’s keep our eyes out of the mud! Our eyes at least! I must be able to see the stars . . .”
“You are so very inspired today,” he broke in sarcastically, with that operatic bass of his. He took another swig from the flask. “But what do you know about the stars? Does Cruells get you to look at them through his telescope? Bah, so stupid . . . Cruells is a mere sleepwalker and if he goes on wasting his time on the stars he’ll never make it to bishop. On the other hand, what would the stars give to be like us? Back to what I was saying. Women never get you wrong: they know at a glance you are a man like any other. But I . . . ‘I can talk to you like a brother . . . ’ They’re so silly! Since when could one ever speak to one’s brother?”
The murmur from the distant battle ebbed; a bare night, no moon, nothing. He kept sipping his cognac, staring short-sightedly at the tin cup from time to time, without his glasses, like a rare species of animal.
“And they like confiding! When they start, they go on and on, nobody understands the poor things! They feel an imperious need to be understood . . . They drown you in such dross, if you let them!”
I listened silently to his rambling monologue, trying to guess where it would lead.
“So it seems I’m a gifted listener. You, on the other hand, don’t understand them, you get straight to the point. You don’t waste time listening. You just go for it. The oddest thing is that we like the same kind of women.”
“Please, Juli, can you stop the flow of rubbish? The same kind of women?”
“Don’t look so daft – you look like the Economics professor. You were suggesting as much only a moment ago: ‘I’ve done things that . . .’ I know perfectly well what you have done.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your latest fling.”
“What fling?”
“The carlana, of course. While we’re about it, let me congratulate you: what a woman! Fantastic . . . Worth a few lines from Baudelaire:
Ce qu’il faut à ce coeur profond comme un abime
C’est vous, Lady Macbeth, âme puissante au crime . . .
“You know, there was never anything between us. You must find these fantasies in your novels about —”
“About what?”
“About whores?”
He stared at me in that short-sighted, lucid yet mocking way of his that made the colour come to my cheeks. And he drawled, in his best bass voice, keeping his eyes glued on me: “Eppur si muove.”
I wanted the ground to open beneath my feet. My hands were shaking, my face was on fire. He had stopped staring at me and was taking a long swig straight from the flask.
“Spell out what you’re thinking.” I stammered. “I expect it’s more slander.”
“Call it what you want. Don’t try to make me believe that you manufacture marriage certificates . . . free of charge. You must agree that register worked a treat! And you still say I’m not a good friend, that I’m not generous, that I refuse to help a friend who can’t get himself out of a huge mess . . . and so discreetly; I realise you’d not worked out that it was me. I could have sold it to you: supply and demand; do you remember our Economics professor? A total fool unable to see anything beyond supply and demand! But I’m a fool too, even if I haven’t yet earned myself a chair in pedantry: thinking my forte was canon law, and marriages in articulo mortis in particular . . . Such a balls-up! The association of the two things has always fascinated me, death and the nuptial night, the macabre and the obscene . . . So you’d think the idea of the wedding in extremis must have come from me; well, it didn’t. It was hers. When I met her, she’d got it all worked out. She’d never crammed canon law into her head, but she’s as clever as they come. I’ve even suspected that . . .” He looked at me as if he was wondering whether to say it, “And why not? She was a real rogue; and if you start to hypothesise . . .”
“I can’t think what you are suggesting.”
“The carlà was the last to be assassinated. Why did they leave him for dessert? He was a completely grey person: let’s be clear about that, a simpleton, incapable of formulating a single idea. I don’t think he even made it to be a Carlist, you know. Why would the anarchists have such a big grudge against him? The idea of murdering him could well have been suggested by —”
“Suggested by?!”
“The carlana. You’ve experienced her, she has a gift for suggesting and fascinating —”
“I will never believe such a thing!” Then I remembered my praying mantis pair.
“So much the worse for you. You imagine her as much less of a literary character than she is. I tell you, you don’t have a clue. me puissante au crime . . . She is extraordinarily literary! And wasted on you . . . It is really true when they say ‘God gives beans to those who hav
e no teeth’.”
“If you understood her mind so well, how come you didn’t fake the certificate?”
“Your idea, like so many good ideas, has one ever so small drawback: you don’t see that it was impractical. You forget that Olivel was anarchist territory; if I infiltrated, I did so clandestinely, without a uniform. Strictly incognito, we could say. It was difficult to set up a marriage in articulo mortis in anarchist territory. How would you get the anarchist committee – remember, the mayor and councillors have vanished into thin air – to recognise the signatures of friars and the act as valid? After suggesting the idea to – and, let me repeat, the carlana is wonderfully gifted at suggesting things for other people to do – she beat a retreat. She hesitated. ‘No, I can’t. It would be a forgery!’ She spoke as if I had suggested it to her. She’d simply realised it was unviable while the anarchist committee was in Olivel. Qualms of conscience come when we know we’ll lose everything if we throw them overboard. She was simply sublime the last time I saw her: ‘You mistook me for someone else. You ought to know I’m not interested in forging documents, let alone your propositions.’ ”
“What propositions?”
“What do you think? Exactly what she suggested to you: with the small difference that she said ‘yes’ to you. Agh,” he sighed and paused. “Have you forgotten your penal law? Dishonest propositions . . . She’s very sensitive to dirt – I don’t know if you ever noticed: she’s a woman who is spotlessly clean, that is, who has no feeling. Because feelings always come with a spot of dirt or two, or filth, you won’t deny. I was dirty in her eyes, fantastically dirty. I could see the mixture of fear and disgust in her eyes. It’s difficult to provoke disgust, believe me; it’s hard to sustain a conversation and guide it where you want it to go without being interrupted! One day I asked her about the deceased’s favourite sexual perversions; it would be quite odd if a dead man like him had never practised some sexual perversion . . .”
“Juli, you are a moron . . .”
“Thanks. Perhaps you don’t realise I could report you as a forger and you’d get years inside.”
“You do what you think fit. Just think of the children: you’d make bastards of them again.”
“So you did it for them, did you? The poor little orphans. So sublime, Lluís, I congratulate you.”
“Don’t be such a fool and give me a straight answer: do you have it in you to report me?”
“I already have.”
Silence. My hand was trembling and making its own way to my back pocket, but I remembered it wasn’t loaded, I always carried it unloaded. He calmly swigged cognac from the flask.
“I’ve reported you, Lluís, not to any judge, but to your wife. I’ve described your splendid goings-on with the most literary lady roundabout with a wealth of gory detail.”
“You’re so stupid. It’s not any of Trini’s business.”
“Perhaps you are the stupid one. Do you really think it’s not any of her business? Do you think you can leave a woman all alone because she’s yours and she’ll just make do? The poor things then complain their husbands don’t understand them and have every right to complain that he’s been cuckolded in the end.
I grabbed the flask and threw it at his face. The cognac poured down his cheeks and all over that sky-blue shirt. He didn’t lose his temper, just wiped it with a handkerchief and went on: “You think I’m intolerable and you’re the one that’s intolerable. One can’t tell you anything!”
LA POBLA DE LADRON, 19 SEPTEMBER
We’re all poor sleepwalking wretches and have had two weeks of macabre fantasy . . .
The 4th Company left its reserve positions because of violent enemy counterattacks. We’ve lost a lot of men.
We’ve been given a short break back in La Pobla, which is being hit by mortars and howitzers and even stray machine-gun fire. Their aeroplanes shit on us two or three times a day; we’ve guards on watch at the top of the belfry who sound the alarm by shouting out: “They’re shitting on us!” Because they only sound the alarm when they see actual bombs dropping from the aeroplanes; if they had to shout whenever a little squadron flew over we’d never leave our cave.
Our cave is the cellar of the only house still standing, a freestone, probably fifteenth-century, house. An underground cellar with stone vaults; the bombings resound there like a prophet’s voice in the catacombs and the clouds of dust coming down the spiral stairs make us all cough.
All that remains of La Pobla is this house and the ruins of the church; the rest is rubble. The high street is strewn with parchments and ancient title deeds; a bomb exploded in the parish archive and blew it up. I don’t always go down to the cave when the alarm sounds, because you grow tired of doing so; I sometimes prefer to watch the aircraft unloading. They look like insects in flight laying their long thin eggs. Sometimes I pass the time investigating ancient title deeds; it’s strange how in the fifteenth and even in the early sixteenth century they still wrote in a mixture of Catalan and Aragonese.
I’ve lived the last two weeks as if under the influence of an overdose of cocaine. I felt on a strange high. I now know we retook La Pobla, and that the enemy launched a counteroffensive; the only souls we found alive were the lice. Incredible amounts! We scratch like mad.
Could I give you a coherent account of what happened in those two weeks? No. Battles leave no memories. You say and do things as if dictated to by someone else. I vaguely remember I was on the move – and that’s all.
I remember an esplanade: was it stubble or barren land? The enemy had set up their machine guns as if they’d attended my lecture in Olivel: their lines of fire came at belly level. It was impossible to advance. And we’d been ordered to advance – without cover: we had no tanks.
Gallart led the company and was the first to fall; the Publicist soon after. I remember the lavender bending in the wind; every now and then a stem split in the middle as if cut by an invisible sickle. The recruits were in tears; it was the first time they’d looked war in the face. The other officer, a Miralles, fell, and I was now alone leading the three sections. Barely half the company had survived; we retreated into a wood of pines and juniper.
Hand grenades and mortar bombs fell among the pines but it was an oasis of peace compared to the esplanade. We had a problem with our wounded. We could hear them shrieking; some tried to shout and their voices turned into a sob like the last cry of a rooster being beheaded. We’d lost touch with the battalion. There was another stretch of barren land behind the woods, an open, treeless expanse that was also under machine-gun fire. The recruits realised we’d abandoned our wounded – we couldn’t risk retrieving them. We’d lose more than we’d rescue. I was at a loss: how could I restore contact with our commander?
That was on my mind when I saw an officer with a handful of soldiers crawling over the barren land behind us to dodge the bullets. They were also trailing something behind them. Commissar Rebull was bringing us the telephone wire.
You see, the commander had got his way and turned him into a Communications officer! Incredibly, when he was sent to work with our battalion, that Communications officer hadn’t yet arrived from Army H.Q. Here was Rebull acting as best he could as that non-existing officer: he successfully advanced beneath a constant stream of machine-gun bullets that hummed like swarms of mosquitoes. He was sweating blood. I remembered the stupid jokes we played on him in Olivel; now I could have cried as I watched him grafting so hard. I couldn’t repress the temptation to give him a big hug. He looked at me in amazement, clenching his pipe between his teeth, as if he found my outburst out of place and tawdry. He handed me the field telephone. Commander Rosich was at the other end of the line: “At your orders, Commander. Captain Gallart is dead: we’re afraid the other two lieutenants were killed as well. We can no longer hear their voices. I’ve taken charge of the company.”
“Don’t move from the woods. I’ll send a couple of .85 mortars to shut up those blasted machine guns.”
“We’v
e got wounded, Commander, bleeding to death out in that open country.”
“Don’t try anything before the mortars reach you or that will be the end of the 4th Company, the only one left! The mortars will be there in no time. Remember my barn owl? He’s dead too!”
We hid in that wood for several days. Despite the mortars, hostile machine-gun fire caught us whenever we tried to make a foray. We’d used up our provisions and water.
I remember our last desperate sortie like a hallucination.
The recruits followed us as if they were in a trance. All I could think was: quick march! I could hear the machine guns as if I were in Uncle Eusebi’s office when the four typists were all in action. Naturally, I heard them in front. Then I suddenly started hearing fire from behind: were we caught between two lines of fire? The others made a different noise: screeching partridges rather than tapping typewriters. It was clearly a different model of gun. They were ours.
We even heard snatches come and go on the wind of that lame rhyming hymn Picó invented and forced his men to sing:
The machine-gun singing
death bringing
to the fatchas . . .
Our two mortars weren’t off target. We were beneath the parabola drawn by their bombs and I have to say they were dead on target; they were falling, almost plumb, on the machine-gun nests the “fatchas” had set up – whoever made that word up? It’s what they’re always called at the front! And the recruits kept following me; some fell, the others paid no notice. They advanced as if in a dream . . . What’s this? What do you think it is? Barbed wire! How did we get here so quickly?
The mortars had blown up some of the stakes; we worked hard widening the gaps with the butts of our rifles – in a mad rush, otherwise nobody would live to tell the tale. Now we’re between the barbed wire fence and the trench. A hundred steps and we’ll be there! A hundred steps stooping low and running fast if we want to get there alive.