by Joan Sales
When I sit down in a field by the river I watch thousands and thousands of petals float by: there are so many that in places they completely cover the river to very strange effect: a river of purple.
In the end the saffron scent becomes an obsession; I really don’t know why but it makes me think of her.
After lunch, old Olegària left me alone in the house; she had to go to water her allotment, or she’d lose her turn until the next week. The water from the river is severely rationed.
It was the opportunity I’d so been waiting for. My bedroom is on the ground floor; hers is on the floor above. I went up like a thief. The door was only pulled to: the smell of a room where someone sleeps and is never aired hit me in the face like bad breath. It was pitch dark inside; old Olegària only opens her shutters in special circumstances, like that one time. I’d never have thought I’d come back one day by myself and on the sly . . . I groped my way to the window. What would I say if she came in unexpectedly? I’d not tell her the truth; let her think I was stealing, whatever, no matter.
I leaned on her bed. It has five woollen mattresses, as double beds do in these parts.
I sank into it as if it were a cloud because they’re shapeless, not reinforced. Old Olegària had been to Barcelona once in her life; she had to consult an eye specialist as cataracts were forming. Her only precise memory is of the mattress there: “Crikey, how can they sleep on something so stiff?”
The photos stared at me from their purple frames. The fixed smile, the staged expression, the charcoal hair and eyelashes . . . Then, all of a sudden – you idiot! What made you of all people stand on top of the sandbag parapet?
Didn’t that second lieutenant also have a deep wrinkle to the left of his mouth, an early sign that something was wrong with his liver? Bah, in the end we all look alike. When two people look alike, there’s always one who looks more alike than the other. What does looking alike mean? What does having something wrong with your liver mean? A man who’d just been shot from a range of thirty feet, who may have been hit in the liver, could be forgiven for looking as if there was something wrong with his liver. In such a situation, who wouldn’t look poorly?
This bedroom really reeks, worse than Father Gallifa’s cell, and that’s saying something. And what guarantee is there that those photos, which have been so retouched, give any idea of his real appearance? Particularly this one, when he’s taking first communion at the same time as his grandmother, I mean his grandmother’s sister – thanks to the good works and grace of a portrait photographer who thus earned himself a hundred pesetas. A hundred pesetas! The wretched swindler! And this horrible frame, a present from a Doña . . . “A real Doña, Don Luisico, because she was the village schoolmistress.” Can you expect anything but toil and trouble from such people?
OLIVEL, 17
The weather is still so dismal that I went to the tavern rather than for a stroll. Melitona was going to and fro, as busy as usual. And poor Gallart abandoned on that barren waste . . . A strange reaction on the part of the commissar, he refused to set foot in that inn when he returned to Olivel. “It wouldn’t be right in Gallart’s absence.”
The commander wrote: “Don’t move from Olivel. These operations have been a disaster. Wait for us. We won’t be long.”
Is there something in the Olivel air that goes to the head? Why do I always feel so well here? The afternoon’s thousand hues, the migrating birds, the falling leaves, the water bubbling in the brook, all seem to say: “Don’t waste the best years of your life, you won’t live twice, your seconds are ticking on towards the void like the saffron petals the Parral is sweeping away . . . and those seconds could be wonderful!” I would give everything for a moment of glory.
I was twenty-six the day before yesterday: I just remembered. And a wave of melancholy flowed over me like a forgotten melody. Like a piece of music that was perhaps wonderful but we didn’t notice when we were listening and now we notice, we’ve forgotten . . . O God, where do the years we’ve lived disappear to?
This morning, without realising, instinctively, I found myself walking up the slope to the castle. Fortunately, I stopped halfway: where am I going? Why would I go to say hello to her? What would I say?
OLIVEL, 18
I climbed up to the castle.
Her servant took me to the attics I’d never seen before. There are eight or nine huge attics, separated by the top of the building’s master walls. The sharply sloping ceilings are the underside of the roof, the supporting beams of which are eye-catching. Where did they find such gigantic trees? They must be ancient walnut trees, like the ones along the banks of the Parral, that seem to touch heaven with their crests and hell with their roots.
There are lots of swallows’ nests among these enormous beams, and in both north- and south-facing attics, nests different from the ones you see under the roof eaves; I gather they are made by different varieties of swallow. However, the swallows have now left both kinds of nests, though the geckos are still running around. In the odd wall – and they aren’t plastered – you see the holes where barn owls must make their nests. The floor isn’t tiled and shakes underfoot. There’s a lot of old junk piled up in each corner: an antique dealer would find more than one piece of interest. Worm-eaten walnut-wood chests, some with Gothic lids, escritoires with drawers missing, friars’ chairs with broken legs, extraordinary baroque braziers, tools you can’t put a name or use to. Three paintings caught my attention: they were stacked facing the wall so only the back of the canvas was visible, they were large and punctured in various places.
She was in the smallest, south-facing attic. There was no junk, but cages of rabbits and hens and a small pigeon loft, as well as a reed fence on a pair of damaged boxes, and a mat with figs covered in flour drying in the sun.
She was sitting on a low chair, busy with saffron like everyone else; the children also have their little chairs and corresponding couple of panniers, and were concentrating hard, doing what she was doing. There and then a ray of sun slipped through a gap in the clouds, seemed to quiver full of invisible droplets until it came to rest on the head of the younger boy. I hadn’t realised he was so fair: he gleamed like old gold on the altarpiece.
She told me to sit on another chair, not taking her eyes off her work. Pleasant and polite, and that was it. I couldn’t think what to say: I asked her what the three paintings were about.
“Enric’s grandparents. The anarchists amused themselves firing their pistols at them. I brought them up to the attic because I felt they were giving me the evil eye.”
“Can I take a look?”
Three equestrian portraits that, apart from belonging to past eras – one corresponding to each ancestor – are quite undistinguished, third-class provincial paintings of the sort you can’t see improving with age because the years make them darker and harder to see. I calculate that they represented, respectively, the grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather of the deceased Enric, judging by the style of clothes from one to the next. All were dressed in their best and mounted stiffly on their steeds, looking straight ahead without a hint of irony, their left hands on the hilts of their swords and their right on the reins. Their blank stares are made of the same stuff as old Olegària’s grandson, and, just as the latter’s absence of irony is accompanied by an impressive good faith, the three equestrian portraits have the same half-foolish, half-crafty eyes that so enliven the photographs of their descendant. All three naturally carry the same knightly shield under the legs of mounts that are prancing spiritedly: a silvery olive tree in a field of green, unless I’m a complete dunce at heraldry. The carlana’s children don’t have a grocer’s beady eyes; they don’t resemble these people in the least . . . or the carlà!
I think the shield is missing its motto: “No credit today, tomorrow maybe.”
“You should have them restored someday. They are your children’s forebears, after all.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll bear it in mind.”
>
She pulled out the pistils with a light touch and around her the uneven attic floor was strewn with petals; the scent seemed to come not from the plucked petals but from her. Stooped over her work, she had no eyes for me. I looked at her in silence.
“Holy Maria of Olivel . . .,” I muttered. Then I was silent again. What else could I have said? Pray for us?
She raised her eyes, they flickered with that shadowy light I knew so well.
“Did you say something?” Her contralto voice rang out naturally, with none of the tremolo that used to knock me out. Or had I dreamed that tremolo? Could that voice ever have quivered?
“Yes, but I don’t know what. I think it was to do with the saffron flowers. Or perhaps the praying mantis. I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book called The Wonders of Instinct by Fabre from Provence; it’s very interesting. I found it a pleasant surprise years ago. I was fourteen or fifteen, just imagine.”
“I thought you mentioned our local Virgin.”
“Yes, her too, and why not? We could also mix in the local Virgin, since you bear her name. Maria d’Olivel, Olivela, so much work simply to profit from those minute pistils! And these pretty, scented petals are simply thrown away; the river’s full of them and looks purple from a distance.”
“They’re good for nothing,” and she turned her gaze back on her work, never resting her fingers.
“Agreed, they’re good for nothing. Instincts are a wonderful thing but in the end what use are they? What use would life be if we lost the only thing of any value?”
“What are you talking about now?”
“How do I know? One can dream up so many hypotheses! Some people dream them up without thinking, Santiaga, for example . . .”
She looked at me as if she were thinking: he’s got a screw loose. If we’re going to dream up hypotheses, why doesn’t Soleràs take his further? Those children who are so fair, those big eyes – their mother’s. There is a sure way to make certain precautions fail, but then there are so many possible hypotheses: this could be never-ending. For example, what if the carlà and the carlana turned out to be brother and sister and were quite unaware of the fact? And why not? There’s been a graft from somebody, God knows who. But then they’d bear a slight or strong resemblance; the children would have something of the deceased, who must have been their uncle . . .
Strangest of all, the fact that she’d brought those splendid children into the world was what most attracted me to her. A dark instinct stirred inside me, perhaps more vegetable than animal, spurring the spread of powerful and dominating life, like one of those walnut trees on the banks of the River Parral with fantastic roots, to spread a race of gods: Eritis sicut dii, our most secret desire, the uncertain glory for which Adam exchanged the quiet, certain glory of Paradise. The wonders of instinct, I thought: the female, once inseminated, devours the male who is good for nothing, then denies herself until she dies for a posterity she will never know: everything for posterity! We are nothing; posterity is all. However, what is posterity? A pack of fools like us. And insects are basically as foolish as we are.
Perhaps when the deceased was alive there were precautions that were worth defying. But now . . . now she is free . . . and she doesn’t have to trick anyone . . . what would be the point . . . ?
“They are good for nothing,” I repeated. “They protect these red pistils. Once the pistils are gone, what use are they?”
“That’s right,” and she nimbly carried on with her work, almost completely ignoring me.
“You know what I’m referring to?”
“No, I can’t think what you’re talking about.”
“Do you know what a praying mantis is? It’s an insect that’s noteworthy for several reasons.”
“We call them ‘nuns’ around here. There are lots in the stubble when it gets really hot. People say that if a child loses his way in the fields, he has only to ask a nun the way; the insect will put its hands together in prayer and point him in the right direction.”
“That’s another hypothesis. If we start, believe me, we’ll never finish! Just listen to what I wanted to tell you: isn’t it a pity to throw such pretty flowers away? It’s fine to keep the pistils, I won’t deny that, but it’s cruel to throw away the petals . . .”
“What would we do with them? They don’t serve any useful purpose.”
“No useful purpose like a woman who has brought children into the world. I don’t mean that children don’t deserve respect, children when they’re ‘home-produced’, as our commander says. However, must we renounce love and glory? Believe me, Olivela, utility isn’t everything! We mustn’t be like insects.”
“Which insects?”
“The nun, for example. Obviously you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about. The nun has habits – how can I put it? – that one shouldn’t recommend. Yet will you believe me if I say there are times I feel exasperated and envy the male who’s been devoured? At least he had his moment of glory, however uncertain. An instant, but think how long it lasted! To be envied! Why live longer? Such a moment is worth an eternity.”
“I haven’t seen a nun in a long time,” she said as naturally as a great actress. “When we were little, we searched for them in the stubble, held their tails between our fingers and said, ‘Join your hands together.’ And they did. My God, how the years have flown by . . . We also went tadpole fishing in the river and kept them in jam jars until they turned into frogs.”
“There are so many possible hypotheses! Olivela, you’re the one person in the world to make me imagine so many. You mention tadpoles that change into frogs if they don’t fall by the wayside. It’s called metamorphosis. And some turn into toads and others into salamanders, because the world is as full of metamorphoses as it is of hypotheses. You meet such hypotheses as you travel the world: Turdy, for example, poor Turdy . . .”
“Say what you think. Are you worried you might offend me?”
“Turdy was never your father! Some things hit you between the eyes. A toady tadpole inevitably leads to a toad.”
“Don’t think that hadn’t already occurred to me . . . You won’t believe how often I’ve thought that and wished it were true, for my sake and his. Especially his. It would so much better for him . . .”
“Yes, Olivela. What about the other one . . .”
“Which other one?”
“The other idiot, the shy, polite kind. The well-mannered idiot. Don Enrique de Alfoz i Penyarrostra . . . that tame Roland! If we could start hypothesising about him, we’d never finish. Agh, the gap in the roof lets a cold breeze in . . .”
Her eyes flashed blindingly like lightning: “We’re at cross purposes,” she interrupted me. “I’m sorry. Why do you find it so hard to understand?”
“To understand what?”
“My position. I’m only interested in my children.” She returned to her work.
The hesitant ray of sun, with its burden of raindrops, now settled on the head of her elder son: “I’m the carlán, you must obey me”, and he too gleamed like old gold. Both were separating out the pistils, intently, quickly. The swallows’ nests were so silent!
OLIVEL, 19
An unexpected visit. Soleràs.
He turned up at old Olegària’s place: “I heard you were ill. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
I told him to sit on the only chair. I was lying on my bed.
“You’re a lucky man. Wonderful laryngitis allows you to live like a king . . . and in the village where you have your bit on the side . . .”
He took off his leather blouson and dropped it on the floor.
“I don’t have a bit on the side, here or anywhere. Please don’t start on your usual rude nonsense. Do want a smoke? They stole my pipe and pouch, but there’s a small packet there and paper to roll.”
“I’d be more grateful for a glass of cognac.”
The republic of the baby’s bottle fellows had left me one of fire-water, which, according to them, the doctor includ
ed, is the best cure for laryngitis. He poured himself almost a full cup – my tin cup – and put his feet on the table, stretching and yawning.
“You and I should have words, Lluís, and not about your bits on the side who don’t interest me. You can preserve them in aspic. Frankly it’s a side of life that does nothing for me either way. At the end of the day, if you give it a little thought, all a man and woman do when they kiss is to bring together the top ends of their digestive tubes.”
“Is that what you call philosophy?”
“Yes, the cheapest kind, that’s within the range of any intellect, like yours now.”
He laughed with that unpleasant cluck of his while taking a long swig from the cup.
“It will make you ill, Juli, it’s firewater.”
“We should talk seriously, Lluís. Don’t you think that Macabre Wedding would be a good title for a novel? One I’ll write someday; for the moment I’ve got a title. A super-pornographic effort worthy of our times! What if I were to tell you that the idea for that monastery wedding was inspired by you . . . and Trini. Or do you deny that you’re like a couple of mummies doing your double act?”
“I repeat, watch what you’re saying. You could make me lose my temper like last time.”
“Poor Trini! You can’t forgive her for remaining faithful: “Et lire la secrète horreur du dévouement . . .”
“Have you come to sermonise?”
“No, Lluís. I’ve yet to scale such heights. You can take it easy. I came to tell you that you and I will never be notaries. Notaries! Is it possible that you and I ever prepared for the entrance exams? Those cramming sessions we had with the Digest, the Book of Decrees . . . A waste of time, Lluís! Not to mention the Pandects. Yuck! Who now remembers the Pandects? We’ve had a taste of glory that leaves an aftertaste to make one hate the Book of Decrees, the Pandects, the Digest and even Papinian’s Definitions. We’ve been a-wandering, we’ve done this and that, we are free, we have acted like men and we’ve acted like wild beasts . . . how can anyone now ever become a notary? War is the bit on the side that poisons your blood for ever; anything else pales in comparison. Just think for a moment, why do we still read the Divine Comedy? Supposing, that is, we do still read it, and I have to say that it’s a book I’ve read with even more enjoyment after The Horns of Roland. Because only one like it has been written in three thousand years while so much other nonsense has been poured out – oceans of tedium! But only one Divine Comedy! So then, if one is written every three thousand years, that means three thousand Divine Comedies would take three thousand times three thousand: however little trigonometry or algebra you know, you can work that sum out. And the years just fly by; it seems that only yesterday the diplodocus and prehistoric sloths were wandering on God’s earth . . . and two hundred million centuries have whizzed by! So poor Dante will end up stashed away in huge attics full of books as good as his that nobody reads: who could read so many million works of genius? Human memory couldn’t retain the names of the thirty or thirty-five million Dantes who will have accumulated, even though this planet of ours, that’s noteworthy for various reasons, may endure a reasonably long time, astronomically speaking, provided it doesn’t pop like a fart – a not entirely impossible outcome. That’s why I have decided not to write Macabre Wedding and have given up the idea of being the next Dante.”