by Joan Sales
You must rid yourself of this depressing view of yourself – why should you put off women? After all you’ve the one quality we all appreciate: sensitivity. You think of everything, you can always imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, you know how to keep us company when we need it and how to vanish when you’re in the way. Why do you say you’ll never find a woman to love you? I’m sure you will one of these days. You are just the person to make a woman happy: you’ll make a lovely husband, a model husband and an ideal father! I’ve seen that with Ramonet: he thinks the world of you. He remembers every single story you told him when you came to our place before the war as well as the one you told him on the evening of your surprise visit with the tinned milk, the one about “the three wise men of Piteus”. I can’t think how often I’ve told him it again, he liked it so much. He laughs himself silly!
That night you were quite shocked that I went to mass: you asked me why and I promised I’d tell you. Yes, Juli, I owe you this explanation because you were the first person to take me to a mass, something I thought quite ridiculous. If I go now, it’s because of you.
Do you remember? It was in Santa Maria del Mar, a long time before war broke out. How could we have imagined then that Santa Maria del Mar would be burned down like every other church in Catalonia? You and I went up and down those streets and side streets on the pretext that we were selling La barrinada. Lluís hadn’t yet joined our group and I didn’t even know him, but you and I were already taking long walks around old Barcelona with a bundle of copies of La barrinada under our arms. We’d come out on the small plaça de Santa Maria; it must have been eleven. All of a sudden you said, “Let’s go in.” And we did.
Once inside I knelt down next to you, simply because I saw you do that. I’d never been inside a church before. It was all new to me. You were kneeling by my side, holding your head between your hands; then I realised you’d been crying and I felt vaguely annoyed: what was your playacting about now? What was the point? How distant that all seems now! How time has passed! It must be at least seven or eight years ago and it’s just a distant blur. I’d passed my entrance exam to the science faculty and was mad about geology: I’d never remotely felt religion could be of any interest. In my family there’d always been a great respect for the positive sciences and a complete indifference to what they called “metaphysics”. We thought that sooner or later the positive sciences would rationalise the whole of society, namely the scientific organisation of anarchy: anarchy was for us the logical consequence of the positive sciences and we were in no doubt about it. You can imagine how shocking we found your barbed comments: I remember how you shocked us when you said, “It’s obvious that once we know the exact age of the fossilised os Bertran* of a diplodocus, within a margin of under six minutes and three seconds, we’ll all become brothers and sisters.”
Why did you say such things? Didn’t you see that making fun of science was sacrilege in our eyes? Or were you perfectly aware of that? When you said all those things you made us feel you weren’t one of us, that you were paying us a visit like one of the foreign tourists who came to our country – before the war! – to look for what was “typical”, basically because they thought our country was picturesque, when it’s the most ordinary, banal place as far as we are concerned. One night you even went so far as to suggest we should hold all our meetings in the dark and set up a “spiritualist chain”. You couldn’t have suggested anything more shocking, given what our views were.
The few times you talked to me about Christianity had a similar impact as your “spiritualist chain” and that’s why I felt so uncomfortable leaving Santa Maria del Mar after I noticed you’d been crying. I’d found the ceremony mechanical, boring, and devoid of meaning . . . “But what about the Gregorian chant . . . ?” you replied. If only you’d known how bored I’d been, not to mention the carnival costumes . . . I knew, because I’d read about it, that Christians think the host is transformed into Jesus Christ when consecrated by the priest, but what most caught my attention was how long the priest took, as if he were playing with the host, like a cat with a mouse. In the meantime, you’d knelt next to me, hiding your face behind your hands, and I wanted to roar with laughter at the idea of the cat playing with a mouse before eating it.
And now I go to mass every Sunday!
Well, not every Sunday. It’s difficult to find one. A mass is now as clandestine as our meetings used to be, and that’s why Uncle Eusebio – I’ll tell you about this someday – when he found out that I was going, exclaimed: “Clandestine masses? They must be like a cell meeting!” And my father, who also knows I go, thinks that in my case it’s all about the spirit of contradiction: “You’re a real daughter of mine,” he says, “always going against the tide! But isn’t going to mass taking it too far?”
I owe you an explanation, because if I go to mass it’s because of you, although I find that hard to explain even to myself! It’s both very simple and very complicated . . . Too simple to express in words! One day I’ll tell you the events and circumstances that led me there but I’m not in the mood today. It’s been so long since I received a letter from him! Do you remember that day when you brought me a bunch of hyacinths? No, I don’t expect you do – I do and I’ll never forget it! Lluís was so surprised that he asked you, “Where are you going with that?” He hadn’t remembered it was my saint’s day. If only you knew how the scent of those hyacinths has stuck in my mind. It often drifts back to me. It’s strange how scents leave such precise memories that are quite beyond words.
If you only knew how lonely I feel at times! You’ll say I have the boy. True, but children don’t keep you company; on the contrary, we adults must keep them company. I could try to distract myself, but what good would that do? Escapism is so tedious. Better to stay at home and wallow in sadness, a feeling which taken calmly can be almost as soothing as an April shower. If we knew how to make the most of our sadness, we might realise that the only happiness possible in this world is the sorrow of quiet resignation. But there are times when sorrow shows its most repugnant side; there are times when it’s not even sadness, when it’s only emptiness, aridity, tedium, and then . . . Even so, escapism is even emptier and more arid; it empties and deadens whatever it touches. Forgive me yet again for recounting all my sorrows. You’re compassion personified, my true brother. After all, what do I have in common with Llibert, apart from the fact that we happen to be the offspring of the same father and mother?
16 APRIL
The other day I was talking to you about escapism and don’t think I did so lightly: people have never been as frantic about finding distraction as they are now. It’s depressing; you see such sights . . . Cinema queues have never been so long since the war started. I don’t go, because I’ve always found films incredibly boring. However, I do something similar: I read more and more books about geology. I’d come to hate studying just after getting married – if one can use that word in my case – and I’m now getting back into it in order not to feel so alone and empty.
The daily newspapers are always full of battles, attacks and counterattacks, dead and wounded, positions lost and won; you adapt to everything and end up not taking a blind bit of notice. The butchering has been going on for nine months now and people queue outside cinemas. The more savage the film, the better. And I understand: can you believe that I find fossilised molluscs from the Carboniferous Period more interesting than dispatches from the front?
At night, now, when Ramonet and the maid are asleep, I sit in my usual armchair with my book open on the table in the dim lamplight and distract myself as best I can, like everyone else. I’m not any better than they are – on the contrary: could anything be more absurd in these tragic times than finding fascination in the fossilised bones of an unknown species of squid that lived five hundred million years ago? That’s much more absurd than going to the cinema. Sometimes, when I’m alone like this at night, I think I can see that face again: those eyes, that mouth gaping in horror. I n
ever told you or Lluís about that. I didn’t so as not to depress you, but so many months have gone by . . . It was early morning on 1 August: you and Lluís had been at the front for a week. That last night in July was horribly hot; the dog days were oppressive in Barcelona and I couldn’t get to sleep. I heard three short shots ring out on the plot of wasteland behind our house just before dawn. I’d nodded off in my chair and woke up with a start. You people at the front don’t see the horrors in the rearguard, and just as well; we hear gunfire every night in Barcelona, though I had never heard anything so close to home. I went out. It was a few minutes to four, dawn was faintly breaking over the port.
He was very old and his soutane had turned green from wear, it was patched and mended. His eyes and mouth were open wide. I was terrified and screamed and called to our maid. She ran down in her nightshirt looking exhausted and some neighbours came who’d heard my scream and the three pistol shots. The magistrate on duty finally arrived at six when the sun was high in the sky and a few flies, the fat golden green variety, were strolling over the lips and nose of that stiff scarecrow who’d met his end near us. “We get them early every morning,” the magistrate said, “a few more or a few less depending on the day, but always a lot.” “So what can we do to stop this butchery?” “Next to nothing,” he replied. “The authorities can’t cope.” “Who is he?” I asked. “A poor village priest,” the magistrate replied, “I’m sure of that. Marauding gangs of hotheads go round the villages burning churches and murdering priests and they often bring them back to Barcelona to kill . . . We find them early every morning,” he repeated.
A week later, quite unexpectedly I found myself attending a clandestine mass.
An old friend of the family lives in a flat on carrer de l’Arc del Teatre, a woman who is getting on, the widow of a print worker who’d been a close friend of Father’s. She hasn’t any children, so lives by herself and earns a living doing housework. I’d had to take her a bread voucher that my brother Llibert – it’s amazing how his pockets seem full of them – had got for her, after bread disappeared from Barcelona as quickly as silver coins and everyone was chasing vouchers. Three weeks after the war started, a baguette became a thing of the past.
I climbed up to the eighth floor where she lives to give her that bit of cheer: a bread voucher! After she’d hugged me very emotionally she suddenly said: “Come up to the attic with me.” I followed her up. I hadn’t noticed it was Sunday. I had no idea what to expect: we found a dozen or so people in the attic, almost all women. It was stiflingly hot because the ceiling was very low and immediately beneath the roof terrace. I had only been to one other mass, with you in Santa Maria del Mar, and this one was quite different. Why had that widow decided to say “Come with me” when she knew I wasn’t a Catholic?
The few pieces of furniture were very battered. A small, unsteady, chipped chest of drawers they’d put on a little dais acted as an altar, one of those black chests with a white marble top every household used to own and that now seem so tawdry and old fashioned. The strangest thing was the old man officiating: he was the living image of the murdered priest.
If the anarchist’s widow had whispered in my ear “He’s an apostle, apostle so and so”, she probably wouldn’t have taken me by surprise: everything was so unexpected! An ordinary apostle, of course, the most ordinary of the twelve. He must have been eighty and wore an old work-man’s clothes, patched velvet trousers, a smock and rope sandals. He’d put a chasuble over them, and his trouser legs peeping out from underneath looked ridiculous. His actions were weary, as if his body had run out of strength: when he kneeled, he flopped down like a sack of something and the sound of his knees made the legs of the little dais rattle. When he turned round to bless us his expression reminded me of the murdered man’s bulging eyes . . . What an expression, my God! How can they say the soul is invisible?
I went on other Sundays, perhaps just to poke my nose in, perhaps it was my way of protesting – though nobody would ever find out and it would serve no purpose – against the “priest hunt” that was at its height across the country. I’d have liked that old man to preach a sermon, to say something to us, but he never did. “He says he doesn’t know how,” the widow told me. “He said he did when he was young but now he’s old he’s realised he has nothing interesting to say, that he’s always been a bore talking, and that, anyway, we already know what he might say as well as he does.” He did once utter or rather mumble a few words. “My children,” he said, “look how the Church has returned to the catacombs. Jesus is showing us his face covered in blood and spittle as when Pilate said: Ecce homo.”
He never said another word. And then one Sunday, it was the beginning of November by now, the widow said there would be no mass, there would be no more because the old man had disappeared. We don’t even know his name; we’ve had no more news of him. I shall never forget his exhausted, imploring expression. Sometimes, quite unawares, instinctively, I put my faith in him, I pray to him. You’ll think me ridiculous praying to someone who may still be alive, but when I remember a face like his I feel there’s nothing separating this world from the next.
18 APRIL
I’ve received the letter in which you ask me for more detail about what you call my “conversion”, possibly with a touch of sarcasm. My “conversion”, as you call it, is no such thing, it’s much vaguer and more nebulous. The letter I sent you two days ago gave you an inkling and perhaps there’s no point adding anything; as far as geology goes, you’ll recall I’d given that up when Lluís and I started living together. He was always cursing the bourgeoisie, though we lived comfortably on his dividends from “Ruscalleda’s Son” – where he never deigned to set foot since he had always thought manufacturing soup pasta was stupid and the pits. I had no need to earn money and as Ramonet had come into this world very quickly – only three weeks after we’d started living together – I simply spent my time looking after the house.
However, this wasn’t the real reason why I hated geology, though that’s what I told you and him. I hated life as such and hid it from you both. I felt overwhelmed by disillusion a few months after coming to live in this mansion. You know the house is his, that he inherited it from his mother: what I possibly never told you is that Lluís, immediately upon coming of age, assigned it to me and Ramonet at the notary’s, with the single condition that the legacy would be extended to other children if we had any. You see, Lluís has this generous side, though he’d already started suffering those attacks of silence that could last for days. You often came to spend the afternoon with us and your visits were the only thing in the world I had to look forward to. He also brightened up when you came. Once, we were drinking our eleventh or twelfth cup of tea, the rays of the winter sun were shining diagonally through the window and the wood stove, full of holm oak shavings, was glowing red and spitting. As usual, we’d been talking about fifty thousand things, jumping from one to another: life and death, spiritualism and magic, the mating habits of scorpions and burial rites in Papua New Guinea. Silence fell. You broke it and summed up the conversation with what seemed like a casual remark: “It’s obvious: we come from the obscene and are on our way to the macabre.”
You like these boutades and don’t realise how hurtful your words can be. Words we let slip, not thinking they may open up a pit beneath other people’s feet, a bottomless abyss, or that others may suffer from vertigo. You like to walk along these precipices that make my head spin! It was when I began to think everything was pointless, whether studying Carboniferous Age molluscs or bringing children into the world, from the moment it seemed the world didn’t or couldn’t have any end or point to it. It was just one sprawling suburb – a suburb, but in which city? – a chaotic space criss-crossed by dead rail tracks and bristling with posts that supported cobwebs of cables, and all to no purpose, an appallingly grey area fenced in by two interminable walls: the obscene on one side and the macabre on the other. What sense could anything have, if everything was reduc
ible to this?
If you only knew how lonely I felt then, especially when Lluís was at home; yes, especially when he was by my side. Much lonelier than I feel now, I can tell you, now he’s far away and can’t crush me with his silences.
19 APRIL
I’m so ashamed I wrote you that letter yesterday. You know, when I got back from the post office I found two from Lluís the postman had slipped under the door.
Two letters that were so loving and so sad you can’t imagine how much they moved me. He says he misses me, that we will start a new life when peacetime comes and that the war has helped him understand how much we’re made for each other. He asks me to forgive the things he did in the past and put my trust in him for the future. How could I deny him that?
Lluís really knows how to find the words to make me cry and forget . . . A couple of loving letters from him and here I am surrendering abjectly yet again – and not for the first time! I’m such a walkover! Lluís has a natural gift when it comes to finding forgiveness, it’s so natural he’s quite unaware of it, doesn’t even notice. If he did, he’d be such an actor! Such a performer! But he’s not, he does it spontaneously when he acts . . . His son has inherited this gift along with many others; if you could only see how he wheedles forgiveness from me after a tantrum, and he’s good at throwing them! He is such an adept and then all of a sudden he’ll decide to stop playing up and be as nice as pie, and he’s good at that too!
The postman came back later that afternoon to bring me the money from payments that had been delayed: three months of an adjutant’s pay plus the extra bonuses for being in action that add up to more than his pay. It was a big wad of notes. I felt so happy that this morning I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy a Queen Isabel secrétaire I’d seen days ago in a hotel sale; street porters have just carried it here. I’ve put it in the drawing room and hung above it that portrait in oils of his great-grandfather, the colonel in the First Carlist War, the one you said was a spitting image of our boy. I hadn’t told you I’d found a gilt frame in an antique shop on carrer de la Palla that was just the right size, shape and style, so I’ve now framed the great-grandfather we were keeping in a drawer until we’d found the right frame. It’s an old gold oval frame and the painting looks very decorative on the wall. He certainly does resemble the boy: I was scrutinising the portrait and the boy just now and imagining Ramonet with those huge side whiskers and the big red beret. It’s so comical: if only you knew what my family thought about Carlists! And about colonels!