by Joan Sales
Ramonet has turned out a real Brocà; these Brocàs have war in their blood: he won’t shut up, is always nagging me to let him go to war with his father. The more he does that, the more like Lluís he becomes . . . and I just feel more childish and older by the day. Both at the same time. I’m twenty-one now; it was my birthday yesterday. I’ve come of age . . .
3 MAY
Yes, Juli, I’ve been baptised; didn’t I tell you? I’m sorry, I’ve been so frantic I don’t remember when I last wrote you or what I said – was it two weeks ago? I only remember it was before your second visit, as unexpected as your first . . . However, to be frank, despite what you said on that long night that was so . . . short, for heaven’s sake, I wasn’t by any means convinced. You made it out to be very important, but I . . . I felt fine as I was; I was happy to be more or less vaguely Christian. I found it hard to decide to do something just to please you.
I’ve finally done it and, to tell you the truth, I feel exactly the same as I did before. I’m writing from my armchair by the window and every now and then I look at the pyramid of tinned milk that’s really shrunk. You had no reason to apologise for not bringing more on your last visit, as I can imagine you can’t do that very often and, on the other hand, I have enough to be going on with. I was so happy to see you so unexpectedly! The night passed so quickly talking to you . . . I remember everything you said: I keep pondering over your words and sink deep into my armchair as my grandmother does into hers. Now, right now, quite frankly, I feel rather annoyed that I yielded to your pressure: how can a person as intelligent as you think that such an external rite like baptism can be so important? Yes, I know all about sacraments and the grace infusing them . . . I reckon the only sacrament I’m struck by is marriage!
And when I say marriage is a “sacrament” I mean what the theologians say; I’m not referring to the ceremony, whether it is religious or civil, which I know isn’t strictly necessary. I mean the union of a man and a woman with a view to permanent bonding and the transmission of life: if that wasn’t a sacrament, what would it be? It would be a gross obscenity, the mere thought of which sends a shiver down my spine!
As for baptism . . . what can I say? Is there anyone who can still believe in anything so idiotic – that by splashing a few drops of water on some-one’s head and muttering a few magic words we manage to save a soul that would otherwise be condemned . . . ? I’m sorry, but I must speak as I feel.
I know you’ll tell me that this isn’t what one must believe; that many people who have been baptised will be condemned and many who’ve not will be saved, because the designs of God are inscrutable, etc., etc., etc. That’s all very well, but what then is the point of baptism? If I’ve had it done, it was because you were so insistent and for no other reason, I can assure you.
From my armchair, through the open window I can see the lime tree glinting with new pale green leaves full of silvery reflections and I remember the worst days when I hated everything, absolutely everything, even this poor lime tree! That was when your boutade – “We come from the obscene and are on our way to the macabre” – was always hammering in my brain. Ramonet wasn’t walking yet, only crawling over the drawing-room carpet, and I looked at him as if he were a kitten and wondered what right I had to give him a life that can only end in death; this life that is only one long death agony without hope. Nevertheless, I loved my son, of course I did; I was crazy about my boy, but wasn’t that another of nature’s tricks, like the one impelling us to perform the act that transmits life? Would we be so amused if we brought them into the world as they will become later, like my grandmother, for example? It was November and there were no leaves on the lime tree the gardener had pruned back to almost a bare trunk. And the lime tree seemed as idiotic as everything else; every year the same performance, losing its leaves, growing new ones, and to what end? What was the point? It was as ridiculous as Lluís’ beard. I would hear him every morning because he’s much more of an early riser than me. He liked to shave, not in the bathroom but in the bedroom sink, so I’d be half asleep listening to him scraping away at his beard with a razor. As ridiculous as the beard they shave every morning, that grows back again, day in day out! Everything in this world was endless, senseless, monotonous repetition. That was when I began to loathe geology which, more than anything else, cynically strips bare the interminable, futile succession of identical acts, the appalling monotony of layer upon layer of sediment, each representing tens or hundreds of thousands of years, one settling on another until they are several kilometres thick: the abyss of time that is beyond our understanding and brings on nausea . . . And the trunk of that lime tree was an obscene pole being poked into my brain and provoking a headache worse than any migraine! It stood there, against the light. Fortunately, that November is now quite distant. Time dragged so slowly it seemed to come to a halt, its slowness crushing me the way Lluís’ silences did once. When I was a child, time had seemed like a magician! As far back as I can remember I had loved the passing of time: I loved the traces it left, and the past itself. Sometimes, when wandering down the byways of old Barcelona where I was born and where my parents have always lived, I’d be entranced by an old doorway with a date – 1653, 1521 – I would count the years that had gone by since people like us had built those arches and stones which accompanied me through life. The older they were the more companionable they seemed. Then, when I was older, I was attracted to geology because it gave me a great sense of security with its sedimentary rocks that count the centuries in their millions. It’s strange: if I strain my memory, I find I’ve savoured the ineffable pleasure of having a past from the age of four or five. It’s hard to understand, but that’s how it is: a four- or five-year-old already has a past that’s like an abyss.
Around that mid November, when time had stood still and seemed like a hand that was strangling me, my mother paid a visit one afternoon. I could barely follow the thread of what she was saying: I was living as if I didn’t belong to this world, as if my links with the world outside had been severed and were impossible to re-establish. She talked and talked, as she always does, telling me lots of things I couldn’t hear. Some words suddenly surfaced from her endless chatter and sounded like the distant rumble of a waterfall: Mother was telling me about an incident that had created a stir down the whole of carrer de l’Hospital. A neighbour had thrown herself and her newborn child from her eighth-floor flat: “A young, perfectly normal neighbour; you know, we all have neighbours like her. And she seemed so happy to be expecting a child: it was her first. Nobody understands it.”
“It’s obvious enough!” I exclaimed. Mother looked at me as if I’d gone crazy, then nodded and changed the subject. Why am I telling you all this? Because it happened soon after you gave me – also for my saint’s day – the Gospels in a single volume. I’ve kept it on my desk ever since. It’s still got the bookmark between the pages where you’d put it: when I opened it there I found the famous passage where Jesus says we have to eat his flesh and drink his blood. All his disciples abandon him when they hear him say something so monstrous and the apostles who are still hesitant start to leave as well. Only Simon stays. Jesus asks him, “Will you also abandon me?” And you had underlined Simon’s reply in red. “If I don’t follow You, whom will I follow?” I looked through the whole volume, I was curious to see whether you’d underlined any other passages, but you hadn’t. Only this one! And on the blank endpapers you’d written: “The Cross or the Absurd”.
The Cross or the Absurd . . .
A few days later, I was coming back from the market by tram. In one of those rare coincidences in a city as big as Barcelona, I saw Lluís standing on a street corner surrounded by people. It was dark but he was under a street lamp and the gaslight had made him luminous. I was sitting by the window, looking out but not seeing a thing; raindrops streamed down the glass like tears and beyond them was a chaotic jumble of cars, trams, and people rushing along the pavements of the Rambla under their umbrellas – I w
as coming from the Boqueria market – while the central path was almost deserted under the bare branches of the plane trees. The rain glinted on the oilskin covers the stallholders had placed over their newspaper displays. And there he was on the corner, surrounded by people; he and I were going through one of our worst spells and hadn’t spoken to each other for days . . . And there he was on the corner of carrer del Carme, waiting to cross the road, like everybody else. The rain soaked his hair and trickled down his cheeks; as usual, he didn’t have a hat or umbrella. He looked so anonymous in the crowd on that dark, rainy November afternoon in Barcelona; so anonymous . . . A person is never so alone as when seen in a crowd; his eyes stared blankly; he was ill-shaven and that was unlike him, or perhaps it was already late in the day and he’d shaved early that morning, and the shadow was back. I could see him through the glass misted by rain but he couldn’t see me; for a moment I thought he was crying but he wasn’t: it was the rain dripping from his hair. His eyes seemed enormous against his motionless face – the fact that they were so blank made them looked even more desperate. I’d never seen him look like that; I’d have liked to alight from the tram, which had stopped for a moment, and run after him so we could cry together; I’d help him bear the burden that was oppressing him, even if I couldn’t fathom what it was. But the tram started off and once I was home and by myself in my bedroom I lay in bed and sobbed and sobbed thinking how one day some tram or other would start off and an even mistier window would separate us for ever. I’d see him and he wouldn’t see me, and couldn’t see me ever again. I’d see him looking lonelier, more anonymous than ever among the jostling, indifferent crowd, more at a loss than ever . . . and he wouldn’t, couldn’t see me however much he wanted to, now when it was too late! I cried on and on, stupidly, feeling pity for him and for myself; afterwards, as after a heavy downpour, my sky suddenly cleared and I no longer hated Lluís, I felt sorry for him.
No, Juli, it’s not that Lluís can’t stand me. Don’t start on that again. It’s not what I told you the other night; it’s not that at all! I know only too well that he needs me although he doesn’t realise he does. He finds people who wish him well irritating. It’s a psychological mechanism that’s so stupid I took ages to see through it. I suffered a lot before I did. Lluís is terribly hard on people who love him – on his uncle, for example. I’ll tell you about that some other day. Lluís is so contradictory, I often can’t follow him. He kept talking about his brother Ramon, for example; you know he worshipped him but he’d never taken me to meet him. When I asked him to, he’d say, “You’d faint, you’d not stand it, you’d be really shocked.” I couldn’t persuade him and he kept talking about him in a way one can only describe as devotion. Lluís thinks he is a non-believer, naturally; a non-believer, I ask you! He can act like a monster and often has towards me, quite unawares, but a non-believer . . .
One day, he finally took me to the Order of St John of God and I met his famous brother Ramon. We could hardly talk to him. He was feeding some mentally deficient folk who were grunting and slavering; ten or twelve quite adult defectives, between twenty and forty years of age, a very distressing sight – and he fed them and wiped away their drool as if that was the most natural thing in the world, as I did with Ramon when he was eleven months . . . While he was giving spoonfuls of soup to one, another peed in his trousers, and Lluís, who was visibly upset, tugged my arm and said, “Let’s go. Who can live with such a spectacle?” The scene stuck in my mind for days and on the odd night I’d dream of the mentally ill – I, who never dream. The things I tell you! Just let me add, by way of conclusion, that a few weeks later I was sitting in my armchair by the window as usual. It was a bright December evening and I was watching the evening star descend into the horizon: it twinkled for a moment before setting. Shocked and bewildered, I thought I could see the face of that man who’d peed in his trousers and at the same time I heard a distant voice saying: “The obscene and the macabre, the Cross or the Absurd.” I was trying to understand how a moment earlier the evening star had been around, twinkling so brightly, and was now gone, as if it had never existed! A moment can be so long when it separates what is no longer from what still is . . . and the past from a moment ago is as past as a moment from a million centuries ago! Who can ever grasp this? And I suddenly thought of the stupid bare trunk of the lime tree I could see against the sunset, I thought I could see a branch growing across that obscene, macabre trunk . . . something to cling to! “The Cross or the Absurd”, I repeated to myself, still not understanding what was happening. No, please don’t make fun of me: I’m not trying to say I had a vision like your aunt; no Saint Philomenas! Please, no more Saint Philomenas! It was then I understood your words: the Cross or the Absurd; and I understood that ancient line, O Crux, ave, spes unica.
I beg you not to make fun of me. Perhaps you’ve sometimes thought my letters trite: it would be a poor world if we couldn’t be trite now and then! If only you knew how consoling it is to have a friend you can tell everything that’s going through your mind, however silly . . . You’ve seen how I spend hours writing to you; obviously I could burn these letters but I’d rather not. After all I write to communicate with someone. Could that be anyone but you?
7 MAY
You ask me for details of my baptism; it’s curious how you think it’s so important when I don’t oblige. If only you knew how meaningless and external the ceremony seemed; it left me feeling quite cold . . . As I didn’t know where to turn, and you’d been so insistent, I mentioned it to the widow of the anarchist; since the Jesuit disappeared – she told me that, in effect, he was a Jesuit – they’d stopped holding mass in her attic, but she knew of another house where they held one almost every Sunday. A place where she’s done lots of housework for years and is completely trusted.
It was a house on a side street in Sant Just that from the outside looked as grey and old as any other in the neighbourhood . . . Inside was another matter . . . I thought I was seeing visions! I’d never been in a house like that. It’s really strange the anarchists haven’t requisitioned it yet; maybe it hasn’t occurred to them that the most diehard aristocrats own houses in old neighbourhoods. And it’s also very strange so many of them still live in Barcelona and have been able to survive the horrors.
When the anarchist’s widow, Ramonet and I arrived, a group of twenty-five to thirty mostly middle-aged ladies were waiting for us. I was surprised there were so many and felt inhibited, especially when Ramonet started playing up and saying he wanted to go home; and the more they fussed over him the more he hid his head in my skirt. Then, as often happens, he suddenly stopped being naughty and decided to be good as gold, to the great excitement of all those ladies fighting over him. While we waited for the priest and the godfather who still hadn’t come, I took a good look at that drawing room: it was huge, with a high ceiling, the biggest I could remember seeing. Naturally, the windows and doors were shut, and they’d even drawn the thick green damask curtains so nothing would be heard outside. A huge rock-crystal chandelier with twenty or thirty wax candles illuminated and perfumed the whole room. When the lady of the house saw the surprise on my face she said they only lit them on special occasions: “Today is one such occasion,” she told me, smiling most pleasantly. On the walls large gilt-framed mirrors alternated with period paintings –“by El Vigatà”† the lady said – and the ceiling was decorated with frescoes that I thought represented the “Judgement of Paris” or some other piece of mythological nonsense. In each corner of the room was a chaise longue with four armchairs, all antique, made from solid mahogany and upholstered in dark red velvet. A large carved walnut double door occupied the middle of one wall, two wide windows the one opposite and two large chests of drawers the centre of each of the others. Each chest must have been worth a fortune. They had such elegant lines, with delicate filigree and sculpted silver handles; you could spend hours if not days treasuring them. The most beautiful feature of all was the amount of space left, so much bare, emp
ty wall by each chest, window and walnut double door: what bliss – large white walls are so restful on the eyes!
They’d placed a guéridon in the middle of the room under the chandelier and on it a kind of solid-silver basin: “an antique wash basin, that belongs to the family,” the mistress of the house told me, eager to placate my nosiness. I gathered it was necessary for the ceremony they were about to enact; I’d no idea how a baptism was performed – I’d never seen one. I’ve said that all the ladies were on the old side, fifty plus, though there was a young blonde who I assumed was the lady’s daughter-in-law. She started to talk to me so enthusiastically about my decision, even though I didn’t think it was such a big step and didn’t know what to say in reply. The priest finally arrived in a rush, as if very short of time; he too was young, around thirty, freshly shaven, dressed like a worker, impeccably so, and acted confidently and quickly. Hand on heart, I took an immediate dislike to him! To temper my hostility I told myself he was risking his life to exercise his ministry and that all those women were in danger too. The godfather was taking his time arriving and the priest kept looking impatiently at his watch: he stretched his arm out brusquely, holding it up to his eyes, even to his ear, as if afraid it had stopped: he was obviously worried by the time he was wasting on our behalf. The godfather finally turned up. He was a most courteous, shy, affable, little old man who was delighted to see all the ladies. He kissed some on the hand. I’d have preferred the godmother to be the anarchist’s widow, but they’d planned everything and it was to be the lady of the house. It would have seemed very rude to try to unpick all that. Besides, I was feeling more and more as though I couldn’t care less about these preambles that seemed to make no sense.