Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  “Well, now we are all here,” said the priest, raising his voice and immediately silencing the ladies’ chatter. He’d donned a white alb the lady of the house had taken from one of the chests, and the ceremony began. Its only charm was the fact that it was clandestine. The priest kept explaining the meaning of everything he was doing and the more he explained the less sense I thought it made. It would probably be better to say nothing and just use the minimum words necessary; the more they say, the more they undermine the whole ceremony. Ramonet found everything very entertaining, but I thought it was drawn out and boring! The priest had a sternly energetic face and all that grim energy – so much conviction! – riled me. He spoke with a self-assurance that annoyed me: how can such obscure things be so clear? How can he be so sure, so convinced? In contrast, the other priest, the old man, the Jesuit in the attic on carrer de l’Arc del Teatre, hadn’t seemed sure about anything very much! He was every inch a decrepit, down-at-heel apostle with little conviction and a whole lot of faith . . .

  If the old Jesuit from the attic on l’Arc del Teatre had baptised me, I think I’d have felt stirred within myself. I remembered the first mass the old man had said in that sordid space – where he’d lived in hiding, the anarchist’s widow subsequently told me – it turned out she’d hidden him there. I gradually learned all this later. The memory of that mass reminded me of the stiflingly hot and horrible summer when they were hunting down priests throughout Catalonia. But this priest had said mass so simply, as if it were an everyday act . . . Swarms of flies flew in through the wide-open skylights and a few were always crawling over his upper lip that was covered in beads of sweat. He did nothing to frighten them away and I thought I could see the other face, the murdered priest’s, that other face with those other flies. If he’d baptised me . . . why did I never think of it when he was among us?

  I could see . . . Here and now . . .

  The priest sprinkled me and the boy from a silver conch shell they’d also taken from the chest of drawers; they had everything in that house. The owner finally decided to show me an eighteenth-century “baptismal dress” that had been worn from the time of the Archduke and was still being worn by all the children in the household: “because in this house,” she told me, “we are, naturally, supporters of the Austrias.” It was a sumptuous garment made from extraordinarily intricate lace, though it was hardly suitable in our present circumstances: Ramonet couldn’t wear that garment made for a newborn babe and I even less so. “You should think,” the lady continued, “how it was used to baptise the nephew of the prince of Darmstadt, who was born in Barcelona during the siege of 1714, and we were his godparents too.” If I’d taken her literally, I ought to have imagined that lady and her father-in-law – it turned out that the old man was her father-in-law – as being over two hundred years old.

  The marquis – one of the other ladies whispered to me that he was the Marquis of X, and if I write “X” it’s not out of any wish to imitate tear-jerking novels or to avoid compromising you should this letter fall into the wrong hands, but simply because I don’t remember the full title she mentioned – seemed old but not that old, and was really charming. He was such an attentive, unpretentious man with a childish sparkle of hope in his eyes! “He’s almost ninety,” added the same lady who’d whispered that he was the Marquis of X, “and he refused to flee abroad. He’s always been a great eccentric.” He heard her and retorted with a laugh: “At my age, one would rather die at home than live among strangers.”

  I’ve just realised that since I’m telling you about real ladies and a real marquis, you may be imagining they were dressed as such, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were disguised as proletarians like everyone else in Barcelona – apart from my father: he has not only refused to give up his usual jacket and tie, but now, ever since the revolution, wears a hat too, when previously he’d never worn anything on his head. “The revolutionary carnival,” as he calls it, makes him furious. Strangely, it is immediately obvious that these people are well-to-do. Perhaps it’s the fact that they exaggerate their proletarian garb and it doesn’t seem quite right, or perhaps it’s the way they walk, move and speak – that is, never like labourers, though they are all disguised as labourers: as if they didn’t suspect that there are other kinds of workers, better-off workers who dress as smartly as the next man. After the ceremony the lady of the house served a snack. A servant – also dressed like a labourer – brought in chairs that he placed in a circle around the guéridon and people chatted. The priest took another look at his watch, said he must be off soon and that in the meantime he would make a start on registering the baptisms. He extracted a book from under his smock, where I discovered he’d been making a note of all the baptisms he’d carried out since the Church has been forced to go underground. He asked the lady of the house for two sheets of uncut paper in order to prepare our certificates. He was only doing his duty, and putting his life in so much danger to boot, but I’d had enough! – this paperwork was out of place, it seemed so much stupid red tape! Then a small detail made me see it differently.

  The priest wrote on Ramonet’s certificate of baptism: “Ramon de Brocà i Milmany, natural child of Lluís de Brocà i Ruscalleda and of Trinitat Milmany i Catassús . . .” You can imagine how the word “natural” seemed like a stab in the back! It made no odds that it was what they had called me; I’m so used to seeing “natural daughter” on my documents . . . I asked them why it couldn’t just be “son”, without going into detail: “No, senyora, we’re obliged to put that.” “But it’s not his fault he is illegitimate, is it?” “He isn’t illegitimate,” the priest replied, as if shocked by that word, and then he told me that “natural” had no pejorative connotations, as if all children were illegitimate apart from adopted offspring, and that natural children became legitimate when their parents married. “Unlike illegitimate ones,” he continued, “who are procreated by parents who can’t marry.” You, as a lawyer, must be laughing at my total ignorance, but I think this must confuse lots of people. “Now, of course,” added the priest, “we all,” and he pointed to the congregation seated on the circle of chairs, “we all hope that as soon as your . . . husband returns to Barcelona, you will make your union legitimate with a proper church marriage.” I realised he thought we’d had a civil wedding and I was quick to tell him we hadn’t, that we weren’t married at all. “As far as we are concerned,” he went on, “it makes no difference whether you are or aren’t. We believe there is no marriage without the sacrament.”

  And what if I told you, Juli, that I agree . . . how could a marriage not be a sacrament? But I couldn’t take it any further; however much I agreed – at least to an extent, though he was blind to it – with much that he was saying, I really didn’t like the priest. His aplomb, his conviction, his energetic expression and gestures . . . the way he continually looked at his watch, making us feel we were wasting his precious time!

  In the meantime the maid had brought in a large tray of toast she left on the guéridon: it was solid silver like the basin he’d used for the baptism; the plates they then handed round were Sèvres china with gold trim. The beautiful crockery contrasted with what was served up on them: small pieces of toast made from thinly sliced rationed bread with thinly spread dripping. They were freshly toasted and warm and the whole gathering said they were delicious.

  “Who’d have thought the time would come,” said one of the ladies, “when we would put dripping on our toast rather than butter.”

  “And we’re lucky to have that,” said another.

  “We received this yesterday,” interjected the lady of the house, “from my brother-in-law via the General Consulate of Great Britain. I don’t know how we would manage without the parcels of groceries he sends us.”

  “A few weeks ago,” added another of the congregation, “we got a dozen tins of corned beef from an uncle in New York, also via the General Consulate – of the United States. Before the war we’d never heard of co
rned beef and if anyone had ever told us such a thing as tinned meat existed we’d have fainted with disgust.”

  “Yet corned beef is so tasty,” sighed the lady of the house. “There were so many delicious things we never suspected the existence of. After the war I think I’ll continue to use dripping instead of butter and corned beef rather than roast beef. I’ve never known anything so tasty!”

  Then they served tea: in Barcelona you can find as much tea as you want because so few people drink it. Sugar has disappeared completely, but the lady of the house had procured several kilos of sugar from London along with the dripping, and the sweet tea tasted so good, as it did when we drank it together! At home I drink as much tea as ever, but without sugar – I think the saccharine some people substitute for sugar is disgusting.

  Toast with dripping and tea with sugar were, of course, special treats – all in honour of this baptism that the assembled ladies apparently considered a historic event. I was reluctant to think it so important. I didn’t believe it was so out of the ordinary and then concluded from the comments they made that they felt it was more a victory than an event. What the young blonde said made me suspect they were interpreting my decision as a sign that I was finally admitting that they were right. When I realised this, it struck me as comic, because I felt as alien in their midst as I might have with a tribe from Papua. When I said how strange it was that there was only one man among so many women, the young blonde looked astonished. “All the men have fled the red zone, didn’t you know, except for Grandfather who has always embodied the spirit of contradiction. Just imagine that when everyone was republican, he was a monarchist and now everyone is —”

  “Now that everyone is fascist,” he countered affably, “I’m still the incorrigible liberal I’ve always been, you mean?”

  And he addressed me with a childlike smile I found quite disarming: “Senyora . . . or senyoreta, since according to the reverend, we can’t accept that you were married if you only had a civil —”

  “Not even that,” I insisted.

  “The reverend has already said that it makes no difference. Can you believe that for the first time in my life I regret not having any talents? Yes, I’ve never been worried by my scant talents. Our Lord gave me some, but now I would like to be as gifted as Stendhal so I could write a novel that I’d entitle Neither the Red nor the Black.”

  “Don’t take any notice . . . Grandfather has always been rather . . . special,” said the young blonde, and I realised she called him “Grand-father” because the marquis was her husband’s grandfather. “Would you believe he even refuses to listen to Radio Sevilla? And if we tell him what we learn from its broadcasts, it leaves him cold.”

  “Whichever side wins, I’m a loser,” he muttered, still smiling at me. Then he looked down, as if afflicted by a sudden wave of melancholy.

  “But, Grandfather, when our boys are risking their lives on the field of battle . . . Don’t you think, senyora,” she added, turning to me, “that in the circumstances within which we’re facing this, indifference is suicidal?”

  When I heard her say “our boys” with reference to the other side and in a tone which took for granted that I was one of “theirs”, I stared in bewilderment at the anarchist’s widow. In effect they’d seated her within their circle of chairs and were giving her dreadfully patronising glances from time to time; she seemed so happy to be there with all those rich ladies, not seeming to grasp any hidden agenda behind what they were saying. She does their housework, I thought, and is happy because for once in her life they’ve allowed her to sit next to them. I understood at once – when she saw I was looking at her, she looked at me with a big smile and misty eyes – that what was making her so happy and so adrift from our conversation was the fact that Ramonet and I had been baptised, and I immediately understood she was worth more than any of us! The priest kept glancing at his watch while taking slices of toast from the tray; the young blonde was excitedly talking about “our boys” and referring to the day – it wasn’t far off, according to her – when they’d be here. I listened to her and thought: who does she think I am? At that point I interrupted her to say I’d been baptised on advice from a “red” officer and I underlined my point by staring her in the eye: “An out-and-out red.”

  She had used that absurd adjective to describe you republican fighters. The marquis gave me an amused, very supportive look, whereas I thought the priest had been stunned by my outburst. In any case the conversation tailed off, the priest took the opportunity to say goodbye, “horrified by how quickly time passes”, the lady of the house accompanied him to the front door and the meeting dispersed.

  There was one final incident: I was going out, holding Ramonet’s hand, and followed by the anarchist’s wife across the passage from the drawing room to the front door, which is so dark and covered by a very thick carpet that I stumbled on the edge of it and fell head over heels.

  When I was back in the street and the fresh air, I felt a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Why should I conceal this from you? It all felt like one big misunderstanding. And left a bad taste in my mouth.

  The only thing that I felt resembled that “supernatural happiness” which books of religion talk about came a few days afterwards when I saw how our baptism shocked my mother. I relished a wicked pleasure quite mercilessly against her and shamelessly confess it now. I even began to suspect that, deep down, I’d decided to take that step more for the joy of annoying her than because of your insistence. The wickedness we hide within us is terrifying.

  13 MAY

  You ask how that conversation went with my mother: “It must have been dramatic,” you say, and as you put it that way . . . Yes, it was, if not worse.

  I now feel I couldn’t live seventeen days in that flat on carrer de l’Hospital where I’d lived the first seventeen years of my life. Her constant presence would make it unbearable: her presence alone is a real dead-weight. I don’t know how to say this: my mother is the kind of person you hear even when they say nothing. They cannot and refuse to be unnoticed. My mother . . . it’s sad when one can’t love one’s own mother! We carry so much wickedness within us, and mine started long ago! I didn’t like her when I was a young child. She always behaved as if she preferred Llibert, which is natural enough: they are so alike . . . They both see the world in the same way, as the most delicious cake they’re not allowed to sink their teeth into; all they worry about is finding some way to get a bite. They are so different from poor Father, who has always regarded the proletariat with such tender good faith. Years ago he was offered the editorship of a commercial magazine: his experience as a journalist on La barrinada would have served him well and he could have earned a decent wage. He refused the opportunity . . . he has no interest in earning a good wage! He wants to live the life of a proletarian; he would never move from that flat on carrer de l’Hospital for a better place, as Llibert now says he should; if Father had to live somewhere else, if they moved him from his beloved flat, it would kill him.

  Yes, I went to the flat. I climbed those stairs that were divided into ramps, joined on each landing and then separated out again: wasted space that could have been used by the flats. With four flats on each landing . . . The walls on the stairs were still flaking, there were more damp patches and more pencil or charcoal scrawls than ever. I remember how you called it “graffiti” and told me it would be valuable if one wanted to study the psychology of the masses. I remember how you’d even started to collect it. You’d see many more now: a few months of war has led to an explosion of political and obscene graffiti. As for that wrought-iron banister which you thought so fantastically baroque, if not a masterpiece, it’s being eaten away by rust since nobody gives it a layer of paint; put your hand on it and it comes off all red. The house is a hundred years old; you must remember the date above the door onto the street: 1837. Romanticism . . . Did they spend all their money on staircases in those days? The banister handrail from the bottom to the second
floor is made of beaten copper and shines like gold: it is the only thing the concierge cleans. Let the copper shine, the rest can go to hell. The steps also mark out sharp class differences: they are marble as far as the first floor, then they’re ordinary tiles with a wooden lip, the tiles and wood worn out by use. A hundred years of feet tramping and stamping up and down . . . So many feet go up and down this staircase, almost as many as walk down the street, for heaven’s sake! Almost as many as walk up and down carrer de l’Hospital, a gorge that’s always flooded with water. And the streams of humanity can be so wretched! Clearly, a hundred years ago the various classes lived in the same buildings and the difference was marked out by the floor. The poorer you were, the closer you lived to heaven. As I remember it, apart from the first floor – with only one door, behind which a doctor has always lived and had his surgery – starting with the second, which had four doors, to the seventh, where we lived, it was all worn out. That kiosk owner is still in the entrance, the same fellow who has really built up his business: as well as newspapers and magazines he now stocks popular fiction, not to sell but to loan out. For ten cèntims he lets you have one for a whole week and he has a lot of local customers. As I walked up, I passed fifty or so people coming down, and I’m not exaggerating, I counted them, forty-nine all told. Apart from the first floor, there are six levels with four flats apiece: 6 × 4 = 24 families. And they’re not small families; ours with only five members is an exception. As I went upstairs I heard Policàrpia screeching, fourth floor first door, she who spends her day arguing through the window with the woman from the fifth floor second door. To think how many years I heard her shouting and hardly noticed; now she’d give me such a migraine my head would explode.