by Joan Sales
How easily we become addicted to calm and quiet, white walls, space, and a few items of individually chosen furniture! That heap of ridiculous furniture, umbrella stands, sideboards, dressing tables, chairs with cardboard imitation-leather seats lining the passageway ready to trip you up . . . I think the sense of tawdry comes not from a lack but, like a sense of luxury, from excess: perhaps tawdriness and luxury are twin brothers . . . That same flat would look quite different not by adding but by removing things: throwing out the dark-red wallpaper, the print of Pi i Margall in his Phrygian cap, half the chairs, the umbrella stand and in particular that ugly light, that gaslight which has been adapted to electricity and hangs from the ceiling above the dining-room table threatening to singe all who eat there.
Father wasn’t home. Mother said he rarely was nowadays – in order to avoid arguments with Llibert. It turns out that Llibert wants to move them to a first floor flat on the passeig de Gràcia, which has, of course, been confiscated from its owner: when he heard him, father was so incensed he hit the roof: “I’d die of shame,” was his response; mother says that they quarrelled violently. Obviously, this is now the best of all possible worlds for Llibert ever since he’d got his first taste. Father threw at him everything that’s been happening over recent months: the murders, the burned churches, the many harmless citizens who’ve been hunted down like rabid dogs. Llibert listened with a condescending smile: “There will always be rejects unable to adapt to the new circumstances,” was his single comment, “eternal rejects or resentful failures.” Father was beside himself and told him to leave and never set foot in the house again. Mother had to struggle to pacify them, at least on the surface, establishing truces that could only last as balancing acts, avoiding the issues that might lead to the next flare-up.
She and I were in the back gallery that looks over the inner courtyard. You’ve never seen this part of my parents’ flat because they don’t want strangers to go there; it’s where my grandmother lives. My paternal grandmother, Trini, after whom I’m named. She says when I was born they couldn’t decide between Vida or Alegría; Vida would have been horrific, don’t you think? But Alegría wouldn’t have been as bad, although, poor me, it wouldn’t have been very apt . . . As they couldn’t make their minds up, Father finally opted for his mother’s name, Trini, in her honour.
Grandmother is stuck in her invalid chair, from where she can see the courtyard, which is deep and narrow – just imagine, six floors! – shared by four buildings as down-at-heel as ours. The air gets stale and, apart from the summer months, is dark, heavy and damp as river water; it always reeks of enclosed spaces, a bedroom that’s never aired; and you can always hear the neighbours shouting and arguing from one window to another. The gallery opposite had several potted plants with large leaves that were a dismal dark green and between the plants were a parrot on its perch and a monkey on a chain. For so many years this has been my grandmother’s universe. A parrot and a monkey that quarrel; the monkey plays a thousand and one tricks on the parrot, who squawks in response.
For how long? I don’t know. I don’t remember ever seeing her different. She hardly speaks; she expresses herself with inarticulate sounds. Some days she doesn’t recognise a soul, not even my father, her son. We talk in front of her as if she were a newborn babe.
My mother and I spoke a lot that day. Most conversations in Barcelona centre on the problems of rationing. It’s a topic that makes me despair, since talking about it resolves nothing and it seems absurd to prolong our obsession with hunger this way. It would be better to distract ourselves by speaking of other things. I told her about our baptism.
She shut up and looked at me as if I’d gone mad. After a lengthy pause she came out with this gem: “How sinister and how stupid!”
“Why ‘stupid’?” I asked. “Why on earth ‘sinister’?”
“Dogma . . .” she replied, pulling a face.
And I recalled how she’d pulled exactly the same face and said “dogma . . .” the day I told her about the poor village priest on the waste ground behind our house. I told her how I’d found the corpse and the old man was wearing such a worn, patched soutane, how he seemed so old, and said I was sick of the way the authorities were doing nothing. Then she grimaced and said: “Bah, dogma!” That was her only comment on the murder of the old priest.
“So you’ve joined the bigots, have you?” she added after a sarcastic lull. “Does it make you happy to be with the blue-bloods? I suppose you did it to spite me: you know only too well that few things upset me as much. In my family we’ve no memories of anyone yielding to the yoke; my grandfather joined the uprising in 1835, my father the one in 1875 – at the time of the First Republic – I was in the middle of the Setmana Tràgica.”
“And following the hallowed tradition Llibert was part of last year’s turmoil,” I replied. “Mother, I’m not a traditionalist like you and Llibert.”
“A traditionalist? The Carlists are traditionalists!” she shouted angrily. “They are the traditionalists, the holy water birds, the sacristy rats who chew hosts by the handful!”
And all too predictably she came out with that nonsense about the nuns buried alive “with their fists chained”. I can’t think how often I’ve heard her rehearse that nonsense and how often Father told her not to tell it again because it was completely untrue. When convents were burning in the Setmana Tràgica, the arsonists happily disinterred monks and nuns, as they did last summer. In one ancient convent they found vertical niches; evidently that convent buried its nuns standing up. This led to the idea that they were buried alive; generally, their arms were folded over their chests and there was a small chain in their fists. According to my father, a doctor went to look and after a careful examination deduced that those little chains were the last traces of their rosary beads; as the beads were wooden, they’d disintegrated over the centuries and only the chains remained. But neither my father nor all the doctors in the world could dispel my mother’s conviction that monks and nuns perpetrate frightful crimes inside enclosed orders.
I have the impression that when you and Lluís revolted against bourgeois prejudices you had no idea of the extent of the proletarian variety. She’s not only shocked by our baptisms, she’s also shocked by the secrétaire I bought the other day, and even more so by great-grandfather with the side whiskers and beret. That’s why she lambasted the “traditionalists”. She could have alleged it was dangerous to have Carlist grandparents, but that wasn’t what was driving her: she found the Isabel II secrétaire and the grandfather with a red beret “terribly old-fashioned”. Rather than the secrétaire she would prefer me to have an umbrella stand like hers, one of those with a mirror and brass hooks for hanging hats on and a glazed pot where you leave umbrellas. I can’t tell you how alien I felt, and not just because of the umbrella stand, naturally. Or even her rude comments on our baptisms; she was at the end of her tether and at that point we don’t know what we’re saying. She said some really insulting things I’d rather not transcribe, but that’s not the point either. My feeling of alienation from her dates back much further, to my childhood. It’s sad when one doesn’t love one’s mother, but however far back I go I don’t think I ever have . . .
You ask me, as if you’re shocked, why I didn’t mention even in passing the events of last week, whether we in Pedralbes hadn’t noticed what happened. I said nothing because I didn’t want to depress you; I didn’t mention it to Lluís either. It’s much better if you at the front don’t find out about the shameful things happening at home. And because I was also loath to write about unpleasant things nobody will ever understand – really horrible things! Maybe it’s selfish of me but I simply didn’t want to know. There were moments when I just wanted to shut myself inside my house and think only of Ramonet and Lluís – and you as well, of course – and only of my own life and detach myself from the lunatic world around us. And we can do nothing to change the situation . . . It was another bloody battle like the one last July; they
say five hundred were killed. Yes, we spent a few nasty days crammed in caves in Vallvidrera with other families that fled from Pedralbes. In Pedralbes we could hear the din of distant gun and cannon fire in the city centre and didn’t know what was going on; then shells started to fall on our neighbourhood and we hadn’t a clue who was dropping them. Some neighbours – the ones who always know everything – said a fascist warship was aiming at us to make the situation in Barcelona even more frightful; then we discovered it wasn’t true, it was the anarchists. They’d got hold of a big mortar and were firing it without knowing how to aim. Other neighbours said they had acquaintances who owned a mansion in Vallvidrera and who, at the beginning of the war, had had caves dug out of the side of the mountain in their garden so they could take refuge during bombing raids: if we wanted to go, there’d be room and we’d be very welcome. I was reluctant to leave our house to go and live in a cave but at that very moment one of those big mortar shells dropped on the waste ground behind our house, at the spot where we’d found the old murdered priest. It was such a big explosion it shattered all our windows and that made my mind up for me. All three of us went off to Vallvidrera, the maid, the boy and myself.
We lived four or five days in those caves. I didn’t know what to do to feed Ramonet and the maid; Barcelona was hell once again. I had moments when I was furious with the maid – the poor girl, an extra mouth to feed when Ramonet was problem enough. Why do you need a maid, I asked myself, when you’re reduced to leading the life of a caveman? But I couldn’t get rid of her: she comes from a village in Galicia and her whole family lived in fascist territory; I couldn’t possibly tell her to go home! The nights were cold and damp in the caves and it was hard sleeping on the ground. I told myself that Lluís must always sleep like that, on the ground and under the open sky. Poor Lluís, I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t to blame, if I’d not been understanding enough, and not just once. We crave to be understood in order to be forgiven . . . But why am I telling you this? You too must be sleeping any way you can, without even a cave to protect you from the cold of night. What a long war this is! Now that it has calmed down in Barcelona, it’s difficult to grasp what happened. It was all the fault of anarchists: it’s always the anarchists. Everyone is fed up with the anarchists, and what if I told you that no-one is more disgruntled than my father?
15 MAY
After those days in the Vallvidrera caves I sometimes awake in the morning with the feeling that it’s wonderful to be home in this soft, warm bed, in this spacious, cheerful house. It’s like when I woke up full of wonder at being a Christian . . .
Yes, I would wake up full of wonder at being a Christian, and that was before we’d been baptised. I felt I was a Christian, I felt it with all my soul when I awoke, yet what did being a Christian mean? Will I still feel like one when the Church leaves the catacombs? Will I recognise Jesus under all the disguises they will inevitably give Him? It was so easy to recognise Him in those July and August days, when they carried Him in rags, with His crown of thorns and His face covered in blood and spittle, on the way to the Camp de la Bóta or the Rabassada roadway to finish Him off with a pistol shot. How can one not feel full of compassion for Him when He’s been bearing the cross of all our suffering down every road in the world? We would prefer to flee Him and take the most out-of-the-way track, the one that will lead us furthest from Him, but we will always find traces of His footsteps!
Lluís is incapable of suspecting that I am a Christian but you noticed straightaway! Yes, you soon realised I could no longer stand the emptiness: I needed to believe. “There is a kind of optimism that is simply the unawareness of vegetables,” you once told me in a comment on the incredible self-confidence of some atheists.
We were talking about total atheists, who are very rare; I’ve hardly known any, except for Llibert – and even then I wouldn’t put my hand in the fire: who knows what he’s hiding within himself? What do we really know about other people if we hardly know ourselves? Why does my mother, who thinks she is such a complete atheist, get so uptight talking about religion? How could we hate something if we didn’t believe in it, if we didn’t believe in some way, however peculiarly?
That was before I got to know Lluís, meaning before December 1930. You and I went on endless walks along the Rambla and the streets and back alleys of old Barcelona; we used to buy two wholemeal rolls in a vegetarian shop at the bottom of the Rambla and two chunks of Mahon cheese in another. Window upon window of things to eat to suit every taste! We would walk up the Rambla eating wholemeal rolls that we’d finish before we reached Canaletes where we drank cider at the kiosk. I remember that mixture of flavours, wholemeal bread and cheese and cool, sharp cider, the taste of our strolls together. I remember that as if I could taste it now, as if I’d just eaten one of those rolls and slices of Mahon cheese and had drunk one of those large glasses of cider they sold at the kiosk on Canaletes. Will these good things ever return? By this time I’d joined the Ladies’ Sports Club and some mornings, when I had a free hour between classes, I’d escape for a swim in the Sant Sebastià pool. Why didn’t you like me doing that? I never understood why you didn’t, and I still can’t. What was wrong with that? Besides, what business of yours was it? Every December they’d hold that competition they called the cross-harbour race. I participated for the first time in 1930, very soon after which there was that big commotion in the university when I met Lluís. At the time, I hadn’t yet met him.
It makes me feel so strange when I now write “I hadn’t yet met him” in relation to Lluís! As if it was absurd, rather than impossible, that I’d not known him for ever.
While swimming I didn’t feel the cold because we greased our bodies before venturing across the harbour, then we removed the grease with a boiling hot shower. After the race we still had time to get to our last class. I bumped into you arguing with a group of students in front of the entrance to the university. You were holding forth on the rumours that had been circulating for days of a military insurrection to proclaim a republic and other heady developments so exciting that I didn’t go to my class. I stayed and argued with you. I was standing quietly in the middle of the street and you noticed I was shivering; then I told you I’d just swum across the harbour.
“Are you crazy?” you said. “You crossed the harbour? In mid December?”
I burst out laughing and told you the race was really terrific and talked to you enthusiastically about the lad who’d won the race in the morning, “a big, broad-shouldered lad who with every stroke surged . . .” You wouldn’t let me finish! “Is that what you admire? Brute strength?” No, I didn’t admire brute strength, and never have, but I’ve always loved the spectacle of a powerful swimmer cutting through the water like a dolphin. The more I tried to explain myself, the more irritated you became. Why did you find it so annoying that I liked swimming and admired those who swam better than me?
You are very intelligent, Juli: I’ve always said so and don’t regret saying it again. But you’ve always been rather peculiar in ways that – how can I put it? – I find disconcerting. On that occasion you left me completely dumbfounded over why you were so bothered by my participation in the cross-harbour race and my enthusiasm for the style of that champion swimmer. Some time later, when I’d forgotten the episode, you told me your aunt didn’t let you swim in the sea even though you spent your summers on her estate by the coast, and that was why you didn’t know how to swim. At the time I thought you’d been troubled by the fact that I admired a talent in someone else which you didn’t possess: isn’t yours a rather childish attitude? Can we all be good at everything? You have the most prized talent – intelligence: how could you envy someone else for a talent so puny next to yours?
You are very intelligent, Juli, the most intelligent person I’ve ever known. It would be stupid to compare you to that swimming champion: you are so superior to him. That champion who was wonderful in the water when they pulled him out was simply a poor boy who couldn’t string a sentenc
e together. Wasn’t that another reason to admire him when he was swimming, as it was the only grace he possessed? Juli, you are very intelligent, but sometimes, I’m sorry to say, you act as if you’re not.
Quite the opposite of Lluís’ uncle, who isn’t brainy but sometimes acts as if he were! A few hours after we met he’d guessed I was a Christian – when Lluís still suspected nothing! I can now tell you about all that and not worry I might be compromising him; I’d refrained from doing so until now for fear my letters might fall into the wrong hands. I’ve finally been notified via the International Red Cross that he is in Italy and out of danger after a long odyssey through the woods in the Guilleries, where he lived in hiding with others. Now I can tell you that I finally met this famous uncle whom Lluís always referred to so sarcastically. I can do so, knowing what I know, because he hid in our house for weeks: he is a lovely person.
Lluís has this very curious tendency to take a dislike to those who only wish him well: like me, for example. Because his uncle does love him and much more than he realises.
It was the end of October and three months since you and Lluís had left Barcelona: he’d gone to the Madrid front and you to Aragon. One Saturday morning the maid came to tell me that a militiaman from a patrol wanted to talk to me. I went to the front door: in effect, a short, round-faced stranger stood there with a worker’s cap pulled down over his eyes and a red and black scarf partially covering his face. He was wearing rope sandals and threadbare clothes.