Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  However, I met Lluís there. So even if the future of the universe wasn’t decided in that diplodocus’ den, the basement of La extremeña, mine was. For better or for worse, God alone knows.

  He was arguing with the other students – I got to the meeting late that day. I immediately sensed that in my eyes this young man was different from you or any of the others. Right then the talk was about pistols – an issue that often cropped up in our conversations. Lluís was examining some that one of the conspirators had brought, saying he didn’t think they were much use. “A Parabellum is what we need,” was his verdict. “A Parabellum?” you said. “You might as well ask for the world!”

  Rumours of a possible military insurrection against the king were gathering pace across the Peninsula and kept us in a constant state of nervous tension. One day it wasn’t simply a rumour: it was the headlines in all the newspapers – a captain in the Foreign Legion had started an insurrection in Jaca.

  Two days later the morning newspapers reported a summary court martial and the execution of that captain and another who’d supported him. We met in permanent session in the diplodocus’ den: we had to raise the stakes, take the university and proclaim the republic. There were heated arguments over which flag to hoist. Each group wanted its own and it was amazing how each group and groupuscule had its flag, whether it was black, red, black and red, red and green, or whatever. I remember at one point you banged your fist on the table and proposed the flag of Baluchistan: “As nobody is familiar with it,” you said, “it will upset nobody. On the other hand,” you added, “given our idiosyncratic ways, if we were in Baluchistan we’d obviously hoist the Catalan flag, but as we are actually in Catalonia that would clearly show deplorably bad taste.”

  In the end the majority voted for the federal flag, because nobody there was specifically a federalist. Then we faced another problem: what was the federal flag exactly? We consulted the diplodocus, the owner of La extremeña, but he didn’t know; he wasn’t a federalist even in those days but a supporter of the unitarians, Castelar and Lerroux. It’s worth saying that very few of us knew what a unitarian republic was either; the diplodocus had only a vague memory and assured us that he’d seen his idol, Don Alejandro, on one occasion with a little Spanish flag in the band of his panama. Finally it was my father who got us out of the impasse: he made a big effort and remembered the flag my grandfather, a lifelong federalist, had kept for ages at the back of a drawer among other faded souvenirs of his youth.

  You gave me the task of sewing that famous federal flag we would hoist over the university. We wanted a large one so it would be seen easily from the university square, and it was a lot of work. I had to use different coloured materials – red, yellow and purple – with a sea blue triangle in one corner. I had to put white stars on this sea blue background to symbolise the federated states. Fresh interminable arguments: how many federated states should there be and thus how many stars? My father didn’t know: he couldn’t remember his father ever speaking to him with any precision on this aspect of federalism – the federalists of his day clearly felt that was a secondary issue. They weren’t bothered about who should be in the federation; the object was to federate, though they probably didn’t know what that meant either. We had to go back yet again to our diplodocus. The owner of La extremeña shrugged his shoulders: it was the first time he’d ever heard any talk of federated states and he barely understood when we tried to explain the concept to him.

  How many stars should we put on the flag – four, seven or fifteen?

  “Better have too many than miss any out,” you said. “Put a good couple of dozen and everything will be fine: keep everybody happy.”

  The stars also had to be big so passers-by could see them from carrer Pelayo and Ronda Sant Antoni and you and Lluís came to my place to lend a hand: we cut them out from sugar paper, a whole sheet for each star, and glued them on with thick floury paste. When we laid it out on the floor for the glue to dry it took up the whole dining room and a section even made it into the passageway.

  The morning came when we’d decided to make our mark on history; you wrapped the flag round your waist and put an overcoat on top. You looked a rare sight! So as not to attract attention we went to the university in a big gang, hiding you in our midst but making fun of you. Our companions were already there, mounting a barricade with paving stones from the square. The passers-by took no notice; it was the traditional time of year for students to erect barricades and demand longer Christmas holidays. There were only two or three pairs of police from that era, the so-called Security Police, men of a venerable age armed only with swords who merely stood and watched the students erecting their barricade with pavement stones. Now, when I remember the Security Police under the monarchy with their anachronistic swords and large grey moustaches, looking as if they’d all fathered large families, when I recall their blue uniforms and helmets, so like firemen, so good-humoured, gentle and henpecked and think of the horrors we’ve seen since . . .

  When we walked through the groups erecting the barricade, they knew what we were planning and applauded and shouted: “Visca la república!” It was at that point that a respectable gentleman who happened to be walking by stopped and asked: “Hey, lads, are you by any chance proclaiming the republic? I thought you were asking for longer holidays as per usual for this time of year.”

  “Yes, sir,” someone replied, “we are proclaiming the republic, but ours will be an orderly republic.”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” retorted the fellow sarcastically. “You students and the Foreign Legion will give us a sensible republic of the sort that’s rarely been seen before.”

  Without wasting any time, we crossed the lobby between the huge plaster statues of Ramon Llull and I don’t know who else and on to the law courtyard with you still in our midst. We climbed the stairs and entered the library. We were supposed to be meeting some of our people there who were pretending to read enormous reference books: in the meantime while the librarian was yawning, which was most of the time, their task was to find out which of the small doors concealed in the library led to the winding staircase up to the roof with the flagpole. None of us had ever been on the roof: all we knew or thought we knew was that the door in question was one of the ones hidden among the shelves of the university library.

  The university library . . . how little we went there! When I remember it now, the first thing that springs to mind is how it reeked of damp, of mouldy, worm-eaten paper and stale air. The rare occasions we set foot inside were to look up the odd word in the Espasa Encyclopaedia since its tomes were the few that were easily accessible. If you ever wanted anything that wasn’t the Espasa Encyclopaedia or Cèsar Cantú’s Universal History, you had to go into the office of the librarian who would give you an astonished, withering look. We called him “little old man” because that was what he was; he spent hours in his cramped, shabby office, that was more like a cave, reading scabrous works from the eighteenth century. He hated being disturbed when carrying out his exhaustive, erudite research into erotic literature in the Age of the Enlightenment, as his reading of Mirabeau, the Marquis de Sade, Diderot, Cholderlos de Laclos and other fathers of the French Revolution filled file after file that he kept in old cardboard shoe boxes; with the patience of a Benedictine monk he was preparing a monumental monograph on a subject that was as risqué as it was dog-eared. He took no interest in anything else: it was usually a waste of time to ask him for a book because he would never have found it – only a minute section of books was catalogued.

  I understand the library was mainly set up with books from monasteries that were suppressed in 1835. They were salvaged from arson attacks of the time or were those that well-meaning citizens picked up in the middle of the street while the monasteries were going up in flames and then brought to the university. They included so many tomes of theology and the lives of saints, so many books written by friars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that nobody reads and nobod
y is interested in nowadays. Tens of thousands of dead, fossilised books filling shelf after shelf and quietly turning into dust thanks to ravenous woodworm and an indifferent sex-obsessed librarian.

  There are so many of these books – collected in huge quantities from monasteries in the era of Mendizábal – that they don’t fit in the university and are beginning to invade bookshelves in the secondary school. There they fill a big inner yard covered by a huge skylight, a three-storey well the sides of which are lined by books of parchment that give off an intense stench of damp wood, fungi and mildew. I rarely dream, but in one that I had years ago I dreamed I was in freefall down a bottomless “well of books” . . . You and Lluís went to Jesuit secondary school and never saw the inside of that place. I should also tell you that the ground floor of that inner yard, where the dust and stale air are at their rankest, is where we students at the school had our gym lessons; it was there we did our breathing exercises. What made the place even gloomier was the skeleton they’d placed on the left as you went in, the genuine item articulated with wire so it stood up: the class was about giving us notions of anatomy as well as gym and breathing exercises.

  Why am I telling you all this? Why did I get sidetracked into recalling the university library and the gym class at secondary school? I’m always reminiscing about the old days and flitting from one thing to another, as if I were adrift. I sit still in my armchair, staring blankly into space, unable to concentrate on anything, as if my memories were dancing a sarabande before my eyes – trivial memories of no interest, with no logic to them, of dead things from long ago that are meaningless except to me, and that’s if I’m lucky!

  I was telling you about the day we hoisted the flag and were in the library searching for the concealed door that leads to the winding staircase. Our companions whose task it was to find it got it wrong: they pointed us to one that wasn’t the one we wanted. By the time we’d realised it was too late to turn back, we were already on the roof. That little door led us to interminably winding stairs that didn’t go straight to the flagpole but to another side of the huge roof. From where we came out we could see the flagpole behind an expanse of tiles that looked like a mountain peak we now had to crawl towards.

  Lluís went first, then me, with you in the rear. We crawled cat-like in single file, and the tiles creaked under our hands and knees. It might have been dangerous but I insisted on accompanying you: it seemed too exciting and too glorious an adventure for me to miss. You didn’t want me to. I’d quarrelled violently with Lluís in the library – whispering! I’d stubbornly followed you despite your protests and now, with the three of us on the roof, was no time to argue. Lluís told me to hold on to his foot, you supported me with your free hand and we made our way over the roof.

  “Anyone flying across the sky would think we were two tomcats after a she-cat in January,” you quipped.

  That roof was never-ending and suddenly we started hearing pistol shots in the square. We later learned it was our people firing those two pistols, the only ones they had – that Lluís had inspected in the basement and were next to useless. The Security Police didn’t return fire because they only carried swords, but we later discovered they’d been replaced by the civil guard, because the students were firing pistols. That happened as we were crawling over the roof, making the tiles shift, and couldn’t see anything; the burst of gunfire took us by surprise since we’d agreed there’d be no shooting. When Lluís heard the reports, he turned round and told me to go home, that my place wasn’t there; he was furious but I refused, I wanted to follow you and do whatever you did! I was so excited and thought it all so wonderful and the gunfire made it even more so. Lluís got increasingly exasperated in that dangerous situation, crawling along and stretching a foot out for me to cling to, he turned round to speak to me, to insult me, calling me a crybaby and a bore, and chucking in a few really nasty obscenities. While he and I argued, you’d gone on ahead, unravelled the flag from round your waist, climbed on to the small metal platform at the foot of the huge flagpole and were fiddling with the rope. Poor Juli, you couldn’t work it out, you’re clumsy, hopeless with your hands; and soon you were in a fine pickle with the double rope on the flagpole. Lluís came to help and as the rope had got entangled near the pulley he was forced to stand on the platform railing and hang on to the pole to disentangle it. You in turn climbed up to help him. You draped the flag over some tiles and I sat on top to ensure a gust of wind didn’t blow it away.

  Sitting on the flag I poked my head over the stone battlements. You were so engrossed in trying to fathom how the rope and pulley worked you didn’t give me a glance. My head hovered over the void and the square looked strange from up there: the centre was empty, without trams or cars; the barricade erected by our companions was on one side and the civil guards on the opposite, by the Ronda Sant Antoni.

  I had no doubt it was the civil guard; I had a perfect view of their three-cornered patent-leather hats. “Clear off!” shouted Lluís. “Give us the flag and scram!” But I was fascinated by the contingent of civil guards. Our people, from behind the barricade, kept shooting their two pistols sporadically and the civil guards stood to attention on the pavement of the Ronda and didn’t react. An officer had spotted us: he was looking through his binoculars while gesturing with his free hand to another next to him, as if pointing out what you were doing. You finally managed to slip the flag on the rope and hoist it. It billowed like a sail in the wind and gallantly flapped its paper stars. You were still standing on the rail, clinging to different sides of the pole; the civil guard sharpshooters could have easily picked you two off, but they still stood to attention with their hands clasped over the ends of their rifles, the butts resting on the ground, while their officer observed us through his binoculars and gesticulated to his colleague.

  We retraced our steps over tiles that clattered even more as we descended. When we were crossing the library – the invisible librarian must have been in his lair reading the Marquis de Sade – we met some companions who were waiting impatiently for us.

  “Did everything go O.K.?”

  “The flag is flapping in the wind,” you replied. “Such a wonderful flag! Everybody will think it’s the flag of the United States.”

  “We’ve got a can of oil,” they replied, “but don’t know what to do with it. We ought to start a fire somewhere.”

  “As we’re in the library,” you suggested, “why don’t we start it right here? We couldn’t find a better place. It will burn like dry tinder.”

  You were already on your way to the shelves with the Espasa Encyclopaedia when Lluís, beside himself, swore at you, called you an irresponsible savage and other coarse names, grabbed the can and gave you a shove. You shrugged: “If all that had gone up in flames,” you retorted, pointing at the shelves with the Espasa Encyclopaedia and César Cantú’s history book, “do you think it would have been a great loss?”

  “Let’s go to the rector’s wing,” said one student.

  “To the great hall,” suggested another. “There’s that large oil painting of the king wearing the habits of the Order of Calatrava.”

  “We could light a bonfire on the square under the noses of the civil guards,” rasped Lluís. “We could throw on the king and whatever other junk we find in the great hall and the rector’s wing.”

  The stairs to the great hall were already packed with people. They were carrying a big beam they’d found God knows where that they were now using as a battering ram to smash open the doors. Ten or twelve were holding it and to build up momentum they chanted: “One, two, three, go!”

  The robust double doors creaked, shook and shuddered at each attack and the hinges and bolt began to give. One door collapsed quite unexpectedly and the ramming was at such a rate that soon they all crashed to the ground. The great hall was ours! At the back, above the directorate’s dais, Alfonso XIII was smiling at us mischievously, impeccable in his snow-white garb.

  “Let’s put him on trial!”
went up the shout.

  The hall filled in a flash as people flooded in. A court area was set up and the magistrates donned their disguise of robes and birettas someone had found in a wardrobe in the secretariat.

  “Let Soleràs be the prosecutor!” went up another shout.