Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  Why do these pitiful memories keep coming back to me? Things you did and said in times that now seem so distant . . . How wan and faded they seem after everything that’s happened and is still happening! After all we’ve seen and lived through, those times we thought so unruly now seem bathed in an aura of peace. You took the Parabellum from that young man for the same reason the civil guards – fantastic marksmen – only hit the ceiling. Will such times ever return?

  15 JUNE

  Now we shall never see such times again, Juli; something has happened in this land to poison it for ever . . . Just so you know: your hopeful, encouraging letter arrived shortly after I heard that Cosme had been murdered. It will soon be a year since this tedious butchery began: could we ever suspect that Cain’s seed has been scattered so widely across this land and is ready to germinate? How often in the past eleven months have we blindly believed the government would put an end to it or had already done so, that the arsonists and murderers would be rendered powerless, that if the war were to continue – that’s bad enough in itself – at least it would be a clean war! Or has there ever been such a thing as a clean war? Are the sacrifices made by the soldiers at the front – on both sides – always condemned to be soiled by crimes in the rearguard? Must we not only crucify Jesus but do so between two thieves? Just so you know: you speak to me of happy times that are approaching, that are perhaps “already palpable”, and of a “beautiful peace” the like of which has never been seen before; you say your heart tells you that you are about to “touch heaven with both hands”, are about to take a decisive step in your life, attain what you always wanted, what you most dreamed of, what you wanted with “all your senses and your soul”. Just so you know: I don’t understand what you mean or what you are referring to, but if you are referring to a time of peace or at least of a clean war – and who knows if a clean war, even a tragic one, might not be more beautiful than peace with all its joy – if this is what your heart is telling you, Juli, then you are mistaken. The Cains are running amok in this world as they always have: last month’s events that were a disaster so raised our hopes but only to dash them.

  The crimes continue despite last month’s events. Sometimes I would like to ignore them and lead a secret, marginal life far from this cruel, incoherent world, but that would be monstrously selfish, wouldn’t it? And even if I did decide to bury myself in my selfishness and indifference, how could I prevent the news reaching me from a world that’s falling apart? The stench of decomposition would penetrate every crack, would pursue me to my bed when I was trying to sleep the sleep of a lethargic animal about to hibernate and be stirred by nobody! It must have been a fortnight ago that I was walking along Pelayo. If only you could see those bright, gleaming shop windows that were once full of goods and are now empty and drab, and the usual thronging crowd that now seems sad and tired and drags its feet . . . And I was dragging mine through the crowd, pulling a whining Ramonet by the hand, because I wanted to buy him new shoes he really needed, though he wanted me to buy an accordion, not new shoes. I could have said I’d buy both and thus deal with his tantrum but I’d decided not to give in to his whims anymore because if I do he’ll become a spoilt brat and I will be to blame. Speaking of shoes, if you only knew how difficult it is to find decent shoes. The ones we get are made from a leathery cardboard that soon wears out and if you want real leather they cost a fortune – and Ramonet gets through them so quickly . . . So I was walking along the pavement on Pelayo dragging a Ramonet who wouldn’t stop whining, feeling miserable and demoralised in that miserable, demoralised crowd, when, lo and behold, a complete stranger stopped me. He was a shortish skinny man I’d have taken for a poorly dressed labourer who’d not eaten for days, but he had the eyes of a defenceless, resigned, generous child – the eyes, my God, of a little old man who’s been abused and only keeps going because of hope that belongs to another world.

  “Aren’t you Trini Milmany?”

  “Yes, if I can be of help?” I replied, not realising who he was.

  “Don’t you remember me? I’m your godfather . . .”

  I couldn’t resist the impulse to kiss him on both cheeks – my godfather, the marquis I’d completely forgotten! He lifted the boy up to give him a kiss and he stopped whining, intrigued by that unknown little old man – he didn’t remember him either – who was showing him such affection in the middle of carrer Pelayo. The poor marquis seemed so upset; his eyes had misted over, the passing crowd never stopped, kept pushing and shoving us while we talked; it was like being hit by pebbles swirling in a stream.

  “Sooner or later the waters will settle,” he told us and his eyes seemed to look far into the distance like the eyes of a blind man, “then you must often come to my house and bring Ramonet, because I’m his godfather too. If I don’t tell you to do that now, if I’m not insisting, it’s because a visit to a house like mine could bring you problems. But one day the victors, whoever they are, will realise that we are perfectly harmless and will allow us to become gradually extinct in the natural way of things . . .”

  Then he vanished again, a poor anonymous old man amid that grey, starving, exhausted crowd flowing down carrer Pelayo as if it were the bed of a stream. Soon after the anarchist’s wife, the one who lives on carrer de l’Arc del Teatre, came to see me in Pedralbes: the marquis had disappeared from his house, his daughter-in-law couldn’t think who to ask when trying to find some trace of him and I was the only “red” who’d come to mind. She’d thought I – poor me! – might be able to help. All I could say was that I’d recently seen him still alive on carrer Pelayo.

  That I might be able to help . . . and in the meantime poor Cosme has been murdered!

  Perhaps I’ve not told you that Cosme had made a drastic break with the people in the union as a result of last month’s events. He said it was playing into the fascists’ hands to rise up against the autonomous government in the present circumstances: something that is blindingly obvious.

  Apparently emboldened by the defeat of the anarchists, an examining magistrate decided to search part of the woods in Penitents, at the foot of Tibidabo, near the Rabassada roadway. Cosme, it seems, wasn’t aware of the crimes his companions had been perpetrating wholesale over the last few months: however strange it may seem, he’s one of many who still know nothing and believe blindly that the sinister times we’ve been suffering are a glorious people’s revolution with not a single shadow to darken its dazzling light. A glorious people’s revolution . . . if I were to tell you, Juli, that if this were true, if all this had really been a revolution by the people, there’d be good reason to hate the people with all our hearts! So much innocent blood, my God . . .

  Pure chance put Cosme in touch with that splendid magistrate and – who’d have thought it! – the labourers had barely begun to dig in the woods when they found a secret grave with two hundred and thirty-six corpses. As they exhumed the bodies, the forensic doctor kept noting that almost all showed signs of having met a violent death, usually a shot in the back of the neck. All Barcelona knew that in those months the anarchists had taken thousands of people for “a ride” to those woods; they took them by car and, once there, killed them from behind even before they could alight. All Barcelona knew of this, except for Cosme and thousands of dreamers like him; this was nothing new, but now a magistrate had appeared and begun an investigation and a printed newssheet was keeping the general public informed about their findings. The majority of the corpses dated back to the first months of the war and it was impossible to identify them unless some form of documentation survived in the pockets of clothes that had half disintegrated, though some bodies were more recent. And my poor marquis was one.

  Cosme kept publishing his reports in La barrinada and for the first time in its life the hapless weekly was selling thousands of copies. Cosme’s articles didn’t contain strings of sonorous adjectives like Father’s, but stark, chilling figures, with exact details, dates and locations. All Barcelona was riveted to the seri
es, and if there’d been elections at the time a wave of popularity would have carried my father, the magistrate, the forensic doctor and Cosme to the highest offices of Catalonia.

  And then Cosme’s body appeared as well a few days ago, on the Rabassada, with a bullet in the head. The magistrate and doctor have crossed the frontier but my father refuses to leave the country: “Better to die in Catalonia than live in a foreign land” – there’s no way he can be made to leave. It’s what the old marquis said, except he said it more gently and simply: “At my age I’d rather live at home than live among strangers . . .” At least I was able to persuade him to come and live in our house. I had to struggle to get him to grasp that he should go underground and suspend publication of La barrinada at least for a few weeks. It was a real struggle to convince him to lie low in my house where his enemies won’t look for him because they don’t know of its existence.

  So there you are, I’ve got Father home, though it won’t be for long because he’s fretting to get back to carrer de l’Hospital and resume publishing La barrinada. He feels he is being a real coward by hiding and not bringing it out.

  Poor Father, he’s barely sixty and already seems as old as the marquis. I’m not at all surprised people call him “old Milmany”. His moustache droops like a limp flag of defeat and his eyes communicate disillusion and fatigue. He now tells me at length in a sad, rather than sarcastic tone about the most recent family upsets: “I told your brother never to set foot in my house again. I would rather not see him. Let him get on with his life and I’ll get on with mine: he’s my son and I’m his father but the best thing would be for neither to know what the other is doing. I’m not sure if you know that he went off to live in a posh first-floor flat on passeig de Gràcia, where he’s been housing a little friend for some time. You may not have heard of her but she’s that Llopis woman who’s a big star on the Paral·lel: Llibert calls her an artiste, an actress, one of the glories of Catalan theatre. Poor old Catalan theatre . . .”

  “So what about his proletarian theatre? Has he given up on that?”

  “Not likely, don’t you know our Llibert? Because the government pays out, we’ve more proletarian theatre than ever: more and more proletarian performances without a single spectator. His Llopis, on the other hand, packs out the Espanyol. He says the queue outside the ticket office goes right round the block. As for the proletariat . . . if I could only tell you, Trini, how disillusioned I am! If I told you everything . . . For appearances’ sake, so nobody can say Llopis isn’t a genuine proletarian, Llibert composes ditties for her to mix into her usual repertoire, songs full of proletarians and bourgeois, hated fascists and libertarian dawns – it’s all there! Together with that risqué number about the flea and other racy routines as old as the hills. And they pack out the Espanyol like sardines in a tin and the place shakes to the standing ovations! The proletariat, Trini

  . . . Hmm . . . When all’s said and done, at least the show in the Espanyol doesn’t cost the taxpayer a cèntim: they make a fortune. The cultural department doesn’t have to subsidise them as it does proletarian opera or theatre for the masses; on the contrary, they rake in taxes galore. From that point of view, no complaints, whatever you may think . . . Some people queue for three hours before the performance starts and they say that on a Saturday night the queue reaches way past carrer de Sant Pau. Of all the little ditties my beloved son has written for Llopis to sing, this must the most moronic:

  Carai, Carai,

  how brave, how brave,

  carai, carai,

  how brave is the F.A.I.¶

  “Llopis actually sings those words?”

  “While lifting the loveliest of legs! And winking at the audience! She’s livewire and saucy with it! And I don’t just say this to put her down, Trini: she is really clever. The history of this revolution will credit her with one of the most famous and apt of comments. One day in August she arrived at the theatre and was met by a committee of usherettes and scene changers, backed by the cleaning ladies and sweet sellers who’d decided to collectivise the place. From then on, they informed Llopis it would be governed by a libertarian communist system and everyone would earn the same from the star actress to the lowliest usherette. “Oh, you don’t say?” she retorted. “So let an usherette bare her bum!”

  Poor Father, he didn’t laugh when he told me that; on the contrary, you could see he was desperately sad. It’s only too obvious that he feels this liaison between Llibert and Llopis is a mésalliance that brings us dishonour: “I know that he and Llopis went through the charade of a civil marriage a few days ago. The fools, what’s a civil marriage got over a religious one? I wasn’t invited; I wouldn’t have gone anyway. It’s the dignity of the partner we choose that honours the union of a man and a woman, not any religious or civil hocus-pocus. Your mother and I may have spent our lives quarrelling and falling out, but she is an honourable woman. Now, by the way, we quarrel more than ever . . . and she did go to the municipal court to see how the lad married!”

  Poor Father, the first day he visited the whole house – he’d not done that yet – he shook his head at the crucifix in our bedroom. “At any rate, I’m glad you’re displaying it when others have been cowardly and hidden theirs away.”

  He looked at it silently, as if he’d had an idea that he finally came out with – as if he were talking to himself. “I’ve always worried about . . . this Jesus of Nazareth . . . Some say he was a kind of anarchist and I believed that once, though it’s not true. It’s not so simple. Jesus of Nazareth . . . The Big Loser . . . the man who carried the cross for all our iniquities and wretchedness, who took on board all our failures . . . He wasn’t simply an anarchist, he was something else I can’t pin down, that I can’t work out.”

  He even reacted benevolently to Lluís’ great-grandfather: “What incredible side whiskers! Those cussed Carlists so liked to exaggerate.”

  He sat in my armchair by the window overlooking the garden: “Your house is really nice; I feel really at home, my love! If you only knew how lonely I have felt in our flat on carrer de l’Hospital in recent months . . . it was a real blow to me when you went all reactionary, you being the only one in the family on my wavelength. I’ve felt so disillusioned, Trini . . . And I don’t just mean your mother and your brother – I mean the lot, this sinister revolutionary carnival we’ve witnessed over the past year. Such a sinister carnival! I could never have predicted this. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that any idea, however good it may be, turns rotten when it becomes too popular.”

  He said this on another day: “Trini, there are moments when I feel so tired, so exhausted, so squeezed dry: I so want to leave this world where it seems you can’t fight one injustice without committing a worse one. I really feel as if I want to say goodbye to you all, to say: I’m leaving, if you want to stay on here . . . You’ll do your best . . . At other times I feel this huge nostalgia for the old days, and not because I want to be young again, not because I miss being in my thirties or forties, no, I couldn’t care less about my youth. It’s water under the bridge! I don’t want to go back there one little bit: I only want you and Llibert to be children once more and our ideals to regain their lost innocence. Our ideals were so beautiful: so beautiful, when nobody had tried to put them into practice! It’s so beautiful to believe in something, to believe wholeheartedly, to believe you’ll never be as happy as when you’re dedicating your life to that faith! And you, when you were children . . . When he was three, Llibert was such fun . . . being able to believe in an ideal, to believe in your children . . . When Llibert was three, he was so lovable: he was such a cheery chappie and said such comic things. When you were little I would take you to Les Planes every Sunday. You know, that was my mass, my way to celebrate Sundays: taking you into the countryside, to the woods in Les Planes. We had such a good time, while your mother stayed in carrer de l’Hospital preparing a good rice dinner! What lovely times we had surrounded by nature in Les Planes! You asked me to tell y
ou stories and fairy tales: I always tried to make sure the tales I told were educational, with some geography or natural history in them, and you two listened so intently! A father is a god in the eyes of his children. Now . . . Llibert . . . Now, how can I still believe in anarchism after all we’ve seen this past year?”

  “Why don’t you believe in Jesus, Father? He’s never disappointed anyone who believed in Him wholeheartedly.”