by Joan Sales
And you talked to me about your childhood, quite unawares, obsessively. You told me about your aunt for the first time; I didn’t know who you lived with, if indeed you lived with anyone. Then I discovered you were an orphan, had never known your mother or father, that you’d always been with a maiden aunt, your father’s sister who, with you, was the only surviving member of the whole Soleràs family. That evening you spoke so animatedly of your aunt, so enthusiastically and so unexpectedly! You’ve never spoken to me as you did that day. It was a damp November evening and we could see the pious old ladies entering the cathedral to take candles to the Holy Christ of Lepanto and others who were leaving after they’d finished their prayers. You spoke to me passionately – yes, there was real passion in your voice – of your maiden aunt, about whom you’ve only spoken since sarcastically or ironically, another great devotee of that Christ who even at the time had a blood-curdling impact on me.
It makes me think – since to this day I’ve still not met this aunt of yours – that you were bewitched by her as a child; it’s the only word that comes to mind when I remember you talking that evening. You said that as a child you lived for the never-ending fantastic stories she invented; that you were never so happy in those distant days as when you had the flu because each bout meant she would tell you stories for hours, keeping you company. Even today, you said, the word “happiness” conjured up a state of flu without much of a temperature and time spent blissfully in bed: “I’ve never met,” you said, “anybody with so much imagination: her imagination had expanded in all directions like a monster at the expense of other aptitudes as if it had flattened them. I only needed a slight temperature and I knew what joy awaited me: the abolition of reality! Yes, reality was abolished with the whiff of the first mallow root infusion she forced me to drink; the medicine came with the most incredible stories she made up non-stop. Later, as an adult, when I heard about opium and its effects for the first time, I could only imagine the stuff in the form of icing sugar, since my aunt sweetened her ineffable infusions with icing sugar.”
While you talked about your aunt, the pile of La barrinada that we’d put on the stone bench next to us got wetter and wetter in the drizzle. You were telling me how throughout your childhood you felt you’d lived all there was to live via your aunt’s stories, from caveman to martyr in the catacombs, from Knight Templar to hero of La Vendée: “Naturally,” you explained, “my aunt was on the side of La Vendée.” And then you added: “What a pity we are anarchists! We could have revived La Vendée or even the Templars. I’ve often suspected that all the evil in the world comes from the suppression of the Knights Templar. In any case we’d have had much more fun pretending to be clandestine Templars rather than anarchists. The fact is that reactionaries have incomparably greater imaginations, and besides the past is their preserve. On the other hand, as the future is pure non-existence, they leave it to people with no imaginations. Yes, Trini, you need lots of imagination to be a reactionary and that’s why there are so few of them: my aunt is the only person I’ve known who can really claim to be one.”
At the time I was always left dumbfounded by your boutades. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone speak positively about reactionaries; I mean, the first time I’d heard them spoken about as real living people – how could they have ever existed if they were like the horrors I’d been told about?
“Godfrey de Bouillon,” you went on, “could be mistaken for a Jacobin in comparison. Just so you know: he is almost as familiar to me as she is – my aunt tells you about Godfrey de Bouillon as if he were the only man in her life.”
You and I talked about our childhoods ironically and complaisantly as if they were far behind us: you were seventeen and I fourteen. We seemed so blasé when you said that evening: “One day we will be so ashamed to have been seventeen.” “Why?” I asked, taken aback. “Because it’s a foolish age. Just imagine, we are the people of the future! Pure non-existence! We are nothing, yet we’ve betrayed ourselves a thousand times.” “How exactly did we do that?” “Once, when we were chatting after lunch, my aunt said it was a pity I’d grown up, since we were both so happy when I was five – and we will never be again, my aunt assured me. At the time I was annoyed by her outburst: how on earth could she want me not to grow up? Well, Trini, I’ve thought about it often since and the idea doesn’t seem so horrendous: my aunt was right. Like Jesus Christ.”
“Like Jesus Christ?”
“Yes, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ and my aunt. Wasn’t it Jesus Christ who said: ‘Do as these children do and you will enter the kingdom of heaven’? You know, Trini, I’ve often thought about that strange remark my aunt made that day after lunch and the more I do the clearer it becomes. And I’m telling you now because I’m in the right mood. I probably won’t mention it again, not because it’s not on my mind but because I won’t feel like it. I’ll never tell my aunt, for example, though it would make her happy and take no effort on my part. On the other hand, what’s the point in my seeing things so clearly if there’s nothing we can do about them? Where’s the brave man who can take the spirit of childhood on board if those of us who see it so clearly can’t, don’t know how to and don’t want to? Perhaps the saints could, but not even all of them . . . Now we’re always swearing that we’ll never betray or deny our youth, that we will always remain faithful to it, but what if we’ve already betrayed and denied our childhood? So why won’t we betray and deny our youth when the time comes? The great betrayal is already a fact of life; the cock has still to crow and we’ve already denied Him three times.”
But for now, Juli, I implore you: don’t stir up any more memories of childhood! It’s a subject that fills me with grief, though I couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps because of what I just wrote, because I see children these days and feel saddened that our childhood was so peaceful by comparison; or perhaps because of what you said the other evening, that we’ve already betrayed and denied it at the age of seventeen, so from then on we are the loathsome thing known as a grown-up. I simply have to tell you that I’ve never met anyone so able to be at one with a child, to act like a child when with one: you find it so easy to keep Ramonet amused, to put yourself on his level and enter the mysterious, illogical world of children ruled by laws so different from ours. He listens to you all agog when you spin him one story after another and then he tells me I don’t know how, and it’s true mine aren’t much fun. Will you believe me if I say I have bought myself an Art of Storytelling, written by a distinguished pedagogue, so they say, and that I’ve read every word intently? But isn’t it pathetic when we have to learn rules in order to practise an art: art should be like love, if it’s not instinctive, nobody can teach you. “Do as these children do . . .” In a nutshell, that’s the art of storytelling, I’m sure, but it’s so difficult!
10 SEPTEMBER
Your letter arrived so opportunely that it now seems providential.
This morning the postman left me a letter from Lluís, franked in Sierra Calva. The most loving letter he has ever written me and he ends it by asking me to marry him.
I felt happy, like someone who’s just won a battle her life depended on. I’m such a dupe!
The postman returned at midday. Your letter stunned me.
I had to close the bedroom door so my little boy couldn’t see me. I stretched out on my bed, hid my face in a pillow and tried to cry. Impossible. I felt horribly dry.
Now I feel empty, but at least I’m calm. Dry and empty, but calm. Your letter came to my rescue in time and I am so grateful. What would it be like now if we’d married? And yet you still ask if you did the right thing by telling me.
I’m so lucky not to be tied to Lluís for ever! Could I love him more than I did? What a dreadful man not to repay love with love! Could I have needed him more than I did, or given him more than I did? Poor Juli, you’ve spared me such a cross – one of those crosses that crush you under the weight of your own absurdity.
From now on I will simply see
him as my son’s father; that aside, he will be a stranger as far as I’m concerned. Once a month I’ll send him a short, polite letter with news of his son, who by chance also happens to be mine. By chance, that’s all! And Ramonet will always be a “natural son” at the end of the day, like his mother, and that’s no tragedy. It’s never been one for me, so why should it be for him?
I couldn’t find the words to express the affection I feel for you right now. If it weren’t for you I would feel so alone in this world, so terribly alone, that I might end up in a lunatic asylum; loneliness scares me, I can’t handle it. If anyone saw me now, they’d think: “What a desiccated, spinsterish face . . . that’s a woman who doesn’t know what love is!” I know what my face looks like: I’ve spent a long time gazing at myself in the mirror.
12 SEPTEMBER
The arguments you deploy to demonstrate that I am free to marry anyone I like seemed odd on the page. Of course I am free! Why are you telling me this? Do you think I don’t know? It’s my only consolation. Clearly, I’m single. Why remind me?
I’m single, completely free; nothing ties me to him. That’s my stroke of luck in the midst of unhappiness, and thanks to it I don’t feel crushed by the absurdity of the situation I find myself in. But think of marrying someone else? Such an idea is eccentric at the very least, I would say. Marry whom? I’m not interested in Lluís, and even less interested in other men: who might that be? Such a stupid idea never crossed my mind. Why would I want to give Ramonet a stepfather?
I’ve lived for years ingenuously with the expectation that someday Lluís and I will sort out our relationship and become husband and wife in the eyes of God and men; now I couldn’t care less. Nothing in this life is worth worrying about. Do I have a right to lament the absurdities in my own life after the horrors we have lived through, are still living through, and may live through for months if not years? A country that has burned and bled, so many families destroyed, so many innocents sacrificed on both sides? Am I going to create a drama because Lluís is having an affair? God may punish me but I can tell you sincerely, Juli, that I’m more grateful to you than ever for helping me open my eyes to another life in which the frightful nonsense of this one can never get in. I’ll always keep on my desk the Gospels you gave me as a present years before the war: the bookmark is still where you left it. I only need open it at that page to find the words you underlined in red. “If I don’t follow You, whom will I follow?” I followed Lluís and you can see where that led me, can’t you, poor Juli!
If Lluís had died at the front, do you think I’d have wanted to marry someone else? You know me well enough to anticipate the answer is no. At any rate I beg you by all that’s most holy not to tell him any of what I write to you; don’t tell him how upset I am. Don’t try to repair what’s beyond repair. I don’t want him to know I feel so unhappy; a woman who’s been deceived is doubly ridiculous if she is unhappy. And I don’t want to be that in his eyes! I don’t want to have to put up with more of his shit! Yes, shit – why not call it by its proper name? I’m no Daughter of Maria! I’m the natural daughter of anarchists who practise free love! I won’t stand for any more of his shit, but marry somebody else? The very idea is . . . appalling.
15 SEPTEMBER
Your letter, just received, made me cry and I couldn’t tell you if the tears were sad or happy, or something else. “A serene, trusting love, a brother and sister’s love”. Is such a thing possible? I think it’s absolutely necessary to have you at my side as always, my only friend and true brother, to have you there as usual and, if you’d like, even more often. I think this is natural and imperative. But, poor Juli, if we were to take it a step further, wouldn’t that be . . . incestuous?
I’m sorry, I have always thought of you as a brother!
If you could also imagine the bad taste the thing they call love has left in me: a murky storm where faces become blurred and cease to be human to atone for the crime of becoming too intimate . . .
I’ve made various plans over the last four or five days: I will resume the studies I interrupted – my beloved geology – and will ask for a teaching job. I’ve already put out feelers; the science faculty is offering me the post that Maria Engràcia Bosch held, of assistant to the chair in crystallography: you can imagine how her decision to go and live on that farm has helped me. They’ll turn a blind eye to the fact that I’ve not yet passed my final degree examinations and that crystallography isn’t exactly a specialism of mine. They can’t be choosy in times of war when there is such a shortage of teachers! I’d written to Maria Engràcia – I didn’t want to fill her position without her express agreement – and must start at the beginning of next month when the new academic year begins, that is, in twenty or so days. And your letter caught me in the throes of re-adapting, leafing through thick tomes I’d almost forgotten existed, learned treatises gathering dust on a library shelf from where they’d never budged since Lluís and I started living together in this Pedralbes mansion.
At one stage in my life I came to hate them, when I suddenly thought this chasm in time was senseless. Now, on the contrary, I find them a consoling sedative: our petty domestic disputes, our absurdly ridiculous chagrins de ménage are so petty on this scale. If our poor bones by some extraordinary stroke of luck managed to fossilise instead of turning into minute specks of dust blowing in the wind, they would be so puny resting under layers of sediment four or five kilometres thick . . .
If a teacher of geology like me discovers a few petrified bones in a hundred million years – the last traces of me and Lluís – how will she guess, or what the hell will it matter to her, whether we were unhappy or blissful, exemplary in our faithfulness or ghastly in our adultery? In a hundred million years how will that geology teacher imagine my life with Lluís – or what will it matter to her?
Such thoughts are hardly consoling, you will say: they are certainly not cheerful, but what can we do about it? Sorry if I’m boring you with my geology – I know it’s never interested you – but I’m up to my neck in it at the moment.
I would like to be completely independent from Lluís, to have my own means and manage to be a single mother, with all the consequences – and satisfaction – that brings. A single mother who doesn’t need to depend on her son’s father and can walk head held high through this world, and you can only hold your head high if you are independent. I will be.
My only hesitation concerns this house. He made it over to Ramonet and me as a gift before a notary: should I now renounce his gift, return his mansion to him and spit in his face: I want nothing from you? But that way won’t I hurt Ramonet – who is not to blame in any way. Wouldn’t I be acting blinded by a pride that is never good counsel? Isn’t it just and right I keep it as compensation for all the wrong he’s done me over the years? I’d like you with your law degree to give me advice: could I, for example, in my turn give my share to my son – who is his only son and the only grandson of his deceased mother, from whom we inherited this property. That would quieten my conscience. Perhaps I could – you must tell me – hold my share in reserve as usufruct: I’m due some right to shelter. I would really appreciate your advice: I will certainly do whatever you tell me; you see, with respect to the house in Pedralbes, whatever you decide is the right and just thing to do.
As for the other . . . about you and me marrying . . . your other suggestion . . . my God, where would that land us? I’m afraid we would both lose out; we would ruin our friendship, that’s now long-lived – I was fourteen when I met you and I’m now almost twenty-two. This friendship that has sustained me and still does, and that ensures I don’t feel alone without a helping hand in this world. Alone without a helping hand! Obviously, I have Ramonet, but as I’ve told you before, what companionship can a child give? Children can’t keep us company; they only crave it from us.
I try to imagine our friendship as transformed into something else . . . and fail. I’m sorry, Juli; perhaps you are offended by my saying this, but I feel your
suggestion is absurd because of the very things I admire in you. You are too intelligent and love is a jungle. A couple of wild animals howling on the edge of a precipice.
The thought horrifies me.
When I think of the hand you flourish so expressively in debate or conversation but which can’t hold on to anything – it is too white and too contorted – and then of that hand holding mine, I want to run from it, as if from something unnatural and monstrous. I owe it to you to be frank. I would like to love you with all my soul, but only with my soul. Yet I think loving you with my soul and nothing else wouldn’t amount to love, and there’d be no merit in such a love because it would have come too easily. And then I think I do love you more than this, and lose sight of myself.
Or who knows if I’m not woman enough, am too childish and too old like fruit that doesn’t ripen, green in the morning and rotten in the evening! I am afraid that the hurt Lluís has done may have marked me for life. He did so from the first day, from the time he hugged and kissed me on the corner seat on that fifth-floor landing. That first kiss was a brutal revelation, however much my happiness made me lose my senses. Yes, a brutal revelation: he hurt me from that first day and has kept on ever since! His scandalous affair with the feudal lady in Olivel, “the most beautiful, romantic woman in Aragon”, as you said in your letter, really amounted to very little: it was an explosion of light that suddenly made me see all this. In its merciless brilliance I saw and suddenly grasped that he’d never loved me or I him, that what I loved in him was his youth, his strength, his dash and his sensuality – everything I now find repugnant.