by Joan Sales
I want to tell you something I’ve never told you. To lower my opinion of you, when he was talking about you Lluís often came out with details . . . things you’d said or done that at the very least were very peculiar. Even now, in one of the few letters he’s written to me since he joined your brigade, he has told me other odd things . . . I recall him mentioning a cave where he says you read some book or other about Charlemagne or maybe Roland . . . and other really weird and wonderful things I couldn’t fathom. I never bothered to try and discover the extent to which the things Lluís wrote were true, since they involved you . . . and involved him! When he’s not making mischief, it’s only on account of inertia.
I do know for sure that you have always behaved well towards me and that you always will: I know you won’t hurt me. I’m horrified by the thought I might be left all alone in this life – a stray with nobody to keep me company. I need you and I trust you; that sums up my feelings towards you and I’ll entrust myself to them. You decide: I will do whatever you tell me.
On the other hand you love Ramonet so dearly . . . I’m certain you will never be a stepfather. Yesterday we started on the last crate of El Pagès tinned milk. Would you believe that I’ve kept all the empty ones as souvenirs? I’d thought of keeping them forever in memory of these difficult times; the poor things get in the way . . . Someday they will have to go into the fire, but I’d like to wait for a day when you are here. Then I’ll burn them all at once – these poor crates that are always around to remind me of your kindness. The way things are going, who knows if, by the time they are crackling cheerfully in the flames, who knows if we might not both be sitting in these armchairs by the fireside – you and I, husband and wife?
Who knows . . . ?
I can tell you one heartfelt thing: I’m moved to discover all of a sudden that you are so much more sensitive and kind than I’d ever imagined. Your silence over all these years . . .
* An imaginary backbone that was supposed to bring on laziness, invented by Joan Amades, an apothecary in Barcelona, who also thought up the necessary healing ointment.
† Marià Colomer i Parès (1743–1831), a painter from the town of Vic.
‡ La Soli: Solidaridad Obrera, the newspaper of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, C.N.T., the main anarcho-syndicalist union.
§ The barbers – and bakers – of Barcelona were organised in anarchist unions. The reference to chains also harks back to the early nineteenth-century cry of “Vivan las cadenas!” of the clerical-led anti-liberal crowds who wanted to keep their chains.
|| Mussa the Moor (640–716) was the Yemeni general who led the Ummayyad invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, rapidly conquering cities from Sevilla to Lleida.
¶ F.A.I., the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, the far left of the Spanish anarchist movement, in favour of collectivisation and revolutionary general strikes; membership went from individual pacifists to the pistoleros who killed many clergy and bourgeois.
PART THREE
His uncle, who was a bishop, was
surprised that he wasted his time
on astronomy.
VITA COPERNICI
I
Personally I realised, when it was too late, that God had decided to teach me a stern lesson. People like me are never careful enough; when we think we have covered our fault lines, the subtlest still remains: self-love. We risk mistaking our innermost frailties for virtuous impulses; we assume every summons comes from Holy Grace and think we are acting like angels sent by Providence when in truth we are flying straight to perdition.
When, oh when, will we ever grasp this truth: that we should hope for no company other than God’s in the wilderness of this world? Solitude is our daily bread, and it comes freshly baked.
In the seminary Dr Gallifa once said we don’t face our worst temptation while young, as most people imagine, but when we cross the frontier of our fifties. That is when we plumb the depths of solitude; when our hearts begin to harden and we long for a tenderness we have never known; dearth of love is the most painful burden we must bear in that exile. Nothing weighs as heavily upon us as that emptiness.
A cup of lemon verbena by the fireside when the November wind scatters the dead leaves and a scent of damp earth wafts in from the garden, a cup of lemon verbena by the fireside, exchanged glances of silent understanding . . . My God, release me from my guilty longings!
Monsenyor Pinell de Bray lived in Paris, but he would come and stay in Barcelona, in my aunt’s mansion. He was a bishop in partibus, I think for Samarkand; I remember him as if it were yesterday, slinking between the Louis XV furniture in the drawing room with the elegant indolence of an angora cat. Tall and thin, his snow-white hair underlined youthful tanned features, where his eyes smouldered like embers beneath the ash. At the time he adopted the condescending tone used to address a boy who has finally reached the age of reason; I was twelve – when my aunt had given me that telescope to celebrate my top marks – and some of his veiled, velvety sentences, full of vague references to things I didn’t understand, made me think of passages from the Apocalypse that I’d just read for the first time. My aunt listened to him as if he were an oracle.
In effect, Monsenyor Pinell de Bray was the family oracle; my aunt, a first cousin of his, always presented him as an example to follow. I felt proud to belong to a family Heaven had endowed with such an illustrious man.
It’s as if I could see him now in that gloomy, hushed drawing room where gilded furniture glinted, flanked by tawdry red-velvet curtains; as if I could see him now, so slim and ascetic, with that humble, restrained smile, hear his voice deep and silken like the bass notes of a muted grand piano. It was 1931. I am now reminded of some of his expressions: the prior catastrophe, the re-establishment of the Kingdom of God . . . He made veiled allusions to the mysterious visitors he welcomed in his elegant apartment on the Champs Elysées, though I never grasped what lay behind those riddles. I was too young; my aunt, who had good reason to grasp much more, sometimes took fright: “But you’re exposing yourself to real danger . . .” He’d smile gently, as self-deprecatingly as always: “It is only right that we should risk our life for a good cause.” He sometimes referred to our cardinal primate in unctuously pitiless terms: “A moron, a spineless character . . .” and occasionally spoke openly of the need to restrict his activities. But I was naïve and continued to be so for quite some time.
I now know that the atrocities committed in His name are infinitely worse than the atrocities committed against His name.
When I’d finished my studies I went to live in an industrial slum overlooked by the grey mass of the Rexy Mura factory. At night its four hundred windows, a hundred per façade, seemed like so many eyes scrutinising every centimetre of the wretched slum where hovels sprawled. The fortune of Sr Creus – which he insisted must be pronounced Kroitz – was an offspring of the catastrophe. The remarkable change in the way his name was pronounced wasn’t an isolated case in that era; I should add that he didn’t renounce Kroitz and return to Creus until the end of 1945. According to him, another genealogist – genealogists struck it rich in those years – had carried out fresh, more penetrating research into that business and just as the 1939 specimen had plumped – with precipitate hindsight – for German forebears, the new genealogist in the last weeks of 1945 was rather drawn to the hypothesis that Creus might mean something like Cruces in Castilian, and that it wasn’t impossible, but in fact highly probable – declared the genealogist – that Sr Creus was descended from Godfrey de Bouillon in person.
He’d owned a factory pre-war, but it was little more than an engineering workshop with fifty or so workers, like hundreds of others in Barcelona. Without the turmoil he could never have scaled his present heights – not even in his dreams. In 1936 he was forced to flee abroad like so many: he hasn’t forgotten and will never forget that for almost three years his factory, adapted to the needs of war, worked for the reds, as he likes to put it. It wasn’t collectivised by
the anarchists, and the autonomous government ensured it continued to function during the maelstrom. When he returned from abroad, Sr Creus or Kroitz – he would maintain the latter pronunciation until the end of 1945, I’ll remind you – discovered it was fitted with the latest Skoda machinery and that four building extensions had been made; he had no scruples appropriating such unexpected improvements. No sooner was he back in the managing director’s chair than he took his first decision – to offer substantial shares in Rexy Mura to three or four individuals whose sense of strategy and tactics had enabled them to straddle the crossroads between official and black-market prices. In the wake of the catastrophe, what better reward than to be able to buy at rock-bottom official prices and sell on at your asking price? It was wonderfully simple, as all miracles are; Sr Creus had no need to over-exercise his brain to lead his firm, now much enhanced by Czechoslovakian equipment, on to ever dizzier heights.
Not forgetting the stunning publicity: advertisements for Rexy Mura sprang up everywhere as if by magic. Immense, amazing, fantastic, multi-coloured billboards: the great, indispensable Llibert Milmany had waded in. He was the one to suggest that the business could be expanded via the manufacture of chemical products for the embellishment of ladies; later he recognised that the new era also made it possible to make a profit by prettifying gentlemen. Brilliant comrade Llibert Milmany – more of a comrade than ever in those new times – was quick to adapt all the tricks he’d learned organising war propaganda to the fresh set of circumstances. Barcelona had never forgotten those “Make tanks, tanks, tanks” posters and so many others worthy of being remembered for ever. A brilliant comrade! The Rexy Mura advertisements re-created their brio but were bigger, flashier and more categorical: “No more bald pates!” “Axe excess fluff!” “Look after your armpits!”
To show his gratitude to Divine Providence, Sr Creus decided to dedicate his factory to the Sacred Heart. What’s more, he decided to make the Sacred Heart a shareholder. As such a unique beneficiary couldn’t attend meetings or accept bank dividend payouts, it was agreed that Monsenyor Pinell de Bray should act as its representative. My relative blessed the factory and showered the Czechoslovakian machinery with holy water. From then on there was a stream of soirées and receptions in the Creus family castle, because – I should add – they now lived in a Gothic castle that had been sumptuously renovated. This family, whose roots were so deeply Catalan, now went by the name of Kroitz and spoke only Castilian. Sr Kroitz staged the most dazzling of parties on the occasion of his entry into the Order of the Holy Sepulchre: ennoblement was all the rage.
Glossy magazines published photographs of a party that became the talk of the town; I’ve kept some I look at from time to time to remind myself that it wasn’t simply a dream. Sr and Sra Creus appear in one surrounded by their guests, all wearing grotesque paper cornets and blowing fairground trumpets, splitting their sides evidently under the influence of copious intakes of alcohol. Nothing was prized as much as frivolous excess in that period of emaciation and poverty for the majority, and the saddest side of such events, given that they were held to honour the Holy Sepulchre, was the occasional attendance of a cardinal from Rome at the ceremony to present a sword to a new knight or a sash to a new lady. No cardinal from Rome attended the party for the Kroitzes; they had to be content with Monsenyor Pinell de Bray, but the frivolous behaviour was blatant; they say that in the course of the soirée a young or middle-aged couple would discreetly disappear and then only resurface in the drawing room after a lengthy absence. All I know is that subsequent to this famous soirée, each time Sra Creus hosted a party she locked all the bedroom doors in the castle by way of precaution: in spite of everything, the poor lady still clung to some of her pre-war principles. I should also say that the Creus couple had a daughter who was about fifteen at the time. When it was her birthday at the beginning of summer, they threw an open-air party in the castle grounds. The climax of the party was undoubtedly the “mock joust” when guests bombarded one another with cream or custard éclairs rather than confetti and streamers. The idea, so the gossip went, was the brainchild of publicity ace Llibert Milmany; apparently he wanted to use the furore to get Rexy Mura into the headlines because he was sure the credit ratings of Sr Creus and his company would soar, boosted by a cream pastry bacchanalia that in the circumstances beggared belief. The whole of Barcelona wanted to know what had gone on; it monopolised the news for several days and even La Soli felt duty-bound to denounce it.*
I had rarely seen the Creuses’ daughter because the family didn’t usually go to mass in the church near the shanty town. I’d only conversed with her once and been shocked, almost dumbfounded, by her absolute ignorance of what had happened in the country over the previous years. She’d no idea what life was like in Catalonia before the war; and when I tried to explain she’d look at me as if I were telling her a story about some lunatic asylum. Once, when I tried to explain to her that everyone used to eat bread, and that anyone could buy it at any bakery without needing a ration card or to queue, she looked at me, shook her head in astonishment, and exclaimed – in Castilian as always – “How frightfully disorderly!”
Twenty years on it may seem that I’ve invented this; not at all, it is her reaction verbatim. I don’t think she was an idiot; she thought it very chic to be blasé about everything that wasn’t her own self, and believed that to be so was the last word in femininity: “Agh, politics!” she’d groan and grimace: as far as she was concerned, “politics” meant everything that wasn’t fun. Her group of friends acted likewise and they weren’t at all feminine, as soon became clear. The life this young girl led was as hollow as it was frenzied, always with the same group of friends who drove her to all manner of stupid entertainment at lunatic speeds.
One afternoon she turned up at the rectory most unexpectedly. She seemed in a state of shock.
She looked at me and said nothing. “Well?” I said. Two tears rolled down from her motionless eyes; she didn’t blink and her face was blank.
“Mummy wants to take me to a doctor she can trust . . . I’ve run away from home!”
After that outburst, her eyes became horribly dry again and silence fell.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered, “You’re attractive, enormously wealthy. I don’t see why he wouldn’t want to . . .”
“There are seven,” and she laughed nervously as she stared at me hard. “Seven.”
She laughed mechanically; her hands shook and kept shaking; her horribly dry eyes kept staring at me and that nervous laugh made her wriggle as if someone was tickling the soles of her feet.
I promised to see Sra Creus and dissuade her from taking such a criminal path. But an hour later they had gone abroad in her mother’s huge Cadillac, accompanied by the doctor.
A few months after, the extravagant parties resumed in the castle. The news that she’d married Llibert Milmany completely stunned me. He had had his previous civil marriage to an artiste from the Paral·lel annulled without difficulty. In those years, civil marriages were thought not to have happened in any real sense and many who weren’t bachelors remarried on the excuse that a merely civil tie had no legal standing. This scandalous situation lasted a long time. The great Llibert Milmany made the most of it to rid himself of the embarrassing burlesque singer and dancer who was an obstacle in his climb to the top.
I now live in a mountain village with fewer than two hundred inhabitants.
I fled the shanty towns. I’m a coward. Monsenyor Pinell de Bray was very clear about that: “He’ll get over his infatuation with slums soon enough.” Even so, I owe my victory over my aunt to the Monsenyor. Auntie . . . when did I begin to be repelled by her? I have only hazy memories of my mother; I was four when I went to live with Auntie – and I can detect instinctive repulsion even in my earliest memories. When I was nine or ten they started to be tinged with admiration. It was a complex, morbid feeling, like those aroused by a mummified saint. She was always engaged in pious works: at the t
ime she’d concentrated her efforts on Help for Ecclesiastical Vocations, usually known by its acronym H.E.V. After lunch she’d explain to her illustrious cousin the workings of this institution, of which she was the factotum. “How admirable,” exclaimed the bishop in partibus as he held his tiny coffee cup under his nose so he might inhale the intense aroma: Auntie was apt to serve strong coffee which we drank from cups that were more like thimbles. Monsenyor sipped slowly, holding the handle between his index finger and thumb while ostentatiously lifting his little finger. After a meal he would hiccup and with each hiccup he lifted a handkerchief of the finest cambric to his mouth. He did everything with exquisite elegance, with refined manners that belonged to another age: he’d say “pardon” after each hiccup and the conversation would resume:
“How admirable . . . The H.E.V. is a most holy work, if ever there was one.”
After Auntie had given me that portable telescope – I’d managed three outstanding passes in my second year at secondary school and the instrument was my reward – I’d spend a couple of hours every night on her mansion’s terrace watching the moon and the planets. When Monsenyor found out, he cracked a little joke: “Luckily the boy will get over it,” he said. “Nobody has made a career out of staring at the moon.” And leaving this childish tomfoolery of mine, he would return to H.E.V. and the “holy work” being undertaken by Auntie; she had started it, she was quick to emphasise, not out of any love for children but out of love for her Creator. “I know that some seminarists we give grants to will be unworthy, but that doesn’t matter; I do it for the sake of God.” Which God, which God, oh my God, if not the one she’d forged in her own imagination, one to her liking, one that was simply an unconscious idealisation of herself? “This is holy work,” our illustrious relative insisted. Auntie lowered her eyes and blushed. She produced figures and yet more figures: statistics of parishes without priests, slums without priests. She knew the yearly percentages of ecclesiastical vocations in every bishopric in Catalonia, percentages that kept going down by the year – this she attributed to the dastardly influence of the republic, however much earlier the continuous decline may have begun.