by Joan Sales
“Nobody’s coming forward,” the Monsenyor reiterated, ecstatically inhaling the aroma from his thimble of a cup. “Vocations are indeed on the wane.”
H.E.V. had small posters put up throughout the city reminding people of the lack of vocations and asking for gifts to create scholarships to help poor seminarists. To this end Auntie organised so many collecting tables, so many charity tombolas! One of her favourite strategies consisted in dressing plainly and knocking on the doors of the grandest mansions in Sarrià; if the maid didn’t recognise her, the trick worked: “Tell your mistress that a poor woman is asking for alms, but would like to see her in person.” The mistress would appear, immediately recognise her, and the outcome was moving and edifying.
After my twelfth birthday she granted me the honour of helping in her “works”. I typed up hundreds and thousands of addresses. Auntie sent out an incredible number of letters, circulars and prospectuses, forever driven by her obsession with the dearth of curates and priests. It distressed her greatly and she communicated her anxiety to me. At times I would feel so miserable thinking about the souls that weren’t being saved because of this shortage of priests and curates; I couldn’t imagine how the damnation of a soul could be someone else’s fault – a knotty problem. In any case, Auntie’s mistake wasn’t to pose it as such, the problem being real enough, but to imagine that she’d found such an easy and straightforward solution. As far as she was concerned, a soul was lost because of the absence of a mossèn to look after it in the same way that we might miss a train because nobody was in the ticket office to sell us a ticket. Auntie would have judged it unthinkable to slip on to a train without a ticket, on the sly. But how many must have beguiled their way through – starting with Dismas, the first to successfully jump the gate!
As she found it unthinkable for anyone to get on the train in such a “vulgar” manner, it was all about buying a ticket in time, so she needed lots of employees to sell them. She understood that there were first-, second- and third-class tickets, and as one who underlined her patronising attitude towards the poor with a saccharine smile and a wealth of diminutives she would even have gone so far as to create a fourth class of passenger: “We must provide facilities,” she’d often say, to buy tickets for the train that did the Earth-to-Heaven run. When every kind of facility was available, when every slum had its priest and every village its curate, it was the devil’s work that accounted for people missing the train.
The admiration I then felt for her pioneering activities had finally erased the instinctive repulsion she’d aroused in me as a young child. Among her many properties, Auntie owned a house divided into flats on carrer Balmes near the Diagonal. We thought the concierge there was exemplary; she was pious and deferential, and often came to visit us in Sarrià. She had a son not much older than me and brought him along one day to tell us that he was entering the seminary: in fact with a H.E.V. scholarship. Deeply moved, Auntie wrapped her arms around him: “You have chosen the most worthy path, even the angels will envy you . . .” I witnessed that tender scene; Auntie even wept as she embraced the concierge’s son.
I couldn’t sleep that night: her tears, the concierge’s excitement and the boy’s blissful expression kept going round in my head. The idea came to me all of a sudden, naturally – I felt extremely ashamed I’d not thought of it before – that I’d not been worthy of such an aunt! I couldn’t get to sleep and impatiently waited for day to break. My aunt has always been an early riser.
She looked at me taken aback: “What’s got into you?” She hadn’t had time to comb her hair; I was hoping she’d take me in her arms like the concierge’s son and that her tears would meld into mine.
“But . . .” she looked disconcerted, “we must talk about this later. I don’t think you’re seeing things at all in the proper light.”
Soon after Monsenyor Pinell de Bray came from Paris and stayed with us a while.
“Our boy wants to become a priest,” Auntie told him, “a priest in the slums . . .”
She gave her voice that indulgent tone she often liked to adopt, the same saccharine sweet inflection she used when speaking to the poor while feigning an interest in their little household and children. O Eternal God, you could so bring us to account for our cloying diminutives and condescension!
Monsenyor Pinell de Bray looked at me as though he found the idea amusing, if perplexing.
“We need to talk this through,” Auntie said, “and, of course, not in his presence.”
I felt irritated. I wasn’t crazy; why had she told the bishop in partibus of my decision in that ironic, pitying tone? I stood behind the door; I wanted to listen to their conversation. It was the Monsenyor’s velvety, sinuous voice: “Some down-and-out priests do well; I know one, the son of the Duke of Albi’s sharecroppers, who is now a canon in Tarragona. He’ll get over his infatuation with slums in time, like the telescope. It’s adolescent nonsense. He has plenty of time for second thoughts before he finishes at school. His idea isn’t as peculiar as you think; most of our serving bishops come from the lay clergy and not religious orders . . .”
At that time a bishop in partibus was more distinguished than one in a real post, because most of the latter had in effect risen from the ranks of “down-and-out priests” as Monsenyor said. However, I didn’t feel at all inclined to “do well”; the very expression appalled me. I kept listening behind the door: “I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: the boy’s idea isn’t as peculiar as you imagine. A secular priest can retain his wealth since he doesn’t have to pledge himself to poverty; on the other hand, if he becomes a Jesuit, as you’d prefer —”
“Some things are more important than wealth,” Auntie interrupted. “Look at me: I’m giving everything to the poor.”
•
And, as you see, God steeped me in solitude. I had no friends until war broke out; until I met Soleràs. I had lots of companions but I was desperate to have a friend, not friends but a friend. Not really knowing why or how, I found myself enlisted in the army of Catalonia before I was twenty. I’d gone to a hospital to give blood in those terrible July days in 1936; I was a nurse, then an auxiliary, and one fine day I was allotted to a brigade in the 30th Division as a medical adjutant. Once at the front I felt happy, and why not? It was a regular brigade, militarised from the start, and the ideas and feelings around were in essence similar to mine – those people were congenial, why shouldn’t I have liked them? Weren’t they my brothers? Later I was often asked if I hadn’t been aware that, while we were at the front, in the rearguard they were burning churches and beating priests to death. Of course we knew, it was impossible not to; at the time we didn’t know the incredible extent of the killings during that summer, but we did know they were going on. We were only too aware of it, but reasoned that if there’d been a plague epidemic we wouldn’t have abandoned our country. We were trapped between two lines of fire and knew that was the reality.
When I’ve been asked so often since what I was doing with the “reds”, when I’ve asked myself the very same question – yes, I have sometimes wondered why, and even did so during the war – I’ve always come out with the same reply: I had no choice. Beyond all the ridiculous ideological excuses, there was a geographical divide; for the vast majority – of which I was one – who knew nothing about politics, there was that and perhaps little else. We were republicans because the zone where we happened to be, where we were born, was republican; if we’d been born in the other zone, we’d have belonged to the opposite camp. There were certainly people who went from one to the other and vice versa; I myself – as I’ll explain – almost did so, like Soleràs and so many others, but by and large everyone simply followed the flags of the geographical area where they happened to be living. That was so for the bulk of the population and that’s probably how it is in all wars; anyway, I can say that if anyone was ashamed of the arson, killing, and absolute disorder in the republican rearguard, we were more ashamed than most. Strictly speaking I c
an say this only for our brigade, the only one I knew in any depth. And I should add that, on occasion, especially at the beginning, there was talk of organising a march on Barcelona with the other regular brigades in order to crush the anarchist gangs ravaging the country. Someday someone will elucidate the murky and mysterious ways of anarchism: all we know right now is that they did exactly what was necessary for the war to be lost.
At the beginning, just after I’d joined up, I remember officers and brigadiers talking openly about a coup that the odd general and various colonels were apparently planning in order to sweep the streets of Barcelona clean of arsonists, thieves and murderers. The names of distinguished soldiers, Guarner, Farràs, Escofet, filtered down even to us subordinate officers and everyone else who might have been in favour of such a thing. But that couldn’t have happened without endangering the front.
I remember a meeting of officers in our brigade almost at the very beginning of the war in which Soleràs spoke. Some raised a serious objection against the supporters of the “march on Barcelona”: the fascists would walk through the gaping hole we would open up. With his razor-sharp mind, which made him so many enemies because people found it irritating, he prophesied that if we allowed the rearguard “to fuck up” we would lose the war: they cut him off in full flow and warned him that an officer could not speak in such defeatist terms, that defeatism in an officer warranted the death penalty. Exasperated by this interruption he strode out, slamming the door behind him and shouting: “You can all go to fucking hell!”
He was a strange, brusque young man at once repellent and attractive. I felt a kinship with him from this time when he spoke so lucidly and courageously, and because he displayed a combination of courage and eccentricity. The oddest stories were told about him and a legend was thus forged around him within the brigade. He liked to wallow in contradiction and disconcert people: just as he’d been the most strident supporter of military action against the anarchists – “An army which doesn’t feel defended by its rearguard cannot possible win,” he’d said – he also came out with the most amazing apologies for anarchism, “the only serious attempt to transform the world into that huge creel of crabs we all crave”. Depending on the phase of the moon, he could defend the most contrary ideas; many people thought he was incoherent when in fact he was the most intelligent person I’ve ever known.
He took no notice of me. He wasn’t avoiding me, it was worse: it seemed he wasn’t even aware I existed. One day, I talked to him about that meeting of officers in order to express my support for what he’d said; I told him I suspected that devious provocateurs were at work among the leaders of the murderous gangs terrorising Barcelona. This was no vague conjecture on my part since I’d met Lamoneda: I’ll say more about him one day. Soleràs cut me off: “That’s all so obvious. One shouldn’t waste one’s breath on things that are self-evident.”
My attempts to speak to him in a more personal fashion also failed, for yet again he stopped me in my tracks: “We’ve all got aunties desperate for us to go over to the other side.”
He once threw this remark in my face that he was to repeat several times: “Every nephew has the aunt he deserves.”
Our aunts, his and mine, had nothing or almost nothing in common. He felt genuine affection towards his, however much he concealed it behind his sarcasm, whereas I have always felt repelled by mine. Despite his barbs I retained my feelings of sympathy towards Soleràs; his cynicism didn’t win out. I guessed he was a loner consumed by secret anguish: was he a Catholic? At most, a cynical Catholic; religious truths assumed the most surprising shapes on his lips, often the most exasperating ones.
When he was stripped of his rank of machine-gun lieutenant because of odd behaviour in the course of a battle – I won’t go into that now – I went to see him and express my unflinching friendship.
I did so with all my naïveté at the time; I thought he might need me, now that he’d been demoted – Lluís hadn’t yet joined our brigade. I imagined that a few soothing drops of balsam on the wound his demotion had inflicted might be welcome; now, many years later, I find it strange that we could at the time think of the loss of a second lieutenant’s stripes as so important – he was a second lieutenant though his post was a full lieutenant’s – stripes that were replaced by an adjutant’s, the immediately inferior rank. But the fact was that after a few months at war we’d so assimilated the military spirit that a drop in rank seemed unbearably humiliating. After he lost rank, some people turned their backs on him whenever they saw him.
I found him one day in the brigade’s supplies store, sitting on a sack between crates of tinned milk and sacks of rice and chickpeas, engrossed in a tome that he was reading.
“Sit down,” he said curtly. “I was just thinking about you, as you are our medical adjutant. You ought to be able to describe to me the exact symptoms of gonorrhoea.”
His eternal nonsense . . . but it was totally unexpected and I almost burst into tears, because I am so meek . . .
“Don’t take it like that, for heaven’s sake. I’m not referring to myself. I have Casanova in mind. You may have heard of him? Casanova de Seingalt: a professional Venetian. His memoirs have got me really worried. To believe him, he was cured of the clap as easily as he caught it. Now, is that possible?”
“In the eighteenth century, that would have been nothing short of a miracle.”
“A miracle! It would be fantastic to be cured of the clap like that, but Casanova was an adept of Voltaire, so we should discount the miracle hypothesis.”
“I didn’t come here to talk to you about Casanova.”
“Perhaps you came to bore me to tears with politics?”
At the time people were still always talking politics in the brigade; there was so much political talk everyone quickly became sick to death of it – this was just before Lluís arrived. We finally settled down to fight a war, “since we’d joined the dance”, without giving ourselves any more political headaches. Soleràs was the first to weary of political harangues; he often poured scorn on the speeches the radio was constantly spewing or that reached the front via the newspapers.
“Here you see,” he pointed to the sack of chickpeas, “how I am heroically waging war on the fascists, I mean, the baddies. We scream: ‘Death to the fascists!’ They scream: ‘Death to the reds!’ We are both saying the same thing: ‘Death to the baddies!’ Everybody is against the baddies; everybody everywhere is rooting for the goodies. My God, it’s so boring! Does nobody on the planet have the slightest imagination? But the worst side to wars is the fact they’re turned into novels; at the end of this war – and I assure you it’s a war that’s as shitty as any – novels will be written that are especially stupid, as sentimental and risqué as they come: they’ll have wonderfully courageous young heroes and wonderfully buxom little angels. I don’t mean you, Cruells; you’ll not be stricken by one of these tomes. But foreigners . . . It’s a pity you don’t believe in my gifts as a prophet; I could tell you, for example, that foreigners will turn this huge mess into stirring stories of bullfighters and gypsies.”
“Bullfighters? I’ve never heard mention of any, so far as I know . . .”
“Right, poor Cruells: a bullfighter has never been sighted in the army, let alone a gypsy, but foreigners have a good nose for business. Business is business, as all foreigners say, and time is money; if a novel with a Spanish theme is going to succeed, the hero just has to be a bullfighter and the heroine a gypsy and by the third chapter they must be fornicating in a tropical jungle full of wild bulls; anything else is a waste of time and time is money. Foreigners are idiots; I know what I’m talking about because I’ve travelled. The world would be a better place if there weren’t so many foreigners.”
“What have you got against foreigners?”
He looked at me as if my question astonished him: “What I find most annoying,” his bass voice droned on, “is the thought that I too am a foreigner. That’s the first thing you learn when you tra
vel. The first time that a government official addressed me as a foreigner – I was in the former kingdom of Saxony – I was on the point of punching him as if he’d insulted me. ‘Me, a foreigner?’ I squealed. ‘Not likely! You’re the foreigner here!’ And the fact is that we all like to think foreigners are the others. We’re all foreigners, and that’s a real pain! We like to live under the illusion that only the others are, when yours truly is the most out-and-out foreigner of the lot.”
“Poor Soleràs,” I said, “you are so fundamentally right. The most out-and-out foreigner . . . But what do you gain by always seeking out fundamentals?”
“I simply gain a load of shit,” he rasped. “If only I could be as stupid as everyone else! Take a look at this newspaper that’s spread out over these sacks of chickpeas; look at this huge headline on the front page: ‘On your feet, proletarians!’ It’s from a harangue that emanated from our brilliant comrade Llibert Milmany, Director General of War Propaganda. I apologise, I see you don’t know who I’m talking about.”
In truth, at that time, I’d hardly heard a word about Lluís’ brother-in-law – I’d not met Lluís yet – even though he’d been enormously active in the propaganda department from a few weeks into the war. I’d joined the front in the very first days when Llibert Milmany was still an unknown quantity and nobody at the front talked about him, just as nobody talked about any of the new people who came and went on the political stage in a rearguard charade we found incomprehensible. On the other hand, Soleràs was very well acquainted with him: “A brilliant comrade! He’s our age and as fit as a fighting bull, but he is indispensable in the rear, it’s plain to see: ‘On your feet, proletarians!’ rolls off the tongue so easily when you’re sitting in your office in Barcelona. When you walked in, my conscience was wracked by doubt; you must have noticed how I was sitting on a sack of chickpeas reading the memoirs of Casanova, yet the newspaper headline clearly insists: ‘On your feet, proletarians!’ Should I continue to sit on the sack of chickpeas? Should I be ‘on my feet’ as our brilliant comrade instructs me? Apparently this ‘on your feet’ means ‘stand up straight’, but do I qualify as a proletarian? What a dreadful worry! In fact I only aspire to be a notary; a letter should be written to our illustrious Llibert – anonymously because he knows me only too well – suggesting he vary his speeches a little. In the next one, for example, he could say: ‘On your feet, notaries! On your feet, apothecaries!’ My dear sir, a little variety . . .”