by Joan Sales
“I’m listening,” I answered.
“I simply must tell you all this, Cruells; I must! The bedroom smelt stale, since Auntie slept with the door closed. Normally my footsteps, even if I was barefoot, would have woken her, since she has very good hearing, not to mention the fact that I’d opened the door. Normally it would have been pitch black inside yet I caught a vague glimmer, something bluish and hazy coming from somewhere or other, and enough for me to be able to make out her features. Her eyes were open and she was smiling. Spittle trickled from the corners of her lips onto the pillow; she was motionless and smiling and couldn’t see me; she was asleep, though her eyes were open wide. Her small mahogany bedside table seemed to hang in the air; only one of its three legs was touching the ground, and it swayed gently as if dancing to the first movement of the slowest of waltzes. All this, so long in the telling, lasted a second; as soon as I walked in the table quickly put its feet back on the floor, the bluish glimmer faded and the noise stopped. Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
“The next morning I tried to talk to her about it, though I didn’t say I’d gone into her bedroom. I only mentioned the strange noises and the vague glimmer; she grimaced scornfully, incredulously, and touched her forehead with her finger: ‘This is stupid nonsense,’ she replied, ‘spiritualist rubbish. You’d fare better reading the complete works of Bossuet.’ ”
“Does it have to be Bossuet?”
“It was obvious that Auntie had heard nothing; that much was obvious, although she had very good hearing. I knew that only too well because I had to work miracles to make my night-time sorties; by the age of thirteen I’d started my night-time forays. We were the only people in the flat after ten at night, when her maid – an old woman who’d worked in a nunnery for years before joining us – went to sleep in the attic, where her bedroom was much bigger and more comfortable than Auntie’s. I should add that the building is one of the many she owns, and definitely the oldest; we live in the smallest flat, but the attic is huge. So, from ten o’clock only Auntie and I were in the flat, and the rattling – for that was what it was, don’t laugh – always took place between midnight and four a.m. I’d worked out that when the rattling started, Auntie slept more soundly than usual. I took advantage of this discovery for my sorties. I could walk along the passage and open and shut the front door next to her bedroom without her noticing. She was in a trance.”
“You really expect me to believe —”
“Yes. Yes, I expect you to believe that, because it’s the only possible explanation. You’ve had attacks of sleepwalking and you know from your own experience that one remembers nothing subsequently. Some nights my aunt falls into a trance when she is asleep and does so totally unawares. Let’s say, to put it plainly, that she is a medium but doesn’t know it; you wouldn’t know you were a sleepwalker if nobody told you. Might it be relevant at this point to remind you that others have written prose without realising they have? We do so much without knowing! On the other hand, my aunt’s isn’t as rare a case as you might imagine; many like her have been studied. They are the rule rather than the exception: the majority of mediums operate quite unawares. If my aunt who is so devout and so fond of the Oratory Brothers suspected any of this, she’d want to throw up. Once, when we were chatting after a meal, I skilfully guided our conversation in the direction of certain metapsychic experiments that were in the news at the time and had counted on the presence in person of Einstein and Marie Curie. She interrupted me: ‘Don’t ever talk to me about such things, I beg you; they make me so queasy I want to throw up.’ All I can add is that after this whenever I heard the name ‘Einstein’ my stomach gave a turn. Well, you know, these strikingly queasy feelings give us a clue: doesn’t her unease at the mention of para-psychological phenomena derive from the fact that she too is deeply infected but doesn’t know she is? We find nothing more upsetting than what is so deeply hidden within us. Now, Cruells, you can perhaps understand who I am: I’m genetically infected and have lived for twenty or more years up to my neck in an atmosphere as dank as stagnant pond water. I’m merely the hysterical nephew of a semi-epileptic aunt, the only surviving male of a family with a screw loose; the only surviving male, credit this, brought up and spoilt by a millionaire spinster aunt who saw visions. Cruells, I horrify myself; sometimes, at night, when I’m alone at the back of that huge supplies store – that’s where I sleep – I feel cold shivers as if somebody were blowing on my face in the dark. The hair along my spine bristles like that of a dog howling opposite . . . opposite what? Dogs know, we don’t. I suppose there’s no point my telling you that spiritualists are generally the nicest of people with no imaginations, who are happy to enjoy the innocent illusion that they are chatting a while to their dearly beloved deceased aunts? But there’s nothing there; the poor defunct dears don’t involve themselves in any of that. If they did, it would be so simple; but they don’t. Beings who are much disturbed do so: our own selves. It’s our ‘other will’, that ‘alter ego’ we carry within us quite unawares. It’s that ‘alter ego’ which operates from the moment we are conceived; it organises matter into hands, eyes, feet, at puberty it makes hair sprout suddenly, taking us so by surprise. And there’s a good reason to be surprised! We are surprised by spiritualist phenomena with mediums to the point of refusing to believe in them and yet we’re not at all surprised when our nails and beard grow, as if the one wasn’t as inexplicable as the other. That spittle I saw trickling from my aunt’s lips was probably ectoplasm; that’s right, but in the last analysis that’s what beards and nails are too. Everything is ectoplasm! On the other hand, there is one metapsychic phenomenon within everyone’s grasp, namely dreams; in our dreams we see things, we see faces, we hear noises, we hear voices: we manufacture all that ourselves, not with our conscious will, but with another will. How often have we wanted to dream at will! Not possible. We’d like to dream of wonderful things, if we could choose them! We could, for example, dream of wonderful, beautifully proportioned dames, their eyes full of the most steaming, tempting complicity. Yet, you know, I dream of frightful women; what if I told you how often I’ve dreamed of that Madame Zoraida, who was horrible! If we could exercise our ‘other will’ as we do our conscious will, we could even do better than dream at will; we could have a face like a god, a thick, luxuriant beard, muscles like a stevedore, a chest like a horse. Not possible! Not possible! We can’t influence our ‘other will’; it is blind and gropes its way. It can take bizarrely wrong paths in the same way as it organises matter during gestation – into a hand or a foot, a liver or a spleen, or else a monstrous cancer.”
“You’ve lost me,” I muttered.
“I’m lost too,” he replied. “Yes, I’ve lost myself too. All this is beyond me. Everyone has the face he wants: it simply depends on the other will; and that’s the worst of it, since everyone has the face he deserves, the one he creates for himself. Yes, that’s the worst of it, because my face . . . better not to mention it, I beg you; I’d die at the thought! My face is beyond me. And the robot that rules us, this unconscious will, this double abyss where it has flung us . . . I say ‘this double abyss’ because it all takes place between two mysteries, our origin and our end, the obscene and the macabre, a couple of bottomless pits. Everything, and I mean everything, comes down to this: ectoplasm phenomena as much as dreams. It’s not for nothing that spiritualists have thought they have discerned messages from the dead there; their funereal air often makes you believe it. Though they’ve never succeeded in telling us the other side of the story, they are always left feeling disconcerted, and often when their beloved, disembodied aunts send messages from the beyond, they come out with ludicrous rubbish.”
“Always the same old story,” I muttered nonplussed. I couldn’t follow the thread of what he was saying and at the same time I was dead tired and the rainy gusts from the skylight kept hitting me in the face.
“Yes, always the same old story,” said Soleràs, tryin
g to light his cigarette – the wet blasts kept putting his matches out. “Conversely, the Freudians, the fucking Freudians see only the obscene side; they are like the carnival giants who see the world through their flies. They miss out the macabre. Each sees only one side, but there are two! It’s a double abyss! And we’re sunk up to our eyes in the mud in this double abyss, though even so, our eyes still get a peep, enough to see the other abyss, the one up above . . .”
He was still trying unsuccessfully to light his cigarette; the wet breeze kept putting his matches out; his voice grew gruffer and gruffer in the dark: “Around that time I’d begun systematically to start enjoying a real man’s night on the tiles. I’d wait for the rattling to start and slip out of the flat barefoot. Between midnight and four o’clock I lived my other life in dives that stank of rum and piss, in the heart of the barri xino; people drank litres of rum and then did what came easiest, pissed it out in the corner of the room. Later the rumour spread that these dens of vice had been set up by the town hall for the benefit of tourists – a wily ploy, but it’s a slander; I swear that in my time I saw no sign of any tourists. I came home at dawn dead drunk. One Monday I slumped into bed more pissed than usual; my bed rocked like a boat and made me feel sick. The grandfather clock in the sitting room was striking four when a bluish-green phosphorescent glow, the size of an apple, appeared in the dark, level with the ceiling: it jiggled along, not losing height before coming to a halt. It assumed a viscous consistency or was perhaps more like sticky dough, and an eye formed within it that stared down at me. I lay on my back, looking at the ceiling, trying to tame the waves of drunken retching and that single eye stared down at me from the ceiling; the other eye didn’t open, I could make out its shapeless outline in the whitish, phosphorescent dough. The features of a face began to emerge as well, first a big blur, then it became easier to recognise: it was mine. Yes, it was a face that strangely resembled mine; I heard its voice, a husky voice like the voices from those old phonographs with a horn from our childhood or perhaps more like the voice of a war-wounded man who’d lost his vocal cords and was making a supreme effort to speak. The voice said: ‘Eppur si muove.’ ”
By now I was half asleep and couldn’t stop myself from laughing because it was all so unexpected.
“Don’t laugh,” said Soleràs. “It said: ‘Eppur si muove.’ As surely as I’m speaking to you here! And while the face with a single eye began to disappear like melting wax I heard that voice again, huskier than ever: ‘Millions and millions and millions . . .’ ”
“Millions of what?”
“I don’t dare repeat that in your presence, poor Cruells, but no matter. You can imagine the scene. Right then my guts won out and I puked up all the gutrot I’d drunk in the dive run by la Tanguet – that was her name, or what they called her, one of the most hardened madames on carrer de l’Arc del Teatre, you know, overripe like those figs nobody’s bothered to pick that in late autumn drop by their own weight from trees and burst open. I went there precisely because I was fascinated by the stench of autumnal mulch she gave off; that was why I went to her dive – which I think I’ve described to you on other occasions. Because, indeed, as in my case, you dream of the most virginal girls, the ones that look so aggressively innocent, the scent of thyme from the world’s first dawn in their hair, and elusive as wild rabbits . . . but, Cruells, when your head is full of impossible dreams, of unfulfilled longings, one finds exquisite peace in a dive run by an overripe, sleazy, worn-out whore.”
He sighed, hurled his empty matchbox at the skylight and continued after a pause: “You now see me embroiled in keeping an account of the chickpeas you stuff down, but I was born for better things. Who on their deathbed can’t say like Maine de Biran: ‘J’étais né pour quelque chose de mieux’? But what can we do? We were all born to conquer the universe, and we conquer bugger-all! The universe is beautiful but it resists, like the virginal girls with bright aggressive eyes who are so wild and elusive. It always boils down to the same old story. One has tried everything: taming angels who like to kick, cramming geology, straddling the slimy abyss of the paranormal and Freudianism and the redemption of the enslaved. And wouldn’t it be glorious to redeem them! But they resist too. The proletariat resists, probably for the same obscure, hence powerful, reasons that the universe, ectoplasm, angelic shepherdesses and geology resist. It’s our voracious impotence before the feminine ocean, nailed as we are to the beach like so many Tantaluses – before the entire universe that is so beautiful it is scary! Take a look in the autumnal twilight and see for yourself. Why is it so beautiful if we can’t possess it? Why aren’t this immense hunger and this immense universe made for each other? No wonder man tells himself: damned hunger, what more could you want than the universe? Yet the whole universe wouldn’t satisfy you – it’s God you should devour!”
I was stunned when I thought I’d heard a terrible blasphemy; the cantor’s voice had taken tremulous flight, not up but down, becoming gruffer and gruffer like a black bird spiralling downwards. You’d have said the cellar walls were shaking as his voice echoed round and I went into a cold sweat at what I believed to be hateful blasphemy.
“Hey, a time comes when man tells himself: it’s God I want to eat up! And God lets him.”
I suddenly understood him, curled up in my bed, and started to sob quietly because I couldn’t take any more; because I’d understood him and couldn’t stop the tears streaming down.
“Don’t take it like that, don’t be such a fool,” he reacted. “If God didn’t let us eat Him, humanity would have starved to death a long time ago! But perhaps it’s time to sleep. We’ve turned over enough nonsense.”
* La Solidaridad Nacional, the newspaper of the Falange, the single party allowed under Franco.
II
I hardly recognised Barcelona in December 1937.
I’d not been back since going to the front eighteen months earlier; the city had none of the initial excitement of that July crisscrossed by vociferous crowds brandishing guns amid the smoke from burning buildings. On the contrary, it was the deathly silence of Barcelona that struck me now.
The air tasted pestilent in a silence that was still, sad and icy. Gone from the streets were the women with cropped hair, dressed like men and carrying weapons, that were part of my last vision of Barcelona. Now you saw almost nothing but women in the street, though they didn’t remind you of the “militiawomen” of those early months. What stood out now were tresses of brightly coloured hair, the strawberry and platinum blondes and redheads who left a whiff of cheap and nasty perfume in their wake. There were so many they sent you into a spin; the excess of freedom, fruit of a year and a half of revolution, hovered like a fraught, nervous shadow over those blue, green, brown and grey eyes. Here you see, I reflected, how war has separated out the Ocean and the Sahara that Soleràs talks about; men at the front and women in the rear – and all of a sudden I had been plunged into that Ocean.
What on earth was I doing in Barcelona in December 1937? It’s difficult to say. For the moment, I was roaming the streets and feeling a total stranger in a city that was nevertheless mine. I felt much more of a stranger in it than in July 1936: the heady excitement had gone, to be replaced by something I felt repugnant because it seemed both hypocritical and incomprehensible, and more than a touch sardonic, weary and disillusioned. After being intoxicated by “strange cries”, Barcelona was now crestfallen, resigned and cynical.
Its walls had disappeared under an astonishing number of posters. The passion of 1936, now dead and forgotten, tried to live on in those posters that nobody looked at apart from me. They were a novelty; when I’d left the city a year and a half earlier those stirring posters hadn’t yet flourished and spread. Ordinary people, disenchantment writ large upon their faces, dragged themselves along like a sluggish muddy river beneath those huge multicoloured posters exalting the revolution, the proletariat and the “war on fascism”; they dragged themselves along and didn’t even notice them. O
ne displayed a foot shod in a Catalan espadrille stamping on a swastika; others, would-be republican soldiers I’d never have recognised, struck arrogant poses in spotless uniforms; there was the infamous poster we’d heard so much about, that exhorted – who? Women in the rearguard? – “Make tanks, tanks, tanks.” I knew that array of hortatory, garish, bewildering posters was the work of a Llibert Milmany I’d never met. I’d learned of him from all the letters I’d read surreptitiously, but in Barcelona where everyone spoke of “comrade Llibert” as an influential person and the biggest of the wheeler-dealers, I’d have come to know anyway. The very moment I got away to Barcelona, the great Llibert Milmany had jumped ship from the Soli – it was beginning to go down – to scramble aboard another vessel chugging full steam ahead, or so it seemed. I didn’t meet him till the following spring; while his reputation hit me from every side and he was on the lips of everyone I spoke to, he was signing off those enormous posters that were plastering the city walls: “Every single one is his work.”