by Joan Sales
At that precise moment, as her insensitive husband argued with the commander, his rant rose in a crescendo above the buzz of general conversation like a clap of thunder: “Agreed, Soleràs was a fool, but he always got it right.”
“And I say, what about perfidious Albion?” shouted the commander. “It’s been a long time since we heard from her.”
“And who might that lady be?” the captain’s wife asked the doctor. “I’ll tell you in song,” he replied, and began singing in his deep baritone voice:
Every month English lovers
write letters to each other.
“Sra Picó, perhaps you may not be aware,” remarked the commander, “that you can’t stage bullfights in rainy weather, because bulls go tame if the sun doesn’t shine. Well, it is always raining in England, just imagine! It’s a disaster! At the beginning of the war, a Labour MP visited our trenches and criticised everything he saw. The guns weren’t properly greased, the troops were undisciplined and the officers were unshaven . . . Soleràs caught him en passant with an ‘Every people gets the climate it deserves . . .’ ”
The captain’s wife loved this barb by Soleràs; short and olive skinned, she thought of herself as a “sultry southerner”. She wanted to learn to sing the couplet and while she hummed “Every month English lovers” she snapped her fingers imitating castanets. The doctor shouted out loud so the head of table could hear: “Picó, you never told us you had such a racy wife, and so sultry, wow! She’s got sex appeal, yum-yum . . .”
“Are you trying to wind me up?” asked Sra Picó, wriggling and laughing as the machine-gun captain smiled from the head of the table, flattered by the praise the doctor was showering on his wife. It was the last straw for Sra Puig, who whispered to Lluís: “It’s pathetic. Did you hear that, Lluís? ‘Trying to wind me up’ indeed . . .”
“ ‘Trying to wind me up!’ ” exclaimed the doctor. “I’ve just been reminded of another antidote. There once was a corpse in Mecca . . . Yes, Merceditas, don’t look at me so disgusted, we were talking about Mecca, weren’t we?”
The commander’s wife had almost dropped off and had said nothing for some time. She followed the conversation from far away, as if from inside her dreams; now and then she gave a start and sat up, fought off her drowsiness and smiled vaguely in the direction of whoever happened to be speaking. Marieta and Ramonet were arguing.
“The man buried in Mecca is Mahomet,” said Marieta.
Unfortunately, she said it so loudly everybody heard. And silence descended. A shocked silence. Aroused by that curious silence, Sra Rosich suddenly gave a start, under the impression that her daughter had said something out of place: “What do you know, child? You don’t have any experience.”
“Well, it’s what it says in the book they’re reading to us at school.”
“And the one they’re reading at mine,” retorted Ramonet, “says quite the opposite.”
“Quite the opposite, hmm . . . quite the opposite of what?” growled the commander.
“Quite the opposite of cuckolded,” interjected the doctor. “We’d be in a fine pickle if all the books said quite the opposite!”
“And supposing Soleràs has gone to Mecca?” asked the commander.
“Soleràs in Mecca!” exclaimed Dr Puig. “That would cap the lot!”
“It’s only a hypothesis,” replied the commander, as if apologising for presenting it.
“Who is this Soleràs fellow they keep talking about?” Sra Puig asked Lluís.
“That’s what I was wondering too,” he replied. “At the end of the day, who is Soleràs? A hypothesis perhaps? An enigma? I’d give my right arm to find out.”
“Solerás, senyora,” interjected the commander, “is someone who disappears without trace; he’s a phantom.”
“Well, let’s agree that Solerás is a mere phantom,” granted the doctor, “but the eau de cologne some greasy young lieutenants find in no-man’s-land is genuine enough. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”
“In Denmark?” asked his wife, perplexed. “What’s Denmark got to do with Mecca?”
“And what’s a backside got to do with the Four Seasons?” he bawled back.
Merceditas’ cheeks flushed with indignation but she restrained herself. Lluís rushed to offer her a third Camel. “Thanks,” she replied, voice all a-quiver.
“Well, that’s right, Denmark,” retorted her husband, addressing the captain’s wife. “Denmark is where one finds everything from bottles of Fundador and cologne to coffee beans and packets of Camel. Absolutely everything! One even finds big fat jars of Polierotikol; they obviously grow the lot in Denmark. Everything must be rotten in Denmark.”
“Doctor Know-all, what they grow there,” cut in Picó quietly and ever so cleverly, “is Sauternes 1902 for a doctor who can’t keep a professional secret. I don’t think you’ll taste another drop of Fundador if you don’t shut that gob of yours.”
At that precise moment the commander unbuttoned his leather jacket and shirt as if boiling hot; he stood up, called for silence with a wave of his hand and solemnly proclaimed: “Officers, petty officers and rank-and-file: I’m as pissed as a newt!”
His wife ran over to him. He was beating himself on the chest.
“What’s wrong? Don’t you feel well?”
“As a newt!” and he burst into tears as he embraced her. “I’d pledged not to drink while you were here and look at me now, pissed as a newt!”
“Today’s a special day,” she said soothingly. “There’s no shame in tippling on such a day! The patron saint of infantry!”
Husband and wife decided the best thing to do would be to go upstairs and sleep it off. Marieta and Ramonet had gone off to play away from the stove that was giving out too much heat. With all these desertions, the table began to lose heart.
“It’s pathetic, my dear,” muttered Merceditas, looking at her husband. “And you wanted me to bring the children . . . what bad examples you set!”
“You are quite right, senyora,” Picó chipped in. “That such cultured men —”
“And what’s it to you, Picó? What’s it to you?” asked the doctor. “I wipe your culture on my —”
“My dear, you too ought to go and sleep it off.”
“I don’t want to! Culture . . . can’t you read? It says it all there in capital letters: DO BLASPHEME. You are all witnesses. Sleep it off? Bah, an injection will cure that. An injection, ouch, and you’re right as rain!”
“An injection of what, my love?”
“Of streaky bacon, my darlin’.”
Merceditas blanched. She threw her cigarette away. She got up from the table. Her husband quietly poured himself another glass of Fundador. She was going to add something, but snarled and left the dining room slamming the door behind her.
“Now, at last!” he said, looking at the end of his nose, “I am free to speak. Poor Letamendi left with his tail between his legs! It’s amazing that my father-in-law didn’t sock it to me as well, given he’s so loaded with money. Merceditas softened him up. You know, she’d just seen a film about a poor doctor who’d saved a city from cholera and she thought I was like the doctor in the film. But I had no cholera, no cash, and no clients . . . And to think I went to the war in search of peace!”
IV
And every life is a solitary path.
MÀRIUS TORRES
The brigade was at a standstill, waiting on the weapons and recruits it needed to re-form. As I had hardly any work in the medical store, I spent more and more time in Santa Espina where I often stayed overnight. If there was an emergency, Dr Puig could call me on the field telephone that linked the two villages. It was never necessary.
When I stayed, I slept in the room near the attic where there were still three mattresses, although I’d slept by myself ever since the ladies came. That’s where I kept the chalice that Picó had found in no man’s land, which I have mentioned previously; I knelt before it to say my evening prayers. I
prayed in front of that chalice I’d set on a wobbly table that I’d managed to salvage; I prayed remembering what used to fill the chalice. At such moments I often thought of Dr Gallifa; not having any news of him, not even knowing whether he was dead or alive, I sometimes instinctively addressed him in my prayers. I wasn’t addressing him as a saint; it was more as if I were conversing with him mentally, seeking his advice. Like a fool I then thought that he’d have approved of what I’d set out to do, and that I sorely needed his advice to avoid slipping on that slippery slope! Dr Gallifa was so remote from the everyday, but possessed a rare insight into decisive, fundamental matters. He would have intuited the guilty motives driving my apparently generous intentions, although I personally wasn’t at all conscious of them. And Dr Gallifa was not one to dilly-dally over scruples; quite the contrary. Until the outbreak of war I had suffered from lots of nightmares and I’d often asked God to spare me my dreams; I tried to do as much with Dr Gallifa. “My son,” he’d interrupt, “don’t waste my time: there’s a big queue.” He was in fact a confessor who was much in demand, and the queue to his confessional often reached as far as the entrance to the church. So I was left with my dream as if it were a counterfeit coin nobody wanted; I couldn’t get rid of it.
Dreams are quite something: one way or another we carry them within us from the moment we dream them. Each person’s dreams become a part of that person, a peculiar, incoherent part, but a part nevertheless. Their meaning eludes us; the interpretations Freudians give barely scratch the surface; our dreams are much more varied and fantastic, sometimes even more criminal than anything they might say about them! Their meaning escapes us and yet they seem strangely clear when we dream them. It’s only later that we don’t understand them; awake, we can’t follow the man who was asleep a few moments before. That’s why a man who is awake feels vaguely ashamed of the man who was asleep a moment earlier, who was simultaneously himself yet somebody else: we’re ashamed we can’t control this other part of ourselves which is our dreams. “A dream is a no man’s land between life and death,” Soleràs once said, “between the obscene and the macabre.”
What does being in love mean? I still don’t know and a quarter of a century has gone by! Perhaps my heart has never dared to ask itself. Might it be our desire to share that mystery so we can gain release? The mystery of life and death, of the obscene and the macabre; the haziest of desires, however painfully we may think it pricks, the most obscure of impulses that perhaps only becomes clear deep within our dream but eludes us yet again when we awake. It’s all as murky as the phenomena Soleràs described to me on a night I shall never forget; happy are they who can act like the birds in the sky, who live and die without ever worrying about life or death. But I’ve been troubled throughout life by nightmares, by attacks of sleepwalking and scruples of conscience . . . when I’d have liked to fly in the full light of day! So much darkness oppresses me, O my God: we would like to live with the utmost simplicity, in the full light of day, in air that’s really free; we would like to live, as You Yourself said, like the smallest of children, happy with the world as it is, with things and people as they are, given that You created everything. Accept everything as it is, as it comes, humble in spirit, in all its simplicity, life in all its simplicity, but by her side.
When a man and a woman are in love, a wooden hut is a palace; that is an ancient secret. Don Juan knew it well enough, the man who knew only the most fleeting moments of love, because, O my God, our hardship derives from this, from our fleeting life. If we could only make this or that transitory moment eternal . . . the world would be such a wonderful place . . . Because one finds happiness not in things, but in love; the spirit of wealth is born in the void we try to fill with things in love’s absence. The spirit of wealth is relative, is about possessing what others don’t have, but love is absolute, only love can be love – even when it is fleeting, even when it is sin, even when it is criminal, because it is a crime “to covet one’s neighbour’s wife”. However brief, however sinful or criminal, it was a moment that was absolute! Don Juan knew that well enough and so do all those who have loved for good or for evil, for a moment or for ever, saintly or criminally, but with all their soul.
That breath of the absolute is enough to transfigure life and death! That breath of love makes everything glorious. The hallowed house in Nazareth must have been a humble abode: little more than a wooden hut. And that’s what we think of when we want to imagine a happy household – that represents the very idea of happiness! Those bright, cheerful days in Galilee, that humble, silent peace surrounding Jesus, Joseph and Mary . . . The Gospel of the Passion would not attain its full meaning without that other Gospel of Childhood: more than once we will have thought it but a string of childish tales barely credible in the eyes of critical reason, but can critical reason ever understand love? The horrors of the Crucifixion would be meaningless if it weren’t about Jesus of Galilee, love and poetry. The Gospel teaches us to accept the Cross when its time comes, but doesn’t it also say we should accept happiness? Isn’t that the greatest crime of all, to reject love, happiness and poetry, and nail them all to the cross? Hallowed be happiness: it is the end the Almighty wants for man and it is terrible to reject that.
And yet we will all be crucified. Every life must inevitably end in death.
We will all be sacrificed, but hush! Don’t let the little children hear that. Let’s rather tell them about humanity in the future – that will be wonderful. And why should humanity in the future be wonderful? Poor humanity, how could it ever be in the future? It will always be present, grimly present, torn between two summonses: happiness and crucifixion.
The summons of crucifixion . . . isn’t that what war is all about? Naturally, people flourish pretexts: causes, noble words, but how hollow, incomprehensible and ridiculous that all seems in the eyes of another generation! Will we ever grasp why our great-grandfathers slaughtered themselves so willingly on behalf of the male line, as opposed to the female line, of the Bourbons? It makes us laugh now, but our great-grandfathers did slaughter each other over it. Our great-grandsons will laugh when they discover how we did the same as proletarians against bourgeois or Aryans against Semites: yet Stalin’s and Hitler’s concentration camps were created in the name of these empty derisory words. Derisory words, empty words that the multitudes followed . . . Point the hatred of the multitudes towards the villain and they will follow; what does it matter that villain is but a word? Aristocrat, bourgeois, priest, Semite, fascist, red, no matter! As he is the villain, he is to blame. To blame for what? For everything! Death to the bourgeois, to the priest, to the Jew, to the fascist, to the red! Long live death! Burn, kill and gorge on blood: qu’un sang impur abreuve vos sillons. Always the same old story. Butchery.
One day, when she and I were by ourselves in Santa Espina, I asked her why she thought such a motley crew had come to the front – Lluís, Picó, Solerás, the commander, the doctor: all of us and all the others, the “reds” and the “fascists”. She replied, seemingly surprised by my question: “They must do it for the cause, I imagine.” “The cause!” I exclaimed. “The cause would be different for everyone . . . And what could it be? No, it’s not for any cause; they have come to crucify one another, on both sides. It’s the same story in every war and that’s why there will always, always, always be wars. Because man was created to sit by the fireside with his beloved, yet he feels the need to crucify. If you’d seen these coarse, simple-minded, frivolous fellows at the ‘gala lunch’, you can’t imagine the pain they can suffer and inflict when the time is ripe! They advance and fall, one after another, yet continue to advance.”
What drives them? Not the cause – nobody knows what that is – but glory, which is something everyone feels. But what glory, O my God, what kind of glory, if nobody will ever know the names of so many soldiers who have fallen in so many battles? Posterity? How foolish! If posterity had to remember all those who have died in one battle out of the many, all those whose names
are written on sand . . . Even their closest comrades forget them after a while, sometimes after a few weeks. There are so many! They are searching for the glory man cannot give; what they want is to be crucified. War has no other meaning, but it is such a profound meaning! Whoever wins, whoever loses, no sacrifice is in vain. Whatever happens, the crucified win and the executioner loses. “Pick up your cross and follow me,” and they picked it up and followed Him, quite unawares, perhaps not even believing in Him, or believing that they don’t believe, and some even blaspheming.
Like all mysteries of life and death they are resolved in Jesus on the Cross! What does it matter to be requited, what do not being understood and loneliness matter if one loves; who is the fool who spoke of love without hope? Where there is love there is hope, and where there is hope there is faith! How many who believe they don’t believe will be saved by love, how many others by hope . . .? But Soleràs, who was so clear-sighted, was so badly wrong; perhaps without realising, he sometimes ended up with the illuminists, those most repellent of heretics, or in a pessimism that left hardly a trace of hope in the supernatural. He was so clear-sighted – but at other times! The winners are the ones most to be pitied, whoever they may be; “I pity with all my heart he who finds victory within his grasp,” he would say. As for the defeated, vanquished through the centuries in the name of whatever cause, they are redeemed by their very defeat; they felt the thirst for glory – and that, and nothing else, is what drives men to crucify themselves – the thirst for great, heroic, absolute things; they wrote on sand and the wind of centuries erased their words; human memory seems to have forgotten them as if they’d never existed, but “every sin will be forgiven except for blasphemy against the Spirit” and doesn’t every man crucified for a cause he thinks just proclaim the Spirit? Nobody risks his life if he doesn’t believe in something worth dying for, and what could that be but the Spirit?