by Joan Sales
He wrote on sand and was crucified and you, in defeat, whoever you are, have only to raise your eyes to see Him as we saw Him in those last, incoherent days of our final routs, when whole armies pulverised by artillery, tanks and aeroplanes had to embark on endless marches, leaving behind a trail of corpses, the dying, the sick and exhausted stragglers. Often at sunset, above the ridge, among the bent silhouettes of soldiers the evil machine gunners were mowing down, I thought I could also see His silhouette etched on the twilight sky. Also bent under a weight – of the Cross – He marched before us, defeated among the defeated, pointing us towards the path of failure: in solidarity with all the pain, all the defeats, and all the shame. He was dragging along His bare, bleeding feet and I wasn’t the only one to see Him in the course of those days: so many eyes opened and saw Him then! How could I ever forget that moment when we arrived at the ridge of the Pyrenees and looking back at the great plain and those villages and cities going up in smoke, and by way of goodbye to the crucified fatherland we were about to abandon, we sang the “Virolai”.* We all did, even the anarchists! In the final days of the war we were all jumbled together in the indescribable havoc of the final defeat.
Yes, Soleràs was clear-sighted, but he lost sight of the fact that an ideal survives even in victory, however much of a caricature it may be. We could have been the victors and could now feel the shame experienced by so many miserable victors, but our ideals would survive as much as theirs. Our means are woeful; our violin strings are made from catgut, but Bach exists; love exists and is as immense as the Great Fugue, even though our means are so pitiful. And what of God Himself? Didn’t He appear to us as a young victor resplendent in His glory? Gentlemen, please . . . That night it was Soleràs, of course, it was always Soleràs who spoke to me in depth about that: “We don’t have an exact idea of what the crucifixion was like; our own crucified don’t give us the slightest idea,” he said, before adding: “The sight of God is as unbearable in His glory as it is in His shame.’ ”
Curled up on my mattress in the dark, I said nothing and listened. He was telling me about Constantine, who abolished crucifixions and replaced them with the gallows: “If he’d done so to save the condemned a drawn-out death agony, he’d deserve our eternal gratitude, but he did it so criminals didn’t die like Him, like He who had precisely wanted to die like a criminal! Did you know, Cruells, that Christians avoided portraying Jesus on the Cross for four centuries? They knew only too well what that entailed. It wasn’t until long after Constantine, when that was long forgotten, that the first crucifixes began to appear. They now gave no idea . . .”
I listened to him, mouth open wide, unable to stem his list of atrocities though they were too much for me to take: “Those condemned were stripped stark naked. Which moron imagined that executioners in those days jibbed on the job? And there was no wooden shelf to rest your feet on; feet were nailed into the wood and to that end they had to bend knees and separate thighs . . .”
“Shut up,” I said; “I can’t bear any more.”
“Nor can I, one cannot bear to imagine the Cross! You see, poor Cruells, what we succeeded in doing with our Creator once we had him in our power?”
But Soleràs was gravely mistaken because he refused to accept humbly the wretchedness of our means. However great our wretchedness, life is immense! If it is cowardly to refuse crucifixion when God summons us, it is a crime to refuse happiness when God wants us to be happy. Soleràs proudly rejected that and fled. He stubbornly stared at the Obscene and the Macabre as if they had bewitched him; he, who knew better than most how God had assumed all our shame, for isn’t that what Christianity is? The absurd lunacy of the Cross? Christianity is strange, is absurd – and strange and absurd as it is, it is the only answer. God assuming the immensity of our wretchedness and to that end stripping Himself of the immensity of His glory, offering Himself up crucified on the Cross in an obscene and macabre spectacle to redeem the Obscene and the Macabre . . . ‘Eloi, eloi, lama sabachtani’, how can I complain I am alone and isolated in this world, when I know He was infinitely more so?
* The anthem of the Abbey of Monserrat, composed by the poet of the Catalan late nineteenth-century renaissance, Jacint Verdaguer.
V
On the night of 21/22 December, when we’d all been sound asleep in Santa Espina for some time, the battalion band that had come unannounced from Villar woke us with the jolly blasts of a strident festive reveille. They’d marched ten kilometres along the cart track to wake us like that! I grumbled as I got out of bed, thinking it was yet one more of those ghastly jokes we played on each other: awful in that icy cold! Coming down from the attic I bumped into Picó, Lluís and their wives on the first landing, dead tired, freezing to death and cursing that “bloody crowd from Villar”, “who didn’t let us have a minute’s peace”. “The Villar crowd” was creating an unbelievable racket in the dining room: some were dancing on the big table, others sang or bawled slouching on the fireside benches; others were belting it out on their trombones and bugles. Some were cheekily drinking rum and cognac from the bottles we kept in the cupboard.
Commander Rosich, the doctor and their respective wives had arrived behind the band, albeit in the Ford; in fact, the doctor and he were in the group on the table dancing a zapateado that made the walls shake. Their flushed faces, bright eyes and frenetic gestures signalled that they’d been drunk out of their minds for a good while.
“Gloria in excelsis Deo,” cried the commander when he saw us emerge from the staircase door, “and let’s shit on the flatfooted brigade!”
Sra Puig was standing in a corner of the room, far from the fire and visibly apart from everyone else, looking deeply shocked. When I went over to say hello, she said: “They are worse than the people in Sodom and Simorra.”
Certain highly incoherent expressions half suggested it wasn’t simply another round of frivolity for the sake of it; that night there was something to justify the jubilation. It was very difficult to get to the bottom of it but finally we did establish that Villar had just heard on the telephone line linking them to brigade headquarters that the republicans had taken Teruel. When we realised what the good news was, we joined in the jamboree and sang and bawled and drank till the first light of day when they returned to Villar bugles blasting and trombones honking.
In the silence of that bright and icy dawn I then remembered another day, this time in June, exactly six months ago. I had gone to Parral del Río to try to see Soleràs; Lluís had joined the brigade the day before but I hadn’t yet met him, and as for Soleràs, he wasn’t in Parral. Captain Picó took me to an advanced position where he thought we might find him and from where one could see a line of poplars sinuously following the river and beyond that the brick belfry and houses of Vivel, a village in fascist hands. While we contemplated the view, the bells of Vivel began to chime frantically and we could hear a raucous din of gleeful shouts and cannon salvoes. Picó and I were quiet, trying to act as if we’d heard nothing, but the racket wouldn’t go away; we were both thinking the same thought that we kept to ourselves: They are celebrating the conquest of Bilbao. Days later, in effect, the news reached us in the newspapers – late as always. And lo and behold! Six months later we were the ones celebrating the conquest of Teruel; we didn’t know then, and found out only much later, how horrendous the battle had been. On the other hand, the worst wasn’t taking the city but the enemy counteroffensive that lasted weeks and months.
We knew none of this then and our Christmas that year was happy and hopeful. On the morning of 24 December the snowfall was one of the heaviest that winter; it stopped only in the evening. The snowstorm caught me in Santa Espina. When I stayed in Don Andalecio’s house we’d got into the habit of “seeing a movie” to keep Ramonet amused over the long evenings; that day nobody left the house because of the snowstorm and even the adults came to the showing as they couldn’t think what to do to pass the time. We “saw movies” in Lluís and Trini’s large bedroom comp
rising a sitting room and bedroom separated by an arch. I hid in the bedroom and used the brougham light to project a luminous circle on to a sheet that hung from the arch; I passed cardboard cutout characters in front of the light that appeared like magnified Chinese shadows on the sheet: the audience, usually just Ramonet and Trini, watched from the sitting room.
That night, after the show, a sumptuous supper awaited us by the fire. We should have gone to Villar, where the commander wanted to offer us a “gala supper” to celebrate Christmas Eve, but the snowstorm had cut us off. After dinner Lluís decided to take the boy – swaddled in a very thick woollen blanket, not an army cotton blanket but one he’d found in a village house – for a stroll along the streets to see what sort of impact the spectacular snowstorm had made.
The snow had stopped falling, the clouds had splintered into streaks that stretched across the sky and the Dog Star glinted between two of them. A row ensued: Trini thought it was “frankly idiotic” for Lluís to want to take the boy out on such a cold night. It was one of the few occasions when they argued in front of everyone else.
Lluís was adamant, so Trini decided to accompany them; the snow was very dry and spongy and their boots sank deep but didn’t get wet and made that swishing sound which heavy silk makes when shaken. She wore oversize soldier’s boots that the captain had given her: they were loose on her and she had to wear thick woollen socks over her stockings. She never adapted to those rough ugly shoes, though, strangely enough, they suited her. On the other hand, didn’t anything she wore always suit her?
I stood in the doorway and watched them walk down the main street, leaving the houses inhabited by the troops to go towards the least devastated part of the village where the men were playing a hurdy-gurdy and singing Christmas carols. They’d lit a big bonfire in the middle of the street on snow that was melting under the spitting embers, and were creating a terrible racket. It was a silent, icy, moonless night.
When they disappeared round the end of the high street, I went out by myself and walked towards the lower part of the village which was all in ruins. The soldiers’ carousing and the shrill notes of the hurdy-gurdy faded as I moved away.
The great bellows from the forge half covered by snow in the middle of the street looked like the corpse of a giant wrapped in a winding sheet. That wasn’t the only thing I found flung far from its rightful place; I also spotted a wooden bench, a church bell, an olive press, a sprung mattress and other junk. I walked through that lumber, my boots sinking almost to my knees in the snow, as if I were wading through the remnants of a shipwreck. The shattered harmonium lay on the far corner of the church square, almost outside the village, as if they’d thrown it from the choir stalls through the rose window after they’d smashed the glass, and it had stayed there, numbed by its fall.
The church entrance gaped like an empty black mouth, a maw which blasted out a freezing draught that seemed to come from beyond the grave. I crossed myself before going in.
Only bare stone remained of the interior. I placed the chalice on the main altar, lit two tallow candles and prayed.
You’d have thought that bitterly cold silence was about to turn into ice. Waves of sound reached me through the almost crystallised silence. Bells! It was hard to tell whether I was hearing or dreaming them. I stopped praying and listened. Bells on Christmas Eve! Now and then they sounded clearer, however faraway they were. So faraway and pure, they too could have been made of ice or glass. I was astounded to hear them; were they bells from Heaven? How could they be of this earth if bells hadn’t chimed since the start of the war – besides, hardly any had survived!
Suddenly, I understood: they were in enemy territory.
Enemy territory? What meaning did those words have on such a night?
I realised they must be singing midnight mass in a village in enemy territory, beyond no man’s land; the extraordinary silence and density of that icy air was why I could hear them. That’s what the mystery was. The bells were ringing merrily and reminded me of toads piping on a midsummer’s night.
Entranced by the sound of distant bells, I left the church. I was back on the cart track, out of the village and on the frozen river bank. I could no longer hear carousing soldiers or the hurdy-gurdy; only the distant bells that were audible or not, depending on the breeze. The snow was so bright and white it was like being in the moonlight. I walked up into a pine grove and the dry snow crackled as my boots sank.
The branches of the pines bent under the weight of the snow; crystals of frost, studded on pine needles, sparkled iridescent in the dim starlight and made me think of the toy-like rock-crystal chandelier I’d seen in Trini’s drawing room when I’d visited her. The stars also sparkled like crystals of frost. The Dog Star, the Dog Star yet again, scattering the brightest of sparks among ragged clouds; blue sparks at the heart of a universe solidified by cold.
I’d reached the top of that pine wood but could see nothing. I’d have liked to see the small lights, the bonfires of the soldiers that could point me to the village whence the sound of bells came. I still heard them from time to time but could see nothing.
I walked slowly back to Santa Espina. A light was flickering in the church. I thought that was strange. I went in.
It was the two candles I had forgotten on the main altar; they’d almost melted away. The gilded silver chalice gleamed dimly between them. I kneeled down to pray for a good long while.
I prayed to Dr Gallifa; it was the first time I’d really prayed to him, as if I’d been praying to a saint, yet I still didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. I knew, or thought I knew, that he was the old Jesuit on carrer del Teatre, something that was becoming increasingly self-evident as far as I was concerned. I prayed to my old seminary teacher at length, asking him to help me and not leave me alone at that crossroads where I was beginning to feel I had gone astray.
•
The last time I’d seen him was in the house that belonged to a brother of his, a rich landowner from the Plana de Vic who lived in Barcelona for most of the year in a flat on the riera del Pi, a huge old flat with high ceilings. He’d received me in his room, its walls invisible behind four ceiling-high bookcases that left space only for the door and the window; the bed was hidden in a very small alcove. He was sitting with his back to the window, opposite a table strewn with books and papers. It was the only item of furniture apart from the rush-bottomed chairs where we sat and another set opposite by the other corner of the table. The air smelt of antique books and snuff; my teacher was one of the rare surviving takers of snuff. While he read and spent hours there every day, he kept taking pinches of tobacco dust from a small box that was open next to his book; a silver box that, I can see now, had tarnished. The smell of snuff was inseparable from his person, as if he were impregnated with it.
He could have returned to his monastery when they repealed the anti-Jesuit laws in 1934, but because he was so old and frail he preferred to stay in his brother’s house. He lived with his family like a lay priest; he went to the seminary every day and taught his moral theology classes. From the day he left the convent he took more snuff than ever; perhaps his chronic addiction to inhaling tobacco dust was the cause of the migraine and nausea attacks he suffered so often. He was around eighty at the time.
That smell of snuff and antique books was accompanied by the regular tick-tock of a very old grandfather clock that you couldn’t see because it was by his bed in the alcove. He’d insisted on putting it by his bedside; he slept badly and said its tick-tock kept him company at night during the hours he couldn’t sleep, hours that would have seemed endless, he’d say, lying in his bed in the pitch black, without the regular beat of the clock. He also liked to hear it strike on the quarter, half hour and hour so he didn’t lose the sense of time. If I’m lingering on these trivial details it’s because I want to give an idea of the atmosphere surrounding Dr Gallifa in the last months of his life, a life that belonged to another century. And it was relaxing to be in that sp
ot where the riera del Pi sloped and where one could imagine oneself in the eighteenth century, only a short walk from the Rambla at the heart of a frenzied city. I’d spent ages talking to him there – before the war, when people still had time to talk.
That was two days before the war broke out, although we didn’t have the slightest idea what was coming. Or rather he’d heard a rumour via a nephew of his by the name of Lamoneda, a relative he was worried about, and with good reason. He talked to me at great length about this nephew, with whom I’d been acquainted for some time. He was extremely worried on his behalf.
It’s now also time for me to say something about Lamoneda, who over time would become something like my own personal ghost. Dr Gallifa’s strange nephew was like his shadow and I knew him well by this time, though I never suspected he would become mine too. When I say he was his shadow and is now mine, I mean that he seemed like someone who followed us everywhere, as if he had emanated from our selves and yet was our negation, as people sometimes say the Devil is God’s shadow. In my eyes – and I wasn’t yet twenty – he was a confirmed bachelor; according to his uncle he was well past the forty mark, although he’d simply say evasively: “I’m thirty plus.” He still lingered around the university, where he was vaguely enrolled in the faculty of pharmacy. How long had he been studying there? Dr Gallifa would declare, though everything about his nephew was a blur, that he had tried his hand in several faculties, Law, Philosophy, Medicine, and had wasted a few years in each. When I met him, he was working as assistant to an apothecary on carrer de Sant Pau that I’d visited several times; it was so small and humble you’d have thought it was a neighbourhood herb shop. That’s where the police arrested him one night on suspicion of dealing in cocaine. Though they couldn’t prove he’d sold any without prescription and in the end had to release him, the apothecary decided not to continue with his services. He always insisted he was innocent and had been the victim of a misunderstanding, and his uncle believed him or at least acted as though he did.