Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  I, on the other hand, never thought the police had got it wrong. Moreover, I’d suspected more than once that Lamoneda himself was an addict. Sometimes I’d seen him with a face looking so far gone it was quite painful to behold; with his gaping mouth and vacant eyes staring into the distance – quite different from an alcoholic’s – I’d always thought he was suspect. He’d occasionally have pots of money and I could never work out where it came from. I suspected it was in those good times that he was a secret addict; generally he was rather broke, particularly after he’d been sacked by the chemist on carrer de Sant Pau.

  Lamoneda’s father, a widower, lived in the countryside the whole year; Dr Gallifa’s sister, his nephew’s mother, had married the heir to a landed family that was as rich as the Gallifas. She died soon after giving birth. Lamoneda lived by himself in Barcelona on money his father sent him, his only child – which also seemed to make his father resigned to letting him lead the life of an eternal student.

  He was also what we’d call an eternal youth. In his forties, according to his uncle’s calculations, he’d still speak of “us youngsters” in a distinctly obsessive manner. He was tall and skinny with a spotty, stubbly face; when he walked along the street he kept himself very straight-backed and tried to give himself what he thought was a military air by swinging his arms at a stiff, regular tempo. Moreover, he liked to shroud himself in mystery, as if he were involved in some top-secret business. He lived in a boarding house but rented an attic which he called his “bachelor pad”, on carrer de Tallers. Here he sometimes invited me up to read me fragments from things he was writing. I remember how one afternoon he reeled off a string of enigmatic paragraphs about Baron de Koenig, a murky figure from the First World War years, about whom I had only the foggiest of notions, given that I was born at the end of the war. He’d clearly been the talk of Barcelona in his day, but who exactly was this baron? “A genius,” Lamoneda assured me on that occasion, “a man well in advance of his times. Before anyone else he’d grasped how useful the anarchists were. In the name of anarchy and the proletarian struggle, the anarchists liquidated the Catalan industrialists who were supplying arms to the Allies; people today still haven’t understood that there was a Kaiser behind the anarchist gunmen . . .” At the time I paid no attention to the strange things Lamoneda came out with, because I thought they were the product of his delirious imagination. It was only years later that I realised, to my amazement, that it was all mysteriously coherent.

  Nevertheless I knew he had some incredible bedfellows; I knew, though his uncle didn’t, that he was involved with anarchists; he even told me that they were gunmen though he didn’t let on what they were up to. Neither his uncle nor I had ever shown the slightest interest in politics, least of all in the politics of clandestine terrorist groups. I now know – I didn’t find this out until many years later – that Lamoneda was in secret contact with Llibert Milmany, but at the time it wasn’t his political activities that worried me. His uncle thought he was an unreliable fellow who lived “with his head in the clouds” and that his enigmatic references to mysterious transcendental matters were simply motivated by a desire to appear important in our eyes. “A simple lad,” he’d say, “that’s all he is.”

  My teacher was unaware of a side to his nephew that would have changed this view. Lamoneda believed in nothing – although he pretended to be a Catholic, and a devout one at that when with his uncle – and was heavily engaged in erotic experiments. He thought he was a Stendhal and wrote a great deal; Dr Gallifa knew nothing about his literary aspiration. It was basically pornographic, however much he presented it as “minority literature”. He read with the expression of a fool who thinks he is really clever; it was a real pain watching that sourpuss bachelor gone to seed who thought he was a Don Juan, and in an ambience that reeked of the most sordid, solitary pleasures!

  Could he have been the Judas that betrayed his uncle? I went into a cold sweat each time that suspicion came to mind, because Lamoneda was in effect one of the very few people – two or three – who knew where he was hiding. I never discovered where. The last time I saw Dr Gallifa, he’d spoken to me at length about his nephew as if he’d been worrying him more than ever. He told me Lamoneda had been to see him the day before to inform him that he was in “grave danger” – that was imminent, or so he said. “I didn’t really understand him,” he told me. “I don’t know what he’s up to; he’s involved with some sort of clandestine committee and other strange activities.”

  He continued to think, as ever, that this was just nonsense his nephew invented, things he dreamed up in order to lead an idle life: “He’s living more than ever like a character in an adventure novel; I think he must be mentally disturbed . . .” That was what worried Dr Gallifa, and not the “grave danger” Lamoneda had warned about. “He tried to persuade me that I should go into hiding, because he says I am in serious danger, but who could ever want to harm me? I’m afraid the wayward life he leads has damaged his brain.”

  Less than a week later I recognised Lamoneda among arsonists setting fire to a church in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood.

  “Fascist!” they shouted at me, because I was trying to put out the fire. I’d recognised Lamoneda despite his disguise. A days’ old beard darkened his face and made me think he hadn’t shaved since he’d last spoken to his uncle. He was wearing a worker’s overall and a large black and red kerchief that half hid his face. He came over as well and shouted “Fascist” at me.

  “Lamoneda,” I whispered, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” “Fascist!” he cried, as he pulled my arm to get me to follow him. With me in tow he slipped through the thick of the crowd of arsonists. The smoke billowing inside the church made us splutter; the flames were beginning to take hold of the chairs they’d piled up in the middle of the nave. Their faces blackened by soot, the arsonists screamed as they ran out. He dragged me out of the church, which was starting to crackle and go up in flames.

  “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I repeated.

  “I did warn you,” he replied, whispering, “Now fuck off or this lot will lynch you. Is it my fault if you never take any notice of anything I say to you?”

  The arsonists began to throng around us, taking a strong interest in me. It wasn’t as if I was wearing a soutane – of course I wasn’t; I never wore one in the summer holidays. But I was the only one not dressed as a proletarian. I was wearing my summer suit, ironed white piqué: it stood out a mile! Some of those troglodytes were muttering: “If he’s a fascist, why don’t we do him in?” Lamoneda heard it and gestured to them to shut up, saying: “Compañeros, this man you see before you was a priest, but is one no longer. He has just told me he regrets ever being one and will now join us in shouting: ‘Long live anarchy! Long live free love! Make way for the youth!’ ” I was really struck by the way he held sway over that ragtag mob; they listened to him open-mouthed as if he were some kind of oracle and furiously chorused each of his slogans. The final one stuck in my mind more than the others: “Make way for the youth!” How often and in what strange circumstances I was to hear that cry go up; how often . . . Finally, when I managed to extricate myself – and I can say that I owe my life to Lamoneda – I ran to the mansion in Sarrià where I was living with my aunt, dying to look at Barcelona through the telescope from her terrace roof. You could see a great expanse of the city and I watched all the churches going up in smoke: every single one at the same time.

  That night we learned they weren’t simply burning churches but also murdering priests. At dawn the next day I ran to the riera del Pi; Dr Gallifa’s brother told me he was no longer living there and for safety reasons they didn’t want to tell anyone outside their closest family where he’d gone into hiding.

  Now I didn’t belong to “closest family” but Lamoneda did; he knew where he was hiding. Barcelona was spitting smoke and fire beneath the stifling sky of the dog days of summer and those gangs of ragamuffins were coming in from elsewhere, faces blackened
with soot, running all over the city in their search for priests to murder.

  Their implacable round-up went on for months and months and Lamoneda, the leader of one of those gangs, knew where Dr Gallifa was hiding. I know for a fact that at the start he’d have tried to save him, as he’d saved me, but what might his crazed mind have decided later? Would he have sold his uncle in a moment of weakness?

  And so, lo and behold! I prayed to him for the first time on that Christmas Eve though I didn’t know for sure that he was dead. I prayed at length in the Santa Espina church that was as cold and bare as a tomb. I don’t know how long I prayed to my former teacher, wherever he was, in this world or the next. When I left the church the bells were no longer chiming. I stopped for a moment in the entrance when I saw something that startled me: the footprints of two other pairs of boots beside mine in the snow. It was obvious that two people had come and gone while I was praying. I remembered that mine were the only footprints in the snow when I entered the church that second time. Two unknown people had entered the church while I was at prayer, and I hadn’t heard them.

  VI

  Sra Puig and Sra Picó went back to Barcelona the day after Twelfth Night. The commander’s wife and Trini had decided to stay on for several weeks as the fresh country air and food were doing the children a world of good. Barcelona was suffering ever more bombing raids from fleets of aircraft based in Majorca and hunger was striking ever more cruelly. We all felt it would be better for Ramonet and Marieta to continue with us as long as the snow covered our dead front: this was unanimously agreed. We didn’t think the fact that the battle for Teruel had been fought despite the snow was an argument against, as the element of surprise played such a key role there. So Trini asked for two months’ leave from her university and I recall how her dean, in his letter granting it, offered her tongue-in-cheek congratulations for “being able to live a tranquil and plentiful life at the front”.

  Ours wasn’t the only dead front; many sectors were as becalmed as ours and the situation in which Trini and the commander’s wife were placed wasn’t as unusual as it might seem. We’d sunk into the endless calm of that winter as if it were a chronic disease that had become everyday and tolerable; in any case, and despite Teruel – that did seem so unusual and so remote – none of us thought battle could resume in any of the mountain sectors before the snows melted. As if to confirm us in our delusion, high command never got round to sending us the weapons or new recruits required to reconstitute so many battalions and brigades, devastated by the previous summer’s campaigns and now living a kind of winter hibernation along the frozen sierras. If I dwell on this I do so to justify myself; my opinion weighed heavily in Trini’s determination to stay on into the spring, a decision that was to have dramatic consequences.

  I’d gone up to spend a day in Santa Espina soon after Twelfth Night. I sometimes went there without telephoning beforehand, and it was the case that day and I discovered that Picó and Lluís had left for an expedition to the abandoned valley, no man’s land, where they now made frequent incursions. Trini was alone with her son in Don Andalecio’s house.

  She’d made a find the day before and wanted to show it off to me: a mahogany armchair, apparently from the Louis XVI period, that had appeared in an attic of the ruined rectory. She’d placed it in her bedroom, in front of the large window through which sunbeams now slanted; from there you could see the small cultivated terraces along the Purroy, now buried under two or three feet of snow. A big baroque brazier – another of her discoveries – was heating the room. We’d found a large number of sacks of pressed olive stones in the houses in the two villages, so it was easy enough to keep the braziers lit in every room of the house. When I went in, Ramonet was drawing in a notebook; being an only child he knew how to amuse himself and sometimes even talked aloud to himself, arguing and quarrelling as he might have done with a playmate.

  I sat down in the armchair facing the window with Trini on a low chair opposite me so I saw her against the light. The rays of the sun – and the January sun in that intense cold could be really bright – made her hair gleam; that was the day I realised for the first time it was red, a very pale red only the full sunlight brought out, which was why I hadn’t earlier noticed that particular sheen. Ramonet came over and asked me to make him a cardboard doll; his mother told him to leave us in peace. She wanted to talk to me.

  I realised that she needed to, which made me happy; I felt at ease by her side in that room.

  “I’m so happy,” she said. “I’d never seen my boy with such colour in his cheeks. This dead front is working miracles for him.”

  “And for you as well,” I added.

  “Bah, as far as I . . .”

  Silence descended and I was too inept to know how to proceed; I didn’t understand where she was heading, why she was so interested in talking to me, all alone. I felt at ease by her side in that room. She must have found red ochre in one of the abandoned houses, because the tiles were a luminous red and the radiant red floor contrasted pleasantly with the resplendent whitewashed walls. How it’s changed since she arrived, I thought; most astonishing of all was the difference in the appearance of the junk furniture, those survivors from previous centuries; the friars’ chairs, sideboard, baroque table and trousseau chest. Trini had had them all brought up to her spacious bedroom – very spacious, as I said, with a sitting room and a bedroom. She had plugged the wormholes with wax, and by rubbing the antique walnut hard with a rough woollen cloth had teased out a warm glow that soothed the eyes. She had positioned the mortars, oil lamps, candlesticks, chocolate pots and other various copper items she’d collected around the different pieces of furniture, after rubbing and polishing them furiously to remove layers of mildew: they now shone like red gold. If a slanting ray of winter sun slipped almost horizontally through the window and landed on one, fiery sparks seemed to shoot everywhere. They weren’t only for show; she was using the candlesticks and oil lamps. At nightfall, which came early, she would light them and dissipate the gloom of the long winter evenings. Lo and behold, I thought, this room has been touched by a magic wand; it’s so nice and comfy here . . . In that bedroom you felt you were in a well-established patriarch’s farmhouse: there was a strong scent of lavender from the small bunches she had spread around. A scent of woods and meadows, I thought, the scent of a fine house with a young mistress – it was the first time I’d realised this: quite unawares, Trini seemed born to be the mistress of an ancient mansion. I felt so at ease by her side in that room, even in that deep silence; you have to feel relaxed by someone’s side to be unthreatened by silence . . .

  “The fact is,” she added after that lull, “I’m simply a failure.”

  “ ‘A failure?’ ” I exclaimed, taken aback. “That depends on you.”

  “Do you think I said that because I’ve broken with Lluís? I beg you . . . life is absurd, but not to that extent. I couldn’t care less about Lluís.”

  Her eyes flashed and glinted and I looked down at the floor. Then she suddenly fired another question I wasn’t at all expecting: “Do you know my brother?”

  “Llibert?” But I stopped myself in time; I knew almost nothing about Trini’s brother in that period except for what I’d read in the letters.

  “Lluís hates him and quite right too. I hate him as much as he does. That’s at least one thing Lluís and I agree on.”

  “Lluís told me a bit about him,” I lied, since Lluís had never – or barely – mentioned his brother-in-law. “Soleràs also . . . and please forgive me if I bring him in.”

  “Forgive you? I asked you up to my room precisely to talk about Soleràs; I so much want to talk to you about him . . . And we will do so later; now we’re on the subject of Llibert, who is quite the opposite of Soleràs. Llibert belongs to the race of people who only believe in success.”

  “I’m familiar with that race,” I said. “But who knows whether Llibert . . . ?”

  “I beg you to leave Christian ch
arity out of this; it would be extremely tedious to talk about Llibert and not be uncharitable. As I said, Llibert is totally at home with the race of winners. As far as he’s concerned, any faith, religious or not, is simply consolation for failures, ‘opium for the immense mass of failures’ were the words he used once. He likes to be emphatic and is the kind that listens to his own voice when he’s talking.”

  “That race is all the same. They’re infatuated by rhetoric.”

  “So then, I detest the race of winners as much as I love the race of failures. When I said ‘I am a failure’, I meant ‘I belong to Soleràs’ race.’ You see I’m giving you a clue.”

  “But Lluís has nothing in common with Llibert; he’s no ‘winner’, as you say. He’s not fond of rhetoric and doesn’t like to be emphatic.”

  “Lluís? You don’t know him at all! You’re quite wrong about Lluís, Cruells, as I was too, unfortunately. For the moment Lluís is more interested in women than in banknotes; his ‘successes’ are different in kind, but basically, aren’t they all the same? Why should we only measure success in terms of money? It’s a large, diverse world and there are many other equally selfish aims. And Lluís . . . one should bear in mind, has never had to go without, unlike Llibert. Why would he chase after money if he didn’t need to? Lluís is still very young and for the time being he prefers to chase after women; give him a few years and maybe he will surprise you. Who knows if one day he won’t become the most important noodle manufacturer in the whole of Europe . . . ?”

  She said this in a vicious, sarcastic tone, simply repeating Uncle Eusebi’s wild prophecy which I was only aware of from the letters I’d read. I tried to defend Lluís: “You hate him now . . . and hatred . . . hatred is a warped mirror that disfigures everything . . .”