The sound of a door closing pulls him out of a deep sleep, as empty and prolonged as it is painless, timeless … He wants to call out to his wife, to know that he isn’t alone, to mock that abysmal and overwhelming solitude and the fear of greater solitudes, but he can’t manage to turn his thoughts into words. He feels abandoned, perceives his own etherealness; he knows he is almost at the end. He will go no farther than this. With the slowness of defeat, he opens his eyes and looks at his feet: it’s the best he can do, perhaps the only thing he can do. Whenever he’s been at a crossroads, he has, at some point, looked at his feet, conscious or not of why he’s doing it, pushed by some hidden impulse, as if responding to forces greater than him. He knows that other people have preferred to look at their own faces, their eyes, the shapes of their lips, to discover in those features, or at least try to, vestiges of joy, anguish, expectation: to find answers, even. Others look to their hands: hands that have done glorious, repugnant, irreversible things. And there are also those who like to contemplate their genitals, conscious of what drives human decisions, toward joy or ruin. Many times, he’s taken refuge there himself, shyly or shamelessly. But ever since he was a teenager in the mountains, it’s been his feet, his eyes pulled there by a strange attraction in which feelings of familiarity and strangeness, of proximity and distance, have mixed in varying doses. Those extremities, now deformed and useless, are in many senses the sum of what his life has and has not been, because it was with those feet, of course, that he walked down paths both chosen and imposed, that led him to the existence he was allowed to create for himself. His feet have led the way: from innocence to blame, from ignorance to knowledge, from peace to death, from a pleasant walk to hauling loads across the mountains to fleeing without a backward look, driven by fear. His feet first set him in motion and now, exhausted at last, they’re taking him down the final path. Antoni Barral knows he will soon take an irrevocable step, the step that will bring him closer to his mother, Paula; to his father, Carles; to his sad fool of a brother, l’Andreu, a useless and confused martyr of the war, his death the most terrible aspect of war. Yes, he will go no farther with his feet. Everything else will be silence.
Oozing blood from the bedsores covering his back and behind, inhaling and exhaling with an alarming consciousness of breath, exhausted by a battle he knows is lost, laid out forever, he insists on looking, well aware that this is perhaps his last consultation with his feet and their twisted nails, so prone to growing into his flesh, his last time examining those toes with their protruding joints, all the more evident now that they’re little more than bone and weathered hide. His feet, once a wanderer’s, are now the impotent extremities of a near-corpse. A sense of alienation ends up defeating whatever sense of continuity he was hoping to find, since he’s overcome by the impression that these feet are no longer his. Nothing is his anymore. Wait, yes, She is still his, as She will never cease to be, now and before and forever, and with this thought he at last abandons the contemplation of his feet.
He barely raises his eyes and finds Her on Her pedestal, the mistress of time, of all time, and the mistress of time’s ineffable power. Majestic, black, and powerful, illuminated by the scented candle that his wife lit before quitting the room, hoping to leave not only a little light behind but also a smell that might—but couldn’t—do combat with the sour smell of death. And She is his because She guided him all the way here, to the foreseeable end of his unforeseeable life, a life cobbled together bit by bit. And She will accompany him to the great beyond, when his feet stumble for the last time and arrive before the Creator to be judged and sentenced for the sins he’s committed. Including the greatest, the mortal sin that the commandments warn against and for which there is no forgiveness, even with his mitigating circumstances. The murder that for years he’d been claiming he committed for Her, to save Her.
Overwhelmed by the pressure of the guilt he’d never managed to forget, pursued for over fifty years by the expression on the face of the dead man who didn’t understand why he had to die, and overwhelmed too by the pain of not even having been able to dig the graves of those closest to him, he studies his feet once more. He recalls the diffuse light of the damp in the pestilent hold of the trade ship where he’d sat facing Her brilliantly black form, just before putting on his dirty and tattered espadrilles and preparing to leap into the unknown. At that moment too he’d stopped to stare at his feet. On that occasion, the feet he contemplated were filthy, infected with oozing fungus, but young and capable all the same, the only thing, he’d thought, that had always (and would always) be his. And he’d trusted in them and in Her to get him out of that bind, same as they’d gotten him out of others.
They had been at sea for sixteen days since, like a surreptitious rat, he had snuck onto that ship flying a French flag in the Basque port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Without the least idea where in the world it would take him, assuming he survived the passage, he had chosen it by the simple virtue of its being the most practical, among the vessels about to set sail, for him to board. The young man knew only that any destination was preferable to the ones haunting his horizon since History entered his life and begun to march him to its own beat, by way of war. It was he, of all people—or so he’d thought—who had lived in a corner of the world forgotten by time, or in a timeless time that, for centuries and centuries, had swallowed up the lives of his ancestors. A passage that didn’t even merit the sense of movement implied in the word, since, if anything, it had been a state of continual paralysis plagued by a brief cycle of life and death—the time on earth grudgingly granted by the Creator.
Upon boarding, he had found his stowaway’s refuge in the ship’s remotest hold, behind the barrels of fat, emanating their greasy stench. He thought he knew what he was risking if he were to be discovered. He had read and heard stories of stowaways who were whipped, even thrown overboard, and he was quite certain that if the trip were prolonged and provisions ran out, the risks would only grow. Prepared for the worst, he carried with him, in the same coal sack with which he’d made his entire pilgrimage, two bottles of water, two loaves of dark bread, a brown paper package of three dozen olives he’d bought with his last coins, the handful of goat cheese—too smelly for his liking—that he’d stolen at the city market, and, lastly, the dark effigy of Our Lady of la Vall. From his waist hung the coarse knife that had proven good for everything: peeling, cutting, sawing, and, if necessary, shaving. Even for killing. But Antoni Barral was also counting on tools that seemed much more important: his years spent navigating the mountains like a goat; his youth, having just turned sixteen; and his feet. And the undeniable power of the Black Virgin.
The day after he’d slipped onto the ship, he felt the metallic murmur of the anchors lifting, followed by the deep tremor of the engine starting up. He placed himself in Her care as he made the sign of the cross over himself. Comforted by the knowledge that he was moving, he slept for several hours, he didn’t know how many, until a change in noise and rhythm woke him. Why were they stopping? Where? Antoni Barral dragged himself to the farthest corner of the hold and curled into a ball. From there, he saw several men come down carrying sacks that they piled up on wooden platforms until they formed a mountain. From what the stevedores were saying, he gathered that they’d dropped anchor in Bordeaux and, as soon as some cargo was unloaded, the ship would continue its journey, this time across the Atlantic.
When the vessel was moving again, the young man breathed a sigh of relief, but he remained in his damp corner where he patiently waited for what he calculated to be a single day. Then he decided that the time had come to safeguard the effigy of the Virgin he carried in his leather pouch. As carefully as possible, he used his knife to pry open the cover on one of the barrels of fat and, after kissing the stump of Her hand, whose fingers were lost because of him, he dunked the icon in the white paste where, he hoped, no one would think to look for Her. He marked the lid of the barrel with a barely visible cross and closed it again, lining it up with the floorboards in its original position.
Later, he would learn that he had been navigating through his dark refuge for four days before he was discovered. Trapped by the impossibility of leaving the hold, Antoni hadn’t counted on the capacity of his own body to betray him. The fetidness of his bowel movements and the stink of his urine, in addition to the emanations from his skin, created a noxious air that he got used to, but which alerted a sailor sent in search of salt. Accompanied by another seafarer, each armed with a dim lantern, the sailors demanded that whoever was back there emerge from his hiding place before they removed him by force. The young stowaway, convinced that there was no possible escape, at last abandoned his refuge and made his way toward the two men, who stared him down hard and long, as if they’d discovered nothing more than a thief: because, after all, having taken a journey for which he’d paid with neither money nor labor, that’s precisely what he was.
Antoni Barral always believed that his relationship with luck was problematic at best. Nevertheless, at the most critical points, the capricious fickleness of fortune tended to favor him. On that occasion as well, one of the diciest in which he would find himself, his lucky star shone down on him (or was it the work of the Virgin?); the captain of the Saint Martin, as the French ship was named, saw that his furtive passenger was practically a child, and so decided to hear his story before choosing his punishment. Captain Rogelio Flores was from Cádiz but had spent more years at sea than on land: a man whom Antoni would soon learn was proud to be the grandson of Pedro Blanco, one of the last mercenary slave traders who’d once devastated the Atlantic (and perhaps himself the descendant of that mythical medieval pirate and Knight Templar, the captain of the famous ship the Falcon of the Temple, Roger de Flor), and who had also begun his life on the sea as a stowaway. Antoni Barral, laying all his cards on the table, told the captain that he was Spanish, Catalan, from the Pyrenees of Girona known as the Alta Garrotxa, and that he had fled his village when the war began, after some violent anarchists arrested his father, Carles, and his brother, l’Andreu, accusing them of being bourgeois counterrevolutionaries simply because they refused to let their goats be “socialized” in the name of the libertarian revolution. Spurred on more by fear than by any practical considerations or plans, Antoni crossed the sierra through a pass in the mountains known only to contraband runners, shepherds, and mule drivers, where he knew there was no danger of being found. Once he was on French soil, he wandered westward, following a path marked in the sky by the Milky Way. He knew that was the course by which, they said, if he walked far enough, he would someday reach the ocean of Finisterre, the door to America. And thus, he had arrived at that city bejeweled by a river and a seaport. There he heard someone say that the Saint Martin would depart in a few hours from the port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz to cross the Atlantic, and confirmed that it wouldn’t be too complicated to get on board. Captain Flores, despite his years of wandering the seas, was well aware of the difficulties caused by the ongoing war on the other side of the Pyrenees from his home. He was amused by the idea of socializing goats, fishing boats, and chicken coops in order to foster change in the world. But he considered the obsessive, almost religious way his compatriots liked to kill one another, again and again throughout history, to be pathetic. Perhaps moved by such feelings, the old Cádiz-born captain decided that, to earn some leftover food and, above all, the right to his passage, at least till they stopped over in Havana, the young man could brush and shine the ship’s less noble areas, beginning with the foul-smelling hold, and each and every one of the officers’ latrines and showers. When it was time to sleep, he would go down to the same vault where he had initially hidden. As a basic measure of security, his rustic knife would be confiscated, without any right of return—in other words, it would be socialized.
They sailed for fourteen days before arriving at their first transatlantic stop, the mythical city named Havana, which the boy had heard Padre Joan speak of as a place where everything and anything could happen, good and bad, that legendarily torrid town mentioned so often in those old and nostalgic Catalan songs known as habaneras. For their part, the sailors and Captain Rogelio Flores assured him that the city was one of the world’s most entertaining and frenetic, a beloved nexus of freedom, damnation, music, and the most triumphant examples of feminine beauty ever forged by the sun, air, and that mixture of bloodlines particular to the tropics. As they sailed toward port and the boy devoted himself to cleaning floors and toilets, young Antoni invested every spare moment in planning his escape from the vessel as soon as they docked. He knew, or thought he knew, that leaving the ship with his Black Virgin in hand entailed risking further “socialization,” in the form of the crew’s confiscating the statue as payment for his journey. The sight of it might even cast doubt on his story of escape and his claim of being a war refugee. Who runs for his life carrying such a hunk of heavy wood? And what if the Virgin was actually as valuable as Padre Joan had assured him? Every time he thought about it, the only viable option his mind returned to was that of throwing himself into the sea as soon as the ship was anchored—except Antoni was pretty certain the sea wouldn’t be as forgiving as those mountain creek tide pools, where, from boyhood, he had splashed around on summer days, flapping wildly to keep himself afloat when he lost his footing.
The sun was barely up on his fourteenth day at sea when the rumble of the engines changed intensity: the Saint Martin’s much-anticipated first port of call was in view and, in the depths of the hold, Antoni Barral stood up, searching for his worn espadrilles and looking, as ever, at his feet: once again, they were about to be on the move. Except that on this occasion, his arrival somewhere didn’t depend on him, but rather, on the buoyancy of his image of the Virgin whom, the previous night, he had extracted from the barrel of fat, wiped down, rinsed off, and hidden in his pilgrim’s coal sack.
Trusting that the crew and Captain Flores must surely have forgotten him amid the greater responsibilities and attractions of landfall, the young man remained in the hold, like an animal lying in wait, until he heard the three whistles of the merchant’s siren announcing their imminent arrival. After delivering himself over to the care of God and all the saints, and after invoking the power of the Black Virgin (so many tales of miracles surrounded Her!), Antoni Barral went up on deck where he found such commotion as befitted the docking of a ship and the expectations of its sailors, the two days of bawdy fun they’d promised themselves before continuing their journey on to Veracruz and Recife. On one side of the ship the boy could make out the city, its domes, towers, and scattered crosses. On the other side, a rocky outcrop, sparsely populated by mangroves, jutted out from a rough coast dotted with small wooden docks. Near the summit, the steep precipice was crowned by the impenetrable wall of an unending rampart behind which rose an old fortress. So, which was it to be? Would Antoni Barral choose the city or the rock? Instinctively he knew he could only choose the outcrop, throw himself off that side of the ship, and flounder for one of the protruding docks. He looked into the dark waters. His icon’s ability to float meant life or death. But what else was there to do other than, again, and forever, entrust his life to Her? Antoni tied the sack to his waist, hugging and kissing it before throwing himself at the sea and the unknown.
As he sunk into the bay’s murky waters, the young Catalan peasant had time to be surprised: in contrast to the mountain’s tide pools, this sea was as warm as soup and so dense that, just as his lungs began to clamor for oxygen, the sack with the Virgin bobbed toward the surface, and he followed Her back into the air a dozen feet from some greenish planks that had to be the remains of a dock. Swept into the Saint Martin’s wake, the boy swam and kicked with all of his energy, as he had seen dogs do, and he came to brush against the slippery wood jutting out of the sea. Just when his strength was abandoning him and he began to sink, a wave buoyed him up and he managed to grab onto an old piling. Panting, his arms wrapped around this dark stalk, he looked at the ship, which continued its march toward a small motorized barge. Antoni Barral thought he saw, peering over the railing, the face of Captain Rogelio Flores. Antoni would swear, for the rest of his days, that the Cádizian was smiling and, more mysterious still, that they had somehow met long before their first journey together.
He hopped from stump to stump until he reached the rocky coast and there collapsed, exhausted. Only then did he confirm that he had lost his espadrilles—good for walking, not so good for swimming. He looked at his still-grimy feet and knew they would suffer from the sharp edges of the reefs, but he also reminded himself that it wouldn’t be the first time they’d faced such a challenge. In the distance, on the coast, he could see other piers, some houses, humble-looking, although he had no basis for comparison, since he didn’t know anything about the place where he’d just arrived. And without having the least possibility of gauging what awaited him onshore or indeed from now on, he felt a warm certainty that he was safe.
It was on that same magical afternoon—after entering the small village church he’d found after crossing a fishermen’s hamlet—when Antoni Barral, fugitive, stateless, and a killer, knew for sure that the oft-mentioned miraculous capacities of the icon he’d carried from his hometown were indeed powerful, unstoppable, universal. Because on the great altar of the shrine rising on the banks of the ocean of those distant tropics, dressed in finery and surrounded by votive candles, another Black Virgin looked down on him from Her perch, as if She were there to receive him, as if She had been waiting for him—or for Her. OUR LADY OF REGLA, he read on a small wall card announcing ordinary masses and masses for the dead, weddings, and baptisms. From that moment on, the boy had the conviction that his salvation and that of his Virgin had and would always depend on the extraordinary coincidence of color between She who’d recently arrived from a hamlet deep in Catalonia, and Her hostess in the Americas, mistress of a chapel filled with the smell of the sea, looking out at that city of dreams and songs: Havana, in which Antoni Barral would settle, and where he would find out six years later that his father, Carles, and his brother, l’Andreu, had been killed by some faux revolutionaries back home, and where Antoni would reinvent himself in a way he could never have imagined. The place in which he would turn invisible, become someone else, and live out the rest of his years until at last losing himself, in a final delirium, a final somnolence, in the evocation of his great adventure on the seas—and let out his last breath.
He died early in the morning, old Antoni Barral, sans regrets, eyes on his feet, and the black icon of Our Lady of la Vall illuminated by a funerary candle infused with the lavender essence he had always associated with the remote valley from which History’s excesses had expelled him.