Since you never came to Bearn, I must explain that it is a mountain estate located near a small village of about four hundred souls also called Bearn. Whether the estate took the name of the village or the village that of the estate remains unknown. Year after year, on the day of Sant Miquel, the patron saint of Bearn, the preacher mentions that these lands have belonged to the Senyors since the Conquest.* It may be true, although there are no documents to prove this fact. ‘Our lineage’, Don Toni said, ‘is so old that it can’t be dated. It’s lost in the darkness of time.’ However, the oral tradition that made them respectable and irreproachable has had no official recognition. There is a good reason: the documents are missing. All the Senyors except for Don Toni, who was a francophile, were always quite indifferent as far as erudition was concerned. Even within the past century and a half, one of his great-great-grandfathers, also called Don Toni, was such a primitive soul that he was the object of many tales of mischief, although they probably exaggerate what he actually did. The old people remember the following rhyme:
Our Lord Jesus is in Heaven
and in Moorish lands, the heathen.
The Devil lives deep down in Hell
and in Bearn Don Toni dwells.
The Senyor found it all very amusing. ‘At least,’ he said, ‘he didn’t waste any time.’ His other ancestors were more sensible. They lived in the country, and either ignored or looked down upon the refinements of city life. The City,* in turn, ignored them.
From the village to the estate is about an hour’s walk, but due to the mountainous terrain one cannot see the estate until one is practically on top of it. Bearn is thus, figuratively speaking, a lost cause. The land is poor, with only pine and oak growing between jagged rocks. It will soon be thirty-eight years since I came into this world, the son of a labourer and a farm girl. I have no recollection of my parents. I have heard that my mother was very beautiful and had jet-black eyes. When I was seven, I was sent to work as a swineherd, but the Senyor decided almost immediately that I was to be sent to school in the City. I can remember it as if it were this very moment. It was a summer afternoon and I had taken the herd over to S’Ull de Sa Font when the Senyors went by. They would spend long periods in the City, and when they returned, my respect, my fear or my embarrassment made me run off and hide every time I saw them. I barely dared to look at them anywhere but in the village church, on the day of Sant Miquel, when they sat in two red velvet-covered chairs next to the altar.
Dona Maria Antònia was very beautiful, and Don Toni, thin, graceful, and rather slight, resembled her despite his ugliness. They were first cousins. Although they almost always smiled, they were imposing because they appeared to be made of a different substance from that of the peasants, something newer and more luminous; not even now could I explain it. The way they dressed undoubtedly had something to do with it, but I do believe it was a less material, almost magical quality that surrounded the feudal and pastoral name of Bearn, revered every year from the pulpit on the holiday. Usually around Sant Miquel it rains in the mountains, and the history of the old family is as closely associated with the beginning of the cool weather and the joyful green of the first pastures as it is with the deeds of the conquerors in the battlefield.
‘Look at that boy, Tonet,’ said Dona Maria Antònia. ‘Have you noticed his eyes?’
The Senyor stared at me and did not reply. Dona Maria Antònia was lost in thought.
‘He reminds me of someone…I’m not sure who,’ she said.
He remained silent. The following day I was sent to the Theatine school. I returned for the Easter vacation. My benefactors were not at the estate. Madò Francina told me that ‘the Senyor was off travelling’ and that Dona Maria Antònia was at the townhouse of Bearn, a stone house by the church. I thought I sensed some mystery in her words. Indeed there was: everybody was talking about it, whispering to each other, and no matter how much I listened, I could not understand a thing. Besides, whatever I could have understood would only have been the outside appearance of the matter. Years later, the Senyor, who was unreserved with me and with almost everyone, unveiled the psychological mechanism behind it in a series of long conversations which truly resembled a confession. Although I do not know to what degree they could be considered as such, despite their sincerity, and I understand that you may be shocked, as I myself am, to think that to this date, after all my years as the family priest, I cannot honestly state that he ever made a single confession.
His soul was as transparent and ever-changing as glass. Precisely because he was such a sincere man, you could never know what he was really like, just as you cannot know what images will be cast by a piece of crystal. It is strange that those people who refuse to lock themselves into a system, perhaps so as not to neglect any aspect of reality, are the ones who appear to be most dishonest. If you add to that the fact that noblemen are trained from an early age in the art of kind words that are not to be taken literally, and yet always are by those less educated, we find another reason why people mistrusted Don Toni. Ordinary people believe that only the tactless are sincere, because they are incapable of interpreting the conventional values and the things that are taken for granted in good manners. For example, I believe I already told you that he used to wear a white wig and the habit of a Franciscan. Those who compared his past and his conversation, not always edifying, with those robes, saw nothing but the disparity which undoubtedly existed, but they might also have seen the similarities (his secluded life, his love for matters of the soul) that were no less real. People who only spoke one language admired this man who spoke several. The Senyor was basically well-meaning, although some of his actions may have been disastrous; he believed that disasters were caused by errors of intelligence rather than by voluntary evil, which he refused to accept.
‘Don’t you understand,’ he used to tell me, ‘that the cheat or the swindler probably doesn’t think of himself as such? The cheat makes thousands of arrangements so as to end up on top, which clearly does not imply evil; it implies error. Believe me, Joan, the coachman doesn’t drive the carriage into the ditch out of malice, but out of carelessness.’
That may have been why he read so much and made an effort to educate himself, forgetting that intelligence can sometimes also lead us astray. He had an eighteenth-century education and could not disregard La Raison, despite having, as you will see, a poetic, even contradictory nature.
‘I will grant you,’ he told me, ‘that the flame of reason is a weak one, but that doesn’t mean that it should be put out; on the contrary, it should be made brighter.’
He was a skilled sophist and dialectician. I have considered his teachings with caution, but have not always succeeded in resisting his charm.
How could it have been otherwise? The school I was taken to when I was seven lacked spirit. Our education was monotonous and pedantic; the students’ manners were coarse. Every time I returned to Bearn I was in awe of the aura of freedom and graciousness surrounding the Senyor. Don Toni never argued nor got angry, although he had not given up the custom of inflicting physical punishment on his servants when they misbehaved. I have seen him whip the ploughman, who looked like an athlete and moaned with every blow, and then reason out the punishment to the village priest, who disapproved of such measures. It only happened every now and then, because the ploughman would let out ‘goddamns’ and ‘bloody hells’, expressions that hardly befitted an eighteenth-century vocabulary. I found the preparations for the scene both chilling and fascinating: the gracious ease with which the Senyor pointed to the belt hanging behind the door and the way the ploughman then handed it to his master in submission.
‘Let’s see how long you remember this,’ Don Toni said. ‘Take your shirt off and sit down on this stool. Lean your head down, it’s in my way.’ The ploughman bent his head and it was shocking to see the tall, strong young man letting himself be whipped by Don Toni, a small man well over fifty. Because the scene defied all physical and biological laws, I believe the ploughman’s submissiveness (considered base by some) was due to moral forces, to an entire order of things, disciplines and traditions honoured by both master and servant.
After the ceremony, Don Toni recommended that the ploughman put some of their best oil on his back if it stung, and then returned to read the Classics. He taught me French and introduced me to Racine and Molière; thanks to him, a poor country priest who never chose to break his vows will not die without knowing the love of Phaedra or the smile of Célimène. I think God must like it better this way; he must prefer my conscious sacrifice to those of ignorant men, which can hardly be considered sacrifices at all.
He was an extraordinary man. I know that his detractors may have many arguments against him, or even mock his moth-eaten eighteenth-century culture. As science advances (and it is doing so at an alarming rate as the end of the century approaches) his erudition will naturally seem frivolous, that of an amateur. In fact, he never really intended to be anything more than that, but he had moments of genius that set him ahead of his time. I have no qualms about stating that this reasonable, sceptical, weak-willed and indifferent man appeared in some ways, may God forgive me, to be a sorcerer, and that is how he was perceived, albeit simplistically, by many of the peasants in Bearn.