The Senyor did not like the City. He had been born at Bearn and studied in Madrid shortly after the invasion of the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis.
‘Those were the years of the worst absolutism, followed by tremendous liberal anarchy,’ he told me. ‘The French of the Restoration didn’t think they could instill any order here without a dictatorship, and they weren’t altogether wrong. However, they would have liked to impose a more moderate government, as is obvious when one considers that the Duke of Angoulême imprisoned the members of the Regency of Urgell, among them the Archbishop Elect of Tarragona. Even Chateaubriand, the famous author of the Génie du christianisme, had denied the Regency’s authority. In other words, they all found our absolutists too extreme, to such an extent that before long Ferdinand VII did not seem absolute enough to many Spaniards and the Apostolic Uprising emerged after having been planned in the forests of Catalunya. I was about nineteen at the time. It was a period of utter confusion, with different anti-liberal factions killing each other instead of the enemy.’
His criteria were clear enough to keep him from excessive accusations against Ferdinand, whose memory, like that of his daughter Isabel, is now execrated by almost everyone.
‘They accuse them of the most contradictory facts, you know,’ he told me. ‘They’ll say on the one hand that he was an autocrat, on the other that he used the support of the populace; that he sought counsel among the Dukes who favoured him or from the water-seller at the spring of the Berro. If that had been true, the democrats would have honoured his memory, but are there really any democrats in Spain? Ever since the War of Independence, everything has been pure anarchy here.’
It was not easy for him to accept that when you leave the path of religious unity you fall into a state of confusion worthy of the Tower of Babel. At my age, I was drawn to discussion, despite the fact that respect held me back. Were the anarchy and the confusion my benefactor bemoaned not the natural outcome of the principles of 1789, drawn directly from the Encyclopedia?
‘Your Honour,’ I dared to say, ‘remember that the very men who fought Napoleon proclaimed the Constitution of Cadiz and allowed freedom of the press. We won the battles, but the invaders left their mark.’
‘You little devil! You’re too young to be jumping to conclusions with such assurance,’ he exclaimed, pulling my ear.
Even though I did not know what to attribute it to, I realized that my assurance pleased him. Due to some strange vanity, he was also pleased to see that as I grew I was becoming strong and graceful. He had asked the rector of the Seminary to let me swim and play ball; he proposed that I emulate the beautiful athletes of antiquity perpetuated in Greek statues. He even set up a small gymnasium at the estate so I could exercise during my holidays. Veneration for sports has always struck me as inappropriate in a man of the cloth. You and I, Miquel, have discussed this many a time: the fate of a vigorous body is love or war, both of which are forbidden to us. I was too ashamed to confess to him that for me physical fitness was a kind of martyrdom. Besides, since he had not made a vow of chastity, he did not share my terror of lust; and as the pagan Gautier could have asked the disciplined monks of Zurbarán: ‘Pour le traiter ainsi, qu’a donc fait votre corps?’
When you do not accept the painful mystery of Original Sin there are many things you cannot understand. I do not mean to attribute to him the sacrilegious attempt to lead me down the path of sin; if anything, quite the contrary. Even though he did not really believe in certain things, he would have liked me to face the throes of passion with strength and bravery, so that through the child he had taken in out of benevolence he could live the spiritual adventures denied him by paganism and the indulgence of his century. The fact is that he did not wish to give up any aspect of Creation. If he wished to make a handsome youth out of me, it may have been because he had a somewhat frail constitution himself, and since he was insensitive neither to the fascination of women nor to sophistical arguments, he must have enjoyed the sight of a naïve athlete, both chaste and devout: a new wax figure in the Musée Grévin of his memory.
Long before the Paris scandal, the Senyor had severed relations with almost all his family. Although he was polite in his manners, his advanced ideas were publicly known. Nobody knew exactly what they were, but everyone wanted to pass judgement on them. They went so far as to claim that during Easter he had thrown the priest out when he went to bless the house; in fact, he received him graciously and gave him a gold duro every year. It was also rumoured that he had slapped an altar boy in the Cathedral, which was true, but they overlooked the fact that the boy had been quarrelling with another child during the Holy Mass. Those better informed claimed he was a Freemason.
‘If it goes on like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up making rhymes about me, like they did about my ancestor,’ he once told me.
He was joking, but that baseness of spirit did not please him in the least. Besides, his wife was a Bearn from head to toe: she may have believed—and she was wrong—that in the country there are fewer dangers than in the city. For one reason or another, as the years went by, they spent more and more time at the estate, until finally they never left it.
‘I don’t know what they see in the old quarter by the Cathedral,’ my benefactor used to say. ‘I can understand that foreigners find it interesting, because they have no intention of living there. I would force them to spend a whole winter in one of those dark, dank halls that are fifteen yards long, without a ray of sunlight, decorated with black paintings, where you can’t even see what’s in the picture.’
His criticism was sincere. Besides, Palma made him long for the other cities he had visited with his wife. He liked Genoa, with its beautiful palaces, which he preferred to the ones in Florence; but above all, he loved Paris.
‘France is the country of intelligence,’ he often told me. ‘Campoamor wrote that it’s “El país del ingenio y de la guerra”* because he undoubtedly agreed with the Bourbons and Bonaparte. But even though Napoleon has now been taken to the Invalides, he was neither French nor good at anything but wreaking havoc and disorder. Like all good dictators, he managed to rave in the name of God. His power didn’t even last twenty years, and all the victories attributed to him on the sides of the Arc de Triomphe—Saragossa, Wagram, Austerlitz—are nothing but defeats.’
I asked him whether it was true that they did not know what direction his body faced in the grave.
‘It’s true,’ he replied, ‘but you can’t go on like this. I’ll have to show you these wonders sometime. It was all built during the time of Louis XIV, by the architects Bruant and Mansard, two men who worked for posterity. Bonaparte,’ he added (he rarely called him Napoleon) ‘is in five or six coffins, one of which is made of lead. The sarcophagus, made of red porphyry, sits on a green neoclassical pedestal and faces south; but since it’s symmetrical and so are the coffins, there’s no way of knowing in what direction the General lies (he never referred to him as the Emperor), which would appear to symbolize that the Napoleonic adventure, ultimately, has neither head nor tail.’
Night had fallen and we were in the garden. It was a splendid summer evening. He was silent and looked up at the sky. His classical wig shone silver in the moonlight.
‘Years ago, on a night like this…’ he murmured. But he stopped himself suddenly, and started talking about the palaces of the old French monarchy.
‘Napoleon III lives in luxury, not because of his uncle, who never succeeded in building a thing,’ he said, ‘but thanks to Catherine de Medici: the Tuileries are the work of a Florentine princess and artist who chose to live away from the hustle and bustle of the Louvre. Then it seemed suitable to connect the Louvre and the Tuileries, and they built the hall called du bord de l’eau, famous because the kings of France used to heal the sick there.’
I was surprised.
‘Heal?’
The Senyor smiled.
‘They were neither doctors nor saints, but they were kings. It’s something in between. Now we’re living in the century of positive science and it all sounds awfully strange to us. However, in the long run, science won’t be able to part with its element of witchcraft.’
‘But the Kings of France, the country of Reason…were they sorcerers?’
‘I insist: they were kings. It must have been marvellous to see them walk by, dressed in purple and ermine, as in the stained glass windows of the Sainte Chapelle, among those poor souls, touching them softly and pronouncing the magic words: “Dieu te guérisse; le roi te touche.” ’
‘What kinds of illnesses did they heal?’
The Senyor smiled again.
‘Endowed, as they were, with supernatural powers, they should have cured them all, but for some strange reason they specialized in scrofula and the mumps.’
He paused and added: ‘Perhaps because they happen to heal on their own.’
Was it really a hoax? The Senyor spoke in a serious tone and I did not end up asking my question; as happened so many times, he saw it coming, or asked himself the same one. Speaking softly, he added: ‘Truth and lies are parts of a whole. Charcot says that hysterics have fits because their nature forces them to do so, so one can’t really say they’re doing it for effect. Precautions seem better than lies. Wise men in the times of Alexander the Great put chicken eggs through bottlenecks. They did it using two methods: either uttering a magic word, or soaking the egg for hours in a vinegar bath that softened the shell. Good magic supposedly called upon both methods.’
I could not help but speak up.
‘If they softened the shell to get the egg through, they had no need for a magic word.’
‘You really think so, son?’
He changed the subject to avoid an argument.
‘It’s a beautiful night out. Do you like these mountains?’
‘I was born here,’ was my reply.
It was a beautiful night. I wished I could have suggested to the Senyor that he join me in prayer. There was a deep silence. I shut my eyes and collected my thoughts. Behind us, the jasmine gave off its perfume, mingling with the scents of the forest.
‘I too was born here,’ my benefactor said, ‘and I hope to die here. One of these days, the Senyora will get tired of the townhouse and come back.’
It was the first time he had mentioned their separation.
‘And you,’ he continued, ‘will be the family priest. So you will attend to our last moments.’
I was sitting at his feet, and he caressed my ear.
‘But we’ll live many years yet, God willing. If we could only fly all the way to Paris and back…there’ll probably come a day when balloons will be perfected so we can travel by air.’
Sometimes he liked to rave.