We had a good music teacher at the Seminary. Father Pi was a lover of modern music and had a preference for Wagner, who was almost unknown in Spain. He claimed that Wagner composed the music of the future.
‘He has revolutionized everything,’ he told me, enthusiastically.
His admiration was paradoxical in such a conservative, moderate man. Even more incomprehensible was his admiration for Bismarck and the bellicose, Protestant Germany. The truth is that nowadays there are many bourgeois raving about Tannhäuser and Die Walküre.
‘It’s hardly surprising,’ the Senyor told me. ‘The Prince Bismarck is a man of humble extraction. William I is only a descendant of some poor Marquis of Brandenburg. Dreams of grandeur are typical of those who aren’t much in the first place. Such a distortion of history, a Hohenzollern proclaimed Emperor at the Galerie des Glaces in Versailles, has to have gone to their heads. Wagner reflects a state of things that can’t last very long.’
Repeating concepts I had learned from my teachers, I ventured to ask him whether he thought that Germany was the greatest cultural and military power in the world.
‘I believe none of that, and such ideas surprise me coming from a future priest. Prussian culture is merely Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, or a war to death against Catholicism.’
He was right. However, why was Germany depicted as a virtuous, healthy country? Youth expects an answer to every question, and I found one of my own: ‘Because France is a corrupt nation.’ Every day the paper spoke of the immorality and anarchy of France, and one must admit that if literature and theatre are reflections of their cultures, the country of Saint Louis cannot be proud of names such as Renan, Comte, Dumas, Emile Zola and so many others.
‘You’re forgetting,’ said the Senyor, ‘Bernadette Soubirous and the miracles of Lourdes; Chateaubriand, Jean Croisset, author of The Christian Year, Louis Veuillot…’
One can always prove what one pleases; nothing is absolute, except for God. I was lost in confusion.
‘Wagner,’ the Senyor continued, ‘is as excessive as Bonaparte. Therefore he isn’t great, because greatness implies proportion. I admit they both knew their craft and that within the limitations of their professions they did prove skilful, but neither is a man of the future, precisely because they’re incapable of seeing things as a whole. That’s a shortcoming we tend to call genius so as not to call it monstrosity, which is more or less the same thing. Wagner’s success blew over as fast as Napoleon’s.’
‘We can only find a supreme vision by coming closer to God.’
The Senyor did not seem to hear me.
‘They’re both excessive,’ he continued. ‘They didn’t know human nature. Who’s capable of enduring the reiterations of Siegfried, the din of Die Walküre, to say nothing of the length of each scene? No stomach can take a thirty-course meal. The French got tired of their hero before long. Even Béranger, a firm supporter of Bonaparte, interpreted the feeling of his times when he wrote:
Terreur des nuits, trouble des jours,
Tambours, tambours, tambours, tambours!
M’étourdirez-vous donc toujours,
Tambours, tambours, tambours, tambours?’
I was not interested in Wagner, whose music I did not know at all, but I certainly was interested in the moral dispute over the German hegemony. The Senyor believed that the Empire of Bismarck would not last and that Prussia appeared to be stronger than it really was. He believed it was a country of specialists, incapable of looking ahead and discerning the hierarchies of the soul.
‘Those kinds of people,’ he said, ‘are easily disoriented. They’re fundamentally anarchic.’
Yet anarchy was a quality my professors attributed precisely to the French.
‘Paris,’ Father Pi would tell me, ‘is an annex of Hell. A city of atheists, indulging in pleasure and vice. The war of the seventies was a warning from God, but to no avail. They’ve given in to suicidal demagoguery; the Republic has been infiltrated by socialism. It can only lead to chaos.’
Father Pi always dropped the names Voltaire and Renan (I do not know whether he had read Nietzsche or whether at the time the latter had already written his blasphemous Anti-Christ). When he spoke of socialism and the materialistic interpretation of history (this did not occur to me until many years later) he did not seem to know that Karl Marx, who inspired the revolution of 1848, was German.
I said at the start that the Senyor introduced me to literature and that his teachings were opposed to what I learned at the Seminary. Our old professors spoke in hyperboles. The words ‘immortality’, ‘glory’, ‘laurels’, were frequent in their vocabulary and were repeated with cold monotony. The adjectives lavished by the poets of antiquity became insignificant, as the Senyor would have said, because they were out of proportion. The Seminary was, above all, grammatical. They always spoke of declensions and objects, verbs and adverbs.
‘Be careful with grammar,’ he told me. ‘Grammarians are honest workers who place rocks next to each other and bind them with the cement of syntax. That’s as far as a mason can see. The building as a whole, conceived by the architect, doesn’t concern him; he can’t even grasp it.’
Among the papers he left me I find many statements defending voluntary self-control and moderation. He was an enemy of the romanticism that has to scream and shout to express feelings and passions. ‘The least literature can aspire to,’ he wrote, ‘is to express the states of the soul in an intelligible, or, in other words, an intelligent manner. The best writers will be the ones who come closest to reaching that end, which is, incidentally, inaccessible. Those who do not even strive for that—Victor Hugo in Hernani, for instance—are not even copyists. Nonetheless,’ he added, ‘prose that can be understood ceases to be considered brilliant by the common herd that places Chateaubriand above La Fontaine.’
Apropos of La Fontaine, a few weeks before his death the Senyor told me that writers have always attributed far too much importance to themselves. As far as he was concerned, La Fontaine was one of the few exceptions to that rule. He was an amateur: he only sought his own pleasure. For Don Toni art was a little like children, who cannot be conceived following a method, but only in the careless joy and intimacy of the night.
I asked him whether it was true that he had been a superficial man, who did not hold the morals of his fables.
‘Certainly. For La Fontaine, the moral wasn’t so important. His strength lies in his wit, his joie de vivre, the variety in metre and rhyme. If, for example, he attributes evil qualities to cats, it’s not because he’s opposed to them, which would be absurd, since every species follows its own nature. On the contrary, he does so because he finds it amusing. He himself was a cat: lazy, selfish and wild. He spent his fortune, sold the position he’d inherited from his father and always lived off others. That isn’t so easy to accomplish unless you’re endowed, as cats are, with some redeeming qualities.’
I chose not to ask him what those might be. The Senyor continued. ‘He always had a benefactor. The most loyal one was Madame de la Sablière. Incidentally, they met in a very strange way. When a rich man with whom he lived passed away, La Fontaine walked out into the street before the body had even been buried and ran into Madame de la Sablière on a street corner. “I was looking for you,” the woman said. “Where will you go now?” “Wherever you go, Madame,” he replied.’
That lack of dignity embarrassed me. Without my saying a word, the Senyor suspected my feelings.
‘It’s true, La Fontaine had no dignity,’ he said, ‘but he did have wit. Save your anger for a better occasion,’ he added smiling, ‘and remember that dignity can be a form of arrogance, or, in other words, a mortal sin…and utter nonsense, too.’
I could not conceive of a mortal sin being nonsense—nonetheless, before the greatness of God, arrogance must appear as the most nonsensical of all sins.
We were talking under the stars. It was late and he gave me his hand to kiss. ‘You must reconcile yourself with La Fontaine,’ he added as we parted. ‘If I were born again, I’d devote myself entirely to literature and adopt one of his famous alexandrines as my motto: “A beaucoup de plaisir je mêle un peu de gloire…” ’
I have looked for the alexandrine, and as yet have been unable to find it. Obviously, trying to find that line among all La Fontaine wrote is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I do not know whether the Senyor’s prodigious memory had begun to fail him every now and then. In any case, if the alexandrine were apocryphal, it deserved to be authentic and the fact that he could have invented it only proves the man’s affinity with the lighthearted spirit of the author of the Fables.