It was shortly before the September Revolution that my benefactor, who had spent a fortune on Dona Xima, thought of selling the house in the City, which had been empty for several years. We went to stay there for the-sale towards the end of summer in 1868. Don Toni chose to consult the Senyora first through the village priest. Dona Maria Antònia’s response was as clear and quick as her character. ‘If some day we were to live together again, and that is a matter I do not wish to discuss for the time being, I would consent on the condition that we never leave these mountains. In the City people are always talking, and we’re too old to be the subject of gossip. Here in the village the scandal was so great at the time that it blew over long ago. I believe it would be good for Tonet to get rid of some debts, provided he knows how to.’
We stayed in the City for about five weeks. The sale did not appeal to the nephews or niece, who already considered the house as good as theirs. It was an old building on one of the streets near the Cathedral, with a gothic courtyard and a stone staircase. It had a hall covered in paintings from floor to ceiling, and the rooms were well furnished, with damasks and gilded consoles. The result was slightly excessive for a Christian family which, albeit old and respectable, had but a meagre income.
‘In any case,’ my benefactor said, ‘the heirs would have had to sell it the minute our eyes had been closed. My nephews don’t want to study and will never amount to much. My niece is married to a captain…’
Dona Magdalena had married a captain from the mainland with nothing to his name but his profession. All her brothers did was sit around smoking and gambling at the club. The Senyors could not stand them, and yet did not wish to disinherit them; they had no children and wished the succession to follow its natural course. They felt it was their duty. Therefore, they never thought of drawing up a will; they simply did not see much of them during the periods they spent in the City. With the sale of the house, all relations were finally severed.
In those days the City was rather rundown, with narrow streets full of convents. The revolutionary rage of ’35 had destroyed some of them, among them the Convent of Santo Domingo, considered the richest and most artistic. The reign of Isabel II, whom some called the Angèlica, was prodigal in acts of this soft. Finally, the mobs, who did not respect the sacred laws of the Church, encouraged by the indifference if not by the help of the leaders, went even further: in the September Revolution we saw them knock down and drag along the ground the statue of the queen who was supposed to lead us to freedom and who, much to her own chagrin—she was a good soul, after all—succeeded only in opening the door to licence.
I witnessed that act of vandalism shortly after the Battle of Alcolea. We were walking in formation on our way back from the city walls overlooking the sea. It was a cool, cloudy afternoon; it reminded me of autumn in Beam. I thought of the thrush, of the blissful fields in the rain, the green grass sprouting up in the pastures. Instead of that beloved image, a sea of lead, menacing and motionless, loomed ahead of me beyond the pier. As we walked up Marina Street, we saw a pack of wicked-looking men in the Avenue of the Born, by the statue of Queen Isabel; they had slipped a rope around her waist and were trying to pull her off the pedestal. The priests who were leading us made us turn back down by the walls and enter by the archway of the Calatrava. Some say that it was a suggestion of one of the guards passively observing the scene, but in fact they may have received orders not to intervene. When I saw the crowd, I walked closer and did not notice when the others turned back. I was left alone. At that moment, a dark, weathered stevedore walked over to me laughing and said in a fatherly tone: ‘Don’t be afraid, my boy. If you were the bishop you’d be in trouble, but since you aren’t anything yet…’
I was not the least bit afraid at that moment and my reply came straight from my heart. ‘You have it the wrong way around. Precisely because I’m nobody, you can do whatever you please to me, but if I were the bishop, I’m sure you wouldn’t dare touch a thread of my robes.’
‘This little brute is looking for trouble,’ the stevedore said.
‘I’m not, but with this rosary on me I’m not afraid.’
When he saw the cross he left me alone, but only after lifting his finger to his forehead to show I was mad. I sat down on a bench and began praying under the hostile and mistrusting glances of the mob. To this day I do not know what I thought I was proving by adopting an attitude my superiors judged thoughtless. On the one hand, I felt strong enough to knock the man over with a single blow, and doing so would have given me immense physical satisfaction. However, I knew that if I hurt him I’d be tortured by my conscience. Ever since Jaume’s tragedy, violence has terrified me, and given a choice between hurting or being hurt, I prefer the latter. The small, dark man who made that insolent attempt to protect me was probably married. I could picture him going home wounded to a miserable house full of dirty, sickly children…My ability to place myself in other people’s shoes is undoubtedly what destroys the aggressive urge that courses through my veins. At Bearn I calmed my restlessness swimming in the reservoir or climbing and hunting in the mountains. None of that was possible at the seminary, and my provocative act sitting down to pray (provocative is in fact what they called it) was probably due to the uneasiness produced in a youthful character by that struggle of conflicting forces. At a certain moment, while I was praying for the ill-fated queen, I looked up at the straining, sweating men, who were not strong enough to knock the statue down and did not even know how to pull properly, and a most extraordinary temptation came over me: I wanted to join them and accomplish what they were incapable of doing. Since I am rather thin, seeing me dressed no one would suspect me to be as strong as I really am. I could imagine the surprise of the growing crowd, I could feel their admiration; and the Devil whispered in my ear that the admiration of the people can, in times of Revolution, be in the interest of the Church. I closed my eyes and gathered my thoughts. A sudden crash forced me to open them. The statue had fallen, and in front of me lay the body of the Queen of Spain shattered to pieces on the muddy street. An illustrious city had just been dishonoured.
During his stay in the City, the Senyor chose to take me to the Opera. Il Barbiere di Siviglia was playing. They all sang admirably, and the piece itself was not immoral—the dancers did not perform as they do in others— but the soprano played Rosina with an excess of passion that was incompatible with the modesty of a good young lady from a decent family. I voiced these impressions to the Senyor, who laughed at my naïveté.
‘And what in the world makes you think she’s from a decent family?’
And why, in God’s name, was I to assume otherwise? Had my literary studies not taught me that theatrical works must set a moral example?
He also showed me the clubroom at the Círculo, with its mirror-covered walls and two galleries supported by women, sparsely clad and inspired, I was told, by the Pompeian style. This is where the musicians sat on evenings when there was a ball.
It seems unbelievable to me that a reasonably decent society should have been so eager to attend a club built on the very spot where the Convent of Santo Domingo once stood.
‘Life will teach you not to be shocked by anything,’ the Senyor told me. ‘Everything happens for a reason, and is therefore natural. When you become a priest and listen to people’s confessions, you’ll understand many things.’
It is not easy for youth to accept compromise. My benefactor’s philosophy and my own were following different paths. Not only did forty years separate us, but also an entire cultural background. I have always said, and you and I have argued the point many times, that the morals of noblemen are more complaisant than those of the poor. It was in the heart of the people that the doctrine of Christ first took root. With a very Prussian sense of history, Nietzsche, the sadly notorious creator of superman, says that Christianity is nothing but an insurrection of slaves. He makes the statement with contempt because he does not understand the greatness of an entire people seeking to free itself from the moral slavery in which it was kept by paganism. The fact is that noblemen must be highly virtuous if they are not to sin. We must pray for them even more than for the poor, for theirs, according to the Scriptures, is the kingdom of Heaven. On the days preceding the Battle of Alcolea, there were endless political discussions, even though the local press recommended caution. The Marquis of Collera was purported to be one of the best informed people in the City. He was a young man at the time; he travelled to Madrid and was acquainted with General Serrano, Duke of La Torre. He had already been a Liberal representative (he was later to occupy the same position in the Conservative Party) although not for long. He was a fervid speaker, and his supporters believed that if people had listened to him, Queen Isabel might not have been dethroned. There were nasty rumours about an affair with Dona Obdulia Montcada, an arrogant lady married to a Bearn from the other branch of the family, a rather weak man who died young; she was therefore related to my Senyors. I must add that this side of the family, in which the eldest have the title of Baron, claim that the Bearns are related by marriage to the Princes of Nemours and the Kings of Navarre. According to the Senyor, there are no facts to support such a claim, and there is indeed no reference to that effect in the archives. However, we have no right to deny it, and Don Toni can be accused of treating the subject too lightly in his Memoirs. The affair with Dona Obdulia did not dishonour the Marquis; quite the contrary. We must assume nothing serious came of it (‘because they were both too stupid’, according to the Senyor) and that Dona Obdulia’s spiritless husband never heard any of the rumours. The Marquis added to his glory as a speaker the reputation of a Don Juan he was to flaunt all his life, even though in his latter years envious tongues may have hinted at deeds as monstrous as they were inconceivable. That is high society for you: claiming to be Catholic and yet given to self-indulgence. It is not always perversion, but rather frivolity, no less pernicious, that moves the gracious and carefree people of the world.
Apart from the act of vandalism I already mentioned, the authorities tried to maintain order. There were nonetheless some surprises that prove how little is to be expected of human nature. One of the Senyor’s cousins was leaving the church of Sant Gaietà, and when she reached Carasses street she had to hide in a doorway so a ‘civic rally’ could march by. At the head of the group, waving a flag and shouting wildly with her hair loose and tangled, was the lady’s cook, a peasant from Caimari who had been a servant at her house for almost forty years. I also heard a story about a little old lady from Pina, the village with the kindest, loveliest people on the entire island. Apparently, the priest of Sant Jaume was rushing off to Mass when he heard the old lady say to him in a low voice: ‘You can’t run because of those robes. We’ll take them off you, don’t worry.’ What is so strange and gives you a notion of how distorted people’s minds have become, is that this woman was also on her way to Mass and listened to the priest with the same devotion as usual. I have also heard, although I could not be sure that it is true, that the coachman of the Count of Biniamar told his Senyor that from that day on he would be the Count and the Count would be the coachman. What is certainly true is that some Senyors in Lluchmayor whose daughter was ill with typhus had their house burned down. They managed to get the girl into a carriage, and on their way into the City they saw the entire estate go up in flames. The fire was so dreadful that it spread to some nearby houses and destroyed the home of the man who had planned the whole thing; he was so horrified that he died on the spot. Revolutions are blind, heedless forces, like lightning. May the Lord preserve us and keep us from them.
At Bearn there were also attempts to revolt, and two extremists started ringing the churchbells without the priest’s permission. But the people here have a fair amount of common sense, and when they went down into the square the men were received with a beating they will not forget in a long time. They were embarrassed enough not to make any further attempts of the sort.
These circumstances were hardly the most propitious for the sale of an important property such as the Senyor’s town house, and in that respect his relatives were right when they suggested that we should wait. Don Toni listened to no one. Apart from his needing the money, he was in a hurry to leave the City, and all he could think of was going back home to the country, as was only natural.