On September 28, having sold the house at a low price, because there was not much money around and also because he had refused to wait, the Senyor returned to the country. I went with him: the following day was the Patron Saint of Bearn’s day.
During the time that they had been living apart, the Senyors only saw each other on that occasion. In order to avoid any unpleasant comments, they had agreed to continue to sit in two chairs placed next to the altar, side by side. After the service, Don Andreu used to go over to greet them and the three would then leave the church together and talk briefly outside the door, facing the village. After a few minutes the Senyor would look at his watch and say out loud: ‘It’s getting late, and it’s quite a way from here to Bearn…’
Dona Maria Antònia would reply: ‘Especially with those roads that look like riverbeds. It’s a good thing the mules are used to them.’
They would say their goodbyes graciously and not see each other for another year. However, that day the conversation was drawn out on the subject of the political developments. Rumour had it that Queen Isabel had fled to France. It was not true just then, but it would be a day later. The priest was uneasy.
‘How does your Honour think these people will react if we have a Republic?’
‘Stupidly, I should think,’ the Senyor replied. ‘We’ll have to put up with music and speeches, but I doubt if anything important will happen.’
For the moment the villagers were more interested in the Senyors than in the fate of their Queen. When Don Toni disappeared into the coach and his wife had returned to her house, as every other year, the chatter began.
‘You’d never guess they weren’t getting along.’
‘Who says they aren’t?’
‘Well, then, why aren’t they living together?’
‘That’s another story.’
‘It’s like the gentlemen in the City, who can be in the midst of a lawsuit and still greet one another in the street.’
‘I wonder when they’ll get back together…’
‘The Senyora can’t forgive him. When he left with his niece…’
‘And then there was Barbara Titana.’
‘That’s a lie.’
‘A lie?’
‘Lies and envy.’
‘So you also think it’s a lie that the Senyor keeps his light on all night long in his room?’ said a voice, shrill with indignation yet held back in fear.
‘All night long?’ the women asked. ‘What could he be doing up so late?’
‘You don’t know?’ asked the indignant and fearful voice. ‘Well, neither do I.’
‘The one who knows it all is Madò Francina, but she won’t open her mouth. She keeps things to herself.’
‘I’ve always heard,’ an old woman exclaimed, ‘that people who keep their lights on at night are calling for the Devil.’
The priest appeared all of a sudden.
‘Enough of this chit-chat. Gossip will be the end of you. Go home and cook your soup, or your supper will be late.’
Existence seemed uneventful in these mountains, and yet was pregnant with psychic life. The Senyor spent his days buried in papers. There was some entirely unjustified gossip about him and Margalideta, a fair girl who died after less than a year at the estate. By then, he already wore a sort of Franciscan habit and a Louis XV wig because he had gone bald. He was thin, with a face as wrinkled as Voltaire’s. Rumour had it that he had lost his fortune, but he knew how to reason out the causes of his ruin. Since the workers’ revolution of 1848, he believed the world was being re-organized and that the era of bourgeois capitalism was on the decline. He thought socialism would triumph in the end, as he sometimes explained to the priest.
‘May the Lord have mercy on us, Don Toni,’ he replied.
Then the Senyor uttered one of his prophetic statements: ‘They may give it another name and call it something else, but the governments that are determined to fight the signs of the times will only manage to foster them.’
In that respect, he has since been proved right. In regard to nobility, I don’t know whether to call his ideas modern or feudal. He was convinced that families improve on their own in the course of time, like good wines. Kings are often no more than parvenus, and, besides, what power do they have to grant certificates of nobility?
‘It hasn’t yet been proved,’ the Senyor even ventured to say to the priest one day, ‘that James I* was his father’s son.’
‘That sort of statement is horrifying.’
‘Not really, Don Andreu. Nobody really cares.’
The priest used to come by every so often and try to convince him to destroy his Encyclopedist library. Don Toni made reference to the permission he had requested to read banned works. The reply to his request was being delayed. I cannot believe that he made use of his influence at the Palace in order to defer a response he expected to be negative. I prefer to believe that the bishopric did not want to deny the permission, but they did not wish to grant it either. I think they were more concerned about what he might write than about what he might read. He was said to be working on his Memoirs. The people who lived at the estate knew he stayed up all night. He was always expected to do something outlandish. The Memoirs he has left, in addition to a few stories and essays, are indeed disconcerting. His wish was to have it all published after his death, and to that effect he gave them to me a few weeks before he died, as if he had a premonition. He gave me the manuscripts and the money I have mentioned to you, pointing out that the Memoirs were still incomplete and that he would give me the rest as he wrote it. He did not add much to them. I would have liked to persuade him to hand the matter over to someone else.
‘Your Honour must understand,’ I said, ‘that there are some points, as we have sometimes discussed, that do not seem to agree with the dogmas.’
‘That isn’t so,’ he answered. ‘You know a great deal about theology, more than enough to be able to find their good sides. I have always written without thinking about theology, which I don’t believe concerns this life so much as the one beyond. However, your point of view is different. You have my permission to add to my work and say whatever you please about it. If it turns out to be immoral or antidogmatic, you can moralize and present it to the reader’s consideration as a bad example, as an example of what should not be done. And if my death were not “proper”,’ he added, with a melancholy smile, as if he were foreseeing an outcome soon to come, ‘you could even present it as a natural consequence of my life. Morality would win in the end. I believe that even from a literary point of view, that double aspect could add interest to my work.’
‘Your Honour hardly needs me to add interest to it. Besides…’
‘Besides, what?’
‘I understand you perfectly. I could write a prologue praising your literary skill and regretting your errors and follies.’
‘Such an apologia would probably get you a canonry. It would please the bishop and wouldn’t bother me in the very least. Quite the contrary.’
He did not mind having his beliefs refuted and opposed, but if that was so, why was he intent on perpetuating his work? I understood the Senyor all too well, as over the years he evolved towards pernicious Socratic scepticism. Ideas had no value to him, or rather, they had equivalent values, and he felt no need to condemn some in order to accept others. That gracious attitude was built upon his fundamental immorality, an immorality which the Athenians punished with hemlock. Clearly the Senyor, being a sceptic, could not object to having his ‘errors’ refuted. He was not determined to defend a doctrine, but to exercise the reader’s mind as in a gymnasium, and to immortalize all his recollections and loved ones through art. If I were to sum up his life, I would say: ‘He lived and loved.’ ‘Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto,’ Terence wrote. Knowing this, was I to distort the problem pretending to place importance upon those things that were if anything accidental to the Senyor, leaving without comment those he considered paramount and perhaps even justified?
‘I could write the prologue you propose,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know whether it would get me a canonry, but I have not grown up at your Honour’s side for nothing. I’m too honest for that.’
He ran his fingers through my hair with unusual tenderness.
‘Son,’ he said, ‘I have no one but you. All my friends are dead. Do as you see fit.’
He gave me the Memoirs to read and said he wished to be alone. Although I could not be certain, I thought I noticed something strange in him, but he seemed calm, and smiled. I glanced at him with curiosity. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, and when I reached the door, he said in a perfectly natural tone: ‘I must have conjunctivitis.’
Therefore I knew he was crying.