You already know that after the première of Faust the Senyor had to return to Mallorca and that his wife refused to live with him. They spent ten years two leagues apart, yet spiritually more united than one would have suspected. Those years were not spent in vain by Dona Maria Antònia, who devoted herself to religious practice and household virtues. After they were back together, she used to tell her husband (she was a Bearn after all, and knew how to laugh about most serious matters) that she had not missed him very much because she had kept herself busy crocheting a bedspread. It was true to a certain extent, although not entirely so. She drew the strength of her temperament from religion. She was sure that she would reach salvation, and I, who listened to her confession on the night she died, have no doubts either. Just as there is hygiene for a healthy body, so is there hygiene for a healthy soul. The materialists believe praying is a waste of time, the very time they spend mumbling in conversation at clubs, and that it makes no sense to repeat the Ave Marias of the rosary fifty times when you have said it all in one. Following this purely rational criterion, there would be no need to educate children, either: all you would have to do is give them a list of sins and virtues. However, we know that it would have no moral value and that without the example of praxis rules serve no purpose whatsoever. A philosopher such as Pascal once said that to have faith we must begin by crossing ourselves with holy water. Even my benefactor acknowledges that Dona Maria Antònia was strong because she was at peace with the angels of Heaven, while he only was with those of the earth.
Those angels undoubtedly inspired the Senyora, who was highly esteemed by all. They believed she was honest and sincere. In fact she had the necessary discretion to live in a tiny village for ten years without having an argument with anyone. She respected the beliefs that prevailed in her surroundings; in other words, she kept her own to herself. She was very polite and I cannot say for sure that she was altogether sincere. If she had been, she could not have appeared to be, just as the Senyor did not seem sincere because he really was, and did not hide his sins. The local peasants are used to living slightly on guard, because the village is small and everything is remembered far too long; therefore they tend to hush up their faults and, in general, anything out of the ordinary. They thought it absurd that the Senyor should stay up all night reading, because for them it would have been, and even though he was the most understanding man in the world, they did not understand him, and thus found him mysterious.
When he returned from Paris, the slander about Margalideta began. She was a blonde, blue-eyed girl, just as the real Marguerite in Faust must have been. In Faust, Marguerite is seduced, has a child and kills it. Margalida of Bearn had no need to kill a soul: she died within the first year she spent at the estate. She was buried in the garden, under a magnolia tree, and the Senyor ordered a white marble monument that was never built. However, a sculptor did come to study the site which raised even greater suspicion. Not for a moment did they think his intentions could have been innocent, nor did they consider the possibility that, not having any children with Dona Maria Antònia, he may have wanted to adopt the girl. The political climate at Bearn was already askew, and by then we had two Republicans in the village who went so far as to say at the café that Don Toni should go on trial. ‘You poor devils,’ replied the sacristan, who was an intelligent man, ‘if you insult the Senyor, you’re insulting the entire village along with him.’ But they would not budge from their theories; they did not acknowledge noblemen, popes or kings, and the worst is that they did not lack people who listened to them.
Shortly after the incident, Barbara Titana, a skinny, dark and half-crazed young girl, finally went stark raving mad, and since she came by the estate fairly often, rumours began going around about the Senyor having cast a spell on her.
‘What do you think of that, Joan?’ he told me. ‘So now I’m a sorcerer.’
‘That must prove to Your Honour,’ I replied disrespectfully, ‘the dangers of universal suffrage.’
‘Steady, son. Don’t jump to conclusions. These people are uneducated, uncompromising and coarse. The ones to blame are the upper classes, who have been on the decline for some time. We’ll have to go through an enlightened dictatorship before democracy wins out in the end.’
I did not express my lack of faith in historical interludes that presuppose a better world ‘in the end’, as if there were any definitive ends in history. The truth is that he was appalled, and rightly so, by human stupidity.
‘If I were capable of casting spells,’ he continued, ‘I wouldn’t waste my time on a woman as ugly as Titana.’
The poor soul had fallen in love with him and lived in a sort of mystical delirium in which Don Toni appeared in angelic forms; she remained in this state until her death only a few years ago. Titana’s spell was all the peasants needed to redouble their fears. These good people can also be brutal, and more than once, when we went to the village through the woods of Sa Creu, they threw stones at us from the bushes. ‘It appears,’ the Senyor wrote, ‘that man, contrary to the doctrines of Rousseau, is endowed with a natural portion of cruelty, either directed towards others in a sadistic manner or towards himself, leading to a masochistic nature. One cannot be too cautious. When La Fayette asked the Queen whether she loved her people, who had just invaded the courtyard of Versailles, she replied that she did, “mais avec les grilles fermées.” With those beneath them, the nobility must always take the initiative. They must love their people from a distance and not appear friendly unless they wish to do so, since love can draw them near, but intellectual communion is almost impossible. They can kiss them, but they can never shake hands with them.’
Later on, still thinking of the stones that broke two carriage windows, he wrote the following words, more reminiscent of recent German philosophy than of the doctrines of Christ and in which he seems to relive the spirit of some legendary Bearn of times past: ‘If the Senyor does not use his whip, surely the farmer will rise up against him sooner or later,’ only to end with a scientific and optimistic rigmarole very typical of the sources which he had been drawing upon: ‘It may all be due to a nervous disorder, and over the years they may discover a drug that affects the sympathetic system and gives us back the tranquillity we seem to have lacked ever since Cain.’
The drug the Senyor referred to and which he hoped to find in the materialism of chemistry has existed for centuries: it is called Christian humility and fraternity. But so much for that.