Twenty-two years have gone by, Miquel, since Dona Maria Antònia returned to the house and the automobile burned up in the fireplace. Twenty-two years in these peaceful mountains, with the sole interruption of a trip abroad in the company of the Senyors. I will recount it all in the course of this Second Part, which takes place for them, even if not for me, in the most perfect serenity.
Dona Maria Antònia had begun to crochet a bedspread and the Senyor was writing. We seldom saw them before lunchtime. Madò Francina, who had been the Senyor’s nursemaid, brought him his breakfast until the last few years, when she was replaced by Tomeu, a young farmboy whom I will mention again further on, as in a way he contributed to the unfolding of the tragedy. As in all tragedies, we find that fate has carefully choreographed numerous different causes. Each one of them is blind to all the others, and yet they operate together with the accuracy of a precision instrument. Tomeu is now almost twenty-three, and last week he was married to Catalineta, Dona Maria Antònia’s maid. He is dark and his hair is always uncombed; the Senyor used to threaten to cut it. When he was still a child, a foreign woman wanted to paint him in a mythological scene surrounded by nymphs; it was quite a scandal. Women sometimes seem mad to us, or so different that we cannot understand them. Six years later, this catastrophe has occurred. Yet I must not jump ahead of the events.
During the first period after their reconciliation, I was at the seminary and only returned every now and then during my holidays. Before I turned twenty, the Senyora used her influence to make sure I would be ordained as a priest, even though I did not say mass until later on. Since then I have not left Bearn, apart from our trip to Rome, and I would have liked to spend the last days of my life here, too, had Providence not determined otherwise.
At the beginning, our life was monotonous and disciplined, although towards the end we lived in a friendly sort of anarchy. Dona Maria Antònia got up at ten and went to hear mass at the chapel. Then I would go off to the archives. The three of us met at lunchtime. The Senyor would come down from the rooms upstairs, his wig combed and his mind sharpened by the acute thoughts he had just put down on paper. He was usually in an excellent mood. At the table, he would recall his travels and tell me stories about Paris and Rome.
‘Maria Antònia, we must go back before we die. Joan has to see the world.’
I was dying to visit Rome, but I realized that we could not really allow ourselves such prodigality. Together, Dona Maria Antònia and I had managed to put the administration of the estate back on its feet to some extent, but we had not succeeded in paying off the main mortgages, the interest on which took most of the profit from the harvest. Dona Maria Antònia neither approved nor disapproved of her husband’s plans.
‘Don’t you think we’re a little old for that, Tonet?’
Over the years she had become less and less concerned with monetary problems. If I explained that a trip to Rome would cost far too much, she would calmly reply: ‘You may be right, but I believe that given a chance a priest has the obligation of visiting the Pope. Be quiet and stop behaving like a child.’ Patting my hand, she added, ‘If the Senyor wants to take us, I think we should take advantage of it. This is our chance.’
After lunch, my benefactor and I used to go walking in the woods. We usually took our guns, but we hardly ever hunted; we preferred to sit under an oak tree and discuss the ancient poets. I do not know whether it was out of perversity or refinement, but he preferred the French classics.
‘They’re better than the Greeks and the Latins, for one, because they’re less original; having drawn from the ancients, they’re capable of surpassing them. Assuming Homer really existed, he was too primitive; his works are like compilations of folk tales. Socrates is a sort of nouveau riche of reason. Think about it; he’d just discovered it. In historical terms, he’s a keystone of civilization, but how can one avoid preferring Candide to Plato’s Dialogues.’
He was an optimist about Creation, and, in his own way, an admirer of the greatness of God, only his God could prove at times to be rather strange. I found it disturbing to hear him speak of Voltaire’s religious sentiment.
‘Voltaire was a deist, Joan. It’s a known fact. “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.” ’
Invent God! I cannot think of a more blatant misrepresentation of the problem.
At seven o’clock sharp we said our rosaries in the chapel. Afterwards we always sat in the courtyard, or by the fireplace in winter, until it was time for supper. Rumour had it that the Senyor never went to bed before dawn, but it was hard to know, because he always left the table as soon as he had finished eating and we would not see him until two o’clock the following day. He always reappeared looking pleased, as if the world were new to him day after day. He would ask us how we had spent the night and we would walk to the dining room rather ceremoniously, the Senyora and I ahead and the Senyor a little further back, to the left of the Senyora. That order, that precision worthy of a convent or a palace, prevailed until only a few years ago, when they started getting up late and disrupting their schedule.
Lately, when the bell rang at lunchtime, instead of coming down to the dining room, Dona Maria Antònia called Catalineta, asked her to comb her hair and disappeared off to the left. Then the Senyor, who had not yet washed, asked for hot water and disappeared to the right. If truth be told: life in Bearn was enviable. In the place where so much had happened (and happened still in the realm of the soul, as the Senyor was constantly writing) nothing seemed awkward. Dona Maria Antònia never had the slightest doubt that their tranquillity was perfectly consolidated. She carried peace within her and considered the disorder of the last few years to be some new sort of order in itself. Bearn was like an anticipation of Paradise, with forests, lambs and sunsets, the stone house and the old fireplace, spring and winter, hydrangeas and snow…How I will miss it all when in just a few weeks I leave this place forever! Nonetheless, Miquel, here I have suffered more than you could possibly imagine. This paradise was ephemeral for me; it was earthly, the one man is bound to lose. The tree of Good and Evil grew here, but Dona Maria Antònia grasped only one aspect of the tragic duality revealed in the Senyor’s posthumous and supposedly frivolous writing. Her calm blue eyes were far removed from the beady, bright eyes of her husband, surrounded with wrinkles, and from mine, too black, having seen so little happiness. In her unsurpassed serenity, no matter where she had been, she would have succeeded in reliving the maxim written by Horace: ‘Of all the corners of the earth, this one smiles at me the best.’