On August 11, 1883, after a very hot night, I awoke at dawn to read Virgil’s eclogues under the oaks at the Puig de Ses Llebres. Through the mist you could just barely see the pink light of the Cathedral of Mallorca in the distance. The sun was beginning to rise and the golden moon wondered whether to set. I found that moment of indecision deeply moving. I sat down thinking of the sadness of Meliboeus banished from the land where he was born. In the poem, Meliboeus, young and unlucky like myself, appears standing as he contemplates Tityrus—Virgil, that is—who is sitting under an old oak. ‘You are fortunate, Tityrus,’ Meliboeus tells him, ‘to be able to rest in the shade of these trees…’ ‘Shepherd,’ Tityrus replies, ‘this rest has been granted to me by a god.’ ‘Poor Joan,’ the Senyor had said to me the first time I read that passage, ‘poor Joan; the god Virgil speaks of is not God with a capital G, but merely a triumvir. It’s unfair of the old poet to use trickery to make you or Meliboeus cry, you noble souls who know how to admire without envy. Virgil, or Tityrus, had been to Rome, where he used his cunning and his influence to convince Octavius to exempt him from the general confiscation of land.’ Voltaire put ice in the basins of holy water. I was hurt by the Senyor’s words.
‘Does your honour mean to say that Virgil was a deceiver, an ignoble soul?’
The Senyor stared at me with curiosity.
‘Don’t use excessive words, Joanet; they don’t mean a thing. Virgil had talent.’
I dared not reply.
As I meditated, I was distracted by a muted noise that sounded like distant gunshot. It seemed to come from the City, and since at that time there had been more talk about Carlist insurrections, I looked towards the bay, but it was covered in fog and nothing could be seen. I was about to warn the Senyor when I realized what I thought to be gunshot was coming from the opposite direction, from S’Ull de Sa Font. I climbed the hill to see the other side and found men felling pine trees. Such boldness at six in the morning was brazen, and as I was closer to the house than to the pine forest, I ran to tell the Senyor. When I entered the courtyard it occurred to me that he would be sleeping. The steward, whom I told what I had seen, suggested sending for the Civil Guard, or that we all go, he and the farmers armed with guns and myself with the double authority of priest and administrator, to speak to the delinquents. Neither one of the two solutions pleased me, least of all the first; for some reason—you will soon see that my instinct was right—I was horrified at the thought of mixing strangers into the affair. The only solution was to wake the Senyor. I knocked softly on his door and he immediately asked me in. I was astonished to find him awake and dressed. He was sitting at his desk, pen in hand, examining some papers.
‘Look, Joan,’ he said, handing me a drawing. ‘Let’s see if you can guess what this is.’
He seemed perfectly happy, not the least bit surprised at such an early visit. Without looking at the drawing, I tried to apologize.
‘Audaces fortuna iuvat,’ he replied, laughing. ‘Sit down and stop that nonsense. You know that in principle I’ve always defended boldness.’
And he wandered off into a literary digression, witty and perhaps ever so slightly sophistic, only to end up saying that our writers had never been bold, and therefore could never be amusing.
‘Bold, amusing…’ he continued. ‘The secrets of charm are feminine. One can’t possess anything, and least of all a woman, without being a little bold. Don’t you agree?’
‘Your Honour knows that I have no opinion on such matters.’
‘It’s true,’ he said, taking it back, ‘I’m pleased that you’re such a good boy.’
I was intrigued. When did the Senyor sleep? For years it was rumoured that he kept his light on all night. Suddenly, hearing his brilliant, fluent speech, seeing the ease with which he found timely quotations from the classics, lightly underlined with irony in order to neutralize whatever solemnity they conveyed, I understood that Don Toni was one of those people for whom the first moments of the morning are those of the greatest lucidity. That lucidity must have diminished in the course of the day, and by the evening, when he excused himself after dinner claiming that he was going off ‘to write,’ he must have collapsed into bed, exhausted, without even remembering to put out the candle. That was the explanation that occurred to me at first, although it has since changed somewhat: he probably left the light on purposely, so that in the morning, when he really did work, everybody would think he was asleep and allow him to rest; expecting them to allow him to work would have been asking too much.
The Senyor chattered on merrily and I could not find a way of telling him what had happened.
‘What do you know!’ he told me. ‘Fourteen years ago we burned all those books, and now I’ve been left with no maps. That night, the Senyora and I went too far: we even destroyed The Christian Year and Thomas à Kempis. Now I need a map of Rome and I wanted to draw one up from memory. But Rome, unlike Paris, is a centipede. The heroes of Italian culture are no longer the Italians. There must be a reason why the platinum standard metre is kept in Meudon. Look, this is Michelangelo’s Porta del Popolo. This is where the three main streets start from. The one in the middle is the famous Corso, which joins the Popolo with the Capitoline Hill. But it’s a narrow street, and it would be hard to widen because it’s bordered with old palaces, which probably aren’t as artistic as they’re supposed to be.’
He sat, lost in thought, and I took the occasion to tell him what was happening at S’Ull de Sa Font.
I assumed he had not heard me when he continued: ‘Nevertheless, it’s a unique city, if only for its fountains.’ But then he added: ‘The pine forest they’re cutting down has been sold. As soon as the hot weather is over, we’ll leave for Italy. A priest has the obligation of visiting the Pope.’
I was astounded.
‘So your Honour has sold the pine forest? Hadn’t we decided that whatever we got from it would be used to cancel part of the mortgages?’
‘You’d made the decision…but in order to travel we need a full purse. However,’ he added, seeing the look on my face, ‘I haven’t sold the entire pine forest; only the largest trees’ (which happened to be the most expensive). ‘Cheer up, Joan. Fourteen or fifteen years from now it will be just the same as it is now.’
‘Fifteen years from now, your Honour will be close to ninety!’
‘If I’m alive,’ he replied.
I did not know what had hit me. To see the Pope was what I had most desired in life, but the pine forest of Sa Font was our last resort. How had he managed to sell it without my knowing? I later discovered it had all been done by means of letters that I myself put in the mail; that is what it is for, after all, and inventions must serve some purpose. I dared to tell him that he ought to have warned us, because the steward had almost called the Civil Guard.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I forgot.’
I assume that given his reluctance to discuss monetary matters he had preferred to not say a word until the buyer had begun to fell the trees and we were faced with a fait accompli. The pine forest of S’Ull de Sa Font can only be seen from the Puig de Ses Llebres. The Senyor must have assumed that we would not notice until a few days later. Fate would have it that I found out that very morning.
‘When are we leaving?’
He smiled and put his arm around my shoulders.
‘Slow down. There are a thousand arrangments to be made…First of all, we must arrange for a private audience with our Holy Father. Leo XIII is an enlightened and liberal man, as he has proved during his five years as Pontiff.’
It was not the first time he expressed his admiration for the enlightened Pope, as he called him. I noticed that on the table lay the encyclicals Diuturnum and Humanus generis, which had just been published.
‘Does the Senyora know…’
‘Of course. She knows everything.’
I remembered that Dona Maria Antònia had announced a surprise a few days earlier. But did she understand that it meant spending the money from the pine forest on travel? My mind was set on finding out. I said goodbye and turned to leave, but the Senyor stopped me.
‘Listen, Joan: don’t say a word to anyone…’
‘Very well.’
He stared at me with curiosity: ‘Are you trying to outsmart me? What do you mean by “very well”?’
‘That I shan’t tell anyone you wake up so early in the morning.’
‘Under the seal of confession,’ he laughed. ‘You can go now.’
I went out into the room with the fireplace. It was not yet eight and Catalineta told me the Senyora was sleeping. She was frightened and wiped her lips with her hand. She had chocolate stains around her mouth. I gave her a gentle scolding (she was not even fourteen) and sat down by a balcony. A few minutes later, the Senyora appeared. She greeted me with the following words: ‘Joan, we can get the trunks ready.’
She knew that they had started cutting down the pine forest and seemed quite pleased.
‘Joanet, that means we’ll have money. I hardly get excited over cèntims’—like all country ladies, she said cèntims even when referring to large amounts—‘but I’m happy that we can still find some when we need them. One can make any sacrifice whatsoever in order to see the Holy Father. Aren’t you pleased?’
‘It’s what I’ve dreamed of all my life, but…’
‘Hush,’ she interrupted, striking me softly with her fan, ‘don’t tell me we’re getting old. Thank God, we’re still strong and healthy.’
Her gesture with the fan proscribed any possible discussion. Until that moment I had not suspected that Dona Maria Antònia’s mental faculties were beginning to decline, and it still took me quite a while to acknowledge it. The sale of the pine forest made her feel optimistic and, by the same token, child-like. In fact neither she nor the Senyor had ever been deprived of anything. Whenever money was needed, money appeared. Such experiences tend to give the powerful security and a certain hardheartedness; that is why Jesus Christ said salvation was not as easy for them as for the rest of men. It also gives them a certain kind of blindness. ‘You’re ruined, you’re swamped with mortgages,’ I could have cried, ‘everything will be sold in a public auction…’ I was reluctant to upset their happiness. It was a lost cause.