For no particular reason, some superstitious villagers believed that Madò Coloma, the old woman who lived alone up on the hill, would be murdered. Indeed, one day she was found dead at the foot of her bed, and it looked as though she had been strangled. Her nephews, warned by Trinxet, arrived when she was still warm and saw that theft could not have been the motive of the crime. Nothing was missing from her house: neither the goat, nor her clothes, nor even her gold chain, although it had been broken and the pendant was not found. Everyone was terrified, and the people who had thoughtlessly predicted the murder were as surprised as everyone else. Who could have any interest in killing a woman who was no longer in this world? However, people need to point fingers and it was soon known that sotto voce two names were being discussed. The first was the English painter. The second (and God knows I was hardly surprised, because I had come to expect it) was the Senyor.
I will never cease to wonder what has done most harm in this world, whether malice or stupidity. In this case, ignorance was the main culprit of the nonsense that was being said about Don Toni.
‘He stays awake all night long,’ some said.
‘He invokes the Devil.’
‘He never goes to Church.’
I can assure you that on the days of obligation he never missed the celebration of mass. As far as his practice of sorcery is concerned, I can think of nothing more ridiculous than applying such an accusation to a man so deeply affected by the illuminati and who had borrowed the remark from Diderot, ‘Reason is a very weak light; along comes a necromancer and puts it out.’ As his lack of popularity increased, the facts were distorted, and they even went so far as to accuse him of lending money when in fact it was the villagers who lent money to him, as I already mentioned, and always at high interest.
Nobody was able to discover the source of another rumour, according to which the pendant stolen from Madò Coloma was Masonic, and far-fetched though the connection may have been, the Senyor’s name was brought up once again. I took that mysterious death as a warning, almost as a premonition. Evil creeps in when we least expect it, and we are all exposed to its fury. Let us pray to God and trust only in His mercy. That rule, which as a priest I have always preached, was applied better by Dona Maria Antònia than by myself.
‘I don’t know,’ she used to say when she heard us discussing politics, ‘why you worry so much about those things. Don’t you see that whatever shall be shall be? If we only thought about what happens from day to day and didn’t try to have the future at our disposal I think everything would be better. Why are they fighting a war over Cuba? Wars are sinful, apart from the fact that one risks losing them.’
Like the Senyor, she no longer chose to perceive the differences between great things, which all seemed the same to her, whereas she attributed great importance to the ones we usually qualify as little. She did not understand how Don Toni could spend so many hours writing ‘for no particular reason’.
‘I’m writing about you, Maria Antònia,’ he answered on one occasion. ‘And about my writing, I’ll say, to quote Corneille, that it will preserve the memory of your eyes and that I shall
dans mille ans faire croire
ce qu’il me plaira de vous.’
‘Oh, Tonet! Did Corneille think his poems would be read a thousand years later? Besides, what do we care about what they think of us one thousand years from now? I’d like to see what you’re writing. Are you only writing about me?’
‘I also mention other ladies, but they all lead me back to you. I’ve never been unfaithful to you.’
‘Oh, Tonet…’
‘I mean I’ve never been unfaithful to you with anyone who didn’t resemble you.’
Dona Maria Antònia seemed to meditate.
‘Well, then, why were you unfaithful to me, if they were the same…? Or didn’t you know beforehand?’
The Senyor shook his head.
‘No?’ Dona Maria Antònia inquired. ‘You don’t know until afterwards? Now that we brought up the subject, in what way do I resemble Dona Xima?’
‘You’re both kind-hearted. You both would have offered me a place at your table.’
‘And Miss Bernal?’
‘Her feet were just like yours.’
‘And that Italian lady?’
‘She fluttered her eyelashes the same way you do.’
I was about to retire, given the intimate turn the conversation had taken, when Dona Maria Antònia noticed and looked at me mischievously, with the best smile of her youth.
‘Joan, don’t you think the Senyor is always joking?’ she said, pulling my sleeve so I would not leave. ‘Pull up a chair and help me roll a ball of yarn.’
It is true that the Memoirs are an homage to Dona Maria Antònia. ‘I can assure you,’ the author writes, ‘that I have always found her in each one of the women with whom I have betrayed her, so to speak.’ Her husband sees that as a symbol of conjugal fidelity. However, was such a statement of crime really necessary? He himself answers the question: ‘Once I had realized that Maria Antònia was morally and psychologically my true wife, proving the fact became unnecessary, just as one doesn’t need a thermometer if one knows one’s body temperature.’ I believe, having seen with my own eyes, that each adventure drew him closer to his wife. Nonetheless, it is not easy to accept his paradoxical statement that one cannot be sure that Philemon was faithful to Baucis precisely because he had never betrayed her.
‘That,’ I dared to say, ‘is like proclaiming that light is dark.’
‘The Greeks,’ he replied, ‘succeeded in proving that snow is black.’
The Greek sophists, naturally. Zeno also proved that movement did not exist. Was the Senyor a humorist, making fun of absolutely everything? Despite appearances, it would be wrong to judge him so. His love for womankind, embodied in Dona Maria Antònia, and for letters, to which he devoted half of his life, present him as the opposite of a sceptic. On occasion I was surprised to see him defend some of the villagers’ lowest superstitions. For instance, he believed in the effects of the moon and changes in the weather on people’s health and mood. It is true that he may have believed so out of mistrust towards the official scientific truth.
‘All medicine,’ he said, ‘is sorcery. If it were a science, doctors would be able to treat their patients at a distance, just as engineers build bridges without leaving their offices, merely by applying precise rules. There would be certain pills for headaches, other ones for coughs, and so forth. And yet we find that there isn’t one kind of headache, but many, and that there are as many illnesses as there are people. Doctors have to “guess” in each case. Haven’t you heard people say that a doctor has “guessed” what was wrong with them?’
I took the occasion to tell him some of the rumours that were being spread around the village concerning Madò Coloma’s death, the pendant she had worn on a gold chain and the Senyor’s supposed sorcery.
‘They think I killed her?’ he asked.
I was astonished, because that was not what I had said.
‘It’s all rubbish, Senyor; it’s best not to listen to it.’
‘You’re wrong,’ he replied. ‘It’s quite curious. I would like to know the process by which an old advocate of the Enlightenment like myself can be turned into a sorcerer in the eyes of the people.’
God knows that I also would have liked to know. I mentioned the light in his room after midnight and the candles that were burned in the house, which amounted to a fine sum of money by the end of the year. He listened to me patiently.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t take much. Three hundred years ago, an abbess who died in the odour of sanctity appeared before her daughters and told them she was condemned. “One day,” she explained, “while I was praying with my hands crossed, I thought that my hands were beautiful”…’
I reminded him that the Church did not recognize that apparition.
‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but many people do without finding it the least bit extraordinary that a poor nun should receive such a cruel punishment for having admired her own hands. The pendant Madò Coloma was wearing,’ he added, ‘was indeed Masonic.’
I was astonished.
‘How does your Honour know?’
It took him a moment to reply. Then he said: ‘Because I gave it to her many years ago.’
‘To Madò Coloma?’
He smiled sadly.
‘Madò Coloma was young once, too. And one of the times I went to France, I became a Freemason. Come, now, Joan, don’t fret. I was only with them for a while. I don’t know what Freemasonry was like at other times. In my time it was utterly ridiculous. Coloma—Madò Coloma,’ he quickly rectified—‘fell in love with the pendant and I gave it to her along with the chain. I also let her have that plot of land. It all happened a long time ago.’
There was a deep silence and I could not break it. Madò Coloma, considered almost a saint, had in fact been a sinner? The Senyor, with his usual cunning, read my mind and tried to comfort me.
‘It isn’t that bad, Joan,’ he said, caressing me kindly. ‘Apart from the pendant, there was nothing…More than fifty years ago, my God!’ Then he repeated twice. ‘Nothing, nothing…’ and very softly, as if to himself, he added: ‘Almost nothing…’
I looked up.
‘Why did your Honour compare her to Dona Maria Antònia the day we went up to visit her?’
‘You have a sense of veneration,’ he answered, ‘and that says very much for your generosity. It’s strange that a man as strong, as handsome and as marvellously endowed as you can be so humble and respectful. After all, you’re young.’ He spoke slowly, and for an instant I thought that instead of saying I was young he was going to say I was nothing but a servant. ‘The years will teach you,’ he continued, ‘that all things have their similarities, and that in the end everything is necessary.’
I asked him for permission to retire and the Senyor pointed to a chair.
‘Sit down and listen,’ he said. ‘That’ll teach you to ask questions. When the Senyora and I were reconciled, more than twenty years ago, she went through a difficult period. Nobody noticed because we knew how to hide it. There have been other deranged people at Bearn.’ The eighteenth-century shadow of Don Felip, with his light blue uniform and a rose in his hand, seemed to float up, graceful and elegant, like a painting by Van Loo. ‘Whenever she signed her name, she wrote “Xima”. Since it happened several times, she began to feel haunted with fears and became neurasthenic. The doctors in the City were at a loss, so I decided to write to Charcot, explaining all the background, part of which he already knew, as he had met Xima and me in Paris. I even sent him photographs of the Senyora, one full face and one profile. Charcot told me what I already knew: that my wife’s distress was due to an inner shock. But he added something that had not occurred to me; in her illness, for fear of losing me, she identified with my niece, whom, according to Charcot, she resembles physically and corresponds to in the moral aspect as the positive would to the negative of a photograph.’
‘And did your Honour take those statements into account?’
‘Now that her mind is going,’ the Senyor continued, ‘and she is far more relaxed, you’ve seen how she even asks me directly in what way she resembles Dona Xima.’
‘That doctor in Paris who passes judgement without seeing his patients must be quite frivolous indeed.’
The Senyor looked at me. Then he said with the composure so typical of the Bearns: ‘If tomorrow it doesn’t rain, we can go hunting for thrush.’
I arose and this time he did not detain me. I needed to collect my thoughts and pray. As the years went by, I thought I glimpsed in all those analogies and harmonies of opposites advocated by Don Toni a dangerous return to oriental fatalism.
That crime, those mysteries and that confusion against the background of the apparent peace of Bearn felt like a premonition. Could it have been the prelude to what in military terms we would call a mobilization of the troops? The Senyor had just let me know he did not wish to discuss anything but thrush. Even if he had not changed the subject, that afternoon I would not have asked him whether he believed in the identity of God and the Devil. I would have feared some outrageous reply.