Confessions (7 page)

There was a brief, feeble prayer for the dead, a rushed and dismayed benediction over the humble box. Then the improvised officiant, Brother Julià de Sau, gave the signal to the five peasants from Escaló who’d climbed up to help the monastery with that mournful event. There were no signs yet of the brothers who were to come from the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey to confirm the monastery’s closing. They would arrive too late, as they always did when they were needed.

Brother Julià de Sau entered the small monastery of Sant Pere. He went into the church. With tears in his eyes, he used the hammer and chisel to make a hole in the stone of the high altar and pull out the tiny wooden lipsanotheca that held the saints’ relics. He was overcome with dread because for
the first time in his life he was alone. Alone. No other brothers. His footsteps echoed in the narrow corridor. He glanced at the tiny refectory. One of the benches was up against the wall, and had damaged the dirty plaster. He didn’t bother to move it. A tear fell from his eye and he headed towards his cell. From there he contemplated the beloved landscape he knew like the back of his hand, tree by tree. Above his cot, the Sacred Chest that held the monastery’s founding charter and that now would also hold the lipsanotheca containing the relics of unknown saints that had been with them for centuries of daily prayers and masses. And the community’s chalice and paten. And the only two keys in Sant Pere del Burgal: one to the small church and one to the monastic area. So many years of canticles to the Lord reduced to a sturdy savin wood box that would become, from that moment on, the only testimony to the history of a closed monastery. On one end of his straw mattress lay the handkerchief to make a bundle with two pieces of clothing, some sort of rudimentary scarf and the book of hours. And the little bag with the fir cones and maple seed pods that reminded him of the other, old life he didn’t miss much, when he was called Friar Miquel and he taught in the Dominican order; when, at the palace of His Excellency, the wife of the Wall-eyed Man of Salt stopped him near the kitchens and said here, Friar Miquel, pine and fir cones and maple seeds.

‘And what would I want them for?’

‘I have nothing more to offer you.’

‘And why would you need to offer me anything?’ said Friar Miquel impatiently.

The woman lowered her head and said in an almost inaudible whisper, His Excellency raped me and wants to kill me so my husband doesn’t find out, because then
he
would kill me.

Stunned, Friar Miquel had to go into the hallway and sit down on the boxwood bench.

‘What do you say?’ asked the woman, who had followed him and stood before him.

The woman didn’t add anything more because she’d already said it all.

‘I don’t believe you, you despicable liar. What you want is …’

‘When I’ve hung myself from a rotten beam will you believe me then?’ Now she looked at him with frightening eyes.

‘But child …’

‘I want you to hear my confession because I am going to kill myself.’

‘I’m not a priest.’

‘But you can … I have no choice but to die. And since it’s not my fault I think that God will forgive me. Isn’t that right, Friar Miquel?’

‘Suicide is a sin. Run away from here. Far away!’

‘Where can I go, a woman alone?’

Friar Miquel would have liked to be far away, where the world ends, despite the dangers lurking at the wild limits of the universe.

In his cell at Sant Pere del Burgal, Brother Julià looked at his outstretched hand that held the seeds he’d been given by that desperate woman whom he hadn’t known how to console. The next day they found her hanging from a rotten beam in the large hayloft. She swung by the rosary of the fifteen mysteries that hung around the waist of His Excellency’s habit, which had been lost two days earlier. By order of His Excellency, the suicide victim was denied burial on sacred ground and the Wall-eyed Man of Salt was expelled from the palace for having allowed his wife to commit an act that cried out to heaven. It was the Wall-eyed Man of Salt himself who’d found her that morning, and he’d tried to break the rosary in the absurd hope that she was still breathing. When Friar Miquel found out, he cried bitterly and prayed, despite his superior’s orders, for the salvation of that desperate woman’s soul. He swore before God that he would never lose those seed pods and pine cones that reminded him of his cowardly silence. He looked at them again, twenty years later, in his open hand, now that life had thrown him a curve and he would become a monk at Santa Maria de Gerri. He put the seeds in the pocket of his Benedictine habit. He looked out the window. Perhaps they were already quite close, but he could no longer make
out movements in the distance. He tied the handkerchief into an awkward bundle. That night no monk would sleep at the monastery of Burgal.

Holding tight to the Sacred Chest, he went into each and every one of the cells, Friar Marcel’s, Friar Martí’s, Friar Adrià’s, Father Ramon’s, Father Basili’s, Father Josep de Sant Bartomeu’s, and his humble cell, at the end of the narrow corridor, the cell that was closest to the tiny cloister and closest to the monastery’s door, which he had been entrusted, if that’s the word, to watch over since his arrival. Then he approached the reservoir, the modest chapterhouse, the kitchen and once again the refectory where the bench was still eating away at the wall’s plaster. Then he went out into the cloister and he couldn’t keep his grief from welling up, a burst of deep sobbing, because he didn’t know how to accept that as the will of God. To calm himself down, to bid farewell forever to so many years of Benedictine life, he went into the monastic chapel. He got down on his knees before the altar, clinging to the Sacred Chest. For the last time in his life he looked at the paintings in the apse. The prophets and the archangels. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Saint John and the other apostles and the Mother of God showing her devotion, along with the archangels, to severe Christ Pantocrator. And he felt guilty, guilty of the extinction of the little monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal. And with his free hand he beat on his chest and said confiteor, Domine. Confiteor, mea culpa. He put the Sacred Chest down on the floor and he knelt until he could kiss the ground that so many generations of monks had walked upon in their praise of the Almighty God who observed him impassively.

He stood, picked up the Sacred Chest again, looked at the holy paintings one last time and walked backwards to the door. Once he was outside the small church, he closed the two door leaves with a brisk motion, gave the key its final turn in the lock and placed it inside the Sacred Chest. Those beloved paintings wouldn’t be seen again by human eyes until Jachiam of Pardàc opened the church up, almost three hundred years later, by simply pushing on a rotten worm-eaten door leaf with his flat hand.

And then Brother Julià de Sau thought of the day that his feet – eager and weary, still filled with fear – had reached the door of Sant Pere and he’d knocked with a closed fist. Fifteen monks then lived intra muros monasterii. My God, Glorious Lord, how he missed those days – despite not having any right to feel nostalgia for a time he hadn’t experienced – when there was a job for each monk and a monk for each job. When he knocked on that door begging for admission, it had been years since he had left security behind and entered deep into the realm of fear, which is every fugitive’s constant companion. And even more so when he suspects that he might be making a mistake, because Jesus speaks to us of love and kindness and I didn’t fulfil his commandment. But he did, yes, because Father Nicolau Eimeric, the Inquisitor General, was his superior and it was all carried out in God’s name and for the good of the Church and the true faith, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t because Jesus was so far from me; and who are you, Friar Miquel, silly lay friar, to ask where Jesus is? Our Lord God lies in blind, unconditional obedience. God is with me, Friar Miquel. And he who is not with me is against me. Look me in the eyes when I speak to you! He who is not with me is against me. And Friar Miquel chose to flee, he preferred uncertainty and perhaps hell to salvation with a bad conscience. And that was why he fled, taking off his Dominican habit and entering the kingdom of fear, and he travelled to the Holy Land searching for forgiveness for all his sins as if forgiveness were possible in this world or the next. If they had been sins. Dressed as a pilgrim he had seen much misfortune, he had dragged himself along compelled by regret, he had made promises that were difficult to keep, but he wasn’t at peace because if you disobey the voice of salvation your soul will never find rest.

‘Can’t you keep your hands still?’

‘But Father … I just want to touch the parchment. You said that it was mine, too.’

‘With this finger. And carefully.’

Adrià brought a timid hand forward, with one finger extended, and touched the parchment. He felt as if he was already inside the monastery.

‘OK, that’s enough, you’ll dirty it.’

‘A little bit more, Father.’

‘Don’t you know what that’s enough means?’ shouted Father.

And I pulled away my hand as if the parchment had shocked me, and that was why, when the former friar returned from his journey in the Holy Land with his soul wizened, his body gaunt and his face tanned, his gaze hard as a diamond, he still felt the fires of hell inside him. He didn’t dare go near his parents’ house, if they were even still alive; he wandered the roads dressed as a pilgrim, begging for alms and spending them at inns on the most poisonous drinks they had on hand, as if he was in a hurry to disappear and not have to remember his memories. He also relapsed into sins of the flesh, obsessively, in a search for the oblivion and redemption that penitence hadn’t afforded him. He was a true soul in purgatory. Then the kindly smile of Brother Julià de Carcassona, caretaker of the Benedictine abbey of La Grassa where he had asked for hospitage to spend a freezing winter’s night, suddenly and unexpectedly illuminated his path. The night’s rest became ten days of prayer at the abbey church, on his knees beside the wall furthest from the community’s seats of honour. It was at Santa Maria de la Grassa where he first heard of Burgal, a cenobium so far from everything that they said that the rain reached it so weary that it barely dampened your skin. He held on to Brother Julià’s smile, which may have sprung from happiness, like a deep secret treasure, and he set off on the road to the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey, as the monks at La Grassa had advised him to do. He brought with him a pouch filled with donated food and the secret, happy smile, and he headed towards the mountains that are snow-capped all year round, towards the world of perpetual silence where, perhaps, with a bit of luck, he could seek redemption. He went through valleys, over hills and waded, with his destroyed sandals, through the icy water of the rivers that had just been born of the snow. When he reached the Santa Maria de Gerri abbey, they confirmed that the priory of Sant Pere del Burgal was so secluded and remote that no one knew for
sure if thoughts reached there in one piece. And what the father prior there decides with you, they assured him, will be approved by the father abbot here.

So, after a journey that lasted weeks, aged despite not having reached forty, he knocked hard on the door to the monastery of Sant Pere. It was a cold, dark dusk and the monks had finished evensong and were preparing for supper, if a bowl of hot water can be called supper. They took him in and asked him what he wanted. He begged for entrance into their tiny community; he didn’t explain his pain to them, instead he spoke of his desire to serve the Holy Mother Church with a modest, anonymous job, as a lay brother, on the lowest rung, just attentive to the gaze of God Our Lord. Father Josep de Sant Bartomeu, who was already the prior, looked into his eyes and sensed the secret in his soul. Thirty days and thirty nights they had him at the door to the monastery, in a precarious shack. But what he was asking for was the shelter entailed in the habit, the refuge of living according to the holy Benedictine law that transforms people and bestows inner peace on those who practise it. Twenty-nine times he begged them to let him be just another monk and twenty-nine times the father prior, looking into his eyes, refused. Until that one rainy, happy Friday that was the thirtieth time he begged for entrance.

‘Don’t touch it, goddamn it, you’re always touching everything!’

The alliance with Father was shaky if not already cracked.

‘But I was just …’

‘No ifs, ands or buts. You want a smack? Eh? You want a smack?’

That Friday had been long ago. He entered the monastery of Burgal as a postulant and after three freezing winters he took his vows as a lay brother. He chose the name Julià in memory of a smile that had changed his life. He learned to calm his soul, to tranquilise his spirit and to love life. Despite the fact that often the Duke of Cardona’s or Count Hug Roger’s men passed through the valley and destroyed that which did not belong to them, there in the monastery at the
mountain’s peak, he was closer to God and his peace than to them. Tenaciously, he initiated himself in the path to the shores of wisdom. He didn’t find happiness, but he attained complete serenity, which gradually brought him balance, and he learned to smile, in his way. More than one of the brothers came to think that humble Brother Julià was climbing the path to sainthood.

The high sun struggled uselessly to provide warmth. The brothers from Santa Maria de Gerri hadn’t yet arrived; they must have stopped for the night at Soler. Despite the timid sun, it was bitterly cold at Burgal. The peasants from Escaló had arrived hours earlier with sad eyes and asked for no pay. He closed the door with the big key that for years he had kept close to him as the brother caretaker and that he would now have to hand over to the Abbot. Non sum dignus, he repeated, clutching the key that summed up the half millennium of uninterrupted monastic life at Burgal. He remained outside, alone, sitting beneath the walnut tree, with the Sacred Chest in his hands, waiting for the brothers from Gerri. Non sum dignus. And what if they want to spend the night at the monastery? Since Saint Benedict’s rule specifically orders that no monk should live alone in any monastery, when the father prior felt himself growing weaker, he had sent word to the Abbot of Gerri so they could make arrangements. For eighteen months he and the father prior were the only monks at Burgal. The father said mass and he listened devoutly, they both attended hourly prayers, but they no longer sang them because the cheeping of the sparrows drowned out their worn, flat voices. The day before, mid-afternoon, after two days of high fevers, when the venerable father prior had died, he was left alone in life again. Non sum dignus.