Cathedral of the Sea

by Ildefonso Falcones

  Joan had become the outstanding pupil at the cathedral school. He had mastered Latin in no time at all, and his teachers were delighted at this thoughtful, sensitive pupil who in addition was so deeply devout. He was so gifted that nearly all of them foresaw a great future ahead of him in the Church. Joan gradually won Gastó and Eulàlia’s respect, and the two of them would often sit with Pere and Mariona and listen in rapt attention to the way the young lad explained the holy scriptures. As a rule it was only the priests who could read those books written in Latin, and yet now, in this humble house by the sea, the four of them could enjoy the sacred teachings, the ancient parables, and other messages from the Lord that they had previously heard only from the pulpit.

  If Joan had won the respect of all those around him, Arnau could say the same: even Simó regarded him with great admiration: a bastaix! Almost everyone in La Ribera knew of the efforts Arnau made to carry stone for the Virgin. “They say that the great Berenguer de Montagut got on his knees to help him,” another apprentice had told Simó, hands spread wide in astonishment. Simó imagined the great master, respected by noblemen and bishops, kneeling at Arnau’s feet. When the master spoke, everyone, including his father, kept silent, and when he shouted ... when he shouted, everyone trembled. Simó watched Arnau when he came home at night. He was always the last to arrive. He looked tired and sweaty, carrying the leather headpiece in his hand, and yet... he was smiling! When had Simó ever come home from work smiling? On several occasions, he had crossed Arnau’s path as he was carrying stones down to Santa Maria: his legs, arms, and chest seemed made of iron. Simó stared at the block of stone and then at Arnau’s straining face: how could he possibly have seen him smile?

  All this explained why, despite being older than them, when Simó had to look after his sisters and Arnau or Joan appeared, he kept in the background and the two girls could enjoy the freedom they were denied when their parents were there.

  “Let’s go for a walk on the beach!” Alesta suggested one day.

  Simó wanted to refuse. Walking along the beach: what would his father say if he saw them ... ?

  “All right,” said Arnau.

  “It will do us good,” Joan agreed.

  Simó said nothing. So the five of them went out into the sunshine: Aledis with Arnau, Alesta alongside Joan, and Simó bringing up the rear. Both the girls let the sea breeze play with their hair and mold their loose smocks against their bodies so that their breasts, stomachs, and thighs stood out.

  They walked along in silence, looking out to sea or kicking at the sand, until they came across a group of bastaixos relaxing on the beach. Arnau waved at them.

  “Would you like me to introduce you to them?” he asked Aledis.

  She glanced over at the group of men. They were all staring at her. What could they be looking at? The breeze pressed her smock up against her breasts and nipples. Dear God! It seemed as though they were trying to burst out of the material. Aledis blushed and shook her head, although Arnau was already going over to the men. She turned on her heel, and Arnau was left standing there.

  “Run and catch her, Arnau,” he heard one of his colleagues shout.

  “Don’t let her get away,” another one said.

  “She’s a pretty one!” a third man added.

  Arnau ran until he had caught up with Aledis.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She did not answer. She turned her face away and held her arms folded across her chest, but did not insist they return home. So they walked on along the beach, with only the sound of waves for company.

  20

  THAT SAME NIGHT, as they were eating by the hearth, Aledis rewarded Arnau with an extra second’s attention, a second when she kept those enormous brown eyes of hers fixed on him.

  It was a second when Arnau once more heard the waves on the shore, and felt his feet sinking into the sand. He glanced round to see if anyone else had noticed, but Gastó was still talking to Pere, and nobody else seemed to have seen a thing. No one seemed to hear the waves.

  When he dared look at her again, Aledis had lowered her gaze and was pushing her food around the bowl.

  “Eat, child!” Gastó the tanner ordered, seeing her toying with the food rather than raising it to her mouth. “Food isn’t for playing with.”

  Gastó’s words brought Arnau back down to earth. For the rest of the meal, not only did Aledis avoid looking at him again, but she made a deliberate show of ignoring him.

  It was several days before she offered him a silent gift similar to the one she had given him that night after their walk along the beach. Until then, on the few occasions they met, Arnau had been longing to see her eyes on him, but Aledis always managed to avoid him, or kept her face turned away.

  “Good-bye, Aledis,” he said to her absentmindedly one morning, as he left for the beach.

  It so happened that they were alone at the time. Arnau was about to shut the door behind him, but something he could not describe made him turn and look at the girl instead. There she stood, erect and beautiful by the hearth, an invitation in her great brown eyes.

  Finally! Finally. Arnau blushed and looked away. Flustered, he made to shut the door, but as he was doing so, he stopped a second time: Aledis was still standing there, calling out to him with those eyes of hers. And she smiled. Aledis had smiled at him!

  His hand slipped off the door latch. He stumbled and almost fell. He did not dare look at her again, but rushed off toward the beach, leaving the door wide open.

  “HE GETS EMBARRASSED,” Aledis whispered to her sister that same evening, before their parents and brother came upstairs, when the two of them were lying on the pallet they shared.

  “Why should he be?” Alesta asked. “He’s a bastaix. He works in the port and carries blocks of stone for the Virgin. You’re only a young girl. He’s a man,” she added, with more than a hint of admiration.

  “You’re the silly young girl!” her sister snapped.

  “Oh, and you’re a grown woman, are you?” Alesta replied, turning her back on her sister as she spoke the same words their mother used whenever either of them asked for something they were not old enough to have.

  “That’s enough,” Aledis said, to calm her.

  “A grown woman. I am, aren’t I?” Aledis thought of her mother and her friends, of her father. Perhaps ... perhaps her sister was right. Why would somebody like Arnau, a bastaix who had shown the whole of Barcelona his devotion to the Virgin of the Sea, become embarrassed when a young girl like her looked at him?

  “HE GETS EMBARRASSED. I’m sure of it,” Aledis insisted the following night.

  “Silly goose! Why would he?”

  “I don’t know,” Aledis replied, “but he does. He gets embarrassed when he looks at me. And when I look at him. He gets flustered, he turns red, he runs away ...”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Maybe so, but ...” Aledis was sure she was right. Although the previous night her sister had made her doubt it, she would not succeed again. She had proved it. She had watched Arnau, and waited for the right moment, when nobody could catch them by surprise. She went up to him, so close she breathed in his body smell. “Hello, Arnau.” Nothing more than that, a simple greeting accompanied by a gentle smile, so close to him they were almost touching. Arnau blushed, looked away, and tried to get away. When Aledis saw him pull away from her, she smiled again, this time out of pride at discovering a power she did not know she had. “You’ll see tomorrow,” she told her sister.

  The fact that her sister was there as a witness led her to take her coquettishness still further; she was sure she would succeed. That morning, as Arnau was about to leave the house, Aledis stood between him and the door, leaning against it. She had planned the move over and over again in her mind while her sister slept.

  “Why don’t you want to talk to me?” she said softly to Arnau, staring him straight in the eye.

  She was amazed at her own audacity. She had said the sentence so many t
imes to herself she was uncertain whether she would be able to get it out without stumbling over the words. If Arnau answered, she was lost, but to her delight this did not happen. Because he was disturbed by the presence of Alesta, when Arnau turned instinctively toward Aledis, his cheeks reddened as they always did. He could not leave, but he could not look her in the face either.

  “I, yes ... I ...”

  “You, you, you,” Aledis interrupted him, growing bolder. “You run away from me. We used to talk and laugh together, but now, whenever I try to approach you ...”

  Aledis stood as straight as she could in front of him. Her young breasts poked through her smock. Despite the rough cloth, her nipples stood out like darts. Arnau saw them, and not all of the stones in the royal quarry could have made him take his eyes off what Aledis was offering him. His whole body quivered.

  “Girls!”

  Eulàlia’s voice as she came down the stairs brought them all back to reality. Aledis opened the door and went out before her mother could reach the ground floor. Arnau turned to Alesta, who was still standing watching everything openmouthed, then rushed out of the door as well. Aledis had already vanished.

  That night in bed the two girls were whispering to each other again, trying to find answers to the questions raised by this new experience that they could not share with anyone. What Aledis was sure of, although she did not know how to explain it to her sister, was the power her body had over Arnau. This feeling delighted her, filling her entirely. She wondered if all men would react in the same way, but was unable to see herself with anyone other than Arnau; she would never have behaved like this with Joan or any of the tanning apprentices who were friends with her brother, Simó. Just imagining it made her ... And yet, when it came to Arnau, something inside her broke free ...

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH the lad?” Josep the guild alderman asked Ramon.

  “I don’t know,” Ramon answered in all sincerity.

  The two men looked across at the boats, where Arnau was vigorously demanding they give him one of the heaviest loads. When he succeeded, Josep, Ramon, and the others saw him stagger off under its weight, with clenched jaw and strained face.

  “He won’t be able to keep this rhythm up,” Josep asserted.

  “He’s young,” Ramon said, trying to defend him.

  “He won’t be able to withstand it.”

  They had all noticed. Arnau demanded the heaviest loads and stones as if his life depended on it. He almost ran back to get the next job, again calling for them to load him down with more weight than was good for him. At the end of the day, he limped back exhausted to Pere’s house.

  “What’s the matter, lad?” Ramon asked him the next day, as they were both carrying heavy bundles to the city storehouses.

  Arnau said nothing. Ramon was unsure whether his silence was because he did not want to talk, or because for some reason he could not do so. His face was strained again because of the weight on his back.

  “If you have a problem, perhaps I ...”

  “No, no ... ,” Arnau managed to stutter. How could he tell Ramon his body was burning with desire for Aledis? How could he tell him he could find peace and quiet only by loading heavier and heavier weights on his back until his mind was fixed only on reaching his destination, and forgot her eyes, her smile, her breasts, her entire body? How could he tell him that whenever Aledis played her little games with him, he lost all control of his thoughts and imagined her naked beside him, caressing his body? It was then that he would recall the priest’s warnings about forbidden relationships: “They’re a sin! A sin!” he would warn the faithful loudly. How could he tell him he wanted to return home so exhausted that he would collapse onto the pallet and fall asleep at once, despite the fact that she was so close by? “No, no,” he repeated. “But thanks, Ramon.”

  “He’ll collapse,” Josep insisted at the end of that day.

  This time Ramon did not dare contradict him.

  “DON’T YOU THINK you’re going too far?” Alesta asked her sister one night.

  “Why?”

  “If Father found out ...”

  “What is he supposed to find out?”

  “That you love Arnau.”

  “I don’t love Arnau! It’s just that ... I feel good, Alesta. I like him. When he looks at me ...”

  “You love him,” her younger sister insisted.

  “No! How can I explain it? When I see him looking at me, when he blushes, it’s as though a little caterpillar were crawling through me.”

  “You love him.”

  “No. Go to sleep! What would you know about it?”

  “You love him! You love him! You love him!”

  Aledis decided to say nothing; but did she love him? She knew only that she liked being looked at and desired. She was pleased that Arnau could not take his eyes off her body. She was content that he was so obviously upset when she ceased flirting with him; was that loving someone? Aleda tried to find an answer, but before long she lapsed into a state of pleased contentment, and then fell asleep.

  ONE MORNING, RAMON left the beach when he saw Joan coming out of Pere’s house.

  “What’s wrong with your brother?” he asked straight out.

  Joan thought it over.

  “I think he’s in love with Aledis, Gastó the tanner’s daughter.”

  Ramon burst out laughing.

  “Well, that love is driving him mad,” he warned Joan. “If he carries on like this, he’ll collapse. No one can work as hard as he is doing. He can’t take all that effort. He wouldn’t be the first bastaix to drop ... but your brother is very young to be crippled. Do something, Joan.”

  That same night, Joan tried to talk to his brother.

  “What’s bothering you, Arnau?” he asked, lying on his pallet.

  Arnau said nothing.

  “You ought to tell me. I’m you’re brother and I want ... I’d like to help. You’ve always shared my worries; let me do the same for you.”

  Joan waited while his brother struggled to find the words.

  “It’s ... it’s because of Aledis,” he admitted finally. Joan did not want to interrupt. “I don’t know what’s happened to me with her, Joan. Ever since we went for that walk on the beach ... something’s changed between us. She looks at me as though she’d like to ... I don’t know what. And I ...”

  “And you what?” Joan prompted him when he fell silent.

  “I’m not going to tell him about anything except for the way she looks at me,” Arnau decided, as the image of Aledis’s breasts flashed through his mind.

  “Me? Nothing.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  “I have bad thoughts. I imagine I can see her naked. Well, that I’d like to see her naked. I’d like ...”

  Joan had recently been asking his tutors to tell him more about women, without realizing his interest came from his concern about his brother, and his fears that Arnau could be led astray. His teachers had been only too glad to explain at length all the theories on the character and perverse nature of woman.

  “You’re not to blame for that,” Joan told Arnau.

  “Why not?”

  “Because wickedness,” he told him, whispering across the hearth where they slept, “is one of the four natural illnesses mankind is born with as a result of original sin, and women’s wickedness is greater than any other in the world,” said Joan, repeating word for word what he had heard his masters tell him.

  “What are the other three illnesses?”

  “Avarice, ignorance, and apathy, or the inability to do good.”

  “But what has wickedness got to do with Aledis?”

  “Women are wicked by nature, and take pleasure in tempting men onto the paths of evil.”

  “Why?”

  “Because women are like moving air, like vapor. They shift constantly, like the breeze.” Joan could remember the priest who had made that comparison standing there, his arms outstretched, his hands waving around his head. “
Secondly, because women, by nature—because they were made that way—have so little common sense, and therefore have no way of keeping their natural wickedness in check.”

  Joan had read all this, and a lot more besides, but was unable to put the ideas into words. The wise men also stated that women were by nature cold and phlegmatic, and it was well-known that when something cold finally caught fire, it burned fiercely. According to authority, women were without doubt the antithesis of men, and were therefore incoherent and absurd. One had only to look at the difference in their bodies: women’s bodies were broad at the base and narrow at the top, whereas a well-formed man’s body should be the opposite, narrow from the chest down, but broad in the chest and back, with a short, vigorous neck and a large head. When a woman was born, the first letter she pronounced was an “e,” which was a letter to complain with; men by contrast first said the letter “a,” the first letter of the alphabet, opposed to “e.”

  “It’s not possible. Aledis is not like that,” Arnau objected.

  “Don’t be fooled. Apart from the Virgin, who conceived Jesus without sin, all other women are the same. Even your guild’s ordinances say so! Don’t they prohibit adulterous relations? Don’t they insist that any man who has a friendship or lives with a dishonest woman be expelled?”

  Arnau had no response to that argument. He had no opinion about the arguments of wise men and philosophers, and however much Joan insisted, he was not really interested; but he could not go against the rules of his guild. He knew what they were, and the aldermen had warned that if he broke them he would be expelled. And the guild could not be wrong!

  Arnau was extremely confused.

  “So what’s to be done? If all women are evil ...”

  “First you must marry,” Joan butted in, “and once you are married, then follow the teachings of the Church.”

  To get married ... The thought had never crossed Arnau’s mind, but... if that was the only solution ...

  “What does one have to do once one is married?” he asked, his voice trembling at the thought of being with Aledis forever.