Cathedral of the Sea

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “They’re the size of small tangerines,” said one, pointing to the large swellings on the man’s neck.

  “They’re black, hard, and hot to the touch,” added a second doctor.

  “Cold cloths for his fever.”

  “We have to bleed him. If we do, the bleeding around the ganglions will disappear.”

  “We have to lance the ganglions,” a third one opined.

  The other doctors looked at the sick man and then at their colleague.

  “According to our books, lancing is of no use.”

  “After all,” said another one, “he’s only a caulker. Let’s look at his armpits and groin.”

  There were big, hard, ganglions there too. Shrieking with pain, the plague victim was bled, and what little life he had left seeped out through the cuts the medical experts made in his suffering body.

  That very same day, more cases were discovered. The next day, more still, and even more the day after that. The inhabitants of the city shut themselves in their houses, where some of them died amid terrible suffering. Others were left out on the streets for fear of contagion, and met slow, agonizing deaths. The authorities ordered a whitewash cross to be daubed on the door of every house where an outbreak had occurred. They continued to insist on hygiene, and for people to avoid all contact with the plague sufferers. They had the bodies burned in huge funeral pyres. Many of the inhabitants scrubbed at their skin until it came away in clumps, and wherever they could, they stayed away from the victims. But nobody thought of getting rid of the millions of fleas in the city, and to the astonishment of doctors and authorities, the disease continued to spread.

  Several weeks went by, and like many others Arnau and Maria went every day to Santa Maria, offering prayers that received no response from the heavens. All around them, close friends, such as Father Albert, were dying. The plague also took the old couple Pere and Mariona, who were not able to resist the disease for long. The bishop organized a pilgrimage that would go round the entire city; it was to leave the cathedral and head down Calle de la Mar to Santa Maria. There the Virgin of the Sea would be waiting on her dais, and she would become part of the procession.

  The Virgin was in Plaza de Santa Maria, with the bastaixos, who were to carry her on their shoulders. The men looked sadly at one another, silently wondering about all those who were no longer among them. Nobody said a word. They all clenched their teeth and stared at the ground. Arnau remembered earlier processions, when there had been so many of them they had to fight to get near the dais. The aldermen had to organize them so that everybody could have a turn carrying the statue, whereas now ... there were not enough bastaixos even to be replaced. How many had died? How long would this go on? The sound of people murmuring their prayers came down Calle de la Mar. Arnau looked at the head of the procession: everyone was shuffling along despondently. Where were all the nobles who were usually so proud to walk alongside the bishop? Four of the city’s five councillors had died; three-quarters of the Council of a Hundred had met the same fate. The others had fled the city. The bastaixos lifted their Virgin in silence, balanced the dais on their shoulders, let the bishop go past, and then joined the procession and the prayers. The pilgrims went from Santa Maria down to the Santa Clara convent via Plaza del Born. At Santa Clara, despite the incense the priests were burning, the smell of burned flesh was all too obvious; many of those present burst into tears. At San Daniel gate they turned left and headed toward the Nou gateway and the Sant Pere de les Puelles monastery; as they advanced they had to avoid several dead bodies and tried not to look at the dying who lay on every street corner and in front of doors daubed with a white cross that would never again open for them. “Holy Mother,” thought Arnau, carrying the statue on his shoulder, “what have we done to deserve this?” From Sant Pere the pilgrims carried on down to the Santa Anna gateway, where they turned left again in the direction of the sea, until they reached the Forn dels Arcs neighborhood, and headed back toward the cathedral.

  Despite this public display of faith, many people were beginning to doubt whether the Church or the city authorities were doing anything useful: they prayed and prayed, but the plague continued to cause havoc everywhere.

  “They say it’s the end of the world,” Arnau complained one day when he returned home. “All Barcelona has gone mad. They call themselves the flagellants.” Maria had her back to him. Arnau sat down, waiting for his wife to take his footwear off as usual. He went on: “There are hundreds of them out in the streets, naked from the waist up. They shout that the day of judgment is at hand, confess all their sins openly to anyone who cares to listen, and lash their backs with whips. Some of them are cut to ribbons, but they go on ...” Arnau stroked Maria’s forehead as she kneeled before him. She was burning up. “What... ?”

  He lifted her chin in his hand. No, it could not be! Not her! Maria looked at him, glassy-eyed. She was sweating, and her whole face was swollen. Arnau tried to lift her head further in order to see her neck, but she winced with pain.

  “Not you!” he wailed.

  On her knees, Maria gripped his sandals and stared up at him. Tears began to course down her cheeks.

  “My God, not you!” Arnau knelt beside her.

  “Get away, Arnau,” Maria stuttered. “Don’t stay close to me.”

  Arnau tried to put his arms round her, but as he did so, she whimpered with pain once more.

  “Come here,” he said, helping her up as gently as he could. Sobbing, Maria continued to insist that he leave her. “How could I? You’re all that I have ... everything! What would I do without you? Some people recover from it, Maria. You will, you’ll see. You’ll get better.” Trying to comfort her, he led her to the bedroom and laid her on the bed. There he could get a clear sight of her neck: the beautiful outline was tinged with black. “A doctor ! We need a doctor!” he shouted, flinging open the window and going out onto the balcony.

  Nobody seemed to hear him. Yet that night, when the ganglions started to swell on Maria’s neck, someone came to paint a white cross on their door.

  All Arnau could do was press cold cloths on his wife’s brow. She was shivering uncontrollably in bed. Every time she moved, she was in such pain she could not help moaning in a way that made the hairs on Arnau’s arms stand on end. She was staring blankly up at the ceiling, but Arnau could see the lumps on her neck growing, and turning ever darker. “I love you, Maria. How often would I have liked to tell you so.” He took her hand and knelt by the bed. He spent the whole night on his knees, clutching her hand and shivering and sweating along with her, imploring the skies for help each time Maria writhed in pain.

  HE USED THE best sheet they had as a shroud to wrap her in, then waited for the cart for the dead to pass by. He was not going to leave her out in the street. He wanted to hand her body over himself. And that was what he did. When he heard the weary clop of horses’ hooves outside his house, he picked Maria up and went out into the street.

  “Farewell,” he said, kissing her on her forehead.

  The two officials, who were wearing gloves and had thick scarves to protect their faces, were taken aback when they saw Arnau unwrap the shroud and kiss his wife. Nobody wanted to go near the plague victims, not even their loved ones, who usually left them out in the street or at most called the officials in to take them from their deathbeds. When Arnau handed them Maria’s body, they were so astonished that they laid her gently on top of the dozen or so bodies already in their cart.

  With tears in his eyes, Arnau watched as the cart disappeared in the streets of Barcelona. He would be next: he went back into his house and sat to wait for the death that would reunite him with Maria. For three days, Arnau awaited the plague, constantly feeling his neck for a swelling that refused to appear. There were no ganglions, and so Arnau finally had to accept that, for the moment, the Lord was not calling him to his side to be with Maria.

  Arnau walked along the beach, oblivious to the waves lapping the shore of the cursed city. He wandered
through the streets of Barcelona, oblivious to the misery, the dying, and the cries from house windows. Something took him once more to Santa Maria. Building work had been suspended, and the scaffolding was empty. Blocks of stone lay all around, waiting for the masons, and yet ordinary people still flocked to the church. Arnau went in. The faithful were clustered around the unfinished high altar, standing or kneeling to pray. Although the church still did not have walls around the main apses, the atmosphere was filled with the perfume of incense that was burned to conceal the smell of death that penetrated everywhere. As Arnau was heading for the Virgin statue, he heard a priest talking to the congregation.

  “You should know,” he told them, “that our supreme pontiff, Pope Clement the Sixth, has published a bull in which he absolves the Jews of all blame for causing the plague. The disease is a trial sent by God to test his Christian people.” There were murmurs of disapproval from the flock. “Pray,” the priest said, “and commend yourselves to the Lord ...”

  As they left the church, many of the worshippers were arguing about what the priest had said.

  Arnau paid no attention to the homily, but walked on to the Jesus chapel. The Jews? What could that possibly have to do with the plague? As ever, his little Virgin was waiting for him in the same place. As usual, the bastaixos candles kept her company. Who could have lit them? This time, though, because of the thick clouds of incense, Arnau could not see his holy mother’s face: he did not see her smile. He tried to pray but found it impossible. “Why did you allow her to die?” The tears rolled down his cheeks again as he remembered Maria and all her suffering, her body racked with pain, the dreadful ganglions that had devoured her. If it had been a punishment, he should have been the one to suffer: he was the one who had sinned by being unfaithful with Aledis.

  Standing there in front of his Virgin, he sore a solemn oath that never again would he allow himself to be carried away by lust. He owed that to Maria. Whatever happened. Never.

  “IS SOMETHING WRONG, my son?” he heard someone ask. Arnau turned and found himself face-to-face with the priest who a few minutes earlier had been addressing the congregation. “Oh, it’s you, Arnau,” the man said, recognizing him as one of the bastaixos who frequented Santa Maria. “Is something wrong?”

  “Maria.”

  The priest nodded sadly.

  “Let us pray for her,” he said.

  “No, Father,” said Arnau. “Not yet.”

  “It’s only in God that you will find comfort, Arnau.”

  Comfort? He had no hope of finding that anywhere. Arnau peered again toward his Virgin, but the incense still obscured his view.

  “Let us pray,” insisted the priest.

  “What were you saying about the Jews?” Arnau asked, still trying to avoid having to pray.

  “Throughout Europe they are saying that the Jews are to blame for the plague.” Arnau looked at him inquisitively. “They say that in Geneva, at Chinon castle, some Jews have confessed that the plague was spread by one of their number from Savoy who poisoned wells with a potion prepared by rabbis.”

  “Is that true?” Arnau asked him.

  “No. The pope has absolved them, but people want someone to blame. Shall we pray now?”

  “You do it for me, Father.”

  Arnau left Santa Maria. In the square outside he found himself surrounded by a group of about twenty flagellants. “Repent!” they shouted at him, all the while whipping their own backs. “It’s the end of the world!” others spat in his face. Arnau could see blood running down their raw backs and legs, past the hair shirts wound round their waists. He surveyed their faces, their wild, staring eyes. He ran away from them down Calle de Montcada until he could no longer hear their cries ... but something here caught his attention too. The doors! Very few of the huge doorways to the palaces on Calle de Montcada displayed the white crosses that seemed to be everywhere in the rest of the city. Arnau found himself opposite the Puig family palace. There was no cross there either; all the windows were closed, and he could see no sign of life inside the building. Arnau willed the plague to find them wherever they had taken refuge, and for them to suffer as much as Maria had done. Then he hurried away even more quickly than he had from the flagellants.

  When he reached the corner of Calle de Montcada and Carders, he again ran into a noisy crowd, this time armed with sticks, swords, and crossbows. “They’re all crazy,” Arnau told himself, stepping back to let them by. The homilies preached in every church of the city had been of little use. Clement the Sixth’s bull had not succeeded in calming people desperate to unleash their anger on someone. “To the Jewry!” he could hear them shouting. “Heretics! Murderers! Repent!” The flagellants were part of the crowd, still lashing their backs and spattering all those around them with blood.

  Arnau fell in behind the mob, among a group who were following them silently. Several plague victims were with them. It seemed as though the whole of Barcelona had converged on the Jewry, surrounding the partly walled neighborhood on all four sides. Some took up position to the north, next to the bishop’s palace. Others were on the western side, by the old Roman walls; still others filled Calle del Bisbe, which bordered the Jewry to the east; the rest, including Arnau’s group, were to the south, in Calle de la Boqueria and outside Castell Nou, where the entrance to the Jewry stood. The noise was deafening. They wanted revenge, even though for the moment they were content to stay outside the gates, shaking their sticks and crossbows.

  Arnau found some room for himself on the crowded steps of San Jaume church, the same one he and Joanet had been thrown out of all those years ago when they were searching for the Virgin they could call their mother. San Jaume rose close to the southern wall of the Jewry, and from its steps Arnau could see what was happening over the heads of the mob. The garrison of royal soldiers, headed by the city magistrate, was preparing to defend the Jewish quarter. Before launching any attack, a group of citizens went to talk with the magistrate beside the half-open gates of the Jewry and persuade him to withdraw his troops. The flagellants kept up their shouting and dancing around them, while the crowd continued to hurl threats against the Jews, whom they could not even see.

  “They won’t withdraw,” Arnau heard a woman next to him say.

  “The Jews are royal property; they depend entirely on the king,” another man agreed. “If the Jews die, the king will lose all the taxes he’s imposed on them...”

  “And all the loans he’s had from those usurers.”

  “Not just that,” said a third man. “If the Jewry is attacked, the king will lose even the furniture the Jews offer him and his court whenever they come to Barcelona.”

  “The nobles will have to sleep on the floor,” someone shouted, to general laughter.

  Arnau himself could not help smiling.

  “The magistrate will defend the king’s interests,” the woman asserted.

  She was proved right. The magistrate did not back down, and as soon as the two sides had finished talking, he shut himself inside the Jewry. That was the signal the mob had been waiting for. Before the gate was even shut, those closest to the walls rushed at it, while the others flung sticks, arrows, and stones over the walls. The assault had begun.

  Arnau watched as the hate-filled crowd threw themselves at the gates and walls of the Jewry. No one was leading them; the only thing resembling orders was the cries of the flagellants who were still whipping themselves beneath the walls and urging the others to scale them and kill the heretics. When they did succeed in climbing over, many of them fell to the royal soldiers’ swords, but the Jewry was under siege from all four sides now, and many more overran the defenders and began to attack any Jews they could find.

  Arnau stayed on the steps of San Jaume for two hours. The war cries reminded him of his days as a soldier: Bellaguarda and Castell-Rosselló. The faces of those who fell mingled with those of the men he himself had killed; the smell of blood took him back to Rosellón, to the lies that had led him to that absur
d war, to Aledis and Maria ... As he recalled all this, he left his vantage point.

  Leaving behind the massacre, Arnau walked down toward the sea, still thinking of Maria and what had forced him to seek a way out in fighting. All at once, his thoughts were interrupted. He was level with Castell de Regomir, a tower in the old Roman wall, when shouting close by forced him back to reality.

  “Heretics!”

  “Murderers!”

  Arnau found himself confronted by a group of about twenty people filling the street. They were brandishing sticks and knives and shrieking at some others who must have been pressed up against a house wall. Why could they not simply mourn their dead? Arnau did not want to stop, and pushed his way through the enraged attackers. As he was forcing a path for himself, he glanced briefly at the spot they had surrounded: in a house doorway a bloody-faced Moorish slave was using his body to try to protect three children dressed in black with the yellow badge on their chests. Arnau suddenly found himself in between the Moor and his attackers. Silence fell, and the children’s terrified faces peeped out from behind their protector. Arnau glanced at them: how he regretted never having given Maria any children! A stone flew through the air toward them. It grazed Arnau, and when the Moor stepped into its path, hit him in the stomach. He doubled up with pain. A child’s tiny face peered directly at Arnau. His wife had loved children: she had not cared whether they were Christians, Moors, or Jews. She would gaze at them on the beach, in the streets of the city ... Her eyes would follow them tenderly, and then she would look back at him ...

  “Move away! Get out of our way, will you?” Arnau heard a voice shout behind his back.

  Arnau looked again at the pair of terrified eyes in front of him.

  “What do you want with these children?” he growled.

  Several men armed with knives confronted him.

  “They’re Jews,” they said as one.

  “And just for that you’re going to kill them? Aren’t their parents enough for you?”