Cathedral of the Sea

by Ildefonso Falcones

  That night while Arnau slept, Guillem went down to the countinghouse. He had found a loose stone in the wall. He wrapped Abraham Levi’s document in a cloth and hid it behind the stone, which he replaced as best he could. One day he would ask one of the workmen at Santa Maria to seal it properly. That was where Arnau’s fortune could lie until he found a way to tell him where it had come from. It was all a matter of time.

  A matter of a long time, Guillem had to admit to himself one day when he and Arnau were walking back along the beach after attending to some business at the Consulate of the Sea. Slaves were still arriving at Barcelona; human goods that the boatmen transported to the shore crowded into their small craft. Men and boys who could work, but also women and children whose wailing led both men to stop and look at what was going on.

  “Listen to me, Guillem. No matter how bad a situation we may find ourselves in,” said Arnau, “we will never finance any trade in slaves. I would prefer to be beheaded by the city magistrate before I did that.”

  They watched as the galley was rowed farther out to sea.

  “Why is he leaving?” Arnau asked without thinking. “Why doesn’t he take on another cargo for the return journey?”

  Guillem turned toward him, shaking his head gently.

  “He’ll be back,” he assured Arnau. “He’s only going to open sea... to carry on unloading,” he ended, with a trembling voice.

  Arnau watched the galley heading out to sea. For a few moments, he said nothing.

  “How many of them die?” he asked at length.

  “Too many,” said the Moor, remembering one such ship.

  “Never, Guillem! Remember that: never!”

  36

  I January 1354

  Plaza de Santa Maria de la Mar

  Barcelona

  OF COURSE IT would have to be outside Santa Maria, thought Arnau. He was standing at one of his windows watching as the whole of Barcelona crowded into the square, the adjoining streets, onto the scaffolding, and even inside the church, all of them staring at the dais the king had ordered erected in the square. King Pedro the Third had not chosen Plaza del Blat, the cathedral, the exchange building, or the magnificent shipyards he himself was building. He had chosen Santa Maria, the people’s church, the church being constructed thanks to the united efforts and sacrifices of all the citizens of Barcelona.

  “There’s nowhere in all Catalonia that better represents the spirit of the people of Barcelona,” he had commented to Guillem that morning as they surveyed the work going on to erect the platform. “The king knows it, and that’s why he chose here.”

  Arnau shivered. His whole life had revolved around that church!

  “It will cost us money,” the Moor complained.

  Arnau turned toward him to protest, but the Moor would not take his eyes off the platform, so Arnau chose not to say anything more.

  Five years had gone by since they had opened the countinghouse for business. Arnau was thirty-two years old, happy ... and rich, very rich. He lived austerely, but his ledgers showed he had amassed a considerable fortune.

  “Let’s have breakfast,” he said finally, putting his hand on Guillem’s shoulder.

  Downstairs in the kitchen Donaha was waiting for them with Mar, who was helping her set the table. When the two men appeared, Donaha carried on working, but Mar ran toward them.

  “Everyone’s talking about the king’s visit!” she cried. “Do you think we could get near him? Will his knights be with him?”

  Guillem sat down at the table and sighed.

  “He’s come to ask us for more money,” he explained to her.

  “Guillem!” Arnau rebuked him when he saw the girl’s puzzled expression.

  “But it’s true,” said the Moor in self-defense.

  “No, Mar, it’s not,” said Arnau, winning the reward of a smile. “The king has come to ask for our help in conquering Sardinia.”

  “Help meaning money?” asked Mar, winking at Guillem.

  Arnau looked at her, and then at Guillem: they were both smiling at him mischievously. How the girl had grown! She was almost a woman now: beautiful, intelligent, and with a charm that could enchant anyone.

  “Money?” the girl repeated, interrupting his thoughts.

  “All wars cost money!” Arnau was forced to admit.

  “Aha!” said Guillem, spreading his palms.

  Donaha began to fill their bowls.

  “Why don’t you tell her,” Arnau went on when Donaha had finished, “that in fact it doesn’t cost us money. It makes us more?”

  Mar stared wonderingly at the Moor.

  Guillem hesitated.

  “We have had three years of special taxes,” he said, refusing to accept that Arnau was right. “Three years of war that we people of Barcelona have financed.”

  Mar smiled once more, and looked toward Arnau.

  “That’s true,” Arnau conceded. “Exactly three years ago we Catalans signed a treaty with Venice and Byzantium to declare war on Genoa. Our aim was to conquer Corsica and Sardinia, which according to the Treaty of Agnani ought to be feudal possessions of Catalonia and yet are still controlled by the Genoese. Sixty-eight armed galleys!” Arnau raised his voice. “Sixty-eight armed galleys—twenty-three from Catalonia, the rest of them from Venice and Greece—joined battle with sixty-five Genoese men-o’- war.”

  “What happened?” asked Mar, when Arnau unexpectedly fell silent.

  “Neither side won a victory. Our admiral, Pone de Santa Pau, died in the battle. Only ten of our twenty-three galleys came back. What happened then, Guillem?” The Moor shook his head. “Go on, Guillem, tell her,” Arnau insisted.

  Guillem sighed.

  “The Byzantines betrayed us,” he intoned. “They made peace with Genoa and in return gave them the exclusive monopoly on trade with their city.”

  “What else happened?” insisted Arnau.

  “We lost one of the most important trade routes in the Mediterranean.”

  “Did we lose money?”

  “Yes.”

  Mar continued to switch her gaze between the two men. Over by the fire, Donaha was following their argument.

  “A lot of money?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than we have given the king since?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only if the Mediterranean is ours can we trade in peace,” Arnau concluded triumphantly.

  “What about the people from Byzantium?” Mar wanted to know.

  “The following year, King Pedro equipped a fleet of fifty galleys commanded by Bernat de Cabrera, and defeated the Genoese off Sardinia. Our admiral captured thirty-three enemy galleys and sank another five. Eight thousand Genoese died, and a further three thousand two hundred were taken prisoner. But only forty Catalans lost their lives! After that the Byzantines changed their minds,” he added, gazing into Mar’s eyes, which were sparkling with curiosity, “and opened up their ports to trade with us once more.”

  “Three years of special taxes that we are still paying,” Guillem noted.

  “But if the king now rules over Sardinia and we can trade with Byzantium, why has he come here now?” asked Mar.

  “The Sardinian nobles, led by a certain judge in the city of Arborea, have risen up against King Pedro. He has to go and quash the uprising.”

  “The king,” Guillem protested, “should be satisfied with having his trade routes open and receiving his taxes. Sardinia is a rough, inhospitable land. We will never succeed in taming it.”

  The king spared no pomp in appearing before his people. Up on his dais, his short stature went unnoticed. He was dressed in his finest robes, the bright scarlet of his doublet glinting in the winter sunlight as much as the precious stones adorning it. He had made sure he was wearing his golden crown, and the small dagger of office hung at his belt. His retinue of nobles and courtiers was not to be outdone and wore equally magnificent costumes.

  The king spoke to his people, whipping them up into a frenzy. Whe
n before had they ever heard a king addressing ordinary citizens in this way, explaining what his plans were? He spoke about Catalonia, its lands and its interests. When he went on to talk of the betrayal of Arborea in Sardinia, the crowd raised their fists in the air and clamored for vengeance. He continued to stir them up, until finally he asked them for the help he needed: by then, they would have handed over their children to him if he had so desired.

  Everyone in Barcelona had to pay their contribution: Arnau was taxed heavily as an authorized money changer. Soon afterward, King Pedro set off for Sardinia in command of a fleet of a hundred ships.

  After the king’s army had left Barcelona, the city returned to normal. Arnau went back to his countinghouse, to Mar, to Santa Maria, and to helping all those who came asking for a loan.

  Guillem had to get used to a way of doing business very different from the one he had known with the other money changers and merchants he had worked with, including Hasdai Crescas. At first he was opposed to it, and made no secret of his position whenever Arnau opened his purse to lend money to one of the many workmen who seemed to need it.

  “Don’t they pay? Don’t they return all our money?” Arnau asked him.

  “But they don’t pay any interest,” Guillem objected. “That money could be making a profit.”

  “How often have you told me we should buy a palace, that we should be living in more luxury than we do? How much would that cost, Guillem? You know it’s infinitely more than all the sums I’ve lent to these people.”

  Guillem was forced to keep quiet. Above all, because it was true. Arnau lived modestly in his house on the corner of Canvis Nous and Canvis Vells. The only thing he spent money on was Mar’s education. The girl went to a merchant friend’s house to learn from the tutors there, and also at Santa Maria.

  It had not been long before the commission of works of the church had come to ask Arnau for funds as well.

  “I already have a chapel,” Arnau told them when they suggested he might like to dedicate one of the side chapels. “Yes,” he said when they looked at him in surprise, “my chapel is the Jesus Chapel, the one the bastaixos look after. That will always be mine. But anyway... ,” he said, opening his money chest, “how much do you need?”

  “How much do you need? How much could you make do with? Will this be enough?” These were questions Guillem had to get used to hearing. As people started greeting him on the street, smiled at him, and thanked him whenever he was on the beach or in La Ribera neighborhood, he came to accept Arnau’s approach. “Perhaps he’s right,” he began to think. Arnau was constantly giving to others, but had he not done the same with him and the three Jewish children who were about to be stoned, complete strangers to him? If Arnau had been different, he, Raquel, and Jucef would in all likelihood have been killed. Why should he change now, just because he was rich? So Guillem, just like Arnau, began to smile at everyone he met and to thank strangers who made way for him in the street.

  Yet some decisions Arnau had taken over the years seemed to have nothing to do with that attitude. It was logical enough that he should refuse to take part in the slave trade, but, Guillem wondered, why did he sometimes turn down opportunities that had nothing to do with slaves?

  At the beginning, Arnau simply announced his decision:

  “I’m not convinced.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t understand it.”

  On one such occasion, the Moor’s patience was exhausted.

  “It’s a good opportunity, Arnau,” he said as the traders left their countinghouse. “What’s wrong? Sometimes you reject things that would bring us a good profit. I don’t understand. I know I have no right to—”

  “Yes, you have,” Arnau butted in, without turning toward him. “I’m sorry, it’s just that...” Guillem waited for him to make up his mind. “Look, I will never have anything to do with a deal that involves Grau Puig. I never want to see my name associated with his.”

  Arnau stared straight in front of him, somewhere in the distance.

  “Will you tell me why one day?”

  “Why not?” mused Arnau. He turned to him and began to explain all that had happened between him and the Grau family.

  GUILLEM KNEW GRAU Puig, because he had worked with Hasdai Crescas. The Moor wondered why, when Arnau was so adamant about having nothing to do with him, the baron seemed willing to do business with him. Could it be, after all that Arnau had told him, that he did not feel the same way?

  “Why?” he asked Hasdai Crescas one day, after he had briefly told him Arnau’s story, confident it would not leave those four walls.

  “Because there are many people who will not have any dealings with Grau Puig. I haven’t done so for some time now. And there are lots more like me. He’s a man obsessed with being somewhere he was not born to be. While he was an artisan, you could trust him, but now ... now he is aiming for something else. He did not really know what he was doing when he married a noblewoman.” Hasdai shook his head. “To be a noble you have to have been born one. You have to have drunk it with your mother’s milk. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, or trying to defend it, but that’s the way the nobility survives and succeeds in overcoming the difficulties of their position. Besides, if a Catalan baron is ruined, who would dare challenge him? They are proud, arrogant even, born to give orders and to feel they are superior to everyone else, even when they are ruined. But Grau Puig has managed to become a noble only through his money. He spent a fortune on his daughter Margarida’s dowry, and that has almost bankrupted him. All Barcelona is aware of it! People laugh at him behind his back, and his wife knows it! What is a simple artisan doing living in a palace on Calle de Montcada? The more people laugh at him, the more he has to prove himself by spending more. What would Grau Puig be without money?”

  “You mean to say that... ?”

  “I don’t mean to say anything, but I won’t have any dealings with him. In that sense, if for a different reason, your master is quite right.”

  From then on, Guillem paid particular attention to any conversation where Grau Puig’s name came up. At the exchange, the Consulate of the Sea, in business deals, when goods were being bought or sold, or during general conversations about the trade situation, the baron’s name featured far too often.

  “His son, Genis Puig... ,” he said to Arnau one day after coming back from the exchange, as they stood gazing at the sea, which seemed calmer and gentler than ever. When he heard the name, Arnau turned sharply to his companion. “Genis Puig has had to ask for a loan on easy terms in order to follow the king to Mallorca.” Were Arnau’s eyes gleaming? Guillem looked at him steadily. He had not said anything, but wasn’t that a gleam in his eye? “Do you want to know more?”

  Arnau still said nothing, but eventually nodded. His eyes had narrowed, and his lips were drawn in a tight line. He nodded again as he heard the details from Guillem.

  “Do you give me authority to take all the decisions I consider necessary?” asked the Moor.

  “I don’t give you the authority. I beg you to do it, Guillem.”

  Discreetly, Guillem began to use his knowledge and all the contacts he had acquired over years of doing business in Barcelona. The fact that the son, Don Genis, had been forced to take up one of the special loans reserved for the nobility meant that his father could no longer meet the costs of going to war. Those soft loans, thought Guillem, still meant a high rate of interest had to be paid: they were the only ones where Christians could lend money with interest. Why would a father accept that his son paid interest unless he himself did not have the capital? And what about Isabel? That harpy who had destroyed Arnau’s father and Arnau himself, who had forced Arnau to crawl on his knees to kiss her feet, how could she accept something like that?

  Over the next few months, Guillem cast his nets wide. He talked to friends, to anyone who owed him favors, and sent messages to all his agents: What kind of situation was Grau Puig, the Catalan baron and merchant, rea
lly in? What did they know about him, his business affairs, his finances... his solvency?

  As the seagoing season was coming to an end, and ships were heading back to the port of Barcelona, Guillem started to receive replies to his inquiries. Invaluable information! One night, after they had closed the countinghouse, Guillem remained seated at the table.

  “I have things to do,” he told Arnau.

  “What things?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  The next morning as the two men sat at the counting table before breakfast, the Moor said to Arnau: “Grau Puig is in desperate straits.” Was that another gleam in Arnau’s eye? “All the money changers and merchants I’ve talked to are agreed: his fortune has been swallowed up—”

  “Perhaps it’s only malicious gossip,” Arnau said, interrupting him.

  “Wait, look at this.” Guillem handed him his agents’ letters. “Here’s the proof. Grau Puig is in the hands of the Lombards.”

  Arnau thought about what that meant: the Lombards were money changers and merchants, agents of the big banking concerns in Florence and Pisa. They were a tight-knit group who always looked after their own interests; their members dealt with one another or with their headquarters. They had a monopoly on the trade in luxury cloths: woolen fleeces, silks, brocades, Florentine taffeta, Pisan veils, and many other goods. The Lombards helped no one, and allowed others to have a part of their trade only so as not to be expelled from Catalonia. It was never a good idea to be in their hands. Arnau glanced at the letters, then dropped them on the table.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “What do you want?”

  “You know what I want: his ruin!”

  “They say that Grau Puig is an old man now, and it is his wife and children who run his business affairs. Just imagine! His finances are precarious: if any venture failed, everything would come crashing down, and he would not be able to pay his debts. He would lose everything.”

  “Buy up their debts,” said Arnau coldly, without moving a muscle. “Do it discreetly. I want to be their chief creditor, but I don’t want anyone to know. Make sure one of his ventures does fail... No, not one,” said Arnau, correcting himself, “all of them!” he said, thumping the table so hard even the heavy ledgers shook. “As many as you can,” he said more calmly. “I don’t want them to escape me.”