Cathedral of the Sea (17 page)

“That’s right, Santa Maria! That’s right. Now everyone: pull!”

The wooden scaffolding creaked again. Arnau and Joanet glanced at it and then at Berenguer de Montagut. He was staring intently at the stone, which slowly, very slowly, rose into the air.

“Heave! Come on, everyone. Pull harder!”

When the keystone reached the level of the first scaffolding, Berenguer ordered the groups to stop pulling, and to keep the stone in the air.

“Santa Maria and Santa Eulàlia, stop pulling,” he ordered. “Santa Clara, you pull!” The stone moved sideways until it reached the platform Berenguer was standing on. “Now, everyone! Slacken off the ropes little by little.”

Everyone, including all those hauling on the ropes, held his breath as the stone came to rest on the wooden structure, close to Berenguer’s feet.

“Slowly!” he cried out.

The platform buckled under the weight of the stone.

“What if it gives way?” Arnau whispered to Joanet.

If it gave way, Berenguer ...

It did not give way. But the scaffold had not been built to withstand such a weight for any length of time. The keystone had to be hauled to the top, where Berenguer had calculated that the platforms were more resistant. The workmen changed the cables onto the next set of pulleys, and the men started to haul on them again. The next platform, then the one after that; six tons of stone rose to the spot where the vaulted arches were to come together, high in the heavens above all their heads.

The men were sweating; their muscles had seized up. From time to time, one of them collapsed, and the builder in charge of that line ran to pull him out from under the feet of the man in front. Some strong-looking men from the city were among the crowd, and whenever a man dropped out, they took over.

Berenguer continued to shout orders from high up on the scaffolding. Another man lower down made sure all the groups heard him. When the keystone finally reached the topmost platform, a few smiles appeared on tightly drawn lips, but they all knew that the most crucial moment had arrived. Berenguer de Montagut had calculated the exact position where the keystone had to be placed so that the vaults of the arches would fit perfectly around it. For days he had used ropes and stakes to calculate the precise spot in between the ten columns. He had dropped plumb lines from the scaffolding and tied ropes from the stakes on the ground up to the top. He had spent hour after hour scribbling on parchment, then scratching out the figures and writing over them. If the keystone was not placed exactly right, it would not support the stress from the arches, and the whole apse could come crashing down.

In the end, following thousands of calculations and even more sketches, he traced the outline of where the keystone should go on the top platform of the scaffolding. That was the exact spot, not an inch to one side or the other. When they had hauled the keystone right to the top, the men below almost despaired when Berenguer refused to allow them to rest it on the platform as they had done lower down, but went on shouting orders:

“A little more, Santa Maria. No. Santa Clara, pull, now hold it there. Santa Eulàlia! Santa Clara! Santa Maria ... ! Lower! Higher! Now!” he suddenly shouted. “Everyone hold it there. A little lower! Little by little. Gently does it!”

All at once, there was no more weight on the cables. The men peered silently up at the sky, where Berenguer de Montagut was kneeling to inspect the positioning of the keystone. He walked round its two-yard diameter, stood up, and waved in triumph to everybody down below.

Arnau and Joanet could feel the shouts of joy that rose from the throats of men who had been toiling for hours: they reverberated against the church wall behind them. Many of them sank thankfully to the ground. A few others hugged one another and danced. The hundreds of spectators who had been watching shouted and applauded. Arnau could feel a knot in his throat, and all the hairs on his body stood on end.

“I wish I were older,” he whispered to his father that night as the two of them lay on the straw pallet surrounded by the coughs and snores of the slaves and apprentices.

Bernat tried to fathom what was behind his son’s wish. Arnau had returned home in high spirits, and had told him a thousand times how the keystone of the Santa Maria apse had been raised. Even Jaume had listened closely to him.

“Why, son?”

“Because everybody does something. There are lots of boys who help their fathers at Santa Maria, but Joanet and I ...”

Bernat put his arm round his son’s shoulders and drew him toward him. It was true that except when his father had some special errand for him, Arnau spent the whole day at the church. What could he usefully do there?

“You like the
bastaixos,
don’t you?”

Bernat had felt his son’s enthusiasm whenever he spoke about these men who carried the blocks of stone to the new church. The boys followed them as far as the gates of the city, waited there for them, then walked back with them, all along the beach from Framenors to Santa Maria.

“Yes,” Arnau said. His father rummaged for something under the pallet.

“Here, take this,” Bernat said, giving him the old waterskin he had taken with them when they first fled his lands. Arnau felt for it in the darkness. “Offer them fresh water. You’ll see how they thank you for it.”

As always, at dawn the next day Joanet was waiting for him at the gates of Grau’s workshop. Arnau showed him the skin, then hung it round his neck, and they both ran off down to the beach. They made for the angel fountain, the only one that was on the
bastaixos
route. The next fountain was down in Santa Maria itself.

When the boys spotted the line of
bastaixos
coming slowly toward them, bent under the weight of their stones, they clambered onto one of the boats on the beach. As the first
bastaix
came level with them, Arnau showed him the waterskin. The man smiled and came to a halt next to the boat so that Arnau could pour the water directly into his mouth. The others waited until the first man had finished; then the next one stepped up. Lightened of their load, on their way back to the royal quarry they paused at the boat to thank the boys for the fresh water.

From that day on, Arnau and Joanet became the water carriers for all the
bastaixos.
They waited for them close to the angel fountain, or, whenever the laborers had to unload a ship and could not work for Santa Maria, followed them, around the city to pour them water without their having to drop the heavy loads they were carrying.

The two boys still found time to go down to Santa Maria to watch the building work, talk to Father Albert, or sit and watch how Angel wolfed down his food. Anyone observing them could see how their eyes shone in a different way whenever they looked at the church. They were doing their bit to help build it! That was what the
bastaixos
and even Father Albert had told them.

The keystone hung high in the sky, and the boys saw how the ribs from each of the ten columns were gradually rising to meet it. The masons built trusses and then placed one block after another on them, curving upward. Behind the columns, surrounding the first eight of them, the walls of the ambulatory had already been built, with the interior buttresses in place. “Between these two,” Father Albert told them as he pointed out two of the stone columns, “we will put the Jesus chapel, the one belonging to the
bastaixos,
where the Virgin will stand.”

He said this because as the walls of the ambulatory were being built, and the new vaults were constructed on the struts from the columns, the old church was gradually being demolished.

“Then above the apse,” Father Albert went on, with Angel nodding at his side, “we’ll build the roof. Do you know what we will use?” The two boys shook their heads. “All the faulty pottery jars in the city. First will come the ashlar filling, and then on top of that all the jars, lined up next to one another. Finally there will be the roof covering.”

Arnau had seen all the broken jars piled next to the blocks of stone outside Santa Maria. He had asked his father why they were there, but Bernat did not know the answer.

“All I know,” he had said, “is that we have to pile up all the faulty pieces until someone comes and collects them.”

In this way, the new church began to take shape behind the apse of the old one, which they carefully dismantled in order to be able to use its stones. The La Ribera district did not want to be left without a church, even while the new, magnificent shrine to the Virgin was rising around them. Masses were said as usual, and yet there was a strange atmosphere in the church. Like everyone else, Arnau went in through the lopsided doorway of the tiny Romanesque construction, but once inside, instead of the welcoming gloom that had protected him while he talked to the Virgin, there was now a flood of light from the windows in the new apse. The old church was like a small box contained within another much larger and more beautiful one, a box destined to disappear as the other one grew, a box whose fourth side was taken up by the new, soaring apse that already boasted a roof.

H
OWEVER, THERE WAS more to Arnau’s life than Santa Maria and giving water to the
bastaixos.
In exchange for bed and board, he had, among other duties, to help the Grau family cook whenever she went into the city to buy food.

So every two or three days Arnau left the workshop at dawn and went with Estranya, the mulatto slave, into the city streets. She walked with splayed legs, her huge body swaying dangerously as she waddled along. As soon as Arnau appeared in the kitchen doorway, she would give him the first things to carry: two baskets of dough they were to take to the ovens in the Calle Ollers Blancs for baking. One basket contained the loaves for Grau and his family: these were made of wheat flour, and became the finest white bread. The other held the loaves for the rest of the household, made from rye, millet, or even beans and chickpeas. When baked, this bread was dark, heavy, and hard.

Once they had handed over the loaves, Estranya and Arnau would leave the potters’ neighborhood and cross the wall into the center of Barcelona. In this first part of their journey, Arnau had no problem following the slave, and even found time to laugh at her swaying body and rippling dark flesh.

“What are you laughing at?” the mulatto had asked him more than once.

At that, Arnau would look into her round, flat face and stifle his smile.

“You want to laugh? Laugh at this then,” she said in Plaza del Blat as she gave him a sack of wheat to carry. “Where’s your smile now?” she would say on the way down La Llet as she loaded him with the milk his cousins were to drink. She would repeat the taunt in the narrow Plaza del Cols, where she bought cabbages, pulses, or other vegetables, and in Plaza de l’Oli, weighing him down with oil, game, or fowl.

After that, struggling under her purchases, Arnau followed the slave all over Barcelona. On the 160 days of abstinence, the mulatto plodded and swayed down to the shore, near Santa Maria. There she fought with the other customers at one of the city’s two official fishmongers (the old and the new) to buy the best dolphin, tuna, sturgeon, or
palomides, neros, reigs,
and
corballs.

“Now we’ll get your fish,” she said. It was her turn to smile as she went round the back of the stalls to buy the leftovers. There were as many people here as at the front, but Estranya did not fight to get the best.

Even so, Arnau preferred these days of abstinence to those when Estranya had to go and buy meat, because whereas to purchase the leftovers of fish she simply had to walk round the stall, when she bought meat Arnau had to carry all his packages across half the city.

She bought the meat for Grau and his family from one of the butchers situated outside the slaughterhouses. Like everything else sold in the city, this was fresh, first-class meat: no dead animals were allowed inside Barcelona. Everything that was sold was slaughtered on the spot.

That was why, to get the cheap cuts to feed to the servants and slaves in the household, they had to leave the city by Portaferrisa until they reached the market where carcasses were piled alongside meat of unknown origin. Again it was Estranya’s turn to smile as she bought, and loaded the boy with her new purchases. Then it was back to the baker’s to pick up the bread from the oven, and then to Grau’s house, Estranya still swaying and waddling her way along, Arnau dragging his feet.