Cathedral of the Sea (38 page)

The Pla d’en Llull, an open area situated between Santa Maria and the Santa Clara convent, was filled to overflowing. People were sitting on the ground, talking among themselves but not taking their eyes off the spot where the Valencian troubadour was to appear: so great was his reputation that even noblemen had come to listen, accompanied by slaves carrying seats for their families. “They’re not here,” Joan told Arnau when he saw him looking anxiously among the nobles. Arnau had told him about his meeting with the Grau family in Santa Maria. The two men found a good place to sit alongside a group of
bastaixos
who had been waiting for some time for the spectacle to begin. Arnau sat on the ground, but not before he had scanned all the noble families who stood out higher than all the rest.

“You should learn to forgive,” Joan whispered. Arnau said nothing, but gave him a hard look. “A good Christian—”

“Joan,” Arnau interrupted him, “never. I’ll never forget what that harpy did to my father.”

At that moment the troubadour appeared, and the crowd broke into applause. Martí de Xàtiva was a tall, thin man with easy, fluent gestures. He raised his hands to call for silence.

“I am about to tell you the story of how and why six thousand Catalans conquered the Orient, how they defeated the Turks, the Byzantines, the Alans, and all the other warlike peoples who tried to stand against them.”

Again, applause rang out all round the square. Arnau and Joan joined in.

“I will also recount how the emperor of Byzantium murdered our admiral Roger de Flor and many other Catalans, after inviting them to a feast ...”

Someone shouted: “Traitor!” and the rest of the public growled more insults.

“I will end by telling you how the Catalans took revenge for the death of their leader, devastating the Orient and sowing death and destruction in their wake. This is the story of the company of Catalan Almogavars, who in the year of 1305 set sail under the command of admiral Roger de Flor ...”

The Valencian troubadour knew how to capture his audience’s attention. He gesticulated and acted out his words, accompanied by two assistants. He also invited members of the public to take part.

“Now I turn again to our Caesar,” he said, as he began the story of the death of Roger de Flor. “Accompanied by three hundred horsemen and a thousand foot soldiers, our admiral went to Andrinopolis, where
xor
Miqueli, the emperor’s son, had invited him to a feast in his honor.” At this point, the troubadour pointed to one of the most elegantly dressed nobles in the crowd and asked him to come up onto the stage to play the role of Roger de Flor. “If you involve your audience,” the troubadour’s master had explained, “especially if they are nobles, they will give you more money.”

On the platform, the figure of Roger de Flor was received with adulation by the two assistants, acting out the first six days of his stay in Andrinopolis. On the seventh, xor Miqueli summoned Girgan, the leader of the Alans, and Melic, chief of the Turcopoli, and their cavalrymen.

The troubadour strode restlessly round the stage. The crowd started to shout again; some of them got to their feet, and it took all the efforts of the two assistants to prevent them from intervening to defend Roger de Flor. The troubadour himself stabbed the admiral, and the nobleman playing the part fell to the ground. The crowd bayed for revenge for the treachery. Joan looked across at Arnau, who sat there staring at the fallen nobleman. The eight thousand Alans and Turcopoles assassinated all the thirteen hundred Catalans who had followed Roger de Flor—the assistants made stabbing gestures at one another time and again.

“Only three men survived,” the troubadour continued, raising his voice. “Ramon de Arquer, a knight from Castelló d’Empúries, Ramon de Tous ...”

He went on to tell how the Catalans wreaked their revenge, laying waste to Thrace, Calcidia, Macedonia, and Thessaly. The crowd cheered whenever the singer mentioned any of these names. “May the vengeance of the Catalans be upon you!” they cried over and over again. They all knew of the feats of the Almogavars when they reached the duchy of Athens. There they killed twenty thousand men and won another victory, after making Roger des Laur their captain. All this the troubadour sang, and then he went on to relate how they gave the woman who had been married to the lord of la Sola as wife to their new leader. At this point, the troubadour sought out another nobleman, invited him up onstage, and then picked a woman from the audience and brought her up to accompany the new chief of the Almogavars.

“In this way,” sang the troubadour, joining the hands of the nobleman and the woman, “the Almogavars shared the city of Thebes and all the castles and lands of the duchy, and married off all the women to the men of the Almogavar company, according to their merits.”

As he was singing the final verses of his chronicle, the two assistants chose men and women from the audience and formed them into two lines. A lot of people were happy to be chosen: they saw themselves in the duchy of Athens, as Catalans who had avenged the death of Roger de Flor. The group of
bastaixos
caught the assistants’ attention. The only unmarried man among them was Arnau, so his companions hauled him to his feet and offered him as someone to join in the revelry. To the delight of his colleagues, he was immediately selected. Arnau went up onto the stage.

As soon as Arnau joined the line of Almogavars, a woman stood up from among the public and stared at him with her huge brown eyes. The assistants saw her: she was hard to miss, being so young and beautiful, and so insistent that she be allowed on the stage. When the two men came to lead her away, a surly old man grabbed her by the arm and tried to force her to sit down again. The crowd laughed as she tried to free herself from him. The assistants looked toward the troubadour, but he urged them to carry on: “Don’t worry if you humiliate someone,” he had been told, “if that means you get the rest on your side”—and the rest of the audience was laughing openly at the old fellow, who by now was on his feet struggling with the young woman.

“She’s my wife,” he tried to explain to one of the assistants, pushing him off.

“The vanquished have no wives,” the troubadour cried out from the stage. “All the women of the duchy of Athens now belong to the Catalans.”

At this, the old man hesitated for just long enough to allow the troubadour’s assistants to snatch the young woman from him and place her in the line of women. The crowd cheered.

The troubadour carried on with his chronicle, pairing off the Athenian women with the Almogavars to loud applause. Arnau and Aledis stared at each other. “How long has it been, Arnau?” those huge brown eyes of her were asking him. “Four years?” Arnau glanced back at the group of
bastaixos,
all of whom were smiling and encouraging him. He could not meet Joan’s gaze. “Look at me, Arnau.” Aledis had not opened her mouth, but Arnau could hear her calling him. Arnau’s eyes sank deep into hers. The Valencian troubadour took her hand and led her across to Arnau. He lifted Arnau’s hand and joined the two together.

Another shout of joy rang out. All the couples were in pairs facing the public, headed by Arnau and Aledis. Aledis could feel her whole body tremble as she gently squeezed Arnau’s hand. He was looking out of the corner of his eye at the old tanner, who was standing in the audience glaring at them.

“And so the Almogavars settled down,” sang the troubadour, pointing to the couples. “They settled in the duchy of Athens and there, in the distant Orient, they still live, to the glory of Catalonia.”

The Pla d’en Llull burst into noisy applause. Aledis squeezed Arnau’s hand again to catch his attention. They stared at each other. “Take me, Arnau,” those brown eyes of hers were begging him. All of a sudden, she was no longer beside him: her husband had grabbed her by the hair and was dragging her off in the direction of Santa Maria, to hoots of derision from everyone in the crowd.

“A few coins for the performance,” the troubadour said, stepping in front of Aledis’s husband.

In reply, the tanner spat and carried on dragging Aledis away.

“WHORE! WHY DID you do it?”

The old man still had strong arms, but Aledis felt nothing when he slapped her.

“I ... I don’t know. It was all the people, the way they were shouting; all at once I felt I was really in the Orient ...”

“In the Orient? Harlot!”

The tanner picked up a leather strap, and Aledis forgot Arnau and how she had been unable to resist the temptation to join him.

“Please, Pau, please. I’ve no idea why I did it. Forgive me. I beg you, forgive me.” Aledis sank to her knees in front of her husband and lowered her head. The leather strap wavered in his hand.

“You are to stay inside the house until I give you permission to leave it,” he said, finally relenting.

Aledis said nothing more. She stayed on her knees until she heard the door to the street close behind him.

Four years earlier, her father had given her away in marriage. Since she had no dowry, this was the best Gastó could arrange for his daughter: an old master tanner who was a childless widower. “One day you will inherit from him,” had been his only commentary. He did not add that when the old man died it would be him, Gastó Segura, who would take his place at the head of the business. In his view, daughters did not need to know such trivial details.

On their wedding day, the old man had not waited for the end of the celebration to haul his young bride off to the bedroom. Aledis allowed herself to be undressed by his unsteady hands, and to have her breasts kissed by his drooling mouth. As he touched her, Aledis shuddered at the contact with his calloused, rough fingers. Pau quickly led her to the bed, then fell on top of her, still in his clothes. He was drooling, quivering, panting. He smothered her in kisses and bit her breasts. He thrust his hand between her legs. Then, still dressed, he started to pant more and more loudly, moved jerkily, and finally sighed, rolled off, and fell fast asleep.

It was the next morning that Aledis lost her virginity beneath a frail, weak body that pressed on her with clumsy desire. She wondered if she would ever feel anything other than disgust with him.

Each time she had to go down to the workshop for some reason or other, Aledis stared intently at her husband’s apprentices. Why did none of them look at her? She could see them: her eyes followed the way their muscles tensed, and rejoiced at the drops of sweat that formed on their brows and then ran across their faces, down their necks, and onto their strong, powerful chests. Aledis’s desire moved to the rhythm of their arms as they tanned the hides, back and forth, back and forth ... but her husband’s orders had been very clear: “Ten lashes of the whip for any of you who looks at my wife once; twenty for the second time; the third, no food.” So night after night Aledis asked herself what had happened to the pleasure she had heard so much about, the pleasure her young body demanded, the pleasure the decrepit husband she had been forced to marry could never offer.

Some nights the old man clawed at her with his rasping hands. On others, he forced her to masturbate, or chivied her to let him penetrate her as quickly as possible before his urge faded. Afterward, he always fell sound asleep. On one such night, being careful not to wake him, Aledis got up silently. Her husband did not even move as she left the bed.

She went down to the workshop. The workbenches stood out in the darkness. She walked between them, caressing the smooth surfaces with the fingers of one hand. “What’s the matter? Don’t you desire me?” Aledis was thinking dreamily of the apprentices as she stepped between the tables, stroking her breasts and thighs, when a dim glow in the corner of a wall caught her eye. A knot had fallen out of one of the planks separating the workshop from the area where the apprentices slept. Aledis went over and peeped through the hole. She immediately took a step back. Her whole body was trembling. She pressed her eye to the hole once more. They were all naked! For a moment she was afraid her breathing might give her away. One of the apprentices was touching himself as he lay on his mattress!

“Who are you thinking of?” asked the lad who lay closest to the wall where Aledis was hiding. “The master’s wife?”

The other apprentice made no reply, but kept on rubbing his penis, back and forth, back and forth ... Aledis began to perspire. Without realizing what she was doing, she slid a hand between her legs and, staring at the boy who was thinking of her, quickly learned how to give herself pleasure. She came even before the young lad did, and slumped to the ground beside the wall.

The next morning, Aledis walked by the apprentices’ bench exuding desire. Without thinking, she came to a halt in front of the apprentice she had seen the night before. Eventually, he could stand it no longer and surreptitiously glanced up. She knew it was true that he had been thinking of her, and smiled to herself.

That afternoon, Aledis was called back down to the workshop. The tanner was waiting for her behind the apprentice.