Cathedral of the Sea (4 page)

F
RANCESCA WANDERED ABOUT the farmhouse like a lost soul. She carried out all the domestic chores, but never said a word. The sad atmosphere she created soon spread to the farthest corners of the Estanyol family home.

Bernat had several times tried to apologize for what had happened. Once the terror of his wedding day had receded, he had tried to explain what he had felt more clearly: his fear of the lord’s cruelty, the consequences for both of them of refusing to obey his orders. Bernat repeated “I’m sorry” over and over again to Francesca, but she simply stared at him in silence, as though waiting for the moment when, without fail, Bernat’s argument led him to the same crux as ever: “If I hadn’t done it, another man would have come ...”At that point, he always fell silent; he knew there was no excuse, and his rape of her rose every time like an insurmountable barrier between them. The apologies, excuses, and silences slowly healed the wound in Bernat, if not in his wife, and his feelings of remorse were tempered by the daily round of work. Eventually, Bernat even resigned himself to Francesca’s stubborn refusal to talk.

At daybreak every morning, when he got up to start a hard day’s grind, he would stare out their bedroom window. He had always done this with his father, even in his last illness, the two of them leaning on the thick stone windowsill and peering up at the heavens to see what the day held in store. They would look out over their lands, which were clearly defined by the different crop growing in each field and extended right across the huge valley beyond the farmhouse. They watched the flight of the birds and listened closely to the noises the animals were making in their pens. These were moments of communion between father and son, and between the two of them and their land: the only occasions when Bernat’s father appeared to recover his sanity. Bernat had dreamed of being able to share similar moments with his wife, to be able to tell her all he had heard from his father, and his father from his own father, and so on back through the generations.

He had dreamed of being able to explain that these fertile lands had in the distant past been free of rent or service, and belonged entirely to the Estanyol family, who had worked there with great care and love. The fruits of their labors were entirely theirs, without their having to pay tithes or taxes or to give homage to any arrogant, unjust lord. He had dreamed of being able to share with her, his wife and the mother of the future inheritors of those lands, the same sadness his father had shared with him when he told the story of how it was that, three hundred years later, the sons she would give birth to would become serfs bound to someone else. Just as his father had told him, he would have liked to have been able to tell her proudly how three hundred years earlier, the Estanyol family, along with many others in the region, had won the right to keep their own weapons as freemen, and how they had used those weapons when they had responded to the call from Count Ramon Borrell and his brother Ermengol d’Urgell and had gone to fight the marauding Saracens. How he would have loved to tell her how, under the command of Count Ramon, several Estanyols had been part of the victorious army that had crushed the Saracens of the Córdoban caliphate at the battle of Albesa, beyond Balaguer, on the plains of Urgel. Whenever he had time to do so, his father would recount to him that story, tears of pride in his eyes; tears that turned to ones of sadness when he spoke of the death of Ramon Borrell in the year 1017. This was when, he said, the peasant farmers had become serfs again. The count’s fifteen-year-old son had succeeded him, and his mother, Ermessenda de Carcassonne, became regent. Now that their external frontiers were secure, the barons of Catalonia—the ones who had fought side by side with the farmers—used the power vacuum to exact fresh demands from the peasants. They killed those who resisted, and took back ownership of the lands, forcing their former owners to farm them as serfs who paid a part of their produce to the local lord. As others had done, the Estanyol family bowed to the pressure; but many families had been savagely put to death for resisting.

“As freemen,” his father would tell Bernat, “we fought alongside the knights against the Moors. But we could not fight the knights themselves, and when the counts of Barcelona tried to wrest back control of the principality of Catalonia, they found themselves facing a rich and powerful aristocracy. They were forced to bargain—always at our expense. First it was our lands, those of old Catalonia. Then it was our freedom, our very lives ... our honor. It was your grandfather’s generation,” Bernat’s father would tell him, his voice quavering as he looked out over the fields, “who lost their freedom. They were forbidden to leave their land. They were made into serfs, people bound to their properties, as were their children, like me, and their grandchildren, like you. Our life ... your life, is in the hands of the lord of the castle. He is the one who imparts justice and has the right to abuse us and offend our honor. We are not even able to defend ourselves! If anybody harms you, you have to go to your lord so that he can seek redress; if he is successful, he keeps half of the sum paid you.”

After this his father would invariably recite all the lord’s rights. These became etched in Bernat’s mind, because he never dared interrupt his father once he had started on the list. The lord could call on a serf’s aid at all times. He had the right to a part of the serf’s possessions if the latter should die without a will, if he had no offspring, if his wife committed adultery, if his farmhouse were destroyed by fire, if he were forced to mortgage it, if he married another lord’s vassal, and of course, if he sought to leave it. The lord had the right to sleep with any bride on her wedding night; he could call on any woman to act as wet nurse for his children, and on their daughters to serve as maids in the castle. The serfs were obliged to work on the lord’s lands without pay; to contribute to the castle’s defense; to pay part of what they earned from the sale of their produce; to provide the lord and any companions he brought with lodging in their homes, and to provide them with food during their stay; to pay to use the woods or grazing land; to pay also to use the forge, the oven, and the windmill that the lord owned; and to send him gifts at Christmas and other religious celebrations.

And what of the Church? Whenever Bernat’s father asked himself that question, his voice would fill with anger.

“Monks, friars, priests, deacons, canons, abbots, bishops,” he would say, “every single one of them is just as bad as the feudal lords oppressing us! They have even forbidden us from joining holy orders to prevent us escaping from the land and our enslavement to it!”

“Bernat,” his father would warn him whenever the Church was the target of his wrath, “never trust anyone who says he is serving God. They will use sweet words on you, and sound so educated you will not understand the half of it. They will try to convince you with arguments that only they know how to spin, until they have seduced your reason and your conscience. They will present themselves as well-meaning people whose only thought is to save you from evil and temptation, but in fact their opinion of us is written in books, and as the soldiers of Christ they say they are, they simply follow what is written there. Their words are excuses, and their reasoning is of the sort you might use with a child.”

“Father,” Bernat remembered he had once asked him, “what do their books say about us peasants?”

His father stared out at the fields, up to the line of the horizon dividing them from the place he did not care to gaze on, the place in whose name all these monks and clergymen spoke.

“They say we’re animals, brutes, people who cannot understand courtly manners. They say we are disgusting, ignoble, and an abomination. They say we have no sense of shame, that we are ignorant. They say we are stubborn and cruel, that we deserve no honorable treatment because we are incapable of appreciating it, that we understand only the use of force. They say—”

“Are we really all that, Father?”

“My son, that is what they wish to make of us.”

“But you pray every day, and when my mother died ...”

“I pray to the Virgin, my son, to the Virgin. Our Lady has nothing to do with friars or priests. We can still believe in her.”

Yes, Bernat Estanyol would have loved to lean on the windowsill in the morning and talk to his young wife; to tell her all his father had told him, and to stare out over the fields with her.

THROUGHOUT THE REST of September and all October, Bernat hitched up his oxen and plowed the fields, turning over the thick crust of earth so that the sun, air, and manure could bring fresh life to the soil. After that, with Francesca’s help, he sowed the grain; she scattered the seed from a basket, while he first plowed and then flattened the ground with a heavy metal bar once the seed was planted. They worked without talking, in a silence disturbed only by his shouts to the oxen, which echoed round the whole valley. Bernat thought that working together might bring them closer, but it did not: Francesca was still cold and indifferent, picking up her basket and sowing the seed without so much as looking at him.

November arrived, with its yearly tasks: fattening the pig for the kill, gathering wood for the fire; to enrich the soil, preparing the vegetable patch and the fields that were to be sown in spring, pruning and grafting the vines. By the time Bernat returned to the farmhouse each day, Francesca had seen to the domestic work, the vegetables, the hens, and the rabbits. Night after night, she served him his meal without a word, then went off to bed. Every morning, she rose before he did, and by the time he came down, breakfast was waiting for him on the table, and his noonday meal was in his satchel. As he ate, he could hear her tending the animals in the stable next door.

Christmas came and went, and then in January they finished harvesting the olives. Bernat had only enough trees to cover the needs of his house and what he had to give his lord.

After that, Bernat had to kill the pig. When his father was alive, the neighbors, who rarely visited, were certain never to miss the day the pig was butchered. Bernat remembered those occasions as real celebrations; the pigs were slaughtered and then everyone had plenty to eat and drink, while the women cut up the carcass.

The Esteve family—father, mother, and two of the brothers—turned up this year. Bernat went out into the courtyard to greet them; his wife hung back.

“How are you, daughter?” her mother asked.

Francesca said nothing, but accepted her embrace. Bernat studied the two women: the mother anxiously hugged her daughter, expecting her to put her arms round her too. But Francesca simply stood there stiffly, without responding. Bernat looked anxiously at his father-in-law.

“Francesca,” was all Pere Esteve said, his eyes still looking beyond her shoulder. Her two brothers raised their hands in greeting.

Francesca went down to the pigsty to fetch the pig; the others stayed in the courtyard. No one said a word; the only sound to break the silence was a stifled sob from Francesca’s mother. Bernat felt an urge to console her, but when he saw that neither her husband nor her sons made any move, he thought better of it.

Francesca appeared with the animal, which was struggling as if it knew the fate awaiting it. She brought it up to her husband in her usual silent way. Bernat and the two brothers upended it and sat on its belly. The pig’s squeals could be heard throughout the Estanyol valley. Pere Esteve slit its throat with a sure hand, and the men sat while the women collected the spouting blood in their bowls, changing them as they filled. Nobody looked at one another.

No one even had a cup of wine while mother and daughter sliced up the meat of the slaughtered animal.

With their work done and the onset of night, the mother again tried to embrace her daughter. Bernat looked on anxiously, to see if this time there was some kind of reaction from Francesca. There was none. Her father and brothers said farewell without raising their eyes from the ground. Her mother came up to Bernat.

“When you think the time for the birth has come,” she said, taking him to one side, “send for me. I don’t think she will.”

The Esteve family set out on the road back to their farm. That night, as Francesca climbed the ladder to bed, Bernat could not help staring at her stomach.