Cathedral of the Sea

  Joan ran out of the house. As soon as he had gone, Arnau tried to stretch. He could not move a single muscle. They had all seized up, and he felt stiff from head to toe. Bit by bit, however, his young body came back to life, and after eating a frugal breakfast he went out into the sunshine. He smiled when he saw the beach, the sea, and the six galleys still at anchor in the port.

  Ramon and Josep made him show them his back.

  “One trip,” the guild alderman told Ramon before rejoining the group. “Then he can go to the chapel.”

  Arnau turned to look at Ramon as he struggled to replace his shirt.

  “You heard him,” Ramon said.

  “But...”

  “Do as you’re told, Arnau. Josep knows what he is doing.”

  He did. As soon as Arnau lifted the first jar onto his back, his wound started bleeding again.

  “But if it has started bleeding already,” he said when Ramon unloaded his jar of grain on the beach behind him, “what’s the problem if I make a few more journeys?”

  “The callus, Arnau, the hard skin. The idea is not to destroy your back, but to let the hard skin form. Now go and wash, put more ointment on, and get down to our chapel in Santa Maria ...” As Arnau made to protest, Ramon insisted: “It’s our chapel—it’s your chapel, Arnau. We have to look after it.”

  “My boy,” said the bastaix who had carried the jar with Ramon, “that chapel means a lot to us. We’re nothing more than port workers, but La Ribera has offered us something that no nobleman or wealthy guild has: the Jesus chapel and the keys to the church of Santa Maria de la Mar. Do you understand what that means?” Arnau nodded thoughtfully. “There can be no greater honor for any of us. You’ll have plenty of time to load and unload; don’t worry about that.”

  Mariona tended his back, and then Arnau headed for Santa Maria. He went to find Father Albert to get the keys to the chapel, but the priest first took him to the cemetery outside Las Moreres gate.

  “This morning I buried your father,” he told him, pointing to the cemetery. Puzzled, Arnau looked at him. “I didn’t want to tell you in case any soldiers appeared. The magistrate decided he did not want people to see your father’s burned body either in Plaza del Blat or above the city gates. He was frightened others might do the same. It wasn’t hard to convince him to let me bury the body.”

  They both stood silently outside the cemetery for a while.

  “Would you like me to leave you on your own?” the priest eventually asked.

  “I have to clean the bastaixos’ chapel,” said Arnau, wiping away his tears.

  For several days after that, Arnau made only one trip carrying a load, then went back to the chapel. The galleys had already weighed anchor, and the goods from the merchant ships were the usual items of trade: fabrics, coral, spices, copper, wax ... Then one day, Arnau’s back did not bleed. Josep inspected it again, and Arnau spent the whole day carrying heavy bundles of cloth, smiling at every bastaix he met on the way.

  He was also paid his first wage. Barely a few pence more than he had earned working for Grau! He gave it all to Pere, together with a few coins he still had from Bernat’s purse. “It’s not enough,” the boy thought as he counted out the coins. Bernat used to pay Pere a lot more. He peered inside the purse again. That would not last very long, he realized. His hand still inside the purse, he looked at the old man. Pere grimaced.

  “When I can carry more,” said Arnau, “I’ll earn more.”

  “You know as well as I do that will take time, Arnau. And before that, your father’s purse will be empty. You know this house isn’t mine ... No, it isn’t,” he added, when the boy looked up at him in surprise. “Most of the houses in the city belong to the Church: to the bishop or a religious order. We have them only in emphyteusis, a long lease for which we pay rent every year. You know how little I can work, so I rely on the money from the room to be able to pay. If you can’t cover it... what am I to do?”

  “So what’s the point of being free if citizens are chained to their houses just as peasants are to their lands?” asked Arnau, shaking his head.

  “We’re not chained to them,” Pere said patiently.

  “But I’ve heard that all these houses are passed down from father to son; they even get sold! How is that possible if they don’t belong to you? Are you not tied to them?”

  “That’s easy to understand, Arnau. The Church is very rich in lands and properties, but according to its laws it cannot sell ecclesiastical possessions.” Arnau tried to intervene, but Pere raised a hand to stop him. “The problem is that the bishops, abbots, and other important positions in the Church are appointed by the king. He always chooses his friends, and the pope never says no. All those friends of the king hope to receive a good income from what they own, and since they cannot sell any properties, they have invented this system called emphyteusis to get round the ban.”

  “So that makes you tenants,” said Arnau, trying to understand.

  “No. Tenants can be thrown out at any time. The emphyteuta can never be thrown out ... as long as he pays his rent to the Church.”

  “Could you sell the house?”

  “Yes. That’s known as subemphyteusis. The bishop would get a part of the proceeds, known as the laudemium, and the new subemphyteuta could carry on just as I do. There is only one caveat.” Arnau looked at him inquisitively. “The house cannot be passed on to anyone of a higher social position. It could never be sold to a nobleman ... although I doubt whether any noble would be interested in this place, don’t you?” he said with a smile. When Arnau did not join in, Pere became serious once more. He said nothing for a while, then added: “The thing is, I have to pay the annual rent, and between what I earn and what you pay me ...”

  “What are we going to do now?” Arnau thought. With the miserable wage he earned, he and his brother could not even pay enough for food, and yet it was not fair to cause Pere problems: he had always treated them well.

  “Don’t worry,” he said hesitantly. “We’ll leave and then you—”

  “Mariona and I have been thinking.” Pere interrupted him. “If you and Joan accept, perhaps you could sleep down here by the fire.” Arnau’s eyes opened wide. “That way ... that way we could rent the room to a family and be able to pay the annual rent. You would only have to find two pallets for yourselves. What do you think?”

  Arnau’s face lit up. His lips began to tremble.

  “Does that mean yes?” Pere prompted him.

  Arnau steadied his mouth and nodded enthusiastically.

  “Now IT’S TIME we helped the Virgin!” one of the guild aldermen shouted.

  Arnau felt the hairs prickle on his arms and legs.

  That day there were no ships to load or unload. The sea in the port was dotted with small fishing boats. The bastaixos had gathered on the beach as usual. The sun was climbing in the sky, heralding a fine spring day.

  This was the first time since Arnau had become a bastaix at the start of the seagoing season that they had been able to spend a day working for Santa Maria.

  “We’ll help the Virgin!” the group of bastaixos shouted.

  Arnau surveyed his companions: their drowsy faces were suddenly all smiles. Some of them swung their arms back and forward to loosen their back muscles. Arnau recalled when he used to give them water, and see them going by, bent double under the weight of the enormous stones. Would he be up to it? Fear tightened his muscles, and he began to exercise like the others.

  “This is your first time, isn’t it?” said Ramon, congratulating him. Arnau said nothing, and allowed his arms to drop to his sides. “Don’t worry, my lad,” Ramon added, resting his hand on his shoulder and encouraging him to catch up with the others, who were already leaving the beach. “Remember that when you are carrying stones for the Virgin, she carries part of the weight.”

  Arnau looked at him.

  “It’s true,” the bastaix insisted with a smile. “You’ll discover that today.”

  They sta
rted from Santa Clara, at the eastern end of the city, and had to cross the entire city, then out of the walls and up to the royal quarry at La Roca, in Montjuic. Arnau walked without talking: from time to time he could sense that some of the others were watching him. They left La Ribera behind, then the exchange and the Forment storehouse. As they passed by the angel fountain, Arnau could see the women waiting to fill their pitchers; many of them had let him and Joan in when they came running up with the waterskin. People waved as they went by. Some children ran and jumped around the group of men, whispering and pointing at Arnau with respect. The bastaixos left behind the gates of the shipyard and reached the Framenors convent at the western end of the city. It was here that the city walls petered out; beyond them were the unfinished royal dockyards and, farther on still, open countryside and vegetable plots: San Nicolau, San Bertran, and San Pau del Camp. This was where the track up to the quarry began.

  Before they could reach it, however, the bastaixos had to cross Cagalell. The stench from the city’s waste hit them long before they could see it.

  “They’re draining it,” one of the men said when the smell overwhelmed them.

  Most of the others agreed.

  “It wouldn’t smell so bad if they weren’t,” another bastaix explained.

  Cagalell was a pond that formed at the mouth of the gully by the walls. It was here that all the waste and sewage from the city accumulated. The ground was so rough it could not run off properly across the beach, so the water lay stagnant until a city workman dug a channel through and pushed the waste out into the sea. That was when Cagalell smelled its worst.

  They skirted round it until they came to a narrow part they could jump across, then walked on through the fields until they reached the slopes of Montjuic.

  “How do we get back across Cagalell?” asked Arnau, pointing to the foul-smelling stream.

  “I’ve never yet met anybody who could jump with a block of stone on his back,” laughed Ramon.

  As they climbed up to the royal quarry, Arnau peered back down at the city. It looked far, far below. How was he going to walk all that way with a huge stone on his back? He could feel his legs giving way just at the thought of it, but he ran to catch up with the rest of the group, who were still talking and laughing as they climbed ahead of him.

  They went round a bend, and there the royal quarry lay in front of them. Arnau could not help gasping in astonishment. It was like Plaza del Blat or any of the other city markets, except that there were no women! On a flat expanse of ground, the king’s officers were dealing with everyone who had come seeking stone. Carts and mule trains were lined up on one side, where the walls of the mountain had not yet been excavated. The rest looked as though it had been sliced through, and was a mass of glistening rock. Countless stonemasons were dangerously levering off huge blocks of stone; down on the flat ground others cut them into smaller stones.

  The bastaixos were greeted with great affection by all those waiting for stones. While their leaders talked to the quarry officials, the others embraced or shook hands with the people waiting. They laughed and joked together, and skins of wine or water were raised.

  Arnau could not help watching the stonecutters at work. He was equally fascinated by the way the laborers loaded the carts and mules, always supervised by a clerk noting everything down. Just as in the markets, people were talking or waiting their turn impatiently.

  “You weren’t expecting anything like this, were you?”

  Arnau turned and saw Ramon handing back a wineskin. He shook his head.

  “Who is all this stone for?”

  “Oh!” said Ramon, then began to reel off the list: “for the cathedral, for Santa Maria del Pi, Santa Anna, for the Pedralbes monastery, for the royal dockyards, for Santa Clara, for the city walls. Everything is being built or changed; and then there are the new houses for the rich and the noblemen. Nobody wants wood or bricks. They all want stone.”

  “And the king gives them all this stone?”

  Ramon burst out laughing.

  “The only stone he gives free is for Santa Maria de la Mar ... and possibly for Pedralbes monastery too, because that is being built at the queen’s behest. He charges a lot for all the rest.”

  “Even the stone for the royal dockyards?” asked Arnau. “They are for the king, aren’t they?”

  Ramon smiled again.

  “They may be royal,” he said, “but the king isn’t the one paying for them.”

  “The city?”

  “No.”

  “The merchants?”

  “Not them either.”

  “Well, then?” asked Arnau, turning to face him.

  “The royal dockyards are being paid for by—”

  “The sinners!” the man who had offered him his wineskin took the words out of Ramon’s mouth. He was a mule driver from the cathedral.

  Ramon and he laughed out loud at Arnau’s bewildered look.

  “The sinners?”

  “Yes,” explained Ramon, “the new shipyards are being built thanks to money from sinful merchants. Look, it’s very simple: ever since the Crusades ... You know what the Crusades were, don’t you?” Arnau nodded: of course he knew what they were. “Well, ever since the Holy City was lost forever, the Church has banned all trade with the sultan of Egypt. But as it happens, it’s there that our traders can find their best goods, so none of them is willing to give up trading with the sultan. Which means that whenever they want to do so, they go to the customs office and pay a fine for the sin they are about to commit. They are also absolved beforehand, and therefore they don’t fall into sin. King Alfonso ordered that all the money collected in this way should go to financing Barcelona’s new dockyards.”

  Arnau was about to say something, but Ramon raised his hand to cut him short. The guild aldermen were calling them. He signaled to Arnau to follow him.

  “Are we going before them?” asked Arnau, pointing to the muleteers they were leaving behind.

  “Of course,” said Ramon, still striding ahead. “We don’t need to be checked as thoroughly as they do: our stone is free, and easy to count: one bastaix, one stone.”

  “One bastaix, one stone,” Arnau repeated to himself when the first bastaix and the first stone came past him on their way down the mountain. He and Ramon had reached the spot where the stonecutters were cutting the huge blocks. He looked at his companion’s taut, tense face. Arnau smiled, but his fellow bastaix did not respond: the time for jokes and pleasantries was over. Nobody was laughing or talking now; they were all staring at the heap of stones on the ground. They all had the leather thongs fixed tightly round their foreheads; Arnau slipped his over his head. The bastaixos were coming past him now, one by one. They were silent, and did not wait for the next one. The group around the stones was growing smaller all the time. As Arnau stared at the stones, he could feel his stomach wrench. A bastaix bent over, and two laborers lifted a block of stone onto his back. Arnau could see him flinch under the weight. His knees were knocking! The man stood still for a few moments, straightened up, then walked past Arnau on his way down to Santa Maria. My God, he was three times as strong as Arnau, and yet his legs had almost given way! How was he going to...?

  “Arnau,” called out the guild aldermen.

  There were still a few bastaixos waiting. Ramon pushed him forward.

  “You can do it,” he said.

  The three aldermen were talking to one of the stonecutters. He kept shaking his head. The four of them were surveying the pile of stones, pointing here and there, and then shaking their heads again. Standing by the pile, Arnau tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. He was shaking: he had to stop! He moved his hands, then extended his arms backward and forward. He could not allow them to see him trembling!

  Josep, one of the aldermen, pointed to a stone. The stonecutter shrugged, glanced at Arnau, shook his head once more, and then waved to the masons to pick it up. “They’re all the same,” he had told the bastaixos over and over.
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  Seeing the two masons approaching with the stone, Arnau went up to them. He bent over and tensed all the muscles in his body. Everyone fell silent. The masons slowly let go of the block and helped him grasp it with his hands. As the weight pressed down on him, he bent still farther over, and his legs started to buckle. He clenched his teeth and shut his eyes. “You can do it!” he thought he heard. In fact, nobody had said a word, but everyone had said it to themselves when they saw the boy’s legs wobble. “You can do it!” Arnau straightened under the load. A lot of the others gave a sigh of relief. But could he walk? Arnau stood there, his eyes still closed. Could he walk?

  He put one foot forward. The weight of the block of stone forced him to push out the other foot, then the first one again ... and the other one a second time. If he stopped ... if he stopped, the stone would crush him.

  Ramon took a deep breath and covered his face with his hands.

  “You can do it, lad!” one of the waiting muleteers shouted.

  “Go on, brave heart.”

  “You can do it!”

  “For Santa Maria!”

  The shouting echoed off the walls of the quarry and accompanied Arnau as he set off on his own down the path to the city.

  But he was not alone. All the bastaixos who set off after him soon caught up and made sure that they fell in with him for a few minutes, encouraging him and helping him on his way. As soon as another one reached them, the first would continue at his own pace.

  Arnau could hardly hear what they said. He could scarcely even think. All his attention was on the foot that had to come from behind, and once he saw it moving forward and touching the ground under him, he concentrated on the other one; one foot after the other, overcoming the pain.

  As he crossed the gardens of San Bertran, his feet seemed to take an eternity to appear. By now, all the other bastaixos had overtaken him. He remembered how when Joan and he used to give them water they would rest the block on the edge of a boat while they drank. Now he looked for something similar, and soon came across an olive tree. He rested the stone on one of its lower branches; he knew that if he left it on the ground, he would never be able to raise it again. His legs were stiff as boards.