Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

IN ONE YEAR MANY thoughts had run through Ferran de Lloberola’s mind.

When he graduated from the Jesuit high school, he was a tender, affectionate boy, of inordinate vanity and innocence. Ferran didn’t realize what kind of house he lived in. He had never given a thought to his father or his mother, nor did he have the slightest idea about Don Tomàs and the family catastrophe. Ferran had lived the life of a boy into whom the fathers of the Company of Jesus, finding fertile ground, had injected their whole system. Ferran made off with the highest honors at school. With a normal intelligence and a prodigious memory, he left everyone else behind, and as one grade followed another, his position as a model student was a sort of sinecure that no one disputed. As for discipline, he carried the rule book at sword’s point and only on very rare occasions had he been subject to punishment. He was the prefect of the Congregation of Sant Lluís and a brigadier in three different brigades. Though he didn’t tend to fawn, nor was he particularly given to the virtues of spying, Ferran’s mentality had been malleable to the Ignatian fingers, heirs to the rigid ratio studiorum .

Ferran’s faith was fairly skin-deep, and he was about as chaste as a normal healthy boy can be when puberty blooms. It had never occurred to Ferran to doubt what the Jesuits taught him in their conversations, readings and, above all, retreats. Ferran didn’t find the sort of theological indoctrination that occurred at the beginning of the school year — against a great black backdrop, to the lugubrious wheezing of a harmonium and a “Veni Creator Spiritus” sung in the teary drone of boy sopranos — particularly upsetting. The science in the sermons spat out by the father who conducted the operetta of the pain of adolescent boys was a science Ferran was accustomed to. The conversations on death, on eternal damnation, on the horrible vision of carnal sin, streamed through the brain of that young boy with the freshness of an idyllic spring. He agreed wholeheartedly with everything, and he already knew that in order for those things to have any effect on the distracted, the rebellious, or the devil’s disciples they had to exaggerate a bit. Ferran’s humble, tender eyes looked at the sunken cheekbones and ascetic shadows under the eyes of this father or that without any malice, as if to say: “You and I are in on the secret and we understand each other perfectly. You can push as much as you want, and I will take communion with the minimum of faith and minimum of enthusiasm required to be a perfect student.”

Ferran’s world was limited to the school, from the resplendent and theatrical communions to the ball thrown, with perfect bad faith, at the nose of the fattest and stupidest boy during recess. It was precisely in these free periods, more or less devoted to sports, that the Jesuit technique was most pronounced and the spirit of Ignatius of Loyola was most evident. Their purpose was to allow the young man whose head had been swollen for his personal merits, or his place in class, or the esteem in which his teachers held him, to behave like a despot toward the classmate beaten down by bad fortune or bad conduct. You could distinguish the perfect products of Ignatian technique from the incorrigible ones by their way of playing, of kicking each other, or of humiliating a classmate, and Ferran was a prodigy. The father prefect of the school could take great pride in him. Even when he was harming a classmate, he did it with unctuousness, and a phony smile of mercy and impunity. And it wasn’t that he was a hypocrite, or mean, or heartless … On the contrary, he simply believed that this was the normal and proper way to behave, and the only way to be an exemplary student.

When he left school, he ran into the world of the streets and into other boys who came from other atmospheres that had nothing to do with St. Ignatius. That was when Ferran began to understand a bit who his family was. He observed his father’s wretchedness and ineptitude and the economic penury that surrounded them with horror. The Jesuits had inculcated an entirely useless and puerile vanity in him. In his first year at the university, it only took a few underhanded punches to shatter his vanity and bring him down to earth. He was a ductile boy and a quick study. He understood that the false world the Jesuit school had created was pointless. His religious faith was quickly reduced to a bare minimum. He was still chaste, more out of fear than anything else. He would go to exciting shows with other boys like himself, but he didn’t dare breach certain doors. The contacts he maintained with the Jesuits were purely perfunctory; he was even a bit offended when he realized that a former teacher wanted to snare him for a religious vocation that couldn’t have been farther from his mind.

Life in the apartment on Carrer de Bailèn became odious to Ferran. He couldn’t abide the air that wafted from his mother’s coiffure or the clerical gesticulations of Grandmother Carreres. He thought that, in time, he could come to be an architect of some originality, a man of good standing and reputation, and this wasn’t with the puerile vanity of high school, but with a pride that was growing in him little by little. Ferran’s pride grew alongside the spirit of family disintegration, the same spirit that drove his sister Maria Lluïsa. After three centuries, Ferran was the first of the Lloberolas to feel absolute contempt for the name he bore and for everything his family had stood for.

Ten months before Ferran found himself face to face with a dead man on leaving a brothel on Carrer de Barberà, he had a crisis that could have traced a definitive trajectory for him.

It had been just over a year since that veneer of faith and moral prejudice he had picked up in school had begun to fade. Ferran was practically indifferent to it all, and on the verge of risking the modicum of shame and the three drops of chastity he still had on the first eyes he came upon around the first corner he turned. If he hadn’t made his move it was because the right opportunity hadn’t presented itself. But just when his religious faith and moral tenacity were at their most tepid, a strange event disoriented him. Ferran believed that a supernatural event had occurred within him, in his innermost life. And this supernatural event turned Ferran’s soul toward a very particular ambition. For a few months he stopped dreaming of being a great architect. What he wanted for himself was the glory of Christ’s shepherd, Saint Paul. He thought he had a right to that glory, because what happened to him seemed analogous to what had happened, according to legend, to that storied apostle on the road to Damascus.

When Ferran told Pare Mainou, of the Company of Jesus, about these innermost impressions, not even he could organize them logically. The fact was that he was never able to give a precise account of what had happened to him. The only thing that was clear was the radical change that took place in his feelings and actions. Ferran imagined that, during a night of erotic turbulence, he must have fallen asleep after assuaging his secret misery, and a few hours later he was awakened by a very unusual light. He couldn’t be sure if it was part of a dream or a real light. He was under the impression, though, that it was a real, physical light that had penetrated his bedroom. By this light, Ferran thought he had distinguished images of an angelic nature, forms in keeping with his purely infantile visual idea of the world of the blessed. The vision he was certain he had had was fleeting, it lasted just a moment, between waking and sleep. But it so impressed Ferran that he didn’t hesitate to imagine that what had happened to him was of transcendent importance. Ferran was certain that God had called him in a way that went beyond the ordinary path, and that what he had seen with his own eyes was precisely what theologians call a miracle.