Josep Maria de Sagarra - Private Life

He stayed in bed for a few hours, unable to sleep, turning over his supposed vision in his mind. The consequences he derived from the event compelled him to get up early, head for the church of the Jesuits, and throw himself like a dog at the foot of Pare Mainou’s confessional.

Pare Mainou listened to him and told him with perfect aplomb that God had worked a miracle to convert him. Ferran was dismayed. He made a horrible confession. With sadistic fruition, he accused himself of every carnal misery, chewing over the tiny details that are the hardest to tell, against which shame most rebels. The child felt the voluptuosity of lowering himself and humiliating himself with all the force of his seventeen year-old blood.

From that day on, Ferran wallowed in a pathological mysticism, with a nervous oversensitivity and a tendency to cry that would have been heartbreaking had he not made every last effort to conceal what was happening to him so that no one would realize what a state he was in, or suspect what he was going through.

He only calmed down during the time he spent with Pare Mainou. In the morning, he would seek him out in the confessional, and in the afternoon, he would plant himself at the door of his cell. There, he could cry and strip bare the puerility of his soul without compunction. Pare Mainou felt edified by his conversion, by that life soft as warm wax flowing through his fingers.

Pare Mainou was a very good person, but in Ferran’s case he was a bit misguided. Not realizing that the whole thing was a childish fantasy, he put too much faith in the boy’s words, and he let himself be carried away on the warm and fascinating wings of the miracle. Pare Mainou didn’t advise calm or serenity. The readings he prescribed for Ferran were like a drug that exacerbated his pathological state. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, in particular, spread like a trail of gunpowder down the entire length of Ferran’s spine. Some people think that no book can produce such acute sensual upheaval in an adolescent as directly erotic reading. Ferran’s case could easily disprove such an unsophisticated opinion. St. Augustine’s Confessions or the Imitation of Christ produced spasms and indescribable sensations in him. People well-versed in the history of the mystics know something about the terrible and monstrous explosions caused by the desire for divine contact. A being who finds himself in Ferran’s situation seeks this contact in any way he can, and the most vivid and sensitive course is almost always through physical pain. To experience such pain and calibrate it to the limit of one’s resistance is to feel an ineffable pleasure, a fruition that cannot be explained, nor can it be understood by a person who has not undergone similar moments. By an entirely different and apparently pure path, one can reach the most vicious masochism, the ruination and shredding of the flesh.

That boy was the victim of this evil, and Pare Mainou, in the greatest of good faith, did nothing but make it worse. Ferran began by analyzing all the things — even the most insignificant things — he found enjoyable, and started forgoing them one after the other. He started depriving himself of everything in such an absurd way that if he was thirsty he would not drink until he couldn’t bear it any longer, valuing the physical torture of his thirst. In any area related to vanity and to the relationship with his classmates he reached extremes of sleight-of-hand to avoid suspicion. Sometimes the puerility of Ferran’s sacrifices would have been laughable if he had not truly been suffering. His nights were tragic. He slept in a bedroom with his brother Lluís, two years younger than he, a soft, unsuspecting child who didn’t imagine a thing.

In bed, Ferran felt a well-being he found offensive. When it became unbearable, he would kneel down on the bare tiles. This position, which quickly progressed from humiliation to pain, soothed him. He managed to remain immobile, and when the pain in his knees began to stab him with an insolent sharpness it seemed as if Ferran’s lungs breathed more joyful breaths. Any boy who was not undergoing such a moral breakdown, could not under any circumstances have withstood two hours of kneeling on a tile floor like Ferran, who reached an unbearable degree of torment. Sometimes his brother would wake up and see him in that position. Naturally, he couldn’t resist a few gibes at Ferran’s expense. Instead of answering back, Ferran would hide in his bed, utterly ashamed, as if he had been caught doing something disgusting. Then he would finally fall asleep, content at having experienced both intense pain and humiliation, in the mockery and sharp words of his brother.

He felt the greatest fruition in the mornings when he received communion. As a child, even in his most tender and celestial years, Ferran had practiced this Catholic ritual in a fairly unconscious, if not completely unconscious, way. Spiritual withdrawal and respect had been the consequence of a fear imposed from without. All the magic of the sacrament escaped him, and ten minutes later, he would happily break his fast, without a single thought for mystery or the supernatural. Having to receive communion irritated him a little, because beforehand he would have to go and confess his sins. Except for this, it was just one of the many events of childhood. Later, he had ended up losing what little respect he had for it. When his “conversion” took place, it had been a little over a year since he’d last approached a confessional. When he began to change, Ferran discovered all the deep force of the sacrament. He came to take communion with a burning, shattering passion, with a shivering sensuality. That act was the only sedative for the irresistible stinging of his soul.

At first, after his conversion, Ferran would occasionally fall into the habit of a solitary vice that, naturally, he wanted to forswear entirely. He reacted with desperation to these lapses, which he could not overcome. Pare Mainou couldn’t find the words to comfort him and make him understand that the flesh is weak and those unfortunate lapses were no cause for him to consider himself the most vile and unhappy of men.

Ferran wanted to bring order to the turmoil of his doubts. He wanted to draw a map of his path and of the direction his life would have to take. Amid all his grand denials, puerile vanity still had him in its grasp. Ferran dreamt of being an apostle of Christ, an awakener of souls, even of becoming a martyr, if need be. A literary proclivity led him to fall in love with the uncomfortable habit of the Capuchin friars. He imagined himself with a beard, wearing a hood, preaching the Gospel in the most inclement climes. When he told Pare Mainou these thoughts, the priest suggested that he would find the greatest renunciation, the maximum humility, and the maximum sacrifice in the Company of Jesus. He told Ferran that no other order had such severe rules and such strict practices as the order of Ignatius of Loyola, and said that for one who was readying himself with all his strength to achieve sainthood, no other institution could offer him greater security than the Jesuits.

Ferran was swayed. From then on in he began preparing for the novitiate. Pare Mainou put him in the hands of Pare Masdeu, the head of novices from Gandia, who by chance was in Barcelona at the time. Pare Masdeu had his feet much more firmly on the ground than Pare Mainou. He examined the young man from head to toe and realized that, in his case, there was at least fifty percent of suggestion and misdirected sensuality.

With Pare Masdeu, Ferran restrained his lyricism. In Ferran’s vocation, there was an element he didn’t dare confess even to himself. This element proceeded from the weakness and cowardice inherited from the Lloberolas. It was passivity and inaptitude for struggle, bred in a depleted family that had not lifted a blade of straw from the ground in two hundred years.