Dark Vales (Dedalus European Classics) by Raimon Casellas

Author:Raimon Casellas [Casellas, Raimon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909232884
Publisher: Dedalus Limited
Published: 2014-04-21T22:00:00+00:00

And from that moment on they set about getting everything prepared for the sad pilgrimage, fully resigned to abandoning the sunlit walls and the flower-bedecked cloisters where their lives had been spent, ready now to set off on the journey into the deep, dark wilderness. During the whole time they were travelling, on a route as rough and steep as Calvary itself, they never gave out a single sigh of sadness or a single moan of regret… And once they had arrived at their destination, once they were holed up in that lonely corner where they were to live as exiles from the world of men, neither of them had any other thought but of moulding to their new situation the habits they had followed in the convent. Absolutely nothing had impinged on the perpetually long-suffering spirits of the old couple. Everything was still done in the same way and at the same rhythm. The unremitting, silent labour; the habitual patience and self-sacrifice; and the God-be-with-you incessantly repeated in the convent: none of this behaviour was interrupted in the slightest. When, at midday or in the evening, their tasks completed, they briefly came together in the house, husband and wife would greet one another with the usual convention:

‘May God be with you, Mariagna.’

‘And with you forever, Josep.’

Once these words of greeting had been exchanged, each of them sank back into uninterrupted silence and like shades of persons from centuries past, they meekly went off again to their respective chores. The local people, seeing them coming and going in the vicinity of the church, silent and withdrawn like penitents in the wilderness, stared at them in bemusement and often even made fun of how they looked and behaved. Although the old couple dressed much the same as everybody else, there was something oddly ecclesiastical about how their clothes had been put on and were worn. Josep went about in a black smock which, had it been only a little longer, might have been a cassock; and with his arms crossed in their usual position, with each hand tucked into the opposite oversleeve, he looked strangely, from any angle, like an ordained cleric. And as for Mariagna, it was even more obvious… She had a particular way of fastening under her chin the white scarf she wore as though it were a toque, and of putting on top of this her black hood, tipped forward so that it looked like a veil and so that she had all the appearance of being a real nun.

Father Llàtzer could not look at them without being struck that they could have been holy people from earlier centuries, forgotten survivors preserved in the here and now, or faded images that had escaped from an ancient reredos. What grieved him was that those quaint altar-saints, so perfectly self-denying and humble, did not bear within their habits a compassionate spirit that might have shown some real feeling for all the suffering he was experiencing. But they offered no

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.