Rosinante to the Road Again Part 11

I the peaceful soul of the herds that tinkle half-hidden by the tall gra.s.s.

I the soul of the forest that sways in waves like the sea, and has as far horizons.

And also I was the soul of the willow tree that gives every spring its shade.

I the sheer soul of the cliffs where the mist creeps up and scatters.

And the unquiet soul of the stream that shrieks in s.h.i.+ning waterfalls.

I was the blue soul of the pond that looks with strange eyes on the wanderer.

I the soul of the all-moving wind and the humble soul of opening flowers.

I was the height of the high peaks...

The clouds caressed me with great gestures and the wide love of misty s.p.a.ces clove to me, placid.

I felt the delightfulness of springs born in my flanks, gifts of the glaciers; and in the ample quietude of horizons I felt the reposeful sleep of storms.

And when the sky opened about me and the sun laughed on my green planes people, far off, stood still all day staring at my sovereign beauty.

But I, full of the l.u.s.t that makes furious the sea and mountains lifted myself up strongly through the sky lifted the diversity of my flanks and entrails...

At sunset time drinking at the spring's edge I drank down the secrets of mysterious earth.

The sea and mountains, mist and cattle and yellow broom-flowers, and fis.h.i.+ng boats with lateen sails like dark wings against the sunrise towards Mallorca: delight of the nose and the eyes and the ears in all living perceptions until the poison of other-worldliness wells up suddenly in him and he is a Christian and a mystic full of echoes of old soul-torturing. In Maragall's most expressive work, a sequence of poems called _El Comte Arnau_, all this is synthesized. These are from the climax.

All the voices of the earth acclaim count Arnold because from the dark trial he has come back triumphant.

"Son of the earth, son of the earth, count Arnold, now ask, now ask what cannot you do?"

"Live, live, live forever, I would never die: to be like a wheel revolving; to live with wine and a sword."

"Wheels roll, roll, but they count the years."

"Then I would be a rock immobile to suns or storms."

"Rock lives without life forever impenetrable."

"Then the ever-moving sea that opens a path for all things."

"The sea is alone, alone, you go accompanied."

"Then be the air when it flames in the light of the deathless sun."

"But air and sun are loveless, ignorant of eternity."

"Then to be man more than man to be earth palpitant."

"You shall be wheel and rock, you shall be the mist-veiled sea you shall be the air in flame, you shall be the whirling stars, you shall be man more than man for you have the will for it.

You shall run the plains and hills, all the earth that is so wide, mounted on a horse of flame you shall be tireless, terrible as the tramp of the storms All the voices of earth will cry out whirling about you.

They will call you spirit in torment call you forever d.a.m.ned."

Night. All the beauty of Adalaisa asleep at the feet of naked Christ.

Arnold goes pacing a dark path; there is silence among the mountains; in front of him the rustling lisp of a river, a pool.... Then it is lost and soundless.

Arnold stands under the sheer portal.

He goes searching the cells for Adalaisa and sees her sleeping, beautiful, p.r.o.ne at the feet of the naked Christ, without veil without kerchief, without cloak, gestureless, without any defense, there, sleeping....

She had a great head of turbulent hair.

"How like fine silk your hair, Adalaisa,"

thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.

She sleeps, she sleeps and little by little a flush spreads over all her face as if a dream had crept through her gently until she laughs aloud very softly with a tremulous flutter of the lips.

"What amorous lips, Adalaisa,"

thinks Arnold. But he looks at her silently.

A great sigh swells through her, sleeping, like a seawave, and fades to stillness.

"What sighs swell in your breast, Adalaisa,"

thinks Arnold. But he stares at her silently.

But when she opens her eyes he, awake, tingling, carries her off in his arms.

When they burst out into the open fields it is day.

But the fear of life gushes suddenly to muddy the dear wellspring of sensation, and the poet, beaten to his knees, writes:

And when the terror-haunted moment comes to close these earthly eyes of mine, open for me, Lord, other greater eyes to look upon the immensity of your face.

But before that moment comes, through the medium of an extraordinarily terse and unspoiled language, a language that has not lost its earthy freshness by mauling and softening at the hands of literary generations, what a lilting crystal-bright vision of things. It is as if the air of the Mediterranean itself, thin, brilliant, had been hammered into cadences. The verse is leaping and free, full of echoes and refrains. The images are sudden and unlabored like the images in the Greek anthology: a hermit released from Nebuchadnezzar's spell gets to his feet "like a bear standing upright"; fis.h.i.+ng boats being shoved off the beach slide into the sea one by one "like village girls joining a dance"; on a rough day the smacks with reefed sails "skip like goats at the harbor entrance." There are phrases like "the great asleepness of the mountains"; "a long sigh like a seawave through her sleep"; "my speech of her is like a flight of birds that lead your glance into intense blue sky"; "the disquieting unquiet sea." Perhaps it is that the eyes are sharpened by the yearning to stare through the brilliant changing forms of things into some intenser beyond. Perhaps it takes a hot intoxicating draught of divinity to melt into such white fire the various colors of the senses. Perhaps earthly joy is intenser for the beckoning flames of h.e.l.l.

The daily life, too, to which Maragall aspires seems strangely out of another age. That came home to me most strongly once, talking to a Catalan after a mountain scramble in the eastern end of Mallorca. We sat looking at the sea that was violet with sunset, where the sails of the homecoming fis.h.i.+ng boats were the wan yellow of primroses. Behind us the hills were sharp pyrites blue. From a window in the adobe hut at one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes and peppers and the m.u.f.fled sound of eggs being beaten. We were footsore, hungry, and we talked about women and love. And after all it was marriage that counted, he told me at last, women's bodies and souls and the love of them were all very well, but it was the ordered life of a family, children, that counted; the family was the immortal chain on which lives were strung; and he recited this quatrain, saying, in that proud awefilled tone with which Latins speak of creative achievement, "By our greatest poet, Juan Maragall":

Canta esposa, fila i canta que el pati em faras suau Quan l'esposa canta i fila el casal s'adorm en pau.

It was hard explaining how all our desires lay towards the completer and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new cohesions were in the making.

"I want my liberty," he broke in, "as much as--as Byron did, liberty of thought and action." He was silent a moment; then he said simply, "But I want a wife and children and a family, mine, mine."

Then the girl who was cooking leaned out of the window to tell us in soft Mallorquin that supper was ready. She had a full brown face flushed on the cheek-bones and given triangular shape like an El Greco madonna's face by the bright blue handkerchief knotted under the chin.

Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung out from her body, solid like a Victory's under the sleek grey shawl as she leaned from the window. In her eyes that were sea-grey there was an unimaginable calm. I thought of Penelope sitting beside her loom in a smoky-raftered hall, grey eyes looking out on a sailless sea. And for a moment I understood the Catalan's phrase: the family was the chain on which lives were strung, and all of Maragall's lyricizing of wifehood,

When the wife sits singing as she spins all the house can sleep in peace.

From the fishermen's huts down the beach came an intense blue smoke of fires; above the soft rustle of the swell among the boats came the chatter of many sleepy voices, like the sound of sparrows in a city park at dusk. The day dissolved slowly in utter timelessness. And when the last fis.h.i.+ng boat came out of the dark sea, the tall slanting sail folding suddenly as the wings of a sea-gull alighting, the red-brown face of the man in the bow was the face of returning Odysseus. It was not the continuity of men's lives I felt, but their oneness. On that beach, beside that sea, there was no time.