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.
After high school, Ferran understood the failure and destitution of his household, and if he entertained the pride of being a great architect and man of personal value, his enthusiasm soon waned, and in the marrow of his bones he felt the indolence and weakness characteristic of his father, his uncle, and his grandfather, Don Tomàs. Like all the Lloberolas, Ferran was afraid of life, and as soon as he decided to enter a religious order, this problem of life and the struggle to live was solved. The order would provide for him, and would make his decisions for him. Ferran’s vocation was fifty percent egoism, and it is very possible that under the scrutiny of a capable and discerning man such as Pare Masdeu this fifty percent did not go unnoticed.
Despite Pare Masdeu’s misgivings, which at times verged on positive skepticism, the headmaster of the novitiate didn’t want to discourage him. Ferran seemed more and more determined, and Pare Masdeu said that in another month he could go to Gandia, not to join the novitiate, but to have a good look. There he would try to put his vocation to the test, and if it was a true vocation, there would be no reason not to admit him.
Ferran had kept his counsel and not said anything to anyone. He accepted the month imposed by Pare Masdeu, and looked for an excuse to make a trip to Gandia. But one day he lost control, and he told a friend who was older than he, in whom he had utmost confidence, about his situation and all his plans. Ferran’s friend couldn’t believe his ears, but when he realized it wasn’t just a bad joke, he gave him a talking-to. Among other things, he said that his vocation was no such thing, and above all he was being a coward. Ferran cried his heart out. His friend understood the state of weakness and of moral unraveling to which his own suggestibility and the influence of Pare Mainou had reduced him.