Ferran’s friend tried to get him to react. He was intelligent enough to see that Ferran was the victim of a collusion of absurd eventualities and that, in the best of good faith, he was about to commit moral suicide.
His friend sought the aid of a very famous Capuchin priest who was in vogue at the time. The Capuchin father spoke with Ferran and gave him the most sensible advice possible, in the course of which, even so, the spirit of rivalry between Franciscans and Jesuits was not entirely absent. What became clear was that Ferran’s vocation was so shallow that the Capuchin father’s arguments were able to reduce it by half in the first round.
Ferran spent two days meditating and looking at himself in the mirror, without setting foot in the convent on Carrer de Casp. Oddly, all the castles in the air he had built over the past couple of months, along with all his convictions of sainthood and sacrifice, were slowly turning into pale shadows. Still, Ferran had inherited his father’s pride and stubbornness, and it was very hard for him to give in and confess that he had made a mistake.
On his visits to Pare Masdeu, Ferran couldn’t find the words, and it wasn’t long before Pare Masdeu grasped the child’s unhappiness. He told him not to torture himself, not to worry. He could be just as holy and just as perfect living in the world and having a career as wearing on his head the four black peaks of the Jesuit biretta. Ferran didn’t want to give in. He still protested, he tried new experiments in pain, he clung like a man possessed to the pages of the Imitation of Christ, but it was all pure willfulness, pitiful mental masturbation. Pare Masdeu told him not to persist. The provincial head would never admit him to the Company of Jesus, and he should go out in the fresh air and enjoy himself.
Ferran followed his instructions to a tee, and for the first time in his life, he felt all the strength, all the joy of liberation. Ferran felt exactly as if a chain that oppressed his breast and kept him physically from breathing had been broken. He went back to his puerile vanities, to the happiness of his classmates, and to giving free rein to his senses. As practical as he was, Pare Masdeu never suspected that such sublime faith would disappear in four months.
Not only did Ferran abandon his saintly projects, he completely abandoned religion. It seemed impossible to him that he had been the victim of those monstrous hallucinations. He felt deeply indignant on remembering the hours he had spent kneeling on the tile floor. He called himself stupid and idiotic. He was truly embarrassed by his unspeakable immaturity. And he extended his indignation to Pare Mainou, who had put the finishing touches on his delusion. True as it was that Pare Mainou was somewhat guilty, he was not nearly as guilty as Ferran liked to think.
In time, his hatred extended to the entire Jesuit Order, the whole Catholic Church, and all of Christianity. The marvelous thing he had found in the Sermon on the Mount and other passages from the Gospels turned into a feeling of disgust. Ferran began to read books he would never before have dared to open. He found these authors just as enthralling as he had found the Confessions of St. Augustine just a short time before. The Antichrist of Nietzsche, translated into Castilian, which he bought for just a ral, a quarter of a pesseta, at the used bookstand on Santa Madrona, revealed a bright new world to him where his ideas could wander.
By hating the doctrine he had learned since childhood, he felt as if he were avenging all the bad dreams and all the sufferings of those months of torture. He considered Pare Mainou, a saintly and dignified man, to be the most abject criminal in the world. One day, in the Sant Sebastià bathhouse, he realized that his first communion medallion was hanging from gold chain around his neck. Ferran whipped off this last sign of slavery. He hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should sell it or pawn it, but he decided to throw it into the sea. An absurd puerility led him to believe he was carrying out an act of heroism by throwing that little medallion away.
When the Republic came, and later, when the Jesuit order was dissolved, Ferran was as happy as a dog with a bone, because his family was outraged, and, more to the point, because the Jesuits were his enemies, who had almost led him to perdition. In those days, like many students of his time, he was a communist, and he only liked Soviet films.
In this period of hatreds and inoffensive vengeances, Ferran was still afraid of women and brothels.
The day he made his decision, you might say he was perfectly calm. After the afternoon of the murder on Carrer de Barberà, Ferran turned on a dime. He made a series of important discoveries. One of them was the existence of his sister, Maria Lluïsa.
Indeed, the young man had been too busy inventing himself, first as a mystical farce, and then as a demagogical farce, to be able to experience his natural character in an ordinary way. It took the jolt of contact with a prostitute and the sight of a murdered man to plant his feet on the ground.
Ferran had never seen his sister. As children, when they played together, Maria Lluïsa was nothing to Ferran but someone a little older, a little more delicate and a little weaker than he was. Then life at school separated them completely, and Maria Lluïsa’s emancipation, and the fact that she treated her brother like a child, did the rest. Ferran found her intolerable, he found her affected and overbearing, a person who did nothing but talk back to their mother over lunch and dinner. Maria Lluïsa and Ferran knew absolutely nothing about each other.
Ferran was in love with love. He was going through that stage young men his age go through in which a kind of sentimental and erotic desire is latent in every idea their brains can elaborate, and in all the impressions they receive from the outside world. The man is in love, and he doesn’t quite know what he loves, or what he wants. All the subjective elements are mixed up in a tender and confused way, and what is missing is the concrete person who can channel and rearrange those elements. The woman has not yet appeared, but he can sense her perfume, in the daylight, in music, in every girl’s gaze, in an inexplicable melancholy, in nighttime dreams, in cool bathwater, and in the flight of a swallow. The man lives in love with love.
One evening, in this peculiar state, Ferran looked at his sister, Maria Lluïsa. The life of this young woman was a mystery to Ferran. Her feminine climate was hermetically sealed in a world whose existence Ferran knew nothing of. He sensed, though, that a specific thing united him and his sister: their anti-family spirit, the aversion both of them felt to that apartment on Carrer de Bailèn and to the Lloberola name.
For the first time in his life, Ferran spoke of these things with his sister. Maria Lluïsa listened with discretion, appearing not to pay much attention. For her, that boy was the child she still envisioned in a sailor’s suit or in golf knickers, and it was impossible for her to take him seriously. It is very hard for a brother and sister to crack the shell of family intimacy, which is precisely the least cordial, least communicative and least human relationship that exists. In a family, affection and coexistence have an inevitable, instinctive cohesion that can be observed in a brood of chicks in a nest or in an ant colony, but the elective affection, that spark of friendship or love, that something that free will and feelings create as they go through the world and sort out affinities and connections, is missing.