Cathedral of the Sea

bastaixos caught the assistants’ attention. The only unmarried man among them was Arnau, so his companions hauled him to his feet and offered him as someone to join in the revelry. To the delight of his colleagues, he was immediately selected. Arnau went up onto the stage.

As soon as Arnau joined the line of Almogavars, a woman stood up from among the public and stared at him with her huge brown eyes. The assistants saw her: she was hard to miss, being so young and beautiful, and so insistent that she be allowed on the stage. When the two men came to lead her away, a surly old man grabbed her by the arm and tried to force her to sit down again. The crowd laughed as she tried to free herself from him. The assistants looked toward the troubadour, but he urged them to carry on: “Don’t worry if you humiliate someone,” he had been told, “if that means you get the rest on your side”—and the rest of the audience was laughing openly at the old fellow, who by now was on his feet struggling with the young woman.

“She’s my wife,” he tried to explain to one of the assistants, pushing him off.

“The vanquished have no wives,” the troubadour cried out from the stage. “All the women of the duchy of Athens now belong to the Catalans.”

At this, the old man hesitated for just long enough to allow the troubadour’s assistants to snatch the young woman from him and place her in the line of women. The crowd cheered.

The troubadour carried on with his chronicle, pairing off the Athenian women with the Almogavars to loud applause. Arnau and Aledis stared at each other. “How long has it been, Arnau?” those huge brown eyes of her were asking him. “Four years?” Arnau glanced back at the group of bastaixos, all of whom were smiling and encouraging him. He could not meet Joan’s gaze. “Look at me, Arnau.” Aledis had not opened her mouth, but Arnau could hear her calling him. Arnau’s eyes sank deep into hers. The Valencian troubadour took her hand and led her across to Arnau. He lifted Arnau’s hand and joined the two together.

Another shout of joy rang out. All the couples were in pairs facing the public, headed by Arnau and Aledis. Aledis could feel her whole body tremble as she gently squeezed Arnau’s hand. He was looking out of the corner of his eye at the old tanner, who was standing in the audience glaring at them.

“And so the Almogavars settled down,” sang the troubadour, pointing to the couples. “They settled in the duchy of Athens and there, in the distant Orient, they still live, to the glory of Catalonia.”

The Pla d’en Llull burst into noisy applause. Aledis squeezed Arnau’s hand again to catch his attention. They stared at each other. “Take me, Arnau,” those brown eyes of hers were begging him. All of a sudden, she was no longer beside him: her husband had grabbed her by the hair and was dragging her off in the direction of Santa Maria, to hoots of derision from everyone in the crowd.

“A few coins for the performance,” the troubadour said, stepping in front of Aledis’s husband.

In reply, the tanner spat and carried on dragging Aledis away.

“WHORE! WHY DID you do it?”

The old man still had strong arms, but Aledis felt nothing when he slapped her.

“I ... I don’t know. It was all the people, the way they were shouting; all at once I felt I was really in the Orient ...”

“In the Orient? Harlot!”

The tanner picked up a leather strap, and Aledis forgot Arnau and how she had been unable to resist the temptation to join him.

“Please, Pau, please. I’ve no idea why I did it. Forgive me. I beg you, forgive me.” Aledis sank to her knees in front of her husband and lowered her head. The leather strap wavered in his hand.

“You are to stay inside the house until I give you permission to leave it,” he said, finally relenting.

Aledis said nothing more. She stayed on her knees until she heard the door to the street close behind him.

Four years earlier, her father had given her away in marriage. Since she had no dowry, this was the best Gasto could arrange for his daughter: an old master tanner who was a childless widower. “One day you will inherit from him,” had been his only commentary. He did not add that when the old man died it would be him, Gasto Segura, who would take his place at the head of the business. In his view, daughters did not need to know such trivial details.

On their wedding day, the old man had not waited for the end of the celebration to haul his young bride off to the bedroom. Aledis allowed herself to be undressed by his unsteady hands, and to have her breasts kissed by his drooling mouth. As he touched her, Aledis shuddered at the contact with his calloused, rough fingers. Pau quickly led her to the bed, then fell on top of her, still in his clothes. He was drooling, quivering, panting. He smothered her in kisses and bit her breasts. He thrust his hand between her legs. Then, still dressed, he started to pant more and more loudly, moved jerkily, and finally sighed, rolled off, and fell fast asleep.

It was the next morning that Aledis lost her virginity beneath a frail, weak body that pressed on her with clumsy desire. She wondered if she would ever feel anything other than disgust with him.

Each time she had to go down to the workshop for some reason or other, Aledis stared intently at her husband’s apprentices. Why did none of them look at her? She could see them: her eyes followed the way their muscles tensed, and rejoiced at the drops of sweat that formed on their brows and then ran across their faces, down their necks, and onto their strong, powerful chests. Aledis’s desire moved to the rhythm of their arms as they tanned the hides, back and forth, back and forth ... but her husband’s orders had been very clear: “Ten lashes of the whip for any of you who looks at my wife once; twenty for the second time; the third, no food.” So night after night Aledis asked herself what had happened to the pleasure she had heard so much about, the pleasure her young body demanded, the pleasure the decrepit husband she had been forced to marry could never offer.

Some nights the old man clawed at her with his rasping hands. On others, he forced her to masturbate, or chivied her to let him penetrate her as quickly as possible before his urge faded. Afterward, he always fell sound asleep. On one such night, being careful not to wake him, Aledis got up silently. Her husband did not even move as she left the bed.

She went down to the workshop. The workbenches stood out in the darkness. She walked between them, caressing the smooth surfaces with the fingers of one hand. “What’s the matter? Don’t you desire me?” Aledis was thinking dreamily of the apprentices as she stepped between the tables, stroking her breasts and thighs, when a dim glow in the corner of a wall caught her eye. A knot had fallen out of one of the planks separating the workshop from the area where the apprentices slept. Aledis went over and peeped through the hole. She immediately took a step back. Her whole body was trembling. She pressed her eye to the hole once more. They