Cathedral of the Sea

He said this because as the walls of the ambulatory were being built, and the new vaults were constructed on the struts from the columns, the old church was gradually being demolished.

“Then above the apse,” Father Albert went on, with Angel nodding at his side, “we’ll build the roof. Do you know what we will use?” The two boys shook their heads. “All the faulty pottery jars in the city. First will come the ashlar filling, and then on top of that all the jars, lined up next to one another. Finally there will be the roof covering.”

Arnau had seen all the broken jars piled next to the blocks of stone outside Santa Maria. He had asked his father why they were there, but Bernat did not know the answer.

“All I know,” he had said, “is that we have to pile up all the faulty pieces until someone comes and collects them.”

In this way, the new church began to take shape behind the apse of the old one, which they carefully dismantled in order to be able to use its stones. The La Ribera district did not want to be left without a church, even while the new, magnificent shrine to the Virgin was rising around them. Masses were said as usual, and yet there was a strange atmosphere in the church. Like everyone else, Arnau went in through the lopsided doorway of the tiny Romanesque construction, but once inside, instead of the welcoming gloom that had protected him while he talked to the Virgin, there was now a flood of light from the windows in the new apse. The old church was like a small box contained within another much larger and more beautiful one, a box destined to disappear as the other one grew, a box whose fourth side was taken up by the new, soaring apse that already boasted a roof.

10

HOWEVER, THERE WAS more to Arnau’s life than Santa Maria and giving water to the bastaixos. In exchange for bed and board, he had, among other duties, to help the Grau family cook whenever she went into the city to buy food.

So every two or three days Arnau left the workshop at dawn and went with Estranya, the mulatto slave, into the city streets. She walked with splayed legs, her huge body swaying dangerously as she waddled along. As soon as Arnau appeared in the kitchen doorway, she would give him the first things to carry: two baskets of dough they were to take to the ovens in the Calle Ollers Blancs for baking. One basket contained the loaves for Grau and his family: these were made of wheat flour, and became the finest white bread. The other held the loaves for the rest of the household, made from rye, millet, or even beans and chickpeas. When baked, this bread was dark, heavy, and hard.

Once they had handed over the loaves, Estranya and Arnau would leave the potters’ neighborhood and cross the wall into the center of Barcelona. In this first part of their journey, Arnau had no problem following the slave, and even found time to laugh at her swaying body and rippling dark flesh.

“What are you laughing at?” the mulatto had asked him more than once.

At that, Arnau would look into her round, flat face and stifle his smile.

“You want to laugh? Laugh at this then,” she said in Plaza del Blat as she gave him a sack of wheat to carry. “Where’s your smile now?” she would say on the way down La Llet as she loaded him with the milk his cousins were to drink. She would repeat the taunt in the narrow Plaza del Cols, where she bought cabbages, pulses, or other vegetables, and in Plaza de l’Oli, weighing him down with oil, game, or fowl.

After that, struggling under her purchases, Arnau followed the slave all over Barcelona. On the 160 days of abstinence, the mulatto plodded and swayed down to the shore, near Santa Maria. There she fought with the other customers at one of the city’s two official fishmongers (the old and the new) to buy the best dolphin, tuna, sturgeon, or palomides, neros, reigs, and corballs.

“Now we’ll get your fish,” she said. It was her turn to smile as she went round the back of the stalls to buy the leftovers. There were as many people here as at the front, but Estranya did not fight to get the best.

Even so, Arnau preferred these days of abstinence to those when Estranya had to go and buy meat, because whereas to purchase the leftovers of fish she simply had to walk round the stall, when she bought meat Arnau had to carry all his packages across half the city.

She bought the meat for Grau and his family from one of the butchers situated outside the slaughterhouses. Like everything else sold in the city, this was fresh, first-class meat: no dead animals were allowed inside Barcelona. Everything that was sold was slaughtered on the spot.