What Do You Fear/Revere?

A beastly-built countryman Josafat fleds his home and joins a church assisting priests, but after his savage attack on a man whose simple act of not removing his beret, that is blasphemous and intolerable in Josafat's eyes, for The Lord he is relegated or rather established as a bell-ringer by the church patrons. Now, living alone in his cell, performing his duties as a bell-ringer and caretaker, with reverence for the God and patrons of the church, he fears nothing except his own growing lust and sin & unfortunate results that may accompany it.¹

1.    A vision from his youth appeared in his dreams; a shepherdess sprawled on the grass, playing with her sherpherd-dog and revealing desirable white flesh. She came from his village, and he had hidden her away in the labyrinthine shadows of his domains; trembling impatiently, he sought her out through galleries and underground passages, in places littered with rubble and refuse, down infinite stairways and when he saw her, and she opened her and shamelessly offered herself up, an interminable procession of priests in purple, led by the Right Reverend Bishop, interceded. The Right Reverend Bishop beat him with his walking-stick, expelled him from the church…

When Pepona—the shepherdess from his village and who still reigns his dreams—comes to meet Josafat with her prostitute friend Fineta he is so taken aback by female's presence in his domain that he is unsettled and couldn't fulfill their wish to visit the belfry. From this visit, Fineta is attracted by Josafat, and wants to fulfill her carnal desires. On the other hand, fearing God's commandment, trying to hold his celibacy, he tries to establish a love-tie with Pepona in one of those visits, so by marrying her he'd licit his virility and offend neither God nor the priests—but things turn unexpected, in that claustrophobic and gloomy spaces inside the church & intricate passages and architectural variations where most of the novella is set. The lust driven Fineta visits Josafat again, this time alone, and is able to seduce him, to make him take part in her erotic ecstasy. Josafat can't abate his desires but also is filled with remorse. ²

2.    When she re-appeared, he never argued with his conscience, even though remorse gnawed at his soul. Every day, at about eight, while he toiled in the cathedral, he watched a Jesuit gentleman with trembling lips and a head of snow-white hair enter the confessional. Then the bell-ringer felt the need to cleanse himself of all sin and slowly walked round the apse intending to prostrate himself at the confessor's feet. But he never did… He knew that once he had confessed his lust, he couldn’t possibly see Fineta again.

The intimacy of Fineta and Josafat, initially pleasant for both later turns sinister, Josafat troubled by voices, images, his god fearing awakening marred by his lustful involvement and he can't bear Fineta's presence anymore, who's pressing all the while. The later chapters of the novella dramatize Josafat, avenging his lascivious desires almost frenzied to bring peace onto himself, of course which ends in a tragic.

First published in 1906, now adapted into movies, musicals and circus adaptations, it is no surprise that Josafat was scandalous for its time. The mere setting might have offended the church authorities. It's a tale of lust and lunacy—this rings true. Another explanation might be a clash between "lord" and "lust", where in the fear of authoritarian church drives a man impatient. Bertrana's character portrayals are pure, every movement and air perfectly captured in the shadowy spaces of the church where the Godly reverence present inside a man is infringed by his own shadows. Sexual descriptions are overshadowed by Josafat's internal turmoil and his nervous frenzies. He is a God-fearing-monger, whose anxiety and temptations leave him in isolated moral haze. Fineta is mere a spark. Josafat, gives a tour inside Girona Cathedral, and a poor man arrested inside those solid walls by his own hardened beliefs.

Author: Prudenci Bertrana
Translator: Peter Bush
Publisher: Francis Boutle Publishers
Page Count: 80
Price: $ 11.53