Висенте Бласко-Ибаньес
The Shadow of the Cathedral
His niece complained to Don Antolin, they paid no attention to her and flouted her, no woman now ever came to help her gratuitously in her household duties. They replied insolently that those who wanted servants must pay for them. What was her uncle thinking about? It was certainly time to assert his authority and to lay a heavy hand on these people.
She herself, so lively and energetic in her own house, was now obliged to retire snorting with rage or weeping, whenever she stationed herself at her door. All the women of the Claverias wished to revenge themselves for their former thraldom, standing already on the declivity of disrespect.
"Look at her!" screamed the shoemaker's wife to her neighbours, "always so dressed up, the ugly jade. She decks herself with the blood that vampire of an uncle sucks from the poor."
And from the iron gratings of the upper Claverias, giving on the roofs, there was generally a voice singing the ancient couplet, no doubt inspired by the Cathedral garden—
"Las amas de los curas y los laureles Como nunca dan fruto siempre estan verdes."36
It was this that ended the patience of Don Antolin; this insulting conjecture about himself and his niece that disturbed his miserly chastity. He visited the cardinal to complain of the inhabitants of the cloister, but His Eminence, who lived in a perpetual rage, grew furious listening to him and very nearly thrashed him. Why did he come to him with such tales? For what reason had he been given any authority? Was there nothing left of a man beneath his cassock? He who was wanting in the good discipline of the house—turn him out into the street at once! More energy, and be careful never to trouble him again with such insignificant tales, otherwise the person who would be turned into the street would be Silver Stick himself.
Don Antolin felt a little braver after this interview, although he swore mentally never again to visit that terrible prelate. He was determined to reassert his authority, by punishing the weakest, whom he considered as the origin of all these scandals. The shoemaker should be expelled from the Claverias, as he was there through no other right but that his wife had been born there. Mariquita, bewildered by her uncle's energy, must needs speak to some one about these intentions, and so the news circulated through the cloister.
Don Antolin did not dare to move a step further, terrified by the silent unanimity with which the whole population rose against him.
The Tato looked at him with mocking and threatening eyes, in which Silver Stick could plainly read "Remember the knife"; but what terrified Don Antolin more than anything was the silence of the bell-ringer, and the savage and hostile glance with which he responded to his words.
Even the good Wooden Staff, Esteban, protested in his own way, saying quietly to Don Antolin:
"Is it really true that you intend turning out the shoemaker? You will do wrong, very wrong, for after all he is very poor, and his wife was born in the cloister. These innovations always bring misfortune, Don Antolin."
So the priest, finding he had no support, and seeing hostility on every side, put off his energetic resolutions till the following day, even reproving his niece when she threw his weakness in his face.
The Canon Obrero, from whom he had implored help, did not care to disturb the blessed peace of his existence by mixing himself up in the quarrels of the smaller people. It was Silver Stick's own affair; he could punish or expel any one he thought fit without fear of anybody. But Don Antolin, dreading the responsibility that might accrue from energetic action, ended by delivering himself over to Gabriel and begging for his assistance. That man was the one who wielded the real authority in the upper cloister; all those who had listened to him followed his advice blindly.
"Help me, Gabrielillo," said the priest with an agonised expression. "If you cannot restore order, this will end badly; they even insult my poor niece, and some day I shall turn half the people of the Claverias out into the street, as I hold authority from His Eminence for everything. Ay, señor! I do not know what has happened here; surely the devil must have got loose in our upper cloister! How these people have changed to me!"
Luna guessed Don Antolin's thoughts and his allusions to the devil who had got loose in the cloister. That devil was himself. No doubt Silver Stick was right. Without intending it he had introduced discord into the Cathedral. He had sought calm and forgetfulness in that refuge, and the spirit of rebellion had followed him even into this concealment. He recalled his thoughts on the first day, when he was alone in the silent cloister; he wished to be another stone in the Cathedral, without thought, without feeling, to spend the rest of his life fixed to that ruin, with the embryonic life of the fungus on the buttress, but the spirit of the outside world had entered in with him.
Luna remembered how travellers in time of plague had crossed the sanitary cordon—they were well and happy, nothing betrayed the infection in their bodies; but the poisonous germs travelled in the folds of their clothes and in their hair, carrying death without knowing it, helping it to leap all barriers and obstacles, without being in the least aware of it. He was the same, but instead of spreading death, he spread tumultuous and rebellious life. The protest of the lower orders that had been surging throughout the world, for more than a century, had entered with him into this still remaining fragment of the sixteenth century. He had awakened those men, who had been like the sleepers in the legend, motionless in their cave for ages, while the centuries rolled on and the world was transformed.
The awakening of these people was sudden and violent, like that of a people in revolution. They were ashamed of the old errors that they had worshipped, and this made them receive as gospel everything that was new, without quailing before the consequences.
It was the faith of a people which, once it takes form, rushes onwards, accepting everything, justifying everything, the only requirement being its novelty, and casting aside contemptuously those traditional principles which it had just abandoned.
The cowardly submission of Silver Stick was the first victory of those more daring souls who formed Luna's surrounding. The avaricious and despotic priest lowered his eyes before them, smilingly anxious to make himself agreeable. This they owed to the master, for he was now the true ruler of the upper cloister. Don Antolin consulted him before making any arrangements, and his ugly niece smiled on Gabriel as the daughters of the conquered might smile on a triumphant hero.
They now no longer hid themselves in the bell-ringer's house for their meetings; they formed a circle in the cloister during the evenings, discussing the audacious doctrines taught by Luna, without now being intimidated by the religious atmosphere. They sat with the look of lords, surrounding their master, while in the opposite gallery walked Silver Stick like a black phantom, reading his book of hours, and casting now and then an uneasy glance on the group. Even his ancient vassal, the chaplain of the nuns, had dared to leave him to go and listen to Gabriel.
Don Antolin with the keenness of his ecclesiastical training, guessed the intensity of the evil produced by Luna. But for the moment his egoism was stronger than his reflection. Let them talk—what did it matter? It was only a little ebullition of pride in those people, nothing more. All words and wind in the head. Meanwhile they had better not ask for any more money! In exchange he had a very good auxiliary in Luna, who, sharing his authority, spared him many annoyances, and the Cathedral disposed of his services gratuitously as interpreter to the foreigners.
These already began to talk of the great intelligence and education of the Toledan sacristans, a praise Don Antolin received as though it were entirely deserved by himself.
Gabriel was far more alarmed than Don Antolin at the effect of his words; he bitterly repented having been led to speak of his past and of his ideals. He had sought for peace and silence, but he was still surrounded, though in a smaller degree, by the atmosphere of proselytism and blind enthusiasm, as in the days of his martyrdom. He had wished to efface himself and to disappear on entering the Cathedral, but fate mocked him, reviving the agitation in the midst of his concealment, to disturb the peace of that ruin. Society had forgotten him, but he unconsciously was agitating, and drawing to himself the attention of the outside world.
The enthusiasm of these neophytes was a danger, and his brother, the Wooden Staff, without understanding the full extent of the evil, warned him with his usual good sense.
"You are turning the heads of these poor men, with the things you tell them. Be careful; they are very well meaning, but they are very ignorant. And having been ignorant all their lives, it is dangerous to turn such men into sages at one blow. It is as if I, being accustomed to the homely stew, were taken to-day to His Eminence's table. I should gorge myself and drink too much; at night I should have a colic, and should probably hop the twig."
Gabriel acknowledged the truth of this prudent advice, but he could not draw back—he was driven on by the affection of his disciples and his own ardour as propagandist. It was a great delight to him to see the wonder in those virgin minds, entering tumultuously into the luminous palaces constructed by human thought during the last century.
The description of the future of humanity inflamed all Luna's ardour. He spoke of the happiness of men, after a revolutionary crisis which would change all the organisation of humanity with mystic rapture, like a Christian preacher describing heaven.
"Man ought to seek happiness solely in this world, for after death there only existed the infinite life of matter with its endless combinations, but the human being was effaced as entirely as a plant or an animal—he fell into oblivion when he sank into the tomb. Immortality of the soul was one of the illusions of human pride worked up by religions, who laid their foundations on this lie. It was only in this life that man could find heaven. Everyone embarked on immensity in the same ship, the earth. We were all comrades in our dangers and our struggles, and we ought to look upon one another as brothers seeking the common welfare. And what about the unequal distribution of goods, the division of classes, the ability to work, and, above all, the struggle for existence, that the philosophers and poets of the oppressing classes paint as an indispensable condition of progress? Communism is the holiest aspiration of humanity, the divine dream of man since he began to think in the first dawn of civilisation. Religions had endeavoured to establish it, but religion had been shipwrecked and was moribund, and only science could enforce it in the future. They must stop on the way they were going, as humanity was marching on the road to perdition, therefore it was necessary to return to the point of departure. The first man who had cultivated a portion of the earth and garnered the fruits of his toil, thought it was his for ever, and left it to his sons as their property; they engaged other men to cultivate it for them—so these men became robbers, appropriators of the universal heritage. It was the same with those who possessed themselves of the invention of human genius, machines, etc., for the benefit of a small majority, subjecting the rest of mankind to the law of hunger. No, everything was for everyone. The earth belonged to all human beings without exception, like the sun and the air; its products ought to be divided between everyone with due regard to their necessities. It was shameful that man, who only appeared for an instant on this planet—a minute, a second, for his life was no more than this in the life of immensity—should spend this mere breath of existence fighting with his kin, robbing them, excited by the fever of plunder, not even enjoying the majestic calm of a wild beast, which when it has eaten, rests, without ever thinking of doing harm from vanity or avarice. There ought to be neither rich nor poor—nothing but men. The only inevitable division must be that between brains more or less highly organised. But the wise, from the fact of being so, ought to show their greatness, sacrificing themselves for the more simple, without seeking to assist the greatness of their minds by material advantages; for in stomachs there were no categories or ranks. Everything that exists, even the smallest production that man considers his exclusive work, is the work of the past and present generations. By what right can anyone say 'This is mine, mine only'? Man is not consulted before he is formed if he wishes to burst forth into life. He is born—and from the fact of being born he has a right to well-being." Gabriel proclaimed his supreme formula, "Everything for everyone, and well-being for all."
His friends listened in profound silence. The right to well-being sank profoundly into their minds; it was the saying that most cruelly touched their poverty, taunted by the contrast of the wealth of the Church.
Don Martin, the young chaplain, was the only one who timidly raised any objections to the master's sayings. He wished to know if, when everything was for everyone, when man should have recognised his right to happiness, without laws or compulsion to force him to production—would he work? seeing that work was a necessity, and not a virtue, as those who employ labour say, to glorify it.
Gabriel loudly affirmed the necessity of work in the future. The man of the future would work without being forced to do so by his necessities; he would not be ruled by the body and its imperious requirements; his conscience would be inspired with the clear understanding of solidarity with his fellows and the certainty that if one abandoned social duties others would follow the example, thus rendering life in common impossible and so returning to the actual times of poverty and robbery.
"Why do not the few men of culture and sound conscience living at present kill and rob?" exclaimed Gabriel. "It is not through fear of the law and its representatives, for a clear intelligence, if it takes the trouble, can easily find ways of evading both; neither can it be through fear of eternal penalties and divine punishment, as such men do not believe in these inventions of the past. It is from that respect to his fellows which is felt by every elevated mind, from the consideration that all violence should be avoided, for if everyone gave themselves over to it, all social life must disappear. When this understanding, which now only belongs to a few, embraces all humanity, men will live ruled by their own consciences without laws or police, working from social duty, without requiring man to be the only spring of activity, and sweating without compassion to be the only way to ease."
Throughout all his revolutionary raptures Luna had no illusions as to the present. Humanity was at present an infected land, in which the best seeds rotted, or which at best produced only poisonous fruits; we must wait till the equalising revolution begun in the human conscience a century ago should be completed, after that it would be possible and easy to change the basis of society; he had a blind faith in the future. Man must progress in the same way as communities; these reckoned their evolutions by centuries, but man by millions of years. How could a man of to-day be compared to the biped animal of prehistoric times, though bearing visibly the traces of the animalism from which he had lately emerged? Living in fellowship with his ancestors the monkeys, the principal difference being the first babblings of speech, and the first trembling spark that began to burn in his brain.
From the ravenous beast of former days, suffering from all the cruel forces of nature and living in fraternal misery with the lower animals, the man of to-day was evolved, asserting his superiority to his ancestors, dominating all nature. From the men of to-day, in whom the passions of their former animalism are finding their equilibrium with the gradual unfolding of the mind, will arise that superior and perfect being indicated by philosophers, pure from all animal egoism, and endeavouring to change the actual cruel, restless, and uncertain life, into a period of happy and prosperous equality.
The animalism at present dominant in man exasperated Gabriel; it was the great stumbling-block to all his generous views of the future, and he explained to his astonished listeners the transformations of natural creatures and of the origin of man, and the wondrous poem of the evolution of nature from the original protoplasm to the infinite varieties of life. We still carry in us the marks of our origin. One could not help laughing at the God of the Jews, who had modelled a man from clay, like a sculptor. Unlucky artist! Science pointed out much carelessness and bungling in His work, without being able to justify such mistakes. The skin of our bodies did not serve us as a covering like the fur of an animal. How could we then believe it? Why were nipples given to human males, if they were of no use for milk giving? Why was the vertebral column at the back of the body as in quadrupeds, when it would have been more logical, in creating a man who stands on his feet, to place it in the centre of the body as a strong support, thus avoiding the curvatures and weakness of the spine that are now suffered by this disequilibrium in the support of its weight?
Gabriel enumerated the various inexplicable inconsistencies and incongruities found in the human body, presuming it to be of divine origin.
"I feel prouder," said he, "of my animal origin; to be a lineal descendant of inferior beings than to have emerged imperfect from the hand of a stupid God. I feel the same satisfaction that a nobleman feels in speaking of his ancestors when I think of our remote forefathers, those men-beasts, exposed like the animals to all the cruel severity of nature, who, little by little, through hundreds of centuries, have transformed themselves, triumphing in the unfolding of their minds, their brains, and their social instincts. Making clothes, edible foods, arms, tools and houses, neutralising the exterior influences of nature. What hero or discoverer in the four thousand years comprising our history can compare with those elementary men who have slowly evolved and maintained on the earth the existence of our species, exposed thousands of times to annihilation. The day on which our ancestors cared for the sick and wounded, instead of abandoning them as all animals had previously done; on which the first seed was planted, the first arrow shot, brought nature face to face with the greatest of her revolutions. Only one in the future will be able to equal it; if man in remote times was able to free his body, now he requires the great revolution to free his mind. The races who go furthest in their intellectual development will be the ultimate survivors; they will be masters of the earth, destroying all others. The least wise in those days will probably be far superior to the most cultivated intellects of the present times. Each individual will find his happiness in the happiness of his fellows, and no one will try to exercise compulsion on his neighbour. No laws or penalties will exist, and voluntary associations will supply through the influence of reason the present power of authority. This will be in the future—far, very far off. But what do centuries matter in the life of humanity! They are like seconds in our existence. On the day when man shall be transformed into this superior being, with the full development of all his intellectual faculties, now so embryonic, this earth will no longer be the vale of tears spoken of by religion, but the paradise dreamed of by the poets."
In spite of the enthusiasm with which Gabriel spoke, his hearers did not appear to share these illusions. They were silent, and their attitude was one of coldness before the immense distance of that future to which their master confided all his hopes of universal prosperity. They wished for it at once, with the eagerness of a child who is shown a dainty which is afterwards put out of its reach. The sacrifices, the slow work for the future, struck no chord in their minds. From Gabriel's explanations they only drew the fact that they were unhappy, but that they had the same right to happiness and comfort as those privileged few whom they had formerly respected in their ignorance. As a certain portion of human felicity belonged to them they wished to possess it at once, without delay or resistance, with all the fervour of one claiming what belongs to him. Luna remarked in this silence a certain rebellion, like those ironical gestures with which his companions in Barcelona had received his illusions about the future and his anathemas against violence of action.
These ardent neophytes outdistanced their teacher; they listened to him with respect, but they were obliged to isolate themselves from him in order to digest his teachings in their own fashion. Don Martin was the only one who followed him in his visionary excursions into the future. The bell-ringer, the organ-blower, the shoemaker and the Tato now went up nightly to the bell-ringer's house, without summoning the master, and there they gave vent to their hatred of everything existing, under the forgotten old prints, yellow and wrinkled, which pictured the inglorious episodes of the Carlist war.
This nocturnal reunion was a continual complaint against social injustice. They thought themselves even more unfortunate when they took an exact review of their situation. The shoemaker recalled with tearful eyes the little child who had died of hunger, and spoke of the misery of his offspring, so numerous as to render his work useless. The organ-blower spoke of his miserable old age, the six reals daily during his life, without any hope of earning more. The Tato, in the fits of rage of a bullying coxcomb, proposed to behead all the canons in the choir some evening and then to set fire to the Cathedral. And the bell-ringer, gloomy and scowling, said aloud, following up the course of his thoughts:
"And below so much wealth that is of no use to anybody—amassed from pure pride—thieves! robbers!"
Gabriel returned to pass his days by Sagrario's side. His disciples hid themselves daily more carefully in their isolation in the tower. Don Martin had his mother ill, and could not leave the convent.
Silver Stick felt quite satisfied with Luna seeing him alone, believing that it was he who had alienated his disciples, cutting short in this way his dangerous conversations so as to restore order in the cloister. One day he addressed him smilingly with a patronising manner.
"You will be rewarded for your good conduct, Gabrielillo, much sooner than you expect. Did I not say I would look out for something for you in exchange for the help you gave me in showing the treasury? Well, now you have it. From next week two pesetas daily will fall into your purse like two suns. Are you equal to staying all night in the Cathedral? The older watchman, the one who was a civil guard, is tired of it, and is going home to his own village. It appears that since his dog died he has taken a dislike to the duties. The other watchman is very poorly and wants a companion. Will you undertake it? If it were winter I should not say anything about it, as you cough too much to spend the night down there; but in summer the Cathedral is the coolest place in Toledo. What lovely nights! And by the time bad weather comes on we will have found you some better place. You are trustworthy, though your head is rather light; but you come of an honoured and well-known family, which is what is wanted. Do you accept?"
Luna accepted, declaring his intention to Esteban, when the latter objected on account of his weak health. He would only undertake the watchman's duties during the summer; besides, two pesetas a day were even more than Wooden Staff earned; the income of the family would be doubled, and it would be a pity to lose such a good opportunity.
That evening Sagrario spoke to her uncle praising the energy which prompted him to undertake any sort of work so as not to be a charge on the family.
They were in the cloister leaning on the balustrade; below was the dark garden with its waving branches, above a summer sky veiled by the heat haze which dulled the brightness of the stars. They were alone in the four-sided gallery. The lighted windows of the Chapel-master's little room threw a square of red on the opposite roofs. They could hear the harmonium playing slowly and sadly, and when it stopped the shadow of the musician passed and repassed over the square of light with his nervous gestures, which, enlarged by the reflection, appeared the most grotesque contortions.
The nocturnal calm and darkness surrounded Gabriel and Sagrario with a gentle caress; that mysterious freshness was falling from above which seems to revive drooping spirits and magnify old remembrances. The Church seemed to them as an immense sleeping beast, in whose lap they had found peace and protection.
Gabriel spoke of his past, in order to convince the young woman that his work in the Cathedral would not be very arduous. He had suffered much; there was no bitterness that he had not tasted; he had endured hunger, terrible hunger, in his peregrinations through the world. He did not know which were the most painful, his martyrdom in the dungeons of the gloomy castle, or his days of despair in the streets of crowded cities, seeing food and gold through the glass windows of the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger. He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and melancholy companion.
Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.
"Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her. She was a strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of thought than by carnal attraction. I loved her when I first saw her. I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way, that I do not for certain know what it is."
He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his beliefs. Goethe had defined it as an "elective affinity," speaking as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct product. Two beings between whom no affinity existed could meet through false laws of life in perpetual contact, but they could not mix or merge into one another. This happened more often than not between the individuals of different sexes who peopled the earth; a passing sentimentality could exist, or carnal caprice, but seldom love. The poor invalid Lucy was his affinity; they met and they loved. In their pity for human miseries, their hatred of inequalities and injustice, their self-abnegation in the cause of the humble and unfortunate they were equal; they were not only united by their hearts but by their brains.
She was plain, with a soft and sad plainness that seemed to Luna the supreme ideal of beauty in the midst of that struggling world of unfortunates and victims. She was the image of a woman of the people reared in the workmen's slums of great cities, anaemic from the mephitic air of the den in which she was born and from bad and insufficient food, with a wretched body, all feminine graces paralysed in their development by the rough work done in her childhood. Her lips, that great ladies paint red, were violet; the only beauty of her face lay in her eyes, those windows of sorrow, made larger by the cold nights passed in the street from horror of the scenes she saw in her childhood; her father, drunken, with the brutal wish of a workman to forget, who, after imagining that his tavern was a paradise, would become infuriated with the poverty of his home and beat the whole family.
"She was like all you women of the lower orders, Sagrario. Your beauty only lasts an instant; in fact, it can only exist in the first flush of youth. A woman of the poor cannot be beautiful unless she gets out of her class. Daily labour makes her lose all her freshness and strength, and maternity in the midst of poverty absorbs even the marrow in her bones. When her daily work is ended and she returns home, she has to sweep and wash, and shrivel herself to a mummy before the smoky kitchen stove. I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by social injustice."
He recalled the unbending and deadly hatred with which that little woman spoke so quietly of the supreme vengeance of the fallen, of the revenge for long years of oppression. She showed herself more firmly rooted and fiercer in her illusions than Gabriel, and he would praise her daring as a propagandist, her perilous expeditions into the great towns, running the gauntlet of watchful police, carrying on her arm that old bonnet-box full of pamphlets that might have sent her to prison. She was the "miss" animated by evangelical propaganda, who travels over the globe distributing Bibles with a cold smile, fearless alike of the mockery of civilisation, or the brutality of savages; but what Lucy distributed were incitements to revolution; she did not seek out the happy but the despairing, in the factories and infected slums. The two endured hunger, finding themselves often separated by persecution and prison, but they met again, continuing their romantic career, till poverty and consumption ended her life.