B0040702LQ EBOK (44 page)

I - Santiago in Galicia has long been one of the world's
shrines, and there people still wait and watch intently for a
miracle ...

II - One evening, my sister Antonia led me by the hand to the
cathedral. Antonia was much older than I. She was tall and
pale with dark eyes and a rather sad smile. She died when I
was still a child. But how well I remember her voice and her
smile and the ice of her hand when she used to take me to the
cathedral in the evening! ... Above all, I remember her eyes
and the luminous, tragic flame that burned in them when she
looked at a certain student walking in the atrium, wrapped in
a blue cloak. I was frightened of him. He was tall and slim and
had the face of a dead man and the eyes of a tiger, terrible eyes
set beneath hard, slender brows. His resemblance to the dead
was further increased by the way his knees creaked as he
walked. My mother hated him and, in order not to see him,
she kept the windows of our house that looked out on the
Atrio de las Platerias firmly closed. On that evening, as on
every evening, he was walking along, wrapped in his blue
cloak. He caught up with us at the door to the cathedral and,
drawing a skeletal hand from beneath his cloak, dipped it in
the holy water and held it out to my sister, who was trembling.
Antonia looked at him pleadingly, and he murmured, smiling:

`I'm desperate!'

III - We went into one of the chapels, where a few old
ladies were following the Stations of the Cross. It is a large,
dark chapel with an echoing wooden floor beneath the
Romanesque vault. When I was a child, the chapel seemed to
me imbued with a rural peace. It gave me the same cool pleasure as the shade of an old chestnut tree, as the vines that
grow over certain doorways, or as a hermit's cave in the
mountains. In the evenings, there was always a circle of old
ladies praying. Their voices, fused into a fervent murmur,
bloomed beneath the vaulted ceiling and seemed to illumine
like the setting sun the roses in the stained glass windows. You
could hear a glorious, nasal flutter of prayers, the dull sound of
dragging feet, and a small silver bell rung by the altar boy,
while he raised his lit candle above the shoulder of the priest
spelling out the Passion in his breviary. Oh, when will this
soul of mine, so old and so weary, immerse itself once more in
the soothing shadows of the Corticela Chapel?

IV - It was drizzling and night had fallen when we crossed the
atrium of the cathedral to go home. In the large, dark vestibule, my sister seemed afraid, for she ran up the stairs, still
without letting go of my hand. When we got home, we saw
my mother crossing the anteroom and disappearing through a
door. Without knowing why, I was filled with mingled curiosity and fear; I looked up at my sister and she, without a
word, stooped and kissed me. Despite my great ignorance of
life, I guessed my sister Antonia's secret. I felt it weigh on me
like a mortal sin as I crossed the anteroom which was full of
smoke from an oil lamp with a broken jet. The flame in the
lamp formed two horns and reminded me of the Devil. At
night, lying in the dark, that resemblance grew inside me and
would not let me sleep and it returned to trouble me on many
other nights.

V - A few rainy evenings followed. The student strolled in the
atrium of the cathedral in the occasional dry intervals, but my
sister did not go to the chapel to pray. Sometimes, while I was
doing my homework in the living room filled with the perfume of faded roses, I would open the window to see him. He
was always alone, always with the same tense smile on his face,
and, as night fell, such was his deathly appearance that it struck
fear into the heart. I would withdraw from the window, trembling, but I could still see him before me and was unable to concentrate on my studies. From the large, closed, cavernous
room, I could hear him walking about, his shinbones and
kneecaps creaking ... The cat miaowed outside the door and
seemed to me to be saying the student's name:

`Maximo Bretal!'

VI - Bretal is a hamlet in the mountains, near Santiago. The
old men there wear pointed caps and serge smocks, the old
women do their spinning in the stables because it's warmer
there than in the houses, and the sacristan runs a school in the
atrium of the church. With him keeping time with a baton,
the children learn to speak the ornate language of mayors and
scribes, chanting the charter of rights of an ancient family
long since ruined. Maximo Bretal belonged to that family. He
came to Santiago to study Theology and, to begin with, an old
lady from the village who sold honey would come every
week to bring him maize bread and bacon. He lived with
some other poor theology students in an inn where one paid
only for the bed. Maximo Bretal had already taken minor
orders when he came to our house as my Latin grammar
tutor. The priest at Bretal had commended this action to my
mother as a charitable deed. She was visited by an old lady
wearing a lace cap who came to thank her and brought her a
basket of pippins as a gift. Later, it was said that the spell that
bewitched my sister Antonia must have been contained in
one of those apples.

VII - Our mother was very devout and did not believe in
omens or witchcraft, but occasionally she resorted to them as
explanations for the passion consuming her daughter. By then,
Antonia was beginning to acquire the same deathly air as the
student from Bretal. I remember seeing her working on her
embroidery at the far end of the living room, blurred, as if I
were seeing her in the depths of a mirror, her slow movements
apparently responding to the rhythm of another life, her voice
dull, her smile somehow removed from us. She looked very
white and sad, adrift in a mysterious twilight, so pale that she
seemed to have a ring around her, like the moon. And my mother, drawing aside the curtain at the door, would look at
her and then noiselessly depart.

VIII - The sunny evenings returned with their tenuous golds,
and my sister, as before, took me to pray with the old ladies in
the Corticela Chapel. I would tremble, fearful that the student
would reappear and hold out to us his ghostly hand dripping
with holy water. The fear made me look up at my sister, and I
would notice that her lips were quivering. As we approached,
Maximo Bretal, who was in the atrium every evening, would
keep disappearing and then, as we crossed the cathedral nave,
he would reappear in the shadow of the arches. We would go
into the chapel and he would kneel on the steps leading down
to it and kiss the stones on which my sister Antonia had
placed her feet. He would remain kneeling there, his body like
a tomb, his cloak over his shoulders and his hands clasped.
One evening, when we were leaving, I saw his shadowy arm
reach out in front of me and pinch between his fingers one
corner of my sister's skirt:

`I'm desperate! You must listen me, you must know how I
suffer ... Don't you even want to look at me now? ...'

White as a flower, Antonia murmured:

`Leave me alone, Don Maximo!'

`No, I won't. You are mine, your soul is mine ... It isn't
your body I want, for death will come for that sooner or later.
Look at me, let your eyes confess themselves to mine. Look at
me!'

And the waxen hand tugged so hard at my sister's skirt that
it tore it. But her innocent eyes confessed themselves to those
other pale and terrible eyes. That night in the darkness, I wept
to think of it as if my sister had actually fled the house.

IX - I continued studying my Latin homework in the room
filled with the perfume of faded roses. On some evenings, my
mother would enter like a shadow and silently sink down on
the great crimson damask sofa. I would hear her sighing and
catch the murmur of her voice as she said the rosary. My
mother was very beautiful, white-skinned and blonde, and always wore silk; she had two fingers missing on one hand and
on that hand she always wore a black glove; the other was like
a camellia and covered in rings. This was always the hand we
kissed and the hand she used when she gave us a caress. The
other hand, the one in the black glove, she would conceal in
her lace handkerchief, and only when she crossed herself did
she reveal it entirely, so sad and so sombre against the paleness
of her brow, against the rose of her mouth, against her
Madonna-like breast. My mother was praying as she sat on the
sofa, and I, to take advantage of the ray of light coming in
through the half-open balcony windows, was studying my
Latin grammar at the other end, my book open on one of
those pedestal tables used for playing draughts on. One could
barely see in that large, closed, cavernous room set aside for
best. Occasionally, my mother, emerging from her prayers,
would tell me to open the balcony windows wider. I would
obey in silence and make the most of that opportunity to
look out onto the atrium, where the student would still be
pacing up and down, amongst the twilight mists. Suddenly,
that evening, while I was watching him, he disappeared. I
went back to chanting my Latin verbs and then someone
knocked at the door of the room. It was a Franciscan friar
recently returned from the Holy Land.

X - Father Bernardo had once been my mother's confessor
and, returning from his pilgrimage, had thought to bring her a
rosary made of olive stones from the Mount of Olives. He was
an old man, small, but with a large, bald head; he reminded me
of the Romanesque saints round the cathedral portico. That
evening was the second time he had visited our house since he
had returned to his monastery in Santiago. When I saw him
come in, I left my grammar and ran to kiss his hand. I
remained kneeling, looking up at him, awaiting his blessing,
and it seemed to me that he was making the sign of the horns
with his fingers. I closed my eyes, terrified by that work of the
Devil! With a shudder, I realised that it was a trap he had laid,
like the ones that figured in the stories of saints that I was
beginning to read out loud to my mother and to Antonia. It was a trap to lead me into sin, similar to one described in the
life of St Anthony of Padua. Father Bernardo, who, according
to my grandmother, was a living saint, was too busy greeting
the older member of his flock, my mother, and forgot to utter
his blessing over my sad, shorn head with its ears wideset as if
ready to take wing. The head of a child on whom weigh the
sombre chains of childhood: the day's Latin and the fear of the
dead and of the night. The friar spoke in a low voice to my
mother and she raised her gloved hand:

`Leave the room, child!'

XI - Basilisa la Galinda, an old woman who had been my
mother's nursemaid, was crouching behind the door. I saw her
and she grabbed my clothes and put her wrinkled palm over
my mouth:

`Don't call out, my dear.'

I stared at her because I found in her face a strange resemblance to the cathedral gargoyles. After a moment, she gave
me a gentle shove:

`Off you go, child.'

I shrugged my shoulders to free myself from her hand,
which had soot-black wrinkles on it, and I stayed by her side.
I heard the voice of the friar say:

`It's a question of saving a soul ...'

Basilisa gave me another shove.

`Go away, you're not supposed to hear. .
.'

Hunched by the door, she pressed her eye to the crack.
I crouched down near her. Now all she said was:

`Just forget everything you hear.'

I started laughing. She really did look like a gargoyle. I
wasn't sure whether she looked like a dog or a cat or a wolf.
But she bore a strange resemblance to those stone figures
reclining or leaning out above the atrium on the cathedral
cornice.

XII - You could hear them talking in the room, though the
friar's voice dominated:

`This morning, a young man who had been tempted by the Devil came to our monastery. He told me that he had had the
misfortune to fall in love and that, in despair, he had sought
access to infernal knowledge ... At midnight, he had invoked
the power of the Devil. The evil angel appeared to him on a
vast ash-strewn beach full of great rushing winds that made his
bat's wings tremble beneath the stars.'

I heard my mother utter a sigh:

`Dear God!'

The friar went on:

`Satan told him that if he signed a pact he would bring him
good fortune in love. The young man hesitated, because he
has received the baptismal water that made him a Christian,
and fended the Devil off with a cross. This morning, as dawn
was breaking, he arrived at our monastery and in the secrecy
of the confessional he made his confession to me. I told him
that he must renounce his diabolical practices and he refused.
My advice was not enough to persuade him. His is a soul on
its way to damnation! ...'

Again my mother moaned:

`I'd rather my daughter were dead!'

And in a voice full of a terrifying mystery, the friar went on: