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Now that the bishop of the diocese of Renada, to which this my beloved village of Valverde de Lucerna belongs, is said to be urging the process of beatification of our Don Manuel, or rather, Saint Manuel Bueno, who was parish priest here, I want to put in writing, by way of confession (although to what end only God, and not I can say), all that I know and remember about that matriarchal man who pervaded the most secret life of my soul, who was my true spiritual father, the father of my spirit, the spirit of myself, Angela Carballino.

The other, my flesh-and-blood temporal father, I scarcely knew, for he died when I was still very young. I know he came to Valverde de Lucerna from elsewhere—he was a stranger to the place—and that he settled here when he married my mother. He had brought a number of books with him: Don Quixote, some classical plays, some novels, a few histories, the Bertoldo, a veritable grab bag. These books (practically the only ones in the entire village), set me daydreaming, and I was devoured by my daydreams. My dear mother told me very little about the words or the deeds of my father. For the words and deeds of Don Manuel, whom she worshiped, of whom she was enamored, in common with all the rest of the village—in an exquisitely chaste manner, of course— had obliterated all memory of the words and deeds of her husband whom she fervently commended to God, as she said her daily rosary.

I remember Don Manuel as if it were yesterday, from the time when I was a girl of ten, just before I was taken to the convent school in the cathedral city of Renada. At that time Don Manuel, our saint, must have been about thirty-seven years old. He was tall, slim; he carried himself erect, his head the way our Buitre Peak carries its crest, and his eyes had all the blue depth of our lake. As he walked he commanded all eyes, and not only the eyes but the hearts of all; gazing round at us he seemed to look through our flesh as through glass and penetrate our hearts. We all loved him, especially the children. And the things he said to us! The villagers could scent the odor of sanctity, they were intoxicated with it.

It was at this time that my brother Lazaro, who was in America, from where he regularly sent us money with which we lived in decent comfort, had my mother send me to the convent school, so that my education might be completed outside the village; he suggested this move despite the fact that he had no special fondness for the nuns. “But, since, as far as I know,” he wrote us, “there are no lay schools there yet—especially not for young ladies—we will have to make use of the ones that do exist. The important thing is for Angelita to receive some polish and not be forced to continue among village girls.” And so I entered the convent school. At one point I even thought of becoming a teacher; but pedagogy soon palled.

*  *  *  *  *

At school I met girls from the city and I made friends with some of them. But I still kept in touch with people in our village, and I received frequent news from them and sometimes a visit. And the fame of the parish priest even reached the school, for he was beginning to be talked of in the cathedral city. And the nuns never tired of asking me about him.

Ever since I was a child I had been endowed, I don’t really know why, with a large degree of curiosity and uneasiness, due in part at least to that jumble of books which my father had collected, and at school these qualities were stimulated, especially in the course of a friendship I developed with a girl who grew excessively attached to me. At times she suggested that we enter the same convent together, swearing to an everlasting “sisterhood”—and even that we seal the oath in blood. At other times she talked to me, with half-closed eyes, of sweethearts and marriage adventures. Strangely enough, I have never heard anything of her since, nor of what became of her, despite the fact that whenever our Don Manuel was mentioned, or when my mother wrote me something about him in her letters—which happened in almost every letter—and I read it to her, the girl would cry out ecstatically: “What a lucky girl you are to be able to live near a saint like that, a living saint, of flesh and blood, and to be able to kiss his hand; when you go back to your village write to me a lot and tell me lots of things about him.”

I spent five years at school, five years which have now evanesced in memory like a dream at dawn, and when I was fifteen I returned to my own Valverde de Lucerna. By now everything there revolved around Don Manuel: Don Manuel, the lake, and the mountain. I arrived home anxious to know him, to place myself in his care, and hopeful that he would set me on my path in life.

It was rumored that he had entered the seminary to become a priest so that he might thus look after the children of a recently widowed sister and provide for them in place of their father; that in the seminary his keen mind and his talents had distinguished him and that he had subsequently turned down opportunities of a brilliant career in the Church because he wanted to remain exclusively a part of his Valverde de Lucerna, of his remote village which lay like a brooch between the lake and the mountain reflected in it.

How he loved his people! He spent his life salvaging wrecked marriages, forcing unruly children to submit to their parents, or reconciling parents to their children, and, above all, he consoled the embittered and weary in spirit and helped everyone to die well.

I recall, among other incidents, the occasion when the unfortunate daughter of old Aunt Rabona returned to our town. She had been living in the city and lost her virtue there; now she returned unmarried and abandoned, and she brought back a little son. Don Manuel did not rest until he had persuaded an old sweetheart, Perote by name, to marry the poor girl and, moreover, to legitimize the infant with his own name. Don Manuel told Perote:

“Come now, give this poor waif a father, for he hasn’t got one except in heaven.”

“But, Don Manuel, it’s not my fault . . . !”

“Who knows, my son, who knows . . . ! And in any case, it’s not a question of guilt.”

And today, poor old Perote, inspired on that occasion to saintliness by Don Manuel, and now a paralytic and invalid, has the support and consolation of his life in the son he accepted as his own when the boy was not his at all.

On Midsummer’s Night, the shortest night of the year, it was, and still is, a local custom here for all the old crones, and a lot of old men, who thought they were possessed or bewitched—they were, in fact, hysterical for the most part, and in some cases epileptics—to flock to the lake. Don Manuel undertook to fulfill the same function as the lake, to serve as a pool of healing, to treat his people and even, if possible, to cure them. And such was the effect of his presence, of his gaze, and above all of his voice—his miraculous voice!—and the infinitely sweet authority of his words, that he actually did achieve some remarkable cures. Whereupon his fame increased, drawing all the sick of the environs to our lake and our priest. And yet, once, when a mother came to ask for a miracle on behalf of her son, he answered her with a sad smile:

“Ah, but I don’t have my bishop’s permission to perform miracles.”

He was particularly interested in seeing that all the villagers kept themselves clean. If he chanced upon someone with a torn garment he would say: “Go and see the sacristan, and let him mend that tear.” The sacristan was a tailor. And when, on the first day of the year, everyone went to congratulate the priest on his saint’s day—his holy patron was Our Lord Jesus Himself—it was Don Manuel’s wish that everyone should appear in a new shirt, and those that had none received the present of a new one from Don Manuel himself.

He treated everyone with the greatest kindness; if he favored anyone, it was the most unfortunate, and especially those who rebelled. There was a congenital idiot in the village, the fool Blasillo, and it was toward him that Don Manuel chose to show the greatest love and concern; as a consequence he succeeded in miraculously teaching him things which had appeared beyond the idiot’s comprehension. The fact was that the embers of understanding feebly glowing in the idiot were kindled whenever, like a pitiable monkey, he imitated his Don Manuel.

The marvel of the man was his voice; a divine voice which brought one close to weeping. Whenever he officiated at Solemn High Mass and intoned the Preface, a tremor ran through the congregation and all who heard his voice were moved to the depths of their being. The sound of his chanting, overflowing the church, went on to float over the lake and settle at the foot of the mountain. And when on Good Friday he chanted, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” a profound shudder swept through the multitude, like the lash of the northeast wind across the waters of the lake. It was as if these people heard Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as if the voice sprang from the ancient crucifix, at the foot of which generations of mothers had offered up their sorrows. And it happened that on one occasion when his mother heard him, she was unable to contain herself, and cried out to him right in the church, “My son!” And the entire congregation was visibly affected, tears pouring down every cheek. It was as if the mother’s cry had issued from the half-open lips of the Mater Dolorosa—her heart transfixed by seven swords— which stood in one of the side chapels. Afterwards, the fool Blasillo went about piteously repeating, like an echo, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” with such effect that everyone who heard him was moved to tears, to the great satisfaction of the fool, who prided himself on this triumph of imitation.

The priest’s effect on people was such that no one ever dared to tell him a lie, and everyone confessed to him without need of a confessional. So true was this that one day, after a revolting crime had been committed in a neighboring village, the judge—a dull fellow who badly misunderstood Don Manuel—called on the priest and said:

“Let’s see if you, Don Manuel, can get this bandit to admit the truth.”

“So that you may punish him afterwards?” asked the saintly man. “No, Judge, no; I will not extract from any man a truth which could be the death of him. That is a matter between him and his God. . . . Human justice is none of my affair. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged,’ said Our Lord.”

“But the fact is, Father, that I, a judge . . .”

“I understand. You, Judge, must render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, while I shall render unto God that which is God’s.”

And, as Don Manuel departed, he gazed at the suspected criminal and said:

“Make sure, only, that God forgives you, for that is all that matters.”

*  *  *  *  *

Everyone in the village went to Mass, even if it were only to hear him and see him at the altar, where he appeared to be transfigured, his countenance lit from within. He introduced one holy practice into popular worship; it consisted in assembling the whole town inside the church, men and women, old and young, about a thousand souls; there we recited the Creed, in unison, so that it sounded like a single voice: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth . . .” and all the rest. It was not a chorus, but a single voice, all the voices blending into one forming a kind of mountain, whose peak, lost at times in the clouds, was Don Manuel. As we reached the section “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh and eternal life,” Don Manuel’s voice was submerged, drowned in the voice of the populace as in a lake. In truth, he was silent. And I could hear the bells of the city which is said hereabouts to be at the bottom of the lake—bells which are said also to be audible on Midsummer’s Night—the bells of the city which is submerged in the spiritual lake of our people. I was hearing the voice of our dead, resurrected in us by the communion of saints. Later, when I had learned the secret of our saint, I understood that it was as if a caravan crossing the desert lost its leader as they approached the goal of their trek, whereupon his people lifted him up on their shoulders to bring his lifeless body into the promised land.

When it came to dying themselves, most of the villagers refused to die unless they were holding onto Don Manuel’s hand, as if to an anchor chain.

In his sermons he never inveighed against unbelievers, Freemasons, liberals, or heretics. What for, when there were none in the village? Nor did it occur to him to speak out against the wickedness of the press. On the other hand, one of his most frequent themes was the sinfulness of gossip. As he himself forgave everything and everyone, he would not accept the existence of forked tongues.

“Envy,” he liked to repeat, “is nurtured by those who prefer to think they are envied, and most persecutions are the result of a persecution complex rather than of an impulse to persecute.”

“But Don Manuel, just listen to what that fellow was trying to tell me. . . .”

“We should concern ourselves less with what people are trying to tell us than with what they tell us without trying. . . .”

His life was active rather than contemplative, and he constantly fled from idleness, even from leisure. Whenever he heard it said that idleness was the mother of all vices, he added: “And also of the greatest vice of them all, which is to think idly.” Once I asked him what he meant and he answered: “Thinking idly is thinking as a substitute for doing, or thinking too much about what is already done instead of about what must be done. What’s done is done and over with, and one must go on to something else, for there is nothing worse than remorse without possible solution.” Action! Action! Even in those early days I had already begun to realize that Don Manuel fled from being left to think in solitude, and I sensed that some obsession haunted him.

And so it was that he was always busy, sometimes even busy looking for things to do. He wrote very little on his own, so that he scarcely left us anything in writing, not even notes; on the other hand, he acted as scribe for everyone else, especially composing letters for mothers to their absent children.

He also worked with his hands, pitching in to help with some of the village tasks. At threshing time he reported to the threshing floor to flail and winnow, meanwhile teaching and entertaining the workers by turn. Sometimes he took the place of a worker who had fallen sick. One bitter winter’s day he came upon a child half-dead with cold. The child’s father had sent him into the woods to bring back a calf that had strayed.

“Listen,” he said to the child, “you go home and get warm, and tell your father that I am bringing back the calf.” On the way back with the animal he ran into the father, who had come out to meet him, thoroughly ashamed of himself.

In winter he chopped wood for the poor. When a certain magnificent walnut tree died—”that matriarchal walnut,” he called it, a tree under whose shade he had played as a boy and whose nuts he had eaten for so many years—he asked for the trunk, carried it to his house and, after he had cut six planks from it, which he kept at the foot of his bed, he made firewood of the rest to warm the poor. He also was in the habit of making handballs for the boys and many toys for the younger children.

*  *  *  *  *

Often he used to accompany the doctor on his rounds, and stressed the importance of following the doctor’s orders. Most of all he was interested in maternity cases and the care of children; it was his opinion that the old wives’ sayings “from the cradle to heaven” and the other one about “little angels belong in heaven” were nothing short of blasphemy. The death of a child moved him deeply.

“A stillborn child, or one who dies soon after birth are, like suicides, the most terrible mystery to me,” I once heard him say. “Like a child crucified!”

And once, when a man had taken his own life and the father of the suicide, an outsider, asked Don Manuel if his son could be buried in consecrated ground, the priest answered:

“Most certainly, for at the last moment, in the very last throes, he must surely have repented. There is no doubt of it whatsoever in my mind.”

Often he would visit the local school too, to help the teacher, to teach alongside him—and not only the catechism. The simple truth was that he fled relentlessly from idleness and from solitude. He went so far in this desire of his to mingle with the villagers, especially the young people and the children, that he even attended the village dances. And more than once he played the drum to keep time for the boys and girls dancing; this kind of activity, which in another priest would have seemed like a grotesque mockery of his calling, in him somehow took on the appearance of a divine office. When the Angelus rang out, he would put down the drum and sticks, take off his hat (all the others doing the same) and pray: “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary: Hail Mary . . .” And afterwards: “Now let us rest until tomorrow.”

*  *  *  *  *

“The most important thing,” he would say, “is for the people to be happy; everyone must be happy just to be alive. To be satisfied with life is of first importance. No one should want to die until it is God’s will.”

“I want to die now,” a recently widowed woman once told him, I want to follow my husband. . . .”

“But why?” he asked. “Stay here and pray God for his soul.”

Once he commented at a wedding: “Ah, if I could only change all the water in our lake into wine, into a gentle little wine which, no matter how much of it one drank, would always make one joyful without making one drunk . . . or, if it made one drunk, would make one joyfully tipsy.”

One day a band of poor circus people came through the village. Their leader—who arrived with a gravely ill and pregnant wife and three children to help him —played the clown. While he was in the village square making all the children, and even some of the adults, laugh with glee, his wife suddenly fell desperately ill and had to leave; she went off accompanied by a look of anguish from the clown and a howl of laughter from the children. Don Manuel hurried after her, and a little later, in a corner of the inn’s stable, he helped her give up her soul in a state of grace. When the performance was over and the villagers and the clown learned of the tragedy, they came to the inn, and there the poor, bereaved clown, in a voice overcome with tears, said to Don Manuel, as he took his hand and kissed it: “They are quite right, Father, when they say you are a saint.” Don Manuel took the clown’s hand in his and replied in front of everyone:

“It is you who are the saint, good clown. I watched you at your work and understood that you do it not only to provide bread for your own children, but also to give joy to the children of others. And I tell you now that your wife, the mother of your children, whom I sent to God while you worked to give joy, is at rest in the Lord, and that you will join her there, and that the angels, whom you will make laugh with happiness in heaven, will reward you with their laughter.”

And everyone present wept, children and adults alike, as much from sorrow as from a mysterious joy in which all sorrow was drowned. Later, recalling that solemn hour, I came to realize that the imperturable happiness of Don Manuel was merely the temporal, earthly form of an infinite, eternal sadness which the priest concealed from the eyes and ears of the world with heroic saintliness.

*  *  *  *  *

His constant activity, his ceaseless intervention in the tasks and diversions of his flock, had the appearance of a flight from himself, a flight from solitude. He confirmed this suspicion: “I have a fear of solitude,” he would say. And still, from time to time he would go off by himself, along the shores of the lake, to the ruins of the abbey where the souls of pious Cistercians seem still to repose, although history has long since buried them in oblivion. There, the cell of the so-called Father-Captain can still be found, and it is said that the drops of blood spattered on the walls as he flagellated himself can still be seen. What thoughts occupied our Don Manuel as he walked there? I remember a conversation we held once when I asked him, as he was speaking of the abbey, why it had never occurred to him to enter a monastery, and he answered me:

“It is not at all because my sister is a widow and I have her children and herself to support—for God looks after the poor—but rather because I simply was not born to be a hermit, an anchorite; the solitude would crush my soul; and, as far as a monastery is concerned, my monastery is Valverde de Lucerna. I was not meant to live alone, or die alone. I was meant to live for my village, and die for it too. How should I save my soul if I were not to save the soul of my village as well?”

“But there have been saints who were hermits, solitaries . . . ,” I said.

“Yes, the Lord gave them the grace of solitude which He has denied me, and I must resign myself. I must not throw away my village to win my soul. God made me that way. I would not be able, alone, to carry the cross of birth . . . . ”

*  *  *  *  *

I trust that these recollections, which keep my faith alive, will portray our Don Manuel as he was when I, a young girl of almost sixteen, returned from the convent of Renada to our “monastery of Valverde de Lucerna,” to kneel once more at the feet of our “abbot.”

“Well, here is Simona’s daughter,” he said as soon as he saw me, “quite a young woman, and knowing French, and how to play the piano, and embroider, and heaven knows what else besides! Now you must get ready to give us a family. And your brother Lazaro, when is he coming back? Is he still in the New World?”

“Yes, Father, he is still in America.”

“The New World! And we in the Old. Well, then, when you write to him, tell him from me, on behalf of the parish priest, that I should like to know when he is returning from the New World to the Old, to bring us the latest from over there. And tell him that he will find the lake and the mountain as he left them.”

When I first went to him for confession, I became so confused that I could not enunciate a word. I recited the “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” in a stammer, almost sobbing. And he, observing this, said:

“Good heavens, my dear, what are you afraid of, or of whom are you afraid? Certainly you’re not trembling under the weight of your sins, nor in fear of God. No, you’re trembling because of me, isn’t that so?”

At this point I burst into tears.

“What have they been telling you about me? What fairy tales? Was it your mother, perhaps? Come, come, please be calm: you must imagine you are talking to your brother. . . .”

At this I plucked up courage and began to tell him of my anxieties, doubts, and sorrows.

“Bah! Where did you read all this, Miss Bluestocking? All this is literary nonsense. Don’t believe everything you read just yet, not even Saint Teresa. If you want to amuse yourself, read the Bertoldoi as your father before you did.”

I came away from my first confession to that holy man deeply consoled. The initial fear—simple fright more than respect—with which I had approached him, turned into a profound pity. I was at that time a very young woman, almost a girl still; and yet, I was beginning to be a woman, in my innermost being I felt the maternal instinct, and when I found myself in the confessional at the side of the saintly priest, I sensed a kind of unspoken confession on his part in the soft murmur of his voice. And I remembered how when he had chanted in the church the words of Jesus Christ: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” his own mother had cried out in the congregation: “My son!”; and I could hear the cry that had rent the silence of the temple. And I went to him again for confession—and to comfort him.

Another time in the confessional I told him of a doubt which assailed me, and he responded:

“As to that, you know what the catechism says. Don’t question me about it, for I am ignorant; in Holy Mother Church there are learned doctors of theology who will know how to answer you.”

“But you are the learned doctor here.”

“Me? A learned doctor? Not even in my dreams! I, my little theologian, am only a poor country priest. And those questions, . . . do you know who whispers them into your ear? Well . . . the Devil does!”

Then, making bold, I asked him point-blank:

“And suppose he were to whisper these questions to you?”

“Who? To me? The Devil? No, we don’t even know each other, my child, we haven’t even met.”

“But if he did whisper them? . . .”

“I wouldn’t pay any attention. And that’s enough of that; let’s get on, for there are some sick people, some really sick people, waiting for me.”

I went away thinking, I don’t know why, that our Don Manuel, so famous for curing the bedeviled, didn’t really believe in the Devil. As I started home, I ran into the fool Blasillo, who had probably been hovering around outside; as soon as he saw me, and by way of treating me to a display of his virtuosity, he began repeating—and in what a manner!—”My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I arrived home utterly saddened and locked myself in my room to cry, until finally my mother arrived.

“With all these confessions, Angelita, you will end up going off to a nunnery.”

“Don’t worry, Mother,” I answered her. “I have plenty to do here; the village is my convent.”

“Until you marry.”

“I don’t intend to,” I rejoined.

The next time I saw Don Manuel I asked him, looking him straight in the eye:

“Is there really a Hell, Don Manuel?”

And he, without altering his expression, answered:

“For you, my child, no.”

“For others, then?”

“Does it matter to you, if you are not to go there?”

“It matters to me for the others. Is there a Hell?”

“Believe in Heaven, the Heaven we can see. Look at it there”—and he pointed to the heavens above the mountain, and then down into the lake, to the reflection.

“But we are supposed to believe in Hell as well as in Heaven,” I said.

“Yes, that’s true. We must believe everything that our Holy Mother Church believes and teaches, our Holy Mother Church, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. And now, that’s enough of that!”

I thought I read a deep sadness in his eyes, eyes as blue as the waters of the lake.

*  *  *  *  *

Those years went by as if in a dream. Within me, a reflected image of Don Manuel was unconsciously taking form. He was an ordinary enough man in many ways, as everyday as the daily bread we asked for in our Paternoster. I helped him whenever I could with his tasks, visiting his sick, our sick, the girls at school, and helping, too, with the church linen and the vestments; I served in the role, as he said, of his deaconess. Once I was invited to the city for a few days by an old schoolfriend, but I had to hurry back home, for the city stifled me—something was missing, I was thirsty for a sight of the waters of the lake, hungry for a sight of the peaks of the mountain; and even more, I missed my Don Manuel, as if he were calling me, as if he were endangered by my being so far away, as if he were in need of me. I began to feel a kind of maternal affection for my spiritual father; I longed to help him bear the cross of birth.

My twenty-fourth birthday was approaching when my brother Lazaro came back from America with the small fortune he had saved up. He came back to Valverde de Lucerna with the intention of taking me and my mother to live in a city, perhaps even in Madrid. “In the country,” he said, “in these villages, a person becomes dull, brutalized, and spiritually impoverished.” And he added: “Civilization is the very opposite of everything countrified. The idiocy of country life! No, that’s not for us; I didn’t have you sent away to school so that afterwards you might go to waste here, among these ignorant peasants.”

I said nothing, though I was ready to oppose any idea of moving. But our mother, already past sixty, took a firm stand from the start: “Change pastures at my age?” she demurred at once. A little later she made it quite clear that she could not live away from her lake, her mountain, and above all, her Don Manuel.

“You are both of you like those cats that get attached to houses,” my brother kept saying.

When he realized the extent of the sway exercised over the entire village—especially over my mother and myself—by the saintly priest, my brother began to resent him. He saw in this situation an example of the obscurantist theocracy which, according to him, smothered Spain. And he began to spout the old anticlerical commonplaces, to which he added antireligious and “progressive” propaganda brought back from the New World.

“In this Spain of useless, easy-going men, the priests manipulate the women, and the women manipulate the men. Not to mention the idiocy of the country, and this feudal backwater!”

“Feudal,” to him, meant something frightful. “Feudal” and “medieval” were the epithets he employed to condemn something out of hand.

The absolute failure of his diatribes to move us and their lack of effect upon the village—where they were listened to with respectful indifference—disconcerted him no end. “The man does not exist who could move these clods.” But he soon began to understand— for he was an intelligent man, and therefore a good one—the kind of influence exercised over the village by Don Manuel, and he came to appreciate the effect of the priest’s work in the village.

“This priest is not like the rest of them,” he announced. “He is, in fact, a saint.”

“How do you know what the rest of them are like?” I asked him, and he replied: “I can imagine.”

Even so, he did not set foot inside the church nor did he miss an opportunity to parade his lack of belief—though he always exempted Don Manuel from his scornful accusations. In the village, an unconscious expectancy began to build up, the anticipation of a kind of duel between my brother Lazaro and Don Manuel—in short, it was expected that Don Manuel would convert my brother. No one doubted but that in the end the priest would bring him into the fold. On his side, Ldzaro was eager (he told me so himself, later) to go and hear Don Manuel, to see and hear him in the church, to get to know him and to talk with him, so that he might learn the secret of his spiritual sway over our souls. And he let himself be coaxed to this end, so that finally—”out of curiosity,” as he said— he went to hear the preacher.

“Now, this is something else again,” he told me as soon as he came back from hearing Don Manuel for the first time. “He’s not like the others; still, he doesn’t fool me, he’s too intelligent to believe everything he has to teach.”

“You mean you think he’s a hypocrite?”

“A hypocrite . . . no! But he has to live by his job.”

As for me, my brother was determined I should read the books he brought me, and others which he urged me to buy.

“So your brother Lazaro wants you to read,” Don Manuel declared. “Well, read, my child, read and make him happy. I know you will only read worthy books. Read, even if you only read novels; they are as good as histories which claim to be ‘true.’ You are better off reading than concerning yourself with village gossip and old wives’ tales. Above all, though, you will do well to read some devotional books which will bring you contentment in life, a quiet, gentle contentment, and peace.”

And he, did he enjoy such contentment?

*  *  *  *  *

It was about this time that our mother fell mortally sick and died. In her last days her one wish was that Don Manuel should convert Lazaro, whom she hoped to see again in heaven, in some little corner among the stars from where they could see the lake and the mountain of Valverde de Lucerna. She felt she was going there now, to see God.

“You are not going anywhere,” Don Manuel kept telling her; “you are staying right here. Your body will remain here, in this earth, and your soul also, in this house, watching and listening to your children though they will not see or hear you.”

“But, Father,” she said, “I am going to see God.”

“God, my daughter, is all around us, and you will see Him from here, right from here. And all of us see in Him, and He in all of us.”

“God bless you,” I whispered to him.

“The peace in which your mother dies will be her eternal life,” he told me.

And, turning to my brother Lazaro: “Her heaven is to go on seeing you, and it is at this moment that she must be saved. Tell her you will pray for her.”

“But . . .”

“But what? . . . Tell her you will pray for her, to whom you owe your life. And I know that once you promise her, you will pray, and I know that once you pray . . .”

My brother, with tears in his eyes, went up to our dying mother and gave her his solemn promise to pray for her.

“And I, in heaven will pray for you, for all of you,” my mother replied. And then, kissing the crucifix and fixing her eyes on Don Manuel, she gave up her soul to God.

“Into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” prayed the priest.

*  *  *  *  *

My brother and I stayed on in the house alone. What had happened at the time of my mother’s death had established a bond between Lazaro and Don Manuel. The latter seemed even to neglect some of his charges, his patients, and his other needy to look after my brother. In the afternoons, they would go for a walk together, beside the lake or toward the ivy-covered ruins of the old Cistercian abbey.

“He is an extraordinary man,” Lazaro told me. “You know the story they tell of how there is a city at the bottom of the lake, submerged beneath the water, and that on Midsummer’s Night at midnight the sound of its church bells can be heard. . . .”

“Yes, a city feudal and medieval’ . . .”

“And I believe,” he went on, “that at the bottom of Don Manuel’s soul there is a city, submerged and drowned, and that sometimes the sound of its bells can be heard . . .”

“Yes . . . And this city submerged in Don Manuel’s soul, and perhaps—why not?—in yours as well, is certainly the cemetery of the souls of our ancestors, the ancestors of our Valverde de Lucerna . . . ‘feudal and medieval’!”

*  *  *  *  *

Eventually my brother began going to Mass. He went regularly to hear Don Manuel. When it became known that he was prepared to comply with his annual duty of receiving Communion, that he would receive Communion when the others did, an inner joy ran through the town, which felt that by this act he was restored to his people. The rejoicing was so simple and honest, that Lazaro never did feel that he had been . . .”Vanquished” or “overcome.”

The day of his Communion arrived: of Communion before and with the entire village. When my brother’s turn came, I saw Don Manuel—white as the January snow on the mountain, and moving like the surface of the lake when it is stirred by the northeast wind— come up to him with the holy wafer in his hand, trembling violently as he reached out to Lazaro’s mouth; at that moment the priest shook so that the wafer dropped to the ground. My brother himself recovered it and placed it in his mouth. The people saw the tears on Don Manuel’s cheeks, and everyone wept, saying: “How he loves him!” And then, because it was dawn, a cock crowed.

On returning home I shut myself in with my brother; alone with him I put my arms around his neck and kissed him.

“Lazaro, Lazaro, what joy you have given us all today; the entire village, the living and the dead, especially our mother. Did you see how Don Manuel wept for joy? What joy you have given us all!”

“That’s why I did it,” he answered me.

“Is that why? Just to give us pleasure? Surely you did it for your own sake, because you were converted.” And then Lazaro, my brother, grew as pale and tremulous as Don Manuel when he was giving Communion, and bade me sit down, in the chair where our mother used to sit. He took a deep breath, and, in the intimate tone of a family confession, he told me:

“Angelita, it is time for me to tell you the truth, the absolute truth, and I shall tell it, because I must, because I cannot and ought not to conceal it from you, and because sooner or later, you are bound to find it out anyway, if only halfway—which would be worse.”

Thereupon, serenely and tranquilly, in a subdued voice, he recounted a tale that cast me into a lake of sorrow. He told me how Don Manuel had begged him, particularly during the walks to the ruins of the old Cistercian abbey, to set a good example, to avoid scandalizing the townspeople, to take part in the religious life of the community, to feign belief even if he did not feel any, to conceal his own ideas—all this without attempting in any way to catechize him, to instruct him in religion, or to effect a true conversion.

“But is it possible?” I asked in consternation.

“Very possible and absolutely true. When I said to him: ‘Is it really you, the priest, who suggests that I pretend?’ he replied, hesitatingly: ‘Pretend? Not at all! It would not be pretending. “Dip your fingers in holy water, and you will end by believing,” as someone said.’ And I, gazing into his eyes, asked him: ‘And you, by celebrating the Mass, have you ended up by believing?’ He looked away and stared out at the lake, until his eyes filled with tears. And it was in this way that I came to understand his secret.”

“Lazaro!” I moaned.

At that moment the fool BIasiIlo came along our street, crying out his: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” And Lazaro shuddered, as if he had heard the voice of Don Manuel, or even that of Christ.

“It was then,” my brother at length continued, “that I really understood his motives and his saintliness; for a saint he is, Sister, a true saint. In trying to convert me to his holy cause—for it is a holy cause, a most holy cause—he was not attempting to score a triumph, but rather was doing it to protect the peace, the happiness, the illusions, perhaps, of his flock. I understood that if he thus deceives them—if it is deceit—it is not for his own advantage. I submitted to his logic —and that was my conversion. And I shall never forget the day on which I said to him: ‘But, Don Manuel, the truth, the truth, above all!’; and he, all a-tremble, whispered in my ear—though we were all alone in the middle of the countryside—’The truth? The truth, Lazaro, is perhaps something so unbearable, so terrible, something so deadly, that simple people could not live with it!’

” ‘And why do you allow me a glimpse of it now, here, as if we were in the confessional?’ I asked. And he said: ‘Because if I did not, I would be so tormented by it, so tormented that I would finally shout it in the middle of the Plaza, which I must never, never, never do. . . . I am put here to give life to the souls of my charges, to make them happy, to make them dream they are immortal—and not to destroy them. The important thing is that they live undisturbed, in concord with one another—and with the truth, with my truth, they could not live at all. Let them live. That is what the Church does, it lets them live. As for true religion, all religions are true insofar as they give spiritual life to the people who profess them, insofar as they console them for having been born only to die. And for each race the truest religion is their own, the religion that made them. . . . And mine? Mine consists in consoling myself by consoling others, even though the consolation I give them is not ever mine.’ I shall never forget his words.”

“But then this Communion of yours has been a sacrilege,” I dared interrupt, regretting my words as soon as I said them.

“Sacrilege? What about the priest who gave it to me? And his Masses?”

“What martyrdom!” I exclaimed.

“And now,” said my brother, “there is one more person to console the people.”

“To deceive them, you mean?” I said.

“Not at all,” he replied, “but rather to confirm them in their faith.”

“And they, the people, do you think they really believe?”

“As to that, I know nothing! . . . They probably believe without trying, from force of habit, tradition. The important thing is not to stir them up. To let them live on the thin diet of their emotions rather than acquiring the torments of luxury. Blessed are the poor in spirit!”

“So that is what you have learned from Don Manuel. . . . And tell me, do you feel you have carried out your promise to our mother on her deathbed, when you promised to pray for her?”

“Do you think I could fail her? What do you take me for, Sister? Do you think I would go back on my word, my solemn promise made at the hour of death to a mother?”

“I don’t know. . . . You might have wanted to deceive her so she could die in peace.”

“The fact is, though, that if I had not lived up to my promise, I would be totally miserable.”

“And . . .”

“I have carried out my promise and I have never neglected for a single day to pray for her.”

“Only for her?”

“Well, for whom else?”

“For yourself! And now, for Don Manuel.”

We parted and each went to his room, I to weep through the night, praying for the conversion of my brother and of Don Manuel. And Lazaro, to what purpose, I know not.