From that day on I was nervous about finding myself alone with Don Manuel, whom I continued to help in his pious works. And he seemed to sense my inner state and to guess at its cause. When at last I approached him in the confessional’s penitential tribunal (who was the judge, and who the offender?) the two of us, he and I, bowed our heads in silence and began to weep. It was Don Manuel who finally broke the silence, with a voice that seemed to issue from a tomb:

“Angelita, you have the same faith you had when you were ten, don’t you? You believe, don’t you?”

“Yes, I believe, Father.”

“Then go on believing. And if doubts come to torment you, suppress them utterly, even to yourself. The main thing is to live. . . .”

I summoned up my courage, and dared to ask, trembling:

“But, Father, do you believe?”

For a brief moment he hesitated, and then, taking hold of himself, he said: “I believe!”

“In what, Father, in what? Do you believe in the life hereafter? Do you believe that when we die, we do not die altogether? Do you believe that we will see each other again, that we will love each other in the next world? Do you believe in the next life?”

The poor saint was sobbing.

“My child, leave off, leave off!”

Now, as I write this memoir, I ask myself: Why did he not deceive me? Why did he not deceive me as he deceived the others? Why did he torture himself? Why could he not deceive himself, or why could he not deceive me? And I prefer to think that he was tormented because he could not deceive himself into deceiving me.

“And now,” he said, “pray for me, for your brother, and for yourself—for all of us. We must go on living. And giving life.”

And, after a pause:

“Angelita, why don’t you marry?”

“You know why.”

“No, no; you must marry. Lazaro and I will find you a suitor. For it would be good for you to marry, and rid yourself of these obsessions.”

“Obsessions, Don Manuel?”

“I know what I am saying. You should not torment yourself for the sake of others, for each of us has more than enough to do answering for himself.”

“That it should be you, Don Manuel, saying this! That you should advise me to marry and answer for myself alone and not suffer over others! That it should be you!”

“Yes, you are right, Angelita. I am no longer sure of what I am saying since I began to confess to you. Only, one must go on living. Yes! One must live!”

And when I rose to leave the church, he asked me:
`
“Now, Angelita, in the name of the people, do you absolve me?”

I felt pierced by a mysterious and priestly prompting and said:

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I absolve you, Father.”

We left the church, and as I went out I felt the quickening of maternal feelings within me.

*  *  *  *  *

My brother, now totally devoted to the work of Don Manuel, had become his closest and most zealous collaborator and companion. They were bound together, moreover, by their common secret. Lazaro accompanied the priest on his visits to the sick, and to schools, and he placed his fortune at the disposition of the saintly man. And he nearly learned to help celebrate Mass. All the while he was sounding deeper the unfathomable soul of the priest.

“What an incredible man!” he exclaimed to me once. “Yesterday, as we were walking along beside the lake he said: ‘There lies my greatest temptation.’ When I interrogated him with my eyes, he went on: ‘My poor father, who was close to ninety when he died, was tormented all his life, as he himself confessed to me, by a temptation to commit suicide, by an instinct toward self-destruction, which had come to him from a time before memory—from birth, from his nation, as he said—and he was forced to fight against it always. And this struggle grew to be his life. So as not to succumb to this temptation he was forced to take precautions, to guard his life. He told me of terrible episodes. His urge was a form of madness—and I have inherited it. How that water beckons me with its deep quiet! . . . an apparent serenity reflecting the sky like a mirror—and beneath it the hidden current! My life, Lazaro, is a kind of continual suicide, or a struggle against suicide, which is the same thing. . . . Just so long as our people go on living!’ And then he added: ‘Here the river eddies to form a lake, so that later, flowing down the plateau, it may form cascades, waterfalls, and torrents, hurling itself through gorges and chasms. Thus life eddies in the village; and the temptation to commit suicide is greater beside the still waters which at night reflect the stars, than it is beside the crashing falls which drive one back in fear. Listen, Lazaro, I have helped poor villagers to die well, ignorant, illiterate villagers who had scarcely ever been out of their village, and I have learned from their own lips, or sensed it when they were silent, the real cause of their sickness unto death, and there at their deathbed I have been able to see into the black abyss of their life-weariness. A weariness a thousand times worse than hunger! For our part, Lazaro, let us go on with our kind of suicide working for the people, and let them dream their lives as the lake dreams the heavens.’

“Another time,” said my brother, “as we were coming back, we caught sight of a country girl, a goatherd, standing tall, on the crest of the mountain slope overlooking the lake and she was singing in a voice fresher than the waters. Don Manuel stopped me, and pointing to her said: ‘Look, it’s as though time had stopped, as though this country girl had always been there just as she is, singing the way she is, and it’s as though she would always be there, as she was before my consciousness began, as she will be when it is past. That girl is a part of nature—not of history—along with the rocks, the clouds, the trees, and the water.’ He has such a subtle feeling for nature, he infuses it with feeling! I shall never forget the day when snow was falling and he asked me: ‘Have you ever seen a greater mystery, Lazaro, than the snow falling, and dying, in the lake, while a headdress is laid upon the mountain?’ ”

*  *  *  *  *

Don Manuel had to moderate and temper my brother’s zeal and his neophyte’s rawness. As soon as he heard that Lazaro was going about inveighing against some of the popular superstitions he told him firmly:

“Leave them alone! It’s difficult enough making them understand where orthodox belief leaves off and where superstition begins. And it’s even harder for us. Leave them alone, then, as long as they get some comfort. . . . It’s better for them to believe everything, even things that contradict one another, than to believe nothing. The idea that someone who believes too much ends up not believing anything is a Protestant notion. Let us not protest! Protestation destroys contentment and peace.”

My brother told me, too, about one moonlit night when they were returning to the village along the lake, whose surface was being stirred by a mountain breeze, so that the moonbeams topped the white-crested waves, and Don Manuel turned to him and said:

“Look, the water is reciting the litany and saying: ianua caeli, ora pro nobis; gate of heaven, pray for us.”

And two tears fell from his lashes to the grass, where the light of the full moon shone upon them like dew.

And time sped by, and my brother and I began to notice that Don Manuel’s spirits were failing, that he could no longer control completely the deep-rooted sadness which consumed him; perhaps some treacherous illness was undermining his body and soul. In an effort to arouse his interest, Lazaro spoke to him of the good effect the organization of something like a Catholic agrarian syndicate in the Church would have. “A syndicate?” Don Manuel replied sadly. “A syndicate? And what is that? The Church is the only syndicate I know of. And you have certainly heard ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Our kingdom, Lazaro, is not of this world. . . .”

“And of the other?”

Don Manuel bowed his head:

“The other is here. Two kingdoms exist in this world. Or rather, the other world. . . . Ah, I don’t really know what I am saying. But as for the syndicate, that’s a carry-over from your radical days. No, Lazaro, no; religion does not exist to resolve the economic or political conflicts of this world, which God handed over to men for their disputes. Let men think and act as they will, let them console themselves for having been born, let them live as happily as possible in the illusion that all this has a purpose. I don’t propose to advise the poor to submit to the rich, n?r to suggest to the rich that they submit to the poor; but rather to preach resignation in everyone, and charity toward everyone. For even the rich man must resign himself—to his riches, and to life; and the poor man must show charity—even to the rich. The Social Question? Ignore it, for it is none of our business. So, a new society is on the way, in which there will be neither rich nor poor, in which wealth will be justly divided, in which everything will belong to everyone—and so, what then? Won’t this general well-being and comfort lead to even greater tedium and weariness of life? I know well enough that one of those leaders of what they call the Social Revolution said that religion is the opium of the people. Opium . . . Opium . . . Yes, opium it is. We should give them opium, and help them sleep, and dream. I, myself, with my mad activity am giving myself opium. And still I don’t manage to sleep well, let alone dream well. . . . What a fearful nightmare! . . . I, too, can say, with the Divine Master: ‘My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.’ No, Lazaro, no; no syndicates for us. If they organize them, well and good— they would be distracting themselves in that way. Let them play at syndicates, if that makes them happy.”

*  *  *  *  *

The entire village began to realize that Don Manuel’s spirit was weakening, that his strength was waning. His very voice—that miracle of a voice—acquired a kind of tremor. Tears came into his eyes at the slightest provocation—or without provocation. Whenever he spoke to people about the next world, about the next life, he was forced to pause at frequent intervals, and he would close his eyes. “It is a vision,” people would say, “he has a vision of what lies ahead.” At such moments the fool Blasillo was the first to burst into tears. He wept copiously these days, crying now more than he laughed, and even his laughter had the sound of tears.

The last Easter Week which Don Manuel was to celebrate among us, in this world, in this village of ours, arrived, and all the village sensed that the tragedy was coming to an end. And how those words struck home when for the last time Don Manuel cried out before us: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” And when he repeated the words of the Lord to the Good Thief—”all thieves are good,” Don Manuel used to tell us—: “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” And then, the last general Communion which our saint was to give! When he came to my brother to give him the Host—his hand steady this time—just after the liturgical “. . . in vitam aeternam,” he bent down and whispered to him: “There is no other life but this, no life more eternal . . . let them dream it eternal . . . let it be eternal for a few years. . . .” And when he came to me, he said: “Pray, my child, pray for us all.” And then, something so extraordinary happened that I carry it now in my heart as the greatest of mysteries: he leant over and said, in a voice which seemed to belong to the other world: “. . . and pray, too, for our Lord Jesus Christ.” I stood up weakly like a sleepwalker. Everything around me seemed dreamlike. And I thought: “Am I to pray, too, for the lake and the mountain?” And next: “Am I bedeviled, then?” Home at last, I took up the crucifix my mother had held in her hands when she had given up her soul to God, and, gazing at it through my tears and recalling the “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” of our two Christs, the one of this earth and the other of this village, I prayed: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and then, “And lead us not into temptation. Amen.”

After this I turned to the statue of the Mater Dolorosa—her heart transfixed by seven swords—which had been my poor mother’s most sorrowful comfort, and I prayed again: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” I had scarcely finished the prayer, when I asked myself: “Sinners? Us, sinners? And what is our sin, what is it?” And all day I brooded over the question.

The next day I went to see Don Manuel—now in the full sunset of his magnificent religiosity—and I said to him:

“Do you remember, my Father, years ago when I asked you a certain question you answered: That is a question you must not ask me; for I am ignorant; there are learned doctors of the Holy Mother Church who will know how to answer you’?”

“Do I remember? . . . Of course, I do. And I remember I told you those were questions put to you by the Devil.”

“Well, then, Father, I have come again, bedeviled, to ask you another question put to me by my Guardian Devil.”

“Ask it.”

“Yesterday, when you gave me Communion, you asked me to pray for all of us, and even for . . .”

“That’s enough! . . . Go on.”

“I arrived home and began to pray; when I came to the part ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,’ a voice inside me asked: ‘Sinners? Us, sinners? And what is our sin?’ What is our sin, Father?”

“Our sin?” he replied. “A great doctor of the Spanish Catholic Apostolic Church has already explained it; the great doctor of Life Is a Dream has written ‘The greatest sin of man is to have been born.’ That, my child, is our sin: to have been born.”

“Can it be atoned, Father?”

“Go away and pray again. Pray once more for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. . . . Yes, at length the dream is atoned . . . at length life is atoned . . . at length the cross of birth is expiated and atoned, and the dogma comes to an end. . . . And as Calderon said, to have done good, to have feigned good, even in dreams, is something which is not lost.”

*  *  *  *  *

The hour of his death arrived at last. The entire village saw it come. And he made it his finest lesson. For he did not want to die alone or at rest. He died preaching to his people in the church. But first, before being carried to the church—his paralysis made it impossible for him to move—he summoned Lazaro and me to his bedside. Alone there, the three of us together, he said:

“Listen to me: watch over my poor flock; find some comfort for them in living, and let them believe what I could not. And Lazaro, when your hour comes, die as I die, as Angela will die, in the arms of the Holy Mother Church, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman; that is to say, the Holy Mother Church of Valverde de Lucerna. And now farewell; until we never meet again, for this dream of life is coming to an end. . . .”

“Father, Father,” I cried out.

“Do not grieve, Angela, only go on praying for all sinners, for all who have been born. Let them dream, let them dream. . . . Oh, how I long to sleep, to sleep, to sleep without end, to sleep for all eternity, and never dream! Forgetting this dream! . . . When they bury me, let it be in a box made from the six planks I cut from the old walnut tree—poor old tree!—in whose shade I played as a child, when I began the dream. . . . In those days, I really did believe in life everlasting. That is to say, it seems to me now that I believed. For a child, to believe is the same as to dream. And for a people too . . . You’Il find those six planks I cut at the foot of the bed.”

He was seized by a sudden fit of choking, and then, feeling better, he went on:

“You will recall that when we prayed together, animated by a common sentiment, a community of spirit, and we came to the final verse of the Creed, you will remember that I would fall silent. . . . When the Israelites were coming to the end of their wandering in the desert, the Lord told Aaron and Moses that because they had not believed in Him they would not set foot in the Promised Land with their people; and he bade them climb the heights of Mount Hor, where Moses ordered Aaron to be stripped of his garments, so that Aaron died there, and then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, looking into Jericho, and the Lord showed him all of the land promised to His people, but He said to him: ‘Thou shalt not go over thither.’ And there Moses died, and no one knew his grave. And he left Joshua to be chief in his place. You, Lazaro, must be my Joshua, and if you can make the sun stand still, make it stop, and never mind progress. Like Moses, I have seen the face of God—our supreme dream—face to face, and as you already know, and as the Scriptures say, he who sees God’s face, he who sees the eyes of the dream, the eyes with which He looks at us, will die inexorably and forever. And therefore, do not let our people, so long as they live, look into the face of God. Once dead, it will no longer matter, for then they will see nothing. . . .”

“Father, Father, Father,” I cried again.

And he said:

“Angela, you must pray always, so that all sinners may go on dreaming, until they die, of the resurrection of the flesh and life everlasting. . . .”

I was expecting “and who knows it might be . . .” but instead, Don Manuel had another choking fit.

“And now,” he finally went on, “and now, at the hour of my death, it is high time to have me taken, in this very chair, to the church, so that I may take leave there of my people, who are waiting for me.”

He was carried to the church and taken, in his armchair, into the chancel, to the foot of the altar. In his hand he held a crucifix. My brother and I stood close to him, but the fool Blasillo wanted to stand even closer. He wanted to grasp Don Manuel by the hand, so that he could kiss it. When some of the people nearby tried to stop him, Don Manuel rebuked them and said:

“Let him come closer. . . . Come, Blasillo, give me your hand.”

The fool cried for joy. And then Don Manuel spoke:

“I shall say very few words, my children; I scarcely have strength except to die. And I have nothing new to tell you either. I have already said everything I have to say. Live together in peace and happiness, in the hope that we will all see each other again some day, in that other Valverde de Lucerna up there among the stars of the night, the stars which the lake reflects over the image of the reflected mountain. And pray, pray to the Most Blessed Virgin, and to our Lord. Be good . . . that is enough. Forgive me whatever wrong I may have done you inadvertently or unknowingly. After I give you my blessing, let us pray together, let us say the Paternoster, the Ave Maria, the Salve, and the Creed.”

Then he gave his blessing to the whole village, with the crucifix held in his hand, while the women and children cried and even some of the men wept softly. Almost at once the prayers were begun. Don Manuel listened to them in silence, his hand in the hand of Blasillo the fool, who was falling asleep to the sound of the praying. First the Paternoster, with its “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” then the Ave Maria, with its “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death”; followed by the Salve, with its “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears”; and finally, the Creed. On reaching “The resurrection of the flesh and life everlasting” the people sensed that their saint had yielded up his soul to God. It was not necessary to close his eyes even, for he died with them closed. When we tried to wake up Blasillo, we found that he, too, had fallen asleep in the Lord forever. So that later there were two bodies to be buried.

The whole village immediately went to the saint’s house to carry away holy relics, to divide up pieces of his garments among themselves, to carry off whatever they could find as a memento of the blessed martyr. My brother kept his breviary, between the pages of which he discovered a carnation, dried as in a herbarium and mounted on a piece of paper, and upon the paper a cross and a certain date.

No one in the village seemed willing to believe that Don Manuel was dead; everyone expected to see him—perhaps some of them did—taking his daily walk along the shore of the lake, his figure mirrored in the water, or silhouetted against the background of the mountain. They continued to hear his voice, and they all visited his grave, around which a veritable cult grew up; old women “possessed by devils” came to touch the walnut cross, made with his own hands from the tree which had given the six planks of his coffin. And the ones least willing to believe in his death were my brother and I.

Lazaro carried on the tradition of the saint, and he began to compile a record of the priest’s work. Some of the conversations in this account of mine were made possible by his notes.

“It was he,” said my brother, “who made me into a new man. I was a true Lazarus whom he raised from the dead. He gave me faith.”
“Faith? . . .” I interrupted.

“Yes, faith, faith in life itself, faith in life’s consolations. It was he who cured me of my delusion of ‘Progress,’ of my belief in its political implications. For there are, Angela, two types of dangerous and harmful men: those who, convinced of life beyond the grave, of the resurrection of the flesh, torment other people—like the inquisitors they are—so that they will despise this life as a transitory thing and work for the other life; and then, there are those who, believing only in this life . . .”

“Like you, perhaps . . .”

“Yes, and like Don Manuel. Believing only in this world, this second group looks forward to some vague future society and exerts every effort to prevent the populace from finding consolation in the belief in another world. . . .”

“And so . . .”

“The people should be allowed to live with their illusion.”

*  *  *  *  *

The poor priest who came to replace Don Manuel found himself overwhelmed in Valverde de Lucerna by the memory of the saint, and he put himself in the hands of my brother and myself for guidance. He wanted only to follow in the footsteps of the saint. And my brother told him: “Very little theology, Father, very little theology. Religion, religion, religion.” Listening to him, I smiled to myself, wondering if this were not a kind of theology, too.

And at this time I began to fear for my poor brother. From the time of Don Manuel’s death it could scarcely be said that he lived. He went to the priest’s tomb daily; he stood gazing into the lake for hours on end. He was filled with nostalgia for deep, abiding peace.

“Don’t stare into the lake so much,” I begged him.

“Don’t worry. It’s not this lake which draws me, nor the mountain. Only, I cannot live without his help.”

“And the joy of living, Lazaro, what about the joy of living?”

“That’s for others. Not for those of us who have seen God’s face, those of us on whom the Dream of Life has gazed with His eyes.”

“What; are you preparing to go and see Don Manuel?”

“No, Sister, no. Here at home now, between the two of us, the whole truth—bitter as it may be, bitter as the sea into which the sweet waters of our lake flow—the whole truth for you, who are so set against it. . . .”

“No, no, Lazaro. You are wrong. Your truth is not the truth.”

“It’s my truth.”

“Yours, perhaps, but surely not . . .”

“His, too.”

“No, Lazaro. Not now, it isn’t. Now, he must believe otherwise; now he must believe . . .”

“Listen, Angela, once Don Manuel told me that there are truths which, though one reveals them to oneself, must be kept from others; and I told him that telling me was the same as telling himself. And then he said, he confessed to me, that he thought that more than one of the great saints, perhaps the very greatest himself, had died without believing in the other life.”

“It’s not possible!”

“All too possible! And now, Sister, you must be careful that here, among the people, no one even suspects our secret. . . .”

“Suspect it!” I cried out in amazement. “Why, even if I were to try, in a fit of madness, to explain it to them, they wouldn’t understand it. The people do not understand your words, they have only understood your actions. To try and explain all this to them would be like reading some pages from Saint Thomas Aquinas to eight-year-old children, in Latin!”

“All the better. In any case when I am gone, pray for me and for him and for all of us.”

At length, his own hour came. A sickness which had been eating away at his robust constitution seemed to flare up with the death of Don Manuel.

“I don’t so much mind dying,” he said to me in his last days, “as the fact that with me another piece of Don Manuel dies, too. The remainder of him must live on with you. Until, one day, even we dead will die forever.”

When he lay in the throes of death, the people, as is customary in our villages, came to bid him farewell and they commended his soul to the care of Don Manuel—Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr. My brother said nothing to them; he had nothing more to say. He had already said everything there was to say. He had become a link between the two Valverdes de Lucerna—the one at the bottom of the lake and the one reflected on its surface. He was already one more of us who had died of life, and, in his way, one more of our saints.

*  *  *  *  *

I was disconsolate, more than disconsolate; but I was, at least, among my own people, in my own village. Now, having lost my Saint Manuel, the father of my soul, and my own Lazaro, my more than flesh and blood brother, my spiritual brother, it is now that I realize that I have aged. But have I really lost them then? Have I grown old? Is my death approaching?

Life must go on! And he taught me to live, he taught us to live, to feel life, to feel the meaning of life, to merge with the soul of the mountain, with the soul of the lake, with the soul of the village, to lose ourselves in them so as to remain in them forever. He taught me by his life to lose myself in the life of the people of my village, and I no longer felt the passing of the hours, and the days, and the years, any more than I felt the passage of the water in the lake. It began to seem that my life would always be like this. I no longer felt myself growing old. I no longer lived in myself, but in my people, and my people lived in me. I tried to speak as they spoke, as they spoke without trying. I went into the street—it was the one highway—and, since I knew everyone, I lived in them and forgot myself (while, on the other hand, in Madrid, where I went once with my brother, I had felt a terrible loneliness, since I knew no one, and had been tortured by the sight of so many unknown people).

Now, as I write this memoir, this confession of my experience with saintliness, with a saint, I am of the opinion that Don Manuel the Good, my Don Manuel, and my brother, too, died, believing they did not believe, but that, without believing in their belief, they actually believed, in active, resigned desolation.

But why, I have asked myself repeatedly, did not Don Manuel attempt to convert my brother through deception, pretending to be a believer himself without being one? And I have finally come to the conclusion that Don Manuel realized he would not be able to delude him, that with him a fraud would not do, that only through the truth, with his truth, would he be able to convert him; that he knew he would accomplish nothing if he attempted to enact the comedy— the tragedy, rather—which he played out for the benefit of the people. And so, he won him over to his pious fraud; he won him over to the cause of life with the truth of death. And thus did he win me, and I never permitted anyone to see through his divine, his most saintly, game. For I believed then, and I believe now, that God—as part of I know not what sacred and inscrutable purpose—caused them to believe they were unbelievers. And that at the moment of their passing, perhaps, the blindfold was removed.

And I, do I believe?

*  *  *  *  *

As I write this—here in my mother’s old house, and I past my fiftieth year and with my memories growing as dim and faded as my hair—outside it is snowing, snowing upon the lake, snowing upon the mountain, upon the memory of my father, the stranger, upon the memory of my mother, my brother Lazaro, my people, upon the memory of my Saint Manuel, and even on the memory of the poor fool Blasillo, my Saint Blasillo—and may he help me in heaven! The snow effaces corners and blots out shadows, for even in the night it shines and illuminates. Truly, I do not know what is true and what is false, nor what I saw and what I merely dreamt—or rather, what I dreamt and what I merely saw—nor what I really knew or what I merely believed to be true. Neither do I know whether or not I am transferring to this paper, white as the snow outside, my awareness, for it to remain in writing, leaving me without it. But why cling to it any longer?

Do I really understand any of it? Do I really believe in any of it? What I am writing about here, did it actually take place, and did it take place in just the way I am telling it? Can such things really happen? Can all this be more than a dream dreamed within another dream? Can it be that I, Angela Carballino, a woman in her fifties, am the only one in this village to be assailed by these far-fetched thoughts, thoughts unknown to everyone else? And the others, those around me, do they believe? At least they go on living. And now they believe in Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr, who, with no hope of immortality for himself, preserved that hope in them.

It appears that our most illustrious bishop, who set in motion the process of beatifying our saint from Valverde de Lucerna, is intent on writing an account of Don Manuel’s life, something which would serve as a guide for the perfect parish priest, and with this end in mind he is gathering information of every sort. He has repeatedly solicited information from me; he has come to see me more than once; and I have supplied him with all sorts of facts and details. But I have never revealed the tragic secret of Don Manuel and my brother. And it is curious that he has never suspected anything. I trust that what I have set down here will never come to his knowledge. For, all temporal authorities are to be feared; I distrust all authorities on this earth—even when they are Church authorities.

And here I end this memoir. Let its fate be what it will. . . .

*  *  *  *  *

How, you may ask, did this document, this memoir of Angela Carballino, fall into my hands? That, dear reader, is something I must keep secret. I have transcribed it for you just as it was written, with only a few, a very few editorial emendations. Does it remind you of other things I have written? This fact does not gainsay its objectivity nor its reality. Moreover, for all I know, perhaps I created real, actual beings, independent of me, beyond my control, characters with immortal souls. For all I know, Augusto Perez in my novel Mist was right when he claimed to be more real, more objective than I am, I who thought I had invented him. As for the reality of this Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr—as he is revealed to me by his disciple and spiritual daughter, Angela Carballino—it has not occurred to me to doubt his reality. I believe in it more than the saint himself did. I believe in it more than I do in my own reality.

And now, before I bring this epilogue to a close, I wish to remind you, patient reader, of the ninth verse of the Epistle of the forgotten Apostle, Saint Jude— what power in a name!—where we are told how my heavenly patron, Saint Michael Archangel (Michael means “Who such as God?” and archangel means arch-messenger) disputed with the Devil (Devil means accuser, prosecutor) over the body of Moses, and would not allow him to carry it off as a prize, to damnation. Instead, he told the Devil: “May the Lord rebuke thee.” And may he who wishes to understand, understand!

I should like also, since Angela Carballino introduced her own feelings into the story—I don’t know how it could have been otherwise—to comment on her statement to the effect that if Don Manuel and his disciple Lazaro had confessed their convictions to the people, they, the people, would not have understood. Nor, I should like to add, would they have believed the two of them. They would have believed in their works and not in their words. And works stand by themselves, and need no words to back them up. In a village like Valverde de Lucerna one makes one’s confession by one’s conduct.

And as for faith, the people scarcely know what it is, and care less.

I am well aware of the fact that no action takes place in this narrative, this novelistic narrative, if you will—the novel is, after all, the most intimate, the truest history, so that I scarcely understand why some people are outraged to have the Gospels called a novel, when such a designation actually sets it above some mere chronicle or other. In short, nothing happens. But I hope that this is because everything in it remains, remains forever like the lakes and the mountains and the blessed simple souls, who, beyond faith and despair, the blessed souls who, in the lakes and the mountains, outside history, took refuge in a divine novel.