The Shadow of the Cathedral

For them there was no other truth but Gabriel's words; the bell-ringer, although the roughest and most silent among them, was the most advanced in his conversion. His admiration for Gabriel which dated from their childhood, his dog-like fidelity, carried him on with leaps and bounds, making him accept at once even the most distant ideals.

"I am whatever you are, Gabriel," he said firmly. "Are you not an anarchist? I will be one also—indeed, I think I have always been one. Do you not preach that the poor should live and the rich should work; that everyone should possess what he earns, and that we should all help one another? Well, this is just what I thought when we wandered over the country with our guns and our scarf. And as far as religion is concerned, which formerly nearly drove us mad, I feel perfectly indifferent. I am convinced on hearing you that it is a sort of fable invented by clever people in order that we, the poor and unfortunate, should submit to the miseries of this world hoping for heaven; it is not badly imagined, for in the end those who die and do not find heaven will not return to complain."

One day Gabriel wished to go up where the bells were hung. It was now well on in spring; it was warm, and the intense blue of the sky seemed to attract him.

"I have not seen the 'big bell' since I was a child," he said. "Let us go up; I should like to see Toledo for the last time."

And accompanied by his admirers, indeed, almost carried by them, he went slowly up the narrow spiral staircase. Arrived at the top, the soft wind was murmuring through the great iron railings, the cages of the bells. From the centre of the vault hung the famous "Gorda," an immense bronze bell, with all one side split by a large crack; the clapper, which was the author of the mischief, lay below it, engraved and as thick as a column, and a smaller one now occupied the cavity. The roofs of the Cathedral, dark and ugly, lay at their feet, and in front on a hill rose the Alcazar, higher and larger than the church, as though keeping up the spirit of the emperor who built it, Caesar of Catholicism, champion of the faith, but who nevertheless strove to keep the Church at his feet.

The city spread out around the Cathedral, the houses disappearing in the crowd of towers, cupolas and absides. It was impossible to look on any side without meeting with chapels, churches, convents and ancient hospitals. Religion had absorbed the industrious Toledo of old, and still guarded the dead city beneath its hood of stone. From some of the belfries a red flag was floating, bearing a white chalice; this meant that some newly-ordained priest was singing his first mass.

"I have never been up here," said Don Martin, sitting by Gabriel's side on one of the rafters, "without seeing some of these flags; ecclesiastical recruiting never ceases, there are always visionaries to fill its ranks. Those who really have faith are the minority, the greater part enter because they see the Church still triumphant and seemingly commanding, and they think that in her ranks some tremendous career is waiting for them. Unlucky wights! I also was led to the altar with music and oratorical shouts, as though I were walking to a triumph. Incense spread its clouds before my eyes, all my family wept with emotion at seeing me nothing less than a minister of God. And the day following all this theatrical pomp, when the lights and the censers were extinguished and the church had recovered its ordinary aspect, began this miserable life of poverty and intrigue to earn one's bread—seven duros a month! To endure at all hours the complaints of those poor women, with their tempers embittered by seclusion, common as the lowest servants, who spend their lives gossiping in the parlour of what is passing in the towns, inventing scandals to please the canons, or the families who protect the house. And there are priests who envy me! hungering against me for this coveted chaplaincy of nuns! looking upon me as a flattering hanger-on of the archiepiscopal palace, not understanding how otherwise, being so young, I could have hooked out this preferment that allows me to live in Toledo on seven duros a month!"

Gabriel nodded his head, sympathising with the young priest's complaints.

"Yes, it is you who are deceived. The day for making great fortunes in the Church is past, and the poor youths who now wear the cassock and dream of a mitre make me think of those emigrants who go to distant countries famous through long centuries of plunder, and find them even more poverty-stricken than their own land."

"You are right, Gabriel. The day of the all-powerful Church is past; she has still in her udders milk enough for all, but there are few who can fasten on to them and fill themselves to repletion, while others groan with hunger. One could die of laughing when one hears of the equality and the democratic spirit of the Church. It is all a lie; in no other institution does so cruel a despotism reign. In early days Popes and bishops were elected by the faithful, and were deposed from power if they used it badly. The aristocracy of the Church exists still; it may be a canon upwards, or one who succeeds in crowning himself with a mitre; from them no account is required. Among the laity appointments are changed, ministers are turned out, soldiers are degraded—even kings are dethroned; but who exacts responsibility from Pope or bishops once they are anointed and in more or less frequent intercourse with the Holy Spirit? If you want Justice you are sent before tribunals equally formed by the aristocrats of the Church; there is no power more absolute on earth, not even the Grand Turk, who in a measure is responsible through fear of revolts in his seraglio. Here, in the seraglio of the Church, we are all less than women. If it happens that a priest, weary of persecution, feeling the man once more rising beneath his cassock, deals a heavy blow at his tyrant, he is declared mad; the climax of hypocrisy! They try to demonstrate that in the Church one lives in the best of worlds, and it is only the lack of reason that causes any rebellion against its authority."

Don Martin was silent for a long while as though he were searching in his memory; at length he continued:

"You also laugh at the idea of the actual poverty of the Church in Spain. She is like the great ruined noblemen, who still have enough to live upon in idleness, but who think themselves miserably poor compared to their former wealth; the Church has the nostalgia of those former centuries when she possessed half the wealth of Spain. Poor she is if she thinks of those times, but if you compare her with the Catholicism of other modern nations you find that, as in former years, she is by far the most favoured and best paid establishment in the State. She absorbs forty-one millions of the revenue, which is enormous in a country which only devotes nine millions to schools and teaching, and one million to the relief of the poor. To maintain an intercourse with God costs a Spaniard five times as much as to learn to read. But this forty-one millions is a blind. My own poverty made me inquisitive, and I wished to know what the clergy in Spain really receive, and what comes to our hands, the rank and file. The demands and pensions of the Church are an intricate tangle, apart from the forty-one millions. There is not a single ministry in which the Church has not struck her roots; she is paid by the Ministers of State for foreign missions, which are no use to anyone, by the Ministers of War and Marine for military clergy, and by the Ministers of Public Instruction and Justice. She is paid to support the pomp of the Roman Pontiff, as we maintain his ambassador in Spain, which is as though I allowed myself the luxury of keeping servants, and laid on my neighbour the obligation of paying them. She is paid for the repairs to churches, for episcopal libraries, for the colonisation of Fernando Po, for unforeseen occurrences, and I do not know how many supplemental items besides! And you must take into account what the Spanish people pay the Church voluntarily apart from what the State gives. The Bull of the Holy Crusade produces two and a half million pesetas annually; besides this you must consider what the parochial clergy draw from their congregations, the annual gifts to the religious orders for their ministry and offices (and this is the fattest portion), and the ecclesiastical revenue from the Ayuntamientos and deputations. In short, this Church, which is continually speaking of its poverty, draws from the State and the country more than three hundred million pesetas annually—nearly double what the army costs; although they are always complaining in the sacristies of these modern times, saying that everything is devoured by the military, and that the fault of everything that has happened is theirs, as they threw themselves on to the side of that cursed liberty. Three hundred millions, Gabriel! I have calculated it carefully! And I, who form part of this great establishment, receive seven duros a month; the greater part of the vicars in Spain are paid less than an excise officer, and thousands of clergy live from hand to mouth, wandering from sacristy to sacristy trying to obtain a mass to put the stew on the fire; and if bands of clergy do not go into the highways to rob, it is only from fear of the civil guard, and because after a couple of days of hunger a third may come in which they may beg some scraps to eat; there is always a crumb to allay hunger, and no cassock ever falls in the street dying of want, but there are a great many clerics who spend their existence deceiving their stomachs, trying to imagine they nourish themselves, till some sudden illness comes which hurries them out of the world. Where, then, does all this money go? To the aristocracy of the Church, to the true sacerdotal caste; but we who are in religion are people of the backstairs. What a terrible mistake, Gabriel! To renounce love and family affection, to fly all worldly pleasures, the theatre, concerts, the cafe; to be looked upon by people, even by those who think themselves religious, as a strange being, a sort of intermediate, neither a man nor a woman; to wear petticoats and to be dressed like a lugubrious doll; and in exchange for all these sacrifices to earn less than a man who breaks stones on the road. We live idly, certain that we shall never fall from over-work, but our poverty is greater than that of many workmen; we cannot acknowledge it, nor put ourselves in the way of begging alms, for the honour of our cloth. And besides, why should they keep us if we are of no practical use and cost the country so dear? When the religious domination came to an end in Spain it was only we, the lower ones, who suffered in consequence. The priest is poor, the temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no danger. The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy; the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove, and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money."

"It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains. The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it, forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes, and that generation after generation pass between its death and burial. Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen. The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the philosophers despised it. All the same Christianity required many years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed them. Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their ceremonies to the religions that follow them. We have been born in one of those times of transition, we are present at the death of a whole world of beliefs. How long will the agony last? Who knows? Two centuries? Possibly less may be wanted to crystallise in humanity a fresh proof of its uncertainty and of its fear of the great mystery of nature, but death is certain, inevitable. But what religion has been eternal? The symptoms of dissolution are visible everywhere. Where is that faith that drove those warlike multitudes to the crusades? Where is that fervour which continued building cathedrals for a couple of hundred years with angelic patience to shelter a host under a mountain of stone? Who scourges themselves to-day, or tortures their flesh, or lives in the desert musing continually on death and hell? Three centuries of intolerance and of excessive clerical severity have made our nation the most indifferent to all religious matters. The ceremonies of worship are followed by routine, because they appeal to the imagination, but no one takes the trouble to understand the foundations of the beliefs they profess; they live as they please, certain that in their last hours it is sufficient to save their souls, to die surrounded by priests with a crucifix in their hands. In former days the pressure from clergy, friars, and inquisitors was so great that the machine of faith burst into a thousand pieces, and there is no one now who can fit the pieces together, which require the co-operation of all. And that was a piece of good luck, friend Don Martin; a century more of religious intolerance and we should have been like those Mussulmen in Africa, who live in barbarism on account of their excessive bigotry, after having been the civilising Arabs of Cordoba and Granada."

"Do you know," said the young curate, "why Catholicism has held up its appearances of power? It is because from ancient times, in all Latin countries, it has possessed itself of every avenue through which human life must pass."

"It is true, no religion has been so cautious as ours, or has ambushed itself better to entrap men. None has chosen with such certainty in the time of power the positions it can hold strongly in its decadence. It is impossible to move without stumbling against her. She knows of old that man as long as he is healthy, in the plenitude of his vital strength, is by instinct irreligious. When he lives comfortable the so-called eternal life concerns him very little. He only believes in God and fears Him in the hour of supreme cowardice, when death opens before him the bottomless pit of nothingness, and his pride as a rational animal revolts against the complete extinction of his being. He wishes his soul to be immortal, and so he accepts the religious phantasies of heaven and hell. The Church, fearing the irreligiousness of health, has occupied, as you say, all the avenues of life, so that no man shall accustom himself to live without her, appealing solely to her in the hour of death. The dead provide much money, they are her best asset; but she wishes equally to reign over the living. Nothing escapes her despotism and her spying. She insinuates herself into all human concerns from the greatest to the most insignificant, she interferes in both public and private life; she baptizes the child when it comes into the world, accompanies the child to school, monopolises love, declaring it shameful and abominable if it does not submit to her benediction, and divides the earth into two categories—the consecrated, for those who die in her bosom, and the dunghill in the open air for the heretic. The Church interferes in dress, laying down what is honest and Christian wear and what is scandalous frivolity. She interferes in the most intimate relations of domestic life, and even penetrates into the kitchen, turning Catholicism into a culinary art, ruling what ought to be eaten, what ought or ought not to be mixed, and anathematizing certain foods, which, being good enough the rest of the year, become the most horrible sacrilege if partaken on certain days. She accompanies a man from his birth, and does not leave him even after he is laid in the tomb; she keeps him chained by his soul, making it wander through space, passing from one place to another, ascending the pathway to heaven, according to the sacrifices imposed on themselves by his successors for the benefit of the Church. A greater or more complete despotism no tyrant could possibly imagine."

It was mid-day. The bell-ringer had disappeared; suddenly the rattle of chains and pulleys was heard and a dull thunder made the tower tremble; all the stones and metal and even the surrounding ether vibrated. The big "Gorda" had just rung, deafening the bystanders. A few moments afterwards, from the front of the Alcazar, came the sound of martial music, trumpets, and drums.

"Let us go," said Gabriel. "Really, Mariano might have warned us and spared us this surprise."

And he added, smiling ironically:

"It is always the same; it is the parasites who shine the most and make the most noise; they make up in noise what they lack in utility."

The festival of Corpus drew near without anything occurring to ruffle the quiet life of the Cathedral. Sometimes in the upper cloister they spoke of His Eminence's health. His serious quarrels with the Chapter had obliged him to keep his bed, and he had just had an attack which made them fear for his life.

"It is his heart," said the Tato—who was usually very well informed about things in the palace—"Doña Visita is weeping like a Magdalen and cursing the canons, seeing Don Sebastian so ill."

As Wooden Staff sat down to table with his family he began to speak of the decadence of the feast of Corpus, which had been so famous in Toledo in former times. In his desire to complain he forgot the bitter silence he had imposed on himself in his daughter's presence.

"You will hardly recognise our Corpus," he said to Gabriel. "Of all that we remember nothing remains but the famous tapestries that are hung outside the Cathedral. The giants are not drawn up before the Puerta del Perdon, and the procession is shorn of its glory."

The Chapel-master also complained bitterly.

"And the mass, Señor Esteban? Just think what a mass for such a solemn festivity! Four instruments from outside the house, and a Rossini mass of the lightest description so as not to cost much. It would have been far better for this to have played the organ alone."

According to an ancient custom, on the vesper before the feast, the band of the Academy of Infantry played in the evening before the Cathedral. All Toledo came to hear the serenade, which was an event in the monotonous life of the town, and from the province of Madrid many strangers came for the bull-fight on the following day.

Mariano, the bell-ringer, invited his friends to listen to the serenade from the Greco-Roman gallery on the principal front. At the hour when the lights were usually extinguished in the Claverias and Don Antolin locked the street door, Gabriel and his friends glided cautiously to the bell-ringer's "habitacion." Sagrario was also persuaded to come by her uncle, who in this way managed to tear her from her machine. She really must enjoy some little amusement; she ought to appear in the world now and then; she was killing herself with all that tiresome work.

They all sat in the gallery. The shoemaker had brought his wife, always with a small baby at her flabby breast. The Tato was talking delightedly to the organ-blower and the verger about the bull-fight on the following day, and Mariano stood by his adored comrade, while his wife, a woman as rough as himself, spoke with Sagrario.

The men were deploring the absence of Don Martin. Probably he had gone down below among the people who filled the square, doubtless dreading that he must be up before daybreak to say mass to the nuns.

The palace of the Ayuntamiento was decorated with strings of light, which were reflected on to the façade of the Cathedral, giving the stones a rosy flush as of fire.

Among the trees walked groups of girls with flowers and white blouses, like the first appearances of spring. The cadets followed them, their hands on the pommels of their swords, walking along with their pinched-in waists and their full pantaloons à la Turc. The archiepiscopal palace remained entirely closed. Above the rosy light in the piazza, spread the beautiful summer sky, clear and deep, spangled with innumerable brilliant stars.

When the music ceased, and the lights began to fade, the inhabitants of the Cathedral felt unwilling to leave their seats. They were very comfortable there, the night was warm, and they, accustomed to the confinement and the silence of the Claverias, felt the joy of freedom, sitting on that balcony with Toledo at their feet and the immensity of space above them.

Sagrario, who had never been out of the upper cloister since her return to the paternal roof, looked at the stars with delight.

"How many stars!" she murmured dreamily.

"There are more than usual to-night," said the bell-ringer. "The summer sky seems a field of stars in which the harvest increases with the fine weather."

Gabriel smiled at the simplicity of his companions. They all wondered at God, so foreseeing and so thoughtful, who had made the moon to give light to men by night, and the stars so that the darkness should not be complete.

"Well, then," inquired Gabriel, "why is there not a moon always if it was made to give us light?"

There was a long silence. They were all thinking over Gabriel's question. The bell-ringer, being most intimate with the master, ventured to put the question about which they were all thinking. "What were the heavens, and what was there beyond the blue?"

The square was now deserted and in darkness, there was no light but the gentle shimmering of the stars scattered in space like golden dust. From the immense vault there seemed to fall a religious calm, an overwhelming majesty that stirred the souls of those simple people. The infinite seemed to bewilder them with its vast grandeur.

"You," said Gabriel, "have your eyes closed to immensity, you cannot understand it. You have been taught a wretched and rudimentary origin of the world, imagined by a few ragged and ignorant Jews in a corner of Asia, which, having been written in a book, has been accepted down to our days. This personal God, like to ourselves in His shape and passions, is an artificer of gigantic capacity, who worked six days and made everything existing. On the first day He created light, and on the fourth the sun and stars; from whence then came that light if the sun had not then been created? Is there any distinction between one and the other? It seems impossible that such absurdities should have been credited for centuries."

The listeners nodded their heads in assent; the absurdity appeared to them palpable—as it always did when Gabriel spoke.

"If you wish to penetrate the heavens," continued Luna, "you must get rid of the human conception of distance. Man measures everything by his own stature, and he conceives dimensions by the distance his eyes can reach. This Cathedral seems to us enormous because underneath its naves we seem like ants; but, nevertheless, the Cathedral seen from far is only an insignificant wart; compared with the piece of land we call Spain it is less than a grain of sand, and on the face of the earth it is a mere atom—nothing. Our sight makes us consider thirty or forty yards a dizzy height. At this moment we think we are very high because we are near the roof of the Cathedral, but compared to the infinite this height is as small as when an ant balances on the top of a pebble not knowing how to come down. Our sight is short, and we who can only measure by yards, and apprehend short distances, must make an immense effort of imagination to realise infinity. Even then it escapes us and we speak of it very often as of a thing that has no meaning. How shall I make you understand the immensity of the world? You must not believe, as our ancestors did, that the earth is flat and stationary and that the heaven is a crystal dome on which God has fastened the stars like golden nails, and in which the sun and moon move to give us light, you must understand that the earth is round, and whirls round in space."

"Yes, we do know a little about that," said the bell-ringer doubtfully, "for we were taught so at school. But, really, do you think it moves?"

"Because in your littleness as human beings, because to our microscopic mole-like sight the immense mechanism of the world is lost, do not for a moment doubt it. The earth turns. Without moving from where you are, in twenty-four hours you will have made the complete circuit with the globe. Without moving our feet we rush along at the rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the fastest trains cannot attain. You are astonished? We rush along without knowing it. Our planet does not only turn on itself, but at the same time it turns round the sun at the rate of nearly a hundred thousand miles an hour. Every second we cover thirty thousand miles. Men have never invented a cannon ball that could fly so quickly. You move through space fixed to a projectile which whirls with dizzy speed, and, deceived by your smallness, you think you are living immovable in a dead cathedral. And this velocity is as nothing compared with others. The sun round which we turn, flies and flies through space, carrying on by its attraction the earth and the other planets. It goes through immensity, dragging us along, travelling towards the unknown, without ever striking other bodies, finding always sufficient space to move in with a rapidity which makes one giddy; and this has gone on for thousands and millions of centuries without either it or the earth who follows it in its flight ever passing twice over the same spot."