El Miserere · I

Some months ago, while visiting the famous abbey of Fitero and busying myself with turning over some volumes in its abandoned library, I discovered in one of its corners two or three quite old music notebooks, covered in dust and even partly nibbled by mice.

It was a Miserere.

I know nothing of music; but I am so fond of it that, even without understanding it, I sometimes take up the score of an opera and spend hours turning its pages, looking at the more or less clustered groups of notes, the lines, semicircles, triangles, and sorts of etceteras they call clefs, and all this without comprehending a jot or getting a cursed bit of profit.

True to my mania, I went through the notebooks, and the first thing that caught my attention was that, although on the last page there was this Latin word, so common in all works, finis, the truth was that the Miserere was not finished, because the music only went up to the tenth verse.

This was undoubtedly what struck me first; but after I had looked a little closer at the sheets of music, I was even more surprised to observe that instead of those Italian words they put in all of them, like maestoso, allegro, ritardando, più vivo, a piacere, there were lines written in a very small hand and in German, some of which served to warn of things as difficult to do as this: They creak... the bones creak, and from their marrow the wailings must seem to issue; or this other: The string howls without discord, the brass thunders without deafening; that is why everything sounds, and nothing is confused, and everything is humanity sobbing and moaning; or the most original of all, without doubt, recommended at the foot of the last verse: The notes are bones covered with flesh: unquenchable fire, the heavens and their harmony... force!... force and sweetness.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked an old man who was accompanying me, upon finishing half translating these lines, which looked like sentences written by a madman.

The old man then told me the legend that I am going to relate to you.

Many years ago, on a rainy and dark night, a pilgrim arrived at the cloister door of this abbey, and asked for a little fire to dry his clothes, a piece of bread with which to satisfy his hunger, and some shelter where he might await the morning and pursue his way with the light of the sun.

His modest collation, his poor bed, and his blazing hearth, the brother to whom this request was made placed at the disposal of the traveler, whom, after he had recovered from his fatigue, he questioned concerning the object of his pilgrimage and the point to which he was bound.

“I am a musician,” the interlocutor replied, “I was born very far from here, and in my homeland I once enjoyed great renown. In my youth I made of my art a powerful weapon of seduction, and with it I kindled passions that dragged me into a crime. In my old age I wish to convert to good the faculties I have employed for evil, redeeming myself through the very means by which I could condemn myself.”

As the enigmatic words of the unknown man did not seem altogether clear to the lay brother, in whom curiosity was already beginning to awaken, and instigated by it he continued with his questions, his interlocutor proceeded in this manner:

“I wept in the depths of my soul the guilt I had committed; yet upon attempting to ask God for mercy, I found no words to adequately express my repentance, when one day my eyes happened to light upon a holy book. I opened that book, and in one of its pages I found a giant cry of true contrition, a psalm of David, the one that begins Miserere mei, Deus! From the instant I had read its stanzas, my only thought was to find a musical form so magnificent, so sublime, that it might suffice to contain the grandiose hymn of sorrow of the Prophet King. I have not yet found it; but if I succeed in expressing what I feel in my heart, what I hear confusedly in my head, I am sure of making a Miserere so marvelous that those born have never heard another like it; so heartbreaking that upon hearing the first chord the archangels will say with me, their eyes covered with tears, addressing themselves to the Lord: mercy! and the Lord will have it of His poor creature.”

The pilgrim, upon reaching this point of his narration, fell silent for an instant; and then, exhaling a sigh, he took up the thread of his discourse once more. The lay brother, some dependents of the abbey, and two or three shepherds from the friars’ farm, who formed a circle around the hearth, listened to him in profound silence.

“After,” he continued, “touring all of Germany, all of Italy, and the greater part of this classic country for religious music, I have not yet heard a Miserere in which I can inspire myself, not one, not one, and I have heard so many that I can say I have heard them all.”

“All?” said one of the herdsmen then, interrupting him. “I bet you haven’t heard the Mountain Miserere yet!”

“The Mountain Miserere!” exclaimed the musician with an air of strangeness. “What Miserere is that?”

“Didn’t I say?” murmured the peasant; and then he continued with a mysterious intonation: “That Miserere, which only those who like me wander day and night after the cattle among scrub and crags happen to hear by chance, is quite a story; a very old story, but as true as it seems incredible.”

The fact is that in the wildest part of those ranges of mountains that bound the horizon of the valley, at the bottom of which stands the abbey, there was many years ago—what do I say many years! many centuries—a famous monastery, a monastery that, to all appearances, a lord built at his own expense with the goods he was to bequeath to his son, whom he disinherited upon dying, as a punishment for his wickedness.

Up to here all was well; but the fact is that this son, who from what will be seen later must have been of the devil’s own hide, if he was not the devil himself in person, knowing that his goods were in the power of the religious and that his castle had been transformed into a church, gathered a few bandits, comrades of his in the life of perdition he had embarked upon upon leaving his parents’ house, and one Holy Thursday night, when the monks were in the choir, and at the very time and hour when they were going to begin or had begun the Miserere, they set fire to the monastery, sacked the church, and, letting none escape, they say they left not a friar alive.

After this atrocity, the bandits and their instigator with them departed, no one knows where—to the depths perhaps.

The flames reduced the monastery to rubble; of the church the ruins still remain standing upon the hollow crag from whence the spring is born, which after dashing from rock to rock forms the stream that comes to bathe the walls of this abbey.

“But,” interrupted the musician impatiently, “and the Miserere?”

“Wait,” continued the herdsman with great sarcasm, “everything will come in its turn. Having said this, he continued his story thus:”

“The people of the surrounding areas were scandalized by the crime: from fathers to sons and from sons to grandsons it was recounted with horror in the long evening gatherings; but what keeps its memory most alive is that every year, on a night just like the one on which it was accomplished, lights are seen shining through the broken windows of the church; a sort of strange music is heard and some lugubrious and terrifying chants that are perceived at intervals in the gusts of the wind.”

They are the monks, who, perhaps dying without finding themselves prepared to present themselves at the tribunal of God clean of all guilt, still come from purgatory to implore His mercy by singing the Miserere.

The bystanders looked at one another with signs of incredulity; only the pilgrim, who seemed vividly preoccupied with the telling of the story, asked anxiously of him who had related it:

“And you say that this portent is still repeated?”

“Within three hours it will begin without fail, because precisely tonight is Maundy Thursday, and they have just struck eight on the abbey clock.”

“At what distance is the monastery?”

“Scarcely a league and a half... but what are you doing? Where are you going on a night like this? God has forsaken you!” they all exclaimed upon seeing that the pilgrim, getting up from his bench and taking his staff, was leaving the hearth to head for the door.

“Where am I going? To hear that marvelous music, to hear the great, the true Miserere, the Miserere of those who return to the world after they are dead, and know what it is to die in sin.”

“And saying this, he disappeared from the sight of the frightened lay brother and the no less astonished shepherds.”

The wind whistled and made the doors creak, as if a powerful hand were struggling to tear them from their hinges; the rain fell in torrents, lashing the windowpanes, and from time to time the light of a flash of lightning illuminated for an instant the entire horizon that could be seen from them.

Once the first moment of stupor had passed, the lay brother exclaimed:

“He is mad!”

“He is mad!” repeated the shepherds; and they stirred up the fire anew, and gathered around the hearth.