El Miserere · II

After an hour or two of travel, the mysterious personage whom they called mad at the abbey, tracing the current of the stream indicated to him by the shepherd in the story, reached the point where the black and imposing ruins of the monastery rose.

The rain had ceased; the clouds floated in dark bands, through whose tattered shreds a furtive ray of pale and doubtful light sometimes slipped; and the air, as it lashed the strong buttresses and spread through the desert cloisters, might have been said to exhale moans. Nevertheless, nothing supernatural, nothing strange came to wound the imagination. To one who had slept more than one night with no other shelter than the ruins of an abandoned tower or a solitary castle; to one who had braved in his long pilgrimage a hundred and a hundred storms, all those noises were familiar.

The drops of water that filtered through the cracks of the broken arches and fell upon the flagstones with a measured sound, like that of a clock’s pendulum; the cries of the owl, hooting sheltered beneath the stone nimbus of an image still standing in the hollow of a wall; the noise of the reptiles, which, awakened from their lethargy by the tempest, thrust their misshapen heads from the holes where they sleep, or crawled among the weeds and brambles growing at the foot of the altar, between the joints of the sepulchral slabs that formed the pavement of the church, all those strange and mysterious murmurs of the countryside, of solitude, and of the night, reached perceptibly the ear of the pilgrim who, seated upon the mutilated statue of a tomb, anxiously awaited the hour when the prodigy should come to pass.

Time and time passed, and nothing was perceived; those thousand confused rumors kept sounding and combining in a thousand different ways, but always the same.

“What if he has deceived me!” thought the musician; but at that instant a new noise was heard, an inexplicable noise in that place, like that produced by a clock some seconds before striking the hour; a noise of wheels turning, of cords stretching, of machinery stirring dully and preparing to use its mysterious mechanical vitality, and a bell stroke sounded... two... three... up to eleven.

In the ruined temple there was no bell, no clock, nor even a tower anymore.

The last bell stroke had not yet expired, fading from echo to echo; its vibration could still be heard trembling in the air when the granite canopies that sheltered the sculptures, the marble steps of the altars, the ashlar stones of the pointed arches, the traceried parapets of the choir, the festoons of trefoils on the cornices, the black buttresses of the walls, the pavement, the vaults, the entire church, began to illuminate spontaneously, without a torch, a taper, or a lamp being seen to shed that unusual clarity.

It looked like a skeleton, from whose yellow bones that phosphoric gas is detached which shines and smokes in the darkness like a bluish, restless, and fearful light.

Everything seemed to animate, but with that galvanic movement which imparts to death contractions that parody life, an instantaneous movement, even more horrible than the inertia of the corpse that it agitates with its unknown force. The stones reunited with the stones; the altar, whose broken fragments were previously seen scattered without order, rose intact as if the artisan’s last chisel blow had just been struck upon it, and along with the altar rose the demolished chapels, the broken capitals, and the shattered and immense series of arches which, crossing and linking themselves capriciously among each other, formed with their columns a labyrinth of porphyry.

Once the temple was rebuilt, a distant chord began to be heard that might be confused with the buzzing of the air, but which was a set of distant and deep voices, that seemed to come from the bosom of the earth and rise little by little, becoming each more and more perceptible.

The daring pilgrim was beginning to feel fear; but with his fear his fanaticism for everything unusual and marvelous still struggled, and encouraged by it he left the tomb upon which he rested, leaned over the edge of the abyss through whose rocks the torrent leaped, plunging with an incessant and frightening thunder, and his hair stood on end with horror.

Badly wrapped in the tatters of their habits, with cowls pulled down, beneath the folds of which the dark cavities of their skulls’ eyes contrasted with their fleshless jaws and white teeth, he saw the skeletons of the monks who were hurled from the parapet of the church into that precipice, emerging from the depths of the waters, and grabbing with the long fingers of their bone hands onto the cracks of the crags, climbing up them until they touched the edge, saying in a low and sepulchral voice, but with a heartbreaking expression of pain, the first verse of David’s psalm:

Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam!

When the monks reached the peristyle of the temple, they formed into two rows, and penetrating it went to kneel in the choir, where with a louder and more solemn voice they continued intoning the verses of the psalm. The music sounded to the beat of their voices: that music was the distant rumor of the thunder, which, the tempest having vanished, moved away murmuring; it was the buzzing of the air that moaned in the concavity of the mountain; it was the monotonous noise of the cascade falling over the rocks, and the drop of water filtering, and the cry of the hidden owl, and the rustling of the restless reptiles. All this was the music, and something more that cannot be explained nor scarcely conceived, something more that seemed like the echo of an organ accompanying the verses of the Psalmist King’s giant hymn of contrition, with notes and chords as giant as his terrible words.

The ceremony continued; the musician witnessing it, absorbed and terrified, believed himself outside the real world, living in that fantastic region of sleep in which all things clothe themselves in strange and phenomenal forms.

A terrible jolt came to pull him out of that stupor that embargoed all the faculties of his spirit. His nerves leaped at the impulse of a most powerful emotion, his teeth chattered, shaking with an impossible-to-suppress tremor, and the cold penetrated to the marrow of his bones.

The monks were pronouncing at that instant these frightening words of the Miserere:

In iniquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.

Upon the resounding of this verse and its echoes dilating, rumbling from vault to vault, a tremendous howl arose, which seemed a cry of pain wrung from all of humanity by the conscience of its wickednesses; a horrifying cry, formed of all the laments of misfortune, of all the howls of desperation, of all the blasphemies of impiety, a monstrous concert, a worthy interpreter of those who live in sin and were conceived in iniquity.

The chant continued, now very sad and deep, now resembling a ray of sun that breaks the dark cloud of a storm, making one flash of terror succeed another flash of jubilation, until thanks to a sudden transformation, the church shone bathed in celestial light; the skeletons of the monks clothed themselves in their flesh; a luminous aureole shone around their foreheads; the dome broke, and through it the sky was seen like an ocean of light open to the gaze of the just.

The seraphim, the archangels, the angels, and the hierarchies accompanied with a hymn of glory this verse, which then rose to the throne of the Lord like a harmonic waterspout, like a gigantic spiral of sounding incense:

Thou shalt make me to hear joy and gladness: that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

At this point the dazzling clarity blinded the eyes of the pilgrim, his temples throbbed violently, his ears buzzed, and he fell unconscious to the ground, and heard nothing more.

The following day, the peaceful monks of the abbey of Fitero, to whom the lay brother had given account of the strange visit of the previous night, saw enter through their doors, pale and beside himself, the unknown pilgrim.

“Did you finally hear the Miserere?” the lay brother asked him with a certain mixture of irony, casting a sidelong look of intelligence at his superiors.

“Yes,” the musician answered.

“And what did you think of it?”

“I am going to write it. Give me a refuge in your house,” he continued, turning to the abbot; “a refuge and bread for a few months, and I will leave you an immortal work of art, a Miserere that will wipe away my sins in the eyes of God, eternalize my memory, and with it that of this abbey.”

The monks, out of curiosity, advised the abbot to grant his request; the abbot, out of compassion, even while believing him to be mad, finally agreed to it, and the musician, now installed in the monastery, began his work.

Night and day he worked with incessant eagerness. In the middle of his task he would stop, and it seemed as though he were listening to something sounding in his imagination, and his pupils would dilate, he would leap in his seat, and exclaim:—That is it; like that, like that, there is no doubt... like that! And he would go on writing notes with a feverish rapidity, which on more than one occasion caused those who observed him unseen to marvel.

He wrote the first verses, and the following ones, and up to the middle of the Psalm; but upon reaching the last one he had heard on the mountain, it was impossible for him to proceed.

He wrote one, two, a hundred, two hundred drafts: all useless. His music did not resemble that music already set down, and sleep fled from his eyelids, and he lost his appetite, and fever took possession of his head, and he went mad, and finally died without being able to finish the Miserere, which, as a strange thing, the friars kept upon his death and it is still preserved today in the abbey’s archive.

When the old man finished telling me this story, I could not help turning my eyes once more to the dusty and ancient manuscript of the Miserere, which was still open on one of the tables.

In peccatis concepit me mater mea.

These were the words on the page that I had before my eyes, and which seemed to mock me with its notes, its clefs, and its squiggles, unintelligible to the laymen in music.

To have been able to read them I would have given a world.

Who knows if they are not madness?