A Ray of Moonshine · I

I do not know whether this is a story that seems like a tale, or a tale that seems like a story; what I can say is that at its core there is a truth, a very sad truth, of which I shall perhaps be one of the last to profit, given the nature of my imagination.

Anyone else with this idea might have made a volume of lachrymose philosophy; I have written this legend, which, to those who see nothing in its core, may at least serve to entertain them for a while.

He was noble, had been born amid the clash of arms, and the unaccustomed clamor of a war horn would not have made him raise his head for an instant nor turn his eyes a single point from the dark parchment upon which he was reading a troubadour’s latest song.

Those who wished to find him ought not to have sought him in the spacious courtyard of his castle, where the grooms broke in the colts, the pages taught the falcons to fly, and the soldiers beguiled their days of rest by whetting the iron of their lances against a stone.

“Where is Manrique, where is your lord?” his mother would sometimes ask.

“We do not know,” his servants would reply: “perhaps he is in the cloister of the monastery of La Peña, sitting at the edge of a tomb, lending an ear to see if he can catch some word of the conversation of the dead; or on the bridge, watching the waves of the river run one after another beneath its arches; or curled up in the cleft of a rock and busy counting the stars in the sky, following a cloud with his gaze, or contemplating the will-o’-the-wisps that cross like shooting stars over the surface of the lagoons. Anywhere he will be rather than where everyone is.”

Indeed, Manrique loved solitude, and loved it in such a way that sometimes he would have wished to have no shadow, lest his shadow follow him everywhere.

He loved solitude because within its bosom, giving free rein to his imagination, he forged a fantastic world, inhabited by strange creations, daughters of his delirium and his poet’s daydreams; for Manrique was a poet, so much so that he had never been satisfied with the forms in which he might enclose his thoughts, and had never enclosed them when writing them down.

He believed that among the red embers of the hearth inhabited fire spirits of a thousand colors, which ran like golden insects along the burning logs, or danced in a luminous round of sparks at the apex of the flames, and he would spend the dead hours sitting on a stool beside the high gothic hearth, motionless and with his eyes fixed upon the fire.

He believed that at the bottom of the river’s waves, among the moss of the spring and over the vapors of the lake, lived mysterious women, fairies, sylphs, or undines, who breathed laments and sighs, or sang and laughed in the monotonous murmur of the water, a murmur he would hear in silence, attempting to translate it.

In the clouds, in the air, in the depths of the forests, in the crevices of the rocks, he imagined he perceived forms or heard mysterious sounds, forms of supernatural beings, unintelligible words he could not comprehend.

To love! He had been born to dream of love, not to feel it. He loved all women for an instant: this one because she was blonde, that one because she had red lips, the other because she swayed as she walked like a reed.

Sometimes his delirium reached the point of his remaining an entire night looking at the moon, which floated in the sky amid a silver vapor, or at the stars, which trembled in the distance like the shifting hues of precious stones. In those long nights of poetic insomnia, he would exclaim:—If it is true, as the prior of La Peña has told me, that it is possible these points of light are worlds; if it is true that in this globe of mother-of-pearl rolling over the clouds people dwell, what beautiful women the women of those luminous regions must be, and I shall not be able to see them, and I shall not be able to love them!... What must their beauty be like?... What must their love be like?...

Manrique was not yet mad enough for the boys to follow him, but he was enough so to talk and gesticulate to himself, which is how it begins.

Over the Duero, which passed licking the gnawed and dark stones of the walls of Soria, there is a bridge that leads from the city to the ancient convent of the Templars, whose possessions extended along the opposite bank of the river.

At the epoch to which we refer, the knights of the Order had already abandoned their historic fortresses; but there still remained standing the remains of the wide turrets of their walls, there were still to be seen, as indeed they are seen in part today, covered with ivy and white bindweed, the massive arches of the cloister, the prolonged ogival galleries of their parade grounds, in which the wind sighed with a moan, agitating the tall grasses.

In the orchards and gardens, whose paths the feet of the religious had not trodden for many years, the vegetation, abandoned to itself, displayed all its finery, without fear that the hand of man would mutilate it, believing it beautified. The climbing plants went clambering up the aged trunks of the trees; the shadowy lanes of poplars, whose crowns touched and mingled with one another, had become covered with turf; wild thistles and nettles sprouted in the middle of the sanded paths, and on the pieces of masonry close to collapsing, the wall-flower, floating in the wind like the plume of a crest, and the white and blue bindweeds, swaying like a swing upon their long and flexible stalks, proclaimed the victory of destruction and ruin.

It was night; a summer night, mild, full of perfumes and gentle murmurs, and with a white and serene moon in the middle of a blue, luminous, and transparent sky.

Manrique, his imagination seized by a vertigo of poetry, after crossing the bridge, from whence he contemplated for a moment the black silhouette of the city, which stood out against the background of some whitish and light clouds rolled up on the horizon, plunged into the deserted ruins of the Templars.

Midnight was drawing nigh. The moon, which had been rising slowly, was already at the highest point of the sky, when upon entering a dark grove of poplars leading from the ruined cloister to the bank of the Duero, Manrique uttered a slight, muffled cry, a strange mixture of surprise, fear, and jubilation.

In the depths of the gloomy grove he had seen something white stir, which floated for a moment and disappeared into the darkness. The hem of a woman’s dress, of a woman who had crossed the path and was hiding among the foliage, at the very instant when the mad dreamer of chimeras or impossibilities entered the gardens.

“An unknown woman!... In this place!... At this hour! That, that is the woman I seek,” Manrique exclaimed, and darted off in pursuit of her, swift as an arrow.

He reached the spot where he had seen the mysterious woman lose herself among the thicket of branches. She had disappeared. By where? Far away, very far away, he thought he made out through the crossed trunks of the trees something like a brightness or a white form that was moving.

“It is she, it is she, who bears wings on her feet and flees like a shadow!” he said, and rushed in pursuit of her, parting with his hands the nets of ivy that stretched like a tapestry from one poplar to another. He came breaking through the underbrush and parasitic plants to a sort of landing illuminated by the brightness of the sky... No one! “Ah! this way, this way she goes,” he exclaimed then. “I hear her footsteps upon the dry leaves, and the rustle of her dress dragging on the ground and brushing against the bushes,” and he ran, and ran like a madman this way and that, and did not see her. “Yet her footsteps keep sounding,” he murmured once more. “I believe she has spoken; there is no doubt, she has spoken... The wind that sighs among the branches; the leaves, which seem to pray in a low voice, have prevented me from hearing what she said; but there is no doubt, she is going that way, she has spoken... she has spoken... In what language? I do not know, but it is a foreign tongue...” And he turned to run in her pursuit, sometimes believing he saw her, others thinking he heard her; now noticing that the branches through which she had disappeared were moving; now imagining he distinguished in the sand the footprint of his brief feet; then, firmly persuaded that a special perfume he inhaled at intervals was a scent belonging to that woman who was mocking him, taking pleasure in fleeing from him through those intricate thickets. Useless toil!

He wandered for several hours hither and thither beside himself, now stopping to listen, now gliding with the greatest precautions over the grass, now in a frenzied and desperate run.

Advancing and advancing through the immense gardens that bordered the riverbank, he arrived at last at the foot of the rocks upon which the hermitage of San Saturio rises.— “Perhaps, from this height I will be able to get my bearings to continue my search through this confused labyrinth,” he exclaimed, climbing from crag to crag with the aid of his dagger.

He reached the summit, from which one discovers the city in the distance and a great part of the Duero twisting at his feet, dragging an impetuous and dark current between the curved banks that imprison it.

Manrique, once at the top of the rocks, cast his gaze around him; but upon casting it and fixing it at last on a point, he could not contain a blasphemy.

The moonlight shimmered, sparkling in the wake left behind by a boat that was heading with all oars toward the opposite shore.

In that boat he had believed he distinguished a white and slender form, a woman no doubt, the woman he had seen at the Templars’, the woman of his dreams, the realization of his wildest hopes. He clambered down from the crags with the agility of a chamois, threw his cap to the ground—whose round and long feather could hinder him in running—and stripping off his wide velvet cloak, he set off like a streak of lightning toward the bridge.

He intended to cross it and reach the city before the boat touched the other shore. Madness! When Manrique arrived panting and covered in sweat at the entrance, those who had crossed the Duero on the side of San Saturio were already entering Soria through one of the gates of the wall, which at that time reached the riverbank, in whose waters its brown battlements were reflected.