Three Dates · II

Here is what I desired to find!” I exclaimed upon seeing it; and sitting down upon a stone, placing my portfolio upon my knees, and sharpening a wooden pencil, I set about tracing, however lightly, its irregular and whimsical shapes so as to preserve its memory forever.

If I could paste here with wafers the very light and poorly drawn sketch that I keep of that place, imperfect and all as it is, I would save myself a wealth of words, giving my readers a more approximate idea of it than all imaginable descriptions.

Since that cannot be, I shall try to paint it in the best possible manner, so that, by reading these lines, they may form a remote idea, if not of its infinite details, at least of the totality of its whole.

Imagine an Arab palace, with its horseshoe-shaped doors; its walls adorned with long rows of arches that cross one another a hundred and a hundred times, and run above a strip of bright azulejos: here one sees the hollow of a mullioned window divided in two by a group of slender columns and framed within a border of minute and capricious work; there rises a watchtower with its light and airy lookout, its roof of glazed tiles, green and yellow, and its sharp golden spire that loses itself in the void; farther off is descried the dome covering a cabinet painted in gold and blue, or the high galleries enclosed with green blinds, which when drawn back reveal gardens with myrtle walks, laurel groves, and towering fountains. Everything is original, everything harmonic, though disordered; everything lets a glimpse be caught of the luxury and wonders of its interior; everything lets the character and customs of its inhabitants be guessed.

The opulent Arab who possessed this building abandons it at last; the action of the years begins to crumble its walls, to tarnish the colors, and to corrode even the marbles. A Castilian monarch then chooses that crumbling alcazar for his residence, and at this point he breaks a canvas and opens a pointed arch and adorns it with a fringe of coats of arms, among which twines a garland of thistle and clover leaves; at that one he raises a massive ashlar keep with its narrow arrow slits and its pointed battlements; at the one beyond he builds a wing of high and gloomy rooms, in which are seen on one hand pieces of glistening tilework, on the other darkened panelled ceilings, or a single mullioned window, or a light and pure horseshoe arch, which gives entrance to a severe and imposing Gothic hall.

But the day arrives when the monarch also abandons that precinct, ceding it to a community of religious women, and these in turn build anew, adding other traits to the already strange physiognomy of the Moorish alcazar. They close the windows with lattice screens; between two Arab arches they place the coat of arms of their religion sculpted in hard stone; where tamarinds and laurels once grew, they plant melancholy and dark cypresses; and taking advantage of some remains and raising others upon the rest, they form the most picturesque and extravagant combinations that can be conceived.

Above the portal of the church, where a row of saints, angels, and virgins—as if wrapped in the mysterious twilight in which the shadows of their canopies bathe them, at whose feet twist, among the acanthus leaves, stone serpents, monsters, and grotesques—may be seen rising, stands a slender, filigreed minaret with Moorish workmanship; next to the arrow slits of the great wall, whose battlements are already broken, they place an altarpiece, and they wall up the large openings with partition walls filled with tiny holes and resembling a chessboard; they place crosses over all the peaks, and they build, finally, a bell-gable with its bells, which ring out mournfully day and night calling to prayer, bells that swing at the impulse of an invisible hand, bells whose distant sounds sometimes draw tears of involuntary sadness.

Afterwards the years pass, and bathe with a glaze of semi-dark tone the entire building, harmonize its tints, and make the ivy sprout in its crevices.

The storks hang their nest on the weather vane of the tower; the swifts on the wing of the roofs; the swallows on the granite canopies, and the owl and the scops owl choose for their lair the high putlog holes, from which on gloomy nights they frighten the credulous old women and the terrified youngsters with the phosphorescent gleam of their round eyes and their strange, sharp hisses.

All these revolutions, all these special circumstances, could alone have resulted in a building so original, so full of contrasts, of poetry and of memories, as the one that afternoon offered itself to my sight and today I have essayed, though in vain, to describe with words.

I had already traced it in part on one of the pages of my portfolio. The sun was scarcely gilding the highest spires of the city, the twilight breeze was beginning to caress my forehead, when, absorbed in the ideas that had suddenly assailed me upon contemplating those silent remains of other ages, more poetic than the material one in which we live and drown in sheer prose, I let the pencil drop from my hands and abandoned the drawing, reclining against the wall that was at my back and abandoning myself completely to the dreams of the imagination. What was I thinking? I do not know if I will know how to say it. I clearly saw epochs succeed one another, some walls collapsing and others rising. I saw some men, or rather, I saw some women make way for other women, and the former and those who came after, turning to dust and flying away undone, a breath of wind bearing beauty away, beauty that drew secret sighs, that engendered passions and was a fountain of pleasures; then... what do I know... all confused, I saw many things jumbled together, and lace and stucco dressing tables with clouds of aroma and beds of flowers; narrow and gloomy cells with a kneeler and a crucifix; at the foot of the crucifix an open book, and upon the book a skull; severe and grandiose halls, covered with tapestries and adorned with trophies of war, and many women crossing and recrossing before my eyes; tall, pale, and thin nuns; dark-skinned odalisques with very red lips and very black eyes; ladies of pure profile, haughty bearing, and majestic gait.

All these things I saw, and many more of those that after being thought cannot be remembered; of those so immaterial that it is impossible to enclose them in the narrow circle of the word, when suddenly I leaped upon my seat, and passing my hand over my eyes to convince myself that I was not still dreaming, rising as if moved by a nervous spring, I fixed my gaze on one of the high lookouts of the convent. I had seen, I could have no doubt of it, I had seen her perfectly: a very white hand, coming out of one of the holes of those mortar lookouts, resembling chessboard squares, had waved several times as if greeting me with a silent and affectionate sign. And it was greeting me; it was not possible for me to be wrong... I was alone, completely alone in the square.

In vain I awaited the night, nailed to that spot, and without removing my eyes for an instant from the lookout; uselessly I returned many times to occupy the dark stone that served as my seat the afternoon I saw that mysterious hand appear, already the object of my nighttime dreams and my daytime deliriums. I never saw it again...

And the hour finally arrived when I must depart from Toledo leaving there, as a useless and ridiculous burden, all the illusions that had arisen in my mind within its bosom. I put the papers away in my portfolio again with a sigh; but before putting them away I wrote another date, the second, the one I know by the date of the hand. Upon writing it, I looked for a moment at the previous one, that of the window, and I could not help smiling at my madness.

From the time the strange adventure I have related took place until I returned to Toledo, nearly a year went by, during which its memory did not cease to present itself to my imagination, at first at all hours and with all its details; then less frequently, and lastly with such vagueness that I myself sometimes came to believe I had been the plaything of an illusion or a dream.

However, as soon as I arrived at the city, which some with such good reason call the Spanish Rome, it assaulted me anew, and with my memory full of it I set out, preoccupied, to wander the streets, without a fixed path, without any preconceived intention of heading to any definite point.

The day was sad, with that sadness that reaches everything one hears, sees, and feels. The sky was the color of lead, and in its melancholy reflection the buildings looked older, stranger, and darker. The air groaned along the winding, narrow streets, bringing in its gusts, like lost notes of a mysterious symphony, now unintelligible words, the clamor of bells, or echoes of deep and distant strikes. The damp and cold atmosphere froze the soul with its glacial breath.

I walked for several hours through the most remote and deserted neighborhoods, absorbed in a thousand confused imaginings, and contrary to my habit, with my gaze vague and lost in space, without a single whimsical detail of architecture, nor a monument of unknown order, nor a marvelous and hidden work of art managing to call my attention—in short, none of those things upon whose minute examination I would pause at every step when only ideas of art and historical memories occupied my mind.

The sky was closing in ever darker; the air was blowing with more force and noise, and a fine, penetrating rain of melted snow had begun to fall in tiny drops, when, without knowing how, for I still did not know the way, and as if led there by an impulse I could not resist, an impulse that dragged me mysteriously to the spot toward which my thoughts were going, I found myself in the solitary square my readers already know.

Upon finding myself in that place I emerged from the sort of lethargy in which I was plunged, as if I had been awakened from a deep sleep by a violent jolt.

I cast a glance around me. Everything was as I had left it. I am wrong, it was sadder. I do not know whether the darkness of the sky, the lack of greenery, or the state of my spirit was the cause of this sadness; but the truth is that between the feeling I experienced upon contemplating those places for the first time and the one that struck me then, there was all the distance that exists from melancholy to bitterness.

I contemplated the gloomy convent for a few moments, on that occasion more gloomy than ever to my eyes; and as I was preparing to walk away, the sound of a bell struck my ears, a bell with a cracked and muffled voice, which tolled slowly, while there accompanied it, forming a contrast with it, a sort of small bell that suddenly began to ring with a speed and a pitch so sharp and continuous that it seemed as though stricken with vertigo.

Nothing could be stranger than that building, whose black silhouette was outlined against the sky like that of a rock bristling with thousands upon thousands of whimsical peaks, speaking with tongues of bronze through its bells, which seemed to sway at the impulse of invisible beings, one as if weeping with stifled sobs, the other as if laughing with shrill guffaws, resembling the laughter of a madwoman.

At intervals, and mingling with the deafening noise of the bells, I thought I could also perceive confused notes from an organ and the words of a religious and solemn chant.

I changed my mind; and instead of moving away from that place, I reached the door of the temple and asked one of the ragged beggars sitting upon its stone steps:

“What is going on here?”

“A habit-taking ceremony,” the poor man answered me, interrupting the prayer he was murmuring between his teeth, to resume it afterwards, though not without first kissing the copper coin I placed in his hand when asking him my question.

I had never witnessed this ceremony; nor had I ever seen the interior of the convent church. Both considerations impelled me to penetrate its enclosure.

The church was tall and dark: its naves were formed by two rows of composite pillars made of slender columns joined in a bundle, resting on a wide, octagonal base, and from whose rich crown of capitals sprang the origins of the robust pointed arches. The high altar was placed at the back, beneath a Renaissance-style dome encrusted with cherubs bearing coats of arms, griffins, whose finials feigned profuse foliage, cornices with moldings and gilded rosettes, and whimsical, elegant designs. Around the naves could be seen a multitude of dark chapels, in the depths of which burned a few lamps, resembling stars lost in the sky of a dark night. Chapels of Arabic, Gothic, or Churrigueresque architecture: some closed with magnificent iron grilles, others with humble wooden railings; these plunged into shadows with an ancient marble tomb before the altar; those profusely illuminated with an image dressed in gaudy tinsel and surrounded by silver and wax votives with little bows of brightly colored ribbon.

Contributing to give a more mysterious character to the entire church, completely harmonious in its confusion and artistic disorder with the rest of the convent, was the fantastic clarity that illuminated it. From the silver and copper lamps hanging from the vaults; from the candles on the altars and the narrow pointed arches and the twin windows of the wall, rays of light of a thousand diverse colors departed: white, those penetrating from the street through some small skylights in the dome; red, those detaching themselves from the candles of the altarpieces; green, blue, and a hundred other different shades, those making their way through the painted glass of the rose windows. All these reflections, insufficient to flood that sacred enclosure with adequate clarity, seemed as though they were struggling, mingling with one another at certain points, while making others stand out as a luminous, brilliant spot against the veiled, dark backgrounds of the chapels. Despite the religious festival taking place there, the faithful gathered were few. The ceremony had begun quite some time ago and was about to conclude. The priests officiating at the high altar were at that moment descending the carpet-covered steps, enveloped in a cloud of bluish incense that swayed slowly in the air, to make their way to the choir where the nuns could be heard intoning a psalm.