-Xxx-

Ten years form a stage, not only in the life of an individual, but in that of nations. Ten years comprise a period of renewal: ten years rarely pass in vain, and he who looks back is usually surprised at the ground covered in a decade. But just as there are persons, so there are places for which the lapse of a tenth of a century is imperceptible. There stand the Pazos de Ulloa, which will not belie me. The great burrow, defying time, remains as heavy, sombre, and forbidding as ever. No useful or graceful innovation is visible in its furniture, in its orchard, or in its tilled lands. The wolves of the coat-of-arms have not grown tame; the pine puts forth no fresh shoots; the same symmetrical waves of petrified water wash the piers of the stately bridge.

On the other hand the little town of Cebre, paying homage to progress, has attended to “moral and material improvements,” to quote an enlightened townsman who sends letters to the newspapers of Pontevedra and Orense. Politics is no longer chattered about solely in the tobacco-shop: for that purpose there has been founded a Club of Instruction and Recreation, Arts and Sciences (so runs its charter), and some little shops have been established which the aforesaid citizen terms bazaars. It is true that the two bosses still dispute the supreme sway; yet it now seems certain that Barbacana, representing reaction and tradition, is yielding ground to Trampeta, the living embodiment of advanced ideas and the new age.

Some malicious tongues say that the secret of the liberal boss’s triumph lies in the fact that his adversary, now a supporter of Cánovas, has grown extremely old and infirm, having lost much of his fire and of his untamed, treacherous spirit. However that may be, Barbacana’s influence is battered and diminished.

One who has aged prematurely is the former chaplain of the Pazos. His hair is streaked with silver; his mouth sunken; his eyes dimmed; his shoulders bent. He walks slowly along the narrow lane winding among vines and thickets towards the church of Ulloa.

What a poor church! It looks rather like a peasant’s hovel, its sacred character being revealed only by the cross crowning the little roof of the porch. The impression is one of melancholy and dampness; the grassy churchyard is at all hours, even at midday, sprinkled and soaked with dew. The soil of the churchyard rises higher than the peristyle of the church, and the building sinks, buried in the earth that slowly slips down from the neighbouring knoll. In one corner of the yard a little detached belfry supports the cracked bell; in the centre a low cross, upon three stone steps, lends a poetic, pensive touch to the scene. There, in that corner of the universe, dwells Jesus Christ... but how lonely! How forgotten!

Julián paused before the cross. He was old in truth, and also more manly: certain features of his delicate face had set and acquired greater firmness; his lips, drawn and pale, revealed the severity of a man accustomed to subdue all passionate impulses, every earthly desire. Mature age had taught him how great is the merit and must be the crown of the pure priest. He had become very indulgent towards others, as well as severe with himself.

On treading the churchyard of Ulloa he experienced a most singular impression. It seemed to him that some person dearly loved by him was walking there, resurrected, living, enveloping him in her presence, warming him with her breath. And who could that person be? Good heavens! Could he now fall into the absurdity of believing that the lady of Moscoso was alive, despite having read her death notice? So strange a delusion was doubtless caused by his return to Ulloa after a lapse of ten years. The death of the lady of Moscoso! Nothing easier than to verify it... There lay the cemetery. To approach an ivy-crowned wall, push a wooden door, and enter its precincts.

It was a sombre spot, though lacking the weeping willows and cypresses that so well accompany the solemnity of churchyards with their stately poses. It was bounded on one side by the church walls, on the other by three ramparts covered with ivy and creeping plants; and the gate opposite that from the yard was formed of a wooden railing through which was visible a clear, remote horizon of mountains, violet-tinted at that hour when the sun, not yet hot, begins to climb towards its zenith, and nature awakes as if from a bath, shivering with morning freshness and chill. Over the gate hung an ancient olive, where a thousand noisy sparrows nested, fluttering among the boughs; and opposite stood an enormous hydrangea bush, withered and bent by the autumn rains, sickly and graceful with its clusters of faded blue and yellowish blossoms. To this was reduced the whole ornament of the cemetery, though not its vegetation, which from its rank luxuriance inspired disgust and superstitious dread, prompting the fancy whether in those stout nettles, half the height of a man, in that lush grass, in those vigorous thistles with candle-yellow petals, there might not be incarnated by some mysterious transmigration the vegetative souls of those who slept there for ever, without having lived, without having loved, without ever having throbbed for any noble, generous, spiritual idea such as stirs the mind of thinker or artist. It seemed that human substance—of a rude, primitive humanity, sunk to the neck in ignorance and matter—nourished that mournful flora. And in truth, in the soil, ridged with little mounds, the foot felt at times the hardness of ill-covered coffins and yielding softnesses that inspired horror, as if treading upon flaccid corpses. A frozen breath, an odour of mould and decay, a sepulchral atmosphere rose from the uneven ground, packed with dead piled one upon another; and among the damp greenery, marked with the glistening trail of snails and slugs, leaned black wooden crosses edged with white, bearing curious inscriptions crowded with misspellings and strange blunders. Julián, experiencing that prickling in the soles of his feet which comes from treading on something living or once endowed with life, felt a sudden agitation: one of the crosses, taller than the rest, bore a name in white letters. He drew near and deciphered the inscription, unmindful of errors: “Here lie the ashes of Primitivo Suárez; his kin and friends pray to God for his soul”... The ground there rose in a swelling mound. Julián murmured a prayer, turned away hastily, fancying he felt beneath his feet the bronze body of his formidable foe. At that very moment there arose from the cross a little white butterfly, one of those late butterflies of the year that fly slowly as if chilled, and settle on the first resting-place they find. The new rector of Ulloa followed it, and saw it light upon a wretched mausoleum, cornered between the wall and the church masonry.

There the insect halted, and there Julián too, with beating heart, clouded sight, and his spirit for the first time in long years overwhelmed and utterly unhinged by the shock of an emotion so deep and extraordinary that he could not have explained how it invaded him, mastering his nature, breaking dams, leaping barriers, sweeping all before it with the superhuman power of long-repressed feelings that at last become absolute masters of the soul because they overflow and submerge it. He did not even notice the absurdity of the tomb, built of stone and lime and decorated with skulls, bones, and other funereal emblems by the clumsy hand of some village dauber; he needed not to decipher the inscription, for he knew that where the butterfly had settled, there rested Nucha, Señorita Marcelina, the saint, the victim, the maiden ever pure and heavenly. There she lay, alone, forsaken, betrayed, outraged, calumniated, her wrists bruised by a brutal hand and her face withered by disease, terror, and grief... Thinking of this, prayer died upon Julián’s lips, the current of existence rolled back ten years, and in a transport rare in him, but sudden and irresistible, he fell upon his knees, stretched out his arms, and passionately kissed the wall of the niche, sobbing like a child or a woman, pressing his cheeks against the cold surface, and digging his nails into the lime until he tore it away...

He heard laughter, whispers, merry clamour, unsuited to the place and the hour. He turned and rose in confusion. Before him stood a charming pair, illumined by the sun which was now mounting towards mid-heaven. The boy was the handsomest youth fancy could conceive; and if as a child he resembled Cupid of old, the lengthening of lines that distinguishes puberty from childhood gave him now a remarkable likeness to the archangels and travelling angels of biblical engravings, uniting feminine loveliness and curly locks with touches of graceful manly severity. As for the girl, slender and tall for her eleven years, she struck Julián to the heart by her astonishing likeness to her poor mother at the same age: the same long black tresses, the same pale face, though darker, more matt, of purer oval, with brighter eyes and a firmer gaze. Well indeed did Julián know the pair! How often had he held them in his lap!

Only one circumstance caused him to doubt whether those two enchanting children were indeed the bastard and the legitimate heiress of Moscoso. While Sabel’s son wore clothes of good cloth, cut between well-to-do peasant and young gentleman, Nucha’s daughter, clad in a faded print dress, wore shoes so torn that she might truly be said to go barefoot.

Paris, March 1886.

End of the Project Gutenberg edition of The House of Ulloa, by Emilia Pardo Bazán.