It was this, the arrival of this priest weighed down with good intentions, his Masses, his conversation with the mentally unstable inhabitants of magical Ébora, this and no other, the most remarkable event the cruel postwar brought to this place. Don Blas didn’t stop visiting the Fountain of Enchantment, talking to those present about the New Testament, and the Old, and the need to have the hope of eternal life for after this life of conflict and suffering. The men didn’t pay him much attention. Some, weighed down with uric acid, carried on drinking. Others, their stomachs on fire, burped loftily and said, “Excuse me, father,” after such digestive outbursts. The rest listened to the priest’s words, wide-eyed with incredulity. They never took him all that seriously. Perhaps they suspected a triple share of the “woes and disturbances” he liked to talk about would soon land on this precocious seminarian’s head.
To start with, Don Blas, as yet unskilled in the handling of ars oratoria, repeated his sermons, but, following a meaningful event that changed his life and that of Ébora’s inhabitants, he altered his discourse at each and every celebration, a gesture that was much appreciated by his audience, who saw their evangelical knowledge increase and, above all, learned thousands of extremely important things for their academic formation, because Don Blas, with all his resolve, did not limit himself to commenting on Biblical passages, he went much further than that: Arithmetic, History, Literature, Geography, Orthography, Latin and other disciplines. He decided on this plan of action a few weeks after taking possession of the parish, one night in front of the life-size figure of St Benedict, much venerated in Ébora owing to its reputation for curing all types of swellings or wounds, be they blisters, lumps, boils or any other kind of tumefaction, as well as certain spiritual ills. The people would wet a cloth in the font and then touch the saint with it. At night, they would rub their lesions with the cloth and in seven days, more or less, the ailments would vanish. It even cured epilepsy, known then as the “devil’s disease”, for a month the sick person being required to drink only holy water filtered through a white cloth that moments earlier had been passed over St Benedict’s body. A miracle. Don Blas, who at the time didn’t believe much in such things, thought the water in contact with the wooden surface must have produced a curative substance, and yet he never dared mention this argument to any of the locals, it was better to foment faith and hope, charity not being an abundant virtue in that time of hunger, less so in Ébora, and outings that went unconfessed by assassins. Horror lingering in dawn shots and screams, once the war was over and absence hovered above each house in the country. Ébora, hidden among the mountains, was barely touched by misfortune and was left to grow, on its own, accompanied by a kind of madness that kissed its cracks of melancholy future.
The night the priest decided to accompany his Masses with Arithmetic, Latin and other such knowledge occurred in the early forties of the century that had 1900 as its outset. After dinner, Don Blas perceived a strange noise, something like a voice echoing in the church. He left his room, which was just above the altar, went downstairs, looked hither and thither, gazed around, peered this way and that, but didn’t see anybody. The voice came again. He hurried towards it. It was a moan coming from the niche that contained the figure of St Benedict. He drew near. Gazed into the image’s eyes. “Impossible,” he murmured a couple of times. He turned his back on the saint and then heard, “Blas, Blas, take the rose.” There could be no doubt, the statue was talking to him.
The priest rubbed his eyes, pinched his arm to see if he was sleeping, jumped up and down, waggled his head about, slapped his face with his soft, seminarian’s hands that were more used to books than to prodigies, jumped up and down again. The voice continued, “Blas, Blas, take the rose.” “What is it, Lord?” “This isn’t the Lord, this is Benedict, the saint who cures all kinds of blisters, I have to give you an important message for your future and that of this community of lunatics, madmen, this barmy army, unhinged, unstable troop anchored in perpetual insanity and unreason.”
Before saying another word, the priest peered into every corner of the church, under the pews, among the candles, behind the altar, at the figure of Christ, in the confessionals. There was nobody there, he was all alone. Reality, no doubt, always surpassed fiction, at least the fiction he had read as a child in books by Stevenson or Verne. It seemed astonishing to him that a sensible man like himself, who had studied in a seminary and could discern fantasies and other such impossibilities, should be talking to a statue, a wooden statue that was famous for curing all kinds of ailments, including the “devil’s disease”. When he thought about this illness, the devil popped into his mind: was it the devil talking to him right now? He certainly believed in Satan, in Lucifer. That was a lesson of obligatory interest in any priest’s career: during the first few centuries of the Church, the name of Lucifer had been applied to Christ, the true light, then applied to Satan as a proper noun, to whom was attributed the passage from Isaiah concerning the fall of the Babylonian king. He tried to remember the passage, and remembered it: Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris, or something like that, memory was not his greatest attribute. He believed in the devil: to get to priest, certain inevitable dogmas or axioms are required. But he wasn’t sure how to address him. A cold sweat began to stream down his angelic face, he started trembling, puffing in and out, very nervously.
This, he thought, is a divine punishment for suppressing a supernatural gift in my insides, for denying the great mysteries of Christianity, for thinking Jesus didn’t resurrect Lazarus, for believing that business about the loaves and the fish was just a story invented by people who were fond of hyperbole and excess, perhaps those were the first symptoms the telluric currents of Ébora, arising in the Fountain of Enchantment, were depositing in his body. He knelt down in front of the cross hanging on the far wall. “Forgive me, Lord, forgive me because I also didn’t know what I was doing. Show me the path I should follow, with faith no demon can have power over me, faith, give me faith, Lord.”
Wrapped in tears, all sorrowful, he again heard the selfsame voice: “Blas, Blas, stop all this moaning and listen to me, take the rose!” He calmed down, there was no way the devil could talk so benevolently. He calmed down and ran, ran towards the saint, held out his arm to grab the red rose being proffered. He looked at him and said, “What is it, St Benedict, primordial saint, healer and miracle-worker, legend of the celestial Parnassus?” “Culture, Blas, humanity is in need of culture, lots of culture, that is the source of all good or luck or pleasure or gladness, the only stimulus capable of turning the soul’s indigence into plenty, the cause of joy or happiness, the reason for gladness and the path that enlightens doubt and darkness, culture leads to faith, men and women need culture. Blas, listen to me.”
Emotion got the better of him, and he accidentally dropped the rose. The saint became annoyed. “Pick it up, anyone would think you had butter fingers.” He quickly picked it up. St Benedict continued with his discourse: “Don’t enclose yourself in mystical arguments nobody can understand, you have to be useful to the inhabitants of Ébora, to show them the wonders of the world, the bottomless well of knowledge, they’re going through a difficult patch, the future lies in your inquisitiveness, you can’t go anywhere without culture, culture, Blas, culture, that is the rose you’re holding in your hand, it needs care, attention, to be put on show so those who look at it feel a fragment of paradise has been installed in their breasts, a moment of joy, remember man does not live from bread alone – or woman either – remember the soul’s nourishment is not matter, but ether, and ether, my dear Blas, is composed of letters and numbers, numbers and letters, agglutinations of different types and forms that, together or alone, lay down the future’s foundations, the wealth of all civilizations, don’t ever forget this, go back to ether, an untouchable, invaluable element that fills and inhabits the interior of transparent or opaque bodies, an invisible substance born in every space, in the soul, our soul that is damned if we don’t do enough to earn a patch of land in paradise, as I did when alive, and still do now in death, day after day healing blisters and botches, day after day looking after this Ébora full of unstable, strange men and women, looking after you, ever since you were a student at the seminary, ever since you were born, so you would grow in precepts of the faith, so you would walk in the way of the Lord, and I succeeded, here you are, don’t throw away this opportunity to add to your possessions in paradise, ether, ether, letters and numbers filling empty spaces.” How much St Benedict knew, thought Don Blas. He also thought about the devil, culture, faith, miracles… and ether, of course.
The truth is, when the cock crowed very shrilly the next morning, the priest had a terrible headache, as if a crystal beam had tried to penetrate his shattered brain. A headache that went from the back of his neck to his eye sockets, passing through him, irritating him, embittering his happy awakening of cocks and goldfinches and winds. A nightmare, he thought. “A nightmare because of last night’s dinner, I can’t go drinking wine before going to bed, or putting so much bread inside my body, heavy starch that blocks my intestines, no, no, wine has never sat well with me,” he affirmed, perched on the edge of his bed. He examined himself in the mirror, gently slapped his face, told himself off: “Don’t drink, responsibility, you’re the shepherd who should guide his flock, direct the sheep along the path of wisdom and justice, amend their mistakes, correct their sins, don’t drink, Ébora is full of woes and disturbances, don’t drink, shepherd, don’t drink.” He put on his cassock, washed his face, breakfasted on black coffee and a few crumbs of cornbread left over from the previous night’s dinner, an agape he had accompanied with a couple of bowls of wine and potatoes, no lack of those, my goodness, in this land, its rich and fertile surroundings, at a time of hunger and misery and scarcity. He was glad about the first posting his bishop had given him, these people seemed to be crying out for his words. That day, in all six sermons, he would talk about the Road to Santiago, St John the Baptist, the Good Samaritan, honesty, the seven deadly sins, the Last Judgement; he would keep a few other matters in reserve in case his audience silently asked for further interventions: the need for forgiveness, Mary Magdalene, the prophets and last of all, should the previous night’s dream be of any use, culture. It was ten to eight and at that precise moment, as he opened the door, a sudden episode made Don Blas’s satisfied face grow pale: on the floor, all forgotten, gazing timidly at his locks that were as blond as the rays of the ruddy, ferocious midday sun, was a rose.
