Spain, v. 1 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

square is tremendous!” Why? I do not know: it may have been an illusion of mine. It is with cities as with faces—each one reads them in his own way.

The streets and squares of Saragossa impressed me thus, and at every turn I said, “This place seems to have been made for a combat,” and I looked around as though something was needed to complete the scene—a barricade, the loopholes, and the guns. I felt again all the profound emotions which the account of that horrible siege had produced upon me: I saw the Saragossa of 1809, and hurried from street to street with increasing curiosity to find the traces of that gigantic struggle at which the world trembled. Here, I thought, indicating to myself the place, passed the division of Grandjean, there perhaps Musnier’s command sallied forth; at this point the troops of Morlot rushed into the fight; at that angle before me the light infantry of the Vistula made their charge; still farther round occurred the attack of the Polish infantry; yonder three hundred Spaniards were cut down; at this spot burst the great mine which blew a company of the Valencian regiment to atoms; in this corner fell General Lacoste, his forehead pierced by a bullet.

There lie the famous streets of Santa Engracia, Santa Monica, and San Augustine, through which the French advanced toward the Coso from house to house with a blasting of mines and counter-mines, through crumbling walls and smoking beams, under a tempest of bullets, grape-shot, and rocks.

There are the narrow ways, the little courts, the dark alleys, where they fought those horrid battles, hand to hand, with bayonet and dagger, with scythes and their very teeth; their houses barricaded and defended room by room, in the midst of fire and ruin, the narrow stairways which ran with blood, the gloomy halls which echoed to cries of pain and despair, which were covered with mutilated corpses, which saw all the horrors of pestilence, famine, and death.

As I was walking from street to street I came out in front of the cathedral of Our Lady of the Pillar, the terrible Madonna to whom came the squalid rout of soldiers, citizens, and women to plead for protection and courage before they went to die on the ramparts. The people of Saragossa still persevere in their ancient fanaticism in regard to it, and venerate it with a peculiar sentiment of love and fear, which still lives in the minds of persons who are strangers to all other religious feelings. Nevertheless, from the moment you enter the court and raise your eyes toward the church to the moment you turn on leaving it to take a farewell look, be careful not to smile or make any careless gesture which might possibly seem irreverent; for there are those who see you, who watch you, and who will on occasion follow you, and if faith is dead within you, prepare your mind, before you cross the sacred threshold, for a confused reawakening of those childish terrors which few churches in the world have such power to revive even in the coldest and most callous of hearts.

The first stone of Our Lady of the Pillar was laid in the year 1686, in a place where stood a chapel erected by St. James to receive the miraculous image of the Virgin, which still remains. It is an immense edifice, with a rectangular base, surmounted by eleven domes painted in different colors, giving the whole a pleasing Moorish effect. The walls are unadorned and dark in color. Let us enter. It is a vast cathedral, dark, bare, and cold, divided into three naves, encircled by modest chapels. One’s eye turns quickly to the sanctuary which rises in the middle: there stands the statue of the Virgin. It is a temple within a temple, and might stand alone in the middle of the square if the building which surrounds it were torn away. A circle of beautiful marble columns, arranged in the form of an ellipse, bear up a dome richly adorned with sculpture, open at the top, and ornamented within the opening by aspiring figures of angels and saints. In the centre stands the great altar; on its right the statue of St. James; on the left, far back under a silver canopy which gleams against a background of a richly-draped velvet curtain sown with stars, amid the flashing of thousands of costly offerings, in the glare of innumerable lights, the famous statue of the Virgin, where St. James placed it nineteen centuries ago, carved in wood, black with age, all enveloped in a bishop’s gown, excepting its head and the head of the Christ child. In front of it, between the columns grouped around the sanctuary and in the far recesses of the naves, in every place from which one can see the venerated image, kneel faithful worshippers, prostrate, their heads almost touching the pavement, their hands clasping the crucifix—poor women, laboring-men, ladies, soldiers, boys, and girls—and through the different doorways of the cathedral passes a continuous stream of people, walking slowly on tiptoe, with solemn faces; and in that deep silence not a murmur, not a rustle, not a sigh; the very life of the crowd seems suspended: it seems as though they were all expecting a divine apparition, a mysterious voice, some awful revelation from the dim sanctuary; and even one who does not have their faith, and who does not pray, is forced to gaze himself at that point where all eyes are turned, and the current of his thoughts is interrupted by a sort of restless expectation.

“Oh, would that some voice would speak!” I thought. “Would that the apparition would appear! Would that there might be a word or a sigh which would turn my hair white with fear and make me utter a cry the like of which was never heard on earth, if so I might for ever be delivered from that horrible doubt which saps my brain and saddens my life!”

I tried to enter the sanctuary, but I could not have done so without passing over the shoulders of a hundred worshippers, some of whom had already begun to look surly because I was going around with a note-book and pencil in my hand. I attempted to go down into the subterranean crypt where are the tombs of the archbishops and the urn which holds the heart of John II. of Austria, the natural son of Philip IV., but this I was not allowed to do. I asked to see the vestments, the gold, the jewels, which had been poured out at the feet of the Virgin by the lords, the rulers, and the monarchs of every age and every land, but I was told that it was not the proper time, and not even by showing a shiny peseta was I able to corrupt the honest sacristan. But I was not refused some information concerning the worship of the Virgin after I had told him, to win favor in his eyes, that I was born in Rome in the Borgo Pio, and that from the little terrace in front of my home I could see the windows of the Pope’s apartments.

“It is a fact,” said he, “almost a miracle—and one would not believe it if it were not attested by tradition—that at the very early time when the statue of the Virgin was placed on its pedestal, even down to the days in which we are living, except in the night when the cathedral is closed, the sanctuary has never been empty a moment—not even a moment, in the full sense of the word. Our Lady of the Pillar has never been alone. In the pedestal there has been a hollow worn by kisses in which I could put my head. Not even the Moors dared to forbid the worship of Our Lady; the chapel of St. James was always respected. The cathedral has been struck by lightning many times, and the sanctuary too, even on the inside, right in the midst of a crowd of people. Well! the souls of the lost may deny the protection of the Virgin, but no—one—has—ever—been—struck! And the bombs of the French? They have burned and ruined other buildings, but when they fell on the cathedral of Our Lady it was as though they had fallen on the rocks of the Sierra Morena. And the French, who pillaged on every hand, did they have the heart to touch the treasures of Our Lady? One general only allowed himself to take some trifling thing to give to his wife, offering a rich gift to the Virgin in compensation, but do you know what followed? In the next battle a cannon-ball carried away one of his legs. There is not a trace of a general or a king who has imposed on Our Lady, and moreover it is written up above that this church will stand to the end of the world.” And he ran on in this vein until a priest made a mysterious sign from a dark corner of the sacristy, and he at once bowed and disappeared.