“But to me, and to all the community, you seemed to be resigned to the monastic life.” “I seemed a lie—I lived a lie—I was a lie—I ask pardon of my last moments for speaking the truth—I presume they neither can refuse me, or discredit my words—I hated the monastic life. Inflict pain on man, and his energies are roused—condemn him to insanity, and he slumbers like animals that have been found inclosed in wood and stone, torpid and content; but condemn him at once to pain and insanity, as they do in convents, and you unite the sufferings of hell and of annihilation. For sixty years I have cursed my existence. I never woke to hope, for I had nothing to do or to expect. I never lay down with consolation, mockeries of God, as exercises of devotion. The moment life is put beyond the reach of your will, and placed under the influence of mechanical operations, it becomes, to thinking beings, a torment insupportable.
“I never ate with appetite, because I knew, that with or without it, I must go to the refectory when the bell rung. I never lay down to rest in peace, because I knew the bell was to summon me in defiance of nature, whether I was disposed to prolong or shorten my repose. I never prayed, for my prayers were dictated to me. I never hoped, for my hopes were founded not on the truth of God, but on the promises and threatenings of man. My salvation hovered on the breath of a being as weak as myself, whose weakness I was nevertheless obliged to flatter, and struggle to obtain a gleam of the grace of God, through the dark distorted medium of the vices of man. It never reached me—I die without light, hope, faith, or consolation.”
Under circumstances like these the most passionate contentions are excited by the slightest causes, and the minutest deviations from regularity are regarded as adventures of the most important gravity. Yet the liveliness thus aroused naturally becomes morbid and distorted, and degenerates into ‘spleen, malignity, curiosity.’ The soul is stunted for ever, and the mind grows impervious to every great or generous feeling; barbarous punishments are inflicted for the slightest offences. Alonzo is, from his very entrance there, the black sheep of this community. He is, indeed, most punctual in his religious performances, but it is easy to see that he is not penetrated with the spirit of the monastical life, and his exactness in the forms only ‘will not do’ for the monks. They can not excite his interest about such matters as whether the hour for matins should be postponed ‘full five minutes,’ and even a sham miracle is performed for his sake in vain. Before long an unexpected incident gives them opportunity of assuming towards him an attitude decidedly hostile. One night the porter of the convent smuggles to Alonzo a scrap of paper, which turns out to be a letter from his brother Juan, whom he has seen but once and who is intent upon effecting his liberation from the convent.
Juan, the younger son of the duke Monçada, has been educated by the Director and, from his earliest infancy, been taught to hate his brother and regard him as a bastard and usurper of his rights. In this the Director first succeeds, but then the impetuous and vehement nature which he has tried to develop in Juan, is suddenly turned against himself. To the monastical life Juan has an aversion as strong as that of Alonzo himself, and when he learns that the latter is to be made a monk, he cannot but think it an injustice, and begins to feel a strange interest in his unfortunate brother. It is a fine and touching piece of juvenile psychology Maturin gives in the short sketch of Juan. A mind naturally generous, if ever so spoiled and distorted by improper education, always wishes its enemy to be in a fighting condition; and when Juan thinks of Alonzo as a monk, an object unfit for hate and unable to defend himself, his feelings of hostility are replaced by a passion exactly opposite, only stronger, as being conformable to his natural instincts. He now finds out all the wrongs done to Alonzo, and devotes his energies to his liberation. Alonzo, he learns, can reclaim his vows, if he declares them to have been extorted from him by fraud or terror; the business can be carried on in a civil court. Juan then procures an able advocate and succeeds in bribing the porter of the convent, through whom Alonzo is to send him a written memorial to be used by the advocate.
Having received his brother’s communication Alonzo at once proceeds to write the memorial, on the pretext of writing his confessions, and safely dispatches it to Juan. His frequent demands for paper, however, have excited the suspicions of the Superior, and Alonzo is accused of having employed the paper granted to him in some purpose contrary to the interests of the community. His cell and his person are searched with a zeal showing that the monks have, at last, got something to do. Nothing is found, but a few days later a copy of the memorial is sent by the advocate to the Superior. Now Alonzo is subjected to severe persecution on the part of the community, led by its brutal Superior. First of all he is confined in a subterranean dungeon, where he passes three days fighting with reptiles. Then he is removed to his cell, as the Superior, on account of the publicity with which the suit is carried on, dare not keep him actually imprisoned; still the community seems to have resolved that if he is to quit the convent, he is not to do so alive. He becomes the object of complete excommunication. He is excluded from the matins and from the church in general, and publicly pointed out as an object of the greatest abhorrence; he is never spoken to, every one shrinking from him as from a polluted being. At meals a mat is placed for him in the midst of the hall, where he is supplied with offal from the kitchen. The crucifix, the rosary, the vessel for holy water and everything else is removed from his cell so that at last there is nothing left except the bare walls and a miserable bed. The worst of all is that he is denied repose. One night he awakes to see his cell in flames; hideous figures have been scrawled on the walls with phosphorus. Another night he is aroused by a voice whispering to him temptations and blasphemies until he almost believes he is spoken to by the enemy of mankind. He cannot suppress a cry of horror; immediately a monk rushes in asking why he disturbs him in his sleep. Alonzo alleges turbulent dreams and the monk departs, but the following night the scenes are renewed. The voice becomes more and more horrible, uttering things which a good Catholic would shudder even to think of; once the image of the mother of God is displayed to him, and the voice exhorts him to spurn it and to spit upon it. Weak and delirious though he is, Alonzo still has power to resist these invitations. He cannot, consequently, be accused of obeying the temptations of Satan, but the news of his being subjected to them spread rapidly through the convent. Everybody believes, or pretends to believe it, and the general horror towards Alonzo increases; he is now excluded from all devotions. One night, when the voice again discusses the Madonna in an unutterable connection, the measure flows over:
I could bear it no longer. I sprung from my bed, I ran through the gallery like a maniac, knocking at the doors of the cells, and exclaiming, “Brother such a one, pray for me,—pray for me, I beseech you.” I roused the whole convent. Then I flew down to the church; it was open, and I rushed in. I ran up the aisle, I precipitated myself before the altar, I embraced the images, I clang to the crucifix with loud and reiterated supplications. The monks, awakened by my outcries, or perhaps on the watch for them, descended in a body to the church, but, perceiving I was there, they would not enter,—they remained at the doors, with lights in their hands, gazing on me. It was a singular contrast between me, hurrying round the church almost in the dark (for there were but a few lamps burning dimly), and the group at the door, whose expression of horror was strongly marked by the light, which appeared to have deserted me to concentrate itself among them. The most impartial person on earth might have supposed me deranged, or possessed, or both, from the state in which they saw me. Heaven knows, too, what construction might have been put on my wild actions, which the surrounding darkness exaggerated and distorted, or on the prayers which I uttered, as I included in them the horrors of the temptation against which I implored protection. Exhausted at length, I fell to the ground, and remained there, without the power of moving, but able to hear and observe every thing that passed. I heard them debate whether they should leave me there or not, till the Superior commanded them to remove that abomination from the sanctuary; and such was the terror of me into which they had acted themselves, that he had to repeat his orders before he could procure obedience to them. They approached me at last, with the same caution that they would an infected corse, and dragged me out by the habit, leaving me on the paved floor before the door of the church. They then retired, and in this state I actually fell asleep, and continued so till I was awoke by the bell for matins. I recollected myself, and attempted to rise; but my having slept on a damp floor, when in a fever from terror and excitement, had so cramped my limbs, that I could not accomplish this without the most exquisite pain. As the community passed in to matins, I could not suppress a few cries of pain. They must have seen what was the matter, but not one of them offered me assistance, nor did I dare to implore it. By slow and painful efforts, I at last reached my cell; but, shuddering at the sight of the bed, I threw myself on the floor for repose.—
With these procedures, however, the monks at last overshoot the mark. A closed community as the convent is, still the rumour is spread in Madrid, that a monk there is every night sorely harassed by the devil. This rumour also attracts the attention of the authorities, and the bishop of the diocese arrives to investigate the matter. He is a man calm, rigid, and passionless beyond measure, nor does he feel any personal sympathies for Alonzo; but when he sees the state of Alonzo’s cell and hears of the treatment he has been subjected to—which is contrary to the established rules of the convent—he sternly commands the Superior to restore everything to Alonzo and make him no longer an exception in any respect. Thus far, then, his torments now come to an end, but the greatest blow is yet to fall: intelligence reaches the convent of the failure of his appeal.
Day follows day without Alonzo’s heeding them, until a new adventure commences, more dreadful than all the previous, as Juan once more finds means of smuggling a letter to him. He has been kept in the country almost a prisoner, but has succeeded in escaping to Madrid and settling everything for the escape of Alonzo, which is to be accomplished with the help of one of the monks. This future companion of Alonzo is not an agreeable character; he has entered the convent in order to escape the punishment following parricide, and is a man who ‘envies Judas the thirty pieces of silver for which the Redeemer of mankind was sold.’ For money he has now undertaken to assist in the liberation of Alonzo. In spite of Juan’s encouragements, Alonzo feels despondent and disconsolate. He fully understands the difficulties of his enterprise; even if he should manage to quit the convent in safety, where could a runaway Spanish monk find refuge? Nevertheless he gets into contact with the monk, who soon fixes the night for their escapade. He has procured the key of a door leading to the vaults of the convent, which have long been disused. From the vaults there is a trap-door to a remote part of the garden, whence they are to climb the wall by a ladder procured by Juan. Before they start it strikes Alonzo that his companion cannot brave that risk merely on his account, and asks how he is, in future, to provide for his own safety. The answer has a peculiarity of its own, opening a prospect the like of which none of the ‘terrific’ writers before Maturin had invented:
“No, we must escape together. Could you suppose I would have so much anxiety about an event, in which I had no part but that of an assistant? It was of my own danger I was thinking,—it was of my own safety I was doubtful. Our situation has happened to unite very opposite characters in the same adventure, but it is an union inevitable and inseparable. Your destiny is now bound to mine by a tie which no human force can break,—we part no more for ever. The secret that each is in possession of, must be watched by the other. Our lives are in each other’s hands, and a moment of absence might be that of treachery. We must pass life in each watching every breath the other draws, every glance the other gives,—in dreading sleep as an involuntary betrayer, and watching the broken murmurs of each other’s restless dreams. We may hate each other, (for hatred itself would be a relief, compared to the tedium of our inseparability), but separate we must never.”
With these bright prospects the pair commence their nocturnal wandering in the subterranean vaults, one, no doubt, of the most frightful wanderings ever described in literature. All difficulties which possibly can be encountered in such enterprises are heaped upon them, from their first ineffectual attempts to force the door with the rusty key and with lacerated hands, till the moment they sink down, exhausted, at the trap-door, after losing their way, after seeing their lamps go out, and after stumbling all night in darkness amid terrors real and imaginary, physical and psychical. Alonzo remembers old superstitious tales of demons who seduce monks into the vaults of the convent, and almost fancies he can hear the choir of their infernal sabbath; he grows giddy and stupefied, his knees and hands are stript of skin, and an intolerable thirst is produced by the unnatural atmosphere. At last human nature can endure no more; they lay down ‘like two panting dogs’ in the darkness. When day draws nigh, a faint stream of light makes itself observable above their heads: they have arrived just at the trap-door they have been searching for. But even this hope is turned to despair when it appears that morning is so far advanced that people are already in the garden. They have to remain another twenty-four hours where they are. Retiring into a recess which the parricide seems to be acquainted with they fall asleep, but Alonzo is soon roused by the most hideous screams and imprecations which the other is uttering in his sleep. At last it becomes too much for Alonzo; he awakens his companion with great exertions and wildly vows he is not to sleep any more. The man obeys, but insists on telling a story which has reference to the very recess they are in and which proves to be as sinister as were his dreams.