There was no such place, of course.
"I shall see your father at once," shouted the priest, and he rushed out of the cathedral like a bull.
My brother and I then made our escape through the cloister.
This red-faced priest, fat and ferocious, rushing out of the dark to choke a nine-year-old boy, has always been to me a symbol of the Catholic religion.
This experience of my boyhood partly explains my anti-clericalism. I recall Don Tirso with an undying hate, and were he still alive—I have no idea whether he is or not—I should not hesitate to climb up to the roof of his house some dark night, and shout down his chimney in a cavernous voice: "Don Tirso! You are a damned villain!"
A VISIONARY ROWDY
I was something of a rowdy as a boy and rather quarrelsome. The first day I went to school in Pamplona, I came out disputing with another boy of my own age, and we fought in the street until we were separated by a cobbler and the blows of a leather strap, to which he added kicks. Later, I foolishly quarrelled and fought whenever the other boys set me on. In our stone-throwing escapades on the outskirts of the town, I was always the aggressor, and quite indefatigable.
When I began to study medicine, I found that my aggressiveness had departed completely. One day after quarrelling with another student in the cloisters of San Carlos, I challenged him to fight. When we got out on the street, it struck me as foolish to goad him to hit me in the eye or else to land on my nose with his fist, and I slipped off and went home. I lost my morale as a bully then and there. Although I was a fighter from infancy, I was also something of a dreamer, and the two strains scarcely make a harmonious blend.
Before I was grown, I saw Gisbert's Death of the Comuneros reproduced as a chromo. For a long, long while, I always seemed to see that picture hanging in all its variety of colour on the wall before me at night. For months and months after my vigil with the body of the man who had been garroted outside of Pamplona, I never entered a dark room but that his image rose up before me in all its gruesome details. I also passed through a period of disagreeable dreams. Some time would elapse after I awoke before I was able to tell where I was, and I was frightened by it.