The Dead Command / From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

In Madrid, the same thought had flashed through his brain one afternoon while he was strolling with two women through the outskirts of the town. The crests of the hills near the river were occupied by silent villages, among whose white edifices rose pointed groups of cypress; and on the opposite side of the great city also existed other bivouacs of silence and oblivion. The city was surrounded by a closely drawn cordon of fortresses of the departed. Half a million living beings swarmed through the streets, imagining themselves alone in the mastery and direction of their existences, never heeding the four—six—eight millions of their kind, close beside them, but invisible.

The same thought had come to him in Paris, where four millions of stirring citizens dwelt, surrounded by twenty or thirty millions of whilom inhabitants now asleep. The same melancholy reflections had haunted him in all the great cities.

The living were nowhere alone; the dead ever surrounded them, and as the dead were more, infinitely more, they weighed upon the living with the heaviness of time and of numbers.

No; the dead did not depart, as the people thought. The dead remained motionless on the brink of life, spying upon the new generations, forcing upon them the authority of the past with a rude tug at the soul whenever they tried to step out of the beaten path.

What tyranny was theirs! What unlimited power! It was futile to turn away the eyes and to stifle memory; the dead are everywhere; they occupy the highways of the living, and they stride out to meet us and remind us of their benefactions, compelling us to a debasing gratitude. What servitude! The house in which we live was constructed by the dead; religions were created by them; the laws which we obey the dead dictated. Our favorite dishes, our tastes, our passions, came from them; the foods which nourish us, all are produced by earth broken up by hands which now are dust. Morality, customs, prejudices, honor—these are their work. Had they thought in some different way, the present organizations of men would not be as they are today. The things which are agreeable to our senses are so because thus the dead willed them; the disagreeable and useless are detested by the will of those who no longer exist; what is moral and what is immoral are sentences pronounced centuries ago by them.

Those men who make an effort to say new things do nothing but repeat in different words the same thoughts that the dead had been expressing for centuries. That which we consider most spontaneous and personal in ourselves has been dictated to us by unseen masters lying in their earthen couches, who, in their turn, had learned the lesson from other ancestors. The gleam of our eyes is but the glow of the souls of our forefathers, as the lines in our faces reproduce and reflect the traces of generations long disappeared.

Febrer smiled sadly. We imagine that we think our own thoughts, while in the convolutions of our brain stirs a force which has lived in other organisms, like the sap of the grafted shoot which carries energy from old and dying trees to new offshoots. Much of the thought which we express spontaneously, as the latest novelty of our mind, is an idea of those others, encysted in our brain at birth, and which suddenly bursts its bondage. Our tastes, our caprices, our virtues and our defects, our affinities and our repulsions—all inherited, all a work of those who have disappeared but who survive in us.

With what terror Jaime thought of the power of the dead! They concealed themselves to make their tyranny less cruel, but they had not really perished; their souls were lying within the confines of our existence, just as their bodies formed an entrenched field roundabout the man-made towns. They scrutinized us with arbitrary eyes; they followed us, guiding us with invisible clutch at the slightest indication of deviating from the path; they banded together with diabolic determination to lead the flocks of men who rush after some new and extraordinary ideal, reëstablishing with violent reaction, the order of life, which they love, silent and placid, amid rustle of dried grasses and the flutter of butterfly wings and the sweet peace of the cemetery, asleep in the sun.

The souls of the dead fill the world. The dead do not go away, they remain as masters. The dead command, and it is useless to resist.

The man of the great cities living a giddy life, knowing not who built his house, nor who makes his bread, seeing no other works of nature than the stunted trees adorning his streets, ignores these things. He does not even realize that his life is spent among millions and millions of his forefathers crowded together but a few steps away, spying upon him and directing him. He blindly obeys their tugging, without knowing where leads the cord fastened upon his soul. Poor automaton, he believes all his acts to be the product of his will, when they are nothing less than impositions of the omnipotent invisible horde.