The Shadow of the Cathedral

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

The visitors were bewildered seeing all this vast collection of stuffs and embroideries unrolled piece after piece—all the past of a Cathedral which, having millions of revenue, employed for its embellishment armies of embroiderers, acquiring the richest textures of Valencia and Seville, reproducing in gold and colours all the episodes from the Holy books, and the torments of the martyrs, all the glorious legends of the Church, immortalised by the needle, before printing had been able to do so.

Gabriel returned every evening to the upper cloister, wearied out with walking the length and breadth of the Cathedral. During the first few days he was delighted with the novelty of seeing fresh faces, to hear the rustle of the visitors who, branching off from the great stream of travellers who inundated Europe, came as far as Toledo. But after a little while the people he saw every afternoon seemed to him just the same. There were the same questions, the same stiff and hard-featured Englishwomen, and the same o-o-o-h's of cold and conventional admiration, and the same identical way of turning their backs with rude pride when there was nothing else to be shown. Returning to the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition of the Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more revolting and intolerable. The shoemaker seemed sadder and yellower in the rank atmosphere of his den, bending over his bench hammering the soles, his wife more feeble and ill, the miserable slave of maternity, weakened by hunger, and offering to her little son as his only hope of food those flaccid breasts in which there was nothing left but a drop of blood. The little child was dying! Sagrario, who had left her machine to spend the greater part of the day in the shoemaker's room said so in a low voice to her uncle. She did all the work of the house, while the poor mother, motionless in a chair, with the little one in her lap, looked at it with weeping eyes. When the baby woke from its stupor it would wearily raise its head from its little neck, which had become a mere thread; the mother to stifle its feeble moans would press it to her breast, but the child would turn away its mouth guessing the inutility of expending its strength on that rag of flesh from which it could only succeed in extracting the last drop.

Gabriel examined the child, noting its extreme emaciation and the spots that scrofula had spread over its straw-coloured skin. He shook his head incredulously when the neighbours who had gathered round the invalid each diagnosed some particular ailment, and recommended every imaginable sort of household remedy, from decoctions of rare herbs and stinking ointments to applications on the chest of miracle working prints, and tracing seven crosses on the navel with as many paternosters.

"It is hunger," said Luna to his niece, "nothing but hunger." And depriving himself of part of his own food, he sent to the shoemaker's house the milk that had been brought up for himself. But the child's stomach could not retain the liquid too substantial for its weakness, and threw it up as soon as swallowed. The Aunt Tomasa, with her energetic and enterprising character, brought a woman from outside the Cathedral to nourish the child, but after two days, and before the effects became visible, she came no more, as if she had felt disgusted at the miserable and corpse-like little body touching her. In vain the gardener's widow searched; it was not easy to find generous breasts who would give their milk for very little pay.

In the meanwhile the child was dying. All the women came in and out of the shoemaker's house, and even Don Antolin would stand at the door in the mornings.

"How is the little one? Just the same? It is all in God's hands."

And he would retire, doing the shoemaker the great charity of not speaking to him about the pesetas he owed him, on account of the sick child.

"Virgin's Blue" was annoyed by this incident, which upset the calm of the cloister, and disturbed the bliss of his digestion as a happy and well-fed servant of the Church. It was a shame that that shoemaker should be allowed to live in the Claverias with all that flock of wretched and scurvy children; one would die every month; all sorts of illness would lay hold on them. By what right were they in the Cathedral when they drew no wage from the Obreria? Such stinking excrescences ought to remain outside the Lord's house.

His mother-in-law was furious.

"Silence, you thief of the saints!" she cried. "Silence, or I will throw a dish at you! We are all sons of God, and if things were as they should be, all the poor ought to live in the Cathedral. Instead of saying such things it would be much better if you gave those unhappy people part of what you have stolen from the Virgin."