The Moonbeam

I do not know whether this is a history that seems a tale or a tale that seems a history; what I can say is that at its heart there is a truth, a very sad truth, from which I, given the bent of my imagination, may be one of the last to profit.

Another man, with this idea, might have made a volume of tearful philosophy; I have written this legend which, for those who see nothing at its heart, may at least pass the time for a while.

He was noble; he had been born amid the clash of arms, and the sudden blare of a war trumpet would not have made him raise his head for an instant, nor take his eyes for a moment from the dark parchment on which he was reading a troubadour's latest song.

Those who wanted to find him should not have looked in the broad courtyard of his castle, where the grooms broke in the colts, the pages taught the falcons to fly, and the soldiers spent their days of rest sharpening the iron of their lances against a stone.

"Where is Manrique? Where is your master?" his mother would sometimes ask.

"We do not know," his servants would answer. "Perhaps he is in the cloister of the monastery of La Peña, sitting on the edge of a tomb, listening in case he can catch some word of the conversation of the dead; or on the bridge, watching the waves of the river run one after another beneath its arches; or curled up in the cleft of a rock, busy counting the stars in the sky, following a cloud with his eyes, or gazing at the will-o'-the-wisps that cross like shooting stars over the face of the pools. He will be anywhere except where everyone else is."

And indeed Manrique loved solitude, and loved it so much that at times he would have wished to have no shadow, so that his shadow would not follow him everywhere.

He loved solitude because in its keeping, giving his imagination free rein, he forged a fantastic world inhabited by strange creatures, children of his fevers and his poet's reveries; so much so that no form in which he might have enclosed his thoughts had ever satisfied him, and he had never enclosed them by writing them down.

He believed that among the red embers of the hearth lived spirits of fire of a thousand colours, which ran like golden insects along the burning logs, or danced in a shining ring of sparks at the tips of the flames; and he would spend idle hours sitting on a stool beside the tall Gothic fireplace, motionless, his eyes fixed on the blaze.

He believed that at the bottom of the river's waves, among the moss of the spring and over the mists of the lake, there lived mysterious women, fairies, sylphs or undines, who breathed out laments and sighs, or sang and laughed in the monotonous murmur of the water, a murmur he listened to in silence, trying to translate it.

In the clouds, in the air, deep in the woods, in the cracks of the rocks, he imagined he could make out shapes or hear mysterious sounds: the shapes of supernatural beings, unintelligible words he could not understand.

Love! He had been born to dream of love, not to feel it. He loved every woman for an instant: this one because she was fair, that one because she had red lips, the other because she swayed like a reed as she walked.

Sometimes his fever went so far that he would spend a whole night gazing at the moon floating in the sky in a silver mist, or at the stars trembling far away like the glints of precious stones. On those long nights of poetic sleeplessness he would exclaim:

"If it is true, as the prior of La Peña has told me, that those points of light may be worlds; if it is true that people live on that pearly globe rolling over the clouds, how beautiful the women of those shining regions must be, and I will never see them, and I will never love them!... What is their beauty like?... What is their love like?..."

Manrique was not yet mad enough for the boys to follow him in the street, but he was mad enough to talk and gesture to himself, which is where it begins.

Over the Duero, which flowed lapping the worm-eaten, dark stones of the walls of Soria, there is a bridge leading from the city to the old convent of the Templars, whose lands stretched along the opposite bank of the river.

At the time we speak of, the knights of the Order had already abandoned their historic fortresses; but the remains of the wide towers of their walls were still standing, and one could still see, as in part one sees them today, covered in ivy and white bindweed, the massive arches of their cloister and the long pointed galleries of their parade grounds, where the wind sighed with a moan, stirring the tall grass.

In the orchards and gardens, whose paths had not felt the monks' footsteps for many years, the vegetation, left to itself, displayed all its finery, with no fear that the hand of man would mutilate it in the belief that it was making it beautiful. The climbing plants scaled the old trunks of the trees; the shady avenues of poplars, whose crowns touched and tangled together, had grown over with turf; wild thistles and nettles sprang up in the middle of the sanded walks; and on two stretches of masonry about to collapse, the hedge mustard, waving in the wind like the plume of a crest, and the white and blue bindweed, swinging on their long and supple stems, proclaimed the victory of destruction and ruin.

It was night; a summer night, mild, full of perfumes and gentle murmurs, with a white and serene moon in the middle of a blue, luminous and transparent sky.

Manrique, his imagination seized by a whirl of poetry, crossed the bridge, from which he gazed for a moment at the black outline of the city standing out against a few pale, light clouds rolled up on the horizon, and went into the deserted ruins of the Templars.

Midnight was striking. The moon, which had been rising slowly, was already at the top of the sky, when, as he entered a dark avenue of poplars that led from the ruined cloister to the bank of the Duero, Manrique let out a faint, stifled cry, a strange mixture of surprise, fear and joy.

At the far end of the shadowy avenue he had seen something white stir, float for a moment and vanish into the darkness. The hem of a woman's dress, of a woman who had crossed the path and was hiding among the leaves, at the very instant the mad dreamer of chimeras and impossibilities entered the gardens.

"An unknown woman!... In this place!... At this hour! That one, that one is the woman I am looking for," Manrique exclaimed; and he rushed after her, swift as an arrow.

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Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, 1862. An excerpt, translated for Zeitzung from the Spanish text at Ciudad Seva. Public domain.