Saint Manuel, the Good, Martyr

-Saint Manuel, the Good, Martyr

by Miguel de Unamuno

Translated from the Spanish by Nancy Mayberry for the use of students in Spanish 2665

Capítulo 1

Now that the bishop of the diocese of Renata, to which my village of Valverde de Lucerna belongs, is going about, so they say, beginning the process for the beatification of our Don Manuel, or rather, Saint Manuel the Good, who used to be our parish priest, I want to leave written here, by way of confession, (and only God knows and not I what fate it may have), everything that I know and remember about that motherly male who filled the most intimate part of my life and soul, who was my true spiritual father, the father of my soul, of myself, Angela Carballino.

The other one, my flesh and temporal father, I scarcely knew, since he died when I was very young. I know that he had arrived in our Valverde de Lucerna as a stranger, that he settled here upon marrying my mother. He brought with him some few books, the Quixote, works of classical theater, some historical novels, histories, the Bertoldo, all mixed up, and as a daydreaming child I devoured those books, almost the only ones in the whole village. My good mother scarcely told me any facts or sayings of my father. Those of Don Manuel, whom like the whole village she adored, with whom she was in love- of course most chastely- had wiped out the very memory of those of her husband. Each day, on praying the rosary, she fervently commended him to God.

I remember our Don Manuel as if it were yesterday, when I was a child of ten, before they took me off to the religious school in the cathedral city of Renada. Our priest was probably about thirty-seven years old then. He was tall, thin, erect, and carried his head like our Buitre Peak carries its crest, and there was in his eyes the blueish depth of our lake. He attracted the glance of everybody, and after that, their hearts, and he, upon looking at us, seemed to look straight through our flesh like glass, to look at our hearts. We all loved him, but especially the children. What things he told us! They were things, not words. The town began to reek of holiness; one felt full and drunk with its aroma.

It was then that my brother Lazaro, who was in America from where he regularly sent us money so that we might live in seemly comfort, made my mother send me to the religious school, so that I might complete my education outside of the village. And this, even though he didn’t think much of nuns. “But since there”, he wrote us, “there are no progressive lay schools as far as I know, and even fewer for girls, one must make do with what there is. The important thing is that Angelita be polished and not continue among the crude village girls.” And I entered the school intending at first to become a teacher in it, but then I got tired of pedagogy.

Capítulo 2

At school I met girls from the city, and became friends with some of them. But I kept in touch with the things and the people in our village, from which I received frequent news, and now and again a visit. And the fame of our parish priest reached even as far as the school, and he began to be talked about in the cathedral city. The nuns questioned me unceasingly about him.

From the time I was very young on, I don’t know exactly how, I fed on curiosities, worries, and anxieties, caused at least in part because of that jumble of books belonging to my father, and all of it increased in school, in my dealings especially with a friend who became extremely fond of me, and who sometimes proposed that we should enter the same convent together, swearing eternal sisterhood and even signing the vow in our blood. Other times she spoke to me with her eyes half closed of boyfriends, of matrimonial adventures. Actually, I have not heard from her again nor do I know her fate. And when we talked of Don Manuel, or when my mother told me something about him in her letters, (and he was in nearly all of them) that I used to read to my friend, she used to exclaim as if in ecstasy, “How lucky you are my friend, being able to live near a saint like that, a real live saint, of flesh and bone, and be able to kiss his hand! When you return to your town, write lots to me, lots and lots, tell me all about him!”

Capítulo 3

I spent some five years in the school, which now seems lost as if in a morning dream in the far off mist of memory, and at fifteen I returned to my Valverde de Lucerna. Now it was all Don Manuel, Don Manuel with the lake and the mountain. I arrived anxious to meet him, to put myself under his protection, so that he might set out for me my life’s direction.

It was said that he had entered Seminary to become a priest with the goal of taking care of the children of one of his sisters, recently widowed, to serve as their father; that in seminary he had distinguished himself by his mental acuity, and his talent, and that he had rejected offers of a brilliant ecclesiastical career because he only wanted to stay in Valverde de Lucerna, a village stuck like a broach between the lake and the mountain that was reflected in it.

And how he loved his people! His life was fixing broken marriages, reconciling wild sons to their fathers, or reconciling fathers to their sons, and especially consoling the bitter and bored, and to help all die a good Christian death.

I remember among other things, that when the disgraced daughter of tía Rabona returned from the city, (the daughter who had ruined herself and returned single, hopeless, bringing a little son with her), Don Manuel never stopped until he had her old boyfriend Perote marry her, and recognize as his own the little child, telling him:

“Look, give this poor little one a father, for he only has the one in heaven...”

“But Don Manuel, I’m not the guilty one!”

“Who knows, my son, who knows....! and especially because its not a question of guilt.”

And now poor Perote, an invalid and paralyzed, has as his staff and comfort in life that son, the one who, having caught the holiness of Don Manuel, he recognized as his son, even though he was not.

Capítulo 4

On St. John’s night, the shortest night of the year, there is accustomed to come to our lake all the poor old ladies and not a few little old men who are considered possessed of the devil, and who seem really only to be hysterics, and sometimes epileptics, and Don Manuel undertook the task of trying to alleviate them and if possible cure them. And his presence was such that his looks, and especially the extremely sweet authority of his words, and above all his voice- how miraculous was his voice- that he succeeded in getting surprising cures. So his fame increased, which attracted to our lake and to him all the sick people in the district. And once a mother arrived asking him to do a miracle for her son, and he answered her smiling sadly;

“I do not have permission from our lord bishop to perform miracles.”

He was especially careful that every one should be clean. If someone wore a torn outfit, he would say to them, “Go see the sacristan, so he can mend that.” The sacristan was a tailor. And when they would go to congratulate him on New Years day, since it was his saint’s day, (his patron saint was Jesus Our Lord), Don Manuel wanted everyone to come dressed in a new shirt, and if someone did not have one, he himself gave them a present of one.

He showed the same affection for everyone, and if he paid more attention to some, it was to the most unfortunate, and to those that seemed most rebellious. And as there was in the town a poor boy retarded since birth, Blasillo the fool, he was most affectionate to him and even succeeded in teaching him things that seemed a miracle that he had been able to learn them. And the little ember of intelligence that still remained in the retarded boy was lit when he imitated like a poor monkey Don Manuel.

His marvelous feature was his voice, a divine voice that made one weep. When on officiating at a high or solemn mass, he intoned the preface, the church trembled and all who heard him were moved to their very core. His chant, going out from the church went to sleep on the lake and at the foot of the mountain. And when in the sermon on Good Friday, he cried out that “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” a deep tremble went through the town as over the waters of the lake on the days of the north wind. And it was as if they heard Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, as if the voice broke from that old crucifix at whose feet so many generations of mothers had left their anxieties. So that once, when his mother heard him, Don Manuel’s, she could not hold back and from the part of the church in which she was seated, she cried “My Son!” And there was a shower of tears from everyone. It was as if they believed that the maternal cry had broken forth out of the half open mouth of that statue of the Sorrowing Virgin - her heart traversed by seven swords- that was in one of the chapels of the church. Then Blasillo, the fool, went around repeating in a pathetic tone, through the byways and like an echo, the “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and in such a way that on hearing him everyone broke out in tears of pleasure at the imitative triumph of the poor foolish boy.

His dealing with the people was such that no one dared to lie in front of him, and everyone, without having to go to the confessional, confessed to him. It reached such a point that

when once a repugnant crime was committed in a nearby town, the judge, an insensitive man who did not know Don Manuel well, called him and said to him:

“Lets see if you, Don Manuel, can make this bandit tell the truth.”

“So that you can punish him?” replied the holy man. “No, sir judge, no, I don’t get the truth from anyone that might perhaps lead to his death. There between God and him...Human justice does not concern me. Judge not lest you be judged., Our Lord said.”

“But its just that I, sir priest...”

“Understood; render, sir judge, unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and I will give unto God that which is God’s.”

And upon leaving he looked piercingly at the presumed criminal and said to him;

“Be careful that God has pardoned you, for that is the only thing that matters.”

In the town everyone went to mass, even if they only went to hear and see him at the altar where he seemed to be transfigured, his face lighting up. There was a holy practice that he introduced into the popular rite, and that was, gathering in the church the whole town, men and women, old and young, some thousand people, we used to recite in unison, with one single voice, the Creed: I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth, and what follows. And it was not a chorus but a single voice, a voice simple and united, all founded on one and acting like a mountain whose crest, lost sometimes in the clouds, was Don Manuel. And upon arriving at the part -I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting-, the voice of Don Manuel plunged as into a lake, into that of the whole town, and it was there that he grew quiet. And I heard the bells of the village that they say is submerged in the lake bed here, bells that they say are also heard on the eve of St. John’s day and they were those of the submerged village in the spiritual lake of our town. I heard the voice of our dead who were resurrected in us in the communion of saints. Afterwards, upon learning the secret of our saint, I understood that it was as if a caravan going through the dessert after the leader had died, upon approaching the end of their course, took him on their shoulders in order to put his lifeless body in the promised land.

Most did not want to die unless holding onto his hand as if to an anchor.

Never in his sermons did he set himself to preach against the unrighteous, - masons, liberals or heretics. Why, if there were none in the village? Nor even against the wicked press. Instead, one of his most frequent themes in his sermons was against gossip or slander. Because he forgave everyone and everything. He did not want to believe in the bad intentions of anyone.

“Envy,” he liked to repeat, “is maintained by those who believe themselves envied, and most persecutions are in fact the result of a persecuting mania rather than a persecutor.”

“But look, Don Manuel, what I meant to say...”

And he “We ought not to worry so much about what one means to say as to what one may say without meaning to....”

His life was active and not contemplative, fleeing as much as he could from not having anything to do. When he heard that Idleness is the mother of all vices, he answered “and the worst of all is to think idly.” And as I asked him once what he meant by that, he answered me “To think idly is to think in order not to do anything or to think too much about what one has done instead of what one has yet to do. What’s done is done. And another thing, there is nothing worse than remorse over what cannot be remedied. To act, to act.” I understood well from then on, that Don Manuel fled from idle thinking and when alone, from some thought that persecuted him.

So it was that he was always busy, and not a few times in inventing occupations. He wrote very little for himself so that he did not leave us writings or notes, rather, on the other hand, he made himself a memoir writer for others, and for mothers especially he wrote letters to their absent children.

He worked manually also, helping with his arms in certain labors of the town. At threshing time he went to thresh and winnow and while he taught them he entertained them. He sometimes substituted at his or her job for someone sick. One day, the cruelest in winter, he met a child, half dead with cold, whose father had sent him to pick up a cow a long way off on the mountain.

“Look”, he told the child, “go back home and warm yourself and tell your father that I am going to take charge of it.”

And upon returning with the animal, he met the father, all confused, who went out to meet him. In winter he chopped wood for the poor. When that magnificent walnut tree dried up, a matriarchal walnut tree he called it, in whose shade he had played as a child, he took it to his house and afterwards he made it into six boards that he kept at the foot of his bed.. He made wood to warm the poor from the rest. He also used to make balls for the boys to play with and not a few toys for the children.

Capítulo 5

He used to accompany the doctor on his rounds, and reinforced the prescriptions of the latter. He was especially interested in pregnancies, in the raising of children and he thought it one of the greatest blasphemies that of “From the cradle straight to heaven” and the other one “little angels in heaven.” He was profoundly moved by the death of children.

“A child who is born dead or that dies just after being born, and a suicide,” he said once, “are for me the most terrible of mysteries, a crucified child!”

And once, because of having taken his own life, the father of a suicide, a stranger, asked if he would bury him in sacred ground, he answered him;

“Certainly, for in the last moment, in the second of death, he doubtless repented.”

He often went to school to help the teacher, to teach with him and not only the catechism. He fled from idleness and solitude. So that because of being with the people, and above all the young people and the children, he used to go to dances. And more than once he set himself to play the drum so that the boys and girls could dance, and this, which in another would have seemed a grotesque profanation of priesthood, in him took on the sacred character as of a religious practice. When the Angelus sounded, he dropped the drum and stick, took off his hat and everyone with him prayed; “The Angel of the Lord announced to Mary, Hail Mary....”And then

“And now, let’s rest for tomorrow.”

Capítulo 6

“The main thing,” he said, “is for the people to be happy, that everyone be happy with their life. The happiness of life is the main thing of all. No one should want to die until God wills it.”