Emilia Pardo Bazán: A Ripper of Yesteryear

Emilia Pardo Bazán

A Ripper of Yesteryear

FEBRUARY 19, 2022 ~ NINA ZUMEL

(Un destripador de antaño)

Translated by Nina Zumel

The legend of “The Ripper,” the half-sage, half-sorcerer assassin, is a very old one in my homeland. I heard it at a tender age, whispered or chanted in frightful refrains, perhaps by my old nursemaid at the edge of my cradle, perhaps in the rustic kitchen, in the gathering of the farmhands, who told it with shudders of fear or dark laughter. It appeared to me again, like one of Hoffman’s phantasmagoric creations, in the dark and twisted alleys of a town that until recently remained tinged with medieval colors, as if there were still pilgrims in the world, and the hymn of Ultreja still resounded below the vaults of the cathedral. Later, the clamor of the newspapers, the vile panic of the ignorant multitude, made the story spring forth again in my imagination, tragic and ridiculous as Quasimodo, hunchbacked with all the humps that disfigure blind Terror and infamous Superstition. I will tell it to you. Enter valiantly with me into the shadowy regions of the soul.

– I –

A landscape painter would be enchanted by the sight of that mill in the village of Tornelos. Draped upon the slope of a low mountain, fed by a dam that formed a lovely natural pond, bordered with cane and meadow-grass, it was set, like a hand mirror on a green skirt, atop the velvet of a meadow where golden buttercups grew, and in autumn the irises opened their elegant purple corollas. On the other side of the millpond was a path, well-trodden by the feet and hooves of the men and donkeys who came and went loaded with sacks: arriving with corn, wheat, and rye grain, leaving with dark, white, or yellow flour.

And such a well composed arrangement! The great chestnut tree crowned the rustic mill and the poor miller’s humble cottage with its outspread branches and lush canopy, which was covered in spring with pale and disordered flowers, in October with spiny, bulging burrs. How graceful and majestic was its outline against the bluish crest of the mountain, half veiled in the gray curtain of smoke that emanated, not from the chimney—for the miller’s house had no chimney, nor do many of the villagers’ houses in Galicia, even today—but from everywhere: doors, windows, chinks in the roof, and cracks in the dilapidated walls!

To complement the scene—gentle, full of poetry, worthy to be captured by a gifted artist in some idyllic painting—a girl of about thirteen or fourteen, who would take a cow out to graze on those slopes, always so flowery and fresh, at least until the harshness of summer, when livestock languish for lack of grass. Minia embodied the ideal of a shepherdess: she harmonized with the scenery. In the village they called her roxa, but in the sense of blond, because she had hair the color of the flax that she sometimes spun, straight hair of a pale blond, which, like a vague, luminous reflection, surrounded her small oval face, wan but somewhat sunburnt, where only her eyes shone with a touch of azure, like the blue that can sometimes be glimpsed through the mists of a mountain cloudscape.

Minia covered her limbs with a red flannel skirt, already faded from use; a sturdy burlap shirt concealed her breasts, still poorly developed; she went barefoot, and she wore her short hair tangled, disheveled, and at times matted—without a hint of Ophelian affectation—with stalks of hay, or the stems of whatever she had reaped for the cow on the edges of the croplands. And even so, she was pretty, as pretty as an angel—or, to put it better, as the patron saint of the nearby Shrine, to whom she bore—so people say—a singular resemblance.

This celebrated saint, the object of a fervent devotion among the villagers of the region, was a cuerpo santo, a “holy body” brought from Rome by a certain resourceful Galician, a sort of Gil Blas, who became, through the vagaries of fortune, the servant of a Roman cardinal. After ten years of good and loyal service came to an end upon his master’s death, he asked for no other renumeration beyond the display case and effigy that graced the cardinal’s oratory. These they gave to him, and he brought them to his village, not without ceremony. With his small savings and with the help of the archbishop, he erected a modest chapel. Within a few years of his death, the alms of the faithful, and the sudden devotion awoken for many leagues around, transformed it into a rich Shrine, with its grand baroque church and its good living for the caretaker, a post that of course the parish priest assumed, thus converting that forgotten mountain parish into a lucrative sinecure.

It was not easy to ascertain with exact historical rigor, nor to verify with reliable and incontrovertible documentation, to whom would have belonged the fragment of human skull embedded in the wax head of the saint. Only a yellowing paper, written in a firm meticulous hand and pasted to the bottom of the display case, declared these to be the relics of the blessed Herminia, a noble virgin who suffered martyrdom under Diocletian. It seems useless to search the Acts of the Martyrs for the blessed Herminia’s family name and manner of death. The villagers neither asked, nor desired to go to such depths. For them, the Saint was not a wax figure, but the uncorrupted body itself; from the martyr’s Germanic name they created the cute diminutive Minia, and in order to take better possession of her, they added to this the name of the parish, calling her Saint Minia of Tornelos. The mountain devotees cared little about the how and when of their Saint; in her, they venerated Innocence and Martyrdom, the heroism of weakness; a thing sublime.

The miller’s child had been christened Minia at the baptismal font, and every year on the feast of her patron saint, the girl would kneel before the display case so enraptured in contemplation of the saint that she could hardly move her lips to pray. She was fascinated by the effigy, which for her was also a real body, a genuine cadaver. The saint was beautiful; beautiful and terrible at the same time. The wax figure depicted a young girl of about fifteen, with perfect, pale features. Beneath her lids, closed in death, but slightly ajar from the contraction of her final death throes, crystal eyes shone with a mysterious luster. Her pale lips, also parted, revealed the enamel of her teeth. Her head rested upon a pillow of crimson silk covered by now-tarnished gold lace, and she boasted a crown of silver roses on her blond hair. The pose gave a perfect view of the wound on her throat, rendered with clinical exactitude: the severed arteries, the larynx, a few drops of blood blackening on her neck. She wore a green brocade vestment over a caramel-colored taffeta tunic, an outfit more theatrical than Roman, which was ornamented liberally with sequins and gold threads. Her bloodless, finely sculpted hands were crossed over the palm leaf of her triumph. Though the glass of the display case, in the reflection of the candles, the dusty effigy and its clothing, faded by the passage of time, took on a supernatural life. One felt that the wound was about to shed fresh blood.

The girl would return from the church absorbed and distracted. She was always of few words; but for a month after her saint’s day, she rarely emerged from her silence, nor be seen to smile, unless the neighbors told her “how much she looked like the Saint.”

Country people aren’t soft-hearted; on the contrary, they’re usually as hard and silent as the palms of their hands. But, when their own interest isn’t at stake, they possess a certain instinct for justice that induces them to take the part of the weak against the strong. And so they regarded Minia with profound pity. The young girl, having lost father and mother, lived with her aunt and uncle. Minia’s father was a miller, and had died of an intermittent malaria, sadly common in those of his trade. Her mother followed him to the grave, not snatched away by grief, which in a country woman would be a strange kind of death, but due to a pain in her side that she got when she emerged, sweaty, from cooking a batch of corn. Minia was left alone at the age of one and a half, newly weaned.

Her uncle, Juan Ramón—who earned a hard living as a bricklayer, since he had no love for farming—entered the mill as if it were his own home, and, finding the industry already in place, the clientele established, the business pleasant and comfortable, promoted himself to miller, which in the village is a rise in status. Before long, he took as consort the woman he was seeing, and with whom he already possessed two fruits of sin: one male and one female. Minia and these two offspring grew up together, without much apparent difference, except that the little ones called the miller and milleress papai y mamai, while Minia, though no one had taught her, never called them anything but “uncle, sir”, and “auntie, ma’am”.

If one were to study the family situation in depth, more serious differences would be seen. Minia lived relegated to the status of a maid or kitchen wench. This isn’t to say that her cousins did no work, because no one is excused from work in a peasant household; but the vilest labor, the hardest chores were kept for Minia. Her cousin Melia, destined by her mother to be a seamstress, an aristocratic profession among country women, plied her needle on a little chair, and amused herself listening to the crude flattery and mischievous pranks of the young men and women that came to the mill and passed the night there, wakeful and bantering, to the obvious benefit of the devil, and not without frequent and illegal increasing of the species.

Minia was the one who helped to load the gorse cart; she who, with her little hands, kneaded the bread; she who fed the calf, the pig, and the chickens; she who took the cow out to graze, and, stooped and exhausted, brought back a bundle of firewood from the mountain, or a sack of chestnuts from the grove, or a basket of grass from the meadow. Andrés, Melia’s young brother, didn’t help her at all; he passed his life in the mill, assisting with the milling and measuring, and on strolls or at parties, singing and beating the tambourine with the other lads and lassies. From this early education in corruption the boy learned insults, expressions, and shenanigans that at times bothered Minia, without her knowing, nor trying to understand, why.

The mill for many years produced enough to provide the family a certain ease. Juan Ramón took the business seriously: he was always ready for the clientele, he was active, vigilant, and exact. Little by little, with the decadence of a life that runs effortlessly and pleasantly, his affinity for indolence and comfort revived, and the negligence, so near a relative to ruin, began. Well-being! For a peasant, well-being rests in little: not much more than bacon and fat in the pot, occasional meat and plentiful bread, fresh milk or buttermilk; this distinguishes the well-to-do farmer from the destitute one. Then comes the fine apparel: the good bouclé suit, gaiters with meticulous topstitching, the embroidered shirt, the sash decorated with silk flowers, the fancy kerchief and the silver buttons on the red waistcoat.

Juan Ramón had all these necessities, and perhaps it was neither the food nor the suit that unbalanced his budget, but the wicked habit he was developing of “taking a drop” at the tavern in Canelo: first, every Sunday; later, on Holy Days of Obligation; and finally on many days when the Holy Mother Church does not impose the requirement of Mass on the faithful.

After the libations, the miller returned to his mill, now as merry as a cricket, now gloomy, cursing his luck and itching to give someone a smack. Melia, upon seeing him return in this state, would hide. Andrés, the first time his father unleashed a blow on him with the bar of the door, turned on him like a wild beast, subdued him and left him with no desire for further aggressions. Pepona, the milleress, stronger, bigger-boned and tougher than her husband, likewise could repay the slaps in good currency; this left only Minia, long-suffering and constant victim.

The girl received the blows with stoicism, blanching at times when she felt intense pain—when, for example the edge of a wooden clog struck her on the shin or the hip—but she never cried. The parish was not unaware of this treatment, and some of the women took much pity on Minia. In the conversations in the vestibule after Mass; at the corn huskings, in the pilgrimages to the Shrine, in the markets, the rumors began that the miller was falling into debt, that the mill was failing, that in measuring out their toll-corn they robbed customers without fear of God, that it would not be long before the millwheel stopped and the bailiffs would come in and seize everything down to the shirts on their backs.

One person fought against the growing disorganization of that humble industry and that poor household. That was Pepona, the milleress, an avaricious, greedy woman, holding tight to every penny, tenacious, forceful and harsh. Up before the break of day, working tirelessly, she was always seen, now bent over tilling the earth, now in the mill haggling over the toll-corn, now rushing barefoot down the road to Santiago with a basket of eggs, poultry, and greens on her head, going to sell them at the market. But what good is the care and the zeal, the sordid economies of one woman, against the vice and the laziness of two men? A single morning of Juan Ramón’s drinking, a single night of Andrés’ carousing, squandered the fruit of a week of Pepona’s labor.

The household business was going badly, and the mood of the milleress was getting worse, when to complicate the situation came a fatal year, a year of misery and drought, in which, having lost the harvests of corn and wheat, the people lived off spoiled green beans and dried grain, off meagre and wilted vegetables, off some rye from the previous harvest, already eaten away by ergot and weevils. The most shrunken, shriveled thing imaginable would not even begin to describe the depleted state of a Galician peasant’s belly, nor the emptiness of their elastic stomaches in such years. Cabbage thickened with flour, flavored with a rind of rancid bacon; and this day after day, without the sustenance of meat, without a drop of wine to give a little strength to the vital spirits and restore vigor to the body. Potatoes, the bread of the poor, was largely unknown then; because I don’t know if I mentioned that what I am recounting to you happened in the first five or ten years of the nineteenth century.

Consider how it would go with Juan Ramón’s mill in such a year: Once there’s no crop, the millstone must stop. The wheel, standing and silent, inspired sadness; it resembled the arm of a paralytic. The mice, furious at not finding grain to gnaw on, and starving as well, scampered around the millstone, emitting sharp squeaks. Andrés, bored from the lack of the usual gatherings, got more involved in messy affairs and amorous adventures, returning home like his father, worn-out and angry, with his hands itching to thrash something. He beat Minia with a mixture of rustic gallantry and brutality, and showed his teeth at his mother because the daily rations were scanty and tasteless. A slacker by profession, he went from fair to fair, looking for quarrels, fights, and booze. Luckily, in the spring he became a soldier and left with his gun for the city. The hard truth forces us to confess that the greatest satisfaction he could give his mother was to get out of her sight: he never brought a crust of bread home, and when he was there he only knew how to waste money and grumble, confirming the saying: “poverty breeds discontent.”

The scapegoat, the one who atoned for all Pepona’s sorrows and disappointments was … who else would it be? Pepona had always treated Minia with hostile indifference; now she treated her with the vicious hatred of a wicked stepmother. For Minia, rags; for Melia, bright red petticoats; for Minia a pallet on the hard floor; for Melia a bed as good as that of her parents; to Minia they threw a crust of moldy millet bread, while the rest of the family finished off the piping hot soup and a second course of pork. Minia never complained. She was a little paler, and perpetually preoccupied, and her head sometimes leaned languidly against her shoulder, increasing her resemblance to the Saint. Silent, outwardly indifferent, the girl secretly suffered a mortal anguish, unexplainable nausea, depression, pain in the deepest and most delicate parts of her body, mysterious shame, and above all, a constant yearning to die, to rest and go to heaven….

And the landscape painter or the poet who passed by the mill and saw the leafy chestnut tree, the millpond with its sleeping water and its border of cane, the little pensive blond shepherdess who let the cow satiate itself freely on the flower-lined border, would dream of idylls and would compose a gentle, enchanting description of the unhappy, beaten, hungry girl, already half imbecilic from lovelessness and cruelty.

– II –

One day more dismay than ever fell upon the millers’ shack. The fatal deadline had come: the end of the lease, and either they paid the landlord, or they would see themselves evicted from the property, with neither a roof to shelter them nor land to cultivate the cabbage for their soup. And both the good-for-nothing Juan Ramon and the diligent Pepona alike professed for that parcel of land the mindless affection that they would hardly profess for their son, the fruit of their loins. To leave that place seemed to them worse than going to the grave; for the latter, in the end, must happen to all mortals, while the former doesn’t occur save for the unforeseen hardships of bad luck. Where would they find the money? There probably wasn’t in all the region the two onzas that amounted to the rent for the place. In that year of misery, Pepona calculated, one wouldn’t find two onzas except in the poor box or St. Minia’s collection plate. But the priest surely would have two onzas, and plenty more, sewn into his mattress or buried in the vegetable garden.

This possibility was the theme of the husband and wife’s conversation, lying face to face in the conjugal bed, a sort of crate with an opening to the outside, and inside a padding of corn husks and a threadbare blanket. To honor the truth, it must be said that Juan Ramón, giddy with the four shots that he had taken at nightfall to comfort his nearly empty stomach, didn’t even think of the priest’s onzas until his conjugal partner, that veritable Eve, suggested them; and it’s only fair to observe as well that he replied to that temptation with very discreet words, as if the spirit of the grape weren’t speaking through his lips.

“Listen, Juan Ramón: the priest is sure to have plenty of what we need. The priest will have lots of gold… Are you snoring, do you hear me, or what?”

“Fine, and if he does have it, what do we care? He won’t give it to us.”

“Give it, no; but—a loan….”

“A loan! Yeah, see if he will lend it to you.”

“When I say ‘loan’, I mean by force. Damn it! You’re no man, there’s nothing manly about you except your big talk. If Andresiño were here…. one day, as it gets dark….”

“If you ever say that again, the devil take me if I don’t punch your teeth out.”

“Cowardly pig, even women have more guts.”

“Shut up, you she-wolf! Are you tryng to get rid of me? The priest has a shotgun… and what’s more you want St. Minia to send down a lightning bolt that will actually destroy us.”

“St. Minia is the fear that eats you.”

“Bitch! Take that!”

“Drunken boozer!”

Minia was huddled on a bundle of straw, a short distance from her aunt and uncle, in that promiscuity of Galician shacks, where the rational and the irrational, parents and children, lie intermixed and intermingled. Stiff with cold beneath her clothing, which was piled up to cover her—-would that God had given her a blanket—she half-heard some confused and suspicious phrases, the muffled exhortations of the woman, the grumbling and wine-fueled mockery of the man. They were speaking about the Saint; but the girl didn’t understand. Nonetheless, it sounded wrong to her, offensive; if she had a notion what the word meant, she would have called it blasphemous. She moved her lips to recite the only prayer she knew, and praying thus, she nodded off.

No sooner had sleep overcome her when it seemed to her that a bluish-gold light filled the interior of the hut. In the heart of that light, or giving off that light, like the “lady of fire” that the fireworks seller displayed during her feast day, was the Saint, not reclining but on her feet, and waving her palm leaf as if she were brandishing a terrible weapon. Minia thought she distinctly heard the words, “Do you see? I’ve killed them.” And looking towards her aunt and uncle’s bed, she saw black, charred cadavers, with contorted mouths and tongues hanging out. At that moment the rooster’s sonorous song rang out; the calf mooed in the stable, clamoring for its mother’s teat. It was daybreak.

If the child could have done as she pleased, she would have stayed curled up in the straw on the morning that followed her vision. She felt great pain in her bones, a general weakness, intense thirst. But they made her get up, pulling her by the hair and calling her lazy; and as usual, she had to take out the livestock. With her habitual passivity she didn’t argue; grabbing the rope, she set out for the little meadow.

Pepona, for her part, having washed first her feet and then her face in the pool nearest to the millpond, and donning the cape and overskirt that she wore on special occasions, as well as—unheard-of luxury—her shoes, gathered in a basket about two dozen apples, a lump of butter wrapped in a cabbage leaf, some eggs and the best laying hen, and with the basket on her head, left the mill and took the road to Compostela with a resolute air. She was going to implore, to ask for installments, an extension, for forgiveness of the rent, something that would let them finish that terrible year without abandoning the beloved homestead, made fertile by their sweat. Because the two onzas for the rent—Ha! The money would remain in St. Minia’s poor box, or under the priest’s mattress, because Juan Ramón was a wimp, and Andresiño wasn’t at home, and she wore the skirts in the family, not her husband’s badly worn breeches.

Pepona didn’t harbor great hopes of obtaining the least concession, the smallest respite. She said so to her neighbor and comadre Jacoba de Alberte, whom she ran into at the crossroad, discovering that they were going on the same journey. Jacoba was going to the city to bring back medicine for her man, who was afflicted with a diabolical asthma that kept him from sleeping, and in the mornings, practically from breathing. The two women decided to travel together, for more protection from wolves, or from apparitions, if they had to return near dark; and setting one foot after the other, praying that it wouldn’t rain, for Pepona was carrying the last of her nest egg, they began the long walk, chatting together.

“What’s killing me,” said Pepona, “is that I won’t be able to speak face to face with the Marquis, and I’ll have to get down on my knees in front of his agent. The noblest aristocrats are always the most sympathetic to the poor. The worst are the little self-made gentlemen like Don Mauricio, the agent; they have hearts as hard as stone and treat you worse than what’s on the bottom of their shoe. I’m telling you, I’m going there like an ox to the slaughter house.”

La Jacoba, who was a tiny little woman with narrow eyes, wrinkled yellow features and two brick-like marks on her cheeks, answered in a plaintive voice:

“Oh comadre! I’ve been a hundred times where you’re going, and I’ve never wanted to go even once where I’m going. Saint Minia, be good to us! The Lord our God in his wisdom brings me health, because health is worth more than riches. If it weren’t for the love of health, who would have the courage to step into Don Custodio’s apothecary shop?

On hearing this name, a lively expression of astonished curiosity washed over Pepona’s face, and her forehead wrinkled, short and flat, where her hair grew almost a finger’s breadth from her bushy eyebrows.

“Ay! You’re right, woman; I’ve never gone there. I don’t even like to pass in front of his shop. There’s been who knows how many rumors that the apothecary does black magic.”

“Let’s hope that’s not true, but when it’s health on the line… To be healthy is worth more than all the treasures of this world; and the poor, who have no other riches except their health, what won’t they do to preserve it? I’m ready to beg the devil in hell for a good cure for my man. A peso and twelve reales we spent this year in the pharmacy, and nothing; it was like water flowing from a fountain. It’s practically a sin to squander our money like that, when we don’t even have a single measly crust to put in our mouths. But then yesterday evening, my husband, who was coughing until he almost burst, said to me, he said:

“‘Hey, Jacoba! Either you go ask Don Custodio for an ointment, or I’m a goner. Forget about the doctor; and about Christ our Lord, too, should it come into his hands. You have to go to Don Custodio; for if he pleases, he can get me out of this predicament with just two teaspoons of those remedies that he knows how to make. And don’t be stingy with the money, woman, unless you want to become a widow.'”

“And that’s why…” Jacoba furtively put her hand to her bodice and took out a tiny little object, wrapped in a bit of paper. “Here I carry our most precious treasure: a four-fold doubloon! I’ve worn myself out earning it; I saved it to buy clothes, because I’m walking around nearly naked. But my man’s life comes first, comadre. So I’m bringing it here for Don Custodio’s taking. May Jesus forgive me.”

Pepona reflected, dazzled by the sight of the great gold coin and feeling in her soul such a surge of avarice that it almost suffocated her.

“But, say, comadre,” she murmured earnestly, gritting her great horse teeth, sparks shooting from her little eyes, “I ask you, how does Don Custodio earn so much money? Do you know what they say around here? That this year he bought a lot of property from the Marquis. The most valuable property. They say that he already has five hundred bushels of wheat in rent.”

“Oh, comadre! Why shouldn’t this man who cures all of the ills Our Lord created earn money? It’s frightening to enter there; but when you leave with health in your hand…. Listen, the pastor of Morlán, who do you think cured his rheumatism? For five years he was bedridden, crippled, disabled—and suddenly one day he got up, hale and hearty, walking around like you or I. And what was it? An ointment that he rubbed on his hips, which cost half a doubloon at Don Custodio’s house. And old Gorio, the innkeeper from Silleda? That was another miracle. They’d already given him last rites, and someone brought him a bottle of white water from Don Custodio—and it was as if he were resurrected.”

“The things that God can do!”

“God?” replied Jacoba. “Who knows if it’s God, or the devil. Comadre, can I ask you a favor? Will you come with me when I go to the apothecary shop?”

“I’ll come with you.”

Chattering away like this made the walk more tolerable for the two friends. They arrived in Compostela as the bells of the cathedral and the many churches were ringing for Mass, which they went to hear at Las Ánimas, a house of prayer favored by the villagers, and therefore extremely nauseating, dirty and malodorous. From there, crossing the square named for bread, which was inundated with vendors selling bread rolls or earthen pots, and crammed with peasants and mules, they went down an arcade supported by columns with Byzantine capitals, and arrived at Don Custodio’s fearful lair.

Two steps descended down into the interior, and between this and the fact that the arcade blocked the light, the apothecary shop was always submerged in a vague penumbra, enhanced by the blue, red and green windowpanes, which back then were a brand-new and rare innovation. The shelves still displayed those picturesque bottles that today are valued as objets d’art, and upon which could be read labels in gothic lettering that seemed to be alchemical formulae: Rad. Polip. Q ; Ra, Su. Eboris; Striac. Cala; and other inscriptions no less sinister.

The apothecary was sitting in a cowhide armchair, shiny from use, before a table where an open lectern supported a voluminous tome. He had been reading when the two village women entered, and arose upon seeing them. He appeared to be a man of some forty or so years, with a gaunt face, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, a pointed gray beard, a balding and lustrous pate with a halo of long hair beginning to go gray: the tortured but sympathetic head of a penitent saint, or of a German doctor walled away in his laboratory.

As he stood before the two women, a reflection from one of the blue panes fell upon his face; he could truly have been mistaken for a sculpture or statue. Without a word, he gazed steadily at the pair of friends. Jacoba trembled as if she had quicksilver in her veins, and it was Pepona, the bolder of the two, who revealed the whole story of the asthma, the cure, and the doubloon. Don Custodio assented, inclining his head gravely. He disappeared for three minutes through the red serge curtain that hid the door to the back room; then he returned holding a little bottle carefully sealed with wax. After taking the doubloon and depositing it in a box on the table, he returned a silver piece to Jacoba, and merely said:

“Spread this on his chest in the morning and at night,” and without another word returned to his book.

The two women looked at each other, and rushed out of the shop like a soul carried off by the devil. Once outside, Jacoba crossed herself.

It was three in the afternoon when they met again at the tavern at the head of the road, where they ate a light lunch of bread with a piece of hard cheese, and soothed their bodies with two fingers of brandy. Afterwards they began their return journey. Jacoba was as cheerful as could be: she had a cure for her husband; she had sold a good half bushel of beans, and from her precious doubloon she still had a peso left, thanks to Don Custodio’s compassion. Pepona, in contrast, had a hoarse voice and burning eyes, brow furrowed more than ever; her large coarse body hunched over as she walked, as if she had been given a severe beating. As soon as they set out on the road she gave vent to her troubles in bitter lamentations. Don Mauricio’s larceny: it was as if he had been born deaf, or to be a tyrant over the unfortunate.

“‘The rent, or leave the place,’ Comadre! I wept, I shouted, I got down on my knees, I pulled out my hair, I begged him on his mother’s soul, on the souls of his loved ones in the other world. But he was inflexible.

“‘The rent, or leave the place. You’ve been in arrears all year, and a bad harvest isn’t to blame. Your husband drinks, and your son is a wastrel. My Lord says the same; he’s fed up with you. The Marquis doesn’t like drunkards on his properties.’

“I answered him: ‘Sir, we’ll sell the oxen and the cow; and then, how will we work the land? We’ll sell ourselves for slaves…’

“‘The rent, I tell you—and now get out.’ And all the while, pushing, pushing, he threw me out the door. Oh! You do well to take of your husband, Jacoba: a man who doesn’t drink! Me, I have to carry that drunk to the grave. If he is a sick man, there’s no medicine I can buy to cure him.”

With such chitchat the two friends whiled away the road. Since in the winter night comes quickly, they took a shortcut, going into the wilderness, through dense pine forests. The bell for Angelus rang from some distant church tower, and the fog, rising from the river, began to conceal and confuse the surrounding objects. The pine trees and underbrush melted away into that gray vagueness, taking on a spectral appearance. It was some effort for the two peasant women to find the path.

“Comadre,” Jacoba said suddenly and with some anxiety, “for the love of God please don’t say anything in the village about the ointment.”

“Don’t worry, comadre. My lips are sealed.”

“Because if the priest finds out about it, he’s liable to reprimand us in the middle of Mass.”

“And why would he care?”

“Well, they say that this remedy ‘is what it is’.”

“Is what?”

“Hail Mary full of grace, comadre!” whispered Jacoba, coming to a halt and lowering her voice, as if the pine trees could hear and betray her. “Do you really not know? I’m amazed. Why, today, in the marketplace, the women won’t talk about anything else, and the young girls would sooner be torn to shreds before walking down the arcade. If I went in there, it’s because I’m well past being a girl; but as old as I am, if you hadn’t come with me, I wouldn’t set foot in that apothecary shop. May the glorious St. Minia protect us!”

“Honestly, comadre, I don’t know any of this. Do tell, comadre, do tell! I’ll stay as silent as the grave.”

“As if there were no more to tell, my lady! Dear Jesus! These miraculous remedies that bring the dead back to life, Don Custodio makes them from the fat of virgins.”

“The fat of virgins!?

“From a young, fair, virgin girl, just at the age to be married. He scoops out the fat with a spoon, and melts it to prepare his concoctions. He had two young housemaids, and no one knows what happened to them, except that they disappeared like the earth had swallowed them up, and no one ever saw them again. It’s said that no human being has entered the back room of his shop; that there’s a trapdoor there, and if a young woman enters and steps on it: splash! she falls in a deep well, so terribly deep that no one can plumb its depths. And there the apothecary rips out her fat.”

It would have been one thing to have asked Jacoba how many fathoms beneath the earth the Ripper of Yesteryear’s laboratory was located; but Pepona’s analytical skills were not as deep as a well, and she only asked with an ill-defined eagerness:

“And only the fat of young virgins will do for this?”

“Only that. We old women aren’t even worth stealing the fat from.”

Pepona kept silent. The mist was damp; in that mountainous place it turned to wet fog, and imperceptibly, little by little, the drizzle soaked the two women, worn out from the cold and frightened by the darkness. As they advanced into the uninhabited wetlands that precede the lovely little valley of Tornelos, and from which one could make out the tower of the Shrine, Jacoba murmured in a subdued voice:

“Comadre. Isn’t that a wolf over there?”

“A wolf?” Pepona said, trembling.

Over there. Behind those stones. They say that lately the wolves have eaten many people. All that was left of one boy from Morlán was his head and his shoes. Jesus!”

The wolf scare reoccurred two or three times before the two women came in sight of the village. Nothing, however, confirmed their fears; not a single wolf approached them. At the door of Jacoba’s hut they said goodbye, and Pepona went alone into her miserable home.

The first thing she tripped over at the threshold was Juan Ramón, drunk as a wine barrel, and she had to get him up, cursing and swearing, and drag him bodily to bed. About midnight, the drunkard emerged from his stupor, and with slurred speech managed to ask his wife what happened with the rent. To this question, and its disconsolate answer, followed reprimands, threats, blasphemies, a rare whispering, heated, furious. Minia, lying on the straw, listened. Her heart was throbbing; her chest was tight; she hardly breathed. There came a moment when Pepona, leaping out of bed, ordered her to move to the other side of the hut, to the area where the livestock slept.

Minia gathered up an armful of straw, and huddled not far from the cowshed, shivering with cold and fright. She was very tired that day; Pepona’s absence obligated her to take care of everything: to make the stew, to gather grass for the livestock, to wash, to do the countless duties and chores that the household demanded. Worn-out with fatigue, tormented by her usual singular worries, by that feeling of unease, the indescribable oppression that troubled her, sleep would not come to close her eyes, nor would her soul calm itself. She prayed mechanically, she thought of the Saint, and she said to herself, without moving her lips: dearest Saint Minia, take me to Heaven soon; quickly, quickly….

Finally she fell, if not exactly to sleep, at least into a state conducive to visions, psychological revelations and even physical transformations. Then it seemed to her, as on the previous night, that she saw the effigy of the martyr; only—how strange!—it wasn’t the Saint; it was she herself, the poor child deprived of all refuge, who was laid out in the glass display case, surrounded by candles in the church. She wore the crown of roses; the vestment of green brocade covered her shoulders; her pale, cold hands gripped the palm leaf; the bloody wound gaped in her own neck, and from there her life departed, sweetly, insensibly, in gentle little surges of blood that left her calm, ecstatic, blissful…. A sigh escaped the girl’s breast, her eyes rolled up, she shuddered—and went completely still. Her last confused impression was that she had finally reached Heaven, in the company of her patron saint.

– III –

In that back room of the apothecary shop, where, according to the authoritative account of Jacoba de Alberte, no human being entered, Don Custodio was in the habit most nights of having a chat with a canon of the Holy Metropolitan Church, a fellow student of pharmaceutical arts, an older man, dry as a piece of kindling, with a ready smile and a great fondness for tobacco. He was the constant friend and intimate confidant of Don Custodio, and if the horrendous crimes that the common people attributed to the apothecary were true, no one would be more appropriate to keep the secret of such abominations than the Canon Don Lucas Llorente, who was the quintessence of mystery and of concealment from the masses.

Silence, absolute reserve in Llorente took on the proportions and character of a mania. He revealed nothing of his life or activities, even the slightest and most innocent. The canon’s motto was: “Let no one know anything about you.” And he even added (in the privacy of the shop’s back room): “Everything that people near us discover about what we do or think turns into a lethal and damaging weapon. It’s better for them to invent things, rather than build on the ground that we ourselves offer them.”

Due to Llorente’s nature, and their long-standing friendship, Don Custodio placed absolute trust in Llorente. He would speak with no one else about certain serious matters, and consulted only with him on dangerous and difficult cases. One night, as the rain came ominously down in buckets, and sporadically thunder rumbled and lightning flashed, Llorente found the apothecary agitated, nervous, nearly frantic. As the canon entered, the other man rushed towards him, grabbed his hands, and dragged him into the depths of the back room, where, in place of the dreadful trapdoor and the bottomless well, there were cupboards, bookcases, a couch, and other equally inoffensive things. He said to the canon in an anguished voice:

“Oh, Llorente, my friend! How I regret having always followed your advice, and added fuel to ignorant gossip! From the start I should have refuted the absurd stories and dispelled the stupid rumors. But you advised me to do nothing, absolutely nothing, to change the image that the common people had formed of me, because of my retiring lifestyle, because of the trips abroad to study advances in my profession, because of my bachelorhood, and because of the cursed coincidence (here the apothecary faltered a little) that two housemaids—young women—had to leave home secretly, without telling anyone why, because… but tell me, what does the public care about their motives?

“You kept telling me: ‘Custodio, my friend, leave things alone; don’t waste any effort trying to set fools straight, because in the end you’ll fail, and they’ll misinterpret your efforts to address their concerns. So they believe that you make your ointments from dead people’s fat and are paid dearly for it—fine; let them, let them bray. You sell them good remedies, the latest modern pharmaceuticals, which you’ve made sure are the most advanced in those foreign countries that you’ve visited. You cure their illnesses, and the imbeciles believe that it’s by magic. Of all the multitudinous nonsense invented and propagated by the damn liberals today, the worst is this idea of ‘enlightening the masses.’ May God enlighten you!

“‘The people can’t be enlightened. They are, and will forever be, a bunch of dolts, a pack of donkeys. If you present them with the natural and the rational, they won’t believe in it. They crave the strange, the outlandish, the marvelous and impossible. The more outrageous the nonsense, the faster it’s swallowed. And so, Custodio my friend, you should stop marching in the procession, and if you can, steal the flag and lead it instead. This world is a complicated dance.'”

“Certainly,” the canon interrupted, taking out his little snuffbox and pinching some of the powder between his fingertips. “I probably said this to you; and what harm has come to you from my advice? I believe the shop’s cashbox is nearly full to bursting, and you recently bought some very beautiful property in Valeiro.”

“I bought it, I bought it; but at what cost!” exclaimed the apothecary. “If you only knew what happened to me today! Go ahead, guess. What do you think happened to me? No matter how much you tax your mind to imagine the worst atrocity, you won’t come up with this, three of you together would never come up with this.”

“What was it?”

“You’ll see, you’ll see! This takes the cake. Today, at an hour when I was completely alone, a village woman came into the shop; she had come some days before with another woman to ask me for an asthma remedy. A tall, hard-faced woman, unibrowed, with a prominent jaw, a flat brow and eyes like coal. An imposing type, believe me. She said she wanted to speak to me secretly, and after she saw that she was alone with me in a safe place, it turned out—Here’s the best part!— It turned out that she had come to offer me the fat of a young girl, her niece, just of marriageable age, a virgin, blond; with all the required conditions, in sum, to make her fat suitable for the remedies that I customarily make.

“What do you say to that, Canon? This is where we are. Out there, it’s an everyday thing for me to disembowel young girls, and from the fat that I take from them I compound these marvelous remedies—poof!—capable of bringing the dead back to life. The woman assured me of it. Do you see? Do you understand the stain that has fallen upon me? I am the terror of the villages, the horror of young women, and the most loathsome and perverted being that the imagination could conceive.”

A distant and deep clap of thunder accompanied the apothecary’s last words. The canon laughed, rubbing his dry hands and happily shaking his head. He seemed to have achieved a great and desired triumph.

“I told you: do you see it, man? Do you see how they are still more bestial, animalistic, monstrous, and slavish than even I thought? Do you see how what occurs to them is always the greatest atrocity, the grossest folly, and the laziest bullshit? You are the simplest, most good-natured and peaceful man on the planet. You have a tender heart; you interest yourselves in other people’s troubles, even though they don’t affect you at all. You are incapable of killing a fly and think only of your books, your studies, your chemicals. All this is enough for those unmitigated savages to brand you a horrible monster, a killer, guilty of all manner of crimes and abominations.”

“But who would have invented these slanders, Llorente?”

“Who? Universal stupidity; mixed with universal malice, as well. The common people are the beast of the Apocalypse, believe me, even though St. John doesn’t say it so baldly.”

“Fine! That’s how it shall be; but from now on, I won’t let myself be slandered anymore. I don’t want that; no sir. See for yourself what a struggle it is! As soon as I get careless, a girl dies because of me! That bloodthirsty fiend, so willing to kill her. Consider what she kept saying to me:

“‘I’ll kill her and leave her in the forest, and say that the wolves ate her. They come around a lot at this time of the year, and you’ll see for sure, by the next day she’ll look like she’s been eaten.’

“Oh, Canon! If you could have seen how hard it was to convince that mule that I don’t extract the fat from anyone, I don’t even dream of it! No matter how much I kept saying to her, ‘This is an outrage that’s going around; a defamation, madness, an insult; and when I figure out who is spreading it, I’ll disembowel them,’ the woman stood firm as a post, and stubbornly repeated:

“‘Sir, two onzas, nothing more. Everything will be kept quiet, everything. For two onzas, I’ll get the fat. You’ll never find such a good deal.’

“What an evil viper! The Furies of Hell must have faces like hers. I tell you it was a hard victory to persuade her. She didn’t want to leave. I had to drive her out with a stick.”

“Let’s hope you’ve persuaded her!” declared the canon, suddenly worried and agitated, twirling the snuffbox between his fingers. “I’m afraid that you’ve made a real blunder. Oh, Custodio! You’ve made a mistake. I’ll take my oath that you’ve made a mistake.”

“What are you saying, man; are you a priest, or the devil?” exclaimed the apothecary, springing from his seat in alarm.

“I’m saying that you’ve made a mistake. No, that you’ve done a foolish thing to suppose, as always, that in those brutes there’s even a spark of natural reason, or that it’s proper or helpful to tell them the truth, and argue it with them, and enlighten them with the lamp of intellect. By that time, probably, the girl will be in heaven, as dead as my grandmother. Tomorrow morning, or the day after, they’ll bring you the fat wrapped in a cloth… You’ll see!”

“Quiet, quiet… I can’t listen to that. It’s too much for a human mind. What should I have done? By God, don’t drive me mad!”

“What should you have done? The opposite of what’s reasonable, the opposite of what’s truthful, the opposite of what you would do with me or with any other person in their right mind who, although perhaps as bad as the rabble, is somewhat less idiotic. Tell them that yes, you have bought fat for two onzas, or three, or one hundred…”

“But then…”

“Wait, let me finish. But that any fat extracted by them is useless. That you have to perform the operation in person, and consequently, they must bring the girl to you, healthy and fresh. And when you have her securely in your custody, then we will send out the hand of Justice to apprehend and punish the villains. Don’t you see clearly that this is a child that they want to harm, that she’s in their way, maybe because she’s an extra mouth to feed, or maybe because she has something and they’re anxious to inherit it? Hasn’t it occurred to you that such an atrocity is decided in a day, but it’s conceived and fermented in the mind sometimes for long years? The girl is under sentence of death. You can believe that it’s just a matter of time….”

And the canon brandished the snuffbox, with an expressive gesture across his throat.

“Canon, are you finished with me? How will I sleep tonight? I’m saddling the mare right now and heading to Tornelos.”

A startling and nearby clap of thunder answered the apothecary that his resolution was impractical. The wind moaned and the rain erupted furiously, pounding on the windows.

“And you contend,” Don Custodio asked despondently, “that they are capable of such iniquity?”

“Of anything. And of inventing much, much more that we still don’t know. Ignorance is invincible; it’s the sibling of crime!”

“And yet,” argued the apothecary, “you advocate the perpetuity of ignorance.”

“Oh, my friend!” responded the obscurantist, “Ignorance is an evil. But evil is necessary and eternal, part of the natural order in this sinful world! We will never see ourselves free from either evil or death.”

What a night the honest apothecary passed, considered as he was by the populace to be the most horrifying monster imaginable. Why, two centuries before he might have been prosecuted for witchcraft!

At dawn he threw a saddle onto the white mare that he rode on his excursions to the countryside, and took the road to Tornelos. The mill would serve as a signpost to quickly find what he was searching for.

The sun began to climb in the heavens, which after the storm shone clear and cloudless, with a radiant brightness. The grasses were already soaking up the rain that had covered them, and the raindrops that had spilled over the brambles during the night were drying up. The wet pines exhaled a faint aroma that began to permeate the cool, diaphanous, transparent air. A magpie, speckled black and white, alighted almost at the feet of Don Custodio’s horse. A jackrabbit emerged from out of the thicket, graceful and playful; startled, it dashed in front of the apothecary.

Everything announced one of those splendid, incomparably calm winter days that in Galicia usually follow tempestuous nights; and the apothecary, suffused by the joy of the atmosphere, began to believe that everything from the evening before was a delusion, a tragic nightmare, or his friend’s extravagance. How could anyone kill anyone else, and especially like that, in such a barbaric and inhuman manner? Madness, nonsense, the canon’s imaginings. Bah! In the mill, at this hour, they would certainly be getting ready to grind the grain. From the Shrine of St Minia, driven by the wind, came the silvery peal of the bell, announcing the first Mass. All was peace, love, and sweet serenity in the countryside.

Don Custodio felt as happy and exhilarated as a little boy, and his thoughts changed course. If the lass was pretty and humble, he would take her home with him, freeing her from her tragic slavery, and the danger and neglect in which she lived. And if she turned out to be good, loyal, unaffected, modest—not like those two crazy housemaids, one of whom had escaped to Zamora with some sergeant, and the other led astray by a student, until finally what happened had happened, and she was obliged to go into hiding—if the little milleress was not like them, but on the other hand developed into the gentle sort of woman that the inveterate bachelor sometimes dreamed of: then, who knows, Custodio? You’re still not so old that….

Captivated by these thoughts, he gave the mare her head, and didn’t realize that he had entered deeper into the wilderness, deeper, into the most tangled and rugged regions. By the time he noticed, he had already traveled a good distance from the road. He turned around and retraced his steps, but with little luck, for he got lost again, finding himself in a wild, craggy locale. Without knowing why, a strange anguish oppressed his heart.

Suddenly, right there, beneath the rays of the sun, of the joyful, beautiful sun that reconciles humanity with themselves and with existence, he spotted a mound, a dead body, that of a young girl. Her bent head revealed the tremendous wound on her neck. A coarse mantelo covered the mutilation of her lacerated and exposed entrails. There was blood everywhere, already diluted by the rain; trampled grass and underbrush; and all around them, the grand silence of the high mountains and the solitary pine forests.

– IV –

Pepona was hanged in La Coruña. Juan Ramón was sentenced to prison. But the apothecary’s intervention in this criminal drama was enough for the common people to believe him a ripper even more than before, and a ripper who had the ability to make the just pay in place of the sinners, accusing others of his own murderous assaults. Fortunately, there was no populist movement in Compostela at the time, otherwise the apothecary shop could easily have been set on fire, which would have made the Canon Llorente, on seeing his theories of universal, irremediable stupidity confirmed, rub his hands.

Ultreja… The term Ultreja (“Beyond”) is a greeting among pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago. It seems to have also been a hymn or song: “The Song of Ultreia,” as mentioned in the 12th century Codex Calixtinus.

cuerpo santo… “In a Catholic context, the term ‘cuerpo santo’ refers to those bodies that were exhumed from various ancient cemeteries and catacombs and later exported as relics of Holy Martyrs to different locations inside and outside of Italy.” — https://kripkit.com/cuerpo-santo/ (My translation)

Once there’s no crop… The original expression: Perdida la cosecha, descansaba forzosamente la muela — When the crop is lost, the millstone is forced to rest. ↩

Poverty breeds discontent. The original expression: Donde no hay harina, todo es mohína — Where there’s no flour, everything is misery.

Collected in Un destripador de antaño: (historias y cuentos regionales), 1900.

First published in La España Moderna, January 1890.