The Kiss

by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

part 1

When a section of the French army seized in 1808 the historic city of Toledo, its leaders, who were ignorant of the danger to which they were exposing themselves among Spaniards by fanning out into separate lodgings, started by setting up quarters in the town’s biggest and best buildings.

After having occupied the sumptuous palace-fortress of Charles V, they laid hands on the house in which the Council of Castille was located and, when this was full to capacity, they began to invade the privacy of religious communities, ending up, at the end of the day by converting into stables even churches where masses were normally said for the faithful.

Such then was the state of affairs in the town where the event took place that I am about to relate when, one night, already quite late, wrapped in the dark capes they wore while on active service and deafening the narrow and solitary streets that lead from the Puerta del Sol to Zocodover Square with the clash of their arms and the noisy hoofbeats of their steeds striking sparks from flints, there came into the town up to no less than a hundred of those tall, proud and hefty dragoons of whom our female forebears still talk admiringly.

The force was commanded by a fairly young captain, who proceeded at a distance of thirty paces in front of his men, quietly conversing with someone who was also a soldier, judging by his uniform. The soldier, on foot just ahead of his superior officer and carrying a small lantern, appeared to be acting as a guide to him in order to negotiate that labyrinth of dark, tangled and twisting streets.

“Really,” the cavalryman was saying to his companion, “if the lodging being prepared for us is as you describe it to me, it would almost be preferable to settle ourselves down in a field or in the middle of one of the squares here.”

“What do you want me to do, captain?” answered the guide, who was in fact a quartermaster sergeant in charge of billeting. “In the royal palace-fortress there’s no room for a grain of wheat now, never mind a man. The monastery of San Juan de los Reyes is out of the question: there’s a monk’s cell in there where fifteen hussars are sleeping. The monastery I’m going to take you to wouldn’t be a bad place for accommodation but, a matter of three or four days ago, one of those flying columns that are scouring the province arrived here from out of the blue and, fortunately, they were able to crowd into the cloisters, leaving the church untenanted.”

“Ultimately,” the officer exclaimed after a short silence and as if resigning himself to the strange lodging that fate was providing for him, “discomfort is better than no comfort at all. Anyway, if it rains, which seems likely given the current cloud formations, we’ll be under cover and every little helps.”

The conversation was broken off at this point, and the cavalrymen, preceded by the guide, followed the road ahead in silence until it reached a small square in the corner of which loomed the black shape of the monastery with its Moorish tower, its steepled belfry, its ogival cupola and its vaulted ceiling adorned unevenly and darkly with crests.

“I have here your billet,” said the quartermaster on perceiving it and walked towards the captain who, after he had ordered his platoon to halt, got down from his horse, taking the small lantern from the hands of the guide, and approached the destination that the latter had pointed out to him.

As the church of the monastery was completely dismantled, the soldiers who occupied the rest of the building had thought that its doors were no longer either useful or ornamental and had stripped from them, piece by piece, one panel today, another the day after, in order to make of them bonfires with which they could warm themselves at night.

Our young captain had no need then to turn keys or to draw back bolts so as to enter the church’s interior.

By the light of the small lantern, the dubious clarity of which was lost in the dense shadows of the naves and made disproportionately big on the wall the fantastic one cast by the quartermaster sergeant who was walking in front of it, the captain went up and down the church, scrutinising one by one its deserted side chapels until, having taken it all in, he ordered his men to dismount and disposed them and their horses in the various spaces to the best of his ability.

As we have previously stated, the church was completely derelict. Over the high altar still hung from the elevated curtain rails the red tatters of the veil that the monks had covered it with on abandoning these precincts. Strewn through the aisles, some altarpieces had been veiled with their backs to the wall and the niches were empty of holy images. In the choir, the strange silhouettes of dark larch-wood choir stalls were visible. On the stone floor, broken at various points, could still be made out broad gravestones full of marks of honour, shields and big Gothic inscriptions. Far away, in the distance, in the corners of the silent chapels and across the transept, there stood out in a blur against the darkness, like white and stationary spectres, stone statues which, some lying down, some kneeling on the marble of their tombs, seemed to be the sole inhabitants of this ruined edifice.

To anyone less exhausted than this particular captain of dragoons, whose body had borne a day’s trot of fourteen leagues that day, or to one who might be less used to seeing such sacrilege as the most natural thing in the world, two ounces of imagination would have been enough for him not to sleep a wink all night in that dark and impressive place, where the oaths of soldiers complaining aloud of their improvised accommodation, the metallic rasp of spurs against the aforementioned grave slabs, the sound of horses impatiently pawing the ground, tossing their heads and rattling the chains with which they were secured to pillars, together formed a strange and frightful background noise throughout the whole church, repeating itself in ever more confused echoes under the high ceilings.

But our hero, young as he was, was already so familiar with these vicissitudes of campaign life that, scarcely had he housed his men than he asked for a sack of fodder to be placed at the bottom of the steps leading up to the presbytery and, wrapping himself up as best he could in his cape and leaning back his own head on those steps, he was, after five minutes, snoring more serenely than King Joseph Bonaparte himself in his palace in Madrid.

The soldiers, making pillows of their saddles, imitated his example and, little by little, the murmur of their voices died out.

After half an hour, the only sounds that could still be heard were the stifled moans of the wind coming in through the broken panes of the church’s windows, the bewildered fluttering of night birds that had made their nests in the stone canopies of the sculptures lining the walls, and the alternating paces of the sentry, who was walking back and forth, wrapped in the broad folds of his cape, outside the main entrance.

* * *

In the period to which dates back the telling of this story, as true as it is extraordinary, for those who were unable to appreciate the artistic treasures, then as now, enclosed by its walls, the city of Toledo was no more than a rambling, ancient, tumbledown, insufferable dump.

French army officers, whose ranks, judging by the acts of vandalism thanks to which they left in this town a sad and lasting reminder of their occupation of it, contained the least number of artists and archaeologists, evidently did not care greatly for this age-old city of the Caesars.

Given this state of mind, the most trifling novelty that came to break the monotonous calm of those endless and unruffled days was avidly seized on by the idle. So it was that the prompt promotion of one of one’s comrades-in-arms, the news of the strategic deployment of a flying column, the publication of an official letter or the arrival of any kind of military force in the town were transformed into a fertile topic of conversation and became an object for all manner of commentaries until a further incident took their place, serving as the basis for new complaints, criticisms, suppositions.

As was only to be expected, among the officers who, as was their wont, came the next day to sun themselves and chat for a while in Zocodover Square, there was no other matter for discussion than the arrival of the dragoons, whose commanding officer we left in the first part of our story sleeping soundly and resting from the trials and tribulations of his journey.

The conversation had revolved around this subject for about an hour and the absence of the new arrival had begun to be variously interpreted, including by an old college friend of his, when, in one of the side streets of the square, our bizarre captain appeared at last, divested of his loose-fitting cape, his great metal helmet, topped by a plumage of white feathers, gleaming, wearing a turquoise blue dress coat with a red belt from which hung a magnificent broadsword in a sheath of steel dragging resoundingly in time with his martial footsteps and the thin and sharp jingles of his golden spurs.

No sooner had his former classmate seen him than he went forward to greet him and with him nearly all those who at that time formed this coterie, in whom the details that had been related to them regarding his odd and original character had aroused a feeling of curiosity and the desire actually to meet him.

After the close embraces, congratulatory exclamations and obligatory questions customary in these encounters, after having talked at length of what was new now in Madrid, the fluctuating fortunes of the war and dead or absent mates, the conversation ranging from one subject to another, the one inescapable topic was broached: the hardship of military service, the lack of distractions in the town and the discomfort of their billets.

At this point one of those present who had, apparently, got wind of the reluctance with which the young officer had resigned himself to housing his men in the abandoned church, said to him teasingly: “On the subject of lodgings, what kind of a night did you have in the one that was allocated to you?”

“There were all sorts of things,” answered the captain, “but if it is true that I did not sleep much, the cause of my wakefulness was well worth the trouble that the evening put me to. Sleeplessness next to a pretty woman is certainly not the worst thing that can befall one.”

“A woman!” his questioner repeated, as if in admiration of the latest arrival’s good fortune. “That’s what they call hitting the jackpot at the first attempt.”

“Perhaps it’s an old flame at court who has followed him to Toledo to make his social ostracism more bearable.”

“No, not that!” said the captain. “Anything but that. I swear, on my honour as a gentleman, that I did not know her from of old and that I never thought to find such a beautiful mistress in such desolate surroundings. It really was an adventure for me.”

“Tell us then! Tell us about it!” the officers around the captain chorused and, as the latter set his stall out to do just that, all paid the closest attention to what he had to say, and he started to narrate what had happened:

“I was sleeping last night like a man sleeps whose body has absorbed a trek of more than thirteen leagues when, just as I was losing myself completely in the arms of Morpheus, I was rudely wakened. I pushed myself up on my elbow to an almighty din, a din so loud that it deafened me for a moment, leaving a buzzing in my ears for nigh on a minute, as if a bluebottle had got into them.

“As you may well have imagined, what had startled me was the first stroke I heard of that damnable fat bell, a bronze choral soloist if you will, that the canons of Toledo have hung in their cathedral with the laudable intention of making life a misery for those in need of rest. Cursing under my breath both the bell and the bellringer, I was trying to recover the thread — once that fearsome and unwanted noise had abated — of my interrupted sleep when something extraordinary impinged on my sense of sight.

By the wavering light of the moon coming into the church through the narrow mullioned window in the wall of the main chapel, I saw a woman kneeling down next to the altar.”

Proceed to part 2...