Miró's «El obispo leproso»: Echoes of Pauline Theology in Alicante
Roberta Johnson
El obispo leproso (1926) has no plot in the traditional sense1. On the surface it is the story of a young boy and girl (Pablo Galindo and María Fulgencia Valcárcel) growing up in a provincial Spanish town (Oleza) in the early twentieth century. The town, comprising people with opposite views of modern life, is thrust into the twentieth century by the advent of a railroad. There are two levels of meaning and reference in the novel. A temporally specific level develops significant events in the lives of Oleza's citizens, particularly of María and Pablo between the ages of eight and seventeen. Simultaneously at an allegorical level Pablo and María undergo a kind of rite of passage and like the first man and woman on earth discover a concept of good and evil in social behavior that is larger than they are. Allegorically Oleza is a microcosm of the modern world, suffering the growing pains of every new generation as it emerges.
The underlying significance of El obispo leproso is revealed in Miró's carefully controlled use of imagery. This essay will analyze two sets of images as central to the novel's meaning: 1) Biblical associations, particularly those inspired by St. Paul's books of the New Testament, and 2) spatial images, particularly those deriving from the Alicantine setting, which we explore in the light of Gaston Bachelard's ideas on poetic space. Images and references from each set meet and mutually support one another in the allegory of spiritual transformation.
Temporal phenomena (the religious calendar, people growing older and dying, the progress of the railroad) help weld the Biblical and spatial motifs. In the first half of the book we witness key events in Pablo and María's childhood years and in the daily routines of certain Olezans. Pablo and María's lives develop in remarkably parallel fashions. Both are estranged from their families and brought up under unsympathetic guardianship in religious institutions. Being about the same age, they discover sexuality simultaneously but separately. In the second half of the book, their incarcerations end and significant events assume the rhythm of the religious calendar: the central event, the sexual awakening of the adolescent protagonists, occurs at Easter, Pablo leaves the Jesuit school on Corpus Christi and on the tenth of August, «Día de San Lorenzo», María leaves the convent to marry Don Amancio. After Pablo enrolls in Don Amancio's academy in October, their illicit relationship begins and they meet each Sunday in the schoolmaster's orchard until the Sunday in November when they are discovered.
Near the end of the novel María writes Paulina a long letter on Easter Saturday: «Principian a tocar las campanas del Sábado Santo. Tocan lo mismo que antes de marcharme a la Visitación. ¡Antes de ir a Oleza, cuánto había de sucederme! ¡Tocan las mismas campanas, y ya está todo!»
2 Paulina, Pablo and Álvaro leave Oleza conveyed by the same coach that bore «don Daniel todos los 28 de junio para comer con su prima doña Corazón y asistir a las horas canónicas de la vigilia de San Pedro y San Pablo, la misma galera que trajo a Paulina para su boda en el alba del 24 de noviembre, día de San Juan de la Cruz. También era noviembre aquella tarde»
(p. 1051). After specific events have occurred and people's lives have been shifted this way and that, the perennial rhythms remain as evidence that these events respond to universal patterns of human existence.
The Bible was one of Miró's early and continuous reading interests, and he studied it with scholarly intensity in 1915 as editor of a Sacred Encyclopedia. All of Miró's secular work reflects this interest to some degree, but in the later books (Nuestro Padre San Daniel, El obispo leproso and Años y leguas) he best fuses the Biblical themes, motifs and images with his own world view3. Nuestro Padre San Daniel and El obispo leproso form a Biblical unit in which the former echoes the events and atmosphere of the Old Testament -exile from the promised land (El Olivar) and apocalypse (a cosmic flood purges Cara-rajada, symbolic evil); the names of the mother and son, Paulina and Pablo, are clues to the New Testament theology of El obispo leproso4.
Both names evoke the apostle who first preached the doctrine of Adam and original sin and who wrote to the Romans: «be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind»
(Romans: 12:2). In a discussion about Pablo's unwillingness to love his aunt Elvira, Pablo asks his mother why he was not named Daniel like his grandfather. She has just explained the grandfather's all-encompassing human compassion: «¡Tu abuelo quiso a todos, Pablo; sé como él!»
(p. 982). Pablo's name and story, unlike the grandfather's in Nuestro Padre San Daniel, have a New Testament significance. Pablo asks the question about his name on Good Friday, which will be for him, as it was for Christ, the beginning of his spiritual trial and transformation. After his trial he is able to respond compassionately to Elvira. The principal points in which the novel's imagery touches on Pauline theology are St. Paul's notion of Christ's life, death and resurrection as a metaphor for man's moral renewal and his interpretation of the Garden of Eden and the Fall from Paradise (particularly the suffering and sacrifice) as a starting point for that renewal.
Dialectics of love-hate, liberalism-reactionism, future-past, open-closed in the attitudes of Oleza's people form a corridor through which the protagonists pass on their way to maturity. The secondary characters either open-mindedly accept the relaxing of traditional morality in the emerging twentieth century or they cling to the old order, trying through reaction and hate to maintain a now meaningless or misinterpreted set of values. Pablo's first test on the road to a «new life» is to survive the life-denying forces led by his stern, humorless father Don Álvaro, «acatado con obstinación como un dogma»
(p. 982). The group includes Pablo's old-maid Aunt Elvira, Father Bellod, a Jesuit priest who tortures church rats to death in Nuestro Padre San Daniel, Don Amancio, who lives primarily in the «glorious past» of Oleza through his historical research and writings, the childless Moneras, and the unmarried Catalanas.
Heading the life-oriented forces are the Count and Countess Lóriz, who are naturally and effortlessly assimilated into modern life and even help catapult traditional Oleza into the twentieth century by financing the railroad project. Paulina, Pablo's beautiful mother, is spiritually related to the Lóriz circle, although she is legally and physically tied to her husband Álvaro and his sister. Contrasted to Father Bellod and the Jesuits of the anti-life group are the non-Jesuit Bishop, Don Magín and Don Jeromillo, who openly enjoy the sensual aspects of life within the confines of priestly celibacy. Grifol, the visionary doctor, balances the life-as-history position of Don Amancio. The voluptuous, life-loving Purita holds a place in Oleza society that is in constant tension with that of the sterile Monera woman and the spinster Catalanas.
The general societal tension is repeated at a more personal level as a specific tension between several pairs of characters. One or both characters in each pair has a romantic and sexual attraction to the other which is unrealizable within the social code: Don Jeromillo to Doña Corazón, the Bishop to Paulina, Don Magín and Purita, María and Mauricio, Paulina and Máximo, Pablo and María Fulgencia, and the most unlikely and impossible of all, Elvira to Pablo.
Pablo and the Bishop are key figures in the allegory of transformation: Pablo changes spiritually, the Bishop physically. Although he appears as a mysterious figure in the background, seldom participating directly in the novelistic action, the leprous Bishop is a unifying force in the novel. Leprosy, the Biblical disease, fascinated Miró, and his early work, Del vivir (1904), is set in a leper colony. In El obispo leproso the disease is significant because it is literally the carnal rotting of a spiritually lofty man. The diagnosis of the disease announces the suffering of the innocent that was necessary in the first Christian sacrifice: «Ese mal de la piel era como el mandato y la muestra de otro más recóndito, de una etiología callada. Habló de sobresaltos y trastornos de emoción que predisponen a padecimientos que si no significan un peligro pueden ir fermentándolo»
(p. 948).
Miró compares the Bishop to suffering Job at one point, but he is more often a Christ-figure: «En todas las iglesias de la diócesis se rezaba por el llagado. El Señor le había elegido para salvar a Oleza»
(p. 1043). Emphasizing his Messianic dimension, the Bishop's death coincides with a new and less oppressive life for Pablo and Paulina at the Olivar. As they are about to leave Oleza, the church bells begin to toll for the Bishop's death and Pablo notices a palm branch still attached to the balcony from the previous Easter when his rites of passage began. The beginning and ending of the story are signaled by the sights and sounds of Easter and a wish Pablo expressed as a child has been symbolically fulfilled: «¡Yo quisiera que el Señor hubiese muerto en Oleza!»
(p. 982).
Dr. Grifol prophesies the Bishop's fate: «No se curará: tiene el dolor en las entrañas»
(p. 948), and his prediction is true of the old pattern of life as well. The Bishop's disease is that of all mankind suffering the slow, painful death of its old formulas for social coexistence. Dr. Grifol was not present when the Bishop entered Oleza for the first time because he was busy grafting a sweet lemon to a bitter one. In symbolic terms the horticultural project was not successful because the proper sacrifices had not been made and the times were not right to achieve the better fruit -the better life.
Like the Old Testament prophets, the doctor dies long before the fulfillment of his prediction, but it is his idea of happiness that triumphs in the end: «La felicidad de la vida ha de tener su carácter: el nuestro [i. e., that of our own time]»
(p. 927). Oleza has finally entered the modern world at the end of the novel and part of Pablo's initiation into manhood is to recognize and accept time. The morning after Elvira's clumsily passionate attempt to kiss him he notices his mother's age and «por primera vez en la mañana recién abierta le pesaban los pensamientos viejos»
(p. 1047). On the first morning Pablo is to attend Don Amancio's academy, his father awakens him according to the time on his mother's watch: «Estuvo esperando la hora exacta de la salida de Pablo. Se incorporaba para ver el reloj de oro descolorido de su mujer; quiso que la hora puntual y disciplinaria la señalase el reloj de la madre... Y el hijo levantóse con graciosa ligereza, diciendo -¡Ya es otra vida!»
(p. 1032). Near the end of the novel, when Pablo watches the Oleza train from an Olivar window, he does not watch it on its Murcia route (toward María Fulgencia and the past), but as it goes toward the sea and «las puertas del mundo lejano»
(p. 1054).
Like the Bishop's, Pablo's significance has Christ-like overtones at times. He is directly compared to Christ on Good Friday when his mother comes to the Jesuit school to comfort him for having been punished. The hermano portero reminds Paulina that «¡En esta tarde Nuestra Señora no pudo besar a su Hijo sino después de muerto!»
(p. 982). But more frequently his actions are significant in the light of St. Paul's combination of the symbology of Christ and Adam in the image of a new man: «The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. / Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. / The first man is of the earth; earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven»
(I Corinthians 15:45-47). Pablo, after his confession to the Bishop, envisions himself as Adam: «Así contemplaría el primer hombre la creación intacta delante de sus ojos y de sus rodillas»
(p. 1045). He has achieved the state enjoined by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, «put off... the old man, which is corrupt according to deceitful lusts; / And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; / And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness»
(Ephesians 4: 22-24).
The Adam and Eve motif is first suggested when María and Pablo meet secretly in Don Amancio's orchard. The Alicantine setting requires that the forbidden fruit be a lemon rather than an apple. And in El obispo leproso the lemon as both an agent in the sinful act and a ritual purifier is a more complex symbol than the apple of «Génesis». In the incident leading to María's and Pablo's relationship, María ceremoniously cleanses Pablo's ink-stained hands with a lemon that she has bitten open. Pablo confesses his relationship with María to the Bishop in a lemon grove, while the Bishop refrains from touching the purity of the fruit with his decaying flesh: «Subió el obispo sus manos para perfumárselas en las hojas tiernas del limón; y las vio llagadas, y no quiso tocar la hermosura del árbol»
(pp. 1044-45). An ominous lemon-apple prophesies difficult times in Nuestro Padre San Daniel. Don Amancio has just plucked a lemon from a tree when he hears the news of the new Bishop's election to Oleza. Don Amancio and the anti-life forces have been campaigning to place Father Bellod in the palace: «Soltóse el limón de la mano de Alba-Longa, y parecía que rodaba encima de toda Oleza la manzana de la discordia»
(p. 806). María writes to Paulina, thus closing the Adam and Eve motif in El obispo leproso: «Yo no quise fingir porque "él y yo solos" sin pensar en los demás, no caímos en ninguna vergüenza; pero pensar en los otros hasta tener que engañarles era ya sentirse desnudos, como dicen que se vieron nuestros primeros padres en el Paraíso. Y anticipándoseme ese sonrojo, tuve el presentimiento de que mi paraíso estaba ya cerrado»
(p. 1053).
Pablo's childishness is stressed through-out the novel: «Pablo todavía es un zagalillo. No sé aún si ha de quedar sellado con la semejanza del padre o de la madre»
(p. 940). And he is still «todo niño»
(p. 1044) when he confesses to the Bishop. Forgiving Elvira signals the last stages of Pablo's metamorphosis into manhood, his coming of age. When she is disgraced he does not use his moral power to humiliate her as she has done with him in the past: «Eso sería ser ya hombre: apiadarse y menospreciar; sentir por los demás y hacia los demás; resonarle humanamente el corazón»
(p. 1047). One hears echoes in this passage of St. Paul's often quoted «when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things»
(I Corinthians 13:11). Pablo can forgive Elvira because he has sinned and been pardoned himself. The Fall is not man's greatest misfortune in the view of St. Paul or Miró; it is a necessary part of a significant human life.
The tone and meaning achieved by the images that lead us to interpret El obispo leproso as an allegorization of St. Paul's notion of the fall into the moral life are complicated by Miró's sometimes combining pagan elements with the Christian or by his ironically reversing traditional Christian roles. For example, just prior to María's marriage to Don Amancio and Pablo's enrollment in the latter's academy, each witnesses the slaughter of a defenseless, captive bird by one of the negative anti-life characters. Father Bellod kills the tame jackdaw at the Círculo de Labradores and la clavaria crushes María's male dove. In the context of María and Pablo's ensuing loss of innocence, the killings take on the aura of primitive rituals carried out by a pagan priest and priestess, parodying St. Paul's interpretation of blood sacrifice: «And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. / It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these [Christ]»
(Hebrews 9: 22-23). There are further examples of distortions of traditional Christian roles. Álvaro's desk is «vedada como un ara máxima»
(p. 914), while the Bishops office and desk are Pablo's playground. And the resurrection is mimicked when María's father, suggestively named Trinitario, returns to life during his own wake. His wife becomes then an ex-widow, who at night believes she is «acostada con el cadáver de su marido. Daba gracias a Dios por el milagro de la resurrección, uno de los pocos milagros que nunca se nos ocurre pedir»
(p. 930). These a-Christian ironies do not finally distort the positive vision of the novel that a better life is possible, but rather lend depth and richness of texture.
Leading into and reinforcing the allegorical purification ritual are the numerous spatial images of El obispo leproso. The conflict between open and closed attitudes toward changing social mores is reflected, even created in the novelistic space. There is a constant tension between indoors and outdoors, a natural dialectic in the Alicantine setting, a perennial garden, where doors and windows can be open nearly year around. The partially open door signifies Pablo's emergence, especially according to Gaston Bachelard's interpretation of the door as «an entire cosmos of the Half-open... one of the primal images, the very origin of a day-dream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being...»
5
Pablo as a small child escapes daily from the dark, enclosed house where Álvaro and Elvira monitor everything he and his mother do. The novel opens: «Se dejó entornada la puerta de la corraliza. ¡Acababa de escaparse otra vez! Y corrió callejones de sol y de siesta»
(p. 911). Partially open windows of a study hall signal the coming summer away from the rigors of the Jesuit school: «Las ventanas del salón de estudio, de par en par. Azul de mediodía estremecido y madurado de azul; anchura cortada por la rotonda de la enfermería... Todo eso fue para Pablo la promesa de una felicidad, la lejanía...»
(p. 1007). When Pablo is about to leave for the Olivar after his rites of passage have ended, the aperture is no longer «entornada», but «abierta del todo»
(p. 1042).
The stages of Pablo's development are revealed in spatial imagery. His consciousness opens under Don Magín's benevolent eyes: «En él se abría la curiosidad y la conciencia de las cosas bajo la palabra del capellán»
(p. 912). After graduating from the Jesuit school, Pablo is once more subject to Elvira's scrutiny «y entonces se cerró más la vida de Pablo»
(p. 1031). His maturation is seen as a spatial ascent, a necessary struggle to achieve a morally mature life: «Tantos años lisos de infancia entre paredes; tantos años para ir subiendo a la faz oreada de su júbilo y en unas horas se le escombró la vida...»
(p. 1046) or «Así fue anocheciendo aquel domingo de otoño, como un último día de una época suya toda de sed por la misma cuesta...»
(p. 1047). In one of the few incidents recounted from Pablo's years in the Jesuit school, he mischievously climbs to the rafters on a rope. He thus outwits and exasperates his teachers and symbolically foils Elvira's desire to break his spirit with rigorous Jesuit discipline. The spatial imagery of statues reveals Pablo and María's sexual awakenings. Pablo takes a voyeuristic interest in a nude female statue at the Lóriz palace and María Fulgencia sublimates her romantic interest in her cousin Mauricio in a perverted cult to the nude statue of an angel.
The positive, «human» characters are often associated with luminous, verdant Alicantine gardens, while none of the negative characters is ever aligned with any but interior, enclosed places. For example, Don Magín's presence makes closed places seem open: «Con don Magín entraba en Palacio un claror de vida ancha...»
(p. 912). Even though the Bishop is nearly a hermit, his room, «gozoso de sol y naranjos»
(p. 926), always reflects the out-of-doors. Positive, life-oriented human emotions triumph in open places. There are more extended out-of-door scenes when Pablo and María begin to meet secretly in Don Amancio's orchard. And Pablo wanders in the palace garden before each of his important interviews with the Bishop, the first to assure that the Olivar will not fall into Jesuit hands and the second to receive absolution for his sin.
In the first half of the novel -the pre-redemptive stage of the allegory- interior settings prevail; Pablo is in the Jesuit school, María is in a convent and Paulina is practically a prisoner in her own house where Elvira keeps everything closed: «Si una puerta se quedaba entornada, temía el acecho de unos ojos enemigos»
(p. 917). The half-open door, the primal image of temptation, frightens Elvira; she cannot cope with the «ultimate depths» it suggests. Pablo is aware of this mania for locks, keys and closed doors even through his sense of taste: «Ese estridor de llaves y cerraduras creía sentirlo Pablo hasta con la lengua, amarga por el relumbre del agua oxidada, agua de clavos viejos, que el padre y tía Elvira le obligaban a beber para que le saliesen los colores»
(p. 917).
Pablo gives us the allegorical clue to these spatial images when he precociously remarks: «En mi casa siempre llora la mamá. Es que la mujer y el marido parecen los otros dos»
(p. 914). This familial triangle is reminiscent of St. Paul's interpretation of Abraham's two wives as an allegory of free and captive spirits (Galatians 4:22-31). Elvira, the bondwoman, would enslave Pablo's free spirit if she could, while Paulina, like Sarah the free-woman, eventually triumphs as the genuine «mother of us all». The dialectic of captive versus free is reinforced in other images. For example, the Lóriz' exotic fish from the Holy Land are mentioned three times: 1) when Don Magín visits the couple prior to Máximo and Pablo's enrollment in the Jesuit school, 2) when the countess gives the fish to the Jesuits at her son's and Pablo's graduation, and 3) when Don Roger breaks the bowl, releasing and killing the fish, just before Pablo meets María. The captive fish signal crucial points in Pablo's life as a spiritual prisoner and they image St. Paul's notion of Christ leading «captivity captive... That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro...»
(Ephesians 4:8-14).
The train is Miró's symbol for social opening up. Pablo, shut away at the Olivar after his transgression, and María, incommunicado at her Murcia estates, escape mentally by watching the train pass on the newly built railroad. At the same time they underwent trial and transformation, the train has brought Oleza into the twentieth century «cerca del mundo, participando abiertamente de sus maravillas»
(p. 1056). On the day Máximo Lóriz entered the Jesuit school «llegaba un ruido de azadas, no de azadas agrícolas, frescas, primitivas, sino un ruido de azadonazos rectos, unánimos, disciplinados que rajaban el campo para tender las traviesas y vías del ferrocarril»
(p. 945). This passage leads into the section entitled «Antorchas de pecado», in which a public scandal is described (the railroad workers watch a nude prostitute sing while tied to a tree). Another scandal evolves in the second half of the novel with Pablo and María's sinful love. The railroad startles Oleza from her centuries of religious cloister; a socially taboo love affair brings María and Pablo to maturity.
The title of the central chapter, «Clausura y siglo», embodies the conflict between open and closed space as it emerges in time. The Spanish word siglo admirably evokes expansiveness (both temporal and spatial) while clausura suggests a physical and spiritual shield, protecting the religiously oriented soul from the ephemeral changes of the secular world. Traditional Oleza is a clausura for her citizens and the Jesuit fathers who regulate her moral life treat her as a projection of their monastery: «La ciudad equivalía a un patio de Jesús, un patio sin clausura, y los padres y hermanos la cruzaban como si no saliesen de casa»
(p. 290).
Time itself is often expressed in spatial terms: «Como su hijo, ella [Paulina] también se sentía penetrada de las distancias de los tiempos»
(p. 982). One feels the weight of time's passage in the more readily grasped spatial concept. Happiness, another abstract, is also frequently spatialized. Pablo is described leaving home for Don Amancio's academy: «Y se vistió y se marchó cantando. Olor de nardos recién abiertos; la ribera transparentaba lejanías con promesas de felicidad; los árboles del río incendiaban el azul con sus follajes de oro»
(p. 1032). The Olivar, never actually a setting in El obispo leproso, is the distant promise of happiness, impossible to reach until the final scenes when Pablo's transformation is complete.
In El obispo leproso the things that regulate inhabited space gradually acquire symbolic importance, eventually revealing the eternal truths as Miró perceived them. Like Bachelard's philosopher he «describes his "entry into the world", using a familiar object as a symbol»
6. In his chapter on miniatures Bachelard gives the example of a prose-poem by André Pieryre de Mandiargues in which a flaw in a window pane gathers a whole landscape into itself: «we can read the landscape in a glass nucleus. We no longer look at it while looking through it. This nucleizing nucleus is a world in itself. The miniature deploys to the dimensions of a universe»
7. Similarly, Dr. Grifol's glasses «recogían y renovaban las miniaturas de la tarde campesina: un follaje, una yunta, un temblor de álamo verde, un trozo de horizonte...»
(p. 925), and reveal Miró's Oleza as a microcosm of the world. The «trozo de horizonte» takes us geographically beyond that provincial Spanish world and imagistically suggests a brighter future in the time/distance metaphor.
There can be little doubt that Miró saw Oleza as mankind itself at the dawn of the technological era, struggling to find a different interpretation of morality. Paulina says: «Y no es posible salvarle [a Pablo]... sin salvarnos a todos»
(p. 1049). It is this age and every age caught in the moment when it is merging with another; man struggles to adjust his vital rhythms and social values to the new age. The prophets are ignored and the child-man must be born anew into the world, without the consolation or instruction of history: «Eran tiempos necesitados de rigor; y el rigor había de sentirse desde la infancia de las nuevas generaciones»
(p. 920). St. Paul's vision of man's ability to change his moral life and escape the worldly boundaries that enclose him at any particular moment is a positive message for humanity that Miró saw reflected in the luminous life-giving Alicantine landscape.