PALACIO VALDÉS A WIZARD OF LITERATURE (I)

 

THE IDYL OF A SICK MAN THE NARRATIVE MASTERY OF ARMANDO PALACIO VALDÉS

 

I retrace my steps, I rejuvenate again with the reading of one of the great Spanish novelists unjustly forgotten A. Palacio Valdés Laviana 1858- Madrid 1936. I was 20 years old, I worked hard to advance three careers and on top of that I gave private classes to help my family. I fell into asthenia or general weakness, some doctors said my stomach was sagging, I was like a spatula, others suspected consumption, I thought it was stomach cancer, I returned everything I ate.

I collaborated in the Madrid newspapers with my first articles and reports.

To make matters worse, I had an oral infection due to a supernumerary that grew backwards, they hospitalized me, they were able to avoid septicemia with the extraction of a redneck and a tusk.

  Was I going to be toothless all my life? I fell into despair. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to find a dentist who, after making me a prosthesis, told me that I did not suffer from cancer, or consumption, nor did I have a sagging stomach.

  Mine was a surmenage or overwork and he sent me to be cured with an uncle of mine, a priest in an Asturian village.

There not only did my problems go away, I also began to live life. I fell in love with everything that moved: chigres girls, ataruxos, pilgrimages, the campanu, the filandones. I believed that existence was a primal dance and that the world was populated with human beings like the Iturripes and women as perfect as Demetria, even though there were filthy seminarians like Celesto, the deuteragonist of this novel, who, upon receiving minor orders, would give up wine. and the women when they ordained him as adults, since he only wanted to be a mass and pot priest.

Meanwhile, Celesto sang through the windlasses of those Anacreontic Luiñas:

The woman who is fat and tender / she has a good leg / and she makes the priest sin / she deserves to be a duchess / and the priest a cardinal

Celesto, despite his charlatanism, his incombustible nonsense, would end up being a good clergyman with his pot, his mass and his Marialuisa.

He would preach on Sundays before a packed church, but guardian of the faith, administrator of God's patience and the sacraments.

  The coalman's faith in such an instance is what counts. The enemies of the church want our faith to be a fly issue under the rule of only one commandment, the sixth and there are ten others. The worst is the eighth and the most harmful is greed disguised as pride and wisdom.

Bureaucracy, modernism, globalism, Satanism, Vatican macrocephaly determine a change that some describe as good but for those of us who, even though we are sinners like me and know a little about theology, find it deleterious and destructive: the convents for sale , the empty seminaries, the cathedrals converted into museums where you have to pay to enter, where plainchant is no longer heard and divine services are hardly celebrated.

That is the plot of the old farce. Ecce homo.

For this reason, the nuns of Belorado are sent by God against all odds and despite the episcopal conferences, led by that idiot called Luis Arguello whom I met as a seminarian in Arenas de San Pedro.

There's the quid of the question. The busilis of the thing.

  Having stated what has been said and if we abstain from libelatic bishops and impostor priests, the Poor Clares of Belorado, even at the cost of being called heretics, have sent a warning to Rome and their reason is my reason that I also love the church and believe deeply in Xto Savior.

  That's why when I go up the Huerna highway back to Madrid and pass near the belfry of a rural church next to the road I say to my companion:

“I would have been a good priest like the priest of Riofrio, the relative of the protagonist of Idilio, of a patient perhaps too avuncular and with wide sleeves.

Well, that Asturian pilgrimage song already said it: “the priest does not dance because he has a crown, dance, Lord priest, dance, that God forgives everything.”

  And she reproaches me, “Good cure for painting; young man, lap boy, you liked the mulleres too much, don't come to me with stories.”

She smiled. All of Don Armando's novels make me smile.

  He was a tolerant writer, the best of the Restoration. They also sometimes make me cry.

  Needless to say, the young writer of the Idyll of a Sick cures all his illnesses and pains and returns to Madrid like an arm of the sea.

In Asturias he fell in love, was cured and got a girlfriend.

But let's not anticipate events.

This is the first part of a series of chapters that I plan to dedicate to my favorite author.

Puxa Asturies.

Tuesday, May 21, 2024