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Updated: June 10, 2025
Robbers! this slow subversion and sale, that rent in pieces the revenues of the Cathedral, caused the Señor Esteban as much indignation as though the bailiffs had entered his house in the Claverias to remove the family furniture, each piece of which embalmed the memory of some ancestor.
He pressed the young woman's hands, who, bewildered by Gabriel's words, knew not what to say, and wept softly. Upstairs, in the upper storey of the Claverias, the Chapel-master played his harmonium. Gabriel knew the music: it was Beethoven's last lament, the "Must it be," that the great genius sang before his death with a melancholy that made one shiver.
Gabriel had often spoken to the cadet, for when the youth met him in the cloister he always stopped to speak, endeavouring by the platitudes of his conversation to justify his presence in the Claverias; but Luna was surprised to meet him there on a festival afternoon. "Are you not going to the bull-fight?" he inquired. "I thought everyone from the academy would be in the Plaza."
Returning to the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition of the Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more revolting and intolerable.
His greasy skull cap had been discarded as too old by its former owner, one of the canons; his cassock of a greenish black and his shoes had also belonged to some one of the beneficiaries; in the Claverias they all whispered of the monies hoarded by Don Antolin, and of his savings that were devoted to usury loans that never went beyond two or three duros to the poorer servants of the church ground down by poverty, and which he recovered with interest at the beginning of every month when they were paid by the Canon Obrero.
All the women and children of the Claverias were down below admiring the monument, the "habitacions" seemed quite deserted. As he sat Gabriel saw his brother pass by the window, and in another moment he appeared at the door. "What do you want, Gabriel? What has happened to you? The aunt frightened me with her summons. Are you worse?" "Sit down, Esteban. I am well, calm yourself."
He even flattered Mariquita, who could not show herself shy with him, in spite of his cassock. "He has a very good appearance," she said to the women of the Claverias with the enthusiasm inspired by every man. "I like to see him by the side of Don Gabriel and to hear them talk as they walk in the cloister. They look like two great noblemen.
He occupied the best "habitacion" in the Claverias. During High Mass and the choir in the evening he walked about the naves to check any irreverence on the part of the congregation or any inattention on that of the staff.
But the gardener, in order not to be alone in his big "habitacion" in the Claverias, had married three years previously the daughter of the sacristan, and he had now one son; besides, he could not tear himself away from the church, he was another square block in the mountain of stone, he moved and spoke as a man, but he felt a certainty that he should perish at once if he left his garden.
Gabriel's aunt was by far the most important person in the Claverias; her word was worth quite as much as Don Antolin's, the Silver Stick was afraid of her, bending before the powerful protection that they all guessed stood behind the poor old woman.
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