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Updated: June 10, 2025
When he discovered the Tato repeating in the Claverias all the gossip from down below, he threatened him with all his authority as head of the house. Esteban was also very much concerned at the state of his brother's health.
He moved about, intent on giving orders to his fellow-workers; he went from the church to the top of the Claverias, where the monument was stored, and seeing himself covered with dust, and with his limbs fatigued by the constant coming and going, he deluded himself into thinking he was strong again.
In order not to sleep, he read by the light of his lantern any books he could get in the Claverias, uninteresting treatises on history in which Providence played the principal rôle; lives of the saints, amusing from their simple credulity, bordering on the grotesque; and that family Quixote of the Lunas', that he had so often spelt out when little, and in which he still found some of the freshness of his childhood.
You Lunas have always been delicate; your father, long before he was my age, could barely walk, and was always complaining of rheum and of the damp in this garden. Here am I in it constantly, and I feel just the same as when I am upstairs in the Claverias.
Gabriel knew through Silver Stick that the chaplain's mother had died, and a week afterwards he saw him one evening in the Claverias. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks thin, and his skin drawn as though he had wept much. "I come to take farewell, Gabriel. I have spent a month of sorrow and sleeplessness nursing my mother.
"If you cannot restore order, this will end badly; they even insult my poor niece, and some day I shall turn half the people of the Claverias out into the street, as I hold authority from His Eminence for everything. Ay, señor! I do not know what has happened here; surely the devil must have got loose in our upper cloister! How these people have changed to me!"
Tired of the chattering of the women who stood at the doors of the Claverias, he would go up to the dwelling of the bell-ringer, his old companion in arms, or he would go down into the garden by the remarkable staircase del Tenorio when it was open, or by the archbishop's archway crossing the street.
In one of the dwellings of the Claverias you could hear the incessant tap, tap, of a hammer; it was that of a shoemaker whom Gabriel had seen through the window-panes, bending over his bench.
From the farther end of the nave were coming the night watchmen, to take up their charge till the following morning, preceded by the dog. The two friends went out into the cloister, guided through the dusk by the rich glow from the stained glass windows; outside, the last rays of the sun were touching both the garden and the cloister of the Claverias with crimson.
"You who are so kind, aunt, you will tell me; everyone seems afraid to speak about it; even my nephew the Tato, who is such a chatterer and skins everyone in the Claverias, is silent when I ask him. What happened, aunt?" The old woman's face grew very sad. "A great misfortune, my son, such as was never known before in the upper cloister.
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