Unbeknownst to him, my friend Fr P from Kentish Town
recently answered a question that has haunted me for years by posting on LiberFaciorum about a book he’d recently read – the story of an unfortunate priest
in a remote corner of mid-nineteenth century Spain. Alarums rang in my mind as
I recognised what was almost certainly the origin of a TV series I’d caught
hallucinatory bits of years and years ago, and all of which I retained in my
memory was a priest making his way with a donkey through dark woods dripping
with rain, a menacing theme tune, and the suggestion of ‘goings on’ which in
the fragmentary narrative I encountered were never clear. The book is Los Pazos
de Ulloa by the late-19th century Spanish novelist Emilia Pardo
Bazan and I can barely express my astonishment and joy that this ghost was laid
to rest in so unexpected a fashion after nearly 20 years! I found that I could
watch the TV series via the archive of a Spanish broadcaster, if I was prepared
to put up with a moderate quality picture, occasional stumbles and jams as the
internet caught up with itself, and a painfully literal translation which was
almost as much a hindrance as a help.
There are four episodes, comprising not only Los Pazos de
Ulloa itself but also its sequel, Madre Naturaleza, crammed into a single
chapter. The story concerns Fr Julián, newly arrived in Ulloa, buried in the
Galician mountains and a long way from anywhere, as domestic chaplain to the
Marquis, who isn’t really the Marquis but the nephew of the real one who lives
a much more civilised life in Santiago. Julián’s introduction to his new
employer is when he, the Marquis, knocks him off his donkey next to a wayside
cross and puts a gun to his head. The priest soon discovers that the Manor
House of Ulloa is not a haven of the spiritual life. The Marquis gets a filthy little
boy who hangs around the kitchen, and who, it turns out (though nobody will
talk about it) is his illegitimate son, drunk to shut him up; he is having a
long affair with his maid who later tries to shock Julián by stripping and
throwing herself on his bed; the Marquis’s majordomo (the maid’s father) is a
malign fraudster; the chapel is a rat-infested ruin; and the local clergy have
long since given up trying to affect their parishioners’ lives for the good. The
whole estate is dreadfully run down and the people are superstitious and
brutish. Julián decides optimistically that God has sent him to sort it all
out, and he starts with trying to civilise the Marquis by finding him a wife from
among his four cousins in Santiago. They both pick the virtuous Nucha and bring
her back from shiny city life to moss-encrusted Ulloa. Predictably this all
goes horribly wrong, and in the last episode the disgraced and sacked Julián
appears as a sad figure in a battered hat and besmirched cassock, living in a
hut in the woods and praying at Nucha’s tomb. ‘You have brought nothing but
misfortune here’, Sabel the maid told him as he packed to leave the manor, and
indeed it doesn’t even stop when he has left: the Marquis’s son by Sabel and
his daughter by Nucha, unaware of their shared patrimony, fall in incestuous
love which ends with him running off and her going into a convent.
This tale has elements of the Gothic novel: based around a
run-down, isolated house, peopled by extreme individuals, and pervaded by an
atmosphere of inevitable doom. ‘What will happen will happen,’ the residents of
Ulloa tell Nucha’s brother Gabriel who has come to rescue and ideally marry his
niece, when he confronts everyone with the truth about her and her
half-brother. It’s that kind of place. The theme tune starts with a
melodramatic shriek and Julián and Nucha are both prone to having terrifying
dreams as the lightning flashes around the Manor and its shutters batter its walls in the wind.
Julián, especially, has a vision of witchcraft and devilry on his first night
there, and how much is real and how much is dream is hard to discern. The cackling old village woman La Sabia certainly looks the part of a rustic witch. But Ulloa’s
real tone is more social satire than anything else, like a less
relentlessly miserable and more mocking take on Thomas Hardy.
Because Julián is really the central character, it’s his
flaws and those of the Church he represents which are most to the fore. He
seems to have lofty intentions but neither the resolve nor the realism to carry
them through, and for all his moping about the woods in the last episode never
even manages to face his own responsibility for the disaster, getting no
further than a limp ‘perhaps it would have been better had I never come to this
House’. Deluded by his own idealism throughout, he never stops being shocked
and baffled.
There were two odd elements I couldn’t get past, though,
apart from various plot elements I missed because of the risible translation.
Right at the end, Gabriel insists that, as she makes her confession, Julián
makes clear to his niece Manuela that he will still marry her despite what’s
happened. What we see on-screen, to ominous music, is Julián, from behind, describing
to the girl that God will be her only earthly consolation and that she should concentrate
on Him, implying that he has sent her unknowing to the cloister. When Gabriel
confronts her, though, she states that she knows full well what he’s prepared to do, but
that she still feels she must take the veil. Finally, the voice-over narrator –
God? – states that ‘Julián fulfilled his revenge’. One can’t imagine the daft
priest having any such thoughts, really, although seeing Manuela wrested from
the poisonous atmosphere of Ulloa might have come to him as a sort of victory. Did
he or didn’t he? And secondly, given that Manuela’s relationship with her
half-brother is incestuous, were late 19th-century Spanish mores
such that nobody batted an eyelid at her uncle planning to marry her? As she
and Nucha are both played by beautiful Victoria Abril, I so wanted her to say, ‘So,
quite apart from you being about 30 years older than me, you’re saying you mainly
fancy me because I remind you of your dead sister? That’s not creepy at all, is
it?’
I will have to read the books now ...
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