This story 'Casca' is translated from 'La tia Casca' (“Aunt Casca") by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836 -- 1870), originally part of his Cartas desde mi celda (Letters from My Cell), written during his stay at the Monastery of Veruela in Aragón and first published in 1864. Bécquer’s letters, like Daudet’s later Lettres de mon moulin, are at once personal reflections and finely crafted tales.
“This translation and the translation of LA VOZ DEL SILENCIO preserves the syntax and tonal qualities of Bécquer’s 19th-century prose, allowing the rhythm of the original to breathe through the English."
Editor's Note
In the shadowed mountains of Aragón stands the Monastery of Veruela, where Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, poet and chronicler of Spain’s Romantic age, sought convalescence and quiet. From that cloistered refuge came his Cartas desde mi celda -- Letters from My Cell-- nine meditative dispatches written between illness and revelation.
The sixth letter recounts the fate of La tia Casca, the witch of Trasmoz, whose death at the hands of fearful villagers leaves behind an echo that no rational mind can wholly dispel. In Michael Wooff’s translation, the tale becomes a dialogue between superstition and reason -- between the traveller’s cultivated disbelief and the shepherd’s unshaken faith in curses and damnation.
As the bells of Trasmoz toll through mist and mountain silence, Casca reminds us how stubbornly the old world lingers, whispering through stone and superstition long after daylight fades.
La Voz del Silencio
Introduction
There are stories that seem to rise from the stones themselves -- whispered from walls long accustomed to solitude. La Voz del Silencio --The Voice Out of Silence belongs to that lineage of quiet hauntings that Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer gave to the Spanish Romantic tradition.
Written in the middle of the nineteenth century, when superstition still clung to the streets of Toledo like evening mist, the tale follows a wandering artist who hears a woman’s voice -- not a cry, but a sigh --threading through the twilight air. What he discovers is neither spirit nor certainty, but the echo of longing that every artist must learn to live with: the voice that calls from beyond reach, shaping the imagination into story.
Michael Wooff’s translation keeps faith with Bécquer’s stillness -- a hush between the Angelus bell and the turning of a page -- where absence becomes presence and silence speaks.
The Voice Out of Silence
During one of the visits I make to the ancient, silent town of Toledo, like an oasis to me in the daily struggle for existence, the following small incidents occurred which, enlarged upon by my imagination.
I am now transferring to blank sheets of paper.
I was wandering one evening through the narrow streets of the imperial city with my sketch pad under my arm when I sensed that a voice like an enormous sigh was enunciating next to me indistinct and mixed up words.
I hastily turned round and leave it to you to imagine my amazement at finding myself completely alone in that narrow alleyway. And nonetheless, indubitably, a voice had spoken only a few paces from where I was standing.
A strange voice, a blend of lamentations, a woman’s voice no doubt.
Tired of looking in vain for the mouth that had launched its vague complaint behind my back, and being as the hour of the Angelus had already struck from the clock of a nearby convent, I headed for the inn that
served as a shelter to me in the endless hours of night.
When I was finally alone in my room, by the dim light of a vacillating candle flame, I drew in my sketchbook the outline of a woman.
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 The Narrow Street in Toledo == Twilight’s Whisper |
The day was beginning to fade.
The sun was staining the horizon with red and purple blots. The bronze tongue of a bell
marked such and such a time, sounding solemn in the silence. My pace was slow.
A vague sadness imparted to my countenance a doubtful expression.
And again the voice, the same voice as the day gone by, returned to disturb the silence and my peace of mind.
This time I decided not to rest until I found the key to the enigma and, just as I had already started to doubt the efficacy of my investigations, I discovered in an old
house, the architecture of which was very ancient, a small window closed by a grille of whimsical and artistic trelliswork. There could be no doubt that it was from that very window that the melodious and singular female voice had come.
 The Window with the Voice -- A Breath Beyond the Bars |
Night had fallen completely, the voice-sigh had stopped and I decided to return to the inn and my room with its whitewashed walls. Having stretched out on the hard bed, my imagination conjured up a novel which can never, sad to say, be a reality.
The following day, an old Jewish man, who has a hardware stall facing the old house from which the mysterious voice had issued, told me that the house in question had not been lived in for a long time. There used to live in it a woman who was very beautiful, alongside her husband, a miserly merchant much older than her. One day the merchant went out of the house, locking the door with a key, and nothing further was known either of him or his beautiful wife. Legend has it that, from that time on, each night, a white phantom in the shape of a woman wanders through the ruined and ramshackle house and indistinct voices can be
heard, half curses, half laments.
And the same legend thinks to see in the white phantom the beautiful wife of the miserly merchant.
It was that woman’s voice that had come to me like heavenly music, like the sigh of a soul in love, wafted by the air’s caress full of springtime odours. What mystery is there in your inarticulate words, your quavering complaints, your strange and harmonious singing?
Casca Pictorials
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Casca
after Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836 - 1870)
Translated from the Spanish by Michael Wooff
“Whoever lives badly will come to a bad end."
-- From the oral tradition of Aragón
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Two or three years ago now, you may perhaps have read in the press of Saragossa the report of a crime that took place in one of the small municipalities in this area.
It had to do with the murder of a poor old woman accused by her neighbours of being a witch. Recently, due to a strange turn of events, I had the opportunity to know the details and the circumstantial history behind a deed that we can scarcely comprehend in the middle of a century as live and let live as our own.
The day was drawing to a close.
The sky, which since daybreak had been dull and cloudy, was beginning to grow dark as the sun that had been previously shining through mist was losing its strength, when I, in the hope of seeing its famous castle as the terminus and end point of my artist’s day out, left Litago in order to tramp to Trasmoz, a village at a distance of three quarters of an hour away if I took the shortest way to it. As usual, exposing myself, in exchange for being able to view to my heart’s content the harshest and the most uneven parts of the terrain, to the inconvenience and hardships of losing my way among those crags and brambles.
I ended up taking the longest, the most difficult and dubious way, and I indeed got lost despite the highly detailed instructions with which I had equipped myself on leaving Litago.
Already caught up in the densest and roughest undergrowth on the mountain, leading my mule with my right hand along paths that were almost impenetrable, now over heights to discover the way out of this labyrinth, now down with the idea of finding a short cut, I wandered at random for a good part of the afternoon until, at last, I came across a shepherd in a valley bottom watering his flock in a stream which, after slipping over a bed of stones of a thousand different hues, sprang forth to meander there with a singular gushing noise audible from a long way off in the midst of the deep silence of nature which, in that place and at that hour, seemed either dumb or asleep.
I asked the shepherd the way to the village which, according to my calculations, could not be far from the spot we were in, since, although I had not kept to a definite path, I had always taken care to go forward in the direction that had been indicated to me.
The good man answered my question to the best of his ability and I was already by way of continuing my hazardous journey, scrambling up on hands and feet and pulling on my mule as God directed me among slabs of stone overgrown with scrub and thistles, when the shepherd, watching me ascend from a distance, shouted to me not to take the track Old Casca had taken if I wanted to arrive safe and sound at the top
The truth was that the path I had mistakenly embarked on was becoming harder and rougher by the minute. There was, on one side, the shadow projected by the highest rocks, which appeared to be hanging over my head and, on the other, the dizzying sound of the water running deep at my feet from which had begun to rise a blue and restless mist obscuring, as it made its way along the valley bottom, objects and colours.
All of this contributed to troubling my sight and touching my soul with a feeling of painful unease that might commonly be called a prelude to fear. I went back down again to where I had met the shepherd and, while we together followed a track leading to the village where he, my improvised guide, was also going to spend the night, the least I could do was to ask him somewhat emphatically why, apart from the difficulties afforded by the ascent per se, it was so dangerous to go up to the top the way Old Casca had.
“Because before you get to the end of the path," he said, speaking quite normally, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “you will have to skirt the precipice into which fell that damned witch who gave it its name and in which, it is said, her soul is being punished, a soul that, having departed her body, neither God nor the devil have wanted to lay claim to."
“Dear me!" I exclaimed as if surprised, though, in all honesty, I had expected an answer like this or along these lines. “And what the devil does the soul of that poor old woman find to amuse it in this godforsaken spot?"
“She amuses herself in pestering and persecuting the unhappy shepherds who venture into this part of the mountain sometimes howling in the bushes as if she were a wolf, sometimes moaning pitifully like a wounded animal or squatting in the breaks between the rocks at the bottom of the precipice, from where she beckons with her dry and yellow hand to those who are walking on its edge, skewering them with a look from her owlish eyes, and, when their head begins to spin with vertigo, she makes a big jump, grasps them by the feet and pulls at them till they fall in the abyss.
Curse you, witch!" the shepherd exclaimed presently, stretching his clenched fist towards the rocks as if he were threatening her.
“Curse you. You did many evil things when you were alive and, even now you’re dead, we still haven’t managed to get you to leave us alone. But make no mistake == we’ll have to squash you and your diabolic race of sorceresses one by one like vipers."
“It’s my understanding," I insisted, after he had finished his outlandish cursing, “that you are very well informed about that woman’s misdemeanours. Were you by any chance old enough to have known her? It seems to me that you’re too young to have lived when there were still witches going about in the world."
On hearing these words the shepherd, who was walking in front of me to show me the way, stopped walking for a bit and, staring at me in amazement as if to ascertain if I was joking, exclaimed with surprising earnestness: “You don’t think I’m old enough to have known her! What if I were to tell you that less than three years ago to the day I saw her with these same eyes I’ll have when I’m pushing up the daisies falling off the top of that precipice, leaving behind on each of the rocky outcrops and the brambles a shred of her clothing or her flesh until she hit the bottom where she stayed, crushed like a toad trodden down by your foot?"
“In that case," I replied, astonished in my turn by that poor man’s credulity, “I shall accept what you say unreservedly, although I had imagined," I added, stressing the last phrases in my sentence to see what effect they had, “that all this guff about witches and spells was no more than village tall stories and absurd old wives’ tales."
“That’s what townies say because they aren’t bothered by them and, on the basis that it’s all just made up, they sent some poor wretches to prison who performed a charitable act for the people who live hereabouts by forcing that wicked woman off a cliff."
“So it wasn’t an accident when she fell, was it? They pushed her, didn’t they? Tell me how it happened. It must have been a strange thing to see," I added, showing enough credulity and surprise for him not to suspect that I only wanted to be entertained for a while by listening to his nonsense, since I have to admit that the finer details of the event did not then remind me that I had already read of something similar in the province’s newspapers.
The shepherd, convinced by the display of interest with which I made ready to listen to his tale, that I was not just one of those townies, ready to dismiss his story as eyewash, raised his hand to indicate one of the peaks and started to talk, pointing out one of the rocks that stood out, dark and imposing, against the grey background of the sky, that the sun, as it set behind the clouds, was changing to a reddish colour.
“Do you see that high point up there, cut so steep it seems a peak, where, in among the rocks, gorse and brambles are growing? It still seems to me that it happened only yesterday. I was only some two hundred paces down the road then from where we just met. Even the time of day will soon be the same when I thought I heard yells in the distance and raving and cursing mingled with men’s angry voices audible first on one side, then on the other like shepherds pursuing a wolf among brambles.
The sun, as I say, was in the process of setting and behind the height could be discerned a rag of sky, red and inflamed like cochineal, against which I witnessed the apparition of something tall, desiccated and tattered, like a skeleton emerging from its grave, still wrapped in scraps of its shroud, a horrible old woman in whom I recognized Old Casca.
Old Casca was famous in these parts and for me it was enough to see the off-white mop of hair twisting in curls round her forehead like snakes, her bizarre silhouette, her bent body and her misshapen arms, all of which things stood out dark and angular against the fiery backdrop of the horizon, to recognize in her the witch of Trasmoz.
When she came to the edge of the precipice, she stopped for a moment, not knowing which way to turn. The voices of those who appeared to be following her sounded to be getting nearer and, now and again, I saw her contort herself, shrink or hop to avoid the things that they were throwing at her.
She could not have been carrying the box of her devilish unguents because, if she had been, she’d have flown across the chasm leaving her pursuers outwitted and panting like greyhounds who have lost the scent. It was not God’s will for her. He had permitted she should pay for all her misdeeds in one fell swoop. The lads now arrived who were after her and the mountaintop was crowned with people, some of them with stones in their hands, some of them with sticks and, further off, some carrying knives.
Then an awful thing transpired. The old woman, steeped in hypocrisy, seeing she was cornered, threw herself down on the ground, dragged herself to kiss the feet of some, embraced the
knees of others, begged for help from Our Lady and the saints, whose names sounded in her mouth like blasphemies. But the lads paid as little attention to her petitions as I pay to rain when I’m under a roof.
“I’m a poor old woman who never did any harm to anyone. I’ve no sons or relatives to turn to for shelter. Forgive me! Have mercy on me! -- howled the witch and one of the lads, who had seized her by the hair with one hand while holding in the other a clasp knife he was trying to open with his teeth, answered her, roaring furiously: “It’s too late now for these lamentations of yours. We all know you for a black witch!== “You hurt my mule
that wouldn’t eat after that and died of hunger leaving me destitute!" said one. “You put the evil eye on my son and you take him out of his cradle and spank him at night!" said another, and all of them found reasons to attack her verbally: “You cast a spell upon my sister!" “You bound my girlfriend!" “You poisoned the grass!" “You bewitched all the village!"
I stayed rooted to the same spot in which this infernal clamour had surprised me, unable to move hand or foot, waiting for the outcome of that struggle.
The voice of Old Casca, sharp and strident, dominated the hullabaloo of all the other voices joining together in unison to accuse her, throwing her crimes in her face, and she
continued to groan and to sob, continued to call on God and patron saints to bear witness to her innocence.
In the end, acknowledging the total hopelessness of her situation, she begged as a final mercy they should let her ask of Heaven pardon for her sins before dying and, just as he was, kneeling on the edge of the precipice, the old woman bowed her head, joined her hands in prayer and began to mumble through her teeth prayers that were incomprehensible.
They were words I could not hear because of the distance between us but even those next to her could make no sense of them. Some said she was speaking Latin, others maintained it was a primitive and unfamiliar language, albeit there was no lack of those who grasped that she was indeed praying, though she was saying the prayers backwards as is the wont of these bad women.
At this point in the narrative the shepherd stopped for a moment, looked around him and continued thus:
“Can you sense that profound silence reigning over all the mountain, no sound of a pebble dropping, or the rustling of a leaf, and the air is still and weighs down on your shoulders and you feel oppressed by it?
Can you see those scraps of dark mist gradually sliding all the way along the steep mountain range of Moncayo as if its cavities were insufficient to contain them? Do you see them going forward mutely and slowly like an aerial legion moved by an invisible force?
There was the same deadly silence then. The afternoon mist evinced the same strange and fearsome aspect, swirling round the far-off summits for as long as that anguished hiatus lasted.
I freely admit that I began to be afraid.
Who could tell if the witch was taking advantage of these moments to cast one of those terrible spells that call forth the dead from their tombs, even the most hellish and rebellious spirits?
The old woman was praying, praying ceaselessly, the lads were stock still as if bound by a spell and the dark mists kept advancing and enveloping the crags around which masqueraded a thousand strange shapes -- deformed monsters, red and black crocodiles, colossal apparitions of women wrapped in white cloths and long and vaporous streamers which, caught by the last light of evening, resembled huge, coloured serpents.
With my sight fixed on that fantastic army of clouds that seemed to be running to assault the crag on whose top the witch was going to die, I waited for a time when lungs would open to frustrate the diabolic multitude of evil spirits, giving rise to a horrible fight on the edge of the precipice between those who were there to bring the witch to justice and the demons that, in payment for her many services, were coming to her aid in that bitter period.
“And finally," I exclaimed, interrupting the animated story being told me by my interlocutor and already impatient to know its outcome, “how did all that end? Did they kill the old woman? I think that, no matter how many spells the witch recited and how many signs you saw in those clouds surrounding her, the evil spirits would have kept quiet, each one in its hole, without in any way interfering in earthly matters. Is that what happened?"
“So it was. It might have been because the witch, in her disturbed state, could not come up with the right formula or, which I think more likely, that because it was Friday, the day on which Our Lord and Saviour died for us, and before they’d finished saying vespers, during which bad people have no power, the fact was that, seeing that her devilish drivel was going on and on, a lad told her to stop and, lifting up his knife, prepared to wound her.
The old woman then, hitherto so humble and mealy-mouthed, stood up with the speed of a coiled snake that you tread on, and unfolded her rings until she was angrily erect. “Oh, I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!" she said. “Leave me alone or I’ll bite the hands that you’re holding me down with!"
But hardly had these words been spoken than, rushing at her pursuers beside herself, with her hair loose, her eyes bloodshot and her stinking maw half open and full of spittle, I heard her let out a frightful scream, raise two or three times her hands to her side with great alacrity, looking at them and then, instinctively, looking at them again. Finally, taking three or four steps, swaying as if she were drunk, I saw her fall down into the chasm.
One of the lads, of whom she had bewitched a sister, the prettiest, the most devout in the village, had mortally wounded her just as he felt her sink her black and sharp-pointed teeth into his arm.
But do you think that matters ended there? Not a bit of it. The old demoness had nine lives like cats do. She fell into a precipice down which anyone else who had merely slipped would not have stopped falling till reaching the bottom but she, perhaps because the devil softened the blow or because the tatters of her smock enmeshed her in brambles, stayed suspended from one of the pointed rocks that the gully bristled with, shuffling and twisting there like a reptile hanging by its tail. God, how she blasphemed! What horrible curses came out of her mouth! Your flesh shivered and the hairs on your head stood up just hearing her.
The lads followed from above her grotesque motions, waiting for the moment when the last scrap of smock holding her there would rip and she would somersault from rock to rock till she reached the valley bottom.
But she, in imminent danger of death and without ceasing to proffer, now awful blasphemies, now prayers interlaced with curses, coiled round the scrub.
Her long, bony and bloody fingers clung like pincers to the cracks in the rocks so that she might perhaps, using her knees, her teeth, her feet and her hands to help her, have managed to climb back up to the edge, had not some of those watching her, who had started to fear her now, lifted up a heavy stone with which they planted such a blow to her chest that both stone and witch went down together simultaneously, bouncing from step to step down those calcareous rocks as sharp as knives until they arrived in that stream you can see right at the bottom of the valley.
Once there the witch remained immobile for a long time with her face sunk in among the silt and slime of the ditch running red with her blood. After that she gradually began to come back to herself and to move convulsively.
The bloody and swampy water splashed, beaten by her flailing hands which, from time to time, rose in the air, clenched and terrible, whether it was they were begging for mercy or still expressing threats in their death throes.
And so she spent a certain amount of time writhing and trying in vain to
get her head clear of the current, searching for a little air to breathe until, in the end, she dropped down dead, quite dead, since we who had watched her fall and who knew what a witch as astute as Old Casca was capable of, did not take our eyes from her till night having well and truly fallen the darkness prevented us from seeing her, and in all that time she didn’t move a limb so that, if the wound and the blows had not been enough to finish her off, it was certain she had drowned in the stream whose waters she had so often bewitched in life to make our livestock die. Whoever lives badly will come to a bad end! That was what we exclaimed after looking one last time at the dark valley bottom and, crossing ourselves and asking God to help us in all eventualities, as in this one, against the devil and those who belong to him, we set out, without undue haste, to return to the village, in whose rickety bell tower the bells were calling our devout neighbours to prayer.
Exactly as the shepherd finished telling his story, we reached the nearest summit to the village, from where the dark and imposing castle, with the high bell tower paying homage to it, offered itself to my view. All that remained standing of it was a piece of wall with two slits for firing arrows through that scattered brightness and looked like the eyes of a phantom.
In that castle, which has as its foundation the black slate that constitutes the mountain, and whose ancient walls, made of huge lumps of stone, seem to be the work of Titans, it is said that the area’s witches congregate for their nighttime secret meetings.
Night had already drawn in, dark and misty. The moon could be seen intermittently among the scraps of clouds flying around in our direction, almost brushing the ground, and the bells of Trasmoz could be heard slowly tolling for prayers like the end of this terrible story they had just recounted to me.
Now that I am back in my quiet monk’s cell, allocated to me as a visitor to this monastery, and recording these strange impressions, I cannot fail to marvel and feel hurt that old superstitions should still have such deep roots among village folk, giving rise to such incidents, but -- why trouble to conceal it? -- as the last words of that fearful narrative continued to echo with me, having next to me that man who, in such good faith, asked God for divine protection so that ghastly crimes could be perpetrated, seeing at my feet the black and deep abyss in which water was lapping in the darkness, simulating moans and lamentations, and aware, in the distance, of that traditional castle, crowned with dark battlements that looked like ghosts appearing on the walls.
I felt anxious, my hair stood up of its own volition, and reason, mastered by the fantasy that all was in thrall to, the place, the hour, the silence of the night, stumbled slightly. I could almost believe that witchcraft and hexes might be possible.
Knowing that the girl who waits on me, who, armed with an enormous iron oil lamp, has just finished tidying up in the kitchen and snuffing out the candles there, comes from Tarazona, which is close to Trasmoz, and that a good part of her family live in this village, it occurred to me to ask her if she herself knew who Old Casca was and if she was party to any knowledge of her notorious spells. You cannot imagine the face she pulled on hearing the witch’s name mentioned, nor the expression of fright and worry with which she looked around her, trying with her oil lamp to throw light on all the cell’s dark corners.
Then, after hanging up the oil lamp on a nail, and standing at a respectful distance from my table, as she had declined to sit down despite my invitations to, she told me the story of the other witches.