Miro's "El Obispo Leproso": Echoes of Pauline Theology in Alicante

Abstract

E L OBISPO LEPROSO (1926) has no plot in the traditional sense.' On the surface it is the story of a young boy and girl (Pablo Galindo and Maria Fulgencia Valcrcel) growing up in a provincial Spanish. town (Oleza) in the early twentieth century. The town, comprising people with opposite views of modern life, is thrust into the twentieth century by the advent of a railroad. There are two levels of meaning and reference in the novel. A temporally specific level develops significant events in the lives of Oleza's citizens, particularly of Maria and Pablo between the ages of eight and seventeen. Simultaneously at an allegorical level Pablo and Maria undergo a kind of rite of passage and like the first man and woman on earth discover a concept of good and evil in social behavior that is larger than they are. Allegorically Oleza is a microcosm of the modern world, suffering the growing pains of every new generation as it emerges. The underlying significance of El obispo leproso is revealed in Mir6's carefully controlled use of imagery. This essay will analyze two sets of images as central to the novel's meaning: 1) Biblical associations, particularly those inspired by St. Paul's books of the New Testament, and 2) spatial images, particularly those deriving from the Alicantine setting, which we explore in the light of Gaston Bachelard's ideas on poetic space. Images and references from each set meet and mutually support one another in the allegory of spiritual transformation. Temporal phenomena (the religious calendar, people growing older and dying, the progress of the railroad) help weld the Biblical and spatial motifs. In the first half of the book we witness key events in Pablo and Maria's childhood years and in the daily routines of certain Olezans. Pablo and Maria's lives develop in remarkably parallel fashions. Both are estranged from their fam lies and brought up under unsympathetic guardianship in religious institutions. Being about the same age, they discov r sexuality simultaneously but separately. In the second half of the book, their incarcerations end and significant events assume the rhythm of the religious calendar: the central event, the sexual awakening of the adolescent protagonists, occurs at Easter, Pablo leaves the Jesuit school on Corpus Christi and on the tenth of August, Dia de San Lorenzo, Maria leaves the convent to marry Don Amancio. After Pablo enrolls in Don Amancio's academy in October, their illicit relationship begins and they meet each Sunday in the schoolmaster's orchard until the Sunday in November when they are discovered. Near the end of the novel Maria writes Paulina a long letter on Easter Saturday: 'Principian a tocar las campanas del Saibado Santo. Tocan lo mismo que antes de marcharme a la Visitaci6n. iAntes de ir a Oleza, cuainto habia de sucederme! iTocan las mismas campanas, y ya estai todo!' '2 Paulina, Pablo and Alvaro leave Oleza conveyed by the same coach that bore don Daniel todos los 28 de junio para comer con su prima dofia Coraz6n y asistir a las horas can6nicas de la vigilia de San Pedro y San Pablo, la misma galera que trajo a Paulina para su boda en el alba del 24 de noviembre, dia de San Juan de la Cruz. Tambien era noviembre aquella tarde (p. 1051). After specific events have occurred and people's lives have been shifted this way and that, the perennial rhythms re main as evidence that these events respond to universal patterns of human existence. The Bible was one of Mir6's early and