‘The Holy Innocents’: tragedy and oppression

Delibes—with short scenes, concise dialogue and plain style—uses recurrent leitmotifs to emphasise the distinctive physical traits of his characters.  Azarías, whose ironic name means “helped by God,” is feeble-minded and filthy.  He can’t count past 11 and always jumps from there to 43; has a toothless drooling mouth, pees on his hands to prevent chapping and shits whenever he feels like it all over the farm.  The fastidious landlord cannot eat a woodcock that Azarías has plucked with his pissed-on hands.  He fires the old, useless and lice-ridden farmhand, who moves into the crowded house of his sister Régula and her husband Paco.  But Azarías has an uncanny understanding of birds, keeps calling his tame pets “little kitey” and can magically summon them from the sky to land on his left shoulder.

Régula has to take care of her sick child and backward brother.  Azarías has a similar understanding of Paco’s sickly, suffering, skeletal daughter Charito, who’s confined to a large crib and pierces the air with agonizing screams of pain.  Her “body was as small as a rabbit’s, her little legs were dangling and flopping like a rag doll’s, as if she didn’t have any bones, but Azarías’ trembling hands cradled her head in his lap, gently held her in his brawny arms, holding her to his chest, and he began softly scratching her brow while he whispered, ‘pretty kitey, pretty kitey.’ ”  Charito and Azarías are both infantile and disabled.  She’s the only one who understands him; he cherishes her and she becomes the human equivalent of his pet birds.  On her last night she screeches like Azarías’ pet owl, won’t eat and suddenly dies.

Azarías’ brother-in-law, the obliging peasant Paco, who has a bloodhound’s sense of smell, flares his wide nostrils and “lifts both hands to his head as if to keep it from flying off his neck.”  Paco’s 14-year-old daughter Nieves, named for the Virgin of the Snows, has well-developed breasts. The intelligent Nieves is forced to work as a servant for the bailiff Pedro and has to abandon her hope for an education that would free her from servitude.  Iván mocks the idea of allowing the impoverished girl to celebrate her First Communion.  The Marquesa’s daughter Miriam, impressed by Nieves’ skill, tries to determine her future by saying “she’d make a good first maid.”

Pedro nervously chews the inside of his cheek.  His wife, the ironically named Purita, “acts like someone’s sticking pins into her all the time, she gets so hysterical, not even Pedro can stand her.”  The bored and provocative Purita wears a seductive half-cup bra and low-cut blouse, and Señorito Iván “rakishly peered down Purita’s swooping neckline into her beautiful cleavage,” dreaming of pleasures to come.  After Iván’s droit de seigneur  seduction, Pedro calls Purita a whore and threatens to whip her.  Publicly humiliated by his boss, Pedro “followed behind her in a frenzy, waving his arms, but besides shouts, he emitted staccato howls [like Charito], and at the height of his tantrum, his voice broke, he threw his whip onto a piece of furniture, burst out sobbing, and whined, ‘you enjoy making me suffer, Pura, I only do what I do because I love you.’ ”  When Pedro meekly and bitterly asks, “ ‘care to share what you’re playing at?,’ Purita scornfully shook him off, turned away and started pouting.”  The innocent Nieves, warned by her parents to “watch and remain silent,”  observes everything in the corrupt household.

As Régula rushes to open the gate, the landowning Marquesa and the bishop arrive in her chauffeur-driven Mercedes for the elaborate First Communion of her grandson.  She inquires about the families of her peasants (to make sure there are enough workers in the future), “bestows on them a haughty, thin-lipped smile and hands each of them a shining fifty-peseta coin”.  The Marquesa’s elegant daughter is horrified by the screams of the incurably infantile and incontinent Charito, and shocked that her people must live in subhuman conditions.

Señorito Iván, son of the Marquesa, is the quintessence of evil.  He defends the old feudal order at dinner with his foreign and upper-class guests, and rejects the idea that the peasants “should be treated as people, that’s just ridiculous”.  He demands grovelling respect, and is offended by the sullen silence, lack of deference and dignified refusal to accept a tip from Paco’s son Quirce (whose name means “martyr”).  Iván is determined to show his guests how well he treats the peasants.  Declaring that “nothing less than the dignity of our nation is at stake”, he summons Paco and Régula to the Casa Grande and forces them to laboriously scribble their names on a piece of paper to prove that they are literate.

Iván has slaughtered game for thirty years and calls the other hunters, who don’t shoot as many birds as he does, effeminate “fags” (maricones).  He orders Paco to gouge out the eyes of a decoy pigeon and treats him like an animal; makes him show off his hunting skills by crawling on the ground like a dog and expertly sniffing the scent of the lost fallen birds.  The crucial event that sets the plot in motion occurs during the hunt: “as Paco was climbing down a giant holm oak, his numb leg buckled, and he fell like a sack and landed two yards from Señorito Iván, and Señorito Iván, startled, jumped back, ‘fucking fag, you almost flattened me!’ ”  Iván refuses to believe the doctor who tells him that Paco’s leg is broken and insists that he must continue to work in the next big shoot.  The doctor replies, “I’m telling you what I know, Iván, you do what you want, you’re the donkey’s master.”

Iván blames Paco for breaking his leg and forces the cripple to climb trees.  When Iván urges him to retrieve the dead birds more quickly, “Paco tried hard, but the uneven ground made it hard for him to find his footing, and when he tried to move faster, bang! he hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, ‘ay, Señorito Iván, the bone cracked again, I felt it!’ ”  Paco repeatedly apologises for the accidents.  Iván ignores Paco’s extreme pain and is merely angered by the inconvenience.

On her way home from work in the Casa Arriba (the house above) Nieves sees Iván and Purita “locked in a passionate, moonlit embrace.”  When Purita mysteriously disappears, Pedro tries in vain to find out how she escaped and concludes that she must have left with Iván.  He’s hidden Purita in his big Mercedes and kidnapped her for a brief affair.  He tries to deceive the cuckolded Pedro while hinting at the truth: “if you quarrelled, maybe she hid in my trunk or in the space behind the back seat, the Mercedes is quite roomy, I mean she could have slipped in without my noticing.”  Since both Iván and Purita are completely rotten, it’s clear that he’ll abandon her after their short-lived affair.

When Iván asks what Azarías’ tame crow does, the observant Paco gives a detailed explanation: “it picks bark off cork oaks, it looks for glass, it sharpens its beak on the stone ledge of the trough, sometimes it takes a nap in the willow branches, it really does whatever it wants.”  Only the bird is free.  But Quirce, superstitious like the rest of his family, tells Azarías “nothing good comes from blackbirds.”

Frustrated by the disappointing shoot, Iván still has the urge to kill.  He aims his rifle at Azarías’ carefully tamed crow, who’s replaced his sick owl, while Azarías begs Iván not to shoot it.  The victim—in a rapid succession of verbs—then descends into death: “he couldn’t help himself, he had the bird in his sights, he pulled his trigger, and instantly the jackdaw, after a burst of black and blue feathers, tucked its feet in, lowered its head, curled into a ball, and tumbled down, crashing through the sky.”

The novel ends suddenly and dramatically when Azarías, taking Paco’s place in the hunt, expertly plans and carries out an execution.  He climbs a tree, ties a noose and drops the rope around Ivan’s neck.  He “pulled with all his might, groaning and slobbering, and Señorito Iván lost his footing [like Paco], and felt himself suddenly hoisted into the air. . . . His body swayed in empty space for a while until it finally went still, chin on chest, eyes bulging out of their sockets, arms dangling limply down, while up above, Azarías drooled and laughed idiotically at the empty sky, at nothing at all.”  The feeble-minded Azarías doesn’t seem to understand anything.  But when Iván, frustrated by his failure to shoot pigeons, cruelly kills the crow, Azarías skillfully retaliates in a kind of moral murder and kills the killer who’s been cruel to all the characters in the novel.

The starkly realistic cinematic version of The Holy Innocents (1984), written and directed by the Spaniard Mario Camus, exactly matches the spare quality of the novel.  Camus transforms the superb book into a brilliant and deeply moving film, shot in the harsh landscape of Extremadura on the western border with Portugal.  All the actors perfectly embody their characters.  A photographer takes a severe black-and-white picture of Paco’s desperately poor family posing stiffly in their ragged work clothes.  The film expertly improves the spare novel.  Paco’s two sons in the novel become one son in the film, which intensifies the focus on the obedient but resentful Quirce.  Camus compresses a long lesson, when a teacher tries to explain the alphabet to Paco, into one short scene.  Unlike the chronological novel, the film moves back and forth in time.  All the main characters— Quirce, Nieves, Paco and Azarías—have their own stories in flashbacks.

The film opens as Quirce, with new military training and self-respect, arrives by train on a furlough from the army.  He meets Nieves as she comes out of the degrading factory, and then takes a bus to visit to his parents.  In the novel Régula (Rule) says, “while I’m alive, no child of my mother will die in an asylum.”  In the film Quirce finally visits the hopeless but strangely content Azarías, mentally unfit to stand trial for murdering Iván, clean for the first time in his adult life and confined to an insane asylum.

All the characters in the novel and film suffer a tragic loss.  The crippled Paco and his wife Régula, worn out by a lifetime of hard labor, lose Quirce and Nieves who leave home.  The intelligent Nieves loses her chance to continue her education and celebrate her First Communion.  Azarías loses his pet owl and pet crow, his sanity and his freedom.  Purita loses her husband and her lover.  Pedro loses his wife.  Iván loses his life.

Note: By contrast, I lived in a Spanish village on the prosperous Mediterranean coast from 1971 to 1975, during the last four years of Franco’s dictatorship, and life was quite pleasant as long as you did not actively oppose the government.  

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