Noches lúgubres by José Cadalso: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

It is a stormy night, and Tediato waits beside a church for the clock to strike two. He has paid Lorenzo, the church’s gravedigger, to help him with a task he will not explain. Lorenzo, who has buried the dead for thirty-five years without a tremor, goes in this time full of fear. Tediato tells him how one night, alone in that same church, he saw a shape with glowing eyes climb out of a pit: it was Lorenzo’s mastiff, which had fallen asleep in the grave.

As they lever up the slab, Lorenzo tries to guess whom they are looking for. Tediato’s father? His mother, a brother, a son, a friend? Each question unleashes a bitter speech against family and human friendship. Through the gap come the stench and the worms, and Tediato weeps over what has become of the body he loved; but his strength fails, the stone drops back and day breaks. Only then does he reveal his plan: to carry the corpse home, die beside it and set the house on fire so that both turn to ashes.

On the second night, while he waits again for Lorenzo, a stabbed man dies clutching his leg, and the law takes him for the murderer. Tediato spends the hours in a cell longing for death, while from the next cell he hears what seems to be a secret execution. When he is released, an hour before dawn, he stumbles over a child asleep in the street who turns out to be the gravedigger’s son, and he discovers the misery in which the family lives.

Cadalso was a soldier and a writer of the Enlightenment, yet these pages are almost all feeling: night, storm, tombs, melancholy and the wish to die. That is why some critics see it as the work that opens Pre-Romanticism in Spanish literature. It is usually linked to the death of the actress María Ignacia Ibáñez, Cadalso’s beloved, in 1771; over the years a legend grew that he himself tried to dig her up, though scholars believe that happened only in his imagination. The name Lorenzo seems to come from the Night Thoughts of the English poet Edward Young.

Although it is prose, it moves like a poem, with parallel phrases, repetitions and exclamations: “¡Entre cuántos peligros camina el hombre el corto trecho que hay de la cuna al sepulcro!” (“Amid how many dangers man walks the short stretch from the cradle to the grave!”). In the nineteenth century it was hugely popular despite the censors and an Inquisition inquiry, opened after a complaint that accused it of inciting suicide and contempt for parents. It still shocks with its rawness, and its night-time church, its worms and its gravedigger make it ideal reading for Day of the Dead nights.

José Cadalso was born in Cádiz on 8 October 1741 and died on 26 February 1782 at the siege of Gibraltar, struck by a shell fragment, shortly after being promoted to colonel. He was a central figure in the Spanish literary life of his day.

He wrote the satire Los eruditos a la violeta (1772), the poems of Ocios de mi juventud and the Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters), which, like the Noches lúgubres, were published after his death. He is one of the leading authors of the Spanish Enlightenment.