English Translation Of San Manuel Bueno Martir

SAN MANUEL BUENO MARTIR
   Now that the bishop of the diocese of Renata, to which my village of Valverde de Lucerna belongs, is going about, so they say, beginning the process for the beatification of our Don Manuel, or rather, Saint Manuel the Good, who used to be our parish priest, I want to leave written here, by way of confession, (and only God knows and not I what fate it may have),everything that I know and remember about that motherly male who filled the most intimate part of my life and soul, who was my true spiritual father, the father of my soul, of myself, Angela Carballino.
        The other one, my flesh and temporal father, I scarcely knew, since he died when I was very young. I know that he had arrived in our Valverde de Lucerna as a stranger, that he settled here uponmarrying my mother. He brought with him some few books, the Quixote, works of classical theater, some historical novels, histories, the Bertoldo, all mixed up, and as a daydreaming child I devoured those books, almost the only ones in the whole village. My good mother scarcely told me any facts or sayings of my father. Those of Don Manuel, whom like the whole village she adored, with whom she wasin love- of course most chastely- had wiped out the very memory of those of her husband.  Each day, on praying the rosary, she fervently commended him to God.
        I remember our Don Manuel as if it were yesterday, when I was a child of ten, before they took me off to the religious school in the cathedral city of Renada . Our priest was probably about thirty seven years old then. He was tall,thin, erect, and carried his head like our Buitre Peak carries its crest, and there was in his eyes the blueish depth of our lake. He attracted the glance of everybody, and after that, their hearts, and he, upon looking at us, seemed to look straight through our flesh like glass, to look at our hearts.  We all loved him, but especially the children. What things he told us! They were things, notwords. The town began to reek of holiness; one felt full and drunk with its aroma.
         It was then that my brother Lazaro, who was in America from where he regularly sent us money so that we might live in seemly comfort, made my mother send me to the religious school, so that I might complete my education outside of the village. And this, even though he didn’t think much of nuns. “But sincethere”, he wrote us, “there are no progressive lay schools as far as I know, and even fewer for girls, one must make do with what there is. The important thing is that Angelita be polished and not continue among the crude village girls.” And I entered the school intending at first to become a teacher in it, but then I got tired of pedagogy.
        At school I met girls from the city, and becamefriends with some of them. But I kept in touch with the things and the people in our village, from which I received frequent news, and now and again a visit. And the fame of our parish priest reached even as far as the school, and he began to be talked about in the cathedral city. The nuns questioned me unceasingly about him.
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        From the time I was very young on, I don’t know exactlyhow, I fed on curiosities, worries, and anxieties, caused at least in part because of that jumble of books belonging to my father, and
all of it increased in school, in my dealings especially with a friend who became extremely fond of me, and who sometimes proposed that we should enter the same convent together, swearing eternal sisterhood and even signing the vow in our blood. Other times shespoke to me with her eyes half closed of boyfriends, of matrimonial adventures. Actually, I have not heard from her again nor do I know her fate. And when we talked of Don Manuel, or when my mother told me something about him in her letters, (and he was in nearly all of them) that I used to read to my friend, she used to exclaim as if in ecstasy, “How lucky you are my friend, being able to live...