Father Judas
The whole of this district was amazing, marked with a character of almost religious grandeur and sinister desolation.
In the centre of a quiet ring of bare hills, where nothing grew but whins and a rare, freakish oak twisted by the wind, there lay a vast wild tarn, in whose black and stagnant waters shivered thousands of reeds.
A solitary house stood on the banks of this gloomy lake, a small low house inhabited by an old boatman, Father Joseph, who lived on the proceeds of his fishing. Every week he carried his fish down to the neighbouring villages, and returned with the simple provisions necessary to his existence.
I had the whim to visit this hermit, and he offered to go and raise his nets for me.
I accepted.
His boat was a worm-eaten old tub. Thin and bony, he rowed with a quiet monotonous movement which soothed my spirit, already caught up in the melancholy of the enclosing sky.
Amid this ancient landscape, sitting in this primitive boat, steered by this man from another age, I imagined myself transported to one of the early epochs of the world.
He raised his nets, and threw the fish down at his feet with the gestures of a biblical fisherman. Then he consented to take me to the end of the marsh, and suddenly I saw, on the other bank, a ruin, a gutted hovel, on the wall of which was a cross, a huge red cross: under the last gleams of the setting sun it looked as if it were traced in blood.
“What is that?” I asked.
Instantly the man crossed himself, and answered:
“That is where Judas died.”
I was not surprised; I felt as though I might have expected this strange reply.
But I persisted:
“Judas? What Judas?”
He added: “The Wandering Jew, sir.”
I begged him to tell me this legend.
But it was better than a legend, it was a piece of history, of almost contemporary history, for Father Joseph had known the man.
Once upon a time the hut was occupied by a tall woman, a beggar of sorts, who lived on public charity.
From whom she had got this hovel, Father Joseph no longer remembered. One night an old man with a white beard, so old that he looked a centenarian twice over, and could hardly drag one foot after the other, passed by and asked this poor old woman for alms.
She answered:
“Sit down, Father, all here is for all the world, for it comes from all the world.”
He sat down on a stone in front of the house. He shared the woman’s bread, her bed of leaves, and her house.
He never left her. He had finished his travels.
Father Joseph added:
“It was our Lady the Virgin who permitted that, sir, seeing that a woman had opened her door to Judas.”
For this old vagabond was the Wandering Jew.
The countryside did not know this at once, but soon suspected it from the fact that he was always walking, the habit was so strong in him.
Another thing had roused their suspicions. The woman who sheltered the unknown man in her house passed for a Jewess, since she had never been seen at church.
For ten leagues around no one called her anything but “the Jewess.”
When the little children of the district saw her coming to beg, they cried out:
“Mother, mother, it’s the Jewess!”
She and the old man began to wander round the neighbourhood, holding their hands out at every door, babbling entreaties after every passerby. They were seen at all hours of the day, on lonely paths, in village streets, or eating a piece of bread in the shade of a solitary tree, in the fierce heat of noon.
And they began to call the beggar “Father Judas.”
One day he brought back in his sack two little live pigs which had been given him at a farm because he had cured the farmer of a sickness.
And soon he stopped begging, wholly occupied in leading his pigs about in search of food, guiding them along the tarn, under the solitary oak-trees, and in the little valleys near by. The woman, on the contrary, wandered ceaselessly in quest of alms, but joined him again every evening.
No more than she he went to church, and had never been seen to make the sign of the cross at the wayside shrines. All this caused a deal of gossip.
One night his companion was taken ill with a fever, and began to shake like a rag in the wind. He went to the town to get medicine, then shut himself up with her, and for six days no one saw him.
But the curé, having heard that “the Jewess” was about to pass away, came to bring the dying woman the consolations of his religion, and to offer her the last sacrament. Was she a Jewess? He did not know. In any event, he wished to try and save her soul.
He had scarcely knocked at the door when Father Judas appeared on the threshold, panting, his eyes blazing, all his long white beard quivering like running water: he screamed words of blasphemy in an unknown tongue, stretching out his thin arms to hinder the priest’s entry.
The curé tried to speak, offered him money and assistance, but the old man continued to revile him, making the gesture of stoning him.
And the priest retreated, pursued by the beggar’s curses.
Next day, Father Judas’s companion died. He buried her himself in front of the doorway. They were so poor that no one interfered with them.
Once more the man was seen leading his pigs along the tarn and on the hillsides. And several times he began begging for food again. But now he got next to nothing, so many stories were going round about him. And everyone knew in what a fashion he had welcomed the curé.
He disappeared. It was during Holy Week. No uneasiness was felt.
But on Easter Monday some boys and girls who had gone for a walk up to the tarn, heard a great noise in the hut. The door was shut; the boys broke it open and the two pigs escaped, leaping like deer. They were never seen again.
They all entered, and saw on the ground a few old rags, the beggar’s hat, some bones, some dried blood and remains of flesh in the hollow of a skull.
His pigs had eaten him.
And Father Joseph added:
“It had happened on Good Friday, at three in the afternoon.”
I asked him: “How do you know?”
He replied: “It cannot be doubted.”
I did not try to make him understand how natural it was for the famished beasts to eat their suffering master if he had died suddenly in his hut.
As for the cross on the wall, it appeared one morning, and no one knew what hand had painted it that strange colour.
After that, none doubted that the Wandering Jew had died in that place.
I believed it myself for an hour.