But it was better than a legend, being a true story, and quite a recent
one, since Uncle Joseph had known the man.
This hut had formerly been occupied by a large woman, a kind of beggar,
who lived on public charity.
Uncle Joseph did not remember from whom she had this hut. One evening an
old man with a white beard, who seemed to be at least two hundred years
old, and who could hardly drag himself along, asked alms of this forlorn
woman, as he passed her dwelling.
“Sit down, father,” she replied; “everything here belongs to all the
world, since it comes from all the world.”
He sat down on a stone before the door. He shared the woman's bread, her
bed of leaves, and her house.
He did not leave her again, for he had come to the end of his travels.
“It was Our Lady the Virgin who permitted this, monsieur,” Joseph added,
“it being a woman who had opened her door to a Judas, for this old
vagabond was the Wandering Jew. It was not known at first in the
country, but the people suspected it very soon, because he was always
walking; it had become a sort of second nature to him.”
And suspicion had been aroused by still another thing. This woman, who
kept that stranger with her, was thought to be a Jewess, for no one had
ever seen her at church. For ten miles around no one ever called her
anything else but the Jewess.
When the little country children saw her come to beg they cried out:
“Mamma, mamma, here is the Jewess!”
The old man and she began to go out together into the neighboring
districts, holding out their hands at all the doors, stammering
supplications into the ears of all the passers. They could be seen at
all hours of the day, on by-paths, in the villages, or again eating
bread, sitting in the noon heat under the shadow of some solitary tree.
And the country people began to call the beggar Old Judas.
One day he brought home in his sack two little live pigs, which a farmer
had given him after he had cured the farmer of some sickness.
Soon he stopped begging, and devoted himself entirely to his pigs. He
took them out to feed by the lake, or under isolated oaks, or in the
near-by valleys. The woman, however, went about all day begging, but she
always came back to him in the evening.
He also did not go to church, and no one ever had seen him cross himself
before the wayside crucifixes. All this gave rise to much gossip:
One night his companion was attacked by a fever and began to tremble
like a leaf in the wind. He went to the nearest town to get some
medicine, and then he shut himself up with her, and was not seen for six
days.
The priest, having heard that the “Jewess” was about to die, came to
offer the consolation of his religion and administer the last sacrament.
Was she a Jewess? He did not know. But in any case, he wished to try to
save her soul.
Hardly had he knocked at the door when old Judas appeared on the
threshold, breathing hard, his eyes aflame, his long beard agitated,
like rippling water, and he hurled blasphemies in an unknown language,
extending his skinny arms in order to prevent the priest from entering.
The priest attempted to speak, offered his purse and his aid, but
the old man kept on abusing him, making gestures with his hands as if
throwing; stones at him.
Then the priest retired, followed by the curses of the beggar.
The companion of old Judas died the following day. He buried her
himself, in front of her door. They were people of so little account
that no one took any interest in them.
Then they saw the man take his pigs out again to the lake and up the
hillsides. And he also began begging again to get food. But the people
gave him hardly anything, as there was so much gossip about him. Every
one knew, moreover, how he had treated the priest.
Then he disappeared. That was during Holy Week, but no one paid any
attention to him.
But on Easter Sunday the boys and girls who had gone walking out to the
lake heard a great noise in the hut. The door was locked; but the boys
broke it in, and the two pigs ran out, jumping like gnats. No one ever
saw them again.
The whole crowd went in; they saw some old rags on the floor, the
beggar's hat, some bones, clots of dried blood and bits of flesh in the
hollows of the skull.
His pigs had devoured him.
“This happened on Good Friday, monsieur.” Joseph concluded his story,
“three hours after noon.”
“How do you know that?” I asked him.
“There is no doubt about that,” he replied.
I did not attempt to make him understand that it could easily happen
that the famished animals had eaten their master, after he had died
suddenly in his hut.
As for the cross on the wall, it had appeared one morning, and no one
knew what hand traced it in that strange color.
Since then no one doubted any longer that the Wandering Jew had died on
this spot.