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“People can commit many sins. But the most grievous sins of all are the sins of not knowing your true self, and even worse, of fearing it.” Dr Sandor Kardos Part One: Dr Kardos The unexpected arrival, nine months previously, of an itinerant Hungarian psychologist had produced an unfamiliar mélange of suspicion and curiosity among the inhabitants of Puente de Almas, a relatively small, off-the-beaten-track town nestling discreetly in the picturesque folds and foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees to the north-west of Jaca, in the province of Aragon. In spite of this, the enigmatic Dr Sandor Kardos had quickly managed to secure for himself comfortable rooms, including both living space and a surgery, above a rustic, but thriving, craft shop which specialised in the production and sale of all manner of finely-crafted religious artefacts. It offered a particular speciality by way of the production and sale of exquisitely embellished statuettes of the Blessed Virgin (both with and without child). Almost every home in the town and outlying villages contained at least one item or icon which had been obtained from ‘La Casa Sagrada de Madura’, making the sombre and religiously devout proprietor, Don Francisco Farsante, one of the wealthiest, and hence most respected, men in the region. From the outset there had been considerable doubt as to whether Dr Kardos could, in fact, truly claim to hold that esteemed title. He was, beyond doubt, one of the brightest students of his generation in Hungary, and spoke several European languages fluently. Having graduated with distinction from the prestigious Semmelweis University in Budapest, where he had earned something of an exotic reputation for himself as a bohemian and, some said, ‘dangerous’ free-thinker, he embarked upon a doctoral thesis under the tutelage of Professor Ernst Nagy, who was regarded by many as the leading figure in the field of clinical and experimental psychology in eastern Europe at that time. As the months passed, however, the simmering personal and academic differences between the two men eventually boiled over, and their already turbulent relationship strained itself beyond breaking point. In addition to his inability to suffer anyone, let alone fools, gladly, Professor Nagy was possessed of an unyielding conservatism in all things, including his fiercely religious beliefs, which led to several bitter and, some alleged, physical, confrontations between them. Although the precise nature of the matter which precipitated the final breakdown of their relationship was never fully revealed, it was never really in any doubt that it was Professor Nagy’s point-blank refusal to sanction some of Kardos’s allegedly highly controversial experimental techniques and proposed therapeutic approach (which Kardos saw as indispensable to proving his doctoral thesis) which heralded the end of Kardos’s ambitions of securing his doctorate at Semmelweis, and led to him departing from the university under something of a heavy grey cloud. Kardos left Budapest, disappearing to nobody-knew-where for some three years. He then suddenly resurfaced in Salzburg, claiming to have finally obtained his doctorate, although this had apparently been obtained from an obscure ‘university’ in eastern Romania, and in possession of dubious paperwork which he claimed proved this contention. For the next few years Dr Kardos moved with rather suspicious regularity from one mid-European city to another, before finally settling for some time in Vienna, where his practice became quite successful. He even, gradually, earned grudging respect from some of his peers for his work in the field of analysing and treating a diverse range of fears and phobias. As his success grew, however, so did the interest in his clinical techniques, over which he had somehow always managed to throw, and maintain, a dense, dark shroud of secrecy. Some of his more jealous peers attempted to suggest, without evidence, that his techniques were unethical and hidden suspiciously from peer scrutiny. In spite of these crude attempts to smear his reputation, and perhaps even partly owing to them, Dr Kardos managed to maintain a thriving practice. Several months before arriving in Puente de Almas, Dr Kardos was approached by a wealthy Austrian of nobility, Baron Karl-Friedrich von Hummelberg. The baron had made the decision to spend at least a year in Brazil with his wife, where he planned to investigate the possibility of investing in several avcılar escort bayan flourishing coffee plantations, and asked Dr Kardos if he could treat his beloved, if slightly coquettish, wife, the baroness, for her lifelong pathological phobia of snakes. Apparently several reputed psychologists had tried, and failed, and the baron was by that time more than willing to ignore the rumours circulating in Vienna about Dr Kardos in an effort to have his wife successfully treated for her extreme ophidiophobia. Dr Kardos accepted the case, for a significant fee, and began treating the baroness. The treatment, however, produced both positive and negative results. After the first two or three sessions with Dr Kardos, it was apparent that the baroness’s deep and lifelong phobia was being significantly, if not miraculously, reduced. However, from the baron’s perspective, it came at a high price, for as the phobia began to diminish, the baroness became ever-more withdrawn, both emotionally and physically, from her husband. She began to refuse to have sex with him, and after three or four weeks she moved out of their bedroom altogether, and into her own. In spite of the spectacular progress, the baroness began to insist on visiting Dr Kardos on an increasingly regular basis, raising the obvious suspicion in the baron’s mind that the two were having an affair. The baron confronted his wife about this. She told him that she had nothing to discuss with him, but this confrontation simply seemed thereafter to make her even more remote and cold towards her husband, and increase her desire to visit Dr Kardos for further treatment which the baron was now convinced was not needed. In a state of frustration and desperation, the baron then confronted Dr Kardos and demanded to know the truth. Dr Kardos maintained the obviously ethical position that what occurred between himself and his patients was subject to the strictest confidentiality. Finally, in an effort to break whatever spell the baron knew Dr Kardos was holding over his wife, he offered Dr Kardos whatever sum of money he wanted to close down his practice and leave Austria for good, and to never contact either him or the baroness again. It was an offer that Dr Kardos told the baron he would consider carefully. Part Two: Magdalena Puente de Almas was one of the oldest towns in Aragon, with a rich history bathed in religious fervour and superstition. The town in which Dr Kardos arrived had barely changed for centuries, at least from the perspective of the deeply ingrained religious beliefs of almost all its inhabitants. At least two sightings of the Blessed Virgin had been claimed there in relatively recent times; the first in 1864 and the second as recently as 1939, at around the time General Franco assumed power in Spain. However the town had previously seen events equally strange and mysterious. In fact, on the day Dr Kardos arrived, the town was celebrating a fiesta which had been known for centuries as ‘El día del fuego misterioso’ or ‘The day of mysterious fire.’ This fiesta was connected to the apparent sighting of another supernatural figure in the town, several hundred years earlier. In 1484, a young woman then in her early twenties, named Magdalena, claimed to have seen visions of a beautiful Hellenic goddess, who appeared in her room over a period of several weeks. Magdalena said nothing to anyone about the visions, knowing that to do so may have led to allegations of sorcery or heresy, and of course being fully aware of all the potentially horrific consequences which such allegations entailed at that time. However, one night Magdalena’s widowed mother woke to hear her daughter in the next room, seemingly talking to herself in the middle of the night. The whispering and mutterings gradually became louder, until it appeared to her mother that Magdalena was in some pain. She could hear her moaning loudly and beginning to let out small screams. In a state of concern, she hurried to Magdalena’s room and threw the door open, only to find her daughter writhing and thrashing wantonly on her hay-stuffed mattress, her legs parted wide with her fingers between them, moving and twisting them deep inside her drenched sex, and on the very verge of her climax. Her mother ran to her and tried to shake her but Magdalena was not to be denied. She continued to pleasure herself wildly, on and on, until the deep desire of her body eventually broke uncontrollably over her, moaning beylikdüzü escort bayan the name ‘Sofia’ over and over until, several minutes later, she fell into a deep, dark sleep, with no inkling of the presence of her mother beside her. The following morning Magdalena’s mother confronted her, asking who Sofia was. In a state of initial shock, Magdalena told her mother about Sofia’s visitations. Beside herself with worry, and not knowing what to do, Magdalena’s mother sought the assistance of the local priest. By this time, far from feeling fearful, Magdalena told the priest everything relating to her visions of Sofia. She told him that Sofia said that she had been sent by the mother spirit to release her, Magdalena, from the bondage of lies and deception, and also that Sofia had seduced and ravished her many times in the previous weeks. The priest immediately suspected demonic possession and, wishing to try to deal with the problem without ‘higher’ intervention from the religious authorities, who were then engaged in serious persecution of heretics and witches, for the sake of the young woman’s mother he attempted to perform an exorcism upon her. However, even after this Magdalena insisted that Sofia was still visiting her, and had told her that she was to tell the priest that a time would come when the dove would cross with the sword, and the people of Puente de Almas would begin to embrace a new and freer spirit. The priest then conceded that he was unable to exorcise whatever ‘dark and malevolent spirit’, as he termed it, was possessing Magdalena and reluctantly handed her over to the Inquisition who, after questioning and torturing her for some time, then decided on an auto-da-fé . One morning in late April, she was taken to the town square where she was tied unceremoniously to a rough stake and the firewood under her lit, ‘in the name of all righteousness’. As the flames began to gather their crackling menace around her legs, almost tasting the warmth of her skin, witnesses to the scene then watched in horror as Magdalena’s body suddenly, somehow, became translucent. She smiled at the onlookers to her fate and then, almost instantaneously, her body became transformed into a wide, twirling velvet ribbon of lime green smoke which swirled and twisted from the stake to which she had been bound. The ropes that had held her hands behind her fell into the flames and were devoured by them. Those gathered to witness ‘God’s vengeance’ and righteous punishment being dispensed watched in a fearful disbelief. Many began crossing themselves frantically, or clasped their hands together, wringing them like damp rags, whilst muttering impromptu supplications to the Blessed Virgin, as they watched the dancing plume of smoke that was once a young girl dance and wind its way into the thin, cool mist waiting patiently on the nearby mountainside. Part Three: Paloma With possibly enough money on offer to make him comfortable for life, Dr Kardos considered where he might go in order to both fulfil the baron’s desire that he ‘disappear’ from Austria permanently, and his own desire to further the work which was his passion. Quite by chance, as he browsed the shelves in a small Viennese bookshop, he came across a volume entitled ‘Faith and Fear’, by Spanish author Juan Miralles. As his eyes scanned the text, they suddenly alighted on the name ‘Puente de Almas’, which he noted Miralles had described as ‘probably the most religiously conservative town in Spain, if not the world; it is dense and thick with the most ingrained religious superstition and fear of change that I have ever found anywhere.” Within moments, Dr Kardos had made up his mind to extract as much money as he could from the emotionally crippled baron and, for a while at least, move to Puente de Almas in order to explore the relationship between faith and fear. Having heard her mother leave the house for the local bakery where she worked, Paloma removed the small key from its hiding place within the hollow metal tube of her bed frame and went to her wardrobe. She knelt down and pulled a robust metal trunk from inside the wardrobe, put the key into the lock, turned it and lifted the dense, weighty lid, which creaked its resistance. Pulling a variety of items from the top of the trunk, Paloma rummaged around towards the bottom. Having found what she was searching for, she pulled it free and removed it. It was a lime green notepad, almost full. She locked esenyurt escort the trunk, pushed it back into her wardrobe and, clasping the notebook to her chest, she then left the house and began to make her way towards the town. Paloma had returned to Puente de Almas two years previously, and had resumed living with her mother, if only because she felt she had few realistic alternatives. The relationship between them was still as strained and unhappy as it had been upon her return, something which had its origins in events four or five years previously. As she made her way along the dry-dust track that led from her modest wood-built home to the town, she cast her gaze up the nearby mountainside where the trees, rising like proud green spires into the far distance, were draped in a morning mist, like a grey, wispy veil covering the face of a sad bride. How often she had walked along that track in the mornings and seen the mist, wondering to herself whether hidden somewhere within its soft, cool depths was Magdalena, her voice still and small among the boughs and branches. She would dream of one day meeting Magdalena and disappearing into the mountainside with her. Then the sun would gradually burn off the dream and it would disappear for another day into who knows where. She then cast her eyes across the fields to the south, where as a sixteen year old girl she had played, begun to discover boys and learned to ride her uncle’s magnificent chestnut horse, its muscular flanks shining brilliantly in that same early morning sun. Often she would go riding with a boy for whom her heart had danced, named Alonso. They would gallop up to the trees, tie up the horses and then disappear, often for hours, within the cathedral pillars of rising trunks and silence, to talk and kiss, and kiss again, as he days melted away like warm butter. One day she had gone riding alone. It was a day when she felt truly free, the wind whipping her wild auburn hair back, licking and cooling her face as she galloped on, ever faster, as though she were flying. She circled the fields; the horse beneath her was shining and glistening, her blue floral skirt was hitched to the very top of her lightly bronzed thighs, contrasting deliciously with the sleek, shining chestnut coat of the horse between them, riding hard until she was once more in sight of her home. As she slowed, she became aware of a wetness between her legs. She dismounted and lifted her skirt to see a wet, red circle of blood on the white cotton of her panties. She screamed out, almost involuntarily, causing her mother to rush from the house. Upon seeing the blood, her mother without hesitation accused Paloma of having what she called ‘the sin of carnal relations’ with Alonso, an allegation that Paloma obviously denied vociferously. She was immediately banned from seeing the boy again, and her mother made immediate arrangements to send her to a school near Burgos, run by the sisters of one of the strictest religious orders in Spain, for the following two years, all for the sin of breaking her hymen on a wild, ecstatic horse ride one summer’s morning. Paloma had always secretly despised religion and the way it restricted her. All of her craved to be free; free of being told she was sinful, worthless, guilty and under the continual judgement and punishment of an omniscient and harsh deity. The following two years were austere and cruel, and the regime humiliating. Gradually she withdrew into herself, a burning, torrid rage moving inside her for which she had no outlet. Upon her return to Puente de Almas, she became almost a recluse, shutting herself away in her room, and whiling away the hours writing feverishly in her notebooks, which she then locked away in her trunk. Her mother became increasingly irritated and upset, constantly telling her that she had to get a job, pray several times daily, confess her sins daily, and go to the church of San Lorenzo every Sunday, something she had steadfastly refused to do since her return from Burgos. One day, things became so heated between them that Paloma ended up throwing various items against the wall and shouting uncontrollably at her mother in frustration. The local policeman, Santiago Fuentes, was called. During the course of the intervention, the police officer tried to take Paloma’s arm to calm her down, whereupon her elbow flew back quite accidentally into the policeman’s nose, causing it to bleed profusely. Serious consideration was given as to whether to bring Paloma before the local court for assaulting the policeman, but eventually it was decided that if she agreed to seek help, she would escape with a warning. Her mother had wanted the ‘help’ to be given by the church; something which Paloma flatly refused.