Terra Nostra

I. THE OLD WORLD

FLESH, SPHERES, GRAY EYES BESIDE THE SEINE

Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal. Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth.

About four o’clock in the morning one fourteenth of July, Pollo Phoibee, asleep in his high garret room, door and windows flung wide, dreamed these things, and prepared to answer them himself. But then he was visited in his dream by the somber, faceless figure of a monk who spoke for Pollo, continuing in words what had been an imagistic dream: “But reason — neither slow nor indolent — tells us that merely with repetition the extraordinary becomes ordinary, and only briefly abandoned, what had once passed for a common and ordinary occurrence becomes a portent: crawling, sending carrier pigeons, eating raw deer meat, abandoning one’s dead on the summits of temples so that vultures as they feed might perform their cleansing functions and fulfill the natural cycle.”

Only thirty-three and a half days earlier the fact that the waters of the Seine were boiling could have been considered a calamitous miracle; now, a month later, no one even turned to look at the phenomenon. The proprietors of the black barges, surprised at first by the sudden ebullition, slammed against the walls of the channel, had abandoned their struggle against the inevitable. These men of the river pulled on their stocking caps, extinguished their black tobaccos, and climbed like lizards onto the quays; the skeletons of the barges had piled up beneath the ironic gaze of Henri de Navarre and there they remained, splendid ruins of charcoal, iron, and splintered wood.

But the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, knowing events only in the abstract, embraced with black stone eyes a much vaster panorama, and twelve million Parisians understood finally why these demons of yesteryear stick out their tongues at the city in such ferociously mocking grimaces. It was as if the motive for which they were originally sculptured was now revealed in scandalous actuality. It was clear the patient gargoyles had waited eight centuries to open their eyes and blast twaa! twaa! with their cleft tongues. At dawn they had seen that overnight the distant cupolas, the entire façade, of Sacré-Coeur appeared to be painted black. And that closer at hand, far below, the doll-sized Louvre had become transparent.

After a superficial investigation, the authorities, far off the scent, reached the conclusion that the painted façade was actually marble and the transparent Louvre had been turned to crystal. Inside the Basilica the paintings, too, were transformed; as the building had changed color, its paintings had changed race. And who was going to cross himself before the lustrous ebony of a Congolese Virgin, and who would expect pardon from the thick lips of a Negroid Christ? On the other hand, the paintings and sculptures in the Museum had taken on an opacity that many decided to attribute to the contrast with the crystalline walls and floors and ceiling. No one seemed in the least uncomfortable because the Victory of Samothrace hovered in mid-air without any visible means of support: those wings were finally justifying themselves. But they were apprehensive when they observed, particularly considering the recently acquired density in contrast to the general lightness, that the mask of Pharaoh was superimposed — in a newly liberated perspective — upon the features of the Gioconda, and that lady’s upon David’s Napoleon. Furthermore: when the traditional frames dissolved into transparency, the resulting freeing of purely conventional space allowed them to appreciate that the Mona Lisa, still sitting with arms crossed, was not alone. And she was smiling.

Thirty-three and one half days had passed during which, apparently, the Arc de Triomphe turned into sand and the Eiffel Tower was converted into a zoo. We are confining ourselves to appearances, for once the first flurry of excitement had passed, no one even troubled to touch the sand, which still looked like stone. Sand or stone, it stood in its usual location, and after all, that’s all anyone asked: Not a new arrangement, but recognizable form and the reassurance of location. What confusion there would have been, for example, had the Arc, still of stone, appeared on the site traditionally occupied by a pharmacy at the corner of the rue de Bellechasse and the rue de Babylone.

As for the tower of M. Eiffel, its transformation was criticized only by potential suicides, whose remarks revealed their unhealthy intentions and who in the end chose to play it cool in the hope that other, similar jumping places would be constructed. “But it isn’t just the height; perhaps even more important is the prestige of the place from which one jumps to his death,” a habitué of the Café Le Bouquet, a man who when he was fourteen had decided to kill himself at the age of forty, told Pollo Phoibee. He said this one afternoon as our young and handsome friend was pursuing his normal occupations, convinced that any other course would be like yelling “Fire!” in a movie theater packed with a Sunday-evening crowd.

The public was amused by the fact that the rusted structure from the Exposition Universelle was now serving as a tree for monkeys, a ramp for lions, a cage for bears, and as a very heavily populated aviary. Almost a century of reproductions and emblems and references had reduced the tower to the sad, but really affectionate, status of a commonplace. Now the continual flight — dispersion of doves, formations of ducks, solitudes of owls, and clusters of bats, farcical and indecisive in the midst of so many metamorphoses — was entertaining and pleasing. The uneasiness began only when a child pointed to a passing vulture that spread its wings at the very top of the tower, sailed in a circle above Passy, then flew in a straight line right to the towers of Saint-Sulpice, where it settled in a corner of the perpetual scaffolding of the eternal restoration of that temple to watch with avarice the deserted streets of the Quarter.

First, Pollo Phoibee brushed a strand of blond hair from his eyes, then ran the fingers of one hand (for he didn’t have two) through his shoulder-length mane; and finally he leaned out of his sixth-floor rooming-house window to salute a summer sun that like every summer-morning Paris sun was supposed to appear borne on a chariot of warm haze, attended by a court of street perfumes — the odors the sun king disperses in July different, of course, from those distilled by the moon queen in December. Today, nevertheless, Pollo looked toward the towers of Saint-Sulpice, reviewing in his mind the catalogue of accustomed odors. But as the vulture settled onto the scaffolding, Pollo sniffed in vain. No freshly baked bread, no scent of flowers, no boiling chicory, not even damp city sidewalks. He liked to close his eyes and breathe in the summer-morning air, concentrating until he could distinguish the scent of the tightly closed buds in the distant flower market of the Quai de la Corse. But today not even cabbage or beets in the nearby market of Saint-Germain, no pungent Gauloise or Gitanes, no wine spilled on straw or wood. Not a single odor in the whole of the rue du Four — and no sun appeared on its customary vehicle of haze. The motionless vulture faded from sight amid billowing black smoke issuing like a blast from a bellows from the towers of the church. The enormous vacuum of odors was suddenly filled with foul and offensive effluvium, as if Hell were discharging all the congestion from its lungs. Pollo smelled flesh … burned fingernails and hair and flesh.

For the first time in his twenty-two summers, Pollo closed the window and hesitated, not knowing what to do. But he would scarcely realize that in that instant began his longing for the visible symbol of liberty provided by that always open window — night and day, winter and summer, rain and thunder. He would scarcely identify his unaccustomed indecision with the feeling that he and the world about him were irremediably growing older. He would not likely overcome that feeling with a swift question: What’s happening? What is it that forces me to close my free and open window for the first time…? They must be burning refuse; no, it smelled of flesh, they must be burning animals. An epidemic? Some sacrifice? Immediately Pollo Phoibee, who slept in the nude (another conscious symbol of freedom), entered the stall with the portable shower head, listened to the noisy drumming of water against the white-enameled tin, soaped himself carefully, sudsing with extra attention the golden pubic hair, raised his only arm to direct the stream of water onto his face, letting water dribble through his open lips, turned off the tap, dried himself, and left the small and impeccable confessional that had washed him of every sin except one, that of innocent suspicion; forgetting to prepare any breakfast, he slipped on leather sandals, drew on khaki-colored Levi’s and a strawberry-colored shirt, glanced swiftly around the room where he had been so happy, bumped his head against the low ceiling, and ran down the stairs, ignoring the empty, abandoned garbage pails on each landing of the stairway.

At the entresol, Pollo stopped and with his knuckles rapped at the concierge’s door. There was no answer, and he decided to go in to see if there was any mail, a most unlikely possibility. Like the doors of all concierges, this was half wood and half glass, and Pollo knew that if the self-absorbed face of Madame Zaharia did not peer from between the curtains, it was because Madame Zaharia was out, but since she had nothing to hide from the world (this was her favorite saying: she lived in a glass house), she had no objections to her tenants’ coming in to pick up the infrequent letters she sorted and left tucked in the mirror frame. Consequently, Pollo decided he could go into that cave of bygone gentility where the fumes of an eternal cabbage stew misted over photographic mementos of soldiers twice dead and buried, once beneath the soil of Verdun, now beneath a film of vapor. And if his earlier indecision had controlled Pollo Phoibee’s spirits when, like a warning of disillusion and old age, he had noticed the absence of summer smells, now to enter the concierge’s room in search of a most improbable letter seemed to him an act of primordial innocence. Absorbed in this sensation, he entered. But the physical reality was more novel than his new mood. For the first time he could remember, nothing was bubbling in the kitchen, and the photos of the dead soldiers were limpid mirrors of useless sacrifice and tender resignation. Even the odor had evaporated from Madame Zaharia’s room. But not sound. Lying on her sagging bed, upon an eiderdown covered with the blooms of ancient winters, the concierge — less preoccupied than usual — was choking back a gurgling moan.

Many suns will pass before Pollo Phoibee condescends to analyze the impression provoked by Madame Zaharia’s condition and posture: which cause and which effect? Perhaps it would be possible to propose, without the authorization of the protagonist, that the terms of his matutinal equation had been inverted: the world, irremediably, was growing younger — and decisions had to be made. Without stopping to think, he ran and filled a pail of water, he lighted the flame of the burner and set the water to boil on the stove, and with a blend of atavistic wisdom and simple stupefaction he gathered towels and tore strips of sheets. The same thing had happened too many times during the past thirty-three and one half days. With his teeth Pollo rolled up the sleeve of his one good arm (the other sleeve was pinned over his stump), and knelt between the open, febrile thighs of Madame Zaharia, ready to receive the tiny head that must soon appear. The concierge uttered a sputtering howl. Pollo heard the water boiling; he lifted the pail from the flame, threw the pieces of sheet into it, and returned to the foot of the bed to receive, not the expected head, but two tiny blue feet. Madame Zaharia moaned, her belly was gripped by oceanic contractions, and Pollo’s stump throbbed like a piece of marble longing for the companionship of its mate.

After the breech birth had been effected, and once Pollo had spanked the babe, cut the cord, tied the umbilical cord, disposed of the placenta in the pail, and mopped up the blood, he did certain things in addition: inspected the infant’s male genitals, counted six toes on each foot, and observed with amazement the birthmark on its back: a wine-red cross between the shoulder blades. He didn’t know whether to hand the baby into the arms of the ninety-year old woman who had just delivered it or to take charge of it himself, care for it, and carry it far from possible contamination and death by asphyxia. He chose the second; in truth, he feared the ancient Madame Zaharia might drown or devour her so untimely son, and he walked to the antique gold-framed mirror where the concierge customarily inserted, between the glass and the frame, the few improbable letters addressed to her tenants.

Yes. There was a letter for him. It must be one of the official notices that arrived from time to time, always inordinately late, for the almost total collapse of the postal services was a normal fact in an epoch when everything that a hundred years earlier signified progress had ceased to function with either efficiency or promptness. No chlorine purified the water, the mail did not arrive on time, and microbes had imposed their triumphal reign over vaccines: defenseless humans, immune worms.

Pollo leaned closer to look at the envelope and noticed that the letter bore no recognizable stamp; gripping the newly born infant against his chest, he slipped the letter from the frame. It was sealed with ancient, grimy sealing wax; the envelope itself was old and yellow, as the writing of the sender seemed old, and curiously antiquated. And as he took the letter in his hand a few quivering drops of quicksilver rolled across it and dropped onto the floor. Still clasping the child, Pollo broke the ancient red wax seal with his teeth and extracted a fine, wrinkled sheet of parchment, as transparent as silk. He read the following message:

“In the Dialogus Miraculorum, the chronicler Caesarius von Heiterbach warns that in the city of Paris, the fountain of all knowledge and the source of the Divine Scriptures, the persuasive Devil inculcated a perverse intelligence in certain few wise men. You must be on the alert. The two forces struggle between themselves not only in Paris but throughout the world, although here the combat will seem to you more acute. Chance has determined that it was here you would be born, spend your youth, and live your years. Your life and this time could have coincided in a different space. It does not matter. Many will be born, but only one will have six toes upon each foot and a wine-red cross upon his back. This child must be baptized Iohannes Agrippa. He has been awaited through long centuries; his is the continuity of the original kingdoms. Further, although in another time, he is your son. You must not fail this duty. We are expecting you; we shall find you, make no effort to look for us.”

This extraordinary missive was signed Ludovico and Celestina. Astounded by this reversion from the death he had smelled in the smoke of Saint-Sulpice and divined in the zealous vultures to the life he held in his single arm and believed to have extracted but not introduced, as the letter so mysteriously indicated, Pollo had no time to reread it. Twice he shook his head in negation: he knew no one named Ludovico or Celestina, and he had never slept with the ancient woman. He dipped his fingers in the bloody water, sprinkled a few drops on the head of this infant as exceptional as recently born, and in accordance with what the letter had requested, he murmured: “Ego baptiso te: Iohannes Agrippa.”

As he did so, he winked an eye in the direction of the robust poilu killed in some forgotten war of trenches, tanks, and mustard gases who was the ephemeral, the certified, the only husband of the aged Madame Zaharia; he placed the child in the arms of the startled old woman, rinsed his hand, and without a backward look left the room with the satisfaction of a duty well done.

Truly? He opened the heavy street door onto the rue des Ciseaux, that imperturbable narrow little street that for centuries has stretched between the rue du Four and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and he had to struggle against a new alarm that threatened anew his wish to enjoy this glorious July morning. Was the world growing younger? growing older? Pollo, like the street itself, was partly bathed by the sun but partly in deserted shadows.

The open doors and sidewalk tables and chairs of the Café Le Bouquet, usually filled with the faithful, looked inviting, but the mirrored wall behind the bar reflected only orderly rows of green and amber bottles, and the long copper stripping showed only light traces of hastily smeared fingerprints. The television had been disconnected and bees buzzed above the cigarette showcase. Pollo reached out his hand and directly from the bottle drank a gulp of anise. Then he searched behind the bar and found the two large posters advertising the bar-café-tobacco shop. He thrust his head between the panels and adjusted the leather straps that joined across the shoulders. Thus outfitted as a sandwich man, he returned to the rue du Four and without concern walked by the open and abandoned shops.

Buried in Pollo’s young body, perhaps, was an ancient optimism. Sandwiched between his posters, he was not only doing the job for which he received his modest stipend. He was also adhering to a code according to which, when the subway has been stalled for more than ten minutes and all the tunnel lights go out, the proper thing to do is continue reading the newspaper as if nothing had happened. Pollo Ostrich. But as long as none of the things that had happened to Madame Zaharia happened to him (and considering the times, who was going to stick his only hand into the fire?), he saw no reason to interrupt the normal rhythm of his existence. No. Just the opposite: “I still believe that the sun rises every day, and that each new sun announces a new day, a day that yesterday lay in the future; I still believe that, as one page of time closes, today will promise a tomorrow invisible before and irrepeatable afterward.” Immersed in these reflections, Pollo did not notice he was walking through thicker and thicker smoke. With the innocence of habit (which inevitably is solidified by the malice of the law), he had walked toward the Place Saint-Sulpice and was now prepared to parade before the faithful, the usual café customers, the posters that fore and aft covered him to the knees. His first thought when he saw he was surrounded by smoke was that no one would be able to read the words recommending the choice of the Café Le Bouquet. He looked skyward and realized that not even the four statues on the Place were visible; nevertheless, they were the only witnesses to the publicity posters trussed upon Pollo, and entrusted to Pollo. He told himself, idiotically, that the smoke must be coming from the mouths of the sacred orators. But not even Bossuet’s teeth, Fénelon’s lips, Massillon’s tongue, or Fléchier’s palate — aseptic stone cavities all — could be the source of that nauseating odor, the same stench that had been so noticeable at the window of his garret room. What accentuated it now, more than proximity, was the beat of unseen marching feet his ear first located on the rue Bonaparte. Soon he realized what it was: the sound of universal movement.

Smoke enveloped him, but someone besieged by smoke always believes there is clean air about his own body; no one trapped in haze feels he is devoured by it. “I am not become haze,” Pollo said to himself. “The haze simply swirls around me as it surrounds the statues of the four sacred orators.” From smoke, but also toward smoke, Pollo extended his only hand, then immediately drew it back, frightened, and thrust it behind the panel that covered his chest; in that brief instant his outstretched fingertips, invisible in the smoke, had touched other flesh, fleeting, naked … other flesh. He hid the fingers that remembered and still bore the traces of a film of thick oil almost like butter: other bodies, invisible but nevertheless present bodies … swift, grease-covered bodies. His only hand never lied. No one had seen him, but Pollo felt ashamed for having been afraid. The true motive of his fear had not been the casual discovery of a quickly moving line of bodies marching toward the church in the obscuring smoke, but the simple image of his only hand, his outstretched hand, devoured by the smoke. Invisible. Vanished. Mutilated by the air. I have only one. I have only one left. With that recovered hand he touched his testicles to assure himself of the continuance of his physical being. Higher, far from his hand and his genitals, his head whirled in a different orbit, and reason, again triumphant, warned him that causes provoke effects, effects propose problems, and problems demand solutions, which are in turn, by their success or failure, converted into the causes of new effects, problems, and solutions. This is what reason taught him, but Pollo didn’t understand the relation between such logic and the sensations he had just experienced. And he continued to stand there in the midst of the smoke, exhibiting his posters for no one to see.

“Don’t be too persistent, it’s annoying, counterproductive,” the patron had admonished him when he contracted for his services. “A turn or two in front of each competitor’s, and away … alleyoop … off to a new spot.” Pollo began to run, far from the Place Saint-Sulpice, far from the smoke and the stench and that contact; but there was no escape; the smell from Saint-Sulpice was stronger than any other; the odor of grease, of burned flesh and fingernails and hair stifled the remembered perfumes of flowers and tobacco, of straw and wet sidewalks. He ran.

No one will deny that in spite of an occasional slip our hero basically is a dignified man. The awareness of that dignity caused him to slow his pace as soon as he saw he was approaching the Boulevard, where, unless everything had changed overnight, the usual (for the last thirty-three and one half days) spectacle awaited him.

He tried to think by which street he could with least difficulty reach the church, but they were all the same; down the deserted rue Bonaparte and rue de Rennes and rue du Dragon, he could see the compact mass of heads and shoulders on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the crowd lined up six-deep, some perched in trees or sitting in the temporary stands they had occupied since the previous night, if not before. He walked along the rue du Dragon, which was, at least, the farthest from the spectacle itself, and in two long strides had overtaken the owner of the Café Le Bouquet walking toward the Boulevard with his wife, who was carrying a basket filled with bread and cheese and artichokes.

“You’re late,” Pollo said to them.

“No. This is the third time this morning we’ve gone back for more provisions,” the patron answered condescendingly.

“You two can go right up to the front. What luck!”

The patronne smiled, looking at the sandwich boards and approving Pollo’s fidelity to his employ. “More than a right. An obligation. Without us, they’d die of hunger.”

“What’s happened?” Pollo would have liked to ask. “Why are two miserable tightwads like the two of you (that’s the truth, I’m not complaining) going around giving away food? Why are you doing it? What are you afraid of?” But, discreetly, he limited himself to a “May I go with you?”

The owners of the café shrugged their shoulders and indicated with a gesture that he could accompany them through the ancient narrow street as far as the corner. There, Madame placed the basket on her head and began to call out: “Let the supplies through, make way for the supplies,” and the patron and Pollo forced a path through the festive multitude jammed between the house fronts and the police barricades set up along the edge of the sidewalks.

A hand reached out to steal one of the cheeses and the patron clipped the scoundrel on the head: “This is for the penitents, canaille!”

The patronne, too, rapped the joker on the head. “You! You have to pay. If you want a free meal, join the pilgrims!”

“That really tears it!” Pollo muttered. “Did we come here to laugh or cry? Are we dying or being born? Is it the beginning or the end, cause or effect, problem or solution? What are we living through?” Again reason proposed the questions, but the film of memory, swifter than reason, rolled back in time to a cinema in the Latin Quarter … Pollo walking with his employers, carrying their supplies along the rue du Dragon … Pollo remembering an old film he’d seen as a child, terrified, paralyzed by the meaningless profusion of death, a film called Nuit et brouillard (fog, the smoke from the Place Saint-Sulpice, the haze pouring from the vulture-guarded towers), night and fog, the final solution … cause, effect, problem, solution.

But now the spectacle burst before his eyes, interrupting his pensive, nostalgic, fearful mood. Circus or tragedy, baptismal ceremony or funeral vigil, the event had revived ancestral memories. All along the avenue, people were decked out in peaked Liberty caps that protected their heads from the sun; there were tricolor ribbons for sale and assortments of miniature flags. The first row of seats had been reserved for a few old ladies, who, quite naturally and in respect to certain well-known precedents, knitted ceaselessly, commenting on the groups passing before them, men, boys, and young children carrying banners and lighted candles in broad daylight. Each contingent was led by a monk wearing a hairshirt and carrying a scythe across his shoulder; all of them, barefoot and exhausted, had arrived on foot from the diverse places identified by their gold- and silver-embroidered scarlet banners: Mantes, Pontoise, Bonnemarie, Nemours, Saint-Saëns, Senlis, Boissy-Sans-Avoir-Peur. Bands of fifty, a hundred, two hundred men, dirty and unshaven, boys who could scarcely drag their aching bodies, young children with filthy hands, runny noses, and infected eyes, all of them intoning the obsessive chant:

The place is here,

The time is now,

Now and here,

Here and now.

Each contingent joined the others in front of the Church of Saint-Germain, amid the hurrahs, the toasts and jokes of some, the sepulchral fear and fascination of others, and the occasional scattered, drifting choruses repeatedly singing the stirring La Carmagnole and Ça Ira. Antithetically and simultaneously, voices demanded the gibbet for the poet Villon and the firing squad for the usurper Bonaparte; they advocated marching against the Bastille and the government of Thiers at Versailles; they recited chaotically the poems of both Gringore and Prévert; they denounced the assassins of the Duc de Guise and the excesses of Queen Margot; paradoxically, they announced the death of the “Friend of the People” in his tepid tub and the birth of the future Sun King in the icy bed of Anne of Austria. One cried, “I want a chicken in every peasant’s pot on Sundays!”; another, “A marshal’s baton in every knapsack”; over here, “get rich”; over there, “all power to imagination!”; and one, a sharp, ululating, anonymous voice drowning out all the others, shouting obsessively, “O crime, what liberties are committed in thy name!” From the rue du Four to the Carrefour de l’Odéon, thousands of persons were struggling for a favored spot, singing, laughing, eating, wailing, embracing, pushing, exhausting themselves, joking among themselves, crying, and drinking, while Time flowed into Paris as if toward a roaring drain, and barefoot pilgrims took each other’s hands to form a double circle before the church, an enormous circle whose extremes touched, to the north, the Gallimard bookstore and the Café Le Bonaparte; to the west, the Deux-Magots; to the south, Le Drugstore, the Vidal record shop, and the Boutique Ted Lapidus; and to the east, the church itself, towering and severe. An escaped prisoner and an Inspector of Police timidly raised a heavy metal manhole cover, could not believe what was happening before their eyes, and disappeared again, lost in the black honeycomb of the sewers of Paris. A tubercular courtesan watched with languor and disillusion from behind the closed windows of her high-ceilinged apartment, closed her curtains, lay back upon her Empire couch, and in the shadowy room sang an aria of farewell. A young, slim, febrile man, dressed in a frock coat, top hat, and nankeen trousers, strolled along, indifferent to the throng, his attention fixed on a piece of skin of wild ass shrinking upon the palm of his hand.

Pollo and his employers reached the corner of the Deux-Magots and there, according to agreement, Madame handed the basket to her husband.

“You go on, now,” he said to his wife. “You know they won’t accept anything from a woman.”

Madame faded into the crowd, not without first musing: “Something new every day. Life is wonderful these days.”

Pollo and the patron walked toward the double circle of silent pilgrims, who were beginning to disrobe, and as the two men approached with the basket, those nearest looked at each other without speaking; they suppressed an exclamation, probably joy, and fell to their knees; with humility, heads bowed before their two providers, each took a piece of bread, a piece of cheese, and an artichoke, and still kneeling, heads still bowed, and with sacramental piety, broke the bread, savored the cheese, and peeled the artichoke, as if these were primary and at the same time ultimate acts, as if they were both remembering and foreseeing the basic act of eating, as if they wished never to forget it, wished to inscribe it upon the instincts of future generations (Pollo Anthropologist). They ate with increasing haste, for now, whip in hand, a Monk advanced toward them from the center of the circle. Again bowing their heads before Pollo and the patron, the pilgrims finished removing their clothes, until, like all the other men, boys, and children who formed the double circle, they were clad only in tight jute skirts falling from waist to ankles.

In the center of the double circle the Monk cracked his whip and the pilgrims in the first circle, the internal one, fell, one after another in slow succession, arms spread, face down upon the ground. The impatient, distracted, and excited murmurs of the crowd diminished. Now every man and boy and child standing behind those who had prostrated themselves stepped over one of the prone bodies, dragging their whips across them. But not everyone in the enormous circle lay flat, with arms outstretched. Some had adopted grotesque postures, and Pollo Catechist, as he glanced around the circle, could repeat, almost ritually (for haven’t we been educated to know that every sin contains its own punishment?), the cardinal expiations demanded by fists clutched in rage, an avariciously grasping hand, those bodies sprawled in green isolation, the unrestrainedly plunging buttocks, the stuffed bellies bared to the sun, lolling heads propped upon lifeless hands, the prideful poses of disdain and self-esteem, the gross mouths, the greedy eyes.

As the Monk walked toward the penitents, a blanket of silence descended over the crowd: the whip cracked first in the air and then against those fists and hands and buttocks and bellies and heads and eyes and mouths. Almost all choked back their cries. One sobbed. And with every whiplash the Monk repeated the formula: “Rise, for the honor of sainted martyrdom. Whoever say or believe that the body will arise in the form of a sphere, with no resemblance to the human body, be he anathematized…”

And he repeated the formula as he stopped only a step away from Pollo before an old man clenching and unclenching his fists, an old man whose stooped shoulders were covered with gray hair. With every blow on the penitent’s livid hands, our young and beautiful friend shivered and bit his lips; he felt that everyone in the dense crowd was shivering and biting his lips, and that, like him, they had eyes for nothing but the Monk’s whip and the old man’s flailed hands. Yet a force stronger than Pollo made him look up. And as he looked, he met the Monk’s eyes. Dark. Lost in the depths of his hood. An expressionless gaze in a colorless face.

For the last time the Monk lashed the clenched hands of the old man so visibly containing his fury, and repeated the formula, staring directly at Pollo. Pollo no longer heard the words; he heard only a breathless, timbreless voice, as if the Monk were forever doomed to that breathless panting. The Monk turned his back to Pollo and returned to the center of the circle.

The first act had ended; a noisy roar surged from the throats of the crowd: old women clicked their needles, men shouted, children agitated the branches of the plane trees where they perched. The same Police Inspector, lantern held high, continued his pursuit of the fugitive through the rat-infested labyrinths of black water. In her shadowy room, the courtesan coughed. The thin and febrile young man clenched his fist in desperation: the wild-ass skin had disappeared completely from the palm of his hand, as life flowed from his liquid gaze. A new whiplash, a new silence. The penitents rose to their feet. In his hand each held a whip, a cruel instrument ending in six iron-tipped thongs. The Monk intoned a hymn: Pollo could scarcely hear the first words: “Nec in aerea vel qualibet alia carne ut quidam delirant surrecturos nos credimus, sed in ista, qua vivimus, consistimus et movemur.”

The initial words of the celebrant were expected; whether thirty-three days and twelve hours old or new, never heard or ancient, they were received with the same amazement, bathed in the same aura, as when this hooded man had first sung them, standing in the center of the double circle of penitents lines up before the Church of Saint-Germain. It seems that on that extremely distant occasion the spectators had stood in silence until the end of the hymn and then had run to buy all the Latin textbooks in the Quarter’s bookstores, for the most informed among them barely knew that Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. But now, as if they all knew somehow that the opportunities for the purely oral excitement of every performance would necessarily become fewer, or at least less exalting, the crowd immediately erupted into shouting and weeping as the Monk chanted the first words.

This echoing wail, this long loud lament was passed from voice to voice, it died out on one corner, was resuscitated at the next, was muffled in a pair of hands, and recovered between breaths … It was one vast onomatopoetic bell, prayer, poem, chant … a sob in the desert, a howl in the jungle. As they chanted, the penitents looked to the heavens; the Monk exhorted them to prayer, to piety, and warned against the terror of the days to come; whips snapped against naked shoulders with a rhythmical crack interrupted only when a metal point dug into a penitent’s flesh, as now happened to the young man whose flying hair formed a black aureole against the sun, who yelled above the anticipated howl of the crowd, the moaning of his companions, and the chanting of the Monk. Added to the crack of leather against skin was the tearing of metal upon flesh, and this robust young man, trapped in the perpetual rhythmic, circular movement of the flagellants, struggled to remove the iron dart from his thigh; gouts of blood stained the paving stones of the atrium; and at that moment Pollo thought the young man’s skin was not actually dark but greenish, swollen, and inflamed. He saw a flash of agony in the protruding green eyes of the wounded flagellant, whose olive-colored forehead was as hard as a breastplate, crisscrossed with throbbing veins and trickles of cold sweat.

The news of the self-flagellation spread from mouth to mouth until it exploded into a moving ovation, a blend of compassion and delight. Pollo turned away from the spectacle and walked toward the Place Furstenberg, opening a path through the crowd with the posters that were his breastplate, the sails of his useless windmill. And as he walked away from the abbey that was also the tomb of the Merovingian kings, that had been burned by the Normans, reconstructed by Louis VII, and consecrated by Pope Alexander III, it was too late to see the flagellant’s arms reaching out to him, as he muttered through clenched teeth in a Spanish-accented French: “I am Ludovico. I wrote you. Didn’t you receive my letter? Don’t you remember me?”

The Place Furstenberg was untouched. Pollo sat upon a bench and admired the symmetrical arrangement of blooming poincianas and round white street lamps: an island of calm, a place privileged to convey the belief and to engender the belief that no time had passed. He clamped his hand over one ear: so Paris was a dream; the patronne had been grateful; life had become marvelous; things were happening; the desperate routine had been broken. For her (for how many others?), things again had meaning; for many (for her too?) there was vision again in existence, vibrations with everything that, unlike life, identifies life. He could see the Monk’s lips moving, his words drowned out by the roar from the spectators and the flagellants. Pollo had no proof that the man with the dead eyes had really said what he was attributing to him now, sitting here on the bench in the Place Furstenberg; he didn’t understand the corollaries to this extremely simple proposition: in Paris, this morning, an ancient woman had given birth, and a patronne had found life enchanting. This average, chubby, adorable patronne with her rosy cheeks and tight-knotted bun; vile, greedy, dull patronne, counting every centime that came into her coffers. What frightening force, what terrible fear, had brought her to this new generosity? Pollo looked at his only hand, at the traces of the grease so obstinately clinging to his palm, congealing in the creases of the lines of life and fortune and love and death. That film he had seen as a child … night, fog, the meaningless profusion of death, the final solution. Pollo shook his head.

“It’s time to be practical. It is mathematically exact that this morning I walked among several thousand spectators. Never before at one time have so many people been able to see the advertisements for the Café Le Bouquet. But it is also true that no one noticed them. My posters could not compete with the spectacle in the streets, and so the day when most people could have received the impact of the publicity so desired by the patron turned out to be the day when fewest people were disposed to be seduced by an advertisement. Neither the number of the crowd nor their lack of interest is my fault. Ergo: it doesn’t matter whether I walk among the crowds or through the most deserted streets.”

Quod erat demonstrandum: Cartesian Pollo. This reflection neither cheered him nor disheartened him. Furthermore, clouds were building up in the west and soon would be speeding to meet the sun, which was traveling in the opposite direction. The beautiful summer day was about to be spoiled. With a sigh, Pollo rose and walked along the rue Jacob, neither too slowly nor too fast, preserving a kind of impossible symmetry, displaying the profile of the sandwich boards in the windows of the antique shops, stopping from time to time to admire some display of trinkets: gold scissors, antique magnifying glasses, famous autographs, miniature dictionaries, little silver bookmarks in the shape of fists, a cloth or a mask worked of feathers with a design of dead spiders in the center. It was so serene on this street that his spirits were almost calm again. But as he saw himself reflected in the shop window he asked: can a one-armed man ever be truly serene? Pollo Mutilatum.

He stopped before an abandoned kiosk exhibiting dusty, yellow newspapers, he read some of the more provocative headlines: Urgent Meeting of Geneticists Called by WHO in Geneva, Madrid Mysteriously Deserted, Invasion of Mexico by U. S. Marines. He realized that the clouds were gathering more swiftly than he had expected and that in the narrow canyon of the rue de l’Université the light and shadow were changing with the regularity of heartbeats. It’s light from the clouds and shadow from the sun, Pollo repeated, or maybe it’s someone making jokes with the old tin pan in the sky. No, it isn’t; that isn’t the smoke from Saint-Sulpice stagnating somehow over the Place Furstenberg. That smoke was filled with ash, but this promises water. Pollo walked down the rue de Beaune to the Seine, murmuring the words of his baptismal poem (for when he was born it was no longer the fashion to baptize with an obsolete saint’s name, but rather to choose a name from a book of poems). This poem had been written by a mad old man who had never learned to distinguish between political treachery and raving humor; he was a man who detested equally mimicry of the archaic and avant-garde ingeniousness, who would not accept a past that had not been nourished in the present or a present that did not comprehend the past, who confused all symptoms with all causes: “Bah! I have sung women in three cities. / But it is all one. / I will sing of the sun. / … eh?… they mostly had gray eyes, / But it is all one, I will sing of the sun.”

There they were, all along the Quai Voltaire, the young women and the old, the fat and the thin, the delighted and the inconsolable, the serene and the distressed, lying on both sides of the street, some propped against the parapets of the quay, others huddled close to the buildings, all alternately illuminated and obscured by the swift play of clouds and July sun. July … murmured Pollo … in Paris everything happens in July, always … if you collected all the calendar pages of all the past Julys, you wouldn’t miss a single gesture, a single word, a single trace of the true face of Paris; July is the anger of the crowds and the love of couples; July is paving stones, bicycles, and a lazy river; July is an organ-grinder, and many beheaded kings; July has the heat of Seurat and the voice of Yves Montand, the color of Dufy and the eyes of René Clair … Pollo Trivia. But this is the first time that a July announces the end of one century and the beginning of another (the first time in my life, I mean … Pollo Pubescent), although deciding whether 2000 is the last year of the old century or the first of the new can lead to confusion and arguments. How far away is December, and the January that will dissipate all doubts and fears!

July, and the sun, that enormous, free, and fervent reflecting ball revealing with every successive blink of its eye that the city is open space, the city is a cave. And if Saint-Germain was all confusion, here, as in Saint-Sulpice, there was only silence punctuated by soft sounds: the marching of bare feet in the Place echoed in soft weeping.

Everywhere the eye could see, from the bridge of Alexandre III in one direction to that of Saint-Michel in the other, women lying on the sidewalks were being assisted by other women. The unique miracle at the house of Madame Zaharia had become the collective miracle of the quays: for here women of all ages, shapes, and conditions were giving birth.

Pollo Phoibee picked his way among these women in labor, trusting somehow that some of them might be in the mood to read the advertisements on the boards thumping against his knees and thighs and, once present contingencies were overcome, find themselves disposed to visit the advertised café. But it is true he had very few illusions along that line. Swathed in sheets, bathrobes, and towels, stockings rolled to their ankles and skirts raised to their navels, the women of Paris were giving birth, preparing to give birth, or had just given birth. Those who had already delivered were eventually removed by the makeshift midwives who had assisted them and who immediately prepared to attend the new arrivals waiting in line along the two bridges. Pollo asked himself: at what moment would the midwives themselves become the ones giving birth, and who would assist them but those who either had delivered or were about to? And if the miracle of Madame Zaharia were not exclusive but generic, would the old women knitting socks and fussing with their peaked caps at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés spectacle already have had their moment, or was it still to come? In any case, all the rooms facing the river had been emptied, and the new mothers, with their babes, were led to them as soon as they had passed the obligatory interval between the birth, the modest celebration of the new arrival, and a brief rest in the open air.

But these administrative details were not what made Pollo uneasy as he threaded his way among the prone figures, repressed moans, and gurgling of infants; it was the glances the birthing women directed at him. Perhaps some, the youngest, might have taken him for the possible father, who surely at that very moment was celebrating with the flagellants at the Church of Saint-Germain; some glances were hopeful, some disappointed, but as is the way with things, the hopeful ones turned into certainty of deception, while the disappointment yielded to false expectation. Pollo was sure that not a single one of those newly born infants was any of his doing; and the women who could see his mutilated arm were also sure, for one can forget or confuse anything except copulation with a one-armed man.

Some infants lay on the maternal breast; others were waved away in anger or fear by their mothers and grudgingly held in the arms of the midwives; the beatitude of some young girls and the resignation of some of the thirty-year-old women, however, were not the common denominator in this new spectacle of Paris-in-July. Many of the young girls of marriageable age, and the more mature, probably married, women, seemed as puzzled as numbers of the elderly among them; their expressions communicated a certain slyness … and amazement. These aged women, some dignified, straight as ramrods, some stooped as a shepherd’s crook, little old ladies until yesterday engrossed in their memories, their cats, their television programs, and their hot-water bottles, those parchment-skinned octogenarians who hobble through the streets grumbling at passers-by, ironclad relics who stand about all day arguing in markets and in stairwells, all of them, all the formidable, the hair-raising, and the dearly beloved female gerontocracy of Paris, smacked their gums and winked their eyes, undecided between two attitudes: whether, in bewilderment, to question, or whether to feign a secret knowledge. Pollo had only to look: he could tell that none of these women knew the father of their infants.

As he advanced along this frontier between astonishment and slyness, some old women reached out to touch our hero’s leg; he sensed that one of the ancient ladies had let it be known to her neighbor that he, the blond, handsome, if slightly crippled young man, was the unacknowledged father of the swaddled infant the old harpy was shaking in the air like a rattle. The chain of gossip was about to form, and its consequences — Pollo suspected with terror — would be unequaled. The scapegoat. The Lynch law. Nuit et brouillard. Fury. Mother Joan of the Angels. The Ox-Bow Incident. Pollo Cinémathèque. The accusing stare of the little old lady paralyzed Pollo; for an instant he imagined himself surrounded by a pack of betrayed women, the old, the mature, and finally the young, all rushing at him, kissing him first, running their fingers through his hair, pinching and scratching him, each convinced that it was with a one-armed man, only with a one-armed man, they had made love nine months earlier, invoking his mutilation as proof of a singular fertility, demanding that he acknowledge his paternity; blind, furious at his every denial, driven by the need for a propitiatory victim, tearing off his clothes, castrating him, ceremonially, communally eating his balls, hanging him from a post, claiming up to the very end that he was the one, when in all sincerity — although with great astuteness — he could only repeat: “I’m just me, just me, a poor crippled young fellow earning a difficult livelihood as a sandwich man for a neighborhood café. That is my one destiny; humbly and gratefully, I swear to you that is my only destiny.”

He had the sang-froid to return the stare of the decrepit old woman who was insinuating that he was the father of her child. Pollo’s stare transfixed the old thing, caused her to frown and sadly shake her head. Weeping and sniveling, chin trembling, she pressed the infant to her raddled lips; stupidity and terror welled in her eyes. For, without actually planning it, as he looked at her, Pollo had willed a single image, one exclusive and overwhelming image, to pass through his mind; and that vision was necessarily the opposite of the present inordinate procreation. In his mind Pollo had projected the film of a row of grease-covered, barefoot men, veiled in smoke, penetrating into the frightful stench of the church watched over by the birds of prey: Saint-Sulpice. And as he projected that image from his mind to his eyes and from his eyes to hers, he added one idea: the final solution … rigorously programmed death. Then he told himself he wasn’t sure of that, that he’d only invented it, merely remembered the unifying symbol of the film; his real intention had been to project to the old woman a terrifying image related to the immediate situation, something emanating from the earth, and pinning her down to the very sidewalk where she lay.

No one will ever know whether Pollo truly communicated anything to the old woman, but that isn’t important. What he wished was not to test his telepathic powers but to free himself from any memory or intuition about Saint-Sulpice, now converted by his imagination and cinematographic memories into a cathedral of crime, a death chamber. He felt relief at having transferred, having bequeathed, the image to the old woman, the image, perhaps the fate, of death. But he wondered, is it the young who pass death to the old, or do the old bequeath it to the young? To some few good men, disorder is the evil. Such simple convictions allow them, in exceptional situations, to find peace where none seems to exist. This concept made Pollo’s head spin: implacable order ruled at Saint-Sulpice — along with an absolute absence of good — whereas terrifying disorder reigned on the Quai Voltaire, but there was no evil there, unless life had adopted the features of death, or death the semblance of life. Facing Pollo across the sidewalk lay the Pont des Arts, an iron structure linking the quays of the Institute to those of the now transparent Louvre. The bridge stretched from the restrained tumult of this open-air maternity ward (it would be raining soon, and then what?) across the boiling, noisy anarchy of the waters. In the midst of all these signs of catastrophe the bridge stood as a lonely landmark of sanity. Impossible to know why the women crowded the other accesses to the quays and ignored this one. Some unknown rule? Free choice? Fear? The fact is that no one was crossing the Pont des Arts; consequently, that bridge shone in solitary stability.

Pollo felt the need to find the dead center of a city thrown off balance, its scale pans tipped by an excess of smoke and blood. He climbed the steps of the bridge, but could not believe his eyes; he could see the Seine, flowing toward the Ile de la Cité that split its waters; he saw the glassy outlines of the Louvre, and the corona of the storm above the truncated towers of Notre-Dame. The transformations which had seemed like ominous portents now seemed insignificant details: mist lay upon the river, veiling the ruined barges; the city’s skyline was once again visible in the crystal-clear air and glowing light, captured in a band of glass and gold between the land and the hovering storm.

A girl was sitting halfway across the bridge. From a distance, against the light (Pollo ascending the steps leading to the Pont des Arts), she was a black dot on the horizon. As he walked closer, Pollo started to fill in the outline with color: the hair caught back in a long braid was chestnut, the long smock violet, and her necklaces green. She was drawing on the asphalt surface of the bridge. She did not look up as Pollo approached, and he added to the description: firm skin delicate as a china teacup, a turned-up nose, and tattooed lips. She was drawing with colored chalk, as hundred of students had done through the years, reproducing famous paintings or inventing new ones to solicit aid from passing pedestrians to pay for their studies, or a trip, or a ticket home. In other times, one of the joys of the city had been to walk across this bridge reading the chalk letters “Thank you” written in all the languages of the world, to hear the clinking coins, and the guitars at dusk accompanying the students’ ballads of love and protest.

Now only this one girl was drawing, absorbed in the banality of her uninspired depiction: from a black circle radiated colored triangles, blue, garnet, green, yellow; Pollo tried to remember where he had only recently seen a similar design. He stopped before the girl, and the thought passed his mind that her lips were much more interesting than her drawing: they were tattooed with violet and yellow and green snakes, capricious flowing serpents that moved as her lips moved, determined by that movement and at the same time independent of it. The tattoo formed a separate mouth, a second mouth, a unique mouth, perfected and enriched by the contrasting colors exaggerating and underlining every glimmer of saliva and every line inscribed on those full lips. Beside the girl was a large green bottle. Pollo wondered whether the painted lips would drink its wine. But the bottle was made fast with an ancient, imprinted, and virgin red-wax seal.

One round drop, then a larger one, then yet another, fell upon the drawing. Pollo looked toward the dark sky, and the girl looked at him; as he watched the sky, his first thought was of the design being erased by the rain, and his second, inexplicably, of a sentence that had been running through his dreams for several days, unuttered until this very instant. The tattooed lips moved, and spoke the words he was thinking: “Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal.”

Pollo’s impulse was to flee; he looked back toward the quays: there was no one there; obviously the intensifying rain had forced the midwives and their patients to seek refuge. Staring at the sign Pollo had so ineffectually displayed all morning, the girl mouthed words as if she were reading what was written on it. The young cripple relaxed; his newfound calm changed to pride; Pollo wished his employers could see him now; if only they could see him now. No one, ever, had read with such seeming intensity and with such gray (eh?) eyes the advertisement for Le Bouquet; Pollo puffed out his chest; he had justified his wages. Then he exhaled; he’d been acting like an idiot. You had only to look at the girl’s eyes to know she wasn’t reading that innocuous advertisement. Now it was raining steadily, and the girl’s vulnerable design was trickling toward the river in spirals of dark color; surely the letters of his sign were similarly streaked; nonetheless, the girl, frowning in concentration, and with an indescribable grimace on her lips, continued to read.

Now she rose and walked toward Pollo through the rain. Pollo stepped back. The girl held out her hand. “Salve. I have been waiting for you all morning. I arrived last night, but I didn’t want to inconvenience you, although Ludovico insisted on sending you the letter. Did you receive it? Besides, I preferred to wander awhile through the streets alone. I am a woman [she smiled]; I like to receive my surprises alone and the explanations later, from the lips of a man. Why do you look at me so strangely? Didn’t I tell you I would come today to meet you? We made a vow — don’t you remember? — to meet again on the bridge this very day, the fourteenth of July. Of course, the bridge didn’t exist last year; we dreamed there should be a bridge on this spot and now, you see, our wish has been fulfilled. But there are many things I don’t understand. Last year all the bridges across the Seine were of wood. Of what are they made now? No, don’t tell me yet. Hear me to the end. I’m very weary. The trip from Spain is long and difficult. The inns are crowded, and the roads are more dangerous every day. The bands of pilgrims are advancing at a rate that can be explained by only one fact: the aid of the Devil. Terror reigns from Toledo to Orléans. They’ve burned the lands, the harvest, and the granaries. They’re assaulting and destroying the monasteries, churches, and palaces. They are terrible: they kill anyone who refuses to join their crusade; they sow hunger in their wake. And they are magnificent! The poor, the vagabonds, the adventurers, and the lovers are joining them. They have promised that sins will no longer be punished, that poverty will erase all guilt. They say the only crimes are corrupting greed, false progress, and individual vanity; they say the only salvation is to rid oneself of everything one possesses, even one’s name. They proclaim that each of us is divine and therefore everything belongs to all of us. They announce the coming of a new kingdom and they say they live in perfect joy. They are awaiting the millennium that will begin this winter, not as a date, but as an opportunity to remake the world. They quote one of their eremite poets and sing with him that a people without a history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments. Ludovico is their master; he teaches that the true history will be to live and to glorify those temporal instants, and not, as until now, to sacrifice them to an illusory, unattainable, and devouring future, for every time the future becomes the present instant we repudiate it in the name of a future we desire but will never have. I have seen them. They are a tumultuous army of beggars, fornicators, madmen, children, idiots, dancers, singers, poets, apostate priests, and visionary eremites; teachers who have abandoned their cloisters and students who prophesy the incarnation of impossible ideas, especially this: life in the new millennium must eradicate all notions of sacrifice, work, and property in order to instill one single principle: that of pleasure. And they say that from all this confusion will be born the ultimate community: the minimal and perfect community. At their head comes a Monk, I have seen him: an expressionless gaze and a colorless face; I have heard him: a timbreless, breathy voice; I have known him in another time: he called himself Simón. I have come to tell you of this, as I promised. Now you must explain the things I don’t understand. Why has the city changed so? What do the lights without fire mean? The carts without oxen? The women’s painted faces? The voices without mouths? The Books of Hours pasted to the walls? The pictures that move? The empty clotheslines hanging from house to house? The cages that rise and descend with no birds inside them? The smoke in the streets rising from Hell? The food warmed without fire, and snow stored in boxes? Come, take me in your arms again and tell me all these things.”

The girl knew him. Because of his occupation, Pollo was recognized every day by everyone in the district, but the girl’s recognition was different. He had never been truly recognized before. All about him, throughout the city, children were being born and men were dying: in spite of everything, each child would be baptized and each man would be laid to rest with his own name. But it was not the children being born or the men dying, or the flagellants and pilgrims and crowds at Saint-Germain, that attracted this girl’s attention, but all the normal, everyday, reasonable activities of Paris: the cages rising and descending with no birds within them. Pollo watched with fascination the calligraphy of those lips that had just spoken: this girl has two mouths, with one she speaks perhaps of love; with the other … not hatred, but mystery; love against mystery, mystery against love; idiotic to confuse mystery with hatred; one mouth would speak the words of this time; the other those of a forgotten time. Pollo took a step backward, the girl followed. Wind fluttered her violet smock and the rain bathed her face and hair, but the tattooed lips were indelible, moving silently.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you recognize me? Didn’t I tell you I would return today?”

Be he born or dying, he was Pollo; he was baptized Pollo and would be buried Pollo; the young cripple, the employee of the Cafe Le Bouquet, the sandwich man; Pollo from A to Z. Here … look … where could that book of poems be? Where does it say my name is Pollo? Written by an old madman who confused all symptoms with all causes. The Poet Libra, a Venetian phantom, Pound, exhibited in a cage, a recluse in an American asylum. Gray eyes, eh? The gray eyes of this girl recognized him; but her lips formed, soundlessly, a different name: “Juan … Juan…”

Who was being born? Who was dying? Who could recognize a cadaver in one of the newborn infants on the quays of the Seine? Who is it who’s survived to remember me? Confused, Pollo asked himself these questions; he had only one possible recourse in deciphering the enigmas. He would try to read the words written on the sandwich boards and thus find out what the girl had been reading with such intensity: but the words were written so that the public could read them, not he, and as he twisted his head to try to decipher them, fighting against the whirling wind that blew his long hair into his eyes — twice blinded, by wind and hair — fighting the threat of being engulfed in that odor of burned fingernails, fighting the tactile memory of grease and placenta, fighting against the meaningless words he had uttered, words dictated by a memory of resurrections, ego baptiso te: Iohannes Agrippa … Pollo slipped and lost his balance.

And the girl, through whose eyes had passed the same questions, the same memories, the same survivals — as detailed in her memory as generic in his — reached out to steady Pollo. How was she to know the boy had only one arm? She grasped empty air, her hand scratched by the pins of the empty sleeve … and Pollo fell.

For an instant, the sandwich boards seemed like the wings of Icarus, and a soaring Pollo saw the flaming Paris sky, as if the struggle between light and clouds were resolved in an explosive conflagration; bridges floated like ships in the fog, the black keel of the Pont des Arts, the distant stone sails of the Pont Saint-Michel, the gilded masts of the Pont Alexandre III blazing corposant. Then the blond and handsome youth plunged into the boiling Seine; his shout was muffled in the implacable, silent fog, but for an instant his only hand — white, emblematic — was visible above the water.

With one hand the girl clung to the iron railing of the bridge, and with the other she tossed the sealed green flask into the river; she prayed that Pollo’s hand would grasp the ancient bottle; she tried to peer through the almost motionless mist to the water; she hung her head.

She stared down at the river for several minutes. Then she returned to the center of the bridge and sat down again, legs crossed, straight-backed, letting the wind and rain play with her hair as her spirit drifted into indifferent contemplation. Then through the storm a pale white light descended toward the bridge; the girl raised her head but immediately buried her face in her hands. The light, a white dove, settled upon her head. But the moment it alighted, its white plumage began to fade and streak in the rain; as the dove revealed its true color, the girl repeated silently, over and over:

“This is my story. I want you to hear my story. Listen. Listen. Netsil. Netsil. Yrots ym raeh ot uoy tnaw I. Yrots ym si siht.”

AT THE FEET OF EL SEÑOR

It is told:

Since the previous night his alguacil had been installed in the mountain shelter with all the accouterments. Huntsmen and hounds, carts and baggage, pikes and harquebuses, hangings and horns, lent a festive air to the inn. El Señor arose early and opened the window of his bedchamber to enjoy better the radiant sun of this July morning. The village nestled in a forest of6 live-oak trees, extending into a cool glade that disappeared at the foot of the mountains. The sleeping valley lay in shadow, but the rising sun shone between the knife-edged peaks.

Guzmán entered to tell El Señor that the plans for the hunt had been made. The hounds had been to the mountains. The tracks and signs indicated that a hart was somewhere on the ridge, a stag that had been hunted before. El Señor tried to smile. He stared at his chief huntsman, who lowered his eyes. Satisfied, El Señor placed his hand on his hip. When this man — who was both his lieutenant and his secretary — had previously come to tell him, prudently and respectfully, what game was in the forest and where the chase would lead, El Señor had found no need to feign a haughtiness that was natural to him — although it is true he used hauteur to conceal his true feelings for the sport: a mixture of aversion and indifference. But when the deputy told him they would be hunting a hart that had been run before, El Señor did not hide his feeling. Calm, and secure, he could look Guzmán in the face, smile, even sigh with a touch of nostalgia. He recalled his youth in this country. The heat would lead them, hart and hunter alike, to the most beautiful parts of the mountain, where water and shade alleviate to some degree the harshness of the sun on the open plateau.

El Señor ordered that more dogs be readied, for the summer day is long and it is the beasts that tire most quickly; he said, too, that water should be loaded onto the mules, that they should calm the ardor of the dogs and run them through the coolest, greenest places. The chief huntsman, still facing El Señor, bowed his way from the room; the Liege, as he again approached the window, immediately heard the horn summoning the gathering for the hunt.

Following the storm, the day will be clear. The receding tide laps at the shoreline. A brigantine has for a long time lain in the cleft where a dry stream bed leads to the sea. A tattered standard catches the wind and flutters between the rocks. Motionless fog lies over the water, blurring the horizon. The only beacon along the coast has been extinguished during the storm. They say its keeper embraced the dog who is his usual companion and that the two lay down beside the howling fire in the chimney.

When the horn sounded the departure for the mountain, El Señor, on horseback, joined his huntsmen. Dressed entirely in green and wearing a short hooded cape of Moorish style and making, he arrived at a light trot. His company followed on foot and on horseback, the servants with tent, spade, billhook, and pickax, should it prove necessary to spend the night in the field. El Señor told himself that all would go well: the brilliant dawn promised a swift, sure hunt, and a return to the mountain pass with the first evening shadows, followed by a well-deserved nocturnal celebration at the inn where his alguacil had already set out several kegs of red wine, and where they would sing ballads and consume the savory entrails of the hart. In their game bags his personal servants carried flint and tinder, needles, thread, and diverse curatives. In accordance with custom, El Señor murmured a prayer, and looked with affection at his favorite dog, the large white mastiff Bocanegra, who preceded the ten huntsmen. Each of the men carried a lance in one hand and with the other checked the straining dogs chained to wide iron collars displaying gleaming heraldic devices and the dynastic motto Nondum. When they reached the foot of the mountain, El Señor stopped and looked sadly at the dried vines and the surrounding basalt hills. He remembered his hopeful anticipation of the morning, the imagined ride through the green lands of his youth. It is true that every mountain has four faces, and one tends to know but one. And the saying says that even the best of leaders can lose his way, but El Señor did not dare protest in the name of nostalgia, or countermand an order under the guise of being misled; his chief huntsman was not the kind of man who made mistakes; clearly, the hart had chosen the arid face of the mountain, not the rivulets and bosky groves of El Señor’s childhood. His vision, that of the flowering landscape, was superseded by another: an arduous ride under a burning sun across the bluffs and gulleys of the mountainside, hoping that time and strength would permit them to reach the higher vantage point that promised a third prospect: a refreshing view of the sea.

Almost no one visits this area of the coast. Sun and storm, both equally cruel, dispute this domain. When the heat rules, sea spray sizzles as it splashes upon the hard-crusted earth: no man’s foot can bear the heat of the fine black sand that penetrates, and desiccates, the strongest leather breeches. The stream bed dries up like the skin of an ailing hawk, and in its meanders agonize the ruins of ancient shipwrecks. The beach is an oven with neither breeze nor shadow; to walk along it, one must fight the suffocating weight of this sun-drenched terrain. To walk this beach is to wish to escape from it, climb the baking dunes, then mistakenly believe it possible to cross on foot the desert separating the shore from the mountain range.

But the desert is as unmarked as the hands of a cadaver, all lines of destiny wiped clean. Everyone knows the stories of shipwrecked men who have perished here (for only disaster can lead a man to this remote territory), turning in hopeless circles, fighting their own shadows; inveighing against them because they do not rise from the sand; imploring them to float like cool phantoms above their owners’ heads; kneeling, finally, to straddle and strangle those implacable ghosts. The brains of the ill-fated melt in this heat, and when that butter-yellow sun no longer rules the coast, the tempest reigns in its stead to complete the task.

A world of spoils awaits the hapless man, still another man who, almost defeated by the sea, hopes to find salvation here: empty coffers and demagnetized compasses, skeletons of ships and carved figureheads recarved by wind and sun to resemble broken phalanxes of petrified squires, a desolate battlefield of statue and shadow: tillers, tattered banners, and sealed green bottles. Cabo de los Desastres, it was called in the ancient maps: the chronicles abound in notices of galleons from the Spice Islands, Cipango, and Cathay sunk with all their treasure, of ships vanished with all hands aboard, their crew of Cadizmen as well as captives of the wars against the Infidel, master and servant made equal by the catastrophes of fate. But as if to compensate they also speak of sailing vessels battered against these rocks because lovers were fleeing in them. And if not the chronicles, then superstition, often an unacknowledged source of the former, says that on stormy nights a flotilla of caravels, more spectral than the fog enveloping them, passes by here, their mainmasts flaming with St. Elmo’s fire, illuminating the livid faces of captive caliphs.

Four men on horseback and eight on foot had returned with the exhausted hounds, confirming the news: this hart had been hunted before. Guzmán, fingering the moustache that fell in two thin plaits to his Adam’s apple, stood in his stirrups and issued commands in rapid succession: ready more hounds than usual, and use only four dogs for each foray; the hunters must be very quiet and strongly discipline their dogs so their growling will not alert the hart.

From his saddle, El Señor pondered the paradox: the timid hart requires more precautions than the pursuit of a courageous, if ingenuous, quarry. Innocent movement, cautious cowardice. Fear is a good defense, he said to himself as he rode forward under the sun, his face hidden beneath the sheltering hood.

They unleashed twelve dogs to cover the mountain and locate the hart’s territory; riding beside El Señor, Guzmán told his Liege that the hart was seeking new feeding grounds but because it was summer any new feed would be found in the haunts of the previous summer: where there was water. “It will be easy, Sire, to follow the only stream bed in this arid land and find where the water collects in marshy ground.” El Señor nodded without really listening, then cautioned himself he must be more alert … his indifference, the burning sun … Guzmán still waited for an answer, and as El Señor studied the bronzed face of his chief huntsman he realized he was awaiting not only the practical answer his present duties required but also another, more intangible response involving hierarchy: Guzmán had suggested what should be done, but El Señor must give the order. The Liege reacted, and told his deputy to prepare a replacement of ten dogs for the moment when the first dogs, flews frothing, should return from the search. Guzmán bowed his head and repeated the order, adding a detail El Señor had overlooked: a band of men should immediately climb to a high position where they could oversee the whole operation in silence.

He pointed to this one, that one, another, until he had selected ten men. A mutter of protest rose from the huntsmen chosen to form the party that must climb still higher. When he heard the rebellious murmuring, Guzmán smiled and raised his hand toward his dagger. El Señor, flushed, checked the movement of his lieutenant, who was already caressing the hilt in anticipation; he stared coldly at the men, who felt themselves diminished by an order to fulfill a task that held no danger. Their barely veiled expression of rancor changed now, revealing the anticipated fatigue of that climb to the highest, most rugged parts of the mountain, and also their dejection at not being able to kill the hart they would be the first to sight but the last to touch.

Angered, El Señor spurred his horse toward the band of rebels: the action alone was sufficient; they hung their heads and ceased their muttering. They avoided looking either at each other or at El Señor, and from among them Guzmán chose three men he could trust; those three lined up their sullen fellows and posted themselves one at the head, one in the middle, and one at the end of the line, like guards leading a chain gang to garrison.

“Do not take the crossbows” was Guzmán’s final order. “I see too many impatient fingers. Remember, this hart has been hunted before. I want no sound of voices. I want no shots fired. Signal only with smoke or fire.”

El Señor no longer listened; he continued up the hard-baked mountainside, displaying nobility in his attitude, although to himself admitting indolence. That rebellious muttering, immediately quelled by Guzmán’s actions and his own presence, had drained him completely. Then his eye caught the majestic outlines of the mountains, and as he fingered his reins, he reminded himself that he was here to give a rest to his powers of judgment, not to make them more keen. How many times, as he knelt before the altar or walked about the cloister, had the memory of the obligation he was now fulfilling interrupted his most profound meditations. He spent more time secluded than he should: he needed to be in the field performing heroic feats to be witnessed and remembered. But until now he had always managed to dominate his natural inclinations; he had always given the order for the hunt before Guzmán had to remind him of it, or before his wife’s ennui yielded to mute reproaches. And to El Señor’s pragmatic reasons, his wife had contributed another of purest fantasy: “Someday you may find yourself in danger, some animal may threaten you. You must not lose the ability to take physical risks. You were young, once…”

More judicious now, El Señor consciously exaggerated his noble attitude and gallant posture to gain respect. For long hours in the saddle beneath the burning sun he would not ask for water, so that his vassals might feel the strength of his royal presence, so that when he was once again in prolonged seclusion they would ignore the counsel divulged from mouth to mouth, dark mysteries, imagined disappearances: has our Liege died, has he secluded himself forever in the holy sanctuary, has he gone mad, does he permit his mother, his wife, his deputy … his dog, to govern in his stead?

Squinting, he peered up the mountainside. The lookouts, forbidden the use of horns, were excitedly signaling the sighting of the buck. The hounds were brought up from the rear; they would follow the scent of the prey sighted by the men high on the mountain. As they passed by his side, straining but silenced by their handlers, El Señor could sense the trembling strength of their bodies, compounded by restraint and enforced silence.

The hounds raised a light cloud of dust and soon were lost from sight in the rough terrain. El Señor felt lonely, his only company the mastiff Bocanegra, following him with sad small eyes, and the faithful guard of men who, like the dogs and the men stationed on the mountainside, were panting to participate actively in the hunt — but whose duty obliged them to stay behind El Señor, to carry the bags with the curative agaric and mistletoe.

Then, unexpectedly, the sky began to darken. El Señor smiled: he would have respite from the terrible heat without having to ask for relief; all the planned maneuvers of his chief huntsman, as definitive as the authoritative voice in which he had ordered them, would be reduced to naught by the fortuitous change of weather, by the willful caprice of the elements. Double relief, double pleasure; he admitted it.

In this way the storm completes the labors of the sun and the sun those of the storm; the one returns burning bodies, unable to advance a hundred feet beyond the dunes, to the sea; the other offers the ruins of its shipwrecks to the devouring sun. The blond and beatific youth might lie there forever, unconscious and abandoned. Half his face is buried in wet sand, and his legs are licked by soul-less waves. His arms and long yellow hair are tangled with kelp; his widespread arms resemble a cross of seaweed, or one covered by a clinging ivy of iodine and salt. The visible side of his face — eyebrows, lashes, and lips — is covered by the black dust of the dunes. Tattered dun breeches and strawberry-colored doublet cling wetly to his skin. Crabs skirt his body, and someone watching from the dunes might say this is a solitary voyager who like so many before and after him has prostrated himself to kiss the sandy beach, to give praise …

“What country is this?”

If outward bound, he will kiss the foreign soil he never thought to encounter beyond a stormy, interminable sea expected to end in the universal cataract. If returning home, the voyager will kiss the prodigal earth and whisper his exploits to her, for there is no better partner than she in these dialogues: the adventures of the pennon he carried into battle and on to new discoveries, the fortunes of armies and armadas of men, like him exiled and liberated by an enterprise that although undertaken in the name of the most exalted sovereigns was secured by the humblest of subjects.

But this traveler still dreams he is struggling against the sea, knowing his efforts are in vain. Gusts of wind blind him, spume silences his cries, waves burst over his head, and finally he mumbles he is a dead man, deposited in the depths of a cathedral of water; a cadaver embalmed with salt and fire. The sea has yielded up the body of this survivor, but it has confiscated his name. He lies there upon the sand, his arms tangled in kelp, and from the heights of the dunes watching eyes discern through the ragged shirt the sign they wish to see: a wine-red cross between the shoulder blades. A face buried in the sand, outstretched arms. And a fist clinging — as if to a lifebuoy — to a large green bottle, rescued, like the youth, from extinction.

Rain drums upon the canvas tent. Inside, seated on his curule chair, El Señor is stroking Bocanegra’s head, and the mastiff looks at him with those sad bloodshot eyes, as if revealing in that gaze the eagerness for the hunt that fidelity to his master forbids him. Bocanegra may be condemned to domestic company, but he nevertheless wears an iron breastplate and heavy spiked collar. El Señor strokes his favorite dog — short silky hair, smooth skin — and imagines how that sadness would disappear were the mastiff, accustomed to watching the other dogs depart as he remained by his master’s side, solicited for a different hunt: perhaps, sometime, El Señor might ride too far ahead, lose his way, be attacked. Then Bocanegra would know his hour of glory. From his eternal position at his master’s feet, he would rise and follow the scent of his master’s boots to the farthest gully of the mountain and with a savage bark rush to his defense. Once the father of El Señor had been attacked by a wild boar; his life had been saved solely by the fine, fierce instincts of the dog that was always by his side, which sank its ferocious canines and spiked collar into the eyes and throat of the boar — already wounded, it must be acknowledged, by rutting rivals.

At times like these, El Señor repeated that story to the mastiff as if to console him with the promise of a similar adventure. But no, it wouldn’t be on this occasion. Guzmán knew his office well and had ordered the tent raised in this narrow gorge, the hart’s only exit from his haunts in the marshy little valley. All afternoon the servants of his personal guard had been cutting brush and madroño branches so that, if the rain let up, El Señor could sit in a blind higher on the mountainside and watch the outcome of the hunt; other servants, with picks, had set up the tent in the gorge so that if it was necessary El Señor could spend the night on the mountain. No, Bocanegra, it wouldn’t be this time. But perhaps it was also true that when the opportunity for risk and valor presented itself the domesticated mastiff, his instincts forgotten, would not know how to respond.

It was raining. The snares Guzmán had ordered set up close to the tent were soaking wet. Cords and strips of linen cloth sealed off the narrow stream bed the driven hart must enter — where he would meet his death at the feet of El Señor. Guzmán had placed the greyhounds in position. Guzmán had situated the horses that must await the end of the hunt. Guzmán had stationed the men that were on foot. If the hart attempted to change its course it would run into the lines and cords; in turning from them, it would fall into the hands of the hunters.

“Guzmán knows his office well.”

El Señor patted his mastiff’s head, and as the dog moved, the spikes of the studded collar scratched his master’s finger. Quickly El Señor put his finger to his mouth and sucked the blood, praying it would stop, don’t let me bleed, a bit of good fortune, just a light scratch, don’t let me bleed like so many of my forebears dead from the bloodletting of wounds never healed; he tried to concentrate upon an immediate recollection in order to block out that ancestral memory: yes, the men who had been on the verge of rebelling that morning. There was no reason the incident should continue to upset him. Guzmán had merely demonstrated he knew his office well, an office he performed in the service of El Señor. It was natural he should choose from among the lowest ranks the men who served as lookouts; no others would lend themselves to such an unrewarding task. What he could not accept, because it could not be explained, was the fact that it was the most unpretentious men who showed signs of rebellion. But neither he nor his deputy could possibly be responsible for that; and after all, the brief uprising had been instantly quelled. Nevertheless, the question remained unanswered: why was it these most humble men, raised from nothing in their villages to a station in the palace, placed in a situation that was clearly an improvement for them, why was it they who muttered through clenched teeth and tried to evade a responsibility that they of all men should know they were chosen for in the first place? Wasn’t pride a privilege to be enjoyed by the enlightened, and those of noble lineage? Why did men who were nothing and who had nothing protest once they were given something? El Señor did not dwell upon this enigma beyond a well-remembered maxim of his father the Prince: Give the most beggarly of the beggars of this land of paupers the least sign of recognition, and he will immediately comport himself like a vain and pretentious nobleman; do not dignify them, my son, not even with a glance; they are entirely without importance.

For the moment, the party of lookouts high on the rocky mountainside would have to suffer the rain. The fog would blind them, and their voices would be twice silenced, once by their orders, and again, by nature: a wind that could drown the most penetrating blast of a hunter’s horn could certainly muffle the shouts of these rough mountain men. Perhaps they would be thinking of their Liege, who had for one moment deigned to look at them, who without words had destroyed them with a glance. Perhaps the men were cursing, imagining El Señor’s privileged position, a site chosen so that he more than any other could experience the supreme pleasures of the hunt: watch the hunters leave, direct the progress of the hunt, determine whether there were any miscalculations and how they might be remedied; preside over the entire process and then enjoy its culmination. And it would be he who assigned the rewards and punishments of the day. If missing the excitement of the hunt had caused those men to climb the mountain with such reluctance, then surely they would be imagining anything except that El Señor — sheltered from the rain in his tent, his only wound the accidental scratch from a spiked collar — was also suffering the anguish of the wait, that he like them might be unaware of the progress of the hunt. El Señor wrapped his scratched finger in a linen handkerchief; it was barely bleeding, it would heal; this time I will not die, I thank you, my God. Had those rough men seen him sitting with his dog inside the tent it is possible they might have muttered anew: the family line has lost its taste for hunting, which, after all, is but a practice game of war; perhaps the smoke of the sacristy and the soft life of devotion have exhausted the vitality of their leader, and he is leader only because he knows more, can do more, risk and bear more than any of his subjects. Were that not so, the subject would deserve to be the chief, and the chief would be the servant. And when El Señor dies, who will succeed him? Where is his son? Why does La Señora constantly announce pregnancies that never reach port safely but always founder in miscarriage? These were the murmurings in the mountains and the inns, in forges and tile kilns …

Suddenly the mastiff Bocanegra scrambled to his feet, displaying short, thick claws. His collar and breastplate shone in the feeble light of the tent; the dog slipped beneath the canvas and, barking, ran off into the night. But El Señor did not want to think of anything now, not even the reason for his mastiff’s strange behavior; easier to close his eyes behind the handkerchief-bandaged hand, easier to sit alone, his thoughts subdued; better to drift off into a milky vacuum than dwell on memory … surprise … premonition. He murmured a prayer in which he asked God whether it was sufficient, if God and his vassal El Señor found there was any pleasure in the hunting and killing of a hart, that the vassal, even though he not feel it, reject such pleasure for the greater glory of his Creator.

“It is he,” says the man, sure he recognizes certain identifying marks on the body of the shipwrecked youth lying below on the beach.

He and his men spur their horses forward and plunge down the dunes, raising blinding clouds of black dust. Their horses whinny as they near the prostrate body; the horsemen dismount, walk forward, and encircle the body, their footsteps resounding like whiplashes as they stride through pools of tepid water. The horses snort nervously at the unfamiliar scent, and seem to sense intuitively the fear behind the armor of that deep, strange sleep. The slow, silent sea, warm and muddied from the storm, laps at the shore.

The leader kneels beside the body, runs his fingers over the blood-red cross; then, grasping the boy beneath the arms, rolls him over. The youth’s lips part; half his face is blackened by sand. The man with the long, plaited moustache gestures, and his men lift the youth to his feet; the bottle drops from his grasp, and returns to the waves. The youth is dragged to one of the horses and thrown across its back like a prize of the hunt. His arms are lashed to the saddle trappings and his lolling head presses against the animal’s sweating flank. The chief issues a command and the company rides up the dunes and gains the flat rocky plateau extending toward the distant mountains.

Then through the dense fog they hear a sound like the rowels of spurs or metal striking against rock: following the sound appears a litter of burnished ebony; four Negroes strain beneath its weight as they advance toward the party of men leading a horse with a body across it.

A bell tinkles inside the litter and the blacks stop. Again the bell tinkles. The porters, with a concerted groan, hoist the palanquin with powerful arms and deposit it gently upon the desert sand. Exhausted by their efforts and the humid heat following the storm, the four naked men fall to the ground and rub their streaming torsos and thighs.

“Up, pigs!” shouts the man with the plaited moustache; as the horseman raises his whip to lash the porters, he communicates his fury to his mount; the horse rears and pitches in a nervous circle around the litter. The four Negroes, whimpering, get to their feet; their yellow eyes are filled with glassy anger, until a woman’s voice speaks out from behind the closed draperies of the litter: “Leave them alone, Guzmán. It has been a difficult journey.”

The horseman, still circling, still flogging the blacks, shouts above his horse’s snorting: “It is not well for La Señora to go out accompanied only by these brutes. The times are too dangerous.”

A gauntleted hand appears between the curtains. “If the times were better, I would not need the protection of my men. I will never trust yours, Guzmán.”

And she draws the curtains.

The shipwrecked youth believed he had been embalmed by the sea; blood pounded at his temples; he squinted through half-opened eyes; the sight of this fog-shrouded desert was perhaps not too different from what he would have encountered on the floor of an ocean of fire, for as he fell from the ship’s forecastle to the sea, he couldn’t see the waves he was falling toward, only the blazing corposant above him: the St. Elmo’s fire at the top of the mainmast; and when he was tossed unconscious onto the beach, he was wrapped in dense fog. But now, as he opened his eyes, the curtains of the litter also opened; instead of sea or desert or fire or fog, he met someone’s gaze.

“Is it he?” the woman asked, looking at the youth, who stared in turn at black eyes sunk in high cheekbones, brilliant eyes contrasting with a face of silvery paleness; she looked at him, not realizing that from behind a web of sandy eyelashes he was watching her.

“Let me see his face,” the woman said.

The youth saw clearly now, saw the sure, arrogant movements of this woman swathed in black reclining in her litter, looking very like the nervous but motionless bird reposing on her gauntleted wrist. The man with the plaited moustache grasped the youth’s hair and jerked his face upward for the woman to see. The youth’s lusterless eyes caught the impatient movement of her head, framed by the high white wings of a wimpled headdress.

She raised her arm, covered in a full, puffed sleeve; as she spoke, her pointing finger ordered her Negroes: “Take him.”

The sound of panting echoes through the desert, an infinite breathiness that seems to come from the fog itself; then a swift, trembling body, a flash of a huge white dog that growls and throws itself against the leader’s horse; for a moment the chief is stunned; the dog leaps at his legs, drives the spikes of his collar into the belly of the man’s rearing, whinnying horse; the leader pulls his dagger from his waistband, tugs at the reins to control his mount, and aims a vicious, slashing blow at the dog’s head; the dog’s collar scratches the man’s fist, and the dog whines and falls to the ground, his sad eyes staring into the eyes of the forgotten voyager.

At nightfall an exhausted El Señor entered his tent, slumped into his chair, and drew a coverlet around his shoulders. The rain had stopped, and for several hours the servants had been out looking for Bocanegra, but instead of following the trail of the fugitive dog, the hounds stupidly circled the tent, as if the scent of their master’s dog were inseparable from that of the master. Finally El Señor, heavy of heart, resigned himself to the loss of his mastiff — and felt even more chilled.

He had begun to read his breviary when Guzmán, his sweating face and stained clothing showing signs of the prolonged hunt, parted the flap of the tent and advised El Señor that the hart had just been brought to camp. He apologized: the rain had altered the tracks; the hart had been chased and killed at some distance from the site reserved for El Señor’s pleasure.

El Señor shivered and his breviary fell to the ground; his impulse was to pick it up, he even bent forward slightly, but like a flash Guzmán was kneeling before his Lord; he picked up the book of devotions to hand to his master. From his kneeling position Guzmán, as he looked up to proffer the breviary, for an instant looked directly at El Señor, and he must have arched an eyebrow in a manner that offended his Liege; but El Señor could find no fault in his servant’s celerity in demonstrating his obedience and respect; the visible act was that of the perfect vassal, although the secret intent of that glance lent itself, and all the more for being ill-defined, to interpretations El Señor wished both to accept and to forget.

Guzmán’s wound grazed the wound on El Señor’s hand; the handkerchiefs that bound them were of very different quality, but the scratches caused by a spiked collar were identical.

El Señor arose and Guzmán, not waiting for his Lord to express his intention — would he continue reading? would he come out to the fire? — already held the Biscayan cloak in his hands, ready to assist his master.

“I did well to bring a cloak,” El Señor commented.

“The good huntsman never trusts the weather,” said Guzmán.

El Señor stood motionless as his chief huntsman placed the cape about his shoulders. Then Guzmán, bowing deferentially, again lifted the tent flap and waited for El Señor, face hidden beneath the hood, to step out to the blazing bonfires. El Señor left the tent, then paused before the body of the hart stretched on the ground before his feet.

One of the huntsmen, knife in hand, approached the hart. El Señor looked at Guzmán; Guzmán raised a hand: the huntsman tossed his dagger and the lieutenant caught it in the air. He knelt beside the hart and with one swift, sure motion of the hunting knife slashed the throat from ear to ear.

He cut off the horns and then slit the skin above the rear hoofs, breaking the joints to expose the tendons.

He rose and ordered the men to hang the hart by its tendons and skin it.

He returned the knife to the huntsman and stood watching; between Guzmán and El Señor hung the cadaver of the hart.

The men slit the hide of the animal from hock to anus, and from there in a line down the middle of the belly. They spread open the gash and removed the bladder, the stomach, and the entrails; they threw these organs into the bucket filling drop by drop with the hart’s blood.

El Señor was grateful for the double mask of the night and his hood; nevertheless, Guzmán was observing him in the wavering firelight. The huntsmen cut open the chest to the breastbone and removed the lights, the liver, and the heart. Guzmán held out his hand, and the heart was handed to him; the other viscera plopped into the bucket of blood with a sound identical to that of the beating of El Señor’s troubled heart. Unconsciously, El Señor clasped his hands in a gesture of pity; Guzmán caressed the hilt of his dagger.

The head was severed at the back of the neck, and although the task of quartering the hart continued, El Señor, in the flickering firelight, could see only the head, that stupid-looking, that slack-jawed, that excruciatingly pitiful head deprived of its crown. The dark, glassy, half-open eyes still simulated life, but behind them, triumphant, lurked the specter of death.

Now several huntsmen cut the tripe into small pieces, toasted them over the fire, then dipped and stirred them in blood and bread. And if previously only the hart’s body had separated El Señor from his lieutenant as they skinned, dehorned, and quartered the animal, now there was a world between them. The blood and bread and tripe were brought to the bonfire; the huntsmen stood in a circle around the blaze, along with the hounds that had participated in the hunt. With one hand the men restrained the dogs; in the other they held their hunting horns. El Señor’s traditional position of eminence had for the moment been preempted by the excitement and confusion. The distraction of the nervous, panting hounds and the men’s absorption in the double task of managing dogs and horns would have allowed the Liege to slip back to his tent and renew his pious reading without anyone’s being the wiser, but he knew there was still one formality demanding his attention. An order, a casual gesture, and the huntsmen would blow their horns in unison, signaling the ritual end of the hunt.

In that obscurity to which he’d been relegated, El Señor started to give the signal, but at that very moment the huntsmen blew their horns. The ringing blast from those great curved instruments shook the night, a hoarse lamentation seeming not to fly but to gallop on iron-shod hoofs across the hard-baked drum of the earth to the mountains from which it had been torn. Although El Señor had never given the signal, the ritual had been fulfilled. It was too late. He stood stupefied, his unheeded gesture frozen in mid-air. He was thankful Guzmán was not beside him, grateful he was engrossed in the activity that absorbed them all, that he had not seen the startled face, the half-open mouth whose ritual command had been fulfilled — without word or gesture of the Liege.

At the sound of the horns, the hounds had strained forward to be fed, their greedy muzzles and trembling loins illuminated in the glow of the firelight. Surrounded by the ravenous pack, Guzmán dangled the hart’s entrails at javelin tip, high above their heads. The hounds snapped and leaped. Maddened by the deafening horn blast and their own natural savagery, they were a flowing river of luminous flesh; their tongues were sparks flashing against a sweating, happy Guzmán, javelin held high, feeding the hart’s entrails to hounds that would relish the treat and greedily await the next hunt. El Señor turned from the spectacle; he was obsessed by an infinite and circular thought.

As the dogs smeared their muzzles in blood and charcoal, Guzmán, with the point of his knife, traced a cross on the heart of the stag, then deftly divided it into four portions. He chuckled dryly as he tossed one portion to each point of the compass; the huntsmen laughed with him, well pleased with the day, and with every spirited gesture of the chief huntsman; thus exorcising the evil eye, they shouted: to Pater Noster, to Ave Maria, to the Credo, and Salve Regina.

“Sire,” said Guzmán, as finally he approached El Señor. “It is Your Mercy’s pleasure to distribute the rewards and punishments of the day.”

And he added, smiling, grimy, wounded, exhausted: “Do it now, for these men are tired and wish to return as soon as possible to the shelter.”

“Who was first at the kill?” asked El Señor.

“I, Sire,” replied his chief huntsman.

“You returned just in time,” said El Señor, cradling his chin on his fist.

“I don’t understand, Sire.”

Thoughtfully, El Señor toyed with his thick lower lip. No one could realize that the Liege’s eyes, hidden beneath the hood of his cape, were examining his lieutenant’s boots and that upon them he observed traces of the black sand of the coast, so different from the dry brown mountain dirt. For the first time, Guzmán noticed on his Liege’s hand the wound that was the counterpart to his own, and irresolute and perturbed, he hid his hand. Reward and punishment? El Señor and Guzmán thought simultaneously: For whom? They thought of each other and of themselves, of the dog Bocanegra, and the frustrated and rebellious band of lookouts.

A woman’s hand awakens him, caressing his face, wiping away the damp black grains of sand. The youth awakens a second time, dozes, made drowsy by the motion of the swaying litter where he lies captive among silken pillows and ermine coverlets, brocade curtains, and a deep and aggressively feminine perfume, a scent the youth can see at the same time he inhales and sees the color black.

He knows he is lying in a moving, luxurious, fantastic bed. A woman’s soft hand strokes him without ceasing, but from where he lies he sees her other hand, gloved in a rough and greasy gauntlet on which perches a bird of prey. The youth’s eyes and the sunken eyes of the bird lock in an unswerving gaze, but if the youth drifts between sleep and wakefulness, the hawk’s stare is unvarying, hypnotic, as if an artisan had set two old, worn, blackened copper coins in the head of the bird; and in that gaze are two timeless numbers. The furious falcon is motionless, stiff, its legs spread to better grip its mistress’s gauntlet. The purchase of the bird’s feet on the woman’s wrist is such that its claws seem an extension of the greasy fingers of the glove. One would think it a Maltese statue, it is so still; only the tiny bells fastened to its tarsi indicate movement or life; their jingling blends with other persistent metallic sounds of iron buckles and metal dragging along the road.

The youth turns his head toward the woman who caresses him, sure he will see the silver-pale face he had glimpsed that morning between the curtains of the litter, the woman who had asked who he was, who had looked at him not knowing she herself was watched. But black veils hide the features of the woman in whose lap he rests … sleeps … wakens. La Señora (so the brutal man who had tied him across the horse had called her) is a statue in black: brocades, velvets, silks; from head to foot she is swathed in veils and draperies.

Only her hands indicate her living presence; with one she caresses the youth’s face, brushes away the sand; the other sustains the motionless bird of prey. The shipwrecked youth fears the question she must ask: Who are you? He fears it because he does not know the answer. Lulled within the cushiony perfumed litter, he realizes he is the most vulnerable man in the world: he cannot answer that question; he must wait for someone to tell him “You are…”—to reveal an identity he must accept, no matter how menacing, disagreeable or false it may be — or remain nameless. He is at the mercy of the first person who offers him a name: alone, lulled by the motion, he thinks, he knows. But in spite of the thick fog clouding his senses — sleep, motion, perfume, the hawk’s hypnotic gaze — the touch of those soft fingers on his face and forehead keeps him awake, permits him to cling to lucidity as the falcon clasps the gauntleted wrist of La Señora. The youth’s feeble argument, reinforced by the fact he has no other, is that if someone recognizes and calls him by name, he will recognize and name the person who identifies him, and in this act know who he is: who we are.

Consoled, very softly he brushes the cloth of the woman’s skirt; he is content for a long while, but when he feels almost overcome once more by the swaying, the perfume, and fatigue, he reaches toward the veils covering the woman’s face.

She screams: or he believes she screams; he does not see the mouth hidden behind the veils, but he knows that a cry of horror has shattered this dense atmosphere; he knows that as he reaches toward her face, she screams; but now everything happens simultaneously: the litter stops, he hears heavy, moaning voices, the woman thrusts the hawk’s ungainly head toward his face and the bird rouses from its heraldic lethargy, its bells jingle furiously as La Señora’s hand — once caressing, now rapacious — brutally covers his eyes, he barely glimpses behind the parted veils a mouth displaying teeth filed sharp as the spikes of a hunting dog’s collar; the hawk strikes at his neck, tender from the sun and salt of fiery seas, and against his flesh he feels the icy humors exhaled from the heavy curved beak; he hears the words of that shout congealed in space, entombed in the oppressive luxury of the litter; a shout that claims and claims again the right of every being to carry a secret to the grave. And the young prisoner cannot distinguish the breath of the falcon from that of the woman, the bird’s icy beak from La Señora’s sharp-filed teeth as the pinpricks of tenacious hunger sink into his neck.

That night a crippled, bleeding Bocanegra limped into the inn. His arrival spoiled the huntsmen’s celebrations. They ceased their drinking and their singing:

How sad and long the day, oh,

How poor the rich may be,

To sadness I’d say nay, oh,

His castle I’d gainsay, oh,

Today a roof of hay, oh,

Seems fairer far to me,

Yes, fairer far to me.

Quarrels were interrupted and loud talk stilled; astonished and uneasy, they all stared at the fine white mastiff with a gaping wound on his head, his paws stained with the black sand of the coast.

The dog was led to El Señor’s quarters, where the Liege ordered him to be treated. Now, in the candlelight, the servants at last had reason to open their bags. El Señor knelt on his prie-dieu, placed his opened breviary upon it, but turned his back to the black crucifix that accompanied him on all his journeys; he watched the servants, who had first wished to carry the dog to the courtyard, considering it not entirely proper to treat him in the master’s bedchamber. El Señor said no, they must tend him there; reluctantly, the servants bowed to his superior will. The Liege’s presence would inhibit their excited comments about this event, their improbable versions of what had taken place.

Once again, kneeling and silent, El Señor asked himself whether unbeknownst to him the servants were secretly rebellious, whether from their humble condition they demanded something more than the favor of their Lord, more than the duties that gave them greater rank than any servants in the land. But in the flurry of activity the servants forgot their indiscreet discontent, and their master his discreet conjectures.

One servant removed the dog’s hair from around the wound; he cleaned and then stitched the wound with a formidable thick, squared needle, careful to fasten a little hide and a little flesh with every stitch. The wound was closed with the heavy thread, pulled not too tight, and not too loose. Then the first servant withdrew various curative powders from the bag to apply to the wound: oak leaf, palm bark, blood of the dragon tree, burnt sorrel and hordeum, medlar-tree leaf, and pennyroyal root. The second servant dampened heated handfuls of oakum fibers, wrung them well, and placed them over the powders, while the third placed a dry layer over the first, binding it finally with a strip of cloth.

The servants left behind them a sad and whimpering Bocanegra, and a dozing El Señor kneeling on his prie-dieu, his head resting on the velvet armrest, giddy from the foul stench of the powders and smoking kettles, and the metallic taste left (in the air) by the dog’s blood, and (on the floor) the traces of dark coastal sand where you lie, returned, your own twin, your new footprint upon your ancient footprint, your body for a second time outlined on the sand that a body like yours abandoned this morning when the sea abandoned you; you are lying on the same beach, outspread arms entangled in seaweed, a cross between your shoulder blades, clutching a large green sealed bottle, your old and your new memories erased by storm and fire, your lashes, your eyebrows, your lips covered by the sand of the dunes, as Bocanegra whines and El Señor in his sleep obsessively recalls the day of his triumph and repeats it to the dog; but the dog wants only to learn the terror of the black coast, while El Señor wishes only to justify his return, tomorrow, to the palace he had ordered on the very same day to be constructed in honor of his victory.

VICTORY

The fortified town fell following a ferocious battle. The news was carried to the camp; within the hour he was entering the conquered city; now, in his memory — black and brilliant as the cuirasses of his German mercenaries, turbid and liquid as the lakes surrounding the besieged borough — arose tumultuous images of the devastating battle he had waged against heresy in the lowlands of Brabant and Batavia. In earlier times, in Spanish territories, El Señor’s remote ancestors had combated and vanquished the Waldenses and Insabbatists; now their obstinate descendants, with their train of supporters and Jews who had renounced their conversion to Catholicism, had found refuge and a land propitious to their resurgence in these North Countries that had traditionally harbored heretics. There, like moles from their tunnels, they gnawed at the foundations of the Faith, whereas in León and Aragon and Catalonia these same people showed themselves in the light of day, proclaimed their beliefs with Luciferian pride — and so were more easily persecuted.

Looking at the flat contours of these Low Countries, El Señor mused that perhaps their very flatness demanded that men hide, and move with caution, while the ruggedness of the Iberian landscape stimulated men’s honor and pride, animated them to rise to heights inspired by their rugged mountains, to shout their defiance from the peaks and openly join the unarmed legions of the blasphemous, as Peter Waldo, a merchant of León, had done; he had publicly preached poverty, censured the riches and vices of ecclesiastics, established a secular church where everyone, even women, had the right to officiate and to administer the Sacraments, a right they denied to those priests they considered unworthy; they fled from the temples, saying it was better to pray in one’s own home, and on these principles Peter Waldo organized a dreadful rabble called the Insabbatists, because as a mark of poverty they wore shoes with a thick wooden sole and with a coarse leather strap across the instep; and following the teachings of their heresiarch they said they were rich because they had renounced all worldly goods; they were called the Poor Men of León, who lived on charity and rejected the inheritance of property, and among them there was no “mine” or “yours,” and they called Rome covetous and false and wicked, rapacious wolf, crowned serpent, and many disciples were attracted to their mystic austerities; they allied themselves with the heretical Cathari and the rebellious Provençal troubadours, who said that the human body was the seat of pain and sin and that the earthly consolation offered by Jesus Christ and His saints was of no worth, either in life or at the hour of death; they believed that the natural sinfulness of the human body should be exhausted during the course of life on earth, and that thus it would be purified and worthy to meet the divine gaze of Heaven. Don Pedro el Católico had zealously eradicated this Waldensian heresy and the tenacious uprisings of the Poor Men of León. El Señor remembered his ancestor’s words and repeated them now to himself: “Be it known that if any person, noble or plebeian, discover in our kingdoms any heretic, and kill or mutilate him or divest him of his goods or cause him any other harm whatsoever, he must not for that be punished; rather, he will enjoy the benefit of our grace.”

Black, brilliant, turbid, liquid memory of the present: the heretics were well supplied with stores inside the walled city built upon a small hillock and encircled by a deep moat; it was additionally protected by its swampy lakes, as the heretics were protected by the inciting Brabantine and Batavian dukes who set their temporal authorities against the divine authority of Rome, claiming Caesar’s portion for themselves instead of God; in this way they freed themselves from the payment of tithes, kept in their own coffers all proceeds from the sale of indulgences, and favored the merchants and usurers of the gray Nordic ports; and too, El Señor smiled bitterly, the heretics, akin to Waldensian austerity and Catharistic sin, but who now called themselves Adamites, had ended up in the service of the sins they claimed to combat: greed and riches and power. That alone was enough to justify this war against heretics and princes who had rebelled against Rome, and merchants faithful only to their overflowing treasure chests. Give me strength, O God, to combat them in your name and in the name of the Christian power bequeathed me by my warrior father.

“Follow always the example set by your father,” his mother had told El Señor since he was a child. “On one occasion he slept thirty successive days in his armor, thus uniting the sacrifice of the body with the battle of the soul.” El Señor, entering the city he had conquered by siege, considered himself worthy of such a dynastic inheritance: later he would remember tremulous images of faces blasted by powder, raw and mutilated flesh, eyes and hands torn away by crossbow and cannon on the sites where these novelties had been employed; there was similar cruelty where the struggle had followed ancient seignorial custom: chain mail driven into flesh by heavy ax blows, eyes burned raw by enemy-thrown quicklime: the combat of body against body, mount against mount; horsemen killed not by enemy action but by concussion when their helmeted heads struck the ground; men drowned in the attempt to cross the lake in their heavy armor or dead of heat stroke inside their creaking cuirasses; men run through by El Señor’s swordsmen after they had fallen and were struggling like overturned turtles in their heavy armor. Maneuverability, on the other hand, was the rule of war in the troops of El Señor, who had brought with him Spanish infantry — Asturians and miners, by origin — to dig and sap and act as rear guard once the light cavalry, the strategic weapon of victory, had descended upon the heavily armored phalanxes of the heretic-protecting Duke; the victory had been won by the mercenaries recruited among the Germans of the Upper Rhine and the Danube, mounted forces most effective in this new style of warfare — effective, that is, as long as they received their wages, for otherwise the risk was great that they would desert to the enemy; these German reiters fought with the pistol, a new weapon invented in the Italian village of Pistoia; five or six of these light arms assured stunning mobility in skirmishes, confusing and unsettling at the first encounter the massed enemy cavalry, whose horses were slowed by armor and the disproportionately long lances of the troops. As their armor and trappings were all of black, these mercenaries were called the Germans of the Black Band.

The victory belonged to them, but also to El Señor’s cold and lucid martial ingenuity — inflamed by faith, cooled by the science of warfare learned from his father. Once its heavy cavalry had been destroyed, the enemy barricaded itself inside the city, protected by tall towers and projecting bastions, a deep moat, and the waters of the river that branched into many smaller channels to form small lakes and swamps about the city walls. But El Señor overcame this natural defense: observing the cumbersome cavalrymen drown in river and swamp, he had utilized the boats along the shore, formerly used to transport foot soldiers, to construct a surer, swifter crossing; gunwale to gunwale he lined up the boats and filled them all with earth; the clever Germans obtained information from fishermen about places a man could wade across the lake in waist-deep water: light, light at all costs, the advance upon the besieged city, give every horse a measure of oats, captains and horsemen must do without the service of their squires, maneuverability, the enemy has lost four flags in the battles outside its walls, we must entrench ourselves in that lost ground, mobility, set broad planks across the river, mark a route through the swamp, the enemy lies in ambush, cuts down trees we might use as refuge or hiding place in the woods along the river, for man and tree are easy to confuse by night, the mills are turning, mills driven by horsepower, water mills, windmills, praise God, the wind is rising, and a strong wind means a swift-spreading fire, the Germans thunder across the causeway of boats, the infantry follows across planks and tightly bound branches, straw huts in the false village outside the walls burst into flame, the enemy constructs ingenious trenches, deep inside, low outside, now black smoke engulfs the besieged city, they cannot see us but we can see the buttresses of the wall, now, Asturian miners, dig a honeycomb of trenches so we can reach the moat about the city, mine the bastions with powder so rotten that like the dead it must be carried in shrouds, now, from the side of the river lost by the enemy, fire the cannon, tower after tower falls, rampart after rampart, don’t hold back now, days pass, the city resists the siege but we can smell what is happening inside: the stench of death; deserters leap from the ravaged towers into the lake, our vanguard sees the city fathers expelled, they come to us and tell us: We are peaceful burghers, the Duke and his heretics force us to work like slaves repairing the walls, if we refuse we are flogged in public and if we are recalcitrant we are hanged, and if we do not accept his terms we are thrown from the city into the hands of the enemy, for the Duke considers this a worse punishment than the whip or the gallows, and we can tell you that although the city is without provisions or arms it is not lacking in courage, and it will defend itself whether with stones or arrows or caldrons of boiling pitch, for there are many archers and many strong arms, but no cannon or culverin or ordnance; El Señor ordered his troops to shield themselves against the falling stones and to assure their positions beside the battered walls and crumbling towers inside temporary shelters, and thus protect themselves from both defenders and attackers, from the stones and arrows of the Duke as well as the cannon and crossbows of El Señor; he ordered his German cavalry to position themselves outside the city’s rear gate, then the mines were exploded, the towers demolished, the artillery finally breached the wall, and shouting and yelling, El Señor’s troops entered the terrified city: the Duke and his heretics fell back and attempted to escape, but with pistols and daggers the Germans awaited them, fearful squadrons — the black splendor of the Rhinelanders’ cuirasses and the coppery refulgence of those of the Danubian mercenaries; with pistol and dagger they fell upon the heretics; the Germans shot and slaughtered, the Spanish shoveled and exploded, and at exactly one o’clock in the afternoon a captain of the Banner of the Blood planted his flag on the ruins of the highest tower, opened the gates, lowered the drawbridges, and El Señor rode into the city.

He expected a triumphal reception, if not from a populace accustomed to wars and indifferent to interchangeable lords, or from soldiers equally available to either side, at least from his own troops. But instead, as he advanced through the narrow streets, from the windows overhead, clouds of feathers and storms of loose straw rained down upon him and upon his caparisoned charger.

Seeing a captain of his troop emerging from one of the houses, El Señor shouted to him: “What is happening? What does this mean?” The captain, his face flushed, told El Señor that his Spanish soldiers were ripping apart the beds in search of the gold they had heard this Northern race of misers and usurers hid beneath their pillows; had the inhabitants still been there, the soldiers would happily have thrown them from the windows, but they had fled in fright, perhaps leaving their savings behind. At least, that’s what the soldiers hoped. Don’t they know that this is a Crusade of the Faith and not a war of spoils, El Señor asked his captain. Don’t they know that of all the Princes of Christendom the Pope named me Defensor Fides and charged me with the eradication of this Flemish heresy? The captain shook his head. Crusade or no, the men engaged in these wars are hired soldiers, Sire, and they don’t fight for pleasure or for sacrifice; they fight because war is their profession, and it doesn’t matter to them whom they fight as long as they get their wages and their spoils. If he wanted a crusade, El Señor should enlist the peasants of his domains, but those peasants knew only the plow; they couldn’t manage a sword — much less a crossbow or a firearm or the big cannon that gave us the victory, praise God, and thanks to His providence it will not be said of us, as it is of unsuccessful armies, that the throne of military honor rests upon the triumphs of one’s enemy. Resign yourself, Sire; accept the dishonor of the sacking, for it is proof of victory; the honor of the vanquished serves only as food for worms and flies.

The captain walked away, and that afternoon neither flowers nor terrified burghers rained down upon El Señor from the windows overhead, only stuffing from gutted pillows and mattresses. And dogs devoured the bodies of the dead in the streets, not the worms and flies the captain had invoked. Gripped with rage, El Señor stopped before the great Cathedral and directed a crossbowman to throw open the portals of this magnificent Gothic temple, the ancient tomb of martyrs, and a collegiate church; he ordered the church bells rung, he would convene a grand Te Deum in honor of the victory against the enemies of the Faith. The crossbowmen seemed nervous, even aggrieved; some covered their faces, whether to hide their laughter or to shield against the stink of the bodies piled high in the atrium, it would be difficult to judge. As El Señor watched the soldier open the Cathedral doors, he said to himself, knowing he could never, he must never, reveal an instant’s doubt: “Always that moment of uncertainty between the order and its execution…”

When the doors were opened, he himself was forced to cover his nose and mouth with a gauntleted hand; from inside the Cathedral came a foul excremental odor that mingled with the stench of the dead heaped in the street.

Laughing, shouting German soldiers and horsemen were running up and down the naves; some were defecating at the foot of the altar, others were urinating in the confessionals, and dogs wandering in and out of the temple, not satisfied with the banquet of human carrion in the streets, were lapping up the vomit of the drunken troops. Even before El Señor gave the order, his crossbowmen made a brusque and aggressive movement, prepared to expel their companions from the Cathedral, arrest them … or perhaps they intended only to advise them that El Señor was standing watching from the shadow of the threshold. But El Señor signaled them to stop; then, irresolute, he stood toying with his lip.

Surely his duty was first to discipline the crossbowmen who had not prevented the profanation, and second to punish the profaners themselves. But he felt a stronger, a mortifying, impulse to linger behind one of the columns in a dark corner of the Cathedral. With a gesture, he ordered his men to leave him in the Cathedral. He listened to their reluctant footsteps, and then the great doors closed and El Señor was alone with a feeling of personal defeat that more than offset the satisfaction of the great military victory of this day; the anonymous captain was mistaken, it would be better for honor to derive from the triumph of the enemy if such dishonor was the fruit of victory. He rested his head against the column; he was overcome (are you listening, poor Bocanegra) by the repulsive odors and raucous noises of the German mercenaries who had won the day for the Faith.

It was difficult to see clearly what was happening by the altar; the guttural accents of a black-clad horseman stood out above the base and drunken voices. Everyone stopped to listen, and after he had finished speaking in his Teutonic tongue, his companions shouted “Long lives!” and “To the deaths!” They retrieved their swords and their cuirasses, the copper of the Danubians and the black that gave the name to the Rhenish band, thrown carelessly in the heaps of stinking excrement, black and copper, at the foot of the altar; and in the thick darkness the assault began, sword against sword, Rhinelander against Austrian, the Black Band against those in copper armor, shouting insults, threatening death, and howling in agonistic ecstasy, and as I could not see them clearly, Bocanegra, I closed my eyes and remembered similar profanations in the past; I imagined that this monstrous din and nauseating stench might have accompanied earlier scenes: the French crusaders in Hagia Sophia, where they had sat a whore upon the throne of the Patriarch and drunk from the sacred ciboria, all the while singing obscene rondelets; and I recalled the taking of the temple of Jerusalem by Christian horsemen who rode through the sacred nave in blood up to their knees; but that was the blood of infidels, Bocanegra.

Leaning against the column, he felt infinitely weary. The victory had drained him. Him, yes, but not the warriors; they’d not had enough, and the battle was continuing inside the Cathedral; those German reiters were far surpassing the obligations of their mercenaries’ salaries. He stood there a long while, eyes closed, secretly fascinated (yes, Bocanegra, I can tell you) with the spectacle God had visited upon him, he was convinced (I am convinced), to dilute the pride of military victory, to propose that the victory of arms be set aside and that instead we recall the unending battle for the salvation of souls. For what was this war but the struggle between Christianity and these heretics who had found refuge beside the icy Northern Seas, against the last Waldenses and Cathari, who now called themselves Adamites, who disguised themselves under the name of the father Adam and claimed to live as God’s first creature lived before the Fall?

“Since there is nothing worse than our world, Purgatory and Hell do not exist; because man’s nature is sinful, and since that nature is acquired on earth, it is here that sin must be purged; man fell because of sensuality, therefore he must infernally exhaust himself in sexual excess to cleanse himself of every vestige of this bestial tendency; then he will be purified, and when he dies he will become one with the Celestial Body; we deny, therefore, that Jesus Christ and His saints come at the hour of death to give solace to the souls of the just, since life is pain and no soul leaves this earth without great pain; and we maintain that as compensation no soul retains any awareness or memory after death of what it loved in its Age. So be it.”

These words coming from the darkness surrounding El Señor turned his blood to ice. At first he thought the speaker was one of the three buried there who had been martyred by Nero; then as he looked toward the silent sepulchers of Gaius, Victoricus, and Germanicus, he imagined it must be the very darkness speaking.

“Adam was the first Prince of the world, and when he came into his kingdom he had an intimation of his destiny: Adam, the first commandment of your religion is this: your flesh will sin today so that tomorrow you will be pure of soul and may conquer death. Your body will not be resurrected, but if it has been cleansed by pleasure, your purified soul will unite with God’s, and you will be God, and like God your soul will have no memory of the time lived on earth. But if you have not fornicated you will be doomed to Hell, and be reincarnated in the form of a beast until with a beast’s instinct you expend what you were unable to vanquish with the intelligence of a man.”

As El Señor peered into the shadow, he discerned the figure that spoke these things. He could distinguish the figure from the shadow, but shadowy still was the figure; the face, hands, and body of the unknown were cloaked in a habit dark as the ecclesiastical space (my dream intensifies the shadow); before the trembling, victorious Liege, the speaker affirmed:

“From Lyons to Provence and from Provence to Flanders, men’s bodies are inflamed with the Truth, and neither your arms nor your victories will prevail against them. Our succession of homilists is older than your line of princes; we came from Byzantium, roamed through Thrace and Bulgaria, and by unknown roads reached Spain, Aquitaine, and Toulouse; your ancestor Pedro el Católico ordered our homes burned and destroyed our Books of Hours written in the language of the people, and he took for himself the castles of the rich who had joined our crusade of poverty; your ancestor Don Jaime el Conquistador submitted us to the tortures and persecutions of the Catalan and Aragonese Inquisitions, and of our devastated Provence the troubadour could only sing, ‘Would that he who sees you now have seen you once!’ You believe that today you have finally defeated us. But I tell you that we shall outlive you. Beneath the cold moonlight in remote forests where your power cannot penetrate, bodies are coupling in cleansing pleasure so that they may reach the heavenly kingdom free from sin. Neither prison nor torture, neither war nor the stake, will prevent the natural union of two bodies. Look there at the altar and see the destiny of your legions: excrement. Look deep into my eyes and you will see the destiny of mine: Heaven. You cannot prevail against the gratifications of an earthly paradise that combines the pleasure of the flesh and the act of mystic ascension. You cannot prevail against the ecstasy that is ours when we enjoy the sexual act as it was practiced by our parents Adam and Eve. Sex as it was before sin; that is our secret. We realize fully our human destiny so that we may free ourselves eternally from our burdens, so we may become souls in a heaven that ignores earth; and in so doing, we also realize our celestial destinies. Your mercenary legions will not prevail against us; you represent the principle of death, and we the principle of procreation; you engender corpses, and we, souls; let us see which multiplies more swiftly from this time on: your dead or our living. You can do nothing. Our free spirit will live on the far shore of night and from there we shall proclaim that sin is nothing but the forgotten name of an impotent thought, and that innocence is the pleasure with which Adam, once he knew himself to be mortal, fulfilled his destiny on earth.”

“Where do you come from?” El Señor managed to ask.

“From nothing … nada,” the shadow replied.

“What is nothing?”

“Our father, Adán.”

“Who are you?”

“I am not.”

“What do you want?”

“I want not.”

“What, then, do you possess, that you show yourself so proud?”

“I possess nothing, which is everything, for in poverty lies absolution from sin. Only the poor can fornicate in a state of grace. Greed, on the other hand, is the true corruption, the final and utter condemnation. Nothing I have told you would be true if it were not done in poverty. Such is the precept of Christ.”

“Not his precept but his counsel.”

“Christ was not a courtier; he taught by example.”

“Can you, a sinner, compare yourself to Christ?”

“I am more like Him than any luxury-dulled Pope.”

“The Church has answered you and men like you with two weapons: Franciscan poverty and Dominican discipline.”

“The Antichrist in Rome knows very well how to dissemble, and how to use half measures to distract from what should be fully accomplished.”

“Regardless of what you say, you could learn something of humility from the Franciscan, for your pride cannot be easily reconciled with your poverty; and from the Dominican you could learn system and order, for your dream is not consistent with action.”

“My action is poverty: I would offend the Dominican; my dream is pride: I would not be congenial with the Franciscan.”

“Where is it you are going?”

“To absolute freedom.”

“And what is that?”

“A man who lives according to his own impulses, who makes no distinction between God and his own person. A man who looks neither ahead nor behind, for a free spirit knows neither before nor after.”

“What is your name?”

The specter laughed. “The Nameless Wilderness.”

And the specter approached so close that El Señor could feel its warm breath, and a burning hand touched his.

“You thought you had destroyed us today. Be grateful that is not true, for if you defeat us you defeat yourself. You think you have won the battle? Look at the altar; look at the troops that routed us in the name of Rome, the crowned serpent. Look. Fight against the true powers of the earth, not against those of us who promise pleasure and poverty in life and purity and forgetfulness after death. Come with us, with us who have nothing. We are invincible: you can take nothing from us.”

“In the name of God, who are you?”

“Try to remember. Ludovico. Do you remember? We shall meet again, Felipe…”

And for an instant El Señor could see two glinting green eyes and hear loud laughter; he dropped to his knees behind the column, hoping to close his eyes if they had been open, or open them if everything he had seen had been a dream; the shouting inside the Cathedral grew louder, and mockery and boisterous laughter outstripped even the loathsome odors. El Señor reached out in the darkness; the specter was not there.

The only light that night came from the sparks of clashing blades; the copiously sweating comrades were waging a battle to the death; the day’s meager victory had not sufficed to consume their energies; that poor victory, won by mercenary soldiers over heretics who proclaimed the paradoxical divinity of sin and the eventual riches of voluntary poverty, was ending a second time in this pagan celebration of blood and excrement before the altar of the crucified Christ, and, crossing himself, El Señor could believe that the instincts of the Assyrians were everlasting and inherent in the blood of man, that the Whore of Babylon sat upon all thrones and all altars, and that theological benevolence lied when it affirmed that all a soldier need do to reach Heaven — even without the intermediary step of Purgatory — was to perform well the duties demanded by his office: war, war against the true heretics, those who had won the battle against the excommunicants only to profane the Communion altar! War, war against the warriors! But with what arms? I alone? Unarmed battle against the arms that had won the day for Christ the King? I alone? The pierced side of Christianity was bleeding; Jesus, God, and true man, born of the Blessed Mother, the always virgin Mary who had conceived without knowing man: I prayed quietly, Bocanegra. The odor of blood was joined to the stink of excrement, urine, and vomit, and to the clatter of swords, the sound of ciboria rolling in the aisles.

Then they tired; they fell asleep before the altar, along the naves, in the confessionals, the pulpit, behind the shrine, beneath refectory cloths. Only one drunken, humming soldier, crawling on his hands and knees, showed any sign of life. The others seemed dead, as dead as those on the field of battle. With his hands, the crawling soldier shaped a mound of excrement at the feet of the crucified figure on the altar. Did he laugh or cry? No one knows. It was the end of El Señor’s vigil. There was no light that night? For El Señor, yes: the excrement shining like gold at the feet of the agonized Christ. The brilliance of that common, anonymous offering disturbed El Señor’s secret prayer.

Over and over he repeated a verse from Ecclesiastes, Omnis Potentatus vita brevis, and in his own life this night he wished to verify it: gold from the entrails of the earth, excrement from the entrails of man, which of the two gifts was the more worthy in the eyes of the Creator who had created both? Which was more difficult to obtain, to offer, to recompense?

Trembling, sobbing, incapable of distinguishing between what he had seen and what he had dreamed, El Señor left the Cathedral and in this last hour of a long night walked through the empty streets of the conquered city toward the ruined bastions. He climbed to the tower where the Banner of the Blood had been set in pulverized sandstone. He looked out over this Low Country dotted with windmills and sheltered by compact clusters of low woods, soft, undulating flat land stretching beneath the light of a pale moon toward a North Sea whose icy, untamed waves regularly invaded them.

As he left the Cathedral, he had longed for the silent companionship of the moon. But when he saw it he knew again he was incapable of judging whether perhaps the brutal mercenaries of the Upper Danube and the Rhine had intuitively made the maximum, the priceless offering of their blood and waste to God Our Father, incapable of understanding whether the true sacrifice of those soldiers had been made there before the altar or earlier during the battle. He thought of the profaned temple and in that instant he swore to erect another, a temple to the Eucharist, but also a fortress of the Sacrament, a stone chalice that no drunken soldiers could ever profane, the marvel of the centuries, not for its luxury but for an implacable austerity and a stark symmetry whose divine severity would have frightened even the hordes of Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, and it was those hordes, and that cruel chieftain, who were the ancestors of the barbaric Germans who had today won the day for the Faith.

Standing beside the flag fluttering in the stormy gray breeze of the dying night, looking out toward the windmill-spiked fields of Flanders, there amid the debris of the round fortified tower with no company but the silent moon, El Señor uttered these words, his statement of purpose in founding his inviolable fortress of the Eucharist: Recognizing the many and great beneficences we have received from the Lord Our God and every day receive from Him, and recognizing how He has been called upon to direct and guide our deeds and affairs in His holy service, and to help sustain and maintain these kingdoms within His Holy Faith, which by doctrine and example of the religious servants of God is conserved and augmented, and so that likewise they may pray and intercede before God for us, and for our fathers who came before and those who will follow us, and for the good of our souls, and the continuation of our Royal Estate, I shall erect a vast edifice, rich, holy, decorative, beneficial, the eighth marvel of the world in rank but the first in dignity, a retreat for spiritual and corporeal recreation, not for vain pastimes, but a place where one may devote himself to God, where every day divine praises will be sung with a continual choir, with prayer, alms, silence, study, and letters, to confound and shame all heretics and cruel enemies of the Catholic Church and all the blasphemers who with impiety and tyranny have leveled Thy temples in so many lands. Amen.

And as El Señor spoke this prayer aloud, he removed the Banner of the Blood with his own hands: the campaign would end here, the victory would serve as an example, the mercenaries’ armies would penetrate no further into these Low Countries, their villages and crops devastated by fire. Let this example be sufficient; El Señor kissed the ancient banner that had served as the ensign of his father’s victories, and in truth he prayed so that his father’s wandering soul might hear him: Father, I promised to be worthy of your heritage, to do battle as you had done, to declare my presence in the fires of forts and villages in lands unsubmissive to our power and that of God, and like you to fight and sleep thirty successive days in armor; Father, I have fulfilled my promise, I have paid my debt to you and to your example, now I must pay my debt to God: I shall never again go to war, my blood is weak; I am exhausted, Father, forgive me and understand me, Father: from this time forward, my only battles will be battles of the soul; I have won and lost my last war of arms.

He threw the flag of victory into the moat of the conquered city: a yellow and red bird, it floated an instant upon the ashy waters and then sank to join the armed corpses of the conquered.

“And you, my faithful Bocanegra, what are you dreaming? Where were you today when you escaped my presence? Who wounded you? What do you remember, dog? Could you tell me things, as I have you?”

With no intent of hurting him, El Señor softly patted the dressing covering Bocanegra’s wound. The dog howled with pain. In this recollection of danger he returned to the coast, to the black sands.

WHO ARE YOU?

Weary waves caress your bare feet. Gulls skim across the water and you can believe it is their tranquilizing chatter that awakens you. You can also imagine that the warmth of the sand where you lie is that of your own body, that it had awaited you, was held for you alone: the darkest convolution and the most recent wound in your consciousness tell you you have been here before. You touch your burning throat and raise your head from the sand.

First you look close around you: the flotsam of many disasters returns a different gaze, sterile and opaque; only a green bottle, buried in the damp sand and, like you, licked by the sea, shines with something that your hunger and thirst would like to identify as a life of its own. A sealed bottle that may contain something to drink; you realize that the shine you attribute to the bottle originates only in your starving gaze; you pick up the bottle, you turn it, shake it, but it contains no liquid, only something like a twisted whitish root, some repulsive tail, perhaps a twist of tightly rolled paper; weakly, you toss the bottle back into the waves, and again look about you, this time into the distance.

The sun is beginning to set behind the dunes. But on the skyline you perceive a long row of figures passing between you and the sun. Dark outlines, silhouette after silhouette, plodding slowly and silently. Little clouds of dust raised in their passing whirl and disintegrate in the light of the setting sun.

You hear — perhaps you hear — a wordless hymn, guttural and somber. The marchers move with lowered heads as if each of them, even those who are unencumbered, even those who are riding, were carrying a heavy burden. You cannot count them; the procession stretches, uninterrupted, from one extreme of the dunes to the other. Clearly, what you hear is a persistent, rhythmic drumming. You raise your arms and beckon. You shout, and more than greeting, your Salve implores help. But no sound leaves your throat. You stand and brush the sand from your body, you run toward the dunes; your feet sink in deep soft sand, you progress with difficulty, you will never be able to make the climb, it seemed so close from the beach, so easy to gain …

Sand cascades onto your head, choking you, blinding you, deafening you; you breathe sand. And yet you can see the insects working their hidden tunnels in the dunes, insects that at your stumbling, desperate step skitter like grains of gold in a sieve; filled with gratitude, you are alert to the marvels of the earth; the earth lives, even in the tunnels of the most despicable insects. You do not know how you came here. But an instinct that has been awakened with movement tells you you have been saved and that you should be thankful. Someone shouts to you from the heights of the dune; a dark arm waves to you; a rope strikes your forehead; you hold on with all your strength, and open-mouthed, eyes tightly closed, you are dragged up through the sand. You are exhausted. At the top of the incline, arms seize you and try to pull you to your feet. Each time, you fall again beside the halberds the soldiers have left lying in the sand. Your legs are numb. The procession has halted because of you. The soldiers grumble reprovingly. They hear the sound of a penetrating voice and hesitate no longer. They leave you lying there on the ground, your dry, sand-caked tongue protruding from your mouth, and the caravan renews its route to the rhythm of the drummer.

You watch the figures pass, blurred, reverberating, spectral: fatigue blinds your eyes. Behind the troop of halberdiers follow two officials on horseback, and behind them, many people riding mules laden with coffers and large kettles, wineskins, and strings of onion and pimento. The muleteers drive their animals, whistling through toothless gums, and a garlic sweat glistens on their scarred and barely healed cheeks. You watch the passing parade: barefoot women balancing clay jugs upon their heads; men in straw hats carrying long poles on which are impaled the heads of wild boars; a party of huntsmen leading suspicious dogs; men in hempen sandals, two by two, supporting poles upon their shoulders from which hang spoiled partridges and worm-infested hares; modest palanquins bearing women with protruding eyes and women with deep-set eyes, women with rosy cheeks and women with parchment-dry skin, all breathless from the heat, all fanning themselves with their hands, and even the dry-skinned ones trying to dry with handkerchiefs the perspiration streaming down their faces toward paper-and-parchment-stiff wimples fastened beneath their chins; more elaborate palanquins occupied by men of wise aspect whose eyeglasses slip down their noses or are suspended from black ribbons, men with salt-and-pepper beards and with holes in their slippers; hooded monks intoning the lugubrious hymn you heard from the beach, at last you can decipher the words — Deus fidelium animarum adesto supplicationibus nostris et de animae famulae tuae Joannae Reginae — their shoulders bearing the weight of palanquins carrying priests oppressed by heat and by their own humors of urine and incense; then two skittish horses drawing a leather carriage with closed curtains, and behind that, pulled by six slow-paced horses and accompanied by another guard of halberdiers, the great funeral coach, black and severe, like a vulture on wheels. And inside the coach, bolted to the floor, the coffin, also black, its glass carapace capturing the light of the setting sun like the glittering shells of the insects that live in the sandbanks. You saw them. I want you to hear my story. Listen. Listen and I will see for you.

Behind the funeral coach follows a tortuous, writhing retinue of beggars, contrite, sobbing, swathed in dark rags, their mangy, scabrous hands offering empty soup bowls to the dying sun; at times the most daring run ahead to beg a scrap of the rotten meat and are rewarded with kicks. But they are free to come and go, run ahead, fall behind. Not so another throng encircled by a crossbow-armed guard, painfully dragging themselves forward, women dressed in long, torn silks, hiding their faces behind a bent arm or behind cupped hands, dark men with dark gazes, painfully choking back scraps of a song caught in taut throats, other men with tangled beards and long dirty hair, dressed in rags, in pain, attempting to hide the round yellow patches sewn over their hearts, and in the midst of this multitude, staring at the heavens, a monk humming they must be converted by the eventide, they will hunger like dogs, they will surround the city …

And behind the beggars and the captives marches a page dressed all in black and beating on a black velvet-covered drum a slow deliberate rhythm like the sound of the feet and wheels and iron-shod hoofs upon the sand. Black breeches, black leather shoes, black gloves holding black drumsticks: only the page’s face is alight, like a golden grape in the midst of so much blackness. Firm, fine skin — you are sure; once you have seen the page you truly see again, your sight no longer clouded by obscuring sound — upturned nose, gray eyes, tattooed lips. He is staring directly ahead. The leather tips of the drumsticks define (or only recapture) the solemn chant floating above the procession, Joannae Reginae, nostrae refrigerii sedem, quietis beatitudinem, luminis claritatem, the overall chant of the procession that competes with and drowns out the secret chant the monk hums amid the captives … they will hunger like dogs, they must be converted by the eventide.

You have so feared that someone would ask “Who are you,” knowing you cannot answer, that now you do not dare, for fear of another’s fear, to ask the same question of the page with the tattooed lips marching to the muted rhythm of the drum. At first, kneeling there in the sand, the sea behind your back, you felt confused, and you watched until the caravan passed you by; then quickly you arose, the long line is disappearing in a cloud of dust, creating the illusion (accentuated by the long, moribund shadows) of a distance that belies time; for a moment, you think you might never again recapture — are you still dreaming on the beach? have you dreamed of another shipwreck, death by drowning, burial in the sea? — the company of that long parade, at once funereal and festive, with its onions, halberds, horses, palanquins, beggars, Arab and Hebrew captives, palanquins, hymns, coffin and drummer.

You rise to your feet and race to catch up with the last figure in the cortege, the black-clad page, who does not turn to look at you, who continues to march to the rhythm of the drum, who is perhaps challenging you to ask “Who are you,” knowing that you already know he knows you fear to ask the question and receive the response. You run as if the distance that separates you from the caravan could be measured in time and not in space. You run, but all the while continue to address that part of you you do not know. What a fool you are; it’s been centuries since you’ve seen your face in a mirror; how long has it been since you’ve seen your twin image? How can you be sure? Perhaps the storm that tossed you upon these shores erased your features, perhaps the corposant burned your skin and the waves tore out your hair, perhaps the sand wounded forever your eyes and lips. Storm and sword; corposant and worms; waves and dust; sand and ax. You extend your seaweed-entangled arms: how can you know what appearance you present to the world, how the world may see you, shipwrecked, orphaned, poor, dear wretch.

The drummer does not turn to look at you, and you do not dare ask him anything. Again you touch his shoulder, but he is indifferent to your appeal. You run before him and his eyes look through you as if you did not exist. You leap, you growl, you fall to your knees, you rise again, you wave your arms wildly before his eyes, but the imperturbable page continues on his way and again the cortege leaves you behind.

Now you run parallel to the procession and the dunes; you run past the drummer, past the Moslems and the Jews, past the beggars and the mounted halberdiers, and in a swift movement, unforeseen by the mounted guard, you leap onto the funeral coach and in that instant glimpse beneath the glass carapace a bed of black silk, cushioned and decorated around all four sides with black brocaded flowers, and you see the bluish figure reclining there: great staring eyes and skin the color of a plum; a prognathic profile with thick parted lips, a medallion upon the silk shirt, a velvet cap; the halberdiers swoop down upon you, seize you by the neck and arms, throw you to the sand, a blow from one of their iron weapons splits your lower lip; you taste your own blood, you smile, idiotically satisfied with this proof of your existence; the preceptor monk of the captives also approaches, gesticulating madly, runs to where you lie in the sand, claims you for his train: “What is your name?” You cannot respond, the monk laughs, what does it matter.

“He will say his name is Santa Fe or Santángel, Bélez or Paternoy, but of course he is a Jewish pig, a convert, he will not admit even that, he will say he is a true Christian, but I can see the face of a heretic Jew, converted, but returned to his faith, I see his hungry dog’s face and I say he belongs in my train, we will make him taste the rotted flesh of pig and see whether he likes it or whether it sickens him, I see the face of a convert pig, a false Christian, a Judaizing animal, he stays in my train, in my train…”

Until now the beggars had paid no attention to you, surely because you are so like them, but now the monk is calling you pig they pause, they sniff an entertainment, violence, smelling your blood with more acuity than the monk. They wink at one another biliously, they suck their withered gums, shake their lousy heads, point to the diversion, drive their poles into the sand and run to where you lie, prostrate and bleeding, ringed by halberdiers, the zealous monk leaping about you, and over the heads and between the legs and embracing the waists of the soldiers and shouting into the ear of the monk, they stare at you, spit at you, shake their clenched fists at you.

“Who is he?”

“From a wrecked ship, they say.”

“No, a heretic, this monk says…”

“Hey, you, Santurde, look down on the beach…”

“Anything there…?”

“No.”

“I say yes.”

“I see coffers and bottles and pennants.

“Is the ship’s cat on the beach?”

“I say no.”

“Any man on the beach?”

“I say no.”

“No survivors, man or cat, whatever’s down there’s ours.”

“They say his ship was lost.”

“I say we beat him to death.”

“Anything’s there belongs to him.”

“Kill him, I say, fucker. If there’s no man or cat survived, it’s ours! That’s the law.”

“They say he’s a heretic.”

“… a pig.”

“… a captive.”

“Who needs another mouth to feed?”

“Who gives a fig if he’s a son of Allah or of Moses; we never hear the end of that. Kill him!”

They pull their poles from the sand and brandish them in the air, they stick them between the monk’s and the soldiers’ arms and legs, guffawing, shrieking toothlessly, spitting, they threaten you, kick you, curse you, as the halberdiers drag you through the sand, the beggars grumble and the monk returns to his flock of prisoners, and you are dragged toward the small, slow-moving carriage with the drawn curtains.

MONOLOGUE OF THE LADY VOYAGER

“Señor caballero, whoever you may be, please remain quiet, and be grateful. You have gone too far. You hoped to pardon your indiscretion by attributing it to a youth still untaught in respecting another’s mystery.

“The mystery of other individuals, señor caballero, is ordinarily grief we neither share not understand.

“Keep silent and listen.

“Do not attempt to draw the curtains and look at me.

“Keep silent and listen …

“No! Do not attempt to look at me! I say that for your good more than for my own.

“I do not know who you are or where you are going.

“What I am telling you now will be forgotten the moment we part.

“And that will be true even though you live a thousand years more trying to recall it.

“It would be useless; we voyage only by night; you are unaware of the exception that permitted you to meet us by day; I have always feared that an accident of this nature might be placed in my path; praise God that not a glimmer of light can penetrate this carriage; the curtains are thick, the glass is sealed with lead and painted black; it is a miracle, señor caballero, that one can breathe in here, but I need very little air; that which enters during the day while I rest in the monasteries and the servants clean my carriage is sufficient.

“Light and air. Those who need them are those who still cultivate the deception of their senses. First of all, señor caballero, I shall tell you this: long centuries of exhortation have taught us that we can trust only in our five senses. Ideas flourish and swiftly fade, memories are lost, hopes are never fulfilled, sentiments are inconstant. The senses of smell, touch, hearing, sight, and taste are the only sure proofs of our existence and of the reflected reality of the world. That is what you believe. Do not deny it. I have no need to see you or hear you; but I know that your poor heart is beating at this instant because of the aspiration of your senses. You would like to smell me, touch me, hear me, see, perhaps kiss me … But I am not important to you, señor caballero; I interest you only as proof that you yourself exist, that you are here, and are master of your own senses. And if I demonstrated the contrary …

“Who are you? I do not know. Who am I? You do not know. But you believe that only your senses can verify each of our identities. In exchange for your senses, in order to conserve them in all their precious distinction — which for you is actually the vain and voracious affirmation that life was created for you, not you for life — you would sacrifice me without a second thought: you continue to believe that the world culminates in you, do not deny it; you continue to believe that you, you yourself, poor señor caballero, are the privilege and the sum of all creation. That is the first thing I want to advise you: abandon that pretense. With me your senses will be useless. You believe you are listening to me and that by listening you can act upon me or against me. Stop for an instant. Don’t breathe, for there is no air in this carriage. Don’t open your eyes, there is no light. Don’t attempt to hear; I am not voicing the words I am directing to you. You do not hear me, you cannot hear anything, no sound can penetrate the sealed glass of this carriage, not even the hymns I have ordered to be sung, not even the drum that announces the anguish of our passage …

“We have left our homes and we must pay the price of such prodigious behavior: the home is prodigal only if we abandon it in search of the abandon we are denied by its customs. Exile is marvelous homage to our origins. Oh, yes, señor caballero, I see that you too are traveling without direction. Perhaps we can accompany one another from now on. Time has lost its rhythm; this is the first occasion I have voyaged by day, and that explains two things. That we met by chance. And that now we must continue our wandering until we recapture all the moments lost in the accidental encounter: until night once again comes to an end. The councilman must appear very confused. His duty is to keep time with the hourglass he carries constantly beside his knee (Didn’t you see him? He is traveling in a modest palanquin; his eyeglasses slip down his nose), but yesterday instead of falling as usual from the upper into the lower, the sand inverted the process, defied the natural laws and would have filled the upper glass in an hour if the unhappy councilman, who is antagonistic to marvels, had not instantly reversed the hourglass to assure the normality of its measurement. Normality! As if the origin of the world, the alternation of light and darkness, the death of the grain so that the wheat may grow, the body of Argus and the gaze of the Medusa, the gestation of butterflies and gods, and the miracles of Christ Our Lord were normal. Normality: show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it, because it is normal, miraculous.

“From that time, as in the beginning, since the councilman reversed the hourglass, we have been governed by the revolutions, appearances, disappearances, and possibly by the immobility of the stars; we cannot know, perhaps the stars explode, are born, live and die like us. but perhaps, too, they are but congealed witnesses of our wanderings and agitations. We cannot control them, señor caballero. With that you will agree. But continue to believe that you can control your senses; you will not attempt to control the waxing and waning of the moon. We can maneuver an hourglass we can hold in our hands; we cannot make the disk of the sun revolve. But now we do not know whether we have lost or gained a day. There is no solution except to await the next sunrise and then renew our routine, approach a monastery, ask for hospitality, spend the day there, leave by night …

“But the sun does not penetrate these painted windows of my carriage. I am at the mercy of my servants. We are dependent upon their seeing the sun. I will not be aware of it. I do not want to be. Every dawn we shall come to a different monastery. Swaddled in rags, I shall descend from this carriage and they will lead me to a windowless cell, then to the crypt beneath the earth; then back to the carriage again, always in shadows … We must take care, señor caballero; we are at the mercy of their deceit. They can pretend that they have seen the sun. They can take advantage of our constant appetite for darkness. You saw them this morning; they are not people to be trusted. They behave as they do from habit, you see; but habit affects only individuals. I, señor caballero, live by heritage. And that affects the species.

“It is not that they are bad people. On the contrary, they serve me devotedly, beyond even ordinary demands. But they must be weary. We have not paused since we fled from that convent. They must believe I have imposed this march on them as punishment for their mistake. The horses are probably frothing at the mouth. The feet of the muleteers are probably badly wounded. The food has probably spoiled. By now perhaps neither Moors nor Jews, not even the beggars, will accept our hares and partridges. How my poor sheriffs and ladies-in-waiting must be sweating!

“Poor ladies! Permit me to laugh; if you desire, imagine my laughter, for your ears would hear only an indignant howl: poor ladies, indeed! I have been deceived, sir, I have been deceived; we arrived at that convent at dawn; I am in the hands of those who serve me; without them I cannot take a step; it is they who must prepare everything, see that we want for nothing, my son is generous and has placed at my command all that you have seen, a guard of forty-three halberdiers and their officers, a majordomo, a councilman, controllers, doctors, treasurers, servants, wine stewards, a sheriff, eight ladies-in-waiting and fifteen duennas (Oh, señor caballero, permit me to laugh, do not be startled by my laughter), fourteen valets, two silversmiths and their apprentices, eighteen cooks and their scullions; the preceptor monk, and thirty-three captives, the false converts from Mohammed and from Jewry, for in this manner my son El Señor, in the course of my wanderings, assures all the villages in Spain that we are steadfast in our combat, that we are tearing out the root of those accursed beliefs, and thus stills the voices that murmur against us, insinuating that all this filth, pretending false conversion, has placed itself in the councils of the kingdom and there debates and disposes in our name; no, let them all see the tenacity of our persecution of the tenacious infidels and how I amuse myself by leading both Jews and Arabs, who despise one another, for it is commonly known that the Jew steals from the Arab and the Arab kills the Jew, and here all are mixed together and humiliated and without any anticipated end to their afflictions amid muleteers, messengers, rough horsemen, hunters, valets, and pensioners, my thirteen priests and a drummer-and-page; everything you have seen and also someone you have not seen: Barbarica, my Barbarica, my faithful companion, the only woman I allow in my presence; you cannot see her because she is very tiny and as she has a most unpleasant defect she insists upon traveling inside a wicker trunk … Señor caballero, what more could one expect of filial gratitude, I who have never asked but one thing, I who willingly would wander these roads alone, bearing my burden on my back, I who without need of this procession would travel from town to town and from cloister to cloister, dressed in sackcloth, begging charity and shelter, contenting myself with the little I could importune: solitude, nakedness, and darkness, by night and by day. I alone, bearing my burden on my back. If I had strength, if it were physically possible …

“That is my desire. Balls and gallantries are not for him, or luxuries and childbirth for me. The merriment has ended and we are alone. I ordered burned all the clothing he had touched; I ordered that in the courtyard they make a pyre of our bed, and although first I wished to remain to my death dressed as I was at the moment I learned of his, until my skirts fell from me in shreds and my slippers grew thin as paper and my undergarments came unstitched of their own accord, later I decided to change my clothing one final time and to wear forever this habit of patched and mended rags. But you can see for yourself; they swaddled me in black rags, they do not allow me to see or breathe, and now I am unable even to undress myself. I had wished differently. I wanted only to eat what was indispensable, bread moistened in water, perhaps gruel, very rarely chicken broth. I wanted to sleep on the ground.

“Can all the sordidness possible to humanity, sir, compensate for the vacuum left by death? I wanted sordidness, I lived with sordidness. But since my son insists on it, I am now dependent upon this scrupulous service in my travels. My rules are simple. You would be surprised, you, señor caballero, who seem to wander through the world with no beast of burden to bear your sorrows and without even a rough pair of leather breeches to protect you from the stones and thorns, you would be surprised, I tell you, at the way the most simple dispositions are complicated the moment they are set apart by ceremony. In the end, the ceremony is converted into the substance, and the marrow of the matter becomes of secondary importance.

“Every evening at dusk they transport me to my carriage; they always draw the curtains and seal the doors and windows; they have the horses hitched in pairs; the black coach rolls behind my carriage; the torches we need to light our way are lighted; we travel through the night; every dawn the monks and a few halberdiers approach the nearest monastery and, with humility and authority, ask for shelter against the unbearable sun; as always they convey me, swathed in rags and carried by the soldiers, to a bare room; after me they bring the body of my husband; they prepare the Requiem Mass; they advise me of the hour, the Mass is celebrated; they leave me there at the foot of the catafalque, my only company my faithful Barbarica; again at dusk they come to get us; the voyage is renewed once the obolus has been paid to the monks.

“Let my grief be respected. Let my solitary company with death be respected. Let no woman approach me! None, except Barbarica, who is hardly a woman and who can awaken no passion or jealousy. I hear their footsteps, their women’s footsteps, women’s voices, rustling taffetas, crackling crinolines, high-pitched laughter, sighs of intrigue; the walls of the convents moan with the voices of love; the hollow walls howl with indecent gratifications; behind the door of every cell some woman weeps and cries out her pleasure … Let no woman dare! I tolerate everything, señor caballero, this costly company my son has imposed upon me, the violation of my declared desire to be anonymous, the mockery of my supreme intent of sacrifice: a poor woman, naked and hungry, widowed and solitary, in rags, dragging along the roads her heavy burden wrapped, like herself, in the sackcloth of beggarhood. I accept everything … except the presence of a woman. Now he is mine, mine alone, forever.

“The first time I kissed him again, señor caballero, I had to break the seal of lead, the wood, the waxen cloths enveloping him. I could, at last, do what I would with that body. They had been generous and lenient with me. Let no one oppose her in anything, let no one do anything that might cause her discontent; do her will and protect her health, and little by little she herself will be convinced of the necessity for burying the corpse: that is what they murmured with their stupid air of compassion.

“Locked within my castle, I could, at last, do as I wished: part the fur cape, rip the silken shirt (like this, señor caballero, like this), tear the medallion from his chest and the velvet cap from his head; I could remove those brocade breeches (like this, Barbarica, like this) and the rose-colored hose and know whether it was true what was said about him, murmured in bedchambers as well as in anterooms, kitchens, stables, and convents, son mary estoit beau, jeune et fort bien nourry, et luy sembloit qu’il pouvoit beaucoup plus accomplir des oeuvres de nature qu’il n’en faisoit; et d’autre part, il estoit avec beaucoup de jeunes gens et jeune conseil, qui et l’oeuvre luy faisoient et disoient paroles en présens de belles filles, et le ménoient souvent en plussieurs lieux dissoluz … Because I had to know whether it was true; I had known him only in bedchambers as black and dark as this carriage, señor caballero, at the time of his choosing and his pleasure, with no warning, with no words, no light, almost without his touching me, for he only looked upon and allowed himself to be seen by the courtesans in innumerable villages and the country girls with whom he exercised his seignorial right; he took me in the dark; he took me to procreate heirs; with me he invoked the ceremony that prohibits to all chaste and Catholic and Spanish couples any delight of sight or touch, or any prelude or prolonged contentment, especially in the case of a royal pair, whose hurried coupling has no reason but to fulfill the strict laws of descendancy; do you understand, señor caballero, how one’s senses can be suffocated by such ceremony, how we can be left with no domain but that of incorporeal imagination? Only now that he is dead, I alone can see him, I can see all of him, motionless and subjected entirely to my caprice, night after night in our hollow of cold stone, with no adornment, not even a prie-dieu.

“I sent for the learned gentleman and apothecary Don Pedro del Agua so that he could correctly remove my husband’s entrails and all the other organs except the heart, which Señor del Agua himself recommended should be left in the body; he cleansed the cavities and incisions with a brew of aloes, alum, wormwood, caper, and lye that he boiled according to his art, adding the first spirits drawn from the still, strong vinegar, and ground salt. When the body was well cleansed, he left it to dry for eight hours in two bushels of ground salt. Then he completely filled the body cavities with powders of wormwood, rosemary, sweetgum-tree sap, benzoin, alum rock, cumin, water germander, myrrh, lime, thirty twigs of cypress, and all the black balsam the body would hold. When the cavities were filled, Señor del Agua closed them, sewing them with the fellmonger’s stitch, and then, except for the head, face, and hands, he anointed the cadaver, using an aspergillum to sprinkle the body with a mixture of distilled substances; turpentine, rosin, benzoin, and acacia. Then he immediately swathed all the anointed portions in bindings saturated in a liquor made of gillyflower, sweetgum-tree sap, wax, mastic, and tragacanth. Then Dr. del Agua left, affirming that my husband would be preserved without suffering the offensive ravages of time. And so I made him mine.

“I have had even the altars removed and have ordered the windows painted black so that every chapel we visit is identical to the service it lends. Even the royal catafalque seemed an offense to the severity I desired, requested, and obtained. The purple mantle that covered his body, the silver ornamentation on the coffin, and the ornate crucifix were a mockery; the four candelabra, an insult; the light on the candles, a flickering offense. They said to me: Señora, in life he loved luxury and gaiety. Remember, you yourself gave birth to a child one evening while a ball was being held in the courtyard of the palace of Brabant; while your husband was pursuing the girls of Flanders you felt the pangs of birth and went to hide in the privy and there we found you and there was born your son, the present Señor. The midwives arrived just in time, for the umbilical cord was strangling the infant, his suffused face was blue with asphyxia and he was bathed in blood. So it was related. Now I shall reject the excesses of such pomp and I shall find motive for life in the spectacle of embalmed death, as before in the act of giving life to my son I nearly knew death; like Rachel, I could proclaim to my son, filius doloris mei, and to the world, the sons of maternal pain are inclined to happiness. I kissed the bare feet of this swathed and spice-filled spoil, my husband, and the silence was sudden and absolute.

“One must close one’s ears with wax, señor caballero; one cannot live with one’s eyes closed, one’s ear involuntarily sharpened, telling oneself that soon one will be hearing the squeaking of the coffin lid, the movement of a tortured body, the hollowness of invisible footsteps, the slow regeneration of features, the crepitating growth of a dead body’s hair and nails, the rebirth of the lines erased from the hands of a cadaver that lost them at death as they had acquired them at birth; no, señor caballero, deaden your senses; as I have told you, there is no other solution if one wishes to be alone with the one one loves. Dr. Pedro del Agua went away, and I did not know whether to thank him or curse him for his diligence. I was absolute mistress of an incorruptible body, one that maintained the semblance of life, but one that for that very reason could be mistaken for other men; women would see only a handsome, sleeping man. Don’t you hear them? It’s the women! Yes, I cursed the science of Señor del Agua; he had restored my husband with the appearance that had been his in life, and with the promise of corporeal incorruptibility; but he had taken from me the one thing I might have called my own: a corrupt cadaver, foul flesh, dust and worms, white bones that belong to me…! Do you understand what I am telling you, señor caballero? Do you know that there are moments that cannot be measured? Moments when everything becomes one: the satisfaction of a fulfilled desire along with its remorse, the simultaneous desire and fear of what was, and the simultaneous terror and longing for what will be? No, perhaps you do not know of what I am speaking. You believe that time always advances. That all is future. You want a future; you cannot imagine yourself without it. You do not want to provide any opportunity to those of us who require that time disintegrate and then retrace its steps until it come to the privileged moment of love and there, only there, stop forever. I embalmed Prince Don Felipe so that, as he looks like life, life may peacefully return to him if my undertaking be fulfilled, if time obey me, move backward, return unconsciously to the moment when I say: Stop, now, never move again, neither forward nor backward, now! Stop! And if that undertaking be frustrated, then I have faith that my husband’s resemblance to life will attract to his body another man capable of inhabiting that body, eager to inhabit it, to exchange his poor mortal shell for the immortal figure of my incorruptible husband.

“You look at me with scorn; you believe I am mad. You know how to measure time. I do not. Originally because I felt I was the same; later because I felt I was different. But between before and after, time was forever lost to me. Those only measure time who can remember nothing and who know how to imagine nothing. I say before and after, but I am speaking of that unique instant which is always before and after because it is forever, a forever in perfect union, amorous union. Do you think you feel my hands upon your lips, señor caballero? I laugh, I soothe you, I caress your head. Quickly, Barbarica. Do not try to touch me, señor caballero. In spite of everything, in spite of everything, you see, we each possess a unique body; because they are different they are immediately adversaries. One lifetime is not sufficient to reconcile two bodies born of antagonistic mothers; one must force reality, subject it to his imagination, extend it beyond its ridiculous limits. Soon, Barbarica; he will never return, this is our only opportunity, hurry, run, fly, go, return, little one! I am attempting to breathe to the rhythm of the body, to imitate the body, young man; I always concentrate in this imitation all the lassitude of my own body and all the edge of my mental powers so that you do not encounter any resistance; so that I may hear the other breathing, I myself cease to breathe; that hushed breath will be the first sign of my desire and of the return; if there was the slightest distraction, that sign might escape my notice; you must understand, if I move, I shall not know whether he, whether you, has begun to breathe again. I have stilled all sounds, except that of the chant that is my sorrow and the drum that is the beating of my heart. Embrace me, señor caballero, sleep (you, he) embracing your mortal twin and perhaps this morning (we voyage only by night, I in the sealed carriage, he, you, in the black coach) you will speak in your dreams, and his dream will be different from the two-become-one I have dreamed of.

“In that case, I will have to kill him again, do you understand? Death must, at least, make us equal; dream, even though a shared dream, would once again be the sign of difference, of separation, of movement. Truly dead, with no dreams, inside death, made equal by the total extinction of death, inanimate, identical, neither the dream of death nor the death of dream to separate us and provide a channel for separate desires. An exchange of dreams, señor caballero. Impossible! I shall dream of him. But he will dream of other women. We should be separate again. No, señor caballero, do not draw back. I swear I shall not touch you again. It is not necessary. Did you hear, Barbarica? It is no longer necessary. Lying upon him (him, not you, you no longer feel anything, isn’t that true?), I trembled and wept to prevent our dreams from becoming separate and thereby separating us, but I could not prevent it; within the quietude of the two embraced bodies I felt a swift withdrawing, and in order to hold him with me, I caressed his entire body, my husband’s reclining body, with my tongue. My tongue tastes of pepper and clove, sir, but also of the worm and aloe.

“I imagined that the only thing I could truly possess was a silhouette. I caressed myself. I thought of the man sleeping beneath my weight in the shared coffin. I felt new. The first wave reaching the first shore. The decision to create a city upon the earth: to raise an empire from the dust. I kissed the eternally parted lips. I imitated that voice: I always imitate it, tomorrow will be today and today will be yesterday; I imitated the immobility of the dust and the stone that confiscate our movements of love, desperation, hatred, and loneliness. I brushed my cheek against the castrated hoarfrost where my husband’s sex had beat, the virility I had never seen, neither alive nor dead, for although Dr. del Agua extracted before my view the corruptible viscera, he turned his back and stood between us the moment when he severed the already corrupted sex of my husband. He was other and he was the same. He spoke, he moved, only when I dreamed of him; I was his mistress, his nurse, his wife, forever, but only in the realm of thought. Dr. del Agua’s efforts had been in vain; I could have buried my husband because I could possess him only in memory. I thought about this, and I made a decision; I asked Barbarica to lash me with a whip, and she, weeping, beat me. I had thought only of myself, but I was only one branch of a dynastic tree.

“I watched my husband sleep; he was called the Fair, and oh, he was fair. Perhaps sleep was but the ultimate channel for his scandalous presence. A black cat devours you each night, Felipe, father, husband, lover: La reyna no tenia sano el juyzio para governar. No, the Queen did not have sound judgment to govern, only to love, love with desperation, in death and beyond death. Our houses are filled with dust, señor caballero, the houses of Castile and Aragon; dust, sound, tactile sensation. Don’t you hear those bells that are restored to the wholeness of a solitary dream before they are returned to their essential state of reverberation? La reyna no tenia sano el juyzio para governar. La reyna has abdicated in favor of her son, the Benjamin of this tearless Rachel, sure that the son will continue the task of the mother and will govern for death. Don’t you hear those hymns announcing what has already happened? Deus fidelium animarum adesto supplicationibus nostris et de animae famulae tua.… La reyna, the servant of God, has died, señor caballero; she is again one with her poor Prince, ungrateful and faithless in life, grave and constant in death.

“La reyna is dead. Nothing more appropriate than that one dead person should care for another. The Queen is now responding to the summons of her son, who has constructed a tomb for his ancestors in the garden of a demolished castle, converted into a dust and plaster plain by ax and pick and hoe, by calcining ovens and great lime basins white as the ancient bones of royalty at this very instant converging upon their final fatherland: the Spanish necropolis. We shall arrive amidst dust, ashes, and storm, we shall listen in shrouded silence to the Responsory for the Dead, the Memento Mei Deus, and the antiphonal Aperite Mihi; we shall recall the ancient stories:

“Our Lord the Prince, may he rest in glory, had played very strenuously at ball for two or three hours in a cool location before he became ill, and without covering himself he had cooled off from the exercise. On the morning of Monday he awakened with a temperature, with the little bell-shaped piece of flesh we call the uvula very thickened and swollen and slack, also the tongue and palate to some degree, so that he had difficulty swallowing his saliva or speaking. They applied the cupping glasses to his back and neck, and with that he felt some relief. His chill came upon him that day, and the doctors were in accord that he should be purged the next day, Tuesday. But, first, he died.

“Ah, señor caballero, you will say it is laughable to drag throughout the whole of Spain the body of a Prince who died of a catarrh and who in life was as cruel and inconstant, as frivolous and as shameless a womanizer as any of those scullions who follow in my train. El Señor my husband was so irrepressible that only yesterday, in spite of my order that in every village we enter the women must remain in their houses, as far removed as possible from the cortege of my handsome husband, fate — as if the Prince Don Felipe still attempted to indulge his appetites from the depths of the penumbra that envelops him — led us to a convent of Hieronymite nuns, who upon our arrival carefully shielded their faces from me, sending as representatives in their veiled stead several miserable, beardless acolytes who lend their services there, and not only at the hour of Holy Mass, you may well imagine! so that these nuns did not show themselves until after the coffin had been installed in the crypt; and then, fluttering like black butterflies, as cunning and voracious as cats in heat, the nuns swooped down upon my grief, mocked my presence, and, as in life, adored my husband.

“Butterflies? Cats? No, they were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto with the heads of slick serpents; Medusas of penitents’ cells; abbesses with stony stares; Circes of sputtering candles; nuns with inflamed eyelids; mystic Graeae with one common eye and one single sharpened fang for all the aberrant multiplicity of their bodies; novices with tangled gray hair; Typhoeuses of the altars; Harpies strangled with their own scapulars; Chimerae sweeping down in concerted attack from the crown of crucifixes to press their parched lips upon the dead lips of my husband; Echidnae exhibiting swollen white breasts of poisonous marble; see them fly, señor caballero, see them kiss, feel, suck, cuddle in the hollow of scraggly wing, part their goats’ legs, sink in their lionesses’ claws, offer their bitches’ bottoms, their damp nostrils quivering and sniffing at the remains of my husband; smell the incense and the fish, señor caballero, the myrrh and the garlic, sense the wax and the sweat, the oil and the urine, now, yes now, let your senses awake and feel what I felt: that not even in death could my husband’s body be mine. See the white-coifed flight and the aspiration of yellow claws, hear the sound of spilling rosary beads and splitting sheets: see the black habits engulfing the body that belongs to me! To the convents he so infamously profaned returns the body of my husband, there to be profaned, for there is not a woman in this kingdom who does not prefer the dead caresses of my whoring Prince to the inexperience of a living, beardless acolyte. Pray, nuns; reign, reyna.

“We fled from that confusion, from those intolerable contacts; and that was why you chanced to meet us on the road in daylight. Señor caballero; no one will say it is laughable to do what I do: possess a corpse for myself alone, in death if not in life; such was my undertaking and now you see how it was frustrated by the vulgar appetites of my embalmed husband and of those buttocks-waggling nuns; but if not to me that body shall belong to our dynasty; we shall die together, but not our image upon the earth. The perpetual possession of and perpetual homage to the Very High Prince whose body I bring with me is mourning, yes, and is ceremony, but also it is — believe me, I know, I do not deceive myself, they call the ultimate limits of my lucidity madness — play and art and perversion; and there is no personal power, even ours, that can survive if to strength is not added the imagination of evil. This we who possess everything offer to those who have nothing; do you understand me, poor dispossessed soul? Only one who can allow himself the luxury of this love and this spectacle, señor caballero, deserves power. There is no possible alternative. I bequeath to Spain what Spain cannot offer me: the image of death as an inexhaustible and consuming luxury. Give us your lives, your sparse treasures, your strength, your dreams, your sweat, and your honor to keep our pantheon alive. Nothing, poor gentleman, can diminish the power based upon the meaninglessness of death, because only for men does the fatal certainty of death have meaning, and only the improbable illusion of immortality can be called madness.

“It is sad that you will not live as long as I, señor caballero; a great pity that you cannot penetrate my dreams and see me as I see myself, eternally prostrated at the foot of tombs, eternally present at the death of Kings, insanely wandering through the galleries of palaces yet to be constructed, mad, yes, and drunk with grief before a loss that only the combination of rank and madness can support. I see myself, dream of myself, touch myself, señor caballero, wandering from century to century, from castle to castle, from crypt to crypt, mother of all Kings, wife of all Kings, surviving all, finally shut up in a castle in the midst of rain and misty grasslands, mourning another death befallen in sunny lands, the death of another Prince of our degenerate blood; I see myself dry and stooped, tiny and tremulous as a sparrow, dressed like an ancient doll, in a loose gown of torn and yellowed lace, toothless, whispering into indifferent ears: ‘Do not forget the last Prince, and may God grant us a sad but not odious memory…’

“A true gift does not admit equal recompense. An authentic offering rises above all comparison and all price. My honor and my rank, señor caballero, prevent my accepting anything in exchange which could be considered superior or even equal to my gift: a total, final, incomparable, and uncompensatable crown or body. I am offering my life to death. Death offers me its true life. At first, being born, I believed I was dying, although unknowing I was born. Later, dying, and knowing, I have again been born. This is my gift. This is the unsurpassable offering of my cult. No, my work is not perfect. But it is sufficient. Now rest. You will forget everything I have told you. All my words have been spoken tomorrow. This procession is moving in the opposite direction from that you know how to measure. We came from death: what kind of life could await us at the end of the procession? And now, because of your perverse curiosity, you have joined us. Notwithstanding, let no man speak evil of my largesse. For you, señor caballero, I have a gift also. They are awaiting us, señor caballero, we have an appointment. Yes … Yes…”

REUNION OF SOUNDS

Silence will never be absolute; this you tell yourself as you listen. Forlornness, yes, possibly; suspected nakedness, that, too; darkness, certainly. But either the isolation of the place or that of forever embraced figures (you say to yourself, señor caballero) seems to convoke that reunion of sound (drum; squeaking carriage wheels; horses; solemn chant, luminis claritatem; the panting of the woman; the distant bursting of waves upon the coast where you awoke this morning, again in another land as unknown as your name) which in the apparent silence (as if it were taking advantage of the exhaustion of your own defenses) builds layer upon layer of its most tenacious, keenest, most resounding insinuations; the silence that surrounds us (señor caballero, she says to you, her head resting upon your knees) is the mask of silence: its person.

You cannot speak; the lips of the lady voyager silence yours, and as she kisses you you are repeating her words, unwillingly you repeat: “Make no mistake, señor caballero; it is my voice, and they are your words issuing from your throat and mouth.” You speak in the name of what she, her body resting upon yours, summons. Like her, you are inertia transformed into a conduit for energy; you were found along the road; you had a different destiny; she separates her lips from yours and you feel too-tiny hands upon your features; they seem to be drawing, tracing, the contours of the face that belongs to you but which you have never seen. The fingers are minuscule, but heavy and rough. They seem to hold colors and stones and feathers that they arrange upon your face, as your former face disappears with every stroke of those moist fingertips. The fingernails scrape against your teeth as if filing them. The plump palms pass through your hair, as if spreading a dye, and as they touch your cheeks, those tiny hands create a beard light as a canary’s plumage; surprised, you rub your jaw. Those strange fingers, so removed from the voice of the woman who seems remote from it, work upon your former skin, and suddenly the monotonous and changeless rhythm of the drum ceases, only the wail trapped behind the clenched lips of the captive Moslem can be heard; then that chant, too, dies. She warned you; in the silence you can hear your hair and fingernails growing, your features changing; the tutelary lines of your palms are erased, rerouted, reborn.

“My husband’s body is mine only in the realm of thought; I give it to you, señor caballero, for you to inhabit, not in the name of my love, but of our power. Such is my offering. You can neither reject it nor make an offering in return.”

You are immersed in something you can only call nothingness. In spite of it all, the drum had been a message from the external world, a thread to rescue you from the impenetrable darkness of the carriage; similarly, so was the dislocated Moorish chant seeking flight toward sacred Mecca. The drum was: the beating of a heart (professionless, possessionless señor caballero). The drum was: the heart of death (Didn’t I tell you, señor caballero, that Dr. Pedro del Agua extracted all the viscera except the heart?). You were listening all the time, not realizing; and once you realize what you are hearing, it is too late; its unaccustomed sound is replaced by tumultuous presences. Then: pandemonium, babel, clamor, hullabaloo, brouhaha: for the first time since you were thrown inside it — you know neither how nor where, such was the combined menace of the beggars and the halberdiers — the carriage stops.

The door of the carriage opens, or rather, light in a riot of white blades pierces the carriage and a woman’s loud wail is heard over the shouts of the crowd and the jabbering gibberish of the astonished halberdiers, who whirl in their tracks, weapons in hand, not knowing whom to attack or whom to defend but instinctively alerted to a danger which because it is intangible is all the more menacing; over the noise of the monks, as incredulous as astounded, running toward the carriage, flapping like windmills in the wind; over the babble of deceitful ladies-in-waiting, who forgetting to maintain their fragile disguises drop their perukes and raise their skirts to reveal twisted, hairy legs; over the song of the beggars, who kneeling around the carriage sing the Alabado, praise to the Sacrament, for as the beggars are always closest to the funeral coach they are the first to see the miracle; and over the finally released shouts of the Arab, who had restrained his song: at last, the soul is One, One is the soul, the ancient Averroës died, but not his science! and over the sound of the Moorish woman, who hides her unveiled face with her hands and croons: the hearts of the fallen reveal a great marvel, to Spain and her realms has come a great evil; the Jews, more circumspect, murmur among themselves: sephirot, sephirot, All emanates from All, and All emanates from One, thirty and two are the roads to Adonai, One is the God, but three are the mothers who give birth to the emanations, three mothers and seven doubles: the Cabala spoke, and hearing them the delirious preceptor monk cried out, I was right, I was right, the Judaizing reverted pig slipped through my thin fingers, he climbed upon the royal carriage, he bewitched Our Most High Queen, he made her prisoner of his philosophy of transformations while I wished to make him prisoner of our truth of unity, the Infidel transformed himself into a snake and a bird, a unicorn and a cadaver, for the Christian is but an image of the Creator who is One and although the Christian be born, suffer, and die he is always one, one, one, not two, not three, not seven, but one, and scullions drop the rotted hares and run to hide among the squat bushes beside the mountain road, and notables tumble from litters suddenly abandoned by bearers, and clay jars break shattered upon rocks, for here all is confusion and babble and buzz and beside you in the carriage a bundle whitened by the glaring sun of this summer afternoon trembles and hides her face behind a cascade of rags, helped by a chubby-cheeked dwarf who watches you through acrid, puffy eyes, smiling a toothless smile.

The woman orders with a new wail: “Take him! Don’t let him escape!”

For you have leapt from the carriage, poor wretch, searching for the gray eyes of the drummer amid the throng of terrified servitors, who look as if they were participating in a hecatomb. Finally the halberdiers find an outlet for their energies and, deathly afraid, prepare to detain you: the miracle glows in the innocence of their eyes. They have not known what to do; they sniffed danger, they heard the woman’s voice; they were grateful for the ferociously shouted order; they prepared to fulfill it; but when they saw you they hesitated, dumfounded, as if you were untouchable; only a new order from the woman traveling in the leather carriage has impelled them, terrified, to seize you.

You do not resist. Returning your gaze, you have just seen the only serene eyes in this cortege of madmen. You ignore the beggars who are beginning to kneel around you, trembling, heads lowered, stretching out their hands to touch you as they would a saint, murmuring words soliciting your favor: the same beggars who shortly before wanted to beat you to death in order to steal any remains from your shipwreck.

Two maids lift the woman wrapped as always in the rags hiding her face, and lead her thus veiled to the funeral carriage. The dwarf descends from the leather carriage, tripping and stumbling; she wears a dress of red brocade much too large for her, sleeves turned up, skirts caught up in a thick roll about her waist. The throngs of servants and companions open a respectful path to the invalid and the dwarf; you trail behind them, receiving no such respect.

They pause beside the black coach. A horrendous silence descends. The maids assist their bundle, helping her approach the glass of the coffin fastened to the coach floor. Fleetingly, two slits of eyes glisten through the rags, but now the woman does not cry out. Following the silence there is an incredulous exclamation, and as the beggars had done before, all those present fall to their knees around the funeral coach. They have all seen the same thing. A corpse dressed in the clothing you wore this morning when the waves tossed you upon the shores of the Cabo de los Desastres, clothing that would be unremarkable were it not that it had been ravaged by fire and sea and sand; they say the tattered dun breeches and strawberry-colored doublet cling, still damp, to the dead flesh resting in the coffin of black silk, cushioned, decorated around all four sides with black brocade flowers, beneath a carapace of glass. And upon the face (is the face the same face?) a cloth or mask of garnet and yellow and green and blue feathers; and in the place of the mouth, a circle of spiders. The broken arrows that form the nervure of the mask rest upon the neck, temples, and the forehead of the cadaver no longer that of the Very High Prince and Lord dragged from monastery to monastery by his widow: formerly only the beggars and captives had seen this miracle, now the courtiers and servants of the lady traveler also see it.

And before such convincing evidence everyone begins to stare at you, poor caballero, flogged, dragged through the sand, thrown into the sealed carriage; and as their astonishment is so great they force you to examine yourself, touch the velvet cap that smells of benzoin, the medallion resting on a silken shirt redolent of aloes, to look at the rose-colored hose, and the fur cape still retaining an aroma of clove; amazed, you rub a jaw covered by a new beard you sense is golden. Everyone is kneeling around you, only the rag-swathed Lady sustained by her maids remains standing, while her vast company of halberdiers and notaries, cooks and scullions, sheriff and deceitful ladies, cross themselves and chant prayers of praise, and the Jews murmur: sephtori, sephtori, All is emanation and the world is transformed, and the Arabs grasp the opportunity to praise Allah and to ask themselves whether this portent bodes good or ill for them. The dwarf kneels also; with a grimace of false respect on her chubby face she crosses herself, but when she notices the multicolor stains on her tiny hands she quickly hides them among the folds of her voluminous dress.

Still not revealing her face, the Lady says: “My son will be happy to see you.” And she orders her servants: “I want to kiss the feet of the Prince.”

And they lower the bundle they hold to your feet and she kisses them and now you alone are standing, the honored caballero who doesn’t know his own name or his own face, and fears now never to recover them, and before you, you see the black-clad drummer with the gray eyes and tattooed lips, and from those intently staring eyes and those moving but silent lips you read — a moment before you fall, fainting, stranger to yourself, enemy to yourself, enemy to your new body, overwhelmed by the black invasion of the incomprehensible, your former, although unremembered life, battling against your new and unsought mortal shell — the single message: “Salve. We have awaited you.”

But as night falls, in this confusion of sounds, mute are the words of the drummer, resonant those of the invalid voyager, the wandering phantom that found you along the way, bring him here, bring him to my carriage, march, march, we shall not stop again, our painful pilgrimage has ended, they are awaiting us, the sepulchers are prepared, sheriff, notary, halberdier, without pause, march, toward the Pantheon of Kings erected by my son El Señor Don Felipe, there we shall find repose, the living and the dead, march, away from the coast toward the high plains, toward the palace constructed from the heart of the mountains, identical to the mountains: to our tombs, all.

THE WORKERS

Where are the rockrose shrubs where we used to shelter our flocks, eh? Martín smiled and sank his hands into the lime basin, glancing at his two companions, who were preoccupied with slaking the lime. Where will they find succor and shelter now in time of storm and wind and snow and all the other misfortunes we know so well? Nuño started toward the lime kilns, and Catilinón said they’d done a good job, and that it would last well. Martín felt the lime burning his arms and withdrew them from the tank.

As they walked, they cleaned their arms and hands on their chests and shirt fronts, passing the day laborers, who were sinking the foundations until they touched solid ground and then throwing the excavated dirt outside the enclosures. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and time to rest and eat. Martín shouted this to the laborers on the crane, as if his voice could be heard in the midst of all the commotion on the platforms and scaffolding.

“Hup!”

“Easy!”

“Pull, now!”

“Hold it, there!”

“Stop!”

“A little over, there!”

“Back!”

“A little more!”

On this very spot there had been a spring that never went dry, Martín smiled again, and beside it the woods that were the only refuge for the animals, winter and summer. Catilinón winked his eye and guffawed. “Ah, but you’re in such a state now, my pretty, we’ll never have pleasure of you again!” And everyone laughed heartily with him.

All the stone was carved at the quarry; at the work site and in the chapel one could scarcely hear the ringing blows of the hammer. Martín and his friends ate in one of the tile sheds, seated on bricks; then they bade each other farewell and Martín walked to the quarry; he ran the back of his hand across his mouth and picked up his chisel. The supervisor walked among the workers, repeating with kindness and gentleness the specifications for this particular work, for these lands had never seen its equal and it was difficult for the old shepherds converted into stoneworkers to construct a palace conceived in the mortified imagination of El Señor; as the supervisor continually reminded the workers, El Señor wished to offer to Heaven some noteworthy service for favors and intercessions performed. Round the columns very carefully, said the supervisor, and Martin applied his chisel with care; easy now, smiled the estate master, just two light taps of the hammer, no pit marks, no rose or chip or bump anywhere; so Martín had only to smooth it a bit with fine chisel strokes; in that way it was smooth all over. Martín looked up at the pounding sun, missing the rockrose, the flock, and the spring that never dried either in winter or in summer.

Later he walked to the stream bed that drained the quarry, where several day laborers were cutting stone from the vein and carting it out in hand barrows. Although it was not his work, Martín helped them load the rough-hewn blocks he would later chisel and polish. He nodded to Jerónimo, who was in charge of the quarry forge; better than anyone, this bearded man knew how to sharpen iron tools, how to set the wedges and sheath the iron tools with steel edges to protect them from the ruinous blast furnace. Even so, only yesterday he had been accused of oversharpening the tools. That meant the loss of a day’s wages. It doesn’t matter, Jerónimo told Martín; we just do our jobs the best we can; the supervisors do theirs by finding defects where there aren’t any; they’re parasites, that’s their condition, and if from time to time they don’t criticize some error, soon they themselves would be criticized for not doing anything.

At four-thirty in the afternoon they all ate a plate of chick-peas with salt and oil, and Martín calculated the time. It was midsummer. It was still two months before winter work hours began. Now during the long fatigue of the sun they must resign themselves to their own. From Santa Cruz in May to Santa Cruz in September a man must come to work at six in the morning and work continuously until eleven, and from one in the afternoon until four, and then, as they were now, cease work for a half hour, then return at four-thirty and continue until sunset. But in July the sun never sets, Catilinón said, laughing; he could already see himself in Valladolid with his little pouch full of wages saved to spend through the long, nightless summer, going from eating house to eating house, matching his sure pleasure against his unsure fortune. Martín spat out a mouthful of sour and masticated chick-peas at the lime worker’s feet and said that at five ducats every three months he’d be lucky if he got as far as Burgo de Osuna, where every morning the oxen left, pulling their granite-laden carts, and bearded Jerónimo rapped the clownish Catilinón on the head and told him that in addition the oxen were more sure of their food than any rapscallion dreaming of city eating houses, for the beasts had hay and straw and rye and wheat aplenty, and in addition had provisions for two years in advance, and that there was also an order to deliver two thousand bushels of bread annually to the monastery and an equal quantity for any poor that might pass by; but for them? no provision at all when this work was ended, not even if they became the homeless poor, and as for that scamp Cato, he shouldn’t get any ideas, he’d be returning to Valladolid exactly as he’d left, to live the same way he had as a child, hanging about under stairways and fighting with the dogs for scraps of food. Well, at least there’s scraps, Catilinón answered with another wink, and hunger sharpens your wits, so a man can get by; poulterers throw chicken heads and feathers into the street; butchers slaughter their animals in their shop doorways and let the blood run down the street, and lacking for wine, the blood’s not bad watered a little, and there are always pigs running loose, and fishmongers toss what they don’t sell into the street. Fishmongers, grumbled Jerónimo, toss what’s rotted into the street, what those able won’t buy, and you, Catilinón, you’re a born fool, bound to die of the Great Pox in cities swarming with madmen delirious from pure hunger, and why can’t you just be happy with your work here, Nuño added, at least we’ll be eating more than dirt and with luck the end of this job doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, maybe our sons and even our grandsons will be working on it. And Catilinón wiped a crocodile tear from his eye and said: Give me money, not counsel, and if I’m to be a fool I choose to be foolish like the fool from Perales, who while he was servant in the convent got all the nuns pregnant, and I don’t want to end up like Santa Lebrada, you know what happened to her, that sainted rabbit put on her habit and went out to do a good deed, but for all her toil she was boiled in oil, and worse, she was fricasseed, for we’re all screwed from the start and alive only by a miracle, for let’s see, now, how old was your brother, Martín, when he died, and your father, Jerónimo? and let the shortness of life console and unite us, brothers, and stinking water and damp rooms as well, for either here or in the city we live the same, here or there, a bit of light, a lot of smoke; beasts or men, there’s but the one door for us all.

“You ask about my brother,” Martín replied. “We were laborers in Navarre, in the kingdom of Aragon. The King promised us justice, the Lieges, too, who so zealously safeguarded justice — but for themselves, only to find more ways to oppress their serfs and pile so many more taxes upon our shoulders, in coin and kind, that several lifetimes wouldn’t be long enough to pay. And since my brother was the oldest of the family and couldn’t pay the debts we owed to our Liege, and as we’d contracted new debts with some of the villagers not as unfortunate as we were, the Liege demanded the debts he was owed, and he informed my brother that in these lands the Liege could treat his vassals well or badly, according to his whim, and take away their belongings when it pleased him and deprive them even of their names, and there was no King and no statute that could protect them. And as my brother could not pay he took refuge in the church, and the Liege denied him even that asylum, and when he captured him he reminded my brother that we, the poor of the land, had no rights, whereas the Liege had the right to do as he wished, kill us, and choose the manner of our death: hunger, thirst, or cold. And as a warning to the slaves, our Liege ordered my brother killed by hunger and thirst and cold, and in the worst of winter he left him upon a little hillock, naked and surrounded by troops, and after seven days my brother died on that hill — of hunger and thirst and cold. From a distance, we watched him die, and there was nothing we could do. He became like the earth, hungry, thirsty, and cold; he became one with the earth. I fled. I came to Castile. I hired out for this work. No one asked me where I came from. No one cared to know the name of my land. They urgently needed laborers for this construction. The Liege of my land orders death for all who flee. I made myself one of you, exactly like you, and hoped no one would recognize me here.”

“Fighting against the Moors and defending the frontiers, we at least earned the right to abandon our Liege, if we left him our property; thus, from the Liege’s chattel we could become the King’s villager, and the Liege cannot seize us in royal territory; that’s why I came here,” Nuño said.

“Your land was very far south,” Martín sighed.

“And yours far to the north,” smiled Nuño.

“North and south, it doesn’t matter,” murmured Jerónimo. “Our lives have very little value, for the life of a Jew is estimated at two hundred days’ salary, and that of a laborer at only one hundred.”

“I say you’re all fools,” laughed Catilinón, “and everything you say is laughable, pointless; you’ve been more concerned with your dignity than with your life, while others just like you who have been obedient and submissive have courted favor and in the end were freed, even earned their right to be called gentlemen.”

“And do you know what it cost them, churl?” Martín answered in a rage. “The Liege’s right to mount their virgins. Accepting the fact that marriage between two serfs is not permanent and that a family is not even a family — for the father has no authority, since the Liege owns our land, our lives, our honor, and our deaths. Yes, even the serf’s corpse belongs to the Liege.”

“Patience and obedience,” Cato winked cockily, “for those who don’t flee or rebel or dispute with their Lords pass from serfs to vassals, from vassals to laborers, from laborers to landholders, and there’s always a way to a fortune for the person who knows where to look.”

“And what will your road be, poor Catilinón, for here we all chew the same chick-pea, we all cook with the same measure of oil, and every man of us washes with the same square of Castile soap.”

And cock-of-the-walk Cato crowed: “A man like me would make a good servant for some high Lord. And a servant sees his Liege mother-naked, and hears him when he shits.”

The old man who tended the forge sighed, rose, and declared: “When my father came to these lands he was so poor and desperate that he sold himself as a serf to El Señor’s father. He had to present himself at the church with a cord around his neck and a maravedi coin on his head to signify his lowly rank. El Señor promised him protection, a job, and land to work. But now the land no longer yields any fruit; we might as well sow in the sea, for the land’s going bad on us and God and his saints seem to have fallen asleep; brothers, we’ll have eaten up our own livelihood in this construction, and in so doing we’ll have dried up the land that once nourished us. We need to think about what’s going to happen in the future, and forget what’s gone before.”

ALL MY SINS

He sees him kneeling on his prie-dieu, his hands folded upon the velvet armrest and his dog drowsing at his feet. He will spend the morning contemplating the man contemplating the painting.

The painting: Bathed in the luminous pale air of Italian spaces a group of naked men with their backs turned to the viewer are listening to the sermon of the figure standing in front of a small stone temple in the angle of an enormous empty piazza whose rectilinear perspectives fade into a gauzy, greenish, transparent background. Everything in the figure of the orator bespeaks his identity: the sweet nobility of his bearing, the white drapery of his tunic, the admonitory hand with the forefinger pointing toward Heaven; the blend of energy, pain, and resignation upon the face, the straight nose, thin lips, the chestnut-colored beard, the golden highlights in the long hair, the clear forehead, the very fine eyebrows. But something is lacking and something is overdone. The head is not encircled by the traditional halo. And the eyes are not directed toward Heaven as they should be.

El Señor buried his head between his interlocked hands and over and over repeated (each word amplified by the preceding word, because in this crypt the echo would be inevitable): Should anyone say that the formation of the human body is the work of the Devil and that conception in the maternal womb is diabolical, then anathema, anathema, anathema it be.

Thrice he struck himself upon the breast and the mastiff growled uneasily. Blows and growls echo hollowly against the arches, walls, and bare floors. El Señor, coughing, wrapped himself in his cape and repeated the three anathemas.

The painting: The eyes are not directed toward Heaven. Cruel, or elusive, bearing the secret of a different sign, too close or too distant to what they seemed to observe, not visionary as one might expect, not generous, not inclined to sacrifice, unaware of the fatal denouement of the legend, sensual eyes, yes; eyes for the earth, not for Heaven? These eyes stare at the naked men and they are staring too low.

Hidden behind a column in the crypt, Guzmán could have said what El Señor was thinking as he beat his breast; he was thinking he shouldn’t be kneeling there examining a painting in order to examine his own conscience, he should be actively employed in hastening the construction that, for one reason or another, was unduly behind schedule. The various processions ordered by El Señor were on the road; the scouts and messengers had reported seeing them approaching the palace, dragging their heavy burdens over bare mountains and wooded mountains, along the coastal roads, stopping at inns, sheltered among the pines, abandoned in mastic-tree thickets, mired down along the highways, but advancing inexorably toward the place appointed by El Señor: the mausoleum of the palace. And here was El Señor, with eyes and energy only for the supposed mystery of an Italian painting.

Even the growling of the dog Bocanegra could be interpreted as a reproach against its master. Hadn’t it been he who had dictated unequivocally: Construct with all haste?

The palace: Above and outside on the vast surrounding plain, blocks of granite were piled high. Sixty master quarriers were working the marble, and oxcarts laden with new stones were arriving every moment. Masons, carpenters, smiths, weavers, goldsmiths, and woodworkers had set up their workshops, their taverns, and their huts on the flat field beneath the burning sun, while the original constructions were being raised beside the chestnut grove, the last refuge on plains and mountains devastated by the fury and urgency of building this edifice ordered by El Señor Don Felipe upon his return from the victory against the heretics of Flanders: the ax had felled forever the pine groves that had been intended to shelter the palace against the extremities of summer and winter. It’s true, thought Guzmán, that El Señor had said, “The woods will guard against the cold northerly winds of winter, and zephyrs and west winds will cool us in summer.” But even more true was the fact that today the stripped lands could offer neither; the good intentions of El Señor and the exigencies of construction had not been compatible. And El Señor, always enclosed in the crypt, was unaware of what had happened.

El Señor coughed; his nose and throat felt very dry. He resisted the temptation to seek a glass of water from the room beside the chapel, preferring to discipline himself, fingering the leather pouch filled with holy relics he wore tied about his neck. And his thirst was soothed by the thought, constantly in his mind, that behind every immediate material expenditure lay the inexhaustible riches of eternal life; he was constructing for the future, yes, but also for salvation, and salvation knows no time; salvation is not just an idea, he murmured, it is another place, the life eternal we must all attain, for men’s lives cannot be counted by years but by virtues, and in the next life white hairs do not crown the head of he who has lived longest but he who has lived best; yes, the life eternal that we must all attain, but also an eternity that is mine by both natural and divine right. It is a very small thing to leave behind some tangible evidence of that certainty, this palace dedicated to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.

“For doesn’t everything testify that eternal life will be mine, my imperfections, but also my persistence by word and deed in being pardoned, the discipline I impose upon myself, rejecting all indulgence of the senses, war, hunt, falconry, carnal love, as well as the construction of the fortress for the Eucharist? I concede my sins, but with greater devotion I concede that he who is not mortified cannot be a Christian Prince, but I know that frailties, expunged with penitence, do not arouse God’s ire, not even their memory. Will the life eternal be denied to him who not only fulfills the penitences of all men but who also, because he is the Prince, would deprive his subjects of all hope if in spite of everything he were condemned at the final judgment?”

To know this (he said to himself; or the vassal who was observing him said it for him) was almost to know himself immortal. El Señor rejected this arrogant notion; he looked at the disquieting eyes of that Christ without a halo and murmured: “Confitemur fieri resurrectionem carnis omnis mortuorum.”

The painting: The Christ without a halo, standing in the angle formed by the temple walls, looks at the naked men whose backs are turned to the viewer. The arcades of the vast, clean, open piazza are contemporary, characteristic of the new airy architecture of the Italian peninsula; the diligent eye might note small flaws in the painted marble floor, minute cracks, scratches, shoots, and sprouts of grass; the piazza is of the age. But from what age are the scenes in a background lost in the distance of deep perspectives and echoing a remote chorus to the protagonists on the proscenium of this sacred theater — a Christ without an aureole, and a group of naked men? Minute, remote scenes, lost in time, the profound perspectives of this painted space distance those scenes, convert them into remote time.

El Señor flung himself upon the polished granite floor, his arms spread in a cross; and on the back of his cape the yellow embroidered cross recaptured what little luminosity was shed by an altar intricately carved and ornamented to house the monstrance from which this isolated light originates; light shimmers on a jasper plinth shot with golden veins, on columns so fine and hard that no tool, not even the best-tempered steel, had been found that could cut them; they had been cut and polished with diamonds. El Señor’s forehead was resting on an icy floor which, like the light, seemed enormously remote from the parched ground and all-pervasive sun overhead; above this crypt and chapel lay dry dust as hot as ashes. At the far end of the extensive sacred space, an uncompleted stairway began an ascent that was to lead to the burning plain overhead. His head pressed against cold granite, feverish images El Señor preferred to forget raced through his mind. And he did forget them, by contemplating the unfinished stairway behind him, and thinking about his immediate duty: to bring this construction to a conclusion, but to avoid the Greek arrogance of an Alexander who ordered that Mount Athos be cut and carved in his own image; here, in Spanish mansions imitating those of Heaven, day and night the same, one might continually engage in the occupation of angels, with continuous prayers one might pray for the health of Princes, the conservation of their estates, one might mitigate divine ire and justly deserved rage against the sins of man; such, in this hour, was the supplication of El Señor, for his mind could not conceive of separation between religious and political affairs, knowing as he did that of all the virtues that regulate human actions the queen of all is prudence; and that among the varieties of prudence, the one that best serves a Prince is politics: St. Basil laments that some defame politics under the improper appellations of artifice and cunning, and never perceive that acts of cunning and of artifice are daughters of the deadly prudence of the flesh, not of the spirit, for from spiritual prudence derives the life and peace of kingdoms. To this peace, now — the cunning of his youth, the artifices of the flesh, the simulations of war, behind him — El Señor aspired in his humble prayer. And what better mark of the union of prudence and politics than to construct a monument, which means, after all, “something to remind”; monumentum dicitur, eo quod moneat mentem? according to the words of St. Augustine. And this being so, can there be any true monument that does not convert political prudence into religious glory, since no man who takes counsel in this life loses the eternal?

The painting: In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee. She was troubled at his saying, and the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever: and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

The palace: The emissaries have traveled throughout the continent commissioning the treasures that, by contrast, will enliven the somber majesty of the palace under construction. Either already obtained or still on the road, waiting in improvised storerooms or about to arrive on beasts of burden, everyone knew that the iron grill work was forged in Cuenca and the bronze balustrades in Zaragoza; that the gray, white, green, and red marbles were extracted from veins in Spain and Italy; that the bronze altar figures were cast in Florence and those for the mausoleums in Milan; that the candelabra arrived from Flanders, and the censers and crosses from Toledo, and that the altarcloths, surplices, albs, purificators, Rouen and Holland linens, and India silk were embroidered in Portuguese convents. El Señor covered his face with the wounded hand bound in a linen handkerchief embroidered by the Holy Sisters in Alcobaça. The religious paintings had been painted in Brussels and in Colmar, in Ravenna and in Hertogenbosch. And the painting he had spent the morning contemplating had come from Orvieto. People were talking: Hertogenbosch, the evil bosk where the Adamite sects had celebrated their Eucharistic orgies, transforming each body into the altar of Christ and each carnal coupling into redeeming Communion. Orvieto, no one denied it, was the ancient Etruscan Volsinii conquered by the Romans and converted into Urbs Vetus, site of a black and white cathedral, and fatherland to austere, sad, and prolific painters.

The painting: And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and said unto them, Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you this day is born in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. When Herod the king had heard these things, he was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethelem, from two years old and under, but behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee to Egypt. And they were there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.

The dog Bocanegra could move his bandaged head with his accustomed nervousness, but not his ears. And perhaps the fresh wound, the roughly stitched flesh, and the pressure of the compress made him doubt his own instincts. Lying by his master’s side, he looked toward the nuns’ choir loft hidden behind a high iron chancel.

Guzmán was watching from a place of concealment behind a column, counting on the knowledge that the dog was familiar with his scent and fearful of his hand. And behind the intricate grill work of the choir loft, La Señora will spend many hours watching without being observed. At first the mastiff’s muffled growls had disturbed her, but finally she told herself that Bocanegra’s fear must be the result of something he had seen rather than fear of anything unseen. Like the dog, La Señora was watching her master, stretched out upon the floor, face down, his arms spread in a cross, his lips murmuring professions of faith, with the light from the altar reflecting on the embroidered cross on his back. Like her husband, La Señora was motionless, but she stood erect, more erect than ever (Guzmán wished to penetrate the invisibility of that chancel), more conscious than ever (because no one was watching her) of the value of a gesture and of the intrinsic dignity of a posture; she was enveloped in shadow, and once again she regretted the fact no one was witnessing her magnificent picture of majestic ire. She, too, was looking at one of the background scenes in the painting.

The painting: Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him. And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

La Señora stroked the bald head of the hawk clinging to her gauntleted wrist, free of its bells and relieved from the heat by a light breakfast of water and the heart of a deer; La Señora herself had fed the bird before coming, as she did every morning, to the choir loft, where she could observe her husband waste another morning — as he always did. But inevitably the moment arrived when the bird of prey, by his natural inclination, began to be uneasy in the darkness. Initially grateful for the shadows that saved him from the burning summer heat, little by little the hawk began to long for the light. La Señora stroked his head and body (Guzmán knew those gestures); the warm, dry skin of the bird suffered in summer; it was necessary to carry him to cool, dark places like these. Such would be her excuse (La Señora kept repeating) if someday the dog or El Señor should find her hidden in the nuns’ choir loft.

Guzmán had warned her more than once that it is the nature of the bird to demand spaces where no obstacle is interposed between his rapacious gaze and the desired prey; great open spaces, Señora, where once he has sighted his prey, the hawk can speed toward it like an arrow. La Señora could feel in the palm of her hand the increased pulse in the bird’s breast, and she became fearful that his instinct for action would overcome the passivity she demanded, and that yielding to his instinct, the bird would launch itself from its mistress’s wrist and believing the darkness infinite would crash against the chapel walls or the iron grillwork and thus be either killed or crippled: Guzmán had warned her.

The painting: And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of them that sold doves. And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves. And to the scribes and Pharisees he said, Woe unto you! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, justice, judgment, mercy, and faith! Woe unto you! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. And to his disciples he said: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. And he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

As she felt that desperate throbbing, La Señora covered the bird of prey’s head with the black hood, turned from the iron grillwork, the altar, and the painting, and accentuating the disparity between her shameful vigil and her lordly hauteur, slowly and silently, almost on tiptoe, her head held high, she climbed the spiral stairway and emerged into the blinding light of the flat ground where blocks of granite, boards, and tools were stacked.

The palace: The crypts, the chapel, and the choir loft were completed, and alongside them extended the nuns’ cloister, El Señor’s bedchamber, and a bare patio where stone arcades communicated with other rooms, which were in turn to communicate with the church proper, as yet not built. But in each room a double window was already installed — one stained glass, one solid like a door — designed to enable one to hear Mass from one’s bed, if necessary, and to attend services apart from the religious community.

But until the plan was completed, to return to the cloister and her own room, La Señora, choosing not to pass through the chapel itself and ascend the monumental but still unfinished stone stairway, had to make a complete circle around the chapel, beneath the burning sun, through the construction and materials (and worse, in view of the workers), always with the hawk poised upon the greasy gauntlet and fondled by a pale hand; no one was aware what delight the woman derived from that tumultuous throbbing, from possessing such a fine bird, from that good hawk body — more flesh than feather — whose pulsing manifested the desire to fly, bells jingling, announcing his rapacious hunger, his consuming desire to swoop down upon his prey, talons sinking so deep and sure that not even the fiercest boar could free himself from that grip.

Every morning she would return to the chapel, accompanying from a distance the pain and professions of faith of her husband, El Señor. She would stroke the bald, hot, throbbing hawk. From the corner of her eye she would look at the painting brought (it was said) from Orvieto.

The painting: The naked men turn their backs to El Señor and La Señora to look at the Christ; El Señor looks at the direction of Christ’s gaze and La Señora looks at the small, tight buttocks of the men. And Guzmán will look at his masters, who are looking at the painting. Disturbed, he will glance up toward the painting; the painting is looking at him.

Every morning, La Señora would return to her rooms, holding the bird, unaware that anyone might suspect the sensual delight that caressing the hawk’s pulsing body afforded her. Lost in her pleasure, La Señora paid no attention to the palace laborers.

Martín, bent almost double beneath the weight of the stones, paused with his loaded hand barrow. He licked the sweat rolling down his temples and cheeks, mixed with the dust that powdered his eyelashes. Once again he saw the mirage seeming to float over the flat reverberating ground: the erect woman, her pace swift but deliberate, so firm and sure she seemed not to touch the ground, dressed entirely in black velvet, farthingale belling, the outer skirt dragging through the dust, the tiny feet barely visible, lace appearing and disappearing with that subtle, incorporeal movement, one hand pressed to her waist, the other extended to support the hooded hawk upon its perch on the greasy gauntlet, red-jeweled rings absorbing the unbearable heat of the sun in their bloody coolness, face framed by the high white wimple … Droplets of sweat stood out on La Señora’s forehead; she withdrew the hand from her waist to wave away the flies, and entered the palace.

For a long while Martín stood doubled beneath the weight of the stones, captured by that vision, at the same time imagining his own rough and powerful body, tan and hairy, shirt open to the navel and stained with sweat, his square face shaved only on Sundays, his hands tough as pigskin. Then he shook his head and continued on his way.

The painting: And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain; and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. No man can serve two masters. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

El Señor, lying face down, arms opened, sobbed; he raised his head to look at that minute scene, only a remote echo in the great painting in the chapel; and believing himself alone, he cried out: Tibi soli peccavi et malum coram te feci; laborabor in gemitu meo, lavabo per singulas noctes lectum meum; recogitabo tibi omnes meos in amaritudine animae meae …

The painting: And as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name: him they compelled to bear his cross. And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull. They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall; and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink. And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots; And sitting down they watched him there; And set up over his head his accusation written, THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS. And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God.

With no intent of hurting him, El Señor softly patted the dressing covering the wound of the mastiff Bocanegra. The dog growled, and sniffed at his torturer. Then Guzmán moved forward from the concealment of the column, and as he knew he would, the mastiff ceased his growling, retreated into silent fear, and with complete naturalness the vassal walked to the prostrated figure, stopped, leaned over, and, barely touching El Señor’s outspread arms, murmured that such penitence was harmful to his health. El Señor closed his eyes; he felt utterly defeated, and at the same time aware of a voracious appetite.

He allowed Guzmán to help him to his feet and then lead him to the bedchamber constructed beside the chapel so as to enable him to attend services without moving from his bed, as well as to be able to pass directly (as now) from the chapel to the bedchamber, unseen by anyone.

Aided by his servant and followed by his dog, El Señor, lips parted, eyes expressionless, breathed heavily through his mouth; there was a finger’s breadth between the upper and the lower lip. He complained of an intense pain that originated in his brain, but spread throughout his entire body; as he walked clumsily to rest against the doorframe of his bedchamber, he mumbled something Guzmán could not understand.

The painting: Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst. And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit; and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

Nevertheless, Guzmán pretended he understood; he nodded obsequiously, led his master to the bed, removed his cape and slippers, loosened his doublet, and unfastened his ruff.

El Señor, his mouth agape, looked about the room; he was lying upon black sheets beneath a black canopy in a chamber whose three walls were covered by black drapes and the fourth by an enormous map of dark and ocher hues; the only light was that of a chandelier so high that to light and extinguish it one needed a long pole with a crook on the end. Guzmán approached with a flask of vinegar in one hand and a small coffer in the other. El Señor caught himself with his mouth open; he tried to close it. He felt as if he were choking; Guzmán rubbed El Señor’s hairless white chest with vinegar, rattling the pouch of holy relics tied around El Señor’s neck; El Señor tried to breathe with his lips closed and to open his hand and move his fingers to reach out for the coffer. Guzmán would not speak another word; he never spoke except when absolutely necessary. At the back of El Señor’s palate, the adenoids were atrophying and hardening more every day. Again his lips parted, and he tried to move his fingers.

With vinegar-damp hands, Guzmán prized open his master’s fist; then he chose one ring after another from the coffer, placing on El Señor’s ring finger the gold-set stone intended to prevent bleeding, and on the other fingers and thumb English bone rings to ward off cramps and spasms, and again on the ring finger, above the first ring, the most miraculous of all: a diamond ring in which was embedded a hair and a tooth of St. Peter; in the palm of that crippled hand he placed the blue stone that was supposed to cure gout; in the other he placed the green stone that would eventually cure the French malady.

The painting: And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. But, behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table, and dippeth with me in the dish.

For almost an hour El Señor gasped and trembled while his servant discreetly stood in the farthest and darkest part of the room. The dog had stretched out beneath the bed. Perhaps El Señor’s repose was like that of an overly active dream; perhaps a waking nightmare is more fatiguing than all the happy and cruel activity of a war, either mercenary or holy; perhaps … I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new in my father’s kingdom. El Señor spoke in dead nasal tones; he demanded something to eat, immediately. Guzmán halved a melon lying upon a copper platter. El Señor sat up and began to devour it; Guzmán, after bowing with obeisance, rested one knee against the edge of the bed.

Their glances met. El Señor spit the seeds on the floor; Guzmán’s nimble fingers searched through his master’s thin oily hair; occasionally the fingers found what they sought, the louse was cracked between his fingernails and thrown on the cool tile floor as the master had thrown the melon seeds.

The palace: Patios would be added to patios, rooms for monks, servants, and troops would be added to the bedchambers of the original rectangle. A granite quadrangle, as wide as it was long, would be the center of the palace, conceived of as a Roman camp, severe and symmetrical; and in that center would rise the great basilica; the exterior would be a straight, severe castle with a bastion on each corner; within there would be a single nave, enormous, empty; and all four sides would be enclosed by a strong wall, so that from a distance the palace would look like a fortress, its straight lines fading into the plain and the infinite horizon without a single concession to caprice, carved like one solid piece of gray granite and set upon a polished stone base whose snow-white contrast would lend an even more somber air to the whole.

She could envision it from the double window that would someday overlook the palace garden, but which for the time being overlooked only the expanse of heavy, distant plains bound by granite mountains whitened like the bones of a bull beneath the double assault of deforestation and sun; like a mountain, this palace would be wrested from the mountain. And as she envisioned it, she repeated what El Señor had said on one occasion when he stated his wishes; he had never again had to repeat the words: with all haste construct a palace and monastery that will be both a Fortress of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist and the Necropolis of Princes. No ostentation, no celebration, no swerving from that implacably austere project. He had conceived it; now the army of workmen were executing his concept.

La Señora, staring at the monotonous plain from her room, was imagining with some alarm that her husband’s wishes finally would be fulfilled; and she confessed to herself that secretly she had always believed, the world being what it is, that some chance, some unpredictable whim, or a very predictable weakening of will, would impose upon El Señor’s master plan a few — not many, but all the more delectable for being few — concessions to the pleasures of the senses.

“Señor, may the shepherds come beneath my windows to shear their sheep, and perhaps to sing me a few songs?”

“We are not conducting a fair here, but a perpetual Mass for the Dead that will last until the end of time.”

“Some baths, then, Señor…”

“The bath is an Arabic custom and will have no place in my palace. Follow the example of my grandmother, who wore the same footwear for so long that when she died it had to be pried off forcibly.”

“Señor, the greatest of the Catholic kings, Charlemagne, accepted from the infidel Caliph Harun al-Rashid, without diminution of his Christian faith, gifts of silk, candelabra, perfume, slaves, balms, a marble chess set, an enormous campaign tent with multicolored curtains, and a clepsydra that marked the hours by dropping little bronze pellets into a basin…”

“Well, here there shall be no treasures but the relics of Our Saviour I have ordered to be brought here: a hair from His most holy head, or perhaps His beard, within a rich inlay, for if He said He loved the hairs of our heads, we should die for one hair of His; and eleven thorns from His crown, a treasure that would enrich eleven worlds; just to hear of such treasures pierces the soul, what will the actual seeing of them be! God’s goodness, He who suffered thorns for me, and I not one for Him; and a piece of the rope that bound the hands or throat of that most innocent Lamb.”

“Señor, I cannot imagine power without luxury, and the Byzantine court would be forgotten were it not for its artificial lions, its trilling mechanical birds, and its throne that rose into the air; and the Emperor Frederick was not in the least impious when he accepted from the Sultan of Damascus a gift of bejeweled astral bodies, moved by hidden mechanisms, that described their course upon a background of black velvet…”

“When one begins in that direction, Señora, he ends like Pope John, converting the pontifical palace into a brothel, castrating a cardinal, toasting the health of the Devil, and invoking the aid of Jupiter and Venus in a night spent playing at dice.”

“A great King always wishes to be the wonder of the world.”

“My asceticism will be the wonder of this age, Señora, and of ages to come, for when we are dead this palace will be dedicated throughout the ages to a perpetual Mass for the Dead, and every moment of the day and night there will be a pair of priests before the Most Sacred Sacrament of the altar, praying to God for my soul and the souls of my dead, two different priests every two hours every day; twenty-four priests daily executing a task as savory as prayer is not a heavy burden. This will be the disposition of my testament. The wonder of the world, Señora? Simon, that famous prince of the Maccabeans, wished to make eternal the memory of his dead brother, the prince Jonathan; to do this he ordered a sepulcher to be built beside the sea, so prominent that its funereal memorials could be seen from every ship, for it seemed to him that whatever he could tell of his brother’s excellent virtues would be less than what strangers would learn, or what that mausoleum might mutely preach. Thus, I, Señora; except that it will not be sailors who see this funereal sepulcher, but pilgrims who venture to our high plain; and always, from Heaven, God and His angels. I want, I ask no other testimony.”

“You are speaking of the dead; I ask only a small adornment for myself … for the living…”

“The only adornment in this house will be the orb and the cross, the symbol of Christianity and of its triumph over pagan styles. Our faith is above any style. Here everything will be consistent. Somber. So that anyone who comes to this palace will say: ‘When you have seen one column of it, you have seen them all.’”

“Señor, Señor, have mercy; do not reproach my wish for beauty; ever since I was a child I have dreamed of having a tiny portion of that beauty created with trees and fountains and colored stone and delightful vistas that the Arab inhabitants left in your land from another time.”

“It is easy to see, Isabel, that you are English, or you would not yield in this manner to the temptations of the Infidel. We have spilled our blood in reconquering our Spanish land.”

“It was theirs, Señor, the Arabs filled it with gardens and fountains and mosques where before there was nothing; you conquered something foreign, Señor…”

“Quiet, woman, you do not know what you are saying; you are denying the course of our destiny, which is to purify all Spain of the Infidel scourge, to eradicate it, mutilate its members, to be left alone finally with our humiliated, but pure, bones. Do you want to know what the only concession to sinful senses in this entire fortress will be? Look, then, atop this edifice I am constructing, the eighth wonder of the world, and you will see it crowned by golden spheres. In this way, as did my forebears upon reconquering the cities of the Moors, I will commemorate our victories for the Faith: see in those spheres the heads of the Infidel exposed to God’s wrath.”

La Señora gazed sadly into the gathering dusk. She smelled something intolerably offensive; the offense was converted into an even more intolerable suspicion: she smelled the burned flesh, fingernails, and hair of a man.

The painting: And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him; If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone.

Pressing his hands to his temples, El Señor asked: What is going on outside? Nothing, Guzmán replied; some miserable twenty-four-year-old youth was involved all summer in a vile affair with two thirteen-year-old boys, just here, in the rockrose thicket below your kitchen, and today he is being burned alive beside the stable for his wicked crime. Yesterday he demonstrated great repentance and regret; he said that to be pardoned even the angels must weep for their sins, and that his was the sin of angels, for he had committed one more diabolical that he would never confess. He said it, Señor, as if he wished to defy his punishment as much as the judges’ curiosity, and he was condemned for what was known as well as that still unknown. You yourself signed the death sentence, do you not remember?

The painting: And Pilate, when he had called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, said unto them, Ye have brought this man unto me, as one that perverteth the people: and behold, I having examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him: nothing worthy of death is done unto him. I will therefore chastise him, and release him. For of necessity he must release one unto them at the feast. And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man, and release unto us Barabbas: Who for a certain sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prison. Pilate therefore, willing to release Jesus, spake again to them. But they cried, saying, Crucify him, crucify him. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

El Señor looked at his cramped fingers, closed his eyes and said in a slightly stronger voice that the boy was right; yes, the saints, the very elect of God, wept, because they knew that not even angels may be pardoned without tears and without penitence; doubtlessly, God has special scales to weigh and to expiate the transgressions of all those who are inferior to Him; some for the crimes and punishments of men, and others for those of angels, whose codes we do not know; but one thing is true: only God is free; therefore, everything inferior to Him, not being free, sins, even a King or a seraph; yes, they sin by their mere imperfection.

He buried himself deeper in his bed and said that the clamor of the saints could be heard and they said: I have sinned only against You and before You I have done evil; therefore, there is no such thing as a secret crime; God is witness to evil even when it is but imagined; God is impassioned against sin, for all that is not God is culpable imperfection. For that reason, Guzmán, we have all sinned before God; for that reason, we will all be guilty before the divine tribunal. You ask me: Who has not thought evil? and you will have partially proved my assertion; I shall answer you: What living thing is not guilty simply by the mere fact that he exists? and I shall have proved it fully. Is it right that on earth we are innocent only if we have not been apprehended by law and judged by the courts? I have suffered in my lamentations and every night I have bathed my bed with tears; El Señor added, his head bowed, for You I shall review all my years and all my sins in the bitter solitude of my soul. All my years. And all my sins.

He tried to rise from the bed, but the pain in his swollen foot impeded him.

“Guzmán. Have I still time to pardon him?”

The servant shook his head. No, it was too late. The boy’s body had been consumed by flames.

“It is true, Señor; we all sin against God; but only God has the right to judge the crimes of the mind, or, if it please you, the crime of existing. But it is the right of power to judge the crime of acts.”

All my sins, murmured the man lying helpless in the bed. I shall be better tomorrow, he said to himself, tomorrow I shall be better.

“Need I remind you what day tomorrow is?”

El Señor shook his head and waved his vassal away.

“God be praised.”

“God be glorified.”

The palace: Along the only nave of the chapel, one wall interrupted by the door leading to El Señor’s bedchamber and the other by the elaborate grillwork of the nuns’ choir loft, await the open tombs, the rows of porphyry, jasper, and marble coffins, open, their heavy stone slabs resting against the tomb markers and pyramidal bases, each inscribed with the name of one of El Señor’s ancestors, an Ordoño, a Ramiro, the Alfonsos and the Urracas, a Pedro and a Jaime, the Blancas and Leonors, the Sanchos and Fernandos, each slab and each marker engraved with one simple inscription beneath the name and the dates of birth and death, a different inscription for each body, many bodies reproduced in supine marble effigy, all the inscriptions linked together by a single thought: sin and contrition, sin and death. HE DID NOT DO THE GOOD HE DESIRED, RATHER THE EVIL HE DID NOT WISH, Manifest were the works of his flesh, which were fornication, lewdness, and lust, Peccatum non Tollitur Nisi Lacrymis et Paenitentia; Nee Angelus Potest, Nee Archangelus; In his members was discovered another decree which struggled against the decree of reason; He was prisoner to the decree of sin, which was in his members; he who placed all his happiness in music and vain and lascivious songs, in roaming, games, hunts, galas, riches, authority, vengeance, in the esteem of others — see him now: that brief appetite converted into eternal, irremediable rage, implacable dust; SWEET UNFORTUNATE QUEEN FREED BY DEATH FROM THE PRISON OF EARTHLY DEATH; The Sins of the Throne Are Seldom Single, Thus the Most Difficult to Forgive; O GOD WHO TAKETH AWAY FOR BETTERMENT; he was example of bad habits, bad customs, and sinister advice, those qualities that clothe the souls of the wretched, who for their pride are lions; for vengeance, tigers; for lust, mules, horses, pigs; for tyranny, fish; for vainglory, peacocks; for sagacity and diabolical cunning, vixens; for gluttony, monkeys and wolves; for insensitivity and malice, asses; for simple-mindedness, sheep; for mischief, goats; vainglory, and a brief life; DEATH RAN CLOSE BEHIND THE PAGES OF HIS HOPES TO MAKE OF THEM ASHES. And at the rear of the nave ascended the interminable and unterminated steps that led to the plain above, for by that broad stairway were to descend all the bodies at this moment advancing through mourning towns, through cities and cathedrals, escorted by priests, entire convents, and chapters of all orders. And only when they had arrived and were reposing in their tombs would the heavy slabs be lowered upon them; and the ingress from the plain to stairway, conceived only for this ceremony, would be forever sealed, along with the crypt, the nuns’ choir loft, the altar of gold and jasper, the painting brought (it was said) from Orvieto, and the bedchamber of El Señor.

The painting: While we spake these things unto the disciples of John, behold there came a certain ruler, and worshipped him, saying, My daughter is even now dead: but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. And Jesus arose, and followed him, and so did his disciples. And when Jesus came into the ruler’s house, and saw the minstrels and the people making a noise, he said unto them, Give place: for the maid is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when the people were put forth, he went in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose. And the fame hereof went abroad into all that land.

Outside, the July sun never tired. There’re enough people here to populate a city, said Martín, shrugging his shoulders, shortly after the dispersal of the throng that had gathered to witness the boy’s death beside the stables: some were unloading iron ingots, some were rolling and plaiting esparto and cáñamo fibers into ropes and cables, cords and swirls; farther away an army of sawyers and carpenters was working, and closer by, beneath their awnings, upholsterers silently worked on their satin cloths, skeins of silk, fringe and cord. How the sun lingered above this desert-like earth! Martín looked at the earth as he drove the wedges into the wall of the quarry, trying to divine the hidden gardens and concealed rivulets in this fierce plain: leagues and leagues of rock, and such pale gold light that one could see every puff of dust for miles.

Jerónimo, Martín said to the bearded man pumping the bellows and then at intervals arranging the chain he had forged during the day, have you seen that woman? And the smith answered him with another question: Martín, do you know who the boy was they just burned alive?

ON THE BEACH

Summer storm clouds gather to the north of the beach on the horizon where the land meets the sea; and along the shoreline, at the meeting of sand and sea, a young man lies face down, his arms spread in a cross.

High on the dunes, watching eyes discern upon the naked body a sign they wished, and at the same time did not wish, to see: a blood-red cross between the shoulder blades.

THERE IS A CLOCK THAT DOES NOT STRIKE

So El Señor, very early in the morning, and with great stealth, arose and threw on a heavy black cape. He was so practiced, so skillful in silently slipping from the bedchamber, crossing the chapel — without looking toward the painting brought from Orvieto — and reaching the foot of the great stairs, that this morning the dog Bocanegra, usually so alert, did not even stretch in his sleep as his master left, but continued to lie at the foot of the bed, head bandaged, a persistent smear of black coastal sand next to the wound and on his paws.

But this particular morning (El Señor has asked Guzmán to be sure to remind him what day it is; a boy has been burned yesterday at the stable beside the palace construction; the work of the palace itself is unduly delayed, while funeral carriages struggle through time and space to attend their rendezvous; Jerónimo has been punished for over-sharpening the tools; Martín has watched La Señora pass, the hawk upon her wrist; a young man lies face down, arms spread in a cross, upon the black sand) El Señor, before leaving his chamber, stops an instant with the cape in his hands and stares at the dog, wondering why Bocanegra slept so soundly. But he gave no import, no reply, to his own question. He preferred instead to have this fresh morning for himself, to enjoy the coolness of the high plains that compensated for the fiery blasts of the previous day, so removed from the grinding heat that would follow in a few hours. He left the bedchamber, crossed through the chapel, and reached the foot of the stairway.

What were considerations of the unusual behavior of a dog compared to those raised by this tremulous proximity to the uncompleted stone stairway? Looking up, he could count the thirty-three broad steps that connected the crypt to the flat ground of what had been the shepherds’ grove. Broad stairs, well polished, smooth. What worker had polished them? What did he look like? What were his dreams? Where did these stairs lead? He pressed a hand to his brow: outside, to the plain, to the whirling, proliferating, sweating world; to an encounter with the laborer who had constructed them. He knew that well enough. Why did he always doubt it? Why did he always rise before dawn to see with his own eyes the state of this stairway conceived with the single purpose of accommodating the procession of seignorial coffins and the corteges that would accompany them to their final resting place? Why were his orders not fulfilled? Were they constructing with all haste? And why did he himself not dare ascend those stairs, preferring to look at them from below before beginning his long daily routine of prayer, reflection, and penitence?

Why did he not dare take the first step? A lost sensation, a fire in his blood, forgotten during the imperceptible passage from youth to maturity, was born again in his loins and breast, raced through his legs, shone in the luminous excitement of a rejuvenated face. He raised one foot to climb the first step.

He made a rapid calculation; it was still not four o’clock in the morning. First he looked at his own black slipper suspended in air. Then he stared up toward the top of the stairway. A night as black as his slipper returned his gaze. He dared; he took the first step; he placed his right foot upon the first stair and immediately the cool night turned to rosy-fingered dawn; he took the second step, he placed his left foot upon the first stair; the dawn dissipated into warm melting light, morning. At that moment El Señor’s flesh, already exalted by his eagerness to achieve the next step, prickled involuntarily, and for an instant he could not distinguish between the shiver of pleasure and the shudder of fear.

Bocanegra ran from the bedchamber through the chapel toward the stairway; the thought flashed through El Señor’s mind that perhaps his momentary doubt before the sleeping dog had, in some way, stirred the depths of his dream. But now a ferocious dog, sharp teeth bared, jaws slavering, was racing forward as if his hour to defend his master had at last arrived; he ran toward his master and his master, trembling, said to himself: “He doesn’t recognize me.”

But Bocanegra stopped at the foot of the staircase, cowed before the first stair, where El Señor stood, a figure diffused in the violent light falling from overhead: a solar column of light, a column of dust motes, El Señor. First the mastiff barked with fury, and El Señor could not separate that emotion from his own fascinated innocence; did the dog or its master realize what was happening? El Señor thought, I can’t tell the difference between my trembling ignorance and the dog’s ignorant fury. Bocanegra barked, he approached the first step, he fled as if the stone were fire; worse (his master observed closely): for the dog the stairway did not exist; the dog could not see the standing El Señor, yet he smelled his presence; for El Señor was not present at the time the dog was living, but rather in a time he had encountered by chance when he stepped onto the stairway; the fire died in his entrails, he could no longer believe in the resurgence of his youthful exaltation, he cursed the notion of maturity and its identification with corruption; he cursed the blind will for action that one day had distanced him and now separated him forever from the only possible eternity: that of youth.

“The apple has been cut from the tree, its only destiny to rot.”

Then El Señor, poised upon the first step, committed the error of stretching out his hand to take Bocanegra by the spiked collar with the heraldic blazon inscribed in the iron. The dog growled, shook his head, and tried to sink first the spikes, then his canines, into the hand attempting to pull him toward the first step. The initial sensation that he was not recognized was followed in El Señor’s soul by the certainty of animosity; the bellicose dog not only did not know his master, he saw him actually as an enemy, an intruder. He refused to share the place and the instant his master had invaded on the stairway. El Señor regarded the perspective of the crypt from the first step; the chapel, from the stairway to the altar in the background to the luminous Italian painting and the jasper monstrance, was a copper engraving. Instantly he was suffused with immeasurable rage; on the day of his victory he had sworn to erect a fortress of the faith that no drunken soldier and no ravenous dog might ever profane; yet at the very entrance of the space he had chosen for his life and his death, the space constructed for him and by him, here he stood defending himself against a dog that was, in turn, resisting being pulled toward the stairway; El Señor looked toward the distant lights on the altar and, with a jerk, ripped the bandage from the dog’s head. Bocanegra howled heart-rendingly; the bandage had pulled the sandy scab from the wound.

Howling, vanquished, his head lowered and the bandage trailing between his trembling paws, Bocanegra retreated to the seignorial bedchamber. El Señor hesitated between ascending one stair more and returning to the granite floor of the chapel. He moved his right leg to ascend the second stair; but now that pleasureful lightness had once again turned to leaden weight. He was afraid; he made a half turn and placed his foot beneath the first stair, on the floor. He looked up: the sun had disappeared from the firmament, the dawn was again announcing its appearance. He moved his left leg and stepped completely from the first stair; again he looked up, toward the square of the heavens at the top of the stairway: the dawn had yielded to the night that had preceded it.

THE KISS OF THE PAGE

The page-and-drummer, dressed completely in black, descended from the dunes to the beach and knelt beside the shipwrecked young sailor. He stroked the damp head and cleaned the face: the buried half was a mask of wet sand; the cleaned half, however (murmured the page-and-drummer), was the face of an angel.

Startled, the boy awoke from his long dream; he cried out: he could not distinguish between the caresses of the page and those he believed he must have dreamed from the moment when he fell from the fore-deck into the boiling waters of the sea; dreams of encounters with women in carriages; he feared that the avid lips and sharp-filed teeth of a young Señora would again sink into his neck; he feared that the wrinkled lips and toothless gums of an old woman bundled in rags would again seek his loins. With the eyes of innocence he stared at the tattooed lips of the page-and-drummer, and imagined that in those lips — like the field and the device upon an escutcheon, like the coat of arms and the wind upon a pennant — were blended the desirous mouths of the other two women; he decided the page was the women he had dreamed of resolved into a new hermaphroditic figure; if he were half man and half woman, the page would be sufficient unto himself, he would love himself, and these caresses with which he was attempting to console and resuscitate the young sailor would be either an insignificant or an infinitely charitable act, but nothing more. And if the page were a man, the youth would accept his affection as that of the companion long desired in his solitude and mortal danger. But as the page’s tattooed lips approached his, he did not smell the heavy scent of sandalwood or fungus of the other women, but a perfume of the forest, of flaming brambles and dye baths in the open air. The page cupped the youth’s face in his hands and placed his warm soft tongue between the youth’s parted lips. Their tongues met and the youth thought: “I have returned. Who am I? I am reborn. Who are you? I have dreamed. Who are we?” He believes he must have repeated it aloud, for the page answered him, whispering into the ear he was caressing: “We have all forgotten your name. My name is Celestina. I want you to hear my story. Then you will come with me.”

EL SEÑOR BEGINS TO REMEMBER

There was no anger in Guzmán’s attitude, only the profound and silent contempt of one who knows his office and who scorns the errors of others; but emphasizing El Señor’s guilt, Guzmán’s contempt was disguised in the precision with which he attempted to remedy the hurt done the dog. The master, breathing heavily and scratching his jaw, has no time to notice either these details or what they might reveal of the disparity between Guzmán’s actions and his thoughts. His attention is captured by a much more powerful fact: it is five o’clock in the morning, the sun is just rising, and the dog Bocanegra is being treated by Guzmán for an incident that had occurred one hour earlier when the sun was at its future zenith.

He glanced at the vassal, allowing him to proceed. Guzmán rubbed the dog’s wound with olive oil to soothe the pain, then applied a thick coating of stale melted hog fat; finally he bound the dog’s body to a board so he couldn’t scratch himself, and said: “It would be better now for the wound to get air; it will heal more quickly that way.”

El Señor scratched his tickling ear and looked again. Guzmán had treated the dog and was kneeling before the hearth; he laid a fire and lighted it with oakum. El Señor sat upon his curule chair beside the fire, aware that Guzmán had again divined his desire: in spite of the fact it was a summer day, El Señor was trembling with cold. The flames began to play impartially upon El Señor’s prognathic profile and the sharp angles of Guzmán’s face.

“I must remind El Señor that today is his birthday. I must apologize for not having mentioned it sooner. But because of the dog’s condition…”

“It is all right, all right,” gasped El Señor, waving aside Guzmán’s apologies. “It is I who should apologize, for my carelessness with the dog…”

“El Señor has no cause to concern himself with dogs. That is why I am here.”

“What time is it?”

“Five o’clock in the morning, Sire.”

“You are sure?”

“A good huntsman always knows the hour.”

“Tell me … Who constructed the stairway that leads from the chapel to the ground above?”

“All of them, you mean, Señor? Surely many; and none with a memorable name.”

“Why have they not completed it? Soon the funeral retinues will be arriving; how will they descend to the crypt?”

“They will have to come around, Señor, around the grounds, through the corridor, across the patio, through the dungeon, the way all of us reach the crypt.”

“You do not answer me. Why have they not completed the stairway?”

“No one dares interrupt the meditations of El Señor. El Señor spends almost the entire day kneeling or prostrate before the altar; El Señor prays; the work falls behind…”

“I pray? I meditate? Oh, yes, I recall, entire days, it all comes back to me … Guzmán … Would you wish to relive one day of your life, even one, to live it differently?”

“Each of us had dreamed of rectifying a wrong decision in the past; but not even God may change what has already taken place.”

“And if God gave me that faculty?”

“Then men would see it as the gift of the Devil.”

“… if God permitted me, at will, to walk into the past, revive what is dead, recapture what is forgotten?”

“It would not be enough to change time. El Señor would also have to change the spaces where the time occurs.”

“I would grow young…”

“And this palace, so laboriously constructed, would tumble down like dust. Remember that five years ago this was a shepherds’ grove and there was no building upon it. Ask God, rather, to speed up time; thus El Señor will know the results of his work, which are the results of his will.”

“I would see them as an old man.”

“Or dead, Señor: immortal.”

“And if old, or immortal, I would only see in the future what I would see in the past: the flat plain, a building disappeared or in ruins, destroyed by battles, envy, or indifference; perhaps abandonment?”

“El Señor, then, would have lost his illusions; but he would have gained wisdom.”

“You awakened a philosopher today, Guzmán. I prefer to maintain my illusions.”

“As El Señor wishes. But time is always a disappointment; foreseen, it promises us only the certainty of death; recaptured, it makes a mockery of freedom.”

“To choose again, Guzmán; to choose…”

“Yes, but always knowing that if we choose the same as the first time, we shall live a pleasant routine, with no surprises; and if we choose differently, we will live tortured by nostalgia and doubt: was the first choice better than the second? It was better. In any manner, we would be more enslaved than before; we would have lost forever a liberty that chooses, whether well or badly, only once…”

“You are talking more than usual, Guzmán.”

“El Señor asked me to remind him what day it is. It is his birthday. I have thought, if he will forgive me, a great deal about El Señor. I have thought that to choose twice is to mock the free will that does not forgive our abuses and that, mocked, mocks us, shows us its true face, which is the face of necessity. Let us instead, Sire, be the true masters of our past and future; let us live the present moment.”

“That moment is for me a long anguish.”

“If El Señor consistently looks behind him, he will be turned into a statue of salt. In El Señor resides a sum of power much greater than his father’s…”

“At what high price! You do not know, Guzmán. I was young.”

“El Señor has united the dispersed kingdoms; he has put down the heretical rebellions of his youth; stopped the Moor and persecuted the Hebrew; constructed this fortress that combines the symbols of faith and dominion. The usury of the cities that destroyed so many small seigniories renders homage to his authority and accepts the necessity for central power. The shepherds and laborers of these lands today are workers at the palace; El Señor has left them with no sustenance but their daily wage. And it is easier to take money from a wage than to collect bushels from a harvest, for the harvest can be seen in measurable fields, while wages are manipulated invisibly. Other great undertakings await El Señor, no doubt; he will not find them behind him, but ahead.”

“If one could begin again … if one could begin better…”

“Begin what, Sire?”

“A city. The city. The places we inhabit, Guzmán.”

“El Señor would have to employ the same arms and the same materials. These workers and these stones.”

“But the idea could be different.”

“The idea, Señor?”

“The intent.”

“However good it was, men would always make of it something different from what El Señor had intended.”

“So I believed once.”

“Forgive me, Señor, believe it still.”

“No, no … Listen, Guzmán; take paper, pen, and ink; listen to my story. I wanted this on my birthday: to leave something tangible of my memory; write: nothing truly exists if it not be consigned to paper, the very stones of this palace are but smoke if their story not be written; but what story can be written if this construction is never completed? What story! Where is my Chronicler?”

“You condemned him to the galleys, Sire.”

“The galleys? Oh, yes, yes … Then you write, Guzmán, write. Listen well to my tale…”

EL SEÑOR VISITS HIS LANDS

He arrived at dusk at the head of twenty armed men; they galloped through the mist-soaked fields, their swinging whips lopping off heads of wheat from the stalk. Some carried flaming torches and when they arrived at the hut in the middle of the plain they threw the torches on the straw-thatched roof and waited for Pedro and his two sons to be driven out like animals from a cave: light, smoke, beasts, men, all things have but one exit, El Señor had said before they rode out.

From his tall charger El Señor accused the aged serf of having shirked in his obligations as a vassal. Pedro said that was not the way of it, that according to the old laws he was to turn over to the Liege only part of the harvest and that he might keep some part to feed himself and his family and some to sell in the marketplace. As Pedro spoke he glanced from the blazing roof to his Lord seated astride the dun-colored horse, its skin freckled and wasted. Pedro’s skin was like that of the horse.

El Señor asserted: “There is no law but mine; this is an isolated place, you may not invoke a justice long out of use.”

He added that Pedro’s sons were to be carried by force into his service of arms. And the next harvest must be delivered in its totality to the castle gates. Obey, said El Señor, or your lands will be turned into ashes and not even weeds will grow upon them.

Pedro’s sons were bound and placed on horses and the armed company galloped back toward the castle. Pedro was left standing beside the blazing hut.

THE HEIR

The falcon struck blindly against the walls of the cell. “He’ll pluck out my eyes, he’ll pluck out my eyes,” young Felipe repeated over and over, shielding his eyes with his hands as the disoriented bird swooped in flight, striking against the walls only to launch itself again into a darkness it believed was infinite.

El Señor opened the door of the cell and the sudden light increased the frenzy of the rapacious bird. But the Liege approached, holding out his gauntleted arm to the hooded bird, which settled peacefully onto the greasy leather, and as he caressed the warm wings and lean body, he guided the falcon’s beak to the water and food. El Señor glanced at Felipe with an aggrieved air and led him to the great hall of the castle, where the women sat embroidering while minstrels sang and a jester cut his capers.

El Señor explained to his son that the falcon requires darkness for his rest and for his feeding, but not so much darkness that he believes he is surrounded by the blackness of infinite space, for then he feels he is master of the night, his bird-of-prey instincts are awakened, and he swoops off in suicidal flight.

“You must know these things, my son. It will be you who will one day inherit my position and my privileges, and the accumulated wisdom of our domain as well, for without that wisdom the privileges are but vain pretension.”

“You know, Father, that I am reading the ancient writings in our library, and that I am a diligent student of Latin.”

“The wisdom to which I refer goes far beyond the knowledge of Latin.”

“I will not disappoint you again.”

The conversation between the father and son was interrupted by the cavorting of the jester, who came toward them with abroad, smudged smile, saying in a low but at the same time grotesquely high voice — for this comedian also had about him something of the ventriloquist — we buffoons know secrets, and he who would hear more, let him open his purse. He danced away but at the height of his next leap fell, choking, bluish bubbles bursting from his lips, and died.

The music ceased and the ladies fled, but Felipe, guided by an impulse, approached the jester and stared at the malignant face beneath the belled cap. He thought he saw something decidedly disagreeable, disfigured, and degraded in that scarlet mask-like visage. Kneeling, Felipe embraced the jester’s body, recalling the moments of pleasure he had afforded his father’s court. Then he grasped the clown by the buckle of his belt and dragged his body through the passageways. He imagined how it had been, the jester doing things he did not want to do, mimicking, capering, juggling, rhyming couplets, offering secrets in exchange for money: whom was he imitating, whom was he deceiving, whom was he despising as he fulfilled his role with such ill will? For, yes, his inner life was revealed in death: he was not a likable person.

The two sons of the serf Pedro had been lodged in the jester’s rooms, so that Felipe found them there as he dragged the body into the room and deposited it upon a wretched straw pallet. But the two youths believed, as they looked upon his well-cut clothes and graceful, almost feminine features, that Felipe was a castle servant, a page surely, and they asked him whether he knew what fate El Señor had in store for them. They spoke of escape, telling Felipe that some men lived in freedom, without masters, openly traveling the roads, singing, dancing, making love, and doing penance so that this world might come to an end and another, better one begin.

But Felipe seemed not to hear them; beside the body of the buffoon he had heard an infant’s high-pitched cry. When the heir looked more closely he could see the body of a babe-in-arms, wrapped in coarse bedclothes and half buried in the straw beside the jester’s body. He had not known the jester had a newborn son, but he did not wish to ask further, for fear of betraying himself before the two who had taken him for a servant.

“Let’s escape,” Pedro’s first son said. “You can be of help to us since you know the ways out.”

“Help us; come with us,” said the second son. “The millenary promise is close at hand, the second coming of Christ.”

“Let’s not wait for Christ’s return,” said Pedro’s first son. “Let’s be free; once away from here we’ll join the other free men in the forests. We know where they are.”

THE FALCON AND THE DOVE

The tall Augustinian monk, his skin stretched taut over prominent bones, addressed the group of students in red felt caps, tranquilly repeating the consecrated truth: man is condemned before his birth, his nature corrupted for all time by the sin of Adam; except with divine assistance, no one can escape the limitations of this truth; similarly, grace may be obtained only through the Roman Church.

Ludovico, a young theology student, arose impetuously and interrupted the monk. He asked whether he had considered the beliefs of Pelagius, who judged that God’s grace, being infinite, is a gift directly accessible to all men without the need for intermediary powers; and also whether he had examined the doctrine of Origen, who was confident that God’s charity is so great it would pardon even the Devil.

For an instant the monk stood stupefied; in the next moment, he pulled his hood over his head, preparing to leave.

“Do you deny the sin of Adam?” he asked the student Ludovico with compunctious and ominous fury.

“No, but I do sustain that, as he was created mortal, Adam would have died with or without sin; I also sustain that Adam’s sin hurt only Adam and not the human race, so that every child born of man is born without offense, as innocent as Adam before the Fall.”

“What is the Law?” the tall monk exclaimed.

Raging, when his question met only silence, he himself answered: “The Synod of Carthage, the Council of Ephesus, and the writings of St. Augustine!”

Then the students, who had obviously prepared for the scene, simultaneously loosed a falcon and a dove. The white dove alighted on Ludovico’s shoulder, while the bird of prey swooped, struck the monk’s chest, then flew away over his head. The students laughed with pleasure as the monk fled the hall, his head splattered with the bird’s droppings; this seemed a propitious moment to break a few windows.

THE WOMEN OF THE CASTLE

The two women had not yet finished dressing; they had been distracted by the bitch’s whelping. They crouched beside the beast, the young girl caressing the pups as her duenna looked from the bitch’s gaping and bleeding wound to the chastity belt shackled heavily between her own thighs. She asked the girl whether she felt well. Yes, the girl replied, well enough, no worse than any other month. But the duenna grumbled, saying it was woman’s lot to bleed, to whelp like animals, and to have smothered beneath padlocks what the poets were wont to call the flower of the faith; well, so much for flower and so much for faith, lily she might be, but withered, called Azucena now more from custom than because she was baptized so, and her soldier of the faith, a poor smith of these parts, had turned the key on her and gone forth to fight the Moors, or maybe only to the offal heap to shit, begging the girl’s pardon, the only certain thing being that a long absence breeds forgetfulness.

Then this same Azucena looked with tender eyes upon the young girl and asked whether she might ask a favor. The girl, smiling, nodded. And her duenna explained that when he died the jester had left a newborn child in his straw pallet. She didn’t know its origin, only the buffoon could have solved that mystery. She had decided to care for the child in secret, but her breasts were dry. Could she suckle the infant at the bitch’s teats?

The girl made a gesture of disgust, then smiled and finally said yes, smiling, why yes, but they must hurry and finish dressing and go to the castle chapel. There they knelt to receive the Sacrament. But when the girl opened her mouth and the priest placed the Host on her long, narrow tongue, the wafer turned into a serpent. The girl spit and screamed; the priest, enraged, ordered her to leave the chapel at once: God himself had been witness to the offense. No unclean woman may set foot within the temple, much less receive the body of Christ; the girl screamed in horror, and howling with rage, the priest answered her with these words: “Menstruation is the course of the Devil through the corrupt body of Eve.”

Felipe loved this girl from afar; he witnessed the scene in the chapel, standing aside, constantly stroking his beardless, prognathic chin.

JUS PRIMAE NOCTIS

A great country wedding was being celebrated in the granary, with dancing, singing, and drinking. The newlywed pair, a ruddy-faced young smith and a pale, slim sixteen-year-old girl, were dancing; his arms were about her waist, her arms around his neck, their faces so close that from time to time their lips could not help but meet in a kiss. Then everyone heard the heavy hoofbeats in the yard outside and they were afraid; El Señor and his young sapling, the one called Felipe, entered, and without a word the Lord approached the bride, took her by the hand, and offered her to Felipe.

Thereupon he led his son and the girl to a nearby hut and ordered Felipe to bed with the bride. The youth resisted. His father pushed him toward the trembling girl. In his mind Felipe imposed upon this girl the features of the young Lady of the castle who had been expelled from chapel during the early Mass. Even so, that imagined face still did not excite him, but confirmed in him instead his profound conception of the loved one as something one may desire but may not touch: didn’t all the youths and handsome minstrels tell only of the passion of parted lovers, of ladies adored from afar: didn’t all of them dwell in ineffable distance?

El Señor pushed his son aside; he stripped off his own boots and breeches and fornicated with the bride, quickly, proudly, coldly, bloodily, heavily, while Felipe watched amid the smoke and stench of the cotton wick swimming in a basin of fish oil. The father departed, telling Felipe to return alone to the castle.

Felipe told the sobbing girl his name and she told him hers, Celestina.

THE LITTLE INQUISITOR

The student Ludovico had been brought before the Holy Office by the taut-skinned monk, and there the Augustinian informed the Inquisitor that the young man’s ideas were not only theologically in error, they were, in practice, dangerous, for if they filtered down to the people they would corrode the effectiveness, even the existence, of ecclesiastical hierarchy.

“Less zeal, less zeal,” the Inquisitor, a stooped little man wearing a cardinal’s biretta, said in irritation to the monk. In contrast, he spoke sweetly to Ludovico, asking him to recant; he promised him everything would be forgotten. My design, the ancient man said, sucking his lips, is not to win battles with words but to convince the head and heart of man that we must accept the world as it is, and peacefully; the world we live in is well ordered and offers rewarding riches to those who accept their place in it without protest.

The impassioned Ludovico stood and asked violently: “A world from which God is absent, sequestered by a few, unseen to all who openly aspire to his grace?”

So the Inquisitor also rose, trembling like an aspen leaf, as Ludovico leapt toward the blue-leaded window and escaped across the red tiles of the Archbishopric city.

He slammed the window after him with such force that the leaded panes shattered at the feet of the monk and the Inquisitor, and the latter said: “Increase the accounts due the University pro vitris fractis. And do not bring me these foolish problems. Rebels grow tall with attention but are effaced by indifference.”

THE PLAGUE

Cadavers lie in the streets and the doors are marked with hastily painted crosses. Atop the high towers yellow flags are whipped by a rancorous wind. Beggars do not dare to beg; they watch quietly as a man pursues a dog around the square, finally captures it and strangles it, for it is said that animals are the cause of the pestilence; the dye-stained water which formerly flowed from the dyehouses has dried up, now no one tosses urine and excrement from his window, even the hogs that once wandered loose through the streets devouring the filth have died; but the cadavers of cattle slaughtered at the slaughterhouse lie putrefying there, and fish thrown in the street, and chicken heads; and over it all the thick celebratory clouds of flies. The sick have been driven from their homes; they wander alone, finally joining their infected fellows among the piles of refuse.

Blackened bodies float in the river and black fish die on the contaminated shores. Open graves are set afire. One or two mournful orchestras play in the squares, hoping to dispel the heavy atmosphere of melancholy hanging over the city.

Very few people dare walk through the streets; when they do they are cloaked in long, heavy black robes, leather gloves, boots, and wear masks with glass-covered eyeholes and beaks filled with the oil of the bergamot fruit. The convents have been closed, their doors and windows sealed.

But a good and simple monk named Simón has dared go out, believing it his duty to attend and cure the sick. Before he approaches them, Simón dampens his vestments with vinegar and fastens about his waist a sash stained and thickened with dried blood and ground dried frogs. He turns his back when he must hear the confession of the sick, for the breath of the infected can coat the surface of a water jug with gray scum. The afflicted moan and vomit, their black ulcers bursting like inky craters. Simón administers the Last Sacraments, moistening the Host in vinegar and then offering it secured upon the end of a long wand. Usually, the dying vomit the Body of Christ.

The city is choking beneath the weight of its own refuse; in spite of the abundance of animal and vegetable detritus, greater still is the accumulation of decomposing bodies. Then the Mayor comes to Simón and asks that he go to the prison and speak with the prisoners to make them the following offer: when the plague is over they will be liberated if now they lend their services to work in the streets, burning the dead.

Simón goes to the prison and makes the offer, first warning the prisoners of the dangers they run; isolated in their dungeons they have escaped the sickness; once outside, collecting the bodies in the streets, many of them will die, but those who survive will be freed.

The prisoners accept the agreement proposed by Simón. The simple monk leads them into the streets and there the prisoners begin to pile the bodies upon carts. The black smoke from the funeral pyres asphyxiates birds in their flight; the bell towers become nests filled with black feathers.

CELESTINA

The thin pale bride took to her bed and lay there trembling day and night. Her bridegroom tried to approach her, but every time he came near, Celestina screamed, rejecting her husband’s overtures. Then the young smith would bow his head and leave her in peace.

Once alone Celestina draws close to the fire, fed constantly to soothe the sick girl’s trembling; she thrusts her pale hands into the flames, choking back her screams and moans by biting down hard on a rope. She continues this way, burning herself, biting the rope, burning herself, until there is nothing left of the rope but a wet string and her hands are one great running wound. When the virginal husband sees his wife’s hands he asks her what has happened. She answers: “I have fornicated with the Devil.”

THE FLIGHT

That night Felipe escaped from the castle with the two young serfs. All three hid in the nearby forest, breathing in its strong verdant embrace. They did not sleep, for Felipe had many questions to ask them, and the two youths, in great detail, told Felipe where he could find the armies of free men, the enlightened, the vagabond kings of the interregnum preparing for the second coming of Christ to earth.

As dawn approached, three of El Señor’s hunters entered the forest, guided by large and ferocious dogs; Felipe climbed a tall pine and hid himself there, but the two sons of Pedro were hunted down and devoured by the mastiffs.

When the hunters had departed, Felipe descended from the tree and continued alone to the place described by Pedro’s two sons. As night fell he heard music and he came to a clearing where naked men and women were dancing and singing: The divine essence is my essence and my essence is the divine essence, for every spark of creation is divine and reincarnation will be universal. Felipe thought of the bloody and dismembered bodies of his unfortunate friends; he took off his clothes and joined the dancers. He felt drunk, and like them, he danced and shouted.

SIMON’S FACE

The plague in the city has ended. The prisoners bury the last bodies and Simón the monk helps them. The yellow flags are struck while the monk joins the prisoners around a bonfire and they tell tales of the time they have passed together: they are friends.

There is a final brief silence. Simón announces to them that now they are free. Many have died, it is true, and sad; but those who live have won something more than life; they have won their freedom. They are drinking the last swallow from the wineskin when the Mayor and his halberdiers approach them. The Mayor simply orders his armed company to seize the prisoners and return them to the prison. The period of grace has ended. All the surviving prisoners will be returned to prison to fulfill the time of their sentences.

One of the prisoners spits in Simón’s face.

IN THE FOREST

Celestina forsakes her home; she, too, wanders through the forest, bathing her injured hands in the fresh streams and eating roots and nuts. At night she sits beneath a great tree and fills with flour the little cloth dolls she carries hidden beneath her skirts; she caresses them, she presses them to her breasts, she invokes the Evil One and asks him to take her and give her a son. But she raises this supplication only when the sounds of the whistling, howling, moaning forest are most intense; only the forest must hear her.

One night, as two old men were returning from a distant fair, hot and excited, they heard her and parted the branches and watched her; when Celestina’s passion reached an unbearable level, the two old men fell upon her and raped her, one after the other; but the pale thin girl, lost in the consuming intensity of her fantasy, was oblivious to their acts; perhaps she imagined only that her pleas had been attended, that a Devil with two tails had got her with child. The old men questioned the significance of the flour-filled dolls, then shrugged their shoulders, laughed, and destroyed them.

After the two old men had gone, Celestina lay exhausted and alone for a long while. Then she heard the sounds of music and singing coming toward her. She saw Felipe at the head of a vast horde of men and women dressed in hairshirts and carrying scythes across their shoulders. Felipe’s heart turned over, for he recognized Celestina as the bride whom his father had one evening taken for himself. He knelt beside her, stroked her hair, and said to her: “Suffer no more. No one is going to punish you for your sins. Now poor souls like you may love and not be condemned for that love. Come with us.”

He took Celestina’s injured hands, and she answered him: “No, you come with me. I have had a dream. We must go to the sea.”

The singing throng continued on its way; Felipe, who knew now that dreams may be real when no other course is possible, went in the opposite direction with Celestina.

THE BOAT

The aged serf Pedro had reached the coast and had set about building a boat. His arms were still strong and every time he looked at the sea he could feel his strength increasing. That morning, glancing from the sea toward the dunes, Pedro saw the monk Simón descending, covered in dust, his habit hanging in shreds. The monk asked Pedro: “Are you a sailor? Where will you be sailing?”

The old man told the monk that questions were unwelcome; if the monk wanted to go with him, he should get to work immediately. But before the two men had picked up their hammers and nails, the student Ludovico, in beggar’s rags now, also appeared on the dunes; he, too, came down to the beach and asked whether he could join them on their voyage, for the boat could carry them far, very far, from here.

Ludovico joined in their labor, and as the day came to a close, Celestina, guided by her dream, appeared with Felipe, and both requested a place in the vessel. Pedro told them they could all accompany him, but on the condition that first they work.

“You, girl, tend to the cooking, and you, lad, bring us something to eat.”

Pedro handed Felipe a sharpened knife.

THE CITY OF THE SUN

When they had finished their day’s work, the five of them ate meat from the deer Felipe had slain and Celestina asked where they would be sailing once the ship was ready. Pedro answered that any land would be better than the one they were leaving behind. And Ludovico added that surely there were other, freer, more prodigal lands; the whole earth could not be one enormous prison.

“But there are cataracts at the ocean’s end,” said the monk Simón. “We cannot go far.”

Felipe laughed. “You’re right, monk. Why don’t we stay here and try to change the world we know?”

“What would you do?” the student Ludovico asked. “If you had the power, what kind of world would you create?”

They all sat very close together, contented after their completed tasks and the savory food. Pedro said he envisioned a world where there were no rich or poor, a world where neither man nor beast would be governed by arbitrary powers. He spoke brusquely but with the voice of a dreamer who sees a community where every being would be free to ask and to receive from others the things he needed most, where his only obligation would be to give to others what they asked of him. Each man would be free to do what most pleased him, because every job would be natural and useful.

They all looked toward Celestina and the girl pressed her hands to her breast, closed her eyes, and imagined a world where nothing would be forbidden, where all men and all women could choose the person and the love they wanted most, for all love would be natural and blessed; God approves all the desires of all His creatures, if they are desires of love and life, not hatred and death. Didn’t the Creator himself plant the seed of amorous love within the breasts of all His creatures?

The monk Simón said: “We can’t have love until there is no more sickness and death. I dream of a world where every child will be happy and will live forever. No one will ever again fear pain or extinction, for when he is born into this world he will inhabit the earth forever, and thus earth will be heaven and heaven will be here on earth.”

“But this,” the student Ludovico intervened, “would presuppose a world without God, since in the world you have each imagined, a world without power or money, with no prohibitions, with no pain or death, each man would be God, and God therefore would not be possible. He would be a lie, because His attributes would be those of every man, woman, and child: grace, immortality, and supreme good. Heaven on earth, my friend monk? Earth without God, then, since God’s proud and secret place is a heaven without earth.”

Then they all looked to young Felipe and waited in silence. But the son of El Señor said he would tell his dream only after he had interpreted in turn what the others had just imagined.

PEDRO’S DREAM

You are living in your happy commune, old man; the harvests belong to everyone and every person takes and receives from his neighbor. The commune is a great island of freedom surrounded by the seas of serfdom. One evening, as you are peacefully contemplating the sunset from your reconstructed hut, you hear a great hue and cry. A man is brought before you; he has been captured, and is accused of stealing. He must be judged. He is the first man to have broken the laws of the commune.

You lead this man before your people assembled in the granary and you ask him: “Why did you steal, if everything here is held in common?”

The man asks to be pardoned; he did not know what he was doing; the excitement of the crime was stronger than his sense of obligation to the commune. More than by greed, since everything, it is true, belongs to every man, he was motivated by the lure of danger, of adventure, of risk; how can one overcome in a day the inclinations of a lifetime? He has returned to confess his guilt and to be pardoned. He has stolen something without value, something he found in the communal storehouse: a large green bottle, old, covered with moss and spider webs and sealed with very old wax. He had stolen to experience the exciting thrill of danger. But then he felt shame and fear, and fled from the commune. He fell into the hands of El Señor’s soldiers. He was taken to the castle. And there, under torture, he revealed the existence of the commune to El Señor.

Contain your anger, old man, and disguise your fear, for you well know that your best defense has been invisibility; you know that El Señor will not visit you until the next harvest is collected, or until a wedding when he comes to take, by force, his rights as the Lord. For this reason you have forbidden anyone to marry before the harvest time, trusting that by then the commune will be sufficiently strong to confront El Señor. You ask the repentant man standing before you: Why have you returned when you could have remained with your stolen bottle under the protection of El Señor?

The thin man, his ankles raw from the torture ropes, answers you: “I have returned to do penance for my double betrayal: I have returned to fight in defense of my companions, for tomorrow the army of El Señor will march against us and will crush our dream…”

You ask him: Where is this bottle you have stolen? And he bows his head and admits that inexplicably El Señor took it from him. But he pleads: “I am a traitor and a confessed thief, but let me return and fight with you. Don’t despise my poor bones.”

You decide to pardon him. But the assembly protests: you hear voices demanding death for this man as an example to whoever might feel tempted to repeat his crimes. And there is more: many allege that if the man has returned, it is because El Señor plans to employ him as a spy within the commune. You argue heatedly, old man: not a single drop of blood must be spilled here; to yourself you say silently that, in the same way the thief and traitor could not change his instincts overnight, the multitude gathered here cannot suppress its own. The members of the commune defy you: once El Señor attacks, the spilling of blood will be inevitable; in fact, the time remaining before the fateful battle has been brutally curtailed. You point to the traitor’s ankles, still bleeding from the torture: a man replies that this is an obvious stratagem of El Señor, so that, once pardoned, the traitor can remain in the commune and continue to inform against it. They accuse you of evading the facts, and several strong men hurry outside; soon in the warm summer night you hear the sound of the hammer and the saw.

Inside the granary your community first debates, then decrees: we will live in peace only when our rules of life are accepted by everyone; in the meanwhile we must set aside our own code of brotherhood and actively destroy those who do not deserve it, our enemies. You try to calm them, old man; you say we must live in isolation and in peace, with the hope that sooner or later our good example will spread; you say we must conquer with persuasion, not with arms. Your people shout in your face: we must defend ourselves, for if we’re destroyed we can offer no example at all. You persist, weakly: we will negotiate with El Señor, we will deliver this harvest in exchange for the right to pursue our new mode of life. Then the assembly laughs openly at you.

The traitor is condemned to death and hanged that same night from the brand-new gallows erected in the middle of the commons. The people elect one of the carpenters to organize the defense; the new leader’s first orders are to raise barricades in the fields; a popular army is formed and neighbor watches over neighbor to prevent future betrayals.

Old man: you are petitioned to remain in your hut; occasionally in the evenings young girls come to bring you flowers and honor you as the founder of the commune; but you do not dare ascertain what really is happening. The new leader has warned you that if you speak again, if you again repeat the arguments you expressed during the assembly, you will be exiled, and if you persist in debate outside the commune, you will be considered a traitor and murdered in broad daylight. From your window you can see the gallows erected in the commons. It seems to you that only the hangman and you are motionless, waiting, always waiting; the rest of an incomprehensible world races by before your eyes, and your ears are filled with the chaotic sounds of running horses, of weeping, of discharged harquebuses, and of fire. What is the source of the arms the members of the commune employ in their struggle against El Señor? You find out the day you see in the square the pennants and infantry of another Liege, a rival of your oppressor. Every day, men are hanged; you no longer know, you don’t want to know, whether they are men of the commune or soldiers of El Señor. It is said (at times the sorrowing women dare communicate the rumors) that some members are opposed to the alliances that, under the guise of necessity, the new leader has effected with the noble rivals of El Señor.

Once the new leader visits you and says: “Pedro, I hope someday when we again live in peace we can raise a monument to you right here where the gallows now stands.”

CELESTINA’S DREAM

Felipe took the girl’s hand.

You’ve chosen me, isn’t that true, Celestina? And I feel I’ve chosen you. Here, let’s drink to our love. Together we’ll work with our new friends to build the old man’s ship; together we’ll voyage to a new and better land. We’ve become good friends, we five, but you and I, my love, will make love beneath the stars as the ship softly breasts the waves of the unknown sea.

Ludovico the student is also our friend now; but every night, following the day’s hard labor, as we drink and I look into your eyes he will try to hide his behind his cup; I can see my love for you reflected in his eyes.

We’ve no need for explanations, Celestina; soon every night Ludovico will lie with us beneath our covers; I love him like a brother and you love what I love; there will be no hatred, no suspicion, no jealousy, only satisfied desire, when I make love to you and then permit him to do the same.

At times you are assaulted by temptation and by doubt: “I am the only woman on board. It is only natural they both love me.” But Ludovico’s passion, his tender touch, even the newly minted words so different from his usual dogmatic expression, the beauty of the pleasure he gives and receives from you, all this tells you he loves you because you are Celestina, and that he could love no other woman. You are Celestina: you are mine: Ludovico is yours.

Then I begin to believe that perhaps my friend loves you more than I, Celestina, for he loves both you and me, or me through you; and you, because of your freely given loyalty to me, fear you are becoming too close to him and more distant from me. I love him, he is my brother; you must please me by loving him always more.

During the day, old Pedro stands at the helm while the monk prays and fishes. Ludovico and I perform the exhausting tasks; we climb the mainmast and ready the sail, we scan the horizon and at the sight of storm clouds prepare the crossjack, we sound and scrub and polish, and gaze interminably at the endless ocean from whose center we seem never to move, as if we were lying to. Our shoulders and hands touch constantly; we have learned to haul the ropes as one, to know the power and grace of our common muscles, for now we even walk like twins, as if the symmetrical distribution of our bodies’ weight were essential to the equilibrium of the ship. And our bodies sweat together beneath the summer sun; our skin is dark, our hair bleached by the gold light of the sea. You, Celestina, are pale; you stand away from us during the day, in the shadows, salting down the fish and slicing the toughened loaves, alien to our active labor, alien to our cultured Latinist jests, morosely humiliated you cannot share in the wit and puns of the education we have in common, when Ludovico says to me: “Crinis flavus, os decorum cervixque candidula, sermo blandus et suavis; sed quid laudem singula?” And I reply, caressing the nape of his neck: “Totus pulcher et decorus, nec est in te macula, sed vacare castitati talis nequit formula…”

Now we come to you every night in order to be close to each other; I grow excited thinking of him, and then make love to you; he doesn’t have to tell me he does the same. The long slow nights drift by; increasingly you are the vehicle of our desire, something to be possessed so we may possess each other. Finally one night you lie alone; we are together. The muscled sunburned bodies have fulfilled their desire, but frustrated yours.

Now you know, lying huddled apart from us, that if you attempt to satisfy your own desire you will wound me or hurt my lover, my brother. You look beyond that rhythmically moving coverlet to the place where the monk lies sleeping. You go and sit at his feet, and once again begin to stitch your little cloth dolls, and you feel a dark and distant urgency; you howl, Celestina, you howl like a lost bitch, and in the phosphorescent sea dew that moistens your lips seek the kiss of your only true lover, the Devil.

SIMON’S DREAM

When Felipe ceased speaking, the monk Simón shook his head no, and said: “You are mistaken. You have begun at the end. Before there can be true peace or true love, authentic justice or pleasure, sickness and death must cease.”

Felipe looked into Simón’s clear, pained eyes and remembered his father’s dark and willful brow. And he said to the monk: “You, Brother Simón, have experienced the terrible plague you told us of today as we were eating; you saw men battle against death. But the only men who truly battled were your prisoners: they had been promised freedom. But in the perfect world that you imagine there will be no death. And without certainty of death, how can there be desire for freedom?

“Let me pause, good monk, and ask you to recall your city once again, this time without death. A child is born in the manorial castle; at the same time a child is born in one of the dark hovels of your city. All rejoice, the rich parents and the poor as well, for they all know that once their sons are born, they will live forever.

“The two male children grow. One excels in the arts of falconry, archery, hunting, and Latin; the other follows the paternal profession; he will learn to give shape to iron, to keep the ovens burning red, and to wield the powerful bellows. Let us say that the boy born and reared in the castle is called…”

“Felipe,” murmurs Celestina.

“Yes, Felipe, we shall say; and let us suppose the young smith’s name is…”

“Jerónimo,” murmurs Celestina.

“Yes, let us suppose.” Felipe continued: “Consider, monk, the iron apprentice; when he has reached his twentieth year he falls in love with a young country girl, much like Celestina, and weds her; but the night of the wedding the young Prince from the castle appears and takes the virgin for himself, invoking his inarguable seignorial right. Celestina’s melancholy resembles madness; she forbids her bridegroom to come near her. The young smith fans the fires of hatred and revenge against me, Felipe, the young Lord.

“But both are immortal. He cannot kill me. I cannot murder him.

“We must find something to replace the death that neither can inflict upon the other.

“So for death I substitute non-existence. Since I cannot kill the young smith for despising me, or you, old man, for your rebelliousness, or you, Celestina, for your sorcery, or you, Ludovico, for your heresy, I condemn each of you to death in life. For me, you do not exist, I consider you dead.

“Look now, monk; look at your city peopled by my slaves, look at your walled city surrounded by my men and arms; listen to the steps of phantoms in my vast encircled cities. I have laid siege to the city. And I have entrapped each of you; not your immortal bodies, but your souls, mortal within immortal flesh.

“For this is the weakness of your dream, monk; if the flesh cannot die, then the spirit will die in its name. Life will no longer have any value; I shall have denied men liberty; they cannot exchange their slavery for death. They no longer have the only wealth an oppressed man can offer in return for the freedom of other men: his death.

“And I, monk, I will live forever, enclosed in my castle, protected by my guards, never daring to sally forth; I fear the knowledge of something worse than my own impossible death: I fear the spark of rebellion in the eyes of my slaves. No, I am not speaking of the active rebellion that you, monk, or you, old man, know and desire, although at times I also fear the simple, irrational murmuring of the multitude, the tides of living phantoms inundating my island, my castle, who, since they cannot murder their tyrant, convert him into one more of their infinite and anonymous company. No, monk, no: I fear the rebellion that simply ceases to recognize my power.

“I have not killed them; I have only decreed they do not exist. Why should they not repay me in the same coin? This will be the young smith’s revenge; he can murder me by forgetting that I exist. You, monk Simón, walk among the spectral throngs of your city, vainly offering your useless charity and futilely seeking that spark I fear, for the immortal do not rebel unless the certainty of death is assured. They will kill me by forgetting me; my power will have no meaning.

“And so we will continue to live, you and I, I and they, repeating ceaselessly a few uncertain gestures that vaguely recall times past when we lived and fought and believed and loved and desired with the goal of either deferring or hastening death. We shall live, we shall live forever, monk, as the mountains and the heavens live, the seas and rivers, until, like them, immobilized, our faces will be lost, left to the obliterating powers of erosion and the tides.

“We shall all be sleepwalkers, you in your city, I in my castle, and finally I shall come out, I shall walk the streets and no one will remember me, no one will recognize me, as the stone fails to recognize the hill at whose feet it lies. We shall meet, you and I, but as we will both be immortal, our eyes will never meet.

“Only our fingertips will touch, Brother Simón; and our lips will foolishly utter the word ‘flesh,’ never ‘Simón’ or ‘Felipe’; flesh, as one would say hair, stone, water, thorn.”

LUDOVICO’S DREAM

The student nodded gravely, considered, then shook his head no. No, he said to Felipe, your syllogism is false; the perfect world will depend upon my premise: a good society, good love, eternal life will be ours only when every man is God, when every man is his own immediate source of grace. Then God will not be possible because His attributes will be a part of every man. And man, finally, will be possible because he will no longer be ambitious or cruel; his grace will be sufficient unto itself, and he will love himself and love all creation.

Young Felipe spoke again, glancing from Ludovico’s worried eyes to Celestina’s somber, suspicious features. And he said:

I see you, my brother Ludovico, busy in your tiny student’s garret, filled with the grace of God, convinced you are your own God, but obliged, nonetheless, to struggle against two implacable necessities. You feel the cold of this winter night, and the fire does not warm you, for the logs have been wet by strong November rains.

You wish your grace would spread beyond your body, beyond the narrow confines of your miserable little room, that it would overflow the limits of your serene spirit and subject the fires of earth and the rains of heaven to your will: you curse the same fires, the same rains old Pedro praises as he walks through the swampy fields toward the warm coals of his hearth.

You ask yourself, Ludovico: Can one separate the satisfaction of grace from the temptation to create? You ponder this question, shivering over your damp green firewood: Isn’t grace worthless if it cannot dominate nature? God could have been content with eternal life, could have lived alone except for the companionship of His own grace; why did He feel the need to fill the void of that grace with the accidents of natural creation?

You are thinking about the Divinity before Creation. You see a solitary transparency surrounded by the black rays of that temptation to create: God imagines Adam, then declares himself insufficient. Unlike the sickly fire in your chimney, your brain is aflame, you imagine a piece of wood that would burn forever once it was lighted. Yes, that would be the material gift of grace, the practical equivalent to your divinity; then grace and creation would be one, and their name would be knowledge. Then, surely, master of gnosis, you would be God and God would be unnecessary since you could yourself convoke a new order, as God, unique, arrogant (and dangerously saddened to know He was insufficient, compelled), once did.

You learn the secrets of alchemy; you work for years, indefatigably; you grow old, stooped over dying fires, glutinous tars, and greenish oils, mixing, experimenting, coaxing the momentary flare, subduing the insistent flash, agonizing over a spark, exhilarated by a flameless aura, watching the St. Elmo’s fire from the beaches, wandering through peat fields, distilling mustards and linseed oils, polarizing and magnetizing every combustible element known to man, and still others of your own invention, until your work is ended. Ah, how true the Biblical curse; neither grace nor creation alone would have granted you knowledge; science is not gratuitous; you had to add the sweat of your brow.

You have dedicated your life to pragmatic grace and now you can proudly show the results to the honorable council in your city. Some of the priests accuse you of practicing the black arts, but the burghers, who see in your invention a necessary reconciliation of faith and utility, override this clerical vigilance, and soon you are installed in a profitable workshop near the city, from which supplies of your incandescent firewood flow to peasant huts, lords’ castles, and the ovens of the Guilds. No one need ever again feel the cold. You have triumphed over God’s careless design: allowing wood to get wet when dryness is more useful, flooding the woods with winter’s rain. The civilized world applauds you; it matters little that the vapors from your invention stain the firmament with a yellow cloud that settles into the valleys as a resinous bog. Grace, creation, and knowledge now are one in you; you have established the objective norm of truth.

Old and proud, saved by fame from the solitude and the questions that, were you alone, your forgotten grace — the original impulse to your creation and the solitary germ of your knowledge — might have posed, you ride through the countryside, basking in your renown, the gratitude of the populace, the usefulness of the gift you have bestowed upon them. That malodorous smoke issues from every chimney … from every chimney save one. Dumfounded, you dismount and enter that smokeless cottage.

There you find Celestina. She has grown old, too; she is truly a witch now, gray and wrinkled, sitting frostily before a bare hearth stitching her little dolls and stuffing them with flour. She is intoning a diabolic litany, in effect invoking the only companion to her solitude: the vacant intensity of her eyes reveals a true acquaintanceship with the being her voice is conjuring. In her solitude she too demands a contiguous presence, a shared wisdom.

Why do you not have a fire? you ask Celestina, and she replies she neither needs nor wants one; the smoke would frighten away her familiars and they would no longer come to her. You show your anger: woman, ignorant, superstitious … woman! but the truth is that your soul has now suffered the supreme insult: there is one being who fails to appreciate your offering to humanity, the tangible proof of your superior grace.

The wrinkled hag tries to read your face and finally cackles: “You know what you know; I know what you will never know. Leave me alone.”

And you, old man, proud, wise Ludovico, return slowly to the city with a leaden heart and a deepening sense of decision. You denounce Celestina before the ecclesiastical tribunal, and a few days later you go to the public square and there amidst the silent crowd you watch the halberdiers lead Celestina to the stake. The woman is bound to the wooden post and then the executioners set fire to the dry crackling wood at the feet of the recalcitrant witch. Your own invention, of course, is not utilized on this occasion.

NOWHERE

The three men and the woman sat a long while in silence after young Felipe stopped speaking. The youth himself sat staring toward the dawn sea; they had passed the night in conversation. And when the sun appeared, El Señor’s heir thought he saw in the orb of day the dead jester’s horrible grimace. Then he looked intently at Celestina and with his eyes asked her: “Please do not tell the others who I am.” Celestina bowed her head.

The student Ludovico was the first to rise; with a sudden movement he seized an ax and before anyone could stop him (but no one wished or dared to stop him) he threw himself against the skeleton of the old man’s boat and destroyed it, reduced it to splinters. Then, his face scarlet, he drove his ax into the black sands and murmured hoarsely:

“Nowhere does not exist. We have dreamed of a different life in distant time and distant space. That time and space do not exist. Madness. We must go back. Go back to your land, your harvest, and your serfdom, old man. Go back to your plagues and your healing, monk. Woman, return to your madness and your devils. And you, Felipe, the only one of whom we know nothing, return to your unknown. And I will go back to confront the torture and death that are my destiny. The Inquisitor of Teruel was not without reason: this is our world, even though it is not the best of all possible worlds.”

Felipe remained kneeling beside the dawn waves. The others rose and walked toward the dunes. Finally Felipe ran after them and said: “Wait a moment, please. You have not asked me what my perfect world would be. Give me that opportunity.”

The company paused at the edge of the high sandy ground, their silence interrogating the youth. And Felipe said: “Look. Utopia is not in the future, it is not in another space. The time of Utopia is now. The place of Utopia is here.”

HERE AND NOW

And so Felipe led the mad young witch and the proud student and the honest serf and the humble monk back toward the city, and there he said to them: “There is the perfect world.”

And their eyes opened to what they already knew, to shrieking, playing children, clerics selling indulgences, to the cries of street hawkers and the dragging steps of beggars, to quarrels among rivals and disputes among students, and also to sweethearts comforting each other, couples kissing in the narrow lanes, the strong scents of gin and bacon, roasting boar and frying onion; the hotchpotch of red-gauntleted, purple-robed doctors, purple-hatted, gray-cloaked lepers, scarlet-clad whores, freed heretics with the double cross embroidered on their tunics, and Jews with the round yellow patches over their hearts; pilgrims flourishing palm leaves returning from Jerusalem; pilgrims from Rome with St. Veronica’s cloths covering their faces; pilgrims from Compostela with seashells sewn to their hats; and pilgrims from Canterbury with a drop of the blood of the priest, the turbulent Thomas a Becket, in a small vial.

But these accustomed sights, sounds, and smells were but the veil drawn across a world moving rapidly and silently from some unknown center, issuing from some subterranean force; this Felipe pointed out to his companions: the dances seemed the same happy dances, but they were different; one had only to look a little more closely to discover their secret design; clasping hands, people danced all together, the entire city tracing the patterns of a lively galliard, moving in the undulating contractions of a giant serpent, led by the fife and lute, the mandolins and psalteries and rebecs of a group of musicians; and suddenly, when the five friends joined hands to form part of that ribbon of dancers, they saw other signs of change, for monks were coming out of their monasteries and nuns from their convents and Jews from their aljamas and Moslems from their alquerías and magicians from their towers and idiots from their asylums and prisoners from their prisons and children from their homes, and men armed with garrotes and axes and lances and pitchforks joined them, and one of them approached Felipe and said: “We are here. At the time and the hour you ordained.”

Felipe nodded, and many people climbed into the carts and others took the place of oxen and pulled the carts, while a horde of men dressed in frayed sackcloth, their bodies covered with crusted filth and scabs and ulcers, barefoot and hirsute, flocked into the city, dragging themselves on their knees like wounded cats, flagellating themselves cruelly as they chanted Felipe’s words: “The time is now, the place is here.”

And Felipe placed himself at the head of the crowd and cried: “Jerusalem is near!”

And the multitude shouted and marched behind him, following him beyond the walls of the city into the fields; and as they passed, the hordes burned and leveled the fields, and a leper, reaching out his sore-covered arms to the black clouds of smoke, said: “The Parousia is near, the Coming! Christ will return for the second time to Earth. Burn! Destroy! Let not a single stone from the past remain. Let not a single affliction from the past remain. Let the new age find us naked upon a barren earth. Amen.”

Singing and dancing, the multitude advanced, scarring their knees and scourging their breasts; they attested that the river ceased to flow as they crossed it, and that its warm waters stood icy-still about their legs; that the hills flattened out before their march and the clouds visibly descended to touch the brittle crust of the earth and protect from the furies of the sun the new Crusaders of the millennium, the imitators of Christ, the prophets of the third Joachimite Age — the Age of the Holy Spirit — the exalted peoples living the last days of the Antichrist. This is what certain sweating monks proclaimed; the masses of Arabs and Jews following behind Felipe in this caravan muttered different things among themselves.

Then the singing, shouting children saw the castle resting beneath the low-hanging clouds, and they cried: “Is this Jerusalem?” But Felipe knew it was only his father’s castle. He instructed the men to prepare arms for the assault, but when they reached the castle moat they found the drawbridge already lowered, the huge doors opened wide.

Silently, they descended from their carts. Children clung to their mothers’ skirts. The flagellants dropped their scourges. Pilgrims from Rome peered from behind their Veronica cloths. Amazed, they entered the castle of El Señor, where a vast repast had been hurriedly abandoned; musicians’ instruments lay in disorder beside the cold, ashy hearth; black blood and grease seeped from the cadaver of a decapitated deer; the tapestries hung motionless, although their flat ocher figures of glittering unicorns and hunters seemed to welcome Felipe’s army. Then their amazement gave way to frenzied action; the crowd took up the wine flasks and the musical instruments, they seized the roast partridges and grape clusters; men, women, and children ran through the great halls and bedchambers and passageways, dancing, tearing down the tapestries and cloaking themselves in them, donning casques and caps and tiaras and birettas and steeple caps and airy gossamers; they adorned themselves in chains of gold and silver earrings, ceremonial medallions, even the emptied basins of oil lamps; they plundered every coffer, jewel chest, and casket that lay in their paths. Renegade monks offered indulgences to scarlet-clad whores in exchange for their favors, pilgrims from England mixed the blood of the saint with the blood of the wine, and a drunken cleric was proclaimed Dominus Festi and baptized with three pails of water, while during the height of the orgy a Brabantine heretic bellowed the catastrophes awaiting the world: war and misery, fire from the heavens and greedy abysses yawning at the feet of humanity. Only the elect would survive. Then the Jews rejected the plates of unclean suckling pig; the Moslems decided to swallow the pieces of gold they had found.

The celebration continued for three days and three nights, until everyone succumbed, overcome by love-making and lack of sleep, hysterical exaltation, bleeding wounds, by indigestion and by drunkenness. But during this frenzy — and its eventual attrition in mournful songs, renewed vows, and indolent gestures — the five friends first observed and then acted according to their own desires. Celestina and Felipe lay down together upon a soft bed of marten skins; the student Ludovico soon joined them, since in truth the three had thought of nothing else since El Señor’s son had imagined the story of their love-making on board the ship that never sailed.

The two older men, Simón the monk and Pedro the peasant, slowly left the castle. Once beyond the moat they clasped hands, then set out on different routes; Simón said the sick awaited him in other unfortunate cities; Pedro, that it was now time to return to the coast and begin to build a new boat.

As Simón and Pedro bade each other farewell, the drawbridge very slowly began to rise; the old men paused again as they heard the sound of heavy chains and creaking wooden planks, but they could not see who raised the bridge. Each sighed and continued on his way. Had they waited but a few instants more, they would have heard the violent pounding on the other side of the raised bridge, now become an impregnable barbican; they would have heard desperate cries for help, and the heart-rending weeping of the imprisoned.

THE REWARD

When the slaughter had ended, El Señor’s soldiers sheathed their bloody swords and returned to the soldiers’ huts where they had been hidden during the long feast of the brief Apocalypse. Felipe had asked that the cadavers lie exposed for one whole day in the great halls and bedchambers of the castle; then, when the stench became unbearable, El Señor ordered that they all be burned upon a pyre erected in the center of the castle courtyard. Felipe also asked his father that Celestina and Ludovico be spared any punishment, because they had afforded him great pleasure.

“That pleasure is now a part of my education, Father, a part of the pedagogy not to be found in the Latin texts, the things you wanted me to learn in order to be worthy of my legacy.”

El Señor approved what his son had done, for by his actions he had shown himself worthy beyond any doubt of the power that would one day be his. Playfully, he seized his son by the nape of the neck and murmured, with a wink of the eye, that perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing that a father and a son should enjoy the same female. He laughed with prolonged pleasure and then, as a reward, he told Felipe he might have the thing he most desired.

“Father, I want to marry that young lady, our English cousin, who was reprimanded and expelled from the chapel by the vicar.”

“You could have had that wish at any time, my son. All you had to do was ask.”

“Yes, I know. But first I had to be worthy.”

THE SILENT HOUR

It was the deepest, darkest night of the year; the guards were dozing and the dogs lay exhausted from being chained all day. That day El Señor’s son had wedded his young Lady. In this silent hour Ludovico the student went to Celestina and told her to make ready, they must both flee the castle.

“Where will we go?” asked the bewitched young girl.

“First to the forest, to hide,” the student answered. “Then we will look for the old man. He has probably returned to the coast to build another boat. Or perhaps we can find the monk. He is sure to be in some afflicted city. Come, Celestina; hurry.”

“But we will fail, Ludovico, exactly as the young Liege told. I have dreamed it.”

“Yes. We will fail, once, and then again, then still again. But every failure will be a victory. Come, hurry, before the hounds awaken.”

“I do not understand you. But I will follow you. Yes, let us go. We will do what we must do.”

“Come then, my love.”

THE EXHORTATION

What do you expect of the future, my poor unhappy lad? Why did you leave your home, your distant but fertile fields where you were loved and protected? Why are you marching in this Crusade? What have they promised you? Listen, stop the dancing; do not excite yourself; why are you concerned, my son, why are you worried? Rejoin your friends; ask them to be silent, what an infernal din! No one can be rational in such circumstances, how can anything be understood; tell them to put down their fifes and bagpipes and drums and listen to me: the world is in order, it is well ordered; we struggled long and hard to emerge from the shadows; you young do not know what that was. Darkness, my children, barbarism, yes, the sacking, plundering hordes; blood, crime, and ignorance. It was with great effort that we came forth from that hell; more than once we fell back; more than once the sword of the Goth, the conflagration of the Mogul, and the horsemen of the Hun tumbled our constructs as if they were of sand. But look now: we have organized a space, we have created a stable order; look at the cultivated fields, look at the cities safe within their bastions, look at the castle on the heights and give thanks for the protection our Señor the Prince, like a good father, offers in exchange for our vassalage. Go back to your classrooms, my sons, what are you doing here? Go back to Bologna, to Salamanca, and to Paris; you will not find the truth accompanying this rabble, this mob of beggars and prostitutes and false heresiarchs: the truth lies in the teachings of the Church Fathers, and in the flower of their philosophy: the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas, who summed up for eternity all the wisdom of which the human being is capable; do not look for heaven in this orgy of sensuality and music and exultant doubts and heretical ideas, there are no heavens but those defined in the Elucidations: the corporeal heaven we see, the spiritual heaven inhabited by the angels, and the intellectual paradise where the fortunate shall stand face to face with the Holy Trinity. Young men: each of us has a well-established place on this earth; the Liege commands, the serf obeys, the student studies, the priest prepares us for the life eternal, the learned doctor propounds the inviolate truths; no, it is not true what you proclaim; it is not true that we are free because Christ’s sacrifice redeemed us from the sin of Adam; it is not true that the grace of God is within the reach of every man without the intercession of ecclesiastical powers; it is not true that redeemed human flesh may savor its own juices, its own polished smoothness, its joyful contact with other bodies, without fear of sin, we cannot put aside the fact that, as today we throw ourselves with pleasure into bed, soon others will throw us into the tomb; it is not true that the New Jerusalem can be constructed on this earth; anathema be the teachings of the heretic Pelagius, defeated, thankfully, by St. Augustine of Hippo, anathema, too, the teachings of Origen the suspect, who, surely not without some reason, culminated his thought with the atrocious act of self-castration, and the teachings of Joachim of Floris, that tenebrous Italian monk, as well, for no man obtains grace without the Church, as Pelagian heresy would have; nor will a millenary kingdom be realized in the souls of all believers, as Origen speculated, nor will there be, as prophesied in the Joachimite madness, a place in space, a third age, that will be the sabbath and the pleasure of sorrowing humanity, and in which epoch Christ and His Church will be replaced, since the spirit will reign fully in their stead; it is not true that you are the bearers of grace, accompanied by this riffraff, barefoot vagabonds who burn the lands and harvests, stables and farms, who assault and destroy monasteries, churches, and hermits’ cells, who steal food and clothing from devastated castles, who will not work, who contend they live in perfect joy, and who say they do all this to hasten the second coming of a Christ who must in truth be the Antichrist, and so a cruel and seductive tyrant — but a tyrant who may nevertheless be overcome, and for that reason one who is capable of bringing about the defeat of your millenary promise, of a kingdom-of-heaven-on-earth never to come about while Lords are masters of all and serfs masters of nothing. What confusion is this? You say the millenary kingdom will arise only upon a vacant, destroyed, and leveled earth, like that of the first day of Creation; but the Creation, my beloved children, was beyond history and thus cannot be repeated. And you add that only upon this demolished earth may the new Christ be received, a Christ who actually will be the conquerable Antichrist whose downfall will assure, oh yes, will assure that joyous era where the spirit will reign unfettered, not in an individual incarnation, but incarnate in all. But if that cruel and seductive tyrant should not be vanquished, but instead be perpetuated in a third age of weeping and terror and misery, embodying history, and with all his means enlisting those who do not understand that the act of Creation cannot be repeated, that its repetition would only disguise the original act, inscribing it forever in the same history they wish to negate, and thus provide the Antichrist the double weapon of the ability to act, masqueraded as the Creator, and also to reign with impunity as the Ruler — what then? Is this the way you say you are imitating Christ, whose reign will not be of this world, and whom we shall encounter only in Heaven when all time has come to an end, far from the earth, far from history, far from the eschatological delirium with which you are attempting to establish as a part of history everything that has no part in history? Do you truly believe that poverty erases sin, that communal property and the exaltation of sex and the sensuality of the dance and the rejection of all authority and the unrestrained life of vagabonds in the forest, on the beaches, and along the highways could supplant and even overcome the established order? Listen; stop your dancing, why do you not listen? Cease your singing, what infernal racket! How may I make myself heard? Damned sickness of St. Vitus, you are mad, you are sick; rest, go back to your homes, the carnival is over, the revelry cannot last forever: the disarmed crusades, the rebellious, aspiring soul, end in sacrifice upon funeral pyres in seignorial castles; forget your illusions, stop yearning for the impossible, accept the world as it is, stop dreaming! Yes! The Liege has the right to the first nuptial night, and his are the harvests and the honor and respect, and he is entitled to recruit for his wars and impose tributes for his luxuries; and yes, the Bishop can sell indulgences and burn witches and torture heretics who speak of Jesus Christ as if He were a purely human man, our equal … Do not doubt, do not think, do not dream, my unhappy sons; this is the world, the world ends here, there is nothing beyond the edge of the sea and whosoever embarks seeking new horizons will be but a miserable galley slave in a ship of fools: the earth is flat and this is the center of the universe; the land you seek does not exist, there is no such place! There is no such place!

And so a raving, ranting Simón wandered the streets of the cities of his time, cities stifled beneath the plague, buried beneath their own filth. Though they retained their pain, his eyes had lost their clarity forever; he was become a breathless, timbreless voice, an expressionless gaze, a colorless face.

ASHES OF THE BRAMBLES

“That woman … is it you … Celestina?” asked the youth sitting beside the breaking waves when the page-and-drummer’s story had ended.

“I am also called Celestina,” she answered.

“Why are you traveling in this funeral cortege dressed as a man?”

The page looked at the youth with sadness; her beautiful gray eyes asked: Still you do not remember me? Was the impression I left in your memory so weak? But the tattooed lips recounted another story:

I lived with my father in the forest. He used to say that the forest is like the desert in other lands: the place of nothingness, the place to which one flees, for in the world it was our fate to inhabit there were so many things one must flee: empty spaces will be our protection. He, and his fathers before him, my father told me, fled the world because the world was plague, poverty, war, and an early death. When I was eleven I wanted to know why; I never completely understood his answer. In the memory of his ancestors (I retained only images; they filtered through my memory, already filtered through the memory of my father) those plague-ridden cities, those wars and invasions, the chaotic hordes and orderly phalanxes, slavery and hunger, passed like diurnal phantoms. I never completely understood; as I have told you, all that was left to me were certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel. Our life was very simple. We lived in an ordinary hut. I spent most of the year tending sheep. I recall very clearly the time of my childhood. Everything had a meaning and a place. The sleepy summer sky and the early frosts of winter; the sheep and the bleating; the sun was a year and the moon turned in a month; day was a smile, and night, fear. But I remember especially the autumn time; between September and December, my life was flooded with unforgettable odors; it was the time to gather ashes to use in washing, and also the time to collect the oak-tree bark I used in dyeing, and forest resins for making torches and candles; and honey from the wild honeycomb.

We lived an isolated life; my father, when we walked far from our hut, pointed out the ancient Roman roads and told me that those routes now overgrown with grass and torn apart by invasions were once the pride of the ancient empire: straight, clean, cobbled. We sold our honey and torches, our candles and dyes; I began to sew and to dye clothing that found buyers among the voyagers traveling the new roads — worn smooth, my father said, by all those trampling feet — between the fairs and holy places, ports and universities; in this way I learned the happy and distant-sounding names of Compostela, Bologna, Venice, Chartres, Antwerp, the Baltic Sea … And thus I came to know that the world extended far beyond our forest. Men on foot and men on horseback, beasts of burden as well as the carts of the merchants, all abandoned the ancient roadways that only linked one castle to another. The travelers told me: We are afraid to pass close by the fortresses, for the Lords invariably rob us, rape our women, and impose all kinds of taxes upon us. I asked my father: What is a Lord? and he answered: A father who does not love his children as I love you. I did not understand. I sold our honey and candles in exchange for clothing I then washed with the ashes and dyed with the bark, then exchanged again for onions and for ducks. And so I helped my father; together we tended our flock and later, after the time for shearing the lambs had passed, he would travel to the castle to deliver to our Liege bales of wool in exchange for his permission to continue living in the isolated forest. But, little by little, our forest became fraught with dangers.

I remember the first time I saw El Señor. He had never visited us, but one day he came to advise us that every Saturday from that time forward, except on Twelfth Night and Pentecost Eves, accompanied by priests and horsemen, by farmers and shepherds, he would devote to hunting and destroying marauding wolves and to setting traps for them throughout the district. I, who always had frightened away the wolves with bonfires and burning brands, could not understand the need for killing or trapping them. But my father said: “They want to come into the forest; someday even here we will not be able to live in peace and we will have to flee again, searching, for the harsh desert.” But I recognized in the hard and fearful gaze of El Señor only the desire to assert his presence and the fear that someone, someday, somewhere, would fail to recognize him. This twelve-year-old girls understand, for we, too, fear that, when we cease to be girls and become women, people who have always loved us will not know us.

Then came the strangest event of my childhood. One clear spring night I was tending my sheep and in spite of the full moon and balmy air had built the usual fire to protect myself and protect my flock, when close by I heard the sound of an animal in pain. I picked up one of the brands, sure that a wolf was approaching; and so it was, except that the moan should have warned me: it wasn’t a howl in the distance, or the approaching stealth I recognized in wild beasts; it was a very tender and painful moan, and it was very close by. I lowered the flame: the light fell on a large gray she-wolf, her ears pricked up and her eyes feverish. Ever since I had learned to speak I had learned, before anything else, the sayings about wolves, for they were our greatest danger; and in spite of the tameness of this wolf, I said to myself: even if a wolf grow old and lose its teeth, it’s still a wolf. But the she-wolf showed me a wounded paw she’d hurt in one of the traps set by El Señor during the Saturday hunts and I, in a childish and spontaneous way, knelt beside her and took the paw she offered me.

The she-wolf licked my hand and lay down beside my fire. I saw then that her belly was great and that the beast was not moaning only from the pain of the wound but for a graver reason: I had watched my sheep give birth and I understood what was happening. I stroked the she-wolf’s angular head and waited. Soon she was giving birth; imagine my surprise, young sailor, when I saw emerge from between the she-wolf’s legs two tiny blue feet exactly like those of a human baby; I was doubly confounded by the fact that even when baby rams — the animals most inclined to the monstrous — are born, even with two heads, those two heads appear first, but the she-wolf was delivering a child, and that child was emerging feet first.

It was a boy; he was born quickly, hunched and bluish; I tried to take him, afraid for him, born as he was on the ground of the forest, amid brambles and dust and bleating sheep and tinkling bells that seemed to celebrate the event; only then did the she-wolf snarl, and she herself licked the baby and cut the cord with her sharp teeth. I touched my breasts and realized that although I knew a lot I was still a little girl; the she-wolf pawed the newborn infant to her teats, and suckled him. I saw then, upon the infant’s back, the sign of the cross; not a painted cross, but part of his flesh; flesh incarnate, young sailor.

I didn’t know what to do; I would have liked to take the she-wolf and her offspring to my father’s house, but the moment I tried to separate them or pull them both from the brambles, the she-wolf again snarled and snapped at my hand. Filled with fear, astonishment, and uneasiness, I returned to our cottage. I told my father what had happened and at first he laughed at me and then he told me to take care; he repeated one of the sayings I tell you now: “When the wolf gets his fill of savage ways, he joins the priesthood.”

Very early the following morning, I returned to the bramble thicket, but neither the she-wolf nor the child was there. I was afraid for them, and I cried. I prayed that the she-wolf would find a deep hidden den where she could protect the child; otherwise, both would die during the hunt the following Saturday. My father came to the place where it had happened, and when he, as I, found nothing, he said I shouldn’t fall asleep again while I was tending the flock, for I had already seen that wolves can appear in dreams, and one day while I was asleep they might really appear.

In spite of all the distractions our forests offered — even though its limits were shrinking — I never forgot that strange event. I recall that more people passed by every year of my adolescence. I met students traveling to their universities; horsemen and clerics; jugglers, minstrels, drug sellers, sorcerers, itinerant workers, freed serfs, soldiers without employ, beggars, and barefoot pilgrims carrying long staffs with hooks holding bottles; all the travelers of the routes of our Christian empire. And farmers also passed by, complaining that they had lost their lands, or that they couldn’t pay both the tribute demanded by their Liege and the taxes demanded by the cities that spread outside their walls, absorbing fields and forests for themselves. And I never stopped wondering if, in some manner as mysterious as his birth, the destiny of the child born and suckled of the she-wolf was not somehow tied to the destiny of all these people who now marched through the same brambles which had witnessed his birth.

And one day I had a new, although fleeting and incomplete, response, for it was the memory of a child who is beginning to remember. Months before the she-wolf’s whelping, just now I remembered, some of El Señor’s men rode by on horseback, announcing their presence with singing and banners and long-tailed monkeys hanging to the backs of the chargers; and among the servants of the castle, also clinging like a monkey, with his knees hooked around the saddle horn, came El Señor’s jester, with his many-colored hose and belled cap; and this buffoon was dandling a very blond and very young child, laughing at the cool branches of our forest. This child, too, had a cross between his shoulder blades. The procession passed by quickly, and when I told this to my father, he laughed, and said that I was a very fanciful little girl, and that cutting a cross upon one’s back with a dagger or branding one with a red-hot iron was an old custom of the Crusaders and a common occurrence among the pilgrims. But this was a very small child. If the buffoon and the child ever again passed through our forest, I would approach him and say, “I know him; I saw him born.”

And if the forest had been converted into a much-traveled route (and how many new things my dazzled eyes beheld: caravans laden with coffers filled with crowns and swords and coins with Arabic inscriptions, chests filled with intoxicating spices from the Orient), it also had created its own dangers. Isolated before, now we felt closed in, not only by the wolves, but by the bandits who hid in the forest thickets awaiting passing travelers; and what is worse, by horsemen in ambush, former Lords forced into the forest darkness by the debts accumulated on their former domains. This my father also told me. They carried long knives; all they had been able to salvage from their disaster.

One day El Señor visited us again; he arrived on a dun-colored horse and told my father that, from then on, the products from the land and animals we had always paid him were not enough, but my father would have to pay with money for the use of the land on which he lived and grazed his flocks and dyed his cloth. My father replied that he neither had nor used money, but instead traded one thing for another. El Señor told us that rather than ducks and onions we should demand money for our bales of wool and our honey and dyes. “Have your astonished eyes seen, serf, the chests and coffers passing through this forest? Well, their contents are delivered into the hands of the merchants of the city and to buy them, to adorn my castle and clothe my women, I need money.”

It was not this that disquieted my father, not the fact it destroyed our simple customs and confronted us with the problem of how we might procure money and the novelty of dealing with the merchants of the towns; it was the way El Señor looked at me, and the question he asked my father: “When will the girl be married?” For then he added; “Marry her soon, for noblemen are roaming this forest who have lost their lands, but not their taste for virgin girls; what’s more, they are in a mood to avenge the loss of their seignorial rights, and as the people of the cities have organized the defense of their lives and possessions, such noblemen are taking advantage of the daughters of men like you, defenseless in the forest. In any case,” laughed El Señor, “remember you must save her maidenhead for me, because I still have power, and I swear to increase it, whether at the cost of the burghers or the impoverished princes. Guard your girl from them all, shepherd; don’t let it be said afterward that you allowed her to be ruined for both you and me.”

He rode away laughing and my innocent father decided to dress me as a boy from then on, although later we learned that El Señor had died of the fever before I could marry or he could take me. Dressed in sackcloth and rough leather breeches, my hair cut like a lad’s, I continued my work of dyeing and herding, and I became a woman. Several years went by; my father grew old and our lives changed scarcely at all. Until one day there appeared armed men from the Prince Don Felipe, heir to the lands and privileges of his dead father. Their mission was to gather all the boys in the forest for service at arms and as servants; they captured me in the oak forest that from my childhood had been my protecting habitation and took me with them while I reflected upon my thankless fate: whether dressed as a man or a woman, like misfortune awaited me.

When Prince Felipe saw me dressed like a shepherd lad he did not guess my true condition, although my features seemed to awaken something disturbing in his memory. I, I swear it, had never seen him before. The new Señor assigned me to the service of his mother, where the presence of women, I then learned, was forbidden. As a young shepherdess I had learned to play the flute and I let this be known to the head steward in order to entertain myself and as a distraction in my desire to live separated from the servants and soldiers, before whom I never disrobed. I was able to live in the quarters of the musicians, who were too occupied at night and early morning in sleeping off their drunkenness to notice me, and too busy during the day taking advantage of the funereal self-absorption of the mistress of the castle, constantly kneeling before her husband’s embalmed cadaver, to steal provisions and bottles from the cellars. The mother of El Señor’s son had forbidden all gay music in her presence, and although she respected my musical talents, she ordered me to learn to play the drum, for as she was living in continuous mourning she wished to hear only funereal sounds. And thus, when the elderly Lady began her long pilgrimage with her husband’s corpse, she assigned me to the last position in the procession, dressed all in black and playing my drum, an announcement of mourning. La Señora, mother of the present Señor, does not admit women in her company because she is jealous of them all, as if her husband’s cold dead flesh were still capable of the abuses that won him fame in life and from which, by my great good fortune, I was saved, although only to fall into this miserable condition.

But I have wandered from essential things, and I wish to bring my story to a close as night falls upon this beach. Only by a mistake that the mayor and the halberdiers will pay very dearly for, we entered yesterday a convent of nuns who wanted to take possession of El Señor’s mummified body. And that is why, instead of traveling all night cloaked in the darkness the Lady prefers, we fled and are traveling by day. Thus I have found you. Now you must come with me.

“Who am I?” asked the shipwrecked youth. “Where have I come from?”

But the page had ended her story, and did not wish to answer him. She offered both hands to the youth, but he held out only one. With the other, impelled by some inexplicable fascination, he picked up a sealed green bottle, a piece of flotsam tossed by the waves onto this Cabo de los Desastres.

EL SEÑOR SLEEPS

El Señor had faltered in the midst of his narration, after recalling the affair with Ludovico and Celestina (imagined on the ship of the ancient Pedro, but actual in the bloodstained castle; more hallucinatory, nevertheless, the dreamed than the real). Guzmán had served him a soothing potion; and now, as he finished the story, repeating the exhortation of the monk Simón faithfully transcribed for El Señor by the Court Chronicler, the master asked for a second potion; Guzmán, ever solicitous, prepared it as El Señor murmured: “This is the story I wished to record on my birthday, which will also be the day of the second burial of all my ancestors. El Señor, may he rest in glory, was my father; and my name as a youth was Felipe.”

“And the young Lady of the castle?” Guzmán inquired, as he offered the narcotic to his Prince.

“She is our Señora, who dwells here…”

His lids heavy, he repeated, “Our Señora…” but could not finish the prayer; the sleeping potion had swept him to the depths of a heavy stupor in which he imagined himself besieged by eagles and hawks deep within a valley of stone. Sluggishly, he searched for an exit; but the valley was an open prison, a vast, deep jail with steep, sheer walls. One single distant unbarred window: the blue and mottled patch of sky high above, accessible only to the birds. And these birds of prey would soar high in the sky and then dive with rage to attack an abandoned and imprisoned El Señor, more heavy-limbed than fearful. And after wounding him, the eagles and falcons again soared to the heights. Immediately, without logical transition, he dreamed he was three different men, the three a single man although possessing three different faces in three distinct times; the three, always, captive in the stony valley with no exit but the sky. Dragging himself through sharp-pointed rocks of this frozen wasteland, he peered into the pupils of the first of the men who was himself and he could see, in one of the eyes of these alter egos, Pedro’s sons mutilated by the hounds; and in the other pupil he saw himself as an adolescent protecting himself from his father’s falcons. But the face of the first man that was he, through whose pupils these scenes were projected, was no longer the youth fleeing with the sons of the serf, or the youth fearful of the falcons, but the identical face of the man who one fateful day had threaded his way among the corpses of children, women, farmers, artisans, beggars, prostitutes, lepers, Jews, mudejares, penitents, heresiarchs, madmen, prisoners, and musicians led to their slaughter in the castle so that he, Felipe, might demonstrate to El Señor that he was worthy of inheriting the power of the older man.

Why did these painful images of a fearful youth persist in the eyes of the face that was both seductive and cruel? The dreamer could not answer his own question; he fled from the first man to encounter the third; he recognized himself now in the form of an ancient man dressed in black lying upon a large flat rock, his face turned to the sun; but the sun neither illuminated nor melted the waxen visage that repelled the light, and through its facial orifices crawled worms less white than the ancient’s skin: from the ears, between the lips, through the nostrils, twisting and pullulating; and moist behind the milky concave curtain of the eyes, for behind the transparent cornea writhed a colony of tiny, threatening eggs.

He turned from the third man and lay down — he, the dreamer, the second man, the actual Señor, the prisoner of the profound sleep induced by Guzmán’s potions — face down among the rocks; he opened his arms in a cross and begged forgiveness; but his dominion over measurable time had ended; he knew he would remain there forever, prostrate, mouth agape, breathing uselessly, prisoner of this palace of shattered rock, until the swallows built their nests in his open palms, until the falcons and eagles, in a false and unbelievable spirit of love for the species, no longer dived to strike: he, too, would be an eagle — a conquered eagle, an eagle of stone. “One wolf does not bite another,” El Señor murmured in the prayer in his dream; he did not doubt the dark instinct of the relationships which in this jail of rapacious birds led him to think of other, of vulpine threats. Eagle and wolf, he murmured, wolf and lamb, swallow and eagle, spiritual lover and libertine, devout Christian and bloodthirsty criminal, punctilious student of the truth and unscrupulous manipulator of the lie, I am but one of you: a Spanish gentleman.

Lofty jail, icy sun, flesh of wax, charnel house … the dreamer sobbed: Where, my sons; to whom shall I bequeath my inheritance?

GUZMAN SPEAKS

In the tossing and turning of his nightmare, El Señor finally lay face down on the bed, arms opened in a cross. Guzmán circled about him, pacing always more nervously about the bed, as if El Señor’s relentless sleep were a test of the narcotic prepared and administered by the vassal. And nevertheless he knew no more powerful drug than this mixture of the male and female blossoms, black and white, pepper and arsenic, of the mandrake, the tree with the face of a man. Only after his master lay face down in the customary position for prayers on the chapel floor, but also (Guzmán could not know that) imitating the posture he was that instant dreaming, so the postures in life and dream coincided, only then did Guzmán tell himself that he was master of El Señor’s nightmare, as he could never be during the cruel penitential vigils. The impossible mask dropped: that of the Guzmán who knew how to cure dogs and train hawks and organize the hunt. He discarded that mask for what it was: a thin layer of flesh maintained — easily now, from habit — over his true features. Closer to the bone the true Guzmán was revealed: the expression recognized by the hounds, feared by the deer, and accepted as natural by the hawks; the rapacious profile that revealed itself to El Señor when the servant least desired: kneeling to pick up a breviary, withdrawing to fulfill a command.

Guzmán drew a long dagger from its sheath and held it over El Señor’s back.

Here am I, he said to himself (to him), master of your sleep, master of your unconscious body, even if only to see you in sleep as you can never see yourself. If the value of a man is determined by the price promised for his murder, you, Sire, are of no value: no one would pay me to kill you. If I wish to murder you, it must be done without spilling a single drop of your blood or collecting a single maravedi. But you, if you knew my desire, how much would you pay for my death, Sire? And so our roles are reversed, for although you are everything, no one would give me anything for your death; whereas I am nothing, but for my death, to avoid your own, you would give everything.

Guzmán ceased speaking only to Guzmán: as he raised his voice, Bocanegra picked up his ears: Imbecile, you do not deserve your power; you will never even know that your sin was not in murdering the innocents but in wasting the opportunity to include your father and your mother and your sweetheart in the slaughter and thus build your absolute authority upon the absolute freedom of the crime: an ascension to power without the need of dynasty and without the pathos of being who you are merely by inheritance; you could have had a power free of any debt. You botched even your crime, poor stupid Felipe; you inscribed it upon the mortal line of your succession, instead of converting it into the uncompromised basis for your absolutism; that is the reason for your dissatisfaction, not remorse, but the mutilation you wrought upon your inner self. You aged mortally in the instant you presented your crime to your father, having killed your father’s subjects. Did you want witnesses? Is that why you committed the error of pardoning the student and the witch? You will regret that; it is I, Guzmán, who tells you, you will regret that, because even an ignorant mountain bandit knows that one must never pardon an enemy, however innocent he may be; the pardon strips him of his innocence and turns him into an avenger. Did you want witnesses? You had me write your confession so that the events you recounted might come into being, because for you only what is written exists, and you understand no permanency but that of a piece of paper; bah, this very moment I could burn it; this very moment I could rewrite it, eliminate and add, write that you also murdered Ludovico and Celestina, and then you would yourself believe it, because it was so written; and if that man and woman should reappear you would only see two phantoms. Did you want witnesses? You are alone. Without witnesses, your crime would have been so absolute that only you and the world would have shared it; your witness would have been history, not the whimpering dog who hears your laments. Hear me, poor, suffering, sick little Felipe, aged before your time by your lacerating asceticism; I, Guzmán, tell you I am not what you believe or would like to believe, some upstart upon whom you can bestow minute favors that are supposed to seem enormous to me. It is I, Guzmán, who tells you this, not some bastard son of a bitch, but a Lord like you, although broken by debts. Not some scum covered with scabs and filth, but another Prince, although destitute. Not some young sneak thief from some dusty hamlet in Aragon, but a boy who like you had the opportunity to learn the arts of falconry and archery, horsemanship, and the hunt. Not some lout from Guadarrama turned highway robber, but a nobleman incapable of understanding or of holding back an invisible movement in which land, the base of all power, could be converted into insubstantial money, and where castle walls constructed for eternity would last a briefer time than winter’s swallows; I, reduced to vassalage by a power with neither fortification nor cannons by the usurers, merchants, and miserable clerks of leprous cities. My fathers and grandfathers, Sire, fulfilled before your ancestors the ceremony of homage and thus entered a pact: our service in exchange for your protection. In this way, we would all maintain the fundamental principle of our society; no Lord without land and no land without a Lord. And we were maintaining the balance between strength and need; the power of the Liege in exchange for the protection and survival of the weak. And within this major pact, we entered a lesser — although for me, Sire, one no less important, reasoned, or vital: the service of noble vassals given in exchange for your protection would assure that we nobles would always be nobles and that the lower classes would be kept in their place, for the blood of the two is not equal, nor can their destinies be equal. But see me today, Sire, born a nobleman and become a servant — the blame is yours. You did not honor the treaty. Our service continued, but not your protection. You allowed the debilitation of the power based on the land, confronted with the power of commerce based on money. You undertook costly and distant campaigns against heresy, forgetting the counsel of the ancient Inquisitor to the zealous Augustinian: rebels grow tall with attention, but are effaced by indifference. You squandered your fortune in constructing a useless, inaccessible, austere mausoleum; the common man identifies power with luxury, not with death. Your guilty conscience led you to submit your interests to religion; the astute Prince subjects religion to his interests. But behind your sterile obsessions — heresy and necrophilia — a real world is growing, agitating and transforming everything. You left your noble vassals undefended; you were too much preoccupied with persecuting heretics and building sepulchers; we had to sell our lands, assume debts, close the workshops that could not compete with the city merchants, and sell our serfs their freedom. Faced with the power of the cities, you vowed to increase yours at our expense. We paid for your crusades and your crypts; you did not exterminate the heretics, for where one martyred rebel falls, ten spring up in his place; and you will not resuscitate the corpses of your ancestors; they will not accompany you in the solitudes of your governing. You have destroyed the grades of nobiliary authority between the Liege and the cities. So today there remain only two powers; that of the minor nobleman no longer exists. I, Sire, allied myself to what destroyed me; I passed over to the enemy lines so as not to be conquered by them; and I joined your service to enable myself to participate in both powers until this battle is decided; for it will be decided, Sire, have no doubt about that; and then I shall opt for the conqueror. What I am doing is called politics; choosing the lesser, the more secure, of two undesirable solutions. I, Guzmán, tell you that I learned to speak the language of the human rubble that constructs your palaces and hunts your boars; I, Guzmán, learned to control your peasants, to threaten and gratify them in turn; it was not my destiny to cut the heart from the deer and with this ceremony adulate those rowdies; I, Guzmán, converted by necessity into a knave, an informer, and for that reason cosseted by Lords who would be incapable of knowing what was happening in their domains if a Prince among bandits did not do it for them — and receive their favors for the task. I tell you this; I, Guzmán, like you, educated for divine and unending seigniory, but forced by circumstances to know the very temporal and profane sophistries with which these new men combat inherited power; I, Guzmán, capable, like you, of crime, not in the name of dynastic providence but in the name of political history. For to your faith in the hereditary continuity that makes of you a harassed accident of birth, these new men oppose the simple will of their own persons, with neither antecedents nor descendancy, a will that is consumed in itself, and whose dispersed potency is called history. I belong to both bands, my Lord; I am impelled to vengeance against them by the recollection of my seignorial youth, by the subjugation of my destiny by men of the cities who mock destiny, for theirs flows as swiftly as their ducats pass from hand to hand; I am impelled to vengeance against you by this question that I dare ask you only while you are sleeping: last of the Lieges, corrupt and crepuscular sum of the powers you wrested from the minor nobles but could not maintain against the great burghers, will your strength be less than that of a knave? And will you know less than a knave? But without the knave could you manage to be anything but a witness to the splendiferous sunset of your power? Our Señor … the last Señor. Bah … I shall mark my time patiently, I shall cure your dogs and order your hunts so that you maintain some semblance of your power; and I shall prepare for the inevitable contest between your power and that of the new men; if my will does not weaken and if fortune favors me, I shall be arbiter between both; and someday, have no fear, I shall govern in your name as governed the stewards of the indolent Kings of France.

THE DOGS

Guzmán walked around the sleeping body, still holding high the long knife, and a grieving and restless Bocanegra growled quietly; then Guzmán laughed and sheathed the dagger. He walked to the door and Bocanegra’s growl rose to a ferocious pitch; he opened the door and took the leashes of several steaming, jostling, expectant greyhounds, along with vessels containing various compounds, from the hands of the faithful hunt attendants. He led the dogs into the bedchamber; Bocanegra, bound to his board, could not move, but he barked desperately; the other dogs approached to sniff him, as Guzmán called them by name: here, Fragoso; here, Hermitaña; down, Preciada; quiet, Herreruelo; here, Blandil. He took the forepaws of the swollen Hermitaña and rubbed her dugs and engorged black teats made tender by the overdue whelping; then he threw her on the bed of the sleeping Liege; he took the vessel containing a paste of ash and watered wine and briskly anointed the bitch’s gaping genitals. Then with a burst of laughter he spoke to Preciada: “And how is my pretty little Preciada? How do you like going without food for a day? What sweet eyes she has, here … here.”

He held out a portion of leavened dough and as the ravenous bitch ate, and before she realized, he had inserted three grains of coarse salt in her anus; then he unleashed Herreruelo, who went straight for the bitch’s black hole, and excited by the trembling induced by hunger and the salt, mounted her and began pumping energetically, all on El Señor’s bed. Then Guzmán called Blandil to the bed, fed him a mixture of human excrement and goat’s milk, and the dog began to urinate on the bed while Herreruelo and Preciada fornicated, linked together like a monster with two heads and eight paws, and Hermitaña finally began to deliver her pups in her master’s bed, one after another, and each one, born in the island of silk between the contracted paws and the warm muzzle, was licked clean by the bitch, who cut the cord with her teeth and then nuzzled the pups to her pulsing teats. Bocanegra barked, incapable, now the hour had finally arrived, of defending his master: Guzmán jerked three hairs from his tail and the great mastiff stopped barking, as if he were fearful of being expelled from his own quarters. The chief huntsman took Fragoso by the collar and dragged him to El Señor’s curule chair where the master’s clothing was scattered.

“Fragoso, good Fragoso, my beast,” he murmured into the silky ear. “Smell the master’s clothing, smell it well, that’s a boy. Go get him, Fragoso, go at him, boy.” Guzmán stimulated the dog, stroking its testicles and penis, and then unleashed him, directing him at the bed, where he leaped upon the person sleeping there drugged by the heavy vapors of the mandrake. Seated upon his Liege’s wrinkled clothing in the curule chair, Guzmán observed the spectacle, laughing, master of El Señor’s infinite dream.

“I know perfectly how to cure the dogs, but not El Señor. But what are your miserable amulets, Master Felipe, compared to my ointments of excrement and hog fat. When the hour arrives, you will not be able to save yourself, my fine Prince.”

Then he looked at the crouching, suffering, confused, and resentful Bocanegra and said: “I know you, brute, and I know that you know me. You alone know what I really think, what I do, and what I plan to do. El Señor has no more faithful ally than you. Sad that you can do nothing to tell your master all you see and hear, what only you know; too bad, poor unhappy Bocanegra. Yes, we are rivals. Guard yourself well from me, for I know how to defend myself from you. You have the weapons, although not the voice, to be a menace to me. I, to combat you, have both weapons and voice.”

In the depths of the walled valley, accompanied by a youth and an ancient, El Señor murmured prayers in which he asked three things: a brief life, an unchanging world, and eternal glory.

JUAN AGRIPPA

Enclosed; condemned to hear the sounds; every day, one day after another, the expected sounds, the day filled to overflowing with repetitious sounds that paralyzed every action except waiting and listening; the yearning for the exception, the accident of chance that would interrupt the monotony of the established sounds: matins, the cock’s crow, the hammer, the wheels of the oxcarts coming from Burgo de Osuna, the smith’s bellows, the shouts of the supervisors, the laughter of the water carriers, crackling fires in the taverns, deliveries of bales of hay and straw, the murmur of the looms, the screech of slate in the quarries, the hollow sound of tiles being broken and fitted, the barking of dogs, the wings of the hawk in flight, the cautious footsteps of Guzmán, the monotonous chant of El Señor’s prayers, the orotund pealing of the evening bells. This is the accustomed, through every repetitious day; this is the first thing she would wish to interrupt, to disturb; but she comes to fear more the shock of an unexpected sound; the succession of known sounds is preferable; one can wait without waiting.

La Señora wept throughout the night; not from grief, that she would have rejected as unseemly, nor for a humiliation that she would know how to disguise with an exaggerated dignity of external bearing.

“He has been condemned. He will be burned alive beside the palace stables,” Guzmán told her.

Slowly and with sensual pleasure, La Señora looked around the isolated luxury of her bedchamber, decorated from the beginning to contrast with the mystic austerity her husband had desired — and achieved. This corner of Arabia decorated in secret by La Señora with the help of Guzmán and the painter-priest Julián was far, still very far, from her ultimate aspiration: re-creating a Court of Love like the celebrated courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Poitiers and the gallant fairs celebrated in Treviso, the court of joy and solace where a Castle of Love had been defended by noble ladies against the assault of the rival bands of noblemen of Padua and Venice, the former dressed completely in black and the Venetians completely in white. But today in this chamber redolent of Chinese ginger, carnation, pepper, camphor, and musk, a major accouterment of pleasure was missing. La Señora accepted as the flaw in the luxury that, in order to maintain it, in order to dwell in it, from time to time it was necessary to abandon it, to summon the black bearers, climb into the heavily perfumed and curtained palanquin, position the falcon on her gauntleted wrist, and travel the desert, coastal, and mountain roads seeking the reborn prisoner; without him the luxuries of the bedchamber were but theatrical trappings, a dimensionless curtain, like the silken and gold veil that had belonged to the Caliph of Córdoba, Hisham II, and now adorned one wall of her chamber. Quite different destinies, in truth, thought La Señora: hers and that of her accursed mother-in-law, El Señor’s mother; for while the one wandered hazardous roads searching for a renewed lover, the other wandered the same roads bearing the everlasting cadaver of an eternal lover.

Brother Julián, the palace iconographer, had endured many wakeful nights delicately tracing with minute brushstrokes on porcelain brooches the figure and place dreamed by La Señora: the place, the coast of the Cabo de los Desastres; the figure, a young man lying face down on the beach, naked, with a blood-red cross between his shoulder blades. Brother Julián was grateful for the potions of belladonna that La Señora furnished him to maintain his condition — lucid and dreamy, absent and present, remote and near, participant in the dream and the dream’s faithful executor — while the monk’s pale hand re-created the material lines of the dream fantasies communicated to him by La Señora. Looking at the drawing, the mistress kept to herself the ultimate meaning of the painter’s art: the identity. Brother Julián, in his drugged trance, added minuscule details to the drawing, the six toes on each foot, for example, of the man presumed to be the victim of a shipwreck.

“Hexadigitalism is the privilege of those destined to renew their family bloodlines. Believe me, Señora, the sterility of your union is not your fault but the tariff accumulated by the family of El Señor, who, remember, is your second cousin. If you trace back a strict dynastic line, you will see that your common ancestors are reduced to a very small number. Every living man carries within himself thirty phantoms; such is the extant relationship between the living and the dead. Your line, Señora, goes back to only a half dozen incestuous brothers and sisters living for centuries in the promiscuous isolation of their castles, avoiding all contact with the mob and their pestilential menace; isolated, telling you the ancient stories of the birth, passion, and death of Kings. What is certain is that the price of extreme consanguinity as well as the excesses of extreme fertility are in the end enemies to dynastic continuity. Cambyses, King of Persia, married his sister Meroë and when she was carrying his child killed her by kicking her in the belly. See in this crime the ultimate in certain sibling relationships. And on the other hand, twins — a form of pregnancy as superfluous as redundant — have killed three great dynasties, those of the Caesars, the Antonines, and the Carolingians. Renew the bloodlines, Señora, seek neither sterile incest nor prolific births but love and its customs, which are the ways of passion that engender beauty and precision. Enough, Señora, of this attempt to deceive your subjects: the familiar public announcement of your pregnancy, hoping to attenuate the expectation of an heir, merely forces you to pretense: you must stuff your farthingale with pillows and imitate a condition that is not yours; then follows the equally familiar announcement of a miscarriage. Frustrated hopes are often converted into irritation, if not into open rebellion. El Señor, and you also, Señora, are beginning to suffer excessively for past legitimizations, for in our world custom makes law and a twice-repeated event becomes a custom. The rights of your dominion must be exercised continually or they will be lost. El Señor is no longer seen to wage war, to subdue, with the spilling of blood, any to whom it might have occurred to spill the blood of the powerful. And you are not seen to produce heirs. You must be cautious. Allay their discontent with one theatrical blow: fulfill their hopes by producing a son. You are the daughter of the happy English isle, Anglia plena jocis, and naturally you are unsuited to this Castilian severity. Wager everything on pleasure; combine it, Señora, with duty and you will win all the games. You may rely on me, whatever you decide; the only proof of paternity will be the features of El Señor that I introduce upon the seals, miniatures, medallions, and portraits that will be the representation of your son for the multitude and for posterity. I cannot change an infant’s features, but I can emphasize in my icons the hereditary features of the supposed father, our Señor; I can erase the real features, whether they be those of one of your black bearers, of some common construction supervisor, or of the poor youth, your latest lover, condemned to die at the stake. And let us give thanks to God that he is dying for the secondary and not the principal crime. But to return to our concern: the populace will know the face of your son only through the coins bearing the effigy I have designed that are minted and circulated in our kingdoms; the ordinary citizen will never have occasion to compare the engraved image with the real face; he will never see your infant except from a distance, when you deign to display him from some high, remote balcony; and history will know only the effigy that I, following your will, leave to it. For, no matter how beautiful your offspring, I shall charge myself to mark upon his face the stigmata of this house: prognathism.”

“You are right, Brother Julián. I should have allowed myself to become pregnant by that beautiful boy.”

“Ah yes, he was truly beautiful! But think no more of him; he will be dead within a few hours. Better think of the new youth, the one of your dream.”

“And what will his name be?”

“Juan Agrippa. Remember, six toes on each foot and a blood-red cross upon his back.”

“What do the name and the marks signify?”

“That Rome still lives.”

“How do you know these things?”

“Because you have dreamed them, Señora.”

“I don’t know whether the dream is completely mine; I don’t know…”

“Some dreams can be induced, and some can be shared.”

“You lie. You know more than you are telling.”

“But if I told her everything, La Señora would cease to have confidence in me. I do not betray La Señora’s secrets; she must not insist that I betray mine.”

“It is true. Then you would cease to interest me.”

La Señora and the miniaturist monk, both under the effects of the belladonna, stared at each other unseeing, their pupils dilated. In the pupils of the tall, fragile, blond, and bald cleric was revealed the image of an eternal empire, renewed and immortal throughout all the convolutions of blood and war, of bed and gallows; darkly reflected in La Señora’s pupils was the chance event only, but not the continuity; the event was pleasure, the continuity the duty Julián wished to impose upon her; she saw, multiplied ad infinitum, the figure of the youth lying on the beach, and between his thighs she wished to divine the seed of pleasure as well as the seed of pregnancy; she did not know, actually, whether both could germinate at the same time.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, against his will, my husband goes to the hunt.”

“Even better; he will be distracted and absent-minded; and you will be able to go as far as the coast.”

“Tell Guzmán to ready the litter, the hawk, and the Libyan bearers.”

“He will want a guard to accompany you. It is a very lonely area.”

“Let my orders be obeyed! And if your prophecies are true, Brother Julián, you will have pleasure.”

“That is all a contrite and devout soul could ask.”

BRIEF LIFE, ETERNAL GLORY, UNCHANGING WORLD

When he awoke, El Señor attributed the filth of his bed to the attack of the eagles and the mockery of the hawks during his dream of the stone valley: bound to his board, Bocanegra dozed, exhausted. Captive in what he believed to be the physical prolongation of his nightmare, El Señor had no time to feel revulsion; the stench of the bedchamber, the inexplicable presence of the thick slobber, the tortured stools, animal placenta, and stains of urine and blood, semen and grease, were less compelling than the will to decipher the tripartite prayer that echoed through his dream like an airy refrain: Brief life, eternal glory, unchanging world.

Then he was struck by the recollection of the Cathedral profaned on the day of his victory: excrement and blood — copper and iron — of what were they signs? Inheritance or promise? Residuum or new dawn?

He sensed a flash of light; he turned his head; he saw himself reflected in a hand mirror resting against a water pitcher near the head of his bed. He saw himself, his mouth opened like a man yelling. But no scream escaped from that breathless, choking throat.

He picked up the hand mirror and hurried into the chapel, fleeing from the silent horror of the filthy bedchamber. In the chapel greater dangers existed, real dangers, dangers far removed from the intangible menace of his bedchamber.

Once there, he found time to question, once again, the Christ without a halo standing to one side in the painting brought from Orvieto. He received no response from the figure; then he walked to the stairway.

Mirror in hand, he paused at the first step.

He raised the mirror to his eyes, studying his image.

It was he. A man born thirty-seven years earlier: serene forehead, skin like wax, one cruel eye, one tender (both veiled by heavy-lidded, saurian eyelids), straight nose with flaring nostrils, as if compassionately amplified by God himself to facilitate the difficult respiration; thick lips, salient jaw, disguised both by the silken beard and moustache and by the folds of the high white ruff that hid the neck, separating the head from the trunk; above the ruff the head was poised like a captive bird.

El Señor gazed at himself and tried to recall how he had looked in his youth when he fled through the forest with the sons of Pedro and, with Celestina, reached the sea; how the wind had whipped his then curly hair and battered his bare chest; how the thorns had torn at his boots and the branches ripped his shirt; how strong his legs had been and how his sun-bronzed arms had glistened as he tugged at the ship’s sail beside the student Ludovico; ah, to be young …

No longer was he that youth, but neither was he yet this man: watching himself in the mirror, he ascended the first step; and the change, although almost imperceptible, did not escape his keen attention, his secret proposal; the mouth was a bit more open, as if the difficulty of breathing had increased. He ascended the second step: in the mirror the network of wrinkles was more finely woven about eyes a little more sunken and hollow.

He climbed the third step, indifferent to the swift and inexplicable changes of the light, attentive only to the changing image in the mirror: the front teeth were missing now, and the mesh of wrinkles about the eyes and mouth had become impenetrable. He climbed the fourth step: his beard and hair were reflected white as an August cloud, white as a January field; the mouth, now agape, sought with anguish the never sufficient air and the bloodshot eyes recalled too much — and begged clemency for what they remembered.

He reached the fifth step, and it was only with a great effort that he refrained from retreating rapidly to the lower stair: the asphyxiated face in the mirror conveyed the image of the resignation that precedes death. His neck was bandaged, pus ran from his ears, and worms filled his nostrils. Already dead? Dead in life? To ascertain, he found the courage to climb the sixth step; the face in the mirror was motionless, and the neck bandages now shrouded his jaw.

He fled from that image, ascending; now it became difficult to penetrate the shadows of the mirror, to discern, after accustoming himself to the darkness of that reflection, that the bandages had been destroyed by the slow and persistent working of the worms, and the jaw itself consumed by the humidity and weight of the earth — but the mouth, closed at last, no longer pleaded for air. On the seventh step, he seemed to see several mirrors reflected in the quicksilver of his hand mirror, for the face was multiplied in successive whitish, silvered, phosphorescent layers as the flesh relinquished its privileges to bone. Only bone was reflected at the level of the eighth step, a skull that frightened him less than the previous apparitions, for why did it have to be his? How to distinguish one skull from all the rest, if death’s booty is always the loss of one’s face? He ascended rapidly: the skull persisted through the eternity of the four steps; but on the thirteenth, the prolonged darkness surrounding a glowing center of bones was dissipated.

In its place, a strange sky, at once opaque and transparent, like the metallic domed sky of solar eclipses — as if by the addition of layer after layer of white light a dense transparency was finally formed — clouded by the oval of the mirror; only then did El Señor realize, in retrospect, that the faces had not appeared in a vacuum, but accompanied by sounds he tried not to reconstruct: there were birds, yes, and footsteps, and the rustle of cloth; there were fragments of music too swift, too evanescent to be heard or judged; there were voices so low and thunder so loud that they could be recovered only in the reconstruction of memory; there was the sound of grass growing, close, very close, too close, and in the distance, bleating, neighing, braying, lowing, barking, howling, and buzzing. Again they existed only in memory; in that moment of nothingness even sound ceased, and what El Señor most mourned was the absence of the birds.

On the following step the domed sky parted; the metallic light disintegrated; but the gusts of wind and the flashing lights, resolved into hitherto unseen globes of color, into triangles of fire and columns of phosphorus, blocks of total terror and enigmatic spirals, obstructed his ability to place himself within that total space, fleeting and infinite, with no beginning and no end; El Señor mused that if his face had still existed — even if in the form of scattered, although reconstitutable dust — it would be the face of madness contemplating something without an origin and without an end; he recalled that the palace astrologer, Brother Toribio, had once spoken to him of Eridanus, the river of luminous sands in the heavens that flows beneath the scepter of Brandenburg illuminating the ramparts of the stars and vitalizing the tomb of the Phoenix: he felt as if he were falling from that cluster of flowing stars as upon ascending the next step he saw in the mirror the lush vegetating depths of a jungle where no sun penetrated, where not even the dense, petrified, archaic foliage of a dead flower moved; the flower acquired life, became aqueous, marine, plastic, undulating, only when he stepped onto the next stair.

In the center of the liquid and fleshy vegetation, again glowed a dot that, although unrecognizable, El Señor knew was himself. The dot was a white drop; he knew it had life, and desperately he willed it to be his. He climbed; the reflection again became murky; a sea of mud in the center of the night, the obverse of all medals, the horary of the moon, a palace of ashes, a recollection of rain, the first word, animals dreaming of themselves and of other animals and thus effecting the first breath of existence; dreamed, not created; creating themselves as they dreamed themselves.

Shivering, he reached the step he had been waiting for: a whitish being, hairless, amorphous, swimming in dark liquid. Now he advanced rapidly: here, connected to the body by a delicate web of veins and nerves, two egg-like lumps, shining but dormant, dominated the unformed fetus: the eyes; higher, the white body became covered with hair; the drawn-up paws began to move, as if wishing release from their prison; he heard a ferocious howl: suddenly all the lost sounds returned, the world again was echoing with laughter and waterfalls, waves and bird song, fires and marching feet, trumpets and whistles, rustling taffeta and scraped platters, the resounding blow of the ax and the blast of the bellows; but all that was reflected in the mirror was a newly born wolf cub; El Señor paused in his feverish ascent and with a growing tremor contemplated those eyes, one cruel and the other tender, that gaping snout gasping for air, those sharp teeth. Slowly, never taking his eyes from the vision in the mirror, he climbed. The wolf was full-grown now and it was running through fields that El Señor seemed to know, pursued by arms and men with insignia that El Señor recognized as his own: Nondum, Not yet.

Terrified, he threw the mirror from the top of the stairway and it shattered against the granite flooring in the crypt. Gasping, he ran down the stairs, crowned from above by the dyssymbolic light of refractory years; pursued by the past of his future, he threw himself face down, arms opened, before the altar; the steady light originating in the clear painted space of an Italian piazza illuminated the cross on his cape; the future lay behind him, half seen, for El Señor could not again review the totality of those thirty-three steps. His exhausted body called upon memorized words: “In my weakness I beseech your aid in my struggle not to be vanquished by the importunate and astute temptations devised against me by that most ancient of Serpents. But great is the battle of love; its powerful weapons are your beneficences that spread confusion in the hearts of the ungrateful. As the Holy Spirit says, the impious one, the evildoer, flees even though he not be pursued, for he accuses himself and is rendered pusillanimous and cowardly by his own crime. Oh, God, I know that the testimony of one’s own conscience is a continual exhortation that cannot be ejected from one’s house, or stilled. According to St. Paul, that conscience serves as glorious consolation to the Just, but is a continual torment to the ungrateful. Am I to be judged ungrateful, and not just? Am I to be judged impious, am I the evildoer, is that why you reserve these visions for me in spite of my intense devotion?”

Prostrate, weeping, choked by feelings of confusion and guilt, he rejected these ideas; but, unconsciously, he was seeking to reject the terrible duplicate memory: from this time forward he was doomed to recall both his past and his future. And that curse could not be the work of the Most Tender Lamb.

“The Devil endeavors with rabid fury to obstruct the holy exercise of my mental prayer. To this end this wily Dragon applies whatever means and whatever confusion his persistent and indefatigable malice can contrive; but when he cannot succeed, he changes his tactics and interjects his cunning deceits into the holy exercise itself. Oh, God, do not allow the Devil to take advantage of the intense fervor of my prayer; assure me in this moment, prostrate before you, my head filled with horrible visions, that my affection is no less pure, and assure me that my present state of abjection and forlornness will not serve the Enemy of God as an opportunity to sow the seeds of his accursed dissension; do not allow him to deceive my grieving soul, openly, invading every minute, every occasion, every place, invading the holy exercise of prayer itself. I do not know, my God … I question even whether the occasion of my penitence may be the Devil’s greatest opportunity, for that venomous serpent strikes in silence; and there is nothing worse than his mind, for there is no good thought in it, and only that mind would unveil the picture of my future. You would not do so, you who have granted us the beneficence of not knowing what lies ahead, reserving for yourself that wisdom without which you would not be God. You reserve for us only the certainty of death, not the where or the how or the why. Nor would you be God if you revealed upon our births the course and the final end of our lives, nor would we be your loving creatures if we knew: such intelligence may only be the false gift of the Evil One.”

The candles sputtered, and incense suffused the crypt; El Señor gazed with passion, anxiety, doubt, and surrender at the principal figure of the painting brought from Orvieto, and to that figure he directed his prayers: “Liberate me, God, from vain complacency and hidden pride, from exaggerated pentitence, and from imaginary visions and false revelations. How may I distinguish the true interior voices, which are those of God, the supernatural and divine ecstasy and raptures in which a loving God communicates with my soul, from the methods of the Devil, who, in simian imitation of the works of God, attempts to counterfeit and mimic them? Let not my soul be deceived by imagining that God speaks to me and offers me visions when it is not God speaking but my own spirit and fevered imagination. I reject, I reject the hidden satisfaction and somber pride that leads me to believe that God is speaking to me; I accept that the Devil has feigned these raptures and ecstasies, that he has caused visions to appear to me, that he has taken advantage of the fact that my mind is but weak clay, and that if Your Majesty permits he may transform himself into the Angel of Light, appear even in the form of Jesus Christ himself. But then, oh, my God, how shall I distinguish the voices of the Creator from the voices of His Child, and these voices from the speech of the Devil we all bear within us because of the Fall of our first father, Adam? How? How? What does the doctrine offer to enable us to avoid that the moment of communication with God be converted into communication with the Devil? How do I distinguish Your visions from mine, and both of these from those of Lucifer? And how do I know whether I should accept, and suffer, and understand the Devil’s visions, his demoniac fantasies, since you have permitted them, and for some reason from Your High Omnipotence you permit the Devil to act instead of crushing him forever beneath your Divine Foot? How am I to know?”

Dragging his body forward, he approached the altar, his arms still spread in a cross; with bloodless fingers he touched the great painting; his flattened fingertips traced the outlines of the figure of the Christ without a halo preaching to the naked men in the corner of the Italian piazza.

“The Chalice you hold, God, in your powerful hand, is filled with a mixture of tribulations and consolations, and only Your Divine Majesty knows and understands to whom and when it may behoove you to bestow either one or the other; you have filled my cup, oh, Jesus, with unequal measures and although my sparse fortunes serve to cloak my enormous afflictions, they are nothing — neither fortunes nor misfortunes — compared to the desire that enslaves me: oh, Jesus, allow me to achieve true union with you, the union of the spirit purged and purified of all sentiments of the base portion of the soul; thus I would no longer need occupy myself with governing and with war, with persecution of the heretic, with symbolic hunts; let me enjoy fruitive union with you, after which nothing I ever had or did not have in this life would matter; allow me to know the exceeding joy and delight of experiencing the immediate touch of divinity, and to remain intoxicated and annihilated in that enormous sea of softness and sweetness, transported beyond myself, borne entirely in my God and Lord, in you, Jesus Christ: far from this palace that emerged from and will return to stone; far from my wife, far from the demands of my dead but living father and my living but dead mother; far from what he, my father, asked of me, power and cruelty; far from what she, my mother, asks of me, honor and death; power and cruelty, honor and death. In your mysteries, Jesus, such unwanted duties of political legitimacy are dissolved and forgotten; in you, and not — as she believes — in the satanic black hole of the very virgin Señora, my wife.”

El Señor’s eyes, at times wildly staring, occasionally suspicious — a warm gaze, a cold gaze — moved from the figure of the Christ of Orvieto to the transparent predella of the Sacrament, and from it, over his shoulder, to the rows of open sepulchers behind him awaiting the arrival of the Lords and Ladies and noble relatives, his ancestors: as each corpse would be contained within the sepulchral stone, so El Señor wished to be united with Jesus.

“I know that there are degrees within divine union, but you are free in all your works, even in regard to the Blessed, and like the spontaneous mirror you are, you may reveal yourself to a greater or lesser degree; manifest yourself to me, Jesus, in the state of passive union of the soul with God, in which are fulfilled the great mysteries written in the Holy Epistles of the dark Songs of Solomon. My happy soul longs like a bride to enter the Mystic Cellars owned by you, the Blessed Husband, where the purest and most holy love is the free-flowing wine that inflames and intoxicates hearts in sovereign love. Bestow upon me, Jesus, your most chaste and mysterious kiss, for I sigh for it like a virtuous wife. Your kiss is that precious Pearl without price. This is the innermost Kingdom of Heaven that you can communicate to me; let me know, my God, the flowery bridal chamber of the Divine Husband and the Paradise of your celestial delights. Contract binding matrimony with me in this my mortal life that you and I — that we both — may enjoy delicious consummation in the eternal felicity of Glory.”

Heavy sepulcher slabs, heavy bases in the form of truncated pyramids, carved effigies of the Señors, marble bodies of the Señoras, stone husbands and wives sleeping side by side in their beds of death, prostrate nobility awaiting the arrival of the corpses whose lives these pale statues represent, so natural they seemed hollowed from real bodies: witnesses to El Señor’s prayer.

“Grant me your divine presence and Your divine touch and the sovereign encircling arms of the Divine Husband; I can live no more apart from you; grant me a brief life to hasten my nuptials with you; my inflamed anticipation can bear no more; grant me eternal glory where I will have no need to wait longer, wait, for nothing, where I need not despair of the resolutions effected by the tyrant Time; oh, my Jesus, when will it be! Not yet, Not yet read my dynastic devices, but I pray you: allow me to quit this unchanging world, more like its initial sin and pain, more like unto itself, the more it changes, and let me join with you in the delicious variability of a promised Heaven. Come, Jesus, come to me, come, come now, now, now…”

Then, still imploring, El Señor raised his head and saw that the figures of the painting were moving; he turned to see whether all the inanimate figures had taken on life, but only the naked men listening to Christ who had been standing with their backs to the viewer were now turning to reveal their faces to El Señor; behind El Señor the horizontal statues, the sleeping bas-reliefs on the slabs of the sepulchers, were still blind and unmoving; and the Christ without a halo who had been facing forward, preaching, began to turn away. The naked men had enormous, tumid, erect penises, red and shining, pulsing with blood and semen, and engorged hairy testicles, iridescent with pleasure; the Christ of the shadows displayed a blood-red cross between his shoulder blades, and a thick stream of blood trickled into the cleft between his buttocks.

El Señor screamed; he stretched out his hand and taking a penitential whip began to lash his back, his hand, his face, while the statues of his ancestors stared at him with blank eyes and inviolable marble skin. El Señor was bleeding now. Then he muttered between clenched teeth: “I do not want the world to change. I do not want my body to die, to disintegrate, to be transformed and reborn in animal form. I do not want to be reborn to be hunted in my own lands by my own descendants. I want the world to stop and to release my resurrected body in the eternity of Paradise, by the side of God. When I die, I do not want — please, have mercy — I do not want to return again to the world. I want the eternal promise: to ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven and there forget the unchanging world and lose for all time the memory of the life I led, forget that there is life on earth. But in order to reach Heaven, in order for Heaven actually to exist, this, my world, must not change, for only of its infinite horror, from that contrast, may be born the infinite goodness of Heaven. Yes, yes, the necessary contrast.… And it was for that reason that as a youth, darkly, not completely aware of what I was doing, I murdered those who dared offer me Heaven on earth; that was the reason, Father, Don Felipe, not because I had promised never to disappoint you again and to make myself a worthy heir to your cruel power; this is the reason, Mother, Doña Juana, not to consummate the nuptials of honor and death; yes, this is the reason, and that is why now I am growing old, and, consciously, I encourage evil on earth so that Heaven may continue to have meaning. Let there be a Heaven, God, your Heaven; do not condemn us to a Heaven on earth, to a Hell on earth, to a Purgatory on earth, for if the earth contains in itself all the cycles of life and death, my destiny is to be an animal in Hell. Amen.”

But neither the Christ facing away from El Señor nor the men with the throbbing erections nor the sepulchral statues awaiting the corpses of the thirty phantoms, his ancestors, were listening. El Señor realized that, and in fury he raised the whip: “Devil … Devil in disguise … You Devil, assuming at will the figure of other men, of phantoms, of the One God … Oh, cruel God, bestowing or withdrawing your gifts at will, permitting that Lucifer himself usurp your figure to deceive my poor soul … Show yourself to me, my God, let me know whether it is you who touch me or whether it is the Devil … Why do you submit us Christians to the severe test of never knowing, on the mystic heights, whether we are speaking with you or with the Enemy? Oh, you bastard Jesus, show yourself to me, give us one single proof that you hear us and that you think of us, one single proof! Do not humiliate me further, do not again proffer excrement as the mirror of my life, the excrement surrounding me at my birth in the Flemish privy, the excrement that encroached upon me at your altar the day of my victory against the Adamite heretics, the excrement that fell upon me this very morning as I slept; Son of shit, God of shit, how shall I know when you speak to me! Let me enjoy mystic ascension with neither doubts nor visions, for only in this epiphany may I resolve the conflict of my poor soul, captive here below of the debt of power owed my father and the debt of honor owed my mother and the debt of sensuality owed my wife: only by your side may I leave all that behind — but you do not wish to tell me whether by sacrificing power, honor, and sex I shall know you, or whether I am embracing the Devil!”

With a strength he would have believed impossible, El Señor arose and lashed at the painted bodies with his whip, imagining he had caused the very canvas of the painting to bleed; and then with fury he turned toward the back of the Christ whose shoulders were marked with the cross, but as he attempted to strike out, his arm was paralyzed; the whip writhed in the air with its own contractions as if it had become a black serpent; and the figure of the Christ was again turning, turning back toward El Señor, and the Christ was laughing, a sovereign laughter that resounded above all the doubts, all the desires, all the anger, all the terror, and all the humiliations of the Liege frozen like a statue, looking almost like another of the thirty sepulchers in this crypt, while the figures in the painting rotated, showing an infinite variety of forms.

And as El Señor’s prognathic jaw strained forward seeking the rarefied air of the underground vault that was the center and the sum of his life, the lips of the Christ in the painting finally moved, and He said: “Many shall come in my name, saying: I am the Christ, and many will be seduced. And once again the Antichrists will emerge, and the false prophets; they will announce their coming with prodigious signs and they will execute false miracles, intending to falsely persuade the elect. The witness of St. John is true: and the Antichrists shall be many. But with the appearance of the one Antichrist, there will come many Antichrists. But only one among them will be the true Antichrist. You must recognize him. Through him you will find the salvation you have so long sought. You attempt to imitate me; the heretics you have persecuted also are inspired in the imitation of Christ. Fools! If I am God, my legend and my life on earth are unique and inimitable. But if I were merely the man Jesus, then anyone who wished might be like me. Why the devil, then, did I fall into the temptation of being born as a man and record my name in the annals of history, why did I live under the reign of Tiberius and the procuratorate of Pilate, why did I act in history and make myself its prisoner? Were it so, then more fool I, for true Gods preside over the irrepeatable origin of time, not its accidental course toward a future that has no meaning for a God. Resolve this dilemma. And furthermore, you are the bastard!”

PRISONER OF LOVE

The handsome youth gazed at her absently through dilated pupils as she moved back and forth, first arranging the perfumed pillows about his arms and beneath his head, then standing at a distance to stare at him with admiration, with gratitude; again she approached him, she kissed the sleeping nipples, trying to arouse them, her hands sought the hollow of his armpits, curling strands of blond, damp hair around her fingers; again, at a distance, she contemplated the youth lying upon her bed, completely naked, remote, surrendered to the power of the belladonna and the mandrake, unconscious of time or place or even the identity of the woman who was adoring him, who licked his navel clean with her tongue, who caressed his muscled belly, whose eyes closed as her lips kissed the bush of coppery hair crowning his dormant sex; then La Señora opened her blue eyes and hastily, timorously, with one hand she held the youth’s hands and with the other she gestured toward the bedchamber, offering it to him.

“Take it, it’s all for you; in all the pantheon constructed by my husband El Señor, this is the only luxury; and I amassed this luxury for you, waiting for you, desiring you in dreams and wakeful nights, in anger and in sadness, in deceit and in truth; I have always held you here, burning, clasped between my breasts and thighs, waiting, waiting; it is all for you, and without you it is nothing…” Her gesturing hand offered to the fair, semi-conscious boy the precious hangings covering the stone walls, the opened coffers filled with gold dinars and silver dirhems, Oriental rugs, barbaric goldwork, skins embossed with motifs from the Steppes, smoking censers, and crystal prisons enclosing gigantic flies and bees, spiders and scorpions — sterile, abulic, brutalized, sheathed in heavy copper, their shells encrusted with emeralds. She offered him this redoubt, this sumptuous lair won with deceit and bribery, won above all by the indifference of El Señor. She had pleaded: she wanted baths, she wanted to hear the song of the shepherds … He refused: the palace was a tomb of the living; she realized that, obsessed by and with death as he was, her husband would have neither time nor will to sniff out, to spy upon or pursue any living thing to its hiding place; she knew what Guzmán had told her was true: El Señor has faith only in what is written, not what is seen or told, and as long as no one records La Señora’s bedchamber, La Señora may live in peace; she gave one of her necklaces to the man in charge of all the construction and a ring to the supervisor of the laborers; behind the curtains of her bed she had constructed a splendid tiled Moorish bath, and, like the most ancient synagogues of the desert, had her floor covered with white sand. El Señor dictated to Guzmán a folio declaring that in this palace the customs of Moors or Jews would not be tolerated and that, following his grandmother’s example, every person in the palace should die wearing the shoes he had always worn. When Guzmán recounted this to La Señora she sighed; El Señor had only to consign something to paper and he believed it had an existence of its own; he would not bother again with these sensual minutiae. Beneath her pillows, La Señora had placed perfumed gloves, tiny colored pastilles, and little sacks filled with aromatic herbs.

The youth returned the pressure of La Señora’s hand, freed his hand, and touched her arm. He saw the white sand that covered the chamber floor and saw in it the tracks of his own feet; he imagined he still lay on the coast, on the same beach where he’d been shipwrecked, now furnished, perfumed, adorned with skins and hangings. And the sand had changed color.

The youth moved his lips: “Who are you? Where am I?”

La Señora kissed his ear; she took an earring from one of the many nearby coffers and fastened it on the boy’s earlobe; she performed this act with joy, concealing a certain perturbation welling up behind her joyful gesture; she had found him naked, dispossessed, on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres; now she was placing an eardrop on his ear; perhaps with that single, simple, pleasureful act, she was imposing upon this man a personality and a destiny that, like the sands of the coast and of her chamber, were a clean sheet of white paper upon which nothing could be written, since all signs would immediately be erased by the waves and the wind, and by other footsteps; but the earring hung now in the youth’s ear, and La Señora was telling the boy that he was in a far-off palace where all spaces and all dwellings coexisted in time, and that according to his pleasure he could imagine himself in Baghdad, Samarkand, Peking, or Novgorod, and that she was both his mistress and his slave … A series of warring emotions flashed across the face of La Señora, mistress and slave; she asked herself whether she was giving life to this man, now her captive in this rich room, or taking it away; whether she was diverting him from his true destiny by bringing him here, or whether, on the other hand, the man had been born for this moment; whether she assumed a power of creation similar to the divine; prisoners, both of them, enclosed, alone, face to face, would the young man end by being a copy of his mistress, or would she be the imitative servant of the absolute powers — until now untouched, erupted suddenly like the wings of a butterfly or an unexpected ray of light in a storm — of this young man?

She kissed the boy’s lips, she placed her arms about his waist, she sighed, moved away from him, shrugged her shoulders when he repeated: “Who are you? Where am I?”

“Pity me,” La Señora replied, and sitting on the edge of the bed, she recounted the following story:

Still a young girl, I was brought from my native country, England, to the castle of one of the great Lords of Spain, who was my uncle. I came happily, for from the cradle I had been told stories of the land of the sun where the orange trees blossom and the fogs of my land are unknown. But here I found, as if the sun were a plague and the happiness it engenders in our bodies a sin, that the sunlight was shunned, was condemned to perish in deep dungeons, that granite walls were built against it, and that simple bodily gratification was subjected to the contritions of the fast, flagellation, and ceremonial etiquette. I came to long for the noisy vulgarity of the English; there drunkenness, the dance, insults, the pleasures of food and of carnal sensuality compensate for a climate of icy mists. Every night there were bonfires and banquets in my parents’ mansion beside the river — both dead finally, he of cholera, and she from complications of childbirth. So I came to Spain; I was a proper child of English nobility with corkscrew curls and stiff white cotton petticoats. I was a little girl for a long, long time, my lover, my only entertainment dressing dolls, collecting peach pits, awakening late sleepers, and dressing up my duennas like the actors my father had taken me to see in London.

I believe I ceased to be a child one morning when I went to chapel to receive Communion; I was menstruating, and the moment the Host was placed upon my tongue it turned into a serpent; the priest reprimanded me before everyone and expelled me from the holy sanctuary. Listen carefully, my love; I still do not know how much evil that terrible event unleashed; I still do not know. Perhaps my cousin, the son of the Liege, my uncle, had loved me before that time, secretly; he has told me he watched me from afar that morning at Communion, already adoring me; I did not know. But I knew when I heard the order from the lips of his father several weeks later amid horror and crime, in the castle hall piled high with corpses that guards were dragging by the feet to a monstrous funeral pyre in the courtyard that for days infested the castle with its nauseous fumes. All I knew was that the slaughter of the rebels, the heresiarchs, the men and women who had been living communally, the Moors and Jews who had been deceived and led into a trap by the young Prince Felipe, had all been to prove something to his father: he deserved both his father’s power and my hand.

I knew then I had to obey. I was going to be the wife of the heir and our wedding would be celebrated upon an altar of spilled blood. The ceremony took place; that moment signaled an end to all my games. The serpent that had surged from my impure tongue sank its fangs into me now, wound about my hands and feet, suffocated me and wounded me. I was the slave of those serpents: my duennas and my body servants took away my dolls, hid my costumes, discovered my hidden trove of peach pits, and forced upon me an endless and excessively strict schedule of lessons: how to speak, how to walk, how to eat … everything befitting a Spanish Lady.

I yielded to their customs. I became a prisoner of an obligatory symmetry of movement and demeanor. And after ten years of speaking in phrases prepared for every occasion, of learning to walk holding myself tall, stiff, with a hawk poised upon my wrist (symmetry of movement! As the country girls walk to the fountain with a water pitcher upon their head, so moved my falcon and I), of eating very little, a few mouthfuls, taken always with precisely held fingers and head erect, after all those years I was still as full of longing as I was innocent: but my hands were never, never again to play with my dolls, my legs were never to carry me in games around the costumed duennas, or my knees to touch the earth of the garden to bury my precious peach pits. I resigned myself. It takes a very long time to perfect bearing; that is what tradition is: choosing one of the many possibilities in life, maintaining it, cherishing it, disciplining it, excluding from it everything that would be an offense or menace. In this way we of the nobility are like the people, we have both endured a long time, and neither is inclined to change our customs every year. Tradition, Lords, people; this Brother Julián, my favorite friend who is the court miniaturist, explained to me.

I had no idea to what extremes protocol was to influence my life (my body forgetting everything it had learned naturally) until one day, while my husband was absent on one of his wars against rival Princes and protectors of heretics, I returned from an outing through some nearby gardens and as I was descending from my litter lost my footing and fell flat on my back upon the paving stones of the castle courtyard.

I called for help, because lying on my back, dressed in iron hoop skirts and billowing skirts, it was impossible for me to get to my feet by myself. But none of the menservants or the alguaciles or the duennas who came in answer to my calls, none of the many nuns and chaplains, stewards and priests, bearers and halberdiers — as many as a hundred gathered around me — held out a hand to help me to my feet.

They stood in a circle looking at me, uneasy and anxious; and the chief alguacil warned: “No one may touch her. No one may help her rise, if she cannot manage it for herself. She is La Señora and only the hands of El Señor may touch her.”

In protest against such reasoning, I called to my maids: “Do you not dress and undress me every day, do you not dress and comb my hair for lice? Why can you not touch me now?” They looked at me, offended, and their injured glances said: “What happens within your chambers, Señora, is one thing, but what takes place before the eyes of the world is something quite different: ceremonial ritual.” Again, dear heart, I longed for the freedom of my country, my merrie England. And I was sure that my destiny was to be worse than that of the English women pilgrims whose bad reputation had caused St. Boniface to prohibit female pilgrimages: most of them had strayed from the path, very few arrived still pure at their destination, and there is scarcely a town in Lombardy or France without a whore or adulteress of English race. But a thousand times worse, I tell you, was my destiny: a pilgrim ruined by etiquette and chastity, for both weighed heavily on my heart.

That afternoon passed; night fell, and only the most faithful chambermaids and roughest soldiers remained with me; the iron framework of my skirts creaked beneath my weight; I saw the stars move in the heavens, some more fleetingly than usual; I saw the new sun born, more slowly than on remembered days. The second day even my duennas abandoned me and only the halberdiers remained by my side, although at times they forgot who I was, or even that I was there, and they passed the time eating, urinating, and cursing there in the courtyard. I am stone, I said to myself resignedly; I am turning to stone. I ceased to count the hours. I imposed imaginary dawns upon the night, and I stained the day black. But the sun stripped the skin from my face and caused a dark fungus to erupt on my hands; it rained a night and a day, my powders and rouges ran, my hair and my skirts were soaked with rain. After the most unseemly delay, for the unforeseen event in ceremonial routine had petrified them with confusion, the duennas took turns holding great black sunshades above my head. When the sun came out again, I abandoned my modesty and loosened the ties of my bodice so my breasts might dry. And one night, mice sought lodgings in the ample cave of my tented underskirts; I could not scream, I allowed them to tickle my thighs, and to the most adventurous among them I said: “Mus, you have reached places even my own husband does not know.”

Only my husband had the right to raise me from this position, first accidental, then ridiculous, and finally pathetic. But those arms have never taken me for myself, never! To whom, in that instant, was I speaking? No, I will not deceive you, my love: I was speaking to the most faithful of the mice, he who finally established his home in the hollows of my hoop skirt, for of course I considered him a better partner in conversation than my befuddled duennas or the pompous alguaciles or the inflexible halberdiers. I recalled the melancholy face of the man who was to be my husband — harsh and melancholy — the first time he had gazed at me through the eyes of love on that long-ago morning when I’d been expelled from the chapel by the priest. But what did I know of love, Mus? A few rather brutal things: that same morning a bitch had whelped her pups in my bedchamber; I had menstruated; my duenna Azucena was shackled by a chastity belt. What else did I know? What I had secretly read in Andreas Capellanus’s book of honest lovers: that true love must be free, mutually shared, and noble; that a lowborn man, a common man, is incapable of giving or receiving such love. But above all, that love must be secret, my mouse; the lovers, in public, must not show signs of recognizing each other except in furtive gestures; the lovers must eat and drink very little; and last, I learned that love is incompatible with matrimony: everyone knows there is never any love between a husband and wife. My husband, mouse, had never touched me; was that actually proof that there is no love in marriage? So much so that husband and wife may never be united in their bridal bed? Or was it proof that like every true lover my husband loved me secretly and furtively, like you, Mus … like you, Juan? I told the mouse these sad things, and also this thought: my own mother-in-law, the mother of my husband El Señor, had known man’s work only in the dark; my Spanish uncle, the Liege, had needed her only to engender princes. And I? Not even that; I, virgin as the day I embarked from my own country, from England. I could eat and drink very little in my absurd position; I lay in a secret and furtive posture, the posture of a true and honest lover … and only the mouse visited me night after night, nibbled at me, knew me …

And so I lay there thirty-three and one half days, my love; life in the castle resumed its ordinary ways; the duennas fed me from soup ladles; they had to grind my food in mortars, for I was otherwise unable to swallow it; I drank from the crudest wineskins, for anything else trickled down my chin; and when they brought my china pot the duennas shouted and shooed away the sly and cunning guards, although many times I was unable to contain my natural necessities before the chambermaids arrived, always at the same fixed hours, with no heed for my urgencies or desires. And every night, the furtive mouse visited me; he came out from his hole in my hoop skirts to nibble a bit more at the hole of my virginity. He was my true companion in that torture.

One afternoon, when I had ceased to count time, or imagine how my unwashed face must seem, or look at my stained skirts, my husband, at the head of the victorious troop, entered the courtyard. He had been informed on the road of my misfortune. But upon entering he passed me by and went directly to the chapel to give thanks, not even pausing to glance at me. I had sworn not to reproach him for anything; I had imagined he might be dead in battle and then my destiny, with no hands worthy of touching me, would have been to await my own death, lying in the courtyard, threatened by the elements until sooner or later, ancient or still young, I myself became an element: a pile of bones and hair under the sun and storm, with no company but that of the mouse. I could be lifted only in the arms of my husband, El Señor; if he was dead, I was dead; if he was dead, only one life would accompany me to the hour of my own death: that of a tiny, wise, silky-smooth, nibbling Mus. So how could I resist giving myself to the mouse, making a covenant with him, acceding in whatever he asked of me? Forgive me, Juan, forgive me; I did not know I was to dream you, and dreaming you, to find you …

Later my husband came to me accompanied by two youths carrying between them a large, full-length mirror. At my husband’s order, the youths held the mirror before my face; I screamed, horrified to see that face I could not recognize as mine, and in that instant my thirty-three and a half days of grotesque penitence were totted up, and in addition to them, the humiliation my husband, El Señor, offered me with intentions that were mortal because they were eternal and eternal because they were mortal; in that moment, believing myself a virgin still, I lost forever my innocence.

I looked at my husband and I understood why he was doing this to me; he himself had aged, slowly, doubtlessly; but at that moment, upon his victorious return from still another war, the passage of time had become real, but something had happened of which I had not previously been aware: El Señor had returned from his last battle; I realized I was witnessing the moment of his aging, of his renunciation, of his dedication to the works of memory and death; I tried to recall, this time in vain, the visionary eyes of the slender youth in the chapel, or the cruel eyes of the man in the hall, the scene of the crime, who had felt worthy of me only because of that crime; the eyes now staring at me, as I stared at them, were those of an exhausted old man who in order that I might accompany him in his premature senescence was offering me my own altered image, dusty, without eyelashes or eyebrows, my nose sharp and trembling like that of a starving wolf, my scalp faded as gray as that of the mice who had visited me. I closed my eyes and wondered whether it was possible that from the distant fields of battle in Flanders El Señor, my husband, with the aid of the Devil and mischievous lemures, the specters of the dead, had contrived for me to stumble so ridiculously and fall on the courtyard paving stones with the purpose of making our appearances equally decadent when again we met. But El Señor’s works were not those of the Devil, but rather divine dedication to Christian fervor; and if he had chosen God as an ally so that this might befall me, then in response I would choose the Devil.

Only then, after he had shown me my image in that dark mirror of horrors, El Señor offered me his hands, but I lacked the strength to take them and pull myself up. He had to kneel and for the first time take me in his arms and assist me to my own chambers, where the maids, on their own initiative and risking El Señor’s displeasure — for him the bath was an extreme medication — had prepared a boiling bath. My husband disrobed me, helped me into the tub, and for the first time looked upon my body unclothed. I did not feel the burning temperature of the bath; I was paralyzed, numb. He told me that we would be leaving his ancient family castle and that we would construct in the high plains a new palace that would be both a mausoleum for princes and a temple of the Most Holy Sacrament. In this way, he added, he would commemorate the military victory, and also … He could not finish.

He fell to his knees, hiding his face with one hand, and said to me: “Isabel, you will never know how much I love you, and above all, how I love you…”

I asked him to explain; I asked with disdain, with arrogance, more than anything with rancor, and he answered: “Ever since that morning in the chapel when you spit out the snake, I have loved you so devotedly that I shall never be able to touch you; my passion for you is nourished by desire: I shall never be able, nor should I, to satisfy that desire, for once satisfied I would cease to love you. I was educated in this ideal; it is the ideal of the true Christian gentleman, and to it I must be faithful until death. Others may be faithful — and die for their faith — to the dream of a world without power, without illness, without death, a world with complete sensual satisfaction and of human incarnation of the divine. I, because I am who I am, can be faithful only to the dream of unrequited desire, constantly nurtured but never realized; in this way, comparable to faith.”

I smiled; I reminded him that his own father, and with no small fame, had satiated his desires by claiming his seignorial right on a thousand occasions; with lowered head my husband answered that he, too, admitted his sins in that regard, but that it was one thing to take a woman of the lower classes, and a very different matter to touch his feminine ideal, the Señora of his heart; angrily, I pointed out that his father, though in the dark and without pleasure, had taken his, Felipe’s, mother in order to beget an heir; how would he resolve this problem? Was he disposed to leave an acephalous throne? Bastards, bastards, my husband murmured several times, and in spite of his words, and in strange contrast to them, there amid the heavy vapors of my bath, he too removed his clothes before me for the first and last time, and it was now as if I held the same despicable mirror to the body of El Señor, and instead of observing the temporary ravages inflicted upon me by the intemperate weather, I could see the permanent dues his heritage had bequeathed him, abscesses, chancres, boils, the visible ulcers of his body, the premature debility of his parts. The boiling water wounded me, raising blisters on my back and thighs; when I felt it, I cried out and I begged him to retire. The moment demanded it, but also the future; I did not want my husband ever again to penetrate the sanctuary of my chamber; I knew that his shame at that moment would be the best lock on the door of my desired solitude, and that shame culminated in the words El Señor, my husband, said as he withdrew: “What thing could be born of our union, Isabel?”

Felipe withdrew with a gesture he hoped said more than the words that had been spoken: the frightful contrast between his words of ideal love and his loathsome body, his silence, asked me to draw my own conclusions, to deduce, to forgive. But I had not the strength for that. I left the bath, wrapped in sheets I walked through the vast galleries of the castle. Hallucinating, I saw a long row of my duennas who turned their backs to me as I passed. Their figures stood out against the light; they turned their invisible faces to the white leaded windows and I saw only backs cloaked by nuns’ habits and heads covered by black coifs.

I approached each one, asking: “What have you done with my dolls? Where are my peach pits?”

But when I saw them in the light I saw that their habits covered only their backs; from the front, one could see their aged and obese, naked and feeble, varicose and wasted, hairless, yellowish, milky-white, purplish bodies; they laughed harshly; in their hands they held, as they would a rosary, clean and knotted roots like colorless carrots, and they offered them to me. My head chambermaid, Azucena, spit through broken teeth and saliva dribbled across her shimmering, enormous, purplish nipples; she said:

“Take this root; it is the magic mandrake that we have gathered from beneath the gallows, the racks, and the stakes of the condemned; accept it in the place of your forever vanished playthings; accept it in the place of your forever postponed love; you will have no toy and no lover except this diabolical body born of the tears of the hanged, the tortured, and those burned alive; be grateful for our gift; we have had to expose ourselves to terrible dangers to obtain it for you; we shaved our heads and with the twisted gray hairs we tied one extreme to a knot of the root and the other to the collar of a black dog, who, frightened by the weeping of the mandrake, fled, and so pulled the root from the humid tomb that also was its cradle; we closed our ears with wads of oakum; the dog died of fright; take the root, cherish it, for in truth it is the only company you will ever know; care for it as you would a newborn child; sow wheat in its head and it will grow silken hair; insert two cherries in place of its eyes and it will see; place a slice of radish for a mouth, and it will speak. Do not be frightened of its livid, knotted body, or of its smallness; it will pass for the court dwarf; it will be your servant, your friend, and your seeker of hidden treasures … take it…”

Azucena placed the pale root in my hands, forcing my fingers to close around that obscene, palpitating tuber; I tried to drop her offering but the slimy surface of the mandrake stuck to my skin and, terrified, I fled back to my room, feverish, trembling, recalling my husband’s desire and substituting for it another, real, alive, and tangible desire that exploded in my brain and coursed with fire through my breasts and belly, my sealed secret place, my arms and legs and back: a body, a body, oh, Señor, I have need of a body, a body for me alone, and my own; not a slobbery root, not a skillful and prudent mouse, not an ulcerated husband: a body. Feverish, maddened, I examined my naked, washed, clean, new body in the mirror of my chamber; I touched my body, and when my fingers reached the flower of my chastity I discovered I could insert one finger — rupturing the remains of a gnawed membrane — to the depths of my unschooled pleasure; I could not understand; I knew I was a virgin, I was a virgin, and yet all that remained of the sovereign portal of my virginity was a jumble of slender threads. Overwhelmed by sensation, I could stand no more; I fell on my bed, and dreamed; and from the plethora of my recent experiences was born a dream that was a memory; I dreamed you, and I remembered you; I saw you tossed face down upon a beach, swept by waves, your shoulder sealed with a purple-colored cross, the six toes and fingers of each hand and foot dug into the muddy sand; and as I dreamed you I remembered, born of the ashes of my ridiculous martyrdom, the pathetic visions of my husband and myself in that bath, the row of witches, the feel of the mandrake; when he died, the court buffoon had left a nameless child hidden in the straw of his pallet; the maid Azucena had found him, had felt compassion for him, had asked permission to suckle him at the teats of the bitch who had recently whelped; I recognized you; you returned; I dreamed you, shipwrecked on an unknown beach …

When I awakened, I told myself I would earn my sins: scarcely aware of what I was doing I called the court miniaturist, Brother Julián, who had afforded me my only moments of happiness in perusing his paintings, medallions, and seals, and by secretly providing me with volumes of the De arte honeste amandi: I stood before him, naked, and without a word he took up his brushes and painted the veins of my breasts blue, making the whiteness of my flesh even more startling; then the priest took me, and, finally, I lost my virginity. I rediscovered my lost nature. My dolls. My costumes. My peach pits. I was myself again; I was a child again. I mean, of course, that that was my first experience in the arms of a man. For as the priest made love to me with a preciseness of passion that used my body totally, I was becoming convinced I had earlier lost my virginity to a tiny nibbling beast. After our pleasure we both slept. I was awakened by faint noises. Something was moving beneath the sheets of my bed. Something emitting a fetid odor. A tiny mouse was huddled there; it peeped out from beneath the sheet, looked at Julián and me, hid itself again; a white and knotted root with the figure of a tiny person, almost a homunculus, crept toward our closely joined faces, disseminating sleep, desire, hallucination … Mandrakes grow beneath the gallows. Let us not weep for the dead: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. When we moved from the castle to the palace, I buried the mandrake here in the sand of this chamber. You, Juan Agrippa, I found on the sands of the sea.

Slowly La Señora disrobed. Without disturbing the youth’s rest, calling him her little sleeping scorpion like the somnolent insects within the crystal boxes, murmuring that she had found her treasure of lost peaches, soft and wrinkled, the hard pits surrounded by savory, pulpous flesh, hanging like two ripe fruits from the tree of his golden skin; she licked that tree, kissed it, and when it was aroused, strong as a sword of fire and marble, burning cold, icy hot, she shifted and sat astride him, clasping him between her legs; she felt him penetrate the wall of black jungle, separate the moist lips, enter, soft and hard; so must the flames be that consume the condemned, she said to herself (to him), condemn me then, cast me into the flames of Hell, for I cannot distinguish between Heaven and Hell; if this is sin let my flesh know eternal salvation and eternal damnation; flame of flesh, devouring serpent of my black bats, son of the sea, Venus and Apollo, my young androgynous god, let me feel the pulsing of your stones beneath my parted welcoming thighs, stroke my buttocks, bury your finger, there, deep between them, part my lips wide, there, I feel it, play with my moist, silky hair, let me weave them with yours, there, I feel it, there, there, there, I die because I am not dying, there, there, strike deep your scepter, my true lord, grant me your great mandrake, my only root, be my body, and let me give you mine, give me your warm milk, yes, yes, now, give me … now …

Later, lying beside the new and handsome youth who from now on would be this room’s inhabitant, trying to forget her former lover, La Señora whispered: Look at me carefully, for I am the only person you will see; I shall take that risk — that you may tire of me — but you will never leave this chamber, nor will you see anyone, speak to anyone, or touch anyone, except me; previously I wished to be generous, I permitted the boy chosen while I was attempting to find you, while I was searching for the incarnation of my dream, I permitted him, I tell you, to wander through the palace and even to go outside; I seduced him with my own desires; I caused him to dream of a different life, free from the strict moral and social prohibitions that suffocate us here, and he carried that freedom into the stable yards, to the stables and the kitchens; that is why he is dead, that, and because of the stupidity of wanting to leave behind him in a poem more than he was able to live; you are not going to die, my beautiful mandrake, you are going to live here with me, my blond mouse, here forever, although forever is a fleeting timepiece, alone with me even though you despise me, though I repel you, and it will be useless to pretend, for I shall know at what moment I cease to inflame you, the moment you begin to long for air and different company; perhaps that will be the moment when your seed begins to grow within my belly, and believing you were chosen for pleasure you reject the chains of duty; but I tell you now: you will only leave here, Juan Agrippa, when you are dead …

La Señora fell silent, startled again by the sounds and breathing seeming to emanate from the floor of white sand; something was growing there, something was scurrying swiftly, hidden, something was watching her, and from now on would be watching them. She saw only the captive youth, his dreamlike appearance, a trackless beach, an unmarked wall, receptive, hearing everything, saying nothing, listening to the responses to his obsessive questions, who am I? who are you? where am I? The youth named Juan opened one eye, and that eye, not needing words, communicated to La Señora: a man without a past begins to live the moment he awakens, hears, and sees; for him the world is whatever he first sees, hears, and touches; you, your words; I must accept the name and destiny you give me, because without them I have nothing and I am nothing; so you have wished it: and as I come to know you, do you not fear that I may be your twin, since I know no other reality but you?

And in that innocent eye, innocence born of a new birth from the sea, La Señora saw incredulity and doubt; Señora, you have told me a great deal, but you have not told me everything, and what you do not tell me, I must live for myself.

DISASTERS AND PORTENTS

And so things happened: Martín told Jerónimo, Jerónimo told Catilinón, Catilinón told Nuño, one whispering to another, Nuño in Martín’s ear, as they were eating their chick-peas or stirring the fires or slaking the lime, wrapped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust that muted the tones of the uneasy, secretive voices sliced by the knives of the sun of these high plains. First, a very simple thing happened: one of the supervisors went to gather walnuts; he climbed the tree, was cutting a branch, and slipped; he tried to save himself by grabbing another branch, missed, and fell to his death; and then some of the laborers were working on the south façade of the great cloister when a journeyman fell from the scaffolding, and died from the fall; and then a carpenter fell from a crane in the small cloister beside the gates and was killed, Nuño, he was killed, and that makes three in as many days; be careful when you climb upon the crane, Catilinón, or your miserable little store of savings will do you no good, you’ll not be spending it some summer night in the eating houses of Valladolid; but these things aren’t just happening to people, Martín, they’re happening to things, too; it’s as if we were things ourselves, for whatever it is that’s happening draws no line between a bramble hedge and a stonemason; listen, Jerónimo, hear how the wind is rising, blowing down scaffolding, tearing tiles from the roofs, covering our meager supply of pond water with a film of dust; someday, Martín, as the day is dawning, you will sneak over to the flat hedged land where they plan to put the palace garden, and you watch La Señora look from the curtains of her room; you will know her by the glitter of her earrings that at this hour of the morning are at the level of the sun and return the sun’s dawning gaze; you will watch her looking out at the hot dry crust and you try to see her imagining a garden with cool, gurgling fountains, rosebushes and stock and lilies, imagine Martín, her desire to part those eternally drawn curtains and open her chamber windows to the early-morning scent of non-existent honeysuckle, forgotten jasmine, and longed-for honey locust, or her longing to lie upon her sweet-smelling bed hearing and sensing the nearness, the sounds, and the fragrance of the garden they promised when they brought her from her English fogs, when they wedded her to our Señor, when they took her dolls and her peach pits from her; how do you know all these things, Jerónimo? her head chambermaid Azucena told me when she came to ask me as a favor that I, being the smith on this job, unshackle the chastity belt her husband, my apprentice, had girded on her when he left on the crusade from which he never returned, and you, Jerónimo, what did you ask in exchange for that favor, eh? to play that her bosoms are two handfuls of flax to be spun and then twirl your distaff in old Azucena’s hopping bunny, eh? oh, shut up, Catilinón, why are you complaining? everyone here’s had either that old whore or her helper Lolilla, they’ve been fondled and diddled by all the workers, but they bring us gossip from inside and carry it back there from here; you’ll look at that promised garden early some morning, Martín, you poor shitass, and then run away, afraid they’ll find you in that forbidden corner of the palace we constructed for them, and you’ll hope — with an anxiety so fragile, it doesn’t seem to fit your rough body, an anguish so deep you can’t explain it as you gaze at your plaster-coated hands — that that vision in silk and fine linens, our Señora, with the hooded hawk upon her wrist, will walk by — never looking at you — in her daily journey between the chapel and her chambers; listen, Nuño, the dust is going to settle, the sun’s fatigue will find its rest; the storm is breaking on the granite peaks, it descends through mountain passes and pillars of rock, a gray and menacing figure with outstretched arms and moaning voice and avid fingers, it tears the brambles from a vineyard fence and tosses them onto the heads of the mules and horses; it demolishes a work shed where quarriers are working and kills one of them; then it drives us all away from our cranes and ovens and foundations, we abandon our pickaxes and bellows, we huddle together terrified in the tile sheds where bricks and slate and wood are stored, as if those materials could protect us against the fury of the storm and El Señor, because Guzmán suggests it, orders the Bishop to come out of his retirement, fat and old, barely able to officiate, never allowing himself to be seen; carried by palace monks in a palanquin, coughing, his hands livid, covering his face with a handkerchief, he is borne on their shoulders to the quarries, to the forges, the sheds, spitting phlegm into a batiste cloth and trying to subdue the wind with his shouts as the monks attempt to maintain the tall miter upon his head, his silver staff in his hands, the girdle of his alb about his vast, soft belly, and the dalmatic settled upon the rounded shoulders.

“The Devil is doing this to mislead us, but he shall not benefit from it, for we shall prevail and his wickedness will be revealed! Return to your work, men of God, my beloved flock, for the recompense of your hard labors shall be nothing less than Heaven itself! Vade retro, Satan, for you will gain nothing here! To work, to work, and then to Heaven, to Heaven!”

The Bishop raises his fingers toward the scudding clouds, and as if he had convoked it (you saw it, Jerónimo, for its light outshone your forges), a long-tailed comet appears in the sky, beautiful and great, its head pointed toward the lands of Portugal and the tail trailing toward Valencia; it races by with its long silvery mane and continues to shine in the night after the bearers have borne away the exhausted Bishop and we are still clustered together in the sheds, fearing to go out or to eat, for we don’t know what significance to attribute to these portents, and all we can hear in the great silence of the night is the howling of a dog; a doleful, menacing howling that combines both rage and pain, that frightens us more than the storm or the comet or the deaths of our companions; and not only us, Martín, tempers are rising; there, inside, a supervisor quarreled with the journeymen and the architect with the overseer, and their quarrel was so heated that the girder on which they were standing broke and the first journeyman fell and was crushed to death upon the granite paving stones below; what do we know, Jerónimo? only what reaches our ears, Catilinón, only what succeeds in penetrating the wax in our ears, that’s all, what originates in those bedchambers that we will never see and sifts through the empty crypts and icy chapels by way of the cloister and courtyards and porticos and gates of this palace where, in spite of having constructed it with our own hands, you and I, Martín, would lose our way; all we know, day after day after day, is the site of a foundation or the area of a plastered wall, and then they give us five ducats for every window without our ever knowing what one sees when looking from that window, and eighteen reales for every door without our ever knowing where it will lead when it’s opened, feeling our way with our hands, we see what we’re building like the blind, but we will never know either how the entire palace looked in the heads of those who conceived it or how it will look when it’s finished and inhabited by our Señores; I swear to you that we will never look outside from those windows, and I swear to you that we will never enter through those doors; and if someday the rosebushes that La Señora wants so much blossom in her garden, it won’t be you who sees them; and in exchange for our feelings, Catilinón, they gave us five ducats not to see and eighteen reales not to hear; you think you’re clever, Cato, but you’re blind and crippled, and I wish to hell you’d fill that blaspheming mouth of yours with chickpeas: so shit on God, you filthy churl, but your curses fall on barren ground, and what you should do is pick the wax out of your ears; we hear the words spoken inside by way of the kitchens and the stables, words heavier and harder than the iron ingots we melt down here every day: a comet in summer means drought and the death of Princes; a comet under the sign of the Crab and in the house of Mars means misfortune; that’s what Brother Toribio, the astrologer, said in there and we learned it through the passageways and stable yards and the mouths of Azucena and Lolilla, but you and I, Nuño, know only that we’re afraid, and that the dog howls as if he wanted to tell us something, what is that you say, Martín? that the dog doesn’t want to scare us? something else? warn us? what? old Jerónimo, what do you believe he wants to tell us, you who have the fire of your ovens in your eyes, and in your beard the same burning red as your coals? what does that dog say that frightens us every night running and barking through the passages and chapels, penetrating the nuns’ cloister and frightening them to death, entering even the bedchambers of El Señor and the prelate, dragging chains and horns that blow by themselves, for so swift is the course of that unseen dog that we all hear it but no one sees it, none would fear it if it could be seen, that panting, stubborn dog, with an uncannily sharp nose, racing along an old and secret scent as if it were new, yowling as if every moment were its last; listen to it, all of you; you think the dog is telling us not to be afraid? listen to what they’re telling us, Nuño; you and I know that the comet disappeared yesterday, but that the storm is still crouching there, hidden behind its own veils, to deceive us; it is still there, leaden and restless, disguised as lowering clouds, obscuring the outlines of the mountains; that we know because we can see it; and we hear the dog running every night through the deserted galleries of the palace; but now we’ve been told that on the fourth night of the dog’s forays the nuns, because they could hear it but could not see it, decided it was a phantom dog, a soul from Purgatory, the messenger of misfortune, the guide of the dead, and at midnight they gathered in the chapel beside the bedchamber — where El Señor was suffering from crushing headaches — beneath the gaze of the Italian painting and beside the sculptures of the royal sepulchers, and there they first began to pray, then chant, and finally to bark louder than the dog itself to still its voice, to trumpet louder than the horns it dragged behind it, to give themselves courage, or perhaps to be like the spectral dog, for they told us that in their raptures the pious Sisters, after crawling on their knees until they bled, began to lash each other with penitential whips and finally urinated — deathly afraid as the sound of chains grew louder — beside the columns in the sacred room, more frightened now of each other than of the dog, huddled together, clinging to one another, sniffing at each other’s armpits and beneath the voluminous skirts of their black habits, weeping and moaning in ever decreasing volume until the chains and horns and the barking of the invisible dog filled all the space left vacant by the Sisters’ fear; their mouths were still open, as if they were yawning, but no sound issued from them; the howling of the hound seemed to emanate from those gaping, benumbed, lipless mouths, raw slits in the flesh of their faces, like the mouths of vipers and mandrakes, Madre Milagros, for they say that snakes drag themselves, and they say that magic little men are born beneath the gallows, and we have an abundance of those in Spain, my happy-go-lucky Catilinón, a man who is born low will be lowborn no matter where he goes, don’t forget: in Spain the worms don’t eat the corpses, it’s the corpses that devour the worms and so everything serves to fatten the vipers that in the end eat everything; see that you cry loud and long, Nuño, if you ever die on the gallows, for then your tears will engender the mandrake and you will have our offspring, poor miserable bastard.

“No one has died! No one has died! Why are you weeping so?” Madre Milagros called to the Sisters; she did not fear the truth in their voices, rather the portent, for led by the young novitiate Inés, the Sisters had been slowly turning to face El Señor’s bedchamber that opened directly onto the chapel so that he might, if he so desired, attend the Divine Services without moving from his bed; and the nuns cried and wept, staring toward the purple curtain behind which El Señor lay in Guzmán’s arms, swooning, moaning, everything is excrement, Guzmán, it’s all around me, it was there when I was born in the Flemish privy, it was there on the altar of my victories, and now, on this altar constructed to exorcise the horrors of the human body and condemn them to extinction, I smell the urine of these nuns; human excrescence is a tidal wave that will finally engulf me, Guzmán; I say this to Guzmán as well as to you, Catilinón, that a man who is a failure in his land will be a failure when he leaves it, but you’ve seen an example of that; common men, both of you, Guzmán has maneuvered things so he now has access to seignorial bedchambers while you, Catilinón, are as poor as dirt, and while he boasts of his successes, you, you miserable pup, you who arrived in this world without so much as two coins to rub together, you’re still plotting and planning how to spend that pittance you’ve earned here, and that, you poor bastard, is what I call dressing in rags and giving away the rest to whores; and Madre Milagros exclaimed: No one is dead! and El Señor trembled more violently, for now Guzmán had left him alone, enclosed in his four walls, three covered by dark hangings, the fourth by the ocher map of a world extending only to certain timorous boundaries: the Pillars of Hercules, Cape Finisterre, the mouths of the Tagus, and this wall of wailing flesh menacing him from the other side of the curtain, for El Señor (the rumor came through passageways, galleries, kitchens, stables, smoking tile sheds) feared that if the invisible dog was not located, the maddened nuns, either from fear or on the pretext of fear, would turn into an avenging mob: you, Señor, are responsible for our being here, we sought the peace of the cloister and you brought us to this ominous, dusty, desert place where we must live our lives surrounded by rough laborers, rude supervisors, and terrible workmen who polish and chisel all day at their granite with busy, restless fingers, by exciting, sweating leadworkers who melt down their ingots wearing nothing but a leather breechclout that barely covers their shame, by mares and mules fornicating before our eyes, crossbreeding to populate this plain with sterility; oh, yes, Señor, you removed us from the tranquillity we so desired to fill our thoughts with other, frightening desires: that our cell walls, that the palace walls that separate us might fall and that we might all come together, nuns and workers, in one great bacchanal of feeling, talking, drinking, belching, pinching, thrusting, and thumping beneath this burning sun; all that separate us from such promiscuous possibilities are a few unfinished walls: let the mares pump and the mules hump and the workmen’s tools swell and the nuns be defiled; what have our eyes not seen, Madre Milagros, since you brought us to this desert of savage muleteers, far from the sheltered convents of our sweet homelands, Seville and Cádiz, Jaén and Málaga, Madre, see what happens when you bring a group of Andalusian nuns here to these arid heights, to this relentless heat, to this unremitting cold, and the most beautiful of all, Sor Inés, as beautiful as an olive grove in flames, her hair and eyes black as an olive, her skin white as a lily, her lips an overblown carnation, see her now, on her knees, howling like a bitch in heat, sniffing at armpits and peeing in the corners of the chapel — so deep and shadowed it looks more like a dungeon than a place of worship — of our Lord and Master, Liege of the Dogs, Lord of All Devils; why are we here, Madre Milagros, tell me, you who are our Superior; those terrible men who surround us by day and night, isn’t it true they make you nervous, too? the hubbub of their picks and cranes and forges and hammers drowns out our matins and hymns and vespers, our plaintive devotions; you, too, looked out of the corner of your eagle eye at the naked arms of the masons in the summer heat, the sweat trickling down their torsos, the hair of their armpits, the heavy weight of their breechclouts. Oh, Most Holy Mother Mary, cleanse us of these disturbing thoughts, quiet in our voices the howl of the phantom dog, bury in our breasts the sweet emblem of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, cover with a Carmelite scapulary our black throbbing triangles, draw a veil, Most Pious Mother, across that pagan painting that hangs above the altar of the Eucharist, we want never again to see men’s legs, we want never to dream of men’s bodies, we want never to have to gather together at night, slipping from our cells, sobbing, grievously distressed, beyond solace, knowing, but not speaking of, what is happening, seeking any pretext to remove the white starched nightclothes you apportioned us, to put on the heavy penitential hairshirts and the sackcloth that afford us the opportunity, in the exchange of clothing, to glimpse our Andalusian bodies, to divine our heavy oranges and sniff our black olives, oh, Mother, Mother Mary … Madre Milagros … what is this silence? don’t you hear? don’t you hear that there is nothing to hear? don’t you hear that the invisible dog has stopped howling? Madre! Madre! what silence … and now, Madre … what new sound is that interrupting the silence? whose loud, arrogant bootsteps are those advancing through the chapel? what is that being dragged across the granite floor? what sound is that of metal striking against stone? passageways, kitchens, stables, Azucena, Lolilla; wake up, sleepyhead Cato, you may not owe a cent to any man, but he who would slumber and doze will never wear fine clothes; listen to what Guzmán said, knowing we’d hear; he knows everything, he’s El Señor’s chief huntsman, he says there are some greedy hounds that no amount of punishment can control, and this is their flaw; as soon as their handler lets them off the chain they are prone to pick up an old trail and bark as furiously as if it were a new one; they draw all the other dogs off the scent and when they follow the greedy hound they set up an uproar that confuses the huntsmen and endangers the hunt; such is the result of the sorrow and the excessive greed of this kind of hound; they want what they can never have, and so they die mad, mad of rage, and I tell you this, Jerónimo, so that you understand me, Martín, and listen, all of you, to what happened last night; all these restive nuns were in the chapel, sweet, luscious young Andalusians all of them, but none as ripe a plum as the one they call little Inés, Inesilla, haven’t you seen her, Martín? shit, Martín only has eyes for something he can never touch, La Señora, the untouchable, the sacred, why ask him? only Nuño and I have eyes for Sister Inés, eh Nuño, for are we just to perish here, all suffering, and no whoring? well look, would you, look at this crew of bleary-eyed jackanapes and bastards, but cool down, brothers, if it’s consolation you want, remember that though the poor squire’s horse may die on him, the rich squire loses his woman; we’ve all sidled up to that courtyard and those cells to look and to be looked at, to see whether we could catch a peep while those holy Sisters from Andalusia or Bilbao … or Turkey, who the hell cares, were undressing; those black habits don’t drain the heat out of them or out of us either, especially when this cock-of-the-walk Cato raises his loincloth and flashes his stones for the little nuns; so they were all huddled together in that chapel we built beneath the earth, you remember? with the crypt or dungeon with thirty-three steps leading up to the plain above, shouting like crazy women because of the phantom dog’s howling, when Guzmán came in dragging the body of Bocanegra, El Señor’s favorite dog, on a chain, all decked out as if for the hunt, with cords and tassels for the horns, the spiked collar with the arms and device of El Señor, his claws burned, his legs swollen; they say there were wounds on his throat and head, that he was dead as a doornail and that he smelled of all the unguents with which he’d been treated in life, pine resin, alum stone, cumin and juniper, paste of ashes and kid’s milk: the dead dog smelled of all that, it had been a fierce mastiff they said, but as if he’d been infected, Catilinón, by the mortifications and sluggishness of El Señor, who always kept the dog by his side and never allowed him to go out to hunt, so he was dressed for it only then when he was dead, but instead of the hunter, he was the hunted; Guzmán stepped up onto the altar with the corpse of the dog in one hand and the still bloody blade in the other; he hung the mastiff from a railing and turned to the nuns: “There’s your phantom dog. He won’t howl again. Return to your cells. Respect El Señor’s rest.”

So, alleluia, their fears evaporated, their terrors ceased, it was the end of Babylon, and Pope Puffer and Panter went back to sleep, and we’ll be returning to our basins, the quarries, the ovens … and the wind, Martín? the wind’s still blowing? and the order, Jerónimo? the order not to work today? we’re all supposed to go to the esplanade in front of the palace for a ceremony? what ceremony? who knows, some ceremony, a holiday, it must be a circus, maybe it’s a troupe of puppeteers, who knows, anyway, a ceremony, and what a ceremony, with thunderbolts and lightning flashes that are seen, but not heard, same as the phantom that turned out to be El Señor’s favorite dog, surely it was rabies, all those wounds smeared with pitch, careful, Catilinón, rabies are transmitted by foxes, don’t go near anyone foxy; God has painted His heavens the color of slate and the storm is so near you can smell it in the earth, don’t you smell the storm, Catilinón? why do you think the dust is settling, as if sheltering, as if protecting, as if covering, its eyes with a gray sleeve? So, let’s go, Nuño, Jerónimo, Martín, Catilinón, the dog wasn’t a phantom, Guzmán demonstrated that, it was just a rabid dog, and even though he was El Señor’s best dog, even though he died with El Señor’s broad heraldic collar around his wounded neck, he ceased to be the favorite when he became rabid, you don’t let a Jew or a pig or a rabid dog in your garden, and Guzmán killed him by driving a sharp blade into his neck, dead, stone-cold dead he is, dead as the youth who was burned the other day beside the stables, dead as the journeyman who fell from the scaffold and the supervisor who went to gather walnuts and the worker who splattered upon the paving stones, dead, all of them, and he who sighs over another’s death wears a long noose about his own neck, Bocanegra is dead, hanging from the chapel railing, there won’t be any more accidents now, they’ve killed the phantom dog that was the cause, the comet has disappeared, you’ll see, everything’s back to normal, everything, back the way it was before, hey, let’s go, hear the clarion call and the voices singing, hurry, no, slowly, Catilinón, let’s take our time, for at last we’re going to see something with our own eyes, see, not be told, look, Nuño, look, Madre Milagros, have you told them? one, two, three … thirteen, fourteen … twenty-three, twenty-four holy mendicants, two rows of Lords and noblemen, and eight Hieronymite nuns beside the chaplains and the chaplains beside the litters; just look what a long line, Madre, coming down from the mountain, Martín, look, they’re raising the stilled dust, trampling the weeds, caught by the brambles, a long, interminable black line, Madre, they’re cutting through the thicket and crushing even flatter the brush of this flat dry land, so different from our Andalusian gardens, here they come, Catilinón, through that rocky valley, avoiding the dangerous potholes; almost all have reached the esplanade, the procession is very long, behind the litters come mounted archers armed with lances and on the lances are tied streamers of black taffeta; be more circumspect, Inesilla, even if you’re struck by lightning, don’t be afraid of those black clouds, lower your eyes and forget that clouds bring rain and wind and thunder and lightning, no, Madre Milagros, the storm doesn’t frighten me, I’m lifting my face to be washed by these heavy raindrops, to be refreshed after the terrible heat of this accursed plain you brought us to, far from our sea and the broad rivers, quiet, look how around each litter there’s a splendid footguard and twenty-four mounted pages, count them carefully, carrying wax tapers, all of them wearing black mourning, even the trappings of the mules pulling the litters are black, but what’s on those litters, Martín? climb on my shoulders, Catilinón, look carefully, over the heads of the other workers and nuns and halberdiers and La Señora’s duennas, look carefully and then tell me, I’m up, there, look, there’s El Señor, all in mourning, standing in the palace entrance, pale, almost frightened, as if he expected to see himself in what he is seeing, and by his side, seated, is La Señora, Martín, La Señora, her face expressionless, dressed in black velvet, with the hooded falcon on her wrist, and behind her stands Guzmán, Martín, Guzmán, with the plaited moustache, one hand resting upon his blade, the same dagger he used to kill the dog Bocanegra, and yes, yes, Martín, El Señor is reaching out his hand as if he were looking for the faithful dog, but he’s not there, but what is it we’re seeing, Catilinón, quit all the quibbling and just tell me what’s on those litters, they’re bodies, Martín, bodies! corpses, Madre Milagros, that’s why we were all so frightened, that’s why the dog was howling, because he smelled them approaching, because he knew more than we, and you said no one had died! those are dead bodies, Martín, on my faith and by my balls, they’re corpses, some are skeletons, but they’re all dressed up in rich clothes, black and red, with gold medallions, dressed-up skeletons, Martín, and some are mummies, still grinning, their hair still on their heads, now the halberdiers are lifting them from the litters and carrying them toward the tombs, Madre; be quiet, Inés, and look, here come four precentors dressed in capes, look, Martín, there’s the fat Bishop again, blue in the face from coughing and gagging, and a gelding as well, they say, and he and all his ministers are wearing brocade, Madre, and the monks are singing the Subvenite, and I know how to sing it, too, but the wind … the rain … the decorations on the caskets are flapping in the wind, the wind will blow the dead away, they are our dead, daughters, El Señor’s ancestors have arrived now, overcoming flatland and mountain, storms and deep pits, canyons and swampy grasslands to receive their final burial in this palace of the dead, all the dynasty, from the time of its foundation, the thirty ancestors on their thirty litters destined for the thirty sepulchers, the thirty phantoms of the dynasty that rules us, little Sisters, beneath the invincible motto, Not yet, Not yet, inscribed in the center of the abyss that is the very center of the coat of arms, Not yet, Nondum, Nondum; the first Señor, he of the battles against the Moors; the courageous Señor his son, who threw himself from the towers of his besieged castle upon the lances of Mohammed rather than surrender; the Arian King and his disobedient son whom the father ordered decapitated one Easter morning; the Señor who died of fire between incestuous sheets as he violated his own daughter, whose remains are eternally joined to those of her father, and their son and brother, who to avoid temptation dedicated himself to the collection of miniatures; the Señor who was an astronomer, son of the preceding Señor, who from the study of the minute passed to the investigation of the maximum, but as he did so complained that God had not consulted him about the creation of the world; the brave Señor who died of his sins, for his life was nourished by his virtues; and his Señora who fought like a lioness against the usurping pretenders; the Señor known as the Suffering, whether because of his spiritual pain or his well-known corporeal constipation isn’t known, and his grandson, the taciturn and impotent Señor whose only pleasure came from sniffing the crusts of excrement he habitually allowed to accumulate in his breeches; and the young Señor, the murderer, who ordered his two brothers, his rivals, thrown from the walls, and who, as they died, summoned him to God’s judgment thirty-three and a half days later, after which time this Señor was found dead in his bed, poisoned by the constant handling of a poisoned lead rosary; look at them, daughter, they are our wise and beloved masters and rulers; the cruel Señor who abandoned his legitimate wife for the love of a concubine and then forced the members of his court to drink his favorite’s bath water; the abandoned Señora who fashioned a flag the color of her blood and tears, for a more worthy occupation for her widow-like state no one could propose, or she imagine, and that blessed banner of sorrows was carried into battle against impious Cathari heretics; and thus you are witnessing, Inesilla, little silly, how everything in this world is part of a greater plan, and how even the most insipid devotions have some purpose; and the harsh Señor who had statues erected on the sites of his nocturnal crimes, for he was given to sallying out at night, cloaked, to provoke street duels for no more than a knock-this-chip-off-my-shoulder, and then celebrated his murders by commemorating his victims in marble, until one night one of those stone arms fell on his head and killed him; and the virgin Señora murdered by one of her husband’s halberdiers while she was praying, in order to assure her rapid passage to Paradise; the rebellious Señor who rose up in arms against his stepfather, the murderer of his mother, she who died in prayer; the seditious Infanta who in battling for the succession leveled plains, burned palaces, and decapitated loyal nobles; the Señor who employed all the days of his reign in celebrating his own funerals, thus considering his human servitude and making himself the equal of lepers who by law must observe their burials before they die, and so he lay in his coffin and intoned the De Profundis; the Señor who was widowed at an early age and whose small sons were sequestered — it was soon discovered it was all the work of a Jewish conspiracy — for the famous Dr. Cuevas who attended the Queen was Jewish and the three heirs to the throne were kidnapped by Hebrews who later slit their throats by the light of the moon and manufactured magical oils from them, for which the King felt obligated to burn alive in the plaza of Logroño thirty thousand false Christians, in truth pertinacious Jews; see the little coffin, Inesilla, there is the body of a little child in it, symbolizing the three lost noble children; and El Señor’s grandmother, our most chaste Señora, who never changed her clothing, for she said that in this way the Devil would never see what belonged only to God, and who on dying had to be pried loose from the stockings and shoes that had stuck to her flesh, and the mad Señor, her husband, the grandfather of our own Señor, who enjoyed boiling hares alive, who collected snow in his chamber pot and had his sugar dyed with ink: they say that one night as he was devoting himself to unspeakable pleasures he was strangled with a silken noose by four Moorish slaves; so they say; and finally, Inesilla, the father of El Señor, the whoring Prince whose body has been dragged by his widow, the Mad Lady, the mother of El Señor, through all the monasteries of this land drained by so many battles, by so much crime and so much heroism and so much injustice; here they will all find their rest, in these crypts of granite and marble, forever, daughter, forever, for this palace is a tomb and a temple and is constructed for eternity, but nothing is eternal, Madre Milagros, except the true eternity of Heaven and Hell, quiet, you’re very impertinent for a novitiate, all these bones and skulls will never move from here, and the resurrection of the flesh, Madre? and the day of the final judgment? won’t our Lords ascend to Heaven in the bodies they had in life? accursed Inesilla, don’t try to confuse me, you should be wearing bells, child of fun- and merrymakers, instead of the habits of our saintly order, are you trying to confuse me? for the body in which we will be resurrected will not be the lustful body in which we died, but it will be a new Christian body, the same body, but renewed, reconverted by a second baptism in the temple of the Holy Spirit, repeat, my poor child, repeat, and then ask yourself, tollens ergo membra Christi faciam membra meretricis? and recall the exhortation of St. John Chrysostom, “You have no right to defile your body, for it is not yours, but the temple of God, your Father,” and recall also that the Holy Father in Rome has ordered denounced to the Inquisition all who hold that kissing, embracing, and touching to the end of carnal delectation are not mortal sins, remember that, but, Madre, I don’t want to look at those repulsive mummies and skeletons, what I want to see are those wooden coffers with golden handles, lined with green taffeta and trimmed with silver gimp, don’t you see them? yes, my daughter, those house the relics of the saints and the beatified and others pertaining to the succession of our very illustrious Lords, but the weather is still gray and overcast, hey, Catilinón, what’s in those boxes? tell me, they’re opening them now, Martín, I can see very well your shoulders make a good tower and now El Señor is walking toward one of the boxes which a monk is holding out to him and he’s taking out a shinbone, do you hear, a shinbone, from the knee down, with part of the kneecap, with skin and nerves still hanging from a large part of it, and now El Señor is raising it to his lips, kissing it, and that, Jerónimo, and that was a flash of lightning that struck the bell tower and tore down part of the stonework, but look, there at the end of the procession, it’s a small leather carriage advancing beneath the rain, surrounded by an exhausted multitude of halberdiers, cooks, alguaciles, ladies-in-waiting, and scullions carrying javelins with boars’ heads impaled upon their points, strings of onions, dried pork, and tallow candles, and behind them, look, behind them, a funeral carriage, the last, the one that was missing, Inesilla, the one needed to complete the thirty bodies that must lie in the thirty sepulchers of this hall, the most ornate, the most embellished of the carriages, with all the fury of the rain pouring off its glass cover, they’re stopping, Martín, who is coming now, Madre? the procession is over, my habit is soaking wet, the cloth is clinging to my breasts, Madre, let’s go change our clothing, let’s go stand naked before the fire to dry, who’s coming there? four halberdiers are approaching to open the door of the leather coach, the storm is worsening, the corpses are being received in a terrible wind, the tabernacle is crashing to the ground, the wind is blowing the brocades of the caskets, look, Madre, look; look, Martín, a spark of fire high on the tip of the bell tower, just beneath the golden sphere, look, the sphere is blazing as if it held a fiery wax taper, and as the sphere blazes the chants burst forth, and the funeral bells, and the praise and psalms and the prayers of the multitude; the four halberdiers help from the small leather carriage a bundle in black, nervous, shaking, sobbing; yellow eyes shine from the rags and no one knows when the Mad Lady reveals her face whether those are tears or raindrops running down her dry cheeks; and behind that bundle wrapped in wet rags, you descend, beneath the storm, you, beatified, handsome, and stupid, you, in your velvet cap, fur cape, the golden fleece upon your chest, the rose-colored stockings, you, the resurrected Prince, fair, beatified, and idiotic, you, the usurping shipwrecked youth wearing these insignia and clothing, mere appearances, you, with the gaping mouth, the drooping lip, the prognathic jaw, the waxen stare, the labored breathing, and behind you stops the carriage of the dead wherein the youth found on the dunes lies in tattered clothing in the place of the whoring Very High Lord who died of catarrh after playing strenuously at ball, and who the following day was embalmed by the science of Dr. Don Pedro del Agua. They’re calling you, Jerónimo, eh? they need you, the lightning bolt has set fire to the bells themselves, the bells are fusing, are melting, and we …

“We’ve spent our lives constructing a house for the dead!”

THE MAD LADY

Shut yourselves in your cells, said Madre Milagros, all of you, and don’t show so much as a hair of your head, bar your doors and cover your windows with cloth, El Señor’s mother, the Mad Lady, wrapped in her black rags, carrying the corpse of her husband, and accompanied by some idiotic nobleman who, according to her, is her own husband revived, father of himself or son of himself or twin of her husband, El Señor’s father, I don’t know, I don’t understand, I can’t make any sense of it, Sister Angustias, Sister Clemencia, Sister Dolores, Sister Remedios, hide yourselves, children, for the Mad Lady cannot tolerate the presence of other women, even though they be nuns and novitiates devoted to the most chaste of devotions, betrothed to Christ, having already taken their vows, that isn’t enough for her, she sees a threat in every skirt in the world, she fears that every woman has an ungovernable desire to rob her, if only for one night, of the husband who in life was so unfaithful that had he not died of fever from a catarrh he surely would have died of the French malady that poisons the blood and covers the body with chancres, is that why our Señor doesn’t have children, Madre Milagros, because he inherited the malady and can’t or because he can but fears he will transmit the infection? all of you, be quiet, shhh, it’s a heavy charge I’ve taken upon my shoulders in shepherding you Andalusian nuns, there’s a contradiction for you, nuns from Seville, why, their breasts have budded by the time they’re eleven and what they don’t know they find out and what they can’t find out they guess, shhhh, all of you, go to your cells and let me count you and bless you, you, Clemencia, and you, Remedios, and you, Dolores, and you, Angustias, and … Inesilla, my God, where’s Inés, Sister Angustias, she should be right here beside you in the cell next to yours, oh, that Inesilla, where could she be? who knows, Madre Milagros, El Señor has ordered so many Masses celebrated, Low Masses, Requiem Masses, Pontifical Masses, sermons in all the cloisters and in every corner of the palace to commemorate the second burial of his ancestors, and Inesilla is so devout, so curious, you mean, and high-spirited, she wouldn’t miss all the festivities, hush, Sister Remedios, these aren’t festivities, you Andalusian girls are so irresponsible, this is funeral reverence we celebrate, ceremonies of tears and mourning, not Sevillian fairs, but listen, do you hear? hide yourselves in your cells, do you hear the sputtering of the lighted tapers, the footsteps, the moaning? what did I tell you, little Sisters of the Lord, servants of God, brides of Christ, go hide, for here comes the Mad Lady, hear the cart squeaking? they are pushing her in her little cart, she’s making the rounds of the entire palace to see whether all the women are securely locked up, look at them, Sister Clemencia, I’m looking, Madre Milagros, here come two halberdiers with lighted tapers, and a dwarf’s pushing the little cart and within the cart is a motionless shape with yellow eyes peering out of the rags, and behind that a young man wearing a velvet cap and a fur cape — all accompanied by an icy blast of air — through the cloister, the stone galleries, the yellow plastered walls, that youth with the imbecilic air is running the tips of his fingers over the plaster bas-reliefs, the heart of Jesus, the wounds of Christ, oh, what a wind, Madre Milagros, and behind them are two priests perfuming everything with incense, and the Mad Lady looking at everything without a word, staring toward the little windows of our cells with those eyes of intense hatred, Madre, why is she in the little cart? is she crippled? shhh, daughter, shhh, the mother of El Señor has neither arms nor legs, when her husband died she lay in the center of the castle courtyard and said that a true Señora would not allow herself to be touched by anyone except her husband, and that as her husband had died, she would never again be touched by anything except the sun, the wind, the rain, and dust, for as those elements are no one, they are nothing, and there she lay for several months; her son, our Señor, said: Respect her will, give her food and water and attend her needs and keep her neat, but respect the will of La Señora, my mother, let her do as she will with her body and with her sorrow, and let this example of what the honor of a Spanish Lady is be known and praised; but she could have entered a convent, Madre, she could have flagellated herself, fasted, walked upon thorns, allowed them to pierce her hands and feet; but you are seeking logical solutions, Sister Dolores, and the Señora who is El Señor’s mother is mad, and in her madness she decided to do that penance and no other; but her legs, Madre Milagros, and her arms? you saw today, daughter, that shinbone that El Señor kissed, that member that he took from the coffer and then pressed to his lips, that is the leg of his mother, now a relic like that of a saint, conserved forever in these palace crypts alongside twelve thorns and a hair from Our Saviour’s head, the shinbone almost as sacred as the hair and the thorns, but the Mad Lady had said that no one should touch her, and men understood, but not the beasts, and one evening her dead husband’s dogs, being hungry for the hunt, for they had not been out of the palace since the death of their master, were taken for a turn by the huntsman Guzmán, as was his custom and his duty, but the mastiffs were restless, and by a stroke of bad fortune La Señora, the wife of El Señor, was having an entertainment that night, she had pleaded for it, begged her husband that they might again hear music and dissipate the long mourning in the palace, the musicians were playing horns whose sound could easily be heard through the windows opened to the spring; the hounds mistook the sound for the signal to the hunt, even for the attack, and they launched themselves, Guzmán being unable to restrain them, upon a strange quarry: it is believed that, perhaps all these things at the same time, they smelled the sweat and the flesh of their dead master in the flesh and sweat of the Lady lying in the courtyard, or that they were attracted by the scent of excrement and other filth on El Señor’s mother’s body, or that they confused the body of the Reyna with that of a trapped beast, and they fell upon her, growling and snapping, gravely wounding her extremities, while the Mad Lady, instead of screaming with pain, gave praise to God for this test and begged for the death that as a faithful Christian she could not inflict upon herself but nevertheless longed for and sought from God with the goal of being united with her very beloved husband; the gray spotted dogs were attempting to devour the mad Señora that night, incited by the horn of celebration that they thought sounded death, to the kill, until Guzmán fortunately had the idea of sounding his own horn to regroup and the mastiffs came to his call, setting the Lady free. El Señor tried to have her carried from that open-air prison, to have her tended and her wounds cured. But his mother, La Señora, insisted, she said that only her husband could touch her and thus her arms and legs wounded by the fury of the dogs began to swell, they never healed, and pus ran from her punctured, purple, pestilent limbs while the Lady mumbled prayers and prepared to commit her suffering body and contrite soul to the Creator of all things, God Our Father, shouting loudly that honor and glory are loss and not gain, voluntary sacrifice, and not avaricious hoarding, loss without possibility of recompense, loss because there is no richness in this world that can compensate for honor and glory, and that honor and glory are supreme! she shouted that every night of that spring, until El Señor, her son, our present Señor, ordered some guards to violate his mother’s, the Mad Lady’s, express will, to lift her up by force, with fury and without respect, for the Mad Lady struggled with a ferociousness equal to that of the hunting mastiffs, she bit the hands of the guards, spit blood in their faces and invoked the Evil One to strike them dead with a bolt of lightning; but to no avail, she was carried to a bedchamber and there, although the doctors applied ointments and cupping glasses to the wounds on her legs and arms, it was too late, and they decided to amputate her limbs, which took place amid frightful shrieks which I heard, my sisters, which I heard, trembling with fear, listening to the words the Lady shouted as they chopped, oh, save me, Christ my Saviour, save me from the rage of these Jewish doctors come like rats out of their alleyways and hovels to mutilate me and then make impious use of my members, they are doctors of the Hebraic faith, look, look at those unnatural stars engraved upon their chests, they will boil my limbs in oil so that all good Christians die and they, therefore, inherit our riches: listening to the words that the Lady uttered before she fainted, while the saws were slicing her putrid flesh and splintering her fragile bones, I listened to how she gave thanks to God, finally, for subjecting her to this terrible test that again placed her in extremis, as she so desired, and just before she fainted she shouted: Honor through sacrifice, the height of my nobility is sustained not upon the possession of the ephemeral things of this world but upon their total absence, and what greater sacrifice or greater loss, excepting death, than this sacrifice of half my body, especially at the hands of these detested pigs who imposed even worse sacrifice upon Christ Our Lord. She retained, nevertheless, possession of her will. Look at her beady eyes, Sisters, see how arrogantly she stares at us, see how she tells us, never uttering a word, that we would not be capable of bearing what she has borne, see how she tells us that she has returned, mutilated, dragging with her a cadaver, in possession of a new being, of a new Prince, of a new youth, see her, there she goes toward the servants’ quarters, parading her pride, telling us she has returned and that things will be as they were before, that death is deceit, that there is no possible decay when the will for loss is imposed upon the will for acquisition, she has returned; she’s returned, Azucena, she’s headed toward our corridors, she’s coming to lock us up again, she’s coming to take away the freedom that La Señora, El Señor’s wife, enclosed in her bedchamber, indifferent to our coming and going, to all our quarrels and disputes, has given us; but not any longer, the Mad Lady’s back, here she comes, pushed in her little cart, look, look, Lolilla, pushed by the dwarf Barbarica, that little monster’s come back, too, that fat-cheeked, puffy-eyed, wrinkled little dwarf, look how the tail of her dress drags the floor, she’s always insisted on wearing the old dresses of all the Señoras, even though they drag the floor and she has to roll up the sleeves on her short arms and gather them in a bunch around that belly tight as a drum! didn’t that dwarfish Barbarica dance around you, Azucena, didn’t she leap and cavort around you, farting at will, didn’t she show off in front of you wearing a cardboard crown, her face painted gold, the veins on her bare breasts painted blue, shouting “I’m a Queen, too, I’m a little Queen, a miniature Señora,” and then fire off three quick blasts of her cannon? didn’t she? they’ve come back, Azucena, they’ve come back, to our infinite bad fortune, oh, fateful day, oh, black day, this day on which the Mad Lady and her tooting dwarf returned to this palace, after we thought we’d been freed forever from that sinister pair, and look, look, Lolilla, would you look at what they have with them, a young man, he looks bewildered, as if he’d been clubbed over the head, as if they’d tossed him in a blanket till he couldn’t move, either from the pain or the muddled brain, who knows? look at him, he isn’t really ugly, but the way he moves makes him seem ugly, as if he weren’t really here, somehow, like a puppet, as if he were sick in the head, that shows, Azucena, that shows that if you try to bake your bread in a faulty oven, you can expect twisted loaves, he must be a son of St. Peter, one of those you can see right through even when he insists he’s the nephew of some priest and then is knocked silly by the drubbing the priest gives him to keep the boy from calling him “Father,” no, Lolilla, he’s not the son of a cleric, no, have you forgotten what we saw when they burned that boy down behind the kitchens? the new life from the tears of the condemned man? the mandrake, Azucena, the mandrake! and we told La Señora about it, about the tiny man born from the infamy of the stakes and gallows and racks, all the places where the men of our land die weeping, the pillory and the vile garrote, Azucena, the ashes of the boy burned alive! oh, oh, oh, I knew it would happen, I knew it wouldn’t be the young Señora who found it, but this mad old woman without arms or legs, this evil witch, she had to be the one to find it, and care for it until it grew to be a man, surely she suckled it with that Barbarica’s milk, dribbling from her teats like milk from a mad nanny goat, unchecked and uncontrolled! and what is it the Mad Lady’s mumbling, Azucena, what is she saying? where is her drummer? she needs her black-clad drummer to accompany her, announcing her mournful passage through these halls, and what does that matter to us? what matters to us is that this evil old tyrant’s returned and she’s headed toward the bedchamber of our Señora, our protector, our carefree mistress who so wanted to fill this somber place with joy and merriment, against the strict orders El Señor transmitted to us through Guzmán, to arrange gardens, to entertain herself with plays and courts of love and carrousels, who wanted the shepherds to return, to shear their sheep beneath her balcony, who wanted something entertaining to happen here, something besides our odious obligation to slick down the young Señora’s hair with saliva when she’s feeling drowsy, but now, not even that, for who knows how many days it has been since La Señora allowed us to enter her chambers, now we can’t steal anything, no, not now, we’ve been had, and the tyrant’s returned, here she comes on her little cart with her dwarf and her fool, shouting obscenities, that a true Señora has no legs,

“Do you know that? A true Señora has no legs!”

What do I know, Lolilla, what do I know? the only thing we know is that this horrible old woman will shut us up, will send guards to lock us in our miserable little rooms, will take away everything we possess, everything we’ve managed to store away through the years, we won’t be able to hide anything, that’s what mandrakes are for, to discover hidden treasures, and so we won’t have any treasures any more, the Old Witch will say we’re thieving servants, and she’ll deprive us of the dignity we’ve won as duennas and maidservants to La Señora and will turn us into scullery maids again, come on, Lolilla, yes, Azucena, let’s run hide everything, let’s put everything beneath a loose paving stone, everything we’ve sneaked from the chamber of the young Señora, the dolls, the peach pits, the silken stockings, the locks of hair, the worn slippers, the little sacks of dried violets, the colored pastilles, the insects dipped in gold that we make buzz around our breasts and our hairy mounds, all of it, all of it, let’s hide it all very carefully, for it is our only inheritance, you tired old cunt, our only inheritance.

THE FIRST TESTAMENT

“Dip your pen in the inkwell, Guzmán, it’s never too late to prepare oneself for a good death, to settle one’s accounts with God, especially on the day — needing no mirror to verify it — I see my death reflected in that of my ancestors and I ask for myself that someday I may enjoy the repose I have procured for them. They are at rest, are they not, Guzmán?”

“Each has been placed within his own sepulcher, Señor. There they lie.”

“I prepared everything, I planned everything so that the arrival of the thirty funeral litters would coincide with my birthday, so that the celebrations of life and death would be blended into one; one year less of life for me, one year more of death for them; but now, finally, we are all together, celebrating equally what we have in excess and what we need, for tell me, Guzmán, is it that they lack life or that I lack death? Do they suffer an excess of death or I an excess of life?”

“In my humble opinion, these dead are very dead, they have been for a long time. This is not the hour to weep for them, rather to make this ceremony a celebration of your life and power.”

“I planned; I anticipated. So that all would arrive on the same day, the day of my birthday. But you saw, that wasn’t the way it happened. The caravan was four days late.”

“You demanded that the procession should be perfect, that all the bodies should arrive here together, at the same moment, not one on Tuesday and five Friday and three more Sunday; so that many were forced to wait in the foothills pending the arrival of the others, those that were delayed by accidents of the road, wrong turns, unexpected storms, perhaps unforeseen encounters, I don’t know…”

“My will was not sufficient.”

“The elements are invincible, Señor.”

“Quiet. My orders were not sufficient. Four days of desperate waiting; four days during which other accidents occurred, other deaths, other storms that could have been avoided had they arrived on the day of my birthday. Bocanegra would not have died. You would not have killed him.”

“Do not blame me for his death. He had rabies. He could not remain by your side. Does it make sense to save a dog and lose a Prince? Charity has its limits. Also sorrow, if we’re not to become falsely melancholy.”

“All right, all right, Guzmán; everything will again be at peace; the nuns will not be whirling madly outside my bedchamber; the workers will return to work and soon this, my life work, will be completed, the pantheon of my ancestors and the mausoleum for my own remains.”

“Let us celebrate life, Señor; let us not anticipate the work of time.”

“Place on me my bone ring, I feel a cramp.”

“Let us go to your bedchamber where I can place your feet on a cushion and you can dictate to me in comfort.”

“No, Guzmán, no; it must be here, here in the chapel, you seated before the lectern and I resting here on these icy stones, each of us surrounded by the thirty sepulchers of my ancestors; tell me, Guzmán, how did their remains reach this crypt if the stairway that was constructed for their use is still unfinished?”

“They had to come around the stables, through the kitchens and courtyards, galleries and dungeons, treading upon the damp leaves of the past winter accumulated in these subterranean chambers.”

“Why is the stairway not finished?”

“I have explained; they feared to interrupt your devotions…”

“No, you do not understand what I mean; it should be complete; I ordered only thirty steps between the crypt and the plain above, one symbolic step for each coffin that was to descend to its tomb on this great day; why did they build thirty-three? I counted them, whom else are they expecting? How many steps will there be? There will be no more corpses, it’s thirty, thirty phantoms, the number of my specters, Guzmán, not one more, nor one less, whom are they expecting?”

“I do not know, Sire.”

“Who constructed the stairway?”

“I repeat, Sire; everyone, no one, they have no names. They’re not important.”

“If the corpses had been carried down the stairway … you do not know, Guzmán, you cannot imagine…”

“I know only what El Señor deems worthy to communicate to me and order me to do, Señor.”

“Hear my secret, Guzmán; I have ascended that stairway; to go up those stairs is to ascend toward death. Coming down them, would my ancestors have descended toward life? Would they have been regenerated as I gradually decomposed in the mirror as I ascended? Would I now be surrounded by my living ancestors?”

“It is difficult for me to follow the reasoning of El Señor. May I ask again, let us return to your bedchamber, you will be more comfortable there…”

“No, no, it must be here where both of us can see and be seen by that painting they sent from Orvieto; we will speak to that painting, and finally, it will speak to us; I know it; unroll your parchment and place it upon the lectern; sit down, Guzmán, do as I ask, write, what I tell you will be told us by that painting, it will speak through my lips to give voice to its mute allegory.”

“Señor: the storm calmed the din of summer on the plain, but it sifted coldly into the crypt as if here to await a premature encounter with winter; your teeth are chattering and your bones creaking, you are stiff with cold; permit…”

“Write, Guzmán, write, what is written remains, what is written is true in itself, for it cannot be subjected to the test of truth, or to any proof at all; that is the full reality of what is written, its paper reality, full and unique, write: In the name of the Holy Trinity, three persons and one All-Powerful and True God, Creator of all things … wait, Guzmán, what are we saying, what are we writing out of mere habit? Do you never doubt, Guzmán? Does a Devil never approach you and say, that wasn’t how it was, it was not only that way, it could have happened that way but also in a thousand different ways, depending upon who is telling it, depending on who saw it and how he chanced to see it; imagine for an instant, Guzmán, what would happen if everyone offered their multiple and contradictory versions of what had happened, and even what had not happened; everyone, I tell you, Lords as well as serfs, the sane and the mad, the devout and the heretical, then what would happen, Guzmán?”

“There would be too many truths. Kingdoms would be ungovernable.”

“No, something worse; if everyone could write the same text in his own manner, the text would no longer be unique; then there would be no secret; then…”

“Then nothing would be sacred.”

“True, exactly so, Guzmán; and you would be right, kingdoms would be ungovernable, for upon what is government founded but the unity of power? And this unitary power, upon what is it founded but its privileged possession of the unique written text, an unchanging norm that conquers, that imposes itself upon, the confused proliferation of custom? The subject, acting, exists; the Prince, acting, is; custom falls into disuse, is exhausted, is renewed and changes aimlessly and chaotically, but the law does not vary, it assures the permanency and the legitimacy of all acts of power. And upon what is that legitimacy founded?”

“The law the Prince invokes is said to be a reflection of immutable divine law, Señor; such is its legitimacy.”

“Then listen to me. You have never ascended that stairway, have you, Guzmán? You have not seen the changing reflection in a mirror … a mirror that … I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know … I do not know whether it reflects the origin or the end of all things … or whether it tells me that all things are identical in their origin and in their end … but what things, Guzmán? What things? Please tell me, do you never doubt? Do you never imagine? For even though things are namable and countable and weighable, their Creator is unknown, no one has ever seen Him and perhaps no one ever will, the Creator has no number or weight or measure; we are the ones who gave Him His name, we wrote it, He did not tell it to us, He has never written His own name, not Allah, not Yahweh, or Ra or Zeus or Baal, which are all names that men have given the Creator, not names He has told us.”

“Pardon, Señor; if what you have said is true, then may I take the liberty of believing that the name we give God cannot be sacred because it is not secret; and it cannot be secret because we need to know His name so that we may adore Him. A God worshipped in stealth is a thing of witchcraft, and that God must be a devil.”

“You may take that liberty, but you reason badly, my poor Guzmán. You know a great deal about hawks and dogs, but very little about things of the soul.”

“I am at your feet, Señor.”

“Think, rather, that the name of God will always be secret and sacred, for no one but He knows it; and then an abyss opens between that mystery and the bad game we act out here, for I am where I am, and you are at my service, Guzmán, because I believe, you believe, and my subjects believe with us, that I am Prince by divine right; that God wrote my name so I might govern in His. Does God know my name while I am ignorant of His? What blind torture is this, and what injustice?”

“You give strange names to faith, my Lord. One believes in God, he does not try to prove His existence. If it consoles you, think that even if you cannot prove the existence of God, for God it is equally difficult to prove yours.”

“Are you saying I should renounce my desire to know God?”

“I ask nothing of you, Sire; I hear you and accompany you. And I remind you that if we believe in God, God will believe in us.”

“Do you know who was my listener and my companion before, Guzmán?”

“That would be vain pretension on my part; I serve El Señor, I do not spy on him.”

“The dog Bocanegra. He heard everything that I am telling you today.”

“Thank you, Señor.”

“Write; do as I say.”

“And if what is written endures, may I, with respect, ask El Señor why he has decided that I should hear and write what before only the dog — without understanding — was permitted to hear?”

“No, no, you may not. It is better that you simply write. I asked our Bishop here, on this very spot, in this crypt, whether he knew the Creator and he said no; in answer to whether he expected to know Him, he said yes, if the good fortune of death and resurrection carried him to be seated by God’s side where he might see His face in the Paradise reserved for good Christians; now turn toward that stairway, Guzmán, look at it; I challenge you to climb it with a mirror in your hand, I challenge you; you will climb to the end and the origin of everything, but like me, you will not see the Creator in the mirror, and that absence, more than the announcement of our irremediable senescence, of our mortal death, will be what terrifies us; as you look into the mirror you, as I, will know only the most promiscuous solitude, for as I died I was alone, I did not see God, but I was not alone, if you can understand that, rather, surrounded by matter, absorbed by matter as if by a gigantic sponge; and the Being whom, according to the doctrine, I resemble, the Being who gave me life in His own divine image, did not await me at the end to guide me, to take me in and console me, to recognize me as I recognized Him, to prove finally my existence in His own, as our Bishop believes, to carry me with Him to Paradise; the Creator was not there, I was alone with living but mute matter and I did not know whether that was Heaven or Hell, eternal life or transitory death; and do you know why I have never seen Him? Because I suspect that the Father was never born, was never created; that is the question that neither our Bishop nor the learned Brother Julián nor the astrologer Brother Toribio nor our poor Chronicler, who imagined so many things, has ever been able to answer to alleviate my own imaginings and to buttress my well-tested faith: Who created the Father? Did the Father create Himself? Neither the dogma nor the Bishop nor the painter-monk’s eagerness for conciliation nor the imagination of the Chronicler nor the stars of the astrologer could answer me; I answered myself: The Father was never born, was never created; that is His secret, His distinction, and only knowing this shall we understand why He was capable of creation: so that no one would resemble Him.”

“Must I write all this, Señor?”

“Yes, and more: if you dare, as I did, ascend those stairs that do not lead, as our eyes deceitfully indicate, to the plain above but to the origins of everything, you can confirm it; yes, write, Guzmán, that there be written evidence; I have been to the beginning and I have not seen the Father born. Look upward, to the end of the stone stairs: look beyond the plain; what do you see?”

“The stormy light of this summer morning.”

“Dare to ascend; take my mirror and tell me what you see in it as you ascend, as you pause on each stair…”

“Señor, don’t ask that I repeat your sublime actions, which as they are yours are inimitable; who am I…?”

“A mortal. And for that reason, like any mortal, you may know the dwellings of the Creator; yes, you may climb as I did, with Brother Toribio our astrologer, to the highest tower to look at the heavens through the glass that his invention has polished for the purpose of penetrating with the human eye the opacities of the firmament; I searched the heavens with the magical apparatus of the Chaldean and in no corner of the dome that embraces us could I encounter the likeness of the not-born Father; and, nevertheless, looking through those lenses, hearing the names that Brother Toribio gives to the celestial mansions, and measuring the distances he calculates between body and body, star and star, dust mote and dust mote, I saw that although the Father was not visible, the sky was not empty; I told myself that those spheres and those dissimilar particles were not the Father, but that they were visible proof of his creative origins. Although I thought also, listening to the explanations of Brother Toribio, that if his science was true, then it was also limited, for if the heavens are truly infinite, as the astrologer maintains, what the lenses showed me was only a finite part of that enormity; and if the heavens were infinite, the mystery of their lack of limits did not exclude the rule of the creative principle; in some place, at some moment, the first heaven was created; and once there was the first heaven, the succeeding heavens were derived from it, similar to the first, but more and more distant from it, until the reproduction of heavens, more and more pale, more and more tenuous, as happens with repeated copies, could be seen by us. With everything, even with Brother Toribio’s lenses, we know only the last heaven, Guzmán, the most imperfect copy, the farthest removed from the original model although the closest to this earth we inhabit, and I fear that all the things of our earth are but the product of the creation closest to us but most distant from the Father who only indirectly created us, for first He created powerful angels who in turn created more and more inferior angels who in the end created us. We are the result of the uninterested caprice of a few bored angels who possessed only the strength and imagination necessary to invent human misery. But thus they fulfilled the secret design of the Creator: that man be what is farthest removed and least like the original Father.”

“The last act of creation was the creation of man and of the world, Señor; thus it is written in the Sacred Scriptures.”

“Which, because they are written, are; God save me from contradicting them … but not from enriching them.”

“Could God have been absent from the act with which He culminated the creation of all things?”

“You may still my voice, Guzmán; how shall you still my conscience?”

“I am writing this only because El Señor asks me…”

“Write, Guzmán; the last act of the creation was simply that, the last, not the culminating act, but an act of carelessness, of tedium, of lack of imagination; is it conceivable that the Father, being omnipotent, would have directly created this odious mockery we men are? If it were so, He would not be God, or He would be the most cruel of gods … or the most stupid. So realize that since it is we, and not God, who are the ones to give God a name, we who write His name, our sinful pride makes us believe and repeat that God created us in His image and likeness. Understand, Guzmán, what I wish is to purify totally the essence of God by freeing the Father Creator from the supreme sin, the creation of men; we cannot be His work, we cannot, no … Allow me to free God from the supreme sin that we attribute to Him: the creation of man.”

“Of whom, then, Señor, are we the work?”

El Señor was silent for an instant and then he took the hand mirror he had held as he ascended part of the thirty-three steps leading from the chapel to the plain; he looked into the sterile lake captured within the frame of satiny old gold scratched by many hands before those of El Señor, who today was its possessor without knowing how it had become part of his fortune, or who was its former owner, and he was at the point of losing himself in the rugged track of this new riddle: to return to the origin, not of the first and never seen God ignorant of the name that we give Him, of the ceremonies we perpetrate in His name, but of this object he held in his hand: this mirror, the descending line of its former owners, the maker of this beautiful utensil, useful only to see ourselves in and thus confirm our vanity or our desolation: the life of the mirror, of all the mirrors that duplicate the world, that extend it beyond all realistic frontiers, and to all that exists, mutely says: you are two. But if this mirror had an origin, it was crafted, and used, and passed from hand to hand and from generation to generation; so it retained the images of all those who had viewed themselves in it, it had a past and not only the magic of a future that El Señor had seen one morning as he ascended the stairs with the mirror in his hand.

“Look into my mirror, Guzmán,” said El Señor, and the space of the mirror was transformed, echoing from heaven to heaven like a drum that with each thump of the hand reveals an earlier skin, and then another before that, and in each space revealed in the dissolving layers of its quicksilver allows a new voice to be heard, a voice of smoke, a voice of stars …

The mirror: What can we, we who are the last angels, we who have never seen God Our Father, imagine from our impotence? This we, the most humble delegates of Heaven, asked ourselves. And one of us, one who is anonymous among us, for in this our inferior heaven it is impossible to know whether we descended from other, superior angels or whether one of us was that superior angel, the fallen Lucifer, Lucifer himself, suggested to us: “Let us invent a being that will have the presumption to believe it is made in the likeness of God the Father.”

“And so we were born, Guzmán.”

“Señor, in order to find the truth, pray that Our Lord Jesus Christ grant you His favor and grace by virtue of the death and the passion He suffered, for the Most Holy Blood that He spilled on the cross for sinners …

“Yes, Guzmán, sinners, among whose number I confess before His Divine Majesty to be the greatest, in whose Faith I have always lived; I swear to live and die as a true son of the Holy Church of Rome, for whose Faith I have constructed this palace of paradoxes; its towers and cupolas rise impotently toward the heavens, aspiring to an encounter with the Father who has hidden His face from us, its rectangular lines imposed upon a level valley, its sad gray color, its perpetual dedication to suffering and death, have as their intent mortifying the senses and reminding us that man is small and that his power is but nothing compared to the greatness of the unseen Father; here, here in this stony austerity I caused to be erected, I say: we are the sons of Lucifer, and nevertheless we aspire to be the sons of God: such is our servitude and such is our greatness; look into my mirror, Guzmán, and write, write before the Devil dries my tongue, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one true God, and doubt, Guzmán, because neither Paul, nor Luke, nor Mark, nor Matthew ever had the audacity to say that Jesus was God: look into my mirror, Guzmán, look into it if you have the eyes to see and let its shifting quicksilver transport us to that hot spring afternoon in the Levantine; penetrate these mists of crystal and you will not see your own face reflected in them, look…”

The mirror: My dog is not well and I have neither the humor nor the patience for a prolonged trial of yet another of the all too many Judean magi who parade around announcing catastrophes and portents: the end of Rome, or the freedom of the Hebrew people; no, my sick dog and these crushing dog days and one informer more, one more among the spies I have placed, placed by the hundreds, in the councils of the Jewish nation; I shall pay the accustomed thirty pieces of silver; I, Pilate, could be any other, call me Numa or Flavius or Theodorus, I could fulfill my functions as so many other procurators have fulfilled them before me and will fulfill them after me, it is normal that I, one more judge, be judging one more of the magi who for centuries have repeated the same prophecies to false followers who for centuries have denounced them before us, the authorities desirous of maintaining secular order at any cost.

“Let us be reasonable, Guzmán, and let us ask ourselves why we have accepted as truth only one series of events when we know that those events were not unique, but common; that they are ordinary, multiplicable unto infinity in a series of plots that repeat into exhaustion: look at them, look at them filing by, interminably, century after century, in the glass of my mirror. Why, among hundreds of Jesuses, and hundreds of Judases, and hundreds of Pilates, did we choose only three upon whom to base the history of our sacred Faith? But also you must doubt these explanations, Guzmán, doubt the supernatural by explaining it rationally, but doubt also that which seems natural, seeking the magical, savage, irrational explanation, for none is sufficient unto itself, and each exists side by side, in the same way a God named Christ lived beside a man named Jesus: hurry, Guzmán, look at them, the two of them together, Jesus the man and Christ the God, see them in my mirror; the smoke is covering them, their images are being swallowed by time, no one remembers…”

“Señor, I would like to demonstrate my loyalty to you. Let us burn these words, for if the Inquisition should read them, all your power would not…”

“Do I tempt you, Guzmán? Do you feel, as you hold these papers in your hands, that you could barter them for my power?”

“I insist, Señor; let us burn them; let us put an end to this doubting…”

“Quiet, Guzmán, let me delight in this my hour of power by edging toward heresy, both punishable and unpunishable; punishable because it destroys a certain order of the Faith, that which through the chance and accidents of politics according to St. Paul, a persistently subtle coalescence of compromise and intransigence, has triumphed; unpunishable, truly, because heresy collects and recalls all the rich and varied spiritual impulses of our Faith, the faith that it never denies, but on the contrary multiplies, its magnificent opportunities to be and to convince. Pelagius, the conquered, is as much a Christian as Augustine, the conqueror: Origen, the castrated debtor, as much a Christian as Thomas Aquinas, the seraphic creditor. And if the heretical theses had triumphed, today’s saints would be heretics and the heretics the saints, and none, because of it, less Christian. Let us struggle, not against heresy, but against the pagan and idolatrous abomination of the savage nations that do not believe in Christ: depending on how much they deny, they believe neither in His divinity nor in His humanity; we Christians believe in Him because we debate whether He was both divine and human, only divine, or only human; our obsession keeps Him alive, forever alive; write, Guzmán, write, erase from my mirror the monstrous image of Tiberius Caesar’s procurator, blow on the glass, Guzmán, and cover with mist my accursed mirror so that I can no longer see the face of Pontius Pilate, the true founder of our religion, and his very real dilemma…”

The mirror: For I was the only one who knew the rivals, the son of God and the son of Mary, both led into my presence that burning-hot afternoon in Jerusalem. How was I to distinguish between them in the darkening shadows of this room whose cool stone and white curtains isolate me from the boiling heat of the desert spring, and how was I to hear them, so near the courtyard filled with swaying palm trees and bubbling fountains? Which of the two should die, the one who is called Christ and says he is the son of God, or the one who is called Jesus and says he is the son of Mary? Christ who asserts the humanity of His divine acts, or Jesus who proclaims the divinity of his human acts? This one who promises the kingdom of Heaven, or this one who promises the kingdom of the Jews? Which is the more dangerous, which must die, which must supplant Barabbas on the cross? I must choose only one; it is equally hazardous to assassinate more than one prophet, or to liberate more than one thief; justice must be balanced so that it disguises the criminal nature of its decisions. But the one thing of which I am sure this afternoon is that my dog’s illness, the summer weight of food in the belly, the shadows gathered to combat the heat, the external distractions of the clear fountains and the date clusters falling from the prodigal arms of the date palms, all weigh too heavily on my soul. I am sleepy. I am bored, and worried about the dog; this climate is not good for making decisions; one gets drowsy; the sea and the desert; Rome has extended her boundaries too far from her center, vigilance is becoming difficult, institutions are crumbling, becoming attenuated: who is going to ask me for an accounting? Who, in Rome, could be interested in this story?

“Guzmán: was our religion founded upon an error of the Roman police system? Anathema, anathema be whosoever divides between two characters or persons the words and deeds attributed to Christ-Jesus in the Scriptures, according one part to the man and the other to the God.”

The mirror: Which of the two did I condemn? Which of the two did I present before the people, murmuring: “Here is the man…” having decided that one of them was the man and the other the God; which of the two did I judge less dangerous, which of the two did I condemn? Confronted with two identical twins, two magi identically bearded, equally intense and eloquent and ravenous, how could I help but doubt? Which of the two? How was I to know? One would die upon the cross, and when I condemned him I believed that truly, and not only symbolically, I was washing my hands of the problem. The example of the death of the one would serve as a warning to the other and also to forewarn any Jewish prophets who were tempted to imitate him. How was I to imagine the subtle trap prepared by the two called Christ and Jesus? One would die, yes, on the cross, suffering; but the other, two days later, would play his part in the comedy of the resurrection. How was I to know that? And how, then, was I to know which of them died and which lived to be reborn in the name of the dead one? I shall only confess this to myself, in secret: Christ the God was crucified, He died; for if I, Pilate, did not condemn a God to death, then my life would have no meaning; I could kill a thief in the name of Caesar, but if I killed a God, the memorable glory is mine, only mine. It was the lifeless body of the God I ordered crucified, His forever useless body, that was thrown by His followers into the waters of the Jordan, with weights tied to the neck and ankles so that when it met the waters of the Dead Sea it would not float to the surface. But they needn’t have worried, for the body disintegrated swiftly, became part of the mud and silt in the Valley of the Ghor; a hurried investigation I ordered so testified. And in exchange, Jesus the man — my spies told me: he was present at the death of his double, winking at John of Patmos and Mary his mother, and Magdalene the courtesan — was saved from the cross by a humanity that I deemed innocuous, and then he hid himself, with a handful of dates, a bottle of wine, and a large loaf of bread, in the tomb reserved for the victim, and he emerged two days later; but he could not then rejoin his mother or his lover or his disciples. This is what I had feared: that he would reappear, that he would renew his activities as prophet and agitator, mocking both the law of Rome and that of Israel, my indirect condemnation in turning him over to the Jews and the direct condemnation of the Jews in determining his crucifixion; yes, this would have broken the delicate equilibrium between the Roman and Jewish powers; yes, this simple administrative transaction, although it did not deserve to, would have come to the attention of my superiors in Rome; yes, that would have been the death blow to my career. That is what I thought two days following the death of Christ the God when His disciples announced that He had been resurrected. I was cautious; I waited before I acted. The disciples said that their master had ascended to Heaven. I breathed a sigh of relief; I had feared not an improbable miracle but the authentic continuation of the survivor’s career of agitation in the lands under my jurisdiction. But if the actor of the death on the cross was now lost in the waters of the desert, the actor of the resurrection, for the purpose of making credible his ascension into Heaven, had the good judgment to lose himself in the waterless desert. From Egypt he had come, as a child; to Egypt he returned and there for many years hid in the dog-ridden, sandy alleys of Alexandria, mute, impotent, ragged, old, a beggar, rendered forever useless by his own legend, so that his legend might live and be spread through the voices of Simon and Saul; they say that when he was very old, his only opportunity to satiate his appetite for legend to become an aged wanderer, an ancient Jew without a country, without roots, he arrived in Rome during the reign of Nero, son of Agrippina and Domitius Ahenobarbus, and there was present, in the coliseums, at the death of those who died in the name of his legend. He, too, then, I condemned to death; the testimonial death of a wanderer who only could be present, unable to speak his name, at the death of those dying in his name or against his name. Hebrew pilgrim, I know you; you are Jesus the man, condemned to live forever because you did not die at the privileged instant of Calvary. I know because I accompany you, I am always by your side; I am condemned to be something worse than your executioner: your witness. The God died. You and I live, the phantoms of Jesus the man, and Pilate the judge.

“Condemned by the cruel, not-born Father to live forever, Guzmán, as the Father condemned Christ the God to eternal death, thus saving himself from the rebellious divinity of a new Lucifer; for what Pilate — from the ocher profundities of the painting from Orvieto, now reflected in the mirror — says is true: Christ the God was crucified, He truly died, abandoned forever, once His part in the play was enacted, by the phantom Father. And this is what Pilate did not know: that the omnipotent Creator could not tolerate the return to Heaven of a possible rival, of a new Lucifer who had known the detestable mysteries and needs of fallen humanity and who might contaminate the timeless, ambitionless purity of eternal Heaven; it was the Father who condemned the Son, Guzmán, not Pilate, not the scribes and the Pharisees; the Father abandoned, murdered, His Son; the Son of God could come to earth only to die on earth. Thus the Father saved himself, I tell you, from a rebel in Heaven; but he also spared himself the necessity of showing His own face: Jesus the man would represent Him forever, in His name, throughout history. And thus you must believe with me, Guzmán, that reason is the intermediary between God and the Devil, since neither the evils of the Devil nor the virtues of God would be as they are or would affect us without the aid of reason; if we accepted evil as fact and virtue as mystery, Guzmán, we would never rise above that, and then, do you understand me? I would be born again from the belly of a wolf, I would be hunted in these same lands by my own descendants: I want the Heaven and the Hell that have been promised, Guzmán, I want to be condemned or saved for all eternity, I want that total non-existence that the Father denied the Son and the Man, Christ and Jesus, I do not want to return with claws and fangs and hunger to this world; I do not want my death to be the material guarantee of a new life, a second life, another life, but simply that: my absolute death, my absolute remission to non-existence, a hermetic absence of communication with all forms of life; this is my secret project, Guzmán, hear me: let us establish a hell on earth to assure the need for a heaven that will compensate for the horror of our lives; the horror we do and the horror that is done to us … Let us then doubt our Faith, always within that Faith, in order to deserve first hell on earth, torture, the stake, used against us as heretics, against the barbaric nations as idolaters; only in this way, by first liberating the powers of evil on earth, shall we someday deserve the beatitude of heaven in Heaven. Heaven, Guzmán: forgetting forever that we once lived … What did you do with my faithful mastiff Bocanegra?”

“Señor, I have explained. He had rabies.”

“He never knew his hour of glory. He died without being able to defend me. He lived half awake, half asleep, drugged, at my feet. My poor faithful Bocanegra.”

“He was the phantom dog.”

“Do you mean to tell me that that was the glory he awaited so long? Is that why you killed him when he was dressed for the supreme hunt?”

“Perhaps.”

“You killed him.”

“It was my duty, Señor. He had rabies…”

“No one verified that but you.”

“It was true; he was frightening the nuns, the workers; you saw the mad self-indulgence that overpowered the nuns; you yourself felt its menace; the Sisters and the workers were eyeing each other on the sly, Señor; they were becoming aroused; the contagion could easily have spread from the cloisters to the work sheds…”

“Ah, now that he is no longer here, I feel that the dog was my only ally, my only guardian…”

“He had become listless; he had lost his taste for the hunt.”

“Did he at least die in God’s grace?”

“He was a dog, Señor. What do we know…?”

“Without pain? What do we know? Was he one of my ancestors? Is that why he was so close to me, tried to warn me against danger, never abandoned my side, never, except to protect me? Why did he run out that day from my tent on the mountain? When he returned, he carried the sand of the seashore on his paws, in his wound … Who wounded him?”

“He was a dog, Señor. He could not speak.”

“What was he trying to tell me, poor brute, poor, fine, supposedly fierce mastiff? Was he one of my blood? Have we buried here the lifeless body of a Prince dead for centuries, not knowing that at the same time we were killing, in my favorite dog, his resurrected soul, living, gifted — even though he no longer savored the blood of the boar — with high values, like fidelity, and unarguable adherence to my person? Tell me, Guzmán. Do not look at me like that, vassal, I am not reproaching you; write, write my testament: In the name of the always glorious, forever virgin Mary Our Lady, look quickly, Guzmán, watch what is happening in the painting from Orvieto…”

The painting: Mother of the carpenter’s son, it all seems like a dream, I don’t know where the truth lies, I don’t know now, I never knew, I don’t know whether I became pregnant by the carpenter, or by some lusty apprentice of that aged artisan, Joseph, to whom I had been wed still a girl, or whether by some anonymous voyager who stopped to ask for water for his camels and to tell me enchanting stories, I, married to Joseph the carpenter, I, the mother of the child … I, the true daughter of the house of David, not the carpenter. History will say the opposite, because it is written by men; I, the woman, the daughter of David …

“Look how the forms are changing, see how the figures are turning and walking forward and going in and going out as if in some elaborate altarpiece, see the child-become-man, see him in the company of the Holy Spirit that descends in the form of a dove to accompany him on the day of his baptism in the desert waters of the Jordan, see the fiery, flowing river crossing now from border to border of the painting, Guzmán, and doubt, imagine an impotent carpenter, and watch the tiny scene unrolling up there, on those rocks below that humble shed in one corner of the painting.”

The painting: He kissed me, all he did was kiss me, he told me that this was what marriage was, a few rough, panting, anguished kisses sterile as the roadways of Sinai, that is what he told me, but when he saw my belly swelling he repudiated me; I was of the house of David, I knew its ancient secrets, in us are united great wisdom, the liquid, flowing formulas of our rivers, the Nile and the Tigris, the Ganges and the Jordan, one single flux of ancient memories, of magical knowledge born by the shores of the waters where men founded their first cities, fourteen generations after the captivity of Babylon, one night I served hallucinatory philters to the unlearned carpenter and caused him to dream of the hovering, Priapic, subornable, Lucifer-like angels of the nearest heaven, the one all we women can see with our bare eyes, the corrupt heaven we have at hand, the heaven of bodies; in the stupor of his body I caused those false angels to visit the carpenter and in his dream I made him believe that I had been got with child by the Holy Spirit and that I would give birth to the son of God, the heralded Messiah, the descendant of David the King.

“Hear the raucous laughter of the angels, Guzmán, hear it echoing from heaven to heaven, down through the years that for the phantom Father are but an instant, until the not-born Father — see his perfidious triangular eye there in the upper center of the painting we contemplate as it contemplates us — becomes aware of the monstrous joke and in an instant of caprice endorses the joke by sending the dove.”

The painting: Do you not see the light surrounding our bodies immersed in the river? do you not hear the beating wings of an invisible bird, John? baptize me, John, Master, I want to be a man with you, John, show me the road of life, John, my mother says I am the son of God, John, but beside you I feel I am only a poor Galilean, weak, human … too human, eager to taste the fruits of life, bored by so many hours of wearying Bible study, a discipline imposed by my mother, read, you must know everything, ever since I was a boy, astonish the doctors, you must play your part well, you cannot be a dull and ignorant man like your father, baptize me, John, bathe me, John, take me in your arms, John, in my blood are blended the ignorant humility of a carpenter and the proud wisdom of a race of Kings, tell me what I must do with this double inheritance of slave and King, John, help me lead the slaves and humiliate the Kings, John.

“See the dove, Guzmán, alighting on the head, yes, of the human, yes, too human, yes, Galilean, yes, the day of his baptism which perhaps was but the day of his sodomite nuptials with John the Baptist who was perhaps a handsome man who perhaps died, as the other day a boy died here, burned beside the stables, because of his heinous relations with the son of the carpenter and, as a consequence, because of the combined animosity of two women who desired him but could never seduce him: Herodias and Salome, the ancient and the young naiads of the court of Israel; look, Guzmán, see it in the painting: see how the figure of the Christ without a halo is approaching that of the man dressed in a brief tunic of animal skins, how they take one another’s hands, how they embrace, kiss each other upon the lips … how the Baptist consummates his marriage with Jesus, what I ask for in my prayers, the divine embrace, the most chaste kiss…”

“Señor, for saying less, men have died in these lands, impaled upon a stake driven up their buttocks, tearing through their entrails, and exiting through an eye or a mouth, for your fables suggest a similar punishment…”

“Be quiet, and look; be quiet, and understand; look at Jesus, born of Mary and an unknown father, visited by a Christ sent from the phantorn not-born Father; only after that baptism in the river do the two live together; a pragmatic Christ, Guzmán; hear Him…”

The painting: I shall do quickly what is to be done and at every opportunity I shall deny my terrestrial parents so that everyone may understand that my virtues and my miracles are not of this world, nor will they ever be, so I may offer to men the image of Tantalus, invite them to drink the water and eat the fruit that — the moment they stretch out their hand, or open their mouth — disappear before their thirst and their hunger.

“That is the joke, Guzmán; to recall to us His unknown and forgotten existence before there was any Heaven or creation, the phantom Father sends His impossible representative, places Him within the body of a son of a lowly Hebrew, offers the vain illusion of a virtue that reproduces that of a Father who was never born, Guzmán, who never knew what it is to tremble with fear, to sigh with pleasure, to desire, to envy, to scorn what he has and to undertake mad adventure for what he can never achieve, who never knew what it is to ejaculate, to cough, to weep, to evacuate, to urinate, Guzmán, the things that you and I and the monk and the Chronicler and the Bishop and the astrologer and the supervisors and workmen and smiths all do … the things we all do.”

The painting: Tremble with fear, sigh with pleasure, desire, envy, ejaculate, cough, shit, piss, weep, and, bound to such wretchedness, attempt furthermore to imitate me; but if, bound to passion as they are, to fragility and to the filth of the earth, they succeed, in spite of everything, in scorning what they have and in undertaking mad adventure for what they will never achieve, then yes, yes, in truth I say to you, not only will they imitate me, they will surpass me, they will be what I could never be, dung and courage, enamored dust.

“No, do not listen to that falsifier, Guzmán, it isn’t true, Christ’s cruelty is to demonstrate to us that we can never be like Him, the cruelty of excrement is that it makes equals of us all, and between the two cruelties we attempt to forge some personal differences that will give us an identity; that is what my mutilated mother does, and that false Prince she has brought in her train, that false heir, as false as Christ the divine was to the humanity of Jesus, in whose body he dwelt.”

The painting: As false as you, Jesus, are to my divinity as Christ: without consulting you I have appropriated all the blame, the defects and the needs of that body, your body, Jesus, chosen from among thousands; my Father has placed His phantom within your mortal flesh, oh, son of Mary, so He might offer to men the mirage of an impossible virtue; but the moment you feel the vinegar in your throat, I warn you; the moment you feel the thorns upon your brow, I shall abandon your body and leave you in the hands of human cruelty.

“Look at the painting from Orvieto, Guzmán, study its subtle movements, its subtle Italianate frivolities, look how a painting of pious intent is transformed into the scene of a drama of unforeseen entrances and exits, see how the fickle artists of the other peninsula have displaced the sacred representations of the ecclesiastical atrium with profane theaters of illusory spaces, curtains, arches, shadows, and fictitious lights, see how into the scene occupied by the man Jesus enters a double identical to him, how he embraces him, kisses him, see how the two bodies seem to blend into one another in order to perform the comedy of the master of mockery, the not-born Father. Multiply your doubts, Guzmán, tell all the possible stories, and ask yourself once more why we chose one single version among that pack of possibilities and upon that choice founded an immortal Church and a hundred transitory kingdoms.”

“You are the head of one of those kingdoms, Señor; try not to lose it.”

“I tell you to doubt, Guzmán: the human body of Christ was a phantom, His suffering and His death were mere illusion, for if he suffered he was not God, and if he was God he could not suffer. Doubt, Guzmán, and watch the performance that is taking place before our eyes, within the frame of that painting.”

The painting: If I am God I cannot suffer; if I suffer I am not God; the vinegar and thorns are enough; now they will take me from the cell, they will lead me through the deep, shadowy passageways toward the great door where I must carry my own cross and painfully ascend that dusty hill seen so many times in my dreams, where they have raised, like the foundation of my destiny, two other crosses, miracles, miracles, now is the moment to concentrate all my powers of transfiguration, of convocation, of prestidigitation; if I could do it to fill the amphoras of Canaan with wine, to multiply the fishes, and to reverse the hours of Lazarus, why should I not do it now, now when my own divinity is in danger of escaping through the chinks of pain. As they gave me vinegar to drink, as they lashed me and crowned me with thorns, I avoided pain by thinking intently of a quiet, coarse, and therefore receptive man called Simon of Cyrene, invoking him to come to my side, intensely entreating with the same intensity I begged Lazarus to renounce the peace of death and accept the agitation of life through the simple recourse of suicide in death, entreating that Simon hear me from afar and be present at the hour and in the place with the necessary assistance; that afternoon I was conducted by guards through the dark and musty passageways that lead from the cells to the great Praetorian door, my gaze penetrated the darkness and to my nostrils came the odor of fish and garlic and sweat: Simon had heard me from afar, Simon, dressed as a simple vendor of foodstuffs, laden with vegetables and fish, had come to obey me, to take my place; I pretended to stumble, the guards lost their martial beat, stopped, turned back, started forward again, turned around, confused, beat me, beat and cursed the Cyrenian who had already taken my place, who was now carrying the cross while I carried the onions and dried salted fish; I offered them to the Centurions and was rejected; the procession continued on its way and I gave thanks for the blindness of the foreign masters toward an alien and submissive race, for although we could distinguish the face of each foreign oppressor, for our lives might depend on it, they see us for what we are: a mass of slaves without individual physiognomy, each indistinguishable from all the others … Later, that same afternoon, I was able to watch Simon, crucified in ignorance and in error; I was able to contemplate my own torture and death, for the Centurions, the apostles, Magdalene and Mary and John of Patmos believed that Simon was I; and as my eyes penetrated the light shifting between granular sunlight and stormy shadows, I saw Simon of Cyrene upon the cross, and I could not believe my eyes; in his agony, the quiet, ordinary man of Cyrene had assumed my features; the sweat and pain of his face were forever imprinted upon Veronica’s handkerchief. And thus I, Jesus, upon the hill of Calvary was witness to the crucifixion of Simon, and this was my most miraculous, although my least well known, act.

“But look, Guzmán, how quickly the scenery of the painting is changing, the backdrop remains the same, but the clothing of the figures is changing, the set is being replaced, the invisible, cruel, and capricious artist is arranging his tale in a new order, he has prepared a new performance for us.”

The painting: Neither divine nor miraculous: I am a Palestinian, a political agitator; I convince my companions and intimates that a mock martyrdom is absolutely necessary to our cause; we cast lots to determine who is to betray me to the authorities and who is to take my place when, as I foresee, I am condemned to death. The lots fall to Judas and to Simon of Cyrene. Our group is very small for reasons of security, mobility, and purity of convictions; but also because it is composed of men who physically are very similar. In this way we can disguise ourselves as one another, appear simultaneously in different places under the generic name of Messiah, and astound the ignorant and ordinary folk with false miracles carefully organized and executed not by one but by several of my companions, but always attributable to me, as I am the symbol of the rebellion and its intellectual author. Only in this way am I different from my companions; my mother forced me to burn the midnight oil reading the Sacred Scriptures; I articulated the spontaneous rebellion of my untutored companions and channeled, organized, and intellectualized it. I lament that Judas and the Cyrenian were those elected by chance. I would have preferred to lose Peter, the most insecure and the weakest among us all, or John of Patmos, too whimsical to be politically effective. But sentiment must not intervene in these decisions that are more important than our own personal likes and dislikes. Thus, along the road to the cross, we all follow behind a double prepared to give his life for me and for my cause; there we all feign tears and despair; pretending only to a certain point, it’s true, for Simon of Cyrene is a good man and a loyal, although expendable, warrior; we feign tears and despair to deceive the authorities and to cement our subversive legend, and then all of us who are actors in the drama withdraw into the darkness from which we will emerge for a short time to perform the sacramental play of the individual insurrection of the slaves against the collective ethic of Rome and the weighty tradition of Israel. That afternoon on which the weather so opportunely collaborated with us, that afternoon begun in heat and sun and dust and ended in storm, that early darkness and the motionless violence of the stones, were necessary so that our rebellion might fly on the wings of a legend of sacrifice. Only from sacrifice are new worlds born. But men have always been sacrificed. So it occurred to me: sacrifice a God. The ancient gods and their divine history were born from human sacrifice. From divine sacrifice human history would be born. It was a very effective inversion, well worth the effort. My fate and that of my followers are not important. No one ever again knew anything of us. But there was no one who did not know what happened that afternoon on Golgotha. Our creation is called history.

“Doubt no more, Guzmán: the soul of Christ abandoned the suffering body of Jesus, who upon dying was again only the son of Mary and an unknown father. Write, Guzmán, write the principal section of my testament, dictated today, the day of the final burial of all my ancestors whom I shall one day join, write: In the name of the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost who are one Being, unique, three names that are one essence, as the body, the intelligence, and the soul are the one essence of every man, and if we do not doubt the existence of this union, mysterious though it may be, why would we doubt the substantive union of our dogma: the intelligence of the Father, the body of the Son, and the soul of the Holy Spirit, like the Sun a unique substance that manifests itself as light, heat, and as the sphere itself: light, the Spirit; heat, the Son; and the sphere, the Father. So was the Son one day sent forth, like a ray of light; but doubt this, too, and believe in what this painting is telling us; I told you it would speak to us as we spoke to it, look at its space, suddenly empty, or invaded by a light so white it erases everything, blinds everything, converts everything into blackness, into absence of light…”

The painting: Because I am God I am unique; and I, that unique God, was the One who descended unto Mary the virgin and got her with child, and from her I was born, the only God who had never been born before: I, Father of Myself; I, Son of Myself; a unique, indivisible God, it was I who suffered and I who died, men crucified the one God, I, the Father.

“And so you will accept, Guzmán, that our Christianity bleeds because of simple arithmetic, and attempts to explain the inexplicable with the weapon of the Devil instead of forever defeating the Devil by denying the temptation of the rational, by drawing the fangs of the forbidden, by accepting that everything is magic, that everything is mystery, that everything is the intellectual liberty of the few — faithful, persecuted, eternally heretical, and eternally nonconformist: God’s triumph, Guzmán, is that enduring, persecuted, and ever triumphant Christian community; Christianity exists because Jesus was defeated, not because Constantine triumphed; I know Nero’s temptation, I sometimes dream it, I ask myself whether in order to strengthen my Faith there are not, in truth, more than two roads: to be either the persecutor or the persecuted…”

“You, Señor, ordered the unruly mob in your father’s castle to be killed and you led your armies in crusades against the Waldensian, Abelite, Adamite, and Cathari heretics. Whom, then, did you persecute?”

“Ease my heavy spirit, Guzmán; perhaps that tiny community of true Christians is hidden in the souls of madmen and rebels, of children and lovers, those who live without need of me or need of the Faith … and by persecuting them and killing them, perhaps without knowing it I have strengthened that Faith.”

“You are the Defender. Your battles, your escutcheon, and your laws so proclaim; and also a papal bull.”

“Yes, yes, the Defender; seal my mouth, Guzmán, as you will put the seal to this my testament when it is completed, and repeat with me, now, this very moment, on your knees, the eternal truth: We believe in one God, a supernatural Father, the Maker, Creator, and providential Monarch of the Universe, from whom cometh all things, and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, His Son, a God procreated by the Father before the beginning of time, God of a God, totality issued from totality, unity of unity, King of a King, Lord of a Lord, the Word Incarnate, living wisdom, the true light, the way, the resurrection, the shepherd, the door, the essence, the purpose, power, and the glory of the Father; eternal image of the Deity, irreplaceable image, the unique image that no infidel can exchange for one of sullen stone and harrowing grimaces: Your image, Lord, is the sweet face of the Italian painting that stares down upon me as, kneeling, I praise your Name, and that image can be no other: God the Creator, divine Christ, most human Jesus, but only in that face consecrated by tradition, and never in the stone masks of savage idolaters; those who attempt to change your face, O God, shall see their works burned, torn down, destroyed by the combined anger and piety of my armies; never again will new Babylons arise to deform your sweet likeness, my God. Repeat with me, Guzmán, this credo, for if doubt transforms the dogma of the Trinity or stains the conception of Mary or separates Christ’s divinity from his humanity or changes the most precious face of Jesus, endangered all by the heresies I have exposed for the purpose of exorcising them, then I would lose my power and it would be gained by madmen, rebels, children, and lovers; and it is not that they may not deserve it, no; it is that they would not know how to use it, it would be useless to them, and above all, a contradiction: once they had the power they would cease to be what they are: children and madmen, lovers and rebels. Better it be this, better it be I, better one single dogma, any dogma, than a million doubts and debates, whatever they may be. Now you must understand the reasoned order of my apparent lack of reason, Guzmán: all doubts are consigned to paper, dictated by me, written by you. They are there, and they will remain written; but they will remain in my possession, like black envoys of the luminous truth of the Faith, they will not be loosed and rained and carried and fluttered in the wind of temptation and the incoherent noise of mockery. Let us incorporate evil into knowledge, Guzmán, and it will be but a healthful contrast and warning to the life of truth and good. Write my words, Guzmán: evil is only that which we do not know; and only that which does not know us is evil; and it is that unknown and unknowing evil, unsubmitting, irreducible, not to be possessed even through the writing that is our privilege, which we must extirpate without mercy.”

“Amen, Señor, amen.”

“Peace, and an early death, Guzmán. Bocanegra was more fortunate than we; what we seek, he has already obtained.”

“El Señor is unjust with me. I only fulfilled my duty, as I fulfill it now, by writing down El Señor’s words.”

“Truly, I am not reproaching you. Come, Guzmán, come nearer; let me tell you something, in confidence…”

“Señor…”

“That dog attacked me on the stairway … one morning … attacked me … he didn’t know me … that’s why I tore off his bandages … to defend myself from him … and you treated him, Guzmán … you were right; he had rabies. You treated him, not knowing; when you knew, you killed him … Loyal and efficient Guzmán; thank you, Guzmán, thank you for doing what is necessary, while I live in the realm of the imagination; thank you; I am not reproaching you…”

“Señor, I beg you; let us put an end to these words. Today is a memorable one; you have brought together all your ancestors in your own palace erected for that purpose; and, in so doing, you have raised your dynasty above any other in this land. Rest, Señor; your words are dictated by your soul’s fatigue…”

“Guzmán, Guzmán, what intolerable pain … come, place the red stone in the palm of my hand … You see, my body pains me even more; Guzmán, do you never doubt?”

“If I had power, Señor, I would never doubt anything.”

“But you do not have it, poor Guzmán; come, kiss my bone ring, kiss my hand, thank me for having taken you from nothing and given you a place in my service, in which you have risen, I recognize, by your own merits and well-proven abilities. Let me see what you have written … Where did you learn such a fine hand?”

“Although in straitened circumstances, I was able to spend a year in Salamanca.”

“You learned a beautiful hand.”

“Among other things, Señor. Students tend to be bellicose rascals. El Señor should be grateful that my defects are in the service of his virtues.”

“Ah, yes. Come then, kiss my hand with respect and gratitude.”

“I do so, Sire, I do so with great humility…”

“Do you know something, Guzmán? All you need do is show the Bishop this writing, alleging that it is a confession, and you can imagine that I would be brought before the Holy Office, judged and condemned to the stake; well, have no such hope; it would do you no good, however bellicose and rascally you may feel; they would not believe you, everything is written in your hand, yes, just so, sprinkle sand on the words to dry the ink, and even though they believed you and condemned me, Guzmán, it would not help you, for if you usurped my power…”

“Señor, you judge me harshly.”

“Shhhh, Guzmán; for if you usurped the power in my name, you, or any man like you … I do not wish to offend you, but any man like you, a new man, you would not know what to do with power, you would go mad, you believe you would not doubt, but you would do nothing but doubt, the entire day, you would be riddled with doubt about what you had done and what you had allowed to be done, doubt establishes its kingdom between moral duty and political duty, there is no possible escape, none, Guzmán, thank heaven that you are a servant and not a master…”

“I do not complain, Señor…”

“But, hear me, one can retain power only when he has behind him a legion of murdering, cruel, incestuous, mad phantoms mortally damaged by the French malady and inclined to bleed to death at a scratch. What is there among men except exchange? And if some serve and others command, Guzmán, it is because some succeed in offering something for which the others have no response: something for which they can offer nothing in exchange. And who in this land can offer me anything in exchange for my thirty bloodless, corrupt, demented, incestuous, criminal, ill — ill even in death — cadavers, Guzmán, come here with me, look at them in their sumptuous sepulchers, see the grimaces and leprous bodies and infirmities and death’s-heads and moth-eaten ermines, regard my thirty phantoms, their heads crowned in blood, their bodies brilliant with chancres and boils and wounds that never healed, no, not even in death. Who, Guzmán? Only I, Guzmán, only I can offer to myself the one gift that is superior, only I can say: this dynasty will die with me; hear me well, and now take my ring and roll the parchment carefully and seal it with the wax; obey me, Guzmán; do as I tell you … do it! Why do you stand there, motionless? Does it horrify you so to see such tumefaction? These are very old cadavers; there is neither stink nor fear in them.”

“But something is still lacking, Señor.”

“I tell you, nothing is lacking, in this testament I have left my doubt, my life, my anguish, and something more: a suspicion, that denies my uniqueness, a suspicion that whatever exists exists only because it is related to, circulates through, or eats into what we believed unique, turns uniqueness into a commonplace, a boiling quagmire, and the parallel suspicion that nothing is unique because everything may be seen and told in as many ways as men existed, do exist, or will exist. Is that not enough? Is there anything more to risk in my undertaking to rescue truth by accumulating in one place all the lies that refute it?”

“Only your signature is lacking, Señor, for without it, as you have said, and said rightly, these papers have no meaning. I could have written them myself, rolled the parchment and then sealed it with El Señor’s ring as Your Mercy was dozing.”

“True, Guzmán, how am I to tempt you if I do not sign the papers?”

“El Señor must be equal to the challenges he proposes. Sign, Señor, here…”

“What do you really want, Guzmán?”

“Irrefutable proof of El Señor’s confidence. Otherwise I cannot occupy myself in dissipating the dangers soaring around his head.”

“What do you mean? Everything is calm; the storm has passed; the nuns are quiet; the workers, I tell you, have returned to work; Bocanegra is dead; the cadavers lie in their crypts; the procession is over; now we are complete; now they may close forever the roads leading to this place; we are all here, united. It has been a memorable day. Nothing remains to be done. Nothing remains to be said. At least, that is my most fervent wish.”

“One day of glory, Señor! Many days of glory, for your dead have spread your renown throughout our land, not only today but during the weeks and months it took to form the corteges and begin their journey through mourning towns and cathedral cities, escorted by clerics, by the heads of all the orders, by entire convents that joined in the procession. All the land has seen your cadavers en route, lying within their litters draped and adorned in black, all for your glory, Señor. But this afternoon as the procession entered this uncompleted palace, upon hearing the funeral bells, the praise and psalms of the monks and the prayers of the multitude, as the Masses and sermons and funeral orations you ordered were celebrated in every corner of the palace, I had to ask myself, Señor, why nature seemed to oppose your design, eager to overthrow it; I saw a sign in that storm that in an instant divested the catafalques of their adornment, tore away the drapery, and allowed the wind to tip over the tabernacle and carry off the black ribbon clusters, ripping and tearing everything so badly that today the plain is covered with the remains of your dead’s remains. Your corpses have been humbled by the storm. Now they lie in peace, but I believe that they will never again be the same; you have given them a second life, Señor, a second opportunity.”

“No, no one shall have a second opportunity, neither the dead nor the living nor those who will never be born; all that I have told you would be in vain if it did not confirm in written words the wordless desire that pulses in every beat of my life: death, truly to be death, nonexistence, radical oblivion, and disappearance; my power is absolute because I shall be the last Señor, with no descendants, and then you and yours, with no need to denounce me, can do what you will with my heritage…”

“Señor, stand up, for God’s sake, don’t kiss my feet, I…”

“There will be no more wretched, defective sons forced to kill the dreams of others so that power may be transmitted from generation to generation, there will be no more…”

“Señor, Señor, stand up, here, lean on my arm, Señor…”

“Yes, let me sign, for if what I say is true, what does it matter…”

“Trust in me, Señor; you have constructed a house for the dead through the labor, accidents, and misery of the living; I have ears, Señor, I have eyes, and I have a good sense of smell; the storm is only nature’s notice of what is happening in the souls of men; let me act, Señor; let me act against men, for, like you, I can do nothing against nature; let me work for you here in the place where the act of nature and the acts of men seem as one: this is the privilege you have accorded to us, the new men, the ability to act without the doubt that arises between morality and practicality; did the bells of the tower burn because they were struck by lightning, or because of a premeditated fire lighted by very human hands?”

“You doubt, Guzmán?”

“Señor: these fields are strewn with the black brocade flowers which the storm tore from the catafalques. At this very moment some stonemason or smith, the former shepherds of these lands, is walking through the arid fields picking up pieces of crape and thinking, remembering that they and their people were dispossessed, removed from their fields, denied their streams, their reserves of water exhausted, so that upon the ruins of the land could arise a funereal city. Let me work for you, Señor; and in my acts your will to conquer hell upon earth may encounter its best ally; and my services will finally be identified with the death and disappearance you so desire…”

“Guzmán … what are you doing? Why are you drawing that curtain? What is moving behind that curtain? Are we not alone, you and I? Who is it? Who is it, Guzmán, what are you showing to me, offering me? Who is it?”

“See, Señor, there is a witness who has heard everything.”

“Who is it? Why is the hair so short? Is it a lad? No, the nightdress cannot hide the shape of her breasts, who is it, please?”

“Come to your bedchamber, rest, lie down…”

“What are you showing me? Who is this girl? What beauty, how white that lily skin, what eyes, like black olives … why have you brought her here? Who is she?”

“Rest, Señor; she will come to you; you need not move; she will do everything. Although a virgin, she is wise; and as you are who you are because of the life and death of those remains we buried here today, she is who she is because of the land where she was born…”

“Guzmán, what are you doing, I am ill, I am ill…”

“She is a broad, deep-flowing river…”

“Take her away, Guzmán, I am rotted…”

“She is the odor of damp geraniums and the zest of the lemon, come, Inés, come, do not be afraid, our Señor needs you, after such a festival of death, bodies demand the celebration of life, it is the law of nature, our Señor will give you all the pleasure you need, stop thinking about the journeymen and smiths and leadworkers, stop torturing yourself by imagining impossible love with the scum that works on this construction, lose your virginity in the arms of our Señor; come, Inesilla, you need El Señor and El Señor needs you, come, Inesilla, you know, you must allow yourself to become pregnant by our Señor…”

“No, Guzmán, no, haven’t I told you…”

“… for if El Señor cannot produce an heir, even if only a bastard, the mother of El Señor will impose her will, and will convince everyone that that imbecilic boy she has brought in her train is the true Prince, the providential sovereign announced in all the prophecies of the common people, the last heir, the universal usurper, the true son of the true father; fear your mother, Señor, fear her, for even mutilated as she is, a mere hulk without arms or legs, wrapped in black rags, she compensates for the missing limbs with intensity of will and the lucidity of her aged brain, I can see, Señor, and I can smell, and I already hear the sound of rebellion, the discontent because your Queen offers no legitimate heir, discontent that the Lady your mother might install an idiot as Prince; for either reason, rebellion…”

“Guzmán, do not betray my purpose; I do not want an heir, I must be the last Señor, and then nothing, nothing, nothing…”

“Choose quickly, Señor, there is no time: either sacrifice your desire for personal death and renew your life in the fertile seed of this young girl of the people, or once again face rebellion and the duty to repress it, as you did once before as a youth, again fill the halls of your palace with corpses; choose, Señor, renewed blood or spilled blood; and see, too, Señor, that what I am offering you refutes the lack of loyalty you suspect in me: I offer the continuity of your dynasty, Señor…”

“Why, Guzmán?”

“What would become of me in a world governed by children, lovers, and rebels? But enough; take this girl, quickly, let her slip between your black sheets, caress her, Señor…”

“Guzmán … the painting … what black space … the light has faded.”

“Do not look at the painting, look at her flesh, Señor, could you imagine there was such softness in the world, you must touch her to believe it…”

“What a horrible voice … who is that speaking from the shadows of the painting … I don’t understand … horror…”

“Lose yourself in your pleasure, Señor, and allow me to act for you. And if you are disposed to die, die in the arms of this maiden, spend yourself between her round thighs and give your soul to the Devil.”

“Yes, let her come, let her come, bring her to me, Guzmán, let me touch her, let me…”

The painting: They always turn out the lights when I speak. I always speak in the darkness, when attention is focused elsewhere; no one has ever paid the least attention to me — and with good reason. A secondary character, a miserable Jewish carpenter who doesn’t know either how to read or how to write, an honest workman who has always earned his living with his hands. They know nothing about that. They scorn my calluses and my sweat. But, without me, what would they sit on, what would they sleep on? Bah! They couldn’t even sit down to discuss their idiotic problems or lie down to dream their equally imbecilic dreams. No; they turn out the lights when I speak because they are afraid of me. Afraid of the simple truth of a hairy, callused, ignorant old man, but a man who knows the truth; that’s why they fear me and hide me as they would a shameful illness. Joseph doesn’t exist. The carpenter is happy with a good trencher of lamb, garlic, pepper, and wine. Perhaps it’s true. I followed the steps of the Bastard and the truth is that I never paid too much attention to what he said or did because there were other more interesting things to see; at the last supper with all his cronies I spied on them from a distance; I couldn’t hear what they were saying, not that it mattered to me; I was outside, lost among the dogs, the hangers-on and the passers-by, and looking inside I found it more interesting to watch what the cooks and the serving girls were doing; I was more interested in the braziers and their savory odors, in the platters of food and the bread and wine, than in the people being served. It’s true; I’m always distracted by anything that tastes good, by anything that can be touched or smelled or chewed; I have no patience for the fancy words of that crew of geldings, for that’s what they are: the only thing I really saw clearly was that Judas kissed the Bastard. That’s proof he wasn’t my son; would any son of mine allow himself to be kissed by a man? Bah … More and more lights are going out, they don’t want to hear me, they’re afraid of me. They’ve invented a personality for me that isn’t mine; a quiet, ignorant old man who swallows all their lies, a shadowy figure on the edges of what’s going on. They’d have a real laugh if they knew the truth: from the time he was a young man Joseph was a real hand with the girls, a braggart, a good eater, and a good drinker; anyone will tell you that, and if you believe I’m lying hear what they have to say in the brothels of Jerusalem, the taverns of Samaria, and the stables of Bethlehem, why, in that hay more than twenty wenches warmed by the burning days of the desert came to know me, they’d have died of the cold if it hadn’t been for me; that’s who I am, I, Joseph, and Mary and her family ought to be grateful to me for marrying her; I took her from a family that was having hard times but still very pretentious for all that, all her family putting on fine airs, although they were very happy to let an honest man who worked as a carpenter provide their food. Bah! And fine thanks I got from that twit of a girl. First it was no, don’t touch me, I’m afraid, let me get used to it gradually, it hurts, not now, another night, and then one fine day I noticed that although she’s supposed to be a virgin, she’s pregnant, and I mean really pregnant, and what a wallop I gave her, and all the time she’s swearing it was all because of some dove. Am I to take the responsibility for that? I, Joseph, a real man, cuckolded by a dove? Oh, I gave it to her, pow, and again, pow, and again … I left her; I went off to Bethlehem to look up some old friends, but she followed me and had her son there, and right away Miss Big-mouth began telling all the shepherds in those parts that her son was the son of God, and three clowns dressed up in turbans — magi and puppeteers by profession, and professional gossips as well — heard of it, and they took it upon themselves to carry the news to court and then … fury and fear from Herod, and children drawn and quartered all through Judea, and I on my way to Egypt to get away from the mess that witch had got me into, and she on a donkey right behind me, you can’t abandon me now, what bellowing, and finally yes, I will be yours, take me, and the flesh is weak and she’s very beautiful and so I fell for it. We had several more children in Egypt and after we returned to Palestine, but all her affection and care were for the Bastard, the others grew up wild as goats, dirty and running loose, but not the Bastard, no, all indulgence, and secrets all the time, and sorcery, and old rolls of papyrus brought from my in-laws’ house covered with all kinds of useless stuff, and the boy stuffed with nonsense by the age of twelve, debating with learned doctors, Mister Know-it-all, full of silly ideas, delusions of grandeur, unbelievable pedantry, and then he goes off into the world and it was nothing but scorn for us who’d given him food and a roof over his head, I told you, woman, he’s a good-for-nothing, he scorns us, he can’t even say hello to us in public, he never says a word about us, he even counsels everyone to abandon his father and his mother, he’s an unnatural son, and a liar besides, I’ve spied on him and I follow him, I watch while he makes a deal with Lazarus, a sick man from Bethany, so he pretends to die, and they bury him, and then the Bastard brings him back to life, and the whole thing arranged with Martha and Mary, the sick man’s sisters, all pure intrigue, the sisters owe him a favor and that’s why they agree to the comedy, and disciples hiding beneath the wedding table with baskets filled with bread and amphoras brimming with wine, and then, a miracle, a miracle, and I, forgotten, scorned, cuckolded, you think I’m not going to betray him? you think I’m not going to give myself the pleasure of being the one, the very carpenter who with his old, callused hands, a simple man of the people, crude but honest, the one who held the saw and cut two planks and joined them together to make a cross and nailed them firmly so they would bear the weight of a body? Thirty pieces of silver. I’d never seen so much money. I hefted the weight of the pretty pouch as lost in the crowd of curiosity seekers I watched him die on the cross I had built. Do you hear me? I, Joseph, I … Bah! They always turn off the lights on me. I’m always talking into empty space.

THE PALACE IDIOT

Now the Mad Lady orders them to seat me in this stiff straight-backed chair, and she orders me to sit quietly while her servants throw a sheet over my shoulders and the barber in her retinue approaches with scissors and razors. But I am too young to need a barber, too beardless, I pull the two or three hairs from my chin with my fingers, pinching them between my fingernails, it’s a very simple process, all this ceremony isn’t necessary; if it’s ceremony they want, let them lend me a mirror and I’ll pull the hairs from my chin myself (and see myself for the first time; my memory is very bad, I cannot remember my face; the sea was too rough to reflect my image, and the fire of the corposant blinded me as I fell from the mainmast; now they could at least be good enough to hand me a mirror so that I could see my forgotten face for the first time), but I see that their intention is not to shave me but to do something more serious; the barber is clicking his scissors with gusto, with excessive gusto; he licks his lips, he bends over, he circles about me, observing me, until the Mad Lady says, enough, do what you have to do, and the barber approaches and begins to cut my long hair; tufts of blond hair fall upon my chest and shoulders, fall upon the cold floor of this chamber that according to that damned gossiping dwarf will from now on be mine … my prison, the dwarf said. I was led here by the Mad Lady, the dwarf, and the halberdiers, who guided us with wax torches: we had to walk a long way (I am very tired) through the galleries of this palace, hearing the murmur of feminine voices, doors closing, the whisper of nuns’ coifs as they hurried to their cloister, locks and chains, and water dripping down the walls, always lower, deeper, and if this were a ship and not a house I would say they had brought me to the deepest part of a brigantine, to the brig, but the Mad Lady calls this bare stone room with iron rings embedded in the walls and a straw mat on the floor a bedchamber.

“Try to be comfortable here, you can come out only when I permit it.”

I remember nothing, not my face, not my life, only the St. Elmo’s fire on the mainmast, my fall into the sea, my miraculous salvation on the beach, the passage of the procession across the dunes, the impulse to save myself, to join those men, to know that I was alive and that men would look after me, look after a poor shipwrecked youth who had no home, no occupation, no memory: the most orphaned of orphans who had ever stepped upon these shores. I forget everything that happens; by night I no longer remember what happened during the day. Yes, perhaps I recall the things closest at hand, clothes, or the most definitive things, death. But everything else … what happens between the time one dresses and one dies … what is said and thought between the time one puts on his breeches and the time he’s placed in his coffin … nothing of that. What is happening now, yes. What is immediate, what happens during the day, before I go to sleep, yes. We arrived here today as part of a procession, at the end of a procession, the bells were tolling, there was a storm, the palace is enormous and still uncompleted, there are many workmen, cranes, piles of things, straw and tiles, blocks of stone, carts, smoke, smoke everywhere, smoke that prevents one from seeing very far, that deceives, that makes one believe that a corridor continues when in reality it ends, ends as empty space or continues only as dangerous planks, carelessly placed, the dwarf must be very careful as she pushes the Mad Lady in the little cart, the wax torches must illuminate very well, tonight we came close to killing ourselves, we came to the landing of a stairway, and continuing to descend (down, down, always down; this chamber must be in a very deep place, far beneath the rest of the palace, near the cisterns, for the plain is dry, whereas black water seeps through these walls), the dwarf, who must have very sharp vision — doubtlessly in compensation for her minute stature — shouted no, no, be careful, there are no stairs here, they’ve not been built yet, it’s only a landing, it’s open, be careful, and if she hadn’t seen that there were no steps we’d have fallen off that open landing, yes, and now our broken bones would be lying at the bottom of some forgotten corner of the palace and our flesh would be food for rats and I wonder whether seeing the three of us dead — the Mad Lady, the dwarf, and me — would please the other persons who live here, and who are they? and I realize I must be satisfied with this room that, whatever the Mad Lady and the dwarf say, is a jail, not a bedchamber. But I shall keep what I know to myself. And also I will tell them that it is a very fine chamber, very comfortably appointed, and I will allow the barber to cut my long hair and to take the razor, as he does now, and shave me, painfully, he’s a clumsy brute, he wets my head with water and then quickly runs the razor over it, very roughly, without having first soaped it, and I can feel that he’s cutting my scalp, and blood is rolling down my forehead and cheeks. The blood blinds me and I close my eyes, and I have a strange impression that is difficult to explain, I examine my thoughts, I know that I must never cross the Mad Lady and the dwarf, who are watching me with great contentment as the barber shaves my head, the Mad Lady is all satisfaction, her bilious eyes glowing like coals: all her life is there, gleaming, she is nothing but eyes, the dwarf, as she watches me, is holding a dove in her tiny little arms, stroking it, then suddenly I have a flash of intuition as to the role I must play here, I must not cross them, I must be respectful to them, they will treat me well, not as if I were a servant, no, I must not cross them, but others, yes, perhaps that’s the very reason they will treat me well, they hope I will treat others badly in their name, an invalid Lady and a tiny dwarf, dependent upon me to convert their desires into actions, I begin to yell as if I were mad, I see that while they are shaving me the dwarf is playing with her dove, and I yell: I cannot bear this headache, relieve the pain, relieve my blood with the blood of the dove. The dwarf leaps toward me, shrieking with joy, not asking permission of the Mad Lady, and offers me the white bird; I take it and I seize the razor from the surprised barber, I plunge it into the smooth, white, quivering breast of the dove and when I see the blood staining its feathers I crown myself with the dying bird, I place its tremulous body upon my shaven and bleeding head and allow the blood to run down my face and blind me again, but now I refuse to close my eyes, I see the joy of the dwarf, who is leaping with pleasure, I see first the defiance, then the fear, and finally the proud acceptance of the Mad Lady, who exclaims: “The crown one fashions is the crown one will wear.”

She understands that I understand. Then I am able to close my eyes and lick the sour taste of blood and remember, before I forget, for the day has been long and troubled and tomorrow in order to survive I shall have forgotten all that occurred today, how we arrived in the midst of the storm that tore the ribbons from the litters and the veils from the catafalques, how we descended from the carriage and prostrated ourselves before El Señor, who stood receiving the various companies, and how the Mad Lady orders me to kiss the pale hand and then the stinking feet of El Señor, her son, and she says to me: This is El Señor, my son; and to him she says:

“You should always have trusted me. I am the only one who has brought you a living person instead of a dead body. Do not bury in the black marble crypt reserved for my husband that corpse I bring with me; throw it into a common grave, along with the tavern keepers and criminals and dogs of your army of huntsmen: that body I have brought here with me is not that of a high Prince, your father, but a shipwrecked beggar. The true Señor, your father, was reincarnated in the body of this youth. See in him both your resurrected father and the son no one has given you: your immediate ancestor and your most direct descendant. Thus God Our Lord resolves the conflicts of privileged dynasties.”

Now the Mad Lady enjoys the effect of her words: her son’s increased pallor, the contained anger of the beautiful Señora seated beside El Señor with a hooded bird poised on her greasy gauntlet, the impotent gesture of the man standing behind them, who with such fury, but also with such futility, places his hand to his belt, to the handle of his dagger, but then has to settle for stroking his braided moustaches; how the Mad Lady’s yellow eyes bore into my body prostrated at the feet of such high Lords before she says:

“One day you tore me from the arms of death, my son; you frustrated my will to die and join my most beloved husband. Today I thank you for that. You forced me to recover the past in my lifetime. Listen carefully, Felipe: our dynasty will not disappear: you will be succeeded by your own father, and your father by your grandfather, and your grandfather by his father, until we meet our end in our beginnings and not — as the sterile women who live with you, and despise you, would wish — in our end. Take good care of your dead, my son; let no one steal them from you: they will be your descendants.”

As if he were obeying a ritual previously agreed upon, the halberdier supporting the trunk of the mutilated Mad Lady shifts her so that she looks directly into La Señora’s face, but La Señora is not looking at the Mad Lady; rather, she is looking at me, and with an intensity, with an astonishment, that is also recognition; I would have liked to ask her: Do you know me, do you know me, do you know this shipwrecked victim, this orphan, this man without parents or any who love him, do you know me? But now La Señora was searching for something among the sea of faces at this ceremony. I follow the direction of her gaze, and more than meeting, it seems to transfix like a ray of lightning or a sword the gaze of a tall, blond, pale priest who moves away from the group and hurries into the palace. With the motion of her head — erratically tracing the sign of the cross in the stormy late-afternoon air — the Mad Lady blesses her son, El Señor; he seems almost asphyxiated, his thick lips move spasmodically, and he thrusts his enormous chin forward as if to capture any air escaping from his lungs. The Mad Lady smiles and orders them to take her to her rooms and there she joins me, the dwarf, and the halberdiers, who place her in the little cart that the dwarf begins to push along the passageways; there we go again, walking, it’s no wonder I’m exhausted, the dwarf pushing the little cart, and I behind, past the cells of the nuns, who peer secretively from behind their veils and the hangings in their cells, past the bedchambers of the duennas, until we reach the bedchamber of La Señora, and I cannot understand why we enter the splendid bedchamber in this manner, with churlish fury, without knocking. The halberdiers guard the door, the dwarf pushes the little cart, the Mad Lady, with rapid movements of her head, looks from La Señora to me and from me to La Señora, the dwarf tilts her head to one side, jumps up and down twice, and then rushes at La Señora, pummeling her belly, beating her fists upon La Señora’s bulging skirts, cackling wildly, as the Mad Lady says cuttingly:

“Enough of these silly games, Isabel; that bulge is false; there’s nothing in your belly but wind and feather pillows. Enough of this announcing a false pregnancy, followed by an equally false miscarriage; your belly is as sterile as this devastated plain: enough, enough, it’s no longer necessary; I have found the heir, I have brought him here: here he is.”

I, the shipwrecked orphan? I, the heir? I expected to see in La Señora’s face an astonishment equaling mine: but instead she pointed toward the bed and said: “Juan.”

And naked, you rise from the bed redolent of spices and dried violets, you, a youth like myself, entirely naked, golden, with a faraway look in your eyes in which stupor is indistinguishable from forgetfulness or satisfaction.

“Turn around, Juan; show your back to this witch.”

You slowly turn and show us your back and on it there is a blood-red cross, part of your flesh; I want to walk to you, to recognize you, embrace you, remember something with you, and you, as you look at me, seem astonished, of what I do not know, for an instant you seem to recapture something lost, to take a step outside that waking dream in which you move, impelled by the voice of the young Señora, perhaps, like mine, your spirit too struggles to recognize itself by recognizing me, I feel it, I feel the same hollowness in my stomach I felt as I fell from the mainmast into the emptiness of the ocean, perhaps you feel the same, I don’t know, but La Señora paralyzes all of us with her words, directed to the dwarf: “Don’t touch me again, you disgusting creature; you are beating my son.”

“You lie, you are sterile, sterile, who sows his seed in you sows in the sea,” shouts the Mad Lady.

Then, at a sign from La Señora, you turn sideways to us, you arch your back, you tilt your head backward, and we can see the priming of your great weapon, how it is gradually, smoothly, swiftly erect, enormous, so rigid its tip touches your dark, deep, warm navel.

Then, very calmly, La Señora says: “No, I am not sterile; it is your son, our Señor, who is sterile, sapped by the excesses of those remains that today we buried here in my palace, mine, poor Señora-mother, you’ve outstayed your welcome.”

The Mad Lady screamed; with her voice she halted the dwarf, who had rushed toward the youth’s huge, erect mandrake; La Señora has no need to laugh, she simply looks at me uneasily, I feel stupid, useless, dressed in these clothes that are not mine, the cape of moth-eaten fur, the velvet cap pulled down to my eyebrows, the tarnished gold medallion upon my breast, awkward, useless, disguised, envying the beauty and freedom and grace of that youth whom La Señora now commands: “Rest now, Don Juan; go back to bed.”

Slowly the youth called Juan obeyed. He seemed asleep, eternally asleep, and La Señora, who must be the mistress of that sleep, stared with the icy gaze of a wild beast at the Mad Lady, at the dwarf, and me, and said: “When you returned this morning, I feared you, old woman, for a moment I feared you. I saw standing beside you a young man who looked very much like this one who sleeps with me. I thought you had stolen him from me. Then, when I ascertained that it was not so, I decided that fortune had been equally generous with the two women of this house: one youth for me, and another, very similar, for you.”

She paused, smiled, and continued: “But now I see that anything you desire, anything you look upon, or anything your deformed, dwarfed little friend touches in your stead, turns into the image of yourselves: mutilation and deformity. Is this all your arts can convoke, Most Exalted Señora? A fool?”

I, mouth agape, I, the authentic fool: is this the role I must play? If I play it, will they treat me with affection, will they feed me from time to time? Will they, will they? The dwarf pushes the little cart, we flee from that place, far from the bedchamber of the young Señora and her young companion, I following the Mad Lady and the dwarf, understanding nothing, a true cretin, and now I am sitting here in this stiff chair, my eyes closed and a dead, no longer bleeding, pigeon upon my head: but I am bathed in blood, my face is covered with sticky blood, the sheet on my shoulders is a purplish mantle, and now the Mad Lady is enchanted, she seems to have forgotten her fit of temper, she bows her head and murmurs: “The imperial toga; the purple of the patrician. Praise be to God who in this manner manifests His signs, and make them concur and conform.”

The stained sheet. My formerly blond hair now red with blood. What more can I do? The business of the dove was a good idea; the Mad Lady is very happy, perhaps if I continue to do mad things she will be even happier, less harsh with me, will allow me to go out from time to time, will forget her threat to keep me locked up in this hole; perhaps there are gardens in this palace and the Mad Lady will permit me to walk through them in the afternoon, no, from the bedchamber of the young Señora one sees no garden, only a dusty, dry, enclosed space, but that chamber is as beautiful as its mistress; how I hope they will transfer me to a room like that, her room brings long-lost memories, almost dreamed, I don’t know, from distant lands, from lands where the sun is born, the East, yes, the East, the hangings, the perfumes, the skins, the tiles, everything in that chamber was almost a clear memory, a fearful and irrecoverable voyage, but the truth is that truly I must be a fool, a total fool, for I understand nothing; the dwarf whispers secretly to the Mad Lady: Take off his clothes, mistress, let’s see if he too has that cross on his back, let’s see if he too has a great stiff staff and a pair of great fat orbs like that impostor back there, let’s see; but the Mad Lady pays no attention to her; she pays no attention because she fears something, then she recovers her dignity and authority and orders the barber and the menservants: “Bathe him, then put on him this long, black, curly wig, then summon the painter, Brother Julián, to come paint the miniature of the heir, the future Lord of all Spain.”

The barber, as is their custom, holds the mirror before my face after they finish bathing me and fitting on the wig. Finally I recognize myself, finally I ask myself whether that stony figure, that pale, chalky face, that bewigged specter is really I, and I recall (for tomorrow I shall have forgotten) the golden beauty of the youth in the bedchamber of La Señora, asking myself why it is so upsetting to me to imagine that the youth’s beauty might be mine.

HAWKS AND HAZARDS

Guzmán said to himself: “Something is happening that I do not understand. I must be prepared. What are my weapons? The great Lords have armies: I have only my dogs and my hawks.”

He spent several days with the hounds and the birds, reviewing them, treating their ailments, refining his knowledge of them, preparing himself and preparing them for an event he could not foresee but that sent chills down his spine and kept him awake half the night now that he was sleeping on a straw pallet in the roost of the birds of prey. He asked the huntsmen who were under his command to mingle with the workmen, sharing bread and salt with them, and he asked them to listen sharply to what was being said in the tile sheds and at the looms. He remained in the place where the hawks are brought to be trained; he told himself that there, occupied in the elementary care a young hawk that is born small and with sparse plumage requires to become a bold, full-grown bird with fine plumage, he could await with laborious tranquillity what was to happen, he could think, think in the only way he knew how to think: occupied in an exacting task. He cared for the birds that had equal need: the eyas and the haggards. He trimmed the beak and claws of the young birds, and bathed them with water before attaching the bells for the first time so that they would become accustomed to them, and also so he would be able to hear them if the young falcons, so early are their rapacious instincts awakened, left the roost, became lost, or returned injured from their first forays. To avoid their languishing in captivity, he gave them good fare and offered them wood and cork to sharpen their beaks; he released rats, and sometimes frogs, so they might hunt within the confines of the mews. He stroked the dry, warm, young birds, and because it was summer refreshed them with beakfuls of water, for the dryness could make them hoarse and harm their craws and livers; he offered them small amounts of good food: the heart of a deveined sheep, the flesh of a lean rabbit, or the tenderest heifer, and then he listened to the huntsmen who night and day came to the roost to tell him: Yes, the storm is over now, but the rain strewed the spoils of the funeral procession across the plain; yes, the workmen are picking up the black brocade flowers torn loose from the catafalques; the fools are collecting them, carrying them with them, they are attaching them to their shirts and hanging them beside the sacred images in their huts, attempting to adorn their poor devotions; but the more malicious are making cruel jokes, they are saying that now only black roses will bloom on this high plain, only funeral carnations, and when they gather together to eat their chick-peas, they recall the rockrose, the streams, and the woods, and they say that even the climate has changed, that the summer is hotter and the winter colder since the trees were cut down, the valleys dried up, and that the animals had died and would die without the rockrose bushes to protect them.

Guzmán listened silently; he continued his precise tasks, dedicating the morning to the young hawks, taking care that they were kept in rooms that were not damp, in which smoke could not enter, rooms bathed in light, for the first rule of good falconry is to avoid complete darkness, thus preventing the swiftly flying hawk from confusing darkness with the limitless space of night, crashing into walls or beams, crippling or killing itself: as he repeated this rule to himself, Guzmán recalled the day, neither recent nor very distant, when he had presented himself to offer his services to El Señor, who demanded so many services to effect the rapid construction of the palace; and in order that his merits be appreciated, Guzmán, his head bowed before the master, a panting haste in his servile voice that made no attempt — just the opposite — to hide the urgent need for employment, enumerated in rapid fire the occupations he knew, and the rules of those offices, and El Señor listened calmly, and only when Guzmán said, Señor, your young falcons are badly attended, I have walked through the mews and I have seen they are crippled because someone has allowed them to confuse the confined darkness of enclosure with the great rapacious space of the night, only then did El Señor tremble as if Guzmán had touched an open wound, a live nerve, and only then had Guzmán raised his head and looked into El Señor’s face. And Guzmán placed clods of turf in the mews for the hawks’ rest, and the huntsmen came to tell him: Yes, the accidents have continued; no, the affairs of men have not calmed like the weather; it was not enough, Guzmán, that the storm abated when El Señor’s dead were buried; it was not enough that the phantom dog was hanged from the railing in the chapel this morning; as the supervisors and the workmen were cutting stone in the quarry and removing earth to facilitate the process, an avalanche of earth from this fearful mountain fell upon them and buried them. And in the palace, asked Guzmán, in the palace, what is happening there? Nothing, silence, nothing, they replied.

In the afternoons, Guzmán attended the haggards; their talons, the bird’s principal weapon in attacking and seizing its prey, split, fall out, and get caught in the cracks of their perches; Guzmán removed one aged bird from its perch and recalled its former glory, its talons are so hungry, so greedy, can be sunk so deep, become so embedded in the flesh of the boar or the deer, and the bird may so resist releasing its grasp, Señor, that only with great expertise can the talons be loosened without pulling them from the bird; but as they grow old, Señor, their talons — without exposure to either glory or danger — simply fall out, the falcons cling to their quiet perches and Guzmán listened as with a piece of turquoise he trims the broken talons of the old hawks, the wife of one of the laborers buried by the avalanche of earth came today, with scissors Guzmán cuts back the broken claws till he reaches the quick, the woman came in her terrible poverty, weeping, more dead than alive, through those fields, and Guzmán listened as he ground comfrey and the resin of the dragon tree, she came alone, unaccompanied, weeping, and Guzmán applied the mixture to the quick of the talon and bound the wound with a cloth of fine linen, weeping for her husband’s death and attributing her misfortune to the fact that El Señor, had constructed a palace for the dead in the lands that had formerly belonged to the shepherds, and so great was the woman’s poverty that she had no one who would help her carry her husband’s body back to the village where she lived. Guzmán stroked the bandaged hawk and replaced it upon the perch. “Now you will rest there three or four days.”

A gouty hawk: his prescription, mummified flesh from the apothecary. Laborer dead in a landslide: his prescription, burial at the site of your death, said Jerónimo, for only El Señor has the right to move his dead from the place where they died and bring them, accompanied by companies of guards and prelates, to a crypt of black marble: be satisfied, woman, leave your man buried on the very spot where he was overcome by bad fortune; we’ll hold his wake right here. Who is Jerónimo? An old smith, the one who mans the forges; well, he isn’t all that old, according to what he tells us, but he looks old because of his long beard and furrowed brow and disillusioned eyes. Jerónimo. And who else, huntsmen? And what else?

“A long absence breeds forgetfulness, my mother used to say, and it’s a long rope that tugs at one who grieves over another’s death. Forget the afflictions of others, we have enough of our own.”

“Do you believe this life is worse than the one you left behind, Catilinón?”

“What I believe is that it’s the local man who gets the ruined land. And if you don’t like it here, why don’t you go live in a city, Martín?”

“Because neither I nor any of mine ever had enough to pay our Lord what we owed him and thus be free to leave that land.”

“Well, I say to you, Martín, that the land’s abandoned us, and we’ve lost all our lands. We had some rights as long as we were a frontier against the Moors; we lost those rights, although we were promised protection, when the powerful Lords gathered the free lands under their sole dominion; we lost both rights and protection, in the end, when the greatest Lord claimed these lands from the lesser Lords in order to construct his tombs here. And what’s left to us? A wage, as long as the work lasts. And then? Neither wage nor lands, and how are we to begin again?”

“You speak well, Jerónimo; but if we’ve nothing left, we’ve nothing to lose; all we have is a long life of pain, and death, at the end.”

“That’s mutinous talk, Martín…”

“And I speak following much deceit, Catilinón, and for many unquiet people who’ve been stripped of everything they had…”

“Well, your rope must be longer than the one that tugs at the dead laborer’s wife; dead, there’ll be no one to bury you, and alive, there’s no one to look after you.”

“And the burial of a Prince’s bones costs more than all our lives put together…”

“And who’ll be governing us when this Señor dies without leaving any heir?”

“Some foreign lady?”

“No, Nuño, but you can be sure there’ll be a roar and hubbub among the nobles and clergy — the great Babylon of all Spain.”

“But what can we do, Jerónimo, you know how it is with a whore or a crow: the more you wash them, the blacker they grow.”

“You were born a blockhead, Cato, and you’ll die a blockhead, and you’ll never understand what it is to be a free man, or that we could govern ourselves.”

“If you want to give me something, Jerónimo, make it money, not advice.”

Who’s Catilinón? A buffoon come from Valladolid, a rascal there and a good-for-nothing here, given to speaking in proverbs. Nuño? a laborer in the quarry, slow as an ox but stubborn as a mule, the son and the grandson of foot soldiers and farmers, a bad mixture, for those askari soldiers fought with the rebellious Urraca against her cousin and husband, Alfonso the Battler, and in favor of the laborers, against imposed taxes, and against the holdings of mills, vineyards, and forests by the monasteries, and since Doña Urraca was defeated, and the farmers lost the war, and the lands remained in the hands of the clergy and Lords, their resentment is deep. Martín? Be cautious there, he’s so tough that quicklime doesn’t strip the flesh from his arms, be cautious, he’s Navarrese, from Pamplona, come here for this job, be cautious, those men did battle against the Moor but were just as happy laying ambush to the armies of the Most Catholic King Charlemagne who crossed the Pyrenees to defend Christianity; with the Navarrese, it’s let’s look after ourselves. Catilinón. Nuño. Martín.

Guzmán attended the falcons affected with hydropsy or diarrhea from having eaten damp or bad meat, from being kept in cold places, or from having swallowed feathers that had stuck in their craws through the hunter’s carelessness. The birds thus affected secrete a warm, foul liquid that irritates and damages the liver and tripe. The bird’s skin becomes dry, its thighs grow thin, it has no strength, its craw becomes engorged, it has a sorrowful aspect, ruffled feathers, and an insatiable thirst, Señor. Guzmán rattled off his words to insinuate himself with the Lord and obtain a place with him by enumerating his knowledge of birds and hounds, hunting and hawks’ mews, and as he raised his head to look at El Señor, El Señor flushed, El Señor was humiliated; nevertheless, Guzmán knew from that moment that El Señor liked this humiliation. “Trust in me, Señor, count on me, Señor.” Guzmán moved the sick hawks to dry perches made from the cork tree, and he prepared a new mixture of red powder, finely ground incense, and myrrh, what is happening in the palace? nothing, Guzmán, all is silent, nothing, an odor of incense and myrrh issues from La Señora’s bedchamber; an odor of warm, foul water issues from the Mad Lady’s bedchamber, an odor of bad sleep and griped bowels issues from El Señor’s bedchamber; nothing, Guzmán. As if each person had decided to remain alone in his chambers, forever, his body his only company, his body, huntsman? what do you mean? his own body, Guzmán, that’s all; Guzmán smelled the reddish powder, the incense, and the myrrh: a young shipwrecked sailor, a foolish Prince, a nubile nun, each with his own body. Hadn’t they been able to ascertain what he already knew, those loose-tongued huntsmen he had charged to find out? Valiant spies; the sailor, the Idiot, the nun. And I, I, Guzmán, with no one of my own, with no company but an old hawk with broken talons and a poisoned craw.

He made all his preparations, for something told him, something as sure and at the same time as vague as the first rapacious instinct of his birds, he must be prepared, as he had been earlier in preparing the death of the mastiff Bocanegra, and now that the greatest hunt of all was approaching, he must have the skins ready, the trappings, and the trimmings, he must have at hand the curved knife, the turquoise, the flat-and-convex file, the scissors, the irons, the awl, and the fetters, he must accustom the young hawks to wear the bells tied with jesses so artfully knotted that the birds can neither lose them accidentally nor pick them off themselves, though they be lost for many days in the field, searching, always searching, for big game? What? Who? A turbulent river, the river Guzmán.

“Great disorder breeds great order. Trust in me, Señor.”

And he was extremely careful not to tell El Señor who he was, he, Guzmán, he told only his favorite hawk: Hawk, beautiful hawk, see these hands that care for you and feed you, those are not the hands of some boorish workman like those Martíns and Nuños, but the hands of an ancient line of Lords who sold protection to the Moorish kingdom of Al-Ta’if and thus amassed noble lands on the frontier that were then ruined by the combined enterprise of nature and men, but if it was by chance that a great plague killed half the population, it was the premeditated action of men that took advantage of our desolation, our lack of strong arms for labor, to ruin us: I owe my ruin to the laborer who feeling himself indispensable raised his normal salary five times over; I owe my ruin to the burgher who taking advantage of our sudden indigence bought up the lands of the dead at a low price; and the other ruin, the ruin of my soul, I owe to El Señor, who gave me shelter and humiliated me, kiss my hand, Guzmán, that’s the way, with respect and gratitude, you think, Guzmán, but you think poorly, poor Guzmán, what would you do with my power if you had it? what would I do, Señor? what would we do, my angry hawk, what would we do? Let El Señor never know who I am, hawk, you must never tell him; let El Señor believe I am of his own making, let El Señor believe that the little I am, the little I have, I owe to him. You are my master, hawk, as you work, so shall I, and like you I shall soar to the heights from which I may wreak vengeance on all those who ruined me, hawk …

And last, he must try on the gauntlet made of the hide of a dog, test its roughness, for the bird cannot get a good purchase on a smooth gauntlet, grease it carefully, so that it is well covered with fat, and cut the tips of the fingers, for if one’s own fingers are long they don’t fit into the tips, which become very dry and hard, Señor. And trim the beaks well, over and over, one doesn’t want the hawk to catch his beak in one of the holes of the bell, and die. And finally, take the hawks among the dogs with whom they must hunt, so they come to know them, and so that, feeling secure on Guzmán’s wrist, and greedy for live prey, the hawk will eat amid the dogs, and never fail to recognize them, never forget them, so that the bird will know that his prey is not the dog but something else, but what? a bearded smith, who seems old, a resentful quarrier, slow but stubborn, a rebellious Pamplonian; a clown from Valladolid, an imbecilic Prince who, did you hear, Guzmán? the palace barber himself told me, crowns himself with bleeding doves; a Mad Lady in a little cart pushed by a babbling, ass-peddling, farting dwarf; a Señor who must be as ill in his soul as he is in body, for he moans as if something were eating at him that could as easily be the result of a thorny prayer as a trot with a spicy vixen. Oh, well, they are finding out something, the featherheads, and now, said Guzmán, stroking his favorite hawk, the situation is just reversed, for this time I possess the weapon — the hawk — but I am not sure of the prey; whereas before, I knew the prey — the faithful Bocanegra — but I was not sure of the weapon. It must be a weapon like this curved file, flat on one end and rounded at the other, so that it may be used two ways, for a man in my position, my fine hawk, must be the secret enemy both of those who have everything and of those who have nothing.

“Look sharp, hawk, my beautiful hawk, see how beautiful you’ve become, look how well I’ve cared for you; look sharp, nice and straight now, so you are one flowing line from your back to the tip of your tail, let me stroke your fine back and your wings, my hawk, those strong wings, your long slim throat; I tell you there is nothing in this world more beautiful than you, my companion, and I made you so, my beautiful, handsome, greedy hawk, look at that head, as flat and smooth as a snake’s or an eagle’s, my beautiful hawk, look at that jutting brow, those sunken, gleaming, yellow eyes, that slash of a beak, made spirited by the flare of the wide nostrils that give you the scent of the prey, my elegant hawk, my severe hawk, my fierce and gallant hawk, and it was I who gave you life, you who were born battered and small and scrawny, and it was I who trained you for the great hunt, remember me, remember Guzmán, my spirited hawk, my well-fleshed, beautifully formed hawk, remember Guzmán your true master, for your legal master is drowsing in bed with a novitiate, far removed from all my preparations, far from the difficult and rewarding and persevering office that formerly assured Lords a power and a rank granted them not by the mere fatality of birth but by the constant audacity of their actions, their valiant deeds, and by the noble knowledge of this office, amid hounds and falcons and arrows and sword blows and chargers; as I am your servant, you humiliate me, little Felipe, my Señor, you need do nothing, and yet you have everything; I shall humiliate you, Señor, my little Felipe, for today a servant knows how to do what formerly only Lords knew, hear me, my high, long, and full-breasted hawk, let me stroke you, again and again, my beautiful hawk, feel the hand of Guzmán, son of the Ta’if kingdoms where my Spanish fathers exploited the weak Moslem lords, where they placed all their faith in the prodigal land that produces on its own, where they lost faith in the cunning industry that creates riches where none existed before, where they acquired the conviction that the Spaniard governs while the Arab and Jew labors, for manual labor is not considered fitting for a don of Spain, only the riches acquired by exaction of fief and military tribute: let us not forget that lesson, hawk, you and I shall together win a kingdom with our hands and our wings, we shall not spare sweat or stain, or trust in the land or in the slave; and if not here, hawk, see for yourself in the mirror of our decadent Señor: new Spain will be ours, hawk, its only privileges those of the task well done, those who will not labor will become a nation of beggars, the powerful Lord will be he who labors most, and that will be our justice, hawk, a fitting justice, place upon my rough gauntlet your rugged, wide-spread claw, grip my greasy leather with your long slender toes, your beautifully rosy talons shading into blackest black, poise yourself upon my wrist with your feet planted firmly apart, and hear me, hawk, once you are upon the wrist of your true owner, I myself, stationed in a tree awaiting the passage of your victim, you must be prepared for the great hunt, you must swoop down upon the prey, conquering by the swiftness of your flight and killing in the clutch of your steely talons; and though your victim struggle, and thrash about, and fight against you, you, with your long tarsi, will take advantage of brush and scrub, making escape more difficult and allowing time for the arrival of your master and his dog. Noble bird; you shall be fed always on living or freshly killed animals; I shall not give you less than you deserve, I swear it, I shall offer you living prey and you yourself shall kill it and be satiated on it. Faithful hawk: the traveler who returns and who is not recognized even by his wife is recognized by his falcon. El Señor no longer has his guardian, his companion, his dog; but I have you, and I shall not abandon you, my hawk; be prepared; I shall be present the day you soar into the heavens with the swiftness of a prayer and swoop down with the speed of a curse. You are my weapon, my devotion, my son, my luxury, the mirror of my desires, and the face of my hatred.”

And yes, Guzmán, we thought we had seen everything, but we were bamboozled like little children and hoodwinked like fools, for the portents have not ceased, nor have the processions ended, as we believed; here’s what happened: this afternoon, as the sun was setting, the fires in the forges dying, and the men leaving the quarries and gathering together to eat, the one called Martín, who has a reputation for sharp vision, saw a cloud of dust that descended from the mountain, and the one called Nuño, who has ears like a fox, added his ears to Martín’s sharp eyes and between the eyes of the one and the ears of the other they came up with an impression that neither, reliant only upon eyes or ears, could have reached on his own, for oxcarts raise clouds of dust, and rumbling can often be heard in the mountains, even if it’s only rockslides rattling down the ravines, that’s enough, get to the point, now, I know, don’t go for monkeys by way of Tetuán, yes, come, tongue, open the door, whatever else do I feed you for? for they were descending the mountain through the valley, Guzmán, descending? what was descending, huntsman, what? another phantom? another corpse? come, man, never try to screw a catamite or rob a thief, I’ve paid you well — and I will continue to favor you with more than money, with promotions and good positions in the corps of huntsmen and later, perhaps, within the palace — first, paid you for several nights imitating the dog’s howling that so frightened the nuns and upset El Señor, and now I’m asking you for exact news and not stammering and stuttering and certainly not stories about phantoms, for I am the one who takes care of phantoms, with my trusty blade, and they end up hanged for all their troubles, no, Guzmán, it wasn’t phantoms, though that’s what those ignorant laborers thought who gather every evening in the tile sheds to have their bite and to mutter, Guzmán, to curse and speak ill of us all, no, it wasn’t a phantom, it was a drummer dressed all in black, surely some page was lost and left behind by the funeral procession, lost his way in the wolfsbane and arrived late, beating a steady drum roll, a very young page with gray eyes and flaring nostrils and tattooed lips, Guzmán, do you hear? painted lips, all dressed in black, the cap, the cape, the breeches, the shoes, and even the drumsticks covered with cotton on the tips and black streamers attached to the sticks; and behind the drummer, Guzmán, came a young, almost naked man, wearing a doublet the color of crushed strawberries, dead with fatigue, and walking like a blind man with his hand resting upon the shoulder of the page leading him, a blond, slender, handsome youth, Guzmán, and on his back, through the torn doublet, Guzmán, we saw, we saw …

“Don’t tell me, huntsman, I already know: a blood-red cross between his shoulder blades.”

PORTRAIT OF A PRINCE

I feel very uneasy tonight; my body aches all over. I have a fearful pain right on my tailbone, just at the tip of my aching spine stiff from posing so long for this tall, pale, blond priest, who requests, with his eyes if not with words, the regal posture the Mad Lady demands of him in his portrait and from me in my life. But where have I seen this priest before? Yesterday, when we arrived? Before, in the life I cannot recall? Where? It is curious how I can remember words, but no events or people, at least until they become so deeply involved in my life that finally they are a part of my vocabulary and, because of that, take on substance and life, continuity and duration. If not, everything simply fades away, like this priest who is painting my portrait whom I swear I have seen before. The Mad Lady and the dwarf, no, they are no longer women to me, they are words, they have become words. My body aches, as if something, lost these many years, were about to take place … another body that was, or will be, mine. They permitted me to look at myself in the mirror; I did not recognize myself, nevertheless I have no other proof of my existence. Soon I shall have one more: the portrait this priest is so assiduously sketching with tiny brushstrokes, by order of the Mad Lady, upon an enameled oval.

“I want the portrait to have the immutability of the figure of the heir,” said the Mad Lady. “I want the Prince to resemble no other living creature, Brother Julián; least of all, that impostor snuggled between adulterous sheets in this very palace.”

The friar named Julián looked at me, inquisitively, as if he were asking me what instead he asked the Mad Lady: “Immutability, Most Exalted Lady? The portrait can adopt a thousand different configurations. Which do you desire: the image of he who was or he who is to be? And in what place do you wish him: in the place of his origin, that of his destiny, or that which he presently occupies? What places, what times, Most Exalted Lady? For my art, limited as it may be, is capable of introducing whatever changes and combinations Your Grace desires.”

Then the Mad Lady leaned forward; her mutilated trunk, propped against the back of a leather chair, swayed, and only the rapid intervention of the dwarf prevented the disaster of a fall; the Mad Lady wished only to show the painter the enamel upon her bosom, the image, the profile, of her dead husband, a rigid profile, like that on an ancient seal, suitable for the minting of coins, gray, as gray as the undifferentiated space of the background; there is nothing to invent, said the aged Lady, everything is actual, we are the children of God, God is One, and his totality exists in all places, in the immensity of the firmament as well as in the reduced dimensions of this oval: it matters not whether you paint a portrait or a wall, Friar: the space your brushes cover will be the same as the space where we are now, and both spaces are the same as the universe, which is the invariable space of God’s thought, accommodated equally in the largest or the smallest space, in a grain of sand and in the enormity of the broad seas; but come, hurry, paint, do not be proposing false problems.

The friar smiled and bowed his head, joining this action of respect with a serious investigation of the area of my feet, his courtly acquiescence to the demands of the Mad Lady blending into the continuation of honest artistic activity; he insisted on seeing me unshod, on carefully counting, his brush pointing to each one, the toes of my feet. In so doing, he took advantage of the fact that the Mad Lady had summoned a tailor and a bootmaker to make me a change of clothing and some boots, but if the clothing hung from me loosely, much too loosely, the boots were tight, too tight, and what could I do? I felt deformed in that footwear, bowlegged, and it seemed as if one leg were shorter than the other, and I gave the artisan a good kick with the toe of his own boots, till the rascal begged for mercy, making excuses, how was he to know that I had six toes on each foot? why do you say that? what is strange about that? I have always had six toes on each foot, and exactly twelve toenails; I am infuriated; with great grimacing I order the servants to cut the boots into little pieces and to force the damned bootmaker to eat them like tripe, all of which was performed amid great shouting and other less civil noises from the dwarf, until the bootmaker ran vomiting from the room; the Mad Lady ordered the dwarf to be still, and showed me an open coffer filled with precious jewels and I was to choose from among them those that pleased me most for my personal adornment. I chose an enormous round black pearl; I put it in my mouth and swallowed it, which caused new merriment on the part of the dwarf, who handed me a chamber utensil so that when I felt the desire to defecate, the pearl could be deposited there with my evacuation, and between us the dwarf and I would charge ourselves with examining the excrement until we found the precious pearl; the Mad Lady nodded and said the pearl would be doubly precious for having passed through my body from mouth to bum, and that it would henceforth be known as the Pilgrim Pearl. And there was more, she promised she would give me clothing and more clothing so that I would never twice dressed in the same attire; I stared with avarice at the medallion that adorned her bosom, and as she perceived the direction of my gaze, she said that my likeness would be engraved upon precious stones, and my profile on all the coins of the land, and to that end they would use the image Brother Julián was painting at that moment; and smiling, the priest, still working, said: “Then see, Most Exalted Excellencies, how this image I am painting begins to be suffused with unforeseen desires, with pleasures and whims and humors not present in the unvarying original creation; see how I render not what is given but what is desired … For painting is a mental process.”

But no one listened to him; the dwarf was already proposing that we write the Pope asking that he grant me the gift of the supreme relic: the foreskin from Christ’s circumcision, then we would have everything; the dwarf guffawed, revealing her whitish, toothless gums, we would fill this chamber with relics, the ultimate relic, the piece of skin from the penis of the infant Jesus, we would fill the chamber with delights, with garbage, with talismans, with sumptuous clothing and superb tatters, curiosities, miniatures, we would celebrate magnificent banquets here, said the dwarf, as I nodded enthusiastically, gluttonously, with an increasing appetite to fill the chamber as full as I would stuff myself with pleasures; great banquets, the dwarf repeated, and the Mad Lady said yes, excess, expense, the most obnoxious ostentation: for that we had been born, that was why we were who we were, nothing would be too much to humiliate those who never may have, never should have, and never want to have anything, isn’t it true, mistress? isn’t it true that our mourning is over? that our weeping is ended? yes, my faithful Barbarica, the Prince is again with us, our funereal devotion has ended, let there be luxuries, let there be excesses, look, said the Mad Lady, look, listen, make a good face for the painter, my boy, let him see you neither too happy nor too sad, put on a Prince’s face; you will have a Prince’s face when you understand me: I shall repeat to you the lessons I taught my son Felipe, our Señor, to educate you in the proper governing of these kingdoms, a man alone is nothing, I said to him when he was a child, each of us sitting beside the winter’s fire, and now I say to you, an individual dependent solely upon his own strength readily succumbs, his life is spent in searching for what, once obtained, he must spend, only to begin once again to exhaust himself in the search; but not we, not we, because in the midst of the weaknesses of men who are alone, we, you and I, my boy, shall be like the world itself, single individuals represent only themselves, we shall represent the world, because we have created, with vices, powers, devotions, altars, hearths, battles, gallows, palaces, monasteries, the only immortal thing, the signs that last, the scars of the earth, what remains after individuals are forgotten: we have invented the image of the world; compared to fragile individual existence you and I will be the essence of existence, you and I are the sea and they the fishermen, you and I, Prince, are the veins of ore, and they the miners, they take sustenance from us, not we from them, they need us in order that their poor lives have meaning, they shall live from us and we shall live from ourselves, they go and we remain, they exploit, devour, and exalt us because they fear to die, whereas we shall not understand the meaning of death.

“Everything in excess, my boy, everything in excess to demonstrate that death has no meaning, that the powers of re-creation are much more vast than those of extinction, and that for every thing that dies, three are born in its place; the only thing that dies is that which dies as an individual, never that which is continued as a race. Quickly, Barbarica, order us a great dinner, I see the young Prince is fatigued, little eel pies and a great stew of pork, cabbage, carrots, beets, and chickpeas, and an infinite variety of sausages, red, and hot, and stuffed with onions, and naturally, order a hundred pounds of black grapes boiled in the copper caldrons to obtain the few grams of mustard we like to season our stew, run, quickly, order it, and return immediately, Barbarica, for the court painter has asked that you pose beside the Prince, that you appear in the second painting, a large one this time, on canvas, you standing, with the Prince’s hand upon your shoulder, hurry back, Barbarica, men shall remember you, thanks to Brother Julián, our painter.”

“They will remember me, mistress, Señora?” sighed the dwarf. “May I put on my pasteboard crown and my long cape so they’ll believe that I am the Prince’s wife, the miniature Queen?” How she laughs, beside me, that wicked dwarf, and more loudly as I laugh with her; easy as you please I lift her off her feet and swing her up in the air till I can bite one breast; I clamp my teeth upon one round, blue-painted teat until she howls with pain and then with pleasure, and finally the two are indistinguishable, and I nibble and I suck, never taking my eyes from the Mad Lady, who does not intervene, who looks at me as if a new idea were forming in her head, as if she were imagining a new project as she sees us, the dwarf and me together, embraced, what a pair.

“Who was it who kissed you in the carriage, who caressed you, who tore your shirt, who removed your breeches, who formed your new face with the soft, swift touch of her tiny, moist, painted, plump, magic hands? Who? Who was it invented your second face with the paints and cosmetics she carried hidden in her little wicker trunk? Who is it who’s dying to touch you and suck your beautiful dingalingdong? Who? And please, never call me thus … dwarf, it sounds so ugly, call me what everyone else calls me, with affection, Barbarica, Barbarica…”

The dwarf whispers these words into my ear, then pulls away from my kissing and nibbling, her breasts marked by my teeth, she covers the tiny teeth marks on her blue-painted flesh, and runs from this jail, and I sit down amazed, more muddleheaded than ever, rapidly reviewing after listening to what she had said, forgive me, Barbarica, I had one face when I reached the shore, and in the carriage Barbarica had exchanged that face for another, then they had cut my hair and dressed me in a full, black, curly wig, and now the painter is imposing a fourth face upon me, renewed and different, and my true face was fading farther and farther into the distance, I have lost it forever, forever, and meanwhile Brother Julián continues his rapid painting.

My body aches. I hurt all over. Barbarica returns from ordering the meal, and climbs into the wicker trunk that serves her as a bed. Brother Julián has been impatiently waiting to begin the second portrait, and now he asks me to pose again, seriously. The priest sighs; the Mad Lady asks that he paint a third portrait of me, this time wearing the mask I had with me when I reached shore, where is it? it had appeared upon the face of her husband’s corpse, it was woven of brightly colored feathers, said the Mad Lady, with a center of dead spiders, that would be strange, new, incalculable, no one would know how to explain it, they would see my stiff, upright body, my throat and my cape and my hand upon my breast, my black breeches and my tight boots, but they would not see my face, they would have to imagine that, it would be covered by the mask of feathers I had brought with me from the sea when I was thrown upon the beach, and climbed the dunes to encounter my second destiny: the Mad Lady recalls all this, it happened a long time ago, I had already begun to forget, as tomorrow I shall have forgotten everything that has happened today; who recalls the most important moment of his life: the moment he was born? No one. I shall take care to tell that to the Mad Lady. But I speak only to myself, my words are within me, mine alone, the Mad Lady and the dwarf have never heard me speak, they probably believe I am mute, they have only seen me place bleeding doves upon my head, force the bootmaker to eat my raw boots, bite the teats of Barbarica. But where is that mask, a fifth face for me? the ultimate folly, to mask myself, considering that I was already masked in my own flesh when I arrived here. The Mad Lady moves her head from side to side, disconcerted, searching; the painter sighs. The Mad Lady says that a painting of me with the mask covering my face would intrigue the chroniclers, no doubt about it. Where is the palace Chronicler? Have them search for him, bring him here, I want him to begin to write the true chronicle of the Prince’s life. Let us establish immutability: she wants the signs of my identity to be multiplied, I, the heir, in paintings, engravings, coins, pearls, chronicles, let there be immutable awareness that I am who I am, the Heir Apparent of Spain, and no one else, least of all that blond stallion the wife of El Señor has secluded in her bedchamber.

The painter-priest sighs again; he says: “The Chronicler is not in the palace. He committed an indiscretion and was banished to the galleys. If you so desire, I can tell you his story. Then you will be less aware of the passage of time as I finish the painting.”

And this is the story Brother Julián narrated, as the servants entered and prepared the stew on which we were to dine that night.

THE CHRONICLER

Feverish and ill, he wrote through the night; reduced to a tiny space in the depths of the prow of the reserve brigantine, he heard the groaning of the ship’s skeleton, with utmost difficulty he held the inkwell upon one knee and the paper upon the other; the motion of the little stub of candle swinging back and forth before his eyes made him seasick, but he persisted in his wakeful task.

Along with the rest of the flotilla, the brigantine was sailing toward the mouth of the broad gulf, slipping among the islands. He did not know the nature of the maneuvers which the squadron was executing under the cloak of night so as to control the mouth of the gulf by dawn, thereby sealing the exit to the Turkish fleet aligned in rigorous formation far back in the gulf. But he felt certain that, whatever the agreed strategy, the following day would witness a fierce battle, frightful butchery, and little mercy for a humble oarsman like himself, removed that afternoon from the galley because of his feverish and unserviceable condition; ill or not, they would need all hands tomorrow to combat the formidable fleet of Islam, a force of a hundred twenty thousand men, including warriors and the crew of galley slaves.

One night, he thought, a single night, perhaps the last night. He was writing rapidly, the fever of his imagination adding to that of his body, made seasick by the dancing candle stub suspended before his eyes, its wax dripping upon the wrinkled parchment: a soul of wax, that I am, a soul of wax on which the continual motion of the world is imprinted, idea after idea. For the only thing that does not change is change itself, and not, as my most exalted Señores would have it, the stability that so consoles them on a medallion, in a sonnet or a palace, allowing them to believe that, everything considered, the world will end with them, that the world does not move, that the world will respect what is, without concern for what might be.

And so, simultaneously he recalled, he imagined, he thought, and he wrote, blessing the mercy accorded him in the remission of his pain. The respite granted because of his fever was not, nevertheless, gratuitous.

“No,” the commander said to the galley slaves, “rather a demonstration of good faith that the oarsmen who perform well in this encounter will be freed from the chain. On the other hand, we captains of the Christian fleet know that the lack of similar magnanimity among the Infidels will assure that many galley slaves from the enemy armada will take advantage of the confusion of the combat to jump ship and swim for shore.”

At any rate, he did not associate his night of grace with these maneuvers and calculations, nor did he differentiate his specific situation in this hour, exceptional although fleeting, from his larger destiny. Fortune had cast a heavy burden upon his frail shoulders; and to the uncertain question that he formulated as he wrote — Is it possible that a wrathful fate exceeds itself in persecuting me? — the answer, unfortunately, was as sure as it was affirmative. Of his family he remembered only oppression and debts; of his office, only lack of understanding and sleepless nights; of his masters, injustice and blindness. From all of it, necessity. Abundance, only in his imagination; too subtle to be spooned to his lips or cut with a knife. In this nocturnal hour, writing, he muttered to himself Friar Mostén’s counsel: “As you wished it, so shall it be”; for, instead of limiting himself to dedicating his fictions, with their customary laudatory epistles and prologues, to the very exalted Señores who were his patrons, he concocted a great number of things in his imagination, and from invention passed to the documentation of the events he witnessed and of the world he inhabited, reaching a moment when he could no longer differentiate between what he imagined and what he saw, and thus he added imagination to truth and truth to imagination, believing that everything in this world, after passing from his eyes to his mind, and from there to pen and paper, was fable; in the end he convinced his Señores, who desired only chimeras from his pen, that chimeras were truth, but at the same time, truth was never anything but truth. See, thus, the mystery of all written and painted things, for the more they are the product of the imagination, the more truthful you may hold them to be.

Nevertheless, his was a very different scheme, and tonight he was putting it into practice with feverish haste; the swift flight of the hours, guttering away like the stub of the candle, announced the fatal battle of the coming day. Fatal for him whatever its outcome, whether death in combat, capture by the Turks, or liberation from the galleys (although he had little faith in this promise, since his crime was not an ordinary one, but of the imagination, therefore more severely punished by the powers that be than the theft of a money pouch), his destiny was to be neither envied nor extolled: shadow of death, shadow of captivity, or shadow of poverty. And that shadow he had always said and written was worse than the reality of poverty itself, the explicit situation, with no misconceptions, real and spacious as the Plaza of San Salvador in Seville, where a legion of scoundrels could dedicate themselves to larceny, to contraband, to deceit and deception with no excise imposed, and with the broad satisfaction of knowing themselves to be the scum of the earth. The reality of poverty, not its shadow.

He said to himself: Then one is someone, as the farmer and the beggar are someone. In contrast, the impoverished nobleman, the surgeon’s penniless son, the stepson for a fleeting moment of the halls of Salamanca, the heir to musty volumes wherein are recounted the marvels of knight-errantry, the orphaned son of the implausible deeds of Roland and the Cid Rodrigo merely exist, they do not live, and in that such a man is doubly accursed, for knowing what it is to be, he cannot achieve being, only existence, his head filled with mirages and his platter empty, existence, not life, maintaining the appearance of a nobleman though his leggings be tattered and frayed. The heir without his inheritance, the orphan, the stepson, merely exist in the shadow … like an insect. Poverty: he who praises you has never seen you. A battered beetle, an insect lying overturned on its hard, armor-plated back, waving its numerous legs …

A different scheme, to cease to exist and to begin to be; a different scheme, paper and pen. This is what he was thinking as he wrote an exemplary novel that had everything and nothing to do with what he was thinking; paper and pen in order — at any price — to be; to impose no more or no less than the reality of the fable. The incomparable and solitary fable, for it resembles nothing and is related to nothing, unless it be the strokes of the pen upon the paper; a reality without precedents, without equal, destined to be destroyed with the papers upon which it exists. And nevertheless, because this fictitious reality is the only possibility for being, for ceasing merely to exist, one must struggle boldly, to the point of sacrifice, to the death, as great heroes and the implausible knights-errant struggled, so that others believe in it, so that one may tell the world: this is my reality, the only true and unique reality, the reality of my words and their creations.

How were they to understand this — those who, first, denounced him; second, judged him; and, finally, condemned him? He recalled, as he was writing a story for all time in the depths of the prow of a brigantine, one not-so-long-ago morning when he had walked through heaps of hay, tiles, and slate of the palace under construction, deploring, as he knew the former shepherds of the place deplored, the devastation wrought upon their oasis of rockrose and water by the necrophilic mysticism of El Señor. The Chronicler, on that not-so-long-ago morning, actually was attempting as he walked to imagine a bucolic poem that would please his Señores; nothing original, the thousandth version of the loves of Filis and Belardo; he smiled, as he walked, searching his mind for facile rhymes, flowery, bowery, rhyme, thine, sublime … and he asked himself whether his masters, when they summoned him for a new and delightful reading of the themes that were so comforting because they were so familiar, would accept the blending of the pastoral form with a singular nostalgia shared by the inhabitants of this devastated place, nostalgia that the Chronicler, because of that, considered more a temptation than a mockery; or whether, in truth, what they expected from him was not precisely that nostalgia, never accepted by them as such, but as a faithful description of an everlasting Arcadia. Did they not have, then, these Lords, eyes to see? Were they completely indifferent to the destruction that their hands wrought as their minds continued to find delight in images of clear, still streams, leafy arbors, and the trailing branch of the grapevine? Did they so mistakenly confuse nostalgia with fact, and fact with exigency? Perhaps (the Chronicler wrote) they were aware of their guilt and placated it with a secret promise: once the time of ceremony, of death, of inexorable constructing for death has passed, we shall re-create the garden; the dust shall flower, the dry stream beds will flow anew, Arcadia will again be ours.

The skeptical Chronicler shook his head and repeated quietly: “There will not be time, there will not be time … Once the flower is cut from its stalk, it never revives, but quickly withers; and if one wishes to preserve it, the best way is to press it between the pages of a book and, from time to time, try to sniff the remaining vestiges of its wasted fragrance. The tangible Arcadias are in the future, and we must learn how to deserve them. There will not be time, but they refuse to recognize that. Shoemaker…”

To your last: he returned to his quiet rhyming, and was linking the flowery with the bowery when he saw pass beneath the kitchen portico a youth whose beauty was in startling contrast to the smut and sweat that marked the other men who labored here. Not this youth, no; beautiful and golden, he was eating an orange, he displayed an extreme grace of movement that only the possession of luxury, if one is wealthy, or the contemplation of evil, if one is poor, produces; a sufficient pleasure in himself, capable of flowering either in this sylvan solitude or in the company of someone who expects, or even possesses, everything, would know when he met this youth that certain things can never be possessed unless they are fully shared. With rejoicing, the Chronicler thought he recognized in the youth who was savoring his orange the image his sterile pen required: the pastoral vision demanded by his masters, the figure of the shepherd lad crowned, like the ancient rivers of Arcadia, with salvia and verbena: the hero.

The youth passed by swiftly; happiness, wickedness, and deceit were in his gaze; he wiped his hand across his lips as he passed, perhaps because he was eating a juicy, flame-fleshed orange, or possibly because he had just kissed his beloved; either was justified by the secret satisfaction of his expression, the tempered, vibrant heat of his body. The Chronicler could at that very moment inscribe the words in his memory; he imagined a young pilgrim passing by this palace, the temple and the tomb of Princes, like a breath of young life, a carefree wanderer with that mixture of permanent astonishment and delicate disenchantment that the knowledge of other seas, other men, other hearths, gives a man; he was able to blend in the swift versifying of that instant the appearance of the sun and the appearance of this youth, naked, alone. The youth disappeared into the smoke of the palace kitchens; the Chronicler returned to his cubicle beside the stables, and sat down to write.

That was a Thursday; Saturday he read his composition before the Señores, Guzmán, and me, yes, I was there, I, the painter-priest who spent so many afternoons in the sweet, bitter, amiable, and quietly desperate company of the Chronicler, listening to his laments and interpreting his dreams: I, Julián, the gentle thief of my friend’s words. And as I listened to him that Saturday as he was reading the poem to his masters, I did not know whether to look with amazement at my lost friend or to attend the growing plea for silence and warning of punishment in the eyes of La Señora, where the ice of fear and the fire of anger flashed in swift succession, the ice quenching the fire and then the fire inflaming the ice, both born of the icy heat in the convulsive breast of my mistress, the same breasts I had with my brushes one day painted blue, following the tracery of the network of veins with the purpose of making more startling the whiteness of her skin; eat, Most Exalted Lady, stuff yourself with sausage, my gentle Barbarica, suck the pork ribs, supposed Prince; I am aware that for some time now, engrossed in your gluttony, you have not been listening, I know that I am speaking only to myself; so it has been always: you eating while something important happens, not even realizing. I admired my poor friend’s innocence, but I understood that his candor could be my ruin, for once someone pulled the loose thread the entire garment would unravel. Soul of wax, my candid friend had impressed in his poem more, much more, than he imagined; he had converted the fleeting vision of that youth, whom he had glimpsed eating an orange before disappearing in the smoke of the kitchens, into the foundation of his imagination, and upon it had raised an edifice of truth: I hear again the voice of the Chronicler, ringing with conviction, the habitual tones of despair stilled in the reading.

That voice described the handsome shepherd lad with greater exactitude than my own paintings; there was no doubt that it was he, the young pilgrim born with the sun, twin of the sun, so familiarly Spanish with the orange in his hand, so distant, so strange, so foreign in his gaze of disenchanted amazement: a hero here and a hero there, ours and not ours, relative and stranger, almost, one might say, a prodigal son: through the Chronicler he sang of Arabian oases, Hebraic deserts, Phoenician seas, Hellenic temples, Carthaginian fortresses, Roman highways, dank Celtic forests, barbarous Germanic cavalcades; not an idealized shepherd, or an epic warrior, not a Belardo nor a Roland, the hero not of purity but of the impure, hero of all bloods, hero of all horizons, hero of all beliefs, having reached in his pilgrimage the bucolic carrousel of a Señora of a joyless palace, endowed with the pristine feelings that only nature, although all histories, had touched, and chosen by that Señora who, though she could have been any, could only be ours. Chosen for the pleasure of La Señora, led to a luxurious bedchamber, and there surfeited with love and other delights in exchange for his freedom to roam, at the end of the verse choosing to return to the byway, abandoning La Señora to time and oblivion.

El Señor seemed to understand none of this, experiencing, perhaps, only that vague, dreamy nostalgia the Chronicler, performing the function of his office, had wished to provoke; Guzmán suspected something, betraying himself by placing one hand on the hilt of his dagger, and nervously stroking his plaited moustache; La Señora envisioned it all, seeing herself thus depicted in a literary model, her love affair with the youth inadvertently revealed as the true model; I feared everything, but for other reasons. But the Chronicler believed only in the poetic reality of what he had created; any relationship that could not be reduced to the resolute struggle to impose his invented words as the only valid reality was as foreign to him as it was incomprehensible: candid pride, culpable innocence. And thus the strength of his conviction convinced the others of the documentary truth of what he was reading to us.

When he finished reading, the only sound to be heard was the weak and empty applause from El Señor’s pale hands. The dog Bocanegra barked, breaking the icy tension of the moment — Guzmán’s suspicion, El Señor’s lack of comprehension, La Señora’s outraged disarray, and my own fear. Only the Chronicler smiled beatifically, unaware of the passions loosed by his poem, sure only of the verbal reality created, and hoping to be congratulated for it; he was convinced that he had read us the poetic truth, he hadn’t the least intimation that he had repeated aloud to us the secret truth. I moved with haste, I denounced the youth to Guzmán, accusing him, as was true, of having base relations with some kitchen lads barely entered into puberty, but keeping silent what I knew, and knew very well, for I had been the go-between who led the strange youth to La Señora’s bedchamber, thus gaining the gratitude of my mistress on that afternoon of carnal despair after she had spent thirty-three and one half days lying in the castle courtyard with no arms worthy of assisting her, thus, in addition — except on one imperious occasion — saving myself the obligation of calming my mistress’s desires: I do not like to break my vow of chastity, no, and to have to renew it again before a knowing Bishop who as he hears my confession dares look at me with disrespectful complicity: are we not all so? do we not all do the same? is it not fortunate that this vow of purity is renewable? is not the Church magnanimous that it thus understands the weaknesses of the flesh? No, we are not all equal, nor shall I allow that the Bishop so believe. I am an artist. The pleasure of the flesh robs strength from my artistic vocation, I prefer to feel my sexual juices flow toward a painting, wash over it, fertilize it, realize it; the delights of the flesh castrate me, the delights of art satisfy me.

Yes, I concealed what I knew: that the shepherd lad who served as model for our Chronicler had alternated his sodomite afternoons with nights in the bed of La Señora. Guzmán communicated the crime against nature to El Señor, and El Señor, with no further formality, ordered the death of the youth, who was sentenced to burn at the stake beneath the kitchens of his sinful, although not unique, amours. I consulted with La Señora, convincing her that she should sacrifice her private pleasure to her public rank, and promising her, in exchange for her present sacrifice, renewed and increased pleasures in the future. “For the powers of re-creation are much more vast than those of extinction, Señora, and for every thing that dies three are born in its place.”

From the Chronicler’s cubicle, to which I had free access because of our frequent and delightful conversations, I removed some culpable papers in which my erudite friend related, mistakenly, the multiple possibilities of the judgment of Christ Our Lord at the hands of Pontius Pilate; I showed the papers to Guzmán, who did not understand their content but took me to El Señor, to whom I pointed out that in the guise of fable that narration evoked the anathematized heresies of Docetism, which affirms the phantasmal nature of the corporeal body of Christ; of the Syrian Gnosticism of Saturninus, which proclaims the unknowable and untransmissible character of a unique Father; of the Egyptian Gnosticism of Basilides, which has Simon of Cyrene supplant Christ upon the cross, and Christ becomes merely a witness to the death agonies of another; of the Judaizing Gnosticism of Cerinthus and the Ebionites, combated by the Father of the Church, Irenaeus, for declaring that Christ the God occupied only temporarily the body of Jesus the man; of the Patripassianist monarchism that identifies the Son with the Father; of the Sabellian variant that conceives of a Son who is emitted from the Father like a ray of light; of the Apollinarian heresy and of extreme Nestorianism, which attributes to two different persons the acts of Jesus and of Christ; and finally, of the doctrine of Pelagian freedom, condemned by the Council of Carthage and by the writings of the saintly Bishop of Hippo, which denies the doctrine of Original Sin.

“I shall be even more explicit, Señor; the fable is worse than the heresy it illustrates, for in one instance the most Pure Virgin, Our Lady, admits adultery with an anonymous camel driver; in another, Our Lord Jesus Christ declares that he is a simple political agitator of Palestine; and, in the most evil of these examples, our St. Joseph declares himself criminally responsible not only for having betrayed our Sweet Jesus but for having built as well the cross that served as the rack of torture that redeemed our sins. And there is more, Señor. I investigated the palace archives; my suspicions were well founded: the Chronicler is a marrano, a pig, a filthy Jew, the son of converted Jews.”

But instead of being scandalized by the crushing weight of my most careful explication, El Señor asked me to repeat it, again and again; his eyes shone, his curiosity changed to delight, but delight did not give way to shock. I requested, as was natural, that the Chronicler be handed over to the Holy Office; El Señor waited a long while, his eyes closed, before answering me; finally, he placed one hand on my shoulder and asked this most unexpected question: “Brother Julián, have you never seen an uneducated soldier vomit and defecate upon the altar of the Eucharist?”

I answered no, not understanding the sense of his question.

El Señor continued in these terms: “Should I deliver you to the Holy Inquisition for having repeated these heresies?”

Hiding my alarm, I told him I repeated them only to denounce an enemy of the Faith, but that I myself did not sustain them.

“And how do you know whether the Chronicler has not done the same: merely recounted them, without approving them?”

“Señor, these papers…”

“When I was young, I met a student. He, too, believed that there was no Original Sin. He lived, fought, and loved (perhaps died, I do not know; one day I thought I had seen his ghost in the profaned Cathedral), because he believed that God could not have condemned us to misery even before we were born. Others died in the halls of my father’s castle for believing what that student believed … but they were not redeemed by the grace of their thought. Not they, or those crude Teutonic soldiers who besmirched the altar of my victory. Imagine, Friar, that I had challenged those rebels and soldiers: explain in writing the ideas that move you to action, and you shall remain free; if not, you will be executed. None would have been capable of reply; none could have saved himself from death. On the other hand, the student and the Chronicler…”

This frail Señor seized my hand with great strength, squeezed my fist in his, and looked at me with terrifying intensity. “Brother Julián, we must have faith unto death in the values of our religion; let us condemn the idolaters and the infidels, but not the heretics, for they do not deny religion, rather they buttress it by revealing the infinite possibilities for combining our holy truths; let us burn the rebels who rise up against our necessary power in the name of a freedom that they themselves, should they obtain it, would be incapable of exercising, but let us not act against the heretics who in the saintly solitude of their intelligence fortify, unknowingly, the unity of our power by multiplying the alternatives of Faith.”

“But you yourself crushed the Adamite heresy in Flanders, Señor, how then…?”

“That heresy was a pretext employed by the Princes and merchants of the North in order to free themselves from the protection of Rome, and the payment of tithes and indulgences, and in order to name docile bishops who would work on behalf of the power of Mercury, not St. Peter. I acted at the behest of the Pope, not against the heretics, but against those who incited and manipulated them. Do you understand me, Friar?”

With the utmost respect, I bowed my head and then shook my head that I did not; I looked up, seeking my master’s eyes; he was smiling with acerbic pity.

“But you, better than anyone, should understand. Theological skirmishes, Friar, are less dangerous than political ones. Political contention first debilitates me, but then forces me to act, whereas theological arguments divert and channel energies that otherwise would be turned against the government of these kingdoms. I know that the extent and the unity of my power removes very vast powers from the hands of men, but still, that men maintain reserves of uneasiness and strength that someday might menace me; I know that, Friar. I prefer that these reserves be spent in arguing whether Mary conceived without sin, whether Christ was God or man, rather than in discussing whether my power is of divine origin and if, in short, I am deserving of it. Heresy, then, is tolerable as long as it is not employed directly against power.”

“Señor, the prelate who resides here in the palace might think differently.”

“And who will show him these papers, tell me that, Brother Julián … who?”

“You would discourage those of us who try to watch out for your interests. The cause is clear: the Chronicler is a heretic, a Jew reverted to his beliefs…”

“And it is your wish that he be delivered to the Holy Inquisition?”

“It is, Señor.”

“And you say you are safeguarding my interests? Is it your wish that I strengthen, by constantly offering it more jurisdiction, a power that I prefer remain marginal, expectant, dependent upon me, not I upon it? For if I nourish it, the Inquisition will grow at my expense. No, Julián. I prefer to be a little more tolerant in order to remain a little stronger. Our Chronicler does not deserve the renown you would accord him by prosecuting him before the Holy Office, nor do I deserve that for so slight a reason such a tribunal be aggrandized to the degree that someday it might impose its policies upon me. Always minimize your enemy, Friar, particularly if with that action you also diminish a dangerous ally.”

“Most Illustrious Señor: you were not tolerant with the other criminal, the young lad who is to be burned beside the stables. Is sodomy a worse crime than heresy?”

“It is simply a crime that is condemned with horror by the Holy Bible and by common opinion. Let us suppose, Friar, that this youth, in addition to being a sodomite, were also a relapsed and heretical Jew. For which of his crimes would you judge him? For the crime that promised vexatious proceedings, complicated religious debates, and even worse judicial complications? Or for the crime whose punishment everyone would approve and expedite? Let us suppose … just suppose, I say … that this youth is not going to die for his true offense … Is it not considerably more convenient for everyone that he die for the false rather than the true crime?”

El Señor gazed at me sweetly, sadly, wearily. And his visage was one of such utter exhaustion that I shall never know whether or not he actually perceived my own state of agitation. I struggled to say something, but no words came to my defense. El Señor seemed to experience no similar difficulty, either ingenuously or by chance; or, perhaps with perverse calculation, he was touching upon all the points of my own involvement in the intrigue.

“Do you still paint, Friar?”

“That is my vocation, Señor, although minor and expendable compared to my greater vocation, serving God and serving you.”

“Have you seen the painting in my chapel … the one painted … they say … in Orvieto?”

I trembled. “I have seen it, Señor…”

“You have doubtlessly noted the oddities and innovations within it?”

I stood without speaking; El Señor continued: “How would you have painted Christ Our Lord?”

I bowed my head. “I, Sire? As a sacred icon, unchanging since the beginning of time; a flat, fixed figure upon a nonspecific background, as befitting his eternity.”

“The anonymous artist of Orvieto, on the other hand, has surrounded the figure of Christ with the atmosphere of the time; he has placed Our Lord in a contemporary Italian piazza and paints him standing before naked and contemporary men, speaking to them and looking at them. What does the artist mean in this manner to suggest?”

“That the revelation was not made only once, Señor, but that it is through new figures being constantly fulfilled for different men and different epochs…”

“Would you burn the painting in my chapel, Brother Julián? Is its creator a heretic?”

My head bowed, I shook my head. El Señor attempted to rise, but he was racked with a fit of choking. He put a handkerchief to his mouth, and these were his muffled, subdued words: “Very well. There is no more dangerous enemy to order than an innocent. Very well. Let him lose his innocence. Send him to the galleys.”

The candle stub had burned out and the Chronicler had finished writing. Animated by an excitement that erased his fatigue, he arose and said: “Our souls are in continual movement.”

And he added, first stroking, then tightly rolling the parchment: “Here I am master of myself: here I hold my soul in the palm of my hand.”

He inserted the roll of parchment into a green bottle, tapped it with a cork, and sealed it with the still-warm drippings from the candle, crudely, but well, and placed it in the wide pocket of his slave’s breeches, then climbed to the deck.

What a marvelous spectacle lay before his eyes! The Christian fleet, spread out in the mouth of the gulf, formed a huge semicircle of galleys, their pennants flying high and all oars held at the ready; they were facing into a strong wind blowing from the land; the sea was choppy. Sixty Venetian galleys formed the right wing of the crescent; sixty more, Spanish, the central core; and another sixty, from the Maritime Republics, closed the mouth of the gulf; in each galley three hundred galley slaves faced the sun and wind and sea, manning fifty-four enormous oars in each ship. Their guns were installed on the prow; each galley trim from stem to stern, from topmast to hold; the impression of order and symmetry was perfect. But as the Chronicler stepped onto the deck of the brigantine and saw the disposition of the battle lines, he had a moment for other sensations; he could smell the odors from the dark brown coast, the odor of sliced onion and the odor of bread fresh from the oven; and he observed in minute detail, grateful for this marvel, the flight of wild ducks above both armadas, indifferent, these free, guiltless birds, to the Christian standard being raised at that very moment, and to the Turkish pennant already waving deep within the gulf. And the Chronicler observed the rough turquoise-colored sea, the swiftly dissipating clouds, the limpid skies. He gave thanks, in short, for life.

As the standard was hoisted, the call to arms was also sounded, warning all the galleys; the Chronicler was aboard one of the reserve brigantines that along with the supply ships were standing at a distance so as not to obstruct the movement of the galleys, but were prepared to deliver troops and matériel to them; he heard the cannon blasts signaling the battle, and he saw how immediately both fleets moved into action, the Christian flotilla advancing toward the Turkish fleet trapped in the waters of the gulf, and the Turks advancing to the encounter with the Christians, their only alternatives to destroy the Christians, to perish, or to flee by land. The sun rose higher. The wind died down, and the gulf turned into a crystalline lake. Now the oarsmen had a less difficult task. A soft breeze was at their backs. Everyone, even those waiting in the reserve galleys and brigantines behind the central corps of the battle, knelt to receive general absolution, and to prepare to die. The flagship of the Turkish fleet fired the first cannon; kneeling, the Chronicler felt the weight of the green bottle in his pocket, and raising his eyes to Heaven he knew that one part of his life was ending and another beginning; farewell to the folly of youth, greetings to the age of extreme hazard: between the two ages, between the two moments, he found an instant to address himself to the clouds, to the sea, to the frightened ducks flying back to the brownish shores: “What Heaven has ordained, no human effort or wisdom can prevail against.”

And thus he imagined himself to be at the true hour of his death, it could be this instant, or another slightly more remote; brief, nevertheless, was the time for anxieties to mount and hopes to flag.

Six Venetian galleasses, armed with cannon mounted on all sides, advanced to throw disorder into the Turkish ranks; the drums and bugles sounded to clear the decks for action, but even these strident sounds were drowned out by the fearful cries of the Moorish throng; the beaks on the prows of the Christian galleys, sawed before the battle, were pulled down, the great firearms belched smoke, inflicting great damage upon the Turkish ships, whose salvos, aimed above the obstacle of their own beaks, passed harmlessly over the Christian galleys. The Turks did not retreat, but sent formation after formation of galleys in their attempt to rout the wings of the Christian line, attack the rear guard, and gain access to the open sea; at noon the Turks launched a ferocious attack against the left wing, attempting to breach it and force its galleys, for fear of running aground on the sandbanks near the shore, to break ranks from the closed, crescent formation. The Turks were attempting to escape through that gap, when rough hands pushed the Chronicler toward a boat and from there to one of the galleys, and from there, without transition, into the merciless struggle between two galleys locked in combat like two animals in a definitive territorial battle for food and shelter. There was a steady hail of arrows, volleys from harquebuses, and shells; many ships were sunk, and others run aground; many Christians had fallen into the pantheon of the sea and many Moorish galleymen who had attempted to swim to shore were drowned among blazing ships and shellfire; the Chronicler in his position in the galley, clinging to his section of the oar, felt the shudder of the ship under a blast from a Turkish cannon; the prow was ripped away, exposing the tightly packed galley slaves and leaving them unprotected before an assault from the Turks who swarmed on board, granting no quarter; a small squadron rapidly arrived to defend them; they boarded the besieged galley and retaliated, blow with savage blow; the Chronicler, thrown to the deck, felt the open wound in his bleeding hand; with a strength he would not have believed possible he withdrew the sealed green bottle from his breeches and threw it into the sea. He watched the bottle, less swift than the salvos from the harquebuses, trace a slow parabola through the air and disappear from his sight before splashing into the water amid the smoke and fire and cannon blasts.

“Inexorable fates,” he sighed, as he lost sight of the bottle that contained his last manuscript, the pages written under the certainty of misfortune and the uncertainty of life: inexorable fates, inexorable star, the manuscript would follow its course while the galleys were joined in combat, locked together at prow or gunwales or stern; the manuscript would float on, indifferent to the shouting, shots, fire, smoke, and laments; the bottle would be borne along in the currents of a turbulent sea, stained now with blood, the sepulcher of severed heads and arms and legs. The manuscript was this minute being washed away by the sea, master of its own eternal life, untouched by pike, lance, sword, fire, or arrow of this fearful combat; it would not perish in the holocaust, the crashing yardarms, masts, the flaming firebrands; and even the most desperate combatant, drowning this afternoon in the foaming sea, would cling to oar or trailing rope or rudder to save himself, but never to a green bottle containing a manuscript. And though its author should die at this very moment, the manuscript would never die.

“What is your name, lad?”

“What is yours, old man?”

“Miguel.”

“And mine as well.”

“It’s a common name, of humble clay.”

“You have to take the name of the land where you live, old man. Here, today, Miguel. Yesterday, in the melancholy oasis lost to us, Mihail-ben-Sama. The day before yesterday, in the tumultuous, teeming Jewish quarters, Michah. I fled the tumult before we were murdered; I fled the Andalusian oasis before we were defeated. I came to Castile to die.”

“Did you know that, lad?”

“It was written. You can’t flee the executioner forever. I thought I could avoid their persecution by living among them, that I would be invisible among them. You see that I was mistaken.”

“You call them executioners? They were merely retaking what was theirs: Andalusia.”

“What they took was ours. We created that land, we embellished it with gardens and mosques and clear fountains. Before, there was nothing. All races lived together there: look at my black eyes, old man, and my blond hair. All bloods flow in my veins. Why must I die because of only one of them?”

“Then you are dying for a lesser, not a principal, reason, lad.”

“Which is which? And why have they locked you here in this cell with me? Why are you to die?”

“I am not to die. I have been ordered to the galleys. But possibly you are right. Perhaps I, too, am condemned for a secondary, not a principal, reason. Forgive me, lad. If I hadn’t seen you one afternoon … walking amid the workmen on this job … savoring an orange … your lips so red … none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have written that accursed poem.”

“It’s all right, old man, don’t blame yourself. If I don’t die for one thing, I’ll die for another. What can I do to change my mixed blood? And someday the Christian world will make a man pay for his Jewish blood. And then those kitchen lads, younger than I … I envied them. La Señora is a little more ripe than you might think. Race … boys … La Señora … what does it matter what the reason, it’s my emotions and my pleasures that kill me, not men…”

“Do you envy youth? I envy yours.”

“You do well to do so, old man. I carry all my secrets with me. With me, they burn at the stake. What shall you do with yours? It isn’t too bad to die still thinking about what one could have been: I wouldn’t like to die knowing what I was.”

“Perhaps I shall imagine what you might have been, lad, and write about it.”

“Good luck, old man, and goodbye.”

The Chronicler moaned, touching his wounded hand, and in the midst of this fearful clamor, choking on the acrid odor of gunpowder, blinded by its murderous opacity, he saw the tattered pennants of Islam, the crescent moons, the defeated stars, and he himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of the prophets of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and gardens and patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that had been made more beautiful by man for man’s pleasure, not for his mortification, as it had been at the necropolis of El Señor Don Felipe; surrounded by the inextinguishable fires of the galleys, thinking he must die, the Chronicler repeated a mute prayer that the peoples of the three religions might love one another and know one another and live in peace, worshipping the one unique God, faceless and incorporeal, the one all-powerful God, the name of the sum of our desires, the one God, sign of the meeting and confraternity of all wisdoms, all pleasures and recreations of mind and body; and believing himself to be mortally wounded, hallucinating from the vision of Turkish heads impaled on pikes and brandished with the victory cry, he remembered that lad with whom he had shared the dungeon the night before the youth’s death and the old man’s exile, he remembered him not as he truly was but as the Chronicler imagined him, the impure hero, the hero in whom all bloods and all passions flowed; in his delirium he imagined all the endless line of impure heroes, heroes without glory, heroes only because they did not scorn their own passions but followed them to their disastrous conclusion, masters of total passion, but mutilated and imprisoned because of the cruelty and narrowness of a religious and political rationale that converted their marvelous madness, their excesses, into a crime: pride … punishable, love … punishable, madness … punishable, dreams … punishable; certain he was dying, he imagined once again all the adventures of those heroes, all the transformations of those knights with frustrated illusions, the undertakings possible only in an impossible world where the external and internal faces of men are one, without disguise, without separation, but impossible in a world that masked both, one for appearing before the world and another for fleeing from it — the world mask, simulation; the escape mask, crime, passion forever separated from appearance: madmen and dreamers, ambitious and enamored men, criminals; he imagined a knight maddened by the truth of his reading, insistent upon converting that truth into a false reality, thereby saving it, and saving himself; he imagined ancient Kings betrayed on black and stormy nights of ignorance and madness by men and women more cruel than pitiless nature itself, which is only involuntarily cruel; and he imagined young Princes enamored of pure words, incapable of provoking the action or exorcising the death that reality reserves for dreamers; he imagined a profaner of honor and sacred convention, a hero of secular passion who would pay for his pleasures in the hell of the law he had denied so often in the name of free, common, and profane pleasure; he imagined couples consumed by love that was both divine and diabolical, for divine and diabolical would be a love in which the lovers no longer distinguished between themselves, the man being the woman and the woman the man, each the other’s being, each one transfixed by a shared dream that defied the social convention of what is individual, separate, what is placed in the pigeonholes of condition, wealth, and family; he imagined a greatly ambitious man, trembling with cold, alone among the millions who populate the earth, alone, denied the presence of gods or men, separated from them, abandoned, the only channel for his energies that of attracting hatred and aversion toward the person of a nature that denies the size of his pride; and he imagined ambitious little men, resigned to their sensual mediocrity, their great dreams unachieved, already defeated, their illusions lost, wasted throughout their lives, like the traveler who leaves some part of his riches in every inn along the highway; power and riches, or murder and suicide: manners of accepting or denying a passion grown pallid; he imagined, finally, the penultimate hero, the one who realizes he is enclosed in the present, his past eclipsed, a past that no longer projects the shadow of the hero that the hero has previously called his future: Tantalus is the name of that hero, of all the heroes who have devoured their present in order to reach a dreamed-of future of madness, ambition, and love, never obtaining it because the future is a fleet phantom that will not let itself be captured; it is the hare, we the turtles; these heroes must turn their faces to the past to recapture what is most precious, what they have lost, what they cannot bring with them in the vibrant and desolate search for the passion forbidden by icy laws and demanded by fiery blood; desire possesses, possession desires, there is no exit, oh, heroic Tantalus of fragile ashes and vanquished dreams; the hero is Tantalus and his opponent is Time; the final battle: Time conquers, Time is conquered …

And believing he was dying, he imagined them all and lamented that now there would not be time to write about them; he had only been able to write about the last hero during a last night of grace granted his improbable stay on earth, and thus he had concentrated all his vulnerable life, all his sentiments of honest poverty, infinite misfortune, indiscreet pride, uncertain estate, sad rewards, and exhausted imagination, in repeating the first words of his last hero in that manuscript to which he had given his last night as he had just given the manuscript itself to the sea, to time to come, to men still unborn, thinking perhaps that with luck, someday, slimy and salt-pocked, carried from the white sands of this gulf, impelled by vast currents to darker seas, buried in the deltas of powerful rivers, dragged against the current by whirlpools that stirred the muddy bottoms, deposited finally in the dark beds of a lazy stream, fished from the water by the hands of a child, or a madman, an ambitious or an enamored man, by a man as ill and sad and persecuted as he, by another Jew in another land in another age of misfortune, beside other ruined palaces, beside other ashen tombs, the green bottle would be picked up, its seal broken, the manuscript extracted, read, and perhaps understood — in spite of the strange and ancient language of old Spain that Jews like this Chronicler had rescued, stabilized, given to be read and divulged in ordinary poetry — read, in spite of the crossings-out and the corrections in that spidery hand, further distorted by the pitching of the sea and fever and sadness the night before the battle; perhaps:

As he awoke (??? — a man; a name; let whoever finds it put in the name; the lad who had been condemned to the stake was right: one must take the name of the land where one lives, old man, names of clay and dust and dreams) one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect struck through: a different creature, perhaps mythic, a dragon, a unicorn, a griffon, a mandrake, the mandrake is found at the foot of gallows, of stakes, Miguel, do you hear me? struck through a griffon, a salamander, no, better an insect, a cockroach, a hero, the final hero struck through). He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back (insect’s shell, correction, eye, the shield of an ancient hero, shell a defense against being crushed beneath someone’s foot) and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments (abyss: struck through, correction, abyss, the center of a coat of arms, the navel of one’s identity, abysmal, abysmally absorbed, sun of bodies) on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes. What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.

I stopped. But they were dreaming, the Mad Lady, her dwarf, and the young Prince sleeping as if drugged following their copious dinner. They had heard nothing; they had understood nothing. Once again I remembered my lost friend whose dreams and literary plans I knew so well, having had continual discourse with him during the time he enjoyed the benevolent protection of our sovereign, that I felt capable of imagining what would have passed through his head when he was wounded, perhaps killed, in one of the fierce battles for Christianity. Yes. I picked up the enamels, the oils, canvas, and brushes, and silently stole from this prison, this bedchamber.

THE LAST COUPLE

Come, give me your hand, place the other upon my shoulder, pretend you are blind, do not stumble. I know the roads, all the roads, I grew up in the forest near the abandoned routes of the ancient empire, I traveled the new footpaths of the merchants and students and friars and heretics, I watched she-wolves whelp in the brambles, I collected honey and cared for flocks, come, I know this land, this land is mine, there is nothing in it that I either do not know or cannot predict, remember, or desire, let me guide you, we have already left the mountain behind, we are descending to the plain, smell the smoke of the bonfires and ovens, hear the sound of the carts, chisels, and cranes, come, follow me, hold tightly, my body is your guide, have faith in my body, young, handsome, shipwrecked sailor, we are exhausted, we have walked far since we left the sea that washed you up at my feet, beneath my waiting gaze, for I knew of your arrival, knew that that early morning you would be thrown upon the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres, and that is why my drumsticks beat a rhythm that took us to that very convent and not another, to that convent which I knew — because I know the land — was inhabited by voracious nuns avid for the flesh of man, as I knew that the Mad Lady, when she recognized she had been misled, would flee the place in the daylight, breaking the established routine, forgetting her own rule: we travel only by night, during the day we rest in the monasteries and worship my husband’s remains; and so we would pass by the beach soon after you were tossed there by the sea, by life, by the history you carry with you, buried deep in the well of your corrupted memories. I, not you, knew you would be there, a man without a name, distinguishable only by the cross on your back; you reached that shore knowing nothing, and that is why you are the authentic traveler, the prodigal son, the unconscious bearer of truth, you, who know nothing, you, because you know nothing, you, who seek nothing, you, because you seek nothing … Place your hands upon my shoulders, walk behind me, do not look, let me play the drum, announce our arrival at the palace, now …

“It looks now as if it’s all over,” Nuño said to Martín.

“The storm’s quieted now,” said Martín to Catilinón.

“Now the workmen have returned to their jobs,” Catilinón said to Lolilla.

“Now that idiot boy found by the Mad Lady is entertaining himself with Barbarica’s buffoonery,” Azucena said to Lolilla.

“Now that youth found while El Señor was hunting is lying in La Señora’s bed,” said Lolilla to a huntsman.

“Now we the huntsmen and halberdiers who have twice been to the beach swear, swear as God’s our witness, that those two youths, the Mad Lady’s and La Señora’s, are absolutely identical,” said the huntsman to Guzmán.

“Now a third youth is approaching, and he will probably be identical to the other two,” Guzmán said to his hawk …

… now I am announcing with the black sticks of the black drum our arrival at the palace, with your hands upon my shoulders, walking like a blind man, you must let me guide you: don’t look, don’t look at the disorder on this dry plain, the tents of the taverns, the bodies crouched around the fires, the stream of black brocade flowers and torn funereal cloths, and rent tabernacles, the slavering jaws of the yoked oxen, the piles of tiles and slate, the blocks of granite, the bales of straw and hay, don’t look, young sailor, do not look at this false disorder, do not open your eyes until I tell you, I want you to see the perfect symmetry of the palace, the inalterable order imposed by El Señor, by Felipe, upon this gigantic, still-unfinished mausoleum, that is what I want you to see when you open your eyes; don’t look now at the dumfounded peasants watching our arrival, don’t listen to the cries of that woman kneeling beside a landslide where two lighted candles gleam palely in the daylight, don’t look, don’t listen, my handsome youth, body guided by my body, body saved by my body, the first thing I want you to see is the order of the palace, I want the first person you speak to to be El Señor: I want you to break the order of this place as you would shatter a perfect goblet of finest crystal; your eye and your voice will be like two powerful hands arrived from an unconquerable sea; my tattooed lips can repeat it all; my name is Celestina; my tattooed lips can repeat it all, my lips forever engraved with the burning kiss of my lover, my lips marked with the words of secret wisdom, the knowledge that separates us from princes, philosophers, and peasants alike, for it is not revealed by power or books or labor, but by love; not just any love, my companion, but a love in which one loses forever, without hope of redemption, one’s soul, and gains, without hope of resurrection, eternal pleasure; I know everything, this is my story, I shall tell you everything from the beginning; I know the story in its totality, from beginning to end, handsome, desolate youth, I know what El Señor can only imagine, what La Señora fears, what Guzmán guesses; touch me, follow me …

“I had a nightmare: I dreamed that I was three persons,” said El Señor.

“You and I, Juan, you and I, one couple, Juan,” said La Señora.

“I alone, trembling with cold, I alone, without the presence of gods or men,” said Guzmán …

… don’t speak, don’t look, you are blind, you are deaf; my knowledge is total, but incomplete, only you were lacking to make it complete, only you knew what I could not know, because my wisdom is that of only one world, this world, our world, the world of Caesar and Christ, a closed world, a sorrowful world, whole, seamless as a succubus, without orifices, contained within its memory of certain misfortune and impossible illusions: a world that is a flickering flame in a night of turbulent storm: of it I know everything; I knew nothing of the other world, the one that you knew, the one that has always existed knowing nothing of us, as we knew nothing of it; I saw you born, my son, I, I saw you born from the belly of a wolf; who, then, but I would be present as the circle of your life, begun one night in the brambles of a forest, closes; who but I on the beach where you awakened this morning, without memory, forgotten by everything, forgotten by everyone, except by the person who received your feet as you were born? Take your hand for one moment from my shoulder; check, do you have the map safe in your breeches, do you have the green bottle I saw you pick up on the beach? Good; again, forward; don’t look; they are looking at us; they are coming toward us; they thought that the wonders had ended, they are looking at us in amazement, a page and a shipwrecked sailor: the pair that was missing; they are looking at us; they are leaving their taverns, their tile sheds, their forges; the weeping is quieting; we are walking forward, opening a path through the smoke and dust and heat, I, dressed all in black, deceiving them, giving the impression that my sex and my condition are other, not my own; you, tattered, your feet bare and bleeding, your hair rumpled, your eyes closed, your lips covered with dust. And then that bearded man — ruddy from the glowing coals, his chest sweaty, and his gaze prematurely old — drops his bellows, looks intently at me, approaches, opens a path through the throng, looks again, this time into my eyes, does not recognize my lips, but does recognize my gaze, holds out his hands, doubts, touches my breasts, falls to his knees, embraces my legs, and murmurs my name, again and again.

STAGES OF THE NIGHT

The night in Rome had seven phases, Brother Toribio, the palace astrologer, told Brother Julián, as he scrutinized the dark heavens above the high tower reserved for him by El Señor, and the other listened gloomily: crepusculum; fax, the moment at which the torches are lighted; concubium, the hour of sleep; nox intempesta, the time when all activity is suspended; gallicinium, the cock’s crow; conticinium, silence; and aurora.

For each stage of the long night of our ancestors — so divided in order to prolong, or perhaps to shorten (it was impossible to know for absolute fact), the process of time — Brother Julián assigned one of the bedchambers of the palace still under construction to represent a different phase; in his mind, two figures, a pair, materialized in each chamber, arranged by the priest as a kind of game, or final combat, a tourney without appeal whose time would be regulated by those nocturnal phases, seven in number, a solemn, fatal, and consecrated number: “Choose seven stars from the sky, Brother Toribio…”

Seven stages of the night: seven stars? seven couples? The night is natural, the painter-priest said to himself, and its division into phases a mere convention, as are too the names of persons; a person is a name or a noun, an action is a verb, conventions; the night itself would not know to label itself “night,” even less know that it is inaugurated by dusk and closed by dawn; the stars are infinite, and to choose among them is another convention, the choice this time a matter of chance: Fornax Chemica, Lupus, Corvus, Taurus Poniatowskii, Lepus, Crater, Horologium; neither did the seven constellations from among which Brother Toribio chose seven stars for Brother Julián’s night know their names; when it came to naming seven pairs … would there be a sufficient number of men and women in this palace … in this world, to form them? For the roles of fate and convention, in matters regarding an encounter between two human beings, are insignificant beside the power of the will of passion or the passion of will. And thus the perfect symmetries conceived by intelligence never surpass the ideal of the imagination but instead succumb to the proliferating invasion of hazardous irrationality; one demands to be two in order to be perfect, but it is not long until a contingent third appears, demanding its place in the dual equilibrium, only to destroy it. But perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror; nature rejects that order, preferring instead to proceed with the multiple disorder of the certainty of freedom.

Brother Julián remembered his lost friend, the Chronicler; he would have liked at this moment to say to him: “Let others write the history of events that are apparent: the battles and the treaties, the hereditary conflicts, the amassing and dispersion of authority, the struggles among the estates, the territorial ambition that continues to link us to animality; you, the friend of fables, you must write the history of the passions, without which the history of money, labor, and power is incomprehensible.”

CREPUSCULUM

Many years later, old, alone, cloistered, El Señor would recall that this night, at the crepuscular hour, he had caressed for the last time the warm hollow of Inés’s back, where in that animated sweetness, in that soft quiet spot of her body, he had found, and held in his hand, his true pleasure; the protuberant lip kissed the curve that transformed the delicious narrowness of her waist into the magnificent fullness of her buttocks, and he moved away from the novitiate’s knowing body, a body that in spite of everything was still unknown to him; always he would ask himself — then and later, but always with the same feverish anguish, augmented perhaps by the swift passage of time that rushed toward the future while the memory of reality, of what could be verified because it had happened, ran backward, ceased to be tangible and sure to become spectral and doubtful, the past: who are you, Inesilla, a princess or a farm girl? brought to me by Guzmán, delivered by Guzmán to my pleasure: are you the daughter of a merchant, a workman, or a noble? how well the habit disguises one’s origins, how well, the moment he dons the habit, the converted Jew, the heretical doctor, the son of miserable swineherds, disguises his condition; neither the armor of the soldier nor the ermine of the emperor disguises men as well, or to such a degree makes them equal, as the tunic of devotion. What lineage have I violated: the highest or the lowest? what youth have I forever besmirched? who is this, my subject? more subjected than the peasant who delivers his harvest to me, more subjected than the vassal who pays me homage, or the worker who labors in my quarries; who is this subject of my sick flesh? the sweet depository for the silver that flows through my bones? the heir to my shameful afflictions? who? and to whom, in turn, do I deliver her that my very kingdom be overspread with that sick silver? or are we condemned, she and I, to live together from this moment, secretly bound together, hiding our love as we hide our shared illness? In you, I have sinned, I have sinned knowingly, my unknown Inés; I did not want it, I did not wish it; Guzmán divined my weaknesses, the moment my will faltered; death surrounded me, my thirty corpses were less exhausted than I, I had dictated to Guzmán that spurious testament, imagining my death, and Guzmán took advantage of my awareness of death to offer you to me; who, even I, does not weaken when surrounded by so much death? who does not fall into the temptation of affirming life, even though by so doing he poisons life, sickens it, and prepares it, though loving it, for death? you came to me, Inés, like an offering of provisional life, to make me believe that I, a phantom, could without punishment, without affliction, without body, making love to a virgin; that I could possess you, Inés, more with terror of mind than with trembling of body; that I might imagine you, lying in the bed, only to consider that as today you lie in bed someday your body will lie in the tomb; and I succeeded, didn’t I, Inés?; you have not closed your eyes one second, and to make love with one’s eyes open is already to have one foot inside the grave, it is to spy upon the lesser death, the infant death, the servile death, that lurks behind the beauty of the rose; you have not sighed all the time we have been together, you have watched me with those wide-open eyes, however, you did not desire the irrepressible heat of your own body, your body that bursts into flame in spite of your cold will to know everything, to examine everything, to give yourself to me in order to know, not to take pleasure …

El Señor arose from the bed and wrapped himself in the dark green bedcover; he tried to hear, to see, to sense some sign of the normal passing of time. But his penetrating and avid eyes saw only proof of abnormality: the candles of the chamber instead of having burned themselves out had grown taller; the hourglass instead of having during all that time filled the lower glass showed the upper globe filled with tiny yellow grains; he looked at the vessel from which he had drunk during the long day and night of their love-making, the water that cleared the cobwebs from his throat; it was brimming full. And he thought, here am I, a man thirsting for marvels he wishes both to accept and to reject; such a disposition gives all the advantages to the marvels, for they can, as they are convoked, impose themselves, conquer, precisely because they have been summoned against the will; and magic prospers in negation.

El Señor picked up the hand mirror he had carried one morning as he ascended the thirty-three steps of the unfinished stairway, and in which on another day he interrogated the figures of the painting brought — he was assured — from Orvieto: he wished now to regard in it the man thinking these thoughts, as if the mirror might also reflect the semblance of thought, and a flicker of madness crossed his face; had not that same mirror fallen and shattered upon the stone floor of the chapel that dismal morning? how, when, why did the fragments recompose between that morning and the day when he dictated his first testament? did the shattered pieces join together by themselves, more desirous of their union in quicksilvery smoothness than El Señor himself to possess a single destiny and not a monstrous plural metamorphosis of youth into age into cadaver into dispersed, mutilated matter, dust particles formed into antagonistic matter, reintegrated, formed again in the sperm of a beast, the egg of a she-wolf, in a resurrected birth, a new desire to nourish itself, grow, kill, die, an unending circle, immortal matter … without a soul.

He staggered toward the door of the chamber, he parted the tapestry that separated the room from the chapel, he looked toward the steps leading upward to the plain; raving, he asked, why was that stairway not completed? why could his thirty corpses not descend there? it was not completed, it was supposed to have only thirty steps, it would never be completed, it already had thirty-three, he raved …

“Accursed is a man who would govern so. He will lose everything if he cannot manage to maintain — with the same extenuating strength he employs to entreat his burning fantasy — an icy lucidity. Who would not exhaust his forces?”

From the bed Inés followed El Señor’s movements with a slight movement of her head, round and thistly as the first figs of the Barbary coast, trying to deduce the meaning of El Señor’s investigations, why his uncertain steps faltered as he walked around the bedchamber, why he looked at himself in a mirror, why he stood clinging to a tapestry; he looked at her looking at him with curiosity, he saw her shaven head, and with an uncontainable surge of affection he attributed to her an innocence that could only accentuate the degree of culpability of the acts in this cloister where mirrors and rites repaired unaided their scattered fragments; stairs, completed, were forever uncompleted; candles, as they burned, grew taller; water, as it was drunk, replenished itself; and hours, as they were spent, returned. El Señor felt that his body and soul had separated; the ax that had divided them was irrational time; to which of the thus divorced moments did his body belong, and to which his soul: to this moment, the one which with all too sufficient proof was skittering backward like a crab, toward fatal origins, the total consummation his mother the Mad Lady had announced, claiming to have arrived with the son of the father who at the same time would be the father of the grandfather; or to the moment which in spite of everything, with every step El Señor took through the chamber, with every slow and questioning turn of Inés’s head, insisted on catapulting itself into the future?

“There is a clock that does not strike,” El Señor murmured.

Then Inés — concentrating upon divining El Señor’s thoughts, with no point of orientation other than his restrained curiosity as he stood before some candles, an hourglass, and a water pitcher — picked up the pitcher, contemplated it for an instant, and then poured its contents onto the stained and rumpled bed.

“What are you doing, for God’s sake!” El Señor exclaimed; and as he observed the novitiate’s action he felt that the shadow of madness flitted across his soul.

“I am cleaning the sheets, Señor; they are stained with blood.”

Without putting it into words, Inés sensed that, like cisterns, hearts are rapidly emptied, but they fill very slowly, drop by drop. Like the cistern, she felt emptied; and emptied, conquered, and transformed. Her happiness, her curiosity, her nervous, childish, Andalusian innocence belonged to a remote past; yesterday, barely yesterday, giggling and shivering, she had stood with Sister Angustias looking at the bodies of the workmen. And now she knew that she must wait a long time before her body would again be filled. Her emotions were full, but she felt unsatisfied, used, defiled, with no freedom, no curiosity, no joy; she was not herself: “My self is not my own.”

“Señor, I must go back.”

“Where, Inés?”

“Do not ask me that; do not send Guzmán for me; I shall return … when I feel filled again. Filled, Señor, needed.”

“I can send for you whenever I wish; I can order you … you cannot…”

“No; I shall come, if I come, at my own pleasure; you cannot force me; that would be a horrible sin.”

El Señor knelt beside the bed and repeatedly kissed her hand; Inés, you are the innocent proof that time is turning back; sweet Inés, beautiful, young, soft, warm Inés with the olive-black eyes and skin like crushed white lilies; my youth has returned; we have spent twenty-four hours together, the time it takes to fill the hourglass, the time it takes a tall wax taper to burn itself out, the time it takes to drain a brimming water pitcher; you entered my chamber with the dusk; with the dusk you are leaving; how old are you, Inesilla? eighteen? twenty? why were you not born earlier, ten, fifteen years earlier? then we would have met in time, when I still was young; the two of us, you and I, Inés, young; we would have fled from this place, renouncing everything, with you I would have abdicated time before crime and inheritance collected their toll, we would have fled together on the aged Pedro’s ship, we would have found a new land, together, now it is too late, because the end still has not come, how long it takes to come: there will be time only at the end, Inés, and then I shall be very old and you very different; now your presence and your youth are a mockery, a mirage that makes me believe that because I am master of this land, of labor and honor, I am also master of time, and can recover it at will, be young again, not fear death, offer my life to others, not their deaths; but that, at least now, cannot be, Inés, it cannot be; there is no salvation, for if time, instead of running forward to reveal to me the death I saw in my mirror as I climbed those unfinished steps, begins to run backward, then I shall fear not my death but my birth; then my birth will be my death; there is no salvation now, there will be none until dying I know whether I shall be born again, and once born know whether I shall again die; now there is no salvation: there is only a time that, however long it last, Inés, is never the same for two living beings, for no one is born at the precise instant another man or another woman is born; so I am alone … alone; the time of one man never coincides perfectly with that of other men; we are separated not only by years but by the unsynchronized and unique rhythm of our lives, my precious Inesilla, my beloved Inés; to live is to be different, only death is identical, only in death are we identical; and if this were not true, if death were only another form of being, then what? would our guilt and our sorrows never end? forgive me, forgive me, Inés, again, forgive me; absolve me, precious child, absolve me if you can; with you I have truly sinned; I have sinned against you; until I met you I had always asked myself, prostrate every day before the altar in my chapel, facing those carefully identified but unknown figures of the painting from Orvieto, what would be the unforgivable sin?; there must be one, one sin that will forever close to us the gates of Heaven; I wanted to know what it was, Inés, I imagined everything, every possible combination, scrabbling at the very foundations of our Faith like a devilish mole, suggesting to myself corrosive doubts that could undermine the basis of my power as it is recognized by the Faith, as a simple reflection of Faith, risking my power as I risked my Faith; I have tried by every means possible, do you understand, Inés, heresy and blasphemy, crime and cruelty, illness and culpable indifference, affirmation and negation, action and omission, to know the face of impardonable sin; to test myself, I tested everything I knew; what sin could never be pardoned?; but each of my sins found its own justification; hear me well, Inés, try to understand even though you will not listen: I killed, but power justifies that crime; I imposed my authority, but devotion is pardon enough for the sin of power; I spent hours and days in mystic humiliation, but honor, my own and that of God, excuses the sin of excessive devotion, which is in turn related to the sin of pride that engenders the crime that serves as the excuse for power that procreates devotion that seeks the pardon that, once again, culminates in honor — our salvation; by denying Faith one merely fortifies it, for Faith swells in proportion to attacks and doubts against it; one denies life, one levels a fertile plain and forces men who once earned their livings there to labor slavishly constructing a dwelling for death … and life is strengthened, finding a thousand reasons whereby it can thus assaulted affirm itself; and this very palace, constructed for death, does it not already have the life of all created things? is it not like a gigantic stone reptile binding me in its jasper and mosaic coils, does it not possess a heart beating in its basalt breast that wishes to be heard, to affirm, to live on its own account, independent of the will of the one who conceived it and of those who constructed it? On the other hand, you … you are the unforgivable sin, the sin that cannot be pardoned either by crime or power or devotion or honor or pride or blasphemy or death; kill you, subjugate you, pray you, exalt you, insult you, kill you: all in vain; as is the abominable custom of human beings I have made love to you looking into your face — beasts, more wise, do not look each other in the eye during their fornication — facing you, I have sullied you, the more you consented, the greater the violation, facing you; I am lying here beside you, and you beside me, alone, alone in the universe, stripped of customs and motivations, the only relationship our own, yours and mine, you I and I you, and I have taken from you but can give you nothing in exchange, you and I alone, facing one another; but nothing more, I give nothing of the only things I am able, or fear, or have learned to give: not death, not subjugation, not sacrifice or pride; a man and a woman alone, together, their only offering to each other the draining coming together, sufficient, swift, eternal, gratuitous, impossible to transfer to any realm not that of its own instantaneity, its own pleasure, its own misfortune: Heaven and Hell, judgment beyond appeal, infinite pain and infinite joy forever united; anyone may call me to account for my acts, witch or astrologer, farmer or student, my wife, my mother, Guzmán or Julián … for any of my acts except this one, today, with you, an act that leads to nothing, consumed in itself, here and now, sufficient unto itself, enclosed in a circle of delectable flames, an act that originates in nothing and goes nowhere, and nevertheless the greatest pleasure and the greatest worth; it does not demand of us the calculation, the anxiety, the sustained will, or time of all the undertakings that promise us a place beneath the sun, and nevertheless, undemanding as it is, it is worth more than they, and is its own immediate reward. Is this love, Inés, this act that belongs to no one and to nothing but you and me?; have we consented to evil in order to experience good, and to good in order to know evil, alone, an act that affects no one except you and me and for which no one can demand anything of us, not even we ourselves, and if this is love and if love is such, Heaven and Hell, a cause sufficient unto itself, mutual sustenance, a hermetic exchange between two people, prison of enchantment, good and evil shared, then through which rent in Heaven, through which chink in Hell, through which crevice in the prison wall, Inés, will my individual, my unforgivable sin filter? the sin that separates you from me and destroys the plentiful causes of love, linking love again to what would deny it: power and death, honor and death, devotion and death? I have given you illness in exchange for pleasure, while you have answered pleasure only with pleasure; I have involved you in the line of my corrupt blood, having denied that same evil to La Señora, my wife who is already of my blood, my cousin, out of horror of continuing a degenerate dynasty as well as nostalgia to maintain a juvenile ideal of love that may be desired but not touched; Inés, Inés, will you be what Guzmán said, new earth for my exhausted seed, will my corrupt seed be cleansed in your womb, or will my corruption impose itself upon your purity? will I infect your very entrails, ravage your skin?; may I pardon myself by arguing that before I knew you I did not know I was to make love to you, Inés?; but that is not enough, is it? that is not enough because love is like no other thing, and in no other thing may it be justified but in itself, nothing outside of love can save it although everything outside it can condemn it. Thus love is at once its own heaven and hell; but I have succeeded — knowing heaven and transforming it into hell — in separating Heaven from Hell, in giving all the powers to the abyss and denying them to Paradise, hoping, in spite of everything, that Heaven will take pity on me; do not abandon me, Inés … leave me, Inés, leave through that door that leads to my chapel and never return … never leave this chamber … go … stay … Inés …

With sweetness and strength, the novitiate withdrew her hand from the lips of El Señor. She arose from the bed; she donned again the rough sackcloth she had worn when she entered. She walked to the threshold that led to the chapel and there, sweet, distant, barefoot, she found words; words crowned her, transported her, possessed her; perhaps they were not hers, perhaps she was but the vehicle and they spoke through her tongue: “Señor, your race has made Heaven and Hell one. I want only the earth. And the earth does not belong to you.”

El Señor would never, even before he knew they had been her last, forget Inés’s words. He would repeat them to the end, until the moment when older and more ill than ever, astounded at his own survival but certain of his mortality, he again ascended the stairs of his chapel in search of the final light and truth.

FAX

Light the torch, huntsman, and lead me to the chamber of our Señora, Guzmán said: I do not know why this night, of all nights, seems the darkest I can remember; come, light up, it is the hour for torches, don’t all the old sayings tell us that darkness follows the light, as the calm the storm, death, life, pride, humiliation, and patience, its reward? Come, light up, huntsman, for I already sense that our hour is approaching, and one must be prepared to seize the opportunity; I feel it; my bones tell me, and also the bodies of my hawks, quivering with eagerness; tell me, huntsman, did you follow my orders? did you act while El Señor and the novitiate were sleeping? did you reverse the hourglass? did you fill the water pitcher and substitute new tapers for the burned ones? We must carefully govern our acts so that nothing be left to chance, for we have nothing to lose, you and I, and everything to gain, if we counter the calculation and might of new blood against the docile fatalism of exhausted blood; everything is change, huntsman; the man who knows how to see change and go along with it prospers; he who refuses to recognize it decays and perishes; that is the only unchangeable law: change; lead me with your torch, you will be rewarded; someone will need to take my place when I ascend to a more exalted position; who better than you, who knows so well how to serve me? you, loyal servant and most faithful henchman; I know you, though I do not know your name — but even you don’t know that; I know you as well as I know myself, for what I order, you execute, you are my right arm and my shadow: you know how to imitate a dog’s howling beneath the echoing vaults of this palace; you know how to fill an empty pitcher in El Señor’s bedchamber while our Señor sleeps away exhausted pleasures with the novitiate: I know you, and from this moment I put this challenge to you: be ambitious, huntsman; attempt in your turn to take my place; that will be the way to serve me loyally: scheme, plot, dissemble, rage against me as you serve me, or you will never have a name of your own but will be only an abject and expendable adjunct to the name of El Señor, who has his name because he inherited it, not because he earned it; and you and I, huntsman, we are going to demonstrate that one earns one’s name, and that the only Señores will be those who acquire their names, not inherit them; I had no name either; I did not inherit a name, I earned it; Guzmán has a name today, though not as great as he would wish, or as great as someday it will be; so, huntsman, you must be both my partisan and my enemy, for only by being my adversary can you be my follower; that is what I want, that is what I demand of life among men: be my enemy, nameless huntsman, do not deny me that fealty, achieve your baptism with ambition, for the name given you at an inauspicious hour by your wretched parents has been forgotten by the world and you will earn your true name only in the history of men … if you know how to participate in it and excel, and in so doing, leave the trace of your person upon that history; struggle against me, huntsman, you and I both knowing, for if not, you condemn me to a life without risk, without opportunity to defend myself and affirm myself in the defense, and like the aged falcons, my claws will finally crack and split in idleness upon the perches of repose.

Guided by the torch, Guzmán halted before the door of La Señora’s bedchamber; he ordered the huntsman to wait, torch in hand, outside; he entered without knocking and closed the door behind him; La Señora was sleeping, embracing the body of the youth called Juan; she smiled in her sleep and her smile spoke volumes: this is my man, this man is mine. Only these two, this pair, were honoring the hour of nocturnal repose, Guzmán said to himself: El Señor and the novitiate, lying apart, are each keeping an icy night vigil: he imagined Inés’s naked feet, Felipe’s naked hands, the icy stones of that cloister and bedchamber. Only this pair was joined in sleep, La Señora lying naked across the body of the youth.

“As if even in sleep she could possess him,” Guzmán murmured with melancholy jealousy.

At his quiet words, and insistent stare, La Señora wakened with a start; when she saw Guzmán she covered her breasts with the sheet; the blond youth seemed to sleep; frightened, indignant, surprised, La Señora opened her mouth to speak, but Guzmán interrupted; she must choose: either she permitted herself the luxury of leaving her door unlocked, demonstrating thereby that she feared nothing and could be accused of nothing, or she bolted it like any other discreet burgher’s wife as she allowed herself the luxury of adultery; she must choose.

“Do not look at me with such hatred, Señora.”

La Señora pulled the sheet over the youth’s head. “Your business had better be urgent, Guzmán.”

“It is; so urgent it will not admit delay or ceremony.”

And he told La Señora that the good huntsman has eyes and ears everywhere, in seignorial bedchambers as well as the taverns on the plain; for if the Señores were blind and deaf, either from choice or from apathy — Guzmán would not qualify which — their vassal, in proof of loyalty, would see and hear in their exalted names. See and hear, yes, but not act, for the second measure of loyalty owed the Señores was to inform them, and permit them to act with the authority that was theirs by divine right.

“Señora: we are not alone. We are not the only ones.”

He smiled as he looked at the outlines of the figure he imagined sleeping beneath the sheet; this afternoon the third youth of this company has descended from the mountain to the plain. He is identical to the other two: the one you shelter here and the one your mother-in-law, the Señora, mother of El Señor Don Felipe, harbors in a dungeon. The three of them are identical, even to the sign they all bear: the blood-red cross upon their backs; identical, even in the monstrous configuration of their feet, for among them they can boast of sixty-six fingernails and toenails. Identical, different only because the persons who accompany them are different. I have ears, I have eyes: one youth is at the forge, one in a dungeon, and the third here in your bedchamber. One of them stares uncomprehendingly at his companion, who is probably his lover; her name is Celestina, or at least so she is called by the old smith of the palace. The other stares with dull stupidity, in which a tiny flame of horror begins to gleam, at his unsought companions: the one known as the Mad Lady, and Barbarica the dwarf. And this one? Is he still sleeping, my Señora? Are you desired by him, or detested? What do we know, Señora?

‘’He is my lover,” said Isabel, with frightened arrogance.

And the youth named Juan, pretending to sleep beneath the sheet, silently repeated her words, and in silence listened to the continuation of Guzmán’s discourse: one thing is certain, Señora, and that is that what we thought was a unique event when we found the shipwrecked youth that afternoon upon the beach of the Cabo, deceiving El Señor while he was hunting, is not unique at all; and this — Guzmán smiled again — offends my sense of reasonable coincidence. Why three? Why the cross? Why the six toes on each foot? And especially why, since the world is so wide and far-reaching, the three of them here? I have no time to answer these riddles. I have no arguments with which to answer magic, but I have actions aplenty. It is time to act, Señora, to act with the energy and determination that will skillfully unite the forces of fortune. We must take the initiative, you and I, Señora; I do not know what destiny holds in store for us if we allow events to unfold blindly; nothing good, surely; imagine an irrational encounter among the three youths come like phantoms out of nowhere, a mad old lady, a concupiscent dwarf, a catamite drummer-and-page who asks to be called by a womanish name and allows himself to be kissed and caressed by men; imagine an uneasy multitude whose words of rebellion have come to my ears, and a Señor with no vital strength who divides his time between mystic devotions and culpably lubricious interludes with the novitiates of this cloister who have taken the vows of chastity, confinement, and marriage with Christ. Can you and I, we two, eat of the stew of the ingredients simmering here? Do not let your eyes rebuke me, Señora; truly, my devotion to your person does not warrant that. But you think I am lying. You know your husband’s body. You know he lacks vigor. But I speak the truth; there is one who has revived those dormant energies. It is not easy to confine a young and beautiful Sevillian novitiate in this somber cloister and expect her to dedicate herself to a life of shadows; like the air she will pass between the bars of her cell to play her role as harlot with the delight that comes only with the forbidden. And thus pleasure is not solely your privilege in this palace; your husband is pleasuring himself with a young girl who being a clever Sevilliana is not unaware that the vows of chastity are renewable. On the other hand, who will wash away the sins of my Señora? I speak the truth; but it does not matter. What is important is that El Señor has stored his coat of mail in chests filled with bran; he has lost, yes, this is surely true, the taste for war that, more than divine will, procured the throne for his grandfathers. El Señor, our master, is becoming mad: he is convinced that time has favored him, and that instead of advancing is running backward. He fears, therefore, his birth more than his death; but whatever happens, he fears his death, for he has not seen either Heaven or Hell reflected in the mirror of time, but rather, horrendous transformations of an eternity on earth: man into animal, and animal into man. In any case he fears the earth, which he does not deserve to inhabit. Do not be alarmed, Señora; I am not proposing a crime, that is not necessary. One day, as El Señor slept a deep sleep similar to death, I walked about his bed with my dagger held high above him; I could have killed him at that instant, but this thought stayed my hand: El Señor is already dead; all that is lacking, Señora, is that he be enlightened and interred. And who will succeed this sterile Lord? An imbecile fabricated by the madness of the Queen Mother? That lackluster lover lying beside you? A third usurper whose intentions, schemes, and means we do not know? Who?

La Señora broke her silence. “Guzmán, then?”

Guzmán, yes, Guzmán and La Señora, you and I, together; I the will, you the blood, and both destiny, he repeated, continuing his fevered plea; Señora, this palace has been constructed in the name of order, but today disorder threatens on every side … Guzmán attempted to recall to his mind’s eye the naked figure of La Señora as she lay when he surprised her sleeping, her body intertwined with that of the youth called Juan … we know, you and I, how to take advantage of disorder and not lose ourselves in it … he struggled against the burning impulse to take La Señora in his arms, embrace that waist and caress those breasts, and beneath the sheet the youth named Juan felt the wave of that contained passion wash over him in a wordless challenge, a wordless longing to possess the woman that he, Juan, now possessed, and that he, Juan, did not know was his alone … these three youths are deceiving us, Señora, I do not believe in coincidence, it must be a plot, they must be conspiring among themselves, they are feigning a stupid apathy, like the cat pretending to doze so the mice will come out from their hiding places … mice, thought the youth called Juan, like the mouse that shares with me the sleep and love of La Señora, the Mus that traveled with her from the courtyard of the old castle of her torment to the bedchamber of the new palace of her pleasure, Mus, Mus, the one that crept into her flesh as Guzmán would like to penetrate the dark hiding place of the pale Señora … they thought, they desired, together, unknowing, Guzmán trembling, feverish, proud, standing before La Señora, so morbid and soft, so inciting, so hapless, what maddening contrast in the convergence of whitest skin and blackest hair that Guzmán had seen for the first time when, unannounced, he entered this chamber … let us not be led astray by the feigned disorder in the arrival of these three unknown youths, no … let me be led astray in your flesh, Señora, let me drive the shining silver of my arrow into the deep, final, black, lost, sweet heart of your carnation of milk and blood, fleece and honey … as I do, thought Juan, as I do, as Guzmán’s awful, silent, unsatisfied wave of desire again washed over the white shadow hidden beneath the sheets … we must turn the true disorder that threatens us to our own advantage, the discontent of the workmen on this job, we must incite them, give wing to their displeasure so they do our work for us, so they clothe the revolt in the name of justice and popular rights, so they seize power and then, inevitably, lose it: then you and I can do everything a man and woman can do together … What I do, what they do to me, murmured Juan beneath the sheet, and he felt hidden like a mouse in his hole, like the mandrake root buried by La Señora beneath the white sands of this chamber; and he wanted to shout to Guzmán: Take her, then, if you want her so much, what’s stopping you? why don’t you do what you want? why do you speak and not act, Guzmán, does my presence immobilize you and terrify you more than you want to admit? Poor Guzmán, I am only a tiny mouse, a lifeless root, an orphan of the sea; do you want to kill me, Guzmán?

And as if she heard Juan’s mute questions, La Señora asked: “And my lover?”

“Quick…”

“What would we do with him so that you and I might be together, Guzmán?”

“Señora, by night…”

“And what would you do that I might live without him?”

“My dagger…”

“Do you know me even the least bit, Guzmán? Do you know even the least bit who I am?”

“I have been of assistance to La Señora; I deceived our master to go with her to the coast and find this young castaway…”

“Yes, and thereby gained my confidence. Now you will lose it, poor Guzmán, and gain nothing in exchange.”

“I served La Señora at the hour of pleasure; now I ask to serve her at the hour of duty; that is all.”

“Would you take away my pleasure, this small sensual world that with such effort and such deceit I have succeeded in creating here?”

“The three youths must die…”

“Do you know who they are?”

“We will find out later; for the moment, they are the mystery that threatens us. What we do not understand we must exterminate.”

“I repeat: do you know who I am?”

“You and I, Señora, the will and the blood…”

“You mean power, Guzmán? But the only thing that interests me is fucking the whole day long … poor Guzmán…”

“I am a man, Señora…”

“Hear me, Guzmán; I want an heir.”

“I, Señora, I am a man…”

“I am pregnant by this youth…”

“It’s a sorry heir you will have, then: the youth’s apathy is like El Señor’s; neither the passivity of pleasure nor the weakness of illness will be able to govern these kingdoms…”

“He will be handsome, like his young father: I shall govern with him, Guzmán, with them, Guzmán, with my lover and our son, Guzmán. Do you see how my glorious plan excludes your pitiful hungers?”

“You will need me, Señora, you know nothing of the practical requirements of falconry, the hunt, war, controlling the rabble; you will not govern with pleasure and beauty, no; you will need me, I shall not be here, unless it is as I wish it.”

“The world is full of men like you.”

“Find them, then. Find someone able to take my place. There is no living soul in this palace who does not owe, fear, obey, or depend upon me — even if he does not know it.”

“And who will live in this palace?”

“I do not understand La Señora.”

“I said, who will live in this palace?”

“You and I, Señora, I am a man, let me prove it to you…”

“Fool. You have not understood anything. Only my husband can live here. The rest of us are merely transients. The rest of us are but usurpers. You and I, you and all those you say you control here, all of them and even the palace itself would tumble down on us like sand castles without the presence of my husband El Señor. Fool. This is his palace; it was born of his deepest being, of his deepest need. He raises this palace in the stead of war, power, faith, life, death, and love; it is his, and for it he sublimates, and for it he sacrifices everything. This is his eternal dwelling: he constructs it for that, to live here, dead, forever, or to die here, living, forever. It is the same. Poor Guzmán. How can my husband see Heaven or Hell when the only thing he can see is this palace which is made of stone and which condemns him to stone?”

A trembling stone, the youth called Juan felt an icy sweat on his face and hands: prison of love, accepted, prison of stone, rejected; and his simple reasoning at this hour of the torches was: in a prison of love, I shall be love; in a prison of stone I shall become a statue. His rejection of the latter possibility was paralleled in an urgent plea, Guzmán, speak no longer, Guzmán, act; if you do not act now you never will and you will share the quality you scorn: the passivity you attribute to El Señor, and to me. Guzmán, embrace her, kiss her; come, Guzmán, to our bed. But instead Guzmán said only: “Señora, you and I; Guzmán and La Señora; you and I, together…”

“No, wretch; no, clod; no, peasant; I and greatness; I and pleasure; El Señor and I; I and my lover; never La Señora and a common rogue, the dregs of pestilent cities.”

“Do not wound me, do not say such unpardonable things…”

“Return to the cellars of your servitude; call my black litter bearers: I would rather go to bed with them than with you; before I would go to bed with you, I would choose one of those laborers out there, in the kitchens, in the stables, in the lofts, one of the scullions or the mule drivers; go back there, Guzmán, go to your place, scum. And pray that I do not call my blacks, the mule drivers and scullions, to give you a good drubbing. For that is what you deserve, and not…”

La Señora crawled to the edge of the bed, staking her territory, dominating it, until she reached Guzmán’s extended hands; she spit in his open, imploring palms.

“I and greatness, Guzmán; never you, you who know only ambition and cunning; I and my lover, or I and my husband; never you and I…”

Guzmán wiped the palms of his hands on his leather doublet. Now, implored Juan, the youth, now, Guzmán, don’t let the words, the fury, the tears, the weapons of a woman overcome you, now, Guzmán …

“Is your cunning so limited? How have you dared to confide in me? I can denounce you; it is within my power to ask my husband this very night to send you to be tortured or beheaded, poor miserable, ambitious, wretched … lowest of the low.”

Now, Guzmán, wait no longer, I am choking, the sheets are suffocating me, they are drenched in sweat, they are my shroud, my winding sheets, save me, Guzmán, act now, take her, have her or you will never be master of yourself, please, Guzmán, save me as you save yourself, liberate your violence or it will turn to poison in your blood and you will seek revenge against us all for what you could not do to one woman, now, Guzmán, take her, choke her cries with your lips, don’t speak, don’t let her speak, dominate her or she will dominate us both, you and me, sully that womb with your foul lust, it is not my son that is germinating there, but the son of the mouse that makes its nest in this fraudulent bridal bed, act, Guzmán, for you, for me, Guzmán …

“La Señora forgets that the sword cuts two ways.”

Juan moaned and closed his eyes, making doubly black the sepulcher of the bed.

“My husband tolerates everything; he can desire me only if he does not touch me; he has told me so; and he cannot touch me because his blood is poisoned; there is nothing he can do but tolerate everything. That is my certain if limited strength: he will tolerate everything.”

“Because no one has told him anything. And even more: because no one has written it. He knows, only in secret. And silence is not the source of El Señor’s authority, rather the declaration, the edict, the written law, the ordinance, the statute, the written word. El Señor lives in a world of paper; that is why those of us who know only the unwritten laws of action shall conquer.”

Petrified Juan; Juan of stone; the statue Juan. Your words have defeated me, the young man said to himself; your words, Guzmán, have sealed my fate.

“My husband has what you will never have: honor…”

“A cuckold’s honor, Señora?”

“Yes, Guzmán, see how far you can go; reach the limits of my tolerance, let me have the pleasure of collecting my due in one lump sum.”

“You have already made me pay, Señora. There is nothing more you can do to me.”

“And you, servant, do you expect to collect?”

Did you ask for a name, an identity, a mirror, a face, Juan, the day this man and this woman picked you up on the beach? what are you thinking now, what are you asking yourself now, Juan? shrouded in the sheet, your eyes closed, your hands cold, your head burning? And memory and premonition pulse as one in hands, eyes, and head. Pleasure and honor, honor and pleasure; when you were reborn in this land you said you would assume your identity from what you first saw in it after waking from your very long dream. So you arrived. You awakened. And you know. You listen to the little mouse gnawing in the heart of the bed.

“For El Señor, honor and paper are the same thing; the only testimony of honor is what is written. On the other hand, for us, for those whom you scorn so, such considerations have no value; neither paper nor honor mean anything; survival is all.”

La Señora laughed. “You give a fine name to cowardice.”

“El Señor knows and tolerates everything [Play your part, Guzmán, the moment for action has passed; how cold I feel, and suddenly I know that Hell must be winter: the longest winter of all], as long as there is no formal written accusation. Then his old habits are revived; then again he is the son of traditional procedure, Señora; then he is crime, honor, and the public act that is expected of him, as it was expected of his father and his father’s father … everything in one, Señora: to El Señor, attitude is more important than substance.”

Guzmán was silent, because remembered visions were speaking to him and he was listening abstractedly; he recalled the ceremonial gestures that El Señor was wont to affect, as if to consecrate acts that were performed before El Señor had signaled permission … One night … on the mountain … by the campfire … as they were dressing the stag … as the heart of the animal was cut into four portions … La Señora was no longer listening; she was laughing at him and Guzmán prolonged his humiliation by the means for which he had just criticized El Señor: words; in response to words La Señora will laugh angrily, will walk around the sheet-covered body of her lover, will turn her back to Guzmán; acts, Guzmán? why do you not take me, Guzmán, force me?; words, Guzmán?; shut up, servant, let disorder come, luck will carry my lover and me through; get out now, go, begone, do not insult my happiness further, it is enough: my bedchamber, my man, my possession; begone, and as you leave, remove the dog offal your boots have tracked onto the white sand of my bedchamber.

La Señora paused beside the body of her lover; she turned back the sheet, revealing the youth’s hidden head, quiet, pretending?; impossible to know whether he truly slept, or merely feigned sleep; Juan: found on the beach, brought here, without consulting his wishes, to take the place of a foreign youth burned at the stake, Mihail-ben-Sama, Miguel-of-Life; brought here, silent Juan; he has never spoken a word, he is a body, he makes love, he makes love indefatigably, like no other man, a man, a body without words to extend its personality, bland, empty, expressionless eyes, clean as the sand of the bedchamber; anything might be written upon that sand, a name, Juan, my possession, mine, he was nothing, he was no one before he came here; he will be only what here he learns to be; I do not know whether he is sleeping, whether he hears us, whether he pretends not to be conscious, but even drowsing, what can be written upon that mind that is like a clean new whitewashed wall with not a mark on it, what can be written there except what he hears, sees, understands, and feels with me? Is this man my mirror?

“He will abandon you, Señora, like all the other youths who have passed, or who will pass, through this chamber. You give them what they did not have before, what they lacked; then they want to test it in the world, without you. Remember the one who died at the stake: he succumbed to the temptation of the world. The same thing will happen to the one lying here.”

“He will never leave.”

“He will leave; you are his wet nurse, and he will go out into the world.”

“So be it. Then through him I will be prolonged in the world.”

“Your payment will be solitude.”

“What we create is ours only after it is no longer ours. Can you understand that, servant?”

“The milk of your breasts tastes of gall, Señora.”

“You will never taste it.”

“Rather, Señora, think how others will come, you have nothing to fear, there is no contradiction, if this one leaves, others will come, there are plenty of youths; here there are three; do you plan also to take possession of the other two?”

“There is none like this one, and I would not exchange him for anyone. He is enjoying my weakness.”

“On the other hand, you and I, Señora…”

“Peasant. Clod. You have not justified your lack of respect in entering this room without notice. I cannot forgive that.”

“Close your door and lock it, Señora. The time of appearances has ended. Disorder has arrived. There are hearers. There are ears. Even the scullery maids and the halberdiers spy, run, tell, return, repeat. That is what I came to tell you. You must take precautions. And remember always who helped you find this lad, helped bring him here, deceiving El Señor and exposing himself to the most severe punishment. Why do you think he did it?”

La Señora laughed. “Undoubtedly because you love me, Guzmán.”

“You know that?”

“It is of no importance. Anything you do out of love I accept as a service. Go ahead, denounce me, let us measure our strengths. And permit me to question yours. My lover is still alive, lying here by my side. You have not killed him. I am here, still untouched. You have not dared to take me. You talk a lot, but you do very little, you are a churl.”

Guzmán bowed his head and backed from the room; he swore to himself that whatever he did, whatever he had to do, he would never again let himself be tempted by that luminous, dark body; and that if ever he was tempted, it would be because, like El Señor, he had desired her body without seeing it or touching it, or even thinking of it. Desire it, but do not touch it; for a moment Guzmán felt himself a victim of the accursed chivalric code; no, by God, take, take without hesitation, immediately, yes, ravish what one desires. He was on the point of returning to La Señora’s bedchamber. He was stopped by the taste of gall upon his lips, as if he had in truth drunk the milk of the woman’s breasts. His soul was bitter and for a moment he hung his head, saddened and humiliated. But only the old and sick falcons would hear his pain.

“Quickly,” he said to the huntsman who awaited him outside with his torch held high. “There is no time to lose.”

CONCUBIUM

At the hour of sleep, Celestina was alone with Jerónimo in the forge, where the smith with the prematurely aged gaze, never taking his eyes from the woman, continued to forge the chains ordered by Guzmán: the ubiquitous and efficient Guzmán, who, when he was not personally attending El Señor or training hawks or curing hounds, wandered through the palace dungeons: Guzmán murmuring, stroking the plaited strands of his moustache: “Here there are luxurious marble prisons for the dreams of the dead, but not enough chains for the dreams of the living.”

Jerónimo was close to Celestina, but also distant, while outside, Martín, Catilinón, and Nuño were feeding the weakened, mute youth who had accompanied Celestina here. Jerónimo felt close because he had recognized her and knew it was she, but distant, nevertheless, because he did not really recognize her, it was not really she. No one on the plain would sleep this night. The smith Jerónimo would keep the vigil of memory; looking at Celestina, he recalled the pale young girl whose hands had circled the neck of the ruddy, robust bridegroom on the day of their wedding in the grange, before El Señor and his son, the young Felipe, arrived to destroy — coldly, unfeelingly, disdainfully, and cruelly — the modest but ample happiness of the young pair. Jerónimo laid down the chains and approached Celestina, still dressed as a page, all in black. He took her hands in his and examined them for traces of that long-ago torture by fire, when the girl raped by El Señor repeatedly thrust her hands into the fire, biting upon a rope to bear the pain. But now he could not find the scars of those remembered wounds; he thought surely that time, for once merciful, must have erased them; in contrast, those painted lips were like a wound, as if on them time, once again merciless, had there recorded his sweetheart’s pain and humiliation. He wanted to kiss those lips, but Celestina placed her hand upon his.

“It is you, Celestina; it is you, I am not mistaken?”

The youth led here from the beach, standing at the entrance to the forge illuminated by the weak fires of this late hour, watched Celestina parry the uncertain, irresolute kiss of the smith Jerónimo, who had not known whether to kiss first the ancient wounds of her hands or the new scars on the tattooed lips: he could not decide whether lips or hands more greatly merited the kisses of an old affection.

“Is it you, Celestina? Is it truly you? I am not mistaken? Many years have passed since you fled from that house, but you have not changed at all; you are the same girl I married, whereas I … look at me, I am an old man now … you are the same, aren’t you?”

The page-and-drummer’s fingertips still rested lightly upon the smith’s lips, but Jerónimo, with a leonine movement, jerked his head away, seized Celestina violently by the shoulders, and said: “I have waited too long.”

“But I was never yours.”

“God united us.”

“But I have belonged to others.”

“That doesn’t matter; I have waited years, many long years, for you; and your absence, woman, turned my waiting into patience; today it is my desire to change this humble patience into vengeance. You are Celestina, aren’t you?”

“I am and I am not; I am she; I am another. Jerónimo, I do not belong to you.”

“To whom then? That youth you brought with you?”

Celestina emphatically shook her head no, several times, and the youth moved sadly away from the threshold. Now in the hour of sleep, Celestina said no, I was not his, not in the way you believe; I thought I would possess him, but I was mistaken; when we lay together, the youth and I, one night on the mountain highway leading to this palace, naked beneath the stars, lying on the earth still warm from drinking in the July sun, impervious to the cold mantle of sudden night, I thought I would possess him; though he did not know who I was, I knew him, for I had taken advantage of the first hours of his sleep to break the seal of the green bottle and read the manuscript within, thus confirming that he was the same I had seen born, when I was a girl, from the belly of a she-wolf in the brambles of the forest; but then I fell asleep and when I awakened he had placed upon my face a mask of many-colored feathers, of bands of feathers radiating outward from a black sun, a center of dead spiders; and I knew I had discovered only half his secrets and that the other half I could know only by giving myself to him; still dressed as a page, I embraced him, fearing the passing of mountain muleteers who would see us and believe that two youths had given themselves to forbidden love, believing themselves alone in the night on the unpopulated mountain; slowly he disrobed me, slowly he covered my body with kisses, slowly he took me, made me his until my fingers clawed the cross upon his back and I cried out, from pleasure, yes, but also from horror, for I felt in the embrace of that youth a bottomless vacuum, as if when his flesh penetrated mine the two of us had hurtled into nothingness, fallen from some high cliff, were floating in air, captured in the cataract at the end of the world; my knowledge ended and his began there, in the center of the knot of love; forgive me, Jerónimo, but I must tell you everything; as I opened the windows of my flesh to him, I knew that he had been where no other man of our world had ever been; I am not sure whether I heard him speak or whether the soft pressure of his hands upon my buttocks spoke to me, or whether his warm breath in my ear recounted wordless stories, or whether in his fixed and tender and passionate gaze, when he drew his head back from mine to fully witness my pleasure, there unrolled a fragile parchment whereon were written the letters of a simple but incomprehensible message, serene in its certainty but terrifying in its novelty: voice, body, breath, gaze, probable dream, hands; everything about him was a cipher, a message, a word, the true and glorious news — not that which Christians have fruitlessly awaited century after century; no. Did I possess him? Did he possess me? I do not know, Jerónimo, and it does not matter; we were, perhaps, both possessed by the news my own body received as we made love, I and this youth found on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres; for in love-making the youth’s memory returned and what he remembered is this, Jerónimo: we were right, our youth was not mistaken, our love was not mistaken, old Pedro was right, his ship could have carried us to a new land, the earth does not end where you and I and El Señor believed; there is another land, far beyond the ocean, a land we do not know and which does not know us; this is what the youth told me; he knows, he has been there; he knows the new world, Jerónimo …

They stood silent a long while. The youth found on the beach had not heard them; he had rejoined the laborers; but as he raised his eyes he saw a profanation of the hour of sleep: a light was moving, interrupted but persistent, along the windows of the palace; it descended from a tower, proceeded along various passageways, then disappeared, growing fainter and fainter, into the lugubrious entrails of the building: Brother Julián, summoned with urgency, was hurrying, candle in hand, toward the chambers of the Mad Lady. Passageways, dungeons, kitchens, tile shed: Azucena told Lolilla, Lolilla told Catilinón, Catilinón, roaring with laughter, shouted it from the entrance of the forge to Jerónimo and Celestina, and left hurriedly to join La Lola in a haycart.

The smith said: “Death governs us. We are prepared to die to provide an opportunity to life.”

“When?”

“As soon as Ludovico arrives.”

“Will he be long?”

“He will be here this very night.”

“You have taken twenty years to decide, Jerónimo.”

“It was necessary to wait.”

“They burned Pedro’s hut, and killed his sons.”

“They tore you from my arms on our wedding day, and raped you, Celestina.”

“They led us to the massacre in the castle. Twenty years, Jerónimo. Why have you waited so long?”

“Our pain had to become everyone’s anger. But you and your companion need not endanger yourselves with us. You can continue on your road, tonight, without stopping.”

“No.”

“We will act in your name too, Celestina; never fear.”

“No; I have had my vengeance.”

“When?”

“The very night of the massacre.”

“But you and the student were saved by Felipe.”

“And I poisoned Felipe. Not knowing, blindly, Jerónimo. As all those people were dying in the halls of the castle, I was destroying the young Prince as we were making love. I passed on to him the corrupt illness his father had passed to me when he raped me. The father poisoned me; I poisoned the son.”

Jerónimo cradled Celestina’s head against his breast; he feared the coming phase of the night. The man and the woman, chastened by the prolonged hour of sleep, lowered their voices.

“But your youth, Celestina…”

“Ludovico and Celestina fled the bloody castle that night. Each followed his own road, as before them the monk Simón and Pedro the peasant had followed theirs. Each had decided to be what Felipe had condemned them to be: conquered desire, frustrated dreams. None ever again heard of the others. I imagined the monk in pestilent cities, the serf building a ship by the shores of the sea, building it only to destroy it when it was finished and to begin again; I imagined Ludovico in his garret, receptive to the twin creations of grace and creation. I am sorry, Jerónimo; I was not able to envision Celestina with you again, adding harm to hurt.”

“But that youth, you made love with him … you contaminated him…”

“He is incorruptible.”

“But your bloom, your freshness; you are the same as the day we were wed in the grange.”

“You must imagine why.”

“There’s not enough light, woman. You tell me.”

“Wait. It still is not time. How long until the dawn?”

“Many hours. I wonder what is happening inside the palace?”

“Promise me one thing, Jerónimo.”

“Whatever you say.”

“That before you and your men enter the palace, you will give me one day of grace so that my companion and I may enter first. And one thing more, Jerónimo.”

“Tell me, Celestina, I will do it.”

“Remember the day of the massacre. If you find the gates to the palace open wide, beware, be on your guard.”

And unexpectedly Jerónimo thought of Guzmán, who just the other day had come to ask the smith to place a new mirror in an old golden frame, to replace the broken glass; bad luck, you know, do it quickly; couldn’t it be repaired; no, old man, look at the pieces, broken to slivers, take them, I give them to you, keep them or throw them away, perhaps they’re worth a fortune, or more worthless than shit, I don’t know …

NOX INTEMPESTA

At the hour when the augurs proscribe all activity, Brother Julián entered the dungeon inhabited by the Mad Lady, the Prince, and the dwarf Barbarica. He had to clear a path through the throng congregated there. With eyes still blinded and dazzled from stargazing with Brother Toribio, he sought the motionless torso and dizzying gaze of the ancient woman who had summoned him there with these precise directions: “Wear everything, the alb and dalmatic, the apron and the girdle, stole and cowl. And carry in your hands the missal you illuminated with your own hands.”

What Mass did she mean to have him celebrate during the phase of nox intempesta? A path opened among the servants who were laying a table heaped with melons, watercress salad, omelets, pâté, suckling pig skewered on flaming lances, platters of bulls’ testicles, tureens of jellied consommé, large plates of apple peel, scarlet tongue, pears, cheeses sprinkled with black seeds, and more: salted fish, young pigeons, pork tripe, huge roast geese, baked capons, francolins, and pheasants, timbale of pigeon, and toasted chick-peas: in short, all the delicacies of the Castilian table.

The dwarf was dipping indiscriminately into all the receptacles, stuffing her mouth with special morsels, her fat cheeks distended with food, and the Idiot Prince was lying in a corner alternately covering his ears and his eyes with his fists, his velvet beret slipping lower and lower over his forehead … what Mass was to be celebrated?

“All of them!” howled the Mad Lady. “The Mass of Masses! Solemn Mass and Low Mass, the Rosary Mass and High Mass, Good Friday Mass and ordinary Mass, capitular Mass, Advent Mass, the entire Requiem: all at once, the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the Introit, the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Collect, the Epistle, the Gradual and the Alleluia, the Gospel, the Credo, the Offertory, the Lavabo, the Secret, and Preface, the Sanctus and the Tersanctus, the Canon and the Remembrance of the Living, the Consecration, the Elevation, the Anamnesis, and the Commemoration of the Dead, the Pater Noster, the Breaking of the Host, the Agnus Dei, the Communion, the Go-to-the-Devil, the Benedictus and the Last Gospel; Extreme Unction, the Anointing, the Impanation, and the Transubstantiation: everything, Friar, everything! Right here, right now, the Mass of Masses, because blood has met blood; image, image; inheritance, inheritance. There will be no more lies or delays or expectations or searches where there is nothing to be found: tonight the heir marries the dwarf, and you are officiating!”

All the Mad Lady’s retinue was present: the halberdiers, the stewards, the alguaciles, the cooks, scullions, serving boys, wardens, muleteers, wine stewards, and false ladies-in-waiting, previously disguised so as to maintain appearances during the long funeral expedition through mountains and monasteries; now once again they were dignified black-clad Spanish gentlemen, their hands upon their breasts; even the beggars of her train were there; but there were men who were lower than the beggars, men who like the Idiot Prince sought the dark corners of this dungeon, demonstrating great familiarity with the shadows, and on their dark faces the pallor of prisons had not replaced the coppery hue of desert and sea.

“Only my drummer-and-page is missing!” the ancient Lady shouted. “I need the funereal drum to accompany the wedding of our heir!”

As they heard her, the laughing beggars began to drum upon anything they found at hand: walls, the stones of the floor, earthen pots emptied of their food, which the happy dwarf scooped up from the floor and shoveled into her gluttonous, lipless, toothless mouth, a pure moist orifice, chafed by excessive use, cured by the aseptic miracle of a mouth that like that of the buzzard becomes cleaner the more filth it devours; the Moorish prisoners intoned the high plaintive chants of the muezzin and secretly turned their faces toward the distant sacred oasis; the captive Hebrews, their lips tightly closed, throats vibrating, moaned the deep strophes of hymns learned in their Jewish quarters; the beggars rapped with raw knuckles upon their bowls, against the very back of the leather chair where the mutilated body of the howling Lady was propped upon her provisional throne, exposed to the fortunes of this greedy, drunken, rancorous, and vengeful crowd; the serving boys poured pitchers of red wine into copper cups and even the beggars permitted themselves the pleasure of making toasts and noisily slurping their wine in the presence of the Most Exalted Señora: men were there inferior to the beggars themselves — who, after all, considered themselves to be free men — and those were the captives who huddled in the corners and hummed and awaited, as they had learned from experience, the cruel rewards of the Christian feast.

“Look, look,” the Mad Lady demanded of the terrified Prince, “I have brought you Jews and Moors, see them there in their corners, tatterdemalions, the very dregs of humanity, separated forever from the presence of God the Father and ineligible for the redemptive sacrifice of God the Son; look at them, at this moment of your wedding ceremony I want you to know our enemies, the enemies of our Faith, the object of your arrogant wrath, flesh for your prisons and fodder for your avenging sword; I have ordered them brought here to your wedding so that you may do to them whatever your sovereign will decrees; do not be compassionate: the garrote, the pillory, the rack, beheading, whatever you wish on this the day of your wedding, the stake — establish yourself in blood, my lover, son, husband, ancestor, and descendant; act quickly, give wing to your actions, indulge neither in repose nor impatience, for your time will be brief, and supreme; you are but the transition toward the resurrection of our breed, in you my husband has been reborn, from you will be reborn our father’s fathers, our dynasty will regress toward its beginnings, our blood will be renewed: you shall marry my gentlewoman Barbarica. Steward! Place in the Prince’s hands the sword of the battles against the Infidel; Barbarica, get up off the floor, stop stuffing yourself, roll your white nuptial taffetas tightly around your waist; Chamberlain! place the crown of orange blossoms upon the head of the tiny Queen; Friar! open your breviary … and let the ceremony begin!”

“Oh, mistress! Why are you crowning me with such riches? I have served you well, and I am the most faithful of your servants. But I do not deserve such happiness.”

“I am thinking of my poor husband, Barbarica, and of all the women who desired him. Ah, what a mockery, what a fierce revenge, my little one!”

“Oh, mistress! Your worthy heir deserves something better than I.”

“There is nothing better than you, I tell you, you are the only person I could bear to see married to the phantom of my husband. Let the whores, nuns, and peasant girls who loved my husband and were loved by him in turn writhe with envy; let them choke with rage when they see you, a little monster, a runty bitch, a misshapen fetus, in their place, you in the Prince’s bed, you renewing the bloodlines of Spain.”

“Oh, mistress! My body is too small to contain my joy.”

“Grasp the sword hilt in your hands, Prince, do not falter; let it also be said of you: It was a propitious hour he girded on his sword; remove that grin from your face, Barbarica, more dignity, my gentle lady; and you there in your chamber beside the chapel, have no anxiety, my son, born of a sick father in a Flemish privy: the succession is assured, you now have an heir and an heiress, there is now a royal couple, Spain is saved, from this time forward there will be only fatal sterility or unfortunate monstrosity, now nothing will be born, or what is born will be irreconcilable, a step further toward our marvelous separation: let no one resemble us, let no one recognize himself in us, we are different, we are unique! there is no possible interrelationship, there is none! power must culminate in absolute separation or it is not worth the struggle, no one resembles us, no one may take a mirror and say, we could be you, no one, no one; and you, my barren Señora of the falsely bulging skirts, roll in your soft bed and on your floor of sand with your handsome lover, prefer the illusion of beauty and the mirage of pleasure to the insuperable power of that which resembles nothing else, that which is perfectly, definitively, immutably, heraldically unique; your pleasure and your beauty will disappear with time; fear time, watch it waste and bite and wrinkle and dry and gall and strip and rot and corrode; contemplate and fear the corrosive action of the years upon your defeated body and your stultified and envious mind, Señora; envy those of us who have nothing to fear because we have already been devoured by time, we are beyond its misery and we know that even time cannot ruin a ruin. This is where we live, in the abyss which is the very center, the blind spot, the motionless heart of the heraldic field. Glut yourselves, beggars; drink, alguaciles; eat, stewards; tremble, infidels; more dignity, Barbarica; clasp your sword, Prince; officiate, officiate, Friar; my monstrous couple against your handsome lover, Señora; my heirs against yours. Let the milk and blood flow; ooze nectars, seep odors.”

When the nuptial ceremony had ended, the Idiot Prince stood like a statue for a long while, his eyes staring into nothingness; Brother Julián stood with his head bowed; the dwarf disguised as Queen and bride tugged impatiently at the cape and doublet of her husband, and her eyes pleaded to the Mad Lady, tell everyone to go, please, mistress, tell them to get the hell out; this part is over, now my fun begins; in turn, the Mad Lady’s eyes commanded silence and attention: frozen like a medallion that was both dead and alive, lacking any sense of animation, the motionless Prince compensated her for all her desiring, weeping, suffering, love, and hatred; in the Mad Lady’s mind all the sovereigns of the past, all the dead of the present, and all the phantoms of the future were joined together, given substance, culminated in the figure of her heir: fabricated by her, animated by her, converted by her into this frozen statue.

Then the Idiot raised his arm, the long waxen fingers moved; he stared absently into the corners of the dungeon where the Moorish and Jewish captives huddled together; he extended his arm and for the first time he spoke: You are free, he murmured, you may go in freedom, rise, walk, leave here as free as the day you were born, return to life, let your hair and your beards grow, do not rend your garments any longer, cover your women’s faces with veils, adore whomever you desire, be free in my name, please, get up and leave here; this is my will on the day of my marriage; leave here: you have been pardoned; leave us alone, my wife, the Lady, and me; leave this land; save yourselves …

The cock crowed. And before its distant sound died, it was revived in the melancholy strains of a flute.

“My drummer!” shouted the old Lady, bobbing her head like a nervous hen. “He’s returned!”

But instead, amid the incredulous stares of the liberated captives and the rancorous stares of the beggars, who had expected something more in the way of largesse from the Prince, her wildly staring eyes met the eyes of a flutist squatting beside one of the dungeon walls. His eyes — with the unblinking stare of a mirror — were directed toward the Idiot Prince. But the flutist’s eyes — groaned the ancient Lady — cannot see. They were clouded by the green opacity of blindness. And thus, in the upheaval of the Lady’s emotions were blended in that hour — as the flutist blended into the crowd of captives and beggars — impressions of opulence and misery; she did not know whether this merriment, this wedding, these banquets, a musician’s blindness, the captives’ freedom, a Prince’s will were a sign of poverty, or plenty.

GALLICINIUM

The smith’s preternaturally old eyes gleamed, and outside, at the hour of the cock’s crow, Celestina’s young companion, drawn by an irresistible attraction toward the palace, walked along the side of the interminable construction until he stopped beside the high walls of an enclosed garden.

Once again La Señora traced the contours of the youth at her side; the air of the bedchamber was even heavier than usual, the odors of gum acacia blending with the aromas of exuded perfumes, and the captive breath of stock mingled with the secret exhalations of the little sacks hidden beneath the cushions that were also the habitation of the wise, silky Mus; the vapors from the tiled bath seemed to evoke a fine, almost imperceptible mist from the sand-covered floor. At this hour of the cock’s crow La Señora’s fingertips awakened the sleeping flesh of the youth; she thought her caresses were arousing him to the dawn, and to new love-making; she did not know that the youth called Juan had heard and understood everything during the hour Guzmán had spent in the chamber; but in this caress La Señora’s swift touch performed a different function (and La Señora, even though she did not want to admit it, knew it; had not the diabolic little mouse told her — on her true wedding night as she lay upon the paving stones of the castle courtyard — that from that moment her diminished senses would double in power, extent, and anguish, seeing more, touching more, smelling more, tasting more, hearing more, heighten, as if by an unconscious drug, that secret pact between a virgin Queen and a satanic Mus crept in between her legs?); but the other youth could know none of this, he who was Celestina’s companion, he was not the one with whom the little mouse had made its pact; and nevertheless, as he stood there beside the wall looking up toward La Señora’s window, the third youth found on the beach felt as if invisible hands were caressing him, arousing him, summoning him … and then he leaned weakly against the wall, bathed in cold sweat, experiencing an anguish he knew was not his but that he longed to communicate with a cry of alarm to someone in danger, to a body that was not his but depended upon his as he depended upon it, a body both near and remote, intimate and strange: hands caressed both the body lying within their reach and the one not in their presence; as the flesh of the youth lying by her side was aroused there was a similar awakening of something forgotten until that very moment, forgotten since he had been found on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres by La Señora and Guzmán; La Señora did not want to know what her touch elicited (in spite of the fact that the Mus that had gnawed away the thin membrane separating her from pleasure had warned her: You will feel more, Isabel, and therefore you will know more; but you will feel more than you know; you will delegate to me the wisdom procured by your senses; yours will be the pleasure and mine the knowledge; such will be our pact, concluded upon these icy stones in a courtyard on a night of gray clouds and black lightning; you will feel; only later, much later, will you know what you have felt, what you have done and undone with your fingernails, your senses, your eyes and nose and ears and mouth); and the youth called Juan, thus aroused by La Señora, remembered; and as he remembered he feared; and as he feared he imagined: he imagined, feared, remembered something that until that moment — buried in the drugged atmosphere of the chamber, lulled by the domination of another’s senses, senses that monopolized all experience for themselves — had not again come to mind; also he asked himself, who am I? and realized he asked that question for the first time since he had been borne in the litter along the deserts of the shore up to the high plain with La Señora, hidden behind her veils, and the heraldic bird of icy humors and proud, sleek head.

As La Señora moved closer to embrace the youth, he recalled with a rush of terror the last instant of his consciousness in the litter, when he had felt La Señora’s breath upon his throat, when a face like a silvery moon had appeared between the parted veils and between parted red lips he had seen ferocious, bloody, greedy fangs …

“Do you want to see yourself, Juan? Do you want to know what you look like and, when you see, love yourself as I love you?”

La Señora held a mirror of black marble to Juan’s face; as the youth penetrated its turbid depths he saw himself, naked; he recognized himself, and for an instant loved himself; the longer he looked, the more he loved himself, but as that love and that gaze were prolonged, a stern and rigid hatred rose from the tremors of self-love and crystallized in the form of a body; it was he, this image, this reflection, this shadow; he had no other proof of his existence, and on the beach his only certainty had been that he would become the name he was first called and the face he was first shown; it was he, his nakedness reproduced in the black mirror La Señora held before him, and that uncontestable self, always with the same features, the original face, was assuming the aspect of a woman; he saw his body, again in the same unchanging form, being clothed in La Señora’s garments and then, like La Señora, lying upon its back on the paving stones of a courtyard; rain washed the body and soaked the clothing but did not wash away the assimilated man and woman in the mirror’s image; when the sun reached its zenith the rain ceased; the shadow of Juan and La Señora’s common body — La Señora with Juan’s features, Juan with La Señora’s clothing and hair and jewels — disappeared, and Juan choked back a moan; the mirror reproduced the death tremor, the reflected figure sighed its last sigh, and La Señora, who was he, surrounded by indifferent alguaciles and uneasy duennas and inquisitive halberdiers, expired in the courtyard of her torment; they died together, Juan and La Señora, with no arms worthy to assist them, the body of love abandoned by the master engaged in Flemish lands in his last combat of arms; they died at the same instant in the mirror, two souls inhabitating the same body died only for an instant; the mouse that had in turn inhabited La Señora’s farthingale slipped swiftly between the corpse’s legs, burrowed through the tangle of black hair, entered the slippery vagina, ascended through the entrails, devoured the heart of the dead figure, climbed to the eyes, the brain, the tongue, stained them with black urine, emerged through the mouth of the corpse, and the corpse breathed again; the shadow of the body reappeared and slowly lengthened toward the west, the movement in the courtyard, temporarily suspended, was resumed; the halberdiers renewed their coarse jokes, elbowing each other slyly, the maidservants held soupspoons to the mouth of the prone figure; it all happened in an instant, death passed without being seen, almost without leaving a trace; but in the hiatus between life, death, and resurrection, that body had been possessed, that pact concluded; the mouse restored life to the woman who was La Señora with the face of Juan: what would the woman give the satanic Mus in exchange?

The image in the marble dissolved. La Señora withdrew the mirror from before the youth’s face. With a cry, he clutched his wounded neck; he imagined his own body, pallid and waxen, just as he had seen it in the mirror, dead in life, alive in death; and with a memory of lightning as dark as that at midday in the castle courtyard, a memory further awakened by the cock’s crow, he repeated to himself the story La Señora had told him his first night in this bedchamber; he opened his eyes and searched in vain for the features of the little English girl who had entertained herself in dressing up the maidservants, playing with her dolls, and burying peach stones in the garden; he saw a mature woman by his side, almost overripe, poised on the hazardous, knife-thin edge of a ripeness depicted in contrasting areas of black and white, here the impenetrable blackness of the eyelashes, there the dazzling whiteness of the skin, here again the noxious darkness of the hair; not a step farther, not a minute more lest the equilibrium be broken and this Señora who watched over him here, made love to him, nourished him but was also nourished by him, would blow away like a statue of dust, disintegrate like a spider’s web, cave in like a tunnel of sand, melt like the snows of spring, rot like fruit abandoned to the severity of the sun and rain and wind. (Do I nourish myself from you? you the one called Juan Agrippa, according to Julián the painter-priest? do I sink my teeth into your neck, suck your blood, without knowing, without will? I have wished only to love you, absorb you, touch you, kiss you, like any woman who desires her man, do only what any woman in love will do; I swear it, Juan, I did not know my fingernails and teeth do more, bite flesh, rake nerves, suck blood; for my body, for my ordinary body, Juan, what any woman wants would be enough, but my body is twofold, mine and that of my true master, the diabolical mouse that feeds from me as I from you; it kisses you through me, and through my flesh drinks your blood and through me makes love to you; poor Mus; it was so tiny and silky, so hungry, so industrious; it must envy your beauty, Juan, surely it wants to be like you: an angel …)

Like fruit abandoned … the youth remembered, again he summoned the image of La Señora lying in the castle courtyard, invaded by mice, skin peeling from the sun, body lashed by the rain, and he saw her at that moment convoking the last resort of the afflicted, the only being capable of saving her, the fallen Prince who could enter into a pact with her and promise her salvation in exchange for her submission to his mandates; he had known all this from the moment La Señora told him her story on the first day of his amorous captivity; but now, after looking into the black mirror, he knew something more: that La Señora was he himself, and that the pact effected with the Mus saved La Señora not only from her torment but from an actual although instantaneous death, fleeting because the mouse did not permit it to be prolonged into eternal death; that death, my God, was double: both hers and his; she had been saved from the torture of absurd ceremony and the anguish of unloved flesh, and saved also from death, along with the lover who was he, the young shipwrecked sailor with features identical to La Señora’s; and thus he saw file before his feverish gaze the phantoms of the other youths who had preceded or would succeed him in this bedchamber; his ears were deafened with the sound of the forgotten footsteps of youths without name or number who had passed or would pass to the stake and the gallows through La Señora’s bedchamber, where their last years had engendered or would engender new subterranean creatures torn by night from their damp tombs and brought to the oasis of the palace, to this bedchamber of white sands and heavy perfumes and brilliant tiles and sumptuous brocades; for where could this chamber lead (Juan asked his awakened and frightened imagination) but to the tomb, from the tomb to this bed, and from this bed to the tomb, the only other avenues those of Hell: repetitious fate. He heard the crowing of the cock and told himself he did not want to be but another of that number, that legion of phantoms created like wax dolls from the love and hatred and dissatisfaction and desires of La Señora.

“Guzmán, Guzmán,” Juan sighed sadly. “Guzmán, why did you not dare take her for yourself, why? Your man’s body would have broken the chain of phantoms. You could have saved me, Guzmán, I knew it, I told you, implored you in silence; you have condemned me, Guzmán, you have condemned me to be the twin of the woman who loves me so that she may love herself, and whom I love so that I may love myself; you have imprisoned me in a mirror, Guzmán … with her, like her … I am she, she is I…”

The first youth rescued from the sea countered La Señora’s every caress — the hands eager to insure their dominance and the passivity of the youth they possessed — with the question: Who am I?; the response was always the same: I am she, and if I am she, as I love her I love myself, and as I make love to her I make love to myself, and eventually I shall not be able to answer the question: Who am I? for this love will have forever destroyed my self, and he answered his jailer’s every repulsive kiss with the burning strophes of a litany that defined him as it delineated her: in order to differentiate himself from her, he would be her equal, she would gain nothing of his true and secret self, she would derive from his beautiful and fecund and warm body only her own qualities, herself, and he would go into the world to be what she was in this enclosed chamber, a covetous and deficient woman, envious, malicious, thieving, greedy, inconstant, the two-edged blade (Juan: “I fear, I imagine, and I try to recall my identity but I can identify only with the first thing I see upon awakening, the only thing I know outside myself: I am you because the only thing I know besides myself is you), proud, pretentious, lying, garrulous, indiscreet, curious, lustful (Isabel: “I desire and I reject, I admit and I deny: you see yourself in me and that is my triumph, you despise what you see of yourself in me, and that is my sadness, you take from me what I am so you may be you, and that is my defeat, we are identified in one another, and that is our miserable truth”), root of all evil … who will tell of your lies, your deals and exchanges, your lewdness and your tears, your tumult and your daring, your deception and forgetting, your ingratitude and coldness, your inconstancy and your attestations, your denials and reconsiderations, your presumption, your depression and madness, your disdain, your chatter and your coercion, your greed, your fear and your audacity, your ridicule and your shame? this woman, this woman (Juan: “Your hands are awakening me: I am you”), the vehicle of the Devil (Isabel: “I lie, I fear, I imagine; this youth is not I, he is you, Mus of the Devil, hymen-eater, you made use of me so that you could penetrate me and extract from me your desired image, your angel of light, your heart imprisoned within a body before the creation of the hells you inhabit”), discoverer of the forbidden tree, deserter of the law of God, inciter of men (Juan: “I am awake: I am you; am I a woman?”), seat of sin, weapon of the Devil, expulsion from Paradise, mother of sin, corrupter of the law, enemy of friendship, sorrow from which one cannot flee (Isabel: “Mouse, devil, fallen serpent who caused my fall, seek again your body of light, find the angel you one day were, possess it”), necessary evil, natural temptation, desired calamity (Juan: “I awake: I am you, are you a woman? do I reflect you or you me? are your attributes mine?”), domestic danger, sinful detriment, essence of evil (Juan: “Do you and I reflect another being?”), destroyer of manhood, tempest of the hearth, impediment to repose, jailer of life (Isabel: “But with me you would be neither you nor another; you would have neither face nor virtue nor defect; if you are not I, you are nothing except what passes through me; it is the same, regardless”), daily harm, willful dispute, sumptuous battle, invited beast, thirst for permanence, enveloping lioness (Juan: “The mirror, please, the mirror again”), embellished danger (Isabel: “Night, please, night again”), malicious animal, woman … this woman.

As he repeated the litany, the youth knew who he was: he was able to answer his own question; he identified himself with the woman; having plucked its fruit, he rejected the identification, and hoped that La Señora would do what she had to do, what he had begged and she had refused to do. La Señora took the marble mirror. Juan seized it from her grasp and held it to La Señora’s face. In the mirror, as she looked at herself, La Señora saw Juan. She saw his slim body, the pattern of muscles in the torso, chest burned by marine sun, ocher arms, white legs; monstrous beauty: six toes on each foot; mysterious beauty: a blood-red cross upon his back: Juan’s body, but from the neck emerged the head of a mouse; the crown of the body of love was the tiny, sagacious, mocking head of the Mus, darting eyes and twitching ears, gray fur and stiff whiskers, a damp, black, sensitive nose, a scarlet tongue, and greedy fangs. La Señora saw what she knew, and dropped the mirror upon the sand of the floor. He was she, and therefore other; he was other, and therefore he; he was himself.

“Everything that thinks, dares; everything that dares, thinks,” said Don Juan.

With inexorable will, he cast La Señora from him, watched her tumble, hair flying, toward the edge of the bed, feigning incomprehension, weakened by the fear and the need to hide her terrible happiness (Isabel: “If I have triumphed, I have lost; if I have lost, I have triumphed”), momentarily defenseless, questioning, incredulous, knowing what she knew but rejecting that knowledge; bursting with self-awareness, obsessed by the resonance of his name, his destiny, his adventure, Don Juan arose from the bed; a cistern long empty, he was abruptly filled with the liquid vices and froth of an identity seized from the woman whose greatest fear and greatest desire was that she might lose him (Isabel: “My triumph and my defeat”), seized also from dream, words, the remote flow of origins, a long-dormant will awakened by the cock’s crow with its faint promise of dawn and sun, a day of heat and risk, but also with its sad memory of betrayal; Don Juan walked to one of the walls; he tore from the wall a thick, opaque, luminous brocade woven of shadow and silver and wrapped it about him; he stared with mockery and scorn and pride at the Señora with the terrible lips and wild eyes, crouched like an animal, naked, on all fours upon the bed, black and white, at the point of rotting, at the point of crumbling into sand indistinguishable from the sand of the floor, contemplating the rebellion of her angel, her succubus, her vampire, with a mixture of apprehension and nostalgia, triumph and defeat, as if this was what she both expected and refused to accept, what she both feared and desired, something she remembered already, with resignation, and something more: the fatal return to this chamber, this prison and its caresses, already divined, expected. The youth walked with firm steps to the door of the bedchamber.

“Where are you going?” La Señora’s voice could not express the contradictory complexity of her emotions, her words voiced a single attitude among the hundreds the Devil had set aboil in the breast of his serf. “You cannot leave here, you cannot; life is here, by my side (No, your life is outside; carry me into the world within your skin, carry my master, the diabolic mouse, into the world; bury his stiff, hairy tail deep in all the asses he and I can never possess, go, with your archangel image, to perform the work of infernal imagination; exist, fornicate, kill, deceive, satiate yourself for him and for me, Juan; break all the chains of chastity; free us, Juan; go and tell the world it is not we women who are the instruments of the Devil and thereby to be persecuted as witches and burned at the stake; demonstrate that a man may also be the incarnation of the Devil; free us, Juan; act so they forget us and persecute you; oh, how great is my triumph, Juan, how great my revenge upon men: my husband, El Señor; Guzmán, the humbled; the bishops and Inquisitors who if they knew of my actions would burn me before the greedy eyes of the workmen who would possess me merely by watching me die; oh, what triumph, Don Juan, you hide me and save me by acting for me in the world while I serve my true master in this secret chamber; go quickly, Don Juan, do the work of the Devil and the woman you embody in the world, go now, you have been born, but fear me because you carry with you my soul and my heart, you condemn me to the pursuit of a new lover to exorcise the loneliness of my bed); you cannot abandon me, Juan; you cannot survive alone; you lack will, you are mine; the man who leaves this room will encounter only death; you will encounter death (our life, Juan), only death.”

“Death?” queried the erectly proud young man blazing now with his own light, burning cruelty in his eyes, master of his own words. “So remote a threat?”

With long strides and a mocking laugh he left the room, closing the door firmly behind him; he breathed in the cold, enclosed air of stone passageways; he walked with gusto and pride, dominated by an arrogance that in him, and for him, transcribed and attenuated all the attributes enumerated in the litany of woman: in the room next to La Señora’s, the room where beneath loose paving stones they had hidden her dolls, peach stones, stockings, and locks of hair, Azucena and Lolilla heard the violent gust of wind — as if the brocade enveloping Juan were a sail impelling him across the seas of the palace — and peeked from behind their door; their mouths dropped open, their stares of amazement were returned by Don Juan’s stony gaze; with him they laughed, and torn between fear and desire to be part of whatever was taking place, they slammed their door just as a laughing Don Juan threw his weight against it, and continuing to laugh, his arms spread in a cross, one hand on each side of the doorframe, allowed his man’s smell, his man’s laughter to filter through the cracks of the door, inflaming both of them with this inconceivable proposal: “Open the door; La Señora’s lover can also be the servants’ stud; down with doors; no more locks; pleasure is for all, or for no one.”

He laughed again as he walked through the galleries of the palace, repeating his name to himself, Juan, Juan, Juan, desiring a mirror in which he might look at himself as a thirsty man becalmed upon the Sargasso Sea desires sweet water, wishing he could convert the granite walls of the palace into a mirror of vanities, a labyrinth of reflecting mercury; he spoke his name (and acted out before the silence and darkness of the stone the gestures and attitudes of all his names): greed and gluttony, inconstancy, two-edged blade, pride, gossip, lust, Devil’s gate, seat of sin, corrupter of law, enemy of friendship, natural temptation, desired calamity, essence of evil, destroyer of womanhood, storm of hearths, sumptuous battle, invited beast, embellished danger, malicious animal: he, Don Juan; he, usurper of all the mirrors of all the women of the world.

And then he stopped. If not the mirror, then the mirage; at the end of the gallery a girl was leaning against the wall, a woman, in spite of the fact that with her closely shaven hair she resembled a lad; barefoot, dressed in rough sackcloth that for Juan’s eyes could not disguise the fragile fullness, the round delight of her young, ripe, female form. Juan stopped. He placed one hand on his hip. He waited. She would come to him. She would come, fatefully, she would come in quest of the sumptuous battle.

CONTICINIUM

First, in the hour of silence, La Señora merely felt herself alone, abandoned, incomplete; defeated, she lay where she had been thrown upon the bed, listening to the fluttering wings of her restless falcon, thirsty — glutted with darkness — and hungry for the hunt; the sound of the wings awakened her from her lethargy; images of the hunt evoked by the hawk flashed before La Señora’s half-closed eyes; quietly, sensing that pain would become despair and that despair then would circulate through her bloodstream as desire for revenge, she said to the hawk, offering it a wrist, on which the bird of prey obediently alighted: “Let me tell you a story, hawk. Selene, the moon, fell in love with a young hunter, Endymion; and as she was the lady of the night, she caused him to sleep; covering him with her white veils, she cloaked him in darkness, and thus, as he slept, she could kiss and make love to him at will.”

The hawk’s talons, dug into its mistress’s bare arm, but she felt no pain — pain of the flesh, no, pain of the soul; and the voice of her soul told her that the falcon’s company would not be enough, but also that she could endure Juan’s absence … The mouse … The mouse slept beneath the lover’s pillow, he hid there, he crept from beneath the pillow every night to disseminate dream, desire, and hallucination. La Señora, her mouth half opened, her body swelling with expectation, fell upon the pillows with frenzy, threw them one by one onto the sand of the floor beside the accursed mirror. The frightened falcon fled from its mistress, fluttering uneasily. La Señora found the little sacks filled with aromatic herbs, the perfumed gloves, the colored pastilles. But not the familiar mouse.

“Mus … Mus…” murmured La Señora. “Mus…”

But nothing stirred in the perfumed early morning. This time the mouse did not creep out, look at her, and scurry back to its hiding place.

“Master … lover, my true lord … can you not hear me, Mus?”

Wildly, La Señora pawed through the pastilles, tore open the sacks, and strewed the herbs upon the sterile sand; as she bit the finger of each aromatic glove, she fancied she had discovered the mouse’s new hiding place.

“Mus … have you forgotten your lover? Mus, have you so soon forgotten our wedding in the courtyard, how your tiny teeth nibbled my flesh, darling mouse, how you devoured my virginity, mouse, my love? Mus, I have fulfilled my pact … I delivered to you the body of my lover, Mus, I returned to you, poor tiny, scorned beastie, the image of the angel that once was yours … Mus…”

She buried her face in the softness of the bed. She understood, and as she understood, she wept. “You went with him, is that not so? The two of you abandoned me, is that not so? You used me in order that you might enter the body and soul of that youth … filthy mouse.”

The hawk again alighted on La Señora’s wrist.

She looked with hatred at the stupid bird that had understood nothing, had proved itself incapable of defending its mistress, of attacking the youth who carried off the mouse hidden in the folds of his brocaded cape.

“But what happened when Endymion awakened? Did he stay by Selene’s side, or did he abandon her forever? I cannot remember how that legend ends, falcon.”

The hawk, so confidently clinging to its mistress’s wrist, shivered; La Señora carefully examined the rumpled sheets and found hairs from her lover’s head and fingernail trimmings, which she piled into a little heap, stirred, held to her nose and mouth; she murmured incoherent phrases, and the bird of prey, accustomed to receiving solicitous attention and giving obedience in return, trembled and fluttered its wings, confused, sensing in its smooth, lean body that the normal order of things had been reversed, that in place of mutual fidelity there was now sudden menace; it fluttered desperately and lurched from La Señora’s unsteady wrist, taking advantage of her intense concentration on the nail trimmings and strands of hair she held in the palm of one hand, the shivering bird launched into blind, nervous, suicidal but redemptive flight about the rich bedchamber, the oasis in this somber palace, striking against brocade-covered walls and ceilings embossed in Arab fashion, against closed windows and the door through which Don Juan had escaped; then La Señora rose from the bed and pursued the falcon, stretching out her arms, grunting, crouching, waiting for the bird to cripple itself as it flew into stone walls and fall upon the white sand floor; the sound of the fluttering wings sent ripples of terror through the chamber; the hawk’s increasing fear would soon be turned against the Señora; forgetting the hours of faithful company, the falcon would see in her the enemy, its prey, which it should have seen in Don Juan and the falsifying Mus; and as it perceived its prey it would swoop down upon and seize La Señora’s flesh in a fury of fear and incomprehension: its universe was crumbling; all the bird’s habits, acquired by instinct and reinforced by Guzmán’s application, faded with each thrust of frenzied wings; the hawk struck mercilessly against the windows and, wounded, fell to the floor; La Señora ran to it and the hawk pecked at its mistress, still attempting to defend itself, sinking it talons into the white flesh rejected by Don Juan; with one hand La Señora seized its beak, and with the other, covered its rapacious eyes, pushing its head into the sand, slowly, suffocating it, burying it in the sandy floor of the chamber, mercilessly strangling it as she muttered: “Domum inceptam frustra … frustrate the construction of this house … may this palace never be completed … domum inceptam frustra…”

Thank you, true Señor, true master of my soul, murmured La Señora as she opened the window of her bedchamber, you who did not refuse my call when I needed you, you who answered in the body of a mouse, slipped between my undergarments and crinolines during the nights of my torture and humiliation in the castle courtyard, you who with your sharp fangs divested me of my virginity and introduced me to pleasures forbidden by my husband, you who sent your young representative to my bed, you who were present when as I received the Host I spit it out in the shape of a serpent, not understanding that even then you had chosen me for your black works, you, the unknown, lurking, secret, insinuating power that guided my hands when as a child I buried my peach stones in the earth and dressed my dolls; and with all her strength La Señora flung the body of the hawk from her window; the inert body, its wings broken, its beak sealed, flew above the sterile space of the promised garden and fell beyond the wall. Thank you, Lord who governs tormented and evildoing lemures and the tormented exile of the wondering spirits of the larvae that punish the living thank you, Lord who gives me power to command the manes, disturb the course of the stars, limit divine powers, command the elements and threaten the very sun: astral body, I shall envelop you in a veil of eternal shadows; thank you for making me your servant and granting me your powers; thank you, master, fallen angel, black light, now I understand you, now I forgive you, you said that first I would feel and then I would know, such was our pact, you have not betrayed it, now I understand, I have had pleasure, now I shall have knowledge, no one, not you, not even the God whom you defy, may enjoy pleasure and knowledge at the same time, thank you, fallen angel, for revealing to me that my present body is but one more transformation among the thousands that I have, unknowing, lived throughout the centuries, not knowing that I have been woman, bird and she-wolf, child, butterfly, jenny, and lion, and that now, thanks to that youth who left here with you, I am pregnant by you and by him, for both of you fertilized me with your dark semen, and from my womb will be born the future Lord of Spain.

Smiling, she closed the window and walked to the foot of the bed, where the marble mirror lay amid herbs and pillows. She picked it up. She looked at herself in it. She saw nothing but dark bloodstains running down the glossy black surface, as if the stone were bleeding.

Dispirited, she hung her head.

“Not even this, master? You also deny me your son? This is how you inform me that I am bleeding again, that my woman’s cycle has not been interrupted by the fecundation of my love-making with the youth called Juan? This is how you show me that in the period of the moon a woman’s mirror is stained with blood?”

Her lips tightened. She told herself she could endure all trials, that she would overcome them with the arts of black magic inculcated by the Mus, she would not allow herself to be defeated, she would give thanks again, thank you, master, for teaching me the words of my powers, thank you for recalling to me words forgotten during the course of my metamorphoses, the words that define me through mutable time and the exhausted spaces of the world: saga et divina, potens caelum deponere, terram suspendere, fontes durare, montes diluere, manes sublimare, deos infirmare, sidera extinguere, Tartarum ipsum illuminare, thank you … The dead falcon fell at the feet of Celestina’s companion, who stood contemplating La Señora’s window, and La Señora, on the thrust of her new wings, followed the dead hawk through the same Castilian air on the membranous wings of the body convoked through age-old words of female sages and seers in the early dawn of time; flight, eager harmony in the black lance of her head, life in her fangs and phalanges, thank you, black light, fallen angel, who taught me these words through long nights in the courtyard, you have divested me of everything except words, but now words are everything for me, I can no longer nourish my dead life with the blood of the handsome youth I fed upon for you, Mus, but because of the power of words I shall now be able to nourish myself from death itself.

The bat, the winged mouse, Mus of the skies, traced a nervous arc above the plain and sought a new entrance into the palace through the crypts; veiled in mourning, the dying night guided it and sustained it in its flight.

Slow the heavens, suspend the earth’s turning, stop the streams and dissolve the mountains, convoke the manes of Hell, defame the gods, extinguish the stars, illuminate the black regions of Tartar … invoking those powers, the blind bat, wings beating faster than the eye could perceive, guided by the proximity and remoteness of the mausoleums, entered into deep crypts reserved for El Señor’s ancestors in his own private chapel.

When it felt the marble of a tomb, the blind winged mouse reassumed the body of La Señora, naked but defended against the cold of these tombs by heat of spirit; quickly, fearing that the coming dawn would rob her of her powers, sweating, excited, La Señora pried up the heavy stones of the tombs, with her hands she broke the glass panes of the sarcophagi where the royal mummies lay, and ripped away flabby nostrils, brittle ears, frozen eyes, powdery tongues, the dried members from several remains; she murmured curses and spells still unproved, for she did not know the true extent of the forces she invoked, mute forces of demoniac powers that God had given man immediately after this creation, nor did she know whether they would be fulfilled immediately, tomorrow, or many centuries later, for the power of the Devil is circular, a sphere divided by the line of time and thus a part of time, but it is also one hemisphere above and one below time, and thus removed from time; but someday, someday … if she could withstand the difficult tests to which her true master subjected her, if she did not falter in her prayers to the mouse who had crept in between her legs, if she maintained her absolute faith in the serpent she had spit out one morning as she received the Host, all she sought would come to pass:

may all those within this palace never leave it, may it be their eternal prison and eternal tomb, or if they leave it, may they carry it with them on their backs, as the snail his shell or Cain his crime;

may all men who wish to flee from this curse be transformed into beavers and terrified by captivity, may they devour their own genitals in the belief that they lighten their bodies in preparation for flight;

may Juan, captive within the palace, find within that prison the jail he most deserves, a jail of mirrors, a windowless prison;

and may any woman made pregnant by Juan be condemned to perpetual pregnancy, like an elephant bearing throughout eternity her heavy burden within an enormously swollen belly …

“When a man and a woman set sail with Venus, the only provisions they need are a lamp filled with oil and a chalice filled with wine; you and I have not even that; may our pleasure compensate for such poverty,” Juan had said to the novitiate Inés as they lay down — the man dropping his brocaded mantle and the girl her harsh sackcloth — on a crude bed in the servant’s room nearest the place of their meeting; and the ahs and sighs of love of the young pair blended with the squabbling of the servants Azucena and Lolilla, for the murmurs sifted through the fissures of the badly mortised stone separating these miserable rooms, and through the open windows of the July night; but they were completely compensated by their pleasure; Inés told Juan who she was, and asked whether he feared the furies of Heaven, and he replied: “That is a matter between Heaven and me. But believe me when I tell you that I fear neither Heaven nor Hell, nor the lycanthrope.”

“Not even my father who is nearby in this very palace, waiting to speak with El Señor?”

“Never fear; someday he will invite me to dine.”

“And do you not fear even El Señor?”

“Your blood is cold, Inés. El Señor was. I am. And he who says ‘I was’ is worth nothing, it is ‘I am’ that matters.”

“And me, do you not fear me?”

Juan laughed: “Unfortunate the woman who places her trust in a man! Doña Inés, it is your gain that you are the first I found; but that is no reason you should deprive other women of the rightful claims they hold upon my heart.”

“Your blood is cold, Juan.”

Juan withdrew like a lizard from Inés’s naked body, placing the palms of his hands against the wooden planks that served them as a bed and raising himself above her; through the open window they could hear the covetous giggles of the two scrubbing-girls-become-royal maidservants; Inés screamed with terror, she pushed away her lover’s body, her tensed muscles slackened, with horrified hands she covered the sex Juan had just abandoned, the wound opened by El Señor and then enjoyed by Juan the same night had closed, she was again a virgin, inexorably the opened lips had closed, the hair knitting together into a mesh like steel wire, the teeth of chastity had come together, the flower closed its petals; Juan, laughing, his head cradled on his arm and the arm propped against a wall to support a body weak with laughter, said: “If either I or El Señor have made you pregnant, Inés, you will have to give birth through your ear…”

Swirling his cape about him, Juan left the little room; he pounded on the door of the neighboring room, laughing at the excited giggling of Azucena and Lolilla.

La Señora, again transformed into a bat, flew several times from the crypts to her bedchamber, carrying each time in her mutilated phalanges a bone and an ear, a nose and an eye, a tongue and an arm, until from the parts stolen from the tombs she had formed upon the bed an entire figure of a man.

In her flight she feared the light of the coming dawn, the contrast of firmament against the increasing clarity of the sky; when her task was completed she contemplated, exhausted, her work; she admired the monstrous figure created from bits and pieces lying upon the bed: the nose of the Arian King, one ear from the Queen who stitched flags the color of her blood and tears; the other from the astrologer King who complained that God had not consulted him about the creation of the world; one dark eye from the fratricidal King, and a white one from the rebellious Infanta; the livid tongue of the cruel King who had forced the members of his court to drink the bath water of his concubine; the mummified arms of the rebel King who had risen in arms against the stepfather who had murdered his mother; the blackened torso of the King who died in flaming sheets; the skull of the Suffering and the shriveled sex of the Impotent King; one shinbone from the virgin Queen murdered by the King’s halberdier as she was praying; another from her own mother-in-law, the Mad Lady, a relic of the sacrifice the mother of the present Señor had imposed upon herself after the death of her handsome husband, the whoring Prince and violator of country girls.

La Señora lighted her fire, over it she hung a caldron and threw into it Juan’s fingernails and hair and then added the myrrh-like cáncamo, a tear shed from an Arabian tree, and the gum of the storax tree which coagulates and hardens like resin; she stirred everything together, waited until it boiled, and then poured the boiling, waxy mixture over the pieces of mummified flesh, anointing them, and joining the separate members into a human form. She waited for the wax to cool, looked at the new body, and said: “Now Spain has its heir.”

“I smell something, I smell something,” said the Mad Lady, sniffing nervously as she was wheeled in her little cart by the dwarf, who had stamped her feet and sulked and demanded to be taken to spend her wedding night in the magnificent crypt of the forebears; Barbarica and the Mad Lady, followed by a serene Idiot Prince, strangely indifferent to the two women, content with having freed the captives, an act the ancient Lady did not know whether to approve or condemn, but respected because it was the sovereign decision of the heir; nonetheless, she smelled something now that made her overlook both his idiocy and his need, an odor wafting in foul-smelling clouds through the galleries of the palace, the odor of putrescent flesh and burning bone and burned fingernails and wax that intoxicated the Mad Lady; “Where is it coming from, where is it coming from? what is that nectar of new life? who is doing these things? why have I not been informed? why do I have a service so vast and exact if no one knows to inform me of what is going on here? I must be alert, there are silent powers that may frustrate me, new blood for the banquet of time … no, old blood for the wedding with eternity, our world is now constructed to last until the end of the world, nothing must change it, I have done what needed to be done, hear me, Felipe, my son, aid your poor mother mutilated by honor and maddened by fidelity, nothing must change, not ever, you are right, Felipe, I ally myself with you, there is an heir now, banish those who would idolize nature, order the sacred tree to be burned, along with those who would search for God in nature, baptizing fountains, placing the cross upon rustic altars of branches and flowers, complete your palace, my son, enclose everything within it — sepulchers, monasteries, stones, and even the future palaces that may be constructed within yours — in a gray and infinite perspective, invent within the walls of your palace a replica of everything nature offers and enclose it all here, the double of the universe, enclose everything so that this be the true nature, not what merely passes for nature, not the nature that changes and dies, sows, germinates, grows, and flows, but a petrified nature of stone and bronze and marble that is ours, and within which our bodies are a miniature world: land, flesh; water, blood; air, breath; fire, heat; think on this, my son, in your chapel and in your bedchamber; think on this with the same intensity and pain St. Peter Martyr must have felt when the knife was buried in his skull, think on it so that our order may never change, so that things be as they have been conceived in our eternity: servitude, vassalage, exaction of taxes, homage, tribute, caprice, our sovereign will, passive obedience on the part of everyone else, that is our world, and if it changes we shall change; and if it dies, we shall die…”

At the mute explosion of the dawn the dwarf Barbarica, wrapped in her nuptial trappings, drunk and dyspeptic, farting and belching, climbing and clambering over the tombs of the forebears, shouted for the painter-priest to come record continuity: she was the Queen, only she, and upon each marble mausoleum, at the foot of each stone plinth, leaning against each bronze banister, the dwarf imitated what she imagined were the royal poses the illustrious Señores and Señoras and Princes and Bastards here buried had adopted in life.

The Mad Lady scornfully observed Barbarica’s antics, she was completely silent, absorbed in the grandeur of the crypt; her gaze was lost in the gray perspectives of domes and colonnades that with unnatural attraction retained the dark wings of night that outside were already flying in swift pursuit of the last light of the new day. Inside, in contrast, the acid of the shadows was eating into the copperplate of the royal tombs. As her eyes were exactly like engraved metal, the Mad Lady first noticed only the general appearance of the crypt; only later, after they had adjusted to that darkness, the color without color, her eyes, like two prismatic engraving styli, bit into details: then she noted that the glass of certain sarcophagi was broken, the heavy stone slabs were pulled back, the tombs profaned, and she shouted to the Idiot to push her closer, and when she saw the profanation she screamed anew: curses, my own arms, my own hands, the relics of my sacrifice, are missing, the limbs embalmed by the apothecaries and learned doctors, who filled them with aloe and quicklime and black balsam; she shouted, she wept; the dwarf continued to swing from tomb to tomb, and the Idiot Prince, with an air of infinite weariness, removed his tightly curled wig, walked to the tomb of El Señor’s father, the Mad Lady’s husband, lifted the covering copper slab and there encountered himself, or at least some remains dressed in the clothing he had worn when he emerged from the sea: a tattered strawberry-colored doublet, and dun-colored breeches still stained with sand. The dwarf cackled, the Lady shouted with indignation, and no one was watching him; he could not remember (because his memory could not retain what vanished with each sunset) that the Lady when she arrived had asked her son that the body of the shipwrecked sailor be thrown into a common grave along with the cadavers of dead dogs, nor could he appreciate that it was only by a chance accident he did not question, since he could not even imagine it, that this dead replica of himself, vaguely familiar, lay in the tomb of the handsome and whoring Señor whose identity the Idiot had imperfectly usurped, as if some formula of the double metamorphosis had failed, as if traces and scraps of one had tenaciously adhered to the other. The dwarf cackled, the Lady shouted, no one was watching him.

The Idiot Prince climbed into the sarcophagus, lay down upon the remains of his own body, and sank into the corrupted flesh of the sailor who was himself; once again his flesh fused with the blood-red cross that stigmatized the cold depths of the sepulcher; once inside, he allowed the stone of the tomb to fall after him, and in the darkness he closed his eyes; he felt greatly relieved, in peace at last; now he could rest, wait, a long time, with no surprises, no need to decipher the enigmas that he in his doubling as sailor and Prince, true orphan and impostor heir was incapable of resolving; no need now to make decisions, to act out an expected madness or a certainty of approaching desperation, no need to free captives or crown himself with bleeding doves or swallow black pearls; he was freed from the duties of condemning or emancipating, of constructing his power upon the foundations of caprice. He closed his eyes, and slept within the tomb.

Celestina’s companion entered the forge with the broken body of the strangled hawk in his hands. He showed it to the girl dressed as a page, and to the smith. Celestina took the dead bird and carried it to the entrance of the smithy.

“Give me hammer and nails,” she said to Jerónimo, and he obeyed her.

Celestina placed the body of the hawk against the center of the doorframe, she extended the defeated wings and nailed the body and outstretched wings to the dry wood. The three stood mutely, witnessing the crucifixion of La Señora’s bird. Then they heard muffled, dragging, infirm footsteps across the devastated plain; these steps were preceded by the plaintive strains of a flute.

AURORA

Like La Señora, Toribio, the astrologer-priest, dreaded the end of the night.

She dreaded its coming because she had still not completed animating the body that could assume or simulate life only during the hours of darkness. The astronomer dreaded it because then the stars would disappear from view, and not even the powerful telescopes he had constructed with such grave patience could return his darlings to him; for among all possible visions, he considered that of viewing the stars the one most to be trusted and desired.

La Señora, lying beside the cadaver she had only just fabricated from the skulls and scraps of the royal remains, cursed the lateness of Don Juan’s flight, as it left so few nocturnal hours for forging a revenge she imagined circular, eternal, and therefore infernal. Brother Toribio, on the other hand, was preparing to greet the aurora (when it did arrive; not yet; there was still time to prove an experiment; what he needed was a witness) with praise that united the gratitude of his Christian soul for the miracle of a new day with the satisfaction of his libido sciendi that the new day proved the circular, eternal, and therefore celestial parentage of the spheres; and this joy compensated for his nostalgia for the night.

Thus where La Señora saw evil, he saw good; and where she saw good — in the vile fabrication that lay upon the black sheets beside her — he saw evil: he had always compared the dark science of his contemporaries and secret rivals with the witchcraft of the ancient sorceresses of Thessaly, who taking feet, hands, heads, and torsos from various sepulchers, ultimately created a monstrous Prometheus with no relation to true man; plotting their concentric circles, their excentric circles, and their epicycles, these false uranographers were incapable of discovering the shape of the earth, or its measure, for they knew everything about the infinite movement of the stars except the most simple and unique truth: that movement, all movement, is regular and invariable, the same for stones thrown by the creature’s hand as for planets set in rotation by the hand of the Creator.

He was thinking these things as he fashioned a meniscus, concave on one face and convex on the other, resigning himself to postponing its use until the following night; then he would ask that fatal and eager night, never expecting she would speak or tell her own story, but hopeful that astride the mount of experience she would with a simple movement of her head sign the yes or no the priest’s hypotheses deserved. Toribio put down the meniscus, picked up a piece of heavy paper, and patted it; he was impatiently awaiting the return of his comrade Julián, the painter-priest, urgently summoned by the Mad Lady.

La Señora patted the cold members of the human form by her side and put her lips to the mummified ear affixed with cáncamo to the dissimilar skull, for while in some places the Arabic resins had formed a flesh-like gray film, in others the bone shone through opaquely, like old silver; whispering into that ear La Señora asked her true master (multiplying his names, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Elis, Azazel, Ahriman, Mephisto, Shaitan, Samael, Asmodeus, Abaddon, Apollyon) whether, in truth, in the guise of a mouse, he had granted her that night of their secret wedding in the castle courtyard the powers of magus and seer, of slowing the heavens, suspending the turning of the earth, stopping streams and dissolving mountains, of evoking the manna of Hell, and extinguishing the stars so beloved by the wise Chaldean in the tower, Brother Toribio; if so, this was the moment to put them to the test, to animate gradually the rigid members of the heir she had constructed, for she knew now that this figure was the true fruit of her union with the mouse, and that possessed by him she could not be impregnated by Don Juan: let that livid tongue speak again; fill those mismatched eyes, one light and one dark, with flecks of light; now, please, Master and Lord, chief of Tartar, sovereign of the sulphurous hole of Acheron, prince of the shadows of Hades, you, king of Avernus, you who bathe in the waters of the river of fire but not in the waters of the river of forgetfulness, do not forget me, do not forget your servant, now, before the sun undoes the work of the shadows, make these parts rot again, return them all to dust … now …

“Hold this paper, Brother Julián,” Toribio said when the painter-priest returned from his long night in the company of the Mad Lady, the dwarf, and the Idiot. “Hold this paper, punch a hole in the center with the point of this pin, and then hold the paper to your eye. Go out onto the balcony of my tower; hurry, for the dawn is coming. Look at the stars through the tiny aperture made by the pin. What do you see?”

“What do I see? That the stars have lost their aureole; they look very small…”

“And you realize, then, that their apparent size is an illusion created by their refulgence…?”

“Yes; but I am not sure of what I see, Brother Toribio: I am tired; it has been a long night.”

“Isn’t it true that nothing looks as small as a star robbed of its light? And nevertheless, many of them are larger than this earth we inhabit. Imagine, then, how our earth must look — only one star among millions of other stars — from the star most distant from us; or imagine how many stars must fill the dark space between us and the most distant star. Can you believe, Brother, that our tiny star is the center of the universe? Can you believe that?”

“What I do not dare believe is that God designed the universe in honor of our earth and the miserable, cruel, and stupid beings that inhabit it. I have learned one thing tonight: men are mad.”

The painter-priest offered several folded sheets of paper to the astrologer-priest, whose benevolent smile seemed to ask: You have only now come to that realization? although his bowed head indicated a certain fear in response to the words of his comrade: “That is a conclusion I have tried to avoid, Brother Julián. I have never wished to imply that the great expanse of the infinite diminishes either God or man. You understand, that is something they would never forgive.”

Julián looked at Toribio with affection; he had learned not to laugh at the slightly comic appearance of the astrologer, his tonsure encircled by wild, dark-red curls, and one perpetually wandering eye; he stood straight and tall, but lacked either grace or symmetry, and he always held one twitching shoulder higher than the other. Toribio accepted the folded manuscripts with respect; he had recognized El Señor’s seal at the bottom of each page.

“Who gave you this?”

“Guzmán, just a moment ago, on the stairway that leads to your observatory. He asked me to read them and judge them.”

Squinting his eyes, the palace astrologer approached a lamp of wax candles enclosed in smoke-blackened glass hanging from the beamed ceiling; he adjusted the light and with an eagerness belied by his outward casualness began to read the testament El Señor had dictated to Guzmán; he raised one arm and with a gesture at once forceful, gentle, and controlled he pushed the lamp, which described a wide pendulum arc above the heads of the two priests. One continued to read, while the other contemplated with exhaustion and surprise the arc described by the lamp.

“Watch carefully, and count,” murmured Toribio, never taking his eyes from El Señor’s folios, where the shadows cast by the lamp rhythmically shortened and lengthened. “Count your own pulse, Brother Julián, count carefully and you will learn, you will see, that each swing of this lamp takes exactly the same amount of time, always the same, whether the distance of the arc is great or small…”

Julián, counting his pulse, approached the astronomer: “Toribio … Brother … what can you…? Tell me, do you know of anything that will cleanse me, purify me, of this accursed night?”

Toribio continued to read. “Yes. I know that the earth is in the heavens. Does that console you?”

“No, because I know that Hell is on earth.”

“Do we ascend or descend, Brother Julián?”

“Our sainted religion affirms that we ascend, Brother Toribio, that there is no movement but that of the soul in its ascent, in search of an eternal good, which is above…”

Toribio shook his rust-red head. “Geometry knows nothing of good or evil, or of supremes or relatives, but it assures us we neither climb nor descend; we spin, we spin, I am convinced that everything is spherical and that everything spins in circles; everything is movement, incessant, circular…”

“You are describing men…”

“You have just discovered that men are mad; but mathematics is not mad; a hypothesis may be false if experience does not prove it; false, but never mad.”

“Neither can the earth be mad, although the men that inhabit it are mad, and their madness is a movement like that you describe: incessant and circular, relentlessly returning to the same exhausted point of departure while they believe they have reached a new shore; and with this movement men wish to communicate their delirium to the earth. But the earth does not move…”

“You say it does not move?”

“How can it move? We would all fall, we would all be thrown into the emptiness of space … the immobility of the earth has to be the stabilizing factor for the agitated coming and going of its maddened populace, Friar … if the earth moved — in addition to the movement of men — we would all be thrown toward the heavens, Friar…”

“Did I not, just now, tell you that we are already in the heavens?” The astrologer laughed; he rolled up El Señor’s papers and threw them on a table; he took Julián by the arm and led him to the balcony.

There Toribio picked up two stones of unequal size; he walked to the parapet and extended his hands beyond the edge, the smaller stone in his right hand and the larger in his left. “Look. Listen. I am going to drop the two stones at the same time. One is heavier. The other, lighter. Watch. Hear. Both will fall at the same velocity.”

He dropped them. But neither friar heard them strike the ground. Toribio stared uncomprehendingly at Julián, his eyes, as always, vaguely out of focus.

“I heard nothing, Brother Toribio. Was this the miracle you wished to demonstrate? That your stones fall and strike the earth without making any sound?”

The astrologer trembled. “Nevertheless, they fell at the same velocity.”

“We would have heard them strike; either one stone first, and then the other, or both at the same time; but we should have heard the sound, Brother, and we heard nothing…”

“And nevertheless, I swear to you by my Chaldean ancestors, they fell, and they fell together, at the same exact velocity, in spite of their different weights … even if they were caught by an angel! And they fell moved by the same force that moves the moon, the earth in its rotation, and all the planets and stars of the universe; should those two miserable and blessed stones not descend at a uniform velocity from this tower, then at this instant neither you nor I am alive; stones move because the moon moves around the earth, and the earth around the sun, as if in a stately celestial pavane; one impels another, one sphere affects another, indeed the entire universe, without a single imaginable fissure, without a single rupture in the chain of cause and effect; each is related to the other so that beginning with the revolution of each planet all phenomena are explainable and this correlation binds together so tightly the order and magnitude of the spheres and of their circular orbits and of the heavens themselves that nothing, Brother, do you understand me, nothing, can be changed in its place without mortally disrupting every other part, the very universe itself…”

“And you know all this because of the two stones you dropped that we did not hear fall?”

Toribio emphatically nodded yes, although his lips murmured: “I do not understand, I do not understand…”

And the rosy dawn crowned his head with pale flames but threw the bowed face of the astrologer into shadow.

“Brother Toribio: Joshua ordered the sun to stop in its course that he might gain the day in his battle.”

“The Holy Gospels preach supernatural truth. Natural truth is of a different order. Everything is simultaneously uniform movement and persistent change … Change and movement, movement and change, without which the stars would be corpses on the highways of the night.”

“El Señor, Brother Toribio, is like Joshua. Do not forget it. You have read the testament that the unlettered chief huntsman Guzmán could not have invented. You and I know how to read between the lines. El Señor desires neither movement nor change; he wants the sun to stay its course…”

“What battles can El Señor win now? Better that he invoke the powers of dusk and defeat.”

“El Señor does not want change; and we are his servants.”

“And, nevertheless, El Señor does change; and as he changes, he suffers, and as he suffers from change he decays and dies.”

“Our poor Señor. Everyone says he is no longer the man he was. They say he was a handsome youth, audacious, also cruel. He led a rebellion against his own father so that he might more easily deliver the rebels into his father’s hands. His own power is founded upon that slaughter, and because he has power he has been able to build this palace where you and I find protection and opportunity to read the stars and to paint icons … Do not forget that, Brother. Here you and I have saved ourselves from a dangerous world. What would have become of us were we not here? In what wretched workshop would you, a simple journeyman, be fashioning lenses? I would be shoveling manure in the stables where I was born. Without the shelter of our sacred order and of the seignorial power that offers us the privileges of this palace, would you and I be able to paint and study, Friar?”

“Do not see in our Señor anything more than you observe in other men, Friar, in the universe itself. Perhaps in that way we may save ourselves from the dangers of the adulation of the court, and of being completely forsaken. There is nothing exceptional about El Señor except the accident of his birth. Everything else is a matter of components common to every thing and every person: violence originates force, force begets joy, joy is converted into forms, forms eventually harden, cool, decay, and die. And death is the violence that reinitiates the cycle.”

“And suffering, Brother?”

“What suffering?”

“The same suffering you have been speaking of. The suffering that, as it changes, decays and dies.”

“I was speaking generally, not specifically, about El Señor.”

“Careful, Brother, nothing exists that is not made incarnate. And even in El Señor the suffering that, as you say, necessarily accompanies the passage from joyful violence to cold death must also be made incarnate. For our Señor is approaching death, the papers we have read tell us so. Death in life, it occurs to me, must be defeat and frustration, and this is the death, I suspect, that our Señor is living, although I recognize that I am incapacitated insofar as my ability to penetrate the secret motives of the decision that led him to create here in this palace and in those who inhabit it the perfect semblance of death. On the other hand, does the universe understand frustration? Tell me that, now that you are not only an astronomer but also a horoscopist.”

Toribio returned slowly to the room filled with lenses, condensers, telescopes, ustorious mirrors, charts of the heavens, compasses, and astrolabes. He stopped, followed closely by the questioning Brother Julián, beside an astrolabe; he seemed to be admiring the graduated rule, gently he stroked the sights that marked the divisions of the metal sphere: he set the device spinning.

“No, it does not know frustration. The universe functions, and fully expresses itself, always.”

“Is it pure force, then, pure realization, pure success, without the martyrdoms and beauties of joy, form, decadence and death? And if it is so, may I overcome with my painting the mortal norm El Señor imposes upon us? May I, with joy, form, decadence, death, and resurrection through martyrdom and the beauty of art, save myself from both the plenitude of the universe and the finiteness of El Señor, and thus establish the true human norm?”

Toribio spun the sphere faster and faster, murmuring: “A force that accounts for itself … a force born of the perfect equilibrium of death…”

He looked at the painter-priest. “Lightness is born of weight and weight of lightness; each expends in the same instant the benefits of its creation, each spends itself in proportion to its movement. And each, too, is simultaneously extinguished. All forces destroy themselves, but they also create each other; for them, death is mutual expiation and violent birth…”

With a deliberate, arbitrarily theatrical, gesture, the astrologer abruptly stopped the spinning of the astrolabe and added: “This is the law. Neither your painting nor my science may escape the norm. But the paradox is that, by violating it, they create it: the law exists thanks to those who oppose it with the violent exceptions of science and art.”

Julián placed one hand upon Toribio’s shoulder. “Brother, in his testament our Señor dabbles in the most detestable violations of the law of God; he combines all the anathematized heresies…”

“Heresies?” Brother Toribio’s eyebrows rose, and he laughed. “A good Spaniard is our Prince, and his heresies at times are nothing more than blasphemies…”

“Heresies or blasphemies, he discusses them, and allows them to run their course, exactly like our poor friend the Chronicler of this palace; poor Señor, too, for he cannot be sent to the galleys to expiate his sins. But I want to be charitable, Brother, and I ask myself, convinced by what you have just said, whether El Señor simply is not seeking, with pain, at a different level, the truths you say you have encountered through your telescope … Toribio, is El Señor too solitary? Could we not, you and I, for the good of all … approach him…?”

“Do not be deceived. El Señor does not seek what we seek.”

“We, Brother?”

“Yes, you, Julián, you and your painting. Do you think I cannot see? That is all I do do, poor thing that I am, poor cross-eyed Chaldean: if I can scrutinize the heavens, I am entirely able to observe a painting, quite capable of going to El Señor’s chapel and reading the signs of that painting they say was brought from Orvieto, perhaps so that the distance of the origin might also distance the painting and hide the real intentions of its creator…”

“Silence, Brother, please, silence.”

“Very well. But what I want to tell you is that there is no reason to pity El Señor, or to compare him to ourselves.”

“We have sworn obedience to him.”

“But there are many degrees of obedience, and above that of service to El Señor is the obedience you owe your art and I owe science; and above all, that we owe God.”

“Silence, please, silence; El Señor believes that to obey him is to obey God; there is no room either for your science or for my painting in the two obligations that govern us.”

“And nevertheless, in these papers El Señor doubts, and you believe that El Señor’s doubt is similar to our secular faith.”

“Yes, I believe that; obscurely, piously, I believe it … or at least I want to believe it.”

“But it isn’t true, Brother; his doubt is not doubt, his doubt is not our doubt; El Señor still lives in the old world, and truth may not be found among all those conceptual and analytical subtleties, distinctions, questions, and suppositions; these are the things you and I are going to leave behind forever: the words El Señor consigned to paper in these folios through the fervent hand of his lackey Guzmán are like a pile of bricks without cement or mortar to bind them; the least breath of air can tumble them, the cement is missing; their union is poetry and poetry is the lime, the sand, and the water of all things, poetry is logical knowledge, poetry is the fullness of human activity and creation; and poetry tells us, without El Señor’s doubts and tricks of logic, that nothing is as audacious or sinful as El Señor believes, that there is nothing that is unbelievable, and that nothing is impossible for the profound poetry that binds all things together. Poetry is cohesion and coherence; your art and my science tell us, Brother, that the possibilities we deny are merely possibilities we still do not know. Condemn those possibilities, as has El Señor, and you give them the name of evil. Open yourself to them, and you will know the solidarity of good and evil, how they mutually nourish one another, and the impossibilities of dissociating them: can you split a coin in half and still call it a ducat? The only reason El Señor examines his doubts is to conserve an order; he places his trust in the fact that the truth revealed can withstand all assaults upon it, those of reason as well as those of imagination; believe that, Brother Julián.”

“You and I, then … do we wish to destroy that order?”

“Now I am the one to say: silence, please, silence; let us simply proceed with our work, confident that the order of mathematics and the order of painting are, or in the end will be, identical to divine order.”

“In truth, you have not answered my question.”

“Allow me to answer in my fashion. Although nature, like the tormented Tantalus, has an insatiable hunger and thirst, nothing, basically, is destroyed; rather, nature creates a succession of new lives and new forms for her own nourishment; time destroys, but nature produces more rapidly than death destroys. In the depths of his soul, El Señor is opposed to nature; he opposes it, Brother, and this is the limited grandeur of his impossible combat; the earth wishes to lose life, desiring only constant reproduction: El Señor wishes to save his life, denying the increment of this holy terrestrial substance ordained by God. Not an inch further, El Señor has declared to nature, sequestering it forever within a parallel universe of stone and death: this palace. Who will denounce him for it if everyone, El Señor and you and I, are prisoners of the earliest and most ancient thoughts conceived by men in opposition to the cosmos? El Señor is the prisoner of the idea of a world designed by the Deity in a single act of immutable, irrepeatable, intransformable revelation; you and I are tributaries of the idea of a divine emanation which is in perpetual flux, realized by continual transformation … Yes, our poor Señor. He believes that, like creation itself, perfection is unfeeling, immutable, and unalterable.”

“Yes, I can see you are right. That is why he ordered the construction of this palace.”

“Then, like moles, ants, mice, and acids, like slow-moving rivers, like the wind, or the termite, you and I, allies of time and flux, must undermine his project from within so that the palace itself may suffer the imperfection of being alterable, generative, and mutable, for this is the law of nature, and there would be no benefits, but only misery, if the earth were one enormous pile of unfeeling sand, or one enormous mass of immutable jade, or if, following the flood, the frozen waters had turned it into an enormous crystal globe, perfect, but unalterable. Our Señor deserves to find himself encountering a Medusa head that would transform him into a diamond statue: he would find perfection there. But that may be his fear: to be transformed into something else, anything, even an eternal statue lacking life or movement.”

“But God is eternal, unchanging, as El Señor wishes to be; and God lives … He is…”

“Everything that is eternal is circular, and what is circular is eternal. My God, Brother! Do you not yet realize that this movement, this change, this perpetual regeneration means that God creates, creates unceasingly, animates everything, makes it spin for His greater glory, as if He wished to see His own creation from every angle, from every perspective, in the round, wished every conceivable view of the flowing marvels He conceives?”

“And you claim to have observed that movement, that order, in the heavens, to know when and where the stars are moving, how they are measured, and what they produce? Can you, therefore, deny that your pride is as great as El Señor’s, for even though you will not admit it, you believe you possess the same genius as the Creator of the heavens?”

“I only believe that, having logically approached a comprehension of the structure of the universe, which God knew instantly and without temporal rationality, whereas we approach that comprehension step by step, and rationally, it would be ruinous to divorce the word of God from the work of God. The truth that astronomy demonstrates is the same truth already known to Divine Wisdom. Or do you believe that everything you see here should be destroyed, my charts, my spheres, my crystals, that I should cease to observe the heavens so that the divine presence might be made manifest without obstacles? Whom would my inactivity benefit? God, who brought me into the world so that I might know a fraction of what He has always known? El Señor himself, our temporal sovereign, who, in spite of everything, changes, suffers, and decays like every other living thing, and who needs that someone, although he would never say it, know the truth? Believe me, Brother; it is better that someone know these things, even if in silence; someday they can be, if not the accepted truth, at least an alternative to a policy of despair, or what is the same thing, repetition. And endless repetition changes the name of the despair that nourishes it; finally, Julián, it is called destruction.”

“Brother Toribio; I love you; you know that. I am merely saying what the Holy Office would say if it knew … if it knew that you affirm these things.”

“The partial knowledge of one man does not offend the total knowledge of God.”

“They would say that the center of the universe is the earth, the seat of Creation, the seat of humanity, and the seat of the Church…”

“Does it diminish the omnipotence of God to say that what God once performed can never happen again? Invert this negative proposition and you will understand what it is I do: little by little I identify human thought with divine thought, not with past thought, but thought that is taking place now; not with the design revealed one day, a simple initial act, but with its flow, its perpetual emanation and transformation.”

“You are looking into a deep abyss, and you make me dizzy.”

“I am not looking at the shadows of the cavern; I am bathing in the river. That is my desire.”

“May it also be your fear. For through that hole you have opened in the heavens our spirits may drain away from us, and if we lose our souls, what good will your frozen rhomboids and triangles do us?”

“The universe is infinite; perhaps we may lose what we consider our individual soul, and gain the soul of all creation…”

“Oh, my brother, and what if your discoveries carry you to this terrible, terrible conclusion: what if you discover that the divine order of the infinite is one thing, and the infinite order of nature something different? What if we discover that there are two infinites? Which would we choose, Brother?”

Toribio bowed his head and walked toward the table where the ustorious mirror stood. He did not speak for a long time. The day burst forth and the rays of the sun began to play upon the icy crystal. Finally he spoke: “I do not know what to answer.”

“They will say that if the universe is ruled by its own laws, the powers of the Holy Father are not important, or those of powerful Señores like our own, or…”

The supplicant friar began to stammer; Brother Toribio spoke reluctantly. “I imagine nothing of this; no; that is what God does; it is God who made man mortal, for had He made him immortal, neither the world nor the presence of man in the world would have been necessary; man is mortal, therefore the world exists as the abode of mortality. Is this true, Brother?”

“They will condemn you, Brother; this is true: man was created immortal, in the image and semblance of God; and only because of Original Sin did he lose his divine attributes. Our religion is based upon these three stones: Original Sin, inherent corruption, and divine pardon. Destroy these foundations and you destroy the very edifice of the Church, which would then have no reason for being; for if man did not sin originally, then he is still God-like and can commune directly with God, without need for the mediating grace of the Church…”

“… Was the proposal of creation to bind the feet and hands of man and then immediately condemn him because he cannot walk? No, Brother; for me, man’s mortality is part of the divine plan of Creation; for me, dying is part of man’s freedom, of God’s loving paternity, and of the law of movement and change; these are my three foundation stones, it must be so; God made the earth in the form of a sphere and set it spinning in a uniform revolution with other celestial bodies that alter the earth and consequently are themselves alterable. If this is the eternal law of the universe, how could the law of the tiny man inhabiting a tiny planet be any different? how? how, Brother? if the universe changes and decays and dies and is renewed, why would we be the exception? No, man was conceived mortal, he was born to die, and there is no inherent corruption in him, but rather corporeal and spiritual perfectibility.”

“And if there is no sin or corruption, divine pardon is unnecessary. No, Brother! They will judge you, they will condemn you, they will force you first to retract, and then they will burn you, Brother; the earth does not spin as you say it does, or rise or descend, because above the earth is Heaven…”

“I tell you that the earth is in the heavens!”

“… and beneath the earth is Hell, and it will not be you who crumbles the hierarchies of established truth.”

“And nevertheless, man’s death is the condition of his eternity.”

Brother Toribio placed the face of the concave crystal of the ustorious mirror toward the sun, and the sun obeyed, casting its rays with fury upon the crystal. The friar placed the folios of El Señor’s testament beneath the lens. Brother Julián ran to stay the hand of the uranographer: “Brother, what are you doing, what new madness is this? Guzmán will ask me for these papers, they bear the seal of our Señor…”

The sun’s rays began to burn the papers, clustered together in the ring of the lens, a tightly bound fascine of fire. “Do not worry about Guzmán, he is an unimportant lackey; place the blame on me, Brother; say it was my carelessness, an accident…”

The smoldering, curling flames devoured the folios.

“You are right, Brother. I shall say nothing.”

“Let these condemnable papers be burned, Julián, and the volumes of my library be saved. Look at them; their pages are in Arabic and Hebrew script. They could be considered more culpable than these dark blasphemies and foolish heresies dictated by El Señor to Guzmán, and delivered to you by Guzmán … under what pretext, by the way?”

“The same I used when I gave the papers of the Chronicler to him, which was how El Señor discovered these dissident heretics that today so delight and perturb him. Go, Guzmán, I told him, let El Señor see these papers, he will understand their contents. Guzmán said the same thing to me today. That he understood nothing. That I judge.”

Julián looked at Toribio with great affection. “I shall say nothing.”

The two friars embraced, and Toribio whispered to Julián: “I shall write nothing, as the disciples of Pythagoras wrote nothing. But not because of fear, oh, no, Brother…”

“You do well; believe that my spirit is relieved, knowing your resolution.”

“But understand me: not from fear…”

And Julián, embracing his comrade, not seeing his eyes, but feeling in the encompassing embrace the trembling of the astrologer-priest, did not wish to ask: Are you weeping? is it then because of pride since it is not fear?; but Toribio himself spoke: “Because of my scorn. There are more drones than bees in this world. I shall not reveal what I know to the mockery of mediocre men. I have spent much time, much love and care, in understanding a few things that for me are beautiful: I shall not expose myself either to the scorn or the mockery of miserable charlatans … Mockery, Brother: ‘Look what this squint-eyed Chaldean has seen through his powerful crystals, with his celestial spectacles…’”

“Brother … sit down … wait … rest.”

“I shall disclose nothing; we will wait. I shall disclose nothing, but neither shall El Señor. The sun will devour both his words and mine.”

“And if El Señor himself asks an accounting of the destruction of his papers?”

“As is my courtly custom, I shall draw him a happy horoscope; there I shall demonstrate that the destructive sign of Scorpio determined the fatal loss of his testament. He will accept his unfortunate loss in exchange for the many false ventures that with eulogies and dithyrambs and comparisons to the gods and heroes of antiquity I shall announce to him. And that will be that, Brother. Come; let us go drink; let us go laugh … although he who laughs last, weeps first.”

A pilgrim without a country, the son of several lands, and therefore the forgotten orphan of all lands, Celestina’s companion, the blond youth with the blood-red cross upon his back, attempted to recognize in the feeble light of this dawn the place where he had been led; he walked to the foot of the astronomer’s tall stone tower which reminded him vaguely of other buildings similarly oriented toward the stars. The youth’s desire soared upward with that of the ascendant, supplicant tower. He looked about him; he saw the flat land of Castile, the calm dust of early morning, the even and shadowless silhouette of the mountains at dawn standing darkly against the first rays of the sun; he saw the swift passing of black horses, and the slow step of steaming oxen dragging carts heaped with straw, hay, and blocks of granite; with an early-morning flock of storks, he flew in search of a nesting site, he heard the cawing of the crows circling above the roofs of this interminable palace, he smelled the burned skin and dripping fat of a lamb roasting in some tile shed on the work site, and he listened to the first cattle bells of the day; he touched the gray stone of the tower and there, in spite of the recentness of the construction, his fingers felt an ancient and persistent sign of life, a hollow mysteriously worked in the stone, and in that sheltered place a tiny sprig of wheat was germinating. The pilgrim looked toward that land to which he had returned and asked himself whether it was so inhospitable that wheat was forced to grow in stone; and he tried to recall other fields, in another world he had known where tall green stalks grew bearing thick, flexible, hard, and yellow leaves, he thought of a different bread, the bread of the other world, the red and yellow grains.

He raised his arms above his head, he held his open palms to the sky, to the tower, not knowing as he did so whether he was praying, giving thanks, or attempting to remember; and in the instant he held his hands toward the dawn sky, two stones fell from the top of the tower, one large, the other smaller, the larger upon his left palm and the smaller on the right; the stones were cold, as if they had been all night in the cold night air; but as he closed his fists around them, the youth, excited by this miracle, quickly communicated warmth to them; the skies of Spain rained stones.

He returned to Jerónimo’s forge, drawn by the soft, sad sound of a flute being played, with closed eyes, by the stranger arrived the night before, that strange, first night the pilgrim had spent in Castilian lands, one he would always remember, when lights moved unassisted along the passageways of the dark palace, when wheat grew in stone, when dead falcons flew from windows, and bats — he had seen it — soared back and forth above his head carrying mutilated limbs, shinbones, ears, skulls; when, finally, the skies rained stones.

The youth clutched the stones as if they were two precious jewels. He reached the forge where Jerónimo, Celestina, and the blind flutist maintained their vigil. Above the strains of the plaintive flute, he heard the footsteps of an armed company approaching across the plain. Jerónimo rose to his feet. Celestina took his arm.

“It does not matter,” she said. “Let them come and take us with them. That is the reason my companion and I have come.”

The flutist ceased his playing and cleaned his instrument, wiping it upon the tatters of his ancient doublet. The pilgrim kept the two stones in his hands as the members of El Señor’s guard seized an unresisting Celestina; they approached the youth, and he, too, offered no resistance; he had known, since the night in the mountains when he had made love to the page-and-drummer with the tattooed lips, that he had come to this place in order to face a Señor and tell him what the pilgrim himself — though he knew it — was reluctant to believe.

THE SECOND TESTAMENT

“I. I … by the grace of God … knowing, according to the doctrine of St. Paul the Apostle … what comes after that, Guzmán, what are the words dictated by our testamentary tradition?”

“… how, following sin, it is ordained by Divine Providence that all men die in punishment of it. Señor, it is not time…”

“… and as the goodness of our God is so full and great … how, Guzmán? read it, read me what it says in the breviary…”

“That that same death which is punishment for our guilt is received by Him as due preparation of life, and we suffer it gladly … Señor, for God’s…”

“Gladly, Guzmán? Have you seen my preternaturally aged members, my body sapped by the excesses inherited from those mummies and skeletons that the day before yesterday we entombed here for all time, the flame of my body that in spite of everything persists in igniting, and which must then be extinguished with penitence, words of repentance, flagellation, and unending nightmares … for I have no right to contaminate Isabel; true, Guzmán?”

“Do not vex yourself so, Señor…”

“If she became pregnant, Guzmán, what would be born of our coupling but another corpse, a monster dead before it was born, a tiny mummy destined to the cradle of the sepulcher, to be rocked in one of the crypts we have constructed here, is that not true, Guzmán?”

“And from your union with Inés, Señor, what will be born?”

“Evil; the unknown. Why did you bring her to me?”

“The unknown, yes. Perhaps good; chance; the renewal of your blood.”

“And patience…? What do I say now? What does the dogma say?”

“… and we come to our death with rational will, compelled not so much by the natural obligation of death, as to welcome it as transit and passage to eternal felicity and the well-lived life…”

“Doubt, Guzmán, doubt; look in my mirror; climb the thirty-three steps of my stairway and give the lie to dogma, affirm in opposition to the dogma that if we are resurrected it will be in ethereal flesh or in flesh different from that in which we live, are constituted, and move upon the earth; affirm, Guzmán, that if we are resurrected it may well be in the form of a sphere lacking any resemblance to the body we inhabit; deny, too, that on the day of final judgment resurrection will be simultaneous for all the men who have been born upon the earth, and that instead each will be resurrected in his time and his manner, from the bellies of she-wolves, from the coupling of dogs, from the eggs of serpents, from the indifferent union of the insects that infest stagnant waters; and by this reasoning we can believe, trembling, that the formation of the human body — in the womb of Isabel, in the womb of Inés, in the breast of my mother — is the work of the Devil, and that those conceptions in the womb of my mother or Inés or Isabel are the result of demons; yes, Guzmán, for if the first God — whom we do not know and who does not know us — created a first, perfect Heaven, there was no place in it for the imperfection of mortal men who are but the creations of Lucifer; Lucifer is the wound in the perfect Heaven through which Paradise seeps, the crack through which oozes the creation of something that is of no interest to an all-perfect and all-powerful God: men, you and I, Guzmán; take advantage of the birth of this new day to write my second testament; this I bequeath them: a future of resurrections that may be glimpsed only in forgotten pauses, in the orifices of time, in the dark empty minutes during which the past tried to imagine the future. This I bequeath: a blind, pertinacious, and painful return to the imagination of the future in the past and the only future possible to my race and my land. Do you understand what I am saying, Guzmán? Append, append these harsh formulas. This is my second testament.”

“Señor, there is no time now. And this second testament is unnecessary since you dictated another yesterday.”

“Append what I say. Yesterday I did not know Inés. Append. Add words to words. Will this palace survive? Should it not survive, let words serve as its continuity and reproduce the life that was lived within it.”

“So that dying we shall be faithful and loyal witnesses to the infallible truth that our God spoke to the first fathers: that sinning, they, and we their descendants, all would die…”

“False, Guzmán: God does not desire; God does not exist: God is but potential, He can do anything, but it serves Him naught, for He neither desires nor exists; He despises us; sin is being, sin is loving. Guzmán, Guzmán, what intolerable pain … come, place the red stone in the palm of my hand…”

“Have you finished, Sire?”

“Yes, yes … Guzmán, do you never doubt?”

“If I had power, Señor, I should never doubt anything.”

“But you do not have it, poor Guzmán.”

“And soon you shall not have it if you do not act against the dangers that threaten you.”

“I know well these dangers; they are the menace of a too-enlightened soul; they lurk about me here, in this chamber, in these galleries, in this chapel; I know them all too well, Guzmán; they are the dangers of the man who possesses both wisdom and power, irreconcilable gifts; I wish I were a brute like my murdering and warring ancestors who lie outside there in my crypt and chapel; to exercise power unaware; what relief, Guzmán, what profound peace, if only it could be so; the accumulation of time has added knowledge, doubt, skepticism, and the weakness of tolerance to the original deposit of power; that is the danger, can you not realize it?; I exorcise that danger with words, penitence, reason, and delirium; with sins, to the end of being pardoned…”

“Your danger lies outside, Señor, and only power can undo it.”

“Power? Again?”

“Always, Señor.”

“Was one crime not enough? Did I not fulfill my duties to power by basing it, that one time, upon the death of innocents?”

“This is vital, Señor; you must again act as God acts: not by being; not by loving; only by being able — power. You have said it yourself.”

“And I myself rejected it.”

“You cannot pay your debts with the words of your testament.”

“What are you saying? Everything belongs to me. The earth is mine; the earth is bounded, limited, by what I possess. Everything the land produces is mine, harvests, herds, everything is brought to my palace, delivered to my gates by vassals and serfs as it was to the gates of my fathers and my grandfathers…”

“Yes; your vassals still bring what they owe you under the old laws, but there are fewer vassals and less tribute, and the expenses of the construction are greater, and greater, too, the number of products that no longer pass through your hands. The cities, Sire … the cities today receive the greatest part of the riches…”

“But I continue to receive what I have always received: such is the law of my kingdoms…”

“Yes, and a good law it was when you received more than anyone else. But today, though you continue to receive the same, you receive much less than others. The cities, Señor. Almost everything today is taken directly from the fields to the nearest city instead of making the long trip to this palace, and from the city, merchants bring things here, and you must pay for them. You continue to receive what you have always received: so many head of cattle, so many sheaves of wheat, so many bales of hay. But you must now pay for things not due your sovereignty. Cadavers arrive here from great distances, but not the eggs, vegetables, bacon that are delivered to the markets of the burghers. These are no longer the golden times of your father, Señor…”

“What are you saying to me? Eggs, vegetables! I am speaking to you of death and sin and the resurrection of souls, and you speak to me of bacon?”

“Without eggs and bacon, one cannot speak of the soul. The world beyond the castles has changed, without your having realized it. Forgive my effrontery. The people constantly require less and less from you. People have invented their own world, without corpses, without sin, without the torments of the soul…”

“Then it did no good to kill them. Then heresy has triumphed. Then I am an imbecile. Is this what you are saying?”

“Señor, my devotion is to you alone, and it includes speaking the truth. I know nothing of theology. I only know that instead of working at your command and for the use of your kingdom, now men are producing things without your command, and selling them…”

“To whom?”

“To how many, you mean. Why, to buyers: whomever; they receive money; they use intermediaries; they specialize; there are new powers being formed not upon blood but upon the commerce of salt, leather, wine, wheat, and meat…”

“My power is of divine origin.”

“There is a greater divinity, if you will forgive me, Señor, and that power is called money. And the law of that god is that after debts are contracted, they must be paid. Señor: your coffers are empty.”

“What, then, is being used to pay the servants of this palace? The construction? The workmen?”

“Precisely, Sire; there is nothing left with which to pay them. This is what I urgently needed to tell you, once the ceremonies for the dead had been concluded. I did not want to bother you before that. Now it is my duty to inform you that the construction of the crypts for your ancestors, and the costly transportation of all the corpses here, have consumed everything that remained.”

“But the riches within the palace; the iron railings forged in Cuenca, the balustrades from Zaragoza, the Italian marbles, the Florentine bronzes, the Flemish candelabra…”

“All still owed; nothing has been paid; your credit is great, but the moment for payment has arrived.”

“What? Why are you holding my testament? What is that new paper?”

“A detailed listing of what is owed: debts with smiths, shipowners, butchers, carpenters, bakers, salt merchants, weavers, fullers, dyers, shoemakers — and look here, one of them is complaining that the youth who accompanied your mother forced him to eat the leather of his shoes; he asks indemnification for it; one must pay for such willful behavior — harness makers, drapers, vintners, brewers, barbers, doctors, tavern keepers, tailors, silk merchants … Should I continue, Señor?”

“But, Guzmán, everything used to be produced here in the castle…”

“There is no one now but the workmen constructing the palace and those of the religious orders, who serve death. There is honor. There is no money.”

“And what do you propose, Guzmán?”

Guzmán walked to the entrance to the bedchamber; he parted the curtain separating it from the chapel. A stooped old man was standing behind the curtain. A short fur cape protected him against the cold of the early morning and the long night’s vigil in the stone chapel; but the cape did not warm the rock crystal of his carved, avaricious features, or the blue snow of his eyes.

A cap of marten skins covered his head; his long, knotted fingers toyed with a silver medallion hanging upon his emaciated chest; his black breeches clung loosely to spindly legs. His toothless mouth was distorted into an obsequious smile; this old javel bowed before El Señor, professed his fealty, and thanked him for the honor of being received; he had waited many hours, all night, in that icy chapel, with no companion but the dead; it was a most sumptuous chapel, what had the balustrades, the marbles, the paintings, the sepulchers themselves, cost?; a fortune, doubtlessly, a fortune; the quality of the workmanship, the cost of the transport, then the installation, which was also very costly, no doubt …

No, he wasn’t complaining about the wait; he had observed, he had seen; he had admired the great construction; no one except the royal servants knew what it was like inside; curiosity was high, as great as the fame of this interminable palace; and he had special reason to appreciate this place and he wasn’t complaining of the fatiguing trip he had undertaken from Seville so that he might know it, so he might offer his service to El Señor and also know the place where his daughter, the rare fruit of a late marriage, was preparing to take her vows; strange girls, those of today, Señor, and his girl — instead of taking advantage of everything an aged father close to death and made rich by commerce and the moneylending arts could offer her — preferred to cloister herself in this palace; surely the old adage was right: when an old man has a daughter, if he’s lucky, she’ll pay him heed, but if she’s inclined to madness, she’s very mad indeed; and add to that fact that she’s a Sevillian, then if she turns out all right, she’s one in a million; well, the blood is tired, and the child of an old man is early an orphan; tired the blood, yes, but not the mind, especially if throughout a lifetime that mind has been sharpened, day in and day out, by the clever dealings demanded by the merchant’s trade and by the evil called usury, which in truth is not an evil at all but an act of charity; but in any case, experience is the best teacher, and as a merchant I just go on my way, you know, not too much loss, not too much pay, though if I do say so, I’ve had a sharp nose when it comes to detecting when the price of metals is going up and when the price of salt is going down, and dealing accordingly with my colleagues on the Baltic and the Adriatic, for the merchant who doesn’t know his lore closes his store; invest a little here, withdraw a little there, the coin of a miser is money that’s wiser … a marvelous word, money, Señor; money … fondle it, sow it, and watch it grow, fertilized by commerce and manufacture, into a tree with great spreading branches, mining, maritime transport, the administration of lands, and loans to princes in need of funds for war, exploration … and the construction of palaces.

Ah, this palace should be completed, didn’t El Señor think so? it would be a shame to leave it half done, just a shell, looking as if the curses of Heaven had rained down upon it; it was El Señor’s lifework, wasn’t it, and it was for this he would be remembered in centuries to come; it was to erect this palace that he’d devastated the ancient Castilian orchard, turned it to dust, had removed peasants from their lands and shepherds from their hills, and put them to work as laborers in exchange for wages, very well, very well, and there’s nothing I can teach you on this subject, Señor, you’re aware that there’s no reason the products necessarily should belong to the man who produces them, what good do they do him without the legs of someone to carry his produce to market for him, and the hands of a lender who can provide in case of a bad harvest, a storm, an accident, or overspending? We’ve been damned, Señor, and nevertheless I insist our mission is one of charity. And we’ve not always been well paid. In my long life I have known grandees of these Spanish lands who out of pure madness for luxury and honor and appearances have after plowing their lands planted them with silver, as if the metal could sprout and yield new fruit; I have known them to cook with candles of precious wax in order to impress their own scullions, and impress themselves; I have known them at the end of a celebration to order thirty horses to be burned alive, for the pure pleasure of the wasteful spectacle that allows them to believe they are above the common mortal. And the worst is that they have at times murdered the moneylenders who come to their aid. You see, then, Señor, the demands and dangers of my miserable office.

In any case, let every whore ply her trade and every ruffian turn his deal, the products must belong to those who encourage their production, transform them, increase their value greatly, didn’t El Señor agree? times have changed, the codes of yesteryear no longer have their old following, their old value; it used to be that illness and hunger caused men to cherish hopes of the world beyond, but now a man can work, Señor, dedicate his life to hard labor, and harvest his fruits right here on earth, and in spite of low origins, know the favors of merit, if not those of blood: money makes a man whole and when he has bread his suffering is diminished: I live, Exalted Señor, from what I earn and from the money I change; that will not impede me from serving you and from sustaining with my tired old bones a power based on inherited rank. Do not judge me harsly; new times, new ways; the interdictions of our faith, which have dealt so harshly with my office, belong to a destroyed and sick and hungry world, Señor, to a stagnant world; the sinful stigma cast upon the practice of usury by Christians forced Jews to fulfill this necessary function; but if you persecute the Jews, who will fulfill it? and will an act of necessary charity be condemned when pure Christians like myself practice it, Señor? Then my occupation must be accepted as a sign of a strengthened and salutary faith which promises two Paradises: one here and one beyond, one now and one later: is this not an admirable promise? And finally, one must consider that my sins, if they are sins, are compensated and perhaps even pardoned by the fact that my sweet daughter, my only heir, to whom, naturally, I shall leave all my money, is preparing in this very palace for her permanent vows and her marriage with Christ.

So sooner or later, Señor, my copious wealth will have to pass through the hands of the good nuns of your palace, for Inés, my daughter, will by then have made her personal vow of poverty. As a result, what I am now more than disposed to lend you so that you can pay your debts — at a modicum of interest, twenty percent annually — will not only resolve your present but your future problems as well: my money, thanks to Inesilla, will revert to El Señor’s fortune, as the girl — whom from the chapel I watched leave your bedchamber this night — will again demonstrate her devotion to El Señor, in the same way El Señor demonstrates his devotion to her father in a thousand little ways, for in dealing with El Señor a man will not have to come many times to the well, and anyone who comes to the aid of El Señor must surely receive something more than the ordinary moneylender’s interest, for El Señor can make a gentleman of a flea, and permit me in December to enjoy the pleasures of May, and add honor to riches. You will emerge the winner, Sire, believe me, you will emerge the winner.

Now, if this gentleman can prepare the paper, the pen, the ink, the blotting sand, and seals, we can proceed to an agreement; I am cold, I am sleepy, it has been a very long night and in my long waiting, seated behind the chancel of the nuns, I have dreamed terrible dreams. Forgive my excessive loquacity; let us get on with it; it is getting late, let us get on with it.

El Señor, numb in body and soul, took the pen. But first, narrowing his glassy eyes, he asked: “If I may, I would like to pose a question to this gentleman: If your powers as a merchant and moneylender are so extensive, why do you accept mine?”

The aged moneylender bowed his head. “Unity, Sire, unity. Without a visible head, bodies are wont to be dispersed. Without a supreme power to which to appeal, we would devour each other like wolves. Thank you, Sire.”

That morning Guzmán attended El Señor as he tended his sick falcons, with various ointments, brews, and infusions to ease the complaints of his prostrate master exhausted by ills too long held at bay which suddenly appeared, scourge in hand, and by sleeplessness, love-making, and the increasing horror of his conscience.

“Drink this, Señor”—Guzmán held the potion to his lips—“drink this grama tea that is an admirable remedy against difficulties of the urine and especially against those resulting from ulcers of the bladder, and let me rub your feet with this hot, damp bile of the wildcat, which soothes and assuages the pain of gout.”

“Who opened the skylight, Guzmán? The room is filled with mosquitoes; it is summer, and as the ponds on this plain are dead water, mosquitoes feed there.”

“Do not worry, Señor, I have placed a vessel containing bear’s blood beneath your bed, and all the mosquitoes will gather there and drown.”

“And I, I am drowning…”

“But, Señor, you should be happy; that aged Sevillian moneylender has given us new life, the palace can be completed; you must reward him; besides, he is the father of the novitiate, give him the title, at least, of Comendador; he is old, give him that pleasure before he dies.”

El Señor moaned. “Who is that old man, who is he, really? Is he the Devil, a homunculus come here to humiliate me, to offer me money in exchange for my life; but that is the most horrible sin of simony, does he want my soul in exchange for his money?”

“This is the way of progress, Señor, and the old Sevillian does not exercise a diabolic profession but a liberal one.”

“Liberal? Progress?”

“Progress like that of the sun in its daily course, or of the corpses of your grandfathers to this palace, except that it is now applied to the ascendant road of an entire society; and liberal, Señor, as befits free men who are opposed to servility.”

“But as the sun is born and dies on the horizon, so I conceive that this progress of yours will die of the same causes that engender it; and insofar as liberal is concerned, any serf that attempted to be liberal would run counter to the laws of nature; I do not know these words.”

“The only knowledge is action, Señor.”

“There is hereditary dignity, Guzmán, that cannot be bought or sold.”

“There is the dignity of risk, Señor, one can live with and like either angels or the Devil, one may choose; knowing his limitations, one is free to ascend or descend.”

“No, Guzmán, the only human hierarchy is based upon possession of an immortal soul and its patrimony in the life eternal.”

“No, Señor, there is fate, there is fortune, and there is the virtue which constantly checks that hierarchy and transforms it; man is the glory, the mockery, and the enigma of the world, and the world is an undecipherable enigma either for man’s glory or for his mockery.”

“There is repression, humiliation, and sacrifice, in order to gain eternal life, Guzmán.”

“There is passion, ambition, and desire to gain earthly life, Señor.”

“Wisdom is revealed, Guzmán.”

“Prudence is acquired through trial and error, Sire.”

“The highest ideal is that of the contemplative gentleman meditating upon the Scriptures and the dogma of the Revelation, Guzmán.”

“There are no absolute ideals, Señor, only secular prizes for a life of action.”

“Truths are eternal, Guzmán, and I do not want them to change, I do not want that primary wisdom my family has conserved for centuries to be converted into an object of usury, to be debauched by men like that old man, a man so low he would sell his own daughter, and the multitude like him; I know them, Guzmán, I know their horrifying history, I recall the fate of the Children’s Crusade that set forth to do battle for Christ in the land of the Infidel but instead fell into the hands of Hughes Ferreus and Guillaume Porcus, arms makers of Marseilles, who offered the children free transport to the Holy Land, but actually carried them to the barbarous coasts of Africa, where they sold the innocents as slaves to the Arabs. And will you tell me that I, too, have killed, Guzmán? Yes, but in the name of power and the Faith, or in the name of the power of the Faith, but never for money. And I suspect that he who dedicates his toil to money can be nothing but a falsifying Jew, a convert, a filthy pig, even though he bears the name of a pure Christian; the doctor who mutilated my own mother and almost killed her said his name was Cuevas, and he insisted he was a good and pure Spaniard until they discovered the prayer books and candelabra of Jewry in his house. Are you amazed by the confidence I place in you, Guzmán? Now you shall know: the Spanish nobility is infested with converted Jews, false faithful, and only among the people of your own low estate does one find today the old, uncontaminated Christian bloodlines. Do not tell me now, Guzmán, that you have allied yourself with the enemies of our eternal order…”

“Señor, for God’s sake, everything I do, I do because of intense devotion to your interests…”

“But you believe that my interests can be reconciled with those of that band of merchants and moneylenders, simonists, enemies of the Holy Spirit?”

“They can and they must be, Señor; the new forces are a reality: dominate them or they will dominate you. That is my sincere counsel.”

“No, no, I am right, our line ends here and now, the world may die with us but it will not change, the world is well contained within the limits of this palace, Guzmán; whom are you defending, on whose side are you? tell me.”

“Señor, I repeat, I serve El Señor, I advise him and I warn him that he must make use of the new powers so they do not make use of him: if you honor him with the title of Comendador, the aged moneylender will feel an obligation to honor and obey El Señor; at the same time El Señor can enjoy Doña Inés, and renew his blood, now that the seed is weary of growing in the same field; recognize the bastard and contravene the madness and intrigue of the Queen Mother who offers an idiot heir; and if not her madness, then the restlessness of the workmen who are sheltering a second pretender who arrived yesterday in the company of a page-and-drummer who is actually a woman, although dressed in the customary attire of a man, part of your mother’s train; threat is added to threat, the designs of the women and the designs of the world are being joined, and if El Señor wishes somewhere to encounter the Devil, he may find him in the horrendous coupling of woman and the world.”

“What are you doing to avert these threats?”

“What it is my place to do: order the arrest of the masquerading drummer and her young companion, and if El Señor authorizes, torture them.”

“Why?”

“They went directly to the forge of the smith Jerónimo, and have remained there with all the grumbling workmen my men have heard and observed.”

“A drummer who is actually a woman…”

“A Devil with tattooed lips, Señor.”

“A youth accompanying her, you say?”

“Yes, identical to … to the young Prince your mother brought here, even down to the signs of a common monstrosity: six toes on each foot, and a blood-red cross upon their backs…”

“Twins, Guzmán? Do you know the prophecy?”

“No, Señor…”

“Twins always announce the end of dynasties. They are the excess that promises immediate extinction. And a swift renascence. Ah, Guzmán, why have you been so slow to reveal these things to me? Can these twins be the dual sign of the disappearance of my house and the foundation of a new line? Guzmán, do not torture me any more; enough; have the usurpers, the enemies to my uniqueness and to the permanence of my order, arrived at the very doors of my palace?”

“I am not torturing El Señor; I use the root, slim as chard and bursting with pungent liquor, of the turpeth-of-the-East, a name that meant ‘quitcares’… and I am relieved of one care, knowing that finally El Señor understands the singular nature of the dangers threatening him…”

“Bring the youth and the disguised girl before me. Help me, Guzmán, the pain…”

“I am helping El Señor, who only tortures himself. And I shall take charge of averting the threats of which I have spoken … with El Señor’s permission.”

“Enough, enough, Guzmán, the only care you can relieve me of is this fear that things change, that the world can exist beyond the world contained within my palace … You must realize, Guzmán: I killed innocent people in order to assure the permanence of my world. Do not tell me that usury, money, debt, and a pair of unknown youths threaten that world; do not snatch away, Guzmán, my reason for being; do not destroy the very foundation stone of my existence; everything … here … within the stone walls of my palace; here my doubts; here my crimes; here my loves; here my ills; here my Faith; here my mother and her Idiot Prince and her dwarf; here my untouched wife; here, part of me and my palace, these two strangers whom you will bring before me; here my contradictory words, Guzmán, and also my vulnerability; I know I am contradictory, as are my profound Faith and the string of heresies I repeat, to test it, yes, but also to demonstrate to you, to myself, to no one, to everyone, to the very walls, for they have ears, that my knowledge is as certain as it is weak, that that prisca sapientia, that fundamental knowledge, is not foreign to me, I guard it here, here in my head, here in my breast, Guzmán, adding light to shadow and shadow to light so that somewhere, in spite of and because of contradictions, the intelligence may exist that nothing is totally good or totally evil; that I know, although not everyone believes or knows or understands that I know it, and this is the privilege of the long continuity of my house upon this earth, with all its crimes and madness, that justifies everything, Guzmán, that is my wisdom, and everything that has happened has happened so that someone, one person, one single person, that I, may know it, and that, sadly, is enough; one cannot use that wisdom in governing, for then, you are right, he would lose his kingdom, although not the knowledge that good and evil are one and that each nourishes the other; I know that, although it serves me no purpose, but your usurer from Seville does not know it, or your grumbling workmen, nor do you yourself know it, Guzmán, for on the day you, any of you, sit upon my throne, you will have to learn it again, beginning from nothing, and you will commit the same crimes but in the name of other gods: money, justice, that progress of which you speak; none of you will have the minimal tolerance my awareness of madness, evil, fatality, impossibility, human frailty, illness, pain, and the inconstancy of pleasure assures us. Balance, a precarious balance, Guzmán: to burn a youth only for an obviously abominable crime, and for no other; to protect the life but punish the guilt of my Chronicler by sending him to the galleys as a cure for his innocence; to make myself blind and deaf to any other evidence. Who did the painting in the chapel? You would want to know Guzmán, if you saw, as I have seen in it, a culpable rebelliousness of the soul, but I know how to be deaf and blind and mute when the solution to one problem creates a thousand new ones. Look at that map on the wall: look at its limits, the Pillars of Hercules, the mouths of the Tagus, Cape Finisterre, distant, frigid Iceland, then the universal abyss, the shoulders of Atlas, the slow and deliberate turtle upon whose shell the world rests: Guzmán, swear to me that there is nothing more; I would go mad if the world extended one inch beyond the confines we know; if it were so, I would have to learn everything again, begin everything again, and I would know no more than the usurer, the workman, or you know; my shoulders, like those of Atlas, are tired: I can bear no more weight; nor is there room on my head for one additional fathom of sea or one additional square acre of land; Spain is contained within Spain, and Spain is this palace…”

“Look at me, Señor,” said Guzmán, “look at me, understand me, multiply the number of men like me, and be assured. Spain can no longer be contained within Spain.”

Quickly, huntsmen, said Guzmán as he left the bedchamber of the delirious El Señor, send an armed guard to the plain and bring to El Señor’s chapel that drummer and her young companion; we will not rest a moment, so as not to allow our exhausted sovereigns a moment’s rest; let our muscles and our tireless blood act so we will heap fatigue upon the heads and hearts of our Señores; what good and efficient confederates I have, who imitated the howling of Bocanegra and thus justified the death of El Señor’s favorite dog, who took advantage of El Señor’s diseased sleep to exchange burned tapers for fresh ones, fill emptied pitchers, and reverse the time of the hourglasses; from the common grave where it slept the eternal sleep with the cadaver of Bocanegra, they rescued the corpse of the sailor who arrived here in the coffin of El Señor’s father, and they buried it in its rightful tomb to mock the plans of the Mad Lady; quickly, let us act, for our way is action and theirs the madness of irrationality; quickly, let us find the Mad Lady and tell her that the proclamation announcing the Prince and the dwarf as heirs to the crown will take place this very morning; and the huntsmen who have insinuated themselves into the ranks of the rebellious workmen, let them go to the quarries, the forges, and the tile sheds, and tell men like Jerónimo and Martín and Nuño not to fear, that I am with them, that the gates of the palace will be open to them when they decide to attack; and let the workmen know who the heir is, that it is the Idiot who will rule at the death of El Señor; and you, huntsman, go and tell the Sevillian moneylender that El Señor has favored him by granting him the title and the honors of Comendador, and after the Comendador has been informed of his appointment, let him know, huntsman, that his daughter the novitiate has been seduced and violated by La Señora’s young lover, and go to La Señora and tell her that the same novitiate who seduced El Señor now has captive another prisoner of love, the youth we rescued from the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres; and as for El Señor … I myself shall inform El Señor, at the opportune moment, that that same youth is the lover both of the novitiate and of La Señora, his untouched wife; and I shall inform him that there are not two intruders here but three, and that all three are identical, not twins but triplets, ha, and we shall see — as that ingenuous, stammering, cross-eyed Chaldean in the tower would say to the no less ingenuous, although scheming, Brother Julián — what black prophecy this triangular, not singular, situation suggests to him; we shall have pleasure, huntsmen, pleasure, hubbub, and hullabaloo; count on Guzmán; from this adventure — happen what may — we shall emerge stronger, I in the forefront, and then with me you, my faithful companions; count on Guzmán.

NOTHING HAPPENS

La Señora resorted to every known means; she summoned the maidservants Azucena and Lolilla and promised them pleasures and riches if they would conspire with her and steal from the palace kitchens the many supplies she needed to perform certain ceremonies; and they happily obeyed, for all these two desired was excitement and bustle and buzz, and doing these services for La Señora merely increased their excuses for tittle-tattle and for flurries of activity: go down to the kitchen, down to the stables, steal everything La Señora had asked, hide it beneath their underskirts, poke it into their bodices between their breasts, and before they delivered the herbs and the roots and the paste and the flowers, tell everything, amidst bellows of laughter, to Señor Don Juan, cloaked in the brocade drapery torn from the wall of their mistress’s bedchamber; now he was lodged in the servants’ room awaiting the return of the novitiate Doña Inés, who unable to endure his absence any longer would one day come, head bowed, knock on the door, and beg for a second night, a second deflowering to free her from her spell: a succubus made virgin again.

In the meantime Don Juan began to dally, alternately, at times simultaneously, with the scrubbing maids, who told him between giggles and belches, between sips of wine stolen as they stole the hog’s fat, between mouthfuls of ham stolen as they stole the ground sugar, what La Señora was doing in her bedchamber of Andalusian tiles and Arabian sands, lying beside that fresh cadaver fashioned from scraps of the royal mummies that had taken the place in her bed formerly occupied by Don Juan:

She has prepared an ointment from a hundred grams of animal fat and five of hashish, a half a handful of cannabis blossoms and a pinch of ground hellebore root; she rubbed it on the neck, behind the ears, under the arms, on the belly and the soles of the feet, and on the crook of the arm — on hers or the mummy’s, Lolilla? — her own, Señor Don Juan, on her own, and then she waited for the clock to strike eleven on a Saturday night of the new moon, which was yesterday; then she dressed herself in a black tunic and placed a lead crown on her head, and covered her arms with lead bracelets set with onyx and sapphire and jade and black pearls; then on her little finger she placed a lead ring set with a stone engraved with the image of a coiled serpent; she sprinkled the mummy with fumigating powders made from sulphur, cobalt, chlorate, chalk, and copper oxide; she has surrounded the mummy with seven wands made from the seven metals of the planets: gold of the sun, La Señora murmured; silver of the moon; mercury of Mercury; copper of Venus; iron of Mars; tin of Jupiter; lead of Saturn; in her hand she clutched a new knife from old Jerónimo’s forge on the plain — and one after another she picked up the seven wands and thrashed the cadaver, shouting words in Chinese or Arabic or some language we couldn’t understand:

“Peradonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth,” said Don Juan, “Verbum Phytonicum, Mysterium Salamandrae, Conventus Sylphorum, Antra Gnomorum, Daemonia Coeli Gad, Veni, Veni, Veni!”

“And nothing happened, Señor Don Juan, nothing; the mummy just lay there, stiff and stretched out on the bed; and La Señora fell exhausted to the sand.”

She’s asked us for more things, the servants said in unison, and then Don Juan asked them for a monk’s habit, a prince’s doublet and breeches, a white tunic and a crown of thorns, and when they went to gather the materials La Señora had demanded, Don Juan, in the hooded robe of a monk, came to the cell of the novitiate Sister Angustias; he listened to the wails from within and then quietly tapped on the door. The Sister opened the door, still on her knees, naked, and with a penitential scourge in her hand; her shoulders and breasts were bleeding. When she saw the monk, Sister Angustias bent over till her head touched her knees and said, Father, Father, I have sinned, free me from my evil thoughts, Father, I do not want to dream of the bodies of the men who work here, the supervisors, the ironworkers, the water carriers, the masons, and Don Juan stroked the girl’s shaved head, helped her to her feet, embraced her tenderly, and told her she should suffer no more, that she should think instead how being in the convent made her supremely free, how since she could not marry she was free to love within the convent; she was not subject to the bonds of human law that restrict a legitimate wife to fidelity to one man, her husband, whereas a nun could be the delectable love object of all men, and with these arguments he led her to the bed of bare planks; tenderly he removed the shreds of her bloodstained nightdress and kissed the novitiate’s bleeding wounds, and his lips caused both pain and pleasure; Don Juan consoled her, caressing her swollen breasts and the palpitating scapulary of hair between her legs, I will not love you forever, I am making love to you to make you free, to make you a woman; accept me so you may learn to accept all men without shame: I tell you I will not love you forever, Sister Angustias, come, Angustias, believe me when I say I love myself more than I could ever love you, and oh, how beautiful you are, how your wounds shine against your olive skin, and how it pains me, loving myself so much, to have to love you even for a moment, how I long for refuge and escape from self-love in your deep jungles and the rolling hills of your flesh, Angustias; liberate me; I am liberating you. Weep with pleasure, little nun, weep; beg me to return someday; I do not know whether I shall be able, for there are more women in the world than stars in the sky, and there will not be time to love myself in loving them all.

We took more things to her, Azucena and Lolilla said, we had to go everywhere, even to the monk Toribio’s apothecary in his stargazing tower, scurrying like mice through tunnels and stairways, passageways and dungeons, and she prepared a new ointment from fifty grams of the extract of opium, thirty of betel, six of cinquefoil, fifteen of henbane, a few grams of belladonna, the same amount of hemlock, two hundred and fifty grams of Indian hemp, five of cantharides, and then some gum tragacanth and ground sugar; look, Don Juan, Your Mercy, it’s all written down here on this paper she gave us so we wouldn’t forget the names; we had a hard time, but we spelled them out on the monk Toribio’s porcelain jars; and besides all that, she said in a loud voice that this time she would perform the ritual called … the clavier? no, the clavichord, Azucena, no, the ritual of the Clavicle, Lolilla, the Clavicle, I know what she said; she took two candles that had been blessed and stuck them in the sand, and with a cypress branch — that’s something else we’d got her, and it had to be cut by the light of the crescent moon — she drew a circle in the sand, stood inside it, and said:

“Emperor Lucifer, master of rebellious spirits, be favorable unto me,” said Don Juan, “give to this inert form the mobility of the great Prince of Darkness, let that power surge forth from the great funnel-shaped Hell divided into seven zones each with seven thousand cells where seven thousand scorpions hide and a thousand barrels of peat bubble; send the Prince of Darkness to me with the dominions that are particularly his: knowledge, flesh, and riches, now that I invoke the words of the Clavicle, so powerful they may torment the Devil himself,” said Don Juan, trembling and hiding in the folds of his brocade a temporarily aged, contorted, and intolerably pinched face: Aglon Tetragrammaton Vaycheon Stimulamathon Erohares Retrasammathon Clyoram Icion Esition Existien Eryona Onera Erasyn Moyn Meffias Soter Emmanuel Sabaoth Adonai, I convoke you, Amen.”

And nothing happened, Señor Don Juan, nothing. The mummy still lay there stiff and stretched out on the bed; and the Señora fell exhausted to the sand.

During the scrubbing maids’ next absence Don Juan dressed in the white tunic, stained it with his own blood, and placed the crown of thorns upon his head. And thus robed, by night he went to the cell of the Superior, Madre Milagros, and finding the door open, he entered with great stealth and found the sainted woman kneeling upon a priedieu, her hands folded in prayer before the sweet image of Jesus the Redeemer. On tiptoe, Don Juan silently approached until he stood between the divine image and the dazzled eyes of Madre Milagros; in the midst of the shadows he was the living incarnation of the Christ to whom she was directing her prayers. The devout woman choked back a cry that was almost a sob; Don Juan raised one finger to his lips, and with the other hand he stroked the Mother Superior’s head and murmured softly: “Wife…”

Madre Milagros’s eyes filled with tears, and her weeping betrayed a battle between incredulity and faith.

“Hail, you are filled with grace, the Lord is with you,” Don Juan said sweetly. “Do not be afraid, Milagros, for you have found favor with God, and you shall conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son. He shall be great, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob unto the ages, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”

The confounded woman automatically repeated the words she had learned as a young girl: “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?”

“Are you not wedded to me?” Don Juan smiled. “Did you not take a vow to love me?”

“Yes, yes, I am the bride of Christ, but you…”

“Look carefully … behold my tunic … behold my wounds … behold the crown of my torment…”

“Oh, Lord, you have heard my prayers, you have honored the most undeserving of your servants, oh, Lord…”

“Rise, Milagros, take my hand, come with me, the virtue of the Most High shall cover you with His shadow, come with me to your bed, Madre…”

“I am the handmaiden of the Lord; do with me according to your word.”

And, Madre, Don Juan said in the bed of the Superior, the Lord honors those who are most deserving, and no one more than you, holy and beautiful, most fair and pure; pure, yes, Mother Milagros said, sighing, but not beautiful. I am an old woman, Lord, a woman thirty-eight years old; governess and shepherdess to this flock of young Sisters; no, Milagros, old, too, was Elizabeth, Mary’s kinswoman, who believed she was barren but who gave birth to the Baptist who was called John; and shall I, too, give birth, Lord? are you the Holy Spirit come down to visit me?; oh, Milagros, Madre Milagros, the duty and the honor of the elect has always been to be made fruitful by the Divine Spirit before belonging to any mortal man; I shall belong to no one but you, Lord, I swear it; then you will have a long wait, Madre, a long wait then; but I am the handmaiden of the Lord, do unto me according to your word.

Our mistress, Señor Don Juan, sent us out to the difficulty and danger of collecting animals, some within the confines of the palace, others in the nearest foothills; for some it was necessary to set traps, and at times we fled with terror before some stalking beast; at times it was necessary to spend the night waiting to hear the trapped cry of some animal, the two of us grumbling and complaining, Señor Don Juan, clutching each other in the shadow of huge rocks or holding each other tight from fear of the black forest, abandoning you those nights, longing for your so amiable company; we captured a kid and an owl, a dog and a mole, one black cat, and two serpents: when we were finally able to take these creatures to the bedchamber of La Señora, she had placed an inverted crucifix upon the mummy’s bed which she had surrounded with red candles, ciboria she had made us steal from her husband’s chapel, and Hosts made from black kale, and with her cypress wand she wrote in the sand the letter

V

and then I

T

R

and I

again, and an O

and finally an L and then she covered the mummy with a black sheet, and on the sheet there was a circle and a cross within it, and La Señora said it was the cross of Solomon; then she knelt and asked us to hold the kid very tightly by its horns, and exposing herself to an early death from its sharp hoofs, she kissed its ass and then, crazed, her forehead wrinkled by that tightly fitting crown, she plunged the knife we stole from Jerónimo’s forge into its belly; and before the jets of blood stopped spurting from the kid, as if to startle fear itself, she jabbed at the owl’s eyes, the dog’s neck, the black silk of the cat, the yawning jaws of the serpent, and the scurrying figure of the mole which was trying to bury itself in the sand; the beasts defended themselves in their own manner, scratching, barking, digging, pecking, fluttering, writhing, but they had no chance before the awful fury of La Señora, who was screaming: Veni, Veni, Veni, as she slashed, slit, ripped, and disemboweled the beasts.

The sands of her chamber, Señor Don Juan, are still soaking up the spilled blood; La Señora, our Señora, scratched, wounded, and exhausted, lies amid the new corpses. We brought two serpents from the hills, but she killed only one, Señor Don Juan, help us; we do not want to go back to the mountain to look for more animals; that’s a job for the master huntsman, Don Guzmán, and even he runs dangers among jackals and wild pigs, and we, poor little scrubbing girls, we’re not good for anything but collecting lizard droppings, certainly not for finding the snake still hidden in the sands of La Señora’s room, oh, oh, oh…”

But besides being so frightened we wet our underskirts, nothing happened, Señor Don Juan; the mummy still lies there, motionless; and La Señora opened her window and is listening to the sad lament of a flute coming from the forges, the tile sheds, and the taverns on the work site.

With eyes of dark resignation, the Mad Lady regards the somber crypt and seignorial chapel; her resignation is a triumph; everything is as it should be; like precious metals, pain and joy, mourning and luxury, shadows and light are here alloyed; give them eternal rest, Lord, and may your eternal light illumine them, alleluia, alleluia; propped upon her little cart the aged and mutilated Queen was, on the other hand, paying no attention to the cavorting of Barbarica, who leaped from tomb to tomb, all profaned, so that every cadaver resembled her cruel and generous mistress, for one lacked an arm, another a head, that one over there a nose, this one an ear, and Barbarica could only murmur: Oh, my beloved husband, my poor foolish but handsome Prince, do not hide from me, why won’t you come out and play with your tiny playmate? come out of your hiding place, don’t be cruel, you freed the unworthy prisoners on our wedding night, don’t humiliate me while you’ve favored vermin crawled out of nasty Jewish and Arab hovels, don’t deny me the great mandrake I so desire, don’t let my wedding night go by without a prodding from your pike, don’t make me believe you’re a boy-loving sodomite, I offer you my bulging painted tits and my greatest prize, a purse of a normal woman’s size, out of all proportion to the meanness of my other parts, oh, my little Prince, oh, my darling Idiot, who was it who took you from your beggarly state, from your sad condition as a tattered sailor, the day we found you on the dunes about to be torn apart by the crowd? who was it who had brought in her wicker trunk the cosmetics, pomades, pencils, paints, and false whiskers that transformed your appearance? who, my handsome Idiot? You could see nothing in the darkness of my mistress’s leather carriage, you heard her but didn’t see me or sense my presence; no, you didn’t see or hear me, and you believed the hands that disrobed you were those of my mistress the Mad Lady, who has no hands, so it was my hands that removed your doublet and your breeches, and it was I who slipped from the hole in the floor of the carriage hidden by my wicker trunk, I who nimbly slipped out and ran between the wheels and the horses’ slow hoofs to the funeral carriage, carrying your wretched clothes rolled into a bundle I had thrust in my bosom, and it was I who removed the clothes from the cold corpse of the Prince called the Fair, who in life was the husband of my mistress and the father of our present Señor, and in death was embalmed into incorruptibility by the science of Dr. del Agua, it was I who put your robber’s rags on him and then ran back to the carriage of my Lady and dressed you in the cap and medallions, the fur cape and brocade breeches, the hose and slippers, belonging to the cadaver, and it was thus the miraculous transformation took place that caused such clamor and amazement among our following; and you owe to me the fact that you are a Prince and not a beggar; and I was rewarded, for my mistress gave you my tiny, pudgy, loving hand in matrimony; and you, who owe everything to my craft and my artifice, now want to deny me the pleasure of your beautiful dingalingdong between my chubby little thighs, oh, you wicked boy, oh, you rascal, why won’t you come play with your poor Barbarica, your wife before God and man, come out where I can see you, come out where I can love you, you be my sweet pickle, come play with my pears, you darling idiot boy …

And, still babbling, the dwarf Barbarica came to the tomb reserved by El Señor Don Felipe for his father — the Fair, the whoring, Señor — and she was amazed to see that it was the only tomb with the stone still firmly in place upon the funeral plinth. Her strength was fed by desire, her short, chubby, baby-like body strained and struggled, and sweating and panting she moved aside the bronze slab; she shrieked, she crossed herself, she yowled like an alley cat and trembled like quicksilver, for in the depths of the sepulcher, side by side, lay two identical men, identically dressed and identically arrayed down to the most minute detail of rings and medals, and both were the Prince, her Prince, sleeping within this tomb like twins gestating within a stone womb, both resting upon the horrible remains of the Mad Lady’s embalmed husband, still dressed in the ragged clothing of a sailor; two! two! my God, you redouble my pleasure, panted Barbarica, but you offer them only to take them from me, they are both dead; ah, the bitch that birthed them, ahhh, I shall die a virgin, ay, I must live my wedding night untouched, among men with cocks as cold as dead fish, the only procuress to remedy my ills death itself, ay, ay, ay, and the dwarf clambered into the tomb and kissed the lips of the embalmed Señor dressed in tattered sailor’s garb; this first kiss tasted of aloes, and the lips were dead indeed; next she kissed the parted lips of one of the two identical Princes, and that kiss tasted of the dried blood of a dove; the dwarf jerked the cap from this Prince’s head, saw the shaved skull, and knew he was the poor scramble-brained youth she had married, and her husband’s bloody lips had the scent of madness and sacrifice, but not of life. The dwarf squinted one swollen-lidded eye, her upturned nostrils quivered; she smelled ordure; she remembered; she separated the legs and lowered the breeches of the Idiot Prince, her husband; her tiny hand poked through the greenish feces, she gagged, and kept repeating, oh, what a smell, it stinks to high heaven, but she continued to poke and paw through the Idiot’s excrement until she found what she was looking for: the black pearl, the pearl called the Pilgrim, and she popped it between her bulging bosoms, after wiping it clean on the doublet of the sleeping youth, her — as yet unconsummated — husband.

Only then did she look with increasing curiosity and excitement at the third body lying in the tomb, the second Prince, identical to her husband who slept so soundly his sleep was twin to death, in the same way the youths were twin to each other; she kissed this Prince. And this kiss tasted of perfume, of sweet-scented herbs … and it was returned.

“He kissed me back,” screamed the dwarf, “he did, he did, he kissed me back!”

Don Juan’s hands seized Barbarica’s waist, he tossed her playfully into the air like a doll, it stinks to high heaven, the dwarf laughed, it stinks to high heaven, she repeated as Don Juan raised her voluminous, bunched-up skirts; he tickled her tight little ass with one finger, and as he thrust his face between the dwarf’s legs, he also laughed, saying, blessed Jesus, what a stinkus, blessed Jesus, what a smell, and a tongue that seemed to the little creature like fire and brimstone plunged into the swamp.

She sent us out onto the plain, Señor Don Juan, beneath the burning July sun, to search for a certain blind flute player, Aragonese by birth, who arrived a few days ago to take part in the meager festivities of the palace workmen, by playing his sometimes plaintive, sometimes happy, little tunes; by pushing him and overriding his mute protests, we brought him to our Señora’s bedchamber, which he already knew through the stories of the poor Señor Chronicler sent to row in the galleys — and too bad you didn’t have the pleasure of knowing him, Your Mercy, for he was a discreet and courteous man, and he would treat a scullery maid as well as a lady — and also from the accounts of Your Honor’s predecessor in enjoying the favors of our Señora, the youth burned beside the stables for fiddling with too many bottoms: the kitchen lads’ as well as La Señora’s … though as you often say, and rightly, let every man take his pleasure where he may.

Our Señora ordered the blind man to sit upon the sand and play his wretched sad little flute; he was bald, dark-skinned and heavy-shouldered, dressed in crudely stitched, ragged burlap, and as he played he looked at everything out of sightless green eyes, bulging like two onions, seeing nothing; La Señora baptized the frogs we’d caught in the old wells and stagnant waters on the plain, and she forced black Hosts down the frogs’ throats while with her left hand she made a reverse sign of the cross upon her trembling breasts, saying:

“In the name of the Patrician,” said Don Juan, “of the Patrician of Aragon, now, today, Valencia; all our misery has ended, Spain; come, luminous angel, come to breathe life into this being I have formed, make him rise from the bed in the image of Lucifer, covered in sardonyx, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx, jasper, sapphire, ruby, emerald, and gold, and accompanied by the music of this blind demiurge from the diabolical village of your Aragonese kingdom, Calanda, where hands beat on drums until the skin is raw, blood flows, and the very bone is splintered to insure that Christ will be resurrected in the full Glory of his Sabbath: so may this my Angel be revived; come, come, come, twin of God, fallen archangel, King of Spain.”

Yes, that’s how it was, Señor Don Juan, exactly as you said it, although that wretched flute player surely is not from Calanda where the Holy Week celebrations are famous and pilgrims come from faraway places to witness them; considering his looks he must have come from Datos, Matos, Badules, Cucalón, Herreruela, Amento, or Lechón, for those are the most miserable of the villages of Aragon. Then, inflicting great pain upon herself, La Señora tore off one of her fingernails, howling those words you just spoke, Don Juan, and the blind flute player sat upon the red-stained sands amidst the day-old, already stinking cadavers of the sacrificed animals, and played his saddest, most plaintive tunes. Suddenly, as he heard La Señora’s screams of pain, the flutist stopped his playing and said what you heard, Señor Don Juan, from where you were hiding behind the chamber door:

“St. Paul advised us that Satan is the God of this century. St. Thomas advised us that Lucifer desired beatitude before the time appointed by the Creator, desired it before anyone, wished to obtain happiness for himself alone, only for himself, and that was his pride, and that pride, his sin. God condemned him for his pride; that is why the haughty descend from him. The Most High gave powers of genesis to woman, and having it, woman felt she was the most privileged of all creation, for she could do what no man could do: create another being within her womb, and that therefore she was superior to man, who could fertilize but not reproduce. And woman decided that even this power of fecundation should be denied to man, and so she refused him her body and allowed herself to be deflowered and made pregnant only by God himself, or by a representative of God’s spirit, before she would be touched by any mortal man. And mortal man felt even greater resentment at his mortality, for he lacked the power to produce another being, and woman was his only after belonging to God, to the Spirit, to the Priest, or the Hero designated by God to continue in the female’s womb the responsibility of creation. And so man took revenge on woman by making of her his whore, by corrupting her, so she was no longer fit to be the vessel for divine semen. And man despised his children, for if they were the children of God they were not his, and if they were the children of whores they were not worthy to be his. And man murdered his detested children, sacrificed them, his children, for they were also the children of the prostitute who first had given herself to the Hero or the Priest acting in the name of God, or he devoured them, in order to nourish himself from the sacred essence that God had stolen from man and granted to woman and to her offspring. And so the mother protected her child, knowing that the father would not live in peace until he had murdered it, and she saved it, as with Moses, by entrusting it to the waters. And for all this, man blamed woman as being Lucifer’s representative on earth; and believing that woman is the seat of the diabolical pride that desired happiness before its rightful time and that anticipated the common beatitude that men may achieve only on the day of final judgment, the Council of Laodicea prohibited woman from officiating in the Mass. Man took shelter in material power in order to negate the spiritual powers of woman. Woman thus became Satan’s priestess, and through her Satan regains his androgynous nature and becomes the hermaphrodite imagined by the Eremites and seen in the Hebraic Cabala: and it is from the Devil that she acquires the knowledge transmitted on the day of the first Fall, for Satan fell before Eve. Bury the fingernail in the sand, Señora, and worms will be born from it, and great hail will fall in summer and terrible storms will be loosed upon this land.”

“How, if you are blind, do you know I tore out my fingernail?” our Señora asked between tormented sobs.

“Everything done in a visible manner in the world may be the work of demons,” the flutist replied.” Only the invisible is the work of God, and therefore demands blind faith, and offers no temptation. Señora, if you desire the blind to see, slice the eyeball with a razor at the precise moment a cloud cuts across the circumference of the full moon; then night will become day; water, fire; excrement, gold; dust, breath; and the blind shall see.”

“I have no desire to create worms or to unleash storms. The Chronicler spoke of you one day, and also my poor executed lover knew you, the youth called Miguel-of-Life. I know your name.”

“Do not repeat it, Señora, or your efforts will be in vain.”

“I know your powers. They spoke of that. But it is not hail in summer I want of you; I want the body that lies upon my bed to acquire life.”

“Then do what I have told you, and the Devil will appear.”

And so our Señora, trembling and subdued, the oil-anointed dagger in her hand, approached the cadaver fabricated from the scraps of the dead, and the Aragonese flutist closed his enormous green eyes and began to play. La Señora also closed her eyes, and at that very instant, with a single slash, she cut the staring white eye of the mummy; a thick black liquid ran down the silvery cheek of that motionless monster, Señor Don Juan. But aside from that, nothing happened; the mummy still lies there, stiff and stretched out on the bed; and La Señora again falls exhausted to the bloody sand, this time beside the corpse of the owl, and recriminates the flute player, casting his impotence in his face, calling him mendacious, a liar; where is the Devil? the rites of the man from Aragon are worthless, the Devil did not appear to aid La Señora and to give life to the horrible cadaver of cadavers, and meanwhile the flutist smiles and spends his short breath in playing lugubrious little tunes.

“Poor Señora; she does badly to seek with such eagerness and such painful invocation what is already near, just across the passageway, something even her maidservants can see,” Don Juan said, casting aside his brocaded mantle and revealing himself before the two awestruck scullery maids, who embraced one another as they looked upon him and ran to huddle together in the farthest corner of the room, for they had never seen him naked and had dallied with him only in the darkness, and now they saw him, chest covered with sardonyx, his waist bound by a chain of diamonds, his arms painted gold, his sex garlanded with a rosary of pearls that disappeared between his buttocks and fastened over one hip, his legs sheathed in jasper, his wrists adorned with sapphires, his ankles with chrysolite, his neck with rubies. This their bedazzled eyes beheld, but finally Azucena saw something more, as this splendid man, unparalleled among mortals, whirled about, and that was the six toes on each of his feet and the vividly purple cross upon his back; laughing, Don Juan strode from the room; the scrubbing maids crossed themselves again and again, and as they watched him leave they knew he would never return, and Azucena said to Lolilla: It’s him, it’s him, the child the court jester abandoned twenty years ago, the one I took in, nursed at the teats of our young Señora’s bitch, before her marriage to El Señor, I recognized him, he’s mine, my lover, my son, I was his wet nurse, his true mother, until the day of the horrible slaughter in the castle when I feared for his life, feared that with the monstrous signs of his back and his feet he would be confused with that mob of heretics, Moors, Jews, whores, pilgrims, and beggars that overran us that day, even the children in that procession were slain by the knife, but I saved him, I placed him in a light basket and tied it and cast it into the river where it would drift downstream towards the sea, sure that someone would pick him up and care for him, and now he has returned, he has been my lover, he has promised to marry me, you, too, Azucena? but that’s what he told me, you lie, Lolilla, as God is Christ and Christ is God, you lie, that’s what he told me, no, me, don’t you lay your lowborn hands on me, you filthy hag, I’ve had about enough from you, slut, let me go, you squeezed-out old bag, I’ll gouge out your eyes, you cheap little ass-peddler, I’ll yank out your mane, baggage, why, you spawn-of-a-bastard-Moor, I’ll tear your heart out, ay, ay, ay, my eye, my leg, you’ve got claws like iron, you tramp, but I’ll ram a pike up your ass and out your snout that’ll turn you inside out and rot your bloody bowels, you itching, snitching, butt-twitching, son-of-a-bitching old whore, oh, let go my hair, ay, get off me, oh, my knee, I swear I’ll kill you, no, I’m going to kill you, you cunt-sir-ass-sir-anyway-at-all-sir old hump, stinking trollop, I’ll knock the snot out of you, you troublemaking, double-talking, double-dealing, sneaky-slimy-snaky strumpet, why you hairy-chested, spindle-shanked bawd, I’ll kill you, I’ll straighten out those crossed eyes for you, I’ll bash your brains against a rock, yagh, yagh, yagh…! Oh, look what you’ve done to us, Don Juan! all because of you, Don Juan, come back to us, Don Juan! oh, Señor Don Juan, you are nothing but a woman’s whore.

Don Juan returned to the crypt and chapel where he had left Barbarica, exhausted from pleasure, in the arms of the Idiot Prince, the two of them asleep in the sumptuous tomb of El Señor’s father. He walked toward the little cart where the Mad Lady sat, and if the maidservants’ terror had been awesome when they saw him naked and be-jeweled, the Mad Lady’s simplicity was now entirely natural; she greeted the young gentleman before her dressed in the velvet doublet, the fur cape, the cap and breeches and medallion of the embalmed Señor.

“You’ve come back at last,” the Mad Lady said serenely.

“Yes. This is our place.”

“Shall we always be close to each other?”

“Always.”

“Shall we rest now?”

“Yes.”

“Are we dead?”

“Yes, both of us.”

He lifted the old woman from her little cart, carried her very gently to a niche carved between two pilasters, and very sweetly placed her there, her white head and black-clad torso propped against the icy stone of the wall. The Mad Lady seemed content; her eyes followed Don Juan as he Walked away, stopped beside the great mausoleum of the old woman’s husband, and lay down upon the stone slab. He lay half reclining, his head resting upon his right arm: he was the living crown of the funeral tomb. He was the perfect and chaste youth the old woman had adored in her obsessive dreams of love and death, the resurrection of the past and the transfiguration of the future. Now, at this instant, in a present the Mad Lady wished to hold captive forever, beneath these arching domes, in this crypt, the dream was a reality, and the youth who represented her husband, her lover, and her son lay half reclining, resting on his right arm, as he gazed with fascinated pride into a mirror that an inattentive visitor might mistake for a book.

For a moment, the aged Señora feared that both of them — she in her niche, looking at him, and he, half reclining upon the slab of the sepulcher, looking at himself — had turned to stone and had thus become forever a part of this sumptuous cave of tombstones, pedestals, truncated pyramids, funereal epitaphs, and carved stone bodies, the reproduction of the remains of all the descendants of this house. A shiver, an icy doubt, ran down the Mad Lady’s spine; she knew until now she had dreamed, and that she had been dreaming in life; but from this moment, placed by Don Juan in her niche in this chapel, she would believe she was dead, for now she dreamed she was living.

And that night in his tower the Chaldean, Brother Toribio, said to the painter, Brother Julián: “Brother, if you believed in them, I would tell you that Devils are wandering around my tower, for henbane and belladonna, betel and hellebore have disappeared from the stores in my apothecary; it must be thieves.”

GAZES

El Señor summoned his court, making use of Guzmán, who in turn availed himself of his faithful and anonymous band of huntsmen; he summoned all and all responded to the summons to gather in the subterranean chapel. Only La Señora remained in her bedchamber, intent upon instilling life in the mummy fashioned from bits and pieces of royal cadavers, exhausting the formulas of diabolic invocation, and in her turn counting on no one and nothing except the assistance of the uncouth serving girls, Azucena and Lolilla, and the obscure words of the blind Aragonese flautist. In contrast, many were gathered in El Señor’s chapel: hidden behind the tall latticework whose shadows turned their faces and habits into a pattern of white honeycombs were Madre Milagros, the nun Angustias, Sister Inés, and all the Andalusian novitiates; the fat Bishop was there, reclining on a litter borne by mendicant priests, perspiring, wiping his brow with a lace handkerchief and followed closely by an Augustinian monk with cadaverous features; the Sevillian usurer, wearing his marten-skin cap, was quick to prostrate himself before El Señor and thank him for the title of Comendador that afforded him the opportunity to enjoy May in December and add honor to riches; and the astrologer Brother Toribio had been summoned to read the signs of this event through which El Señor hoped to decipher all past enigmas and then place them in the horoscope with the assistance of the walleyed, red-haired priest.

And Guzmán gazed upon it all, knowing that once the court had been assembled his huntsmen would scatter across the plain and communicate to the workmen on the site — Nuño, Jerónimo, Martín, Catilinón — the false, although entirely probable news: the Mad Lady had had her way; our Señor has proclaimed the Idiot and the flatulent dwarf his heir and heiress; it is this obtuse and deformed pair that soon will govern you, for the degenerate, mystic, and necrophilic El Señor, his energies lost forever, his love for the hunt, for warfare, for women — the sap of power — forever forgotten, will soon abandon his mortal shell; look what awaits you if you do not rebel now: generation after generation of idiot monarchs, bleeders prone to the French malady who like vampires will derive from your eternally robust but eternally servile blood what little strength they can possess. Do you dream of restoring your ancient rights as free men? do you dream of a justice that will defend you against the power of the Señores? do you dream of a statute that will free you from both the caprice of the castle and the usury of the cities? do you dream of a contract that will permit you to give and receive with equity? Then look at El Señor, and if you think his reign has been harsh, imagine what that of the dwarf and the Idiot will be, and of the monstrous offspring such a pair will engender, and you will know that your lamentations can only increase and be prolonged endlessly unto the consummation of the centuries.

And the painter-priest Julián gazed at everything through different eyes, lost among the multitude of monks, alguaciles, stewards, councilmen, duennas, officials, majordomos, and comptrollers called before El Señor. For him this first gathering of the members of the court in the private chapel was like the inauguration, the unveiling, of the great painting that Julián, with the assistance of the Chronicler, had convinced El Señor had come from Orvieto, the fatherland of a few austere, melancholy, and energetic painters, but which in truth the priest, painter of miniatures, inflamed with rebellious ambition, had executed with patience and stealth in the deepest dungeon of the palace, fearing that his work’s novelty, the audacious rupture from the symmetrical aesthetic demanded by orthodoxy — so that the works of man might coincide with revealed truth — would be so obvious that it would be Julián’s destiny to join the Chronicler in cleansing himself of the guilt of the worst of all rebellions: not Cain’s: fratricide; but Lucifer’s: deicide.

This is what he feared, although secretly he was offended that no one paid any attention to the painting, no one scrutinized it, or even anathematized it. Was its message so veiled? So diaphanous and terse and hidden was its criticism (or perhaps its decisiveness, its judgments — thought Julián — if one considered the Greek origin of a word whose destiny he would not dare prognosticate) that to discover it would demand an investment of attention and time that none of those here present was prepared to make … or lose? Would the slow contamination, the inevitable corrosive power of the figures there arranged, arranged thus in order to shatter the sacred order of Christian painting, take so long to have effect? A central and uncontaminated deity surrounded by two-dimensional, unrelieved space, immune, too, to all temporal condition.

“That is the law.”

Brother Julián was tempted to open a path through the indifferent crowd, the throng of palace sycophants, to reach the altar, approach the painting, and trace his signature with thick brushstrokes in one corner of the canvas. He was tempted, but he resisted; not because of physical fear, but rather, moral suspicion. He was restrained by a vague reflection, the residue of his conversation in the tower with the astrologer: if the universe were infinite it would have no center, not the sun, not the earth, not the powers upon the earth, and certainly not an individual person and his pretentious scrawl, Julianus, Frater et Pictor, Fecit, and furthermore his spirit might seep away through that signature; let there be no center to in infinite universe which lacks a center. Julián stood apart, airily spiritual, illuminated, because of its paradoxical nearness and immobility, by a sudden communion with everything that was outside himself or his body or his consciousness; he himself posed the opposite response to his own argument: then if there is no center, everything is central and thus, as he gazed at it, he could understand the painting he had created and say to himself, confused, but assured:

“No one put his signature to the towers of Milan or Compostela, the abbeys of Apulia or the Dordogne, the stained glass or domes of our Christian kingdom; and I must do honor to the anonymity of those artists and speak with them the new truths, never sacrificing the ancient virtues; paint an Italian piazza with profound perspective flowing like the time in which men are born, in which they mature and perish, and flowing like the unrestricted space in which men are fulfilling the designs of God: here are houses, doors, stones, trees, real men, not the unrelieved space of the revelation or the hourless time of the original fiat, but space that is place, and time that is the scar of creation. Blind men: can you not see my Christ without a halo, facing a corner of the painting that is thus prolonged beyond its limits to invent new space, no longer the space of oneness, the invisible and invariable space of the revelation, but the many and different places of a constantly maintained and renewed creation? Poor blind creatures: do you not see that my Christ occupies a corner of specific but in no way finite space in my painting, and that in that precise, ex-centric positioning, Christ is eternally his own center in relation to the dimensional circle I have drawn, and that the naked men are standing in a real Italian piazza, and thus instead of illustrating a theme they are protagonists of an event, and that their center does not coincide with the center Christ displaces, do you not see that what is important is not a central or ex-centric placement which ceases to exist if the center, being everywhere, is nowhere, but that what is important is the relationship between two distinct essences, divine and human, and that the bridge between the two is their exchange of gazes? Blind, blind: I paint so that I may see, I see so that I may paint, I gaze at what I paint and what I paint, when painted, gazes at me and finally gazes at you who gaze at me when you gaze upon my painting. Yes, Brother Toribio, only what is circular is eternal and only the eternal is circular, but within that eternal circularity there is room for all the accidents and variations of the freedom that is not eternal but instantaneous and fleeting: my Christ elects to gaze, freely, instantaneously, and fleetingly, at the men’s bodies, whereas the men gaze at the world, the space and the time surrounding them, and it is this world that gazes at Christ and thus, as everything is related through the gazes, everything divine is human, and everything human, divine, and the true halo forming an aureole above them all is the pale and transparent light — no one’s and everyone’s — that bathes the space of the piazza. Blind men!

“My signature would mutilate the prolongation of the space that should extend, as one gazes, to the right and left of the canvas, behind, above, and beneath it, and also in a second perspective, the one that flows from the canvas toward the spectator: you, we, they. Let my figures gaze beyond the painting that temporarily emprisons them. Let them gaze beyond the walls of this palace, beyond the plain of Castile, beyond the taut bullhide of our peninsula, beyond the exhausted continent we have damaged with greed and lust, with numberless crimes and invasions, and saved, perhaps, with a handful of beautiful buildings and with elusive words. Let them gaze beyond Europe to the world we do not know and that does not know us, but which is no less real, no less space, and no less time. And when you, my figures, also grow weary of gazing, cede your place to new figures that will in their turn violate the norm that finally you will consecrate: disappear, then, from my canvas and let other representations occupy your place. No, no, I shall not sign, but neither shall I be silent. Let the painting speak for me.”

Hidden behind the tall chancel, Madre Milagros also gazed at the painting, but all her attention was centered on the white-clad Christ with the bleeding brow: it was he, it was he, the very one who had come to her that unforgettable night and claimed her for himself, and the Mother Superior was not surprised by the absence of a halo above that figure, for no light had crowned the Christ who had made her His wife. Madre Milagros sobbed; now she would not have to pray imploring the Saviour’s presence; now she knew where she could find Him: here, in this chapel, in this painting; all she had to do was come here in secret, by night or at dawn, and touch the figure of the Christ in the painting and He would descend to her, Milagros, the chosen, and would again take her upon the most sacred of beds, upon the bed of the altar itself, on this very altar. Madre Milagros sobbed, and quietly beat her breast, oh, unworthy woman, oh, prideful woman, why would the Lord come to me again after having done so once? Why would He not instead visit other women and confer honor upon them as He honored me? Pride, pride, and I presuming to think of coming here to see Him and touch Him and make love with Him, presumption, He would not remember me, He would turn his back upon me, pride, pride, torture me no longer, Serpent, I am afraid to return here because I am afraid the Lord my God will turn His back upon me, will banish me from His presence, will scorn my pleas and punish my presumption, my honor; my honor? no, my pride, I became a nun for the sake of honor, to guard it and keep it, and because there was no man whom I considered worthy of my bed or for whom I would change my name, only to become the bride of Christ, for the sake of honor, no man will stain it, not even Christ the Saviour, forgive me, forgive me, sweet Jesus, but I do not love you, I do not love you, why did you come to me and make me yours? I loved you while you were unreachable, incorporeal, and therefore the most perfect object of a love beyond human fetters, beyond the bonds of honor, pride, presumption, or the fear of being scorned, I no longer love you, Christ, I loved a sweet and pure image, I cannot love a real lover, forgive me, Lord, forgive me …

Different was the gaze of the nun Angustias, who was not engaged in scrutinizing the painting above the altar, but in scrutinizing the figures of the monks gathered in the chapel, and in guessing which was the man who had at last assuaged her hungers and her lacerations and given her in exchange the unknown pleasure and pulsing freedom of desiring more and more and more, but desiring now with the security of knowing she could have, have, have, have love, yes, but not a child, no, that was what she feared now, her trembling face hidden behind the iron fretwork of the nuns’ choir, oh, monk, if you made me a child you will not have given me pleasure with the freedom you promised, and pleasure without freedom is not pleasure at all, oh, monk, you took advantage of my delirium, of my shame, of my hunger for a man, oh, monk, if you have made me pregnant I will have to say that your child is the work of the Devil, and I will have to kill him at birth, before you yourself kill him, for you and for me, monk, I pray that you gave me only freedom and pleasure, not obligation, for it would be our mutual triumph so to have conquered the two laws that bind us — marriage outside the convent and chastity within — and be free, monk, free, to continue to make love with impunity, you to as many women as you desire, and I to as many men … No, I do not love you, monk, but I shall love the pleasure and the freedom you have taught me. May you do the same.

And where should the novitiate Doña Inés look, she who found so many points of interest among the motley throng? There, making his way toward El Señor, was her aged father, the usurer, the marten-skin cap in his hand obsequiously extended in a sign of respect more toward El Señor than to this sacred area, chapel and tomb; there was El Señor himself, seated upon a curule chair at the foot of the altar: there was Guzmán, who had one night led her to the nearby bedchamber of El Señor. Everyone was there except the one she sought: Don Juan, he who had given her the pleasure El Señor was unable to give, but also a scourge: the flower opened by Don Felipe had been enjoyed by Don Juan and then closed again; who had condemned her to this punishment? who could secretly have desired such misfortune? who was it who wished that she belong to no one, or who wished that she belong to him alone? She did not understand, her head whirled, her eyes were unfocused, seeing nothing, until her gaze, with vague and tortured dreaminess, wandered along the rows of royal coffins raised upon truncated pyramids the length of the chapel, and lighted upon him, it is you, Don Juan, the half-reclining, chaste youth resting upon one arm, it is you, oh, yes, it is you, I would know you anywhere, my lover, oh, it is you and you are stone, you are a statue, a statue has made love to me, I invited a stone statue into my bed, that is my curse, I have made love with stone, so what is to prevent me from turning into stone myself? and if we are both stone … I see it now, then of course we shall be faithful to each other, you, Juan, and I, Inés, you have blood like ice, I knew it, I told you so: do not fear my father, do not fear El Señor, fear no one, Don Juan, because no one can kill you, one cannot kill a statue, one cannot kill death; Doña Inés’s fingers clung to the grillwork of the chancel and with a stony gaze she stared intently at the stony figure of her lover lying motionless upon the stone sepulcher. And when you and I are stone, Don Juan, the entire world will be stone, stone the rivers, the trees, and beasts, stone the stars, the air, and fire: creation will be a motionless statue, and you and I its unmoving center. Nothing moves now. Nothing. Nothing.

And while Doña Inés’s gaze of stone was directed only at what she believed to be the stone figure of Don Juan, Don Juan merely feigned immobility; that was easy for him, he recognized it as one further attribute of his person: a will of iron that allowed him to simulate the most delicious impassivity. Not one nerve of the semi-reclining figure upon the stone slab moved, and like Inés, everyone present at this ceremony convoked by El Señor thought he was a statue. The youth did not even blink. With indifferent eyes, indifferent to the confused ceremony about to begin without any perceivable cause, insofar as those present could note, Don Juan, remote, unconcerned with the reunion of the court, disguised as a statue and disguised, too, by the shadows, gazed toward the painting in the chapel: for the first time he gazed at the painting that dominated El Señor’s private chapel, and as if in a mirror saw himself in the Christ without a halo, a Christ, like him, on the periphery; it is I, it is I, someone knew me before I knew myself, why did someone paint my image before I arrived here, why? why? that painting is … more than the heart of La Señora, more than the eyes of Doña Inés, more than the jewels of Lucifer, my mirror … Oh, that painting, why was I so long in seeing it? how I wish I had first seen myself in it and not in the mirror of La Señora that held our superimposed images; it is no wonder I so easily deceived the Mother Superior and enjoyed her favors; it is no wonder that I deceive all women, for each always believes I am someone else, a husband, a lover, a father, a Saviour, and each loves someone else in me; who will love Don Juan for himself, not because she believes he is someone else and that she is making love to someone other than him, a husband, lover, monk, Christ himself, but never Don Juan … never? Azucena and Lolilla love me because I promised to marry them, Madre Milagros because she believed I was the Divine Spirit, the nun Angustias because she confused me with her confessor, no one has recognized me, no one has loved me … except Inesilla, for only she knows who I am. And I do not love her, because no woman interests me unless she already belongs to a lover, a husband, a confessor, to God; no woman interests me if as I make love to her I do not stain another man’s honor; no woman interests me if my love does not liberate her. I shall never love any woman forever, I love her only to make her a woman, and Inés is already a woman, Inés does not belong to El Señor, who deflowered her; El Señor is master only of this palace of death; Inés is the only one who loves me because she is already mistress of herself, and if my logic is correct I cannot love her, for then someone like myself would come to take her from me; I shall insult the honor of other men, but no man shall insult mine, for I shall have none, no honor and no sentiments; and if a scrubbing girl, a novitiate, a Queen, or a Superior should bear my child it will not be mine, it will be the child of nothingness and I shall condemn it to nothingness; I shall devour my children, castrate them, stab them to death; the nourishment of the ordinary man, honor and fatherland, hearth and power, is forbidden me; I have no nourishment but women and their offspring; I shall eat the cunt of the women and the heart of the children, and Don Juan will be free; he will sow disorder, he will inflict passion where passion seemed dead, he will break the chains of divine and human law; Don Juan will be free so long as a slave to law, power, hearth, honor, or fatherland exists upon this earth, and be captive only when the world is free … never.

And the brand-new Comendador, the Sevillian moneylender, the father of Doña Inés, gazed at everything through narrowed, calculating eyes, and nothing that moved caught his eye, rather the richness of the wood of the choir and the chairs in the chamber, of acana and mahogany, terebinth and walnut, box and ebony, and the paneling with embellishment, molding, and inlay of mahogany, and the columns of the choir of blood-red acana, each fluted and round, their richly wrought capitals supported by corbels carved in thistle leaves; sixty feet long, at least, this chapel, the Sevillian said to himself, and fifty-three feet wide, but it contains more riches than a space a hundred times greater could hold, for the tables are of green and pink and white marble and jasper, inlaid, veneered, and outlined in contrasting colors; the altar is of finest jasper trimmed with bronze made golden by fire, and the monstrance is like a flaming ruby adorned with diamonds — and diamonds had to be used in carving such a costly tabernacle; well said he who said that there are sufficient riches here to found a kingdom, certainly there will be more than enough to repay a moneylender, for I see no thing in this sacred place that cannot be melted down or torn from its place to be resold; there is too much here for one little-used room, and the former councilman of this place spoke the truth when these communal lands were expropriated by El Señor: “Note down that I am ninety years old, that I have twenty times been mayor, and that El Señor will build here a nest of locusts that will devour the land; place first the service of God”; and to fulfill the demands of El Señor they uprooted forests, leveled hills, stopped streams, and all, yes, all out of devotion to God, to sing His divine praise with continual choirs, prayers, charity, silence, and study, and also for the fitting interment of our Sovereign’s ancestors. But one never knows for whom he labors, and perhaps what today honors God and the dead in this one room can tomorrow, without diminishing the greatness of the Creator, adorn the houses of the living, and this balustrade can be sent to Seville, and that candelabrum perhaps to Genoa, that pilaster to the house of a merchant in Lübeck, the chairs to schools where the children of prosperous and frugal citizens are educated, and the chasubles, dalmatics, capes, albs can easily be transformed into sumptuous attire for our women, for one sells the good cloth in his coffer; these riches are buried here, and no one benefits from them. El Señor must have planned that these marvels would be the treasure of future centuries, but I see them as a profitable annual balance, and in order to obtain them I shall believe that everything I have seen and heard here the last few nights is but a nightmare; things are things and can be touched and measured and exchanged and sold and resold; the objects here are but adornment for useless rites and events my senses cannot credit; no, I did not see the flight of a bat, or the transformation of that bat into a naked woman, or the robbing of sepulchers, or fornication inside them, or the apparition of dwarfs and mutilated old ladies or youths who recline upon rich funereal tombstones, or any of the things my reason cannot comprehend or my interests translate. This age is long in dying, and makes even a hardened merchant like myself see visions and phantoms. Let the old dreams die, Señor; everything you possess here must circulate, move, find a new dwelling place and a new owner. That is reality, and this prodigious edifice will be but the tomb of your ancestors, and of your dreams also, your vampires, your dwarfs, your armless and legless old ladies, your mad youths disguised as statues. Thank you for my title, Señor, although what you reward in me will be your own downfall. Your spectral God is not my real Goddess. I call my deity Reason, alert senses, rejection of mystery, banishment of all that does not fit within the secure treasure chest of common sense where I amass logic and ducats joined together in happy matrimony.

And the fulgurating gaze of the Mad Lady was the gaze of triumph, and as the aged Comendador wedded reason and money, she wedded life and death, past and future, ash and breath, stone and blood: propped in one of the chapel’s carved niches, incapable of movement, indifferent to any fear of a fatal fall from the niche to the granite floor, her gaze was of triumph: all the court, all living beings gathered in this deep sepulchral crypt resembled her adored dead, and perhaps with luck no one would ever leave here, everything would remain forever fixed in time, like the figures in that painting above the altar, a strange painting of Christian theme and pagan conception where contemporary naked figures coexisted with those steeped in Sacred History; the perfect exchange of death and life was now being consummated; the reward of life was death; the gift of death was life; the obsessive game of reversal that dominated the insane reason of the Mad Lady had reached its ultimate point of equilibrium. Let nothing upset it, pleaded the Mad Lady, let nothing upset it, and she drifted into a profound dream that also confused the domains of life and death.

The eyes of everyone present turned to scrutinize a dejected El Señor as he occupied the curule chair Guzmán held for him at the base of the altar; all eyes, from those of Inés, hidden behind the grill work of the choir, to those of the most distant alguacil innocently standing at the foot of the stairway of the thirty-three steps. In all the crush of the assembled throng, no one occupied those steps; it was as if an invisible glass shield sealed access to the stairway. Regarding the crowd before him, El Señor was more aware of certain absences than of the assembled presences, and as he wished to identify those absences, he named them Celestina and Ludovico, Pedro and Simón, asking himself, his fingers clutching the smooth mahogany arms of the chair, whether his dreams of yesterday could eventually bear any relation to the mysteries of today, whether the dreams had announced the mysteries, and whether the enigma, finally, was but ignorance of the logical bond between what youth desired and old age feared, whether the mystery of today was only, how could one know? the failure of yesterday’s dream. Perhaps … perhaps it was the student and the bewitched girl, the serf and the monk who invisibly occupied the steps of that never completed stairway, the stairway where every stair was a century and every step a step toward death and extinction, oblivion, inert matter, and then accursed resurrection in a foreign body. Toribio’s unfocused gaze, the fear-filled gaze of Brother Julián, the greedy, obsequious gaze of the Sevillian moneylender, the bored gaze of the prelate, Guzmán’s impenetrable gaze, told him nothing; they held no answer to the question that El Señor asked himself as he asked them. And he found no response, he retreated into his only sure refuge: his own person.

His real, his royal person. El Señor decided to count only on himself and to rely on the simple oneness of his own person to dominate surprise, crowd, enigma, and disorder. But immediately he asked himself: Is my person sufficient? And the answer was now the first rupture in that simple unity — I, Felipe, El Señor — no, my person is not enough; my person is drained by the power I represent, and that power extends beyond me, for since it antedates me it does not actually belong to me, and as it passes through my hands and through my gaze it seeps away and ceases to belong to me; I, Felipe, am not enough; power is not enough; what is needed are the trappings, the place, the space that contains us and gives a semblance of unity to me and my power: the chapel, this chapel with the painting from Orvieto and the bronze balustrades and the fluted pilasters and carved chairs and high iron grillwork of the nuns’ choir and the thirty sepulchers of my ancestors and the thirty-three steps that ascend from this hypogeum to the plain of Castile; thus the illusion of unity was but the complex fabric of a man, his power and his space, and Julián gazing at El Señor seated before the anonymous painting which was said to have come from Orvieto, imagined him imagining himself as an ancient icon, a timeless, spaceless reproduction of Pankreator, but vanquished by the proliferation of spatial and temporal signs in the painting: you, Felipe, El Señor … here and now; and as the masked page and the blond youth entered, the enigmas were multiplied rather than resolved, enigmas enslaved the soul of El Señor in the same way the simple couple enslaved the multitude of dumfounded alguaciles and duennas, monks and halberdiers, councilmen and stewards who opened a path for them into the presence of El Señor; and thus he himself, seated upon the curule chair with Guzmán standing by his side, his back to the altar, to the Italian painting, to the offertory table, to the embroidered altar cloths, the ciboria, and the tabernacle itself, became the purveyor of the questions he himself had formulated: Who are they? why do they look the way they do? why is the page wearing a mask, hiding his features behind a green and black and yellow feather mask? why does he have a large green sealed bottle secured in his sash? who is the youth with the tattered breeches and doublet and tousled blond hair the page is leading by the hand, and what is he clutching in his hand?; the cross, the cross; what is that blood-red cross between the youth’s shoulder blades, the cross I now see clearly as a clumsy halberdier twists the boy’s arm, makes him moan with pain, forces him to kneel, his back to me as mine is to the altar; my back also bears a cross, the gold-embroidered cross of the cape resting upon my shoulders; and what has dropped from the hands of the youth now forced to prostrate himself, abject and captive, before me? two rocks, two gray stones, what offering is this? to whom does he offer it, to me, or to the powers of the altar behind me?; did he intend to stone me in my own temple? did he intend to stone us both, both Lords, I and the other, I and the Christ without a halo? is that what he wanted?; and why does my astronomer Toribio rush through the throng to the prostrate boy, the infinitely strange and conquered and defiant youth at my feet, and pick up the two stones, gaze at them with his crossed eyes, weigh them in his hands, seem to recognize them, kiss them, and immediately hold them aloft, exhibit them, exhibit them to Brother Julián the miniaturist, run toward him with the stones?; has my horoscopist friar lost his judgment, or is he merely carrying out to the last detail the function for which I had him brought here: to resolve the enigmas and then position them in the astral chart?; and thus hesitated the royal and unique person of El Señor, made multiple by doubt and the double presence of these strangers, the black-clad page masked in feathers and his young companion; thus there arose a shrill bird-like shrieking from the nuns’ cage: it is he, my Sweet Lamb, shrieked Madre Milagros; it is he, my cruel and most beloved confessor, shrieked Sor Angustias; it is he, another Don Juan, shrieked the novitiate Inés; one is of stone and the other living, I have lost my reason; which should I love? the one that promises the adventure of motionless stone or the one that promises me the misadventure of trembling flesh? and the twittering shrieks of the nuns aroused the Mad Lady from her dream and she, too, saw the man who was identical to the one she had rescued from the dunes one evening and elevated to the rank of royal heir; and Don Juan himself gazed at his double kneeling before El Señor and then he gazed intently into the mirror he held, still reclining, in one hand, and he said to himself: I am turning into stone and my mirror is but the reflection of my death: we are two, two cadavers; that is the power and the mystery of mirrors, oh, my lucid soul, for when a man dies before a mirror he is in reality two dead men, and one of them will be buried but the other will remain and continue to walk upon the earth: and that one kneeling there, is that I?

In contrast, the masked page did not hesitate. While the splintering of El Señor’s soul revealed itself in similar contortions of a face that in doubt and oblivion and premonition and fear and resignation prematurely assumed the features reserved for the moment of death, the page advanced toward him with a firm step. The echo of his footsteps resounded upon the granite floor of the chapel; the steps resounded more because of the hushed silence occasioned by El Señor’s evident perturbation than because of the forcefulness of the slight body of the Mad Lady’s page-and-drummer. And the Mad Lady, ensconced in her niche, gazed now at her lost drummer and cried out: “You’ve returned, ingrate, jackanapes; after abandoning me, without my permission, you’ve returned to cause my ruin, to shatter my equilibrium: damned knave!”

And this aged Queen was so agitated that she fell from the high carved niche where Don Juan had placed her with such delicacy, and lacking arms or legs to brace herself against the fall she tumbled headfirst to the granite floor and was knocked unconscious. No one paid the least attention to her, for all their powers of observation were focused on what was taking place before the altar. The page climbed upon the dais and, still masked, approached before the perturbed gaze of El Señor. And also Guzmán’s, standing nearby; and Don Juan’s, liberated to the imagination of evil and death; and the Comendador’s, fearful that these events, more akin to intangible fantasy than to the solidity of his merchant’s scales, would turn from its course the stream of precise and precious affairs of commerce; and the nuns’, stupefied by the apparition of the young man identical to their own lovers. The most alert eyes could scarcely see; not even the most attentive ears could hear. They heard nothing of what the page, after kissing El Señor’s hands, whispered into his pallid ear; only a few would see that for an instant the page removed the mask, but everyone, in tune with their Lord’s most minute vibration, felt that El Señor shivered like quicksilver when he glimpsed the page’s face: gray eyes, upturned nose, firm chin, moist, tattooed mouth imprinted with many-colored serpents that writhed with the movement of full lips; and Don Juan, from his position upon the slab of the tomb, could see El Señor’s ears flush, as if the page had lighted the candles of memory behind them.

And that memory, unknown to everyone except El Señor and the page, stopped the wheels of time, immobilized bodies, suspended breath, blinded gazes, and thus the painter Julián could tear his own gaze from the vast canvas he had painted to focus upon another, still larger, although less detailed canvas: the court of El Señor, fixed, paralyzed, converted into insensible figures within the space of the royal chapel; and Julián, who gazed, one gaze within this space, could neither hear the words nor see the few trembling gestures El Señor directed to the page and the youth: the protagonists.

The page replaced the feather mask upon his face; he offered a hand to El Señor, who grasped it, arose, and descended from the dais; but even this uncommon movement did not reanimate those who observed incomprehendingly, although luster was restored to eyes that watched El Señor and the page descend from the altar, saw the page offer his other hand to the kneeling youth in tattered clothing, a cross upon his back, his blond locks hiding his face; the page’s young companion arose from his position of humiliation, the halberdiers released him, and the trio — the page, the youth, and El Señor — walked toward the neighboring bedchamber separated from the chapel by a black curtain, and passing through the throng that formed a double wall of questioners, they entered El Señor’s chamber.

Guzmán drew back the curtain to allow them to pass. And that was the gesture that revived the movement, sighs, chatter, and exclamations of the court; everyone crowded over, ran across, nudged, or trampled the mutilated body of the Mad Lady, perhaps thinking it was some animal, perhaps El Señor’s dog, a forgotten package, a bundle of black rags, a bale of old hay; they thundered over it like a herd of horses, like a drove of oxen; no one saw her die, no one heard the last sigh from that mutilated bleeding old woman, her head split open, her tangled white hair matted with blood, her eyes starting from her head, her torso flattened, a heap of discarded rinds and peels, for everyone buzzed like a swarm of insects before the bedchamber door.

But only those closest — Julián and Toribio, the Comendador and Guzmán — could see what happened; Don Juan only imagined it; Inés only feared it. And this is what those who could see and hear, and lived to tell it, say:

The page approached El Señor; again he whispered something to him, and El Señor gave orders corresponding to the words of the page, for only at the page’s instruction did El Señor seem capable of acting; they were to send for a certain Aragonese flautist, and allow the page and his young companion, holding hands, moving extremely slowly, as if underwater, not looking at one another, somnambulists, to walk to El Señor’s bed, climb upon it, lie down, and await the indispensable arrival of the flautist; he is on his way, Señor, he was entertaining La Señora in her chamber with his sad, blind trilling; poor solitary and defeated Señora, she seems to be following the road of all our Queens: to be devoured by a Time with a body, a gullet, teeth, claws, scruffy hide, and hunger; they’re opening a path for him now, Señor; he’s guided by eyes that can see and by his own divining hands, Señor; here comes the flautist, no, no one knows where he came from, or when, or how, or why, only that the page deems him indispensable for the incomprehensible ceremony taking place upon the bed where our Señor has in the past been treated by Guzmán for all his premature ills, and where ill, unmoving, he has been able to watch other ceremonies, divine ceremonies, without being seen; but this ceremony cannot be divine, for the two boys have climbed upon El Señor’s own bed and are embracing there as if to console or recognize each other, as if to remember each other; tender, humane gazes, Julián and Toribio may think, but not the prelate who in a high state of agitation cries sodomy, sodomy in the chapel dedicated to the sovereign worship of the Eucharist, sovereign the worship as sovereign should be contrition before a sin becoming more and more prevalent, and St. Luke has said: Nay; but, except you repent, ye shall all likewise perish, and the only way to purge this heinous sin is in the way the youth was purged who was discovered in improper relations with the stableboys: at the stake, by fire, sic contritio est dolor per essentiam; and only vaguely hearing him, for the prelate’s admonitions in no way detracted from the force of curiosity outside the seignorial chamber or the force of fatality within it, Julián gazed toward the painting on the altar and asked himself whether Christian contrition must necessarily be repentance of intent, and not repentance for the passion that was cause and effect, as necessary to the sin as to the pardon, and as he met Julián’s eyes, the friar who was horoscopist and astronomer, he longed to ask him whether the moment was not approaching to change an act of contrition into an act of charity, an act without the repentance the Bishop judged and proclaimed essential, an act of pardon (Inés, Angustias, Milagros) that did not detest the fault committed, for there is something in Christian contritio that as we cleanse ourselves of the sin (Milagros, Angustias, Inés) also washes away our lives, pretending that we have never actually lived them: was it worth the trouble to begin again? Toribio and Julián asked each other with their eyes: Is it worth the pain? while the page and his companion lay embraced on El Señor’s bed; there they are awaiting, Inés, Madre Milagros, Sister Angustias, the arrival of the flautist from Aragon, who now enters the bedchamber, feeling his way, yellow-fingernailed hands extended before him, heavy shoulders, limping walk, his silent rope-soled sandals tied with rags around ulcerated ankles, his flute tied to his belt with a tattered cord: the blind man.

Doubly blind, doubly, Toribio reported to Julián, Julián to the Comendador, the Comendador to an alguacil, the alguacil to a steward; the sound of their voices flowed over the flattened cadaver of the Mad Lady until it reached the agitated honeycomb of nuns hidden behind the distant ornamental ironwork: doubly blind, for now the page blindfolds the blind man with a dirty handkerchief stained with visible remains of dried blood; the blind man remains blindfolded; he is led by the page to the bed and the flautist too climbs upon it, where he sits at one end, legs crossed; he removes his flute from his belt and begins to play a melancholy, monotonous tune with interminably repeated rhythms: music such as we have never heard here, Julián, Toribio, Inés, Madre Milagros, music that smells of smoke and mountain, that tastes of stone and copper, that does not recall in us any recollections, but seems to revive the page’s young companion, draws him out of his stupor, causes him to lift his face as if in search of a sun banished from these royal dungeons, lights a flame in his eyes as if truly an errant star were reflected there, Toribio, Julián; and the page is drawing the curtains around El Señor’s bed, Inés, Madre Milagros, Sister Angustias, while the light in the eyes of the blond and tattered youth spreads across his entire face and animates his lips; the youth’s lips are moving, Guzmán, Toribio, Inés, Madre Milagros, and this is the last thing we who have the privilege of being able to peer through the door to El Señor’s chamber can see before the page’s hand draws the last curtain and separates the three — the page, youth, and flautist — from eyes avid for these novelties and also from the defeated gaze of a trembling El Señor seated again upon the curule chair brought to him by Guzmán: all three are hidden by the three curtains that completely close off the bed from head to foot and from top to bottom: more than a bed, it is a fragile tomb, a motionless carriage.

The youth speaks. And El Señor hears what the youth is saying, but his fatigued arm hangs lifelessly by his side, and his hand gropes distractedly for something beside the curule chair, a companion, perhaps a dog that would make him feel less defenseless.

The youth speaks, hidden behind the curtains that envelop El Señor’s bed, hidden in the strange company of the page and the flautist. One can hear the flautist’s melancholy music accompanying the words of the young pilgrim. Nothing, on the other hand, can be heard from the lips of the page. And these are the pilgrim’s words: