Terra Nostra

III. THE NEXT WORLD

LOVE OF WATER

“Why is everything so still?”

La Señora would spend long hours alone in her bedchamber, her only company that of the creature she had fashioned — inanimate, impervious to all rituals, deaf to all convocations; seated upon fine carpets and cushions and cloths, toying distractedly with the sands of the floor of her rich Arabic bedchamber, she would not look at him, attentive only to the sound of water in the late afternoon outside her window on the high plain and the mountains, divining, listening, imagining the origin of the scant liquid sounds of that flat, dusty, quiet, inhospitable land: she listened intently: she could hear water flowing in the silence of the Castilian afternoon.

“Azucena, Lolilla, where are you?” How long the solitary hours. Where had everyone gone?

For an instant she imagined she had been abandoned, her only companion the creature born of her witchcraft. She imagined herself as the solitary mistress of the palace. Oh, then there would again be shepherds and songs and dances and baths and pleasures … hours falling like silver coins. Golden light: stone gilded by the setting sun; the cleft hoofs of goats upon the mountain; the cloven hoofs of bulls upon the plain; invisible water: dripping water in the dungeons, black drops trickling down the walls; water draining from the quarries, water coursing from the grumbling, snowy mountain; narrow, shallow rivers, water of stone; the nearby storm building in the east, distant thunder … water …

She did not look toward the figure lying upon her bed.

She gazed through the half-open window, sniffing the coming rain, the summer storm, water from the east, the great bath for the dirty land that forbade ablutions, the absorption by water of strength indispensable for war and sanctity and affliction; the increasing drumming of raindrops upon dry earth, on canvas tents of forges and taverns on the work site, on paving stones of the palace. Each drop: pleasure; she had asked nothing more; she had not solicited these love affairs, these diabolical pacts, these black arts: she had sought nothing more than a little indulgence of her senses.

Her head resting upon her closed fist, she dreamed of the East, the Indies, the Crusades; she was living in a castle at the time of the Crusades, discovering unknown pleasures, drop by drop, a rosary of pleasures; everything that is pleasure is foreign, it comes to us from afar, Mihail, Juan, the rosary, the rosary itself came from Syria, beads of the rosary of pleasure, rice, sugar, sesame, melon, lemon, orange, peach, artichoke: a rain of delectable spices, cinnamon, ginger, perfume; a solid sheet of cotton, satin, damask, carpets; a rain shower of new colors, indigo, carmine, lilac.

“Everything that hangs, that one can taste or smell, comes from very far away.”

Water, love of water; seas, oceans, rivers, sails and rudders, pitch and distant swallows, oars and anchors, sail, sail far from here to the lands of pleasure, far from the rivers of my English fogs and Spanish shadows, far, far away; here pleasure is evil, phantoms are born of fog and shadow; lands of the sun where pleasure is good, it is to you I long to travel, to the East, to the Indies; who will carry me there? Let us go south, Mihail, to Andalusia, to Cádiz, we shall make love upon the sea, you should never have come here, you should have remained beside the sea … love of water …

She drank deeply from her water pitcher, then poured what was left upon the sand, as if she wished to create a beach, a shore, a place where she might sail away from the prison of her bedchamber of sands and tiles and cushions; and where she had emptied the pitcher, in the center of the damp stain spreading across the sand, something stirred, as if the sand were germinating, a plant being born from this sterility, a bud, a seed of life, a caterpillar struggling from the cocoon of the damp sands, wet grains of sand, a homunculus, insignificant, diminutive, a living root bursting forth, baptized by the water she had drunk, convoked by water, a moist tuber, the mandrake, torn from the earth of death, born of the tears of a hanged man, of a man burned alive, the mandrake, at last I understand, torn from the burned earth beneath the ashes of Mihail-ben-Sama, Miguel-of-Life, ashes mixed with sand, the root of the mandrake, quickly, two cherries for his eyes: he shall see; a radish for a mouth: he shall speak; wheat, wheat sown upon the tiny head, I have none, bread, the crust of bread, bread crumbs upon his head: his hair shall grow, he shall see, he shall speak; he will tell me his secrets, he knows where the treasures are, little turnip, little man, you were here all the time, hidden in my own bedchamber, where did these sands come from? oh, they must be the sands of death, ash, and dust collected from beneath all the racks, all the stakes where men have died, mandrake, weeping, mandrake, that they might give you life, drops of their tears, drops of their sperm, mandrake, for the hanged man, the burned man, the impaled man, mandrake, everyone knows, dies with his last erection …

How still it is. Where is everyone?

THE DECREE

The voice of the pilgrim was silent.

The music of the blind Aragonese beggar had ceased.

The curtains around El Señor’s bed remained drawn, the sails that had brought the shipwrecked sailor to the high plains of Castile, led by a woman dressed as a page, and behind which he had recounted to El Señor his voyage and had divined El Señor’s reactions — his trembling, his fear, his anger, his desire to interrupt the narration, to rise from the curule chair and call an end to this unwonted audience, to order all the court to return to their chambers, their cells, their towers — but not his desires: to be left alone with his mortification, then to ask Guzmán for ointments, brews, rings, and magic stones, then to ask Inés to return once again, one more night …

Trembling and panting, El Señor half rose to his feet. Though his legs were feeble, his face was a mask severe as stone, and his voice was muted thunder: “Be you hereby warned that it will in no manner be allowed that any person write of the superstitions and the way of life you have heard recounted here, nor allowed that they be repeated by any tongue, for such would be contrary to the service of God Our Lord and our…”

And collapsing again onto the curule chair, he joined his hands, cracked his fingers, and added, weighing each word: “We hereby decree … that a … new … world … does not … exist…”

He gazed into the silence around him. With a disdainful flick of his hand, he dismissed the company.

With his own imperious gesture, Guzmán ripped back, one by one, the curtains that veiled the bed’s three occupants. “And what, Sire, will you do with the bearers of this news?”

“Guards … halberdiers … take them into custody … place them … in the deepest dungeon…”

“Torture, surely, Señor; they have not told everything they know…”

“Let no one touch them. Guard them zealously. Later I shall speak with them. Not now, Guzmán, I want everyone to leave; you, too; my fatigue is great; be off, all of you, be off!”

RUMORS

Alguaciles and chaplains, monks and stewards, Julián and Toribio, Guzmán and the Comendador, the halberdiers taking charge of the three prisoners, the young pilgrim, the blind flautist, the girl with the tattooed lips dressed as a page, the nuns fluttering behind the iron latticework, the Bishop and his companion, the monk of the order of St. Augustine, the scrubbing girls hidden behind the columns, the huntsmen, Guzmán’s men, all hurrying from the chapel, murmuring, lost in amazement, doubt, mockery, deafness, credulity, incomprehension, fear, indifference, hurrying swiftly from the vicinity of El Señor’s bedchamber, could you hear anything? I couldn’t, and you? nor I, what did they say? nothing, pure fantasy, what did they say? nothing, pure lies, lands of gold, lands of idols, beaches of pearls, blood, sacrifices, infidels, teach them, truth, the Gospel, barbaric nations, exterminate them, blood and fire, idolaters, by the handfuls, dreams, lies, not one shred of proof, they didn’t bring even one grain of gold with them, fucking, they were fucking, two men, two sodomites, no, one was a woman in disguise, and one an old man, a flautist, and one a young man, a sailor, and they were all in one bed together, fucking, Babylon, take your pleasure and you’ll die an old man, quarreling and loving make all men equal, madmen, lies, save us, God, from madmen in dangerous straits, but in this palace, eh? fantasies, fairy treasure, God, Our Father, what happened, Mother Milagros? nothing, daughters, nothing, still another challenge to the Faith, still another, always a challenge, Christianity bleeds from battling against the Infidel, the Body of Christ, the rack of the cross, the redemption of sins, praise, praise, praise be, scurrying like little mice among the sumptuous tombs of the ancestors, trampling unawares over the bulk that is the mutilated body of the Queen called the Mad Lady, avoiding the forbidden stairway that leads to the plain, avoiding the strange painting brought, it is said, from Orvieto, abandoning the icy chapel to its solitary inhabitants, the corpse of the Mad Lady, Don Juan, a statue of himself, resting upon a tomb, and inside another sepulcher, by his own choice, the Idiot Prince, and close to him, hidden, containing her rage, the whorish, farting dwarf, and again through tunnels and courtyards, galleries and kitchens, stables and passageways, bedchambers and dungeons, the rumor: “There is a new world beyond the sea”

“What proof is there? None. It’s a tangled tale we’ve heard, pure fable, dream, imagination, delirium, danger, for that devil’s-spawn pilgrim is in league with the other two, his twins, and one of them has planted his ass in La Señora’s bedchamber, and the third one is plotting with that crowd of rebels in the work sheds.” “Be calm, Don Guzmán, drink up. Thank you for bringing me to these cool and shady mews, and thank you, especially, for notifying me of my elevation to the rank of Comendador. It is a pleasure for me to celebrate it here with you in this place where men’s work is done rather than in some site of leisure and luxury, for this place is more fitting to our purposes, that men rise in the world by virtue of their merit — never forgetting our humble origins and hard times, isn’t that right, Chief Huntsman?” “But I, Guzmán, I was born high.” “That’s worse, much worse. If you’ve come down in the world, it’s with even greater energy you must strive to ascend.”

“There’s a new world on the other side of the sea”

nonononono, Spain is Spain, not an inch of land exists outside of Spain, it’s all here, all here contained within my palace, oh, help me, my Lord, God, and True Man, see me once again prostrate before your altar of mysteries, hear me this time, answer me this time, assure me that everything that exists in the material and the spiritual world is already contained here within my palace, my reason for living, the duplication of everything that exists enclosed here with me forever, I, the last I, with no descendants, here in this reduced space with everything within reach of my hand, everything, everything, not in a limitless, inaccessible, and multiple expanse, the world is trickling through my fingers, the brief life, eternal glory, unchanging world, here there is no room for even one additional idea, one terror, one joy, one challenge, everything is here, everything is enclosed within the walls of my mausoleum, luxury is here, mourning, the war of the soul, and here is art, Brother Julián, science, Brother Toribio, power, Guzmán, honor, my mother, perversion, game, and pleasure, my Señora, love, Inés, and your own plan of eternal well-being and human redemption, Christ Saviour, here, solid, fixed, contained, comprehensible, distilled in their final essences, here good, evil, and the final judgment of everything that exists, do I not thus, for my own reasons, advance your work? does not everything here advance your work? until the very end, until with the consummation of all things we too are consumed and my scheme complete, we shall be the only ones, the last ones, we shall have had all, and the final act will take place on this stage so that everything finally is resolved, comprehended, so ambition and war, lust, doubt, offense, and crime disappear, so it be known here, once and for all, which will be condemned and which saved, which is the face of man and which the divine face, one life, my God, one entire life dedicated to lessening the haste, fatigue, and madness of men, enclosing them all here, giving them every opportunity until there are no opportunities left, and thus hastening the last event of the world, your sovereign judgment, the clarification of all mysteries, the certainty that we have achieved your kingdom in Heaven, forever, for the earth shall have ceased to exist, and never again will there be played out upon it the mockery and tragedy of man, there will be only Heaven and Hell, without the accursed intermediary step of life on earth, and this will be so because no one can offer a gift surpassing that of the end of everything, the offering we make of everything that exists, exists for the last time, in order that it all end here with me, with us, and not in the broad and terrifying chance of a new world where everything can begin all over again … nononono …

“Anew world exists”

“Why not, Brother Julián? If all the bodies in the heavens are spheres, the earth will be no exception, and it is possible that it traces a circle from East to West, from the setting to the rising sun, always returning to the original point of departure.” “I understand you, Brother Toribio, it is other things that frighten me, not that.” “What things?” “If the new world described by that youth and the new universe you describe are real, then they are immense, and fatally diminish the stature of man and of the God who created him.” “God does not need to be rewarded, or excused, or aggrandized, Julián, for if there is a God, He is All.” “But man, Toribio, man…” “Now it is up to us to glorify man and instill pride in him through the art and philosophy and science of man; the new matter and space will not diminish us, Brother, they will not conquer us.” “The soul, Toribio…” “Pride, Julián, do not fear human pride.” “Our soul is escaping from us, dribbling away, hurry, we must stanch the flow…”

“Beyond the ocean”

“I’m losing control of things, chance is unraveling all my projects, how was I to foresee what that sailor was going to tell us? what effect will it have upon the soul of El Señor? proof, proof, I need proof…” “A feather mask?” “Bah, this youth has spoken of fabulous riches, of chambers lined with gold and silver, of rich ornaments, but I have yet to see with my own eyes the tiniest pip of gold, the darkest and most misshapen pearl, nothing, he has brought nothing with him, not the least proof, nothing but a small mirror, a pair of scissors, and a mask such as any Eastern artisan might fabricate … Nothing! I do not believe…”

“Exists”

“Gold palaces, jade temples, bronze earrings, you say, Lolilla?” “Yes, my mistress, and beaches where pearls grow, and everything the lowest scrubbing girls like ourselves or the most exalted Ladies like Your Highness could dream of.” “Oh, Lolilla, Azucena, this afternoon I dreamed how pleasure always comes to me from afar; everything that is pleasurable has come to us from the East, there was nothing here before; what pleasures these new lands must hold! You say a blond youth with a cross upon his back and six toes on each foot has been there? Oh, my splendid scrubbing maids, there are three different — although identical — men; oh, Don Juan, oh, my very own, I know where to seek you, you are not unique, I told you, you can never escape from me, I shall always find you again, oh, my true master, Mus, this is how you reward me, by revealing to me the new land and its pleasures, the new world from whence came my lover, my lovers, and the ardent cinnamon and juicy orange and soft damask, oh, my tiny man, my mandrake, this is how you manifest yourself, thus you first reveal to me the place of treasures, you are faithful to your legend, look at him, Azucena, Lolilla, look what was buried in my sand.” “Ay, a snake!” “No, its antidote: the mandrake.” “Ay, the sticky turnip, the slobbery root!” “No, the tiny man of secrets; see how the face is coming to life; the cherries are becoming eyes; the bread, hair; the radish, a mouth; he appeared, and I received the news of the new land and its treasures; everything is in accord; the walls of my prison are crumbling; the road to the Indies, the return to the Orient, is opening, oh, what a dream, oh, what mad joy, oh, let my feet touch those distant shores where all men are like you, Juan, for if the three of you are identical, then all the men of the new world must be the same, and my pleasure will know no end…”

“A world”

“Arise, Sire, from that unseemly posture, for this is not the moment for penitence and plaint, but for action that will save men’s souls; what an urgent task the Redeemer has entrusted to us, He who died to redeem our souls, there is much to do if we are to carry the light of the Gospel to the afflicted nations of which this young pilgrim, if he speaks the truth, has told us.” “Who are you, for God’s sake? Tell me, Señor Bishop, who is this man accompanying you? I have never seen him before, and I wish to see nothing new here, neither person nor thing, least of all this creature you have brought into my presence, a devil, a demon, the Antichrist: you must recognize him, my sweet Jesus told me, you must recognize him, for your life is bound up in his, and I believe that this is he.” “Calm yourself, Señor, calm yourself, this is the Inquisitor of Teruel.” “A devil, I tell you, look at his red eyes, see how his flesh clings to his bones, his skin is bone, his face is a skull.” “Sire, I owe allegiance to you and to my order, that of St. Augustine; I have been a professor of theology, a defender of the faith, an enemy of heresies, and for these reasons I have succeeded the former Inquisitor of Teruel; I followed with admiration your admirable conduct as you prepared your astute trap for the heresiarchs of your domains, delivering them into your father’s hands, may he rest in glory, after endangering your own life by joining with them; I celebrated your zeal in the campaigns against the pertinacious Cathari, the wily Waldenses, and their deformed stepchildren of the North, the Flemish Adamites; great and good accomplishments all, but even greater had you but made use of your natural ally, the ecclesiastical arm of power: error is still not eradicated in Europe, and now you find yourself facing yet another gigantic undertaking: that of evangelizing the savage nations of this new world, if it exists, bringing to them the light of the Faith, and converting them for Christ the King, and having done that, the no less awesome task of extirpating pagan idolatry and protecting the new Faith, our Faith, against the dangers of a reemergence of barbaric and heinous behavior, like that exposed here today.” “Yes, yes, I have always so stated, I have always so sworn: war against idolatry, I never doubted that.” “One would say, Sire, that you had doubted something.” “Nononono.” “Arise, Sire, take my hands, look with me at the Sweet Jesus upon the altar of the Eucharist, and with me consider how your obligations are now multiplied.” “Nononono.” “For if the new world exists you must take it for yourself, your fortune, and your Faith.” “Nononono.” “And if this world and that world are to be governed, the same rigorous law must pertain to all men, there and here; there must not be, either here or there, even one vassal, no matter how independent of your power, who escapes immediate subjection, who is not subject to your mandates, your censures, your taxes, and your prisons; regard, Señor, with what harmony God’s ways are manifested: you may subject all dissidents with one blow, the laws against Moors and Jews extended against idolaters, and the laws against idolaters applied equally to Moors and Jews; sons must pay for the sins of their fathers, for did not the blood of our crucified Lord stain forever the blood of His executioners? and let the accuser speak in secret, for must he who works in the name of God be held to account for his actions? nor shall accuser and accused ever confront one another, for would the common thief confront the Supreme Maker? nor shall the names of witnesses be made public, for who would confuse those who sell their soul to the Devil with those who sell themselves to God?; and thus, investigate everyone, until every man fear to speak or listen to another; let all intellect serve the Faith; and finally, both here and there, impose total silence upon every man, for through the least chink of science or poetry slips heterodoxy, error, the poison of the Jew, the Arab, and the idolater. Sire: do as you will with the riches these new territories hold. But do so in the name of the Faith, for if not, you shall have gained the world but lost your soul, and what profiteth it a man to have gained the world…”

“New”

“Oh, Señor Don Guzmán, doubt is excellent when it is a question of securing what we already possess, but it can be fatal if it impedes us in pursuit of what we seek.” “Are you out of your mind? Have you swallowed that pack of lies?” “No, but I shall have the prudence, with no illusions, to submit everything I have heard to the harshest test: the same proof that you demand; but you must see things in my manner, Don Guzmán; if the new world does not exist, we shall have lost nothing; but if it does, by chance, exist, we have everything to gain; oh, my dear friend; I cannot ever sleep again in peace for thinking that the riches recounted by that young voyager may exist, and may lie there for centuries, wasted, unless my hand take them and turn them to their true purpose, which is not the adornment of idols, but commerce, the arts, prosperity, change … Did you notice how naïvely those natives exchanged their jewels for a mirror or a pair of scissors? Oh, Don Guzmán: these ancient eyes and these feeble ears have never seen or heard of better business…”

“Beyond”

“Azucena, Lolilla, I tell you that everything that hangs, that tastes and smells comes from another place, even the rosary of our devotions, which comes from Syria, oh, I shall have it bead by bead, I shall have everything, guided by my homunculus, away from here, far from this accursed cloister of death, I shall be reborn, I shall live, I who have longed for a garden of jasmine and mosques, I who asked only that the shepherds return beneath my window with their flutes and flocks, I who came from misty England in search of the land of the sun and its orange trees and instead found myself on a plain of weeds, my flesh pierced by nettles and thistles, now I shall have the greatest garden in the world at my feet, the free land, the new land, without the burdens and crimes and prohibitions of this accursed plain to which my English aunt and uncle sent me, oh, Don Juan, pleasure will be for everyone or no one, and in the free land woman, to be woman, need not sell her soul to the Devil, oh, I shall beat the Devil at his own game, I shall sell my soul for the second time, he cannot keep his records straight, for so great is his desire to make himself master of souls that he buys them once and twice and a thousand times, I shall deceive the horned and tailed one himself, for if after it is all over I am condemned, what do I lose, my dear scrubbing maids? and if in deceiving him I win, I win nothing less than a second chance: a second life, in the second land; oh, my most cherished scrubbing lasses, what happiness you have brought me.” “Mistress, mistress, remember that the Devil may refuse to come in spite of your potions and spells and fancy words; we have tried everything and nothing happens; where is the Devil? Surely he’s not this little bit of a man, this slobbering root that inspires only disgust, not fear, and who would be lucky not to end up as a partner for that clown of a Barbarica.” “But I know, Azucena, Lolilla, I know; now I know, now I know where the Devil is…”

“The ocean”

be off, be off, far from my chapel, my cocoon, let them take everything, the palace, the servants, the land, everything except this place, my dead, my stairway, my painting, my bedchamber, my nest, my anguish, exterminate idolatry, yes, I promised that, I dictated that to Guzmán, and what is written exists, exists permanently, but how was I to know that there were still more pagans in the world? the world was closed, its frontiers circumscribed, fenced in, conquered, the heretics and idolaters known, yes, let the idolaters die by my hand and I shall be granted the pardon I bestowed upon the heretics, true pardon, not for my transitory acts on the fields of Flanders, but for my eternal words in this final cloister, who will recall even a single act that has not been recorded? will the need to exterminate idolaters in the new world be the price for pardoning heretics in the old? but that Augustinian, that man with the face like a skull, has told me just the opposite, the same law for everyone, extermination for everyone, Jews, Arabs, idolaters, heretics, and if not that, then must it be precisely the opposite? pardon for everyone, those there and those here? oh, nonono, I shall save nothing that way if the new world exists, it must be destroyed, for never have I heard of anything that so ferociously mocks my world, a world, that youth said, a world where the natural order must be recreated each day, for its life depends upon the sun and the night and sacrifice, a world that dies with each dusk and which must be re-created with each dawn, nononono, the goal of my world is to be forever fixed, that it may be forever regulated by power, crime, inheritance, my world equal to my palace, the new world the most dissimilar world possible, that world incomprehensible, proliferating, flower of a day, death every night, resurrection every morning, the very thing I saw in the mirror as I ascended the stairway, everything changing, nothing dying completely, nothing expended, everything resurrected, transformed, everything nourished from every other thing, extinction impossible, everything repeated, oh, for all my theorems, all my philosophy, I would be naked, defeated, truly defeated, for everything I offer to the world to force the world to say I cannot repay you, you have won, your obliteration is my defeat, I continue to live but you have succeeded in obliterating your presence, you have killed me, for as you die I die because of you, for as you die I can summon nothing to occupy your place, all that is nothing if now some contemptible boy offers me an entire world, a new world, oh, my God, with what can I repay such an offering? what could I give in return for such a gift? with what could I fill the space of the new world? how many crimes, loves, anxieties, battles, persecutions, dreams, and nightmares would I have to suffer before again being able to reach this trembling needle point of concentration that constitutes my entire existence? oh, Lord who hears me, tell me, finally, the truth, if I conquer the new world, will I not be the conquered, not it?

“From the other side”

“Since man has observed the order of the heavens, Toribio, when they move, where they move, to what degree, and what that movement produces, could you deny that man, if I may put it this way, that man possesses a genius comparable to that of the Creator of the heavens?” “No, Julián, I would merely say that in some manner man could fabricate heavens if he could but obtain the divine instruments and materials.” “Well, I would be content if I could fabricate a new world using human materials.” “Do not doubt it could be done, my brother, for anything is possible; nothing must be rejected; nature, and in particular human nature, encompasses each and every level of existence, from the divine to the diabolic, from the bestial to the mystic; nothing is beyond belief; nothing is beyond possibility; the only possibilities we deny are the possibilities we do not know…”

“Of the sea”

“Business dealings for whom, old man? I’ll tell you: for El Señor, for his fortune, not ours, and thus this new world, once again, will defer our bettering ourselves, and bind us even more tightly than before to seignorial power…” “Oh, Don Guzmán, do you have so little confidence in my astuteness? Look around you; look at the Princes, the monks, at the palace, look at religion itself; what is their common sign? Nonproductivity; for as the monks do not propagate sons, El Señor does not propagate riches; he cannot, it is contrary to his most profound reason for being; if what I know of him from my own account and what you have told me about him is true, then it is also true that his rank, his power, his cult, depend upon loss, not acquisition. El Señor’s dynasty confuses honor with loss, glory with loss, rank with loss, power with loss, like the magpie that to no one’s benefit steals and hides in her nest everything that glitters. Look closely, Don Guzmán. Reflect seriously upon what we have heard and what I now tell you, and you will find a frightening similarity between the motives that animate El Señor and those that govern life in the new world. Power is a challenge based upon offering something for which there is no possible counter-offering. A challenge, I say, for greatest is the power of the one who ends by having something that is nothing; in the end, loss; in the end, death; in the end, sacrifice: sacrifice, death and loss for others, as long as it is possible, and when it is no longer so, then sacrifice, death and loss for oneself. My solution is very simple; to these negative practices I oppose the very positive proposition of exchanging in order to acquire; to loss, I oppose acquisition. El Señor wished to complete his palace of death? You have seen that he had to come to me for a loan. Does he wish to send an expedition to ascertain the existence or non-existence of a new world? He will have to come to us, the outfitters, the dealers in commodities, the manufacturers of arms. Does he wish to colonize new lands? He will have to come to men like you, Don Guzmán, and to every last ordinary man in this palace, and to the rogues in the cities, and to the impoverished nobles; the new world will belong to us, we will win it with our arms and our brains, and we shall be repaid for our efforts with the gold and pearls that will flow from the hands of the natives into ours, though we will take care to reserve the royal fifth part for El Señor, and to collect payment for his debts in advance, and to make him content, and deceive him. Oh, yes!” “Bah, you’re a dreamer, too, testy old fool; it was an ill-fated day when I opened the doors of this palace to you. You’re dreaming, for whether or not that new world exists, El Señor has decreed that it does not; you heard him.” “But a piece of paper will never stay the course of history.” “El Señor believes it so; he believes only what is written.” “Then we shall win with paper; find me a pen, ink, and parchment, and this very night my letters will go out to the contractors and navigators of Genoa and Oporto, Antwerp and Danzig; the word will spread far and wide…”

“Exists”

“The Devil, yes, Azucena, Lolilla, the Devil exists, I know it, but not in the single body of the wise, nibbling, silky-haired Mus, and not in a double body, the mouse’s that assumed the flesh of Don Juan and directed his actions. No, look, my duennas: look upon my bed at that body I formed from bits and pieces of the royal cadavers, held with sap from the storax tree and gum acacia; look at it, the eyes from one body, the thighbone from another, the ears from one and hands from another, and that is what the Devil is like; I know him now; he is a soul living amid us; he must be composed as I composed this monstrous body: compose the Devil’s soul from portions of the souls of El Señor, his mother, the dwarf, Guzmán, Julián, the astronomer-priest, the Chronicler, the workmen, Don Juan, the Idiot, this pilgrim of whom you speak, the female with the tattooed lips, the blind flautist from Aragon, your own souls, and mine; mix them together and stir them in a great pot over a lighted fire, and even without adding benzoin or aloe, you shall know the soul of the Devil.” “His passion, his dream,” “Ay, my mistress, who said that?” “His fear, his anger, his mortality, his innocence.” “Ah, my bones are rattling with fear.” “His gluttony, his rebellion, his desire, his misery, his stupidity, his wisdom.” “Ay, Lolilla, the voice from beyond the tomb.” “Ah, Azucena, the sands are speaking.” “His dissatisfaction, his servitude, his grandeur.” “Listen, my scrubbing maids, he is speaking; listen, he knows.” “His longing to leave a record of his passage through the world; poor creature that he is, the Devil is all these things.” “He is speaking, my pretty maids; the radish has become a mouth; my homunculus is speaking.” “And as we, too, are all these things, he attempts to seduce us, to make a pact with us, to complete himself through us.” “Ay, I’m coming down with the ague.” “To play, to love, to weep, to laugh, to do battle, to dream, to wound, to kill, to die, and be reborn with us.” “Ay, upon my soul, the little turnip knows how to talk!” “For God is none of these things; He is eternal perfection, pure, uncontradicted essence, unopposed oneness.” “Ay, the little play toy is talking!” “And thus, loving us, He despises us.” “Ay, I’m eaten up with fear!” “And thus as He summons us to Him, He scorns us.” “Ay, upon my oath as a whore, it must be seen to be believed!” “God asks us to come to Him, but the Devil comes to us; we are like him; he is our most fervent, secret, and compassionate ally.” “Ay, Azucena!” “Ay, Lolilla!” “Ay, St. Thomas!” “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it!”

“A world”

my husband, my King, come out now, don’t hide, see, everyone has gone now, there’s no one left but me, your Barbarica, your tiny Queen, your squat little piece of real woman, don’t deny me that delicious dingalingdong, come out from your hiding place, don’t spoil my wedding night, where have you gone? Come, come back to me, let me show you all the things I know that compensate for my defects, you’ll see how warm and deep my twat is, you’ll see how much I love you … and if you don’t come to me, you bastard, I hope your knees swell and your eyelids turn red and your skin turns green and you blood turns to poison and your dead fish rots off and if you leave here without me, I hope everyone shouts “bugger” at you everywhere you go!

“New”

tell me, hawk, ferocious hawk, my beautiful falcon, what should I do? you are my only faithful friend, my only true confessor, not that Friar Julián who sometimes plays the role, you, hawk, tell me, like a mole I have gnawed at the foundations of El Señor’s power, with patience I have plotted, I have carried my grudge for a long time, I am no one’s man, and I know that from this great disorder a new order will emerge that is favorable to me, whatever the outcome, for if El Señor triumphs, he will remember me as a prudent counselor who forewarned him of the dangers surrounding him, and if his many enemies triumph — the cities, merchants, workmen — they will recognize in me a loyal friend who from within prepared the way for the rebellion, and opened the doors to it, but I did not expect this news, a land beyond the great ocean, a second opportunity for El Señor and his house, Nondum, Not yet, yes, now, now, for if El Señor extends his domains he will survive, he will become master of the fabulous riches seen by that youth, he will owe nothing to anyone, and once again, this time perhaps forever, I will be indebted to his accursed dynasty, Don Nobody, but if that new world exists, hawk, if the moneylender is right, then how can I not play a part in the adventure of discovering it, conquering it, and colonizing it? Will I be El Señor’s servant forever, with never another opportunity, forever the bored sentry at his idiotic mystic sessions? shall others win the fame and fortune for which I have so long striven? the new world, the new world, who will win it, if it exists? this unenterprising, pusillanimous, sick Señor who, I swear it, whether or not the new world exists, will never set foot upon it because he will never expose his weak body to the fatigue and terrors of scurvy, sargasso, leviathans, vermin, fevers, hand-to-hand combat, the new world, hawk, my elegant hawk, will my arm know how to win it, along with all its treasures? Guzmán, Don Nobody, the new man, decisive, a man of action, free of diseased blood and morbid anguish, I, an undertaking worthy of my individual energies, I, I, I? The new world, if it exists, hawk, how can I not play a part in it? oh, hawk, I am beginning to believe not only that it exists but that actually it exists for me, for men like me to demonstrate there in those jungles and seas and rivers and plains and mountains and temples that the universe will belong to action and not contemplation, to strength and not inheritance, to chance and not fatality, to progress and not stasis: to me, and not El Señor, oh, my fine falconet, my friend, my handsome hawk, am I dreaming too? shall I defeat our puny Felipe both here and there? Yes, I shall act on his behalf, with words, but I shall act for myself in fact, I shall write long chronicles of the discovery to make him believe he is the sovereign of lands he will never know, he will believe everything he sees written, oh, hawk, I begin to burn with desire to cross the great sea, to drive my sword into the blazing shore of the new world, to burn temples, topple idols, conquer idolaters, heroic deeds await us, my fine young hawk, for you will voyage with me, my arm will be your perch, and as you swoop like an arrow to capture your prey, so will I sweep down like a curse upon the treasures of the new lands, and then, hawk, and then … what did that pilgrim say? a beach, a beach of pearls with sufficient riches to captivate the favors of the coldest, most remote, most noble and disdainful lady, and bathe her in pearls, gold, emeralds, to make her mine, heroic feats, La Señora, the new world, the land conquered, the woman conquered, hawk …

“Not yet”

Barbarica, Barbarica, stop blubbering, can you not hear me, little dwarf? can you not see me? have you eyes only for the tomb where lies our heir? come to me, little silly, your mistress is calling you, I need your aid, for I have neither arms nor legs, come to me, now I have come back to life I need you more than ever, why do you not hear me? do you not realize? I was already dead, little one, dead, I accompanied the corpse of my King and Lord through the highways and monasteries of Spain, dead, I arrived here, at the mausoleum of my son the King, idiots, unruly women made me fall from my niche, they trampled over me like a troop of jennies, they believed that by killing me they killed me, oh, what an error, little Barbarica, what a great error, what a grave error, for how can someone die who is already dead? and if dead, how not be revived as he is killed? come, my little Queen-to-be, let us go together, we have much to do, have I not always told you so? as we die we may lose the five senses of natural life, but we gain the sixth sense of supernatural life, here, pick me up, we will live again, we will begin again, I smell something new, I smell it on all sides, the world is expanding, imbeciles, they look beyond, with vain illusions, with great hopes, they believe they can escape from us, from our law, power and loss, honor and sacrifice, nothingness, we shall conquer, we shall impose the kingdom of nothingness upon the land toward which they gaze with hope, for every forward step they make we shall take two backward, we shall capture the flight of the future in the ice of the past, leave that Idiot Prince in his tomb, abandon him, I promise you better things, Barbarica, I promise myself better things, oh, never again shall I marry a husband who dies before me …

“Nondum”

“The red stone, the ring of bones, Guzmán. I cannot breathe. How good that you returned, I was choking to death here by myself.” “Drink this, Señor, drink this.” “Even water turns to pus in my throat.” “I beg you, drink, and listen to me.” “Loyal Guzmán, what would I do without you? You have attended me, you have warned me, will you now be able to console me for something worse than either madness or lack of breath: the loss of the things that cause me to cling to life, something that is both madness and lack of breath?” “I understand El Señor, but I do not share his judgment, if El Señor will forgive me.” “A new world, Guzmán, a world new to me, to my crown. All I sought was the reduction of every existing thing to fit within the space of these walls, and then the quick extinction of my person and my line. I constructed a necropolis; they offer me a universe. The new world will not fit within my tombs.” “Señor, I tell you, with the greatest respect, you have triumphed; look at things in this way: in that new world you can duplicate your own and freeze it in time.” “What do you mean?” “Something very simple, Sire. Once you told me that for heaven really to be heaven, there could be no heaven on earth.” “Yes, I told you, and I told myself: let us construct a hell upon earth so as to assure the need for a heaven that will compensate for the horror of our lives; let us first deserve hell on earth, torture, the stake; first we shall free ourselves from the powers of evil upon earth with the goal of someday deserving the beatitude of heaven in Heaven; Heaven, Guzmán; to forget forever that we ever lived.” “And you prayed, Your Grace, to Christ Our Lord, and you said…” “Those who attempt to change your image, my God, shall see their work burned, crumbled, destroyed by the combined rage and piety of my armies; never again will new Babylons be raised to deform your sweet likeness, my God.” “Señor, then construct your hell in the new world; raise your necropolis upon pagan temples; fix Spain in time outside of Spain; your triumph will be double; never will the times have seen its equal; and no one will be able to surpass your gift: an entire universe consecrated to mortification and death; no one, Señor … Raise your cause of stone and sorrow above both worlds, the old and the new.” “The new world, Guzmán; you heard that youth; a world that must be remade each day as the sun appears.” “Destroy it, Sire, convert it into the mirror of Spain, that whoever sees himself in it see the motionless stone of death, the eternally fixed, the motionless statue of your eternal glory.” “Amen, Guzmán, amen.” “The new world will fit within your tombs…”

“Plus Ultra”

this I fear above all, Brother Toribio, that the new world will not in truth be new, but rather a terrible extension of the old world we are living here, did you see El Señor? did you see how he trembled every time that pilgrim pointed out the similarities between the crimes of that place and our own, the oppressions there and oppressions here? I tremble, too, Brother, although for reasons different from those that shake our sovereign; El Señor wishes that his life, his world, his experience, be unique and final, a definitive page written for eternity, unrepeatable; he fears anything that opens outward and divests him of his sense of culmination, the final and unquestionable end; the life he lived was to be the last, forever; not only for him, no, but for the species itself; so great is his arrogant will for extinction; on the other hand, I tremble because I fear that in conquering the tyranny of the new world those of the old world will grow in strength and dimension, ally themselves with greed and cruelty, and all this in the name of our sacred Faith; the powers of Mars and Mercury are waxing; they mask themselves with the face of Christ; war, gold, evangelization: we shall lose the opportunity to transfer to the new world that new world you and I, Brother, had so quietly begun to create with our telescopes and paintbrushes, protected here in the sheltering and indifferent shadows of this palace; fear, Brother; we shall be watched; we shall be persecuted, all I have warned you of is certain: we shall be accused, and in the most innocuous of our preoccupations will be discovered error, heresy, traces of the Jew; and as in the new world everything will be destroyed and the diabolical signs of idolatry seen in every action and object, as those artisans of whom the pilgrim spoke will be murdered, their works of stone and feather and metal destroyed, the gold melted down, the statues beheaded — all signs of evil, since evil is what we do not know and what does not know us — thus shall we be burned, you and I, Brother; and we will be unable to defend ourselves; we lack the strength to rebel; your science and my art detest equally disorder and oppression and desire perfect equilibrium between all things necessary and all things possible, a balance between order and freedom; oh, Brother, precarious indeed is the harmony we require, and when we lose it we shall be both victims and executioners of oppression, which will continue as order, before being victims and executioners of rebellion, which always means disorder …

“Beyond”

Don Juan, Don Juan, where are you? it is so dark and lonely in this chapel, the only light shines from the figures in that painting behind the altar, you would almost think the figures are moving, that they wish to speak to us, but that is deception, as the stone in which you have cloaked yourself is deception, I saw you from the choir, from behind the iron latticework I glimpsed you reclining atop one of the sepulchers, and I desired you again, my lover, but now, disguised in stone, how can I distinguish you in the darkness from the other statues, from the Princes and Lords and heirs represented here? I shall go from tomb to tomb touching the hands of all the dead, kissing the lips of all the statues until I recognize you, Juan, if I rescue you from the stone, if thanks to my lips and my hands I save you from being but one statue more in this pantheon, will you be grateful to me? will you truly? that deserves some reward, does it not? I shall free you from the spell of the stone, and you will free me from the spell of being virgin again, Juan and Inés, Inés and Juan, we shall break one another’s spells, one night more with you, Juan, that is all I ask, then I shall seclude myself here forever as a nun in this palace where my father brought me, did you know? to prove his faith, so no one might doubt the sincerity of our conversion, Juan, you didn’t know that, but I do, from childhood I knew nothing else, how they ordered us to wear a round yellow patch over our hearts, how they called us filthy pigs, marranos, how they forced all the Jews into one section of the city, and forced us to wear strange clothing, rags that brought scorn upon us, how they made the men let their beards and hair grow, we were sorrowful-looking creatures, one saw hunger in every face, they forced us to eat the flesh of the pig, there were great slaughters, the Jewish quarters of Seville and Barcelona and Valencia and Toledo were completely destroyed, and in the name of devotion they greedily stole our property, we won it back, again and again, my father told me this, we did without clothing, we dared not even keep our Hebrew books of prayers, lest some servant come upon them by accident, what could we do but recant, be converted, in order to survive? and once converted rebuild our fortunes from nothing in offices scorned by Castilians, for had we not performed them, no one else would, they accused us of seeking easy employment, of refusing to dig or plow, but what my father and his people did, Juan, someone had to do, even though to do it revealed us as Jews and vile people, my father was an old man when I was born, my mother dead in childbirth, I learned these stories late, and I had barely become a woman when my father destined me — as proof of his sincere confession and his faithfulness as a new Christian, and in hope that in time, our names changed and our old ways forgotten, we would be considered pure Christians — to take holy vows and thus, he told me, when the persecution begins again, as inevitably it will, perhaps I will already be dead, or perhaps I shall suffer persecution, but you will be safe, sheltered by your order, office of fire, office of shadows, one must choose between them, oh, Don Juan, I kiss your lips of stone, I give life again to your statue, Don Juan, between the two offices, between persecution and life in the convent, give me one night more, that is all I ask of you before I resign myself to my fate, one night more of love, I touch you, I kiss you, you will be flesh again, be mine again, Don Juan, first El Señor deflowered me, now, the second time, let it be you, Don Juan, and I shall accept my destiny forever, I took Christ as my bridegroom that I might love all men …

“Mudnon”

“See things as they are, Señor. Do not delude yourself. And in my daring, see the proof of the same fidelity you would demand of a dog, could he speak.” “You have a voice, Guzmán.” “And my truthful voice tells you that my huntsmen are mingling among the uneasy mob, the noisy grumblers of the work sheds and forges whose discontent is growing; something is about to happen; I do not know exactly what, but I can smell conflict in the air. You must be prepared, the motives for rebellion are mounting: the fruitful land destroyed, insufficient wages, the contrast between your luxury and their poverty, the accidental deaths, the fact that you buried your dead with such ceremony while those who died suffocated under the landslide lay abandoned, their widows wailing, and black crape mockingly adorned the plain; you were prepared to give charity to the poor passing by, but there is nothing for the workmen; they ask themselves who will succeed you, they have no trust in your foreign Lady and they believe that when you die that idiot brought here by your mother will take your place; yes, something is in the air.” “What should I do, Guzmán?” “The same thing you did as a young man, Señor; open the doors, let them enter, lock them here inside the palace, and exterminate them.” “This time they will be forewarned.” “Hope blinds them; nothing is forgotten more quickly than the past; nothing repeats itself like the past.” “Again?” “This is destined, Señor.” “So you say; but you do not believe in destiny.” “I give more than one name to action; the means justify the means.” “And the end?” “It is but the means between two actions which in turn becomes means for other actions.” “Guzmán; let me tell you something; of all the things that poor shipwrecked lad recounted, nothing impressed me as much as this: that in the new world the death of innocents is justified by the very order of their cosmos. I did not have that justification. How much suffering I could have saved myself! Do you remember what he said? The inhabitants of the new world are equally disposed to honor light if it triumphs, or shadow if it conquers.” “Then you must accept their belief as valid, and your undertakings will be justified not only by divine right but by the rights of nature as well.” “You have decided, have you not, Guzmán, for yourself, for me? You will go to the new world.” “I shall be a simple soldier in the fleets of El Señor and those of the evangelizing God.” “Guzmán, you know the answer; you told me, you brought that old man here, you forced me to contract that debt, you suggested I name him Comendador of the very noble Order of Calatrava; how shall we pay for the expeditions?” “A divine end, human means. Did not the Inquisitor of Teruel give you the solution? Expel the Jews, Señor, take possession of their riches, demand both purity of blood and purity of Faith; both are in peril. We shall carry to the new world the immaculate flag of Christ our Lord; we must not let false converts filter into the evangelization, false Spaniards who have never been willing to work as laborers or herd cattle, or to teach those offices to their sons, but who have sought positions of ease, and ways to earn a lot of money for very little work. And if what you thus amass is not sufficient for your royal purse, consider the cities, Señor; I repeat, that is where the riches accumulate; there are the merchants and sellers and collectors of excises and interests, and the gentlemen’s stewards and officers, and tailors, shoemakers, tanners, curriers, tilemakers, spice sellers, peddlers, silk mercers, silversmiths, jewelers, physicians, dyers, doctors, and other similar offices; impose exorbitant taxes upon them and deny them the shelter of statutes, courts, tribunals, and assemblies; while your ancestors were combating the Moors and persecuting the Hebrews, while you did battle against distant heretics and then shut yourself up to construct your necropolis, men of the cities were governing themselves, gaining rights and statutes and courts of justice; they were meeting in assemblies and practicing audacious customs; they speak of the will of all men, they make decisions by a majority of votes, they deny the basis of your unquestionable and unique ordination; impose tributes and outlaw their courts; the Augustinian of Teruel spoke wisely; the same law, for those in the new world and those in the old; enough vacillation, subject the Moor, expel the Jew, humble the free man and the burgher, enough contemplation, the undertaking is too great, too profitable, and too holy; there is a superabundance of accusations, choose one: traitors, sodomites, blasphemers, infanticides, murderers disguised as doctors, poisoners, usurers, heretics, witches, profaners of the Holy Spirit; the method is the same, impose it: act out of fervor for the Faith and the salvation of souls, even though you act against many true Christians, utilize the testimony of enemies, rivals, the merely envious; act without proof of any kind, lock them up in ecclesiastical prisons, torture them, wrest confessions from them, condemn them as heretics and relapsed converts, deprive them of their goods and property, and deliver them to the secular branch of power to be executed: with this one stroke you will fortify your Faith, your political unity, and your depleted coffers.” “Guzmán, Guzmán, I lack the strength; you ask me to reconstruct a kingdom and then to construct a new world in its likeness; I wished only to forfeit it all; I wished to end, you wish to begin.” “Let me act, then, Señor; sign these papers and I shall act in your name; I shall not importune you except when absolutely necessary, I swear to you; your signature will be sufficient, you can continue to dedicate yourself to your devotions — known to everyone — and your passions — known to none; Inés, I shall bring her to you again, Señor.” “Inés? Silence, lackey; Inés, never again; Inés, sold by her father; I have paid for a woman; I desire her, I admit it, but never again, Guzmán, never again; I have never touched the woman I have loved since my youth, because such was my chivalresque ideal; I shall never again touch the woman I love, because I shall not pay for the pleasures of the flesh. I did not touch La Señora; instead I took peasant girls, I took Celestina; I shall not touch a woman who was sold to me in exchange for a loan and a title; no.” “Others touch them, Sire.” “Silence, Guzmán.” “You wish to exorcise the world that lies outside the walls of this palace, but that world has already filtered in here; you know two of the youths who arrived here: the imbecilic heir accompanying your mother and the dreadful shipwrecked sailor accompanying the girl dressed as a page.” “Twins … the prophecy … Romulus and Remus … you should have warned me … the usurpers … those who begin everything anew…” “No, not twins, but triplets; a third…” “Silence, silence; heed me; obey me.” “A third, Señor; you must know the truth; a third, identical to the other two, and more to be feared than they, for he has touched both the touchable and the untouchable; he sleeps with Inés in the servants’ quarters, which El Señor has never entered, and he sleeps with La Señora in La Señora’s bedchamber, also never entered by El Señor; this third youth has touched El Señor’s honor, his wife and his lover, Señor; both are lovers of this audacious burlador, this seducer of women who in addition, on successive nights, has satiated his brutal appetites with Sister Angustias, Madre Milagros, the dwarf Barbarica, the palace scrubbing maids, and have no doubt, would do the same with your own mother, so great is his insatiable lust.” “Oh, Guzmán, Guzmán, nonono, you have wounded me deeply, Guzmán, what shall I do with you?” “I am at the feet of El Señor.” “I think I no longer have the spirit for either. I constructed this space to renounce the material world and consecrate myself to the spirit; here I exorcised my youth, my love, my crime, my battles, my doubts, in order finally to be alone with my soul, complete, free, suspended, awaiting its ascension into Paradise; but now I believe that events are accelerating, sifting in through a thousand chinks; you opened one of them; you brought me Inés; should I punish you or reward you? Yes, events are accelerating; I believe I must reserve my limited forces and respond to only one of the thousand challenges the world again sets before me; I prayed for an unchanging world, but the world is quivering like a thousand-eyed Argos and all those eyes are staring at me, summoning me, challenging me; I shall respond to one only, and surely that one, the one I must answer with what little strength remains, is not you, or what you do, eternal lackey; poor Guzmán, poor creature; I am sorry for you, so much effort, so much energy, so much devotion, for what? for what good if you, like Bocanegra, never know your instant of glory, for what good, if now, purely as a whim, as you seek it for the Jews, heretics and burghers, I ordered your execution — the pillory, the rack, the garrote — with no explanation, saying only, ‘He had rabies’; poor Guzmán, you have wounded my honor, but I forgive you; do I not wound yours?” “Honor, Sire? That concept, so often invoked in this land and so little conforming to the purposes of shrewdness and ambition, needs to be analyzed.” “You see, Guzmán, you see, you would like to undo it, take it apart as if it were a clock or a machine; no Guzmán, those of us who possess honor know it cannot be debated or dismantled; one simply has honor, and knows it, with no need for explanations, and those who would like to explain it will never know or possess it; so, Guzmán, everything I have said to you is true; you do not deserve my attention.” “You will do better, Sire, to occupy yourself with these papers; sign them.” “I shall do it gladly, my loyal, pragmatic Guzmán, because in them I see acts that will make the world more remote, that will abandon me here in this solitary sanctuary of my soul; and if you want me to believe what you have told me, bring me more papers, Guzmán, on paper and with paper domonstrate the reality of what you have told me about Inés and La Señora.” “I shall do so, Señor, as soon as possible; in the meanwhile, have you so little curiosity that…”

“artlu sulp”

“You say the world is round, Toribio; I believe you; does that prove, round as it may be, that the lands described by that sailor are to be found upon it?” “No, not at all.” “Do you believe what he told us?” “Not necessarily; perhaps he merely dreamed it.” “And nonetheless, will the whole of Spain go out in search of what may be nothing but a dream?” “There is much that is ignominious in this land, but only one greatness: the belief in dreams.” “Great madness, Toribio.” “Enormous glory, Julián.”

Great is Felipe, the Lord of Spain,

Great is our King Sublime.

He governs the greatest part of the world

Under his rights divine.

“Did you repeat my arguments, bailiff?” “With total fidelity, Your Excellency.” “Did El Señor sign the papers I dictated to you?” “Here they are, Señor Inquisitor.” “The expulsion of the Jews?” “Signed and sealed.” “The suspension of statutes, courts, chapter meetings, and assemblies?” “Signed and seal…” “The extraordinary taxes upon the cities and the burghers, their officials?” “Sign…” “Have them proclaimed immediately, and upon these papers will the true unity of this kingdom be founded, the unity of power and faith, of power and riches; for only upon such power will the new world, if it exists, submit to our will, and at the same time, if it does not, Spain will subject herself, and that is sufficient.” “Without suspecting it, that naive voyager gave us excellent justification, Your Excellency.” “Good, good, Guzmán; you have acted with promptness and precision. Take this, take this purse for yourself — and know my generosity…” “Señor Inquisitor: with the greatest respect, I beg you to allow me to refuse it.” “What is it you wish, then?” “A promise: that I be remembered, that I be permitted to head an expedition to the new lands and prove myself in danger, and thus confirm my loyalty to the Crown and the Church.” “So promised, Don Nobody…”

Thus our invincible King,

Wherever man had trod,

Has spread around the globe

The sacred word of God …

well, caro amico, here I am an old man enjoying new youth, new honors, and if we act with discretion, an extensive fortune; I cannot write you of everything I heard, for the sailor youth’s account abounded in evident fantasies and barbaric idolatrous theologies, and the names he said were impossible to pronounce, Mexicunt, Whazaldat, Chipitits, which are names of lands and idols over there; but all this is secondary, and only three things are important: a new world does exist beyond the ocean; the land is rich, no, opulent; and one can sail there and return to Europe; I am writing now, as to you in Genoa, to all our navigator and contractor friends of the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean; we must be audacious and cautious at the same time; the persecutions our race has suffered at the hands of the Spanish powers force us to be; this is how I see things: in the first euphoria of the discoveries they will overlook our Jewish origins, for the Spanish will badly need all the things we have to offer — the maintenance of commerce; an infinite number of ships laden with merchandise, whose port taxes will support their armadas; the handling of merchandise and administration of royal taxes and tribunals established outside of Spain — but once religious zeal overcomes practical considerations, have no doubt, dear Colombo, they will turn against us, they will remember our origins and doubt the fidelity of our conversion; we shall be persecuted anew; they will wish once again, as always, to take command of our fortunes under the pretext of the purity of Christianity; let us be forewarned: let us establish our principal houses in Flanders, in England, in Jutland, in the Germanic principalities where pragmatic inclination will always be stronger than religious zeal, so that when the moment comes we have in Spain only a minimum of agents and can transfer to the North the substance of the South; these undertakings and their maintenance over a long period, along with the expenses of war and administration they presuppose, will always be extremely costly; let us act, you and I and all those of our profession, to assure that the riches of the new world are employed to pay our services; and even they may be insufficient, thus forcing the Princes and captains to contract debts with us, as happened during the Holy Crusades that were so favorable to us, making us the creditors of those harebrained knights and even, dear Colombo, permitting us to rid ourselves of undisciplined sons and pass for faithful Christians by the simple expedient of sending our rebellious scions to Palestine; and guard yours carefully, caro amico, though stubborn and audacious, he lacks discretion, and in his eyes shines the fire of a certain madness; mine, a daughter of my later years, is making her vows in the palace from which I write you this July night; your most obedient servant, loyal servitor and faithful friend, I kiss your feet, Gonzalo de Ulloa, Comendador of Calatrava …

“and never again will Thule be the ultimate boundary of the world”

“Take my breviary, Guzmán; read for my repose, this day is ending.” “And so that dying we be faithful and loyal witnesses to the infallible truth that our God spoke to the First Fathers, that sinning they and all their descendants would die…” “That sinning, that sinning…” “That is what it says…” “No, Guzmán, do not accept these words; doubt, doubt, Guzmán; affirm that all evil is done by us, but that it is not born in us; we were born with no sin but the capacity for good and evil, and this our sin is nothing but the freedom that both likens us to and differentiates us from God; for His freedom is absolute, and ours, sad, terrible, profound, and poignantly relative; God’s freedom is a fatal attribute, whereas that of man is but a fragile promise; nevertheless, we were conceived without vice or virtue, and before the activity of our personal will there is nothing in us except what God placed there to tempt us, to test us, to condemn us, to diminish us before His presence: the lights and shadows of free will. Hear me, Brother Ludovico, lost companion of my lost youth, hear me and repeat with me, wherever you may be: Adam was created mortal and would have died whether or not he had sinned, God could never have conceived of immortal man, His infinite pride would not have tolerated such a challenge; there were men free of sin, righteous men, before the coming of Christ; God sent Christ to avenge himself upon the rare, but certain, righteousness of men and to impose upon them a sense of pervading guilt; the Redeemer needed to redeem; but newly born children are as free of sin as Adam when he was created; the human race did not perish with the fall and death of Adam, nor did it arise with the torture and resurrection of Christ, for man can always live outside of sin if he so desires, if he so wishes; I love you, beautiful Inés, and I do not know why loving you should be a sin, except that more than a thousand years have lashed my flesh and my conscience, humbling me to the guilt that Christ requires as a condition to His promised redemption; I hear you, Brother Ludovico, I love you, as always, and finally I understand you and repeat your words, words we never spoke because they were flesh of our meeting beside the sea, constructing the aged Pedro’s ship so we might sail beyond the end of the world and seek the beginnings of the earth, the earth before sin, the new foundation, the new land, oh, my Ludovico, twin image of my youth, my strength and adventure, woe unto us, for there will be no land but this one where we suffer and where everything is lost; would I follow you today? you, Pedro, who died fleeing from me, cursing me? you, Ludovico? you, poor bewitched Celestina? you, good monk Simón? would I follow in that adventure, the search for a new beginning?; I humble myself, Ludovico, my head touches the cold floor of this chamber, and I tell you I do not know, I do not know, I do not know; with you I believed I could, I believe I wished to, I am what I believed, and when I was with Inés I believed it, too; but God neither wishes nor is; He is all-powerful, He can do anything; see how he has determined things, joined and separated and rejoined our destinies, but for no purpose, for He neither wishes nor is: He does not wish or exist as you and I wish and exist; true, my brother? true, my beautiful, soft, warm Inés? true, Celestina? true, my lost youth, my lost, forgotten, shared dream? true, my unpardonable crime?; we should have embarked that afternoon on the beach on old Pedro’s boat, all of us together, you and I; you would pardon me today, you who wished and were while I — tiny God in my somber castle — merely demonstrated I could, could, could … Oh, Ludovico, Pedro, Celestina, Simón … how have our lives ended? what have hope and forgetfulness and time made of us? it is your, not God’s, pardon I should seek, it is to you I should pray, not to the most glorious and pure Virgin and Mother of God, mediatrix of all sinners, do not in the hour of my death abandon me, but with my Guardian Angel and with St. Michael and St. Gabriel and all the other angels of Heaven, and with the blessed St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter and St. Paul, St. James the Greater and St. Andrew and St. John the Evangelist, St. Philip and St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. James the Less, St. Anne and St. Mary Magdalene, my mediators, and with all the other Saints in the court of Heaven, succor me and aid me with your special favor so that my soul through your intercession and by virtue of the passion of Jesus Christ Our Lord may take its place in the glory and beatitude created in the beginning. Amen, Guzmán, amen.” “Amen, Señor, and now draw the curtain across your existence, for the world is racing inexorably toward its destiny, and that destiny is no longer yours.” “What shall I do with you, Guzmán?” “You have said already: I do not deserve your attention.” “Should I reward you, should I punish you?” “It would be reward or punishment for my fidelity.” “You have lied to me, Guzmán; you think you know everything, but you lie; I have been in La Señora’s bedchamber, I have seen…” “Señor…” “My honor is intact; my wife’s sins are venial: she has created a refuge in the image and likeness of the pleasure she desires; you have accused her of adultery.” “I swear to you, Señor…” “I have eyes, you said, I have a nose; I know how to see, I know how to smell…” “I try to serve El Señor; if I err, it is without ill will, because I am human.” “Ludovico, Celestina, my youth, my love — before there was crime — my project is drawing to an end, Guzmán; my mother was right, if I cannot end in extinction, I shall end at the beginning; I shall return to that privileged instant of my life, to that shore, to my four companions, I shall renounce my inheritance, my power, my father, Isabel, it will again be six o’clock on a summer’s day near a ship on a beach, we shall set sail, we shall voyage to the new world; we dreamed of it before anyone, we stepped upon its shores before anyone.” “You are raving, Sire, you are invoking phantoms, your companions are dead, they are lost, they are nothing, they have been swallowed up by time, the plague, madness.” “Poor Guzmán, you know a great deal about hawks and hounds, but nothing of the affairs of the heart. Go now; close the breviary, arise, draw the tapestry, tell the halberdiers to free them and let them enter, I want them here — Ludovico, Celestina…”

Oh, I am the Moor Moraima,

young, and fair to behold …

“Are you singing, mistress?” “Oh, Lolilla, look how happy our mistress is, you’re alive again, mistress, and your happiness gives us pleasure.” “I am singing, my scrubbing maids, and laughing.” “We were terribly afraid for you, Señora, when we saw your husband enter your bedchamber for the first time, without knocking, as if seeking a…” “And see what he found, my duennas; just look at that creature lying upon my bed, fabricated from bits and pieces I stole from the sepulchers; see him as El Señor saw him: is this my lover, this mummy, this monster? Yes, Señor, he is my penitence, the proof of my loyalty to your proposals, Sire, the Oriental luxury of a bedchamber and upon the bed, a cadaver, my companion, Sire, the only choice you have left me, the reflection of your funereal will, luxury wherein death resides, the pleasures of the senses subjugated by the domination of a cadaver; see how well I understand you, see how I follow in your path, see how closely bound I am to your most intimate mandates … and now, Azucena, Lolilla, let us prepare ourselves for a great voyage, all is ended here; warm my bath water with hot charcoal; the most perfumed soap, Lolilla; clean my most elegant dress, Azucena, scrape well the wax stains left by the candles; bathe me, lather me with soap, take the torche-cul, Lolilla, and wash well all my parts so that no odor of man cling there, not one drop of man’s love … my perfumes, Azucena, and that dress, the one with the lowest décolletage — they say that the eyes are the windows of the soul and décolletage the window of Hell — and my jeweled gloves, and the slippers that fit my feet so sleekly that common people will wonder how I put them on and off, and gold powder for my hair, and remove those precious glass panes from my windows and pack them away so no one will ever again look through them toward a garden that does not exist; the garden is beyond, in the other world, and we are going there.” “And this sealed green bottle, mistress; is there something in it?” “Don Juan brought that with him from the sea; leave it here on the sands of the chamber.” “And the monster, Señora; will he remain on your bed?” “Oh, Azucena, Lolilla, my homunculus knows everything, understands everything; he has already told me what we must do with my royal mummy; there will be time; let us make ready; take that cup, Lolilla, the one made from an ostrich egg; fill it and give it to me.” “Drink, Señora…” “Sing, mistress…”

A Christian came to my gates,

ah, woe is me,

hoping to deceive …

CELESTINA AND LUDOVICO

I recognized you, said El Señor, when the woman with the tattooed lips, dressed as a page, and the blind Aragonese flautist had entered his bedchamber; Felipe dismissed Guzmán, who, stuttering with rage, and eyes burning, excused himself, saying: “I would rather a wrathful El Señor castigate me for angering him than a repentant El Señor condemn me for not giving him counsel…”

No one looked at him, no one answered him, and when he attempted to station himself outside the door to the chapel the halberdiers prevented him; Guzmán crossed the chapel, walked through corridors, courtyards, kitchens, and mews, and emerged into the night of the tile sheds, taverns, and forges of the work site.

I recognized you, said El Señor, gazing at them with great tenderness. You, Celestina; you, Ludovico; you have returned, it is true, is it not? I was slow to recognize you both; you, Ludovico, do you remember when we talked beside the sea? a dream, a world without God, sufficient grace for every man; you, Celestina, the world of love with nothing forbidden to the body, each body the solar center of the world; I was slow to recognize you, time has wounded you, brother, and favored you, my girl; you cannot see, poor Ludovico, I could not believe you were so old, and you so young, it is you, Celestina, it is truly you? I am, and I am not, she said, the girl you remember is not I, and the girl I was you do not remember, although you met me one day in the forest; is it you, Ludovico? Yes, it is I, Felipe, here we are, we have returned, and you must return with us to that shore by the sea where we destroyed Pedro’s ship with our hatchets, you must hear our stories again, hear us again and remember what you told us then, remember what you imagined, then compare it with what actually happened, imagine what actually will happen.

And this is what, in turn, the girl with the tattooed lips and the blind flautist recounted that night.

THE FIRST CHILD

Felipe pleasured himself in that night of love with Celestina and Ludovico: Ludovico in the love of Celestina and Felipe; Celestina, in the love of Felipe and Ludovico. The three, lying together on marten-skin furs, turned one of their sea dreams into reality.

And thus they passed several days. Their pleasure was inexhaustible. They invented words, acts, combinations, desires, recollections, that led them toward the ultimate truth of their bodies; not finding it, they imagined their youth and their love would be eternal. Celestina had been right. The world will be liberated when all bodies are liberated.

Felipe left them by day. He offered no excuses, they were not necessary. The castle was the place where everything they had dreamed was becoming reality. The others, Ludovico said to Celestina — Pedro, Simón, the Eremites, the Moors, the pilgrims, the Hebrews, the heresiarchs, the beggars, the prostitutes — must, like them, be liberating themselves in the diverse forms of their various pleasures. At night, Felipe returned, always with brimming pitchers and trays laden with food.

“We need never leave here,” he said to them, “Everything we need is here.”

They made love. They slept. But one night Felipe entered the bedchamber and with him a frightful odor penetrated the room.

“Now the smell is of death, not of pleasure,” Ludovico said to himself.

He waited until Felipe and Celestina were sleeping, naked, their limbs intertwined. The young student donned his beggar’s clothing and left the chamber. A thick cloud of smoke forced him to retreat. He steeled himself to investigate what was happening. Cautiously he walked a long passageway. Death was borne on the wings of the smoke. Choking, he sought refuge. He opened a door and stepped into a bedchamber.

Two women were peering through a high narrow arched window onto the castle courtyard below. They did not see him as he entered. Clutching each other in fear were a beautiful young Lady and a malodorous scrubbing maid in wide skirts. The student approached the window. Seeing him there, the women screamed and embraced each other even more tightly. Brusquely forcing them aside, Ludovico looked out onto the courtyard. The women ran screaming from the room.

He had not seen the women before, but the cadavers, yes. Guards in coats of mail, bloody swords unsheathed, were dragging bodies by the hair or by the feet and throwing them onto a great pyre blazing in the center of the courtyard. He recognized the men, women, and children Felipe had led to the castle.

Ludovico looked about the rich apartment. With a gesture of rage he ripped down a tapestry hanging on one of the chamber walls. Behind the tapestry was a cradle. And in the cradle slept a baby only a few weeks old. A thousand conflicting thoughts raced through the student’s feverish brain. All were resolved in one almost instinctive action: he removed the child from the cradle, wrapped him in the same silks that had covered him, and left the room with the infant in his arms.

He believed he was saving an innocent from the terrible slaughter. He returned to Felipe’s bedchamber. The youth and the girl were still asleep. Holding the infant aloft to show him to his companions, he almost awakened them. He looked at Celestina’s sleeping face and smiled tranquilly; he knew what she was dreaming. He looked at Felipe and his smile froze; he did not know what Felipe dreamed. Beside the seashore each of them except Felipe had told what he desired: Pedro, a world without servitude. Simón, a world without illness. Celestina, a world without sin. Ludovico, a world without God.

Again he looked at Felipe’s sleeping face. The prognathic jaw. The laborious breathing. Both characteristics emphasized in sleep. He remembered royal medallions: Felipe was one of them.

He sighed with great sadness and left the chamber, coughing, and protecting the child. In the next room, which was a falcons’ mews, he hid the child. Fearfully, he covered him with a hood like those covering the hawks themselves in the hours of sleep.

THE DEATH CART

About midday Felipe left them, and later Ludovico and Celestina heard bells, flute music, and tambourines. The student mashed some food until it was the consistency of gruel, and fed the child he had hidden in the mews, but he told Celestina nothing of what had passed.

At dusk Felipe returned, magnificently arrayed: polished shoes in the Flemish style, rose-colored breeches, brocaded robe lined with ermine, and on his head a cap as beautiful as a jewel; a cross of precious stones lay upon his breast, and orange blossoms on the ermine. He told them he had obtained a signal favor from his father. The student and the girl could remain in the castle. They would become accustomed to palace life. Ludovico could make good use of the great library, and Celestina find delight in the dances and amusements of the court. Their beautiful nights of love would continue forever. Celestina told him, gaily, she didn’t recognize him, he was so elegant. Ludovico said nothing. Felipe said: “That is because today was my wedding day…”

He left, smiling. Celestina embraced Ludovico, and the student told her all he had learned. They awaited the deepest hour of the night and when they felt sure that the guards were sleeping and the dogs exhausted from being chained all day, they stole from their bedchamber, gathered up the child from the mews, and sought an escape.

Yes, the guards and the dogs were sleeping; but the heavy door of the barbican was closed, and the drawbridge raised above the moat. Then Celestina heard a noise in the courtyard; several men were occupied in piling the charred remains of cadavers onto carts.

Hidden in the shadows of the archways, they waited until the last hour of the night. They took advantage of a moment when the men went to pick up more bodies, and hid in one of the carts, making a place for themselves among burned arms and legs and torsos, and staring into the fiery eyes of corpses with slashed throats. Ashes and blood stained them too; Celestina clutched the infant to her breast, fearfully covering its mouth with her hand, and fighting back the nausea that welled in her throat.

Face down among the cadavers, stained as the cadavers themselves, they shivered in silence as additional charred bodies were thrown on top of them and they heard the creaking wheels of the cart. The huge doors were opened and the drawbridge lowered; Celestina choked back her tears and cradled the infant; the infant cried out; Ludovico shuddered, and Celestina clapped a blood-stained palm over the infant’s mouth; the carts rolled on toward the Castilian dawn.

“Did you hear anything?” said one of the drivers.

“No, what?”

“A baby crying.”

“What have you been drinking, blockhead?”

“The leftovers from Prince Don Felipe’s wedding feast, just like you, you bleary-eyed old sot…”

Now, Celestina, now, jump, we’re in the woods where they cannot find us, Ludovico whispered, and the drivers saw two figures from the heap of cadavers leap from the cart and run into the thicket.

They stopped, climbed out of the cart, and examined the load of dead bodies they were carrying to dump into a mountain ravine; they knelt, crossed themselves, and said: “Don’t tell anyone about this; they’ll say we were drunk and give us the beating of our lives.”

THE TOLEDO JEWRY

They took refuge in the Jewry of Toledo. At first the Hebrews received them out of pity, seeing them in a great state of fatigue, dressed like beggars and carrying a child in their arms, but later they wished to interrogate the couple, and they went to call upon them. Celestina was bathing the child, and the Jews saw what Ludovico and Celestina had seen with astonishment as the day dawned in the woods after their escape from the cart, stained with blood and ashes: the child had six toes on each foot and a blood-red cross upon his back.

“What does this mean?” the visitors asked each other, and Celestina and Ludovico asked each other the same question.

“Is the child yours?” they asked, and the student replied no, that he and his wife had saved him from death, and for that reason loved him as they would their own.

But after a few months everyone noted that the girl was expecting another child, her own, for her torn garments could not hide the swelling of her belly. And they all said: “So; may the Lord be with you; now you will have a child of your own, may he bless your house.”

They lived in a single room behind tall stone arches. There was little light, as the windows were high and very small and covered with oiled paper; the cotton wick floating in a basin of fish oil emitted a strong odor but very little light, although it burned for a long time.

“We stole the child,” Ludovico said to Celestina, “but Felipe robbed us of our lives.”

The learned doctors of the Synagogue of the Passing came to see the child, and almost without exception they shrugged and said they did not understand the anomalies of the six toes on each foot and the cross upon the child’s back. But one stood gravely silent, and one day he sought out Ludovico and spoke with him. Thus he learned that the student was expert in translating Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, and he took him to the synagogue, and there entrusted him with various tasks.

“Read; translate; we have saved many of the folios which were taken from Rome to the great library of Alexandria, and from there — saved from the great destruction of the civil war waged by Aurelian, and later from the Christian holocaust — were brought to Spain by Hebrew and Arab savants, saved here, too, from the barbaric Goths, and zealously guarded by our people, for all faiths are nourished from a common wisdom. I do not know your faith, nor shall I question you in that respect. We are all sons of the Book, Jews, Moors, and Christians, and only if we accept this truth shall we live in peace one with another. Read; translate; conquer your prejudices, as every man has his own; think how many men have lived before us; we cannot deprecate their intelligence without mutilating our own. Read; translate; find for yourself the things I know and will not tell you, for greater will be your joy if you come to that knowledge by dint of your own efforts, and only thus will you perhaps learn something my long years have not taught me.”

This man was an erudite Jew of advanced years, with a long white beard; his head was always covered by a black toque and the tails of his black tunic were gathered together beneath a silver star pinned upon his breast; in the center of this star, inscribed in bas-relief, was the number 1.

THE CABALA

The Cabala descended from Heaven, brought by angels to instruct the first man, guilty of disobedience, in the means by which he could regain his primordial nobility and happiness. First, you will love your Eternal God. He is the Ancient of ancients, the Mystery of mysteries, the Unknown of unknowns. Before creating any form upon this earth, He was alone, formless, resembling nothing. Who could conceive of how He was then, before the creation, since He had no form? Before the Ancient among ancients, the Most Concealed among all concealed things, had prepared the forms of kings and their first diadems, there was neither limit nor end. Therefore, he began to sculpt those forms and trace them in imitation of his own substance. He spread out before him a veil, and upon that veil he drew the kings and gave them their limits and their forms; but they could not survive. For God did not dwell among them; God did not reveal himself even in a form that would permit Him to be present in the midst of creation, and thus perpetuate it. The ancient worlds were destroyed: unformed worlds we call sparks. Because it was the work of God, and God was absent from it, Creation failed. Thus God knew that He himself was responsible for the Fall, and for that reason must also be responsible for redemption, for both would occur within the circle of divine attributes.

And God wept, saying: “I am the Most Ancient of the ancients. There is no one who knew my youth.”

THE SECOND CHILD

In the eighth month of Celestina’s pregnancy, Ludovico dared ask her: “Who is the father of your child? Do you know?”

Celestina wept and said no, she did not know. They did not know the father or the mother of the child they had stolen from the castle; now they knew only that she was the mother of the child about to be born, but its father was unknown …

“Did Jerónimo, your husband, never touch you?”

“Never, I swear it.”

“But I did.”

“Both you and Felipe.”

“Our semen was mixed; poor girl, what will you give birth to…?”

“And three old men in the woods, one after another…”

“And the first, then, who was the first?”

“The first man…?”

“Yes…”

“El Señor, Felipe’s father; Felipe did not dare; his father took my virginity on my wedding night…”

“Then you knew…”

“Who Felipe was? I always knew.”

“Oh, Celestina, you should have spoken; those innocents would not have died…”

“Would you have exchanged all the world’s pleasure for all its justice?”

“You are right; perhaps not.”

“And now, would you exchange knowledge for vengeance?”

“Not yet. I need to know, that later I may act.”

“And I, Ludovico?”

“The semen is mixed, I tell you. We shall never know the father of your child.”

“I fornicated with the Devil, Ludovico.”

Celestina’s child was born one dark March night. The midwives came. The air of Toledo was green, and its sky, black silver. The Jews, beneath that dome of blazing phosphorus, sought shelter from the storm with fervent prayers. Lightning flashed like bloodless lances. The child was born feet first. He had six toes on each foot, and a blood-red cross upon his back.

When Ludovico carried the child to be presented at the synagogue, he bowed before his mentor, the erudite ancient. Ludovico glanced up and saw that gleaming on the star upon his protector’s breast was inscribed the number 2.

THE ZOHAR

And thus, the Ancient of ancients, intending to rectify the flaw in His creation, which was His absence from the world and the cause of the common Fall of God and man, conceived of redemption as a way to manifest Himself among men and to remain present among them. But as He could not incarnate in human form, or be represented in any icon — not even as an exclamation point or a period — without forfeiting His unknown form in the unknown, manifested Himself in the very origins of the new life. Which was this: life and thought were intermingled. What is thought, is. What is, is thought. And this being so, all human souls, before their descent into the world, will have existed before God, in Heaven, for there, having been thought, they were. But before coming into the world, each soul is composed of a woman and a man joined together in a single being. Upon descending to earth, the two halves are separated and each half animates a different body. According to the works they do and the paths they follow upon the earth, the souls, if they work with love and follow the paths of love, will be reunited in death. But if they have not done so, the souls will pass through as many bodies as are necessary to incarnate love. Thus the damned souls take possession of living bodies, and fearful is the battle within every man: one former soul, incomplete and condemned to wander because of lack of love, takes possession of a portion of each new soul born in search of love. But as it has existed before God, in Heaven, all that a soul learns on earth it has always known. And this being so, all that has existed in the past will also exist in the future, and all that will be has already been. And this being so, nothing is born or dies completely. Things simply exchange places.

THE SOMNAMBULIST

Celestina soon saw that the resemblance between the two children was not limited to the extreme manifestations of the feet, and the cross, but also that in all other ways, in their bodily proportions and their features, they were identical. She pointed this out to Ludovico; the student could say only that it was a true mystery, and since there was no possible explanation, and as such was its nature, nothing could be done but trust that someday the mystery would reveal itself. He said this grudgingly, for these events, and the reading and translations through which he earned his living in the synagogue, were contrary to the deepest beliefs of his rebellious intelligence: grace is directly accessible to man, without intermediaries; it must be incarnate in matter, direct itself to pragmatic ends, and be explicable by logic.

Ludovico advised Celestina not to venture outside the Jewry, enclosed on four sides by the Puerta del Cambrón, the hills of the Tagus, the old mosque, and St. Eulalia, as it was the couple’s invisible protection and to venture out into the Christian sector would endanger their anonymity. But certain afternoons, driven by a waking dream, Celestina left the two children, taking advantage of their napping, or confident that neighbors would respond to their cries, and wandered like a sleepwalker beyond the limits of the Hebrew quarters.

Perhaps only now, twenty years later, did she dare explain the reason for those somnambulistic walks through steep stone alleyways and ancient Arab markets, to the Castle of San Servando, toward the river, to the Alcántara Bridge, to the northernmost ports, and to the southernmost port, Puerta de Hierro, where the fearful, dense, desolate, extensive, profound Castilian plain dies at the feet of the mountains of Toledo.

She looked at people. She sought one face. Many afternoons went by. She recognized no one. No one recognized her. They were all living. Each had been born before or after or at the same time as she. No dead wandered these Toledan streets, no one who could approach her, take her arm, stop her, and say: “I knew you before I died or you were born.”

THE SEPHIROT

Everything that exists, everything formed by the Ancient (sanctified be his name!), is born of both male and female. The father is the wisdom from which everything is engendered. The mother is intelligence, as it was written: “To intelligence you shall give the name Mother.” From this union is born a son, the major offshoot of wisdom and intelligence. His name is knowledge, or science. These three sum up in themselves everything that has been, is, and will be; at the same time, their union resides within the head of the Ancient of ancients, for He is all and all is He, and thus the Ancient (sanctified be his name!) is represented by the number 3, and has three heads that form but one. God reveals His creation through His attributes, the Sephirot that radiate like rays and extend like the branches of a tree. But all the rays and all the branches emanating from God must return to the number 3, lest they be destroyed in dispersion. Thus the Hebrew alphabet, which is the word of God, has twenty-two letters, and these letters can be combined and arranged in diverse manners, always as long as they are not dispersed and all possible combinations return always to the three mother letters, which are . The first is fire. The second water. The third air. From them is born everything that multiplies. And through them everything returns to unity. And from unity again derive the first three Sephirot, which are the Crown, Wisdom, and Intelligence. The first represents knowledge, or science. The second, the one who knows. The third, what is known. The son. The father. The mother. From this trinity are born all other things, manifesting themselves progressively in love, justice, beauty, triumph, glory, generation, and power. Rash would be he who, traveling this route, attempted to go beyond, for wishing to surpass himself he will know only the disintegration of all that preceded him: power, generation, glory, triumph, beauty, justice, love, intelligence, wisdom, and knowledge; and will only commit himself to the desert of the wandering death, seeking a soul to appropriate so he can reincarnate and reinitiate the circle of life, postponing his return to Heaven and reunion with the lost half of his soul. The holy soul, on the other hand, will stop, recognizing that plenitude possesses limits and that these limits assure that plenitude is plentiful, for infinite disintegration is a vacuum, and that soul will renounce ambitious mirages and will turn back upon its steps to return to the threshold of the three, which in turn is the threshold of return to unity. For it is written that every thing shall return to its origin, as from it, it emerged.

CELESTINA AND THE DEVIL

And so it happened that one night, upon returning to the room they shared, Ludovico found Celestina crouching beside the flames of a brazier, weeping, biting upon a cord, and burning her hands in the flames; she was insensible to the weeping of the two children, and surrounded by little flour-filled cloth dolls.

The student tried to help her and draw her away from the flames, but the girl was possessed of an invincible strength, and she told him to leave her, that her memory was returning, that she had forgotten everything, her dream had been realized: love without prohibitions — a liberated body, she, Ludovico, and Felipe — had been like a drug, she had allowed herself to be lulled by a false illusion, now she was beginning to remember again, she had been violated by El Señor Don Felipe the Fair, taken coldly and brutally by that whoring, incontinent, hurried Prince, on the very night of her wedding with Jerónimo in the grange, and she had said to herself: I shall give myself to the Devil, I have no friend but the Devil, only Satan could be more powerful than this filthy Señor, God has not thought me worthy of His protection, perhaps the Devil will defend me, I shall be his wife, he will give me the power to avenge myself against El Señor and his house, El Señor and all his descendants, and she held her hands to the fire, drew them back, took the cord and bit upon it to relieve her torment, plunged her hands into the fire, invoking him, angel of venom and death, come, take me … and amidst the flames, Ludovico, a shadow appeared, visible only in the center of the fire, as if requiring purest light to appear and to be seen, and that form of pure shadow without face or hands or legs, pure darkness revealed by the flames, spoke to me and said:

“Do not weep, woman. There is one who will take pity on you. You have learned what the world offers you if you obey the law of God and as a reward suffer the cruelty of men. Remember that woman was once a goddess. She was goddess because she was keeper of the most profound wisdom. This ancient female sage knew that nothing is as it appears to be, and that behind all appearances there is a secret that both refutes and completes them. Men were unable to dominate the world while women knew these secrets. So they joined together to divest them of their dignity, their priesthood, their privilege: they excised and amended the ancient texts that recognized the androgynous character of the first Divinity, they suppressed mention of the wife of Yahweh, they changed the Scriptures to hide this truth: that the first created being was both masculine and feminine, made in the image and likeness of the Divinity in whom both sexes were joined; in His place they invented a God of vengeance and anger, a bearded goat; they expelled woman from Paradise, to her they assigned guilt for the Fall. Nothing of this is true, it is merely the lie that is indispensable to the foundation of man’s power, power without mystery, cruel, divorced from love, separated from real time, which is woman’s time, simultaneous time: the power of man is captured within a simple succession of events which in their linear progression lead every thing and every being to death. Hear me, woman: I shall tell you how to conquer death; I shall tell you how to conquer this atrocious masculine order; and I shall tell you secrets, see how much you can do with them, and quickly, your time is brief, I shall demand much of you, you will be exhausted, all you can do is initiate what I ask you, you will not be able to finish it, it is too much for one person, you must realize that in time so you can transmit what you know to another woman in time, before men again wrest from you the forces that today I grant you; remember, let another woman continue what you initiate, for you can only continue what others have initiated in my name. Woman was Goddess. I was Angel.”

“What,” moaned Celestina, “what will you teach me, what must I know, I do not understand…”

“Your wounded hands are the sign of our communion: fire. The woman who kisses your hands shall inherit what I give to you.”

“When? How shall I know?”

“Look for me in the streets of Toledo. There you shall find me, when fate so decrees.”

“What shall I do in the meantime?”

“Flee to the forest. Spirits and succubi dwell there, the familiars of witches. Seek their counsel. They are the ancient pagan gods, expelled from their altars by cruel Christianity. They will recognize in you the ancient goddesses of the Mediterranean world, condemned to witchcraft by Christian powers and executed in public squares with the same cruelty accorded Christ upon Golgotha. Adore the forbidden goddesses. Disguise them as an innocent game. Fabricate dolls made from rags. Fill them with flour. Flour is the color of the moon. There dwells the hidden goddess of all time.”

“Where? In the forest? In the moon?”

But the invisible vision in the center of the fire had disappeared.

NUMBER 3

Morning, midday, and night. Beginning, middle, and end. Father, mother, and child. Everything that is complete is three times complete. Thrice a saint, truly a saint. Dead three days, truly dead. Three regions make up the heavens: sky, land, and water. Three bodies have the heavens: sun, moon, and earth. Thrice is the rite repeated, and three persons fulfill it. Sacrificial animals must be three years old. The Law ordains three fasts per year and three prayers a day. Three is the number of righteous men. Three flocks come to the well. Guilt extends unto the third generation. Three generations are needed to avenge fathers. Three years without a harvest justify the husbandman’s impatience, and the abandonment of his lands. Three days is the guest tolerated. Three times, one circles the funeral pyre. Three are the Furies. Three are the judges of death. Every three years are celebrated the festivals of Bacchus. Three were the first augurs. Three, the first vestals. Three, the books of the Sibyls. Three days pass in the descent into Hell. Three days the soul remains beside the corpse awaiting its resurrection. Thrice are repeated the words that protect voyagers, that induce sleep, that calm the fury of the sea. Thrice Yahweh blessed creation. Heaven offers us three witnesses. Three daughters had Job. Three sons Noah, and from them we have descended. Thrice Balaam blessed Israel. Three friends had Job, and three, Daniel. Three emissaries from Heaven visited Abraham. Thrice Jesus was tempted. Thrice he prayed in Gethsemane. Thrice Simon denied Him. He was crucified at the third hour. There were three crosses on Golgotha. Thrice Jesus revealed himself to His disciples after the Resurrection. Three times Saul desired. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Beast, Serpent, and False Prophet. Faith, Hope, and Charity. Three sides has a triangle. One is the root of all. Two is the negation of one. Three is the synthesis of one and two. Three contains both. It balances them. It announces the plurality that follows. Three is the complete number. The diadem of the beginning and the middle. The reunion of the three times. Present, past, and future. Everything ends. Everything begins again.

THE DUEL

Many afternoons Celestina wandered through the streets of Toledo, steep and level, solitary and tumultuous, opening into broad plazas, honeycombs of long narrow lanes, seeking the promise of the Devil. Her search was for one known face.

One late afternoon she passed by a walled garden, and she heard cries in the garden and noises on the other side of the high wall. A cloaked cavalier with a nun in his arms leapt over the wall. The gate opened and two other cavaliers ran into the street, their swords unsheathed. The nun lay in a swoon; the cloaked man was wounded in one leg. He saw Celestina. He entreated her: “Try to revive the novitiate. Take her with you and I shall come for her. Tell me where you live.”

Celestina had no time to respond. The armed cavaliers rushed toward the cloaked man and he, tossing his cape over his shoulder, arose and unsheathed his sword. Steel clashed against steel; the cavalier of the cape battled with joyful fervor against his rivals, and in spite of his wounded leg held them at bay. Celestina turned to reviving the nun; she succeeded in getting her to her feet, and, supporting her, led her to a hidden lane not far from the scene of the duel, where the nun again fell to the ground; close by, they could hear the shouted insults, the cry of the vanquished, the hurrahs of the victors. Celestina watched the two men with bloody swords run by, down the wider street, away from the arbor roofed by ivy reaching out from the garden on either side and clasping gnarled fingers above the heads of Celestina and the nun.

“Go, go to him,” sighed the nun, “see if they have killed him.”

Celestina ran to the site of the duel, where the abductor lay bleeding. A scarlet rosebud bloomed upon the brocade of his breast. Celestina knelt beside the dying man, not knowing exactly what to do: the cavalier of dark beauty looked at her through half-closed eyes, smiled, and managed to say: “Celestina … Celestina … Is it you, you are young again? Oh, Mother, that I meet you again only as I am again dying … I who saw you die before … oh, God, oh, Death, have I not always said … so distant a challenge…!”

And so speaking, he died. Terrified, Celestina ran from the body back to the nun hidden in the shadowy lane. Dead leaves were falling upon her white habit. She asked Celestina the outcome of the duel and the fate of the cavalier, and Celestina said: “He died.”

The nun did not weep, but merely sat there beneath the dense ivy bower of that path, with a strange expression in her eyes; finally she said: “He murdered my father for love of me. I loved my father’s murderer. My love for the living was greater than my love for the dead. He did not come to deceive me, but my father, buried here in this very convent. He came to mock the sepulcher, to challenge the statue of my father; he invited him to dine this very night at the inn, he refused my pleas to take me with him again, he said he spent only a few days with each woman he loved, one to fall in love with her, another to win her, another to abandon her, one more to find another in her place, and one hour to forget her; I pleaded; he refused; my brothers entered, they challenged him, he laughed; he seized me and fled with me, not for love of me, but to defy my brothers. He scaled the convent wall, we fell, I fainted. He died.”

The nun toyed with the dead leaves. “I saw my father’s statue tremble, the stone come to life. He would have gone to the rendezvous, I am sure. Now you see, little sad-eyed girl, how nothing has ended as I planned it, but instead in a squalid back-alley duel. Please help me, take me to the door of the convent. My honor is saved. But not my love. Do you know something, child? The worst of it all is that my fancy is still unsatisfied. Don Juan should not have died this way … Perhaps in another life. Come, help me, please take me to the convent door.”

TWO SPEAK OF THREE

Ludovico said he believed he understood some part of what he had read and translated, but now he asked the aged doctor with the black robes and with the star upon his breast for an hour of conversation, because for the moment the student could go no further without the vital juices of dialogue, which animates thought and wrests it from the inert page.

“I am listening,” the aged man said.

“Your texts honor the number 3, but your star is inscribed with the number 2…”

“Which once was one.”

“Do two deny one?”

“Only relatively. Duality diminishes unity. But it denies it absolutely only if the duality is definitive. Two eternally opposite terms could not ever combine their action for a common effect. Pure duality, should it exist, would be an irreversible severance of the continuity of things; it would be the negation of cosmic unity; it would open an eternal abyss between the two parts, and this opposition would merit the epithets of sterile, inactive, static. Evil would have triumphed.”

“Have I read correctly? Can only the third term reanimate inert duality?”

“You have read well. Binaries differentiate. Ternaries activate. Unity confers latent individuality. Duality is severing and unchanging differentiation. A trinity, as it activates the encounter between opposites, is the perfect manifestation of unity. It combines the active with the passive, it unites the feminine principle with the masculine. Three is the being that lives. What would God and the Devil do without a third, except confront one another, immobile, throughout an endless night? Good and evil: man activates them, for God and the Devil are in contention for man.”

“This morning I was translating the Cabalist, ibn-Gabirol, and he says: ‘Unity is not the root of totality, for Unity is but one form and totality is both form and matter; three is the unity of totality, that is to say that Unity represents form, and the number 2, matter.’”

“The sage speaks wisely, for three is the creative number, and without it form and matter would be inert. Nothing develops without the intervention of a third factor; without three, everything would remain forever in static polarity. Youth and old age require a middle age; past and future, the present; sensation and awareness, memory; sum and remainder, substitution. Two equal quantities in themselves are equal only by comparison to a third quantity. The intelligences of form and matter are joined and ordered in the number 3. Beginning from that number, man is armed to confront the world, and life. But he is alone.”

“What follows 3?”

“Four is nature, the cycle of constant repetitions: four seasons, four elements. Five is the first circular number: the number of the creature who has five senses, and who enclosed within a circle forms a pentagram, the five points his head, his hands, and his feet: it is the hand of the prophet Mohammed. Six is 2 times 3, perfection of the form and matter incarnate in man: beauty, justice, balance. Seven is man along his way, fate, the progression of life, for as the wise Hindu of the Atharva-Veda says, ‘Time moves upon seven wheels.’ Eight is liberation, health, the state of well-being resulting from the progression of seven: eight are the ways of Gautama Buddha, the eight rules for emerging from the river of reincarnations and touching the shore of Nirvana. Nevertheless, few are those who achieve such beatitude, and the number 9 signifies redemption and the reintegration of all things upon the threshold of unity: Nirvana is not the final point of human evolution, for he who has reached Nirvana must, in an act of enormous charity and in solidarity with a multitude of suffering creatures, renounce his personality to aid in the work of universal redemption. Such perfection is reached at the number 10: unity truly realized is the collective being, common good. All is for all; nothing is for one; the creature returns to the first Unity of the Ancient of ancients and the Unknown of the unknown: praised be His name!”

“Is there anything beyond that reunion?”

“The number 11, which, as St. Augustine of Hippo wisely said, is the arsenal of sin. Ten closes the great circle of creation and life, redemption and reunion. In eleven there is one small unity, a miserable one opposing divine unity: Lucifer. Eleven is temptation; having everything, we desire more. The multiples of eleven only accentuate this evil and this misfortune; twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four, fifty-five, increasing dispersion, the always vaster separation between human and divine unity … Oh, my young friend: may that number never appear on the star upon my breast.”

“Will the number 3 appear instead?”

“This does not depend on me. Will a third child be born?”

THE KNIGHT OF THE SORROWFUL COUNTENANCE

Celestina expected the nun to kiss her fire-scarred hands, but it did not happen.

The resigned nun disappeared behind the closed doors of the convent and for a moment Celestina stood in the street staring at the corpse of the murdered cavalier, trying to understand his last words, saddened because she understood none of it. What wisdom could she possibly transmit, knowing nothing?

She walked slowly, not knowing whether she was dreaming or waking, far from the scene of the duel, toward the port of Almofada, and as she was passing by an inn she heard a great commotion and a stout, ruddy-complexioned peasant came running out of the inn, raising a great alarm, and when he saw her he took her by the arm and said to her: Here, wench, whoever you may be, please help me, for my master has gone mad and I believe you are the only one who can restore in him a little calm and reason; try to behave like a fine lady, although it matters very little, since he sees nobility where there is only meanness, and perceives fine breeding in those of lowest office.

In the courtyard of the inn four serving boys and the innkeeper were mercilessly tossing in a blanket a thin-shanked old man with a short white beard and eyes of saintly choler; as this unfortunate sailed through the air he shouted and cried out: Knaves, villains, varlets; and the innkeeper shouted even more loudly: Go to the devil, you son of Satan, for you have run through all my wineskins with your rusty old sword till there is nothing left but a sieve, and the knight shouted, no, they were giants, they were magicians and enchanters come to challenge him by night, in the shadows, like cowards, but they had not counted on the always ready sword that had subdued the furies of Brandabarbarán de Boliche, Lord of all Araby, but as that does not apply in this instance, sobbed the peasant, do as your master orders and sit with him to take a meal, for neither master nor meal will be mine after this adventure; I came naked into this world, and naked I find myself now, I neither gain nor lose, and at that moment the knight’s bones hit the dust, and as he lay there the serving boys thrashed him with poles, laughing uproariously, and then went about their chores.

“Those cowardly knaves had more arms than the hundred possessed by the titan Briareo,” moaned the flogged knight when he could bring himself to speak, amidst sounds of pigs, asses, and hens; with cloths dampened in water his peasant squire soothed his wounds, murmuring, “Whether the pitcher falls upon stone or stone upon pitcher, it’s all bad for the pitcher, but you must see. Your Mercy, that there is no evil from which some good does not result, and now you can lift your beard from the mud, your efforts were not in vain, for with them you freed this most illustrious and exalted lady who is here beside me, Señor, and who comes to thank you for the heroic deed you performed last night, which freed her from the captivity of magicians…”

The cudgeled knight stared intently at Celestina, then at the peasant, and trembled with rage. “Is this how you mock me, my friend? Do you believe I am so addled my eyes would not clearly see before me this old witch, this bawd?; when she passes by, the very stones shout out, ‘Old whore!’ and she has rubbed her back raw in every brothel in the land. Though you not believe it, I was once young, and it was at the hands of this same false, stubble-chinned, evil old woman I lost my virtue, for promising to gain me access to the bedchamber of my beloved, she instead in her own chamber drugged me with love philters and took me for herself, I having paid in advance. I know you well, greedy, tongue-clacking, foul-mouthed old witch, may you burn in Hell, shameless, prevaricating sophist, bawd, magpie, trotting around convents to further your vile trade; and you delivered my beloved Dulcinea to another, for more money, what are you doing in these lands? ah, grubby, greedy go-between, you may be a plum, a purple-juiced juror in the tribunal of lust, but you’ll not get two prunes from me … Be off with her, Sancho, for I am seething with rage, I knew her as a youth, I thought her dead — ha! let Judas believe it! — and may God grant you evil Easters, the bad weed never dies! And you, squire, why do you try to bring me a cat for a hare, and foist off scrubbing girls and whores and bawds in the stead of princesses? Do you think I am blind? Do you think I do not recognize the real reality of things? Windmills are giants. But Celestina is not Dulcinea. Come, Sancho, let us leave Toledo, which Livy wisely labeled urbs parva, lesser city … for wide is Castile!”

A SICK DREAM

Do you begin to understand, woman? I shall make use of Ludovico. You will tell him what has happened to you. He will scold you affectionately for having wandered beyond the limits of the Jewry: you see? you were recognized twice. I feared that. You have been in the streets. I, in the libraries. Do we now know the same things? This is what I wrote after reading, and after listening to you. What is thought, is. What is, is thought. I travel from spirit to matter. I return from matter to spirit. There are no frontiers. Nothing is forbidden me. I believe I am several persons mentally. Then I am several persons physically. I fall in love in a dream. Then I encounter the loved being when I awake. Did you not go to the burial of the cavalier who died in the duel before the convent? I did. Your story wakened my curiosity. I arrived early, before the mourners, even though I assumed they would be few, given the dead man’s evil reputation. I looked at him, lying within his coffin. His beard had grown in the two days following his death. I looked at his hands. His fingernails had grown, too. I separated the hands crossed upon his breast. All the lines of fortune and life, intelligence and love, had disappeared from the palms: they were a white wall, two newly whitewashed walls. Upon his breast, other hands — these still blessed with fortune and life, intelligence and love — had placed a paper with these words:

Let him be warned who doubts God’s wrath:

His hand will not be stayed.

There is no time that will not come,

Nor debt that not be paid.

Again I looked at his face. It had changed. It had been transformed. It was not the face of the man you saw die in the street. It was not the face I had seen as I quietly entered the temple, before I had parted his hands and read that paper. He was a different man. Do you understand, Celestina? This horrified me. Once more I looked at the new face of the dead man and told myself: This is the face that one of our children, the one we abducted from the castle, will possess when he becomes a man. How shall I know? I could search through the streets, as you have done, for a man who has the dead man’s face. Or I could wait, patiently, for twenty years and then know whether, as he matures, this child will have the dead man’s face. Wait. I left the temple of the Christ of the Light, previously the mosque of Bib-al-Mardan, turning my back upon the coffin, murmuring what today I write and read to you:

“One lifetime is not sufficient. Many existences are needed to fulfill one personality.”

Two men said they had known you long ago. Both believed you were old; one of them, dead. Imagine what I have read and written and now communicate to you. Each child, one born every minute, reincarnates in each of the persons who die every minute. It is not possible to know in whom we reincarnate because there are no actual witnesses who can recognize that being we reincarnate. But if there were one single witness capable of recognizing me as the person I had been, then what? He stops me in the street … before dismounting from a horse, or entering an inn … he takes my arm … he forces me to participate in a past life that had been mine. He is a survivor; the only one who can know that I am reincarnated.

This child and you. The world and you, Celestina. You have wandered the streets of Toledo searching for the one who could recognize you. You found two men who knew your eternal name and your variable destinies. It does not matter. Go out again. There are others who do not speak — but who see us; those who do not see — but who remember us; those who do not remember — but who imagine us. That is enough to decide our fate, though we never exchange a word. Who are the immortals? This is what I have read, this is what I wrote, let me read it to you:

“Those who lived many times, those who reappear from time to time; those who had more life than their own death, but less time than their own life.”

What is the shared wisdom of God and the Devil, Celestina? The Cabala says nothing disappears completely, everything is transformed, what we believe to be dead has but changed place. Places remain; we do not see them change place. But what is time but measurement, invention, imagination? What is, is thought. What is thought, is. Times change space, join together or are superimposed, and then separate. We can travel from one time to another, Celestina, without changing space. But he who voyages from one time to another and does not return in time to the present loses his memory of the past (if it was from the past he arrived) or his memory of the future (if it was there he had his origins). He is captured by the present. The present is his life. And each of us, without exception, returns late to our present: time does not stop to await us while we travel to the past or the future; we always arrive late; a minute or a century, it is the same. We can no longer remember that we were also living before or after the present. Perhaps this was your pact with the Devil: to live in our present without memory of your past or your future, if it was from them you arrived at our today.

I imagine, woman, I only imagine; I read, I write, I listen, I tell you. What did that dead cavalier and the cudgeled knight remember when they saw you? Who you were, where you lived before, where you died before, Celestina? I am thinking for you. If I wished to rid myself of the memory of something hideously sad, this would be my pact with the Devil: “Take my memory and I will give you my soul.”

God cannot undo what has been done. The Devil, on the other hand, affirms that he can convert what was into what was not. Thus, through the Devil, God challenges and tempts man. But as we forget a hideous event, do we not also run the risk of forgetting the best of our lives, our parents’ love, a woman’s beauty, a man’s passion, the joy of friendship, everything? This is the Devil’s condition, woman: to forget everything or to forget nothing.

Do you know that this morning the elder of our two children, the one we stole from the castle, crawled out the door as if he wished to tell me goodbye. I smiled at him and blew him a kiss. I had scarcely taken two steps before a hand stopped me: a cold, pale, almost wax-like hand. It was a cloaked cavalier.

“Who is that child?” he asked me in a voice deadened by the folds of his cape.

“He is mine,” I replied.

“Look at my face,” he said to me, uncovering himself.

I looked at him carefully, without noting anything unusual except an excessive paleness similar to that of his hands. He recognized my indifference; he touched his cheek, then extended both hands and showed them to me. “Look. My beard continues to grow. My fingernails continue to grow. Does that not seem extraordinary to you?”

I told him no. Then he turned his hands over to show me his smooth and unlined palms. I concealed my amazement; I know that the cavalier wanted to smile, but pain prevented him; I noticed then the rosette of dried blood upon his breast; I tried to offer my arm to assist him; he stopped me with a disdainful gesture and a few hollow, sonorous words: “Every man born becomes a body for every man who dies. Do you want to know the face the child who crawled out to say goodbye to you a moment ago will possess in twenty years? Go directly to the temple of the Christ of the Light. You will find me there. And you will see the face your son will possess. I was unable to terminate my life.”

You say that cavalier died two days ago in a duel? Go, then, Celestina, continue your search, conquer the Devil, seek what you have forgotten in the words of those who speak to you but do not look at you; in the glances of those who look but do not remember you; in the memory of those who do not remember, but imagine you. In that way you will overcome the Devil: you will be the Devil, you will know what he knows, and also what he does not know.

Reality is a sick dream.

WOUNDED LIPS

Celestina saw in the city marketplace a little girl about eleven years old, accompanied by her father. Father and daughter were offering candles, dyes, and honey for sale. This child was very beautiful, with gray eyes and an upturned nose; her skirts were old and patched, and she wore no shoes.

Celestina noticed her because she was like a drop of crystalline water in a sea of blood: nearby, chickens’ necks were being wrung, farther away a sheep was being quartered; one man was butchering a pig, another gutting a fish; blood ran between the rough plaza paving stones and down the gutters of the alleyways; urine and offal were thrown from windows, dogs wandered unrestrained, and flies buzzed about the severed animal heads; the water casks emitted a terrible stench, buyers and sellers streamed in and out of dank rooms; and in their fast, penitents shouted their visions from their windows: the Devil, the Devil, the Devil appeared before me; dressed in white, a twelve-year-old bride passed by on the way to St. Sebastian followed by a sparse train of yellowish, pockmarked, hawking and spitting women, and behind her came the munificent, obese, sexagenarian groom, distributing coins among the unruly throng of beggars with ulcerated, never-healing sores upon their arms and chests; children pullulated beneath the archways, fighting among themselves over scraps stolen from the dogs; many children were sleeping in the streets, beneath stairways, on thresholds; a few Dominican priests crossed the plaza, looking like spotted dogs in their habits of white wool and black capes, singing:

From evil dreams defend our eyes,

From fantasies and nocturnal fears;

The phantom enemy is near,

Free us from all corruption.

And the little girl with gray eyes and upturned nose, shoeless, in patched skirts: Celestina looked at her in the midst of that throng in the old market of Toledo, for there was nothing more beautiful than she. And she looked at her also because two men had recognized her, and one had said to her: You are dead; and they had called her Mother, and old whore. She saw herself in that child. She wanted to see herself there. So she must have looked at that age, before what was to happen had happened, if she had reached the present from the future; after what had happened had happened, if she had come to this morning from the past.

Sadly the child gazed upon sadness: the slaughter of beasts, the child bride, bodies covered with sores, the raving of madmen, a lamb bound by the feet, and a butcher with dagger poised high, preparing to plunge it into the white wool of the tiny animal.

The child ran to plead with the butcher: no, it is just a lamb, I look after them, I protect them from the wolves, I stay awake through the nights with them, do not kill the lamb.

The butcher laughed and shoved the child aside; she fell to the bloody stone. Her father ran to aid her, but Celestina reached her first; she patted her head, and held out her hands to her. The child, eyes filled with tears, kissed them. She looked up, her childish lips now bore the mark of Celestina’s wounds; Celestina stared at her hands; they were hers, the hands of the bashful and happy bride of the wedding in the grange; the signs of her travail had disappeared, a tattoo of wounds gleamed on the child’s lips.

“Who are you?”

“I am a shepherdess, señora.”

“Where do you live?”

“My father and I live in the woods near the castle of a great Señor whose name is Felipe.”

The father drew his child away from Celestina; child, my little girl, what has happened to you? look at your mouth, who injured you, this whore-son butcher? no, this evil, ragged witch, here, everyone, after the vicious creature, look at my daughter’s mouth, after her, run, Celestina, knock down tents, stumble over pigs, a house, a stairway, dogs barking, flies buzzing, dank rooms, basins of excrement, madmen shout at you, I have seen the Devil, straw upon the floor, cover yourself, hide, they are going to burn you, witch, flee, wait, night is falling, the marketplace is emptying, the incident is forgotten, you look from the tiny window of your hiding place upon the city spread before you, a steep promontory, encircled by the Tagus, layered in steep grades of stone, a besieged city, accessible only by the north across the desolate plain, defended on the south by the deep ravines of the river, and now, escape, like a mouse scurry through the night, return to the Jewry, awaken Ludovico, what has happened to you? I must go, I must search, I shall return, wait for me, care for the children, and if I cannot, come to meet me, Ludovico, where, Celestina? on the beach, on the same beach where we dreamed of embarking for a new world, on the same day, July 14, when Celestina? twenty years from now.

THE THIRD CHILD

She begged for charity along the roads and in the hamlets, and after walking three days she saw the towers of the castle she thought never to see again, and to the north, the vast forest.

She recognized it. Here she had found refuge when she abandoned Jerónimo: the forest is a fine hiding place for a woman bewitched; and here in the long moonlit nights, surrounded by sounds of the owl and the wolf and the cicada, she was visited by a husband without light or shadow, pure nothingness, who said to her: “I shall reward you, Celestina … But your time is brief … Do not believe my reward will be eternal … Your happiness will be an illusion … Transmit to another woman what you know when you know … Not yet, not yet…”

Here she played with her flour-filled dolls. She took a deep breath. She recognized the odor of damp earth, the whisper of the arching branches of the elms above, and of fallen leaves on the ground, remnants of a forgotten autumn. Here one night she had been taken by three aged merchants. Here she dreamed what her lover spoke into her ear: “… A graceful youth … The stigmata of his house: prognathism … He will pass by here … Detain him … You will recognize him … He did not want to rape you … You know him … He is the son of the Señor who so brutally exercised his rights as Lord … Take him to the beach … The Cabo de los Desastres…”

And now one night as she approached a clearing in the woods she saw her.

It was the young girl who had kissed her hands in Toledo. She was tending her sheep and in spite of the full moon and the balmy air had built a small fire to protect herself and her flock. Celestina looked at her with love: the girl was scrubbing her lips with her hand, again and again; she spat, but the wound on her lips would not be erased. It is she, Celestina said to herself, I know, but I do not understand … She tried to recall what she knew; everything was a sign, and the directions were so many … One lifetime would not be sufficient to follow that network of intersecting roads.

She heard an animal’s low whine. The child picked up a burning brand. She held it low; it illuminated a large gray she-wolf. The animal held out a wounded paw, and she knelt beside it and took its paw. The beast licked her hand and lay down beside the fire. Celestina watched, hidden behind a clump of white poplars that seemed to swallow the light of the moon. After a while, the animal gave birth, amidst the brambles and the dust and the bleating of the sheep. It was a boy child. He was born feet first. He had six toes upon each foot, and upon his back the sign of the cross; it was not a painted cross, but part of his flesh: flesh incarnate.

SPECTER OF TIME

That morning Ludovico encountered the ancient of the Synagogue of the Passing kneeling upon a rug and murmuring prayers, huddled in so profound a bow that his head touched his knees. The student waited until the prayer had ended.

“Do you wish to speak?” asked the ancient.

“Yes, but not to annoy you.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“I have been uneasy.”

“I know. You have read much here. Not all of it agrees with what you believe.”

“I dreamed aloud one afternoon on the beach. I spoke and I dreamed of a world without God, where every man would create his own grace and offer its benefits to other men so their lives would be transformed. Now I do not know. I do not know because I know that one lifetime is not sufficient to fulfill all the promises of individual grace. I fear, venerable sir, to go to the opposite extreme and believe that spirit is all and matter nothing; the spirit eternal, the matter perishable.”

“Nothing dies, nothing perishes completely, neither spirit nor matter.”

“But do they develop similarly? Are thoughts transmitted? Are bodies transmitted?”

“Ideas, you know, are never completely realized. At times they recede, they hibernate as some beasts do, and await the opportune moment to reappear: thought bides its time. The idea that seemed dead in one time is reborn in another. The spirit is transported, duplicated, at times substituted; it disappears, one believes it dead, it reappears. In truth, it announces itself in every word we speak. There is no word that is not laden with forgetfulness and memories, colored with illusions and failures; nevertheless, there is no word that is not the bearer of imminent renovation; each word we say simultaneously announces a word we do not know because we have forgotten it and a word we do not know because we desire it. The same happens with bodies, which are matter; and all matter contains the aura of what it was previously and the aura of what it will be when it disappears.”

“Then am I living an epoch which is my own, or am I but the specter of another epoch, either past or future?”

“Each of the three.”

The ancient of the synagogue arose from his abject position and looked at Ludovico.

He saw the star upon the ancient’s breast. Upon it was inscribed, in bas-relief, the number 3.

MEMORY UPON THE LIPS

Come, child, come to my arms, do you remember me? señora sí, I kissed your hands, you wounded my lips, I scrub my mouth but it doesn’t come clean, every day the scars bite deeper, like a tattoo, child señora sí, a mouth of many colors, let me kiss you, señora sí, do you remember me? señora sí, my pretty little girl, I would like to be like you forever, to be like you again, once I must have been like you, I no longer remember, what else do you remember? señora sí, a black hairy scorpion, where, child? between the legs of El Señor, señora sí, here in this forest, one night, El Señor on horseback, his shirt open, excited, riding by night, alone, swallowing up the leagues, señora sí, lashing the tree branches, like a madman, shouting, drunken, I don’t know, lopping off the heads of wheat stalks, you saw him? señora sí, I was hiding, I put out my fire, I hid as you did just now, amid the poplars, trees of light, light of the moon, a she-wolf caught in a trap, El Señor dismounted, laughing, shouting, growling, stripping off his clothes, he freed the she-wolf from the trap, he lowered his trousers, the black scorpion, he seized the she-wolf, the animal defended herself, growled, howled, clawed, he put the scorpion in the she-wolf’s bottom, you remember that? señora sí, but my voice, my voice is fading, señora sí, he took off his clothes like this? señora sí, so warm, what a beautiful spring, child, your little breasts are budding, little lemons, your fine legs, open them, child, señora sí, Toledo, the marketplace, the beheaded sheep, your underarms, how moist, how perfumed, señora sí, how bare your little mound, you can count the silken hairs, so few, señora sí, open your legs, child, how tight your little cunt, it smells of saffron, my pretty child, my delicious child, señora sí, do you like my soft tongue? ah yes, ah yes, I’ll kiss you all over, will you let me? ah yes, ah yes, El Señor, the hairy scorpion, the burning ass of the she-wolf, the red anus of the beast, he took her, he shouted, he laughed, a drunken madman, señora sí, your tongue in my mouth, my tongue on yours, forest poplar, bramble, sheep bell, she-wolf, sheep, severed heads of wheat, I absorb it all, all of nature, let nothing escape me, my tongue in your ear, hear my secrets, hear what I know, nothing dies, everything is transformed, places remain, times change, I carried you within me, I was you when I was young like you, I penetrate inside you, the black scorpion, the dark tongue, my time has ended, señora sí, your voice is my voice, señora sí, I am exhausted, señora sí, I give you my life, continue it, señora sí, I give to you my voice, I give to you my lips, I give to you my wounds, my memory is upon your lips, men infected me with illness, the Devil with wisdom, daughter of no man, lover of all, I am poisoned, El Señor transmitted his illness to me when he took me on my wedding night, I transmitted it to his son in the castle bedchamber, I was the conduit, through me the father infected the son, they need us, they pursue us, there will be no well-being for man upon earth as long as a single black hole of sulphur and flesh and hair and blood exists, there will be no well-being for woman upon earth while the hairy black scorpion commands, the whip of flesh, the erectile serpent, remember me, child, señora sí, grow, try to be like me, I leave you my wounded lips, upon them my memory, upon them my words, you will know and you will tell what I knew and told you, I shall know and I shall tell in time, he told me, act in time, your name is Celestina, you remember the whole of my life, you live it now for me, in twenty years, on an afternoon of a fourteenth of July you will be on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres, divert paths, deceive wills, alter time, you must be there, we have a rendezvous, señora sí, señora sí …

SIMON IN TOLEDO

I scarcely recognized her, the monk Simón said to Ludovico one night, as the student served him a plate of lentils and dried codfish, for her voice was hoarse and low, and the rags she wore could not hide the fierce wounds on her face and hands, still bleeding as if a wild beast had wounded her with claw and fang, and her eyes held no light.

She said she had found me by inquiring in every desolate city where houses have been abandoned by their dwellers, where the beasts of the forest, guided by instinct, come and make their dens in halls and bedchambers. I asked her whether she did not fear for the life of the child. She laughed and said: “A child born as this one will never die from a vile plague.”

She gave him to me, Ludovico; she told me where you were and asked me to deliver the child to you. She said that without fail she would be at the rendezvous in twenty years. In the houses of the dead everything is open, doors and treasure chests. The servants who have not died have fled. Celestina took a handful of gold and another of jewels from a chest, cackled, and left as if fleeing, as if cloaked, making herself small like the miser who fears the light of the sun will melt her gold.

But first she gave me these coins for you. It was her last generous gesture. She wept as she gave them to me. She had laughed as she took them.

Look carefully at the profile minted on these coins, Ludovico.

The salient jaw.

The heavy, protuberant lip.

The dead gaze.

It is El Señor.

THE ALCAZABA IN ALEXANDRIA

Ludovico made his farewells to the learned doctor of the Synagogue of the Passing and traveled far, very far, with the three children.

He had read in the texts in Toledo a manuscript wherein Pliny speaks of a people without women, without love, and without money — an eternal society into which no one is ever born. This people lived in a village near the shores of the Dead Sea, fleeing the great cities to the end of perfecting their simple, silent, and austere lives. There Ludovico desired that the three children left in his care grow to manhood.

They sailed from Valencia on a Christian ship that one night left them near the port of Alexandria. They were soon lost in the twisting alleyways of that city, the widow of gods and of men; in his beggar’s rags, and despite his great strength, struggling to carry the three children in his arms, he attracted a great deal of attention. Nevertheless, he was well received. He spoke Arabic, he could pay for lodging and meals, and the three boys were singularly quiet and well behaved. They found lodging in a dovecote on a flat rooftop high above the city and from there Ludovico watched the hundred-armed river empty into the waters of the incorporeal sea.

One night, because of the heat, he was sleeping upon the sun-bleached stones of the rooftop, and he dreamed he set out in a small sailboat, and rowed toward the source of the Nile. Only three stars shone in the firmament; there was no other light and a great silence lay over the land of Egypt. As he rowed, he moved closer and closer to the three silent stars until, reflected in the water, they were within reach of his hand. He plunged his hand into the river and fished out a star.

First the star trembled. Then it spoke. It said sun, and the sun appeared. It said wheat, and the shores were covered with undulating heads of grain. It said city, and a white settlement emerged from the sands of the desert. It said children, and three persons, two youths and a girl, appeared and swam beside the boat, guiding it to the shore of the river.

“This is my brother, and this my sister,” said one of the youths.

During the first day, the youth who had first spoken sowed the land, harvested its fruit, channeled the waters of the river so they irrigated the desert, formed bricks from the black mud of the shore, constructed a house, and thus provided both sustenance and shelter to his brother and sister.

That night, as an act of gratitude, his sister took him as her husband and they slept together in the house. The other brother lay down in the night air, but brief was his rest. He arose and walked beside the river, wakeful, resentful, barely containing his anger and envy.

At the dawn of the second day, the envious brother entered the house where the couple lay, and killed his sleeping brother. He dragged the corpse to the river and threw it into the waters. The wife-and-sister wept, and walked along the muddy shores, searching for the body of her brother-and-husband. The murdering brother told Ludovico: “You are sleeping on a rooftop. Seal your lips. If you betray me, I shall also kill you in the dream. You will never awaken.”

And he walked into the desert, naked and defenseless.

Ludovico went in search of the woman. After a while he found her kneeling beside some rushes that had trapped the body of her dead brother. The woman pressed her lips to those of the dead man and revived him with her breath, passing life from her mouth to his. Then she said: “Lips are life. Mouth is memory. The word created everything.”

And the dead man returned to life. But he was a living dead man, not the man he had been before. And as he returned to life he said: “I am yesterday and I know tomorrow. Like me, my children will live their deaths and die their lives. We shall never again be three, alone in the world, conceived by ourselves, with no father to engender us or a mother to give us a name.”

And the land was peopled.

Upon the third day of his dream, Ludovico found himself wandering among the multitudes of the city of Alexandria. The many-colored turbans and veiled faces and flowing mantles and unshod feet and thieving hands were indifferent to him, but at the same time he felt threatened by the haste, the harsh voices, the wailing cries. On the stone threshold of a white door he recognized the murderer. He was sitting, legs crossed, before a rickety stool, writing, without pausing, as if condemned to write, as if his well-being depended upon scratching the Arabic characters upon stiff, curled leaves of papyrus, as if by writing he postponed a damnation.

Ludovico approached the scribe. He was not recognized. Flies lighted upon the criminal’s face and he brushed them away with one hand, not blinking. Ludovico passed his hand before the scribe’s eyes. Again he did not blink. Ludovico read over the blind scribe’s shoulder. “One night I killed my brother. Attention. Read and understand. I shall tell you why it happened, how, when, and for what reasons; what I then foresaw, what today I remember, what I shall fear tomorrow. Attention. Stop. Does not my story arouse your curiosity…?”

Ludovico dreamed that the murdered brother and his wife-and-sister that night lay sleeping in the tomb. She awakened and said: “We can leave now. Now you will know the destiny of those who live outside the tomb.”

“Yes,” replied the murdered man, “but secretly. Let no one see us.”

They emerged from their winding sheets as if abandoning their skins. The woman shook out her robe of a thousand colors, and from its folds day was born, and night fell, light was kindled and shadow prolonged, the cloth burst into flame and poured down her body like water; at its touch the living died and the dead were reborn; all the while the couple walked through the same streets of Alexandria toward the numberless mouths of the great river.

Finally he saw them.

The murderer brother lay dead in the abandoned alley, his face stained by spilled ink, his pen clasped tightly in his hand, the scrolls of paper strewn about his body, white, virgin, not a single character upon them.

The couple sailed up the river in a luminous boat, the man naming things in secret, water, sand, wheat, stone, house, the woman asking the waters: “Why did our brother succumb to the temptation to write of his own crime?”

He was awakened by fingers brushing his. Lying beside him was a woman of indeterminate age; veils covered her face and body except for an aperture over her lips. The aperture followed the outline of her lips. The mouth was stamped with many colors; she spoke.

“Flee,” she said to Ludovico, “go as quickly as possible to the place I shall tell you. There is your well-being. Here your children will be in danger if the sign they bear is discovered. They will be identified with a sacred prophecy. They will be separated from you and, captive, will await their manhood only to enact once again the struggle of rival brothers…”

“What is the prophecy?” asked Ludovico; but the woman wrapped herself in her multicolored veils — the raiment, like her lips — and disappeared into the darkness.

THE CITIZENS OF HEAVEN

With half his remaining gold, Ludovico bought a small boat, provisions, and a compass, and sailed from Egypt toward the coast of the Levant. The three children laughed and crawled on the deck; their eyes and skin glowed with the good health and fortune bestowed by the brilliant Mediterranean sun.

He docked in the port of Haifa; he sold the boat and after a few days on donkeyback arrived at a desert village near the Dead Sea. Without asking anything of anyone, he followed precisely Pliny’s instructions for reaching the community. They were received by several men dressed as poorly as Ludovico and the three boys, and all saw a good sign in this arrival, for the desert community was divided into four classes: children, disciples, novices, and the faithful; and the three still very young infants, arriving into the life of the sect so free of the past, could readily ascend in the scale of knowledge and merit. To Ludovico they explained that the reason they joined together there was not the inability to possess goods; rather, it was a will to possess everything in common. Ludovico placed his remaining gold in a common chest.

For ten years Ludovico and the three boys lived the life of this community. They awakened at dawn. They worked the fields watered by wells known to the faithful. Before the midday meal they bathed and turned to the severe tasks of carpentry, ceramics, and weaving. They supped; no one ever spoke during meals. Before going to sleep they could study, meditate, pray, or contemplate. They dressed always like paupers. They forbade all ceremony, for they affirmed that good must be practiced with humility, not celebrated. They abhorred equally the pomp of all churches, those of the East and those of the West, the Hebraic and the Christian, all rites and all sacrifice. And they transmitted their beliefs not in sermons but in ordinary conversation, at the hour of rest, during the day’s labor, in a quiet and reasoned voice. No one there noticed the external signs the three boys shared.

“Your body is transitory matter, but your soul is immortal.”

“Captive within the body as if within a prison, the soul can aspire to freedom only if it renounces the world, riches, and stone temples, and in contrast serves God with piety, practicing justice toward all men.”

“Do harm to no one, neither voluntarily nor at anyone’s behest.”

“Detest the unjust man and succor the just.”

The three boys learned these maxims by memory. Seated at the refectory table according to their age in the time of the community, Ludovico and the three boys finally occupied a high rank, for here age was not judged by external appearances of youth or maturity but by the time spent in the community, and thus the boys were older than some gray-haired men who had arrived more recently. These old men were considered children; Ludovico became a novice; the boys, disciples.

“Equality is the source of justice; it manifests to us true riches.”

“Three are the roads to perfection: study, contemplation, and knowledge of nature.”

“But also there are dreams.”

“Dreams come from God.”

“At times, they are the shortcut to the final beatitude the other three roads can procure.”

One day in the year when the three boys, in different months, became eleven, Ludovico told the faithful what he had dreamed. He must return to the world to fulfill the dictates of justice. The faithful returned to him the gold coins he had surrendered upon his arrival. Ludovico looked at the coins Celestina had sent from Toledo by the monk Simón. The same prognathic profile, in bas-relief; the pendant lower lip; the dead gaze. But the effigy imprinted there was not the former Señor’s but that of his son Felipe.

“The old King?” the captain of the sailing vessel replied as they set sail one afternoon from Haifa.

The captain looked at the coins Ludovico had given him in payment of their passage. He bit one to assure its legality, and added: “He died years ago. His son Don Felipe, may he enjoy glory, has succeeded him.”

Ten years of silence and labor, Ludovico said to himself, ten years of bookless study, thinking, contemplating, in silence, remembering everything I have learned, restructuring it in my mind. Felipe predicted it would take longer to achieve pragmatic grace. I shall need less time to change grace through action. He imagined I would be alone, in a miserable little room, bent over charcoal and pitch, philters and mud, growing old before knowing, knowing, an old man, knowing, of no use. But I am not alone. I am I plus my three sons. My small, formidable army. One lifetime is not enough to fulfill a destiny.

He gazed for the last time toward the coasts of Palestine. The desert was sinking into the sea. The desert began in the sea. A people in the desert, without women, without love, and without money. An eternal people, where no one is born. Men came to the community; men left. But no one was seen in birth or in death. And perhaps because of this, he mused, only there could he think clearly and totally of his destiny and that of the three boys bound to his own.

One night in the dog days the captain approached him and after staring for a moment at the motionless, opaque sea, said to him: “I have heard one of your sons praying in the early morning. The things he said are those repeated centuries ago by a sect rebelling against both the law of Israel and the law of Rome: this sect held that all Churches are dens of the Evil One.”

“That is so. We have lived ten years among them,” Ludovico replied.

“But that is impossible. All the members of the sect were condemned by the Sanhedrin and delivered to the Centurions, who took them out into the desert and abandoned them, bound hand and foot, without bread, and without water. They could not have survived. They were called the Citizens of Heaven.”

For an instant, dizzied, Ludovico felt he had never gone there; be also that he had never left.

A long night’s sleep dissipated his obscure anxieties.

THE PALACE OF DIOCLETIAN

This is the city-palace; this is the palace-city; its name is Spalato, space of a palace, city within a palace, a palace converted into a city upon the steep coasts of the Adriatic Sea, the last dwelling of the Emperor Diocletian, plazas that had been courtyards, cathedrals that had been mausoleums, baptistries of Christ formerly temples of Jupiter, churches that had been chapels, streets that had been passageways, gardens that had been orchards, lodgings that had been bedchambers, inns that had been great halls, merchants’ stalls that had been anterooms, public dining halls that had been private, wine cellars that had been taverns that had been dungeons, an imperial palace partitioned by time, consumed by usury, blackened by kitchen smoke, cracked by repeated cries, meeting of two worlds, the East and the West, Dalmatia, high cliffs and flat beaches, dirty sands, slippery seaweed and rotted timber, shivering octopuses and sealed bottles, enduring ash and decayed excrement, tunnels, subterranean passages, rusty iron rings, damaged marble, stone worn and polished like antique coins, scratched paintings, waves of conquerors, Byzantine, Croatians, Normans, Venetians, Hungarians, a beehive of dark stone devastated by hordes of Avars who had with greater fury desolated neighboring cities, all of whose refugees came to live in this abandoned palace, this labyrinth of thick walls, soaring on the side of landfall, forest of masts, sky of sails, the palace of Diocletian, its sixteen towers, four gates, waves of fugitives, crossroads, they all came here, from here they scattered across Christian Europe, from the precinct where Diocletian had launched his edict against Christians for having offended the gods of Rome with the sign of the cross, from here they went out, here they came in, through the Porta Aenea, the guardians of the Egyptian secrets of the two brothers and a sister: Osiris, who founded everything upon the word; Set, who was the first murderer; Isis, the sister-and-wife who returned life through her mouth; through the Porta Ferrea the ragged disciples of Simon Magus, forever seeking the lost goddess in temples and brothels, the guardian of secret wisdom, the damned, the expelled, Eve, Helen, the Hetaera of Babylon, she who had been condemned by the Priapic angels of the vengeful God, the demiurge of evil, wise female, feminine sage, lost woman, the piece lacking to complete total knowledge; through the Porta Aurea the bearers of Gnostic and Manichaean heresy, dissatisfied with the work of creation, desirous of a second truth, higher, more perfect, more secret, more total than that consecrated by the Councils of the Church, the incarnate enemies of St. Augustine who saw in the Roman and apostolic Holy See the full realization of the promise initiated with the birth of Christ, while they, disciples of Basilides of Alexandria, of Valentinus, and Nestorius and Marcion, saw a world foundering in pomp, corruption, and surrender to the works of the second God, He who had created evil while the first God created good, and they anticipated the solution of this conflict in a second millennium, a second coming of Christ to earth to purge the world and prepare it for the final judgment; and through the Porta Argentea the zealous guardians of Orphic secrets, recipients of the Pistis Sophia, revealers of the prophecies of the pythonesses, the Sibyls who announce the appearance of a last Emperor, King of peace and abundance, the triumph of true Christianity, which is the religion of selflessness, charity, poverty, and love, the last monarch, annihilator of Gog and Magog:

“His purifying task completed, he will go to Jerusalem, he will deposit his crown and mantle upon Golgotha and will abdicate in favor of God…”

“And does history end there?” Ludovico asked of a one-eyed itinerant Greek with hair like black serpents and wearing a black toga as they sat eating fried hake served on lead plates. “Does your story end there?” he asked of this man who disseminated the auguries of the Tiburtine Sibyl beside the busy Porta Argentea, gate in the walls of Spalato.

THE PROPHECY OF THE THIRD AGE

“No,” mumbled the magus. “Three are the ages of man. The first age of the world passed beneath a reign of faith, when the elect, still weak and enslaved, were not yet capable of freeing themselves. Their law was the law of Moses; that age was continued until the One came who said: ‘If the Son free you, then shall you be truly free.’ The second age was initiated by Christ and continues unto the present hour; it frees us in respect to the past, but in no way affects the future. St. Paul spoke wisely: ‘We know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.’”

The magus cleaned his teeth with a fishbone. “The third age will be initiated in these days we are living. It is imminent. For have we not seen everywhere the fulfillment of the prophecies Matthew put in the mouth of Jesus, that nation shall rise against nation, that there shall be earthquakes and famines and pestilences and all manner of tribulations, and false prophets shall rise, iniquity abound, and the love of many wax cold: the world is growing old and deteriorating. Are we not governed by a false Pope and a King of unchaste countenance? It is time now for the last Emperor to appear and unite all nations into a single flock, for the Sibyl has said: ‘Rex novus adveniet totum ruiturus in orbem…’”

“And does history end then?” Ludovico insisted.

The magus asked for something to drink. He gulped grossly. He wiped his lips on a black sleeve. “Good does not belong to the age of men. Its triumph is partial. Absolute evil must come so that absolute good may triumph. Absolute good is divine. It is not of the world of men, as is absolute evil. But once the third epoch is begun in peace and abundance — man’s precarious blessings — the Antichrist will appear to destroy them in all his fury.”

He looked at Ludovico with his cat eyes and continued: “He is absolute evil. Only if he incarnates in the future will history know its apotheosis: the future ends there. Absolute evil will provoke absolute good. The Son of Man will descend upon clouds from Heaven, bearing power and great majesty. And He will send forth His angels with resounding trumpets and gather His elect from the four winds. He will sit upon His throne of glory and to the just He will give possession of the kingdom prepared for them since the creation, saying unto them: For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat; naked, and ye clothed me. And to the damned He will say: Depart from me, and will cast them into the everlasting fire, saying: I was a stranger and ye took me not in, sick and in prison, and ye visited me not. And both the elect and the damned will ask: When did we or did we not all these things? and the Son of Man will say unto them: Inasmuch as ye have done it even unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me; but inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. Each shall occupy his place in Eternity. And there will be no further human history.”

Exalted by his own words, the magus had risen to his feet.

Ludovico looked up to ask: “How will you recognize the Antichrist?”

The magus embraced one of the three boys, who always accompanied Ludovico, listening to his every word; he said only: “Bird of prey; black penis. Where the cadaver is, there will the vultures gather.”

“But first, the good King of whom you spoke, how…?”

The magus kissed the cheek of Ludovico’s second son. “A cross upon the back. Six toes upon each foot. He will conquer. He will be conquered.”

“Where?”

“In the house of the scorpions.”

“What place is that?”

“In the only land with the name of Vespers: Spain.”

The magus knelt beside the third child, and other disciples, of other persuasions, who had gathered to listen to him, were offended by the Greek’s allusions to false prophets; and the mob — upon occasion so credulous, at other times so malicious — began to mock the magus, and they shouted at him, some laughing, others somber, all defiant: “If you are a magus and know so much, perform a miracle, or we cannot believe what you have told here…”

Then this terrible one-eyed man with hair like serpents withdrew a scimitar he guarded beneath his black toga and with unexpected strength and ire, as if possessed of a hundred arms, cut the hand from one man, the tongue from another, with two rapid strokes pricked the eyes from one man’s sockets, and spat a thick black stinking phlegm upon another’s face, and this man’s face melted like wax; and to all, the magus cried out: “Were you blind, you would see; maimed, your limbs would be restored; mute, you would speak; sick, you would be healed, but as it is not thus, see how miraculously you have lost eyes, hands, tongue, and health. Men of little faith: who will convince you?”

With clubs and fists, with daggers and hatchets, weeping and vociferating, this crowd fell upon the Greek magus, and tore him limb from limb.

His members were thrown into the sea: the head and the two halves of his trunk, split from his pelvis through his breastbone, like any beast hunted in the forest.

“Never go barefoot, run and play along the beaches and sea walls, but never remove your shoes, never bare your back, always be well covered, listen, speak, mix with everyone, hear them all, learn, survive, compare what we learned in the desert community with what we are living here, we have things to do when you are old enough, something to do together, forget nothing, when you are fourteen we shall leave this city, each will go his separate way, we shall meet again for the final episode, now I want you, with me, to learn, now you are becoming men, I shall gather together everything I know, what little I know, and we shall channel a new course for all this confusion of beliefs, rebellions, and aspirations, we shall join them with my dream on the beach, the promised millennium will take place within history and will be different from Eternity, the world will be renewed within history, without oppression, Pedro, without prohibitions, Celestina, without plagues, Simón, without gods, Ludovico; we shall not return to the original age of gold, nor shall we find it at the end of history, the age of gold is within history, it is called the future, but the future is today, not tomorrow, the future is present, the future is immediate, or it is nothing; the future is here, or there is no such place; the future is now, or there is no such time; we are the future, you three, I…”

THE GYPSY

After three days Ludovico and the three boys descended to the beach of Spalato beneath the high walls of the city-palace in search of the remains of the mutilated Greek magus. The boys agreed that as the one-eyed magus had embraced one, kissed a second, and knelt beside the third, he had asked them to perform this act.

The dirty sands were deserted. Ludovico and the boys searched among the spoils of the sea for the parts of the magus’s body, but finding nothing they sat down to rest and admire the sunset over the yellow waters of the Adriatic.

Then, as if emerging out of nothing (but the sand deadened her steps), they saw walking toward them clothed in red and saffron robes a gypsy woman of the race so named because they had come from Egypt, one of the many prostitutes and thieves with barbaric earrings dangling in their pierced ears that thronged the streets and houses of Spalato selling their favors, telling fortunes, and at times working as servants, for there is no better guardian of things that can be stolen than a thief himself, and this is the age-old wisdom: children of night, guardians of their mother.

But as the woman approached, Ludovico felt fear; the gypsy’s lips were tattooed in the same colors as her billowing dress. It was growing dark; the woman asked them whether they wished her to tell their fortunes, to throw the naipes, a word that comes from naibi, the most ancient Oriental name for she-devils, sibyls, and pythonesses. Ludovico refused, dismissing her brusquely, for secretly he feared any announcement of a new fate that would alter the destinies of his three sons.

Then the gypsy asked: “Are you searching for the remains of the one-eyed one?”

Ludovico sat silently, waiting, but the boys eagerly responded. The gypsy spoke simply: “It is in the cards.”

“Read them,” one of the boys said impulsively.

“Yes, read them,” the other two chorused.

The gypsy smiled enigmatically: “I have only three cards with me.”

The boys reacted with childish disappointment.

“But with three cards one may achieve all the combinations of the tarot; the number 3 signifies the harmonious solution of the conflict of the fall, the incorporation of the spirit with the pair, the formula of each of the created worlds, and synthesis of life: man with his father and mother; with his wife and his child; with his father and his son … So spoke the tarot, which contains all enigmas and their solutions.”

The woman moved her hands in the air as if shuffling cards; the three boys laughed and mocked her, she doesn’t even have three cards! her cards are pure air! deceiver, thief, whore! but the gypsy did not laugh; she looked at one boy and said to him: Run along the shore and pick up that bottle half buried in the sand; and to the second she said: Dive into the water, there is another bottle on the bottom; and to the third: Swim still farther, I see the green crystal gleam of another bottle floating on the waves. The three boys did as she asked. They returned to the beach with three bottles, slimy, green, red-sealed. Only the feet of one boy were wet; the other two, soaked and out of breath, were on all fours on the dirty sand shaking themselves like dogs.

“Get up!” Ludovico shouted with growing terror. “Like men, on two feet!”

The gypsy smiled and said: “These are the remains of the magus; his head and the two halves of his severed torso.”

Again the boys laughed, and said they were only three old bottles; they looked at them and shook them: there was something inside, not even wine, not water, a tight sheaf of papers within each bottle. They laughed. They looked at one another. They started to throw them back into the sea. The gypsy screamed and shouted three words, tiko, tiki, tika, it is the word of God, which in all tongues is pronounced the same, theo, teos, deus, teotl, and only these sons of the Devil will disguise it by naming God dog, in reverse, yes, get up, do not tempt me, be men, not dogs, you, boy, your bottle, tiko, which means destiny in the Chinese tongue, you, boy, your bottle, tika, which means fate in the Gypsy tongue, guard them well, never open them or you will have neither fate, chance, nor destiny, they have been sealed for many ages, one comes from the past, destiny; another from the present, chance; the other from the future, fate; this is the gift of the one-eyed magus who gave you an embrace, a kiss, a caress while others mocked him, and once again killed him …

“But you said these were the parts of his body,” murmured one of the boys.

And the gypsy replied: “The magus was paper. Always he was paper, either a hero or an author of paper. First he was protagonist. When he returned to his hearth from wars and adventures, he wrote. What he lived as a hero is one thing: the centuries sing of it. What he wrote as a poet is a different thing: the letters are silent. He lived the lore that traveled from mouth to mouth. He died what was written upon paper. When he discovered the infidelity of his wife, weary of waiting for him, he lived all his adventures in reverse order. And as he relived them, he wrote about them. He did not stop his ears with wax: he was seduced by the song of the sirens. He did not resist the beauty of the lotus: he ate, and from that time he has lived a dream. Without weapons, he confronted Polyphemus; the Cyclops tore out one of his eyes. He returned to the origin: Ulixes, son of Sisyphus, forever between Scylla and Charybdis, between the monster of imagination — the creature with twelve feet and six heads and serpents’ necks and teeth like a shark and barking dogs in the place of its sex — and the monster of nature — the enormous mouth that swallows and vomits out all the waters of the universe; son of Sisyphus, he returned to the origin, condemned to write of his own adventures again and again, to believe that he had finished his book only to begin again, to relate it all from a different point of view, according to unforeseen possibilities, in other time, in other spaces, aspiring from the beginning and to the end of time the impossible: a perfectly simultaneous narration. He was paper. His body was his death. When they killed him and threw him into the sea, he was again paper. He lived again. Guard him well. It is his offering.”

She left without another word, and one of the boys swore that she walked into the sea and disappeared, another said no, she walked down the beach followed by a herd of swine, and the third was sure she had entered a cave among the rocks, a cave alternately covered and revealed by the waves, where one heard the frightful roaring of lions and the howling of wolves, but Ludovico stood gazing at the gypsy’s footsteps in the sand, and the wind blew and the waves washed over the tracks but the tracks were not erased.

THE THEATER OF MEMORY

They left Spalato before the anticipated time. Three times Ludovico had returned alone to the beach; each time he found there, unerased, the gypsy’s footprints. They traveled to Venice, a city where stone and water retain no trace of footsteps. In that place of mirages there is room for no phantom but time, and its traces are imperceptible; the lagoon would disappear without stone to reflect it and the stone without water in which to be reflected. Against this enchantment there is little the transitory bodies of men — solid or spectral, it is the same — can do. All Venice is a phantom: it issues no entry permits to other phantoms. There no one would recognize them as such, and so they would cease to be. No phantom exposes itself to such risk.

They found lodging in the ample solitudes of the island of La Giudecca; Ludovico felt reassured, being near the Hebraic traditions he had studied so thoroughly in Toledo, even though not sharing all their beliefs. The coins Celestina had sent by hand of the monk Simón had been exhausted in the last voyage; Ludovico inquired in the neighborhoods of the ancient Jewry where many refugees from Spain and Portugal had found asylum, as he now did, whether anyone had need of a translator; laughing, everyone recommended he cross the broad Vigano canal, disembark at San Basilio, walk along the estuaries of the shipwrights and sugar merchants, continue past the workshops of the wax workers, cross the Ponte Foscarini, and ask for the house of a certain Maestro Valerio Camillo, between the River of San Barnaba and the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, for it was widely known that no one in Venice had accumulated a greater number of ancient manuscripts than the said Dominie, whose windows even were blocked with parchments; at times papers fell into the street, where children made little boats of them and floated them in the canals, and great was the uproar when the meager, stuttering Maestro ran out to rescue the priceless documents, shouting at the top of his voice whether it were the destiny of Quintilian and Pliny the Elder to be soaked in canals and serve as a diversion for brainless little brats.

Ludovico found the described house without difficulty, but its doors and windows prevented the passage of either light or human; the residence of Donno Valerio Camillo was a paper fortress, mountains, walls, pillars and piles of exposed documents, folio piled upon folio, yellowed, teetering, held upright thanks only to the counterpressure of other stacks of paper.

Ludovico circled the building, looking for the house’s garden. And, in fact, beside a small sotto portico facing the vast Campo Santa Margherita, extended a narrow iron railing worked in a series of three recurring heads: wolf, lion, and dog; fragrant vines trailed from the walls, and in the dark little garden stood an extremely thin man, the meagerness of his body disguised by the ample folds of a long, draped tunic, but the angularity of his face emphasized by a black hood — similar to those worn by executioners — that hid his head and ears, revealing only an eagle-like profile; he was occupied in training several ferocious mastiffs; he held a long stick on which were impaled pieces of raw meat; he teased the dogs, dangling it above their heads; the barking dogs leaped to snatch the prize, but at every leap the man placed his arm between the raw meat and the beasts’ fangs, miraculously barely escaping being wounded; each time, with amazing swiftness, the frail, hooded Donno pulled back the arm grazed by the dogs, and stuttered: “Very well, very well, Biondino, Preziosa, very well, Pocogarbato, my flesh is the more savory, you know how I trust you, do not fail me, for at the hour of my death I shall be in no condition to discipline you.”

Then he threw another piece of meat to the mastiffs and watched with delight as they devoured it, fighting among themselves to seize the best portions. When he saw Ludovico standing in the entrance to the garden, he rudely demanded whether he had so little interest in his life that he had to pry into the lives of others. Ludovico asked his pardon and explained that the motive for his visit was not gratuitous curiosity but the need for employment. He showed him a letter signed by the ancient of the Synagogue of the Passing, and after reading it Donno Valerio Camillo said: “Very well, very well, Monsignore Ludovicus. Although it would take many lifetimes to classify and translate the papers I have accumulated throughout my lifetime, we can do some small part, we can begin. Consider yourself employed — with two conditions. The first is that you never laugh at my stuttering. I shall explain the reason this once: my capacity for reading is infinitely superior to my capacity for speaking; I employ so much time reading that at times I completely forget how to speak; in any case, I read so rapidly that in compensation I trip and stumble as I speak. My thoughts are swifter than my words.”

“And the second condition?”

The Maestro threw another scrap of meat to the mastiffs. “That if I die during the period of your service, you must be responsible to see that they not bury my body in holy ground, or throw it into the waters of this pestilent city, but instead lay my naked body here in my garden and loose the dogs to devour me. I have trained them to do this. They will be my tomb. There is none better or more honorable: matter to matter. I but follow the wise counsel of Cicero. If in spite of everything I am someday resurrected in my former body, it will not have been without first giving every digestive opportunity to the divine matter of the world.”

Daily Ludovico presented himself at the house of Maestro Donno Valerio Camillo and daily the emaciated Venetian handed him ancient folios to be translated into the tongues of the various courts where, mysteriously, he hinted he would send his invention, along with all the authenticating documents of scientific proof.

Soon Ludovico became aware that everything he was translating from Greek and Latin into Tuscan, French, or Spanish possessed a common theme: memory. From Cicero, he translated the De inventione: “Prudence is the knowledge of good, of evil, and of that which is neither good nor evil. Its parts are: memory, intelligence, and prevision, or pre-sight. Memory is the faculty through which the mind recalls what was. Intelligence certifies what is. Pre-vision or pre-sight permits the mind to see that something is going to occur before it occurs.” From Plato, the passages wherein Socrates speaks of memory as of a gift: it is the mother of the Muses, and in every soul there is one part of wax upon which are imprinted the seals of thought and perception. From Philostratus, the Life of Apollonius of Tyana: Euxenes asked Apollonius why, being a man of elevated thought, and expressing himself so clearly and swiftly, he had never written anything, and Apollonius answered him: “Because until now I have not practiced silence.” From that moment he resolved to remain silent; he never spoke again, although his eyes and his mind absorbed every experience and stored it in his memory. Even after he was a hundred years old he had a better memory than Simonides himself, and he wrote a hymn in eulogy of memory, wherein he stated that all things are erased with time, but that time itself becomes ineradicable and eternal because of memory. And among the pages of St. Thomas Aquinas, he found this quotation underlined in red ink: “Nihil potest homo intelligere sine phantasmate.” Man can understand nothing without images. And images are phantoms.

In Pliny he read the amazing feats of memory of antiquity: Cyrus knew the names of all the soldiers in his army; Seneca the Elder could repeat two thousand names in the order they were communicated to him; Mithridates, King of Pontus, spoke the tongues of the twenty nations under his dominion; Metrodorus of Scepsis could repeat every conversation he had heard in his lifetime, in the exact original words; and Charmides the Greek knew by memory the content of all the books in his library, the greatest of his age. On the other hand, Themistocles refused to practice the art of memory, saying he preferred the science of forgetfulness to that of memory. And constantly, in all these manuscripts, appeared references to the poet Simonides, called the inventor of memory.

One day, many months after beginning his work, Ludovico dared ask the always silent Maestro Valerio Camillo the identity of that renowned poet Simonides. The Dominie looked at him, eyes flashing beneath heavy eyebrows. “I always knew you were curious. I told you so that first day.”

“Do not judge my curiosity as vain, Maestro Valerio, now it is in your service.”

“Search among my papers. If you do not know how to encounter what I myself found, I shall consider you are not as clever as I believed.”

After which the agile, stammering, slight Maestro bounded across the room to an iron door he always kept closed, protected by chains and locks; he opened it with difficulty and disappeared behind it.

It took Ludovico almost a year, alternating translation with investigation, to locate a slim, brittle document in Greek wherein the narrator recounted the story of a poet of bad reputation, despised because he was the first to charge for writing, or even reading, his verses. His name was Simonides and he was a native of the island of Ceos. This said Simonides was invited one night to sing a poem in honor of a noble of Thessaly named Scopas. The wealthy Scopas had prepared a great banquet for the occasion. But the waggish Simonides, in addition to a eulogy in honor of his host, included in the poem a dithyramb to the legendary brothers, the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, both sons of Leda, the former by a swan and the latter by a god. Half mocking, half in earnest, Scopas told the poet when he had ended his recital that, since only half the panegyric had honored him, he would pay only half the agreed sum, and that he should collect the other half from the mythic twins.

Bested, Simonides sat down to eat, hoping to collect in food what the miserly Scopas had denied him in coin. But at that instant a messenger arrived and told the poet that two youths urgently sought him outside. With increasing bad humor, Simonides left his place at the banquet table and went out into the street, but found no one. As he turned to reenter the dining hall of Scopas he heard a fearful sound of falling masonry and cracking plaster; the roof of the house had collapsed. Everyone inside had been killed; the weight of the columns crushed all the guests at the banquet, and beneath the ruins it was impossible to identify anyone. The relatives of the dead arrived and wept when they were unable to recognize their loved ones lost among all those bodies crushed like insects, disfigured, their heads smashed in, their brains spilled out. Then Simonides pointed out to each kinsman which was his dead: the poet recalled the exact place each guest had occupied during the banquet.

Everyone marveled, for never before had anyone achieved a similar feat; and thus was invented the art of memory. Simonides voyaged to offer his thanks at the shrine of Castor and Pollux in Sparta. Through his mind, again and again, passed in perfect order the mocking, indifferent, scornful, ignorant faces of Scopas and his guests.

Ludovico showed this text to Valerio Camillo, and the Dominie nodded thoughtfully. Finally he said: “I congratulate you. Now you know how memory was invented and who invented it.”

“But surely, Maestro, men have always remembered…”

“Of course, Monsignore Ludovicus; but the intent of memory was different. Simonides was the first to remember something besides the present and the remote as such, for before him memory was only an inventory of daily tasks, lists of cattle, utensils, slaves, cities, and houses, or a blurred nostalgia for past events and lost places: memory was factum, not ars. Simonides proposed something more: everything that men have been, everything they have said and done can be remembered, in perfect order and location; from then on, nothing had to be forgotten. Do you realize what that means? Before him, memory was a fortuitous fact: each person spontaneously remembered what he wished to or what he could remember; the poet opened the doors to scientific memory, independent of individual memories; he proposed memory as total knowledge of a total past. And since that memory was exercised in the present, it must also totally embrace the present so that, in the future, actuality is remembered past. To this goal many systems have been elaborated throughout the centuries. Memory sought assistance from places, images, taxonomy. From the memory of the present and the past, it progressed to an ambition to recall the future before it occurred, and this faculty was called pre-vision or pre-sight. Other men, more audacious than those preceding them, were inspired by the Jewish teachings of the Cabala, the Zohar, and the Sephirot to go further and to know the time of all times and the space of all spaces; the simultaneous memory of all hours and all places. I, monsignore, have gone still further. For me the memory of the eternity of times, which I already possess, is not sufficient, or the memory of the simultaneity of places, that I always knew…”

Ludovico told himself that Dominie Valerio Camillo was mad: he expected to find burial in the ferocious digestive system of mastiffs, and life in a memory that was not of here or some other place, or the sum of all spaces, or the memory of the past, present, and future, or the sum of all times. He aspired, perhaps, to the absolute, the vacuum. The Venetian’s eyes glittered with malice as he observed the Spanish student. Then gently he took him by the arm and led him to the locked door. “You have never asked me what lies behind that door. Your intellectual curiosity has been more powerful than common curiosity, which you would judge disrespectful, personal, unwholesome. You have respected my secret. As a reward I am going to show you my invention.”

Valerio Camillo inserted keys into the several locks, removed the chains, and opened the door. Ludovico followed down a dark musty passageway of dank brick where the only gleam came from the eyes of rats and the skin of lizards. They came to a second iron door. Valerio Camillo opened it and then closed it behind Ludovico. They stood in a silent white space of marble, illuminated by the light of the scrupulously clean stone, so marvelously joined that not even a suggestion of a line could be seen between the blocks of marble.

“No rat can enter here,” laughed the Donno. And then, with great seriousness, he added, “I am the only one who has ever entered here.

And now you, Monsignore Ludovicus, now you will know the Theater of Memory of Valerio Camillo.”

The Maestro lightly pressed one of the marble blocks and a whole section of the wall opened like a door, swinging on invisible hinges. Stooping, the two men passed through; a low, lugubrious chant resounded in Ludovico’s ears; they entered a corridor of wood that grew narrower with every step, until they emerged upon a tiny stage; a stage so small, in fact, that only Ludovico could stand upon it, while the Donno Valerio remained behind him, his dry hands resting upon the translator’s shoulders, his eagle’s face near Ludovico’s ear, stuttering, his breath redolent of fish and garlic. “This is the Theater of Memory. Here roles are reversed. You, the only spectator, will occupy the stage. The performance will take place in the auditorium.”

Enclosed within the wooden structure, the auditorium was formed of seven ascending, fan-shaped gradins sustained upon seven pillars; each gradin was of seven rows, but instead of seats Ludovico saw a succession of ornamental railings, similar to those guarding Valerio Camillo’s garden facing the Campo Santa Margherita; the filigree of the figures on the railings was almost ethereal, so that each figure seemed to superimpose itself upon those in front of and behind it; the whole gave the impression of a fantastic hemicycle of transparent silk screens; Ludovico felt incapable of understanding the meaning of this vast inverted scenography where the sets were spectators and the spectator the theater’s only actor.

The low chant of the passageway became a choir of a million voices joined, without words, in a single sustained ululation. “My theater rests upon seven pillars,” the Venetian stammered, “like the house of Solomon. These columns represent the seven Sephirot of the supra-celestial world, which are the seven measures of the plots of the celestial and lower worlds and which contain all the possible ideas of all three worlds. Seven divinities preside over each of the seven gradins: look, Monsignore Ludovicus, at the representations on each of the first railings. They are Diana, Mercury, Venus, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn: the six planets and the central sun. And seven themes, each beneath the sign of a star, are represented on the seven rows of each gradin. They are the seven fundamental situations of humanity: the Cavern, the human reflection of the immutable essence of being and idea; Prometheus, who steals fire from the intelligence of the gods; the Banquet, the conviviality of men joined together in society; Mercury’s sandals, symbols of human activity and labor; Europa and the Bull, love; and on the highest row, the Gorgons, who contemplate everything from on high; they have three bodies, but a single shared eye. And the only spectator — you — has a single body but possesses three souls, as stated in the Zohar. Three bodies and one eye; one body and three souls. And between these poles, all the possible combinations of the seven stars and the seven situations. Hermes Trismegistus has written wisely that he who knows how to join himself to this diversity of the unique will also be divine and will know all past, present, and future, and all the things that Heaven and earth contain.”

Dominie Valerio, with increasing excitement, manipulated a series of cords, pulleys, and buttons behind Ludovico’s back; successive sections of the auditorium were bathed in light; the figures seemed to acquire movement, to gain transparency, to combine with and blend into one another, to integrate into fleeting combinations and constantly transform their original silhouettes while at the same time never ceasing to be recognizable.

“What, to you, Monsignore Ludovicus, is the definition of an imperfect world?”

“Doubtless, a world in which things are lacking, an incomplete world…”

“My invention is founded upon precisely the opposite premise: the world is imperfect when we believe there is nothing lacking in it; the world is perfect when we know that something will always be missing from it. Will you admit, monsignore, that we can conceive of an ideal series of events that run parallel to the real series of events?”

“Yes; in Toledo I learned that all matter and all spirit project the aura of what they were and what they will be…”

“And what they might have been, monsignore, will you give no opportunity to what, not having been yesterday, probably will never be?”

“Each of us has asked himself at some moment of his existence, if we were given the grace of living our life over again would we live it the same way the second time? what errors would we avoid, what omissions amend? should I have told that woman, that night, that I loved her? why did I not visit my father the day before his death? would I again give that coin to the beggar who held out his hand to me at the entrance to the church? how would we choose again among all the persons, occupations, profits, and ideas we must constantly elect? for life is but an interminable selection between this and this and that, a perpetual choice, never freely decided, even when we believe it so, but determined by conditions others impose upon us: gods, judges, monarchs, slaves, fathers, mothers, children.”

“Look; see upon the combined canvases of my theater the passage of the most absolute of memories: the memory of what could have been but was not; see it in its greatest and least important detail, in gestures not fulfilled, in words not spoken, in choices sacrificed, in decisions postponed, see Cicero’s patient silence as he hears of Catiline’s foolish plot, see how Calpurnia convinces Caesar not to attend the Senate on the Ides of March, see the defeat of the Greek army in Salamis, see the birth of the baby girl in a stable in Bethlehem in Palestine during the reign of Augustus, see the pardon Pilate grants the prophetess, and the death of Barabbas upon the cross, see how Socrates in his prison refuses the temptation of suicide, see how Odysseus dies, consumed by flames, within the wooden horse the clever Trojans set afire upon finding it outside the walls of the city, see the old age of Alexander of Macedonia, the silent vision of Homer; see — but do not speak of — the return of Helen to her home, Job’s flight from his, Abel forgotten by his brother, Medea remembered by her husband, Antigone’s submission to the law of the tyrant in exchange for peace in the kingdom, the success of Spartacus’s rebellion, the sinking of Noah’s ark, the return of Lucifer to his seat at the side of God, pardoned by divine decision; but see also the other possibility: an obedient Satan who renounces rebellion and remains in the original Heaven; look, watch as the Genoese Colombo sets out to seek the route to Cipango, the court of the Great Khan, by land, from West to East, on camelback; watch while my canvases whirl and blend and fade into one another, see the young shepherd, Oedipus, satisfied to live forever with his adoptive father, Polybus of Corinth, and see the solitude of Jocasta, the intangible anguish of a life she senses is incomplete, empty; only a sinful dream redeems it; no eyes will be put out, there will be no destiny, there will be no tragedy, and the Greek order will perish because it lacked the tragic transgression which, as it violates that order, restores and eternally revives it: the power of Rome did not subjugate the soul of Greece; Greece could be subjugated only by the absence of tragedy; look, Paris occupied by the Mohammedans, the victory and consecration of Pelagius in his dispute with Augustine, the cave of Plato inundated by the river of Heraclitus; look, the marriage of Dante and Beatrice, a book never written, an aged libertine and merchant of Assisi, and untouched walls never painted by Giotto, a Demosthenes who swallowed a pebble and died choking beside the sea. See the greatest and the least important detail, the beggar born in a Prince’s cradle, the Prince in that of the beggar; the child who grew, dead upon birth; and the child who died, full-grown; the ugly woman, beautiful; the cripple, whole; the ignorant, learned; the sainted, perverse; the rich, poor; the warrior, a musician; the politician, a philosopher; one small turn of this great circle upon which my theater is seated is sufficient, the great plot woven by the three equilateral triangles within a circumference ruled by the multiple combinations of the seven stars, the three souls, the seven mutations, and the single eye: the waters of the Red Sea do not part, a young girl in Toledo does not know which she prefers of the seven identical columns of a church or the two identical chick-peas of her supper, Judas cannot be bribed, the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ was never believed.”

Panting, for a moment Donno Valerio fell silent and ceased to manipulate his cords and buttons. Then, more calmly, he asked Ludovico: “What will the Kings of this world pay me for this invention that would permit them to recall what could have been and was not?”

“Nothing, Maestro Valerio. For the only thing that interests them is what really is, and what will be.”

Valerio Camillo’s eyes glistened as never before, the only light in the suddenly darkened theater: “And it is not important to them, either, to know what never will be?”

“Perhaps, since that is a different manner of knowing what will be.”

“You do not understand me, monsignore. The images of my theater bring together all the possibilities of the past, but they also represent all the opportunities of the future, for knowing what was not, we shall know what demands to be: what has not been, you have seen, is a latent event awaiting its moment to be, its second chance, the opportunity to live another life. History repeats itself only because we are unaware of the alternate possibility for each historic event: what that event could have been but was not. Knowing, we can insure that history does not repeat itself; that the alternate possibility is the one that occurs for the first time. The universe would achieve true equilibrium. This will be the culmination of my investigations: to combine the elements of my theater in such a manner that two different epochs fully coincide; for example, that what happened or did not happen in your Spanish fatherland in 1492, in 1520, or 1598, coincide exactly with what happens there in 1938, or 1975, or 1999. Then, and I am convinced of it, the space of that co-incidence will germinate, will accommodate the unfulfilled past that once lived and died there: this doubled time will demand that precise space in which to complete itself.”

“And then, in accord with your theory, it will be imperfect.”

“Perfection, monsignore, is death.”

“But at least do you know the space where everything that did not happen awaits the co-incidence of two different times to be fulfilled?”

“I have just told you. Look again, monsignore; I shall turn the lights on again, place the figures in movement, combine spaces, that of your land, Spain, and that of an unknown world where Spain will destroy everything that previously existed in order to reproduce itself: a doubly immobile, doubly sterile, gestation, for in addition to what could have been — see those burning temples, see the eagles fall, see how the original inhabitants of the unknown lands are subjugated — your country, Spain, imposes another impossibility: that of itself, see the gates closing, the Jew expelled, the Moor persecuted, see how it hides itself in a mausoleum and from there governs in the name of death: purity of faith, purity of bloodlines, horror of the body, prohibition of thought, extermination of anything that cannot be understood. Look: centuries and centuries of living death, fear, silence, the cult of appearances, vacuity of substances, gestures of imbecilic honor, see them, the miserable realities, see them, hunger, poverty, injustice, ignorance: a naked empire that imagines itself clothed in golden robes. Look: there will never be in history, monsignore, nations more needful of a second opportunity to be what they were not than these that speak and that will speak your tongue, or peoples who for such lengthy periods store the possibilities of what they could have been had they not sacrificed the very reason for their being: impurity, the mixture of all bloods, all beliefs, all the spiritual impulses of a multitude of cultures. Only in Spain did the three peoples of the Book — Christians, Moors, and Jews — meet and flourish. As she mutilates their union, Spain mutilates herself and mutilates all she finds in her path. Will these lands have the second opportunity the first history will deny them?”

Before Ludovico’s eyes, amid the screens and railings and lights and shadows of the gradins of this Theater of Memory of everything that was not but that could sometime have been, passed, in reverse, with the assurance it would be they he watched, animated, incomprehensible images, bearded warriors in iron cuirasses, tattered pennants, autos-da-fé, bewigged lords, dark men with enormous burdens on their backs, he heard speeches, proclamations, grandiloquent orators, and saw places and landscapes never before seen: strange temples devoured by the jungle, convents built like fortresses, rivers broad as seas, deserts poor as an outstretched hand, volcanoes higher than the stars, prairies devoured by the horizon, cities with iron-railed balconies, red-tile roofs, crumbling walls, immense cathedrals, towers of shattered glass, military men, their chests covered with medals and gold galloon, dusty feet pricked by thorns, emaciated children with swollen bellies, abundance by the side of hunger, a golden god seated upon a ragged beggar; mud and silver …

Again the lights died down. Ludovico did not dare ask Valerio Camillo how he controlled the illumination of the theater, how he projected or mounted or raised from nowhere these moving images through railings, upon screens, or what was the function of the cords he pulled, the buttons he pressed. He could imagine, yes, that the Dominie was capable of repeating the unspoken words of Medea, Cicero, or Dante through the simple expedient of reading lips: the understandable art of the stutterer.

Valerio Camillo said only: “I shall reveal my secrets to the Prince who will pay the highest price for my invention.”

But again Ludovico doubted that any Prince would want to see face to face what was not, but wished to be. Politics was the art of the possible: neither the statue of Gomorrah nor the flight of Icarus.

Every night the translator returned to his miserable room on the long backbone of La Giudecca, resembling, in truth, the skeleton of a flounder, and there found his children engaged in their personal occupations. One would be wielding a wooden sword against the late-evening shadow projected onto the ancient walls of the Church of Santa Eufemia; another, wood shavings tangled in his golden hair, would be sawing, polishing, and varnishing shelves for the books and papers of Ludovico; the third would be sitting tailor-fashion in the doorway, contemplating the bare paving stones of the Campo Cosmo. Then the four would dine on fried sea food, beans, and mozzarella cheese. One night they were awakened by a desperate pounding. One of the boys opened the door. Gasping, his face caked with ashes, his clothing scorched, Dominie Valerio Camillo fell across the threshold. He stretched out his hands toward Ludovico and grasped his wrist with the fierce last strength of a dying man.

“Someone denounced me as a wizard,” said the Donno without a trace of a stutter. “Someone slipped a letter into the stone mouth. They tried to take me prisoner. I resisted. I feared for my secrets. They set fire to my house. They prodded me with their blades, to subdue me. They wanted to enter the theater. They tried to break the chains. I fled. Monsignore Ludovicus: protect my invention. What I fool I was! I should have told you my true secrets. The theater lights. A deposit of magnetic carbons on the rooftop of the house. They attract and store the energy of lightning and the supercharged skies above the lagoon. I filter this energy through waterproof conductors, copper filaments and bulbs of the finest Venetian crystal. The buttons. They set some black boxes in motion. There are mercury-coated silk ribbons bearing the images of all the ages, miniatures I have painted, that increase in size as they are projected upon the gradins by a light behind the ribbons. A hypothesis, monsignore, only a hypothesis … you must prove it … save my invention … and remember your promise.”

There, upon the brick floor, Donno Valerio died. Ludovico covered the body with a blanket. He asked the boys to hide the body in a boat and bring it the following day to the Dominie’s house. Lodovico went to the Campo Santa Margherita that same afternoon. He found a black shell: the house burned, the documents burned. He made his way inside to the locked door. The mastiffs Biondino, Preziosa, and Pocogarbato were huddled there. He called them by name. They recognized him. He unlocked the chains with the Maestro’s keys. He penetrated the passageways of the rats and lizards. He reached the marble chamber. He touched the invisible door and it swung open. He entered the narrow space of the stage. Darkness reigned. He pulled a cord. A brilliant light illuminated the figure of the three Gorgons with the single eye beneath the sign of Apollo. He pressed three buttons. On the screens and railings were projected three figures: his three sons. On the gradin of Venus, on the railing of love, the first son was a statue of stone. On the gradin of Saturn, on the railing of the Cave, the second son lay dead, his arms crossed upon his breast. On the gradin of Mars, on the railing of Prometheus, the third, writhing, was bound to a rock, pecked by a falcon that was not devouring his liver but mutilating his arm.

As he turned to leave, Ludovico found himself face to face with his three sons. He whirled toward the auditorium of the theater; the shadows of his sons had disappeared. He looked back at the three boys. Had they seen what he had seen?

“We had to flee with the body of the Maestro,” said the first.

“The Magistrati alla Bestemmia came in search of the fugitive,” said the second.

“They threatened us; they know your connection with Valerio, Father,” said the third.

They left the theater; they retraced their lost steps. Ludovico again chained and locked the door; from a burned-out window he threw the keys into the River of San Barnaba. They recovered the body of Valerio Camillo from the boat and carried it to the garden. Ludovico collected the mastiffs. They removed the clothing from the corpse. They laid it in the garden. More than ever, in death the Dominie, with his sharp profile and waxen flesh, resembled a frail young cardinal. Ludovico loosed the dogs. The bells chimed in the tall campanile of Santa Maria del Carmine.

Valerio Camillo had found his tomb.

THE DREAMERS AND THE BLIND MAN

“They will search for him throughout the city. They will search for us at our house. It would be best to spend the night here,” Ludovico said to the boys. “No one will think to look for us in the most obvious place.”

As always, the three boys listened attentively to Ludovico, and lay down beside the padlocked door to sleep. The former student who had one day challenged the Augustinian theologian in the university and had another day escaped across the rooftops of Teruel from the wrath of the Aragonese Inquisition, marveled once again: the boys were almost fifteen years old and they were still absolutely identical. Actually, instead of accentuating their individuality, time had underlined their similarities. He no longer knew which was which: one, abducted one night from the castle of the Señor called the Fair, was the son of unknown parents; a second, true, he was the son of Celestina, but by an unknown father: that same Señor who while Felipe watched had taken her by force on the night of her wedding in the grange? the three hurried old men who had raped her in the forest? Prince Felipe? Ludovico himself? they who had each pleasured themselves with Celestina in the bedchamber of the bloody castle, occasionally both enjoying her at the same time; and the third — yes, this one was certain, but the most fantastic — was the son of a she-wolf and the dead Señor; that news Celestina had sent upon the lips of Simón; but the girl was half mad and her word was not to be trusted.

He looked at them that night as they lay sleeping. Better they not know. He knew (he remembered; he imagined): when he was twenty, one of the boys, the one abducted from the seignorial castle, would have the face of the cavalier dead in the back-alley duel and mourned in the temple of the Christ of the Light. His name was Don Juan. But although the three are identical today, will they be so in the future? And as they are identical, will all three have the face Don Juan acquired in death? Better they not know; enough. They are all my sons; enough. They are brothers; enough.

Moved by a torrent of love for the three creatures abandoned to his care, he longed to awaken them, to know they were alive and happy and loving.

He sought some pretext for expressing this overwhelming tide of love. Some news that would justify awakening them from their deep sleep — he spoke, he called them, he touched one’s head, shook another’s shoulder — yes, this news: the time was approaching, it was five years still before the appointed meeting — he lighted a candle, held it to their sleeping faces — but they would return to Spain, the meeting was to be in Spain, and there they would prepare themselves …

Only the third boy awakened. The other two continued to sleep. The one who awakened said to Ludovico: “No, Father, leave them alone; they are dreaming of me …

“I have news for them…”

“Yes, we already know. We are going to make a voyage. Again.”

“Yes, to Spain…”

“Not yet.”

“We must.”

“I know. We shall go together, but we shall be separated.”

“I do not understand, my son. What secret is this? You have never done anything behind my back.”

“We have always accompanied you. Now you must accompany us.”

“We shall go to Spain.”

“We shall reach Spain, Father. But it will be a long voyage. We shall take many turnings.”

“Explain yourself. What is the secret? You have…”

“No, Father. We have made no pacts. I swear it.”

“Then…?”

“They are dreaming about me. I shall do what they dream I am doing.”

“They have told you that?”

“I know. If they awaken, if they cease to dream of me, Father, I shall die.”

“Which one are you, for God’s sake, which of the three…?”

“I do not understand. We are three.”

“What do you know? Have you read the papers inside those bottles?”

The boy nodded, his head lowered.

“You could not resist the temptation?”

“Not we. You must resist it. We have sealed them again. They are not for you…”

“That damned gypsy, that temptress…”

The boy again nodded; Ludovico felt they had not fled from Venice in time, that the city had imprisoned them within its own spectral dream, that the destiny Ludovico shared with the three boys was splitting into four different paths. For the first time, he raised his voice: “Hear me; I am your father … Without me, the three of you would have died of hunger, or been murdered, or devoured by beasts…”

“You are not our father.”

“You are brothers.”

“That is true. And we venerate you as a father. You gave us your destiny for a time. Now we shall give you ours. Accompany us.”

“What enchantment is this? How long will it last?”

“Each one of us will be dreamed thirty-three and a half days by the other two.”

“Why that cipher?”

“It is the cipher of dispersion, Father. The sacred number of Christ’s years upon the earth. The limit.”

“Thirty-three, twenty-two, eleven … Distant from unity, the numbers of Satan, the learned doctor of the Synagogue of the Passing told me…”

“Then the days of Satan are the days of Christ, for Jesus came to disperse: the power of the earth belonged to One; Jesus distributed it among all men, rebel, humble, slave, poor, sinner, the sick. If all are Caesar, then Caesar is no one, Father…”

Ludovico was amazed to hear in the mouth of one of his sons the arguments denying all aspiration toward recovering perfect unity. With sadness he realized he was facing a rebellion that could not be contained; for the first time, he felt old. “Thirty-three and a half days … That is little time. We can wait.”

“No, Father, you do not understand. Each one will be dreamed those days by the other two and thus he will be dreamed for sixty-seven days. But the one dreamed will actually live an equivalent time; and that makes one hundred and a half days. And because as he ceases to be dreamed by the other two, the one dreamed, not to die, must join one of the dreamers to dream of the third; that now makes two hundred and two days. And as the third ceases to be dreamed he must join the one already dreamed to dream of the one who has only dreamed but has not yet been dreamed; then, three hundred and four days shall have passed.”

“That is still not too much; we have more than four years.” Ludovico again shrugged his shoulders.

“Wait, Father. We love you. We shall tell you what we have dreamed, once we have dreamed it.”

“That is my hope.”

“But to tell you what we have dreamed will take as long as dreaming it.”

“Nine hundred and twelve days? That is still only half the time I wanted. There are 1,825 days in five years.”

“More time, Father, much more, for each one will tell what he dreamed about the other two, plus what the others dreamed about him, plus what he lived in reality as he was dreamed; and then each one must tell the others what he dreamed he was dreaming as he was dreamed; and each must tell what he dreamed as he dreamed what the other dreamed as he was dreamed by him; and then what each one dreamed dreaming he was dreaming the dreamed one; and then what the other two dreamed dreaming that the third one dreamed, dreaming, he was dreaming the dreamed one; and then…”

“Enough, son.”

“Forgive me. I do not mock you, nor is this a game.”

“Then, tell me, how long will all these combinations take?”

“Each one of us will have the right to thirty-three and a half months to exhaust all the combinations.”

“That is one thousand and a half days for each of you …

“Yes: two years nine months and fifteen days for each one…”

“Which would be eight years and four months for the three of you…”

“They will be, Father, will be. For only if we fulfill exactly the days of our dreams can we then fulfill our destinies.”

Ludovico smiled bitterly. “At least you know the exact time. For a moment I believed the combinations would be infinite.”

The boy smiled in return, but his was beatific. “We must, in turn, tell all the combinations of our dreams to you, for we hold no secret from you.”

“That is my hope,” Ludovico repeated, but now with a lingering sadness.

“And it is the narration, not the dream, that is infinite.”

Ludovico ordered the carpenters on the Squero de San Trovaso to construct for him two lightweight and well-ventilated coffins, for it was not their purpose to lie under the ground but to travel with him and remain undisturbed for long days at a time while each of his sons lived the dream the other two dreamed of him.

From the ship carrying them to land he watched the golden cupolas, the red-tile roofs and ocher-colored walls of Venice fade into the distance. The challenges had been made. One was the infinite destiny the three boys had chosen — violating the warning of the gypsy woman of Spalato, forgetting the instructive example of Sisyphus and his son Ulysses — after reading the manuscripts contained within the three bottles; a second, finite, destiny was that he had chosen for them; it had an hour: afternoon; a day: a fourteenth of July; a year: five years from now; a place: the Cabo de los Desastres; and a purpose: to see Felipe face to face, to settle the accounts of their youth, to fulfill their destinies in history, not in a dream. The times foreseen in the boys’ dreams would not work out so that he, Ludovico, could attend his appointment on the Spanish coast. He must, by force, shorten the boys’ dreams, steal from them three years and four months, interrupt them in time … he must deceive them, prevent one from telling another what he dreamed the dreamed one was dreaming, he must prevent one from being told what the other was dreaming as he was dreamed by him, cut short the dream the third dreamed he was dreaming as he was dreamed … cut short their dreams … As he told himself these things, Ludovico struggled against the deep and strange love he felt for the three youths placed in his care. He kept his decision to himself: he would have enough integrity, intelligence, and love to reunite his destiny and that of the three boys, make equal sacrifices for all four. But even thinking this, was he not admitting that from now on, none of the four would have the unified destiny a dream dreamed or a will willed?

He calmed his agitation by reflecting: “That is the price of a destiny in history: to be incomplete. Only an infinite destiny like that imagined by the three boys can be complete: that is why it cannot occur in history. One lifetime is not enough. One needs many existences in order to fulfill a personality. I shall do whatever possible to assure that this finite date in history — an afternoon, a fourteenth of July, within five years — does not deprive my sons of their infinite destiny in dream…”

And so he laid down a challenge to himself, a self-imposed challenge, an act of voluntary flagellation that would serve as witness to his conscience of the good faith that motivated him. There could be nothing better than to see for the last time the splendid sight of Venice, the glimmering scales of her canals, the sealed light of her windows, her white jaws of marble, her solitary stone squares, her silent bronze doors, the motionless conflagration of her bells, her shipwrights’ pitch beaches, the green wings of the lion, the empty book of the Apostle, the blind eyes of the saint: Ludovico was a man forty years old, bald, with olive-colored skin and green protruding eyes, with a sad smile marked by the lines of poverty, love, and study … He was seized by enormous bitterness. Felipe had been right. Grace was neither immediate nor gratuitous: one had always to pay history’s price: the denunciation of a witch who denied the pragmatic efficacy of grace, Felipe had said then; the foreshortening of dreams that extended beyond calendar years, Ludovico said today.

He did not tear out his eyes. He did not even close them. He simply decided not to see; he would see nothing, never again, he would be voluntarily blind; he, blind, his sons, sleeping, until their destinies flowed together and were again joined — by dissimilar routes, with different purposes — in Felipe’s presence; then their pledges could be redeemed: history colored by dream, as well as dream penetrated by history.

He would not see again. They sailed away. In the distance, San Marco, San Giorgio, La Carbonaia, La Giudecca; in the distance, Torcello, Murano, Burano, San Lazzaro degli Armeni. The image his pilgrim’s eyes beheld, the most beautiful of all cities, was what would remain. They had not fled in time. No one ever flees Venice in time. Venice imprisons us within her own spectral dream. He would not see again. He would not read again. The dreamer has another life: wakefulness. The blind man has other eyes: memory.

THE BEGUINES OF BRUGES

They say that one winter night, oh, about five years ago, a slow-moving cart drawn by starving horses entered the city of Bruges. Its driver was a very young man of handsome appearance: by his side sat a blind beggar. Patched canvas covered the cart’s contents.

A few faces peered out from the narrow windows of the houses, for the night was so silent, and so frozen and hard the ground, that the wheels groaned as if they supported the weight of an army.

Many crossed themselves as they saw that phantasmal apparition advancing beneath the light, persistent snow, through the white streets, across black bridges; others swore that the shadow of the carriage, the beggar and his guide, and their tottering old nags did not reflect in the motionless waters of the canals.

They stopped before the great gate of a community of Beguines. Aided by the boy, the blind beggar descended and knocked softly at the door, repeating over and over: “Pauperes virgines religiosas viventes…”

Snow covered the heads and shoulders of the wretched pilgrims; finally they heard the scraping sound of footsteps approaching the other side of the door, and a woman’s voice asked who it was disturbed the peace of this place in that profane hour, saying they could offer pilgrims nothing here, for the community was under a papal interdiction and such grave censure prevented them from celebrating Divine Offices, administering Sacraments, or burying in holy ground … I come from Dalmatia, said the blind mendicant; the gypsy of the tattooed lips sent us, added the boy; they heard the sound of other feet, the hissing of awakened geese; the door opened, and more than twenty hooded women in gray wool tunics, veils covering their faces, observed in silence the entrance of the creaking cart onto the grass court of the community.

INSIDE THE WINDMILL

They say that barely three years ago the same cart was dragging along across the fields of La Mancha when a terrible storm broke that seemed to crumble the distant mountain peaks, first dry thunder and then a steady, driving downpour.

The beggar and the boy in the open cart sought refuge in one of the windmills that are the sentinels that take the place of trees on that arid plain.

They turned back the canvas that covered the cart bed and exposed two coffins which they laboriously transported to the entrance of the windmill. Once inside, they deposited the boxes on dry straw and, shaking themselves like dogs, climbed the creaking spiral stairway to the upper floor of the windmill: the wind was madly spinning the sails and the noise inside the windmill was like that of swarms of wooden wasps.

The entrance where they had left the two death boxes was dark. But as they ascended, deafened by the noise of the sails, they were illumined by a strange light.

On the upper floor an old man lay upon a straw pallet. As the beggar and the boy approached, the light in the room began to dim; the shadows rearranged themselves and certain barely visible forms were suggested in the penumbra; then they disappeared, as if swallowed by the darkness, as if they had melted into the rough circular walls of the windmill.

PEDRO ON THE BEACH

“I knew we would find you here. You are Pedro, are you not?”

The old man with the hairy gray body said yes, but that words were unnecessary; if they wanted to help him, to take up nails, hammers, and saws.

“You do not remember me?”

“No,” said the old man, “I have never seen you before.”

Ludovico smiled. “And I cannot see you now.”

Pedro shrugged his shoulders and continued to fit planks upon the skeleton of the boat. He asked the slender youth who accompanied the blind man: “How old are you?”

“Nineteen, señor.”

“How I wish,” Pedro sighed, “how I wish it would be a young man who first steps upon the beaches of the new world.”

SCHWESTER KATREI

No, said the Mistress of the Beghards, we are affected by the interdiction but we were not the cause; it was the Princes of these Low Countries who every day remove themselves further from the power of Rome and endeavor to act with autonomy in collecting indulgences, naming bishops, and allying themselves with merchants, navigators, and other secular powers, thus confusing the aims of Satan and Mercury; we have no idea what will be born of this pact …

Ludovico nodded as he listened to these explanations and he told the Mistress that he was familiar with the purposes of the Beguines, which were to renounce riches and come together in a community of poverty and virginity, offering an example of Christian virtue in the midst of the century’s corruption, although without segregating themselves from it; but was it not also true that the last Cathari, defeated in the Provençal wars, came to these secular convents seeking refuge and that the sainted women did not refuse them shelter, but here allowed them to regain their strength, to practice their rites, and…?”

The Mistress clapped her hand over Ludovico’s mouth; this was a holy place, given to intense devotion to the rules of the imitation of Christ: poverty, humility, the desire for illumination and union with the person of the Divinity: here dwelled the legendary and never sufficiently praised Schwester Katrei, purest of the pure, virgin of virgins, who in her state of mystic union had reached perfect immobility; so great was her identification with God that all movement was superfluous and only from time to time did she open her mouth to exclaim: “Rejoice with me, for I have become God. Praise be God!” Then she would again fall into a motionless trance.

Ludovico asked if he could approach the sainted Sister. The Mistress smiled with compassion. “My poor brother, you cannot see her.”

“Is that necessary? I can sense her presence.”

He was led to a hut at the rear of the geese- and sycamore-dotted green where dwelt Katrei, the Saint. The snow was beginning to melt beneath a fine, constant rain from the North. The Mistress, with the familiarity of long practice, opened the door of the hut.

Schwester Katrei, naked, sat astride the blind man’s young companion; she was shouting that she was mounted upon the Holy Trinity as upon a divine steed; her legs locked about the youth’s waist, she shouted, I am illuminated, Mother, I am God; she clawed the boy’s back, and God can neither know, nor desire, nor effect anything without me … the naked youth’s back was covered with bleeding crosses … nothing exists without me …

The Mistress fell to her knees upon the melting snow and agreed to summon the Cathari who had taken refuge in this region to a meeting in the remote forest of the Duke where they were wont to gather secretly on certain nights of the year.

Ludovico uncovered the cart and the Mistress saw the two coffins lying there.

“No, we cannot bury anyone. That is part of the interdiction.”

“They are not dead. They are merely dreaming.”

GIANTS AND PRINCESSES

The old man on the pallet in the windmill laughed loud and long; he had an infinite capacity for laughter that was in great contrast to the sadness of his features; tears of laughter ran down the wrinkles in the emaciated cheeks of this man with the short white beard and unkempt moustaches. He laughed for more than an hour and finally, his words interrupted by merriment, managed to speak: “A beggar and a youth … A blind man and his guide … Whoever would have believed…? Two persons in such condition … would be the ones who come to break my spell … to free me from this prison … where I have lain for so many years…?”

“This windmill is a prison?” Ludovico asked.

“The most terrible of all prisons: the very entrails of the giant Caraculiambro, Lord of the Island of Malindrania. What arts did you call upon to reach here? The giant is zealous…”

He requested his arms, which like him lay upon the straw, and the blind man and the youth armed him with his broken lance and dented shield. In vain they searched for the helmet he had requested, until he himself informed them that it resembled a barber’s basin.

Between them, they helped him to his feet; the knight’s bones clanked like old chains as, supported between the blind man and the youth, he was dragged to the head of the stairway. The moment his foot touched the first step, the circular area of the windmill was again illuminated; they heard plaintive voices, and frightening and guttural sounds, the latter impotently menacing, and the former heart-rendingly pleading: Do not abandon us, you promised to aid us, to free us, turn back, knight, do not leave us, you are escaping only because two corpses have intruded into our domains, you will be damned, you will be accompanied by death, see whether you can free yourself from it after you have freed yourself from us …

The old man paused, turned, and said, his eyes filled with tears: “Do not miaow, my unrivaled Miaulina, nor you, peerless Casildea of Vandalia, I am not abandoning you, I swear it, I free myself only to return to the attack and vanquish our captors; do not growl, fearful Alifanfarón de la Trapobana, do not open your gaping jaws, Serpentino de la Fuente Sangrienta, I have not put the final period to our combat, nor will any blue and bedeviled enchanter ever succeed in doing so; the crumbs will not grow stale before they reach my lips…”

Huddled beside the circular wall, the youth saw pale and trembling ladies held captive in the enormous, bleeding, and hairy fists of giants, and he said to Ludovico: It is true, what this man says is true; but Ludovico was grateful for his blindness and he smiled, tranquilly unbelieving.

ULTIMA THULE

They set sail one afternoon guided by the evening star. They sailed always toward the west. They caught sharks. They witnessed a mortal combat between a leviathan and a swordfish. They were becalmed on the Sargasso Sea, the limits of the known world, but beyond it they were seized in a deep whirlpool that carried them into the depths of the sea, the marine tomb, the tunnel of the oceans into which endlessly pours the great cataract of the world.

Ludovico stood alone on the beach between the two coffins, his back to the sea; he murmured: “Return. There is nothing behind me.”

HERTOGENBOSCH

Schwester Katrei was once again alone and she promised, from that instant, to devote herself to the supreme mortification of her illumined and persecuted faith.

“Go,” she told the youth who had robbed her of her virginity, “I shall devote myself to endura, the will for death, motionless, my eyes opened, my mouth closed, fading away little by little. Nothing stands between me and eternal union with God.”

The youth kissed the enlightened woman’s open eyes and whispered into her ear: “You are wrong, Katrei. The dream is the only intelligent form of suicide.”

“Let us go beyond that,” Ludovico told the initiates that night in the woods. “If the world is the work of two gods, one good and the other evil, we shall not reach Heaven — as you have believed until now — through purity and total chastity; on the contrary, if our body is the seat of evil we must exhaust that body on earth so we may reach Heaven cleansed of any stain, with no recollection of the body we once possessed, like our father Adam in his primordial innocence; let us remove our clothing, let us not be ashamed of our bodies, as Adam was not ashamed; for if you accept Adam’s guilt you must also accept the need for sacraments and priests, the need for a church to mediate between God and his fallen creature; but if you accept that the body is free and deliver yourself unto pleasure, you will be twice worthy on earth, twice free, you shall battle for the innocence of the body by exhausting its impurities and so, from this time forward, you will be called the Adamites, followers of Adam, disrobe…”

His young companion revealed to those assembled there his beautiful naked body, and soon all of them were naked and accompanying him in a circle dance around the fire; no one felt the cold that night, but danced among the trees, copulated in the ponds and with the flowers, naked they rode horses and wild pigs, the night was filled with sounds of the horn, they awakened the birds, they dreamed they were floating inside pure globes of crystal, devoured by fish, and devouring strawberries; and they were seen only by the owls and by the eyes of one middle-aged initiate who never removed his peasant cap, as if something was hidden beneath his hat.

When day again dawned over the village of Hertogenbosch, this man, eyes half closed, recounted everything through thin, colorless lips to a mute retable which had just witnessed the same events seen by the humble artisan.

DULCINEA

Believe me, I was once young, I was not born as you see me now, old, and cudgeled, I was young and I was in love, the knight recounted to the blind man and the youth, and it is not the way of youth to stop and dream about what he desires, but to rush to seize it quickly, for blessings, if they are not communicated, are not blessings, and let us all win them, let us all share them, let us all be merry, for thus are fabricated the marvels of the present, and death is distant and pleasure near at hand; he spoke beneath the sudden sun of La Mancha, the sky washed clean by the storm and creased by clouds with trailing shadows. I loved Dulcinea, she proved herself virtuous, so I used the services of the old procuress and possessed the maiden for myself, my ideas about time began to change, I cursed the cocks because they announced the dawn and the clock because it struck so quickly, the man said, seated between the two coffins in the cart; we were surprised by the girl’s father, he challenged me, I became violent, he became violent, he ran his own daughter through with his sword, and I him with mine: it is told that there was never a more bloody day in all Toboso; father and daughter were buried together beneath a statue that represented the daughter sleeping and the father standing guard over her with his sword; all this the old man told them as the cart advanced slowly over earth studded with rocks resembling half-buried bones, raising clouds of orange, flaming dust. I fled, they placed a price upon my head, I changed my name, and settled in a place whose name I do not wish to recall, alone, knowing in my own flesh the truth of what the old procuress who furnished me Dulcinea’s favors had told me: old age is a hostelry of illness, an inn for thoughts, unremitting anguish, incurable wound, stain of the past, pain of the present, morose concern for the future, neighbor to death, and, standing as tall as possible in the cart and raising his lance as if to wound the clouds, he said, books were my only consolation, I read them all, I imagined I could be one of those flawless knights, rescue those illustrious ladies, vanquish those perfidious giants and magicians, return to Toboso, break the spell of my maiden of sleeping stone and restore her to life, as young as the day she died, Dulcinea, do you remember Don Juan, your young lover? see him now, I am returning to you with a basin for a helmet, a broken sword and a skinny nag, I return to your tomb, the old man said, opening his arms as if to embrace the reverberating expanse of the granite-strewn plain, I returned convinced that I would rescue her from the enchantment of death and stone, I was once again the young Don Juan, not the aged Don Alonso I had become in order to flee from justice, I begged and pleaded before her tomb; it was not the effigy of the maiden that moved but the statue of the father, noble sword in hand, who spoke to me and said, I wanted to kill you when you were young, but now I see you are old and worthless. I tried to challenge him anew, to invite him to dine, now gladly I would throw myself into the pit of Hell, what were phantoms to me! but the statue only laughed, and he told me he was condemning me to something worse, that my imaginings and my reading would become reality, that my fragile bones would actually confront monsters and giants, and that again and again I would rush to right wrongs only to be cudgeled, mocked, caged, taken for a madman, and dishonored, the mocker mocked, he laughed, ridicule will kill you, for no one but you shall see those giants and magicians and princesses, you will see the truth, but only you; others will see sheep and windmills, puppet stages, wineskins, sweaty peasant girls and piggish servants where you see reality: armies of cruel despots, giants, frightful hordes of Moors and adorable princesses: that was the statue’s curse, said the old man, sinking down beside one of the coffins.

FIRST MAN

Dawn rose upon a beach of pearls and turtles tossed there by the tempest. He thought he had lost Pedro in the storm. He found him at the end of the beach. They constructed a house. They placed limits about a space. They lighted a fire. Floating tree trunks arrived bearing naked men armed with lances. They put out the fire. They killed Pedro. They bore the youth upriver to a village inhabited by an ancient king in a basket filled with pearls. Great rains came. They climbed the mountain. The ancient received the youth in a temple. He called him brother. He told him the story of the creation of the new world. First man. The youth thanked him by offering him a mirror. Young chieftain. The ancient died of terror when he saw himself in the mirror. In the stead of the ancient the men of the jungle placed the youth in the basket of pearls. There he would wait forever, until he died, as ancient as his predecessor.

THE FREE SPIRIT

From province to province they advanced, at a pace that others attributed to the assistance of the Devil; they devastated the lands, destroyed churches, and burned monasteries; at their head was a young, blond heresiarch, his hair bound into three crowning golden bands, his back bared to show the sign of the elect, his feet unshod so as to astound with his twelve toes, his face painted white to glow in the night — to some, the prophet of the human millennium; to others, the Antichrist; for some, a teacher telling of a land without hunger, without oppression, without prohibitions, without false gods or false popes or false kings; entire families joined with him, apostatized monks, women disguised as men, highwaymen, prostitutes, ladies of great breeding who had renounced their wealth to find salvation in poverty but who in truth were only seeking nights of pleasure with him, with the young heresiarch, here called Tanchelm, in other places, Eudes de l’Etoile, names that others gave him, Baldwin, Frederick, Charlemagne, he who had no name, accompanied always by two coffins and a blind beggar who on occasion spoke for him, he stirring up the multitudes of poor who followed after him, only the poor shall achieve the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Heaven is here upon earth, seize it, each of you is Christ, Paradise is here, dissolve the monasteries, take the nuns for your women, set the monks to work, in truth I say to you: let the monks and nuns grow the vine and the wheat that sustain us, chop down the door of the rich man, and we will sup with him, persecute the clergy, let every priest hold us in such fear that he will hide his tonsure even if it is covered under cow’s dung, march day and night, through all the land, from Louvain to Haarlem, from Bruges to St.-Quentin, from Ghent to Paris, though they slit our throats and throw us into the Seine, Paris is our goal, there where thought is pleasure and pleasure thought, the capital of the third age, the scene of the final battle, the last city, there where the persuasive Devil inculcated in a few wise men a perverse intelligence, Paris, fountain of all wisdom, let us march with our standards, and our candles burning in the light of day, we will flagellate ourselves in the streets, we shall make love in the open, the pain and the delight of the flesh, hurry, we have but thirty-three and a half days to complete our crusade, that is the holy cipher for our processions, the number of the days of Christ upon the earth, but sufficient time to sweep away the corrupt Church of the Antichrist in Rome, there is no authority but ours, our life, our experience, let us recognize nothing except that, follow me, I am but one of you, I am not the leader, do as I do, seduce women, they belong to each of us, weavers, needle sellers, rascals, beggars, Turlupins, the poorest of the poor, the same as I, nothing is mine, everything belongs to us all, there is no sin, there was no Fall, take possession, with me, of the visible empire preparing for the end of the world, preached the young heresiarch to the accompaniment of the blind beggar’s flute, be free, the knowing man is in himself heaven and purgatory and hell, the man of free spirit does not know sin, take everything for yourself, nothing is sinful except what you imagine to be so, return with me and my blind father to the state of innocence, let us take off our clothes, take each other by the hand, kneel, swear obedience only to the free spirit, dissolve all other vows, matrimony, chastity, priesthood, God is free, therefore everything was created to be shared, freely, by all, everything the eye can see or desire, stretch out your hand and take, go into the inns, refuse to pay, beat him who would ask you for payment, be charitable, but if charity is denied you, take it by force, women, food, money … the hordes of Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Picardy, at their head the beggar kings, a youth with across upon his back, and a blind flautist: the end of the world …

THE GALLEY SLAVES

Well, master, what must we do? the squire who abandoned me to stay to govern an insalubrious and insipid and inhuman island always used to ask me, and I always replied: “What must we do? Favor and aid the needy and the helpless.”

The old man of the sad countenance, lying between the two coffins, clutching in both hands his aching head aggravated by the swaying and creaking of the cart, was silent for a long moment. Then he sighed and said: “Many are the ways that such a holy undertaking may be accomplished, and mine was but one of many. But see what my fate has been, sirs, that I see the truth of things which others hold to be a lie; the enchantment lay upon the others; and greater the enchantment of my enchantment, as I saw that only I, cursed by the statue of Dulcinea’s father, saw giants where others, as if enchanted, saw only windmills.”

Jolted by the cart, he drew closer to the blind man and the youth; he looked at them with wrathful eyes. “But do you know what my revenge will be?”

He laughed again, and struck his fist against his chest. “I shall declare that my reason has returned. I shall keep my secret. I shall accept that everything I have seen is a lie. I shall try to convince no one.”

Cackling, he placed a bony hand upon the youth’s shoulder. “I lived the youth of Don Juan. Perhaps Don Juan will dare to live my old age. You, my boy … I cannot remember … I believe I looked like you in my youth. You, lad, would you agree to continue living my life for me?”

The youth had no time to respond, or the blind man to comment. As the old man raised his eyes he saw on the road ahead a party of a dozen men on foot, strung by their necks like beads along a great iron chain, and all of them handcuffed. Two men on horseback carrying flintlocks accompanied them, and two on foot carrying javelins and swords … The old man, reanimated, leaped from the cart, sword in hand, but as the cart did not stop, he fell flat on the ground, where dusty and battered he cried to the youth: “Aha! here is an example of the purpose of my office: to rout armies and to succor and aid the wretched; will you not accompany me, my boy? will you not follow adventure with me? see that injustice, see these galley slaves led against their will, abused and tortured, will you allow a wrong of such magnitude to remain unpunished? will you not do battle by my side, my boy?”

The youth jumped from the cart, assisted the old man to his feet, and the two serenely awaited the passage of the chain gang.

THE LADY OF THE BUTTERFLIES

But it did not happen that way. Rather, one night, cinnamon-colored hands with long black fingernails parted the deerskin hangings of the bower, and a strangely beautiful woman crowned by glowing butterflies, her lips painted a thousand colors, entered and said to him: “Your life is in danger. For days now they have gathered about the bonfires to deliberate. They have decided to offer you as a sacrifice. Take this knife. Come with me. They are sleeping.”

And that night the two of them slit the throats of all the inhabitants of the town in the jungle. Then they made love.

At dawn, she said to him: “Twenty-five are the days of your destiny in this land. You shall remember twenty, because in those days you will have acted. Five you will forget, for they are the masked days you will set aside from your destiny to save against your death.”

“And at the end of those days, what will happen to me?”

“I shall await you at the summit of the pyramid, beside the volcano.”

“Shall I see you again? Shall I sleep with you again?”

“I promise. For one year you will have everything. You will have me every night.”

“Only a year…? And then?”

The Lady of the Butterflies did not answer.

THE DEFEAT

Felipe, El Señor, Defensor Fides, in the name of the Faith he defended and the sacred power of Rome, had laid siege to the Flemish city where the hordes of the heresiarch and the Brabantine Duke who protected them had taken final refuge.

“All is lost,” said the Duke.

He stroked a mole on his cheek and again looked at Ludovico and his young companion. “That is to say, everything is lost for you. I shall make peace with Don Felipe and with Rome. If I lay down my arms I shall have gained something: the right to collect tithes, plus privileges of navigation and letters of commerce for my industrious subjects. And without need of accords, but thanks to the crusade of the heretics, I shall have discredited both the Church, which was so easily challenged and humiliated by your throng, and the mystics who participated in such excesses. The true triumph of this war belongs to the secular and lay cause. The men of the future will remember that it is possible to burn effigies, disband convents, and expel monks, converting the unproductive riches of the clergy into the sap of commerce and industry. They will also remember that mobs guided by mysticism level fields, destroy harvests, harass the burghers, and violate their women. Thus, I shall have triumphed, if I lay down my arms. A thing I shall do. However, they are asking the head of this youth. You, blind man, you may go free. It is a sad thing, but no one sees any danger in you. Go now.”

Ludovico hid in the shadows of the Cathedral. There was a terrible odor of vomit and excrement. He heard the Teutonic voices of Felipe’s mercenaries. He smelled Felipe’s presence; he knew that body, he had loved it, he had possessed it. He spoke to him from the shadows. He did not open his eyes. Not yet. Phantoms do not frighten us because we cannot see them: phantoms are phantoms because they do not see us.

Then he fled. It was night. He kept his ear to the ground. He followed the sounds of the retreat of the Duke and his men. He hitched up the cart. A blind man with two coffins. Dead from hunger, from the war, from the plague, what did it matter? They allowed him to pass beyond the walls. He followed the sounds of the flight of the Duke and his men.

He was guided by the dark drums of execution.

Naked, his hands bound, the young and beautiful heresiarch with the blood-red cross upon his back knelt beside the stump of a tree and laid his head upon it.

The executioner raised high the ax.

SING YOUR TROUBLES

“I only promised to take them to the next town,” the blind man protested, “where I am going to bury two of my sons who died of the cholera. I’ve never seen them before.”

They allowed him to continue on his way. They set free the scramble-brained old man in his town-without-a-name, amid the jeers and the anguish of the priest, the barber, the bachelor, and the niece, for everyone knew about the madness of Señor Quijano, but they placed a chain about the neck of the youth, and handcuffed him and strung him to the chain gang.

The captain of the guard said to a subaltern: “Did you see that? That youth has a cross upon his back, and six toes on each foot…”

“So, that means nothing to me…”

“Don’t you remember almost twenty years ago now, when we were serving in the castle guard?”

“Nah, so we served in the guard, so…”

“El Señor gave orders to place traps for wolves through all the district, and each Saturday we went out to hunt the beasts; we were to kill immediately any she-wolf we saw, or any child with those same signs of the cross and the feet; don’t stop to make sure of anything, he said, kill them quickly, don’t you remember?”

“God’s blood, how should I remember, it’s been so long…”

Sing your troubles, they said to him in the dungeons of Tordesillas; they tied a cloth over his face, covering his nostrils and cutting off his breath, and through the cloth they poured streams of water which ran down the back of his nose into his throat; speak, who are you? you’d better speak up, wretch, for in any case you were condemned to death twenty years ago, no one will ask about you, speak, who are you?… I’m drowning, drowning, drowning …

THE CIRCULAR DREAM

The black, blood-bedaubed priests took him by the hands and arms, and amid smoking censers, forced him to lie upon the stone at the summit of the pyramid that faced the throne of the woman with the painted lips …

He smiled sadly. To reach her he had fled from village to village, through the jungles and valleys of the new world, until he reached the temple beside the volcano; employing all the tricks of the rogue, he had deceived, he had assumed the role of a blond white god who according to the legends of the natives was to return from the East, he had accepted their gifts, he had asked that it all be converted into gold, he had laden himself with heavy pouches, he had made love to the women, he had explored every facet of his cleverness, he had demanded sacrifices in his name, he had presided over the pageantry of death, more, more, always more, the god is insatiable, he exploited their weakness and fear, he ordered the death of the old because they were of no service, of the young because they could serve as nourishment, and of children because they were innocent, he had set people against people, he demanded war as proof of devotion, he knew the burning of villages, he had seen cadavers on the plains, and in his ascent from the coast to the high plain he had promised each nation to free it from the tribute exacted by the next strongest, only to subject it to the taxes of the next nation along his path; he had created a chain of tributes worse than any servitude previously known in these lands. He justified himself by saying he did it in order to survive; one single man against an empire … had history ever known an undertaking comparable to his? Alexander’s armies, Caesar’s legions; he was alone, Ulixes, son of Sisyphus, breaking forever from his father’s fatalism: this time the rock, pushed to the summit, would crown it forever. But who would know of this odyssey, who would tell it to generations to come? Was it worth the effort to perform memorable feats with no witnesses to sing of them?

He alone.

The woman of the painted lips whispered into his ear: “You remember nothing more?”

“No.”

“You have forgotten the five days?”

“I have lived but twenty.”

“And the beautiful year we spent together, you favored and attended, you and I making love?”

“I remember nothing.”

He had survived. The black priest raised the flint knife and with a single, swift movement drove it down toward the youth’s heart …

At the instant the stone knife touched his breast, he awakened.

He breathed a sigh of relief. He was sleeping beside a tree on a pile of dried leaves. He was trembling with cold, and he attempted to stretch his limbs. His hands were tied. He tried to struggle to his feet. He fell back among the damp leaves. A rope bound his feet. Two soldiers walked toward him, cut the rope binding his feet, and led him to a clearing in the forest.

On horseback, the Duke looked at him with sadness, gave the order, and galloped away.

The order was short and decisive: “Take his head to the victorious Señor, Don Felipe, in proof of my good faith.”

They forced him to kneel beside the stump of a tree and lower his head until his cheek touched the stump.

The executioner raised the ax high and with a single swift, sure movement drove it toward the youth’s neck …

In the instant the ax touched his neck, he awakened.

Someone had kicked him in the ribs. He opened his eyes and saw a tall monk wearing the habit of the order of St. Augustine; he had a face like a skull, so tightly did his skin adhere to the bone.

“Are you ready to speak?”

“What would you have me say?”

“Where were you born?”

“I do not know.”

“What is the meaning of that cross upon your back?”

“I do not know.”

“You know nothing, imbecile, but our former Señor, may he live in glory, surely knew something when he ordered your death twenty years ago when you were scarcely born, after you disappeared one night from the bedchamber of Isabel, Lady of our present Señor; do my words mean nothing to you?”

“Nothing.”

“You are very stubborn; in any case, you are going to die, but if you speak you can spare yourself torture. You know nothing?”

“I remember nothing.”

“Then sing your troubles.”

He scarcely had a moment to glimpse for the last time the brick floor of the cell, the thick stone of the walls, the iron bars covered with drops of water like the dew: they tied a cloth over his face, covering his nostrils and cutting off his breath, and through the cloth they poured streams of water which ran down the back of his nose into his throat … I’m drowning, drowning, drowning …

THE CABO DE LOS DESASTRES

Quickly, Pedro, for the first time all three are dreaming at the same time, they must be dreaming one another, for the first time it is not one who acts as the other two dream him, I tell you they are dreaming each other, an infinite, circular dream with no beginning or end, perhaps it is my fault, may God, if He exists, forgive me, they told me that the total cycle of their dreams would be thirty-three and one half months multiplied by three, too much time, I interrupted their dreams three times, I stole time from them, I justified myself by saying that on those three occasions the intensity of their dreams frightened me, their screams, their voices of terror, and loneliness, and death. I do not know whether I did them harm or good by interrupting their dreams at those instants, stealing time from them to gain my own, the ordained day, tomorrow, the ordained date, the fourteenth of July, the ordained year, twenty years after the youths were born, the ordained place, the Cabo de los Desastres, the same beach where we all met twenty years ago, do you remember? Felipe and Celestina, the monk Simón, and you and I; Celestina will be here tomorrow, I know it, she promised, Simón is now at the site of the palace, he has notified the friar Julián, Felipe, El Señor, will go out to hunt tomorrow, destinies are flowing together, I tear my sons from their dreams in order to immerse them in history, quickly, yes, all right, Ludovico, but I can go no faster, you cannot see, but the storm is terrible, you will not calm it with the music of that flute, it cannot be heard, the squall will drown it out, Ludovico, and I have only two hands to furl the sail, the sky is black, even the lightning flashes are black this night, ay, my poor ship is creaking, you see, it would never have reached the other side of the great ocean, this worthless nutshell could never have withstood even a miserable coastal storm, so many years wasted in building, destroying, building again, perfecting a ship that would carry me far, far away to the new world, to the better world, ay, the mainmast’s aflame, St. Elmo’s fire, did you lash each one’s bottle securely to him, Pedro? yes, Ludovico, between his belly and his breeches, as you asked me, swear to me, Pedro, you will never tell my secret, that no one will ever know I interrupted their dreams, that everyone will believe that these youths completed the sacred cycle, the thirty-three and one half months, if someday we find ourselves facing El Señor, do not betray me, Pedro, do not make a liar out of me, now, Ludovico, while we can take advantage of that blazing light from the mainmast, now Pedro, throw them into the water, one after another, the three youths, the three dreamers, they will drown, Ludovico, death by water, love for water, you mean, Pedro, if it is their destiny to be saved, they will be saved, if they die, they will continue to dream, and dreaming eternally I do not know whether they will forgive me for having taken their destinies in my hands, perhaps they were destined to end their lives dreaming one another, a fatal circle, and I am awakening them to bind them to my own destiny, the encounter with Felipe, the return twenty years after the illusion and the crime, but I must know, Pedro, can you understand? they are my work and I am theirs, neither they nor I shall ever be anything but what we have been together, everything they know they learned with me, they are the founding brothers common to all races, all peoples, except with different names, the ones who named, the ones who fell, those who founded everything for a second time upon the ruin of the first creation, making themselves part of it, grace, Pedro, practical grace set free in history, incarnate in the present, in our present, here and now, throw the first one overboard, now the second, now the third, three, always three, a dream in Alexandria, seclusion in Palestine, prophecy in Spalato, a memory in Venice, a crusade in Flanders, a pilgrimage to the new world, an encounter in La Mancha, the roads of liberty, encounters and partings, quickly, Pedro, it is done, Ludovico, and may God forgive you, I do not know who these boys are but I believe you have put them to death as surely as you drown a rabid dog by throwing it into the river in a sack, no, Pedro, creation is eternal, it is repeated time and time again like the dreams of those young men, they are the founders, the brothers who will not this time be able to repeat the crime of brother against brother, as it was written, because I looked after them, I intervened, I saved them for this moment, I took them away from the tempting sister, the enchantress, the woman of the tattooed lips, the gypsy, and now I am returning to them the freedom the dream took from them, I am returning them to history, my history, to see what they can do in it, with it, for it, to see what destiny awaits them, what faces, what names, the brothers, always two, always two, the learned doctor of the synagogue told me two is the static opposition that resolves itself in death, not now, for they were three, history will be changed, three is the number that puts things in movement, animates them, makes fluid what seemed immobile, transforms the cavern into a river, I saved them from the prophecy, one brother did not kill the other, because they were more than two, one brother shall save the others, because they were three, and the ship creaks, the tempest breaks the mast and the fire falls into the sea, the deck shatters, the hull splits apart, jump, Ludovico, the ship is nothing but splinters, tie me to the rudder, Pedro, quickly, my poor ship is foundering, it’s sinking, we shall shatter against the rocks, we are drowning, drowning, drowning …

MOTHER CELESTINA

Felipe’s father, El Señor, visited them, and asked Celestina’s father: “When will the girl be married? Marry her soon, for noblemen are roaming this forest who have lost their lands but not their taste for virgin girls. In any case, remember you must save her maidenhead for me…”

He trotted away, laughing, and Celestina remembered with fear the night this same Señor, drunken and shouting, had ridden through the forest looking for trapped she-wolves, and in his erotic fury had fornicated with one of them. This the girl had never told her father; that innocent, thinking thus to defend her against wandering noblemen hungry for a female, decided to dress her as a man from that day forward; she, allowing herself to be disguised, hoped to defend herself against El Señor, although she knew he would as soon rape a lad as a woman or a beast.

With her father, she grew up in the forest. He grew old; at times his fingertips brushed the forever wounded lips of his daughter, and he murmured sadly: “A mouth with pain says no good thing. It was an unlucky day we left the shelter of our forest to go to Toledo.”

He avoided speaking with his daughter masquerading as a lad. One day they learned of the death of El Señor. And then the armed men of the heir Don Felipe appeared, their mission to gather all the boys in the forest for the service at arms, and as servants.

“Who will work the land, who will care for the flocks?” were the last words she heard her father speak.

Prince Don Felipe, seeing her dressed as a man, did not guess her true condition, although her features seemed to awaken something disturbing in the heir’s memory. She was assigned to the service of the young Señor’s mother, where the presence of women was forbidden. As a shepherdess, she had learned to play the flute and she let this be made known to the head steward so she might entertain herself and others, living apart from the servants and the soldiers, before whom she had never disrobed. The Mad Lady respected the musical talents of her new page: she ordered the page to learn to play the drum, for she had forbidden all but funereal sounds now that she lived in continuous mourning. And thus, when the aged Lady began her long pilgrimage with her husband’s corpse, she assigned the page to the last position in the procession, playing the drum and dressed all in black, a herald of mourning.

From the castle of Tordesillas the procession advanced to Burgos, and from there to the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores; through great cities, Medina del Campo and Avila, small cities, Hornillos, Tórtolos, Arcos, and middle-sized cities, Torquemada and Madrid. And one day in this city of little merit as the Mad Lady was secluded in the monastery worshipping her husband’s remains, the members of her procession dispersed along the servile banks of the Manzanares, and thus the black-clad page with the colored and wounded lips happened to pass by some tanneries along the banks of the river; the smoke from the tanneries recalled to her her childhood in the forest, and as she stood, overcome by nostalgia, a hand seized her arm and a hunched figure spoke into her ear:

“O-ho, there, my girl, whom do you think you’re fooling? I can smell a virgin a league away, and there are very few virgins in this town — and may God be praised for it — who have been stitched without me as guide to the needle. When a girl is born I mark her name in my book so I will know which of them escapes my net. You may deceive the rest of the world, but not Mother Celestina, for if I’ve restored one maidenhead, I’ve restored a thousand, and a whiff tells me yours has not been touched, and that is bad, my girl, for you should never be miserly with what costs you so little. How have you escaped my register? Are you a stranger in this town? Hear me, my pretty, I may have lost my molars, but the taste for love is still strong on my gums. And if you are a virgin, trust in me, because for every girl that’s born, there is a boy, and for every boy, a girl, and there is no one in this world who does not have a mate if he but knows how to find him; a lonely soul neither sings nor weeps, it’s a rare sight to see a single partridge in flight, and there is nothing more pitiful, my daughter, than the mouse that knows but one hole, for if that is blocked up he has nowhere to hide from the cat. Who longs for honor without profit? You look like a barren ewe; go change your clothing and show the world what God gave you, for I divine a sublime form beneath that black garb. Yes, you’ve fallen into good hands…”

The girl’s wounded lips moved. “Celestina,” she said.

“Yes, Celestina,” answered the old woman so swathed in black rags that only her face and hands were visible. “I see that my fame has spread afar, and if you find my name evil, ask yourself as I did, was the wind to look after me? what estate did I inherit? do I have a house, or a vineyard? But if you think it evil, you will find I have a good name among men; just walk along with me, daughter, and you will see how they greet me, gentlemen, old men, lads, abbots of all rank from bishops to sacristans: you’ll see hats tipped in my honor as if I were a duchess. Oh, you accursed, voluminous skirts, tripping over you, I can never go as fast as I want.”

“You don’t remember me?”

“Daughter, he who scatters his memory in many places finds he has none to spare…”

“My lips…?”

“What happened to you, child? Did the Devil kiss you? Come along with me; I’ll lend you a veil until I can mend them for you, for there’s nothing that cannot be cured with the ointment made from goat’s blood and a few hairs from its chin whiskers. I tell you, you fell into good hands when in all of this spoiled meat pie of Madrid you came to this aged lapidary who perfumes ladies’ toques, extracts mercury chlorate, knows all there is to know about herbs, and physics babies…”

“But I remember you…”

“How can that be, daughter? I have lived a lot of years. There is no one who remembers how I used to be, not even I myself. But I tell you what you would like to hear, and what others will tell you one day: me-thinks you were beautiful; you look different, you’ve changed. Daughter: the day will come when you won’t recognize youself in your own mirror.”

“I remember everything. I have lived remembering you, Mother. Along with your kisses and your caresses you left me your memory. I grew up with one body and two memories. And the memory you gave me has been more profound than my own, for I have had to live with yours in silence for twenty years, Mother, unable to speak to anyone about what I remembered. The boys. The three boys. Ludovico. Felipe. The crime in the castle. The nights of love. The dream on the beach. The days in the forest. The pact with the Devil. The rape. El Señor. The wedding in the grange. Jerónimo.”

The cloaked and toothless old woman stopped for an instant, looked intently at the girl dressed as a page, and said with great sadness: “He who has little sense or judgment loves almost nothing except what he’s missed. The wanderer tired at the end of his long day’s travel would be mad to walk back the same path only to return to the place from which he started. I take care of my needs in my own house, and no one outside knows of them. Tumble-down or strong, it’s my house, right or wrong. Enough now. Let it never be said of me that I took a single step without hope of gain. Where are you going, daughter, and what is there in it for me?”

“Our procession is going to the palace being constructed on the plain, where the greatest Señor in this land, Prince Don Felipe, has built tombs for his ancestors, and there awaits their remains.”

“Remains, you say, palace? Strength, strength, Celestina, be not faint, there were always suppliants aplenty waiting to ease your pain! How many corpses are there?”

“Thirty, they say…”

“Ah, I who have exhausted myself going from cemetery to cemetery at midnight seeking the materials necessary to my trade, there’s not a Christian or Moor or Jew whose burial I’ve not attended; I hide and spy on them by day and dig them up by night; just this morning I removed with some eyebrow tweezers seven teeth from a hanged man; do you realize what you are telling me? Go on, get along, I shall prepare my utensils, I shall bid my kindred farewell, I shall leave my affairs in the hands of my faithful Elisia and Areusa, who may be young but are no less sinful, and artful, and skillful whores for it; they will look after my affairs as if they were their own, and I shall follow the faint scent of your virgin’s odor — may you soon lose it! — and look for you in the place you have told me of; and tell no one, my girl, for when we have learned something to our gain, we do not noise it about to our harm; very few live to a ripe old age, and those that do never died of starvation!”

THE SEVEN DAYS OF EL SEÑOR

Many years later, walking through the deserted galleries of the palace, shading his eyes with one hand to protect them from the light filtering through the white leaded windows, El Señor would remember his last encounters with the companions of his youth, Ludovico, the student, blind of his own will, bald, shoulders bowed, dressed in beggar’s rags, his face marked by the exertion of memory and questioning, and Celestina, yes, Celestina, no, not young, not that young, so like the other, the bewitched girl they had both made love to twenty years before, but no, not that similar, an illusion, an impression caused by certain features, her figure, gestures that could not withstand close examination: a resemblance born of possession or of memory …

Ludovico and Celestina, twenty years later. Somber pleasure illuminated Felipe’s pale face; he knew everything; everything was once again a succession of questions; for seven days he had asked what he had already known; they remained in the bedchamber, they ate there, they slept there, at fixed hours alguaciles and stewards, chamberlains and guards attended them; Brother Julián officiated at the early Mass, but at night El Señor asked to be left in total solitude in the chapel; seven days and seven nights: El Señor recalled the narrative told alternately by Ludovico and Celestina: the number 7, fortune, the progression of life, time moves upon seven wheels …

FIRST DAY

“The sickness…”

“The women of the people, with their sweaty underarms and wide hips, infected your father.”

“The accursed malady…”

“Your father infected me when he took me on the night of my wedding in the grange.”

“Corruption…”

“Celestina transmitted your father’s malady to you when you and I had her in the castle of the crime.”

“Then you were also infected…”

“I never touched another woman.”

“I never touched my wife.”

“Did you know carnal love with any other woman?”

“With a novitiate who then made love with one of these you call your sons…”

“My sons are incorruptible.”

“But they are sons of corruption: brothers…”

“By destiny, not by blood.”

“No, Ludovico, at least two of them are my father’s sons…”

“How do you know that?”

“Celestina’s child is my father’s son.”

“I copulated with three old men in the forest, Felipe; with you, with Ludovico … with the Devil.”

“The enigma would not be so dark if all three had been born at the same time from the same womb, like the brothers of old.”

“And the son of the she-wolf is my father’s son…”

“But these … my will has made them brothers: my sons.”

“And if two of them are my father’s sons, then the third must be also.”

“Who is the mother of the child Ludovico and I stole from the castle?”

“I do not know, Celestina. They are all my father’s sons. There is no other possible bond…”

“There were two women in the chamber where I found him.”

“And if they are my father’s sons, all three are my brothers…”

“A scrubbing maid…”

“Bastards…”

“And a young Lady…”

“Silence, Ludovico, for the love of Heaven, silence!”

Then, in response to Ludovico and Celestina’s story, El Señor told them of his father’s death and his mother’s voluntary sacrifice, her mutilation, and her decision to live accompanying forever the embalmed cadaver of her husband.

When night fell, he had gone into the chapel he imagined to be deserted, to calm his soul praying before the altar and the painting from Orvieto, when behind him he heard terrible curses; he looked toward the double rows of tombs, and there, poking into each of them, he could see the crooked figure of a woman who seemed brazenly to be admonishing the corpses: “Curses on you! May you be eaten up by canker. May your pores ooze stinking water and evil nits eat your flesh! Who beat me to the robbing of these rich tombs?”

El Señor took her by the arm and asked who she was; the cloaked woman fell to her knees, looked up at El Señor, and begged his forgiveness; she said she was called Mother Celestina, and that in all Spain there was no more honorable woman to be found, that His Maj’sty could ask in the tanneries along the Manzanares, her word was as good as gold in every tavern there; a devout and honorable woman she was who in her pilgrimage had come to this holy place of wide-spread and well-deserved fame to worship the holy relics of El Señor’s ancestors; and although she be the first to do so, she would not be the last, for such a notable mausoleum would attract multitudes desirous of sharing El Señor’s pain and paying homage to his affliction.

El Señor yanked back the hood hiding the woman’s face; he knew it was she, the girl of the wedding in the grange, the bewitched girl Celestina his father had raped because he, Felipe, did not possess the spirit for it and was saving his virginity for his English cousin, the beautiful Lady of the curls and starched petticoats. Here was a Celestina with no memory of anything, having transmitted everything she had known and experienced to the other woman, the one disguised as a page, who with Ludovico awaited him a few steps away in the bedchamber; Felipe tied up loose ends, Felipe felt rejuvenated, his project against the world was regaining strength, Celestina was an unforeseen ally, she did not remember him but he could reconstruct the youthful face behind that mask marked by greed, promiscuity, gluttony, and wine, the alert and malicious eyes that remembered nothing, in truth, because she lived for the day, her flesh swollen, lax, and wrinkled, the mouth toothless, the nose crisscrossed by broken veins: Celestina …

“But you say someone beat you here … Who?”

“But look here, Yer M’rcy, there’s a leg missing here, and a head there, and here fingernails, and there the scorpion…”

“Who?”

They heard weeping and sighing: Celestina took El Señor’s hand, placed a finger to her lips, and they walked between the royal sepulchers until they came to the tomb of Felipe’s father: there they found Barbarica sniveling and whimpering by the open tomb, and in it, upon the remains of the former whoring Señor, lay the new Idiot Prince brought there by the Mad Lady. The dwarf was startled when she saw El Señor and Mother Celestina; she crossed herself, joined her hands in supplication to Heaven and to earth, do not castigate me, Señor, but see how my husband lies sleeping, nothing brings him to his senses, he lies there just as if he’d been drained; your mother the Queen promised us your throne, but it’s a fine job we’ll do of occupying it — on that distant day when you’re no longer with us, Señor, and may God keep you for many years — if my sovereign husband is stretched out here stupefied forever upon the embalmed remains of your father, El Señor, see …

Felipe affectionately stroked Barbarica’s head. “Do you truly wish to reign, my little monster, or would you prefer to be with your lover forever?”

“Oh, Señor, both things, if it please Your Mercy.”

“You cannot do both. You must choose.”

“Oh, most generous Prince, then I wish to remain forever with him…”

“Do you know the monastery of Verdín?” El Señor asked Mother Celestina.

“There is no monastery, Señor, where I cannot count a brother among the friars.”

“Are you discreet?”

“Have no fear, Most Munificent Prince, I am not one of those women they pillory as witches for selling girls to the abbots…”

“Do you know what happens in Verdín?”

“It is a place of bed-fast people, Señor, where all those who tire of life, or of whom life has tired, exhausted old men, disillusioned youths, dishonored families, take to their beds and pledge never to arise until death carries them off feet-first. In short, whoever goes there makes a vow to keep himself between his sheets and never rise again, and it is a marvel to see a father, a mother, children, sometimes even servants, lying there one beside the other, some sighing, some weeping, one pretending to sleep, another saying aloud the Magnificat, some avoiding looking at the others, some staring at each other absently or with enigmatic smiles, the old appealing for a swift passing, the young soon accustomed to living that life, even believing there is no other, that the world outside is pure illusion. No one lasts very long. Death takes pity on those who imitate it.”

“There you will take this youth, already sleeping, and the dwarf, with the escort and documents I shall give you…”

“But it must be in the same bed!” shrieked Barbarica, who had listened with growing delight to the words passing between El Señor and Celestina.

“Being honorable, I am nonetheless poor,” murmured Mother Celestina, “and when lips are sealed, I pray the mouth of the purse be opened…”

El Señor tossed a heavy pouch at Mother Celestina’s feet, wheeled, and returned to his bedchamber. The maiden-mender and the dwarf fell upon the pouch, squabbling over its possession, but Celestina kicked Barbarica to the floor, as a lustrous black pearl rolled from the dwarf’s closed fist.

“So you have hidden treasures, do you, you botch of a woman?”

“It is the Pilgrim Pearl my mistress gave to me.”

“It smells of shit.”

“It’s mine.”

“I’ll have that pearl, you gimpy she-ass.”

“But it’s mine, old whore!”

“I’ll kick you to sleep, you stinking lump, and once and for all carry the both of you sleeping off to bed, you and your lunatic husband … Shackled in irons, and shitting with fear!”

SECOND DAY

My brother, murmured El Señor; your heirs, Ludovico answered, and Felipe nodded: my mother has so proclaimed one of them, but Ludovico shook his head, it cannot be one alone, it must be all three, and in a very low voice made opaque by anguish, El Señor said, “Again dispersion? the war of brother against brother, the partitioning of my kingdom, the loss of unity represented by my person and my palace: I, this place, the summit?”

He stared toward the high window of the bedchamber, as if the fragmented light of history shone there; he recalled how much pain the pretensions of royal bastards had caused Spain, and how much blood they had spilled to make those pretensions valid; but Ludovico did not relent in his argument: the three in one, the same as in the dream: the first remembers what the second understands and the third desires; the second understands what the first remembers and the third desires; the third desires what the first remembers and the second understands …

“Who are they, Ludovico?”

“I myself do not know, Felipe. You have heard the same stories I have.”

Celestina assured El Señor that they had told him everything, even things she had not told the youth it had been her fate to find on the beach and bring to the palace.

“The usurpers, Celestina?”

“The heirs, Felipe?”

From the chapel they could hear the chanting of the Mass for the royal dead; El Señor knelt before the black crucifix of the bedchamber and intoned the beginning prayers of the Office of Darkness, Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, omnibus Sanctis, et vobis, fratres: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere; and striking his breast thrice, repeating, like a spectral echo, the words of the monks in the chapel, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

He was racked by a fit of coughing. Then in a hoarse voice, as if his words were a continuation of the Mass for the Dead, he invoked with credulous conviction the writings of his own testament, with no shade of variation between the tone of his voice as he prayed for the dead and that as he sought the visitation of the unborn: “This I bequeath to you, 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.”

“The founders, Ludovico? Felipe?” said Celestina, her voice silvery, as if her words incorporated the antiphony of the canticle being sung in the chapel and the prayer of El Señor, canticle and prayer both of black velvet.

“This I bequeath to you: a blind, pertinacious, and painful return to the imagination of the future in the past as the only future possible to my race and my land…”

Beneath all the suns, said Ludovico, in all times, two brothers have been the founders, two brothers have fought each other, one brother has killed the other, and then everything has been founded once again upon the memory of a crime and the nostalgia for death.

“Dies irae, dies illa…”

He asked Felipe to return to the origins of all things, two brothers, Abel and Cain, Osiris and Set, Plumed Serpent and Smoking Mirror, rival brothers, the argument over the love of the forbidden woman, the mother, the sister, Eve, Isis, or the Princess of the Butterflies, why have all men at the dawn of their history dreamed, thought, or lived the same thing, spanning all distance, as if all of us, Felipe, all of us before we were born had known one another in a place of common encounters and then, upon earth, been separated only by the accidents of distant spaces, different times, and unknown unknowing? One day we were one. Today we are other.

“Quantus tremor est futurus…”

Did Felipe remember how Simonides was saved from the collapse of the house of the wealthy Scopas by Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri? From the chapel they could hear the phrases repeated by El Señor, kneeling before the crucifix: Lacrimosa dies ilia, qua resurget ex favilla, judicandus homo reus. Castor was mortal and died in the battle against the cousins whose women the twins had stolen. And then Pollux, the immortal son of Zeus, rejected an immortality that did not include his brother Castor. He preferred to die with his brother.

“That is the love my three sons hold for one another.”

“My three brothers? The usurpers?” asked El Señor, never varying the solemn voice of the funeral chant.

“I tell you I know as much and as little as you yourself.”

Celestina, her eyes closed, spoke in the voice of dream: “The twins … salvation of sailors and castaways … guardians of St. Elmo’s fire…”

El Señor rose to his feet, Dona eis requiem, Amen, looked toward the map covering one wall of his bedchamber, and said he was thinking, actually, of other signs, other brothers, other rivals, other founders, Romulus and Remus, thrown into the Tiber, suckled by the she-wolf, the founders of Rome. Romulus had raised a wall about the city. Remus had dared leap over it. Romulus killed his brother, and with these words established his power: “So dies he who leaps my walls.” Then he disappeared in the midst of a storm: the exiled founder, the fugitive from himself.

“Consider, I tell you, all the brothers in history…”

“But now they are three. One brother will not kill his brother, because if one dies, the other two will not remember, or understand, or desire. Look, and understand, Felipe: for the first time three brothers are establishing a history; three, the number that resolves oppositions, the fraternal cipher of encounter and the mixing of bloods, the dissolution of the sterile polarity of the number 2: understand, and make a place for them in your history…”

“They have challenged with their histories my will to end this dynasty now, here, with me. All the things they have recounted they have done to the end of destroying my project of death. They have…”

“Et lux perpetua luceat eis.”

In exchange for Celestina and Ludovico’s accounts, El Señor employed the remainder of the day telling, with sadness, of his never consummated marriage with Isabel, explaining his ideas of chivalric love, and recalling La Señora’s misfortune when she fell on the paving stones of the castle and remained there awaiting arms worthy of assisting her: arms that had never taken her as a woman.

And nevertheless, as night fell, Felipe went to the chapel with a light step; he had not felt so young in years; his breast was pounding, his arms pulsing, his mind was clear; but the chapel was filled with shadows, as if inverting the equation between his recovered vigor and the eternity of the stone raised to support the weight of the centuries: El Señor’s luminous gaze, and the announcement of death in the lengthening shadows in the holy place. He paused. He looked toward the altar. A young man wrapped in a cape of sumptuous brocade was scrutinizing the painting from Orvieto; by his side, holding a letter in one hand, one of the common laborers from the site was importuning the youth. El Señor, protected by the shadows, moved nearer, and hidden behind a pillar, listened.

“My name is Catilinón, my lord Don Juan, but I am an honest man, and your most faithful servant…”

“Who has given you such license?” asked the youth, gazing intently at the painting.

“No one, but that is what I want to ask of you, for such opportunities are as few as hairs on a bald man’s head, and though I’ve had to sweat blood for it, I guess the bread here’s as good as that in France; I can take my medicine! I want you to know your well-deserved fame, carried by La Azucena and La Lolilla, has spread to the forges and tile sheds on the job, and when I heard of it I said to myself, Catilinón, that noble Don Juan has need of a servant to look after him, warn him of trouble, and find out things for him, to go ahead of him to clear the way, to follow behind him to cover his flight, to list his love affairs and his feats, to take his place, if necessary, and, with luck, to enjoy a few of his leftovers, for if you give me a heifer, you’ll see how swiftly I’ll hav’er, and you’ll never find this year’s bird in last year’s bird’s nest.”

“To me you have the smell of a scoundrel and adventurer. You must remember that the noble lord’s adventures are fine deeds, but those of the common man are sins.”

“Ah, but my lord Don Juan, alike we go but to our deaths.”

“What, a challenge so distant?”

Don Juan again gazed with fascination at the face of the Christ standing alone in one corner of the painting: he saw himself, he saw his face; El Señor looked at the lively gaze of Don Juan, and the dead gaze of the Christ: he recognized the face of the pilgrim from the new world: Don Juan turned toward the scoundrel by his side.

“Be truthful; why have you approached me?”

“There are rumors of insurrection on the work site, and I do not want to be counted among the losers, for any battle the poor engage in is as good as a promise of jail, and when a poor wretch looks for a prize, he gets poked in the eye.”

“What is brewing, then?”

“The greatest uproar in all Spain.”

“Who are the actors?”

“Men within and men without.”

“Without?”

“The discontent of the workmen; the rancor of the humbled; the revenge of the dispossessed; many cloaked Jews; many heretics who arrived disguised as monks in the funeral processions; many exalted merchants and doctors of the towns who are conspiring and arming themselves against tributes, the disbanding of their tribunals, and the new power of the Holy Inquisition…”

“And within?”

“Guzmán, who comes and goes both inciting and terrifying us, promising us a government of free men, and menacing us with a reign of madmen and dwarfs; and the old moneylender, the Comendador of Calatrava, who writes letters to his colleagues in other countries; look, I told him I had a cousin in Genoa who is married to a sailor who plies his way back and forth between the two coasts, and Guzmán placed in my hands this letter, so that it might reach Italy, and a contractor there by the name of Colombo. He paid me thirty maravedis — the price of a pound of capon flesh — to do it; I opened it, and read it, and now I hand it over to you; it is proof of a culpable intrigue against El Señor, who might very well give us the price of a whole capon for it.”

“And what makes you think, rascal, that I am faithful to El Señor?”

“Nothing, Señor Don Juan, nothing; but by delivering it to you, I prove I am thinking only of you. Good God in Canaan, how salty the sea has become! everything is in a bad state, and if the longest life is a brief life and only Hell awaits us after death, I prefer to live my life with you, Don Juan, for as you are worse than they, you will defend me equally from a mad dog, a Turk, a heretic, or a phantom, and when we must go to the Devil, you should be able to conquer the Devil himself, so you see why, in spite of everything, I must be faithful to you, for my fear will make a place for zeal, and putting reins to my feelings I will force myself to applaud what my soul might despise. I shall live the lively carnival with you, and reap my harvest while I can, for I have learned that among the poor I shall harvest nothing but sorrows, and with El Señor Don Felipe nothing but jeers, for a fun-poking verse is already circulating that goes like this:

“Lived a prince of fantastic intentions,

Of his speech had philippic pretensions,

From his mother came comic conventions,

For his tricks, known as prince of inventions,

Sing ho, sing hey,

Sing rondelet lolly,

Sing loud pimps and rogues by profession.”

THIRD DAY

“Listen, and you will understand, Felipe. Two slept: the one who understood it all, the pilgrim of the new world, neither desired nor remembered anything.”

“You tore them from their dream, Ludovico, their circular and eternal dream; what have you given them in exchange?”

“History. I have returned them to history.”

“What is that?”

“That depends upon you.”

“Wait … the pilgrim … the voyager from the new world … he dreamed it … he was not there … Pedro’s boat never set sail…”

“Pedro drowned in the storm on the Cabo de los Desastres. I saw that in reality. But in the dream he died on the beach of pearls, pierced by a lance.”

“Wait … then the new world does not exist … it was dreamed by a dreamed youth … who, you say, understood it all … but desired and remembered nothing.”

“Except the love of a woman with tattooed lips, and she returned his memory to him.”

“No, he could not remember twenty days, having lived five, or five days, having lived twenty…”

“My lips returned memory to him, Felipe; once, when he took my virginity on the mountain; again, here in your bedchamber. Only while making love to me does he remember.”

“There is no proof…”

“I do not know, Felipe…”

“I was right…”

“The pilgrim was dreamed by the other two…”

“My world ends here!”

“But he returned with proof: a map of feathers and spiders.”

“Ah, Ludovico, Celestina, what weapons you have provided me.”

“The map, Felipe, listen and understand; I did not give it to him, he brought it from his dream…”

“I decreed: the new world does not exist, they do not believe me, they prefer to follow after an illusion, all of them will chase after phantoms of gold, they will spill over the great cataract of the sea, I shall be left alone, here…”

“I accompanied the young heresiarch of Flanders…”

“What is written is true: my decree of non-existence…”

“I accompanied the wanderer in La Mancha…”

“The spoken word is not true; what that youth told as you were making love with him, Celestina…”

“I did not accompany the pilgrim from the new world…”

“I am laughing, Ludovico, Guzmán’s pitiful ambition! the Augustinian’s pitiful zeal, the moneylender’s pitiful calculation, all gone in an expedition against nothing!”

“I stayed behind on the beach with Pedro and the two coffins, waiting…”

“I have triumphed! Ah, do not believe that I shall discourage them, on the contrary, I will give them royal seals, fleets, protection, whatever they ask, as long as they set sail and never return…”

“The pilgrim was the only one who was dreamed alone, without the company of the other two…”

“My palace! Everything concurs: there is no new world, there are no heirs, my family line ends here…”

“He was the only one who returned alone by sea, tossed at our feet by the waves…”

“I alone!”

“He did not awaken. It was the first time the three dreamed at the same time, Felipe…”

“Everything here, unmoving, until the hour of my death!”

“And thus was born my plan to throw them still sleeping into the sea on the day of the appointed meeting, so that they wake together, without the third having been able to tell his dream to the other two, as before…”

Then El Señor recounted the details of his last armed crusade against the Adamite heresy in Flanders: how the sacred glory of his triumph had been stained by the blasphemy and desecration of the Teutonic mercenaries in the Cathedral; how he had sworn then to erect a temple, a palace and pantheon of princes, an impregnable fortress of the Holy Trinity. And as a renunciation of battle, how he had thrown the Banner of the Blood from the tower of the citadel into the moat: from that moment forward, nothing but solitude, mortification, and death.

When that night he went for the third time into the chapel, he was surprised to hear contentious voices at the foot of the stairway of the thirty-three steps. The darkness was even deeper, all the easier to hide himself. He saw the gleam of two unsheathed swords. A voice sobbed behind the latticework of the nuns’ choir. A trembling servant hidden behind a pillar was muttering impudently. El Señor also trembled, the place he had constructed to protect the Eucharist was again profaned: howling nuns, a dead dog, crossed swords. Like the servant, he trembled. Like the servant, he also hid.

“You have doubly stained my honor, Don Juan,” the old Comendador was saying, spurred by anger to a spirit inconsistent with the frailness of his limbs.

“You speak of something you do not possess, old javel,” the graceful youth replied, one hand at his waist, one hand disdainfully parrying at sword point the edge of Inés’s father’s sword.

“You would add insult to injury, liar?”

“May God be a witness! You sold your daughter to El Señor. Is that your honor?”

“You have none, sir, or you would not mention such arguments, for honor lies in silence, especially when it is harmful to the honor of others.”

“Honor is appearances, old man, and judging on appearances, you are ruined.”

“Honor means respecting the seal of a letter; and you opened mine through the offices of a rogue who has charged us for his faithlessness.”

“It is said that honor is the strict fulfillment of duty, and you have failed in all of yours: that you owe El Señor, for having given you rank; that you owe yourself, out of gratitude; and that you owe your daughter, if honor also lies in woman’s honor and virtue.”

“She gave herself to El Señor and to God, supreme honors on earth and in Heaven; but with neither title nor honor, you seduced her; for that I demand redress.”

“Be grateful that even though she was stained, I granted her my favors.”

“Monster! Vile knave!”

“Honor is glory that results from virtue, Señor Comendador de Calatrava, and it transcends families, persons, and even the acts of the one who earns it: my honor is greater in seducing than yours in procuring, and a greater feat…”

Thoughtful, the Sevillian moneylender lowered his guard and rested his chin on the hilt of his sword. “Let us consider that.”

Don Juan laughed, gleefully threw his sword into the air, and caught it again in mid-air. “Yes, let us consider that.”

The old man and the youth sat down on the first step of the thirty-three that led from the chapel to the plain.

“You say that honor is appearances,” murmured the Comendador.

“For others; not for me, for public reputation could never harm the exalted and profound concept I have of my own honor.”

“Then no one can be insulted except by himself?”

“So say the masters of ethics: the whole world cannot injure you if they touch not your soul, for only by his own soul may man be harmed.”

“Well, I believe that each of us is the child of his acts, not of his lineage. Plato says there is no King who has not come from low origins, as there is no man of low estate who has not descended from eminence. But the vagaries of time have reversed all ranks, and fortune lowered and raised them. Who then is the nobleman? Seneca answers: He whom nature has shaped for virtue. Such is my case, Señor Don Juan, for my honor rests upon my virtue, my virtue upon my acts, and my acts upon my wealth.”

“Thus, to rob you of your wealth is to take your acts, your virtue, and your honor.”

“To lose it, sir, would be to lose my soul. And I shall lose it all if you do not return that letter to me.”

“Wait; first would you give your life or your honor?”

“I tell you, if each of us is son of his acts, each can be the founder of a dynasty: but there is no lineage — or honor and glory in our lifetime and even after death — without wealth, for our acts procure for us the fame that lives after us. Don Juan: return my letter.”

“As God is witness, what a foolish interpretation you give to morality! In these kingdoms it is held as common wisdom that one owes his wealth and his life to the King, but that honor is the patrimony of the soul, and the soul belongs only to God.”

“And you, Don Juan, do you prefer honor to death?”

“I don’t give a fig for honor; and as far as death is concerned, it is a long day between now and then.”

“Don Juan: I believe we can come to an understanding. Return my letter, thus saving my wealth, my acts, my virtue, and my honor, for yours matter not to you.”

“But my life matters, javel.”

“Do not expose it to danger, then.”

“You do not understand, wretched old man. This is my life: the adventure I begin, whether love affair or duel, is the challenge from which I emerge victorious: I live for pleasure, not for God, the King, wealth, virtue, acts, lineage, or honor.”

“Then fear me, for I shall have my revenge, even after death.”

“If you are saving your vengeance for your death, it is better that you give up hope.”

The two men rose to their feet, the moneylender agitated, Don Juan serene.

“Return that letter, Don Juan, or by my honor, I swear…”

“What, javel? That by that feeble arm you will kill me?”

“I shall die with honor…”

“One is born with honor; but you…”

“One also dies with honor…”

“What? A challenge so distant?”

“Then take this, swine!”

Holding his sword before him, the old man threw himself upon Don Juan; Don Juan, with one motion, impaled him like a butterfly and raised the frail figure of the Comendador, like a pierced shadow, high in the air …

There was a scream from the nuns’ choir; Don Juan with a flick of his wrist freed from his blade the body of the old man, which fell noiselessly upon the granite floor of the chapel, and noiselessly Don Juan slipped behind the altar, followed by a terrified Catilinón, the servant exalted by fear and also by the novelty of the incomprehensible codes, arguments, and ceremonies of people of breeding … through galleries, courtyards, dungeons, the hiding places of the servants Azucena and Lolilla; as he passed before the altar, the rascally servant knelt and swiftly crossed himself, and there, taking them as his own, repeated the words of his master: “I don’t give a fig…”

As the nun Inés ran into the chapel and knelt weeping beside the motionless body of her father, El Señor emerged from the shadows and approached the pitiful pair.

Inés raised teary eyes, kissed El Señor’s hand which loomed long and pallid beside her, and implored: “Oh, Señor, Señor, see this poor old man dead, a lifetime of labor and cares wasted, dead scarcely after he achieved the honor for which he had so long striven; Señor, if I have pleased you in any way, please me now: promise me that you will erect a statue upon my father’s tomb in Seville, a mausoleum of stone that will perpetuate, in death, the honor that was so fleeting in his lifetime…”

“That favor will cost me nothing, Inés. Your father’s fortune will now pass into my coffers.”

Still clinging to El Señor’s hand, the nun bowed her head: “I told you one night that of my own will I would return to your bed. That my heart needed to empty itself. Refill itself. Now it is my will.”

“But it is not mine.”

“How then may I repay you for the honor you accorded my father?”

“Take this ring. Go with it to your superior, Madre Milagros. Tell her it is my order that in twenty-four hours one of the nun’s cells be lined with mirrors.”

“With mirrors, Señor?”

“Yes. Mirrors are not lacking here. All the materials of the world have been brought to this work site. I preferred stone to mirror, as I preferred mortification to vanity. Now the hour of the mirrors has arrived. Have them cover an entire cell: walls, floors, doors, ceiling, windows. Every inch must be reflection. Then, Inés, you will lead the youth named Juan to that room, and there seduce him.”

“Oh, Señor, Don Juan wants nothing from me, or from any woman a second time.”

“Then you will seduce him through a third party. I know such a person. Wait until she returns. She is now undertaking a charge for me.”

“Oh, Señor, there is something still worse … A witch’s spell has closed the lips of my purity, making me a virgin again.”

El Señor began to laugh as he had never laughed, as if this act not only restored his youth but actually transformed his character; first he laughed softly, then he bellowed; he laughed, laughing, he who had never laughed. And between shouts of laughter, he said to Inés: “Well, you will see that I also have a cure for that ailment. Mother Celestina has restored many virgins; now, for the first time, she will demonstrate her art in the contrary operation: she will unstitch it for you, my beautiful Inés…”

FOURTH DAY

“Let me figure this carefully, Ludovico; I want to reason it out; you say that each of the dreams of each of the three youths lasted thirty-three and one half months?”

“Thirty-three and one half months.”

“Which makes two years, nine months, and two weeks…”

“Which is a thousand and one half days…”

“What was your reason, Ludovico…?”

“Life was more brief…”

“The dreams of Flanders and the new world could have lasted a thousand and one half days…”

“… than the dream was long.”

“Not the dream about La Mancha…”

“Two slept: and he who remembered everything, the wanderer of La Mancha, understood and desired nothing.”

“I tell you, that boy remembered nothing: he met a mad old man in a windmill, they came across a chain gang of galley slaves, he was captured, he was tortured by water, there was time for nothing more…”

“The dream of La Mancha lasted a thousand and one half days.”

“That isn’t true, Ludovico; the actions do not coincide with the amount of time you mention. I do not understand your arithmetic…”

“Arithmythic, Felipe. Between the adventure of the windmill and the adventure of the galley slaves, on the cart, along the highways, we lived a thousand and a half adventures with the Knight of the Sad Countenance. Each day he told a different story. How he was knighted. The stupendous battle with the Biscayan. The meeting with the goatherds. The story the goatherd told about the shepherdess Marcela. The heartless Yanguesans. The arrival at the inn we took for a castle. The night with Maritornes. The adventure of the dead body. The gratifying winning of Mambrino’s helmet. The adventure in the Sierra Morena. Beltenebros’s penance. The story of the fair Dorotea. The tale of foolish curiosity. The fierce and extraordinary battle with some wineskins. The appearance of the princess Micomicona. The discourse on arms and letters, which took an entire day and a night. The Captive’s tale. The story of the young muleteer. The adventure of the troopers. The enchantment of our poor friend. The quarrel with the goatherd. The adventure of the Penitents. The enchantment of Dulcinea. The adventure of the chariot of the Courts of Death. The meeting with the Knight of the Mirrors. The adventure of the lions. What happened in the house of the Knight of the Green Coat. The adventure of the enamored shepherd. The wedding of Camacho the Rich. The Cave of Montesinos. The braying adventure. And that of Maese Pedro’s puppet show. The famous adventure of the enchanted bark. The fair huntress. The breaking of Dulcinea’s spell. The arrival at the castle of the Duke and Duchess. The adventure of the Dolorous Duenna. The arrival of Clavileño. The island of Barataria, and what happened there to our friend’s squire. The love of the enamored Altisidora. Doña Rodríguez. The adventure of the second Dolorous Duenna. The battle against the lackey Tosilos. The encounter with the bandit, Roque Guinart. The voyage to Barcelona and the visit to a miraculous place where through enchantment books reproduce themselves. The Knight of the White Moon. When the knight became a shepherd. The adventure of the hogs. The resurrection of Altisidora. The return of our friend to the village-whose-name-he-did-not-wish-to-remember, for a narrow prison it was for his magnificent dreams of glory, justice, danger, and beauty.”

“You have named fifty stories, but you spoke of a thousand and one half days…”

“Fifty accounts are accounts beyond count, Felipe. For from each account came twenty others, inopportunely, tempestuously, unseasonably, and each story contained as many others: the story told by the knight, the story lived by the knight, the story told to the knight, the story the knight read about himself in the press in Barcelona, the oral and anonymous version of the story told as pure verbal imminence before the knight existed, the version written in the papers of an Arabic chronicler, and based upon that, the version of a certain Cide Hamete; the version which to the knight’s anger a shameless wretch by the name of Avellaneda had written apocryphally; the version the Squire Panza endlessly recounts to his wife, thus filling her to bursting with both intangible illusions and everyday proverbs; the version the priest tells the barber to kill the long hours in the village; and the version which to revive those same dead hours the barber tells the priest; the story as it is told by that frustrated writer, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco; the story that from his particular point of view Merlin the magician tells about those same events; the story the giants challenged by the knight tell among themselves, and the fantasy fabricated by the princesses whose spells he broke; the story told by Ginés de Parapilla as part of his everlastingly unfinished memoirs; the one that Don Diego de Miranda, seeing it all from the viewpoint of friendship, set down in his diary; the story dreamed by Dulcinea, imagining herself a farm girl, and the story dreamed by the farm girl Aldonza, imagining herself a princess; and, finally, the story staged again and again, for the amusement of their court, by the Dukes in the theater of resurrections…”

“What did that maddened knight achieve by repeating to you twenty times each of his fifty adventures and all their versions?”

“Simply the postponement of the day of judgment, which was to recover his sanity, lose his marvelous world, and die of scientific sadness.”

“Then, in any case, he was defeated by destiny…”

“No, Felipe; in Barcelona we saw his adventures reproduced on paper, in hundreds and at times thousands of copies, thanks to a strange invention recently brought from Germany, which is a very rabbit of books: if you place a piece of paper in one mouth, from the other emerge ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million pages with the same letters…”

“Books reproduce themselves?”

“Yes, there is no longer a single copy, commissioned by you, written only for you, and illuminated by a monk, which you can keep in your library and reserve for your eyes alone.”

“A thousand and one half days, you said, but you have accounted only for fifty stories in twenty versions: one half day is missing…”

“And will never be completed, Felipe. That half day is the infinite sum of the readers of this book, for as one finishes reading, one minute later another begins to read, and as that one finishes his reading, one minute later another begins it, and so on and so on, as in the ancient example of the hare and the tortoise: neither wins the race; so, too, the book is never without a reader, the book belongs to everyone…”

“Then, wretch that I am, reality belongs to everyone, for only what is written is real.”

Later El Señor told of his strange experience on the stairway of the thirty-three steps, and how each step devoured a long stretch of time, in such a manner that whoever ascended them lost his life but gained his death, his metamorphosis into matter, and his diabolical resurrection into the body of a beast: it was more worthwhile, then, to perpetuate and re-create the past in a thousand combinations than to extinguish it in the pure linearity of a future without end.

That night El Señor hastened to the chapel. He was well aware of the reasons for his recent exaltation, which harmonized so well with his personal project. The new world was a dream. Two of the bastards, the heirs, his brothers, were eliminated, one locked in a dungeon, the other fast in bed in a monastery; and the third would not be long in falling into the trap baited by El Señor. But what purpose would these triumphs serve (he asked himself) if the very uniqueness of things and their eternal permanence on the written page became the property of every man?

“Power is founded upon the text. The only legitimacy is the reflection of one’s possession of the unique text. But now…”

He knelt before the altar and looked at the painting from Orvieto. The shadows served up a banquet of form and color. El Señor recognized the faces in the painting.

“Oh, all-merciful God, must I undertake a new battle, this time against the pages being reproduced by the thousands, thus granting power and legitimacy to all those who possess it: nobles and common men, bishops and heretics, merchants and procuresses, children, rebels, and lovers?”

He rose and sought escape from his doubts by walking between the thirty sepulchers — fifteen and fifteen — lining both sides of the chapel: one by one he visited them, brushed their cold tombstones with his fingertips, caressed the veined marble, gazed at the reclining statues that reproduced in stone and bronze and silver the figures which in life had been his ancestors. He read the singular inscriptions on each sepulcher: these funeral texts, at least, would be irreproducible, unique, inseparable from each figure commemorated in this vast vault of rotting bodies.

As he reached the last tomb, that closest to the stairway of thirty-three steps, he trembled, divining at last that the three additional steps, which he had never ordered to be constructed, Providence had reserved for his three brothers. From his conversations with Ludovico and Celestina, only one conviction had been imprinted upon his soul: the three youths were the sons of his father, the fair and whoring Prince of insatiable appetites: his father had been capable of impregnating the very sea, air, and rock.

His head whirled dizzily; his penis dangled between his legs like a black and withered petal; he supported himself upon a tombstone; as a cold sweat stained his clothing, he drew comfort from a single thought: “I ordered thirty steps, one for each of my dead ancestors; the workmen, guided by the hand of Providence, constructed thirty-three; each step thus convokes the death of one of the usurpers who came here; there is no step for me.”

He asked himself, panting heavily through thick, foam-speckled lips: Shall I never die, then? And immediately said out loud: “Nor is there a step for my mother. Will she and I live forever?”

“Yes, son, yes,” a muffled murmur arose from a black bundle lying in one corner of the chapel and crypt, invisible at a casual glance. Felipe stepped back, surfeited with mystery, hungry for reason; but with the same motive he approached the bundle, knelt beside it, and discovered the mutilated body of his mother, the one called the Mad Lady, as he himself was called by rogues and rascals the fantastic, comic, inventive, pretentious, and deceptive Prince.

Bewilderment silenced El Señor; the severe waxen mask of the old woman’s face, barely illuminated by a bitter smile, moved slightly. “Do you believe I am dead? Do you believe I am alive? In either argument, you hit the mark, my son, for he who is born dead cannot die, nor live, he who died in life, and from these opposing explanations is nourished what you can call, if it please you, my present existence. Do not bury me, Felipe, my son: I am not as dead as these, our ancestors; but neither return me to common life, to ambition, to effort, to appearance, to eating and defecating, to clothing, and to dreaming: grant me the place my particular existence deserves, the natural result of my entire life and death, as one day I explained it to a poor fellow I found on the highway coming here, on the dunes of a beach, so long ago it seems to me: do you know, our senses deceive us, they give us no proof of life, neither is their absence proof of death: we are a dynasty, my son, something greater than you or I alone, something more than an entire succession of Princes, individuals perish but legacies are continued, the strength of a man is exhausted but the power of a family line increases, because individuals seize and grasp so as to have something for themselves and thus end by losing everything, while we live on loss, excess, pomp, the sumptuous gift, waste, and thus end by gaining everything; hush, my little son, do not interrupt me, do not answer me, respect your elders, simply listen, every error is repaid, every excess compensated, every crime expiated, history is the secular account of ransom; but if common men pay for their errors by making amends, compensate for excess with a vow of future frugality, and expiate their crime with the pain of repentance, we, quite the reverse, repay error with more errors, compensate for excess with new excesses, expiate crime with worse crimes: everything offered us we return in like nature, a hundredfold, until it culminates in the gift for which there is no possible response: no one can repay us, compensate us, or expiate us, for fear that we will return to them, multiplied and magnified, the very evils they give to us in an attempt to conquer us; do not bury me, little Felipe, or return me to my bedchamber; grant me the place appropriate to me: do it as a reward for my sorrowful love for you; I never wounded you, my son, I never told you all the truth; place me in that niche from which I fell; then order them to wall me in to the level of my eyes, my mutilated body hidden behind common brick; let only my eyes be seen; I shall not speak; I shall ask for nothing; I shall be a walled-in phantom; my eyes will gleam in the growing shadows of your chapel; do not place stone or inscription beneath me; I shall not be dead; we shall not know what date to inscribe for my death, we cannot know what name to put on my tomb-in-life; I shall concentrate my gaze on all the histories of Queens, I shall be the mirror of those who preceded me and the phantom of those who will follow me; from my immured pedestal I shall dream them all, I shall live because of them, I shall live for them, I shall accompany them without their realizing that I, suspended between life and death, inhabit them, I shall be what I was, Blanca, Leonor, and Urraca, I shall be what I am, Juana, and I shall be what I am to be, Isabel, Mariana, and Carlota, eternally beside the tombs of Kings, eternally widowed and disconsolate, eternally near you, my son: from time to time pass before my walled niche, seek my eyes, tell me the sad stories of men and nations; I have more than enough days, I have more than enough deaths…”

FIFTH DAY

“The dream of Flanders lasted thirty-three and a half months…”

“Which are a thousand and one half days…”

“The arrival in Bruges. Schwester Katrei. The nights in the Duke’s forest. The crusade of the poor. The free spirit. The free spirit. The final battle against you. The defeat…”

“The profaned Cathedral; that is why I constructed this fortress of the Most Holy Sacrament.”

“That night, Felipe, I approached you; I asked you to join us: the dream on the beach, you, we…”

“You said you were invincible, Ludovico, because nothing could be taken from you … You said that if I vanquished you, it would be to vanquish myself…”

“Two slept: the one who desired everything, the heresiarch of Flanders, understood and remembered nothing…”

“I asked the Duke of Brabant for his head; he delivered it to me…”

“Do you have it?”

“In that coffer beneath my bed.”

“Show it to me.”

“You, girl, you are more agile, drag that chest here to me…”

“Open it, Celestina.”

“There; it has become wrinkled and black; it has shrunk, but there…”

“Look at it, Felipe, this is not the head of the youth.”

“True.”

“Now you know them; you know that the Duke never delivered to you the head of the young heresiarch who was dreamed, but that of another man…”

“Who is he?”

“I cannot see. I do not wish to see.”

“Until when, Ludovico?”

“Let me measure my time. Describe the severed head to me.”

“It was that of a man of middle age, bald, but the head has shrunk, it now bears a long mane of gray-streaked hair…”

“And what more?”

“Half-opened eyes, thin lips, a long nose; it is difficult to describe it to you: the face of a rustic, with no great distinction, a common face…”

“Poor man, poor man…”

“Did you know him?”

“The Duke deceived you, Felipe; he deceived us all; he delivered to you the head of the most humble of his followers; poor artist, secret painter.”

Then El Señor, to demonstrate his gratitude for this conversation, in his turn told them how he had questioned that painting brought from Orvieto, asking Christ to manifest himself and clearly make known to Felipe, the most faithful of his devoted followers, the truth about his mystic visions: were they prophetic prospects of his destiny in eternal Heaven, or deceitful heralds of a condemnation to repetitive Hell? The painting had not answered. He lashed himself with a penitential whip. The masculine figures with their erect penises had turned toward him. A wound of blood welled from the canvas. Christ had called him a bastard.

For the remainder of the day they did not speak. El Señor summoned to the chapel his most trusted foreman and there instructed him to wall up in her niche the mutilated trunk of the Mad Lady; the foreman said he would need a couple of workmen to help him with the brick and mortar, but El Señor forbade it. All day he listened to the slow progress of the work.

By night El Señor left the chapel and examined the completed job. He thanked the foreman for his efforts and handed him a sack filled with gold pieces. As he felt the weight of his reward, the foreman knelt before El Señor, kissed his hand, and told him that the payment was excessive for such an undemanding task.

“You will have need of it,” said El Señor. “I swear to you that you will have much need of it.”

The foreman retired, murmuring a thousand thanks, and El Señor walked through the shadows of the chapel toward the altar and its painting.

Now it was he who fell to his knees, stupefied.

The painting from Orvieto, before which he had prayed and cursed so often, the witness to his doubts, blasphemies, solitude, and culpable delays throughout the days and nights of the construction of this palace, monastery, and inviolable necropolis, the scene of his ascent up the stairway to a distant and terrifying future, agent of the words of his testament, spectator to the nuns’ fear, the death of Bocanegra, the burial of the thirty cadavers of his ancestors, and the arrival of the mysterious strangers — the page of the tattooed lips and the pilgrim from the new world — that painting, come, it was said, from the fatherland of a few somber, austere, and energetic painters, the painting which in El Señor’s imagination had seen, heard, and spoken everything that had happened here, that painting was disappearing before his very eyes; its varnish was cracking and splitting, entire sections were peeling from the canvas like the skin from a grape, like the down from a peach, and the forms painted there, the Christ standing alone in one corner, without a halo, the naked men in the center of the Italian piazza, and all the details contemporary to the place which occupied the foreground, all the many and minute details of the background, all the New Testament scenes, no longer had any discernible or concrete form, they were turning into something entirely different, pure light or pure liquid, and like an arch of light, a river of colors, mingling and blending, were flowing above the head of El Señor, away, away…”

With maddened eyes El Señor sought the origin of the force that was stripping his painting and converting it into a stream of chromatic air: with a single brusque movement he turned from the altar and perceived, among the ever increasing shadows of the chapel, the point toward which the forms were fleeing: a monk at the foot of the stairway leading to the plain, a friar holding some object in his hands, something that glittered like the head of a pin or the point of a sword; El Señor lacked the strength to struggle to his feet; he crawled from the altar toward the stairway, following the route of that luminous way which coursed through the heavens of the chapel like an artificial constellation.

When he could see clearly, he stopped.

Brother Julián, a mirror in his hands, stood motionless before the first step of that finite but infinite stairway, completed but incompletable, passable but forbidden, traversable but mortal, and toward the mirror, a triangle, flowed the scrambled, liquid, and dissolved forms of the painting from Orvieto: the triangular mirror swiftly captured and imprisoned them within its own neutral image.

“Julián … Julián,” El Señor managed to murmur, captive to marvels, as the enormous painting was captive within the tiny mirror.

The priest seemed of stone; absorbed in his task he did not look at him, but said: “Punish me, Señor, if you believe I am stealing something that belongs to you, but pardon me if I but collect what is mine, so that I may give it to others; not mine, not yours: the painting will belong to everyone…”

Brother Julián turned his back to El Señor and directed the light of the mirror toward the top of the stairway, the plain of Castile, and the forms momentarily captured there flowed from the triangular mirror.

The mirror emptied; El Señor rose to his feet, choking back a savage growl, the voice of a hunted animal, of a wolf wounded in its own domain by its own descendants, tomorrow’s Princes who could not recognize in the poor beast an ancestor incapable of gaining the eternity either of Heaven or of Hell; he tore the mirror from Julián’s hands, he threw it to the granite floor and stamped it beneath his feet, but the crystal did not break, nor was the metal band which bound it on three sides altered in shape.

Julián said quietly: “It is to no avail, Señor. The triangle is indestructible because it is perfect. There is no other figure, Sire, which, having three parts, always resolves itself with such exactitude into a single unity. Assign three numbers, whatever numbers you please, to each of the three angles. Add them two by two and write the resultant number on the side linking those two angles. The number of each angle, added to the number that results from the sum of the other two, always comes out the same. What can we, you or I, do against such truth? Behold in this miraculous object the meeting of science and art; the astronomer-priest and I — Toribio and I — fabricated it together.”

“Julián,” panted El Señor. “In some mysterious manner I always knew you were the creator of that accursed painting…”

“You could have accused me at your will, Sire.”

“One day I explained why I did not…”

“In order to avoid nonessential disputes, not to give more weapons than necessary to the Inquisition? You have given them everything they need if the decrees that have been published recently and signed with your name are true…”

“But you, Julián, you and Toribio, from my most loved and protected order, the Dominicans…”

“The Lord’s dogs, Señor; as faithful to Him as Bocanegra was to you.”

“You placed that painting there, that black talisman, that mirror with which you have tortured me incessantly…”

“Without it, Sire, would you be who you are today and would you know what you know?”

“I always knew what that painting brought me to know even more fully: the angel of my heart will battle eternally against the beast of my blood. So be it; what have you done with that painting, yours and mine?”

“It has been seen by those who needed to see it in this time and place; now it will be seen by those who will need to see it in another time and another place.”

“By whom?”

“Señor; I have read your testaments in the papers Guzmán delivered to me, and which I delivered to my colleague the astrologer. You spoke there of the orifices of time, the dark, empty moments during which the past tried to imagine the future…”

“Yes, that I bequeath to them, that is written, a future of resurrections, a blind, pertinacious, and painful return to the imagination of the future in the past as the only future possible to my race and my land…”

“I merely fulfill your projects, all of which coincide with those of my order, the Preachers; what have we to preach but what we remember? and what are we to remember but what we have written or painted? There will be no witness to any identities except what I may have recorded in paintings, portraits, and medallions: thus yesterday’s identities will be today’s when tomorrow, Sire, be today.”

“Such magic has no place in the rules of memory which St. Thomas includes as part of the virtue of prudence. And without prudence, there is no salvation. Would you condemn your soul, Brother Julián, to save your art?”

“Now I can affirm to you, Señor, yes. I would condemn myself, if it save my art, which can save many.”

“How pitiful is your pride. Your art, poor Julián, is nothing but empty space behind the altar. Look.”

“My art is unsigned, Sire, and thus does not represent an affirmation of stupid individualism but an act of creation: in it matter and spirit are reconciled, and both not only live together but actually live. And before my act, they did not. You see magic in what is new, Señor. I see only what gives life to elusive spirit and inert matter: imagination. And imagination is what changes, not spirit or matter in themselves, rather the manner in which their union is imagined. My painting has already been here, in this chapel. It has been seen. It has seen. It is fitting now that it see and be seen in other places.”

“Where, monk?”

“In the new world, in the virgin land where knowledge can be reborn, rid itself of the fixity of the icon and unfold infinitely, in every direction, over all space, toward all time.”

“My most naïve friend: the new world does not exist.”

“It is too late now to say that, Señor. It exists, because we desire it. It exists, because we imagine it. It exists, because we need it. To say is to desire.”

“Go, then, sail in the ship of the mad toward the great precipice of the waters; unfurl, monk, the sails of the navis stultorum … Along with your art, fool, tumble over the cataract of the deep, and what will you leave behind you? Look again: empty space.”

“Fill it, Sire.”

“I? Would it not be better for you yourself to paint another painting above my altar?”

“No. My painting has already spoken. Now let another speak. It is his turn.”

“Who, monk, who? You must know, you who know how to hasten disasters…”

“Señor: show the severed head of that poor Flemish painter that you keep in a chest in your bedchamber to the empty space my painting occupied…”

SIXTH DAY

“Will you never leave here, Felipe?”

“Never, Ludovico. You may doubt everything, except that fact. This is my space, enclosed, determined. Here I shall live until I know what fate Providence has in store for me: eternal Heaven, eternal Hell, or the feared resurrections my mirror announced to me one day as I ascended those stairs leading to the plain.”

“Others will leave…”

“But no one else will come.”

“If you won a world, a new world, would you never visit it?”

“Never, Ludovico, even if it existed. Let others chase after that illusion. My palace contains everything I need to know my fate.”

“You climbed that stairway…?”

“Yes.”

“You saw only yourself…?”

“Yes…”

“You could have seen the world…”

“I tell you, the world is contained here within my palace; that is why I constructed it: a replica of stone to forever isolate and protect me against the snares of everything that multiplies, corrodes, and conquers: the canker of ambitions, wars, crusades, necessary crimes and impossible dreams, ours, Ludovico, those of our youth. See to what a bad end we have come. Pedro never knew the world without oppression that he dreamed of; Simón knew nothing but hunger and the plague; Celestina, only the slavery of her body. And you, Ludovico, you shall never know a world without God, filled with human grace.”

“We merely initiated those dreams…”

“Time has mocked you soundly.”

“Perhaps; now others will follow.”

“Who, woman?”

“The three youths.”

“My poor Celestina; if that is the illusion that sustains you, prepare to pass on your memory, your wisdom, and your wounded lips to another woman, and see yourself in the mirror of the old whore who passed them to you … And you, Ludovico, in what do you now place your dream of human grace, direct, Godless, with no need for mediators?”

“In everything I have learned these twenty years. Review everything I have said here and you will know what I know, no more, no less.”

“You have spoken to me of divine unity and diabolical dispersion, if I have understood you correctly.”

“Exactly. And the human struggle that takes place at all the intermediate grades on that scale. It is your struggle. But you saw only Felipe on the stairway, not the world. You saw the transformations of your individual matter, but not the doors that opened on each side of the steps as you ascended, beckoning you to open them and recognize other possibilities.”

“What possibilities, Ludovico? You tell me.”

“One lifetime is not sufficient. One needs multiple existences in order to unify a personality. Every identity is nurtured from all other identities. In the present we call ourselves solidarity. In the future we shall call ourselves hope. And behind us in the illusory past, living, latent, everything that had no opportunity to be because it awaited your birth to be given that opportunity. Nothing disappears completely, everything is transformed; what we believe to be dead has but changed place. What is, is thought. What is thought, is. Everything contains the aura of what it was previously, and the aura of what it will be when it disappears. You belong simultaneously to the present, the past, and the future: to today’s epic, yesterday’s myth, and tomorrow’s freedom. We can travel from one time to another. We are immortal: we have more life than our own death, but less time than our own lifetime. You did not open the doors, Felipe. You believe you have the entire world reproduced here within your palace, but you have only yourself; you are nothing, neither unity nor dispersion, not Heaven or Hell or resurrection: nothing, because you have denied the unities which finally joined would integrate your unity, and because you deny them, you have no Heaven, which is the first and last unity; if there is no Heaven there is no Hell; and if there is no Hell there is no dispersion; and lacking the stage of human grace which unfolds between these two poles, you will never know true resurrection, which is to continue to live in others, not in our own skin. Alone, Felipe, you will be only what you have feared: a wolf hunted in your own domains by descendants who fail to recognize you. They will kill you.”

“Is there time to do anything different?”

“Your chapel…”

“The Theater of Memory…”

“Transform it…”

“We shall work together, you and I, and Celestina…”

“The three youths…”

“Search for your Chronicler…”

“Bring Julián and Toribio…”

“We will add together all our knowledge in order to transform this place into a space that truly contains all spaces, into a time which truly embodies all time: a theater in which we occupy a stage where your altar stands today, and the world will unfold before our eyes, express itself in all its symbols, relations, stratagems, and mutations; the spectators on the stage, the performance in the auditorium; a theater with three revolving concentric circles, one that contains all forms of matter, another that contains all the forms of the spirit, and a third containing all the signs of the stellar universe; as each wheel revolves, all three, concentrically, all the combinations of nature, intellect, and the stars, will be formed, and from each combination will be born a specific form which, although symbolically remaining on our wheels, will actively separate itself from them, ascend your stairway, and go out into the eternal world; then the eternal world will return to us new forms that will descend your stairway and add their number to the triple wheel of our theater: unceasing transformation.”

“What shall we gain, Ludovico?”

“We shall know the truth of the order of things, and our place in them and with them: we shall be both actors and spectators in the very center of the struggle between chaos and intelligence, between dream and reason, between unity and dispersion, between ascent and descent: we shall see how everything that exists moves, integrates, relates, lives, and dies. We shall know everything, because we shall remember and foresee everything in the same instant. And thus, Felipe, we shall regain our authentic human nature, which is divine, and neither God nor Heaven nor Hell nor resurrection will any longer be necessary, because in the single instant which is all times, and in the one space which contains all spaces, we shall have seen and known, forever and from all time, the manner in which everything is related: the totality of manner and form in which we have been, are, and shall be, joined in a single source of wisdom that unifies everything without sacrificing the unity of any part. We shall attend, Felipe, the theater of eternity; we shall carry to its conclusion the secret and feverish dream of the Venetian Valerio Camillo, all things being converted into all men, all men into all things, eternal multiplicity nourishing eternal unity, which in turn simultaneously and eternally nourishes multiplicity. And then, yes, then we shall cry out with jubilation the baptismal words of the emerging era which represents the renascence of all things: what a great miracle is man, a being worthy of reverence and honor! He penetrates the nature of God as if he himself were a god, but he recognizes the race of devils, for he knows it was from them he descended.”

“Do we have time? Would it be sufficient for me to order the beginning of this new construction within the other? Today?”

“A single action is lacking.”

“What is that?”

“I have told you, it depends upon you. You are free.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“The seventh day?”

For a long time Felipe pondered these arguments in silence. Later he told Celestina and Ludovico how one morning in the month of July he had gone out hunting, expecting to ride through the flowering land of his childhood, and how, instead, a storm had broken that forced him to take shelter in a tent, with a breviary and a dog, far from the hunt arranged by Guzmán. Inexplicably, Bocanegro had fled as if he wished to defend his master from some grave danger. He returned, wounded, with the sands of the coast upon his paws. The hunting dog could not tell the truth the master now knew: Guzmán had wounded the dog when it had tried to defend Felipe from a threat greater than that of a wild boar: the return of the three usurpers … No, at the time that was not what worried him; rather, two most unusual events. One was the spirit of rebellion displayed by the band of huntsmen sent to the highest point of the mountain to warn with smoke and fire of the presence of the hart, consequently being deprived of the pleasure of the kill. The second: the inevitability of the final acts of the hunt: formally, El Señor was supposed to signal the sounding of the horns, the quartering of the hart, and the awarding of the prizes and rewards of the day; in actuality, everything had been done independently of his orders, as if truly he had given them.

As always, he went that night to the chapel. Two halberdiers were waiting for him with torches in one hand and bloody swords in the other. Mother Celestina stood uneasily between the two guards, shaking her head.

“Did you carry out my orders?”

“Señor; the foreman of whom you spoke is on the way back to his native village with a pouch of gold tied to his waist, but without hands to carry it or tongue to tell of it.”

“Very well.”

“And this woman, Señor, returned with your ring, which she says gives her permission to approach you. We found her wandering around the cells, and as she is one of those who damage reputations, who if she enters a house three times engenders suspicion, we brought her here…”

El Señor dismissed the halberdiers. From the corner of his eye he glanced at the empty space behind the altar. He asked Mother Celestina: “Are the Idiot and the dwarf in their places?”

“Fast in bed, Yer Maj’sty, beneath the same sheet, until one of them dies on us.”

“Did you speak with the nun?”

“Inesilla was awaiting me most impatiently, and caught me as I returned. An angel in disguise! How can that handsome cavalier scorn her, when they seem made for one another? ‘Mother,’ she said to me, ‘serpents are eating away this heart of mine.’ Oh, most gentle and fragile feminine sex! I repaired her maidenhead, divining your intentions for that mocker of honor with whose accomplishments the other nuns and the servants Azucena and Lolilla had entertained me; I went to that cavalier Don Juan, as you had arranged with Inesilla, and I said to him, ho, there, woman’s whore, little gamecock, downy-cheeked lad, you have deflowered an entire convent, saying — as I believe — that a pleasure unshared is no pleasure at all, Heaven have mercy, even though I am old, do you believe I am unable to receive and give pleasure? do you believe I have no heart or feelings? would you not take the sheets as shirttails with me? would you allow me to die with my virginity intact? and the cavalier laughed aloud, and said that Troy was stronger, and on the spot undid his breeches, and away … but I answered him that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that pleasure is all the greater at night, which is the cloak for sinners, and that I would await him, Yer Mercy, sir, in the cell where I shall now lead you, where he must still be, and where Inesilla has been for hours, heavily cloaked, and disguised in garments like mine.”

El Señor and the go-between walked to the palace convent courtyard, then along one of the corridors flanked on both sides by cells. Before one of them Mother Celestina stopped, placed a finger to her lips, quietly opened the Judas window in the door, and signaled El Señor to peer within.

Author of this work, inciter of this act, El Señor stepped back, clapped his hands over his mouth, prey to a delicious fright at what he saw as he peered through the aperture: the barbaric coupling of the cloaked Don Juan and Doña Inés, he in sumptuous brocade mantle, she in the voluminous tatters of the aged Celestina, both mantle and rags raised to the waist, the young cavalier’s virile member plunged into the deepest recesses of the novitiate’s soft, plump flesh, fornicating, rolling about, she with pleasure, he with fury, her eyes open, his closed, she taking pleasure and he trying to avoid seeing himself in the floor of mirrors, walls of mirrors, windows of mirrors, door and ceiling of mirrors, face down, refusing to look at himself in the floor, face up, seeing himself in the ceiling, again closing the eyes hidden beneath the mantle, forever condemned to seeing himself — or trying to avoid seeing himself — reproduced a thousand times, making love to the same woman, reproduced infinitely in the reflections of reflections, a heaven, earth, air, fire, north and south, east and west of mirrors, she moaning her unceasing pleasure, hidden fire, pleasurable lesion, savory poison, sweet bitterness, dolorous delight, joyful torment, sweet and savage wound, tender death: sweet love; he, neither wishing nor knowing, repeating the words she spoke.

“With a thorn from the limb of a dragon tree I opened anew her virginity,” said Mother Celestina, “and I lined the mouth of her pleasure with a double row of fishes’ teeth, and placed ground glass deep in her woman’s place, then bathed her mound of Venus with drops of bat’s blood; I restitched her with a thread as fine as a hair from your head, exactly the same, but strong as the strings of a cittern, so the cavalier would believe he was taking her for the first time, believing she was I, an ancient virgin, and the day will come, El Señor, Yer Mercy, when they will not recognize themselves in those mirrors…”

SEVENTH DAY

“Today is the seventh day,” said El Señor. “Will you see again, Ludovico? Will you open your eyes?”

“I have already told you, that depends upon you…”

“And what is it you expect of me?”

Ludovico reached out to touch Celestina. The girl dressed as a page took the blind man’s hand as he began to speak with deliberation. “Twenty years ago chance brought together four men and a woman on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres. At that time you listened to our dreams. You explained to us why they would be impossible. You did not tell us your dream. We could not therefore tell you why it too would be impossible.”

“Do you want me to do that now?”

“Wait, Felipe. You told Pedro that his community of free men would be destroyed, and that in order to survive, its members would be forced to act in the same ways as their oppressors. Freedom would be their goal, but in order to achieve it they would have to employ the methods of tyranny. Therefore, they would never be free.”

“Would that not have been the way? And would that oppression not have been worse than mine, since I have no need to justify my acts in the name of liberty, but they, on the other hand, do? I can be exceptionally benevolent, they cannot. Because no one can demand an accounting of me, I can condone failure; they cannot; they would be condemned by others. If the tyranny of a single man is reprehensible, would the tyranny of many men — who would multiply, never diminish, the oppression of the solitary tyrant — be any different? I am able to judge men remembering that within each breast, as in mine, an angel struggles against a beast; they cannot, for the heresy of liberty is the offspring of the Manichaean heresy, which conceives of all things in irreconcilable terms of good and evil. My enlightened discretion as a despot, Ludovico, is preferable to the deformed libertarian zeal of the mob; their oppression is worse than mine.”

“And you would not allow even one opportunity for Pedro’s dream?”

“Did Pedro’s dream offer a single opportunity to me? Besides, the old man is dead; whether drowned in this world or run through by a lance in the other, the effect is the same.”

“Pedro’s allies are gathered outside your palace. You thought you had rid yourself of his sons by setting your voracious mastiffs on them. But now Pedro has more sons than ever. Your discontented workers. The men of the cities, offended by your capricious decrees. The persecuted races, Moors and Jews, who are as much a part of this Spain as you and I, as Castilian or Aragonese, as Goth, Roman, or Celt. They have been born here, lived and died here; they have left the signs of their labor and their beauty in temples and books. No other land in this old world possesses such a gift: to be the common home of three cultures and three different faiths. Instead of persecuting them and driving them out, search for the way in which they can coexist with Christians, and those three links will form your true fortress.”

“This is my fortress, this palace, constructed as the shrine for the two sacraments which are but one: my power and my faith. I do not wish the chaos, the canker, the Babel you propose to me…”

“Outside the walls of your necropolis and its strict façade of unity, Felipe, another Spain has been gestating, an ancient, new, and varied Spain, the work of many cultures, multiple aspirations, and different readings of a single book.”

“The Book of God can be read only in one manner; any other reading is madness.”

“Without your realizing it, many men, inch by inch, have been gaining their human rights as opposed to your divine right. No, enclosed here, you did not realize that, as you were equally unaware of the emptying of your coffers that forced you to go to the Sevillian moneylender…”

“Not only words and things must coincide: all reading must be the reading of the Divine Word…”

“Be apprised: one city defended the sanctuary it had offered a persecuted man…”

“… for in an ascending scale everything finally flows into one identical being and word: God…”

“Be apprised: another city instituted a tribunal against the royal caprice of one of your ancestors…”

“God. God. The first, the efficient, the final, and the restorative cause for everything that exists.”

“Be apprised: one of the more distant cities began to meet in assemblies of the people in order to debate and vote…”

“And thus, the vision of the world is unique…”

“Be apprised: yet another city granted freedom to serfs emancipated from their serfdom…”

“All words and all things possess a forever established place, a precise function, and an exact correspondence with divine eternity…”

“Be apprised: still another city enjoyed a judge who dictated justice in accordance with laws, not caprice, and men’s eyes were opened…”

“The world of man and the world of God are expressed through a proclamation based upon the word, which can be enriched, combined, and interpreted, yes, but which is in the end immutable, Ludovico…”

“Be apprised: one city said secretly of your mandates: obey, but do not fulfill.”

“But every enrichment, combination, or interpretation of words leads us always to the same hierarchical and unified perspective, to a single reading of reality. And beyond this canon, all reading is illicit.”

“Be apprised: little by little the people of Spain, in secret, have given birth to the institutions of freedom.”

“Oh, honor us, God, oh, honorus, God, oh, onerous God…”

“Gather into one sheaf all these dispersed events. You will see the plant of liberty germinate. Do not destroy it. Give that opportunity to Pedro’s dream.”

“What shall I have gained?”

“Spain will thereby be a new world, a world of tolerance, and proof of the virtues of human exchange. And upon this new world we shall found a truly new world beyond the sea, and do there as we do here, coexist with the native cultures.”

“You are dreaming, Ludovico; I see no possible coexistence with idolaters and flesh-eaters.”

“Our crimes in the name of religion, dynastic power, and belligerent ambition have been no better. If you show yourself to be tolerant here, surely you will be persuasive there. As in that world Quetzalcoatl’s morality was perverted by power, that of Jesus has similarly been perverted here. Can we not return together, freed from terror and slavery, to that original goodness, both here and there?”

“You say that all this depends on me?”

“If you will but open your arms to those who in a spirit of rebellion have joined together in the tile sheds, forges, and taverns on this work site, in nearby towns, and among the delegations in the procession that brought your ancestors here.”

“You say workmen and burghers, Moors and Jews, surround me and threaten me. I already know that. Is there also rebellion in the religious orders?”

“The thirty processions came from far away, from all extremes, from Portugal and Valencia, from Galicia, Catalonia, and Majorca. The secret adepts of the ancient Waldensian, Cathari, and Adamite heresies joined them disguised as monks and nuns, beggars and pilgrims. You are surrounded, Felipe. Will you receive them in peace?”

“What must I offer them?”

“The shared governing of this kingdom. Their freedom, but also yours. Although you never told us your dream that afternoon by the seashore, you clearly allowed us to see your fears.”

“I had none. I knew what I was doing. I demonstrated to my father that I was worthy to succeed him, to increase his power and bring unity to its consummation. Do you want me to sacrifice everything to the dispersion now threatening me?”

“You are not alone. I have three sons. You have three brothers.”

“The usurpers, Ludovico?”

“The heirs you never had, Felipe.”

“And that I never desired.”

“Felipe, my life would not be the same without you: I love you that much. In my sons, your brothers, recognize the bond between your solitary unity and the community of many. They are three, remember: unity that increases without dispersion.”

“Be charitable, Ludovico. Let them be patient with me. Let them allow me to disappear in peace. Then they can take everything, and have no need to rebel. Let them allow me to follow my own destiny to its conclusion…”

“Nothingness is not a destiny.”

“Perhaps the power of nothingness would be: my privilege.”

“Will you not share even that?”

“Tell those discontented workers, those rebellious burghers, the Moors and Jews and excommunicated heretics, that out of love they disperse and leave me in peace, enclosed here, without love. That is all I ask.”

“Rebellion is one manner of loving. And your destiny is no longer yours: in spite of anything you can do, it is shared now. Do what you will, those three youths have already diverted the course of your destiny merely by coming here; nothing will be as you had previously planned it; nothing will be as you previously desired it…”

“Unchanging world…”

“Change has begun with the news about the new world. The new world already exists in the imagination or in the desire of all those who heard the third youth speak, or heard of what he told.”

“Brief life…”

“The second youth has prolonged it, fulfilling his destiny as a holy madman, encountering dynastic continuity in the most humble, scorned, and deformed of women, Barbarica, of all those who dwell within your palace the soul most worthy of love, Felipe, and as he joined himself in matrimony, lighting the spark of rebellion, extending life to the dynasty of all men; the strange ways of a destiny that is no longer yours, Felipe…”

“Eternal glory…”

“The first youth based it upon immediate pleasure, desire converted into action, passion rooted in the present … Felipe, the monk Simón dreamed of a world without illness or death. You countered with the dream of your fears: solitude.”

“I said then that if the flesh cannot die, the spirit would die in its name. I would deny men their freedom and men could not barter slavery against death. Thus Simón’s dream would be defeated.”

“And you added that you would live forever enclosed in your castle, protected by your guards, never daring to go out, fearing to know something worse than your own impossible death: the spark of rebellion in the eyes of your slaves.”

“You say that I am surrounded today, and that it is not a spark but a bonfire. But you see: I am not afraid.”

“No, you said something different. Try to remember with me. A conversation on the beach twenty years ago. Not that you would fear the simple and irrational menace of the multitude, but rather the rebellion that merely ceased to recognize you. You would kill no one. You would simply decree the non-existence of every person. Why would they not have paid you in the same coin? This would be the world’s vengeance: to kill you by forgetting you exist.”

“Do I ask anything more? But today’s rebels, Ludovico, do recognize me, since they have challenged me…”

“Perhaps this is your last opportunity. If you do not recognize them, your horrible dream will be fulfilled. You will be a phantom in your own castle.”

“Do I ask anything more? You forget that the other time I ordered them all killed.”

“I love you as much as I hate you, and I cannot explain why. You condemned my dream to sterile and solitary pride. You were right. The grace of the knowledge acquired by a single man may perhaps kill God, but it may also kill the one who obtains it. Today I am almost able to say that my hatred toward the egoism of science is capable of casting me once again into the arms of an abominable belief in the Christian God. I have told you my story. I did not follow the path you spoke of that afternoon. Fate joined me mysteriously to the destiny of three children and the wisdom of many men in many places. This I learned: that grace is shared knowledge. No man can keep it for himself. Shared knowledge is true creation, always fragile, maintained by many desires, errors, jubilations, fears, unexpected losses, and sudden discoveries. I cannot separate myself from the three lives I have protected, from my conversations with the learned doctor in the Synagogue of the Passing, from the dream I had on the rooftop in Alexandria, from the ten years that perhaps I lived with the Citizens of Heaven in the deserts of Palestine, from the words of the one-eyed magus in Spalato, from the vision of Valerio Camillo’s theater in Venice, from the crusade of the free spirit in Flanders, from our encounter with the old man in the windmill and the tales he told us, from the dream of my third son in the new world, and from the company of both Celestinas, the old and the young. I am all that I know, plus these lives, these stories, and these words. I offer them to you in order that, through all these events, ideas, and destinies joined together here today, I may offer you what few men have had, Felipe: a second opportunity…”

“Poor Celestina. She longed so for complete love. Have we ever known it? Did we three have it as we made love those nights in the castle? What excitement, Ludovico! To kill by day and make love by night. My youth ended there; perhaps my life…”

“Felipe, listen, a second opportunity. Let them enter: do not kill them this time, do not repeat history, win your freedom, everyone’s freedom, by proving that history is not unalterable, purge for all time your first crime by avoiding the second.”

“I did not know then. How strange. What a distant memory, Ludovico. I feared not being recognized because I feared not to be loved. I wished to be loved. I loved Isabel. I loved Inés. Yes, I loved the pleasure our companion, the young Celestina, gave me. Ludovico: I have known the old woman, Mother Celestina. She does not remember me. Along with her lips she passed her memory to this woman who accompanies you. Mother Celestina, Ludovico: see the destiny of love, just see…”

“A second opportunity, Felipe, do not repeat the crime of your youth…”

“But today, do you see, Ludovico? I fear nothing because I love no one; do you see, Ludovico? will you finally open your eyes?”

“I shall open them on the day of the millennium.”

“What day will that be?”

“Remember the prophecy of the magus of Spalato. The Sybyl announced the coming of the last Emperor, the King of peace and abundance, the triumph of true Christianity, who will vanquish the Antichrist, who will go to Jerusalem, deposit his crown and mantle on Golgotha, and abdicate in favor of God, initiating the third age of history in expectation of the eternal judgment that will put an end to history. It is written that this King will govern over all the peoples of the world, uniting them in one single flock, rex novus adveniet totum ruiturus in orbem. You must be that providential monarch, Felipe, in my name and yours, I beg you, in the name of our lost youth and our regained lives…”

“I lack the strength, Ludovico.”

“They will help you. That is why I have brought them here. The Sibyl said: a cross upon the back, six toes on each foot. They will set in motion the third age.”

“The Antichrist. How shall I know him?”

“This is your opportunity to re-create history, Felipe. Señor: conquer yourself.”

El Señor had no strength for further conversation; and that night, while Ludovico and Celestina slept beside the ash-filled hearth in the bedchamber, he again removed the severed head from the coffer, and carried it to the chapel.

He stopped before the space left vacant by the flight of the painting from Orvieto. He took the head by its long gray locks and raised it high, exhibiting it before the altar. The half-closed eyes of the head blinked. El Señor wanted to scream, to throw the head on the granite floor and return to the sanctuary of his bedchamber. But as his hand trembled and the eyes of the head blinked, the empty space began to fill with form and color; El Señor stood transfixed by the miracle; as all the lines, volumes, figures, and perspectives in the painting from Orvieto had poured toward Julián’s triangle of light, now new figures, outlines, and colors flowed from the eyes of the severed head toward the space behind the altar, struggling toward composition, seeking their places, unfolding harmoniously, and finally integrating into a triptych with its three panels.

On the first of these, the left wing, El Señor saw the lost promise of an earthly paradise, harmonious clarity, a light joining together all species of creation, animal, vegetable, and mineral; from a pond painfully emerge the first beasts, winged fish, otters, thrushes; a valley enclosed by soft hills leads to a grove of orange trees and a blue lake in whose center rises, the color of the rosy dawn, the fountain of youth: unicorns bathe in its waters, swans, geese, and ducks glide across its surface; immediately behind the fountain, giraffes and elephants stand poised on a plain, and beyond them rise bluish mountains, encircled by spiraling flocks of birds; in the foreground, three figures: a naked youth, seated: the pilgrim of the new world; his face displays innocence, astonishment, and forgetfulness; kneeling beside him is a naked woman with long, copper-colored hair: she has the face of the young Celestina; and standing between them, he, El Señor, his hair longer, but the same thick lips, the same prognathic jaw hidden behind the same beard, the same eyes of serene madness, the same incipient baldness, holding the woman by one hand, offering her to the man. El Señor was delighted with this vision, asking himself how it happened that he would join that man and that woman; he stared at the beneficent tree of life under which the youth sat, palm leaves, a clinging vine, fleshy fruit; still holding high the severed head, he approached the panel depicting Paradise and with horror saw details imperceivable from a distance: a leopard fleeing with a dead rat in its jaws, a scorpion killing a toad, a dark, heavily maned, almost human beast, impossible to identify either as man or animal, devouring a prostrate body, crows nesting in the caves of the mountains and at the base of the fountain of youth, and perched in a dark circle, the timeless bird, the owl, watching over everything …

He stepped back, examining the central space of the triptych, and he saw a vast garden of delights, a universe of small human forms interwoven in successive planes to form a sumptuous tapestry of rosy flesh, bodies that resembled flowers, full of grace, the color of mother-of-pearl, entwined in chaste play, a river of flesh flowing from a lower foreground to a second intermediate plane, ending on a third plane that blends into the horizon, the whole bathed in clear blues, delicate roses, olive greens: brilliant and sweet reflections of human felicity; El Señor stared, lost in the vertigo of ideal, unobtainable sensuality; the half-opened eyes of the severed head blinked swiftly and among the figures appear monstrous animals, gigantic fishes, rapacious birds, enormous strawberries, raspberries, cherries, and plums; breast-shaped crystal covers one couple, other bodies are half hidden in the twin shells of a mussel; a solitary man is devouring an enormous strawberry with as much greed as the dark beast its victim, one man has inserted a bouquet of flowers into another’s anus and is thrashing his buttocks with a second bouquet, a crow alights upon the sole of an upturned foot whose owner, in an attempt to free himself from the bird of bad omen, is offering it an enormous plum, in the river floats a scarlet fruit from which emerges a crystal cylinder, a man inside the fruit stares at the rat sitting at the other end of the cylinder, each is staring at the other, above them on the fruit floats a bluish globe, a transparent membrane inhabited by a pair of lovers captured forever within a sphere of mirrors, a woman plunged head-first in the river, her parted legs exposed in the air, hides her sex with her hands, but upon that sex nests a crushed raspberry; the bodies, all of them, are prisoners of something, of themselves, of glass, of mirror, of the mussel, the coral, the birds, the shells, or the solitary gaze of the owl.

“Happiness and glass are quickly shattered,” the mouth of the severed head spoke in the Flemish tongue; El Señor almost dropped the head; he closed his eyes for an instant, persevered, and looked at the second plane of the central panel of the triptych; again the fountain of youth, and around it a cavalcade of naked men and women mounted on horses, unicorns, wild boars, tapirs, griffons, goats, tigers, bears, an eternal circle of delight and lamentation, orgasmic trembling and exhausted pleasure, white and black women bathing in the stream, birds perched upon their heads: peacocks, storks, and crows. El Señor quickly turned his eyes to the last, the most distant plane of the painting: a frozen mineral lake, in its center a sphere of blue steel topped by horns of pink marble, the fountain of adultery, forbidden couples, black and white, brother and sister, mother and son, father and daughter, woman and woman, man and man, surrounded by an icy world, marble plants, pearl flowers, golden trees, quicksilver streams, all watched over and encircled by four stone castles: El Señor stepped closer, the figures were so tiny, it was so difficult to distinguish the faces, and, near, they were so terrible to see: El Señor covered his face with his hand, and between the cracks of his fingers saw, yes, each face multiplied, repeated everywhere, his own, it was he, he himself, naked, he thrust in a tunnel, fed from the beak of a monstrous bird, it was Isabel, La Señora, his wife, engaged in love-making with a Negro, his mother, the one called the Mad Lady, hidden in the tower of a castle, placing one finger up the anus of a figure hidden inside a different tunnel, Felipe, little Felipe, my darling son, shall I put my finger up your little bottom? Julián and Toribio, the confessor and the astronomer, peering from inside a vegetal hut, handing an enormous fish to Isabel, the nuns, Milagros, Angustias, Clemencia, Dolores, naked, are caressing one another, cherries capping their heads, and again he, El Señor, kneeling, flowers up his anus, lashed by Ludovico, Celestina inside a crystal cylinder, an apple in her hand, is watched over by the shadows of the Mad Lady and Barbarica the dwarf, Isabel, Isabel, transformed, hairless, unpowdered, all the sadness of the world in her eyes, is staring at a diabolical mouse advancing through a crystal tunnel to eat the face of the Queen, above her in the crystal globe, the prison, Don Juan and Inés coupled in a prison of transparent mirrors, Guzmán, Guzmán is an owl with four arms and four legs, and again Don Juan, the Idiot, and the pilgrim from the new world, naked, with Celestina are plucking fruit in a forest; again, all are mounted upon steeds of passion, all are raked by the same spur, all reined by the same bridle: heaven, earth, sea, fire, wind, heat, cold, and the waxing and waning of the menstrual moon crowning the entire painting: circle, horror, passion, immutable law, warning, warning, fragility, flight, flower of a day: these were the things El Señor saw.

Then the mouth of the severed head spoke again: “That is what you see, corrupt thing that you are … I painted something different … The sexual act so pure it is a prayer before the eyes of God … The act of the flesh with no remorse or fear of God … The external man cannot stain the man within … Who loves God more? A scorned and subjected people, a people of sinners, of publicans and Samaritans who love their fellow beings? See what I painted … On the left, the original Paradise, when a malevolent God separated man from woman, who previously had been one, the image of the good God, of the supreme androgynous divinity … In the center, Paradise restored by the free spirit of man, without need for God: there is no Original Sin, all flesh is innocent … And now, wretch, look to the right, see the true hell of your own creation…”

And so El Señor, motionless as the victims of the Medusa, looked at the last and third panel of the painting, Hell, conflagration, everything aflame, everything bathed in the color of fire, all of them united once again, Inés is a pig seducing an emaciated Don Juan, the other two youths are crucified, the Idiot upon a harp, the pilgrim upon a rebec, both being devoured by serpents, the Mad Lady, naked, is devoured by a salamander, Isabel stands with a die upon her head, Ludovico hides his face as a hooded demon crouches upon his shoulders, a large clothed and crested bird leads a naked Toribio by the hand, Guzmán, yes, Guzmán is pinned to an overturned gaming table, Barbarica is jigging about holding the great rosy phallus of a bagpipe in her hands, the nuns are noseless monsters with gaping mouths and lidless eyes singing notes they read from a staff imprinted on naked buttocks, the monks peer from beneath the psaltery, Toribio lies naked, torturing himself with the iron crank of a machine, he, he himself, El Señor, is an indescribable monster, a human hare wearing a copper caldron as a crown and seated upon a wooden privy stool devouring men one after the other, then expelling them through the seat of the throne of shit, eliminating them into an excremental well, and at the center of everything is the head, the same head he now held by the hair, the severed head, pale, attached to a broken eggshell, the torso and long legs pure-white bone disappearing into enormous blue boats of shoes, face, egg, leg, visage, ovum, bone the color of an atrocious birch tree petrified in spectral whiteness; and beyond, beyond, the conflagration of the world, a flaming edifice, his palace, his life work, the seat of his power, the fortress of his faith, a holocaust, a ruin, a cloaca …

Choking back a growl, El Señor forcibly closed the mouth of the severed head; the thin lips and ill-shaven cheeks were hard as stone and resisted closing; he covered the eyes of the head with his hand, closed the lids, the eyelids were flaccid and rough like those of a reptile; he hurled the head against the painting, it burst against the steel sphere in the center of the triptych, the icy fountain of eternal youth; it fell, leaving a star of blood upon the painting; and that line of blood, as it trickled down the painting, wrote upon the pigments in small Gothic characters a name El Señor could barely read:

He ran to close the wings of the triptych, to exorcise forever that monstrous vision of life, passion, the Fall, the happiness and death of everything ever conceived or created; intending only to close the wings of the Flemish painting, he found instead his hands were touching a new painting, and this ultimate image was of the entire world, a perfect sphere, transparent and empty, surrounded by water, the first landscape of the earth illuminated only by moonlight, and there God was but an inferior figure relegated to a position outside the world, as if the world had existed before, long before, God, and the Divinity had only recently arrived, rancorously, weakly, slowly, hurriedly, newly arrived; and toward the top of the painting was written in golden letters, Vides hic terram novam: ac caelum novum: novas insulas.

“Oh, my God, honor us, oh, honor us, God, oh, honorus, God, oh, onerous God!” El Señor cried out. “Is this the end of the world? is this the beginning of the world? is this the beginning of the world, or the end of my world?”

THE REBELLION

Most magnificent señores: The affairs of the kingdom become every day more inflammatory, and our enemies are perceiving it. In view of this situation it is our opinion that we must arm ourselves as quickly as possible. First, to castigate tyrants; second, so that we may be secure, where did you find that letter, Catilinón, who gave it to you? what novelty is this that it is not written by hand but in even and freshly inked letters that smear at the touch of my fingers? I intercepted it, Señor Don Guzmán, it came addressed to the Comendador of Calatrava, who is no more, having been run through by the blade of my master Don Juan; I passed myself off as the servant of the Comendador, for it was with great stealth that hurried messengers who arrived on horseback from Avila commended it to me, and so I said to myself, there’s mischief afoot here, and since I cannot enter the King’s presence, I deliver it to you, And above all it is necessary that we all join together to establish order in the badly ordered affairs of these kingdoms, because in the case of such numerous and such important affairs, it is just that they be determined by numerous and most mature counsels, they are just beginning their deliberations, Catilinón, I must act immediately, spread the word among the workmen, the Moorish captives and Jews liberated by the Idiot, hurry through the forges, tile sheds, workshops, and taverns, the hour has come, El Señor stands petrified before his altar holding a Gorgon’s head in his hand, the gates are open, the guards are nowhere to be seen, inside they believe the tempest has passed, outside, Cato, outside, my rascal, do your work, We know well, señores, that many will revile us with their tongues, and that later many will defame us with their quills in histories, accusing us of seditious insurrection. But between them and us we place God Our Lord as witness, and as judge, our intentions in this case. For our goal is not to supplant obedience to the King, our Señor, but to abolish the tyranny of his consorts, for they hold us as their slaves, not the King them as his subjects, I am one of you, I, Guzmán, chief huntsman, and you, overseers, architects and foremen, and which of you will be safe from the madness and caprice of El Señor? you have seen what happened only a few days ago to one of yours, he who left here with his tongue and hands amputated by order of El Señor so as to be unable to speak or write of one of the dark mysteries that occur inside there; yesterday it was he, today it will be someone else, tomorrow you or I; regard the courage of our estate companions, the burghers of Avila, Toledo, and Burgos, prepared to take up arms so that these kingdoms be governed by laws and not by caprice; the gates are open, I swear to that; it is the moment to act, Jerónimo, Martín, Nuño, injustice is added to injustice, resentment is mounting, yes, twenty years ago El Señor forced my young bride on the day of our wedding, he besmirched her, because of him she went mad, she was never mine, that is called his right, his right to rape virgins, I came here to this work, I bided my time, and my time has come, Martín, Nuño, right, justice, as a warning my brother was ordered to be killed by hunger, thirst, and cold, left naked and surrounded by troops in the wintertime on a hilltop in Navarre, after seven days my brother died there, by the order of a Lord inferior to this one who governs us, and if the lesser did so much, what will the greater not do? Nuño, in order to be half free and to leave our homeland, we had to deliver our inheritance to the noble Lord of the place where we were born, and here you find me, less injured than you, Jerónimo, Martín, Guzmán, but no less determined, Do not believe, señores, that we are alone in this tumult, for, speaking truthfully, many generous caballeros who are representative of all three estates have joined with us, how much did the burial of El Señor’s thirty ancestors cost, brought here by guards and halberdiers amid chants, canopies, and the prelates of all the orders? what would have been the cost of burial of the workman smothered beneath the earth slide and there mourned by his widow and left to rot? the oxen are more sure of food than we, for the beasts have up to two years’ provision of hay, straw, wheat, and rye, whereas there is no provision made for us once this job is completed and we have eaten up our wages, five ducats every three months, and thus in Segovia, as well as León, in Valladolid and Toledo, in Soria and Salamanca, in Avila and Guadalajara, in Cuenca and in Burgos, in Medina and Tordesillas, caballeros of the middle estate are speaking the same words as we, magistrates, jurors, mayors and recorders, canons, abbots, archdeacons, deans and precentors, learned scholars, captains and marshals, doctors, lawyers, and university bachelors, physicians and physickers, merchants and money-changers, notaries and apothecaries, you will be expelled, Jews, persecuted, Moors, there will be no place for you in this kingdom of purity-of-blood, pure Christians, clean of bloodline, who are you? how many are you? there was a time when the Mozarabic Christians lived in Mussulman territory and the Mohammedan mudejares in Christian lands, and each tolerated the other and also coexisted with the Jews, and they called themselves the Three Peoples of the Book, and San Fernando, King of Castile, proclaimed himself King of the three religions, and the Moors and Jews brought to Gothic barbarism architecture and music, industry and philosophy, medicine and poetry, and the Inquisition was held within bounds so as not to surpass the power of the monarchs, and thus the cities prospered, and institutions of local liberty were taking shape, but now, who will be safe from the new powers of the Inquisition? in what innocent act will they not see suspicion, read guilt, dictate extermination? how will you defend yourselves against torture, prison, death, and the loss of your lives, families, and possessions? to whom will you appeal? on what grounds will you appeal? read, all of you, this decree issued by El Señor: everyone is guilty unless he proves his innocence; will you prove yours on the rack, Moor? at the hour of the garrote, Hebrew? in the torture of the pillory, serf? and also all variety of offices of all and each of our cities, shopkeepers, masons, armorers, silversmiths, jewelers, jet vendors, cutlers, ironsmiths, foundrymen, bakers, oil sellers, butchers, spice sellers, salt sellers, waxchandlers, fellmongers, hat makers, shearers, linen drapers, rope sellers, hosiers, bonnet makers, harness makers, cobblers, tailors, barbers, chair makers, carpenters, stonecutters, napkin makers, it is not the hour to seek counsel, it is the hour to act, yes, Guzmán, to act, here we are in the very precinct of El Señor, the gates opened, the inhabitants of the palace sleeping or engaged in strange devotions, unaware of everything that is going on, without opposition we can attack the very heart of oppression, pierce it, cut off its head with one stroke, pikes, poles, chains, the steel forged in your forges, Jerónimo, the weapons of the poor, quickly, the gates are open, in such a manner, señores, that we are able to speak of the general will of this kingdom to undo the injustices that affect us all and thus, for what it is understood we do, it should be sufficient justification that we do not ask you, señores, for money to initiate war, but rather that we ask your good counsel in seeking peace, where is the rockrose where we used to shelter our flocks, eh? on this very spot there was a stream that never ran dry, and nearby a woods that was the sole refuge for the animals in winter and summer; today only roses of black crape grow in this devastated garden; and afterward, what? do you doubt, Jerónimo? it is merely that I remember, Martín, I remember, the gates open, so it was with the earlier slaughter, the gates open, be cautious, wait, that is no longer possible, Jerónimo, look at the mob, we are all going, down the stairway leading from the plain to El Señor’s chapel, that is the open gate that was never closed, the gate we all respected, imbeciles that we were, it was always open, do you realize the insult? have they feared us so little? thirty steps from the plain to the chapel, we have only to descend them to reach the sepulchers, everyone, armed, lances, javelins, pikes, chain, steel, hoes, hatchets, and torches, workers, Arabs, Jews, heretics, beggars, overseers, whores, eremites, Simón, Martín, Nuño, and Jerónimo, all drawn along by the mob and the whinnying of the horses and the bellowing of the bulls which break their fences and trample, terrified, nervous, and sweating, across the plain of Castile, whinnies, bellows, dust, the flight of the crows, everyone down the stairway, Many youths of these cities, rising up against the latest edicts of El Señor, seek immediate violence and it will take a great effort to persuade them that we must establish a democracy, omnia eo consulta tendebant ut democratia, and they answer that the conquest of liberty cannot be attained by following the paths of the law, de libertate nunc agitur quam qui procurant nullas adeunt leges, omni virtuti pietatique renunciant, law for those who stain all things? pity for those who offer none? Simón, all of you, join us, do not change your clothing, but dressed as monks and nuns join us, beggars, pilgrims, eremites, prostitutes, followers of Peter Waldo, against the excesses of Rome, the crowned serpent, the false pope, the power of the Inquisition, now, march, oh, perfect Cathari, herein dwells the god of evil, let us burn his dwelling place, this is the house of the Devil, Adamites, believers in the innocence of the body of our first father and of all his sons, to the palace, everyone, the gates are open, follow me, Simón, for I have seen the illness and sorrow and poverty of man, follow me, unsheathe your ancient knives, raise high your cudgels, light your torches, It will be difficult to contain them if we do not act swiftly, and for this reason we ask you, señores, by your leave, that you examine the present letter, then without further delay send your procurers to the Junta of Avila, and be assured that as the situation is inflammatory, the longer you delay in going, so much more you increase the damage to Spain, but previously, Guzmán, hurry, leave, Señor, leave this chapel, leave your bedchamber, seek refuge in the deepest dungeon until the storm passes, they are already descending the stairway, what are you saying, Guzmán? one only ascends those steps, no one has descended them, ever, I climbed them to know my own death and resurrection, are they descending in order to know their own life and resurrection? neither life nor resurrection, Señor, everything is prepared for this moment, as it was twenty years ago the guards are hidden, everything has the appearance of innocence, but everyone is prepared to act, as you acted twenty years ago, Guzmán, I gave you no orders, I still have not finished debating this problem within my own heart, I still am consulting with my own soul, it is too late, Señor, flee, hide, the hordes are descending that stairway, they are armed, I have but followed the example that you yourself provided two decades ago, I am faithful to your lessons, go, Señor, far down to the same dungeons where you will find the pilgrim of the new world and your companions of the past seven days, the blind flautist from Aragon and the girl dressed as a page, quickly, Señor, take this letter, I have always told you, other, worse rebellions lie ahead, crush today’s in order to prevent the morrow’s, quickly, away, Señor, allow me to act in your name, for as the dog Bocanegra is dead, no one is more faithful than I, Guzmán, and all the matters we treat in the Junta will be treated in the service of God: First, fidelity to our King, El Señor. Second, the peace of the kingdom. Third, the reparation of the royal patrimony. Fourth, injuries done the native inhabitants. Fifth, neglecting to call into session municipal councils. Sixth, tyrannies invented by some of our own. Seventh, the impositions and intolerable burdens suffered by these kingdoms, see the sepulchers? who will give us a burial like that? see the luxury of the false church, the false pope, and the monarch of the lewd visage, raise the slabs of the tombs, hack at the marble figures, throw those old bones outside their tombs, take up the ciboria, drink the wine, breakfast on the Hosts, there is more bread in this tabernacle than all that our fathers ate in their lifetimes, strike with your hoes against the pillars, turn over the chests, dalmatics, surplices, girdles, dress yourself in them, tumble in one day what it took five fruitless years to build, five years of hard labor to construct a royal cemetery, fuck them! run through the passageways, courtyards, corridors, kitchens, stables, dungeons, free the prisoners, stuff yourself with victuals, tear down the tapestries, set fire to the stables, to the cells, pray, my sisters, for El Señor, doors barred, padlocked, pray, God save you, Queen and Mother, Queen of Mercy, the prophecy has been fulfilled, the hordes of the Antichrist have arrived, Angustia, Clemencia, Dolores, where has Inesilla gone? where is she that we do not see her? who knows, Madre Milagros, she is so turbulent by nature, so curious, bar the door, lock it, Ave María Purísima, conceived without sin, to the bedchambers, they will go there, look for them, El Señor, La Señora, the Idiot, the dwarf, the Mad Lady, hidden, find them, and then, So that, in order to destroy these seven sins of Spain, we believe that seven remedies must be invented in the Holy Junta, and so it will seem to you, for you are sane men. So that, in treating all these matters, and in finding for them a most complete remedy, our enemies will not be able to say that we with the Junta are rebelling, but rather that we are new Brutuses of Rome, redeemers of the fatherland, Martín, holding high a torch, ran through the corridors of white leaded windows, opening doors, finding nothing, El Señor, we must take El Señor, that was the order, cut off with one blow the head of the tyrant, La Señora, take La Señora, he opened the door, the bedchamber of white sands and Arabic tiles and caliph’s tapestries, La Señora kneeling beside the bed, the cold body on the bed, a dead man, a mummy made of scraps and pieces, motionless, the woman he had seen and desired so many times, he wheeling the handbarrow filled with stone, she walking beneath the sun, the hawk upon her wrist, that vision of soft whiteness, of untouchable beauty, here, within reach of his hand, at last, he threw the burning torch to the floor of sand, conflagration of the desert, desire, take what he wants, do not wait, the hungry body, the incarnate vision, he seized the woman, pulled her from her kneeling position, she did not cry out, she did not speak, blue eyes, brilliant, defiant, moist lips, half opened, twisted, half-naked breasts, infernal, milky white, he embraced her waist, kissed her with fury, she pushed him away, she was pushing him away, finally she recognized him, the beast, she smelled the sweat, the garlic, the shit of the true man’s body, she clawed his hairy chest, the tanned arms, the rebellion, what was it? where was it happening? what were the reasons? here, now, take what he had so desired, nothing else mattered, Martín tore off La Señora’s clothing, revealing her breasts, he sucked the nipples, threw her to the sand, placed one hand beneath her buttocks, his penis strained against his loincloth, he freed it from between his thighs, like an arrow his sex was erect, pulsing, slavering now, with his other hand he covered the woman’s lips, spread open her legs, saw the treasure, the jungle, the bottom of the sea, he was going to enter, he was going to submerge himself in an ocean of silver fish, he was going to enter, the door, swift footsteps on the sand, he was going to enter, Guzmán’s blade, the dagger thrust between Martín’s shoulder blades, the workman fell heavily on La Señora’s wide skirts, she bit one finger, her gaze feverish, Guzmán standing, dagger in hand, Martín mouth down, dead, penis erect, Martín’s heavy body, Guzmán hoisted it up by moist armpits, threw it face down on the sand, the sand stained with blood, silence, finally, what do I owe you, Guzmán? what do I owe you? silence, Guzmán’s closed eyes, the bloody dagger resheathed, nothing, Señora, nothing, I have other things to do, La Señora’s loud laughter as Guzmán left the bedchamber, the insulting, godless pride of La Señora, lackey, swine, Don Nobody, how did you dare interrupt my delicious coupling with this male? We grow tired of obeying without being consulted, and joined together in a Junta born of the general will of the three estates, we shall reestablish the laws of the kingdom diminished by the recent decrees of El Señor our King, we will pay no extraordinary tributes that not be approved by the assemblies of all the people, and in the kitchens there are geese, young pigeons, eel pies, wine from Luque, from Toro, and Madrigal, here, have some, and you, and you, drink your fill, drink, forget your daily plate of chickpeas, you, beggar, you, whore, you, hermit, let the madmen mumble, the monk Simón and his Shrovetide of mystics, all crammed together in the chapel guarding a triptych they say was painted by one of their own, preventing the altarpiece from being profaned or destroyed, possessors of the temple, the new religion, restored Christianity, the beginning of the third age, purity, the destruction of false images, no, lack of purity, an exhausted body on earth so that the soul arrives in Heaven purified, arguments, flagellations, cries, naked disciples, men and women, ropes of bodies fornicating before the altar, the same as in the Flemish painting, Simón, his arms thrown above his head, shouting for order, order, order, Adamites, adepts of the free spirit, the illuminated, Cathari lying upon the tombs of princes, endura, await death, pass quickly through life without staining the body, perfection, the Insabbatist Waldensians, poverty, destroy luxury, let not a stone remain upon stone, argument, blows and insults between Waldensians and Adamites, destroy the painting, protect it, Arabs scurrying toward the high tower of the astronomer Toribio, do not fear, brother, we shall break nothing, we shall touch nothing, let us pray from on high, we have dragged ourselves like worms for so long, let us sing to Heaven here in the heavens, and the Jews sat down in a courtyard, to wait, and those converts will no longer be persecuted who with their labor enrich the coffers of Spain, nor mudejares already integrated into Christian communities, nor shall any prosecution continue because of blood, and Jerónimo, separate from the throngs invading El Señor’s palace, searched, descending by the narrow, dank spiral stairways into the deepest dungeons where black water dripped deep beneath the earth, water that never reached the calcined plain where drumming hoofs of horses and bulls resounded, and there in a cell, motionless, he found El Señor seated on a wooden bench, absorbed in his own thoughts, oblivious to everything that was happening, and the old man with the beard fiery as the fires in his forge said to him, do you remember me? and from his self-absorption El Señor looked at him and shook his head, no; Jerónimo, twenty years ago, the wedding in the grange, I have waited a long time, Señor Felipe, too long, but I am here now with my chains in my hands, chains I forged for you, to kill you in the way I wish, with the product of my labor, to beat you to death, and El Señor looked up, smiled, and said, I do not remember you, I do not know who you are, but I am grateful to you for what you offer me, I await death, I desire death, I have not taken my life because I am a most devout Christian, give me what I have most desired, you, a stranger, you, a man with no true reality for me, I shall be grateful to you in eternity, and Jerónimo hesitated, looked at El Señor, and said yes, you are right, your torture is life, I shall not give you what you want; he dropped the chains at El Señor’s feet, left the black dungeon, strangely elated, strangely sure of his action, the guards took him prisoner outside the dungeon, and Guzmán said, bind him with his own chains, you should have killed me, Jerónimo, and Jerónimo roared, struggled, was subdued, and then, still staring into Guzmán’s eyes, he spit in Guzmán’s face, Judas, Judas, nor shall the King have the right to grant posts in perpetuity, nor shall the intimates and courtiers of the crown be freed at his whim, but be prosecuted, as will the King himself, so that the right to resistance shall be established within a new constitutive order in the kingdom, of which the King is but one element, chapel, passageways, courtyards, stables, kitchens, bedchambers, cells, towers, the halberds of El Señor, the arrows of El Señor, the harquebuses of El Señor, the lances of El Señor, the swords of El Señor, the daggers of El Señor, the axes of El Señor, posted at every exit, beneath every window, beside every opening in this palace of interminable construction, blocked, all the holes through which the mice might escape, the burrows fumigated, explosion of powder in the chapel, arrows in the chests and backs of those running through the courtyards and kitchens, axes in the skulls of those eating in the kitchens, daggers in the hearts of those dozing away their love-making and gluttony in bedchambers, swords in the bellies of those praying in the tower, halberds in the necks of those waiting in the courtyard, not one alive, shouted Guzmán, running from place to place, even those who seem dead, stab them again, run through with your swords anyone that moves and the unmoving as well, two deaths to everyone, three deaths, a thousand, the example will spread, let the members of the Junta of Avila know what awaits them, tear out rebellion by the roots, tear out the eyes of the dead whose eyes remain open, the tongues of those whose mouths remain open, the hands of those with open hands, the heads of them all, ax them, heretics, Moors, beggars, pilgrims, Jews, whores cohabiting with blasphemy and sedition, quickly, the palace is a cup running over with blood, raise it before the altar of the Eucharist: this is my blood, this is my body, and no decision shall be taken if it does not conform with the will of all and the consent of all, and from her walled-up niche, through the narrow aperture at the level of her yellow eyes, the Mad Lady watched the slaughter in the chapel, so comfortable, her limbless body propped so easily on that invisible pedestal, nothing but torso and deluded brain, snuggled so closely in that eternal uterus of stone, she had returned to the womb, she watched the death of the enemy, the hordes, those who attempted to deny the very reasons for the life and death of the ancient Queen, dead and living, giving thanks, Felipe, my son, you have again demonstrated that you are worthy of my succession, my blood flows in your blood, Spain is one, great, strong, We do not doubt, señores, but rather you may marvel, and many in Spain will be scandalized to see a Junta joined, which is a new novelty. But then, señores, you are wise, you know how to judge the times, considering the bountiful fruit which is expected of this Holy Junta, you must disregard that evil men will think of us as traitors, for from that we shall draw renown as immortals in the centuries to come, Nuño understood only one thing, free the prisoners, he was lost in the honeycomb of subterranean passages of the palace, he approached a cell where a candle sputtered, with the pick he had brought as a weapon he broke the chain and lock and opened the door, here, you are free, the blind Aragonese flautist, the girl dressed as a page, and the youth who had accompanied her to Jerónimo’s forge one not so long ago night, he embraced them, you are free, we have taken the palace, the gates were open, El Señor offered no resistance, come with me, come away from here, take me to the chapel, Ludovico asked, there I shall see again, Felipe understood, I can open my eyes again, the three went out, guided by Nuño, the son of askaris on the Moorish border, Ludovico holding the hands of Celestina and the pilgrim from the new world, asking, and the other two, my sons, what do you know of them? who? the one they disguised as a prince and called the Idiot, the one they disguised as a seducer of women and called Don Juan, no, I have not seen them, what do they look like? exactly like this one, Nuño, the three of them exactly alike, no, I haven’t seen them, then this is the heir, my son, the free man arrived from the new world, the only one to enter the history of Spain and not be devoured by it, the survivor, my son, they climbed the spiral stairway behind the chapel, stopped an instant behind the altar, the silence in the chapel was more profound than that of the dungeons, I am going to see, son, Celestina, Nuño, I am going to open my eyes again, I lost the mirror that could reflect the entire world, at first I believed that without eyes there would be no memory and consequently there would be no imagination; then I found out that I had seen everything before I closed my eyes, and I could keep it forever; I would have seen no more than any other dead man my age and that would be the measure of my memory and my imagination; I could have slashed my eyes; I did not do it because, in spite of everything, I held the hope of one day again seeing something worthy to be seen, the millennium, the triumph of human grace, God’s death, the millennium of man, that day has arrived, I am going to open my eyes, tell me when we reach Felipe’s chapel, there I shall open my eyes again, Because it is a general rule that all good work is received by evil men under guise of something different. This being presupposed, it is beneficial to know that in everything to come, all affairs may succeed in the reverse of our plans, and they may endanger our persons, destroy our homes, and finally, we may lose our lives, and Lolilla, there’s more mischief afoot than we had thought, and tell me the truth, in all this festivity didn’t you hope to play a little tune on some heretic’s or Moor’s or Jew’s flute? well, don’t you complain, Catilinón, for you had designs on the fancy purse of the English whore or the blasphemous nun when you should have been content with my old cunt, and I with your mandrake, but don’t complain, we’ve reaped our harvest, my petticoats are filled with jewels and my doublet with ducats, Lolilla, and now we have the wherewithal to escape from this den of spooks and set up business in Valladolid, Avila, or Segovia, get along now, lady holier-than-thou, hup, you swaggering braggart, this way, bad-mouthed hussy, come on, blustering bastard, let’s fun awhile, here, in this cell, look, and they entered the chamber of mirrors where Don Juan was dallying with Doña Inés, rascal, the master shouted to the servant, where were you when I needed you most? did you not promise to protect me, to scout ahead of my adventures, protect my flights, take my place if it be necessary? oh, my lord Don Juan, I would gladly take your place in this instant and give you Lolilla in exchange for Inesilla, cackled Catilinón as he helped Don Juan separate himself from the nun, oh, if you must stick your nose in here, tell me why I desire that syphilis-wracked whore, moaned Don Juan, and Lolilla cried out when she saw him, the tip of your taper is all bloody, my lord Don Juan, oh, that holy whore has stripped the skin off it for you, and Don Juan swept his brocaded robe over his injured parts, Doña Inés arose, weeping, Catilinón and Lolilla marveled at seeing themselves reflected in walls of mirror, ceiling of mirror, floor of mirror, what do you have stuffed in your clothing, rascals? you look as if you’re about ready to give birth, sly puss, and you, Sir Cock, have you grown tits?; the servants’ faces flushed red as fire, and Don Juan ordered them to remove their clothing and lie down on the floor of mirrors, Inés covered Lolilla in Mother Celestina’s rags and Don Juan draped his brocade over Catilinón; Inés and Don Juan dressed themselves in their servants’ clothing, stick that fine poker in Lola’s pelt, Cato, enjoy yourselves in your prison of mirrors, my crafty bastards, flee with me, Inés, between your legs I recaptured my brother’s dream, he awaits us in a brigantine, take the chain and padlock this prison, I smell treachery in the palace, let us flee, I shall look after you, my lover, your presence maddens me, your delicious scepter will heal, your words hallucinate me, we shall live, together, far away from here, your breath poisons me, come, Don Juan, come, Inés, together let us call on Heaven, and if Heaven does not hear us or if its gates close against us, Heaven will be responsible for our passage on earth, not I, in such a case we shall say that disfavor is favor; danger, security; that robbery is riches; exile, glory; to lose is to win; persecution is the crown; and death is life. Because there is no death as glorious as that of a man who dies in defense of his republic, funeral drums resound across the plain, more muted than the drumming of oxen’s and horses’ hoofs again enclosed in fences, the smoke of the taverns and huts dies out, mourning women stare in silence, muffled, old before their time, barefoot children, bleary-eyed, burned by the sun, blond locks on dark heads, bleached by the sun, with round black eyes and torn fingernails, stand clutching the skirts and hands of the women, mangy dogs wander about, storks fly in search of their nests, three lines of El Señor’s soldiers, lances raised, black standards, harquebuses at the ready, halberds at rest, stand on three sides of a square of dust, and on the fourth, before the tall midday sun-lighted façade of the uncompleted and uncompletable palace, El Señor sits beneath a black canopy on a throne of carved wood rosettes, he too dressed in black, as prematurely aged as the women in the crowd who have borne thirteen children since they were thirteen years old, the Bishop stands beside him, crimson miter, dalmatic and tunicle, brocade waistband in his chasuble, pastoral staff, beside him the Inquisitor of Teruel, the monk with thin skin drawn taut across the bones, wearing the habit of St. Augustine, on each side of them deacons and subdeacons carrying the cross, acolytes with their tall, richly adorned candlesticks, all dressed in dalmatics and cords of silver cloth, damask and slubbed silk, and behind El Señor, bending to speak into his ear, Guzmán, in ceremonial attire, a short fur cape, velvet cap, black breeches, his hand resting on the hilt of his blade, drums, the first prisoner, Nuño, bound to one of the two stakes driven into the dusty plain, naked except for a loincloth, the guards beat him with rods, a hundred times, his entire body is an open, bleeding wound, then they cover his body with honey, a goat is led to him and begins to lick the honey with its rough tongue, stripping away shreds of skin, Nuño closes his eyes, grits his teeth, flesh and hide, blood and nerve, the goat’s rough tongue, the drums roll, the second prisoner, the ringleader, an old man with a beard as fiery as the fires of his forge, the rack, he reaches the stake, they tie him to it so that his feet do not touch the ground, to the large toe of each foot they tie weights of a hundred and forty pounds and wait half an hour, watching him suffer slowly while the Augustinian of Teruel exclaims in his hoarse voice, bulwark of the Church, pillar of truth, guardian of the Faith, treasure of religion, defense against heretics, light against the deceit of the enemy, touchstone of the pure doctrine, accursed scum! kill the rebels! I watch you die with pleasure, rebel dogs, we are the ministers of the Holy Inquisition! and then they coat the naked body with fat and set fire to the stake, and the Inquisitor of Teruel cries, light the flame! Jerónimo roars like a lion, they have lighted only his sides, so only his ribs are burned, they extinguish the fire, they place upon him a shirt dipped in nitric acid and light it; Jerónimo’s beard sizzles, he closes his eyes, his eyelashes and eyebrows are burned away, again they extinguish the fire, they remove the shirt, they seize his clenched fists, force them open, sink needles and nails deep beneath his fingernails, they wash stinking urine over his body, they press his right hand between burning planks, and press, and burn, they squeeze his wrist with iron pincers, they wait, Guzmán has asked to be the executioner, he removes his dagger from its sheath, approaches Jerónimo at the stake, cuts off his penis, stuffs it in the unfortunate man’s mouth, he stretches the testicles back until he can stuff them in Jerónimo’s anus, he slits open Jerónimo’s belly in the form of a cross, rips out the entrails and the heart, cuts the heart in four portions, throws one to each of the four cardinal points, laughs, to Pater Noster, to Ave Maria, to the Credo, and Salve Regina, he gives the final order, cut off his head, impale the head upon a lance at the entrance to the palace, cut the body in four parts and hang them from four poles at the four corners of the palace, such is the will of our King, our Señor, and you, Nuño, son of askaris on the Moorish frontier, know me as you die, I am the son of that impoverished lord of the Ta’if kingdoms who had no money to retain you when you and yours abandoned our lands to weeds and drought, condemned us to poverty, leaving us without hands for labor, believing you would gain a little freedom by becoming the King’s subjects and ceasing to be my father’s laborers; look at you now, Nuño, I am collecting at the hour of your death the debt of slavery you owe me, and may your body rot here as example and warning to rebels, We have wished, señores, to write you this letter so that you see what is our goal in calling this Junta, and those who fear to venture their persons, and those who suspect the loss of their properties, will not be cured by following us in this undertaking, or even less in coming to the Junta, because as these are heroic acts, only very exalted hearts may undertake them, between the two, La Señora and her mandrake, the homunculus with vaguely defined features, cherries for eyes, a radish for a mouth, crumbs for hair, a root for a body, his monstrous appearance hidden as much as possible beneath high boots, heavy breeches, a bejeweled doublet, a loose cap with an eyeshade and long ear flaps, gloves embroidered with precious stones, ruffles on his wrists and a high ruff beneath his chin, between them they lifted the mummy made of royal bits and pieces from the bed in the Arabic chamber, and the little dwarf said, Señora, a great silence reigns now, night has fallen, this is the time to do what I have recommended to you, help me carry your Prometheus, you take his arms and I his feet, he is well joined, his parts well adhered thanks to the storax gum and resinous cáncamo, quietly, Señora, we shall leave together, through the galleries, halls, and small courtyards they went, carrying the mummy, first the feet, carried by the homunculus who was leading, through severe cloisters of strong, square pillars, through forests of arches, beneath the carved ceilings of the storerooms, through a series of eleven doors, until they reached a vast gallery La Señora had never seen, two hundred feet long and thirty feet high, the fronts, sides, and domed ceiling covered by painting, columns embedded in the walls embellished with fascia, jambs, lintels, and railings in a row, in the manner of balconies, the ceiling and the dome with grotesque and elaborate plaster ornamentation, a thousand variations on real and fictional figures, plaster medallions and niches, pedestals, men, women, children, monsters, birds, horses, fruits and flowers, draperies and festoons, and a hundred other bizarre inventions, and at the rear of the room a Gothic throne of roughly worked stone, and behind the throne a semicircular wall with feigned painting of two draperies hanging from their spikes, with flounces and fringe, look, Señora, it seems so real, it deceives many until they come to draw them and touch them; La Señora and her dwarf carried the inert body of royal bits and pieces, fashioned from the worm-eaten nose of the Arian King, an ear from the Queen who stitched flags with the colors of her blood and tears, the very flag that El Señor had one day cast into the putrid moat of the conquered Flemish city, another from the astrologer King who complained that God had not consulted him about the creation of the earth, one black eye from the fratricidal King and a white eye from the rebellious Infanta, the livid tongue of the cruel King who had forced his courtiers to drink the bath water of his concubine, the mummified arms of the rebellious King who had risen in arms against the stepfather who murdered his mother, the blackened torso of the King who violated his own daughter and who died between flaming sheets, the skull of the Suffering and the shriveled sex of the Impotent King, a shinbone from the virgin Queen murdered by the King’s halberdier while she prayed, another shinbone from the Mad Lady, a relic of the sacrifice of the present Señor’s mother, the twisted lips of the Reprieved, the murderer of his brothers, found dead in his bed after the thirty-three and a half days of the justice of God had passed, the silky hair of the kidnapped Princes whose throats were slit by Hebrews by the light of the moon, the rotted teeth of the King who employed all the days of his reign in celebrating his own funerals, and the feet of the most chaste Queen who never changed her clothing and whose shoes had to be pried off with a spatula when she died, they seated this creature on the throne, the homunculus ran behind the throne, picked up a golden crown encrusted with sapphire, pearl, agate, and rock crystal, a mantle of opaque purple, a scepter and a sphere, and he said to La Señora, you have invoked all the arts of the Devil, you have called upon them all, my mistress, you have attempted everything, except the simplest and most apparent: do it yourself, as this your mummy is seated on the most ancient throne of Spain, crown him yourself, thus, wrap him in the royal mantle, that’s it, pry open his afflicted fingers and close them again upon this orb and scepter, La Señora did as he advised, and that very instant the royal mummy blinked, his eyes filled with turbid light, his arm creaked as he raised the scepter, the backs of his knees squeaked, the twisted lips opened, the livid tongue moved, the homunculus shrieked with joy, words tumbled from the crowned mummy’s lips, he spoke contradictory words, close, Santiago, after them, I live without living in myself, plus ultra, plus ultra, in my hunger I command, dominate, Castile, dominate, you, the dominant, scorn what you do not know, and since from Spain we come, let us resemble what we were, La Señora fell to her knees and murmured, thank you, thank you, she kissed the hand of the King of Kings, now Spain has an eternal King, a Holy, Caesarian, Catholic Majesty, We do not doubt, señores, that in our wills both here and there we are one; but the distances of lands forbid communication of persons; from which follows no little harm for the enterprise we have undertaken, to mend the kingdom, for very arduous affairs are long in their conclusion when there are long roads to travel, and let it not be said of us what Don Pedro of Toledo once said, that he hoped death would come to him from Spain, so that it might come to him very late. Only that to the messengers who carry these words you give your entire faith in these words, El Señor has been magnanimous, too benevolent, said Guzmán, for I have never tired of warning him that the innocent, once pardoned, will not tarry in making themselves his enemy and very quickly will assume the guilt of the accusation, and in my opinion all of you are guilty, faithful allies of the seditious rebels who yesterday fell into our trap, but I am still more faithful to the desires of my Señor, you are free, you, blind man, and you, girl, and you, monk from pestilent cities, the fever of rebellion spreads throughout the kingdom and I am sure that we soon will meet again, you, up to your elbows in intrigue, by the side of the insurgent townsmen of the cities of Castile, I by the side of my King, Guzmán is patient, we will settle our accounts then, and my son? pleaded Ludovico, he has done nothing, he is innocent, he can be accused of nothing, will he not be freed? yes, laughed Guzmán, but not now, not with you, I shall free him in my own way, El Señor has granted me that kindness, Celestina kissed the forehead of the pilgrim from the new world, clasped the youth’s hands in hers, spoke into his ear, we shall wait, one day we shall triumph, we shall await the new millennium, I give you this appointment, far from here in another city Ludovico has told me of, Paris, the fountain of all wisdom, the fourteenth of July, when this millennium is dying, the fourteenth of July of 1999, I shall look for you, I shall find you, all waters communicate with each other, we shall find one another over the waters, we shall arrive by water, water passes from the Cantabrian to the Seine, from the Tiber to the Dead Sea, from the Nile to the gulfs of the new world, I shall look for you, I shall find you, upon a bridge, I shall pass my memory and my life to another woman, kissing her upon the lips, my lips are my memory, try to remember me, I shall look for you, Guzmán ordered the halberdiers to take Celestina, Ludovico, and Simón from the donjon, lead them to the plain, and abandon them with a week’s provisions, he did not understand why El Señor was pardoning them, Guzmán would have subjected them to the rack, the same as the ringleader, Jerónimo, when the two of them remained alone in the cell, Guzmán stared with derision and amusement at the youth, We wish to make known to Your Mercies that yesterday, Tuesday, which we counted the eleventh, Guzmán came to this town with two hundred musketeers and eight hundred lances, all prepared for war. And certain it is that Don Rodrigo rose no earlier against the Moors of Granada than Don Guzmán against the Christians of Medina. Once at the gates of the town, he told us that he was a captain general and that he had come for artillery. And, as we had not been told that he was captain general, we set ourselves to defend it. So that being unable to reach an agreement by words, we had to determine the matter by arms. Guzmán and his men, as soon as they perceived that we were superior to them in strength of arms, resolved to set fire to our homes and property, because they believed that what we had won by our efforts, we would lose by our greed. Certainly, señores, all the weapons of our enemies, aimed against one point, wounded our flesh, and in addition, the fire destroyed our properties. And above all else, we saw before our eyes that the soldiers were despoiling our women and our sons. But we give thanks to God that, thanks to the good effort of this town of Medina, we sent Guzmán away vanquished, twenty-four years ago I was brought still a child to your house, Felipe, Isabel said to him that night, a young Princess with starched petticoats and corkscrew curls, do you remember?; I arrived on the eve of a terrible slaughter; we celebrated on the same day our wedding and your crime; today I ask you that our separation coincide with this new slaughter that closes so perfectly the circle of your life, my poor Felipe, I believe that I now know all it is possible to know about you, and I about you, Isabel, everything, my poor dear? everything, Isabel, all your secrets, and the worst of them, too, the secret that is a greater crime than all of mine, for now you have seen, my crimes are repeatable but yours are not: the dead would have to be revived before you could again commit your unique crime, I shared Celestina with my father, with Ludovico, and perhaps with Beelzebub himself, I shared Inés with Don Juan; on the other hand, Isabel, I could not share you with your first lover, that is why I never touched you, that is why in my love you will always be that most perfect ideal, untouchable, incorruptible, soiled by no one, for only my mind sustains it and nourishes it and only with me will it die: I will share you only with my life and my death; and knowing this, do you believe, Isabel, that your love affair with the one called Mihail-ben-Sama could matter to me — with what relish I sent him to the stake, never invoking his true crime, only a secondary one — or your love-making with the one they called Don Juan, who is now living forever the hell he so feared and the death he so long postponed with a single female in a prison of mirrors; did you always know the truth, Felipe?; always, Isabel; and even so, you loved me, Felipe, in spite of my first love?; I shall always love you, Isabel; only I, among all living beings, shall have known and loved what you could have been; my love, beloved Isabel, has been the votive temple for that precious child who entertained herself in playing with her dolls, waking drowsy duennas, and hiding peach stones in the gardens: you, my child Isabel, you, my eternal lover, you, what you could have been; what I myself could have been; what we could have been together: the withered sheaf of our possibilities, the shattered shell of our realities; Felipe, my poor dear Felipe, I have harmed you greatly, I shall harm you greatly still, I shall leave in your land deep seeds of rancor, I shall live despising Spain until I purge myself completely of Spain, you will know my evil though I journey far from here; and in spite of everything, Felipe, given what we have been, being what we are, knowing our shared miseries and weaknesses, tell me, Felipe, did we learn at last to love one another?; I have always loved you, Isabel, you answer, have you at last learned to love me?; yes, Felipe, a thousand times yes, my child, my sweet muck-working mole, my little saint, my pitiful chained puppy, my wounded bird, my poor scarred man, conquered equally by humility and pride, my tender, impossible lover, sequestered in the stone of the sacred prison you have constructed, my innocent victim of the power you inherited, how am I not to love you to the very enormity of my hatred, he who hates so intensely, at times without realizing, gives all the intensity of his love to the one he thinks to despise; yes, that is why I love you, for the same reasons you love me: I love what could have been; thank you, Isabel, thank you for coming this night for the first time to my bedchamber, without my asking you, of your own will, thank you, look at it, what a poor naked funereal chamber, thank you for coming to me for the first time and — we know, for the last time, is that not so? no more talk, Felipe, take my hand, take me to your bed, we shall spend this last and first night together, clothed, not touching one another, like a dead brother and sister, like two additional statues lying in the crypt where you have united your ancestors, sleep, sleep, sleep … Do not marvel, señores, at what we have said; marvel at what we have not yet said. Our bodies are fatigued by combat, our houses all burned, our properties all stolen, our children and women with no place of shelter, the temples of God turned into dust; and especially, our hearts so disquieted we fear we shall become mad. We cannot believe that Guzmán and his men sought only artillery; for if this were so, it was not possible that eight hundred lances and five hundred soldiers would cease, as they ceased, to do battle in the plazas and turn to robbing our homes. The damage in sad Medina done by fire, you will want to know, all the gold, silver, brocades, silks, jewels, pearls, tapestries, and riches that were burned, is beyond the power of tongue to tell, there is not a quill that can record it, nor is there heart that can think on it, or mind that can consider it, there are no eyes that can see it without tears; in burning our unfortunate Medina the tyrants did no less harm than the Greeks in burning powerful Troy. We have such justice in our demands, señores, that we must never desist in our undertaking. And if it is necessary, we shall send more men into the country, and aid them with more money and artillery, for it would be no small affront to Medina if this so just war were not carried to a conclusion. We seek first a compromise: Guzmán provoked the encounter of arms. What he did in Medina he will repeat, if we permit it, in Cuenca, Burgos, Avila, and Toledo. To the bearer of the present notice give your entire faith in what he tells you in our behalves and belief, damp walls of Galicia tapestried with ivy, dead leaves, the ground icy cold; as the brigantine put out to sea from the port of La Coruña, La Señora looked at the Spanish coasts for the last time; El Señor lacked the will to oppose the annulment, he acquiesced in the fact that he had never touched Isabel, and it did not matter to him now that this truth be known in all the circles in St. Peter’s; some dim-witted cardinal spoke of canonizing him, believing that chastity was a requisite of sanctity; El Señor commissioned Julián, the friar, to go to Rome to initiate the process before the Sacred Roman Rota; no one wanted to accompany La Señora in her English exile, which for her was only a return to the land of her father; the maid Azucena wept and explained and made excuses, you are returning to England, my mistress? and what language do they speak there? how could a muddlehead like me get around there without either understanding or being understood? I, La Azucena, speak English? Jehosaphat, not even if it were God’s will, and remember, mistress, I know that little men like yours are born beneath gallows, gibbets, pillories, and racks, are engendered by the tears of the tortured, ay, poor Jerónimo, cut to pieces like a hunted stag, ay, poor Nuño, left to bleed to death and rot, his flesh stripped away by a goat’s tongue! at the feet of both, my Señora, there must be two other little men like yours, two mandrakes, mistress, waiting for me to go by the light of the moon, cut off a strand of my hair, tie it to a black dog’s tail, the other end to the mandrake root, and pull, cover my ears, and amid cries so terrible they cannot be heard, our little men will be yanked from their dank cradles of mud and tears; I shall put in cherries for their eyes, and they will see, radishes for their mouths, and they will speak, wheat on their little heads, and their hair will grow, and a great carrot between their legs, my mistress, tee-hee-hee, and I shall have a great dingalingdong to entertain myself with while I grow old, for I am nothing but an argumentative old whore, and may God keep me so, although without La Lolilla, my mistress, who do I have to argue with or play ruff and honors with? for that scrawny old Lola has disappeared on us, I don’t know where she’s got to, and I scare myself to death thinking that in all the slaughter they may have confused her with the English whore, begging your pardon, mistress, Your Mercy, and chopped the bawd in two with an ax, and besides, if the Devil is to carry us off, it will be the same either here or there, but better a known Devil than a Devil still to know, and the scrubbing maid wept and made her goodbyes, and the little dwarf said no, he wouldn’t go either, for who would be left to look after the true monarch, the mummy seated on the Gothic throne in the gallery of paintings, columns, and plaster ornaments, who would listen to what he said, applaud the strange movements of his arms, his harsh and trembling gestures, celebrate his witticisms, so clumsy and difficult with that ancient, livid tongue, look after his tidiness, attend to dressing him, change his clothing according to the time, the mode, changing fashions, for that King, the true King, would in truth remain on the throne for centuries and centuries to come, and the little dwarf would be his only page, his buffoon, his confidant, counselor, and executor, and only Julián agreed to accompany Isabel, but he only to an English port, and from there he would continue on to Rome to carry out El Señor’s charge, and then, Friar, and then? Brother Julián leaned on the port railing, watching the deep inlets of the sheer coasts of Galicia fade into the distance, and said to her, Señora, as soon as the kingdom is again at peace, the rebellion of the city communities put down, all the riches confiscated from the insurgents, the Jews expelled and the Moors conquered, everyone will be employed in navigation and discoveries; the new world must exist, because the vanquished desire it so they can flee to it, and the conquerors as well, in order to channel into virgin lands all the energies and discontent that have flowered since the middle of the summer, all done in the name of the unity of Spain, proof of its unique power and evangelizing mission; a thousand ambitions palpitate beneath these reasons, those who can be Nothing here, can be Somebody there; you will see that in leaving their land all the Spanish will become Princes and luminaries, and in the new world the swineherd and smith and laborer will be able to achieve the lineage that being Spanish in Spain he could never achieve; the treasures of the new world will attract both conquerors and vanquished in the Spanish fratricide, and those conquerors, having subdued Spain, will have energy to spare for subduing idolaters; I shall go with them; I have something to do there; together they gazed at the green and golden coast of Galician autumn, La Señora recalled the smoke and flames of pyres consuming cadavers of the two slaughters, one in today’s palace, one in yesterday’s castle, on reaching Spain, on leaving Spain; then she turned her back to the land and looked at the tossing, slate-gray sea opening in stony waves before the brigantine’s advance; England, her country, she had left so late, she told Julián, the friar, she was returning so late, no, it was not too late, it would not be too late, there would still be time, a virgin Queen, humiliated, burdened with vengeance and anguish, thus she would return, thus she would present herself, the home of her uncles, the Boleyns, awaited her, from those forgotten fields of Wiltshire she could plot her revenge, no one knew the Spanish land and its men as well as she, no one would know as well as she how to counsel her own race, reveal the secrets and weaknesses of terrible Spain, Isabel, virgin Queen, returning to her fatherland, filling the seas separating La Coruña from Portsmouth with powerful squadrons of vengeance, English fleets, English pennons, English cannons, and then toward the west, toward the new world, sons of Albion, so the new world would belong not only to Spain, she, Elizabeth again, as she was baptized, would take charge of instigating, pressing, intriguing, harassing, enlightening England so that its men also would set foot on the new lands and there forever confront the sons of Spain, challenging them, as cruel as they, and more, as covetous as they, and more, as criminal as they, and more, but without holy justification, without dreams of becoming gentlemen, without the temptations of the flesh, considering the new world a challenge, not a prize, like the Spanish, exterminators of natives, but without joining their bodies, or living the torments of that divided blood, seekers of treasures they would never find, they would have to wrest the fruits from the hostile land with their sweat and calluses, leisure for the Spaniard, industry for the Englishman, enervation of feelings for the Spaniard, the discipline of strength for the Englishman, illusion of luxury for the former, frugal reality for the latter, oh, yes, orders would be inverted, for the Spaniard — abandoning penitence, scarcity, sadness, and doors closed to ascent in his own land — would find too much leisure, too much opulence, and too great ease for personal grandeur in the new world, and he would sink into a swamp of golden softness, confusing reality with his person, and the Englishman abandoning the same problems in his world, oppression, war, and hunger, would find in the new world no leisure, no opulence, no ease, only the challenge of a new and virgin land that would give him nothing in compensation for his flight but what he conquered with his bare hands, working from nothing; Spain: conquer cities of gold; England: conquer virgin forests, untouched land, solitary rivers, plow furrows where Spain digs mines, build wood cabins where Spain raises palaces of quarried stone, paint white what Spain covers with silver, decide to be, where Spain contents itself with appearing, demand results, where Spain proclaims desires, commit yourself to actions where Spain dreams illusions, sacrifice to work what Spain sacrifices to honor, live the consensus of the hour where Spain lives the expectation of destiny, live forever disabused while Spain passes from illusion to disillusion and from disillusion to new illusion, let England prosper in the hard calculation of efficiency while Spain exhausts herself maintaining dignity, heroic appearances, and the self-gratification of commendation by others, yes, England asked everything that negated her, the dream of pleasure and luxury would not be for her, she sacrificed those dreams gladly so that Spain could swell to bursting, poisoned first from the excess the new world offered her famished austerity, and then from the disenchantments that sense of satiety produced; Spain: on the docks at La Coruña, Julián, I offered a gold ducat to a mendicant; it was my parting gift; and do you know what he said to me: “Look for some other poor man, Señora”; I shall give that same ducat to a beggar in London, and I shall tell him how to multiply it, invest it, reinvest it, lend it on interest and with conditions, attract partners, money-changers, contractors, the Jewish intelligentsia expelled from Spain, fleets of pirates, provocations against Hispanic dignity, all the measures, all of them, Julián: the gold of the new world will pass like water through Spain’s hands into England’s coffers: I swear it; and for yourself, Isabel, what do you want for yourself, Señora? this autumn morning, sailing back to my English fatherland, Julián? Elizabeth wants nothing but the image of a little girl, a Princess with corkscrew curls and starched white cotton petticoats, and she will ask that child, did your dolls arrive safely? none was broken on the voyage? where did you bury your peach stones? oh, the hawk, how it soars, how it spreads its jet-black wings! have you ever heard of a bedchamber with white sand floors, Arabic tiles, soft tapestries? will you come with me to the Court of Love where a company of knights dressed in white will compete for your hand against a company of knights dressed in black? do you hear the little bronze pellets dropping into a basin, marking the hours? let’s play, ring-a-ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tishoo, a-tishoo, we all fall down, Yesterday, Thursday, we came to know what we had never wanted to know and heard what we had never wanted to hear: it is fitting to know that Guzmán has burned down the very loyal town of Medina. As God the Lord is our witness, if he burned the houses in that town, he will roast our entrails. But hold, señores, as true that as Medina was lost for Segovia, either no memory shall remain of Segovia, or Segovia will avenge the injury to Medina. We have been informed that you battled against Guzmán, not like merchants, but like captains; not as if unprepared, but defiantly, not like weak men, but like strong lions. And as you are sane men, give thanks to God for the burning, that it afforded you opportunity to achieve such glory. For beyond comparison you must hold greater the fame you earned than the properties you lost. The disasters of war stir us to move the General Junta from Avila to Valladolid, and from there to continue the struggle for the general remedying of the kingdom, occasioned by bad governing and the counsel our Señor the King has received, conquered in Medina, conquered in Segovia, conqueror in Torresillas and in Torrelobatón, my defeats and victories are all victories, for I provoked and goaded the townsmen to war with tears in their eyes and affronted dignity, bad judges of cold military calculation, but what do such victories and calamities mean to me if I still have not vanquished you? Guzmán had said to the young pilgrim of the new world brought once again by Guzmán to the site of the first hunt on the spurs of the Cantabrian range, and in view of the coast, you see that I am loyal, youth, you came from here, I bring you again to this very spot, on a clear day from this height one can see the beach and the Cabo de los Desastres, El Señor told me, set him free, one of his brothers sleeps forever, fast in bed in Verdín, and the other purges his pleasure and heresy in a prison of mirrors, the prophecy has been defeated, there are not three now, or two, but only one, let him go free, there is no way he can harm us, and all our efforts must be directed against the rebellious townsmen, who in truth are threatening us, not against a poor wretch who dreamed a new world, he says you were three, that is what the blind flautist and the girl with the tattooed lips led us to believe, but Guzmán is not so easily deceived, I know the truth, there was only one, I never saw the three together, and what the eyes do not behold, the mind does not understand, I saw the same one every time, in different places, in different attires, and with different persons, they are all you, you are all three, I asked El Señor, Sire, let me set him free in my own manner, with as much justice and as much chance as the hart is given in the hunt, and he agreed, and that is why, now, you, the last youth, blond, pursued, you, trembling with cold, in ragged clothing, you, who knew the dangers of the high seas, the beach of pearls, the town beside the river, the virgin jungle, the sacred wells, the smoking pyramids, the snowy volcano, the entrails of the white hell, the city of the lake, the palaces of gold of the new world, that is why you have been running, walking, falling, struggling to your feet, since yesterday, Guzmán said he would give you one day’s start, then would follow to hunt you, it has snowed all day, first that fact frightened you, all the footsteps of your route through the mountains, toward the sea, would leave a trail, he had warned you of that, you will have one day’s start, but it is snowing, snow erases old trails, one easily finds the fresh track, the wind blows snow from the branches, a good time to run new game, the dogs will be well baited, but by dusk the wind began to blow strong from the knife-edge ridges of the mountain and looking back you saw that it was hidden beneath a cape of white snow and with it the track of your feet; you had won or lost a day’s advantage: you can see the signal tied to a lance by the lookouts on the highest point of the mountain, placed so that everyone sees it, even you: it is the call to flush the stag; you stop for a moment in the midst of the storm that as it muffles the sound of horns and trumpets seems to impose an illusory silence over the snowy clearing through which you have fled from the mountain; but suddenly the storm died down, Guzmán loosed one pack of dogs, and then another, and then a third; you count each wave of barking behind you, Guzmán told you, freedom, freedom, you came here to speak of freedom, freedom for the new world beyond the sea, freedom for the new world here, you will see how long your freedom lasts, here or there, you will hear the cry of Spain every time they offer you your freedom: Long live chains! you hear the steadily approaching horns, Guzmán had instructed the crossbowmen, these are dogs that will not follow a trail if they do not smell blood, kill that boar to excite them, you are a stag, pilgrim, Guzmán had told you, the easy way to kill an animal is from a distance, aiming at its side, the longest part of its body, but more audacious and fatal is to wound it face-on, to drive in your lance to the hilt, turn it, and then allow the hart to be subdued by the dogs, run, youth, run, pilgrim, run, founder, run, first man, run, Plumed Serpent, you do not know the wiles of the wild boars that as they come down from the mountain to graze in wheat fields send two or three little ones ahead, and as they enter the wheat they give them two or three quick thrusts of their tusks, making them squeal, then return to high ground where they can survey the field; they do this three times, until they are assured there is no hunter about, and the fourth time they descend without caution, and are easily hunted; you, no instinct, no wile, you run toward the sea, packs of dogs close behind you, Guzmán mounted, his favorite hawk upon his forearm, wrapped in dark-brown cape, hooded and heavily booted, I told you, hawk, beautiful hawk, fierce hawk, your hour would come, that hour is now, I prepared you for the great hunt, remember Guzmán, brave hawk, you are my weapon, my devotion, my child and my luxury, the mirror of my desires and the face of my hatred, and you see the sea before you through cobwebs of fog, the Cabo de los Desastres, the beach of Celestina’s and Pedro’s, Simón’s and Ludovico’s former dreams, the beach of Felipe’s deceit, the beach that received you and your two brothers in order to hasten history, destinies, the millennium, in the land of eternal vespers, Spain, Vespers, Hesperia, land of Venus, its own twin, in anguished and interminable search of its other countenance, Spain, you are running, again returning to that beneficent sea, your heart tells you that the sea will save you, in spite of everything, how near the terrible horns, barking, hoof beats, panting, you run like the hart, the fringe of desert between the mountains and the sea narrows, besieging greyhounds block any exit to the right, whippets to the left, the whippets must contain the greyhounds so they will not capture you too soon, you are trapped between two lines of menacing dogs, Guzmán knows his office well, the passage to the sandy beach narrows, you scramble down between icy-crusted dunes, you fall face down upon the beach, your arms flung in a cross, you rise, barking, horns, Guzmán on the height of the sand dunes, laughing, before you the misty sea, behind you, Guzmán and the huntsmen, Guzmán frees the hawk, go, hawk, beautiful hawk, I promised you, I did not deceive you, I swore to you, I will offer you the freshest flesh, that is your prey, soar into the skies with the swiftness of a prayer and swoop down with the speed of a curse, the hawk soars, the dogs run, you have not reached the sea, a greyhound’s jaws close about your arm, his fangs sink deep, tear your flesh, a whippet chases away the greyhound, you are free for a moment, you fall, you rise, your feet sink in the slime of the shore, turbulent waves break and die around your knees, the hawk soars, speeding like an arrow, it swoops swift as a curse, fastens onto your arm, digs its steely talons into your flesh, fixes upon your arm with its long tarsi, sinks its beak into the wounds opened by the dog’s fangs, you run into the sea, the bird still clinging to you, you struggle, you roll over, you beat at the bird, the falcon is devouring your arm, you try to swim, you cannot with a single arm, you try to drown this ferocious falconet, Guzmán, on horseback, is laughing from the dunes, you plunge the arm in the iron grip of the hawk into the sea, you sink, in the obscured heavens you seek the light of your star, Venus, the sailor’s guide, and in the depths of the sea, St. Elmo’s fire, flame of inseparable brothers, Marquis, kinsman: I write to apprise you that Tuesday last, the day of St. George, near the village of Villalar, our army joined battle — in which participated all the viceroys and governors of our kingdoms — against the army of rebels and traitors, in which it pleased Our Lord and His Blessed Mother to give us the victory without any harm to the men of our army, and from the enemy we recaptured the artillery they had taken from us and usurped, and all the ringleaders of the General Junta were taken prisoner and killed. Captain Don Guzmán was outstanding in this action, galloping on horseback, face flushed red, sweat streaming from a brow blackened by the agitation of his soul, hoarse from shouting to our men: Kill the accursed rebels; destroy the impious and dissolute upstarts; pardon no man; you shall enjoy eternal rest among the just if you eradicate from the earth this accursed people; do not forbear in wounding either in the front or in the back these disturbers of tranquillity. Before night fell, one could see the townsmen fleeing for a distance of two and a half leagues; one hundred men were dead on the field, four hundred were wounded, a thousand captured. Not one of our soldiers lost his life. Of the townsmen the most nimble saved themselves, and some who had the foresight to exchange our white crosses for the red crosses fastened to their breasts and backs that distinguished them from us. There reigns in Villalar, the tomb of the townsmen’s rebellion, more silence than in a village of only three men. Your most abject servitor and servant, who kisses your hands, kinsman Marquis, your most fervent, faithful and humble adept, etc., etc., etc., Guzmán asked a single favor from his King Don Felipe in reward for his actions, and that was to lead an expedition that would cross the great ocean in search of the new world and thereby ascertain its existence or non-existence; El Señor heartily acceded, giving proof of grace and munificence, and urging Guzmán to take with him many of the troublemakers of his kingdoms, men of excessive energy capable of disturbing his calm, so that the prayers and peace of his necropolis would not again be perturbed by heretics, rebels, madmen, and lovers: “For your hand is harsh, Guzmán, you will know how to discipline these upstarts, and how to use them to best advantage in the undertakings of great risk that only those who have nothing to lose will attempt”; Guzmán supervised in Cádiz the construction of a fleet of three-masted caravels with triangular sails rigged on masts distributed along the longitudinal plan of the ships; these caravels were a great novelty, for formerly the varinel had been used on such expeditions, a ship with both oars and sail, and the barque, whose conformation and round sail greatly reduced its maneuverability and speed. As he directed the construction of these new ships, and smiling to himself, Guzmán recalled the labors of the aged Pedro on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres, for these new ships were as long as the varinel but with decks high as the barque’s, combining the advantages of both hulls, eliminating their defects, for the Latin-style triangular sail permitted lying closer to the wind, thereby receiving better advantage of it, and its lighter design resulted in greater agility in speed and maneuverability. El Señor provided for the expenses of the expedition a fund of two million maravedis expropriated from three families of exiled Jews, the Santángel, the Santa Fe, and the Bélez, and as warranty ordered the authorities of towns and villages along the Andalusian coast to provide Guzmán whatever goods he asked for his flotilla, allowing them to collect excise taxes. As additional warranty, El Señor promised that all who signed on board the caravels would be given security, and his promise that no one could harm their persons or their goods because of any crime they had committed. Thus three hundred men signed on, and as he watched them board the caravels with their sparse belongings, Guzmán smiled, guessing that here was the conquered townsman and there the common criminal, in this one he saw an impoverished nobleman, and in that one the pretended convert, in one a laborer of the land, and in another a rancorous smith. If only they had waited a little: Jerónimo, Nuño, Martín, Catilinón … He had not again seen that servile rascal given to speaking in proverbs. Had he been killed by mistake in the palace slaughter? Distracted, Guzmán did not notice the strange couple who arm in arm boarded one of the caravels. A hooded man, walking slowly, bent over with pain, one hand protecting his sex and the other resting upon the shoulder of a Mozarab of short stature and effeminate gait dressed in rags, his head shaved and features obscured by grime. It was almost the hour to set sail. Through the narrow windows of Cádiz, from behind the green shutters of their houses, peered pale, suspicious faces. Guzmán knew what they were thinking: they are headed for disaster, they are mad, and we will never see them again. He hoisted the pennants of the caravels. A message arrived from El Señor: wait two more days. Brother Julián, the palace iconographer, will join your expedition. Guzmán’s mouth tasted of gall.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONFESSOR

Up to now, Julián said to the Chronicler, that is what I know. No one knows the things I know, or knows things I do not know. I have been confessor to them all; believe only my version of events; listen to no other possible narrators. Celestina believed she knew everything and told everything, because with her lips she inherited memory and through them she thinks to transmit it. But she did not hear El Señor’s daily confession before taking Communion, the details of the vanquished illusions of youth, the meaning of his penances in the chapel, his ascent up the stairway leading to the plain, the defiance of his listing of heresies, his relationship with our Señora, or his late passion for Inés. Furthermore, I heard the confessions of the Mad Lady, those of nuns and scrubbing maids; those of the Idiot and the dwarf before they were joined in matrimony and with my benediction wed; and those of the workmen. I heard Guzmán’s confession; and if he believes that, in fleeing in search of the new world, he will leave behind the memory of his guilt, a great frustration awaits him. And I heard, my friend Chronicler, Ludovico’s and Celestina’s relations in El Señor’s bedchamber: only I know the passageway that leads to the wall where hangs the King’s ocher map; I pierced holes for my eyes and ears in the eyes of the Neptune that adorns it. Everyone who spoke there, everyone who thought aloud there, everyone who acted there, everyone who listened or was listened to there, gave me their secret voices, as I lent them my penitent ear, for often the confessor suffers more than the one who confesses; he relieves himself of a burden and the confessor assumes it.

Therefore, give no attention or credence to what others tell you, Julián continued, nor hold any faith in the simple and deceitful chronologies that are written about this epoch in an attempt to establish the logic of a perishable and linear history; true history is circular and eternal. You have seen: when she found him on the beach, the young Celestina did not tell all the truth to the pilgrim of the new world, so as not to distract him from his central purpose, which was to narrate before El Señor the dreamed existence of an unknown land beyond the sea; and even less, much less, was La Señora able to tell all the truth to the castaway called Juan when she took him to her bedchamber and there made love with him with such intense fury. How could Guzmán tell anyone except me — as the fires of the secret seal my lips — of his turbulent acts, the debates within his soul, and the designs of his life? who but I could know, and keep secret, the ignominy of his drugging El Señor and setting the dogs on him?; he conceived of regicide, but he opted to kill our Señor not with a dagger, not with philters of lunacy, but by making potent his impotence, leading him step by step: the shattered mirror restored, pitchers filled after they were emptied, candles that grew taller as they were burned, the howling of the phantasmal dog, the commotion of the nuns in the chapel, Bocanegra’s death, the impossible passion with Inés, always greater and greater confrontations with what cannot be.

I kept everything secret, my candid friend, and if now I have told you everything, it is because my need to confess and do penance for the harm I have caused you supersedes all the vows of my priesthood. Including the secrets of the confessional. I am going far away. Someone must know these stories and write them. That is your vocation. Mine carries me to other places. But I do not want this story to be cut short, this hadith-novella, as you say it must be called in order to give to the tale the dignity the Arabic settlers in our peninsula gave to the communication of news. I give you, then, all the news I know — which is all the news — as I told you from the day you returned, exhausted, dressed as a beggar, your arm crippled from the fierce naval battle against the Turk. You saw things clearly, friend; your freedom was not given you in exchange for your meritorious performance in combat; but with only one good arm you were of little service on the galleys. You were abandoned on the Algerian coast and taken captive by the Arabs. They treated you well, but you, a Christian, fell in love with a beautiful Moorish girl, Zoraida, and she with you; you knew spring in autumn. Zoraida’s father wished to separate her from you; you were abandoned on the Valencian coast by Algerian pirates and returned to prison in Alicante. That is where I went in search of you once I obtained the roll of those dead, wounded, and repatriated following the famous battle. With my facile hand it was no effort to feign El Señor’s signature on your order of liberation, and even less to take advantage of Don Felipe’s sleep to seal it with his ring. From the bold terraces of the muscatel, the almond, and the fig, through the vast garden of Valencia, through open land and rice fields I brought you here, disguised as a mendicant, up to the arid Castilian plain to this tower of the astronomer Toribio where the tasks of science and art can ward off, even if only momentarily, the ambush of madness, crime, injustice, and torment that seethes before our eyes. Here you have heard everything: all that happened before your arrival and after it, from Felipe’s first crime to the last. I say, deluded creature that I am, that I am telling you the story so you will write it and thus, perhaps, his story will not be repeated. But history does repeat itself; that is the comedy and crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change, scenes change, names change, but the passions are the same. Nevertheless, the enigma of the story I have told you is that in repeating itself it does not end: see how many facets of this hadith, this novella, in spite of the appearance of conclusion, remain inconclusive, latent, awaiting, perhaps, another time in which to reappear, another space in which to germinate, another opportunity in which to manifest themselves, other names to call themselves.

Celestina made a rendezvous with the pilgrim for a very distant date in Paris, the last day of this millennium. How shall we put a period to this narration if we do not know what will happen then? That is why I have revealed the secrets of the confessional to you, and only to you, because you write for the future, because it does not matter to you what is said today concerning your writing or the laughter your writing provokes: the day will come when no one will laugh at you, but everyone will laugh at the Kings, Princes, and prelates who today monopolize all homage and respect. Ludovico said that one lifetime is not enough: one needs multiple existences to unify a personality. He also said other things that impressed me. He called immortal those who reappear from time to time because they had more life than their own death, but less time than their own life. He said that since a man or woman can be several persons mentally, they can become several persons physically; we are specters of time, and our present contains the aura of what we were before and the aura of what we will become when we disappear. Don’t you see, Chronicler, my friend, how this argument coincides with El Señor’s repeated malediction in his testament, his bequest of a future of resurrections that can be glimpsed only in forgotten pauses, in the orifices of time, in the dark, empty minutes when the past tried to imagine the future, a blind, pertinacious, and painful return to the imagination of the future in the past as the only future possible to this race and this land, Spain, and all the peoples that descend from Spain?

I, Julián, friar and painter, I tell you that as the conflicting words of El Señor and Ludovico blend together to offer us a new reason born of the encounter of opposites, so in the same way are allied shadows and lights, outline and volume, flat color and perspective on a canvas, and thus must be allied in your book the real and the virtual, what was with what could have been, and what is with what can be. Why would you tell us only what we already know, without revealing what we still do not know? Why would you describe to us only this time and this space without all the invisible times and spaces our time contains? why, in short, would you content yourself with the painful dribble of the sequential when your pen offers you the fullness of the simultaneous? I choose my word well, Chronicler, and I say: content yourself. Discontented, you will aspire to simultaneity of times, spaces, and events, because men resign themselves to that patient dribble that drains their lives, they have scarcely forgotten their birth when it is time to confront their death; you, on the other hand, have decided to suffer, to fly in pursuit of the impossible on the wings of your unique freedom, that of your pen, though still bound to the earth by the chains of accursed reality that imprisons, reduces, weakens, and levels all things. Let us not complain, my friend; it is possible that without the ugly gravity of the real our dreams would lack weight, would be gratuitous, and thus of little worth and small conviction. Let us be grateful for this battle between imagination and reality that lends weight to fantasy and wing to facts, for the bird will not fly that does not encounter resistance from the air. But the earth would be converted into something less than air were it not constantly thought, dreamed, sung, written, sculpted, and painted. Listen to what my brother Toribio says: Mathematically, everyone’s age is zero. The world dissolves when someone ceases to dream, to remember, to write. Time is the invention of personality. The spider, the hawk, the she-wolf, have no time.

To cease to remember. I fear sequential memory because it means duplicating the pain of time. To live it all, friend. To remember it all. But it is one thing to live, remembering everything, and something different to remember, living everything. Which road will you choose in order to complete this novella that I entrust to you today? I see you here, beside me, diviner of time, of the past and the present and the future, and I see how you are looking at me, reproaching me for the loose ends of this narration while I ask you to be grateful to me for the oblivion in which I left so many unfulfilled gestures, so many unspoken words … But I see that my wise warning does not satiate your thirst for prophecy: you ask yourself, what will be the future of the past?

For you, I have violated the secrets of the confessional. You will tell me that a secret is the same as death: the secret is a word and an event that have ceased to exist. Then, is all past secret and dead? No, is it not true? because the remembered past is secret and living. And how can it be saved by memory and cease to be the past? By converting itself into the present. Then it is no longer the past. Then all true past is impenetrable secret and death. Do you wish that, having told you everything of the past I wish to rescue in order to convert it into present, I also tell you what must be secret and dead in order to continue to be the past? And all of it only to give to you what you yourself do not know: a story that will end in the future? Oh, my indiscreet scribe, that is why you ended up in a galley, unceasingly you confound reality with paper, just like the one-eyed magus whose quartered body was thrown into the waters of the Adriatic. Be grateful, I tell you, for loose ends; accept the truth spoken by the Mad Lady: every being has the right to carry a secret to the tomb; every narrator reserves to himself the privilege of not clarifying mysteries, so that they remain mysteries; and who is not pleased, let him demand his money …

Who said that? Who? Wait. One minute. He who would know more, let him loosen his purse strings … There are so many things I myself do not understand, my friend. For example I, as much as you, depend upon Ludovico and Celestina for an understanding of the story of the three youths … For me they were always three usurpers, three youths allied to frustrate El Señor’s intent and prolong history beyond the limits of death and immobility indicated by the King; three heirs, three bastards, yes, even three founders, as Ludovico said, but, I swear to you, I never understood that story, those signs, clearly. I repeated to La Señora what Ludovico asked me: a blood-red cross upon the back, six toes on each foot, the kingdom of Rome still lives, Agrippa, his is the continuity of the original kingdoms, phrases, phrases I repeated without understanding, loose ends, accept them, be grateful for them, I tell you …

The three bottles? What did the three bottles contain? I do not know that either, I tell you, and he who would know more, let … Equality? You ask me for equality, then? you accept not knowing the things I do not know, and ask only to know what I know, you permit me no secret, nothing I can take to the tomb except what, like you, I do not know? that is the only agreement you will accept? oh, my friend, that is the only way you will forgive me for having been the cause of your harm, the galleys, your certainty of death on the eve of the battle, your being crippled in it, your delivery to the Arabs, your prison in Alicante … only in that way?

I am going far away, my poor friend. I shall know nothing of what happens here. It is left in your hands, to your eyes and your ears, to continue the story of El Señor Don Felipe. Where I am going, little news will reach me. And certainly, less news, or none, will you have of me. I do not know if a new world exists. I know only what I imagine. I know only what I desire. As a consequence, it exists for me. I am an exasperated Christian. I wish to know, and if it exists, I wish to protect it, and if it does not exist, I wish to adopt it, a minimal community of people who live in harmony with nature, who own no property except those things shared by all: a new world, not because it was found anew, but because it is or it will be like that of the first Golden Age. Remember, my candid and culpable friend, everything I have told you and, with me, ask yourself, what blindness is this? we call ourselves Christians but we live worse than brutish animals; and if we believe that this Christian doctrine is but a deceit, why do we not abandon it altogether? I am abandoning this palace; I am abandoning my friends, you, my brother Toribio; I am abandoning El Señor. I go with one who needs me more: Guzmán. It is true; do not look at me with such amazement. I know that I go in search of the happy Golden Age; I know that Guzmán goes, with great malice and covetousness, in search of sources of gold, and that his age in the new world will be an iron age, and worse; I know that I seek, tentatively, the restoration of true Christianity, while Guzmán seeks, with certainty, the instauration of fortunate Guzmánism. I am needed more there than here; there will be need of someone who will speak on behalf of the defeated, perpetuate their founding dreams, defend their lives, protect their labors, affirm that they are men with souls and not simple beasts of burden, watch for the continuity of beauty and the pleasure of a thousand small offices, and channel souls, for the glory of God, toward the construction of new temples, the astounding temples of the new world, a new flowering of a new art that will defeat forever the fixity of icons that reflects a truth revealed only once, and forever, and instead reveal a new knowledge that unfolds in every direction for every delectation, a circular encounter between what they know and what I know, a hybrid art, temples raised in the image and likeness of the paradise we all envision in our dreams: color and form will be liberated, expanded, and fructified in celestial domed ceilings of white grape clusters, polychrome vines, silver fruit, dusky angels, tile façades, altars of excessive golden foliage, images, yes, of the paradise shared by them and me, cathedrals for the future, the anonymous seed of rebellion, renovating imagination, constant and unfulfilled aspiration: a vast circle in perpetual movement, sweet friend, my white hands and their swarthy ones joined to do more, much more, than anything I could ever do in the old world, secretly painting culpable paintings to disturb the conscience of a King; hybrid temples of the new world, the solution of all our mute inheritances in one stone embrace: pyramid, church, mosque, and synagogue united in a single place: look at that wall of serpents, look at that transplanted arch, look at those Moorish tiles, look at those floors of sand.

There is no such place? No, my friend, there isn’t if you look for it in space. Seek it, rather, in time: in the same future you will investigate in your exemplary — and thereby scandalous — novels. My white hands and their dark hands will juxtapose the simultaneous spaces of the old and the new worlds to create the promise of a different time. I shall assume, my sweet, bitter, lovable, desperate friend, the dreams dreamed and lost by Ludovico and Celestina, Pedro and Simón, on that long-ago afternoon on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres. Without their knowing it, I shall also assume the dreams of El Señor and Guzmán, of the Comendador and the Inquisitor, for neither they nor we know what we do, only God, whose instruments we are. Guzmán will seek new countries in his desire for gold and riches; El Señor will accept events in order to transfer there the sins, the rigidity, and the will for extinction operating here, but God and I, your servant Julián, shall work together for the most exalted goals. My friend: will the new world truly be the new world where everything can be begun anew, man’s entire history, without the burdens of our old errors? Shall we Europeans be worthy of our own Utopia?

Thus, I accept your proposition to teach by example: I shall arrive in the new world cleansed of culpable secrets and odious burdens. Let us be ignorant of the same things, you and I; let us know the same things; and he who wishes to know more, let him loosen his purse strings, and he who is not pleased with what I tell him, let him demand his money. That is what the jester with the broad bedaubed smile used to say when he entertained with his buffoonery in El Señor’s castle, with the grimace of the dying day reflected in the twin orbs of eyes beneath a pointed cap pulled low on his brow; how would he not see the glances of carnal cupidity El Señor’s father directed toward the beautiful child Isabel, come from England after her parents’ death to find refuge and consolation by the side of her Spanish aunt and uncle: starched white petticoats, long corkscrew curls, Elizabeth, yes, that incontinent and whoring Prince desired her as a child, he who had raped every country girl in the district, taken all the honorable maids of his kingdoms by seignorial right, who was pursuing the girls of Flanders while in a latrine in the palace of Brabant his wife was giving birth to his son, our present Señor, he who had satiated his appetites with a she-wolf, scarcely had he seen the budding breasts and the down in the armpits of his English niece — after playing with her and offering her dolls and gifts, then breaking upon the floor the same dolls he had given her as a gift — when he surreptitiously deflowered her.

In whom was the young girl to confide but in the only man in that castle who, like her, played: the jester? But if she said nothing to me, I, who even then entertained her with my brushes and engravings and miniatures, found her weeping one day, and noted the swelling fullness of her belly and breasts, and she, weeping, told me she wept because for two months she had not bled.

I was shocked by the news: what was to be done with the young English girl who was gazed upon with eyes of love by the youthful heir Felipe, and who had committed the indiscretion — worse than the deed — of telling the truth to the most deceitful and disturbed of the courtiers, the jester of bitter features, a buffoon because in all his existence he found no cause for joy? It would be useless to tell the jester that I shared the secret and urge him to guard it. He would have placed a price on his silence, as in the end he did; an intriguer, but stupid, he told El Señor’s father he knew the truth.

First our insatiable master ordered that the Princess Isabel be removed for seven months to the ancient castle in Tordesillas, there to receive a disciplined education in the arts of the court, to be accompanied only by a marshal, three duennas, a dozen halberdiers and the famous Jewish physician, the humpbacked Dr. José Luis Cuevas, brought from prison where he was expiating the unconfessed crime of boiling in oil six Christian children by the light of the moon, exactly as an ancestor of his had done with three royal Princes, for which the King of that time had ordered burned alive thirty thousand false converts in the plaza of Logroño. Cuevas was taken to Tordesillas with the promise of being exonerated if he fulfilled well his office in the somber castle, the ancient lodging of many mad royalty. Cuevas attended the birth; he marveled at the monstrous signs on the child and, laughing, said that he looked more like a son of his than of the beautiful young girl; he laughed for the last time: the halberdiers cut off his head in the very chamber of the birth, and they were at the point of doing the same to the newborn child, had not the young Isabel, clutching the child against her breast, defended him as a she-wolf defends her cub.

She said: “If you touch him, first I shall strangle him and then kill myself, and we shall see how you explain my death to your Señor. Your own death is hovering nearby. I know that as soon as we reach the castle, the Señor will order you killed as he ordered the death of this poor Hebrew doctor, so that no one can tell of what happened here. On the other hand, I have promised before God and before man to keep eternal silence if the child leaves here alive with me. Which will have the greater import, your word or mine?”

With this, the halberdiers fled, for well they knew the violent disposition of El Señor’s father, and they did not doubt the words of Isabel, who returned to the castle with two of the duennas, while another, with the marshal, carried the child by a different route. Warned by my young mistress of the approximate dates of events, I had circled about the palace of Tordesillas for several days prior to the birth, and cloaked, wearing the hat and clothing of a highwayman, I assaulted the duenna and the marshal, galloped back to the seignorial castle with the bastard in my arms, and delivered him in secret to the child mother, Isabel.

Discretion was my weapon and my desire: the heir, Felipe, loved this girl; he would wed her; the future Queen would owe me the most outstanding favors; I would enjoy peace and protection in which to continue my vocation as friar and painter, and also to extend them to men like you, Chronicler, and to my brother, the astronomer Toribio. But if someone discovered the truth, then what confusion there would be, what disorder, what rancor, what uncertainty for my fortunes; Felipe would repudiate Isabel; Felipe’s mother, who had pardoned her husband so many deceptions, would not absolve him of this particular transgression; my fortune would be unsure; I would be defeated, like Oedipus, by incest! Through the alleyways of Valladolid I sought out an ancient blackbird, a renowned procuress expert in renewing maidenheads, and in secret I led her to Isabel’s chamber in the castle, where the old curmudgeon, with great art, mended the girl’s ill and stole away as she had come, a drone in the shadows.

Isabel wept because of her many misfortunes; I asked her about the infant; that giddy child moaned that, not knowing how to care for him, or nourish him, or anything concerned with him, she had given him into the hands of her friend the jester, who was keeping him in some secret part of the castle. I cursed the girl’s imprudence, for she was furnishing more and more weapons to the intriguing buffoon, who, neither late nor lazy, made known to the outrageous and whoring Prince, our Señor, what he knew, and asked him money in exchange for guarding the secret. The Señor called the Fair, you see, was convinced that the duenna and the marshal — following the King’s direction — had abandoned the newborn child in a basket in the waters of the Ebro. Therefore, the jester’s greedy project was short-lived, for that same afternoon, when all the court was gathered in the castle hall, El Señor, our master, offered the jester a cup of wine to animate him in his buffoonery, and the incautious mime, cavorting and capering, died, choked by the poison.

I set about to look for the lost infant and found him in the most obvious of places: on a straw pallet in the cell occupied by the jester. I gave the child to Isabel’s duenna, Azucena. The duenna took him to Isabel and explained to her that when he died the jester had left a newborn child in his pallet. She had decided to care for the child, but her breasts were dry. Could she nurse the babe at the teats of the bitch who recently had whelped in Isabel’s bedchamber. Isabel, who was still bleeding from her own childbirth, said yes, and to her uncle, El Señor, she said: “Our son can pass as the son of the jester and Azucena. Do not kill anyone else. Your secret is safe. If you do not touch my son I shall tell nothing to anyone. If you kill him, I shall tell everything. And then kill myself.”

But that ferocious and handsome Señor did not wish to kill anyone, he wished to make love to Isabel again, he wished to love without limits, he wished to possess every living woman, every bleeding female, nothing could satiate him; that very morning in the chapel he saw Isabel spit out a serpent at the moment she received the Host, he saw the eyes of love with which his own son Felipe gazed at Isabel, and being unable to make love to her again, and thus desiring her more ardently than ever, he drank until he was drunk, rode out on his dun-colored steed, lopping off heads of wheat with his whip, he encountered a trapped she-wolf, he dismounted, violated the beast, howled like her and with her, satiated all his dark needs, his frustration, and burning fires: animal with animal, the act did not horrify him; it would have been a sin against nature to make love again with Isabel, but not beast with beast, no, that was natural: this is what he told me as he confessed another night, the night when Isabel and Felipe had just been wed and after the cadavers burned on the pyre in the courtyard had been carried away in carts; this he confessed to me, in addition to all his earlier crimes, sure of my silence, feeling the need to pour out his tormented soul before someone.

“Have I impregnated a she-wolf?” he asked me through the grating of the confessional, hoping to find solace for his monstrous imaginings.

“Becalm, Señor, please be calm; such a thing is impossible…”

“Accursed breed,” he murmured, “madness, incest, crime, the only thing lacking was to make love as beast to beast; what do I bequeath my son? Each generation adds scars to the generation that follows; the scars accumulate until they lead to sterility and extinction; degenerate seeks out degenerate; an imperious force impels them to find one another and unite…”

“The seed, Señor, exhausts itself from growing upon the same soil.”

“What would be born of my coupling with a beast? Did some dark necessity impel me to renovate the blood with a living but nonhuman thing?”

“In spite of classic wisdom, Señor, nature at times makes strange leaps,” I said ingenuously, thinking thus to absolve myself of any knowledge concerning the paternity of Isabel’s child, and also to promote the current belief about his origin. “For instance, consider a child,” I added, “that is not the son of man and she-wolf but the child of jester and scrubbing maid; he bears monstrous signs of degeneration…”

“What signs?” cried El Señor, who had never seen the child.

“A cross upon his back, six toes on each foot…”

Now El Señor called the Fair howled, he howled, and his animal cry resounded through the domed ceiling of the church; he left, shouting: “Do you not know the prophecy of Tiberius Caesar? is this the sign of the usurpers, rebellious slaves, have I engendered slaves and rebels who will usurp my kingdom? parricidal sons? a throne raised upon the blood of their father?”

I knew he ordered the child killed, but he disappeared, as also disappeared that same night, to his great sadness, Felipe’s companions, Ludovico and Celestina; I knew that El Señor ordered that every Saturday be dedicated to hunting wolves until every wolf was exterminated. Only I understood the reason for these orders. I gave thanks when El Señor died, after playing very strenuously at ball; Prince Felipe occupied his place, and my Señora Isabel ascended to the throne reserved for her.

Isabel displayed great austerity and discretion as the wife of the new Señor, Don Felipe, and I never imagined that the maidenhead restored by the magpie of the alleyways of Valladolid remained intact. My respectful friendship with La Señora was constant. I attempted to entertain her, as I always had, with my enamels and miniatures, and by lending her to read the volumes of courtly love of the De arte honeste amandi of Andreas Capellanus, for beneath her dignity I noted an increasing melancholy, as if something were lacking; at times she sighed for her dolls and her peach stones, and I told myself that my Señora’s transition from young foreigner to solitary Queen and secret mother of a vanished child had been too swift. The people murmured: When will the foreigner give us a Spanish heir? False pregnancies were announced, followed always by unfortunate miscarriages.

Nothing was more disastrous, however, than the accident that then befell my mistress, her husband being in Flanders at war against the Adamite heretics and the dukes that protected them. The humiliation of the thirty-three and one half days she spent lying upon the paving stones of the castle courtyard transformed my Señora’s will; it unleashed forces, passions, hatreds, desires, memories, dreams that doubtless had throbbed for a long time in her soul and had awaited only an astonishing event, both terrible and absurd, like this one, to fully manifest themselves. A mouse, then, and not the virile member of our Señor, gnawed away the restored virginity of my Señora. She called me to her chamber, when finally she returned to it: she asked me to complete the work begun by the Mus; I possessed her, finally breaking the network of fine threads the go-between of Valladolid had woven there. I left her in the spell of a delirious dream, cursing myself for having broken my vow of chastity: a renewable vow, yes, but also less sacred than my resolution to pour all my bodily juices into my art. To perfect that art, I have dedicated myself all these years.

I often went out into the countryside searching for faces, landscapes, buildings, and perspectives that I sketched in charcoal and guarded jealously, later incorporating these details of everyday reality into the figures and spaces of the great painting I was secretly creating in a deep dungeon of the new palace El Señor was constructing to commemorate his victory over the dukes and heretics of the vicious province of Flanders. Thus one morning, as I was wandering through the fields of Montiel, I happened to meet a cart being driven by a blond youth by whose side was seated a green-eyed, sun-burned blind man playing a flute. I asked permission of the blind man to sketch his features. He acceded with an ironic smile. The youth was grateful for the rest; he went to a nearby well, drew a bucket of water, disrobed, and bathed himself. I turned from my preoccupation with the blind man, who could not see me, and gazed at the splendid beauty of the youth, so like the perfect figures rendered by Phidias and Praxiteles. Then, with amazement bordering on horror, I noticed the sign upon his back: a blood-red cross between the shoulder blades; and as I looked at his naked feet, I knew I would count six toes upon each foot.

I controlled my trembling hand. I bit my tongue not to tell the blind man what I knew: the youth was the son of my Señora, the brother of our present Señor, the bastard disappeared on the night when wedding and crime were allied; I told him, rather, that I was a friar and painter of the court, in the service of the most exalted Prince Don Felipe, and then it was he who became perturbed, his expression alternately revealing the desire to flee and the need to know. I asked him what he was hauling in his cart beneath the heavy canvas. He reached out a hand, as if to protect his cargo, and said: “Touch nothing, Friar, or the youth will break your bones on the spot.”

“Have no fear. Where are you going?”

“To the coast.”

“The coast is long, and touches many seas.”

“You are good at prying, Friar. Does your master pay you well to go as talebearer throughout his kingdom?”

“I take advantage of his protection and attend secretly to my vocation, which is not that of informer, but artist.”

“And what kind of art would yours be?”

I deliberated for a moment. I wished to gain the confidence of the blind man who was accompanying the lost son of my Señora. I did not, however, tell him what I knew. I tried to tie up loose ends: in some manner this man was involved with the child’s disappearance; perhaps he had received him from other hands, but perhaps he himself had stolen him that night from the bloody castle; and who had disappeared at the same time as the child? Felipe’s companions: Celestina and Ludovico. I knew the rebellious student; I could not recognize him in the blind man. I took the risk, not knowing whether I would be rewarded with the blind man’s good faith or a drubbing from his young companion; I took a stab in the dark.

“An art,” I answered him, “similar to your ideas, for I conceive of it as a direct approximation of God to man, a revelation of the grace inherent in every man, man who is born without sin and thus obtains grace immediately without the intercession of the agencies of oppression. Your ideas incarnate in my painting, Ludovico.”

The blind man almost opened his eyes; I swear, friend Chronicler, that a ray of strange hope flashed across his obstinately closed eyelids; I pressed his coppery hand in my pale one; the youth dropped the bucket back into the well and approached, naked and drying himself with his own clothing.

“My name is Julián. You can rely on me.”

When I returned to the palace, I found my Señora upset from a dream she had just experienced. I asked her to tell it to me, and she did so. Feigning stupor, I replied that I had dreamed the same, dreamed of a young castaway tossed on a beach. Where? My dream, I told her, had a site: the coast of the Cabo de los Desastres. Why? The place of my dream, I said, had a history: the chronicles abound in notices of varinels sunk there with their treasures from the Spice Islands, Cipango, and Cathay, of vessels that had disappeared with all the Cádiz crew and all their captives of the war against the Infidel aboard. But also, as if in compensation, they tell of sailing ships broken upon the rocks because lovers were fleeing in them.

She asked me: “What is the name of this youth of whom we both have dreamed?”

I replied: “It depends upon what land he treads.”

La Señora reached out to me: “Friar, take me to that beach, take me to that youth…”

“Patience, Señora. We must wait two years nine months and two weeks, which are a thousand and one half days; the time it will take your husband to finish his necropolis of Princes.”

“Why, Friar?”

“Because this youth is life’s answer to the will-for-death of our Señor, the King.”

“How do friars know these things?”

“Because we have dreamed them, Señora.”

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

“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, Friar. You would cease to interest me. Do what you have promised. At the end of a thousand and one half days, bring that youth to me. And if you do so, Brother Julián, you will have pleasure.”

I lie, my friend. I did not answer her saying, “That is all a contrite and devout soul could ask”; no, I did not wish to be my Señora’s lover; I did not want to waste in her bed the vigor and vigilance I must devote to my painting; and I feared this woman, I was beginning to fear her; how could she have dreamed what had happened between Ludovico and me when the blind man told me he was going to the Cabo de los Desastres, the beach where more than sixteen years before he and Celestina, Felipe, Pedro, and the monk Simón had met, and that this time Pedro’s ship would sail in search of the new world beyond the great ocean, and that the youth with the cross upon his back would embark upon it and on a precise day, a thousand and one half days later, on the morning of a fourteenth of July, he would return to the same beach, and that then he could go with me, travel to the palace of Don Felipe, El Señor, and there fulfill his second destiny, that of his origins, as in the new world he would have fulfilled his first destiny, that of his future? I was confused by these explanations; the place and the time, on the other hand, were engraved in my mind; I would then see some way my mistress could recover her lost son. But Ludovico added one condition to our pact: that I find a way to advise Celestina that on the same day she should pass by that beach. Celestina? The blind man knew what Simón had told him when, he said, the blind man had returned to Spain: disguised as a page, she was playing a funeral drum in the procession of the Mad Lady, Don Felipe’s mother, who bore throughout Spain the embalmed cadaver of her impenitent husband, refusing to bury him. It was not difficult for me to send a message to the page of the lunatic Queen.

But my Señora, I tell you, frightened me: how did she dream that dream? was it the potions of belladonna I had administered to calm her delirium? the recollections of some drawing of mine of real or imagined castaways? was it the presence in her bedchamber of a furtive Mus I saw moving at times among her bedsheets, hiding, watching us? was it a white and knotted root like a tiny human figure, almost a little man, I occasionally saw move with stealth among the hangings of the bedchamber? was it a Satanic pact, something of which I was unaware and that caused me to tremble as I entered my mistress’s bedchamber, some horrible secret that damaged and hindered the causes of my art as well as the beliefs of my religion? and was it not my purpose, candid friend who hears me, to conciliate once again reason and faith through art, to return to human intelligence and divine conviction the unity threatened by separation? for it was, and is, my belief that religion warring against reason becomes the facile prey of the Devil.

In order to rid myself of this increasing fear of the demonic, and also to rid myself of the increasing sexual appetite of La Señora, I searched for gracile youths that I might lead in secret to her bedchamber; I became, I confess, a vile go-between, as much a procurer as that hymen-mending magpie of Valladolid; and in one thing, worse, for these youths led to her bedchamber never left there alive, or if they did, they disappeared forever and no one ever heard of them again; some were found, white and bloodless, in the passageways of the palace and in forgotten dungeons; of others, a very few, I came to know this: one died on the gallows, one on the pillory, another was garroted. I feared more and more for the health of my protectress’s mind; I must channel her passions in a manner beneficial to my own desires, and also convincing to hers — whatever they might be. I searched through aljamas and Jewries in Toledo and Seville, in Cuenca and Medina. I was searching for someone in particular. I found him. I brought him to the uncompleted palace.

In lands of ancient Castilian Christianity he was called Miguel. In the Jewries he was called Michah. And in the aljamas he was known as Mihail-ben-Sama, which in Arabic means Miguel-of-Life. Your husband El Señor, I said, has exhausted his life in the mortal persecution of heretics, Moors, and Jews, and those three bloods and those three religions flow through Miguel’s veins; he is a son of Rome, of Israel, and of Araby. Renew the blood, Señora. Enough of this attempt to deceive your subjects; the familiar public announcement of your pregnancy, hoping to attenuate the expectations of an heir, merely forces you to pretense: you must stuff your fathingale 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 open rebellion. You must be cautious. Allay their discontent with one theatrical blow: fulfill their hopes by having a son. You may rely on me: the only proof of paternity will be the features of El Señor, your husband, that I introduce upon the seals, miniatures, medallions, and portraits that will be the representation of your son for the multitudes and for posterity. The populace — and history — will know the face of your son only through coins bearing the effigy I have designed that are minted and circulated in these kingdoms. No one will ever have occasion to compare the engraved image with the real face. Combine, Señora, pleasure and duty: provide Spain with an heir.

Conveniently deaf, Chronicler, I did not hear — I swear it, I did not hear — La Señora’s answer to my arguments: “But, Julián, I already have a son…”

She said it serenely, but there is no worse madness than serene madness; I tell you I did not hear her; I continued; I said: Recover the true unity of Spain: regard this young man, Mihail-ben-Sama, Miguel-of-Life, a Castilian, Moorish, and Hebrew Miguel; I swear to you, Chronicler, do not look at me in that way, that is when I said this to La Señora, I did not say it later, when I took her own son to her, the youth found on the Cabo de los Desastres, when I told you this, I lied, I accept my lie, yes, because I did not know then how this story was going to end, I believed I would never reveal my greatest secret to anyone, I thought today, as I began to speak to you, that the worst secret would be any secret at all, for example, when El Señor told me what he saw in his mirror as he ascended the thirty steps, I said to myself, this will be the secret, the father of El Señor fornicated with a she-wolf, but that she-wolf was none other than an ancient Queen dead for centuries, the one who stitched flags the color of her blood and her tears, a restless soul resurrected in the body of a she-wolf, it was natural that another child should be born of her belly, blood calls to blood, degenerates seek out one another and copulate and procreate: three sons of the Señor called the Fair, three bastards, three usurpers, Felipe’s three brothers, is it not enough you know this secret? is your curiosity not satiated? I wished to be honest with you, to win your forgiveness, do not now accuse me of something so frightful, I asked La Señora to have a child by Mihail-ben-Sama, you, you were the true culprit, you, a Chronicler made bitter and desperate because your papers are not identical to life, as you would wish, you interrupted my project with your idiotic poem, you removed Mihail from life and placed him within literature, you wove with paper the rope that was to bind you to the galley, indiscreet and candid friend, you sent Mihail to the stake, do you not remember? you shared a cell with him the night before your exile and his death, how could I have been the iniquitous procurer who delivered a son to the carnal love of his mother? how was I to know that was what La Señora desired? she recognized him, yes, she recognized him, the cross, the toes, I believed I was compassionately reuniting a mother and a son, she knew who he was, she knew she was fornicating with her own son, she knew it, and she screamed her pleasure of him, I knew it, and I lamented it with prayers and breast beating: blood calls to blood, the son born of incest has closed the perfect circle of his origin: transgression of moral law; Cain slew Abel, Set, Osiris, Smoking Mirror killed the Plumed Serpent, Romulus, Remus, and Pollux, son of Zeus, rejected immortality at the death of his brother Castor, son of a swan: sons of a witch, sons of a she-wolf, sons of a Queen, these were three, they did not kill one another, their number saved them, but there is no order that is not founded upon crime, if not of blood, then of the flesh: poor Iohannes Agrippa, called Don Juan, it fell to you, in the name of the three brothers, to transgress in order to found anew: not Set, not Cain, not Romulus, not Pollux, your destiny, Don Juan is that of Oedipus: the shadow that walks toward its end by walking toward its origin: the future will respond to the enigmas of the past only because that future is identical to the beginning; tragedy is the restoration of the dawn of being: monarch and prisoner, culprit and innocent, criminal and victim, the shadow of Don Juan is the shadow of Don Felipe: in her son, Don Juan, La Señora knew the flesh of her husband Don Felipe: only thus, Chronicler, only in this way; candid friend of marvels, soul of wax, hear me, I believed I was returning her lost son to her, but instead she recovered her true lover, you are to blame, foolish friend, not I, not I, such was not my intent, I swear it, forgive me, I forgive you, events acquire a life of their own, they escape our hands, I did not propose such a horrible infraction of divine and human laws, you frustrated my project with your literature, now you know the truth, you must now alter all the words and all the intent of this long narration, revise now what I have told you, Chronicler, and try to discover the lie, the deception, the fiction, yes, the fiction, in each phrase, doubt now everything I have told you, what will you do to collate my subjective words with objective truth? what? you sent Miguel-of-Life to the stake, and you condemned me to be an accomplice to an incestuous transgression: see the fires of the stake upon every page you fill, Chronicler Don Miguel, see the blood of incest in every word you write: you desired the truth, now save it with the lie …

“Señor, this great painting has been sent to you from Orvieto, fatherland of a few somber, austere, and energetic painters. You are the Defender of the Faith. They offer it in homage to you and to the Faith. See its great dimensions. I have measured them. They will fit perfectly within the empty space behind the altar in your chapel.”

SOUL OF WAX

Brother Julián embarked on one of Guzmán’s caravels that yesterday set sail from the port of Cádiz; I remained here alone in the astronomer’s tower with my pens, paper, and ink. I say alone, because Toribio was working feverishly, as if very little time remained and as if the well-being of the world depended upon his tasks; he paid little attention to my presence. I was grateful for this situation. I could finish the narration begun by Julián. I would be the phantom of King Don Felipe, the wax whereupon were imprinted the footprints of his soul, to the very end. I wanted to be a faithful witness. But from the moment I sat down to write the final section of this hadith, my imagination intruded to divert the worthwhile purposes of my chronicle. First I wrote these words: “Everything is possible.” Next, beside them, these: “Everything is in doubt.” Thus I knew, by the mere fact of writing them, that I was writing on the threshold of a new era. I longed for the certitude inculcated in me during my fleeting passage through the halls of Salamanca. Words and things coincide: all reading is, in the end, but the reading of the divine word, for, in an ascending scale, everything finally flows into one identical being and word: God, the first, the efficient, the final, and the restorative cause of everything that exists. In this manner the vision of the world is unique: all words and all things possess an established place, a precise function, and an exact correspondence within the Christian universe. All words signify what they contain and contain what they signify. I thought then about the knight Ludovico and his sons had met in the windmill and I began to write the story of a hidalgo from La Mancha who continued to adhere to the codes of certainty. For him, nothing would be in doubt, but everything would be possible: a knight of the faith. That faith, I said to myself, would originate in reading. And that reading would be madness. The knight would persist in the unique reading of the texts and would attempt to transmit that reading to a reality that had become multiple, equivocal, and ambiguous. He would fail time and again, but every time he would again take refuge in reading: born of reading, he would remain faithful to it because for him there was no other licit reading: the sorcerers he knew through reading, and not reality, would continue to interpose themselves between his undertakings and reality.

I paused at this point and decided, audaciously, to introduce a great novelty into my book: this hero of mockery and hoax, born of reading, would be the first hero, furthermore, to know he was read. At the very time he was living his adventures, they would be written, published, and read by others. A double victim of reading, the knight would twice lose his senses: first, as he read; second, upon being read. The hero who knew he was read: Achilles knew no such experience. And this obliges him to create himself within his own imagination. He fails, then, as a reader of the epics he obsessively wishes to transmit to reality. But as object of reading, he begins to conquer reality, to infect it with his insane reading of himself. And this new reading transforms the world, which begins more and more to resemble the world wherein are narrated the knight’s adventures. The world disguises itself: the enchanted knight ends by enchanting the world. But the price he must pay is the loss of his own enchantment. He recovers his reason. And this, for him, is the supreme madness; it is suicide; reality delivers him to death. The knight will continue to live only in the book that recounts his story; there will be no other recourse to prove his own existence, it will not be found in the unique reading life gave him, but in the multiple readings life took from him in reality, but granted him forever in the book … only in the book. I shall create an open book where the reader will know he is read and the author will know he is written.

Founded upon these principles, reader, I wrote both this chronicle faithful to the last years of his reign, and the life of Don Felipe, El Señor. Thus I fulfilled the fearful charge of the one who had until now narrated this story, Brother Julián, now embarked upon a caravel in the hope of finding beyond the unknown ocean a new world that would truly be a New Spain. I shall suffer and burn the midnight oil. My only hand will tire, but my soul will be illuminated.

CORPUS

Where is everyone?

He dedicated his days to wandering tirelessly through all parts of his palace, attempting, in vain, to hear again the persistent — unnoticed because it was accustomed — sound of picks and bellows, hammers and chisels and cartwheels. But following the torture of Nuño and Jerónimo before the noonday-lighted façade of the palace, a great silence fell over the work site, as if the hand of God had placed over it a large inverted goblet, covering the entire space of the construction, and thus imposing a divine truce.

That day, after the storm and after the death of the workmen, he walked through one of the three doors of the north wall of the palace, which, because it faced the north wind, lacked windows; he gazed for the last time upon the external walls of the palace, the mass of the granite, the tall towers on every corner. Temple of Victory. City of the Dead. Eighth Wonder of the World. He avoided the door leading to the kitchens and also that leading to La Señora’s quarters: both evoked bad memories. He chose the door leading to the palace courtyard; he admired for an instant the jamb, the lintel, architrave, and pilasters, the quality of workmanship of the entire door facing, its stone so carefully joined that the seams were invisible, with its columns that finished off, tied together, gave harmony to the door and the low plinth, fascia, and high cornice. He entered, and swore he would never go outside again.

“Where is everyone?”

The nuns were still there; the monks were still there; a minimal staff of kitchen and palace servants remained. The servants, unordered, devoted themselves to quietly preparing El Señor’s meals and to attempting to clean his rooms, but as most of the savory dishes were almost always returned untouched to the kitchens, and as El Señor refused to allow them to change the black sheets on his bed, or touch a broom to his chamber, and as he himself never changed the black attire in which he had presided over the final ceremonies of death, the cooks, scullery lads, and chamber servants found very little to do, except what will be seen they did. El Señor ordered the monks to perform a perpetual service for the dead and said to them: “You have but one mission: to pray for the dead and to pray for me.”

First he ordered that two friars be continuously before the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar, praying to God for his soul and the souls of his dead, day and night, in perpetual prayer. Then on the day of Corpus Christi, he ordered that thirty thousand Masses be offered for the repose of his soul. The friars were astounded, and one of them dared say to him: “But you still live, Sire…”

“Would you bear witness to that?” El Señor replied with a bitter smile, and he added that when the thirty thousand Masses were ended, a new series of equal number should be begun, and so on unto infinity, whether he lived or died.

The outspoken friar said: “You do violence to Heaven.”

“I shall temper it with piety,” El Señor responded, trembling, and added: “Yes, and may two thousand Masses be said for souls in Purgatory. And at the end of each Mass, say a response for my soul, and with this intent may the appropriate alms be distributed among the poor.”

And to Madre Milagros he said: “Have your nuns watch over me. Let them frighten away fear.”

“Our Inesillais lost, Señor. That is what frightens us.”

“One nun does not make a convent. Have you not replaced her?”

“Yes, other novitiates have arrived, Sor Prudencia, Sor Esperanza Sor Caridad, Sor Ausencia…”

“I want no intruders. Let them howl like bitches when anyone approaches me, as they howled when they heard the barking and chains and horns of my faithful hound Bocanegra.”

During those years, the nuns howled every time an increasingly ancient Mother Celestina came to visit El Señor to assure him that the feared usurper, the Idiot Prince, remained in bed with the dwarf Barbarica at the monastery of Verdín. The stubble-chinned old woman marveled at El Señor’s solitude and poverty, shook her head and said things El Señor had decided to allow only her to say: “He who has little sense or judgment loves almost nothing except what he’s missed. And you, Don Felipe, you feel great remorse for the years you lost. Would you return to the first age?”

He told himself he would not, and La Celestina told him that word was spreading of the alms distributed here following every Mass; the beggars of the kingdom, in growing numbers, were gathered at the palace gates, they surrounded the palace, they were appropriating the old huts of the workmen and the abandoned taverns and forges, awaiting the daily charity.

Then the old woman would leave and El Señor would sit for long hours in his curule chair beside the tireless hearth and recall the young bride ravished on the day of her wedding with the smith Jerónimo, the girl who accompanied him to the beach and there told her dream of a world free for love and the body, the lover with whom he and Ludovico had shared their nights in the bloody castle. Would they wish to return to the first age?

Occasionally in the late afternoon he ascertained that the couple bound together by sex in the prison of mirrors were still there, moaning, incapable of extricating themselves from one another, like street dogs, the juices of pleasure burned up, the lubricious orifices dried up, desiccated prick and withered cunt yoked together, both wounded — powerless ever to heal — by the ground glass Mother Celestina had introduced into Inés’s sex and by the sharp fish’s teeth she had set in the lips of Inés’s restored virginity. Doña Inés and Don Juan moaned, the nun’s face always covered by the coif of her habit, the cavalier cloaked always in his brocaded mantle. El Señor did not wish to see them. It was enough to know they were there, condemned to see themselves one day in what could be seen only when they tired of living with their eyes closed: their own images in a world consisting solely of mirrors.

Everyday, without opening the door of the cell, the servants passed a plate of dried beef beneath the door. They occupied themselves with this chore, and with delivering the leftovers of El Señor’s meals to the beggars clustered beneath the tile sheds, who at the hour of the Angelus came to the kitchen door on the north façade to ask for charity. El Señor never watched Inés and Juan eat. One night a servant dared say to him as he served him dinner in the bedchamber where dust mounted in the corners: “They snarl over the dried beef like beasts, master, and never reveal their faces; they’re worse than the hungriest beggars we attend…”

El Señor asked the servant to be silent, and ordered that he be lashed for his impudence. It happened that this same night the nuns howled quietly, and a friar entered El Señor’s chamber accompanied by an ancient gentleman of learned aspect who said he was Dr. Pedro del Agua; he looked at El Señor with an embalmer’s eyes, and even asked in a low voice: “Will it be my fate to embalm both father and son?”

Is there a doctor in Spain who is not a Jew? And is there any Jewish doctor who is not a poisoner? Angrily, El Señor ordered the incautious friar to condemn Dr. del Agua before the Holy Office, and to prosecute him, and torture him, and force a confession from him, and since his name was Marrano, Filthy Pig, del Agua, he should be tortured by water until he burst. And he ordered that from that time nothing should be communicated to him aloud, but only in writing, only in writing, always.

“Only what is written is real. Wind carries away words as easily as it brings them. Only the written remains. I shall believe in my life only if I read it. I shall believe in my death only if I read it.”

And thus, after a few day’s time, a different friar brought El Señor a document and El Señor read it. It related therein the suffering of the Jews expelled from his kingdom, and this chronicle was signed by an Andrés Bernáldez, priest of Los Palacios; the Jews could not sell their possessions in exchange for gold or silver, as the exportation of these metals was forbidden, thus they have sold houses, properties, and everything they possessed for the pittance pure Christians wished to pay them, they wandered about with them, begging, and finding no one who would buy them; they gave a house for an ass, a vineyard for a little cloth, and then fled Spain in cramped and badly captained ships, and many drowned in storms, and others reached the north of Africa only to become victims of pillage and murder, the Turks killing many of them to steal the gold they had swallowed hoping in this fashion to conceal it, others perished from hunger and epidemics, and there were those who were abandoned naked on islands by their captains; some were sold in Genoa and its villages as men- and maidservants and some were thrown into the sea; staggering, the most fortunate had reached the cities in the north of Europe, Amsterdam and Lübeck and London, and there have been given refuge and accepted in their offices as money-changers, contractors, jewelers, and philosophers …

At first El Señor savored the reading of this chronicle, giving thanks that his land was being rid of those who, denying the divinity of Christ, threatened El Señor’s personal well-being and solitude. But then he was struck by diarrhea like a hare’s or nanny goat’s that kept him bedfast for a week. He persisted, nevertheless, in his decision to heed only what was communicated to him in writing, and to speak only with the ancient Celestina, when she came to visit him, or with his mother, the one called the Mad Lady, when he himself approached the walled-up niche in his chapel.

“What are you doing, Mother?”

Through the opening at the level of the mutilated Queen’s yellow eyes, he heard her muted, ancient voice: “I was remembering, my son, when you were a little boy and used to sit at my feet, or upon my knees, during the long winter nights beside the fire in the chimney hearth in our old castle, while I educated you to be a true Prince, repeating to you the rules every good preceptor inculcates in legitimate heirs. I told you then, son, that it befits no one more than a Prince to have much and good knowledge, but this knowledge must be useful and employed toward heroic and praiseworthy ends. The bee does not settle upon every flower, nor from those from which she sucks does she take more than she has need of to fabricate her honeycombs. The erudite Prince need not know everything, but neither may he ignore any of the things leading to the designs of his birth. Thus let it be said of you, my darling son: that you knew everything you should, but that you studied nothing you need not have known. How young I was then, and beautiful, and whole, and you were so small and blond and attentive in your high ermine collar, your pale, delicate hands resting upon my knees, so serious, listening to me: it is not sufficient, my son, that you confess and take Communion every month, but, knowing that in the use of the Holy Sacraments lies your best defense, you must habituate yourself, first, to confessing every two weeks, then every week, and then every day; and do not content yourself with confessing only the sins you have committed since your last Communion, but every day confess first the last ten years of your life, then twenty, then thirty, until you are accustomed to confessing your entire life every day. And in order to do this with greater purity, you must not only most forcefully forbid yourself all that is illicit, but even be moderate in the honorable portion of your life, keeping your fasts, even though your physician counsel you differently, suffering your labors with patience, and surmounting your passions, for he who is not mortified can never be a Christian Prince. Let your virtue shine forth, oh, my son, my Prince, in the delights of bodily purity, and let it be said of you that you were like the pearl that never leaves its shell except to receive the dew from Heaven: never betray the limits of this virtue, not even in the strict law of most chaste matrimony. This will be a rare marvel in a depraved century! In a perfect body! In a young sovereign! And in a palace filled with adulation, and the delights of the world. For let the fables say what they will of their chaste deities; the poets lie when they say that Hercules destroyed serpents in his cradle, but here we shall say with all truth, and in all simplicity, that a young King choked within his palace all the serpents of his appetites. Oh, what a great victory! Let the Phoenix make its nest amid heavy perfumes in the high mountains of Araby, that is well and good; but that the Ermine be not stained in the black vapors of Babylon is cause for admiration. The admiration of others, my son: power is appearance, honor is appearance, the Spanish knight and Prince are what they appear to be, for appearance is reality, and reality a fleeting illusion. That a King confined within his bedchamber, penitent, austere, contemplative, may keep himself clean and pure, I can easily understand; but that a King caressed by all delights, feted with music, flattered with entertainments and feasts and a thousand incentives for pleasure, keep himself always so temperate; truly, that has all the signs of a miracle. God placed Adam in Paradise; and here observes St. Augustine: who must guard whom?. Paradise, Adam? or Adam, Paradise? Answer this question today, my little son, and if you ask me, what are you doing, Mother? where are you? I shall tell you I am with you, I, young, and you a child, more than forty years ago, inculcating in you the education of a Prince, asking you to be what your father, my husband, the fair, never was, always looking to your salvation, son, inciting you to chastity, pleading with you never to succumb, never to touch any woman, not even your wife, or to know anything it was not fitting to know, and that you devote yourself to mortification, for I would charge myself with procuring for you an heir who would not lead us to extinction but guide us back to our origins, thus perpetuating our breed. I have fulfilled my part, little Felipe, you have an heir without having stained your body; you would not be like your father who caused me such great suffering, you would be for me what your father never was, chaste, mortified, and prudent; and what you were not, another would be in your name, the heir I rescued from the poking and pinching and sticks of a mob of beggars so that he would do what you would never have to do. Have you deserved, my son, the name of Prince? That I am: I am a young and beautiful Queen, saved by the honor and esteem of her son: you. My name is Juana.”

In the solitude of his dust-filled bedchamber of black sheets, black tapestries, black crucifix, and high narrow window, El Señor pondered his mother’s words. Seated there, he was pleasured by a summer’s day, the last summer’s day he had lived. He knew he would never again see such a day. It would be eternal winter in this solitude. He looked from time to time toward the nuns’ choir. Encarnación, Dolores, Esperanza, Caridad, Angustias, Clemencia, Milagros, Ausencia, Soledad: he, Felipe, a recluse among women, seated in eternal penumbra.

On that last summer’s day of his life he had ridden through the flowering land of his childhood. He had ridden out to hunt. Guzmán had prepared everything. His faithful Bocanegra accompanied him. It rained. He took refuge in his tent and read his breviary. Bocanegra ran out of the tent. It stopped raining. Everyone gathered around the felled stag. He was to give the order for the final ceremony: that the horns sound, the stag be quartered, the hounds be baited, and the prizes and punishments of the day be allotted. He raised his hand to give the order. But before he gave it, everything happened as if he had already acted. The culminating moment of the hunt proceeded as if El Señor’s order had been given. As if his most perfect presence were absence itself.

“Where is everyone?”

Who was giving orders in his name? Who was governing in his stead? or was it that everything was happening — as it had that night on the mountain — through inertia, without El Señor’s having signed papers, or ordered or forbidden or rewarded or castigated.

He walked through the courtyards, passed through doors, fatigued vestibules, wandered through the small cloisters of the convent, the great square that served as a locutory, with its pilasters of granitic stone, he passed beneath lunettes of melancholy windows, past walnut benches with back rests, through the upper level of the convent with its long walls and cloisters traversed and crisscrossed by a multitude of arches, beneath the carved ceilings of the storeroom, until he entered a vast gallery he had never seen before, two hundred feet long and thirty feet high, the fronts, sides, and domed ceiling covered by painting, columns embedded in the walls embellished with fascia, jambs, lintels, and railings in a row, in the manner of balconies, the ceiling and the dome with grotesque and elaborate plaster ornamentation, a thousand variations on real and fictional figures, plaster medallions and niches, pedestals, men, women, children, monsters, birds, horses, fruits and flowers, draperies and festoons, and a hundred other bizarre inventions, and at the rear of the great hall stood a Gothic throne of carved stone, and seated upon it a man, he tried to recognize him, the high, starched ruff, damask doublet, tightly laced shoes, one leg shorter than the other, stiff torso, pale, grayish face, drowsy, stupid eyes with the gaze of an inoffensive saurian, half-open mouth, the lower lip thick and drooping, heavy prognathic jaw, sparse eyebrows, long wig of black, oily curls, and crowning the head a bloody white pigeon, the blood ran down this King’s face, yes, this secret monarch who stiffly raised one arm, and then the other, and governed in his name, now he knew, now he understood … the royal mummy fabricated by La Señora, the specter of all his ancestors, seated upon this throne and crowned by a dove, thank you, thank you, Isabel, I am indebted to you, this phantom governs for me, I can devote myself to the greatest undertaking: my soul’s well-being …

Another crown, this one of gold encrusted with sapphire, pearl, agate, and rock crystal, lay on the floor at the feet of the mummy, of this animated corpse that did not stare at him any more intently than he, trembling, stared at it.

Impulsively, he picked up the Gothic crown and fled from the gallery, not hearing the titters of the homunculus hidden behind the throne, and walked hurriedly through mournful passageways, unfinished gardens, secret stairways, tombstones of dark marble, avoiding the chapel and the ceremonies of that Holy Day of Corpus Christi, until he reached the chamber of his wife Isabel, he had seen the mummy there, lying on her bed, he entered: there was nothing there now except the white sand floors, a warm June breeze drifted through the window from which La Señora had ordered the costly windowpanes removed and packed, the shiny tiles of the Arabic bath had been torn out, the bed collapsed. In her absence, Isabel’s chamber had begun to resemble El Señor’s; hasty abandon, passing glory.

Something glittered, half buried in the sands of the floor.

El Señor walked to it, stooped over, and withdrew a green bottle from its tomb of sand.

He broke the bottle’s red seal.

The bottle contained a manuscript.

With difficulty he extracted the manuscript. It was ancient parchment, its stained leaves stuck to one another, and it was written in Latin.

He sat upon the sand, and this is what he read.

MANUSCRIPT OF A STOIC

I

I am writing in the last year of the reign of Tiberius. The Empire inherited from Augustus still maintains its maximum and magnificent extension. From the central navel of its foundation by the sons of the she-wolf, its possessions extend, in great universal arcs, to the north, the Frisian Islands and Batavia, through all Gaul, conquered by Caesar, and to the south and west, from the Pyrenees to the Tagus through the lands where Scipio availed himself of three Lusitanians to murder the rebellious Viriathus and then, everything once having been founded upon revolt, blood, and betrayal, it was necessary to found it all a second time in Numantia, upon the honor of heroic failure: Numantia, where, before surrendering, the Iberians set fire to their homes, killed their women, burned their children, poisoned themselves, thrust daggers into their breasts, cut the hocks of their horses, and those who remained alive after this immolation threw themselves from their towers upon the Romans, lances pointed, trusting that as they crashed to the ground and died they would take with them, impaled, an invader.

All the lands embraced to the east of the Rhone and south of the Danube, from Vienna to Thrace, are Roman; Byzantium, the Bosporus, Anatolia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, and the great crescent that sweeps from Antioch to Carthage are Roman; hers is the Mare Nostrum: Rhodes, Cyprus, Greece, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Islands. The world is one and Rome is the head of that world. Rome is the world, even when its most ambitious citizens temper this truth with glances directed toward what remains to be conquered: Mauritania, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Dacia, the Britannic isles … Nevertheless, we can say with pride, along with our great founding poet: Romans, masters of the world, a togaed nation.

Like falcons, descend, reader, from this high firmament that permits us to admire the unity and extension of the Empire, to the place where dwells Tiberius, Master of Rome.

Until recently, we narrators could begin our chronicles with this notice: Listen, reader, and you shall have delight. I do not know whether this be my case; I ask forgiveness beforehand as I lead you to Capri, a craggy island of goats anchored in the gulf of Naples, accessible only by one small beach, surrounded by bottomless waters, and defended by sheer cliffs. On its summit: the Imperial Villa, the most inaccessible spot on this small, barren, and impregnable island.

And, nevertheless, this afternoon a poor fisherman who has had the good fortune to catch an enormous mullet does ascend laboriously, though sure-footedly, for from the time he was a child he has competed with the other lads of the island to see who can most rapidly scale the vertical rock formations; he sweats, he pants, his legs are scratched, and with a single hand, in moments of danger, he clings to the sharp yellow rocks; his other arm clutches to his breast the fish with the silver belly and eyes (both in life and in death) half covered by transparent membranes. Night is falling, but the fisherman does not falter in his keen determination to reach the summit where dwells Tiberius Caesar; night is falling but in the enormous eyes of Tiberius Caesar there is no fear, for we all know that he can see in the dark.

At night, he sees by thrusting forward his stout, stiff neck; by day, he shuns the sun, even inside the Imperial Villa wearing a wide-brimmed hat to protect himself from the glare of the sun. Now he has discarded the hat, and as the sky grows dark, he asks his counselor Theodorus to place upon his head a crown of laurel leaves; it is only night, night naturally descending upon us, Theodorus says to Caesar; one never knows, Tiberius replies, the sky grows dark, it may be night, but it may be a storm approaching, crown me with laurel so lightning can never touch me, and make sure, Theodorus, that when I die they bury me more than five feet in the ground, where lightning cannot penetrate and commit my manes to the ignipotent god Vulcan, whom I most fear.

Caesar sits silently in the darkness and listens to the dripping of the water clock that marks time; a time of water; and then, brusquely, he seizes the wrist of his patient counselor who had acquired in the East — and never renounced — the customs of his attire and personal appearance: linen tunic, sandals of palm fiber, and shaved head. Theodorus: this afternoon as I was sleeping my siesta I dreamed again, the phantom returned; who, Caesar?; Agrippa, Theodorus, Agrippa, it was he, I recognized him; that poor youth is dead, Caesar, you know it better than anyone; but not because of me, is that not true, Theodorus, not through any fault of mine? be frank with me, only in you will I tolerate frankness, you are the son of my rhetoric master, Teselius of Gandara, you can tell me, without fear of retribution, what others, if they spoke, would pay for with their lives …

“Caesar; your stepfather, the Emperor Augustus, told you once that it does not matter that others speak evil of us; it is sufficient that we prevent their doing evil; I, Caesar, if I speak evil, I do you good; in what other way would you hear the complaints, rumors, ire, and sorrow of your Empire?”

“I do not care to know what is said; rather, I wish to act against the complainers, the rumor-mongers, the wrathful and sorrowful; make that distinction; and do you never fear, Theodorus, that one day my fury will turn against you, will attribute to you the crimes you inform me of, the opinions you transmit to me?”

The counselor bowed slightly, and Tiberius caught the silvery gleam of his shaved head in the darkness. “Caesar, I run that risk … Shall I order the torches to be lighted?”

“I can see at night. Furthermore, I prefer to hear you and not see you. I shall close my eyes. It will be as if I were speaking to myself. I have forgotten how to do that, and that is why I have need of you. But I cannot speak to, or touch, or hear that phantom that visits me every afternoon. It appears at the foot of the triclinium where I have lunched, and later napped, and smiles at me, merely smiles at me…”

The counselor looks around the bedchamber. He does not know whether the masks that adorn it are smiling: they are Tiberius’s ancestors.

“Since you wish to hear the truth in order that your spirit be calmed, I shall tell you, Caesar, that the first act of your reign was the murder of that poor youth who now appears to you in dreams. Agrippa Postumus, the legitimate grandson of Augustus, his blood heir…”

When he speaks, Tiberius always nervously drums his fingers.

“While I am but the son of Augustus’s wife, is that not what you mean? But Augustus chose me; dying, he called me to his bedside and told me, you will be Emperor, you, not that idiotic, gross, physically strong but mentally weak, handsome but imbecilic youth, it will be you, it will not be he … You will be Caesar, Tiberius.”

“The people believe otherwise.”

“What do they believe? Tell me, do not be afraid.”

“That you took care not to reveal the death of Augustus until you had murdered his true heir, Agrippa Postumus; that the corpse of Augustus was closeted away, hidden, rotting, while you ordered Agrippa to be murdered.”

“Augustus Caesar left a letter…”

“The people say that Livia, your mother, wrote in the name of Augustus, her husband, to clear the way for you, the stepson, condemning the young Agrippa, the grandson, to exile…”

“The youth was murdered by the Tribune of the soldiers.”

“The Tribune said that you gave the order.”

“But I denied it and ordered the Tribune killed for slandering me … for slandering the new Caesar, accepted by the Senate and by the Legions … Are these legitimizations not sufficient?”

“In any case, the Agrippa Postumus who died, murdered in his exile on the island of Planasia, and who appears to you every afternoon in your dreams, is merely a specter. Although I believe, Caesar, that no one, not even a phantom, could reach this place; you have chosen your refuge well; the island is a natural fortress.”

Then Caesar screams, raises one arm, points a trembling finger, and Theodorus, the son of a rhetoric master, attempts with narrowed eyes to penetrate the darkness that is so familiar to his master; the phantom! it has returned, this time by night, there! it entered by that balcony, behind that curtain, light the torch, Theodorus! shouts Tiberius, a coarse, trembling man with enormous eyes and a neck like a bull: as the counselor lights the oakum torch he hears the murmur of a humble and frightened voice: “Caesar … the most modest man of this island begs you to accept our hospitality…”

The torchlight reveals a mature man, head bowed, a sparse beard, uncombed hair, and dirty fingernails, wearing only a loincloth; his feet are bleeding, his chest and arms gleaming with sweat; the fish he had clamped against his breast, he now holds out in offering to the Emperor.

“Who are you? How did you reach here?”

“I am a fisherman; I offer you the best of my humble hospitality; the fruit of the sea, this beautiful mullet, Caesar, see how large it is, how gray its side, how silver its belly, and how beautiful its fins…”

“Then anyone at all could come here…”

“Since I was a boy, Caesar, I…”

“And you could lead anyone here…”

“I do not understand; my fathers taught me that it is proper that the humble offer hospitality to the powerful, and that they, without in any way diminishing their greatness, accept it…”

“Innocent; you have shown the way to phantoms.”

At Caesar’s screams a great number of servants burst into the room; they carry torches, lamps, wax tapers, candles; only after the servants have entered, the guards rush in and take the fisherman prisoner — both the guard and the fisherman are trembling; Caesar, also trembling, is muttering that anyone at all can come here, even a miserable fisherman, even a phantom, the phantom that pursues him every afternoon and now sends messengers by night with poisoned fish; no, Caesar, I swear to you, I caught this fish this very afternoon, it is the largest mullet that has ever been taken from these waters, it seemed to me that I would sin through pride if I kept it for myself and my poor family, it is my homage, Caesar, it is the custom of hospitality; the other fishermen say that Agrippa is not dead, that he has been seen on other islands, on Planasia and on Closa, and that soon he will land here with his army of slaves to reclaim the inheritance of his grandfather, Caesar Augustus, they say he is young and blond, and he appears only at night and never twice in the same place: Agrippa Postumus; I argued with my companions, Caesar, I told them you were the Emperor and that with my fish I would offer to you the hospitality of Capri so that your dreams would be tranquil, and mine also; we wish peace, Caesar, my father died in the civil wars fighting against Cassius and Brutus, I wish only to fish in peace, and honor Caesar…”

“Imbecile,” says Tiberius, “you have but doubled my nightmares. Guards, smear the mullet in this brute’s face, rub its snout and teeth in his face; and now what do you say, imbecile? will you again dare scale those cliffs behind my palace and make me believe that anyone, even the phantom of Agrippa, can do what you have done? what do you say?”

“I say, Caesar, that all is well and that I give thanks for having caught a soft-fleshed mullet instead of bringing you a crab…”

And Tiberius laughs; he orders a man of his guard to bring a crab from the kitchen, and orders a servant to fetch the relief guard resting at this hour in the barracks, and orders them to scrub the face of the miserable fisherman with the crab until the man weeps, and bleeding and fearing to lose his sight is ejected from the palace.

“And from now on, believe in a usurping phantom,” Tiberius yells to the air, to the fisherman, to Theodorus, and to himself; and then he orders a relief guard to take the men of the night watch who had not been able to prevent the passage of a wretched fisherman and who, also, had reached the imperial bedchamber after his own servants had arrived; surely they deceived him, they who comprised that watch were not true soldiers, but slaves freed in their master’s wills, orcivi liberated by the grace of Orcus, god of death; such grace would be of short duration; let these cowards of the night watch be rewarded, give each man much to drink, and then bind his genitals so he cannot urinate, and so pass the night with his water strangulated and kidneys swollen, and only in the morning when he, Tiberius Caesar, can attend the spectacle, let each and every man of them be thrown into the sea from the heights of the cliff; and have a crew of sailors waiting below on the sea to break with gaffs and oars the bones of those who did not drown, and yes, even these; and let the relief guard look upon my justice.

The counselor Theodorus believes that parricides suffer a worse fate; beat with canes, they are stitched inside a leather bag with a dog, a cock, a monkey, and a serpent, and thrown into the sea.

“Theodorus: I had among my animals a serpent. One day I discovered it, devoured by ants. The augur warned me against the power of the multitudes.”

“You do well to show caution, Caesar; you have already seen, you were opposed to attending the contest of the gladiators at Fidanae; the amphitheater collapsed and twenty thousand spectators died; you might have been one of them. Stay away from crowds, Caesar. Remember your ancestor, the second Claudia, whose wax mask hangs there beside the balcony.”

“I shall do so. And you try to remember why you have not informed me of that legend now circulating…”

“Caesar; you ask so many things of me.”

Tiberius claps his hands loudly; fetch my servants, disrobe me; lead me to the bath, bring my little fishes, prepare a feast, and merriment, girls, ephebes, let us forget fishermen and phantoms, let the fishermen return to the sea and phantoms to their ashes; farewell, fisherman, come, little fish…”

“Caesar, the rumor is widespread; this apparition is not, of course, the phantom of Agrippa, but the very real person of his slave Clemens, who has taken advantage of a rare physical resemblance, being of the same height and stature as his master, to spread the news that the heir is not dead. This notice is murmured secretly, in the manner of all forbidden stories, in the solitude of the night or under cloak of the similar protection of the multitudes at spectacles, for neither the night nor the mob possesses a discernible face; every fool with a ready ear listens to it; every subversive malcontent; Clemens shows himself only by night and never twice in the same place; who sees him or hears him once will not see him or hear him again, for the man is as swift and intangible as the rumor he disseminates. Publicity, joined to immobility, reveals truth too clearly, Caesar; imposture requires mystery and swift movement from one place to another. All Italy believes that Agrippa lives…”

“Agrippa is nothing but ashes; let Italy recognize them…”

“The slave Clemens stole them, Caesar.”

“Why did you wait so long to tell me this? How do you wish me to be informed, if not by you? Must I wait for some idiot fisherman to climb up here to tell me?”

“Caesar: I have not wished to add fear to fears; of what import is an impersonation condemned to die out, whether by force of ridicule or the force of arms that can mercilessly crush that rabble of slaves? Let the rumor spend itself; no miracle lasts more than nine months; it tires; new marvels will out … Furthermore, Agrippa is not the first murdered heir. So too was Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.”

Enough; warm water, lustral water; how it soothes me, how it renews me; quickly, my little fish, my tender, docile children. Into the water, I seated and you swimming, swiftly, tenderly, between my legs, little fish, you bronzed and I pale, you slim and I soft, between my legs, little fish, until you find your golden fishhook, my weak flame, my aged, tired penis, my withered testicles, come, little fish; how fruitless, but how delicious, little fish, do not hold back, do not be impatient, it matters not, lick, suck, caress; enough. Theodorus, I am leaving the water, dry me, clothe me, the toga, the laurel, my cothurnus, let everything be prepared at the lunar sigma, my crescent couch, mullets and crabs and warm water to mix with the wine and the amphoras well sealed with plaster; have them bear me there, place me there, have my young nymphs come before me, my perverted youths; eat, drink, read the book of the poetess Elephantis wherein are described more than three hundred postures, one for each night of the year; you, Cynthia, and you, Gaius, and you, Lesbia, place your little tongue into Cynthia’s beautiful shaved sex, and you, Cynthia, place between your lips the delicious, dripping penis of our Gaius, and you, Persius, mount Gaius, spread the taut wrinkles of his asshole, loosen with your saliva-moistened fingers the rectum of our ephebe and introduce your long, hard African prick, and you, Gaius, suck the shimmering nipples of our Cynthia, and my children, my little fish, approach, caress with your bronzed hands anything that is unengaged, Lesbia’s buttocks, Persius’s testicles, Gaius’s armpits, and Cynthia’s navel; and you, Fabianus, you masturbate, let your hand slide powerfully from the base of your penis to the scarlet head, so, so, let your weighty peaches feel the gentle energy of your hand, let us see the supple, pellucid skin stretched taut and glistening, bursting with blood and semen, I have always asked myself why we do not ejaculate blood, that would be a glorious sight, red blood and white toga, let your veins swell like pig’s tripe, so, so, oh, now, shower them, bathe them in silvery milk, all of them, children and men and women, now separate yourselves, all of you, break the chain, drink the semen of our Fabianus, smear it between your breasts, between your legs, scoop it up on your fingers and drink that heavy wine through your anuses, let your bodies be covered with a crust of burning snow from our he-goat, our strong and hairy and handsome stud, so blond he is almost white, covered with red scars in the pit of his buttocks and on the tip of his cock and on his red, red, lips, beautiful red-tipped Fabianus, now, change position, do not come yet, weave a new garland, each of you, seek a different mouth, a different pubis, vagina, penis, testicles, anus, breasts, armpits, feet, navel, feast yourselves, naked, on Venus, struggle face to face, attack without fear and wound to the death, give no quarter, do not fear, there will be no offspring, there will be no fruit, the women are extirpated, the seed of the men is dead, your bodies are pure, washed, shaved, clean, lustral, full … enviable Priam Theodoras, who survived all his kin and left no offspring; he was the culmination of his breed, Tiberius wishes also to be the last, he can … he must …

“You have made much progress toward that end, Caesar: you poisoned your adoptive son, Germanicus; and permitted your daughter-in-law to poison your other son, but then you condemned her to eternal voyaging, bound in chains within a closed litter, her sons imprisoned with her: so far as the world is concerned, they do not exist; you ordered your grandsons murdered: Nero on the island of Pontia, Drusus in the dungeon of your palace; both died of hunger; Drusus tried to eat the stuffing of his mattress; you ordered the youth’s remains to be cast to the winds. Caesar: you have no successors, you can be as happy as Priam. Only a phantom threatens you, and that phantom, you know now, is but a slave, he has a name and a body, he can be found, and crucified; you can punish him as you have punished so many. Just punishment, Caesar, worthy of your magnificence and equanimity; the patrician sold as a slave for cutting off his sons’ thumbs to render them unfit for war, the legions you decimated because of their cowardice in combat, all the men tortured and imprisoned and deprived of their citizenship…”

“… yes, repeat it all now that I take delight in the pleasure of these bodies, do me this favor, Theodorus, allow me to think of that as I see this, think of sorrow as I see pleasure, my pleasure will be redoubled and I shall be ever grateful to you, look, look, Theodorus, my sex swells merely thinking of it, a miracle, a miracle, do not stint, Persius, Fabianus, my little fish, Lesbia, tell me what I did to Agrippina, the wife of my son Germanicus, when she dared suspect me … Cynthia, Gaius, continue…”

“You exiled her to the island of Pandateria, Caesar, and as she persisted in telling that you murdered the valiant Germanicus, you ordered a centurion to beat her until she lost one eye, and then, half blinded, the woman ceased to eat, so that she might die of hunger, then you ordered your soldiers to pry open her mouth and force food upon her…”

“… go on, speak, counselor, tell me of unjust punishments, excite me…”

“You condemned to death, and burned the books of, a poet who called Brutus and Cassius the last Romans…”

“… I am the last Roman, Theodorus, I alone; Rome is the unity of all history, what the world has always desired, from the beginning of the most desolate tribes and primitive villages, unity, Rome has acquired it, Rome has acquired something more than lands, seas, cities, towns, booty, it has acquired unity: a single law, a single Emperor, there cannot, there must not be anything but dispersion following the Rome that is Tiberius and the Tiberius that is Rome; let a resurrected Agrippa return to the throne, and see the combined power and enormity of Rome trickle through his hands like the sands of the moon; I desire, believe me, I desire as much as I desire to kiss Cynthia’s sweet buttocks, for that to happen after I am dead…”

“It is happening in your time, Caesar; hear the complaints: you have not filled the vacant posts in the Decurions, nor have you changed the soldiers’ tribunes, or the prefects and governors in the provinces: a great uneasiness responds to your negligence…”

“Quickly, all of you, each give the one closest to him the black kiss, the excremental kiss, quickly…”

“For years you have left Spain and Syria without consular governors, you have allowed Armenia to be enslaved by the Parthians, Moesia by the Dacians, and the Gallic provinces by the Germans. The people say that in all this there is danger and dishonor for the Empire, and they blame you.”

“… do not speak of obligations, Theodorus, speak of pleasures…”

“You ordered a man killed who beat a slave beside your statue, and a man who changed his clothing beside another of your statues…”

“… have you drunk sufficiently? then urinate, urinate in each other’s mouths, quickly…”

“… you ordered a man killed who entered a public urinal wearing a ring that bore your effigy, and still another who entered a brothel wearing a similar ring.”

“… and now, all the men, on your feet, Fabianus and Persius and Gaius, fornicate, each of you with the one before him, while the women kneel and kiss your testicles, each of you thinking how at the hour of death you will think upon your bodies as ridiculous wrinkled wineskins, and of your acts as indecent buffoonery that condemned you to death; tell, tell, counselor; ally my pleasures…”

“You killed a patrician who allowed himself to be honored in his natal village, only because on a different occasion, but on the same date and in the same place, you had been honored; and the time of every village, Caesar, begins upon the day you visit it…”

“Minutiae, minutiae, I visit nothing today, I am ensconced in my villa in Capri, content, imagining, imagining the sublime: how to make my death coincide with the death of my Empire. I cannot bear the thought that someone might succeed me, it would be as if our beautiful Cynthia, instead of offering me her buttocks white as animated marble, had begun in this instant to feel the pangs of childbirth, and had lain upon my sigma to give birth, imagine such horror; the same horror I feel when I imagine that anyone could succeed me, lie down in my places, touch Lesbia’s breast, pluck a pubic hair from Fabianus, no, no, they must all die first, I die only with my Empire; Theodorus, there must be alerts, executions at the least pretext, let no one remain, I want to die but I want to die the last death, execute, Theodorus, execute, ejaculate, execute and let the corpses be thrown down the mournful steps of the Forum and dragged on gaff hooks to the Tiber…”

“It has been done, Caesar…”

“… and as it is our impious custom to strangle virgins, first let the executioners rape them, and then hang them…”

“It has been done, Caesar…”

“… let no one commit suicide without my consent…”

“Carmulus has just committed suicide, Caesar, that malcontent Carmulus.”

“… then he escaped me! you see, counselor, such imprudence, what lack of attention to scruples…”

“Agrippina, too, conquered in her exile, she died of hunger, as she desired…”

“… let none other escape me, each of you must be vigilant!”

“No one, Caesar? not even those who wish to die?”

“Not even they…”

“How, then, will you condemn them?”

“By forcing them to live…”

“Whom shall we call on, Caesar? Italy is peopled with spies, with informers, with resentful and offended men. It is an enormously cunning mechanism, even those injured by you believe there is no reason their case should be unique and they betray a friend or an enemy, or the relatives of friends and enemies, to other friends and enemies, and thus all Italy is founded upon the revenge of vengeance, and we do not know where it will end; and there are cases of those who have no one in their families whom you have had killed, they feel neglected and swiftly contrive an intrigue that will make them worthy of such an honor; and all the informers listen to them, their only desires are to provide deaths for you; whom shall we call on now…?”

“Listen to the dwarfs, Theodorus, they smell out traitors, they have a great nose for treachery, the gods have granted them that gift in exchange for their misshapen bodies. If a dwarf asks you why it is permitted that this one or that one live, being a traitor to my person, immediately execute the informers, even if they be Fabianus or Cynthia, my lovers; now, tell me from whom I descend, recall my cruel line to me, Theodorus…”

“From the Lucians, Caesar, but you changed the surname when those of the family so named were condemned for looting and murder. From the Claudias, Caesar. From the first Claudia, who, to demonstrate that her chastity could not be questioned, threw a rope over her shoulders and dragged from the muddy banks of the Tiber a mired boat laden with sacred objects…”

“… what women, Theodorus, what females!”

“From the second Claudia, condemned as a traitor by the Senate because one day, when the mob in the streets blocked the passage of her litter, she descended and asked publicly that her brother Pulcher be resurrected, and as he had done in life, lose another fleet to the enemy, and thus there would be fewer crowds in Rome and the patricians could pass through the streets without mishap.”

“… yes, yes, what women, they have always despised the mob.”

“And the second Claudia would not even dress in mourning to ask clemency as she was judged. Clemency was for slaves and castrati, she said, not for a woman who hoped to encounter all her friends and admirers in Hades, on the other side of the lazy black waters of the River Styx…”

“… yes, yes, Theodorus, that line culminates in me; look, search in your archives and your recollections, search for the most obscure, the least known, the most forgotten testimony of a rebellion against me; an individual rebellion, originating in the crowd, but one that means revolt against us who although we are unique represent a collective ethic incarnate in marble temples and marble laws that I, and only I, can convert into dust and ridicule, not the mob, not the multitudes, not the ants that devoured my serpent: our Roman law, Theodorus, the same for all, sustained in a vast and unified Empire: unique Rome, you can belong to no one but a unique Tiberius; die with me, Rome; and you, son of a rhetorician, search, go forth in your palm sandals, find what I seek and allow me to take pleasure from my children and ephebes and nymphs, what? have you tired so soon? quickly, consult Elephantis, a new posture, quickly, my pleasure will not tolerate half measures, and you are here for my pleasure, not your own, quickly, Elephantis to our aid…”

II

I, Theodorus, the narrator of these events, have spent the night reflecting upon them, setting them down upon the papers you hold, or someday will hold, in your hands, reader, and in considering myself as I would consider another person: the third person of objective narration; the second person of subjective narration; yes, Tiberius’s second person, his observer and servant; and only now, in the seclusion of this cubicle filled with piles of papers I have collected throughout my travels, seated on a rough wooden cot near a window that does not look out upon the sea, my only view the barren ocher rocks of Capri, I can consider myself, in the solitude that is my spare autonomy, first person: I, the narrator.

I have witnessed these events; most monstrous events, for I could understand the Emperor’s lewd appetites if, in fact, the children he calls his little fish were normal children, or the women called Lesbia and Cynthia were beautiful females, or handsome youths Fabianus, Persius, and Gaius; but to have to attend these orgies, accepting the beauty imagined by Tiberius and imposed upon his sexual attendants while my eyes see what they see, is something that would perturb the serenity of the most discreet and even-tempered man; the pitiful children are blind, Cynthia and Gaius are dwarfs, Persius a hunchback, Fabianus an albino, and Lesbia a monster who has lost the lower portion of her face, from nose to chin, so that the poor woman’s face is partly a great scarred hole, and partly an opening for swallowing ground food, a face dominated by two maddened eyes that attempt to say to me: You who look at me with compassion, tell me how I have come here, what I am doing here, why I repeat these acts I do not understand, why they subject me to this derision and torture …

I would like to explain to her that Caesar is very attentive to the birth of deformed beings, he searches for them in circuses, in ports laid waste by sudden plagues, in isolated mountains where incest reigns, and in subterranean quarters in criminal cities, and from there he has brought to his Imperial Villa these poor creatures forced to acquaint themselves with the book of the poetess Elephantis and to represent a beauty whose patrons Caesar has invented, I do not know whether he does this so that the normality of his own body may be comparatively impressive, or whether, compared to his senescence and impotence, the monsters believe, in spite of everything, that they are beautiful because they can still do with their deformed bodies what our Emperor can no longer do with his.

I do not know; nor is it my function to ascertain, choosing among solutions, involving myself emotionally in all this. I fulfill the simple function of witness. Without ever saying so, Tiberius requires a witness of his character; it is that necessity that saves, and will always save, those of us who otherwise would be the first to be thrown to the lions. Once I attended a venatic spectacle with the Emperor; a man fought in the arena against the beasts, and in the end was devoured by them. I was surprised not to see a single spark of fear in the eyes of that gladiator; he was a tranquil man; he expected nothing, he lost nothing.

Perhaps I, too, am a lost man; my death is deferred by Caesar’s need for a witness. He must know that I write, that I leave proof of these events, and that the Romans of the future will know of them. Consequently, he knows that I do not assign him endearing traits. Nevertheless, he permits it; furthermore, he desires it. Because, perhaps, I am not merely witness to events, which are only actions, but, more importantly, witness to the character that is the agent of these events. Actions change, and different men may enact them; character does not change, only one man may be its agent. The character Tiberius possesses in these later years has been his character always, although, perhaps, in the springtime of his life no one, not even he, was aware of it; the good man does not become evil, or the evil man good. Power does not alter a man’s character; it merely reveals it. If we know this, we shall always understand the character of the powerful. At least, power possesses this virtue; he who retains it can never lie; the light of history is too powerful; it will not serve the powerful to be hypocritical, for the exercise of power will reveal the extent of his hypocrisy. Thus, wise nature balances the fact that she gives much to very few and little to many; the few cannot hide the truth, and this is the penance they serve for having strength; the many can never help but see it, and this is the reward of their weakness.

A man like myself, who understands these things, must, nevertheless, choose between two attitudes as he writes history. Either history is merely the testimony of what we have seen and can thus corroborate, or it is the investigation of the immutable principles that determine these events. For the ancient Greek chroniclers, who lived in an unstable world, subject to invasions, civil wars, and natural catastrophes, the reaction was clear: history can concern itself only with what is permanent; only that which does not change can be known; what changes is not intelligible. Rome has inherited this concept, but has given it a practical purpose: history should be at the service of legitimacy and continuity; future chance must support the act of founding. The law of Rome is an act that defines several and individual chance concerning paternity, possession, marriage, inheritance, and contracts. None of these events would be legitimate without reference to the principle, the act, the general norm — superior to the individual’s — that legitimize them. And what is the base of this legitimacy? The nation itself, the Roman nation, its origins, its foundation. And what is the projection of this legitimacy? The entire world, since the Roman nation incarnates universal principles capable of converting pure nature, cosmos, into a social and historical world, into ecumenae. This is the privilege of Rome; this is why she has been able to conquer the world, to impose unity, to be caput mundis, but the head of a world conceived as extension of the intangible act of our law, our morality, our civil and military administration, not of a natural world where chance prevails over action, a world which consequently is destined to dispersion. Our success is the best proof of this truth: we are the amphora that gives form to the wine of pure creation.

Before these truths and these disjunctions, I choose to be witness to the fatal chance represented by my master Tiberius, asking myself by virtue of which fates a man can wear the imperial purple who denies all the founding virtues of a society so preoccupied with legitimizing itself and its conquests. I have known the East: why do our preceptors lie when they compare the presumed corruption of the Levantine with their equally presumed belief in the simplicity, strength, and beneficence of Rome? And why, if this is believed, is vice secretly fomented in Rome, the cults of Venus and Bacchus, while pressure is exerted on the poets to exalt the virtues represented by a government that maintains the order so disastrously altered following the murder of Julius Caesar that sad day in March? And by what strange contradiction do all these necessities for true responsibility exempt our master Tiberius?

I know that my questions imply a temptation: that of acting, of intervening in the world of chance and placing my grain of sand upon the hazardous beach of events. If I succumb to it, I may lose my life without gaining glory; my kingdom is not that of necessity but that of whatever fragile liberty I can gain for myself in spite of necessity. To the temptation of action I oppose a conviction: since I neither want nor can influence the events of the world, my mission is to conserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be the manner in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.

I confess here that the only temptation to which I shall truly succumb is that of presenting myself to myself — when I write about myself in the third person — in a more worthy, more sympathetic light. The truth is not so beautiful.

But that temptation to act … that all too human temptation …

III

Caesar: I have been able to find nothing more obscure among my papers, or in the deepest recesses of my memory, Theodorus said to Tiberius that midday, while the naked Emperor, before eating, stood near a great fire as servants showered him with cold water and then rubbed his body with oil; nothing more obscure, nothing more forgotten.

You are Mercury, herald of the gods, Tiberius laughed. No, Caesar, a simple archivist mouse, and a humble traveler of the East; consider my method: first I thought about something no one had ever thought before; that is, I thought the impossible, what I did not know, beginning from your premise: find the most unknown testimony of an individual rebellion that originated in the mob. I reviewed the history of Rome; it is too well documented. Then I reviewed the history of the provinces, one by one, until I came to one of the poorest, the most isolated and insignificant, Judea. Examining its history, I found a recent event (unknown because it was recent, for only the ancient has had time to become memorable) that attracted my attention.

One of your Procurators, Pontius Pilate by name, a subordinate of the Roman governor of Syria and a protégé of your favorite, Sejanus, was deposed and forced to commit suicide last year because of a complaint of excessive cruelty issued by the so-called Samaritans, who centuries ago populated and dominated the northern part of the kingdom of Israel. I asked myself, Caesar, what, however dark a deed, could force the abdication and death of one of Tiberius’s Procurators; what strength could a sect or tribe of the desert land of Judea exert to achieve that; and why?; and what are the antecedents?

Suddenly I remembered something I had completely forgotten: five or six years ago in the extreme heat of the month of Nisan I was passing through Jerusalem on the way to Laodicea. I crossed through the heights of the city, through a square called Antonius, or Gabbatha, where there was gathered a great rabble of Jews. I could see, from a distance, two figures standing in the atrium of the praetorium: a man dressed in a toga, washing his hands before the multitude, and beside him, head bowed and crowned with thorns, a figure of mockery, a bearded beggar, lacerated, bleeding, motionless. What is happening? I asked my guide; and he answered: “Caesar’s Procurator is administering justice here.”

We passed by; I was thirsty; I was tired; I wished to reach Laodicea. I had not remembered that incident until today. But beginning from that, I was able to conjecture upon the answers to my questions. The Procurator is charged both with imparting justice and with maintaining peace; the only threat against the peace of Judea is Hebraic messianism, which preaches the coming of a redeemer of the Jewish people, a descendant of King David who will restore the political sovereignty of Israel. There is a surplus of these redeemers, or messiahs, in Judea, Sire; shake any palm tree in the desert, and from it will fall twenty date clusters and ten redeemers. My inquiry became more circumscribed: was the Procurator Pilate involved in one of these cases? Was I, that afternoon during the dog days, an unconscious witness to an encounter between the Procurator and one of those Jewish prophets?

I unearthed the least-consulted papers in our archives; finally I found a brief bureaucratic report telling of an execution, scarcely five years ago, of a Hebrew magus or prophet or rogue of questionable behavior who fraternized with prostitutes and lived with twelve workmen; he was called the Nazarite, or, as that is translated, the Saint of God. This man, the Nazarite, said he was descended from David and that he was the Messiah of prophecy, the King of the Jews. For some months he wandered about the most remote areas of Judea, preaching this rebel-lion-of-one that coincides with what you asked me to find, Caesar: a purely individual revolt that originated in the mob, for the Nazarite was the son of a carpenter and was born in a stable. He said, nonetheless, that he was the son of God, born independently of man, and he affirmed that earthly power and riches are of no worth, for all that matters is to save one’s soul and win the Kingdom of Heaven, that is, the kingdom of that unique God, the supposed father of the Nazarite.

With these ideas he either irritated or disheartened everyone. He discouraged, Caesar, those who were awaiting a call to arms; instead, the Nazarite preached love for one’s fellow, meekness, and other, not in the least martial, virtues, such as offering the other cheek to those who smite us. And he irritated the priests of Jerusalem and the Sadducean aristocracy, our allies, because he expounded before the mob criticisms and reproaches against the Hebrew order and their wise alliance with Rome. He literally walked into the mouth of the wolf: he went to Jerusalem and there incited disorders, outraging the sellers of doves, whipping the money-changers installed in the atrium of the temple, and violating the Sabbath with healings the Jews attributed to Beelzebub, although their only debt was to Aesculapius. He grossly insulted the learned doctors of the law, the Scribes and Pharisees, calling them whited sepulchers and other such pretty names. This permitted the Hebraic aristocracy to denounce him as a dangerous agitator before Pilate, and at first, Caesar, your Procurator seemed doubtful, in spite of the insistence of his wife, who sent him messages telling him to have nothing to do with “The Just” because he made her suffer in dreams; but in the end he capitulated to this argument: the Nazarite says he is King of the Jews; but we, the Hebrew hierarchs, recognize no king but Tiberius; if you free the agitator, Pilate, you will demonstrate that you are no friend of Tiberius Caesar.

Pilate converted necessity into policy; he saw an opportunity in all this to ingratiate himself with the priesthood and the aristocracy, and at the same time to frighten other Jewish insurgents; they, like the Nazarite, threaten both the dominion of Rome and the stability of the Hebrew powers allied with Rome. And, as I have told you, such men abound: one who called himself the Anointed said he had the power to resurrect the dead; another called Jehohanan drowned evildoers in the Jordan as he walked upon the waters. And so on and so forth.

As everyone had agreed, the Nazarite was led to the cross and died there on the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan; but his stubborn disciples say he arose from the dead and ascended into Heaven, and that his kingdom of slaves will be eternal, whereas your kingdom of patricians is but transitory; and in recollection of the sacrifice of their Master, these followers have the custom of making with their hand the sign of the cross upon their face or breast, in the same way we Romans, as a sign of adoration, place our right hand to our lips.

But to return to your Procurator, Caesar. The crucifixion of the Nazarite was the last instance of equilibrium between the power of Rome and that of her Hebrew collaborators. Made arrogant by his political success in ridding himself of the Nazarite, Pilate believed he could use that event to advantage and extend the local power of Rome by confusing it with his own. He had eliminated the prophet; he thought, too, to subject those who had helped crucify him. Naively, he did not perceive that the priests and Jewish aristocracy were well aware of the popularity of the Nazarite and that as they forced Pilate’s hand they were in truth effecting the lessening of prestige of Roman justice, they were weakening our power and strengthening their own. The truth is that poor Pilate succumbed to this human temptation: not to be content with the balance of power he thought he had achieved and, not being content, desiring to upset it. Why?

To augment his own power, yes, or his representation of a power that was not his; but especially to have life, Caesar, to have the life that is born only, always, of the rupture of an earlier state of equilibrium.

He offended the Jewish powers for whom images are an abomination by having our soldiers parade through Jerusalem carrying standards bearing your image, and by placing in full view in the ancient palace of Herod votive shields bearing your name; have no doubt, Caesar, Pilate imagined his own name there, not yours. Judea is a distant land; why not play the part of an Emperor, feel he was a minor Caesar; had the Nazarite not proclaimed himself King of the Jews, and had not Pilate, without consulting Caesar, acted in Caesar’s name, and only to affirm that there was no King but Caesar? Imagine Pilate’s confusion, Sire, for as he asked himself these questions he was forced to add others: was the Nazarite the son of God or merely the phantom of God, a specter issued from the reverberating mirages of the desert? Had the representative of Tiberius killed the representative of God; had Tiberius killed God? Pilate, in order to overcome this quandary, had but one road: he persisted in unnecessarily subjugating those who were already subjugated, in provoking their passive resistance, in charging against the treasury of the temple the expenses of an aqueduct for Jerusalem and, finally, in acting with unnecessary cruelty against the Samaritans. He wished, an obscure emissary in an obscure confine of the Empire, to repeat his hour of glory: the moment when he had ordained the death of God. For he thought that if he had merely ordered the crucifixion of an inoffensive agitator, his deed was scarcely memorable. But if he had delivered to death the Son of God, memorable indeed was his glory, and his alone. Your agent, Caesar, could have executed in your name an insignificant medicaster and charlatan, but if he had crucified a God in Pilate’s name, then Pilate was greater than Tiberius.

I speculate, Caesar. The truth is that Pilate’s confused arrogance endangered our delicate accord with the Hebrews. To the end of salvaging the political reality, Vitellius, Legatus to Syria, had to intervene and depose Pilate. The ancient Procurator came to Rome to seek an audience, and you, wisely, refused; with political reality salvaged, whom would it interest to salvage the mental or administrative reality of a Pontius Pilate? I believe that Pilate went mad; he was seen along the shores of the Tiber, repeatedly washing his hands; finally he committed suicide by drowning himself in those same Tiberine waters, but his drowned corpse was rejected by the river. The people say that the body of Pontius Pilate is borne from river to river, carried to new waters where it is always rejected with repugnance by the flowing current in which no man may ever bathe twice, for as the philosopher says, no water that flows is twice the same. Pilate’s body has found no repose.

This is the end of the tale. I hope, Caesar, that this somber and harrowing account has in no way displeased you, and that now I have told it, this unimportant chronicle, this small mystery, will return to the oblivion and obscurity from which it never should have emerged.

IV

As he listened to his counselor’s narration, Caesar’s servants were singeing his legs with burning nutshells so the hair would grow soft. Afterward, distractedly, Tiberius allowed himself to be dressed; awkwardly, he made that sign of the cross upon his forehead and then, content and laughing, walked to his triclinium and there lay back to lunch.

“I like it, Theodorus, I like it; the sign of the cross; an instrument of torture and death; a sign associated with bodily pain; it pleases me … Why not make the sign of the cross the sign of the death, the dispersion, the multiplicity, the multitudinous, that I desire to follow my death? Hear me, counselor, if Rome is unique, if Rome is the apex of history, its unity must never be repeated lest Rome cease to be exceptional. Let all the kingdoms of the future, partial and dispersed, dream of the inimitable unity of Rome; let them struggle among themselves — yes — beneath the sign of that cross, let them fight and bleed for the privilege of occupying Rome, of becoming a second Rome; and from this growing fragmentation let new wars be born resulting in multiplied and absurd frontiers dividing minuscule kingdoms ruled by less and less important Caesars, like your Pilate, struggling to be a third Rome, and so on, and so on, without end … without end; oh, thank you, counselor; you have given me the weapons and sign of my desire, the cross of the slaves, the rebellion of a wandering Jew; let the Nazarite and his cross triumph and the power and unity of Rome will be dispersed like ashes and wind and dust … No important power will conquer us, not the Germans or the Parthians or the Dacians that today trouble our boundaries, not internal dissension, not license, lust, or decadence of character and discipline, not the loss of civic spirit, not the incapacity of imperial power to dominate the army, not the stagnation of commerce, low productivity, scarcity of gold and silver, not the depletion of the land, deforestation and drought, not plagues and illness, not our increasing disdain for work and subsequent dependence upon conquest, tribute, and slavery, none of these things, but a lugubrious Judaic philosophy of passivity and hope of a kingdom in Heaven … Can you imagine a greater triumph of my imagination, can you imagine anything more ridiculous, Theodoras, than the triumph of the most obscure of the Hebraic redeemers and the sign derived from the rack of his torture?”

He laughed; as Tiberius drained the last cup, Theodoras asked: “Does what you have said imply an order, Caesar?”

“Let’s play mora…”

Each placed his hands behind his back and then quickly extended them. “One,” said the counselor. “Three,” said Caesar. Tiberius saw perfectly the number of fingers revealed by Theodorus; Theodorus was painfully mistaken: Tiberius also showed three fingers. Caesar had not looked, he had not guessed; he merely repeated the number he always chose. He always did so; he always won. He had no time to guess or look; he had time only to choose and repeat what he had chosen.

“Yes,” said Tiberius, “it is an order.”

“How must I execute it?”

“My augur says that every living man has thirty phantoms behind him; three times ten; that is the precise figure of our dead ancestors. I have added to that with a number of murders.”

“You do well, Caesar; perhaps the function of power is to increase the number of phantoms … Will you bequeath your Empire to them?”

“I have no descendants, Theodorus; woe is me; if I had, I would have to divide the Empire among three sons, and make them promise they would divide their three kingdoms among their nine sons, and so on in succession; and in memory of our founding, I would also make them promise to copulate with she-wolves so that the heirs would be born from these beasts, and that as a secret jest, each bears the incarnate cross of the Nazarite upon his back; they would be my heirs, but in a different time, in a time of defeat and dispersion … Am I raving, counselor?”

“No, Caesar; you wish to bequeath an empire of phantoms, and we have phantoms to spare. Your desires, if they are true, can be fulfilled.”

“Enough. I have no offspring. I feel drowsy. Let me sleep, Theodorus.”

Tiberius was breathing deeply; I closed the draperies and waited. The soft Capri afternoon enveloped me; I watched the fire dying in the hearth; I listened to the dripping of the water clock that marked the time of Tiberius Caesar, fat, stiff-necked Caesar, sleeping uncomfortably, and breathing with difficulty; I inhaled the wild perfume of the laurel roses that surrounded the Imperial Villa, and said to myself: Take care, Theodorus, those roses smell good but they are poisonous; I stood up and covered my master’s face with a silk cloth, for flies were gathering about the remains of his meal, and threads of wine and honey trickled from between the Emperor’s thick lips; I was grateful for the adherence to the blessed law of silence.

Then I myself broke that law; I looked at the water clock; it marked the hour. It is told that there are rooms in which no one may enter unless with great need and with prior purification; unless he fulfills the ritual, one will feel afraid … and anyone who lies down in these chambers will be thrown forcefully from his bed by impalpable forces, and later found half dead. I walked toward the balcony that faces the wine-dark sea, a sea of nereids and dolphins, the glimmering court of Neptune, the liquid cave of Circe. Again I gazed about the placid imperial chambers; suddenly the dead flames in the hearth sprang to life; I trembled, I hesitated no longer; I drew back the draperies and saw standing there the phantom of Agrippa; the sun was at his back and cast an aureole about his head, but his somber face reflected only the shadow of the chamber. He wore a black tunic, and he stood motionless. Behind him, jumping down from the balcony and scurrying toward the sharp rocks was the fisherman who had shown him the way; the fisherman who had known this route since he was a child, known how to scale the rocks and catch the largest mullets in these seas; his face was marked by the sharp pincers and rough shell of a crab; I saw him no more; he fled. Only pregnant she-goats browsed on the rocky heights.

The phantom of Agrippa entered the chamber as I retreated, never turning my back, attempting to fathom that gaze, so deep, masked, a gaze capable of convoking its own shades; but the phantom was not looking at me, he stared through me absently, as absent as my body seemed before his advance. I could imagine his goal: the triclinium of Tiberius, where my master dozed, where lay his heavy, digesting, impotent, senile body: my master, the master of the world, the murderer, the pervert, and I his servant, his inseparable witness and chronicler, his sycophant; the black and gold phantom of Agrippa Postumus advanced, bent over the sleeping face of Caesar, breathed upon the pale, parchment cheek of Tiberius, and then suddenly, violently, snatched away the silk cloth covering his face and simultaneously withdrew the cushion upon which rested the Emperor’s head; and the eyes of my master, who could see in the darkness, opened wide like two lakes of terror; and as my lucid mind witnessed that terror, I questioned: why, if every afternoon at the hour of the nap my master is visited by this phantom, does he now show such fear? he must be accustomed to it. My courtliness overcame my amazement: I introduced them: “Caesar … the phantom of Agrippa.”

And Caesar screamed, yes, he could scream, no, no, this is not the phantom, I know the phantom perfectly well, the slave Clemens, this is the slave Clemens, the eyes are different; I can see in the dark, I can distinguish between the two, they are different, the phantom and the slave, Agrippa and Clemens; tell me, slave, how did you become Agrippa? and the black and gold creature, bent over Caesar, finally spoke, the cushion in his hand: “In the same way that you became Caesar…”

He raised his slim, strong, pale arms, he grasped the cushion in both hands and with incredible power thrust it upon Tiberius’s face; the renewed flames of the hearth leaped high and duplicated the trembling of the struggling figures; I succumbed to temptation; I ran to the side of the slave, the phantom, whoever this executioner might be, recalling the imploring gaze of the disfigured Lesbia, her humiliation, her horror, and I helped him suffocate my master.

Old and coarse, even so, Tiberius struggled, he shuddered, and finally freed his manes with a fearful death rattle. The terrible visitor removed the saliva and blood-stained cushion; the enormous eyes of Tiberius contemplated the phantom, and he, the phantom or the slave, enjoyed it, he had the right to enjoy this vision. On the other hand, I fled into the courtyard, quietly summoned the guard, and we ran back to the chamber and captured this infernal man who still knelt beside my dead master, as if paralyzed by Tiberius’s last gaze: the incalculable abyss of those black and glassy eyes.

V

I, Theodorus, the narrator, am writing all this on the day following the events I describe; I am writing them in triplicate, in accordance with the specific logic of my master’s vague testament; and I will place the three writings into three long green bottles, which I will seal carefully with red wax and the imprint of Tiberius’s ring.

The slave Clemens, this very morning, was thrown from the heights of the cliffs into the sea, where a crew of sailors awaited his fall to beat him to death with oars and gaffs. I did not attend the spectacle; I am surfeited with blood; enough, enough, I feel nauseated …

But this afternoon I descended to the village of Capri and listened to what was being murmured in the taverns and among the nets and fishing boats of the old harbor: the slave Clemens had been thrown into the sea, but the sailors had searched for him in vain to break his bones and club him to death with their oars; in vain, for as he hurtled toward the sea, Clemens, in mid-air, was transfigured into Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Augustus and heir to the Empire; his naked body had been cloaked in a cloud, and the cloud transformed into a white toga, and the toga into wings that deposited the condemned man upon the back of a dolphin that swam with him to a safe port from which the heir will again battle against usurpation at the head of the nameless and numberless legions of the slaves.

I know that all this is fantasy; but who can prevent a legend’s being believed by the ignorant? and what threats are posed by that belief? This I do not know. I have limited myself to following closely the last orders of my master Tiberius; I myself, with a knife, traced last night a bloody cross upon the back of the murdering slave, and in the face of his controlled pain, invoked the words of my master:

Let Agrippa Postumus, multiplied by three, one day be revived from the bellies of she-wolves, so he may contemplate the dispersion of the Empire of Rome; and from the three sons of Agrippa may another nine be born, and from the nine, twenty-seven, and from the twenty-seven, eighty-one, until unity be dispersed into millions of individuals, and as each will be Caesar, none will be he, and this power that now is ours will never again exist. And let these things all come to pass in the ragged reaches of the Empire, beneath the secret sands of Egypt where are buried the trinitarian mysteries of Isis, Set, and Osiris, beneath the arid sun of rebellious and restless Spain, fatherland of the insurgent Viriathus and of the Numantine suicides, on the shore of Lutetia, on an unsubmissive Gaul subjugated by Julius Caesar, a city of inquisitive and suspicious minds, as well as in the deserts of Israel, which knew the teachings of the Nazarite and the vulgar ambition of Pilate. And since the cross of infamy will preside over these lives of the future, as it presided over the death of the Jewish prophet the Nazarite, let the sons of Agrippa — who will bear the sign of the cross upon their backs — be called by the Hebrew name Jehohanan, which means “Grace comes from Jehovah.”

This last stricture, I hasten to add for those who may read these papers, was but a small erudite fantasy on my part.

This is not the serious part, what was serious was that in the end, as with the knife I traced a cross upon the back of the rebellious Clemens, I could see his accursed eyes, and in them I saw twice repeated that same bloody cross; that was his gaze. And these were his last words: “My death does not matter. The multitudes will rise again.”

I do not know whether I laughed as I cursed him: “May you grow an extra toe on each foot to aid you in arising and in traveling more swiftly…”

I do not know whether I laughed; I was not master of my words: in my heart I wished to thank him for not having betrayed me.

VI

The notice of Tiberius’s death flies to Rome on the wings of horses no less swift than Pegasus. The funeral flutes will be heard in all Italy and will allow us no sleep; voices will be raised in mournful outcry. This is my pious imagining; my sense of the truth proclaims, on the other hand, that the multitudes will run jubilantly through the streets of Rome, celebrating the death of the tyrant, shouting “To the Tiber with Tiberius,” asking that the corpse of my master be dragged there by gaff hooks, raising supplications to Mother Earth that Caesar find no rest save in Hell. Poor, stupid mob. They desire only occasions for rejoicing, for carnivals, circuses, and saturnalias. Why instead of occupying themselves with the dead do they not occupy themselves with the living? Why do they not ask who will succeed Tiberius, and what new misfortunes lie in store for Rome?

But that is not my problem. My stoic spirit dictates to my hedonistic hand the last words of these folios, and I say that in every good action what is praiseworthy is the effort; success is merely a question of chance, and, reciprocally, when it is a question of culpable acts, the intent, even without the result, deserves the punishment of law; the soul is stained with blood though the hand remain pure.

Did I truly assist the slave, or did I struggle unsuccessfully against his efforts to suffocate my master? I have no moral refuge but that of having written what I have reported; if any of these bottles is retrieved by one of my contemporaries, I shall be punished; if my papers are read in a distant future, perhaps I shall be praised. I write today: I run both risks. Whom have we killed here: a phantom of flesh or the flesh of a phantom? Was it all illusion, deception, a comedy of roving, disembodied larvae and mischievous, ghostly lemures? The true history perhaps is not the story of events, or investigation of principles, but simply a farce of specters, an illusion procreating illusions, a mirage believing in its own substance. I, like Pilate, shall wash my hands and wait for time to decide; let the reincarnations herein consigned, herein desired, herein cursed by the last will of Tiberius Caesar, decide.

Having written these things, I seal, as I have said, the three bottles and throw them one by one from the high lookout on Capri into the deep and boundless waters of Mare Nostrum, as black tonight as the velvet shroud that enveloped the remains of my master Caesar, of whom, when I was still a child, my father, master of rhetoric, Teselius of Gandara, said to me: “He is mire mixed with blood.”

Yes, the bottles carrying my manuscript will drift to all the limits of the Mediterraneum, to the Hispanic coast and the Palestine coast, but I shall keep for myself the most secret of my secrets: the knowledge that Tiberius’s curse had begun to be fulfilled before he had pronounced it, for in truth, on that not so long ago afternoon in the month of Nisan in Jerusalem, when I was traveling on the road to Laodicea, I beheld Pontius Pilate judging three identical men in the Praetorium, three equally ragged and bearded magi or prophets, perhaps three brothers, each crowned with thorns, each wounded by the lash, their lacerated backs marked with the sign of a bloody cross. Which of the three did Pilate condemn as the false Messiah, deliver to the Sanhedrin and death on the cross? What became of the other two? The chronicles say that there were three condemned men on Golgotha. The Nazarite and two thieves. Were, in truth, these thieves the two brothers of the Nazarite?; did Pilate, with the wisdom of Solomon, opt for the death of a single Messiah, depriving the other two prophets of that dignity, condemning them as vile thieves? Did he think thus to balance the relations between the power of Rome and the power of the Jews, giving them something, but not all they requested, giving himself the privilege of killing one God, of refusing the Jews more than one God, of astutely making mock of the Jewish faith in a unique God? Not three: the pantheon — the reunion of all the gods — is the privilege of Rome; so let you, Jews, have one God and two thieves. Rome: one Caesar and many gods. Israel: one God and many Caesars. Pilate and the Nazarite: one Caesar and one God. Poor deceived man: his uniqueness was his mortality; I suspect, on the other hand, that those three identical magi I glimpsed from a distance through the haze of the Levantine dog days will be forever interchangeable …

And then I hear titters from the chamber of Tiberius, I hear the moans and cries and sighs of Lesbia and Cynthia, of Gaius, Persius, and Fabianus; I hear the voice of my master Tiberius summoning me to his quarters, come Theodorus, come in, do not be afraid, speak to me of the flesh, Theodorus, ally my pleasures, pain and lust, Theodoras, do not be afraid, come …

ASHES

He had a vague impression of his own face. In passing, he caught hasty, fleeting glimpses in the stained mirrors the inhabitants fleeing the palace had left behind, here and there, in a bedchamber, in a tower. He did not see the wrinkles, the gray hair, the marks of time; increasingly, he was surrounded by shadow. The shadows were his old age. He remembered certain courtyards, certain galleries with white leaded windows through which the light of day had formerly filtered. Not now. Inch by inch the shadows were confiscating his palace.

“Where is everyone?”

He commanded and ordered that a hundred poor be dressed in the clothing lying forgotten in the coffers of those who had fled, and that ten thousand ducats be provided to wed poor, orphaned women, preferably of good reputation. The nuns howled quietly when Mother Celestina made her periodic visit on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. El Señor delighted in verifying the noxious usury time had practiced upon the aged procuress whose upper lip was now streaked with dark fuzz, and whose chin whiskers were thick as a beard. Unconsciously, El Señor repeated the words formerly spoken by the go-between: You’ve become an old woman; they speak wisely who say that the years take their toll; methinks you were beautiful; you look different; you have changed. And she, for both of them, would reply, laughing, the day will come when you won’t recognize yourself in your own mirror, and he was grateful that the increasing shadows of his palace were the only sign of time’s passing, but the old vixen was like a dog with a bone, and half whining and half laughing said:

“It’s clear that you didn’t know me twenty years ago. Ay! Any man who saw me then, and sees me now … His heart would break with sorrow. But I know very well that I rose in the world merely to descend, and that I flowered only to wither on the vine; I had pleasure only that I might know sadness; I was born that I might live, lived that I might grow to womanhood, reached womanhood only to grow old, and grew old … merely to die. Do you know that, too, Yer Mercy?”

Then she repeated what El Señor wished to know — more than ever after reading the manuscript of Caesar’s man, the counselor Theodorus — that the Idiot Prince was sleeping his long sleep with the dwarf in Verdín, that a hawk’s murderous beak had seized the pilgrim of the new world by one arm, and that both, bird and youth, had drowned on the coast of the Cabo de los Desastres; the third assurance was in El Señor’s own house: the deceiver and the novitiate were forever united, in perverse enactment of love, in the prison of mirrors. And what more? Well, the throng of beggars around the palace was growing larger every day, Señor, and it seems that the kitchens are in service only for them, for Yer Maj’sty never tastes a bite, they say, and the fame of your charity is growing throughout the kingdom.

He was afflicted by many pains, among those of the body, the most troublesome and inordinate was the gout, which caused him the most severe agonies in the separation the corrupt humor was causing in the knuckles and joints of his hands and feet, extremities which were most frightfully sensitive because of their lack of protective flesh, all nerve and bones that in rest tortured him without mercy, as his cries attested; and he was obliged because of the extreme tenderness of his feet to carry with him always a shepherd’s crook with which to steady himself. In addition, his gums were constantly inflamed, and his teeth rotting, and for these reasons he commanded and ordered that every sacred relic that existed in his kingdom, and even beyond its confines, be brought to him without consideration of costs or money matters, and one day in December twenty great crates of relics were delivered to him, closed and sealed with many seals and testimonies and wrapped in linen cloth so that rain or snow could not damage them. “As these are relics of very ancient saints and of that time when the sincerity and poverty of Christians shone forth in the Church, many of them are adorned very poorly and roughly, some are in wooden boxes, others in copper of the most elementary workmanship embellished with stones of glass or an occasional pearl of poor quality, all of which is a most faithful testament of the purity, reverence, and truth of those good centuries when there was so much Faith and so little wealth.”

So stated the folio delivered with the boxes, and although it was signed by a Rolando Vueierstras, the Apostolic Notary designated to attest and certify to the places from which the relics had been removed and assembled, El Señor thought he recognized a hand he had seen before.

Kneeling before the altar of his chapel and the Flemish triptych so zealously guarded behind its painted panels, El Señor spent entire days kissing an arm of St. Barbara and one of St. Xystus, the Pope, a rib of St. Alban, half of St. Lawrence’s pelvic bone, the thighbone of St. Paul the Apostle, and the whole serrated kneecap, complete with hide, of St. Sebastian, Martyr.

With delectation his thick lips caressed the shinbone of Leocadia, Holy Martyr and Virgin, who suffered torment in the dungeons of Toledo, it too still covered with skin and hide, very beautiful, and inviting a thousand kisses.

He carried with him to his bed of black sheets at night an entire jawbone of that thirteen-year-old child, stronger than all the giants of the world, that enamored lamb, Inés, Martyr, who when she died said that the blood of her spouse, Jesus Christ, flushed her cheeks with beauty, and now El Señor repeated those words, caressing throughout the night the jawbone of the Martyr: “Sanguis eius ornavit genua mea.”

Other nights he carried to his bed an arm of St. Ambrose, but what he most enjoyed was caressing, until he fell asleep embracing it, the head of the valiant St. Hermenegild, King and Martyr, martyred by his father, and to the head he would say: “Such an illustrious martyr would not wish a lesser tyrant and executioner.”

Heads abounded on the long list of tariffs paid on the relics brought there, and often El Señor slept with two of them, the very head of the one the Gospel calls St. Simon the Leper, who, they say, was one of the seventy-two disciples, and that of the most holy doctor, St. Jerome, a sane, mature, and grave head; and early one morning, as they carried him his breakfast of dried raisins, the servants were frightened to see beside El Señor’s head, resting on the same pillow, protruding like a living thing from between the black sheets, the head of St. Dorothy, Virgin and Martyr.

“And as my arms lack strength,” he said to himself, “I shall take strength from the strong, never twisted arm of St. Vincent, Spanish Martyr, native of Huesca, and that of Agatha, Sainted Virgin and Martyr, of noble blood, although according to her doctrine more noble still for being the servant of Jesus Christ.”

And he pinned those holy arms to his own sleeves and, with the strength they afforded, wandered interminably through the rows of sepulchers in the chapel.

He ordered that a table be set for dinner in the hall of the seminary, and that the nuns serve a copious collation, as in happier times, and he had placed upon tall chairs all the whole bodies listed among the relics, and with uncertain glances and trembling hands Sisters Angustia and Prudencia, Dolores and Remedios, Milagros and Esperanza, Ausencia and Caridad heaped high with geese and ganders, francolins and pigeons, the lead plates set before the motionless seated bodies of the Holy Martyr Theodoric, presbyter of the time of Clovis, of the glorious Martyr St. Mercury, of the valiant captain of the Holy Legion of Thebes, called Maurice, and that of St. Constant, martyred during the Diocletian persecution. El Señor presided over the table, but he ate only his raisins. And in the place of honor opposite him was seated the tiny, complete body of a sainted and innocent child, a native of Bethlehem, of the same tribe and descendancy as Judah, and he was so tiny he seemed no more than a month old.

“It is true,” El Señor said to the child to initiate the conversation, “that the flesh, and even the bone, when they are those of one of such tender years, shrink and contract greatly over a long period of time…”

And as the child did not answer him, he directed himself to St. Mercury, whose body, with time and neglect in dust-filled shrines, looked worn and black. “Delight us,” he said to him, “by telling us of your suffering during Decius’s persecution, and how, after a few years, you were chosen by Our Lord to rid His Church of the evil of the apostate Julián, and to avenge the blasphemies he was uttering against God, and how he died by your hand, the result of a wound you inflicted with a lance…”

And as St. Mercury did not answer, and as the dishes were growing cold before his invited guests, El Señor chewed a few raisins and pointed toward the painted domed ceiling of the hall whereon was depicted the Most Holy Trinity seated upon a throne: he explained to his guests that the creatures on high were the angels; that slightly lower they could see the sun, the moon, and the stars, and in the lowest portion, the earth with its animals and plants:

“On that side you see the creation of man; on the other, how he sinned by eating from the forbidden tree, deceived by the envy of the ancient serpent, and how man is cast out of Paradise, and thus is summarized all that is written in the first part of the Acts of St. Thomas, whose chair and whose lecture room these are, and whose doctrine is here propounded. And one sees those two emanations that reside in God, which our theologians call Ad intra et ad extra. That of the two divine persons consubstantial ab aeterno, and those of all the creatures of the beginning of time.”

In these and other delightful Christian conversations was spent the dinner El Señor offered the martyrs. Then they were all returned to their crystal boxes and their coffers garnished with many gold flowers and ornamental gold braid; El Señor went to lie down with the grave head of St. Jerome, and the servants divided the cold victuals among the beggars.

And as to the miraculous St. Apollonia, patron saint of toothache, there came to the palace in two boxes two hundred and two teeth from her divine jaws, which El Señor esteemed highly as relief for his pain, placing them in golden vessels in the shape of ciboria.

On the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, a long document sent by Guzmán was delivered to El Señor. Felipe read it with avid repugnance, while in the chapel the obese and now almost centenarian Bishop, accompanied by deacons, acolytes, and choir, knelt, and removing his miter, sang the hymn “Veni, Creator Spiritus.” Guzmán related the news: the dream of the young pilgrim was true, the caravels had reached the very coasts described by the youth; they disembarked on the beach of pearls, they picked up pearls by the handfuls, some even swallowed them. They followed the route of the jungle toward the volcano. The native inhabitants did not know the horse, the wheel, or gunpowder; it was easy to frighten them, for they took the horsemen for supernatural beings, and the harquebuses and cannons for things of magic. They were living, furthermore, in a state of dissension, the weaker peoples subject to the stronger, and all to an emperor called the Tlatoani, whose seat of power was the city of the lagoon. Let El Señor have no worry: the power of arms was at the service of the power of the Faith. As they advanced, the vigorous Spanish forces tore down idols, burned temples, and destroyed the papyri of the abominable religion of the Devil. He had a complaint against Brother Julián, who was constantly intruding in an attempt to save both idols and manuscripts, and who pretended that these savages were as much the children of God as we, and also possessed souls. Guzmán took advantage of the resentment of the various tribes to incite them against the great Tlatoani; the city of the lagoon fell, thanks to the combined action of the Spanish forces and the rebellious tribes. The vast city sank into the swamp; its idols fell, the temples and royal chambers were stripped of gold and silver, the ancient city was leveled and upon it was begun the construction of a Spanish city of severe outlines, similar, Most Christian Señor, to the grid upon which St. Lawrence suffered his martyrdom. I hope thus to respect your intentions, which are to transmit to these domains the supreme virtues of Spain.

Continuing, he recounted that once the imperial city had fallen, its inhabitants saw that they would once again be subjected, and Guzmán did not disenchant them. The natives’ wonderment decreased and they rebelled; but Guzmán knew how to respond. He forced the docile to accompany him as an armed retinue against other tribes; he devastated fields; he burned harvests; he burdened the prisoners with chains, branded them like cattle, and divided them as slaves among his troops. Each soldier of this expedition has thus come to have a thousand or more slaves in his possession, and any man who left Spain without a stitch on his back has promptly earned a much higher state in these lands. In great enclosures, as warning to all, he gathered together men, women, and children; the men with fetters about their necks, and the women roped together ten by ten, the children five by five; he dragged them from town to town, through every region, exhibiting them as a warning that whoever wished to escape that fate would be better advised to submit. In each village he branded some, killed others, promised life to many more if they agreed to a life as beasts of burden, he gave license to his soldiers to take any woman who pleased them, and instilled fear in all. Even among the peoples that did not offer resistance he followed this tactic in order to set a good example: he proposed either servitude or death; even of those who agreed to be servants, he killed many; and among those he took with him, chained and bound, he allowed many to die from hunger; actually, he preferred the death of very young children deprived of mother’s milk, whom he left along to roads to be seen by all. This rage against children culminated in a town of those called Purépechas, or Tarascans, where the inhabitants, as a gesture to demonstrate their peaceful intentions, delivered several pigs to Guzmán, and he, in return for their gift, gave them a great sack filled with dead children. When he came to the next town, he repeated these exploits. He has left no village between Tzintzuntzan and Aztatlán, between Mechuacán and Shalisco, between the lake of Cuitzeo and the river of Sinaloa, that does not weep for a child, scorn a woman, or hold dear the memory of a man.

Vast are the treasures in the temples, palaces, and mines, surpassing even what that poor dreamer and pilgrim told us. And if my eyes have seen much, my ears have heard more. They tell of a route through the deserts of the north that leads to seven cities of gold. They speak of a people of Amazon-like women warriors who have mutilated their right breasts that they might shoot their arrows with a man’s skill. They speak, Señor, of a fountain of eternal youth, hidden in the jungles, where one need bathe only once to recover one’s youth. I know that such fantastic stories are but illusions; they nourish, nevertheless, my men’s greed and desire for glory, inspiring them to run unparalleled risks; your young pilgrim retrieved nothing from his dream, Sire; in contrast, I send you, along with this letter, the most ample proof of the riches of the new world. It is barely the royal one fifth owed you. The booty has been divided among the enterprising members of this expedition which surpasses in boldness and merit even those of Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar. No one has refused his share, not even Brother Julián, whom I tolerate only by your mandate. Nevertheless, he does fulfill the charges of the Faith, erecting chapels and churches in all the towns we have conquered. Let no one say, therefore, that only the desire for gold brought us here, but rather, the desire to serve God.

This long document was signed by the Most Magnificent Señor Don Hernando de Guzmán.

El Señor looked up. The senior sacristan, with a golden sieve, was scattering ashes on the floor of the chapel, forming two lines from corner to corner that intersected in the middle of the temple. The choir sang the “Benedictus Domine Deus Israel” while the Bishop, with his shepherd’s staff, traced the Latin alphabet in the ashes, and then in the intersecting line, the Greek alphabet, intoning in a voice more burned out than the ashes: “Behold, Israel, that we shall not write here your Hebrew alphabet, in order to demonstrate the ingratitude of your people who, being the first, and the first to whom were made the promises of such sovereign treasures, did not recognize those treasures, preferring to live apart from them, a blind, obscured, and cruel people.”

El Señor walked painfully toward the altar, dragging his afflicted feet through the ashes; and there at the foot of the holy table of the Eucharist stood the enormous coffer overflowing with gold, molten gold, gold from ear ornaments, bracelets, idols, floors, ceilings, and collars melted down to remove from them any pagan sign and to invest them with their true value as treasure, money, funds with which to arm armies, combat heretics, erect palaces, placate nobles, endow convents, and regale clerics. El Señor saw the glances of greed which, still in the midst of their prayers of humility, the Bishop, the deacons, the sacristan, and the choir directed toward the coffer.

In a loud voice El Señor said: “Let no one remove this treasure. Let it remain here forever, open, as an offering to God Our Lord. Let no one employ it, divert it, or enjoy any advantage whatsoever from it, except God himself, at whose feet I lay it.”

He bent over to pick up ashes from the floor; with his finger he traced a black cross upon his forehead.

He returned to his bedchamber, from which he could watch unseen the ceremonies of this and all other days, of this and all other years.

Many years passed without his hearing the barking of the nuns announcing a visitor. Why did Mother Celestina not return to see him? What had become of Ludovico, the young Celestina, and the monk Simón, abandoned, although free, on the plain? He forgot his mother; surely, she had died, living, or must be living, dead; he respected her will that he abandon her in the walled tomb with neither inscription nor ceremony. In his arthritic hand he wrote: “One governs the world only if he is guided by the hand of God. Respect my solitude. Respect my devotion. What will it profit a man to gain the entire world if he lose his soul? I hunger for God. I hunger for death. Both are one in my desires. Communicate in writing to me the major news. It need not be good. As if unaware, I shall bear it with resignation.”

He was right. Occasionally missives reached him, rumors consigned to paper, warnings, proposals, suggestions, decrees that required his signature. He signed many things without even looking at them, others he forgot until he was reminded of the need for his signature. He hesitated; he postponed signing; he hesitated again. Such deliberation earned for him the designation of the Prudent. With horror, he received books printed by heretics who had divorced themselves forever from the tutelage of Rome and were founding new Churches. He guarded as secret the news communicated to him: if it was known by all, he would comport himself as if it were unknown.

Shadows, he said to himself, and not years, are besieging me. My age is measured by the increasing expanse of shadows; inch by inch they are taking possession of my body and my palace.

And so he lived until one night he heard a terrible scream from the chapel. It was the eve of another Ash Wednesday. He grasped his staff. The scream echoed through the domed ceiling of the chapel. He attempted to place it. Slowly he shuffled through the double row of royal sepulchers. As he reached the corner nearest the foot of the stairway, he finally found the origin of the sound: the niche where his mother, the Mad Lady, lived, walled up, and, immured, was dying.

“Son, my son! Where are you?” she cried. “Oh, my son! Have you forgotten me?”

“Where are you, Mother? Who are you now, Mother?”

“Ring the bells,” howled the Mad Lady. “Crown me with three thorns of Christ’s sovereignty, drive into my hand the nail of the true Cross, and in the other hand let me clasp the sacred cane of St. Dominic of Silos; bind my enormous belly with the girdle of the convent of San Juan de Ortega! I am giving birth, my son, to my last son, I have given birth to six, and all have died, while the bastards of my husband the King live and prosper; I am giving birth to my poor son, the sixth heir of the house of Austria in Spain, born on the sixth day of the month of the Scorpion; with him I shall vanquish the bastards, this one will live, I shall vanquish the accumulated poison of six generations, he is born, bring him to my bed, to my arms, when I was fifteen I was wed to the King, who was forty-four, poisoned by inheritance and his own excesses, a miserable celebration, we were married in a dusty village, Navalcarnero, a miserable celebration, that of Spain, I tell you, a village chosen for our wedding because the place where monarchs are married need never again pay tribute, that is why I was married in a wretched hamlet populated by fleas and goats and cretins and blind men, and I gave birth to dead sons, and now you, this son, bring him to me, this one will live, this one will reign over a ragged and defeated kingdom; the Great Armada, defeated; the gold of the Indies, evaporated; the regiments in Rocroi, defeated; Spain, lost, impotent Spain, your grandeur is that of a pit: the more it is used, the more it disappears, we cannot pay the salaries of the palace servants, we, the Kings of Spain, eat the meat of dogs and chickens, and crumbs smaller than the flies squatting upon them; bring me my son, healthy and lucid, handsome and of good character, my little son, my beautiful little son who will be my answer to the death and misery of Spain; my weak little son, cheeks covered with ringworm, head covered with scales like a fish or a lizard, my son, the bewitched, cover his head with a cap, pus dribbles from his ears, hide his genitals so that no one can see that stubby, livid scorpion’s tail, even if they believe he is a woman, no one must see that purulent little stump, the bewitched, crown him, quickly, let his head become accustomed to the weight of the crown, he is five years old, he still cannot walk, his nursemaid must carry him, he is not learning to speak, he communicates only with dogs, dwarfs, and buffoons, his body is rigid, and tense, and impotent, he stutters and slobbers, your greatest pleasure is to crown your head with wounded doves and feel the threads of blood trickling down your yellow face, your bed is icy, your heart inflamed with hatred against me, your mother, who wants only to govern well in your name; you are an idiot prisoner of astute and ambitious men who order me to cut my hair, don the habit of a nun, cover my face with the veil, and lock me in the castle of Tordesillas, you are alone, surrounded by intriguers, alone, my son, bewitched, with your swollen tongue and the stupor in your eyes, imitating the sounds of animals, sitting in corners weeping without reason, gritting your teeth to keep from eating, your blood swarming with ants, your brain with frogs, your belly with vipers, your hands with fish, may God bless you: you spend days in a state of insensibility, prisoner of a lugubrious dream; may the Devil pardon you; you spend days clawing at yourself, tearing out your thin hair, you are your own persecutor and executioner; when you see a woman you vomit; a strawberry of pain is growing in my breast, modesty forbids me to consult a physician, and further, my Christian fervor; is there a physician who is not a Jew, an Arab, or a convert? I die, happily, before you, and from the pulpits of Spain my faithful Jesuits sing my praises: blessed indeed, but not as blessed as the cancer that killed our august Queen, for the cancer that tortured the Royal Breast encountered there not only the luminous sphere of her death but the very breath of her life. What will become of you without your mother, my poor bewitched King? My name is Mariana.”

The voice issuing from the niche faded away, but on that occasion other voices pursued Don Felipe as slowly and painfully, supporting himself on his crutch, he walked to the room presided over by the mummy fashioned of royal bits and pieces by Isabel, his untouched wife. Through the honeycomb of galleries and courtyards he heard, echoing through domes of stone and air, rondelets, cruel jests, ditties: a King without a kingdom is our King, the King is leaping, the Queen weeping, the Monarchy creaking, nuns speaking, toadies all peeping, sing ho, sing hey, sing lolly, may God pardon your sire, who, suffering an ill so dire and hoping never to expire, dragged your mother through the mire, oh, rondelet lolly, sing lolly, lai, lay, why that son of a bitch scratches his itch with every wench in the kingdom, without rhyme or reason, sing lolly, sing well, there’s still worse to tell, on the way to perdition, through his benediction, his government’s going to hell, his government’s going to hell, sing ho, sing hey, sing rondelet lolly, sing loud, all ye pimps, sing loud all ye rogues, all randy, at random, yes, sing of the phantom, the phantom, the phantom … now seated upon the Gothic throne Felipe found a rotund and rubicund be-wigged King wearing a tricorn atop his head and sprouting two horns from his forehead; the magnificence of his black-velvet, gold-embroidered coat, his medallions and gold braid, his silver dress sword and white satin stockings, could not compensate for the calamity of his stupid gaze, his drooping lower lip, the red eagle’s beak of a nose crisscrossed by broken veins. And now he was accompanied by a pale ugly woman with an impudent face that was boldly painted, but to no avail, her rat’s hair combed into high peaks of frizzly curls, a saliva-slicked curl plastered over each ear; the bodice of her daring, gauze-thin dress cinched a wrinkled bust, causing her tightly squeezed breasts to bulge over the top of the transparent cloth. A small boy, a faithful replica of his father and mother, a mixture of vulture and rat, sat playing at the feet of his progenitors, and when he saw Felipe on the threshold, he laughed and shrieked, and as if he were rolling a ball rolled a golden and diamond orb toward El Señor.

“What does that old spook want?” shrieked the child, looking, as he posed his question, into the imbecilic, round black eyes of his progenitors.

Felipe fled in terror, wondering whether the specters he saw looked on him as another specter. He fled, returning to his seclusion, his habits, to the passage of years he measured by the stick of the increasing shadow.

At times, seated in his curule chair, aided by the light of a short candle stub that burned his fingers and dripped wax stains on the old, almost illegible, papers in his hands, El Señor reread the manuscript of Counselor Theodorus and pondered, with mortification, any possible relationship between those ancient destinies and his own, that is, the destinies of all those connected with him, for his solitary memory — on behalf of his zealous soul — claimed possession of the beings whose life coincided with his, the destinies of those he loved, but also the destinies of those he despised, those he had combated, those he had ordered killed …

His smile was bitter then, and he felt wretchedly mediocre, How insignificant his despotism seemed compared to that of Tiberius Caesar. He would never have time to become a greater tyrant than he; greater were the domains of today’s Spain than those of yesterday’s Rome, and nevertheless, he could not say, as Caesar had said, I am the head of the world; other powers contested his; heresy was showing its face in the very places he had defeated it, Flanders, the Low Countries, Germany; Mussulman infidels had installed themselves in the very seat of the Second Rome, the Sublime Porte, Constantinople, and from there continued to threaten Christianity and mock the possessive pronoun of Mare Nostrum; the Jews expelled from Spain had carried enlightenment and skills to the kingdoms of the North, and both threatened Spanish hegemony; Isabel’s descendants occupied the throne of England, and all their acts seemed directed toward defying him, avenging themselves against him, humiliating him; in any case, power became diluted over such a vast expanse; he did not wish to know, once he had heard them for the first and last times, any of those distant names, Cholula, Tlaxcala, Machu Picchu, Petén, Atacama, not even when they were disguised with holy Hispanic names, Santa María del Buen Aire, Santiago del Nuevo Extremo, Santo Domingo, Buenaventura: he swore he would never set foot on the new lands; the great crimes were being committed by a swarm of botflies, the little Caesars of the new world, Guzmán, all the Guzmáns. Printing had deprived writing of its uniqueness, it was no longer intended for his eyes alone. Science told him that the earth was round. Art told him that the work of creation was not completed in a single immutable act of revelation, but that it continued to develop, ceaselessly, in new times and new places.

He drew a curtain of rancor over the present that raged so against him, sifting in through the tightly fitted granite blocks of his palace, his monastery, his imperial necropolis. History was a gigantic puzzle; it had left only a few broken pieces in El Señor’s transparent hands. He closed his eyes and attempted to determine how the trinitarian heresies that broke the primary unity of Christianity, the secrets recounted here in this very bedchamber by Ludovico, fitted with the key pieces of Tiberius’s curse: the Cabala, the Zohar, the Sephirot, the magic number of three, and he imagined that, independent of the will of Tiberius, an invisible plot, a stratagem woven of sand and water, was being delineated throughout the confines of the Mediterraneum; a shared destiny, incarnate always in three persons, three movements, three stages, it could be read on the sheer rock faces of the island of Capri, in the meaningless meeting of the Nile and the hunger-filled alleys of Alexandria, in the spectral community of the Citizens of Heaven in the Palestine desert, in the caves and the palace on the Adriatic coast, in the illusory Venetian Theater of Memory, in this new scar of the Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic world represented by his own palace, monastery, and sepulcher, what secret thought joined the words and acts of Tiberius Caesar, the phantom of Agrippa Postumus, and the rebel slave Clemens; the invisible elect of the desert, the one-eyed magus of the Porta Argentea, and the waves of heretics Felipe had combated in the overcast lands of Flanders?; what ruling idea inspired the construction of these edifices, at once solid and spectral, the palace of Diocletian, the Theater of Memory of Valerio Camillo, the Spanish necropolis of the King Felipe?; what identical prophecies were murmured by the voices of a Roman despot, an Egyptian fratricide, and a Greek magus?; what atrocious and ineradicable mark of the origin of humanity was signaled in those parallel histories separated by centuries and oceans, those of the two brothers and a sister — the benefactor, the murderer, and the incestuous woman — in the sands of the Egyptian river and in the jungles of the new world?; is that what the three youths marked by a cross on their backs and disfigured by hexadigitalism were enacting in this palace: a further act of the representation of the beginning, a painful return to the memory of the first dawn, to the terrible acts of the founding of the city upon earth? Ariadne gave a thread to Perseus in the labyrinth: El Señor dreamed of a woman with tattooed lips, present in Alexandria and Spalato, absent in Capri, Palestine, and Venice, and again present here in Spain and in the Spanish domains beyond the seas — before they were conquered. He awakened, and he asked himself, in that sudden and fleeting lucidity that sometimes accompanies the return to wakefulness: had Ludovico read Theodorus’s manuscript, did he know of the curse of Tiberius, or had everything happened independently of will or logic? was it all a gratuitous series of events separate from any relationship of cause or effect?

Then he knew he would never know.

And nonetheless an insistent spark glimmered in the depths of his questions, his dreams, and his waking. What he knows is as important to the education of a Prince as what he does not know; the bee does not alight on every flower …

“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.”

He remembered his father as if he were a stranger, always distant from him, until for the first time he went out into the world, joined the dreamers, the rebels, the children and sinners and lovers, and delivered them to the slaughter in the castle. As a reward, his father gave him Isabel’s hand. Shortly thereafter, he died; Felipe inherited the throne, and his mother lay down to await death in the courtyard, later accepted mutilation, and then traveled throughout Spain bearing with her the embalmed cadaver of that Prince, his father, violator of village girls, the whoring Señor who was pursuing the girls of the palace of Brabant while his son was being born in a privy: the spark became a bonfire, only through his mother did he know who his father was, she wanted him for herself alone, if not in life, then in death, for herself alone, let no one come near, no woman, no man, not even a son …

“You must know the curse that weighs upon the heirs of Rome…”

“I forgive you everything, your women, your appetites, your deceit, everything; but I could never forgive you that…”

“I have lived and ruled with that curse upon my head, weighing upon me, robbing nights from my nights and days from my days…”

“You shall not transmit that curse to my son…”

“Our son, Juana…”

“Mine only, for like Rachel I gave birth to him with pain, forgotten, in a Flemish privy … while you … The First Rome fell, defeated by hordes of slaves. Constantinople, the Second Rome, fell, defeated by the throngs of Mohammed. Spain will be the Third Rome; it will not fall; there will be no other; and Felipe will rule over it.”

“You are mad, Juana; Aragon and Castile can scarcely rule Castile and Aragon…”

“My son inherited a plethora of ills from our line; I shall avoid for him that anguish that has eaten away at you, my poor Señor; called the Fair, you are a horror beneath your skin; I shall save my son from the fear of extinction, I charge myself with the responsibility of assuring that our line will never end…”

“You are mad, Juana; you speak as if you could revive the dead…”

“Even if our phantoms must govern, the line will not be exhausted. You will not bequeath to my son your fear of being the last King, choked and enslaved by the anonymous crowd; he will not be devoured by ants like the serpent in your nightmare. He will know what I wish him to know; he will never know what I do not wish him to know…”

If he could, El Señor would have run to his father’s tomb; instead, he had to support himself upon his cane; painfully, he made his way from his bedchamber to the chapel blackened by the ceremonies of Ash Wednesday; he was assaulted by a fearful stench, my God, oh, my God, oh, God, the same pestilential smell of the day of victory, the same execrable odor of the Cathedral profaned by the mercenary legions that had won the day for the Faith.

Limping, he approached the altar. He looked at the coffer filled with gold from the new world. It shone like gold. But gold has no odor. And this excrement-filled coffer did; it was overflowing with transmuted excrement, gold into offal, the offering of the new world, oh, God, oh, God, the alchemy of your creation; if your creation is nothing but ruin, then shit is your offering. Oh, God, from what jungle temples, from what idolater’s palaces was the gold-become-shit removed? can it be gold only there, and nothing but excrement here?

“Gold, Felipe, is the excrement of the gods,” said a hollow voice from the Flemish triptych behind the altar.

Supporting himself painfully on his shepherd’s staff, Felipe hurried breathlessly to his father’s sepulcher and rested, feverishly, on the slab of the tomb; Dr. Pedro del Agua had embalmed that body, he would be able to see his father as he had been in life, he had died young and still fair, an elegant and whoring Prince whose body disguised his inner corruption, dead before completing his fortieth year, now Felipe could rip off his doublet, his breeches, he could see the embalmed member that had taken Isabel’s virginity, the cloves-and-aloes organ of the man who had possessed and impregnated his wife Isabel, the preserved penis that had done what the son could never do, possess Isabel and give her a son, Isabel, there is nothing there but a scar, a rime frost of ancient vellum, a cobweb between the legs, Dr. del Agua had removed and cut away everything that was corrupt or corruptible, Dr. del Agua castrated my dead father, my father’s sex is nothing but a wound, like the sex of a woman …

But in that same sepulcher where El Señor’s father lay, the Idiot Prince had once been buried atop him, the night of his wedding with the dwarf Barbarica, and there too Barbarica had made love with the double of her lunatic husband, with the deceiver, the whoring, incontinent youth who was his father’s true heir, the son of his father and Isabel, Don Juan, and there, beside the embalmed cadaver, lay a green bottle, the second, stopped with plaster and sealed with wax.

El Señor picked it up, slowly returned to his bedchamber, and once again sat in his curule chair.

He extracted the manuscript from the bottle.

And this he read that early dawn in the weak light from his high, narrow window.

THE RESTORATION

Sitting there in the center of the smoking hut, sitting upon her own hands, her face hidden by a white cloth that collects and simulates the imaginary light of this night in the high tropics, the woman is a photographic cell that detects its own movements, indifferent to the internal immobility of fear. She knows that unconscious movement interrupts the imaginary flow of light (the point of light represented in this dark Indian hut by her white mask) and converts it into a buzzing transmitted to the throbbing drum of her brain. There is no relationship between the light and the sound. A white, masked face (hers) comprises the entire hut, with its walls of crumbling adobe and its straw roof, a face that receives the volume, the attack, the duration, and the decadence of real or imaginary sound.

You hear the rhythm of a drum in the same instant that she recounts:

Only once, never to be repeated: the Ancient Woman says she hears the incessant, muted sound of a drum, half martial, half funereal; but she admits she cannot manage to distinguish certain qualities; she asks you whether the heads of the drumsticks are of wood, leather, or sponge; that throbbing and constant sound of mother-of-pearl is a presence, but a distant one. At times, as now, she assures you that the noise forces her to draw into a tense ball that occludes all her orifices. Injection and choked-back scream. A drill in a molar. A surgical incision. An airplane’s lift-off. The body becomes, she says, a closed order, exclusive, without reference to the threat that could be a delight. You watch her here, closed, trembling, seated on the ground beside the fire in this hut. She is listening attentively; the leather heads of the drumsticks define (or only recapture) the solemn chant: Deus fidelium animarum adesto supplicationibus nostris et de animae famulae tuae Joannae Reginae.

She repeats the words in a soft and disillusioned tone divested of the original vigor that should be used to justify them. Her hands thud against the loose dust every time she repeats the verb of her desire, return. For a long while she sits silently as you listen to the dry crackling of the branches that feed this fire that must defend us against the cold night of the Sierra Madre. Outside, our men are oiling their bicycles, cutting wood for log bridges and passing by in long lines carrying the rolled-up bridges that tomorrow they will remove from the barrancas. The foliage of the myrtle protects us; and, even more, the mist that since this afternoon has been drifting down from the summit of the Cofre de Perote. The Old Woman sits with crossed legs. You describe her as a poet of antiquity in wide, ragged skirts who recounts her own tale with the hesitation of one who speaks of events that have happened to another. She is not recounting a legend; she has told you that one learns legends by memory; if one changes a single word, it is no longer a legend. Her long silence is neither serene nor neutral; it is not a memory, it is an invention seeking its continuity, its support, in the hour of the jungle that surrounds us.

You say you see her there, closed, trembling, her lips forming the sound of a mourning drum, and you tell yourself that terror is the true state of all creatures, sufficient unto itself, separate from any dynamic relationship whatsoever: terror, a state of substantive union with the earth, terra, and a desire to withdraw forever from the earth. History — this history, another, that of many, that of one alone — cannot penetrate terrified bodies that are both paralyzed upon the earth and cast outside it. Surely, the Old Woman cannot know whether in truth that sound is approaching or whether its proximity is precisely the will to fear. Only when she feels that nature is indifferent to her body, the Old Woman tells you that she hears the always closer moaning, that she feels the touch of other hands upon her body, but she cannot be sure whether both sensations are merely an amplification of the essential rhythms of her brain, as if terror were a powerful electrode applied to the cranium and receptive to the variable energy of its waves.

Only once, never to be repeated: she says she hears that drum again; but in that same instant, as if in the distance, as if searching for a meeting of sound, there is the dissonance of something that could be described as the sound of glass broken in the past, glass that is recomposing; utility and reflection: a pile of broken glass rising from the ground as if the moment of its shattering had been recorded on tape that now, in reverse, reconstructs it; glass: a smoking mirror.

The first squadron passes through the low sky and the Old Woman moves her lips, conscious of the insult. At the same moment someone rings the only bell in this village church. She, who in the midst of the ambush of the action, insists on maintaining the distance of the narration, assuming the need to analyze, more than events, the manner in which events are externalized and interrelated, says that the airplane and the bell, as they join in harmony, proclaim their mutual absence at the instant of their meeting: the fleeting sound of pursuit seems to negate the melodic convention of bronze, but in reality a new sonority — which accounts, the woman assures you, for your fascinated silence — is evoked, beginning from the chance encounter.

You brush the Old Woman’s hand. She seems to redouble her concentration. You touch fleetingly what she is always touching. You both know that touch of down and carapace, feathered wing and insect’s foot.

“You have made progress,” you tell her, calmly. “What is it?”

“A gift. They described it to me. I am trying to reproduce the model. It is very difficult.”

She slaps at your curious fingers.

“Stop! Wait till it’s finished.”

She throws her shawl over her shoulders, feigning sudden cold; a shudder ascends to her ears; translucent porcelain. Then she laughs as if she were imitating herself; she repeats the boisterous laughter of a lost occasion, but now the laugh is not crystalline or audacious as it doubtlessly was once, in the time she is attempting to recover. What you hear now is a parody of another laugh, chained and broken: the difference between the fullness of a wave and the fragility of glass. Then, only for an instant, you imagine that the Old Woman’s voice is for you what the sound of the drum is for her.

But suddenly you are distracted. The camp followers are preparing breakfast and into the hut waft the enervating odors of sliced and shredded and crushed chili peppers mixed with fresh tomatoes, chopped onion, and mashed avocado. From the hut entrance, a hand offers two large bowls; you take them and place them beside the woman. She ceases to listen, to speak, or to remember (you realize, or you imagine, that she does all these things concurrently), and squatting, devours the meal as if this were the moment of the invention and offering (and the threat by the hands of forever depriving her) of food. She looks at you with a trace of mockery in the deep-set eyes you can scarcely see beneath the white cloth which has been pushed up, wrinkled above the upper lip to allow her to eat. She says to you, her mouth filled with food, that she eats for the pleasure of eating: a sufficient pleasure. She says that this is not the moment to think or to justify anything. The food serves to connect her, to root her, even more closely with the ground; it is the lead (she says) of a too-light body.

In the distance, the bombardment has begun once again, the indication that day is approaching. But the Old Woman, impervious in serenity as she is in terror, reflects, indifferent to the renewed threat the new dawn promises. Her prolonged pause is like a cinematic dissolve, it is as if she were awaiting the authorization of the first rays of the sun to renew her tale, and as if this nascent light, today, in the Veracruz sierra were in reality the congealed light of a foreseen, promised, surpriseless day.

The fire is going out.

You open your arms wide in a normal stretching gesture that might be confused with praise to the emerging sun that now transforms the cold of night into the fresh heat of a tropical daybreak (announcing, in turn, a long, humid, burning, implacable day). But on the woman’s narrow profile, scarcely visible through the white cloth covering her face (illuminated all night from the earth by the weak fire, as now from the east by the ambling sun), there is a question. You ask yourself whether that nascent sun sheds light on itself or upon us. But you cannot help thinking you are merely repeating the question your prisoner asks herself in silence.

As every morning, the Phantoms swoop by swiftly, flying low, strafing indiscriminately; we all protect ourselves, we tuck our heads between our legs and join our hands over our necks. In the distance, the airplanes drop their full loads of fragmentation bombs, circle through the sky, gain altitude, and disappear. The Old Woman, with no motive, begins to laugh, then drags herself across the floor, turning her head from side to side, until she finds what she is looking for. Brusque movement; every morning’s sudden fear of death, but as soon as the familiar and momentary threat passes, normality is restored with amazing speed. The Old Woman, like everyone else, had crouched into a fetus shape, flinging from her what she held in her hands. And now, as if nothing had happened, quite naturally, she picks it up, strokes it several times, finds the old container filled with glue, and begins her work. There is almost no light (the fire has gone out; it is not worth the effort to light another; the day is beginning). Following fear, there is silence. From time to time, you look at one another; you wait. Her hands move with agility.

You ask: “What is it?”

“Come closer.”

“May I see it?”

“There is little light. Come. Touch it. Do not be afraid.”

“Then you have finished?”

You know she smiles, and that her smile is two answers: she finished it some time ago; she will never finish it.

“Yes, come here. What do you think it is?”

“It’s in the shape of a bird.”

“Yes, but that’s incidental. Almost an accident.”

“It’s like touching a bird. Those are feathers, I’m sure of that.”

“And in the center? In the very center?”

“Just a minute … no, not feathers, I’d say … I’d say they’re … ants.”

“Wrong again. Spiders. The creatures without time.”

“But those lines … like ribs … that seem to divide the cloth…”

“You can call it cloth, if you wish…”

“… that seem to divide it into zones … of feathers … and then separate the feathers from that … that field of spiders, you say … a field of spiders in the very center, yes…”

“Touch it, touch it, run your fingers over it. Follow the ribs to their ends.”

“Let me feel it … like branches … very fine … filaments, almost … but they end, they end, like darts…”

“Arrows. Arrows divide the field. The known field. They partition it. We need light. I wish you could see the colors.”

“Dawn is coming.”

“There are divisions of green, blue, garnet, and yellow feathers.”

“Soon we will be able to see it together.”

“The color of each field indicates the kind of bird that can be hunted there. In addition, these are the actual feathers of the birds that inhabit each sector of the jungle. The quetzal, the hummingbird, the macaw, the golden pheasant, the wild duck, and the heron. Each area is irregular, do you feel it? except for the center. That is regular; it has a perfect circumference. That is the forbidden part of the jungle. There are no feathers there; no one can derive sustenance there; there nothing can be hunted and killed to satisfy the hunger of the body; there dwell the masters of words, signs, and enchantments. Their kingdom is the field of dead spiders that I join with glue to the object you call cloth. And the limits of the cloth are those of the known world. One can go no farther. But one would like to go farther. The tips of the arrows all point outward. Toward the unknown world. They are a limit; they are also invitation. The frontier between the hearth and the marvelous. This is what the Indian woman told me in her tongue as she handed me this offering the first time I came to this land.”

You recall the sparse information, given the difficulty of communications, you have been able to obtain. She entered the country on a tourist’s visa, and she was a professional anthropologist. At least that’s what her papers said. An English father and a Spanish mother, or vice versa, this was not clear. You could not verify her name, or the date of her birth. She was captured while wandering around the camp site, wearing the white cloth mask that covers her face; she said it was for protection against mosquitoes. In the present situation, there was only one possible attitude: suspicion, presumption of guilt. She had said nothing that would prove the innocence of her occupation or that of her appearance in the very place where you are directing the war of resistance. By her voice, her hands, her hunched figure, you deduced that she is old. That is what you call her: Old Woman. She continues to glue the spiders, in silence now. You watch her. Life is renewing all around us. You listen. Water is being drawn by hand, bicycle tires inflated — the whistle of escaping air, bullets introduced into rifle chambers; someone is raking a nearby garden; refugee children nurse at the breasts of women squatting against walls facing the sun. But the beating of the drum envelops and dominates everything else. A naked, bleeding messenger enters the camp and falls to his knees, panting. One hears distant Indian flutes.

“The music of the Nayar,” murmured the Old Woman. “I knew a village of Coras where the church had been abandoned. I was there once, and I recall hearing that music of flute and drum. The church was constructed a little more than two centuries ago, after the late Spanish conquest of that rebellious and inaccessible region. The Indians, the ancient fallen princes, were the masons on the construction. The missionaries showed them engravings of the saints, and the Indians reproduced the images in their own fashion. The church was an indigenous paradise, an opaque vessel containing the colors and forms of the lost kingdom. The altars were golden birds chained to the earth. The dome was an enormous smoking mirror. The white faces of the plaster sculptures laughed bestially; the dark faces wept. One could believe that the Coras, only recently defeated, were reaffirming the continuity of their lives by appropriating the symbols of the conquistador and investing them with a form that continued to represent aboriginal heavens and hells. The missionaries tolerated that transformation. After all, the cross governed. And now one sign would represent the same promise, formerly fragmented into a thousand divinities of wind and sun, water and deer, parrot and blazing bramble. When the work was completed, the missionary pointed to the Christ on the altar and said that the church was the place of love because in it reigned the God of love. The Indians believed it. By night they entered the church and beneath the gaze of that tortured Christ who suffered like them, fornicated at the foot of the altar amid soft bird-like laughter and sighs like wounded cubs’. The missionary discovered them and threatened them with all the fury of Hell. And the Indians could not understand why the God of love could not be witness to love. They had been given a promise, which was the same as permission. And suddenly the fulfillment of the promise had become a prohibition. The Indians rebelled, banished the missionary, and filled with mute deception closed the doors of the church of the false God of love. They decided to visit that church, which for them had been converted into the cloister of Hell, only once a year, and disguised as Devils. The walls are cracked and the atrium is overrun with weeds. A devouring desert, a ruined land whose only temples are the magueys. But the firmament overhead is enormous and burning. The Indians paint their bodies black and white and blue, slowly, caressing one another as if they were again dressing in ancient ceremonial garments: the land is the canvas; the origin of paint is vegetal. Afterward, they simulate a collective fornication beneath the dome of the sky. But the acts of that long sensual passion celebrated every Holy Week are identified with the acts of the Christian Passion. The sighs of abandonment in the Garden of Olives, the cup of vinegar, Calvary, the Crucifixion, the company of the two thieves, the wound in the side, the garment wagered at dice, death, the deposition, and the burial of the holy body are interpreted sexually, like a sorrowful sodomy: God, physically, loved men. It is very strange. The church was a symbol and in it they wished to effect a real act. The sun is real, but beneath its rays they enact a merely symbolic act. The ceremony is observed by a masked man on horseback wearing the large sombrero of the horseman. This horseman cloaks his body in a cape of red silk and covers his face with a feather mask. Only on Holy Saturday does he show his face; Christ has arisen, but not the historical Christ who suffered during the reign of Tiberius and was delivered unto Pilate, but the founding god, he who delivered unto men the seeds of corn, who taught them to cultivate and to harvest: a god not belonging to the time of Christ but to the time of a constantly renewed origin. It is very strange. Do you know that place and that ceremony?”

Yes, you know them, but you say nothing to the woman. You suspect the real intent of her question. She repeats it, is still, and then … what day is it? she asks. You believe it is useless to answer. Slowly she struggles to her feet. You fear she will fall. You also rise, to take her arm, but your instinct keeps you at a distance, though nevertheless dependent upon her; beside her, but not touching her, you duplicate quite naturally her infirm step, picturing the imminent collapse of that fatigued body; finally, brusquely, she supports herself against the central pole of the hut that holds up the straw roof. You move toward her; she clutches the pole but extends her hands toward you, imploring you with words you cannot hear.

“What? What are you saying? I can’t hear you.”

You approach her as you would a little girl, or an animal. You try to divine her desire. You cannot escape her odor. Ancient salt. Mineral husks. Herbivorous fish. Rotten oranges. Black and volatile fumes. A second, viscous skin that passes from her hands to your defenseless skin, now that finally you take her like a little girl or an animal, trying to divine her desire, and lead her to the tiny garden behind the hut: the parcel of land barred on three sides by bamboo, the fourth side a thick adobe wall, a pretension of private property the distant bombardment makes ridiculous.

You cannot escape her smell. You cannot stop touching her. The damp rags that envelop her. You feel the vertigo of an elusive memory.

In the forgotten garden everything is weeds, and if once someone tended it, today it bears evidence of different labor: rusted bicycle wheels, saws, a box of nails, some empty gasoline cans. It looks like a garden of metal, a gallery of scrap-metal sculptures. Its only purpose now is to serve as depository for useless objects that may someday, unexpectedly, again become useful. The wire of the wheels can be used for binding wire. The empty cans as floats. The thick, bullet-pocked wall can be used again.

“Don’t you see?”

“Yes. A garden. Things.”

“No. Something more.”

“Nothing is happening here.”

“Give me a drink.”

You hand her the gourd and look around. The weed-filled garden is indifferent to your gaze, merely describing to you its own nature, compact, green, bounded on three sides by the fence of bamboo tied together with thick maguey rope, the fourth by the wall of crumbling adobe. Weeds emerge from damp ground only to end in split, dried-up, burned tips.

We know this territory inch by inch, from the river Chachalacas to the peak of the Cofre de Perote, and from the Huasteca Tamaulipas to the mouths of the Coatzacoalcos: the besieged half-moon of our last defense against the invader. The rest of the republic is occupied by the North American Army. And facing the Gulf coasts, the Caribbean fleet observes, bombards, and launches raids. Here in Veracruz we were founded by a conquest, and here, almost five centuries later, a different conquest attempts our eternal destruction. We know inch by inch, sierra by sierra, barranca by barranca, tree by tree, this last citadel of our identity.

The Old Woman raises her arm; an age-spotted hand appears from among her rags and a finger points toward the depths of the jungle. Beyond the cimarron trees, sleeping violets, and greedy, spotted tiger-flowers. She points, and then stoops as if to trace a circle in the dust. Her index finger is a knotted scepter. The veils that fall from her head tremble, and she springs like a puma. She digs her fingernails into your chest and you stagger back, off balance; you feel her hands like a tourniquet about your throat and the breath of a weary journey near your mouth: “Why are we staying here? Why do you not take me to a different place?”

She says (and you know) that the question merely passes through lips that are the conduit for the jungle that contemplates you and the jewels the jungle hides. You embrace her in passive combat; in her hand the Old Woman still holds the cloth (you don’t know what else to call it: map? guide for the hunt? plan of operations? talisman?): feathers, spiders and filaments. The only drum resounds, always swifter and more muted.

You push the Old Woman aside with a feeling of physical repugnance (the breath; the bestial hands; the filthy clothing; especially that breath of mushrooms and mildew). You tell her firmly, and with rage: “I know the place you mean. It’s an abandoned pyramid. We’ve hidden there several times. And it serves as a depository for weapons. I tell you this because you will never be able to reveal it to anyone.”

But as you see her there, thrown to the ground in the garden, staring at the thick wall, you must struggle against the pity the woman evokes. A heavy silence surrounds her, as tangible as actual absence; silence, a deserved repose, like that of death; similar, at least, to the chronic death of dream.

The drum resounds and she lies at the foot of the adobe wall. You do not know what she is waiting for, what she invites you to, what she expects of you, whether she wished to remain there or go to the sumptuous Totonac tomb the jungle has devoured.

The Old Woman writhes on the ground and screams, a scream indistinguishable from the others, those of macaws abandoning the jungle in flocks of terror now that the Phantoms return flying in low formation.

The repeated whistle, impact, explosion, intolerable in their screeching descent, the explosion muffled by the foliage of useless targets: they are devastating jungle … nothingness.

You raise your fist to curse them once again: but that is your daily prayer, your sign of the cross; fucking gringo sons of bitches. They fly so low you can read the black insignia on the wings: USAF.

The din strikes against your eardrums with the everyday, irritating sound of a knife scraping against a frying pan. You grasp the maddened dervish beneath the arms and she cries out sharply and tries to hold herself by clawing at the dust at the foot of the bullet-pocked wall; you try to drag her forcibly into the hut where you both should be lying face down for the duration of the bombardment, this time closer and more severe, and furthermore, unforeseen; generally they make their pass only once, in the early morning, dump their load of napalm and lazy dogs and return to their bases. Today they have repeated their daily incursion. What’s happening, you wonder; is this a portent of their victory, or of our resistance? That stretch of garden between you and the hut seems fantastically long; the Old Woman is simultaneously an inert bundle and a metal nerve, a bag of rags and a root sunk several meters into the ground; she is an electrical conductor for voices, fears, and desires that perhaps avail themselves of this weakness to install their strength. Other traditions tell that beings of this nature are instantly recognizable, and can penetrate without obstacle all places, sacred and profane: their voice and their movement are those of an imminence that can appear as easily in a temple as in a brothel.

Why do you not dare tear off the white cloth that covers her face? The temple and the brothel. The Old Woman spoke of the Church of Santa Teresa in the Sierra del Nayar. Then she had been there, in that place you fear so greatly. You listened to her describe it and didn’t know whether this woman was plotting against your country or against your life; whether she was spying on rebellious forces or spying on you when she came to this hidden camp in the Veracruz jungle. You heard her describe the temple constructed by the Coras under the watchful eyes of the Spanish missionaries and you recalled the time you spent there in a different time, when you believed you had a different vocation: the artist’s brush, not the gun. You were sent — you must have been about twenty, no more — with a group of specialists from the Churubusco School to restore the splendor of an old and forgotten painting of enormous dimensions, neglected, damaged by the centuries, humidity, fungus, lack of care, situated behind the altar of that temple of God the Indians had converted into the Devil’s brothel. The peeling and blistered surface depicted, in the foreground, a group of naked men in the center of a vast Italian piazza. Their backs were turned to the viewer and their attitude was one of anguish, of desolate waiting, of terror before an imminent end. To the right of this foreground, a Christ wearing the traditional robes of his teaching, blue mantle and white tunic, stared intently at these men. In the background, forming a deep semicircle, fanned out minute scenes of the New Testament. Professionally, your team prepared to limn the damaged oil painting anew, to remedy its wounds, to fix its colors. Someone, many years before, must have lashed the painting with a whip; you would think that blood had run down the canvas, and that the skin of the painting still had not healed.

Your fancy provoked the laughter of your companions; but soon everyone could see that this fantasy revealed a truth: the painting had been painted on top of another; it was difficult to see with the naked eye because both paintings, the original and the one that was superimposed, were very old, and their materials were very similar. You all discussed whether it could be a pentimento; you imagined an aged and remorseful painter who, lacking materials, used the same canvas to cover up a failure and at the same time create another more perfect work. Someone said that perhaps it was a painting in which the outer stratum had tended to separate from the preparatory stratum. Another said that doubtlessly it was an abortive sketch, and the painter had let too much time pass between the preparatory and the final phases.

You X-rayed the canvas, but the results were very confusing. Colors least penetrable by X-ray were predominant in the painting: lead white, vermilion, and lead yellow. The negative barely suggested differentiations among the hidden images: like a succession of ghosts superimposed one upon the other, the figures reflected several times their own specters, the paint was thick, very old, perhaps what you were seeing was merely a faithful rendering of the original, a past restoration, a swarm of artistic repentances, a simple transposition of colors. You asked permission to make one final test: to resort to an infinitesimally small section made with your artist’s knife; the painting had already been badly treated, it would be sufficient to lift off a tiny fragment that had cracked by itself, treat it with resin and balsam on a glass slide, and examine it under the microscope to see whether between the layers of color there appeared a subtle film of dirt or yellowed varnish. Your test was successful: the color revealed was not the original color of the painting; an intangible line of time separated the two.

With increasing excitement, but also with great caution, your crew cleaned the painting. You applied solvents to its surface, dividing it into small rectangular zones, scraping away with your knives plaster, fungus, tenacious crusts, and little by little the stripped, false skin of the oil painting peeled away, and little by little, no more than thirty centimeters a day, the oils applied with enormous care, the drops of ammonia, alcohol, turpentine, there appeared before the astonished eyes of your small group of artists the original form of the painting.

It was a strange and vast portrait of a court. It could only be a court of Spain, and not one court, but all courts, centuries reunited in a single gallery of gray stone, beneath an arch of stormy shadows. In the foreground, a kneeling King with an air of intense melancholy, a breviary in his hands, a fine hound lying by his side, a King dressed in mourning, his face marked by repressed sensuality, a fine ascetic profile, thick, drooping lips, noticeable prognathism, self-absorbed but inquiring eyes, thin, silky hair and beard; and forming a circle with the King, two additional figures: a Queen in sumptuous attire, elaborate hoopskirts and belled farthingales, a high ruff, a hawk perched on her wrist — never had you seen in eyes so blue, in skin so fair, an expression of such vulnerable strength and cruel compassion; and a man dressed as a chief huntsman, one hand resting upon the hilt of his blade, a hooded falcon on his shoulder, the other hand forcefully restraining a pack of mastiffs. To the left and rear, a funeral procession trooped onto the canvas; it was led by an old and mutilated woman wrapped in black rags, armless and legless, a yellow-eyed bundle pushed on a little cart by a toothless and chubby-cheeked dwarf draped in clothing too generous for her stature; behind them came a page-and-drummer dressed all in black, with submissive gray eyes and tattooed lips; and behind the drummer, a sumptuous, wheeled coffin and a vast company of mayors, alguaciles, stewards, secretaries, ladies-in-waiting, workmen, beggars, halberdiers, captive Hebrews and Moslems accompanying an endless row of funeral carriages that disappeared into the background of the painting, and also surrounded by bishops, deacons, chaplains, and chapters of all the orders. On the right side of the painting, as if watching the spectacle, crouched a flautist, a beggar with olive skin and protruding green eyes, and behind him a huge monster floated in a sea of fire, a cross between a shark and a hyena, whose gaping mouth devoured human bodies. And in the very center of the painting, behind the circle presided over by the black figure of the kneeling King, in the space formerly occupied by the naked men, a trio of young men, also naked, their arms entwined, their backs to the viewer; on each back was stamped the sign of a cross, a blood-red cross. And beyond this plane, deeper and deeper in the perspective of gray stone and black shadow, a group of half-naked nuns lashed themselves with penitential cilices; and one of them, the most beautiful, held broken glass in her mouth, and her lips were bleeding; processions of hooded monks with tall lighted tapers; in a high tower a red-haired monk observed the impenetrable sky; in a similar tower a one-armed scribe bent over an ancient parchment; an equestrian statue of a Comendador; a plain of tortures: smoking stakes, racks, men twisted with pain, pilloried; scenes of battle and throat slashing; minute details: broken mirrors, mandrakes emerging from the burned earth beneath funeral pyres, half-consumed candles, plague-infested cities, a masked nun with a bird’s beak, a distant beach, a half-constructed boat, an ancient sailor with a hammer in his hand, a flight of crows, fading into the boundaries of the canvas a double row of royal sepulchers, jasper tombs, recumbent statues, mere sketches, an infinite succession of deaths, vertiginous attraction toward the infinite; increasing darkness in the background, dazzling chromatic symphony in the foreground: blue, white, golden yellow, vivid red, and orange red.

Of the three youths writhing and twisting in their mutual embrace like Laocoön in his battle with the serpents, only one showed his face. And that face was yours.

The painting had no date, although it was signed: Julianus, Pictoret Frater, Fecit.

Like you, everyone was at first astonished to see you depicted in a portrait painted four, five, six centuries earlier … There was discussion of coincidences, then everyone joked about it and left the church to eat with the white-clad Indians beneath an enormous sun beating down upon the sick land of the Cora people.

“Silence will never be absolute.” This you say to yourself as you listen to her. “Forlornness, yes, possibly; suspected nakedness, that too; darkness, certainly…”

This she says as you try to drag her toward the hut; she says it, but she says it with your voice. Black scale falls from her eyelids. The whites of her eyes are shot with green veins. Her eyes gyrate in their sockets like two captive moons: her white veil has fallen away.

“But either the isolation of the place or that of forever embraced figures [she says to you, señor caballero] seems to convoke that reunion of sound [the drum; squeaking carriage wheels; horses; the 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 was taking advantage of the exhaustion of your own defenses] builds layer upon layer of its most tenacious, keenest, most resounding insinuations…”

Ants swarm across the livid face of the Old Woman lying on her back in the dust of the garden.

You can say nothing; her wrinkled lips silence yours, and as she kisses you, without wishing it you speak what she says in the name of what she, her body resting upon yours, convokes. 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 her hands stroke your features, they seem to be drawing, tracing, a second face upon yours. Her fingers are heavy and rough. They seem to hold colors and stones they arrange upon your features, as your former face disappears with every stroke of her fingertips. The fingernails scrape against your teeth as if filing them. Dry palms pass through your hair, as if spreading a blondish, reddish dye, and as they touch your cheeks, those hands create a beard light as plumage. Her fingers work upon your former skin.

“The silence that surrounds us [señor caballero, she calls you, her head resting upon your knees] is the mask of silence: its person.”

Her hands claw at the air. You offer her the gourd filled with pulque and she drinks without argument, vitally gross. Again she brushes your lips with her fingers. Pulque dribbles down her quivering chin. You drink what her mouth offers you. You hear her murmuring and feel you are again a child in your mother’s lap, far from war, far from death; she tells you that you are young and handsome, a child, sleep, sleep, rest, rest; such clear eyes, such soft cheeks, such moist lips. She strokes your armpits. You raise your arms and cradle your head in your clasped hands; she toys with the moist hair on your chest, the excited nipples of a mischievous child.

“I have managed to deceive you. Every night, when you are not watching me, I have been writing you a letter: My beloved, I think of you constantly from this land filled with the memories of our best years … Here everything speaks to me of you; your Lake Como, so dear to you, spreads before my eyes in all its azure serenity, and everything seems the same as it was before; except that you are there, so far away, so far … I know how to read at night, señor caballero.”

Laughing, her finger counts your ribs, and creeps into your navel, is moistened by the sweat and dirt accumulated there, faint testimony that for days you have not descended to the river, there is no time, everything one does is indispensable, eating, sleeping, waking, we bathe together in the river, but no one looks at the others, soldiers and camp followers, our bodies are also our uniform, we must win our ultimate battle or we shall have no reason to continue living, the vegetation on the shore hides us, our bodies are the color of the deep grasses swaying on the bed of the tropical river. The belly is a smooth stone in the depths of the placid river. She caresses you, and murmurs. Body hair is moss on the stones that lie in the depths of the turbulent river.

“Air and light. Those of us who still cultivate the deception of the senses require them. Ideas flower, but quickly wither, recollections are lost, sentiments are inconstant. Smell, touch, hearing, sight, and taste are the only sure proofs of our existence and of the reflected reality of the world. You believe that. Do not deny it.”

Scorpius, sweet purple scorpion, raceme of moist mud. She caresses you, clasps you, cups your weight.

“We have left our homes and we must pay the price of such prodigious behavior. Exile is marvelous homage to our origins.”

Her toothless mouth descends upon your belly.

“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.”

Her tongue slides along the burning smoothness of your penis; toothless gums imprison you; everything is viscous, dank, open; she touches the live fascine of nerves.

“It is sad that you will not live as long as I; 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 the loss that only the combination of rank and madness can support. I see myself, dream of myself, touch myself, 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, weeping another death befallen in sunny lands, the death of another Prince of our degenerate blood; I see myself dry and stooped, tiny and trembling as a sparrow, toothless, whispering into indifferent ears: ‘Do not forget the last Prince, and let God grant us a sad but not odious memory…’”

You spread your legs for her mouth.

“I said to him: do not dishonor yourself, always be the Emperor, make them bow before you; a monarch is a good shepherd, a president is a mercenary; a republic is a stepmother, a monarchy a mother. You and I will be the mother and father of these people, I said to you as we were climbing from the sea, from Veracruz, toward the plateau, toward Mexico City, seeing frontiers of nopal cactus, naked and swollen-bellied children, dark impassive women wrapped in rebozos; stiff, mute men. We loved them so, didn’t we, Maxl? Do you remember, Maxl, when we hid behind the curtains at Miramar and watched how your brother’s soldiers beat and shot the rebellious Italians; when we allowed them in Trieste to whip a pregnant woman until punishment turned into a blood bath. They told me that we killed ninety thousand Mexicans. But we were their mother and father. They had no name. Only you and I had a name in this anonymous land. But now, dear Maxl, now that I imagine you alone and besieged, far away, dead, I would like to shout: in the name of those we murdered without moving a finger, in the name of those who died while we danced in Miramar and Chapultepec, for the pity we did not have for you, may you have pity on us! Punish our crimes with your pity. Let your mercy be our torture. Castigate and pierce our bodies with the intolerable humiliation of forgiveness. Do not grant us martyrdom. We do not deserve it. We do not deserve it. Are we victims of Mexico, Maxl, you and I and all our ancestors, all the kings of Flemish and Austrian and Spanish blood who first conquered this Indian land and, finally, in this place exhausted their royal line? No, in the end we are all the children of Mexico, because only by hatred can one measure love for Mexico, and only Mexico’s vengeance is measure of its love. Bells are tolling on the hill. Can you hear them, Maxl? Can you not understand that they are attempting to overcome the roar of the Mexican sun, the weeping of guns, the sighs of prayers, and the trembling of that dry land? Give me back the body of my beloved.”

Silence pursued. Silence personified. Spurting, bitter milk; death rattles. The Old Woman’s mouth holds you, saliva and semen blend, and now she allows the mingled liquids to return from her lips toward their origin, the exhausted testicles breathing with the rhythm of a caged animal: you are bared to the sky.

“There is no possible exchange, my son. A true gift does not admit equal recompense; an authentic offering rises above all comparison and all price. They gave us an empire; could we repay that with simple death, with simple madness? I, poor wretch, returned to seek what I had lost. Again I plunged into these accursed jungles. I let myself be led by the map of the new world, the map of arrows and insects that allows us to abandon the known world and venture where no one has any claim on us, to the heart of the virgin forest, to the pyramid itself.”

You lie beside the adobe wall, panting beneath the sun.

“It was for nought. My place was already taken. Another woman stood on the steps of the pyramid. An Indian woman. She was adorned with necklaces of jade and turquoise, and she clasped a dagger of flint in her hand. I recognized her; it was she who when I disembarked from the Novara offered me this gift: this feather mask. Her feet trod the porous stone of the stairway and I could see the wounds of irons and chains on her ankles. I knew she was waiting for someone — perhaps a different man — to lead him a second time. To repeat the eternal journey of defeats and victories, of jungle and sea, plateau and volcano. I pitied her. I returned the map to her. Now I must reconstruct it if I wish to escape from here, to forget, to return to the penumbra that awaits me … the castle in the mists…”

A messenger enters, panting and bleeding, and falls to his knees.

“Rest now. You will forget everything I have said. All my words were spoken yesterday.”

The Old Woman imitates the breathing of the wounded man who has just reached your camp in the Veracruz sierra, while you rise slowly to your feet, zipping your trousers; you run your fingers through your hair, and with your feet scatter the night’s fire: a pyramid of ashes.

“Each of us has the right to carry a secret to the tomb.”

After entrusting your prisoner to the soldiers, you turn off the battery-powered tape recorder that throughout the night has repeated, hypnotically, a single tape, the constant sound of a funeral drum. That tape recorder is the only thing the Old Woman brought with her when she was captured. You expected to hear a message, decipher a code, find something that would implicate her. Only a tape with the sound of a mourning drum. In vain you search for the cloth — you cannot call it, as she does, a map of the jungle — the trance-induced woman fashioned before your eyes in this very hut.

You go out into the garden and you waste precious time poking through the rubbish at the base of the wall. Futile. If only you could remember the exact design of that cloth: surely it was the map of a primitive hunt, the precise composition of the zones of feathers in relation to the center of spiders, the color of the feathers, the directions signaled by the arrows. You have wasted your time. Your arms fall to your sides. You leave the garden and ask about the messenger who arrived at the camp this morning, panting and wounded.

The messenger is lying on a straw mat in the shade. He drinks awkwardly from the gourd you offer him. He tells you that the previous night he had gone to El Tajín as you had ordered to make a recount of the arms hidden inside the pyramid. He had been overtaken there by an electrical storm and had decided to spend the night in the shelter of the jutting eaves of the Totonac temple. Without close examination it is difficult to distinguish between the luxurious vegetation and the elaborate carving of the façade. Shadows of the jungle and shadows of stone integrate into an inseparable architecture. One can easily be deceived. But he swears to you that as he leaned back into one of the openings in the façade, looking for an eave under which he could take shelter, feeling his way with his hands, he touched a face.

He jerked his hand away, but then overcame his fear and played over the wall the flashlight he always carried tied to his belt. First it illuminated only the sumptuary frets of the temple. But finally, inserted in one of the hollows of the pediment that surely had served as airy tombs for royalty, he discovered what he was looking for. And he tells you that he found a strange body there with a profile eroded by time and corruption; an old, perhaps a hundred-year-old, body placed inside a basket filled with cotton and swimming in pearls; a devoured, featureless face with two staring, black, glassy eyes.

He wanted to investigate more closely; he lifted the cape soaked by the storm and devoured by insects, but two events distracted him: behind him, illuminated by lightning flashes, he saw a young Indian girl with a serene gaze and tattooed lips, barefoot, sad, luxuriously attired, her ankles scarred by shackles; as if waiting, she was sitting at the base of the pyramid: in her hands she held a cloth of feathers and arrows, and at her feet lay a circle of dead butterflies; at the same time, he heard an amazing sound, a drum seeming to advance through the jungle, announcing a future or a past execution; he thought he must be dreaming; through the parted undergrowth appeared a funeral procession composed of people of another epoch, white-coiffed nuns, monks in dark-brown hooded robes, lighted tapers, beggars, ladies gowned in brocades, gentlemen in black doublets with high white ruffs, captives with the Star of David on their breasts, other captives with Arabic features, halberdiers, pages, laborers carrying poles across their shoulders, torches and candles. Our messenger was confounded; he extinguished his flashlight and began to run. Above the sound of the drum several shots thundered in unison. The messenger felt a sting on his shoulder and on his arm. He doesn’t know how he managed to reach the camp.

Later you give a few orders, you eat the midday mess and inspect the hanging bridges that tonight will permit us to cross the barrancas, attack the flank of an enemy position, and then disappear into the jungle. We attack only by night. By day we prepare ourselves for combat and blend into the jungle and the population. We all dress like the peons of the region: we are chameleons. We eat, we sleep, we make love, we bathe in the river. If they want to exterminate us, they will have to exterminate the jungle, the rivers, the barrancas, even the ruins — the entire earth and sky.

Following the assassination of the Constitutional President and his family, your brother assumed the post of First Minister in the military regime, and he pleaded with you to join him. Freedom, sovereignty, self-determination; vain words that for defending them as if they were something more than mere words cost the President his life … You had to face reality. The government that emerged following the coup had solicited the intervention of the North American Army to help maintain order and to assure a transition to peace and prosperity. The division of the world into inviolable spheres of influence was a fact that saved us all from nuclear conflict. These are the things your brother said to you in his office in the National Palace as he pressed a series of buttons that turned on a number of television screens. A dozen apparatus were lined up along a dais; across their smoking mirrors passed scenes that your brother, redundantly, described to you. This was the brutal reality: the country could not feed its more than a hundred million persons; mass extermination was the only realistic policy; collective brainwashing was necessary to assure that human sacrifice would again be accepted as a religious necessity; the Aztec tradition of sumptuary consumption of hearts must be joined to the Christian tradition of the sacrificed God: blood on the cross, blood on the pyramid; look, he said, pointing toward the illuminated screens. Teotihuacán, Tlatelolco, Xochicalco, Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Monte Albán, Copilco; they are all in use again. With a smile, he pointed out to you that the commentary was different on each program; the public-relations experts had subtly distributed suitable commentators among the twelve channels to lend to the ceremonies a sports, religious, festive, economic, political, aesthetic, or historical emphasis; one announcer, his voice rushed and excited, was giving the scores of the contest between Teotihuacán and Uxmal: so many hearts in favor of this team, so many in favor of the opposing team; another, in an unctuous voice, was comparing the sites of sacrifice with yesteryear’s supermarkets; the sacrifice of life would directly contribute to feeding those Mexicans who escaped death; then a smiling, typically middle-class family was flashed upon the screen, the supposed beneficiary of the extermination; a third announcer was extolling the concept of the fiesta, the recovery of forgotten collective bonds; the feeling of communion these ceremonies provided; another spoke in serious tones of the world situation: cruelty and spilling of blood were in no way fatalities inherent only in the Mexican people: all nations were resorting to such practices in order to resolve problems of overpopulation, scarcity of food, and depletion of energy sources: Mexico was merely employing a solution fitting to its own sensibilities, its cultural tradition, and its national idiosyncrasy: the flint knife was proudly Mexican; and an eminent physician spoke with a solemn air about universal acceptance of euthanasia and the option — neglected because of mass ignorance and an anachronistic cult of machismo — of employing anesthesia, local or general, etc.…

With horror you watched the ceremonies of death on the electronic mirrors in your brother’s office. Was it for this that millions of men since the beginning of Mexican time had been born, had dreamed and struggled and died? In your imagination were superimposed other smoky images that supplanted those flashing across the screens of this walnut and brocade office in this palace of tezontle and granite that had been erected on the very site of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, the bloody hummingbird magus, and in the same plaza that had served as the seat of Aztec power: a vast Catholic cathedral erected upon the ruins of the walls of serpents, the houses of the Spanish conquistadors built on the site of the wall of skulls, a municipal palace whose foundations were laid upon the conquered palace of Moctezuma with its courtyards of birds and beasts, its chambers of albinos, hunchbacks, and dwarfs, and its rooms lined with silver and gold: the images of a tenacious struggle against all fatalities, in spite of all their defeats. Your poor people; without moving from where you stood you could re-create here on those blinking screens and outside, beyond the thick curtains of the office, on the enormous plaza of broken stone established over the slime of the dead lagoon, all the struggles against the victories of the powerful, against fatalisms imposed upon Mexico in the name of all historic and geographic and spiritual destinies; television screen and plaza: peoples subjected to the power of Tenochtitlán, torn from their burning coastal lands, their fertile tropical valleys, from poor pasturing plains, from high, cold forests, to nourish the insatiable gaping jaws of Aztec theocracy, its terrible fiestas of a dying sun and the war of the flowers; screen and plaza: an invincible dream, alive in the eyes of slaves, the good founding god, the Plumed Serpent, will return from the East, he will restore the Golden Age of peace, labor, and brotherhood; screen and plaza: from the houses that walk upon the water on the day predicted for the return of Quetzalcoatl descended the masked gods on horseback, carrying fire in their fingernails and ashes between their teeth, to impose a new tyranny in the name of Christ, a God bathed in blood, a people branded like cattle, slaves of the large estates, prisoners chained in the depths of a gold mine that fed the transitory grandeur of Spain, in the end, beggars both conqueror and conquered, the haughty conquistador and the fallen Prince; screen and plaza: a tenacious dream, executioner and victim, Spanish and Indian, white and copper, a new people, a brown race, we shall preserve what our own fathers attempted to destroy, an orphan people of an unknown father and a blemished mother, sons of La Chingada, the queen of all bitches, we shall save the best of two worlds, a truly new world, New Spain, the Christian Saviour redeemed by the sins of history, the Plumed Serpent liberated by the distance of the legend, a people of mixed blood, founders of a new, free community; the father forgiven, the mother purified; screen and plaza: a green, white, and red flag, a victorious people vanquished by their liberators, a republic of rapacious Creoles, greedy leaders, fattened clergy, plumed tricorns, parading cavalry, shining swords, useless laws, proclamations, and speeches; an avalanche of empty words and cardboard medals buries the same ragged, enslaved people eternally bound to peonage, subjected to taxes, given in sacrifice; screen and plaza: foreign flags, the Stars and Stripes, the Napoleonic tricolor, the two-headed Austrian eagle, the crowned Mexican eagle, a land invaded, humiliated, mutilated; screen and plaza: an invincible dream, to give one’s life to vanquish death, there is no matériel with which to combat the Yankees in Churubusco and Chapultepec, the French burn all the villages and hang all their inhabitants, a dark, tenacious Indian, fearsome because he possesses all the dreams and nightmares of a people, confronting a blond and dubious prince, fearful because he possesses all the ills and illusions of a dynasty; screen and plaza: the victorious people once again vanquished, their flags fallen, the barefoot soldier returns to the great estates, the wounded soldiers to the sugar-cane mill, the fleeing Indian to be stripped of his property, to extermination; oppressors from within replace those from without; plaza and screen: plumed hats, gold galloon, and the waltz, the ever present dictator seated on a gunpowder throne before a theater backdrop; the learned despot and his court of aged Comtian Positivists, rich landowners, and pomaded generals; plaza and screen: the dream more stringent than the power, the façade falls under machine-gun fire, bayonets rip the curtain and men in wide sombreros with cartridge belts strapped across their chests appear from behind it, the burning eyes of Morelos, the harsh voices of Sonora, the callused hands of Durango, the dusty feet of Chihuahua, the broken fingernails of Yucatan, a shout breaks one mask, a song the next, a laugh shatters a third mask that hid our true face behind the other two, on a bullet-pocked adobe wall appears the authentic face, bare, previous to all histories because it has been dreaming through the centuries, waiting for the time of its history: flesh indistinguishable from bone, inseparable, grimace from smile; tender fortitude, cruel compassion, deadly friendship, immediate life, all my times are one, my past, right now, my future, right now, my present, right now, not indolence, not nostalgia, not illusion, not fatality: I am the people of all histories, and I insist only — with force, tenderness, cruelty, compassion, brotherhood, life and death — that everything happen instantly, today: my history, neither yesterday nor tomorrow: I want today to be my eternal time, today, today, today, today I want love and the fiesta, solitude and communion, Paradise and Hell, life and death, today, not another mask, accept me as I am, my wound inseparable from my scar, my weeping from my laughter, my flower from my knife; screen and plaza: no one has waited so long, no one has dreamed so long, no one has so struggled against the fatality, the passivity, the ignorance others have invoked to condemn him, as this supernatural people who a long time ago should have died of the natural causes of injustice and the lies and scorn oppressors have heaped upon the wounded body of Mexico; screen and plaza: all for this? you ask yourself, so many millennia of struggle and suffering and rejecting oppression, so many centuries of invincible defeat, a people risen time and time again from its own ashes, only to end like this: the same ritual extermination of their origins, the same colonial suppression of their beginnings, the happy lie at the end … again?

Your brother saw your expression and warned you: resistance would be futile, a heroic but empty gesture; a few guerrillas could never defeat the most powerful army on earth; we need order and stability, we must accept the reality of our contemporary world, be satisfied with being a protectorate of Anglo-Saxon democracy, we are interdependent, no one will come to our assistance, the spheres of influence are too perfectly defined, U.S.A., U.S.S.R., China, get rid of your anachronistic ideas, there are only three powers in the world, we are going to realize the dream of universal government, and shelve your moth-eaten nationalism …

You seized the paper knife lying on the desk of the First Minister and plunged it into his belly; your brother had no opportunity to cry out, blood spurted from his mouth, choking him; you drove the bronze dagger into his chest, his back, his face; your brother fell against the multicolored buttons and the pictures faded from the screens, the mirrors once again covered with smoke.

You walked calmly from the office, amiably, you bade goodbye to the secretaries: your brother had asked that no one interrupt him for any reason. Slowly you walked the length of the corridors and patios of the National Palace. You stopped for an instant on the stairway and in the central patio before the murals of Diego Rivera. The Military Junta had ordered they be boarded over. They gave as an excuse the imminent need for restoration.

You open your eyes. You see the real world surrounding you and you know that you are that world and that you battle for it. It is not the first time we have fought. Your smile fades. Perhaps it is the last.

“What shall we do with the old woman, sir?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to decide.”

“Forgive me, sir, but who, if not you?”

“We could stow her away somewhere, Dusty. In some solitary, well-guarded house. How about a madhouse or a convent, Dusty?”

“Is there no superior officer who decides these things?”

“No, sir. There’s not enough time.”

“You’re right. It’s also true that we don’t have any extra men to look after prisoners…”

“Besides, they limit our mobility.”

“And as an example, Dusty, as an example. Of course she was a spy, one of the enemy. This isn’t her country.”

“Very well. Shoot her today. Over there, against the wall behind my hut.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Writing names in the dust with her finger.”

“What names?”

“Names of old bitches: Juana, Isabel, Carlota…”

Beneath the sun you walk back toward the Indian hut. You wonder whether as it appears every morning the sun sacrifices its light in honor of our need; or whether that light, in some manner sufficient to itself, spends its transparency in revealing our opacity. But the light gives form and reality to our bodies. You must shake off this nightmare. Because of the light we know who we are. Without it, we would come to invent identity antennae, detectors for the bodies we wished to touch and recognize. You wonder whether it is possible to shoot a ghost. You aren’t lying to yourself anymore, you know where you have seen before the eyes of an ancient, mutilated, armless and legless woman wrapped in black rags, the eyes of a Queen of vulnerable strength and cruel compassion. The nightmare calls you again; you were also in that painting …

You stop. Beside the entrance to the hut a young native girl with smooth, firm (you are sure) skin, tattooed lips, and scarred ankles is weaving and unraveling, with dexterity and serenity, a strange cloth of feathers. At her side, a soldier is playing a guitar, and singing. You approach the girl. In that instant, the bombardment begins anew.

The lazy dog consists of a mother bomb fabricated of light metal that bursts while still in the air and close to the ground, or when it strikes the ground. Inside the mother bomb there are three hundred metal balls, each the size of a tennis ball, which, as they are liberated from the maternal bosom, scatter independently in every direction, either exploding immediately or lying in ambush in undergrowth or dust, awaiting a child’s foot or a woman’s hand, blowing off the foot, the hand, or the head of the first woman or child who touches it. The men are all in the mountains.

REQUIEM

Recently he had been assaulted by a terrifying multitude of afflictions.

Five wounds erupted; the nuns of the palace called them wounds so as to suggest that the King’s suffering was like that of Christ himself; and Felipe accepted this blasphemy in the name of his hunger for God. One wound on the thumb of his right hand, three on the index finger of the same hand, and another on a toe of his right foot. These five suppurating points tormented him night and day; he could not bear even the contact of the sheets. Finally, the wounds healed, but he was completely incapable of movement. He was transported from place to place in a sedan chair carried, in turn, by four nuns. El Señor observed to Madre Milagros: “Any thing that enters a convent will never leave it; no person, no money, no secret. I could have chosen to be transported by four deaf-mute servants: but thus will you and your Sisters be, Milagros, deaf and mute to everything you see and hear.”

He asked them to carry him once more to the dark corner of the chapel where his mother, the one called the Mad Lady, reposed in a wall; he asked her: “Mother, what are you doing?”

Madre Milagros and Sisters Angustias, Caridad, and Ausencia knelt, frightened, and began to pray in a low voice when they discerned through the crack between the bricks the amber eyes of the ancient Queen about whom so much had been conjectured by gossips and tattlers: she had returned to absolute seclusion in the castle of Tordesillas; she had in life buried herself beside the cadaver of her most beloved husband, she had been accidentally killed during the fierce slaughter in the chapel presided over by Guzmán, she had fled to new lands with her farting dwarf and her lunatic Idiot Prince. Now they heard her voice:

“Oh, my son, how wise you were never to abandon the protection of your walls, and never to cross the seas so you might know the lands of your vast Indian empire. No one, no sovereign of our blood, had ever stepped upon the shores of the new world: they were more discreet than I. But consider, my dear son, my dilemma: my handsome husband, blond as the sun, was only second in succession; we were living in the shadow of the Emperor, Maxl’s brother, in the court in Vienna; amid the frivolity of balls and court etiquette we were living on crumbs from the imperial table, always second, never first, mere delegates, representatives in Milan and Trieste of the true power in an unredeemed and rebellious Italy subjected to the power of Austria. How could we help but hear the song of the siren? An empire, our own empire, in Mexico, our land, discovered, conquered, and colonized by our royal line, but not one royal foot had sunk into the sands of Veracruz. Maxl, Maxl, the poison of incestuous generations was more concentrated in you, my beloved, the hereditary traits, the prognathic jaw, the brittle bones, the thick, parted lips: even so, your blue eyes and your blond beard gave you the aspect of a god; but you could engender no sons. I told you that night in Miramar, if we cannot have children, we shall have an empire. The good Mexicans offered us a throne; we would be good parents to that people; but the Emperor, your brother, refuses us aid: he envies you; accept the aid of Bonaparte; his troops will protect us from the handful of rebels who oppose us. We disembarked from the Novara into the burning tropics, a sky filled with vultures, a jungle of parrots, an aroma of vanilla, orchid, and orange, we climbed to the dry plain, so like this of Castile, my son, to the site of our ancestor’s power, the conquered city, Mexico, the rebellious country, Mexico: an ancient legend, Maxl, a white, blond-haired and bearded god, the Plumed Serpent, the god of good and peace; but they did not want us, my son, they deceived us, my son, they fought to the death against us, they faded into the jungle, the mountains, the plain, they were peons by day and soldiers by night, they attacked, they fled, they lay in ambush, an invisible army of barefoot Indians; we reacted with the fury of our blood: hostages, villages burned, rebels shot, women hanged; nothing subdued them, the French Army abandoned us, first you wanted to flee with them, but I told you that one of our dynasty would never undertake cowardly flight, I would go to Paris, to Rome, I would force Napoleon to live up to his promises, I would force the Pope to protect us; they scorned me, they humiliated me, I became demented, they tried to poison me, they allowed me to spend one night in the Vatican, the first woman ever to sleep in St. Peter’s, then I went to our villa at Lake Como, I received your letters, Maxl, you, alone, abandoned, your letters: If God allows you to recover your health, and if you can read these lines, you will know in what measure I have been buffeted by adversity, one blow after another, since you went away. Misfortune dogs my footsteps and destroys all my hopes. Death seems to me a happy solution. We are surrounded. Imperial messengers have been hanged by the Republicans within sight of us, in trees across the river. The Austrian hussars have been unable to come to our aid. Our munitions and provisions are exhausted. The good Sisters bring us a little bread made from the flour of the Hosts. We eat the meat of mules and horses. We live in our last refuge, the Convent of the Cross. From its towers one can look out over the panorama of the city of Querétaro. I do not know how long we can resist. I shall comport myself to the end like a sovereign defeated but not dishonored. Farewell, my beloved. I answered him: My beloved, I think of you constantly from this land filled with the memories of our best years … Here everything speaks to me of you; your Lake Como, so dear to you, spreads before my eyes in all its azure serenity, and everything seems the same as it was before; except that you are there, so far away, so far … My letter, my son, arrived too late; the bullet-pierced body, convulsed at the base of the firing wall, refused to die. A soldier approached and fired the coup de grâce into his breast. The black tunic burst into flame. A majordomo ran and snuffed out the flame with his livery. The body was taken to a convent to be embalmed so it could be returned to the family. The carpenter, from Juárez’s army, had never seen him in his lifetime. He did not measure correctly. They brought him down from the Hill of the Bells on a caisson of the Republican Army, inside the too-small box, his legs dangling outside the coffin. Naked, the body was laid out on a table. But they had to wait a long time before taking up the scalpel and opening the body cavity. There was no disinfectant naphthaline in the convent. They found a flask of zinc chloride. This liquid was injected into his arteries and veins. The process took three days. Four bullets had penetrated his torso, three through the left breast, and one through the right nipple. A fifth bullet had burned his eyebrows and brow. Beneath the sun one eye had burst from its socket, as if throughout his life he had stared at it without blinking. They searched through the churches for eyes the color of his: blue. Saint by saint; virgin by virgin — only black eyes. Blue had fled from the gaze of that country. They clothed him in a campaign tunic of blue cloth. A row of golden buttons from waist to neck. Long breeches, tie, kid gloves. There was so little left. Barely a rushing of wind. They inserted eyes of black glass in the hollow sockets: no one could have recognized him. Exhausted gases escaped from the opened belly, bubbled in his ears, covered his lips with green spume. The body lay convulsed. A soldier fired the coup de grâce into his breast and then leaned against the adobe wall to smoke. After two weeks, the body turned black. The zinc injections had destroyed the roots of the hair. It was impossible to recognize beneath the glass of the coffin — that bald head, that beardless chin, those false eyes, that flesh first swollen and then sunken — the imperial profile known on gold medallions. The features were erased. My beloved had the face of the beaches of the new world. Again his body crossed the great ocean, on the same ship that had brought us there, the Novara. No one could recognize him. I never saw him again. Look at me, my son; I am that ancient mad doll dressed in a lace dressing gown and coiffed in silk, shut up in a Belgian castle, escaping at times to search beneath the trees of the misty meadows a nut, a little fresh water; they wish to poison me. My name is Carlota.”

That day El Señor abandoned the niche of his mother, the Mad Lady, with great sadness; he did not need to threaten the nuns to silence; it was sufficient to look upon their four bloodless faces, transparent with fear. In the sedan chair they carried him back to the bedchamber and lifted him onto his bed. During that time he was experiencing the first onslaught of a dropsy that swelled his belly, his thighs and legs; and this rheum was accompanied by an implacable thirst, a tormenting passion, for dropsy is fed most unrestrainedly by that which is most delicious to it: water. While he was in that condition, he received a folio signed by the grandees of the kingdom, wherein they explained the lamentable state of the royal coffers owing to droughts, scarcity of laborers, attacks by buccaneers upon galleons carrying back treasures from the new world, and the financial astuteness of the families of Jews settled in the north of Europe.

With his afflicted hand El Señor tortuously wrote orders for monks of the kingdom to go from door to door begging alms for their King. And to prove his Christian humility, he asked that on Holy Thursday he be carried to the chapel for the ceremony of the washing of feet, and that for that purpose be brought seven of the poor from among the multitude of beggars perpetually surrounding the palace awaiting scraps from the palace meals. He insisted, in spite of the pain of movement, on performing this rite of humility. On the morning of Holy Thursday he approached the poor on his knees, supported by Sister Clemencia and Sister Dolores, and with a damp cloth in his wounded hand and a basin of water Sister Esperanza held for him, he proceeded to wash the feet marred with scabs and wounds and buried thorns. After he washed each pair of feet, bowing down, still kneeling, he kissed them; then the hand of one of those poor fell upon his shoulder; El Señor checked his anger, looked up, and met the gaze of Ludovico, the resigned, green, protruding eyes of the former theology student.

First Felipe wept upon Ludovico’s knees, embracing them, while the beggar’s hand rested upon El Señor’s shoulder and the frightened nuns watched and the Bishop continued the Divine Services before an altar draped with black crape, like the effigies and sepulchers in the chapel. Then El Señor made a gesture that meant all is well, do not be alarmed, let us talk. Ludovico leaned over until his head touched Felipe’s.

“My friend, my old friend,” murmured El Señor. “Where have you come from?”

Ludovico looked at El Señor with affectionate sorrow. “From New Spain, Felipe.”

“Then you triumphed. Your dream was realized.”

“No, Felipe, you triumphed: the dream was a nightmare … The same order you desired for Spain was transported to New Spain; the same rigid, vertical hierarchies; the same style of government: for the powerful, all the rights and no obligations; for the weak, no rights and all obligations; the new world has been populated with Spaniards enervated by unexpected luxury, the climate, the mixing of bloods, and the temptations of unpunished injustice…”

“Then neither you nor I triumphed, my brother, but Guzmán.”

Ludovico smiled enigmatically, he took Felipe’s face in his hands and stared directly into his sunken, hollow eyes.

“But I sent Julián, Ludovico,” said El Señor. “I sent him to temper — to whatever degree possible — Guzmán’s acts, the acts of all the Guzmáns.”

“I do not know.” Ludovico shook his head. “I simply do not know.”

“Did he construct his churches, paint his pictures, speak in behalf of the oppressed?” asked Felipe in an increasingly anguished voice.

“Yes.” Now Ludovico nodded. “Yes, he did the things you speak of: he did them in the name of a unique creation capable, according to him, of transposing to art and to life the total vision of the universe born of the new science…”

“What creation? what does he call it?”

“It is called Baroque, and it is an instantaneous flowering: its bloom so full that its youth is its maturity, and its magnificence its cancer. An art, Felipe, which, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum: it fills all voids offered by reality. Its prolongation is its negation. Birth and death are the only acts of this art: as it appears, it is fixed, and since it totally embraces the reality it selects, totally fills it, it is incapable of extension or development. We still do not know whether from this combined death and birth further dead things or further living things can be born.”

“Ludovico, you must understand, I believe nothing I am told, only what I read…”

“Then read these verses.”

From his threadbare clothing Ludovico removed a folio which he offered to El Señor, who unfolded it and read in a low voice:

Pyramidal, earthbound, melancholy,

Born a shadow, he advanced toward Heaven,

The haughty apex of vain obelisks,

And thought to scale the stars …

Then:

And the King, who affected vigilance,

Even with opened eyes maintained no vigil.

He, by his own hounds harassed—

Monarch in a different time well honored—

A timid deer become,

With ear receptive

To the quiet calm,

The slightest movement.

The atoms move and

An inner ear, acute,

Hears the faint sound

Which alters, even sleeping …

“Who wrote this about me? Who dared write these…?”

“The nun Inés, Felipe.”

Trembling, El Señor tried to draw away from Ludovico; instead, his head merely settled more firmly against the beggar’s breast; the nuns watched, stupefied, and redoubled their breast-beating.

“Inés is confined in a prison of mirrors in this palace, Ludovico, bound by the chain of love to your son, the usurper called Juan.”

“Hear me, Felipe, lean close to my lips. The hordes that invaded your palace broke with pickaxes all the chains and locks from the prisons; they never paused to see who inhabited the cells, but ran from cell to cell shouting, ‘You are free!’”

“I did not order the slaughter, Ludovico, I swear it. Guzmán acted in my name…”

“It does not matter. Hear me: those imprisoned lovers are a scrubbing maid and a rogue, Azucena and Catilinón; in the commotion of the day they replaced Inés and Juan…”

“I do not believe you; why would such lowly subjects endure that prison, never revealing who they were?”

“Perhaps they preferred imprisoned pleasure to joyless freedom. I do not know. Yes, I do know: for the pleasure of feeling they were of exalted rank and to receive treatment reserved for those of breeding, they accepted the identity of their disguises … at the cost of death.”

“And Inés? And Juan? What of them?”

“They fled with me. Disguised, we embarked in the caravels of Guzmán. Yes, along with the painter-priest, we would temper the excesses of your favorite: against his sword, our art, our philosophy, our eroticism, our poetry. It was not possible. But have no fear. The nun Inés has been silenced by the authorities: she will never write another line. She has sacrificed her library and her precious mathematical and musical instruments to devote herself, as her confessor and her Bishop ordered, to perfecting the vocations of her soul.”

“That is good, yes, that is good. And Don Juan?”

“Again, have no fear. He met his destiny. He abandoned Inés. He impregnated Indian women. He impregnated those of Spanish blood. He left his descendants throughout New Spain. But on a certain All Souls’ Day, which the Mexican natives celebrate at tombside amid a profusion of yellow flowers, he decided to return to Spain. He had learned of the disappearance of his brothers, of your sterile enclosure in this place, of the heirless throne you would leave behind you. He returned to claim his rights as bastard. On his way, he stopped in Seville. Do you remember that you promised Inés to erect a stone statue on her father’s grave?”

“Yes, and I honored my word. It cost me nothing: when her father died, the nun’s property became mine.”

“What have you done with it?”

“I do not know, I do not govern, I do not know … wars against heretics, expeditions, persecutions, territorial skirmishes, my unfinished palace, I do not know, Ludovico.”

“Don Juan visited the Comendador’s grave. He stared at the statue with irony, and it came to life, vowing to kill Don Juan. A challenge so distant? said Juan, and he invited the statue to dine. The Comendador asked that the dinner be celebrated in the sepulcher itself; Don Juan acceded. The host served Juan wine of gall and vinegar; the deceiver cried out that flame was splitting his breast, he struck at the air with his dagger, he felt that in life he was being consumed by flames; he clung to the statue of Inés’s father, and with him Don Juan sank forever into the sepulcher, death-in-life and life-in-death hand in hand.”

“How do you know all this? Did you see it happen?”

“His servant told me, an Italian rogue named Leporello.”

“And you trusted the word of such a man?”

“No, but like you, what is written. Here: read this catalogue of his love affairs, read of the life and death of Don Juan, handed me by his servant at the exit to a theater.”

“Then that was the end of the youth you had cared for, Ludovico?”

“Perhaps he was destined to that end, ever since the face of the cavalier mourned in Toledo was transfigured into that of my son. But I am not sad. He met his destiny. And his destiny is a myth.”

“What is that?”

“An eternal present, Felipe.”

“You have seen all these things you tell me, and read them? You can see again? You are no longer blind?”

“Not now, Felipe. I opened my eyes that I might read the only thing that was saved from our terrible time.”

“The millennium … you said you would open your eyes at the time of the millennium…”

“I was more modest, my friend. I opened them to read three books: that of the Convent Trotter, that of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, and that of the deceiver Don Juan. Believe me, Felipe: only there in those three books did I truly find the destiny of our history. Have you found yours, Felipe?”

“I still have it, it is here. I shall never leave my palace.”

“Farewell, Felipe. We shall not meet again.”

“Wait; tell me about yourself; what did you do in the new world, how, when, did you return…?”

“You must use your imagination. I have served the eternal present of myth. Farewell.”

Ludovico extricated himself from El Señor’s embrace; the King continued to wash, and kiss, the feet of the beggars. When he was finished, he looked toward the place where the friend of his youth had stood. He was not there. El Señor searched the chapel with his eyes: in the distance, Ludovico was ascending the stairway that led to the plain. El Señor bit the foot of one of the beggars; the beggar cried out; the priests looked at one another with alarm. Ludovico was ascending the thirty-three steps that were the way to death, reduction to matter, and subsequent resurrection; in supplication Felipe stretched out his arms. Then he asked the nuns to carry him before the altar and support his outstretched arms; let his hands never touch those treasures of the new world; let his feet never touch the steps of the accursed stairway; the transitory world, enemy of the soul’s salvation, sifted into his solitude through them; temptation, the temptation to touch gold, the temptation to flee up the stairway.

“A phantom distills its poison in my blood and its madness in my mind, I wish only to be a friend of God.”

In spite of his fatigue, a feverish El Señor asked the nuns to carry him in the sedan chair to the cell of mirrors.

They arrived. They entered. El Señor asked Madre Milagros to uncover the two cloaked figures that lay copulating upon the floor of mirrors.

The blessed woman crossed herself and parted the ancient tatters. She revealed two skeletons in the posture of coitus.

Following the fatigue of a fever of seven days’ duration there erupted on El Señor’s thigh, a little above the right knee, an abscess of malign appearance which little by little grew larger and more inflamed, causing him enormous pain. And on his chest appeared four additional abscesses. As the abscess on his thigh did not heal, though it maturated, the doctors decided that it was necessary to lance it open, a process which was to be feared because the place was so dangerous and so sensitive, and all feared he might die of the pain.

Don Felipe listened serenely to these arguments and asked that before the doctors intervened, the nuns carry him on his litter to a place he would indicate. He directed them to the hall of the Gothic throne so that he might see, perhaps for the last time (for grave and silent were his premonitions), the monstrous monarch fabricated by La Señora from bits and pieces of royal cadavers, who, he was convinced, governed in his name while he lay swooning within his solitude, illness, and shadow of two twin bodies: his palace and his own.

Madre Milagros and Sisters Angustias, Asunción, and Piedad carried the litter; they entered the vast gallery with its carved ceilings and domes, its Gothic throne, and behind it the semicircular wall with the feigned painting of two flounced and fringed draperies hanging from their spikes.

“Look, what beautiful draperies,” said Sor Piedad, who had eyes only for such fripperies. “May I go and pull them and see what is behind them?”

“There is nothing behind them, little innocent,” said Madre Milagros. “Can you not see it is a thing painted to deceive the eye?”

But El Señor’s horrified eyes saw only the figure seated upon the throne: a tiny man, although somewhat larger than the last time he had seen him, wearing a black cap, a uniform of coarse blue flannel with a yellow and scarlet band fastened about the great soft belly, a toy sword, black boots, the eyes of a sad lamb, a trimmed moustache: his right arm was raised in a salute and he shrieked in a high-pitched voice: “Death to intelligence! Death to intelligence!”

Where was the mummy?

“Quickly, take me from here,” El Señor cried to the nuns.

“You, supposed King, do not run,” shrieked the tiny man. “You stole my crown, my precious crown of gold, sapphire, pearls, agate, and rock crystal; return it to me, thief!”

The four nuns, with El Señor on his litter, fled that chamber, as El Señor’s spirit clamored within him: My God, what have you done to Spain? were all the prayers, the battles for the Faith, the illumination of souls, the penitence and sleepless nights insufficient? has a homunculus, a mandrake, the son of gallows and stakes, been seated upon the throne of Spain?

Exhausted, he agreed that on the Day of the Transfiguration they might lance his abscess. There arrived to attend him a licensed surgeon from Cuenca, Antonio Saura, who was aided by a physician from Madrid and a Hieronymite priest named Santiago de Baena, for El Señor did not wish to be treated by secular hands only, as one never knew whether in truth they were the hands of a convert, a filthy pig of a Jew, but rather let divine eyes witness what the hands wrought.

When they opened the abscess, the physicians removed a great quantity of corrupted matter, for the whole thigh had become a pocket of pus so deep it almost touched the bone. As it was so large, nature, not content with the passage provided by art and knife, opened two additional mouths through which El Señor expelled such a quantity of pus that it seemed a miracle a person so frail did not die of it, although the priest Baena tried to pacify their spirits, saying: “It is laudable pus.”

Don Felipe’s skin was pale and transparent, his fine hair, his beard and moustache, silken snow, and this fearsome whiteness was the more startling in contrast to the black attire he had never changed from the time he had resolved to shut himself up in his palace.

After they had lanced the abscess, he ordered all those gathered there, doctors, surgeons, priests, nuns, and servants, to give thanks to God. Kneeling, they thanked God for mercy granted. With this El Señor was consoled and felt a great calm, believing he was imitating martyred saints whose pain had been alleviated as they were transported to the Passion of the One who had died to redeem them. He said he was hungry, and he was speedily brought some chicken broth. When he had drunk it he felt very cold, and from his bed he stretched out his hand and sought his faithful mastiff Bocanegra. He imagined that the hound still lay by his side, and smiling and shivering, said to him: “You see, Bocanegra? After eating, the finely bred Spaniard and his dog experience a chill.”

Nevertheless, he remained in a state of torment from which he never emerged, for every time they treated him they syringed and pressed upon the wound to remove the corruption. Between morning and evening, on occasions of most terrible pain, El Señor filled two porringers with pus.

Thin and wasted with corruption, he at times slept overlong, but at others suffered from a most grievous inability to sleep at all. At times great diligence was necessary to awaken him during the day, depending upon the extent to which the evil vapors of his rotted leg had risen to his brain, and then Madre Milagros, who was often at his bedside serving whatever the occasion demanded, would say, a little gruffly: “Do not touch the relics!”

And then El Señor, startled by this voice, would open his eyes and see the relics placed beside his bed, a bone of St. Ambrose, the leg of St. Paul the Apostle, and the head of St. Jerome; three thorns from the Crown of Christ, one of the nails from His Cross, a fragment of the Cross itself, and a shred of the tunic of the Most Holy Virgin Mary; and, supported against the bed, the miraculous staff of St. Dominic of Silos. In these relics he sought the well-being the physicians were unable to afford him; and upon awakening — thanks to the cries of the aged Madre Milagros — and seeing the relics, he was wont to comment: “For these relics alone I would call this house a thousand times blessed. I have never had nor do I desire treasure more divine.”

But as with morbid melancholy these words recalled to him the treasures arrived from the new world, he soon sank again into gloomy lethargy.

He happened to overhear some conversations between his physicians. “I do not dare open the abscesses on his chest,” Saura said to Baena. “They are too near the heart.”

The Hieronymite assented. One afternoon, this same Brother Santiago came to El Señor with a letter: a filthy sheet of paper that had been handed to him, he said, at the gates of the palace by a beggar indistinguishable from any of those who in increasing numbers gathered about the palace. But this beggar, Baena smiled, said he had been the most faithful of all El Señor’s favorites, and that El Señor owed him more than he owed the King. Such effrontery impressed the small friar with the intense iron-colored eyes and high receding forehead. “Here then, Sire, is the letter.”

Most Holy, Caesarian, and Catholic Majesty: I believed that having labored in my youth I would profit in my later years and find rest, and thus for forty years I busied myself, never sleeping, eating badly, my weapons at the ready, exposing myself to danger, spending my fortune and my youth, all in the service of God, in leading sheep to His pasture, all in lands very remote from our hemisphere, and unknown, and not recorded in our writings, and in advancing and spreading far and near the name of my King, winning for him and bringing beneath his yoke and royal scepter many great seigniories of many barbaric nations and peoples, won by my own person and at my own expense, without being aided in anything, and often obstructed by many envious men who since have burst like leeches from sucking my blood. I devoted myself fully to this undertaking of conquest and only because of it were clergy, Inquisitors, officials, and other minor clerks able to establish themselves in the new world, they who now accuse me of appropriating treasures for myself, of packing and sacking them and even secreting them on my own person, so that the correct sum, the royal one fifth owed to Your Most Holy, Caesarian, and Catholic Majesty never reached its destiny; and, further, they accuse me of excessive cruelties against the natives, as if there were other recourse when dealing with the tenacious idolatry of these savages; of living in concubinage with idolatrous Indian women, as if a man were able to choose between what there was and what did not exist; of lack of loyalty, bad governing, intrigue, and tyranny: why then, Señor, did I risk my life in my own behalf, on behalf of my King and my God, only to gain nothing for myself, only to deliver it all to the Church and Crown? I merely defended the rights you had granted me by royal decree. Today I have nothing, while in contrast the Church and Crown have everything. I find myself old and poor, in debt, I am seventy-three years old and that is not the age to be on the road, rather it is the age to pluck the fruit of my labors. Most Holy, Caesarian, and Catholic Majesty: I merely seek justice. I ask no more than the tiniest part of the world I conquered. Thanks to me, Your Majesty is master of a new world won without either danger to or exertion of Your Royal Person. Again I plead that Your Majesty be pleased to set in order, etc. etc. etc.…

El Señor skipped over the requests to read the ridiculous signature: the Most Magnificent Señor Don Hernando de Guzmán. He laughed. He laughed until he cried. The chief huntsman, the intriguer, the secretary who had far exceeded the will of his Señor. El Señor laughed for the last time. He looked severely at Friar de Baena. “Tell that Don Nobody that I do not know him.”

This was his last pleasure. As he suffered so greatly from the wound and aperture, and the mouths through which nature herself discharged her poisons, he became so racked with pain, so sensitive, that it was impossible for him to shift his weight or turn over in the bed. He was forced, night and day, to lie on his back, never turning to one or the other side.

Thus the royal bed was converted into a pestilential dung heap emitting the most evil odors: El Señor lay in his own excrement.

For thirty-three days, the duration of this illness, they could not change his clothing, nor would he tolerate it; they could not move him or raise him even slightly in order to clear away the result of his natural wants and the pus that streamed from abscesses and wounds.

“I am buried in life. And life has a foul stink.”

It being necessary one time to raise his leg slightly for the purpose of wiping away the matter collected there and cleaning beneath his knees, he felt such excessive pain that he said he absolutely could not tolerate it, and when the physicians replied they must treat him, El Señor said with great feeling: “I protest, for I shall die in torment.”

With these words they were so fully convinced of his pain that they abandoned the treatment. Many other times as they treated him, overcome by agonizing pain, he ordered them to cease and desist. Other times he broke into divine praise, commending to God his efforts. As he was limited to one position, unable to turn over, great sores appeared upon his back and buttocks; not even these parts were to escape pain.

Because of pain in his head, perpetual thirst, horrendous odors, he was unable to retain food. One day after partaking of a simple broth of fowl and sugar, he vomited forty times. And when he did not vomit he was shaken by diarrhea like that of a goat, which flooded his black sheets with greenish feces. Protesting, servants were called who, covering their noses and mouths with damp cloths, crawled beneath the bed and with knives worked a hole through the wooden planks and thin straw mattress so the mixture of excrement, urine, sweat, and pus could be drained. These lackeys fled from the room, their faces and bodies bathed in filth, and it was Madre Milagros, in an act of delicious contrition, who knelt to place a basin beneath the opened hole.

“I am nothing but skin and bones,” said Felipe, “but no one will bear them with more honor than I, since it is a question of dying.”

The basin filled eleven times every day, and when to all the pus and corruption was added the color of blood, El Señor asked for Extreme Unction, wishing to confess and take Communion for the last time, but the priests feared he would vomit the Host and they told El Señor that this would be a horrible sacrilege.

Then El Señor asked: “If I were well, would I not finally defecate the Host? Is it a worse offense that it be expelled through my mouth?”

But to himself he wondered whether his sinner’s body was unfitting even to receive the Saviour’s body. “Does the Devil dwell in me?”

Once again he sank into the heavy, putrid, melancholy humors that flooded through his body toward his brain; at times these humors were dank and half digested, at others less terrible, more lively. From his head they occasionally spread to the region of his heart, causing him sad assaults that greatly disquieted him. Finally he said: “The only healthy portions of my body are my eyes, my tongue, and my soul.”

The last night, nevertheless, he was awakened by an unfamiliar tickling. Madre Milagros and three nuns were sleeping on the floor of his bedchamber. Candle stubs flickered low, sputtering, slowly consuming themselves. Trembling shadows stretched across the fetid chamber. The nuns slept with their heads covered beneath cloths redolent of oil of bergamot. Again El Señor felt the tickling in his nose. Weakly he felt for a handkerchief to wipe away the mucus which like all his bodily fluids drained steadily from him. But with horror he realized this was not drainage but rather something seemingly advancing under its own power; it contracted, paused, and again advanced toward the opening of Felipe’s nostril.

He placed a waxen hand to his nose and extracted a white worm; he choked back a scream, he blew his nose on the handkerchief; a colony of tiny white eggs exploded into the cloth of fine linen, the spawn of the white worm that writhed on the palm of his hand.

He screamed. The nuns arose, the halberdiers guarding the entrance to the bedchamber, the physicians drowsing in the chapel, the monks praying before the altar, all appeared at the door. With a candle in her hand Madre Milagros approached him, and in a faltering voice El Señor said: “Come; it is the hour.”

He ordered that among them they carry him to the chapel, his pain no longer mattered, or the stench, nothing, he wished to be placed in his coffin, for since he was not worthy to receive the Body of Jesus Christ, he was at least worthy of attending his own death, so long desired, of attending his own funeral, he who in this place of corpses had granted repose to all Spanish royalty, had constructed this palace of death; he believed that he was confessing, as they carried him from the bedchamber to the chapel, suffering enormous pain, he shouted, Lord, I am not worthy, I confess, Pedro, I acknowledge my sins, Ludovico, mea culpa, Celestina, I am unworthy, Simón, forgive me, Isabel, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me; they laid him in the lead coffin which for days had awaited him before the altar, and once there he grew calm, he felt sheltered by the white silk that lined the coffin, protected by the cloth of black gold that covered the exterior, and by the cross of crimson satin and the golden nails.

Buried in his coffin, he asked that they open the panels of the Flemish triptych and that one priest read him the Apocalypse of St. John, that the nuns sing the Requiem, and that another priest note down his last will and testament:

Domine, exaudi orationen meam, Et clamor meus ad te veniat,

So he carried me away a spirit into the wilderness, and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns,

I command and order,

Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat et cum Lazaro quondam paupere aeternam habes requiem,

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colors, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls,

I would be crowned with the Gothic crown of gold, agates, sapphire, and rock crystal, the first crown of Spain, and I would wear it to my grave,

Ego sum resurrectio et vita,

Having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication with the Kings of the earth,

Where is Celestina? What became of her? Why did I forget to ask Ludovico?

Qui credit in me, etiam si mortuus fuerit, vivet,

The great Babylon, the mother of harlots;

Simón? What became of Simón? Why did Ludovico not tell me of Simón’s fate?

Et omnis qui vivit et credit in me, non morietur in aeternum,

The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues,

I command and order: Find the third bottle, there were three, I found only two, I read only two, seek the third bottle, I must read the last manuscript, I must know the last secrets,

In tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres,

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of martyrs,

I would be shaved and depilated, and I would have my teeth extracted, ground, and burned so they cannot serve witches for their evil spells,

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine,

And the woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth over the Kings of the earth.

The relics shall not be dispersed or pawned, but rather they shall be preserved and together be handed down in succession,

Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda,

And upon her forehead was a name written: MYSTERY.

I would that all papers opened or sealed, all that be found and that treat our affairs and things past, be burned,

Dies illa, dies irae, calamitatis et miseriae,

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a great voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of Heaven: Come, and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God, that ye may eat the flesh of Kings,

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,

Hear me, all of you, centuries will pass, wars will pass, hungers will pass, death will pass, but this necropolis will remain, dedicated to the eternal cult of my soul, and on the last day of the last year of the last age there will be someone praying beside my sepulcher,

Et lux perpetua luceat eis,

I would have two perpetual anniversaries, the day of my birth and the day of death, and vespers, nocturns, Mass, and responses, all sung, and I command and order that because of my devotion, and in reverence for the Most Holy Sacrament, there be two priests continually before it by night and by day, praying to God for my soul and the souls of my dead, unto the end of the centuries,

Dies illa, dies irae, calamitatis et miseriae,

And there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast,

I command and order: upon my death, I would that thirty thousand Masses be said: violence shall be done unto Heaven,

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,

Thus were blended together lugubrious chants and the mournful glow of the guttering candles, the reading of St. John and the smoke of incense, the mandates of El Señor and the concentrated light in that impenetrable Flemish triptych on the altar, the garden of delights, the millenary kingdom, the eternal Hell wherein El Señor saw all the faces of his life, his father and mother, his bastard brothers, his wife, the companions of his youth, that distant afternoon on the beach, the open sea before their eyes, the true fountain of youth, the sea, but he turned his back, he returned to the brown and arid high plain and there constructed a royal palace, monastery, and cemetery upon the quadrangle of a grill, similar to that which knew the torture of St. Lawrence, a harmony of austere lines, mortified simplicity, rejection of all sensual, infidel, and pagan ornament, a convergence of the tumult of the universe into a single center dedicated to the glory of God and the honor of Power: from his coffin, principal and witness to his own funeral exequies, he gazed at the Flemish painting as he had first gazed at it, a painting brought, it is said, from Orvieto, asking of it, demanding of it, whether these acts of his death agony were of sufficient merit to open the doors of Paradise to he who suffered them.

But first he needed to know once again, now dying, whether the sum total of the events, dreams, passions, omissions, visions, and revisions of his life had been directed by the hand of God or the hand of the Devil: in truth, neither the Divinity nor the Devil had ever clearly manifested himself; was the man who, like him, now asked himself the eternal question not worthy of compassion?; why does God prefer mortal man’s blind faith to the tangible certainty of His existence were He to manifest it?; would the man never enter Paradise who, like him now, again posed the eternal question to God: why if you are Good do you tolerate Evil, allow the virtuous to suffer, and exalt the perverted? That is the reason, the King Don Felipe told himself, his gaping mouth attempting to capture the thin air of a chapel smoky with candles, incense, chants, and prophecies, he had so often allowed fate, indifference, or simple court etiquette to act freely on his behalf, without his intervention; if God so acted, what could He demand of one of his poor creatures?; that was the reason he had so often acceded to the proposals of others: Guzmán, the Inquisitor of Teruel, the Comendador of Calatrava, his own father, called the Fair; that is the reason, too, he had so often acted with such profound awareness of the indissoluble unity of good and evil, of the angel and the beast: the Chronicler, Brother Julián, Ludovico’s and Celestina’s freedom, that of Toribio in his tower. I acted or I failed to act, he murmured while the sensual images of the Flemish painting faded, or were erased, from his sight, because God and the Devil refused to manifest themselves clearly; if it be God’s work, be it praised; if it be the Devil’s, I am not to blame: I did not act, I failed to act; I did not condemn, I forgave — or if I condemned, it was for the secondary and not the principal reason. If I sinned, why, oh, my God, did you not intervene to prevent it?

He screamed for a consecrated Host, but no one heard him, no one came to give nourishment to his soul: everyone was singing or praying or kneeling around his coffin as if he were already dead.

He would have to confess himself.

Therefore, he interrogated himself about the occasions when he had acted, the times he had truly exerted responsibility: he deceived the messianic hordes in his youth, he delivered them to slaughter in the castle, he denied his sex to Isabel, he bestowed it upon Inés, he defeated the Flemish heretics, he ordered this necropolis to be constructed with all haste: as these were acts of which he had been conscious, for which he had been responsible, was virtue to be found in them? And what was the virtue of a King? From his coffin he gazed up into the gray domes of the Citadel of the Faith: it was also a Basilica of Power, and the virtue of a King lay in his honor, and his honor in his passion, and his passion in his virtue, and his virtue, thus, in his honor; honor was called the sun of a monarchy, and the further the kingdom’s subjects moved from it, the greater cold and the greater dispersion they would know; El Señor had attempted to concentrate everything in one place — this palace, monastery, and tomb, and in one person — his, the final, heraldic place and person, definitive in their will for a conclusion, as definite as was the act of revelation in their will to create; the immutable icon of the honor of Power and the virtue of Faith, with no descendants, no bastards, no usurpers, no rebels, no dreamers, no lovers …

In his innermost ear, putrescent now with writhing worms, he heard the horrible laughter of Guzmán and of the Sevillian usurer elevated to the rank of Comendador, of the citizens who had fought against him in Medina and Avila, Torrelobatón and Segovia, and found their tomb in Villalar: honor is invoked by a King’s tyranny; the government of common men works against honor, and then later ignores it; virtue is born of an individual’s excellence and is determined by his interests; whatever that individual desires is good. And to those small and ambitious men who defied the central concept of honor, and opposed it with these new words, liberal, progress, democracy, El Señor in his death agony said: then live dispersed, far from the sun of honor; appreciate riches more than life, cling to existence to enjoy fortune, be ruled by general laws, as the rebellious burghers have demanded, obey what should be done and avoid the forbidden; and on the day of your disenchantment, sirs, again turn your eyes toward my sepulcher and understand the rules of the honor that was mine: give all importance to fortune, but none to life, avoid what the law does not forbid, and do what it does not demand: such, sirs, is the virtue of honor. His gaze was obscured by nests of minute white eggs; oh, my God, oh, my Devil, how can freedom and passions exist side by side? is the honor of a monarch not a better restraint to passions than the ambition of a merchant?

He did not know the answer. He could not answer. The question remained forever suspended mid humors of incense and candle fat and pus, excrement, and sweat from his wounds. The physicians approached. They placed cantharides upon his feet and freshly killed doves upon his head. Dr. Saura said: “To prevent vertigo.”

Then scullions came from the kitchen carrying boiling caldrons and from them Friar de Baena removed the steaming entrails of bull, hen, dog, cat, horse, and falcon and placed them upon El Señor’s stomach. “To raise his temperature and make him sweat.”

El Señor tried to counter: “It is futile. I have but one age. I was born in a privy; I died in another. I was born an old man.”

But he could no longer speak. He felt changed. He felt as if he were a different person. He murmured to himself: “A phantom, day by day, I decay.”

Then the two surgeons approached the coffin with fine, sharp knives in their hands. First they cut open the stinking black garments and revealed the hairless, chalky-white body. El Señor shouted: he could not hear his own voice and he knew no one would hear it again, not ever. The physicians, the nuns, and priests; it was they who were deaf; not he, not he.

They opened the four abscesses on his chest. Three, they said, were filled with pus. The fourth was a cave of lice.

With his knife, Saura opened the body cavity. The two doctors explored it, they extracted the viscera and, as they tossed them one by one into the same caldron that had held the beasts’ entrails, commented:

“The heart the size of a nut.”

“Three great stones in the kidney.”

“The liver, filled with water.”

“The intestines, gangrenous.”

“A single black testicle.”

THE THIRTY-THREE STEPS

Then there was a long absence.

“Where is everyone?”

Then there was a great silence.

“Close your mouth, Your Mercy, for the flies of Spain are very insolent.”

He felt great fatigue, and simultaneously great relief. Relief was death. Fatigue, the long centuries he still must live, though dead; not only his time, but all the time remaining, necessary for drinking to the dregs his unfulfilled destiny. The centuries still to be lived by Queens announced by his mother, by Kings who would occupy the Gothic throne.

“Time and I are worth two.”

As day dawned he could distinguish from the depths of his coffin two figures peering in to look at his corpse. One he recognized immediately: the astronomer, Brother Toribio, with his one unfocused eye and his aureole of flaming hair. He looked at the King’s corpse and said: “Poor fool. He died still believing the earth was flat.”

But the other … the other …

He tried to recognize him, and recognizing him, remember him. Condemned to the galleys, wounded in the great naval battle against the Turks, prisoner in Algiers, dead, surely, and forgotten in the dungeons to which his indiscreet pen had led him; what lie had Brother Julián once told him?: “The Chronicler, Sire? Forget him. He’s been taken to the prison and tower of Simancas, where so many leaders of the rebellious burghers had died, and, like them, decapitated…” And now here he was, alive, peering into the coffin to look upon his dead body. He had but one hand. That hand clutched a long green bottle with a broken seal.

“Poor Señor. He died without knowing the contents of the third manuscript contained in this bottle left by the Pilgrim in the cell from which Guzmán led him to a cruel hunt. Poor Señor. Like the whore of Babylon, upon his forehead I read the word: MYSTERY.”

“You are too compassionate, Miguel,” the astrologer said to the writer. “To assure that everyone will read what you write, you are capable of foolishly risking your head. Be content with the two books you have written in the solitude of my tower, sheltered by me and by El Señor’s apathy: the chronicle of the Knight of the Sad Countenance, which everyone will read, and the chronicle of the last years of our sovereign, which will interest no one.”

“And the manuscript contained in this bottle, Friar, who will read it? I did not write it. One of the youths brought it with him from the sea.”

“Publish it, if you wish. Let everyone read it except the Señor lying here. Look at his embalmed body, shrouded in bindings like a mummy…”

The Uranic friar gestured, his arms wide: “And then look at this marvelous triptych of the millenary kingdom painted by a humble Flemish artist, a follower of the Free Spirit, to suggest in secret all the truths of the human world, as rebellion against the Church, which claims to be the kingdom of God in all souls, and against the monarchy, which claims to be the kingdom of God upon earth. Do you think El Señor ever understood the meaning of this defiance which in spite of everything was installed here in his own chapel and seen by him every day? But El Señor is dead.”

“Must we not thank him for that?”

“Yes, for his lack of curiosity, for never coming to my tower and surprising us in our endeavors. He is dead, I tell you. My science, your literature, and this art have survived him. All is not lost. Let others weep for him, not you, not I, not the soul of the painter of Hertogenbosch.”

They disappeared.

From his coffin, Felipe spent the day scrutinizing that Flemish painting, still unable to penetrate the mysteries Brother Toribio attributed to it. To what age did that painting belong? Well, he believed he understood everything in the manuscript of Theodorus, Tiberius Caesar’s counselor, which was about the past, but he understood nothing in the manuscript of a strange war in the jungles and mountains of the new world, which was the future. And this triptych … He was unable to place it either in the past or in the future. Perhaps it belonged to an eternal present.

When night fell, he slept.

He awakened with a start in darkness. Had they already placed him in the tomb? Was he covered by a slab of marble? And were those faint sounds shovelfuls of earth? No, it had been his will to be buried here in this rotting-house beside his ancestors. Had the heretics triumphed, madmen, pagans, infidels? had they, to avenge themselves, thrown him with others into a common grave beside the corpse of Bocanegra? No, he could smell the dead wax of the chapel, the consumed incense, the metallic wind of refuse heaps that blew down the thirty-three steps …

Footsteps in the night. Night heavy. Nightmare.

A shadow fell upon his dead face.

A figure.

A phantom: he knew because he was looking at it, but the figure was not looking at him. A phantom does not look at us. For it, we do not exist. That is what frightens us.

He felt a fearful attraction toward that being standing so close beside the coffin, not looking at him, as if El Señor no longer existed either in life or in death. Felipe placed his wounded and bound hands upon the white silk of the coffin, he pushed, and sat up within the coffin, he could move, he did not feel the pain of the past years, he swung one leg outside the coffin, then the other, he emerged from the leaden box, he stood, graceful, light of foot, joyful; he looked toward the triptych on the altar: it had become an enormous mirror of three panels, and in them Felipe saw himself in triplicate: one, the youth of the day of the wedding and the crime in the castle; another, the man of middle years who had conquered the heretics of Flanders and ordered the construction of this necropolis; the third, the pale, ill old man who in life had rotted within this rotting-house.

“Choose,” said the voice of the phantom.

He turned to look, but the specter turned its back. Again he looked toward the triptych. He decided to be the young man, to relive his life, to seize the second opportunity that death offered him; the other two mirrors darkened, only the first still shone; the bindings that shrouded him unrolled of their own accord and fell to the granite floor. Felipe saw himself dressed as he had been on the day of his wedding to Isabel, magnificent, magnificent, lustrous shoes of Flemish style, rose-colored breeches, a brocaded, ermine-lined doublet, and upon his head a cap as beautiful as a jewel, and upon his breast a cross of precious stones, and, scattered on the ermine fur, orange-blossom petals. He saw in the mirror of the painting his own features at sixteen, genteel, almost feminine but marked by the stigmata of his house: prognathic jaw, thick, always parted lips, heavy eyelids. But above everything else he was aware of his young body, the body of the imaginary voyage on Pedro’s boat in search of the new world, accompanied by Simón, Ludovico, and Celestina: his skin tanned, his hair bleached by ocean gold, his muscles strong, his flesh firm.

He heard the phantom’s footsteps receding from the altar and the coffin, along the sepulcher-flanked nave. He followed, eager to be seen by the phantom, by anyone, now that he was again young, now that death offered him a second opportunity. But as he passed his coffin he paused, immobilized by a sight that raised his hackles; the ancient, shrouded King, he himself, still lay there, dead, wrapped in white bindings and crowned by the Gothic crown of gold incrusted with pearl, sapphire, agate, and rock crystal. He did not know what he did then, or why he did it; he did not know whether he felt love, hatred, or indifference for those remains; he merely experienced a passion, a necessary passion, neither homage nor profanation: a transport that determined his action. He removed his cap. He removed the crown from the body. He placed the cap on the body. He placed the crown upon his own head.

The phantom, still not looking at him, his back turned, paused at the foot of the stairway.

Then finally he turned and looked at the young Felipe. The Prince’s eyes narrowed, he tried to guess, remember, or, perhaps, foresee the phantom’s features, a youth like himself, a strange mixture of racial heritages, blond and tightly curled hair, black eyes, swarthy skin, a long, beautiful nose, sensual lips. Naked. He held out his hand, inviting Felipe to follow him. “You do not remember me? I am called Miguel in Christian lands, Michah in the Jewries, Mihail-ben-Sama in Arabic aljamas: Miguel-of-Life. You ordered me burned alive one day beneath your palace kitchens. You did not condemn me for the principal reason, but rather, the second.”

He invited Felipe to follow him: to ascend, step by step, that unfinished stairway. Felipe fell to his knees; he prostrated himself; he spread his arms wide in a cross before his victim; no, no, that stairway leads to death, I ascended it one day with my mirror in my hand, and in it saw what I never want to see again, my old age, my death agony, my death, decomposition, my return to brute matter, my metamorphoses, the transmigration of my soul, my resurrection in the form of a wolf, hunted in my own domains by my own descendants, Michah, Mihail, Miguel de la Vida, forgive my crime, honor your name, Miguel-of-Life, do not take mine from me again…”

The one called Miguel smiled. “That time, like Narcissus, you looked only at yourself in your mirror. This time, Felipe, you will see the mirror of the world. Come.”

The young Prince looked behind him: the sepulchers, his own lead coffin, the nuns’ choir, the altar, the triptych, the entrance to his bare bedchamber of secret pleasures and harsh penitences where without moving from his bed he could attend divine ceremonies. He thought of his father. He thought that if he turned his back to the stairway and flew toward that subterranean world he, like falcons hungry for their prey, would confuse the cloistered darkness of the chapel with the infinite space of night, he would strike against pilasters, stone arches, iron grillwork, and would be crippled, and die again.

He grasped the phantom’s burning hand.

He raised one foot and placed it on the first step of the stairway.

“This time do not look at yourself; look at your world; and choose a second time.”

Slowly Felipe climbed, holding the feverish hand of Mihail-ben-Sama.

This time he closed his eyes to avoid seeing, as he had before, himself; rather, the world; and on each step the world offered the temptation to choose anew, choices dating from the dawn of time, but always in the same, if transfigured, place: this land, land of Vespers, Spain, Terra Nostra.

And as he ascended each step he heard the double voice of Mihail-ben-Sama, one voice which was two voices, each voice precise, clear, vague, urgent, two, but one; one, but two.

Androgynous creator of a being invented in his image and likeness

Father creator of an incomplete man: where is woman?

The first being fecundates himself, multiplying himself like the earth, unstained

Man violates woman, and both offend Nature, which expels them from the sick garden

Harmony of the world of the sons prolongs the original harmony of the world of the fathers

Brother kills brother in order to possess a subjugated woman and an inhospitable earth

A diversity of peoples, tongues, and beliefs is the result of a mixing of bloods that strengthens the unity of the human genre

The domination of vanquished woman and earth sets peoples against peoples: insufficiency is exalted as superiority, necessity as reason

Everything is shared by all

Yours and mine

Ours

I must die: I shall return transformed

I must die: I shall never return to this earth

I must live: I desire death

I must die: I desire glory

I am a river

I am a shadow

Everything changes

Nothing must change

Everything remains

Everything must continue

I understand what moves

I understand only what does not move

I love what I do not understand

I despise what I do not comprehend

I recognize myself in what is different

I exterminate what is different

Let my blood be mixed with that of all other men

Let my blood be purified with leeches and cauterization

May my body be reborn enriched by mixed bloods

Let my body die impoverished by the purity of blood

I love the labor of my renewed hands: I re-create Paradise

Unworthy of my ascetic hands is the labor of slaves

I construct gardens

I erect pantheons

Fountains and sweet-scented stock

Stone and shroud

My body fuses

My body separates

Love or solitude

Honor or dishonor

Awareness of my earthly senses

Ignorance of anything that separates me from eternal salvation

Freedom of body and mind open to all fecundation

Oppression of body and mind subjected to penitence

Community

Power

Tolerance

Repression

Many

One

Christians, Moors, and Jews

Fine breeding, pure blood

The Spanish

I, the King

New world

Old world

The Alhambra

The Escorial

Doubt

Faith

Diversity

Unity

Life

Death

“Did you choose, Felipe? Were you able to choose again?”

The double voice of the burning phantom awakened El Señor from his fleeting dream. That voice faded away. He opened his eyes. He had climbed the thirty-three steps of his chapel. Sun punished his eyes. A valiant and vigorous valley lay before him. Harsh crust of stone. Vast flowering of rock. He looked toward the end of a mountain gorge where arose a compact cone of live rock. And on the summit of this rock, as if born of it, a gigantic cross of stone cast its shadow across El Señor’s face; this cross rested upon a double pediment, the first of which was backed by the figures of the four Evangelists; on the corners of the second, smaller pediment stood images of the four cardinal virtues; and to reach these pediments one had to ascend an enormous stairway carved from live rock, for a crypt had been excavated from the heart of the rock, guarded over by a railing of three bodies crowned by a battlement of angels, insignia, and pinnacles accompanying the figure of St. James the Apostle.

Disoriented in space, wounded by a sun he had not seen since in this same place he had witnessed the torture of Nuño and Jerónimo, vanquished by time, Felipe whirled away; he felt trapped, he looked for an exit: a beast trapped by fear, he did not notice the presence of a short old man with a three days’ growth of beard, wearing a uniform of rough gray cloth and a battered cap bearing a copper plate.

“May I offer my services, Señor?” asked this obsequious little man.

“Where am I … please … where…?” Felipe managed to murmur.

“Why, at the Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen.”

“What? What fallen?”

“God’s blood, man, those who fell for Spain, the monument of the Holy Cross…”

“What day is this?”

“As for the day, well, who’s the man who knows what day it is. As for the year, I know that it is the year 1999. Has the Señor never visited the Valley of the Fallen? Allow me, my card. I am a licensed guide and I can…”

Felipe stared at the enormous stone cross: “No, I have never visited it. You see, I went away more than four hundred years ago.”

The little man, until this moment obliging, if indifferent, looked for the first time at Felipe’s face, his attire, his general appearance. He stammered: “By my faith … you see, so many tourists pass this way … all alike … I always say the same things … I know the words by rote…”

And eyes rolling, he threw his cap to the ground and ran from Felipe yelling and waving his arms, his grating voice echoing through the mass of carved rock: “Come one, come all. Hark what I say! There is a man there who claims to have been gone for four hundred years! Come, come, come hear what I have to tell!”

That night, seeking protection for his terror and hunger among the stunted growth of scrub oak and juniper, blackberry and hawthorn clinging to the craggy mountainside, and listening to the always closer sound of the horns and the sputtering torches of the night hunt, the occasional sound of a gun and the unceasing barking of the mastiffs, Felipe approached a small bonfire burning in the hollow of a rock, carefully protected from the north winds.

An instinctive sense of relief and gratitude impelled him to throw himself at the feet of the man watching a battered old coffeepot, and slicing a rough loaf of bread.

The mountaineer patted Felipe’s snout, and he raised great liquid, mournful eyes to gaze into those of the man who offered him a slab of bread and a slice of ham. The eyes were black, but the hair was blond and tightly curled, the skin swarthy, the nose long and beautiful, and the lips sensual.

Snout and fang, Felipe tore at the ham and bread. Nearer and nearer came the fearful sounds of the hunt, but by the side of this young mountain man, his friend, he was no longer afraid. He even understood the words when the man, his booted feet stamping out the remains of the fire, spoke, slowly, and with a tinge of uncertainty in his words, but with the clear intent of being understood by the wolf: “Yes. The truth is this. If I speak of a place, it is because it no longer exists. If I speak of a time, it is because it has already passed. If I speak of a person, it is because I desire him.”

THE LAST CITY

It must have snowed for several hours. The river has risen. The current inundates the stone Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma. Dark waters whirl about the prow of the Ile Saint-Louis. The Luxembourg is shrouded in white. The Montsouris garden recognizes itself in a desolate dawning light. A terrible white beauty blinds the Pare Monceau. Frost outlines the china-ink trees of the Montparnasse cemetery. Snow blankets the Père Lachaise cemetery like a late sacrifice. Snowy tombs of Francisco de Miranda and Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac and Porfirio Díaz. Silvery webs in gardens and pantheons.

Gilded webs on the smooth ceiling of the apartment in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal. The red suite. Flaming velvet. Outside, the snow is a melted standard and the river the lion rampant of the banner. Inside, white stucco. Vines. Cornucopias. Cherubs. Plaster sculpture. Red velvet and white plaster. Mirrors. Stained. Spotted with age. They multiply the space of the narrow apartment.

Long ago the elevator cage ceased to function. Tarnished bronze. Beveled crystal. Outside. On the other side of the double door. You have not opened it. Not in a long time. You avoid the mirrors. They are enormous, full-length, with opaque gold frames and peeling quicksilver. Others are small, hand mirrors. One is black marble, streaked with blood. Another, very small and square, covered with fingerprints. Another, round, its frame crowned with a two-headed eagle. Another, triangular. Many more. You avoid them. The Argentinian Oliveira warned you: none of them reflects the space of the place you inhabit. A string of narrow rooms: living room, bedroom, dressing room, bath, each opening onto the next. No mirror reflects your face. You touch them; you do not look at them; you do not look at yourself. You touch everything with your only hand. Buendía, the Colombian, warned you when you arrived in France: Paris seems much larger than it really is because of the infinite number of mirrors that duplicate its true space: Paris is Paris, plus its mirrors.

Late in life an aged Pierre Menard proposed that all beasts, men, and nations be apportioned a supply of mirrors that would reproduce infinitely their and other figures and their and other territories, for the purpose of appeasing for all time the imperative illusions of a destructive ambition for possession, although dominion only assures us the loss of what we have conquered as well as what is already ours. Only to a blind man could such a fantasy occur. And of course he was, in addition, a philologist.

Oliveira, Buendía, Cuba Venegas, Humberto the mute, the cousins Esteban and Sofía, Santiago Zavalita, the man from Lima who lived every minute wondering at what precise moment Peru had fucked everything up, and who had come to Paris a refugee like all the others, wondering, like all the others — with the exception of the Cuban rumba-rhythm queen — at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up. You haven’t seen them lately. If they are still alive, even today they are surely declaring, along with you, fucked-up Peru, fucked-up Chile, fucked-up Argentina, fucked-up Mexico, the whole fucked-up world. Today: the last day of the dying century. Today: the first night of the next one hundred years. Although deciding whether the year 2000 is the last year of the preceding or the first year of the coming century lends itself to infinite discussion. We are living within a shattered specter. Only Cuba Venegas, that flabby, garish old rumba queen with the swelling heart-shaped buttocks, maintained her strange Antillean optimism to the end, singing melancholy boleros in her sung-out voice in the lowest dives in Pigalle. She said, unaware of the paraphrase: “All good Latin Americans come to Paris to die.”

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps Paris was the exact moral, sexual, and intellectual point of balance between the two worlds that tear us apart: the Germanic and the Mediterranean, the North and the South, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin.

On the anniversaries of their respective deaths, Cuba Venegas carried flowers to the tombs of Eva Perón in Père Lachaise and of Ché Guevara in Montparnasse.

How long ago seemed those nights on the top floor of the old house in the rue de Savoie when everyone used to get together to drink the bitter maté prepared by Oliveira; the blond Lithuanian Valkyrie would put tangos on the record player, and serve pisco and tequila and rum, and everyone played the game of Superfuck, a card game in which the winner was the one who collected the most cards representing ignominy and defeats and horrors. Crimes, Tyrants, Imperialisms, and Injustices were the four suits of this deck, replacing clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds.

“W’ich is bes’?” inquired Cuba Venegas. “T’ree or four of de beeg business, or de rrrrrun of de ahmbassador?”

“It depends,” said Santiago, of Lima, Peru. “I have five of a kind: United Fruit, Standard Oil, Pasco Corporation, Anaconda Copper, and I.T.T.”

“‘Oh, frohm Cooba wis de music!’” cried the rumba queen. “Henry Lean U’will-son, Choel Poyn-sett, Espru-ill Bra-don, Chon Pueri-phooey, an’ Nattani-yell Debbis. W’at de fock you t’ink of dat, baybee?”

“‘My bitter heart, conceal your sorrow…’” you murmured, and turning to address the mute, Humberto: “I’ll give you an Ubico and two Trujillos for three Marmolejos.”

“Do you know how”—Oliveira commented in his unmistakable Porteño cadence as he dealt the cards—“Marmolejo came to power in Bolivia? He joined the line filing through to greet the President on the day of the celebration of national independence, and when he came to the President in the line, emptied his pistol into his belly. Then he removed the Presidential sash, fastened it across his chest, and walked out onto the palace balcony to receive the acclamation of the crowd. What do you have, Humberto?”

The mute held out his five martial cards: Winfield Scott’s squadron, Achille Bazaine’s army, Castillo Armas’s mercenaries, the “worms” of the Bay of Pigs, and Somoza’s National Guard.

“Full house!” shouted Buendía. “Masferrer’s Tigres, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes, and the Brazilian DOPs, plus an Odría and a Pinochet.”

“That’s shit, you’re wiped out, you and your momma and your papa,” Oliveira crowed triumphantly, spreading his four Prisons on the card table: the cisterns of the Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, Dawson Island, the cold plain of Trelew, and the Sexto in Lima … O.K., top that…”

“Just sweeten the pot and deal the cards again,” the Valkyrie proposed as she filled their glasses.

“Just when Santa Anna was winning the battle of San Jacinto against the Texas fifth columnists, he lost because he stopped to eat a taco and take his siesta.”

“You, Zavalita, what do you have?”

“Three of a kind, mass exterminations in the public plazas: Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in Izalco, Pedro de Alvarado at the festival of Toxcatl, and Díaz Ordáz in Tlatelolco.”

“The last two are the same things, that’s only a pair, you bastard.”

“‘Your destiny’s deceiving, I’m grieving, and leaving, to follow you forever…’” intoned Zavalita, tossing his cards face down on the table.

“What were you saying about Santa Anna?”

“When they blew off his leg he buried it after having it borne beneath a canopy to the cathedral in Mexico City. And when the Yankees captured him he sold them half the nation. Then later he sold another little piece to buy European uniforms for his guards and to construct equestrian statues of himself from Carrara marble.”

Humberto’s lips formed a silent “Son-of-a-bitching Diego.”

“And the cousins?” asked Buendía.

“Esteban and Sofía? Shhhh,” said the Valkyrie, “they’re in the bedroom.”

“A bust!” you exclaimed dispiritedly. “One Juan Vicente Gómez, an Indian branded by Nuño de Guzmán in Jalisco, a slave in the mines of Potosí, a slave ship in Puerto Príncipe, and a General Bulnes campaign of extermination against the Mapuche Indians.”

“Ché, Buendía”—again the Porteño—“tell about J. V. Gómez’s two deaths.”

“Well, Juan Vicente Gómez announced his death so that his enemies would come out into the streets of Caracas to celebrate. He hid behind the drapes in a palace window and observed the celebrations through little raccoon eyes, meanwhile issuing orders to his police: throw him in jail, torture that one, shoot that one over there … When he actually did die, they had to exhibit his body in the Presidential chair, dressed in gala sash and uniform, for all the people to file by, touch, and verify: ‘It’s true, this time he’s really dead.’ What a crock!”

“I trade you dis Gómes for two of de Péres Jiménes an’ de t’rone of gold in Bati’ta’s bat’room in Kukine,” crooned the rumba queen. ‘De emeral’ green of de sea sparkles deep in your beeoutiful eyes…’”

“‘Your lips wear the blush of the blood that seeps from the coral…’”

“‘Your voice is a poem of love, a divine and inspiring chorale…’”

“‘The sun-drunken palms brush your cheeks, and echo my sighs…’”

“At Christmas Bastista ordered enormous gift boxes wrapped in bright paper and ribbons to be sent to the mothers of the young men who fought in the Sierra Maestra and in the urban underground. They opened them to find their sons’ mutilated bodies.”

“C.I.A. Poker!” shouted Oliveira, sweeping in all the chips from the center of the table.

“Farewell, Utopia…”

“Farewell, City of the Sun…”

“Farewell, Vasco de Quiroga…”

“Juárez should never have died, ay, have died…”

“Nor Martí, chico…”

“Nor Zapata, mano…”

“Nor Ché, ché…”

“Farewell, Lázaro Cárdenas…”

“Farewell, Camilo Torres…”

“Farewell, Salvador Allende…”

“‘I’ll become once again the wandering troubadour…’”

“‘Who wanders in search of his love…’”

“‘Forgotten, discarded, downtrodden…’”

“De good ol’ days, chico, de good ol’ days.” Cuba Venegas began to sob.

Slowly you wander through the succession of rooms, all linked by French doors. You touch everything. No, you do not touch the red velvet of the furniture, the curtains, and walls. You touch all the objects you have gathered together here and carefully arranged on wardrobes, consoles, commodes, cabinets, antique writing desks with wire-mesh doors, rickety eighteenth-century secretaries, night tables, glass shelves, marble tables. The black pearl. A dog’s heavy spiked collar with a device emblazoned on the iron, Nondum, Not yet. Tall green empty bottles, eternally moldy, some imperfectly sealed with cork, some stoppered with red seals after having been opened with evident haste — when? by whom? — still others sealed with an imperial seal. You open, often, the long case of Cordovan leather that houses in beds of white silk the ancient coins you love to caress, effacing even more the blurred effigies of forgotten Kings and Queens. With your only hand you withdraw papers guarded in a Boulle cabinet, thin, transparent, faded chronicles. You compare their calligraphy, the quality of the inks, their resistance to the passage of time. Documents written in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish: codices written with Aztec ideograms. Characters like spiders, like flies, like rivers, like stone … cloud glyphs.

You soon tire of reading. You never know whether to feel sad or happy that these papers, these mute voices of men of other times, survive the deaths of the men of your time. Why preserve these writings? No one will read them now because there will be no one to read, or write, or make love, or dream, or wound, or desire. Everything that is written will survive untouched, because there will be no hands to destroy it. Is this sure desolation preferable to the uncertain risk of writing only to see one’s work proscribed, destroyed, burned on great pyres while uniformed masses shout, death to Homer, death to Dante, death to Shakespeare, death to Cervantes, death to Kafka, death to Neruda? Your eyes are tired. But there is no way you can get eyeglasses. Your body is fatigued. If only you could see yourself in a mirror and know that you were seeing yourself, not other men, other women, other children, motionless or animated, repeating forever the same scenes in the theater of mirrors. You have lost count. You no longer know your age. You feel very old. But what you can see of yourself when you disrobe — your chest, your belly, your sex, your legs, your only hand and arm — is young. You cannot remember now what the arm and hand you lost in battle looked like.

Once again you begin your wanderings through the apartment. You touch everything. The greasy gauntlet, its amputated fingers dried out and stiff. The rings of red stone, and bone. The ciborium filled with teeth. The ancient boxes ornamented with rope of gold and filled with skulls, thighbones, and mummified hands. One day, laughing darkly, you fitted two of those relics to your stump: an arm and a hand not yours. Afterward, you were nauseated. You know it all so well. You can touch and describe all the objects with your eyes closed. There are days when you entertain yourself doing just that, testing your memory, fearful as you are that you will lose it completely. Even if the roof of the hotel collapsed you could enumerate, describe, and place all the objects in this apartment in the Pont-Royal. A ustorious mirror. Two stones of unequal size. A pair of tailor’s scissors, varnished black. A basket filled with pearls, cotton, and dried grains of corn. You entertain yourself thinking that one day, perhaps, you can nourish yourself from the bread of the new world and then lie down to await death, bedfast and apathetic like the Spaniards in Verdín and the Cathari dedicated to endura. But up till now they still bring you your one daily meal. Invisible knuckles rap at your door. You wait several minutes to make sure that the silent servant has retired. You open the door. You pick up the tray. You eat with great deliberation. Your movements have become old, arthritic, minimal, repetitive, futile.

Then after the meal you return to your preoccupation: reviewing the objects. Of course there is a coffer bursting with the treasures of ancient America, tufts of quetzal feathers, bronze ear ornaments, gold diadems, jade necklaces. And a dove killed with a single knife slash: you look at the wound upon the white breast, the bloodstains on the feathers. A hammer, a chisel, a hyssop, an ancient bellows, rusty chains, a jasper monstrance, an ancient marine compass.

But you receive the greatest pleasure from the maps. A faded navigational chart, an authentic medieval portolano: the outlines of the Mediterranean, the limits, the Pillars of Hercules, Cape Finisterre, Ultima Thule, the ancient names of places lovingly retained on this chart: Gebel-Tarik, Gades, Corduba, Carthago Nova, Toletum, Magerit, in Spain; Lutetia, Massilia, Burdigala, Lugdunum, in France; Genua, Mediolanum, Neapolis, in Italy; the flat earth, the unknown ocean, the universal cataract. You compare this map of Mare Nostrum with the map of the virgin jungle, the mask of green, garnet, blue, and yellow feathers with a black field of dead spiders in the center, the nervature dividing the zones of feathers, the darts that protrude from the cloth.

But the most mysterious of your maps is that of the waters, the Phoenician chart so ancient you scarcely dare touch it, so brittle it seems to wish to be immediately converted into dust and to disappear along with the mysteries it describes: the secret communication of all waters, sub-aquatic tunnels, the passageways beneath the earth where flow all the liquid channels of the world, nourishing one another, seeking a common level, rushing headlong from high mountains, bursting from deep wells, whether their origin be swamp or volcano, whether they spring from the desert or the valley, born of ice or fire: the liquid corridors from the Seine to the Cantabria, from the Nile to the Orinoco, from the Cabo de los Desastres to the Usumacinta, from the Liffey to Lake Ontario, from a deep sacrificial pool in Yucatan to the Dead Sea in Palestine: atl, the root of water, Atlas, Atlantis, Atlantic, Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent that returns along the routes of the great waters, the esoteric highways from the Tiber to the Jordan, from the Euphrates to the Schelde, from the Amazon to the Niger. Esoteric: esoterikos: I cause to enter. Maps of initiation; charts of the initiated. There is a banal inscription written in the left-hand margin of this map, in Spanish: “The nature of waters is always to communicate with one another and to reach a common level. And this is their mystery.” An amphora filled with sand.

You have not opened your windows since summer. You drew the heavy drapes. You live with your lights turned on, night and day. You could no longer tolerate the smoke, the stench of burned flesh and fingernails and hair. The suffocating perfume from the chestnut and the plane trees. The smoke from the towers of Saint-Sulpice. You used to be able to see the towers from your window on the seventh floor of the hotel. You could not tolerate the rows of flagellants and penitents marching every day through the rue Montalembert toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain, or the clamor of proliferating life, new arrivals, thronging along the rue du Bac toward the Quai Voltaire and the Seine: the river boiled, the transparent Louvre exhibited itself shamelessly, spaces seemed to expand, the Gioconda was not alone, the wild ass’s skin shrank in the feverish hand of Raphaël de Valentin, Violetta Gautier lay dying in her bed of camellias, singing softly:

Sola, abbandonata

In questo popoloso deserto

Ch’appellano Parigi …

A line of barefoot men, obscured by the smoke, entered the frightful stench and rigorously programmed death of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Javert pursued Valjean through labyrinthine black waters.

You locked yourself in your apartment. You had sufficient money. The coffer overflowing with ancient Aztec, Maya, Totonac, Zapotec jewels. They told you you could use them while in exile to organize the resistance and aid those who had been banished. Guardian of the coffer, yes, but it was also your subsistence. You, too, are an exile. You read the last newspaper and flushed it down the toilet, torn into little pieces. You watched shocking headlines and judicious commentaries swirl away in a whirlpool of uselessly chlorinated water. The facts were true. But they were too true, too immediate, or too remote, compared to the real truth. That has always, you suppose, been the contemptible fascination of the news: it is its immediacy today that makes it obsolete tomorrow. Fact: the microbic world acquired immunity faster than science could neutralize each new outburst of bacterial independence: chlorine, antibiotics, all vaccines, were useless. But why, instead of taking the minimal steps for safety, did the human world feel itself so attracted, one might almost say mesmerized, by the victory of the microbic world? The ordinary justification, the commonplace, was that once all sanitary programs were abandoned, it was left to nature herself to resolve the problem of overpopulation: the five billion inhabitants of an exhausted planet that was, nonetheless, incapable of ridding itself of its acquired habits: greater opulence for a few, greater hunger for the great majority. Mountains of paper, glass, rubber, plastic, spoiled meat, wilted flowers, inflammable matter neutralized by non-inflammable matter, cigarette butts, junked automobiles, the minimum and the maximum, condoms and sanitary napkins, printing presses, tin cans and bathtubs: Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Hamburg, Teheran, New York, Zurich: museums of garbage. Epidemics furnished the desired effect. The plagues of the Middle Ages had not distinguished between man or woman, young or old, rich or poor. The modern plague was programmed: in new sterilized cities safe beneath plastic bells, a few millionaires, many bureaucrats, a handful of technicians and scientists, and the few women needed to satisfy the elect, were saved. Other cities stimulated death by offering solutions in harmony with what had formerly been called, without the least trace of irony, the national character. Mexico resorted to human sacrifice, religiously consecrated, politically justified, and offered as a sports event on television spectaculars; the spectator had a choice: certain programs were dedicated to reenactments of the War of the Flowers. In Rio de Janeiro, a military edict imposed perpetual carnival, with no time limits, until the population died of pure joy: dance, alcohol, masquerades, sex. In Buenos Aires a suburban machismo was fomented, a tightly woven intrigue of jealousy, insult, and personal drama, instigated by tangos and gauchoesque poems: the knives of vengeance gleamed, millions committed suicide. Moscow was both more subtle and more direct: millions of copies of Trotsky’s works were distributed, and then any person found reading them was ordered to be shot. No one knows what happened in China. The inhabitants of Benares and Addis Ababa, La Paz, Jakarta, Kinshasa, and Kabul simply perished of hunger.

At first, Paris accepted the recommendations of the world council on depopulation. Insofar as it was possible, the obligatory deaths would be natural: hunger and epidemic, though it would be left to each nation to find its own specific and idiosyncratic solutions. But Paris, the fountain of all wisdom, where a persuasive Devil inculcated into some few wise men a perverse intelligence, opted for a different course. Just this spring you watched the debates on television. All possible theories were expounded and criticized with Cartesian subtlety. After everyone had spoken, an aged Rumanian playwright, a member of the Académie, with the aspect of a gnome, or perhaps more exactly, and using the lingua franca of the century, of a leprechaun of the verdant bosques of Ireland: this elf, with tufts of white hair ringing his bald head, and an extraordinary gaze of candor and astuteness, proposed that they merely give equal opportunity to both life and death.

“On the one hand, increase the birth rate, and on the other, the extermination. No generality can prosper without its exception. How can everyone die if no one is born?”

“Thank you, M. Ionesco,” said the announcer.

Your only meal is always the same. The faded menu announces it to be a grillade mixte comprised of testicles, black sausage, and kidneys. When you have eaten, you open the door again. You deposit the empty tray on the hall carpet. Several hours later, silent footsteps approach. You hear noises, and then the footsteps retreat. The elevator does not function. No letters or telegrams arrive. The telephone never rings. On the television screen, always the same program, the same message you read in the last headline of the last newspaper you bought before closing yourself in here. Again you open the box holding the coins. You look at the profiles blurred by the touch of human hands. Juana the Mad, Felipe the Fair, Felipe II, called the Prudent, Elizabeth Tudor, Carlos II, called the Bewitched, Mariana of Austria, Carlos IV, Maximilian and Carlota of Mexico, Francisco Franco: yesterday’s phantoms.

You are not sure whether you sleep by day or night, wander the apartment, touching objects, avoiding objects, by day or night. Time does not exist. Nothing works. The electric lights grow more faint each day. The thirty-first of December, 1999. Tonight they will go out completely. You will wait for them to come on again, in vain. You have conquered the mirrors. They will reflect only darkness. You will not open the drapes. You know by memory the location of every object. You will not need the candle stubs hidden in a drawer beside your bed. And you have only one match left. You allow your slippers to slide from your feet. You dress in a black Tunisian caftan trimmed with gold cord. You hold the manuscripts you found in the bottles. You repeat the texts in a low voice. You know them by memory. But you perform the acts of normal reading, you turn every page after murmuring its words. You see nothing. Outside it is snowing. A procession is passing beneath your windows. You imagine it: tattered pendants, hairshirts and scythes. They must be the last. You smile. Perhaps you are the last. What will they do with you? And suddenly, as you ask yourself that question, you are unexpectedly able to tie together the loose ends of your situation and that of your readings in the darkness, you become aware of the evident, you combine the images you saw for the last time from your window before drawing the drapes, holding the old writing in your hand, those most ancient histories of Rome and Alexandria, the Dalmatian and Cantabrian coasts, Palestine and Spain, Venice, the Theater of Memory of Donno Valerio Camillo, the three youths marked with a cross on their backs, the curse of Tiberius Caesar, the solitude of the King Don Felipe in his Castilian necropolis: an opportunity is offered to all the things that could not manifest themselves in their time, an opportunity to make our time coincide fully with another, unfulfilled time; several lifetimes are needed to integrate a personality: did the press and television not repeat that to the point of nausea? Every minute a man dies in Saint-Sulpice, every minute a child is born on the quays of the Seine, only men die, only children are born, women neither die nor are born, women are merely the vehicle for childbirth, they were made pregnant by the same men who were then led immediately to their exterminations, each child was born with a cross on its back and six toes on each foot: no one explained this strange genetic mutation, you understood, you believed you understood, the triumph was of neither life nor death, life and death were not the opposing forces, gradually, in the time of the epidemics, or later, in the time of indiscriminate extermination, all the present inhabitants, all those — with the exception of the centenarians — born in this century had died; the others, those who impregnated, those who were impregnated, those born, those who continued to die, are beings from another time, the struggle has not been between life and death but between the past and the present: Paris is inhabited by mere phantoms, but how, how, how?

Feverishly you part the heavy drapes and open the window. Wounded feet drag through the snow. You hear a flute. From the street, eyes stare toward your window. Green, protruding eyes stare at you from the street below, summon you. You know the origin and the destination of the footsteps in the street. Each day they have been fewer. The procession used to go toward Saint-Germain. This one is headed toward Saint-Sulpice. They are the last. Then you were mistaken. Death has triumphed; many were born, but many more died. In the end, more died than were born. Perhaps there remain only these final victims who now march through the snow toward Saint-Sulpice. What will the executioners do when their task is finished? Will they kill themselves? Who are the executioners of the executioners? That flautist staring toward your window, that monk with the dark, expressionless gaze, the colorless face? That girl who…? Three persons gaze toward your window. The last. The girl with gray eyes, upturned nose, and tattooed lips. The girl whose multicolored skirts move gently, scattering shadow and light. You stare at the three. They stare at you. You know they are the last.

You summon reason to save you from extremes — the commonness of the event and the impenetrability of the mystery. You are in Paris. In Mexico you did not fully understand your Descartes; in effect, he said that reason that was sufficient unto itself, accounting only for itself, is bad reason, insufficient reason. And now you temper Descartes with Pascal: so necessarily mad is man that it would be madness not to be mad: such is the turn of the screw of reason. And thinking of Pascal, you think of your aged Erasmus and his praise of a madness that relativizes the pretended absolutes of the former world and the present world: Erasmus wrested from the Middle Ages the certainty of immutable truths and imposed dogmas; for modernity he reduces the absolute of reason and the empire of the self to ironic proportions. Erasmian madness is the checkmate of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, not by sin or the Devil. But it is also the critical consciousness of a reason and an ego that do not wish to be deceived by anyone, not even by themselves.

You ponder with sadness the fact that Erasmism could have been the touchstone of your own Spanish American culture. But Erasmism sifted through Spain defeated itself. It suppressed the ironic distance between man and the world in order to deliver itself unto the voluptuosity of a fierce individualism divorced from society, but dependent upon the external gesture, the admirable attitude, the appearance sufficient to justify — before oneself and before others — the illusion of an emancipated uniqueness. A spiritual rebellion that ends by nourishing the very things it meant to combat: honor, hierarchy, the posture of the man of breeding, the solipsism of the mystic, and the hope of a learned despot.

Looking at the street for the first time in many months, seeing the three persons who from the street are trying to see you, you wonder whether modern science can offer hypotheses other than those of immediate news, hermetic mystery, or humanist madness. You wonder: if the world has been depopulated by epidemic, hunger, and programmed extermination, with what has nature filled what it abhors, the vacuum? Antimatter is an inversion or correspondence of all energy. It exists in a latent state. It is actualized only when energy disappears. Then it takes its place, liberated by the extinction of former matter.

The overcast sky of this night of St. Sylvester in Paris prevents your seeing any refulgence. Quasars, the universe’s wandering energy sources, are born of and converted into potential matter by the collision of galaxies and antigalaxies; antimatter awaiting the extinction of something it can replace. If this is true, a whole world identical to ours — insofar as it is capable of integrally replacing, to the maximum and minimum detail, our world — awaits our deaths to occupy our places. Antimatter is the double or specter of all matter: that is, the double or specter of everything that is.

You smile. Science fiction always based its plots upon one premise: other, inhabited worlds exist, superior in force and wisdom to our own. They keep close watch over us. They threaten in silence. Someday we will be invaded by Martians. Wells/Welles: Herbert George and George Orson. But you believe you are witnessing a different phenomenon: the invaders have not arrived from another place, but from another time. The antimatter that has filled the vacuum of your present gestated, awaiting its moment, in the past. Martians and Venusians have not invaded us, rather heretics and monks from the fifteenth century, conquistadors and painters from the sixteenth century, poets and entrepreneurs from the seventeenth century, philosophers and revolutionaries from the eighteenth century, courtesans and social climbers from the nineteenth century: we have been occupied by the past.

Then are you living an epoch that is yours, or are you a specter from another time? Surely that flautist, that monk, and that girl staring at you from the snowy street ask themselves the same question: Have we been transported to a different time, or has a different time invaded our own?

Would you dare think the unthinkable as you stand and hold back the drape with your only hand? Are you looking at a transposition of the historic past into a future that will have no history?

And obsessively, because you are who you are and are from where you are, you tell yourself that if this is true, the transposition must surely be that of the least realized, the most abortive, the most latent and desiring of all histories: that of Spain and Spanish America. Then you mock yourself with a grimace of secret scorn. Would an Indonesian not say the same, a Burmese, a Mauritanian, a Palestinian, an Irishman, a Persian? Idiot: you have been thinking like a white-wigged Encyclopedist. How can one be a Persian? How, in truth, is it possible to be a Mexican, a Chilean, an Argentinian, or a Peruvian?

And you. What will they do with you? This is the first day — you suddenly realize — they have not brought your single meal. They are going to let you die from hunger. Perhaps they do not know you are there in your suite in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal. It isn’t important. The logic of extermination is imposed independently of your existence. Undoubtedly, they have killed your servant. Would it serve any purpose to speed matters up, to go down to the street, join the three beings staring toward your window? It’s all the same. Whoever the true executioners may be, these, others, you will die, ignored, no one will bring you food. You must sleep and recognize your death in dream. You wonder whether you are the only one to perish this way, like the ancient Cathari; you smile. And in that very instant you cease to believe that you are you: this is happening to someone else. Not to just anyone else. To Another. The Other.

You are overwhelmed by vertigo. In that instant, like St. Paul to the Corinthians, you would shout: “I speak as a fool. I am more.”

You return to yourself. You return to your wretched body, your blood, your guts, your feelings, your amputated arm: with your sound arm you cling to yourself as your only life preserver. You are you. You are in Paris, the night of the thirty-first of December of 1999. You passed a day before the monument to Jacques Monod, near Rodin’s statue of Balzac in the Boulevard Raspail. Chance, captured by invariability, becomes necessity. But chance alone, and only chance, is the source of all novelty, of all creation. Pure chance, absolute but blind freedom, is the very foundation of the prodigious edifice of evolution. Without the intervention of this creative chance, every thing and every being would be petrified, preserved like peaches in a can.

Withdrawing your only hand, you allow the curtain to fall closed. You will never again see those three survivors. The silence of the city beneath the snow tells you everything. Everyone is dead. The order of the factors does not alter the product. The men arrived from the past have died, the women of the present impregnated by them, and the children destined for the future, the newborn infants on the quays of the Seine: all Caesars, all Christs, then none a Caesar, none a Christ. Reason? Madness? Irony? Chance? Antimatter? The rules of the game have been fulfilled: every day as many died as were born. The flautist, the monk, and the girl, being the survivors, are necessarily the executioners. Now they will ascend to kill you, and then they will kill themselves.

You go to your bedroom. Lie down, dream, die. Then you hear the sound of knuckles rapping on your door.

They have come for you.

You did not have to descend to seek them.

You did not have to die dreaming.

You open the door.

The girl with the porcelain skin, the long chestnut hair, the full multicolored skirts and gypsy necklaces is looking at you with deep, gray eyes. “‘I have sung women in three cities, but it is all one.’” Women? Cities? “‘They mostly had gray eyes; I will sing of the sun.’” She stares at you, seemingly forever. Then the tattooed lips move, as many-colored as the necklaces and skirts: “Salve. I have awaited you.”

Bedazzled heart.

“Yes.”

You disguise your amazement.

“We had a rendezvous, do you remember? Last fourteenth of July, on the bridge.”

“No, I don’t remember.”

“Pollo Phoibus.”

“‘I will sing of the sun,’” you say, not knowing what you say.

“The words written upon your breastplate gleamed, faded, and others appeared in their place…”

“‘Nothing disabuses me; the world has me bewitched,’” you say as if another spoke for you.

“You fell from the Pont des Arts into the boiling waters of the Seine.”

“‘Time is the relationship between the existent and the non-existent.’”

“For a moment I saw your only hand above the water.”

“‘And what if suddenly we all turned into someone else?’”

“I threw the sealed green bottle into the river, praying you would cling to it and be saved.”

“‘Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.’”

“May I come in, then?”

You shake your head. You emerge from your trance. “Forgive me … Excuse … my lack of courtesy … When one is alone one forgets … one forgets … the rules of conduct. Forgive me; come in, please. You are welcome.”

The girl enters the darkness of the apartment.

She takes your hand. Hers is icy. She leads you gently through the living room. In the darkness you cannot see what she is doing. You hear only the swish of her skirts and the chink of the beads of her necklace upon her breasts.

“Bocanegra’s collar … Fray Toribio’s ustorious mirror. All the mirrors … Fray Julián’s triangular mirror that Felipe was unable to destroy when the painter removed the painting from Orvieto … The round mirror Felipe held as he ascended the thirty-three steps in his chapel … The black blood-streaked mirror in which La Señora and Juan looked at themselves one night … The small hand mirror you stole in Galicia before embarking with Pedro to discover new lands … the same mirror in which the ancient of the basket of pearls saw himself … the same mirror in which you looked upon me, crowned with butterflies…”

You curb the anguish in your voice. “We’re in the dark. How do you know?”

“Only in darkness can I see myself in these mirrors,” she replies, her voice as serene as yours is altered. “Didn’t you yourself, as you opened the door, see me in this same darkness? Didn’t you see my eyes and my lips?”

She moves close to you. She smells of clove, of pepper, and aloes. She speaks into your ear: “Aren’t you tired, Pilgrim? You have traveled far since you fell from the bridge that afternoon and were lost in the waters that tossed you onto the shore of the Cabo…”

You seize her shoulder, you hold her away from you. “That isn’t true, I’ve been shut up here, I haven’t left this place, I haven’t opened my windows since summer, you are telling me things I’ve read in the chronicles and manuscripts and folios I have here in this cabinet, you’ve read the same things as I, the same novel, I’ve not moved from here…”

“Why not believe the opposite?” she asks after kissing your cheek. “Why not believe that we two have lived the same things, and that the papers written by Brother Julián and the Chronicler give testimony to our lives?”

“When? When?”

She places her hand beneath the cloth of your caftan, she caresses your chest. “During the six and a half months that passed between your fall into the river and our meeting here, tonight…”

Lifeless, you surrender, your head touches hers. “There wasn’t time … All that happened centuries ago … These are very ancient chronicles … It is impossible…”

Then she kisses you, full upon the lips; moistly, deeply, long: the kiss itself is another measure of time, a minute that is a century, an instant that is an epoch, interminable kiss, fleeting kiss, the tattooed lips, the long narrow tongue, the palate bursting with sweet pleasure, you remember, you remember, every moment of the prolongation of that kiss is a new memory, Ludovico, Ludovico, we all dreamed of a second opportunity to relive our lives, a second opportunity, to choose again, to avoid the mistakes, to repair the omissions, to offer the hand we did not extend the first time, to sacrifice to pleasure the day we had before dedicated to ambition, to give a second chance to all that could not be, to all that waited, latent, for the seed to die so the plant could germinate, the coincidence of two separate times in one exhausted space, several lifetimes are needed to integrate a personality and fulfill a destiny, the immortals had more life than their own deaths, but less time than their own lives …

You are delirious; you feel you have been transported to the Theater of Memory in the house between the Canal of San Barnaba and the Campo Santa Margherita; you draw away from the kiss of the girl with tattooed lips; you are filled with memories, Celestina has transmitted to you the memory that was passed to her by the Devil disguised as God, by God disguised as the Devil, you draw away with repugnance, you remember, you did not read it, you lived it, you lived it during the last one hundred and ninety-five days of the last year of the last century, during the past five thousand hours: there will be no more life: history has had its second chance, Spain’s past was revived in order to choose again, a few places changed, a few names, three persons were fused into two, and two into one, but that was all: differences of shading, unimportant distinctions, history repeated itself, history was the same, its axis the necropolis, its root madness, its result crime, its salvation, as Brother Julián had written, a few beautiful buildings and a few elusive words. History was the same: tragedy then and farce now, farce first and then tragedy, you no longer know, it no longer matters, everything has ended, it was all a lie, the same crimes were repeated, the same errors, the same madness, the same omissions as on any other of the true days of that linear, implacable, exhaustible chronology: 1492, 1521, 1598 …

The violence of a warrior. The acclivity of a saint. The nausea of an ill man. You feel all this in your body. Celestina caresses you, calms you, embraces you, leads you to your bedroom, tells you, yes, what you remember is true, what you do not remember also, the curse of Caesar and the salvation of Christ are inextricably blended, the elect were not one, as God and the King desired, or two, as all rival brothers feared, or three, as Ludovico and the ancient dreamed in the beautiful Synagogue of the Passing in Toledo; each and all were the elect, all the children born here, all bearers of the same signs, the cross and the six toes, all usurpers, all bastards, all anointed, all saviors, all led, scarcely born, to the extermination chambers in Saint-Sulpice, all children of the total past of man, all fertilized by a transposition of ancient semen from the deserts of Palestine, the streets of Alexandria, the devastated hearth of the astute son of Sisyphus, the beaches of Spalato, the stone squares of Venice, the funereal palace on the Castilian plain, the jungles and pyramids and volcanoes of the new world; first the children died, and then the women, the men, only at the end, with no opportunity for fecundation, and last of all, the executioners, with no one to kill, except themselves …

“Night and fog. The final solution. What tragic jest is this, Celestina? Did everyone have to die before the executioners could finally die? I…”

“Here. Take the mask of the jungle.”

“But the dogma, Celestina, I heard it every day during the processions, anathema, anathematized be those who believe in a resurrection different from that of the body we possessed in life.”

“Your body, my love…”

“I don’t understand…”

“The dogma was proclaimed so that heresy would flower, ever more deeply rooted; all things are transformed, all bodies are their metamorphoses, all souls are their transmigrations … Take the mask, quickly…”

“They accept nothing from women, that’s what the patron of the Café Le Bouquet said to his wife; the penitents accept nothing from women; woman is blemished, she is bloody, she is the vessel of the Devil…”

“Only persecuted and in secret am I able to perform my role; forgive me, I am of little worth; consecrated, I am as cruel as my persecutors; condemned, I maintain the flame of forgotten wisdom. I had to survive. The mask, quickly, we have very little time…”

In the darkness you touch Celestina’s face. It is covered by another mask of feathers, dead spiders, darts …

“You’re wearing it…”

“I am wearing mine, you must wear yours, quickly…”

“Yours … Mine is here, beneath my pillow. But yours, where…?”

“Do you remember a shop window, an antique shop, on the rue Jacob? I broke in. I stole it. How did it get there? I do not know. Put on your mask, and I mine. Identical. Quickly. There is no time. There is no time. What time is it?”

Out of the corner of your eye you glance at the alarm clock on the night table; its phosphorescent hands and numbers indicate three minutes before midnight.

You wish to dispel the mists of vertiginous necromancy that overwhelm you, effacing all sense of internal or external equilibrium; the woman smells of clove, of pepper, and aloes. “Almost midnight. We need twelve grapes. I’m sorry not to be able to offer you champagne. There’s no room service. What shall we sing? Las Golondrinas? Auld Lang Syne?”

You laughed: New Year’s Eve in Paris, without champagne. What a laugh, what truth, what salvation!

“Don’t you think that’s funny? Where’s your sense of humor?”

“Quickly, there is no time.”

“Then what has passed?”

Celestina is silent for an instant. Then she says: “Ludovico and Simón died at five minutes before midnight. They were the last. The student killed the monk. Then he killed himself. I want you to understand: we were not the executioners. We escaped them because we never looked at them. They believed we were phantoms; they looked at us, not we at them. We survived so we could come to you. You are right: the executioners never knew about you. I protected you. I brought you food every day. It has been months since anyone lived in this hotel. Ludovico and Simón died when they fulfilled their mission: to leave me here with you. There will be no more bodies in the naves of Saint-Sulpice. Quickly, we must don the masks.”

You obey her.

The chamber begins to glow with warm luminosity, the color of new grass, a light like ground emeralds: the mask has slits at the level of the eyes; you look at Celestina, masked. She approaches, she removes your caftan, revealing your nakedness, the caftan falls to the floor. Naked, with the terrible stump of your mutilated arm. Celestina removes her necklaces and underskirts, her smock and sandals. Clothing and adornments slide to the floor: you are both naked, facing one another, so long since you have made love to a woman, she looks at you, you look at her, you come together, you embrace her with tenderness; she embraces you with passion.

The masks fall. The light born of your masked gazes remains. You lead Celestina to the bed. You kiss one another, slowly, caress one another, she kisses your whole body, you kiss her whole body, you tell yourself you are re-creating one another with your touch, she with her two hands, you with your one, you kiss one another’s lips, eyes, ears, her breath moistens the hair of your pubis, yours the young perfume of her armpits, your hand caresses one nipple, your lips moisten the other, she moans, she scratches your shoulder, she strokes your buttocks, sticks her finger in your asshole, her fingernails stroke the fascine of pleasure between your asshole and your balls, she lifts the weight of your heavy milk-pouch, you are over her, your legs spread apart, your tongue washes her navel, descends along her belly till your face is buried in the bronze locks of her mound, you nose through the curls, open a way with your tongue, through the hidden, elusive, quivering folds to the moist and palpitating clitoris, her lips, her tongue, her palate, her controlled little teeth devour your prick, she licks your testicles, places her tongue in your asshole, you spread your legs even wider, you seek the acid savor of her asshole, you leave it gleaming and moist as a copper coin abandoned in a rainy alleyway, you move apart from her, with your only hand you lift her legs, you place them on your shoulders and, very slowly, you enter, first the pulsing purple head, little by little, the rest of your prick, to the throat, to the frontier of pleasure, to the blackest and most submissive boundaries of the trembling cave, you do not want to come yet, think of something else, you want to wait, both together, something else, you lived once along the rue de Bièvre, the ancient beaver canal that flowed into the Seine, now a narrow little alley of quiet hawkers’ cries, the odor of couscous, the high laments of Arabic music, aged beggars, mischievous children, hopscotches drawn on the pavement, Dante lived there once, he wrote there, he began to write, Paris, the fountain of all wisdom and the source of the divine writings, where the persuasive Devil inculcated a perverse intelligence in some few wise men, the Inferno, you repeat the verses in silence, don’t come yet, nondum, not yet, midway along the journey of our lives, a dark wood, we lose our way, wilderness, harsh and cruel, the recollection of terror, that isn’t what you want to remember, more recent, not yet, a canto, nondum, the canto, the twenty-fifth canto, that’s it, ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due, the girl cries out, you say the verse aloud, due in uno, uno in due, she screams, closes her eyes, you look upon her face convulsed by the orgasm, her trembling thighs, her tempest-ridden sex, now, yes, now you come, with her, you flood her black, rosy, pearly, recessed cunt with silver and venom and smoke and amber, ed eran due in uno, ed uno in due, the pleasure is prolonged, the juices, the semen, the ocean, she is still shivering, you howl like a beast, you cannot withdraw, you do not want to withdraw, you sink into the woman’s flesh, the woman blends into the man’s flesh, two in one, one in two, your arm, your arm is beginning to grow, your hand, your hand is growing, fingernails, open palm, take, receive, again, let the lost half of your fortune, your love, your intelligence, your life and death reappear: you raise the arm you had lost, it isn’t your arm, the arm you scarcely remember, the arm you lost in a manhunt, Lepanto, Veracruz, the Cabo de los Desastres, my God, your arm is the girl’s arm, your body is the girl’s body, her body is yours; crazed, in that instant you look for the other body in the bed, you have not dreamed this, you have just made love to a woman in your bed in your room in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal, the girl is no longer here, yes, she is here, no, she is not, there is but one body, you look at it, you see yourself, your two hands touch full breasts, your erect nipples, your strange new hips, young and firm, your slender waist, your swelling buttocks, your hands, search, search with the terror of having lost the emblem of your manhood, you brush the mat of hair, seek … no, you touch your still-hard penis, moist and slippery, your exhausted, still-trembling testicles, you search further, below your balls, between your legs, you find it, your hole, your vagina, you insert your finger, it is deep, it is the same, the one you have just possessed, it is the one you will possess again, you speak, I love you, I love myself, your voice and the girl’s speak at the same time, they are a single voice, let me make love to you again, I want to make love again, you introduce your own long, new, pliant penis, sinuous as a serpent, into your own, open, pleasured, palpitating moist vagina; you make love to yourself, I make love to myself, I fertilize you, you fertilize me, I fertilize myself, my male and female selves, we shall have a son, then a daughter, they will make love, they will fertilize one another, they will have sons and daughters, and those sons and daughters will have sons and daughters, and the grandsons and granddaughters, great-grandsons and great-granddaughters, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, and the two shall be one flesh, and in joy thou shalt bring forth children, and blessed is the ground for thy sake, thorns and fruit shall it bring forth to thee, and in the smile of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return — without sin, and with pleasure.

Twelve o’clock did not toll in the church towers of Paris; but the snow ceased, and the following day a cold sun shone.