Читать книгу A Thousand Forests in One Acorn - Valerie Miles - Страница 32

A THOUSAND FORESTS

“THEATER OF MEMORY” FROM TERRA NOSTRA

[A NOVEL]

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 waxworkers, 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 pre-vision, 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 seafood, 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 a 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.

Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

•

“CONFESSIONS OF A CONFESSOR” FROM TERRA NOSTRA

[A NOVEL]

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.

“Be calm, 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.”

Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden