Читать книгу The Inventor - W. E. Gutman - Страница 11

Letter from Rotterdam

Late on the afternoon of October 2, 2008, the phone chimes in the cluttered riverfront office of Michel Montvert, director of the Institute of Symbolic and Hermetic Arts in Paris. On the line is Dr. Manuel Albeniz, a colleague and specialist in Medieval history in Madrid.

“I received a letter this morning from a certain Jan van den Haag. Did you?” Albeniz asks in heavily accented French.

“I don’t know. Why.”

“His signature is followed by a CC addressed to you.”

“Let me look.”

Montvert, a tall, angular, graying man, leans across his desk. The in-box brims with sheaves of documents and unopened mail. He finds the envelope. Peering at the tight, florid script in which his name and address are inscribed, he turns around, leans back in his high-winged leather chair and stretches his feet on the credenza. Through the window, across the slate-colored Seine, the filigreed spires of the Sainte-Chapelle shimmer in the pale pastel colors of dusk. Frozen in time, stupor or lethargy or anguish etched on their granite faces, winged and serpent-like, their shadows stretching over the battlements, gargoyles fix vacant but ever-watchful eyes on the city below.

“I found it.”

“Will you have a chance to read it soon?”

“I doubt it. I’ve been swamped. I’m exhausted. Yesterday I gave a lecture on Frida Kahlo at the Musée d’Orsay. This morning we had a retrospective of the late Jules Perahim’s work. The Bauhaus Museum in Berlin has invited me to address a symposium. I’m flying out tonight. I’ll try to read it on the plane.”

“Do that,” Albeniz presses with some urgency. “You’ll find it … intriguing. Let me hear from you when you get back.”

“De acuerdo. Hasta pronto, hermano.” Deep in thought, Montvert lets out a wearied sigh, fans himself distractedly with the envelope, and stows it in his breast pocket.

In his office at the El Prado Museum, Albeniz, an older man with a high forehead and a lion-like mane of silvery hair, rereads the missive. He frowns, and shakes his head. Grimace turns to grin, grin to sneer.

“Nah, debe ser una broma.” Must be a joke. There’s more hope than certitude in this assessment. Something in Jan van den Haag’s language, in the elegance of his syntax, in his carefully articulated esotericism and allusions reveals broad scholarship and implies initiation into and familiarity with the symbolism and objectives of Freemasonry. His entreaty has the resonance of truth. Most enticing are the data he promises to share in future communications, should Albeniz and Montvert express serious interest.

That evening, as the Airbus that carries Montvert to Berlin descends toward Tempelhof Airport, Albeniz heads to La Escudilla Restaurant, in the Barrio de Trafalgar, for a late supper. He eats absent-mindedly struggling to reconcile history, art, human nature and the politics of discretion.

In his room at the venerable Hotel de Rome on Bebelplatz, off the lime-tree-lined Unter den Linden in the German capital, Montvert reviews his notes for the next day’s symposium. He remembers van den Haag’s letter, still resting in the breast pocket of his jacket. He walks to the closet, retrieves it and stretches on the king-sized bed. Once again, he studies the exquisite penmanship, the stamp, the postmark. He wearily tears the envelope open and removes a sheet of buff-hued paper bearing an impeccably symmetrical italic hand-written message.

P.O.B 3579, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

30 September 2008

Dear Monsieur Montvert,

We share similar interests, political leanings and metaphysical ideals, many of them embodied in the Regius Poem and later reaffirmed in Anderson’s Constitution. You and I are also heir to the same wanderings and tribulations that have darkened the pages of history. It is in that spirit that I write.

I am the direct and last descendant of a legendary artist whose name I cannot reveal at this time. In my possession is a manuscript this early freethinker penned shortly before he died. A codicil stipulates that it will not be opened and circulated until five hundred years after his death. The document has been safeguarded by my family over the centuries and his injunction was scrupulously respected –- until now. Old, unmarried and childless, unsure I will reach the year 2016, when the contents of my ancestor’s revelations can be made public, guilt-ridden but consumed with curiosity, I broke the wax seal and perused an extraordinary compendium of insights and affirmations about his work, personal convictions and the perils of whimsy -- or grotesque realism -- in an age of austere literalism. What I read has left me shaken, enthralled, confused and apprehensive.

Your reputation and that of Señor Albeniz in the world of art and art history are unrivaled. So is your untiring patronage of Surrealism, primitive and contemporary, as are Señor Albeniz’s grasp of inter-doctrinal affairs and expertise on the rift that continues to divide the Church and the secular world.

My forebear’s musings, I believe, need to be made public, studied and deliberated. The airing of this startling document can only be entrusted to a professional, someone whose character, eminence and authority command attention, someone who can stand firm against the firestorm of controversy, perhaps of rancor, that my ancestor’s final words are apt to ignite.

If you wish to learn more and, having done so, can pledge your willingness to shepherd what will surely result in a scandal of sizable magnitude, please write. If not, I apologize for the intrusion with every assurance that I shall bear you not a trace of ill will.

Respectfully and Fraternally,

Jan Henryk van den Haag.

CC. Dr. Manuel Albeniz

Van den Haag’s ornate signature ends with three dots forming an equilateral triangle.

In his luxurious quarters at the papal apartments, Pope Benedict XVI consults with the second most powerful man in the Catholic Church hierarchy, his successor and trusted Inquisitor, the hard-nosed Cardinal William Joseph Levada. The in-camera tête-à-tête focuses on two matters. The first concerns a projected trip by the pontiff to the Middle East, where he will try to mend fences with Jews and Muslims. The second explores new strategies aimed at hardening the Church’s stance on Freemasonry, more specifically the official branding of Catholics who join Masonic lodges as heretics guilty of a mortal sin.

As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctirne of the Faith, then pope-in-training, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger earned a reputation as a hard-line enforcer of Catholic doctrinal absolutism. After heaping syrupy praise on René Descartes, the 17^th century French rationalist philosopher, Ratzinger abruptly suspended his homage by condemning Descartes and forbidding Catholics to read his books “on pain of sin.” He condemned Liberation Theology, the oxygen-rich ministry that redefines and, for the poor and voiceless, enlivens an otherwise stolid Roman Catholicism, and he punished its disciples with public humiliations, swift and irrevocable defrocking, and summary excommunications. He also excoriated and suppressed neo-liberal theologians and delivered hostile orations against abortion, homo-sexuality and the ordination of women to the priesthood.

When Benedict ascended to the Papacy his election was halfheartedly welcomed by some Jewish groups (one of them the right-wing and very accommodating Anti-Defamation League, which is more interested in ingratiating itself with the Vatican than in rehashing history). He received a more tepid welcome from world Jewry which hoped that Benedict would “continue along the path of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II in supporting the State of Israel and committing to an uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism.”

Critics accuse Benedict's papacy of being insensitive towards Judaism. They cite the expanding use of the Tridentine Mass, which calls for the conversion of Jews to Christianity, and denounce the reinstatement of four excommunicated bishops, all members of the Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist and virulently anti-Semitic Catholic organization. One of these bishops is American Richard Williamson, an outspoken Holocaust denier who struggled to issue a skewed apology but did not recant his position on the well documented event.

Pope Benedict's dealings with Islam -- 1.2 billion-strong and growing at about three percent per year -- remain, at best, strained. On September 12, 2006 the pontiff delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he had served as professor of theology. Entitled “Faith, Reason and the University -- Memories and Reflections,” the lecture received critical attention from political and religious authorities. Muslim politicians and religious leaders recoiled at his pompous insensitivity and protested against what they perceived to be inflammatory rhetoric and an odious mischaracterization of Islam. They were especially offended by the following statement:

“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

The pope said nothing about the Crusades, the “Holy” Inquisition and the “Conquest” of the Americas, which, in addition to fattening the Church’s bulging treasury, were waged to spread Christianity … by the sword.

Other pontifical gaffes would follow, all dramatic evidence of a Church woefully out of touch with reality, to say nothing of how prone it is to tinker with history. On his first visit overseas, Benedict told a gathering of Latin American bishops in Brazil that preaching Jesus and his gospel did not intrude upon or corrupt pre-Columbian cultures. This callous falsehood triggered a storm of indignation, prompting the Vatican to issue a hasty but unconvincing “clarification,” not a Mea Culpa. Instead of expressing regret for the evils of colonialism and forced conversions, the clarification indemnified the modern Church by disingenuously claiming that it in no way condones the excesses of the past.

When Benedict was elected pope, one of his first and perhaps most surprising supporters was PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). PETA expediently or naïvely portrays Jesus as a vegetarian, which he may have been when he was not eating fish, but in whose honor the ritual of Holy Communion turns his followers into cannibals. The pontiff’s passion for traditional papal garb, especially gold-embroidered ermine-trimmed vestments, once a royal entitlement, prompted animal lovers everywhere to ask Benedict to live up to his words and give fur a rest. No one knows for sure whether such mundane petition had any effect on papal prerogative.

Distancing himself yet again from actuality, bent on taking the Church back to its darkest days, Benedict, on his first trip to Africa, a continent where at least 25 million people are infected with HIV, told the gathered masses that condoms are not only useless in the prevention of AIDS but that they may actually aggravate the problem. The “cruel epidemic,” he insisted, should be tackled through “fidelity and abstention.” Reckless faith, or depraved cynicism still prevents the pope from grasping the enormity of his counsel. Pro-life -- the protoplasmic kind -- but indifferent to the dignity of man, his outrageous directive condemns millions to an early, agonizing death.

Tired, facing a busy schedule, Montvert surrenders to fitful, dream-haunted sleep. In the morning he will be speaking about the great Kandinsky, one of the most important innovators in modern art. The painter’s abstract, obsessively geometric, brightly colored canvases of incredible sensorial richness coalesce and break apart in a kaleidoscope of Montvert’s own nightmare-induced creation. Further along in the dream, he enters the Bauhaus, the legendary German art and architecture school from which so many modernists would emerge. Suddenly, the edifice crumbles around him, as it did figuratively in 1933 when the Nazis, fearing the “un-German” (Jewish) influence of social liberals and the impact of “degenerate art” on the pristine Teutonic psyche, shut its doors for the remainder of the war.

This is no longer Joseph Goebbels’ domain but Montvert has yet to feel at ease in Germany. His discomfort is visceral. Germans may have collectively expiated the sins of their fathers but there is something about their country that he finds troubling -- the language, clipped, guttural, brusque, imperious -- the frosty aloofness, the uniforms, the mannerisms, the formalistic infatuation with “discipline” and “order,” the reemergence of Nazi cells, the transparent nostalgia for the Third Reich’s brief but intoxicating rapture. All hark back to a time, not so very long ago, when Germans enthusiastically goose-stepped to Hitler’s drumbeat. Even in his sleep, Montvert can’t wait to clear off.

Albeniz, an insomniac, walks home as Madrid’s other self, iridescent and roguish, comes to life in the late evening hours. Lost in thought, brooding over Jan van den Haag’s baffling letter, he turns to another time when darkness reigned, when blindness to man’s inhumanity and deafness to reason were self-inflicted attitudes, not congenital infirmities. Somewhere in the distance church bells strike eleven.

“We have learned nothing,” he says to himself as he unlocks his apartment door and retires for the night.

Night in the Middle Ages is neither longer nor shorter than it’s ever been but it’s infinitely darker, filled with impenetrable shadows, and few venture into the sulfurous chasm for there, under a thick mantle of ignorance, superstition and aberrant beliefs, dwell in untold numbers the loathsome incarnations of man’s most hideous fears. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear of observable truth. Fear of witches, demons, ravenous incubi and insatiable succubi. Fear of temptation. Fear of God’s pitiless tribunal. Fear of Hades and Satan. Fear of sin and eternal damnation.

As day slowly blanches away the blackness, only the sky dares to brighten. The monstrous visions that populate night retreat for a while but they do not vanish. They return at a time of their own choosing. Day scatters the gloom but it sheds no light. It’s just an optical illusion, a hesitant and fleeting sensation on the retina, not a higher state of consciousness or wisdom. It is in the full blaze of sunlight that the real horror resumes, this time inflicted upon the flesh, not dreamed; branded on the soul, not imagined. The nightmare is real, fed by a collective hallucination that will bloody the pages of history for the next four hundred years.

In 1314, charged with heresy, Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar is burned at the stake on orders of Pope Clement V, King Philip IV’s all-too-obliging yes-man.

“Damned,” “accursed,” “banned,” are Spanish epithets reserved for Marranos, the crypto-Jews of the Iberian Peninsula who, by coercion or out of pragmatism, convert to Christianity in the aftermath of the pogroms of 1391. These “conversos,” as they are also called, number more than 100,000. With them the history of the Jews enters a new phase. Hatred of the Jews sparks the introduction of the Inquisition in Spain and hastens their mass expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula.

The Marranos and their descendants are divided into three groups. Some are indifferent to Judaism or any other religion; they welcome the opportunity to trade oppression for the lucrative careers and life of ease opened to them as Christians. The phenomenon inspires the bitter quip, “Conversion is an ignominy of which only Jews are capable….” Others cherish the Jewish faith, preserve traditions and secretly attend synagogue. Others yet, by far the largest in numbers, yield to circumstances, posture as Catholics but remain Jews in their home life and religious rituals.

Incited by the Catholic clergy, Marranos, many among them cultured and affluent, arouse the envy and hatred of the populace. They are routinely hounded and mistreated. The first in a series of riots against them breaks out in Toledo in 1449 and is accompanied by murder and pillage. Prompted by two priests, the mob plunders and burns scores of homes. Another attack takes place in Toledo in July 1467. Some 1,600 houses are consumed. Many Marranos perish in the flames or are slain, some by hanging.

Six years later, emulating Toledo, Córdoba erupts in a conflict pitting Christians and Marranos. On March 14, 1473, during a religious procession, a young girl inadvertently spills the contents of a chamber pot from her window, splashing an image of the Virgin Mary. Outraged, thousands join in a strident call for revenge. The mob pounces on the Marranos, accusing them of heresy, killing them and burning their houses. Girls are raped. Men, women, and children are put through the sword. The massacre and pillage lasts three days and nights. To prevent the repetition of such excesses, Marranos are expelled from Córdoba.

Attacks on Marranos spread to other cities, where they are killed, their houses ransacked and their possessions purloined.

The advent of the Inquisition is followed by an edict forcing Jews to retreat to their ghettoes. Issued by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella “the Catholic,” the edict lays the groundwork for the deportation and exile of the Jews from the country. The decree of expulsion materially increases the number, already large, of those who purchase freedom in their beloved homeland by accepting baptism.

More obsessive than the Spaniards’, the hatred of the Portuguese toward the Jews, which had long smoldered, turns to violence in Lisbon. On April 17, 1506, a Dominican priest rouses the populace and, crucifix in hand, strolls through the streets of the city, crying “Heresy!” and calling upon the people to exterminate the Marranos. More than 500 Marranos are massacred and incinerated on the first day. The innocent victims of popular fury, young and old, living and dead, are dragged from their houses and thrown pell-mell upon the pyre. By the second day, at least 2,000 Marranos perish.

In 1562, foreshadowing Kristallnacht and the ensuing genocide nearly four centuries later, and to facilitate the planned slaughter of more Marranos, high-ranking Church officials decree that they be required to wear special badges and confined to the ghettoes. The yellow star patch and crude tattoos would come later.

Under constant threat of persecution, destitution and death, the Marranos take flight. Many emigrate. Some go to Italy. Others settle in France, Flanders and The Netherlands. Others yet flee as far east as Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and the Levant.

Large numbers of Marranos, however, stay put. Many in Madrid, conscious of their Jewish heritage, are well disposed toward the Jews. Some, like Manuel Albeniz, patronize La Escudilla, a popular kosher restaurant.

Accused by the church of being a relapsed heretic at a farcical trial engineered to placate the English Court, Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in 1431. Her ashes are dumped in the Seine. A retrial 25 years later establishes her innocence and she is declared a martyr. It will take nearly 500 years before she is “beatified,” a status that entitles the faithful to seek the intervention of a dead person in their private affairs. Eleven years later she is canonized a saint and granted a permanent seat in heaven.

In 1468 the Flemish city of Ghent is sacked and the first documented Church-mandated tortures and executions take place, “to fight the Devil’s work.”

Alain de la Roche, a French Dominican priest, writes and illustrates an “authoritative” treatise on the creatures, some real, others skillfully improvised, that personify “sin.” The demented tract is promptly endorsed by the Church and circulated among high-ranking prelates.

In 1481, the “Holy” Inquisition, under the bestial tutelage of Tomas de Torquemada -- himself the grandson of a “converso” -- and acting on behalf of the king and queen, engages in wholesale persecution, torture, murder and expropriations masterminded to purge Spain of the Jews and to enrich the Church.

Six years later, backed by a papal bull (edict) the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer publishes the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witches’ Hammer, a manual that “ascertains the existence” of witchcraft. Challenging and chastising skeptics, the Malleus offers “evidence” that witches are more often women than men. It trains inquisitors to identify them, describes the physical characteristics of the “possessed” and teaches their tormentors the essential methods (think “enhanced interrogation techniques,” -- including water-boarding) most effective against a long list of imaginary transgressions. A latter-day variation on the theme, phrenology, a thoroughly discredited late 18^th century pseudoscience based on the false assumption that mental faculties (or the lack thereof) can be identified by palpation of the skull, would unfairly brand certain people morons, criminals and perverts -- labels that better describe the practitioners of this quackery than their unwitting subjects.

Repression escalates and spreads like wildfire.

Jews are expelled from Spain. In Portugal they are forced to convert to Christianity -- or else. So are the Moors. The persecution continues under the reign of King Philip II and Pope Clement VIII. Openly anti-Semitic, the pontiff links Jews with usury -- the only occupation they are legally entitled to pursue, not with their own money but with funds supplied to them and controlled by an elite of rich, non-Jewish trades people.

Barely concluded, the One Hundred Year War stokes the political and religious discord that cleaves France and England. It will take nearly four centuries for the enmity to cease.

The plague, cholera and a host of venereal diseases erupt, claiming thousands in their wake. The Jews are blamed for spreading these scourges.

Religious frictions, awakened by isolated efforts to breathe fresh air into the Church and resisted by those who aspire to dogmatize it further, threaten to destroy the very fabric of Christianity

Members of a Calvinist sect in Northern Italy are nearly exterminated by the Armies of French king Francis I in a campaign billed as a “crusade against religious perversion.”

In 1497, Girolamo Savonarola, book-burner and self-styled moralizer and prior of St. Mark’s convent in Italy, is excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI. A year later he is roasted alive in the public square where the Bonfire of the Vanities had once blazed. His crime: he preaches against narcissism and the unbridled moral turpitude of the clergy.

Charged with heresy -- endorsing and promoting the Copernican theory that the Sun, not the Earth is the center of our solar system -- Italian philosopher and pantheist Giordano Bruno is expelled from the Dominican Order in 1576. He aggravates his case by arguing that the physical universe is infinite and asserting that human beings are not unique because the presence of life, even that of rational beings, may not be confined to planet Earth. He signs his death warrant when he affirms that absolute knowledge is a myth and that there are no limits to the advancement of learning. He is burned alive. [In 2000, on the quadricentennial commemoration of his execution, the Vatican issues a statement, troubling in its ambiguity and cynicism, insisting that Bruno’s death was “a sad episode of Christian history” but that his writings were “incompatible with Christian thinking and he remains a heretic.”]

Luther, the firebrand reformer, drives a wedge that irreparably widens the abyss dividing Christians and alters the course of western civilization. His ferocious anti-Semitism, his venomous tracts provide the template for the modern hatred of the Jews. His last vituperations, three days before his death, call for the expulsion of all Jews from Germany.