I lit a cigarette and followed your movements. You tried to avoid my eyes, Isabel. With your companions you studied the three yellow-painted bell-chapels along the length of the old rampart. The simplicity of those chapels contrasts starkly with the rich ornamentation of the side entrance to the church. Innovation imposed upon the severity of the sixteenth century: the portal born again with mortised columns that are like sumptuous vines, born again in the Romantic spirit of the tombs which a century ago were ordered placed in this sacred ground by Cholula’s wealthy: crosses of stone made to look like wood, false garlands of stone, stone missives addressed to the departed. And behind, the dark buttresses and the high grille-protected windows and a file of children passing with their ruler-armed Catechists, shrill vioces repeating, “Three separate Persons, one true God.”
The children learn to kneel. They offer copal and small crosses covered with gold, silver, feathers. They offer thick candles ornamented with green feathers and silver tracery, and they offer the stewed food they have brought in plates and bowls. Their parents lead forward living animals, pigs and lambs bound to poles. When they ascend to receive the benediction, they take the animals up in their arms and a wave of laughter spreads as one worshipper tries vainly to hold his piglet’s feet, squelch its squeals.
You moved toward the royal chapel and I ground out my cigarette on the sole of my shoe. You turned, Isabel, pretending to admire the chapel but in reality looking to see if I was following; we both hid behind our dark glasses. In style the chapel originally was Arabic, with open arches in its seven naves where in olden times pageants were presented to the Indians gathered in the atrium, to teach them the myths of their new religion. Now the naves have been closed and the chapel has battlements, Gothic spires, gargoyle waterspouts, and all that remains of the original Arabic line, from the outside, is the mushroom cupolas set with square panes of old glass to illuminate the interior. The long chapel ends in a final tower, a yellow bell tower, which is entered by a door with two escutcheons: one portrays St. Francis’s arm crossed with the arm of an Indian, while the other gives a native view of the five wounds of Christ, strange wounds of blood and feathers, the largest like a fist of mulberry leaves and berries.
You entered the chapel. I followed and waited in the door. You, Elizabeth, Dragoness, wet your fingers in one of the two baptismal fonts and I saw you smile as you realized the incongruity: those fonts are the ancient pagan urns into which the priests of Cholula used to cast the hearts of their human sacrifices. Pearl light filtered down from the Christo-Arabic arches and dulled the burned color of the tezontle-stone floor, giving to it an in-between tone, a middle tone of transition between the burning hell below and the opaque heaven above. The room is vast and almost empty. There is a Christ wearing mockery, a lace jacket and skirt and the crown of an emperor of thorns around a carefully frizzled wig, vinegar dripping from his lips, drops of blood clotted on his forehead, the absurd staff of his buffoon power between his hands: a figure of inglorious humiliation, far removed from the four polychrome angels who guard the altar, but very near the symbols of purgatory that are the chief elements within the chapeclass="underline" an altarpiece in relief in which the Queen of Heaven, crowned by angels, presides over the sufferings of mustached gentlemen, ladies with nude torsos and rosy breasts, tonsured friars, king and bishop licked by flames of repentance; and before the altarpiece is the tomb of a bishop, a skeleton with fallen miter and open intestines, and above it a tapestry of tortured spirits consumed by fire:
STATUM EST HOMINIBUS SE MELMORE & POST HOC IUDICIUM
Indians seated in the great atrium smile as they watch the pageant portraying God’s judgment against the first mortals, the couple who had no umbilicus. Huge rocks, trees, the whole garden of man’s original felicity has been constructed between the chapel’s arches. Golden birds with real feathers perch among the branches. Parrots chatter, monkeys wink at the fields of Eden. In the center stands the tree of life with its golden apples. A paradise of April and May. Turkeys strut across the scene shaking their combs and red mantles. Children dressed as animals scamper. Adam and Eve appear in their pristine innocence. Eve alluringly fondles Adam, tries to make him respond to her, pleads, but he rejects her with exaggerated dread. She eats from the tree, offers him the apple, and he finally consents to bite it. For a moment the audience laugh, but their faces fill with terror as mighty God and his angels descend. God orders Adam and Eve clothed. The angels instruct Adam in cultivation of the earth and give Eve a spindle for spinning thread. Then the fallen pair are driven out into the world and the watching Indians weep while the angels face them and sing:
Why did you eat,
Thou first wife,
Why did you taste
The forbidden fruit?
I’ll give you back
Your time.
An old Lincoln convertible stopped before the plaza arcade and its driver, a blond, bearded youth, set the hand brake and opened the door. Beside him a girl wearing black pants, black sweater, and black boots stretched and yawned and the Negro youth in a charro sombrero who was on the right kissed her neck and laughed. A tall boy wearing a leather jacket jumped from the back seat to the stone-paved street, his guitar in his hand. The second girl, almost hidden behind her mirror-opaque dark glasses, the turned-up lapels of her coat, and the wide brims of her hat, stood and removed her glasses and looked around at Cholula. She wore no makeup, her eyebrows were shaved, her lips were almost invisible under very pale lipstick. She wrinkled her eyes and offered a hand to the young man still seated. Unlike the others, he was dressed conventionally, a jacket of maroon tweed, gray flannel trousers. He closed the yellow portfolio on his knees and said quietly, “Some day I’ll have to persuade them.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the girl in black. She shrugged her shoulders and stood there as if she already owned the arcade.
“Oh, but it does,” said the youth with the portfolio. “Music is inside. There is no need to wear a disguise. The true rebel dresses as I do.”
“Look, man, we’ll scare him more this way.” The tall youth ran a mussing hand through his lank hair.
“Is he here?” said the girl with the shaved eyebrows. In the intense sunlight she was as defenseless as an albino.
“You can bet your life,” said the Negro.
In the street, the girl in black turned on her transistor radio and looked for a station.
The bearded driver of the car took out a white crayon and wrote across the windshield: PROPERTY OF THE MONKS, and the girl in black found her station and the tall youth wiped sweat from his forehead and began to strum his guitar in accompaniment to the music from the radio. All six of them joined arms and walked away under the arcade, singing:
I’ll give you back your time.
But I could hear only the whimpering and sobbing, soft, fused, that I knew came from the trunk of their car.
2. IN BODY AND SOUL
Both are absent. “I wasn’t there”: quotation from a letter directed by the Narrator to his German grandfather, dead in 1880, a Lassalle socialist expelled from the Reich by the Iron Chancellor. The letter is not received. A change of skin. Mutating genes. “I wasn’t there.” Therefore the Narrator quotes Tristan Tzara: “Tout ce qu’on regarde est faux,” in order to save himself from the Museum, from Perfection, and to participate in a personal Happening, a novel written for immediate consumption: recreation. Michel Foucault speaks: