The judge and censor exchanged glances. Dez realised this meeting was an indirect way of forcing him to act more diligently. They’d always been close. He couldn’t understand why Samos, who was usually so calm, had lost his nerve over something so trivial. The worst thing he could do was show his fear. Imagine. . There was no need to imagine anything.
Samos, however, regained his composure, adding a touch of humour, ‘I just wanted, friends, to fill you in on this rather picturesque situation. Even in a country as secure as ours, there’s no escaping the evil eye.’
‘There’s something artistic, deeply human, about yokes,’ said Sulfe after a pause. ‘And about halters, those wire and wicker art pieces for muzzling mouths.’
Sulfe stopped abruptly. He had a passion for ‘alighting on the classics’. Being one of them. Each of them. Cultivating his chosen model to the end. Not just knowing what they thought, but how they expressed it. Assuming their voice, as he said. In short, copying them. So his relationship with knowledge was a form of possession. The secret of his moments of brilliance was this identification that led him to act in his lectures, though he was generally a shy man who spat out monosyllables. Recently the process had been reversed. He began to feel possessed by those he studied and delved into. There was no telling when it might happen, no warning. It was like having a ventriloquist who spoke for him, without permission. Who controlled not only the levers of thought, but the threads of speech as well, until turning him, in the most unfortunate circumstances, into a comedian, a satirist or a gossip. Some people lost their memory. Sulfe acquired new memories. He started consuming what he’d always reviled. From Catullus and Sappho to Afonso Eanes do Coton and María Balteira, the last to mention two members of the most obscene school of Galician-Portuguese cancioneiros or songbooks. The discovery of this branch of wild eroticism, words fornicating like bodies, in medieval lyric poetry, together with his interest in Rabelais, had caused not only a mental upheaval but a shift in his organism similar to a radical change of diet. Possibly to defend herself in a conservative environment or else to justify the daring act of absorbing and disseminating universal poetry’s most obscene creations, Carolina Michaëlis talks of this ‘the most dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’, of compositions whose language is on a par with that of ‘brawlers and gamblers’. Another leading authority on the medieval treasures that lay hidden for centuries, Rodrigues Lapa, talks of a spirited willingness to confront ‘certain verbal sewage’. Dissolute pasquinades! Verbal sewage! When having to refer to these compositions, Sulfe himself didn’t hesitate to talk of ‘a vulgar and immoral branch on a golden tree’. And as he recovered his health, he’d think of a poem by João Soares:
Miss Lucy, Lucy Sánchez, for God’s sake,
if fuck you I could, fuck you I would!
‘Finally,’ he heard the familiar voices of Gargantua and Falstaff, ‘you can tell the difference between pleasure and enjoyment, you’re poking your nose in where you should.’ There was indeed ‘a second world and a second life outside officialdom’, to quote his now revered Mikhail Bakhtin, but not just in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It was a secret, but he was living a second life in a second world. Yes, he was an amphibian in the new Spanish Middle Ages. On the outside, he was the same old doctor. ‘See these fingers yellowed not from tobacco, but from alighting on the classics.’ He was capable of vehemently, even angrily, defending what he called ‘the grammar of power’. The essential superiority of some languages over others. The mystical, warlike quality of Spanish, which made it more suitable for talking to God. The relevance of Nebrija’s warlike grammar, the Empire’s companion language, as a contemporary apothegm. And so on. But anyone who knew him from before, when he came offstage, would observe an ironical form of boasting, an obvious horror of any kind of ambition for public notoriety, be it in the academic sphere or the sphere of official culture and journalism, where he’d attained the stature of a golden personality. When called on to give his opinion on special occasions, he had a sixth sense which enabled him consistently to match ‘the grammar of power’, the taste of mandarins, which he seasoned with a culture they lacked. There were things he couldn’t even mention. Once he bumped into the mayor and greeted him in his most colloquial Latin, ‘Quo vadis, your worship?’ The mayor answered him with sickled face, ‘There you go again, Sulfe, spouting German.’ He now enjoyed himself as never before. He’d crossed ‘the threshold of invisibility’. He was a secret being. He worshipped one, mortal God, the great Dionysius, whose feet the dog Cerberus licked at the gates of hell. It was through him, through Dionysius’ eyes, he saw the world now, without others knowing. He was particularly bold when it came to those he’d always avoided. He turned his reading hours into a nocturnal spree in search of ‘dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’ and ‘verbal sewage’. It had all started as a funny paradox. He’d been asked by the chapter of Santiago Cathedral to study expressions of risus paschalis, paschal laughter, and the so-called festa stultorum, feast of fools, as well as the existence or not of a ‘feast of the donkey’ in the Compostelan Church’s tradition. He didn’t get very far. He couldn’t cope with the fields that suddenly opened. All those books waiting for him on inveterate shelves, in locked cupboards, buried alive in filthy attics and basements. He started poking his finger in cracks he’d previously despised. His warrior philologist’s yellow fingers smelt now of sex and shone like tasty word-slops. What he’d run away from became his bread and butter. As he read, he heard, as if in prayer, the emotional, excited chorus of Bacchantes, ‘When Dionysius leads, the earth will dance.’
He could claim to have been a bibliophile ever since he was a child. He’d certainly grown up with ordered reading, tutored by a pack of Carlist clerics, who kept an eye even on the Spanish mystics and allowed access to enlightened fathers such as Feijoo and Sarmiento only in tiny measures served with little spoons. But somehow he’d become an expert. Books were his most treasured property. When he thought of the old family seat in Ribeiro, he pictured not the land, but the volumes. This set him apart from many other professors and ecclesiastical friends and Compostelan theologians, who were leading authorities on property registers and lawsuits over land inheritance and ownership. And extremely concerned about the culture of rents and the number of feet in a granary. He’d alighted on the classics. And if he’d been given a chair, it was as a result of his knowledge, not of booty or contacts. He was very conservative. A traditionalist. He’d never hidden the fact. Even as a boy, he’d come to the conclusion it was something biological, in his nature. He remembered this with horror when the Dean of Sciences in Santiago conferred a doctorate honoris causa on Franco, comparing his warlike activity to ‘a biological, scientific experience’. In his second life, Sulfe had a stock response, ‘I’m conservative, not inhuman.’ A message that was so simple, constantly repeated as it was in the endless post-war period, it sounded like a bizarre riddle.
Hardly anyone knew about Professor Alfonso Sulfe’s second existence. They may have set out from a similar port, but he’d long since veered off on a course that had nothing to do with the judge Samos or those others who were convinced they had a direct link with God. If he’d renewed a friendship dating back to the 1940s and accepted Samos’ recent invitation to join their conversations in the so-called Crypt (which the judge, with intellectual coquetry, also termed his San Casciano in reference to Machiavelli’s retreat), it was for a reason he kept secret. To start with, he’d replied to the invitation with grateful politeness, alleging, however, that his teaching commitments and his own studies made it difficult for him to attend. He’d be delighted to do so occasionally. But then the embers of a memory revived, turning into a fire that blazed day and night in his brain.