“Hold this paper, Brother Julián,” Toribio said when the painter-priest returned from his long night in the company of the Mad Lady, the dwarf, and the Idiot. “Hold this paper, punch a hole in the center with the point of this pin, and then hold the paper to your eye. Go out onto the balcony of my tower; hurry, for the dawn is coming. Look at the stars through the tiny aperture made by the pin. What do you see?”
“What do I see? That the stars have lost their aureole; they look very small…”
“And you realize, then, that their apparent size is an illusion created by their refulgence…?”
“Yes; but I am not sure of what I see, Brother Toribio: I am tired; it has been a long night.”
“Isn’t it true that nothing looks as small as a star robbed of its light? And nevertheless, many of them are larger than this earth we inhabit. Imagine, then, how our earth must look — only one star among millions of other stars — from the star most distant from us; or imagine how many stars must fill the dark space between us and the most distant star. Can you believe, Brother, that our tiny star is the center of the universe? Can you believe that?”
“What I do not dare believe is that God designed the universe in honor of our earth and the miserable, cruel, and stupid beings that inhabit it. I have learned one thing tonight: men are mad.”
The painter-priest offered several folded sheets of paper to the astrologer-priest, whose benevolent smile seemed to ask: You have only now come to that realization? although his bowed head indicated a certain fear in response to the words of his comrade: “That is a conclusion I have tried to avoid, Brother Julián. I have never wished to imply that the great expanse of the infinite diminishes either God or man. You understand, that is something they would never forgive.”
Julián looked at Toribio with affection; he had learned not to laugh at the slightly comic appearance of the astrologer, his tonsure encircled by wild, dark-red curls, and one perpetually wandering eye; he stood straight and tall, but lacked either grace or symmetry, and he always held one twitching shoulder higher than the other. Toribio accepted the folded manuscripts with respect; he had recognized El Señor’s seal at the bottom of each page.
“Who gave you this?”
“Guzmán, just a moment ago, on the stairway that leads to your observatory. He asked me to read them and judge them.”
Squinting his eyes, the palace astrologer approached a lamp of wax candles enclosed in smoke-blackened glass hanging from the beamed ceiling; he adjusted the light and with an eagerness belied by his outward casualness began to read the testament El Señor had dictated to Guzmán; he raised one arm and with a gesture at once forceful, gentle, and controlled he pushed the lamp, which described a wide pendulum arc above the heads of the two priests. One continued to read, while the other contemplated with exhaustion and surprise the arc described by the lamp.
“Watch carefully, and count,” murmured Toribio, never taking his eyes from El Señor’s folios, where the shadows cast by the lamp rhythmically shortened and lengthened. “Count your own pulse, Brother Julián, count carefully and you will learn, you will see, that each swing of this lamp takes exactly the same amount of time, always the same, whether the distance of the arc is great or small…”
Julián, counting his pulse, approached the astronomer: “Toribio … Brother … what can you…? Tell me, do you know of anything that will cleanse me, purify me, of this accursed night?”
Toribio continued to read. “Yes. I know that the earth is in the heavens. Does that console you?”
“No, because I know that Hell is on earth.”
“Do we ascend or descend, Brother Julián?”
“Our sainted religion affirms that we ascend, Brother Toribio, that there is no movement but that of the soul in its ascent, in search of an eternal good, which is above…”
Toribio shook his rust-red head. “Geometry knows nothing of good or evil, or of supremes or relatives, but it assures us we neither climb nor descend; we spin, we spin, I am convinced that everything is spherical and that everything spins in circles; everything is movement, incessant, circular…”
“You are describing men…”
“You have just discovered that men are mad; but mathematics is not mad; a hypothesis may be false if experience does not prove it; false, but never mad.”
“Neither can the earth be mad, although the men that inhabit it are mad, and their madness is a movement like that you describe: incessant and circular, relentlessly returning to the same exhausted point of departure while they believe they have reached a new shore; and with this movement men wish to communicate their delirium to the earth. But the earth does not move…”
“You say it does not move?”
“How can it move? We would all fall, we would all be thrown into the emptiness of space … the immobility of the earth has to be the stabilizing factor for the agitated coming and going of its maddened populace, Friar … if the earth moved — in addition to the movement of men — we would all be thrown toward the heavens, Friar…”
“Did I not, just now, tell you that we are already in the heavens?” The astrologer laughed; he rolled up El Señor’s papers and threw them on a table; he took Julián by the arm and led him to the balcony.
There Toribio picked up two stones of unequal size; he walked to the parapet and extended his hands beyond the edge, the smaller stone in his right hand and the larger in his left. “Look. Listen. I am going to drop the two stones at the same time. One is heavier. The other, lighter. Watch. Hear. Both will fall at the same velocity.”
He dropped them. But neither friar heard them strike the ground. Toribio stared uncomprehendingly at Julián, his eyes, as always, vaguely out of focus.
“I heard nothing, Brother Toribio. Was this the miracle you wished to demonstrate? That your stones fall and strike the earth without making any sound?”
The astrologer trembled. “Nevertheless, they fell at the same velocity.”
“We would have heard them strike; either one stone first, and then the other, or both at the same time; but we should have heard the sound, Brother, and we heard nothing…”
“And nevertheless, I swear to you by my Chaldean ancestors, they fell, and they fell together, at the same exact velocity, in spite of their different weights … even if they were caught by an angel! And they fell moved by the same force that moves the moon, the earth in its rotation, and all the planets and stars of the universe; should those two miserable and blessed stones not descend at a uniform velocity from this tower, then at this instant neither you nor I am alive; stones move because the moon moves around the earth, and the earth around the sun, as if in a stately celestial pavane; one impels another, one sphere affects another, indeed the entire universe, without a single imaginable fissure, without a single rupture in the chain of cause and effect; each is related to the other so that beginning with the revolution of each planet all phenomena are explainable and this correlation binds together so tightly the order and magnitude of the spheres and of their circular orbits and of the heavens themselves that nothing, Brother, do you understand me, nothing, can be changed in its place without mortally disrupting every other part, the very universe itself…”