“And you know all this because of the two stones you dropped that we did not hear fall?”
Toribio emphatically nodded yes, although his lips murmured: “I do not understand, I do not understand…”
And the rosy dawn crowned his head with pale flames but threw the bowed face of the astrologer into shadow.
“Brother Toribio: Joshua ordered the sun to stop in its course that he might gain the day in his battle.”
“The Holy Gospels preach supernatural truth. Natural truth is of a different order. Everything is simultaneously uniform movement and persistent change … Change and movement, movement and change, without which the stars would be corpses on the highways of the night.”
“El Señor, Brother Toribio, is like Joshua. Do not forget it. You have read the testament that the unlettered chief huntsman Guzmán could not have invented. You and I know how to read between the lines. El Señor desires neither movement nor change; he wants the sun to stay its course…”
“What battles can El Señor win now? Better that he invoke the powers of dusk and defeat.”
“El Señor does not want change; and we are his servants.”
“And, nevertheless, El Señor does change; and as he changes, he suffers, and as he suffers from change he decays and dies.”
“Our poor Señor. Everyone says he is no longer the man he was. They say he was a handsome youth, audacious, also cruel. He led a rebellion against his own father so that he might more easily deliver the rebels into his father’s hands. His own power is founded upon that slaughter, and because he has power he has been able to build this palace where you and I find protection and opportunity to read the stars and to paint icons … Do not forget that, Brother. Here you and I have saved ourselves from a dangerous world. What would have become of us were we not here? In what wretched workshop would you, a simple journeyman, be fashioning lenses? I would be shoveling manure in the stables where I was born. Without the shelter of our sacred order and of the seignorial power that offers us the privileges of this palace, would you and I be able to paint and study, Friar?”
“Do not see in our Señor anything more than you observe in other men, Friar, in the universe itself. Perhaps in that way we may save ourselves from the dangers of the adulation of the court, and of being completely forsaken. There is nothing exceptional about El Señor except the accident of his birth. Everything else is a matter of components common to every thing and every person: violence originates force, force begets joy, joy is converted into forms, forms eventually harden, cool, decay, and die. And death is the violence that reinitiates the cycle.”
“And suffering, Brother?”
“What suffering?”
“The same suffering you have been speaking of. The suffering that, as it changes, decays and dies.”
“I was speaking generally, not specifically, about El Señor.”
“Careful, Brother, nothing exists that is not made incarnate. And even in El Señor the suffering that, as you say, necessarily accompanies the passage from joyful violence to cold death must also be made incarnate. For our Señor is approaching death, the papers we have read tell us so. Death in life, it occurs to me, must be defeat and frustration, and this is the death, I suspect, that our Señor is living, although I recognize that I am incapacitated insofar as my ability to penetrate the secret motives of the decision that led him to create here in this palace and in those who inhabit it the perfect semblance of death. On the other hand, does the universe understand frustration? Tell me that, now that you are not only an astronomer but also a horoscopist.”
Toribio returned slowly to the room filled with lenses, condensers, telescopes, ustorious mirrors, charts of the heavens, compasses, and astrolabes. He stopped, followed closely by the questioning Brother Julián, beside an astrolabe; he seemed to be admiring the graduated rule, gently he stroked the sights that marked the divisions of the metal sphere: he set the device spinning.
“No, it does not know frustration. The universe functions, and fully expresses itself, always.”
“Is it pure force, then, pure realization, pure success, without the martyrdoms and beauties of joy, form, decadence and death? And if it is so, may I overcome with my painting the mortal norm El Señor imposes upon us? May I, with joy, form, decadence, death, and resurrection through martyrdom and the beauty of art, save myself from both the plenitude of the universe and the finiteness of El Señor, and thus establish the true human norm?”
Toribio spun the sphere faster and faster, murmuring: “A force that accounts for itself … a force born of the perfect equilibrium of death…”
He looked at the painter-priest. “Lightness is born of weight and weight of lightness; each expends in the same instant the benefits of its creation, each spends itself in proportion to its movement. And each, too, is simultaneously extinguished. All forces destroy themselves, but they also create each other; for them, death is mutual expiation and violent birth…”
With a deliberate, arbitrarily theatrical, gesture, the astrologer abruptly stopped the spinning of the astrolabe and added: “This is the law. Neither your painting nor my science may escape the norm. But the paradox is that, by violating it, they create it: the law exists thanks to those who oppose it with the violent exceptions of science and art.”
Julián placed one hand upon Toribio’s shoulder. “Brother, in his testament our Señor dabbles in the most detestable violations of the law of God; he combines all the anathematized heresies…”
“Heresies?” Brother Toribio’s eyebrows rose, and he laughed. “A good Spaniard is our Prince, and his heresies at times are nothing more than blasphemies…”
“Heresies or blasphemies, he discusses them, and allows them to run their course, exactly like our poor friend the Chronicler of this palace; poor Señor, too, for he cannot be sent to the galleys to expiate his sins. But I want to be charitable, Brother, and I ask myself, convinced by what you have just said, whether El Señor simply is not seeking, with pain, at a different level, the truths you say you have encountered through your telescope … Toribio, is El Señor too solitary? Could we not, you and I, for the good of all … approach him…?”
“Do not be deceived. El Señor does not seek what we seek.”
“We, Brother?”
“Yes, you, Julián, you and your painting. Do you think I cannot see? That is all I do do, poor thing that I am, poor cross-eyed Chaldean: if I can scrutinize the heavens, I am entirely able to observe a painting, quite capable of going to El Señor’s chapel and reading the signs of that painting they say was brought from Orvieto, perhaps so that the distance of the origin might also distance the painting and hide the real intentions of its creator…”
“Silence, Brother, please, silence.”
“Very well. But what I want to tell you is that there is no reason to pity El Señor, or to compare him to ourselves.”
“We have sworn obedience to him.”
“But there are many degrees of obedience, and above that of service to El Señor is the obedience you owe your art and I owe science; and above all, that we owe God.”
“Silence, please, silence; El Señor believes that to obey him is to obey God; there is no room either for your science or for my painting in the two obligations that govern us.”
“And nevertheless, in these papers El Señor doubts, and you believe that El Señor’s doubt is similar to our secular faith.”