“Yes, I believe that; obscurely, piously, I believe it … or at least I want to believe it.”
“But it isn’t true, Brother; his doubt is not doubt, his doubt is not our doubt; El Señor still lives in the old world, and truth may not be found among all those conceptual and analytical subtleties, distinctions, questions, and suppositions; these are the things you and I are going to leave behind forever: the words El Señor consigned to paper in these folios through the fervent hand of his lackey Guzmán are like a pile of bricks without cement or mortar to bind them; the least breath of air can tumble them, the cement is missing; their union is poetry and poetry is the lime, the sand, and the water of all things, poetry is logical knowledge, poetry is the fullness of human activity and creation; and poetry tells us, without El Señor’s doubts and tricks of logic, that nothing is as audacious or sinful as El Señor believes, that there is nothing that is unbelievable, and that nothing is impossible for the profound poetry that binds all things together. Poetry is cohesion and coherence; your art and my science tell us, Brother, that the possibilities we deny are merely possibilities we still do not know. Condemn those possibilities, as has El Señor, and you give them the name of evil. Open yourself to them, and you will know the solidarity of good and evil, how they mutually nourish one another, and the impossibilities of dissociating them: can you split a coin in half and still call it a ducat? The only reason El Señor examines his doubts is to conserve an order; he places his trust in the fact that the truth revealed can withstand all assaults upon it, those of reason as well as those of imagination; believe that, Brother Julián.”
“You and I, then … do we wish to destroy that order?”
“Now I am the one to say: silence, please, silence; let us simply proceed with our work, confident that the order of mathematics and the order of painting are, or in the end will be, identical to divine order.”
“In truth, you have not answered my question.”
“Allow me to answer in my fashion. Although nature, like the tormented Tantalus, has an insatiable hunger and thirst, nothing, basically, is destroyed; rather, nature creates a succession of new lives and new forms for her own nourishment; time destroys, but nature produces more rapidly than death destroys. In the depths of his soul, El Señor is opposed to nature; he opposes it, Brother, and this is the limited grandeur of his impossible combat; the earth wishes to lose life, desiring only constant reproduction: El Señor wishes to save his life, denying the increment of this holy terrestrial substance ordained by God. Not an inch further, El Señor has declared to nature, sequestering it forever within a parallel universe of stone and death: this palace. Who will denounce him for it if everyone, El Señor and you and I, are prisoners of the earliest and most ancient thoughts conceived by men in opposition to the cosmos? El Señor is the prisoner of the idea of a world designed by the Deity in a single act of immutable, irrepeatable, intransformable revelation; you and I are tributaries of the idea of a divine emanation which is in perpetual flux, realized by continual transformation … Yes, our poor Señor. He believes that, like creation itself, perfection is unfeeling, immutable, and unalterable.”
“Yes, I can see you are right. That is why he ordered the construction of this palace.”
“Then, like moles, ants, mice, and acids, like slow-moving rivers, like the wind, or the termite, you and I, allies of time and flux, must undermine his project from within so that the palace itself may suffer the imperfection of being alterable, generative, and mutable, for this is the law of nature, and there would be no benefits, but only misery, if the earth were one enormous pile of unfeeling sand, or one enormous mass of immutable jade, or if, following the flood, the frozen waters had turned it into an enormous crystal globe, perfect, but unalterable. Our Señor deserves to find himself encountering a Medusa head that would transform him into a diamond statue: he would find perfection there. But that may be his fear: to be transformed into something else, anything, even an eternal statue lacking life or movement.”
“But God is eternal, unchanging, as El Señor wishes to be; and God lives … He is…”
“Everything that is eternal is circular, and what is circular is eternal. My God, Brother! Do you not yet realize that this movement, this change, this perpetual regeneration means that God creates, creates unceasingly, animates everything, makes it spin for His greater glory, as if He wished to see His own creation from every angle, from every perspective, in the round, wished every conceivable view of the flowing marvels He conceives?”
“And you claim to have observed that movement, that order, in the heavens, to know when and where the stars are moving, how they are measured, and what they produce? Can you, therefore, deny that your pride is as great as El Señor’s, for even though you will not admit it, you believe you possess the same genius as the Creator of the heavens?”
“I only believe that, having logically approached a comprehension of the structure of the universe, which God knew instantly and without temporal rationality, whereas we approach that comprehension step by step, and rationally, it would be ruinous to divorce the word of God from the work of God. The truth that astronomy demonstrates is the same truth already known to Divine Wisdom. Or do you believe that everything you see here should be destroyed, my charts, my spheres, my crystals, that I should cease to observe the heavens so that the divine presence might be made manifest without obstacles? Whom would my inactivity benefit? God, who brought me into the world so that I might know a fraction of what He has always known? El Señor himself, our temporal sovereign, who, in spite of everything, changes, suffers, and decays like every other living thing, and who needs that someone, although he would never say it, know the truth? Believe me, Brother; it is better that someone know these things, even if in silence; someday they can be, if not the accepted truth, at least an alternative to a policy of despair, or what is the same thing, repetition. And endless repetition changes the name of the despair that nourishes it; finally, Julián, it is called destruction.”
“Brother Toribio; I love you; you know that. I am merely saying what the Holy Office would say if it knew … if it knew that you affirm these things.”
“The partial knowledge of one man does not offend the total knowledge of God.”
“They would say that the center of the universe is the earth, the seat of Creation, the seat of humanity, and the seat of the Church…”
“Does it diminish the omnipotence of God to say that what God once performed can never happen again? Invert this negative proposition and you will understand what it is I do: little by little I identify human thought with divine thought, not with past thought, but thought that is taking place now; not with the design revealed one day, a simple initial act, but with its flow, its perpetual emanation and transformation.”
“You are looking into a deep abyss, and you make me dizzy.”
“I am not looking at the shadows of the cavern; I am bathing in the river. That is my desire.”
“May it also be your fear. For through that hole you have opened in the heavens our spirits may drain away from us, and if we lose our souls, what good will your frozen rhomboids and triangles do us?”
“The universe is infinite; perhaps we may lose what we consider our individual soul, and gain the soul of all creation…”
“Oh, my brother, and what if your discoveries carry you to this terrible, terrible conclusion: what if you discover that the divine order of the infinite is one thing, and the infinite order of nature something different? What if we discover that there are two infinites? Which would we choose, Brother?”