He returned to Jerónimo’s forge, drawn by the soft, sad sound of a flute being played, with closed eyes, by the stranger arrived the night before, that strange, first night the pilgrim had spent in Castilian lands, one he would always remember, when lights moved unassisted along the passageways of the dark palace, when wheat grew in stone, when dead falcons flew from windows, and bats — he had seen it — soared back and forth above his head carrying mutilated limbs, shinbones, ears, skulls; when, finally, the skies rained stones.
The youth clutched the stones as if they were two precious jewels. He reached the forge where Jerónimo, Celestina, and the blind flutist maintained their vigil. Above the strains of the plaintive flute, he heard the footsteps of an armed company approaching across the plain. Jerónimo rose to his feet. Celestina took his arm.
“It does not matter,” she said. “Let them come and take us with them. That is the reason my companion and I have come.”
The flutist ceased his playing and cleaned his instrument, wiping it upon the tatters of his ancient doublet. The pilgrim kept the two stones in his hands as the members of El Señor’s guard seized an unresisting Celestina; they approached the youth, and he, too, offered no resistance; he had known, since the night in the mountains when he had made love to the page-and-drummer with the tattooed lips, that he had come to this place in order to face a Señor and tell him what the pilgrim himself — though he knew it — was reluctant to believe.
THE SECOND TESTAMENT
“I. I … by the grace of God … knowing, according to the doctrine of St. Paul the Apostle … what comes after that, Guzmán, what are the words dictated by our testamentary tradition?”
“… how, following sin, it is ordained by Divine Providence that all men die in punishment of it. Señor, it is not time…”
“… and as the goodness of our God is so full and great … how, Guzmán? read it, read me what it says in the breviary…”
“That that same death which is punishment for our guilt is received by Him as due preparation of life, and we suffer it gladly … Señor, for God’s…”
“Gladly, Guzmán? Have you seen my preternaturally aged members, my body sapped by the excesses inherited from those mummies and skeletons that the day before yesterday we entombed here for all time, the flame of my body that in spite of everything persists in igniting, and which must then be extinguished with penitence, words of repentance, flagellation, and unending nightmares … for I have no right to contaminate Isabel; true, Guzmán?”
“Do not vex yourself so, Señor…”
“If she became pregnant, Guzmán, what would be born of our coupling but another corpse, a monster dead before it was born, a tiny mummy destined to the cradle of the sepulcher, to be rocked in one of the crypts we have constructed here, is that not true, Guzmán?”
“And from your union with Inés, Señor, what will be born?”
“Evil; the unknown. Why did you bring her to me?”
“The unknown, yes. Perhaps good; chance; the renewal of your blood.”
“And patience…? What do I say now? What does the dogma say?”
“… and we come to our death with rational will, compelled not so much by the natural obligation of death, as to welcome it as transit and passage to eternal felicity and the well-lived life…”
“Doubt, Guzmán, doubt; look in my mirror; climb the thirty-three steps of my stairway and give the lie to dogma, affirm in opposition to the dogma that if we are resurrected it will be in ethereal flesh or in flesh different from that in which we live, are constituted, and move upon the earth; affirm, Guzmán, that if we are resurrected it may well be in the form of a sphere lacking any resemblance to the body we inhabit; deny, too, that on the day of final judgment resurrection will be simultaneous for all the men who have been born upon the earth, and that instead each will be resurrected in his time and his manner, from the bellies of she-wolves, from the coupling of dogs, from the eggs of serpents, from the indifferent union of the insects that infest stagnant waters; and by this reasoning we can believe, trembling, that the formation of the human body — in the womb of Isabel, in the womb of Inés, in the breast of my mother — is the work of the Devil, and that those conceptions in the womb of my mother or Inés or Isabel are the result of demons; yes, Guzmán, for if the first God — whom we do not know and who does not know us — created a first, perfect Heaven, there was no place in it for the imperfection of mortal men who are but the creations of Lucifer; Lucifer is the wound in the perfect Heaven through which Paradise seeps, the crack through which oozes the creation of something that is of no interest to an all-perfect and all-powerful God: men, you and I, Guzmán; take advantage of the birth of this new day to write my second testament; this I bequeath them: a future of resurrections that may be glimpsed only in forgotten pauses, in the orifices of time, in the dark empty minutes during which the past tried to imagine the future. This I bequeath: a blind, pertinacious, and painful return to the imagination of the future in the past and the only future possible to my race and my land. Do you understand what I am saying, Guzmán? Append, append these harsh formulas. This is my second testament.”
“Señor, there is no time now. And this second testament is unnecessary since you dictated another yesterday.”
“Append what I say. Yesterday I did not know Inés. Append. Add words to words. Will this palace survive? Should it not survive, let words serve as its continuity and reproduce the life that was lived within it.”
“So that dying we shall be faithful and loyal witnesses to the infallible truth that our God spoke to the first fathers: that sinning, they, and we their descendants, all would die…”
“False, Guzmán: God does not desire; God does not exist: God is but potential, He can do anything, but it serves Him naught, for He neither desires nor exists; He despises us; sin is being, sin is loving. Guzmán, Guzmán, what intolerable pain … come, place the red stone in the palm of my hand…”
“Have you finished, Sire?”
“Yes, yes … Guzmán, do you never doubt?”
“If I had power, Señor, I should never doubt anything.”
“But you do not have it, poor Guzmán.”
“And soon you shall not have it if you do not act against the dangers that threaten you.”
“I know well these dangers; they are the menace of a too-enlightened soul; they lurk about me here, in this chamber, in these galleries, in this chapel; I know them all too well, Guzmán; they are the dangers of the man who possesses both wisdom and power, irreconcilable gifts; I wish I were a brute like my murdering and warring ancestors who lie outside there in my crypt and chapel; to exercise power unaware; what relief, Guzmán, what profound peace, if only it could be so; the accumulation of time has added knowledge, doubt, skepticism, and the weakness of tolerance to the original deposit of power; that is the danger, can you not realize it?; I exorcise that danger with words, penitence, reason, and delirium; with sins, to the end of being pardoned…”
“Your danger lies outside, Señor, and only power can undo it.”
“Power? Again?”
“Always, Señor.”
“Was one crime not enough? Did I not fulfill my duties to power by basing it, that one time, upon the death of innocents?”