V
and then I
T
R
and I
again, and an O
and finally an L and then she covered the mummy with a black sheet, and on the sheet there was a circle and a cross within it, and La Señora said it was the cross of Solomon; then she knelt and asked us to hold the kid very tightly by its horns, and exposing herself to an early death from its sharp hoofs, she kissed its ass and then, crazed, her forehead wrinkled by that tightly fitting crown, she plunged the knife we stole from Jerónimo’s forge into its belly; and before the jets of blood stopped spurting from the kid, as if to startle fear itself, she jabbed at the owl’s eyes, the dog’s neck, the black silk of the cat, the yawning jaws of the serpent, and the scurrying figure of the mole which was trying to bury itself in the sand; the beasts defended themselves in their own manner, scratching, barking, digging, pecking, fluttering, writhing, but they had no chance before the awful fury of La Señora, who was screaming: Veni, Veni, Veni, as she slashed, slit, ripped, and disemboweled the beasts.
The sands of her chamber, Señor Don Juan, are still soaking up the spilled blood; La Señora, our Señora, scratched, wounded, and exhausted, lies amid the new corpses. We brought two serpents from the hills, but she killed only one, Señor Don Juan, help us; we do not want to go back to the mountain to look for more animals; that’s a job for the master huntsman, Don Guzmán, and even he runs dangers among jackals and wild pigs, and we, poor little scrubbing girls, we’re not good for anything but collecting lizard droppings, certainly not for finding the snake still hidden in the sands of La Señora’s room, oh, oh, oh…”
But besides being so frightened we wet our underskirts, nothing happened, Señor Don Juan; the mummy still lies there, motionless; and La Señora opened her window and is listening to the sad lament of a flute coming from the forges, the tile sheds, and the taverns on the work site.
With eyes of dark resignation, the Mad Lady regards the somber crypt and seignorial chapel; her resignation is a triumph; everything is as it should be; like precious metals, pain and joy, mourning and luxury, shadows and light are here alloyed; give them eternal rest, Lord, and may your eternal light illumine them, alleluia, alleluia; propped upon her little cart the aged and mutilated Queen was, on the other hand, paying no attention to the cavorting of Barbarica, who leaped from tomb to tomb, all profaned, so that every cadaver resembled her cruel and generous mistress, for one lacked an arm, another a head, that one over there a nose, this one an ear, and Barbarica could only murmur: Oh, my beloved husband, my poor foolish but handsome Prince, do not hide from me, why won’t you come out and play with your tiny playmate? come out of your hiding place, don’t be cruel, you freed the unworthy prisoners on our wedding night, don’t humiliate me while you’ve favored vermin crawled out of nasty Jewish and Arab hovels, don’t deny me the great mandrake I so desire, don’t let my wedding night go by without a prodding from your pike, don’t make me believe you’re a boy-loving sodomite, I offer you my bulging painted tits and my greatest prize, a purse of a normal woman’s size, out of all proportion to the meanness of my other parts, oh, my little Prince, oh, my darling Idiot, who was it who took you from your beggarly state, from your sad condition as a tattered sailor, the day we found you on the dunes about to be torn apart by the crowd? who was it who had brought in her wicker trunk the cosmetics, pomades, pencils, paints, and false whiskers that transformed your appearance? who, my handsome Idiot? You could see nothing in the darkness of my mistress’s leather carriage, you heard her but didn’t see me or sense my presence; no, you didn’t see or hear me, and you believed the hands that disrobed you were those of my mistress the Mad Lady, who has no hands, so it was my hands that removed your doublet and your breeches, and it was I who slipped from the hole in the floor of the carriage hidden by my wicker trunk, I who nimbly slipped out and ran between the wheels and the horses’ slow hoofs to the funeral carriage, carrying your wretched clothes rolled into a bundle I had thrust in my bosom, and it was I who removed the clothes from the cold corpse of the Prince called the Fair, who in life was the husband of my mistress and the father of our present Señor, and in death was embalmed into incorruptibility by the science of Dr. del Agua, it was I who put your robber’s rags on him and then ran back to the carriage of my Lady and dressed you in the cap and medallions, the fur cape and brocade breeches, the hose and slippers, belonging to the cadaver, and it was thus the miraculous transformation took place that caused such clamor and amazement among our following; and you owe to me the fact that you are a Prince and not a beggar; and I was rewarded, for my mistress gave you my tiny, pudgy, loving hand in matrimony; and you, who owe everything to my craft and my artifice, now want to deny me the pleasure of your beautiful dingalingdong between my chubby little thighs, oh, you wicked boy, oh, you rascal, why won’t you come play with your poor Barbarica, your wife before God and man, come out where I can see you, come out where I can love you, you be my sweet pickle, come play with my pears, you darling idiot boy …
And, still babbling, the dwarf Barbarica came to the tomb reserved by El Señor Don Felipe for his father — the Fair, the whoring, Señor — and she was amazed to see that it was the only tomb with the stone still firmly in place upon the funeral plinth. Her strength was fed by desire, her short, chubby, baby-like body strained and struggled, and sweating and panting she moved aside the bronze slab; she shrieked, she crossed herself, she yowled like an alley cat and trembled like quicksilver, for in the depths of the sepulcher, side by side, lay two identical men, identically dressed and identically arrayed down to the most minute detail of rings and medals, and both were the Prince, her Prince, sleeping within this tomb like twins gestating within a stone womb, both resting upon the horrible remains of the Mad Lady’s embalmed husband, still dressed in the ragged clothing of a sailor; two! two! my God, you redouble my pleasure, panted Barbarica, but you offer them only to take them from me, they are both dead; ah, the bitch that birthed them, ahhh, I shall die a virgin, ay, I must live my wedding night untouched, among men with cocks as cold as dead fish, the only procuress to remedy my ills death itself, ay, ay, ay, and the dwarf clambered into the tomb and kissed the lips of the embalmed Señor dressed in tattered sailor’s garb; this first kiss tasted of aloes, and the lips were dead indeed; next she kissed the parted lips of one of the two identical Princes, and that kiss tasted of the dried blood of a dove; the dwarf jerked the cap from this Prince’s head, saw the shaved skull, and knew he was the poor scramble-brained youth she had married, and her husband’s bloody lips had the scent of madness and sacrifice, but not of life. The dwarf squinted one swollen-lidded eye, her upturned nostrils quivered; she smelled ordure; she remembered; she separated the legs and lowered the breeches of the Idiot Prince, her husband; her tiny hand poked through the greenish feces, she gagged, and kept repeating, oh, what a smell, it stinks to high heaven, but she continued to poke and paw through the Idiot’s excrement until she found what she was looking for: the black pearl, the pearl called the Pilgrim, and she popped it between her bulging bosoms, after wiping it clean on the doublet of the sleeping youth, her — as yet unconsummated — husband.
Only then did she look with increasing curiosity and excitement at the third body lying in the tomb, the second Prince, identical to her husband who slept so soundly his sleep was twin to death, in the same way the youths were twin to each other; she kissed this Prince. And this kiss tasted of perfume, of sweet-scented herbs … and it was returned.