And the brand-new Comendador, the Sevillian moneylender, the father of Doña Inés, gazed at everything through narrowed, calculating eyes, and nothing that moved caught his eye, rather the richness of the wood of the choir and the chairs in the chamber, of acana and mahogany, terebinth and walnut, box and ebony, and the paneling with embellishment, molding, and inlay of mahogany, and the columns of the choir of blood-red acana, each fluted and round, their richly wrought capitals supported by corbels carved in thistle leaves; sixty feet long, at least, this chapel, the Sevillian said to himself, and fifty-three feet wide, but it contains more riches than a space a hundred times greater could hold, for the tables are of green and pink and white marble and jasper, inlaid, veneered, and outlined in contrasting colors; the altar is of finest jasper trimmed with bronze made golden by fire, and the monstrance is like a flaming ruby adorned with diamonds — and diamonds had to be used in carving such a costly tabernacle; well said he who said that there are sufficient riches here to found a kingdom, certainly there will be more than enough to repay a moneylender, for I see no thing in this sacred place that cannot be melted down or torn from its place to be resold; there is too much here for one little-used room, and the former councilman of this place spoke the truth when these communal lands were expropriated by El Señor: “Note down that I am ninety years old, that I have twenty times been mayor, and that El Señor will build here a nest of locusts that will devour the land; place first the service of God”; and to fulfill the demands of El Señor they uprooted forests, leveled hills, stopped streams, and all, yes, all out of devotion to God, to sing His divine praise with continual choirs, prayers, charity, silence, and study, and also for the fitting interment of our Sovereign’s ancestors. But one never knows for whom he labors, and perhaps what today honors God and the dead in this one room can tomorrow, without diminishing the greatness of the Creator, adorn the houses of the living, and this balustrade can be sent to Seville, and that candelabrum perhaps to Genoa, that pilaster to the house of a merchant in Lübeck, the chairs to schools where the children of prosperous and frugal citizens are educated, and the chasubles, dalmatics, capes, albs can easily be transformed into sumptuous attire for our women, for one sells the good cloth in his coffer; these riches are buried here, and no one benefits from them. El Señor must have planned that these marvels would be the treasure of future centuries, but I see them as a profitable annual balance, and in order to obtain them I shall believe that everything I have seen and heard here the last few nights is but a nightmare; things are things and can be touched and measured and exchanged and sold and resold; the objects here are but adornment for useless rites and events my senses cannot credit; no, I did not see the flight of a bat, or the transformation of that bat into a naked woman, or the robbing of sepulchers, or fornication inside them, or the apparition of dwarfs and mutilated old ladies or youths who recline upon rich funereal tombstones, or any of the things my reason cannot comprehend or my interests translate. This age is long in dying, and makes even a hardened merchant like myself see visions and phantoms. Let the old dreams die, Señor; everything you possess here must circulate, move, find a new dwelling place and a new owner. That is reality, and this prodigious edifice will be but the tomb of your ancestors, and of your dreams also, your vampires, your dwarfs, your armless and legless old ladies, your mad youths disguised as statues. Thank you for my title, Señor, although what you reward in me will be your own downfall. Your spectral God is not my real Goddess. I call my deity Reason, alert senses, rejection of mystery, banishment of all that does not fit within the secure treasure chest of common sense where I amass logic and ducats joined together in happy matrimony.
And the fulgurating gaze of the Mad Lady was the gaze of triumph, and as the aged Comendador wedded reason and money, she wedded life and death, past and future, ash and breath, stone and blood: propped in one of the chapel’s carved niches, incapable of movement, indifferent to any fear of a fatal fall from the niche to the granite floor, her gaze was of triumph: all the court, all living beings gathered in this deep sepulchral crypt resembled her adored dead, and perhaps with luck no one would ever leave here, everything would remain forever fixed in time, like the figures in that painting above the altar, a strange painting of Christian theme and pagan conception where contemporary naked figures coexisted with those steeped in Sacred History; the perfect exchange of death and life was now being consummated; the reward of life was death; the gift of death was life; the obsessive game of reversal that dominated the insane reason of the Mad Lady had reached its ultimate point of equilibrium. Let nothing upset it, pleaded the Mad Lady, let nothing upset it, and she drifted into a profound dream that also confused the domains of life and death.
The eyes of everyone present turned to scrutinize a dejected El Señor as he occupied the curule chair Guzmán held for him at the base of the altar; all eyes, from those of Inés, hidden behind the grill work of the choir, to those of the most distant alguacil innocently standing at the foot of the stairway of the thirty-three steps. In all the crush of the assembled throng, no one occupied those steps; it was as if an invisible glass shield sealed access to the stairway. Regarding the crowd before him, El Señor was more aware of certain absences than of the assembled presences, and as he wished to identify those absences, he named them Celestina and Ludovico, Pedro and Simón, asking himself, his fingers clutching the smooth mahogany arms of the chair, whether his dreams of yesterday could eventually bear any relation to the mysteries of today, whether the dreams had announced the mysteries, and whether the enigma, finally, was but ignorance of the logical bond between what youth desired and old age feared, whether the mystery of today was only, how could one know? the failure of yesterday’s dream. Perhaps … perhaps it was the student and the bewitched girl, the serf and the monk who invisibly occupied the steps of that never completed stairway, the stairway where every stair was a century and every step a step toward death and extinction, oblivion, inert matter, and then accursed resurrection in a foreign body. Toribio’s unfocused gaze, the fear-filled gaze of Brother Julián, the greedy, obsequious gaze of the Sevillian moneylender, the bored gaze of the prelate, Guzmán’s impenetrable gaze, told him nothing; they held no answer to the question that El Señor asked himself as he asked them. And he found no response, he retreated into his only sure refuge: his own person.