Ludovico dreamed that the murdered brother and his wife-and-sister that night lay sleeping in the tomb. She awakened and said: “We can leave now. Now you will know the destiny of those who live outside the tomb.”
“Yes,” replied the murdered man, “but secretly. Let no one see us.”
They emerged from their winding sheets as if abandoning their skins. The woman shook out her robe of a thousand colors, and from its folds day was born, and night fell, light was kindled and shadow prolonged, the cloth burst into flame and poured down her body like water; at its touch the living died and the dead were reborn; all the while the couple walked through the same streets of Alexandria toward the numberless mouths of the great river.
Finally he saw them.
The murderer brother lay dead in the abandoned alley, his face stained by spilled ink, his pen clasped tightly in his hand, the scrolls of paper strewn about his body, white, virgin, not a single character upon them.
The couple sailed up the river in a luminous boat, the man naming things in secret, water, sand, wheat, stone, house, the woman asking the waters: “Why did our brother succumb to the temptation to write of his own crime?”
He was awakened by fingers brushing his. Lying beside him was a woman of indeterminate age; veils covered her face and body except for an aperture over her lips. The aperture followed the outline of her lips. The mouth was stamped with many colors; she spoke.
“Flee,” she said to Ludovico, “go as quickly as possible to the place I shall tell you. There is your well-being. Here your children will be in danger if the sign they bear is discovered. They will be identified with a sacred prophecy. They will be separated from you and, captive, will await their manhood only to enact once again the struggle of rival brothers…”
“What is the prophecy?” asked Ludovico; but the woman wrapped herself in her multicolored veils — the raiment, like her lips — and disappeared into the darkness.
THE CITIZENS OF HEAVEN
With half his remaining gold, Ludovico bought a small boat, provisions, and a compass, and sailed from Egypt toward the coast of the Levant. The three children laughed and crawled on the deck; their eyes and skin glowed with the good health and fortune bestowed by the brilliant Mediterranean sun.
He docked in the port of Haifa; he sold the boat and after a few days on donkeyback arrived at a desert village near the Dead Sea. Without asking anything of anyone, he followed precisely Pliny’s instructions for reaching the community. They were received by several men dressed as poorly as Ludovico and the three boys, and all saw a good sign in this arrival, for the desert community was divided into four classes: children, disciples, novices, and the faithful; and the three still very young infants, arriving into the life of the sect so free of the past, could readily ascend in the scale of knowledge and merit. To Ludovico they explained that the reason they joined together there was not the inability to possess goods; rather, it was a will to possess everything in common. Ludovico placed his remaining gold in a common chest.
For ten years Ludovico and the three boys lived the life of this community. They awakened at dawn. They worked the fields watered by wells known to the faithful. Before the midday meal they bathed and turned to the severe tasks of carpentry, ceramics, and weaving. They supped; no one ever spoke during meals. Before going to sleep they could study, meditate, pray, or contemplate. They dressed always like paupers. They forbade all ceremony, for they affirmed that good must be practiced with humility, not celebrated. They abhorred equally the pomp of all churches, those of the East and those of the West, the Hebraic and the Christian, all rites and all sacrifice. And they transmitted their beliefs not in sermons but in ordinary conversation, at the hour of rest, during the day’s labor, in a quiet and reasoned voice. No one there noticed the external signs the three boys shared.
“Your body is transitory matter, but your soul is immortal.”
“Captive within the body as if within a prison, the soul can aspire to freedom only if it renounces the world, riches, and stone temples, and in contrast serves God with piety, practicing justice toward all men.”
“Do harm to no one, neither voluntarily nor at anyone’s behest.”
“Detest the unjust man and succor the just.”
The three boys learned these maxims by memory. Seated at the refectory table according to their age in the time of the community, Ludovico and the three boys finally occupied a high rank, for here age was not judged by external appearances of youth or maturity but by the time spent in the community, and thus the boys were older than some gray-haired men who had arrived more recently. These old men were considered children; Ludovico became a novice; the boys, disciples.
“Equality is the source of justice; it manifests to us true riches.”
“Three are the roads to perfection: study, contemplation, and knowledge of nature.”
“But also there are dreams.”
“Dreams come from God.”
“At times, they are the shortcut to the final beatitude the other three roads can procure.”
One day in the year when the three boys, in different months, became eleven, Ludovico told the faithful what he had dreamed. He must return to the world to fulfill the dictates of justice. The faithful returned to him the gold coins he had surrendered upon his arrival. Ludovico looked at the coins Celestina had sent from Toledo by the monk Simón. The same prognathic profile, in bas-relief; the pendant lower lip; the dead gaze. But the effigy imprinted there was not the former Señor’s but that of his son Felipe.
“The old King?” the captain of the sailing vessel replied as they set sail one afternoon from Haifa.
The captain looked at the coins Ludovico had given him in payment of their passage. He bit one to assure its legality, and added: “He died years ago. His son Don Felipe, may he enjoy glory, has succeeded him.”
Ten years of silence and labor, Ludovico said to himself, ten years of bookless study, thinking, contemplating, in silence, remembering everything I have learned, restructuring it in my mind. Felipe predicted it would take longer to achieve pragmatic grace. I shall need less time to change grace through action. He imagined I would be alone, in a miserable little room, bent over charcoal and pitch, philters and mud, growing old before knowing, knowing, an old man, knowing, of no use. But I am not alone. I am I plus my three sons. My small, formidable army. One lifetime is not enough to fulfill a destiny.
He gazed for the last time toward the coasts of Palestine. The desert was sinking into the sea. The desert began in the sea. A people in the desert, without women, without love, and without money. An eternal people, where no one is born. Men came to the community; men left. But no one was seen in birth or in death. And perhaps because of this, he mused, only there could he think clearly and totally of his destiny and that of the three boys bound to his own.
One night in the dog days the captain approached him and after staring for a moment at the motionless, opaque sea, said to him: “I have heard one of your sons praying in the early morning. The things he said are those repeated centuries ago by a sect rebelling against both the law of Israel and the law of Rome: this sect held that all Churches are dens of the Evil One.”
“That is so. We have lived ten years among them,” Ludovico replied.
“But that is impossible. All the members of the sect were condemned by the Sanhedrin and delivered to the Centurions, who took them out into the desert and abandoned them, bound hand and foot, without bread, and without water. They could not have survived. They were called the Citizens of Heaven.”