El Señor and the go-between walked to the palace convent courtyard, then along one of the corridors flanked on both sides by cells. Before one of them Mother Celestina stopped, placed a finger to her lips, quietly opened the Judas window in the door, and signaled El Señor to peer within.
Author of this work, inciter of this act, El Señor stepped back, clapped his hands over his mouth, prey to a delicious fright at what he saw as he peered through the aperture: the barbaric coupling of the cloaked Don Juan and Doña Inés, he in sumptuous brocade mantle, she in the voluminous tatters of the aged Celestina, both mantle and rags raised to the waist, the young cavalier’s virile member plunged into the deepest recesses of the novitiate’s soft, plump flesh, fornicating, rolling about, she with pleasure, he with fury, her eyes open, his closed, she taking pleasure and he trying to avoid seeing himself in the floor of mirrors, walls of mirrors, windows of mirrors, door and ceiling of mirrors, face down, refusing to look at himself in the floor, face up, seeing himself in the ceiling, again closing the eyes hidden beneath the mantle, forever condemned to seeing himself — or trying to avoid seeing himself — reproduced a thousand times, making love to the same woman, reproduced infinitely in the reflections of reflections, a heaven, earth, air, fire, north and south, east and west of mirrors, she moaning her unceasing pleasure, hidden fire, pleasurable lesion, savory poison, sweet bitterness, dolorous delight, joyful torment, sweet and savage wound, tender death: sweet love; he, neither wishing nor knowing, repeating the words she spoke.
“With a thorn from the limb of a dragon tree I opened anew her virginity,” said Mother Celestina, “and I lined the mouth of her pleasure with a double row of fishes’ teeth, and placed ground glass deep in her woman’s place, then bathed her mound of Venus with drops of bat’s blood; I restitched her with a thread as fine as a hair from your head, exactly the same, but strong as the strings of a cittern, so the cavalier would believe he was taking her for the first time, believing she was I, an ancient virgin, and the day will come, El Señor, Yer Mercy, when they will not recognize themselves in those mirrors…”
SEVENTH DAY
“Today is the seventh day,” said El Señor. “Will you see again, Ludovico? Will you open your eyes?”
“I have already told you, that depends upon you…”
“And what is it you expect of me?”
Ludovico reached out to touch Celestina. The girl dressed as a page took the blind man’s hand as he began to speak with deliberation. “Twenty years ago chance brought together four men and a woman on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres. At that time you listened to our dreams. You explained to us why they would be impossible. You did not tell us your dream. We could not therefore tell you why it too would be impossible.”
“Do you want me to do that now?”
“Wait, Felipe. You told Pedro that his community of free men would be destroyed, and that in order to survive, its members would be forced to act in the same ways as their oppressors. Freedom would be their goal, but in order to achieve it they would have to employ the methods of tyranny. Therefore, they would never be free.”
“Would that not have been the way? And would that oppression not have been worse than mine, since I have no need to justify my acts in the name of liberty, but they, on the other hand, do? I can be exceptionally benevolent, they cannot. Because no one can demand an accounting of me, I can condone failure; they cannot; they would be condemned by others. If the tyranny of a single man is reprehensible, would the tyranny of many men — who would multiply, never diminish, the oppression of the solitary tyrant — be any different? I am able to judge men remembering that within each breast, as in mine, an angel struggles against a beast; they cannot, for the heresy of liberty is the offspring of the Manichaean heresy, which conceives of all things in irreconcilable terms of good and evil. My enlightened discretion as a despot, Ludovico, is preferable to the deformed libertarian zeal of the mob; their oppression is worse than mine.”
“And you would not allow even one opportunity for Pedro’s dream?”
“Did Pedro’s dream offer a single opportunity to me? Besides, the old man is dead; whether drowned in this world or run through by a lance in the other, the effect is the same.”
“Pedro’s allies are gathered outside your palace. You thought you had rid yourself of his sons by setting your voracious mastiffs on them. But now Pedro has more sons than ever. Your discontented workers. The men of the cities, offended by your capricious decrees. The persecuted races, Moors and Jews, who are as much a part of this Spain as you and I, as Castilian or Aragonese, as Goth, Roman, or Celt. They have been born here, lived and died here; they have left the signs of their labor and their beauty in temples and books. No other land in this old world possesses such a gift: to be the common home of three cultures and three different faiths. Instead of persecuting them and driving them out, search for the way in which they can coexist with Christians, and those three links will form your true fortress.”
“This is my fortress, this palace, constructed as the shrine for the two sacraments which are but one: my power and my faith. I do not wish the chaos, the canker, the Babel you propose to me…”
“Outside the walls of your necropolis and its strict façade of unity, Felipe, another Spain has been gestating, an ancient, new, and varied Spain, the work of many cultures, multiple aspirations, and different readings of a single book.”
“The Book of God can be read only in one manner; any other reading is madness.”
“Without your realizing it, many men, inch by inch, have been gaining their human rights as opposed to your divine right. No, enclosed here, you did not realize that, as you were equally unaware of the emptying of your coffers that forced you to go to the Sevillian moneylender…”
“Not only words and things must coincide: all reading must be the reading of the Divine Word…”
“Be apprised: one city defended the sanctuary it had offered a persecuted man…”
“… for in an ascending scale everything finally flows into one identical being and word: God…”
“Be apprised: another city instituted a tribunal against the royal caprice of one of your ancestors…”
“God. God. The first, the efficient, the final, and the restorative cause for everything that exists.”
“Be apprised: one of the more distant cities began to meet in assemblies of the people in order to debate and vote…”