Then the mouth of the severed head spoke again: “That is what you see, corrupt thing that you are … I painted something different … The sexual act so pure it is a prayer before the eyes of God … The act of the flesh with no remorse or fear of God … The external man cannot stain the man within … Who loves God more? A scorned and subjected people, a people of sinners, of publicans and Samaritans who love their fellow beings? See what I painted … On the left, the original Paradise, when a malevolent God separated man from woman, who previously had been one, the image of the good God, of the supreme androgynous divinity … In the center, Paradise restored by the free spirit of man, without need for God: there is no Original Sin, all flesh is innocent … And now, wretch, look to the right, see the true hell of your own creation…”
And so El Señor, motionless as the victims of the Medusa, looked at the last and third panel of the painting, Hell, conflagration, everything aflame, everything bathed in the color of fire, all of them united once again, Inés is a pig seducing an emaciated Don Juan, the other two youths are crucified, the Idiot upon a harp, the pilgrim upon a rebec, both being devoured by serpents, the Mad Lady, naked, is devoured by a salamander, Isabel stands with a die upon her head, Ludovico hides his face as a hooded demon crouches upon his shoulders, a large clothed and crested bird leads a naked Toribio by the hand, Guzmán, yes, Guzmán is pinned to an overturned gaming table, Barbarica is jigging about holding the great rosy phallus of a bagpipe in her hands, the nuns are noseless monsters with gaping mouths and lidless eyes singing notes they read from a staff imprinted on naked buttocks, the monks peer from beneath the psaltery, Toribio lies naked, torturing himself with the iron crank of a machine, he, he himself, El Señor, is an indescribable monster, a human hare wearing a copper caldron as a crown and seated upon a wooden privy stool devouring men one after the other, then expelling them through the seat of the throne of shit, eliminating them into an excremental well, and at the center of everything is the head, the same head he now held by the hair, the severed head, pale, attached to a broken eggshell, the torso and long legs pure-white bone disappearing into enormous blue boats of shoes, face, egg, leg, visage, ovum, bone the color of an atrocious birch tree petrified in spectral whiteness; and beyond, beyond, the conflagration of the world, a flaming edifice, his palace, his life work, the seat of his power, the fortress of his faith, a holocaust, a ruin, a cloaca …
Choking back a growl, El Señor forcibly closed the mouth of the severed head; the thin lips and ill-shaven cheeks were hard as stone and resisted closing; he covered the eyes of the head with his hand, closed the lids, the eyelids were flaccid and rough like those of a reptile; he hurled the head against the painting, it burst against the steel sphere in the center of the triptych, the icy fountain of eternal youth; it fell, leaving a star of blood upon the painting; and that line of blood, as it trickled down the painting, wrote upon the pigments in small Gothic characters a name El Señor could barely read:
He ran to close the wings of the triptych, to exorcise forever that monstrous vision of life, passion, the Fall, the happiness and death of everything ever conceived or created; intending only to close the wings of the Flemish painting, he found instead his hands were touching a new painting, and this ultimate image was of the entire world, a perfect sphere, transparent and empty, surrounded by water, the first landscape of the earth illuminated only by moonlight, and there God was but an inferior figure relegated to a position outside the world, as if the world had existed before, long before, God, and the Divinity had only recently arrived, rancorously, weakly, slowly, hurriedly, newly arrived; and toward the top of the painting was written in golden letters, Vides hic terram novam: ac caelum novum: novas insulas.
“Oh, my God, honor us, oh, honor us, God, oh, honorus, God, oh, onerous God!” El Señor cried out. “Is this the end of the world? is this the beginning of the world? is this the beginning of the world, or the end of my world?”
THE REBELLION
Most magnificent señores: The affairs of the kingdom become every day more inflammatory, and our enemies are perceiving it. In view of this situation it is our opinion that we must arm ourselves as quickly as possible. First, to castigate tyrants; second, so that we may be secure, where did you find that letter, Catilinón, who gave it to you? what novelty is this that it is not written by hand but in even and freshly inked letters that smear at the touch of my fingers? I intercepted it, Señor Don Guzmán, it came addressed to the Comendador of Calatrava, who is no more, having been run through by the blade of my master Don Juan; I passed myself off as the servant of the Comendador, for it was with great stealth that hurried messengers who arrived on horseback from Avila commended it to me, and so I said to myself, there’s mischief afoot here, and since I cannot enter the King’s presence, I deliver it to you, And above all it is necessary that we all join together to establish order in the badly ordered affairs of these kingdoms, because in the case of such numerous and such important affairs, it is just that they be determined by numerous and most mature counsels,