CONFESSIONS OF A CONFESSOR
Up to now, Julián said to the Chronicler, that is what I know. No one knows the things I know, or knows things I do not know. I have been confessor to them all; believe only my version of events; listen to no other possible narrators. Celestina believed she knew everything and told everything, because with her lips she inherited memory and through them she thinks to transmit it. But she did not hear El Señor’s daily confession before taking Communion, the details of the vanquished illusions of youth, the meaning of his penances in the chapel, his ascent up the stairway leading to the plain, the defiance of his listing of heresies, his relationship with our Señora, or his late passion for Inés. Furthermore, I heard the confessions of the Mad Lady, those of nuns and scrubbing maids; those of the Idiot and the dwarf before they were joined in matrimony and with my benediction wed; and those of the workmen. I heard Guzmán’s confession; and if he believes that, in fleeing in search of the new world, he will leave behind the memory of his guilt, a great frustration awaits him. And I heard, my friend Chronicler, Ludovico’s and Celestina’s relations in El Señor’s bedchamber: only I know the passageway that leads to the wall where hangs the King’s ocher map; I pierced holes for my eyes and ears in the eyes of the Neptune that adorns it. Everyone who spoke there, everyone who thought aloud there, everyone who acted there, everyone who listened or was listened to there, gave me their secret voices, as I lent them my penitent ear, for often the confessor suffers more than the one who confesses; he relieves himself of a burden and the confessor assumes it.
Therefore, give no attention or credence to what others tell you, Julián continued, nor hold any faith in the simple and deceitful chronologies that are written about this epoch in an attempt to establish the logic of a perishable and linear history; true history is circular and eternal. You have seen: when she found him on the beach, the young Celestina did not tell all the truth to the pilgrim of the new world, so as not to distract him from his central purpose, which was to narrate before El Señor the dreamed existence of an unknown land beyond the sea; and even less, much less, was La Señora able to tell all the truth to the castaway called Juan when she took him to her bedchamber and there made love with him with such intense fury. How could Guzmán tell anyone except me — as the fires of the secret seal my lips — of his turbulent acts, the debates within his soul, and the designs of his life? who but I could know, and keep secret, the ignominy of his drugging El Señor and setting the dogs on him?; he conceived of regicide, but he opted to kill our Señor not with a dagger, not with philters of lunacy, but by making potent his impotence, leading him step by step: the shattered mirror restored, pitchers filled after they were emptied, candles that grew taller as they were burned, the howling of the phantasmal dog, the commotion of the nuns in the chapel, Bocanegra’s death, the impossible passion with Inés, always greater and greater confrontations with what cannot be.