You cannot speak; the lips of the lady voyager silence yours, and as she kisses you you are repeating her words, unwillingly you repeat: “Make no mistake, señor caballero; it is my voice, and they are your words issuing from your throat and mouth.” You speak in the name of what she, her body resting upon yours, summons. Like her, you are inertia transformed into a conduit for energy; you were found along the road; you had a different destiny; she separates her lips from yours and you feel too-tiny hands upon your features; they seem to be drawing, tracing, the contours of the face that belongs to you but which you have never seen. The fingers are minuscule, but heavy and rough. They seem to hold colors and stones and feathers that they arrange upon your face, as your former face disappears with every stroke of those moist fingertips. The fingernails scrape against your teeth as if filing them. The plump palms pass through your hair, as if spreading a dye, and as they touch your cheeks, those tiny hands create a beard light as a canary’s plumage; surprised, you rub your jaw. Those strange fingers, so removed from the voice of the woman who seems remote from it, work upon your former skin, and suddenly the monotonous and changeless rhythm of the drum ceases, only the wail trapped behind the clenched lips of the captive Moslem can be heard; then that chant, too, dies. She warned you; in the silence you can hear your hair and fingernails growing, your features changing; the tutelary lines of your palms are erased, rerouted, reborn.
“My husband’s body is mine only in the realm of thought; I give it to you, señor caballero, for you to inhabit, not in the name of my love, but of our power. Such is my offering. You can neither reject it nor make an offering in return.”
You are immersed in something you can only call nothingness. In spite of it all, the drum had been a message from the external world, a thread to rescue you from the impenetrable darkness of the carriage; similarly, so was the dislocated Moorish chant seeking flight toward sacred Mecca. The drum was: the beating of a heart (professionless, possessionless señor caballero). The drum was: the heart of death (Didn’t I tell you, señor caballero, that Dr. Pedro del Agua extracted all the viscera except the heart?). You were listening all the time, not realizing; and once you realize what you are hearing, it is too late; its unaccustomed sound is replaced by tumultuous presences. Then: pandemonium, babel, clamor, hullabaloo, brouhaha: for the first time since you were thrown inside it — you know neither how nor where, such was the combined menace of the beggars and the halberdiers — the carriage stops.
The door of the carriage opens, or rather, light in a riot of white blades pierces the carriage and a woman’s loud wail is heard over the shouts of the crowd and the jabbering gibberish of the astonished halberdiers, who whirl in their tracks, weapons in hand, not knowing whom to attack or whom to defend but instinctively alerted to a danger which because it is intangible is all the more menacing; over the noise of the monks, as incredulous as astounded, running toward the carriage, flapping like windmills in the wind; over the babble of deceitful ladies-in-waiting, who forgetting to maintain their fragile disguises drop their perukes and raise their skirts to reveal twisted, hairy legs; over the song of the beggars, who kneeling around the carriage sing the Alabado, praise to the Sacrament, for as the beggars are always closest to the funeral coach they are the first to see the miracle; and over the finally released shouts of the Arab, who had restrained his song: at last, the soul is One, One is the soul, the ancient Averroës died, but not his science! and over the sound of the Moorish woman, who hides her unveiled face with her hands and croons: the hearts of the fallen reveal a great marvel, to Spain and her realms has come a great evil; the Jews, more circumspect, murmur among themselves: sephirot, sephirot, All emanates from All, and All emanates from One, thirty and two are the roads to Adonai, One is the God, but three are the mothers who give birth to the emanations, three mothers and seven doubles: the Cabala spoke, and hearing them the delirious preceptor monk cried out, I was right, I was right, the Judaizing reverted pig slipped through my thin fingers, he climbed upon the royal carriage, he bewitched Our Most High Queen, he made her prisoner of his philosophy of transformations while I wished to make him prisoner of our truth of unity, the Infidel transformed himself into a snake and a bird, a unicorn and a cadaver, for the Christian is but an image of the Creator who is One and although the Christian be born, suffer, and die he is always one, one, one, not two, not three, not seven, but one, and scullions drop the rotted hares and run to hide among the squat bushes beside the mountain road, and notables tumble from litters suddenly abandoned by bearers, and clay jars break shattered upon rocks, for here all is confusion and babble and buzz and beside you in the carriage a bundle whitened by the glaring sun of this summer afternoon trembles and hides her face behind a cascade of rags, helped by a chubby-cheeked dwarf who watches you through acrid, puffy eyes, smiling a toothless smile.
The woman orders with a new waiclass="underline" “Take him! Don’t let him escape!”
For you have leapt from the carriage, poor wretch, searching for the gray eyes of the drummer amid the throng of terrified servitors, who look as if they were participating in a hecatomb. Finally the halberdiers find an outlet for their energies and, deathly afraid, prepare to detain you: the miracle glows in the innocence of their eyes. They have not known what to do; they sniffed danger, they heard the woman’s voice; they were grateful for the ferociously shouted order; they prepared to fulfill it; but when they saw you they hesitated, dumfounded, as if you were untouchable; only a new order from the woman traveling in the leather carriage has impelled them, terrified, to seize you.
You do not resist. Returning your gaze, you have just seen the only serene eyes in this cortege of madmen. You ignore the beggars who are beginning to kneel around you, trembling, heads lowered, stretching out their hands to touch you as they would a saint, murmuring words soliciting your favor: the same beggars who shortly before wanted to beat you to death in order to steal any remains from your shipwreck.
Two maids lift the woman wrapped as always in the rags hiding her face, and lead her thus veiled to the funeral carriage. The dwarf descends from the leather carriage, tripping and stumbling; she wears a dress of red brocade much too large for her, sleeves turned up, skirts caught up in a thick roll about her waist. The throngs of servants and companions open a respectful path to the invalid and the dwarf; you trail behind them, receiving no such respect.
They pause beside the black coach. A horrendous silence descends. The maids assist their bundle, helping her approach the glass of the coffin fastened to the coach floor. Fleetingly, two slits of eyes glisten through the rags, but now the woman does not cry out. Following the silence there is an incredulous exclamation, and as the beggars had done before, all those present fall to their knees around the funeral coach. They have all seen the same thing. A corpse dressed in the clothing you wore this morning when the waves tossed you upon the shores of the Cabo de los Desastres, clothing that would be unremarkable were it not that it had been ravaged by fire and sea and sand; they say the tattered dun breeches and strawberry-colored doublet cling, still damp, to the dead flesh resting in the coffin of black silk, cushioned, decorated around all four sides with black brocade flowers, beneath a carapace of glass. And upon the face (is the face the same face?) a cloth or mask of garnet and yellow and green and blue feathers; and in the place of the mouth, a circle of spiders. The broken arrows that form the nervure of the mask rest upon the neck, temples, and the forehead of the cadaver no longer that of the Very High Prince and Lord dragged from monastery to monastery by his widow: formerly only the beggars and captives had seen this miracle, now the courtiers and servants of the lady traveler also see it.