You curb the anguish in your voice. “We’re in the dark. How do you know?”
“Only in darkness can I see myself in these mirrors,” she replies, her voice as serene as yours is altered. “Didn’t you yourself, as you opened the door, see me in this same darkness? Didn’t you see my eyes and my lips?”
She moves close to you. She smells of clove, of pepper, and aloes. She speaks into your ear: “Aren’t you tired, Pilgrim? You have traveled far since you fell from the bridge that afternoon and were lost in the waters that tossed you onto the shore of the Cabo…”
You seize her shoulder, you hold her away from you. “That isn’t true, I’ve been shut up here, I haven’t left this place, I haven’t opened my windows since summer, you are telling me things I’ve read in the chronicles and manuscripts and folios I have here in this cabinet, you’ve read the same things as I, the same novel, I’ve not moved from here…”
“Why not believe the opposite?” she asks after kissing your cheek. “Why not believe that we two have lived the same things, and that the papers written by Brother Julián and the Chronicler give testimony to our lives?”
“When? When?”
She places her hand beneath the cloth of your caftan, she caresses your chest. “During the six and a half months that passed between your fall into the river and our meeting here, tonight…”
Lifeless, you surrender, your head touches hers. “There wasn’t time … All that happened centuries ago … These are very ancient chronicles … It is impossible…”
Then she kisses you, full upon the lips; moistly, deeply, long: the kiss itself is another measure of time, a minute that is a century, an instant that is an epoch, interminable kiss, fleeting kiss, the tattooed lips, the long narrow tongue, the palate bursting with sweet pleasure, you remember, you remember, every moment of the prolongation of that kiss is a new memory, Ludovico, Ludovico, we all dreamed of a second opportunity to relive our lives, a second opportunity, to choose again, to avoid the mistakes, to repair the omissions, to offer the hand we did not extend the first time, to sacrifice to pleasure the day we had before dedicated to ambition, to give a second chance to all that could not be, to all that waited, latent, for the seed to die so the plant could germinate, the coincidence of two separate times in one exhausted space, several lifetimes are needed to integrate a personality and fulfill a destiny, the immortals had more life than their own deaths, but less time than their own lives …
You are delirious; you feel you have been transported to the Theater of Memory in the house between the Canal of San Barnaba and the Campo Santa Margherita; you draw away from the kiss of the girl with tattooed lips; you are filled with memories, Celestina has transmitted to you the memory that was passed to her by the Devil disguised as God, by God disguised as the Devil, you draw away with repugnance, you remember, you did not read it, you lived it, you lived it during the last one hundred and ninety-five days of the last year of the last century, during the past five thousand hours: there will be no more life: history has had its second chance, Spain’s past was revived in order to choose again, a few places changed, a few names, three persons were fused into two, and two into one, but that was alclass="underline" differences of shading, unimportant distinctions, history repeated itself, history was the same, its axis the necropolis, its root madness, its result crime, its salvation, as Brother Julián had written, a few beautiful buildings and a few elusive words. History was the same: tragedy then and farce now, farce first and then tragedy, you no longer know, it no longer matters, everything has ended, it was all a lie, the same crimes were repeated, the same errors, the same madness, the same omissions as on any other of the true days of that linear, implacable, exhaustible chronology: 1492, 1521, 1598 …
The violence of a warrior. The acclivity of a saint. The nausea of an ill man. You feel all this in your body. Celestina caresses you, calms you, embraces you, leads you to your bedroom, tells you, yes, what you remember is true, what you do not remember also, the curse of Caesar and the salvation of Christ are inextricably blended, the elect were not one, as God and the King desired, or two, as all rival brothers feared, or three, as Ludovico and the ancient dreamed in the beautiful Synagogue of the Passing in Toledo; each and all were the elect, all the children born here, all bearers of the same signs, the cross and the six toes, all usurpers, all bastards, all anointed, all saviors, all led, scarcely born, to the extermination chambers in Saint-Sulpice, all children of the total past of man, all fertilized by a transposition of ancient semen from the deserts of Palestine, the streets of Alexandria, the devastated hearth of the astute son of Sisyphus, the beaches of Spalato, the stone squares of Venice, the funereal palace on the Castilian plain, the jungles and pyramids and volcanoes of the new world; first the children died, and then the women, the men, only at the end, with no opportunity for fecundation, and last of all, the executioners, with no one to kill, except themselves …
“Night and fog. The final solution. What tragic jest is this, Celestina? Did everyone have to die before the executioners could finally die? I…”
“Here. Take the mask of the jungle.”
“But the dogma, Celestina, I heard it every day during the processions, anathema, anathematized be those who believe in a resurrection different from that of the body we possessed in life.”
“Your body, my love…”
“I don’t understand…”
“The dogma was proclaimed so that heresy would flower, ever more deeply rooted; all things are transformed, all bodies are their metamorphoses, all souls are their transmigrations … Take the mask, quickly…”
“They accept nothing from women, that’s what the patron of the Café Le Bouquet said to his wife; the penitents accept nothing from women; woman is blemished, she is bloody, she is the vessel of the Devil…”
“Only persecuted and in secret am I able to perform my role; forgive me, I am of little worth; consecrated, I am as cruel as my persecutors; condemned, I maintain the flame of forgotten wisdom. I had to survive. The mask, quickly, we have very little time…”
In the darkness you touch Celestina’s face. It is covered by another mask of feathers, dead spiders, darts …
“You’re wearing it…”
“I am wearing mine, you must wear yours, quickly…”
“Yours … Mine is here, beneath my pillow. But yours, where…?”
“Do you remember a shop window, an antique shop, on the rue Jacob? I broke in. I stole it. How did it get there? I do not know. Put on your mask, and I mine. Identical. Quickly. There is no time. There is no time. What time is it?”
Out of the corner of your eye you glance at the alarm clock on the night table; its phosphorescent hands and numbers indicate three minutes before midnight.
You wish to dispel the mists of vertiginous necromancy that overwhelm you, effacing all sense of internal or external equilibrium; the woman smells of clove, of pepper, and aloes. “Almost midnight. We need twelve grapes. I’m sorry not to be able to offer you champagne. There’s no room service. What shall we sing? Las Golondrinas? Auld Lang Syne?”
You laughed: New Year’s Eve in Paris, without champagne. What a laugh, what truth, what salvation!
“Don’t you think that’s funny? Where’s your sense of humor?”
“Quickly, there is no time.”
“Then what has passed?”
Celestina is silent for an instant. Then she says: “Ludovico and Simón died at five minutes before midnight. They were the last. The student killed the monk. Then he killed himself. I want you to understand: we were not the executioners. We escaped them because we never looked at them. They believed we were phantoms; they looked at us, not we at them. We survived so we could come to you. You are right: the executioners never knew about you. I protected you. I brought you food every day. It has been months since anyone lived in this hotel. Ludovico and Simón died when they fulfilled their mission: to leave me here with you. There will be no more bodies in the naves of Saint-Sulpice. Quickly, we must don the masks.”