Thrice he struck himself upon the breast and the mastiff growled uneasily. Blows and growls echo hollowly against the arches, walls, and bare floors. El Señor, coughing, wrapped himself in his cape and repeated the three anathemas.
The painting: The eyes are not directed toward Heaven. Cruel, or elusive, bearing the secret of a different sign, too close or too distant to what they seemed to observe, not visionary as one might expect, not generous, not inclined to sacrifice, unaware of the fatal denouement of the legend, sensual eyes, yes; eyes for the earth, not for Heaven? These eyes stare at the naked men and they are staring too low.
Hidden behind a column in the crypt, Guzmán could have said what El Señor was thinking as he beat his breast; he was thinking he shouldn’t be kneeling there examining a painting in order to examine his own conscience, he should be actively employed in hastening the construction that, for one reason or another, was unduly behind schedule. The various processions ordered by El Señor were on the road; the scouts and messengers had reported seeing them approaching the palace, dragging their heavy burdens over bare mountains and wooded mountains, along the coastal roads, stopping at inns, sheltered among the pines, abandoned in mastic-tree thickets, mired down along the highways, but advancing inexorably toward the place appointed by El Señor: the mausoleum of the palace. And here was El Señor, with eyes and energy only for the supposed mystery of an Italian painting.
Even the growling of the dog Bocanegra could be interpreted as a reproach against its master. Hadn’t it been he who had dictated unequivocally: Construct with all haste?
The palace: Above and outside on the vast surrounding plain, blocks of granite were piled high. Sixty master quarriers were working the marble, and oxcarts laden with new stones were arriving every moment. Masons, carpenters, smiths, weavers, goldsmiths, and woodworkers had set up their workshops, their taverns, and their huts on the flat field beneath the burning sun, while the original constructions were being raised beside the chestnut grove, the last refuge on plains and mountains devastated by the fury and urgency of building this edifice ordered by El Señor Don Felipe upon his return from the victory against the heretics of Flanders: the ax had felled forever the pine groves that had been intended to shelter the palace against the extremities of summer and winter. It’s true, thought Guzmán, that El Señor had said, “The woods will guard against the cold northerly winds of winter, and zephyrs and west winds will cool us in summer.” But even more true was the fact that today the stripped lands could offer neither; the good intentions of El Señor and the exigencies of construction had not been compatible. And El Señor, always enclosed in the crypt, was unaware of what had happened.
El Señor coughed; his nose and throat felt very dry. He resisted the temptation to seek a glass of water from the room beside the chapel, preferring to discipline himself, fingering the leather pouch filled with holy relics he wore tied about his neck. And his thirst was soothed by the thought, constantly in his mind, that behind every immediate material expenditure lay the inexhaustible riches of eternal life; he was constructing for the future, yes, but also for salvation, and salvation knows no time; salvation is not just an idea, he murmured, it is another place, the life eternal we must all attain, for men’s lives cannot be counted by years but by virtues, and in the next life white hairs do not crown the head of he who has lived longest but he who has lived best; yes, the life eternal that we must all attain, but also an eternity that is mine by both natural and divine right. It is a very small thing to leave behind some tangible evidence of that certainty, this palace dedicated to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.
“For doesn’t everything testify that eternal life will be mine, my imperfections, but also my persistence by word and deed in being pardoned, the discipline I impose upon myself, rejecting all indulgence of the senses, war, hunt, falconry, carnal love, as well as the construction of the fortress for the Eucharist? I concede my sins, but with greater devotion I concede that he who is not mortified cannot be a Christian Prince, but I know that frailties, expunged with penitence, do not arouse God’s ire, not even their memory. Will the life eternal be denied to him who not only fulfills the penitences of all men but who also, because he is the Prince, would deprive his subjects of all hope if in spite of everything he were condemned at the final judgment?”
To know this (he said to himself; or the vassal who was observing him said it for him) was almost to know himself immortal. El Señor rejected this arrogant notion; he looked at the disquieting eyes of that Christ without a halo and murmured: “Confitemur fieri resurrectionem carnis omnis mortuorum.”
The painting: The Christ without a halo, standing in the angle formed by the temple walls, looks at the naked men whose backs are turned to the viewer. The arcades of the vast, clean, open piazza are contemporary, characteristic of the new airy architecture of the Italian peninsula; the diligent eye might note small flaws in the painted marble floor, minute cracks, scratches, shoots, and sprouts of grass; the piazza is of the age. But from what age are the scenes in a background lost in the distance of deep perspectives and echoing a remote chorus to the protagonists on the proscenium of this sacred theater — a Christ without an aureole, and a group of naked men? Minute, remote scenes, lost in time, the profound perspectives of this painted space distance those scenes, convert them into remote time.
El Señor flung himself upon the polished granite floor, his arms spread in a cross; and on the back of his cape the yellow embroidered cross recaptured what little luminosity was shed by an altar intricately carved and ornamented to house the monstrance from which this isolated light originates; light shimmers on a jasper plinth shot with golden veins, on columns so fine and hard that no tool, not even the best-tempered steel, had been found that could cut them; they had been cut and polished with diamonds. El Señor’s forehead was resting on an icy floor which, like the light, seemed enormously remote from the parched ground and all-pervasive sun overhead; above this crypt and chapel lay dry dust as hot as ashes. At the far end of the extensive sacred space, an uncompleted stairway began an ascent that was to lead to the burning plain overhead. His head pressed against cold granite, feverish images El Señor preferred to forget raced through his mind. And he did forget them, by contemplating the unfinished stairway behind him, and thinking about his immediate duty: to bring this construction to a conclusion, but to avoid the Greek arrogance of an Alexander who ordered that Mount Athos be cut and carved in his own image; here, in Spanish mansions imitating those of Heaven, day and night the same, one might continually engage in the occupation of angels, with continuous prayers one might pray for the health of Princes, the conservation of their estates, one might mitigate divine ire and justly deserved rage against the sins of man; such, in this hour, was the supplication of El Señor, for his mind could not conceive of separation between religious and political affairs, knowing as he did that of all the virtues that regulate human actions the queen of all is prudence; and that among the varieties of prudence, the one that best serves a Prince is politics: St. Basil laments that some defame politics under the improper appellations of artifice and cunning, and never perceive that acts of cunning and of artifice are daughters of the deadly prudence of the flesh, not of the spirit, for from spiritual prudence derives the life and peace of kingdoms. To this peace, now — the cunning of his youth, the artifices of the flesh, the simulations of war, behind him — El Señor aspired in his humble prayer. And what better mark of the union of prudence and politics than to construct a monument, which means, after all, “something to remind”; monumentum dicitur, eo quod moneat mentem? according to the words of St. Augustine. And this being so, can there be any true monument that does not convert political prudence into religious glory, since no man who takes counsel in this life loses the eternal?