“Fragoso, good Fragoso, my beast,” he murmured into the silky ear. “Smell the master’s clothing, smell it well, that’s a boy. Go get him, Fragoso, go at him, boy.” Guzmán stimulated the dog, stroking its testicles and penis, and then unleashed him, directing him at the bed, where he leaped upon the person sleeping there drugged by the heavy vapors of the mandrake. Seated upon his Liege’s wrinkled clothing in the curule chair, Guzmán observed the spectacle, laughing, master of El Señor’s infinite dream.
“I know perfectly how to cure the dogs, but not El Señor. But what are your miserable amulets, Master Felipe, compared to my ointments of excrement and hog fat. When the hour arrives, you will not be able to save yourself, my fine Prince.”
Then he looked at the crouching, suffering, confused, and resentful Bocanegra and said: “I know you, brute, and I know that you know me. You alone know what I really think, what I do, and what I plan to do. El Señor has no more faithful ally than you. Sad that you can do nothing to tell your master all you see and hear, what only you know; too bad, poor unhappy Bocanegra. Yes, we are rivals. Guard yourself well from me, for I know how to defend myself from you. You have the weapons, although not the voice, to be a menace to me. I, to combat you, have both weapons and voice.”
In the depths of the walled valley, accompanied by a youth and an ancient, El Señor murmured prayers in which he asked three things: a brief life, an unchanging world, and eternal glory.
JUAN AGRIPPA
Enclosed; condemned to hear the sounds; every day, one day after another, the expected sounds, the day filled to overflowing with repetitious sounds that paralyzed every action except waiting and listening; the yearning for the exception, the accident of chance that would interrupt the monotony of the established sounds: matins, the cock’s crow, the hammer, the wheels of the oxcarts coming from Burgo de Osuna, the smith’s bellows, the shouts of the supervisors, the laughter of the water carriers, crackling fires in the taverns, deliveries of bales of hay and straw, the murmur of the looms, the screech of slate in the quarries, the hollow sound of tiles being broken and fitted, the barking of dogs, the wings of the hawk in flight, the cautious footsteps of Guzmán, the monotonous chant of El Señor’s prayers, the orotund pealing of the evening bells. This is the accustomed, through every repetitious day; this is the first thing she would wish to interrupt, to disturb; but she comes to fear more the shock of an unexpected sound; the succession of known sounds is preferable; one can wait without waiting.
La Señora wept throughout the night; not from grief, that she would have rejected as unseemly, nor for a humiliation that she would know how to disguise with an exaggerated dignity of external bearing.
“He has been condemned. He will be burned alive beside the palace stables,” Guzmán told her.
Slowly and with sensual pleasure, La Señora looked around the isolated luxury of her bedchamber, decorated from the beginning to contrast with the mystic austerity her husband had desired — and achieved. This corner of Arabia decorated in secret by La Señora with the help of Guzmán and the painter-priest Julián was far, still very far, from her ultimate aspiration: re-creating a Court of Love like the celebrated courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Poitiers and the gallant fairs celebrated in Treviso, the court of joy and solace where a Castle of Love had been defended by noble ladies against the assault of the rival bands of noblemen of Padua and Venice, the former dressed completely in black and the Venetians completely in white. But today in this chamber redolent of Chinese ginger, carnation, pepper, camphor, and musk, a major accouterment of pleasure was missing. La Señora accepted as the flaw in the luxury that, in order to maintain it, in order to dwell in it, from time to time it was necessary to abandon it, to summon the black bearers, climb into the heavily perfumed and curtained palanquin, position the falcon on her gauntleted wrist, and travel the desert, coastal, and mountain roads seeking the reborn prisoner; without him the luxuries of the bedchamber were but theatrical trappings, a dimensionless curtain, like the silken and gold veil that had belonged to the Caliph of Córdoba, Hisham II, and now adorned one wall of her chamber. Quite different destinies, in truth, thought La Señora: hers and that of her accursed mother-in-law, El Señor’s mother; for while the one wandered hazardous roads searching for a renewed lover, the other wandered the same roads bearing the everlasting cadaver of an eternal lover.
Brother Julián, the palace iconographer, had endured many wakeful nights delicately tracing with minute brushstrokes on porcelain brooches the figure and place dreamed by La Señora: the place, the coast of the Cabo de los Desastres; the figure, a young man lying face down on the beach, naked, with a blood-red cross between his shoulder blades. Brother Julián was grateful for the potions of belladonna that La Señora furnished him to maintain his condition — lucid and dreamy, absent and present, remote and near, participant in the dream and the dream’s faithful executor — while the monk’s pale hand re-created the material lines of the dream fantasies communicated to him by La Señora. Looking at the drawing, the mistress kept to herself the ultimate meaning of the painter’s art: the identity. Brother Julián, in his drugged trance, added minuscule details to the drawing, the six toes on each foot, for example, of the man presumed to be the victim of a shipwreck.
“Hexadigitalism is the privilege of those destined to renew their family bloodlines. Believe me, Señora, the sterility of your union is not your fault but the tariff accumulated by the family of El Señor, who, remember, is your second cousin. If you trace back a strict dynastic line, you will see that your common ancestors are reduced to a very small number. Every living man carries within himself thirty phantoms; such is the extant relationship between the living and the dead. Your line, Señora, goes back to only a half dozen incestuous brothers and sisters living for centuries in the promiscuous isolation of their castles, avoiding all contact with the mob and their pestilential menace; isolated, telling you the ancient stories of the birth, passion, and death of Kings. What is certain is that the price of extreme consanguinity as well as the excesses of extreme fertility are in the end enemies to dynastic continuity. Cambyses, King of Persia, married his sister Meroë and when she was carrying his child killed her by kicking her in the belly. See in this crime the ultimate in certain sibling relationships. And on the other hand, twins — a form of pregnancy as superfluous as redundant — have killed three great dynasties, those of the Caesars, the Antonines, and the Carolingians. Renew the bloodlines, Señora, seek neither sterile incest nor prolific births but love and its customs, which are the ways of passion that engender beauty and precision. Enough, Señora, of this attempt to deceive your subjects: the familiar public announcement of your pregnancy, hoping to attenuate the expectation of an heir, merely forces you to pretense: you must stuff your farthingale with pillows and imitate a condition that is not yours; then follows the equally familiar announcement of a miscarriage. Frustrated hopes are often converted into irritation, if not into open rebellion. El Señor, and you also, Señora, are beginning to suffer excessively for past legitimizations, for in our world custom makes law and a twice-repeated event becomes a custom. The rights of your dominion must be exercised continually or they will be lost. El Señor is no longer seen to wage war, to subdue, with the spilling of blood, any to whom it might have occurred to spill the blood of the powerful. And you are not seen to produce heirs. You must be cautious. Allay their discontent with one theatrical blow: fulfill their hopes by producing a son. You are the daughter of the happy English isle, Anglia plena jocis, and naturally you are unsuited to this Castilian severity. Wager everything on pleasure; combine it, Señora, with duty and you will win all the games. You may rely on me, whatever you decide; the only proof of paternity will be the features of El Señor that I introduce upon the seals, miniatures, medallions, and portraits that will be the representation of your son for the multitude and for posterity. I cannot change an infant’s features, but I can emphasize in my icons the hereditary features of the supposed father, our Señor; I can erase the real features, whether they be those of one of your black bearers, of some common construction supervisor, or of the poor youth, your latest lover, condemned to die at the stake. And let us give thanks to God that he is dying for the secondary and not the principal crime. But to return to our concern: the populace will know the face of your son only through the coins bearing the effigy I have designed that are minted and circulated in our kingdoms; the ordinary citizen will never have occasion to compare the engraved image with the real face; he will never see your infant except from a distance, when you deign to display him from some high, remote balcony; and history will know only the effigy that I, following your will, leave to it. For, no matter how beautiful your offspring, I shall charge myself to mark upon his face the stigmata of this house: prognathism.”