Pollo and his employers reached the corner of the Deux-Magots and there, according to agreement, Madame handed the basket to her husband.
“You go on, now,” he said to his wife. “You know they won’t accept anything from a woman.”
Madame faded into the crowd, not without first musing: “Something new every day. Life is wonderful these days.”
Pollo and the patron walked toward the double circle of silent pilgrims, who were beginning to disrobe, and as the two men approached with the basket, those nearest looked at each other without speaking; they suppressed an exclamation, probably joy, and fell to their knees; with humility, heads bowed before their two providers, each took a piece of bread, a piece of cheese, and an artichoke, and still kneeling, heads still bowed, and with sacramental piety, broke the bread, savored the cheese, and peeled the artichoke, as if these were primary and at the same time ultimate acts, as if they were both remembering and foreseeing the basic act of eating, as if they wished never to forget it, wished to inscribe it upon the instincts of future generations (Pollo Anthropologist). They ate with increasing haste, for now, whip in hand, a Monk advanced toward them from the center of the circle. Again bowing their heads before Pollo and the patron, the pilgrims finished removing their clothes, until, like all the other men, boys, and children who formed the double circle, they were clad only in tight jute skirts falling from waist to ankles.
In the center of the double circle the Monk cracked his whip and the pilgrims in the first circle, the internal one, fell, one after another in slow succession, arms spread, face down upon the ground. The impatient, distracted, and excited murmurs of the crowd diminished. Now every man and boy and child standing behind those who had prostrated themselves stepped over one of the prone bodies, dragging their whips across them. But not everyone in the enormous circle lay flat, with arms outstretched. Some had adopted grotesque postures, and Pollo Catechist, as he glanced around the circle, could repeat, almost ritually (for haven’t we been educated to know that every sin contains its own punishment?), the cardinal expiations demanded by fists clutched in rage, an avariciously grasping hand, those bodies sprawled in green isolation, the unrestrainedly plunging buttocks, the stuffed bellies bared to the sun, lolling heads propped upon lifeless hands, the prideful poses of disdain and self-esteem, the gross mouths, the greedy eyes.
As the Monk walked toward the penitents, a blanket of silence descended over the crowd: the whip cracked first in the air and then against those fists and hands and buttocks and bellies and heads and eyes and mouths. Almost all choked back their cries. One sobbed. And with every whiplash the Monk repeated the formula: “Rise, for the honor of sainted martyrdom. Whoever say or believe that the body will arise in the form of a sphere, with no resemblance to the human body, be he anathematized…”
And he repeated the formula as he stopped only a step away from Pollo before an old man clenching and unclenching his fists, an old man whose stooped shoulders were covered with gray hair. With every blow on the penitent’s livid hands, our young and beautiful friend shivered and bit his lips; he felt that everyone in the dense crowd was shivering and biting his lips, and that, like him, they had eyes for nothing but the Monk’s whip and the old man’s flailed hands. Yet a force stronger than Pollo made him look up. And as he looked, he met the Monk’s eyes. Dark. Lost in the depths of his hood. An expressionless gaze in a colorless face.
For the last time the Monk lashed the clenched hands of the old man so visibly containing his fury, and repeated the formula, staring directly at Pollo. Pollo no longer heard the words; he heard only a breathless, timbreless voice, as if the Monk were forever doomed to that breathless panting. The Monk turned his back to Pollo and returned to the center of the circle.
The first act had ended; a noisy roar surged from the throats of the crowd: old women clicked their needles, men shouted, children agitated the branches of the plane trees where they perched. The same Police Inspector, lantern held high, continued his pursuit of the fugitive through the rat-infested labyrinths of black water. In her shadowy room, the courtesan coughed. The thin and febrile young man clenched his fist in desperation: the wild-ass skin had disappeared completely from the palm of his hand, as life flowed from his liquid gaze. A new whiplash, a new silence. The penitents rose to their feet. In his hand each held a whip, a cruel instrument ending in six iron-tipped thongs. The Monk intoned a hymn: Pollo could scarcely hear the first words: “Nec in aerea vel qualibet alia carne ut quidam delirant surrecturos nos credimus, sed in ista, qua vivimus, consistimus et movemur.”
The initial words of the celebrant were expected; whether thirty-three days and twelve hours old or new, never heard or ancient, they were received with the same amazement, bathed in the same aura, as when this hooded man had first sung them, standing in the center of the double circle of penitents lines up before the Church of Saint-Germain. It seems that on that extremely distant occasion the spectators had stood in silence until the end of the hymn and then had run to buy all the Latin textbooks in the Quarter’s bookstores, for the most informed among them barely knew that Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. But now, as if they all knew somehow that the opportunities for the purely oral excitement of every performance would necessarily become fewer, or at least less exalting, the crowd immediately erupted into shouting and weeping as the Monk chanted the first words.
This echoing wail, this long loud lament was passed from voice to voice, it died out on one corner, was resuscitated at the next, was muffled in a pair of hands, and recovered between breaths … It was one vast onomatopoetic bell, prayer, poem, chant … a sob in the desert, a howl in the jungle. As they chanted, the penitents looked to the heavens; the Monk exhorted them to prayer, to piety, and warned against the terror of the days to come; whips snapped against naked shoulders with a rhythmical crack interrupted only when a metal point dug into a penitent’s flesh, as now happened to the young man whose flying hair formed a black aureole against the sun, who yelled above the anticipated howl of the crowd, the moaning of his companions, and the chanting of the Monk. Added to the crack of leather against skin was the tearing of metal upon flesh, and this robust young man, trapped in the perpetual rhythmic, circular movement of the flagellants, struggled to remove the iron dart from his thigh; gouts of blood stained the paving stones of the atrium; and at that moment Pollo thought the young man’s skin was not actually dark but greenish, swollen, and inflamed. He saw a flash of agony in the protruding green eyes of the wounded flagellant, whose olive-colored forehead was as hard as a breastplate, crisscrossed with throbbing veins and trickles of cold sweat.
The news of the self-flagellation spread from mouth to mouth until it exploded into a moving ovation, a blend of compassion and delight. Pollo turned away from the spectacle and walked toward the Place Furstenberg, opening a path through the crowd with the posters that were his breastplate, the sails of his useless windmill. And as he walked away from the abbey that was also the tomb of the Merovingian kings, that had been burned by the Normans, reconstructed by Louis VII, and consecrated by Pope Alexander III, it was too late to see the flagellant’s arms reaching out to him, as he muttered through clenched teeth in a Spanish-accented French: “I am Ludovico. I wrote you. Didn’t you receive my letter? Don’t you remember me?”