The candles sputtered, and incense suffused the crypt; El Señor gazed with passion, anxiety, doubt, and surrender at the principal figure of the painting brought from Orvieto, and to that figure he directed his prayers: “Liberate me, God, from vain complacency and hidden pride, from exaggerated pentitence, and from imaginary visions and false revelations. How may I distinguish the true interior voices, which are those of God, the supernatural and divine ecstasy and raptures in which a loving God communicates with my soul, from the methods of the Devil, who, in simian imitation of the works of God, attempts to counterfeit and mimic them? Let not my soul be deceived by imagining that God speaks to me and offers me visions when it is not God speaking but my own spirit and fevered imagination. I reject, I reject the hidden satisfaction and somber pride that leads me to believe that God is speaking to me; I accept that the Devil has feigned these raptures and ecstasies, that he has caused visions to appear to me, that he has taken advantage of the fact that my mind is but weak clay, and that if Your Majesty permits he may transform himself into the Angel of Light, appear even in the form of Jesus Christ himself. But then, oh, my God, how shall I distinguish the voices of the Creator from the voices of His Child, and these voices from the speech of the Devil we all bear within us because of the Fall of our first father, Adam? How? How? What does the doctrine offer to enable us to avoid that the moment of communication with God be converted into communication with the Devil? How do I distinguish Your visions from mine, and both of these from those of Lucifer? And how do I know whether I should accept, and suffer, and understand the Devil’s visions, his demoniac fantasies, since you have permitted them, and for some reason from Your High Omnipotence you permit the Devil to act instead of crushing him forever beneath your Divine Foot? How am I to know?”
Dragging his body forward, he approached the altar, his arms still spread in a cross; with bloodless fingers he touched the great painting; his flattened fingertips traced the outlines of the figure of the Christ without a halo preaching to the naked men in the corner of the Italian piazza.
“The Chalice you hold, God, in your powerful hand, is filled with a mixture of tribulations and consolations, and only Your Divine Majesty knows and understands to whom and when it may behoove you to bestow either one or the other; you have filled my cup, oh, Jesus, with unequal measures and although my sparse fortunes serve to cloak my enormous afflictions, they are nothing — neither fortunes nor misfortunes — compared to the desire that enslaves me: oh, Jesus, allow me to achieve true union with you, the union of the spirit purged and purified of all sentiments of the base portion of the soul; thus I would no longer need occupy myself with governing and with war, with persecution of the heretic, with symbolic hunts; let me enjoy fruitive union with you, after which nothing I ever had or did not have in this life would matter; allow me to know the exceeding joy and delight of experiencing the immediate touch of divinity, and to remain intoxicated and annihilated in that enormous sea of softness and sweetness, transported beyond myself, borne entirely in my God and Lord, in you, Jesus Christ: far from this palace that emerged from and will return to stone; far from my wife, far from the demands of my dead but living father and my living but dead mother; far from what he, my father, asked of me, power and cruelty; far from what she, my mother, asks of me, honor and death; power and cruelty, honor and death. In your mysteries, Jesus, such unwanted duties of political legitimacy are dissolved and forgotten; in you, and not — as she believes — in the satanic black hole of the very virgin Señora, my wife.”
El Señor’s eyes, at times wildly staring, occasionally suspicious — a warm gaze, a cold gaze — moved from the figure of the Christ of Orvieto to the transparent predella of the Sacrament, and from it, over his shoulder, to the rows of open sepulchers behind him awaiting the arrival of the Lords and Ladies and noble relatives, his ancestors: as each corpse would be contained within the sepulchral stone, so El Señor wished to be united with Jesus.
“I know that there are degrees within divine union, but you are free in all your works, even in regard to the Blessed, and like the spontaneous mirror you are, you may reveal yourself to a greater or lesser degree; manifest yourself to me, Jesus, in the state of passive union of the soul with God, in which are fulfilled the great mysteries written in the Holy Epistles of the dark Songs of Solomon. My happy soul longs like a bride to enter the Mystic Cellars owned by you, the Blessed Husband, where the purest and most holy love is the free-flowing wine that inflames and intoxicates hearts in sovereign love. Bestow upon me, Jesus, your most chaste and mysterious kiss, for I sigh for it like a virtuous wife. Your kiss is that precious Pearl without price. This is the innermost Kingdom of Heaven that you can communicate to me; let me know, my God, the flowery bridal chamber of the Divine Husband and the Paradise of your celestial delights. Contract binding matrimony with me in this my mortal life that you and I — that we both — may enjoy delicious consummation in the eternal felicity of Glory.”
Heavy sepulcher slabs, heavy bases in the form of truncated pyramids, carved effigies of the Señors, marble bodies of the Señoras, stone husbands and wives sleeping side by side in their beds of death, prostrate nobility awaiting the arrival of the corpses whose lives these pale statues represent, so natural they seemed hollowed from real bodies: witnesses to El Señor’s prayer.
“Grant me your divine presence and Your divine touch and the sovereign encircling arms of the Divine Husband; I can live no more apart from you; grant me a brief life to hasten my nuptials with you; my inflamed anticipation can bear no more; grant me eternal glory where I will have no need to wait longer, wait, for nothing, where I need not despair of the resolutions effected by the tyrant Time; oh, my Jesus, when will it be! Not yet, Not yet read my dynastic devices, but I pray you: allow me to quit this unchanging world, more like its initial sin and pain, more like unto itself, the more it changes, and let me join with you in the delicious variability of a promised Heaven. Come, Jesus, come to me, come, come now, now, now…”
Then, still imploring, El Señor raised his head and saw that the figures of the painting were moving; he turned to see whether all the inanimate figures had taken on life, but only the naked men listening to Christ who had been standing with their backs to the viewer were now turning to reveal their faces to El Señor; behind El Señor the horizontal statues, the sleeping bas-reliefs on the slabs of the sepulchers, were still blind and unmoving; and the Christ without a halo who had been facing forward, preaching, began to turn away. The naked men had enormous, tumid, erect penises, red and shining, pulsing with blood and semen, and engorged hairy testicles, iridescent with pleasure; the Christ of the shadows displayed a blood-red cross between his shoulder blades, and a thick stream of blood trickled into the cleft between his buttocks.
El Señor screamed; he stretched out his hand and taking a penitential whip began to lash his back, his hand, his face, while the statues of his ancestors stared at him with blank eyes and inviolable marble skin. El Señor was bleeding now. Then he muttered between clenched teeth: “I do not want the world to change. I do not want my body to die, to disintegrate, to be transformed and reborn in animal form. I do not want to be reborn to be hunted in my own lands by my own descendants. I want the world to stop and to release my resurrected body in the eternity of Paradise, by the side of God. When I die, I do not want — please, have mercy — I do not want to return again to the world. I want the eternal promise: to ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven and there forget the unchanging world and lose for all time the memory of the life I led, forget that there is life on earth. But in order to reach Heaven, in order for Heaven actually to exist, this, my world, must not change, for only of its infinite horror, from that contrast, may be born the infinite goodness of Heaven. Yes, yes, the necessary contrast.… And it was for that reason that as a youth, darkly, not completely aware of what I was doing, I murdered those who dared offer me Heaven on earth; that was the reason, Father, Don Felipe, not because I had promised never to disappoint you again and to make myself a worthy heir to your cruel power; this is the reason, Mother, Doña Juana, not to consummate the nuptials of honor and death; yes, this is the reason, and that is why now I am growing old, and, consciously, I encourage evil on earth so that Heaven may continue to have meaning. Let there be a Heaven, God, your Heaven; do not condemn us to a Heaven on earth, to a Hell on earth, to a Purgatory on earth, for if the earth contains in itself all the cycles of life and death, my destiny is to be an animal in Hell. Amen.”