Only then, after he had shown me my image in that dark mirror of horrors, El Señor offered me his hands, but I lacked the strength to take them and pull myself up. He had to kneel and for the first time take me in his arms and assist me to my own chambers, where the maids, on their own initiative and risking El Señor’s displeasure — for him the bath was an extreme medication — had prepared a boiling bath. My husband disrobed me, helped me into the tub, and for the first time looked upon my body unclothed. I did not feel the burning temperature of the bath; I was paralyzed, numb. He told me that we would be leaving his ancient family castle and that we would construct in the high plains a new palace that would be both a mausoleum for princes and a temple of the Most Holy Sacrament. In this way, he added, he would commemorate the military victory, and also … He could not finish.
He fell to his knees, hiding his face with one hand, and said to me: “Isabel, you will never know how much I love you, and above all, how I love you…”
I asked him to explain; I asked with disdain, with arrogance, more than anything with rancor, and he answered: “Ever since that morning in the chapel when you spit out the snake, I have loved you so devotedly that I shall never be able to touch you; my passion for you is nourished by desire: I shall never be able, nor should I, to satisfy that desire, for once satisfied I would cease to love you. I was educated in this ideal; it is the ideal of the true Christian gentleman, and to it I must be faithful until death. Others may be faithful — and die for their faith — to the dream of a world without power, without illness, without death, a world with complete sensual satisfaction and of human incarnation of the divine. I, because I am who I am, can be faithful only to the dream of unrequited desire, constantly nurtured but never realized; in this way, comparable to faith.”
I smiled; I reminded him that his own father, and with no small fame, had satiated his desires by claiming his seignorial right on a thousand occasions; with lowered head my husband answered that he, too, admitted his sins in that regard, but that it was one thing to take a woman of the lower classes, and a very different matter to touch his feminine ideal, the Señora of his heart; angrily, I pointed out that his father, though in the dark and without pleasure, had taken his, Felipe’s, mother in order to beget an heir; how would he resolve this problem? Was he disposed to leave an acephalous throne? Bastards, bastards, my husband murmured several times, and in spite of his words, and in strange contrast to them, there amid the heavy vapors of my bath, he too removed his clothes before me for the first and last time, and it was now as if I held the same despicable mirror to the body of El Señor, and instead of observing the temporary ravages inflicted upon me by the intemperate weather, I could see the permanent dues his heritage had bequeathed him, abscesses, chancres, boils, the visible ulcers of his body, the premature debility of his parts. The boiling water wounded me, raising blisters on my back and thighs; when I felt it, I cried out and I begged him to retire. The moment demanded it, but also the future; I did not want my husband ever again to penetrate the sanctuary of my chamber; I knew that his shame at that moment would be the best lock on the door of my desired solitude, and that shame culminated in the words El Señor, my husband, said as he withdrew: “What thing could be born of our union, Isabel?”
Felipe withdrew with a gesture he hoped said more than the words that had been spoken: the frightful contrast between his words of ideal love and his loathsome body, his silence, asked me to draw my own conclusions, to deduce, to forgive. But I had not the strength for that. I left the bath, wrapped in sheets I walked through the vast galleries of the castle. Hallucinating, I saw a long row of my duennas who turned their backs to me as I passed. Their figures stood out against the light; they turned their invisible faces to the white leaded windows and I saw only backs cloaked by nuns’ habits and heads covered by black coifs.
I approached each one, asking: “What have you done with my dolls? Where are my peach pits?”
But when I saw them in the light I saw that their habits covered only their backs; from the front, one could see their aged and obese, naked and feeble, varicose and wasted, hairless, yellowish, milky-white, purplish bodies; they laughed harshly; in their hands they held, as they would a rosary, clean and knotted roots like colorless carrots, and they offered them to me. My head chambermaid, Azucena, spit through broken teeth and saliva dribbled across her shimmering, enormous, purplish nipples; she said:
“Take this root; it is the magic mandrake that we have gathered from beneath the gallows, the racks, and the stakes of the condemned; accept it in the place of your forever vanished playthings; accept it in the place of your forever postponed love; you will have no toy and no lover except this diabolical body born of the tears of the hanged, the tortured, and those burned alive; be grateful for our gift; we have had to expose ourselves to terrible dangers to obtain it for you; we shaved our heads and with the twisted gray hairs we tied one extreme to a knot of the root and the other to the collar of a black dog, who, frightened by the weeping of the mandrake, fled, and so pulled the root from the humid tomb that also was its cradle; we closed our ears with wads of oakum; the dog died of fright; take the root, cherish it, for in truth it is the only company you will ever know; care for it as you would a newborn child; sow wheat in its head and it will grow silken hair; insert two cherries in place of its eyes and it will see; place a slice of radish for a mouth, and it will speak. Do not be frightened of its livid, knotted body, or of its smallness; it will pass for the court dwarf; it will be your servant, your friend, and your seeker of hidden treasures … take it…”
Azucena placed the pale root in my hands, forcing my fingers to close around that obscene, palpitating tuber; I tried to drop her offering but the slimy surface of the mandrake stuck to my skin and, terrified, I fled back to my room, feverish, trembling, recalling my husband’s desire and substituting for it another, real, alive, and tangible desire that exploded in my brain and coursed with fire through my breasts and belly, my sealed secret place, my arms and legs and back: a body, a body, oh, Señor, I have need of a body, a body for me alone, and my own; not a slobbery root, not a skillful and prudent mouse, not an ulcerated husband: a body. Feverish, maddened, I examined my naked, washed, clean, new body in the mirror of my chamber; I touched my body, and when my fingers reached the flower of my chastity I discovered I could insert one finger — rupturing the remains of a gnawed membrane — to the depths of my unschooled pleasure; I could not understand; I knew I was a virgin, I was a virgin, and yet all that remained of the sovereign portal of my virginity was a jumble of slender threads. Overwhelmed by sensation, I could stand no more; I fell on my bed, and dreamed; and from the plethora of my recent experiences was born a dream that was a memory; I dreamed you, and I remembered you; I saw you tossed face down upon a beach, swept by waves, your shoulder sealed with a purple-colored cross, the six toes and fingers of each hand and foot dug into the muddy sand; and as I dreamed you I remembered, born of the ashes of my ridiculous martyrdom, the pathetic visions of my husband and myself in that bath, the row of witches, the feel of the mandrake; when he died, the court buffoon had left a nameless child hidden in the straw of his pallet; the maid Azucena had found him, had felt compassion for him, had asked permission to suckle him at the teats of the bitch who had recently whelped; I recognized you; you returned; I dreamed you, shipwrecked on an unknown beach …