“The Devil is doing this to mislead us, but he shall not benefit from it, for we shall prevail and his wickedness will be revealed! Return to your work, men of God, my beloved flock, for the recompense of your hard labors shall be nothing less than Heaven itself! Vade retro, Satan, for you will gain nothing here! To work, to work, and then to Heaven, to Heaven!”
The Bishop raises his fingers toward the scudding clouds, and as if he had convoked it (you saw it, Jerónimo, for its light outshone your forges), a long-tailed comet appears in the sky, beautiful and great, its head pointed toward the lands of Portugal and the tail trailing toward Valencia; it races by with its long silvery mane and continues to shine in the night after the bearers have borne away the exhausted Bishop and we are still clustered together in the sheds, fearing to go out or to eat, for we don’t know what significance to attribute to these portents, and all we can hear in the great silence of the night is the howling of a dog; a doleful, menacing howling that combines both rage and pain, that frightens us more than the storm or the comet or the deaths of our companions; and not only us, Martín, tempers are rising; there, inside, a supervisor quarreled with the journeymen and the architect with the overseer, and their quarrel was so heated that the girder on which they were standing broke and the first journeyman fell and was crushed to death upon the granite paving stones below; what do we know, Jerónimo? only what reaches our ears, Catilinón, only what succeeds in penetrating the wax in our ears, that’s all, what originates in those bedchambers that we will never see and sifts through the empty crypts and icy chapels by way of the cloister and courtyards and porticos and gates of this palace where, in spite of having constructed it with our own hands, you and I, Martín, would lose our way; all we know, day after day after day, is the site of a foundation or the area of a plastered wall, and then they give us five ducats for every window without our ever knowing what one sees when looking from that window, and eighteen reales for every door without our ever knowing where it will lead when it’s opened, feeling our way with our hands, we see what we’re building like the blind, but we will never know either how the entire palace looked in the heads of those who conceived it or how it will look when it’s finished and inhabited by our Señores; I swear to you that we will never look outside from those windows, and I swear to you that we will never enter through those doors; and if someday the rosebushes that La Señora wants so much blossom in her garden, it won’t be you who sees them; and in exchange for our feelings, Catilinón, they gave us five ducats not to see and eighteen reales not to hear; you think you’re clever, Cato, but you’re blind and crippled, and I wish to hell you’d fill that blaspheming mouth of yours with chickpeas: so shit on God, you filthy churl, but your curses fall on barren ground, and what you should do is pick the wax out of your ears; we hear the words spoken inside by way of the kitchens and the stables, words heavier and harder than the iron ingots we melt down here every day: a comet in summer means drought and the death of Princes; a comet under the sign of the Crab and in the house of Mars means misfortune; that’s what Brother Toribio, the astrologer, said in there and we learned it through the passageways and stable yards and the mouths of Azucena and Lolilla, but you and I, Nuño, know only that we’re afraid, and that the dog howls as if he wanted to tell us something, what is that you say, Martín? that the dog doesn’t want to scare us? something else? warn us? what? old Jerónimo, what do you believe he wants to tell us, you who have the fire of your ovens in your eyes, and in your beard the same burning red as your coals? what does that dog say that frightens us every night running and barking through the passages and chapels, penetrating the nuns’ cloister and frightening them to death, entering even the bedchambers of El Señor and the prelate, dragging chains and horns that blow by themselves, for so swift is the course of that unseen dog that we all hear it but no one sees it, none would fear it if it could be seen, that panting, stubborn dog, with an uncannily sharp nose, racing along an old and secret scent as if it were new, yowling as if every moment were its last; listen to it, all of you; you think the dog is telling us not to be afraid? listen to what they’re telling us, Nuño; you and I know that the comet disappeared yesterday, but that the storm is still crouching there, hidden behind its own veils, to deceive us; it is still there, leaden and restless, disguised as lowering clouds, obscuring the outlines of the mountains; that we know because we can see it; and we hear the dog running every night through the deserted galleries of the palace; but now we’ve been told that on the fourth night of the dog’s forays the nuns, because they could hear it but could not see it, decided it was a phantom dog, a soul from Purgatory, the messenger of misfortune, the guide of the dead, and at midnight they gathered in the chapel beside the bedchamber — where El Señor was suffering from crushing headaches — beneath the gaze of the Italian painting and beside the sculptures of the royal sepulchers, and there they first began to pray, then chant, and finally to bark louder than the dog itself to still its voice, to trumpet louder than the horns it dragged behind it, to give themselves courage, or perhaps to be like the spectral dog, for they told us that in their raptures the pious Sisters, after crawling on their knees until they bled, began to lash each other with penitential whips and finally urinated — deathly afraid as the sound of chains grew louder — beside the columns in the sacred room, more frightened now of each other than of the dog, huddled together, clinging to one another, sniffing at each other’s armpits and beneath the voluminous skirts of their black habits, weeping and moaning in ever decreasing volume until the chains and horns and the barking of the invisible dog filled all the space left vacant by the Sisters’ fear; their mouths were still open, as if they were yawning, but no sound issued from them; the howling of the hound seemed to emanate from those gaping, benumbed, lipless mouths, raw slits in the flesh of their faces, like the mouths of vipers and mandrakes, Madre Milagros, for they say that snakes drag themselves, and they say that magic little men are born beneath the gallows, and we have an abundance of those in Spain, my happy-go-lucky Catilinón, a man who is born low will be lowborn no matter where he goes, don’t forget: in Spain the worms don’t eat the corpses, it’s the corpses that devour the worms and so everything serves to fatten the vipers that in the end eat everything; see that you cry loud and long, Nuño, if you ever die on the gallows, for then your tears will engender the mandrake and you will have our offspring, poor miserable bastard.