“Condemned by the cruel, not-born Father to live forever, Guzmán, as the Father condemned Christ the God to eternal death, thus saving himself from the rebellious divinity of a new Lucifer; for what Pilate — from the ocher profundities of the painting from Orvieto, now reflected in the mirror — says is true: Christ the God was crucified, He truly died, abandoned forever, once His part in the play was enacted, by the phantom Father. And this is what Pilate did not know: that the omnipotent Creator could not tolerate the return to Heaven of a possible rival, of a new Lucifer who had known the detestable mysteries and needs of fallen humanity and who might contaminate the timeless, ambitionless purity of eternal Heaven; it was the Father who condemned the Son, Guzmán, not Pilate, not the scribes and the Pharisees; the Father abandoned, murdered, His Son; the Son of God could come to earth only to die on earth. Thus the Father saved himself, I tell you, from a rebel in Heaven; but he also spared himself the necessity of showing His own face: Jesus the man would represent Him forever, in His name, throughout history. And thus you must believe with me, Guzmán, that reason is the intermediary between God and the Devil, since neither the evils of the Devil nor the virtues of God would be as they are or would affect us without the aid of reason; if we accepted evil as fact and virtue as mystery, Guzmán, we would never rise above that, and then, do you understand me? I would be born again from the belly of a wolf, I would be hunted in these same lands by my own descendants: I want the Heaven and the Hell that have been promised, Guzmán, I want to be condemned or saved for all eternity, I want that total non-existence that the Father denied the Son and the Man, Christ and Jesus, I do not want to return with claws and fangs and hunger to this world; I do not want my death to be the material guarantee of a new life, a second life, another life, but simply that: my absolute death, my absolute remission to non-existence, a hermetic absence of communication with all forms of life; this is my secret project, Guzmán, hear me: let us establish a hell on earth to assure the need for a heaven that will compensate for the horror of our lives; the horror we do and the horror that is done to us … Let us then doubt our Faith, always within that Faith, in order to deserve first hell on earth, torture, the stake, used against us as heretics, against the barbaric nations as idolaters; only in this way, by first liberating the powers of evil on earth, shall we someday deserve the beatitude of heaven in Heaven. Heaven, Guzmán: forgetting forever that we once lived … What did you do with my faithful mastiff Bocanegra?”
“Señor, I have explained. He had rabies.”
“He never knew his hour of glory. He died without being able to defend me. He lived half awake, half asleep, drugged, at my feet. My poor faithful Bocanegra.”
“He was the phantom dog.”
“Do you mean to tell me that that was the glory he awaited so long? Is that why you killed him when he was dressed for the supreme hunt?”
“Perhaps.”
“You killed him.”
“It was my duty, Señor. He had rabies…”
“No one verified that but you.”
“It was true; he was frightening the nuns, the workers; you saw the mad self-indulgence that overpowered the nuns; you yourself felt its menace; the Sisters and the workers were eyeing each other on the sly, Señor; they were becoming aroused; the contagion could easily have spread from the cloisters to the work sheds…”
“Ah, now that he is no longer here, I feel that the dog was my only ally, my only guardian…”
“He had become listless; he had lost his taste for the hunt.”
“Did he at least die in God’s grace?”
“He was a dog, Señor. What do we know…?”
“Without pain? What do we know? Was he one of my ancestors? Is that why he was so close to me, tried to warn me against danger, never abandoned my side, never, except to protect me? Why did he run out that day from my tent on the mountain? When he returned, he carried the sand of the seashore on his paws, in his wound … Who wounded him?”
“He was a dog, Señor. He could not speak.”
“What was he trying to tell me, poor brute, poor, fine, supposedly fierce mastiff? Was he one of my blood? Have we buried here the lifeless body of a Prince dead for centuries, not knowing that at the same time we were killing, in my favorite dog, his resurrected soul, living, gifted — even though he no longer savored the blood of the boar — with high values, like fidelity, and unarguable adherence to my person? Tell me, Guzmán. Do not look at me like that, vassal, I am not reproaching you; write, write my testament: In the name of the always glorious, forever virgin Mary Our Lady, look quickly, Guzmán, watch what is happening in the painting from Orvieto…”
The painting: Mother of the carpenter’s son, it all seems like a dream, I don’t know where the truth lies, I don’t know now, I never knew, I don’t know whether I became pregnant by the carpenter, or by some lusty apprentice of that aged artisan, Joseph, to whom I had been wed still a girl, or whether by some anonymous voyager who stopped to ask for water for his camels and to tell me enchanting stories, I, married to Joseph the carpenter, I, the mother of the child … I, the true daughter of the house of David, not the carpenter. History will say the opposite, because it is written by men; I, the woman, the daughter of David …
“Look how the forms are changing, see how the figures are turning and walking forward and going in and going out as if in some elaborate altarpiece, see the child-become-man, see him in the company of the Holy Spirit that descends in the form of a dove to accompany him on the day of his baptism in the desert waters of the Jordan, see the fiery, flowing river crossing now from border to border of the painting, Guzmán, and doubt, imagine an impotent carpenter, and watch the tiny scene unrolling up there, on those rocks below that humble shed in one corner of the painting.”
The painting: He kissed me, all he did was kiss me, he told me that this was what marriage was, a few rough, panting, anguished kisses sterile as the roadways of Sinai, that is what he told me, but when he saw my belly swelling he repudiated me; I was of the house of David, I knew its ancient secrets, in us are united great wisdom, the liquid, flowing formulas of our rivers, the Nile and the Tigris, the Ganges and the Jordan, one single flux of ancient memories, of magical knowledge born by the shores of the waters where men founded their first cities, fourteen generations after the captivity of Babylon, one night I served hallucinatory philters to the unlearned carpenter and caused him to dream of the hovering, Priapic, subornable, Lucifer-like angels of the nearest heaven, the one all we women can see with our bare eyes, the corrupt heaven we have at hand, the heaven of bodies; in the stupor of his body I caused those false angels to visit the carpenter and in his dream I made him believe that I had been got with child by the Holy Spirit and that I would give birth to the son of God, the heralded Messiah, the descendant of David the King.
“Hear the raucous laughter of the angels, Guzmán, hear it echoing from heaven to heaven, down through the years that for the phantom Father are but an instant, until the not-born Father — see his perfidious triangular eye there in the upper center of the painting we contemplate as it contemplates us — becomes aware of the monstrous joke and in an instant of caprice endorses the joke by sending the dove.”