To your last: he returned to his quiet rhyming, and was linking the flowery with the bowery when he saw pass beneath the kitchen portico a youth whose beauty was in startling contrast to the smut and sweat that marked the other men who labored here. Not this youth, no; beautiful and golden, he was eating an orange, he displayed an extreme grace of movement that only the possession of luxury, if one is wealthy, or the contemplation of evil, if one is poor, produces; a sufficient pleasure in himself, capable of flowering either in this sylvan solitude or in the company of someone who expects, or even possesses, everything, would know when he met this youth that certain things can never be possessed unless they are fully shared. With rejoicing, the Chronicler thought he recognized in the youth who was savoring his orange the image his sterile pen required: the pastoral vision demanded by his masters, the figure of the shepherd lad crowned, like the ancient rivers of Arcadia, with salvia and verbena: the hero.
The youth passed by swiftly; happiness, wickedness, and deceit were in his gaze; he wiped his hand across his lips as he passed, perhaps because he was eating a juicy, flame-fleshed orange, or possibly because he had just kissed his beloved; either was justified by the secret satisfaction of his expression, the tempered, vibrant heat of his body. The Chronicler could at that very moment inscribe the words in his memory; he imagined a young pilgrim passing by this palace, the temple and the tomb of Princes, like a breath of young life, a carefree wanderer with that mixture of permanent astonishment and delicate disenchantment that the knowledge of other seas, other men, other hearths, gives a man; he was able to blend in the swift versifying of that instant the appearance of the sun and the appearance of this youth, naked, alone. The youth disappeared into the smoke of the palace kitchens; the Chronicler returned to his cubicle beside the stables, and sat down to write.
That was a Thursday; Saturday he read his composition before the Señores, Guzmán, and me, yes, I was there, I, the painter-priest who spent so many afternoons in the sweet, bitter, amiable, and quietly desperate company of the Chronicler, listening to his laments and interpreting his dreams: I, Julián, the gentle thief of my friend’s words. And as I listened to him that Saturday as he was reading the poem to his masters, I did not know whether to look with amazement at my lost friend or to attend the growing plea for silence and warning of punishment in the eyes of La Señora, where the ice of fear and the fire of anger flashed in swift succession, the ice quenching the fire and then the fire inflaming the ice, both born of the icy heat in the convulsive breast of my mistress, the same breasts I had with my brushes one day painted blue, following the tracery of the network of veins with the purpose of making more startling the whiteness of her skin; eat, Most Exalted Lady, stuff yourself with sausage, my gentle Barbarica, suck the pork ribs, supposed Prince; I am aware that for some time now, engrossed in your gluttony, you have not been listening, I know that I am speaking only to myself; so it has been always: you eating while something important happens, not even realizing. I admired my poor friend’s innocence, but I understood that his candor could be my ruin, for once someone pulled the loose thread the entire garment would unravel. Soul of wax, my candid friend had impressed in his poem more, much more, than he imagined; he had converted the fleeting vision of that youth, whom he had glimpsed eating an orange before disappearing in the smoke of the kitchens, into the foundation of his imagination, and upon it had raised an edifice of truth: I hear again the voice of the Chronicler, ringing with conviction, the habitual tones of despair stilled in the reading.
That voice described the handsome shepherd lad with greater exactitude than my own paintings; there was no doubt that it was he, the young pilgrim born with the sun, twin of the sun, so familiarly Spanish with the orange in his hand, so distant, so strange, so foreign in his gaze of disenchanted amazement: a hero here and a hero there, ours and not ours, relative and stranger, almost, one might say, a prodigal son: through the Chronicler he sang of Arabian oases, Hebraic deserts, Phoenician seas, Hellenic temples, Carthaginian fortresses, Roman highways, dank Celtic forests, barbarous Germanic cavalcades; not an idealized shepherd, or an epic warrior, not a Belardo nor a Roland, the hero not of purity but of the impure, hero of all bloods, hero of all horizons, hero of all beliefs, having reached in his pilgrimage the bucolic carrousel of a Señora of a joyless palace, endowed with the pristine feelings that only nature, although all histories, had touched, and chosen by that Señora who, though she could have been any, could only be ours. Chosen for the pleasure of La Señora, led to a luxurious bedchamber, and there surfeited with love and other delights in exchange for his freedom to roam, at the end of the verse choosing to return to the byway, abandoning La Señora to time and oblivion.
El Señor seemed to understand none of this, experiencing, perhaps, only that vague, dreamy nostalgia the Chronicler, performing the function of his office, had wished to provoke; Guzmán suspected something, betraying himself by placing one hand on the hilt of his dagger, and nervously stroking his plaited moustache; La Señora envisioned it all, seeing herself thus depicted in a literary model, her love affair with the youth inadvertently revealed as the true model; I feared everything, but for other reasons. But the Chronicler believed only in the poetic reality of what he had created; any relationship that could not be reduced to the resolute struggle to impose his invented words as the only valid reality was as foreign to him as it was incomprehensible: candid pride, culpable innocence. And thus the strength of his conviction convinced the others of the documentary truth of what he was reading to us.
When he finished reading, the only sound to be heard was the weak and empty applause from El Señor’s pale hands. The dog Bocanegra barked, breaking the icy tension of the moment — Guzmán’s suspicion, El Señor’s lack of comprehension, La Señora’s outraged disarray, and my own fear. Only the Chronicler smiled beatifically, unaware of the passions loosed by his poem, sure only of the verbal reality created, and hoping to be congratulated for it; he was convinced that he had read us the poetic truth, he hadn’t the least intimation that he had repeated aloud to us the secret truth. I moved with haste, I denounced the youth to Guzmán, accusing him, as was true, of having base relations with some kitchen lads barely entered into puberty, but keeping silent what I knew, and knew very well, for I had been the go-between who led the strange youth to La Señora’s bedchamber, thus gaining the gratitude of my mistress on that afternoon of carnal despair after she had spent thirty-three and one half days lying in the castle courtyard with no arms worthy of assisting her, thus, in addition — except on one imperious occasion — saving myself the obligation of calming my mistress’s desires: I do not like to break my vow of chastity, no, and to have to renew it again before a knowing Bishop who as he hears my confession dares look at me with disrespectful complicity: are we not all so? do we not all do the same? is it not fortunate that this vow of purity is renewable? is not the Church magnanimous that it thus understands the weaknesses of the flesh? No, we are not all equal, nor shall I allow that the Bishop so believe. I am an artist. The pleasure of the flesh robs strength from my artistic vocation, I prefer to feel my sexual juices flow toward a painting, wash over it, fertilize it, realize it; the delights of the flesh castrate me, the delights of art satisfy me.