“Most Illustrious Señor: you were not tolerant with the other criminal, the young lad who is to be burned beside the stables. Is sodomy a worse crime than heresy?”
“It is simply a crime that is condemned with horror by the Holy Bible and by common opinion. Let us suppose, Friar, that this youth, in addition to being a sodomite, were also a relapsed and heretical Jew. For which of his crimes would you judge him? For the crime that promised vexatious proceedings, complicated religious debates, and even worse judicial complications? Or for the crime whose punishment everyone would approve and expedite? Let us suppose … just suppose, I say … that this youth is not going to die for his true offense … Is it not considerably more convenient for everyone that he die for the false rather than the true crime?”
El Señor gazed at me sweetly, sadly, wearily. And his visage was one of such utter exhaustion that I shall never know whether or not he actually perceived my own state of agitation. I struggled to say something, but no words came to my defense. El Señor seemed to experience no similar difficulty, either ingenuously or by chance; or, perhaps with perverse calculation, he was touching upon all the points of my own involvement in the intrigue.
“Do you still paint, Friar?”
“That is my vocation, Señor, although minor and expendable compared to my greater vocation, serving God and serving you.”
“Have you seen the painting in my chapel … the one painted … they say … in Orvieto?”
I trembled. “I have seen it, Señor…”
“You have doubtlessly noted the oddities and innovations within it?”
I stood without speaking; El Señor continued: “How would you have painted Christ Our Lord?”
I bowed my head. “I, Sire? As a sacred icon, unchanging since the beginning of time; a flat, fixed figure upon a nonspecific background, as befitting his eternity.”
“The anonymous artist of Orvieto, on the other hand, has surrounded the figure of Christ with the atmosphere of the time; he has placed Our Lord in a contemporary Italian piazza and paints him standing before naked and contemporary men, speaking to them and looking at them. What does the artist mean in this manner to suggest?”
“That the revelation was not made only once, Señor, but that it is through new figures being constantly fulfilled for different men and different epochs…”
“Would you burn the painting in my chapel, Brother Julián? Is its creator a heretic?”
My head bowed, I shook my head. El Señor attempted to rise, but he was racked with a fit of choking. He put a handkerchief to his mouth, and these were his muffled, subdued words: “Very well. There is no more dangerous enemy to order than an innocent. Very well. Let him lose his innocence. Send him to the galleys.”
The candle stub had burned out and the Chronicler had finished writing. Animated by an excitement that erased his fatigue, he arose and said: “Our souls are in continual movement.”
And he added, first stroking, then tightly rolling the parchment: “Here I am master of myself: here I hold my soul in the palm of my hand.”
He inserted the roll of parchment into a green bottle, tapped it with a cork, and sealed it with the still-warm drippings from the candle, crudely, but well, and placed it in the wide pocket of his slave’s breeches, then climbed to the deck.
What a marvelous spectacle lay before his eyes! The Christian fleet, spread out in the mouth of the gulf, formed a huge semicircle of galleys, their pennants flying high and all oars held at the ready; they were facing into a strong wind blowing from the land; the sea was choppy. Sixty Venetian galleys formed the right wing of the crescent; sixty more, Spanish, the central core; and another sixty, from the Maritime Republics, closed the mouth of the gulf; in each galley three hundred galley slaves faced the sun and wind and sea, manning fifty-four enormous oars in each ship. Their guns were installed on the prow; each galley trim from stem to stern, from topmast to hold; the impression of order and symmetry was perfect. But as the Chronicler stepped onto the deck of the brigantine and saw the disposition of the battle lines, he had a moment for other sensations; he could smell the odors from the dark brown coast, the odor of sliced onion and the odor of bread fresh from the oven; and he observed in minute detail, grateful for this marvel, the flight of wild ducks above both armadas, indifferent, these free, guiltless birds, to the Christian standard being raised at that very moment, and to the Turkish pennant already waving deep within the gulf. And the Chronicler observed the rough turquoise-colored sea, the swiftly dissipating clouds, the limpid skies. He gave thanks, in short, for life.
As the standard was hoisted, the call to arms was also sounded, warning all the galleys; the Chronicler was aboard one of the reserve brigantines that along with the supply ships were standing at a distance so as not to obstruct the movement of the galleys, but were prepared to deliver troops and matériel to them; he heard the cannon blasts signaling the battle, and he saw how immediately both fleets moved into action, the Christian flotilla advancing toward the Turkish fleet trapped in the waters of the gulf, and the Turks advancing to the encounter with the Christians, their only alternatives to destroy the Christians, to perish, or to flee by land. The sun rose higher. The wind died down, and the gulf turned into a crystalline lake. Now the oarsmen had a less difficult task. A soft breeze was at their backs. Everyone, even those waiting in the reserve galleys and brigantines behind the central corps of the battle, knelt to receive general absolution, and to prepare to die. The flagship of the Turkish fleet fired the first cannon; kneeling, the Chronicler felt the weight of the green bottle in his pocket, and raising his eyes to Heaven he knew that one part of his life was ending and another beginning; farewell to the folly of youth, greetings to the age of extreme hazard: between the two ages, between the two moments, he found an instant to address himself to the clouds, to the sea, to the frightened ducks flying back to the brownish shores: “What Heaven has ordained, no human effort or wisdom can prevail against.”
And thus he imagined himself to be at the true hour of his death, it could be this instant, or another slightly more remote; brief, nevertheless, was the time for anxieties to mount and hopes to flag.
Six Venetian galleasses, armed with cannon mounted on all sides, advanced to throw disorder into the Turkish ranks; the drums and bugles sounded to clear the decks for action, but even these strident sounds were drowned out by the fearful cries of the Moorish throng; the beaks on the prows of the Christian galleys, sawed before the battle, were pulled down, the great firearms belched smoke, inflicting great damage upon the Turkish ships, whose salvos, aimed above the obstacle of their own beaks, passed harmlessly over the Christian galleys. The Turks did not retreat, but sent formation after formation of galleys in their attempt to rout the wings of the Christian line, attack the rear guard, and gain access to the open sea; at noon the Turks launched a ferocious attack against the left wing, attempting to breach it and force its galleys, for fear of running aground on the sandbanks near the shore, to break ranks from the closed, crescent formation. The Turks were attempting to escape through that gap, when rough hands pushed the Chronicler toward a boat and from there to one of the galleys, and from there, without transition, into the merciless struggle between two galleys locked in combat like two animals in a definitive territorial battle for food and shelter. There was a steady hail of arrows, volleys from harquebuses, and shells; many ships were sunk, and others run aground; many Christians had fallen into the pantheon of the sea and many Moorish galleymen who had attempted to swim to shore were drowned among blazing ships and shellfire; the Chronicler in his position in the galley, clinging to his section of the oar, felt the shudder of the ship under a blast from a Turkish cannon; the prow was ripped away, exposing the tightly packed galley slaves and leaving them unprotected before an assault from the Turks who swarmed on board, granting no quarter; a small squadron rapidly arrived to defend them; they boarded the besieged galley and retaliated, blow with savage blow; the Chronicler, thrown to the deck, felt the open wound in his bleeding hand; with a strength he would not have believed possible he withdrew the sealed green bottle from his breeches and threw it into the sea. He watched the bottle, less swift than the salvos from the harquebuses, trace a slow parabola through the air and disappear from his sight before splashing into the water amid the smoke and fire and cannon blasts.