“Now that youth found while El Señor was hunting is lying in La Señora’s bed,” said Lolilla to a huntsman.
“Now we the huntsmen and halberdiers who have twice been to the beach swear, swear as God’s our witness, that those two youths, the Mad Lady’s and La Señora’s, are absolutely identical,” said the huntsman to Guzmán.
“Now a third youth is approaching, and he will probably be identical to the other two,” Guzmán said to his hawk …
… now I am announcing with the black sticks of the black drum our arrival at the palace, with your hands upon my shoulders, walking like a blind man, you must let me guide you: don’t look, don’t look at the disorder on this dry plain, the tents of the taverns, the bodies crouched around the fires, the stream of black brocade flowers and torn funereal cloths, and rent tabernacles, the slavering jaws of the yoked oxen, the piles of tiles and slate, the blocks of granite, the bales of straw and hay, don’t look, young sailor, do not look at this false disorder, do not open your eyes until I tell you, I want you to see the perfect symmetry of the palace, the inalterable order imposed by El Señor, by Felipe, upon this gigantic, still-unfinished mausoleum, that is what I want you to see when you open your eyes; don’t look now at the dumfounded peasants watching our arrival, don’t listen to the cries of that woman kneeling beside a landslide where two lighted candles gleam palely in the daylight, don’t look, don’t listen, my handsome youth, body guided by my body, body saved by my body, the first thing I want you to see is the order of the palace, I want the first person you speak to to be El Señor: I want you to break the order of this place as you would shatter a perfect goblet of finest crystal; your eye and your voice will be like two powerful hands arrived from an unconquerable sea; my tattooed lips can repeat it all; my name is Celestina; my tattooed lips can repeat it all, my lips forever engraved with the burning kiss of my lover, my lips marked with the words of secret wisdom, the knowledge that separates us from princes, philosophers, and peasants alike, for it is not revealed by power or books or labor, but by love; not just any love, my companion, but a love in which one loses forever, without hope of redemption, one’s soul, and gains, without hope of resurrection, eternal pleasure; I know everything, this is my story, I shall tell you everything from the beginning; I know the story in its totality, from beginning to end, handsome, desolate youth, I know what El Señor can only imagine, what La Señora fears, what Guzmán guesses; touch me, follow me …
“I had a nightmare: I dreamed that I was three persons,” said El Señor.
“You and I, Juan, you and I, one couple, Juan,” said La Señora.
“I alone, trembling with cold, I alone, without the presence of gods or men,” said Guzmán …
… don’t speak, don’t look, you are blind, you are deaf; my knowledge is total, but incomplete, only you were lacking to make it complete, only you knew what I could not know, because my wisdom is that of only one world, this world, our world, the world of Caesar and Christ, a closed world, a sorrowful world, whole, seamless as a succubus, without orifices, contained within its memory of certain misfortune and impossible illusions: a world that is a flickering flame in a night of turbulent storm: of it I know everything; I knew nothing of the other world, the one that you knew, the one that has always existed knowing nothing of us, as we knew nothing of it; I saw you born, my son, I, I saw you born from the belly of a wolf; who, then, but I would be present as the circle of your life, begun one night in the brambles of a forest, closes; who but I on the beach where you awakened this morning, without memory, forgotten by everything, forgotten by everyone, except by the person who received your feet as you were born? Take your hand for one moment from my shoulder; check, do you have the map safe in your breeches, do you have the green bottle I saw you pick up on the beach? Good; again, forward; don’t look; they are looking at us; they are coming toward us; they thought that the wonders had ended, they are looking at us in amazement, a page and a shipwrecked sailor: the pair that was missing; they are looking at us; they are leaving their taverns, their tile sheds, their forges; the weeping is quieting; we are walking forward, opening a path through the smoke and dust and heat, I, dressed all in black, deceiving them, giving the impression that my sex and my condition are other, not my own; you, tattered, your feet bare and bleeding, your hair rumpled, your eyes closed, your lips covered with dust. And then that bearded man — ruddy from the glowing coals, his chest sweaty, and his gaze prematurely old — drops his bellows, looks intently at me, approaches, opens a path through the throng, looks again, this time into my eyes, does not recognize my lips, but does recognize my gaze, holds out his hands, doubts, touches my breasts, falls to his knees, embraces my legs, and murmurs my name, again and again.
STAGES OF THE NIGHT
The night in Rome had seven phases, Brother Toribio, the palace astrologer, told Brother Julián, as he scrutinized the dark heavens above the high tower reserved for him by El Señor, and the other listened gloomily: crepusculum; fax, the moment at which the torches are lighted; concubium, the hour of sleep; nox intempesta, the time when all activity is suspended; gallicinium, the cock’s crow; conticinium, silence; and aurora.
For each stage of the long night of our ancestors — so divided in order to prolong, or perhaps to shorten (it was impossible to know for absolute fact), the process of time — Brother Julián assigned one of the bedchambers of the palace still under construction to represent a different phase; in his mind, two figures, a pair, materialized in each chamber, arranged by the priest as a kind of game, or final combat, a tourney without appeal whose time would be regulated by those nocturnal phases, seven in number, a solemn, fatal, and consecrated number: “Choose seven stars from the sky, Brother Toribio…”
Seven stages of the night: seven stars? seven couples? The night is natural, the painter-priest said to himself, and its division into phases a mere convention, as are too the names of persons; a person is a name or a noun, an action is a verb, conventions; the night itself would not know to label itself “night,” even less know that it is inaugurated by dusk and closed by dawn; the stars are infinite, and to choose among them is another convention, the choice this time a matter of chance: Fornax Chemica, Lupus, Corvus, Taurus Poniatowskii, Lepus, Crater, Horologium; neither did the seven constellations from among which Brother Toribio chose seven stars for Brother Julián’s night know their names; when it came to naming seven pairs … would there be a sufficient number of men and women in this palace … in this world, to form them? For the roles of fate and convention, in matters regarding an encounter between two human beings, are insignificant beside the power of the will of passion or the passion of will. And thus the perfect symmetries conceived by intelligence never surpass the ideal of the imagination but instead succumb to the proliferating invasion of hazardous irrationality; one demands to be two in order to be perfect, but it is not long until a contingent third appears, demanding its place in the dual equilibrium, only to destroy it. But perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror; nature rejects that order, preferring instead to proceed with the multiple disorder of the certainty of freedom.
Brother Julián remembered his lost friend, the Chronicler; he would have liked at this moment to say to him: “Let others write the history of events that are apparent: the battles and the treaties, the hereditary conflicts, the amassing and dispersion of authority, the struggles among the estates, the territorial ambition that continues to link us to animality; you, the friend of fables, you must write the history of the passions, without which the history of money, labor, and power is incomprehensible.”