CREPUSCULUM
Many years later, old, alone, cloistered, El Señor would recall that this night, at the crepuscular hour, he had caressed for the last time the warm hollow of Inés’s back, where in that animated sweetness, in that soft quiet spot of her body, he had found, and held in his hand, his true pleasure; the protuberant lip kissed the curve that transformed the delicious narrowness of her waist into the magnificent fullness of her buttocks, and he moved away from the novitiate’s knowing body, a body that in spite of everything was still unknown to him; always he would ask himself — then and later, but always with the same feverish anguish, augmented perhaps by the swift passage of time that rushed toward the future while the memory of reality, of what could be verified because it had happened, ran backward, ceased to be tangible and sure to become spectral and doubtful, the past: who are you, Inesilla, a princess or a farm girl? brought to me by Guzmán, delivered by Guzmán to my pleasure: are you the daughter of a merchant, a workman, or a noble? how well the habit disguises one’s origins, how well, the moment he dons the habit, the converted Jew, the heretical doctor, the son of miserable swineherds, disguises his condition; neither the armor of the soldier nor the ermine of the emperor disguises men as well, or to such a degree makes them equal, as the tunic of devotion. What lineage have I violated: the highest or the lowest? what youth have I forever besmirched? who is this, my subject? more subjected than the peasant who delivers his harvest to me, more subjected than the vassal who pays me homage, or the worker who labors in my quarries; who is this subject of my sick flesh? the sweet depository for the silver that flows through my bones? the heir to my shameful afflictions? who? and to whom, in turn, do I deliver her that my very kingdom be overspread with that sick silver? or are we condemned, she and I, to live together from this moment, secretly bound together, hiding our love as we hide our shared illness? In you, I have sinned, I have sinned knowingly, my unknown Inés; I did not want it, I did not wish it; Guzmán divined my weaknesses, the moment my will faltered; death surrounded me, my thirty corpses were less exhausted than I, I had dictated to Guzmán that spurious testament, imagining my death, and Guzmán took advantage of my awareness of death to offer you to me; who, even I, does not weaken when surrounded by so much death? who does not fall into the temptation of affirming life, even though by so doing he poisons life, sickens it, and prepares it, though loving it, for death? you came to me, Inés, like an offering of provisional life, to make me believe that I, a phantom, could without punishment, without affliction, without body, making love to a virgin; that I could possess you, Inés, more with terror of mind than with trembling of body; that I might imagine you, lying in the bed, only to consider that as today you lie in bed someday your body will lie in the tomb; and I succeeded, didn’t I, Inés?; you have not closed your eyes one second, and to make love with one’s eyes open is already to have one foot inside the grave, it is to spy upon the lesser death, the infant death, the servile death, that lurks behind the beauty of the rose; you have not sighed all the time we have been together, you have watched me with those wide-open eyes, however, you did not desire the irrepressible heat of your own body, your body that bursts into flame in spite of your cold will to know everything, to examine everything, to give yourself to me in order to know, not to take pleasure …
El Señor arose from the bed and wrapped himself in the dark green bedcover; he tried to hear, to see, to sense some sign of the normal passing of time. But his penetrating and avid eyes saw only proof of abnormality: the candles of the chamber instead of having burned themselves out had grown taller; the hourglass instead of having during all that time filled the lower glass showed the upper globe filled with tiny yellow grains; he looked at the vessel from which he had drunk during the long day and night of their love-making, the water that cleared the cobwebs from his throat; it was brimming full. And he thought, here am I, a man thirsting for marvels he wishes both to accept and to reject; such a disposition gives all the advantages to the marvels, for they can, as they are convoked, impose themselves, conquer, precisely because they have been summoned against the will; and magic prospers in negation.
El Señor picked up the hand mirror he had carried one morning as he ascended the thirty-three steps of the unfinished stairway, and in which on another day he interrogated the figures of the painting brought — he was assured — from Orvieto: he wished now to regard in it the man thinking these thoughts, as if the mirror might also reflect the semblance of thought, and a flicker of madness crossed his face; had not that same mirror fallen and shattered upon the stone floor of the chapel that dismal morning? how, when, why did the fragments recompose between that morning and the day when he dictated his first testament? did the shattered pieces join together by themselves, more desirous of their union in quicksilvery smoothness than El Señor himself to possess a single destiny and not a monstrous plural metamorphosis of youth into age into cadaver into dispersed, mutilated matter, dust particles formed into antagonistic matter, reintegrated, formed again in the sperm of a beast, the egg of a she-wolf, in a resurrected birth, a new desire to nourish itself, grow, kill, die, an unending circle, immortal matter … without a soul.
He staggered toward the door of the chamber, he parted the tapestry that separated the room from the chapel, he looked toward the steps leading upward to the plain; raving, he asked, why was that stairway not completed? why could his thirty corpses not descend there? it was not completed, it was supposed to have only thirty steps, it would never be completed, it already had thirty-three, he raved …
“Accursed is a man who would govern so. He will lose everything if he cannot manage to maintain — with the same extenuating strength he employs to entreat his burning fantasy — an icy lucidity. Who would not exhaust his forces?”
From the bed Inés followed El Señor’s movements with a slight movement of her head, round and thistly as the first figs of the Barbary coast, trying to deduce the meaning of El Señor’s investigations, why his uncertain steps faltered as he walked around the bedchamber, why he looked at himself in a mirror, why he stood clinging to a tapestry; he looked at her looking at him with curiosity, he saw her shaven head, and with an uncontainable surge of affection he attributed to her an innocence that could only accentuate the degree of culpability of the acts in this cloister where mirrors and rites repaired unaided their scattered fragments; stairs, completed, were forever uncompleted; candles, as they burned, grew taller; water, as it was drunk, replenished itself; and hours, as they were spent, returned. El Señor felt that his body and soul had separated; the ax that had divided them was irrational time; to which of the thus divorced moments did his body belong, and to which his souclass="underline" to this moment, the one which with all too sufficient proof was skittering backward like a crab, toward fatal origins, the total consummation his mother the Mad Lady had announced, claiming to have arrived with the son of the father who at the same time would be the father of the grandfather; or to the moment which in spite of everything, with every step El Señor took through the chamber, with every slow and questioning turn of Inés’s head, insisted on catapulting itself into the future?
“There is a clock that does not strike,” El Señor murmured.
Then Inés — concentrating upon divining El Señor’s thoughts, with no point of orientation other than his restrained curiosity as he stood before some candles, an hourglass, and a water pitcher — picked up the pitcher, contemplated it for an instant, and then poured its contents onto the stained and rumpled bed.