With sweetness and strength, the novitiate withdrew her hand from the lips of El Señor. She arose from the bed; she donned again the rough sackcloth she had worn when she entered. She walked to the threshold that led to the chapel and there, sweet, distant, barefoot, she found words; words crowned her, transported her, possessed her; perhaps they were not hers, perhaps she was but the vehicle and they spoke through her tongue: “Señor, your race has made Heaven and Hell one. I want only the earth. And the earth does not belong to you.”
El Señor would never, even before he knew they had been her last, forget Inés’s words. He would repeat them to the end, until the moment when older and more ill than ever, astounded at his own survival but certain of his mortality, he again ascended the stairs of his chapel in search of the final light and truth.
FAX
Light the torch, huntsman, and lead me to the chamber of our Señora, Guzmán said: I do not know why this night, of all nights, seems the darkest I can remember; come, light up, it is the hour for torches, don’t all the old sayings tell us that darkness follows the light, as the calm the storm, death, life, pride, humiliation, and patience, its reward? Come, light up, huntsman, for I already sense that our hour is approaching, and one must be prepared to seize the opportunity; I feel it; my bones tell me, and also the bodies of my hawks, quivering with eagerness; tell me, huntsman, did you follow my orders? did you act while El Señor and the novitiate were sleeping? did you reverse the hourglass? did you fill the water pitcher and substitute new tapers for the burned ones? We must carefully govern our acts so that nothing be left to chance, for we have nothing to lose, you and I, and everything to gain, if we counter the calculation and might of new blood against the docile fatalism of exhausted blood; everything is change, huntsman; the man who knows how to see change and go along with it prospers; he who refuses to recognize it decays and perishes; that is the only unchangeable law: change; lead me with your torch, you will be rewarded; someone will need to take my place when I ascend to a more exalted position; who better than you, who knows so well how to serve me? you, loyal servant and most faithful henchman; I know you, though I do not know your name — but even you don’t know that; I know you as well as I know myself, for what I order, you execute, you are my right arm and my shadow: you know how to imitate a dog’s howling beneath the echoing vaults of this palace; you know how to fill an empty pitcher in El Señor’s bedchamber while our Señor sleeps away exhausted pleasures with the novitiate: I know you, and from this moment I put this challenge to you: be ambitious, huntsman; attempt in your turn to take my place; that will be the way to serve me loyally: scheme, plot, dissemble, rage against me as you serve me, or you will never have a name of your own but will be only an abject and expendable adjunct to the name of El Señor, who has his name because he inherited it, not because he earned it; and you and I, huntsman, we are going to demonstrate that one earns one’s name, and that the only Señores will be those who acquire their names, not inherit them; I had no name either; I did not inherit a name, I earned it; Guzmán has a name today, though not as great as he would wish, or as great as someday it will be; so, huntsman, you must be both my partisan and my enemy, for only by being my adversary can you be my follower; that is what I want, that is what I demand of life among men: be my enemy, nameless huntsman, do not deny me that fealty, achieve your baptism with ambition, for the name given you at an inauspicious hour by your wretched parents has been forgotten by the world and you will earn your true name only in the history of men … if you know how to participate in it and excel, and in so doing, leave the trace of your person upon that history; struggle against me, huntsman, you and I both knowing, for if not, you condemn me to a life without risk, without opportunity to defend myself and affirm myself in the defense, and like the aged falcons, my claws will finally crack and split in idleness upon the perches of repose.
Guided by the torch, Guzmán halted before the door of La Señora’s bedchamber; he ordered the huntsman to wait, torch in hand, outside; he entered without knocking and closed the door behind him; La Señora was sleeping, embracing the body of the youth called Juan; she smiled in her sleep and her smile spoke volumes: this is my man, this man is mine. Only these two, this pair, were honoring the hour of nocturnal repose, Guzmán said to himself: El Señor and the novitiate, lying apart, are each keeping an icy night vigiclass="underline" he imagined Inés’s naked feet, Felipe’s naked hands, the icy stones of that cloister and bedchamber. Only this pair was joined in sleep, La Señora lying naked across the body of the youth.
“As if even in sleep she could possess him,” Guzmán murmured with melancholy jealousy.
At his quiet words, and insistent stare, La Señora wakened with a start; when she saw Guzmán she covered her breasts with the sheet; the blond youth seemed to sleep; frightened, indignant, surprised, La Señora opened her mouth to speak, but Guzmán interrupted; she must choose: either she permitted herself the luxury of leaving her door unlocked, demonstrating thereby that she feared nothing and could be accused of nothing, or she bolted it like any other discreet burgher’s wife as she allowed herself the luxury of adultery; she must choose.
“Do not look at me with such hatred, Señora.”
La Señora pulled the sheet over the youth’s head. “Your business had better be urgent, Guzmán.”
“It is; so urgent it will not admit delay or ceremony.”
And he told La Señora that the good huntsman has eyes and ears everywhere, in seignorial bedchambers as well as the taverns on the plain; for if the Señores were blind and deaf, either from choice or from apathy — Guzmán would not qualify which — their vassal, in proof of loyalty, would see and hear in their exalted names. See and hear, yes, but not act, for the second measure of loyalty owed the Señores was to inform them, and permit them to act with the authority that was theirs by divine right.