The strange humour of Christ lay in this, in susceptible spaces, susceptible executions, susceptible carvings, susceptible resurrections and descent into apparent oblivion, apparent nakedness woven into the intuitive chasm of his world.
Everything there could be taken for granted. Nothing there could be taken for granted. And it was this combination of levels, levels of open disguise that gave him the magic of universality — gave him a body susceptible to intelligences and bullets as it was to fatalistic love and unsuspected corridors, underseas, undersides, of creation.
Was unfrocked space his? Was unfrocked nun his? Had he consented to a new kind of nakedness or a new kind of proportion?
Idiot Nameless asked himself these questions as if he were descending into his own past life, past lives (it seemed), preparations, adventures, excesses, crimes of love. It was a peculiar self-accusation but it ran true to a susceptibility to adventure as a mirror of callousness, a mirror of fathoms created and explored in which began the concealment of brides of passion to whom he was to return later through other lives as if these could restore his own rejected premises. Or was it murdered premises, the art of murder and love, from which an overspill of emotion engendered seas, oceans, air, rivers, lands as the burial place and cradle of endless apparitions of guilt, glory, compassion?
Idiot Nameless followed at a snail’s pace in his car the procession of bullet-ridden Christ to San Francisco Convent.
He was stunned by a sensation of mutual disguise, mutual nakedness enveloping him in the faces of the people in that procession. Hewn blood. Solid and dark as though a self-created tree or wall drew each to the other inch by inch into bed, ditch, unfrocked space.
Did earth fall into air, air into sky, sky into a hollow to make seas, lands, mountains over which one marched, moved like self-executed premises in one’s head, self-executed marriages?
For a while it seemed as he crawled inch by inch along the road that god dozed in his wheels and in the shuffling feet of innumerable peasants, until all at once they had reached the avenue that led to the Convent and one was aware of the trees, tall trees whose topmost branches were bent and streaming in the wind.
It always blew, he had been told by the fire-eater’s model, for a week or so at this time of the year.
This was the place then.
He would need to scout for her in the immediate neighbourhood.
What a marvellous old façade seemed all at once to float under the trees as he drew close to the church — squares or tiles, square inches of summer and autumn and winter and spring multiplied and rare.
The whiteness of the sun blazed at the tops of the trees. The stream of the wind blazed in the tops of the trees.
A woman came out of the church. There was dust on her lips. A square inch of thin dust.
He almost swore it was she and a dry sensation crossed his lips before they could melt into hers. But he was mistaken. She was not the woman he was looking for. Their gaze locked, broke and the stem of expectation he had shared for a sun-locked moment with her broke into areas of human drought. Inimitable drought. Inimitable lips … Inimitable dust of a trodden moment, a trodden flower.
THE FOURTH DAY (Unfrocked Spaces)
The Fool made a perfunctory estimate of holes in his chest as they bore Christ through the façade of the seasons — nine bullets in all.
The first two were already spent as interchangeable balloons (pyramid of earth? pyramid of moon?).
And the third brought him to the brink of descending into an unfamiliar bed or chart.
He secured a room in a lodging house, fell into bed, sun-drenched sleep, dreamed he was a man floating on a log. Then he became the log.
A log may drift back into the past, preparations for a journey, shores of the past, self-executed marriages.
Ages past condensed into an autumn bride. Autumn crime. Crime of love.
It was autumn, the Idiot dreamt, an autumn spent hollowing a canvas of space, hollowing oceans on which to sail, hollowing sky within which to fly to Mexico; hollowing evolutions of murder and sacrifice through which to carve a queen of beauty and sorrow in the edges of copper, gold and scarlet leaves carpeting the globe.
Edge of autumn sacrifices, autumn globe within which to sculpt tranquillity, carve immortality. Edge of autumn bride through which to turn again to penetrated tranquillity, penetrated immortality as the blood of expiring calendar rising up into the depths of a sea upon which to sail, turbulence of sea. Creation of horizons, frontiers through enraged premises that become a code of conflict and splendour written into reflections of security.
A log may reflect a leaf, caress a leaf, paint a leaf in the illegality of conquest like a god who begins to sail through ordinary flesh-and-blood towards the execution of hollow spaces to encompass seas. Towards the execution of commodities of love afar off on distant carpeted shores. Intangible layer upon layer of love of commodity under his hand. Scent, animality, wondrous texture, whore of a leaf, whore of a butterfly.
*
Late afternoon of a god the Idiot dreamt. Sacrificed angel pinned to the sky. Reflected wings buried in the sky. Glimpsed pride and guilt as commodities of love.
“The art of murder”, the Idiot said to the angel in his bed, “is the art of love of heaven too through winged premises. Have I not buried you in the sky as I secreted you in the sea? A tree may fly with a leaf and flash its skin, secrete its animal, secrete its darknesses. All these prospects and more add up to executions and menaces buried in wings of time, wings of space …”
He laughed now to dispel a mist, scarlet leaf, copper, gold. He felt the breath of her wings as they fluttered on his lips like a dust cloud, arched themselves into a mellow camouflage, mellow sky at the edge of the sea.
“One dies or kills with the dying year in order to pursue what one prizes, an inimitable equation between life and death …”
The dream faded and the Idiot awoke in a sharp tree of morning light that ran from him across the Mexican sky. Unfrocked angel. It was a beginning … the beginning of the kingdom of light … the beginning of glimpsed proportions, unsuspected proportions … the beginning of a kind of “aloneness”. ALONE
“How should one put it?” the Idiot thought (as he shaved). “Fourth Day in a novel-gospel? Gospel of the Fool?”
Fourth Day of glimpsed proportions perhaps within accumulated levels of sacrifice over unconfessed ages, unconfessing ages. The new fall of man. The aloneness of man.
“I like that,” the Idiot reflected. “Suits me.” He was invaded all at once by an immense sadness, the sister of compassion.
He finished his shaving, ate breakfast and set out to meet the guide Hosé he had secured for the day’s expedition.
Amazing how the sun in this sky sometimes seemed to stand straight up, to suspend one straight up until one felt quite safe, quite well.
And if one fell it was into a pillow of earth newly painted and translated out of the depths of a sky one had oneself hollowed or dug.
Why had he come to this part of the world to live, perhaps to die.? It was a sudden question out of the blue, that hit him like gunfire without rhyme or reason at a stroke, stroke of pen, stroke of a brush as the fire-eater would say.
Somewhere in the composition of his days lay the enigmatic reply. To find an equation between revolution and religion, to face a firing squad.
Stark equation, perhaps, and it left him with a sense of anti-climax, of desolation of premises.
The fire-eater’s model lived in this area. Think of that. Everyone knew. He knew as he absorbed an emotional gunflash that seemed to come out of nowhere into the pit of his stomach.