— Sometimes she carries bread, sometimes bells, it’s terribly symbolic: the tintinnabulation of toasted tits, get it? And look at the next one, Lucía, you hear me? Look up, poor little Lucy! Lift your veil, let our visitor see the empty sockets where your eyes used to be, you preferred being blinded to being screwed, didn’t you? So now you chew your eyes, served up like fried eggs on your plate …
He laughed like crazy, exposing his bloodstained baby teeth, pointing with his finger, getting more worked up since he met with no argument, like a precocious drunkard, commanding the woman with long mahogany hair to open her mouth and show her gums, Apollonia, not a tooth, see, not a single molar, ideal for cocksucking (he laughed harder and harder), a second vagina, the toothless mouth of the dentifrical saint, shake your bag of teeth, Apollonia; which she does, and they all hurry to do something without his asking. The girl with the straw hat, instead of putting the lizard she is holding into her mouth, tries to put herself into the mouth of the lizard; the blind woman takes the fried eggs from her plate and puts them in her empty eyesockets; Apollonia takes the teeth out of her bag and puts them in her mouth; and the child shrieks with laughter and shouts: They just won’t fuck! They just want to get away from men! From repulsed suitors! From unsatisfied fathers! From raging soldiers! Better dead than bed! The convent is their refuge from male aggression, see, they tried to seduce me, I’d like to see them try again; and one woman begins to play the guitar, another the harp — beautiful women, women the color of spikenard and lemon, cinnamon women and pearl women, lilting as an endless autumn, silent as the heart of summer, silky and lacy as a contemplative sea: they don’t look at the child, the child points at them with his tiny finger, the finger injured by the needle; the woman who accompanies him holds her head in her hands, she lowers her arms, she makes me look at her, she is the only one who isn’t beautiful, she is a dusky woman with moles on her temples, she reaches out and drops a thorn from the rose on the table. Come, she says to the child, and the child resists, he says no, she doesn’t repeat her command, she just looks at him, he closes his eyes and puts out his hand, she gives him the thorn, he takes it, and without opening his eyes, he pricks his index finger with it.
His blood flows. The women around the table cry, their voices join in a mournful chorus, the guitarist and the harpist keep on playing, Sister Lucía raises her eyelids and reveals the endless labyrinth of her empty gaze, Sister Apollonia opens her toothless mouth, Sister Margarita tries to force her nose into the lizard’s mouth, Sister Agatha shows the purple scars on her chest, Sister Marina licks her mustache, Sister Casilda places a rope around her neck, the dusky woman calls out their names, as if introducing them to me and the child, who is beside himself and runs to sit on his chamber pot; he makes a face, he stops crying, he screams with worn-out pleasure, and hurrying back to the table with the pot in his hand, he empties it among the roses and the bread. The shit is hard, the shit is golden, the shit is gold. Miracle! Miracle!
— Desire is like snow in our hands, says the melancholy woman who accompanies the child, gold is nothing to us. Look at the dog; he doesn’t know what gold is. But he recognizes shit.
Carlos María: for a long time they hadn’t looked at you, and you hadn’t spoken to them, and in that indifference that combines silence and separation, all you see is a whirl of colors, taffetas, silks, roses, baskets, guitars, doe eyes, peach skin, and cascading hair, and you, too, feel distanced, as if you were watching yourself through opera glasses from the upper balcony of a theater, the paradise of the spectator, absent and present, seeing but seeming absent, tacitly ignored and yet represented, there and not there, part of a rite, a link in the ceremony being celebrated — you suddenly realize — with or without you, but which has been practiced a thousand and one times in preparation for this moment when you are there, absent and present, seeing without being seen, in a theater of the sacred, which seems cruel and bloody to you, the spectator, because it is caught between the style the work demands and the style the spectator provides, it is the midpoint — you stare intently at the child’s pricked finger — between the conception of the sacred and its execution. One can conceive of God without a body, but action requires a body. The child looks at you and runs over to you to put his arms around your waist, growling like a little animal. It is only then that you realize that the floor of this refectory is not made of ordinary red tiles but of dried blood turned to brick.
9
The father and the daughter are going to look at two or three art books together, as they do every night, without discussing what they are going to look at, with the books open on his knees and her lap, pointing out one print or another, from time to time sipping a glass of claret or port, an old custom in the British Isles that has continued through the generations on this side of the Atlantic, he chooses a book of Piranesi prints, lord and master of the infinite, he tells Catarina, the author of engraving’s most absolute light and shade: Roman landscapes and prisons, he points, prisons and vistas without beginning or end, Santiago Ferguson caresses the head of his daughter, the engraving as an infinity symbol lying on its side as you are, alongside my legs, an endless sleep, entrance and exit, liberty and prison, an imprisoned vista, a prison with a view.
— This is what I am offering you. How will you correspond?
She opens her own book, which is resting on her lap. She indicates a photograph of the Teatro Olimpico of Vicenza: she says she prefers Palladio’s public architecture to his domestic architecture; he created uninhabitable Roman temples for the bourgeois of Italy, but for the public, poor and rich alike, he created imaginary cities, prosceniums that refused to be pure theater, instead they extended into streets, alleys, barely visible city vistas, urban mazes that, Catarina Ferguson repeated, as the professor had often said, gave the scene another, an infinite dimension.
— You don’t see it?
— No. I don’t see what you’re talking about.
— It’s the entrance. We are looking at the entrance.
— All I see is the same door as ever, bricked up, the same as always.
— Come with me. I will prove to you that the entrance is there.
— Will you? Has it happened to you, what sometimes happens, that suddenly we seem to see or feel something clearly, something that was there all along but we hadn’t noticed until that moment, when everything comes together around it, and everything stops and falls into place …
— Do you see it, Catarina? Do you see that it’s so? It is …
Later, in each other’s arms, she told him to stop torturing her, it was so tempting to find out about it, but she didn’t want to enter that hateful place ever again, and even though she detested it, and the people who lived there horrified her, still she couldn’t seem to get over the temptation to return to it.
— You don’t believe that there’s a symmetry in all things? Santiago asked her.
— I believe things only happen once.
— In that case, we will never understand each other.
— Very well, Santiago.