Baruch himself, a Jew descended from the Portuguese expelled in the name of the political madness of Iberian unity, an Israelite by birth and religion, wasn’t he thrown out of the synagogue because he did not repent of his philosophical heresies that-the rabbis were correct-led to the negation of the dogma of the doctors and opened the way to what was most dangerous for orthodoxy: free thought, without doctrinal bonds?
No: Spinoza was expelled because he wanted to be expelled. The rabbis pleaded with him to repent. The philosopher refused. The rabbis tried to keep him. They offered him a pension of a thousand florins, and Spinoza replied that he was not corrupt and not a hypocrite but a man searching for the truth. The fact is that Spinoza felt dangerously seduced by Israel and, threatened by that seduction, turned his back on the synagogue. This was how the chief rabbi declared Spinoza nidui, cherem, and chamata, separated, expelled, extirpated from among us.
Which is what the philosopher wanted in order to postulate an independence that would not let itself be seduced, in retaliation, by the rational liberalism of the new Protestant bourgeoisie of Europe. A rebel before Israel, Spinoza would also be a rebel before Calvin, Luther, the House of Orange, and the Protestant principalities. In any case, he told his friends: Keep my ideas secret. Which did not prevent a fanatic one night from attempting to assassinate him with the ragged stab of a knife. The philosopher placed the cape ripped by the knife in a corner of his room.
“Not everyone loves me.”
He did not accept positions, sinecures, or chairs. He lived in furnished rooms, without things, without ties. He did not accept a single compromise. His ideas depended on a dispossessed life, his survival on modest manual work, badly paid and solitary. Thought must be free. If it is not, all oppression becomes possible, all action blameworthy.
And in that isolated solitude, polishing lenses and performing the historical drama of the spider that kills the spider and the spiders that join together to devour the fly and the big fish that eats the small one and the crocodile that eats them both and the hunter who kills the crocodile and the hunters who kill one another for the skin that will crown the helmets of soldiers in battle and the death of thousands of men in wars and the extension of the crime to women and children and old people and the selection of the crime applied to Jews, Muslims, Christians, rebels, libertines, those who, heretics all, choose: eso theiros, I choose: heresy, freedom…
What is everything, in the end, but an optical effect? Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) asks himself as he bends over his lenses, convinced a man is a philosopher only if, like him, he gives himself up to asceticism, humility, poverty, and chastity.
But isn’t this the greatest sin of all? Isn’t the rebellion of Lucifer in its high degree of humility the most awful of crimes: being better than God?
Baruch Spinoza shrugs. The spider devours the fly. Death is no more than an unfortunate encounter.
Thus spake Filopáter.
A SHORT WHILE after that terrible family scene in the mansion in Pedregal, Errol left home. We found out because he left school in the first year of preparatory at the same time, and we decided to call at his house, as curious as we were concerned about a boy whose destiny seemed so different from ours that, in the end, it represented what Jericó and I could have been.
That afternoon the house in Pedregal seemed dismal, as if its extreme bareness of austere lines had become overloaded with the internal accumulation of things I’ve already described. As if the simple contrast of sun and shadow-a taurine architecture, after all, an essential reduction of the ritual-had ceded light to a somber sunset so that the interior of the house infected the exterior despite its resistance.
We didn’t have time for the front door to be opened for us. It opened and on the doorstep a young, robust woman appeared accompanied by the weak-looking, dark-skinned waiter we had met at the reception. Each carried a suitcase, though the woman also had, pressed to her bosom, a small porcelain statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They were not alone. Behind her appeared Errol’s mother, Señora Estrellita, drying her hands on her apron, looking at the servants with a passionate intensity we did not recognize and enduring the downpour of insults from her husband Don Nazario, dressed for the beach in shorts and leather sneakers.
It was like a cataract of hatreds and recriminations on feedback; turbid waters, contaminated with urgencies and excrescences that had their muddy source in the words of the father, were calmed in those of the mother and eventually found a strange backwater of silence in those who should have been angriest, the two servants dismissed by Señora Estrella to shouts of good-for-nothings, scoundrels, you’ve abused my confidence, get out, I don’t need you, I can run the house and prepare the meals better than you, lazy Indian beggars, go back to the mountains, and unaware of our presence, she hurled a misguided domestic fury at the pair of servants but it turned back on Jericó and me, the invisible spectators, and her husband, Don Nazario, a kind of distant but omnipotent Jupiter dressed to go jogging who, in fact, was running around his wife as he stepped on the toes of his employees, whose obstinate silence, stony glances, and immobile postures bore witness to their passive resistance and announced an accumulated rage that, without the mitigation of daily release, would spill over in one of those collective explosions that the Esparzas perhaps could not imagine or perhaps believed they had warded off for long periods of time with the rules of obedience and submission to the master, or it may be they desired it as one desires an emotional purge that sweeps away indecisiveness, secret guilt, the omissions and faults of those who hold power over the weak.
Doña Estrella shoved the dismissed employees. Don Nazario insulted Doña Estrella. The servants, instead of picking up their suitcases and walking away-she praising the Virgin-remained stoic, as if they deserved the storm of insults raining down on them or enjoyed without smiling those the master directed at the mistress in a kind of chain of recriminations that most resembled eternity as a prison sentence.
“Where was the Chinese vase?”
“Stupidities are celebrated in a girl and even forgiven…”
“Admit that you two broke it!”
“… not in an old woman.”
“And the canary?”
“You were a fool when you were young…”
“Why did it die?”
“… but you were cute…”
“Why did you leave it dead in its cage?”
“You were pretty, you moron!”
“Why was the cage door open?”
“What happened to you?”
“Are you trying to drive me crazy?”
“What frightens you more?”
“Don’t stand there like lumps.”
“Living alone or staying on with me?”
“Move away, I’m telling you.”
“Don’t be stupid, tell them to come back. In a minute you’ll-”
Doña Estrella whirled to face, with mouth open and eyes closed, her husband. She stepped to one side. Don Nazario turned his back. The servants walked back into the house, as if they knew this play all too well. They returned armed with the dagger of the insults the master had directed at the mistress. They would hang them, like trophies, in the damp, dark back room, always reserved for the staff, with a wall, it did have that, so they could tack up the print of the Virgin and, as a kind of curse, the photo of the Esparzas.
How long, how long! Errol would exclaim the next day when we went to see him in his tiny apartment: barely two rooms on Calle del General Terán, in the shadow of the Monumento de la Revolución. The dark-skinned servant gave us our friend’s new address, swearing us to silence because young Errol’s parents didn’t know where he was living.