What was he saying to us?
“If you don’t believe in God, believe in the universe. Except that the universe is identical to God. It has no beginning and no end. That is why God alone can see a thousand-year-old tree grow.”
In the admonitory reference to Spinoza, however, we encountered a personal resonance that Filopáter could not, or would not, let us hear. Spinoza was not expelled from Judaism because of persecution. He expelled himself because of love of solitude, and he loved solitude-Filopáter explained-in order to think. He wanted to be expelled from the Hebrew community to demonstrate that religious believers care more about authority than about truth.
“What do you think?”
After consulting with each other, Jericó and I told the priest he would have to answer the question himself. We were disrespectful.
“If what you want, Father, is to set a trap for us so we commit today to what we won’t commit to tomorrow, we believe the one who has been trapped is you.”
“Why?” the cleric said with great, with real humility.
How to tell him that whatever happened, whatever he thought, Filopáter would never renounce his religious fidelity? He would be faithful to it no matter how heretically he might think-no matter how much he might choose.
Perhaps he guessed the answer we didn’t give to his “why” loaded with responsibilities for two young students who were alert but immature.
“Why?”
He looked at us with the gratitude, confidence, and affection we would always have for him.
“Listen, don’t be satisfied with telling me what I might want to hear. And don’t challenge me out of mere negativity. Be serious. Don’t exaggerate.”
It was another way of telling us he had chosen a path but it was up to us to choose our own. He said it in the indirect way I’m saying it now. He left us with a permanent feeling for the unavoidable difficulties in living life seriously. Spinoza engaged in rebellion and scandal intentionally, in order to be expelled and be independent. Filopáter had not done the same. In the light of his experience, was the venerated Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) a coward who, instead of breaking with his Church, looked for the way in which his Church would break with him? And was Filopáter another coward who knew a good many intellectual options outside the Church and settled for the protective cupola of the ecclesiastical dome?
“I avoid rebellion and scandal,” he told us the last time we saw him, Jericó and I both knowing that when we left school we would not visit Filopáter again, or the students, Professor Soler and his restless hands, Director Vercingetorix and his trampled gladioluses. Why? Because it was simply a rule of life that the attachments of adolescence are lost in order to become adults, without weighing the loss of value this can signify. Filopáter would become the object of our self-satisfied contempt because his instruction consisted of teaching the thought of others, with no contribution of his own.
But wasn’t the inquiry itself, the ability to ask and to ask ourselves, an indispensable part of the education that would allow us to be “Jericó” and “Josué”? Only later, much later, did we learn that Filopáter resembled Baruch more than we had imagined at school.
“He did not accept his family’s inheritance. He died in poverty because that is what he wanted. He left with nothing.”
“Nature is happy with very little. So am I.”
The candles drip wax on a barrel filled with blood.
MARÍA EGIPCIACA’S EMPTY bed became the symbol of my being abandoned inside the mansion on Calle de Berlín. Nurse Elvira had disappeared, I suppose forever. The imperious doctor had no need to return. Now the lawyer named Don Antonio Sanginés put in an appearance. I wanted to solve the mysteries that surrounded me. Where was my warden, María Egipciaca? What did the empty bed and rolled-up mattress mean? Where were her clothes, her cosmetics (if she had any), her basic possessions: dentifrice and toothbrush, hairpins, brush, comb? The bathroom was as empty as her bedroom. There were no towels. And no toilet paper. It was as if a ghost had lived in the room of a woman whose physical reality was obvious to me.
The mystery of her absence was no greater than my sense of it, except that the enigma of the woman never became anything else, while in my own case, absence signified solitude. It was strange. The customary presence of Señora María Egipciaca somehow filled the empty spaces of this mansion untouched by reversals or novelty. It wasn’t a beautiful house, or historic, or evocative. It was huge, and I had to admit that the occasionally amiable though almost always hateful presence of my jailer filled all the spaces that now were not only empty but solitary, for hollowness as sidereal as the universe evoked by Father Filopáter is not the same as a disappearance of the concrete and customary, no matter how odious it may have seemed to us. I imagine the worst injustices, the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazi regime, and try to imagine something that might have been a consolation. Suffering with others. The prisoner in Auschwitz, Terezin, or Buchenwald could see his death in the eyes of other prisoners. Perhaps that is the mercy no one could tear away from that group of victims.
How could I, wretch that I was, compare my insignificant abandonment in the mansion on Berlín to the fate of a victim of Nazi racism? Was my vanity so great it placed my minuscule abandonment above the gigantic abandonment of the millions of men and women whom no one could or wished to help?
Well, yes. You can attribute it, now that I, a victim myself, am nothing more than a severed head lapped by the waves of the Southern Sea, to the failings of self-pity, the rupture of the customary, even a certain nostalgia for the presence, odious or amiable but at least habitual and constant, of my old guardian, to calibrate the solitude that invaded me at the time with a sense of being abandoned that brought me dangerously close to the sin of believing that the world was my perception of the world, that my particular image of things was as momentous as the injustice committed against an entire people, religion, or race.
I’m being sincere with you and make no apology for my absurd anguish but do criticize my narrow perception and arrogant presumption in believing that because I was solitary I was persecuted. But who, in a situation comparable to mine, does not project his personal misery onto a greater screen, a collective experience that saves us from the sadness of the trivial and insignificant? Perhaps, looking back, I realize that what I perceived was inside me, and what lay outside was so small that to endure it I had to sketch it on our time’s large collective screen of grief, abandonment, and despair.
Forgive me for saying what I have just said, you who still live and give definitive value to your existence. I do it to punish myself and situate the small crises of my youth within their real limits, which are limits only because we first extended them to the entire universe, turned our small problems into matters of universal transcendence, and compared ourselves, grotesquely, to Anne Frank or, more modestly, David Copperfield. All this is to say that the disappearance of María Egipciaca, preceded by my illness, the incident with Nurse Elvira, and the suspicion I was not who I believed myself to be, confused my existence and left me, like a shipwrecked sailor, wanderering in the solitude of the mansion on Berlín. Waiting for a solution to this new stage of my life, fearful it wasn’t a stage but an insurmountable condition. What would become of me? Following my guardian, would I disappear too? Would I be expelled? How long would a wait continue that was a torment and brought me to the ludicrous extreme of comparing myself to a victimized Jewish girl or an abandoned English boy?