Leaning against the column, he felt infinitely weary. The victory had drained him. Him, yes, but not the warriors; they’d not had enough, and the battle was continuing inside the Cathedral; those German reiters were far surpassing the obligations of their mercenaries’ salaries. He stood there a long while, eyes closed, secretly fascinated (yes, Bocanegra, I can tell you) with the spectacle God had visited upon him, he was convinced (I am convinced), to dilute the pride of military victory, to propose that the victory of arms be set aside and that instead we recall the unending battle for the salvation of souls. For what was this war but the struggle between Christianity and these heretics who had found refuge beside the icy Northern Seas, against the last Waldenses and Cathari, who now called themselves Adamites, who disguised themselves under the name of the father Adam and claimed to live as God’s first creature lived before the Fall?
“Since there is nothing worse than our world, Purgatory and Hell do not exist; because man’s nature is sinful, and since that nature is acquired on earth, it is here that sin must be purged; man fell because of sensuality, therefore he must infernally exhaust himself in sexual excess to cleanse himself of every vestige of this bestial tendency; then he will be purified, and when he dies he will become one with the Celestial Body; we deny, therefore, that Jesus Christ and His saints come at the hour of death to give solace to the souls of the just, since life is pain and no soul leaves this earth without great pain; and we maintain that as compensation no soul retains any awareness or memory after death of what it loved in its Age. So be it.”
These words coming from the darkness surrounding El Señor turned his blood to ice. At first he thought the speaker was one of the three buried there who had been martyred by Nero; then as he looked toward the silent sepulchers of Gaius, Victoricus, and Germanicus, he imagined it must be the very darkness speaking.
“Adam was the first Prince of the world, and when he came into his kingdom he had an intimation of his destiny: Adam, the first commandment of your religion is this: your flesh will sin today so that tomorrow you will be pure of soul and may conquer death. Your body will not be resurrected, but if it has been cleansed by pleasure, your purified soul will unite with God’s, and you will be God, and like God your soul will have no memory of the time lived on earth. But if you have not fornicated you will be doomed to Hell, and be reincarnated in the form of a beast until with a beast’s instinct you expend what you were unable to vanquish with the intelligence of a man.”
As El Señor peered into the shadow, he discerned the figure that spoke these things. He could distinguish the figure from the shadow, but shadowy still was the figure; the face, hands, and body of the unknown were cloaked in a habit dark as the ecclesiastical space (my dream intensifies the shadow); before the trembling, victorious Liege, the speaker affirmed:
“From Lyons to Provence and from Provence to Flanders, men’s bodies are inflamed with the Truth, and neither your arms nor your victories will prevail against them. Our succession of homilists is older than your line of princes; we came from Byzantium, roamed through Thrace and Bulgaria, and by unknown roads reached Spain, Aquitaine, and Toulouse; your ancestor Pedro el Católico ordered our homes burned and destroyed our Books of Hours written in the language of the people, and he took for himself the castles of the rich who had joined our crusade of poverty; your ancestor Don Jaime el Conquistador submitted us to the tortures and persecutions of the Catalan and Aragonese Inquisitions, and of our devastated Provence the troubadour could only sing, ‘Would that he who sees you now have seen you once!’ You believe that today you have finally defeated us. But I tell you that we shall outlive you. Beneath the cold moonlight in remote forests where your power cannot penetrate, bodies are coupling in cleansing pleasure so that they may reach the heavenly kingdom free from sin. Neither prison nor torture, neither war nor the stake, will prevent the natural union of two bodies. Look there at the altar and see the destiny of your legions: excrement. Look deep into my eyes and you will see the destiny of mine: Heaven. You cannot prevail against the gratifications of an earthly paradise that combines the pleasure of the flesh and the act of mystic ascension. You cannot prevail against the ecstasy that is ours when we enjoy the sexual act as it was practiced by our parents Adam and Eve. Sex as it was before sin; that is our secret. We realize fully our human destiny so that we may free ourselves eternally from our burdens, so we may become souls in a heaven that ignores earth; and in so doing, we also realize our celestial destinies. Your mercenary legions will not prevail against us; you represent the principle of death, and we the principle of procreation; you engender corpses, and we, souls; let us see which multiplies more swiftly from this time on: your dead or our living. You can do nothing. Our free spirit will live on the far shore of night and from there we shall proclaim that sin is nothing but the forgotten name of an impotent thought, and that innocence is the pleasure with which Adam, once he knew himself to be mortal, fulfilled his destiny on earth.”
“Where do you come from?” El Señor managed to ask.
“From nothing … nada,” the shadow replied.
“What is nothing?”
“Our father, Adán.”
“Who are you?”
“I am not.”
“What do you want?”
“I want not.”
“What, then, do you possess, that you show yourself so proud?”
“I possess nothing, which is everything, for in poverty lies absolution from sin. Only the poor can fornicate in a state of grace. Greed, on the other hand, is the true corruption, the final and utter condemnation. Nothing I have told you would be true if it were not done in poverty. Such is the precept of Christ.”
“Not his precept but his counsel.”
“Christ was not a courtier; he taught by example.”
“Can you, a sinner, compare yourself to Christ?”
“I am more like Him than any luxury-dulled Pope.”
“The Church has answered you and men like you with two weapons: Franciscan poverty and Dominican discipline.”
“The Antichrist in Rome knows very well how to dissemble, and how to use half measures to distract from what should be fully accomplished.”
“Regardless of what you say, you could learn something of humility from the Franciscan, for your pride cannot be easily reconciled with your poverty; and from the Dominican you could learn system and order, for your dream is not consistent with action.”
“My action is poverty: I would offend the Dominican; my dream is pride: I would not be congenial with the Franciscan.”
“Where is it you are going?”
“To absolute freedom.”
“And what is that?”
“A man who lives according to his own impulses, who makes no distinction between God and his own person. A man who looks neither ahead nor behind, for a free spirit knows neither before nor after.”
“What is your name?”
The specter laughed. “The Nameless Wilderness.”
And the specter approached so close that El Señor could feel its warm breath, and a burning hand touched his.