“Can all the sordidness possible to humanity, sir, compensate for the vacuum left by death? I wanted sordidness, I lived with sordidness. But since my son insists on it, I am now dependent upon this scrupulous service in my travels. My rules are simple. You would be surprised, you, señor caballero, who seem to wander through the world with no beast of burden to bear your sorrows and without even a rough pair of leather breeches to protect you from the stones and thorns, you would be surprised, I tell you, at the way the most simple dispositions are complicated the moment they are set apart by ceremony. In the end, the ceremony is converted into the substance, and the marrow of the matter becomes of secondary importance.
“Every evening at dusk they transport me to my carriage; they always draw the curtains and seal the doors and windows; they have the horses hitched in pairs; the black coach rolls behind my carriage; the torches we need to light our way are lighted; we travel through the night; every dawn the monks and a few halberdiers approach the nearest monastery and, with humility and authority, ask for shelter against the unbearable sun; as always they convey me, swathed in rags and carried by the soldiers, to a bare room; after me they bring the body of my husband; they prepare the Requiem Mass; they advise me of the hour, the Mass is celebrated; they leave me there at the foot of the catafalque, my only company my faithful Barbarica; again at dusk they come to get us; the voyage is renewed once the obolus has been paid to the monks.
“Let my grief be respected. Let my solitary company with death be respected. Let no woman approach me! None, except Barbarica, who is hardly a woman and who can awaken no passion or jealousy. I hear their footsteps, their women’s footsteps, women’s voices, rustling taffetas, crackling crinolines, high-pitched laughter, sighs of intrigue; the walls of the convents moan with the voices of love; the hollow walls howl with indecent gratifications; behind the door of every cell some woman weeps and cries out her pleasure … Let no woman dare! I tolerate everything, señor caballero, this costly company my son has imposed upon me, the violation of my declared desire to be anonymous, the mockery of my supreme intent of sacrifice: a poor woman, naked and hungry, widowed and solitary, in rags, dragging along the roads her heavy burden wrapped, like herself, in the sackcloth of beggarhood. I accept everything … except the presence of a woman. Now he is mine, mine alone, forever.
“The first time I kissed him again, señor caballero, I had to break the seal of lead, the wood, the waxen cloths enveloping him. I could, at last, do what I would with that body. They had been generous and lenient with me. Let no one oppose her in anything, let no one do anything that might cause her discontent; do her will and protect her health, and little by little she herself will be convinced of the necessity for burying the corpse: that is what they murmured with their stupid air of compassion.
“Locked within my castle, I could, at last, do as I wished: part the fur cape, rip the silken shirt (like this, señor caballero, like this), tear the medallion from his chest and the velvet cap from his head; I could remove those brocade breeches (like this, Barbarica, like this) and the rose-colored hose and know whether it was true what was said about him, murmured in bedchambers as well as in anterooms, kitchens, stables, and convents, son mary estoit beau, jeune et fort bien nourry, et luy sembloit qu’il pouvoit beaucoup plus accomplir des oeuvres de nature qu’il n’en faisoit; et d’autre part, il estoit avec beaucoup de jeunes gens et jeune conseil, qui et l’oeuvre luy faisoient et disoient paroles en présens de belles filles, et le ménoient souvent en plussieurs lieux dissoluz … Because I had to know whether it was true; I had known him only in bedchambers as black and dark as this carriage, señor caballero, at the time of his choosing and his pleasure, with no warning, with no words, no light, almost without his touching me, for he only looked upon and allowed himself to be seen by the courtesans in innumerable villages and the country girls with whom he exercised his seignorial right; he took me in the dark; he took me to procreate heirs; with me he invoked the ceremony that prohibits to all chaste and Catholic and Spanish couples any delight of sight or touch, or any prelude or prolonged contentment, especially in the case of a royal pair, whose hurried coupling has no reason but to fulfill the strict laws of descendancy; do you understand, señor caballero, how one’s senses can be suffocated by such ceremony, how we can be left with no domain but that of incorporeal imagination? Only now that he is dead, I alone can see him, I can see all of him, motionless and subjected entirely to my caprice, night after night in our hollow of cold stone, with no adornment, not even a prie-dieu.
“I sent for the learned gentleman and apothecary Don Pedro del Agua so that he could correctly remove my husband’s entrails and all the other organs except the heart, which Señor del Agua himself recommended should be left in the body; he cleansed the cavities and incisions with a brew of aloes, alum, wormwood, caper, and lye that he boiled according to his art, adding the first spirits drawn from the still, strong vinegar, and ground salt. When the body was well cleansed, he left it to dry for eight hours in two bushels of ground salt. Then he completely filled the body cavities with powders of wormwood, rosemary, sweetgum-tree sap, benzoin, alum rock, cumin, water germander, myrrh, lime, thirty twigs of cypress, and all the black balsam the body would hold. When the cavities were filled, Señor del Agua closed them, sewing them with the fellmonger’s stitch, and then, except for the head, face, and hands, he anointed the cadaver, using an aspergillum to sprinkle the body with a mixture of distilled substances; turpentine, rosin, benzoin, and acacia. Then he immediately swathed all the anointed portions in bindings saturated in a liquor made of gillyflower, sweetgum-tree sap, wax, mastic, and tragacanth. Then Dr. del Agua left, affirming that my husband would be preserved without suffering the offensive ravages of time. And so I made him mine.
“I have had even the altars removed and have ordered the windows painted black so that every chapel we visit is identical to the service it lends. Even the royal catafalque seemed an offense to the severity I desired, requested, and obtained. The purple mantle that covered his body, the silver ornamentation on the coffin, and the ornate crucifix were a mockery; the four candelabra, an insult; the light on the candles, a flickering offense. They said to me: Señora, in life he loved luxury and gaiety. Remember, you yourself gave birth to a child one evening while a ball was being held in the courtyard of the palace of Brabant; while your husband was pursuing the girls of Flanders you felt the pangs of birth and went to hide in the privy and there we found you and there was born your son, the present Señor. The midwives arrived just in time, for the umbilical cord was strangling the infant, his suffused face was blue with asphyxia and he was bathed in blood. So it was related. Now I shall reject the excesses of such pomp and I shall find motive for life in the spectacle of embalmed death, as before in the act of giving life to my son I nearly knew death; like Rachel, I could proclaim to my son, filius doloris mei, and to the world, the sons of maternal pain are inclined to happiness. I kissed the bare feet of this swathed and spice-filled spoil, my husband, and the silence was sudden and absolute.
“One must close one’s ears with wax, señor caballero; one cannot live with one’s eyes closed, one’s ear involuntarily sharpened, telling oneself that soon one will be hearing the squeaking of the coffin lid, the movement of a tortured body, the hollowness of invisible footsteps, the slow regeneration of features, the crepitating growth of a dead body’s hair and nails, the rebirth of the lines erased from the hands of a cadaver that lost them at death as they had acquired them at birth; no, señor caballero, deaden your senses; as I have told you, there is no other solution if one wishes to be alone with the one one loves. Dr. Pedro del Agua went away, and I did not know whether to thank him or curse him for his diligence. I was absolute mistress of an incorruptible body, one that maintained the semblance of life, but one that for that very reason could be mistaken for other men; women would see only a handsome, sleeping man. Don’t you hear them? It’s the women! Yes, I cursed the science of Señor del Agua; he had restored my husband with the appearance that had been his in life, and with the promise of corporeal incorruptibility; but he had taken from me the one thing I might have called my own: a corrupt cadaver, foul flesh, dust and worms, white bones that belong to me…! Do you understand what I am telling you, señor caballero? Do you know that there are moments that cannot be measured? Moments when everything becomes one: the satisfaction of a fulfilled desire along with its remorse, the simultaneous desire and fear of what was, and the simultaneous terror and longing for what will be? No, perhaps you do not know of what I am speaking. You believe that time always advances. That all is future. You want a future; you cannot imagine yourself without it. You do not want to provide any opportunity to those of us who require that time disintegrate and then retrace its steps until it come to the privileged moment of love and there, only there, stop forever. I embalmed Prince Don Felipe so that, as he looks like life, life may peacefully return to him if my undertaking be fulfilled, if time obey me, move backward, return unconsciously to the moment when I say: Stop, now, never move again, neither forward nor backward, now! Stop! And if that undertaking be frustrated, then I have faith that my husband’s resemblance to life will attract to his body another man capable of inhabiting that body, eager to inhabit it, to exchange his poor mortal shell for the immortal figure of my incorruptible husband.