“Señor, this great painting has been sent to you from Orvieto, fatherland of a few somber, austere, and energetic painters. You are the Defender of the Faith. They offer it in homage to you and to the Faith. See its great dimensions. I have measured them. They will fit perfectly within the empty space behind the altar in your chapel.”
SOUL OF WAX
Brother Julián embarked on one of Guzmán’s caravels that yesterday set sail from the port of Cádiz; I remained here alone in the astronomer’s tower with my pens, paper, and ink. I say alone, because Toribio was working feverishly, as if very little time remained and as if the well-being of the world depended upon his tasks; he paid little attention to my presence. I was grateful for this situation. I could finish the narration begun by Julián. I would be the phantom of King Don Felipe, the wax whereupon were imprinted the footprints of his soul, to the very end. I wanted to be a faithful witness. But from the moment I sat down to write the final section of this hadith, my imagination intruded to divert the worthwhile purposes of my chronicle. First I wrote these words: “Everything is possible.” Next, beside them, these: “Everything is in doubt.” Thus I knew, by the mere fact of writing them, that I was writing on the threshold of a new era. I longed for the certitude inculcated in me during my fleeting passage through the halls of Salamanca. Words and things coincide: all reading is, in the end, but the reading of the divine word, for, in an ascending scale, everything finally flows into one identical being and word: God, the first, the efficient, the final, and the restorative cause of everything that exists. In this manner the vision of the world is unique: all words and all things possess an established place, a precise function, and an exact correspondence within the Christian universe. All words signify what they contain and contain what they signify. I thought then about the knight Ludovico and his sons had met in the windmill and I began to write the story of a hidalgo from La Mancha who continued to adhere to the codes of certainty. For him, nothing would be in doubt, but everything would be possible: a knight of the faith. That faith, I said to myself, would originate in reading. And that reading would be madness. The knight would persist in the unique reading of the texts and would attempt to transmit that reading to a reality that had become multiple, equivocal, and ambiguous. He would fail time and again, but every time he would again take refuge in reading: born of reading, he would remain faithful to it because for him there was no other licit reading: the sorcerers he knew through reading, and not reality, would continue to interpose themselves between his undertakings and reality.
I paused at this point and decided, audaciously, to introduce a great novelty into my book: this hero of mockery and hoax, born of reading, would be the first hero, furthermore, to know he was read. At the very time he was living his adventures, they would be written, published, and read by others. A double victim of reading, the knight would twice lose his senses: first, as he read; second, upon being read. The hero who knew he was read: Achilles knew no such experience. And this obliges him to create himself within his own imagination. He fails, then, as a reader of the epics he obsessively wishes to transmit to reality. But as object of reading, he begins to conquer reality, to infect it with his insane reading of himself. And this new reading transforms the world, which begins more and more to resemble the world wherein are narrated the knight’s adventures. The world disguises itself: the enchanted knight ends by enchanting the world. But the price he must pay is the loss of his own enchantment. He recovers his reason. And this, for him, is the supreme madness; it is suicide; reality delivers him to death. The knight will continue to live only in the book that recounts his story; there will be no other recourse to prove his own existence, it will not be found in the unique reading life gave him, but in the multiple readings life took from him in reality, but granted him forever in the book … only in the book. I shall create an open book where the reader will know he is read and the author will know he is written.