Founded upon these principles, reader, I wrote both this chronicle faithful to the last years of his reign, and the life of Don Felipe, El Señor. Thus I fulfilled the fearful charge of the one who had until now narrated this story, Brother Julián, now embarked upon a caravel in the hope of finding beyond the unknown ocean a new world that would truly be a New Spain. I shall suffer and burn the midnight oil. My only hand will tire, but my soul will be illuminated.
CORPUS
Where is everyone?
He dedicated his days to wandering tirelessly through all parts of his palace, attempting, in vain, to hear again the persistent — unnoticed because it was accustomed — sound of picks and bellows, hammers and chisels and cartwheels. But following the torture of Nuño and Jerónimo before the noonday-lighted façade of the palace, a great silence fell over the work site, as if the hand of God had placed over it a large inverted goblet, covering the entire space of the construction, and thus imposing a divine truce.
That day, after the storm and after the death of the workmen, he walked through one of the three doors of the north wall of the palace, which, because it faced the north wind, lacked windows; he gazed for the last time upon the external walls of the palace, the mass of the granite, the tall towers on every corner. Temple of Victory. City of the Dead. Eighth Wonder of the World. He avoided the door leading to the kitchens and also that leading to La Señora’s quarters: both evoked bad memories. He chose the door leading to the palace courtyard; he admired for an instant the jamb, the lintel, architrave, and pilasters, the quality of workmanship of the entire door facing, its stone so carefully joined that the seams were invisible, with its columns that finished off, tied together, gave harmony to the door and the low plinth, fascia, and high cornice. He entered, and swore he would never go outside again.
“Where is everyone?”
The nuns were still there; the monks were still there; a minimal staff of kitchen and palace servants remained. The servants, unordered, devoted themselves to quietly preparing El Señor’s meals and to attempting to clean his rooms, but as most of the savory dishes were almost always returned untouched to the kitchens, and as El Señor refused to allow them to change the black sheets on his bed, or touch a broom to his chamber, and as he himself never changed the black attire in which he had presided over the final ceremonies of death, the cooks, scullery lads, and chamber servants found very little to do, except what will be seen they did. El Señor ordered the monks to perform a perpetual service for the dead and said to them: “You have but one mission: to pray for the dead and to pray for me.”
First he ordered that two friars be continuously before the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar, praying to God for his soul and the souls of his dead, day and night, in perpetual prayer. Then on the day of Corpus Christi, he ordered that thirty thousand Masses be offered for the repose of his soul. The friars were astounded, and one of them dared say to him: “But you still live, Sire…”
“Would you bear witness to that?” El Señor replied with a bitter smile, and he added that when the thirty thousand Masses were ended, a new series of equal number should be begun, and so on unto infinity, whether he lived or died.
The outspoken friar said: “You do violence to Heaven.”
“I shall temper it with piety,” El Señor responded, trembling, and added: “Yes, and may two thousand Masses be said for souls in Purgatory. And at the end of each Mass, say a response for my soul, and with this intent may the appropriate alms be distributed among the poor.”
And to Madre Milagros he said: “Have your nuns watch over me. Let them frighten away fear.”
“Our Inesillais lost, Señor. That is what frightens us.”
“One nun does not make a convent. Have you not replaced her?”
“Yes, other novitiates have arrived, Sor Prudencia, Sor Esperanza Sor Caridad, Sor Ausencia…”
“I want no intruders. Let them howl like bitches when anyone approaches me, as they howled when they heard the barking and chains and horns of my faithful hound Bocanegra.”
During those years, the nuns howled every time an increasingly ancient Mother Celestina came to visit El Señor to assure him that the feared usurper, the Idiot Prince, remained in bed with the dwarf Barbarica at the monastery of Verdín. The stubble-chinned old woman marveled at El Señor’s solitude and poverty, shook her head and said things El Señor had decided to allow only her to say: “He who has little sense or judgment loves almost nothing except what he’s missed. And you, Don Felipe, you feel great remorse for the years you lost. Would you return to the first age?”
He told himself he would not, and La Celestina told him that word was spreading of the alms distributed here following every Mass; the beggars of the kingdom, in growing numbers, were gathered at the palace gates, they surrounded the palace, they were appropriating the old huts of the workmen and the abandoned taverns and forges, awaiting the daily charity.
Then the old woman would leave and El Señor would sit for long hours in his curule chair beside the tireless hearth and recall the young bride ravished on the day of her wedding with the smith Jerónimo, the girl who accompanied him to the beach and there told her dream of a world free for love and the body, the lover with whom he and Ludovico had shared their nights in the bloody castle. Would they wish to return to the first age?
Occasionally in the late afternoon he ascertained that the couple bound together by sex in the prison of mirrors were still there, moaning, incapable of extricating themselves from one another, like street dogs, the juices of pleasure burned up, the lubricious orifices dried up, desiccated prick and withered cunt yoked together, both wounded — powerless ever to heal — by the ground glass Mother Celestina had introduced into Inés’s sex and by the sharp fish’s teeth she had set in the lips of Inés’s restored virginity. Doña Inés and Don Juan moaned, the nun’s face always covered by the coif of her habit, the cavalier cloaked always in his brocaded mantle. El Señor did not wish to see them. It was enough to know they were there, condemned to see themselves one day in what could be seen only when they tired of living with their eyes closed: their own images in a world consisting solely of mirrors.
Everyday, without opening the door of the cell, the servants passed a plate of dried beef beneath the door. They occupied themselves with this chore, and with delivering the leftovers of El Señor’s meals to the beggars clustered beneath the tile sheds, who at the hour of the Angelus came to the kitchen door on the north façade to ask for charity. El Señor never watched Inés and Juan eat. One night a servant dared say to him as he served him dinner in the bedchamber where dust mounted in the corners: “They snarl over the dried beef like beasts, master, and never reveal their faces; they’re worse than the hungriest beggars we attend…”
El Señor asked the servant to be silent, and ordered that he be lashed for his impudence. It happened that this same night the nuns howled quietly, and a friar entered El Señor’s chamber accompanied by an ancient gentleman of learned aspect who said he was Dr. Pedro del Agua; he looked at El Señor with an embalmer’s eyes, and even asked in a low voice: “Will it be my fate to embalm both father and son?”
Is there a doctor in Spain who is not a Jew? And is there any Jewish doctor who is not a poisoner? Angrily, El Señor ordered the incautious friar to condemn Dr. del Agua before the Holy Office, and to prosecute him, and torture him, and force a confession from him, and since his name was Marrano, Filthy Pig, del Agua, he should be tortured by water until he burst. And he ordered that from that time nothing should be communicated to him aloud, but only in writing, only in writing, always.