“You look at me with scorn; you believe I am mad. You know how to measure time. I do not. Originally because I felt I was the same; later because I felt I was different. But between before and after, time was forever lost to me. Those only measure time who can remember nothing and who know how to imagine nothing. I say before and after, but I am speaking of that unique instant which is always before and after because it is forever, a forever in perfect union, amorous union. Do you think you feel my hands upon your lips, señor caballero? I laugh, I soothe you, I caress your head. Quickly, Barbarica. Do not try to touch me, señor caballero. In spite of everything, in spite of everything, you see, we each possess a unique body; because they are different they are immediately adversaries. One lifetime is not sufficient to reconcile two bodies born of antagonistic mothers; one must force reality, subject it to his imagination, extend it beyond its ridiculous limits. Soon, Barbarica; he will never return, this is our only opportunity, hurry, run, fly, go, return, little one! I am attempting to breathe to the rhythm of the body, to imitate the body, young man; I always concentrate in this imitation all the lassitude of my own body and all the edge of my mental powers so that you do not encounter any resistance; so that I may hear the other breathing, I myself cease to breathe; that hushed breath will be the first sign of my desire and of the return; if there was the slightest distraction, that sign might escape my notice; you must understand, if I move, I shall not know whether he, whether you, has begun to breathe again. I have stilled all sounds, except that of the chant that is my sorrow and the drum that is the beating of my heart. Embrace me, señor caballero, sleep (you, he) embracing your mortal twin and perhaps this morning (we voyage only by night, I in the sealed carriage, he, you, in the black coach) you will speak in your dreams, and his dream will be different from the two-become-one I have dreamed of.
“In that case, I will have to kill him again, do you understand? Death must, at least, make us equal; dream, even though a shared dream, would once again be the sign of difference, of separation, of movement. Truly dead, with no dreams, inside death, made equal by the total extinction of death, inanimate, identical, neither the dream of death nor the death of dream to separate us and provide a channel for separate desires. An exchange of dreams, señor caballero. Impossible! I shall dream of him. But he will dream of other women. We should be separate again. No, señor caballero, do not draw back. I swear I shall not touch you again. It is not necessary. Did you hear, Barbarica? It is no longer necessary. Lying upon him (him, not you, you no longer feel anything, isn’t that true?), I trembled and wept to prevent our dreams from becoming separate and thereby separating us, but I could not prevent it; within the quietude of the two embraced bodies I felt a swift withdrawing, and in order to hold him with me, I caressed his entire body, my husband’s reclining body, with my tongue. My tongue tastes of pepper and clove, sir, but also of the worm and aloe.
“I imagined that the only thing I could truly possess was a silhouette. I caressed myself. I thought of the man sleeping beneath my weight in the shared coffin. I felt new. The first wave reaching the first shore. The decision to create a city upon the earth: to raise an empire from the dust. I kissed the eternally parted lips. I imitated that voice: I always imitate it, tomorrow will be today and today will be yesterday; I imitated the immobility of the dust and the stone that confiscate our movements of love, desperation, hatred, and loneliness. I brushed my cheek against the castrated hoarfrost where my husband’s sex had beat, the virility I had never seen, neither alive nor dead, for although Dr. del Agua extracted before my view the corruptible viscera, he turned his back and stood between us the moment when he severed the already corrupted sex of my husband. He was other and he was the same. He spoke, he moved, only when I dreamed of him; I was his mistress, his nurse, his wife, forever, but only in the realm of thought. Dr. del Agua’s efforts had been in vain; I could have buried my husband because I could possess him only in memory. I thought about this, and I made a decision; I asked Barbarica to lash me with a whip, and she, weeping, beat me. I had thought only of myself, but I was only one branch of a dynastic tree.
“I watched my husband sleep; he was called the Fair, and oh, he was fair. Perhaps sleep was but the ultimate channel for his scandalous presence. A black cat devours you each night, Felipe, father, husband, lover: La reyna no tenia sano el juyzio para governar. No, the Queen did not have sound judgment to govern, only to love, love with desperation, in death and beyond death. Our houses are filled with dust, señor caballero, the houses of Castile and Aragon; dust, sound, tactile sensation. Don’t you hear those bells that are restored to the wholeness of a solitary dream before they are returned to their essential state of reverberation? La reyna no tenia sano el juyzio para governar. La reyna has abdicated in favor of her son, the Benjamin of this tearless Rachel, sure that the son will continue the task of the mother and will govern for death. Don’t you hear those hymns announcing what has already happened? Deus fidelium animarum adesto supplicationibus nostris et de animae famulae tua.… La reyna, the servant of God, has died, señor caballero; she is again one with her poor Prince, ungrateful and faithless in life, grave and constant in death.
“La reyna is dead. Nothing more appropriate than that one dead person should care for another. The Queen is now responding to the summons of her son, who has constructed a tomb for his ancestors in the garden of a demolished castle, converted into a dust and plaster plain by ax and pick and hoe, by calcining ovens and great lime basins white as the ancient bones of royalty at this very instant converging upon their final fatherland: the Spanish necropolis. We shall arrive amidst dust, ashes, and storm, we shall listen in shrouded silence to the Responsory for the Dead, the Memento Mei Deus, and the antiphonal Aperite Mihi; we shall recall the ancient stories: