“Our Lord the Prince, may he rest in glory, had played very strenuously at ball for two or three hours in a cool location before he became ill, and without covering himself he had cooled off from the exercise. On the morning of Monday he awakened with a temperature, with the little bell-shaped piece of flesh we call the uvula very thickened and swollen and slack, also the tongue and palate to some degree, so that he had difficulty swallowing his saliva or speaking. They applied the cupping glasses to his back and neck, and with that he felt some relief. His chill came upon him that day, and the doctors were in accord that he should be purged the next day, Tuesday. But, first, he died.
“Ah, señor caballero, you will say it is laughable to drag throughout the whole of Spain the body of a Prince who died of a catarrh and who in life was as cruel and inconstant, as frivolous and as shameless a womanizer as any of those scullions who follow in my train. El Señor my husband was so irrepressible that only yesterday, in spite of my order that in every village we enter the women must remain in their houses, as far removed as possible from the cortege of my handsome husband, fate — as if the Prince Don Felipe still attempted to indulge his appetites from the depths of the penumbra that envelops him — led us to a convent of Hieronymite nuns, who upon our arrival carefully shielded their faces from me, sending as representatives in their veiled stead several miserable, beardless acolytes who lend their services there, and not only at the hour of Holy Mass, you may well imagine! so that these nuns did not show themselves until after the coffin had been installed in the crypt; and then, fluttering like black butterflies, as cunning and voracious as cats in heat, the nuns swooped down upon my grief, mocked my presence, and, as in life, adored my husband.
“Butterflies? Cats? No, they were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto with the heads of slick serpents; Medusas of penitents’ cells; abbesses with stony stares; Circes of sputtering candles; nuns with inflamed eyelids; mystic Graeae with one common eye and one single sharpened fang for all the aberrant multiplicity of their bodies; novices with tangled gray hair; Typhoeuses of the altars; Harpies strangled with their own scapulars; Chimerae sweeping down in concerted attack from the crown of crucifixes to press their parched lips upon the dead lips of my husband; Echidnae exhibiting swollen white breasts of poisonous marble; see them fly, señor caballero, see them kiss, feel, suck, cuddle in the hollow of scraggly wing, part their goats’ legs, sink in their lionesses’ claws, offer their bitches’ bottoms, their damp nostrils quivering and sniffing at the remains of my husband; smell the incense and the fish, señor caballero, the myrrh and the garlic, sense the wax and the sweat, the oil and the urine, now, yes now, let your senses awake and feel what I felt: that not even in death could my husband’s body be mine. See the white-coifed flight and the aspiration of yellow claws, hear the sound of spilling rosary beads and splitting sheets: see the black habits engulfing the body that belongs to me! To the convents he so infamously profaned returns the body of my husband, there to be profaned, for there is not a woman in this kingdom who does not prefer the dead caresses of my whoring Prince to the inexperience of a living, beardless acolyte. Pray, nuns; reign, reyna.
“We fled from that confusion, from those intolerable contacts; and that was why you chanced to meet us on the road in daylight. Señor caballero; no one will say it is laughable to do what I do: possess a corpse for myself alone, in death if not in life; such was my undertaking and now you see how it was frustrated by the vulgar appetites of my embalmed husband and of those buttocks-waggling nuns; but if not to me that body shall belong to our dynasty; we shall die together, but not our image upon the earth. The perpetual possession of and perpetual homage to the Very High Prince whose body I bring with me is mourning, yes, and is ceremony, but also it is — believe me, I know, I do not deceive myself, they call the ultimate limits of my lucidity madness — play and art and perversion; and there is no personal power, even ours, that can survive if to strength is not added the imagination of evil. This we who possess everything offer to those who have nothing; do you understand me, poor dispossessed soul? Only one who can allow himself the luxury of this love and this spectacle, señor caballero, deserves power. There is no possible alternative. I bequeath to Spain what Spain cannot offer me: the image of death as an inexhaustible and consuming luxury. Give us your lives, your sparse treasures, your strength, your dreams, your sweat, and your honor to keep our pantheon alive. Nothing, poor gentleman, can diminish the power based upon the meaninglessness of death, because only for men does the fatal certainty of death have meaning, and only the improbable illusion of immortality can be called madness.
“It is sad that you will not live as long as I, señor caballero; a great pity that you cannot penetrate my dreams and see me as I see myself, eternally prostrated at the foot of tombs, eternally present at the death of Kings, insanely wandering through the galleries of palaces yet to be constructed, mad, yes, and drunk with grief before a loss that only the combination of rank and madness can support. I see myself, dream of myself, touch myself, señor caballero, wandering from century to century, from castle to castle, from crypt to crypt, mother of all Kings, wife of all Kings, surviving all, finally shut up in a castle in the midst of rain and misty grasslands, mourning another death befallen in sunny lands, the death of another Prince of our degenerate blood; I see myself dry and stooped, tiny and tremulous as a sparrow, dressed like an ancient doll, in a loose gown of torn and yellowed lace, toothless, whispering into indifferent ears: ‘Do not forget the last Prince, and may God grant us a sad but not odious memory…’
“A true gift does not admit equal recompense. An authentic offering rises above all comparison and all price. My honor and my rank, señor caballero, prevent my accepting anything in exchange which could be considered superior or even equal to my gift: a total, final, incomparable, and uncompensatable crown or body. I am offering my life to death. Death offers me its true life. At first, being born, I believed I was dying, although unknowing I was born. Later, dying, and knowing, I have again been born. This is my gift. This is the unsurpassable offering of my cult. No, my work is not perfect. But it is sufficient. Now rest. You will forget everything I have told you. All my words have been spoken tomorrow. This procession is moving in the opposite direction from that you know how to measure. We came from death: what kind of life could await us at the end of the procession? And now, because of your perverse curiosity, you have joined us. Notwithstanding, let no man speak evil of my largesse. For you, señor caballero, I have a gift also. They are awaiting us, señor caballero, we have an appointment. Yes … Yes…”
REUNION OF SOUNDS
Silence will never be absolute; this you tell yourself as you listen. Forlornness, yes, possibly; suspected nakedness, that, too; darkness, certainly. But either the isolation of the place or that of forever embraced figures (you say to yourself, señor caballero) seems to convoke that reunion of sound (drum; squeaking carriage wheels; horses; solemn chant, luminis claritatem; the panting of the woman; the distant bursting of waves upon the coast where you awoke this morning, again in another land as unknown as your name) which in the apparent silence (as if it were taking advantage of the exhaustion of your own defenses) builds layer upon layer of its most tenacious, keenest, most resounding insinuations; the silence that surrounds us (señor caballero, she says to you, her head resting upon your knees) is the mask of silence: its person.