Shadows, he said to himself, and not years, are besieging me. My age is measured by the increasing expanse of shadows; inch by inch they are taking possession of my body and my palace.
And so he lived until one night he heard a terrible scream from the chapel. It was the eve of another Ash Wednesday. He grasped his staff. The scream echoed through the domed ceiling of the chapel. He attempted to place it. Slowly he shuffled through the double row of royal sepulchers. As he reached the corner nearest the foot of the stairway, he finally found the origin of the sound: the niche where his mother, the Mad Lady, lived, walled up, and, immured, was dying.
“Son, my son! Where are you?” she cried. “Oh, my son! Have you forgotten me?”
“Where are you, Mother? Who are you now, Mother?”
“Ring the bells,” howled the Mad Lady. “Crown me with three thorns of Christ’s sovereignty, drive into my hand the nail of the true Cross, and in the other hand let me clasp the sacred cane of St. Dominic of Silos; bind my enormous belly with the girdle of the convent of San Juan de Ortega! I am giving birth, my son, to my last son, I have given birth to six, and all have died, while the bastards of my husband the King live and prosper; I am giving birth to my poor son, the sixth heir of the house of Austria in Spain, born on the sixth day of the month of the Scorpion; with him I shall vanquish the bastards, this one will live, I shall vanquish the accumulated poison of six generations, he is born, bring him to my bed, to my arms, when I was fifteen I was wed to the King, who was forty-four, poisoned by inheritance and his own excesses, a miserable celebration, we were married in a dusty village, Navalcarnero, a miserable celebration, that of Spain, I tell you, a village chosen for our wedding because the place where monarchs are married need never again pay tribute, that is why I was married in a wretched hamlet populated by fleas and goats and cretins and blind men, and I gave birth to dead sons, and now you, this son, bring him to me, this one will live, this one will reign over a ragged and defeated kingdom; the Great Armada, defeated; the gold of the Indies, evaporated; the regiments in Rocroi, defeated; Spain, lost, impotent Spain, your grandeur is that of a pit: the more it is used, the more it disappears, we cannot pay the salaries of the palace servants, we, the Kings of Spain, eat the meat of dogs and chickens, and crumbs smaller than the flies squatting upon them; bring me my son, healthy and lucid, handsome and of good character, my little son, my beautiful little son who will be my answer to the death and misery of Spain; my weak little son, cheeks covered with ringworm, head covered with scales like a fish or a lizard, my son, the bewitched, cover his head with a cap, pus dribbles from his ears, hide his genitals so that no one can see that stubby, livid scorpion’s tail, even if they believe he is a woman, no one must see that purulent little stump, the bewitched, crown him, quickly, let his head become accustomed to the weight of the crown, he is five years old, he still cannot walk, his nursemaid must carry him, he is not learning to speak, he communicates only with dogs, dwarfs, and buffoons, his body is rigid, and tense, and impotent, he stutters and slobbers, your greatest pleasure is to crown your head with wounded doves and feel the threads of blood trickling down your yellow face, your bed is icy, your heart inflamed with hatred against me, your mother, who wants only to govern well in your name; you are an idiot prisoner of astute and ambitious men who order me to cut my hair, don the habit of a nun, cover my face with the veil, and lock me in the castle of Tordesillas, you are alone, surrounded by intriguers, alone, my son, bewitched, with your swollen tongue and the stupor in your eyes, imitating the sounds of animals, sitting in corners weeping without reason, gritting your teeth to keep from eating, your blood swarming with ants, your brain with frogs, your belly with vipers, your hands with fish, may God bless you: you spend days in a state of insensibility, prisoner of a lugubrious dream; may the Devil pardon you; you spend days clawing at yourself, tearing out your thin hair, you are your own persecutor and executioner; when you see a woman you vomit; a strawberry of pain is growing in my breast, modesty forbids me to consult a physician, and further, my Christian fervor; is there a physician who is not a Jew, an Arab, or a convert? I die, happily, before you, and from the pulpits of Spain my faithful Jesuits sing my praises: blessed indeed, but not as blessed as the cancer that killed our august Queen, for the cancer that tortured the Royal Breast encountered there not only the luminous sphere of her death but the very breath of her life. What will become of you without your mother, my poor bewitched King? My name is Mariana.”
The voice issuing from the niche faded away, but on that occasion other voices pursued Don Felipe as slowly and painfully, supporting himself on his crutch, he walked to the room presided over by the mummy fashioned of royal bits and pieces by Isabel, his untouched wife. Through the honeycomb of galleries and courtyards he heard, echoing through domes of stone and air, rondelets, cruel jests, ditties: a King without a kingdom is our King, the King is leaping, the Queen weeping, the Monarchy creaking, nuns speaking, toadies all peeping, sing ho, sing hey, sing lolly, may God pardon your sire, who, suffering an ill so dire and hoping never to expire, dragged your mother through the mire, oh, rondelet lolly, sing lolly, lai, lay, why that son of a bitch scratches his itch with every wench in the kingdom, without rhyme or reason, sing lolly, sing well, there’s still worse to tell, on the way to perdition, through his benediction, his government’s going to hell, his government’s going to hell, sing ho, sing hey, sing rondelet lolly, sing loud, all ye pimps, sing loud all ye rogues, all randy, at random, yes, sing of the phantom, the phantom, the phantom … now seated upon the Gothic throne Felipe found a rotund and rubicund be-wigged King wearing a tricorn atop his head and sprouting two horns from his forehead; the magnificence of his black-velvet, gold-embroidered coat, his medallions and gold braid, his silver dress sword and white satin stockings, could not compensate for the calamity of his stupid gaze, his drooping lower lip, the red eagle’s beak of a nose crisscrossed by broken veins. And now he was accompanied by a pale ugly woman with an impudent face that was boldly painted, but to no avail, her rat’s hair combed into high peaks of frizzly curls, a saliva-slicked curl plastered over each ear; the bodice of her daring, gauze-thin dress cinched a wrinkled bust, causing her tightly squeezed breasts to bulge over the top of the transparent cloth. A small boy, a faithful replica of his father and mother, a mixture of vulture and rat, sat playing at the feet of his progenitors, and when he saw Felipe on the threshold, he laughed and shrieked, and as if he were rolling a ball rolled a golden and diamond orb toward El Señor.
“What does that old spook want?” shrieked the child, looking, as he posed his question, into the imbecilic, round black eyes of his progenitors.
Felipe fled in terror, wondering whether the specters he saw looked on him as another specter. He fled, returning to his seclusion, his habits, to the passage of years he measured by the stick of the increasing shadow.
At times, seated in his curule chair, aided by the light of a short candle stub that burned his fingers and dripped wax stains on the old, almost illegible, papers in his hands, El Señor reread the manuscript of Counselor Theodorus and pondered, with mortification, any possible relationship between those ancient destinies and his own, that is, the destinies of all those connected with him, for his solitary memory — on behalf of his zealous soul — claimed possession of the beings whose life coincided with his, the destinies of those he loved, but also the destinies of those he despised, those he had combated, those he had ordered killed …