She says (and you know) that the question merely passes through lips that are the conduit for the jungle that contemplates you and the jewels the jungle hides. You embrace her in passive combat; in her hand the Old Woman still holds the cloth (you don’t know what else to call it: map? guide for the hunt? plan of operations? talisman?): feathers, spiders and filaments. The only drum resounds, always swifter and more muted.
You push the Old Woman aside with a feeling of physical repugnance (the breath; the bestial hands; the filthy clothing; especially that breath of mushrooms and mildew). You tell her firmly, and with rage: “I know the place you mean. It’s an abandoned pyramid. We’ve hidden there several times. And it serves as a depository for weapons. I tell you this because you will never be able to reveal it to anyone.”
But as you see her there, thrown to the ground in the garden, staring at the thick wall, you must struggle against the pity the woman evokes. A heavy silence surrounds her, as tangible as actual absence; silence, a deserved repose, like that of death; similar, at least, to the chronic death of dream.
The drum resounds and she lies at the foot of the adobe wall. You do not know what she is waiting for, what she invites you to, what she expects of you, whether she wished to remain there or go to the sumptuous Totonac tomb the jungle has devoured.
The Old Woman writhes on the ground and screams, a scream indistinguishable from the others, those of macaws abandoning the jungle in flocks of terror now that the Phantoms return flying in low formation.
The repeated whistle, impact, explosion, intolerable in their screeching descent, the explosion muffled by the foliage of useless targets: they are devastating jungle … nothingness.
You raise your fist to curse them once again: but that is your daily prayer, your sign of the cross; fucking gringo sons of bitches. They fly so low you can read the black insignia on the wings: USAF.
The din strikes against your eardrums with the everyday, irritating sound of a knife scraping against a frying pan. You grasp the maddened dervish beneath the arms and she cries out sharply and tries to hold herself by clawing at the dust at the foot of the bullet-pocked wall; you try to drag her forcibly into the hut where you both should be lying face down for the duration of the bombardment, this time closer and more severe, and furthermore, unforeseen; generally they make their pass only once, in the early morning, dump their load of napalm and lazy dogs and return to their bases. Today they have repeated their daily incursion. What’s happening, you wonder; is this a portent of their victory, or of our resistance? That stretch of garden between you and the hut seems fantastically long; the Old Woman is simultaneously an inert bundle and a metal nerve, a bag of rags and a root sunk several meters into the ground; she is an electrical conductor for voices, fears, and desires that perhaps avail themselves of this weakness to install their strength. Other traditions tell that beings of this nature are instantly recognizable, and can penetrate without obstacle all places, sacred and profane: their voice and their movement are those of an imminence that can appear as easily in a temple as in a brothel.
Why do you not dare tear off the white cloth that covers her face? The temple and the brothel. The Old Woman spoke of the Church of Santa Teresa in the Sierra del Nayar. Then she had been there, in that place you fear so greatly. You listened to her describe it and didn’t know whether this woman was plotting against your country or against your life; whether she was spying on rebellious forces or spying on you when she came to this hidden camp in the Veracruz jungle. You heard her describe the temple constructed by the Coras under the watchful eyes of the Spanish missionaries and you recalled the time you spent there in a different time, when you believed you had a different vocation: the artist’s brush, not the gun. You were sent — you must have been about twenty, no more — with a group of specialists from the Churubusco School to restore the splendor of an old and forgotten painting of enormous dimensions, neglected, damaged by the centuries, humidity, fungus, lack of care, situated behind the altar of that temple of God the Indians had converted into the Devil’s brothel. The peeling and blistered surface depicted, in the foreground, a group of naked men in the center of a vast Italian piazza. Their backs were turned to the viewer and their attitude was one of anguish, of desolate waiting, of terror before an imminent end. To the right of this foreground, a Christ wearing the traditional robes of his teaching, blue mantle and white tunic, stared intently at these men. In the background, forming a deep semicircle, fanned out minute scenes of the New Testament. Professionally, your team prepared to limn the damaged oil painting anew, to remedy its wounds, to fix its colors. Someone, many years before, must have lashed the painting with a whip; you would think that blood had run down the canvas, and that the skin of the painting still had not healed.
Your fancy provoked the laughter of your companions; but soon everyone could see that this fantasy revealed a truth: the painting had been painted on top of another; it was difficult to see with the naked eye because both paintings, the original and the one that was superimposed, were very old, and their materials were very similar. You all discussed whether it could be a pentimento; you imagined an aged and remorseful painter who, lacking materials, used the same canvas to cover up a failure and at the same time create another more perfect work. Someone said that perhaps it was a painting in which the outer stratum had tended to separate from the preparatory stratum. Another said that doubtlessly it was an abortive sketch, and the painter had let too much time pass between the preparatory and the final phases.
You X-rayed the canvas, but the results were very confusing. Colors least penetrable by X-ray were predominant in the painting: lead white, vermilion, and lead yellow. The negative barely suggested differentiations among the hidden images: like a succession of ghosts superimposed one upon the other, the figures reflected several times their own specters, the paint was thick, very old, perhaps what you were seeing was merely a faithful rendering of the original, a past restoration, a swarm of artistic repentances, a simple transposition of colors. You asked permission to make one final test: to resort to an infinitesimally small section made with your artist’s knife; the painting had already been badly treated, it would be sufficient to lift off a tiny fragment that had cracked by itself, treat it with resin and balsam on a glass slide, and examine it under the microscope to see whether between the layers of color there appeared a subtle film of dirt or yellowed varnish. Your test was successfuclass="underline" the color revealed was not the original color of the painting; an intangible line of time separated the two.
With increasing excitement, but also with great caution, your crew cleaned the painting. You applied solvents to its surface, dividing it into small rectangular zones, scraping away with your knives plaster, fungus, tenacious crusts, and little by little the stripped, false skin of the oil painting peeled away, and little by little, no more than thirty centimeters a day, the oils applied with enormous care, the drops of ammonia, alcohol, turpentine, there appeared before the astonished eyes of your small group of artists the original form of the painting.
It was a strange and vast portrait of a court. It could only be a court of Spain, and not one court, but all courts, centuries reunited in a single gallery of gray stone, beneath an arch of stormy shadows. In the foreground, a kneeling King with an air of intense melancholy, a breviary in his hands, a fine hound lying by his side, a King dressed in mourning, his face marked by repressed sensuality, a fine ascetic profile, thick, drooping lips, noticeable prognathism, self-absorbed but inquiring eyes, thin, silky hair and beard; and forming a circle with the King, two additional figures: a Queen in sumptuous attire, elaborate hoopskirts and belled farthingales, a high ruff, a hawk perched on her wrist — never had you seen in eyes so blue, in skin so fair, an expression of such vulnerable strength and cruel compassion; and a man dressed as a chief huntsman, one hand resting upon the hilt of his blade, a hooded falcon on his shoulder, the other hand forcefully restraining a pack of mastiffs. To the left and rear, a funeral procession trooped onto the canvas; it was led by an old and mutilated woman wrapped in black rags, armless and legless, a yellow-eyed bundle pushed on a little cart by a toothless and chubby-cheeked dwarf draped in clothing too generous for her stature; behind them came a page-and-drummer dressed all in black, with submissive gray eyes and tattooed lips; and behind the drummer, a sumptuous, wheeled coffin and a vast company of mayors, alguaciles, stewards, secretaries, ladies-in-waiting, workmen, beggars, halberdiers, captive Hebrews and Moslems accompanying an endless row of funeral carriages that disappeared into the background of the painting, and also surrounded by bishops, deacons, chaplains, and chapters of all the orders. On the right side of the painting, as if watching the spectacle, crouched a flautist, a beggar with olive skin and protruding green eyes, and behind him a huge monster floated in a sea of fire, a cross between a shark and a hyena, whose gaping mouth devoured human bodies. And in the very center of the painting, behind the circle presided over by the black figure of the kneeling King, in the space formerly occupied by the naked men, a trio of young men, also naked, their arms entwined, their backs to the viewer; on each back was stamped the sign of a cross, a blood-red cross. And beyond this plane, deeper and deeper in the perspective of gray stone and black shadow, a group of half-naked nuns lashed themselves with penitential cilices; and one of them, the most beautiful, held broken glass in her mouth, and her lips were bleeding; processions of hooded monks with tall lighted tapers; in a high tower a red-haired monk observed the impenetrable sky; in a similar tower a one-armed scribe bent over an ancient parchment; an equestrian statue of a Comendador; a plain of tortures: smoking stakes, racks, men twisted with pain, pilloried; scenes of battle and throat slashing; minute details: broken mirrors, mandrakes emerging from the burned earth beneath funeral pyres, half-consumed candles, plague-infested cities, a masked nun with a bird’s beak, a distant beach, a half-constructed boat, an ancient sailor with a hammer in his hand, a flight of crows, fading into the boundaries of the canvas a double row of royal sepulchers, jasper tombs, recumbent statues, mere sketches, an infinite succession of deaths, vertiginous attraction toward the infinite; increasing darkness in the background, dazzling chromatic symphony in the foreground: blue, white, golden yellow, vivid red, and orange red.