That day El Señor abandoned the niche of his mother, the Mad Lady, with great sadness; he did not need to threaten the nuns to silence; it was sufficient to look upon their four bloodless faces, transparent with fear. In the sedan chair they carried him back to the bedchamber and lifted him onto his bed. During that time he was experiencing the first onslaught of a dropsy that swelled his belly, his thighs and legs; and this rheum was accompanied by an implacable thirst, a tormenting passion, for dropsy is fed most unrestrainedly by that which is most delicious to it: water. While he was in that condition, he received a folio signed by the grandees of the kingdom, wherein they explained the lamentable state of the royal coffers owing to droughts, scarcity of laborers, attacks by buccaneers upon galleons carrying back treasures from the new world, and the financial astuteness of the families of Jews settled in the north of Europe.
With his afflicted hand El Señor tortuously wrote orders for monks of the kingdom to go from door to door begging alms for their King. And to prove his Christian humility, he asked that on Holy Thursday he be carried to the chapel for the ceremony of the washing of feet, and that for that purpose be brought seven of the poor from among the multitude of beggars perpetually surrounding the palace awaiting scraps from the palace meals. He insisted, in spite of the pain of movement, on performing this rite of humility. On the morning of Holy Thursday he approached the poor on his knees, supported by Sister Clemencia and Sister Dolores, and with a damp cloth in his wounded hand and a basin of water Sister Esperanza held for him, he proceeded to wash the feet marred with scabs and wounds and buried thorns. After he washed each pair of feet, bowing down, still kneeling, he kissed them; then the hand of one of those poor fell upon his shoulder; El Señor checked his anger, looked up, and met the gaze of Ludovico, the resigned, green, protruding eyes of the former theology student.
First Felipe wept upon Ludovico’s knees, embracing them, while the beggar’s hand rested upon El Señor’s shoulder and the frightened nuns watched and the Bishop continued the Divine Services before an altar draped with black crape, like the effigies and sepulchers in the chapel. Then El Señor made a gesture that meant all is well, do not be alarmed, let us talk. Ludovico leaned over until his head touched Felipe’s.
“My friend, my old friend,” murmured El Señor. “Where have you come from?”
Ludovico looked at El Señor with affectionate sorrow. “From New Spain, Felipe.”
“Then you triumphed. Your dream was realized.”
“No, Felipe, you triumphed: the dream was a nightmare … The same order you desired for Spain was transported to New Spain; the same rigid, vertical hierarchies; the same style of government: for the powerful, all the rights and no obligations; for the weak, no rights and all obligations; the new world has been populated with Spaniards enervated by unexpected luxury, the climate, the mixing of bloods, and the temptations of unpunished injustice…”
“Then neither you nor I triumphed, my brother, but Guzmán.”
Ludovico smiled enigmatically, he took Felipe’s face in his hands and stared directly into his sunken, hollow eyes.
“But I sent Julián, Ludovico,” said El Señor. “I sent him to temper — to whatever degree possible — Guzmán’s acts, the acts of all the Guzmáns.”
“I do not know.” Ludovico shook his head. “I simply do not know.”
“Did he construct his churches, paint his pictures, speak in behalf of the oppressed?” asked Felipe in an increasingly anguished voice.
“Yes.” Now Ludovico nodded. “Yes, he did the things you speak of: he did them in the name of a unique creation capable, according to him, of transposing to art and to life the total vision of the universe born of the new science…”
“What creation? what does he call it?”
“It is called Baroque, and it is an instantaneous flowering: its bloom so full that its youth is its maturity, and its magnificence its cancer. An art, Felipe, which, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum: it fills all voids offered by reality. Its prolongation is its negation. Birth and death are the only acts of this art: as it appears, it is fixed, and since it totally embraces the reality it selects, totally fills it, it is incapable of extension or development. We still do not know whether from this combined death and birth further dead things or further living things can be born.”
“Ludovico, you must understand, I believe nothing I am told, only what I read…”
“Then read these verses.”
From his threadbare clothing Ludovico removed a folio which he offered to El Señor, who unfolded it and read in a low voice:
Pyramidal, earthbound, melancholy,
Born a shadow, he advanced toward Heaven,
The haughty apex of vain obelisks,
And thought to scale the stars …
Then:
And the King, who affected vigilance,
Even with opened eyes maintained no vigil.
He, by his own hounds harassed—
Monarch in a different time well honored—
A timid deer become,
With ear receptive
To the quiet calm,
The slightest movement.
The atoms move and
An inner ear, acute,
Hears the faint sound
Which alters, even sleeping …
“Who wrote this about me? Who dared write these…?”
“The nun Inés, Felipe.”
Trembling, El Señor tried to draw away from Ludovico; instead, his head merely settled more firmly against the beggar’s breast; the nuns watched, stupefied, and redoubled their breast-beating.
“Inés is confined in a prison of mirrors in this palace, Ludovico, bound by the chain of love to your son, the usurper called Juan.”
“Hear me, Felipe, lean close to my lips. The hordes that invaded your palace broke with pickaxes all the chains and locks from the prisons; they never paused to see who inhabited the cells, but ran from cell to cell shouting, ‘You are free!’”
“I did not order the slaughter, Ludovico, I swear it. Guzmán acted in my name…”
“It does not matter. Hear me: those imprisoned lovers are a scrubbing maid and a rogue, Azucena and Catilinón; in the commotion of the day they replaced Inés and Juan…”
“I do not believe you; why would such lowly subjects endure that prison, never revealing who they were?”
“Perhaps they preferred imprisoned pleasure to joyless freedom. I do not know. Yes, I do know: for the pleasure of feeling they were of exalted rank and to receive treatment reserved for those of breeding, they accepted the identity of their disguises … at the cost of death.”
“And Inés? And Juan? What of them?”
“They fled with me. Disguised, we embarked in the caravels of Guzmán. Yes, along with the painter-priest, we would temper the excesses of your favorite: against his sword, our art, our philosophy, our eroticism, our poetry. It was not possible. But have no fear. The nun Inés has been silenced by the authorities: she will never write another line. She has sacrificed her library and her precious mathematical and musical instruments to devote herself, as her confessor and her Bishop ordered, to perfecting the vocations of her soul.”