“That is good, yes, that is good. And Don Juan?”
“Again, have no fear. He met his destiny. He abandoned Inés. He impregnated Indian women. He impregnated those of Spanish blood. He left his descendants throughout New Spain. But on a certain All Souls’ Day, which the Mexican natives celebrate at tombside amid a profusion of yellow flowers, he decided to return to Spain. He had learned of the disappearance of his brothers, of your sterile enclosure in this place, of the heirless throne you would leave behind you. He returned to claim his rights as bastard. On his way, he stopped in Seville. Do you remember that you promised Inés to erect a stone statue on her father’s grave?”
“Yes, and I honored my word. It cost me nothing: when her father died, the nun’s property became mine.”
“What have you done with it?”
“I do not know, I do not govern, I do not know … wars against heretics, expeditions, persecutions, territorial skirmishes, my unfinished palace, I do not know, Ludovico.”
“Don Juan visited the Comendador’s grave. He stared at the statue with irony, and it came to life, vowing to kill Don Juan. A challenge so distant? said Juan, and he invited the statue to dine. The Comendador asked that the dinner be celebrated in the sepulcher itself; Don Juan acceded. The host served Juan wine of gall and vinegar; the deceiver cried out that flame was splitting his breast, he struck at the air with his dagger, he felt that in life he was being consumed by flames; he clung to the statue of Inés’s father, and with him Don Juan sank forever into the sepulcher, death-in-life and life-in-death hand in hand.”
“How do you know all this? Did you see it happen?”
“His servant told me, an Italian rogue named Leporello.”
“And you trusted the word of such a man?”
“No, but like you, what is written. Here: read this catalogue of his love affairs, read of the life and death of Don Juan, handed me by his servant at the exit to a theater.”
“Then that was the end of the youth you had cared for, Ludovico?”
“Perhaps he was destined to that end, ever since the face of the cavalier mourned in Toledo was transfigured into that of my son. But I am not sad. He met his destiny. And his destiny is a myth.”
“What is that?”
“An eternal present, Felipe.”
“You have seen all these things you tell me, and read them? You can see again? You are no longer blind?”
“Not now, Felipe. I opened my eyes that I might read the only thing that was saved from our terrible time.”
“The millennium … you said you would open your eyes at the time of the millennium…”
“I was more modest, my friend. I opened them to read three books: that of the Convent Trotter, that of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, and that of the deceiver Don Juan. Believe me, Felipe: only there in those three books did I truly find the destiny of our history. Have you found yours, Felipe?”
“I still have it, it is here. I shall never leave my palace.”
“Farewell, Felipe. We shall not meet again.”
“Wait; tell me about yourself; what did you do in the new world, how, when, did you return…?”
“You must use your imagination. I have served the eternal present of myth. Farewell.”
Ludovico extricated himself from El Señor’s embrace; the King continued to wash, and kiss, the feet of the beggars. When he was finished, he looked toward the place where the friend of his youth had stood. He was not there. El Señor searched the chapel with his eyes: in the distance, Ludovico was ascending the stairway that led to the plain. El Señor bit the foot of one of the beggars; the beggar cried out; the priests looked at one another with alarm. Ludovico was ascending the thirty-three steps that were the way to death, reduction to matter, and subsequent resurrection; in supplication Felipe stretched out his arms. Then he asked the nuns to carry him before the altar and support his outstretched arms; let his hands never touch those treasures of the new world; let his feet never touch the steps of the accursed stairway; the transitory world, enemy of the soul’s salvation, sifted into his solitude through them; temptation, the temptation to touch gold, the temptation to flee up the stairway.
“A phantom distills its poison in my blood and its madness in my mind, I wish only to be a friend of God.”
In spite of his fatigue, a feverish El Señor asked the nuns to carry him in the sedan chair to the cell of mirrors.
They arrived. They entered. El Señor asked Madre Milagros to uncover the two cloaked figures that lay copulating upon the floor of mirrors.
The blessed woman crossed herself and parted the ancient tatters. She revealed two skeletons in the posture of coitus.
Following the fatigue of a fever of seven days’ duration there erupted on El Señor’s thigh, a little above the right knee, an abscess of malign appearance which little by little grew larger and more inflamed, causing him enormous pain. And on his chest appeared four additional abscesses. As the abscess on his thigh did not heal, though it maturated, the doctors decided that it was necessary to lance it open, a process which was to be feared because the place was so dangerous and so sensitive, and all feared he might die of the pain.
Don Felipe listened serenely to these arguments and asked that before the doctors intervened, the nuns carry him on his litter to a place he would indicate. He directed them to the hall of the Gothic throne so that he might see, perhaps for the last time (for grave and silent were his premonitions), the monstrous monarch fabricated by La Señora from bits and pieces of royal cadavers, who, he was convinced, governed in his name while he lay swooning within his solitude, illness, and shadow of two twin bodies: his palace and his own.
Madre Milagros and Sisters Angustias, Asunción, and Piedad carried the litter; they entered the vast gallery with its carved ceilings and domes, its Gothic throne, and behind it the semicircular wall with the feigned painting of two flounced and fringed draperies hanging from their spikes.
“Look, what beautiful draperies,” said Sor Piedad, who had eyes only for such fripperies. “May I go and pull them and see what is behind them?”
“There is nothing behind them, little innocent,” said Madre Milagros. “Can you not see it is a thing painted to deceive the eye?”
But El Señor’s horrified eyes saw only the figure seated upon the throne: a tiny man, although somewhat larger than the last time he had seen him, wearing a black cap, a uniform of coarse blue flannel with a yellow and scarlet band fastened about the great soft belly, a toy sword, black boots, the eyes of a sad lamb, a trimmed moustache: his right arm was raised in a salute and he shrieked in a high-pitched voice: “Death to intelligence! Death to intelligence!”
Where was the mummy?
“Quickly, take me from here,” El Señor cried to the nuns.
“You, supposed King, do not run,” shrieked the tiny man. “You stole my crown, my precious crown of gold, sapphire, pearls, agate, and rock crystal; return it to me, thief!”
The four nuns, with El Señor on his litter, fled that chamber, as El Señor’s spirit clamored within him: My God, what have you done to Spain? were all the prayers, the battles for the Faith, the illumination of souls, the penitence and sleepless nights insufficient? has a homunculus, a mandrake, the son of gallows and stakes, been seated upon the throne of Spain?
Exhausted, he agreed that on the Day of the Transfiguration they might lance his abscess. There arrived to attend him a licensed surgeon from Cuenca, Antonio Saura, who was aided by a physician from Madrid and a Hieronymite priest named Santiago de Baena, for El Señor did not wish to be treated by secular hands only, as one never knew whether in truth they were the hands of a convert, a filthy pig of a Jew, but rather let divine eyes witness what the hands wrought.