Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
Thus were blended together lugubrious chants and the mournful glow of the guttering candles, the reading of St. John and the smoke of incense, the mandates of El Señor and the concentrated light in that impenetrable Flemish triptych on the altar, the garden of delights, the millenary kingdom, the eternal Hell wherein El Señor saw all the faces of his life, his father and mother, his bastard brothers, his wife, the companions of his youth, that distant afternoon on the beach, the open sea before their eyes, the true fountain of youth, the sea, but he turned his back, he returned to the brown and arid high plain and there constructed a royal palace, monastery, and cemetery upon the quadrangle of a grill, similar to that which knew the torture of St. Lawrence, a harmony of austere lines, mortified simplicity, rejection of all sensual, infidel, and pagan ornament, a convergence of the tumult of the universe into a single center dedicated to the glory of God and the honor of Power: from his coffin, principal and witness to his own funeral exequies, he gazed at the Flemish painting as he had first gazed at it, a painting brought, it is said, from Orvieto, asking of it, demanding of it, whether these acts of his death agony were of sufficient merit to open the doors of Paradise to he who suffered them.
But first he needed to know once again, now dying, whether the sum total of the events, dreams, passions, omissions, visions, and revisions of his life had been directed by the hand of God or the hand of the Deviclass="underline" in truth, neither the Divinity nor the Devil had ever clearly manifested himself; was the man who, like him, now asked himself the eternal question not worthy of compassion?; why does God prefer mortal man’s blind faith to the tangible certainty of His existence were He to manifest it?; would the man never enter Paradise who, like him now, again posed the eternal question to God: why if you are Good do you tolerate Evil, allow the virtuous to suffer, and exalt the perverted? That is the reason, the King Don Felipe told himself, his gaping mouth attempting to capture the thin air of a chapel smoky with candles, incense, chants, and prophecies, he had so often allowed fate, indifference, or simple court etiquette to act freely on his behalf, without his intervention; if God so acted, what could He demand of one of his poor creatures?; that was the reason he had so often acceded to the proposals of others: Guzmán, the Inquisitor of Teruel, the Comendador of Calatrava, his own father, called the Fair; that is the reason, too, he had so often acted with such profound awareness of the indissoluble unity of good and evil, of the angel and the beast: the Chronicler, Brother Julián, Ludovico’s and Celestina’s freedom, that of Toribio in his tower. I acted or I failed to act, he murmured while the sensual images of the Flemish painting faded, or were erased, from his sight, because God and the Devil refused to manifest themselves clearly; if it be God’s work, be it praised; if it be the Devil’s, I am not to blame: I did not act, I failed to act; I did not condemn, I forgave — or if I condemned, it was for the secondary and not the principal reason. If I sinned, why, oh, my God, did you not intervene to prevent it?
He screamed for a consecrated Host, but no one heard him, no one came to give nourishment to his souclass="underline" everyone was singing or praying or kneeling around his coffin as if he were already dead.
He would have to confess himself.
Therefore, he interrogated himself about the occasions when he had acted, the times he had truly exerted responsibility: he deceived the messianic hordes in his youth, he delivered them to slaughter in the castle, he denied his sex to Isabel, he bestowed it upon Inés, he defeated the Flemish heretics, he ordered this necropolis to be constructed with all haste: as these were acts of which he had been conscious, for which he had been responsible, was virtue to be found in them? And what was the virtue of a King? From his coffin he gazed up into the gray domes of the Citadel of the Faith: it was also a Basilica of Power, and the virtue of a King lay in his honor, and his honor in his passion, and his passion in his virtue, and his virtue, thus, in his honor; honor was called the sun of a monarchy, and the further the kingdom’s subjects moved from it, the greater cold and the greater dispersion they would know; El Señor had attempted to concentrate everything in one place — this palace, monastery, and tomb, and in one person — his, the final, heraldic place and person, definitive in their will for a conclusion, as definite as was the act of revelation in their will to create; the immutable icon of the honor of Power and the virtue of Faith, with no descendants, no bastards, no usurpers, no rebels, no dreamers, no lovers …
In his innermost ear, putrescent now with writhing worms, he heard the horrible laughter of Guzmán and of the Sevillian usurer elevated to the rank of Comendador, of the citizens who had fought against him in Medina and Avila, Torrelobatón and Segovia, and found their tomb in Villalar: honor is invoked by a King’s tyranny; the government of common men works against honor, and then later ignores it; virtue is born of an individual’s excellence and is determined by his interests; whatever that individual desires is good. And to those small and ambitious men who defied the central concept of honor, and opposed it with these new words, liberal, progress, democracy, El Señor in his death agony said: then live dispersed, far from the sun of honor; appreciate riches more than life, cling to existence to enjoy fortune, be ruled by general laws, as the rebellious burghers have demanded, obey what should be done and avoid the forbidden; and on the day of your disenchantment, sirs, again turn your eyes toward my sepulcher and understand the rules of the honor that was mine: give all importance to fortune, but none to life, avoid what the law does not forbid, and do what it does not demand: such, sirs, is the virtue of honor. His gaze was obscured by nests of minute white eggs; oh, my God, oh, my Devil, how can freedom and passions exist side by side? is the honor of a monarch not a better restraint to passions than the ambition of a merchant?
He did not know the answer. He could not answer. The question remained forever suspended mid humors of incense and candle fat and pus, excrement, and sweat from his wounds. The physicians approached. They placed cantharides upon his feet and freshly killed doves upon his head. Dr. Saura said: “To prevent vertigo.”
Then scullions came from the kitchen carrying boiling caldrons and from them Friar de Baena removed the steaming entrails of bull, hen, dog, cat, horse, and falcon and placed them upon El Señor’s stomach. “To raise his temperature and make him sweat.”
El Señor tried to counter: “It is futile. I have but one age. I was born in a privy; I died in another. I was born an old man.”
But he could no longer speak. He felt changed. He felt as if he were a different person. He murmured to himself: “A phantom, day by day, I decay.”
Then the two surgeons approached the coffin with fine, sharp knives in their hands. First they cut open the stinking black garments and revealed the hairless, chalky-white body. El Señor shouted: he could not hear his own voice and he knew no one would hear it again, not ever. The physicians, the nuns, and priests; it was they who were deaf; not he, not he.
They opened the four abscesses on his chest. Three, they said, were filled with pus. The fourth was a cave of lice.
With his knife, Saura opened the body cavity. The two doctors explored it, they extracted the viscera and, as they tossed them one by one into the same caldron that had held the beasts’ entrails, commented:
“The heart the size of a nut.”
“Three great stones in the kidney.”
“The liver, filled with water.”
“The intestines, gangrenous.”
“A single black testicle.”