He invited Felipe to follow him: to ascend, step by step, that unfinished stairway. Felipe fell to his knees; he prostrated himself; he spread his arms wide in a cross before his victim; no, no, that stairway leads to death, I ascended it one day with my mirror in my hand, and in it saw what I never want to see again, my old age, my death agony, my death, decomposition, my return to brute matter, my metamorphoses, the transmigration of my soul, my resurrection in the form of a wolf, hunted in my own domains by my own descendants, Michah, Mihail, Miguel de la Vida, forgive my crime, honor your name, Miguel-of-Life, do not take mine from me again…”
The one called Miguel smiled. “That time, like Narcissus, you looked only at yourself in your mirror. This time, Felipe, you will see the mirror of the world. Come.”
The young Prince looked behind him: the sepulchers, his own lead coffin, the nuns’ choir, the altar, the triptych, the entrance to his bare bedchamber of secret pleasures and harsh penitences where without moving from his bed he could attend divine ceremonies. He thought of his father. He thought that if he turned his back to the stairway and flew toward that subterranean world he, like falcons hungry for their prey, would confuse the cloistered darkness of the chapel with the infinite space of night, he would strike against pilasters, stone arches, iron grillwork, and would be crippled, and die again.
He grasped the phantom’s burning hand.
He raised one foot and placed it on the first step of the stairway.
“This time do not look at yourself; look at your world; and choose a second time.”
Slowly Felipe climbed, holding the feverish hand of Mihail-ben-Sama.
This time he closed his eyes to avoid seeing, as he had before, himself; rather, the world; and on each step the world offered the temptation to choose anew, choices dating from the dawn of time, but always in the same, if transfigured, place: this land, land of Vespers, Spain, Terra Nostra.
And as he ascended each step he heard the double voice of Mihail-ben-Sama, one voice which was two voices, each voice precise, clear, vague, urgent, two, but one; one, but two.
Androgynous creator of a being invented in his image and likeness
Father creator of an incomplete man: where is woman?
The first being fecundates himself, multiplying himself like the earth, unstained
Man violates woman, and both offend Nature, which expels them from the sick garden
Harmony of the world of the sons prolongs the original harmony of the world of the fathers
Brother kills brother in order to possess a subjugated woman and an inhospitable earth
A diversity of peoples, tongues, and beliefs is the result of a mixing of bloods that strengthens the unity of the human genre
The domination of vanquished woman and earth sets peoples against peoples: insufficiency is exalted as superiority, necessity as reason
Everything is shared by all
Yours and mine
Ours
I must die: I shall return transformed
I must die: I shall never return to this earth
I must live: I desire death
I must die: I desire glory
I am a river
I am a shadow
Everything changes
Nothing must change
Everything remains
Everything must continue
I understand what moves
I understand only what does not move
I love what I do not understand
I despise what I do not comprehend
I recognize myself in what is different
I exterminate what is different
Let my blood be mixed with that of all other men
Let my blood be purified with leeches and cauterization
May my body be reborn enriched by mixed bloods
Let my body die impoverished by the purity of blood
I love the labor of my renewed hands: I re-create Paradise
Unworthy of my ascetic hands is the labor of slaves
I construct gardens
I erect pantheons
Fountains and sweet-scented stock
Stone and shroud
My body fuses
My body separates
Love or solitude
Honor or dishonor
Awareness of my earthly senses
Ignorance of anything that separates me from eternal salvation
Freedom of body and mind open to all fecundation
Oppression of body and mind subjected to penitence
Community
Power
Tolerance
Repression
Many
One
Christians, Moors, and Jews
Fine breeding, pure blood
The Spanish
I, the King
New world
Old world
The Alhambra
The Escorial
Doubt
Faith
Diversity
Unity
Life
Death
“Did you choose, Felipe? Were you able to choose again?”
The double voice of the burning phantom awakened El Señor from his fleeting dream. That voice faded away. He opened his eyes. He had climbed the thirty-three steps of his chapel. Sun punished his eyes. A valiant and vigorous valley lay before him. Harsh crust of stone. Vast flowering of rock. He looked toward the end of a mountain gorge where arose a compact cone of live rock. And on the summit of this rock, as if born of it, a gigantic cross of stone cast its shadow across El Señor’s face; this cross rested upon a double pediment, the first of which was backed by the figures of the four Evangelists; on the corners of the second, smaller pediment stood images of the four cardinal virtues; and to reach these pediments one had to ascend an enormous stairway carved from live rock, for a crypt had been excavated from the heart of the rock, guarded over by a railing of three bodies crowned by a battlement of angels, insignia, and pinnacles accompanying the figure of St. James the Apostle.
Disoriented in space, wounded by a sun he had not seen since in this same place he had witnessed the torture of Nuño and Jerónimo, vanquished by time, Felipe whirled away; he felt trapped, he looked for an exit: a beast trapped by fear, he did not notice the presence of a short old man with a three days’ growth of beard, wearing a uniform of rough gray cloth and a battered cap bearing a copper plate.
“May I offer my services, Señor?” asked this obsequious little man.
“Where am I … please … where…?” Felipe managed to murmur.
“Why, at the Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen.”
“What? What fallen?”
“God’s blood, man, those who fell for Spain, the monument of the Holy Cross…”
“What day is this?”
“As for the day, well, who’s the man who knows what day it is. As for the year, I know that it is the year 1999. Has the Señor never visited the Valley of the Fallen? Allow me, my card. I am a licensed guide and I can…”