And before such convincing evidence everyone begins to stare at you, poor caballero, flogged, dragged through the sand, thrown into the sealed carriage; and as their astonishment is so great they force you to examine yourself, touch the velvet cap that smells of benzoin, the medallion resting on a silken shirt redolent of aloes, to look at the rose-colored hose, and the fur cape still retaining an aroma of clove; amazed, you rub a jaw covered by a new beard you sense is golden. Everyone is kneeling around you, only the rag-swathed Lady sustained by her maids remains standing, while her vast company of halberdiers and notaries, cooks and scullions, sheriff and deceitful ladies, cross themselves and chant prayers of praise, and the Jews murmur: sephtori, sephtori, All is emanation and the world is transformed, and the Arabs grasp the opportunity to praise Allah and to ask themselves whether this portent bodes good or ill for them. The dwarf kneels also; with a grimace of false respect on her chubby face she crosses herself, but when she notices the multicolor stains on her tiny hands she quickly hides them among the folds of her voluminous dress.
Still not revealing her face, the Lady says: “My son will be happy to see you.” And she orders her servants: “I want to kiss the feet of the Prince.”
And they lower the bundle they hold to your feet and she kisses them and now you alone are standing, the honored caballero who doesn’t know his own name or his own face, and fears now never to recover them, and before you, you see the black-clad drummer with the gray eyes and tattooed lips, and from those intently staring eyes and those moving but silent lips you read — a moment before you fall, fainting, stranger to yourself, enemy to yourself, enemy to your new body, overwhelmed by the black invasion of the incomprehensible, your former, although unremembered life, battling against your new and unsought mortal shell — the single message: “Salve. We have awaited you.”
But as night falls, in this confusion of sounds, mute are the words of the drummer, resonant those of the invalid voyager, the wandering phantom that found you along the way, bring him here, bring him to my carriage, march, march, we shall not stop again, our painful pilgrimage has ended, they are awaiting us, the sepulchers are prepared, sheriff, notary, halberdier, without pause, march, toward the Pantheon of Kings erected by my son El Señor Don Felipe, there we shall find repose, the living and the dead, march, away from the coast toward the high plains, toward the palace constructed from the heart of the mountains, identical to the mountains: to our tombs, all.
THE WORKERS
Where are the rockrose shrubs where we used to shelter our flocks, eh? Martín smiled and sank his hands into the lime basin, glancing at his two companions, who were preoccupied with slaking the lime. Where will they find succor and shelter now in time of storm and wind and snow and all the other misfortunes we know so well? Nuño started toward the lime kilns, and Catilinón said they’d done a good job, and that it would last well. Martín felt the lime burning his arms and withdrew them from the tank.
As they walked, they cleaned their arms and hands on their chests and shirt fronts, passing the day laborers, who were sinking the foundations until they touched solid ground and then throwing the excavated dirt outside the enclosures. It was one o’clock in the afternoon and time to rest and eat. Martín shouted this to the laborers on the crane, as if his voice could be heard in the midst of all the commotion on the platforms and scaffolding.
“Hup!”
“Easy!”
“Pull, now!”
“Hold it, there!”
“Stop!”
“A little over, there!”
“Back!”
“A little more!”
On this very spot there had been a spring that never went dry, Martín smiled again, and beside it the woods that were the only refuge for the animals, winter and summer. Catilinón winked his eye and guffawed. “Ah, but you’re in such a state now, my pretty, we’ll never have pleasure of you again!” And everyone laughed heartily with him.
All the stone was carved at the quarry; at the work site and in the chapel one could scarcely hear the ringing blows of the hammer. Martín and his friends ate in one of the tile sheds, seated on bricks; then they bade each other farewell and Martín walked to the quarry; he ran the back of his hand across his mouth and picked up his chisel. The supervisor walked among the workers, repeating with kindness and gentleness the specifications for this particular work, for these lands had never seen its equal and it was difficult for the old shepherds converted into stoneworkers to construct a palace conceived in the mortified imagination of El Señor; as the supervisor continually reminded the workers, El Señor wished to offer to Heaven some noteworthy service for favors and intercessions performed. Round the columns very carefully, said the supervisor, and Martin applied his chisel with care; easy now, smiled the estate master, just two light taps of the hammer, no pit marks, no rose or chip or bump anywhere; so Martín had only to smooth it a bit with fine chisel strokes; in that way it was smooth all over. Martín looked up at the pounding sun, missing the rockrose, the flock, and the spring that never dried either in winter or in summer.
Later he walked to the stream bed that drained the quarry, where several day laborers were cutting stone from the vein and carting it out in hand barrows. Although it was not his work, Martín helped them load the rough-hewn blocks he would later chisel and polish. He nodded to Jerónimo, who was in charge of the quarry forge; better than anyone, this bearded man knew how to sharpen iron tools, how to set the wedges and sheath the iron tools with steel edges to protect them from the ruinous blast furnace. Even so, only yesterday he had been accused of oversharpening the tools. That meant the loss of a day’s wages. It doesn’t matter, Jerónimo told Martín; we just do our jobs the best we can; the supervisors do theirs by finding defects where there aren’t any; they’re parasites, that’s their condition, and if from time to time they don’t criticize some error, soon they themselves would be criticized for not doing anything.
At four-thirty in the afternoon they all ate a plate of chick-peas with salt and oil, and Martín calculated the time. It was midsummer. It was still two months before winter work hours began. Now during the long fatigue of the sun they must resign themselves to their own. From Santa Cruz in May to Santa Cruz in September a man must come to work at six in the morning and work continuously until eleven, and from one in the afternoon until four, and then, as they were now, cease work for a half hour, then return at four-thirty and continue until sunset. But in July the sun never sets, Catilinón said, laughing; he could already see himself in Valladolid with his little pouch full of wages saved to spend through the long, nightless summer, going from eating house to eating house, matching his sure pleasure against his unsure fortune. Martín spat out a mouthful of sour and masticated chick-peas at the lime worker’s feet and said that at five ducats every three months he’d be lucky if he got as far as Burgo de Osuna, where every morning the oxen left, pulling their granite-laden carts, and bearded Jerónimo rapped the clownish Catilinón on the head and told him that in addition the oxen were more sure of their food than any rapscallion dreaming of city eating houses, for the beasts had hay and straw and rye and wheat aplenty, and in addition had provisions for two years in advance, and that there was also an order to deliver two thousand bushels of bread annually to the monastery and an equal quantity for any poor that might pass by; but for them? no provision at all when this work was ended, not even if they became the homeless poor, and as for that scamp Cato, he shouldn’t get any ideas, he’d be returning to Valladolid exactly as he’d left, to live the same way he had as a child, hanging about under stairways and fighting with the dogs for scraps of food. Well, at least there’s scraps, Catilinón answered with another wink, and hunger sharpens your wits, so a man can get by; poulterers throw chicken heads and feathers into the street; butchers slaughter their animals in their shop doorways and let the blood run down the street, and lacking for wine, the blood’s not bad watered a little, and there are always pigs running loose, and fishmongers toss what they don’t sell into the street. Fishmongers, grumbled Jerónimo, toss what’s rotted into the street, what those able won’t buy, and you, Catilinón, you’re a born fool, bound to die of the Great Pox in cities swarming with madmen delirious from pure hunger, and why can’t you just be happy with your work here, Nuño added, at least we’ll be eating more than dirt and with luck the end of this job doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, maybe our sons and even our grandsons will be working on it. And Catilinón wiped a crocodile tear from his eye and said: Give me money, not counsel, and if I’m to be a fool I choose to be foolish like the fool from Perales, who while he was servant in the convent got all the nuns pregnant, and I don’t want to end up like Santa Lebrada, you know what happened to her, that sainted rabbit put on her habit and went out to do a good deed, but for all her toil she was boiled in oil, and worse, she was fricasseed, for we’re all screwed from the start and alive only by a miracle, for let’s see, now, how old was your brother, Martín, when he died, and your father, Jerónimo? and let the shortness of life console and unite us, brothers, and stinking water and damp rooms as well, for either here or in the city we live the same, here or there, a bit of light, a lot of smoke; beasts or men, there’s but the one door for us all.