“You are speaking of the dead; I ask only a small adornment for myself … for the living…”
“The only adornment in this house will be the orb and the cross, the symbol of Christianity and of its triumph over pagan styles. Our faith is above any style. Here everything will be consistent. Somber. So that anyone who comes to this palace will say: ‘When you have seen one column of it, you have seen them all.’”
“Señor, Señor, have mercy; do not reproach my wish for beauty; ever since I was a child I have dreamed of having a tiny portion of that beauty created with trees and fountains and colored stone and delightful vistas that the Arab inhabitants left in your land from another time.”
“It is easy to see, Isabel, that you are English, or you would not yield in this manner to the temptations of the Infidel. We have spilled our blood in reconquering our Spanish land.”
“It was theirs, Señor, the Arabs filled it with gardens and fountains and mosques where before there was nothing; you conquered something foreign, Señor…”
“Quiet, woman, you do not know what you are saying; you are denying the course of our destiny, which is to purify all Spain of the Infidel scourge, to eradicate it, mutilate its members, to be left alone finally with our humiliated, but pure, bones. Do you want to know what the only concession to sinful senses in this entire fortress will be? Look, then, atop this edifice I am constructing, the eighth wonder of the world, and you will see it crowned by golden spheres. In this way, as did my forebears upon reconquering the cities of the Moors, I will commemorate our victories for the Faith: see in those spheres the heads of the Infidel exposed to God’s wrath.”
La Señora gazed sadly into the gathering dusk. She smelled something intolerably offensive; the offense was converted into an even more intolerable suspicion: she smelled the burned flesh, fingernails, and hair of a man.
The painting: And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said unto him; If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread. And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone.
Pressing his hands to his temples, El Señor asked: What is going on outside? Nothing, Guzmán replied; some miserable twenty-four-year-old youth was involved all summer in a vile affair with two thirteen-year-old boys, just here, in the rockrose thicket below your kitchen, and today he is being burned alive beside the stable for his wicked crime. Yesterday he demonstrated great repentance and regret; he said that to be pardoned even the angels must weep for their sins, and that his was the sin of angels, for he had committed one more diabolical that he would never confess. He said it, Señor, as if he wished to defy his punishment as much as the judges’ curiosity, and he was condemned for what was known as well as that still unknown. You yourself signed the death sentence, do you not remember?
The painting: And Pilate, when he had called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, said unto them, Ye have brought this man unto me, as one that perverteth the people: and behold, I having examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him: nothing worthy of death is done unto him. I will therefore chastise him, and release him. For of necessity he must release one unto them at the feast. And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man, and release unto us Barabbas: Who for a certain sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prison. Pilate therefore, willing to release Jesus, spake again to them. But they cried, saying, Crucify him, crucify him. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.
El Señor looked at his cramped fingers, closed his eyes and said in a slightly stronger voice that the boy was right; yes, the saints, the very elect of God, wept, because they knew that not even angels may be pardoned without tears and without penitence; doubtlessly, God has special scales to weigh and to expiate the transgressions of all those who are inferior to Him; some for the crimes and punishments of men, and others for those of angels, whose codes we do not know; but one thing is true: only God is free; therefore, everything inferior to Him, not being free, sins, even a King or a seraph; yes, they sin by their mere imperfection.
He buried himself deeper in his bed and said that the clamor of the saints could be heard and they said: I have sinned only against You and before You I have done evil; therefore, there is no such thing as a secret crime; God is witness to evil even when it is but imagined; God is impassioned against sin, for all that is not God is culpable imperfection. For that reason, Guzmán, we have all sinned before God; for that reason, we will all be guilty before the divine tribunal. You ask me: Who has not thought evil? and you will have partially proved my assertion; I shall answer you: What living thing is not guilty simply by the mere fact that he exists? and I shall have proved it fully. Is it right that on earth we are innocent only if we have not been apprehended by law and judged by the courts? I have suffered in my lamentations and every night I have bathed my bed with tears; El Señor added, his head bowed, for You I shall review all my years and all my sins in the bitter solitude of my soul. All my years. And all my sins.
He tried to rise from the bed, but the pain in his swollen foot impeded him.
“Guzmán. Have I still time to pardon him?”
The servant shook his head. No, it was too late. The boy’s body had been consumed by flames.
“It is true, Señor; we all sin against God; but only God has the right to judge the crimes of the mind, or, if it please you, the crime of existing. But it is the right of power to judge the crime of acts.”
All my sins, murmured the man lying helpless in the bed. I shall be better tomorrow, he said to himself, tomorrow I shall be better.
“Need I remind you what day tomorrow is?”
El Señor shook his head and waved his vassal away.
“God be praised.”
“God be glorified.”
The palace: Along the only nave of the chapel, one wall interrupted by the door leading to El Señor’s bedchamber and the other by the elaborate grillwork of the nuns’ choir loft, await the open tombs, the rows of porphyry, jasper, and marble coffins, open, their heavy stone slabs resting against the tomb markers and pyramidal bases, each inscribed with the name of one of El Señor’s ancestors, an Ordoño, a Ramiro, the Alfonsos and the Urracas, a Pedro and a Jaime, the Blancas and Leonors, the Sanchos and Fernandos, each slab and each marker engraved with one simple inscription beneath the name and the dates of birth and death, a different inscription for each body, many bodies reproduced in supine marble effigy, all the inscriptions linked together by a single thought: sin and contrition, sin and death. HE DID NOT DO THE GOOD HE DESIRED, RATHER THE EVIL HE DID NOT WISH, Manifest were the works of his flesh, which were fornication, lewdness, and lust, Peccatum non Tollitur Nisi Lacrymis et Paenitentia; Nee Angelus Potest, Nee Archangelus; In his members was discovered another decree which struggled against the decree of reason; He was prisoner to the decree of sin, which was in his members; he who placed all his happiness in music and vain and lascivious songs, in roaming, games, hunts, galas, riches, authority, vengeance, in the esteem of others — see him now: that brief appetite converted into eternal, irremediable rage, implacable dust; SWEET UNFORTUNATE QUEEN FREED BY DEATH FROM THE PRISON OF EARTHLY DEATH; The Sins of the Throne Are Seldom Single, Thus the Most Difficult to Forgive; O GOD WHO TAKETH AWAY FOR BETTERMENT; he was example of bad habits, bad customs, and sinister advice, those qualities that clothe the souls of the wretched, who for their pride are lions; for vengeance, tigers; for lust, mules, horses, pigs; for tyranny, fish; for vainglory, peacocks; for sagacity and diabolical cunning, vixens; for gluttony, monkeys and wolves; for insensitivity and malice, asses; for simple-mindedness, sheep; for mischief, goats; vainglory, and a brief life; DEATH RAN CLOSE BEHIND THE PAGES OF HIS HOPES TO MAKE OF THEM ASHES. And at the rear of the nave ascended the interminable and unterminated steps that led to the plain above, for by that broad stairway were to descend all the bodies at this moment advancing through mourning towns, through cities and cathedrals, escorted by priests, entire convents, and chapters of all orders. And only when they had arrived and were reposing in their tombs would the heavy slabs be lowered upon them; and the ingress from the plain to stairway, conceived only for this ceremony, would be forever sealed, along with the crypt, the nuns’ choir loft, the altar of gold and jasper, the painting brought (it was said) from Orvieto, and the bedchamber of El Señor.