But Bocanegra stopped at the foot of the staircase, cowed before the first stair, where El Señor stood, a figure diffused in the violent light falling from overhead: a solar column of light, a column of dust motes, El Señor. First the mastiff barked with fury, and El Señor could not separate that emotion from his own fascinated innocence; did the dog or its master realize what was happening? El Señor thought, I can’t tell the difference between my trembling ignorance and the dog’s ignorant fury. Bocanegra barked, he approached the first step, he fled as if the stone were fire; worse (his master observed closely): for the dog the stairway did not exist; the dog could not see the standing El Señor, yet he smelled his presence; for El Señor was not present at the time the dog was living, but rather in a time he had encountered by chance when he stepped onto the stairway; the fire died in his entrails, he could no longer believe in the resurgence of his youthful exaltation, he cursed the notion of maturity and its identification with corruption; he cursed the blind will for action that one day had distanced him and now separated him forever from the only possible eternity: that of youth.
“The apple has been cut from the tree, its only destiny to rot.”
Then El Señor, poised upon the first step, committed the error of stretching out his hand to take Bocanegra by the spiked collar with the heraldic blazon inscribed in the iron. The dog growled, shook his head, and tried to sink first the spikes, then his canines, into the hand attempting to pull him toward the first step. The initial sensation that he was not recognized was followed in El Señor’s soul by the certainty of animosity; the bellicose dog not only did not know his master, he saw him actually as an enemy, an intruder. He refused to share the place and the instant his master had invaded on the stairway. El Señor regarded the perspective of the crypt from the first step; the chapel, from the stairway to the altar in the background to the luminous Italian painting and the jasper monstrance, was a copper engraving. Instantly he was suffused with immeasurable rage; on the day of his victory he had sworn to erect a fortress of the faith that no drunken soldier and no ravenous dog might ever profane; yet at the very entrance of the space he had chosen for his life and his death, the space constructed for him and by him, here he stood defending himself against a dog that was, in turn, resisting being pulled toward the stairway; El Señor looked toward the distant lights on the altar and, with a jerk, ripped the bandage from the dog’s head. Bocanegra howled heart-rendingly; the bandage had pulled the sandy scab from the wound.
Howling, vanquished, his head lowered and the bandage trailing between his trembling paws, Bocanegra retreated to the seignorial bedchamber. El Señor hesitated between ascending one stair more and returning to the granite floor of the chapel. He moved his right leg to ascend the second stair; but now that pleasureful lightness had once again turned to leaden weight. He was afraid; he made a half turn and placed his foot beneath the first stair, on the floor. He looked up: the sun had disappeared from the firmament, the dawn was again announcing its appearance. He moved his left leg and stepped completely from the first stair; again he looked up, toward the square of the heavens at the top of the stairway: the dawn had yielded to the night that had preceded it.
THE KISS OF THE PAGE
The page-and-drummer, dressed completely in black, descended from the dunes to the beach and knelt beside the shipwrecked young sailor. He stroked the damp head and cleaned the face: the buried half was a mask of wet sand; the cleaned half, however (murmured the page-and-drummer), was the face of an angel.
Startled, the boy awoke from his long dream; he cried out: he could not distinguish between the caresses of the page and those he believed he must have dreamed from the moment when he fell from the fore-deck into the boiling waters of the sea; dreams of encounters with women in carriages; he feared that the avid lips and sharp-filed teeth of a young Señora would again sink into his neck; he feared that the wrinkled lips and toothless gums of an old woman bundled in rags would again seek his loins. With the eyes of innocence he stared at the tattooed lips of the page-and-drummer, and imagined that in those lips — like the field and the device upon an escutcheon, like the coat of arms and the wind upon a pennant — were blended the desirous mouths of the other two women; he decided the page was the women he had dreamed of resolved into a new hermaphroditic figure; if he were half man and half woman, the page would be sufficient unto himself, he would love himself, and these caresses with which he was attempting to console and resuscitate the young sailor would be either an insignificant or an infinitely charitable act, but nothing more. And if the page were a man, the youth would accept his affection as that of the companion long desired in his solitude and mortal danger. But as the page’s tattooed lips approached his, he did not smell the heavy scent of sandalwood or fungus of the other women, but a perfume of the forest, of flaming brambles and dye baths in the open air. The page cupped the youth’s face in his hands and placed his warm soft tongue between the youth’s parted lips. Their tongues met and the youth thought: “I have returned. Who am I? I am reborn. Who are you? I have dreamed. Who are we?” He believes he must have repeated it aloud, for the page answered him, whispering into the ear he was caressing: “We have all forgotten your name. My name is Celestina. I want you to hear my story. Then you will come with me.”
EL SEÑOR BEGINS TO REMEMBER
There was no anger in Guzmán’s attitude, only the profound and silent contempt of one who knows his office and who scorns the errors of others; but emphasizing El Señor’s guilt, Guzmán’s contempt was disguised in the precision with which he attempted to remedy the hurt done the dog. The master, breathing heavily and scratching his jaw, has no time to notice either these details or what they might reveal of the disparity between Guzmán’s actions and his thoughts. His attention is captured by a much more powerful fact: it is five o’clock in the morning, the sun is just rising, and the dog Bocanegra is being treated by Guzmán for an incident that had occurred one hour earlier when the sun was at its future zenith.
He glanced at the vassal, allowing him to proceed. Guzmán rubbed the dog’s wound with olive oil to soothe the pain, then applied a thick coating of stale melted hog fat; finally he bound the dog’s body to a board so he couldn’t scratch himself, and said: “It would be better now for the wound to get air; it will heal more quickly that way.”
El Señor scratched his tickling ear and looked again. Guzmán had treated the dog and was kneeling before the hearth; he laid a fire and lighted it with oakum. El Señor sat upon his curule chair beside the fire, aware that Guzmán had again divined his desire: in spite of the fact it was a summer day, El Señor was trembling with cold. The flames began to play impartially upon El Señor’s prognathic profile and the sharp angles of Guzmán’s face.
“I must remind El Señor that today is his birthday. I must apologize for not having mentioned it sooner. But because of the dog’s condition…”
“It is all right, all right,” gasped El Señor, waving aside Guzmán’s apologies. “It is I who should apologize, for my carelessness with the dog…”
“El Señor has no cause to concern himself with dogs. That is why I am here.”
“What time is it?”
“Five o’clock in the morning, Sire.”