You learn the secrets of alchemy; you work for years, indefatigably; you grow old, stooped over dying fires, glutinous tars, and greenish oils, mixing, experimenting, coaxing the momentary flare, subduing the insistent flash, agonizing over a spark, exhilarated by a flameless aura, watching the St. Elmo’s fire from the beaches, wandering through peat fields, distilling mustards and linseed oils, polarizing and magnetizing every combustible element known to man, and still others of your own invention, until your work is ended. Ah, how true the Biblical curse; neither grace nor creation alone would have granted you knowledge; science is not gratuitous; you had to add the sweat of your brow.
You have dedicated your life to pragmatic grace and now you can proudly show the results to the honorable council in your city. Some of the priests accuse you of practicing the black arts, but the burghers, who see in your invention a necessary reconciliation of faith and utility, override this clerical vigilance, and soon you are installed in a profitable workshop near the city, from which supplies of your incandescent firewood flow to peasant huts, lords’ castles, and the ovens of the Guilds. No one need ever again feel the cold. You have triumphed over God’s careless design: allowing wood to get wet when dryness is more useful, flooding the woods with winter’s rain. The civilized world applauds you; it matters little that the vapors from your invention stain the firmament with a yellow cloud that settles into the valleys as a resinous bog. Grace, creation, and knowledge now are one in you; you have established the objective norm of truth.
Old and proud, saved by fame from the solitude and the questions that, were you alone, your forgotten grace — the original impulse to your creation and the solitary germ of your knowledge — might have posed, you ride through the countryside, basking in your renown, the gratitude of the populace, the usefulness of the gift you have bestowed upon them. That malodorous smoke issues from every chimney … from every chimney save one. Dumfounded, you dismount and enter that smokeless cottage.
There you find Celestina. She has grown old, too; she is truly a witch now, gray and wrinkled, sitting frostily before a bare hearth stitching her little dolls and stuffing them with flour. She is intoning a diabolic litany, in effect invoking the only companion to her solitude: the vacant intensity of her eyes reveals a true acquaintanceship with the being her voice is conjuring. In her solitude she too demands a contiguous presence, a shared wisdom.
Why do you not have a fire? you ask Celestina, and she replies she neither needs nor wants one; the smoke would frighten away her familiars and they would no longer come to her. You show your anger: woman, ignorant, superstitious … woman! but the truth is that your soul has now suffered the supreme insult: there is one being who fails to appreciate your offering to humanity, the tangible proof of your superior grace.
The wrinkled hag tries to read your face and finally cackles: “You know what you know; I know what you will never know. Leave me alone.”
And you, old man, proud, wise Ludovico, return slowly to the city with a leaden heart and a deepening sense of decision. You denounce Celestina before the ecclesiastical tribunal, and a few days later you go to the public square and there amidst the silent crowd you watch the halberdiers lead Celestina to the stake. The woman is bound to the wooden post and then the executioners set fire to the dry crackling wood at the feet of the recalcitrant witch. Your own invention, of course, is not utilized on this occasion.
NOWHERE
The three men and the woman sat a long while in silence after young Felipe stopped speaking. The youth himself sat staring toward the dawn sea; they had passed the night in conversation. And when the sun appeared, El Señor’s heir thought he saw in the orb of day the dead jester’s horrible grimace. Then he looked intently at Celestina and with his eyes asked her: “Please do not tell the others who I am.” Celestina bowed her head.
The student Ludovico was the first to rise; with a sudden movement he seized an ax and before anyone could stop him (but no one wished or dared to stop him) he threw himself against the skeleton of the old man’s boat and destroyed it, reduced it to splinters. Then, his face scarlet, he drove his ax into the black sands and murmured hoarsely:
“Nowhere does not exist. We have dreamed of a different life in distant time and distant space. That time and space do not exist. Madness. We must go back. Go back to your land, your harvest, and your serfdom, old man. Go back to your plagues and your healing, monk. Woman, return to your madness and your devils. And you, Felipe, the only one of whom we know nothing, return to your unknown. And I will go back to confront the torture and death that are my destiny. The Inquisitor of Teruel was not without reason: this is our world, even though it is not the best of all possible worlds.”
Felipe remained kneeling beside the dawn waves. The others rose and walked toward the dunes. Finally Felipe ran after them and said: “Wait a moment, please. You have not asked me what my perfect world would be. Give me that opportunity.”
The company paused at the edge of the high sandy ground, their silence interrogating the youth. And Felipe said: “Look. Utopia is not in the future, it is not in another space. The time of Utopia is now. The place of Utopia is here.”
HERE AND NOW
And so Felipe led the mad young witch and the proud student and the honest serf and the humble monk back toward the city, and there he said to them: “There is the perfect world.”
And their eyes opened to what they already knew, to shrieking, playing children, clerics selling indulgences, to the cries of street hawkers and the dragging steps of beggars, to quarrels among rivals and disputes among students, and also to sweethearts comforting each other, couples kissing in the narrow lanes, the strong scents of gin and bacon, roasting boar and frying onion; the hotchpotch of red-gauntleted, purple-robed doctors, purple-hatted, gray-cloaked lepers, scarlet-clad whores, freed heretics with the double cross embroidered on their tunics, and Jews with the round yellow patches over their hearts; pilgrims flourishing palm leaves returning from Jerusalem; pilgrims from Rome with St. Veronica’s cloths covering their faces; pilgrims from Compostela with seashells sewn to their hats; and pilgrims from Canterbury with a drop of the blood of the priest, the turbulent Thomas a Becket, in a small vial.
But these accustomed sights, sounds, and smells were but the veil drawn across a world moving rapidly and silently from some unknown center, issuing from some subterranean force; this Felipe pointed out to his companions: the dances seemed the same happy dances, but they were different; one had only to look a little more closely to discover their secret design; clasping hands, people danced all together, the entire city tracing the patterns of a lively galliard, moving in the undulating contractions of a giant serpent, led by the fife and lute, the mandolins and psalteries and rebecs of a group of musicians; and suddenly, when the five friends joined hands to form part of that ribbon of dancers, they saw other signs of change, for monks were coming out of their monasteries and nuns from their convents and Jews from their aljamas and Moslems from their alquerías and magicians from their towers and idiots from their asylums and prisoners from their prisons and children from their homes, and men armed with garrotes and axes and lances and pitchforks joined them, and one of them approached Felipe and said: “We are here. At the time and the hour you ordained.”