“Come then, my love.”
THE EXHORTATION
What do you expect of the future, my poor unhappy lad? Why did you leave your home, your distant but fertile fields where you were loved and protected? Why are you marching in this Crusade? What have they promised you? Listen, stop the dancing; do not excite yourself; why are you concerned, my son, why are you worried? Rejoin your friends; ask them to be silent, what an infernal din! No one can be rational in such circumstances, how can anything be understood; tell them to put down their fifes and bagpipes and drums and listen to me: the world is in order, it is well ordered; we struggled long and hard to emerge from the shadows; you young do not know what that was. Darkness, my children, barbarism, yes, the sacking, plundering hordes; blood, crime, and ignorance. It was with great effort that we came forth from that hell; more than once we fell back; more than once the sword of the Goth, the conflagration of the Mogul, and the horsemen of the Hun tumbled our constructs as if they were of sand. But look now: we have organized a space, we have created a stable order; look at the cultivated fields, look at the cities safe within their bastions, look at the castle on the heights and give thanks for the protection our Señor the Prince, like a good father, offers in exchange for our vassalage. Go back to your classrooms, my sons, what are you doing here? Go back to Bologna, to Salamanca, and to Paris; you will not find the truth accompanying this rabble, this mob of beggars and prostitutes and false heresiarchs: the truth lies in the teachings of the Church Fathers, and in the flower of their philosophy: the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas, who summed up for eternity all the wisdom of which the human being is capable; do not look for heaven in this orgy of sensuality and music and exultant doubts and heretical ideas, there are no heavens but those defined in the Elucidations: the corporeal heaven we see, the spiritual heaven inhabited by the angels, and the intellectual paradise where the fortunate shall stand face to face with the Holy Trinity. Young men: each of us has a well-established place on this earth; the Liege commands, the serf obeys, the student studies, the priest prepares us for the life eternal, the learned doctor propounds the inviolate truths; no, it is not true what you proclaim; it is not true that we are free because Christ’s sacrifice redeemed us from the sin of Adam; it is not true that the grace of God is within the reach of every man without the intercession of ecclesiastical powers; it is not true that redeemed human flesh may savor its own juices, its own polished smoothness, its joyful contact with other bodies, without fear of sin, we cannot put aside the fact that, as today we throw ourselves with pleasure into bed, soon others will throw us into the tomb; it is not true that the New Jerusalem can be constructed on this earth; anathema be the teachings of the heretic Pelagius, defeated, thankfully, by St. Augustine of Hippo, anathema, too, the teachings of Origen the suspect, who, surely not without some reason, culminated his thought with the atrocious act of self-castration, and the teachings of Joachim of Floris, that tenebrous Italian monk, as well, for no man obtains grace without the Church, as Pelagian heresy would have; nor will a millenary kingdom be realized in the souls of all believers, as Origen speculated, nor will there be, as prophesied in the Joachimite madness, a place in space, a third age, that will be the sabbath and the pleasure of sorrowing humanity, and in which epoch Christ and His Church will be replaced, since the spirit will reign fully in their stead; it is not true that you are the bearers of grace, accompanied by this riffraff, barefoot vagabonds who burn the lands and harvests, stables and farms, who assault and destroy monasteries, churches, and hermits’ cells, who steal food and clothing from devastated castles, who will not work, who contend they live in perfect joy, and who say they do all this to hasten the second coming of a Christ who must in truth be the Antichrist, and so a cruel and seductive tyrant — but a tyrant who may nevertheless be overcome, and for that reason one who is capable of bringing about the defeat of your millenary promise, of a kingdom-of-heaven-on-earth never to come about while Lords are masters of all and serfs masters of nothing. What confusion is this? You say the millenary kingdom will arise only upon a vacant, destroyed, and leveled earth, like that of the first day of Creation; but the Creation, my beloved children, was beyond history and thus cannot be repeated. And you add that only upon this demolished earth may the new Christ be received, a Christ who actually will be the conquerable Antichrist whose downfall will assure, oh yes, will assure that joyous era where the spirit will reign unfettered, not in an individual incarnation, but incarnate in all. But if that cruel and seductive tyrant should not be vanquished, but instead be perpetuated in a third age of weeping and terror and misery, embodying history, and with all his means enlisting those who do not understand that the act of Creation cannot be repeated, that its repetition would only disguise the original act, inscribing it forever in the same history they wish to negate, and thus provide the Antichrist the double weapon of the ability to act, masqueraded as the Creator, and also to reign with impunity as the Ruler — what then? Is this the way you say you are imitating Christ, whose reign will not be of this world, and whom we shall encounter only in Heaven when all time has come to an end, far from the earth, far from history, far from the eschatological delirium with which you are attempting to establish as a part of history everything that has no part in history? Do you truly believe that poverty erases sin, that communal property and the exaltation of sex and the sensuality of the dance and the rejection of all authority and the unrestrained life of vagabonds in the forest, on the beaches, and along the highways could supplant and even overcome the established order? Listen; stop your dancing, why do you not listen? Cease your singing, what infernal racket! How may I make myself heard? Damned sickness of St. Vitus, you are mad, you are sick; rest, go back to your homes, the carnival is over, the revelry cannot last forever: the disarmed crusades, the rebellious, aspiring soul, end in sacrifice upon funeral pyres in seignorial castles; forget your illusions, stop yearning for the impossible, accept the world as it is, stop dreaming! Yes! The Liege has the right to the first nuptial night, and his are the harvests and the honor and respect, and he is entitled to recruit for his wars and impose tributes for his luxuries; and yes, the Bishop can sell indulgences and burn witches and torture heretics who speak of Jesus Christ as if He were a purely human man, our equal … Do not doubt, do not think, do not dream, my unhappy sons; this is the world, the world ends here, there is nothing beyond the edge of the sea and whosoever embarks seeking new horizons will be but a miserable galley slave in a ship of fools: the earth is flat and this is the center of the universe; the land you seek does not exist, there is no such place! There is no such place!
And so a raving, ranting Simón wandered the streets of the cities of his time, cities stifled beneath the plague, buried beneath their own filth. Though they retained their pain, his eyes had lost their clarity forever; he was become a breathless, timbreless voice, an expressionless gaze, a colorless face.
ASHES OF THE BRAMBLES
“That woman … is it you … Celestina?” asked the youth sitting beside the breaking waves when the page-and-drummer’s story had ended.
“I am also called Celestina,” she answered.
“Why are you traveling in this funeral cortege dressed as a man?”
The page looked at the youth with sadness; her beautiful gray eyes asked: Still you do not remember me? Was the impression I left in your memory so weak? But the tattooed lips recounted another story:
I lived with my father in the forest. He used to say that the forest is like the desert in other lands: the place of nothingness, the place to which one flees, for in the world it was our fate to inhabit there were so many things one must flee: empty spaces will be our protection. He, and his fathers before him, my father told me, fled the world because the world was plague, poverty, war, and an early death. When I was eleven I wanted to know why; I never completely understood his answer. In the memory of his ancestors (I retained only images; they filtered through my memory, already filtered through the memory of my father) those plague-ridden cities, those wars and invasions, the chaotic hordes and orderly phalanxes, slavery and hunger, passed like diurnal phantoms. I never completely understood; as I have told you, all that was left to me were certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel. Our life was very simple. We lived in an ordinary hut. I spent most of the year tending sheep. I recall very clearly the time of my childhood. Everything had a meaning and a place. The sleepy summer sky and the early frosts of winter; the sheep and the bleating; the sun was a year and the moon turned in a month; day was a smile, and night, fear. But I remember especially the autumn time; between September and December, my life was flooded with unforgettable odors; it was the time to gather ashes to use in washing, and also the time to collect the oak-tree bark I used in dyeing, and forest resins for making torches and candles; and honey from the wild honeycomb.