Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

FIFTH DAY

“The dream of Flanders lasted thirty-three and a half months…”

“Which are a thousand and one half days…”

“The arrival in Bruges. Schwester Katrei. The nights in the Duke’s forest. The crusade of the poor. The free spirit. The free spirit. The final battle against you. The defeat…”

“The profaned Cathedral; that is why I constructed this fortress of the Most Holy Sacrament.”

“That night, Felipe, I approached you; I asked you to join us: the dream on the beach, you, we…”

“You said you were invincible, Ludovico, because nothing could be taken from you … You said that if I vanquished you, it would be to vanquish myself…”

“Two slept: the one who desired everything, the heresiarch of Flanders, understood and remembered nothing…”

“I asked the Duke of Brabant for his head; he delivered it to me…”

“Do you have it?”

“In that coffer beneath my bed.”

“Show it to me.”

“You, girl, you are more agile, drag that chest here to me…”

“Open it, Celestina.”

“There; it has become wrinkled and black; it has shrunk, but there…”

“Look at it, Felipe, this is not the head of the youth.”

“True.”

“Now you know them; you know that the Duke never delivered to you the head of the young heresiarch who was dreamed, but that of another man…”

“Who is he?”

“I cannot see. I do not wish to see.”

“Until when, Ludovico?”

“Let me measure my time. Describe the severed head to me.”

“It was that of a man of middle age, bald, but the head has shrunk, it now bears a long mane of gray-streaked hair…”

“And what more?”

“Half-opened eyes, thin lips, a long nose; it is difficult to describe it to you: the face of a rustic, with no great distinction, a common face…”

“Poor man, poor man…”

“Did you know him?”

“The Duke deceived you, Felipe; he deceived us all; he delivered to you the head of the most humble of his followers; poor artist, secret painter.”

Then El Señor, to demonstrate his gratitude for this conversation, in his turn told them how he had questioned that painting brought from Orvieto, asking Christ to manifest himself and clearly make known to Felipe, the most faithful of his devoted followers, the truth about his mystic visions: were they prophetic prospects of his destiny in eternal Heaven, or deceitful heralds of a condemnation to repetitive Hell? The painting had not answered. He lashed himself with a penitential whip. The masculine figures with their erect penises had turned toward him. A wound of blood welled from the canvas. Christ had called him a bastard.

For the remainder of the day they did not speak. El Señor summoned to the chapel his most trusted foreman and there instructed him to wall up in her niche the mutilated trunk of the Mad Lady; the foreman said he would need a couple of workmen to help him with the brick and mortar, but El Señor forbade it. All day he listened to the slow progress of the work.

By night El Señor left the chapel and examined the completed job. He thanked the foreman for his efforts and handed him a sack filled with gold pieces. As he felt the weight of his reward, the foreman knelt before El Señor, kissed his hand, and told him that the payment was excessive for such an undemanding task.

“You will have need of it,” said El Señor. “I swear to you that you will have much need of it.”

The foreman retired, murmuring a thousand thanks, and El Señor walked through the shadows of the chapel toward the altar and its painting.

Now it was he who fell to his knees, stupefied.

The painting from Orvieto, before which he had prayed and cursed so often, the witness to his doubts, blasphemies, solitude, and culpable delays throughout the days and nights of the construction of this palace, monastery, and inviolable necropolis, the scene of his ascent up the stairway to a distant and terrifying future, agent of the words of his testament, spectator to the nuns’ fear, the death of Bocanegra, the burial of the thirty cadavers of his ancestors, and the arrival of the mysterious strangers — the page of the tattooed lips and the pilgrim from the new world — that painting, come, it was said, from the fatherland of a few somber, austere, and energetic painters, the painting which in El Señor’s imagination had seen, heard, and spoken everything that had happened here, that painting was disappearing before his very eyes; its varnish was cracking and splitting, entire sections were peeling from the canvas like the skin from a grape, like the down from a peach, and the forms painted there, the Christ standing alone in one corner, without a halo, the naked men in the center of the Italian piazza, and all the details contemporary to the place which occupied the foreground, all the many and minute details of the background, all the New Testament scenes, no longer had any discernible or concrete form, they were turning into something entirely different, pure light or pure liquid, and like an arch of light, a river of colors, mingling and blending, were flowing above the head of El Señor, away, away…”

With maddened eyes El Señor sought the origin of the force that was stripping his painting and converting it into a stream of chromatic air: with a single brusque movement he turned from the altar and perceived, among the ever increasing shadows of the chapel, the point toward which the forms were fleeing: a monk at the foot of the stairway leading to the plain, a friar holding some object in his hands, something that glittered like the head of a pin or the point of a sword; El Señor lacked the strength to struggle to his feet; he crawled from the altar toward the stairway, following the route of that luminous way which coursed through the heavens of the chapel like an artificial constellation.

When he could see clearly, he stopped.

Brother Julián, a mirror in his hands, stood motionless before the first step of that finite but infinite stairway, completed but incompletable, passable but forbidden, traversable but mortal, and toward the mirror, a triangle, flowed the scrambled, liquid, and dissolved forms of the painting from Orvieto: the triangular mirror swiftly captured and imprisoned them within its own neutral image.

“Julián … Julián,” El Señor managed to murmur, captive to marvels, as the enormous painting was captive within the tiny mirror.

The priest seemed of stone; absorbed in his task he did not look at him, but said: “Punish me, Señor, if you believe I am stealing something that belongs to you, but pardon me if I but collect what is mine, so that I may give it to others; not mine, not yours: the painting will belong to everyone…”

Brother Julián turned his back to El Señor and directed the light of the mirror toward the top of the stairway, the plain of Castile, and the forms momentarily captured there flowed from the triangular mirror.

The mirror emptied; El Señor rose to his feet, choking back a savage growl, the voice of a hunted animal, of a wolf wounded in its own domain by its own descendants, tomorrow’s Princes who could not recognize in the poor beast an ancestor incapable of gaining the eternity either of Heaven or of Hell; he tore the mirror from Julián’s hands, he threw it to the granite floor and stamped it beneath his feet, but the crystal did not break, nor was the metal band which bound it on three sides altered in shape.

Julián said quietly: “It is to no avail, Señor. The triangle is indestructible because it is perfect. There is no other figure, Sire, which, having three parts, always resolves itself with such exactitude into a single unity. Assign three numbers, whatever numbers you please, to each of the three angles. Add them two by two and write the resultant number on the side linking those two angles. The number of each angle, added to the number that results from the sum of the other two, always comes out the same. What can we, you or I, do against such truth? Behold in this miraculous object the meeting of science and art; the astronomer-priest and I — Toribio and I — fabricated it together.”