Report to Grego (75 page)

The only one able to comprehend the divine frenzy was a poet (no matter if he was also a monk), Father Hortensio Felix Paravicino. He saw the menacing darkness, the savage thunderbolts, the great wings, the saints whose bodies had melted away and become blazing candles, and one day he seized your paint-bespattered hand and kissed it. “You make snow itself burst into flame,” he said. “You have overstepped nature, and the soul remains undecided in its wonderment which of the two—God's creature or yours—deserves to live.” At the last of these words, his voice began to tremble.

You listened, smiling and unperturbed, to the insults and commendations. If you frequently pretended to be angry, the anger was a superficial storm on your face; the depths beneath remained motionless. Because you were aware of the great secret, you had neither hope, fear, nor vain self-conceit. Men scuffle with those two great phantoms good and evil (who knows, perhaps they are the two aspects of God). The most ignorant say that good and evil are enemies. Others rise one step higher and say that good and evil are allies. Still others, embracing the game of life and death upon this terrestrial crust with an all-encompassing glance, rejoice at the
harmony and say: Good and evil are One.

But we, grandfather, are aware of the great secret. We reveal it, and who cares if no one believes! So much the better if they do not. Man is infirm, he needs consolations. If he believed, his blood would run cold. What secret? That this One does not exist.

One day I went to your house in Toledo, grandfather, so that I too could view the saints, apostles, and nobles you painted. How you unburdened them of the weight of the flesh and made them ready to turn to flame. Never in my life had I seen more flaming flames. This is how the flesh is defeated, I reflected, this is how the precious essence is preserved from disintegration, not our feet and hands of clay, not our blond or black hair, but the precious essence which battles inside this sack of skin and which some call soul and others flame.

If you had still been dressed in your flesh, grandfather, I would have brought you some honey, myzíthra, and oranges as gifts from Crete; also Harídhemos, that fine rebecist with the basil behind his ear, to sing you the three mantinádhes you adored:

Luff the helm, embrace your faith come what come may,

Who cares if a project thrive or if it decay!

A job before you, luff and do not fear,

Pay out your youth to it with never a tear.

I am the son of lightning, grandson of thunder's howl;

At will I flash and thunder, at will I fling down hail.

But you had turned to flame. Where could I find you, how could I see you, what gift could I bring you to make you remember Crete and rise from the grave? Only flame is able to find favor in your sight. Oh, if only I could turn to flame and join you!

You perched for thirty-seven years upon this ledge which is Toledo. For thirty-seven years you must have stepped onto this terrace where I now stand, and watched the muddy Tagus flow beneath the double-arched Alcántara Bridge, watched it flee, proceed to pour into the ocean and perish. Your mind flowed with it, your life flowed also, proceeded to pour into death and perish. Bitter, rebellious cries rose from your bowels. So far I have done nothing, nothing, you thought to yourself, clenching your fists
(you did not sigh, you became angry). I have done nothing. What can the soul accomplish with paints and canvas? It does not suit me to perch here at the end of the earth mixing colors, fooling with a brush, and painting saints and crucified Christs. These decalcomanias do not unburden my soul. The world is narrow, life is narrow, God is narrow; I should have taken up fire—fire, sea, winds, and stones—in order to build the world as I wanted it: equal to my own stature!

The sun began to set, the rooftops turned to gold, the river darkened, the evening star plummeted from the mountain. The lamps had been lighted in your house; your old faithful servant Maria Gomez was setting the table. Jeronima, the dear companion of your sleeping and waking hours, stepped onto the terriace and touched your hand ever so lightly, lest she frighten you. “It is dark now,” she said. “You have worked all day and eaten nothing. Don't you pity your body? Come . . .”

But you had called a halt now to your creation of the world and had bounded to Crete. Striding over the Cretan mountains, you did not hear the gentle voice, did not feel the white hand. You were not quite twenty years old. The air smelled of thyme. Singing the three mantinádhes you adored, a kerchief with long fringes girding your raven-black hair, a marigold behind your ear, you were going to the celebrated monastery of Vrondissi to paint the Marriage of Cana, which the abbot had commissioned from you.

Your mind was overflowing with blue, crimson, and green paints. The bride and groom were enthroned on high stools decorated with carvings of two-headed eagles. The marriage tables were ready, the guests eating and drinking; the rebecist sat in their midst playing his instrument and singing sprightly marriage songs. Christ was rising—He had drunk, His cheeks were ablaze—and placing a silver florin on the musician's forehead . . .

Suddenly the beloved voice came to you, as though from far in the distance. You heard it. “I am coming,” you answered. Smiling, you followed the woman who was compassionately returning you to earth. But the Marriage of Cana had luxuriated in your mind, the belled rebec of Crete had tinkled and wailed inside you, and lo, the everyday meal seemed like a wedding feast! You kept two musicians in your employ; you summoned them, O bridegroom, to play the lute and guitar while you ate, so that your humble food
and wine could become a marriage feast of Cana. And when you had finished eating, you too rose (you remembered the picture you had painted in your mind) and with lordly generosity placed two golden ducats on the musicians' foreheads.

For you lived like a lord. You were a lord. Having nothing but scorn for prudence, you squandered all you earned from your art. Friends and enemies alike censured and scolded you. “What do you want with a twenty-four-room house?” they demanded. “What do you want with musicians? Why don't you condescend to load your icons on your back like all the others, and make the rounds of churches and monasteries to sell them?”

They called you high-nosed, disdainful, freakish. You blazed up in anger if a single word was uttered against you; you flew into a rage when asked how many ducats you expected for one of your paintings. “My paintings are not for sale,” you answered. “They cannot be bought. Works of art like mine are beyond the reach of any purse. I am simply leaving them in pawn with you. When I feel like it, I shall return your ducats and take back my painting.”

“Where are you from?” the judges asked you. “Why did you come to Toledo? Who are you?” But you interrupted them. “I am not obliged to answer,” you said, “and I am not going to answer.” When they did not force you, however, you inscribed your name wide and broad on your paintings, and below it, with magisterial pride, the title CRETAN.

And when that venom-nosed King Philip panicked at the sight of the Saint Maurice you had painted for him, you bit your lips and deigned neither to supplicate nor to take the edge off your colors. Instead, enveloped in flames, you took your wrath, pride, and unyielding art with you and scampered off to Toledo.

It was a great moment. A pure, righteous conscience stood on one tray of the balance, an empire on the other, and it was you, man's conscience, that tipped the scales. This conscience will be able to stand before the Lord at the Last Judgment and not be judged. It will judge, because human dignity, purity, and valor fill even God with terror.

Forgive me, grandfather, for being unable to control myself. I felt such great admiration for the thrice-noble moment when you strode across the Escorial's threshold and departed with head held high, leaving the world's great and small profits scornfully behind
you, that I dared to make that moment fast in verse and meter in order to keep it from fleeing. I write my homage in black ink, in red ink, and hang it in the air:

Curled on a ledge beneath the sweltry

  blaze, the king—the worm—observes

  with lingering gaze the masons

towering his desolate foursquare

  coffin all around them. Cell,

  palace and tomb, the savage rough-hewn

granite bellows coarse and nude

  upon the barren crag. His lathery

  mouth was moldering, the unrighteous

judge's wax-white face and wizened

  body slowly decomposing—

  when suddenly horn the mountain's mane

down swoops with joyful shriek a starving

  vulture upon the torpid form:

  thirty years before, it smelled

the stench. The comely youth, the Cretan,

  feels the stalker-bird depart

  his mind to pounce upon the monarch.

In the cavern of his ear reverbrates

  still the hissing wrath-filled lash

  which drove him from the temple of his

dreams: “The King rejects Saint Maurice!”

  The air stirred and tingled—flames on

  every side; arms and angels;

the breasts catch fire, rapt in God;

  the spears are spindling sun-washed lilies;

  flowers spring from flame-hot stones;

enamel, ruby, emerald the shields;

  lion-like prowls the light and consumes;

  in heaven, with their misty stature,

the stalwarts march in file like wraiths in

  early gusts. The youth, with vigorous

  frenzied fingers, kneads a clod of

ardent Cretan cistus gum,

  his hand forever fragrant Noon;

shimmering ait above the stones.

The slender acrite sees a new

  creation flashing vaguely in the

  light—celestial and barely seen

its form. As an upright wing which spreads

  with creaking force, so shakes, immured,

  the monastery, and mankind's ponderous

bastion, the languid body, an azure

  window opens toward the sky.

  Birds the angels, plummeting to the

reason's forge; like rosy apples

  the king's black tidings dangle;

  from chaste heaven's garrets the mind-vulture hurtles

mutely down to the Cretan's brain,

  an archangel with a mouthful of fire.

  Children pass, like embers after

evening rain, and monks, and virgins,

  and lords with sunken cheeks, and mothers

  consecrated to their sons: their

gods. His hands are burning to begin.

  Vague desires are stifling him; with

  insatiable span-length bites he measures

out the ethereal canvas in the air.

  The paints flow thick and simmer briskly

  in his brain before the hand

can seize them. Virile angels plunge,

  swarms of meteors burst at the heads.

  Like martial flags returning in tatters,

the apostles torch into his mind;

  keys they hold, and fires, the beloved

  a massive snake-embossèd chalice.

Upon him, bowed, the youth feels God

  descend as clumps of fire; he howls,

  his body sacrificed upon

the cross. Seething earth. Like a lion's

  tongue, grace divine voraciously

  licks the stones. The unborn mass

enwraps his flanks, a briskly vibrant

  dance. His fingers spark, and one

by one he lights the tips, heads of

slender flame on doubly man-sized

  candles. With otherworldly brilliance,

  like a pearly corona of moon,

earth's trembling upper level beckons him.

  “I shall bow out the body: let it crack!

  God, a magnet high in the clouds,

draws me to the dance floor thrice-

  ethereal. But the King, that venomous

  figwort, ejects me from his dreary

henroost; he sees the light and panics.

  Damn you! goodbye, and learn, you fleshly

  sieve, that art is not submission

and rules, but a demon which smashes the molds.

  I leave you to sweep up cunt-hair with your

  putrid eunuch daubers.” So he

spoke. Sunward to the granite

  turning, those precious indurated

  jewels his eyes he fixes on the

stylite crags. He smelled the cistus;

  Crete the fondled tigress slipped

  and spread throughout his vitals' sounding

darkness. Heavy cares, desires

  proud and manly, drum his breast,

  the bee-swarm buzzes in flowering thyme, and