stars, the three souls, the seven mutations, and the single eye: the waters of the Red Sea do not part, a young girl in Toledo does not know which she prefers of the seven identical columns of a church or the two identical chick-peas of her supper, Judas cannot be bribed, the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ was never believed.”
Panting, for a moment Donno Valerio fell silent and ceased to manipulate his cords and buttons. Then, more calmly, he asked Ludovico: “What will the Kings of this world pay me for this invention that would permit them to recall what could have been and was not?”
“Nothing, Maestro Valerio. For the only thing that interests them is what really is, and what will be.”
Valerio Camillo’s eyes glistened as never before, the only light in the suddenly darkened theater: “And it is not important to them, either, to know what never will be?”
“Perhaps, since that is a different manner of knowing what will be.”
“You do not understand me, monsignore. The images of my theater bring together all the possibilities of the past, but they also represent all the opportunities of the future, for knowing what was not, we shall know what demands to be: what has not been, you have seen, is a latent event awaiting its moment to be, its second chance, the opportunity to live another life. History repeats itself only because we are unaware of the alternate possibility for each historic event: what that event could have been but was not. Knowing, we can insure that history does not repeat itself; that the alternate possibility is the one that occurs for the first time. The universe would achieve true equilibrium. This will be the culmination of my investigations: to combine the elements of my theater in such a manner that two different epochs fully coincide; for example, that what happened or did not happen in your Spanish fatherland in 1492, in 1520, or 1598, coincide exactly with what happens there in 1938, or 1975, or 1999. Then, and I am convinced of it, the space of that co-incidence will germinate, will accommodate the unfulfilled past that once lived and died there: this doubled time will demand that precise space in which to complete itself.”
“And then, in accord with your theory, it will be imperfect.”
“Perfection, monsignore, is death.”
“But at least do you know the space where everything that did not happen awaits the co-incidence of two different times to be fulfilled?”
“I have just told you. Look again, monsignore; I shall turn the lights on again, place the figures in movement, combine spaces, that of your land, Spain, and that of an unknown world where Spain will destroy everything that previously existed in order to reproduce itself: a doubly immobile, doubly sterile, gestation, for in addition to what could have been—see those burning temples, see the eagles fall, see how the original inhabitants of the unknown lands are subjugated—your country, Spain, imposes another impossibility: that of itself, see the gates closing, the Jew expelled, the Moor persecuted, see how it hides itself in a mausoleum and from there governs in the name of death: purity of faith, purity of bloodlines, horror of the body, prohibition of thought, extermination of anything that cannot be understood. Look: centuries and centuries of living death, fear, silence, the cult of appearances, vacuity of substances, gestures of imbecilic honor, see them, the miserable realities, see them, hunger, poverty, injustice, ignorance: a naked empire that imagines itself clothed in golden robes. Look: there will never be in history, monsignore, nations more needful of a second opportunity to be what they were not than these that speak and that will speak your tongue, or peoples who for such lengthy periods store the possibilities of what they could have been had they not sacrificed the very reason for their being: impurity, the mixture of all bloods, all beliefs, all the spiritual impulses of a multitude of cultures. Only in Spain did the three peoples of the Book—Christians, Moors, and Jews—meet and flourish. As she mutilates their union, Spain mutilates herself and mutilates all she finds in her path. Will these lands have the second opportunity the first history will deny them?”
Before Ludovico’s eyes, amid the screens and railings and lights and shadows of the gradins of this Theater of Memory of everything that was not but that could sometime have been, passed, in reverse, with the assurance it would be they he watched, animated, incomprehensible images, bearded warriors in iron cuirasses, tattered pennants, autos-da-fé, bewigged lords, dark men with enormous burdens on their backs, he heard speeches, proclamations, grandiloquent orators, and saw places and landscapes never before seen: strange temples devoured by the jungle, convents built like fortresses, rivers broad as seas, deserts poor as an outstretched hand, volcanoes higher than the stars, prairies devoured by the horizon, cities with iron-railed balconies, red-tile roofs, crumbling walls, immense cathedrals, towers of shattered glass, military men, their chests covered with medals and gold galloon, dusty feet pricked by thorns, emaciated children with swollen bellies, abundance by the side of hunger, a golden god seated upon a ragged beggar; mud and silver . . .
Again the lights died down. Ludovico did not dare ask Valerio Camillo how he controlled the illumination of the theater, how he projected or mounted or raised from nowhere these moving images through railings, upon screens, or what was the function of the cords he pulled, the buttons he pressed. He could imagine, yes, that the Dominie was capable of repeating the unspoken words of Medea, Cicero, or Dante through the simple expedient of reading lips: the understandable art of the stutterer.
Valerio Camillo said only: “I shall reveal my secrets to the Prince who will pay the highest price for my invention.”
But again Ludovico doubted that any Prince would want to see face to face what was not, but wished to be. Politics was the art of the possible: neither the statue of Gomorrah nor the flight of Icarus.
Every night the translator returned to his miserable room on the long backbone of La Giudecca, resembling, in truth, the skeleton of a flounder, and there found his children engaged in their personal occupations. One would be wielding a wooden sword against the late-evening shadow projected onto the ancient walls of the Church of Santa Eufemia; another, wood shavings tangled in his golden hair, would be sawing, polishing, and varnishing shelves for the books and papers of Ludovico; the third would be sitting tailor-fashion in the doorway, contemplating the bare paving stones of the Campo Cosmo. Then the four would dine on fried seafood, beans, and mozzarella cheese. One night they were awakened by a desperate pounding. One of the boys opened the door. Gasping, his face caked with ashes, his clothing scorched, Dominie Valerio Camillo fell across the threshold. He stretched out his hands toward Ludovico and grasped his wrist with the fierce last strength of a dying man.
“Someone denounced me as a wizard,” said the Donno without a trace of a stutter. “Someone slipped a letter into the stone mouth. They tried to take me prisoner. I resisted. I feared for my secrets. They set fire to my house. They prodded me with their blades, to subdue me. They wanted to enter the theater. They tried to break the chains. I fled. Monsignore Ludovicus: protect my invention. What a fool I was! I should have told you my true secrets. The theater lights. A deposit of magnetic carbons on the rooftop of the house. They attract and store the energy of lightning and the supercharged skies above the lagoon. I filter this energy through waterproof conductors, copper filaments and bulbs of the finest Venetian crystal. The buttons. They set some black boxes in motion. There are mercury-coated silk ribbons bearing the images of all the ages, miniatures I have painted, that increase in size as they are projected upon the gradins by a light behind the ribbons. A hypothesis, monsignore, only a hypothesis . . . you must prove it . . . save my invention . . . and remember your promise.”
There, upon the brick floor, Donno Valerio died. Ludovico covered the body with a blanket. He asked the boys to hide the body in a boat and bring it the following day to the Dominie’s house. Lodovico went to the Campo Santa Margherita that same afternoon. He found a black shell: the house burned, the documents burned. He made his way inside to the locked door. The mastiffs Biondino, Preziosa, and Pocogarbato were huddled there. He called them by name. They recognized him. He unlocked the chains with the Maestro’s keys. He penetrated
