wished to make love to Isabel again, he wished to love without limits, he wished to possess every living woman, every bleeding female, nothing could satiate him; that very morning in the chapel he saw Isabel spit out a serpent at the moment she received the Host, he saw the eyes of love with which his own son Felipe gazed at Isabel, and being unable to make love to her again, and thus desiring her more ardently than ever, he drank until he was drunk, rode out on his dun-colored steed, lopping off heads of wheat with his whip, he encountered a trapped she-wolf, he dismounted, violated the beast, howled like her and with her, satiated all his dark needs, his frustration, and burning fires: animal with animal, the act did not horrify him; it would have been a sin against nature to make love again with Isabel, but not beast with beast, no, that was natural: this is what he told me as he confessed another night, the night when Isabel and Felipe had just been wed and after the cadavers burned on the pyre in the courtyard had been carried away in carts; this he confessed to me, in addition to all his earlier crimes, sure of my silence, feeling the need to pour out his tormented soul before someone.
“Have I impregnated a she-wolf?” he asked me through the grating of the confessional, hoping to find solace for his monstrous imaginings.
“Be calm, Señor, please be calm; such a thing is impossible . . .”
“Accursed breed,” he murmured, “madness, incest, crime, the only thing lacking was to make love as beast to beast; what do I bequeath my son? Each generation adds scars to the generation that follows; the scars accumulate until they lead to sterility and extinction; degenerate seeks out degenerate; an imperious force impels them to find one another and unite . . .
“The seed, Señor, exhausts itself from growing upon the same soil.”
“What would be born of my coupling with a beast? Did some dark necessity impel me to renovate the blood with a living but nonhuman thing?”
“In spite of classic wisdom, Señor, nature at times makes strange leaps,” I said ingenuously, thinking thus to absolve myself of any knowledge concerning the paternity of Isabel’s child, and also to promote the current belief about his origin. “For instance, consider a child,” I added, “that is not the son of man and she-wolf but the child of jester and scrubbing maid; he bears monstrous signs of degeneration . . .”
“What signs?” cried El Señor, who had never seen the child.
“A cross upon his back, six toes on each foot . . .”
Now El Señor called the Fair howled, he howled, and his animal cry resounded through the domed ceiling of the church; he left, shouting: “Do you not know the prophecy of Tiberius Caesar?, is this the sign of the usurpers, rebellious slaves, have I engendered slaves and rebels who will usurp my kingdom?, parricidal sons?, a throne raised upon the blood of their father?”
I knew he ordered the child killed, but he disappeared, as also disappeared that same night, to his great sadness, Felipe’s companions, Ludovico and Celestina; I knew that El Señor ordered that every Saturday be dedicated to hunting wolves until every wolf was exterminated. Only I understood the reason for these orders. I gave thanks when El Señor died, after playing very strenuously at ball; Prince Felipe occupied his place, and my Señora Isabel ascended to the throne reserved for her.
Isabel displayed great austerity and discretion as the wife of the new Señor, Don Felipe, and I never imagined that the maidenhead restored by the magpie of the alleyways of Valladolid remained intact. My respectful friendship with La Señora was constant. I attempted to entertain her, as I always had, with my enamels and miniatures, and by lending her to read the volumes of courtly love of the De arte honeste amandi of Andreas Capellanus, for beneath her dignity I noted an increasing melancholy, as if something were lacking; at times she sighed for her dolls and her peach stones, and I told myself that my Señora’s transition from young foreigner to solitary Queen and secret mother of a vanished child had been too swift. The people murmured: When will the foreigner give us a Spanish heir? False pregnancies were announced, followed always by unfortunate miscarriages.
Nothing was more disastrous, however, than the accident that then befell my mistress, her husband being in Flanders at war against the Adamite heretics and the dukes that protected them. The humiliation of the thirty-three and one half days she spent lying upon the paving stones of the castle courtyard transformed my Señora’s will; it unleashed forces, passions, hatreds, desires, memories, dreams that doubtless had throbbed for a long time in her soul and had awaited only an astonishing event, both terrible and absurd, like this one, to fully manifest themselves. A mouse, then, and not the virile member of our Señor, gnawed away the restored virginity of my Señora. She called me to her chamber, when finally she returned to it: she asked me to complete the work begun by the Mus; I possessed her, finally breaking the network of fine threads the go-between of Valladolid had woven there. I left her in the spell of a delirious dream, cursing myself for having broken my vow of chastity: a renewable vow, yes, but also less sacred than my resolution to pour all my bodily juices into my art. To perfect that art, I have dedicated myself all these years.
I often went out into the countryside searching for faces, landscapes, buildings, and perspectives that I sketched in charcoal and guarded jealously, later incorporating these details of everyday reality into the figures and spaces of the great painting I was secretly creating in a deep dungeon of the new palace El Señor was constructing to commemorate his victory over the dukes and heretics of the vicious province of Flanders. Thus one morning, as I was wandering through the fields of Montiel, I happened to meet a cart being driven by a blond youth by whose side was seated a green-eyed, sun-burned blind man playing a flute. I asked permission of the blind man to sketch his features. He acceded with an ironic smile. The youth was grateful for the rest; he went to a nearby well, drew a bucket of water, disrobed, and bathed himself. I turned from my preoccupation with the blind man, who could not see me, and gazed at the splendid beauty of the youth, so like the perfect figures rendered by Phidias and Praxiteles. Then, with amazement bordering on horror, I noticed the sign upon his back: a blood-red cross between the shoulder blades; and as I looked at his naked feet, I knew I would count six toes upon each foot.
I controlled my trembling hand. I bit my tongue not to tell the blind man what I knew: the youth was the son of my Señora, the brother of our present Señor, the bastard disappeared on the night when wedding and crime were allied; I told him, rather, that I was a friar and painter of the court, in the service of the most exalted Prince Don Felipe, and then it was he who became perturbed, his expression alternately revealing the desire to flee and the need to know. I asked him what he was hauling in his cart beneath the heavy canvas. He reached out a hand, as if to protect his cargo, and said: “Touch nothing, Friar, or the youth will break your bones on the spot.”
“Have no fear. Where are you going?”
“To the coast.”
“The coast is long, and touches many seas.”
“You are good at prying, Friar. Does your master pay you well to go as talebearer throughout his kingdom?”
“I take advantage of his protection and attend secretly to my vocation, which is not that of informer, but artist.”
“And what kind of art would yours be?”
I deliberated for a moment. I wished to gain the confidence of the blind man who was accompanying the lost son of my Señora. I did not, however, tell him what I knew. I tried to tie up loose ends: in some manner this man was involved with the child’s disappearance; perhaps he had received him from other hands, but perhaps he himself had stolen him that night from the bloody castle; and who had disappeared at the same time as the child? Felipe’s companions: Celestina and Ludovico. I knew the rebellious student; I could not recognize him in the blind man. I took the risk, not knowing whether I would
