Report to Grego (74 page)

“Welcome,” I said. “I've been expecting you.”

Bending over, he picked up some seaweed the surf had thrown up, and placed it between his lips.

“Here I am,” he said. “I'm glad to see you.”

The blue, fluffy night Was descending from the sky, ascending from the sea. Behind us, on land, the night birds took wing amidst the olive trees; the two great, deathless cries of love and hunger sounded in the black silence. The tiny beasties hiding deep in the squat bushes were hungry too, they too wanted love, and a great dirge rose from the ground.

We remained silent; each could hear his heart beating reposefully. It seemed that all those hidden nocturnal yearnings, all those clashing voices were being harmonized in passing through our vitals.

The joy and sweetness were so great that tears suddenly began to flow from my eyes; ancient, mystical words rose from my vitals and toddled over my lips:

Death and birth are one, my lads,

One the heartache and joy.

One to land and sail away,

One the hello and goodbye!

I turned to the silent companion on my right.

“Are we moving, Captain Odysseus?” I asked. “Have we arrived? Time, as though changed into eternity, seems to have stopped; space is rolled up in my palm like an ancient parchment charted with lands and seas. Deliverance—what we call deliverance and desperately extend our arms toward heaven to reach—has become a sprig of basil behind my ear. Don't you smell its scent in the air?”

My companion inhaled deeply and smiled.

“You have been delivered from deliverance,” he said. His voice was crusty, hoarsened by the sea wind. “You have been delivered from deliverance—and that is man's supreme feat. Your term in the service of hope and fear is over; you have leaned over the abyss, have seen the world's apparition turned upside down, and have not been frightened. We have leaned together over the abyss, precious companion, and have not been frightened. Do you remember?”

The terrible journey sprang into my mind, the sea thundered from one temple to the other; my memory swelled and I viewed, re-viewed, re-enjoyed how we wrenched ourselves away from son, wife, fatherland, the comfortable life, how we left virtue and truth behind us, how we passed between the Scylla and Charybdis of God without losing our ship, how we made for the open sea with bellying sails and valiantly shaped our course for the abyss.

“It was a fine trip,” I said, heartfeltly touching my companion's knee. “Now we have arrived.”

“Arrived?” he asked in surprise. “What does that mean?”

“I know. It means: now we are leaving.”

“Yes, now we are leaving. Without a boat, without the sea, without a body.”

“Free.”

“No, freed from freedom. Beyond.”

“Beyond? Where? My mind is incapable of containing that.”

“Beyond freedom, my companion. Have courage!”

“I am afraid to follow you. My strength reaches just so far; farther I cannot go.”

“No matter, Father. You did your duty: you begot a son higher than you. You stay here as a buoy; I shall go farther.”

Rising, he tightened his belt and glanced out beyond him into the darkness. A star spilled forth and rolled tearlike down night's cheeks. A wind rose from the earth; the waves neighed in the silence like awakening horses. He offered me his hand.

“Are you leaving?” I cried, as though my own soul were leaving.

Bending over, he kissed my right shoulder, my left shoulder, then both my eyes. His lips covered me with brine. He smiled, and his voice issued with tenderness, playfully.

“Who was the ascetic who sought God for forty years and could not find him? Some dark object loomed in the middle, hindering him. But one morning he saw: it was an old fur which he loved dearly and did not have the heart to discard. He threw it away, and all at once he saw God in front of him. . . . You, dear companion, are my old fur. Farewell!”

I was terrified. His final words seemed to come from far, far away, from the other bank. I jumped to my feet and searched in the darkness. No one.

I
KISS
your hand, beloved grandfather. I kiss your right shoulder, I kiss your left shoulder. My confession is over; now you must judge. I did not recount the details of daily life. Rinds they were. You tossed them into the garbage of the abyss and I did the same. With its large and small sorrows, large and small joys, life sometimes wounded me, sometimes caressed me. These habitual everyday affairs left us, and we left them. It was not worth the trouble to turn back and haul them out of the abyss. The world will lose nothing if the people I knew remain in oblivion. Contact with my contemporaries had very little influence on my life. I did not love many men, either because I failed to understand them or because I looked upon them with contempt; perhaps, also, because I did not chance to meet many who deserved being loved. I did not hate anyone, however, even though I harmed several people without desiring to. They were sparrows and I wished to turn them into eagles. I set about to deliver them from mediocrity and routine, pushed them without taking their endurance into account, and they crashed to the ground. Only the immortal dead enticed me, the great Sirens Christ, Buddha, and Lenin. From my early years I sat at their feet and listened intently to their seductive love-filled song. I struggled all my life to save myself from each of these Sirens without denying any one of them, struggled to unite these three clashing voices and transform them into harmony.

Women I loved. I was fortunate in chancing to meet extraordinary women along my route. No man ever did me so much good or aided my struggle so greatly as these women—and one above all, the last. But over this love-smitten body I throw the veil which the sons of Noah threw over their drunken father. I like our ancestors' myth about Eros and Psyche; surely you liked it too, grandfather. It is both shameful and dangerous to light a lamp, dispel the darkness, and see two bodies locked in an embrace. You knew this, you who hid your beloved helpmate Jeronima de las Cuevas in
love's divine obscurity. I do the same with my Jeronima. Intrepid fellow athlete, cool fountain in our inhuman solitude, great comfort! Poverty and nakedness—yes, the Cretans are right in saying that poverty and nakedness are nothing, provided you have a good wife. We had good wives; yours was named Jeronima, mine Helen. What good fortune this was, grandfather! How many times did we not say to ourselves as we looked at them, Blessed the day we were born!

But we did not allow women, even the dearest, to lead us astray. We did not follow their flower-strewn road, we took them with us. No, we did not take them, these dauntless companions followed our ascents of their own free will.

One thing only we pursued all our lives: a harsh, carnivorous, indestructible vision—the essence. For its sake what venom we were given to drink by both gods and men, what tears we shed, what blood, how much sweat! Our whole lives, a devil (devil? or angel?) refused to leave us in peace. He leaned over, glued himself to us and hissed in our ears, “In vain! In vain! In vain!” He thought he would make us freeze in our tracks, but we repulsed him with a toss of our heads, clenched our teeth, and answered, “Just what we want! We're not working for pay, we have no desire for a daily wage. We are warring in the empty air, beyond hope, beyond paradise!”

This essence went by many names; it kept changing masks all the while we pursued it. Sometimes we called it supreme hope, sometimes supreme despair, sometimes summit of man's soul, sometimes desert mirage, and sometimes blue bird and freedom. And sometimes, finally, it seemed to us like an integral circle with the human heart as center and immortality as circumference, a circle which we arbitrarily assigned a heavy name loaded with all the hopes and tears of the world: “God.”

Every integral man has inside him, in his heart of hearts, a mystic center around which all else revolves. This mystic whirling lends unity to his thoughts and actions; it helps him find or invent the cosmic harmony. For some this center is love, for others kindness or beauty, others the thirst for knowledge or the longing for gold and power. They examine the relative value of all else and subordinate it to this central passion. Alas for the man who does
not feel himself governed inside by
an
absolute monarch. His ungoverned, incoherent life is scattered to the four winds.

Our center, grandfather, the center which swept the visible world into its whirl and fought to elevate it to the upper level of valor and responsibility, was the battle with God. Which God? The fierce summit of man's soul, the summit which we are ceaselessly about to attain and which ceaselessly jumps to its feet and climbs still higher. “Does man battle with God?” some acquaintances asked me sarcastically one day. I answered them, “With whom else do you expect him to battle?” Truly, with whom else?

That was why the whole of our lives was an ascent, grandfather—ascent, precipice, solitude. We set out with many fellow struggles, many ideas, a great escort. But as we ascended and as the summit shifted and became more remote, fellow strugglers, ideas, and hopes kept bidding us farewell; out of breath, they were neither willing nor able to mount higher. We remained alone, our eyes riveted upon the Moving Monad, the shifting summit. We were swayed neither by arrogance nor by the naïve certainty that one day the summit would stand still and we would reach it; nor yet, even if we should reach it, by the belief that there on high we would find happiness, salvation, and paradise. We ascended because the very act of ascending, for us, was happiness, salvation, and paradise.

I marvel at the human soul; no power in heaven and earth is so great. Without being aware of it, we carry omnipotence within us. But we crush our souls beneath a weight of flesh and lard, and die without having learned what we are and what we can accomplish. What other power on earth is able to look the world's beginning and end straight in the eye without being blinded? In the beginning was not the Word (as is preached by the souls crushed beneath lard and flesh) nor the Act, nor the Creator's hand filled with life-receiving clay. In the beginning was Fire. And in the end is neither immortality nor recompense, paradise nor the inferno. In the end is Fire. Between these two fires, dear grandfather, we traveled; and we fought, by following Fire's commandment and working with it, to turn flesh into flame, thought into flame—hope, despair, honor, dishonor, glory, into flame. You went in the lead and I followed. You taught me that our inner flame, contrary to the nature of the flesh, is able to flare up with ever-increasing
intensity over the years. That was why (I saw this in you and admired you for it) you became continually fiercer as you aged, continually braver as you arrived ever closer to the abyss. Tossing the bodies of saints, rulers, and monks into the crucible of your glance, you melted them down like metals, purged away their rust, and refined out the pure gold: their soul. What soul? The flame. This you united with the conflagration that engendered us and the conflagration which shall devour us.

The prudent accused us of making the angelic wings excessively large, and of having the audacity to wish to shoot the arrow beyond human frontiers. But we were not the ones who wished to shoot the arrow beyond human frontiers; a devil inside us—let us call him Lucifer, for he brings light—kept urging us on. He it was who wished to overstep the limits in order to go we knew not where. All we knew was: higher. Like Saint George, who carried on his horse's rump the young princess whom the dragon wished to devour, this devil carried life, the life which was stifled and endangered inside every living thing, and which desired to escape in order to save itself. Monkeys must have felt the momentum of the universe inside them in this same way, urging them to stand on their hind legs, even though the pain made them howl, and to rub a pair of sticks together to produce a spark, even though the other monkeys derided them. This is how ape man was born, how man was born; this, grandfather, is how the indestructible, merciless force kicked against our breasts as well: in order to save itself from man, and continue beyond. Why do you think we writhed and suffered so much among men? “We refuse to go further,” they cried. “Clip your wings, do not shoot the arrow so high. You don't fear God, don't listen to reason. Sit down!” But we did not talk, we worked. We worked on our wings, stretched our bow. We ripped open our vitals to let the devil pass.

“I like neither the angels you paint nor the saints,” the Grand Inquisitor of Toledo scolded you one day. “Instead of making people pray, they make them admire. Beauty inserts itself as an obstacle between our souls and God.”

You laughed, thinking tacitly, But I do not want to make people pray. Who told you I wanted to make people pray? . . . You did not speak, however.

And someone else, this time a painter and personal friend,
shook his head when he saw “Toledo in the Storm.” “You trample the rules,” he declared. “This is not art. You have overstepped the boundaries of reason and entered the realm of madness.”

You smiled (how was it you did not explode with anger?) and answered him: “Who told you I produce art? I do not produce art, I do not care about beauty. Reason is too constricting for me, and so are the rules. Like the flying fish, I leap out of safe, secure waters and enter a more ethereal atmosphere that is filled with madness.”

You fell silent for a moment and glanced at the Toledo you had painted: wrapped in black clouds, cleft by thunderbolts, with its towers, churches, and palaces which had been delivered from their bodies of stone to emerge from the blackness as phantoms dressed in disquieting splendor. You looked at them and your nostrils began to quiver, inhaling brimstone. After reflecting in silence for a moment, you cried out in pain, digging your ten nails into your breast, “What devil is in me? Who set fire to Toledo? I really do inhale a wind filled with madness and death, I mean filled with freedom.”