The Last Temptation of Christ (12 page)

“Don’t worry about it,” said the old man. “Well, let’s not stand here. Come on, keep me company—I’m in a hurry. My sons are away. One went to Nazareth to see the crucifixion, or so he said, and it seems the other has gone to the desert to become a saint. So here I am all alone with my fishing boats! Come on, help me pull in the nets; they’re probably loaded with fish by now. I’ll give you a skilletful.”

They set out. The old man was in a merry mood. “Good Lord, just think what poor old God must go through also,” he said with a laugh. “He certainly got himself in hot water when he created the world. The fish screams, Don’t blind me, Lord; don’t let me enter the nets! The fisherman screams, Blind the fish, Lord; make him enter the nets! Which one is God supposed to listen to? Sometimes he listens to the fish, sometimes to the fisherman—and that’s the way the world goes round!”

The son of Mary, meanwhile, had gone along the steep goat’s path in order to avoid Magdala. He did not want to be soiled by this charming, openhearted, but wicked hamlet which lay amid date palms at the rich crossroads where caravans passed day and night, some from the Euphrates or the Arabian desert, headed for the Great Sea, others from Damascus or Phoenicia, headed for the tender green bed of the Nile. At the village’s entrance was a well of cool water, and on its brim sat a painted woman with naked breasts, smiling at the merchants. Oh, to flee, to change route, to cut straight for the lake and reach the desert! There, in a dried-up well, God was sitting, expecting him.

His heart swelled as he recalled God, and he quickened his pace. The sun finally took pity on the girls who were reaping: it began to set. The air grew cool. The mowers stretched out on their backs on the hay ricks in order to catch their breath and tell an off-color joke or two to relieve their minds. They had caught fire, working and sweating as they had all day long in the sun with exposed bosoms, next to the men who were sweating too. They had caught fire, and now, by means of jokes and laughter, they were cooling off.

The son of Mary overheard their laughter and teasing. He blushed. Impatient for the time when he would no longer hear human beings, he forced his thoughts elsewhere and began to turn over in his mind the words of Philip, the loud-mouthed shepherd.

“No one realizes how much I suffer,” he murmured with a sigh; “no one understands why I make crosses or with whom I am wrestling.”

In front of a cottage, two farmers were shaking the fine layer of chaff from their beards and hair, and washing themselves. They must have been brothers. Their old mother was laying out their poor-man’s dinner on the stone shelf beside the oven. Corn was roasting on the hot coals. The aroma filled the air.

The two farmers saw the son of Mary. He was exhausted and covered with dust, and they felt sorry for him.

“Hey you, where are you running to?” they shouted. “It looks like you’ve come quite a way, but you have no sack. Stop awhile and join us for a mouthful of bread.”

“And eat some corn too,” said the mother.

“And drink a bit of wine to put the color back in your cheeks.”

“I’m not hungry. I don’t want anything, thank you,” the son of Mary answered, continuing past them. Once they find out who I am, he was thinking, they’ll feel ashamed that they touched me and spoke to me.

“Three cheers for your pigheadedness,” one of the brothers called to him. “We aren’t good enough for you, eh?”

I’m the cross-maker, Jesus was about to reply, but he turned coward, bowed his head, and went on his way.

The evening descended like a sword. Before the hills had time to glow rosy red the soil turned purple and then straightway black, and the light, which had climbed to the tops of the trees, jumped into the sky and was lost. The darkness found the son of Mary at the summit of a hill. An aged cedar had taken root there. Though lashed by the winds and continually tormented, it held on strongly: its roots had eaten into the rock. The aroma of wheat and burned wood ascended from the plain, and from the scattered cottages rose the smoke of the evening meal.

The son of Mary was hungry and thirsty. For a split second he envied those laborers who finished their day’s work, returned dead tired and famished to their hovels, and saw from afar the lighted fire, the smoke rising and their wives preparing the dinner.

He suddenly felt more completely alone than even the foxes and owls, for they at least had a nest or lair and warm, beloved creatures awaiting them. He had no one, not even his mother. He squatted at the foot of the cedar and huddled up into a ball. He was shivering.

“Lord,” he murmured, “I thank you for everything; for the loneliness, the hunger, the cold. I lack nothing.”

As he said this, however, he seemed to sense the injustice which was being done him. He swept his eyes around him like a trapped beast, and his temples drummed with anger and fear. Getting up onto his knees, he riveted his eyes upon the dark path. The naked feet could still be heard. They were dislodging the stones and mounting. They reached the summit finally and then, involuntarily—he himself was startled to hear his own voice—the son of Mary cried out: “Come closer, my lady. Do not hide. It’s night now; no one sees you. Reveal yourself!”

He held his breath and waited.

Not a soul replied. Nothing but the eternal sounds of the night rising sweetly, peacefully, into the air: crickets and grasshoppers, goatsuckers sighing; and far in the distance, dogs that discovered in the darkness things invisible to men, and barked. ... He stretched his head forward. He was positive that someone stood under the cedar, directly before him.

“My lady ... my lady,” he whispered now in a hushed, beseeching tone, trying to entice the invisible. He waited. He had stopped shivering. Sweat poured from his armpits and brow.

He stared, listening intently. At one moment he imagined he heard the laugh again, coming softly out of the darkness, at another that he saw the air whirl, congeal and become a body which was no sooner formed than unformed and lost.

Melting away with the effort, the son of Mary fought to tether the dark air. He did not cry out now, did not beseech; he simply knelt with outstretched head under the cedar and waited, melting away. ...

The rocks bruised his knees. He changed his position, leaning against the trunk of the cedar and closing his eyes. And then, without losing his tranquility or uttering a cry, he saw her—inside his eyes. But she had not come in the way he expected. He expected to see his bereaved mother with both her hands on his head, calling down her curse upon him. But now what was this! Trembling, he gradually opened his eyes. Flashing before him was the savage body of a woman covered head to foot with interlocking scales of thick bronze armor. But the head was not a human head; it was an eagle’s, with yellow eyes and a crooked beak which grasped a mouthful of flesh. She looked tranquilly, mercilessly, at the son of Mary.

“You did not come as I expected you,” he murmured. “You are not the Mother. ... Have pity and speak to me. Who are you?” He asked, waited, asked again. Nothing. Nothing but the yellow glitter of the round eyes in the darkness.

But suddenly the son of Mary understood.

“The Curse!” he cried, and he fell face downward onto the ground.

THE HEAVENS SPARKLED above him, while below, the earth wounded him with its stones and thorns. He had stretched out his arms; he struggled convulsively and moaned as though the whole earth was a cross on which he was being crucified.

The darkness passed over him with its large and small attendants—the stars and the birds of the night. On every side the dogs, submissive to man, barked on the thrashing floors and guarded the wealth of their masters. It was cold; Jesus shivered. Sleep overcame him for a moment and led him on an airy promenade to warm, faraway lands but straightway threw him back down again to earth, onto the stones.

Toward midnight he heard merry hells passing at the foot of the hill and, behind the bells, the melancholy song of a camel driver. There was the sound of conversation, someone sighed, the clear fresh voice of a woman spouted nut of the night, but the road quickly grew silent once more. ... Mounted on a golden-saddled camel, her face grooved from weeping, the make-up on her cheeks turned to mud, Magdalene was passing by—in the middle of the night. Wealthy merchants from the four corners of the earth had arrived. Finding her neither at the well nor in her house, they chose the camel with the richest, the most golden harness, and sent their driver to bring her to them posthaste. Their route had been extremely long and dangerous, but they kept constantly in mind a body they would find at Magdala, and this gave them strength. They had not found it, however, so they dispatched the driver and lined up in Magdalene’s yard, where they now sat with closed eyes, waiting.

Little by little the bells in the night grew dimmer, sweeter. They now seemed to the son of Mary like tender laughter, like purring jets of water which gushed into a deep orchard and called him caressingly by name; and in this way, gently, following the seductive ring of the camel’s bells, he slid back again into sleep.

He had a dream. The world seemed to be a green meadow, all in bloom, and God an olive-skinned shepherd boy with two twisted horns, newly grown and still tender, who sat next to a cistern of water and played his pipe. Never in his life had the son of Mary heard such a sweet, bewitching sound. While God the shepherd boy played on, the soil, fistful by fistful, quivered and stirred, grew spherical, came to life, and graceful deer with wreathlike antlers suddenly filled the meadow. God leaned over and looked at the water: the cistern filled with fish; he lifted his eyes to the trees: their leaves changed color, became twittering birds. He had gathered momentum; the piper’s music grew furious, and two insects as large as men emerged from the ground and at once began to embrace on the springtime grass. They rolled from one end of the meadow to the other, coupled, separated, coupled again, laughed indecently, scoffed at the shepherd boy, and hissed. The boy lowered his pipe and regarded the audacious and obscene pair. Suddenly his patience gave out. With one blow he crushed his pipe under his heel, and all at once deer, birds, trees, water and the glued man-woman vanished.

The son of Mary uttered a cry and awoke, but not before his eye was caught, just at the moment of awakening, by the pasted bodies of a man and a woman hurling down into the dark trapdoor of his bowels. Terrified, he jumped to his feet.

“So, such is the mud within me, such the filth!”

He unbelted the nail-studded leather strap, trampled the clothes he was wearing underfoot and, without speaking, began pitilessly to scourge his thighs, back and face. The blood spurted out and splashed him. He felt it and was relieved.

Dawn ... The stars grew dim; the frosty wind pricked his bones. The cedar above him filled with wings and song. He turned around. The air was empty; in the light of the day the bronze eagle-headed Curse had become invisible again.

I must go away, must escape, he thought, must not set foot in Magdala—curse the place! I won’t stop till I reach the desert and bury myself in the monastery. There I shall kill the flesh and turn it into spirit.

He placed his palm on the ancient trunk of the cypress and stroked it. He felt the tree’s soul rise from the roots and branch out to the highest, tenderest twig.

“Farewell, my sister,” he murmured. “Last night under your shelter I brought shame upon myself. Forgive me.

He spoke and then, exhausted and with dismal forebodings, started down the hill.

He reached the main road. The plain was awakening; the first rays of the sun fell and filled the loaded threshing floors. with gold. “I must not go through Magdala,” he murmured again. “I’m afraid.” He stopped to decide which way to turn in order to reach the lake. He took the first narrow road he found on his right. He knew that Magdala sat to the left, the lake to the right, and he proceeded with confidence.

He marched and marched, and his mind wandered. He was running from Magdalene, the whore, to God; from the cross to Paradise, from his mother and father to distant lands and seas, to myriad-faced men, white, yellow and black. Although he had never crossed the boundaries of Israel, ever since his early childhood he had shut his eyes within his father’s humble cottage and his mind, like a trained hawk with golden hawk bells, had darted from land to land, ocean to ocean, screeching with joy. It was not hunting anything, this hawk-mind of his; he had become oblivious of the body, he was escaping the flesh, ascending to heaven—and this was all he could possibly desire.

He marched and marched. The twisting path wound in and out through the vineyards, rose once more, reached the olive groves. The son of Mary followed it as one follows running water or the sad, monotonous chant of a camel driver. This whole journey seemed a dream to him. He scarcely touched the earth; his feet trod his human seal, the heel and five toes, lightly into the soil. The olive trees waved their laden branches and welcomed him. The grapes had begun to shine; the heavy clusters hung down until they reached the ground. The girls who went by with their white kerchiefs and firm, sunburned calves greeted him sweetly: Shalom! Peace!

Sometimes, when not a soul was visible on the path, he heard the heavy footsteps behind him again; a bronze splendor flared up in the air and was then snuffed out, and the evil laughter exploded once more over his head. But the son of Mary forced himself to be patient. He was approaching deliverance; soon he would see the lake opposite him, and behind the blue waters, hanging like a falcon’s nest between the red rocks, the monastery.

He followed the path, and his mind ran on, but suddenly he stopped, startled. There before him in a sheltered hollow, spread out beneath the date palms, was Magdala. His mind turned back, turned back, but his feet, against his will, began to lead him with sure steps to the perfumed hermitage of his cousin Magdalene, to the house which was condemned to the fires of hell.

“No, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go!” he murmured in terror. He tried to reverse his course, but his body refused. It stood its ground like a greyhound and smelled the air.