The White Dominican (17 page)

There was a series of strange happenings, which gave the rumours some semblance of truth.

Once, late in the evening, a large shaggy dog with the look of a beast of prey and which no one had ever seen before ran out of the house of the hunchbacked seamstress and the children in the street cried out, “The werewolf! The werewolf!” A man hit it on the head with an axe and killed it.

At about the same time a tile fell off the roof, wounding me in the head; when I appeared the next day with a bandage round my head, people said I had been the nightmare beast and that the werewolf’s wound had transferred itself to me.

Another time, in the middle of the day in the market square, it happened that a man from outside the town, a tramp who was generally considered to be weak in the head, threw up his arms in apparent horror as I came round the corner, and fell to the ground, dead, his features contorted as if he had seen the Devil.

Then again the police were dragging a man through the streets who was resisting with all his might, moaning all the time, “How can I have murdered someone, I’ve spent the whole day asleep in the barn?” I happened to come along, and when the man caught sight of me, he threw himself to the ground and pointed at me, crying, “That’s him! Let me go, he’s come back to life!”

Each time this kind of thing happened a thought appeared in my mind, saying, ‘They have all seen the head of the Medusa in you. It lives inside you, and those that see it all die, while those who just sense it are filled with horror. That night you saw mortality in the pupils of the spectre, the seed of death that resides in you, as it does in all men. Death resides in men, that is why they do not see it; they do not carry ‘Christ’, they carry death within them, it consumes them from inside like a worm. Only someone who has disturbed it, as you have, can see it face to face; such people it will ‘face up to’.’

And truly, at that time the earth became, from year to year, an ever darker valley of death for me. Everywhere I looked, in every shape and word and sound and gesture, I was surrounded by the constantly shifting influence of the terrible lady that rules in the world, the Medusa with the beautiful, and yet so gruesome face.

‘Earthly life is the continuing torture of giving birth to death, to a death that is renewed every second’, that was the insight that stayed with me night and day. ‘The only purpose of life is the revelation of death.’ Thus all thoughts within me had been transposed into the opposite of normal human feeling. ‘The desire to live’ seemed like theft from the being that shared my earthly form, and the ‘inability to die’ like the hypnotic command of the Medusa, “I want you to remain a thief, a robber and a murderer, and to walk the earth as such.”

The verse from the Gospel, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal”, began to rise from the darkness for me, shining brightly. I understood its meaning: the one that must increase is our Founding Father, but I must decrease!

When the tramp fell down dead in the market-place and his features began to go rigid, I was standing among the people crowding round him and I had the uncanny feeling that his life-force was seeping into me, like refreshing air after a shower of rain. I slunk away, laden with a sense of guilt, as if I really were a bloodsucking vampire, aware of the ugly fact that my body only survived by stealing life from others; it was a walking corpse that was cheating the grave of its due. It was only the strange coldness of my heart and my senses that stopped me from rotting alive like Lazarus.

The years passed. I can almost say that the only thing by which I noticed their passing was the way my father’s hair became whiter and whiter and his figure more bent and aged.

So as not to encourage the townsfolk in their superstition, I went out less and less until finally I stayed at home for years and did not even go down to the garden seat. In my mind, I had carried it up to my room and sat on it for hours, letting Ophelia’s presence flow through me. Those were the only hours when the kingdom of death had no power over me.

My father had fallen into a strange silence; often weeks would pass without us exchanging a word apart from a ‘Good morning’ and a ‘Good night’. We had almost abandoned speech but, as if thought had carved out new channels of communication, each of us could always tell when the other wanted something. Now I would hand him some object, now he would take down a book, leaf through it and give it to me; almost every time I found it opened at the place that had been going through my mind.

I could tell by the way he looked that he was perfectly happy. Sometimes his eye would rest on me for a long time with an expression of absolute content.

Sometimes we were both aware that for a whole hour we had followed the precisely same train of thought; we were, so to speak, marching intellectually side by side, keeping step with each other, so that eventually the silent thoughts did turn into words. But it was not like in the past, when the words came too soon or too late, but never at the right time. Rather, we were continuing a thought process, not feeling our way or looking for an opening.

Such moments are so vivid in my memory that the whole surroundings come alive in the smallest detail whenever I think back to them. I can hear my father’s voice again in every word, in every note, as I write down what he said one day when I had been reflecting on what the purpose of my strange deadness might be.

“We all have to turn cold, my son, but with most people life is not capable of bringing it about and death has to do it. Dying does not mean the same for everyone. With some, so much dies at the hour of death that one can almost say that there is nothing left. All that remains of some people is their works here on earth; their fame and their services live on for a while and, strangely enough, in a certain sense their bodies live on, for they have statues built in their honour. How little good and evil are involved can be seen by the fact that even the great destroyers such as Nero or Napoleon have their monuments. It is all a matter of how outstanding their deeds were.

The spiritualists maintain that suicides, or people who have come to some grisly end, are bound to the earth for a certain period. I rather tend to the opinion that it is not their spectres that manifest themselves at séances or in haunted houses, but their images together with certain factors connected with their deaths. It is as if the magnetic atmosphere of the place preserves the event and releases it from time to time. Many features of the conjuration of the spirits of the departed in Ancient Greece – that performed by Tiresias, for example – suggest that this is the case.

The hour of death is merely that point in a catastrophe at which everything in a person that could not be worn down during life is blown away, as if in a storm. You could also put it this way: first of all the worm of destruction eats away the less important organs – that is what we call growing old – but once it reaches the pillar of life, then the whole building collapses. That is the normal course of things.

Such will be my end, for my body contains too many elements which it is beyond my power to transmute by alchemy. If you were not here, my son, then I would have to return to continue the interrupted work in a new incarnation. It says in the books of wisdom of the East, “Have you fathered a son, planted a tree and written a book? Only then can you begin the great task.”

In order to avoid having to return, the priests and kings in ancient Egypt had their corpses embalmed. They wanted to avoid the legacy of their cells being passed back to them and forcing them to return to new work on earth.

Earthly talents, weaknesses and defects, knowledge and intellectual gifts belong to the bodily form and not to the soul. I for my part, as the last branch on the family tree, have inherited the body cells of my ancestors; they went from one generation to the next, and finally to me. I can sense you wondering, ‘How can that be? How can the body cells of my grandfather be passed on to my father if he did not die before the birth of his off-spring?’

The cells are passed on in a different way. It does not take place at conception or birth, nor in a crude, physical manner, as if you were pouring water from one vessel into another. It is the particular fashion in which the cells crystallise around a central point that is inherited, and even this does not happen all at once, but gradually. Have you never noticed – it is a comical fact that gives rise to much amusement – how old bachelors who have a pet dog transmit their likeness to the animal over the years? What happens there is an astral transfer of ‘cells’ from one body to another; you impress the stamp of your own being on anything you love. The reason why pets have such social awareness is simply because human cells have been transferred to them. The more deeply human beings love each other, the more ‘cells’ they exchange, the more they fuse with one another, until one day, after billions of years the ideal state will have been reached in which humanity consists of one single being made up of countless individuals. On the day your grandfather died I, as his only son, came into the last inheritance of our line.

I found it impossible to mourn for him, even for an hour, so quickly did his whole being enter me. The layman may find it a gruesome thought, but I could literally feel his body decomposing day by day in the grave, without finding it horrible or disgusting. For me, his decomposition released forces that until then were bound, and that entered my bloodstream like waves of ether.

If you were not here, Christopher, I would have to keep on returning until ‘Providence’ should arrange – if that is the word – that I myself had the same aptitude as you: to be the crown of the tree instead of a branch.

In the hour of my death you, my son, will inherit the last cells of my physical form, the ones I have not been able to perfect, and it will be up to you to transmute them, to spiritualise them, and with them our whole line.

It could not happen to myself and our forefathers that we ‘dissolved ourselves with the corpse’, for the lady that rules in the realm of decay did not hate us as much as she hates you. Only those whom the Medusa hates and fears at the same time, as she hates and fears you, can succeed; she herself it is who brings about what she would prevent. When the hour is come, she will fall upon you with such boundless fury, in order to burn up every atom in you, that she will destroy her own image inside you at the same time and will thus bring about that which man can never do of his own accord: she will kill a part of herself and bring you your eternal life. She will become the scorpion that stings itself. That will be the great reversal: no longer will life give birth to death, death will beget life!

I rejoice, my son, that you are called to be the crown of our family tree. You have turned cold in your young years, we all remained warm, in spite of age and decay. The sexual urge – whether it reveals itself, as in young people, or whether it is concealed, as in the old – is the root of death; to eradicate it is the vain striving of all ascetics. They are like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up the hill, to watch in despair as it rolls back down to the bottom. They want to achieve the magic state of coldness, without which it is impossible to go beyond the human condition, and so they avoid women. And yet it is woman alone that can bring them help. The female principle, that is separate from man here on earth, must enter them, must fuse with them, only then will fleshly longing be stilled. Only when the two poles coincide is the marriage complete, the ring closed, then the coldness is there, the coldness which is self-sufficient, the magic coldness which shatters the laws of the earth, which is no longer the opposite of warmth, which is beyond frost and heat, and from which pours forth everything that the power of the spirit can create, as if from nothing.

The sexual urge is the yoke on the triumphal carriage of the Medusa to which we are harnessed.

We of the older generations all married, but we were never ‘wed’; you have never married, but you are the only one who is ‘wed’. That is why you have turned cold, while we had to stay warm.

You understand what I mean, Christopher?”

I leaped to my feet and grasped my father’s hand in both my hands. His eyes were shining, and that told me
he knew.

The day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin arrived, the one on which, thirty-two years previously, I had been found as a new-born child by the church door. Once more, as in my fever after the boat-trip with Ophelia, I heard the doors in the house open and close, and when I listened, I recognised my father’s footsteps coming up the stairs and going into his room.

The smell of candlewax and smouldering bay leaves came into my room.

A good hour must have passed, then his voice softly called my name. Filled with a strange unease, I hurried to his room and saw by the sharp lines cutting deep into his cheeks and the pale colour of his face that his hour of death was at hand. He was standing up straight, but with his back against the wall, so as not to fall. His appearance was so strange, that for a moment I thought it was someone else standing before me. He was dressed in a long coat reaching down to the ground; a naked sword hung from a golden chain round his hips. I guessed he must have brought both from the lower stories of the house.

The table was covered with snow-white linen, but all that was on it were a few silver candlesticks, already lit, and an incense burner.

I saw that he was swaying and fighting to control the death-rattle; I was about to rush over to support him, but he held out his arms and waved my assistance away. “Can you hear them coming, Christopher?”

I listened, but everything was deathly quiet.

“Can you see the door opening, Christopher?”

I looked, but to my eyes it remained closed.

Again he looked as if he was about to collapse, but once more he drew himself up and a radiance shone in his eyes such as I had never seen in them before.

“Christopher!” he suddenly called to me in stentorian tones, which chilled me to the marrow. “Christopher, my mission is at an end. I have brought you up and watched over you, as was my duty. Come to me, I must give you the sign.”