A Riddle in Four Parts

A Riddle in Four Parts A Novella by

George R. Buciu

A RIDDLE IN FOUR PARTS A Novella by George Roux Buciu

Buciu/A Riddle in Four Parts/

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Copyright 2010 by George Roux Buciu All Rights Reserved. Author’s Note: this e-book is not to be used in any form without the author’s express permission. Readers do not have the author’s permission to copy or distribute it, freely or for profit. Permission is granted for short quotations or use for non-profit educational purposes.

This is a work of fiction. Any and all resemblances to persons or events, past or present, are purely coincidental. Cover art: “In the Desert” by Prohoroff @ Deviantart.com Used with permission. First Electronic Printing: July 2010


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“And if he left off dreaming about you...” Through the Looking Glass, VI

“What does the fish remind you of?” “Other fish.” “And what do other fish remind you of?” “Other fish.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961, xxvii


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0:01:42 The story, like any other thing, begins in medias res. She gasps. I don’t. I am prepared for this. Three days ago, I could have never imagined that such a room existed. Ironically, here we are, some fifteen years later, back at the beginning of it all. The men holding us, me and her, her and I, our bonds shared, push from behind. We make our way to the center of the room, ancient dust rising up languorously behind us, gently caressing the worn stone wall. Breathing in the air, you can feel the age of the stones here. The floodlights that had been brought in for light look odd and unnatural in the oval chamber. Their iridescent light covers the room in a greenish white, and the underground hallway leading to the room in an aged yellow. In the center of the room, with his back to us, a man wearing an ash grey suit stands behind the sarcophagus on the raised pedestal, smoking a pipe. There are hints of theatrics about this. Slowly he turns around


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and scrutinizes us with his green eyes. Another theatrical pause. “Open it,” he commands softly, between puffs. The narrator begins with a hook. The next scene is the end. Why? Is there a point to finding out the rest of the story? The villain is revealed. The main character dies. The love interest is taken away. There is no happy ending. This story is over. The rest is just… details. I lay here, my back against the curved wood of the boat, softly swaying on the water. Lord Crowley stands above me, looking down at me, his eyes filled with anger, hatred. I can feel a pool of wetness at the back of my head. My arms are limp; my legs propped up and twisted on the bench like I am riding Malabar again. I was eight then, riding that wooden steed, rocking back and forth, my eyes piercing the fields of adventure that did not surround me, and she was only Damsel and Queen, not Mother, not Lover. I remember how she, porcelain doll with a flower print dress, was framed against the royal mahogany, those casket walls cascading with calculated simplicity from her father’s manor’s ceiling. She was seven then, playing makebelieve in between Greek history, piano lessons and geometry. It was a bright day when we started but now it begins to fade away. I am slow. Even Lord Crowley fades into blackness. I can make out, far off in the distance, a scream. I taste the muddy air as I slowly breathe in and choke on warm liquid. It tastes, almost, metallic. I can hear shuffling in the distance getting closer.


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Someone inhales sharply and deeply. The sound is close. Someone is speaking but I do not know what they say; my tongue feels wetly dry. In total darkness, I am limp and helpless. Though I wish to move my arms and legs, they do not respond. I hate this part of waking up. It is always so disorienting, still half in dream and ready to jump out of bed. I am rocking gently when suddenly I hear a scream I cannot understand and my body explodes with pain that is liquid and flowing, pain that moves through me and there are whispers in my ear but they grow softer. The pain too, is fading. Odd. I’ve never felt like this before. I can feel being touched, as if I am watching someone being touched but am feeling it for them. I wonder what it smells like now.


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79 A long, long time after the Liberal government had withered from weak intestines and gave way to the Monarchy and after mirrors had become common household objects, Professor Jose San Cervantes sat quietly on his creaky stool in the middle of the newly discovered building and took deep measured breaths, testing the stagnant air for memories. As he sat surrounded by darkness and heat, the dim light of the oil lamp beside his feet reaching no more than an arm’s length into the shadows, the professor could faintly make out the sounds and echoes of the tools and brushes of his archeological team, an unusually jovial bunch, who had begun their work on this day with the solemnity of a group of childhood friends attending the funeral of one of their own. Being in the small room, he felt his lifelong obsession finally fulfilled: after sixty years of decoding secretly scrawled messages in the masonry of old buildings, after sixty years of researching through old books in new libraries and listening for whispers on loose lips, Professor San Cervantes discovered the location of what he believed to be the Library of Babel, a place that


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for generations existed only in old wives tales, the imagination of grandchildren and the journals of a jealous magician. The autopsy report filed by the local doctor noted that, at that moment, he had been so overjoyed to find himself in the central hall of that building that his body gave out and he suffered a violent heart attack and that this was the cause of the noted archeologists death and not, as was believed, the immediately following collapse the building suffered. Many of the workers on the archeological team said they heard the professor cry out in pain just before the building began to collapse and it was his voice that gave the final push the walls needed to crumble. Others, including the priest of the local church, who had insisted that the professor’s torn body be returned to the wreckage after the autopsy, as that would be the most fitting grave for the dead man, maintained that the collapse was the result of the walls not being able to support the sadness the building felt for the old man’s tragic passing. Either way, the only thing that was known for sure was that after the collapse and after the torrid wind had wafted away the dust of the destruction, the body of Professor Jose San Cervantes lay dead on the day before its eightieth birthday. It was only six-thirty in the morning, and the heat was already unbearable. As the city woke up that Thursday, not yet out of bed and already sweating, news of Professor San Cervantes’ spectacular death spread, carried on by the tune of the waltz band who perpetually sat outside the deserted train station and welcomed trains that no longer stopped with a retinue of forgotten songs as their instruments swelled


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and moaned in the wet, stuffy heat of the sun. All day long people would talk of nothing but what a life the professor led: a brilliant archeologist, a strong drinker, a notorious womanizer and romantic, a man of his word who lied so well nobody could beat him at cards. The details of his life were recounted and his accomplishments remembered but no one, not even the parish priest, thought for one moment of whether the dead man’s last thoughts were of Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes or of the stories written down in fading ink in the old book belonging to Petulengro de Acuña. The fact was that Professor San Cervantes thought all these thoughts and more. He thought of the year he had turned sixteen when he had learnt to read but went blind for three months; he thought of tigers and their dreams; of the house of mirrors he had visited at a carnival at the age of fifty-four; of the winding labyrinth, just beyond the town of his youth, which had been dreamt into reality by a French tourist who, drunk and in the throes of passion, saw before him the universe contained within an infinitely finite sphere and yelled an incoherent phrase that, in the language of the gods, causes things to be. Most of all, he thought about the Library of Babel. Miguel Estrada, the owner of the bar the professor often frequented, opened his doors early in the morning because, goddamn it, they’ll want to mourn and the church is no place for sadness and memories. By nine in the morning, there were already three games of cards being played, seven women gathered in a corner weeping and twelve empty bottles of rum. The professors’ archeological team sat at the bar, drinks in hand, silent, reading old copies of National


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Geographic. Outside, on the patio, two old men, both wearing straw hats to cover their lined faces from the sun, sat in what was left of the shade, drinking gin and talking to each other about when I was in the army, the old fuerzas armadas when de la Vega was still in power, back then I was a young man and could fuck like a hyena, whooooo, goddamn you should have seen the sergeant when he caught me with a beautiful woman in the barracks one night, you know how it was, and everybody knew that his wife only gave it to him once a month when the moon was full; eygh viejo compinche those were the crazy days, the wild days, hmm? “How slowly time passes,” remarked the other. As the weeks after his death wore on, close friends emerged and revealed their memories of the professor. They remembered that he had been born to a kind woman and a blind sailor on a broken bed in a brothel amid the mulatto prostitutes, who, spent from the day’s work, lay draped across couches drenched in wasted love and practiced looks of smoldering, tender innocence in their mirrors as the screams of labor came from one of the upstairs bedrooms. It was said that he did not cry when he was born, preferring, rather, to criticize his poor parents and the midwife for bringing him into the world, and that he learnt to cry only on a warm August night, as they were only in the town of Agadéz, when the smell of the rain carried to his young ears the weeping of one of the young girls in the house whose grandmother, not wanting to raise another child since her son had died, left her at a bar one sunny day, many years ago. Jose’s father, his mother having died in labor, left the town that night


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without him and gave the newborn to Fate, who in turn decided she would rather let him be raised by the matron of the whorehouse. So it was that Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes became the mother of the young infant. She named him Jose San Cervantes, after the first man she had ever sold her body to and placed the cradle she had bought at the foot of her bed so that she could always keep an eye on him, even when strange men drove themselves insane with the pleasure of her body as she lay contemplatively in bed, legs spread, always remembering to make a sound now and then and always making sure they left their money on the dresser. So it went, year in and year out, and Jose was raised with surprisingly tender care by the women of the brothel, each one playing mother and sister in between fucks. One Elaido Donato, a childhood friend that had come to pay his respects and to drink a few glasses of free rum, recounted, without much narrative felicity, that in the summer of Jose’s twelfth year the brothel burned down, permanently scarring Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes on her right side, you should have seen the bitch, her face, her shoulder, her arm, her swollen tit, her stomach, her leg, she couldn’t even be a piece of meat anymore… well she bet the boy away in a game of high stakes canasta to a priest, now I remember, Father Clara was his name, not of that diocese, who… goddamn it, he exclaimed after a revelatory pause, now that I think about it, he was so fiery in his godly passions that it was him who probably burned the building down and then offered absolution to the naked whores in the street, for a price no less, if you catch my meaning… what a goddamed Pardoner he was.


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A crowd of faces gathered when the Professors' body was laid to rest and in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit they bade their farewells with varying sincerity, Amen. Some eyes, blue and brown and green, squinted in the light of the sun and shed tears of hot sweat while others cried. The heat from the ground rose in waves met by the damp air and those at the funeral, dressed in their finest, did their best not to sway as his body was carefully laid back into the brown, dusty and still crumbling ruins that he had spent the last moments of his life in. The older folk, not able to stand the heat and the smell of death, remained in their homes, sitting in the shade on their verandas, and reassured each other that Father Benigno would conduct a proper service for he is a good man, a pious man. The only laugh to be heard in the town that day belonged to Esteban, the owner of the general store, who, leaning on the counter with his elbows with a glass of rum in his hand, upon hearing his neighbor damn old age laughed and said it was death that should be damned because old age had its advantages. “You know, when he was nineteen, he married his Isabella. And my god she was beautiful! It was short lived. He met her on the bus, by accident, I think, years after the fire. It was the only empty seat, the seat beside her. She, recognizing him, turned and said with a smile, if you come to my country, I will marry you. And that’s how it happened. There were no signs of love, there was no… nothing, you know, all the things that people do before they get married. There was none of that. So he moved to Argentina and began studying archeology at the university. They lived in her grandmother’s old


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apartment, apparently the fight those two had had was resolved when the old woman, who had gone to get married on a cruiseship, died in the arms of a sailor after she had jumped overboard to beat her husband for flirting with a cabin stewardess. And the girl worked as a typist to support them both while he studied. I heard she died a while back of cholera or a long time ago of too much love. Who knows when it comes to these things?” "Well," replied Esteban, "for some people, that's enough."


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Anecdotes… They both awoke, before the rising of the sun. One dressed in a leather tunic the other in a sheep’s wool cloak. Silently they both ate in the cold damp of the morning. Outside, sheep were stirring and the ground was covered with dew. The plow blades, resting on wooden blocks, awaited their sharpening and use. Far off in the distance, the sounds of wild animals could be heard. Inside the house, through the window, the first rays of the sun began to chase away the darkness. The Farmer rose, still hungry. The Shepherd wrapped some dry food in a towel and placed it in his pack. They both warmed their hands by the small fire they had lit before starting the day’s work. When the fire died, they stood up, ready to head out. The air was still cold but they could both feel the warmth of the sun on their unshaven faces. The Farmer spoke, “Perhaps I will visit you in the pasture this day, brother.” The Shepherd nodded, gathered his pack and turned to leave. “I will see you tonight, brother.” Pausing and looking at his departing brother, the Farmer


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softly said, “Perhaps,” and went to sharpen the blade of his plow with a rock. A stone’s throw later, darkness had descended and, from that night on, only the Farmer would sleep under the judging light of the coruscating sky.


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The Greatest Show on Earth: Prologue "I have no time for these silly things." That was what Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes had told Jose when he had showed her the poster for "The Greatest Show on Earth" on the back page of the newspaper. Although the young Jose did not often indulge in fantasies, he had heard of the wonder worker Petulengro de Acuña and of his amazing talents and wanted to see him conjure miracles. Now that the magician was going to be performing next week at the local theater, Jose could finally have his wish. The matter remained, however, that he was only eight and it was not that Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes did not want the boy to go, merely that, as the matron of the whorehouse, she could not be missing for a whole day. And so she told Jose that if he wanted to go, he would have to get one of the girls to take him: “I’ll give her the day off, as long as it’s not Evelia or Gabriella.” Jose, having lived his whole life in the whorehouse, had made friends with the women during the times they weren’t busy with their own things or with a customer. To a young boy, what they did, they did to make money and, though he often heard the parents of other children talk, he didn’t judge them, was too young to do so and didn’t


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care either way. There was Juliana who fashioned her deep dark red hair into stunning curls every day and whose skin smelt of gardenias. Magdalena was a short woman, who always wore black and perpetually kept the window to her room open, letting her see the cliffs and smell the sea air outside. A recent arrival at the house, Sofia had enchanted the rest of the town with her beautiful voice, which could only be heard late at night, by the light of a lamp, as she sat on her bed and sang sorrowful songs. Teresa, Viviana, Sahar, and Eugenia could all be found in the parlor, in the early hours of the twilight, after the men had left, playing canasta or bridge or talking in hushed whispers about the gossip they had heard, their soft giggles slipping underneath the doors and betraying their delight. Evelia and Gabriella were sisters. Although not twins, it would have been hard to tell them apart from each other if it wasn’t for the fact that Evelia was blonde and Gabriella’s hair, even at the age of twenty six, was the color of white ash. Jose could remember the day, almost two years ago, when the two had dressed as nuns for the annual carnival and, at first glance, not even Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes could tell them apart. Of all the women in the house, she used to say, Evelia and Gabriella were born to be whores, those two were, you mark my words young Jose and stay away from women like them because they’ll leave you with your pants on the floor, your pockets empty and a hole in your heart that not even the good Doctor Ferdinand can stitch. Finally, there was Isabella. Isabella Fidelia Delgado was a willowy, supple young woman of nineteen. She had been brought to


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the brothel at the age of eleven by the town authorities who asked Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes to take care of the abandoned girl. Having made it a habit to not involve herself in other people’s affairs, the matron found it difficult to ask why it was that the young girl was brought to her, but, given the circumstances, did. The angular policeman, his face twisting in spite and becoming increasingly flushed, told the matron of the fat grandmother’s disappearance while the little girl had gone to the bathroom to wash her hands of some spilled cola. Not yet prepared to be a mother and not being able to say no to the officer who let the brothel keep its doors open by his good graces and a few private visits a month, Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes took the girl in and, as soon as she had turned fifteen, put her to work, first in the kitchen and then in the bedroom. Jose had become close friends with Isabella and it was her that he asked to take him to see the show. Isabella, sitting on a high backed wicker chair, looked at Jose with a smile and told him she would take him as long as he promised her he would be a gentleman and buy her popcorn and cola. Jose nodded enthusiastically, agreeing to the deal, and ran up to Isabella to hug her, catching her by surprise. She took his head in her hands and kissed his forehead, whispering to no one in particular, “Why can’t they all be like you, little Jose?” The rest of the week was no different for the women but turned out to be agonizingly slow for Jose. To keep himself busy, he would practice the card tricks that he had been taught by a friend some time ago. One day, when he couldn’t contain his excitement, he


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went into the parlor where Teresa, Viviana, Gabriella, and Eugenia were waiting for customers. He took a top hat belonging to the man now upstairs with Evelia and used an old bed sheet as a cloak. Jumping through the parlor curtains, to appear with a dramatic flair, he introduced himself as the Amazing and Most Spectacularly Miraculous Jose, Wizard Extraordinaire. Pulling out a deck of cards, he spread it open with a clumsy flourish as only a boy of eight could manage and asked Viviana to pick a card, any card, any card that you wish. “Excellent madame! Now please, if you would, take a look at your card, show everyone… but not me!... and now, if you would, kindly, please, kindly place it back inside the deck of cards… just in the middle like that, yes! And now, watch, if you please, carefully now, watch as I mix the cards and shuffle them so that I can have no idea where it could ever possibly be… and now shuffle them this way. Excellent. Now, madame, I will attempt the impossible and you will see why they call this magician Amazing and Most Spectacularly Miraculous, behold, is…. This…. Your…. Card!?” The women giggled as Viviana bent down and gently pinched the boy’s nose, “No, Jose, that is not it.” Confused, the young magician turned the deck around and began looking through the cards when Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes entered the parlor through the purple and gold velvet curtains. “Jose, out of here! How many times have I told you not to play in the parlor, hmm Jose? If I catch you in here one more time I’ll


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have your hide, boy!” Running off upstairs as fast as his feet could carry him, young Jose, half crying and half confused as to why his card trick hadn’t worked, hid under his bed and looked at the poster for The Greatest Show on Earth, reminding himself that it was only two more days until he would go see the great and mystical Petulengro de Acuña. This is how Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes found him when she came upstairs looking for Evelia’s customer’s top hat. She told the boy to calm yourself Jose, I’m not mad at you, but you know you shouldn’t be playing there, hmm. She patted him on the bottom and, taking the top hat, got off her knees and disappeared downstairs.


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0:12:59 I remember you, Charlotte, that day when we were both ten, I remember you against the golden light of your parent’s meadow by the lake and how we sat beside a bed of lilies, you in your frilly white dress and your golden hair and green eyes, you smiled at me as you wove a crown of dandelions in between your soft fingers and imagined that you were the Queen Elizabeth holding off a thousand Spanish ships whose cannons aimed for the bosom of England and I was merely your servant as I was, to fetch you your horse or bring you a smile when the country had wanted your head and the bishops believed you were weak because you were a virgin but that did not stop you from telling the story of those ancient knights whose secrets you knew and kept hidden from the world as they had asked when you offered them protection and a monastery to hide in which you ordered me to prepare so I did, and the hay-barn was turned into a sanctuary for holy men whose swords and shields hung invisibly on the wall beside the rakes and shovels that were used to toil the land and do you remember that day, how you said that you and I would


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have a child, not knowing what that meant, and he would grow to be like the man from your schoolbooks, he whose father had said would not live off his hands and educated him so that when the time had come to free his David from that solid block of Carrara marble, he sat for four months and sculpted in his imagination until rubbled rock fell from his hammer and chisel and there, in his youthful splendor, in the moment between conscious choice and conscious action, stood the biblical king, his veins pulsing with tense life as the veins of our son would, or daughter you had said, and then I said why not both and you just laughed telling me that queens only have one child and it would be what they wanted and you were so sure of this that I became convinced that in your Greek lessons you had learnt some secrets that I was not privy to so I begged and begged for you to tell me, and you just placed the crown of dandelions upon my head and told me that now I was the fool and destined to entertain at court with a dance or a joke or perhaps I could pass gas and when, hand to mouth, I did, you laughed and that’s what I remember, your open mouth when I could see your teeth which sometimes clenched as you ran and ran and ran in circles, always behind me, always with me at your heels in our game of tag across the meadow by the lake where we could smell your mother bake, on a Sunday afternoon, a plum and apple pie with banana ice cream melting on the side and falling to the table as you tried to break the crust with your spoon and your mother laughed and your father smiled at me and called me son, though I was not his and yes, I saw this in your mother’s eyes as she remembered her best friend of whom a picture had remained and which she had


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solemnly framed and hung above my bed and sometimes when, at night, I cried you would come to my room and find a way to make the bed become a ship under Cleopatra’s rule, sailing on an Ionian sea to Grecian Actium where we would be overcome by the Princeps Octavian and then your mother would open the door and send you back to bed and kiss me in the dark, her lips upon my cheek and whispered I love yous in my ear and she does too, don’t ever fear, but we grew up and you stopped coming to my bed until that night when in the dark you led me to a truth that had been hidden, from me, from you, from all, we thought, until, unbidden it had risen and swallowed us whole till we found ourselves in the belly of a whale and you, with a stick for a sword carved your way out and back to the mahogany of your father’s study and the open books upon the table from behind which you laughed at me when I had asked if it was possible for whale to swallow Pequod whole and you just laughed your laugh which I heard only when we played together and then, many years later, when you gave birth to our daughter whose life-filled veins were hidden beneath bloodied skin and you laughed and smiled and named her Eve and you were Eve and I was Adam and God be damned our daughter had changed the world we lived in, you and I, until you left with her, in search of your knights and long nights I waited by the telephone until you didn’t call but had the gall to send a picture of a rosy little girl with her green eyes reflecting the camera’s lens and her white dress with frills casting back the golden sunshine of an Egyptian sun and I cried and remembered the day when we sat in your parent’s meadow by the bed of pink lilies whose smell now


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reminds me of your skin when you wore a frilly white dress that had gotten stained with the milk from the dandelion crown your lighted fingers wove and you told me that day you knew when you had met me that you and I would always be an us and though much time has passed, we are, now, at the end, an us and become a memory that might be one day framed above our daughter’s bed by you.


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10 That Sunday marked the tenth year that Jose San Cervantes had lived with Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes. To mark the occasion, she had closed the brothel for the day and had had all the girls decorate the main hall to celebrate the boy’s birthday. A few of them had gone to the small flower shop and bought some white gardenias and begonias which they tied around the front porch with the two brown wicker chairs and the old rope swing. Colorful ribbons form Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes' first wedding, preserved carefully along with her dress and the ashes of her husband, were wrapped around the pillars inside the house. All the couches, usually grouped together so that men could more intimately know the whores they paid for, had been rearranged into a circle so that all could see the young boy open his presents. As the morning wore on, men and their mothers began to arrive and enjoyed some warm lemonade in the afternoon heat. Outside the house, the children ran around playing with an old tire, rolling it this way and that. Jose, among them, laughed the


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same laugh that Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes had come to know those past ten years. The dust their feet raised was beat down by the wet heat only to be kicked up again by the rolling tire. At siesta time, the tire lay against the side of the hacienda, its faded black rubber smoldering in the sun, a thick stink of melting chemicals permeating the dog’s nostrils as he stood there, leg raised, and urinated inside the tire hole. Later in the day, it served as a seat for a few of the children as they stood around a massive mountain and watched an immense army of soldiers and workers ferrying provisions to their secret base deep inside the bowels of the earth. With a magnifying glass, one of the boys focused sunlight on a tiny worker, giggling as steam lifted off its burning flesh. Another took the tire and, from a distance, sent it rolling toward the anthill, laughing as it hit the insects’ home, flattening and destroying it, launching the tire into the air towards the back of the boy with the magnifying glass and sending the other children into a fit of laughter as the boy, lifting his head off the ground and spitting out dust, frantically tried to swipe away the burnt ant body now stuck to his forehead. It was a warm August night and the smell of the rain and burning candles filled the main room of the hacienda. Everyone had gathered inside and sat on the couches, waiting for Jose to begin opening his presents. Isabella, being Jose’s invited guest of honor, sat at the head of the room in the large white wicker chair from which Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes greeted her customers on regular days. Jose, sitting on the floor beside Isabella, was finishing his piece of birthday cake, baked for him by Magdalena, and looked around at


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the others as, they too, were taking their last bites. He was eager to open his first present. As Isabella handed him a rectangular box wrapped in bright green cloth with a purple satin bow holding the package closed, Jose’s mother walked through the wall and came to a stop in front of her aging son. Her eyes, white as her hair and bloodless lips, reflected the smile she had on her face for the young boy. Silently she sat on her knees and hugged Jose, stroking his hair and kissing his forehead. She exchanged a smile with Isabella as she leaned over to Jose and whispered in his ear, “Happy birthday, Daniel! Happy birthday, my boy.” After another hug, she paused momentarily. Jose would forever remember that smell of muddy ash and dried onion that filled the room in the space of those few heartbeats. “It is real, Daniel, and you will find it.” With one final caress of his face, she stood and walked through the wall heading towards the sea by the edge of town. Isabella, impatient for Jose to open her present, brushed away the cobwebs of his mother’s visit, undid the bow for him, handed him the unwrapped box once more and used the ribbon to tie up her hair and give the slight breeze in the room access to the back of her neck. As he removed the green cloth that covered the box and opened the lid, the boy saw, in large gold lettering, the title “The Great Libraries: From Antiquity to the Renaissance” printed on the hard-covered black cloth of a large book. “I know you like libraries and talk about a magical library all


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the time so I thought you’d like this, hmm?” “It’s perfect! Thank you, Isabella!” he replied with an eager hug. The rest of the presents came from friends, a new pair of shoes and a shirt from Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes, a jacket and a hat from Evelia and Gabriella, a bit of money from the old woman down the street, and so on. The party was interrupted abruptly, however, when everyone heard a man shouting outside. At first nobody paid the shouting any mind but it had become increasingly frenetic until, after a short silence that took everyone by surprise, a scream of pain was heard. All rushed out to the front porch to see what had happened. A few meters down the path leading to the house they saw a man dressed in the black robes of his office, writhing on the ground in pain and screaming out demon, I cast you from this place. Through the dust, they could see the man’s monk haircut all disheveled, his hands and face dirty with dust sticking to the sweat of his apparent fervor. Realizing, from his black robes, white collar and the wooden cross about his neck that was now doing its best to strangle him, that this was a Father of the Holy Church, everyone froze, not knowing what it was that they were expected to do, or could do, given the circumstances, which, really, were themselves quite unclear. It was Evelia and Gabriella who noticed the snake’s tail sticking out of the priest’s robes. The two women jumped from the porch and sprinted toward the man. Gabriella, always the more adventurous of the two, grabbed


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the snake’s tail and hurled it away from the priest, throwing it somewhere in the field. The priest, holding his leg in pain, babbling I cast you out demon, go, go out from this place, a holy sacrament upon your head and women in your bed of filth yelled in pain over and over as the two women struggled to lift him up. Some men, regaining their senses, also grabbed on to the priest and took him inside, laying him on one of the couches the priest had come to free from sin. Evelia shouted for Jose to run and get the doctor and tell him to bring the black bag he had used to treat the miner who, only a year ago, had been bitten by a woman infected with rabies. “Hold him down.” Gabriella ordered the two men. The priest, drifting in a world of angels and demons and inventing a metaphysics of delirious impossibility, did not notice as Gabriella lifted the skirt of his robe, exposing his shriveled manliness next to two bony thighs, the left one decorated by two puncture wounds out of which greenish red blood flowed. The inflamed spot, no bigger than a coin, had already turned an odd yellowy blue and, due to the two puncture wounds and the few thick strands of thigh hair stuck across it, almost looked like a smiling face. Gabriella’s fingers began to prod the area forcing the greenish red secretion to happily flow out in a bubbly stream. “There’s no time,” she muttered. Indicating his privates to her sister, “Hold this,” she instructed. “Francisca, I need alcohol. And a bowl. Now!” Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes, not yet ready to have a man of the cloth die in her home, grabbed a bottle of scotch off the


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nearby table and drank the last bit of the lemonade in a glass. Gabriella immediately poured the scotch over the wound as well as taking a sip herself before placing her mouth over the contusion and beginning to suck the poison out. Stopping every so often to spit what she had drawn out into the glass and then pouring some more alcohol over the lesion as well as rinsing her mouth with it, the young woman attended the priest until Doctor Ferdinand, an almost doddering old man who lived a few minutes away and was the town’s only qualified physician, arrived with his black bag. Asking everyone to move aside, he relieved Gabriella of her duty and immediately stuck the old man with three injections to counter the poison. “Fine job you have done, young lady,” he told Gabriella a few hours after the priest had been stabilized. “You keep this one around, Madame Cervantes, she could save your life one day.” “Who is he?” is all the matron replied with. “Don’t know, to be rightly honest. I had heard Father Florentino had a guest from another diocese, a passing friend or something of the like. Father Guererra.. or… or Clara, Father Clara I think it was, actually, not of this diocese, of course. Well, we should certainly inform Father Florentino of this. The poor man will have to stay here for a day or two until he regains his strength. He should be fine now, but he’ll have to remain here. Only for a day or two.” “He has two days.” Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes said grimly, looking at the priest and then at Viviana, Evelia, Gabriella, Isabella, Teresa and Magdalena in turn. “Two days and then he is in the hands of Father Florentino… or his God. Whichever comes first.”


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Anecdotes… His belly was full. His woman was still chewing on a piece of meat. The four of them had killed a large boar that day and cooked the meat over a fire. His friend and his woman were curled up in the back of the cave. Outside, the wind picked up gently disturbing their calm fire. He walked to the entrance of the cave and looked upon the rocky slope. This was a good place. If any animals would try and come here, they could defend it easily. He checked the stone knife at his hip. Farther off, in the distance, the edge of the forest began and, above it, dark clouds gathered menacingly. He returned back inside the cave. His woman reached out and pulled him to the ground. She kissed him and he felt her hand going under his wolf tunic. Grunting, he moved it away. Not tonight. Tonight he would remain watchful. He sat up and added another log to the fire. It was going to be a cold night. He couldn’t let the fire go out. Glancing back at his two friends, he saw their blankets moving. He looked at his woman and she smiled at him, leaning back, renewing her offer. He smiled back and stroked her inner thigh, letting her know that he would not give in. Maybe later, he thought


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to himself. Outside, he could hear the rain falling steadily and the wind moaning. It was nights like these that made him think. The land here was good. There were plenty of caves here for shelter. There was good hunting to be had. He could bring his people here and they could live here for a while. He had even heard the sound of water when they had come in. And with this many animals, he was sure that there were many fruits as well. They could live here. That was what he would do. Suddenly, he heard a large booming sound outside. His woman was asleep. She hadn’t heard anything. His friend didn’t seem to either. He grabbed his spear and headed for the entrance once more. As he picked his way among the rocks, he could feel the wetness of the rain on his bare feet. This was a good place, not even rain gathered in this cave. As he walked outside, a lightning bolt hitting the ground greeted him. Fearing for his life, he leapt backwards into the cave and then, slowly, cautiously made his way out again. Standing at the entrance of the cave he witnessed a furious battle. Lightning struck the forest and the ground. The clouds above were alive with the booming sound of thunder. Another lightning bolt came from the sky, smashing the rock only a few meters above the entrance of the cave sending rocks down toward him. Furious, he leapt out and shouted at the sky to leave him be! His mouth filled with rainwater even as he yelled. His voice was deafened by the crack of thunder and lighting. The forest had caught


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fire and burnt brightly despite the heavy downpour. “Aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!” He roared at the sky like a lion. In his fury, he felt a hand on him. Grabbing the stone knife out of his thong, he whirled around and stopped just short of driving it deep into his friend’s skull. As the storm raged around them, he could see the fear in his friends’ eyes. Fearful of the wrath of the unseen, his friend beckoned him to come inside. As a lightning bolt once more struck the forest, his friend crouched and hid behind a rock, lifting his head just enough to stare at the burning forest, fearfully wide-eyed. But not him. He defied the power around him. Each time the thunder cracked, he yelled back. Challenging the storm to strike him down. His rage was fueled by the storm. His spear was held high. His tunic, wet and heavy with rainwater, dropped off him, leaving him to face the storm naked. And naked he raged. Against the wind. Against the lightning. Against the fire. Against the sky. As suddenly as the storm had started, it stopped and left him standing on his mound of earth, victorious. The only evidence of the mighty battle of wills was the burning forest whose fires were dying out even as he stuck his spear into the ground and picked up his tunic to wring the water out of it. He had won and his friend, well, he was no leader. His friend feared those mighty challenges that came from the sky. But not him. He had won this place from the sky. This was a good place. He would bring his people here.


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The Greatest Show on Earth: Memoirs of Petulengro de Acuña …I went to visit my grandfather today. He lives with his wife in the same apartment they bought when they married each other. One might say that it is old and decrepit but it is not, truly. It is the stage upon which a lifetime of memories have paraded their merry, tragic and quiet tunes. The couches have been in the same place for longer than I have been alive; the carpets on which I used to trace roads for my toy cars as a child show their threads as they begin to unravel at a seam, in a corner; the table at which I learnt multiplication with my grandmother creaks when it is touched. Everything shows its age in the bare and threadbare fabrics of old surfaces. The little mushroom soldier lamp by the edge of the couch sheds much needed light on the intricately sculpted mahogany furniture. The cabinets with crystal glasses and Chinese fishermen reflect the light from the window across the rectangular room while the little toy TV on the cabinet


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plings a music-box love theme. The chandelier that hangs low enough to comb my grandfather’s hair each time he passes underneath it has only two light bulbs in it, barely lighting the dark hallway with a library of dust that leads to the bedrooms and the bathroom. My grandmother is a religious woman who thinks my grandfather is a doddering old man. I have often wondered, watching them be, as she, maybe, mends a sock or sews a pair of gloves and he watches the nightly news, if they are in love. Perhaps it isn’t love but something deeper. A profound respect for each other arrived at after a lifetime of… what? He is in awe of her raising their son by herself when she did, that I know. While she cooks, he tries to be helpful. He is forgetful and hard of hearing, of old age, of disease. They bicker in a comic fashion, of sorts, at lunchtime and dinner, where she might yell at him for this and that but he doesn’t hear what she says and so asks her to repeat it. She only becomes more irate. My grandfather is an old man. Like many old men who live a dignified life, he sometimes passes himself in the mirror and notices the few remaining hairs on his head standing every-which way and hurries to the bathroom, in his slow shuffling walk, to comb them down. He solves this problem by sometimes wearing a little cap. His face is lined with wrinkles that lend him an enchanting animation and enhance his still handsome and strong facial features. His liquid blue eyes shine with intelligence and when he speaks, with a slow, deceptively lilting cadence, his hands move and shape the air with the visual imagination of a sculptor. He tastes the stories he recounts, relives the moments as he speaks, moves with the story, using his


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whole seat, now teetering on the edge, now sitting back, now standing up or leaning sideways. Sometimes he breaks his daily routine, of eating at such a time and reading at such a time and napping at such a time and watching the news at seven o’clock, and he sits in silence, catching everyone by surprise as he utters a phrase that is unexpected: “The final burial ground of the dead is not in the ground, but in the hearts of others.” Today, he has a cup of tea beside him. The steam fogs his glasses as he raises it to his lips. He will remove his glasses and put them on again several times during this visit and will forget that they are on and start looking for them at least once. Have I ever told you about when I was young, he asks me. No, I reply. Hm… and after a pause he says that my father died young and left my mother with three children, one garden and no other means of supporting themselves… poverty teaches you to appreciate things. Like a solid roof, or a shoe without holes. My mother needed to work in the day so she shipped us off to school. Primary was six years of which four… well… didn’t study much there but those last two years, they put me in the Deacon’s class and in the Deacon’s class you learnt. You learnt or you bent over his table and learnt how many times a meter stick could hit you before it would break. Ah, but I only learnt that… once… school was easy, not too hard, I did well, not because I was particularly smart but because I had a fantastic memory… I sang too, in the local choir, I remember how one of the music professors saw me and said to me, “You take your secondary


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entrance exams and you pass them! I want you in my choir.” People around town hired me to recite poetry or give a speech or a solo performance. They said I had a beautiful voice but I only gave it serious thought when that man told me to write the exams. Well, that summer I wrote them. My mother didn’t know, she would have been upset if I was actually studying and not helping her in the garden or fixing up the little apartment. Her other two children, well, they were helping. No, I didn’t learn at home, only did that in between classes. And before and after class. At home I helped my mother, god rest her soul, he crossed himself. I went to school had the highest average in the whole school, you know, and took canto classes three times a week. And theater and diction classes twice a week, too. Memorized a lot of poetry, still remember a lot of it. I could recite ten hours of poetry and we’ll just be getting started, Petulengro. Taking another sip of the tea and arranging the pillow behind him he continued: after that I entered post-secondary and sang in the choir. I remember sitting outside the cafeteria… glancing in sometimes. I didn’t eat there. Couldn’t afford it. And the meat was damn expensive. I kept good grades so I had a good student scholarship – well that was, let’s see, two-hundred and eighty a month… two-hundred and fifty of which the university kept for housing, classes, books… they gave me thirty a month to buy toothpaste and other requirements. I sent my mother little sugar packages… as much as I could. She could sell a pack for twenty or… the war, you see, gave sugar value.


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Well, Petulengro, I started singing with the National Choir and I was living the life. Heh, oh yes, we had five suits, five shirts, five pairs of shoes, five ties, just one belt, but it was a damn good black leather one. Had that belt for near twelve years. Choir director, funny man, he told us to show up wearing a certain suit, knowing a certain song and we’d just practice it. You didn’t follow the rules, you were out. And you didn’t want to be out. Whooo, they fed us sandwiches during practice and hot teas steaming out of the mug. Sugar too, during the break at practice, we had to eat hard sugar to soothe our throats. I remember in Russian class… we had to take two Russian classes a year, but I got called into the military. I got out of that with the help of the choir director, funny man, and seven weeks later, well I was back in school, sitting in Russian class and wouldn’t you know it, the teacher calls on me to make a simple prepositional phrase. I’m confused, I’d only been there for the first two weeks of class. He pauses momentarily and blows his nose, folds the handkerchief and places it neatly on the table. Guy behind me, eventually became my best friend in university, he leans in and whispers, “Ya tebyA lyublyU.” So I yell out, in strong and clear voice, “Ya tebyA lyublyU!” and the whole class keels over with laughter. Man, everyone’s just laughing. Very good, the teacher says to me. After class I asked some friends I knew, what did I say. I love you, says one. Heh! I love you. And German, that… haha… I was in German class, it was on the seventh floor, dead of winter, it was freezing cold and the


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radiators were broken. We’re sitting in this fairly open amphitheater and the teacher, an old crone about to retire anyway, she’s teaching us German. Suddenly, the radiators start making a strange sound. Plonk---plonk-plonk-plonk-plonkplonk—plonk, he shows me with his hands. The teacher stops and leans closer to us and looks around and asks, what’s that, she says. Well this guy in the front row, he stands up and leans over his desk and whispers, but a louder whisper, you know, so he stands up and leans over his desk and whispers, “Mephistooooooooo!” Scared the cold right outta the old crone. Heh. Ah, she was crazed anyway, God rest her soul, he crossed himself, always talking about some Library of Babel she called it… …Caught a man spying backstage again today, and after a show, no less. He’s getting more daring, trying to find out my secrets. These rivalries bore me, I’d rather sit and invent a good illusion or get lost in a delusion…


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0:56:20 I found myself staying at a hotel not far from the water and a few steps from the main stage of the Festival di Sanremo. Yesterday’s scene had left me thoroughly shaken. I had attended the Madonna del Lume procession both out of curiosity as well as respect for the local culture. A large crowd of people had gathered about the harbor to witness the blessing: women and children, sailors on the sea in their boats, altar boys and a young girls’ choir whose voices joined in a beautiful song, priests to bless the procession and the sailors. As the Madonna slowly rose from the water, carried on a plank by four men, someone had spotted the body of a woman, I still don’t know who she was, not far from the shore. The crowd erupted in panic. The men carrying the Madonna let her sink back into the water and swam towards the body. Bringing the drowned woman back, wives teared


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and covered children’s eyes; priests prayed. An older woman wept furiously as she reached the body. A man, her finance I judged, had to be restrained by three others in his agony. It had taken an hour until an ambulance was found but by then, the ambulance had seemed more a hearse and its sirens more a song of lamentation. The old woman stood on the wet pavement screaming, “Why?” in seventeen different languages. I could hear the phone ringing from the other room, now. In the study there were no phones but there was no need: she was gone and the phone never rang from her anymore. Picking up my cup of coffee I ignored the ringing and stood by the open window, looking out over the city and listening to the jazz that could be heard from across the way, dada dadada da da. It was a cool late summer night and I wore a cardigan over my now winkled shirt. After a few minutes of silence, the phone rang again. Walking over, I picked it up. “Yes?” “Sir, you have a call. I will patch you through now.” A click was heard. “Hello?” The voice on the other line had a thick British accent with a twinge of foreign color. “Who’s this?” “Well, well, well, Mr. Umberto Carosone. I was hoping I would find you in your hotel room. You are a hard man to find.” “I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name?” “Of course, I did not mean to be rude. I am Lord Byron


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Crowley.” My face drained of blood. I had never met the man but if the stories Charlotte had told me were true, and they could only be true, I thought, now that he had called me, he would be the leader of a sect of religious fanatics who sought what they believed to be the treasure of the Knights Templar. “I will get to the point. We have your wife, or, what is it, now, ex-wife, separated but not divorced, still together but apart for a few years. No matter, we have her as well as your lovely daughter. If you wish to see them again, I’m going to need you to do something for me.” “What?” “Its simple really. I need you to make Mrs. Charlotte… talk. University of Salamanca, main library, fourth floor, there is a hexagon shaped book. Do you know it?” “Yes.” “Two days from now, a man will be reading that book. Meet him and he will bring you to me. Fail to do this and, well, you haven’t seen your daughter in ten years, is it now… perhaps that will make never seeing her again a bit easier. See you soon, I think.”


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16 He had spent the night with her despite what Father Clara would have said. The other boys all boasted that she, horny daughter of the town cobbler, would welcome anyone that brought her a pretty flower and chocolate so he had done those things, not knowing what to expect other than everyone’s promise that when you come out of her room, by the lord’s grave, you’ll be a real man or you’ll be impotent for the rest of your life. She had welcomed him with a smile, a hug and a kiss on the cheek, her black greasy hair shining in the candlelight, damp and stuck to the finely sculpted curvature of her shoulder blades. As she closed the door, he felt the air, kneaded with sweat and sighs from too much use, turn to mud. Even as she unbuttoned his pants and closed the mosquito nest to hide them from her cousin should he wake, Jose knew that years later, when sitting in a dark room, he would remember this moment, with its awkward jerks and stuttering silence and cumbersome politeness, as the moment he fell in love with Isabella. Though he, like all boys


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emerging from the baptizing waters of puberty, worried about an impotence he had only heard of from the old men playing checkers in the town square, his doubts were set aside about the working of his anatomy as her inexperienced moans, not quite filled with the rawness of Evelia’s grunts or the sweetness of Sofia’s sighs, dripped like thick honey on his ear. That morning, even though his manhood itched and pained him as he later urinated outside against a tree trunk on the way back to the church, probably from the excitement of knowing that there was no God or else he would have been struck down by blindness or stupidity, Jose opened the door and walked through it without his shirt on and, as short as it would be, with a new view of the world. He returned to the church and Father Clara, who greeted him with a smile. It was proof of God’s will that Jose was here, now, and not with those harlots, the priest would often say, because a fire such as that could only have been started by a holy hand and a holy spirit he had felt that night, even as the flames drove themselves wild with passion, cindering the building’s wooden walls, while with ritual diligence he sprinkled all the half-clothed women with the sanctified water of his official urn. That week, in desperation, telling Jose that this is how it must be but don’t worry, the priest will teach you Jose, give you an education, Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes had bet and lost the boy in a game of canasta to the priest, who, disappointed that one of the young women had not made it into the pot, challenged the matron to one last game which she refused, saying she had lost all she had and the time had come for her to join her husband. The priest


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took the boy to church and immediately set about teaching him Latin as only Christian men speak it, the word of God and his Son, as written by those who had neither seen nor spoken to either but were certain of the veracity of their work, and how only the sweat of his brow and the pain of a working back were the true ways with which one could lead a holy life, freed from the sin of the past, repentant or not. In those days, Jose took pleasure in the Bible in the way young men are likely to do, his eyes devouring the scenes of sex and violence with a hunger that was only rivaled by the images his mind conjured. It was not that he was a blasphemous witch-horned diabolic, as Father Clara had called them, but that, at the tender age of sixteen he was more fascinated by the naked silhouette of Abigalia Marquez as she, blinds closed, bathed in her living room every night, than in speaking his heart to the Holy God, Father of all that is, who, Francesca Alvarnandez Cervantes had said, never really listened on account of the fact that he’s got a plan and he’s not likely to change it because a little runt like you asks him for some money to buy ice cream. Father Clara had beaten him, of course, when, passing by on his way back to the church from his visit to re-purify the house of the Greek widow living just at the edge of the town, he saw Jose and a few other boys hiding in the bushes spying on the young maid bathing. The whip had hurt, to be sure, but worse were the one thousand rosaries he had been told to say. On the twentieth day after Jose San Cervantes had visited the girl and spent the night, he went blind. That morning, as he woke up,


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he thought, briefly, that the light of the sun had been extinguished and that the Glorious God had ended the world, but then knew better for he could not hear Father Clara and the other priests at the church shouting with joy in the courtyard as he supposed they would welcome the coming of Armageddon. Reaching out in the blackness, he ascertained the existence of the world as his hands touched the now wilted rose he had been given by Isabella as he was being taken away after the fire. His hands saw that his body, too, was whole and solid and still warm. The pain in his crotch had gotten worse and he had decided to go to the doctor to ask what to do. Now he would need help finding his way as his eyes had betrayed him. Standing up, he gently began to explore the world that now seemed elephantine to him, even as it had seemed so tiny the night before. The small room took nine steps to traverse as opposed to the usual four. The door handle eluded him for the briefest of moments as he groped for it. “Help!” He heard himself shouting. “Help!” His ears made out the sound of running footsteps, as he remained propped against the doorway. The priests, seeing the boy had become blind, crossed themselves and counseled that you pray, pray and repent and in your heart of hearts you must cleanse yourself of this sin, my son, or the gaping jaws of hell await your tender flesh to roast in a feast of debauchery. Jose simply asked them to get the doctor. They sat him down on the bed and left Father Clara to watch over him. “How do you feel?” Jose’s head turned towards the voice, and imagined how the


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priest might be sitting. “Blind.” He replied. “What have you done, my son, to deserve this?” After a few minutes of silence he asked again. “Tell me. Confess your sins and perhaps the Lord, in his infinite bounty and grace, will forgive you and give you the use of your eyes once more.” As Jose was about to unrepentantly confess, the voice of a man interrupted him. “I am the doctor,” he said in a thick German accent. With the sound of a bag being opened, the doctor set about examining the teenager. He raised both arms and checked under his armpits and looked at the color of his tongue and smelled his breath. “Father please,” he politely asked the priest to leave the room. With that, the doctor removed Jose’s clothes and, upon seeing the discharge in the boy’s pants, his attention was immediately drawn to the infected penis. “Have you been with a woman recently, boy?” Yes, doctor. “Do you know if she has been with other men?” Yes, doctor. “And has she?” Yes, doctor. Examining the infection, the doctor’s pen made barely audible scratch marks as it moved across the page recording secret notes. “Put your clothes on.” The door to his room opened and closed. Jose, not knowing what was happening, felt around for his pants and pulled them on. Through the door, he heard the doctor explain to the priest that it was obvious he had caught a common bacteria among young people who had started venturing into the territory of impropriety, neisseria gonorrhoeae is its name, and one of the side-effects was, in fact,


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blindness. Yes, there was a cure but it would take a while for it to work. The doctor recommended that the boy take a small dose of silver nitrate every day until the swelling and the infection cleared and then to continue taking it for one week after that. As for the blindness, we never know, in some cases it is temporary and in others permanent but I would be gentle with him Father, for he is more scared now than your God’s righteous rage could ever make him. Thanking him, Father Clara allowed the doctor to leave, opened the door and looked severely at his charge who, unaware of the judgment that was being wrought against him, merely sat on the bed, tasting the air for what his eyes had until then told him. Almost a month passed until the infection had gone away but Jose would remain blind for another two months. To him, days had become relative: it was Thursday until it rained and when it stopped raining it was Saturday. The images of his youth were all he had to keep him company during the long silences when he sat at the feet of Father Clara in the library while the priest read a book and muttered to himself about the blasphemy of the heathens. His world had become one of associated sounds and quick mental sketches where the crunching of a wagon’s wheels on the ground led him to think of the small wagon he had traveled with to the church after the fire or the laughter of a child would be the laughter of the boy with the magnifying glass. The cries of the other orphans, playing outside the church’s courtyard, and the voices of the men and women the priest visited were all attributed to faces that belonged to the people of his memories. Even the doctor, who came once a week to check on the


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infection and to renew the supplies of silver nitrate, had the face of old Doctor Ferdinand and the bag from which the sounds of glass vials clinking against each other emanated was Doctor Ferdinand’s black bag which contained the cure for every disease in the world except for back pains, varicose veins, diarrhea and mild fevers. Jose, in his black world, unknown to anyone, had lost control. It was not a madness derived from his physical ailment but one deeply rooted in his heart. His love for Isabella drove him to humiliation. He wept openly when his nose caught some scent that reminded him of her skin. On some nights, his tears brought rain from the sky and his cries pained the old monk Gabino such that he would have sold his soul so the boy would find peace. He would spend days locked in his room writing wild, illegible notes which he would then burn along with the petals from roses and begonias, hoping against hope that the wind would blow the smoke into whatever room she was in. He could sometimes be found, late at night, in the chapel, playing one of the four songs he knew on the organ with such angelic stupor that many monks and priests living in the church compound would wake thinking that heaven had opened its gates or that perhaps an angel had carelessly fallen and was trying to make his way back into the empyrean. It was during the third month of Jose’s blindness that the gypsy fair visited the town. Through the window in his room the sounds of bagpipes and pan flutes, drums and tambourines and spoon banged kettles poured in that morning, waking him up. Not knowing what was going on, he shouted out to Gabino, who was always in the


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courtyard sitting by the statue of St. Elmo, asking him what in the world was going on. Almost two hundred years ago, though no one knew exact dates, Gabino, a sailor and a Jew, had, over the course of a lifetime, contracted a fascinating concoction of diseases from the shores of Asia Minor, the Orient and the Black Sea and, a month before his sixty-fourth birthday, laid himself down on a straw mat in an old shack on a forgotten beach and prepared for death. He had fallen asleep and was dreaming of a future where ships were made of glass and swords of sea foam when, a little after midnight, Death knocked on the door. Gabino, not one to keep appointments and already fast asleep cradled in his snores, did not answer. Death, his time short and a sizeable list of people to collect in his right breast pocket, decided to postpone the appointment and would return every night for over seven months, the same scene repeating itself over and over, almost tragically, or comically. Every morning, the ailing sailor would wake and curse the fates as only sailors can that he had once more fallen asleep and missed his final hour. It was one particularly stale night that Death, his pudgy accountant’s fingers stopping short of the cabin’s door, resolved that he would no longer put up with this comedy of errors in which he found himself involved and promptly forgot about Gabino, erasing him from both his ledger and the memory of time. The old man, having forced himself to keep awake that night through the use of a chair and a few sharp stakes, saw the first rays of the sun piercing his fragile windows that morning and knew that the end would never come. Sitting in his chair, he


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contemplated what he would do with himself when the idea struck him that he should wash off his diseases in the water of the sea, become a man of the cloth and dedicate the first part of his eternity to St. Elmo, patron saint of sailors. He had moved to what was then a small town, erected a church where no grass would grow and placed the old parish priest in charge of it, preferring that he should have the run of the church while Gabino could busy himself by sculpting a massive statue of his saint. Gabino, having finished his statue many years ago, along with a stool in front of it upon which he perpetually sat, promptly replied to Jose’s confused shouting, “The prophets and their beasts have come to rape us!” Jose later found out that the gypsies had made camp outside the town and were setting up a circus that would remain for a week and would show everyone the splendid wonders of the Jews of Malta and the treasures of the Arabs of the East and the alchemical secrets of Prometheus. Gabino, deciding that the world would not end if he left his stool for a day, offered to take the blind boy to the carnival and guide him around. Father Clara joined them for moral direction. As they reached the gates of the camp the gypsies had set up, a man with the face of a woman, with hair decorated by a diverse species of beads and with honest hands approached them and welcomed them humbly to the grandest and most spectacular of spectaculars. “Inside,” he said, “you will find the dreams of unicorns and the golden wines that soothed the throats of Egyptian gods. For you, my monk, we have the future. And for you Father, we have a patch from


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God’s own robe that was given to us by a holy man in the holy land of Crete. And you, my young boy, might perhaps find what you are looking for.” As they walked among the smoke eyed gypsies whose trinkets and baubles shone with a noonday brightness, the three of them found themselves in front of a large tent with a wooden sign upon which the words, “Tenet of Burebista” were painted. Inside, for five coins each, they were allowed to look upon a man with no memory. Or, in Jose’s case, sit in a different smelling place where the noise was so cacophonous that even the mews of cats sounded foreign. The man with no memory sat on a high-backed chair, gilded out of gold and purple satin. The bearded gypsy beside him told them that this was Burebista, son of Burebista, son of Burebista, and so on who was the son of that ancient Burebista who had conquered and unified the Thracian population from Hercynia in the west to the Bug River in the east and from the northern Carpathian Mountains to Dinoysopolis. He had, with a just hand and the help of his mystical advisor Deceneus, brought laws, ethics and sciences, including physics, alchemy and astronomy to his people. He had sided with Pompey in the struggle against the tyrant Julius Caesar, and later died, through assassination and natural means, in the same year in which the doomed emperor was stabbed to death. It was this very man before them, whose ancestry had entitled him to knowledge beyond human limitation, that knew the secret location of the holy mountain Kagaion in which, it was said, that the Library of Babel was hidden; the alchemical formula for the creation of the philosophers stone, which, when held in front of the sun at the


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correct angle would reveal the location of a secret place; and the secret name of God, which may or may not be thirty-six characters long and may or may not be hidden in the mispronunciation of the tetragrammaton which is found six thousand eight hundred and twenty eight times in the Biblia Hebraica whose meaning is, or at least may or may not be, both “I AM” and “I AM NOT.” Exiting the tent, the two priests and their blind charge were treated to a magical display as a man, not more than four meters away, spun plates on top of long thin sticks and balanced these on strange parts of his body, such as the bridge of his nose, the edge of his shoulder and his protruding chest. The wonderment of such a display took Gabino by unexpected surprise and he, without knowing it, uttered, “This is a wise man.” Jose, trying to focus his hearing past the oooh’s and aah’s of the gathered crowd, could smell the hot friction between the spinning plates and the sticks. As they observed the mystical performance, an old gypsy soundlessly flew about the air on a magic carpet and threw down pieces of cheese to the chickens so they would not follow him about. Father Clara, dragging Jose along, searched for the piece of cloth from God’s robe. What he found was an old woman covered only in a tattered robe sitting on a fraying cushion. Her face was covered by an odd circular tattoo, which covered her whole flesh, the priest would shamefully find out later as she removed her garments, revealing her fallen bitch’s teats and loose skin, and kissed Jose on the lips. As they entered the small tent the priest asked in a whisper what wonders were sold here. “Only what you want,” the old woman


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responded. Father Clara, not having the patience for such games, exited the tent, pulling Jose’s cord so the boy would follow but found that the knot had become loose. The boy remained still as the old woman stood up and hobbled over to him. She caressed his face gently, encircled her arms around his waist and began to lightly weep. Jose could feel her leathery skin against his shirt and would always remain haunted by the way she smelled of pork meat, salted and smoked and dried and hung up for preservation in a windowless cellar. The priest became acutely aware that he could neither move nor speak. He remained a statue as he watched the old woman guide the boy into the middle of the tent, remove his clothes and lay him down on the bed of cushions. She too removed her robe and set it aside. Softly, with a voice much like that of a willow tree, she asked him what he wanted. To see, he said hoarsely, although there are some accounts from gypsies whose tents were within hearing distance which note that the tormented young man had, in fact, said, “to see her.” “If you wish to see, you must merely decide to do so.” So Jose closed his eyes, made up his mind to see, opened his eyes and saw. He was in the middle of a field, laying down in the grass and staring at the stars and Father Clara was a few feet away, weeping.


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Anecdotes… As the sun set, the tribe gathered around the fire. This was the third day of the spirit feast and the spirit ceremony was about to begin. The orange and blue flames gave the elaborate costumes of the tribe members sharp shadows and made them seem more savage than they were. All wore costumes: the men, the women, the children, even the infants. They had been carefully made under the shaman’s supervision to protect the tribe members from the spirits that would be manifest that night. To confuse them, he said, to trick them into thinking you are one of them so they may let those outside the spirit tent live. The platform that housed the shaman and the council of the Elders stood in the middle of the village, used for this purpose once a year, and now filled with food, sacrifices, incenses and animal skulls. When the sun disappeared, he, whom they call Loquenkaque, leader of the tribe, son of Loquenkaque, son of the tribe leaders before him, all named Loquenkaque, stood and began to chant a song that had been passed down through the ages that gave their shaman permission, for this night only, to talk to the ancient spirits of their forefathers. His voice was deep and rang clear in the night. His


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rhythmic chanting was complemented by the crackling of the fire. His words spoke of their tribe’s history and their hardships and their victories and of the time that the ancient ancestors had punished them with a black-spotted death for not observing the ancient traditions. When the song ended, the old shaman, named Death by long established custom, stood from the platform and summoned Loquenkaque and the Elders to the spirit tent where they might ask their ancestors for guidance. As they approached the tent, the shaman turned and threw his fist into the air releasing a glowing dust on the rest of the villagers. “Wait for us here, until the morning,” he advised, “and only when we have spoken with our ancestors and the sun rises once more can you move from this spot, else you risk being taken by one of the ancestors spirits to the land beyond life.” This was the longest night of the year. On this night, Death, Loquenkaque and the Elders not only asked for guidance but also asked the ancestors to give the sun strength enough that it may rise once more into the sky so that darkness would not forever swallow the earth. At the door of the spirit tent, Loquenkaque and the Elders removed their costumes and their tunics. Only Death could face the ancestors in his bear cloak. All others would face them as they were born. They all grabbed mud from the ground and placed it upon their skin. Death grabbed a bucket and handed it to the Elders. Each reached inside and grabbed a frog, which they then began to rub across their chests so that they may be portals for the spirits to


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manifest themselves through. Loquenkaque, as the tribe leader and the maker of requests would go in without this protection and would come out only if the spirits judged him worthy to continue leading. He only drank a juice prepared by Death to keep his mind clear so that he may see the spirits. At Death’s command, they entered. Inside the large tent, a fire had already been lit. They all sat down on the ground. Death poured water on the heated rocks, creating steam. As the steam rose, it was pushed back down towards the ground by the treated sides of the tent. Death began to recite the incantations of the ritual. He continued pouring water on the rocks. Soon the entire tent was covered with steam making it extremely difficult to see. And then, Death slumped over and his body, shaking and sweating, began to emit a shrill sound. Loquenkaque knew that this was the ancestors having taken the shaman’s soul so that they may inhabit his body for a brief time. The tent, still only a moment before, began to shake violently. The Elders began to moan and yell and make animal noises. It seemed like the fire began taking the shape of animals. Above them, the steam took the shape of his ancestors’ faces, though they were distorted, as though looking at them through water. And then, a strange voice. “Loquenkaque…… speak… be heard…… listen…… know………” Outside, the village had seen the men enter into the tent and they had seen the strange shapes that rose up and clawed at the tent


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canvas. They cried in fear when they saw the tent begin to shake violently. Their ears strained to head what was being spoken but they could only make out strange sounds coming from inside the tent. The life-mates of the Elders feared for the lives of the men they loved. And so, they all sat by the fire, as Death had told them, and hoped that Loquenkaque would be able to make the sun rise once more so that they did not have to forever sit by the fire. What seemed an eternity later, Loquenkaque emerged from the tent, his naked body glistening with sweat in the cold night air. He was soon followed by the Elders. Death did not emerge. They stood at the tent and waited patiently. Soon, the sun rose and when the village saw its red outline against the horizon, they cheered wildly. One by one, they removed their costumes and threw them into the fire, feeding its roaring flames and shedding their fears for another year. One by one they stripped naked and ran to the river to bathe in the cold waters of a new day. Loquenkaque and the Elders returned to the platform and covered themselves with their new tunics, which had been arranged for them. They sat down and prepared to keep vigil over the sun for the next three days. The spirit festival would continue until the third day, when, if the long darkness had not returned, they would return to their normal lives. *** Too old, he thought. I’m getting too old for this. Death, alone in his tent, began to remove the hidden poles that had allowed him to shake the tent. He carefully replaced them in the tent structure so that no one would notice when they came inside for


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a remedy. His throat was sore from having to make strange sounds all night. His skin, too, felt heavy after sitting in steam for so long. Careful not to spread it in the air, the old shaman sealed the powder he had placed in Loquenkaque’s drink. He grunted with effort as he lifted the water bucket and moved it to its proper place. As he bent over to put it down, Death caught his reflection in the water. He almost didn’t recognize the lined face that stared back. Too old, he thought. I’m getting too old for this.


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The Greatest Show on Earth: Part I It was called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Everyone who had seen it had agreed that it most certainly was. The things they had seen Petulengro de Acuña do could only be magic. The newspaper review said that this critic has never been left so utterly amazed and impressed that the writing of this review was perhaps the most difficult task he had tried to do. Jose and Isabella arrived at the theater an hour before the show began. He was dressed in his Sunday best with a white shirt, black shorts and vest and an oversized black tie. Isabella wore a form fitting silk dress with a yellow and red floral pattern. The lacy details moved as a gentle warm breeze blew down the street. The front of the theater was filled with people and it seemed to Jose that the whole town had come to see the show. Keeping his promise, Jose bought a small bag of popcorn and a bottle of cola for Isabella with a few coins he had been given by Francesca Alvarnandez Cervantes. They purchased their tickets and entered the theater hall where the majestic red curtain was lit up by a bluish green spotlight.


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Walking down the aisles, they found their seats and settled in. All around them, seats were filling up with people talking excitedly about what they would see, or old friends meeting each other for the second time that day and talking about the weather. A few rows down Jose could see a couple sitting, the young man’s arm around his pretty young girl and his mouth by her ear whispering things to her. Jose recognized his top-hat as the one he had used the week before. Suddenly, the theater went black. A drumroll began. “Ladies annnnnnnnnnd gentlemen!” The theater owner exclaimed from his box with a shrill cricket’s voice. “Please welcome a man who has been to the Indian mountains and learnt the magical secrets of the fakirs! Please put your hands together for a man who has been to the temples of China and conversed with dragons! Please stand up for a man who has been to the Spanish coast and has settled disputes between pirate lords and kings! Ladies and gentleman, I give you the man who has made a pact with the Greek gods and mastered death! I give you the man whose name strikes such fear in the hearts of villains and mortal men that even the King’s Musketeers bow to him out of respect! I give you… the amazing! The miraculous! The great! Petulengro de Acuña!” The curtain opened. The spotlights fixed their gaze upon the center of the stage. Everyone gasped. “Behold,” cried the man in the center of the stage, “the very sword of Damocles!” The man was dressed in a very formal black tuxedo with a


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neatly pressed white shirt with frills and topped with a bow tie. His hands were covered by form fitting white gloves and his wing-tipped shoes shone with a fresh coat of polish. His face was rather lean, gaunt even, with a thin, long, carefully waxed handlebar moustache decorating his upper lip and a small goatee on his chin. His lips were thin. His cheeks, angular and raw-boned. His nose was hooked. His eyes seemed both too large and too small for his face but Isabella was certain that they were undeniably too close together. His forehead was partly covered by his thin shoulder length hair. His voice was too loud for his body. “The very sword that Dionysius, the Tyrant of Syracuse, hung over the head of Damocles with only a strand of hair from a horse’s tail! This is the sword that is above me now!” Petulengro de Acuña was chained to a section of a brick wall, his arms and feet spread wide to prevent any escape. Above him hung a large sword with an ornate golden handle. It hung by a string through a loop a meter above the magician’s head. The end of the string was tied to a brick and placed on the stage floor to the left of the brick wall. Underneath the string on another small stack of bricks was a lit candle slowly burning the string until it would be too weak to support the weight of the sword. The audience could already see the smoke as the string was being alighted. No one made a sound as all were terrified that this man would die before them, brutally impaled by a sword in a death trap of his own making. “Damocles was allowed to live both by fate and by the tyrant. But should he have not been so lucky that day, his story might have


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been a more tragic one. In my travels of the world, I once met an Indian magician who had learnt how to move without moving. And it is this miracle, that I will now present you with.” As he spoke, a beautiful woman wearing a dress made of blue velvet, detailed with silver sequins, walked onto the stage holding a large white cloth. As Petulengro de Acuña continued speaking, she covered his body with the cloth carefully showing everyone that there was no way for the magician to escape, checking his iron chains and the solid brick wall. “I ask for complete silence, ladies and gentlemen. I must concentrate now for this most difficult of wonders.” As the woman stepped away, the sword dropped an inch, the audience gasping. Jose saw a woman in the front row faint out of her chair. The assistant grabbed a large trunk from behind the brick wall and dragged it to the right. She opened the lid, and, tipping the trunk toward the audience, showed everyone that it was indeed empty. She closed the lid with a large thud and, at the same time, the weakened string broke. Jose saw the sword falling through the air. It seemed to take an eternity as it began to spin in the air on its way down. Slowly the tip reached the top of the white cloth, where Petulengro de Acuña’s head was. Effortlessly it cut through and continued its decent for another four inches, until it stopped. For ten seconds, not a single person in the theater breathed. Suddenly, the lid of the trunk opened and Petulengro de Acuña stood. Wild applause erupted in the theater. This was what


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they had come to see. The magician ran his hands through his hair to get it out of his face and, with a shake of his hand he caused a top hat to appear. Somehow, in his other hand he was unexpectedly holding a white-tipped black cane. Petulengro de Acuña bowed deeply. The audience stood, groups of people at a time, and continued clapping. Petulengro de Acuña smiled back at them. Jose’s grin could barely fit on his face. Isabella too, was standing and clapping. She looked down at the boy and tousled his hair. For a moment, Jose saw Petulengro de Acuña slightly turn to look at the beautiful woman on stage with him, her blond hair shining in the bright spotlight, and wink at her. She smiled back at him.


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0:42:11 Sitting in the train cabin on my way to meet Lord Crowley, my body guard dutifully, almost respectfully, watching my every move, I remembered the first night Charlotte had told me the story of the Knights Templar. The landscape, passing by in a blur, almost hypnotically sent me back to that night at the café in Rio, the year we had graduated from university and decided to spend the summer touring the South American coast, where the sultry heat, the sounds of “Garota de Ipanema” played by a local band and the couple dancing the fandango in the middle of the street filled the air with nostalgia. I was drinking a cup of hot black coffee and she had surprised me with a kiss from behind. Excitement sparkled in her eyes as she told me she thought she had found a clue. “I think I’ve done it, Umberto,” she told me excitedly. “Done what?”


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“You know I’ve been fascinated, since I was a young girl, with the Knights Templar and at university I had unprecedented access to history literature from which I could construct the history of the Order.” “And?” “I think I found out their secret!” She began: “Everyone knows that after the First Crusade captured Jerusalem, the Holy Land became filled with pilgrims visiting the sacred sites located there. Jerusalem itself was safe, under the control of the armies, but the rest of the Outremer was not and bandits freely plundered pilgrims on their way from the coastline at Jaffa to the Holy Land. Two French knights, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, offered a solution to the problem: they would create a monastic order that would take up arms in the defense of the pious. At their request, King Baldwin II of Jerusalem allowed them to set up their headquarters in the southeastern portion of the Temple Mount, inside of the Al Aqsa Mosque and, since the Temple Mount was the site of biblical King Solomon’s Temple, they took the name ‘The Poor Knights of the Temple of King Solomon.’ “Okay,” I said, not wanting to intrerrupt. “For the first ten years or so, we know little of the order. There was the Latin Rule with seventy-two clauses that defined the ideal behavior for the knights such as the garments they were required to wear, the types of physical contacts they were allowed, the meals they could eat and so on. They were, you see, ardently defended from any criticism by Bernard of Clairvaux who legitimized


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the taking up of the sword to protect God’s innocent sheep. The Templar’s official seal, two men riding on a single horse, was symbolic of the vow of poverty each knight would take upon joining the order. Anyway, after they were sanctioned by the church at the Council of Troyes, they became quite well known throughout Europe and their financial situation became highly prosperous. Anyone joining the Order was required to willingly relinquish all his wealth, land, businesses and business interests to the Order. In fact, at the height of their power, when the Templars were maybe fifteen to twenty-something thousand strong, I think that only a tenth of that number were fighting knights; the rest formed the core support system: accountants, clergy, squires, stable hands and so on. By 1139, Pope Innocent II issues the papal bull Omne Datum Optimum giving the Order unprecedented freedom: they could pass freely through any border, owned taxes to no state and were subject to no-one’s authority except that of the Pope. The Order had, at this time, spread throughout all of Europe with chapters being established in France, Englad, Scotland, Spain and even Portugal. “You have to understand, the Templars were the elite fighters of their day: with the financial backbone to be provided with the best armor and weapons along with intensive training in warfare and tactics, the Templars were the deciding force in many battles and they were often found leading a charge with their special formations, or remaining at the back of a battle, protecting their allies from ambushes. It is not just that they were good fighters, Umberto, they were holy warriors whose greatest glory was to be martyred on the


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battlefield, warriors who were not allowed to retreat unless they were outnumbered three-to-one and then, only by the order of their commander or if they witnessed the Templar flag be brought down. Bernard de Clairvaux wrote of the qualities of the Order noting that a Templar knight “is truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armor of faith, just as his body is protected by the armor of steel. He is thus doubly armed,” he said, “and need fear neither demons nor men.” Throughout the time that they are active, we find the Templars fighting alongside King Louis VII of France, King Richard I of England, fighting in the Spanish and Portuguese Reconquista and then suddenly, one year, around 1180, they begin to screw up: Grand Masters joining battles and putting forth terribly flawed plans, a number of tactical mistakes that only blind men would make are made, Gerard de Ridefort, a Grand Master of the Order, gets himself captured and does not die fighting as the Latin Rule requires, but surrenders himself and relinquishes Gaza to Saladin in exchange for freedom, the losing of Jerusalem, the Battle of Jaffa, even losing the Siege of Acre and being forced to relocate their headquarters to the island of Cyprus. What happened, I ask.” “What did happen?” “Well, partly it’s related to their financial activities. There was no such thing as banks back then and this put the Order in a particularly favorable position. Their wealth had become so vast that they began to lend money, and, circumventing the church law of no charging of interest by finding a loophole through which they could


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charge for interest in the form of rent, their holdings grew immensely. Pilgrims could give the Order in France some of their wealth in the form of money or land or what have you and would receive, in return, a coded message that detailed their account. As the pilgrims traveled throughout the continent, they could visit various chapter houses and, presenting the letter, could then withdraw money as they needed thus saving them both bag space and, more importantly, increasing their security on the road for a pilgrim traveling with no valuables was not a particularly suitable target for bandits. Finally, before their decline, they had become so wealthy that they were in a position to lend monarchies money and, indeed, this proved to be their downfall. “The young King of France, Philip IV, inherited a kingdom that was in deep financial trouble. He proceeded to borrow exorbitant sums of money from the Templars until, he had gotten into such debt with them that paying the money back was not something he wished to do. So, he decided that the Order of the Knights Templar needed to be destroyed and ordered Pope Boniface VIII to excommunicate them. The Pope, to assert that he was in fact the Vicar of Christ and had absolute authority over earthly power, issued a bull that stated as much and excommunicated the king instead. After a short kidnapping which led to the pope’s death and the selection of a new pope, the non-Italian Bertrand de Goth, a childhood friend of Philip, the previous excommunication was lifted and the papacy suddenly agreed to conduct an investigation of the Templars. “King Philip, apparently not appeased, and under the pretext


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that he did not wish to settle his accounts with the now obviously, he claimed, heretical Order, mandated on Friday, October 13, 1307, that all the Knights Templar in France be seized and, at the hands of the Holy Inquisition, be tortured until they confessed. Though they were given specific instructions that no blood was to be drawn, this was of course largely ignored except for the more public sessions where, for example, a knights feet were burnt until the bones snapped which was perfectly acceptable for all blood would have evaporated in the heat of the flames. Eventually, most of the knights confessed to heresy, spitting, trampling and urinating on the cross, kissing other men on the lips, navel and base of the spine while naked, contempt of the Holy Mass and denial of the sacraments, even to worshipping the Baphomet, a creature with the head of a goat, the upper body of a woman, cloven feet, a perverse pair of angelic wings, a candle on its head, and a symbol of revelation combining male sexual potency with the four elements and intelligence. After sufficient bulling from the French king, the Pope eventually issued the Pastoralis Praeeminentiae bull ordering all Christian monarchs to arrest all Templars and confiscate their assets. Several years later, the French Pope dissolved the Knights Templar. And that’s where official history, so to speak, ends. “But there’s several questions left unanswered: why did King Philip personally invite the last Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, a friend of his, to be a pallbearer at the funeral of the King’s sister on October 12, 1307, the day before the arrests? Why did the mass majority of the Knights Templar recant their confessions after


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de Molay, before being burnt at the stake, denied his confession, calling it a forced lie, and asked to be burnt facing the Notre Dame Cathedral with his hands tied in such a manner that he could pray as flames cracked open his skin? Why did the Templars suddenly become so sloppy in their military exploits? Why were certain Templar possessions left alone or when all the assets of the Order were seized, why were such loose ends left like the inexplicable disappearance of the fleet of 18 ships which, on the evening of October twelfth, was in port at La Rochelle and, on the morning of October the thirteenth, had vanished when the King’s men had arrived to capture them? More importantly, why, after all the scandal that was caused by the trials did the Templars simply seem to disappear off the face of the planet? “Another strange fact: as he burnt at the stake, the defiant Grand Master Jacques de Molay is known to have said, “Within one year, God will summon both Clement and Philip to His Judgement for these actions.” Curiously enough, Pope Clement died a month afterwards and King Philip was tragically killed later that year in a hunting accident. “Well, looking into it carefully I’ve discovered several things: first, they did not disappear, they merely integrated themselves within other societies and orders and, slowly but surely, began to control them. There exist records of other orders of the time that accepted into their ranks former Templars and adopted Templar symbols as well as receiving certain pieces of a secret treasure the Knights Templar supposedly guarded: the Teutonic Knights, the Hospitallers,


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the Rosicrucians, the Cathars, and later the Priory of Sion, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the Hermetics, the Ebionites, and the Rex Deus, all have tenuous links to the secret knowledge of the lost relics and gospels of James the Just, the true history of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, the Judas Testament, King Solomon, Moses, Hiram Abif and the undeniable mysteries of ancient Egypt and beyond. There are certain historical links which tie seemingly unrelated locations to each other: the Rosslyn Chapel and Orphir Church in Scotland, the Trinity Church in New York, the Temple Bruer in Lincolnshire, the Holy Sepulcher in Cambridge, the Royston Cave under the crossroads formed by Icknield Way and Ermine Street, the Castle of Barbera in Spain, the Round Church of Lanleff in France, the Convento de Cristo in Portugal and the Well of Souls in Jerusalem. All these clues are like markers, I thought, markers pointing the way to something. “And, Umberto, I think I know what it was, the Treasure of the Knights Templar. And I think I know where it is. And it’s not just me, my love, but there are others, far more dangerous, looking for the treasure.” “Dangerous?” I asked. “Well obviously there are many people fascinated by the story, just like me, in search of clues or something else. But, there is one man in particular. Lord Byron Crowley, is his name. He is the descendant, indirectly, as in, his bloodline is a bastard’s one, not pure, of the Merovingian dynasty. They, of course, knew of the secrets being protected by the Order of the Knights Templar and were, in


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fact, protectors of that same secret themselves. You see, the Merovingian’s were a Salian Frankish dynasty that was, at a certain point in their history, betrayed and murdered by Pepin the Short with the aid of the Catholic Church and replaced with the Carolingian dynasty. Now the Merovingian’s may not have had direct rule after their downfall, but they certainly had power since every Carolingian king, starting with Charlemagne, married a Merovingian princess. And why did the betrayal happen? Many scholars toy with the old “san greal, sang real,” theory saying that the Merovingian line protected the blood in their veins that was descended directly from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. But that’s not it; that was just a cover story, of sorts. The Merovingian’s were the “sang real,” the real holy blood, the ones chosen by the Templars, to protect the “san greal,” the real holy grail, the treasure of the Templars. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, someone had fathered an illegitimate child and spilled the secret to that branch of the family and Lord Crowley is the eventual result of that line. He knows more than most and he knows the truth behind history. And he wants the Holy Grail at any cost because you see, of what the Holy Grail really is.” And now, fifteen years later, that story has caught up to Charlotte and me and we will both be witness to the unthinkable as Lord Crowley will discover… I can’t even think about it.


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42 The meal had been quite excellent and cooked with great taste. As he took a sip of wine, allowing it to flow down his throat, relishing the taste, he listened to Professor Lope who, in between his last bites of lamb and baked potatoes, was finishing a story. “So you see, he struggled in the fields each day, his body naked in the scorching sun, drenched in his own salty sweat and covered with dry, burning dust, his aching, blistered hands picking the cotton from sunrise to sunset and loading it in the wagon, piece by piece. At night, he would hook the horses to the wagon and, tired as he was, he rode toward the gin, his wagon having accumulated such a load now that it creaked under its own weight. He reached the crossroads and pondered a moment: he could take the north road, the paved road: longer but better; he could take the east road, a dusty beaten path: shorter but filled with chuckholes; he could take the


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west road, through the mountains: beautiful but more perilous. But does it matter, I ask you? For when he reaches the gin, the man does not ask which road he took; instead he asks, ‘Brother, how good is your cotton?’” The small group chuckled. It was a typical story of Professor Lope’s. Night had fallen and a few lights had been lit in the cream colored room. Though it was dark and late, the ground was still hot from the sun and the warm air from the earth rose with enthusiasm to meet the perspiring brows of any and all. The apartment in which Jose San Cervantes found himself belonged to Senior Rogelio, a former professor of his and now a retired member of the University of Argentina. The five of them, Senior Rogelio, Professor Lope, Mamade Prudencia, Teobaldo DeGuerrera and Jose San Cervantes had started meeting every Friday at a different house to share cooking recipes, conversation and their passion for knowledge. This particular Friday, however, was special. In his well known academic obsession with finding the location of the mythical Library of Babel, an “archeologists’ delusional nightmare” a journal had once called the venture, Professor Jose San Cervantes’ plane had, on a recent trip, crashed on an island from which he was later rescued. The incident had gathered the attention of the international news community and, during his absence, the Professor had become an overnight celebrity whose passion and obsession with a figment of cultural imagination and folklore was something to be praised, especially in the terms of his unyielding faith in the object of his search, rather than scoffed at.


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This Friday was special because it was the first time since the crash that the five friends had convened. In the tradition they had established, that evening was Professor Jose San Cervantes’ turn to entertain them with some piece of literature or some story that would give everyone at the table something to think about, argue, and to which they could apply their acumen to. “I think perhaps you are wondering what I will talk about tonight. I would like to talk to you about the crash and I would like to tell you the things that I spoke of to no one else. Not the men who rescued me. Not the media. Not even the journal I keep. I will tell you these things in confidence, and you may almost consider this a confession, of sorts, a confession of a sin against the very fabric of the world, perhaps. Aside from the obvious, you are all aware that I am quite lucid and not prone to the flights of fantasy of young men in the grips of love. As such, my words may seem extraordinary, but I assure you they are the very truth that keeps me awake some nights. “The first thing I have omitted speaking of to anyone else was the manner of the crash. Now then, I will detail this out for you so that you may understand the strange circumstances that led to my arriving on that island. You all know that my plane, a small pistonpowered Cessna, painted a bright orange with blue detailing and black wings tips, crashed on the way back from my recent expedition. It was at some point in the middle of the flight when the pilot informed me that we were experiencing a sort of interference with our navigation instruments and that he would veer slightly off course to get out of the anomaly. Well, as soon as we had cleared the clouds


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we encountered another plane, similar to ours, but painted white with red detailing and a strange symbol in black on its tail. By encountered I mean to say that we were almost about to crash and that my pilot, and theirs, both quickly changed direction. Unfortunately it was too late and our wings collided sending both planes down towards the ocean. I did not see what had become of the other plane but from my location in the water after our crash, I could see a large black column of smoke rising a good distance away. How both the pilot and I survived that terrible plummet towards the water I cannot say. At the time, the fear and excitement was much too great for me to pay attention to this detail. It was only when I was floating in the water, hanging on to some debris and holding the injured pilot as best I could, that I saw the utter wreckage of the plane covering at least a few square miles around us. “For three days I was in the water. The pilot, in his injured state, did not make it past the first. In flight, until we had encountered the strange clouds, I can say with certainty that the weather was clear and the azure water revealed no landmasses to us since our smooth take-off from the airport. And yet, ahead of me, maybe two hours swim, was an island. This is the same island upon which I was found, four months after the crash. “Now, my first thought was to walk around the entire island and see whether or not there were other inhabitants, a sensible thing to do, given my position. I left a marker at the spot from where I began, two large sticks stuck upright into the sand, and headed out. I commenced my journey, exhausted though I was, a few hours after


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sunrise, perhaps close to noon, and reached the spot I had left just as the sun was setting. I had found no inhabitants on the island but did manage to pick-up a few coconuts, which I then, with considerable difficulty, opened and consumed. My first few days on the island, like I have already told the news jackals, were busy building shelter, a signal fire, and fashioning some crude tools to hunt with. Following that, I spent my time on the island making frequent trips inland to hunt for boar or any other creatures I could find while trying to ignore the smell of burning sand that penetrated deep in my nostrils. The one hundred and eight days were quite difficult but somehow I managed to make it through alive until a merchant ship passed by whose captain, by some incredible stroke of luck, I thought at the time, decided he wanted to go ashore for a few hours and found me. I was rescued and returned to the world, almost from the dead the news would have you believe, and the rest of the story, you know. “The second thing I didn’t tell the authorities is the full account of the mechanism by which I found myself rescued from the island. About three months had passed since I had been stranded alone on that tropical prison and was sure that death would soon find me when one day, on one of my frequent trips inland, I chanced upon a large box. To be honest, I could not even begin to give you its dimensions for it seemed to me, either because it was the truth or because my weakened mind made it seem so, that the box was many sizes and shapes at the same time. Walking up to it, I could not mistake the material from which it was built, that is to say, ice. How a cabin with its walls and ceiling made of ice did not melt in the


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suffocating heat I cannot explain, as I cannot explain many of the things that happened. Walking about it, touching its walls, I could find neither an entrance nor a crack in the perfectly smooth surfaces. Disturbed, I fled back to my hut on the beach by the tree line. “I did not leave the beach for almost three weeks. I only ate fish and coconuts so as not to go hunting in the jungle. While the daily struggle for survival occupied my body, my mind was turning the problem of the box over and over. As an archeologist, I could not find any explanation for how it came to be there, who could have built it, what purpose it could have served and how it persisted in its almost stubborn existence. Approaching the problem from a mathematical view, or a scholarly one or any other view that I might have tried, I could arrive at no answer. Finally, in my desperation, I came to the only reasonable and sensible conclusion I could draw. “Here was my reasoning: ancient Sumerian texts often relate of the gaining of knowledge and power through the use of some sort of mystical device which frequently manifests itself in shape of a box of knowledge or a box in which the heroes must lie and pass a test. In fact, the legend of Sergon, first ruler of the Akkadian Empire around the twenty-third century, before Christ of course, notes that the king’s vast knowledge could be traced to his time in the box his changeling mother had put him in as a young boy and set him adrift a stormy river. The ancient Egyptians, a superstitious but practical people, believed in the possible existence of the coffin of Osiris, in which Isis had arranged his dismembered pieces and resurrected the ancient god. I remembered, then, the well known story from Japan of


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one Urashima Taro, who, in his travels encounters a mysterious box named Tamatebako, inside of which his old age is locked; opening it, he, predictably, ages and gains wisdom. The Greeks too have their own legend of the box in the famous anecdote of Pandora’s box, which, in truth, was probably a jar as that is what the Greeks would have been familiar with at that time. “With these historical clues scattered about my memory, I began to build a framework in which it seemed to me that this box was one that had existed since the dawn of mankind, or at least of time, and that it was, strange as it may sound, a magic box. What, I thought, was the goal of such a box? I resolved not to answer that question for the prospect of contemplating box thoughts kept me awake for two nights. It was about a week and a half after I had discovered the box itself, that I discovered its purpose. You see, this magic box, I understood, would grant the person touching it one wish. And in that discovery lay a great dilemma: in making a wish, what would I choose: to be rescued or to finally know the location of the Library of Babel? As I sat on the hot sand reflecting on my choice, the answer came to me in the form of an inflatable boat manned by the captain of the merchant vessel by way of which my rescue was to be achieved. He informed me in broken Spanish that he had received a letter approximately four months ago which gave him instructions to sail to that particular island and explore it for anything worth finding. It became apparent to me that at some point in the future I would choose to wish for my rescue, which would lead to the discovery of the location of the island by someone four months ago, as


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I would be getting ready for my flight home, and the hiring of a boat to go on an exploratory expedition which would last until I chose to make my wish to be rescued. It was clear that time had made a slight error, allowing the captain to find the island before I had made my wish. So, to rectify the situation and set everything on the correct path, I asked the captain to wait a moment, hurried through the jungle to the magic box, placed my hand upon its boiling surface, wished that I would be rescued and hurried back to the beach so that it could be so. “And that my friends, is how I came to be rescued. I’m sure you all have questions and I assure you that I cannot answer them. I do know that the secret of the island must die with the telling of this story so I entreat you to retreat this evening, meditate on what I have told you, and then, promptly, forget about it. I myself do not know the location of the island and, as I have read in the newspaper, in a tragic turn of events, the captain of my rescue vessel, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding in a game of cards involving a family fortune and the ship of an ancient mariner, was set on fire by his first mate who, unknown to either of them, was his illegitimate son by a pretty young girl he had met in Singapore.”


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Anecdotes… “Bring them in!” the Countess’ shrill voice rang out, reaching the girls ears a few rooms down the grand hall. Anna could hear a group of people coming for them. She could not imagine what was happening. Why she was in chains with twenty-eight other girls. A few women down the line, she could see her closest friend since childhood, Katalin, with whom she had come to the castle. The Countess’ chaplain had been in town five days ago, looking to hire a few young women to work at the castle. He promised them good wages and a room to sleep in. When he hired Anna and Katalin, he had brought them to the castle in a coach saving them from walking all the way there. But when they arrived at the castle, he had merely ordered the guards that the two of them be thrown into the dungeon. Not knowing what they had done wrong, Anna told Katalin to keep quiet until they found out more.


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What they found for the next four days was not why they had been jailed, but only an endless row of men taking their turns at grabbing them, penetrating them, spitting on them, treating them worse than whores. Katalin was two years younger than Anna and far prettier. In chains, her golden strawberry blond hair was caked with mud and semen. Not even her black and purple bruises and the mask of terror she wore on her face could hide her sharp feminine features. Her body, in the bloom of youth, was now swollen with bruises from being kicked and punched and forced into unnatural positions. That first night, Anna had told Katalin not to fight because it would only make it worse. But Anna fought. Anna fought. She kicked and screamed and bit and clawed. And it only made it worse. The men considered her a challenge. At least they wouldn’t all gang up on Katalin. She knew she couldn’t win. Not when she couldn’t stand up straight from the blows to her head. Not when she couldn’t claw anymore because of her broken arm. But she fought. One man, at least, would never touch a woman again. They knocked out her teeth after that. But he would remember her. He was her victory. The door opened. It was the chaplain followed by ten armored men. He grabbed the chain and walked out the door. The men’s swords prodded, making sure all the girls moved. The chaplain took them down the grand hall. The men’s eyes looked each woman over carefully. They were all naked but had lost their shame along with their dignity and freedom. The chaplain stopped in front of a set of massive oak doors. Carved in the door was a grand mountain. At the


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foot of the mountain were a few figures, all tall, half naked, proud, strong. One man, in the middle, held thunderbolts. Another, a hammer. Another was a woman. She carried a shield and had donned an elaborate helmet. Her body was feminine and betrayed a proud nobility, a strong spirit, a fighter’s soul. Lost in her thoughts, Anna did not even see the punch coming. “Eyes down, whore!” She could barely make out what the man had said as she struggled to remain on her feet. Suddenly, she was moving, being pulled along by the chain and led into a large bathhouse, all made of marble. Inside, Anna could make out a few servants waiting in a corner, each holding buckets of water. The marble floors felt cold on her feet. The pulling had stopped. “Wash them,” the chaplain ordered the servants. Hurrying with their buckets and cloths, they reached the chain of women and began washing each with wet cloths. When one was clean, they removed her from the chain and took her towards the window, lining them up and telling them to stay. The ten armored men grinned at each other, commenting on the women. When it was Anna’s turn, the world almost went black. The servants washed her body, their strong wipes with the rags pressing her bruises and her broken limbs. As they lifted her arms to wash her armpits, she felt a soft crack in her forearm. As they parted her legs to wash in-between them she heard a popping sound coming from her hips. And then she felt lighter. Opening her eyes, Anna saw her


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hands and feet without the chain. She felt herself be moved toward the other women, who were lined up. She was told to stand there. And for the first time, she noticed that there was a woman by the window. She was dressed in a rich, dark purple gown, embroidered with gold and crimson detailing. Her hair was all curled but let loose and given shape by her tiara. She sat calmly, watching the proceedings. “All done, Countess.” Anna heard the chaplain say. The Countess stood up, slowly, placed her glass on the golden table beside her and began walking down the small set of steps in front of the window. “Bow to the Countess, you whores,” screamed the chaplain. “They are all… impregnated?” she asked softly as she walked down the line of women. “Every last one Countess.” “I’m sure you all absolutely enjoyed your time with my men, my dear girls, but, fact of the matter is, I have other plans for you.” As she walked, she would touch a woman’s arm or stomach, she would grab a woman’s breast or jaw, inspecting, feeling and then moving on. “You see, our Lord God has spared us for another century and can you believe it, we find ourselves in the year of Our Lord, sixteen hundred. And in a few short months, I myself will reach a milestone in my life. I will be forty, you see.” The Countess had reached Anna. She grabbed Anna’s face and pulled her close.


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“Oh, I was once young and naturally beautiful, like you.” Slowly, the Countess stuck out her tongue and licked Anna’s lower lip sending waves of spastic pain through her. “But even the most beautiful and perfumed roses wilt in time.” A sharp slap followed. “And that’s why you’re here girls. You’re here to help preserve this rose.” Smiling, the Countess looked at the chaplain. “Do it.” The chaplain looked at the ten men and nodded. They drew their swords and began grabbing women out of the line. Some screamed. Some didn’t. The men took them to the large bathtub in the center of the bathhouse. Some of the women, held by their hair fought back, trying to escape, trying to save themselves. Some of the women remained as limp as possible, knowing their fate was inevitable. They were placed with their chests against the sides of the bathtub and then, in one slice, the men cut open their throats, waited until the bodies had stopped moving and left them so that the blood could drain into the bathtub. They came back for more girls. Katalin was one of the them this time. As they took her, her blue eyes met Anna’s. Her eyes were wet but no tears fell. She smiled at Anna. The man grabbed her breast and gave her nipple a hard squeeze, his steel glove piercing the skin and letting a drop of blood fall onto the marble floor. Anna couldn’t hear anymore. She could barely see Katalin through the men. But she heard the swords slicing through the women’s throats. Countess Báthory watched as the last of the women were taken to be killed. She motioned for the servants to approach. They,


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obediently, did. Each knowing their task, they set about their work. One began undoing the laces of her gown. One began removing jewelry from her fingers. In the midst of this, the chaplain, having seen to it that the bathtub had been filled with blood, ordered the men to take the bodies away. One by one they were tossed out through a secret passageway. Another servant had finished tying up the Countesses hair in a bun. As the men withdrew and sentries were posted outside the doors, the chaplain sat down on a chair in a corner. The servants removed the heavy gown and began washing her naked body with silk cloth. When everything was done, they retreated and disappeared like ghosts. The Countess walked to the bathtub, climbed the steps and then gently lowered herself into the warm pool of blood. Sighing, she closed her eyes and leaned back. Many years ago, the Countess had read an ancient text that spoke of a witch who, wanting to forever retain the beauty of her youth and become immortal, bathed in the blood of virgins. Consulting some sages, she was told that this would be even more effective if she bathed in the blood of freshly impregnated young women. So, she bathed.


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1:41:41 Through her tears, Charlotte saw the plane. It was a small white Cessna with red detailing along the side and the black symbol of Crowley’s family, the outline of a chalice in the center of a Viking cross, on the tailfin. It would do the job; the location of the island, and the box, was close enough that a plane of this size could make it. The plane was running and the pilot awaiting Lord Crowley’s signal to take off. Charlotte, her hands tied in front of her, did not care anymore. She was shoved up the small stairs and forced to sit across from the aristocrat. “Scotch?” he offered smugly. “Of course not.” A few hours into the flight the pilot called Lord Crowley to the cockpit. She could hear that, apparently, they were experiencing some sort of trouble with the navigational instruments and, as they found themselves in a cloud, were flying blind. Having acquired permission to take them slightly off course, the pilot began to turn the


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plane. Charlotte, seizing the only chance she saw, ran up to the cockpit and kicked the pilot in the head while shoving Lord Crowley aside as best she could. The plane began to veer madly, out of control. Lord Crowley, his hand clenched into an iron fist, punched her in the head, sending her reeling backwards. In her stupor, the last thing she remembered seeing through the dashboard was the plane clearing the clouds and another small airplane, painted an attractive orange with blue detailing and black wing tips, heading towards them. She felt the impact as the two planes’ wings hit each other. The explosion that ended her life along with Lord Crowley’s was deafeningly loud. A few moments later, accompanied by a sad, mysterious song, the credits of the film began to roll. The lights in the theater turned on and the audience stood up and stretched as they waited for those by the aisle to leave. Jose San Cervantes stretched and, looking over at his beautiful wife, Isabella, asked her if she had enjoyed the movie. “’The Templar Conspiracy,’” she said, smiling and shaking her head, “why you enjoy these kinds of movies I will never understand.”


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5 It was called the Labyrinth of Agadéz, named after the town beside which it could be found. The stone walls, three meters high and half a meter thick, stood like proud monoliths of ingenuity as if they had risen from the dusty ground of their own volition and challenged those who dared it to a contest of wits. Years later, the labyrinth would lose that battle for the first time when General Marco Bautiasta de la Vega, leading his army through the region on his way to battle the Republicans and liberate this whore of a country from those stiff pricks, not being able to find his way out, ordered his men to turn the cannons loose on the walls until the General was freed. Then, in his rage, he had the whole thing destroyed and used its stones to build the ovens in which he cremated the bodies of his Republican enemies and was later cremated in himself by the Liberals whom he had fought to get in power when the President heard that de la Vega fell in love and married the daughter of a former enemy and now played checkers in the evenings at his father-in-law’s house.


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Although the labyrinth had not always been there, it was so old that no one could remember when it had been built or by whom. Scholars agreed that it was the only labyrinth left in the world of which no maps existed, though not for lack of trying. It was said by the old spinsters of the town that a curse had been laid upon the labyrinth and that any man or woman who tried to make a map would never be able to find their way out. Strangely enough, the journey through those barren halls was mystical enough for those that emerged that no one had ever bothered to remember the path they took to get out. One night had passed since young Jose San Cervantes, now five years old, had entered the labyrinth against the wishes of Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes. He had been sure that he could keep the twists and turns of his journey firmly in his mind but, after wandering around the grey and brown halls for five hours, he finally admitted to himself that he was indeed hopelessly lost. Not losing courage, and trying as hard as he could not to cry, Jose kept going forward until, by the time evening had descended, he found himself in a hall that looked much like all the others. He was hungry, thirsty, tried, scared and, most of all, really needed to go to the bathroom but not did not do so because he didn’t know if it was polite to do that in a labyrinth and, if it wasn’t, Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes was sure to appear out of thin air and beat him till he was red for urinating in a public place. Panicked and filled with despair, Jose began to run as fast as his legs could carry him, turning left and turning right and then left and left and left once more and then right, until he happened to pass what, through the doorway in the wall,


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seemed to be a large room. Entering it, Jose saw that it was indeed a large room, whose walls and floors were covered in a smooth white marble stone, with four entrances before which there were four plaques that each said, “Welcome, traveller, seeker, to the heart of your journey.” Inside, in the middle of the room, was a circular platform with three steps and with a small circular pedestal in the center made of a black stone. On top of the pedestal stood, almost eight feet tall, a large rectangular mirror with jagged edges. The platform formed the smallest circle in an elaborate design that was carved into the floor: on the outside, formed by the walls of the room, was a large square whose sides were, at four points which in the room were the doorways, intersected by the edges of a circle whose sides were, in turn intersected by a diamond and then a rectangle and then a triangle and then a hexakaidecagon and then a six pointed star inside of a Reuleaux triangle inside of a lemniscate whose center was the vertice of a deltoid curve superimposed on an Archimedean spiral and so on and so on forth in a complex geometrical game of tag whose only meaning could be that the universe did indeed have a sense of humour. While there was no roof to protect the labyrinth, it seemed that neither the mirror nor the room were affected by the rains that regularly fell or by the dirt that the wind kicked up in the way that the rest of the labyrinth had obviously been. Deciding that this was a good, although perhaps strange, place to spend the night, Jose sat down at the foot of the pedestal and promptly fell asleep, his exhaustion defeating his fear and hunger.


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That night, Jose dreamt he was Daedalus, servant of Crete and the King Minos, and that his hands were the ones to build the labyrinth under the orders of his king. It was a magnificent edifice, with marble walls and beautiful fountains and mirrors framed in jewelled gold reflecting a map of the living universe painted on the ceilings with yellow rubies and emerald sapphires and blue gems for the vast rivers in the world all adorning the winding passages and turns that opened into one another, forever seeming to have neither a beginning nor an end. It was the task of six days, and Daedalus, drained, spent the seventh determining how to leave the labyrinth he had so cunningly created. He dreamt of the footsteps of Asterius as the gallop of his hard hooves was heard echoing through endless halls; of the days the prisoner spent admiring the maps of the world and the fountains of water; of the desperate pleas of the sacrifices given unto him and whose bodies served as the markers by which he came to recognize the different halls of his prison; of the death he would gladly welcome at the hands of his redeemer who, with the aid of a royal thread, would emerge from that casket of timelessness having confronted the darkness within himself and rising to the challenge of being the Ionian hero and the unifying king whose palace would be on the fortress of the Acropolis. It was the hooves of the Minotaur that would wake Jose in the early morning and it was Daedalus’ cunning that taught him the plan by which he was to get out of that place. Taking one last look in the mirror, the boy began his search for the tools of his escape, which he soon found. They were two rocks: one black and one white. His


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plan was simple: at each turn he would toss the rocks on the ground and if the white rock was to the right of the black, he would turn right; if the black was to the right of the white, he would turn left. So he slowly proceeded, allowing the rocks to guide him whichever way they would until, a short time after evening had fallen, he saw the entrance to the labyrinth and beyond that, Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes sitting on a stool crying furiously. Seeing the boy, she got up, grabbed him by the hand, bent him over and, in front of half the village who had gathered and were preparing to venture forth into the labyrinth to search for the boy using a long thread to keep their way, beat him with her leather sandal until Magdalena finally decided that enough was enough and intervened. “Well, boy, what do you have to say for yourself?!” was the only thing the furiously relieved Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes could think to ask. His legs crooked from the beating and from the pain in his bladder, Jose tearfully replied, “May I go to the bathroom?”


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The Greatest Show on Earth: Memoirs of Petulengro de Acuña …I had it again, my nightmare. I cannot seem to escape it. I wake up in my room and there is a man, standing there, with a gun pointed at me. He whispers goodbye to me and pulls the trigger. I do not know whether I live or die; the sound of the gun wakes me. What is it that has permanently written this visage upon the language of my dreams?... …How to fly. This single thought has preoccupied my mind for the past week. I’m tempted to turn to Zeno’s paradox. An object at point A can never reach point B because first it must travel half of the distance, then half of the half, then half of the half of the half and so on ad infinitum. Perhaps the trick to flying is falling and not hitting the ground. Zeno would agree, I think. I’m not sure what the man climbing out of Plato’s cave would say but if I shouted hard enough,


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perhaps he could make out my question against the stormy wind. He would probably just want to go back to the cave. It rains less there… …The Library of Babel is as elusive as ever… …In spite of its bloodcurdling title, my new showpiece, The Sword of Damocles, is quite a neat achievement. It’s all achieved, of course, through wireframes and trapdoors, quite simple really, but deceptive and effective. I thought of various stories for the effect, with some lovely elaborate traps to go along with them, but ultimately I believe settling on the story of Damocles makes the improbability of the effect more probable… …Forgive me. Though, as I ask for forgiveness, I do not think I would be condemned to that place where Ugolino’s teeth endlessly gnaw Ruggieri’s neck. I have committed murder this night. Three weeks ago I was in the National Library of Argentina when I ran into an old friend. He accidentally stumbled into me as I was walking through the history section carrying a few books (of particular note: Marcello Thorpe’s “Dialect with the Indian Sages” where, on pages 94-103, he transcribes a conversation with the shaman of an ancient tribe wherein the shaman makes mention of the


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Halls of Sand, a place where every soul that has been, is and will be resides, and mentions that the location of the place is somewhere in South America – must check with other sources.) We decided to share stories over a cup of coffee and I believe I mortally insulted him when I told him of my opinion of the plays of Pierre Lewis. He confided in me that that had been his stage name for the past twelve years. Without a word he left. Our cups of coffee were just arriving. Old friends, hmm? Well, to be perfectly honest, early in my career, he and I were both trying to become famous magicians and, in order to prove myself worthy, I was forced to publicly shame him. He has carried this shame for over a decade and, as I thought, my fate was sealed with that last insult. I woke, the other night, and there was a man in my room. The shadows hid him poorly. His eyes burned into mine with hatred and surety. His hand held a revolver. Though he pulled the trigger, the gun misfired. I set my head upon the pillow once more and dreamed him out of existence… …The police have contacted me in regards to his disappearance. They said that he had a picture of me on his desk with my address on it. I cannot help you find the body, I said to the officer, even as they found some gunpowder on the floor of my bedroom. I’m a magician, I shrugged…

Buciu/A Riddle in Four Parts/100

0:39:59 They say that if you can’t get it up your first time, you remain impotent for the rest of your life. They say that if you masturbate too much you’ll go blind, or your hand will fall off. They say a woman in heat is the devil in disguise. But what about a man? Is he the Holy Spirit then, attempting to conquer, purify and convert? They used to say the earth was flat and even killed for it, but that nonsense was put aside. Superstition brings bad luck, is what I say. We were young and in love, loving love and loved to love. We had been at a party earlier and now, in the middle of the night, on her doorstep, she leans back against her door and pulls me close. The radio of a passing car plays a song that does not fit the mood. Her fists are clenched around the lapels of my jacket, so unlike her and, at the same time, her nature accepting itself fully. Through the door, in the dark apartment, time had lost its meaning, or whatever meaning it had to begin with, as her hands pulled my shirt off and mine hers.


Her hair, brushing my face, smelled of a sweet fragrance I could not recognize. I am not surprised at this. Some might say, well, you could have seen it coming. But even the man sentenced to execution and knows it is coming is caught by surprise as the axe falls or electricity enters his body. How terrible his fate. How cruel. How much easier than this. His certainty is worth more than a hundred uttered phrases of anticipated love. His pain is less torturous than love’s slow game whose rules nobody is ever sure of. But I will live through this, while he does not. I know this because, even as the man sentenced to die turns to God or believes he might come back as some sort of living being, I know this, though it is now happening for the first time, this will happen again. And already, before it even starts, I am thinking of the next time. Her small apartment gives us little ground to cover to her bed for the moment that we have been hurdling towards since we met, all those years ago. I feel alive. Passionate. Her blood is boiling and I have steam in my veins. The bed feels soft against my knees and my left hand, pinning her wrists above her head as my right traces the contours of her body, sinks into the sheets. A beam of moonlight splashes the edge of the bed. I thrust hard and deep, with the skill and precision of a knife fighter, stabbing wildly – out of love – impassioned and cold and hot, sweat dripping from my brow onto her taut stomach, I am Ares and Cupid, I am Don Juan and she is the virgin Mary, I am Hermes, god


of a thousand faces and a thousand lips on her lips, navel, nape, thighs, cheeks, side, buttocks, shoulders, nipples, with her right breast caged in my hand and her breath forced out in sharp rhythmic bursts as she thirsts for the first release of the night that even now is building inside of her mind and her curled toes, her cunt and her fingers digging into the flesh of my back as my flesh and her flesh become one and just when I am at my most hateful and violent, looking at that face framed by wet strands of hair that are stuck to her forehead and jaw and nose and cheeks and her open soundless mouth, single strands and lipid clumps, then her breath becomes an absence of breath, air trapped, pressured inside soft, dark, wet lungs behind glistening, saliva moistened breasts pushed upward by and now her back, masquerading as a great Roman dome, exquisitely carved and stiffly arched, almost stone still, modeled, shaped to perfection by hands from wet earth, sculpted by nature and lasting both a few seconds and a lyrical eternity, an infusion of raw pleasure that threatens to conjure demons through our reflection in the mirror, her thighs crushing me with the force of a thousand Crusades and then she collapses and is spent, the force of her orgasm better explained through her exhausted limpness, her rag doll body, as she lies on damp sheets with closed eyes leaving me hard and unsatisfied, I impotent man, I diabolical, young man, flagellant, I unworthy poet in love with lust. They say the morning after is the hardest part. They say that after the first year, conversation has run dry. They say that


satisfaction and love are mutually exclusive. They say that only unfulfilled love is romantic. Have they experienced eternity? Have they seen it and just fallen short? Superstition brings bad luck, is what I say.


68 “What is the Library of Babel?” the young Nigerian boy asked. Professor Jose San Cervantes, visiting his philosopher friend Teobaldo DeGuerrera in the Maiduguri region, somewhere in the northeast of Nigeria, had taken the time to visit an orphanage where thirty two nuns took care to raise in a most Christian way the one hundred and eighty six children that had been entrusted to their care. There, at the request of a sister, he told the children what his line of work was. Manu Kan, a young boy whose imagination had fired when the sprightly professor had described his vocation, had come to find out more. He was a young boy, around seventeen, almost a man, his sparrow hands and brown eyes strikingly honest, his large rounded belly betraying a sickness that only poverty could cause. His question had left the professor somewhat confused as to how he could answer and explain the Library of Babel to the young boy who could


neither read nor possibly conceive of a library, much less one the size of this particular library. “Suffice it to say, my boy, that it is a library made up of an infinitely finite number of hexagonal rooms whose unnumbered shelves hold all possible books. Not only books that we have now, but all books that have ever been written, all books in existence, all books that will be written, each possible permutation of each of those books as well as every possible permutation of every possible book and every improbable one as well. Those books that are impossible are excluded from the catalog; though, doubtless, I can conceive that there are other books whose main concern is the discussion of the possibility as well as the improbability of impossibility, while others argue against the argument and others still against the need for such arguments. It might sound confusing but think of it as an infinite regression that has an end. In order to keep the library as small as possible, no two books are identical, though their identity might be the same. Some books there make sense and we can read them. Some do not and are pure gibberish, merely conjectured combinations of letters to satisfy the cataloguing of the possibility of the existence of that particular nonsense.” “You mean books with made up words?” “Not even words, just letters, combined in all possible ways.” “But how can you find the book you are looking for?” “Ah, well, you see, some philosophers believe, and by necessity, or possibility, it must be true, that there is one book in the library which is in fact the catalogue of all the others simply because


the library has an order, or must have one, for by its very nature it has a finite number of books. Some have argued, mystics whose words cannot be trusted, that the book is in fact a single circular volume whose spine is continuous and contains a finite number of almost infinitely thin pages. There are those who will tell you that this book is God; others that God created the library…” “God,” a nun, listening to the conversation, interrupted, “does not create such hells, professor.” “God does creates them, sister. It is humans who name them hell.” The young boy, still curious, his hands busy playing with two rocks, one white and one black, his imagination running over fantastical dreams, conjectured: “Perhaps the library is the catalogue.” “A very real possibility, my young boy.” Smiled the professor. “Or perhaps, each book in the library contains instructions for how to get to the catalogue from that particular point. Assume that each book, in being possible, has to be grounded in reality, which in turn means that it was written in a way that someone could understand it, somehow. Even the seemingly nonsensical books have, then, the possibility of being important. The only problem becomes knowing how to understand the book. Knowing and applying that cipher, you could find the phrase, ‘The catalog can be found by…’ inside the pages of any as well as, possibly, all books. The code, then, becomes the problem but each book does have one. Or even stranger was if, using the correct code, each book in the library, properly


interpreted, is the actual catalog itself! All you have to do is define the cipher! Even these two rocks could find it if you developed a system by which you could interpret what they said. There is your library, professor! I hold it in my hand!” “Manu Kan, still yourself boy!” said the sister sternly. Without caring the boy continued, “In that same way, the book the sisters read to us every night, The Three Musketeers, is in fact the map to a hidden treasure, or something else entirely unknown to us! So you see professor, sister, it is not God that creates hell, but people that create God. The only true thing that exists, then, is a cipher that does not allow us to think ourselves out of existence.” Years later, Professor San Cervantes visited that same region searching for the orphanage, wanting to know what had become of the boy. He encountered a sheppard who, playing with two rocks in his hands, told him that the region had been farmland since he had been a boy, more than fifty years ago, and that the orphanage that he was looking for didn’t and has never existed, just like the kingdom of the Christian pope king Prester John.


Anecdotes… The old librarian sat in the shade provided by the trees overhanging the balcony. He looked out at his city whose improbable streets smacked of fiction, the colorful ants scurrying through that cement maze only possibly having come to exist as the result of some grand work of literature or the delusions of the village idiot. He wore a dark blue pinstripe suit with a cream colored shirt and an orange backed, blue polka-dotted tie. His face was long, gaunt, his cheeks droopy, his nose bulbous, his mouth drawn tight with his lower-lip overhanging, his eyes, already struck by the initial stages of blindness, shone in the noonday sun, his left eye more than his lazy right one. Overall, it was a face that might remind one of that of a boxer, or a bulldog, though, perhaps, with fewer wrinkles. Right leg crossed over his left and with a dark black cane


resting against the right side of the chair, his long fingers slowly caressed the edges of the pages they turned. The gentle breeze cooled the steaming coffee at his side. He was reading one of his favorite books. With poetic felicity, it detailed the story of an impoverished gaucho who is drafted into the military and forced to defend the borders of a nation he no longer believes in from Natives who have never harmed him. His life on the plains is, as epics are wont to do, romanticized; his experience of war is not, bloodshed and torn limbs exquisitely described with a kind of glee that only literature is capable of. Through a cruel twist of fate, he ends up an outlaw knife-fighter, as a result of an argument, fight and murder in a bar, and along with his Sancho Panza, a former enemy that, moved by the gaucho’s bravery and skill, betrayed his former allies in the heat of mortal battle to join the hero, lives among the Natives he fought against in the war, in search of a better life. Almost sadistically, the poet dashes all the gaucho’s hopes as they are mistaken for spies and taken as prisoners. Surviving a terrible epidemic, brought about by unknown forces or a young Christian boy, the protagonist loses his companion and his faith and, while at the grave of his compadre, hears the lamentations of an anguished woman. The plot turns chillingly macabre as he finds the woman, who turns out to be a native accused of witchcraft, weeping over the body of her dead son, her hands bound with the boy’s still warm entrails. The outlaw engages in a brutal knife fight with her captor, and spilling his life upon the ground, frees the fragmented


woman and begins the journey of returning with her to civilization, or, at least, to Christian lands. The story ends in a vicious circle where the guacho, attempting to escape his life of horrors by changing his name, is forced into a final, although merely implied, knife fight with the brother of the man he had initially slain in the bar. The hero dies or must die, some literary critics suggest, and his story can be, humorously perhaps and in spite of obvious stylistic differences, compared to that of Caesar, whose tragic demise is played upon the stage before an audience who knows the truth that he, even as he is undone, only finds out at the last moment, when it is far too late.


0:21:07 “’…and so the Minotaur is responsible for Frankenstein.’” The class applauded. “Excellently done, Luis!” Said the professor. “Now, who wants to share next? Umberto, why don’t you go?” I stood up and walked to the front of the lecture hall. I had taken literature class so I could be with her but it had turned out to be an interesting experience. I was no great fan of literature nor was I the most creative but I had, perhaps, an inkling of talent that sometimes manifested itself late into the night when I put pen to paper in my dreams. The assignment was clear and simple: write something that put an interesting spin on previously existing literature. “What is the name of your piece, Umberto?” asked Professor LeRoi. “Shakespeare’s Plot.” “Very well. Let’s hear it.”


As I spoke, she smiled at me from her seat when our eyes met. She wore a short blue dress and a white shirt. She had painted her nails red the night before and the light coming through the window reflected off them somewhat. Her mahogany brown hair framed her slender, angular face. Her blue eyes could pierce into my soul. Charlotte, I would give you my soul if I could. “Shakespeare,” I said, “his mind spiraling out of control with the characters locked inside, had sat down one tumultuous evening and hatched a plan to kill important people throughout the history of the world. And, although he only conceived of this particular plot sometime around 1599, the plan has, of its own will, acted not only forward through history, but also, paradoxically, backwards. “Having difficulty writing his latest tragedy, Shakespeare turns to the recently acquired notes of the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to Shakespeare himself, of course, and finds some notes about the Roman dictator Julius Caesar. The dictator, his body pierced by numerous blades, gives up the fight for his life when the face of Brutus is revealed to be the handler of one of the blades. Shakespeare is inspired. He imagines the pivotal assassination scene: with twenty-three knife wounds inflicted upon him, Caesar, reeling from the betrayal, reportedly utters the phrase, "καi σύ, τέκνον?" in Greek or ‘You too, child?’ in English. Suetonius and Plutarch both write that Caesar did not say anything, choosing rather to pull his toga over his head. Shakespeare, requiring a spoken line of dialogue to convey the dictator’s last breath and to drive home the drama of the scene, creates the macaronic line, ‘Et tu, Brute? Then fall,


Caesar.’ This, conveniently, also fit’s Shakespeare’s mad scheme. “The playwright, knowing fate’s partiality to varied symmetrical repetition, decides to model his plot after the meticulous assassination of the Roman dictator. In the writing of the plan a few conditions are set forth: the scene has to be tragic; the murdered must be in a position to be betrayed by someone for a specific reason and not for tragedy’s sake; the method would be public; and the result would be the death of the perpetrator of the act. “Almost ten years after the plot is conceived of, rationalized, detailed and forgotten in the mind of its creator, the first repetition occurs: François Ravaillac murders King Henri IV of France for religious reasons, stabbing the king in his coach. He is later executed. In 1792, the tragic comedy plays itself out once more: Jacob Johan Anckarström enters the Royal Opera House with a few conspirators and, upon meeting King Gustav III of Sweden greets him with the phrase, ‘Bonjour, beau masque.’, and fires a pistol-shot composed of two balls, five shot and six bent nails into the king’s side. The king, mortally wounded, pushes the assassin away shouting ‘Ah! Je suis blessé, tirez-moi d'ici et arrêtez-le!’ and dies two weeks later. Jacob is executed. “Half a decade later, in 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinates President Abraham Lincoln by shooting him in the back of the head with a .44 caliber Derringer, shouts ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ and escapes by jumping from the president’s box to the theater floor (comically injuring his leg by snagging it on a U.S. Treasury Guard flag used for decoration) and absconding from there after adding,


‘The South is avenged!’, his words magically transforming him into Macrus Brutus, Caesar’s betrayer. Similarly, Luigi Lucheni stabs the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Gravilo Princip shoots the AustroHungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Eugen Schauman shoots the Governor-General of Finland, Avelino Arredondo shoots the president of Uruguay, and Nathuram Godse shoots Ghandi while having his nightly public walk on the grounds of the Birla Bhavan. All assassins die by suicide, cyanide, execution or are themselves, in turn, assassinated. “Not satisfied with itself, the plot, deciding time was somewhat of a nuisance and subscribing to Pythagorean metempsychosis, or more specifically, palingeneis, determines to manifest itself in the past. As such, we find its subtle influence in the silk cords of the viziers of the East and in the poisons of the Egyptians or the crown of thorns adorning the head of he who absolved the human race. The plot has become, is and will become both the stone that Cain hurls at Abel and the unimaginable weapons of the future with which the human race shall pursue its annihilation. “Ultimately, the plot’s loyalty to its cause aligns it solely with the aims of the Knights Templar and their mission to protect whatever secret has been entrusted to them. Perhaps, a logical conclusion is that Shakespeare, one of the most capable tragedians, comedians and poets in the history of the world, was in fact nothing more than a Knight Templar himself, or, more specifically, perhaps, he was the soul of Pythagoras, keeper of that ancient secret, and in creating this plot he did nothing more than ensure the safety of his


charge. “As a final note, it saddens me to make this one remark: the real tragedy of Shakespeare’s plot is not its murderous appetite but the failure to realize, on the part of both the assassin and the assassinated, that they both die merely so that a scene can once more play out.”


23 They had taken to walking the streets at dusk, deciding that they would each go separate routes and, in the end, maybe at ten or eleven o’clock, they would see if fate had guided their footsteps to each other, which it always did. On some nights, when it rained, Isabella would insist that they not take umbrellas with them or they would and give them to someone in need that they would meet on the street. Sometimes Jose would stop by the café outside the museum and, instead of walking, would sit on the terrace and sip hot coffee as he would watch people passing by, imagining where each couple was going, or what they were talking about, or how they had met, or how he would hold her at night when she cried, or how she would stop listening to him talk about his day and kiss him deeply just because. Sometimes Jose and Isabella would meet on the bridge under the flickering light of the streetlamp. Other times they would meet at a library, or at the butcher shop. Once, they had met in an alley where,


just the night before, a man had been murdered. But no matter where they met, they would, hand in hand, or embracing each other or just Jose holding Isabella’s waist, walk home together and fall asleep, or make love and fall asleep, or sit up all night and talk of the future and the present and the past and a time amputechtured by a carnival of idiots and popes. “Could the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different,” one of them says as Isabella’s hand plays in the smoke of Jose’s cigarette against the dove blue background of the walls. It was a warm August night when the smell of the rain carried to his sleeping ears the barking of a dog just outside the old building. They both lay on their sides, her back to him and he holding her close, and slept as contented lovers often do. Isabella had begun to show her age and often she would ask him if he still found her beautiful. He would always stop what he was doing and walk to her, grab her hands and place her fingertips in his mouth to warm them up, smell her long hair and hold her close to him so that without a word passing between them she would know his answer. Sometimes she talked of becoming a whore again and on those nights she would light up in the bed they shared and he knew that she was, in her heart, atoning for her grandmother’s sin. That night they had gone to bed after having eaten a spicy risotto with tomatoes and asparagus and a few glasses of wine. In the lingering heat they had danced naked to a tune on the radio, her thin satin dress draped over the old green wooden chair, the balcony doors open and the window shutters spread so the fevered air could escape. She had suggested that they dance counter-clockwise saying


that she hoped each turn might rob the Earth of angular momentum and slow its spin by a tiny amount such that the night would become longer and they would have more time together. Now, in the middle of the night, she slept dreamlessly as the Earth continued to turn. Jose, sinking deeper and deeper into the place where wild things roam, found himself at the center of a prison whose center was nowhere and whose circumference was everywhere. Knowing he had committed no crime, he cried out to the darkness beyond of his innocence only to receive nothing in return. Resolving to reach a door or at least some thing against which he could bang his frustrations, he began to move. At that instant a large tiger with great fangs and the tail of a lizard appeared to him and began to growl. Jose, scared, froze. The tiger disappeared. And so it went for a time that Jose would try and move and the tiger would appear, his stripes sharp and jagged against his orange hair and when Jose stopped, the tiger would vanish. After what had seemed to Jose to be almost four hundred years, he decided that, as his prison was vast enough, he would merely imagine the center to be somewhere else and, in this way, he was able to see everything that was happening even though he could not take part in it on account of the tiger’s diligent guarding. The world had become a play, only there for Jose’s amusement: waterfalls filling lakes; a polymath writing that this universe, in the strictest of senses, was the best possible one God could have made; the beautiful Scheherazade delights King Shahryar with her stories; a condemned man says, in defiance, “E pur si muove!”; a Persian godking is defied by a score of brave warriors; a


young boy pulls a sword out of a stone; Nikola Tesla, old and alone, develops a unified field theory and resolves to keep it secret; a Gomorrahn boy accidentally lights a haybarn on fire; Armageddon and the Final Judgment come to the faithful of Hiroshima; an apple falls on a sleeping physicist; a Greek conqueror dies in the palace of Nedbuchadnezzar II of Babylon; a man laughs as he reads the Divine Comedy; the Sultan of Egypt and Syria awakes to find the daggers of the old man of the mountain alongside freshly baked hotcakes beside his bed; a young German invents the printing press; a Daoist alchemist, in search for the elixir of immortality, discovers gunpowder; the message “What hath God wrought?” is sent via telegraph; a retired country gentleman battles a windmill; a meteor falls from the sky, its fragments blackened by the burning atmosphere, lands in the Rub’ al Khali desert and is later carried to Mecca; the engineer Yazid Ibn Salam completes the building he has been working on for over six years; grim faced, Don Juan de Austria nods as the messenger informs him of the enemy’s retreat; two twins who had in their childhood drank milk from a wolf’s teats, found a city; ten thousand clay soldiers stand watch as an emperor’s tomb is sealed; a governor shouts, “Enough! Let me die!” before his head is cut off and carried through the streets on a pike; the “Miner’s Friend” is first turned on and generates one horsepower; Al-Afdal Shahanshah falls from the poison in his veins on his way home; on a cold November day, forty thousand troops cross the Berezina River; a hero rejects the sexual advances of the goddess of love and war, ultimately, condemning his friend to death; a Genoese navigator


discovers the land a Norse explorer had settled five hundred years before; a king wanders the sea for ten years in search for his home; a star-crossed lover poisons herself; waking up, Jose finds himself in the Library of Babel speaking of his dream to Luis, one of the despairing librarians.


Anecdotes… om breathing in deeply through the nose, letting the air swirl in the back of the throat before reaching the lungs letting it purify and then letting it out again ommmmm swirling in the back of the throat and out back into the world ommmmm the smell of the candles and the footsteps of someone walking to the right ommmmmmmmm a drop of water dripping off into the pond outside and the air, calm and warm and wet on my skin and oommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm letting my mind clear with each breath and quiet with each exhale ooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

peacefully let everything

fade and concentrate on ooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

hear it

inside your mind and not in the throat place it where you see things in your mind and see and hear oooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm serenity

clarity

feel

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calm liquidity of stillness

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The Greatest Show on Earth: Part II “Ladies and gentlemen! This evening you have seen many miracles performed before your eyes. You have seen a tiger calmed by the will of man. You have seen flight on the back of a great flaming dragon, as taught to me by an old Chinese wizard. You have seen your private thoughts made to dance upon the stage of reality like fine tail-coated gentlemen performing a play. I have shown you, this night, that the laws of nature, like the laws of man, can be bent and sometimes… broken.” The audience sat in rapt attention, their eyes fixed on the man on the stage who paced in front of the dropped house curtain. Indeed, he had shown them things that they believed impossible until then. He had shown them the secrets of freedom and fantasy. He had plucked out their collective dreams and had, in fact, made them manifest. Perhaps he was a god in disguise, thought Jose. “And now, for the final event of the evening. I warn you now, my dear audience, if you are squeamish, if violence frightens you, if terror terrifies you, then I give you this one chance to stand up… and


walk out. Once we begin, there is no turning back. For now, I will show you life and death. “Mankind has always been fascinated with death. And feared it too. Yet there have been cases throughout history where people have conquered death. The beautiful Persephone died for six months of the year and then returned to life. The rising of Lazarus from the grave. Indian fakirs, as a regular practice, allow themselves to die for days at a time and then force their bodies to wake. “I myself was once stabbed straight to the heart.” With this, the magician tore open his shirt, and, to the surprise of the audience, above his heart there was a large, visible, almost unhealed scar. “But with the secrets I have learnt, I was able to return to this world.” Silence. “I will need a volunteer.” Only three people put their hands up. Jose could see Santo Domingo, an eighty-five year old man who believed he was twentythree, eagerly waving his hand in the air. A few rows in front of him was Seignior Julio, butler to the town’s mayor, also putting himself forward. Closer to the front was another hand to someone Jose couldn’t see. By the sleeve, he concluded that it must be a woman. Jose had started putting his hand up as well but Isabella had told him he couldn’t. What would she tell Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes if something were to happen to her little boy? “Miss, you over there.” Petulengro de Acuña pointed to the woman in the third row. “How kind of you, how brave. Please, ladies


and gentlemen, welcome her to the stage with your applause!” As the audience applauded her bravery, fearing for her as well, she stood up and, lifting her dress so as not to get caught in between the seats, she made her way to the aisle and then to the steps at the side of the stage where she was greeted by the dashing magician. As he met her, he took her hand, raised it to his lips and kissed it with a little bow. As her other gloved hand covered her blushing face, the other young women in the audience grew jealous. The magician, his bare chest shining through his shirt in the spotlight, took her to the center of the stage and turned to the audience asking them to quiet down. “Now miss, what is your name.” “Rosalinda Fernando.” “And, Miss Rosalinda, if I may?” She nodded her consent. “Have you ever met me before or prearranged anything with me before the show?” “No, sir.” “There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. What a brave woman, to volunteer for something so dangerous.” He turned to address his volunteer but spoke loudly enough that everyone in the audience could hear. “Now Miss Rosalinda, I’m going to ask you to remain here. I’m also going to place a blindfold over your eyes so that you will not fear what you see. Are you ready to begin? Yes? Very well. Lights, please!” With that, Petulengro de Acuña disappeared behind the curtain leaving the young woman alone on stage, dressed as she was


in a flowing gown colored a deep green, her curly hair let loose behind her and on her face, a thick, black blindfold. With a jolt, the curtains raised and, behind her, the screen showed a scene of calmness in a forest at sunset. From the sides of the stage, a low hanging white fog began to undulate across the stage until, soon enough, it covered everything. In the orchestra pit, a lone violinist began a sad song. From the back of the stage, three silhouettes appeared. In the center was what appeared to be a man wearing a heavy cloak and a top hat. To his left was a small girl dressed as a ballerina. To his right, was a very tall man whose massive muscles inspired fear into many of the audience members. The three began to slowly walk toward Miss Rosalinda. As they stepped into the light, the audience recognized the middle man as Petulengro de Acuña wearing a small mask to cover his face. The effect was sinister. As he gently guided Miss Rosalinda to the side, the strongman took center stage. His skin was covered in sweat and he wore the suit of a medieval executioner. Reaching into fog at his feet, he produced a large metal rod, as thick as Jose’s forearm and about a meter and a half long. Without speaking, he tapped the stage with it and displayed it to the audience, showing it to be made of solid metal and without flaw. The song stopped. In the complete silence of the theater, the strongman lifted the metal rod above his head, holding both ends. With a look that almost challenged the audience, he began to strain his muscles. Jose, from his seat, could see the veins in the man’s arms and chest stand out, a


purpley blue against his white skin. With a great grunt of effort, Jose saw the rod beginning to slowly bend. A woman not far from him, gasped. The man continued to bend the rod until it was almost in the shape of an L. When he had finished, he smiled at the audience and, with a violent grunt, heaved the metal rod offstage. He retreated to the magician’s side, Miss Rosalinda between them. The violinist began to play another song reminding Jose of the two swans he had seen once, on the sea, playing beside each other and fighting each other for the breadcrumbs that other children would throw at them. The ballerina took center stage. She began to dance by herself, her feet and body moving to the music while her hands became engaged with an invisible partner. She twirled delicately and swam through the air with the grace only a dancer was capable of. Her white and pink and golden yellow costume shone in the spotlight and, mixed with the fog, made her seem, almost, as if she were a ghost in a painting. Her dance told the story of a young woman recently married, whose husband was forced to leave her. She, alone, decided to learn to dance. She danced with many partners and enjoyed herself, always thinking of her husband. One day, she was told of her husband’s death. Then he returned home. She, not being able to hold on to reality any longer, became a dance. At the end of the song, the ballerina made her way to Miss Rosalinda and, taking her hand, led her to the center of the stage. The strongman and the magician followed. As they reached the center of the stage, a table began to rise out of the fog. It was made from a


single block of wood, solid all the way through, and was a dark brown color. Resting on the table was a massive double bladed axe. Along with the table, a few tall, ornate candle stands with lit candles also rose. The light in the theater dimmed such that the majority of the atmosphere was from the candles and not the bright spotlights. The strongman lifted the axe. The ballerina gently laid Miss Rosalinda across the table. The magician bent over her, whispering a few words in her ear. The ballerina, after looking at the magician and the strongman, fled the stage. The magician took Miss Rosalinda’s hands and lifted them above her head. The strongman lifted the axe and aimed for the woman’s waist. The sound of the candle flickering could be heard along with the sound of the axe’s edge splitting the air on its way down. A few women fainted. A few parents covered their children’s eyes. Jose and Isabella were transfixed. The axe struck. There was a loud cracking thud as the axe cut through Miss Rosalinda’s body and then, without stopping, continued splitting the table. Blood began to drip. As the table broke in two, imploding on itself, Miss Rosalinda’s intestines spilled out. Not a single person moved. The magician, his back turned toward the audience, still holding the dead woman’s hands spoke softly. “If any of you are daring enough, in the face of death, to not believe what has happened, I invite you now to the stage, to walk between the halves of this severed woman.” Only Santo Domingo, his face ashen white, his body


trembling as if he had suddenly felt the weight of his age, stood. He walked towards the stage, his cane and his footsteps and his breathing and the flickering of the candles were the only sounds in the theater. As he started up the steps all eyes turned to him. Slowly he made his way toward the odious scene. When he arrived, he took out his frayed handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his bald head. He, with his cane, gently poked the woman. A tear formed in his eye. After standing there a moment, he decided that he had seen enough. Turning and heading back, Santo Domingo walked past his seat, out of the theater and headed home to sit and weep beside the ashes of his wife, which is where dawn would find him as the sun would rise that next morning. “Now, I ask you all, to pray for this woman’s soul.” Petulengro de Acuña removed his cloak and placed it over the woman. With the help of the strongman he lifted her and placed the two pieces back together. With the care of a mortician, he wrapped the cloak around her and exposed her white, bloodless face. Only the people in the front rows heard him whisper, “Come back to us.” And then he kissed her. It was a kiss of longing. Passionate. Devoid of fear. Devoid of disgust. A hopeful kiss. Removing his lips from hers, the audience saw his hair move, as if a momentary wind had disturbed it. Almost unexpectedly, Miss Rosalinda inhaled deeply and grabbed the magician to keep herself from falling. With a brisk movement, Petulengro de Acuña tore the cloak away, revealing that she was once more intact.


The audience was too stunned to applaud. Petulengro de Acuña bowed deeply as the curtain came down. The only indicator of what had only just happened was a small chunk of wood from the table that had reached the edge of the stage and was still visible. The theater was silent even when the lights came on. No one moved.


1:22:33 “Open it,” he commanded softly. As he did, three men grabbed the lid of the sarcophagus and, straining with effort, began to remove it. As it moved aside, the inside was slowly revealed. There was no body; rather, it was filled with jewels and rubies and gems of many colors and sizes. After the lid was completely removed, Charlotte and I could see clearly that the arrangement of the precious stones was very specific. It was, in fact, a map drawn in riches. On one side, the South American coast, as known by the creator of the map at the time, could be recognized, though incomplete. On the other, the Spanish coast. In between them, a vast ocean of blue except for one spot, very small, where one jewel was missing and the blackness of the stone behind the precious rocks showed. Lord Crowley chuckled to himself almost inaudibly.


“They left the location dark. How predictable. Tell me, Umberto, did she tell you what it was? Why it’s so funny that they marked the location with the absence of a jewel?” “He doesn’t need to know, Crowley.” “It is irrelevant at this point. But he should know. Darkness,” he told me mockingly, “is used to mark the end of the world. That’s what the good brothers of the Knights Templar believed. That if anyone would find their treasure, the world would be swallowed in darkness. Because, you see, their treasure is a box, a magical box, and whatever you wish for, whatever you desire, just one wish, this box will give you.” “Well perhaps I could make a wish then,” I said, “And wish you never existed.” “Hmm.” Lord Crowley turned to study the sarcophagus. With no one watching us, I began to try and untie the knots at our hands. I managed to get Charlotte’s open and she mine and, without a word, we turned and ran in opposite directions. “Get her!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man tripping Charlotte. As they grabbed her, I turned to go back and help her escape. Everything seemed to slow down and I could make out the details of everything around me: I had reached the small dock in the secret passage underneath the city, a passage that, I had earlier remarked, if only to ease Charlotte’s mood, look very much like the secret tunnels of an infamous phantom; the rough brown stone of the hall leading to


the oval chamber, worn by stagnant air and covered by moss here and there, had the look of carved stone whose mason had long died; I could hear the small boat in the water, directly behind me, as its sides fended off wave after wave of attempts by water to drown it; I could see Lord Crowley, his ash grey suit almost purple in the glow of the floodlights, smiling and pointing a gun at me; I could see the flash at the pistol’s muzzle as it faded away; I could almost make out a bullet heading toward me, spinning viciously as it cut the air in its path. I feel myself falling.


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The Greatest Show on Earth: Epilogue Jose and Isabella stood in the lobby of the theater. Isabella was talking to a handsome young man and twirling a strand of her hair between her fingers as she did so. He, boasting to her that he too knew a bit of magic, tried to touch her shoulder and arm as much as possible. Jose knew what this meant but he was busier thinking about the show he had just come out of. Petulengro de Acuña hadn’t come to the stage again to take his bow and left the audience with their own thoughts. Even though Jose had wanted to see the man who had power over life and death, it did not seem as if he would do so. “Very well, then I will see you next Wednesday night?” “Absolutely.” Isabella said goodbye to the young man, having made a date with him, and was preparing to leave. They walked around the theater lobby for a few more minutes, looking at the pictures of


famous actors and the posters of grand plays and shows. Isabella had told Jose, a long time ago, that she wanted to become an actress but also told him that she had no talent outside whoring. As they were heading to the door, Jose felt the urge to go to the bathroom. They asked the saleswoman at the popcorn stand where Jose could find the bathroom and Isabella told him she would wait for him outside. He made his way down the hall, past the service entrance, like the woman had said, and turned left at the statue of the woman with hair made of snakes. Jose went through the double doors above which a sign said, “Employees Only.” Jose had gotten lost, that much was clear to him when he found himself in a long, dimly lit hallway whose walls were the home of various props, painted backgrounds and costume racks. Picking his way carefully among the cables on the floor, making sure not to disturb anything, Jose passed a large black windowless door marked “Stage Right.” I must be behind the stage, he thought to himself. Standing there, he heard a rhythmic sound coming from one of the doors further down the hallway. As he headed for the sound, he passed a rack that held what Jose recognized as Petulengro de Acuña’s cloak. Reaching out to touch it, he felt the velvety smoothness along with something strangely stiff inside the material. Jose, afraid to ruin anything, continued on. He reached the door from where the sound came and opened it. As he stepped inside the dressing room, the sound became clearer and louder. Jose recognized it for what it was and turned to


leave when he caught sight of the magician’s trunk on top of the wooden table. The mirror behind the table reflected Jose back at himself. The crumbling brick walls of the room made it seem in worse shape than it was in. Overcome by curiosity, Jose, forgetting the door open, dashed to the trunk and lifted the lid. “Hey, what are you doing! Get out of there!” Shouted a voice. Jose, turning in fear, saw Petulengro de Acuña, his pants around his ankles and his legs covered by the skirt of Miss Rosalinda who, her breasts hanging out of her half removed dress, was straddling the magician as he sat in a chair at the back of the room. The sight did not shock Jose; the walls of the whorehouse were full of holes. What Jose felt was fear. The greatest fear he had ever felt in his life. This man could kill him with a thought. “What are you doing here, boy?” Shouted the magician again. “Who sent you, huh? Who sent you?” Rising, he pushed Rosalinda aside and lunged for the boy, almost tripping over his pants. His breath smelled of strong whiskey and, from up close, Petulengro de Acuña looked more like a tired fifty-year old than a devilishly handsome thirty-something. His chest was perfectly smooth, no trace of the large scar he had shown on stage. The magician’s vice grip held Jose in place. “Who sent you, huh? You here to find out my secrets?” He slurred the words. “You here to spy on me?” As he raised his hand to strike the boy, Rosalinda, having covered herself but forgetting to pick-up her red panties that were strewn across the floor, shouted, “No! Don’t!”


“I-I was just looking for the bathroom… sir.” “What are you saying? That I’m shit? You’re here to piss on me?” He shoved Jose to the ground, bent over, barely catching himself from falling, and pulled up his pants. He stumbled over to the trunk and began rummaging in it. “You wanna know? Huh? What the fuck does it matter? It’s all a fucking joke anyways. You know what the miracle is? Hmm?! You wanna know what the amazing thing really is? That you pay your dirty money to come see me, that’s the fucking miracle.” From the trunk he took out a journal and tottered over to his seat. Jose did not see where Rosalinda had gone but she had disappeared. Petulengro de Acuña reached over and grabbed a half empty bottle of whiskey from the shelf, took a large quaff and looked at the book in his hand. Jose remained on the ground, looking at the drunken magician, still fearful. Petulengro de Acuña let out a sigh and tossed the journal to the boy. “Take it and get the fuck out of here.” He took another gulp of the whiskey. His eyes moistened with tears. As Petulengro de Acuña began to sob softly, Jose got up as fast as he could and, clutching the book to this chest, ran out.


79 At the age of seventy-nine, many serious scholars were convinced that Professor Jose San Cervantes had become delusional. In his mania and continuing obsession with finding the Library of Babel, he had returned to the town he had grown up in, Agadéz, and, using his life savings, had funded an excavation of the ruined labyrinth in which he had once spent the night. His team consisted of both young men living in the town at the time, aspiring archaeologists who wished to work with the legendary professor regardless of his mental condition and young children who were curious as to what the hubbub just outside the town was. He stayed at the Hotel Eironeía, which had been built on the same spot on the cliff by the sea where Francisca Alvarnandez Cervantes had managed her whorehouse for over forty years. Tired, sweating and walking about with the aid of a cane, his lined face shaded by a cream colored straw hat, Professor Jose had dug the first hole where the entrance of the labyrinth had been. The team then began to carefully unearth the foundations of that massive place. The excavation had been going for over five


months and some of the young archeologists, now convinced and ashamed that they had been part of a fool’s errand, began to depart for the air-conditioned comfort of their various university departments. That day, when a door with an hexagonal emblem had been unearthed six meters below the exact center of the labyrinth, where Professor San Cervantes remembered there had been a mirror, the team only consisted of the professor and twelve men from the town who, being paid a fair wage did not complain at having to dig some earth for a crazy old man. Jose San Cervantes stood in the late afternoon sun, sweat pouring down his face and mixing with the tears of elation that his discovery brought forth. He had asked to go in alone and to not be disturbed until he called for help. Slowly, they had guided him down to the entrance and, leaving him there, continued digging in another part of the labyrinth because they had nothing else they could think of to do. Moments later, Professor Jose San Cervantes sat quietly on his creaky stool in the middle of the newly discovered building and took deep measured breaths, testing the stagnant air for memories. As he sat surrounded by darkness and heat, the dim light of the oil lamp beside his feet reaching no more than an arm’s length into the darkness, the professor could faintly make out the echoes of the tools and brushes of his archeological team, a unusually jovial bunch, who had begun their work on that day with the solemnity of a group of childhood friends attending the funeral of one of their own. From his stool, Jose San Cervantes noticed two books stuck in the dirt. They had been sewn with a full red cloth binding and the


letters on the covers were woven out of golden threads. The first, titled, “xxhiujwlakdfwn,” contained pages and pages full of paragraphs of what appeared to be nonsense but he knew to be specific instructions on how to find God, or at least, prove he doesn’t exist. The second book was titled, “Jose San Cervantes: From Birth to Death.” Opening the cover gently and running his lined hands over the smooth cream-woven pages, the old archeologist began to remember and read of a warm August night when the smell of the rain and the fragrance of the gardenias and the reek of a heated rubber tire and muddied ash and the scent of salted pork and the redolence of hot sand would carry to his ears the sound of the walls around him beginning to give way and crumble and collapse with an almost lyrical beauty. Almost ten minutes after it had started, the commotion had ceased and the professor’s body lay buried underneath a few meters of rock and dust, holding in his hand his cream colored straw hat. No books were ever found and, adding to the confusion felt by the archeological team, neither was the door that they had unearthed hours earlier.


Anecdotes… Descartes wept. Publicly, his convictions in regards to the subtle mysteries of being were known through the words he had expressed them with, from his mind to his pen and paper, and then to the hungry intellectuals of his day. Whether admired or hated, however, it seemed to Descartes that just at that moment it didn’t really matter if his work spoke volumes in regards to anything. In fact, nothing much mattered quite at all just then. For on that crisp January morning, in the year 1650, Descartes, staring at the cracked paint on his walls, had a foreboding feeling of doom. Descartes, understanding that he was going to die, only wept.


*** END ***

A Riddle in Four Parts

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