a heroic saint? If God is invisible, can He show himself in the saint?
She raised her eyes and met Maura’s. His face had changed a great deal over the years. He’d had white hair since his twenties, but his eyes hadn’t been so sunken, eyes so enamored of his brain, his face so thin; his white beard accentuated the time that had passed, that in his prolonged youth had been pure, promised time. His face had changed, yet she saw that it was the same; it hadn’t changed, it wasn’t another face, even if it was different.
“I can distance myself from myself but not from my body.” He looked at her as if reading her thoughts.
“Remember that our bodies liked each other a great deal. I’d like to be with you again.”
He told her she was the world, and she said, Tell me then, why can’t you be in the world?
Jorge’s silence was not eloquent, but she went on reading his thoughts, for he gave her no option but that of conjecture. Was he searching for solitude, faith, or both? Was he fleeing the world? Why?
“You’re both in and not in the monastery.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you or aren’t you in the religious community?” She thought he could explain himself to her. He owed it to her after so long. “We always understood each other.”
He answered very indirectly and with a distant smile. He reminded her of things she already knew. He was a privileged disciple of the Spanish and European university system that had evolved when Spain-he smiled-was emerging from the Escorial and entering Europe, licking its wounds after losing the war with the United States and the final loss of its empire in the New World, Cuba and Puerto Rico, always the last colonies. Spain joined Europe thanks to the genius of Ortega y Gasset, and Maura was his disciple. That marked him forever. Then Husserl in Freiburg, along with Raquel… He was a privileged man. He had to argue to be allowed to fight against the enemies of culture, against Franco and the Falange, who with their shit-covered boots sullied the halls of universities shouting
“And now you have nothing.” Laura looked at him devoid of emotion. She was tired of Jorge’s political history.
She wanted to tell him that he was left without the world, but she did not think, did not feel that Jorge Maura had come to Lanzarote to convince God with his sacrifice.
“Because it is a sacrifice, I see that, isn’t it so?”
“You mean that when the war was over I should have gone back to my intellectual vocation, to recall my masters Ortega and Husserl and write?”
“Why not?”
He laughed. “Because it’s a fucking disaster to be creative when you know you’re not Mozart or Keats. Dammit, I got tired of scratching around in my past. There’s nothing in me to justify the pretension of creativity. This came before anything, before you, before Raquel, this is a matter of my own emptiness, my awareness of my own limits, maybe my sterility. Does what I’m saying to you seem awful? Now you want to come along and sell me an illusion, which I don’t believe in but which does make me believe that either you’re a fool or you under estimate my intelligence. Why don’t you just leave me alone, so I can fill the emptiness in my own way? Let me see things for myself, learn if something can still grow in my soul, an idea, a faith, because I swear to you, Laura, my soul is more desolate than this rock landscape you see here… why?”
She embraced him, sank to her knees and embraced his legs, leaning her head against his knees, flushing with shame for the moisture in his cheap gray slacks-they seemed worn out by washing, as if there hadn’t been time for them to dry and they still smelled of urine, and the shirt too, washed quickly and put right back on because it was the only one he had, and the bad odors hadn’t gone away, the smell of an earthly body, an animal body, tired of expelling humors, shit, semen. Jorge my love, my Jorge, I don’t know how to kiss you.
“I just don’t have the strength to go on scratching at my roots. The Spanish and Spanish American malady. Who are we?”
She begged his pardon for having provoked him.
“No, it’s all right. Get up. Let me get a good look at you. You look so clean, so clean…”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
By now Laura can’t remember how her lover is standing, with his moist freshly washed old clothes, with a smell of defeat no soap can purge. By now she can’t remember if he is standing or sitting on the cot, if he is looking down or staring out the door. At the ceiling. Or into her eyes.
“What am I trying to tell you? What do you know?”
“I know your biography. From the aristocracy to the Republic to defeat to exile and from there to pride. The pride of Lanzarote.”
“The pride of Lucifer.” Jorge laughed. “You leave a lot of openings, you know?”
“I know. The pride of Lanzarote? That isn’t an opening. It’s right here. It’s today.”
“I clean the monks’ latrines and see impossible drawings on the walls. As if a repentant painter had begun something he never finished and, because he knew it, chose the humblest and most humiliating place in the monastery to begin an enigma. Because what I see or imagine is a mystery, and the place of the mystery is the very spot where the good brothers, whether they want to or not, shit and piss. They are body, and their bodies remind them they can never be wholly spirit, as they’d like. Wholly.”
“Do you think they know? Are they that naive?”
“They have faith.”
God became flesh, said Maura in a kind of controlled exaltation, God stripped Himself of His holy impunity by making Himself man in Christ. That made God as fragile as the human beings who could recognize themselves in Him.
“Is that why we killed Him?”
“Christ became a man so we would recognize ourselves in Him.”
But to be worthy of Christ, we had to sink lower so we wouldn’t be more than what He is.
“A monk should think that when he’s shitting. Jesus did the same, but I do it with more shame. That’s faith. God’s in the pots and pans, St. Teresa said.”
“Was He looking for it?” asked Laura. “Looking for faith?”
“Christ had to abandon an invisible holiness in order to become flesh. Why ask me to become a saint-so I can incarnate a bit of Jesus’ holiness?”
“Do you know what I thought when my son Santiago died? Is this the greatest sorrow in my life?”
“Did you think it was? Or did you wonder if it was?… I’m sorry, Laura.”
“No. I thought that if God takes something from us, it’s because He gave up everything.”
“His own son, Jesus?”
“Yes. can’t help thinking this ever since I lost Santiago. He was the second, did you know? My brother and my son. Both. Santiago the Elder and Santiago the Younger. Both. You’re sorry? Imagine how I feel!”
“Look a bit further. God renounced everything. He had to renounce His own creation, the world, to let us be free.”
God became absent in the name of our freedom, said Jorge, and since we use that freedom for evil and not only for good, God had to become flesh in Christ in order to show us that God could be a man and nonetheless avoid evil.
“That’s our conflict,” Maura went on. “Being free to do evil or good and to know that if I do evil I offend the freedom God gave me, but if I do good, I also offend God because I’m daring to imitate Him, to be like Him, to sin through pride like Lucifer; you yourself said so.”
It was horrible to hear that: Laura took Jorge’s hand.
“What am I saying that is so terrible? Tell me.”
“That God asks us to do something He doesn’t allow. I’ve never heard anything crueler.”
