quadruple, but one, one with God, He is I, I am He,
The night grew chilly. Blimunda had fallen asleep, her head resting on Baltasar's shoulder. Later he accompanied her indoors and they went to sleep. The priest went out on to the patio, and remained standing there all night, watching the sky and murmuring in temptation.
...
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, a friar consulted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition wrote, in his critical assessment of the sermon, that the author of such a text was more worthy of applause than dismay, more deserving of admiration than scepticism. The friar in question, Friar Manuel Guilherme, must have felt some sense of foreboding even while recommending admiration and applause, some imperceptible trace of heresy must have passed to his pituitary gland as he struggled to silence the fears and doubts that must have assailed the compassionate censor as he listened to that sermon being delivered. And when it is the turn of another venerable scholar, Dom Antonio Caetano de Sousa, to read and censure, he confirms that the text he has just examined contains nothing contrary to holy faith and Christian morals, he does not dwell on the doubts and fears that appear to have provoked some disquiet in the first instance, and urging in his closing comments that Dr Bartolomeu Lourenco de Gusmao be held in the same high esteem as that shown him by the Court, thus using the influence of the Palace to whiten doctrinal obscurities that probably warrant closer investigation. However, the final statement will be made by Padre Boaventura of St Julian, the royal censor, who concludes his eulogies and effusions by declaring that only silence could adequately express his sentiments of wonder and reverence. Those of us who are closer to the truth felt obliged to ask ourselves what other thundering voices or more terrible silences would respond to the words the stars heard on the Duke of Aveiro's estate while an exhausted Baltasar and Blimunda slept soundly, and the Passarola in the darkness of the coach-house strained its metallic frame in order to catch what its inventor out on the open patio was declaiming to the skies.
Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco has three, if not four, separate existences, and only when he is asleep, for even when dreaming differently, once awake, he cannot tell whether in his dream he was the priest who ascends the altar to celebrate Mass canonically, the scholar who is so highly esteemed that the King goes incognito to the Royal Chapel and listens to his sermons from behind a curtain, the inventor of the flying machine and the various mechanisms for draining ships that have sprung a leak, and this other, composite man, riddled with fears and doubts, who is a preacher in church, scholar in the academy, courtier in the Palace, and visionary and comrade of ordinary working-class people in Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, and he turns anxiously to his dream in an attempt to reconstruct the fragile and precarious unity that is shattered the moment he opens his eyes, nor does he need to fast like Blimunda. He has abandoned the familiar readings of the doctors of the Church, of scholars versed in canon law, of the various scholastic theories about essence and being, as if his soul had grown weary of words, but since man is the only animal who can be taught to speak and write long before achieving any social or intellectual standing, Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco makes a detailed study of the Old Testament, especially the first five books, the so-called Pentateuch, which is known as the Torah among the Jews, and as the Koran among the followers of Mohammed. Inside any of our bodies, Blimunda would have the power to see our organs and our wills, but she cannot read our thoughts, nor would she understand them, to see a man thinking as in a single thought, such opposed and conflicting truths, yet without losing one's mind, she were she to see it, he for having such thoughts.
Music is something else. Domenico Scarlatti brought a harpsichord to the coach-house, he did not carry it himself, but hired two porters who, with poles, ropes, and a pad filled with horsehair, and much perspiration on their brows, brought it all the way from the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, where it was purchased, to Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, where it would be played, Baltasar accompanied them to show the way, but they required no other assistance from him, for this method of transportation depends on skill and experience, on knowing how to distribute the weight and combine forces like the pyramid in the traditional dance known as the Bica, knowing how to use the ropes and poles in order to set up a steady pace, these, after all, are the secrets of the porter's trade and are as valid as any other, for a tradesman worthy of the name tries to acquire as many secret skills as he can. The Galician porters put the harpsichord down outside the gate, for no one wanted them to discover the existence of the flying machine, so Baltasar and Blimunda had to carry it into the coach-house themselves, a hazardous job, not so much because of its weight as because they did not know how to go about it, not to mention that the vibration of the chords were like anguished cries tugging at their heart-strings, which were also seized by alarm and dismay in the face of such extreme fragility. That same afternoon Domenico Scarlatti arrived, sat himself down and began to tune the harpsichord, while Baltasar wove willow canes and Blimunda sewed the sails, jobs they could carry out in silence without disturbing the music. Once he had finished tuning the instrument, adjusting the jacks, which had been disturbed in transit, and checking the duck quills one by one, Scarlatti began to play, starting off by letting his fingers glide over the keys, as if he were releasing notes that had been imprisoned, then organising the sounds in tiny sections, as if choosing between the right and the wrong notes, between harmony and discord, between phrasing and pauses, in short, as if giving new expression to what had previously seemed fragmentary and dissonant. Baltasar and Blimunda knew very little about music apart from the plain-chant sung by the friars, on rare occasions the operatic swell of the Te Deum, popular airs from the city and countryside, some familiar to Blimunda, others to Baltasar, but nothing that could even remotely be compared to the sounds the Italian drew from the harpsichord, which seemed as much a childish game as some fulminating oath, as much a divertissement for angels as the wrath of God.
After an hour, Scarlatti got up from the harpsichord, covered it with a canvas cloth, and then said to Baltasar and Blimunda, who had interrupted their work, If Padre Bartolomeu's Passarola were ever to fly, I should dearly love to travel in it and play my harpsichord up in the sky, and Blimunda rejoined, Once the machine starts to fly, the heavens will be filled with music, and Baltasar, remembering the war, interjected, Unless the heavens turn out to be hell. This couple can neither write nor read, yet they can say things that seem most unlikely at such a time and in such a place, but since everything has an explanation, we must look for one, and if nothing comes to mind just at present, we shall find it one day. Scarlatti returned many times to the estate of the Duke of Aveiro, he did not always play the harpsichord, but when he did, he sometimes urged them not to interrupt their labours, the forge roaring in the background, the hammer clanging on the anvil, the water boiling in the vat, so that the harpsichord could scarcely be heard above the terrible din in the coach-house, and meanwhile, the musician tranquilly composed his music as if he were surrounded by the vast silence of the space where he hoped to play one day.
Every man follows his own path in search of grace, whatever that grace may be, a simple landscape with the sky overhead, a certain hour of the day or night, two trees, three if they are painted by Rembrandt, a sigh, without our knowing whether this closes or finally opens the path or where the path may lead us, whether to some other landscape, hour, tree, or sigh, behold this priest who is about to cast out one God and replace him with another, without knowing whether this new allegiance will do him any good in the end, behold this musician who would find it impossible to compose any other kind of music and who will no longer be alive a hundred years from now to hear that first symphony, which is mistakenly referred to as the Ninth, behold this one-handed soldier who has ironically become a manufacturer of wings, although he has never risen to being more than a common foot soldier, man rarely knows what to expect from life, and this man least of all, behold this woman with those extraordinary eyes, who was born to perceive wills, her revelations about a tumour, a strangled foetus, and a silver coin were mere child's play when compared with the wonders she is destined to achieve when Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco returns to the estate of Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira and tells her, Blimunda, Lisbon is stricken by a horrendous plague, people are dying everywhere, and it has just occurred to me that this is an excellent opportunity to collect wills from the dying, if they still have any, but I must warn you that you will be taking a great risk, don't go unless you really want to, for I shall not put you under any obligation, even if it were within my power to do so, What is this plague, It is rumoured that the plague was carried here by passengers aboard a ship from Brazil and that it first broke out in Ericeira. That's close to my home, said Baltasar, whereupon the priest reassured him, No deaths have been reported in Mafra, judging from the symptoms, the disease is believed to be the black plague or yellow fever, the name scarcely matters, the fact is that people are dying like flies, you must decide, Blimunda. She got up from her stool, raised the lid of the chest, and brought out a glass phial, How many wills were in there, she wondered, about
