Had Filopater’s position regarding dogma been what eventually excluded him from the religious community? Did the priest distance himself too much from the principles of faith in order to establish himself in the proofs of faith? These were the questions I asked myself when the chaotic or fatal events I have recorded here combined and broke the ties that until then had bound me to friendship (Jerico), sexual desire (Asunta), ambition (Max Monroy), and unspoiled charity (Miguel Aparecido).
What did I have left? The chance encounter with Filopater appeared to me like a salvation, if by salvation you understand not a favorable judgment in the tribunal of eternity but the full realization of our human potential. To be what we are because we are what we were and what we will be. The question of transcendence beyond death is left hanging during the age of salvation on earth. Does the second determine the first? Does what happens to us after death depend on what we accomplish in life? Or ultimately, independent of our actions, is a final redemption valid when it is stimulated by confession, repentance, final awareness of the truth that pursued us from the beginning and which we believe only when we die?
Filopater’s reply (and perhaps the reason for his exclusion) was that each human being was granted individual value independent of belonging to a group, party, church, or social class. The individual inalienable being could, in fact, affiliate with a group, party, class, or church as long as this radical personal value was not lost. Was this what the religious order could not forgive in Filopater: the stubborn affirmation of his person without discrediting his membership in the clergy, his refusal to hand his personality over to the herd, disappearing gratefully into the crowd of the city, the monastery, the party? He had been faithful to what he taught us. He was the favorite son of Baruch (Benoit, Benedetto, Benito, Bendito) Spinoza, excommunicated from Hebrew orthodoxy, irreducible to Christian orthodoxy, a heretic to both, convinced that faith is consumed in obedience and expands in justice.
Back at Santo Domingo and in conversation with Filopater, I expected what he offered as we walked from the plaza to Calle de Donceles along Republica de Brasil, a continuation of our earlier talk, though part of my attention was devoted to crossing the crowded streets, keeping the good father from being run down by trucks, cars, bicycles, or peddlers’ carts.
“I don’t want you going around in circles about the reasons for my exclusion,” he said then, and I understood that the miracle of his existence was not to die by being run down. “My crime was to maintain that Jesus is not a proxy for the Father. Jesus is God because he is incarnate and the Father does not tolerate that. Anathema, anathema!” Filopater struck his emaciated chest, making the ancient tie fly up while I helped him cross the street. “And my conclusion, Josue. If what I say is true, God appears only to the most unworthy of men.”
“The most unbelieving?” I said, impelled by Filopater’s words.
“I don’t believe in a totalitarian God. I believe in the self-contradictory God incarnated in Jesus.
When we finally walked through the large street door of number 815, Calle de Donceles, to a covered alleyway smelling of moss and rotting roots, Filopater led me to a room at the rear of the crowded courtyard, avoiding with a glance I imagined as fearful the stairway that led to the residential floor, as if a ghost lived there.
Filopater’s room was in reality a workshop with tables prepared for precise work: grinding lenses. A table, two chairs, a cot, bare walls unadorned except for the crucifix over the bed. Since I looked longer than I should have at the bed, Filopater took me by the arm and smiled.
“A woman doesn’t fit in my bed. Imagine. Celibacy has been obligatory for priests since the Lateran Council of 1139, except that Henri, bishop of Liege in the thirteenth century, had sixty-one children. Fourteen in twenty-two months.”
“A woman,” I said just to say something, not imagining the consequences.
“Your woman,” Filopater said to my enormous surprise.
He saw the astonishment followed by incomprehension on my face; before my eyes passed the gaze of Asunta Jordan, in my ears the voice of the nurse Elvira Rios, in my nose the smell of Senora Hetara’s whores, but my sealed mouth did not pronounce the name Filopater made himself responsible for saying:
“Lucha Zapata.”
And then he murmured: “Perhaps the voice of Satan said to Jesus on Calvary: ‘If thou be God, save thyself and come down from the cross.’ ”
I WAS AFRAID as I walked up to the apartment on Calle de Praga. On each stair a false step threatened me. In each corner an enemy lurked. I went up slowly, accompanied by a legion of demons unleashed by the visit to Filopater’s hiding place in the center of the immense city. In the shadows, succubi adopted the intangible forms of women to seduce and condemn me. Worse were the incubi who offered themselves to me as satanic male lovers. And the horror of my ascent was that the incubi were men with the face of Asunta and the succubi women with Jerico’s features, as if I wanted to erase from my vision Lucha Zapata’s face, evoked by my visit with Filopater on Calle de Donceles. Then I knew it was all a premonition.
I opened the door to the apartment nervously, hurriedly. I put the keys in my pocket and before I turned on the lights Jerico’s voice asked me-ordered me-from the darkness: “No light. Don’t turn on the light. Let’s talk in the dark.”
I accepted the invitation. Little by little, as usual, my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and Jerico’s shadow was outlined with greater clarity.
But not much. The man, my friend, set aside an area of his own darkness that protected him from a world turned hostile. As if I didn’t know. The arrest order had come from the office of the president with the fury reserved for a traitor.
From then on “Judas” would be the presidential term used to refer to Jerico, “Judas.”
Now Jerico Iscariot was hiding in the most obvious and therefore most concealed place: our apartment on Calle de Praga.
“Do you remember Poe? We read him together. The purloined letter is in sight of everyone and therefore nobody sees it.”
“You’re taking a risk,” I said with a reverberation of affection from my heart but not daring to say: Run away. I didn’t want him, a fugitive, to feel expelled as well. What would I do except respect Jerico’s desire, even knowing I might seem like his accomplice, his harborer?
“Get away. Don’t compromise me.”
I didn’t dare say that.
He said it for me.
He saved me the grief.
“You know, old pal. We wanted so much in life, we read, studied, discussed so much, and ended up only being worth what you pay an informer.”
I became angry. “I’m no Judas.”
He became angry. “That’s what they call me in the president’s office.”
“I had nothing to do…” I stammered. “I’m not a traitor. I don’t work in the government.”
“Then are you my accomplice?”
“I’m your friend. Not a traitor and not an accomplice.”
I asked him without words to understand me. I didn’t want to ask him to leave. Where would he go? He knew I wouldn’t turn him in. He took advantage of our friendship. Did he sacrifice it? I rejected this idea, seeing Jerico cornered by shadows, failed in his illusory takeover of power, the act of an inopportune fascist fascination impossible in our time, the product of an imagination, as I now understood it, exalted by itself, by the past, by a feverish, perversely idealistic intelligence. My friend Jerico with no last name. Like kings. Like sultans. Like Asian dictators.
“Thanks, Monroy. Your monitoring has allowed us to keep an eye on all of Judas’s preparations.”
Max Monroy didn’t tell the president that having access to all the strands of information was useful for something.
Valentin Pedro Carrera couldn’t help making a joke.
“You kept the information till pretty late, Don Max. This Judas almost had his way and turned us into Christ,
