Part 10 (1/2)

Maurice Abramowicz observes:”Jesus, d'apres cescandinave, atoujours le beau role; ses deboires, grace a la science des typographes, jouissent d'une reputation poly- glotte; sa residence de trente-trois ans parmi les humains ne fut, en somme, qu'une villegiature.”In Appendix III to hisChristeligeDogmatik,Erfjord rebuts this pa.s.sage. He notes that the crucifixion of G.o.d has not ended, because that which happened once in time is repeated endlessly in eternity. Judas, now, continues to hold out his hand for the silver, continues to kiss Jesus' cheek, continues to scatter the pieces of sil - ver in the temple, continues to knot the noose on the field of blood. (In order to jus- tify this statement, Erfjord cites the last chapter of the first volume of Jaromir Hladik'sVindication of Eternity.) To claim that He was man, and yet was incapable of sin, is to fall into contradiction; the attributes impeccabilitas andhumanitas are in- compatible. Kemnitz will allow that the Redeemer could feel weariness, cold, distress, hunger, and thirst; one might also allow Him to be able to sin and be condemned to d.a.m.nation. For many, the famous words in Isaiah 53: 2-3,He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, are a foreshadowing of the Crucified Christ at the hour of His death. For some (HansLa.s.sen Martensen,for ex- ample), they are a refutation of the lovelinessthat the vulgar consensus at- tributes to Christ; forRuneberg,they are the detailed prophecy not of a moment but of the entire horrendous future, in Time and in Eternity, of the Word made Flesh. G.o.d was made totally man, but man to the point of iniq- uity, man to the point of reprobation and the Abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosenany of the lives that weave the confused web of history: He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he choseanabject existence: He was Judas.

In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer readers this revelation. The incredulous considered it,a priori, a vapid and tedious theological game; theologians disdained it.Runebergsensed in that ec.u.menical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. G.o.d had ordered that indifference; G.o.d did not want His terrible secret spread throughout the earth.Runebergrealized that the hour was not yet come. He felt that an- cient, divine curses were met in him. He recalled Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces upon the mountain so as not to look upon G.o.d; Isaiah, who was terrified when his eyes beheld the One whose glory fills the earth; Saul, whose eyes were blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simeon benAzai,who saw the Garden and died; the famous wizard John of Viterbo, who went mad when the Trinity was revealed to him; the Midras.h.i.+m, who abominate those who speak th.e.s.h.em Hamephorash, the Secret Name of G.o.d. Was it not that dark sin that he,Runeberg, wasguilty of? Might not that be the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (Matthew 12:31) which shall not be forgiven? Valerius Sora.n.u.s died for revealing the hidden name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be Runeberg's for having discov- ered and revealed the terrible name of G.o.d?

Drunk with sleeplessness and his dizzying dialectic, NilsRunebergwandered the streets ofMalmo,crying out for a blessing-that he be al- lowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer.

He died of a ruptured aneurysm on March i, 1912. Heresiologists will perhaps remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which might have been thought long spent, the complexities of misery and evil.

1944.

The End

Lying on his back, Recabarren opened his eyes a bit and saw the sloping ceil- ing of thick cane. From the other room there came the strumming of a guitar, like some inconsequential labyrinth, infinitely tangling and untangling.... Little by little, reality came back to him, the ordinary things that now would always be justthese ordinary things. He looked down without pity at his great useless body, the plain wool poncho that wrapped his legs. Outside, beyond the thick bars at his window, spread the flatland and the evening; he had slept, but the sky was still filled with light. He groped with his left arm until he found the bra.s.s cowbell that hung at the foot of the cot. He shook it once or twice; outside his door, the una.s.suming chords continued.

The guitar was being played by a black man who had shown up one night flattering himself that he was a singer; he had challenged another stranger to a song contest, the way traveling singers did. Beaten, he went on showing up at the general-store-and-bar night after night, as though he were waiting for someone. He spent hours with the guitar, but he never sang again; it could be that the defeat had turned him bitter. People had grown used to the inoffensive man. Recabarren, the owner of the bar, would never forget that contest; the next day, as he was trying to straighten some balesofyerba,his right side had suddenly gone dead on him, and he discov- ered that he couldn't talk. From learning to pity the misfortunes of the he- roes of our novels, we wind up feeling too much pity for our own; but not Recabarren, who accepted his paralysis as he had earlier accepted the se- verity and the solitudes of the Americas. A man in the habit of living in the present, as animals do, he now looked up at the sky and reflected that the red ring around the moon was a sign of rain.

A boy with Indian-like features (Recabarren's son, perhaps) opened the door a crack. Recabarren asked him with his eyes whether anybody was around; the boy, not one to talk much, made a motion with his hand to say there wasn't-the black man didn't count. Then the prostrate man was left alone; his left hand played awhile with the bell, as though exercising some power.

The plains, in the last rays of the sun, were almost abstract, as though seen in a dream. A dot waveredon the horizon, then grew until it became a horseman riding, or so it seemed, toward the house.

Recabarren could make out the broad-brimmed hat, the dark poncho, the piebald horse, but not the face of the rider, who finally reined in the horse and came toward the house at an easy trot. Some two hundred yards out, he veered off to the side. At that, the man was out of Recabarren's line of sight, but Recabarren heard him speak, get down off his horse, tie it to the post, and with a firm step en- ter the bar.

Without raising his eyes from the guitar, where he seemed to be looking for something, the black man spoke.

”Iknew I could count on you, sir,” he softly said.

”And I knew I could count on you, old n.i.g.g.e.r,” the other man replied, his voice harsh. ”A heap of days I've made you wait, but here I am.”

There was a silence. Then the black man spoke again.

”I'm getting used to waiting. I've been waiting now for seven years.”

Unhurried, the other man explained: ”It'd been longer than seven years that I'd gone without seeing my chil- dren. I found them that day, and I wouldn't have it so's I looked to them like a man on his way to a knife fight.”*

”I understood that,” the black man said. ”I hope they were all in good health.”

The stranger, who had sat down at the bar, gave a hearty laugh at that. He ordered a drink and took a sip or two, but didn't finish it.

”I gave them some advice,” he said, ”which is something you can never get too much of and doesn't cost a lot. I told them, among other things, that a man ought not to go spilling another man's blood.”

A slow chord preceded the black man's response: ”Good advice, too. That way they won't grow up to be like us.”

”Not like me, anyway,” said the stranger, who then added, as though thinking out loud: ”Fate would have it that I kill, and now it's put a knife in my hand again.”

”Fall's coming on,” the black man observed, as though he hadn't heard, ”and the days are getting shorter.”

”The light that's left will be enough for me,” replied the other man, get- ting to his feet.

Hestood square before the black man and in a tired voice said to him, ”Leave that guitar alone, now- you've got another kind of contest to try to win today.”

The two men walked toward the door. As the black man stepped out- side, he murmured, ”Could be this one goes as badf 'rme as the other one did.”

”It's not that the first one went bad for you,” the other man answered, serious. ”It's that you couldn't hardly wait to get to the second one.”

They walked beside each other until they got some distance from the houses. One place on the plains was much like another, and the moon was bright. Suddenly they looked at each other, stopped, and the stranger took off his spurs. They already had their ponchos wrapped around their fore- arms when the black man spoke.

”One thing I want to ask you before we get down to it. I want you to put all your courage and all your skill into this, like you did seven years ago when you killed my brother.”

For perhaps the first time in their exchange,Martin Fierroheard the hatred. His blood felt it, like a sharp prod. They circled, clashed, and sharp steel marked the black man's face.

There is an hour just at evening when the plains seem on the verge of saying something; they never do, or perhaps they do-eternally-though we don't understand it, or perhaps we do understand but what they say is as un- translatable as music.... From his cot, Recabarren saw the end. A thrust, and the black man dodged back, lost his footing, feigned a slash to his oppo- nent's face, and then lunged out with a deep jab that buried the knife in his belly. Then came another thrust, which the storekeeper couldn't see, andFierrodid not get up. Unmoving, the black man seemed to stand watch over the agonizing death. He wiped off the b.l.o.o.d.y knife in the gra.s.s and walked slowly back toward the houses, never looking back.

His work of vengeance done, he was n.o.body now. Or rather, he was the other one: there was neither destination nor destiny on earth for him, and he had killed a man.

The Cult of the Phoenix

Those who write that the cult of the Phoenix had its origin in Heliopolis, and claim that it derives from the religious restoration that followed the death of the reformer Amenhotep IV, cite the writings of Herodotus and Tacitus and the inscriptions on Egyptian monuments, but they are un- aware, perhaps willfully unaware, that the cult's designation as ”the cult of the Phoenix” can be traced back no farther than to Hraba.n.u.s Maurus and that the earliest sources (theSaturnalia, say, orFlavius Josephus)speak only of ”the People of the Practice” or ”the People of the Secret.” In the conventi- cles ofFerrara, Gregoroviusobserved that mention of the Phoenix was very rare in the spoken language; in Geneva, I have had conversations with arti- sans who did not understand me when I asked whether they were men of the Phoenix but immediately admitted to being men of the Secret. Unless I am mistaken, much the same might be said about Buddhists: The name by which the world knows them is not the name that they themselves p.r.o.nounce.

On one altogether too famous page, Moklosich has equated the mem- bers of the cult of the Phoenix with the gypsies. In Chile and in Hungary, there are both gypsies and members of the sect; apart from their ubiquity, the two groups have very little in common. Gypsies are horse traders, pot-makers, blacksmiths, and fortune-tellers; the members of the cult of the Phoenix are generally contented pract.i.tioners of the ”liberal professions.” Gypsies are of a certain physical type, and speak, or used to speak, a secret language; the members of the cult are indistinguishable from other men, and the proof of this is that they have never been persecuted. Gypsies are picturesque, and often inspire bad poets; ballads, photographs, and boleros fail to mention the members of the cult.... MartinBubersays that Jews areessentially sufferers; not all the members of the cult are, and some actively abhor pathos. That public and well-known truth suffices to refute the vul- gar error (absurdly defended by Urmann) which sees the roots of the Phoenix as lying in Israel. People's reasoning goes more or less this way: Ur- mann was a sensitive man; Urmann was a Jew; Urmann made a habit of vis- iting the members of the cult in the Jewish ghettos of Prague; the affinity that Urmann sensed proves a real relations.h.i.+p. In all honesty, I cannot con - cur with that conclusion. That the members of the cult should, in a Jewish milieu, resemble Jews proves nothing; what cannot be denied is that they, like Hazlitt's infinite Shakespeare, resemble every man in the world. They are all things to all men, like the Apostle; a few days ago, Dr. Juan FranciscoAmaro,ofPaysandu,pondered the ease with which they a.s.similate, the ease with which they ”naturalize” themselves.

I have said that the history of the cult records no persecutions. That is true, but since there is no group of human beings that does not include ad- herents of the sect of the Phoenix, it is also true that there has been no per- secution or severity that the members of the cult have not sufferedand carried out. In the wars of the Western world and in the distant wars of Asia, their blood has been spilled for centuries, under enemy flags; it is hardly worth their while to identify themselves with every nation on the globe.

Lacking a sacred book to unite them as the Scriptures unite Israel, lack- ing a common memory, lacking that other memory that is a common lan- guage, scattered across the face of the earth, diverse in color and in feature, there is but one thing-the Secret-that unites them, and thatwill unite them until the end of time. Once, in addition to the Secret there was a leg- end (and perhapsa cosmogoniemyth), but the superficial men of the Phoenix have forgotten it, and today all that is left to them is the dim and obscure story of a punishment. A punishment, or a pact, or a privilege- versions differ; but what one may dimly see in all of them is the judgment of a G.o.d who promises eternity to a race of beings if its men, generation upon generation, perform a certain ritual. I have compared travelers' re- ports, I have spoken with patriarchs and theologians; I can attest that the performance of that ritual is the only religious practice observed by the members of the cult. The ritual is, in fact, the Secret. The Secret, as I have said, is transmitted from generation to generation, but tradition forbids a mother from teaching it to her children, as it forbids priests from doing so; initiation into the mystery is the task of the lowest individuals of the group. A slave, a leper, or a beggar plays the role of mystagogue. A child, too, may catechizeanother child. The act itself is trivial, the matter of a moment'stime, and it needs no description. The materials used are cork, wax, or gum arabic. (In the liturgy there is mention of ”slime”; pond slime is often used as well.) There are no temples dedicated expressly to the cult's wors.h.i.+p, but ruins, cellars, or entryways are considered appropriate sites. The Secret is sacred, but that does not prevent its being a bit ridiculous; the performance of it is furtive, even clandestine, and its adepts do not speak of it. There are no decent words by which to call it, but it is understood that all words somehow name it, or rather, that they inevitably allude to it-and so I have said some insignificant thing in conversation and have seen adepts smile or grow uncomfortable because they sensed I had touched upon the Secret. In Germanic literatures there are poems written by members of the cult whose nominal subject is the sea or twilight; more than once I have heard people say that these poems are, somehow, symbols of the Secret.Orbis terrarumestspeculumLudi,goes an apocryphal saying reported bydu Gange inhis Glossary. A kind of sacred horror keeps some of the faithful from perform- ing that simplest of rituals; they are despised by the other members of the sect, but they despise themselves even more. Those, on the other hand, who deliberately renounce the Practice and achieve direct commerce with the Deity command great respect; such men speak of that commerce using fig- ures from the liturgy, and so we find that John of the Rood wrote as follows:

Let the Nine Firmaments be told That G.o.d is delightful as the Cork and Mire.

On three continents I have merited the friends.h.i.+p of many wors.h.i.+pers of the Phoenix; I know that the Secret at first struck them as ba.n.a.l, shameful, vulgar, and (stranger still) unbelievable. They could not bring themselves to admit that their parents had ever stooped to such acts. It is odd that the Se- cret did not die out long ago; but in spite of the world's vicissitudes, in spite of wars and exoduses, it does, in its full awesomeness, come to all the faithful. Someone has even dared to claim that by now it is instinctive.

The South