The children believe that memory rejuvenates me and Saint John of the Cross had a vision that I am the frame of a family portrait. — which causes me to ask you what you want me to ask and not to ask you what you don’t want me to ask, and I couldn’t even ask it, nor does it even occur to me to ask it — as for the future, my requests are more effective and valuable in your eyes, as they come from You who impels me to make them, I beseech you with pleasure and joy (my judgment depends upon your countenance from this day forth — which happens when you receive and hear my prayers): tear the delicate fabric of this life.”
Place 3 —
We always let night fall, before turning on the lights. Slowly, everything disappears in the place where it was, the children play games, calling him and calling each other. At that hour they are completely blind, they move between the pieces of furniture without knocking them over or touching any of them; they can also remain quiet at my side without me knowing and feeling myself alone awaiting a visitor
on the day I was suffering from hemorrhoids, I stayed in bed all morning: I dreamed that I was where, in fact, I was: in the atmosphere of my room; topless, I looked in the mirror, which I chose to be an oval to remind me of a face and I asked it who it would liberate; in front of me, my body was very beautiful and I wanted to be photographed within the frame; I also wanted to masturbate in front of that body, I was somewhat aroused by my lover’s slipper lying flat on the carpet. My hemorrhoids cause the pain of a shaft being driven through my body. This happened with lightness and brevity, I reached the end, I looked for the notebook and the pen on the bed and I wrote on the day I was suffering from hemorrhoids
I had then a mirror vertigo in which the mirror, being always mirror, appeared to me as a bier, a sick person in their bed, more precisely, Saint John of the Cross, dying in Úbeda. But it was impossible that he was dying because he wrote at my side and the pages of his complete works fell, retroactively, around the mirror while everything happened with lightness and brevity: I dreamed that, in my room, he was beginning to write what he had already written.
I sat down at his side saying what I write, I write for the first time. My observation did not interest him. He lay down on my bed which had become a spare cot and began to die his death of Úbeda, believing I would be capable of taking it as it had been
we three wrote leaning against the railing, dying on our feet, not knowing whose mouth articulated what we said. Saint John of the Cross, fearful to suddenly begin levitating, leave our company, and, not least, become ridiculous because at that time all my lovers walked in the oratory, or rather, the great entrance to the garden.
Ana de Peñalosa was still telling her story
the death of my only daughter, my second mourning
Don Luis del Mercado entrusted me with the education of my niece Inés
it has been three years since I last abandoned my oratory
between me and he who began to detach himself from the ground
“a castle made entirely of diamond or a very transparent crystal where there are countless rooms, as there are many mansions in heaven: some above, others below, others on the sides; and in the center, in the midst of them all, is the most important one, which is the one where things of great secrecy take place”: there was, then, the second space in the house, the ceiling space, where Saint John of the Cross went when he levitated: a subsequent mirror announced itself slowly: a few wrinkles and white hairs, tender text and hard text; I no longer ask for the youth of his face but for that of his writing: an admirable woman is a bad mother: on that day she was the victim of two small deceits that led her to pick up the pen and the book
she was listening to kyrie eleison, Christe audi nos, Christe exaudi nos when, looking at the dresser miserere nobis she had the impression that on top of it, behind a glass, there was another candle miserere nobis; she wondered in astonishment miserere nobis
how it could be possible; she realized it was a flask of beauty cream made from plants miserere nobis the other illusion miserere nobis was that she, in bed, went to close the door to the room overlooking the great hall so they wouldn’t be able to see her through the window miserere nobis: but, once she was lying down, she saw that the window wasn’t actually in front of the bed miserere nobis.
There was yet a small incident:
she was so absorbed that her cigarette went out in her hand and, wanting to relight it to swallow its smoke with the kyries, she remembered that she had left the matches where Saint John of the Cross was, near the ceiling or in the Chapel. She then concentrated on the writing and, suddenly, at the top of the page, scratching at it with her fingers, she found a match that she used to light the candle of an oratory, a table, and a few abandoned images: she spent some hours there, in either an intense or a vague sensation of writing: the house, the true and subsequent house, had yet to be made; changing rooms, another part will be completed; I stop at the entrance to the new room which, for the time being, is only space crossed by air with a few openings of sun and the rest rain, humidity, cold because the climate is not Atlantic like that of the house I left, moderately sweet and bitter; I sit down to the time without movements and I become a faint apparition until a new cell of the new house is written — it must be a cell with a tomb built upon the place where I sat, a tomb of evident and aromatic dream where I see you in many people and many moments of your life. Through the small opening in the attic tomb overlooking the garden, voices could be heard and the beating of oars announcing that Saint John of the Cross was going to arrive. John’s name furrowed the water and the boat’s keel penetrated each letter as he conversed with the book, the book open on his knees being born from his mouth and covered by a particular quality of sun; voices could be heard and the beating of oars, his lowered eyelids still allowed him to utter his dreamed writing. When he put his feet on land I said to him
good morning, actor of speech
and he answered me:
good morning, mother: next to the river was a courtyard surrounded by windows; the ground, washed by you morning and afternoon, was always shining, although one day I noticed the brightness had diminished and the plants lacked the just-watered splendor you gave them, I sat down with my white sheets of paper between my hands, meditating on the enigma, and I ended up writing that you would be in the moment of absenting yourself, almost opening the door, in the most remote room of the house, although you constantly desire to be hospitable. For three centuries, your courtyard influenced the lifestyle of the brothers and sisters who form the community: our rules encompassed the novitiate, the prayers, the style of dress, the slumber, the journeys, the silence, and the utterance of speech. The fast is not from meat, but from movement. At certain hours of the day, when all the sand fell in the clepsydra, those who are part of the community should become immobile and look attentively at the position in which they found themselves; when I stopped in the left wing of the house I thought, since Ana de Peñalosa had left, that all her rooms would be closed. But, obeying the rules, the door had been left completely open and two small birds listened to a mandolin from the old round birdcage; in the dresser drawers she left the clothing she wears to sleep at night; her day dresses hang from pegs placed at the entrance to the next room where there is a work table and a skull, eye sockets wound in ivy. The bed seems that of a young woman, with room for a single body, at its foot hung an engraving of a placenta enclosing a fetus only a short time before birth. The dresses are different colors, short and long, and one has the impression that they seem to describe her. I imagine her in the middle of the carpet, welcoming me, and say: good night, mother. We cannot run to each other because it’s time to follow one of the rules. The light goes on in the birdcage and I make out my open book on her work table, underlined at the beginning of the Living Flame, her hand abandoned in it; I am fascinated by the stillness in the room and I notice that a single ring occupies her hand in the same way her hand occupies the page; I take her hand, infringing on the rules, and her hand contains a word with which she, also infringing on the rules