Original subtitles

Order is the pleasure of Reason,

but Disorder is the delight of the Imagination.

The worst thing is not always surest.

The Satin Slipper. Spanish play in four days. By Paul Claudel.

The scene of this drama is the world

and especially Spain in the late 16th,

unless it be the early seventeenth century.

The author permitted himself to compress countries and periods,

just as at some distance,

several mountain chains form a single horizon.

A touch of trumpet.

Silence.

Silence!

I pray you, brethren that that we now look

at that point in the Atlantic Ocean

located a few degrees above the line equidistant

from the old and the new continent.

We have here represented clearly the hull of a ship dismantled

and floating adrift.

All the constellations of the two hemispheres, the Big Dipper,

Little Bear, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Southern Cross

are neatly suspended like huge chandeliers,

or a huge panoply around the sky.

I could touch them with my cane. Around the sky.

And here below, if a painter would represent the work of pirates

- probably British -

on this poor Spanish boat, he would show that mast,

with its yards and its rigging,

fallen all across the deck, those tumbled cannons,

these open hatches, those large pools of blood,

and those corpses scattered everywhere,

especially those in that group of nuns

collapsed one on top of another.

A Jesuit priest tied to a piece of the mainmast, as you see,

extremely tall and thin.

The torn cassock shows his bare shoulder. Hear what he says:

Lord, I thank you for having fastened me so.

But he is going to speak himself. Listen well, do not cough,

and try to understand a little.

What you won't understand is most beautiful,

what is most drawn out is most interesting,

and what you won't find amusing is funniest.

Lord, I thank you for having fastened me so.

Sometimes I find that your commandments are very hard.

And my will, in the presence of your rule,

perplexed, becomes reluctant.

But today there is no way to be more closely bound to you than I,

and I am pleased to see that not one of my limbs

is capable of being separated from you.

I am truly fastened on this cross,

but my cross is fastened to nothing,

but is floating in the sea.

That sea free at the point where the limit of the known sky melts

and which is equidistant from that Old World I have left

and the other world, the New.

My God, I pray for my brother Rodrigo.

My God, I pray for my son Rodrigo.

I have no other son, oh my God,

and he knows well that he will not have another brother.

You know how at first he followed in my footsteps

under the banner that bears your mark,

and now, having abandoned your novitiate,

he thinks he has turned his back on You.

For his mission, as he thinks, is not to stand and wait,

but to conquer and possess.

As if there was anything that did not belong to You,

and as if he could be somewhere You were not.

But, Lord, it is not easy to escape You,

and if he does not follow You in light,

let him follow You in darkness.

And if not for what he has that is direct,

therefore may he go in indirection.

And if not for what he has simple,

let him go by what is manifold

and laborious and complicated.

And if he desires evil let it be evil which is compatible with good.

Teach him that You alone cannot be far away.

Encumber him with the weight of this other being, lacking him,

so beautiful that it calls to him across the space between them.

Make him a wounded man apart

because once in his life he saw the face of an angel.

Fill these lovers with such desire

as shall involve, lacking each other's presence in the daily whirl,

their primal integrity and essence,

as God conceived them in the beginning, in inextinguishable kinship.

And what he shall try to say awkwardly on earth,

I will translate it, Lord, in your heaven.

"God writes straight with twisted lines."

Portuguese Proverb.

"Even sin " Saint Augustine.

Don Sebastian, King of Portugal,

disappeared in the battle of Alczarqui in Morocco

and with him the best of the Portuguese nobility.

Don Sebastian had no children.

His uncle, Philip 11 of Spain, claimed the crown of Portugal.

By the Treaty of Toresillas, Portugal and Spain

had split the world into two hemispheres.

Philip Il now came to dominate the whole world.

The Portugese people rejected the Spanish King

and the clergy attacked him from the pulpit.

When God, our Lord,

wanted to punish David for the sins he had committed

of adultery and murder, and to warn the people,

he was given a choice of three punishments,

namely: Plague, Famine and War.

We honour God, in Portugal, for taking this mercy on us,

because simultaneously He has given us all three penalties together,

provided that with Don Enes you think in analogies,

expressed in letters neither human nor divine.

Now let us pass over the time of Cardinal Henry's reign,

who did not much grasp the past and future evils,

that threatened the complete ruin of this Kingdom.

Entering the year 1580, Portugal began to feel

the great punishments of which I speak, famine, plague and war.

At that time the streets and highways were filled with corpses

from the plague, and, God forbid, others starved.

And just at that moment came an army of 40 thousand men,

riding across the kingdom to Lisbon,

and many of those who escaped the first two punishments

were massacred.

In this same year, on August 24, the captive king fell,

and began the evil, cruel and tedious, which a soothsayer divined

would last sixty years, three months and seven days.

Thus began the reign of King Philip,

and since we did not pay many financial tributes during his time,

perhaps because we had them not,

still, our sufferings were rigorous,

and so that we would not forget his mercy,

many noblemen were slaughtered,

many nobles and commoners were hung,

and in the river of Lisbon many religious ecclesiastics were drowned.

Do not fear, nor lose trust,

but hope for a bright future

although times are so miserable

and one hears that the whole kingdom is lost,

and that the Moors have landed on our beaches

and taken captive many of our people,

and that the Netherlands have taken from us much of Brazil

and India.

Though our armies are defeated,

We must have faith in God and trust in Saint Vincent, our protector.

That these bones will have flesh again

and will have soul, Spirit and life.

This our Kingdom of Portugal

will eventually return to its former prosperity,

and the lost shall be restored

and many other realms will be won anew.

Shall we move our hands like a living body,

since they now shake like a dead body.

We will triumph over the heretics and above all the infidels,

for the Holy Catholic creed is exalted

and the Holy Roman Church is increased.

And so you can see that always and everywhere,

we have God on our side,

and as our protector the martyr Saint Vincent,

through whose merits and intervention God will give us

in adversity and misfortune, endurance;

for our expectations, fulfillment;

for our temporal well being, prosperity;

for our conquests, valuables;

in the service of God, perseverance;

in the spread of the faith, vigilance.

In this life, grace; in the other, glory.

Paul Claudel has situated in the time of Philip 11

this story of two lovers who never come together,

Dona Prouheze and Don Rodrigo.

The house de Don Pelagio, the husband of Dona Prouheze (Dona Maravilla).

Don Balthazar, there are two paths leaving this house.

One, if the eye could see everything at once,

passes through many towns and villages,

rising and falling like the disorderly skein

on a rope maker's trestle,

and goes directly to the sea,

not far from a hostelry I know,

hidden among huge trees.

That way a knight of arms would escort Dona Prouheze.

Yes, I want her taken from my sight.

Meanwhile, by another way, among the broom,

and climbing among the scattered rocks,

I will yield to the call come to me

from that white spot up there,

this letter from the widow in the mountain,

this letter from my cousin I have in my hand.

As to the Lady Maravilla, all that needs to be done

is to scan the horizon to the east,

where those sails will appear which are to bring her and me

to our governorship in Africa.

Oh, Senor, leaving so soon?

This house of your childhood,

after so many months under a barbarous sun, leaving again ...?

True, it is the only place in the world

in which I feel understood and accepted.

Here I sought refuge in silence,

when I was the terrible judge of His Majesty

extirpator of bandits and rebels.

No one loves a judge.

But he quickly learns that the greatest charity

is to kill criminals.

I have spent days here with no other company from morning to night

but my old gardener,

these orange trees I watered myself,

and this kid that did not fear me.

Yes, she butted me in play

and would eat grape leaves from my hand.

And now there is in addition Dona Maravilla,

who is something more to you than that little nanny goat.

Take care of her, Don Balthazar, on this difficult journey.

I entrust her to your honour.

What! You entrust her to me?

Why not?

Have you not told me yourself that your Catalonian duties are calling you?

It will not prolong your journey very much.

I beg you to excuse me.

Can you not entrust this to some other gentleman?

None.

To Don Camillo, for example,

your ensign and deputy, who will be leaving soon.

He will go alone.

And cannot you let Dona Prouheze wait here?

I will not have time to return here.

What imperative duty calls you?

My cousin who is dying without any man beside her,

with no money in the poor and proud abode, hardly any bread,

and with six marriageable daughters,

of whom the eldest is about twenty years.

Perhaps that is she we used to call Dona Musica?

- I resided there when I was raising the levies for Flanders -

because of that guitar she never let go of and never played on ...

and those big trustful eyes on you

willing to believe in all the wonders,

and those teeth like tender almonds

biting their scarlet lips, and her laughter ...

Why haven't you married her?

Because I am leaner and poorer than an old wolf.

All the money you earn goes to your brother,

the head of the house in Flanders?

There is no better house between the Eschaut and the Meuse.

I undertake Musica, and you will take Dona Prouheze.

Like you, Sir, and despite my age,

I feel better suited as the husband of a beautiful woman

rather than as her protector.

I am sure that neither she nor you, noble friend,

need fear a few days companionship.

In addition, there will always be my wife's maid with her.

Beware the black Jobarbara!

No better protected is a peach tree

growing through a prickly pear.

On the other hand, your journey will not be long.

In no time I will have arranged everything.

And married the six girls?

Farewell Musica.

In another part of the garden. Dona Prouheze and Don Camillo.

I am thankful to your Lady for allowing me to say goodbye.

I have allowed you nothing, and Don Pelagio has forbidden me nothing.

Are you returning to Mogador?

It is the best part of the country, far from Ceuta and its offices,

far from that big blue painting whereon the oars of the galleys

constantly paint in white the name of the King of Spain.

What pleases me most is that bar forty fathoms deep

which costs me one or two boats occasionally

and seems to worry visitors a little.

But as the saying goes: those who come to see me do me an honor,

and those who do not come to see me give me pleasure.

Tell me, you who listen unseen and walk

step by step with me on the other side of these branches,

are you not tempted by what I offer?

Look, what are we doing here?

Let us be off, Maravilla!

And what is this thing so precious that you offer me?

A place with me where there is absolutely nothing more.

Nothing! Nothing!

That is what you have for me?

Is there anything but that nothing which frees us from everything?

But I love life, Senor Camillo. I love the world, I love Spain.

I love the blue sky, I love the hot sun.

I love this place the good Lord has given me.

I also love this. Spain is beautiful.

Holy God, how good to abandon it once and for all!

Is that not what you have always done?

One always returns.

Perhaps it does not exist, this place where there is absolutely nothing?

- It does! - What is it?

A place where there is nothing more, a heart

where there is nothing else but you.

You turn your head when you say that.

So I shall not read the jest upon your lips.

When I say that love is jealous

- you pretend not to understand. - What woman would not understand?

Do not the poets say that for the woman who loves

she regrets not being everything for the one she has chosen?

He must have no more need but for her alone.

She brings with her death and the desert.

Ah! It is not death but life that I offer him I love,

life, were it at the price of my own.

But are you not yourself more than these kingdoms to conquer,

more than that America that must be brought from the sea?

I am more.

And what is it to raise an America compared to raising a soul that sinks?

Must I give my soul to save yours?

There is no other way.

- If I loved you, it would be easy - If you love me not, love my misfortune.

- What misfortune can be so great? - Save me from my solitude.

But isn't just that what you work for endlessly?

If I am void of everything it is to wait for you the better.

Only God fills such a void.

And who knows if you alone can bring me to this God?

I do not love you.

Then I will be so unhappy, and so criminal ...

Yes, I will do such things, Lady,

that will compel you to come to me,

you and that God you keep so jealously for youself,

as if He had come for the righteous alone.

- Don't blaspheme! - It was you who spoke to me of God;

I don't like the topic.

Don Camillo, is it then so difficult just to be an honest man,

a faithful Christian, a faithful soldier, a faithful servant of his Majesty,

a faithful husband of the wife that to him hath been matched?

All this is too embarrassing, slow, complicated.

The rabble always on top of us ... so heavy.

Never to be done with this compact prison,

with this pile of loose bodies!

All this prevents us from following our calling.

What is this irresistible call?

Say, have you not felt it yourself?

The call of Africa.

The land would not be what it is

if there was no fire in the belly,

the gnawing cancer, that ray which eats the liver,

that brazier fueled by the Ocean's breath,

that steaming heath-stone, that oven where the filth comes to burn

from all the breathing animals.

That breeze on you which shakes the leaves

and bangs your shutters, it is Africa that calls it up,

in the throes of her eternal torment.

Others explore the sea;

why should I not go as far

as one can toward that other frontier of Spain, the fire?

The captains that the King is sending to these New Indies do not work for themselves,

but for their master.

I need not think every moment of the King of Spain.

Is he not always present where there is one of his subjects?

Best for me if I go where his writ cannot run.

I have not been given a new world

to mould to my whim.

It is a living book that I study

and whose command is not acquired but by science.

There will I carve a domain for myself,

an insolent small island for myself between the two worlds.

- For yourself alone? - For myself alone.

A place where I shall be more lost than a small gold coin

forgotten in a drawer.

Where nobody but youself can find me.

I wll not come for you.

I therefore give you tryst!

In a city somewhere in Spain.

Don Luis under the window of Dona Isabel.

I swear never to be the wife of anyone other than your Lordship.

Tomorrow, my brother Don Fernando, the cruel tyrant, carries me off from Segovia.

I am one of the bridesmaids who must accompany our Lady

when she goes to the gates of Castile to receive the homage of St James.

Arm yourself, take with you some brave comrades.

It will be easy, in some gorge of the mountains,

to abduct me under cover of night and the forest. My hand!

I swear it. No one will snatch you from my hands.

And why would I try to escape if you are conducting me precisely where I want to go?

And which I refused: it is your husband who commands me.

If you had refused me, I would have gone by myself.

Yes, I should have found a way.

Dona Maravilla, I am sorry to hear your father's daughter speak like this.

Was he a man whose desires were often thwarted?

No, poor Count! Ah, what a friend I have lost!

I still remember the sword thrust he gave me through the side, one carnival morning.

Thus began our friendship.

I think I see him again when I see your eyes, you were already in them.

It would be better for me not to tell you that I have sent that letter.

- A letter to whom? - To Don Rodrigo,

Yes, telling him to come and find me

in that hostelry where you are going to convey me.

Have you been so foolish?

If I had not taken advantage of the amazing opportunity of the gypsy

going directly to Avila, where resides this gentleman,

would I not have sinned, as the Italians say?

Do not blasphme and have the goodness not to look at me like that, I beg you.

Are you not ashamed of your behavior?

Have you no fear of Don Pelagio?

What would he do if he knew?

Kill me, without doubt, but without haste, as he does all things,

after allowing due time for deliberation.

Have you no fear of God?

I swear I do not wish to do evil, so I have told you everything.

Ah, it was hard to open my heart to you

and I fear you have understood nothing,

save my real affection for you. So much the worse.

Now you are responsible and bound to defend me.

- You must help me. - Ah, that would be too easy!

I am not seeking my opportunity, I am waiting for it to come to me.

And I have warned you fairly: the battle begins.

You are my defender.

All I can do to escape you

and meet with Rodrigo, I warn you I will do.

Do you wish to do something so hateful?

To predict is not to wish.

And you see that I so mistrust my freedom

I have put it into your hands.

- Do you not love your husband? - I love him.

Would you abandon him now when the King himself forgets him,

leaving him alone on that wild coastline in the midst of infidels, without troops,

without money, without any element of security?

Ah! This hurts me more than the rest.

Yes, the idea of betraying Africa and our charge

and the honor of my husband's name ... I know he cannot do without me ...

and those poor children that I have mothered instead of those which God has not given me,

those women being nursed,

those few poor retainers who have offered their services to us,

to forsake all this, I can say that horrifies me.

Then what is calling you to this gentleman?

His voice.

You have only known him a few days.

His voice. I never cease to hear it.

What does it say to you, then?

Ah! Please, if you want to prevent me going to him,

tie me up, I detest this cruel freedom.

Put me in a deep dungeon behind iron bars.

There is another guardian that you will not escape from so easily.

Who, Senor?

The angel that God has placed at your side,

from the day you were a small innocent child.

An angel against the demons!

And to defend me against men

I must have such a tower as my friend Balthazar.

The tower and the sword riding along as one,

and that handsome golden beard that betrays you at any distance.

- You are still French! - As you are still Flemish.

Isn't it nice, my French-Comte accent?

Its not so ... All these people need us

to teach them how to be real Spaniards,

which they manage so badly.

How was it your husband married you,

he so old and you so young?

I complied, no doubt, with those parts of his nature

most severely preserved and most secretly nurtured.

So when I accompanied my father to Madrid,

where he was called by the business of his province,

there was soon established between those two high Senors

the agreement that I would love Don Pelagio,

as soon as I was presented,

above all things and for all the days of my life,

such as is legal and binding between husband and wife.

At least there is no doubt that he has fulfilled his part towards you.

If he loved me, I was not deaf to hear him say so.

Yes, however softly he spoke, a single word,

my ear was fine enough to hear.

I was not deaf to the word my heart waited on.

Many times I thought I saw it in his eyes,

whose gaze changed as mine tried to penetrate it.

I interpreted the hand that lay for a second on mine.

Alas I know I am of no use to him, I can never be sure he approves

what I do, nor have I been able to give him a child.

Or perhaps his feeling for me, I sometimes try to believe,

perhaps there is in it something so sacred

it should not be disturbed by being put into words.

Yes, he let me understand something like that once, in his strange, wry way.

Or it may be he is so proud, that, to make me love him,

he disdains to appeal to anything other than the truth.

I see so him little and he frightens me so much!

Nevertheless, for a long time,

I did not think I could be anywhere

other than in his shadow.

And you see, today it is he who has taken leave of me,

not I who wanted to leave him.

He leaves me alone most of the time,

and like him is this house so very dark and forsaken, so poor and proud,

with the sun blazing outside and this delicious aroma within.

Yes, one might think his mother had just left him

in a strict religious order and had gone away,

a great lady, infinitely noble, whom one would hardly dare to look at.

His mother died giving him life.

Perhaps that is the mother of whom I speak.

Don Balthazar, would you do me the favour to hold my mule?

Virgin, holy patroness and mother of this house,

guarantor and protector of the man whose heart

lies more open to you than to me,

and companion of his long solitude: if not for my sake then on his account,

because the bond between us was not of my doing

but only from your intervention,

prevent me from being to this house whose door you guard,

august gatekeeper, a source of corruption.

Keep me from being false to this name you have given me,

and from ceasing to be honourable in the eyes of those who love me.

While I cannot say I understand this man you have chosen for me,

but you I understand, you who are his mother and mine.

So while there is yet time, with my heart in one hand

and my shoe in the other, I give myself over to you.

Virgin mother, I give you my shoe.

Virgin mother, keep in your hand my unfortunate little foot.

I warn you that soon I will see you no longer

and that I will act against you.

But when I try to rush on evil, let it be with a limping foot.

The barrier you have set up,

when I want to bridge it, let it be with a broken wing.

I have done what I could; keep you my poor little shoe,

keep it close to your heart, oh great Mother of mine.

In Lisbon, at the royal palace.

The kingdom that your servants of yesterday purchased

Your Majesty, it is the task of the men of today to open up and keep.

True, but for some time now

I have received from there only dire news:

looting, raids by pirates, extortion, injustice,

extermination of innocent peoples,

and what is graver still, the fury of my captains, dividing my lands,

destroying each other,

as if it were for that cloud of bloodthirsty mosquitoes,

and not for the King, in the shadow of the peaceful Cross,

that God had lifted up a world from the bosom of the waters.

Where the master is away, the muleteers fatten themselves.

I can not be both in Spain and in the Indies.

Let there be one man there, representing Your Majesty,

one man over all. Invested with the same power.

And who should we choose to be Ourselves over there?

A reasonable and fair man.

When the volcanoes of my America shall be extinguished,

when her quivering sides have been exhausted,

when she has left off from the mighty effort

which has brought her out of the blue,

all burning and boiling,

then will I give to rule her a reasonable and fair man!

The man in whom I see myself, and who is fit to represent me

is not a wise nor a fair man:

give me a jealous and eager man.

l know but one man that meets Your Majesty's desire.

He is called Don Rodrigo de Manacor.

I do not like him.

Obedience comes hard to him. But the man you ask of me

can only be made from the stuff of kings.

He is is too young.

This America that are going to give him is almost as young as he.

As a child she was already his marvelous vision

as he accompanied his father who told him of Cortez and Balboa.

Later, his crossings of the Andes,

his descent not like Magellan on the unhindering sea,

but from Peru to cross a leafy Ocean,

his government of Grenada devastated by sedition and plague,

have shown who Rodrigo is, your servant.

- I agree to Rodrigo. Let him come. - Lord, I don't know where he is.

Recently I gave him to understand that America would need him again.

He listened with darkened eyes and gave no answer,

and the following day disappeared.

Let him be brought to me by force!

Don Rodrigo and his servant in the Castilian steppe.

Those horsemen are gone.

They are all in that pine grove, tending to their horses,

one is white and illuminates the rest.

- Tonight we will lose them. - They are not looking for us.

This is the highway

from Galicia to Saragossa where every year,

on his feast day, St James travels, (it is today, you see that shooting star?)

solemnly to call on our Lady of the Pillar.

They are pilgrims going to join the procession?

Pilgrims with weapons ... I saw by that phosphorescent light ...

not concerned about being seen too soon.

Well, this does not concern us.

Anyway, I am keeping an eye on those pines.

And I am keeping an eye on yourself, my dear Isidore.

Oh, you need not fear that I shall flee

as long as you respect our agreement,

and don't make me spend the night near any running water or well.

Are you still afraid that I shall baptize you by stealth?

Why should I give you for nothing the right to make me a Christian

and to enter heaven with the ornament which I provide?

So to offset other less pure desires

you must first do a little service, to my lord, your servant.

That I go with you where a certain black hand is beckoning you?

Very close to where a white hand is beckoning you.

It is nothing base I want.

- Is gold a base thing? - I give relief to a suffering soul.

What is this woman who you love?

Apart from that mouth painted as with a brush,

those eyes more beautiful than if they were crystal balls,

those limbs perfectly formed and suited.

But within the vexation of demons,

the worm, the fire, the vampire fastened to your substance.

The matter of a man who is completely subdued

and who is left with a form broken

and limp as the carcase of a cricket, horror!

Am I not in the employ of my Lord?

How many times have I begged him to think of the salvation

of his soul and mine?

In a hundred years what will be these hundred pounds of female flesh

to which your soul has joined as with a hook?

A little trash and dust and bones.

At the moment she is alive.

I feel that I cannot escape either what is behind and hunts me,

or what is before me,

a white spot on the sea, amongst the dark trees.

What is it coming after you?

The gallop of horses that pursue me,

the mandate of the king from his throne choosing

me of all men to rule half the world,

that part which from eternity

was lost and unknown,

like an infant in his swathing clothes,

that part of the world all fresh and new,

like a star that has arisen on me out of the sea of darkness.

And what is it before you?

A brilliant point down there, like a vision of death.

Is it a waving handkerchief?

Or a wall struck by the noon-day sun?

I know. It is a black monster

to whom, in the cheerfulness of my soul,

because even a sage is not exempt from uncertainty,

and by mistake, "quasi in lubrico", if I may say so,

I so far forgot myself as to lend money.

Not without interest, I am sure. I know your kind of generosity.

If I can not keep you from your folly,

at least I can take profit from it.

Madness, anyone would call it, but I have a crazy rightness.

Is it reasonable to want to save a soul by drowning it?

There is one thing now that I alone can bring her.

- And what is this thing? - Joy.

Have you not made me read fifty times over that for you Christians

sacrifice is what redeems?

Joy alone is the mother of sacrifice.

- What joy? - Of the vision I receive of her.

Call you joy the torment of desire?

It is not desire on my lips but recognition.

Recognition? Tell me what color are her eyes.

I know not. Ah! I admire her so much that I have forgotten to look at her.

Excellent. I have seen big ugly blue eyes.

It is not her eyes, it is her whole self that is a star to me.

And now, quite another star for me,

that point of light in the live sands of the night,

someone human like myself, whose presence and whose face,

beyond the ugliness and miseries of this world,

are only compatible with a state of bliss.

- A treat for all the senses! - The senses!

I liken them to those scoundrels following the army

who plunder the dead and loot the captured cities.

Do you think her body alone could kindle in me such longing?

Ah! If she gave it to me (I am failing, and night is falling on my eyes),

if she did (and she must not do so),

it is not her dear body that would content me.

Only through each others being,

should we contrive to rid ourselves of death,

just as violet melting into orange sets free a pure red.

Tai gu! Tai gu! Tai gu!

We know what lies under those beautiful words.

I know that the union of my being with hers is impossible in this life,

and I will have no other life.

Only the star that is she can slake this dreadful thirst.

Then why are we now going to Barcelona?

Did I not mention that I have received a letter from her?

Things gradually become clear.

"Come to me, I shall be in Sant Feliu.

I am going to Africa. I have many things to accuse you of ".

A gypsy brought me this letter.

I set off, bowing to your wishes, while the King's men pursued me.

Yes, blame me, I pray you!

The affairs of my soul and my purse are all you are thinking of.

Look, I see the small lights in the west dispersed, everything is scattered.

And the red flash of muskets. Listen. Screams!

I fear they are the pilgrims we saw before.

Those who were hiding behind the pines.

Is St James being attacked?

They are undoubtedly heretics or Moors

and the statue is solid silver.

My sword! Let us fly to the aid of Saint James.

And when we have rescued him from the scoundrels

we will not return him without a good ransom.

The Inn of Sant Feliu. Neapolitan Sergeant. Jobarbara.

The servant of Dona Prouheze.

Traitor! I will kill you!

Fi, fi, fi!

Tell me what you did with the bracelet you took from me.

How do you do, Madam!

- Badly, you know well. - And I will not listen.

In gold, I gave you my pretty gold bracelet,

I gave you, it was worth two hundred coins.

It had a hand hanging, a guitar, a key, a guava, a coin,

a goldfish and twenty other beautiful things that together bring luck.

But be careful,

I prayed over it, yes, I've sung over it,

I've danced over it and I have watered it with the blood of a black hen.

So it is good for me,

but he who has robbed me, he will get sick, and die.

I am glad to be rid of it.

What, truly, you sold it, you dog?

- Didn't you give it to me? - I lent it to you,

you said it would bring you luck, villain,

for a certain job you had in hell.

Afterwards you left here by a crack in the wall,

just like lizards, scorpions, crickets, cockroaches and other animals.

Tell me,

the captain who is leaving for the Indies,

isn't the first thing he does to go to the banker

to get weapons and food,

and money to pay his soldiers and sailors?

The following year he returns with ten bags of gold.

But you have not returned even with one.

I haven't returned with even one sack?

And what if I give you a large piece of green and red silk,

enough to make to make fifteen handkershiefs,

and a gold necklace that will go four times around your neck?

And a gold bracelet? And another gold bracelet?

and ditto another gold bracelet? And over that a third, fourth,

and fifth gold bracelet?

And where have you got all that?

Where have I got all that?

Where he got your mother, hidden behind that banana plantation

while all the village women

were collecting grain in the moonlight,

this brave Portingale of Portugal

who took her to Brazil to teach her good manners

and to know the taste of sugar cane, is anything better?

If he had not had that inspiration,

instead of being today this respectable matron,

the oracle of the judge's house,

your hair done up in palm oil and dressed in this paper

you would be dancing like a crazy one on the banks of Zaire,

trying to catch the moon with your teeth ...

A matron ... moonlight ...palm oil ...

you make my head spin, now I don't know where I was.

I was talking of the money you've stolen, thief!

The money I took?

Isn't this much greater than money,

this star from the mountain I have picked with my fingers,

this firefly I've caught and placed in a box,

just when with its heart

it was trying to embrace a jasmine flower?

Do you mean that poor girl

who you arrived with the other day,

the two of you hiding in the bottom of that cart under straw?

Now the boat is ready, and tonight

if the wind is right, we sail for the Latin shore.

And the bracelet that you have taken?

And the chain that you were going to give me instead?

Follow us, stay close to me.

- What is stopping you from coming with us? - What do you want with that poor girl?

I promised to give her the King of Naples, why not?

The idea came to me suddenly, I am sure there is a King in Naples.

I told her that the King of Naples had seen her in a dream.

Ah! That was such a delicious young man I invented on the spot,

who had sent me all over the world to find her.

I would know her through the mark of a dove

on her shoulder.

- And had she that mark? - How odd, she did!

She told me so, but wouldn't show me.

What is her name?

They call her Dona Musica, because of a guitar, which fortunately she never plays.

His real name is Dona Delicia.

And did nobody notice her flight?

They were forcing her to marry an ugly creature dressed in leather,

a cattle drover, with a solemn face,

a descendant of the Goths.

The poor thing said she wanted to go into a nearby convent

to seek light and guidance

and we set off on the same horse to seek light and guidance.

- Were you followed? - They won't catch us.

I can already feel the first breaths of this blessed wind of Castile;

soon it will send off our light skiff.

What are you going to do with that poor girl?

Do you think I'm going to despoil her?

It would be like a baker eating his own cakes.

I melt at her feet out of tenderness and respect.

I breathe on her to remove the dust.

I sprinkle a few drops of water on her with my fingertips.

Each morning I polish her with a feather mop, made from the down of a humming bird.

Observe well, old friend, that road that descends

to that mountain, that looks like a crouching lion,

until there is a sign of that thing that makes me sick to think of it,

that cloud of dust in which flashes arms and stirrups.

Ah, what a fine trade mine is, even if it never brings such profit,

that I don't always want more.

Your salary will be the noose around your neck, you big ugly thing.

Never the rope for me!

I merge into the landscape.

I close my eyes and in an instant

suddenly you cannot tell me from a carob tree.

Cheer up, darling girls!

Your friend, the golden sergeant

is here to find you with a fishing rod

at the bottom of those holes where you moulder.

When your innocent hearts swell,

when your soul trembles delicately

at the thought of that unknown love,

when you are like one of those seeds

which nature has endowed with wings

to fly away on the April breeze,

then will I appear at your window,

flapping my wings and painted yellow.

Back in the Castilian steppe.

Sir, I thank you.

I am glad to have been able to save Saint James.

It wasn't St.James he was pursuing.

He fought like a gentleman and I doubted I would prevail.

Yes, but your doublet has suffered.

Are you seriously injured?

Nothing serious. Give me one of those carriages.

My servant will take care of me.

And you, dear sister, pull yourself together.

Do not stay like that, so pale and distant.

Give thanks to this gentleman who has saved us all.

I thank you.

You know so much, I am so happy to talk with you.

We must take care, little sister, that Don Balthazar does not see us.

It is dusk. It is the hour when the lord changes his sentries,

lest his captive fly away.

I am happy to be so well guarded.

I have checked all means of escape.

There is no way to escape even if I wanted to. Such good fortune!

Yet, I entered without anyone's permission.

How could you have been found,

coiled up like a snake under all that straw?

Now I have you captive, and will not let you escape.

Is it you that keep me from fleeing, or on the contrary,

is it I who have so taken you to myself that you cannot free yourself of me?

Ah, how lovely you are, and how I love you!

If I was your husband I would keep you in a sack,

I should be dreadful with you!

As soon as he returns, I will settle your matter.

It is not necessary for you to settle anything,

he has made up his mind to marry me to a cattle dealer

but I'll get up on the roof and snap my fingers at him!

My husband will be the gracious King of Naples.

- There is no King of Naples! - For Musica there is a King of Naples.

Do not try to hurt me or I will break your little finger.

Is it not true, either, that I have on my shoulder a spot shaped like a dove?

I have shown it to you.

You are the dove.

My Lord, how happy he will be to have me in his arms.

"Oh, how long it has been,

Why did you make me look for you so far away, Musica?" he will say to me.

I fancy I can hear him...

Oh! How glad I shall be to hear him say my name.

He alone knows it.

You silly, you've never even seen him.

I do not need to see him to know his heart.

Why, who else was calling me so loud?

Do you think it was easy to escape my home, trampling on all my people?

He is calling to me and I must respond quickly.

Yes, Musica, I know the man that your heart is waiting for,

I am sure you will not be disappointed.

And hasn't yours long been waiting for someone?

But who would dare to threaten your peace,

when it is protected by such great beauty?

Ah, you were made for each other,

you and that dreadful man who tried to catch me and whose business is death!

Still, you see that Don Balthazar does not rely

solely on my beauty to protect me,

but he has increased the guard around this old castle.

I myself have asked him to.

Do you love your prison so much that you delight in making it more secure?

It must have very strong bars.

What can the world do against you?

It is I who can do much against it.

I don't want any such prison.

Someone has said that for him prison is where I am not.

I have a prison of my own from which no one may take me.

What, Musica?

In the arms of the one she loves she is trapped,

- the wild Musica! - She escapes.

She is only there an instant.

Who may keep her forever with a heart like hers?

Already I am with him, without him knowing it.

It is for my sake, before he has met me,

that he endures so much at the head of his soldiers,

that he feeds the poor and forgives his enemies.

Ah! It will be easy to understand that I am joy,

and only joy, and not the acceptance of sadness,

is what brings us peace.

Yes, I want to mingle in all his feelings

like some pleasant sparkling salt that gradually transforms and purifies.

I'd like to know how he could now be sad

or do evil even if he wanted.

What will my soul in my body be to him,

my soul united with those ineffable chords, in a concert

that no one but he has taken in?

His very silence will make me sing!

Wherever he is, I am always with him.

I am the murmur of the fountain, whilst he is labouring.

I am the tumult of the great port under the midday sun.

I am the fruit of a thousand villages everywhere,

who have nothing to fear from robbers or the tax collector.

I, yes I, little I,

am that silly joy that shines in his ugly face,

I am the justice in his heart, the rapture in his face.

There is nothing that man is less fit for than happiness,

and nothing he tires of so quickly.

- Is he made for suffering? - If he asks for it, why refuse him?

How could anyone suffer when you are there?

Whoever looks at you becomes oblivious of living and dying.

He is not here.

Then there is someone, dear sister,

whose absence accompanies you always?

Hush, little sister, you are very daring!

Who would dare lift his eyes to Prouheze?

- Who could tear them away again? - Who would disturb her heart?

Only one voice in the world, a voice speaking very soft and low.

... inside, in this indissoluble sacrament ...

- Would you silence it? - By that alone I live.

Do you love him so much?

What are you saying? No, I do not love him at all.

Do you regret the time you did not know him?

I live for him now.

How, if your face is forever forbidden him?

My suffering is not.

Do you not want his happiness?

I want him to suffer, too.

He does suffer now.

Never enough.

He calls you, will you not answer?

l am not a voice for him.

Then what are you?

A sword that pierces his heart.

Hurray, my mummy made me pretty, so black and so shiny.

I'm the little fish of the night,

I'm the little spinning top,

the pot that wobbles and bobs in the cold water ever frothing and bubbling.

Sing hey to you, mama papa crocodile,

Sing hey to you, daddy hippo horse!

While the river turns to me,

while the forest turns to me,

while all the villages revolve, round, round to me,

while all the boats turn round to me

because of the hole I make, because of the broth I make,

because of the knot I make in this water that bubbles and troubles.

I have water to rinse me,

I have oil to smoothe me, I have grass to rub me down.

I'm not black, I shine like a mirror,

leap like a pig, duck like a fish,

roll like a little cannon.

Here I am; here I am; here I am.

Come, come, come to me, my little Mister Italian!

Yes, yes, yes, yes,

my little yellow canary,

I put a little coin in your pocket.

Everything that kept you from loving me, I killed,

I broke it with the blood of a chopped chicken.

I only need to turn, turn around. Come to me,

you cannot resist me.

All the threads that bind me to you,

I roll them up, wind them round me like a reel,

You come, I come to you, drawing nearer, twisting round about

like a little cannon, turning like a rope on the winch

that drags the anchor from among the roots.

Here, here, here, here! Ah!

Beardless creature, even clothing your black hide

in this multi coloured integument, I can pierce thee to the soul.

I see your heart drowned out by the teat

like a black clot which casts an evil ray.

I see your liver like an anvil

where demons come to forge lies

and the two lungs above like frightful bellows.

I see your entrails like a bag of reptiles

sending off their infectious and balsmic vapours.

And what else do you see?

I see my money stacked on each side of your spine

like the grain in an ear of maize.

And I'm going to get it back at once!

Oh! Stop, dear love of mine!

If you kill me I will not be able to show you the devil.

Just as you promised me before, and thereby extorted my money.

Never again will your master set eyes on Dona Prouheze.

Unclean alligator! Musky daughter of mud,

fat worm of a low tide!

We will resume this conversation, I warrant you.

Dona Maravilla is in this fortress and Don Balthazar is defending her,

and Don Pelagio is returning tomorrow, or later,

and taking Dona Maravilla to Africa.

And Don Rodrigo will never see her again, tra-la-la-la,

he will never see her again, tra-la-la.

Listen! Senor Rodrigo was wounded

while, sword in hand,

he was defending Saint James from bandits.

- What Saint James? - The silver Saint James.

We have brought him here (I mean Rodrigo)

to the castle of his Lady mother

four leagues from this inn.

Sweet Mother!

Tell her he will die, tell her he wants to see her,

tell her she must visit him soon

regardless of good manners.

But how can she leave here, being guarded on all sides ?

Listen, this morning I met a band of knights.

They were looking for a lady called Musica whom a certain Neapolitan has carried off.

Musica? Heavens!

- You know her? - Continue.

Because of their threats and force I confessed to them that this Musica

was at this seaside inn

- occupied by terrible pirates. - But this is false!

I know, but never mind.

Tomorrow night they will attack Balthazar and his troops.

But they will find nothing.

They will at least find a witch such as I described,

the most dangerous accomplice of the thief with velvet eyes.

I won't go back to the inn!

Then I will kill you myself.

Dona Prouheze will know how to sort everything out.

Tell her to take advantage of the turmoil and escape with you.

How?

Behind the prickly pears, a hundred yards from the inn,

I will wait with my servant and horses for her and for you.

Look at her scramble thorugh the brambles and creepers,

climbing and sliding and recovering, with nails and knees,

trying to climb that steep ascent.

What that desperate heart can hold!

Who said that the Angels cannot weep?

Am I not a creature like her?

Are we not bound by some bond, all God's creatures?

Does what we call suffering happen in a world apart,

shut out from all the rest?

Beyond the vision of angels?

Is it a pleasant thing to countenance even for one who commands what he sees?

Is it quite separate from the love

and justice of which we are ministers?

What use in being Guardian Angels

if we did not understand it?

Only one who sees all goodness,

can fully understand evil.

They know not what they do.

And I, should I have been chosen to guard her,

without a secret kinship with her?

Finally! She has reached the end of these thistles

and the charitable thorns that try to hold her back.

Here she is on the edge of the cliff.

Yes, you are beautiful, my poor child,

with your hair dishevelled

and that indecent dress and cheeks covered with earth

and blood, and that crazed, determined look

which grieves me.

Ah! It is an honour for me

and a pleasure to show my poor little sister thus.

If only there were none to see us.

- I am alone. - She says she is alone.

- I am free. - Unfortunately.

Nothing has stopped me.

We wanted no other prison for you but honour.

I should have been better guarded, I have been loyal.

I warned Don Balthazar.

He will pay for your escape with his life.

Rodrigo is going to die.

There is still time to lose his soul.

Rodrigo is going to die.

- He lives. - He lives!

Something tells me he is still alive.

There is still time to let him see my face and so keep him from dying.

It will not be your love that keeps him from dying.

At least I can die with him.

Listen how glibly she speaks of ridding

herself of that soul that does not belong to her

and that has cost so much to make and redeem.

There is no one but Rodrigo in the world.

Then try to go to him.

Ah! The effort has been too much.

I am dying. Ah! I thought I should never escape that awful ravine.

I could keep her here if I wanted.

Rodrigo is calling me.

Bring him that heart on which my foot is planted.

I must.

See where you will take me.

- Up Prouheze. - I look to God. - Rodrigo!

Ah, I hear another voice in the fire which says: Prouheze!

Ah! How far it is to that bush.

Longer still to Calvary.

Rodrigo, I am yours.

You are his? You shall fulfill him with your outlawed body?

I know l am his treasure.

One cannot get this idea out of her silly head.

- Forward. - Forward.

Rodrigo, I am yours.

See how I have broken this bitter bond.

Rodrigo, I am yours.

Rodrigo, I am coming to you.

And I, I will accompany her.

Understood?

When those bastards attack,

order everyone to regroup and defend the gates and passageways.

It is absolutely forbidden to fire

before I remove my hat.

Should I not leave some guards along the ravine?

We should not divide our forces.

On that side the inn is protected by the ravine

making passage impracticable.

- I have tested it myself. - Hum!

What's that you say, Lord Alferez?

Do you believe everything the Chinese man has said?

His presence is enough. I know him.

It was fortunate that in doing my rounds last night

I heard the screams of poor Jobarbara.

She clung to him with nails and teeth,

but I think if I had not been there, he would have split her like a fig.

Rely on me to defend the King's money against these ruffians.

We have more than money to defend.

- Dona Prouheze ... - I said nothing.

But the Chinese man said it is the god of love

and not of thieves who will flutter

through the smoke of your guns.

If I see a feather or hair: Bang!

Yes, Mr Alferez, bring him down, it will do us all a good service.

I am not speaking for myself,

but why must I always be mixed up

in the love affairs of others,

when no one has been interested in mine?

Suppose that you are commissioned to guard someone,

yes, say, a great criminal.

And she loves someone,

and she learns that he is dying and asking to see her:

would it amuse you to listen to her tears and entreaties?

Is it fair to torment me like this

as if I had the freedom not to do what is written

and what I have been ordered to do.

Are you speaking of a man or a woman?

A man, of course.

Pray, what are you thinking of?

A certain prisoner, I said, whose custody I have been entrusted with.

You are all red and upset,

as if you had just emerged from a fight.

I know you are a man of discretion and good sense.

You're only mistake is to wear your moustache like that, against the rules.

If someone in my place had acted differently,

whether distracted by softness of heart,

and failed to perform his duty,

I would say he was a man without honour.

The only solution for him is death.

Life is not pleasant for an old man,

is it not so?

I say that you are not old.

What hurt me most was not those complaints and supplications,

but those words they say to you in a low measured voice

that tear your heart.

No!

When she saw that everything was to no avail,

then there was that silence, that almost smile.

You know, that kind of relief,

when we know that there is nothing more that can be done.

There are mothers who then begin to sing over their children's corpses.

But still,

I could not have expected those lips on my hands or that voice that thanked me.

Captain,

a group of riders has arrived below, next to the big rock.

One of them is coming towards us waving a handkerchief.

Very good, get everyone to rally onto the bridge.

Even the sentry guarding the ravine?

Him also. And get me the Chinese.

Good day, master.

I am sorry to hear the news that you bring from Don Rodrigo.

Don Rodrigo has nothing to do with this.

Have you not been his servant?

I am the man that Providence has put near to him,

to give him the chance of salvation.

How so?

If he procures holy baptism for me,

will there not be immense joy in heaven,

where one converted Chinese is honoured

more than ninety-nine Spaniards who persevere in their faith?

No doubt.

Such merit, that depends on me alone to earn for him,

when and as it pleases me, deserves much care

and sedulity on his part,

I will not so easily cede to him my soul,

and for a song.

So that, properly speaking,

he is rather my servant than I his.

Still, it seems to me, my son, you give him very good service.

But for now that is not important;

and since you have spoken of song,

all I want to know is if you can sing.

What, sing?

Why, yes, Ah - ah - ah ...Sing it.

I have no guitar, but you can easily keep the beat

with a knife on this plate, as you wish.

Make it something pretty.

Don't you want to know what I was doing last night

talking with that black devil?

I have no desire in the world but to hear your beautiful voice.

Lord, spare me, I will tell you all!

Nothing scares people so much as what they don't understand.

"A song that rises to the lips

is like a drop of honey

that overflows the heart ..."

The truth is that when I was prowling around the castle

looking after the interests of Don Rodrigo,

I came upon a party of horsemen

who asked me if I had heard tell of a certain Dona Musica.

Musica, you say?

They told me that you knew her.

Of a certain Dona Musica

who had fled with an Italian sergeant, and who they were looking for.

Then I had the idea of pointing out

this castle as full of pirates, so that under cover of their attack and noise

I could carry off the people you are guarding.

You would do better not to talk of Musica, and sing as I asked.

Lord, have mercy!

Senor, a man at the gate, without taking off his hat,

and in very blunt terms,

asks that we let him search

for a Dona Musica, whom we are guarding.

Tell him, without removing your hat, and in very blunt terms,

we are keeping our music here.

As you see, I did not lie.

Dona Musica will not be better guarded, wherever she is,

than Dona Prouheze will be by me today.

I see! You think we are all in cahoots

and that it is Dona Prouheze we want. Oh, oh!

"I dreamt I was in heaven

and woke up in your arms ..."

Come on, Come on!

What is this?

It is your supper, which we have brought as ordered.

Well, here it will be pleasant,

eating in the shade while those gentlemen

will see about making a show for us.

You will be quite uncomfortable.

All the shots they fire through the door will be for you.

Not at all, our Chinese friend will take them.

Look you, if your friends shoot, it is you who will die.

I am afraid of nothing.

Until I am baptized no bullet can harm me.

Meanwhile, on this table, we have

the finest fruits of land and sea,

sweet and salty,

midnight blue shellfish,

a beautiful pink trout

under his silver skin like an edible nymph,

the scarlet lobster, that honeycomb,

these translucent grapes,

these overripe figs bursting,

those peaches like globes of nectar ...

Captain, a group of armed men is

heading for the door with axes and ladders.

What should we do?

Well, let them come on, I have given my orders.

Where was I ...?

These peaches like globes of nectar ...

that ham already carved,

this wine of delicious bouquet in a glittering decanter,

this pastry like a tomb stuffed

with strong spices that rise again in the stomach

with warmth and well-being.

Let us contemplate it all once more,

my friend, for we shall never taste any of this again.

- What do you want? - We want Dona Musica!

- You want music? Sing, Chinese. - I cannot sing.

I tell you to sing!

If a man should hear me sing he would think I'm very gay.

I am like the little bird

That was singing as he died.

Give us Dona Musica!

No use, she has just set sail for Barbary.

Sing, Chinese. That will cheer them up.

I embarked on a hazelnut to go to Barbary

To try to find the hair of a frog

Because there's none in Spain.

Open up, or we will shoot.

Sing, China!

I went to the fields to ask the violet

If for the pain of love there was any remedy.

And she replied ...

and she replied ... and she replied ...

Well, what did she reply?

That for the woes of love

Never has there been a remedy.

Heavens! What do I see?

- What do you see? - See for yourself!

Don't look at me, they look at us,

to see if you are looking at me.

Captain, captain! Should we fire?

Only when I give the order.

What do you see, Chinese?

I see a boat going out to sea.

On board is that damn black witch with her yellow devil.

See for yourself!

Turning around is too tiring.

Lord, take cover.They shall shoot!

A tear, a tear from your eyes, A tear from your lovely eyes ...

Ah, what a beautiful voice!

I have never heard anything so beautiful.

Runs down your face

And into your heart it falls ... Into the depth of your heart it falls ...

The tear from your eyes ... The tear from your eyes ...

At Cadiz.

You have prospered in Flanders, Don Gil!

The Panama crossing will reduce you.

Bah! I have room in my belly to put all of America.

Still no news of our Achilles?

It seems that Achilles is in Skiros,

not between the legs of a woman

but pursuing her, sword in hand, and no news of her husband.

I swear that I will not set off without Don Rodrigo.

Me neither.

Even if I have to pay rent here for a full year

and it costs me more than a rabbi's inheritance.

Rodrigo is a just man with everyone.

With his eyes open when necessary,

and closed when necessary.

He knows the soldier.

Enough said! He is my close friend.

None of this fucking red violet!

None of this raspberry juice!

None of this sour wine that gives you a belly ache!

I want a red bright as that which runs through the veins of a gentleman.

I have used all the insects that inhabit the islands of the Hesperides.

My employees all day long

are stuck in a bath of fire and slaughter,

removing from their vats

rags dripping vermilion sauce, redder than the sea that swallowed the Pharoah.

And all this is not enough. I am overwhelmed, gentlemen,

by knights from the four corners of Spain

coming to take the colours of our crusade.

In red, we shall take the faith,

take food and the sun, to those human worms,

those lizard faces,

those discolored images that swarm in the steamy shadows,

or wander the frozen desolate heights.

It is just like the bullfight.

On our terrestrial sphere one side is in the sun and one side in shade.

I will complete your thought:

One part real and one that fails to be quite real.

Yes, that is the idea that I bring back from my expeditions.

Listen to what they say, these old farts!

The gold you get there is real enough.

I am not so sure.

The gold in our pockets has quickly melted away.

We are not going out there to save the shadows of souls.

Nor are they shadows of bodies working in our plantations.

Nor the shadow of a stick to warm the shadow of their rears

if they do not work hard.

We must waken these sleepy heads.

No matter if their skins catch it a bit.

Have we spared our own?

It is worth more being alive than being in limbo.

We have crossed the sea to that land

which had no right to exist without us,

and opened for it the gates of morn.

It has taken all the ages since the creation of the world

to get to them along roads

strewn with hot coals and broken glass.

Now it is their turn to suffer a little.

- Customers, we are there! - Red!

The color of our Lord on the cross.

There are people we shall bring the cross to in every way.

Haven't we got it on our own backs, poor adventurers?

Well strapped on with leather, along with the other luggage?

In red, in red! We go only in red!

It is the vow we took along with the blessing of Brother Lopez.

In red! Under the command of Don Rodrigo.

We will wait as long as we must.

It is yet five months to the month of the Precious Blood.

Come along, rednecks, the public is getting impatient!

Hurry, Come on, I beg you! Hurry - their - prrst - presto!

Take this away! Clear the floor!

"Rednecks" is theatre. Theatre ... cinema ...theatre ... cinema ...

It's all the same.

I should have waited for my costume,

but I lacked the patience to moulder in that room

where the author imprisoned me.

But I am not so easy to keep down,

I escape like gas below a door

and explode in the middle of the work.

Look out, things are about to begin.

I am off on my magic steed.

We are no longer in Cadiz,

we are in the Sierra something or other ...

in the midst of one of those beautiful forests

which have made the name of Cataloña.

A peak! The Castle of Don Rodrigo is nearby,

and there Don Rodrigo is, very ill,

his wound hurts, I think he will die ...

Or am I wrong, he will heal, otherwise the play would be over.

I present the mother of Don Rodrigo.

Get back!

Wait until I come for you!

Marry, who told you to come?

Be off, be off!

The mother of Don Rodrigo, Dona who? ...

Will Honoria suit you?

She had to come,

just when I was going to describe her.

I hate the way these things always happen.

That's why I couldn't be a painter.

My characters suddenly exist

before any part of them has been finished.

Look! I am drawing Dona Honoria.

Well,

before I have even started

she will be asking me questions

and coming off the back of this employee

like Marguerite from the skull of Jupiter.

When I do a dog,

before I've finished his backside he begins to wag his tail

and trots off on three legs without waiting for his head.

Well, good, you are going to see her presently.

Now it is no longer the morning sun,

it is getting late and there is a beautiful light

la la la, la la la, la la la la ...

Attention, up there!

Let down the wings' cloths and lights!

The front spotlight on the garden side!

Now that we have the desired atmosphere

let me introduce Dona Prouheze.

What a name!

It gives her a certain credibility.

Dona Prouheze arrived in the same dress you have already seen a few days ago,

or as long as you like,

for on the stage we handle time like an accordion,

as we like, the hours expand and days disappear.

Nothing easier to set up several different times

going together in all directions.

To speak truthfully,

I fear that the nerves of the lady have succumbed to so many emotions.

I'm not saying she has suffered a collapse,

nor that she is off her head,

but she has fixed ideas, no free thought.

Has she already seen her lover?

Not at all.

Rodrigo is cared for by his mother, who cares for them both.

The two, separated by thick walls,

are trying to meet, running up

and down the stairways of delirium.

I'll get them.

Speak, Prouheze.

Let this crowd that surrounds you unbeknown hear your voice.

Speak, tell us what weighs down your guilty heart.

Rodrigo!

Rodrigo?

He has gone out hunting.

I mean his body is there, the other side of those red bricks

that you can see across the courtyard.

But he spends hours in dreams trying to emerge from that tangled thicket

which he hears stirring before him,

crushing him under the weight of an invisible presence:

Is it you?

In vain trying to say your name, softly,

as you said his just now.

No one answers.

In a moment he will appear in this clearing of dead trees

covered with immemorial moss.

Everything is strangely white against the black background of trees,

even that butterfly that has crossed momentarily

into that one ghastly ray of sunshine;

no one is there.

Rodrigo!

Come now, Honoria,

now is the moment for your appearance!

Let this suffering person

feel her suffering love is enfolded into your own motherly love

and that your mother's heart reasons with her lover's heart.

The hour of trial arrives.

I have only to draw before you a window frame...

and see what piece of Spain comes to fill it.

Hills covered with dense forests,

more matted than the buffalo's coat,

the moonlit night,

the wings of the great mill to our right

that every second intercepts the rays of the moon,

and down there

by the shaded roads,

Don Pelagio, preceded by his page,

is climbing ponderously toward us.

Everything is in order. Come.

I have tried not to cause any bustle.

Only, in the stables, your horses do not get on with mine.

It was not necessary for you to speak loudly.

Everything living in the castle knew immediately that you were here.

Let us say that I was expected.

That is true.

At this banquet of sorrow your place was set.

How is she?

Things are bad.

This morning the doctor came and was worried.

It is not the wound which he received in his side ...

do not mind if I weep,

he is my son, you know ...

but rather this awful internal inflammation ...

It is fifteen days since he was conscious.

This night will be decisive.

It is of her whom I speak.

And how should we be when he is dying?

I understand that she relieves you

- at the bedside of this gentleman. - No.

She has not seen him. She has not demanded to see him.

Her chamber is in the courtyard just opposite to ours.

Antano would once have installed my lady in a place lower down.

Your father once showed me the prison, very strong and secure.

- My duty is to keep my child alive. - Is it this criminal love that will save him?

While she is there, he can not die.

Nor recover, perhaps.

I do not know.

It is her name, not mine, which he incessantly murmurs in his dreams.

He was on his way to meet her.

I was not surprised to see her arrive here.

And me, should I then leave?

Perhaps your arrival was also necessary.

All the same, it would have been preferable

if my horse had stumbled on the way here just now

and flung His Majesty's Judge

into one of those ravines that beckoned to him.

There are things that chance should not be allowed to end.

"Rodrigo!" she would have said,

if in such a case you had let her approach him.

I can see her placing her hand on his forehead:

"Live! The old man is dead."

This thought has not for a moment sullied our hearts.

Do you think my soul was not great enough to set her free,

if I could have done so without committing a crime?

But what God has joined together no man can put asunder.

It is not love which makes a marriage, but consent.

Not the child that I have never had,

nor the good of society,

but the joint agreement in the presence of God, in faith:

To my very end,

until the last particle of that consent

that two beings are capable of yielding to each other,

for better or for worse,

what she has given to me I cannot give back, even if I would.

She asks for nothing,

she does not complain, she has explained nothing to me,

she is silent,

here with me far from the sight of men.

And that is my fault.

Yes, you naturally believe it is I who have done wrong

to marry her, I already so old and she so young

and not knowing what she was consenting to.

I do not think of you.

But I think am thinking of her

and every word I say, one by one,

it seems to me she hears in her silence.

I loved her.

When I saw her I was bathed in sunshine,

soon, my entire soul came out of the mist to meet her,

like a palace hitherto undreamed of.

Must I not wait for my palace

to be completed before love entered into it?

I was full of works and desires.

It was all awaiting her.

Where could she have found such a home to harbour her?

The architrave was set upon the column.

Grand as another's roof may be,

we love better that which we have helped to build.

There is sense in what you say.

But, did I not know better than she what would make her happy?

Was I so ignorant of that life which she knew not at all?

Who knows a plant better:

Itself, which has grown by chance,

or the gardener who plants it where appropriate?

She looked so young

in that foreign Madrid, without a mother and with a legendary father,

surrounded by fortune hunters ...

For me to marry her, did it show a lack of love or understanding?

What matters it if she love me?

What I felt for her, it was not to my dignity to tell her,

it was the world of God's wisdom that would speak on my behalf.

What matters if she love me,

if I can teach a single being what I know,

and fill a single heart with joy and understanding.

All this has lead to a lost child

who escapes from its prison like an animal on all fours

that crosses the ditch and the bush.

Why did she flee like that?

Had I not set her in Paradise, among all things excellent?

Paradise is not for sinners.

In fact the only time I saw her freely smile

was during those hard months she spent with me in Africa.

- You gave her no children. - God denied them to me.

At least you could not deny her suffering.

Perhaps mine was not enough for her?

You are not in her shoes.

It was necessary that something opened her soul

and this body in which we drown.

What thought can she entertain

in her eyes before that window opposite?

You are not absent,

she is still your captive.

Am I not her husband?

Is it not my mission to stand by her?

Shall I forsake her in her agony?

I know what is good for that generous soul.

All that you have said to me I wanted you to say,

and I have understood.

It is not flowers and fruits that she expects of me,

it is a burden.

What are you bringing her?

Instead of one temptation, another and greater temptation.

Take me to her room.

Take me to her room.

I was awaiting you.

In part.

Besides, the thought of returning to Africa

where once you had been with me ...

What wonder, if your heart failed you?

The continual and hopeless war,

Islam, like an expedition into a country cursed, against people betwitched;

water rationed;

below us, treason, above us, slander,

with us, the ill-will of those always asking for money,

the means for everything lacking;

jealousy at Court, hatred from those whom we cost so dear,

boredom of the King, all this, you and I

have tasted drop by drop.

I remember that boat which

with endless troubles we used to get in during the siege.

And instead of flour or money brought us only reprimands.

I was a thief who had to justify himself.

Next day, the tribes, attacked in the rear,

thanks to that wizard whom we won over, scattered.

I charged by your side, sword in hand.

Of all that, you have had enough.

Why do you say this unjust thing to me?

Nevertheless l return there all alone.

Is it so urgent that you must depart now?

The news recalling us from Spain is no better.

I have lost too much time already,

and honour bids me follow to the death a task

in which I no longer believe.

What, you no longer believe in Africa?

Suddenly I saw the truth.

Africa is one of those things in which I no longer have faith.

Still, less faithless than others,

you were not deceived. You knew the shores you were landing on.

Yes, I have loved her.

I longed for her disconsolate face.

It was for her that, since the king allowed,

I left my post of judge errant.

As my ancestors looked to Granada ...

As my ancestors looked to Granada ...

As my ancestors looked to Granada,

so I look to the iron ramparts of that other Arabia closed

and empty, which the legions of Satan tried to prevent us entering,

as if only the damned could live in the flames.

There, in the greatest light that this flesh can bear,

to proclaim that there is another God than Allah,

and that Muhammad is not his prophet!

For me the crusade has not finished.

God has not made man to live alone.

In the absence of this wife

I must not forget the enemy that he has given me.

Moor and Spaniad must not forget that they were made for each other.

Nor those two hearts slacken their grip,

who have long fought so fiercely against each other.

The Wind!

I hear the autumn wind

which with great racket sweeps the earth and the sea.

Suddenly it ceases. And then? Yes,

it is the cricket that thinly tries to resume its song of summer days ...

We know that will not be for long.

You no longer believe in your calling?

I was the builder of a dream.

Is there any woman who is not a dream?

Always the same!

What is woman, frail creature?

It is not because of women that life loses its savour.

Ah! If I were a man

no woman would make me renounce Africa.

That is something that resists. Enough for a lifetime.

- Do you hope to overcome it? - It's not hoping for things that is splendid,

but knowing one has it forever.

Just to grip the enemy by the neck, is that not enough?

He is held!

And he not only forces us to use all our strength

but we feel this same one

will compel us to use it four times over.

Always something new is needful.

What good is it, all this labour? - said the lord chancellor to me.

Spain is poor.

All this money I pour out there on barren sand,

could flourish here in roads, canals,

in crowds of happy children.

That is how Protestants talk, who look to eat and get rich

and they want their instant reward.

But you have taught me to think:

Woe to him who looks only to himself!

- Well then, what should one look to? - Say it yourself.

- This enemy that God has given me! - This is your work on earth.

It is not my enemy I am looking at now.

Look at me, then.

Why not use your eyes

to look at things that are impossible?

Am I still myself?

Look!

Not a single movement of my body

but says that I am no longer yours.

You are mine as long as you can serve me.

What service? When even he I see is dying before my eyes.

Do you deem it a service to prevent his death?

I do not want him to die!

You will not suffice him, you can only give him finite things.

The desire I have for him is not so.

You yourself, what do you ask of him? And what can you give him in return?

Nothing that will suffice him that he will ever cease to crave me.

It is the longing of the damned.

Has this longing been given me for evil?

How can something so fundamental be evil?

What does no good can only be evil.

Is it true I was born only to bring him to his doom?

No, why should you not be fit to do him good?

What good?

What is itself good will do him good.

It is better to do evil

than to be useless, in that garden where you have shut me up.

That is true.

I know of only one castle where it is good to be shut in.

What castle?

A castle that the King has given you to hold to the death.

This is what I have come to tell you of, a task commensurate to your soul:

you must sooner die than surrender the keys.

Do you say die, sir?

I thought with that word that your heart would listen.

But to live could be harder still.

Does the King gives this castle to me?

I give it to you in his name.

- Which one? - Mogador, in Africa.

That place which Don Camillo conquered and now occupies?

Yes, I mistrust that officer.

You must take his place and make him your lieutenant.

- You are not coming with me? - I can not.

I must defend the northern strongholds.

What will you give me to help me in this ?

Not a man or a dime.

How long must I keep your castle?

As long as is necessary.

Do you know the things Don Camillo said to me and I listened to,

the day before his departure?

I can imagine.

Have you such confidence in me?

Yes.

I am a woman.

Must I be warden of that place lost between the sea and sand?

And at the side of a traitor who wants only to insult you?

I have nobody else.

- I can not accept this task - You have already accepted it.

- Give me time to reflect. - The horses are ready.

Get up! Change your clothes.

Roman Campagna on the Appian Way.

However, the Chancellor of France

is quietly returning with his troops back along the Via Nomentana.

Having traveled north along

the same road that we have just travelled southwards on.

I told him to think of us when he last looked at Saint Peter's

so that our eyes would accompany his.

He has no need of Saint Peter's

to keep in mind Your Highness.

Do you believe I got the better of him?

Bah! One of those unsatisfactory treaties

that one needs to renegotiate every few years

backed up by some firepower

so as to bring a little order into our tangled inheritance.

The legacy of the brave!

Have we have not added some small pieces?

The tailors who have pieced them together have fallen out.

I have bad news from the Indies.

Really! Why couldn't they send Your Highness there?

Instead of that elusive Don Rodrigo

the King insists on pursuing.

My place is here, at the foot of this column in the sea

which upholds all of Europe and is the center of the Universe.

And Islam will not tear it down,

nor will those angry northern peoples snatch this Italy

to which all roads lead, crossing the crown of the Alps,

and which gathers up in one cloth every thread and every fibre.

The strong man of Europe is the man who most needs Italy,

and whom Italy most needs.

Once more, thanks to Your Highness,

peace is returning to Rome;

The French have withdrawn their grumbling opposition

and while the furred Russian ambassadors

mingle on the steps of the Vatican with those of India and Japan,

the papal legates prepare their journey to Trent.

And very soon, the new dome of Saint Peter,

like a great stack of corn, will rise over an indivisible Europe.

Rome is all right where she is.

As for me, I am happy to see Naples again,

and its noisy people whom Apollo and Neptune do not cease to agitate

like a niggard fumbling with both hands in a bag of coins.

But your business, learned sir,

is it not rather with the dead than with the living?

Call you dead those living things of marble and metal

that I removed from the lava?

More than living, they are immortal!

Our titles, in God's image, entrusted for centuries

to the archives of a volcano,

these superb Ideas

of which we are but a spongy translation!

Ah! It is those dead who have taught me how to watch the living!

It is true. In that human eruption of Naples,

our friend has also discovered some statues.

The loveliest of all! How I wished you had kept it for yourself!

I will plug my ears.

A splendid woman, I cannot deny.

Daughter of a fisherman, do you say? I call her a daughter of the sea,

worthy of a god and a king.

That is why I gave her to my friend Pierre-Paul Rubens.

Is it she we saw on board that boat

laden with statues, pictures,

and all sorts of curiosities that you were sending to the Duke of Alba?

Exactly.

Accompanied by her mother, like a plant and its root.

So much beauty for the North!

It is like mixing wine and beer.

What I love I like to keep for myself.

What should I have got from this beautiful young girl?

Some selfish pleasure, a small dilettante thrill.

Beauty is made for other use than pleasure.

Pierre-Paul Rubens has eyes only for his large iridescent blondes.

Gentlemen, do you take me for a fool?

Our friend Rubens is too proud.

It isn't as a model that I send him this daughter of the sun, but as a challenge.

I would rather send gunpowder and cannons to the Duke of Alba.

I don't think Rubens will much help the King of Spain keep Flanders.

Rubens will keep Flanders for Christianity

against the heretic.

What is beautiful brings harmony, what is beautiful comes from God,

I can only call it catholic.

It is not that good theology, Master Chaplain?

I should not have thought Rubens was a preacher of the Gospel.

Who has glorified Flesh and Blood better than Rubens;

the very flesh and the blood that God chose to wear,

as the instrument of our redemption?

Are you convinced, heretic?

I hear the bells of Rome, which forbid me from answering,

and among them those of my convent of Santa Sabina

saying for me farewell and hallelujah.

And you, Lucio, do you believe me?

Everything you say is true.

We are proud of our Captain.

Not because you love me am I right.

It is because you speak the truth that we love you,

and from this we have learned to know one another.

And to form this band of brothers at your side.

Why should I get married, with such friends about me?

You have nothing but praise for everything,

but it vexes me to see you use nothing

and so easily do without everything.

If I use anything, I must destroy it,

and then neither you nor I will have got very far.

I have not been made to destroy.

I would like to immortalize everything I touch,make it a treasure.

Come! I need only you!

The joy in the eyes of these men

tells me they are glad I am here.

To horse! We must finish this stage before dark.

Way of Saint James.

Pilgrim of the West,

for a long while a sea deeper than my staff

held me on this turret on four massive blocks of earth,

on this pink Atlantic

that at the end of the primal continent

closes up Europe's inland basin,

and every evening, sovereign vestal,

bathes in the blood of the slaughtered sun.

And there, on that half sunken mole,

for fourteen centuries I slept in Christ,

until the day that I took the road, once again,

at the bow of the sailing ship of Columbus.

I drew him with a thread of light,

while a mysterious wind

filled his sails day and night,

until in the black water he saw the long and russet braids

of those hidden nymphs

the sailors call tropical grapes.

And now, in the skies, yet never leaving Spain,

I pace my circular beat,

whether a shepherd on the Castilian plane

finds me in the Bible of the night

between the Virgin and the Dragon,

or a lookout man sights me behind Tenerife,

already submerged in sea up to my shoulders.

I am the lighthouse between two worlds,

and those that are sundered by the abyss

need but to look at me to come together.

I take up too much space in the sky

for any eye to be mistaken,

and yet am less than a beating heart,

or a thought that in darkness

comes and goes.

With the sea at my feet,

which reflects back my scallop shells,

and whose timeless dream throbs simultaneously

against both Africa and America,

I see the white wake left by two souls

at once fleeing and pursuing.

One ship goes straight towards America,

the other, against an unknown current

and an adverse swell, can barely keep its course.

A man and a woman,

both look on me and weep.

I will not forsake you.

The happy and contented do not see me.

That great hole through the world

where I plant my semaphore, has been created by sorrow.

When the earth only serves to uproot you,

it is in the heavens that you will take root again.

All the walls that separate your hearts,

can not prevent your existing at the one time.

You find me like a meeting place.

Your double restlessness joins in my eternal motion.

When I disappear from your eyes,

it is because I have gone to the other side of the world

to bring you news,

but soon to be back with you for the whole winter.

Fot though I seem motionless,

I never cease for a moment

from this ecstatic roundabout that holds me.

Lift up your eyes to me, my children,

to me, grand apostle of the firmament,

abiding in this ecstasy.

Palace in the El Escorial.

Senor, your proposal, which I accepted with reluctance,

no longer pleases me at all.

I can not leave a woman

at the head of a band of brigands,

in a castle half abandoned between sand and sea,

between treason and Islam.

The alternative is to send troops and money.

I have no troops or money for Africa.

In this case, Your Majesty must be resigned to losing Mogidor.

I would rather lose Mogador than the soul of one of my daughters.

God be praised! Dona Prouheze's soul will not be lost.

She is safe. Never shall she be lost.

What is Mogador after all?

A great thing to me

and to many of your ancestors who have desired it.

A burned up corner of the earth.

Just what is needed for Christians

to do their purgatory in.

Between that and America I have no hesitation.

You have seen Don Rodrigo?

I have seen him.

Prepared at last to go to America?

He is ready if I give the order for Dona Prouheze to return.

The counsel is enough. Leave Dona Prouheze the merit of deciding.

I will.

And Don Rodrigo himself, on the way to his government,

shall be charged to bear my letter and that which you shall add.

Why Rodrigo?

Are you afraid for the virtue of your wife?

- Why this useless torture? - Why useless?

Why should I spare him?

I want him to see the face of the woman

he loves once more in this life.

Let him look on her, become drunk with it, and carry it away with him.

Let them look each other in the face for once and all.

Let him know that she loves him,

that she is his at his sole discretion,

and then leave her by his own unaided will,

forever, and never to see her again!

Someone else might say: And what if he succumbs?

If he fails, well, decidedly

he was not the man I needed, and I shall find another.

For so much toil and suffering,

what will be the reward you keep for him?

My son, the only one he expects, the only one worthy of him:

ingratitude.

Well, let Rodrigo then go, and as Your Majesty suggested

I will presume to add my letter to yours.

Forgive me for this trial to which I must put Dona Prouheze.

Sire, I have no fear for her.

At least you will go to see your wife again.

I shall not see my wife again in this life.

Why?

You think she will not follow this counsel,

that we, and you, will give to her, and that Rodrigo is taking to her?

I think she will not.

Does this exile have so many charms for her?

An exile that at least takes her far from me.

But Rodrigo for his part is going far away.

No matter, she has found her destiny and her destiny has found her.

He who has once known it, cannot free himself so easily

from the amplification of our secret desire in the hands of fate.

Facing Mogador.

It is better to drive through the sand a cart harnessed to unshod cows,

it is better to drive a herd of donkeys

up and down a mountain path,

than to be a passenger on this shit bucket,

and require the conspiring of the four cardinal points

to advance the length of my shadow.

Better to make ten leagues a day on my own legs,

than to progress by zigzagging, by essay, stratagems,

inspiration, and eventually bake in the sun,

waiting for the awakening of a drowsy angel.

My Lord, obviously you are no sailor.

For us the fun is not to be

foolishly driven by a following wind,

but to fight well against adverse winds

by means of this auxiliary sail, the rudder,

until we finally arrive,

in spite of ourselves, where we want to be.

So it is said of our father Ulysses

he was the most cunning of mortals.

You call it cunning,

to continually offer first one side then the other?

And all for us to occasionally pocket

a kind of loose flatulence that lets us cover two cables length.

And every night, larboard, starboard, this red light that maddens us,

showing us the entry to the kingdom of Don Camillo.

Your friend Don Camillo to whom you bring such good news.

I wish to settle with him.

I am giving him back his command,

but it is this worthy gent who saved my life.

How so, I pray you?

Not even my mother's prayers would have sufficed to bring me back.

I was nearing the dark shore.

The name of Don Camillo, suddenly, went though me like a spear.

"He gave me back at once both suffering and life."

I understand.

Almost the same thing happened to me years ago in Valencia

with one Dolores, when for rival

I had a merchant of salted meat.

That's it, comrade, you have understood me perfectly.

I have an order of the King enjoining her to return.

Yes, I will bring her back in this boat.

And then I have promised to leave for good.

But I will be alone with her on this ship.

She has given herself to that Camillo; why should she not yield herself to me?

I do not care about her soul. It is her body I want,

only her body, the crazy complicity of her body.

To enjoy and then be free of.

Otherwise I shall never be rid of it.

Then immediately cast her off.

She shall drag herself to my feet and I will trample on her with my boots.

What say you of that infamous husband

who gave her over like that to that Camillo?

It is thought that Don Pelagio

could not find a better person than she

to guard him against that half-bred Moor.

Ah! He is a great politician!

His wife guarantees him against Camillo, and Camillo guarantees him against me.

He himself has gone to the Presidios.

I have foiled his calculation.

Well, forget that Old World which does not love you,

- Europe, Africa, - as another is calling you.

No, no, I will not leave her like that, everything shall be cleared up.

I only need to see her for a minute,

I cannot believe that she loves that son of a bitch.

I know it is me that she loves and flees from.

Let me but speak to her and everything will become clear in a second,

and there will be no need of explanations.

Still, if she had wished,

the other day, she had only to let herself be captured.

You say you saw her raise her hand?

You saw her as well as me,

our ships tacking against the wind in opposite directions,

no more than a cable's length apart.

It was she. Yes, I saw her lift her arm.

I looked at her and she looked at me.

Suddenly a red flash, bang!

And that bullet that shattered our main-mast.

Fire! Fire, Fire, Fire!

Why did you not obey me?

She should have been sunk.

You should have sent a barrage as I ordered you.

I had enough work to prevent

our own ship from sinking.

It's no joke to get your main-mast by the board.

And while you were getting unstuck she escaped us.

Next day, the wind shifted.

And for three days we have taken our ease, strolling under Camillo's balcony.

There are the two of them, looking at us and laughing.

Bah! The currents have come on. Even tomorrow,

with a little luck, we shall anchor at Mogador.

You say the currents have taken up?

Yes,

and you can see in the sky

that the stars are not twinkling in the same way.

Did you not notice at sunset

these long filaments of cloud like a handful of reeds?

It is the south wind that gradually comes out of Africa.

Tomorrow you will hear our sails

stretching and straining in the great billow of the sea,

and the will of God will blow upon us.

Of which undoubtedly a sign

is this old piece of wreckage we found today.

Wreckage? Where is it?

Here.

It is the stern-board of a boat that has sunk.

I can not read it.

T-l-A...Tiago.

Santiago?

Santiago. You seem surprised.

It is the name of a ship that was going to Brazil;

my brother, a Jesuit priest, was aboard her.

The fortress of Mogador.

It is tue, you have been faithful to our tryst.

Don Pelagio and His Majesty have shown

that to get the better of Don Camillo

it needed but a woman.

Still, I will close my hand when I want.

Not if I do not want you to.

I can put you back on your boat.

And show you are afraid of me?

You will surrender me to Don Rodrigo awaiting me at sea?

- I can imprison you. - You cannot.

- Are you not in my power? - It is you who are in mine.

Do you joke?

I say it is in my power

to make you spend the night in your deepest dungeon.

You have acquired this power in two days?

Two days is more than enough for a woman among all these simple men.

- Where is my dungeon? - Be patient.

I have need of you for now.

And it amuses me to do what I want with you.

It amuses me also.

And to complete my happiness, I need only look at the faithful Rodrigo

standing guard in the middle of the sea.

How small his ship is!

A white dot.

Come. You cannot look for long without danger at that fiery gulf.

A white dot.

A virgin forest in Sicily.

Here is the water.

You have put an armful of green wood on the fire;

you will kill it completely.

Not to mention the smoke it causes,

which can be seen for thirty miles in the moonlight.

I always only make a tiny campfire.

You do not want them to find you, right?

There is no need for fire at all.

We can not stay here together all night, like beasts.

You shall see the green tea I can make with some herbs I know,

and with lemon flowers.

- Do you live on tea? - Me? I do not want for anything.

Who brings you supplies?

Ah, down in that kind of headland that enters the sea

where the forest ends,

there is a crumbling temple,

like those once used by the pagans,

I suppose, with columns in front,

and inside is an old headless stone statue,

so indecent I can hardly dare to look at it.

There all the local people take

all kinds of food by way of offering ...

You understand, my little king? ...

You should not look at me like that ...

Fruit, bread, pastries, honey, eggs,

and much more,

even bits of roast goat.

And I take what I want, without problem.

Does no one stop you?

They are too scared!

None of them would enter this forest even for an empire!

It is the headless good woman who takes the food,

you understand?

Nothing more natural! She has a good appetite!

I must send a missionary to these poor people.

And soldiers to throw me into prison?

How did you make your way into my land without any papers?

It isn't my fault, but the ship's which wouldn't move.

I have already told you.

There was not a breath of air

and then the ship suddenly sank,

as if it had arrived just where it wanted to be.

Something must have come apart,

because I barely had time to jump overboard,

- I was the only one that could swim -

with these pots and other things.

My poor sergeant floated for a while, not very long,

enough to wave me good-bye with his hand.

Fortunately, the land was not far off and the current carried me.

Those imbeciles are still looking for me.

My horse must have mentioned me to them, no doubt.

What a good idea I had suddenly to leave them all!

I didn't know what I would find at the end of this path.

Silence, Lord King!

That's right, take my hand

and think of me so hard that no one will ever be able to find you.

Why do you presume to think I am the King, or the Viceroy in his stead?

Did you not send your servants to search for me?

That sergent, who was your sergeant?

And I, once I had arrived, had only to wait for you here.

Why be surprised that I should have recognized you immediately?

All that is true.

I had forgotten.

Beause of having forgotten

I realise I have always known it.

Have you also forgotten

that mark on my shoulder like a dove

- I will show it to you on another occasion -

by which you were to recognize me?

I have never thought of anything else.

That is a lie you are telling.

I feel everything that happens in your mind.

Yes, I move with it,

and I know my face only shows there a moment,

like a misty moon caught in turbulent seas.

Come, tell me what you are thinking right now?

Now! Reply without thinking.

I am thinking of this fire burning,

this everlasting stream always flowing away,

responding to itelf further and further away, in three or four voices.

Of this wind blowing,

of all those petitioners who plague me,

justice to be done for weeping women.

Of all the wrong I have done unwittingly or half wittingly.

What more?

Of this expedition that I have been told to prepare against the Turks.

And what more?

The French, pirates, the Pope of Rome,

those gold tassels that could never be found for my ceremonial dress.

Those relief measures for the famine in Calabria

which have turned out so badly,

the money lenders I have had to borrow from,

my enemies in Madrid.

And does all this worry you now?

No, merely noise.

Does it hinder you from attending to something else?

- Indeed, there is something else .. - What else?

Something fitfully below it, I would like to hear better.

When I command silence, what will happen?

Can you hear then?

I am not talking of the wind or sea, or this running stream.

What do you hear?

Faint music.

Sing a little of this music, dear, to see if I recognize it.

- I cannot, though I would. - Should I sing?

I have saved my guitar,

- but it has no strings. - No need for strings.

Then look at me a little

till I know where to begin.

- I have hurt you? - My heart stops.

Is it forbidden to look at you?

Let me again feel the same pain!

What is this frightened face I see in the moonlight?

It is my soul trying to defend itself

and fleeing with broken cries.

Is this the whole song that you said was ready?

My song is the one I awaken.

You were singing under a stone in Spain

and even then I heard you at the bottom of my garden in Palermo.

Yes it was you I heard and no other.

Not this play of waters,

not this bird, still heard when he is silent.

Tell me again.

This vast concert, that gives you so much joy,

say it is I who originates it.

It is I, at the bottom of your heart, this single note,

so pure, so melting.

You.

Tell me you will always listen for it.

Do not set anything between you and me.

Do not hinder my existence.

Rather tell me how you existed before I met you?

Do you think I alone was worthy to hear and revel in you?

Without you I would never have begun to sing.

Can it be true that I have given happiness to someone?

This happiness that makes you love so much, my voice when I speak to you,

this joy, my love, that I hesitate to return to you.

Do you think joy is something given and returned as it was?

What you give to me you will see on the faces of others.

For you alone, Musica, my exactions and my severity.

I will not cease teaching you your place, your very small place.

Yes, become proud, as if you knew everthing.

That place I have found for myself, below your heart,

do you know that?

It is mine, and if you could find me there, I would not feel so happy.

You shall explain that to me presently.

Come, we are not well off here.

Let us yield to the advice of the night and the whole earth.

Come with me to this soft bed of rushes and ferns that you have made.

If you intend to embrace me you will never hear the music again.

All I want is to sleep with you, hand in hand,

listening to the forest,

the sea, the running water,

and that other thing always returning,

this hallowed joy, this vast sadness,

mingled with this ineffable happiness.

Later, when God has joined us,

other mysteries will be reserved for us.

The Fortress of Mogador.

I wonder, what prevents you from opening the curtain

and easing your mind?

Don Camillo,

I am glad I have finally found you.

I thought you were hidden at the bottom of some hole.

I thought it best not show myself right away,

and let you freely visit these places.

It was inevitable it would be right here where you would halt,

just where I wanted to guide you,

this little torture chamber,

this boudoir reserved for urgent interviews,

what one might call intimate conversations.

Behind that curtain you are looking at sat the judge,

the unknown onlooker concerned to watch

both the victim

and the good officer working with them ...

What's the matter? You are in no hurry to see me?

I am looking at my shadow on the wall.

Allow me to join with it.

See, we two now form but a single character

with several heads and three arms.

Wherever you go henceforth,

you will never be able to prevent memory of me being mixed in your reflections.

You are accustomed to mixtures.

My shadow added to that of a Moorish dog

merely increases its blackness.

When your courteous shadow has moved on, evermore to haunt other shores,

The Moor's will still live in this castle,

familiar of another, covering and protecting with its blackness another.

Yes, it will only have to go about

a little to uncover another.

I wonder why I do not make a complete shadow of you right now.

Quite, I have no weapons. You have only to kill me

if you think there is no other way of finishing with me.

Anyway, before that I ask that you take cognizance of this note

that madam has charged me to deliver to you.

She has given it to you for me?

Herself myself for yourself.

Her Excellency was at her dresser,

(you realise my senior posts in relation to Her Excellency

give me access at all times to Her Excellency)

My colleague (I mean the chambermaid)

was busy in a corner with her Excellency's nightgown.

I read your letters and I have been entrusted with the answer.

I was asked to deliver it without delay

by hand.

But this note is none other than the one

I was commisioned to deliver to her.

I think on the back there is something written.

"l stay. You go."

"l stay.

You go."

It is clear. She is staying and you have only to go.

Tell the Dona I wish to speak to her right away.

To order me about this way

you must think me blacker

than I am.

Besides, who knows?

This room may not be so remote

that your voice does not directly reach

the ears of Her Excellency.

Will she disobey the commands that the King himself asked me to convey?

Not a command, if I read correctly, but counsel.

An order that together with the King,

- her husband before God gives her. - She chooses to stay here.

Prouheze, do you hear me?

Prouheze, Prouheze, do you here me?

Perhaps she isn't there after all.

Impossible to tell.

A singular task which you have taken upon yourself.

You do not answer,

but your shadow on the wall tells me

that it thinks as I do.

You love her, and all you have to offer is this letter from grandfather

asking her to return. How tempting!

As for youself, (yes, I have also read your letter,

it was given me with the rest of the packet)

you propose to disappear forever.

Well, you can start right now.

Your shadow does not budge.

There it is, stuck to this sorry wall

where more than once, another lonely shadow

has swung gently

- at the end of a rope -

by the light of a little dying charcoal fire.

You have not had enough? You want to hear more?

I think this at least will prove you have both deceived youselves.

She does not love you, you say, she does not love you, and I see it amazes you,

but did you love her?

All you had to do was take her.

But all the while at the bottom of you is that America,

older than that woman's face,

which gnaws at you and which it would be such a shame to give up.

How well I understand you!

What could there be more virtuous than to obey the King,

give back a lady to her husband

and steal her from a ruffian?

And all the while sacrificing oneself.

Love, honour, vanity,

ambition, interest, jealousy, lasciviousness,

the King, her husband, Peter, Paul, James and the devil.

All would have had their share,

everything would have been discharged in one fell swoop.

It is good and healthy to hear all of this.

Have I not told the truth?

There lacks but one essential.

Answer me then, you are listened to.

In faith, I thought I saw the curtain move!

Wherever she is, she cannot help but hear the words I say to her,

and I know she is there, by the sound my soul makes speaking to her,

like a blind man who when singing knows if he is in front of a wall,

or bushes, or nothing.

Speak! You have but to say the word.

You have already called her twice.

I think she is only waiting for your third call: "Prouheze, come".

She is there, and you have but to say her name.

And she will stand before you.

Soon when I have taken to the sea,

then will I call her.

I pray you, Sir, to conduct me to the rooms you have kept for me.

My tradesmen are busy repairing your ship.

Virgin forest in America.

And you say that on one of those blocks you recognized the Holy Cross?

Not just on one, but on plenty of others as well,

a cross with equal arms all coiled up

in spirals like serpents.

So on the graves of these dead people,

whose very name is also perished, there is the Cross!

From the depths of their graves they hold out the Cross to those living,

who launched themselves

from the other side of the world to find them.

There is not only the cross, there are those monsters

or bottles that I have described before,

those giants like the fallen cherubim in the Scriptures

who through the vines half eaten by the cursed trees,

turn to the four points of the horizon their Ethiopian faces.

One of them, taller than the rest, all white

with parrot dung,

was wrapped around, when I saw it,

in the coils of a huge serpent.

These words redouble my desire!

I will pit myself, sword in hand, against these gatekeepers of Hell.

As for me I'm leaving, I've had enough,

I have felt the rottenness of this stinking place

grip me by the entrails.

God forgive me for having entered this place

that was meant to remain hidden from the eyes of humans,

abominable burial ground!

My sole desire is to return and see the sea before dying,

to hear the sound of the surf on the white sand.

All my companions have died,

I have none left but these starving Indians.

Ozorio, give them some handfuls of maize.

And we, Lord Captain, what will we have to finish the journey?

You can return, if you so wish, with Senor Peraldo.

And find myself in Santarem, with my creditors

waiting for me and ready to cast me into that den of lice?

No, I will go to the end which is the furthest end,

I'll put my hand on those sacred emeralds.

Those crosses the Senor was speaking of just now, I recognized them,

as those that were spoken of to me by Sergeant Castro.

I know what they mean, I have it all written down.

And you, Remedios?

If I go back to Santarem, my wife number one will know.

Your Excellency well knows my case is a hanging matter,

maybe even a burning matter.

Forward, by the grace of God!

As for you yourself, Mr Guzman,

it is not emeralds which attract you to this detestable place,

nor the hangman who prevents you from returning.

I want to return to humanity that people doubly dead,

I want to raise the cross above their tomb,

I want to drive the Devil from his pestilential lair,

so that in no place in the world is he safe.

Columbus has discovered the living,

but I, I want to possess all those peoples

that death has stolen from the King of Spain.

I want to propitiate with the true Cross the ancient masters of the land.

Whatever our conquest, I want this old world

to become our heritage.

Forward!

Farewell! Neither for you nor for me is there any hope of return.

On the walls of Mogador.

I accuse this man and this woman

as having left me in the land of shadows

as a shadow without owner.

For of all these images that parade on

this wall, lit by the sun of day or of night,

not one does not know his author

and does not accurately portray his outline.

But I, whose shadow can they say I am of?

Not of this man or this woman apart,

but both at once, who together in me

have become immersed in this new being of formless blackness.

For as this man, upholder and matrix of myself,

passed along this wall, badly smitten by the moon,

as this man proceeded

to the place assigned to him,

the other part of me and my outer dress, this woman,

suddenly began to precede him without his noticing.

And the mutual recognition of them both

was not faster than the shock and fusion

of their souls and their bodies without a word,

nor of my existence on the wall.

Now I accuse this man and this woman

by whom I have existed for one moment, never to end again,

and by whom I have been printed on the page of eternity,

for what has once existed is forever

part of the imperishable archives,

why have they now written on the wall

at their own risk, this sign that has been forbidden them by God?

And why, having created me, have they then so cruelly severed me,

me, who am but one?

Why have they carried off to the far ends of this world

my two quivering halves?

The double shadow has separated on the wall,

which, in the depths of this prison,

corresponds to my presence in the height of the sky,

and instead of this solitary palm branch broken off from the shadow,

this woman's bare arm with its hand

waving faint and slow,

there is now only this palm,

which the sea breeze occasionally

after long pauses keeps moving and trembling,

free and yet captive, real, yet imponderable.

Poor plant!

Has she not had enough to do all day to ward off the sun?

It was time for me to come.

It is well!

Ah! How sweet it is to sleep with me.

I am all over her, within, without,

but the child I love knows so well that my light

only belongs to her darkness.

She has no more to do.

She is not always busy trying to replace what life takes away,

she yields, accepts, I am at hand to uphold her,

she knows, she trusts, she is sped, she is replete, she floats, she sleeps.

All creatures at once,

all beings good and bad,

are drowned in the compassion of Adonai.

How could they not know this light which is not made for the eyes of the body?

A light not to be seen but to be drunk in,

fo the living soul to drink of,

for every soul at the hour of its repose to bathe in and drink of.

How quiet it is!

Scarcely a faint and occasional cry, this bird unable to wake up.

The hour of the milky sea is ours;

if you see me so white, it is because I am Midnight,

the Milk Lake, the Waters.

They who weep I touch with ineffable hands.

Sister, why are you crying?

Is it not your wedding night?

See how the earth and sky are shining.

And where would you pass it with Rodrigo

if not upon the cross?

It is not a matter of your body

but this sacred heartbeat by which the commingling souls

know each other without intermediary,

like father and mother at the moment of conception:

this is what I serve to express.

See her on her knees,

this woman in pain, lost in the light!

It would never have begun if I had not kissed her on the very heart.

It began with those great tears,

like the sick spasms of the agony,

born beneath thought,

from the depths of a being cut to the quick.

The soul that wants to vomit and the iron entering in.

And she might have expired at that first assault in my arms

if while her heart stood still

I had not offered her this word:

"Never"; "Never, Prouheze."

"Never," she cries,

"There, at last, is the one thing he and I can share,

It is 'never' that he learned from my lips in that kiss

just now in which

we have become one.

Never! There at least is a kind of eternity

which can begin immediately.

Nevermore can I cease to lack him, nevermore can he cease to lack me.

There is always someone at God's side

who forbids him my bodily presence

because he would love it too well.

Ah! I want to give much more.

Yes, it is not enough to deceive him, I must betray him.

That is what he learned from me in that kiss

wherein our souls came together.

Yes, he will only marry me on the cross

and our souls each to each in death

and night, beyond all human reason.

If I cannot be his paradise, at least I can be his cross.

For his soul and his body are quartered on me,

as well as on two pieces of cross wood.

Since I cannot give him heaven,

at least I can take him from the earth.

I alone can give him a need to match his desire.

I alone am able to bereave him of himself.

When he has no more means of escape,

fastened to me forever in this impossible marriage bed,

when there is no way to escape

the powerful grip of my flesh

or this unpitying void,

when I have proven his void by my own,

when his void holds no more secrets

that mine is unable to verify,

then will I give him to God,

all bared and mangled, to be fulfilled in a lightning flash;

then shall I have a husband

and hold a god in my arms.

My God, I shall see his joy!

I will see him with You and I shall be the cause!

He asked God of a woman and she was able to give Him to him,

because there is nothing on earth or in heaven

that love is not capable of giving."

These are the things she says in her delirium,

and she does not realize that already they have passed,

and that she herself, in a moment and forever,

will go to that place where they have gone,

- nothing remains but peace, the hour is midnight, -

and now the cup of delight is filled to the brim

which God offers to all His creatures.

She speaks, and I kiss her heart.

As for that voyager,

who so often the confusing work of the hurricane

could not restrain in the small shuttle that strives to lay a thread

between the two worlds,

he is sleeping under folded sails,

tossing and turning at the bottom of the waters of oblivion,

in the unembroidered sleep of Adam and Noah.

For since Adam slept when the woman was ripped from his heart,

is it therefore not fitting that once again he sleeps

on this day of his betrothal, when she is given back to him,

and swoons to her fulfillment?

Rodrigo,

now do you hear that voice that says "Rodrigo"?

Now do you realize that man and woman cannot love

elsewhere than in paradise?

"That paradise that God has not opened for me,

and that for a moment your arms have built for me, ah! woman,

you gave it to me only to make me understand that I am excluded from it.

Each of your kisses gives me a paradise

from which I know I am outlawed.

O woman, you have found this place in me,

that you cannot touch but with eyes closed.

Here you have found it then, in me,

this wound that you cannot touch but with eyes closed.

It is you who opened my paradise,

and you who keeps me from staying there.

How could I be in that all encompassing homeland

when you deny me to be other than with you?

Each beat of your heart brings me renewed punishment,

that impotence to escape from the paradise

you contrive to exclude me from.

Ah! It is in this wound that I have you.

It is from this I feed on you, as the lamp feeds on the oil,

this oil by which the lamp

burns eternally, this lamp which shall never give light."

So he speaks and I kiss his heart.

Church of San Nicholas of Mala Strana in Prague.

The shadow grows

the lamp burns,

and I hear the groans around me of all these people

seeking to settle themselves together in the night.

It needed the night for this lamp to appear.

It needed all this overthrow around me,

this world around Prague where there is nothing more to see,

to make me, closing my eyes,

find my baby in me,

that simple little life that begins.

Oh, my God, how good it is here,

and how happy I am with You. I could not be anywhere else!

My baby is in me, and we are together with You.

And we pray together for this poor, distracted,

wounded and trampled people around me,

that it let itself be healed and to hear the counsel of winter

and snow and night,

which I would not have heard in the past,

before this child was within me,

when my happiness came from outside.

Let anger and fear, pain and revenge

give way to the covering hands of snow and night.

Ah! I see again those bloodied heads,

between which I had to pass,

and which were planted on each side of Charles Bridge

by order of my husband.

My king has come;

he is here, forcing all this chaos to end.

Willingly or unwillingly,

these people must accept the tyrant, as they call him,

but I who have known it before them, know that it is good,

and in his arms this new life in me takes rise.

When you cannot take a step

without finding everywhere barriers and cuttings,

when one can no longer use words except to argue,

then why not realize that across the gulf

there is an unseen ocean at our disposal?

He who can no longer speak, let him sing.

If just one soul should have the simplicity to commence it,

then all souls unwittingly should start to listen and reply.

They are in harmony.

Beyond any borders we will

establish this enchanted republic

where souls will visit souls in those small ships

that only require a tear for ballast.

The king, my master,

has brought to this country stability and peace,

but he has also brought with him his beloved wife,

and here it is where, out of sight,

I wish to stay for ever, I,

Musica, heavy with the fruit I bear.

What matters the discord and pain of today

since they are the beginning of something new,

because there is a morning, since life goes on its way,

using up with us

the vast reserves of creation,

since the hand of God has not ceased moving

and writing with us on eternity,

in lines short or long,

down to the commas, even down to the last imperceptible full stop,

in this book which will have no meaning until it is finished.

My God, grant this child in me,

which I shall plant here in the centre of Europe,

may be a creator of music,

and may his joy be a meeting place for all souls to listen.

Tomorrow is my feast day.

At God's command, over the country trampled by war,

over castles, ruined churches,

and monasteries in ruins,

over destroyed villages,

the angels have made a great carpet

of snow for the passage of the purple bishop.

Everthing there is one,

the Catholics and the sad Protestants,

everything is reunited, everything is pulled together,

the rivers themselves have stopped flowing and separating,

nothing moves.

It is too cold outside for the men of war,

the lords are warmimg themselves by their fires,

fed with the sacristy furniture and sawn up saints;

theologians dispute in taverns, and the poor,

like a bird frozen up among a few holly leaves,

are gently beginning to hope again and to live.

"This will not be forever". Perhaps.

Good people awake,

Do not count on me to weep in your soup.

Look at this small peering sun arising.

I only get on with small children

and my day is not lost when

I put into their hearts a little boisterous joy,

a few shouts of rude laughter.

I revive the frost bitten, rubbing their noses with snow.

And as the winter sun suddenly fills a hundred thousand cottages,

if with the tip of my glove I scratch the frost from your windows,

in a second Saint Nicholas will be over all of Germany.

And what other means were there to prevent

that stupid people surrendering to my Saxons?

Was the black monk be left to install himself in the heart of Europe

to poison the wells?

Let him stay with the phantoms amid its marshes and peatlands.

Praise God! What Poitiers was against Mohammed,

the White Mountain was against the heretics.

Honour to all those worthy captains

recruited from all corners of Christendom,

who at Prague rallied round the flag of the Immaculate Virgin.

Their work is done, and I, Saint Boniface

am left with mine, which is a heavy one.

Ah! It is no small matter to be the apostle of the Saxons,

and bishop of the introverted, shut up flock,

of a people corked and fermenting.

God has not made them for His arms,

or His oarsmen on the sea, or the wing behind His shoulder,

but to be trampled and pressed together under his feet,

to be everywhere pressured, harassed and hindered,

mixed up with incompatible people and irreconcilable beliefs,

to be always working,

matter eternally seeking its form,

impulse always dissatisfied with any equilibrium.

And how they love what they can put in their belly!

Between these two great rivers,

the one that goes as if unseeing seaward,

and the other that goes toward the origin and Asia,

there is a wavering and spongy mass, without form,

without external appeal, without vocation, without any destiny but this ferment,

this slow and heavy expansion,

a people accustomed not to see around,

who wishes to ignore those frontiers that nature has made,

but only see its difference from other men

and other languages that do not mix with its own.

To know this you must look at its heart

because it has no face.

It is I who brought Christ to the Saxons,

and what I have done, Luther has come to undo.

This is the reason why in this moment

when Europe is conquering the earth

and her heart is sufficient for all this new body,

God has placed this contradiction in her midst.

Yes, how good it is in this lonely church,

- bereft of all congregation other than one unseen,

formally suggested by these niches

left and right above us -

listening to this small creature praying with all her heart,

with clasped hands and the feet of her spirit unshod.

It is good to hear her giving thanks to God

in this world halfway to dissolution,

which, for a moment, resigns itself with an ill grace to peace.

She thinks that she has but to let her heart speak

to invite all these creatures into this blessed circle.

But man well knows he was not meant to be happy.

There is nothing on earth made for the happiness of man;

all the keenness of thy Saxons, Boniface,

will not suffice to find it,

that obstinate exploitation of matter,

which the better to penetrate it makes itself formless like matter.

That is why there exists, it is thought, the sea of the Slavs,

that uncharted abyss in which Europe has its roots

and which will always provide their supply of sorrows to her,

if she should run short.

There, far from the ocean that comes to her

only through small inlets,

by narrow gates closed

with complicated locks and padlocks,

churn together the waves of humanity,

that have no banks but purgatory,

in cold, at night, in the wind,

in snow and mud which clog both soul and foot,

in the absence of any guidance

other than this retrograde river flowing toward a dead Caspian,

and of any other visible aim above itself.

That is why at the voice of Saint Paul I left Athens.

Oh! How I disliked all those academies

and my lady Saint Minerva, head goddess of the professors.

I did not go to the East.

I saw that in order to save Europe,

to forge into one the keel of that great vessel, which, breaking the waves

with formless wings, tries to loose itself from the earth,

to escape this mass of mud, to find its direction,

it was the prow I needed, at the tip I must take my place,

where nothing was before me except the stars,

and the whole world be put behind me.

And to lead men through the seas and the night,

what better lantern could there be

than that of my severed head within my hands?

Europe is sleeping under the snow, ah!

Barely has she won this moment of rest.

But soon once again her strength will return to her service,

and in an ever fresh beginning

she feels on every side the inexaustible interest of the sea.

All the rivers flow into the sea, which is like chaos,

but the Danube goes as if to Paradise.

In vain we hear that on that side there is only desert

and mountains piled so high

that it is clearly seen they are inhuman.

Space, at least, abides, free and available,

the Wind of God blows,

and never has anything human been able to take root there.

There is our native country,

ah! how unfortunate for us to have abandoned Thee!

From there every year, return the sunshine and spring!

There roses bloom!

There my heart goes, with unspeakable delight!

There it listens with untold longing,

when the nightingale and the cuckoo sing!

Ah! There would I live!

There goes my heart!

At sea. 100 Lat. N. 300 Lat. O.

Whales! Whales, the commander told me,

is the vulgar term for these animals,

Cetus Magna.

Their head, which is like a whole mountain

full of liquid sperm,

shows in the corner of the jaw a little eye,

no bigger than a vest button,

and the hole of the ear is so narrow

that you could not even insert a pencil.

Do you find that interesting?

It is just disgusting!

I think it is a charade!

And to think that nature is full of things as absurd,

revolting, exaggerated!

With no common sense!

No sense of proportion, restraint or honesty!

We do not know where to look.

Yes, look!

Ah there is one standing up like a tower

and with a flick of its tail pivots around to sweep the horizon.

As easy as that!

God forgive me! I see one of these monsters

turning on its side

and a calf clinging to its dug.

Like an island all given over to the sucking of a mountain!

Revolting! Disgusting! Scandalous!

Ah, a fish giving suck under my very eyes!

It is a great merit of Your Magnificence

to expose yourself to all these unseemly encounters,

abandoning the sublime chair at Salamanca, where you lay down the law

to a whole nation of students.

It is the love of grammar, sir, that as it were transported me!

"Perhaps you can love grammar too well?"; says Quintilian.

Quintilian says that?

Dear Grammar, beautiful grammar, delightful grammar,

daughter, wife, mother, lover

and livelihood of professors!

Everyday I find new charms in you!

There is nothing that I would not do for you.

I was lead on by the will

of all the schoolmasters of Spain.

The scandal was too great.

I threw myself at the feet of the King.

What is happening over there?

What is happening to Castilian?

All those soldiers out of control and left exposed

in that detestable New World.

Will they make us a language for their use and comfort

without the sanction of those who have received patent

and privilege to provide for future ages the means of expression?

A language without professors is like a court without judges,

like a contract without a lawyer.

A horrible license!

I have been given their work to read,

I mean their memoirs, dispatches, reports, as they call them.

I have no end of mistakes to correct.

The noblest words in our language

put to uses both novel and coarse.

These words not found in our lexicon,

are they Toupi? are they Aztec? Bankers' or military slang?

And they are flaunted everywhere without shame

like feathered Caribbeans

in the midst of our diplomatic jury.

And their way of linking together ideas!

Syntax, to bring ideas together, has contrived many a circumlocution

allowing them to gradually come together and make acquaintance.

But these villians simply push straight ahead

and when they can not pass, they jump!

Do you think that can be permitted?

The noble garden of our language is about to become

a sheepwalk, a fairground, trampled underfoot in every sense.

They say it is more convenient.

Convenient, convenient!

This is the only word in their mouths.

They will see the zero I will give them for their convenience!

This is what happens to a people

when they depart from their traditions!

Tradition, you have said the word.

It can be seen that you have read the books of our solid Pedro,

as we call him, the rampart of Salamanca,

Professor Pedro de las Vegas,

more compact than mortar.

"Tradition is everything" says that wise Galician.

We live on an inheritance.

Something that endures with us and that we must perpetuate.

Now what is the tradition of Spain, pray?

It boils down to two names : El Cid

and Saint Isidore the husbandman, war and agriculture.

Is it a good and true-born Castilian

who has taken us by the hand to bring us beyond the sea

to our sunset?

It is a Genoese, a stranger,

an adventurer, a madman, a romantic, a visionary stuffed full of prophets,

a liar, a schemer, a speculator,

an ignoramus that could not read a map,

bastard of a Turk and a Jewess.

And that other one, who not content to discover another land,

determined to give us another ocean ...

As if only one were not enough for our poor sailors.

And what is his name, I pray?

Magellan, magellanus quidam.

A Portugus renegade

paid by the sovereign of that people,

no doubt, to lead us astray.

All this to rob the coarse vulgarian of respect for his superiors,

not letting anyone forget that the earth is round and that I,

the King of Spain, the ladies, the professors of Salamanca,

are all walking upside down like flies on the ceiling.

If the audacity of these criminals at least ended there!

But have you not recently heard of the ideas

of that Slav or Tartar priestling,

a certain Bernique or Bornique, cannon of Thorn ...

Hold on.

Should it not be Tours in France, or Turonibus,

where Saint Martin was bishop, and where the House of Mame manufactures prayer books?

No. It is Thorn in Switzerland, where the people speak Polish.

It's all the same to me.

All these barbarian regions beyond the Pyrenees,

which a good Spaniard would

blush to even know the name of.

France, Germany, Poland,

they are all mists behind the mountains that from time to time

come to obfuscate our clear Spanish genius.

What says Bornique?

Speak without fear, sir, I am ready for anything.

Come on, I am giving you audience.

He says - I can hardly bear to repeat an idea so ridiculous -

The earth ...

He says it isn't the sun that revolves around the earth,

but the earth ...

Finish it, the earth revolves around the sun.

You just have to take the opposite of what all people of quality think,

it is no harder than that.

That is all it takes to get, cheaply,

a pathetic reputation for originality.

Fortunately, from time to time, the joke goes too far.

To see that it is the sun which goes around the earth,

it is enough to simply open your eyes. No need for addition and subtraction,

our great Spanish common sense is enough.

I hate these manufacturers of theory.

They once would not have been allowed.

I say that they are criminals,

scoundrels, enemies of the State, highway robbers.

Perhaps they are simply crazy.

If they are crazy, they should be locked up.

If they are sincere, they should be shot. That is my opinion.

My father always recommended me to dread the new.

"And to start with", he would immediately add,

"There is nothing new,

What is there that could be new?"

I would agree more strongly with this

if I did not feel there was something inappropriate there

that did not add up.

It is because you go too far

and have not correctly read the solid Pedro.

No, no, what the devil,

one cannot keep eternally stewing in the same stew!

"I like new things", says the virtuous Pedro.

"I am not a pedant, I am not a retrograde.

"Give me the new. I like it. I demand it.

- "I must have the new at any cost." - I am afraid for you.

"But, again, which new?"

he continues, "The new, which is

"but the lawful issue of our past.

"New but not foreign.

"The new that is the development of our natural situation.

The new, once again, but which is exactly like the old."

Oh, sublime Guipuzcoan!

Oh, words of true gold!

I shall write it down on my tablets.

"What is new, once again, but which is exactly like the old."

What is there to add to our Spanish virtues,

to our pure Spanish genius,

to the beauty of our women, to the produce of our soil,

to the charm of our intercourse?

Ah, me! If our fellow countrymen but understood themselves,

if they did themselves justice, if they

knew the benefits they received from heaven.

How often do I groan over that fatal gift of self criticism

which spares not even my illustrious relative, the Viceroy of the Indies,

whom I am on my way to visit.

I did not know that Don Rodrigo was your relative.

Not exactly a relative, but more exactly my ally,

an ally, if I may say, by blood.

Everyone knows that in truth he once made

a hole in the side of my sister's fiance,

Don Luis, a very promising gentleman.

I refer to an excellent thrust,

during an obscure fight in which

he himself nearly drank of the river Styx.

Much later, Dona Isabel married Don Ramiro,

whom the Viceroy's favor then promoted to the first rank,

to the point of making him, can I say, his alter ego.

That is a sure way to succeed him.

He does not think to be his successor.

No, we are not yet thinking of succeeding him.

But he can give him sage counsel.

His business is to assert himself.

I am bringing the Madrid atmosphere.

The Viceroy is not liked in Madrid.

He has been gone so long!

He has become that man overseas

whose voice no one has heard, whose face no one has seen.

The idea of uniting the two seas by a canal, I pray, what

do the engineers and the financiers say?

It is not so absurd.

It is only a matter, if I understand right,

of a sort of road whereby, by cables,

and some sort of hydraulics gadgets,

they will pass ships over, safely on some sort of carts,

from one hemisphere to another.

Behold where the money of Spain is going

that we need for higher education.

Some ships riding carts over the mountains,

oh very good!

It is logical, it is logical!

When a weaver turns sailor a Viceroy can become an engineer.

Anyway he has on his side that the King likes him and will never recall him.

Errors that last too long cannot be admitted.

I feel that you wish to say something more.

What would you say if our Viceroy took leave?

Himself of himself?

Himself by himself of himself.

What is this paper?

Have you never heard tell of the famous letter to Don Rodrigo?

Of course. But I believed it was a sort of proverb

or paradigm for schoolchildren.

Like the sword of Damocles or Pandora's box.

Here it is. You can read the address.

But it is sealed.

If it was open, it would lose all its power.

Who got it for you?

A friar had it from a penitent who was hanged in the morning.

Its history is strange,

from the day that at Mogador you know who

gave it to a fugitive galley slave who a month later, in Palos,

having lost his shirt,

had the idea to use it as a stake,

who after having fleeced the entire company,

died two hours later of a knife wound.

And for ten years, the letter passed from hand to hand,

from Barcelona to Macau, from Antwerp to Naples,

bringing to him who put it on the table as a last resort,

success, followed at once by inevitable death.

It is time to finally bring it to its proper recipient.

Give it to me. If the Viceroy leaves all the better.

If he stays, it will be a good introduction for me

to the mind of His Highness.

At sea, off the Orinoco, in America.

Almagro, you shall be hung.

I ask to be tried first and then,

if you find me guilty, to be beheaded as befits a nobleman.

Hanged, as befits a traitor.

I am not a traitor.

I have defended the wealth of the King against you,

this land which I have made and which belongs to me.

The wealth of the King lies in the obedience of his children.

It is not with obedience I have built this new Carthage.

It was not your money that I had in my pocket when I started,

but that of myself and my friends.

And I have fairly earned with sword

what was in the pocket of my enemies.

When I was the first to land on these shores,

among mosquitoes and alligators,

it was not to please you.

This raging need tormenting me through heat,

hunger, disease and the plague of insects,

came to me from no other man.

I followed my own idea.

When I dug canals, hammered piles,

built bridges, buildings and mills,

when I went up rivers and through forests,

yes, all alone, in front,

like a maniac, like an idiot, without bread or water,

with everyone dead behind me,

when I made treaties with the savages,

when I unloaded on my plantations the cargoes of blacks

that I had collected overseas,

when I divided the land among my children,

nobody else gave me orders on paper,

it was a secret between God and me,

it was a sacred hunger that He made to rule my heart.

Then explain to me, Almagro.

What was driving you?

What advantages and what good did you hope to get from all your hazards?

I do not know. I have never thought of it.

It was like the instinct which flings us at a woman.

But not as if something pushed you, but rather drew you forward.

I had to possess this land, enter into it.

It was the indispensable beginning of something.

Look. It is destroyed.

It is destroyed.

The mud fills your channels.

Wild animals will plunder your plantations.

Soon weeds will sprout.

It is finished.

Within two years, no trace will be left of this work

and the name of Almagro.

It is sad enough to see something old crumble,

but what joy had you in destroying this new creation at its beginning?

Yes. I feel joy when I see that fire destroying your work.

It would have been greater if I had done it myself.

Yes, I feel happy destroying a work

which wanted to exist without me.

You never understood me.

And who could have understood you better?

Who has studied you for ten years

and with better eyes?

I tried something similar once in Florida. I took lessons from you.

Yes, sometimes I helped you without you even knowing.

I know your courage, your judgement, your deep seriousness,

your justice to the Indians and blacks,

your damnable pride, your hatred of me,

your injustice towards me.

Yes, perhaps it was that in you that I like the best.

You had all America for your own.

Could you not have left me this corner of the Orinoco?

The Orinoco, too, is mine. I suddenly needed it.

I must have labourers, Almagro. I have no choice.

For this mad passage between the two seas?

Don't criticize what you don't understand.

You had only a domain to create, I have to make a new world.

And I thought that you were jealous of poor Almagro.

That is true.

You said just now I did not understand you.

If I had not understood your work,how could I envy it?

How could you understand something that you do not like?

And how should I ever have liked this foolish work

which stood forbidding me the only thing I desired?

- What did you desire? - Your friendship, Almagro.

The friendship of a man you are going to hang?

My son, can you have taken that joke seriously?

Kill my AImagro? Cut off my right arm!

Destroy such a rival, whom I intend to triumph over every day,

giving him a share similar to my own!

I do not want to serve you.

The misfortune is that I have no choice but to make you serve me.

I have never known what it is to serve another.

You will see how interesting it is to learn.

I prefer to be hanged.

Is that how you appreciate the honor I did to look after you!

I only asked you to leave me alone where I was.

Why do you talk as if all your actions had no other purpose

but to defy me and provoke me?

Certainly I would have done more than you

if I had had the same opportunities.

And you want me to leave a man like that here on the banks of the Orinoco?

If you only want my hatred I am at your service.

Hatred can carry you far Almagro.

How many men have died in my service,

regretting the day they began to hate me?

- You are a cruel and unjust man - If I weren't you would not love me so much.

Ah, why have I not a blade to make you pay for this mockery!

I do not ask anything but to give you that blade.

Look at this poor child who wants to bite me

for kicking his tin soldiers,

when he should thank me for having gone

to fetch him from the shores of his dirty Orinoco.

Almagro, you are wrong by a hundred years.

In a hundred years, it will be time to plow,

now it is with the sword that we must work.

Shall I leave my lion any longer browsing grass like an ox?

There where my America ends,

there where turning towards the pole,

she wavers like a needle traversed by magnetic currents,

is the share I have reserved for you.

Gird on your armor, Almagro.

Buckle the sword on your thigh.

There is a golden empire awaiting you,

and in the Antarctic night those monstrous defenses to scale.

Down there where the world ends is where you should cease also.

You are to close the gate to the unknown and set the word fin to Columbus's adventure.

I do not want you to die in a bed but wounded by a good shot, alone,

on the roof of the world on some forsaken peak,

under a black sky full of stars,

on the high plateau from where all the rivers descend,

in the center of the dreadful plateau

that night and day is swept by the desolate planetary wind.

And no one will ever know where Almagro's body lies.

You are giving me the Indies south of Lima?

There it is, just waiting for you.

I accept. Too bad for you.

Take this stump of my America.

Catch her by the tail.

I will be watching you.

And if you do not want to love me labour to hate me more.

I shall see you never lack reasons for it.

On the walls of Mogador

Listen! Another cry!

I heard nothing.

No risk we'll hear any more.

Good heavens! I've had enough.

What a cry!

A cry like when you've touched a nerve.

What nerve?

That which the executioners look for.

Some have it here, others do not ... The nerve I mean ...

Now it's all over for Don Sebastian. It's always the same.

Out of the depths have I cried...

Saint James, which he kept always in his pocket,

will help him cross the border.

- Poor Don Sebastian. - No names.

It is true that he betrayed us dirtily.

And what else could he do?

- Once that damn bitch Prouheze... - No names.

... Once our old woman married the old man, there was nothing for him but to escape.

And where could he go but to the Turks?

I would do the same if I could.

Not so loud.

You know he often walks at night.

He likes to wear white with a black cloak

but we can see him all the same.

His eyes shine like a cat's.

Wait until I catch him in a corner!

I'll be damned if I wouldn't shoot him!

Who goes there?

In Panama.

Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap!

I would never have believed a wise man could hold so much dust.

Poof! Philip Augustus, take that!

No luck!

Just two days landed in Panama,

without giving him the time to lift his hat to wipe his forehead,

when an arrow of the archer Apollo,

as the master clerk of the justice of the peace says,

left him dead in the street.

One more to whom the letter to Rodrigo brought no luck.

Why do you insist on keeping it?

Give it to me, Leopold, let it fall!

You won't? I beg you.

I beg you.

I need the letter for the play to continue

and not be suspended between heaven and earth.

As you can see, down there that gentleman

and that lady are sorrowfully waiting for us.

I humbly submit my petition to the kind attention

of your Magnificence.

You will say that I only have to put my hand into Philip Augustus

to get the letter.

But I dare not, it would bring bad luck.

I prefer him to get rid of it naturally

like a plum tree of its plums.

Poof! Poof! Poof!

Poof! Poof! poof!

Poof! Poof! Poof!

The Viceroy no longer loves me.

Dear me! The minute he gives you the government of Mexico.

a kingdom ten times bigger and more beautiful than Spain ...

... with its mines, its plantations

and that opening northward to infinity...

and I hear you complaining the Viceroy no longer loves me?

If he loved me, he would not banish me from his person.

Didn't you ask him for Mexico?

- I let you ask him yourself. - Why let me do it?

- I let you ask him to see. - To see what?

To see how you stood in the mind of His Highness.

Blame rather your jealous and tormented disposition.

This melancholy that makes you bring on yourself what you most dread.

- You please him more than me. - And is this my doing?

Perhaps you think that I have a good reason to love him

when it's to him l owe being your wife?

That is true. Let me think on this text for a moment.

He does not care for me.

Despite you having access to him at all times?

Just like his dogs.

How many times have I come and gone without him seeing me.

He only listens when I sing.

Do you think he cares for either you or me?

I only know that life without him is impossible for me.

When his deep gaze turns on me, when I see that he is looking at me,

then there is something in me that stands to attention.

God has given him a sort of right and authority over me

so that everything he asks for is no longer mine.

I see that I am very little to you in comparison to him.

I have rights over you, as he has over me.

Well I will tell him this minute that you no longer want Mexico.

That will be no use. He doesn't forgive hesitation in the people who serve him.

People like me have had time to know him.

He has rejected me, it's all over.

He does not like people who draw back.

Rejected you? We will reject him too.

It is time to live your own life.

For too long you have lived fascinated

and captivated by this evil star.

Ramiro, I do not love you, but I am deeply involved with you.

We will not go to Mexico.

It is not a matter of us leaving, he is the one who must go.

Rodrigo must disappear,

Absolutely cease to be here.

You must take his place.

Take America from him? It would be taking more than his wife from him.

What would you say if he abandoned it?

He will not abandon us.

He is with us always. I believe in him.

God in heaven, why have I not got that letter to Rodrigo!

The letter that your brother brought from Spain?

And that he handed through superstition to that fool

who was killed by sunstroke this morning.

It is better that the letter get lost.

Do you fear that your idol would not pass the test?

I fear nothing!

Just give me the letter to Rodrigo!

Take it, madam, here.

In Mogador.

Dona Prouheze is there?

She is resting and has forbidden me to wake her.

Open that hanging.

I want to restore to her this bead of her rosary that she lost,

and that I have spent the whole day searching for.

She is stretching her hand

as if to receive this drop of water I bring her.

How strange it is,

we are alone in this place

and still it seems to be filled with an innumerable crowd.

So it was with that marabout

who I went to visit long ago in Atlas,

who received me in an unlit room.

I thought I was alone with him and suddenly,

as I spoke,

I saw that the room was full

of an unseen crowded multitude,

listening to me in silence.

I have found the lost bead!

A single bead.

But with just one bead missing

the bond of prayer is undone.

I have regained my lost number.

This tiny transparent stone.

I hold it hard in my hand.

This treasured tear.

This unalterable diamond.

This peerless pearl.

Water found at last.

What are those islands

like motionless clouds whose shapes,

their hollows, their bodies,

their gorges are like musical instruments

for a mysterious concert,

both gathered together and separated?

I hear the sea endlessly breaking on those eternal shores.

- Do not you recognize me? - I do not know.

I see only an uncertain shape like a shadow in the fog.

It is I. I was there. I have never left you.

Your Guardian Angel.

Do you think you were far from me until now?

There was continuity between us.

You were touching me.

It was my hook in the heart of your entrails

and I payed out the line like a patient fisherman.

Look at it coiled about my wrist.

There are only a few lengths left.

So it is true then; I am going to die?

It is nearly time for you to cross the sacred frontier.

Are you waiting for me to die?

I am waiting for your consent.

I consent. I have consented.

But can you consent to give me what is no longer yours?

Is my soul no longer mine?

Have you not given it to Rodrigo in the night?

Then tell him to bring it back to me.

It is he who must give you leave.

Leave me, dear! Let me go!

Let me become a star!

Do you consent to receive from his hand this death that will make you a star?

Ah! I thank God.

Come, dear Rodrigo, I am ready.

Raise your deadly hand over what is yours.

Sacrifice this thing that belongs to you.

To die, to die by you is so sweet.

Now I have nothing to say but goodbye.

I have fulfilled my duty to you.

Farewell, dear sister, until we meet in the eternal light.

What is this stone that I see you holding in your hands?

The stone on which his boat will founder.

He will escape alone,

his head white with foam, he will land in a strange land.

But what matters the wreck! He has landed.

It is not for him a matter of discovering a new world

but of finding again the old one that was lost.

Here he is, come to those darkened expectant peoples,

to those places beyond the dawn,

where confined multitudes are moving.

That nothingness on whose brink they have been stationed for so long,

that void made by the absence of being

played upon by the reflection of the sky,

for which they needed God to come to its understanding.

It is not Rodrigo who brings them God,

But he must come

so that the absence of God in which those multitudes are lying

may become apparent.

Oh, Mary, Queen of Heaven,

round whom unrolls the whole rosary of the skies,

have pity on these waiting people!

Viceroy's palace in Panama.

This orchestra is so bad

I don't know how your highness can tolerate it.

If it were better, I would hear what they were playing, which would be very boring.

I can only appreciate perfection in everything.

- Don Rodilard .. - Madam?

How nice it would be if we could hear some of your own poetry,

which sometimes, they tell me, you read to your friends!

"One hundred and twenty bales of quinine,

two hundred of campeche wood."

The syllables are so precisely counted,

the rhymes so accurately weighed, measured and adjusted

that a single pinch of snuff would capsize the fragile wonder.

For me, a perfect poem is like a stoppered jar.

Your Highness worships comparisons.

Who suggested this other one to me?

A broken piece of jade is worth more than a whole tile.

It is a Chinese phrase.

I suppose it was those fishermen whom our police galley

picked up the other day

near the Tortoise Islands, who contributed that.

No, not Chinese, they are Japanese.

Remind me of that song they sang together

that I liked so much.

On the plain

of Ocean

Towards the four-and-twenty islands

I row my little boat along

ta ta ta ta fa fa!

fa fa ta ta ta ta ta!

So when shall I also get underway on the ocean plain

towards the four-and-twenty isles?

Are you tired, my lord, of your America?

His Highness and myself have for some time

become tired of our America, as you say.

Have I have not heard you repeat several times

when building this palace now so unfortunately damaged,

that she was like your own body?

One gets tired of one's own body.

Have you not succeeded in everything you have undertaken?

We have succeeded only too well.

That Almagro, for example, on whom we built so much hope,

a regular sneak.

This America that you have made,

- will she manage without you? - Quite well. She does well enough already.

Lord, why you do you keep silent

and let this servant speak in your place?

Are not his answers as good as anothers?

I am happy to listen to Rodilard.

All day, while I am Viceroy, he stays at his table,

typing, reporting, copying from one paper to another.

No doubt my destiny.

And from time to time, he favours me with some reflection

and some marginal note or other.

You love me not.

You are making me make errors.

I was going to write on the envelope: "You don't love me"

"Magistrate Ruiz Zeballos at you love me not";

That is no place for a magistrate.

I don't know if Your Highness has realised

how far this lady here is in love with you.

A taking of the heart.

A tender feeling.

But does she love Don Rodrigo? Or the Viceroy? There is no way of telling.

One can easily interest these ladies that are getting on,

of a certain age.

Getting on, but still pretty.

Forgotten ...

No, no, my love, I have not forgotten you.

Ah! I was sure I should find the word

that shakes your heart.

You will not get to his heart except though the gates of memory.

For me to be heard, it is enough to take on the voice of another.

Finish. I want to hear the rest.

I forget.

I have forgotten.

I know not. I forget. I forget myself.

Since you are no longer with me

I have forgotten myself.

I like the way our Isabel sings not in notes so much but lines,

so in the forest sings that bird they call the rialejo.

When I am in company I do not sing the same way.

Why force me, my lord, to stumble on these dark roads?

When I am alone I like to sing

one of those songs of our old Spain.

An air such as you may hear at evening

by the fountain, under the great chestnut trees.

"Far brighter than the moon ..."

"Since that

painful moment ...".

That Spain that neither you nor I shall see again.

I am appalled at the past!

I am appalled at the future!

That voice just now I semed to hear coming from deep inside me,

from behind me, it is not from behind but before me it calls me on;

if it was behind me it would not be so bitter or so sweet.

Forgotten,

I have forgotten myself,

But who will take care

of your soul ...

You need something like:

Now that I have been left out.

But it is more like a vulgar prosody.

But who will take care

of your soul ...

Now that I am,

Now that

I am not there with you,

But who will take care

of your soul ...

Now that

I am with you,

Never more.

Never more.

Never more.

Now that I am with you no more.

There was but one word to say

and I would have stayed with you forever.

Forever with thee.

Forever with thee.

But that word, who knows if she has not said it?

His Highness has probably never heard about the letter to Rodrigo.

- There is no such letter to Rodrigo - There is a letter to Rodrigo.

And there behind us, across the sea,

is a woman awaiting the response for ten years.

In the night

When I lie lonely

Even to the break of day

How the time is long in passing

How the hours are slow to go

Know you, know you,

Tell me, do you know?

His Highness will perhaps allow me

to answer in his stead that he does know.

- Isabel, where is this letter - On the table

I delivered it to your secretary.

Your Highness will excuse me.

I thought to give it to you in a moment,

- once the signing was done - Give me the letter.

It is my name. It is her writing.

Prouheze ten years ago.

I cannot read it.

I should just take that little bare foot.

It is yours, like the rest.

Have I not the honor to be your wife?

I have sworn never to touch you again.

I have yielded to your insulting indifference.

Why did you marry me?

The troops betrayed me, was I not in your power?

My husband was dead.

Why not take the opportunity

once we had captured that poor Franciscan?

I am the one who is in your power.

That is half true.

Of course, if I had not been certain of obtaining

a certain power over you, why marry you?

The King has not relieved me of this charge he has entrusted to me,

Don Camillo, on the coast of Africa.

My presence prevents you from doing all the evil you would otherwise.

Perhaps there is something that I can do: have you flogged.

My body is in your power, but your soul is in mine.

When you twist my soul

do I not have the right to torture your body a little?

The important thing for me is that you do what I want,

for these past ten years, yes,

apart from these occasional ridiculous outbreaks of your savage humour.

In general, I have nothing to reproach you with,

and I believe the King is content.

Such good fortune!

In other words, for me to serve the King it has been enough to stop obeying.

It has not been so easy to cease to obey me.

With someone always present, it is not so easy to forget them.

But soon who knows whether this gross bodily presence

will still be feasible for you?

If that is death you are announcing in those elegant terms,

there is no need to mince words; I am ready.

The idea, thanks to you, has never been so far from my mind,

that a bird's cry, the noise of a plate falling,

a word written with a finger in the sand,

or a grain of incense expiring,

had not been warning enough.

Receive it from me directly.

I have had it already from another, last night.

Your regular visitor, no doubt, and the father of my daughter?

Who would come to see me, lonely

- in the depths of my prison. - Rodrigo last night,

every night, whom neither the walls nor the sea can hinder.

Only you, Ochiali, you well know,

have inflicted me your with your gross bodily presence.

But I know that he and only he is the father of the child

I have given you and who so resembles him.

Is it true?

So does it fall on your head,

dear child, our triple legacy!

Mine too?

You do not doubt, that I will accompany you where you are going?

What do you think?

I think the letter to Rodrigo will not wander forever

without one day reaching its destination.

That appeal which in a moment of despair

I threw into the sea with my eyes closed?

For ten years now it has run from Flanders to China,

from Poland to Ethiopia.

It has even come through Mogador many times.

But I believe that finally Rodrigo has received it,

and prepares to respond.

All over with Cacha Diablo and his little kingdom in Africa.

All over with Prouheze and her little captaincy in hell.

A tide has reached us from the sea

which soon will cure me

of you, my rose, forever.

If you lifted your eyes to me, I should read other words there.

Why lift my eyes if I already know what I should read in yours?

It is worthwhile to look at the one part of the Universe

which still has some interest for you.

This small bare foot is enough for me.

Farewell, senor.

I withdraw my foot, someone has come for me and I am free.

Are you sure?

Have you the impertinence to think

that anything in me was made especially for you?

And if not, from where comes the power which keeps me at your feet

and for ten years forces me to listen

to the beating of your heart?

- Another is the occupant. - He occupies your thoughts

but not that heart, busy every second with creating you.

That heart that forms you, Rodrigo did not form it.

- It was made for him. - I hear it clearly,

but that is not what I hear from that thing much older beating in you,

that beating since the creation of the world

which you have inherited from another.

It pronounces no mortal name.

I know there begins in me a name

of which Rodrigo is the end, on the other side of the sea.

I say rather that he helps you quell this spirit in you always sighing.

Is it not thanks to Rodrigo that I am here with you,

and was it not he who taught me to sacrifice the whole world?

So he could replace it.

Have I not renounced him in this world?

In order to possess him better in the other.

Shall I lose my reward?

Ah! I was waiting for that word!

Christians have no other on their lips.

All the better if it serves me to destroy that of a renegade.

Prouheze, when you pray, do you belong entirely to God?

And when you offer to Him this heart all full of Rodrigo,

what room is left for Him?

it is enough to do no evil.

Does God ask us to give up all our affections?

A feeble answer.

There are affections that God permits and are a part of his will.

But Rodrigo, in your heart,

is in no way the effect of His will

but of yours, this passion of yours.

Passion is bound to the cross.

What cross?

Rodrigo is forever the cross to which I am bound.

But the cross will not be satisfied

until it has destroyed in you everything that is not the will of God.

Oh, terrible word!

No, I will not give up Rodrigo.

Then I am damned

because my soul can not be ransomed but by yours,

and only under this condition can I give it to you.

No, I will not give up Rodrigo.

Die then for this Christ drowned in you who calls me with a terrible cry

and whom you refuse to give me.

No, I will not give up Rodrigo.

Prouheze, I believe in you. Prouheze, I am dying of thirst.

Ah! Cease to be a woman

and let me see upon your face finally

that God that you are powerless to contain.

No, I will not give up Rodrigo.

But otherwise,

from where could there come that light upon your face?

Off the coast of Darien, in the Gulf of Mexico.

Do you not leave the post entrusted to you because of a woman?

A woman? What woman?

It isn't a woman that makes me go.

Do you mean, my lord, it is not because of a certain woman

that you are going?

Not at all, Mr Interrogator.

Duty alone, duty alone, duty alone calls me.

I have no more to say to your highness but goodbye.

I wish your highness a good trip.

Farewell, sir.

I refer for your highness' consideration my complete works.

It is a token of the esteem I have for you.

Goodbye, dear Rodilard. - Only you have understood me.

Only Rodilard has understood you, my Lord?

Only Rodilard has understood me.

Why did you lie so to Don Ramiro?

It amuses me sometimes to lie and go about my affairs

under cover of the false Rodrigo I planted on a pole.

- He loves you. - I detest intimacy.

I also,

will you not say a kind word to me before you leave?

Farewell. I will think of you sometimes.

- I hate you. - So much the better.

My character is so constituted that the hatred and contempt of people

is so much easier to bear than their admiration.

Two months later, the Spanish fleet off Mogador.

A sombre afternoon without a breath of wind.

It is all over. The Moors are running for their lives.

Well, they are quelled.

They will not attack again today.

In faith, Ochiali is a stalwart fellow.

It would be a pity for him to end his career

otherwise than at the end of a Christian rope.

Perhaps you would have liked us to lend him a hand against the infidel?

Yes, in faith,

the whole fleet would have loved to have gone to rescue Cacha-Diablo.

It is much more amusing to see him perish before my eyes

without firing a single cannon shot.

I fancy him every morning looking at the sea,

and the lowering presence of our ships day and night

closing up the horizon.

I had no need to take all these troops from Don Ramiro.

The Moors would not want to leave us so rich a bounty

and Mogador once more belonging to Spain.

But the Moors in Mogador,

are they worth much more than Don Camillo to us?

It is a temptation I suppress,

this ancient African smallpox we have in our blood.

I give short shrift to these unsavoury tricks

working us up again to some expedition Don Sebastian style.

It is not to my purpose that Spain should again have interests in Africa.

The New World is enough.

But what will the King of Spain say?

I have done nothing, sir, I have not fired a single cannon.

Is it my fault if this untimely calm

keeps us these last two weeks from arriving in Mogador?

Am I responsible for the interpretation

these imbecile savages have given to our presence?

And could I guess that the renegade's forces

were ready to mutiny?

But will you not do anything for the widow of Don Pelagio

whom this robber holds captive?

Not captive, sir, from what I know,

but his honoured wife.

Perhaps he would release her if we made him some promise.

I have no promises to make.

I await his proposals.

I see a ship leaving the port.

There is a woman on board,

there is a woman.

Yes, a woman and a child in the boat.

Later.

The envoy of the commandant of Mogador is here.

Show him in.

You are the envoy of Lord Ochiali?

His wife and his envoy. Here are my credentials.

I am listening.

Must I speak before this assembly?

I want all the fleet to hear.

Depart, and let Don Camillo keep Mogador.

I care very little whether Don Camillo, as you call him, or Ochiali,

or whatever his renegade name is, keeps Mogador.

Gentlemen,

I pray you listen to what your general is going to reply.

I ask:

Is it by the will of the King of Spain that you are here?

A letter brought me here,

an appeal, a will against which I had nothing to oppose.

You heard it late.

Once it reached me, I left everything and now I am here.

So you preferred a woman's appeal to the service of your sovereign?

Why should I not make a little war under my own flag?

Like that other Rodrigo, my exemplar, who was called El Cid.

Since there is no one calling you now, leave.

There is no appeal now, do you say?

That is not what the heart listening within me says.

A stiffening sea before Mogador holds down my keel.

Gentlemen, if the King of Spain had wished to destroy Ochiali,

do you think he had no means to do so?

And that having tolerated us for so long

he had any less reason to do so now?

This Africa at the gates of the kingdom,

this immense storehouse of locusts

which has three times engulfed us since the time of Tarif and Yusif

and Almohades,

do you think it could be left unattended

and that it would not be a good idea to keep in reserve

some internal source of information and intervention?

Ochiali the renegade has served Spain better

than Don Camillo the steward.

I will never allow it said that the King of Spain

has need of the services of a renegade.

And I, who know that against evil

there is always some modest thing that may be done,

I say that if the royal shephard had not put his trust

in this dog that I have been for ten years,

the wolf would have eaten many more lambs.

No dog, but a devoted wife whom we admire.

His wife, it is true, I consented to be his wife.

Since I had no more troops

and there was no other way for me to continue at Mogador

this captaincy which the King had entrusted to me,

the restraint and ordering for ten years of that beast.

It is true and I must bear witness.

Many prisoners were freed,

many ships by her orders aided against the pirates,

many shipwrecked men returned without ransom, stand testimony

to what she has done here these ten years for the Kingdom.

The list of Ochiali's villiany would be longer still;

all that came from my quarter was his favorite loot.

I could not hinder everything,

still, I was the stronger.

Several times I have been beaten and tortured.

But he has obeyed me.

You say you have been beaten and tortured?

The first time was when I wrote this letter,

the letter to Rodrigo.

I should never have left you with him.

Why?

The blows of a defeated man do not hurt.

And you, you tortured him also.

Am I to think that only your body was with this man?

Rodrigo, what I have sworn to you every night is true.

Beyond the sea I was with you and nothing came between us.

- Bitter union - Bitter, you say?

Ah! If you had listened better

and if your soul on leaving my arms

had not drunk of the waters of oblivion

what things it might have told you!

- The body is powerful over the soul - But the soul over the body

is even more so.

As witness this child whom my heart,

full of you, has borne.

Is it to bring me this child that you have come?

Rodrigo, I give you my daughter.

Keep her when she no longer has a mother.

So, as I had guessed, you wish to return to Ochiali?

I have yet to hear you refuse

this proposition I am charged to bring to you.

Speak.

If you withdraw your fleet, he proposes to let me go with you.

What do you say to this, gentlemen?

I do not see what should prevent us from saving this woman

who, after all, was the wife of noble Pelagio.

And I am of the opinion that we should finish what we started

and make no agreement with this renegade.

I came here in answer to your appeal,

which was to free you from this man. And I will free you.

I will have no further bond between that wretch and you.

Dear Rodrigo, there is

no other means of freeing me but by death.

Why?

What will prevent me from keeping you on board

while the Moors rid me of Camillo?

Honour prevents you.

I have sworn to him I will return if his conditions are not accepted.

I am no party to that promise.

You will not make me fail my word.

You will not give him this advantage over you and me.

I must leave you in the hands of the Moors?

Everything is in place to blow up the citadel tonight.

At midnight there will be a great fire,

and when that goes out, an explosion.

Then leave. Something will be over.

What will be over, Prouheze?

All is over for Prouheze, all that kept me from beginning.

Officers and comrades in arms,

men gathered here that draw breath

by chance around me in the darkness,

and all who have heard tell of the letter to Rodrigo

and the long desire between this woman

and me like a proverb for ten years

between the two worlds,

look upon her,

as those with eyes now closed

looked upon Cleopatra,

or Helen, or Dido, or Mary of Scotland,

and all those women that have been sent on earth

for the fall of empires and captains

and the loss of many cities and ships.

Love has finished its work in you, my beloved,

and the laughter on your face has been replaced by pain

and the gold that crowned you by the mysterious hue of snow.

This promise between your soul and mine

by which time stood still for a moment,

this promise you made to me,

this undertaking you gave,

this duty towards me you have assumed,

is such that death can in no way

free you from it in my sight, and such that if you keep it not,

my soul from the depths of hell

will accuse you before the throne of God for all eternity.

Die, if you wish, I give you leave.

Go in peace,

withdraw from me the feet of your beloved presence.

Consummate the severance.

Oh, Rodrigo, for this reason I have come;

if it is true that I have given any undertaking to you,

it is for that I came, dear Rodrigo,

to ask for you to give it back!

So is this the tireless call which night and day

for ten years has pursued me by way of land and sea

and has given me no rest.

Dear Rodrigo,

that promise that my body made you I am powerless to fulfill.

Prouheze, standing there,

hear this cry of despair that for ten years

I have unceasingly lifted up to you.

I hear it, but how else respond

if not by the soundless increase of eternal light,

in the heart of this woman so subdued?

How can I speak when I am captive?

How promise as if there were something in me that still belonged to me?

Blame only yourself, Rodrigo.

Why ask me for what no woman would be able to offer?

You would soon be finished with me

if I were not made one with that which is not limited.

He who has faith has no need of any promises.

Why not believe in this word of joy

and ask for nothing else but this word of joy here and now,

that is my existence to make known to you,

and not a promise but myself?

I, Rodrigo!

Myself, myself, Rodrigo, I am your joy!

Myself, myself, myself, Rodrigo,

I am your joy!

No word of joy but of deception.

Why pretend not to believe me

when you desparately believe me, poor wretch?

Where there is most joy is where there is most truth.

From where can I gain that joy if you cannot give it to me?

Open and it will enter.

How can I give you joy

if you do not open the only gate by which I can enter?

No one possesses joy, joy possesses you.

One cannot put down conditions.

When you put order and light in yourself,

when you are fit to be embraced, then will she embrace you.

- When will this be Prouheze? - When you have made a place for her,

when you have withdrawn yourself to make room for this dear joy.

When you ask her for herself

and not to increase in yourself that which opposes her.

Oh, companion of my exile, shall I never hear from your mouth,

anything but that No and again No?

Perhaps, noble Rodrigo,

you would have preferred me to place in your arms an adulteress?

And later, when Don Pelagio died, and I made this appeal to you,

perhaps it was better that it did not reach you.

I would have been no more than a woman half dead upon your breast

and not the eternal star for which you thirst.

What good is this star that is

- never reached? - Oh, Rodrigo,

yes, this distance that separates us

is impossible for us by our strength alone to cross.

But then where lies this road

- between us? - Oh Rodrigo,

why look for it when it came to find us?

This force that takes us out of ourselves,

why not trust it and follow it?

Why not believe in it and yield to it?

Why seek to know and make those movements that disturb it

and impose conditions on it?

Be generous in your turn, as I have done,

can you not do likewise?

Cast off everything, give all to receive everything.

If we go to joy,

what matters it that down here

it is inverse to our bodily proximity?

If I go towards joy, why believe it is for your pain?

Do you really think I came into this world for your grief?

Never for my grief, Prouheze, my joy.

Never for my pain, Prouheze my love,

Prouheze, my delight.

What have I wanted but to give you happiness,

to hold nothing back, be wholly this balm,

to cease to be myself for you to have it all.

There where joy is everything,

how believe that I am absent?

There where joy is everything, there Prouheze is most fully.

I will be with you in the beginning.

I will espouse your cause.

I will learn with God to keep nothing back,

to be that thing of goodness and complete giving

that reserves nothing and from whom everything is taken.

Here, Rodrigo, take my heart, take my love,

this God filling me.

The strength by which I love

is no different from that by which you exist.

I am forever one with that thing giving you eternal life.

Blood is not closer to flesh

than God lets me feel every beat of the heart in your chest

that every second of the blessed eternity unites and separates.

Words from the other side of death I can hardly understand.

I look at you and that is enough.

Oh Prouheze, do not leave my side, stay and live.

I must go.

If you go there is no other star to guide me,

- I am alone - No, not alone.

By dint of not seeing it in heaven,I will forget it.

What gives you this assurance that I can not stop loving you?

While I am I know you are with me.

Only make me that promise and I will keep mine.

I can not promise.

I am still the master. If I wish I can keep you from going.

Do you reaIly think you can prevent me from leaving?

Yes, I can keep you from leaving.

Do you think?

Well, say only one word and I stay.

I swear it.

Say only one word, and I stay.

There is no need for violence.

One word, and I stay with you.

A single word,

is it so hard to say?

One word and I stay with you.

Mother, do not leave me! Mother, do not leave me!

Mother, do not leave me!

End of Part Two.

More than ten years later.

LOW WIND, BALEARIC ISLANDS.

Look out!. Someone is coming. Try to look as if you weren't looking.

It is Don Rodrigo's ship.

Wow! He has hung his whole picture shop out to air.

All the saints of paradise have been over his counter.

Look at the bunting he's hoisted.

A boat returning after three days fishing

isn't more cluttered with sails and nets drying.

It's a good time for doing trade.

The fleet arriving from America with gold

and silver from Peru is here.

The fleet that is going to fight against the Turks

under John of Austria is here, ready to sail.

And the convoy that will supply our Armada against England

is here also.

The king with all his court is here. Finance, diplomacy,

law courts, the whole box and dice.

All Spain is there dancing on the bonny sea.

People have finally realized

that you cannot really live anywhere but on the water.

And fishermen in the middle of all that, friends!

The boats for the provisioning,

servants, comedians, acrobats,

the priests with the Mass ship

ringing the bell, the soldiers.

All you can see are black spots everywhere,

like flies on flypaper.

And the night is amazing with all those lights,

sky rockets, cooking fires flaring and crackling,

the whole great Spanish Ramadan at sea,

the sea, I say, as a sort of large orchestra that can't be silenced,

down below, that never stops humming to itself,

always keeping the beat and dancing under you.

Nobody thinks of going back to land;

boats are going to Majorca to get people when needed.

If I were the King of Spain I would get tired of seeing Don Rodrigo

walking around in the middle of it all with his one leg.

It is not the fault of the King of Spain he has only one leg.

Still, for ten years he was Viceroy of the Indies;

then sent in disgrace to the Philippines, and it was there,

whie waging war on the Japanese, that he was taken prisoner.

And now he's forced to sell sheets of holy pictures

to poor fishermen to make a living.

The sea is just the place for wrecks.

The King of Spain isn't required to bother with all those

that end up here, sailing near the wind.

But defiantly sailing right under his nose,

as proud as a three tier ship!

Well, if I was in his place

you'd see me showing all those golden haired courtiers

what happens to someone

when I have lost interest in them.

But it is he rather who seems to have lost interest in the King of Spain.

You should see his airs, perched on his wooden leg,

and banging it on his boat's bridge,

"Stop, keep away, its me!"

As if to say, as someone might say,

there was nothing more to say, nothing!

As if he was ambushed whenever he spoke.

I think all this will end badly for him.

Meanwhile everyone buys his holy pictures.

There's never enough of them.

There is nothing but them on the wall in the Islands,

even to the prisons of Algeria.

The Fathers of Mercy even send parcels of them to the poor prisoners.

The oddest thing is that he has never tried to paint or draw,

but he explains his ideas,

and there beside him is a Japanese man he brought back from Japan

who executes everything on a wooden board.

With ink and color and a press they pull as many sheets as they want.

The other day he gave me a grand Saint James.

You see him landing in Spain.

He has kind of black whiskers, no eyes,

a big nose like an iron knife.

Dressed like a sailor to the waist,

and below all legs and muscles.

He has his right foot planted on the bow of his boat,

his knee up to chest height.

He's throwing over Spain a sort of spiral

endlessly spinning and twisting

that continues on into the sky, towards a kind of pillar

that you see there, the pillar of Hercules,

the stake that pins Europe in the middle,

the last bolt screwed tight

to keep Europe from splintering.

I have another Saint James.

He's as large as the entire distance between heaven and earth.

He's emerging from the sea, with one foot still in it up to the ankle,

so tall he has to stoop under the ceiling of the clouds.

And he has a huge arm hanging from the right shoulder

and a hand at the end that swings like an anchor, and below,

on the shore, with its shops and its steeples,

you see a small village all white like a pile of flour.

There is a Saint Joseph, on Mount Ararat,

who is being given Noah's Ark.

But the one I've bought is St. Jude,

the patron Saint of hopeless causes.

You see a kind of cross-roads down a mine,

where three or four galleries meet, miles underground.

There is a solitary man, sitting down

with his head on his arms, on a table.

And out of one of those galleries comes a shaft of light

like a lantern approaching him.

There are many more.

You won't see them all by the time you get home.

You might say that someone finds him the images,

and he tosses it to the Japanese man,

always close to him,

like a cook with his frying pan frying in the fire.

All this doesn't say what we are going to do

with this great wine jar

beneath the waves, once we've fished it up.

We will just have to turn bartenders and offer drink to the whole of Spain.

And what would the Holy Inquisition say,

or else the ministry of Customs and Excise?

In my opinion we should rather offer it to the King of Spain

and His Majesty will make us all gentlemen.

Help me, help me! I caught something, I caught something.

- Wakarismaska - Wakarimass.

Is not this good lord here going to get weary

waiting for us in this uncomfortable position?

Finish your work while we are inspired.

I feel its going to work.

I feel inspiration going from me right to the ends of your ten fingers.

How could Your Excellency ever have done anything other than drawing?

That is what I often wonder. The wasted time!

And how I could have all that time been so easy on two legs

with now just one to hold on to the earth?

Yet I find it amusing to flop around

in midair with one leg and a wing.

The other leg, thanks to me, is honored forever

on the battlefield of Sendegahara

- by a small monument. - I do not miss it.

Men of Japan, I was too fond of you.

It was worth losing a leg to enter your land!

Did you mean to express your sympathy with cannon balls?

One uses what one has,

and I have never been free with flowers and caresses.

You were too happy in your little dry hole

in the middle of the ocean, in your closed off garden,

sipping tea in your little cups.

I hate to see people happy; it is immoral.

I wanted to butt into your ceremonies.

In any case, you had to spend some time

with us to learn repose and stability.

I see myself still on that top floor of the Nagoya Castle

which was given me for a prison.

What a prison!

Wasn't it rather me who held all of Japan,

across the joint of her main articulation,

all of Japan that I possessed by way of my seventy windows.

My God, how cold it was!.

On one side were the fields, it was winter,

the country all cracked, the earth pink, the woods black,

and the smallest detail finely drawn

as with a boar's bristle on the finest china.

On the other side, the town filled up

half the view from my windows to the west.

And I remember well that single dark blue blot

made by the workshop of a dyer on the scaly grey of the roof tops.

There I met you, my old Daibutsu!

How many sacred paintings we unfolded together!

How many long rolls passed slowly through my fingers

like a river of images and characters!

If you had wanted

I could have taught you to draw in our own way.

I could never have done it.

I would not have had the patience.

I have a hand like a wooden glove.

I could never have yielded my mind up to nature

like a perfectly blank sheet of paper,

a fasting thing on which one by one the shadows appear

and tinge themselves with various hues;

what can be spoken, and not what is made

to abide forever in the delight

and the concealment of an ineffable light,

like those waters from which the lotus emerges,

like your own islands that are just four or five rocks in the ocean.

I did not come on this earth for enchantment.

It is written that great truths are not imparted save by silence.

If you want to still nature you must not make a sound.

Like water when it sinks into the earth.

If you do not love to listen you cannot hear.

And do you think that I heard nothing during those long legless winter days

when I deciphered the archives of your monks and your hermits?

When I rattled one after another the panels of that room

where you had me locked up?

Prisoner not of walls nor iron bars

but of the mountain and the sea and fields

and the rivers and forests,

everlastingly around me

drawn out on the shifting paper.

I was hearing! I heard!

There were two words that never ceased to accompany me

on that wonderful pilgrimage,

step by step along a path of paper.

And one of those words was: Why? Why?

What is the innermost secret that is bound up

and folded in the knot of these hieroglyphics

like bubbles suddenly rising up from a single thought?

There is always something that says: why?

In the wind, the sea, in the morning and the evening

and in every tiny detail of the inhabited earth.

What is the second word?

There is nobody in all these paintings!

Even if the artist placed some ships on the sea,

sprinkled down a large city

there at the head of a darkening gulf -

that no more fulfills the expectancy of these mountains

tiptoeing one after another for a closer look,

and no more diminishes the loneliness than the chorus of frogs and crickets.

Yes, it is a great lesson in silence

that the painters hang up around us.

Even that crowd of children at play that becomes in an instant,

from the moment the paper captures it under the brush,

silence and stillness, a vision forever.

Friend Daibutsu, it was not to become in my turn silence and stillness

that I broke a continent in half and crossed two oceans.

But because I am a catholic man,

in order that all the sections of humanity be joined

and that no one think itself entitled to go on living in its heresy,

separated from all the others as though it had no need of them.

Your own barrier of flowers and incantations, yes,

that also must be broken like the rest,

and therefore did I come, I,

who breaks down doors and travels along every road.

You will stand no more alone. I bring you the world, the total word of God,

all those brothers, whether you will or no,

to learn more or less

from those brothers with a single parent.

And since you cut off my foot,

since you locked up in prison what was left of my body,

I had left only the soul, the spirit,

and through these your hands, brother Daibutsu,

which have served me,

came these images to which you have incited me,

these great possibilities in myself

that I drew on scraps of paper.

Do you say that all these saints are images of yourself?

They are more like me than I am to myself

with this withered body and this still-born soul!

They are something in me that has succeeded and won its attainment!

They are fully alive!

No more resistance or inertia in them!

They answer wholly to the mind which gives them life,

excellent brushes in the hands of a perfect artist

like the one that Sesshiu took

when he drew that circle, an abiding perfection,

on the wall of Kyoto.

You have nothing else to do but to decorate your prison.

But I with my drawings build that

which passes through every prison.

I created the plan for a thing which adapts itself

to the movement of your heart

as the mill-wheel adapts to the water.

The man who through his eyes receives and has installed within his soul

the design of that tireless engine which is nothing

but motion and desire, takes to himself a power that goes beyond

that of any wall.

As was shown by your martyrs of the Southern Island when I was there,

who were crucified and sprayed with molten brimstone.

Lord Rodrigo, your words prevent me from drawing.

I understand what you want.

I have caught your warnings.

The business is yours no longer

and by your leave I will finish it alone.

Please at least don't mess it up, as you did with Saint George.

You had no grasp of it, my poor old man.

I need to use you for want of anything better.

Don't put on your suffering look! And finish your work quickly,

another idea is coming to me.

It is more amusing planning a saint than making yourself one.

What in the meantime should we do with this good lord in the corner

all thoughtful and tiresome?

It won't hurt him to ponder on and let mature yet awhile the message

that the King has given him to bring me.

This will make his ideas burst out.

Are you not curious to know what the King wishes to communicate to you

through the channel and orifice of Don Mendez Leal here?

Yes, indeed, I am dying to know, and you make me think about it.

Especially as the good lord is impatient

and see how his ribs are agitated, moved by the longing to exist.

Arise, sir!

Good day, sir. I am all ears.

But how do you expect him to speak when he is all flat?

I will cover his nose

and you will see him immediately filled with this air which is his life.

You are right. You are right.

The nose is like a post in the middle of the face that indicates the location.

In our country, when someone wants to say "It's me" he points to his nose.

Weep, weep, sir, weep your insolence and your ingratitude.

After your notable disobedience in Morocco,

after your adventures in Japan, you should have remained in prison.

Impossible to keep me entirely inside a prison.

There will always be something remaining outside.

The King, at my request, has consented to remember

the services that you rendered him

long ago in the West Indies.

Some say that it was you who first had the idea,

who drew, if I may say, the rude and crude design

of that enterprise realised by Don Ramiro,

the royal road of Panama,

which will always bear the name of that great man.

It is a great honor for me that my name should be humbly linked with his.

And how, may I enquire,

have you thanked His Majesty, for the favours

he sought to shower over you on the first occasion

- you were presented to him. - I shudder to hear.

What is this unheard of insolence,

parading thus under his nose at the very moment

he is holding his solemn audiences at sea,

as this kind of garbage, this rag and tatter of a man

whom once he had charged to represent, in the other world,

his own Majesty in person?

I will answer you presently.

But is your Christian name not John?

My name is not John, my name is Inigo,

and my family is the best in the Asturias.

I say this because I have a Saint John over there just finished.

Saint John, patron saint of graziers and herbalists.

Green on green, it is a refreshment for the eyes,

a pure delight to look at.

Continue, please.

I no longer know where I was.

You were at "unprecedented insolence"; and I asked your name.

And while we are at it,

is it not shameful for a gentleman to be hawking daubs?

Dauber of Saints, sir.

What is this familiarity, to represent Saints

as if they were ordinary men

on some soiled paper that a fisherman

or a carpenter nails to the wall of his cabin,

amidst the most repulsive sights?

Is this not lacking in respect for holy things?

Let us instead leave on the altars

and in the oratories, these venerable, respectable figures,

and let them be only seen through the smoke of incense.

If they are to be represented let it be by the blessed and consecrated brush

of some church-warden of art, duly commisioned, a Velasquez,

a Leonardo da Vinci, a Luke Oliver Merson.

I must confess my main reason

for embracing a career in the Fine Arts

was to not resemble Leonardo da Vinci.

A Saint should have a face that is universal

since they are the patrons of many different people,

with a decent demeanour, and gestures meaning nothing in particular.

Trust the painters for that!

It isn't the imagination that drowns them!

And me, I am appalled at those salt cod faces,

those faces that are not human faces

but a little exhibition of virtue.

The Saints were only flame

and nothing is like them that is not hot and enkindles.

Respect! Always respect! Respect is only due the dead

and not the things we use and need.

Love knows not reverence, Saint Bernard says.

There is no way to talk seriously with you.

All I ask is to listen.

Don Rodrigo, I have no use for you,

but who can know the mind of the King?

Who can penetrate into the designs of this sovereign

who keeps his court on the everchanging sea?

Is it possible that you are coming back into favour,

and that I am not the first to seek out this surprising place

where the ray of His grace has settled?

One could not find anywhere more disgusting.

When you are again powerful I hope you will give me much money.

Oh, how I long for all you will be able to give me!

He has spoken of you twice the same day.

It is a sign that he either wants to appoint you Chancellor or hang you.

To the wise, good luck!.

Before leaving take a glass of wine.

Excuse me, the boat is pitching. I am a little seasick.

Then let me at least offer a small picture.

Here is Gabriel, the patron saint of ambassadors.

See how shining and golden he is.

In his memory, those gentlemen have the right to wear

a white feather in their hat.

Stop crying, Butchie, or I will throw into your face

all the salt water you have spilt into the sea

since we left Majorca.

What will my father say? What will my mother say?

What will my brother say?

What will the notary say? What will the Mother Superior at the convent say,

where I have been brought up so well?

What will my boyfriend say,

the splendid owner of the Progressive Butcher?

Ah! Just to think of my boyfriend lends me wings!

I feel that to get away from him,

I will go with you to the end of the world!

You shall come with me if I want you to, for as soon as I get tired of you,

I will send you into the sea with a whack on the head with an oar.

Well, do what you want with me miss, I am happy.

Since I saw your pretty face,

since you looked at me and smiled,

I knew that there was nothing for it but to follow you wherever you go.

We must hurry, Butchie, good weather!

We must not waste time if we want the world

to remain as beautiful as it is just now.

It is not possible. Perhaps it will last barely a second.

Just as the moth does not waste time

going straight to the lovely clear flame that has just been lit.

But we are not moths, we are two small carrier larks

that are singing towards the sun.

Or at least I, for one, am a lark;

you are no more than a big blow-fly.

No matter, I love you all the same.

Where do you want to take me?

Oh, my Butchie, how happy I am!

How good it will be with me, how much fun we will have.

Other girls have a long brutalizing life ahead,

husband, children, soup every day,

washing dishes forever, that is all they think about.

People walk heavily

and do not realize that it is so much easier to fly.

You only need to stop thinking of yourself.

That beautiful sun there, God has put it there with a purpose.

You only need to want to go to it, go!

But no, it is not the sun,

it is that scent so sweet that calls to me.

Oh! If I could only smell it all the time!

Comes the hour of death and there it is still!

It is not the visible sun I want, but like a spirit of wild sweetness,

this lovely scent which makes my heart stop beating.

Where is it, this lovely smell?

There, where my dear mother is; it smells good.

Many times, at night, she has come to me and hugged me tenderly,

and I am her beloved daughter.

And I must go to Africa to set her free.

But didn't you tell me she died down there, more than ten years ago?

She is dead, but she has not finished what she had to do in Africa.

Is she free when there are so many Christians groaning

in the prisons in Barbary?

I cannot go to where she is, but I can go to where they are.

Can we be free

when surrounded and bound by so many oppressed souls everywhere?

Shall I be a bored coward here in Spain,

when it depends on me to free a whole captive people

and a mother who is with them, like them?

Oh! I should have left already!

Is it you who is going to release the captives?

Yes, miss,

and if you start any tricks I have only to twist the tiller

and return you to the Progressive Butchery.

Explain what we are going to do.

As soon as we put together three hundred men

(And there is nothing easier than to gather three hundred men, and many more,

for there is no good Christian in Spain who would not want to be part

of so noble an enterprise)

we will all set off together under the flag of Saint James and Jesus Christ

and we will take Bougia.

For starters, Bougia, we must be sensible;

Algiers is too large.

I spoke with a sailor last week who knows Bougia.

His foster brother was a prisoner in Bougia.

He said there was nothing easier than to take Bougia.

And once we have taken Bougia?

If you want to know what I think I do not think we will take Bougia,

but we shall all be killed and go to heaven.

But at least those poor captives will know we have done something for them.

And all the Christians, when they have seen us die bravely,

will rise up to free them and expel the Turks,

instead of fighting each other like scoundrels.

And I shall be in heaven in the arms of my dear mother;

that's what comes of being me.

And I will always march after you, quite close,

and carry a large water bottle

to give you a drink every time you are thirsty.

If my father wishes, we will not only take Bougia,

but also Algiers and all the rest.

You should see my father. He knows everything.

There is nothing he can't do if he wants to.

What compared with him, are Dragout or Barbarossa?

Isn't it your father who only has one leg

and makes those beautiful sheets of Saints

that all the fishermen want?

My father is Viceroy of the Indies

and it was he that made the ships go over the Isthmus of Panama.

And afterwards it was he who discovered China and Japan

and took by himself with only twelve men

the castle and town of Oshima,

defended by three thousand warriors armed with bows and arrows.

That is where he lost his leg and then,

on the top floor of the Nagoya Castle,

he learned the language of the monks and studied philosophy.

And now, here he is back again,

with all the saints in heaven,

making great armies of paper.

With his brush, he brings down all the saints from heaven

and when they are all ready,

with him at their head and me beside him and you behind me with a big bottle

we will take Bougia and Algiers for the greater glory of Jesus Christ.

John of Austria, the son of Dona Musica,

to whom the King of Spain has offered command of his fleet,

and who sets off tomorrow to fight against the Turk,

is a much greater general than your father.

Not true, Butchie, you lie!

I will never let anyone say there is a better general than my father.

An old man with a severed foot.

Who would want to enlist under the orders

of an old man with a severed leg

when you have only to look at that beautiful young man

to know that he will lead us to victory?

What has he done then, your little Don John, while Africa

and the two worlds are full of my father's name?

You cannot deny it,

if you were a man and not the son,

I mean the daughter of Don Rodrigo,

with what courage you would not immediately go

to join under the standard of Don John!

It is true, my dear Butchie,

Ah, how little you know how right you are!

Go on, I feel that you have something more to say.

You can keep a secret?

I swear, all you give me I can keep.

Don John loves me.

He has seen it in my eyes that I am willing to die for him.

It's all over, I never want to see him again,

ah, he could woo me, my heart belongs to him.

But where did you see Don John?

Last night, when I was going to your house to place the ladder

against the wall of your garden to help you escape.

What did I see under a street lamp at the corner of Oil street?

A beautiful young man in black with a gold chain around his neck,

who was defending himself against three thugs.

I have a huge pistol that I stole from my father

and used to play with, loading it with all the powder

that I could find.

Well, I shut my eyes, and bang!

It made so much noise and smoke

that you would have said it was a cannon, and then you couldn't see anything,

my wrist was all shaken to pieces.

When I saw clear again, the three bandits had fled

and there was only that beautiful young man

elegantly dressed in black, thanking me.

Ah, I was so embarrassed and didn't know where to put myself,

what must he have thought of me?

What did he say? What did he say?

He told me to come with him on his ship

and that I should be his page and his aide de camp

and that he was departing the day after tomorrow to fight the Turk

and that his name was John of Austria

and that he would die before thirty.

Perhaps he was trying to make fun of you.

He is mocking me and I am mocking him.

His name is John of Austria, and my name

is Mary of the Seven Swords, the daughter of the Viceroy of the Indies.

He acts as if it was he the Gospel speaks of,

at the end of Mass, when it says:

"There was a man whose name was John".

I belong to my father and not to that silly boy

who looks so sure of himself and me.

He said I had to come at once,

and that he had been told he would die before 30.

Am I afraid of death?

Just because I am a girl

does he think I can't serve him and die for him?

Ah! I would be a brother to him

and we would sleep together side by side

and I would always be by his side to defend him

and to recognize his enemies at once.

Ah, if he dies I too am ready to die with him.

God rest his soul, amen.

What is that noise?

What power prevents me from right now flinging

out the window this cursed stone,

this device of wisdom that Rodrigo dug up for me

from the bottom of a Mexican tomb,

this translucid skull he gave me as a joke?

A spiritual sponge between my thought

and those things that the curve of the earth prevents me from seeing,

it is an unholy intermediary.

A moment ago, in ten leagues of storm,

in a churn of raging waves lit by a crazed sun,

did I not see the Rosario sink in flames,

with the stern in the air and the royal standard vanishing in the foam?

And now it is a deathly night with slabs of snow floating

and ghastly lights on every side.

I see before me a shore covered with wreckage,

and small crews being put to the sword.

And this obstinate corpse,

in the waters of this prophetic nothingness,

that endlessly rises and then drowns again,

I need only see its shoulder

and its neck circled with a golden thread and a lace collar

to recognize the admiral himself, the handsome Duke Medina Sidonia.

Philip, is it you?

Is it unexpected, everything that has happened to me?

Did I ever nurture any iIlusions?

Was I ever foolish enough to believe

I was going to conquer England with twenty thousand men

and that Armada encumbered with convoy and service ships?

And yet, I had no choice.

I absolutely had to do something.

No need to have hope to initiate a deed.

Heresy is such a stain on Christianity,

in the universal heart something so heinous and horrible,

that had I only the one chance,

it was the duty of the most Catholic King to try

and crush Knox and Cranmer

and nail to her rock that cruel Scylla,

that harpy in human guise, bloody Elizabeth.

I have done my task, I have closed that hole

through which my Accuser might have passed,

I now worship God

on every side, a perfect rampart around my faith.

Sire, good news!

Excellent news, glorious news!

Praised be to God who protects Spain!

Who could ever have doubted that an expedition so well planned,

and with such an honorable goal, under such a distinguished leader

could have had any ending that was not perfectly satisfactory?

Calm yourself, sir, gather your wits,

and have the goodness to tell me in order and measure

what so remarkable thing you would tell me.

I humbly ask His Majesty's forgiveness.

On a day so fair for Spain, who could contain his happiness?

The very sea is trembling under my feet,

and this palace with its mirrors

and its paintings heaves and creaks, as if an irresistible wave

which has just been flung on the cliffs

of Dover and Southampton

were making itself felt at the bottom of that deep eddy

which, from beneath the keel of your most royal ship,

blossoms into a triple crown

upon the brows of Spain, thrice blessed by God.

Abandon this poetic language and enlighten me.

Without any kind of difficulty our glorious Armada

favoured by breath of angels,

has finally reached the shores of Calais and Gravelines,

and there, on the ready boats, has embarked the troops of Parma.

We can only thank God for such a success.

And by now our fleet, going full sail up the Thames,

is thundering at the Tower of London.

We must celebrate a Te Deum and organize a council

on what we should do with Great Britain.

There is only one shadow on your victory, I should say.

Speak.

The poor Duke of Medina Sidonia is drowned, it is not explained how.

Sire, a woman is here who says Your Majesty has granted her audience

and absolutely insists on being introduced to Your Majesty.

One moment.

Did you go to Don Rodrigo,

as I had sufficiently given you to understand was my desire?

It was Don Mendez Leal who undertook that mission.

Well, what answer did he give?

He gave no answer

but he pinned on his back the portrait of the Angel Gabriel

and tied up his nose with a shoelace to prevent him lying.

The poor gentleman is still trembling from the insult.

Very well.

I ask you, sir, to do me the favour for a moment to cease to exist.

Show the lady in.

Lord, Lord!

- I throw myself at the feet of His Majesty - Rise, Madame.

Sire, my King! What shall I say? Where to begin?

Ah! how sensible I am of my audacity.

But what is the King's mercy,

if not like that great cup, in the gardens of Escorial,

nourished by distant peaks

and never knowing the hour of overflowing,

but where the nightingales

always have leave to slake their thirst?

Speak without fear, Madame, I am listening.

Are we not of the same trade, you and I, each in his own theatre?

Ah! If ever my voice has managed to carry to your heart

the accents of Lope and Caldern,

if ever your heart was thrilled

to see Spain in my person

with great reverence throwing herself at the feet of Sertorius,

lend a favourable ear to my poor woman's supplication.

For if it is true that I have fostered with my simple affections

those great words it was my duty to make apprehended,

it is right and fair that in turn all those creatures I have been on the stage,

and that depended on me for their life,

should now surround and support me like great pillars.

I am listening.

- Don Philip de Medina Sidonia ... - I expected this name.

Sire, Philip, my little Philip,

oh!, no one knows as well as me

that he is not made to rule England.

And who has told you, madame,

that I have an England at my disposal

to make a present of?

Everyone knows that Your Majesty

has just conquered England

and that God has scattered his enemies.

The rumor has spread in a flash

like fire in dry grass.

Listen to the songs and cheering everywhere.

True, it is a great day for Spain.

This day has been granted to Spain

a great and memorable day.

Sire, give Philip back to me.

No one knows better than me

he is not made to rule England.

I have all too well vanquished him

for him to be able to now embrace anything but me.

I am worth more than England.

What are you afraid of then, if you are so sure of him?

I am afraid of that Queen Mary

whom the Usurper has cast into a dungeon.

My beautiful Philip will set her free and then she will yield him her hand.

Behold him King of England in the fog and ice.

This is how things happen in all the stories I have played.

Poor Philip! It is all over! I am nothing to him any more!

Queen Mary is no longer in England.

Where is she, then?

Why here, at my feet, I have never thought her so beautiful.

Lord, I do not understand.

No Mary was ever so beautiful and so touching,

So it is I picture her to myself.

Sire, you frighten me.

Please unfold your thought to me!

Don Philip is yours, my daughter.

Take him, I give him to you. What joy to be together again!

Oh, Sire! You are good and I kiss your hands.

What, are you going to tell him to return to Spain?

How to fight against the impulse in my heart?

I will give you Philip if you will give me someone

to govern England in his stead.

Sire, do not mock me.

With so many great men and captains around you,

you have but to choose among them.

He whom I have chosen defies me and refuses to go where I wish.

Ah! Why am I not your Chancellor,

I would in a moment find arguments that would make him give way.

You are stronger than my Chancellor.

Is he still a young man?

He is old and has but one leg.

- You are speaking of Don Rodrigo - The same.

Rodrigo, the picture seller, refuses to be King of England?

He will not refuse when he sees Mary in tears at his feet.

Am I to be Mary?

By what perversity would you want to be anything else.

Escaped from Elizabeth's prison?

And received in great secrecy by the King of Spain.

And what will he do when he finds out the deception?

What does the mouse do when he's caught in the trap?

His duty will then be the cage around him he cannot escape.

It is truly Rodrigo,

out of all your servants that you need?

Of all that I have in England,

he alone is fit to take possession.

And have I to beg him to accept England?

I but await his petition to grant it to him.

And you will give me back Philip?

All that from the midst of the sea and of my navy

that answers at this time to the name of Philip, I give to you.

And I will bring you Rodrigo!

This is our buoy.

Here it is, I recognise it by this red flag we planted on it.

This is our buoy.

Here it is, I recognise it by this red flag we planted on it.

Oh! I am terribly excited.

Oh! I am terribly excited.

Look out! We must just pull together in unison.

It's now or never.

Look out! We must just pull together in unison.

It's now or never.

Why now or never?

Haven't you heard that the English fleet has gone to the bottom of the sea?

- Well? - Well?

Then something is going to come to the top:

When something goes to the bottom something must come to the top.

Then something is going to come to the top:

When something goes to the bottom something must come to the top.

- It's equilibrium. - It's equilibrium.

- What a strange superstition. - What a strange superstition.

- And now, haul away. - And now, haul away.

- We haul. - We haul.

Half a dollar all round and there would be better hauling.

Just a dollar each and we would more willingly haul.

- That's frightful extortion! - That's frightful extortion!

I have already given ten dollars

and if we hoist the catch there will be ten dollars more.

That makes ten dollars I've already given. And ten more if we haul up the bottle.

And let us get on with it, as I always dread seeing Hinnulus turn up.

The big donkey ears!

He claims it's a bottle you have made fast to.

I am always dreading seeing that damn Bidens turn up.

What a sheeps-head!

He pretends that you've harpooned a big fish.

It's rare for bottles like that to wander about in the sea.

Anyway we caught her.

But she was too heavy for us

and went to ground in a hole.

I can't say that I have ever seen a big fish caught like that.

We saw her only a moment.

That was enough to tie the cord; she won't get away.

But she was too strong for us

in that hole where she is hiding.

It's not a bottle, it's a fish we caught.

It's not a fish, it's a bottle.

- And what was this fish like? - We only saw her a second.

Shiny and round like a bottle?

Just what I was going to say: All pink and shiny like a bottle.

And did you not see, occasionally,

something like a light going out

- and then lighting up again? - That's right, uh, Mangiacavallo?

A kind of light, as you might say, going off and then on again.

- And what was that bottle like? - It was a big bottle.

Well, what was in the bottle?

Excuse me, we only saw it for a moment.

Or rather the shadow that she made on the white sand

at the bottom of the water with the red sun above, about to set.

And you didn't see many things moving about inside it?

There are always many things inside a bottle.

Enough talk.

- Now, come all - Now, come all.

- Haul away! - Haul away!

- We haul! - We haul!

- It's coming. - It's coming.

- It's tough. - It's tough.

Before we start again, do you wish to explain, Mr.Professor,

all about this species of animal that you are so anxious to collect?

At first, early in the limestone period

and the cretaceous period,

there journeyed through the steaming seas whales of lacquered metal.

That's interesting.

The animal that we pursue

is one of the few surviving from that naive epoch.

I saw its picture in a German book

and I have gathered pieces of it here and there.

That's interesting. And how was it formed?

It has but one eye, which forms the lens,

and above it a beacon or electric lantern,

that goes on and off at will.

The mouth, what kind of mouth?

It has no mouth. It is completely stoppered.

But in the middle of the stomach may be seen a double wheel

on which is screwed in a figure-eight

an endless belt or treadmill

on which are printed the images captured by the lens.

That's interesting.

Then, pulled by the second wheel

they pass into a kind of jaw or brush,

properly irrigated, that receives the images

and forwards them to the digestive system.

Nothing more beautiful has been seen since the Prapsopteron.

And what shall we call this fish?

We shall call it the Georgeophagus, from George, which is my name,

George Bidens, and phagus, which means fish.

All the fish have names like that.

That's interesting.And you say that a beast like that exists?That's interesting.

Of course it exists! It must exist!

It is a good hypothesis. It is more than useful, it is indispensable.

But if you were able to get the bottle

as close to the boat as you say,

you certainly must have seen something.

Of course we saw something.

- What did you see? - Well, try to guess a little.

If you want my view it is that this bottle is none other

than the one Apollonius of Tyana

threw overboard and that Pantagruel sought.

Who was Apollonius?

Apollonius was a great sage from antiquity.

He discovered how to bottle up time.

You cork it up and it's over, it can't escape any more.

That's a good idea.

Just tell me what you saw.

It's not exactly what you would call seeing,

it was so confusing it was more like hearing.

What did you hear?

The braying of a donkey.

The ass of Silenus, when by moonlight,

in the midst of the bacchanale, he climbed to Parnassus.

A splash, a splash! Like a big fish leaping out of the sea.

It was Proteus feeding his singing seals with four trombones.

Horses galloping among boulders.

The centaurs stumbling among the oleanders

on the rocky slopes of Cithaeron.

- Bravo. - Bravo.

- Go ahead! - Go ahead!

- Haul away. - Haul away.

- We're hauling - We're hauling.

- It's coming. - It's coming.

Its hard. It's so hard, it's hard. Forward, forward. Back up! Back up!

- Madam has forgotten her mascara. - You are right.

A little mascara will make my eyes sparkle more.

The character of the person comes out more strongly with an eyelid in shadow.

And all this for an old peanut vendor,

half dead, to accept a kingdom at our hands.

Don't say that, Mariette! You don't understand anything, Mariette.

It is a wonderful situation.

The most beautiful role I have ever had in my life.

A role of pure gold. What a pity there is no one to see it.

But I will use it for the Madrid season.

It will make a little sketch at the Alcazar, you will see.

And no red on the face.

Just a little carmine on the lobe of each ear.

What do you think?

Just right. Lights everything up.

It must be simple to begin with,

in order to develop it and register all the shades.

Tranquility, gentleness, quite tuneful with a sorrowful undertone.

Simplicity, simplicity!

A kind of submission and resignation full of dignity.

La, la, la, la ...

little pot of butter ...

lilttle pot of butter ...

The notes of the middle register

a little dull.

Simplicity, but also greatness.

I start with a noble simplicity:

"I have summoned you here, sir."

Would Madam like me to bring her the script?

No script, Mariette, it's much finer as it is.

I have to create everything, words and music.

I read my answer in the eyes of my partner.

It is simply a matter of managing the gestures, the words come by themselves.

I begin with a kind of recitation,

my story, a long tissue of pathetic twaddle,

recited in the most musical of voices.

Then, little by little

all the great movements of eloquence and passion,

the accents of that mournful Queen at the feet of that fugitive,

I hope he is quite hideous and brutal,

and occasionally an interrogation,

a word, a touching little question ...

That's it, from time to time a nothing, a trifle,

clear, clear, tender, touching, a pretty little flirt.

And in the background always, naturally,

the secret of woman, something kept back,

half understood.

Oh! I'll hide myself somewhere to see.

Oh, If Madam is as beautiful

as the other night, it will be lovely!

I didn't know where to put myself. I cried all night over it.

- Oh, my God, what's the matter? - We are on the other side of the curtain.

Without noticing we have moved to the other side of the curtain

and the action is going on without us.

Oh my God, someone has stolen my role! I feel stark naked.

Let us hurry to go back in

and we will come out all right at one point or another.

Your Majesty does me a great honor,

consenting to work under my direction like this.

I would prefer it if you told me whether the umbrella should be green or blue.

I see it as a dark blue.

Well I see it as red, a faded red almost yellow.

And underneath an evangelist in full sail,

Saint Luke, busy with his writing.

In a little street in Avignon under the palace of the Popes,

and above, right in the blue of the sky, quite high, there is a flying white buttress,

(make it pink, so it looks whiter)

a soaring buttress of unspeakable joyfulness.

Between Saint Luke and the buttress

there is a dove flying to perch on it.

I like the Saint Matthew more.

Yes, it is a great idea,

I had to place behind him that huge triumphal arch in red stone

with two gates and the inscription in Roman capitals,

and the bull's head.

An angel is Matthew's symbol.

I am sorry, but the bull looks better.

Anyway, you have captured the shade

I wanted for the sky behind and the long, slanting clouds.

St. Matthew the publican between two streams of traffic,

going up and coming down.

Yes, but he's too small, you can't see him.

Quick, another sheet!

We will do another, drawn in a kind of elliptical window.

He has a great Roman face with shaven cheeks

and a double chin,

a yellow robe like a Buddhist monk

pinned on the shoulder, with a large copper brooch,

and under the table a huge foot wearing a leaden sandal,

crushing Calvin who spews forth the devil.

It was lucky for you that you found me

after your Japanese left you standing.

Yes, he just went off.

He must have found a way to return to his own country.

I must have offended him without knowing.

They are like that.

But I am not sorry, you work even better than him,

we are well-matched, you and me.

There are some things for which nothing is better

than the blending of a man and a woman.

What an inspiration for me to suddenly

ask you whether you could draw,

while you stubbornly continued talking to me

of a heap of uninteresting things.

You didn't ask me for my opinion. You simply hired me on the spot.

The tiresome thing is that you can't engrave,

but I am sure you will learn that quickly.

He left all his boards and tools.

That is fine, but I must return to England.

Not at all.

I told you I have no desire to make the acquaintance of England.

I know of a small ancient convent near Majorca

with a courtyard full of lemons so yellow

it hurts the eye.

You will be very well off there for work.

You can work from dawn to dusk without anyone coming to disturb you.

Yes, but the handsome Duke of Medina Sidonia

has just conquered England for me.

I would never have believed that the handsome Duke of Medina Sidonia

was able to conquer something so difficult.

Who knows? Perhaps my heart will not be for him.

All right, marry him, and I will go and make war against you in Ireland.

Don Rodrigo, why are you so rough and so difficult with me?

Marry the handsome Duke of Medina Sidonia.

I am old, a poor man, with only one leg.

If I marry anyone it will be the son of the King ofSpain.

All I ask is to continue your friend.

I prefer you.

It is gracious of you to say that, even if it is not true.

Yes, it pleases me to hear it.

I won't marry anyone!

In the London prison I realised that I had a soul,

a living soul, not made to moulder in a prison.

I swore that never again would I let myself be locked in a prison.

I swore that never again would I endure the great body of a man

between me and the sun.

I do not want to live half alive.

I want someone to help me and not swallow me alive.

With you one is alive. I have been alive with you these two days.

You want nothing of me, you're like music that asks nothing

but, suddenly, carries you away and attunes you to itself.

Since you've been here, it's been like music. I give myself to you eagerly,

with confidence and poise,

as to the arms of a strong dancer,

I feel I give to your spirit what it has wanted.

You are there, and suddenly I feel strong and happy,

I feel so brilliant and resounding.

It is like a cleansing trumpet call, a warlike fanfare

that revives the spent spirit and fills it with courage and fire.

And meanwhile we are both free.

I have no claim over you and you have none over me.

It is lovely. We are together while the music lasts.

Well, let us make, manufacture, and produce pictures without end.

Perhaps I wish to produce with you

something other than pictures and sand-pies.

Is it by the desire of the King of Spain that you found me?

Why deny it?

Medina Sidonia is of no use for anything than to make happy

or unhappy a poor unfortunate woman.

It is you who the King of Spain has need of in England with me.

He awaits but one gesture of yours towards him.

I will not make such a gesture.

What, you will not help me?

So I should be the one with the pleasant mission

of managing this conquered people?

Working under the lash,

every Sunday going quietly to listen to the parish priest,

and every month putting in a bag, for you,

the money that each year you will send to the King in Madrid,

as little as possible.

That is the job you are giving me to explain in Spanish

to my sympathetic subjects.

It reminds me of my old friend Almagro, on his plantations.

What would you have us do?

Madam, who gets most out of a horse,

he who rides him and digs in both spurs,

or he who holds him by the bridle and whips him for all he is worth?

I understand! Ah, you are the man I want!

A horse who needs his master never dreams of throwing him off

and won't become a philosopher or theologian.

You have to keep him busy.

Ah! you are lame, But I am going to place

a magnificent animal under you.

My people, how much I love them!

You shall love then as I do.

Together you and I will show this people its vocation.

Do you think that the King of Spain

will be pleased with this little program?

He will have time to get used to it.

So it's to deceive my sovereign you propose?

Yes, let us hoodwink him a little, yes, yes.

And so I shall return to walls and furniture

and papers again?

The immense spaces and the sun to be mine no more?

To be separated from the sea

that for so long I have felt live in my heart

and that for so long has been my bed fellow

and an imperial couch beneath me?

But in England we are never far from the sea

throbbing right to the heart of our counties.

The island like an immense harp

attuned to catch its voices and music.

Twice a day, the sea comes to feed

and nourish us through every kind of duct

and channel, right to the center of the country.

How lucky it is to have it all around one and to be isolated from everything

in that great garden full of grazing animals,

that meadow in whose heart the rainbow always plants one foot.

You, on the mainland, cannot get it into your heads

there is something else besides land on this planet,

but the sea comes first and the land is within it.

You Spaniards hastened to cross the Ocean

without seeing it, with eyes shut, to quickly batten on that land

that you found on the other side.

But for we English the whole sea is ours,

not only that puddle, your Mediterranean,

but the whole ocean and everything within it,

with land just enough to fasten some barges to it here and there.

We soak in it. We want for nothing. We are free.

We are open on all sides.

The endless water on all sides

comes kissing the steps of our castle.

Come with me to the top of Europe

to that dove-cote, surrounded by a flutter of wings,

where my seagulls, my pigeons,

are forever setting off to seach all the oceans of the world!

Here where we are now there isn't even a tide,

but in London you have your finger day and night

on the throbbing pulse of the world!

While you are busy at your desk,

suddenly the day is darkened,

by a great four-masted ship sailing up the Thames!

When the sun comes shining through the mist

you see the muddy water

enlivened into a million golden scales,

the aegis of Britain.

Will you come with me to England?

I will come if I want, but first I would like to try to make with you

this great projection of the frieze.

It will be called the Kiss of Peace.

I got the idea for it watching the monks in choir

passing on to one another

the kiss which the first of them received from the celebrant at the altar.

Since the middle of the night I have recognised the smell of Majorca,

as if a woman were transmitting it to me

with her black fan.

Only Corsica smells as good.

There is also the city of Marseille.

I would give Corsica and the three Balearics

to breathe the smell of damp wood burning on the shores of Timor.

If I hear you saying those villianous words again

I will send you to the bottom, head first.

Ah! I have done no more than put it to my lips

and you immediately snatched it from me!

Why did I not drink from this poisoned cup

more deeply.

Nothing has changed.

There is the notary's house, there is the lord mayor's,

there the convent of Poor Clares among the cypresses. It's ridiculous.

Show me the house of Dona Austregésilo.

It isn't visible. It's on the other side of the point.

We will be there in minutes with this fair wind.

You can go ashore this evening.

No,

we are making no headway with this old boat

with its keel encrusted with barnacles.

It's too late. I will tell them to drop the anchor.

Are you afraid, captain?

I am afraid, I am afraid, it is true.

Afraid of the happiness that awaits you?

What happiness?

Dona Austregésilo has had time to be married

and widowed two or three times.

I have no illusions!

I am not so naive as to believe she has been faithful

to her oath these last ten years.

No, I don't think so either.

If she had loved me,

she would have found the means to write to me.

Of course.

It is true that she did not know exactly where I was.

But everything is connected at sea

and a letter always ends by getting there.

That's what I say.

Who can trust the oaths of women?

There is no book that doesn't tell you what to think of that.

- It is explained well. - Indeed.

And what can I offer her to tempt her?

I am old and this old patched boat

which is only good for scrapping is all I possess.

Neither war nor commerce,

nothing I've tried on land or sea,

has had any success.

No one can say otherwise.

I have not even managed to discover anything.

Other sailors have countries full of men,

vast, rich territories to show

and share their names with.

But I, Diego Rodriguez,

have only a piece of red slag in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,

inhabited by seals and penguins.

I salute Don Rodriguez, captain of the Santa Fe. I am Don Alcindo.

A very good day, Senor Alcindo.

- Are you the Customs - No, I am not the Customs.

I thought only the Customs would catch us up so quickly.

There are good eyes in Majorca watching the sea,

and there are good memories that have not forgotten the Santa Fe.

I understand, you represent my creditors.

Well, I will not pay you, you can put me in jail.

You are offensive, Don Diego.

You have no other creditor here

than one from whose debt it is not in your power to escape.

What rigmarole is this? I do not understand.

What, have you forgotten Dona Austregésilo?

Is Dona Austregésilo alive?

She is alive.

Really. Tell me the name that she now bears.

What is her husband's name?

Did you think she would wait for you these ten years,

she so beautiful and desirable?

Who are you to deserve such faithfulness?

I am Diego Rodriguez,

who has discovered in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean

a new pebble that no one has ever seen before.

The more I look at you the harder it is to believe

you could once have claimed the hand of the most beautiful and virtuous lady of Majorca.

Is it you she married?

Alas, she has rejected the respectful request I cast at her feet.

Then who is the happy man

she has found worthy of her choice?

No one. She isn't married.

And may I know why

though beautiful, rich, virtuous, and the noblest woman in Majorca,

she has still not found a husband?

Come, can you not guess, Don Diego?

No, I don't know. No.

In a few minutes more, she will tell you herself.

It is she who recognised your ship.

Every day she climbed that tower to watch the sea. It is she who sends me.

Why did she never write to me?

She never doubted that your faithfulness was equal to her own.

- Don AIcindas, what am I to do? - I don't know.

I will sink this ship and send us all to the bottom.

I cannot go on like this.

I am not worthy to lick the soles of her shoes.

That is true.

But does she know what state I return in,

I an old man, a defeated conqueror,

an exhausted sailor, a ruined merchant

and the most ridiculous poor man in all the Spanish seas?

You are not poor.

Dona Austregésilo has looked after your property in your absence

and you are the richest man in Majorca.

Behold the woman, lord,

who you ceaselessly represented to me as faithless.

I ask your forgiveness.

Don Diego, down on your knees, take off your hat

and salute the homeland where such a wife awaits you

after so many voyages.

What is my little lamb thinking?

Well, are you upset ? Doesn't want to talk to her poor dad?

If I say what I think

I am sure you will not respond as I would like.

And what would you like?

I do not want you to keep company with this woman you call the Queen of England.

Her Majesty the Queen of England.

Is she not Mary, the Queen of England?

Have you not seen our own lord, the King of Spain, treat her as such?

She came and threw herself at my feet. How could I repulse her?

Am I free to refuse that task in which no one could replace me?

My conscience bound me to listen to her.

I am nothing to you, and she makes you do whatever she wants.

Daughter, are you jealous?

There is another who is jealous.

Yes, I know of whom you speak, and I see her in your eyes.

My mother, who gave me to you so that you would always be hers.

Yes, I know you have always been hers and a part of herself.

If she was not with me, I would not sense you so much.

So, there is no way to leave quietly, on tiptoe?

I am not only her, I am you also,

there is something in my soul which is you, and spies out your movements.

You shall not escape your little Seven Swords.

When your mother was not there, was when I would speak with her.

When she was not there, was when I spoke to her best.

Speak, dear father. She is dead, she is not here.

But perhaps her guardian angel is here listening.

He is too tired to follow you.

He is asleep, he doesn't hear you.

He is asleep, a bitter sleep, like a desparate wanderer

who sleeps at the inn because they cannot move another step.

- I am alone here with my darling? - Yes, father.

The tears that are in my heart,

the sea would not be big enough ...

What, have you no comfort?

My soul is empty. Because of she who is not here,

heavy tears, my tears, could nourish the sea.

But she will be here presently.

Very soon.

She whom you loved, very soon.

You will find she whom you loved very soon.

I think that will never be.

That essential absence, yes, my dear,

and even when you were alive and I held you in my arms

in that embrace which quenched all hope

who knows if it was anything other than the beginning and apprenticeship

of this fathomless and hopeless craving

to which I am predestined, bare and without realisation.

But that is hell you are speaking.

Those are guilty thoughts, born of doing nothing.

When we love there is always something to do.

Instead of thinking of yourself, why not think of her?

Who knows whether she does not need you?

Who knows if she is not saying, Rodrigo!

Who knows if she is not in a place unknown to us,

fastened with bonds you are able to undo?

More daring than Columbus to get to where she is,

can I cross the threshold between this world and the next?

It is a matter of what we should do,

and we should not worry if one is able or not;

nothing is simpler.

Why do you speak of a threshold as if there were a separation?

There is no separation when things are as close

as the blood is to the veins.

The soul of the departed penetrates our heart

and our brain like breathing.

At night, I hear my mother speaking to me, so sweetly,

so tenderly,

so substantially.

No words are needed for us to understand each other.

Tell me what she says, Seven Swords.

No word that could resound in this outer air we breathe.

In that case how understand her?

What can a captive ask for? It is heart-breaking!

What hands could send deliverance to her?

Where the body cannot go, there love can go,

for it is mightier than everything.

What bread and what water could reach her lips in the grave?

She has no hands or mouth,

but there is no lack of people in her place, in Africa,

who have every means, day and night,

to shout despair towards the Spain that has forgotten them.

Does that not make sense?

Is not theirs the same privation and the same grieving?

While ladies and gentlemen

dance to the flute and the mandolin,

while the lords in tournaments strike each other with great sticks ...

While some old fool amuses himself drawing pictures

with what in the world remains of his mind ...

While our merchants go to the very ends of the earth

to bring back a fistful of pearls,

some barrels of oil, a few bags of spices,

a fatter oil is forgotten,

a more generous wine,

that water, the true water

that regenerates us,

the tears on our hands of the prisoners we have freed

and are returning to their wives and mothers.

By God, Seven Swords, you're right, forward!

What are we doing here, why not already en route to Barbary?

Why look for any other Africa than that very one of which

I have long since been accustomed

to demand the impossible?

Is it true, you want us to set off? I have one little soldier with me,

a butcher's daughter I brought from Majorca.

That makes three. Let me find another forty stout fellows.

it isn't forty we will find but ten thousand, if you like.

And Don Rodrigo to go along first,

at the head of all that army.

Then when do we begin?

It's those tears on my hands that bother me.

I don't like to be wept over.

Instead of smashing down doors with axes,

how much more fun to come in stealthily from behind

like poison, and to fool the prisoners

and their guardians by opening up everything without their knowing it!

Why refuse anything a poor man can give,

or the tears of an innocent heart?

Anyway, what you think fun and funny,

dear father, is besides the point,

but to set the captives free for the glory of God.

When I have freed these prisoners

(well all right, I am willing) there will always be others remaining.

But we shall be left behind as well,

or else we shall be dead, which will free us of our duty.

Seven Swords, my child,

will you think badly of me if I speak my mind?

Speak, father.

It's funny, but it moves me very little,

the idea of the good lord Alonso Lopez in chains, and then returning Lopez

to the bereaved Madam Lopez and all the little Lopezes,

and taking from this time foreward Alonso Lopez in this African episode

of his temporal existence for my guiding North Star ...

Father, I should never have believed that you were so cruel and frivolous.

And neither am I, the devil take me!

But I express my thoughts as I can, I want to make myself understood.

Tell me, my daughter,

who has done most service to poor fever patients,

the devoted doctor who never leaves their bedside,

and at risk to his own life to cure them draws their blood

and takes their life to no avail, or that sort of ne'er-do-well

who, having decided one day to go to the other side of the earth,

finds quinine?

Well, the one who finds quinine.

And who has freed most slaves,

the man who by selling his assets ransomed them one by one,

or the capitalist who found a way

to make a spinning mill run with water?

Everyone has his own way.

It is not so much doing good patiently

to our brothers and sisters

that is commanded us, as doing what we can

to love the prisoners and their suffering,

who are in the image of Jesus Christ, and to lay down our lives for them.

But is it to need me, to request me to do

what anyone else in my place could provide much better?

For instance if you needed a table, you could go to a locksmith,

and you might get something like it,

but in your place I would think of a cabinet-maker.

And so it is not your specialty

to be worried about the suffering of your brothers?

My specialty is not to do good one by one.

I am not a man for detail.

My specialty is not to save Alonso Lopez in a Turkish jail

or Maria Garcia from smallpox.

But don't say, dear father, that you can be of no service at all!

Don't hurt me so!

Don't say that in this miserable world

you cannot be useful for anything you love or any person.

Yes, rather, Seven Swords,

yes, I do not think I came into this world for no reason,

and there is in me something needful that could not be done without me.

What did you come to do among us?

I have come to enlarge the earth.

What is enlarging the earth?

The Frenchman living in France, for instance,

has no space, he chokes,

he has Spain under his feet and England overhead,

and at his sides Germany and Switzerland and Italy,

imagine moving with all that!

And behind those countries there are other countries, and others again,

and finally the unknown.

Fifty years ago, no one knew what was there. A wall.

Do you think to abolish the unknown?

When you talk about freeing the captives

is it freeing them just to pass them from one prison to another prison?

To change compartments?

Spain for me, has long since been just as insuperable a hole as Algiers.

There is always a wall somewhere that holds us back.

Heaven is not a wall.

For man there are no barriers or fences other than the sky.

All that is of the earth, upon earth, belongs to man,

and is his to walk upon, and it is unthinkable

that he should be shut out anywhere.

Wherever his feet will take him he has the right to go.

I want the beautiful and perfect apple.

What apple?

The globe. An apple you can hold in your hand.

That which grew in Paradise?

It is always there!

Where there is order there is Paradise.

Look at the sky, and the astronomers will tell you if there is no order there.

Now, thanks to Columbus, thanks to me,

we are part of this astronomical affair,

happily not separate from anything except God.

We hold by nothing now but Law and Number,

which connect us with the rest of the universe.

What stars!

How rich is God!

And we too may bring our portion of gold

to the inexhaustible richness of God.

I wonder how you came to know of that woman who was my mother.

I didn't come to know her. I was delivered into her hands.

And now her death has set you free again.

What happiness!

My child, do not speak of things that only she and I can know.

That bond with her has been broken by a little death.

When I ask you to come to her rescue you will not.

Another task calls me.

My little teacher has something to say.

Father,

I love you very much,

but when you talk to me of enlarging the earth

and all these great things,

I can no longer follow you, it's too big,

I no longer know where you are, I feel all alone

and I want to cry.

It is not worth having a father if one can't be sure of him

and if he isn't quite as simple and small as oneself.

So I have no right to live for anything but you?

You just said you were delivered into her hands.

Why then are you trying to escape? That is not honest.

You should not have allowed a woman once to get the better of you.

Now what you have promised her

you have no right to withhold,

and I am here to claim it in her stead.

But what if what you ask I am absolutely unable to give?

It is your problem to sort that out, yes, so much the worse for you.

That is an order, do you understand? All you have to do is obey.

I do not like this kind of customs house at the door of your heart

allowing entry to what you like and not the rest.

When I command you something and you say: I can not, what do you know!

You know nothing at all.

Try to see. It's so good, so great to obey.

Then what must I do?

You must promise.

Well, I promise.

That shouldn't be said like: Well, I promise,

but simply: I promise and spit on the floor.

I promise.

I promise too.

I promise, but I may not keep it.

Then I won't keep it either.

My cousin is among the lost.

So is my uncle.

He left me his entire fortune.

I will be very rich. Oh, la, la.

Alas. Alas.

Alas. Alas. Alas.

And just think I had just obtained the monopoly

of Scottish smoked cod for seventy years.

What will my creditors say?

The Duke of Medina Sidonia

had his head caught between the two shells of a huge oyster.

You can see him when the sun shines,

gently moving in a current at the bottom of the sea,

ending in elegant shoes with diamond buckles.

What a strange turn in human affairs.

Even yesterday, on the belief

of that absurd sub-prefect of Bayonne ...

Yesterday and today.

All is lost.

This time there is no doubt.

Nothing will come back to Spain.

Alas, alas, our army.

Alas, alas, our ships.

Oh, our ships.

The Lion of Castile, the Sun Royal,

the Elephant de Asturias, the Wall of the Pyrenees

and the Great White from Spain.

The guard ship of the Bidasoa.

The San Fernnado, the San Fernando.

The Saint Pontius, Saint Alfonso and Saint Ildefonso ...

The Saint Mark Girardin

The Saint Mary Perrin,

Saint Renato Tallandier and Bartholomew Saint Hilaire ...

All gone adrift, to the bottom.

Never mind, don't let us think about it.

The most wonderful thing of all is the attitude of His Majesty.

His face has not changed.

He has not cancelled any celebration.

Nor any audience.

He is keeping his audience with Don Rodrigo?

At the express command of His Majesty. Nothing has changed.

Don Rodrigo is going to be solemnly invested with his English command.

But, he knows nothing?

He has been isolated on a ship.

With strict orders to conceal everything.

You gentlemen have all been ordered

to behave respectfully toward him,

as befits the Viceroy of England, the chosen one of His Majesty.

That will be funny.

This then explains this strange choosing of Don Rodrigo.

We have a great sovereign.

As soon as he knew of the disaster to the Armada,

at the very moment when we heard

the false news of our victory, he thought of Don Rodrigo.

Here he is.

Approach, Don Rodrigo,

finally let me gaze upon that face I have so often described,

that forehead from whence have come so many noble thoughts,

that arm that has been able to impose its laws on fortune.

I have been shown on a map that cutting

which you had the idea of making between the two Americas:

an ingenious little thing from which the talents of Don Ramiro

have managed to extract wonderful results.

And later on, you yourself,

in the midst of the ocean, on the flank of China and Japan,

made as it were those rings, the scattered Philippines,

where this ancient vessel, Spain, has cast her furthest anchor.

So many services deserve reward,

but how to find a position for you that does not cramp you?

Great minds do not have needs.

They mock at titles and money.

What better reward than to give you open fields for your genius

and let you travel at large

in the sunshine of our benignity?

Then did we admire your Christian spirit,

when free from any mercenary consideration

you entirely devoted yourself to the moral welfare

of our labouring populations on the seaboard,

so closely related to their material development.

Leafing through those humble pictures, a record of happy inspirations,

I noted the findings of a generous imagination,

provided with technical means unfortunately insufficient,

and an ignorance of all rules.

You have made me marvel once again how nature by herself

can not compensate for the lack of good teaching.

Believe me, sir, our academies

are full of those with abounding imaginations,

quivering sensitivities, volcanic passions,

but all those beautiful geniuses could not have attained to

clear and harmonious expression,

to their own true social usefulness,

they could not have exploited with economy their own small domain,

they could not provide enjoyment without tiring our eyes and our brain

through that temperate brilliance we so admire,

unless in fear of their own transports

thay had not eagerly seized on all the curbs

that the wisdom of our ancestors has provided,

and if they had not strictly laid down for themselves

this rule of practice:

One who does what someone else has done before,

is not at risk of going wrong.

Forgive me for having enlarged at length on this frivolous topic.

Perhaps you will grant me not altogether devoid of light on these matters,

having received in the past lessons from Raphael,

I refer to Raphael Colin and to Cormon.

But here I desist.

I know that in amusing yourself with these simple compositions

your aim was not to extend

the artistic patrimony of the Spanish nation,

but that the spirit that guided you was that of vulgarisation,

edification and philanthropy.

Nothing can escape the penetrating gaze of Your Majesty.

What honour, and at the same time what confusion,

to have held for a moment the attention of that eagle eye,

as well accustomed to take the measure of an empire

as to follow the poor rabbit

that seeks to hide between two heather shrubs.

So at one time did the great Napoleon,

at a glance, bring to light Lucius de Lancival.

Those drawings that Your Majesty has just sentenced,

have cost me, who am but a poor workman,

much trouble, many years of study, experiment and reflection,

but for Your Majesty a single glance,

a few moments of attention, was enough to recognize their flaws.

Alas! I know them too well.

I lack the ancient symmetry,

and to orient me in my true direction

Your Majesty's words shall be my most precious treasure.

Yes, I will take them for the golden rule

of my art and my life,

which will be devoted entirely not only to uplift

the moral tone of our workers

but to the glory and illustration of His reign.

I approve of your intentions as much as of your modesty.

I spoke only to test you.

The serenity and deference with which you have responded

prove to me that the artist in you has not won over and corrupted everything.

It is not an artist I need in England.

I do not need those hands that spread colour on paper,

but those that once shaped America.

You have my leave to speak, Lord Chancellor.

Don Rodrigo, you have for too long withdrawn yourself

from the appreciation of your sovereign

and the expectations of your comrades in arms.

It is when prosperity, as today, overwhelms us,

when an enterprise, as today,

has had success beyond all expectation,

when incalculable responsibilities arise,

and when all around us there open up

what are in every sense avenues full of interest and peril,

then can be recognized the truly magnanimous heart,

then, if it can be any support

to this overloaded rule, let it come forward and say: I can!

And fly to support its sovereign who is creaking and groaning.

And as in former times with the three women

who went seeking Coriolanus,

today not only has England come

to throw herself at our feet,

Mary whom the harlot's daughter robbed of her heritage,

but Spain, but Christianity, the Church,

begging that Rodrigo no longer play them false.

I do not ask for troops or money.

I ask that as soon as possible

the King withdraw his troops and ships. I will suffice.

You anticipate the desires of His Majesty.

He has need of all his forces in Germany.

And how will you manage, all alone, without soldiers or ships,

to get money out of the British?

Who will reimburse us for our expedition?

The Christian wine of Spain and Portugal, my lord Minister,

which in our fog we will drink to your health, this will undertake your payment.

Peace for evermore. A safe route to the Indies.

No troops or money, understood. But be assured,

we will provide you plentifully with aides and advisers.

I see here, written on a paper

which last night I amused myself scribbling,

that Rodrigo is worth a full salary if whole,

but worthless if cut in half.

What, no lawyers to accompany you?

It's written on my paper.

You want us to have absolute confidence in you?

I wrote on my paper it is necessary.

It is easier to have confidence in one man than in two.

And what obligations do you undertake in return?

What are you willing to do

in relation to military contingent and tribute?

The military contingent will be those troops

that hitherto you have devoted to our injury,

and as for the tribute, I do not find a record

of that word in my book.

Is it in the interests of England or of Spain

that the King sends you there to advise and govern?

I would be a bad guardian if I did not take in hand the interests of my wards.

Must you sacrifice to them the interests of your mandate?

God forbid!

I wish to save the Lord Minister of Finance

the expense of a new Armada.

Yes, while we are there,

let us take full advantage of our victory.

I want England and Spain, after so many combats,

to forever bless the day they had the happy thought of shaking hands!

I beg your Majesty to mark the unsettling ideas of Don Rodrigo.

What he says is not without sense.

I myself do not look upon England with other than peaceful

and matrimonial intentions.

I believe in love!

What politics cannot manage it is up to love to achieve.

What example of the delicate maneuvers of providence

after so many battles, could be better

than an arrangement making at once provision for universal peace

and for the establishment of my sons?

Where better could this forsaken queen be

than in the arms of Don Udolpho or Don Valentino?

The problem of tolerance among nations is already hard enough

without adding to it that of agreement between husband and wife.

Still, I have noticed Queen Mary looked upon Don Ernesto favourably.

No. If anyone knows Queen Mary

I dare say it is I.

She is a reserved and sensitive soul. She has just left prison.

It is obvious that she has spent her life in seclusion,

out of the public eye.

She needed the naive admiration

with which I inspired her before she would open her heart to me;

I penetrated right to the bottom of that virgin heart,

that blend of daring and timidity.

I believe that if any man can influence her mind it is me.

Don Rodrigo has failed to tell us so far the secret means according to which

he alone is sufficient, and how,

without troops, without money or marriage, he will keep England,

and will make it forever friend and ally of Spain.

Give your enemies food

and they will not disturb you at your meal,

or try and steal the bread from your mouth.

I don't understand this parable.

The Indies, away in the setting sun,

I say are beyond the appetite of one man.

I begin to understand.

They have enough to provide a huge meal

for the entire world for centuries.

Why worry so much about this world

when the other is over there merely for the taking,

with his Catholic Majesty forever,

thanks to me, holding the main artery?

You want us then to give England the citizenship

and freedom of our two Americas?

Not only England.

It is not for nothing that the good Lord, after Christopher,

invited us to cross the sea!

I want all peoples to celebrate Easter

at that huge table between the two oceans that He has prepared for us.

When God gave America to that Ferdinand

who is excellently called the Catholic, it was too big,

it was was not for him alone but for all peoples to share.

Let England forever bless the day of her reunion

when in exchange for her freedom,

which was like that of mutineers on a stolen ship,

you gave her a new world!

Give all those little European peoples squeezed so closely together

and stepping on each other, room to move.

Unite all Europe in a single stream.

And all these heresy ridden people

since they cannot reunite at their source,

let them reunite at their river mouths.

Am I to understand that for you to accept this lieutenancy

that I am willing to give you in England,

you demand that I open America to your new subjects,

my recent enemies? Is this your condition?

I do not see what useful thing I can do otherwise.

- What insolence! - What impudence!

- What exorbitance! - What extravagance!

Lord, we beg you not to ... temporise.

We all beg you not to temporise with the shameless,

insolent and extravagant demands

of this exorbitant gentleman.

We can not turn this America

which the genius and virtue of your grandfather

brought forth from the bosom of the Indies

into the common grazing ground of all Europe!

We must not temporise! We must not temporise!

And what do you say, my Lord Chancellor?

Forgive me. I don't know what to think. I am all upset and trembling.

Do you see any way of doing without

Don Rodrigo in England?

Alas, search as we may, I can see no other option!

Do any of you wish to receive England from my hands

instead of Don Rodrigo?

So please Your Majesty, excuse me!

Can you suggest another name?

There is no one else! There is no one else!

Don Rodrigo, let me beg you to be conciliatory.

Listen to the advice of an old man.

You see the cruel and embarrassing situation

in which our sovereign is placed.

Be magnanimous. Do not abuse the situation.

As you see, we cannot do without you.

I beg you not to ask more than it is possible to grant.

I cannot ensure peace if you do not give me the world.

The whole world is little to me, Don Rodrigo,

if it but assures me of your love and fidelity.

Return to your ship.

You shall know my decision soon.

You have made yourself a sight for all men.

Each has been able to look at you in comfort.

Guards accompany His Highness and watch his every step.

I cannot any longer keep you

from the place which you yourself have chosen.

Forward! Courage, Butchie!

Oh, it isn't good-will I lack, miss!

Wherever you go, I well know I have no choice

but to follow you.

If you are tired you have only

to turn on your back, like this, crosswise, with your arms out.

You should only have your mouth and nose out, and when you sink,

a deep breath will quickly bring you back to air.

A tiny movement, like this,

with your feet and half the hands.

There is no risk of tiring.

It is not that I am tired,

but that someone told me he saw sharks.

Oh, I am afraid of a shark coming and pulling me down by the feet.

It isn't sharks, I've seen them.

It's dolphins at play.

Aren't they entitled to have fun?

Perhaps it isn't fun to be a nice dolphin?

Oh, I am afraid they will jump on me.

Don't be afraid, let them come; if any tries to hurt you

I will defend you against them, the bastards!

Miss, I've been looking everywhere, I can't see the red lantern.

Your friends in Majorca must have forgotten us, hurrah, tralala!

Oh, no, don't say that, I beg you, miss, you make me so frightened.

Oh, no, I'm quite sure that neither Rosalie, nor Carmen,

nor Dolores would have forgotten me;

they are waiting for us somewhere with all the clothes ready,

as I told them. Something might have frightened them.

You're afraid, they are afraid, they are frightening you ...fear,

fear, fear, fear, you have nothing but that word on your lips!

I cannot understand why you are in such a hurry to get there,

it feels so good in the lovely sea.

Look before us, the moon is so flat in the water

like a gold plate.

It looks as if I could catch it in my teeth.

Forgive me for being such a bad swimmer.

Let us go quietly at our ease.

It is delicious to soak in this liquid light

that makes us into hovering godlike beings,

in glorified bodies.

No more need of hands to grasp or feet to carry you.

You advance, like the sea-anemone's breathing,

by the mere expansion of the body and the impulse of the will.

The whole body is one sense,

a planet watching the other planets in suspension.

I feel directly with my heart every beat of your heart.

The water bears up everything.

It's delicious, your ear on a level with the water,

to see all these shimmering musicians, the dancers around the guitar,

life, songs, words of love,

the incalculable crackle of so many whispered words.

And all of that is no longer outside you, you are inside;

there is something that unites you blissfully with everything,

a drop of water mingling with the sea.

The communion of Saints.

Damn, I see that the boat has seen us,

and is coming toward us!

Courage, Butchie, one more effort, my lazy one.

Forward, you have only to follow me.

I beg you give me that letter which belongs to me.

Give him that letter, Manuelito.

I will give it to him if I please.

I don't like anyone doing the King of England with me.

That letter belongs to me.

It's you, my old Rodrigo, who belongs to me.

The King, in His great mercy

having decided to pardon a traitor,

gave you over lock, stock and barrel to his Chamberlain,

who in turn gave you to his valet,

in payment for ten gold coins that son of a bitch had lent him.

Who in turn, not knowing what to do with an old peg leg,

has given you for services rendered

to me, a fine catch;

tomorrow I will make you play the drum through Majorca,

I should get at least ten sous for you,

the current price for the skin of a traitor.

Please consider, sir, that letter is from my daughter.

Well, if you like we can play dice.

If you win it's yours.

Brother Leo, I cannot grasp this box because of the chains.

I pray you play in my place.

Three aces! Not bad.

Four aces! I win!

Give him the letter anyway, my son.

I will not give him the letter, but I will read it to him.

Who knows if it doesn't contain some plotting against His Majesty?

What's so funny?

'My dear papa," she says.

And that's funny?

He has got her to believe he was her father.

Her father is Cacha diablas as they called him,

Don Camillo, another renegade in his time,

who acted as a pirate

off the coast of Morocco, and who had for mistress

the widow of an old captain-general of prisons;

hold on a moment, she had a strange name,

something like Ogress or Bugress, - Prouheze.

She was not his mistress but his wife.

I know, because I was the one who married them long ago,

when I was at Mogador.

What, Father. Did you know Prouheze?

It seems that perhaps Rodrigo was papa.

"My dear papa," she writes.

Wait a minute, he wants to say something.

- My lord has something to say? - Not at all.

I join in your simple merriment.

Is it forbidden to laugh?

Your comrade has an infectious laugh,

sign of a happy disposition.

And you do not mind that he called you a traitor?

I would care if it were true.

Bu it is true that you are one!

Then they have managed to fix things so I can no longer harm anyone.

Read us the rest.

The King has given you England. You no longer need me.

He has given him England, that's funny.

He has only to go and take it.

Old fellow, there is an actress called... called something,

she made him believe she was Mary, Queen of England.

She went and threw herself at his feet to ask him to rescue her

- and to accept a kingdom at her hand. - That's funny.

Then the two of them made up

every sort of deal to conspire against the King of Spain.

She has told everything.

I would have liked to have been there

when he laid down his conditions to the King to accept England.

Everyone is still laughing about it.

Ah, you see there an example, father, of the absurd situations

a man of imagination can get into.

Nothing seems surprising to him.

How can you not believe a pretty woman

who absorbed with her lips and eyes everything I said,

a charming person who drew so well,

and with the tip of her brush gathered the least of my intentions?

Where was I? "England, you have no more need of me"

Manuel, I have in my pocket four silver coins

that some charitable souls have given me for my convent.

They are yours if you give me this letter.

- I will give it to you when I've read it. - Let him read it, Brother Leo.

"I am setting off to meet John of Austria" This is news.

You hear, old fellow? She is going to meet John of Austria.

John of Austria will marry her for sure.

Then he won't have to worry about his situation.

She learned about the arrest of her father.

Then she had to get away.

With the old man going to prison, she had to drop him.

Not for nothing she is the daughter of two traitors.

It is the right time to join John of Austria.

But did she meet up with him?

Just now I heard tell that some fishermen had taken from the water

a girl who died on their hands.

How can you both be so wicked and cruel?

It's he that defies us and mocks us

with that calm lofty air.

You could say that milord has invited us, and feels a sincere satisfaction

in the joy that he gives us in adding us to his domestics.

Don Rodrigo, it can't be true, it must be another girl.

I am sure.

What evil could happen to me on a night so beautiful?

It is a beautiful night for you

when they are either taking you to jail or going to sell you as a slave?

I have never seen anything so magnificent.

It is as if I am seeing the sky for the first time.

Yes, it is a lovely night for me,

when I celebrate at last my betrothal unto freedom.

Did you hear that? He's crazy!

Let me finish reading it:

"I am going to meet John of Austria.

Farewell. I embrace you. We will meet again..."

- I can't make it out. - Give me the letter.

"in Heaven. We shall meet again in Heaven.

In Heaven or in some other place. Amen.

Nothing else?

"Your loving daughter, Mary of the Seven Swords."

So the letter ends.

There's another line.

"When I am come to John of Austria, I will tell them to fire a cannon.

Pay attention."

Ahoy!

We are hailed.

There's a boat over there that is signalling us with a lantern.

Is it true, Brother Leo?

Could it reaIly be my daughter,

that the fishermen took from the sea?

No, my son. I am sure it is not true.

Brave Seven Swords, no, no, neither you nor your father

are the type that the sea takes.

He who has a strong arm

and breathes God's air with full lungs,

is in no danger of drowning.

He cheerfully tops that great, splendid wave that wishes us no harm.

You must forgive her.

Forgive her, you say? There is nothing to forgive.

Ah! that she were here, the dear child,

that I might hold her in these arms

in chains.

Go to your destiny, my child, go fight for Jesus Christ,

my lamb, besides John of Austria,

the lamb that is seen in paintings with his banner on his shoulders.

Brother Rodrigo,

is this not the time to open your heart to me?

It is laden with sins and the glory of God,

and it all comes at once to my lips when I try to free my soul.

Then tell me everything at once.

What comes first is my own night

deep down in me, like a torrent of pain and joy

at the touch of this sublime night.

Look! It's like a whole population around us

who live by their eyes alone.

It is there beyond, Rodrigo,

where you will celebrate your engagement with freedom.

Brother Leo, give me your hand.

Try and recollect. Is it true that you saw her?

Who do you mean?

That woman who you married, long ago, in Mogador.

And so you saw her?

Is it true that you saw her?

What did she say to you?

How did she look that day?

Tell me if there has ever been in the world a more beautiful woman?

Yes, she was very beautiful.

Ah, ah, cruel she! Ah, what terrible courage!

Ah, how could she have betrayed me and have married that other man?

And I had only for one moment her beautiful hand against my cheek.

Ah! After so many years the wound is still there

and nothing can heal it.

All that will be explained to you one day.

You must remember.

The day you married her,

did she look happy next to that blackguard?

Did she willingly give him her fair hand,

the finger of her hand, for him to put on the ring?

It is so long ago. I can't remember.

Do you not remember her beautiful eyes?

My son, we must look now only to the stars.

You no longer remember?

Ah, that radiant smile

and those eyes full of trust looking at me,

eyes that God never made to see what is vile

and dead in me!

Abandon these heart-rending thoughts.

She is dead, dead, dead! She is dead, father,

and I shall never see her again. She is dead and will never be mine.

She is dead, and it is I that killed her.

She is not so dead,

as that this sky about us

and this sea beneath our feet be more everlasting.

Yes. That is what she came to bring me with the sight of her face!

The sea and the stars, I feel them under me.

I gaze at them, and cannot have my fill.

Yes, I feel we cannot escape them and that it is impossible to die!

Seek inwardly to your heart's desire.

You will never get to the end of these inexhaustible treasures.

There is now no way to escape from them or being without them!

Everything has been withdrawn from you that is not God.

It has been chained up.

Everything in you that wretchedly fastened on things

one by one, continuously.

No more servile works.

Your limbs, these tyrants, are in chains,

and you have but to breathe to be full of God.

You understand what I meant

when I darkly felt just now that I was free?

Help me!

Welcome, rag-picker sister.

Good day, soldier, is there nothing for me in your ship?

Yes, there is a pile of old odds and ends of all kinds,

old weapons, old hats, old flags,

broken irons, broken pots,

and cracked boilers they gave me to sell in Majorca.

- Let me see, my little soldier. - It's too dirty and ugly for you.

Nothing is too bad or dirty for an old rag-picker sister.

Everything is good for her.

Waste, scraps, debris,

what you throw out, what nobody wants, that's what I seek out and collect.

And you make money out of that?

Enough money to feed many poor and old folk

and to build convents for Mother Teresa.

Is it Mother Teresa of Jesus,

who sends you like this to scour the sea?

Yes, my child, I search for her and for all the convents of Spain.

How much do you want for all that?

- Three gold coins. - Three gold?

I'll give you two.

Mother gleaner, mother gleaner! Since you are buying,

why not take me too, along with the old flags and broken pots?

Who is that man?

He is a traitor who the King gave to me to sell on the market.

Well, boy, you hear? You are a traitor.

What do you want me to do with a traitor?

If you at least had your two legs ...

- You will get me cheaply. - Is he really for sale?

He is for sale, why not?

- What can you do? - I can read and write.

Can you cook, or sew,

- or cut out clothes? - Perfectly well!

- Or mend shoes? - Also that.

- Don't mind him, sister, he is lying. - It's not nice to lie, boy.

- At least I can wash dishes. - If you give them to him, he'll break them.

I wish to live in the shadow of Mother Theresa.

God made me to be her poor servant.

I want to shell beans at the convent gate.

I want to clean her sandals all covered with the dust of the sky.

Take him, mother gleaner.

To please you, Father,

I will take him, but I won't pay anything for him.

Not that I care,

but give me just a small fee for him.

A silver coin, so I can say I got a little something for him.

You can keep him then.

Give him, soldier. You will be safe.

No one knows what might yet come out of this queer old Rodrigo.

Then you can take him.

And can I also take that old iron cauldron

that is of no use to you. Otherwise I won't take him.

Take it, take everything, take my shirt.

Pack up all that, sister. And come with me, my boy.

Mind that ladder with your poor leg.

Listen!

That's coming from the ship of John of Austria.

She is safe! My child is safe!

Deliverance to all captive souls!

My child is safe!

Listen!

Deliverance to all captive souls!