Chapter I

    HE was shorter than other men, thin, dark haired, a big crenellated scar running across his nose. His head was pushed down between his shoulders, so it seemed as if he were hunchbacked, but I found out later he was bent by the scars from a hundred lashes rubbed with salt. How he came by them I heard in different ways: some said it was a sentence of two hundred, some said one hundred; some claimed it was for mutiny, some said it was an unjust sentence unjustly applied, and revenged by his implacable will, and whispered that he stalked the man who sentenced him for years until at last, by means of his cunning and determination, he gained a murderous revenge. However it was, he walked with the stoop of one who had been so scored, and no man alive that I know of ever saw his naked back to count the scars and so resolve the rumours, or dared to ask him of their circumstance. Squeezed into a monstrous curve by the hardened flesh and shredded muscles, he was forced to look up with a squint to see into the faces of other men. It was his eyes made me pause in my idle glancing about the camp: they were fierce and stern, with a flash of black intelligence, limited perhaps but focussed to an uncommon degree. He was speaking through the covers of a sedan to someone inside it, scowling, but I could not hear what he was saying: and his eyes flashed, though whether they flashed with passion, or anger, or hatred, or maybe love, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps he himself could not tell the difference. I was to find that these remarkable eyes mostly remained hooded, dissembled beneath cowardly lids; even when he was animated and spoke loudly with large gestures (which he often did, when he was able to rouse supporters among his ranks) his eyes remained cold shadows in the wreck of his face. They livened only on rare occasions: when he looked at his daughter, and when he murdered or ordered murder: and then, released by his passion, you could see the intelligence which possessed him, fluid and venomous. Flies clustered around his eyes and mouth, and sweat ran down his face from underneath his helmet in little trickles, leaving behind them trails in the dust which clung to him, which clung to us all; and he seemed, somehow, as sometimes images present themselves, a symbol of everything man had become in the new world, which is to say, a nightmare reflection of the old, undisguised by ornament or tradition or the apparent inevitabilities of history. Perhaps I was moved momentarily by a distant pity: how had such a creature survived, even so miserably? For a mere creature he seemed to me then, a cockroach among even such men as surrounded me; but we all know that cockroaches survive even the worst disasters, and even after God's Judgement (which I imagine will be on a perfect scale with our sins, by which I estimate an apocalypse not beyond all imagining but only too readily imaginable, just as our sins are alas! only beyond imagining to those who lack the imaginative faculty) the cockroach will survive, squeezing out of minute crevices to begin again the painstaking disaster of civilisation. I missed at first glance the wiry strength in the shoulders, the pitilessness of his blank gaze, or even the mute story of the scar. From this is deducible how innocent I was, grimed in my vanity by divers campaigns and expeditions and mutinies. The covered sedan, through whose curtains he directed some kind of instruction, I assumed contained his wife, or at the least, a woman who he might have named as his wife. It did not; it contained his daughter, the one human being whom he might truly be said to have loved, however perverse his love might have seemed in the sight of Man and God. I found later that he was animated by an unhinged justice sharpened by his cunning to a dewed blade, and that aside from his daughter he forswore every human love, and God he blasphemed with an unparalleled violence. I am not sure if he was the most evil man I knew. I think he was not: it was that the singular clarity of his obsession focussed his capacity for evil to an extreme fineness, so that in him it had an especial visibility.
    I do not name him: to write his name seems to crush into one word every vile action I have seen or committed in my life, and to darken my eyes in the sight of God, to lower my face in shame yet again, and to take upon myself the guilt of my humanity, which the Lord Christ died in vain to redeem on the Cross of his oppressors; for He has died a million times, and will die a million times again, and still no redemption will appear in humankind. Neither can I pray to God. My lips are sealed by my shame; not in the face of God, but in His absence. And the man who brought me to such a pass - for I confess here and now such deeds as I have done scarce troubled my sleep for many years, for I knew that God blessed me and my King rewarded me - the man who did this to me, waking me to the Hell in which I lived and which was the condition of my existing at all, that man stood there that morning on the 17th of September in the Year of Our Lord 1560, and I but idly noticed him, who seemed no more blackly visaged than any other of the conquerors among whom he stood. For of that number were adventurers, mutineers, murderers, gangsters, rapists, torturers, thieves, brigands and traitors of every kind and number: all true knights of Philip II, King of Spain, in soul and word and deed: and he who was the greatest of his servants, the clearest of eye, the surest of hand, the deadliest of wit, the most bamboozling of tongue, the least solid of his word, stood there among them, as little deserving of notice as one grain in a bushel of his fellows.
    Such was my first sight of him. He vanished back into the crowd, and I thought nothing more of him. The day was already pregnant with the coming heat, and an acrid smoke circled into the air from numberless campfires; a herd of kine trampled a muddy trail to the edge of the water, prodded by some surly natives; babes cried in the arms of women; men clumped together in little groups, talking of this and that; and scuffled off to the side, in squalid disorder, the Indians crouched over tin pots, making a meagre breakfast of maize, or attending to the stick-limbed children whose eyes seemed a perpetual abyss of hunger in starveling faces and who cried without tears, in a thin constant wail, until they died. A little way off as always, Pedro de Ursua lounged in his pavilion with his woman, talking of high things: the sublime gold of the soul, perhaps, which glints in each of us, however meanly; and Inez de Atienza listened, braiding her hair, or strumming lightly on a lute, her lips parted.
    I remember this, for I can imagine everything. I am past and future braided into the present, and you must not forget this. Time as it is placed in histories is the time of the King, and the grammar of the Real is ordered by the King; and he who claims the historian's humility, as Josephus or Herodotus claimed to speak of this and that which they knew or saw or that a man to whom they spoke knew or saw or had from a traveller who had been there and in the first degree witnessed with his own living eyes, only lift the hem of the writerly revolt: a mere napkin. Nor do I pretend that I am a revolutionary, but merely note the effect. And this is not the King's History.
    For example, I note here: the sweet onset of love, which so murderously seduced the noble, the fine, the gentle, the sweetly natured Don Ursua, which so lowered his guard that this fine soldier, this seasoned campaigner, this hardened mercenary, became gentle and soft as a newborn kitten and saw only the goodness of God in every aspect around him. And so, trusting in God, and in himself as the King's representative, he became careless, to the envy and rancour of his companions, who studied the Do-a Inez under their eyelids and spat after she had passed them: for although they could not deny the purity of her profile nor the exquisite form of her lips, they could poultice their envy with abuse of her character. And this they did at every available opportunity: for she was a woman elevated past her place, and it boded ill. For where does a story begin? Silent perhaps on a peak in Darien, where stout CortŽs prepared to slaughter 2000 of his fellow human beings by means of entrapment and deceit, thus to paralyse in overwhelming fear even the thought of resistance? (For this is not the beginning.) We must be precise as to the Romance of Early Exploration (with descriptions of interesting discoveries, thrilling adventures and wonderful bravery of the early explorers) by ARCHIBALD WILLIAMS B.A. (OXON.), F.R.C.S. author of "THE ROMANCE OF MODERN INVENTION," "THE ROMANCE OF MODERN MINING," THE ROMANCE OF MODERN ENGINEERING," "THE ROMANCE OF MODERN EXPLORATION," &C. &C. with sixteen illustrations and five maps. 5s.
    And My God if I had known what travails awaited me I should humbly have shipped myself back to Seville and been as the lowliest scurf subject to ratbites and starvation in the meanest of cellars, and without protest; for there at least I might have had the consolation of Heaven and might have imagined the arms of the mild Mother come to enfold me in her pure bosom, and so my soul might be said to be clean, even if in its smallest corner. But in the way of human beings, I did not know, and when I did know, it was too late to turn back: the rivers of entrapment had closed me around in their silences of jaguars and mosquitoes and green waters. For you must admit that the omens were not good. Firstly: note how the gentle, good, mild mannered, sweet, courteous, noble, brave &c &c Don Ursua came to the city of Lima in the year 1558 and was sent on his fateful expedition by the prudent and estimable Don Andres Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Ca-ete, then Viceroy of that city, who sought in this way to rid his province of the presence of some numbers of turbulent men. And to encourage Don Pedro de Ursua, whose fame in subjugating the revolted Negro Cimmarones at Panam‡ (and other notable conquests) preceded him (and perhaps that fame stirred not a little disquiet in the crafty breast of the Marquis, who wished not to have too many men of noble courage around him, dimming his own light and perhaps in their restlessness and boredom conceiving revolution to answer their own untested ambitions), he awarded him the title of Governor of the Provinces he was yet to discover, and promised him all the honours bestowed on those who enriched the Royal treasuries with their conquests. And it happened that as the rumour of this new expedition was voiced outwards, so malice bored its way into men's hearts, as is the way of such things: for Don Ursua was too young, too noble, too fair, too courteous &c &c to be considered as truly manful. The expedition was talked down, and jealousies and extortions were of its shaping before it even began. And so to the second omen: one Pedro Portillo of Moyobamba, a priest grown fat on vanity and high vaulting ambition, offered to sponsor the quest to two thousand dollars, in return for a Bishopric in the new provinces; and when he thought better of his offer, received an arquebus in his guts and the threat of shot to follow it until he signed over the promised money, and yet more, to the tale of three or four thousand dollars of his fortune. And if there was some satisfaction in seeing the sweat pour down his oily face and smelling the shit which filled his pants, coward and bastard hypocrite that he was, it was only the faintest blush of justice in this place where she had been bled dry by numberless tyrannies. And thirdly: in their jealousy, two of Ursua's most intimate friends, Francisco Diaz de Arles and Diego de Frias, plotted to assassinate the Corregidor Pedro Ramiro, glorious founder of the town of Santa Cruz de Capacopa, anointed Lieutenant-General of the expedition. Why? Because they pleaded prior claims, and smarted that Captain Ramiro had been made Lieutenant-General over their heads. As is the way of such things, no sooner was the deed thought than it was done; but Ursua demonstrated some acumen and feigned indifference to their crime (for who is to tell in this place which murder is legitimate and which is not?) They fled after the murder, but then soft words and gullible arrogance lured them to Santa Cruz, where the Governor determined after grave and legalistic solemnities that their heads would be cut off: and to make sure that they were cut off, he sentenced them to be cut off in public, that the ties of blood and affection would be thus disinterested from the act. And so they were. But I only heard of these events, and was not present at the execution: and like those superstitious fools who examine auspices in the guts of slaughtered animals, or who count the crows to their left, I thought to myself that a conquest begun so in blood could only end in blood. I dismissed this shudder, the spilling of blood in such circumstances being not uncommon: but the fools had the last laugh.

    There was a story which was told between Friars, when they lamented amongst themselves at the iniquities of the Conquistadores, and sorrowed at the disrepute to which they brought the name of Christians. It was said in 1511, when the immortal, noble and brave Conquistador Diego Vel‡zquez first set foot on the Isle of Cuba, there was a cacique called Hatuey, who trembled at the news of the Spanish reaching his island. And he gathered together his people and asked them if they knew why Christians behaved in such a rapacious way as was rumoured. And his people answered him, saying they didn't know, unless they were born innately cruel and evil. And the chief told them: "It is not simply that. They have a god whom they worship above all others." And he showed them a basket full of gold jewellery. "This," he told them, "is the God of the Christians." And he told his people to perform an arietos, which is a sacred dance, before this god, and perhaps he would be quieted, and the people would not be harmed. They danced until they fell down from exhaustion, and then, frightened that they would be killed for the god, they threw the basket of gold into the river. (How efficacious their dancing was may be judged from the fact that when a delegation of priests returned there after the depradations of the Spanish, they found only eleven souls alive.) The good priests blanched at the calumny implicit in the story, and would cross themselves, pious Franciscans that they were, walking humbly on the dusty robes in bare feet, or at the most, the most meagre of leather sandals: but they knew the cacique was correct. For often the clearest view of power is from the angle of those who are the victims of it, and who must cunningly devise ways to survive its forces. It was the Indians themselves who gave an image to this God, which set itself in the breasts of European and blazed there with an inextinguishable flame: The Man of Gold, El Dorado, who lived in the provinces of the Omaguas, as described by Captain Francisco de Orellana. And the legend was that on certain holy days of the year this priest or perhaps this king of a fabulous city in which the temples were built of solid gold was rubbed with turpentine or oil and then coated with gold dust, so that he shone as an immortal, both sun and man, the god incarnate on earth. I have had much time for reflection, having seen this Man of Gold shining in my own visions, a feverish spectre among the trees or trembling in a circlet of sun blooming on the dark water of the Mara-on River, and I have understood who this Man of Gold is: and I am convinced that he was sent by the Great God of Death of the Indians, to madden the blood of the knightly, courageous, cunning, ruthless &c &c Conquistadores and lure them ever more fully into the service of Death. For the God of Death was worshipped in his palaces of skulls, mighty and inhuman, his square jaws dripping with blood, in many subtle and arcane ways, and his marvellous astronomies and mathematics studied by the wise and the powerful; and his hunger is monstrous and may not be allayed by any simple means. It is of course correct that the Man of Gold took fire in such frenzies as are documented widely in the histories of this benighted land only because he already smouldered in the savage hearts of the Europeans; but it was not until they saw the vision of him in the dark jungles and the harsh mountains, flickering ever just behind the distorted veils of fever and sickness and exhaustion, that they gave him shape and made him angelic, the form of all their tormented desires. And he exists to the present day, where the Man of Gold lives now in apparent peaceableness inside a suit of fine wool; and sitting idly before his computer screen, or flying in his aeroplane, decides there is a need for a higher return of gold from - where? Ecuador. And so the Ecuadorean caciques are told that they must raise the price of cooking gas by 80 per cent, and must eliminate 26,000 jobs, and halve wages in four steps (specified by the IMF) and transfer ownership of its biggest water system to foreign powers, and, moreover, permit BP the right to build and own an oil pipeline over the Andes. And the Man of Gold will determine that the people will pay out of their pockets for things the governing bodies had once given freely to the people, and the money will flow into the giant maw of the God of Death, who squats grinning behind his avatar, the Gilded Man. The man in the woollen suit, the high priest of the Temple of Death, knows that the flow of gold was before in any case weighing down the pockets of the local mayor and his gangsters, the police officials, the seller of stamps, the license official, the building inspector, the cocaine lord in his magnificent castle bristling with AK47s: and he will be comforted, knowing that he serveth but a higher cause, which he will name to himself as God, or Democracy, or the Necessary Globe, or the Balance of Accounts, or HimSelf, but who is in reality this Man of Gold, this glittering apparition which is but a vision of life contained and extinguished. For to him who hath much, more shall be given, but from him who hath but little, everything shall be taken away. And so it has always been.
    But I digress.
    In my capacity as nascent lieutenant, I was present at what I believe to be the first meeting between Don Pedro de Ursua (he of the aforesaid gentle qualities) and Do-a Inez de Atienza, ill-mannered lowborn whore or beautiful and pathetically faithful martyr of love (depending on which authority one consults). And being what I was, which is to say, a man of action with little capacity or desire for the baroque coynesses of seduction, I witnessed with some admiration the despatch with which Do-a Inez registered her attraction to the (now) Governor Ursua and drew from him a reciprocating passion, while maintaining the gestures and manners of a highborn woman of virtue. For all her appearance of a fainting dove, the Do-a Inez was a practical woman, but also luminous with the lubricity of her young years; for she was all too early widowed for one of her constitution. She was the daughter of one Blas de Atienza, a citizen of the city of Trujillo, and but recently widowed of Pedro de Arcos, an inhabitant of Piura; and although gracious in her grief, which sombre habit highlighted the delicate sensuousness of her lips and a most romantic pallor in her cheeks, she had no longer authority in her household, and moreover, little to call her own besides two young woman slaves and her lengths of black lace. And when presented with the person of this young Knight of Navarre, who backed up his reputation for courage, nobility, heroism &c &c with a face and body of uncommon male beauty and moreover the noble title of Governor, he seemed to her the personification of her overwhelming longing to be freed of her tyrannical mother-in-law and her sententious and lecturing father-in-law, not to mention the brazen and irritating chatter of sisters-in-law who continually made scornful reference to her inability to produce anything like an heir in her short and tragic marriage to the said Pedro (whose death was as mysterious as much else in her background, and therefore may be assumed to be ignominious); when, as I said, she saw the handsome Don Ursua, her heart flew out towards him, and her loins visibly moistened. I say visibly, by which I mean I noted the flush in her lips as she spoke, so low and modestly, to the Governor; and I felt myself however vicariously the rush of blood which accompanies desire; and if I do not blame the Governor for his perhaps excessive response to her overtures, as he sat courteously sipping an overly sweet madeira laved by the scent of oranges in the courtyard of her father-in-law, it is because I too experienced the intoxicating force of her desire for freedom. And yet even in that moment of perception I felt a superstitious pang, a prickle of fear which only exacerbated the dizzying intensity of the Do-a Inez's presence; for she was more than a little redolent of the ambiguous perfume of the succubus, the Devil's slave who sweetly fixes her lips to the freely conscienced Godfearing man and transports him to delights which are so close to anguish they are indeed called infernal.
    I cannot but think of the marketplace in Seville, where forty conversos and Sephardic Jews and witches and other heretics are to be burned by the Inquisition, bound fast to stakes in the centre among a tumultuous and stinking crowd. It is hot and the sun beats down on their unprotected heads and some are praying and some are weeping and some stare straight ahead without expression, neither weeping nor cursing nor pleading, and they seem not to be there, as if they had already absented themselves from their own deaths. And I am shamefaced by my weakness, because as the fires are lit and these anonymous bodies begin to emit their screams of agony I am overcome by nausea and must stumble away to hide. For I am only a poor shepherd boy with no education and in my naivety do not understand the difference between one human being and another, and mistake the heretics for human beings very like myself. It is only later that I learn to be civilised and how to be a man, and how to write things down in a book so they become real and distinct one from the other, as God dictates. And perhaps this Godlessness has made me apt to certain influences which have weakened me, and so directed my life to this pass in which I find myself: for it crosses my mind that even in the mountains, when we were to cook a pig, we took care to kill it before we burnt it, no doubt because we did not care for its soul, which by such testing might be purified (for of course, pigs do not have souls, although to a young boy this distinction is by no means obvious); and perhaps it seemed to us that to roast it alive (apart from being highly inconvenient and impractical) would be to increase unnecessarily the temporal suffering in the world, which is already heavy and grey with tears. Although it is true, peasants do not think readily of such things, or at least, in such ways.
    But again I digress. O my God, You Who do not exist, but to Whose sublime absence, nevertheless, I direct these pathetic words, so inadequate to their task of adumbrating the destruction of a single human soul: how am I to describe anything? I ask You this in all humility: for if it is true that You are the Word, which may be but a creation of the human accident of the larynx, lips, palate, tongue and breath twisted together into expressiveness by the mind, which as we all know tends towards darkness, possessing alone of the animal kingdom the unfortunate knowledge that darkness is its ultimate destination, then You of anyone will understand how grammar only seems orderly, and is in fact an illusory straightening of the welter of impressions and perceptions which flood our carnal presence in this world, and bears as much and as little symmetry with the real as a butterfly killed and dried and pinned does to the live creature dancing its broken dance in a shaft of sunlight in the middle of a lush and living glade. And it may be that my writing may seem rather the butterfly broken on an axle, its wings perished and dusted of all their marvellous colours, its intricate veinings smashed beyond recognition. And perforce, it may be that I should merely limit myself to the listing of events; but events so listed, however they lift the hair from the neck, are only the outer garments of despair. The inner anatomies: these are the difficulties. If one takes a sword, for example, and slices off the top of a man's head, thereby exposing the brain, all that expressive spouting of blood and matter will give no clue to anything but the violence of the gesture of penetration: one cannot look into a man's mind through the uncivil exposing of its parts. The mind is a whole thing, animated by a single force, however splintered and partial it may seem; and when it is deprived of that binding animation, it is nothing. Even so, I cannot but wonder in my present situation if death is absolute; in the jungle it seems everything is alive, the dead perhaps even more than the living: corpses are quivering bags of maggots within half a day, and even the rocks seem sentient, part of some huge half somnolent organism which is this world, and which we, as human beings, only barely understand. Cleanliness, being the human body stripped of all that might remind it of its putrefaction, is the nearest we might reach to divinity, and is therefore very far from me, writing by the light of a tallow with my hand grimed with sweat and my rich bodily odours colouring the pure air with my own death.

    (One might in one's perplexity consult the pamphleteers, who tell me: As the rotating twin power heads gently lift the carpet pile, steam is injected by the six powerful steam jets and extracted by the six extractors. ALLERGY SUFFERERS! Enquire about FLICK'S Non-toxic Dust-Mite Control Programme! Rid your home of deadly spiders, annoying ants, and disgusting cockroaches the safe sure way... STRICTLY LIMITED OFFER! 2 PESTS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!* Conditions apply)

    If one, for example, could be rid of lice! Although there is, I confess, something to be said for the human intimacy of delousing, the sensuous pleasure of a pair of pretty hands searching expertly through one's follicles for the foul parasites, and cracking them between fingernails, so that minute flecks of blood stain their pale edges, so like the pale edges of the moon. But one will never be free of these things, nor of ticks, nor of mosquitoes, nor of the tiny demons which use the air and through our mouths and nostrils inhabit us with illness, the humiliations of diarrhoea or boils or catarrh or abscesses or infection; nor of the grey rats which thrive in the bilgewater of ships; nor of the horror of leeches. For I have an especial horror of leeches, which grow in the jungle to a far greater size than we are used to in Europe, and a man can be necklaced with them in next to no time at all, and they leave a mark like the round bites of many little teeth, and that wound may easily infect, and sometimes men have died of this. But I am forgetting my story.
There was much business to conclude before the glorious expeditioners could begin their conquest of the Omaguas and their discovery of the El Dorado. Three and a half hundred knights and near to one and a half thousand Indian slaves require an amount of provision and transport which it is not easy to procure; and the noble Governor Ursua was anxious to expedite this with maximum efficiency (hence the forcible squeezing of the Priest's coffers). Although, it is true, the Indians of the Antilles were left to fend for themselves very often, which they did without prodigious success, to judge by the visibility of their ribs and the mortality rate, especially among the very young and the old; of course, this was considered proof of the superior physical stature of we Europeans, who besides being in the nice position of carrying neither anchors nor cannons - some of which were three or four quintales, their weight alone boring ulcerous holes in the shoulders of the miserable carriers, holes which rapidly filled with maggots and stank of gangrene within hours in the humid and fertile jungle airs - had themselves whatever food was to hand. The logic of this conclusion, even then, escaped me; beasts of burden, oxen and donkeys, for example, must be fed if they are to be of any use, and one might assume the same if the beasts of burden are human beings; but one becomes inured to such logic, and the fact was that there was no shortage of slaves, which, especially with a notorious expedition such as ours, the fame of which had spread throughout all of Piru, were readily to hand and easily captured. When there was plenty, the slaves might survive; when there were shortages, they were sure to die; and when there was no food at all, which occurred with distressing frequency, the Spaniards died as well. It was a brutal economy with the single virtue of clarity, which required only a little adjustment of one's natural compassion, as taught by the priests, (or at least, those priests who were not investing their capital in the mines and who saw gold as the true first emanation of God) to accept; for in truth, only a very few innocents, children, a few Franciscans, poets and the like, take words to be literally guides for action: and let us be clear: the Scriptures specifically forbid such acts as were commonly carried out by Conquistadores a mere thirty years before, who nevertheless professed themselves, seemingly without conscious hypocrisy, to be honest Christians and were hailed for their deeds as the glorious flower of our nation. To be deaf, to be blind, to be dumb, to be insensate: these are the necessary attributes of this kind of cruelty. (There are, God forgive me, other kinds of cruelty, which depend rather from a heightened appreciation of the senses, and which revel in depraved and vicious violences, finding there a puissant extremity close to the state of ecstasy which one might otherwise associate with saints: a terrifying diabolism which at times has made me truly see before my bodily vision the image and form of Satan himself, his eyes red with a bloody dew, his hands clawed into carnal hooks of wicked delight: but here I speak not of this). Of the others - God in His wisdom has made many such, and such is the furious singlemindedness such lack of perception permits, in this world which might truly be called the Domain of the Damned, they prosper and grow fat. So might I say, that my life in this world, although it has dispossessed me of the belief in God, has shown me that the Devil himself exists, and indeed, hides himself behind many actions which are commonly called Godly: and here on the sheets of night I can inscribe my belief, that there is no singularity of good, nor even a duality between opposing forces, but only a singularity of evil, which must always and always does triumph over the tiny human lights, which forever flame and flicker and blow out into eternal darkness, having nothing to do with either the divine or the infernal.
    But I am getting lost again in the disorder of my thoughts, for which I ask Your forgiveness. I am only a peasant, and have but rough schooling, and much of that gleaned myself; and I am dead as well, and in this Purgatory to which perhaps You in Your wisdom have inured me (I cannot tell whether it is Purgatory or whether it is one of the many divisions or suburbs of Hell; or it may be, perhaps, that this Afterlife, this flickering dim place in which I seem to exist, conforms to no such guesses, my Heaven and Hell and Purgatory all together, and is my lot for all Eternity - this room with its single dingy window, and its smoky tallow candle, which burns aye but never burns out, and its corners dark with cobwebs, and tiny black spiders my only company); in this place, from which perhaps the prayers of the Blest and my own labours might release me, although I have no guarantee of this, I know only one thing: I am condemned to this endless writing of the Word. There is a door in this room, but it is not only locked; there is an iron padlock on the inside, which puzzles me, and it is rusted so badly that it would be impossible to fit a key into it, and the hinges are rusted almost to the point that they appear to be dissolving into the wood of the door. This has, alas, no effect on the strength of the iron, for when I first found myself here I tried the door and the padlock many times with the force of my shoulder, thinking that such decay as appeared in the iron must result in a concomitant weakness in its substance; but it was not so. So it is I have no choice; I must dip this quill into this infernal inkpot, which no matter how much I write in the intervals of consciousness which are offered me (for there are intervals I hesitate to call sleep, although sleep they must be; at least, darknesses between the tiny lights of consciousness which are offered me) no matter, as I say, how much I write, this inkpot is always full. I have so far resisted the impulse, overwhelming as it is at times, to hurl the inkpot at the walls, just to see if it rights itself and refills. Perhaps I can perform this experiment later. The inkpot is always full; the quill never requires remaking. It is I believe the quill of a goose, or perhaps a swan. It is certainly from a large bird, and the feather, whose tiny filaments in moments of distress I separate one by one, only needing to brush along its shaft to reunite them into a smooth singly constituted object, is white. I have sometimes wondered, although no doubt it is blasphemous for me to even speculate so, if it is a quill from the wing of an angel; this thought allows me a fantasy of the possibility of some sort of redemption. However, it does look to my eye very like a goose quill, and so I am forced to abandon this fantasy before the realness of its appearance; although it is true that I have never seen an angel, and therefore have no knowledge on which to base my speculation, either for or against its originating therefrom. Before me on my humble table, roughly carved like the chair on which I sit of some very black wood that I cannot identify, is a pile of paper, cut roughly around the edges into the approximate size of a quarto, and it is this paper on which I write. The quill often catches on its irregular surface, resulting in a pattern of blots and uneven letterings which distresses me, since I find that the forming of letters is already a labour to which I am not equal. I fill each sheet of paper, writing on both sides, and then I place it on another pile and start on the next. There are consequently two piles of paper, one which is written, and one which is not. The pile on which is written is slowly growing higher, but the pile on the other side remains disturbingly constant. No matter how much I write, it seems, there is always the same amount to write before me.
These then are the circumstances of my writing; and since I must address Someone, and since it also appears that Someone has set me this task of writing, then I must address You, whom I therefore call God. There is no reason for me to suppose that it is not the Devil who has thus tasked me, it is true, but I confess, despite the despair which assails me when I think of God, whom I believe with all my soul does not exist, the despair which grasps me when I think it is the Other for whom I write afflicts me with such anguish that I cannot bring myself to mark these pages at all, and perforce sink onto the mean pallet which is my bed and stare at the ceiling for passages of time which are immeasurable, but which seem to me to be miniature eternities in themselves. Perhaps You will forgive me this little self-deception, Who brought me here, and also for my many errors of logic and learning, for I am, as I said, but poorly read and educated, and have here moreover no books which I may consult to correct the divagations of my memory or the impertinences of my ratiocination. Therefore, begging your patience, I will start again.
    I have already described the man - for I persist in believing that he was a man, despite my conviction at times that he was not human at all, but an avatar of hell - the man whose visage haunts me, who seems to me such an awful mirror of Mankind that I can scarcely bring myself to envision him in my mind's eye, because what I see there in him I see in myself also, and also in the visages of other men when I call them up to my memory. For he afflicts me with a nearness which is more intimate than sight; he brings with him a smell, a sound, a formical sense of horror which encompasses all other senses. He is like a dark light thrown over all humanity, which staineth all yet with his discolour, that if I had not witnessed, I would not see everywhere, or perhaps not at all. It yet remains to me to begin an orderly relation of the expedition. Now I will attempt to rein in my impulses to the demands of the tale which I am condemned to tell, if it is indeed within my powers to do so.

    Lope de Aguirre.

    There. I have written it down.

    He was no daemon. He was a man. He was born out of a woman's womb, as we all were, and he shat and wept and grumbled and sweated and made his way in this world, even as I did. It seems to me that to say he was a daemon is to cheat our humanity of itself. I have heard the monks arguing about the One, the True, the Good, the Beautiful, and how all that is made is God, and is proportional to God, his divine eye being the fire that lighteth the universe; and as his vision animates the world, so in turn the world turneth to God. And they say that as God is the most perfect, being what God is, so all things strive towards perfectibility, for he hath made them, from the divine intuitions of the angelic intelligences down to the most vile worm; and they weave there such a dance of order, such a music of harmony, such gentle and inevitable classifications from the low to the high, that it is enough to make the eyes smart with its beauty, a kind of ache not unlike a nostalgia for the innocent climes of childhood. There has always been something which gave me pause in these beautiful pictures; for although they gave to the eye the highest status, and to the skin the lowest - for vision is how God beholdeth, and touch is how the Devil tempteth - often these monks sat in a clearing and behind them rose the savage canopy of the jungle, where one saw nothing but the hundred hues of green, but heard in its recesses the sharp and anguished cries of birds and the strange calls of frogs and the chittering and screams of monkeys; and they saw it not and heard it not. They scratched themselves, and wiped the sweat out of their eyes, and continued to argue their grave and solemn harmony. I thought, yea, there is an order, but it is an order which is ordained by death. He who eats and he who does not eat; the cattle eat the fruits of the earth, the grain and the grass and leaves, and we eat the cattle and the beasts of the field and the forest, and the lice and fleas eat us; whereof one might argue that the lice and fleas are the most lordly of all God's animals: which is to say that there is indeed a circle, which is held the most perfect of all shapes, but that it is broken into many intricate and complex parts; for example, as when you look closely at the frond of a fern, which has curve after curve infolded, an ever dwindling or ever expanding intricacy of repetitions which are, when you examine them, nevertheless not exactly the same, but differ from one to other in subtle and minute details, which are as impossible to predict as, say, the number of spots on a skewbald cow. And in this uncertain patterning I see not the Eight Spheres, nor other orderly mysteries, but a living and savage thing pursuing only its own becoming, and nothing more, and a world shaped by random and brutal economies of survival, as meaningless as the roll of a dice: that this man is rich and this man poor; that this beast has rending claws and this none; that this creature is cunning and this one simple; and beyond that only an eternal darkness. The monks would say of a man like Aguirre: he lacks the perfection of God, and therefore is not perfectly himself, and therefore is ugly. I am not exactly sure of the truth of that, for I believe that Aguirre, ugly as he was, was perfectly himself, and attained in his obsession a true perfection: and if, as they say, all perfect things are things of God, then he was truly a creature of God.
    I am no theologian, and only a poor peasant stumbling among the wise, which is no doubt where I fall into such errors, for perhaps the Good and the True can encompass such phenomena even as the soul of Aguirre. But if Aguirre and his works can be understood as Godly I am unable to understand the meaning of the Good and the True, although it occurs to me that I may understand Beauty in such a light; and this thought frightens me. For if God is Beauty, as some claim, then perhaps Aguirre might indeed be understood as a form of God. He called himself God's punishment, God's scourge, God's wrath; but I always took that as an expression of his boastfulness and a cheap justification for himself; for thus he places himself as God's servant, avenging wrongs and blasphemies, and so at once glorifies and excuses his own evils before others. In this way, if one took it seriously, one might say he has a place; but this does not explain what he is. Aguirre himself did not believe in God; he believed only in this life, and he believed that this life was hell. On the other hand, perhaps it was his sense of God's treachery in thus not existing which fired him with such anger, and this anger revealed most profoundly a belief in the Divine: this sometimes occurred to me. For in ways he seemed messianic, like madmen sometimes are; and at the same time, despite the madness of his actions, he did not seem mad to me.     But again, I mix up the story and get ahead of myself.

Chapter II

    I dreamt last night that I was asleep on the floor of the house in which I lived as a child. It was a very humble house, divided half for the family, and half for the beasts, who stamped and snorted at its other end as we slept; there was one wall between us. It was dark inside, and stank of cows and sheep and human fug and woodsmoke, which could not always find its way outside through the hole in the roof. We slept, my sisters and my father and I, on a kind of shelf, and were warm cuddled up with our fleas in the steam of dung. I liked it; I knew no better. But in this dream, I was alone; I was asleep on the floor, and it was cold, and the cold woke me up. And when I woke up, I found my head was lying on a pumpkin. I sat up in surprise and looked at the pumpkin; and it looked back at me, for I noted without surprise that it had eyes. It blinked, and announced it was King Philip of Spain; it then screwed up its face and spat at me. I was so outraged at this offensive behaviour that I hit it, and it smashed as pumpkins smash, but then I realised that it wasn't a pumpkin at all, but my little sister Angela, whose head I had broken open, and she looked up at me, the back of her skull caved in, weeping and holding out her arms, and in a panic of horror and loathing I hit her again and again, to rid myself of her piteous expression, and then I woke up with her warm blood all over my face. I sat up, trying to wipe it out of my eyes with my hands, but it wouldn't stop dripping, and I realised I must be bleeding myself, and so lifted the cloth of my bed to stanch the wound, and the top of my skull fell into my hands, cut as cleanly as if it had been sliced with a razor. I instantly felt very foolish; what I must look like with the top of my head missing! and I looked around the room for a hat to hide it, but I couldn't see properly, and in any case I knew it was useless, and that there was no hat in the room. But still I kept looking, with a kind of heavy hopelessness. And then I woke up properly, the sweat running down my face so that for a second I thought I was still back in my dream.
    I cannot reconcile myself to the uselessness of my existence. I abhor this task of writing; I look at the sheets which await me with disgust and hatred. With what ignorant joy I received the gift of literacy! For days on end I sit in this room, staring out of the grimy opaque window, and turn my back on the paper. I do! As if the paper were a person who would take offence, and flounce out in insult. It never does; when I am bored of staring at the wall, or studying the cobwebs, it is always there, just as it was before I turned my back. I fancy it looks at me with reproach. I fancy it is already soured, like a disillusioned mistress, by my procrastinations; how I will do anything, anything, except tell this story I have to tell. It knows all my excuses, how well it knows them! I am convinced it sniggers behind my back, when I am pretending it's not there; I am certain it does. It doesn't care, it's only paper, it can wait as long as it likes. It knows I will return, in the end, to the table, and dip the quill in the inkbottle, and make another mark. It knows that with the contemptuous certainty of triumph. For I have nothing else to do. How miserable this death is.
    I have made a far from exhaustive list of the requirements for the expedition, led by Governor Ursua, to sail the Mara-on River and find the Gilded Man of the Omaguas. There had to be powder, arms, munitions, horses and cattle, rope and ship's stores, and of course the ships themselves, of which more later: anchors, nails, cookware, horse shoes, provision, provision and more provision for both beasts and men, plus the ornament necessary to sustain men of gentle and noble birth in such savage circumstance - robes of silk and velvet, gold chains, marks of office and such fol de rols: and a Bible, and the golden chalices and holy instruments of Mass. Can you, o transcendent reader of these my words, imagine the qualities required to assemble these things in such a place as Lima? For if you wish to purchase a gross of nails, you might wander down to the hardware supermarket, where you will be able to buy a dizzying variety of such things, from tiny blueblack thumb tacks to those grey nails with aluminium hats for hammering into corrugated iron, to four inch steel rods with small, discreet heads and slim long bodies, not to mention every variety in between; and if you wish to buy food, you need merely visit the supermarket, where there will be oranges from Israel and Japanese pumpkins from North Queensland and Arabian dates and Indonesian bok choy and lemongrass and saffron and almonds from the Indies and lettuces packed in ice and flown from the gardens of Werribee, all propogated with or without genetic modifications; such plenty at the mere flicker of your hand over a keyboard, the mere flourish of a signature on a small piece of plastic. For Governor Ursua, you must understand, the situation was somewhat different, and nails most assuredly did not grow on trees, although the ships he built to navigate the melancholy waters of the New World were hewed out of the virgin forest itself. What foresight, cunning, thrift and brutality, what powers of organisation and improvisation, were required to gather together such an inventory! However, I thought writing such a list, incomplete as it is, might sharpen my mind to the task at hand, because I seem unable to write things down in the right order. No doubt it is my lack of education, which has not equipped me for the finer things. Or perhaps being dead has muddled my intellect; perhaps my brain, perhaps all of me, is softly decomposing without my knowledge, although I seem whole enough to me (but how is it that I do not eat? or shit? though, it is true, I breathe, I breathe through my nose).
    A nose is a brave literary instrument, which it might be instructive to deconstruct, had I the time or the inclination. I have neither, and will refer You, God of my Penance, to certain Russians, certain Englishmen, certain even of the Classics. The suffering that has been caused by noses! The agonies of sensibility which have been brought to bear on this most protuberant of our facial features! The histories which have been shaped or warped by this worthless bit of gristle and skin, the Cleopatras, the Caesars, I implore you, can human expression cover it? No, I say, and so shall pass over it in silence. Think of the perorations of ink thus spent, the forests felled! And is any of it sufficient, I ask, to explain the mystery, the ineluctable nature, the true significance of a nose? Of course not. By a nose one might win an Empire or lose the meaning of life. Suffice it to say with my customary brevity that my nose is one of the few prides of my life: it sticks out of my face at a preferred angle, which belies my antecedents with a certain style, nay, nobility. I have often stared, struck, in the mirror, examining how its aquiline shape throws a most I might say aristocratic shadow across my lips. I have taken care to protect my nose, since by virtue of this organ alone I have been able to establish a certain moral authority over other men, men, it must be confessed, who boast none of the accoutrements of authority at all and so be it must be allowed may be cowed by a nose alone. Have they a single display otherwise, a nose will not suffice, but without, a nose is all: and so the cruellest blow on such as I is a blow which breaks my nose. It has happened, I confess, but I have so craftily and with such anxious vanity reshaped the septum, reckoning nothing of my pain, that still it shows not too badly for the life it has led. Or I think it does. There is no mirror here for me to cogitate on how my nose survived my death, and so I am forced to feel it with my fingers (it feels as if it remains unscathed) and to checking my visible members, which all look as I recall them last. My vanity must thus exist alas! as everything else, only within my memory: I visualise myself before a mirror, and there admire the memory of my nose, as I did whenever a mirror was available, or even a still water in a bucket. I tried at the window, but it is so smudged and bleared there is no reflection possible, and in any case to reach it I had to stand on the table, which rocked and creaked beneath my feet in an alarming fashion. In my life I was often ridiculed for my obsession, but to every man belongs a few things which are beyond ridicule, which may even be said to be sacred, and with which he will persist in the face of all the world's disopprobrium and laughter, and withal, if he does not, he is not a man. But what of my story? It seems to me that I will never get out of here if I do not begin it: but alas, I am led astray by - of all things! - my nose. So I have been led all my life. And now it seems, all my death. Existence is cruel. If I had truly deserved my nose, if I had been, after all, the scion of a wealthy family, if I had had the wherewithal by which I might have afforded virtue, which comes in a rich coin, and so is beyond the means of many of us - if I had had, in short, the money to back up my instinct for the aristocratic, it may be that I had led an entirely blameless and perhaps even a model life. I might for example have donated to monasteries, and given alms to the poor, and alleviated by my humble example the suffering which lies all around us, with a coin here, a coin there, housing the beggars at my table, bringing the poor downtrodden eyes up to the beneficence of God, in the pathos of their awed gratitude. But instead I was born with only a rag to call my own, and a snotrag it was too, o my interlocutor, and seldom washed at that: and given that, how could I have made decisions other than the ones I made? For it was a constant comment that my nose was a thing apart, a sublime and extraordinary organ: and if it hadn't been for my nose, I might not have sought to better my miserable situation, I might have been herding goats at this moment, breathing in the innocent mountain air and not giving a fig for golden ingots or dreams of Imperial glory. For it was these visions boiling in my veins, this poison set there, heated into madness by the Gilded Man, which has led me here: and that evil desire, I confess here and now, was entirely due to my nose. An accident of birth and fate! On so little, on such a minuscule flange of flesh, on such an insignificant-seeming tissue, pregnant with inauspicious omen despite its meagre materiality, did my fate depend; and so I throw myself at Thy mercy, saying now: if God had not given me such a nose, such a temptation, then I might have been a good, honest and gentle man, instead of the poor sinner I now am. Aguirre's nose rivalled mine in its imperious sweep, but I liked to think that in that area, at least, I held my own. His could be expressive of a certain demonic flair, but equally, when his eyes were uncandled by lusts, could appear insignificant. Don Ursua's nose was I thought a common proboscis, seeking not the heavens even if it were not base and eschewed the forests of blackheads and pimply extrusions and warts and efflorescences of hair which decorated most of the company. But Do-a Inez possessed (and I say this humbly, with an anguish mitigated only by her sex) the most shapely and exquisite nose I have ever seen - as might have been imagined by the great sculptor himself in a moment of inspiration - delicately lined from between her black brows to where her nostrils flared out in two perfect curves, two miniature ivory premonitions of her white breasts, expressively disdainful and passionate, but with just enough - just enough of a suggestion of flesh to give her commanding austerity (which she could assume at will) a leavening hint of charm; nay, a whiff of the cunt, which softened with its innocent lubricity the sternest of her thorns. Never, in a lifetime of connoisseurship of noses, have I seen an example so fine, so indicative of at once a fine and assertive consciousness and yet also an unbridled and maybe even anarchic sensuality. And just as my fate was led by my nose, so I believe Do-a Inez's was moulded by hers; and she paid terribly for it.
    How hard it is to determine the beginning of anything! Is it in the seed of our father, which grows into the little homunculus inside the forebearing womb of our mother (may her name never be smirched) that first our destiny is written? Is it written incrutably in the Book of God, marked there by the stern Angel of Records? Was I born to such a destiny, or did I there lead myself, blindly navigating crossroads which possessed a significance of which, at the time, I was wholly ignorant? And my poor narration seems to be taking as long to launch as the most humble raft of Don Ursua's expedition for the El Dorado of the Omaguas: for in truth, it was more than twenty months before the first assemblage of the expedition and its inauspicious embarkation onto the waters of the Mara-on River in a series of leaky ships hammered and warped out of ill-cured wood, on that 17th day of September (although some record it as the sixteenth, and others say it was even in October, I remember especially that it was the seventeenth) when the boats slid into the Ribera de Mayo, tributary of the Huallaga, one vein in the vast and mysterious network of the mighty Mara-on.
    There was much disputation on the bank, as I remember: for of the three hundred horse, the ships could with safety take but forty, and many of the cattle also had to be left behind, all to fend for themselves. A Conquistadore was most reluctant to part with his horse; apart from being valuable animals, a man with a horse could carry much more treasure than one mountless, even given the availability of slaves; and moreover, he could make a quick exit from scenes of trouble, if circumstance required. Don Ursua, passing an aristocratic hand over his brow with an affected gesture of ennui, closed the quarrel by choosing the horses of the forty most highly ranked men. They were led onto the great rafts with some difficulty, snorting and kicking, and the sedans of the women were boarded onto the ships, with their slaves and accompaniments, and the trembling Indians and the three hundred noblemen, villains all for all their nobility, and then, without even a ceremonial flourish, this strange and motley fleet began its perilous quest for gold and glory. And a silence fell over all the company as the boats were pushed out into the faster currents in the middle of the vast brown river, and for a short time all that could be heard was the slap and volley of the water and, far away it now seemed, the secret insect buzzing of the jungle, punctuated now and then by the inhuman scream of a bird or a monkey.
    And oblivious to this picturesque scene, King Philip of Spain lounged in his silken sheets, signalling to his personal attendants to dance attendance. I suppose. It occurs to me that I have no idea what a King does in his private time, in the seclusion of his chambers; I have no doubt he shits and pisses, being but a man for all the godlike splendour which attends his public appearances. He bears the nimbus of a god, most truly God's representative on Earth in all his temporal glory, and like God is removed from the heavy toil and sweat which accompanies those whose blood is fated to run in humbler furrows. His absence is truly miraculous, for it is also the most Real, untrammelled, sublimely aware and unaware: beneath his lordly feet toil the dumb workers of the dumb earth, and dumbly they offer up its riches. But unlikewise, I have no idea who They are who, removed into their stratospheric realms of power, send 1500 billion American dollars of currency transactions through the ether every day. Do They, likewise, piss and shit? A single, barely perceptible gesture of their little finger, and one village is burned to the ground, another is subjected to the travails of progress, a third is sold the necessary arms to subjugate a fourth. So the King sits, in his realm most Real, while from his unimaginably fleshly fingers stretch little cobwebs, ever more and more and more attenuated and more complex, which become millions nay billions of actions. The present King is more Divine, being invisible, and therefore even more Real than he has ever been. He moves with the inevitability of Nature herself. He may even be God, since he does not exist and yet is the source of all power, extra-territorial and ubiquitous. He has conquered geography and has swallowed nature. But surely even He - whoever He is - pisses and shits, even if his sheets are made of pure titanium. Only I, of all living things, do not piss and shit. But I, I believe, am not alive... although I am told the borders between the living and the not living are becoming more and more blurred, and consequently the soul of man a disputed territory, a contested region of the borderline between life and death. Therefore I may be absolutely modern, especially in my obsolescence. (Who tells me? I dream these things, they flicker on the humble walls of my mind, this poorly lit cave in which I crouch, wondering what is real and what is not real: for if I am real, then what is my purpose? and if I am not real, what is the agency of my thought? These things puzzle me to the point of anguish).
    Whatever his provenance, King Philip of Spain is as responsible for our actions as is the Don Ursua; his ultimate authority lies behind each action of ours, in protest, lament, obedience or rebellion; his Divine ordering, second only to the Pope and then to God himself, is without question. Only a certain answer to the question of his digestive functions could bring the stink of common humanity about his gleaming shoulders (for how can they not gleam in our dark minds, so uncertain after all that we are real): and who should have the courage to ask him? And although I assume that he does, I cannot be sure. He may well be made of stuff other than us. I have never seen him. Those who have, or who have heard from those who have, say he is a man: but he is a man who wields absolute power, and how can a man who wields absolute power be wholly a man?
Nevertheless, man or divine flesh, I pondered King Philip of Spain, as the boats pushed slowly into the river. He knew or cared nothing of us: of this I was as certain as I could be of anything. He would continue to know or care nothing until we brought back the gold of El Dorado; then perhaps we would be permitted a little of his reality, his recognition, his authority, his mortal Divinity. Until such time as that, we were condemned to toil in the shadows, mere reflections of men, insect-flesh uneasily condemned to its unillumined fate. And for this permit, this entry, at last, into the Kingdom of the Real, we were prepared to gamble everything - for what is life itself if it is but a phantasmagoria of hope, the possibility of fire, but never the flame itself? And here you might ask: among these silences, these silences of the silent flesh of which I am but a single unit, what of those others? What of the writings which are burned by the obedient priests? What of those glances, so full of meaning, which vanish into the temporal abyss? What of the gestures which flash once and are no more? What of the lost languages? For they are so full of words, but they are not the words of our civilisation, my civilisation, they inhabit the unreal although they constitute the real. Without the arms which impotently resist rape, without the woman who covers her child's eyes so he will not see his murderer, without the labour of stick limbs in the infernos of the gold mines, without the despairing eyes of a man stricken and condemned to death by the smallpox, without the abject fear of the villagers shrinking before the conquistadores, without the scream of an old woman mauled by the mastiffs, without the shame of a nobleman stripped of his privilege, without the self-mutilation of a woman who would be a saint, without the bruises on the face of a good wife, without the millions trembling before the hellpit, power would be nothing: nay, without these, the real would be divested of itself, would be of as little significance as the smallest blade of grass. All its gold would mean nothing.
    Picture to yourself, said a wise man, the slow death of a tortured child: and then ponder the guilt of God. And should He not feel guilt, the author of Me?
    To which I say: the King feels no more guilt at the suffering of his subjects than does a housewife who pours boiling water into a nest of ants. For the suffering is not real. And since He garnishees all the Real into his own person, this is indisputably so. My wretched existence, if it can be called that, proves it.
    But I am getting lost again.

    I am the Author of Fate. The Architect of Soul. The Narrator of Destiny. The Shaper of Gods. The Apotheosis of History. I see at last the alchemical reversal of God into the image of Man. How much I fear the truth of what is self-determined, how much I shudder at the thought that this is all my own inscribing, mine and other men. Who is to argue against this suspicion, in the feotid circumspection of his own miserable ego? For of course it cannot be true. But who is to prove otherwise? All of history laboured through long aeons to produce - me.

    But a sense of comedy strangely eludes me. All I can perceive is the tragedy of the absurd. I weep, but no tears run down my face. I retch, but can make no bile. I laugh, but my laughter is forced and vacant. I would like to kill myself, but I am already dead. Perhaps I really am discomposing.

    I mean, decomposing.

Chapter III

    I have no idea why I am writing chapter headings, except to give myself the illusion that I am writing a book. What is a book? A piece of writing with chapters. Why can't it be a book without chapters? But then, given the pile of the unwritten, I would think even more despairingly that I am acheiving nothing. To write a chapter heading seems to divide the time in a way that suggests it is progressing, that it is going forward, that I am managing to move from one point to another. For the fact is, I am getting nowhere with my narration. I wake on my wretched pallet and stagger towards the table only to find the same pile of paper awaiting my attention, the same goosequill (although today it is black rather than white: either it has undergone a transubstantiation, or someone came in while I was sleeping and changed it, but I am incurious as to why).
    It is some days - I suppose they are days - since I have written anything. I suspicion that I am losing my body, but really I am losing my mind. Today I have woken up as a woman. I am a woman with long hair, breasts, cunt, everything. I am definitely losing my mind. My memories seem to me to be unchanged. My memories are that I am a man. But my body appears to be that of a woman's. My chin is no longer encumbered with hair, but is smooth. My hands are delicate, if worn, clearly the hands of a nobly born lady. I seem to be undergoing menstruation. This is the first time my body has expelled something - for as I have said, I neither eat nor shit, nor can I vomit - but it is no comfort. Either I am undergoing menstruation, or I am bleeding to death. It is a very messy business. My room stinks of blood. I am appalled.

Chapter IV

    I am still a woman. The quill is still black.

Chapter V

    O misery! O misery misery misery! What is happening to me? What diabolical genius is it that so plays with my very substance, that I know not what I am? What will I wake up as next time - a cat? a worm? a griffin? Why am I so picked out? It's bad enough being dead.
Was my life so wicked that I am to be subject to this torment? This continual anxiety? I have so little to begin with. Why should even that be taken away? I dare not sleep. I have only one thing to do - to write on these pages - and yet I cannot. Yet despite the oddnesses of my physical being, I am beset by terrible weariness. I must sleep, but I am afraid to. I pass out on the floor rather than lie down on my pallet. I am tormented by tedium, but am unable to absorb myself in the one thing which is available to me to pass the time (time? what does that mean?) I am not only reduced to mere existence, but to the mere existence of a joke.
    I have, I admit, attempted to see if there is any erotic diversion to be had in my new situation, but such is my mental distress I am unable to find any.
    Is this my punishment? To be condemned to femaleness for the rest of eternity? Why could I not, then, be blessed with a woman's mind? Humble, accepting, low voiced, gentle, biddable to fate - yes, surely, if I had a woman's mind, I could accept what is now happening to me. But I am a man.
    I have completely lost my place in this story. But yet it haunts me. It is imperative, I know, that I write it: everything, whatever everything is, depends upon my writing it. But if I must, how then can I? Other visitations come over me like ghosts. Other voices. I am paralysed with horror. I write this down, and read over my last sentence, and see its inadequacy. How can the word "horror" encompass what is happening to me? I have to sleep. I am past exhaustion, past the limits of exhaustion; never in my earthly life have I been so stripped, so pared to the bone. I am haunted by strange memories. I must be turning into someone else. I must sleep.
If I sleep, I pray that I wake as a man. If I wake as a man, I promise, O Diabolical Powers, that I will seriously undertake the telling of my story. I have been remiss, I have perhaps been lazy and recalcitrant, I confess, O God, that I am lacking in wit and intelligence, and I know abjectly that I am deficient in learning and wisdom. Yet O Lord I pray to you to restore to me my own body, so that my mind will not be in such revolt that I am unable to write anything at all.
    I think of the Zaheer, which the Infidels claim is one of the ninety nine names of God: the Image which once seen can never be forgotten. For there is a single image burned into the black space behind my eyelids which I can never forget, which rises into my mind each time I pause in my thought, unbidden and unwelcome. It torments me, it is an anguish to think that this image may be the image of God, My world splinters and dissolves, this strange and estranging world into which I was born, which possessed such a singular unity, such an ordered dance of harmony, of grave and ecstatic heirachies, of sober layerings of soul from the outer coarse garments of matter to the infinitesimally fine spiritual substance of sheer light. No, it all shatters and dissolves and leaves me suspended, weightless and purposeless, in the midst of crass space, crass matter. What was it that the Spaniard could not forget, in his voyage over the Sea of Darkness? A single glimpse of the golden man and he was ill for the rest of his days: Pissaro himself spoke of this sickness. Nothing would content him, all was set in motion in a sea of unmeaning, save for this one thing, the Real, the Royal Gold. And as we were taught that the King was God's human mantle on Earth, subservient only to Our Lord Jesus Christ, so the gold began to seem to him God Himself, and then all Reality, beneath which all other realities were crushed and forgotten. But behind that image of the Gilded Man is another, it is the image I cannot forget: he moved aside and there I saw it ... and behind that image is nothing save the black unbreathing Abyss. It is then I begin to comprehend true horror: it is then I am sick with nostalgia for God, it is then I feel the true stench of my decay. Hurriedly I build again my little hut of sticks; hurriedly I rush to this mean table and take up my quill (the quill, perhaps, of an angel) and make my marks upon this paper. I do not know what it means. And to find myself, thusly, thrust into the shape of a woman is so far to twist the dagger of this horror in my vitals (such as they are), an exquisite torture which I do not know how to describe. I am all loss. It may be that loss is the bare matter of all our human transcendence. I do not know. But this panic in my breast! For here I am, existing, and such is the supernatural state of my existence that it surely argues a supernatural agency: and yet against the weight of my existence comes with the crudity of a mighty battering ram a conviction that it proves only nothing, that my entire consciousness has no implication beyond its puny flutterings in its own moment.
    From where, therefore, the idea that I must narrate this sombre and awful history? For no one has told me so. And yet I believe so, and this belief, perhaps, argues differently? Could it be so? Could this command signify anything more than a strange perverse shadow of my own desire?
My God, if thou pitiest me, thy slave, if thou wouldst vouchsafe me back my own Image, my own Body, then I will make thee the story which Thou Demandest. I swear, on my life and on my death.

Chapter VI

    So it was, gentle interlocutor, in the year of our Lord 1560 that the Baciller Amoroso Valera found himself on a roughly hewn raft floating down the Ribera de Mayo in the vast and populous darkness of infidel Piru: and should I say his heart misgave him? His heart had misgiven him so often, that he had forgotten how to listen to its faint lurchings; they seemed but the irregular beat of its normal workings and no qualms held any forebodings for him. He stared ahead at the sullen brown waters, content for the moment to sit and do nothing, to think nothing. His arms lay like empty sacks beside him, his mouth fell open in his abstraction and a slight train of saliva dropped unnoticed from his slack lip, and sweat crept like slow insects down his face. He was exhausted, he was already sick to death of this romance. But no thoughts turned therefore to his home, for he had no home. Exiled by choice, or by no choice, scoured out his homeland by ambition or greed or despair or hope: he could no longer tell why he was here, he could fathom no reasons. All that existed now for him was the sparkle of light on the slow ripples, the slap and thud of the water against the wood, the claustrophobic chitter of insects from the dark trees that lined the riverbank, now so strangely distant, so strangely self enclosed, that they seemed to be another world from the world of the river. From somewhere to his right came the soft chant of an Indian woman singing as she worked at some task, a long wavering low music which eddied and swayed on the faint wind, now nearer, now further, like the rhythm of a dream. He did not turn his head to look, he had no curiosity. Deeper and deeper he fell into himself, until he scarcely knew he was there.
    He did not know what the woman was singing.
    She kneaded the maize dough with her strong hands.
    She sang of the Eight Disastrous Omens which foretold the fall of the City of Tenochtitlan, which floated like a dream-lily on the blue Lake of Taxcoco in the Valley of Mexico. With its teeming markets full of blossoms and ropes and pots and grain and fish, every thing that can be made or grown or gathered or killed by hand, with its jewelled and gilded temples stinking of human blood, with its seven great causeways and its high ziggurats and broad streets and grand houses and rich treasuries, Tenochtitlan had been splendid and cruel: a harsh and murderous mistress hated by the peoples in the surrounding valley for the gluttony of of its gods. Yet it had been the most beautiful thing in the world.
    No one knew what the Tenochca woman sang, neither the Spanish, nor the Antillean slaves, for they spoke a different language: she had been brought from the North with her grief buried inside her, and she spoke to no one. Only, sometimes, she sang. Her voice, low and broken, played in the mind of Baciller Amoroso Valera like a cracked but still melodious flute, idling beneath his thoughts as the fish swim unseen beneath the surface of the river along the invisible nerves of its currents, and its lament filled his unknowing mind with the hopelessness of the exile who knows he can never return home, because there is no home to return to.

First there was the column of fire
in the tenth year before disaster
a flaming ear of corn
that appeared at midnight
every night for a year
and the people whispered

Second there were flames
in the temple of Huizipochtli
in the eighth year before disaster
the sacred stones blackened and split
and fire broke the altar
and the people whispered

Third there was lightning
in the seventh year before disaster
a clean bolt from the sky
with no thunder following
and the temple of Xiuhtecuhtli
was cleft into rubble
and the people murmured

Fourth there was a burning star
in the fifth year before disaster
which dragged its tail over the sky
even when the sun walked there
and the people began to talk

Fifth we saw huge waves rolling
over Taxcoco's smooth blue surface
which crashed over our rush fields
and the walls of the city
in the fourth year before disaster
and still the people talked

Sixth was the mourning woman
in the third year before disaster
crying alone night after night
so the whole city could hear her:
my children, we must flee!
my children, where shall I take you?
and the people were silent

Seventh Mocteuzma saw
in the second year before disaster
a mirror headed bird
reflecting the entire heavens
but when the King looked twice
he saw a clan of armed men
and the people started weeping

Eighth Mocteuzma saw
in the year of the disaster
double headed men who stalked
the stone streets of his city:
and the King bowed to the Gods
and blood rained from his eyes
and his heart burned
as if it were washed in chili
and the people tore their hair
in the city of Tenochtitlan