Iacobus (20 page)

“We know that but it’s possible that we, unlike yourself, will never return to these parts.”

Nobody looked like he was thinking.

“At least let the boy come with me,” he said in the end. “His opinion will be very helpful when choosing our saddles.”

“Yes, please, let me go with him,” begged my stupid son, imploringly.

“Fine,” I gave in, although I didn’t want to. “Go with him to buy the horses. We’ll meet at the inn within the hour.”

Why, I asked myself, as I walked alone along the rua Mayor, why all of this? Why did I accept to travel by horse? Why am I letting the old man interfere in our lives? Why am I neglecting my first and foremost duty, a mission in which the Papacy and the Hospital of St. John have important interests? Why am I neglecting what is best for my son, his gradual initiation into the Mysteries, impossible to carry out in the company of Nobody? Why am I defying Count Le Mans like this? Why? Why? Why?

The parish church — and I couldn’t deny its Templar origin — had a strange structure split into two identical naves (rather than a single nave or three naves, as is normal), although one of them was an adjacent chapel, lacking an altar and a sacred statue. In the first, a Virgin sat on a throne with a child on her lap, staring blankly at the space in front of her, as if nothing that happened there could affect her in any way. It was the statue of St. Mary of Orzs, a neat and well-carved sculpture but of no interest to me. Had the Templars missed Puente la Reina? I didn’t think so, so I rather anxiously headed towards the second nave.

Strangely, the apse was covered by a heavy, black cloth which, of course, arose my curiosity. What could be behind it? A church doesn’t have an empty nave for no reason, there had to be some compelling reason for such a puzzling occurrence, and seeing as I couldn’t see any signs of building work or scaffolding that justified this protection, the cover must be for some other reason. I didn’t hesitate, and at the risk of being reprimanded by one of the pilgrims who was praying there at the time, I lifted one of the bottom corners of the cloth.

“What are you doing?” shouted a high-pitched voice in the silence of the temple.

“I’m looking. Aren’t I allowed to?” I replied without letting go of the cloth.

“No, you’re not.”

“This is not forbidden,” I said, hastily scanning what was underneath.

“Let go of that cloth right now or I’ll have to call the guards!”

I couldn’t believe what I saw before me … I just couldn’t believe it. I had to remember all of the details. I needed time to get a good look at it.

“And who do you think you are, shouting in a church?” I asked stupidly, trying to keep the owner of the voice occupied. His footsteps were quickly approaching through the nave.

“I’m a member of the brotherhood of this parish!” said the voice just a second later, now next to my ear, at the same time as an old, frail hand crushed the fabric against the wall, concluding my inspection, “I’m the person in charge of its custody and supervision. “And who are you?”

“A pilgrim of the Camino de Santiago, just a pilgrim,” I exclaimed feigning distress. “My curiosity got the better of me. Tell me, who painted these beautiful paintings?”

“The German master, Johan Oliver,” explained the mean watchman. “But as you can see, they are not finished. Which is why you can’t look at them.”

“But they are unsurpassable!”

“Yes, but they will more than likely be replaced by a real Crucifix, similar to the ones painted on the wall.”

“And why is that?” I asked curiously.

“What do I know!”

“You’re not very friendly, brother.”

“And you lack the respect that should be paid to this holy place! So get out, you scoundrel! Out of here! Do you hear? I said out!”

I practically ran out of the church but not from fear of that brother’s bravado which didn’t scare me in the slightest — which is why I took on a humble attitude, which was more believable for a clown like him —, but because I needed to sit down somewhere and carefully think about everything I had seen.

Not far away, I stumbled across the stunning door of the Church of St. James and sat down, like a beggar, against one of the door posts. I don’t know why I stayed there but I didn’t understand very much about the road I was following. Everything was magical, symbolic, everything was multiple and ambiguous, each sign represented a thousand possible things and every possible thing was mysteriously linked to places, knowledge, facts or periods infinitely distant or close in time and space but this only served to increase its mystery.

Behind the black curtain in the apse, I had found the most extraordinary representation that I had ever seen, of the many that I had seen throughout my life: On a universal background, the image of a crucified Jesus Christ, with a human size and shape, hung dying from a forked tree in the shape of a Y, with his body twisted to the left and his head turned the other way. The drama of the scene was so raw and sublime, and the realism was such that I could not repress a shudder every time I thought of it. But there was more: Over the head of Christ, or on top of the tree, the watchful eye of a majestic eagle was looking at a distant sunset. That’s what I had seen and that’s what I had to interpret. Nothing in this life is accidental, and that representation was the least accidental thing that had existed in the history of the world. It was there for some reason, it had that appearance for some reason and there was definitely a reason why it had been covered, and well covered at that.

I began to weigh up possible interpretations. It’s never good to jump to conclusions. So, what did I have? I had a German painter, called Johan Oliver, who had left some paintings unfinished; I had some paintings that would soon be replaced by a real crucifix, similar to the wall panel
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; and I had an extraordinary wall panel covered by black cloth so as it could not be seen. Those were the facts. Now for the symbols. I had a crucifixion without a cross — in one of the capitals in the cloisters at Eunate I had found the same allusion —, because the Y shaped tree, with its bark-covered trunk, from which emerged two higher branches at the height of the abdomen of Christ, was not a cross but rather a known representation of the Pata de Oca, or the Goose Foot, a sign of recognition of the secret brethren of master builders and initiated pontifexes (executors, like Solomon with his temple, of the sacred principles of transcendent architecture); I had a majestic eagle, a symbol of illumination, that could either represent the dazzling sunlight or represent St. John the Evangelist; and lastly, I had a beautiful sunset, a foreshadow of mysterious death that converts the initiated member into a son of the Earth and the Sky.

So, what? What conclusion could I draw from all that? Perhaps the link between all these factors was so absurd that even having it in front of me I could not see it, or maybe it was such a tenuous relationship that I could not grasp it because of its insignificance. It was also possible, I told myself in desperation, that the link was so convoluted and confusing that nobody who was not in possession of the exact key, of the specific one for that tangled web, could correctly de-construct the pieces. Neither could I leave out, of course, the capital at Eunate, with its significant evangelical error, which also showed plausible correlations with the wall paintings. My blindness was frustrating; I did nothing but look for possible combinations of symbols, names and affinities. Maybe I was missing something, maybe my process was not right … The sad truth is that I hadn’t managed to find anything logical.

During the years I had spent studying the Qabalah, one of the basic things I learned was that a good Kabbalist never surrenders to the obstacles and problems he is faced with during his investigation. Rather, he accepts the existence of those difficulties as another aspect of his learning and, once he has done that, he is in the right frame of mind to perceive what must be changed.

Horses’ hooves brought me out of my distraction. And when I say horses’ hooves, I literally mean horses’ hooves, and not their sound, which had somehow penetrated into my brain. Sitting as I was at the entrance to the Church of St. James, with my head sunk between my shoulders and looking at the floor, I saw the hooves of animals coming towards me and stopping in front of my face, and before I had time to react, the offended voice of Jonas began to reproach me for my absence from up high on his palfrey.

“Weren’t we going to meet at the inn an hour after we split up, father? Well, we’ve been waiting for you …, father!”

“How long have I been here?” I asked as I stood up with difficulty, pressing the palms of my hands against the columns of the portico.

“We don’t know how long you have been sitting here,” explained Nobody, bending down slightly to hand me the reins of my steed. “But you have been absent for more than two hours, Don Galceran.”

“More than two hours, father!”

I had had enough of the boy’s insolence.

I didn’t think twice. I stuck out my right arm and grabbed Jonas by the scruff of his doublet, pulling him down without compassion. As his feet were in the stirrups, he stumbled and fell awkwardly to the ground, without me letting go of my grip. From down below his eyes reflected fear and terror, and mine a resentment that I was far from feeling.

“Listen to me, Garcia Galcerañez: This had better be the last time in your life that you disrespect your father,” I whispered. “The last, do you hear me? Who do you think you are, impertinent, miserable servant? Give thanks to the Virgin that I have not covered your body in welts and get back on your horse before I regret that I haven’t.”

I hoisted him up with one hand by the clothes I was still holding on to, and dropped him like a puppet onto the saddle. I saw the anger and powerlessness reflected in his pale, trembling face. I even saw a ray of hatred flash in his eyes but the boy was not bad and his anger dissolved into bitter tears as I mounted my horse and we left Puente la Reina at the slow pace of our steeds. He was no longer the boy I had found when I arrived at the Monastery of Ponç de Riba, that small Garcia, who spied on me from the library windows and who ran out of the infirmary, gathering the tiny folds of the puer oblatus habit. He now had the body of a man, the voice of a man and the temperament of a man which is why, although his mind was often still that of a child, he had to begin to behave like a real man and not like a common peasant.

As we left Puente la Reina we began to gallop. My steed was a splendid animal with a good height and light as a breeze and I would have happily taken him into any battle. But the horse that Nobody had bought for himself was by far the best of the three; gallant, arrogant and hot-blooded.

In a pater noster we crossed the villages of Mañeru and Cirauqui and, following the route of an ancient Roman road, we quickly reached the hamlet of Urbe. The sun was setting in the west to our right when we crossed a small bridge with two arches over the slow-flowing River Salado: ‘Careful not to drink from there, neither you or your horse, as it is a deadly river!’ said Aymeric Picaud in the Codex. Not that we believed him but just in case we followed his advice.

Having crossed the river, we went up a hill, and on the right track, entered Lorca. From there, we crossed a magnificent stone bridge, reached Villatuerta, at the exit of which the Camino branches towards Montejurra and Irache on the left, and Estella on the right, which is the direction we took without slowing our horses.

Estella was a magnificent city filled with monuments, stocked with all kinds of goods. Through its center flowed the fresh, healthy and extraordinary water of the River Ega, over which were three bridges that joined its banks at the start, in the middle and at the end of the town. Within it were churches, palaces and monasteries, one after the other, competing in beauty and magnificence. One couldn’t ask more from a city along the Camino, that was for sure.

We stayed in the monastery inn of St. Lazerus, and we were surprised to find that the official language of Estella was the Provençal language, that the monks of the inn were French, and that most of the population was made up of descendants of Francs who had come from their country to establish themselves as merchants. A few Navarres and Jews from the aljama made up the rest of the neighborhood.

Taking advantage of Nobody’s brief absence at dinner, I questioned the Gaul Cluniacs at our inn. I was very relieved to hear that I would not come across anything Templar that day since the Temple milites had barely made an appearance in those parts, unless it was to fight in some famous battle against the Saracens. Nor had there been any Templar sites in Estella which I was very glad about seeing as I was freed from any investigation for the time being. When I saw Nobody return to the table with a spring in his step, I changed my line of questioning and asked about a group of French Jews who were traveling to Leon and should have passed through there the day before, or two days before at most.

“If you want to know anything about the Jews,” replied the monk with a sudden change of attitude which went from kindness to obvious contempt, “ask in the aljama of Olgacena. You should know that no assassin of Christ would dare to pass through the holy doors of our house.”

Jonas, who since the incident that day in Puente la Reina was more friendly, courteous and polite than ever, looked surprised.

“What’s his problem?”

“Jews are not well seen in all parts.”

“I know that,” he argued, with a voice as soft as cotton. “What I want to know is why he became so aggressive.”

“The intensity of the hate towards the Jews, Garcia, varies notoriously from one place to another. Here, for some reason we are unaware of, they appear to be especially hostile towards them.”

“I want to go with you to the aljama.”

“I’d like to visit there as well,” said Nobody quickly.

“And I say that I will go alone,” I announced in a tone that brooked no argument, staring at Jonas so he didn’t try to argue with me. I was not willing to let Nobody accompany me in anything I did and if I took Jonas with me, I would also have to take the old man. I think that the boy understood (and if he didn’t understand at least he seemed to accept my order with grace). So, after dinner, they headed to the bedroom and I went out into the streets again in search of the aljama.