Pilgrim (40 page)

Amongst the scrub oak there were also fir and pine, plus a modicum of cork and plane trees—these latter, together with some of the pines, rising above the general growth. Their upper branches often played host to flocks of magpies and crows or starlings. Manolo called these trees the
Talking Place
because of the chattering birds.

Manolo began to tread water, fixing his gaze—as Perro had done—on the highest branches of the Talking Place, which stood on the rising slopes above the lake.

A bird—or what appeared to be a bird of gigantic size—was seated there, its wings outstretched as if to grasp the branches for support. Or perhaps to dry them in the sun as a pelican will do, or a buzzard after feeding on offal.

What could it be?

No bird on earth was so large or so white or so wide.

Staring, Manolo stopped treading water and sank.

Spluttering back to the surface, his eyes streaming and the sun so bright it almost blinded him, he could see now that what he beheld was an angel. For only angels have wings so wide and only angels sit so still.

Manolo swam to shore, clambered onto the bank and took up his sticks.

The hair on the ridge of Perro’s back was raised and his tail drooped.

“Come thee with me,” Manolo whispered, touching the dog’s ears and leading the way upward, beneath the trees.

In the dappled shade as he hobbled amongst the dozing sheep, Manolo had the look of a creature half-seen, as if the particles of his being were only then forming to become coherent. He stumbled—he flailed—and the sparkling light and the golden shade divided his limbs, his sticks and his torso into segments that were so disjointed he was barely recognizable as human. And beside him, the shadow of his dog seemed to be a part of Manolo that had been shed and was waiting to be redefined. That it moved was a certainty, but what it was could not be told.

At last—and out of breath—they came to the foot of the tree in which the angel sat. In fact, she gave the appearance more of being entangled in the branches than of sitting amongst them willingly.

Manolo stared.

Perro lay down at his feet and was silent.

The angel’s face was turned towards heaven. Amongst the leaves, she had the look of someone who has gone alone into a great cathedral and while seated there is bathed in the light of stained-glass windows. Manolo had seen this once in Avila, when he was taken there as a child in the hopes that a miracle might occur that would cure him of his palsy. There had been no miracle—but Manolo had been inspired to believe the figures in the windows breathed and had life. They were on fire with light, and shimmered in such a way as to convince him he had seen them move.

Now, there was an angel.

Manolo did not speak. It would be improper.

At last, the angel turned and saw him.

“Have you come here to pray?” she asked him.

“No, ma’am. I came thee to see.”

“Is this your tree?”

“No, ma’am. The tree its own.”

“I see.”

The angel took a firmer grasp of the branches where she was seated.

“Do you think you could help me get down?” she said.

“Thee cannot fly?” Manolo asked.

“No.”

“Then how thou in the tree?”

“I can’t explain. It happens—but I can’t explain it.”

“Happens?”

“I rise. As you can see, I rise sometimes as far as this—other times, not so far. But it is not my doing. It simply happens.”

“Does it hurt thee?”

“No. It makes me dizzy. Then I laugh.”

“Perro is afraid of thee.”

“Who is Perro?”

“My dog. He thought thou were a bird so big thou would fly away with him to eat.”

“I do not eat dogs—and I cannot fly away. I have no wings.”

Hearing his name and the tone of the angel’s voice, Perro looked up and began to wag his tail.

Then the angel said: “the trouble with rising is that
one must come down. Have you a ladder, by any chance?”

“I do not know
ladder
.”

“Steps. Stairs. As in houses.”

“I do not know houses.”

“Well—I shall try to climb down the branches.”

So saying, the angel began her descent. First, she had to disentangle her dress from the branches around her—especially her “wings,” her billowing white sleeves.

Manolo stood back so as not to be in her way and Perro rose and moved behind him. The angel was clumsy and twice she nearly fell, but at last she stood on the earth and shook out her skirts.

She stared at Manolo frankly and without embarrassment. “You are naked,” she said.

Manolo said: “I am often naked. There is no one ever here.” The angel smiled. “My name is Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada,” she said. “I have come to
La Sierra de Gredos
to stay with my uncle Don Pedro, who is my father’s brother.”

Manolo hobbled to one side and attempted to hide behind a tree. “I should like to return to the water,” he said.

“The water. Yes. I could see it from the tree. Las Aguas. My uncle told me of it.”

Teresa led the way.

“Mind thee the sheep,” Manolo said as they started their descent through the woods. “It is their siesta before they go to graze again.”

Perro ran ahead, loping between the trees, expertly navigating his way amongst the slumbering sheep and lambs so that none was disturbed.

As they broke into the open, Teresa stopped in her tracks and, gazing at the man-made lake before her, spread her arms as if she wanted to embrace it. “Oh,” she said, “I have never seen anywhere so beautiful.”

On the far side of the water, a flight of pelicans was resting on the surface amongst the reeds, their feathers stained with yellow dust.

“They come for siesta, too,” said Manolo. “And every day ducks, the sheep and Perro and me—we sleep to the song of the cicada. You hear them now?”

They moved out onto the embankment, where Manolo had earlier scattered his clothes. There was wine there, too—in a skin—and the remnants of bread and cheese, tied in a kerchief. Perro walked into the lake to drink.

Then Manolo said: “close thou thine eyes. I am afraid for thee to see me when I walk.”

Teresa covered her face with her hands and said to him: “I am blind.”

Manolo went to the water’s edge with his sticks where, dropping them, he staggered into the lake and paddled far enough away so that he could stand and yet be covered.

“Now thou may look thee.”

But Teresa had already looked. Moving her fingers just enough to provide her with a view of Manolo’s falling stride as he passed, she had seen his back, noting
a birthmark there in the shape of a butterfly. She had also seen quite plainly that without the sticks he was all but helpless.

Dropping her hands, she sat down beside his clothes and asked him how old he was.

“I be eighteen,” he said. “By count. I can count to one hundred.”

“May you live so long!”

A kingfisher flew down from the trees on the opposite shore and skimmed the waters. Blue. Green. Brilliant.

“That was a messenger from God,” said Teresa. “Did you know that? Pelicans, herons and kingfishers—all are messengers in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Jesus was also a fisherman of men and a shepherd of sheep. Shepherd of God, King Fisher, Lord.”

Manolo slowly waved his arms in the water. “I am not of God,” he said dreamily, smoothing the surface. “I am a shepherd only of sheep.”

“But the sheep are of God,” said Teresa. “We are all of God.”

“Not I,” he said. “So broken. God was not present at my birth. And when Don Pedro—your uncle—took me to Avila to receive the Virgin’s blessing in the Cathedral there, I came away as I had entered—on my sticks.”

Teresa threw a stone into the water. “God is everywhere,” she said.

Manolo looked away.

“He is with that stone as it sinks,” Teresa went on. “And with every bird as it rises.” She sat down and
spread her skirts. She was dressed in what appeared to be the habit of a Carmelite nun. The difference was that her hair, which had a reddish tinge, fell freely to her shoulders and beyond. On her feet, there were sandals and at her waist a rosary hung from a twisted silken cord.

“I believe in God the Father. And I believe God the Father believes in me…” she said. And smiled. “And I know that God the Father believes in you. He believes in all of us. One day, you will know this. He is everywhere—in everyone.”

Teresa’s mother, Doña Beatriz, had died five years earlier, when Teresa had been thirteen. They had shared a love of romance and of romantic notions concerning everything from literature to music to what one wore and how one presented oneself in a world where, one day, a husband must be won. That was then. Teresa de Cepeda had grown up feasting on chivalry, martyrdom and all noble causes. At the age of six, she had set out with her brother Rodrigo, who was ten, to seek martyrdom amongst the Moors of North Africa. Don Pedro had spied the lost children by chance on the road to Salamanca and had returned them to their parents.

This was the pattern of Teresa’s beliefs. To find the Holy Grail, to sail with the great explorers to America and the Orient, to climb through the sky to find the Almighty or to dig through the earth and drag the Devil into the light of day. She read poetry. She read novels. She dressed as Queen Isabella. She affected the robes of the Carmelites. She experimented with
theatrical, even whorish cosmetics—and had once dyed her hair with henna. But the discovery of self had not so much to do with one’s destination as with one’s capacity to achieve it. Clearly, for Teresa de Cepeda, God was at the far end of all these dreamings—but could one reach Him?

She also suffered the dizzying heights of levitation. And worse, she suffered the fiery visions of epilepsy. She was prone to fainting; she endlessly fasted; she retired to her bed; she prayed on her knees for hours on end and then abruptly turned her back on her own sanctuary and went out riding with her brothers into the high Sierra, where she would gallop out of sight and not come home till nightfall.

She was a gross of contradictions, but equally, she never did anything with less than total dedication. Nothing was frivolous. Fun and games were serious occupations. And her love of God was so great, her devotion to prayer so rigid that her father Don Alonso feared he would lose his only daughter to a convent.

In the months prior to her arrival in
la tierra dorada
, she had been extremely ill and a cause for great concern. She had been a paying guest in Avila’s Convent of Our Lady of Grace. The nuns there were of the Augustinian order and renowned as teachers. Teresa’s acceptance of their teachings was polite and scholarly—but guarded. She took and privatized what was agreeable and quietly discarded the rest. And then, all at once, she fell ill and was so gravely sick, the nuns feared for her life.

Don Alonso and his sons came to the convent and
took Teresa home, where slowly she began to recover. There were, however, relapses and she was greatly weakened. It was then that her father brought her to Don Pedro, in order that she might convalesce in the sun and the air and the golden light of
la tierra dorada.

Now, as Teresa sat on the shore of Las Aguas with Perro at her feet and Manolo standing Baptist-like in the water, a braying sound was heard.

“Oh, dear Heaven!” Teresa exclaimed and jumped to her feet. “My poor Picaro! I forgot all about him.”

But she need not have worried. Burros are not adventurous and he would not have wandered off. He had, in fact, found his way down through the trees and safely past the sheep to where his mistress sat on the grass in the sun.

“Picaro,” she cried and threw her arms around his neck. “I am so sorry, my Picaro.” She turned to Manolo, laughed and said: “he is my rascal, and I love him.” She kissed the burro between his ears. “He carries me everywhere—and I left him all alone up there. Oh, I am so very, very sorry.”

“Bring him here and let him drink.”

Teresa led Picaro forward and watched him wade out towards Manolo, where he threw his head back and brayed with the sheer joy of the cool water all about him. At the sound of his voice, the cicadas stopped singing and the pelicans almost took flight, but decided he was harmless and resettled.

Looking around her at the hills, the lake, the sky, the woods, the sheep, the dog, the burro, the birds and the naked man, Teresa said to Manolo: “here is God
Himself. This place and all of us together, we are God.”

From the trees on the opposite shore, a flight of ring-necked doves rose up into the air with a dusty clap of wings, circled three times above the lake and flew away into the hills.

“It is true,” Teresa said. “What I tell you is true. God Himself just said so.”

5

T
.

Carved into the bark of a tree.

T.

Jung sat back.

It was Emma who had made the connection. As her pregnancy had proceeded, she had become increasingly engrossed in reading Pilgrim’s journals—most of which still languished locked in their drawer in Jung’s study. Carl Gustav had finally given her the key and asked her to read more of them for him, since time had filled up with other aspects of his inquiry into Pilgrim’s life and his involvement with other patients. So long as the journals were not removed from his study and were always returned to their place after reading, he agreed she could have access to them. To this, Emma had been faithful.

Perhaps, however, there was also an element of intimidation in Jung’s confrontation with the journals. This, at least, was Emma’s interpretation. She had
watched him withdraw from them over the past few days and had concluded that they were too “personal” for him—too insistent on a single storyline told from one man’s point of view, leaving no room for the kind of exploration Carl Gustav found in personal confrontation. Speaking of another patient, he had once told Emma that “the man, not the work, is my purview.” He was speaking of an artist—a painter—and had concluded that “some men hide in what they create in a deliberate attempt to remain unknown.” Emma’s reaction to this had been: “well? Does it matter? Art is not about the artist. Art is about itself.”