The Last Temptation of Christ (24 page)

In the middle of the yard, beneath the large almond tree, which was heavy with fruit, Judas the redbeard was bent over, silent, swinging his hammer and fitting iron bands around the wine barrels. If you looked at him from the right, his face was sullen and full of malice; if you looked at him from the left, it was uneasy and sad. Many days had passed since he fled like a thief from the monastery. During this time he had gone around the villages fitting up barrels for the new must. He would enter the houses, work, listen to the talk and register in his mind the words and deeds of each man, in order to inform the brotherhood of everything. But where was the old redbeard—the rowdy, the wrangler! Ever since the day he left the monastery, he had been unrecognizable.

“Damn it, Judas Iscariot, open your mouth, devil-hair,” Zebedee yelled at him. “What are you thinking about? Two and two make four—haven’t you realized that yet? Open your mouth, you blessed ruffian, and say something. This is the vintage—no small matter. On a day like this everyone laughs, even the sullen black sheep.”

“Don’t lead him into temptation, Zebedee,” Philip interrupted. “He went to the monastery; it seems he wants to don the robe. Haven’t you heard? When the devil gets old, he becomes a monk!”

Judas turned and threw a venomous glance at Philip but did not speak. He detested him. He wasn’t a man; no, he was all words and no action, a prattler. At the last minute he’d become paralyzed with fear and had refused to enter the brotherhood. “I have sheep,” was his excuse. “I have sheep; how can I leave them?”

Old Zebedee burst out laughing and turned to the redbeard. “Take care, wretch,” he shouted at him. “Monasticism is a contagious disease. Look out you don’t catch it! My own son escaped by a hair’s breadth. My old lady got sick, bless her, and her pet learned about it. He had already finished his schooling in herbs with the Abbot, so he came home to doctor her. He won’t leave here again, mark my words. Where to go? He’s not insane, is he? There, in the desert, there’s hunger, thirst, prostrations—and God. Here there’s food, wine, women—and God. Everywhere God. So, why go look for him in the desert? What’s your opinion, Judas Iscariot?”

But the redbeard swung his hammer and did not answer. What could he say to him? Everything came to this filthy dog just as he wanted it. How could he understand the next man’s troubles? Even God, who wiped others off the face of the earth for the jump of a flea, flattered and coddled this swine, this parasite, this lickpenny; kept him from suffering the slightest harm, fell over him like a woolen cloak in the winter, like cool linen in the summer. Why? What did he see in him? Was the old bastard devoured with concern for Israel? Why, he wouldn’t lift his little finger to help Israel—he loved the Roman criminals because they guarded his wealth. May God protect them, he said, for they maintain order. If not for them, the mob of ruffians and barefooted riffraff would fall all over us, and that would be the last we’d see of our property. ... But, never fear, you old bastard, the hour will come. What God forgets and leaves undone the Zealots, bless them, will remember and do. Patience, Judas; do not breathe a word. Patience. Jehovah Sabaoth’s day will come!

Raising his turquoise eyes, he looked at Zebedee and saw him in the wine press, floating on his back in his own blood. His whole face smiled.

By this time the four giants had carefully scrubbed their legs and jumped into the press. Sunk up to the knees, they stamped and trampled the grapes, stooping to pick up whole fistfuls, which they ate, filling their beards with the stems. Sometimes they danced hand in hand, sometimes each screamed and jumped by himself. The smell of the must had made them drunk—and the must was not all: as they looked through the opened front door toward the vineyards they saw the girls bend over to pick the grapes, and their beauty was visible even above the knees, and their breasts, like clusters of grapes, swung back and forth over the vine leaves.

The treaders saw them, and their minds grew turbid. This was not a wine press, that was not land and vineyard, but Paradise, with old Jehovah Sabaoth sitting on the platform holding a long stick and a penknife and marking his exact obligation to each: how many hampers of grapes each had brought and how many jugs of wine, day after tomorrow when they died, he would offer them—how many jugs of wine, how many cauldrons of food, how many women!

“On my honor,” snapped Peter, “if God came this very moment and said to me, ‘Hey, Peter, my little Peter, I’m in the best of moods today, ask me a favor, any favor, and I’ll do it for you. What do you want?’—if he asked me that I should answer him, ‘To tread grapes, Lord, to tread grapes for all eternity!’ ”

“And not to drink the wine, blockhead?” Zebedee rudely asked him.

“No, from the bottom of my heart: to tread the grapes!” He did not laugh; his face was serious and absorbed. He stopped treading for a moment and stretched in the sun. His upper body was bare, and tattooed over his heart was a large black fish. An artisan, formerly a prisoner, had tapped it on years before with a needle, so skillfully that you thought it moved its tail and swam happily, all tangled up in the curly hairs of Peter’s chest. Above the fish was a small anchor with four crossed arms, each with a barb.

But Philip remembered his sheep. He did not like to plow the land, care for vineyards or tread grapes.

“Good God, Peter,” he scoffed, “some job you found yourself—treading grapes for all eternity! I should have asked the Lord to make heaven and earth a green meadow full of goats and sheep. I should then milk them and send the milk flowing down the mountainside. It would run like a river and form lakes on the plain so that the poor could drink. And every night all of us should gather—all the shepherds, together with God the chief shepherd; we should light a fire, roast a lamb and tell stories. That is the meaning of Paradise!”

“A plague on you, moron!” grumbled Judas, and he threw another fierce glance at Philip.

The adolescents went in and out of the yard, naked, hairy, with a colored rag around their loins. They listened to these disconnected discussions and laughed. They too had a Paradise inside them, but they did not confess what it was. They shoveled the hampers into the press and then with one bound were over the threshold and off to rejoin the pretty vintagers.

Zebedee parted his lips to add a clever remark but remained standing with gaping mouth. A strange visitor had appeared at the door and was listening to them. He wore a black goatskin which hung from his neck; his feet were bare, his hair disheveled and his face yellow, like sulphur. His eyes were large, black, and fiery.

The feet ceased treading, Zebedee swallowed his witticism, and everyone turned toward the door. Who was this living corpse who stood on the threshold? The laughter came to a standstill. Old Salome appeared at the window, looked, and suddenly cried, “It’s Andrew!”

“Good God, Andrew,” shouted Zebedee, “just look at you! Are you returning to us from the underworld? Or maybe you’re on your way down there!”

Peter jumped out of the wine press, clasped his brother’s hand without uttering a word, and looked at him with love and fright. Oh, God, was this Andrew, Andrew the chubby young hero, the celebrated athlete, first in work and play? Was this the Andrew who had been engaged to flaxen-haired Ruth, the prettiest girl in the village? She had been drowned on the lake together with her father, one night when God raised a terrible wind, and Andrew had left in despair in order to surrender himself, bound hand and foot, to God. Who could tell, he thought. If I join God perhaps I shall find her with him. Obviously, he was seeking his fiancée, not God.

Peter stared at him in terror. He remembered how he had been when they surrendered him to God; and now, look how God had returned him to them!

“Hey,” Zebedee shouted at Peter, “are you going to stare at him and finger him all day long? Let him come in; out there a wind might blow and knock him down! Come in, Andrew my boy, bend over, take some grapes and eat. We have bread too, glory be to God. Eat and put some color in your cheeks, because if your poor old father sees you in the state you’re in, he’ll be so scared he’ll burrow right back into his shark!”

But Andrew raised his bony arm: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves!” he shouted to them all. “Don’t you fear God? The world is perishing, and you tread grapes here and laugh!”

“The saints preserve us, here’s another one come to give us a hard time!” grumbled Zebedee, and now he turned to Andrew in a rage. “You won’t leave us alone either, eh? We’re stuffed to the gills, if you want to know. Is this what your prophet the Baptist proclaims? Well, you’d better tell him to change his tune. He says the end of the world has come, that the tombs will open and the dead fly out; he says God will descend—Second Coming!—to open the ledger, and then woe is us! Lies! Lies! Lies! Don’t listen to him, lads. On with our work! Tread the grapes!”

“Repent! Repent!” bellowed the son of Jonah. He shook himself out of his brother’s embrace and stood in the middle of the yard, directly in front of old Zebedee, with his finger lifted toward the sky.

“For your own good, Andrew,” said Zebedee, “sit down, eat, drink a bit of wine and come to your senses. Poor thing, hunger has driven you mad!”

“Easy living has driven you mad, Zebedee,” replied the son of Jonah. “But the ground is opening under your feet, the Lord is an earthquake, he’ll swallow your wine press and your boats and you too, you and your confounded belly!”

He had caught fire. Shifting his eyes from side to side, he pinned them now on one, now on another, and shouted, “Before this must turns to wine, the end of the world will come! Put on hair shirts, spread ashes over your heads, beat your breasts and shout ‘I have sinned! I have sinned!’ The earth is a tree, it has grown rotten, and the Messiah is coming with the ax!”

Judas stopped his hammering. His upper lip had rolled back and his sharp teeth gleamed in the sunlight. But Zebedee could control himself no longer.

“For the love of God, Peter,” he shouted, “take him and get out of here. We’ve work to do. ‘He’s coming! He’s coming!’ Sometimes be holds fire, sometimes a ledger and now—what next! An ax. Why can’t you leave us alone, you impostors, you deceivers of the people? This world is holding up fine, just fine—that’s what I say! ... Tread the grapes, men, and rest assured!”

Peter patted his brother tenderly on the back to calm him. “Be still,” he said to him softly, “be still, Brother; don’t shout. You’re tired from your trip. Let’s go home so that you can get some rest and so Father can see you and quiet his heart.”

He took him by the hand and slowly, carefully, guided his way as though he were blind. They went up the narrow street and disappeared.

Old Zebedee burst into laughter. “Eh, miserable Jonah, my poor old fish-prophet, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes for all the world!”

But now it was old Salome’s turn to open her mouth. She still felt Andrew’s large eyes hanging over her and burning her. “Zebedee,” she said, shaking her white-haired head, “mind what you say, old sinner. Do not laugh. An angel stands above us and writes. You will be paid in kind for your scoffing.”

“Mother is right,” said Jacob, who until now had kept his mouth locked. “You were within a hair’s breadth of suffering the same thing with John, your pet; and as far as I can see, you’re still not out of danger. He isn’t helping with the vintage, so I’m told by the carriers; he’s sitting with the women and slobbering about God and fasting and immortal souls. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes either, Father!”

He laughed dryly. He could not stomach his lazy, pampered brother, and started furiously to stamp the grapes.

The blood rose to Zebedee’s large head. He, in his turn, could not stomach his eldest son—they resembled each other too much. A quarrel would have broken out if at that moment Mary, the wife of Joseph of Nazareth, had not appeared at the door, leaning on John’s arm. Her thin feet were bloody and covered with dust from her long journey. For days now she had abandoned her house and gone from village to village, weeping, in search of her unfortunate son. God had robbed him of his senses; he had departed from the ways of men. Sighing, the mother sang her son’s dirge while he was still alive. She asked, asked everywhere, if anyone had seen him: “He’s tall, thin, barefooted; he was wearing a blue tunic and a black leather belt. Have you noticed him, perhaps?” ... No one had seen him, and it was only now, thanks to Zebedee’s younger son, that she had got on his trail. He was at the monastery in the desert. He had donned the white robe and was prostrate, face down on the earth, praying. ... John, feeling sorry for her, had revealed everything. Now, leaning on his arm, she entered Zebedee’s yard for a bit of rest before she set out for the desert.

Old Salome rose majestically. “Welcome, Mary dear,” she said. “Come inside.”

Mary lowered her kerchief to her brows, bowed her head and passed through the yard with her eyes on the ground. Grasping her elderly friend’s hand, she began to cry.

“It’s a great sin for you to cry, my child,” said old Salome. She placed her on the divan and sat down by her side. “Your son is in safety now; he’s under God’s roof.”

“A mother’s pain is heavy, Salome,” Mary answered with a sigh. “God sent me but one boy, and he a blemished one.”

Old Zebedee heard her complaint (he was not a bad man if one did not interfere with his profits) and came down from his platform in order to comfort her. “It’s his youth, Mary,” he said, “his youth. Don’t worry about it—it will pass. Youth, bless it, is like wine, but we sober up soon enough and slide under the yoke without any more kicking. Your son will sober up too, Mary. Take my own son, the one you see before you: he’s beginning now to get sober, glory be to God.”

John blushed but did not say a word. He went inside to fetch a cup of cold water and some ripe figs to offer the visitor. The two women, sitting side by side, their heads touching, talked about the boy who had been swept away by God. They conversed in whispers so that the men would not hear them and by interfering spoil the deep feminine joy given them by pain.

“He prays and prays, your son tells me, Salome; he prostrates himself so much, his hands and knees have become all calloused. John says also that he doesn’t eat, that he’s melting away. He’s begun to see wings in the air, too. It seems he even refuses to drink water, in order to see the angels. Where can this affliction lead, Salome? Not even his uncle the rabbi can heal him, and think how many other people possessed with devils he has cured. Why has God cursed me, Salome; what have I done to him?”