The Day of the Bees Page 14
Then the sweeping shoreline of a vast bay appeared. Beyond it loomed an architecture of Arab fantasy and gothic excess, stone spires and turrets of castles and cathedrals. The distant city of Palma glinted in dreamlike splendor. One could envision an Arab sheik in flowing white robes, or a Christian Crusader in shining armor, riding on horseback down from the mountains above, ready to enjoy the fruits of life after fighting a long war. This is also how it must have appeared to Zermano fifty years before, when the population of the city was one-tenth of what it was today, before the onslaught of cars and jets, a time in its way closer to the rhythms of shepherds and fishermen than to super-discos and hyper-markets.
In Palma I went directly to the Ministry of Culture to present a letter of introduction from my university confirming my credentials as a scholar. I thought I might find someone there sympathetic to my cause, willing to drop a hint as to the great artist’s whereabouts. Indeed, I was received respectfully and given access to the Zermano archives, which filled three full floors. There wasn’t much in the archives with which I wasn’t familiar. The only thing different was to be able to handle the original materials, rather than to stare at them on a computer screen from six thousand miles away. The one surprise was a large number of previously untranslated lectures regarding the influence on Zermano of Ramón Llull, a thirteenth-century messianic mystic.
Ramón Llull lived variously as a Don Juan, a hermit, the tutor of a future king, the founder of Mallorca’s first Franciscan monastery and Europe’s first school of Oriental languages. His protean outpouring of over two hundred books, fired by his neoplatonic philosophy and his radical belief that Jews, Christians, and Moslems were all of one faith, resulted in his martyrdom in North Africa. Llull’s death instigated one of history’s first conspiracy theories. Revisionists still joust over whether he was killed by ignorant tribesmen or set up by the three organized religions who wanted him out of business. Llull’s best-known work, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, is rediscovered each year by students who regard it as the equal in significance to the Song of Solomon or Das Kapital.
The aesthetic connection between Llull and Zermano, Mallorca’s native sons, was one I had never taken seriously. But Llull, the outlaw philosopher and first liberation theologian, is considered in some quarters to rank between the Pope and Christ, while Zermano fits between Velázquez and Goya. Even so, I had no reason to pursue the parallel theories of these two men any further. I abandoned the archives and queried Ministry officials as to where they guessed Zermano might be. This was frustrating, since Mallorquins are notoriously indirect. Their wariness is the result of centuries of domination, from the Vandals to the Spanish. So I was dealing not only with the cover-up of Zermano, but the island’s paranoia.
The outside world has always posed a threat to the Mallorcan paradise; deception has been its best defense. From the Roman chariots that thundered across the inner plains, and the invaders from the Maghreb storming the coast, to modern mass tourism, Mallorca has been under attack. Today’s outsider is met with a deceptive smile, a discourse on why the remaining natural splendor of the island must be saved, and a polite inquiry as to when the traveler would be leaving. A Mallorcan folk song best expresses this subterfuge: “I went I know not where and met someone I don’t remember. He asked me something I didn’t understand so I can’t recall my answer.” Everyone I queried about Zermano’s whereabouts might just as well have sung me that lyric in reply. I was constantly asked when I had to return to my university, and assured that if documents pertaining to my search for Zermano were found after my departure they would be mailed to me. Still, I persevered.
In the Zermano archives were listed the locations of every place he had lived on the island. These I visited, hoping to find a clue. The first, a dilapidated fisherman’s cottage in a pretty little harbor, was now a fancy seaside restaurant catering to residents of nearby mansions. The second, a deserted sixteenth-century convent during the time Zermano lived and painted there, now housed a medical school. The convent’s former chapel, once Zermano’s studio, was an amphitheater for surgical demonstrations. And on it went, more than seventeen different sites that had since been put to other uses or demolished in the name of progress. I found nothing leading to Zermano, and time was running out. I was left with no alternative but the one I detested most, for it made me feel like a pushy paparazzo: I had to go directly to the family and plead my case.
The family was notoriously uncommunicative and protective. I needed to persuade someone within their closed ranks to break the code of silence. Which one would be the most likely to yield? Of the three children, one son was a judge and the other a senator; my chances of convincing them to talk were probably nil. The third, a daughter, might be my only hope. Perhaps I could appeal to her sense of romance, noting that I was in possession of her father’s love letters. Since the letters had been written before Zermano met her mother, and since the mother was deceased, she would not be betraying her by helping me. Fortunately, the daughter was the youngest of Zermano’s three children, which meant she might be less traditional than older Mallorcans, who are fond of asking: “Which is bigger, the world inside Mallorca, or the world outside Mallorca?”
I found out where the daughter lived in the most straightforward way: I looked in the phone book. There were her name, address, and telephone number. I called the number and the telephone was immediately answered by a woman. I explained who I was and asked if I had the pleasure of speaking with Señorita Serena Zermano.
“Who is calling?” she inquired.
I identified myself again and she hung up. I called back, and in the most polite manner asked if I might leave a message for Señorita Zermano.
“No,” came the answer. The phone went dead.
Perhaps I had been speaking to the maid, who had been instructed to hang up on anyone with whom she wasn’t familiar. I decided to wait and call later, but when I did, no one answered. I phoned the next morning—no answer. I called all day long and into the night until the woman answered again. I made my inquiry. She asked which Serena Zermano I wanted to speak with. I replied the daughter of the painter. Here was my chance, a small crack to slip through—I quickly added that I was in possession of some of Señor Zermano’s most personal items. There was a long silence before she spoke:
“Personal items?”
“Yes, very personal.”
“There is no Serena at this number.”
“Please don’t hang up! These items are more than personal, they are intimate.”
She hung up.
The next day I set off for the address listed in the phone book. It was not an easy place to find. The centuries-old cobblestone streets were a maze of zigzags, circles, and dead ends. The stone facades of the houses formed three-story-high walls with locked wooden doors and window shutters. There was a solemn sense of abandonment, nothing like the sunny Mediterranean idea of half-naked children playing in the street as their laughing mothers shout after them. It was if people here expected the return of raging Moslem armies, who once again would butcher civilians and make the streets run with blood. Who’s to say they were wrong? Their memories were long and the shores of Africa close. It was ironic, I thought, hearing the echo of my own feet as I passed these fortress-houses, that when death came again it would not arrive with the clamor of horses and shouting men in robes brandishing swords. It would come with a whisper, an anonymous missile that would not be tricked by the idea that nobody was home.
On a street in the gothic shadows of Palma Cathedral, I finally found Serena’s house. The massive wooden door was studded with steel spikes. I banged the iron knocker. No response. I banged again. The sound of the loud knocking reverberated in the street like gunshots. Finally a small peephole behind steel mesh in the center of the door slid open. I glimpsed brown, almond-shaped eyes. I politely asked:
“Señorita Serena Zermano?”
She said nothing. The protective steel mesh covering her eyes like a veil mad
e me feel like I was peering at the most prized woman in the harem. The peephole slid closed.
I stood there for a while, knocked once again to no avail, and left. I walked the streets of the city, its houses shuttered against the outside world. I knew I was being watched, as if the letters I had come to deliver could wreak the same havoc as that of past invading armies. It seemed as if the whole island conspired to keep Zermano hidden, knowing that someday a messenger from Louise would appear. As I walked, hollow whispers followed me. I glanced up stone staircases leading to deserted plazas, where old Moorish fountains dripped faint splashes of water. I looked up at the sky, caught in rectangles of blue above narrow passageways that were once crowded with hooded men in black cloaks carrying crucifixes and swords. I stared at dusty palm fronds stirring in the wind and listened to the whispers.
The next day I returned to Serena’s house. This time I went at two-thirty in the afternoon, a time when I knew she had to be home, when everyone was home, enjoying the day’s major meal behind locked doors. I lifted the heavy knocker and let it drop. Footsteps sounded on the other side of the door. The peephole slid open. Brown eyes peered out, not the brown eyes of the day before but those of an older woman. Her words were spoken in Spanish, which fortunately I understood. “She’s not here! Leave before I call the police!”
The peephole closed. Footsteps faded away across tiled floors beyond the door. I could smell food, the scent of heated olive oil and saffron. Serena was in there. I pressed my smallest finger through the steel mesh over the peephole and slid the wooden slat back. Enough of a space opened up so that I could crane my neck and peer inside. It was another world, an immense patio surrounded by Moorish columns of pinkish marble. Sunlight streamed down on a verdant landscape of tropical foliage—flowers bloomed and vines cascaded. Behind two marble columns was an arched opening into a grand salon, where a painting hung in a gilded frame. I had previously seen pencil sketches for this painting, though I didn’t know then if the actual painting existed. The sketches, entitled Swallows Looming at Midnight, were thought to be Zermano’s attempt to capture the moment of epiphany when Ramón Llull, after fasting and praying in a remote mountain cave, received the Holy Spirit. To see the completed painting was stunning—not just the bravura of its execution, but to realize in my own small epiphany that Ramón Llull was the answer. He would lead me to Zermano.
I went back to the archives and with a new eye read through the texts linking Zermano to Llull. I also secured biographies of Llull, including the earliest, published in 1311 while he was still alive. It was difficult to separate legend from fact, to distinguish the reality of his life from the deluge of material offered by his apologists and propagandists. For this reason, serious scholars outside of Spain looked on any connection between Zermano and Llull with a jaundiced eye. To go down that path had about as much validity as proclaiming that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny had an affair and Jesus Christ was their love child. What is known for certain is that Llull was the son of a Barcelona nobleman who sailed in the armada to Mallorca that recaptured the island from the Moors. The father was rewarded with land and social position. His son, at the age of fourteen, was a page at the court of King James the Conqueror, and later became a tutor of James’s son, the future king. Llull traveled throughout Europe, flourishing in the privileged life of royalty. He reached adulthood in a rarefied world of palaces, armored knights, falconers, troubadours, and painted ladies in silken finery. He became a polished and dissolute courtier; his friend, Prince James, tried to tame him by arranging a marriage. The marriage resulted in a son, but could not prevent Llull’s slide into adulterous delights. He himself wrote about this period, “The more apt I found myself to sin, the more I allowed my nature to obey the dictates of my body. The beauty of women was a plague and tribulation.” His conquests in royal boudoirs and houses of pleasure were so well known that women sought him out to determine if his reputation as a skillful seducer was justified. By all accounts it was.
The celebrated incident that changed Llull forever—strengthened his refusal of carnal delights and opened him to spiritual inquiry—happened, not surprisingly, in his pursuit of a woman. It is here that Llull crossed paths with his near-contemporary, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch, another legendary seducer, fell eternally in love when he glimpsed the beautiful Laura de Noves in Avignon Cathedral. For ten years Petrarch held no one else in his heart but Laura, a young married noblewoman whose bed he was never to share. She died of the plague that swept through Provence in the fourteenth century. All that Petrarch held in his heart spilled out in songs and sonnets, a passionate outburst that would outlast not only the plague but his own death, and which shone the light of love’s promise across Renaissance Europe. But the death of Llull’s love sent him on a very different road. It ended with his death in an African desert as he stood preaching with a Bible in one hand and a radical philosophy of universal religion in his heart. He was turned upon by the indignant population.
Like the woman with whom Petrarch fell in love, the woman who changed Llull’s life—Ambrosia de Castillo—was also married. Unlike Petrarch, Llull was not stopped by this. When he saw Ambrosia he did not try to hide his passion. This was astonishing, for Ambrosia came from one of the nine noble families that dominated the island, and a rigid code of behavior was imposed on the aristocracy. Perhaps Llull’s ties to King James allowed him license to pursue his prey without regard to social consequence, or maybe he had finally found the woman for him. He attempted to seduce Ambrosia not with calculated charm and mysterious midnight promises, but with the naked longing and elegant pain of a denied lover. Word spread that Llull waited for the day Ambrosia would come to him, as her marriage had been an arranged one and her husband was in ill health. At first Ambrosia rejected Llull’s advances, no matter how fervent they were. She eventually allowed him a friendship, which meant, in the convention of the time, that he could see her in daylight hours when she was chaperoned by other ladies of her station. It is written that Ambrosia, defying social custom, would sometimes release the lacy mantilla she wore over her head and unpin the coils of her black hair, her eyes gazing at Llull with a longing of her own.
The royalty of Palma followed this courtship closely and it became the source of salacious gossip until one day Ambrosia disappeared. Some said her husband locked her up, others that she committed suicide by jumping into the sea, but most said she had been sent to a convent in France. Llull followed up on every rumor. He broke into her husband’s five houses after dark and searched the rooms for her. He traveled to France and scaled the walls of convent cloisters in hopes of finding her cloaked figure among the praying nuns. He never gave up hope and never looked at another woman. After a year passed, everything changed again for Llull.
On that fateful New Year’s Day, Palma was alive with a festive commemoration of Mallorca’s liberation from the Moors. Boys ran through the streets tethered by ropes to the tails of young bulls; virginal girls smashed clay urns said to be filled with the Devil’s evil thoughts; men on stilts, costumed as gaudy demons, stalked the plazas attempting to snatch terrified children from their mothers’ arms. At night warships sailed along the harbor’s massive fortified sea wall, the ships’ rigging hung with thousands of lanterns. Soldiers disembarked from the ships. On the stone ramparts mock battles raged between Christians and Moors. Llull watched all of this from horseback. Then he saw Ambrosia. At first he thought, because of the long day and the night lit up by spinning fireworks and ships firing cannons, that he must be hallucinating. But it was indeed Ambrosia, in a flower-bedecked carriage.
Llull followed the carriage, and when he drew alongside he called Ambrosia’s name. She turned, startled, hiding her face behind a fan. The carriage driver whipped his horse and the carriage lurched through the parting crowd. Llull followed as the carriage twisted through narrow streets and stopped before a church. He called to Ambrosia as she climbed from the carriage, but she did not stop, running up the step
s into the church. Llull was not about to lose her again. He spurred his horse up the steps and through the church doors left open by Ambrosia. The horse’s iron-clad hooves echoed in the vast church as Llull rode down the center aisle. In front of the altar he spun his horse around. In dim candlelight he could see that the rows of pews were empty. He jumped from the horse. There was only one place she could be. He strode to the wooden cubicle of the confessional and yanked its door open. He stood face to face with her. Ambrosia shuddered and pulled back, her thin body huddled against the wall. Llull spoke softly. He said he had not come to harm her, only to profess his undying love. Why had she abandoned him? He saw her tears through her lace mantilla, her lips quivering. He gently touched her in reassurance. She cringed. Her fingers went to her neck, undoing the clasp of the cape she wore. The cape slid off her shoulders. She unbuttoned her blouse and removed it. A gauzy cloth bandage was wrapped around her chest. She tore the bandage away, exposing her once perfect breasts, now hideously ulcerated and scabbed. She shouted:
“See, Ramón, the falseness of this body that has won thy affection! How much better hadst thou done to have set thy love on Jesus Christ, of Whom thou mayest have a prize that is eternal!”
Llull turned away and vomited on the marble floor.
After this incident it is recorded that, like Petrarch in the next century, Llull devoted himself to describing in verse the purity of love lost to early death. In the tradition of his time, Llull tried to compose a troubadour’s song that would ring with truth. This vain exercise drove him to suicidal despondency; he sought sanctuary in the great agony and sorrow of Christ crucified on the Cross. Llull was a sinner who had loved the beauty of flesh over the beauty of the soul. He had to reinvent himself in order to redeem himself. The rest of his life would be an act of contrition.