Iacobus

by Matilde Asensi

  “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 (26); 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.

  I found it nearby the Convent of St. Dominic, on the hillside above the Church of Santa Maria de Jus del Castillo. They were just about to close the doors of the madinat al yahud (27) and I had to beg the bedin (28) to let me in.

  “What are you looking for at this time of night, good sir?”

  “I am looking for information about a group of Hebrew pilgrims who must have come though Estella recently and who are headed to Leon.”

  “Did they come from France?” he asked, thinking.

  “Yes! Did you see them?”

  “Oh, yes! They came through here yesterday morning. They were the distinguished families Ha-Levi and Efrain, from the French city of Perigueux,” he told me. “They didn’t stay for long.

  They ate with the muccadim (29) and then left. There was a woman traveling with them who stayed behind with us until today. But she left at dawn, on her own. A real berrieh (30),” he muttered.

  “Was her name Sara, by any chance? Sara from Paris?”

  “It was.”

  “You’re right, bedin, she is undoubtedly a woman of character. And she is the person I am looking for. What can you tell me?”

  “Oh, not much! She seemed to have a problem with the Ha-Levis and decided to split up from the group. She bought a horse yesterday afternoon in Estella and left first thing this morning. I think she went to Burgos.”

  “The woman you speak of …,” I wanted to be sure so as not to make a mistake, “did she have white hair?”

  “And moles, lots of moles! The truth is that it’s rare for a Jewish woman to have so many marks on her skin like she did. At least here, in Navarre; we’d never seen anything like it before.”

  “Thank you, bedin. I don’t need to go inside now. You’ve told me everything I needed to know.”

  “Sir, if you don’t mind my asking …,” he said when I had already began to walk away.

  “What is it?”

  “Why are you looking for her?”

  “That’s what I would like to know, bedin,” I replied, shaking my head. “That’s what I would like to know ….”

  Every time we reached a town, Sara had just left. Everyone we asked about her in Ayegui, Azqueta, Urbiola, Los Arcos, Desojo and Sansol, gave us information with no difficulty but it seemed that a cursed fate always kept her at the same distance from us. I despaired at the painful slowness of our pace because although we were pushing our horses as as fast as they could go, ever since leaving Estella we had had to fight against a raging wind that was coming at us and persistent rain that turned the roads and paths we followed into porridge.

  We were held up for a while in the town of Torres del Rio, just less than half a day from Logroño, because when I saw the solemn church tower from afar, I knew that we could not pass by that site. It was a tiny collection of houses sandwiched around a beautiful octagonal temple.

  In order to stop there and visit the Templar chapel, I had to overcome stiff resistance from Nobody, who seemed more interested than us in catching up with Sara. I gave him a trivial explanation about prayers, promises and aspirations but it didn’t seem to convince him at all, and while we were inside the enclosure, an unexpected double of Eunate, he didn’t stop pestering and annoying us with stupid observations and obnoxiously interfering in the few things I tried to say to the boy so he could learn about the important details of what we were seeing.

  The differences between the Templar chapels of Eunate and Torres del Rio were imperceptible. Both had the same structure and the same representations, and again, a single capital that was different from all the others, the one located on the right of the apse, with an evangelic message with an error. This time it wasn’t the miraculous resurrection of Lazerus but of Jesus himself, with two women inexpressively looking at the empty Holy Tomb with the slab ajar. Their stillness was absolute, their inexpressiveness frightening. It seemed as if the impression had killed them. However, the real extravagance of the scene was in the apocryphal quality of the vacant Tomb emitting a cloud of smoke which rose in a kind of spiral labyrinth. In which passage of the Scriptures does it say that Jesus Christ had turned into smoke?

  As was now habitual, at the aljama in Torreviento, Viana, they informed us that Sara had left just a few hours before. We were so worn out from the battle against the storm that we stopped to rest in a hostel in the city, that of Our Lady of the Inn, where servants offered us a loaf of excellent bread and an amphora of unbeatable local wine. Jonas, who was deathly quiet from pure exhaustion, lay down on the bench he had been sitting on and disappeared from my sight behind the table.

  “The boy is worn out,” muttered Nobody, looking at him with affection.

  “We are all worn out. This galloping against the storm would exhaust anyone.”

  “I have an excellent idea to cheer us up!” he suddenly exclaimed, merrily. “Garcia, hey, Garcia, open your eyes!”

  “What’s going on?” asked a weary voice from underneath the wooden table.

  “I’m going to teach you an extraordinary game.”

  “I don’t want to play!”

  “I bet you do! You have never seen anything like it. It’s such a fun and puzzling game that it will have you back on your feet in no tim
e.”

  The old man took a small pouch and a square piece of cloth from his bag which he carefully unfolded on the table. Jonas peered over the edge of the table and took a quick look, with his eyes half-shut. The cloth had a spiral circuit draw on it which was divided into sixty-three squares decorated with beautiful emblems, some fixed and some changeable. Nobody carefully untied the strings of a small bag and took out a pair of bone dice and several wooden blocks painted in different colors.

  “Which do you prefer?” he asked Jonas.

  “The green one.”

  “And you, Don Galceran?”

  “The blue one, no doubt about it,” I said smiling, making myself more comfortable to see the squares better. Jonas did the same. I have always loved board games and luckily for me, the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem (unlike most of the Orders), allowed them and even encouraged them. In my youth, chess was one of my great passions, and during my studies in Syria and Damascus I had really enjoyed taking part in long games of Royal Flush of Ur and checkers. It was the first time I had seen the game that Nobody was showing us which was strange because I knew almost all of them (at least, all the ones played in the East).

  “I’ll have the red block,” he said. “O.K., this game is a favorite amongst the Compostela pilgrims. It’s called The Goose and consists of throwing the dice and moving the same number of squares as the points you get. The first person to reach the last square wins.

  “That’s it?” asked Jonas contemptuously, leaning back.

  “It’s not as easy as it seems, young Garcia. In this game there are many factors that make it exciting. Winning is not what counts. What counts is your perseverance to reach the end. You’ll see.”

  Nobody put our three pieces next to each other in the first square on the cloth, the number one, and threw the dice. I thought that like with all board games where you have to go around the board, The Goose had to hold some ancient initiatory meaning in its inner most secrets. Since the most remote and forgotten ancient cultures, this magnificent bird has been a beneficial deity who accompanies souls to the beyond. It was a flock of geese that warned the citizens of Rome of the arrival of the Barbarians, saving the city. The Egyptians, for example, had a very specific saying — ‘from goose to goose’ —, to express the inverse transit of reincarnation from death until birth, as this bird transports the soul from one point to another. The strong will to reach the end of the game that Nobody was talking about must be a metaphor of the tenacity needed to travel the long and difficult inner journey that leads to initiation which the board intended to represent figuratively. I noticed that on every ninth square (those numbered 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54 and 63), there was one of those sacred web-footed birds, whose leg was a symbol of the initiated masters; there were bridges in squares 6 and 12; a pair of dice in 26 and 53; a well in 31; a labyrinth in 42; and Death in 58.