We burn— we will say—and God laughs? We burn, and God laughs? Oh, most cruel God! Why do You not torture us with Your thunderbolts, rather than insult us with Your laughter? Redouble, merciless One, our flames, but do not rejoice in them! Ah, Your laughter for us is more bitter than our tears! Ah, Your joy to us is more grievous than our woes! Why does our Hell not have chasms where we can flee the countenance of a God that laughs? Too long have we been deceived by those who told us that our punishment would be the sight of the face of a scornful God. A laughing God, we should have been told, a laughing God…. Rather than see and hear that laughter we would have the mountains collapse on our heads, or the earth disappear beneath our feet; but no, in our misfortune we shall see what pains us, and be blind and deaf to everything except to what we wish to be blind and deaf!”
Roberto smelled the sour odor of the chicken feed in the gaps of the planks, and from outside came the mewing of the sea birds, which he had mistaken for the laughter of God.
“But why Hell for me?” he asked. “And why for all? Was it not to keep it only for a few that Christ redeemed us?”
Father Caspar laughed like the God of the damned. “Why, when did He redeem you? On what planet, in what universe do you think you are living now?”
He took Roberto’s hand, raising him violently from where he lay, and dragged him through the maze of the Daphne as the sick man felt a gnawing at his intestine, and it was as if his head housed only foliot clocks. Clocks, he thought: time, death….
Caspar dragged him into a room he had never discovered, its walls white; there Roberto saw a closed catafalque with a circular eye on one side. Before the eye, on a grooved runner, was inserted a little wooden strip fitted with several eyes, all the same size, framing pieces of opaque glass. As the strip was moved along the groove, the eyes could be aligned serially with the eye of the box. Roberto recalled having once seen in Provence a smaller version of this machine that, it was said, could bring light to life thanks to shadows.
Father Caspar opened the side of the box, allowing a glimpse of a great lamp on a tripod; on the side opposite the spout the lamp had, not a handle, but a round, specially curved mirror. When the lamp’s wick was lit, the mirror projected the luminous rays into a pipe, a short spyglass whose terminal lens was that external eye. From here (as soon as Caspar had closed the box again) the rays passed through the glass of the strip, broadening in a cone and casting on the wall some colored images, which to Roberto seemed truly alive, so vivid and precise were they.
The first figure represented a man with a demon’s face chained to a rock in the midst of the sea, lashed by the waves. Roberto could not tear his eyes from that apparition, he blended it with those that followed (as Father Caspar caused them to appear, sliding the strip of wood) and composed them all—dream within dream—without distinguishing what was being said to him from what he was seeing.
A ship was approaching the rock, and he recognized it as the Tweede Daphne; from it Ferrante descended, now freeing the chained man. All was clear. In the course of his voyaging, Ferrante had found Judas—as the legend assures us he was to be found—imprisoned upon the open sea, to expiate his betrayal.
“Thank you,” Judas said to Ferrante—but to Roberto the voice surely came from the lips of Caspar. “From the time I was bound here until the ninth hour today I have hoped to be able yet to atone for my sin….I thank you, brother….”
“You have been here only a day, or even less?” Ferrante said. “But your sin was committed in the thirty-third year after the birth of Our Lord, and therefore one thousand six hundred and ten years ago….”
“Ah, simple mind,” Judas replied, “it is surely one thousand six hundred and ten of your years since I was set on this rock, but it is not yet and never will be one day for me. You do not know that, entering the sea that surrounds this island of mine, you penetrated another world that flows alongside and within yours, and here the sun moves around the earth like a tortoise whose every step is slower than the one before. So in this my world, at the beginning my day lasted two of yours, and then three, and so on, more and more, until now, after one thousand six hundred and ten of your years, I am still and always at the ninth hour. And soon time will be even slower, and then slower still, and I will live always at the ninth hour of the year thirty-three after that night in Bethlehem….” “But why?” Ferrante asked.
“Why, because God has willed that my punishment consist in living always on Good Friday, to celebrate always and every day the Passion of the man I betrayed. The first day of my suffering, when for other human beings sunset approached, and then night, and then the dawn of Saturday, for me only an atom of an atom of a minute of the ninth hour of that Friday had gone by. As the course of my sun began to move even more slowly, for the rest of you Christ was rising from the dead, but I was still barely a step from that hour. And now, when centuries and centuries have passed for you,
I am still only a crumb of time from that instant….”
“But still this sun of yours moves, and the day will come, even if after ten thousand years and more, when you will enter your Saturday.”
“Yes, and then it will be worse. I will have left my Purgatory to enter my Hell. My grief at the death I caused will not cease, but I will have lost the possibility, which still remains to me, of making what happened not happen.”
“But how?”
“You do not know that not far from here runs the antipodal meridian. Beyond that line, both in your world and in mine, lies the day before. If I, now freed, could cross that line, I would be in my Holy Thursday, for this scapular that you see on my back is the bond that requires my sun to accompany me like my shadow, and guarantee that wherever I go, all time has the duration of mine. I could then reach Jerusalem, traveling through a very long Thursday, and I could arrive there before the completion of my wickedness. And I would save my Master from His fate.”
“But,” Ferrante objected, “if you prevent the Passion, then there will never be the Redemption, and the world will still be stained by original sin.”
“Aii!” Judas shouted, crying. “I was thinking only of myself! But what must I do then? If I continue to let myself act as I acted, I remain damned. If I amend my error, I confound the plan of God and will be punished by damnation. Was it then written from the beginning that I was damned to be damned?”
The procession of images went dark at the weeping of Judas, as the oil of the lamp was consumed. Father Caspar was speaking again, in a voice Roberto no longer recognized as his. The scant light now came from a fissure in the wall and illuminated only half of the priest’s face, distorting the line of his nose and making the color of his beard uncertain, very white on one side and very dark on the other. The eyes were both hollows, because the one exposed to the light seemed also in shadow. Roberto realized only then that it was covered by a black patch.
“And it is at that point,” he said now, this man who was surely the Abbé de Morfi, “it is at that moment that your brother conceives the masterstroke of his Genius. If he makes the journey Judas has suggested, he can prevent the Passion from taking place, and thus prevent Redemption from being granted us. No Redemption, all men victims of the same original sin, all doomed to Hell, your brother a sinner—but a sinner like all humankind, and therefore justified.”
“But how could he, how can he, how did he?” Roberto asked.
“Oh”—the abbé smiled with horrid glee—”it required very little. It sufficed only to deceive the Almighty as well, who is incapable of conceiving every travesty of the truth. It sufficed to kill Judas, as I promptly did on that rock, put on his scapular, send my ship ahead to the opposite shore of the Island, arrive here in disguise to prevent your learning the correct rules of swimming so you could never precede me over there, then force you to construct with me the aquatic bell to enable me to reach the Island.” And as he spoke, he slowly removed his habit, appearing in pirate garb, then equally slowly
