All Men Are Mortal

I want to cherish each thing I have as though it alone were all that mattered in the world. But I want every- thing, and my hands are empty. I envy him. I’m sure he doesn’t know what boredom is.”
“As if malice were ever pure! As if there were pleasure in being mali- cious. They would never understand, not even Roger could understand. They were easygoing and insensitive; no bitterness burned in their hearts. I’m not their kind.”
In times past, she had often uttered that prayer when deeply distressed. And God heard her, always agreed with her. At that time she had dreamed of becoming a saint. She practiced flagellation, and at night slept on a board. But there were too many chosen ones in Heaven, too many saints. God loved every- one; she could never be satisfied with such undiscriminating benevo- lence.
“If only I were lucky enough to have amnesia!”
“If I had amnesia, I’d be almost like other men. Perhaps I’d even be able to love you.”
“He goes to restaurants twice a day, he wears chain-store suits and he’s as boring as an office clerk. I think lover-cured him.”
You mustn’t let three whole days go by without coming to see me.” “Three days isn’t long.” “For me, it’s long. Remember, I have nothing else to do but wait for you.”

“That’s just where you’ve made your mistake,” she said. “You may have nothing to do, but I’ve got a thousand things to keep me busy. 1 can’t take up all my days with you from morning till night.”

“You asked for it. You wanted me to take notice of you. Now noth- ing else matters to me. I know you’re alive and I feel an emptiness inside me when you’re away.”

“Ah! It’s the devil!” Annie exclaimed. ‘‘No, not at all. I just came in through the window, that’s all.” Regina stood up. “I’m sorry the window wasn’t locked.”
“Can’t you talk about anything else?” “But how can you think of anything else?” he asked. “How on earth can you feel so permanently settled in the world when you’ve just hardly come into it and when you’re going to leave it again in so few years?”
Why should you think of death when you’re going to die whether you want to or not. It will be so simple for you; you won’t have to bother yourself about it at all.
I’m alive and yet I’m not living. I’ll never die and yet I have no future. I’m no one. I’m without a past, faceless.
“I exist for you, at this moment. But do you really exist?” “Of course,” she answered. “And so do you.” She grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t you feel my hand on your arm?” He looked at her hand. “That hand, yes, but what does it mean?” “It’s my hand, that’s all,” Regina replied. “Your hand …” He was silent for a moment. “You have to love me and I have to love you. Then you’d be there, and I would be where you are.”
What visions-visions that would never die-passed through his mind?
Save me,” she pleaded. “Save me from death.” “Ah!” he said fervently. “It’s you who must save me!” He took Regina’s face in his hands. He looked at her so intensely that it seemed as if he wanted to tear her soul from her body. “Save me from the night and from apathy,” he said. “Make me love you and know that you alone exist among all other women. Then the world will fall back into shape. There will be tears, smiles, expectations, fears. I’ll be a living man again.”
He closed his eyes again. Beatrice turned around and slowly left the room. I stayed beside him and for a long while I studied his smooth cheeks, his fresh eyelids, the face of my beloved son. I had saved him, but I had not been able to give him the strength to cross the lake. Perhaps Beatrice was right to cry. vVith a sudden feeling of anguish I thought, How much longer will he obey me?
He wanted to mold his life with his own hands, his untried, awkward hands. \Vas it possible, after all, to shut that life away in a hothouse and cultivate it free from all dangers? Stifled, bound, it would soon lose its brightness, its fragrance.
But how could I give her what she per- sisted in not asking for.
I wanted to believe that she was no different than those ephemeral insects, but she was just as alive, just as real as I. Her fleeting existence weighed more heavily upon her than my own destiny upon me.
He asked for worries; she took pleasure in suffering. vVhat demons possessed them?
You kill all desires. You give and give, but you never give anything but playthings. Maybe that’s the reason Antonio chose to die- because he couldn’t really live.
When Antonio dove into a lake, when he led an attack, I admired him because he was risking his life. But you, can you ever do anything courageous? I loved his generosity, and it’s true that you give freely of yourself and your possessions with no thought of your wealth, your time, your pains. But you have so many millions of lives to live that you never really sacrifice anything. And 1 loved his pride. He was a man like any other man, but contrary to most of them, he chose to be him- self. 1 think there’s something beautiful about that. You … you’re an exceptional being, and you know it. That doesn’t move me.
in the shame of that useless night watch, I had stopped belonging to myself.
I could not tell him what 1 was really thinking: that a life, even the best of lives, weighs no more than the flight of a gnat, but that the roads, the cities, the canals we could build, would remain on the surface of the earth throughout eternity; that for eternity, we could rip a whole continent from the dark shadows of virgin forests and idiotic superstitions. 1 could not tell him these things because Charles was unconcerned with an earthly future he would never see with his own eyes. But 1 did know the words that were capable of awakening a response in his heart.
I considered the fervor which he brought to bear in combatting the Roman superstitions no less stupid than the superstitions themselves.
“I cannot, will not, retract a single word of what I have said or written, for to act against one’s conscience is neither safe nor honest.”

I winced. His words struck at me like a challenge. But it was not only the words; it was the tone in which he spoke them. This man had the audacity to maintain that his conscience was more important than the interests of the Empire, indeed, than the interests of the world.

I wanted to gather the universe in my hands and he declared that he was a universe in himself. His arrogance populated the world with thousands of stubborn wills. And this, surely, was why the people and even the sages listened intently to him.

He stirred up that rage of pride in their hearts which had devoured Antonio and Beatrice. And if he were permitted to continue his preachings, in time he would have everyone believing that each man was sole judge of his relations with God and judge also of his own acts. How then would I ever be able to make them obey?

He continued to speak, attacking the Church’s established dogma. But I began to see that it was not only dogma, grace, faith that was in question; something else was at stake: the very works of which I had so long dreamed. They could be realized only if men were brought to renounce their self-love, their whims, their follies. And it was pre- cisely this that the Church taught. She enjoined people to obey one set of laws, to bow before one faith; and if I were powerful enough, those laws would be mine. Through the mouths of priests, I could make God speak in whatever manner I wanted. But if each individual sought God in his own conscience, I knew it would not be I whom he would encounter.

“Who has the right to decide?” Balthus had said to me. That was why they defended Luther-they wanted to decide, each man for himself. But then the world would be even more divided than it had ever been before, and it had to be governed by a single will- mine.

How did I dare say to myself one day while listening to the fountains of Granada, “I gave that man his life, his happiness”? Now I would have to say, “It was I who gave him those lifeless eyes, that sad mouth, his shuddering heart. His unhappi- ness is all my doing.” It was cold in his soul and I felt that coldness as keenly as if I had touched my hand to a corpse.
The only solution . .. we have no choice . .. nothing else you could do … Through the years, the centuries, the mechanism slowly un- wound itself. Only a fool could believe that the will of a single human being was able to change its movement. What did our great plans matter?
He seemed to be asking himself, “\Vhy not be defeated?” And per- haps he was right. In spite of everything, there were men whose desires had left their marks on earth-Luther, Cortez … Was it because they had accepted the idea of being defeated? As for us, we had chosen victory. And now we were asking ourselves, “What victory?”
Every two years a general distribution of wool took place, and in the warmer parts of the realm, cotton grown on the royal lands, was handed out to all. Each man was mason and smith as well as cultivator of his allotted field, and he did everything in his own home that needed to be done. There were no poor people among them. As I listened to Filipillo, I thought, That, then, was the empire we destroyed, the empire I dreamed of establishing on earth and that I did not know how to build!
He told me that since the conquest, the songs with which mothers lulled their babes to sleep were all as sorrowful as the one I had just heard. Only women and children were left in the village, the men having been taken away to work in the Potosi mines. And it was thus in every village and settlement through which we passed all the way to the volcano.
From morning till night, trains of mules laden with silver went down toward the coast. Every ounce of metal had been bought with an ounce of blood. And yet the emperor’s chests remained empty and his people continued to live in poverty. We had destroyed a world, and we had destroyed it for nothing.
But do you believe you can force salvation upon others or can you seek it only for yourself?
“With God’s grace, only for myself.” He brought his hand to his brow. “I used to think it was my duty to force others to seek salva- tion, and that was my mistake. It was a temptation placed before me by the devil.”
“I had a son,” I resumed, “and he chose to die because it was the only choice he could make for himself; I left him nothing eIse to live for. I had a wife, too, and because I insisted upon giving her every- thing, she no more lived than if she were dead. And there are those whom we burned alive and who died thanking us. It’s not happiness they want; they want to live.”

“To live? But after all, what does that mean? This life is nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “What madness to want to dominate a world that’s really nothing!”

“There are moments when a fire burns in their hearts; that’s what they mean by living.”
“I understand them,” I said. “Now I understand them. It’s never what they receive that has value in their eyes; it’s what they do. If they can’t create, they must destroy. But in any case, they have to rebel against what is, otherwise they wouldn’t be men. And we who aspire to forge a world for them and imprison them in it, they can’t help but hate us. The very order, the peace that we dream of for them, would be their worst possible curse.”