Iacobus (17 page)

Shortly after dawn the next day, I went to the Hospital of St. Christine to collect Jonas, who was still sleeping on his cot, face down, as if an arrow had shot him in the middle of his back and he had fallen face down with his dislocated body. I approached him slowly to not wake the other sick people in the room and gladly breathed in its clean and healthy smell. I couldn’t help thinking about my hospital in Rhodes, just as airy and neat as this one. How I missed my home! However, the memories were starting to become vague and imprecise and for the first time I had a swift and inexplicable feeling that I would never return.

In the bed next to Jonas’, a strange looking old man stared at me with two black, shiny eyes, like two ravens. He was drying his lips after taking a large swig from a gourd that he left on the floor next to his bed. He had a frail and gnarled physique, with enormous dangling ears with abnormally bulky lobes and he was almost bald, with the remains of some fine, gray hair around his head like a laurel wreath. His gaze was hard and hot, with mineral reflections, and his movements were almost feline, a rapid softness quite in tone with that sly grin he was giving me.

“You are Don Galceran of Born, Garcia’s father,” he said with such conviction that it surprised me. I don’t remember having seen him the day I left Jonas there.

“Correct. And who are you?” I whispered while I carefully sat down on the edge of the boy’s bed.

“Oh, I’m nobody, sir, nobody!”

I smiled. He was no more than a poor, half-crazy old man.

“You remind me of Ulysses, from Troy,” I said with good humor, “when he said his name was Nobody to fool the cyclops Polyphemus
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.”

“Well, call me Nobody, if you please. What difference does it make to have one name today and another tomorrow? Everything is the same and different at the same time. I am the same person with any name.”

“I see that you are a wise man,” I said to flatter him, although in actual fact it was a little sad to listen to him talk such nonsense.

“My words are not nonsense, Don Galceran, and if you thought about them a little bit you would see that.”

I made a gesture of surprise and looked at him questioningly. “What are you so surprised about?” he asked me.

“You replied to my thoughts and not to what I said.”

“What difference is there between what one says and what one thinks? By paying careful attention to people you can see that whatever they may be saying, their face and their body express what they are actually thinking.”

I smiled again, amused. That rickety old bag of bones was just a shrewd and cunning man. Nothing else.

“Your son told me that you are headed towards Compostela,” he added, wrapping himself up in the blanket, leaving only his head uncovered, “to pay homage to the Holy Body of the Apostle James, the brother of the Lord.

“Correct, that’s where we are headed, if God so desires.”

“You’re doing a good thing taking the boy with you,” he said strongly. “He will learn many good things during the journey which he will never forget. You have an excellent son, sire Galceran. Garcia is an extraordinarily sharp boy. You must be very proud of him.”

“I am.”

“And he looks just like you. Nobody can deny that he is your son, although the main features of his face differ slightly from yours.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

I was getting tired of the conversation but seeing as the curt tone of my answers didn’t seem to bother the old man, I frowned and turned to Jonas.

“I see that you want to wake the boy.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to offend him but I had other things to do.

“I see that you want to wake the boy,” he repeated eagerly.

I still didn’t answer.

“And I also see that you do not wish to continue talking.”

I ruffled my hand through Jonas’ messy hair to wake him. There was not the slightest sign of his earlier monastic tonsure in that head.

“Fine by me,” muttered the old man with indifference, turning around. “But don’t forget, Don Galceran, that my name is Nobody. You gave me that name.”

And he slept like a baby as the sun began to pour in through the openings in the wall.

“What were you talking about with the old man?” asked the sleepy voice of Jonas as he slowly began to return to life, turning around so he was lying on his back.

“Nothing important,” I replied. “Are you ready to continue walking?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going to continue with your aspiration to be a martyr?”

“Oh, no, not anymore!” he said, very convinced, opening his eyes and sitting up in front of me. “Now I want to be a Knight of the Holy Grail.”

“A Knight of the what?” I asked, jumping up.

Youth is a really terrible time of life, but not for the person who is going through it, as they say, but rather for the people who have to put up with it.

“A Knight of the Holy Grail,” he repeated as he got up and looked for his clothes.

“Fine,” I said with resignation, handing him his breeches and doublet. Although it seemed incredible, Jonas had grown even more during those days of convalescence. His lanky body had gone through another growth spurt and his breeches were ridiculously short. If he carried on like that, he would soon be taller than me. He looked at his bare legs and smiled happily. It was practically impossible to deny the evidence of his origin — especially because I was always comparing —, and the similarities with his mother were much more evident than the differences.

To my dismay, during the following days I had to listen to endless stories about the fascinating legend of the Grail. According to Jonas, well-informed in these matters by the elderly Nobody — whom he called ‘the old man’ —, the Holy Vessel was hidden in a mysterious temple located on a mountain called Montsalvat, jealously guarded by one person, King Amfortas, who carried out his mission with the help of the perfect and pure Knights of the Holy Grail, who were just like angels. It seemed that the best knights were Parsifal, Galaaz and Lancelot, the boy’s flamboyant heroes, who united their unimaginable religious passion with feats of chivalry, each of whom he told me about in great detail over the long five days it took us to reach Eunate, on the outskirts of Pons Regine
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, a town that linked the two routes of the Camino de Santiago that enter Spain, the Summas Portus and the Roncesvalles.

I will admit that the whole time Jonas was talking, my thoughts were someplace else. I listened with infinite patience for a while and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I blocked out his long-winded speech with my own thoughts until some exclamation, complaint or request brought me back to harsh reality. It’s not that he didn’t care whether I was paying attention or not (I suspect that he was perfectly aware of my distractions) but it was his awkward and imprecise way of building bridges between us, even though they went straight over my head. If his training continued along the right path, he would find out that bridges are built between people by paying close attention to what the other is saying, and not by wearing our their ears.

During our days of walking between Jaca and Pons Regine, we passed by many suggestive places and I paid careful attention to them. However, disappointment began to twist in my spirit, oppressing and strangling it like a tourniquet. The truth is that I had spent too long away from my people, from my friends, my colleagues and brethren of the Order. It had been a long time since I had been able to voice my concerns with someone, without time for my studies and my work. I began to feel as though I had been banished, like a leper condemned to live far away from his people. It was like all of a sudden waking up from a dream and finding out that my life up until then had not been real. They had changed my life and my identity without me realizing, without me having done anything other than obey orders. It was mortifying to think that not even my own Order seemed to care about the consequences that it could have on me. Didn’t anyone care that every day the Perquisitore felt more and more like a frere without a community? Would the Hospital of St. John be aware that one of its monks had been threatened with death by Pope John’s henchmen? Count Joffroi of Le Mans, although invisible, was my constant nightmare. I couldn’t forget about the fact that he was a faithful dog of His Holiness in the strictest sense of the term and that he wouldn’t blink twice before embedding the blade of his sword into my son’s chest to obey the Holy Father’s orders.

That day in mid-September, we woke up covered in frost for the first time and our limbs were stiff with cold. It was clear that summer was drawing to an end and that autumn was just around the corner. The days began to be terribly hot during the day when the sun was at its highest but deadly cold as soon as it set. I was beginning to feel the change in the weather in my old scars but most of all in my calloused feet which swelled to a point of making walking difficult. Luckily, in a house where we had stopped to rest, I had managed to prepare a mixture of cow marrow and fresh fat which really helped with the inflammation and the pain.

The Way of the Apostle bears off to the left when leaving Eneriz to take you to the Chapel of Eunate. Lost in the solitude of the countryside, its belfry guided pilgrims through a vast, desolate plain.

As we were approaching, I realized that Eunate could be even more than it seemed at first sight: It could be what we had been waiting for for weeks, it could be a starting point, a hope for the beginning. My heat was racing and I had to make a great effort to contain myself and not run towards it, leaving Jonas alone on the road. I also had to be careful not to lose control of my emotions, as you never knew who might be watching.

“What does that church tell you, Jonas?”

“Should it tell me something?” he asked contemptuously. Since the previous night his body seemed to have been taken over by a powerful emperor. It happened every now and again.

“I want you to look carefully at its structure.”

“Well, I see a church with basic proportions and sparsely decorated.”

“But what shape is it?” I insisted.

He stared at it with indifference.

“It seems to be octagonal. I can’t see it very well. And it’s surrounded by an open cloister. The truth is that it’s rare to see a church with a cloister on the outside and not inside, like this one.”

“You see? You’re beginning to observe and not just look.”

The flattery was working. Charlemagne disappeared and gave way to the novicius.

“Does anything I said make sense?”

“What you said means that we are in front of a church that is clearly Templar and that is perhaps owned by my Order thanks to the dissolute bull.”

“How do you know?” He asked intrigued. “How do you know that it is Templar?”

By that time we were walking around the building.

“Because of its octagonal shape. Any construction you see built in this way is Templar. Do you remember that when we discovered the hidden meaning of the names of the Arab doctors who had attended to Pope Clement V in Roquemaure, I told you that Al-Aqsa was a mosque located inside the Temple of Solomon that the Templars had used it as their presbytery house in Jerusalem?”

“Yes.”

“Well, let me tell you a story.”

We took our hats off and sat on the ground, worn out from the heat, leaning against the wall of a house to the west of the chapel. Our bodies were immensely grateful for the cool shade after so many hours in the sun.

“Solomon was the educated and intelligent king who ruled Israel about a thousand years before the birth of Christ,” I began. “So as you get an idea of what type of person he was, I will tell you that the beautiful Song of Songs in the Bible was his, as well as the books of Wisdom, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Does that sound like a good enough presentation? Well, the wise and fair king wanted to build a temple in honor of Yahweh. If you have read the first Book of Kings, you will remember that it describes the construction in great detail, and they used the best material in the kingdoms of the East: wood, stone, marble, copper, iron and gold, large quantities of gold. Listen carefully: Every single wall was covered in sheets of this precious metal and the objects of worship and the Great Menorah were cast in solid gold. Nothing was too beautiful to shelter and protect the Ark of the Covenant and the Tables of the Law which Moses chiseled with his own hands on Mount Sinai. Because that’s what was in the temple, Jonas: the Ark of the Covenant and the Tables of the Law. To keep them safe, Solomon ordered the construction of a temple,” I stopped and took a breath. “The whole building was of immense proportions as well as immense beauty: The cherubs above the Ark (made of pure gold, naturally) were like winged lions with a human body and the two enormous columns on the facade of the Temple had oil burners which lit it up day and night.”

The boy’s neck was twisted in his eagerness to keep looking at me while I told him the story. He was completely mesmerized.

“But the materials weren’t the most valuable part of the temple,” I continued. “Not at all! Very special people were involved in its design. Makeda, Queen of Sheba
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, attracted by the renowned wisdom of Solomon and his deep spirituality, made a long journey north to meet him and ‘test him with riddles’, as the Bible says. She stayed with him for a long time, passing on the sacred knowledge of the primordial times so it could be used in the construction of the temple.

“And what Knowledge was that?” asked Jonas, intrigued.

“A knowledge to which you, dear boy, may have access to someday if you are worthy of it,” I said, tricking him, as it was obvious that his initiation had already begun. “But be quiet and listen. The Temple of Salomon had various models and dimensions that came from hidden and initiatory traditions.”

“What hidden and initiatory traditions?”

I carried on as if I hadn’t heard him.

“It had three concentric enclosures inside of which was the sancta sanctorum, the holy place where the Ark was kept and where no one could enter without a death sentence, other than the high priest who could enter once a year. Four centuries later, Jerusalem was destroyed by the troops of King Nebuchadnezzar II, and with it, the beautiful Temple of Solomon.”