The White Dominican (16 page)

The blood begins to race in my veins, my suspicions begin to give way to a sweet joy, but Ophelia’s voice continues to cry out in ever more fearful tones; it is like someone wringing their hands in impotent desperation. Finally I seem to be able to understand the words, “Do not leave me! Help me! He is only wearing my mask!” But then the voice is muffled, as if it came from under sheets.

“Do not leave me!” That was a cry for help! It pierces me to my innermost core. ‘No, my Ophelia, you live inside me and I will not abandon you.’

I clench my teeth and turn cold, cold with suspicion.

‘Who is this ‘he’ who is supposed to be wearing Ophelia’s mask?’ I ask myself as I scrutinise the phantom’s face. For a split second the face of the spectre freezes in an expression of stony lifelessness, the pupils contract as if they had been struck by a ray of light. It was like the lightning disappearance of some being that was afraid of being recognised, but in spite of the speed with which it happened, for a heartbeat I saw the tiny image of another’s head instead of my own in the eyes of the phantom.

The next moment the ghost has left me and is floating with outstretched arms towards the old carpenter, who embraces it and covers its cheeks with kisses, sobbing out loud with love and joy.

I am seized with an indescribable feeling of horror. I feel my hair stand on end; the air is like an icy breath, freezing my lungs.

Hovering in front of me I can see the image of that other head, tiny as the point of a needle and yet clearer and sharper than anything the eye can see. I close my lids and shut it in my mind. The face darts to and fro, like a patch of light in a mirror, then I force it to stand still and we stare at each other.

It is the face of a being of a strange, inconceivable beauty, the face of a girl and at the same time that of a boy. The eyes have no iris, they are as empty as the eyes of a marble statue and glitter like opals.

Around the thin, bloodless lips, drawn up at the corners by fine lines, is the suggestion of an expression of all-destroying mercilessness, only a suggestion, but all the more terrible for that. Its white teeth shine through the silken skin in a gruesome, bony smile.

I sense that this face is the optical point between two worlds; it is like a burning-glass in which are gathered the rays of an empire of hate and destruction behind which lurks the chasm of universal disintegration, of which the Angel of Death is but the mildest symbol.

‘What is that figure that appears to be Ophelia?’ is the fearful question I ask myself. ‘Where did it come from? What power in the universe brought her likeness to life? It can walk, its movements are full of goodness and grace, and yet it masks a satanic power. Will the demon behind it suddenly throw off its disguise and grin at us in all its fiendish hideousness, simply in order thrust a few poor mortals into despair and disappointment?’

‘No’, I suddenly realise. ‘The Devil would not reveal himself for such a trifling purpose.’ Whether it was the primal essence within me that whispered it, whether it was the living voice of Ophelia in my heart which spoke, or whether it was the wordless source of understanding in my own being I can no longer say, but I suddenly knew that it was the impersonal force of all evil, using the mute laws of nature to conjure up miracles which in reality are only hellish phantasms serving the ends of the spirit of negation. The thing wearing the mask of Ophelia has no spatial substance; it is her magic image in the old carpenter’s memory which, under metaphysical conditions that we do not understand, has made itself visible and tangible, perhaps with the fiendish intent of widening even more the gap that separates the realm of the dead from that of the living. It is the soul of the poor hysteric seamstress – a soul which has not yet reached a pure crystallised form of personality – that has provided the matter, emerging from the medium’s body like magnetic modelling clay, from which Mutschelknaus created that spectre. This is the head of the Medusa, that symbol of the petrifying force that sucks us down, at work here on a small scale, bringing blessings to the poor, like Christ, stealing into their dwellings like a thief in the night.

I look up: the spectre has vanished, the seamstress is wheezing, my hands are still on the table. Mutschelknaus leans over to me and whispers, “Don’t say that it was my daughter Ophelia, no one is to know that she is dead; all they know is that it was the apparition of a being from Paradise that loves me.”

Then, like a commentary on my thoughts, the voice of the man with long hair begins to declaim. He addresses me in the strict tones of a schoolmaster,

“Go down on your knees and thank Pythagoras, young man! At Herr Mutschelknaus’ request I asked him, through the medium, to allow you to take part in our séance so that you might be cured of your doubts. – The spiritual star, Fixtus, has detached itself from the cosmos and is speeding towards our earth. – The resurrection of all the dead is at hand. – The first harbingers are on their way already. The spirits of the departed will walk amongst us like living men, and the ravenous beasts will once more eat grass, as they did in the Garden of Eden. – Is it not so? Is that not what Pythagoras said?”

The fat woman gives a gurgle of affirmation.

“Young man, renounce the vanity of the world! I have made my way on foot (he pointed to his sandals) across the whole of Europe and I say to you, there is not one street today, not even in the smallest village, where there are no spiritualists. Soon the movement will flood the whole world like a spring tide. The power of the Catholic Church is broken, for the Saviour will come in His own form.”

Mutschelknaus and the old woman are nodding ecstatically, the words to them are glad tidings promising the fulfilment of their longing; but to me they are the prophecy of a terrible time to come.

Just as, before, I saw the head of the Medusa in the eyes of the phantom, so now I can hear its voice from the lips of the man with long hair, both of them disguised behind the mask of sublimity. It is the forked tongue of a viper from the realm of darkness that is speaking. It talks of the Saviour and means the Devil. It says, ‘The ravenous beasts will once more eat grass.’ By the grass it means the innocent, the unsuspecting, the great mass of people, and by the ravenous beasts it means the demons of despair.

The dreadful thing about the prophecy is – and I can feel it–that it will come to pass. But the most dreadful is that it is a mixture of truth and fiendish cunning. The empty masks of the dead will arise, but not the ones we long for, not the departed for whom those left on earth shed their tears! They will come dancing to the living, but it will not be the dawn of the millennium, it will be a carnival of Hell, a fiendish rejoicing in expectation of the cock-crow of a never-ending, gruesome, cosmic Ash Wednesday!

“Should the day of despair dawn today for the old man and the others? Is that what you wish?” I can hear it resounding, like a mute, mocking question, in the voice of the Medusa. “If that is so, I will not stop you, Christopher. Say the word. Tell them, you who believe you have escaped my power, tell them that you have seen me in the pupils of the phantom that I created and made to walk out of the cancerous cells of the decaying robe that clothes the soul of the seamstress! Tell them everything you know. I will back you up, and they will believe you.

I will be happy for you to carry out the work that is the task of my servants. Be a harbinger of the great White Dominican who is to bring the truth, as your ancestor hopes. Be a servant of the glorious truth, I will willingly bring about your crucifixion. Be bold, tell those gathered here the truth. I look forward to seeing how ‘redeemed’ they will feel.”

The three spiritualists are looking at me, full of expectation of my reply to the man with long hair. I remember the place in Ophelia’s letter, where she asked me to assist and support her foster-father and I hesitate. Should I tell them what I know? One glance at the joy in the shining eyes of the old man robs me of all my courage. I remain silent.

I feel that it is only in the hearts of those who have come alive in the spirit that the dead can find true peace; there alone is rest and refuge for them. If the hearts of men are sleeping, then the dead will sleep in them too; if their hearts wake to spiritual life, then the dead will also come alive and partake of the world of appearances, without being subject to the torment that accompanies earthly existence.

I am overcome with a sense of impotence, of complete powerlessness, as I wonder what I can do, now that it is in my power to speak or to remain silent. And what shall I do later, when I am mature, perhaps one of the perfected, one who has achieved spiritual completion? The time is at hand when belief in mediums is about to inundate the world, like a pestilential flood-tide, of that I feel certain. I picture the abyss of despair which will engulf mankind when, after a short frenzy of delight, they see that the dead that are rising from their graves lie, lie, lie worse than any creature on earth ever could lie, they are demonic phantoms, embryos sprung from an infernal act of copulation.

In that day, what prophet will be strong enough to halt such a spiritual end of the world?

All at once my silent reflections are interrupted by a strange sensation: I feel as if my two hands, which are still lying idle on the table before me, have been grasped by beings that I cannot see. I sense that a new magnetic chain has been forged, similar to the one at the beginning of the séance, only in this one I am the only living link.

The seamstress gets up from the floor and comes to the table. Her expression is calm, as if she were fully conscious.

“It is Py … Pytha … Pythagoras”, says the man with the long hair, but the hesitant, wavering tone of his voice is full of doubt. He seems puzzled by the normal, sober look on the face of the medium.

The seamstress looks me in the eye and says, in a deep voice like a man’s, “You know that I am not Pythagoras.”

A quick glance at the others tells me that they cannot hear what she is saying, their faces are devoid of expression. The seamstress nods in confirmation. “I am talking to you alone, the ears of the rest are deaf. The linking of hands is a magic process; if hands are joined that have not yet come alive spiritually, then the realm of the Medusa rises from the abyss of the past and the depths spew forth the masks of the dead; but the chain of living hands is the rampart protecting the refuge of the upper light. The servants of the head of the Medusa are our instruments, but they do not know it; they believe they are destroying, but in fact they are creating space for the future; like worms devouring dead flesh, they gnaw at the corpse of materialism and devour it; if they did not, its putrefying stench would corrupt the earth. They hope that their day is dawning, the day when they can send the ghosts of the dead out among the living. We are quite happy to let them be. They want to create a void, one that goes by the name of madness and absolute desperation and that will swallow up all life, but they do not know the law of ‘fulfilment’. They do not know that the fountain of help only starts to flow from the realm of the spirit when the need is there.

And it is they who are creating this need!

They are doing more than we do. They are calling down the new prophet. They are overthrowing the old church and do not realise that they are calling up the new one. They want to devour living things, but all they devour is what is decaying. They want to eradicate humanity’s hope for a life after death and only eradicate what must anyway fall. The old church has become black and lightless, but the shadow it casts on the future is white. The forgotten doctrine of the ‘Dissolution with Corpse and Sword’ will be the basis of the new religion and the armoury of the spiritual pope.

Do not worry about him” – the seamstress turned her gaze towards the carpenter, who was staring blankly ahead – “or his kind; no one who is honest is heading for the abyss.”

The rest of the night until the sun came up I spent on the seat in the garden, happy in the knowledge that it was only the form of my lover that was sleeping there at my feet. She herself is as awake as my heart, is inextricably bound up with me.

The dawn rose from the horizon, night clouds hung down to the ground like heavy, black curtains; orange and violet patches formed a gigantic face whose rigid features reminded me of the head of the Medusa. It hovered there motionless, as if it were lying in wait to devour the sun. The whole looked like a shroud from hell with the face of Satan imprinted on it.

Before the sun came, as if in greeting, I broke a branch off the elder tree and, so that it would flourish and grow into a tree itself, planted it in the ground. I felt as if, in doing that, I was enriching the world of life.

Before the great light appeared, the first harbingers of its radiance had erased the head of the Medusa. The clouds that had been so dark and menacing were transformed into an innumerable flock of white lambs drifting across the glorious sky.

I woke one morning with these words of John the Baptist on my lips. From the day I spoke them to my thirty-second year they were like a motto governing my life.

“He’s getting to be an eccentric like his grandfather”, I heard the old folk mutter when I met them in the town. “He’s going downhill month by month.”

“He’s an idle layabout who wastes every hour God gave us”, said my hard-working neighbours. “Has anyone ever seen him work?”

In later years, when I was a man, the gossip had hardened into the certainty that I had the evil eye – “Keep out of his way, his look brings misfortune!” – and the old women in the market-square would hold out the ‘fork’ – index and middle fingers outspread to ward off the ‘magic’ – towards me, or they would cross themselves.

Others maintained I was a vampire, one of the undead that came back in the night to suck the blood from the children as they slept; if two red spots were found on the neck of an infant, then people would say they were the marks of my teeth. Many claimed to have seen me, half wolf, half man, in their sleep and would run away screaming whenever they caught sight of me in the street. The place where I used to sit in the garden was considered bewitched, and no one dared to pass through the alleyway.