Seiobo There Below (20 page)

Many, many things demanded an explanation, as he nearly burst out of the building and rushed into the Carrer Provença, and onward from there, as if he were deaf and blind, and he had not the slightest idea of where to begin, as he had not the slightest idea of where he was at that moment, nor was he even interested; his brain was throbbing so hard that he could not bear, he simply could not bear to deal with anything else, only this throbbing in his brain; at first he thought it was throbbing because he was slamming his heel down too hard and that was making his brain tremble inside his head, but then he walked more softly and with that nothing improved, there was only this throbbing, in general he was thoroughly unhinged, the chaos inside him was total and he was dizzy, so dizzy that he had to keep stopping; certainly the passersby thought he was drunk or that he was going to throw up, but no, he was neither drunk nor was he going to throw up, he was just under assault from this dizziness and this throbbing, and by the fact that at the same time he began to see various things: he saw himself running through the streets, avoiding people; he saw faces as they arose before him for an instant then disappeared; he saw the old man from the museum or whatever it was that he had just left, and he saw at the same time that middle-aged couple too, as they separated while still behind him, passed around him, and then, moving in front of him, took each other by the arm again; he saw the staircase too, as it spiraled upward, and he also saw how in the middle of the big painting, and to the right, the colors were somewhat faded; then there was the staircase again, but now it was winding downward, and the gold leaf on the pictures gleamed, but what disturbed him the very most was that in between all of these simultaneous pictures flashing again and again were the three angels, as they bent their heads to one side, or more precisely, as the middle one and the one on the right bent their heads toward the one on the left, who bowed his head toward them, then all three of the angels looked at him, but just for a second, because almost immediately they disappeared, only the colors remained, the luminous blue and crimson of their cloaks — of course not just any old luminous blue or any old crimson, if these were even blues or crimsons at all, he wasn’t even sure of that, and not even sure that it was even colors that he had seen, he wasn’t certain of anything at all, because they just flared up and then flashed away, but in such a way that the other pictures were flaring up and flashing away at the same time, with such speed in his head, and it was probably that which was making him reel and making everything inside him throb, but the very worst was that he could not stop, which meant that he wasn’t able to bring the entire thing to a halt, he wasn’t able to say to himself, well enough of that, it’s over now, stop, pull yourself together, and then he would stop and pull himself together, because it was precisely this he couldn’t manage, the suspension of this speed out there, because it was inside him as well, he had to run — possibly in such a way that he would not bump into people too much, a lot of people were coming this way and it took a while for him to get out of the city center — and he came out toward the north, to the wide and heavily trafficked boulevard called Diagonal, and well, after that the situation was already better, in addition he already knew this area, so he kept to this northern direction, the one that he had to choose to reach his accommodations, for here already there were fewer and fewer people coming in the opposite direction, and that was exactly what he wanted, for fewer and fewer people to be coming along, so that at last the heavens could have mercy on him and free him from them as well, and then he could already bear to slow down a little, indeed, when he realized that no one was coming after him — of course he knew all along that no one had been coming after him — still it was somehow important now, it had become important that no one was, in any event; when this became unequivocal, and he was able to slow down his steps completely, when he was already proceeding at a walking pace along the narrow streets — he couldn’t exactly say that on a day like today, Saturday, let there be no one outside, because there were people on the sidewalk or in the windows, or how could he not have seen here or there, where the little streets bulged wide, a children’s soccer team now and then, but still, he no longer felt the presence of that monstrous strength that had driven him until now, so that now he could pose to himself the question of what exactly had happened, why was he running to and fro like a madman, and how had he, of all people, got mixed up in this story with the horrendous building, why hadn’t he just left when he could have done so, why had he stayed, what did he even want from this exhibit, he had never before been to an exhibit in his life so why now, of all times, accordingly why and why and why; this had to be answered, he explained to himself, and he rapidly looked around, wondering if he’d been speaking aloud, but that was unlikely, as at least here the passersby did not stare at him, and so everything began to calm down, eventually even his brain slowly left off with the questioning, and with a few vulgar turns of phrase — that is to say fuck it, and really fuck it, and just fuck the whole fucking thing one more fucking time — he succeeded in gaining a psychological advantage in the face of another compulsion that drove him on, saying fine, if he was stopping too, or if he was even sitting down on an empty bench, then he should do so first and foremost to figure out what the hell had happened with him in the past hours, and why had he gone into that Perella, or whatever the hell it was called, and if he had gone inside why did he stay there, and why did he look at that picture, and why had there fallen upon him, with such force, what he had seen there, so that again just why and why and why, the only problem was that this advantage proved to be only momentarily effective, and he had stopped in vain, he cursed in vain, he sat on the empty bench in vain, namely this psychological advantage was all in vain, at the end it was not his more lucid self but instead the other that was triumphant, the one that wanted to find an explanation for why he had allowed himself to be swept into something of which he had not the slightest idea, and of which he never could anyway, I don’t even know what that was hanging on the wall, I don’t even know what building I was in, I — apart from restoration workshops — know the trowel, the mixing hod, the plane, because that didn’t matter now, it didn’t matter that there had been more than one restoration workshop in his life, just as it didn’t even count that he had not become what he was all at once, this nothing who went in with the metro every morning, then out with the metro every evening, it did not immediately start with that foul-smelling, damp, dark room which he had rented during the past year, and where he lived alone, it did not immediately begin with this, but rather it ended with this, this was the end already, he thought now on the empty bench and this thought suddenly quieted down his brain inside, whoopee, the end is here, he said the words to himself, and these five words at last stopped the throbbing in his brain, certainly this is the end, old man, he repeated again, and he looked around the square, or well it wasn’t even really a square, just a kind of forced widening of the street because one crummy house had been torn down among the other crummy houses, and there was just that much more extra space where he sat, and where a group of children were kicking a ball around, only now did he have a good look at them, one of whom moved fairly adroitly, he passed the ball well, it was evident at first that although he was the smallest among them, he was also the most intelligent, because not only did he skillfully dribble the ball, but it was plain that he understood what he was doing, while the others just kept running back and forth and shouted out obviously, I’m over here and the like, but that one, the little one, did not shout, one could tell that he took it seriously, indeed, now that he watched him more closely, his face remained surprisingly, even disconcertingly, serious at all times, as if something depended on whether he could stop the ball arching this way with his chest, or if he could make an accurate pass to the forward; he’s serious, he decided, even too serious, he now only watched the grubby youth, always, unceasingly, unflinchingly serious, that is to say the youth did not for a single moment take part in the common joy as did the others when he kicked the ball, maybe for him it wasn’t even joy but something else — and then at once his head was filled with a wracking pain, he quickly turned his glance away from the children, he didn’t want to see them, and already he wasn’t even there, he went on further in the narrow street, then again, just as the narrow street turned off to the left, he found himself suddenly facing . . . the three angels in the picture, the whole thing was before him in such detail as if it were real, which of course it was not, he stood there rooted to the ground and he looked at them like that, he looked at the miraculous faces, he looked at the angel sitting in the middle and the angel sitting on the left, and how their mantles were so dazzlingly blue, he looked at them for time immortal, then he stared into the gold, finally again at them, and he was disturbed to realize that they weren’t even looking at him; they weren’t looking at all at the person who was looking at them, or rather that, inside the museum or whatever it was, he had been seriously mistaken.

Everything went back to the definition of the Holy Trinity, practically the fate of all Eastern Christianity rested on this, indeed even Christianity itself rested upon the extraordinary concerns surrounding this fundamental question; as a rule, things don’t usually occur in this way, because as a rule the fundamental questions only crystallize later, only later is it usually clear what is being debated, why certain principles are being put forward, why the quarrels, the schisms, then the heaps of massacred bodies; the questions occur generally speaking later; but this was not the case of the Christian religion of love, as here the discussions had been taking place since the fourth century, and finally it was because of this that the theological schism, made official back in 1054, occurred, although there actually had been an Eastern and Western Church since the creation of the Eastern Roman Empire, there was Rome and Constantinople; and this Eastern Church, to speak of only that now, this Constantinople, was none too reassured, neither at the time, nor later on, when an ultimate decision was reached as to the nature of the Almighty, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and what there even was in this realm that surpassed the human, because they had to make up their minds — on every occasion, once and for all — six times; the problem was that human beings — that is the Fathers of the Church, the patriarchs, metropolitans, bishops, priests of the synod, in a word the local and universal synods, and so on, the great Saint Athanasios, Saint Gregory of Nazianos, Saint Basil the Great, and Saint Gregory of Nyssa — had to make a decision in a question that clearly surpassed not only their extraordinary talents but their human capacities, because when the time came to say what was the relation between the Lord, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit, everything came into it: and there were the subtle and heretical distinctions of the most outrageous versions, heresies so subtle that it is not easy to comprehend the large quantity of blood, symbolic or real, that was periodically shed due to one or another miniscule detail of the so-called theological question, that was shed, therefore, because of the teaching of the Holy Trinity: for there were those who argued for the Lord alone, and there were those, too, who acknowledged the uniqueness and primacy of Christ alone, then there were those who argued for the precedence of the Lord and Christ together, but there were finally those who advised for the equal standing of all three, that is of the Lord, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and this school of thought was finally victorious, together with that peculiar formation which became the central tenet of Christian belief: the single essence of the Father but in three forms, so that there followed afterward, for those who can even understand it, the so-called filioque controversy, i.e., as to whether the Holy Spirit originated only from the Father, or from the Son, and this split the Christian faith into two once and for all, and there arose the Orthodox world of belief — this colossal mysterious Byzantine Empire — which remained for a thousand years even after the great collapse of the West, where there reigned a life subordinated simultaneously to the desire for pomp and sensual hunger, and additionally, with equal justification, a life subordinated to a theologically driven faith; and where the essential, earth-shattering
attack on the entire Orthodox congregation following the Seventh Ecumenical Council no longer threatened this fundamental tenet of faith, which of course did not at the same time mean that the question was resolved, the question was not resolved; every decision concerning the Lord, as well as that of the relation between Him and the incarnation as Christ and, respectively, between Him and the Holy Spirit, remained in an unapproachable obscurity, or looking at it from the viewpoint of the later materialist heretics, on the terrain of a fairly indefensible logical failure, where only deference to authority and faith itself was of assistance, that is, as for the most profound saints of the Church, from St. John Chrysostom of the Golden Mouth to St. Sergius of Radonezh, the question of the nature of the Trinity never was problematic, it was and remained a problem only for the others, that is for the world, for all those who were not capable — since they were not capable of what the saints were — of seeing the embodiment of the Creator, of seeing the mystery of the Trinity, of not questioning but experiencing, experiencing for themselves and perceiving the extraordinary concentration of the created and the non-created world, the godly atelier and the supremacy — stunning, miraculous, inexpressible in words — of the strength of creation; allowing the decisions to be rendered upon them, through them, through their saintly beings, by the Church, that is the Holy Synod, as to what the tenet of faith was that could no longer be cast into doubt concerning bodily manifestation, concerning the mystery of the Trinity and its depiction, because it could be depicted, they concluded after some debate — a debate that did not forego destructive resolve — yes, they concluded that it could be depicted, yes, Christ the Son, the Embodiment of the Lord, it could be represented — as the order of the Ecumenical Council of One Hundred Articles conceived it — if Abraham had seen them beneath the oak-tree at Mamre, which indeed he had, then they could be represented, namely if Abraham saw Him in the depiction of the three angels, as was repeated by thousands and tens of thousands, from Athens to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Radonezh, then nothing could be said against the idea of the holy icon-painter depicting the Trinity, strictly on the basis of the prescription of the Council; and in the practical sense, on the basis of the descriptions of the monks of Podliniy, according to them, only Abraham, the most ancient of ancients, once, under Elonei Mamre, that is under the oak of Mamre, saw the three winged youths, sat them down at a table, and feasted them; Sarah’s future was discussed, then after a similarly interesting dialogue between Abraham and the Lord during His celebrated appearance as the Three Angels on the topic of Sodom and Gomorrah, at the end of it, there was, briefly, a promise, that namely if He, the Lord, should find ten innocent people there, pure in soul, then He would show mercy to Sodom and Gomorrah, although inasmuch as later on he does destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, the conclusion can be reached that the Lord did not find even ten innocent people pure in soul in this Sodom and Gomorrah, but enough about that, let us return to the point where after this memorable dialogue, everyone went about their own business, the Lord in some form or another — contradictions arise in the relevant traditions as to what this form was — He went on toward Sodom and Gomorrah; Abraham could have reflected for a long time on what he saw and whom he saw, and what had been said to him under the oak, well then, after all this, from this renowned encounter of Our Father with Abraham, from this meeting’s sacred Ordinance preserved namely in Moses 1:18, the precept of the Synod was established as such, after a good few hundred variations — in consequence of which, the divine grace descended upon Andrey Rublev, and his gentle hand and his humble soul, through the agency of his continuous prayer, and from the inspiring strength of the Unnamable Himself at the commission of Abbot Nikon of Radonezh, in memory of St. Sergius, it bore the title of “The Holy Trinity” and came into being, and was preserved, the extraordinary news of which, like a kind of storm of beauty, swept across the whole of Russia, so that Dionisy’s imagination burst into flame a generation later when a copy of the Rublev perfection was commissioned on behalf of a church now unknown to us, and Dionisy set to work, he and no other, because, although it cannot be authenticated that the author of the copy in question could only have been Dionisy, at the same time, the thought that it could have been anyone else: say, one of his followers or someone from the artel of Dionisy, is inconceivable — it is inauthenticable and impossible — for this painting, which turned up later in the Tretyakov Gallery via a path equally unknown and which, thanks to the auspices of a traveling exhibition, arrived in Martigny, Cannes, and then Barcelona, some five hundred years later, was in its essence such a perfect copy of the perfect original, any painter less talented than Dionisy could not have been capable of it, either in that period or any other; after Rublev a magnificent artist such as Dionisy had simply not turned up for a long time, so that it was only he, and he alone, with nonetheless extraordinary help, namely that the condition of the fulfillment of the commission was nothing else than Dionisy receiving assurance that he could inspect the Rublev original without being disturbed, so that Dionisy must have had to spend a very long time in the Church of the Trinity — in the monastery of St. Sergius in Radonezh — for he would need a very long time to draw near to the spirit of this master-work, the spirit of Rublev, and to draw near to the presence of that which the icon of the Trinity on the iconostasis, located in the first space to the right of the Royal Gate, reveals, inasmuch as not only was it necessary to take within a hair’s breadth the measure of the outline of the figures and all the items depicted in the icon, not only did he have to study the forms, the sketching, the placement, and understand the colors and the proportions, but he had to be able to pledge himself as well to the task, for he must have been aware, while in the midst of contemplating the icon, of the dangers inherent in the task: if word got out about someone, even about Dionisy himself — this celebrated icon-painter of the fifteenth century — that he was not worthy of the preparation of the copy of the Radonezh original, for surely Dionisy knew better than anyone else that if the soul did not feel what Rublev did in that time, then he himself would certainly end up in Hell, and the copy would come to nothing, because it would be just a lie, a deceit, a mystification, just an ineffectual and worthless piece of trash, which would then be placed in vain in the Sovereign Tier of the church’s iconostasis, in vain would it be placed there and worshipped, it would not help anyone and would only lull them into the delirium that they were being led somewhere.