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“I’ve been ill.”
“You look ill. Come up in my shack, if the climb won’t tire you out.”
“I’ll be all right. I had a little trouble the other day, and our physician told me to rest. Fah! If an important guest weren’t coming soon, I’d pay no attention. But he’s coming, so I’m resting. It’s quite tiresome.”
Benjamin glanced back at him with a grin as they climbed the arroyo. He waggled his grizzly head. “Riding ten miles across the desert is resting?”
“For me it’s rest. And, I’ve been wanting to see you, Benjamin.”
“What will the villagers say?” the Old Jew asked mockingly.
“They’ll think we’ve become reconciled, and that will spoil both our reputations.”
“Our reputations never have amounted to much in the market place, have they?”
“True,” he admitted but added cryptically: “for the present.”
“Still waiting, Old Jew?”
“Certainly!” the hermit snapped.
The abbot found the climb tiring. Twice they stopped to rest. By the time they reached the tableland, he had become dizzy and was leaning on the spindly hermit for support. A dull fire burned in his chest, warning against further exertion, but there was none of the angry clenching that had come before.
A flock of the blue-headed goat-mutants scattered at the approach of a stranger and fled into straggly mesquite. Oddly, the mesa seemed more verdant than the surrounding desert, although there was no visible supply of moisture.
“This way, Paulo. To my mansion.”
The Old Jew’s hovel proved to be a single room, windowless and stone-walled, its rocks stacked loosely as a fence, with wide chinks through which the wind could blow. The roof was a flimsy patchwork of poles, most of them crooked, covered by a heap of brush, thatch, and goatskins. On a large flat rock, set on a short pillar beside the door, was a sign painted in Hebrew:
The size of the sign, and its apparent attempt to advertise, led Abbot Paulo to grin and ask: “What does it say, Benjamin? Does it attract much trade up here?”
“Hah — what should it say? It says: Tents Mended Here.”
The priest snorted his disbelief.
“All right, doubt me. But if you don’t believe what’s written there, you can’t be expected to believe what’s written on the other side of the sign.”
“Facing the wall?,”
“Obviously facing the wall.”
The pillar was set close to the threshold, so that only a few inches of clearance existed between the flat rock and the wall of the hovel. Paulo stooped low and squinted into the narrow space. It took him a while to make it out, but sure enough there was something written on the back of the rock, in smaller letters:
“Do you ever turn the rock around?”
“Turn it around? You think I’m crazy? In times like these?”
“What does it say back there?”
“Hmmm-h
“There’s a wall slightly in the way.”
“There always was, wasn’t there?”
The priest sighed. “All right, Benjamin, I know what it was that you were commanded to write “in the entry and on the door” of your house. But only you would think of turning it face down.”
“Face inward,” corrected the hermit. “As long as there are tents to be mended in Israel — but let’s not begin teasing each other until you’ve rested. I’ll get you some milk, and you tell me about this visitor that’s worrying you.
“There’s wine in my bag if you’d like some,” said the abbot, falling with relief onto a mound of skins. “But I’d rather not talk about Thon Taddeo.”
“Oh?That one.”
“You’ve heard of Thon Taddeo? Tell me, how is it you’ve always managed to know everything and everybody without stirring from this hill?”
“One hears, one sees,” the hermit said cryptically.
“Tell me, what do you think of him?,”
“I haven’t see him. But I suppose he will be a pain. A birth-pain, perhaps, but a pain.”
“Birth-pain? You really believe we’re going to have a new Renaissance, as some say?”
“Hmmm-h
“Stop smirking mysteriously, Old Jew, and tell me your opinion. You’re bound to have one. You always do. Why is your confidence so hard to get? Aren’t we friends?”
“On some grounds, on some grounds. But we have our differences, you and I.”
“What have our differences got to do with Thon Taddeo and a Renaissance we’d both like to see? Thon Taddeo is a secular scholar, and rather remote from our differences.”
Benjamin shrugged eloquently. “Difference, secular scholars,” he echoed, tossing out the words like discarded apple pits. “I have been called a ‘secular scholar’ at various times by certain people, and sometimes I’ve been staked, stoned, and burned for it.”
“Why, you never—” The priest stopped, frowning sharply. That madness again. Benjamin was peering at him suspiciously, and his smile had gone cold. Now, thought the abbot, he’s looking at me as if I were one of Them — whatever formless “Them” it was that drove him here to solitude. Staked, stoned, and burned? Or did his “I” mean “We” as in “I, my people”?
“Benjamin — I am Paulo. Torquemada is dead. I was born seventy-odd years ago, and pretty soon I’ll die. I have loved you, old man, and when you look at me, I wishyou would see paulo of pecos and no other.”
Benjamin wavered for a moment. His eyes became moist.
“I sometimes — forget—”
“And sometimes you forget that Benjamin is only Benjamin and not all of Israel.”
“Never!” snapped the hermit, eyes blazing again. “For thirty-two centuries, I—” He stopped and closed his mouth tightly.
“Why?” the abbot whispered almost in awe. “Why do you take the burden of a people and its past upon yourself alone?”
The hermit’s eyes flared a brief warning, but he swallowed a throaty sound and lowered his face into his hands. “You fish in dark waters.”
“Forgive me.”
“The burden — it was pressed upon me by others.” He looked up slowly. “Should I refuse to take it?”
The priest sucked in his breath. For a time there was no sound in the shanty but the sound of the wind. There was a touch of divinity in this madness! Dom Paulo thought. The Jewish community was thinly scattered in these times. Benjamin had perhaps outlived his children, or somehow become an outcast. Such an old Israelite might wander for years without encountering others of his people. Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was the last, the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His “I” was the converse of the imperial “We.”
But I, too, am a member of a oneness, thought Dom Paulo, a part of a congregation and a continuity. Mine, too, have been despised by the world. Yet for me the distinction between self and nation is clear. For you, old friend, it has somehow become obscure. A burden pressed upon you by others? And you accepted it? What must it weigh? What would it weigh for me? He set his shoulders under it and tried to heave, testing the bulk of it: I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every monk and priest who has breathed and walked the earth since Christ, as well as for the acts of my own.
He shuddered and began shaking his head.
No, no. It crushed the spine, this burden. It was too much for any man to bear, save Christ alone. To be cursed for a faith was burden enough. To bear the curses was possible, but then — to accept the illogic behind the curses, the illogic which called one to task not only for himself but also for every member of his race or faith, for their actions as well as one’s own? To accept that too? — as Benjamin was trying to do?