THE PASSION OF LAZARUS

He smelled the damp presence of plants sunk into soft earth, surrounded by brambles; the wind blowing in from the sea, stubbornly contending with the dust and dryness of the desert. He tasted the swampy water, the rot, the acidic slime burning his throat. He felt all of that. What was it? A hallucination? He forced himself to believe that he was hallucinating, or dreaming while awake, or that he was in fact asleep and dreaming that he had managed to leave the cave where they had put him away. Put away? He struggled against a flock of outlaw verbs, highwaymen of the paths of language. Put away. Stored? Deposited. Hidden? That’s it! They had hidden him, plotting a dubious death, to remove him from the fury of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. No, they had not hidden him. Nor would there have been any fury without the resurrection; in that case he would not be fleeing like a rat. Some supposed that he had no right to return from the world of shadows and tried to force him to leave again; there is no place in the world for someone who has been called. Fear of death stimulates the search for God in the hope of aid, but he did not need it; God himself had acted, and men were trying to twist His arm. They had also unleashed a flock of verbs after him. They wanted to hunt him, detain him, capture him, seize him. Mounted upon each verb rode a Levite, the fanatical and blind servants of the power of the Temple. Without any doubt, they would be far more cruel and expeditious than any verb a man could form with his lips and tongue.

He took two or three steps to make sure he was walking. The growing darkness of the storm forming on the horizon was proof that he was moving in the right direction. Ahead, near the river, there was an abyss into which the sun fell ceaselessly every afternoon, making the rock boil and forming a gigantic whirlwind of sand that rose in a spiral. In the empty space of echoes, the path on which he set his feet crumbled, throwing him violently to one side. Could he not even trust the ground beneath him? One inexhaustible force tried to expel him from the world, another to hold him back. Had he become a tool coveted by all, the objective of a game without rules? He remembered—he did not want to remember—and he remembered. He had been ill. He had died. He had been resurrected. The greatest demonstration of divine power had served to return him to earthly life, but not to prevent his persecution. Now he was a fugitive. He could not precisely understand what was happening. He had been very ill, but he only remembered having fallen asleep and remembered awakening. If he had truly been dead for four days, it was impossible for him to recount anything that had occurred in that interval; the four days in the tomb were a black blur in his mind. Time does not exist for those who sleep the sleep of death.

Nor does time exist for the eye that inhabits a plane of existence higher than that of the fugitive. The eye is outside time and outside space. But by virtue of being an eye, it can see. What does it see? The eye observes a thin, sickly man who rises to his feet and resumes his advance along a narrow path flanked by thorny bushes. The thin, sickly man is fleeing; of that there is no doubt. From what does he flee? The resurrection has been a display of divine arrogance. Whatever the source of that portentous power, the Jewish leaders were convinced that very soon all common people would believe in that force. He, the resurrected one, was the living proof and had to disappear.

He calculated that, marching briskly, he would reach the Jordan long before the sun set. It would not have been easy to cross it without light, so it was imperative that nightfall find him on the other side of the river. And then there, what? There was half a day’s journey between the eastern bank and Philadelphia, the city of Abner. He felt weak. Death had consumed him. But he could not afford hesitation. He would walk blindly in the darkness, his best ally. Besides, no one knew who he was in Perea. They would see a pallid man, hurrying past, and wonder whether demons were chasing him. No demon, he might shout back; the murderous intriguers of the Sanhedrin are pursuing me. But he would not do so; it would have been useless. Those simple peasants could barely straighten the bodies bent over the soil. They knew nothing of miracles or of the proclamation of the good news. They were unaware that the priests were determined to stop the spread of the claim that someone had risen from the dead and that this prodigy was the result of a singular power.

Yet as he covered the distance separating him from his goal, the fugitive again wondered what that death had consisted of. He could affirm that he had been very ill, that he had felt himself dying, though he never dared to expect any miracle, that a magician would abandon the essential matters of his work to come to his aid. Who was he, how important was he that rivers and winds should change their course? Multitudes of augurs and healers roamed the regions and villages boasting of their abilities, but he did not trust that power to cure illnesses by the laying on of hands or the force of words spoken in a deep and persuasive voice.

Moreover, divine power had returned him to life without clarifying for how long. Was it a gift, a loan, a mockery? His hour had come, as it comes to all, but a superior will had intervened to amend its own scriptures. He knew that the drop of gall on the tip of the angel of death’s sword acts at the end of the third day. Had the divine mind planned all that spectacle with a petty purpose, indifferent to his own feelings? What did it intend to demonstrate? Only its power, the pure power of divinity? Perhaps he was a rung meant to be stepped on in the ascent of the chosen one toward the summit of the universe. That sacrifice had been demanded of him, without even asking whether he was willing to endure it. Should he accept it gladly, with a bleeding but open heart?

He stopped. A flock of doubts blocked his way. No, not a flock—this time it was an army. The army of doubts had been recruited from all the unanswered questions raised by the act of resurrection. He let his arms fall, discouraged. He would never reach Philadelphia. And even if he did, he would not manage to cross the wall surrounding the city. Abner would see him for what he was: a base rag, a remora. His resurrection was a torch already burned out; its usefulness was that and only that: to show those who doubted power that there were no limits. But death, he thought—my death—waits beyond that bend in the road, or the next. Let us say it plainly once and for all: why resurrect me if you were not willing to grant me immortality? I have not committed so many sins as to deserve this double death.

Man resists acknowledging that there is a purpose, far closer to power than to faith. A day, a month, an additional year can contain the seeds of a tree that will grow, lifting its branches toward the sky. He resists, but finally yields. He begins to intuit the reasons. He, the resurrected one, is the living proof and must remain on earth for as long as necessary, no more. The idea of rebellion floods his blood and grants him new strength. He sets out again. He crosses the river. The doubts scatter in all directions, diffused in a thick gray mist. He believes he sees the towers and domes of Philadelphia silhouetted beyond the horizon, though he knows that is impossible. Perhaps it is the city of the future, guarded by angels of iron. He has had visions like that before, and after the period in the cave they have grown sharper and more insistent. He will write about those events, he enthuses. The teachings of his master and protector would illuminate the path with a light that would not be amiss for him at that moment, when the penumbras begin to cover the world with their blue mantle.

They were in the synagogue, in Philadelphia. Abner had summoned more than a hundred companions to decipher the meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection. A messenger arriving from Jerusalem had brought the news. Since Lazarus had joined that group of believers, and since he himself had undergone a similar experience, they were willing to believe that Jesus too had risen from the dead—why not? It was a time of portents. Abner and Lazarus, who stood together facing the congregation, had just opened the session when some saw a diffuse form appear, a shadow, a sudden and growing tide, blacker than pitch, cut by the reflection of the sun on the wall.

Abner and Lazarus took a few steps toward the shadow, as if they intended to welcome a lost and recovered brother. But the shadow, elusive like all of its kind, vanished into the light and left a breath of ashes floating in the air. Abner and Lazarus looked at one another. They shared the unease and misgivings born of events as strange as they were improbable. The dead were usually buried on the day of death; it was a forced habit in a warm climate. Often someone who was only in a coma was buried, so that on the second or even the third day that person emerged from the tomb and appeared to have resurrected. Was that all that had happened to Lazarus? Was what had happened to Jesus more than that?

Lazarus knew that whatever might happen from then on, the myth would play an indispensable role. What the senses recorded was of little importance. All those people who had followed the Master were ready and willing to construct a narrative that would allow them to relive the original reality at every moment, responding to their deepest needs. The Master would speak in their minds and hearts; all felt the need to recover him, and that image had to be fixed with the greatest certainty and security before others did so artfully, for purposes of manipulation and domination. He, Lazarus, who had been dead or believed he had been, was perhaps the only one who had nothing to lose.

Lazarus raised his arms and merged with the shadows. For a magical instant the scene crystallized and all present heard, avidly, the words they longed to hear.

Focused like a ray against walls and ground, against earth, stones, and trees, against people who boiled and vaporized like dry herbs amid clouds of mist, the myth grew at the expense of truth. Lazarus knew that there was only one way to recover the original version of the moment of light: to rummage among the ruins of what that week had been, from the moment he learned that the Sanhedrin had decreed the death of Jesus until the Master’s crucifixion. Determined to halt the spread of the teachings, the priests judged— not without reason— that it would be useless to execute Jesus if they allowed Lazarus, the ultimate miracle, to testify that Jesus had brought him back from the abode of the dead. Lazarus had remained in his house in Bethany until the situation became untenable.

But many years had passed since then. Years of confusion and estrangement. He quarreled with Peter and with James, the flesh-and-blood brother of Jesus; he parted ways with Paul because he did not accept Paul’s attempts to alter the Master’s teachings. Lazarus, who unlike Paul had known and loved Jesus, could not tolerate that skillful corrupter of the Essene’s doctrines. Nevertheless, Paul was powerful, and he was the same fragile and sickly man who had fled through the desert, striving to put distance between himself and his pursuers, though now far weaker and more worn than then. Now more than ever, he was certain that the resurrection had been the boast of a superior power, indifferent to his opinions and feelings. He had not deserved that death, but neither had he deserved this additional shred of life, sterile, useless as a rope too short.

Lazarus remembered every instant. As if it were possible to call each lentil floating in a bowl of stew by its name, he remembered the before and after of that glorious day. He remembered the words, the gestures; the fists and the shouts. At hearing Jesus’ call he had felt death move away from him like a ship with sails unfurled, and he knew that the error of sleep and pain and passion was returning from its unusual adventure. That is what he remembered, and that is what he now writes, feverish and lugubrious, on a golden parchment. He struggles against a flock of outlaw verbs, highwaymen of the paths of language. To plot. To intrigue. To lie. To falsify. His strength abandons him. He has fought those giants before, without spirit or hope of victory. They return from the world of shadows to demand his silence, to claim ownership of the legend, to push him in the proper direction. What have you become, brothers? What have we become? Lazarus examines the present and glimpses the future: the end of free fraternity and the birth of the murky hierarchical organization. He sees the rich suspicious of the poor who have found their faith; he sees that they feel that this pure faith, derived directly from the Master, threatens their power, and so they have decided to return it like a counterfeit coin, adulterated to serve their petty interests. He writes. He writes.

He writes. He writes. The text has a thousand pages, ten thousand pages, a million pages. He cannot stop writing. New events overlap the old ones, correct and modify them. Each correction annuls a year, a decade, a century. But each correction opens dozens of doors leading to galleries whose flanks hold dozens of doors leading to galleries that open and close endless labyrinths and branches. Each word he writes in the infinite book contains a complete universe. Each universe he creates with each word he writes in the book contains creatures who are born, feel, think, and die. Each universe he creates with each word he writes in the book has its Jesus and its Caiaphas, its Paul and its Lazarus. He knows the sign: multiplication. As he penetrates deeper into the book he has been writing for more than two thousand years, as if through one of the many unauthorized corridors—those corridors full of light and radiation, places so unexpected and contradictory—his body, mind, and heart are invaded by echoes of alarm and surprise; even the stones with which the least important buildings were constructed return to their natural state and beg for a different order. But there are so many possibilities! Words form sentences and sentences paragraphs. No two sentences are the same, nor two paragraphs. A single fact remains immutable, unaltered, no matter how many pages he adds to the book. In all corridors, in all chapters, in all those years—endless years of remaining on earth. Lazarus does not wish the supplication to leave his lips, but the words, like rebellious birds, escape his mouth and form the dreaded, almost abhorred sentence:

—Master, why have you condemned me?

The old man was sitting by the window in one of those bars forgotten by the destructive hand of progress and modernization. I stood before him and dominated him with the bulk of my body. He barely looked at me; his sunken eyes, like yesterday, like always, skittish as rats, scurried along baseboards and moldings, garlands, rosettes, and fillets. Lazarus’ eyes were bottomless wells, plunged into time.

—May I sit?

—No. But you will do so anyway; it is written.

—Where is it written?

—In my book, where else?

—In your book… Have you foreseen each and every movement, as Laplace desired?

—I was Laplace for a time. I didn’t like it.

I knew from the beginning that it would not be simple. Which ones, how many had he been in two thousand years?

—I’m not interested in Laplace —I said—. I have searched for you everywhere; the conjectures indicated that I would end up finding you.

—I am no longer that one. I am who I am now. The only way to outwit immortality is to forget each of those I have been.

—That kind of immortality cancels itself; if one cannot remember the past, one is condemned to a perpetual present.

—How do you come to think that I desire anything else?

He had not changed. He was still the thin and sickly man who stumbled, fell, and rose on that forgotten road from Jerusalem to Jericho, covered a million times by desert sand and dust. He had escaped the wrath of the Sanhedrin, he had evaded Paul’s hostility, but he had not been able to distance himself from the life sentence with which the Master had shackled him.

—The book —I said—, where is the book?

Lazarus looked at me for the first time, and his gaze was a lightning bolt that blinded me forever—at least to seeing the core of pain lodged in an immortal’s chest.

—I burned it. Now the book is here —he said, pointing to his forehead with a long, sharp finger; the nail of that finger could perfectly have been the tool meant to open the most hermetic lock.

I recoiled. —If that book describes the events of the last two thousand years and the only version inhabits your brain, we run the risk that its expressions and emotions will dissolve like sugar in boiling water.

Lazarus smiled, but it was a cold smile, a false grimace. —Your fear is unfounded. This book, against my will, will continue its course forever. Men pass, but Lazarus has been condemned by the will that sought to save him.

—This dialogue is impossible —I said—; it is not happening. This scene is the product of my imagination. Lazarus, if he ever existed beyond the metaphor of the Preacher, died in his time.

—As you wish. —Lazarus poured a few drops of a dark liquor, thick as coagulated blood, into a tiny engraved crystal cup. —As you wish —he repeated. He raised the cup to his lips and let the liquid slide slowly. It looked dark and fetid, sticky, greasy. A mixture of malice and senile sagacity activated each movement the immortal made, and by their very nature they led to the fatal question, but I did not wish to ask it. Lazarus, if that man was indeed the result of the greatest miracle performed by the Nazarene and not an absurd fraud, demonstrated that blind chance, and not a creative will, governs the destinies of the Universe.

—Lazarus —I finally said, resigned to my fate—, were you dead, and did he resurrect you?

Lazarus set the cup on the table; the sound of glass against wood produced a crepuscular, noxious sound. He buried his head in his hands and a convulsive sob shook his body. I respected his reaction and waited impassively for the answer. He probably took another hundred years to gather the necessary strength, and only then did he look at me again—for the last time, not because he was ready to depart, but because I was leaving him in peace forever.

—No —he said—, he never resurrected me; I was always dead.

Original title: La pasión de Lázaro

Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman