The Last Temptation of Christ Part 22

Chapter Thirty-Three.

JESUS SAT under the ancient vine arbor in his yard, his white beard flowing over his uncovered chest. It was the day of the Pa.s.sover. He had bathed, scented his hair, beard and armpits, and changed into clean clothes. The door was shut; there was no one near him. His wives, children and grandchildren laughed and played in the back part of the house; the Negro, who had climbed the eaves at dawn, gazed toward Jerusalem, silent and angry.

Jesus looked at his hands. They had grown extremely fat and gnarled. The blue-black desiccated veins stood out, and on the back of each hand the old mysterious wound had begun to fade and disappear. He shook his white, coa.r.s.e-featured head and sighed.

aHow quickly the years have gone by, how Iave aged! And not only I, but my wives and the trees of my yard and the doors and windows and the stones I step on.a Frightened, he shut his eyes and felt Time run like water from its high sourcea"his minda"down through his neck, breast, loins and thighs, and flow out finally through the soles of his feet.

Hearing footsteps in the yard, he opened his eyes. It was Mary. She had seen him plunged in meditation and had come and seated herself at his feet. Jesus placed his hand on her hair, the raven-black hair which now, like his, had turned white. An inexpressible tenderness took possession of him. In my hands she became white, he reflected, in my hands she became white ...

He bent over and spoke to her. aDo you remember, beloved Mary, do you remember how many times the swallows have come since the blessed day I crossed the threshold of your house as its master, and since I made my way, as husband, into your womb? How many times have we sown together, reaped, vintaged and gathered the olives? Your hair has turned white, Mary dearest, and so has the hair of courageous Martha.a aYes, Beloved, we have turned white,a Mary answered. aThe years go by. We planted this vine whose shade weare sitting under now, we planted it the year that accursed hunchback came, the one who threw a spell over you and made you fainta"do you remember? How many years have we been eating these grapes?a The Negro slid down from the edge of the roof without a sound and stepped in front of them. Mary got up and left. She did not like this strange adopted child. He did not grow, he did not age; he was not a man, he was a spirit, an evil spirit that had entered the house and would not leave again. And she did not like his derisive, frolicking eyes, nor his secret conversations with Jesus during the night.

The Negro approached, his eyes all mockery. His teeth were flas.h.i.+ng, sharp and white. aJesus of Nazareth,a he said softly, athe end is near.a Surprised, Jesus turned. aWhat end?a The Negro put his finger to his lips. aThe end is near,a he repeated. He squatted opposite Jesus and looked at him, laughing.

aAre you leaving me?a Jesus asked, and he suddenly felt strangely glad and relieved.

aYes, the end has come. Why are you smiling, Jesus of Nazareth?a aHave a nice trip. Iave got from you what I wanted: I donat need you any more.a aIs this the way you say goodbye to me? Can you be so ungrateful? All my years of toil for your sake, all my efforts to give you every joy you desired: were these efforts in vain?a aIf your purpose was to smother me in honey, like a bee, your pains have gone to waste. Iave eaten all the honey I wanted, all I could, but I did not dip in my wings.a aWhat wings, clairvoyant?a aMy Soul.a The Negro guffawed maliciously. aWretch, do you think you have a soul?a aI have. And it doesnat need guardian angels or Negro boys: it is free.a The guardian angel went wild with rage. aRebel!a he howled. He pulled up a stone from the courtyard, crumbled it between his palms and scattered the dust into the air.

aAll right,a he said, awe shall see,a and he drew toward the door, cursing.

Wild cries, wailing, lamentation ... Horses neighed; the highway filled with flocks of running people. aJerusalem is burning!a they shouted. aTheyave taken Jerusalem! Weare lost!a The Romans had besieged the city for months, but the Israelites placed their hopes in Jehovah. They were secure. The holy city could not burn, the holy city had no fears; an angel with a scimitar stood at each of her gates. And now ...

The women dashed into the street, screaming and pulling their hair. The men tore their clothes and shouted for G.o.d to appear. Jesus rose, took Mary and Martha by the hand, brought them inside and bolted the door.

aWhy do you cry?a he said to them compa.s.sionately. aWhy do you resist G.o.das will? Listen to what I shall tell you, and do not be afraid. Time is a fire, beloved wives. Time is a fire, and G.o.d holds the spit. Each year he rotates one paschal lamb. This year the paschal lamb is Jerusalem; next year it will be Rome; the following yeara"a aBe quiet, Rabbi,a Mary screamed. aYou forget that weare women, and weak.a aForgive me, Mary,a said Jesus. aI forgot. When the heart takes the uphill road it forgets, and has no mercy.a While he spoke, heavy steps were heard outside in the street. There was the sound of gasping breaths, and thick staffs knocked loudly on the door.

The Negro jumped up, seized the bolt of the door, looked at Jesus and smiled mockingly. aShall I open?a he asked, hardly able to restrain his laughter. aItas your old companions, Jesus of Nazareth.a aMy old companions?a aYou shall see them!a said the Negro, and he threw the door wide open.

A cl.u.s.ter of tiny old men appeared in the doorway. Deteriorated and unrecognizable, they crept into the yard, one leaning against the other. It seemed as though they were glued together and could not be torn apart.

Jesus advanced one pace and stopped. He wanted to extend his hand to bid them welcome, but suddenly his soul felt crushed by an unbearable bitternessa"by bitterness, indignation and pity. He clenched his fists and waited. There was a heavy effluvium from charred wood, singed hair and open wounds. The air stank. The Negro had climbed up onto the horse block. He watched them and laughed.

Taking one step more, Jesus turned to the old man who crept in the lead. aYou, in front,a he said, acome here. Stand still while I push away the ruins of time and see who you are. My heart pounds, but this hanging flesh, these eyes filled with dischargea"I do not know them.a aDonat you recognize me, my rabbi?a aPeter! Are you the rock on which, once upon a time in the folly of my youth, I wanted to build my church? How youave degenerated, son of Jonah! No longer a rock but a sponge full of holes!a aThe years, my rabbi ...a aWhat years? The years are not to blame. As long as the soul stands erect it holds the body high and does not allow the years to touch it. Your soul has declined, Peter, your soul!a aThe troubles of the world came upon me. I married, had children, received wounds, saw Jerusalem burn. ... Iam human: all that broke me.a aYes, youare human and all that broke you,a Jesus murmured with sympathy. aPoor Peter, in the state the worldas in today, you have to be both G.o.d and the devil to endure.a He turned to the next one, who emerged from behind Peteras shoulder. aAnd you?a he said. aThey cut off your nose: your face has become a skulla"all holes. How do you expect me to recognize you? Go on, old companion, speak. Say aRabbi!a and perhaps I shall remember who you are!a The ramshackle form uttered a tremendous cry: aRabbi!a and then lowered its head and was still.

aJacob! Zebedeeas eldest son, the ma.s.sive colossus, the mind set solidly foursquare!a aHis remains, Rabbi,a said Jacob, sniveling. aA wild storm crippled me. The keel cracked, the hull opened, the mast fell. I return to port a wreck.a aWhat port?a aYou, Rabbi.a aWhat can I do for you? I am not a s.h.i.+pyard where you can be caulked. What I shall say, Jacob, is hard, but just: the only port for you is the bottom of the sea. As your father used to say, two and two make four.a He was suddenly overcome with indignation and intense sorrow. He turned to a second chaplet of old men. aAnd you three? Ho, you, you, the gawky bean-stalk: once upon a time werenat you Nathanael? Youave grown flabby. Just look at your bloated, dangling backside, belly and double chins! What did you do with your firm muscles, Nathanael? You are nothing but the skeleton of a three-storied house now. Yes, only scaffolding remains, but do not sigha"that is enough, Nathanael, to get you to heaven.a But Nathanael became angry. aWhat heaven? It wasnat bad enough I lost my ears, fingers and one eye! No, besides that, everything you pounded into us: the pomp, strutting, majesty, kingdom of heavena"the whole lot was drunkenness and now weave sobered up! What do you think, Philip? Am I right?a aWhat can I say, Nathanael,a said a tiny old man lost in the middle of the pile. aWhat can I say, brother! Itas I who have to answer for your joining us!a Jesus shook his head sympathetically and took the hand of this tiny old man they called Philip. aI fell hopelessly in love with you, Philip, best of all shepherds, because you had no sheep. You possessed only the shepherdas crook and you herded the air. At night you took out the winds and put them to pasture. In your imagination you lighted fires, in your imagination you set up the great cauldrons, boiled the milk and sent it flowing from the top of the mountain down to the plain, so that the poor could drink. All your wealth was within your heart. Outside: poverty, hootings, solitude and hunger. That is what it means to be my disciple! And now ... Philip, Philip, best of all shepherds, how youave fallen! You longed, alas, for real sheep, sheep whose wool, whose flesh, you could grasp in your handa"and you perished!a aI get hungry,a Philip replied. aWhat do you expect me to do?a aThink of G.o.d and you shall be filled!a Jesus answered, and then suddenly his heart hardened again.

He turned to a hunched-over old man who had collapsed into the watering trough and remained there, s.h.i.+vering. He lifted the rags which covered him, pushed aside his eyebrows, but could not understand who he was. When he searched under the hair, however, he found a large ear with an age-old broken quill behind it. He laughed.

aWelcome to the immense ear,a he said, greeting him. aHuge, erect, full of hairs, it used to quiver like a rabbitas, all fear, curiosity and hunger. Welcome to the inky fingers and the inkstand heart! Do you still fill papers with blots, Matthew, my scribe? The quill, completely broken, is still behind your ear. Did you wage war using this as your lance?a aWhy do you jeer at me,a said the other with a bitter taste on his lips. aWill you never stop ridiculing us? Think of the magnificence with which I began to write your life and times. I too would have become immortal, along with you. And now, the peac.o.c.k has lost his feathers. It wasnat a peac.o.c.k; it was a chicken. What a shame I worked so hard!a Jesus suddenly felt his knees go slack. He bowed his head; but then, quickly, angrily, he raised it and pointed his finger threateningly at Matthew.

aQuiet!a he said. aHow dare you!a An emaciated, cross-eyed old man appeared between Nathanaelas legs and chuckled. Jesus turned, saw him and recognized him immediately.

aThomas, my seven-month babe, welcome! Where did you sow your teeth? What did you do with the two hairs you had on your scalp? And from what goat did you uproot that greasy little beard which hangs from your chin? Two-faced, seven-eyed, all-cunning Thomas, is it you?a aIn person! Only the teeth are missinga"they fell out along the waya"and the two hairs. Everything else is in order.a aThe mind?a aA true c.o.c.k. It mounts the dung heap knowing well enough It isnat the one who brings the sun, but it crows nevertheless every morning and brings ita"because it knows the right time to crow.

aAnd did you fight too, hero of heroes, to save Jerusalem?a aMe fight? Am I stupid? I played the prophet.a aThe prophet? So the tiny ant-mind grew wings? Did G.o.d blow upon you?a aWhat has G.o.d got to do with this? My intellect, all by itself, found the secret.a aWhat secret?a aWhat being a prophet means. Your holiness also knew it once, but I think youave forgotten.a aWell, sly Thomas, remind mea"it might come in handy again. What is a prophet?a aA prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. Youall ask me why. Itas because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.

aItas a dangerous thing for a man to talk with you, Thomas,a Jesus said, winking at him. aInside your tiny, quick-moving crossed eyes I perceive a tail, two hornsa"and a spark of burning light.a aTrue light burns, Rabbia"you know that, but you pity mankind. The heart takes pity: thatas why the world finds itself in darkness. The mind does not take pity: thatas why the world is on fire. ... Ah, you nod to me to be still. Youare right; Iall be still. We mustnat uncover such secrets in front of these simple souls. None of them has any endurance, except one: him!a aWho is that?a Thomas dragged himself as far as the street door and pointed, without touching him, to a colossus who stood on the threshold like a withered, lightning-charred tree. The roots of his hair and beard were still red.

aHim!a he said, shrinking back. aJudas! Heas the only one who still holds himself erect. Take care, Rabbi. Heas full of vigor, and unyielding. Speak to him gently, ingratiate yourself with him. Look, his obstinate skull is steaming with rage.a aWell, then, to avoid getting bitten letas catch this desert lion by sending a tame lion after him. Have we descended to this!a He raised his voice. aJudas, my brother, Time is a royal man-eating tiger. He is not satisfied with men: he also devours cities, kingdoms and (forgive me, G.o.d) even G.o.ds! But you he has not touched. Your rage has refused to boil away; no, you have never made your peace with the world. I still perceive the unyielding knife by your breast, and in your eyes hate, wrath and hope, the great fires of youth. ... Welcome!a aJudas, canat you hear?a murmured John, who had collapsed at Jesusa feet. He was unrecognizable, with a white beard and two deep wounds on his cheeks and neck. aCanat you hear, Judas? The master is greeting you. Greet him in return!a aHeas pigheaded and obstinate like a mule,a said Peter. aHe bites his lips to keep himself from talking.a But Jesus had fixed his eyes on his old savage companion and was speaking to him sweetly. aJudas, the chattering messenger birds pa.s.sed over the roof of my house and let fall the news, which then dropped into my yard. It seems you took to the mountains and made war against tyrants, both native and foreign. Then you went down to Jerusalem, seized the traitorous Sadducees, tied red ribbons around their necks and slaughtered them like lambs on the altar of the G.o.d of Israel. Youare a great, gloomy, desperate soul, Judas. Since the day we separated you havenat seen a single day of gladness. Judas, my brother, Iave missed you very much. Welcome!a Johnas terrified eyes regarded Judas, who was still biting his lips to prevent himself from speaking. aDense smoke never ceases to curl up over his head,a he murmured, and he dragged himself back to the others.

aTake care, Rabbi,a said Peter. aHe looks at you from every angle and weighs where heas going to fall upon you first!a aIam speaking to you, Judas, my brother,a Jesus continued. aCanat you hear? I greet you, but you donat place your hand over your heart and say, aIam glad to see you!a Has Jerusalemas suffering stricken you dumb? Do not bite your lips. Youare a man: bear up, donat burst into lamentations. You did your duty bravely. The deep wounds in your arms, breast, facea"all in fronta"proclaim that you fought like a lion. But what can a man do against G.o.d? Fighting to save Jerusalem, you were fighting against G.o.d. In his mind the holy city was reduced to ashes years ago.a aLook, heas come a step forward,a murmured Philip, frightened. aHeas sunk his head into his shoulders, like a bull. Now heall charge.a aLetas move to the sidelines, lads,a said Nathanael. aNow heas raising his fist.a aRabbi, Rabbi, be careful!a called Martha and Mary, coming forward.

But Jesus tranquilly continued to speak. His lips, however, had begun to tremble just perceptibly.

aI too fought as well as I could, Judas, my brother. In my youth I set out, like a youth, to save the world. Afterward, when my mind had matured, I stepped into linea"the line of men. I went to work: plowed the land, dug wells, planted vines and olives. I took the body of woman into my arms and created mena"I conquered death. Isnat that what I always said I would do? Well, I kept my word: I conquered death!a Judas suddenly lashed out, pushed aside Peter and the women, who had placed themselves in front of him, and uttered a great, savage cry. aTraitor!a They all turned to stone. Jesus grew pale and placed his hands on his breast.

aMe? Me, Judas?a he murmured. aYouave uttered a grave word. Take it back!a aTraitor! Deserter!a The tiny old men turned yellow and started for the door. Thomas had already reached the street.

The two women jumped forward.

aBrothers, donat leave,a Mary cried. aSatan has raised his hand against the rabbi. Heas going to strike him!a Peter was slinking toward the door to escape. aWhere are you going?a said Martha, grabbing him. aWill you deny him againa"again?a aIam not getting mixed up in this,a said Philip. aIscariot has a mighty arm, and Iam old. Letas go, Nathanael.a Judas and Jesus were now standing face to face. Judasas body steamed. It smelled of sweat and putrescent wounds.

aTraitor! Deserter!a he bellowed again. aYour place was on the cross. Thatas where the G.o.d of Israel put you to fight. But you got cold feet, and the moment death lifted its head, you couldnat get away fast enough! You ran and hid yourself in the skirts of Martha and Mary. Coward! And you changed your face and your name, you fake Lazarus, to save yourself!a aJudas Iscariot,a Peter interrupted at that point (the women had given him courage, aJudas Iscariot, is that the way one talks to the rabbi? Donat you have any respect?a aWhat rabbi?a howled Iscariot, brandis.h.i.+ng his fist. aHim? But donat you have eyes to see with, minds to judge with? Him, a rabbi? What did he tell us, what did he promise us? Where is the army of angels which was supposed to come down to save Israel? Where is the cross which was supposed to be our springboard to heaven? As he faced the cross this fake Messiah went dizzy and fainted. Then the ladies got hold of him and installed him to manufacture children for them. He says he fought, fought courageously. Yes, he swaggers about like the c.o.c.k of the roost. But your post, deserter, was on the cross, and you know it. Others can reclaim barren lands and barren women. Your duty was to mount the crossa"thatas what I say! You boast that you conquered death. Woe is you! Is that the way to conquer deatha"by making children, mouthfuls for Charon! Mouthfuls for Charon! Thatas what a child isa"a mouthful for Charon! Youave turned yourself into his meat market and you deliver him morsels to eat. Traitor! Deserter! Coward!a aJudas, my brother,a Jesus murmured, beginning now to tremble all over, aJudas, my brother, speak more affectionately.a aYou broke my heart, son of the Carpenter,a bellowed Judas, ahow do you expect me to speak to you affectionately? Sometimes I want to scream and wail like a widow and bang my head against the rocks! Curse the day you were born, the day I was born, the hour I met you and you filled my heart with hopes! When you used to go in the lead and draw us along behind you and speak to us about heaven and earth, what joy that was, what freedom, what richness! The grapes seemed as big as twelve-year-old boys. With a single grain of wheat we were filled. One day we had five loaves of bread: we fed a crowd of thousands, and twelve basketfuls remained. And the stars: what splendor, what an outpouring of light in the sky! They werenat stars; they were angels. No, they werenat angels; they were usa"us, your disciples, and we rose and set, and you were in the center, fixed like the north star, and we were all around you, dancing! You took me in your armsa"do you remember?a"and begged, aBetray me, betray me. I must be crucified and resurrected so that we can save the world!a a Judas stopped for a moment and sighed. His wounds had reopened and begun to drain. The little old men, glued again one to the next, struggled with bowed heads to remember and to bring themselves back to life.

A tear popped into Judasas eye. Crus.h.i.+ng it angrily, he resumed his shouting. His heart was still not empty. a aI am the lamb of G.o.d,a you bleated. aI go to the slaughter so that I may save the world. Judas, my brother, do not be afraid. Death is the door to immortality. I must pa.s.s through this door. Help me!a And I loved you so much, I trusted you so much, that I said, aYesa and went and betrayed you. But you ... you ...a Foam gushed from his lips. Grasping Jesus by the shoulder, he shook him forcefully, glued him to the wall. He began again to bellow. aWhat business do you have here? Why werenat you crucified? Coward! Deserter! Traitor! Was that all you accomplished? Have you no shame? I lift my fist and ask you: Why, why werenat you crucified?a aQuiet! Quiet!a Jesus begged. The blood began to run from his five wounds.

aJudas Iscariot,a Peter interrupted again, ahave you no pity? Donat you see his feet, his hands? Put your hand to his side if you donat believe. Itas bleeding.a Judas forced himself to laugh. Then he spat on the ground and shouted, aEh, son of the Carpenter, youare not putting anything over on mea"no! Your guardian angel came during the night.a Jesus shook. aMy guardian angel ...a he murmured with a shudder.

aYes, your guardian angel: Satan. He stamped the red spots on your hands, feet and side so that you could deceive the world and deceived yourself. Why are you looking at me like that? Why donat you answer? Coward! Deserter! Traitor!a Jesus closed his eyes. He felt faint but managed to keep himself on his feet. aJudas,a he said, his voice trembling, ayou were always intractable and wild; you never accepted human limits. You forget that the soul of man is an arrow: it darts as high as it can toward heaven but always falls back down again to earth. Life on earth means shedding oneas wings.a Hearing this, Judas became frantic. aShame on you!a he screamed. aIs that what youave come to, you, the son of David, the son of G.o.d, the Messiah! Life on earth means: to eat bread and transform the bread into wings, to drink water and to transform the water into wings. Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings. Thatas what you told usa"you, traitor! Theyare not my words, theyare yours. In case you forgot, Iam reminding you of them!a aWhere are you, Matthew, scribe? Come here! Open your weighty papersa"you always carry them next to your heart, the same way I carry my knife. Open your writings. Theyave been devoured by time, moths and sweat, but quite a few words can still be seen. Open your writings, Matthew, and read so that the gentleman in question may hear and remember. One night an important notable of Jerusalem, Nicodemus by name, came to him secretly and asked, aWho are you? What is your work?a And you, son of the Carpenter, you answered hima"remember!a"aI forge wings!a As you said that we all felt wings shoot out from our backs. And now what have you come to, you plucked c.o.c.k! You whine away and say, aLife on earth means shedding oneas wings.a Ugh! Out of my sight, coward! If life isnat all lightning and thunder what do I want with it? Donat come near me, Peter, you windmill; nor you, gallant Andrew. Donat screech, women. I wonat bother him. Why lift my hand against him? Heas dead and buried. He still stands up on his feet, he talks, he weeps, but heas dead: a carca.s.s. Let G.o.d forgive hima"G.o.d, because I cannot. May Israelas blood, tears and ashes fall upon his head!a The endurance of the tiny old men gave out and they all collapsed in one heap onto the ground. Their memories had been reawakened; they had begun to feel young again, to remember the kingdom of heaven, the thrones, the majesty. Suddenly they broke out into the dirge. Groaning and wailing, they beat their foreheads against the stones.

All at once Jesus too burst into sobs. He cried, aJudas, my brother, forgive me!a and started to rush into the redbeardas arms. But Judas jumped back, put out his hands and would not let him come near. aDonat touch me,a he shouted. aI donat believe in anything any more; I donat believe in anyone. You broke my heart!a Jesus stumbled. He turned, searching for something to catch hold of. The women, fallen p.r.o.ne on the ground, were pulling out their hair and screaming; the disciples were looking up at him with anger and hatred. The Negro boy had disappeared.

aI am a traitor, a deserter, a coward,a he murmured. aNow I realize it: Iam lost! Yes, yes, I should have been crucified, but I lost courage and fled. Forgive me, brothers, I cheated you. Oh, if I could only relive my life from the beginning!a He had collapsed to the ground while speaking and was now banging his head on the pebbles of the yard.

aComrades, my old friends, say a kind word to me, comfort me. I perish, I am lost! I hold out my hand. Does no one of you rise to place his palm in mine or to say a kind word to me? No one? No one? Not even you, John, beloved? Not even you, Peter?a aHow can I speak, what is there to say?a wailed the beloved disciple. aWhat was the witchcraft you threw over us, son of Mary?a aYou deceived us,a said Peter, wiping away his tears. aJudas is right: you broke your word. Our lives have gone to waste.a All at once from the pile of tiny old men there arose a unified whining din.

aCoward! Deserter! Traitor!a aCoward! Deserter! Traitor!a And Matthew lamented: aAll my work gone for nothing, nothing, nothing! How masterfully I matched your words and deeds with the prophets! It was terribly difficult, but I managed. I used to say to myself that in the synagogues of the future the faithful would open thick tomes bound in gold and say, aThe lesson for today is from the holy Gospel according to Matthew!a This thought gave me wings, and I wrote. But now, all that grandeur has gone up in smoke, and youa"you ingrate! you illiterate! you traitor!a"youare to blame. You should have been crucified. Yes, if only for my sake, so that these writings might have been saved, you should have been crucified!a Once more the unified whining din arose from the heap of tiny old men.

aCoward! Deserter! Traitor!a aCoward! Deserter! Traitor!a At that moment Thomas rushed in from the doorway. aRabbi,a he cried, aI wonat leave you now that everyone is abandoning you and calling you traitor! No, I wonat abandon you, not I, not Thomas the prophet. We said the Wheel turns. Thatas why I wonat leave your side. Iam waiting for the Wheel to turn.a Peter rose. aLetas go!a he shouted. aJudas, step in front, lead us!a Gasping, the tiny old men got up. Jesus was stretched out on the ground, face down, his arms spread wide. He filled the entire yard. They held their fists over him and shouted.

aCoward! Deserter! Traitor!a aCoward! Deserter! Traitor!a One by one they shouted, aCoward! Deserter! Traitor!aa"and vanished.

Jesus rotated his eyes with anguish, and looked. He was alone. The yard and house, the trees, the village doors, the village itselfa"all had disappeared. Nothing remained but stones beneath his feet, stones covered with blood; and lower, farther away, a crowd: thousands of heads in the darkness.

He tried with all his might to discover where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. He wanted to complete his cry, to shout LAMA SABACTHANI. ... He attempted to move his lips but could not. He grew dizzy and was ready to faint. He seemed to be hurling downward and peris.h.i.+ng.

But suddenly, while he was falling and peris.h.i.+ng, someone down on the ground must have pitied him, for a reed was held out in front of him, and he felt a sponge soaked in vinegar rest against his lips and nostrils. He breathed in deeply the bitter smell, revived, swelled his breast, looked at the heavens and uttered a heart-rending cry: LAMA SABACTHANI!

Then he immediately inclined his head, exhausted.

He felt terrible pains in his hands, feet and heart. His sight cleared, he saw the crown of thorns, the blood, the cross. Two golden earrings and two rows of sharp, brilliantly white teeth flashed in the darkened sun. He heard a cool, mocking laugh, and rings and teeth vanished. Jesus remained hanging in the air, alone.

His head quivered. Suddenly he remembered where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. A wild, indomitable joy took possession of him. No, no, he was not a coward, a deserter, a traitor. No, he was nailed to the cross. He had stood his ground honorably to the very end; he had kept his word. The moment he cried ELI ELI and fainted, Temptation had captured him for a split second and led him astray. The joys, marriages and children were lies; the decrepit, degraded old men who shouted coward, deserter, traitor at him were lies. Alla"all were illusions sent by the Devil. His disciples were alive and thriving. They had gone over sea and land and were proclaiming the Good News. Everything had turned out as it should, glory be to G.o.d!

He uttered a triumphant cry: IT IS ACCOMPLISHED!

And it was as though he had said: Everything has begun.

THE END.

A Note on the Author and His Use of Language

BY P. A. BIEN.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is the summation of the thought and experience of a man whose entire life was spent in the battle between spirit and flesh. Out of the intensity of Kazantzakisa struggle, and out of his ability to reconcile opposites and unite them in his own personality, came art which succeeded in depicting and comprehending the full panorama of human experience.

If the scope of Kazantzakisa art was remarkable, even more remarkable was the scope and diversity of his life. He was an intellectuala"the author of treatises on Nietzsche, Bergson and Russian literature, the student of Buddhism, the translator into Modern Greek of Homer, Dante and Goethea"but at the same time he knew and loved ordinary uneducated people, and it was to them that he always gave his greatest allegiance. Though he traveled over most of the world, restless and uprooted in a self-imposed exile, his native Crete remained his true spiritual home, and his devotion to it and to the peasantry into which he was born in 1883 (his father dealt in feeds and kept a small farm) gave his writings that sense of the aspirit of placea which is such an important ingredient of great literature. It was in Crete that he first came to know the shepherds, farmers, fishermen, innkeepers and peasant entrepreneurs who people his novels; it was in Crete too that he first experienced revolutionary ardor, his childhood being spent in an atmosphere where dare-devil hard-drinking heroism was the highest virtue, a virtue best exemplified for the boy by his own father. But when this ardor exploded in 1897 into an uprising against the Turks, young Kazantzakis, who was evacuated to Naxos, suddenly found himself in an atmosphere quite opposite to the one in which he had grown up: he was placed in a school run by Franciscan monks. There, studying French and Italian, he received his introduction to Western thought. More important, he was introduced to a new virtue, contemplation, and to the heroism of a very different kind of fathera"Christ.

These early experiences set the pattern for a lifetime in which Kazantzakis, constantly torn between the need for action and for ascetic withdrawal, was to search untiringly for his true father, his true savioura"for the meaning of his, and our, existence.

His greatest ascetic fervor came after he had taken his degree at the University of Athens and gone to Paris to study philosophy with Henri Bergson. He decided to travel to Mt. Athos in Macedonia, famous for its ancient monasteries and its exclusion of all femalesa"cows and hens as well as women. Kazantzakis remained on the Holy Mountain for six months, alone in a tiny cell, trying through spiritual and bodily exercises to achieve direct contact with the Saviour. Unsuccessful, he decided to renew his allegiance to a saviour he had already found during his studies in Athens and Paris: Nietzsche.

He was thereafter to renounce Nietzsche for Buddha, then Buddha for Lenin, then Lenin for Odysseus. When he returned finally to Christ, as he did, it was to a Christ enriched by everything that had come between.

He was able to return to Christ with conviction precisely because he experienced in his own right the temptations which Christ rejected as false saviours. The same young man who shut himself up in a cell on the mountain where no female has penetrated since the tenth century also came to know the joys of the hearth, for he married in 1911, and if he and his wife eventually began to live a great deal apart, the price in terms of loneliness which his spiritual searchings exacted from him is movingly attested to in his letters. (The marriage ended in divorce; Kazantzakis remarried in 1945) He was also confronted, like Jesus, with the temptation of violent revolution in the cause of freedom. His knowledge of the heroism of the Cretan revolutionaries had left in him a fervent admiration for the active life, plus a desire to partic.i.p.ate in it, and in 1917 this desire was whetted by two things: the Russian Revolution, and his a.s.sociation in a Peloponnesian mining venture with a dynamic man named George Zorbasa"an experience immortalized in Kazantzakisa novel, Zorba the Greek (1946), the princ.i.p.al theme of which is the conflict between action and contemplation. Two years later, having been appointed Director General of the Greek Ministry of Welfare, Kazantzakis had an opportunity to visit Russia, together with Zorbas, in an effort to secure the repatriation of Greek refugees in the Caucasus. The seeds were planted for his short-lived faith in the Bolsheviks.

This faith did not blossom, however, until the middle twenties. At the beginning of the decade he was still unsettled, still searching for his saviour. Although the author of numerous verse plays, and of translations from Bergson, Darwin, Eckermann, William James, Maeterlinck, Nietzsche and Plato, he still did not know the ultimate direction of his life. In Paris he had been tremendously impressed by Bergsonas vitalism: the life force which can conquer matter; he had also been so swept away by Nietzsche s idea of man making himself, by his own will and perseverance, into the superman, that he had gone on a pilgrimage to all the towns in Germany where Nietzsche had lived. Nietzsche, he later said, taught him that the only way a man can be free is to strugglea"to lose himself in a cause, to fight without fear and without hope of reward. These lessons helped prepare him for his next saviour but one, Lenin.

Buddha intervened. In 1922 while staying in Vienna (where, incidentally, he had the opportunity of seeing psychoa.n.a.lysts in action) Kazantzakis embraced the doctrine of complete renunciation, of complete mutation of flesh into spirit. Buddha, like Christ, was for Kazantzakis a superman who had conquered matter. Under this influence, and feeling a great turmoil in his soul, he began to write his credo, the Salvatores Dei. But this was in Berlin, where he had moved the same year. He lived there until 1924, during a period when Germany was prostrate and starving, racked by postwar inflation. Kazantzakis became friendly with a group of Marxists. Here was the cause he could give himself to! He had long been influenced by Spengleras theory that cultures, like human beings, grow old and die; and the war and its aftermath seemed to him the last gasp of Western Christianity. He felt that twentieth-century man had been left in a void, had nothing to relate to, to hold on toa"but that he had the potentiality of fas.h.i.+oning a new world and a new G.o.d for himself, if he would but seize the occasion. This was precisely what the Bolsheviks seemed to be doing, and Lenin became Kazantzakisa new G.o.d. Besides, he reflected, how could a Cretan nursed on revolution and reckless heroism become a Buddhist? Impossible!

He was consumed with the desire to act, to do something concretea"and this meant he must go again to Russia. His desire became reality in 1925, when he spent over three months in the Soviet Union, but by this time a new hero, Odysseus, had already begun to attract him, and he had set to work on his epic, the Odyssey. In 1927 he returned to Russia for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, after having traveled through Palestine, Spain, Egypt, and Italy, where his sojourn in a.s.sisi reflected an interest which flowered almost thirty years later in a magnificent novel on St. Francis. He returned from Moscow resolved to embark on a new life and began at once by writing newspaper articles about his experiences and addressing a ma.s.s meeting in Athens.

In 1928 he made his fourth trip to Russia. The Soviet government had given him a railroad pa.s.s, and he planned to travel from one end of the vast country to the other in order to write about the new saviour. But he found that his thoughts, instead of dwelling on the glories of the Revolution, drifted constantly to the Odyssey, the first draft of which he had just completed. He began to realize that everything he saw and heard must find expression not in propaganda but in art: his epic was to become a vast depository of all geography and all ideas. Kazantzakis now found his vocationa"it was to create. Poetic creation was the Saviour! A basic distrust which he had always had for abig ideasa now applied itself to Marxism, which, despite his great enthusiasm, he had never considered able to satisfy the spiritual needs of men; and by the early thirties Kazantzakisa allegiance to the communists had come to an end. (He continued to dream, however, of an ideal system which he called ametacommunism.a) Thus, at the age of fifty, he threw all his energies into what he considered his sole dutya"to forge, like Joyce, the uncreated conscience of his race; to become a priest of the imagination.

He brought to this task an intense religiosity compounded of Christianity, Buddhism, Bergsonas vitalism and Nietzscheas superman; an intellectuality balanced by a distrust of pure ideas and an admiration for spontaneous action; a wealth of practical experience gained from his service in government, his travels, his business venture; and perhaps strongest of all, his love of the land and people of Greece, ancient and modern. He had incorporated into himself the thought of the sophisticated West, while still retaining the simplicity and the expressive emotions of the East. Most important for his ultimate aim, he was able to synthesize all this and find the ideal acorrelativea in order to transubstantiate his experience into art. Odysseus was Greek, yet a man of the world; he was renowned for both wit and action; he was an exile, a tireless seeker after experience. He was also a superman, and Kazantzakis, in creating this gigantic epic, became a kind of superman in his own right. Living in near solitude, he worked feverishly from dawn to dark, eating but one scanty meal a day. Over a period of thirteen years he rewrote the Odyssey seven times, each time broadening its scope, until it came to include all he had ever seen and heard and thought.

In 1932 Kazantzakis translated the Divine Comedy into Modern Greek. Danteas Odysseus, like Kazantzakisa, leaves Ithaca a second time, because aneither fondness for my son, nor reverence for my aged father, nor the due love that should have cheered Penelope, could conquer in me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world, and of human vice and wortha (Wicksteed translation). But Kazantzakisa relation to Dante goes much deeper than this. He saw in the Florentine a parallel to himself: a man with a burning desire for perfection, a man who sought to convert flesh into spirit by means of art; a man exiled and scorned by his people, forced to become a homeless wanderer. Lastly, Kazantzakis saw Dante as a champion of the language of the people as opposed to a traditional aliterarya language.

Kazantzakis, like Yeats and Synge, felt that great literature must be national literature. He was convinced that the soul and life-blood of Greece was its peasantry, and that the great achievement and expression of the peasantry was the popular language, known as the ademotic.a He knew that the Greek people had (and have) an imagination afiery and magnificent and tendera; in the Odyssey, therefore, as in all his works, he championed the demotic as against the apuristica language favored by the Athenian intellectuals. In translation this element of his work is largely lost, and the English or American reader of The Last Temptation of Christ is in a sense cheated out of the exhilaration of meeting with a type of speech totally foreign to his own. Happily, although the flexibility of syntax and richness of vocabulary of demotic Greek cannot be reproduced in English, the languageas reliance on metaphor can often be conveyed. Demotic always prefers the concrete to the abstract: the sun does not ahanga in the sky, it atolls the hoursa (that is, it is suspended just as the bell is suspended in the campanile); a camel does not aget up,a it ademolishes its foundationsa; the time is not measured by hours but by how many reeds the sun has advanced in the sky. If this love of metaphor is retained in English often at the price of awkwardness, this is but a small price to pay for some feeling, however slight, of the essential Greekness of this novel, which although set in the Holy Land, is peopled by Greeks in disguise. (Witness the use of Charon as personification of death; and the lyre in Chapter XXVII, played with a bow as it is to this day by the peasants of Crete.) Since it is impossible to reproduce the actual words Kazantzakis used and since he looked upon the extraordinary love of words as the key to the peasant imagination, as well as its expression, it is important to say something further about the nature of the demotic vocabulary. Its richness and flexibility are due to the free borrowing of words over the centuries from Romans, Franks, Italians, Turks, Slavs and others; to the ease with which new words can be compounded from existing roots; to the continued existence of dialect areas; and the never-ending metamorphosing of words by villagers who are not yet sufficiently awed by grammarians (as the English have been since the seventeenth century) to abandon these extravagances.

Languages are said to mirror the character of the peoples who speak them, and if so, demotic Greek shows us a race to whom imagination and audacity come before precision and efficiency. To comprehend how completely different this language is from present-day English (English too once had many of the fluid characteristics of modern Greek), the reader is invited to contemplate the noun asplathos, the name of a shrub which, as one might expect in Greek, also has four or five completely different names. To add to this multiplicity, the base-word asplathos undergoes seemingly unlimited metamorphoses in the various parts of Greece. The vowels, for example, are juggled in numerous ways, as can be seen in the forms aspilathos, asplathos, asplat-thas and asphlachtos; the endings are altered: asplathrous, asplethres, asplathras; the accent is s.h.i.+fted: aspalathrs, asphelechts; the original gender (masculine) is changed to feminine: asplathra, and neuter: asplatho; the first syllable is discarded: splathos, sphelachts, etc.; consonants are added: asplarthas, or altered: asphlachtos; and so on and so on, until we find such nearly unrecognizable forms as xelaphts, aspdaros, asplichtro and spla.s.so.

Now see what else the peasant imagination can do with this word In Crete, the suffix eas is added to form aspalathes which means aan area covered with aspalathosa (or more precisely in English, since aspalathos is the plant we know as ahairy broomaa"aan area covered with hairy brooma). This noun is then turned into an adjectivea"and here we can see how the audacious metaphorical language of the peasants comes into being. The Cretan farmer, observing his dingy gray cat near an aspalathes, notices that the cat and the area of aspalathos have the identical color. He therefore begins to call hisa"and soon all similar catsa"aarea-covered-with-hairy-brooma cats, using the new adjective to mean adingy gray.a It is obvious that in the hands of an imaginative artist the potentialities of a language with such flexibility, such love of words for their own sake, such metaphorical richness and syntactical and grammatical looseness, are unlimited. The nature of the demotic vocabulary, for instance, enabled Kazantzakis in the Odyssey to apply over two hundred distinct epithets to Odysseus. (They are catalogued by Kazantzakisa friend and biographer, Mr. P. Prevelakis.) But it is also obvious why the apurista professors of Athens, whose experience with area-covered-with-hairy-broom cats is apt to be limited, should want to curb the extravagance and looseness of the demotic by purging foreign and dialect words and by stabilizing spelling, grammar and syntax more or less according to Atticistic Greek, the traditional literary language.

In championing the demotic, Kazantzakis felt he was defending the soul of the common people against the unimaginativeness of pedantic intellectuals and, even more important, against the ever-expanding forces of newspaper jargon and faulty composition courses in the schools. He was violently attacked not only by the purists but by the advocates of demotic, who claimed he went out of his way to use obscure words. But he zealously defended his position, and the fact that his work does so well convey the spirit of the people is perhaps the best proof that he was right.

The Odyssey was published in 1938. Soon after came the Second World War, and after that the Greek Civil War, during which Kazantzakis served for a short period as Minister of National Education in a quixotic attempt to reconcile the opposing forces. He resigned in despair, now more than ever convinced of what he had known for many years: that because of the political and religious situation in Greece he must live in exile. He settled in France (eventually at the ancient Greek city of Antibes on the Riviera) and entered public life once more as Director of the UNEs...o...b..reau of Translations. But after eleven months of intense labor he decided that he was not accomplis.h.i.+ng what he had hoped to, and he resigned in order to devote all his energies to his own writing. This was in 1948, when he was sixty-five years old. Encouraged by friends and his wife, he decided to try his hand at a novel written in a fully traditional style. In two months he finished The Greek Pa.s.sion. This unbelievable spurt of creativity continued and enabled him to produce in the nine years that remained to him a total of eight books, including Freedom or Death, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Poor Man of G.o.d (St. Francis). By the time he was seventy he found himself known all over Europe: his novels were translated into thirty languages and he was nominated repeatedly for the n.o.bel Prize, losing in 1952 by just one vote. But with all this success came increasing bitterness. The Greek Pa.s.sion raised a furor in Greece which brought him close to excommunication. Next, with the publication of Freedom or Death, the newspapers branded him a traitor to Crete and the h.e.l.lenes: Kazantzakis, who for all his admiration of the peasants never romanticized them, had shown both the good and bad sides of Greek heroism.

The Last Temptation of Christ fanned the inquisitional flames all the more, but by this time Kazantzakisa"who had experienced thirty years of non-recognition and then, when recognition came, the complete misrepresentation of his aimsa"had learned the Nietzschean lesson that the struggle for freedom must be fought not only without fear but without hope.

He saw Jesus, like Odysseus, as engaged in this struggle, and as a prototype of the free man. In The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus is a superman, one who by force of will achieves a victory over matter, or, in other words, is able, because of his allegiance to the life force within him, to trans.m.u.te matter into spirit. But this over-all victory is really a succession of particular triumphs as he frees himself from various forms of bondagea"family, bodily pleasures, the state, fear of death. Since, for Kazantzakis, freedom is not a reward for the struggle but rather the very process of struggle itself, it is paramount that Jesus be constantly tempted by evil in such a way that he feel its attractiveness and even succ.u.mb to it, for only in this way can his ultimate rejection of temptation have meaning.

This is heresy. It is the same heresy that Milton, led by his scorn of cloistered virtue and his belief in the necessity of choice (ideas shared by Kazantzakis), slipped into on occasiona"as when he declared that evil may enter the mind of G.o.d and, if unapproved, leave ano spot or blame behind.a The fact that Kazantzakis not only slipped into this heresy but deliberately made it the keystone of his structure should give us some clue to his deepest aims. He was not primarily interested in reinterpreting Christ or in disagreeing with, or reforming, the Church. He wanted, rather, to lift Christ out of the Church altogether, anda"since in the twentieth century the old era was dead or dyinga"to rise to the occasion and exercise manas right (and duty) to fas.h.i.+on a new saviour and thereby rescue himself from a moral and spiritual void. His own conflicts enabled him to depict with great penetration Jesusa agony in choosing between love and the ax, between household joys and the loneliness and exile of the martyr, between liberation of the body alone and liberation of both body and soul. Kazantzakis tried to draw Christ in terms meaningful to himself and thus, since his own conflicts were those of every sensitive man faced with the chaos of our times, in terms which could be understood in the twentieth century: he wished to make Jesus a figure for a new age, while still retaining everything in the Christ-legend which speaks to the conditions of all men of all ages. The measure with which the reader of this book feels (perhaps for the first time) the full poignancy of the Pa.s.sion will be the measure of the authoras success.

Kazantzakis, like Odysseus, had an unconquerable ardor to gain experience of the world. In 1957, against the advice of his physicians (he had been suffering from leukemia since 1953), he accepted an invitation to visit China. On the return trip he fell ill due to a smallpox vaccination which was given him inadvertently in Canton, and was hospitalized in Germany. There his last days were cheered by a visit from Albert Schweitzer, who had been one of the first to recognize his greatness. His remains were flown from Germany to Athens, preparatory to interment in Crete. Though his European fame had by this time convinced the Greeks that they should welcome him as a national hero, their Archbishop firmly refused to allow his body to lie in state in a church, in the normal manner. In Crete, however, he was granted a Christian burial, and a colossus, seemingly right out of one of his books, seized the coffin and lowered it single-handedly into the grave.

Riparius, N. Y.

P. A. BIEN.

Acknowledgments.

I should like to record my indebtedness to my wife Chrysanthi for her great patience in elucidating the nuances of Greek idioms; to Mrs. Helen Kazantzakis, the authoras widow, for explaining many difficult words; to Mrs. Boule Prousalis and Mr. Manos Troulinos for aid in Cretan dialect; to Mr. George Yiannakos, agriculturalist, who put his intimate knowledge of peasant life and language at my disposal; to Mr. F. I. Venables and Mr. George C. Pappageotes for valuable suggestions; and to Mr. C. H. Gifford and my colleagues at Bristol for true h.e.l.lenic enthusiasm.

Other books by Nikos Kazantzakis

ZORBA THE GREEK.

THE GREEK Pa.s.sION.

FREEDOM OR DEATH.

THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST.

THE SAVIORS OF G.o.da"SPIRITUAL EXERCISES SAINT FRANCIS.

THE ROCK GARDEN.

j.a.pANa"CHINA SPAIN.

TODA RABA.

THE FRATRICIDES.

JOURNEY TO THE MOREA.

REPORT TO GRECO.