Do not misunderstand me, he said. The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. How could there be? At whose behest? This man did not cease to believe in God. Nor did he come to have some modern view of God. There was God and there was the world. He knew that the world would forget him but that God could not. And yet that was the very thing he wished for.
Easy to see that naught save sorrow could bring a man to such a view of things. And yet a sorrow for which there can be no help is no sorrow. It is some dark sister traveling in sorrow’s clothing. Men do not turn from God so easily you see. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him.
By now he is a pensioner in Mexico. He has no friends. By day he sits in the park. The very ground under his feet is composted with the blood of the ancients. He watches passersby. He has become convinced that those aims and purposes with which they imagine their movements to be invested are in reality but a means by which to describe them. He believes that their movements are the subject of larger movements in patterns unknown to them and these in turn to others. He finds no comfort in these speculations I can tell you. He sees the world slipping away. All about him an enormous emptiness without echo. It was at this time that he began to pray. From no very pure motive perhaps. But then what would such a motive look like? Can God be cajoled? Can He be pled with or asked to see the reason in one’s argument? Can anything from his own hand do aught to please Him more than had it acted otherwise? Can He be surprised? In his heart this man had already begun to plot against God but he did not know it yet. He would not know it until he began to dream of Him.
Who can dream of God? This man did. In his dreams God was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him bent at his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of his own presence. Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to his own selfordinated duties. A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix. And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was a thread that was he and he woke weeping.
On a certain day he rose and put his few possessions into an old valise he’d kept beneath his bed these years and descended the stairwell for the last time. He carried his bible beneath his arm. Like the peregrine minister of some paltry sect. In three days’ time he was in the town of Caborca of sacred memory. Standing there by the river squinting up in the sunshine where the dome of the broken transept of the church of La Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora de Caborca floated in the pure desert air. So.
The man shook his head slowly. He’d taken up his makings from the table and begun to roll another cigarette. Very thoughtfully. As if its construction were a puzzle to him. He rose and went to the stove and lit the cigarette with the same blackened splinter of wood and inspected the fire and shut the stove door and returned to the table and sat as before.
Perhaps you know the town of Caborca. The church is very beautiful. By the flooding of the river through the years much has been destroyed. The sanctuary and two bell towers. The rear of the nave and most of the south transept. What remains of it stands on three legs, so to speak. The dome hangs in the sky like an apparition and so it has hung for many years. Most improbably. No mason could devise such a structure. For years the people of Caborca waited for it to fall. It was like a thing unfinished in their lives. Events of doubtful outcome were made subject to its standing. It was said of certain old and venerable men that when they died the dome would fall and they died and their children died and the dome floated on in the pure air until at last it came to bear such import in the minds of the people of that town that they scarce would speak of it at all.
This was what he came to. Perhaps he did not even consider the question as to how he had been brought to this place. Yet it was the very thing he sought. Beneath that perilous roof he threw down his pallet and made his fire and there he made ready to receive that which had eluded him. By whatever name. There in the ruins of that church out of whose dust and rubble he had been raised up seventy years before and sent forth to live his life. Such as it was. Such as it had become. Such as it would be.