he was living a second life in a second world. Yes, he was an amphibian in the new Spanish Middle Ages. On the outside, he was the same old doctor. ‘See these fingers yellowed not from tobacco, but from alighting on the classics.’ He was capable of vehemently, even angrily, defending what he called ‘the grammar of power’. The essential superiority of some languages over others. The mystical, warlike quality of Spanish, which made it more suitable for talking to God. The relevance of Nebrija’s warlike grammar, the Empire’s companion language, as a contemporary apothegm. And so on. But anyone who knew him from before, when he came offstage, would observe an ironical form of boasting, an obvious horror of any kind of ambition for public notoriety, be it in the academic sphere or the sphere of official culture and journalism, where he’d attained the stature of a golden personality. When called on to give his opinion on special occasions, he had a sixth sense which enabled him consistently to match ‘the grammar of power’, the taste of mandarins, which he seasoned with a culture they lacked. There were things he couldn’t even mention. Once he bumped into the mayor and greeted him in his most colloquial Latin, ‘Quo vadis, your worship?’ The mayor answered him with sickled face, ‘There you go again, Sulfe, spouting German.’ He now enjoyed himself as never before. He’d crossed ‘the threshold of invisibility’. He was a secret being. He worshipped one, mortal God, the great Dionysius, whose feet the dog Cerberus licked at the gates of hell. It was through him, through Dionysius’ eyes, he saw the world now, without others knowing. He was particularly bold when it came to those he’d always avoided. He turned his reading hours into a nocturnal spree in search of ‘dissolute carnivalesque pasquinades’ and ‘verbal sewage’. It had all started as a funny paradox. He’d been asked by the chapter of Santiago Cathedral to study expressions of risus paschalis, paschal laughter, and the so-called festa stultorum, feast of fools, as well as the existence or not of a ‘feast of the donkey’ in the Compostelan Church’s tradition. He didn’t get very far. He couldn’t cope with the fields that suddenly opened. All those books waiting for him on inveterate shelves, in locked cupboards, buried alive in filthy attics and basements. He started poking his finger in cracks he’d previously despised. His warrior philologist’s yellow fingers smelt now of sex and shone like tasty word-slops. What he’d run away from became his bread and butter. As he read, he heard, as if in prayer, the emotional, excited chorus of Bacchantes, ‘When Dionysius leads, the earth will dance.’
He could claim to have been a bibliophile ever since he was a child. He’d certainly grown up with ordered reading, tutored by a pack of Carlist clerics, who kept an eye even on the Spanish mystics and allowed access to enlightened fathers such as Feijoo and Sarmiento only in tiny measures served with little spoons. But somehow he’d become an expert. Books were his most treasured property. When he thought of the old family seat in Ribeiro, he pictured not the land, but the volumes. This set him apart from many other professors and ecclesiastical friends and Compostelan theologians, who were leading authorities on property registers and lawsuits over land inheritance and ownership. And extremely concerned about the culture of rents and the number of feet in a granary. He’d alighted on the classics. And if he’d been given a chair, it was as a result of his knowledge, not of booty or contacts. He was very conservative. A traditionalist. He’d never hidden the fact. Even as a boy, he’d come to the conclusion it was something biological, in his nature. He remembered this with horror when the Dean of Sciences in Santiago conferred a doctorate honoris causa on Franco, comparing his warlike activity to ‘a biological, scientific experience’. In his second life, Sulfe had a stock response, ‘I’m conservative, not inhuman.’ A message that was so simple, constantly repeated as it was in the endless post-war period,