The Lady in Blue

by Javier Sierra

“In the next ten hours we will cover almost five thousand miles, before we land at the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport in Texas,” the pilot said over the public address system. “And then another thousand miles until we reach our final destination in Los Angeles. I hope you have a pleasant flight.”

  Carlos sat distractedly in his coach seat, trying to make sense of the information: five thousand miles, more or less, represented the same distance that Mother Ágreda had to travel in a bilocated state. Which is to say, a woman from three centuries before overcame ten thousand miles, almost halfway around the world, during the time the ecstasy lasted. To travel the same distance, he needed nine hours and an astonishing amount of technology.

  “Simply impossible,” he said to himself.

  He took a deep breath before he gave in to an enveloping drowsiness. As soon as things settle down, he thought, I should sleep at least until we fly over Florida. He unlaced his shoes, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, and, tilting his seat back slightly, drew a blanket over himself and tried to sleep.

  He was in this pleasant state when, seconds later, he became aware that someone was sitting next to him. “With all the empty seats on the plane, someone has to come and sit next to me,” he thought. He was about to shift position, turning his back on his unexpected fellow traveler, when a woman’s soft voice, with a strong Italian accent, stopped him cold.

  “Nothing is ‘impossible,’ Carlos. That word does not exist in God’s vocabulary.”

  His eyes snapped opened. He quickly sat up and looked directly at the woman speaking to him.

  “Do we . . . Do we know each other?” he said doubtfully.

  The woman who had taken the seat next to him had a hypnotic quality about her. Her skin was dark brown, and her long, straight hair was gathered in a ponytail, accentuating the beauty of a sweet, moonlike face. Her flashing green eyes studied him curiously. She was wearing a fitted black wool sweater. If he had had to guess where she was from, Carlos would have said she was Neapolitan.

  “Know each other, you and I? No, not directly. But it hardly matters.”

  What was so unique about this woman? Carlos’s metabolism reacted out of all proportion to her presence: his heart rate sped up to 120 beats per minute and a rush of adrenaline was making him shake. At 33,000 feet above sea level, with an outside temperature of eighty degrees below zero, her voice alone was enough to lift Carlos to the outer limits of his heart’s ability to function. All that in a second!

  “Have you heard about the Programmer?” she asked.

  “The Programmer?”

  Carlos knew about him. Definitely. His old professor of mathematics, whom he had visited several weeks before, had been the last person to mention that word to Carlos. And yet, with a shake of his head, he denied it. The woman smiled, as if she could read his thoughts.

  “He is the one who wrote this play. You were the person who wanted to get to know him, weren’t you?”

  The journalist swallowed.

  “But how . . . ?”

  “How do I know?” The young woman whistled enigmatically as she adjusted her seat. “I also know what you are going to do in Los Angeles. And that you are following us.”

  “I’m following you?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember? A few days ago you made the decision to ‘hunt for the Programmer.’ Everything started with the tiny medal you’re wearing around your neck, the one you found just outside the doorway to the magazine.”

  Carlos’s fingers felt for the medal, while she took the opportunity to mention another detail.

  “That medal is mine, Carlos.”

  He turned pale.

  “I put it there in order to draw you toward where you are today. I thought you were ready for it.”

  “But who are you?”

  “They call me many different things, but to make it easy for you, I will just say that I am an angel.”

  Carlos grabbed hold of the medal with the Holy Face in order to be certain that he was awake. The gold chain was still hanging around his neck. The book he had just closed, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, was an audacious essay that tried to explain, as precisely as possible, the origin of “voices in the head” and the religious visions that have taken place throughout history. Carlos had just finished reading that the great biblical prophets, Muhammad, the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, and hundreds of Christian saints had visions in which they confused reality and hallucinations as a result of a common neurological problem. Julian Jaynes maintained that until the year 1250 BC, the minds of such men were split into two sealed-off compartments that occasionally talked to each other, giving rise to the “myth” of divine voices. The prophets, first and foremost, were men with a primitive brain mass. Therefore, when the right and left hemispheres of the human brain evolved sufficiently to be able to interconnect, the voices disappeared completely . . . and with them the ancient gods.

  And him?

  What had happened to him?

  “You’re an angel. Fine.” Carlos tried to calm his heart, which was still beating furiously against his chest.

  “Does that surprise you?”

  The woman placed her hand on his neck, letting him feel her soft, warm skin. She delicately lifted the medal from around Carlos’s neck, looking at it affectionately.

  “Veronica’s veil,” she said. “One of my favorite images.”

  “Let’s say that I believe you,” the journalist interrupted her. “That you put this medal in my path to attract me toward everything that is happening to me now. So, what role are you playing in all this? Why are you suddenly revealing yourself to me?”

  “My job is to protect an old secret. A secret that until now only one man had obtained from us accidentally.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “His name was Alonso de Benavides. And his secret is what I am trying to protect from falling into the wrong hands, which is why I am revealing myself in this manner.” She hesitated for a moment. “I know you find it hard to believe.”

  “Let me try. If I believe that you are an angel, I can accept just about anything.”

  “Although I can touch you, although you see me here, in reality I am a projection,” she said. “A double. A bilocated image.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. At this moment, another part of me is in Rome, getting ready to go to the Leonardo da Vinci Airport to catch a plane to Spain.”

  “Sure.”

  The woman was not affected by Carlos’s disbelief.

  “Very soon you will be convinced of our existence. It’s just a question of time.”

  “ ‘Our existence’?”

  “Come on, Carlos!” The woman’s green eyes sparkled. “Do you think I work alone? You never read anything about angels? We were the ones who warned Joseph in his dreams what Herod was planning against his wife and his child. We very subtly planted ourselves in his psyche. But Jacob wrestled with one of us and his leg was broken, as it states in the Bible. Abraham gave us food to eat. In Sodom they even tried to use us for their own ends because we looked so beautiful to them. Flesh and bone, and lovely to look at. You’ve never read the Scriptures?”

  Carlos was astonished.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “First, so that you know we exist. Now you see me. Although I am bilocated, I am as real as you.” She smiled and once again put her fingers on his neck. “And second, because we believe that you are going to help us with our secret.”

  The journalist shifted in his seat.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Everything fits, my friend. You touched on our secret in Italy, when you interviewed Giuseppe Baldi. That is where we first met.”

  “Chronovision?”

  She nodded. A torrent of images flooded his mind. His visit to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Txema bombarding Baldi with photographs, while he himself tried to lead the man he was interviewing toward a subject
he had spent nearly twenty years trying not to say a word about. And then, his report. The great applause he had received from his readers. His obsession to know more . . .

  “After your encounter with Baldi, we realized that you are a peculiar type. Disbelieving on the outside, Carlos, but inside, in your heart, you have a tremendous desire to believe. So we channeled your search for transcendence toward our own interests.”

  “You channeled?”

  “For example, why do you think I called Father Tejada in Bilbao the night we entered the National Library, if not to leave a clue for you to follow?”

  Carlos felt a sudden shiver.

  “There’s no reason to feel bad. We have been doing this for centuries.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.” She looked at him again with those emerald eyes. “The voices that Constantine, George Washington, Winston Churchill, and so many other people listened to during decisive moments in history were ours. Read their biographies and you will find references to their inspirations. And we were the ones who guided Moses out of Egypt, who carried Elijah and Ezekiel through the air, and we even darkened Jerusalem when Jesus died on the cross.

  “And the synchronicities? The can’t-be-real chance occurrences?”

  “Our specialty! We love doing them, Carlitos!”

  The journalist once again felt that odd current running up and down his spine. Only José Luis called him that, and he was the first man to speak to him about synchronicities and Jung. Did she know him as well?

  “But I thought angels were incorporeal—”

  “A very common error.”

  “Why have you come to see me?”

  “The word ‘angel,’ my friend, comes from the Greek angelos, for ‘messenger.’ And so, of course, I have come to deliver a message to you.”

  “What kind of message?”

  “In your briefcase you are carrying information on Linda Meyers, a Los Angeles doctor who forty-eight hours ago telephoned the National Library asking about a stolen manuscript.”

  Carlos decided to let himself be led.

  “Very well. You should know that she is not your final goal. I have come to save you a bit of time.”

  “Meyers is not the person I am looking for?”

  “No. Take note of the name you are looking for. She will be the one, and not the doctor, who will help you resolve this case. Her name is Jennifer Narody. We have spent some time implanting ourselves in her dreams, preparing everything for your arrival.”

  The angel spelled out the name letter by letter while Carlos wrote it down.

  “She has the secret, without knowing it.”

  “And how is that possible?” His heart was still racing. His accelerated pulse made him scribble the woman’s name in the worst handwriting he could remember. He carefully entered it in his cork-covered notebook, as if that were the last thing he would do that day.

  “You ask how is that possible? Let’s say that I put it in her hands specifically so that it will end in yours. Does that seem strange to you?”

  The young woman did not say another word, but stood up from her seat, taking the medal the journalist had been wearing and putting it in the pocket of her black dress, and with the excuse of returning to her own seat, walked off down the aisle in the direction of business class.

  That was when he saw it.

  And it was as if his chest felt once again the jolt of a whip.

  The woman, so impeccably dressed in dark colors, was wearing red shoes.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  VENICE BEACH

  Differences in time zones are difficult to calculate when one is crossing imaginary terrestrial meridians at some four hundred and fifty miles per hour. Every one of the fictitious lines, drawn at intervals of fifteen degrees on the map of the world, marks roughly an hour of difference from the previous zone. So that it could well be said that at five meridians of distance, from American Airlines Flight 767 to the beach in Venice, California, Jennifer Narody received a new piece of the puzzle of which she still did not know she formed a part.

  This time, her psyche flew in the opposite direction of Carlos. It was on course to Spain.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  ÁGREDA, SORIA

  APRIL 30, 1631

  Benavides had been detained more than six months in the Madrid of the Hapsburgs, attending to his ever more voluminous correspondence and the tasks born in the shadow of the Memorial’s success. In the hallways of the palace, no one could remember a similar state of anticipation. The good friar had amassed a mountain of letters, congratulations, and unexpected commitments, which obliged him to become even more involved in the matter before the Court.

  The bureaucracy in the capital set aside his investigation into the “case of the Lady in Blue” until a later date, which saddened him considerably. Nevertheless, the palace intrigues, above all those of the Dominicans attempting to convince the king to investigate the number of conversions in New Mexico, forced him to stay alert. Luckily for Benavides, he was able to preserve the spirit necessary to struggle on behalf of his interests. How well he knew that the “hounds of the Lord,” the domini canes, were trying to send their own missionaries to the Rio Grande in order to keep Benavides from carrying off all the glory for the conversions.

  Their plans failed.

  Documentation and necessary permissions fortunately arrived in April 1631, making it possible for Friar Alonso to abandon Madrid and continue his task. The results of his work would paralyze the Dominicans’ ambitions forever. He was authorized to visit the Monastery of the Conception at Ágreda to question the prioress and ordered to write a report of his findings.

  All of which gave the Portuguese friar a newfound energy.

  On the morning of April 30, Benavides’s horse-drawn carriage, an unassuming coach of laminated wood adorned with copper filigree and cast-iron trimmings, advanced at a gallop across the temperate Soria countryside, in the direction of the foothills of Moncayo. In its interior, the former custodian of the Holy Inquisition in the Province of New Mexico completed his preparations.

  “So you were Mother Ágreda’s confessor before she became prioress . . .”

  The movement of the carriage was tossing Father Sebastián Marcilla about as well. His stomach was bouncing from side to side, in time to the driver’s caprices. Father Marcilla had had experience putting a good face on disagreeable activities, so it was not difficult for him to maintain the composure necessary to respond.

  “Indeed, Friar Alonso. In fact, it was I who wrote to the Archbishop of Mexico, making him aware of what would come to pass if the regions to the north were explored.”

  “ ‘What would come to pass’? To what do you refer?”

  “This you already know: that they would discover new kingdoms such as those of the Tidán, the Chillescas, the Carbucos, and the Jumanes.”

  “Ah, so it was you?”

  Father Marcilla’s oval face glowed with satisfaction.

  “I advised His Eminence Manso y Zúñiga of the existence of those regions, and if Your Reverence read my letter, then no doubt you did not miss my invitation to confirm the existence of vestiges of our faith in those lands.”

  “And naturally,” Benavides deduced, “that information was transmitted to you by Mother Ágreda.”

  “Of course.”

  “And how did you dare to violate a secret of the confessional?”

  “In fact, it was nothing of the sort. The confessions were exercises in mea culpa, by a young woman who had recently taken vows and who did not understand what was happening to her, and were in no way the source of such precise details. Rest assured, I never absolved her of her ‘sins’ of geography.”

  “I see.” Friar Alonso nodded his head as if in agreement. “I do have to tell you that of all those kingdoms I am only familiar with that of the Jumanos—not ‘Jumanes,’ by the way, which is located to the northeast of the Rio Grande. As regards the others, no Franciscan or soldier of His Majesty has any k
nowledge to this day.”

  “None?” Father Marcilla’s tone was incredulous.

  “Not so much as a rumor.”

  “Perhaps it is not so strange. We will have time to clear up these points with the Prioress of Ágreda herself, who will give us a full account of whatever we ask her.”

  Friar Alonso de Benavides and the Franciscan provincial of Burgos, Sebastián Marcilla, were soon fast friends. Marcilla had joined the veteran custodian of New Mexico in his carriage when it stopped at the city of Soria, and from there the two men shared several hours that served to allow them to agree upon the questions they intended to ask Mother Ágreda, as well as to establish the limits of their rivalry.

  So lengthy and intense was their discussion that neither of the men took note of the abrupt changes in the landscape, the profiles of the towns they passed, or even of their rapid arrival at their destination.

  At first glance, Ágreda appeared to be a serene corner in the highlands of Castile, an obligatory stopping point between the kingdoms of Navarra and Aragón, a crossroads for sheepherders and farmers. As in any village perched on the border, the few noble families in the locality and the religious orders were the only points of lasting reference. And the Monastery of the Conception was one of those.

  In that recently erected cloister, all had been prepared for the visit. The nuns had placed a long red carpet between the road to Vozmediano and the front door of the church, and had even set up tables with pastries, water, and a strong wine to slake the thirst of their illustrious visitors.

  Thanks to the authorizations arranged by Father Marcilla, the entire population of religious stood outside the cloister awaiting the arrival of the delegation. They prayed and sang throughout the morning, reciting the stations of the cross alongside the exterior walls; they were joined by a growing number of the faithful, who knew in advance the importance of the awaited delegation.

  For that reason, when Benavides’s coach pulled up in front of the red carpet, a superstitious silence took hold of the crowd.

  The view from the carriage could not have been more revelatory: the nuns were standing impatiently in two lines, one headed by a Franciscan friar, the other by a sister who the travelers promptly decided must be Mother Ágreda. Following the rules laid down by Saint Beatriz de Silva in 1489, each nun was wearing a white habit, a silver scapular bearing the image of the Virgin, a black veil over her head, and that impressive blue cape.