Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

But like the detective in Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” the gentleman from Rotterdam who now lived on Amsterdam Avenue, he as breathless as I after this runaround, did the one obvious thing. He picked up one of the sheets that the fleeing blind writer presumably had been dropping in his wake, and there Erasmus the polyglot read, translating aloud for my benefit: “He read with precision two writings of the same epic chapter.”

The Dutchman, who obviously had some kind of oral fixation, kissed this page repeatedly, looked at me with sympathy, yes, but also with something like a pity I did not urgently desire, and said: “Come, my friend of the New World, do not accuse me of anything. History was not closed; the epic can have another ending. We are being offered by our fleeing blind friend two, and why not three, six, nine, infinite readings of the same text. Do you understand now? Not just your single, fateful past, or your single radiant, utopian future; oh, no — but the infinitely shapable, re-creatable, prefigurable, but also retroactively diversifiable times of freedom…”

“Bah”—I shrugged again, full of Hispano-Aztec hubris. “This blind man must be an Argentinian, for he is constantly inventing what he does not have…”

Erasmus looked on uncomprehending and said so. “Excuse me, I do not mean to … but—”

“I mean,” I abruptly said, “that Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, and Argentinians descend from ships.”

“Argentinians?” queried Erasmus. “What is that?”

“Yes, you know, the endless wealth of cows and wheat fields, but the poverty of its immediate tradition. Since you don’t have the architecture of Florence, not to speak of Oaxaca, you have to build…”

“Tlon … Uqbar … Orbis Tertius…” the Dutchman slowly murmured, and I gasped, thrust back into memory, feeling that names were the princes of the art of memory, but the entranced Dutchman went on slowly: “Borgia, Borja, Burgos, what the hell was the name he said? Where had I read it before? Where was it obscurely mentioned, as a mere biographical parenthesis — where? Where?”

He stopped because it was at this very moment that a simple little gate appeared before us, breaking the fatal monotony of the maze, and opening on a space so vast that it seemed actually to be a portrait of the horizon: it was equally monstrous.

“We are in the Pampa,” I told my Dutch friend, having the advantage of Mexican grade-school maps in my mind. “We are out of the labyrinth.”

“So I would surmise,” Erasmus said, looking sadly at the limitless flatland that suddenly became a rushing canvas of war enveloping us frightfully with its proximity of menace and blood and spilled guts. A man fell from his horse into our arms, and Dutch and I, amid the pounding of hoofs, and acrid bursts of artillery, and glistening duels by saber light, embraced the fallen officer, who murmured: “I am a coward. Do not let me die. Please. I need a second chance to prove my courage in this battle.”

“It goes on, yes,” I said idiotically, “the battle goes on.”

“It shall repeat itself.” He eyed me, his brow frozen in blood and hatred, and he turned to the strange Dutchman in flowing robes: “Tell them what has happened. Tell them that this second time Pedro Damián was courageous!”

Then he fell quiet. So quiet that we could not tell whether he was dead or alive. The battlefield fled from us: its rampaging fervor moved westward, carrying the broad horizon with it, and only a small hut was left, an isolated dot, along with the loneliness of the ombu tree.

We moved the inert body there. An old gaucho opened the door of the smoke-filled hut. He looked at us as though we were not there. He had eyes only for the man who had called himself Pedro Damián. We asked the gaucho for help.

“He is so heavy, so listless. Is he dead or alive?”

“Put him down there,” said the gaucho, pointing to a mat on the earthen floor. Then he bid us take some maté that was brewing on the fire outside and went back into the hut. Erasmus and I, civilized beings that we were, sipped our tea and, looking back on the destiny of Pedro Damián, wondered whether, in effect, acts are our only symbols. No, said the Dutch humanist, probably not. Is Achilles or Hector conscious that he is only a symbol? Of course not! he exclaimed rhetorically, as if addressing a class of not-too-bright students. Then our politeness was shattered by a fearful scream from inside the hut.

We rushed in. The gaucho was there, his hands holding a knife above his head, then plunging it over and over into the writhing, screaming body of the man we had saved, Pedro Damián — and a frightful occurrence: the long blade of the murdered man, as he fell, expiring, went on fighting the blade of the gaucho, who finally let go of it but continued assassinating his victim, the same gestures but with clenched, empty hands. And it was the daggers that now fought, by themselves, as if they had hated each other since they were forged, even before the gaucho ever met his victim Pedro Damián, whom he now addressed, fearful that he might perhaps still be alive, fearful perhaps of the blood hatred of the two autonomous daggers, screaming, oblivious of our presence: “I killed my father once already! Why did you have to come here and force me to repeat what I did forty years ago! Damn you, I don’t even know you, damn you, damn you! Why did you give me a second chance! I, Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, damn you, whoever you are!”

Then, as the two flashing daggers fell on the dust of the pampa, the man who called himself Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, as if he were going to say nothing more until he himself died, sat down next to the sickly hearth of his hut, repeating endlessly: “Any destiny, no matter how long and complicated, consists of only one moment: the moment when a man forever knows who he is…”

“Knows who he is … Knows who he is …

“Who he is…”

Sitting on three chairs made of skins and hide, we gazed with him intently at the fire in the hut, and as the walls imperceptibly thickened, they reintegrated into a cellar whose sides ceased to be transparent and reappeared simply because we now saw them again, as if they had always been there. The illusion was strong in our spirits. Erasmus took my hand, and I, highly suspicious of his inclinations, wrenched it out of his hold. But I was wrong. He was not thinking about me, and the mad fire in his eyes only reflected his desperate search for the in-octavo volume of The Praise of Folly. On finding it, he seized it with a sort of erotic glee. “Here is my space, at least the space of a book,” he said eagerly, laughing.

I tried, halfheartedly, to join in his amusement. But we now faced, in this cellar, the figure of a bedraggled man, emaciated, with long hair and beard, somewhat like the Count of Monte Cristo after a ten-year stay at the Château d’If. He lay there in the cellar, unaware of us, without a candle, without a book, grunting from time to time, touching things lightly — in the posture, indeed, of Adam receiving life, in the Sistine Chapel, from the hands of Yahweh.

But it was no god, but a strange goddess who finally came down the cellar stairs into this scene, bearing a tray of limp lettuce and a dish of water: a dish, not a glass, not even a cup. The prisoner — what else could he be — lapped it up on all fours, then took the lettuce between his … his paws? and devoured the leaves.

The woman who had come down was frail and slightly stooped. She sat in front of the man and ate a large sugared cake. She then told him: “Georgie, you cannot come out yet. The dictator is still in power. You must be patient. Ten years is nothing, do you understand?”

“No … not Jorge,” he denied vigorously. “Pedro … not Georgie … Salvadores. Pedro Salvadores is my name … you know … why do you…?”