Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“What are you doing to avert these threats?”

“What it is my place to do: order the arrest of the masquerading drummer and her young companion, and if El Señor authorizes, torture them.”

“Why?”

“They went directly to the forge of the smith Jerónimo, and have remained there with all the grumbling workmen my men have heard and observed.”

“A drummer who is actually a woman…”

“A Devil with tattooed lips, Señor.”

“A youth accompanying her, you say?”

“Yes, identical to … to the young Prince your mother brought here, even down to the signs of a common monstrosity: six toes on each foot, and a blood-red cross upon their backs…”

“Twins, Guzmán? Do you know the prophecy?”

“No, Señor…”

“Twins always announce the end of dynasties. They are the excess that promises immediate extinction. And a swift renascence. Ah, Guzmán, why have you been so slow to reveal these things to me? Can these twins be the dual sign of the disappearance of my house and the foundation of a new line? Guzmán, do not torture me any more; enough; have the usurpers, the enemies to my uniqueness and to the permanence of my order, arrived at the very doors of my palace?”

“I am not torturing El Señor; I use the root, slim as chard and bursting with pungent liquor, of the turpeth-of-the-East, a name that meant ‘quitcares’… and I am relieved of one care, knowing that finally El Señor understands the singular nature of the dangers threatening him…”

“Bring the youth and the disguised girl before me. Help me, Guzmán, the pain…”

“I am helping El Señor, who only tortures himself. And I shall take charge of averting the threats of which I have spoken … with El Señor’s permission.”

“Enough, enough, Guzmán, the only care you can relieve me of is this fear that things change, that the world can exist beyond the world contained within my palace … You must realize, Guzmán: I killed innocent people in order to assure the permanence of my world. Do not tell me that usury, money, debt, and a pair of unknown youths threaten that world; do not snatch away, Guzmán, my reason for being; do not destroy the very foundation stone of my existence; everything … here … within the stone walls of my palace; here my doubts; here my crimes; here my loves; here my ills; here my Faith; here my mother and her Idiot Prince and her dwarf; here my untouched wife; here, part of me and my palace, these two strangers whom you will bring before me; here my contradictory words, Guzmán, and also my vulnerability; I know I am contradictory, as are my profound Faith and the string of heresies I repeat, to test it, yes, but also to demonstrate to you, to myself, to no one, to everyone, to the very walls, for they have ears, that my knowledge is as certain as it is weak, that that prisca sapientia, that fundamental knowledge, is not foreign to me, I guard it here, here in my head, here in my breast, Guzmán, adding light to shadow and shadow to light so that somewhere, in spite of and because of contradictions, the intelligence may exist that nothing is totally good or totally evil; that I know, although not everyone believes or knows or understands that I know it, and this is the privilege of the long continuity of my house upon this earth, with all its crimes and madness, that justifies everything, Guzmán, that is my wisdom, and everything that has happened has happened so that someone, one person, one single person, that I, may know it, and that, sadly, is enough; one cannot use that wisdom in governing, for then, you are right, he would lose his kingdom, although not the knowledge that good and evil are one and that each nourishes the other; I know that, although it serves me no purpose, but your usurer from Seville does not know it, or your grumbling workmen, nor do you yourself know it, Guzmán, for on the day you, any of you, sit upon my throne, you will have to learn it again, beginning from nothing, and you will commit the same crimes but in the name of other gods: money, justice, that progress of which you speak; none of you will have the minimal tolerance my awareness of madness, evil, fatality, impossibility, human frailty, illness, pain, and the inconstancy of pleasure assures us. Balance, a precarious balance, Guzmán: to burn a youth only for an obviously abominable crime, and for no other; to protect the life but punish the guilt of my Chronicler by sending him to the galleys as a cure for his innocence; to make myself blind and deaf to any other evidence. Who did the painting in the chapel? You would want to know Guzmán, if you saw, as I have seen in it, a culpable rebelliousness of the soul, but I know how to be deaf and blind and mute when the solution to one problem creates a thousand new ones. Look at that map on the wall: look at its limits, the Pillars of Hercules, the mouths of the Tagus, Cape Finisterre, distant, frigid Iceland, then the universal abyss, the shoulders of Atlas, the slow and deliberate turtle upon whose shell the world rests: Guzmán, swear to me that there is nothing more; I would go mad if the world extended one inch beyond the confines we know; if it were so, I would have to learn everything again, begin everything again, and I would know no more than the usurer, the workman, or you know; my shoulders, like those of Atlas, are tired: I can bear no more weight; nor is there room on my head for one additional fathom of sea or one additional square acre of land; Spain is contained within Spain, and Spain is this palace…”

“Look at me, Señor,” said Guzmán, “look at me, understand me, multiply the number of men like me, and be assured. Spain can no longer be contained within Spain.”

Quickly, huntsmen, said Guzmán as he left the bedchamber of the delirious El Señor, send an armed guard to the plain and bring to El Señor’s chapel that drummer and her young companion; we will not rest a moment, so as not to allow our exhausted sovereigns a moment’s rest; let our muscles and our tireless blood act so we will heap fatigue upon the heads and hearts of our Señores; what good and efficient confederates I have, who imitated the howling of Bocanegra and thus justified the death of El Señor’s favorite dog, who took advantage of El Señor’s diseased sleep to exchange burned tapers for fresh ones, fill emptied pitchers, and reverse the time of the hourglasses; from the common grave where it slept the eternal sleep with the cadaver of Bocanegra, they rescued the corpse of the sailor who arrived here in the coffin of El Señor’s father, and they buried it in its rightful tomb to mock the plans of the Mad Lady; quickly, let us act, for our way is action and theirs the madness of irrationality; quickly, let us find the Mad Lady and tell her that the proclamation announcing the Prince and the dwarf as heirs to the crown will take place this very morning; and the huntsmen who have insinuated themselves into the ranks of the rebellious workmen, let them go to the quarries, the forges, and the tile sheds, and tell men like Jerónimo and Martín and Nuño not to fear, that I am with them, that the gates of the palace will be open to them when they decide to attack; and let the workmen know who the heir is, that it is the Idiot who will rule at the death of El Señor; and you, huntsman, go and tell the Sevillian moneylender that El Señor has favored him by granting him the title and the honors of Comendador, and after the Comendador has been informed of his appointment, let him know, huntsman, that his daughter the novitiate has been seduced and violated by La Señora’s young lover, and go to La Señora and tell her that the same novitiate who seduced El Señor now has captive another prisoner of love, the youth we rescued from the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres; and as for El Señor … I myself shall inform El Señor, at the opportune moment, that that same youth is the lover both of the novitiate and of La Señora, his untouched wife; and I shall inform him that there are not two intruders here but three, and that all three are identical, not twins but triplets, ha, and we shall see — as that ingenuous, stammering, cross-eyed Chaldean in the tower would say to the no less ingenuous, although scheming, Brother Julián — what black prophecy this triangular, not singular, situation suggests to him; we shall have pleasure, huntsmen, pleasure, hubbub, and hullabaloo; count on Guzmán; from this adventure — happen what may — we shall emerge stronger, I in the forefront, and then with me you, my faithful companions; count on Guzmán.