Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

NOTHING HAPPENS

La Señora resorted to every known means; she summoned the maidservants Azucena and Lolilla and promised them pleasures and riches if they would conspire with her and steal from the palace kitchens the many supplies she needed to perform certain ceremonies; and they happily obeyed, for all these two desired was excitement and bustle and buzz, and doing these services for La Señora merely increased their excuses for tittle-tattle and for flurries of activity: go down to the kitchen, down to the stables, steal everything La Señora had asked, hide it beneath their underskirts, poke it into their bodices between their breasts, and before they delivered the herbs and the roots and the paste and the flowers, tell everything, amidst bellows of laughter, to Señor Don Juan, cloaked in the brocade drapery torn from the wall of their mistress’s bedchamber; now he was lodged in the servants’ room awaiting the return of the novitiate Doña Inés, who unable to endure his absence any longer would one day come, head bowed, knock on the door, and beg for a second night, a second deflowering to free her from her spell: a succubus made virgin again.

In the meantime Don Juan began to dally, alternately, at times simultaneously, with the scrubbing maids, who told him between giggles and belches, between sips of wine stolen as they stole the hog’s fat, between mouthfuls of ham stolen as they stole the ground sugar, what La Señora was doing in her bedchamber of Andalusian tiles and Arabian sands, lying beside that fresh cadaver fashioned from scraps of the royal mummies that had taken the place in her bed formerly occupied by Don Juan:

She has prepared an ointment from a hundred grams of animal fat and five of hashish, a half a handful of cannabis blossoms and a pinch of ground hellebore root; she rubbed it on the neck, behind the ears, under the arms, on the belly and the soles of the feet, and on the crook of the arm — on hers or the mummy’s, Lolilla? — her own, Señor Don Juan, on her own, and then she waited for the clock to strike eleven on a Saturday night of the new moon, which was yesterday; then she dressed herself in a black tunic and placed a lead crown on her head, and covered her arms with lead bracelets set with onyx and sapphire and jade and black pearls; then on her little finger she placed a lead ring set with a stone engraved with the image of a coiled serpent; she sprinkled the mummy with fumigating powders made from sulphur, cobalt, chlorate, chalk, and copper oxide; she has surrounded the mummy with seven wands made from the seven metals of the planets: gold of the sun, La Señora murmured; silver of the moon; mercury of Mercury; copper of Venus; iron of Mars; tin of Jupiter; lead of Saturn; in her hand she clutched a new knife from old Jerónimo’s forge on the plain — and one after another she picked up the seven wands and thrashed the cadaver, shouting words in Chinese or Arabic or some language we couldn’t understand:

“Peradonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth,” said Don Juan, “Verbum Phytonicum, Mysterium Salamandrae, Conventus Sylphorum, Antra Gnomorum, Daemonia Coeli Gad, Veni, Veni, Veni!”

“And nothing happened, Señor Don Juan, nothing; the mummy just lay there, stiff and stretched out on the bed; and La Señora fell exhausted to the sand.”

She’s asked us for more things, the servants said in unison, and then Don Juan asked them for a monk’s habit, a prince’s doublet and breeches, a white tunic and a crown of thorns, and when they went to gather the materials La Señora had demanded, Don Juan, in the hooded robe of a monk, came to the cell of the novitiate Sister Angustias; he listened to the wails from within and then quietly tapped on the door. The Sister opened the door, still on her knees, naked, and with a penitential scourge in her hand; her shoulders and breasts were bleeding. When she saw the monk, Sister Angustias bent over till her head touched her knees and said, Father, Father, I have sinned, free me from my evil thoughts, Father, I do not want to dream of the bodies of the men who work here, the supervisors, the ironworkers, the water carriers, the masons, and Don Juan stroked the girl’s shaved head, helped her to her feet, embraced her tenderly, and told her she should suffer no more, that she should think instead how being in the convent made her supremely free, how since she could not marry she was free to love within the convent; she was not subject to the bonds of human law that restrict a legitimate wife to fidelity to one man, her husband, whereas a nun could be the delectable love object of all men, and with these arguments he led her to the bed of bare planks; tenderly he removed the shreds of her bloodstained nightdress and kissed the novitiate’s bleeding wounds, and his lips caused both pain and pleasure; Don Juan consoled her, caressing her swollen breasts and the palpitating scapulary of hair between her legs, I will not love you forever, I am making love to you to make you free, to make you a woman; accept me so you may learn to accept all men without shame: I tell you I will not love you forever, Sister Angustias, come, Angustias, believe me when I say I love myself more than I could ever love you, and oh, how beautiful you are, how your wounds shine against your olive skin, and how it pains me, loving myself so much, to have to love you even for a moment, how I long for refuge and escape from self-love in your deep jungles and the rolling hills of your flesh, Angustias; liberate me; I am liberating you. Weep with pleasure, little nun, weep; beg me to return someday; I do not know whether I shall be able, for there are more women in the world than stars in the sky, and there will not be time to love myself in loving them all.

We took more things to her, Azucena and Lolilla said, we had to go everywhere, even to the monk Toribio’s apothecary in his stargazing tower, scurrying like mice through tunnels and stairways, passageways and dungeons, and she prepared a new ointment from fifty grams of the extract of opium, thirty of betel, six of cinquefoil, fifteen of henbane, a few grams of belladonna, the same amount of hemlock, two hundred and fifty grams of Indian hemp, five of cantharides, and then some gum tragacanth and ground sugar; look, Don Juan, Your Mercy, it’s all written down here on this paper she gave us so we wouldn’t forget the names; we had a hard time, but we spelled them out on the monk Toribio’s porcelain jars; and besides all that, she said in a loud voice that this time she would perform the ritual called … the clavier? no, the clavichord, Azucena, no, the ritual of the Clavicle, Lolilla, the Clavicle, I know what she said; she took two candles that had been blessed and stuck them in the sand, and with a cypress branch — that’s something else we’d got her, and it had to be cut by the light of the crescent moon — she drew a circle in the sand, stood inside it, and said:

“Emperor Lucifer, master of rebellious spirits, be favorable unto me,” said Don Juan, “give to this inert form the mobility of the great Prince of Darkness, let that power surge forth from the great funnel-shaped Hell divided into seven zones each with seven thousand cells where seven thousand scorpions hide and a thousand barrels of peat bubble; send the Prince of Darkness to me with the dominions that are particularly his: knowledge, flesh, and riches, now that I invoke the words of the Clavicle, so powerful they may torment the Devil himself,” said Don Juan, trembling and hiding in the folds of his brocade a temporarily aged, contorted, and intolerably pinched face: Aglon Tetragrammaton Vaycheon Stimulamathon Erohares Retrasammathon Clyoram Icion Esition Existien Eryona Onera Erasyn Moyn Meffias Soter Emmanuel Sabaoth Adonai, I convoke you, Amen.”

And nothing happened, Señor Don Juan, nothing. The mummy still lay there stiff and stretched out on the bed; and the Señora fell exhausted to the sand.