Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

And, still babbling, the dwarf Barbarica came to the tomb reserved by El Señor Don Felipe for his father — the Fair, the whoring, Señor — and she was amazed to see that it was the only tomb with the stone still firmly in place upon the funeral plinth. Her strength was fed by desire, her short, chubby, baby-like body strained and struggled, and sweating and panting she moved aside the bronze slab; she shrieked, she crossed herself, she yowled like an alley cat and trembled like quicksilver, for in the depths of the sepulcher, side by side, lay two identical men, identically dressed and identically arrayed down to the most minute detail of rings and medals, and both were the Prince, her Prince, sleeping within this tomb like twins gestating within a stone womb, both resting upon the horrible remains of the Mad Lady’s embalmed husband, still dressed in the ragged clothing of a sailor; two! two! my God, you redouble my pleasure, panted Barbarica, but you offer them only to take them from me, they are both dead; ah, the bitch that birthed them, ahhh, I shall die a virgin, ay, I must live my wedding night untouched, among men with cocks as cold as dead fish, the only procuress to remedy my ills death itself, ay, ay, ay, and the dwarf clambered into the tomb and kissed the lips of the embalmed Señor dressed in tattered sailor’s garb; this first kiss tasted of aloes, and the lips were dead indeed; next she kissed the parted lips of one of the two identical Princes, and that kiss tasted of the dried blood of a dove; the dwarf jerked the cap from this Prince’s head, saw the shaved skull, and knew he was the poor scramble-brained youth she had married, and her husband’s bloody lips had the scent of madness and sacrifice, but not of life. The dwarf squinted one swollen-lidded eye, her upturned nostrils quivered; she smelled ordure; she remembered; she separated the legs and lowered the breeches of the Idiot Prince, her husband; her tiny hand poked through the greenish feces, she gagged, and kept repeating, oh, what a smell, it stinks to high heaven, but she continued to poke and paw through the Idiot’s excrement until she found what she was looking for: the black pearl, the pearl called the Pilgrim, and she popped it between her bulging bosoms, after wiping it clean on the doublet of the sleeping youth, her — as yet unconsummated — husband.

Only then did she look with increasing curiosity and excitement at the third body lying in the tomb, the second Prince, identical to her husband who slept so soundly his sleep was twin to death, in the same way the youths were twin to each other; she kissed this Prince. And this kiss tasted of perfume, of sweet-scented herbs … and it was returned.

“He kissed me back,” screamed the dwarf, “he did, he did, he kissed me back!”

Don Juan’s hands seized Barbarica’s waist, he tossed her playfully into the air like a doll, it stinks to high heaven, the dwarf laughed, it stinks to high heaven, she repeated as Don Juan raised her voluminous, bunched-up skirts; he tickled her tight little ass with one finger, and as he thrust his face between the dwarf’s legs, he also laughed, saying, blessed Jesus, what a stinkus, blessed Jesus, what a smell, and a tongue that seemed to the little creature like fire and brimstone plunged into the swamp.

She sent us out onto the plain, Señor Don Juan, beneath the burning July sun, to search for a certain blind flute player, Aragonese by birth, who arrived a few days ago to take part in the meager festivities of the palace workmen, by playing his sometimes plaintive, sometimes happy, little tunes; by pushing him and overriding his mute protests, we brought him to our Señora’s bedchamber, which he already knew through the stories of the poor Señor Chronicler sent to row in the galleys — and too bad you didn’t have the pleasure of knowing him, Your Mercy, for he was a discreet and courteous man, and he would treat a scullery maid as well as a lady — and also from the accounts of Your Honor’s predecessor in enjoying the favors of our Señora, the youth burned beside the stables for fiddling with too many bottoms: the kitchen lads’ as well as La Señora’s … though as you often say, and rightly, let every man take his pleasure where he may.

Our Señora ordered the blind man to sit upon the sand and play his wretched sad little flute; he was bald, dark-skinned and heavy-shouldered, dressed in crudely stitched, ragged burlap, and as he played he looked at everything out of sightless green eyes, bulging like two onions, seeing nothing; La Señora baptized the frogs we’d caught in the old wells and stagnant waters on the plain, and she forced black Hosts down the frogs’ throats while with her left hand she made a reverse sign of the cross upon her trembling breasts, saying:

“In the name of the Patrician,” said Don Juan, “of the Patrician of Aragon, now, today, Valencia; all our misery has ended, Spain; come, luminous angel, come to breathe life into this being I have formed, make him rise from the bed in the image of Lucifer, covered in sardonyx, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx, jasper, sapphire, ruby, emerald, and gold, and accompanied by the music of this blind demiurge from the diabolical village of your Aragonese kingdom, Calanda, where hands beat on drums until the skin is raw, blood flows, and the very bone is splintered to insure that Christ will be resurrected in the full Glory of his Sabbath: so may this my Angel be revived; come, come, come, twin of God, fallen archangel, King of Spain.”

Yes, that’s how it was, Señor Don Juan, exactly as you said it, although that wretched flute player surely is not from Calanda where the Holy Week celebrations are famous and pilgrims come from faraway places to witness them; considering his looks he must have come from Datos, Matos, Badules, Cucalón, Herreruela, Amento, or Lechón, for those are the most miserable of the villages of Aragon. Then, inflicting great pain upon herself, La Señora tore off one of her fingernails, howling those words you just spoke, Don Juan, and the blind flute player sat upon the red-stained sands amidst the day-old, already stinking cadavers of the sacrificed animals, and played his saddest, most plaintive tunes. Suddenly, as he heard La Señora’s screams of pain, the flutist stopped his playing and said what you heard, Señor Don Juan, from where you were hiding behind the chamber door:

“St. Paul advised us that Satan is the God of this century. St. Thomas advised us that Lucifer desired beatitude before the time appointed by the Creator, desired it before anyone, wished to obtain happiness for himself alone, only for himself, and that was his pride, and that pride, his sin. God condemned him for his pride; that is why the haughty descend from him. The Most High gave powers of genesis to woman, and having it, woman felt she was the most privileged of all creation, for she could do what no man could do: create another being within her womb, and that therefore she was superior to man, who could fertilize but not reproduce. And woman decided that even this power of fecundation should be denied to man, and so she refused him her body and allowed herself to be deflowered and made pregnant only by God himself, or by a representative of God’s spirit, before she would be touched by any mortal man. And mortal man felt even greater resentment at his mortality, for he lacked the power to produce another being, and woman was his only after belonging to God, to the Spirit, to the Priest, or the Hero designated by God to continue in the female’s womb the responsibility of creation. And so man took revenge on woman by making of her his whore, by corrupting her, so she was no longer fit to be the vessel for divine semen. And man despised his children, for if they were the children of God they were not his, and if they were the children of whores they were not worthy to be his. And man murdered his detested children, sacrificed them, his children, for they were also the children of the prostitute who first had given herself to the Hero or the Priest acting in the name of God, or he devoured them, in order to nourish himself from the sacred essence that God had stolen from man and granted to woman and to her offspring. And so the mother protected her child, knowing that the father would not live in peace until he had murdered it, and she saved it, as with Moses, by entrusting it to the waters. And for all this, man blamed woman as being Lucifer’s representative on earth; and believing that woman is the seat of the diabolical pride that desired happiness before its rightful time and that anticipated the common beatitude that men may achieve only on the day of final judgment, the Council of Laodicea prohibited woman from officiating in the Mass. Man took shelter in material power in order to negate the spiritual powers of woman. Woman thus became Satan’s priestess, and through her Satan regains his androgynous nature and becomes the hermaphrodite imagined by the Eremites and seen in the Hebraic Cabala: and it is from the Devil that she acquires the knowledge transmitted on the day of the first Fall, for Satan fell before Eve. Bury the fingernail in the sand, Señora, and worms will be born from it, and great hail will fall in summer and terrible storms will be loosed upon this land.”