Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“How, if you are blind, do you know I tore out my fingernail?” our Señora asked between tormented sobs.

“Everything done in a visible manner in the world may be the work of demons,” the flutist replied.” Only the invisible is the work of God, and therefore demands blind faith, and offers no temptation. Señora, if you desire the blind to see, slice the eyeball with a razor at the precise moment a cloud cuts across the circumference of the full moon; then night will become day; water, fire; excrement, gold; dust, breath; and the blind shall see.”

“I have no desire to create worms or to unleash storms. The Chronicler spoke of you one day, and also my poor executed lover knew you, the youth called Miguel-of-Life. I know your name.”

“Do not repeat it, Señora, or your efforts will be in vain.”

“I know your powers. They spoke of that. But it is not hail in summer I want of you; I want the body that lies upon my bed to acquire life.”

“Then do what I have told you, and the Devil will appear.”

And so our Señora, trembling and subdued, the oil-anointed dagger in her hand, approached the cadaver fabricated from the scraps of the dead, and the Aragonese flutist closed his enormous green eyes and began to play. La Señora also closed her eyes, and at that very instant, with a single slash, she cut the staring white eye of the mummy; a thick black liquid ran down the silvery cheek of that motionless monster, Señor Don Juan. But aside from that, nothing happened; the mummy still lies there, stiff and stretched out on the bed; and La Señora again falls exhausted to the bloody sand, this time beside the corpse of the owl, and recriminates the flute player, casting his impotence in his face, calling him mendacious, a liar; where is the Devil? the rites of the man from Aragon are worthless, the Devil did not appear to aid La Señora and to give life to the horrible cadaver of cadavers, and meanwhile the flutist smiles and spends his short breath in playing lugubrious little tunes.

“Poor Señora; she does badly to seek with such eagerness and such painful invocation what is already near, just across the passageway, something even her maidservants can see,” Don Juan said, casting aside his brocaded mantle and revealing himself before the two awestruck scullery maids, who embraced one another as they looked upon him and ran to huddle together in the farthest corner of the room, for they had never seen him naked and had dallied with him only in the darkness, and now they saw him, chest covered with sardonyx, his waist bound by a chain of diamonds, his arms painted gold, his sex garlanded with a rosary of pearls that disappeared between his buttocks and fastened over one hip, his legs sheathed in jasper, his wrists adorned with sapphires, his ankles with chrysolite, his neck with rubies. This their bedazzled eyes beheld, but finally Azucena saw something more, as this splendid man, unparalleled among mortals, whirled about, and that was the six toes on each of his feet and the vividly purple cross upon his back; laughing, Don Juan strode from the room; the scrubbing maids crossed themselves again and again, and as they watched him leave they knew he would never return, and Azucena said to Lolilla: It’s him, it’s him, the child the court jester abandoned twenty years ago, the one I took in, nursed at the teats of our young Señora’s bitch, before her marriage to El Señor, I recognized him, he’s mine, my lover, my son, I was his wet nurse, his true mother, until the day of the horrible slaughter in the castle when I feared for his life, feared that with the monstrous signs of his back and his feet he would be confused with that mob of heretics, Moors, Jews, whores, pilgrims, and beggars that overran us that day, even the children in that procession were slain by the knife, but I saved him, I placed him in a light basket and tied it and cast it into the river where it would drift downstream towards the sea, sure that someone would pick him up and care for him, and now he has returned, he has been my lover, he has promised to marry me, you, too, Azucena? but that’s what he told me, you lie, Lolilla, as God is Christ and Christ is God, you lie, that’s what he told me, no, me, don’t you lay your lowborn hands on me, you filthy hag, I’ve had about enough from you, slut, let me go, you squeezed-out old bag, I’ll gouge out your eyes, you cheap little ass-peddler, I’ll yank out your mane, baggage, why, you spawn-of-a-bastard-Moor, I’ll tear your heart out, ay, ay, ay, my eye, my leg, you’ve got claws like iron, you tramp, but I’ll ram a pike up your ass and out your snout that’ll turn you inside out and rot your bloody bowels, you itching, snitching, butt-twitching, son-of-a-bitching old whore, oh, let go my hair, ay, get off me, oh, my knee, I swear I’ll kill you, no, I’m going to kill you, you cunt-sir-ass-sir-anyway-at-all-sir old hump, stinking trollop, I’ll knock the snot out of you, you troublemaking, double-talking, double-dealing, sneaky-slimy-snaky strumpet, why you hairy-chested, spindle-shanked bawd, I’ll kill you, I’ll straighten out those crossed eyes for you, I’ll bash your brains against a rock, yagh, yagh, yagh…! Oh, look what you’ve done to us, Don Juan! all because of you, Don Juan, come back to us, Don Juan! oh, Señor Don Juan, you are nothing but a woman’s whore.

Don Juan returned to the crypt and chapel where he had left Barbarica, exhausted from pleasure, in the arms of the Idiot Prince, the two of them asleep in the sumptuous tomb of El Señor’s father. He walked toward the little cart where the Mad Lady sat, and if the maidservants’ terror had been awesome when they saw him naked and be-jeweled, the Mad Lady’s simplicity was now entirely natural; she greeted the young gentleman before her dressed in the velvet doublet, the fur cape, the cap and breeches and medallion of the embalmed Señor.

“You’ve come back at last,” the Mad Lady said serenely.

“Yes. This is our place.”

“Shall we always be close to each other?”

“Always.”

“Shall we rest now?”

“Yes.”

“Are we dead?”

“Yes, both of us.”

He lifted the old woman from her little cart, carried her very gently to a niche carved between two pilasters, and very sweetly placed her there, her white head and black-clad torso propped against the icy stone of the wall. The Mad Lady seemed content; her eyes followed Don Juan as he Walked away, stopped beside the great mausoleum of the old woman’s husband, and lay down upon the stone slab. He lay half reclining, his head resting upon his right arm: he was the living crown of the funeral tomb. He was the perfect and chaste youth the old woman had adored in her obsessive dreams of love and death, the resurrection of the past and the transfiguration of the future. Now, at this instant, in a present the Mad Lady wished to hold captive forever, beneath these arching domes, in this crypt, the dream was a reality, and the youth who represented her husband, her lover, and her son lay half reclining, resting on his right arm, as he gazed with fascinated pride into a mirror that an inattentive visitor might mistake for a book.

For a moment, the aged Señora feared that both of them — she in her niche, looking at him, and he, half reclining upon the slab of the sepulcher, looking at himself — had turned to stone and had thus become forever a part of this sumptuous cave of tombstones, pedestals, truncated pyramids, funereal epitaphs, and carved stone bodies, the reproduction of the remains of all the descendants of this house. A shiver, an icy doubt, ran down the Mad Lady’s spine; she knew until now she had dreamed, and that she had been dreaming in life; but from this moment, placed by Don Juan in her niche in this chapel, she would believe she was dead, for now she dreamed she was living.