Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

And the brand-new Comendador, the Sevillian moneylender, the father of Doña Inés, gazed at everything through narrowed, calculating eyes, and nothing that moved caught his eye, rather the richness of the wood of the choir and the chairs in the chamber, of acana and mahogany, terebinth and walnut, box and ebony, and the paneling with embellishment, molding, and inlay of mahogany, and the columns of the choir of blood-red acana, each fluted and round, their richly wrought capitals supported by corbels carved in thistle leaves; sixty feet long, at least, this chapel, the Sevillian said to himself, and fifty-three feet wide, but it contains more riches than a space a hundred times greater could hold, for the tables are of green and pink and white marble and jasper, inlaid, veneered, and outlined in contrasting colors; the altar is of finest jasper trimmed with bronze made golden by fire, and the monstrance is like a flaming ruby adorned with diamonds — and diamonds had to be used in carving such a costly tabernacle; well said he who said that there are sufficient riches here to found a kingdom, certainly there will be more than enough to repay a moneylender, for I see no thing in this sacred place that cannot be melted down or torn from its place to be resold; there is too much here for one little-used room, and the former councilman of this place spoke the truth when these communal lands were expropriated by El Señor: “Note down that I am ninety years old, that I have twenty times been mayor, and that El Señor will build here a nest of locusts that will devour the land; place first the service of God”; and to fulfill the demands of El Señor they uprooted forests, leveled hills, stopped streams, and all, yes, all out of devotion to God, to sing His divine praise with continual choirs, prayers, charity, silence, and study, and also for the fitting interment of our Sovereign’s ancestors. But one never knows for whom he labors, and perhaps what today honors God and the dead in this one room can tomorrow, without diminishing the greatness of the Creator, adorn the houses of the living, and this balustrade can be sent to Seville, and that candelabrum perhaps to Genoa, that pilaster to the house of a merchant in Lübeck, the chairs to schools where the children of prosperous and frugal citizens are educated, and the chasubles, dalmatics, capes, albs can easily be transformed into sumptuous attire for our women, for one sells the good cloth in his coffer; these riches are buried here, and no one benefits from them. El Señor must have planned that these marvels would be the treasure of future centuries, but I see them as a profitable annual balance, and in order to obtain them I shall believe that everything I have seen and heard here the last few nights is but a nightmare; things are things and can be touched and measured and exchanged and sold and resold; the objects here are but adornment for useless rites and events my senses cannot credit; no, I did not see the flight of a bat, or the transformation of that bat into a naked woman, or the robbing of sepulchers, or fornication inside them, or the apparition of dwarfs and mutilated old ladies or youths who recline upon rich funereal tombstones, or any of the things my reason cannot comprehend or my interests translate. This age is long in dying, and makes even a hardened merchant like myself see visions and phantoms. Let the old dreams die, Señor; everything you possess here must circulate, move, find a new dwelling place and a new owner. That is reality, and this prodigious edifice will be but the tomb of your ancestors, and of your dreams also, your vampires, your dwarfs, your armless and legless old ladies, your mad youths disguised as statues. Thank you for my title, Señor, although what you reward in me will be your own downfall. Your spectral God is not my real Goddess. I call my deity Reason, alert senses, rejection of mystery, banishment of all that does not fit within the secure treasure chest of common sense where I amass logic and ducats joined together in happy matrimony.

And the fulgurating gaze of the Mad Lady was the gaze of triumph, and as the aged Comendador wedded reason and money, she wedded life and death, past and future, ash and breath, stone and blood: propped in one of the chapel’s carved niches, incapable of movement, indifferent to any fear of a fatal fall from the niche to the granite floor, her gaze was of triumph: all the court, all living beings gathered in this deep sepulchral crypt resembled her adored dead, and perhaps with luck no one would ever leave here, everything would remain forever fixed in time, like the figures in that painting above the altar, a strange painting of Christian theme and pagan conception where contemporary naked figures coexisted with those steeped in Sacred History; the perfect exchange of death and life was now being consummated; the reward of life was death; the gift of death was life; the obsessive game of reversal that dominated the insane reason of the Mad Lady had reached its ultimate point of equilibrium. Let nothing upset it, pleaded the Mad Lady, let nothing upset it, and she drifted into a profound dream that also confused the domains of life and death.

The eyes of everyone present turned to scrutinize a dejected El Señor as he occupied the curule chair Guzmán held for him at the base of the altar; all eyes, from those of Inés, hidden behind the grill work of the choir, to those of the most distant alguacil innocently standing at the foot of the stairway of the thirty-three steps. In all the crush of the assembled throng, no one occupied those steps; it was as if an invisible glass shield sealed access to the stairway. Regarding the crowd before him, El Señor was more aware of certain absences than of the assembled presences, and as he wished to identify those absences, he named them Celestina and Ludovico, Pedro and Simón, asking himself, his fingers clutching the smooth mahogany arms of the chair, whether his dreams of yesterday could eventually bear any relation to the mysteries of today, whether the dreams had announced the mysteries, and whether the enigma, finally, was but ignorance of the logical bond between what youth desired and old age feared, whether the mystery of today was only, how could one know? the failure of yesterday’s dream. Perhaps … perhaps it was the student and the bewitched girl, the serf and the monk who invisibly occupied the steps of that never completed stairway, the stairway where every stair was a century and every step a step toward death and extinction, oblivion, inert matter, and then accursed resurrection in a foreign body. Toribio’s unfocused gaze, the fear-filled gaze of Brother Julián, the greedy, obsequious gaze of the Sevillian moneylender, the bored gaze of the prelate, Guzmán’s impenetrable gaze, told him nothing; they held no answer to the question that El Señor asked himself as he asked them. And he found no response, he retreated into his only sure refuge: his own person.

His real, his royal person. El Señor decided to count only on himself and to rely on the simple oneness of his own person to dominate surprise, crowd, enigma, and disorder. But immediately he asked himself: Is my person sufficient? And the answer was now the first rupture in that simple unity — I, Felipe, El Señor — no, my person is not enough; my person is drained by the power I represent, and that power extends beyond me, for since it antedates me it does not actually belong to me, and as it passes through my hands and through my gaze it seeps away and ceases to belong to me; I, Felipe, am not enough; power is not enough; what is needed are the trappings, the place, the space that contains us and gives a semblance of unity to me and my power: the chapel, this chapel with the painting from Orvieto and the bronze balustrades and the fluted pilasters and carved chairs and high iron grillwork of the nuns’ choir and the thirty sepulchers of my ancestors and the thirty-three steps that ascend from this hypogeum to the plain of Castile; thus the illusion of unity was but the complex fabric of a man, his power and his space, and Julián gazing at El Señor seated before the anonymous painting which was said to have come from Orvieto, imagined him imagining himself as an ancient icon, a timeless, spaceless reproduction of Pankreator, but vanquished by the proliferation of spatial and temporal signs in the painting: you, Felipe, El Señor … here and now; and as the masked page and the blond youth entered, the enigmas were multiplied rather than resolved, enigmas enslaved the soul of El Señor in the same way the simple couple enslaved the multitude of dumfounded alguaciles and duennas, monks and halberdiers, councilmen and stewards who opened a path for them into the presence of El Señor; and thus he himself, seated upon the curule chair with Guzmán standing by his side, his back to the altar, to the Italian painting, to the offertory table, to the embroidered altar cloths, the ciboria, and the tabernacle itself, became the purveyor of the questions he himself had formulated: Who are they? why do they look the way they do? why is the page wearing a mask, hiding his features behind a green and black and yellow feather mask? why does he have a large green sealed bottle secured in his sash? who is the youth with the tattered breeches and doublet and tousled blond hair the page is leading by the hand, and what is he clutching in his hand?; the cross, the cross; what is that blood-red cross between the youth’s shoulder blades, the cross I now see clearly as a clumsy halberdier twists the boy’s arm, makes him moan with pain, forces him to kneel, his back to me as mine is to the altar; my back also bears a cross, the gold-embroidered cross of the cape resting upon my shoulders; and what has dropped from the hands of the youth now forced to prostrate himself, abject and captive, before me? two rocks, two gray stones, what offering is this? to whom does he offer it, to me, or to the powers of the altar behind me?; did he intend to stone me in my own temple? did he intend to stone us both, both Lords, I and the other, I and the Christ without a halo? is that what he wanted?; and why does my astronomer Toribio rush through the throng to the prostrate boy, the infinitely strange and conquered and defiant youth at my feet, and pick up the two stones, gaze at them with his crossed eyes, weigh them in his hands, seem to recognize them, kiss them, and immediately hold them aloft, exhibit them, exhibit them to Brother Julián the miniaturist, run toward him with the stones?; has my horoscopist friar lost his judgment, or is he merely carrying out to the last detail the function for which I had him brought here: to resolve the enigmas and then position them in the astral chart?; and thus hesitated the royal and unique person of El Señor, made multiple by doubt and the double presence of these strangers, the black-clad page masked in feathers and his young companion; thus there arose a shrill bird-like shrieking from the nuns’ cage: it is he, my Sweet Lamb, shrieked Madre Milagros; it is he, my cruel and most beloved confessor, shrieked Sor Angustias; it is he, another Don Juan, shrieked the novitiate Inés; one is of stone and the other living, I have lost my reason; which should I love? the one that promises the adventure of motionless stone or the one that promises me the misadventure of trembling flesh? and the twittering shrieks of the nuns aroused the Mad Lady from her dream and she, too, saw the man who was identical to the one she had rescued from the dunes one evening and elevated to the rank of royal heir; and Don Juan himself gazed at his double kneeling before El Señor and then he gazed intently into the mirror he held, still reclining, in one hand, and he said to himself: I am turning into stone and my mirror is but the reflection of my death: we are two, two cadavers; that is the power and the mystery of mirrors, oh, my lucid soul, for when a man dies before a mirror he is in reality two dead men, and one of them will be buried but the other will remain and continue to walk upon the earth: and that one kneeling there, is that I?