Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

In contrast, the masked page did not hesitate. While the splintering of El Señor’s soul revealed itself in similar contortions of a face that in doubt and oblivion and premonition and fear and resignation prematurely assumed the features reserved for the moment of death, the page advanced toward him with a firm step. The echo of his footsteps resounded upon the granite floor of the chapel; the steps resounded more because of the hushed silence occasioned by El Señor’s evident perturbation than because of the forcefulness of the slight body of the Mad Lady’s page-and-drummer. And the Mad Lady, ensconced in her niche, gazed now at her lost drummer and cried out: “You’ve returned, ingrate, jackanapes; after abandoning me, without my permission, you’ve returned to cause my ruin, to shatter my equilibrium: damned knave!”

And this aged Queen was so agitated that she fell from the high carved niche where Don Juan had placed her with such delicacy, and lacking arms or legs to brace herself against the fall she tumbled headfirst to the granite floor and was knocked unconscious. No one paid the least attention to her, for all their powers of observation were focused on what was taking place before the altar. The page climbed upon the dais and, still masked, approached before the perturbed gaze of El Señor. And also Guzmán’s, standing nearby; and Don Juan’s, liberated to the imagination of evil and death; and the Comendador’s, fearful that these events, more akin to intangible fantasy than to the solidity of his merchant’s scales, would turn from its course the stream of precise and precious affairs of commerce; and the nuns’, stupefied by the apparition of the young man identical to their own lovers. The most alert eyes could scarcely see; not even the most attentive ears could hear. They heard nothing of what the page, after kissing El Señor’s hands, whispered into his pallid ear; only a few would see that for an instant the page removed the mask, but everyone, in tune with their Lord’s most minute vibration, felt that El Señor shivered like quicksilver when he glimpsed the page’s face: gray eyes, upturned nose, firm chin, moist, tattooed mouth imprinted with many-colored serpents that writhed with the movement of full lips; and Don Juan, from his position upon the slab of the tomb, could see El Señor’s ears flush, as if the page had lighted the candles of memory behind them.

And that memory, unknown to everyone except El Señor and the page, stopped the wheels of time, immobilized bodies, suspended breath, blinded gazes, and thus the painter Julián could tear his own gaze from the vast canvas he had painted to focus upon another, still larger, although less detailed canvas: the court of El Señor, fixed, paralyzed, converted into insensible figures within the space of the royal chapel; and Julián, who gazed, one gaze within this space, could neither hear the words nor see the few trembling gestures El Señor directed to the page and the youth: the protagonists.

The page replaced the feather mask upon his face; he offered a hand to El Señor, who grasped it, arose, and descended from the dais; but even this uncommon movement did not reanimate those who observed incomprehendingly, although luster was restored to eyes that watched El Señor and the page descend from the altar, saw the page offer his other hand to the kneeling youth in tattered clothing, a cross upon his back, his blond locks hiding his face; the page’s young companion arose from his position of humiliation, the halberdiers released him, and the trio — the page, the youth, and El Señor — walked toward the neighboring bedchamber separated from the chapel by a black curtain, and passing through the throng that formed a double wall of questioners, they entered El Señor’s chamber.

Guzmán drew back the curtain to allow them to pass. And that was the gesture that revived the movement, sighs, chatter, and exclamations of the court; everyone crowded over, ran across, nudged, or trampled the mutilated body of the Mad Lady, perhaps thinking it was some animal, perhaps El Señor’s dog, a forgotten package, a bundle of black rags, a bale of old hay; they thundered over it like a herd of horses, like a drove of oxen; no one saw her die, no one heard the last sigh from that mutilated bleeding old woman, her head split open, her tangled white hair matted with blood, her eyes starting from her head, her torso flattened, a heap of discarded rinds and peels, for everyone buzzed like a swarm of insects before the bedchamber door.

But only those closest — Julián and Toribio, the Comendador and Guzmán — could see what happened; Don Juan only imagined it; Inés only feared it. And this is what those who could see and hear, and lived to tell it, say:

The page approached El Señor; again he whispered something to him, and El Señor gave orders corresponding to the words of the page, for only at the page’s instruction did El Señor seem capable of acting; they were to send for a certain Aragonese flautist, and allow the page and his young companion, holding hands, moving extremely slowly, as if underwater, not looking at one another, somnambulists, to walk to El Señor’s bed, climb upon it, lie down, and await the indispensable arrival of the flautist; he is on his way, Señor, he was entertaining La Señora in her chamber with his sad, blind trilling; poor solitary and defeated Señora, she seems to be following the road of all our Queens: to be devoured by a Time with a body, a gullet, teeth, claws, scruffy hide, and hunger; they’re opening a path for him now, Señor; he’s guided by eyes that can see and by his own divining hands, Señor; here comes the flautist, no, no one knows where he came from, or when, or how, or why, only that the page deems him indispensable for the incomprehensible ceremony taking place upon the bed where our Señor has in the past been treated by Guzmán for all his premature ills, and where ill, unmoving, he has been able to watch other ceremonies, divine ceremonies, without being seen; but this ceremony cannot be divine, for the two boys have climbed upon El Señor’s own bed and are embracing there as if to console or recognize each other, as if to remember each other; tender, humane gazes, Julián and Toribio may think, but not the prelate who in a high state of agitation cries sodomy, sodomy in the chapel dedicated to the sovereign worship of the Eucharist, sovereign the worship as sovereign should be contrition before a sin becoming more and more prevalent, and St. Luke has said: Nay; but, except you repent, ye shall all likewise perish, and the only way to purge this heinous sin is in the way the youth was purged who was discovered in improper relations with the stableboys: at the stake, by fire, sic contritio est dolor per essentiam; and only vaguely hearing him, for the prelate’s admonitions in no way detracted from the force of curiosity outside the seignorial chamber or the force of fatality within it, Julián gazed toward the painting on the altar and asked himself whether Christian contrition must necessarily be repentance of intent, and not repentance for the passion that was cause and effect, as necessary to the sin as to the pardon, and as he met Julián’s eyes, the friar who was horoscopist and astronomer, he longed to ask him whether the moment was not approaching to change an act of contrition into an act of charity, an act without the repentance the Bishop judged and proclaimed essential, an act of pardon (Inés, Angustias, Milagros) that did not detest the fault committed, for there is something in Christian contritio that as we cleanse ourselves of the sin (Milagros, Angustias, Inés) also washes away our lives, pretending that we have never actually lived them: was it worth the trouble to begin again? Toribio and Julián asked each other with their eyes: Is it worth the pain? while the page and his companion lay embraced on El Señor’s bed; there they are awaiting, Inés, Madre Milagros, Sister Angustias, the arrival of the flautist from Aragon, who now enters the bedchamber, feeling his way, yellow-fingernailed hands extended before him, heavy shoulders, limping walk, his silent rope-soled sandals tied with rags around ulcerated ankles, his flute tied to his belt with a tattered cord: the blind man.