Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Terror and anger: can such contrasting emotions exist side by side? In me, at that moment, yes. I saw death in the quicksilver sea and I imagined a boiling fury where its waters tumbled precipitously over the very edge of the world. With fury and fear I looked at the old man; I hoped to surprise the gaze of madness in those deep-set eyes hidden beneath the ancient lids. I shouted that he was leading us to disaster, that he had deceived me, and that if his proposition was to put an end to his days in such a terrible manner, mine was to save myself, and not to share his wretched fate. I seized a pole and rushed at Pedro. The old man abandoned the wheel and struck me in the belly with all the frightful force of his callused fist, and in that instant the boat rolled, momentarily freed from control, and I lay groaning on the deck.

“It’s your choice, Thief … or Pirate,” Pedro murmured. “You may choose whether you’re to voyage bound hand and foot like a common thief, or standing on your feet, hands free, master, with me, of this sea and the free land we will find on the other shore.”

“Free land? Other shore?” I exclaimed. “You’re mad, old man! You’re going to perish in this mad endeavor, and drag me down to death with you!”

“What is it you reproach me for?” Pedro replied. “The fact that I’m resigned and you’re ambitious?”

“Yes. I want to live, old man, and you want to die.”

“On my life, I tell you not so. Because I’ve lived what I’ve lived, I make this voyage to go on living.”

He looked at me enigmatically, and as I didn’t understand his reasoning, but persisted in my own — he wished to die, I wished to live — he continued in a guarded tone: “Can’t you see it’s me, the old man, who has ambitions, and you, the young one, who’s resigned? I flee because I must. And you?”

He was asking me whether the events of my short life hadn’t disenchanted me with those things that denied life, not life itself.

“Why, then, did you sail with me? Why didn’t you stay behind if you don’t believe in the new land I seek? Where do you come from, Thief?”

I feared that question: I always fear it, because even as I cannot remember my name, I am more than aware of the reason for that ignorance. I answered the old man: “From everywhere.”

“From nowhere, then.”

“What I mean is, the only thing I can remember is an endless pilgrimage. Believe me, old man.”

“Then I’ll call you Pilgrim.”

“Yes, I’ve never stopped, always a wanderer. No corner of the known earth has ever claimed me, made me feel what other men feel that makes them want to put down roots — a name, a hearth, a woman and offspring, honor and property. Do you understand me, old man?”

From the helm Pedro looked at me, pondered, and said no, he couldn’t understand such meaningless words, they were too different from what he would have said to explain his own life: “All the things you never had, I had and lost. Lands and harvests: the lands burned, the harvest stolen; descendants: well, my sons were murdered; honor: my women were besmirched by the Liege. And liberty as well, or its illusion, for I came to know how the multitude can be deceived and led into slavery and death in the name of liberty. Do you know anything at all of this, Pilgrim? I think not, and that’s why I can’t understand your words.”

I tried to explain how little I understood myself, for the fleetingness of my recollections was of a different nature, and very few voices came to my aid in explanation. Visions of pale deserts and distant oases, bronzed mountains and indistinct islands, walled cities, temples of death, men’s faces, cruel or humiliated, perverse or desiring women, the muted cries of children, galloping horses, fire and flight, dogs howling beneath the moon, old men sleeping beside their camels. Could I reconstruct the memory of a life from such visions? I don’t know. I didn’t know the precise names of those places and those people any more than I knew my own name or place. Was what I then said to Pedro enough to encompass all those featureless memories?

“I’ve always lived beside Mare Nostrum. I am a Mediterranean man.”

No. It was not enough: at the moment I uttered the words, my cruel memory, unlimited but also without guideposts, dragged me backward in its impetus, backward to a distant and close memory, never making clear what came before and what came after: memory like air, lost sigh of the past and agitated breath of the present, all one. How could I explain this to the old man? Helpless before absolutes I was myself unable to penetrate, I preferred to concede this invalid but immediate argument once I had satisfied, if only temporarily, it’s true, my immediate instinct of self-preservation. I felt two principles struggling within my breast. One impelled me to survive at all cost. The other demanded mad adventure in pursuit of the unknown. Between the two, resignation reigned. For that reason, my rebelliousness quelled, the spirit of adventure latent, I said: “Since I, like you, am fleeing, although I have no motive and you say you have more than enough, I accept, old man, this voyage to death. Perhaps in death my poor enigmas will be resolved, perhaps it is my destiny to resolve them at the moment I am dying, and to know only when I am dead. It doesn’t matter, it will all have been in vain.”

Resignedly, I arose from the deck where I had been thrown by the force of Pedro’s blow and the motion of the ship, as Pedro said: “You will see, my boy, that we’re not going to our deaths but to a new land.”

“Don’t be deceived. You have many illusions for a man of your years, and I admire you. At the least, I swear to weep with you when you lose them.”

“You’d wager your life against my illusions?” Pedro laughed with a trace of bitterness. “And what will you give me if at the end of the voyage both my illusions and your life survive?”

“Nothing more than I can give you now. My company and my friendship. But I am calm. May you be, too. Believe me, old man, I accept the destiny we will share.”

Pedro sighed. “I could believe you better if you believed what I do.”

He told me then how one must believe in that other land beyond the ocean. How when the sun sinks in the west every night, it is not devoured by the earth or miraculously reborn in the east at dawn, but has circled around the earth, which must be round like the sun and the moon, for his old eyes had never seen flat bodies in the heavens, only spheres, and our earth would not be the monstrous exception.

He recounted how thousands of times at dusk, his feet planted firmly upon the dry earth of summer or sunken in the winter mud, he had gazed upon the expanse of an enormous open field, free of the accident of mountain or forest, and how whirling where he stood he had seen that the earth and the horizon traced two perfect circles and that the sun, as it nightly bade farewell to the earth, recognized itself in its sister form.

“Poor old man,” I said with increasing melancholy, “if what you say is true, then at the end of this voyage we’ll have returned to our point of departure and everything will have been in vain. I will be right. And you’ll be returning to what you remember with horror.”

“And you?”

It was difficult for me to say: “To what I have forgotten.”

“Then believe as I do,” Pedro said energetically, “that God did not create this world to be inhabited only by the men that you and I have known. There must be another, better land, a free and happy land made in God’s true image, for I believe the one we have left behind is but an abominable reflection.”

And he repeated, his voice trembling: “I don’t believe that God created this world to be inhabited only by men that you and I have known, men we have remembered or forgotten … it’s all the same. And if that is not the case, I will no longer believe in God.”