Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“I must not falter now!”

He told me how, twenty-two years before, he’d tried to embark in search of the new land. “My plan was ruined by three men and a woman; their desires destroyed me, for they wanted only the deceptive promises of our old land. They destroyed me, son, but they saved themselves — although I doubt now whether that imperfect old barge would have carried us very far. So I abandoned my fields and came to the seashore; I exchanged the company of field laborers for that of sailors. It took me a long while to learn what I needed. This ship is almost perfect.”

He said that when a squadron of light ships like this were constructed, and of greater size and with larger crews, they would tame the ocean. “We must guard our secret well, though, lest all come by the route that today belongs only to you and me, my boy, where both solitude and freedom are ours.”

He spoke without lowering his voice; vast was the arched ceiling of this marine cathedral, and if I served as his confessor, those words would never cross my lips for anyone but him to hear.

We were in the fourth day of the second month on the route of the trade winds when our sails swelled and we saw the sure sign of a favorable wind in flying fish. We admired those fish, whose two wings emerge alongside the gills, a handsbreadth long, as wide as your thumb, covered with skin like the wing of a bat. Because we had some fine nets aboard, I was able to capture a few that passed very close by the starboard rail. We ate them. They tasted of smoke.

I can tell you now, Sire, that eating those flying fish was the last pleasure we were to enjoy. The following day, toward midday, the sea lay blue and the wind blew soft; the salt of those calm, even waves was the dew of the burning sun: everything, I say, was harmonious … clear, warm beauty. The sea was the sea, the sky the sky, and we were a calm and living part of it all. Then, to the north of our vessel, a tumult burst forth, the azure horizon exploded into tall, brilliant flashes of white; the sea was churned with an anger all the more impressive for being so sudden and so in contrast with the peace and silence the old man and I’d been enjoying an instant before. White waves, though still distant, approached relentlessly, swelling to ever increasing heights. Belly of glass, crowned with phosphorescent plumes, the flotillas of enormous waves devoured each other only to be born redoubled in size.

At last we saw the black tail of the fierce beast threshing the once tranquil waters; we saw it dive and then, a half league from us, shoot like a heavy arrow into the air, opening great jaws of iridescent flesh, turning slowly, diving, again emerging violently from the sea as if it detested both air and water but needed both in equal measure. Sire, first we saw the frightful lime-and-seashell-crusted back, looking like an enormous phantom ship, mysteriously propelled, its driving force the death which clung in that odious dross to the whale’s back. Then we saw its bloodshot, aqueous, flaming eye, crisscrossed with coagulated broken veins, appearing and disappearing between the slowly moving, oozing, oily lid; our safe little ship was turned into an uncontrollable raft, whipped by the chaotic, violent, and ever higher waves engendered by the leviathan.

I feared that if we received one blow from that tail we would sink, broken in two. But the ship was proving its good construction. It behaved like a cork, and the old man and I, hanging on to the same mast, my hands grasping his shoulders and his clutching mine, felt our vessel was the plaything of the tumult; but the boat did not fight the waves; rather, it bent to their hostile commands, bobbing over the crests and in this manner keeping us afloat. Pounding foam sprayed over our heads.

I saw the reason for it all. I shouted to the old man to watch the terrible combat an enormous swordfish had launched against the whale, for so close to us was the struggle that we could see every detail of the fish, the jaw filled with ferocious teeth, the hard rough sword struggling to puncture the whale’s thick hump, and it was a marvel to watch how the fish played the side of his rapier, not the point, ripping and tearing the leviathan’s best defense, the tough striated skin, seeking the opportunity to plunge his sword into the wildly rolling eye of the enemy.

I was grateful that the great fish was employing his sword against the whale and not against our ship, for he could have penetrated our bulwarks a handsbreadth deep, as now, quick as a flash, with an unexpected movement he drove his sword deep into the whale’s eye, with the same gusto and to the same depth the male thrusts into the female. I don’t know whether we shouted with surprise as we saw how the fish, precise and quivering, knew instinctively how to press his advantage in the battle, for it seemed to move with greater speed than the whale could comprehend, whether Pedro and I cried out in empathetic pain, whether the terrible moan came from the enormous jaws of the suffering, wounded giant, whether a victory cry could have been born of the silvery vibrations of the fish, or whether the ocean itself, wounded along with its most powerful monster, issued a mournful cry from the deep, a great bellow of reddish foam.

But imagine, Sire: the leviathan leaps for the last time, attempting to free itself from the fatal pike driven deep into its eye; then it sinks, perhaps also for the last time, seeking refuge in the deep, and perhaps relief from pain. And as it submerges it drags in its green wake the fish, trembling now, eager to free itself from its prey, victimized in turn by its victim, and carried by it to the silent kingdom where the whale can wait whole centuries for its wound to heal, cured by the sea’s medicines, salt and iodine, while the fish, formerly master and now slave to its body’s weapon, body and weapon inseparable, will die, its fine brittle skeleton, as silvery as its scales, deposited in crusts of lime and shell on the hide of the great whale. I must rejoice that the arms of man, staff and iron, though propelled by flesh and blood, are not part of our bodies.

There we stood, blindly clinging to the mast, rubbing our soaking shoulders and our hairy necks. When we opened our eyes, we moved apart, made sure the rudder was in good condition, the lines well secured, and that nothing indispensable had been lost. Only then did we look at the sea of blood surrounding us, the red bubbles ascending from the depths capturing the light of the sun, staining it with blood. What awaited us ahead? Drop by drop, our water clock measured the spilled blood of the wounded ocean.

WHIRLPOOL OF THE NIGHT

Life’s everyday habits must be immediately reestablished; routine boredom seems like noble perseverance when marvels — by their abundance — acquire the aspect of custom. Thus the old man and I, when we touched the hair at the back of our necks, realized that neither scissors nor blade had come near our unshorn heads for many days; nor had we consulted a mirror in more than two months.

We moved away from the stern and its red wake; who would have dared seek his image in a mirror of blood? For a better tool, I rummaged through a canvas sack for the glass I’d stolen from some sleeping household, and braced myself to look at my face. I saw where salt and sun had left their marks, white where the indication of a question, joy, or fear was wont to wrinkle the skin, but the color of polished wood where the twofold action of sun and spume had touched my face. There was little beard, a fine, golden fuzz, not at all like the gray, tangled and abundant fleece adorning Pedro, but my mane reached my shoulders. A young lion and a bear, companions in the middle of the ocean. I looked at myself, and as I looked asked my reflection: “Where do you come from? Where have you been and what have you learned that there is no trace of malice in you? Can innocence be the fruit of experience? One day, when you remember, tell me.”