Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

I fled before that storm of mosquitoes, quickly bathed my body in the sea, and now I did not hesitate. I walked toward the sea turtles as I searched for a receptacle among the seashells on the beach. With one hand I picked up the deepest shell and in the other I firmly clutched my scissors. I approached the turtle farthest from the others; as I drew near she stretched her neck far outside her shell, at the same time hurriedly covering her eggs with sand. I straddled her carapace, grabbed the scoriaceous neck and drove in the scissors to the hilt — for I knew that these beasts have a sac filled with pure water that permits them to live a long time without thirst, like the camels in the desert. I collected the water in the concave shell and, when this was filled, pulled off parts of my clothing in order to catch even more liquid, which I could suck to satisfy my thirst. By the time I held my shirt to the turtle’s neck, only blood ran from the wound, staining it and the sand and the scattered pearls. But I didn’t complain, for the blood of the turtle is as good as water. Thus I quenched my thirst, drinking the water from the shell, then squeezing the blood from the moistened doublet onto my lips; and I had already imagined the savor of the flesh of that ageless beast, said to be as ancient as the ocean and, like it, immortal, when I became aware of the terror — a terror more terrible for being totally silent — of the other turtles that were abandoning their fecund nests in the sand and beginning to disperse across the mother-of-pearl shells toward the protective ocean where they would regain their speed and strength.

I feasted then upon a great banquet of turtle eggs, which are similar to those laid by hens except that those of the sea tortoise are covered only by a thin membrane instead of a shell. And as I was eating I watched the spectacle of that powerful squadron of turtles reentering the sea; and so vast was their company that if a large boat had been in their path, they would have slowed its course. They left behind, for my solace, the flesh of one of their companions and the seed of their children. And a beach stained with blood.

Satiated, I lay on my back in the pearly sand and tried to order my thoughts. Hunger and thirst had blinded me; only now, filled and content, could I reason that those had been real feelings, the hunger and thirst of a living body. And those nests of turtle eggs had not deceived me: they were the opposite face of the pearls, for in the pearls I saw another death image. Without the contact of living flesh, pearls grow old and their luster dims: pearls are a moribund promise; the turtle eggs, pearls of nascent life.

Troubled, I rose to my feet; my mortal reasoning was crumbling; it was inconceivable that any living being could be born in the land of death, or that the beasts of death could give birth to life in the ports of the Beyond, whether it be Paradise or Hell: such absurdity was equally foreign both to science and to legend.

“Then there’s life,” I whispered, “there’s life here … and death.” These words meant changing courses once again, losing my sense of orientation, descending into another maelstrom. There is spilled blood; therefore, there is life. There is life; therefore, I must survive. I must survive; therefore, I must find a companion.

The shining pearly beach stretched toward a distant cape on the horizon. The sea was green as young lemons; the beach a nacreous white; red, the tall palms with clusters of enormous dates much, much larger than those of the desert. Sea turtles and dates: I would not die of hunger. Pearls: I would not die poor. I laughed. Again the noisy flocks of colored birds wheeled overhead, and in the distance at the end of the beach I saw a faint rising spiral of smoke.

Then I ran. I ran, oblivious of any possible menace, indifferent to the dangers of the new and unknown, toward that sign of human life, fearing a deceptive jungle fire, a will-o’-the-wisp, anything except what I most desired, the companionship of my brother … Pedro, Pedro. The shells cut my bare feet; I ran to the edge of the sea, fearful that any odor of blood would again attract those dreadful mosquitoes; it was hot, and I took comfort from splashing in the calm waves; I was finally aware that the sun of this burning landscape was a boiling brazier fiercer than that of any known land: sweat and salt water ran down my body and sand stuck to my skin; long was the distance to that hope-giving smoke.

An hour later — measured by the clock of my belly — I reached the point on the beach, guided by the persevering, wispy column of smoke.

I fell to my knees exhausted; even more than by fatigue, I was overwhelmed by the complete serenity of the landscape, so contradictory to the urgency of my race toward something that might mean life or death to me. The first thing I saw was the upright wheel from our ship planted firmly in the sand. Then I saw a wiry-haired old man, almost nude, tough and tanned, clearing away underbrush at the edge of the jungle, his back turned to the glimmering wealth of pearls.

“Pedro!” I shouted, still on my knees. “Pedro, Pedro, it’s me!”

The old man glanced over his shoulder, looked at me without surprise, and said: “Watch the fire. The rocks are good, they spark when you strike them together. And there’s plenty of dry wood. It took me many hours to start that fire. Don’t let it die out. This is the first fire in the new world.”

A PIECE OF LAND

Fire and death were the two things the old man had fled from. Sorrow and captivity: were those the things I had fled? Now that it’s all over, and the perfect circle of my pilgrimage is completed, I think of you, Pedro, and if there is any man besides me who knew you, I ask him to remember you with me, how you were, precise, manly, a hard-working man, a man of few words. All I desired after I’d found you again was for you to tell me what had happened, how we were saved. Even though I knew you were a taciturn man, I thought surely you would answer my barrage of questions: Was the wheel lighter than the force of the vortex dragging us toward the bottom of the sea? How did we stay afloat once we’d reached the surface? How had we become separated? Did you stay bound to the wheel when I was torn loose? What force of nature allowed supreme power to be overcome by supreme lightness? Do you know where we are?

Pedro answered only my last question: “This is the new world I so desired.”

He didn’t pause for me to tell him: You were right, old man, you won the bet, I gambled my life against your illusions and you returned both of them to me, old man. Nor did he tell me those things himself. Now I understand why: what were our past adventures compared to fortune itself: standing upon the new land so desired by him, so denied and feared — yes, it’s true — by me. In the labor the old man was undertaking in this land I saw a serene but urgent decision to begin a new life, starting from nothing, to give a name and use, a place and destiny, to everything. Like God the Father, this old man covered with hair as white as a fleecy cloud was presiding over the first day of Creation, and his deep-set eyes, showing the strain of his years, said only one thing: “Hurry, I haven’t much time.”

I considered then, with warm and enduring emotion, how this man who was more than seventy years old had attempted twenty years before to make the voyage he had now completed. We must hurry. We don’t have much time.

Pedro collected the dried branches of the red palm trees that formed the wall of the jungle and asked me to strip them of their long, hard, sharp-pointed stalks to feed the fire, while he, from the stripped stalks, fashioned a variety of sharp instruments, daggers, swords, stakes, to enclose the space cleared from the jungle at the edge of the sand, and sharp spears with which he attempted to split open the enormous green dates fallen at the foot of the palm trees.