Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

I held out my hand; I opened it. I offered the chieftain the scissors. He smiled. He accepted them. He flashed them in the sun. He did not know what they were. He manipulated them clumsily. He nicked a finger. He threw the scissors upon the sand. Uneasy, he looked at the blood. Uneasy, he looked at me. With great caution he picked up the scissors, as if fearing they had a life of their own. He shouted a few words. Several men ran to one of the tree trunks beached on the sand and took something from it. He ran back to the chieftain and handed him a coarse cloth similar to that of their loincloths. The cloth held something. The chieftain clutched the scissors in one hand. With the other he handed me the small parcel. I hefted its weight in my open hands. The rough, stiff cloth fell open. In my hands lay a brilliant treasure of golden grains. My gift had been reciprocated.

My hands filled with gold, I looked toward Pedro’s body.

The warriors retrieved their lances, pulling them from the body of my old friend.

With branches and bare feet, the men from the jungle extinguished the lighted fires. I would swear there was sadness on their faces.

THE PEOPLE OF THE JUNGLE

I was placed in one of the tree trunks, which were actually long, barge-like canoes, each one hollowed from the trunk of a single tree. And as I was carried away from shore once again, I secretly named this place Tierra de San Pedro, for my poor old friend had died like a martyr, and I could still see the last flames being fed from his body.

A ring of black vultures was already circling over the beach, and I thought how Pedro had finally met the destruction and death he’d been fleeing. I asked myself whether I too was being carried toward my origins, and whether that origin might have been captivity. For if Pedro’s end had been the same as his beginning, was I an abnormal exception to a destiny that as it fulfilled itself encountered only the semblance of its genesis? And although I’d learned to love old Pedro I prayed now that I wouldn’t inherit his destiny but that his death would free me to find my own, even though it be worse than his. Since the day we’d embarked together we’d shared the same fortunes. Now our destinies would be forever separate.

The fleet of crude canoes did not put out to sea but doubled the cape, and after a short period of silent paddling we sighted the mouth of a great river whose murky waters muddied the sea for several leagues. At a shrill command from the chieftain the armada turned into this broad river flowing between widely separated dark shorelines. The black forests lining either shore were dense and tall, making invisible the source of the sounds hidden in their jungle thickness; intense and mixed, its perfumes were a blending of wild flowers and rotted foliage. The sudden flashes in the milky sky were the eternal birds of this new world, noisy, thick-beaked birds like enormous parakeets, the color of cochineal, green, red, black, and rose. They were masters of the sky; and the masters of the swampy river’s edge were the lizards watching us through drowsy-lidded eyes.

And I, Sire, was a captive with a bag of gold in my hands. We paddled upriver. I no longer remembered; I knew; and I gave thanks for the ignorance that permits us to go on living even though we know the only certainty awaiting us is loss of freedom or life. We know the nature of what is to come, we are ignorant only of the time and circumstance; glory be to God who thus alleviates our painful destiny.

We disembarked near an inhabited clearing. As the natives beached the canoes in the mud, we were surrounded by a hundredfold of old men, women, and children. Our return was greeted with the chirping voices I have already told you of, Sire, and their great excitement was engendered not only by my strange presence but also by an obvious feeling of relief. The remnants of a terror slow to disappear still lingered on the faces of the quivering old men, the uneasy young girls, and the women with nursing children pressed to their breasts. The warriors had returned. The dangers had been surmounted. They were returning with a captive: me. I noted there was not a single young male among those who came to meet us, although there were many young boys, some of whom, as old as twelve, were still suckling at their mothers’ breasts.

I again became aware of my situation when the black-plumed chieftain showed everyone the scissors and urged me to show my cloth filled with the golden grains. They all nodded enthusiastically and the nearest women smiled at me and the old men touched my shoulder with their trembling hands.

I looked about me and saw that all the houses of this jungle village were of matting laid over four-arched stakes, all of them alike, with no visible signs of superior riches or superior power. The chieftain himself unclasped his belt of black feathers and with great deference walked toward an arbor where he placed the belt in the hands of a wrinkled and shivering ancient seated within a basket woven of palm leaves and filed with balls of cotton. And thus the chieftain was no longer distinguishable from the other canary-colored men, for to me they all looked identical. The ancient, who in spite of the heat seemed to be trembling with cold, murmured something and the young man whom I had taken for the chieftain of this band explained something in reply. Then, as one would a curtain, the young man dropped the dried skins attached to the roof of the arbor, and the ancient disappeared from view.

I was offered a strange bed made of cotton netting hanging between two palm trees, and a bitter root to eat. At that, the everyday life of this village was resumed, and I decided it was greatly to my advantage to participate in it as discreetly as I could; and so for several months I occupied myself in doing the things they all did: tending the fires in the ovens, digging in the earth, gathering red ocher, mixing mortar, cutting reeds and twigs, polishing stones, and also collecting pieces of shell for cutting the fruit that grew wild in various locations in the jungle, fruit never before seen by my eyes, of several colors, flaming red, blush pink, or juicy black, with a rough outer shell, and soft and fragrantly perfumed inside. I also gathered firewood, although I noted it quickly disappeared in spite of the fact that little was used.

I rapidly learned that here everything belonged to everyone: the men hunted deer and captured turtles, the women gathered ant eggs, worms, and several kinds of lizards, and the old men were still dexterous in capturing snakes — whose flesh isn’t bad to eat; then these things were routinely divided among the whole community.

This period seemed endless, one day exactly like another; I remember this time very poorly, and see myself very poorly, as if I’d been living in the dark. I clung to one intelligible fact. My scissors had been commended to the care of the ancient secluded in his cotton-filled basket, who was also the possessor of the belt of black feathers he entrusted to a young man only in moments of active danger — as when they had discovered our presence by the smoke on the beach, or when, as on another occasion, the men carried their canoes to the river, paddled upstream and returned with more grains of gold, or descended the river to return with a cargo of pearls from that enchanted beach. Everything was stored in baskets like the one occupied by the ancient, and was carefully covered with deerskins painted with red ocher, all of them stored in the arbor where lived the ancient to whom they then returned the belt of feathers.

Apparently master of the treasures, the ancient was also custodian of my scissors; imagining them in his knotted, blemished hands, I became obsessed finally with the conviction that the gift had been sufficient to assure my peaceful acceptance into this primitive community. As I say, Sire, I clung to one certainty: