Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The gift had saved me. And also the fact I accepted the gift they made me.

But the more I comforted myself with that thought, the more a terrible doubt came to haunt my tranquillity. At some unforeseen moment, would they demand something more? What could I give them then? With that worry, my will redoubled to blend with these natives in their daily tasks, to be exactly like them in every way, to be an invisible stranger who assisted them in catching snakes and delivering them to the women, and then, like them, eat the communally divided rations. Because I heard it constantly, I learned something of the bird language spoken there. But as it was my intention to be unnoticed, even forgotten, I didn’t dare test my knowledge. Thus I learned to understand more than I could speak — although I confess I had a terrible temptation to go to the ancient some night and ask him everything I wanted to know. Scant consolation, Sire, were the weak suppositions I provided myself, measured against a myriad of questions for which there was no answer. Why were we attacked on the beach, and why did the fire seem to infuriate them so? Why such rage against the old man and such obsequiousness toward me in exchange for a pair of scissors? Who was the ancient guardian of the treasures, and what purpose did gold and pearls serve in this miserable land?

This curiosity was not easily reconciled with my intent to assume the color of a stone or a tree, like a lizard. That, at least, was not difficult to do; as they filtered through branches and thick treetops, the rays of the austral sun covered bodies and houses and all the objects of the inhabited area with undulating patterns of light and shadow that blended spectrally into random jungle forms.

Fool that I was, I came to believe that that phantasmal movement of light and shadow did in effect disguise me as it did the lizards, and that I could be two things at once, both curious and invisible. So one evening I approached the arbor occupied by the shivering ancient and dared pull back one of those curtains of skin I have told you of, to look inside. I had only a moment, although that was sufficient to see that certain things were stored there, the greater part of the firewood collected all these months, for example, and some large ears of fruit covered with reddish grains. I noticed also that the old man was completely surrounded with baskets similar to the one that served him perpetually as his bed, and that within them glinted grains of gold. I also saw the ancient’s basket was filled with pearls.

At that moment the old man let out a terrifying shriek, exactly like that of those enormous multicolored parakeets, and I dropped the flap and imagined the worst of possible fates. I was especially startled when I realized that the play of light and shadow that had masked me had disappeared and that my hands and body and everything around me stood out clearly in a different kind of light, gray and brilliant as the pearls in which the decrepit ancient seemed to bathe. Everything was metallic light, Sire; the sun had hidden itself, and with it its companion, shadow. I heard thunder in the sky and it began to rain as if the universal deluge were beginning, not the rain we know here, not even in a storm; no, a steady, incessant downpour, as if the heavens had opened. And the commotion and activity provoked by the torrential rainfall was so great that nobody noticed me, and I grew more calm, telling myself the ancient had shrieked because his bones felt the nearness of the rains, not me.

With a great hubbub a few natives dismantled the matting of the huts and carried them away on their backs, while others rescued the canoes from the river front, and another group dedicated themselves to transporting the ancient in his basket along with the baskets filled with gold and pearls and the piles of firewood and the reddish ears of fruit, everything covered now with skins to protect it from the deluge. So equipped, and pounded by the implacable rains, we walked to higher ground, where we were able to watch from a small tree-covered hill the frightening rise of the river that rapidly inundated the space that till then had been ours.

Then the nature of our lives changed. Every afternoon and every night it rained without interruption, filling the sky with terrible thunder and soundless lightning flashes; but during the morning the sun shone brilliantly and then the wood guarded by the ancient would be used with great care; the women would sit beside their modest fires, take those red ears, separate the grain, grind it, and mix it with water to form a white dough they patted between their palms to form a flat biscuit shape which they held over the fire; the smoke smelled of that strange bread made from the red wheat so jealously guarded by the immobile ancient for this epoch of flight and fear. Fear of hunger, Sire, for the jungle fruit had become rotten and inedible; the jungle had been razed by the enormous expanse of river, and there were months when it was difficult to gather food, months when I participated in all their efforts, hunting and scratching beneath stones in the constant rain of the season that turned all the world into a quagmire; months when I even accepted the deer droppings the women sometimes roasted. I understood then why those sparse ears of grain were so precious and why young boys nursed until they were twelve.

I understood, too, why the dry firewood was as prized as gold and pearls, for there was not a dry stick in the whole of the swampy jungle; the golden morning hours barely served to half warm ourselves, and then the afternoon deluge would drown everything once more, bringing with it the torture I had earlier encountered at the sluggish stream by the beach: mosquitoes; clouds of insects that sucked human blood, glutting themselves to the point of bursting; tiny invisible fleas that burrow into your feet and form sacs as big as a chick-pea, swollen with nits you can see when a sharp-edged shell is used to slit open the foot, as formerly it sliced fruit from the stalk. And sleepless nights, Sire, continuous scratching, rolling on the ground from pain and torment, covering your body with mud … black, swollen bodies, living fodder for the insects; saving dry wood for food and cutting wet wood to make smoke to frighten away those ferocious enemies that claimed all our attention, for to combat them meant to forget everything else, although the natives tried to survive while employing their time for two purposes: armed with coals, they burned the fields and brush to destroy cover for the mosquitoes, and at the same time the fire trapped the few tiny-horned, dark-skinned deer and facilitated digging in the ground for lizards.

Dry wood and wet wood, glowing bonfires and dank, smoking ones; we wouldn’t have survived without the fire and the smoke. Precious firewood, more useful then than all the pearls and gold in the world. Yes, Pedro and I thought that with igneous stone and dry leaves we’d invented the first fire in the new world. Now, surrounded midday to midnight by the burning fires of the jungle, I had at last found the explanation for the natives’ attack. But I also asked myself: if saving the sacred fire warranted a mortal battle against those who would squander it, what value did the pearls and gold have, for they defend no one against anything here, or offer any sustenance. Sire, I was soon to know.

WORDS IN THE TEMPLE

At first the sky crackled with dry storms: lights and drums beneath a domed ceiling the color of a dark pearl, lightning that crossed the firmament with the velocity of the flocks of birds, thunder that echoed and reechoed, receding in more distant and muted reverberations to die against the peaks of the remote mountains hooded in clouds.

Then one day the sun again shone as before, and everything seemed fresh and new. The jungle was filled with clusters of wild flowers and sweet-scented groves, and for the first time, far in the distance, I saw the white peak of a volcano. Air clear as crystal, the transparent regions.