Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The vultures returned before the other birds. Many old people had died in fits of coughing and some young men had died of fever, their trembling greater than the ancient’s who stayed always in the pearl-filled basket. I saw several women die after they were bitten by ticks; their feet were cut open with the sharp-edged shells, but blood crept blackly up their legs until they died. Many young boys suddenly disappeared. All the corpses, young or old, disappeared.

The sun was again the great lord of this land. But its return caused no visible signs of joy, as I would have expected. Rather, a nervous silence fell over everyone and I asked myself what new tribulations this season might portend.

One morning I noticed great activity on the hill. The mat huts were again dismantled: the canoes raised high over their heads, the people returned to the shore of the river. Nevertheless, one company of men remained on the hill, caring for the ancient and his treasures. I can tell you that now I understood this clipped, brusque bird language rather well, and thus I understood that they were asking me to remain with them.

They lifted the basket with the ancient onto their backs; they balanced the other baskets on their heads and, taking me with them, plunged into the jungle away from the river and the sea. At first I feared that the leafy forest, its foliage so augmented by the rains of many months, would devour us and that we would lose all sense of orientation. I soon realized, however, that through the banks of sensitive green plants that yielded to the touch of our fingertips, repeated footsteps had left their trace; scarcely a footpath, it was still more tenacious than the pulsating flowering of lichen, orchid, and all the glittering leaves that still held captive in their delicate silvery fuzz the most brilliant drops of the past deluge.

It was a corrupt jungle, Sire, humid and dark, where the tree trunks had never seen or never will see the light of the sun: so tall and thick are the leaves, so deep the roots, so heavily intertwined the ivies, so intoxicating the perfumes of the flowers — so melded into the mud the scattered corpses of men and serpents. So abundant, too, the song of the crickets.

We walked two days, sleeping in those cotton nets they hang between two tree trunks, stopping near strange deep wells of water almost like small lakes lost at the foot of chalky precipices, or in some clearing of the jungle where the bitter orange grows. But soon the tangled thickness reclaimed us, and the more we penetrated its darkness, the more putrid was the odor and the more intense the croaking of the vultures circling high above us.

It smelled of death, Sire, and when finally we stopped, it was because a most extraordinary edifice rose before us. I would never have seen it from afar because the masking expanse of forest seemed to hold it here in the very center of its dark humid body. This broad-based construction with sheer slimy steps and summit open to the air pulsed like the stony heart of the jungle.

For only the summit received the sun; the body of this great temple was sunken in the corrupt black jungle. Oh, my seas, my rivers; I recalled the blue course that gathers the waters of the desert and leads to the mausoleums of the ancient Kings; like those, this was a pyramid, Sire, although it smelled like a charnel house. Then I observed that it was here the vultures satiated themselves, folding their wings at the top of the pyramid and tearing great hunks of flesh decayed by rain, sun, and death. The tumult at the summit, the feast of the vultures, deafened me, and I knew where the corpses that had disappeared from the village during the long summer deluge had been carried. Deafened, I could still see: the jungle liana climbed and wound around the four sides of the temple and moss covered its steps, but this invasion of the jungle still could not hide the temple’s many sculptured sills, lavish bands of carved serpents that wound with greater vigor than the clinging roots around the terraced levels of that temple.

The barefoot men of our company effortlessly ascended the steep steps with their baskets on their backs; slipping on the moss, I followed them to one of those carved, niche-like openings. Then I saw they were sumptuous caves of human making, and the ancient was set down in one of them along with the baskets of pearls and gold. The natives left him there and told me to enter.

This grotto in the temple had caught the light, and the gold and pearls shone within the deep cavity beneath the low roof, and in one of the palm baskets, immersed in pearls, still sat the old man, my scissors in his hands — hands like the roots of the jungle. He raised one hand and gestured me to approach, to sit beside him. I squatted on my haunches. And the ancient spoke. Opaque and dead, his voice resonated among the dank walls of this at once lugubrious and resplendent chamber.

“Welcome, my brother. I have awaited you.”

THE ANCIENT’S LEGEND

Sire: as I listened to these words in the temple, and the gravity of the ancient’s tone as he spoke to me, I understood that he attributed to me the secret knowledge I had of his tongue; and as it is said of certain magicians that with a magic wand they cause water to burst forth from stone, so burst from my lips the language I had learned without speaking during my long months of living with the people of the jungle. What I do not know, however, is whether I am completely faithful to the words of the ancient man in the temple; I do not know how much I forget and how much I imagine, how much I lose and how much I add. I do not know whether it was only much later during my adventures in the new world that I completely understood everything the old man told me; perhaps it is only today that I understand and repeat it in my own style.

I looked at him, immersed in the pearls that perhaps lent him life and in turn received life from his flaccid skin, the man nourishing the pearls, and the pearls the man. I didn’t know what to say to him; he told me he had been observing me since the day of my arrival, which had been Three Crocodile day, and in that he had seen a good augury, for on such a day, he said, our mother the earth had risen from the waters.

“I was saved from the sea, my lord,” I said simply.

“And you arrived from the East, which is the origin of all life, for the sun is born there.”

He said, too, that I had arrived with the shining yellow light of dawn, with the colors of the golden sun.

“And you dared indicate your presence with fire, and on a dry day. You are welcome, my brother. You have returned home.”

With a gesture he offered me the temple, perhaps the entire jungle. I could only say: “I arrived with another man, my lord, but that man was not welcomed as I was.”

“That is because he was not expected.”

Paying no heed to my questioning glance, the ancient continued: “Furthermore, he defied us. He raised a temple for himself alone. He wished to make himself owner of a piece of the earth. But the earth is divine and cannot be possessed by any man. It is she who possesses us.” He was quiet an instant, then said: “Your friend wished only to take. He wished to offer nothing.”

I looked at the scissors in the hands of the ancient and was again convinced that it was to them I owed my life. And the ancient, gesturing with that rude contrivance I had stolen from a tailor, said something that can be translated like this: the good things belong to everyone, for what is held in common belongs to the gods, and what belongs to the gods is held in common. The words “god” and “the gods” were the first I learned among these natives, for they repeated them constantly, and their “teus” and “teo” are not unlike our “theo.”

“He was my friend,” I said in defense of old Pedro.