Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

There in the parchment-thin pocket of my wide sailor’s doublet I felt the small mirror Pedro and I had used, joking happily, to serve each other as barber on the ship. I took out the mirror. The ancient watched inquisitively. With a gesture of humility and respect I held the mirror to his eyes.

This was my offering; the ancient looked at himself.

I have never seen, and I hope never to see again, a more terrible expression on a human face. His black eyes bulged, the yellow eyeballs seeming to leap from their deep, wasted sockets; all the deaths of all the suns, all the burning bodies, all the destroyed palaces, all the affliction of hunger and tempests of the jungle were instantly distilled in their twin terror. And all the bitterness of recognition. The wrinkles on the ancient’s face turned into pulsing worms that devoured his face, leaving only an infernal grimace; the white tufts on his mottled skull stood up in horror; his jaw dropped open as if he were drowning, choking, in loosened strings of phlegm, and thick slobber trickled down the dark wrinkled network of his chin to stain the sparse white stubble. His lips drew back to reveal broken teeth and bleeding gums: he tried to cry out, his knotted hands clutched his hide-like neck: he tried to rise; with the movement, the basket overturned, spilling pearls and cotton balls and scissors; finally the ancient screamed and his voice drowned out the jungle accompaniment of cicadas and parrots; that shriek pierced my heart, and his head struck the dusty floor of this ornate temple chamber.

Over our heads I heard the flapping of the frightened vultures and then the voices and rapid footsteps of the young warriors.

They entered the temple chamber. They looked at me. Then they looked at the fallen ancient who stared at us with open, but lifeless, eyes.

I crouched beside him, my fatal mirror in my hand.

One of the warriors knelt beside the ancient, tenderly caressed his head, and said: “Young chieftain … youthful founder … first man…”

THE TRIBUTES

My mind was a turtle as torpid and sluggish as the one I had killed when first I stepped onto the beach of the new world. In contrast, the thoughts of the warriors raced swift as quicksilver hares; after an instant of sorrow that gave way to extreme astonishment they turned to look at me kneeling there beside the dead ancient, my mirror in my hand. In the brief instant between sorrow and amazement, my lethargic emotions could not completely absorb the meaning of those mysterious words: “Young chieftain … youthful founder … first man…”

I would need time, I told myself, to decipher that enigma: like a gust of wind blowing through my fragmentary memory arose the recollection of other pilgrimages in search of the meaning of the oracle: I tasted sea foam, I breathed the perfume of olive trees — another time, another space, not these environs where enigma was suffocated beneath fearful certainty: the warriors saw in me the murderer of their ancient father, their king of memory, perhaps their god. And in just retribution, they were preparing to kill me.

Why did they not do it? I could not answer that question. I was enveloped in the general agitation, a whirlwind of confused motion and warring lights; the warriors spoke so quickly and excitedly, and I so feared for my life, that it was difficult for me to understand what they were saying; I knew only that I was guilty of a crime, and I attributed the excitement to that knowledge, which surely was shared by the warriors. Blinded and deafened, I envisioned my death, and the only word I understood was the constantly vociferated: “Lizard … lizard…”

All the warriors were pointing toward the black dripping walls of the treasure chamber, gesticulating toward the numerous swiftly darting lizards that sometimes blended with the stone, sometimes were revealed in the metallic reflections of the gold. They seized me by the arms and legs and head, they lifted me high in the air, and my benumbed brain resigned itself to thoughts of death.

What happened, then, Sire, was something like death. They placed me in the ancient’s basket, my knees touching my chin; they poured the pearls over my body and I felt their nacreous grayness revive at contact with a skin aflame with ignorance and fear. They raised me, and also the body of the ancient, and we left the cave and went out upon the precipitous steps of the temple.

From the tumult of that moment, I tried to rescue swift impressions of what was happening. I was held in the arms of the warriors, a captive within the basket. The cadaver of the ancient was being dragged by its feet toward the summit of the pyramid. As the lifeless, inverted body ascended, its eyes stared into mine, as if trying to explain something; and when we reached the highest platform, the corpse was abandoned to the vultures, who fell upon it immediately. The body of the Lord of Memory became mixed with the putrefying flesh of the other dead, already torn by the slashing beaks of the birds of prey.

Then I looked down toward the foot of this wild temple and saw many of the women and old men and young of the jungle people standing silently there; they seemed to bleed, a thick red liquid dripped from their hair and faces, and at their feet, bathed in the same color of blood, were stones and arrows and shields. All looked up toward me; the entire jungle reverberated redly, mingled with the incessant movement of the warriors who now carried the baskets filled with pearls and grains of gold from the chamber and set them about me, distributing them on the slimy steps of the pyramid. They placed the scissors in my hands. I still held the weapon of the crime: my mirror. My cross and orb. The warrior from the beach clasped the belt of black feathers about his waist, the sign of ritual confrontation.

I waited. The devoured cadaver of the ancient at the temple summit. The festival of the vultures. The celerity of the nervous, unseen lizards. The motionless, silent, red-stained natives at the foot of the pyramid. The mound of objects, also red, at the feet of the women and old men and children. I, in the pearl-filled basket amid the other baskets of gold and pearls. I waited.

Then I saw all the butterflies of the jungle; they flew from the thick branches and fluttered over the engrossed vultures at the peak of the pyramid, and I heard a flute, Sire, and little bells, and a drum and many footsteps in the jungle; and the thick branches parted before the slow advance of a majestic bird whose brilliant blue and garnet and crocus-yellow body seemed to float over the jungle thicket as if over a lush verdant sea.

Then the leaves parted wider and I saw a man cloaked in a white mantle edged in purple, and I saw that the bird was his headdress, its plumage forming a luxurious trailing crest; and this man was followed by a motley company of musicians, and men who held scrolls beneath their arms and carried feather fans, and a company of warriors with round leather shields and ocelot and eagle masks and lances that ended in hard stone points and red-painted bows and arrows, and bearers clad only in loincloths who carried on their backs baskets and bundles wrapped in deerskin. And at the end of the procession came other similar men, naked, who bore upon their shoulders a palanquin of woven reeds covered on all four sides by worked and embossed deerskins painted with the yellow heads of plumed serpents and adorned with heavy bands and medallions of purest silver.

Seeing myself thus situated, surrounded and confronted, I prayed that the memory of the ancient who had died because he saw his face in my mirror had flown from his staring eyes and through the mirror would penetrate mine. For now I occupied his place; and I understood nothing or knew nothing, could foresee or imagine nothing. I was the prisoner of a ritual; I was its center, but was unaware of my role in it. I felt older than the ancient, more dead than he, the captive of the basket and the pearls and the mirror I still held in my hand. I tell you, Sire, I prayed for one thing: that the ancient’s last glance be captured in the mirror as I was captive in the basket. I wished to affirm my own existence in the midst of so many mysteries and I held the mirror to my face, fearing to see in its reflection the image of my own decrepitude, magically acquired in the swift exchange of glances between the ancient and myself. For if I saw an older face in the mirror, then the ancient had seen a young face and had died of that terror. I looked. And then, only then, as the mercury returned to me my own youthful semblance, I understood that the ancient had not been aware of his own age: he had seen himself for the first time as I saw him … and he had never seen a man so old.