Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

In vain, Sire, I freed myself from my preoccupations to listen to the sounds of the village; in vain I waited to hear the sounds of life I had once shared with these natives. No footsteps in the dust, no hands rustling grasses, no weeping of children or chanting of ancients or voices of warriors or plaints of women: nothing.

I conjectured: they have fled to another location: I don’t know what motivates the peregrinations that lead them from the river to the woods, the woods to the river, the river to a new location, carrying their mats, their baskets of useless treasure, their canoes and their lances, the precious ears from which they make their steaming bread, the balls of cotton from which they weave their beds and clothing. But now they have neither bread nor cloth, and the guilt is mine. Now they have no treasure, except for a few dry branches saved against the time of rain. I am misfortune incarnate; I have given them nothing; I have taken everything from them.

I speculated: they have abandoned me here, they have left me to the ravages of hunger and rain and mosquitoes and the rising river; I shall die, bleeding, drowning, starving. And as I asked myself why they had abandoned me, I could only answer: they fear me. And when I asked, why do they fear me? I replied: I brought bad luck to them, I killed the father of their memory, I left them without recollection, they will be like children now, no, like animals, with no sense of direction to their lives; I am bad fortune; because of me they lost what they were to receive in exchange for the pearls and gold. They have abandoned me along with their useless riches: they have fled to seek for themselves the lands of cotton and red grain.

They had abandoned me. They believed that — situated as I was in the basket beneath the bower of the dead ancient who never moved from this spot and who received water and food only from the hands of his people — I would continue in the way of my predecessor, motionless, and dependent upon them. The fires of survival and adventure sparked again in my breast. I told myself that in this land the two were always united, not, as in the lands I had left behind — how long ago? a thousand years? — separate and conflicting. There, survival is calculation, adventure is risk, resignation is the balance between the two. Here, resignation is death: I had seen it on the red-painted faces of the old men and women and children at the foot of the pyramid: captives offered to the so-called lords of the mountain and their Lord of the Great Voice.

Survival called for risk. I accepted the risk. I struggled within the narrow basket, attempting to free myself from that prison of woven branches; I rocked like a violent pendulum until the basket fell to the ground, spraying pearls and cotton balls across the ground, and I crawled out on all fours. I got to my feet. I still had the mirror and the scissors in my belt; I ventured to part the deerskin curtains.

The last of the fires were dying, almost ash, reduced now to low-hanging smoke. They seemed the only living things. In a tomb of ash and mud and blood lay all the dwellers of this village, children with slashed necks, women eviscerated by stone knives, old men run through by warriors’ lances. And the warriors themselves dead upon their shields, also felled by lances. The mat huts and canoes lay in stone-cold ashes. And from the branch of a tree, hanging from the belt of black feathers, the young warrior I had once assumed to be the chief of this wandering tribe.

It was night. I could imagine the legion of vultures already poised in the treetops, hooded by their wings, ready to fall at the first light of dawn upon the feast offered by this immolated village. I thought that as my heart was a victim of fear, the village people had been similar victims of the men of the mountain, of the man with the crest and the men with the fans and all their warriors and bearers, who had thus avenged the rupture of the pact. And as in the darkness I tried to detect the motionless outlines of the warriors and the silhouettes of those voracious vultures, I looked toward the jungle, then toward the hills, and finally toward the splendor of flames on the distant nocturnal horizon.

I did not know how to return to the ocean unless it was in one of the canoes now burned beyond repair. Return to the ocean. It was only at that moment that it occurred to me to question why the men of the mountain demanded the tribute of pearls from the jungle people; why didn’t they go directly to the sea and there loot at will the treasures of the beaches?

I didn’t know the answer, although I was looking at the evidence. All the inhabitants of this village had died. And their assailants had destroyed everything, even the canoes. Those who had destroyed this village, I told myself, wished to impede even the flight of spirits … and mine as well. I didn’t know the way through the jungle to the sea. And once on the coast, what would I find except what was before me now: death — buzzards, Pedro’s skeleton, the ashes of his poor plot of land on the shores of the new world, and the dying treasure of the beaches?

I saw that the fire in the jungle lay in the direction of the temple. It was in the temple that I had begun to learn the secrets of this land. I felt it was there I must return, and that if it was my fate to die — motionless as an idol — no better place than that pyramid locked in the heart of the jungle. There I would again be what destiny decreed.

The heir of the ancient: I repeated that to myself many times as guided by the nocturnal splendor I moved forward into the jungle, freed of the weight of treasure and mat huts and canoes that had slowed the pace of our caravan when I had for the first time traveled the route to the pyramid. Over and over I repeated that my only inheritance in this immolated, deserted, and intractable land was my relation with the ancient: what he had told me and what he had not been able to tell me, what his dead staring eyes had tried to communicate as his body was dragged toward the summit of the temple.

I slept beside one of those wide deep wells in the plains at the foot of the hills. And in my sleep flashed a new question: why did the men of the mountain kill all the inhabitants of the village by the river, respecting only my life? As if in answer to all my questions, a black spider loomed in my dream, swaying before my eyes; then, terrified, I fell into that well at whose edge I slept, and the well was deep — interminable — and I was still falling, and I would die, crushed against the chalky walls or drowned in the depths of its distant waters; and then high above me glowed the spider, and she was spinning a thread she dropped down to me; it was strong, and with its aid I climbed from the well and with a choking cry I awakened from my nightmare. In my hand I clutched a spider’s silken thread.

Trembling, I rose to my feet and guided by the spider’s thread raced into the heart of the night. I didn’t need to see anything on the wooded hill, not even the flames toward which I ran; branches whipped against my face, I trampled ferns beneath my feet; I advanced blindly, hurrying, indifferent to hissing snakes, hurry, hurry, sweating, panting, toward wherever this thread chose to lead me. Everything was in flames. Fire illuminated the night. The temple was a tall torch of stone and ivy and sculptured serpents and sacrificed lizards. I reached the end of the thread. Through the eyes of madness I saw the waiting spider; when it saw me it scurried toward the foliage that trembled in the light and shadow of the fire. I looked again. Where the spider had been, holding the end of the thread, stood a woman.

I say woman, Sire, in order to be understood by you and your company. I call woman that apparition of dazzling beauty and dazzling horror, and beautiful was her lustrous cotton raiment all embroidered with jewels, and beautiful but terrible the two strands of jewels that as if encrusted there crossed her cheeks, and terrible was the crescent moon that adorned her nose, and both beautiful and horrible the mouth painted in many colors, and only beautiful the soft shining darkness of her limbs. She wore a crown of butterflies on her head, not a reproduction, not metal or stone or any glass were they, not a garland even of dead butterflies: hers was a crown of living black and blue and yellow and green and white butterflies that wove a fluttering wreath above the head of the being I call woman. And she was that, for if I seem to describe something painted or dreamed or some carved statue, her eyes were living and the life of their gaze was directed toward me. And behind the woman, the burning temple.