Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

He rose and ordered the men to hang the hart by its tendons and skin it.

He returned the knife to the huntsman and stood watching; between Guzmán and El Señor hung the cadaver of the hart.

The men slit the hide of the animal from hock to anus, and from there in a line down the middle of the belly. They spread open the gash and removed the bladder, the stomach, and the entrails; they threw these organs into the bucket filling drop by drop with the hart’s blood.

El Señor was grateful for the double mask of the night and his hood; nevertheless, Guzmán was observing him in the wavering firelight. The huntsmen cut open the chest to the breastbone and removed the lights, the liver, and the heart. Guzmán held out his hand, and the heart was handed to him; the other viscera plopped into the bucket of blood with a sound identical to that of the beating of El Señor’s troubled heart. Unconsciously, El Señor clasped his hands in a gesture of pity; Guzmán caressed the hilt of his dagger.

The head was severed at the back of the neck, and although the task of quartering the hart continued, El Señor, in the flickering firelight, could see only the head, that stupid-looking, that slack-jawed, that excruciatingly pitiful head deprived of its crown. The dark, glassy, half-open eyes still simulated life, but behind them, triumphant, lurked the specter of death.

Now several huntsmen cut the tripe into small pieces, toasted them over the fire, then dipped and stirred them in blood and bread. And if previously only the hart’s body had separated El Señor from his lieutenant as they skinned, dehorned, and quartered the animal, now there was a world between them. The blood and bread and tripe were brought to the bonfire; the huntsmen stood in a circle around the blaze, along with the hounds that had participated in the hunt. With one hand the men restrained the dogs; in the other they held their hunting horns. El Señor’s traditional position of eminence had for the moment been preempted by the excitement and confusion. The distraction of the nervous, panting hounds and the men’s absorption in the double task of managing dogs and horns would have allowed the Liege to slip back to his tent and renew his pious reading without anyone’s being the wiser, but he knew there was still one formality demanding his attention. An order, a casual gesture, and the huntsmen would blow their horns in unison, signaling the ritual end of the hunt.

In that obscurity to which he’d been relegated, El Señor started to give the signal, but at that very moment the huntsmen blew their horns. The ringing blast from those great curved instruments shook the night, a hoarse lamentation seeming not to fly but to gallop on iron-shod hoofs across the hard-baked drum of the earth to the mountains from which it had been torn. Although El Señor had never given the signal, the ritual had been fulfilled. It was too late. He stood stupefied, his unheeded gesture frozen in mid-air. He was thankful Guzmán was not beside him, grateful he was engrossed in the activity that absorbed them all, that he had not seen the startled face, the half-open mouth whose ritual command had been fulfilled — without word or gesture of the Liege.

At the sound of the horns, the hounds had strained forward to be fed, their greedy muzzles and trembling loins illuminated in the glow of the firelight. Surrounded by the ravenous pack, Guzmán dangled the hart’s entrails at javelin tip, high above their heads. The hounds snapped and leaped. Maddened by the deafening horn blast and their own natural savagery, they were a flowing river of luminous flesh; their tongues were sparks flashing against a sweating, happy Guzmán, javelin held high, feeding the hart’s entrails to hounds that would relish the treat and greedily await the next hunt. El Señor turned from the spectacle; he was obsessed by an infinite and circular thought.

As the dogs smeared their muzzles in blood and charcoal, Guzmán, with the point of his knife, traced a cross on the heart of the stag, then deftly divided it into four portions. He chuckled dryly as he tossed one portion to each point of the compass; the huntsmen laughed with him, well pleased with the day, and with every spirited gesture of the chief huntsman; thus exorcising the evil eye, they shouted: to Pater Noster, to Ave Maria, to the Credo, and Salve Regina.

“Sire,” said Guzmán, as finally he approached El Señor. “It is Your Mercy’s pleasure to distribute the rewards and punishments of the day.”

And he added, smiling, grimy, wounded, exhausted: “Do it now, for these men are tired and wish to return as soon as possible to the shelter.”

“Who was first at the kill?” asked El Señor.

“I, Sire,” replied his chief huntsman.

“You returned just in time,” said El Señor, cradling his chin on his fist.

“I don’t understand, Sire.”

Thoughtfully, El Señor toyed with his thick lower lip. No one could realize that the Liege’s eyes, hidden beneath the hood of his cape, were examining his lieutenant’s boots and that upon them he observed traces of the black sand of the coast, so different from the dry brown mountain dirt. For the first time, Guzmán noticed on his Liege’s hand the wound that was the counterpart to his own, and irresolute and perturbed, he hid his hand. Reward and punishment? El Señor and Guzmán thought simultaneously: For whom? They thought of each other and of themselves, of the dog Bocanegra, and the frustrated and rebellious band of lookouts.

A woman’s hand awakens him, caressing his face, wiping away the damp black grains of sand. The youth awakens a second time, dozes, made drowsy by the motion of the swaying litter where he lies captive among silken pillows and ermine coverlets, brocade curtains, and a deep and aggressively feminine perfume, a scent the youth can see at the same time he inhales and sees the color black.

He knows he is lying in a moving, luxurious, fantastic bed. A woman’s soft hand strokes him without ceasing, but from where he lies he sees her other hand, gloved in a rough and greasy gauntlet on which perches a bird of prey. The youth’s eyes and the sunken eyes of the bird lock in an unswerving gaze, but if the youth drifts between sleep and wakefulness, the hawk’s stare is unvarying, hypnotic, as if an artisan had set two old, worn, blackened copper coins in the head of the bird; and in that gaze are two timeless numbers. The furious falcon is motionless, stiff, its legs spread to better grip its mistress’s gauntlet. The purchase of the bird’s feet on the woman’s wrist is such that its claws seem an extension of the greasy fingers of the glove. One would think it a Maltese statue, it is so still; only the tiny bells fastened to its tarsi indicate movement or life; their jingling blends with other persistent metallic sounds of iron buckles and metal dragging along the road.

The youth turns his head toward the woman who caresses him, sure he will see the silver-pale face he had glimpsed that morning between the curtains of the litter, the woman who had asked who he was, who had looked at him not knowing she herself was watched. But black veils hide the features of the woman in whose lap he rests … sleeps … wakens. La Señora (so the brutal man who had tied him across the horse had called her) is a statue in black: brocades, velvets, silks; from head to foot she is swathed in veils and draperies.

Only her hands indicate her living presence; with one she caresses the youth’s face, brushes away the sand; the other sustains the motionless bird of prey. The shipwrecked youth fears the question she must ask: Who are you? He fears it because he does not know the answer. Lulled within the cushiony perfumed litter, he realizes he is the most vulnerable man in the world: he cannot answer that question; he must wait for someone to tell him “You are…”—to reveal an identity he must accept, no matter how menacing, disagreeable or false it may be — or remain nameless. He is at the mercy of the first person who offers him a name: alone, lulled by the motion, he thinks, he knows. But in spite of the thick fog clouding his senses — sleep, motion, perfume, the hawk’s hypnotic gaze — the touch of those soft fingers on his face and forehead keeps him awake, permits him to cling to lucidity as the falcon clasps the gauntleted wrist of La Señora. The youth’s feeble argument, reinforced by the fact he has no other, is that if someone recognizes and calls him by name, he will recognize and name the person who identifies him, and in this act know who he is: who we are.