Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Night surprised me in the midst of these cavilings, guided always by the spider’s thread. I had passed the chalky plain and was traveling a road that penetrated into a forest of tall trees covered with clusters of crescent-shaped green fruit. I also noted that the road, more arduous now, ran uphill. I was leaving rivers and jungle and sea behind. I felt hungry, and I shook one of those trees to satisfy that hunger. I was just preparing to eat when I heard the sound of someone working. I tried to identify the sound and came to the conclusion that a short distance from me someone was cutting wood. I entered deeper into the dark woods with several of the green fruit in my hand, ready to share them with the woodcutter.

In the darkness I could barely make out the stooped figure of a man standing with his back turned to me, violently attacking a tree trunk with an ax. Confidently, I approached. The man turned to face me and I cried out in horror, for the woodcutter’s face was nothing but two glowing eyes and a swinging tongue that hung from a slit of a mouth, a smooth lipless wound; and the rib cage of this phantom opened and closed like gates in the wind, and as his ribs parted they revealed a living, beating heart that glowed like the monster’s eyes. I was sure I had lost my reason, such was the contrast between my feeling of peaceful friendship and the horror of the vision: then the enormous hanging tongue spoke imperiously: “Dare … Take my heart, take it in your hand, dare to do what no one else has ever dared…”

Oh, Sire, as you hear me, recall, and sum up my adventures from the time I left your shores and tell me why upon hearing these words I would hesitate: what was seizing that palpitating heart compared to the dangers I had met in the sea, in the center of the vortex, among the warriors on the beach, and in the sacrifice of the well?

I reached out and took that sonorously beating, bloody, dripping heart in my hand. I held it with repulsion, wishing only to return it immediately to its owner — but the phantom moaned with fury, his wounded mouth filled with green spittle, and he howled these words: “Demand what you will: power, riches, glory: they are yours; they belong to he who dares take my heart.”

I replied simply: “I want nothing. Here. I return your heart to you.”

The creature, who had only eyes, mouth, and tongue, shouted again and his shouts drowned out the sound of his pounding ribs. “Then it is true!” he shouted. “You are the one who rejects all temptation; today you rejected the gifts of the jeweled bird and now you reject mine. What is it you wish?”

I stood silent, the creature’s heart in my hand. I looked with cold disdain at this forest tempter. The only thing I possessed was my desire; I would not deliver it in exchange for his heart. For I well knew the law of this land was to reply to an offering with another of greater value: what but my desire could I offer the phantom of the forest in exchange for his heart?

When his ribs, like the shutters of a window, again opened, I returned his heart and I asked the one nocturnal question to which I had a right. “Take your heart. And in exchange, tell me now: why did the inhabitants of the town beside the river kill themselves?”

I feared, Sire, I was wasting another question, and that I would hear the answer I had myself proposed: that they had gone mad when they realized they had lost their memory. I did not fear that answer; it would, at least, reaffirm my reason. But the creature with the glowing eyes raised two hands as smooth as his face (hands without fingernails or lines of fortune or love or life), and pressed those hands against his beating rib cage and said: “They sacrificed themselves for you…”

And the phantom began to laugh monstrously. “They sacrificed themselves for you…” Howling with laughter, the horrendous forest apparition repeated: “Sacrificed themselves for you … sacrificed themselves for you…” And with every burst of laughter, his body shrank; the creature hid his face between his hands, and howled: “Fear me, brother, fear me; I am your pursuing shadow; I am the voice you heard last night over your shoulder; I am…”

Suddenly the creature stood tall, looked straight into my eyes. I was looking at myself. The phantom of the forest had my face, my body; he was my exact double, my twin, my mirror.

DAY OF THE SMOKING MIRROR

I say exact, but I am inexact, Sire. For my double was my double in everything except color. My eyes were blue, his were black. My hair was the color of wheat, his the color of a horse’s mane. My skin, in spite of the time spent in these lands, was pale and quick to burn, to blister and peel to a pale rose color. My twin’s was burnished copper. But he was my twin in every other way: size, build, features, and bearing. Now I can recall the differences. That night I was impressed only by the similarity.

I was not master of my hours there. Much time must have passed between the night of the horrendous nocturnal apparition and my next memory of my voyage. The ancient of the temple and the goddess of the butterflies had warned me; I would recall only five days, those saved from the days of my destiny in this land. Now, before opening my eyes again, I could have dreamed: “One day, ten, five more, how many days had passed since that night the phantom offered me his heart and I offered him my wish in exchange?”

I did not know, and that was an advantage the new world held over me; it knew all my steps across its face, even those I actually would never forget because they were not a part of my memory. But if this was my weakness, perhaps that of the new world was having to assume the memory and responsibility for all my acts. I may have done a great deal, Sire, I may have done very little, but I did something between that night and this dawn. But if I were dreaming this dawn, I was consoled by reason: “Yesterday, only yesterday, you escaped from the well of death, following a night of superhuman labor and wakefulness; you were led to the pyramid of the Fat Prince; you rejected the power and the glory offered by the bejeweled bird; you left behind you the chalky plain; you walked through the forests of tall trees; you encountered the phantom, your dark double. You must have slept deeply, as you have never slept before. There is no body, no matter how young, that can bear so much. Your sleep has been so deep that it seems as if it were the longest of your life; no, more than that; it seems longer even than your life. But the truth is that you slept last night and you awakened today. That is all.”

My eyes contradicted my reason. I awakened suddenly, eagerly, breathing rapidly, as one awakens from a nightmare, and I saw a transformed landscape. There was nothing here to recall the warm, florid lands of the coast. It was cold, and my ripped and torn clothing served me badly. It was difficult to breathe; the air was thin and elusive. The luxuriant vegetation of the new world had died, and in its place reigned a no less luxuriant desolation. I was surrounded by a landscape of rock; tumultuous yellow and red stone, at once symmetrical and capricious in its naked shapes of knife and saw, altar and table, cloud and constellation of shattered stone, tall, smooth, sharply outlined cathedrals of sheer rock pierced by twisted thickets and dwarfed gray trees; rock crowned by enormous green-thorned candelabra never before seen by the eye of man, like cathedral organs, tall and dry and armed to defend themselves against any touch, although who would dare touch so forbidding a plant, queen of this petrous desert, whose coarse, prickly habit declared her majestic desire to live isolated in this sterile domain: a hermit plant, a stylite unto herself, O Very Christian Sire who hears me today, both pillar and penitent.

At the foot of this rocky mountain lay a valley of dust so restless and silent that at first I did not notice any life within its reaches, except for the movement of the veils of dry, white whirling dirt, swift and hostile; an icy wind was blowing; and it rent the veils of dust; before me, before my bed of rocks, rose the volcano. I had arrived. I gave thanks. Here my lover was to meet me. I looked around. At my feet was the spider’s thread.