Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Jubilant, I picked it up. Following it, I descended from my harsh eyrie. I no longer thought whether much or a little time had passed between my most recent recollection and this new morning, between my passage through the burning coastlands and my arrival in this cold region. Guided by the spider I descended to the plain, and holding to its thread I moved through the restless dust of the plain, and like the plain I felt crushed by the closeness of the sky and sun which at this height were almost on top of me, and I remembered how distant they had seemed on the coast. I did not understand; terrible was the heat on the beaches I first trod in this new world, and I thought then that nowhere did the blazing sun burn so close to us. Now, I remembered how high and distant it had seemed on the coast and in the jungle; and on this plain of rock and dust, beside the volcano, so nearby, its blaze was lessened. A transparent Host, the sun burned less the nearer I was to it. I realized this, to the astonishment of my body, only at that instant. And as I walked forward I discovered that the dust was also smoke.

In one hand I held the guiding thread. With the other, I tried to fan away the dust and smoke that almost prevented my seeing or breathing. I stretched out my hand before me, Sire, as blind men do, even when someone leads them. And my hand disappeared in that thick haze. My fingers touched other bodies, a swiftly moving line of human bodies hidden by the dust and smoke of this silent dawn at the foot of the volcano. Silence. Footsteps. I drew back a hand throbbing with fear and touched my chest, my face, my sex, for I needed to assure myself of my own existence; and when I knew it was I, that I was there, alive, only then did my sensations begin to float away from reality; and reality insinuated itself, Sire, with such cunning that I believed my sensations were reality. For while I was telling myself I had come into a world of dust, the reality was that the dust was smoke; and while I believed myself to be surrounded by silence, evil and cunning were the murmuring reality on this plain at the foot of the volcano.

Footsteps in the dust. Footsteps amid the smoke. Feet dancing in silence. Feet dancing to a beat not their own, but marked by a different rhythm, one imposed upon them. The spider guided me with its silvery thread. Clutching that thread I lost my fear of the smoke, the dust, and the silent dancing that surrounded me. And free of the fear I realized once again that distance is fear, and proximity, confidence. I began to perceive a persistent music, a monotonous, three-beat rhythm that set the cadence for the silent feet of the dancers; drum and rattle, I said to myself, only a rattle and a drum, but with a persistence and a will for festival, for celebration, for ritual, that converted their rhythm into the very incarnation of this time and this space: the time and the place in which both they, the dancers and the musicians, and I, the pilgrim in these lands, were living, here and now. Nothing beyond the silent dance to the beat of the continual drum and the continual rattle belonged to the reality of this invisible plain that took for a veil the dust and for a coif the smoke. And thus one sees, Sire, how our senses deceive us, thinking we may discover the whole through its parts, never imagining what great universes may be hidden behind the rhythm of a drum and a rattle.

I walked among the silent, hidden dancers of this my new morning in the new world, the third morning of the time that would be granted me here. I felt the nearness of bodies; at times my outstretched hands brushed shoulders and heads, at times feathers and paper streamers and rope touched my chest and legs, but as if they feared my touch, these contacts were fleeting. My bare feet knew only a vast expanse of dust, which is why the sudden contact of my feet with stone was so unexpected: a change of element, like stepping from water into fire, for the dust was liquid and the stone burning hot. And this stone, Sire, rose upward. For a moment I imagined that the spider had led me in an infinite and hidden circle and that I had returned to the rock where I had awakened early this morning. Instinctively I took a step backward to protect my feet from the rough stone and the sheer, hidden reefs of the mountain. But, instead, they found the sharp corners and smooth surface of carved stone.

I climbed. The stone was a stairway of rock. I began to count the steps as I ascended; the sounds of the dance grew fainter and the accompaniment of drum and rattle was fading and the double haze of dust and smoke was dissipating. Thirty-three steps I counted, Sire, not one more, not one less, and as I stepped upon the last, as is natural, I sought the next one, and when I did not find it, when my foot touched air, I was confused. I sought aid by looking upward, for until that moment my gaze had been the captive of the ground. As our senses diminish we depend upon our feet and the earth. As they increase we forget both feet and earth and again we stretch our hands toward heaven. Behind the heights to which I’d climbed, a great white gleaming cone reposed upon a motionless carriage of white clouds. Beneath the clouds, the skirts of the great mountain spread like a black shield of ash and rock protecting the pristine crown of ice, the refulgent field of tiny stars, and the white sea of sand frozen in the heavens.

The haze hovering over the land began to break, and fled, thinner and thinner, across the thirsty face of this desert. From the heights I watched the dissipation of the clouds of dust and I saw a multitude of men and women and children gathered there; I saw that the men were dancing in circles to the rhythm of the drum and the rattle, and that the children stood motionless, waiting, and that the women, kneeling, were variously occupied in pouring liquids and in roasting skinned hares and in patting the dough of the bread of their land and rolling that bread into cylinders that were then sprinkled with red powders and heated upon braziers and in puffing their smoking tubes like the ancient mother of the clean hut where I had taken shelter one night. And there were bundles of rushes there, and beds of hay, and stones like millstones, and piles of rope. I saw the steps, lined with smoking censers, up which I had just ascended, and men with tall crests and golden ear ornaments in the form of lizards sitting on the ledges with enormous conch shells held between their legs. I saw the steep stone stairway that had led me to this summit, the twin of the volcano’s peak, as the smoke and the dust, the phantom and I, were also reflections of each other. The insubstantial bodies formed a horizontal alliance, and the volcano rising before my eyes and the pyramid that reproduced its conical and suppliant structure formed a vertical unity. They were the horizontal plain; we, the vertical summit.

I employed the plural for myself before I knew there were others on the high platform of the temple. Alone, on the plain, I had felt I was many. Accompanied, on the pyramid, I felt alone. Again I sought the assurance of the surface where I stood. The sole of my left foot rested upon the hard stone of the temple; my right foot was planted in a white mound of flour or sand — when I saw my foot sunken in that strange matter I thought it one of the two; hastily I withdrew my foot and contemplated the track, the sign of my passage, there imprinted.

And if before I had been blinded by haze, now sound deafened me. Other drums joined the drum, other rattles the rattle, and pipes and bells and flutes similar to those I had heard at the other two temples: the one in the jungle and that at the well; and when I heard that music I resigned myself; destinies meet in these great stone theaters of the new world; here, in the open air, definitive performances were held, here near the life-giving sun; the pyramids were hands of stone raised to touch the sun, aspiring fingers, mute prayers. One sound reigned above all the others, a sound similar to the moan of the dying beast I had seen one day drifting, wounded, out to sea from the putrid river of the first beach I trod. At first I imagined that it rose from the very entrails of the volcano. Only now, when at last I stopped staring at the track of my foot in the white mound, only now did I see upon the steps those men with the lizard ear ornaments blowing into their enormous conch shells.