Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The moment the warrior ceased speaking, the music again sifted across the plain as the dust had in the past, and with joy and great pleasure the musicians began to thump the hollow gourd rattles with their hands and to strike their sticks upon the skin of their drums, and when the sound of the drum was low in tone they whistled loudly, and dancers in richly colored green and yellow mantles holding clusters of roses and feathered fans trimmed in gold, their faces covered by feather head-coverings shaped like the heads of fierce animals, clasped hands and formed large circles, and upon the summit of the pyramid the sorcerers, at a sign from the black-nailed hand of my lover, struck their flint daggers deep into the breasts of the prostitutes, splitting them from nipple to nipple, and then upward through the breastbone, and with blood-caked hands they tore out their hearts, and finally cut off their heads and piled the mutilated bodies by the troughs beside the pyramid steps, where the women’s blood flowed to sprinkle the plain of now quiet dust where the tempo of the dance was rising and buffoons ran out feigning drunkenness or madness or pretending to be old women, evoking laughter from the watching women and children. The sorcerers tossed the heads of the warriors’ six whores down the temple steps, where they were quickly picked up by old men, who skewered them through the brains and impaled them on lances standing in a row as if in a lance rack.

The black sorcerers placed the smoking hearts of the women in a wooden dish at the feet of the lady who had been my lover. I fell to my knees, Sire, with my arms still held by two of the sorcerers of that group of murderers who were anointing their clothing and faces and hair with the blood of the whores, and I thought of my lost river people, of their simplicity and their lack of greed, of their ordinary life and their extraordinary fate: a people sacrificed by their own hands, and in my name; a people gathered beside the jungle temple to be brought to this high valley of dust and blood, their women given as whores to the warriors of the so-called Lord of the Great Voice, and then offered in sacrifice on the day of the mirror and the smoke. What kind of world was this where beauty and communal ownership of property and love of life coexisted with these ceremonies of crime? In that instant I recalled the frightful apparition in the forest: my double. As he coexisted with me, so the cult of life and the cult of death existed side by side in the new world, for reasons I had still not succeeded in understanding. I was the white god, so the ancient of the memories and the princess of the butterflies had told me: the principle of life, the teacher, the premonitory voice of love, of good and peace. The black god, the enemy, was my brother, the principle of death, of shadow and sacrifice. I thought I had vanquished my phantom twin by refusing him, because of my desire. But my desire was a woman, the woman I saw here now presiding over the pageantry of death.

The warriors knelt before the woman and removed their animal masks: their hair was cut short at the temples, shaved across their foreheads, and their temples painted yellow. They stuck thick thorns through their earlobes and then, one after another, they spoke into the ear of the devouring princess, as penitents speak, Sire, kneeling, and in a low voice. And only after each confession had ended did the woman and the warriors raise their voices, and she asked: “Who inspired your evil?”

And he replied, “You…”

“Of whom were you thinking when you gave yourself to lust?”

“You…”

“Where are lust and evil to be found?”

“In the serpent that peers from between your parted thighs.”

“Who will cleanse you of your sins?”

“You, you who devour filth, soiling yourself to purify us.”

“Who grants me these powers?”

“The smoking mirror.”

“How many times may you confess before me?”

“Once in my lifetime.”

“When?”

“When I am preparing to die.”

“Are you old?”

“I am young.”

“Why are you going to die?”

“Because I am going to war.”

“Against whom will you do battle?”

“Against the people who still refuse to submit to us.”

“Do you prefer death in war to death in old age and infirmity?”

“I prefer it. The aged and the ill die as slaves. I shall go directly to the paradise of soft mists without passing through the icy hell beneath the earth.”

“If you survive, do you know that you will never be able to confess or to cleanse yourself again?”

“I know. You hear each man only once. That is why I prefer to die in combat. I shall not survive.”

The Lady took sweet-smelling herbs and cleansed the bodies of the warriors, brushing them softly over their backs and chests and legs while the sorcerers opened baskets and cages and removed little colored birds from them, wrung their necks, and placed the small feathered bodies at the woman’s feet, and the warriors again put on their animal casques and descended the steps to the plain, where the dancers, the women, and the children had moved aside to make way for a procession led by two dancing satraps with large paper disks bound to their foreheads. Their honey-smeared, black-painted faces glistened in the sun, and they led a group of men whose bodies were stained white. The warriors who had just made their confessions to my lover advanced to meet this procession while the satraps forced the captives — only at that instant did I realize that they were captives — to climb upon some round stones resembling millstones, and they offered them clay pots from which to drink, and each captive raised his pot to the east and to the north, then to the west and to the south, as if offering it to the four corners of the earth, and each, in a plaintive voice, sang the same song:

In vain was I born,

In vain I came to this world.

I suffer, but at least I am here,

I have been born upon earth.

And once the captives were standing upon the stones, the satraps took rope that came from the center of the millstones and tied the rope to the waists of the captives, thus tying them to the stones. Then they gave each captive a lance with feathers stuck to the cutting edge, and a pine war club, and then four warriors walked forward, and they too carried lances, except that their lances had knives on the cutting edge, and two were dressed as ocelots and the other two as eagles, and they raised their round shields and their swords to the sun, and then each warrior began to battle against one captive. But there were captives who swooned and fell to the ground without taking up any weapon, as if they wanted to be killed; and these were scorned by the warriors. And others, seeing themselves tied to the stone, were dispirited, and took up their weapons as if in a trance, and then were vanquished. But others were valiant and the warriors could not subdue them and they sought aid from their companions until among the four they overcame the captive, took away his weapons, and thrusting at him with their knives, bore him to the ground.

The music and dancing burst forth anew; the bleeding captives were freed from the rope and millstone to be dragged by the warriors toward the summit while the plain below was the scene of a colorful dance danced by men wearing sumptuous miter-shaped headdresses from which issued many green feathers, like tall crests, so numerous that the air was green with them.

The warriors, dragging their captives, reached the summit, where the prisoners were taken by the high priests, who tied the prisoners’ hands behind them, and also their feet, and many had fainted and thus they were thrown into the great fire onto the heaped coals burning on the high platform; and where each fell he sank into the bed of coals and hot ash, and there in the fire the captive began to writhe and twist; and his body began to crackle like the body of some roasted animal, and great blisters rose over all his body. And at the height of this agony the sorcerers drew him from the fire with a pothook, dragged him to the stone block, and they split open his chest from nipple to nipple, threw the heart at the feet of the Lady, cut off the captive’s head and threw both head and body, thus separated, down the steps, where aged men received and quickly dragged away the bodies and pierced the heads through the brain, impaling them upon the lances.