Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

One of the warriors walked to the edge of the platform and the voices and music and dancing ceased so that he might be heard.

“Hidden among the women and children and dancers there are many lords and spies of the peoples with whom we are waging war, who want secretly to observe our ceremonies this day. Return to your lands and let it be known what happens to our captives. Fear the power of Mexico!”

For the first time, Sire, I heard a man of this high arid plain speak the name of his nation, for as such I took it, allied as it was with the assertion of power, although it could have been the name of their greatest Lord, he of the Great Voice, or of the supreme god to whom all others owed honor. My limited knowledge of this soft tongue forced me to reduce every word to the roots I had so tortuously learned, and whether this was the name of the land, of the lord, or of the god, that name signified several things at one time: umbilicus, death, and moon; umbilicus, I said to myself, is life; and death, death; and moon, the two faces, waning and waxing, of life and death. I had no time to ponder this: in the midst of the silence the warrior who was speaking walked to the filthy high priests who had officiated here, knelt before them, and his companions imitated him and among them they washed their priests’ feet, stained with blood and melted pitch and cold ash.

The ritual of the foot washing was slow and elaborate, and in the humility of the warriors before the high priests I read another sign of the structure of this land of the navel of the moon: the fearsome warriors with eagle and ocelot headdresses owed obeisance to the celebrants of death and thus were subjected to a power higher than that of arms. Whom, in turn, must these black priests obey? What power was greater than that of this truncated pyramid of death? Numbed, I looked toward the volcano whose form the temple reproduced, and their summits were identical, ice and fire, snow and stone, ash and fire, blood and smoke; and remembering my ascent from the coast to the volcano, I told myself that this entire land lay in the form of a temple, putrid and vegetal at its base, smoking and petrous on its summit, and that I had climbed the steps of that gigantic pyramid, and that the nation that worshipped the sun and called itself moon was like a series of pyramids, one included within the other, the lesser enclosed by the greater, a pyramid within a pyramid, until the entire land was a temple dedicated to the fragile maintenance of life nourished by the arts of death.

Oh, Sire, you who hear me, the bloody rites I have related must evoke in you a horror as great as mine as I witnessed them, but I wish that you might put yourself in my place on that distant day of the Smoking Mirror, and that in spite of the horror you might share my deep desire to understand what I was seeing, and to grant to the desire for comprehension powers greater than the instinct for condemnation. Unarmed, I myself captive and witness to the fate of other captives, I rejected the temptation to condemn what I did not understand. Very limited was my intelligence of what was happening. And perhaps, I told myself, I must await the end of my pilgrimage, the fifth day of my memory and my questions and their promised answers before I could understand this land. The ceremony of the long day’s ritual had not ended, and I still had no understanding of my place in it.

The two priests who held my arms had released me in order to participate in the long and difficult ceremony of the foot washing, for the warriors in their humble task could not clean the melted pitch from the feet of the sorcerers. I decided to test my fortune. I arose, and walked toward the Lady who presided over this festival. The sorcerers looked up at me and intoned hoarse prayers; the kneeling warriors kept their heads bowed. Cautiously, I approached the woman. She, finally, looked at me. She summoned me with her gaze. Everything about her that once had been delight now was terror. There was something in her new presence that prevented me not only from touching her but from even remaining standing before her. Like the warriors before the sorcerers, I fell to my knees, my head bowed, not daring to touch the body that with such pleasure I had made mine in the jungle. I could not, however, resist the urge to question her with my eyes: for the first time that day, I scrutinized the face of my lover. From a distance, and at first glance, it was her face, the face I had known. But closer, Sire, I could note the minute changes on that unforgettable face, the imperceptible traces left on that skin by the passage of time: the faint wrinkles around the eyes, the sudden heaviness of the eyelids, the visible hardness of the lips, the slightest loosening of the flesh on her neck and beneath the still high, firm cheekbones. The passage of time: of what time, Sire? Only three nights earlier I had made love to a girl younger than I; now I was looking at a woman a little older than I, a mature woman, still beautiful, still desirable, but whose features had passed the flush of spring and suggested autumn instead. I thought: it isn’t she. The only way to prove whether or not it was she was to resort to my only legitimate weapon: my question for that day.

Impelled by the anxiety of the discovery and my doubt, and without pausing to think, I said: “My Lady, do you not know me?”

She looked at me from an icy distance. “That is the question you ask me today?”

Realizing my error, I shook my head, not daring to touch her hands, which was my desire: the question with which she answered mine was proof that this woman was my lover, the princess of the butterflies, privy to our pact. “No, my Lady, it is not…”

“You have the right to ask one question…”

“I am surrounded by so many mysteries…”

“You may ask only one question each day…”

“I know; I have fulfilled our pact during the time I have been apart from you…”

Sadly, she looked toward the plain, where activity was renewing: people were eating, women were pouring the liquors of the land into clay pots and preparing the native bread on the stone mortars, and the elders were directing the dances, holding heavy canes adorned with paper flowers soaked with incense. Smoke of the flowers, smoke of the braziers: from afar, beside my Lady, I observed them, and I rejected all temptation to comprehend the present mystery; I must respect the logical order of my questions, climb them like the steps of the pyramid and the land itself; my most profound reason told me I must not skip a single bead in the rosary of cause and effect, or the string of beads would break and scatter, would roll down the steps like the heads of the whores and captives, and I myself would be the prisoner of the day’s enigmas without having resolved those of yesterday, and I would understand nothing of what was still to come.

“My Lady,” I said finally, “why did the inhabitants of the town in the jungle sacrifice themselves for me?”

She looked at me with a touch of disdain, and strong compassion. “That is what you want to know today?”

“Yes.”

Distantly, she gazed at the mixed smokes of the plain, the braziers and the incense, the smokes of human hunger and of the divine hunger of this land. “Because you are the reason for life and we are the reason for death. Because they believed that by sacrificing themselves to you they would not be sacrificed by us. They preferred to die for you rather than be killed by us.”

I was deeply disturbed by these words, and my eyes clouded with blood, anger, and sadness; I recalled once again the quiet people of the jungle and I cursed for an instant the order of this new world that made me the cause for the death of innocents. But fear immediately overcame my sad and impotent rage. Sire: I feared that now those declarations spoken by the painted lips of my elusive lover would be inverted, and that in this day’s ceremony I would die, sacrificed. This was demanded for the equilibrium of the things of the land of the dead moon.