Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“But, my Lady, since last I saw you I have lived only two of those days…”

The woman, Sire, gazed at me with frightening intensity, and for the first time on that day she arose, trembling, burying her long fingernails in the ocelot skin covering her throne, for the first time incredulous, for the first time conquered, Sire, impotent, for the first time doubting herself and her powers. And in that instant the marks of time became more prominent upon her face, as if the years had fallen upon her from above like the pestilent vultures of this land that like my Lady fed upon the world’s offal.

I feared she would fall, so unsure was her posture and so violent the trembling of her body. Half risen, clutching the chair of stone, her voice weak and faded, at last she was able to say, the words foaming from her mouth: “Only two days…?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I have lived two days and two nights apart from you…”

“Two days and two nights…”

“Yes…”

“That is all you remember?”

“Yes…”

With fire in her throat she howled, “That is all you remember, poor miserable fool, nothing more?”

“Nothing, my Lady, nothing…”

“Of all the obstacles I placed in your path, of all the tests to which I subjected you, only four times, twice at night and twice by day, they forced you to ask your question and save your day: your life was worth only two complete days?”

“Yes, yes, yes…”

If earlier she had looked at me with disdain and compassion, now only pity illuminated her maddened eyes. “Poor fool, poor fool … It would have been better had you spent your five days and come here, today, to me, and here with me fulfilled your destiny in our land…”

“The destiny you have offered me is death.”

“Yes, following a year of happiness. Do you prefer death within two days, with no happiness at all?”

As my only answer, I said: “Yes. I still have this night and two more complete days.”

“What will you do with them, poor wretch?”

“I choose to end this day, and tonight to receive the answer to my next question.”

“Where will you go?” asked the Lady, newly impassive.

I looked about me. If I descended the steps of the temple toward the great esplanade of the valley, I would meet only the destiny she had promised; I would immediately be amid the people of this high plain who would worship me and honor me, who would give me food and drink, and who would deliver unto me their most beautiful maiden, exactly as the Lady had proclaimed, and after one year I would die on the pyramid. If I took that route, therefore, I would lose the challenges and the answers of my other destiny. If, on the other hand, I descended the steps on the side facing the volcano, if I climbed the volcano itself, if I descended into its ashy crater, the dangers that awaited me there would offer me the security of chance, and in that instant, Sire, for me chance meant liberty and well-being and life, for I already knew that the other road was fatal, I knew its outcome, and knowing the exact date of my death was not, as the Lady had said, a relief, but an unbearable burden that enslaved my soul. If, in spite of everything, I returned to this temple at the end of a year, it would not be, I told myself, without having first exposed myself to all the risks of the two remaining days of my destiny.

“To the volcano, my Lady…”

First the high priests chirped with fear, and the warriors brandished their shields, shouting hoarsely, the bat fluttered its wings, the dancers scattered their incense, and with a gaze as icy as the volcano, the Lady answered: “Fool. That is the road to hell. In one day there you may lose what I have assured you for an entire year: your life. If you go to the volcano, you will only hasten your destiny: your death.”

“I shall find my own death, my Lady.”

“Fool. There is no solitary destiny. Your death will be a common destiny, and you will return to us by way of death.”

I looked at her sadly, knowing that I would never see her again, that this time the spider’s thread would not lead me to her; now I would travel alone in search of my well-being, not, as before, in search of the redoubled pleasures this woman had promised me one night. How was I to know then that the promised pleasure would be to live one year as a prince in order to die as a slave and thus honor the god of the shadow. I looked sadly at the woman who in offering me this fate believed she offered a reward greater than a new coming together of our bodies.

“Farewell, my Lady.”

Wearing the splendid clothing in which they had dressed me here, but with my torn sailor’s clothes clinging to my shivering skin, I turned my back upon this company. I descended the steps slowly, looking toward my new goal, the volcano that in the late afternoon light seemed more distant, and as the light diminished, it turned the color of the air, as if it already rejected me, as if it were warning me: “You see, I am moving away from you, cloaked in the transparent air of dusk. You must do the same. Choose another route. Turn yourself into air, so that I not turn you into ice.”

Halfway along the road, and before the fire of sunset hid it from my sight, I stopped and turned to look for the last time toward the pyramid. A crown of red sunlight was settling upon the bloody, smoking summit. The temple was a dark beast crouching under the setting sun. Its jaws of carved stone were devouring the blood and dust of the plain.

I turned my back upon the pyramid and walked toward the volcano.

NIGHT OF THE VOLCANO

Long was my road through the plain covered with huge thorny plants, and I gave thanks for the soft boots that protected my feet from constant contact with these needles of the desert. I asked myself, looking at the desolation about me on the route toward the volcano, whether the only nourishment of the people of the arid high plain was the fruit from the jungle and the coast, and whether the reason why the inhabitants of the low areas were subjected and sacrificed was simply the hungers and needs of the inhabitants of the high plains. Something I could not precisely identify told me this was not the case, that there was something more, and that I must reach the site where the Great Lord of this world lived, he who was repeatedly called the Lord of the Great Voice, in order to know the truth about the order my strange presence violated at every step, the order confounded by the novelty of my presence.

As I walked toward the volcano and as night was rapidly descending upon me and the world about me, I kept repeating one certainty, one of the few that consoled me in the midst of so many questions:

“I am an intruder here. I am an intruder in a world unaccustomed to intrusion. A world separate from the world: how long have these people I have known on the coast and high plain lived in solitude, without contact with other peoples? Why not since the beginning of time? A world kept separate by fear; but secure in its reason for being to be able to survive surrounded as it is by portents of disaster. What a fragile balance: death in exchange for possessions, life in exchange for a pair of scissors, the scissors in exchange for gold, gold in exchange for bread, bread in exchange for life, life in exchange for the disappearance of the sun … Truly precarious, for all it takes to upset that balance is the intrusion of an unexpected being, an individual as unimportant as I.”

For now I tell you, Sire, that the men of the new world only foresee and accept catastrophic change, which in truth is not change but an end to what presently exists, and the catastrophe can be only the work of gods or of nature, but never that of a simple man. That is why, I told myself that night, in order to understand me they must see me as a god or as an element of nature.