Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Consoled, very softly he brushes the cloth of the woman’s skirt; he is content for a long while, but when he feels almost overcome once more by the swaying, the perfume, and fatigue, he reaches toward the veils covering the woman’s face.

She screams: or he believes she screams; he does not see the mouth hidden behind the veils, but he knows that a cry of horror has shattered this dense atmosphere; he knows that as he reaches toward her face, she screams; but now everything happens simultaneously: the litter stops, he hears heavy, moaning voices, the woman thrusts the hawk’s ungainly head toward his face and the bird rouses from its heraldic lethargy, its bells jingle furiously as La Señora’s hand — once caressing, now rapacious — brutally covers his eyes, he barely glimpses behind the parted veils a mouth displaying teeth filed sharp as the spikes of a hunting dog’s collar; the hawk strikes at his neck, tender from the sun and salt of fiery seas, and against his flesh he feels the icy humors exhaled from the heavy curved beak; he hears the words of that shout congealed in space, entombed in the oppressive luxury of the litter; a shout that claims and claims again the right of every being to carry a secret to the grave. And the young prisoner cannot distinguish the breath of the falcon from that of the woman, the bird’s icy beak from La Señora’s sharp-filed teeth as the pinpricks of tenacious hunger sink into his neck.

That night a crippled, bleeding Bocanegra limped into the inn. His arrival spoiled the huntsmen’s celebrations. They ceased their drinking and their singing:

How sad and long the day, oh,

How poor the rich may be,

To sadness I’d say nay, oh,

His castle I’d gainsay, oh,

Today a roof of hay, oh,

Seems fairer far to me,

Yes, fairer far to me.

Quarrels were interrupted and loud talk stilled; astonished and uneasy, they all stared at the fine white mastiff with a gaping wound on his head, his paws stained with the black sand of the coast.

The dog was led to El Señor’s quarters, where the Liege ordered him to be treated. Now, in the candlelight, the servants at last had reason to open their bags. El Señor knelt on his prie-dieu, placed his opened breviary upon it, but turned his back to the black crucifix that accompanied him on all his journeys; he watched the servants, who had first wished to carry the dog to the courtyard, considering it not entirely proper to treat him in the master’s bedchamber. El Señor said no, they must tend him there; reluctantly, the servants bowed to his superior will. The Liege’s presence would inhibit their excited comments about this event, their improbable versions of what had taken place.

Once again, kneeling and silent, El Señor asked himself whether unbeknownst to him the servants were secretly rebellious, whether from their humble condition they demanded something more than the favor of their Lord, more than the duties that gave them greater rank than any servants in the land. But in the flurry of activity the servants forgot their indiscreet discontent, and their master his discreet conjectures.

One servant removed the dog’s hair from around the wound; he cleaned and then stitched the wound with a formidable thick, squared needle, careful to fasten a little hide and a little flesh with every stitch. The wound was closed with the heavy thread, pulled not too tight, and not too loose. Then the first servant withdrew various curative powders from the bag to apply to the wound: oak leaf, palm bark, blood of the dragon tree, burnt sorrel and hordeum, medlar-tree leaf, and pennyroyal root. The second servant dampened heated handfuls of oakum fibers, wrung them well, and placed them over the powders, while the third placed a dry layer over the first, binding it finally with a strip of cloth.

The servants left behind them a sad and whimpering Bocanegra, and a dozing El Señor kneeling on his prie-dieu, his head resting on the velvet armrest, giddy from the foul stench of the powders and smoking kettles, and the metallic taste left (in the air) by the dog’s blood, and (on the floor) the traces of dark coastal sand where you lie, returned, your own twin, your new footprint upon your ancient footprint, your body for a second time outlined on the sand that a body like yours abandoned this morning when the sea abandoned you; you are lying on the same beach, outspread arms entangled in seaweed, a cross between your shoulder blades, clutching a large green sealed bottle, your old and your new memories erased by storm and fire, your lashes, your eyebrows, your lips covered by the sand of the dunes, as Bocanegra whines and El Señor in his sleep obsessively recalls the day of his triumph and repeats it to the dog; but the dog wants only to learn the terror of the black coast, while El Señor wishes only to justify his return, tomorrow, to the palace he had ordered on the very same day to be constructed in honor of his victory.

VICTORY

The fortified town fell following a ferocious battle. The news was carried to the camp; within the hour he was entering the conquered city; now, in his memory — black and brilliant as the cuirasses of his German mercenaries, turbid and liquid as the lakes surrounding the besieged borough — arose tumultuous images of the devastating battle he had waged against heresy in the lowlands of Brabant and Batavia. In earlier times, in Spanish territories, El Señor’s remote ancestors had combated and vanquished the Waldenses and Insabbatists; now their obstinate descendants, with their train of supporters and Jews who had renounced their conversion to Catholicism, had found refuge and a land propitious to their resurgence in these North Countries that had traditionally harbored heretics. There, like moles from their tunnels, they gnawed at the foundations of the Faith, whereas in León and Aragon and Catalonia these same people showed themselves in the light of day, proclaimed their beliefs with Luciferian pride — and so were more easily persecuted.

Looking at the flat contours of these Low Countries, El Señor mused that perhaps their very flatness demanded that men hide, and move with caution, while the ruggedness of the Iberian landscape stimulated men’s honor and pride, animated them to rise to heights inspired by their rugged mountains, to shout their defiance from the peaks and openly join the unarmed legions of the blasphemous, as Peter Waldo, a merchant of León, had done; he had publicly preached poverty, censured the riches and vices of ecclesiastics, established a secular church where everyone, even women, had the right to officiate and to administer the Sacraments, a right they denied to those priests they considered unworthy; they fled from the temples, saying it was better to pray in one’s own home, and on these principles Peter Waldo organized a dreadful rabble called the Insabbatists, because as a mark of poverty they wore shoes with a thick wooden sole and with a coarse leather strap across the instep; and following the teachings of their heresiarch they said they were rich because they had renounced all worldly goods; they were called the Poor Men of León, who lived on charity and rejected the inheritance of property, and among them there was no “mine” or “yours,” and they called Rome covetous and false and wicked, rapacious wolf, crowned serpent, and many disciples were attracted to their mystic austerities; they allied themselves with the heretical Cathari and the rebellious Provençal troubadours, who said that the human body was the seat of pain and sin and that the earthly consolation offered by Jesus Christ and His saints was of no worth, either in life or at the hour of death; they believed that the natural sinfulness of the human body should be exhausted during the course of life on earth, and that thus it would be purified and worthy to meet the divine gaze of Heaven. Don Pedro el Católico had zealously eradicated this Waldensian heresy and the tenacious uprisings of the Poor Men of León. El Señor remembered his ancestor’s words and repeated them now to himself: “Be it known that if any person, noble or plebeian, discover in our kingdoms any heretic, and kill or mutilate him or divest him of his goods or cause him any other harm whatsoever, he must not for that be punished; rather, he will enjoy the benefit of our grace.”