Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The earth trembled and opened its yawning jaws, and my only sensation was one of falling through a cave of ashes. Perhaps, unaware, I had reached the highest ledge of the volcano, the mouth of the crater, and through it was slipping down into its extinguished entrails; in the distance I heard sounds, the old man’s laughter, the barking of the hunted animal, the wailing of those flying women; my mouth was filled with ashes, I tried to stop my fall but my hands grasped ashes, and as upon a different night I had been a prisoner of the ocean whirlpool, now I felt myself a captive of this black-earth vortex; and captured, I was not alone, for in my vertiginous descent into the center of the volcano there passed before my eyes dark forms that seemed to beckon me and lead me toward the most unknown of all lands: I saw a man robed in, and toying with, jewels, a man whose shouts and roars filled me with terror, for that noise was like a howl issuing from the very heart of the mountain; he beckoned to me and still falling I reached out toward him in the blackness, but at the moment I almost touched him he disappeared, and behind him, farther in the distance, appeared a different man holding a banner in one hand and upon his shoulder he carried a staff on which were impaled two hearts, and upon this man’s head was a darkness so black it was as if for one precise instant everything else — I, he himself, the sea of ash in which we were drowning — was bathed in light, and all the darkness of the world was gathered in that crown he wore; he, too, beckoned to me, but he immediately faded from view and in his stead I saw a fierce spotted ocelot in the distance devouring the stars born of this deep fertile sky: an upside-down sky, I told myself, the fearful twin, in the entrails of the earth, of the sky we know and worship in the heavens; and through this standing-on-its-head sky, choked in the deepest ashes of the world, again flew those moaning, saddened, cursing skulls, now carrying in their mouths arms and legs torn from the dead; they dropped them, and cried out:

“Where are the doors? I wave these bones before a door, and with their magic, all in the house lie sleeping so the profaner may enter. Is there a door in hell? Only an entrance. Never an exit. Once I was human. I died in childbirth. Where is the door? The profaner stole my hands and my legs. I weep, seated upon rocks by the side of the road. Do not fear me, voyager. The profaner stole my limbs. With them he harmed my children, all children, and he spread plague and pestilence. Do not believe them if they tell you that those are my arms and legs.”

And the legs and hands struck me in the face and then plummeted into the great empty space surrounding me, and the invisible women fled through the air, moaning sadly. My head struck against rock, and I lost consciousness.

A damp tongue licking my face awakened me. I was staring into the bright black eyes of a small red dog, like those I had seen on the slopes of the volcano, and by my side flowed a river of icy waters with great pieces of ice piled along its shores, and the dome above my head was of pure ice, with cold tears hanging from it, and beyond the river only white, empty space.

The dog led me to the shore and entered the waters, and as I clung to his back he swam across the icy torrent, leading me as the spider’s thread had led me before. But to whom did I owe the animal’s assistance? The Lady of the Butterflies had abandoned me, and all that remained of her was the recollection of one night, the sadness of an unfulfilled promise, the warning of the number and order of my days in this unknown land, and an endless mystery: How much time had passed between each of the days I had recalled? How many days had I lived in forgetfulness? What had happened during the time I could not remember? And why, between the memory of the temple of the jungle and the encounter upon the pyramid on the high plain, had time left the traces not of days but of years upon my lover’s face? From among these questions, I said, I must choose the one I will ask this night. Ask whom? A voiceless dog, perhaps, or women dead in childbirth, flying like arrows, nothing but face and tears, along the road to the underworld.

And thus, clinging to the swimming dog, I reached the other shore. There the whiteness was accentuated as if formerly white had not been white but simply ice and frozen caverns and the gelid river of this world beneath the volcano; this was whiteness itself: the pure color of the dawn, foreign to anything ever called white; the white of whiteness, a stranger to any other quality. And in this total whiteness, Sire, I could distinguish nothing, so that the pure brilliance was like impenetrable darkness, I felt I was drowning in milk, in snow, in gypsum.

An unbearable wind blew toward me, whipped my soaked clothes, doubling the tall plumes of my crest, lacerating my painted skin like knives, forcing me to creep forward, blinded by pure, unrelieved light. A wind like daggers. Finally its rending force revealed before my eyes two motionless figures hand in hand, pure form, erect, pure whiteness, but still the form of a man and a woman, one figure shorter than the other, one standing with icy legs planted arrogantly apart, the other with its limbs hidden beneath a skirt of snow: a shimmering white pair so identical to the white spaces surrounding them it was impossible to know whether the air, the space, the colorless color of this land were born from the double silhouette, battered by the wind and solidified by the ice, or whether they were the result of the land surrounding them. At the feet of the motionless pair I could discern the whiteness of a heap of bones.

The dog barked, his hackles rising, and turning, he raced back to the river and plunged into its white waters, swimming until he gained the other shore. I stood defenseless before the white pair, and I heard the cavernous laughter of the man as motionless as an ice statue, as resonating as the harsh wind of these deep caverns, and he said: “You have returned.”

I bit my tongue, Sire, to keep from asking a fruitless question and receiving a fruitless reply; I did not ask, Why have you awaited me? I did not ask anything, and there was no calculation in my silence, rather a sudden exhaustion, as if my soul could accommodate no further astonishment, terror, or doubt before the successive marvels of the new world, but only a passive, warm resignation, like sleep at the end of a fatiguing day. The wind had died down around the icy figure of the man speaking to me. But instead, it whirled violently, to the point of making her almost visible, about the figure of the woman standing beside the man, her hand in his. That motionless frigidity struggled against the whirling wind, until the woman spoke in tones of indomitable hatred:

“You came once before. You stole our red grains and gave them as a gift to men, and because of them men could sow, and harvest, and eat. You delayed the triumph of our kingdom. Without the red bread grains, all men would today be our subjects; the earth would be one vast lifeless whiteness and we, my husband and I, would have emerged from these deep regions to reign over the entire world. What are you seeking now? Why have you returned? This time you will not deceive us. We are warned against your tricks. Furthermore, there is nothing now to steal from us: look at this sterile land; would you steal the wind of death, the bones of death, our frozen whiteness? Do so. You will only give the gift of more death to men, and thus hasten our triumph.”

“No,” I murmured, grateful for the words of this White Lady, for her breath formed a vapor, warm in spite of its smoking whiteness, around her figure, animating mine. “No, I come only with a question, and I seek an answer of you.”

“Speak,” said the White Lord of these regions of death.