Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Majesties, you see in my attire the signs of an identity that has been imposed upon me, and that I, here before you, confess I fear, for I know that it condemns me to death, blood, sacrifice, shadow, and horror…”

“You are dressed in the raiment of Smoking Mirror, who represents all you have said,” said the White Lord.

“Nevertheless, you yourselves have spoken of my other identity, that of the giver of life, educator, man of peace. I know it now: I stole the red grain so that men could live. Who am I, Majesties? That is the question to which I am entitled this night.”

The White Lady, through the icy drops on her lips and the heavy vapor of her hatred, answered, before the man could speak:

“It does not matter who you have been, but who you will be. You have come here, not understanding the warnings that accompanied you in your descent to our kingdom. You have looked upon the skull faces of the women dead in childbirth, profaners of tombs, who course through the air, moaning sadly, cursing, spreading terrible illness, and harming the children who caused their deaths. You have seen the spotted ocelot of the high rocks devouring the stars and awaiting the rising of the sun. You have seen the old man with the conch shell upon his back, which is the whiteness that shines by night, our light, the light of the darkness. You have heard the moan of the heart of the mountains that is the voice of the sun beneath the earth, condemned to disappear every night and not to know whether he will appear the next morning, and you have seen his rival, the lord who carries darkness upon his head and displays two hearts upon his battle standard — the hearts that were mine and my husband’s before we died, before the creation of the world, when there was no need for death. See us now, vanquished each time the sun leaves our caverns; little victorious, however, for scarcely does it reach its zenith in the sky when it begins to decline; it never reaches the status of perfection, eternity in the midday sky, to which it aspires each time it is born — only to lose, and sink inevitably into our kingdoms. You have seen the struggle between the life of men, partial, imperfect, condemned to be born only to die, and the life of the dead, condemned to die only to be reborn. We were at the point of triumph. Every day there were more dead and fewer living: hunger, earthquake, illness, storm, and flood were our allies. Then you arrived, stole the red grains of bread and permitted life to be prolonged. For how long, Thief? Ask yourself that, yes, how long, if men themselves, to the end of maintaining life, assist us in our deadly reconquest through war, the excess of their appetites, and the terror of sacrifice. Do battle, love, and kill to live, O Thief of life, and feel the icy wind pulsating behind your every action, warning you that even as you believe you are affirming life you are promoting the Kingdom of Death. My husband and I are patient. Finally all will end in ice. All will come to us. The sun rises, then hides itself, then rises again: half of life is already death. We shall gain the other half, because the totality of our death is life. We are slow; we are patient; our weapon is attrition. And one day, the sun will rise no more. Then we shall rise to reign over a land identical to ours.”

I feared, Sire, that the icy cataract of words from this Queen of Hell would turn me into ice, and my words into coins of snow. I spoke rapidly, savoring the warmth from my mouth, tossing my words like coals at the feet of the motionless pair: “Who am I? I have the right to one answer this night…”

I would have wished to see the eyes of the King of Death when after a perverse silence, as if the two expected that the pause would suffice to convert me to their condition, he at last spoke: “You are one in your memory. You are another in the time you cannot remember.”

And the White Lady added: “The Plumed Serpent in what you remember. The Smoking Mirror in what you forget.”

As I listened, I hid my face in my hands, and as if she herself had appeared in this deep region I again heard clearly the words of the Lady of the Butterflies, spoken on that warm night in the jungle, only three nights before the night I was now living in the nation of the dead:

“You will travel twenty-five days and twenty-five nights before we are together again. Twenty are the days of your destiny in this land. Five are the sterile days you will save against death, though they will be similar to death. Count them well. You will not have another opportunity in our land. Count well. Only during the five masked days will you be able to ask one question of the light and one question of the darkness. During the twenty days of your destiny, it will not profit you to ask, for you will never remember what happens on those days — forgetfulness is your destiny. And during the last day you pass in our land, you will have no need to ask. You will know.”

I closed my eyes and quickly I measured that promised time: I had lived twenty days without memory, and I remembered only three, for in order to save myself I had felt the need to save only three; and thus I had abused the Lady of the Butterflies, for I had succeeded in meeting her again at the pyramid with two full days left to me, two days in which I had the power to ask, to approach final wisdom, and to remember what might be remembered from the forgetfulness that seemed to be my burden, here in this land, Sire, and there in the lands I left behind.

I opened my eyes and saw superimposed upon the featureless, icy mask of the Lady of Death the semblance of my beloved wife of the jungle and the cruel tyrant of the temple; and when I saw those faces imposed upon nothingness, but simultaneously alive in their expressions of love and hatred, wedded by passion, I swore they were both speaking to me; one, the voice of warm love in the jungle; the other, the voice of the smoking sacrifice on the pyramid; and the voice of the pyramid was telling me not to be deceived further by the terrible tyrant: false was her first promise to me, the woman of the pyramid was saying, as her more recent promise was false: it is not true, you would not have lived like a prince for a year, drinking in the pleasures of the land, then to die in sacrifice; no, my years are like your minutes, stranger, and your year would have ended there, immediately, as the culmination to the bloody day of sacrifice; fear my words; I would have made you believe that the following night had lasted a year, and the next day I would have said: “I have fulfilled my promise. You have lived your year of happiness. Now you must die. This is your last day. As I told you, today you need not ask: you know.”

But while the goddess of the pyramid was speaking, the voice of the woman of the jungle, my lover, also spoke from the depths of the mask superimposed upon the featureless face of the Queen of Death, and that voice was saying, fool, dearest fool, everything I told you on the pyramid was true, the year I offered you would truly have been a complete year, our year, and the woman offered you in marriage would have been I, oh, poor fool, I myself, again your lover for more than three hundred days; that was my true promise, and you refused to take advantage of it; an entire year with me, and then death…”

Oh, Sire, these delirious debates coursed through my mind as wildly as the skull women flew through the air, and as I listened to the two voices I could only remember the Cruel Lady’s confusion when I told her that two days and two nights remained to me; her amazement, her anger, her confusion, revealed that she herself had been deceived; that a power greater than hers had allowed me to live twenty complete days without memory, but only three in memory. Two days and two nights, wrested from my destiny, remained; these days I would remember; on these days I would live guided by my own will, and on the last day I would know. But what I knew I would not know through the intercession of the Lady of the Butterflies, but because of another power superior to hers. And now I would never know what I would have known had I heard in time the voice of my lover: a year by her side, one whole year with her, one year of love, and then one day of death. I was already in the Kingdom of Death: perhaps with only two days remaining of my own will, and they would be days without love, and then, more swiftly this time, this time not to be denied, the same death my beautiful Lady had had the grace to postpone for a year.