Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

She said to me: “Drink. I swore to you we would meet again, and that when we met, your pleasure would be redoubled. You have overcome all temptations and all obstacles. You have reached the summit of power. Drink.”

I held to my lips, Sire, the heavy cup of gold she offered me; I drank a thick, fermented, intoxicating liquid that was like swallowing fire from a hearth; no more turbid beverage exists, or one more crystalline: it was like drinking fragrant mud, it was like drinking ground crystal.

I drained the cup, I threw it aside, I sank my head in the lap of my recovered lover, I thought that under the influence of the liquor I was losing my senses, and that my sight was turning to water, my flesh, my hands and knees, my bones; my Lady, my Lady, hear my question of this day, answer it: the White Lady of Death told me in the deep icy hell that I was one in memory and another in forgetfulness, Plumed Serpent in what I remember and Smoking Mirror in what I forget: what does that riddle mean, my Lady?

I don’t know how many times in my pitiful drunkenness I repeated this question; and the gloved hands of my dark lover consoled me as a mother consoles her child, as the grandmother of the clean hut had consoled me as I slept in her lap. And only when I ceased to repeat my question, when my trembling ceased, did she speak these terrible words:

“Your question has been wasted. Before the Lords of Death, you answered your own question. I said you would voyage twenty-five days and twenty-five nights before we would meet again. I promised you five days to rescue from death to enable you to come to me. You used only two. Three remained. On the pyramid I offered you the opportunity to renounce those days and once and for all to join me. Forever. In life and in death. You preferred to wager your remaining days. What a pity. Now you have found me again. But I am not the same. My time is not your time. Mine has a different measure. So much time has passed since we made love in the jungle … so much time since we saw each other on the pyramid … so much time.”

I closed my eyes and clung to her knees. “I still do not understand; you have not answered my question; I know who I was in memory, I recall the days I was able to save from death; what happened to me during the twenty days I have forgotten?”

“Ask that question of the others tonight. Now come to me.”

She caressed my head with her gloved hands. She said softly into my ear: “Remember the pyramid. Remember it is I who hear the final confession of every man, the one confession of his life, one time only, at the end of life…”

I looked up at the mask of black veils, and I cried out: “But I don’t want to die, I want to live with you, I have found you again! I asked two impossible things today as I entered this chamber of treasures, and one of them has become possible: to hold you, to make love to you again, forever! And since I cannot restore life to the man who was like my father, in his name and in the name of the happiness he sought here, I want to make love to you as long as I live…”

The Lady of the Butterflies laughed from behind her cascade of black veils. “Are you sure of what you say?”

Yes, I answered, yes, as I parted the veils covering her face, a thousand times yes, as I tore at my lover’s clothing, seeking again the cinnamon-colored skin, the black nails, the black jungle of my unrepeatable pleasure …

“My unrepeatable pleasure,” I repeated loudly, stupidly, as I unveiled the woman’s face only to discover it was covered by another mask, of garnet and green and blue feathers, a fan radiating from a center of dead spiders affixed with that resin whose scent I had noted in all the things of this land.

“Your face,” I said, “I want your face, I want to kiss you…”

“Wait. Before you remove this mask, swear one thing.”

“Yes, anything.”

“That you will keep it with you always. That, whatever happens, you will never be parted from it. It is my final gift to you. It is the map of the new world your unfortunate old friend so desired. Keep it with you. One day it will lead you back to me…”

“A map? I see only a center of spiders upon a field of feathers, how can this guide me…?”

She interrupted: “Have faith in what I say. This is the true map of the new world, not the map navigators draw, or voyagers as they travel into the mountains. Not a map that leads to visible places, but one that will one day lead you back to me, to the invisible…”

In the depths of this chamber of treasures, the two of us alone, surrounded by the infinite silence that I myself had imposed upon the city when I threw the jewels from the platform of the pyramid, I removed from the face of my beloved, with great delicacy, with all the tenderness of which I was capable, the mask of feathers and spiders.

Behind the mask appeared the last face of my lover.

I could tell you, Sire, that it was a face devoured by age, a minute network of wrinkles, a deep gaze of opaque passion from the depths of cavernous, livid sockets sunken in jutting, bare bones of forehead and cheek, thinly covered by a skin as yellow as old parchment, and I would speak the truth; I could tell you it was an infinitely ancient face, with the eternal tattoo of the lips erased and wasted by time, conquered by the deep wrinkles that were buried in her lips, that furrowed the corners of her mouth, that disappeared in her toothless gums, and I would speak the truth.

But only half the truth, Sire. For the signs of devastation on the face of my beloved were those of time, yes, but also something worse than time. My beloved, my beloved of the jungle. I looked for the crown of butterflies above the thinned white-haired, wart-covered head of my lover; I watched them fall, dry and dull, lifeless, upon the silver floor of this sumptuous chamber. And I looked at her; such antiquity was the work of illness, of the pox that marked her skin, of the leprosy that corroded her blood, of the tumefaction that burst from the mire of swollen craters, of the filth that oozed from her breasts, of the pestilent swamp of her mouth: my Lady, the devouring goddess of filth, had been devoured by that filth …

She peeled off her gloves, I felt her bony, damp, claw-like hands caressing my cheeks, my neck, my chest …

“Forever, young pilgrim, did you say forever?”

I sobbed in her lap; I am not sure that I heard clearly all she said.

“I was the young temptress, the lover of my own brother who in my arms lost himself and the kingdom of peace; I was the goddess of games of chance, of all that is uncertain, whom you knew in the jungle; in maturity, I was the priestess who absorbs sins and filth, devours them so they no longer exist; now I am but the witch, the ancient destroyer of young men, the envious one; I must be seated upon the body of a young man; that is my throne … you…”

Trembling, the ancient woman thrust me from her. “Go, flee, you still have time; you did not understand; I offered you a year in which we might be together, one year of your life as a man, which is not the equivalent of my years as a woman; you did not accept; after a year of making love to me every night you would have died; now we must wait, so long, so long; keep the map, return, look for me, in a hundred years, two hundred, a thousand years, whatever time it takes that you and I be young at the same time, two, together, at the same time, at the same instant…”

Judge, Sire, my fever, my madness, my ferocious drunkenness; I was not master of myself; I tore the remaining clothing off the foul and rotted ancient woman, I closed my eyes, I told myself, it doesn’t matter, you are drunk, what does it matter? you can have her again, close your eyes, think of the girl in the jungle, think of the woman of the pyramid, she is your only woman, your lover, your wife, your sister, your mother, enjoy the forbidden, make her yours, she is the only woman in the world, do not assess, do not compare, love, love, love…”