Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

We descended the thirty-three steps, we passed through the rooms of the albinos and dwarfs and monsters along the dark gardens where wolves howled, lynx growled, owls hooted, to a great chamber of idols, each with a pot of incense at its stone feet, and like stone were all the visions of my long and brief pilgrimage through this land.

Look, look well, the Lord of the Great Voice, my crippled double, shouted at me, look well, his fist buried in my hair, banging my head against the stone of the idols, look well at your protectors, the powers that assure the rain and the wind and the fertility of the earth, and frighten away devastating earthquakes, droughts and floods, look well, at the eternal opposites, man and woman, light and darkness, movement and quietude, order and disorder, good and evil, the forces that impel the beneficent sun into the heart of the mountains and the forces that revive it from its nocturnal lethargy, at night, the light, shadow in the day, the omen, the double star, twin of itself, the first star at dusk, the first at dawn, world of dualities, world of oppositions, there is life only if two opposites confront each other in battle, there is no peace without war, no life without death, there is no possible unity, nothing is one, everything is two, in constant warfare, and I pretended that everything had become one, everything one, everything all things, I, my somber double shouted at me, you, the prince of unity, of good, of permanent peace, of dissolved dualities, I …

Blood rushed to my eyes.

Smoke blinded me.

I was lying upon the stone of the chapel and when I raised my head I saw only that the Lord of the Great Voice was standing before me, and that we were alone.

And these were his words: “This morning you saw me burning some papers and sweeping away the ashes. Those papers told the story of your legend. In them was the promise of your return. One day you fled toward the east. You went saddened because men had violated your codes of peace, union, and brotherhood. You said you would return one day to restore your kingdom of goodness.”

“I do not understand,” I said in a hoarse, exhausted voice, “I do not understand, why was that kingdom lost, why did men violate the laws of peace and goodness?”

My double laughed. “You are light and I am shadow. Your sons, men, were born of light. I, from the shadows, was unable to create. Night is nourished from increasing nothingness. You invented men in light and for the light. But even light needs repose, and my kingdom, that of night, shelters man’s fatigue. Your sons could be no greater than the sun itself. They, like the sun, would have to sleep, and then I, the demon of dreams, would make them mine, each night, and each night I would cause them to doubt the goodness of their creator, and in the trembling of the night give form to fear, doubt, envy, scorn, and greed, night after night, drop by drop, until I poisoned your sons, divided them, seduced them, made them choose between the temptation of the night and the habit of the day. You made a mistake, my poor brother. You made men free. You allowed them to choose. Who would not choose the delightful prohibitions of night over the insipid laws of day?”

“Even at the price of slavery?”

“They did not know then that upon the disorder of their senses would be raised the sense of my order. Without a single word they became the slaves and I the master, but both — they, to maintain the illusion of their freedom, and I, to maintain the legitimacy of my power — pretended to continue to respect your laws. You fled, saddened; you said you would return. Meanwhile, I would reign as the usurper, as a mere substitute upon your throne, with no legitimacy of my own, every instant fearing your promised return and the end of my power. Look at yourself, drunken, incestuous, unworthy, stupid. You did not resist temptation. The creator is guilty. The creator is as weak as his creatures. Look at yourself. Look…”

The Lord of the Great Voice extended to me a staff holding many mirrors. I closed my eyes so as not to see myself. I murmured an argument that suddenly flared in my memory: “The ancient Lord of Memory told me we were three, three were the creators, one of life, another of death, and the third of the memory that sustains life and death … And if he was memory, and I life, you must be death, death on earth, not the death I knew beneath the earth…”

“The old man lied. We have always been two. Only two. You, the hunchbacked, boil-plagued dwarf who dared leap into the brazier of creation; I, the well-formed and handsome prince who did not have the courage to do so. You returned whole, splendid, golden, rewarded for your sacrifice, with no sign of your former monstrosity but the six toes on each foot and the red cross upon your back: the seal of your passage through the fire, like the spots of the ocelot and the deer. I … look at me … crippled … destroyed by the vengeful contortions of our mother, the earth…”

“You and I, alone…”

“I alone, from now on. Only I, without your pursuing shadow, my double, the always present accuser, watching me over your shoulder, telling me I err, that I do evil, that my power is cruel and bloody, and also unsure and transitory, that you will return to revive the power of goodness … Look at yourself now … My legitimacy will be founded upon your failure. Never again will you disturb our order. Today I burned the papers of your legend. There is nothing more written about you. I shall begin there, I will convert your memory into ashes like those I swept away with my broom.”

I was speaking with my eyes closed. I implored: “Tell me one thing. Answer one question. I have the right to one question tonight.”

My dark double, who saw his dark double in me, waited in silence. I spit blood. I said only: “Tell me: what did I do during the twenty days I have forgotten?”

Sire: the laughter of the one called Smoking Mirror exploded like the wave that had that morning swept over the poorest houses of this city, it burst into echoes against the walls of this sacred room and washed back converted into words, and those words were an irresistible command: “Look, I tell you to look; look in the mirrors on this staff, which is the staff of our lord Xipe Totec, the flayed god, the one who gives his life for the next harvest, the one who escapes from himself as he escapes from his skin; look in the mirrors of his staff, and you will have the answer to your question.”

I opened my eyes. The Lord of the Great Voice held the staff in his left hand, supporting himself upon it. This was now his cane.

A cane of lights: each mirror glittered and every gleam was a terrible scene of death, slashed throats, conflagration, frightful war, and in each I was the protagonist, I was the white, blond, bearded man on horseback, armed with a crossbow, armed with a sword, a cross of gold embroidered upon his breast, I was that man who set fire to temples, destroyed idols, fired cannons against the warriors of this land armed only with lances and arrows, I was the centaur who devastated the same fields, the same plains, the same jungles of my pilgrimage from the coast, my mounted troops trampled whole towns, cities were reduced to dark ashes by my wrathful torches, I ordered the beheading of the festival dancers at the pyramids, I raped the women and branded the men like cattle, I denied the paternity of the sons of whores I left behind me, I charged the poor of this land with heavy burdens and at whiplash set them on their road, I melted into bars the gold, the jewels, the walls and floors of the new world, I spread pox and cholera to the inhabitants of these lands, I, I, it was I who knifed the inhabitants of the town of the jungle, this time they did not immolate themselves in my honor, to honor the god who had returned, the promise of good: this time I killed them, I ordered the hands and feet of rebels to be amputated, I, I, laden with gold and corpses and laments and shadows, I sank into the muddy swamps of a lagoon that receded a little every time a bearer defeated by his burden, a woman branded on the lips, a child born in the desert, fell dead into its waters: the lagoon was a cemetery and I emerged from it, bathed in gold and blood, to reconquer a city without inhabitants, a mausoleum of solitudes …