Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Terrified by these visions, bleating like an animal, pawing like a beast, I pushed away the staff of mirrors; the crippled man lost his balance and fell to the floor beside me.

His face, identical to mine, looked into mine, we were both lying upon the stone floor of the sacred room, staring at each other like animals lying in ambush, our teeth bared in a snarl, saliva dribbling from our jaws, our chests touching the floor, elbows cocked, hands pressing against stone, clawing, we were poised to leap.

“Is that what I did … what you have always done…!”

I asked it, Sire, but terror and fatigue and shortness of breath drowned out the question and offered it to my double as an affirmation.

Frothing at the mouth, he answered: “That is what you will do … The mirrors of this staff see into the future…”

I felt, Sire, as if I were going mad: the compass of my mind had lost its directional needle, my identities were spilling over and multiplying beyond all contact with minimal human reason, I was a prisoner of the most tenebrous magic, the magic represented in stone in this pantheon of all the gods and goddesses I could not conquer in this land, who with fearful grimaces mocked my oneness and imposed upon me their monstrous proliferation, destroying the arguments of unity I had meant to carry as an offering to this world, yes, and also the simple unity in which that total unity was to be maintained: my own, the unity of my person. I looked upon the faces of the idols: they did not understand what I was saying.

What proof did I have, except what I had carried from the coasts of Spain in the pocket of my doublet? Against the mirages of this land, against the fatal staff of the flayed god, against the limpid reflection in the head of the crane, against the very name of Smoking Mirror, against the incomprehensible images of the twenty days of my other destiny, the destiny forgotten because it was still to be fulfilled, or perhaps the destiny fulfilled because it was already forgotten, I had opposed my own small mirror, the one Pedro and I used on the ship that brought us here when we performed the office of barber, the mirror I had shown to the distressed ancient of memories in the temple chamber: my mirror, and my scissors.

I removed both from my doublet, stretched out there like a wild beast facing an enemy beast, my double, Smoking Mirror, the Lord of the Great Voice, also stretched out on the floor, serpents, each of us, staring at one another, lying in ambush, awaiting the next movement of the opponent.

“Do you yourself not fear what I have seen in the staff of mirrors?” I asked him.

“I do not fear what resembles me. I feared you in the forest, when you chose your desire over my heart. Today I ceased to fear you when you converted the power I gave you into desire. If you believe that my mirrors lie, look at yourself in your own.”

Sire: what that ancient of memories must have felt when I showed him his reflection, I now felt when I saw myself, for my own mirror returned to me the face of the ancient who died of terror when he found he was old: in my own mirror I saw myself burdened with time, upon the threshold of death, stricken and ruined, toothless and desiccated, pale and tremulous, immersed in the basket filled with pearls and cotton; I saw myself, Sire, and I told myself I had never moved from the basket under the bower where the men of the river had placed me one night in their town in the jungle; I told myself that the truth was what I imagined then: sitting in that basket I would wait for death to devour me, to become as ancient as the old man I had killed with my mirror; now the mirror is killing me. I had never moved from that town. Everything else, up to the present moment, I had merely dreamed. It was my destiny to see myself, motionless, grow old in this fleeting image. Moons, suns, days, stars, shelter me, water clock, hourglass, book of hours, stone calendar, tides and tempests, do not abandon me, bind me to time, I lose count of the days of Venus, repeating alone that the days of my destiny in this strange land can be only the number indicated by the ancient in the temple: the days of my destiny stolen from the days of the sun; the masked days stolen from the days of my destiny; I have imagined those five sterile days thieved from evil fortune for the purpose of winning them at the moment of my death; but today I have imagined also the twenty days of the sun stolen from the time of my destiny, the twenty days of my evil fortune, the twenty days of my forgotten death which will inevitably occur in the future. How to measure them? How to know whether one day of my time was a century of this time?

I saw myself, an ancient, in my mirror; I choked back a cry; I longed to rejoin my lover, the old woman, the witch, the atrocious female, the murderess, and be reborn with her into youth; it was not possible; our times would never coincide; she would be young again; I was racing toward old age, toward the image in the mirror, the image of the ancient of the temple; he who granted me the time of my memory and whom I killed with the time of my mirror; blindly, I was approaching the time of space and the space of time; the image of the double lay before me, transfixing me with his eyes of black glass; he had granted me the time of my premonition and I would kill him with my scissors; I raised them, and drove them into his face, ripping the face that was my face, I sliced his gaze with my fragile twin steel blades, again I raised the scissors, I struck the back of the Lord of the Great Voice, my double rolled over with a horrible spasm, and I plunged the scissors into his chest, his belly, and his black blood spread across the broad stones of the chapel, and sprinkled the flowers, insects, brooms, the feet of the stone gods.

I rose to my feet, my hands dripping blood.

Sire: I knew then that I must flee, that the twenty days of carnage of my life beneath the sun of Mexico were counted, that I had only one day to flee from that destiny, to repudiate it with my absence, to return to the sea, return to my true guide, Venus, to cling to her sails and on the sea save myself, or drown, but never to submit to the destiny I had forgotten and which the mirrors of the staff recalled to me.

For the last time I looked at the slashed body of my dark double. Again I looked at my blood-covered hands. The legend had ended. The fable would not repeat itself again. My enemy and I had killed the awaited god of peace, union, and happiness. So died the one called the Plumed Serpent. But also — I thought then — so died the one called Smoking Mirror. And with them died their secret: they were one.

DAY OF FLIGHT

Disoriented, I fled from the sacred chamber and lost myself in the stone labyrinths of the city of the lagoon. I was again the person I had been in the beginning, the castaway in tattered clothing, with three wretched possessions: a mirror, my scissors, and now a mask of feathers and spiders.

I was lost. I did not know whether the palace was the city or the city the palace, where a plaza ended and a market began, where a market ended and a causeway began; I fled clad in the armor of fear — but armed only with my bones, and combating an enormous emptiness: empty, the gardens of the birds and snakes and ferocious beasts; empty, the temples; empty, the markets; empty, the canals, the boats abandoned on the shores of the islands; I fled; the city seemed to flee with me; perhaps it had fled before me, and I was merely following in its flight toward the dawn, my last dawn in this new world where I had arrived a year, ten years, a century, before, accompanied by old Pedro who was searching for a free land, his parcel of happiness, the new world emancipated from the injustices, oppressions, and crimes of the old.

Oh, my dear old friend, you died in good hour, you were spared disappointment; all you would have known here — with different causes, with different clothing, with different ceremonies — were the same cruel powers you thought you had abandoned as you embarked with Venus, and with me, on that long-ago morning.