Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“My flowers will never cease…”

“My song will never cease…”

“I raise it…”

“We, too, raise new songs here…”

“Also, new flowers are in our hands…”

“With them delight the assemblage of our friends…”

“With them dissipate the sadness of our hearts…”

“I gather your songs; I string them like emeralds…”

“Adorn yourself with them…”

“On this earth they are your only riches…”

“Will my heart fade away, solitary as the perishing flowers?”

“Will my name one day be nothing?”

“At least, flowers; at least, songs…”

The old man watched me looking and listening. And when at last I again looked at him, I was possessed by conflicting sensations of happiness and sadness.

He asked: “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Then the ancient of memory seized my hand and leaned close to me, and his words were like carved air, written air: “You gave the word to all men, brother. And your enemy will always feel threatened because of fear of the word all men possess. He himself a prisoner. Enclosed in his palace. Imagining there is no voice but his own. Lord of the Great Voice! Hear the voices of all those in this plaza. Know that you are more defeated than all your victims.”

He addressed himself to the midday sun. It had risen above the great plaza of life and death, freedom and slavery, unending struggle, and as its light bathed each of these men and women and children who with hands and arms and voices and feet and eyes were keeping something precious present and alive — cheerful labor, friendly wisdom, bodily pleasure, secret hope — a different light, born perhaps of them, bathed me within, illuminated my blood and my bones, rose to my eyes and filled them with luminous tears.

“Have I or shall I live what I now know, my lord?”

“You have and you will live it. Why would you be removed from the conflict of all men, past or future?”

“I shall not forget your words.”

“You will not suffer if you believe, as I, that the unity I promised will be born of encounter, of the combat and combination of the two worlds. Of the collapse of the walls that separate us.”

“I believed that you lied. In your world I had experienced only signs of a petrified duality.”

“We are three, we shall always be three. Life. Death. And the memory that blends them into a single flower of three petals.”

“Yesterday?”

“Now.”

“Tomorrow?”

“The present that never ceased to be the past and is now the future. Then we shall, as I promised you, reunite with our mother the earth. We shall be one with her and we shall endure all the battles of history, the victory of your defeat, and the defeat of the victorious.”

All times were joined in the eyes of the ancient.

I knew it, but I could not read them.

He pressed my hand. “Now go with your friends. They will guide you on your return.”

He dropped my hand and sank into his basket of cotton, covering his face with his hands.

For the last time, muffled, the voice of that ancient I had believed forever dead was reborn, muffled by cotton, the basket, the sun, his hands:

“Let no one deceive you, ancient brother, newborn son. Freedom was the shore that man first trod. Paradise was the name of that freedom. Inch by inch, we lost it. Inch by inch, we shall regain it. Let no one deceive you, son, brother. You will never return to this shore. Never again will there be the absolute freedom we knew before the first death. But there will be freedom in spite of death. It can be named. And sung. And loved. And dreamed. And desired. Fight for it. You will be defeated. This is the victory I offer you in freedom’s name.”

A fearful noise followed these words. The sky filled with clouds. A muddy rain fell upon the plaza. My young companions surrounded me, as if they wished to protect me. They prevented me from seeing what was happening, they forced me to turn around:

“Do not look back…”

“Quickly, run…”

“The boat awaits you…”

I ran with them toward the causeway, while behind us the detonations continued beneath the rain, the shouting at first was stronger than the detonations, then quieter than the dark and persistent rain.

Silence triumphed.

And from the silence arose a new chorus of voices which pursued us as we ran along the causeway:

“The weeping spreads…”

“Teardrops fall here in Tlatelolco…”

“Where are we going? Oh, friends!”

“Smoke is rising…”

“Mist is spreading…”

“Water has become bitter; food, rancid…”

“Worms pullulate in streets and plazas…”

“Brains are splattered on the walls…”

“The waters run red…”

“Our water is foul, and salty…”

“Our birthright is a mesh of holes…”

“They place a price upon us…”

“A price on youth, on priesthood, on the child and the maiden…”

“Weep, my friends…”

We stopped beside a heavy boat moored to a stele and built of broad planks bound together with the bodies of serpents.

For the last time I looked at the outlines of the city. Night was falling precipitously, summoned early by the pitch-black clouds, the rain, and whirlwinds of dust that struggled against it, unquelled by the storm: a city bathed in darkness, I did not recognize its new and spectral face: its towers were taller and their infinite windows, all of mirrors, like the staff of the flayed god, glittered in the storm, its walls were cracked and crowned with flickering lights, red, white, blue, green, dust-covered lights that winked and signaled with regularity, unaffected by the fury of the elements, tenacious as the fires I had seen upon my arrival, fires the water had merely fanned.

I heard the tolling of deep bells, an impatient roaring, not merely the solitary sound of the drum and the conch, but of thousands and thousands of hoarse whistles, as if the city were invaded by an army of frogs; great was the croaking, but becoming silent beneath the pestilent gray scum overspreading the landscape, veiling the nearby volcanoes, slowly, heavily, asphyxiatingly veiling the entire valley: a shroud fell over Mexico and Tlatelolco.

It was night. It was also an imitation of night.

NIGHT OF THE RETURN

In spite of everything, conquering this avalanche of shadows, as hidden as a pin in a bog, I saw shining, reborn, distant, but at the level of my gaze, the evening star, illuminating the final night of the vast unknown of this land. Now, at last, I would know.

The serpent boat awaited me. My twenty young friends had stopped with me on the causeway between Mexico and Tlatelolco to contemplate the night of the city. One of them was untying the ropes that moored the boat to a low stone stele. A tense melancholy hovered over our group. It was the moment to say goodbye, but until this moment these youths and I had said nothing, or almost nothing. Nonetheless, I said to myself, smiling, they are the only ones here who speak the tongue of Castile, though with traces of the inhabitants of this land: sweet, singing, stripped of the brutal tones of our own accents; theirs, the trilling of birds; ours, the trampling of boots.

No, I thought immediately, disquieted, they are not the only ones; the ancient of memories, too, spoke to me in Castilian; he replied to my questions in that language … My questions. How many I had asked him, how many he had answered; why, if I had the right only to one question each day and another each night, why did he break that agreement in the center of the great plaza of Tlatelolco; why…? The question escaped my lips before I could capture it, before thinking it might be the last I could ask: “Why is that ancient with whom I spoke in the plaza still alive? I swear it: I saw him die of fear one day, and be thrown to the vultures…”