Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

She did not look toward the figure lying upon her bed.

She gazed through the half-open window, sniffing the coming rain, the summer storm, water from the east, the great bath for the dirty land that forbade ablutions, the absorption by water of strength indispensable for war and sanctity and affliction; the increasing drumming of raindrops upon dry earth, on canvas tents of forges and taverns on the work site, on paving stones of the palace. Each drop: pleasure; she had asked nothing more; she had not solicited these love affairs, these diabolical pacts, these black arts: she had sought nothing more than a little indulgence of her senses.

Her head resting upon her closed fist, she dreamed of the East, the Indies, the Crusades; she was living in a castle at the time of the Crusades, discovering unknown pleasures, drop by drop, a rosary of pleasures; everything that is pleasure is foreign, it comes to us from afar, Mihail, Juan, the rosary, the rosary itself came from Syria, beads of the rosary of pleasure, rice, sugar, sesame, melon, lemon, orange, peach, artichoke: a rain of delectable spices, cinnamon, ginger, perfume; a solid sheet of cotton, satin, damask, carpets; a rain shower of new colors, indigo, carmine, lilac.

“Everything that hangs, that one can taste or smell, comes from very far away.”

Water, love of water; seas, oceans, rivers, sails and rudders, pitch and distant swallows, oars and anchors, sail, sail far from here to the lands of pleasure, far from the rivers of my English fogs and Spanish shadows, far, far away; here pleasure is evil, phantoms are born of fog and shadow; lands of the sun where pleasure is good, it is to you I long to travel, to the East, to the Indies; who will carry me there? Let us go south, Mihail, to Andalusia, to Cádiz, we shall make love upon the sea, you should never have come here, you should have remained beside the sea … love of water …

She drank deeply from her water pitcher, then poured what was left upon the sand, as if she wished to create a beach, a shore, a place where she might sail away from the prison of her bedchamber of sands and tiles and cushions; and where she had emptied the pitcher, in the center of the damp stain spreading across the sand, something stirred, as if the sand were germinating, a plant being born from this sterility, a bud, a seed of life, a caterpillar struggling from the cocoon of the damp sands, wet grains of sand, a homunculus, insignificant, diminutive, a living root bursting forth, baptized by the water she had drunk, convoked by water, a moist tuber, the mandrake, torn from the earth of death, born of the tears of a hanged man, of a man burned alive, the mandrake, at last I understand, torn from the burned earth beneath the ashes of Mihail-ben-Sama, Miguel-of-Life, ashes mixed with sand, the root of the mandrake, quickly, two cherries for his eyes: he shall see; a radish for a mouth: he shall speak; wheat, wheat sown upon the tiny head, I have none, bread, the crust of bread, bread crumbs upon his head: his hair shall grow, he shall see, he shall speak; he will tell me his secrets, he knows where the treasures are, little turnip, little man, you were here all the time, hidden in my own bedchamber, where did these sands come from? oh, they must be the sands of death, ash, and dust collected from beneath all the racks, all the stakes where men have died, mandrake, weeping, mandrake, that they might give you life, drops of their tears, drops of their sperm, mandrake, for the hanged man, the burned man, the impaled man, mandrake, everyone knows, dies with his last erection …

How still it is. Where is everyone?

THE DECREE

The voice of the pilgrim was silent.

The music of the blind Aragonese beggar had ceased.

The curtains around El Señor’s bed remained drawn, the sails that had brought the shipwrecked sailor to the high plains of Castile, led by a woman dressed as a page, and behind which he had recounted to El Señor his voyage and had divined El Señor’s reactions — his trembling, his fear, his anger, his desire to interrupt the narration, to rise from the curule chair and call an end to this unwonted audience, to order all the court to return to their chambers, their cells, their towers — but not his desires: to be left alone with his mortification, then to ask Guzmán for ointments, brews, rings, and magic stones, then to ask Inés to return once again, one more night …

Trembling and panting, El Señor half rose to his feet. Though his legs were feeble, his face was a mask severe as stone, and his voice was muted thunder: “Be you hereby warned that it will in no manner be allowed that any person write of the superstitions and the way of life you have heard recounted here, nor allowed that they be repeated by any tongue, for such would be contrary to the service of God Our Lord and our…”

And collapsing again onto the curule chair, he joined his hands, cracked his fingers, and added, weighing each word: “We hereby decree … that a … new … world … does not … exist…”

He gazed into the silence around him. With a disdainful flick of his hand, he dismissed the company.

With his own imperious gesture, Guzmán ripped back, one by one, the curtains that veiled the bed’s three occupants. “And what, Sire, will you do with the bearers of this news?”

“Guards … halberdiers … take them into custody … place them … in the deepest dungeon…”

“Torture, surely, Señor; they have not told everything they know…”

“Let no one touch them. Guard them zealously. Later I shall speak with them. Not now, Guzmán, I want everyone to leave; you, too; my fatigue is great; be off, all of you, be off!”

RUMORS

Alguaciles and chaplains, monks and stewards, Julián and Toribio, Guzmán and the Comendador, the halberdiers taking charge of the three prisoners, the young pilgrim, the blind flautist, the girl with the tattooed lips dressed as a page, the nuns fluttering behind the iron latticework, the Bishop and his companion, the monk of the order of St. Augustine, the scrubbing girls hidden behind the columns, the huntsmen, Guzmán’s men, all hurrying from the chapel, murmuring, lost in amazement, doubt, mockery, deafness, credulity, incomprehension, fear, indifference, hurrying swiftly from the vicinity of El Señor’s bedchamber, could you hear anything? I couldn’t, and you? nor I, what did they say? nothing, pure fantasy, what did they say? nothing, pure lies, lands of gold, lands of idols, beaches of pearls, blood, sacrifices, infidels, teach them, truth, the Gospel, barbaric nations, exterminate them, blood and fire, idolaters, by the handfuls, dreams, lies, not one shred of proof, they didn’t bring even one grain of gold with them, fucking, they were fucking, two men, two sodomites, no, one was a woman in disguise, and one an old man, a flautist, and one a young man, a sailor, and they were all in one bed together, fucking, Babylon, take your pleasure and you’ll die an old man, quarreling and loving make all men equal, madmen, lies, save us, God, from madmen in dangerous straits, but in this palace, eh? fantasies, fairy treasure, God, Our Father, what happened, Mother Milagros? nothing, daughters, nothing, still another challenge to the Faith, still another, always a challenge, Christianity bleeds from battling against the Infidel, the Body of Christ, the rack of the cross, the redemption of sins, praise, praise, praise be, scurrying like little mice among the sumptuous tombs of the ancestors, trampling unawares over the bulk that is the mutilated body of the Queen called the Mad Lady, avoiding the forbidden stairway that leads to the plain, avoiding the strange painting brought, it is said, from Orvieto, abandoning the icy chapel to its solitary inhabitants, the corpse of the Mad Lady, Don Juan, a statue of himself, resting upon a tomb, and inside another sepulcher, by his own choice, the Idiot Prince, and close to him, hidden, containing her rage, the whorish, farting dwarf, and again through tunnels and courtyards, galleries and kitchens, stables and passageways, bedchambers and dungeons, the rumor: “There is a new world beyond the sea”