Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Seeing a captain of his troop emerging from one of the houses, El Señor shouted to him: “What is happening? What does this mean?” The captain, his face flushed, told El Señor that his Spanish soldiers were ripping apart the beds in search of the gold they had heard this Northern race of misers and usurers hid beneath their pillows; had the inhabitants still been there, the soldiers would happily have thrown them from the windows, but they had fled in fright, perhaps leaving their savings behind. At least, that’s what the soldiers hoped. Don’t they know that this is a Crusade of the Faith and not a war of spoils, El Señor asked his captain. Don’t they know that of all the Princes of Christendom the Pope named me Defensor Fides and charged me with the eradication of this Flemish heresy? The captain shook his head. Crusade or no, the men engaged in these wars are hired soldiers, Sire, and they don’t fight for pleasure or for sacrifice; they fight because war is their profession, and it doesn’t matter to them whom they fight as long as they get their wages and their spoils. If he wanted a crusade, El Señor should enlist the peasants of his domains, but those peasants knew only the plow; they couldn’t manage a sword — much less a crossbow or a firearm or the big cannon that gave us the victory, praise God, and thanks to His providence it will not be said of us, as it is of unsuccessful armies, that the throne of military honor rests upon the triumphs of one’s enemy. Resign yourself, Sire; accept the dishonor of the sacking, for it is proof of victory; the honor of the vanquished serves only as food for worms and flies.

The captain walked away, and that afternoon neither flowers nor terrified burghers rained down upon El Señor from the windows overhead, only stuffing from gutted pillows and mattresses. And dogs devoured the bodies of the dead in the streets, not the worms and flies the captain had invoked. Gripped with rage, El Señor stopped before the great Cathedral and directed a crossbowman to throw open the portals of this magnificent Gothic temple, the ancient tomb of martyrs, and a collegiate church; he ordered the church bells rung, he would convene a grand Te Deum in honor of the victory against the enemies of the Faith. The crossbowmen seemed nervous, even aggrieved; some covered their faces, whether to hide their laughter or to shield against the stink of the bodies piled high in the atrium, it would be difficult to judge. As El Señor watched the soldier open the Cathedral doors, he said to himself, knowing he could never, he must never, reveal an instant’s doubt: “Always that moment of uncertainty between the order and its execution…”

When the doors were opened, he himself was forced to cover his nose and mouth with a gauntleted hand; from inside the Cathedral came a foul excremental odor that mingled with the stench of the dead heaped in the street.

Laughing, shouting German soldiers and horsemen were running up and down the naves; some were defecating at the foot of the altar, others were urinating in the confessionals, and dogs wandering in and out of the temple, not satisfied with the banquet of human carrion in the streets, were lapping up the vomit of the drunken troops. Even before El Señor gave the order, his crossbowmen made a brusque and aggressive movement, prepared to expel their companions from the Cathedral, arrest them … or perhaps they intended only to advise them that El Señor was standing watching from the shadow of the threshold. But El Señor signaled them to stop; then, irresolute, he stood toying with his lip.

Surely his duty was first to discipline the crossbowmen who had not prevented the profanation, and second to punish the profaners themselves. But he felt a stronger, a mortifying, impulse to linger behind one of the columns in a dark corner of the Cathedral. With a gesture, he ordered his men to leave him in the Cathedral. He listened to their reluctant footsteps, and then the great doors closed and El Señor was alone with a feeling of personal defeat that more than offset the satisfaction of the great military victory of this day; the anonymous captain was mistaken, it would be better for honor to derive from the triumph of the enemy if such dishonor was the fruit of victory. He rested his head against the column; he was overcome (are you listening, poor Bocanegra) by the repulsive odors and raucous noises of the German mercenaries who had won the day for the Faith.

It was difficult to see clearly what was happening by the altar; the guttural accents of a black-clad horseman stood out above the base and drunken voices. Everyone stopped to listen, and after he had finished speaking in his Teutonic tongue, his companions shouted “Long lives!” and “To the deaths!” They retrieved their swords and their cuirasses, the copper of the Danubians and the black that gave the name to the Rhenish band, thrown carelessly in the heaps of stinking excrement, black and copper, at the foot of the altar; and in the thick darkness the assault began, sword against sword, Rhinelander against Austrian, the Black Band against those in copper armor, shouting insults, threatening death, and howling in agonistic ecstasy, and as I could not see them clearly, Bocanegra, I closed my eyes and remembered similar profanations in the past; I imagined that this monstrous din and nauseating stench might have accompanied earlier scenes: the French crusaders in Hagia Sophia, where they had sat a whore upon the throne of the Patriarch and drunk from the sacred ciboria, all the while singing obscene rondelets; and I recalled the taking of the temple of Jerusalem by Christian horsemen who rode through the sacred nave in blood up to their knees; but that was the blood of infidels, Bocanegra.

Leaning against the column, he felt infinitely weary. The victory had drained him. Him, yes, but not the warriors; they’d not had enough, and the battle was continuing inside the Cathedral; those German reiters were far surpassing the obligations of their mercenaries’ salaries. He stood there a long while, eyes closed, secretly fascinated (yes, Bocanegra, I can tell you) with the spectacle God had visited upon him, he was convinced (I am convinced), to dilute the pride of military victory, to propose that the victory of arms be set aside and that instead we recall the unending battle for the salvation of souls. For what was this war but the struggle between Christianity and these heretics who had found refuge beside the icy Northern Seas, against the last Waldenses and Cathari, who now called themselves Adamites, who disguised themselves under the name of the father Adam and claimed to live as God’s first creature lived before the Fall?

“Since there is nothing worse than our world, Purgatory and Hell do not exist; because man’s nature is sinful, and since that nature is acquired on earth, it is here that sin must be purged; man fell because of sensuality, therefore he must infernally exhaust himself in sexual excess to cleanse himself of every vestige of this bestial tendency; then he will be purified, and when he dies he will become one with the Celestial Body; we deny, therefore, that Jesus Christ and His saints come at the hour of death to give solace to the souls of the just, since life is pain and no soul leaves this earth without great pain; and we maintain that as compensation no soul retains any awareness or memory after death of what it loved in its Age. So be it.”

These words coming from the darkness surrounding El Señor turned his blood to ice. At first he thought the speaker was one of the three buried there who had been martyred by Nero; then as he looked toward the silent sepulchers of Gaius, Victoricus, and Germanicus, he imagined it must be the very darkness speaking.

“Adam was the first Prince of the world, and when he came into his kingdom he had an intimation of his destiny: Adam, the first commandment of your religion is this: your flesh will sin today so that tomorrow you will be pure of soul and may conquer death. Your body will not be resurrected, but if it has been cleansed by pleasure, your purified soul will unite with God’s, and you will be God, and like God your soul will have no memory of the time lived on earth. But if you have not fornicated you will be doomed to Hell, and be reincarnated in the form of a beast until with a beast’s instinct you expend what you were unable to vanquish with the intelligence of a man.”