Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Will the number 3 appear instead?”

“This does not depend on me. Will a third child be born?”

THE KNIGHT OF THE SORROWFUL COUNTENANCE

Celestina expected the nun to kiss her fire-scarred hands, but it did not happen.

The resigned nun disappeared behind the closed doors of the convent and for a moment Celestina stood in the street staring at the corpse of the murdered cavalier, trying to understand his last words, saddened because she understood none of it. What wisdom could she possibly transmit, knowing nothing?

She walked slowly, not knowing whether she was dreaming or waking, far from the scene of the duel, toward the port of Almofada, and as she was passing by an inn she heard a great commotion and a stout, ruddy-complexioned peasant came running out of the inn, raising a great alarm, and when he saw her he took her by the arm and said to her: Here, wench, whoever you may be, please help me, for my master has gone mad and I believe you are the only one who can restore in him a little calm and reason; try to behave like a fine lady, although it matters very little, since he sees nobility where there is only meanness, and perceives fine breeding in those of lowest office.

In the courtyard of the inn four serving boys and the innkeeper were mercilessly tossing in a blanket a thin-shanked old man with a short white beard and eyes of saintly choler; as this unfortunate sailed through the air he shouted and cried out: Knaves, villains, varlets; and the innkeeper shouted even more loudly: Go to the devil, you son of Satan, for you have run through all my wineskins with your rusty old sword till there is nothing left but a sieve, and the knight shouted, no, they were giants, they were magicians and enchanters come to challenge him by night, in the shadows, like cowards, but they had not counted on the always ready sword that had subdued the furies of Brandabarbarán de Boliche, Lord of all Araby, but as that does not apply in this instance, sobbed the peasant, do as your master orders and sit with him to take a meal, for neither master nor meal will be mine after this adventure; I came naked into this world, and naked I find myself now, I neither gain nor lose, and at that moment the knight’s bones hit the dust, and as he lay there the serving boys thrashed him with poles, laughing uproariously, and then went about their chores.

“Those cowardly knaves had more arms than the hundred possessed by the titan Briareo,” moaned the flogged knight when he could bring himself to speak, amidst sounds of pigs, asses, and hens; with cloths dampened in water his peasant squire soothed his wounds, murmuring, “Whether the pitcher falls upon stone or stone upon pitcher, it’s all bad for the pitcher, but you must see. Your Mercy, that there is no evil from which some good does not result, and now you can lift your beard from the mud, your efforts were not in vain, for with them you freed this most illustrious and exalted lady who is here beside me, Señor, and who comes to thank you for the heroic deed you performed last night, which freed her from the captivity of magicians…”

The cudgeled knight stared intently at Celestina, then at the peasant, and trembled with rage. “Is this how you mock me, my friend? Do you believe I am so addled my eyes would not clearly see before me this old witch, this bawd?; when she passes by, the very stones shout out, ‘Old whore!’ and she has rubbed her back raw in every brothel in the land. Though you not believe it, I was once young, and it was at the hands of this same false, stubble-chinned, evil old woman I lost my virtue, for promising to gain me access to the bedchamber of my beloved, she instead in her own chamber drugged me with love philters and took me for herself, I having paid in advance. I know you well, greedy, tongue-clacking, foul-mouthed old witch, may you burn in Hell, shameless, prevaricating sophist, bawd, magpie, trotting around convents to further your vile trade; and you delivered my beloved Dulcinea to another, for more money, what are you doing in these lands? ah, grubby, greedy go-between, you may be a plum, a purple-juiced juror in the tribunal of lust, but you’ll not get two prunes from me … Be off with her, Sancho, for I am seething with rage, I knew her as a youth, I thought her dead — ha! let Judas believe it! — and may God grant you evil Easters, the bad weed never dies! And you, squire, why do you try to bring me a cat for a hare, and foist off scrubbing girls and whores and bawds in the stead of princesses? Do you think I am blind? Do you think I do not recognize the real reality of things? Windmills are giants. But Celestina is not Dulcinea. Come, Sancho, let us leave Toledo, which Livy wisely labeled urbs parva, lesser city … for wide is Castile!”

A SICK DREAM

Do you begin to understand, woman? I shall make use of Ludovico. You will tell him what has happened to you. He will scold you affectionately for having wandered beyond the limits of the Jewry: you see? you were recognized twice. I feared that. You have been in the streets. I, in the libraries. Do we now know the same things? This is what I wrote after reading, and after listening to you. What is thought, is. What is, is thought. I travel from spirit to matter. I return from matter to spirit. There are no frontiers. Nothing is forbidden me. I believe I am several persons mentally. Then I am several persons physically. I fall in love in a dream. Then I encounter the loved being when I awake. Did you not go to the burial of the cavalier who died in the duel before the convent? I did. Your story wakened my curiosity. I arrived early, before the mourners, even though I assumed they would be few, given the dead man’s evil reputation. I looked at him, lying within his coffin. His beard had grown in the two days following his death. I looked at his hands. His fingernails had grown, too. I separated the hands crossed upon his breast. All the lines of fortune and life, intelligence and love, had disappeared from the palms: they were a white wall, two newly whitewashed walls. Upon his breast, other hands — these still blessed with fortune and life, intelligence and love — had placed a paper with these words:

Let him be warned who doubts God’s wrath:

His hand will not be stayed.

There is no time that will not come,

Nor debt that not be paid.

Again I looked at his face. It had changed. It had been transformed. It was not the face of the man you saw die in the street. It was not the face I had seen as I quietly entered the temple, before I had parted his hands and read that paper. He was a different man. Do you understand, Celestina? This horrified me. Once more I looked at the new face of the dead man and told myself: This is the face that one of our children, the one we abducted from the castle, will possess when he becomes a man. How shall I know? I could search through the streets, as you have done, for a man who has the dead man’s face. Or I could wait, patiently, for twenty years and then know whether, as he matures, this child will have the dead man’s face. Wait. I left the temple of the Christ of the Light, previously the mosque of Bib-al-Mardan, turning my back upon the coffin, murmuring what today I write and read to you:

“One lifetime is not sufficient. Many existences are needed to fulfill one personality.”

Two men said they had known you long ago. Both believed you were old; one of them, dead. Imagine what I have read and written and now communicate to you. Each child, one born every minute, reincarnates in each of the persons who die every minute. It is not possible to know in whom we reincarnate because there are no actual witnesses who can recognize that being we reincarnate. But if there were one single witness capable of recognizing me as the person I had been, then what? He stops me in the street … before dismounting from a horse, or entering an inn … he takes my arm … he forces me to participate in a past life that had been mine. He is a survivor; the only one who can know that I am reincarnated.