Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

This child and you. The world and you, Celestina. You have wandered the streets of Toledo searching for the one who could recognize you. You found two men who knew your eternal name and your variable destinies. It does not matter. Go out again. There are others who do not speak — but who see us; those who do not see — but who remember us; those who do not remember — but who imagine us. That is enough to decide our fate, though we never exchange a word. Who are the immortals? This is what I have read, this is what I wrote, let me read it to you:

“Those who lived many times, those who reappear from time to time; those who had more life than their own death, but less time than their own life.”

What is the shared wisdom of God and the Devil, Celestina? The Cabala says nothing disappears completely, everything is transformed, what we believe to be dead has but changed place. Places remain; we do not see them change place. But what is time but measurement, invention, imagination? What is, is thought. What is thought, is. Times change space, join together or are superimposed, and then separate. We can travel from one time to another, Celestina, without changing space. But he who voyages from one time to another and does not return in time to the present loses his memory of the past (if it was from the past he arrived) or his memory of the future (if it was there he had his origins). He is captured by the present. The present is his life. And each of us, without exception, returns late to our present: time does not stop to await us while we travel to the past or the future; we always arrive late; a minute or a century, it is the same. We can no longer remember that we were also living before or after the present. Perhaps this was your pact with the Devil: to live in our present without memory of your past or your future, if it was from them you arrived at our today.

I imagine, woman, I only imagine; I read, I write, I listen, I tell you. What did that dead cavalier and the cudgeled knight remember when they saw you? Who you were, where you lived before, where you died before, Celestina? I am thinking for you. If I wished to rid myself of the memory of something hideously sad, this would be my pact with the Devil: “Take my memory and I will give you my soul.”

God cannot undo what has been done. The Devil, on the other hand, affirms that he can convert what was into what was not. Thus, through the Devil, God challenges and tempts man. But as we forget a hideous event, do we not also run the risk of forgetting the best of our lives, our parents’ love, a woman’s beauty, a man’s passion, the joy of friendship, everything? This is the Devil’s condition, woman: to forget everything or to forget nothing.

Do you know that this morning the elder of our two children, the one we stole from the castle, crawled out the door as if he wished to tell me goodbye. I smiled at him and blew him a kiss. I had scarcely taken two steps before a hand stopped me: a cold, pale, almost wax-like hand. It was a cloaked cavalier.

“Who is that child?” he asked me in a voice deadened by the folds of his cape.

“He is mine,” I replied.

“Look at my face,” he said to me, uncovering himself.

I looked at him carefully, without noting anything unusual except an excessive paleness similar to that of his hands. He recognized my indifference; he touched his cheek, then extended both hands and showed them to me. “Look. My beard continues to grow. My fingernails continue to grow. Does that not seem extraordinary to you?”

I told him no. Then he turned his hands over to show me his smooth and unlined palms. I concealed my amazement; I know that the cavalier wanted to smile, but pain prevented him; I noticed then the rosette of dried blood upon his breast; I tried to offer my arm to assist him; he stopped me with a disdainful gesture and a few hollow, sonorous words: “Every man born becomes a body for every man who dies. Do you want to know the face the child who crawled out to say goodbye to you a moment ago will possess in twenty years? Go directly to the temple of the Christ of the Light. You will find me there. And you will see the face your son will possess. I was unable to terminate my life.”

You say that cavalier died two days ago in a duel? Go, then, Celestina, continue your search, conquer the Devil, seek what you have forgotten in the words of those who speak to you but do not look at you; in the glances of those who look but do not remember you; in the memory of those who do not remember, but imagine you. In that way you will overcome the Devil: you will be the Devil, you will know what he knows, and also what he does not know.

Reality is a sick dream.

WOUNDED LIPS

Celestina saw in the city marketplace a little girl about eleven years old, accompanied by her father. Father and daughter were offering candles, dyes, and honey for sale. This child was very beautiful, with gray eyes and an upturned nose; her skirts were old and patched, and she wore no shoes.

Celestina noticed her because she was like a drop of crystalline water in a sea of blood: nearby, chickens’ necks were being wrung, farther away a sheep was being quartered; one man was butchering a pig, another gutting a fish; blood ran between the rough plaza paving stones and down the gutters of the alleyways; urine and offal were thrown from windows, dogs wandered unrestrained, and flies buzzed about the severed animal heads; the water casks emitted a terrible stench, buyers and sellers streamed in and out of dank rooms; and in their fast, penitents shouted their visions from their windows: the Devil, the Devil, the Devil appeared before me; dressed in white, a twelve-year-old bride passed by on the way to St. Sebastian followed by a sparse train of yellowish, pockmarked, hawking and spitting women, and behind her came the munificent, obese, sexagenarian groom, distributing coins among the unruly throng of beggars with ulcerated, never-healing sores upon their arms and chests; children pullulated beneath the archways, fighting among themselves over scraps stolen from the dogs; many children were sleeping in the streets, beneath stairways, on thresholds; a few Dominican priests crossed the plaza, looking like spotted dogs in their habits of white wool and black capes, singing:

From evil dreams defend our eyes,

From fantasies and nocturnal fears;

The phantom enemy is near,

Free us from all corruption.

And the little girl with gray eyes and upturned nose, shoeless, in patched skirts: Celestina looked at her in the midst of that throng in the old market of Toledo, for there was nothing more beautiful than she. And she looked at her also because two men had recognized her, and one had said to her: You are dead; and they had called her Mother, and old whore. She saw herself in that child. She wanted to see herself there. So she must have looked at that age, before what was to happen had happened, if she had reached the present from the future; after what had happened had happened, if she had come to this morning from the past.

Sadly the child gazed upon sadness: the slaughter of beasts, the child bride, bodies covered with sores, the raving of madmen, a lamb bound by the feet, and a butcher with dagger poised high, preparing to plunge it into the white wool of the tiny animal.

The child ran to plead with the butcher: no, it is just a lamb, I look after them, I protect them from the wolves, I stay awake through the nights with them, do not kill the lamb.

The butcher laughed and shoved the child aside; she fell to the bloody stone. Her father ran to aid her, but Celestina reached her first; she patted her head, and held out her hands to her. The child, eyes filled with tears, kissed them. She looked up, her childish lips now bore the mark of Celestina’s wounds; Celestina stared at her hands; they were hers, the hands of the bashful and happy bride of the wedding in the grange; the signs of her travail had disappeared, a tattoo of wounds gleamed on the child’s lips.