Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

As El Señor peered into the shadow, he discerned the figure that spoke these things. He could distinguish the figure from the shadow, but shadowy still was the figure; the face, hands, and body of the unknown were cloaked in a habit dark as the ecclesiastical space (my dream intensifies the shadow); before the trembling, victorious Liege, the speaker affirmed:

“From Lyons to Provence and from Provence to Flanders, men’s bodies are inflamed with the Truth, and neither your arms nor your victories will prevail against them. Our succession of homilists is older than your line of princes; we came from Byzantium, roamed through Thrace and Bulgaria, and by unknown roads reached Spain, Aquitaine, and Toulouse; your ancestor Pedro el Católico ordered our homes burned and destroyed our Books of Hours written in the language of the people, and he took for himself the castles of the rich who had joined our crusade of poverty; your ancestor Don Jaime el Conquistador submitted us to the tortures and persecutions of the Catalan and Aragonese Inquisitions, and of our devastated Provence the troubadour could only sing, ‘Would that he who sees you now have seen you once!’ You believe that today you have finally defeated us. But I tell you that we shall outlive you. Beneath the cold moonlight in remote forests where your power cannot penetrate, bodies are coupling in cleansing pleasure so that they may reach the heavenly kingdom free from sin. Neither prison nor torture, neither war nor the stake, will prevent the natural union of two bodies. Look there at the altar and see the destiny of your legions: excrement. Look deep into my eyes and you will see the destiny of mine: Heaven. You cannot prevail against the gratifications of an earthly paradise that combines the pleasure of the flesh and the act of mystic ascension. You cannot prevail against the ecstasy that is ours when we enjoy the sexual act as it was practiced by our parents Adam and Eve. Sex as it was before sin; that is our secret. We realize fully our human destiny so that we may free ourselves eternally from our burdens, so we may become souls in a heaven that ignores earth; and in so doing, we also realize our celestial destinies. Your mercenary legions will not prevail against us; you represent the principle of death, and we the principle of procreation; you engender corpses, and we, souls; let us see which multiplies more swiftly from this time on: your dead or our living. You can do nothing. Our free spirit will live on the far shore of night and from there we shall proclaim that sin is nothing but the forgotten name of an impotent thought, and that innocence is the pleasure with which Adam, once he knew himself to be mortal, fulfilled his destiny on earth.”

“Where do you come from?” El Señor managed to ask.

“From nothing … nada, ” the shadow replied.

“What is nothing?”

“Our father, Adán.”

“Who are you?”

“I am not.”

“What do you want?”

“I want not.”

“What, then, do you possess, that you show yourself so proud?”

“I possess nothing, which is everything, for in poverty lies absolution from sin. Only the poor can fornicate in a state of grace. Greed, on the other hand, is the true corruption, the final and utter condemnation. Nothing I have told you would be true if it were not done in poverty. Such is the precept of Christ.”

“Not his precept but his counsel.”

“Christ was not a courtier; he taught by example.”

“Can you, a sinner, compare yourself to Christ?”

“I am more like Him than any luxury-dulled Pope.”

“The Church has answered you and men like you with two weapons: Franciscan poverty and Dominican discipline.”

“The Antichrist in Rome knows very well how to dissemble, and how to use half measures to distract from what should be fully accomplished.”

“Regardless of what you say, you could learn something of humility from the Franciscan, for your pride cannot be easily reconciled with your poverty; and from the Dominican you could learn system and order, for your dream is not consistent with action.”

“My action is poverty: I would offend the Dominican; my dream is pride: I would not be congenial with the Franciscan.”

“Where is it you are going?”

“To absolute freedom.”

“And what is that?”

“A man who lives according to his own impulses, who makes no distinction between God and his own person. A man who looks neither ahead nor behind, for a free spirit knows neither before nor after.”

“What is your name?”

The specter laughed. “The Nameless Wilderness.”

And the specter approached so close that El Señor could feel its warm breath, and a burning hand touched his.

“You thought you had destroyed us today. Be grateful that is not true, for if you defeat us you defeat yourself. You think you have won the battle? Look at the altar; look at the troops that routed us in the name of Rome, the crowned serpent. Look. Fight against the true powers of the earth, not against those of us who promise pleasure and poverty in life and purity and forgetfulness after death. Come with us, with us who have nothing. We are invincible: you can take nothing from us.”

“In the name of God, who are you?”

“Try to remember. Ludovico. Do you remember? We shall meet again, Felipe…”

And for an instant El Señor could see two glinting green eyes and hear loud laughter; he dropped to his knees behind the column, hoping to close his eyes if they had been open, or open them if everything he had seen had been a dream; the shouting inside the Cathedral grew louder, and mockery and boisterous laughter outstripped even the loathsome odors. El Señor reached out in the darkness; the specter was not there.

The only light that night came from the sparks of clashing blades; the copiously sweating comrades were waging a battle to the death; the day’s meager victory had not sufficed to consume their energies; that poor victory, won by mercenary soldiers over heretics who proclaimed the paradoxical divinity of sin and the eventual riches of voluntary poverty, was ending a second time in this pagan celebration of blood and excrement before the altar of the crucified Christ, and, crossing himself, El Señor could believe that the instincts of the Assyrians were everlasting and inherent in the blood of man, that the Whore of Babylon sat upon all thrones and all altars, and that theological benevolence lied when it affirmed that all a soldier need do to reach Heaven — even without the intermediary step of Purgatory — was to perform well the duties demanded by his office: war, war against the true heretics, those who had won the battle against the excommunicants only to profane the Communion altar! War, war against the warriors! But with what arms? I alone? Unarmed battle against the arms that had won the day for Christ the King? I alone? The pierced side of Christianity was bleeding; Jesus, God, and true man, born of the Blessed Mother, the always virgin Mary who had conceived without knowing man: I prayed quietly, Bocanegra. The odor of blood was joined to the stink of excrement, urine, and vomit, and to the clatter of swords, the sound of ciboria rolling in the aisles.

Then they tired; they fell asleep before the altar, along the naves, in the confessionals, the pulpit, behind the shrine, beneath refectory cloths. Only one drunken, humming soldier, crawling on his hands and knees, showed any sign of life. The others seemed dead, as dead as those on the field of battle. With his hands, the crawling soldier shaped a mound of excrement at the feet of the crucified figure on the altar. Did he laugh or cry? No one knows. It was the end of El Señor’s vigil. There was no light that night? For El Señor, yes: the excrement shining like gold at the feet of the agonized Christ. The brilliance of that common, anonymous offering disturbed El Señor’s secret prayer.