Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

SIMON IN TOLEDO

I scarcely recognized her, the monk Simón said to Ludovico one night, as the student served him a plate of lentils and dried codfish, for her voice was hoarse and low, and the rags she wore could not hide the fierce wounds on her face and hands, still bleeding as if a wild beast had wounded her with claw and fang, and her eyes held no light.

She said she had found me by inquiring in every desolate city where houses have been abandoned by their dwellers, where the beasts of the forest, guided by instinct, come and make their dens in halls and bedchambers. I asked her whether she did not fear for the life of the child. She laughed and said: “A child born as this one will never die from a vile plague.”

She gave him to me, Ludovico; she told me where you were and asked me to deliver the child to you. She said that without fail she would be at the rendezvous in twenty years. In the houses of the dead everything is open, doors and treasure chests. The servants who have not died have fled. Celestina took a handful of gold and another of jewels from a chest, cackled, and left as if fleeing, as if cloaked, making herself small like the miser who fears the light of the sun will melt her gold.

But first she gave me these coins for you. It was her last generous gesture. She wept as she gave them to me. She had laughed as she took them.

Look carefully at the profile minted on these coins, Ludovico.

The salient jaw.

The heavy, protuberant lip.

The dead gaze.

It is El Señor.

THE ALCAZABA IN ALEXANDRIA

Ludovico made his farewells to the learned doctor of the Synagogue of the Passing and traveled far, very far, with the three children.

He had read in the texts in Toledo a manuscript wherein Pliny speaks of a people without women, without love, and without money — an eternal society into which no one is ever born. This people lived in a village near the shores of the Dead Sea, fleeing the great cities to the end of perfecting their simple, silent, and austere lives. There Ludovico desired that the three children left in his care grow to manhood.

They sailed from Valencia on a Christian ship that one night left them near the port of Alexandria. They were soon lost in the twisting alleyways of that city, the widow of gods and of men; in his beggar’s rags, and despite his great strength, struggling to carry the three children in his arms, he attracted a great deal of attention. Nevertheless, he was well received. He spoke Arabic, he could pay for lodging and meals, and the three boys were singularly quiet and well behaved. They found lodging in a dovecote on a flat rooftop high above the city and from there Ludovico watched the hundred-armed river empty into the waters of the incorporeal sea.

One night, because of the heat, he was sleeping upon the sun-bleached stones of the rooftop, and he dreamed he set out in a small sailboat, and rowed toward the source of the Nile. Only three stars shone in the firmament; there was no other light and a great silence lay over the land of Egypt. As he rowed, he moved closer and closer to the three silent stars until, reflected in the water, they were within reach of his hand. He plunged his hand into the river and fished out a star.

First the star trembled. Then it spoke. It said sun, and the sun appeared. It said wheat, and the shores were covered with undulating heads of grain. It said city, and a white settlement emerged from the sands of the desert. It said children, and three persons, two youths and a girl, appeared and swam beside the boat, guiding it to the shore of the river.

“This is my brother, and this my sister,” said one of the youths.

During the first day, the youth who had first spoken sowed the land, harvested its fruit, channeled the waters of the river so they irrigated the desert, formed bricks from the black mud of the shore, constructed a house, and thus provided both sustenance and shelter to his brother and sister.

That night, as an act of gratitude, his sister took him as her husband and they slept together in the house. The other brother lay down in the night air, but brief was his rest. He arose and walked beside the river, wakeful, resentful, barely containing his anger and envy.

At the dawn of the second day, the envious brother entered the house where the couple lay, and killed his sleeping brother. He dragged the corpse to the river and threw it into the waters. The wife-and-sister wept, and walked along the muddy shores, searching for the body of her brother-and-husband. The murdering brother told Ludovico: “You are sleeping on a rooftop. Seal your lips. If you betray me, I shall also kill you in the dream. You will never awaken.”

And he walked into the desert, naked and defenseless.

Ludovico went in search of the woman. After a while he found her kneeling beside some rushes that had trapped the body of her dead brother. The woman pressed her lips to those of the dead man and revived him with her breath, passing life from her mouth to his. Then she said: “Lips are life. Mouth is memory. The word created everything.”

And the dead man returned to life. But he was a living dead man, not the man he had been before. And as he returned to life he said: “I am yesterday and I know tomorrow. Like me, my children will live their deaths and die their lives. We shall never again be three, alone in the world, conceived by ourselves, with no father to engender us or a mother to give us a name.”

And the land was peopled.

Upon the third day of his dream, Ludovico found himself wandering among the multitudes of the city of Alexandria. The many-colored turbans and veiled faces and flowing mantles and unshod feet and thieving hands were indifferent to him, but at the same time he felt threatened by the haste, the harsh voices, the wailing cries. On the stone threshold of a white door he recognized the murderer. He was sitting, legs crossed, before a rickety stool, writing, without pausing, as if condemned to write, as if his well-being depended upon scratching the Arabic characters upon stiff, curled leaves of papyrus, as if by writing he postponed a damnation.

Ludovico approached the scribe. He was not recognized. Flies lighted upon the criminal’s face and he brushed them away with one hand, not blinking. Ludovico passed his hand before the scribe’s eyes. Again he did not blink. Ludovico read over the blind scribe’s shoulder. “One night I killed my brother. Attention. Read and understand. I shall tell you why it happened, how, when, and for what reasons; what I then foresaw, what today I remember, what I shall fear tomorrow. Attention. Stop. Does not my story arouse your curiosity…?”

Ludovico dreamed that the murdered brother and his wife-and-sister that night lay sleeping in the tomb. She awakened and said: “We can leave now. Now you will know the destiny of those who live outside the tomb.”

“Yes,” replied the murdered man, “but secretly. Let no one see us.”

They emerged from their winding sheets as if abandoning their skins. The woman shook out her robe of a thousand colors, and from its folds day was born, and night fell, light was kindled and shadow prolonged, the cloth burst into flame and poured down her body like water; at its touch the living died and the dead were reborn; all the while the couple walked through the same streets of Alexandria toward the numberless mouths of the great river.

Finally he saw them.

The murderer brother lay dead in the abandoned alley, his face stained by spilled ink, his pen clasped tightly in his hand, the scrolls of paper strewn about his body, white, virgin, not a single character upon them.

The couple sailed up the river in a luminous boat, the man naming things in secret, water, sand, wheat, stone, house, the woman asking the waters: “Why did our brother succumb to the temptation to write of his own crime?”