Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Ludovico asked if he could approach the sainted Sister. The Mistress smiled with compassion. “My poor brother, you cannot see her.”

“Is that necessary? I can sense her presence.”

He was led to a hut at the rear of the geese- and sycamore-dotted green where dwelt Katrei, the Saint. The snow was beginning to melt beneath a fine, constant rain from the North. The Mistress, with the familiarity of long practice, opened the door of the hut.

Schwester Katrei, naked, sat astride the blind man’s young companion; she was shouting that she was mounted upon the Holy Trinity as upon a divine steed; her legs locked about the youth’s waist, she shouted, I am illuminated, Mother, I am God; she clawed the boy’s back, and God can neither know, nor desire, nor effect anything without me … the naked youth’s back was covered with bleeding crosses … nothing exists without me …

The Mistress fell to her knees upon the melting snow and agreed to summon the Cathari who had taken refuge in this region to a meeting in the remote forest of the Duke where they were wont to gather secretly on certain nights of the year.

Ludovico uncovered the cart and the Mistress saw the two coffins lying there.

“No, we cannot bury anyone. That is part of the interdiction.”

“They are not dead. They are merely dreaming.”

GIANTS AND PRINCESSES

The old man on the pallet in the windmill laughed loud and long; he had an infinite capacity for laughter that was in great contrast to the sadness of his features; tears of laughter ran down the wrinkles in the emaciated cheeks of this man with the short white beard and unkempt moustaches. He laughed for more than an hour and finally, his words interrupted by merriment, managed to speak: “A beggar and a youth … A blind man and his guide … Whoever would have believed…? Two persons in such condition … would be the ones who come to break my spell … to free me from this prison … where I have lain for so many years…?”

“This windmill is a prison?” Ludovico asked.

“The most terrible of all prisons: the very entrails of the giant Caraculiambro, Lord of the Island of Malindrania. What arts did you call upon to reach here? The giant is zealous…”

He requested his arms, which like him lay upon the straw, and the blind man and the youth armed him with his broken lance and dented shield. In vain they searched for the helmet he had requested, until he himself informed them that it resembled a barber’s basin.

Between them, they helped him to his feet; the knight’s bones clanked like old chains as, supported between the blind man and the youth, he was dragged to the head of the stairway. The moment his foot touched the first step, the circular area of the windmill was again illuminated; they heard plaintive voices, and frightening and guttural sounds, the latter impotently menacing, and the former heart-rendingly pleading: Do not abandon us, you promised to aid us, to free us, turn back, knight, do not leave us, you are escaping only because two corpses have intruded into our domains, you will be damned, you will be accompanied by death, see whether you can free yourself from it after you have freed yourself from us …

The old man paused, turned, and said, his eyes filled with tears: “Do not miaow, my unrivaled Miaulina, nor you, peerless Casildea of Vandalia, I am not abandoning you, I swear it, I free myself only to return to the attack and vanquish our captors; do not growl, fearful Alifanfarón de la Trapobana, do not open your gaping jaws, Serpentino de la Fuente Sangrienta, I have not put the final period to our combat, nor will any blue and bedeviled enchanter ever succeed in doing so; the crumbs will not grow stale before they reach my lips…”

Huddled beside the circular wall, the youth saw pale and trembling ladies held captive in the enormous, bleeding, and hairy fists of giants, and he said to Ludovico: It is true, what this man says is true; but Ludovico was grateful for his blindness and he smiled, tranquilly unbelieving.

ULTIMA THULE

They set sail one afternoon guided by the evening star. They sailed always toward the west. They caught sharks. They witnessed a mortal combat between a leviathan and a swordfish. They were becalmed on the Sargasso Sea, the limits of the known world, but beyond it they were seized in a deep whirlpool that carried them into the depths of the sea, the marine tomb, the tunnel of the oceans into which endlessly pours the great cataract of the world.

Ludovico stood alone on the beach between the two coffins, his back to the sea; he murmured: “Return. There is nothing behind me.”

HERTOGENBOSCH

Schwester Katrei was once again alone and she promised, from that instant, to devote herself to the supreme mortification of her illumined and persecuted faith.

“Go,” she told the youth who had robbed her of her virginity, “I shall devote myself to endura, the will for death, motionless, my eyes opened, my mouth closed, fading away little by little. Nothing stands between me and eternal union with God.”

The youth kissed the enlightened woman’s open eyes and whispered into her ear: “You are wrong, Katrei. The dream is the only intelligent form of suicide.”

“Let us go beyond that,” Ludovico told the initiates that night in the woods. “If the world is the work of two gods, one good and the other evil, we shall not reach Heaven — as you have believed until now — through purity and total chastity; on the contrary, if our body is the seat of evil we must exhaust that body on earth so we may reach Heaven cleansed of any stain, with no recollection of the body we once possessed, like our father Adam in his primordial innocence; let us remove our clothing, let us not be ashamed of our bodies, as Adam was not ashamed; for if you accept Adam’s guilt you must also accept the need for sacraments and priests, the need for a church to mediate between God and his fallen creature; but if you accept that the body is free and deliver yourself unto pleasure, you will be twice worthy on earth, twice free, you shall battle for the innocence of the body by exhausting its impurities and so, from this time forward, you will be called the Adamites, followers of Adam, disrobe…”

His young companion revealed to those assembled there his beautiful naked body, and soon all of them were naked and accompanying him in a circle dance around the fire; no one felt the cold that night, but danced among the trees, copulated in the ponds and with the flowers, naked they rode horses and wild pigs, the night was filled with sounds of the horn, they awakened the birds, they dreamed they were floating inside pure globes of crystal, devoured by fish, and devouring strawberries; and they were seen only by the owls and by the eyes of one middle-aged initiate who never removed his peasant cap, as if something was hidden beneath his hat.

When day again dawned over the village of Hertogenbosch, this man, eyes half closed, recounted everything through thin, colorless lips to a mute retable which had just witnessed the same events seen by the humble artisan.

DULCINEA

Believe me, I was once young, I was not born as you see me now, old, and cudgeled, I was young and I was in love, the knight recounted to the blind man and the youth, and it is not the way of youth to stop and dream about what he desires, but to rush to seize it quickly, for blessings, if they are not communicated, are not blessings, and let us all win them, let us all share them, let us all be merry, for thus are fabricated the marvels of the present, and death is distant and pleasure near at hand; he spoke beneath the sudden sun of La Mancha, the sky washed clean by the storm and creased by clouds with trailing shadows. I loved Dulcinea, she proved herself virtuous, so I used the services of the old procuress and possessed the maiden for myself, my ideas about time began to change, I cursed the cocks because they announced the dawn and the clock because it struck so quickly, the man said, seated between the two coffins in the cart; we were surprised by the girl’s father, he challenged me, I became violent, he became violent, he ran his own daughter through with his sword, and I him with mine: it is told that there was never a more bloody day in all Toboso; father and daughter were buried together beneath a statue that represented the daughter sleeping and the father standing guard over her with his sword; all this the old man told them as the cart advanced slowly over earth studded with rocks resembling half-buried bones, raising clouds of orange, flaming dust. I fled, they placed a price upon my head, I changed my name, and settled in a place whose name I do not wish to recall, alone, knowing in my own flesh the truth of what the old procuress who furnished me Dulcinea’s favors had told me: old age is a hostelry of illness, an inn for thoughts, unremitting anguish, incurable wound, stain of the past, pain of the present, morose concern for the future, neighbor to death, and, standing as tall as possible in the cart and raising his lance as if to wound the clouds, he said, books were my only consolation, I read them all, I imagined I could be one of those flawless knights, rescue those illustrious ladies, vanquish those perfidious giants and magicians, return to Toboso, break the spell of my maiden of sleeping stone and restore her to life, as young as the day she died, Dulcinea, do you remember Don Juan, your young lover? see him now, I am returning to you with a basin for a helmet, a broken sword and a skinny nag, I return to your tomb, the old man said, opening his arms as if to embrace the reverberating expanse of the granite-strewn plain, I returned convinced that I would rescue her from the enchantment of death and stone, I was once again the young Don Juan, not the aged Don Alonso I had become in order to flee from justice, I begged and pleaded before her tomb; it was not the effigy of the maiden that moved but the statue of the father, noble sword in hand, who spoke to me and said, I wanted to kill you when you were young, but now I see you are old and worthless. I tried to challenge him anew, to invite him to dine, now gladly I would throw myself into the pit of Hell, what were phantoms to me! but the statue only laughed, and he told me he was condemning me to something worse, that my imaginings and my reading would become reality, that my fragile bones would actually confront monsters and giants, and that again and again I would rush to right wrongs only to be cudgeled, mocked, caged, taken for a madman, and dishonored, the mocker mocked, he laughed, ridicule will kill you, for no one but you shall see those giants and magicians and princesses, you will see the truth, but only you; others will see sheep and windmills, puppet stages, wineskins, sweaty peasant girls and piggish servants where you see reality: armies of cruel despots, giants, frightful hordes of Moors and adorable princesses: that was the statue’s curse, said the old man, sinking down beside one of the coffins.