Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

He trotted away, laughing, and Celestina remembered with fear the night this same Señor, drunken and shouting, had ridden through the forest looking for trapped she-wolves, and in his erotic fury had fornicated with one of them. This the girl had never told her father; that innocent, thinking thus to defend her against wandering noblemen hungry for a female, decided to dress her as a man from that day forward; she, allowing herself to be disguised, hoped to defend herself against El Señor, although she knew he would as soon rape a lad as a woman or a beast.

With her father, she grew up in the forest. He grew old; at times his fingertips brushed the forever wounded lips of his daughter, and he murmured sadly: “A mouth with pain says no good thing. It was an unlucky day we left the shelter of our forest to go to Toledo.”

He avoided speaking with his daughter masquerading as a lad. One day they learned of the death of El Señor. And then the armed men of the heir Don Felipe appeared, their mission to gather all the boys in the forest for the service at arms, and as servants.

“Who will work the land, who will care for the flocks?” were the last words she heard her father speak.

Prince Don Felipe, seeing her dressed as a man, did not guess her true condition, although her features seemed to awaken something disturbing in the heir’s memory. She was assigned to the service of the young Señor’s mother, where the presence of women was forbidden. As a shepherdess, she had learned to play the flute and she let this be made known to the head steward so she might entertain herself and others, living apart from the servants and the soldiers, before whom she had never disrobed. The Mad Lady respected the musical talents of her new page: she ordered the page to learn to play the drum, for she had forbidden all but funereal sounds now that she lived in continuous mourning. And thus, when the aged Lady began her long pilgrimage with her husband’s corpse, she assigned the page to the last position in the procession, playing the drum and dressed all in black, a herald of mourning.

From the castle of Tordesillas the procession advanced to Burgos, and from there to the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores; through great cities, Medina del Campo and Avila, small cities, Hornillos, Tórtolos, Arcos, and middle-sized cities, Torquemada and Madrid. And one day in this city of little merit as the Mad Lady was secluded in the monastery worshipping her husband’s remains, the members of her procession dispersed along the servile banks of the Manzanares, and thus the black-clad page with the colored and wounded lips happened to pass by some tanneries along the banks of the river; the smoke from the tanneries recalled to her her childhood in the forest, and as she stood, overcome by nostalgia, a hand seized her arm and a hunched figure spoke into her ear:

“O-ho, there, my girl, whom do you think you’re fooling? I can smell a virgin a league away, and there are very few virgins in this town — and may God be praised for it — who have been stitched without me as guide to the needle. When a girl is born I mark her name in my book so I will know which of them escapes my net. You may deceive the rest of the world, but not Mother Celestina, for if I’ve restored one maidenhead, I’ve restored a thousand, and a whiff tells me yours has not been touched, and that is bad, my girl, for you should never be miserly with what costs you so little. How have you escaped my register? Are you a stranger in this town? Hear me, my pretty, I may have lost my molars, but the taste for love is still strong on my gums. And if you are a virgin, trust in me, because for every girl that’s born, there is a boy, and for every boy, a girl, and there is no one in this world who does not have a mate if he but knows how to find him; a lonely soul neither sings nor weeps, it’s a rare sight to see a single partridge in flight, and there is nothing more pitiful, my daughter, than the mouse that knows but one hole, for if that is blocked up he has nowhere to hide from the cat. Who longs for honor without profit? You look like a barren ewe; go change your clothing and show the world what God gave you, for I divine a sublime form beneath that black garb. Yes, you’ve fallen into good hands…”

The girl’s wounded lips moved. “Celestina,” she said.

“Yes, Celestina,” answered the old woman so swathed in black rags that only her face and hands were visible. “I see that my fame has spread afar, and if you find my name evil, ask yourself as I did, was the wind to look after me? what estate did I inherit? do I have a house, or a vineyard? But if you think it evil, you will find I have a good name among men; just walk along with me, daughter, and you will see how they greet me, gentlemen, old men, lads, abbots of all rank from bishops to sacristans: you’ll see hats tipped in my honor as if I were a duchess. Oh, you accursed, voluminous skirts, tripping over you, I can never go as fast as I want.”

“You don’t remember me?”

“Daughter, he who scatters his memory in many places finds he has none to spare…”

“My lips…?”

“What happened to you, child? Did the Devil kiss you? Come along with me; I’ll lend you a veil until I can mend them for you, for there’s nothing that cannot be cured with the ointment made from goat’s blood and a few hairs from its chin whiskers. I tell you, you fell into good hands when in all of this spoiled meat pie of Madrid you came to this aged lapidary who perfumes ladies’ toques, extracts mercury chlorate, knows all there is to know about herbs, and physics babies…”

“But I remember you…”

“How can that be, daughter? I have lived a lot of years. There is no one who remembers how I used to be, not even I myself. But I tell you what you would like to hear, and what others will tell you one day: me-thinks you were beautiful; you look different, you’ve changed. Daughter: the day will come when you won’t recognize youself in your own mirror.”

“I remember everything. I have lived remembering you, Mother. Along with your kisses and your caresses you left me your memory. I grew up with one body and two memories. And the memory you gave me has been more profound than my own, for I have had to live with yours in silence for twenty years, Mother, unable to speak to anyone about what I remembered. The boys. The three boys. Ludovico. Felipe. The crime in the castle. The nights of love. The dream on the beach. The days in the forest. The pact with the Devil. The rape. El Señor. The wedding in the grange. Jerónimo.”

The cloaked and toothless old woman stopped for an instant, looked intently at the girl dressed as a page, and said with great sadness: “He who has little sense or judgment loves almost nothing except what he’s missed. The wanderer tired at the end of his long day’s travel would be mad to walk back the same path only to return to the place from which he started. I take care of my needs in my own house, and no one outside knows of them. Tumble-down or strong, it’s my house, right or wrong. Enough now. Let it never be said of me that I took a single step without hope of gain. Where are you going, daughter, and what is there in it for me?”

“Our procession is going to the palace being constructed on the plain, where the greatest Señor in this land, Prince Don Felipe, has built tombs for his ancestors, and there awaits their remains.”

“Remains, you say, palace? Strength, strength, Celestina, be not faint, there were always suppliants aplenty waiting to ease your pain! How many corpses are there?”

“Thirty, they say…”

“Ah, I who have exhausted myself going from cemetery to cemetery at midnight seeking the materials necessary to my trade, there’s not a Christian or Moor or Jew whose burial I’ve not attended; I hide and spy on them by day and dig them up by night; just this morning I removed with some eyebrow tweezers seven teeth from a hanged man; do you realize what you are telling me? Go on, get along, I shall prepare my utensils, I shall bid my kindred farewell, I shall leave my affairs in the hands of my faithful Elisia and Areusa, who may be young but are no less sinful, and artful, and skillful whores for it; they will look after my affairs as if they were their own, and I shall follow the faint scent of your virgin’s odor — may you soon lose it! — and look for you in the place you have told me of; and tell no one, my girl, for when we have learned something to our gain, we do not noise it about to our harm; very few live to a ripe old age, and those that do never died of starvation!”