Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“There you will take this youth, already sleeping, and the dwarf, with the escort and documents I shall give you…”

“But it must be in the same bed!” shrieked Barbarica, who had listened with growing delight to the words passing between El Señor and Celestina.

“Being honorable, I am nonetheless poor,” murmured Mother Celestina, “and when lips are sealed, I pray the mouth of the purse be opened…”

El Señor tossed a heavy pouch at Mother Celestina’s feet, wheeled, and returned to his bedchamber. The maiden-mender and the dwarf fell upon the pouch, squabbling over its possession, but Celestina kicked Barbarica to the floor, as a lustrous black pearl rolled from the dwarf’s closed fist.

“So you have hidden treasures, do you, you botch of a woman?”

“It is the Pilgrim Pearl my mistress gave to me.”

“It smells of shit.”

“It’s mine.”

“I’ll have that pearl, you gimpy she-ass.”

“But it’s mine, old whore!”

“I’ll kick you to sleep, you stinking lump, and once and for all carry the both of you sleeping off to bed, you and your lunatic husband … Shackled in irons, and shitting with fear!”

SECOND DAY

My brother, murmured El Señor; your heirs, Ludovico answered, and Felipe nodded: my mother has so proclaimed one of them, but Ludovico shook his head, it cannot be one alone, it must be all three, and in a very low voice made opaque by anguish, El Señor said, “Again dispersion? the war of brother against brother, the partitioning of my kingdom, the loss of unity represented by my person and my palace: I, this place, the summit?”

He stared toward the high window of the bedchamber, as if the fragmented light of history shone there; he recalled how much pain the pretensions of royal bastards had caused Spain, and how much blood they had spilled to make those pretensions valid; but Ludovico did not relent in his argument: the three in one, the same as in the dream: the first remembers what the second understands and the third desires; the second understands what the first remembers and the third desires; the third desires what the first remembers and the second understands …

“Who are they, Ludovico?”

“I myself do not know, Felipe. You have heard the same stories I have.”

Celestina assured El Señor that they had told him everything, even things she had not told the youth it had been her fate to find on the beach and bring to the palace.

“The usurpers, Celestina?”

“The heirs, Felipe?”

From the chapel they could hear the chanting of the Mass for the royal dead; El Señor knelt before the black crucifix of the bedchamber and intoned the beginning prayers of the Office of Darkness, Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo, omnibus Sanctis, et vobis, fratres: quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere; and striking his breast thrice, repeating, like a spectral echo, the words of the monks in the chapel, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

He was racked by a fit of coughing. Then in a hoarse voice, as if his words were a continuation of the Mass for the Dead, he invoked with credulous conviction the writings of his own testament, with no shade of variation between the tone of his voice as he prayed for the dead and that as he sought the visitation of the unborn: “This I bequeath to you, a future of resurrections that may be glimpsed only in forgotten pauses, in the orifices of time, in the dark, empty minutes during which the past tried to imagine the future.”

“The founders, Ludovico? Felipe?” said Celestina, her voice silvery, as if her words incorporated the antiphony of the canticle being sung in the chapel and the prayer of El Señor, canticle and prayer both of black velvet.

“This I bequeath to you: a blind, pertinacious, and painful return to the imagination of the future in the past as the only future possible to my race and my land…”

Beneath all the suns, said Ludovico, in all times, two brothers have been the founders, two brothers have fought each other, one brother has killed the other, and then everything has been founded once again upon the memory of a crime and the nostalgia for death.

“Dies irae, dies illa…”

He asked Felipe to return to the origins of all things, two brothers, Abel and Cain, Osiris and Set, Plumed Serpent and Smoking Mirror, rival brothers, the argument over the love of the forbidden woman, the mother, the sister, Eve, Isis, or the Princess of the Butterflies, why have all men at the dawn of their history dreamed, thought, or lived the same thing, spanning all distance, as if all of us, Felipe, all of us before we were born had known one another in a place of common encounters and then, upon earth, been separated only by the accidents of distant spaces, different times, and unknown unknowing? One day we were one. Today we are other.

“Quantus tremor est futurus…”

Did Felipe remember how Simonides was saved from the collapse of the house of the wealthy Scopas by Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri? From the chapel they could hear the phrases repeated by El Señor, kneeling before the crucifix: Lacrimosa dies ilia, qua resurget ex favilla, judicandus homo reus. Castor was mortal and died in the battle against the cousins whose women the twins had stolen. And then Pollux, the immortal son of Zeus, rejected an immortality that did not include his brother Castor. He preferred to die with his brother.

“That is the love my three sons hold for one another.”

“My three brothers? The usurpers?” asked El Señor, never varying the solemn voice of the funeral chant.

“I tell you I know as much and as little as you yourself.”

Celestina, her eyes closed, spoke in the voice of dream: “The twins … salvation of sailors and castaways … guardians of St. Elmo’s fire…”

El Señor rose to his feet, Dona eis requiem, Amen, looked toward the map covering one wall of his bedchamber, and said he was thinking, actually, of other signs, other brothers, other rivals, other founders, Romulus and Remus, thrown into the Tiber, suckled by the she-wolf, the founders of Rome. Romulus had raised a wall about the city. Remus had dared leap over it. Romulus killed his brother, and with these words established his power: “So dies he who leaps my walls.” Then he disappeared in the midst of a storm: the exiled founder, the fugitive from himself.

“Consider, I tell you, all the brothers in history…”

“But now they are three. One brother will not kill his brother, because if one dies, the other two will not remember, or understand, or desire. Look, and understand, Felipe: for the first time three brothers are establishing a history; three, the number that resolves oppositions, the fraternal cipher of encounter and the mixing of bloods, the dissolution of the sterile polarity of the number 2: understand, and make a place for them in your history…”

“They have challenged with their histories my will to end this dynasty now, here, with me. All the things they have recounted they have done to the end of destroying my project of death. They have…”

“Et lux perpetua luceat eis.”

In exchange for Celestina and Ludovico’s accounts, El Señor employed the remainder of the day telling, with sadness, of his never consummated marriage with Isabel, explaining his ideas of chivalric love, and recalling La Señora’s misfortune when she fell on the paving stones of the castle and remained there awaiting arms worthy of assisting her: arms that had never taken her as a woman.

And nevertheless, as night fell, Felipe went to the chapel with a light step; he had not felt so young in years; his breast was pounding, his arms pulsing, his mind was clear; but the chapel was filled with shadows, as if inverting the equation between his recovered vigor and the eternity of the stone raised to support the weight of the centuries: El Señor’s luminous gaze, and the announcement of death in the lengthening shadows in the holy place. He paused. He looked toward the altar. A young man wrapped in a cape of sumptuous brocade was scrutinizing the painting from Orvieto; by his side, holding a letter in one hand, one of the common laborers from the site was importuning the youth. El Señor, protected by the shadows, moved nearer, and hidden behind a pillar, listened.