Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“That favor will cost me nothing, Inés. Your father’s fortune will now pass into my coffers.”

Still clinging to El Señor’s hand, the nun bowed her head: “I told you one night that of my own will I would return to your bed. That my heart needed to empty itself. Refill itself. Now it is my will.”

“But it is not mine.”

“How then may I repay you for the honor you accorded my father?”

“Take this ring. Go with it to your superior, Madre Milagros. Tell her it is my order that in twenty-four hours one of the nun’s cells be lined with mirrors.”

“With mirrors, Señor?”

“Yes. Mirrors are not lacking here. All the materials of the world have been brought to this work site. I preferred stone to mirror, as I preferred mortification to vanity. Now the hour of the mirrors has arrived. Have them cover an entire cell: walls, floors, doors, ceiling, windows. Every inch must be reflection. Then, Inés, you will lead the youth named Juan to that room, and there seduce him.”

“Oh, Señor, Don Juan wants nothing from me, or from any woman a second time.”

“Then you will seduce him through a third party. I know such a person. Wait until she returns. She is now undertaking a charge for me.”

“Oh, Señor, there is something still worse … A witch’s spell has closed the lips of my purity, making me a virgin again.”

El Señor began to laugh as he had never laughed, as if this act not only restored his youth but actually transformed his character; first he laughed softly, then he bellowed; he laughed, laughing, he who had never laughed. And between shouts of laughter, he said to Inés: “Well, you will see that I also have a cure for that ailment. Mother Celestina has restored many virgins; now, for the first time, she will demonstrate her art in the contrary operation: she will unstitch it for you, my beautiful Inés…”

FOURTH DAY

“Let me figure this carefully, Ludovico; I want to reason it out; you say that each of the dreams of each of the three youths lasted thirty-three and one half months?”

“Thirty-three and one half months.”

“Which makes two years, nine months, and two weeks…”

“Which is a thousand and one half days…”

“What was your reason, Ludovico…?”

“Life was more brief…”

“The dreams of Flanders and the new world could have lasted a thousand and one half days…”

“… than the dream was long.”

“Not the dream about La Mancha…”

“Two slept: and he who remembered everything, the wanderer of La Mancha, understood and desired nothing.”

“I tell you, that boy remembered nothing: he met a mad old man in a windmill, they came across a chain gang of galley slaves, he was captured, he was tortured by water, there was time for nothing more…”

“The dream of La Mancha lasted a thousand and one half days.”

“That isn’t true, Ludovico; the actions do not coincide with the amount of time you mention. I do not understand your arithmetic…”

“Arithmythic, Felipe. Between the adventure of the windmill and the adventure of the galley slaves, on the cart, along the highways, we lived a thousand and a half adventures with the Knight of the Sad Countenance. Each day he told a different story. How he was knighted. The stupendous battle with the Biscayan. The meeting with the goatherds. The story the goatherd told about the shepherdess Marcela. The heartless Yanguesans. The arrival at the inn we took for a castle. The night with Maritornes. The adventure of the dead body. The gratifying winning of Mambrino’s helmet. The adventure in the Sierra Morena. Beltenebros’s penance. The story of the fair Dorotea. The tale of foolish curiosity. The fierce and extraordinary battle with some wineskins. The appearance of the princess Micomicona. The discourse on arms and letters, which took an entire day and a night. The Captive’s tale. The story of the young muleteer. The adventure of the troopers. The enchantment of our poor friend. The quarrel with the goatherd. The adventure of the Penitents. The enchantment of Dulcinea. The adventure of the chariot of the Courts of Death. The meeting with the Knight of the Mirrors. The adventure of the lions. What happened in the house of the Knight of the Green Coat. The adventure of the enamored shepherd. The wedding of Camacho the Rich. The Cave of Montesinos. The braying adventure. And that of Maese Pedro’s puppet show. The famous adventure of the enchanted bark. The fair huntress. The breaking of Dulcinea’s spell. The arrival at the castle of the Duke and Duchess. The adventure of the Dolorous Duenna. The arrival of Clavileño. The island of Barataria, and what happened there to our friend’s squire. The love of the enamored Altisidora. Doña Rodríguez. The adventure of the second Dolorous Duenna. The battle against the lackey Tosilos. The encounter with the bandit, Roque Guinart. The voyage to Barcelona and the visit to a miraculous place where through enchantment books reproduce themselves. The Knight of the White Moon. When the knight became a shepherd. The adventure of the hogs. The resurrection of Altisidora. The return of our friend to the village-whose-name-he-did-not-wish-to-remember, for a narrow prison it was for his magnificent dreams of glory, justice, danger, and beauty.”

“You have named fifty stories, but you spoke of a thousand and one half days…”

“Fifty accounts are accounts beyond count, Felipe. For from each account came twenty others, inopportunely, tempestuously, unseasonably, and each story contained as many others: the story told by the knight, the story lived by the knight, the story told to the knight, the story the knight read about himself in the press in Barcelona, the oral and anonymous version of the story told as pure verbal imminence before the knight existed, the version written in the papers of an Arabic chronicler, and based upon that, the version of a certain Cide Hamete; the version which to the knight’s anger a shameless wretch by the name of Avellaneda had written apocryphally; the version the Squire Panza endlessly recounts to his wife, thus filling her to bursting with both intangible illusions and everyday proverbs; the version the priest tells the barber to kill the long hours in the village; and the version which to revive those same dead hours the barber tells the priest; the story as it is told by that frustrated writer, the bachelor Sansón Carrasco; the story that from his particular point of view Merlin the magician tells about those same events; the story the giants challenged by the knight tell among themselves, and the fantasy fabricated by the princesses whose spells he broke; the story told by Ginés de Parapilla as part of his everlastingly unfinished memoirs; the one that Don Diego de Miranda, seeing it all from the viewpoint of friendship, set down in his diary; the story dreamed by Dulcinea, imagining herself a farm girl, and the story dreamed by the farm girl Aldonza, imagining herself a princess; and, finally, the story staged again and again, for the amusement of their court, by the Dukes in the theater of resurrections…”

“What did that maddened knight achieve by repeating to you twenty times each of his fifty adventures and all their versions?”

“Simply the postponement of the day of judgment, which was to recover his sanity, lose his marvelous world, and die of scientific sadness.”

“Then, in any case, he was defeated by destiny…”

“No, Felipe; in Barcelona we saw his adventures reproduced on paper, in hundreds and at times thousands of copies, thanks to a strange invention recently brought from Germany, which is a very rabbit of books: if you place a piece of paper in one mouth, from the other emerge ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million pages with the same letters…”