Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

You watch the figures pass, blurred, reverberating, spectral: fatigue blinds your eyes. Behind the troop of halberdiers follow two officials on horseback, and behind them, many people riding mules laden with coffers and large kettles, wineskins, and strings of onion and pimento. The muleteers drive their animals, whistling through toothless gums, and a garlic sweat glistens on their scarred and barely healed cheeks. You watch the passing parade: barefoot women balancing clay jugs upon their heads; men in straw hats carrying long poles on which are impaled the heads of wild boars; a party of huntsmen leading suspicious dogs; men in hempen sandals, two by two, supporting poles upon their shoulders from which hang spoiled partridges and worm-infested hares; modest palanquins bearing women with protruding eyes and women with deep-set eyes, women with rosy cheeks and women with parchment-dry skin, all breathless from the heat, all fanning themselves with their hands, and even the dry-skinned ones trying to dry with handkerchiefs the perspiration streaming down their faces toward paper-and-parchment-stiff wimples fastened beneath their chins; more elaborate palanquins occupied by men of wise aspect whose eyeglasses slip down their noses or are suspended from black ribbons, men with salt-and-pepper beards and with holes in their slippers; hooded monks intoning the lugubrious hymn you heard from the beach, at last you can decipher the words — Deus fidelium animarum adesto supplicationibus nostris et de animae famulae tuae Joannae Reginae — their shoulders bearing the weight of palanquins carrying priests oppressed by heat and by their own humors of urine and incense; then two skittish horses drawing a leather carriage with closed curtains, and behind that, pulled by six slow-paced horses and accompanied by another guard of halberdiers, the great funeral coach, black and severe, like a vulture on wheels. And inside the coach, bolted to the floor, the coffin, also black, its glass carapace capturing the light of the setting sun like the glittering shells of the insects that live in the sandbanks. You saw them. I want you to hear my story. Listen. Listen and I will see for you.

Behind the funeral coach follows a tortuous, writhing retinue of beggars, contrite, sobbing, swathed in dark rags, their mangy, scabrous hands offering empty soup bowls to the dying sun; at times the most daring run ahead to beg a scrap of the rotten meat and are rewarded with kicks. But they are free to come and go, run ahead, fall behind. Not so another throng encircled by a crossbow-armed guard, painfully dragging themselves forward, women dressed in long, torn silks, hiding their faces behind a bent arm or behind cupped hands, dark men with dark gazes, painfully choking back scraps of a song caught in taut throats, other men with tangled beards and long dirty hair, dressed in rags, in pain, attempting to hide the round yellow patches sewn over their hearts, and in the midst of this multitude, staring at the heavens, a monk humming they must be converted by the eventide, they will hunger like dogs, they will surround the city …

And behind the beggars and the captives marches a page dressed all in black and beating on a black velvet-covered drum a slow deliberate rhythm like the sound of the feet and wheels and iron-shod hoofs upon the sand. Black breeches, black leather shoes, black gloves holding black drumsticks: only the page’s face is alight, like a golden grape in the midst of so much blackness. Firm, fine skin — you are sure; once you have seen the page you truly see again, your sight no longer clouded by obscuring sound — upturned nose, gray eyes, tattooed lips. He is staring directly ahead. The leather tips of the drumsticks define (or only recapture) the solemn chant floating above the procession, Joannae Reginae, nostrae refrigerii sedem, quietis beatitudinem, luminis claritatem, the overall chant of the procession that competes with and drowns out the secret chant the monk hums amid the captives … they will hunger like dogs, they must be converted by the eventide.

You have so feared that someone would ask “Who are you,” knowing you cannot answer, that now you do not dare, for fear of another’s fear, to ask the same question of the page with the tattooed lips marching to the muted rhythm of the drum. At first, kneeling there in the sand, the sea behind your back, you felt confused, and you watched until the caravan passed you by; then quickly you arose, the long line is disappearing in a cloud of dust, creating the illusion (accentuated by the long, moribund shadows) of a distance that belies time; for a moment, you think you might never again recapture — are you still dreaming on the beach? have you dreamed of another shipwreck, death by drowning, burial in the sea? — the company of that long parade, at once funereal and festive, with its onions, halberds, horses, palanquins, beggars, Arab and Hebrew captives, palanquins, hymns, coffin and drummer.

You rise to your feet and race to catch up with the last figure in the cortege, the black-clad page, who does not turn to look at you, who continues to march to the rhythm of the drum, who is perhaps challenging you to ask “Who are you,” knowing that you already know he knows you fear to ask the question and receive the response. You run as if the distance that separates you from the caravan could be measured in time and not in space. You run, but all the while continue to address that part of you you do not know. What a fool you are; it’s been centuries since you’ve seen your face in a mirror; how long has it been since you’ve seen your twin image? How can you be sure? Perhaps the storm that tossed you upon these shores erased your features, perhaps the corposant burned your skin and the waves tore out your hair, perhaps the sand wounded forever your eyes and lips. Storm and sword; corposant and worms; waves and dust; sand and ax. You extend your seaweed-entangled arms: how can you know what appearance you present to the world, how the world may see you, shipwrecked, orphaned, poor, dear wretch.

The drummer does not turn to look at you, and you do not dare ask him anything. Again you touch his shoulder, but he is indifferent to your appeal. You run before him and his eyes look through you as if you did not exist. You leap, you growl, you fall to your knees, you rise again, you wave your arms wildly before his eyes, but the imperturbable page continues on his way and again the cortege leaves you behind.

Now you run parallel to the procession and the dunes; you run past the drummer, past the Moslems and the Jews, past the beggars and the mounted halberdiers, and in a swift movement, unforeseen by the mounted guard, you leap onto the funeral coach and in that instant glimpse beneath the glass carapace a bed of black silk, cushioned and decorated around all four sides with black brocaded flowers, and you see the bluish figure reclining there: great staring eyes and skin the color of a plum; a prognathic profile with thick parted lips, a medallion upon the silk shirt, a velvet cap; the halberdiers swoop down upon you, seize you by the neck and arms, throw you to the sand, a blow from one of their iron weapons splits your lower lip; you taste your own blood, you smile, idiotically satisfied with this proof of your existence; the preceptor monk of the captives also approaches, gesticulating madly, runs to where you lie in the sand, claims you for his train: “What is your name?” You cannot respond, the monk laughs, what does it matter.

“He will say his name is Santa Fe or Santángel, Bélez or Paternoy, but of course he is a Jewish pig, a convert, he will not admit even that, he will say he is a true Christian, but I can see the face of a heretic Jew, converted, but returned to his faith, I see his hungry dog’s face and I say he belongs in my train, we will make him taste the rotted flesh of pig and see whether he likes it or whether it sickens him, I see the face of a convert pig, a false Christian, a Judaizing animal, he stays in my train, in my train…”