Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Books reproduce themselves?”

“Yes, there is no longer a single copy, commissioned by you, written only for you, and illuminated by a monk, which you can keep in your library and reserve for your eyes alone.”

“A thousand and one half days, you said, but you have accounted only for fifty stories in twenty versions: one half day is missing…”

“And will never be completed, Felipe. That half day is the infinite sum of the readers of this book, for as one finishes reading, one minute later another begins to read, and as that one finishes his reading, one minute later another begins it, and so on and so on, as in the ancient example of the hare and the tortoise: neither wins the race; so, too, the book is never without a reader, the book belongs to everyone…”

“Then, wretch that I am, reality belongs to everyone, for only what is written is real.”

Later El Señor told of his strange experience on the stairway of the thirty-three steps, and how each step devoured a long stretch of time, in such a manner that whoever ascended them lost his life but gained his death, his metamorphosis into matter, and his diabolical resurrection into the body of a beast: it was more worthwhile, then, to perpetuate and re-create the past in a thousand combinations than to extinguish it in the pure linearity of a future without end.

That night El Señor hastened to the chapel. He was well aware of the reasons for his recent exaltation, which harmonized so well with his personal project. The new world was a dream. Two of the bastards, the heirs, his brothers, were eliminated, one locked in a dungeon, the other fast in bed in a monastery; and the third would not be long in falling into the trap baited by El Señor. But what purpose would these triumphs serve (he asked himself) if the very uniqueness of things and their eternal permanence on the written page became the property of every man?

“Power is founded upon the text. The only legitimacy is the reflection of one’s possession of the unique text. But now…”

He knelt before the altar and looked at the painting from Orvieto. The shadows served up a banquet of form and color. El Señor recognized the faces in the painting.

“Oh, all-merciful God, must I undertake a new battle, this time against the pages being reproduced by the thousands, thus granting power and legitimacy to all those who possess it: nobles and common men, bishops and heretics, merchants and procuresses, children, rebels, and lovers?”

He rose and sought escape from his doubts by walking between the thirty sepulchers — fifteen and fifteen — lining both sides of the chapel: one by one he visited them, brushed their cold tombstones with his fingertips, caressed the veined marble, gazed at the reclining statues that reproduced in stone and bronze and silver the figures which in life had been his ancestors. He read the singular inscriptions on each sepulcher: these funeral texts, at least, would be irreproducible, unique, inseparable from each figure commemorated in this vast vault of rotting bodies.

As he reached the last tomb, that closest to the stairway of thirty-three steps, he trembled, divining at last that the three additional steps, which he had never ordered to be constructed, Providence had reserved for his three brothers. From his conversations with Ludovico and Celestina, only one conviction had been imprinted upon his soul: the three youths were the sons of his father, the fair and whoring Prince of insatiable appetites: his father had been capable of impregnating the very sea, air, and rock.

His head whirled dizzily; his penis dangled between his legs like a black and withered petal; he supported himself upon a tombstone; as a cold sweat stained his clothing, he drew comfort from a single thought: “I ordered thirty steps, one for each of my dead ancestors; the workmen, guided by the hand of Providence, constructed thirty-three; each step thus convokes the death of one of the usurpers who came here; there is no step for me.”

He asked himself, panting heavily through thick, foam-speckled lips: Shall I never die, then? And immediately said out loud: “Nor is there a step for my mother. Will she and I live forever?”

“Yes, son, yes,” a muffled murmur arose from a black bundle lying in one corner of the chapel and crypt, invisible at a casual glance. Felipe stepped back, surfeited with mystery, hungry for reason; but with the same motive he approached the bundle, knelt beside it, and discovered the mutilated body of his mother, the one called the Mad Lady, as he himself was called by rogues and rascals the fantastic, comic, inventive, pretentious, and deceptive Prince.

Bewilderment silenced El Señor; the severe waxen mask of the old woman’s face, barely illuminated by a bitter smile, moved slightly. “Do you believe I am dead? Do you believe I am alive? In either argument, you hit the mark, my son, for he who is born dead cannot die, nor live, he who died in life, and from these opposing explanations is nourished what you can call, if it please you, my present existence. Do not bury me, Felipe, my son: I am not as dead as these, our ancestors; but neither return me to common life, to ambition, to effort, to appearance, to eating and defecating, to clothing, and to dreaming: grant me the place my particular existence deserves, the natural result of my entire life and death, as one day I explained it to a poor fellow I found on the highway coming here, on the dunes of a beach, so long ago it seems to me: do you know, our senses deceive us, they give us no proof of life, neither is their absence proof of death: we are a dynasty, my son, something greater than you or I alone, something more than an entire succession of Princes, individuals perish but legacies are continued, the strength of a man is exhausted but the power of a family line increases, because individuals seize and grasp so as to have something for themselves and thus end by losing everything, while we live on loss, excess, pomp, the sumptuous gift, waste, and thus end by gaining everything; hush, my little son, do not interrupt me, do not answer me, respect your elders, simply listen, every error is repaid, every excess compensated, every crime expiated, history is the secular account of ransom; but if common men pay for their errors by making amends, compensate for excess with a vow of future frugality, and expiate their crime with the pain of repentance, we, quite the reverse, repay error with more errors, compensate for excess with new excesses, expiate crime with worse crimes: everything offered us we return in like nature, a hundredfold, until it culminates in the gift for which there is no possible response: no one can repay us, compensate us, or expiate us, for fear that we will return to them, multiplied and magnified, the very evils they give to us in an attempt to conquer us; do not bury me, little Felipe, or return me to my bedchamber; grant me the place appropriate to me: do it as a reward for my sorrowful love for you; I never wounded you, my son, I never told you all the truth; place me in that niche from which I fell; then order them to wall me in to the level of my eyes, my mutilated body hidden behind common brick; let only my eyes be seen; I shall not speak; I shall ask for nothing; I shall be a walled-in phantom; my eyes will gleam in the growing shadows of your chapel; do not place stone or inscription beneath me; I shall not be dead; we shall not know what date to inscribe for my death, we cannot know what name to put on my tomb-in-life; I shall concentrate my gaze on all the histories of Queens, I shall be the mirror of those who preceded me and the phantom of those who will follow me; from my immured pedestal I shall dream them all, I shall live because of them, I shall live for them, I shall accompany them without their realizing that I, suspended between life and death, inhabit them, I shall be what I was, Blanca, Leonor, and Urraca, I shall be what I am, Juana, and I shall be what I am to be, Isabel, Mariana, and Carlota, eternally beside the tombs of Kings, eternally widowed and disconsolate, eternally near you, my son: from time to time pass before my walled niche, seek my eyes, tell me the sad stories of men and nations; I have more than enough days, I have more than enough deaths…”