Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Julián,” panted El Señor. “In some mysterious manner I always knew you were the creator of that accursed painting…”

“You could have accused me at your will, Sire.”

“One day I explained why I did not…”

“In order to avoid nonessential disputes, not to give more weapons than necessary to the Inquisition? You have given them everything they need if the decrees that have been published recently and signed with your name are true…”

“But you, Julián, you and Toribio, from my most loved and protected order, the Dominicans…”

“The Lord’s dogs, Señor; as faithful to Him as Bocanegra was to you.”

“You placed that painting there, that black talisman, that mirror with which you have tortured me incessantly…”

“Without it, Sire, would you be who you are today and would you know what you know?”

“I always knew what that painting brought me to know even more fully: the angel of my heart will battle eternally against the beast of my blood. So be it; what have you done with that painting, yours and mine?”

“It has been seen by those who needed to see it in this time and place; now it will be seen by those who will need to see it in another time and another place.”

“By whom?”

“Señor; I have read your testaments in the papers Guzmán delivered to me, and which I delivered to my colleague the astrologer. You spoke there of the orifices of time, the dark, empty moments during which the past tried to imagine the future…”

“Yes, that I bequeath to them, that is written, a future of resurrections, 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…”

“I merely fulfill your projects, all of which coincide with those of my order, the Preachers; what have we to preach but what we remember? and what are we to remember but what we have written or painted? There will be no witness to any identities except what I may have recorded in paintings, portraits, and medallions: thus yesterday’s identities will be today’s when tomorrow, Sire, be today.”

“Such magic has no place in the rules of memory which St. Thomas includes as part of the virtue of prudence. And without prudence, there is no salvation. Would you condemn your soul, Brother Julián, to save your art?”

“Now I can affirm to you, Señor, yes. I would condemn myself, if it save my art, which can save many.”

“How pitiful is your pride. Your art, poor Julián, is nothing but empty space behind the altar. Look.”

“My art is unsigned, Sire, and thus does not represent an affirmation of stupid individualism but an act of creation: in it matter and spirit are reconciled, and both not only live together but actually live. And before my act, they did not. You see magic in what is new, Señor. I see only what gives life to elusive spirit and inert matter: imagination. And imagination is what changes, not spirit or matter in themselves, rather the manner in which their union is imagined. My painting has already been here, in this chapel. It has been seen. It has seen. It is fitting now that it see and be seen in other places.”

“Where, monk?”

“In the new world, in the virgin land where knowledge can be reborn, rid itself of the fixity of the icon and unfold infinitely, in every direction, over all space, toward all time.”

“My most naïve friend: the new world does not exist.”

“It is too late now to say that, Señor. It exists, because we desire it. It exists, because we imagine it. It exists, because we need it. To say is to desire.”

“Go, then, sail in the ship of the mad toward the great precipice of the waters; unfurl, monk, the sails of the navis stultorum … Along with your art, fool, tumble over the cataract of the deep, and what will you leave behind you? Look again: empty space.”

“Fill it, Sire.”

“I? Would it not be better for you yourself to paint another painting above my altar?”

“No. My painting has already spoken. Now let another speak. It is his turn.”

“Who, monk, who? You must know, you who know how to hasten disasters…”

“Señor: show the severed head of that poor Flemish painter that you keep in a chest in your bedchamber to the empty space my painting occupied…”

SIXTH DAY

“Will you never leave here, Felipe?”

“Never, Ludovico. You may doubt everything, except that fact. This is my space, enclosed, determined. Here I shall live until I know what fate Providence has in store for me: eternal Heaven, eternal Hell, or the feared resurrections my mirror announced to me one day as I ascended those stairs leading to the plain.”

“Others will leave…”

“But no one else will come.”

“If you won a world, a new world, would you never visit it?”

“Never, Ludovico, even if it existed. Let others chase after that illusion. My palace contains everything I need to know my fate.”

“You climbed that stairway…?”

“Yes.”

“You saw only yourself…?”

“Yes…”

“You could have seen the world…”

“I tell you, the world is contained here within my palace; that is why I constructed it: a replica of stone to forever isolate and protect me against the snares of everything that multiplies, corrodes, and conquers: the canker of ambitions, wars, crusades, necessary crimes and impossible dreams, ours, Ludovico, those of our youth. See to what a bad end we have come. Pedro never knew the world without oppression that he dreamed of; Simón knew nothing but hunger and the plague; Celestina, only the slavery of her body. And you, Ludovico, you shall never know a world without God, filled with human grace.”

“We merely initiated those dreams…”

“Time has mocked you soundly.”

“Perhaps; now others will follow.”

“Who, woman?”

“The three youths.”

“My poor Celestina; if that is the illusion that sustains you, prepare to pass on your memory, your wisdom, and your wounded lips to another woman, and see yourself in the mirror of the old whore who passed them to you … And you, Ludovico, in what do you now place your dream of human grace, direct, Godless, with no need for mediators?”

“In everything I have learned these twenty years. Review everything I have said here and you will know what I know, no more, no less.”

“You have spoken to me of divine unity and diabolical dispersion, if I have understood you correctly.”

“Exactly. And the human struggle that takes place at all the intermediate grades on that scale. It is your struggle. But you saw only Felipe on the stairway, not the world. You saw the transformations of your individual matter, but not the doors that opened on each side of the steps as you ascended, beckoning you to open them and recognize other possibilities.”

“What possibilities, Ludovico? You tell me.”

“One lifetime is not sufficient. One needs multiple existences in order to unify a personality. Every identity is nurtured from all other identities. In the present we call ourselves solidarity. In the future we shall call ourselves hope. And behind us in the illusory past, living, latent, everything that had no opportunity to be because it awaited your birth to be given that opportunity. Nothing disappears completely, everything is transformed; what we believe to be dead has but changed place. What is, is thought. What is thought, is. Everything contains the aura of what it was previously, and the aura of what it will be when it disappears. You belong simultaneously to the present, the past, and the future: to today’s epic, yesterday’s myth, and tomorrow’s freedom. We can travel from one time to another. We are immortal: we have more life than our own death, but less time than our own lifetime. You did not open the doors, Felipe. You believe you have the entire world reproduced here within your palace, but you have only yourself; you are nothing, neither unity nor dispersion, not Heaven or Hell or resurrection: nothing, because you have denied the unities which finally joined would integrate your unity, and because you deny them, you have no Heaven, which is the first and last unity; if there is no Heaven there is no Hell; and if there is no Hell there is no dispersion; and lacking the stage of human grace which unfolds between these two poles, you will never know true resurrection, which is to continue to live in others, not in our own skin. Alone, Felipe, you will be only what you have feared: a wolf hunted in your own domains by descendants who fail to recognize you. They will kill you.”