Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Is there time to do anything different?”

“Your chapel…”

“The Theater of Memory…”

“Transform it…”

“We shall work together, you and I, and Celestina…”

“The three youths…”

“Search for your Chronicler…”

“Bring Julián and Toribio…”

“We will add together all our knowledge in order to transform this place into a space that truly contains all spaces, into a time which truly embodies all time: a theater in which we occupy a stage where your altar stands today, and the world will unfold before our eyes, express itself in all its symbols, relations, stratagems, and mutations; the spectators on the stage, the performance in the auditorium; a theater with three revolving concentric circles, one that contains all forms of matter, another that contains all the forms of the spirit, and a third containing all the signs of the stellar universe; as each wheel revolves, all three, concentrically, all the combinations of nature, intellect, and the stars, will be formed, and from each combination will be born a specific form which, although symbolically remaining on our wheels, will actively separate itself from them, ascend your stairway, and go out into the eternal world; then the eternal world will return to us new forms that will descend your stairway and add their number to the triple wheel of our theater: unceasing transformation.”

“What shall we gain, Ludovico?”

“We shall know the truth of the order of things, and our place in them and with them: we shall be both actors and spectators in the very center of the struggle between chaos and intelligence, between dream and reason, between unity and dispersion, between ascent and descent: we shall see how everything that exists moves, integrates, relates, lives, and dies. We shall know everything, because we shall remember and foresee everything in the same instant. And thus, Felipe, we shall regain our authentic human nature, which is divine, and neither God nor Heaven nor Hell nor resurrection will any longer be necessary, because in the single instant which is all times, and in the one space which contains all spaces, we shall have seen and known, forever and from all time, the manner in which everything is related: the totality of manner and form in which we have been, are, and shall be, joined in a single source of wisdom that unifies everything without sacrificing the unity of any part. We shall attend, Felipe, the theater of eternity; we shall carry to its conclusion the secret and feverish dream of the Venetian Valerio Camillo, all things being converted into all men, all men into all things, eternal multiplicity nourishing eternal unity, which in turn simultaneously and eternally nourishes multiplicity. And then, yes, then we shall cry out with jubilation the baptismal words of the emerging era which represents the renascence of all things: what a great miracle is man, a being worthy of reverence and honor! He penetrates the nature of God as if he himself were a god, but he recognizes the race of devils, for he knows it was from them he descended.”

“Do we have time? Would it be sufficient for me to order the beginning of this new construction within the other? Today?”

“A single action is lacking.”

“What is that?”

“I have told you, it depends upon you. You are free.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“The seventh day?”

For a long time Felipe pondered these arguments in silence. Later he told Celestina and Ludovico how one morning in the month of July he had gone out hunting, expecting to ride through the flowering land of his childhood, and how, instead, a storm had broken that forced him to take shelter in a tent, with a breviary and a dog, far from the hunt arranged by Guzmán. Inexplicably, Bocanegro had fled as if he wished to defend his master from some grave danger. He returned, wounded, with the sands of the coast upon his paws. The hunting dog could not tell the truth the master now knew: Guzmán had wounded the dog when it had tried to defend Felipe from a threat greater than that of a wild boar: the return of the three usurpers … No, at the time that was not what worried him; rather, two most unusual events. One was the spirit of rebellion displayed by the band of huntsmen sent to the highest point of the mountain to warn with smoke and fire of the presence of the hart, consequently being deprived of the pleasure of the kill. The second: the inevitability of the final acts of the hunt: formally, El Señor was supposed to signal the sounding of the horns, the quartering of the hart, and the awarding of the prizes and rewards of the day; in actuality, everything had been done independently of his orders, as if truly he had given them.

As always, he went that night to the chapel. Two halberdiers were waiting for him with torches in one hand and bloody swords in the other. Mother Celestina stood uneasily between the two guards, shaking her head.

“Did you carry out my orders?”

“Señor; the foreman of whom you spoke is on the way back to his native village with a pouch of gold tied to his waist, but without hands to carry it or tongue to tell of it.”

“Very well.”

“And this woman, Señor, returned with your ring, which she says gives her permission to approach you. We found her wandering around the cells, and as she is one of those who damage reputations, who if she enters a house three times engenders suspicion, we brought her here…”

El Señor dismissed the halberdiers. From the corner of his eye he glanced at the empty space behind the altar. He asked Mother Celestina: “Are the Idiot and the dwarf in their places?”

“Fast in bed, Yer Maj’sty, beneath the same sheet, until one of them dies on us.”

“Did you speak with the nun?”

“Inesilla was awaiting me most impatiently, and caught me as I returned. An angel in disguise! How can that handsome cavalier scorn her, when they seem made for one another? ‘Mother,’ she said to me, ‘serpents are eating away this heart of mine.’ Oh, most gentle and fragile feminine sex! I repaired her maidenhead, divining your intentions for that mocker of honor with whose accomplishments the other nuns and the servants Azucena and Lolilla had entertained me; I went to that cavalier Don Juan, as you had arranged with Inesilla, and I said to him, ho, there, woman’s whore, little gamecock, downy-cheeked lad, you have deflowered an entire convent, saying — as I believe — that a pleasure unshared is no pleasure at all, Heaven have mercy, even though I am old, do you believe I am unable to receive and give pleasure? do you believe I have no heart or feelings? would you not take the sheets as shirttails with me? would you allow me to die with my virginity intact? and the cavalier laughed aloud, and said that Troy was stronger, and on the spot undid his breeches, and away … but I answered him that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that pleasure is all the greater at night, which is the cloak for sinners, and that I would await him, Yer Mercy, sir, in the cell where I shall now lead you, where he must still be, and where Inesilla has been for hours, heavily cloaked, and disguised in garments like mine.”

El Señor and the go-between walked to the palace convent courtyard, then along one of the corridors flanked on both sides by cells. Before one of them Mother Celestina stopped, placed a finger to her lips, quietly opened the Judas window in the door, and signaled El Señor to peer within.

Author of this work, inciter of this act, El Señor stepped back, clapped his hands over his mouth, prey to a delicious fright at what he saw as he peered through the aperture: the barbaric coupling of the cloaked Don Juan and Doña Inés, he in sumptuous brocade mantle, she in the voluminous tatters of the aged Celestina, both mantle and rags raised to the waist, the young cavalier’s virile member plunged into the deepest recesses of the novitiate’s soft, plump flesh, fornicating, rolling about, she with pleasure, he with fury, her eyes open, his closed, she taking pleasure and he trying to avoid seeing himself in the floor of mirrors, walls of mirrors, windows of mirrors, door and ceiling of mirrors, face down, refusing to look at himself in the floor, face up, seeing himself in the ceiling, again closing the eyes hidden beneath the mantle, forever condemned to seeing himself — or trying to avoid seeing himself — reproduced a thousand times, making love to the same woman, reproduced infinitely in the reflections of reflections, a heaven, earth, air, fire, north and south, east and west of mirrors, she moaning her unceasing pleasure, hidden fire, pleasurable lesion, savory poison, sweet bitterness, dolorous delight, joyful torment, sweet and savage wound, tender death: sweet love; he, neither wishing nor knowing, repeating the words she spoke.