Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

In the solitude of his dust-filled bedchamber of black sheets, black tapestries, black crucifix, and high narrow window, El Señor pondered his mother’s words. Seated there, he was pleasured by a summer’s day, the last summer’s day he had lived. He knew he would never again see such a day. It would be eternal winter in this solitude. He looked from time to time toward the nuns’ choir. Encarnación, Dolores, Esperanza, Caridad, Angustias, Clemencia, Milagros, Ausencia, Soledad: he, Felipe, a recluse among women, seated in eternal penumbra.

On that last summer’s day of his life he had ridden through the flowering land of his childhood. He had ridden out to hunt. Guzmán had prepared everything. His faithful Bocanegra accompanied him. It rained. He took refuge in his tent and read his breviary. Bocanegra ran out of the tent. It stopped raining. Everyone gathered around the felled stag. He was to give the order for the final ceremony: that the horns sound, the stag be quartered, the hounds be baited, and the prizes and punishments of the day be allotted. He raised his hand to give the order. But before he gave it, everything happened as if he had already acted. The culminating moment of the hunt proceeded as if El Señor’s order had been given. As if his most perfect presence were absence itself.

“Where is everyone?”

Who was giving orders in his name? Who was governing in his stead? or was it that everything was happening — as it had that night on the mountain — through inertia, without El Señor’s having signed papers, or ordered or forbidden or rewarded or castigated.

He walked through the courtyards, passed through doors, fatigued vestibules, wandered through the small cloisters of the convent, the great square that served as a locutory, with its pilasters of granitic stone, he passed beneath lunettes of melancholy windows, past walnut benches with back rests, through the upper level of the convent with its long walls and cloisters traversed and crisscrossed by a multitude of arches, beneath the carved ceilings of the storeroom, until he entered a vast gallery he had never seen before, two hundred feet long and thirty feet high, the fronts, sides, and domed ceiling covered by painting, columns embedded in the walls embellished with fascia, jambs, lintels, and railings in a row, in the manner of balconies, the ceiling and the dome with grotesque and elaborate plaster ornamentation, a thousand variations on real and fictional figures, plaster medallions and niches, pedestals, men, women, children, monsters, birds, horses, fruits and flowers, draperies and festoons, and a hundred other bizarre inventions, and at the rear of the great hall stood a Gothic throne of carved stone, and seated upon it a man, he tried to recognize him, the high, starched ruff, damask doublet, tightly laced shoes, one leg shorter than the other, stiff torso, pale, grayish face, drowsy, stupid eyes with the gaze of an inoffensive saurian, half-open mouth, the lower lip thick and drooping, heavy prognathic jaw, sparse eyebrows, long wig of black, oily curls, and crowning the head a bloody white pigeon, the blood ran down this King’s face, yes, this secret monarch who stiffly raised one arm, and then the other, and governed in his name, now he knew, now he understood … the royal mummy fabricated by La Señora, the specter of all his ancestors, seated upon this throne and crowned by a dove, thank you, thank you, Isabel, I am indebted to you, this phantom governs for me, I can devote myself to the greatest undertaking: my soul’s well-being …

Another crown, this one of gold encrusted with sapphire, pearl, agate, and rock crystal, lay on the floor at the feet of the mummy, of this animated corpse that did not stare at him any more intently than he, trembling, stared at it.

Impulsively, he picked up the Gothic crown and fled from the gallery, not hearing the titters of the homunculus hidden behind the throne, and walked hurriedly through mournful passageways, unfinished gardens, secret stairways, tombstones of dark marble, avoiding the chapel and the ceremonies of that Holy Day of Corpus Christi, until he reached the chamber of his wife Isabel, he had seen the mummy there, lying on her bed, he entered: there was nothing there now except the white sand floors, a warm June breeze drifted through the window from which La Señora had ordered the costly windowpanes removed and packed, the shiny tiles of the Arabic bath had been torn out, the bed collapsed. In her absence, Isabel’s chamber had begun to resemble El Señor’s; hasty abandon, passing glory.

Something glittered, half buried in the sands of the floor.

El Señor walked to it, stooped over, and withdrew a green bottle from its tomb of sand.

He broke the bottle’s red seal.

The bottle contained a manuscript.

With difficulty he extracted the manuscript. It was ancient parchment, its stained leaves stuck to one another, and it was written in Latin.

He sat upon the sand, and this is what he read.

MANUSCRIPT OF A STOIC

I

I am writing in the last year of the reign of Tiberius. The Empire inherited from Augustus still maintains its maximum and magnificent extension. From the central navel of its foundation by the sons of the she-wolf, its possessions extend, in great universal arcs, to the north, the Frisian Islands and Batavia, through all Gaul, conquered by Caesar, and to the south and west, from the Pyrenees to the Tagus through the lands where Scipio availed himself of three Lusitanians to murder the rebellious Viriathus and then, everything once having been founded upon revolt, blood, and betrayal, it was necessary to found it all a second time in Numantia, upon the honor of heroic failure: Numantia, where, before surrendering, the Iberians set fire to their homes, killed their women, burned their children, poisoned themselves, thrust daggers into their breasts, cut the hocks of their horses, and those who remained alive after this immolation threw themselves from their towers upon the Romans, lances pointed, trusting that as they crashed to the ground and died they would take with them, impaled, an invader.

All the lands embraced to the east of the Rhone and south of the Danube, from Vienna to Thrace, are Roman; Byzantium, the Bosporus, Anatolia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, and the great crescent that sweeps from Antioch to Carthage are Roman; hers is the Mare Nostrum: Rhodes, Cyprus, Greece, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Islands. The world is one and Rome is the head of that world. Rome is the world, even when its most ambitious citizens temper this truth with glances directed toward what remains to be conquered: Mauritania, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Dacia, the Britannic isles … Nevertheless, we can say with pride, along with our great founding poet: Romans, masters of the world, a togaed nation.

Like falcons, descend, reader, from this high firmament that permits us to admire the unity and extension of the Empire, to the place where dwells Tiberius, Master of Rome.

Until recently, we narrators could begin our chronicles with this notice: Listen, reader, and you shall have delight. I do not know whether this be my case; I ask forgiveness beforehand as I lead you to Capri, a craggy island of goats anchored in the gulf of Naples, accessible only by one small beach, surrounded by bottomless waters, and defended by sheer cliffs. On its summit: the Imperial Villa, the most inaccessible spot on this small, barren, and impregnable island.

And, nevertheless, this afternoon a poor fisherman who has had the good fortune to catch an enormous mullet does ascend laboriously, though sure-footedly, for from the time he was a child he has competed with the other lads of the island to see who can most rapidly scale the vertical rock formations; he sweats, he pants, his legs are scratched, and with a single hand, in moments of danger, he clings to the sharp yellow rocks; his other arm clutches to his breast the fish with the silver belly and eyes (both in life and in death) half covered by transparent membranes. Night is falling, but the fisherman does not falter in his keen determination to reach the summit where dwells Tiberius Caesar; night is falling but in the enormous eyes of Tiberius Caesar there is no fear, for we all know that he can see in the dark.