Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

He drew a curtain of rancor over the present that raged so against him, sifting in through the tightly fitted granite blocks of his palace, his monastery, his imperial necropolis. History was a gigantic puzzle; it had left only a few broken pieces in El Señor’s transparent hands. He closed his eyes and attempted to determine how the trinitarian heresies that broke the primary unity of Christianity, the secrets recounted here in this very bedchamber by Ludovico, fitted with the key pieces of Tiberius’s curse: the Cabala, the Zohar, the Sephirot, the magic number of three, and he imagined that, independent of the will of Tiberius, an invisible plot, a stratagem woven of sand and water, was being delineated throughout the confines of the Mediterraneum; a shared destiny, incarnate always in three persons, three movements, three stages, it could be read on the sheer rock faces of the island of Capri, in the meaningless meeting of the Nile and the hunger-filled alleys of Alexandria, in the spectral community of the Citizens of Heaven in the Palestine desert, in the caves and the palace on the Adriatic coast, in the illusory Venetian Theater of Memory, in this new scar of the Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic world represented by his own palace, monastery, and sepulcher, what secret thought joined the words and acts of Tiberius Caesar, the phantom of Agrippa Postumus, and the rebel slave Clemens; the invisible elect of the desert, the one-eyed magus of the Porta Argentea, and the waves of heretics Felipe had combated in the overcast lands of Flanders?; what ruling idea inspired the construction of these edifices, at once solid and spectral, the palace of Diocletian, the Theater of Memory of Valerio Camillo, the Spanish necropolis of the King Felipe?; what identical prophecies were murmured by the voices of a Roman despot, an Egyptian fratricide, and a Greek magus?; what atrocious and ineradicable mark of the origin of humanity was signaled in those parallel histories separated by centuries and oceans, those of the two brothers and a sister — the benefactor, the murderer, and the incestuous woman — in the sands of the Egyptian river and in the jungles of the new world?; is that what the three youths marked by a cross on their backs and disfigured by hexadigitalism were enacting in this palace: a further act of the representation of the beginning, a painful return to the memory of the first dawn, to the terrible acts of the founding of the city upon earth? Ariadne gave a thread to Perseus in the labyrinth: El Señor dreamed of a woman with tattooed lips, present in Alexandria and Spalato, absent in Capri, Palestine, and Venice, and again present here in Spain and in the Spanish domains beyond the seas — before they were conquered. He awakened, and he asked himself, in that sudden and fleeting lucidity that sometimes accompanies the return to wakefulness: had Ludovico read Theodorus’s manuscript, did he know of the curse of Tiberius, or had everything happened independently of will or logic? was it all a gratuitous series of events separate from any relationship of cause or effect?

Then he knew he would never know.

And nonetheless an insistent spark glimmered in the depths of his questions, his dreams, and his waking. What he knows is as important to the education of a Prince as what he does not know; the bee does not alight on every flower …

“You must know these things, my son. It will be you who will one day inherit my position and my privileges, and the accumulated wisdom of our domain as well, for without that wisdom the privileges are but vain pretension.”

“You know, Father, that I am reading the ancient writings in our library, and that I am a diligent student of Latin.”

“The wisdom to which I refer goes far beyond the knowledge of Latin.”

“I will not disappoint you again.”

He remembered his father as if he were a stranger, always distant from him, until for the first time he went out into the world, joined the dreamers, the rebels, the children and sinners and lovers, and delivered them to the slaughter in the castle. As a reward, his father gave him Isabel’s hand. Shortly thereafter, he died; Felipe inherited the throne, and his mother lay down to await death in the courtyard, later accepted mutilation, and then traveled throughout Spain bearing with her the embalmed cadaver of that Prince, his father, violator of village girls, the whoring Señor who was pursuing the girls of the palace of Brabant while his son was being born in a privy: the spark became a bonfire, only through his mother did he know who his father was, she wanted him for herself alone, if not in life, then in death, for herself alone, let no one come near, no woman, no man, not even a son …

“You must know the curse that weighs upon the heirs of Rome…”

“I forgive you everything, your women, your appetites, your deceit, everything; but I could never forgive you that…”

“I have lived and ruled with that curse upon my head, weighing upon me, robbing nights from my nights and days from my days…”

“You shall not transmit that curse to my son…”

“Our son, Juana…”

“Mine only, for like Rachel I gave birth to him with pain, forgotten, in a Flemish privy … while you … The First Rome fell, defeated by hordes of slaves. Constantinople, the Second Rome, fell, defeated by the throngs of Mohammed. Spain will be the Third Rome; it will not fall; there will be no other; and Felipe will rule over it.”

“You are mad, Juana; Aragon and Castile can scarcely rule Castile and Aragon…”

“My son inherited a plethora of ills from our line; I shall avoid for him that anguish that has eaten away at you, my poor Señor; called the Fair, you are a horror beneath your skin; I shall save my son from the fear of extinction, I charge myself with the responsibility of assuring that our line will never end…”

“You are mad, Juana; you speak as if you could revive the dead…”

“Even if our phantoms must govern, the line will not be exhausted. You will not bequeath to my son your fear of being the last King, choked and enslaved by the anonymous crowd; he will not be devoured by ants like the serpent in your nightmare. He will know what I wish him to know; he will never know what I do not wish him to know…”

If he could, El Señor would have run to his father’s tomb; instead, he had to support himself upon his cane; painfully, he made his way from his bedchamber to the chapel blackened by the ceremonies of Ash Wednesday; he was assaulted by a fearful stench, my God, oh, my God, oh, God, the same pestilential smell of the day of victory, the same execrable odor of the Cathedral profaned by the mercenary legions that had won the day for the Faith.

Limping, he approached the altar. He looked at the coffer filled with gold from the new world. It shone like gold. But gold has no odor. And this excrement-filled coffer did; it was overflowing with transmuted excrement, gold into offal, the offering of the new world, oh, God, oh, God, the alchemy of your creation; if your creation is nothing but ruin, then shit is your offering. Oh, God, from what jungle temples, from what idolater’s palaces was the gold-become-shit removed? can it be gold only there, and nothing but excrement here?

“Gold, Felipe, is the excrement of the gods,” said a hollow voice from the Flemish triptych behind the altar.

Supporting himself painfully on his shepherd’s staff, Felipe hurried breathlessly to his father’s sepulcher and rested, feverishly, on the slab of the tomb; Dr. Pedro del Agua had embalmed that body, he would be able to see his father as he had been in life, he had died young and still fair, an elegant and whoring Prince whose body disguised his inner corruption, dead before completing his fortieth year, now Felipe could rip off his doublet, his breeches, he could see the embalmed member that had taken Isabel’s virginity, the cloves-and-aloes organ of the man who had possessed and impregnated his wife Isabel, the preserved penis that had done what the son could never do, possess Isabel and give her a son, Isabel, there is nothing there but a scar, a rime frost of ancient vellum, a cobweb between the legs, Dr. del Agua had removed and cut away everything that was corrupt or corruptible, Dr. del Agua castrated my dead father, my father’s sex is nothing but a wound, like the sex of a woman …