Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

But in that same sepulcher where El Señor’s father lay, the Idiot Prince had once been buried atop him, the night of his wedding with the dwarf Barbarica, and there too Barbarica had made love with the double of her lunatic husband, with the deceiver, the whoring, incontinent youth who was his father’s true heir, the son of his father and Isabel, Don Juan, and there, beside the embalmed cadaver, lay a green bottle, the second, stopped with plaster and sealed with wax.

El Señor picked it up, slowly returned to his bedchamber, and once again sat in his curule chair.

He extracted the manuscript from the bottle.

And this he read that early dawn in the weak light from his high, narrow window.

THE RESTORATION

Sitting there in the center of the smoking hut, sitting upon her own hands, her face hidden by a white cloth that collects and simulates the imaginary light of this night in the high tropics, the woman is a photographic cell that detects its own movements, indifferent to the internal immobility of fear. She knows that unconscious movement interrupts the imaginary flow of light (the point of light represented in this dark Indian hut by her white mask) and converts it into a buzzing transmitted to the throbbing drum of her brain. There is no relationship between the light and the sound. A white, masked face (hers) comprises the entire hut, with its walls of crumbling adobe and its straw roof, a face that receives the volume, the attack, the duration, and the decadence of real or imaginary sound.

You hear the rhythm of a drum in the same instant that she recounts:

Only once, never to be repeated: the Ancient Woman says she hears the incessant, muted sound of a drum, half martial, half funereal; but she admits she cannot manage to distinguish certain qualities; she asks you whether the heads of the drumsticks are of wood, leather, or sponge; that throbbing and constant sound of mother-of-pearl is a presence, but a distant one. At times, as now, she assures you that the noise forces her to draw into a tense ball that occludes all her orifices. Injection and choked-back scream. A drill in a molar. A surgical incision. An airplane’s lift-off. The body becomes, she says, a closed order, exclusive, without reference to the threat that could be a delight. You watch her here, closed, trembling, seated on the ground beside the fire in this hut. She is listening attentively; the leather heads of the drumsticks define (or only recapture) the solemn chant: Deus fidelium animarum adesto supplicationibus nostris et de animae famulae tuae Joannae Reginae.

She repeats the words in a soft and disillusioned tone divested of the original vigor that should be used to justify them. Her hands thud against the loose dust every time she repeats the verb of her desire, return. For a long while she sits silently as you listen to the dry crackling of the branches that feed this fire that must defend us against the cold night of the Sierra Madre. Outside, our men are oiling their bicycles, cutting wood for log bridges and passing by in long lines carrying the rolled-up bridges that tomorrow they will remove from the barrancas. The foliage of the myrtle protects us; and, even more, the mist that since this afternoon has been drifting down from the summit of the Cofre de Perote. The Old Woman sits with crossed legs. You describe her as a poet of antiquity in wide, ragged skirts who recounts her own tale with the hesitation of one who speaks of events that have happened to another. She is not recounting a legend; she has told you that one learns legends by memory; if one changes a single word, it is no longer a legend. Her long silence is neither serene nor neutral; it is not a memory, it is an invention seeking its continuity, its support, in the hour of the jungle that surrounds us.

You say you see her there, closed, trembling, her lips forming the sound of a mourning drum, and you tell yourself that terror is the true state of all creatures, sufficient unto itself, separate from any dynamic relationship whatsoever: terror, a state of substantive union with the earth, terra, and a desire to withdraw forever from the earth. History — this history, another, that of many, that of one alone — cannot penetrate terrified bodies that are both paralyzed upon the earth and cast outside it. Surely, the Old Woman cannot know whether in truth that sound is approaching or whether its proximity is precisely the will to fear. Only when she feels that nature is indifferent to her body, the Old Woman tells you that she hears the always closer moaning, that she feels the touch of other hands upon her body, but she cannot be sure whether both sensations are merely an amplification of the essential rhythms of her brain, as if terror were a powerful electrode applied to the cranium and receptive to the variable energy of its waves.

Only once, never to be repeated: she says she hears that drum again; but in that same instant, as if in the distance, as if searching for a meeting of sound, there is the dissonance of something that could be described as the sound of glass broken in the past, glass that is recomposing; utility and reflection: a pile of broken glass rising from the ground as if the moment of its shattering had been recorded on tape that now, in reverse, reconstructs it; glass: a smoking mirror.

The first squadron passes through the low sky and the Old Woman moves her lips, conscious of the insult. At the same moment someone rings the only bell in this village church. She, who in the midst of the ambush of the action, insists on maintaining the distance of the narration, assuming the need to analyze, more than events, the manner in which events are externalized and interrelated, says that the airplane and the bell, as they join in harmony, proclaim their mutual absence at the instant of their meeting: the fleeting sound of pursuit seems to negate the melodic convention of bronze, but in reality a new sonority — which accounts, the woman assures you, for your fascinated silence — is evoked, beginning from the chance encounter.

You brush the Old Woman’s hand. She seems to redouble her concentration. You touch fleetingly what she is always touching. You both know that touch of down and carapace, feathered wing and insect’s foot.

“You have made progress,” you tell her, calmly. “What is it?”

“A gift. They described it to me. I am trying to reproduce the model. It is very difficult.”

She slaps at your curious fingers.

“Stop! Wait till it’s finished.”

She throws her shawl over her shoulders, feigning sudden cold; a shudder ascends to her ears; translucent porcelain. Then she laughs as if she were imitating herself; she repeats the boisterous laughter of a lost occasion, but now the laugh is not crystalline or audacious as it doubtlessly was once, in the time she is attempting to recover. What you hear now is a parody of another laugh, chained and broken: the difference between the fullness of a wave and the fragility of glass. Then, only for an instant, you imagine that the Old Woman’s voice is for you what the sound of the drum is for her.

But suddenly you are distracted. The camp followers are preparing breakfast and into the hut waft the enervating odors of sliced and shredded and crushed chili peppers mixed with fresh tomatoes, chopped onion, and mashed avocado. From the hut entrance, a hand offers two large bowls; you take them and place them beside the woman. She ceases to listen, to speak, or to remember (you realize, or you imagine, that she does all these things concurrently), and squatting, devours the meal as if this were the moment of the invention and offering (and the threat by the hands of forever depriving her) of food. She looks at you with a trace of mockery in the deep-set eyes you can scarcely see beneath the white cloth which has been pushed up, wrinkled above the upper lip to allow her to eat. She says to you, her mouth filled with food, that she eats for the pleasure of eating: a sufficient pleasure. She says that this is not the moment to think or to justify anything. The food serves to connect her, to root her, even more closely with the ground; it is the lead (she says) of a too-light body.