Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Yes, you know them, but you say nothing to the woman. You suspect the real intent of her question. She repeats it, is still, and then … what day is it? she asks. You believe it is useless to answer. Slowly she struggles to her feet. You fear she will fall. You also rise, to take her arm, but your instinct keeps you at a distance, though nevertheless dependent upon her; beside her, but not touching her, you duplicate quite naturally her infirm step, picturing the imminent collapse of that fatigued body; finally, brusquely, she supports herself against the central pole of the hut that holds up the straw roof. You move toward her; she clutches the pole but extends her hands toward you, imploring you with words you cannot hear.

“What? What are you saying? I can’t hear you.”

You approach her as you would a little girl, or an animal. You try to divine her desire. You cannot escape her odor. Ancient salt. Mineral husks. Herbivorous fish. Rotten oranges. Black and volatile fumes. A second, viscous skin that passes from her hands to your defenseless skin, now that finally you take her like a little girl or an animal, trying to divine her desire, and lead her to the tiny garden behind the hut: the parcel of land barred on three sides by bamboo, the fourth side a thick adobe wall, a pretension of private property the distant bombardment makes ridiculous.

You cannot escape her smell. You cannot stop touching her. The damp rags that envelop her. You feel the vertigo of an elusive memory.

In the forgotten garden everything is weeds, and if once someone tended it, today it bears evidence of different labor: rusted bicycle wheels, saws, a box of nails, some empty gasoline cans. It looks like a garden of metal, a gallery of scrap-metal sculptures. Its only purpose now is to serve as depository for useless objects that may someday, unexpectedly, again become useful. The wire of the wheels can be used for binding wire. The empty cans as floats. The thick, bullet-pocked wall can be used again.

“Don’t you see?”

“Yes. A garden. Things.”

“No. Something more.”

“Nothing is happening here.”

“Give me a drink.”

You hand her the gourd and look around. The weed-filled garden is indifferent to your gaze, merely describing to you its own nature, compact, green, bounded on three sides by the fence of bamboo tied together with thick maguey rope, the fourth by the wall of crumbling adobe. Weeds emerge from damp ground only to end in split, dried-up, burned tips.

We know this territory inch by inch, from the river Chachalacas to the peak of the Cofre de Perote, and from the Huasteca Tamaulipas to the mouths of the Coatzacoalcos: the besieged half-moon of our last defense against the invader. The rest of the republic is occupied by the North American Army. And facing the Gulf coasts, the Caribbean fleet observes, bombards, and launches raids. Here in Veracruz we were founded by a conquest, and here, almost five centuries later, a different conquest attempts our eternal destruction. We know inch by inch, sierra by sierra, barranca by barranca, tree by tree, this last citadel of our identity.

The Old Woman raises her arm; an age-spotted hand appears from among her rags and a finger points toward the depths of the jungle. Beyond the cimarron trees, sleeping violets, and greedy, spotted tiger-flowers. She points, and then stoops as if to trace a circle in the dust. Her index finger is a knotted scepter. The veils that fall from her head tremble, and she springs like a puma. She digs her fingernails into your chest and you stagger back, off balance; you feel her hands like a tourniquet about your throat and the breath of a weary journey near your mouth: “Why are we staying here? Why do you not take me to a different place?”

She says (and you know) that the question merely passes through lips that are the conduit for the jungle that contemplates you and the jewels the jungle hides. You embrace her in passive combat; in her hand the Old Woman still holds the cloth (you don’t know what else to call it: map? guide for the hunt? plan of operations? talisman?): feathers, spiders and filaments. The only drum resounds, always swifter and more muted.

You push the Old Woman aside with a feeling of physical repugnance (the breath; the bestial hands; the filthy clothing; especially that breath of mushrooms and mildew). You tell her firmly, and with rage: “I know the place you mean. It’s an abandoned pyramid. We’ve hidden there several times. And it serves as a depository for weapons. I tell you this because you will never be able to reveal it to anyone.”

But as you see her there, thrown to the ground in the garden, staring at the thick wall, you must struggle against the pity the woman evokes. A heavy silence surrounds her, as tangible as actual absence; silence, a deserved repose, like that of death; similar, at least, to the chronic death of dream.

The drum resounds and she lies at the foot of the adobe wall. You do not know what she is waiting for, what she invites you to, what she expects of you, whether she wished to remain there or go to the sumptuous Totonac tomb the jungle has devoured.

The Old Woman writhes on the ground and screams, a scream indistinguishable from the others, those of macaws abandoning the jungle in flocks of terror now that the Phantoms return flying in low formation.

The repeated whistle, impact, explosion, intolerable in their screeching descent, the explosion muffled by the foliage of useless targets: they are devastating jungle … nothingness.

You raise your fist to curse them once again: but that is your daily prayer, your sign of the cross; fucking gringo sons of bitches. They fly so low you can read the black insignia on the wings: USAF.

The din strikes against your eardrums with the everyday, irritating sound of a knife scraping against a frying pan. You grasp the maddened dervish beneath the arms and she cries out sharply and tries to hold herself by clawing at the dust at the foot of the bullet-pocked wall; you try to drag her forcibly into the hut where you both should be lying face down for the duration of the bombardment, this time closer and more severe, and furthermore, unforeseen; generally they make their pass only once, in the early morning, dump their load of napalm and lazy dogs and return to their bases. Today they have repeated their daily incursion. What’s happening, you wonder; is this a portent of their victory, or of our resistance? That stretch of garden between you and the hut seems fantastically long; the Old Woman is simultaneously an inert bundle and a metal nerve, a bag of rags and a root sunk several meters into the ground; she is an electrical conductor for voices, fears, and desires that perhaps avail themselves of this weakness to install their strength. Other traditions tell that beings of this nature are instantly recognizable, and can penetrate without obstacle all places, sacred and profane: their voice and their movement are those of an imminence that can appear as easily in a temple as in a brothel.

Why do you not dare tear off the white cloth that covers her face? The temple and the brothel. The Old Woman spoke of the Church of Santa Teresa in the Sierra del Nayar. Then she had been there, in that place you fear so greatly. You listened to her describe it and didn’t know whether this woman was plotting against your country or against your life; whether she was spying on rebellious forces or spying on you when she came to this hidden camp in the Veracruz jungle. You heard her describe the temple constructed by the Coras under the watchful eyes of the Spanish missionaries and you recalled the time you spent there in a different time, when you believed you had a different vocation: the artist’s brush, not the gun. You were sent — you must have been about twenty, no more — with a group of specialists from the Churubusco School to restore the splendor of an old and forgotten painting of enormous dimensions, neglected, damaged by the centuries, humidity, fungus, lack of care, situated behind the altar of that temple of God the Indians had converted into the Devil’s brothel. The peeling and blistered surface depicted, in the foreground, a group of naked men in the center of a vast Italian piazza. Their backs were turned to the viewer and their attitude was one of anguish, of desolate waiting, of terror before an imminent end. To the right of this foreground, a Christ wearing the traditional robes of his teaching, blue mantle and white tunic, stared intently at these men. In the background, forming a deep semicircle, fanned out minute scenes of the New Testament. Professionally, your team prepared to limn the damaged oil painting anew, to remedy its wounds, to fix its colors. Someone, many years before, must have lashed the painting with a whip; you would think that blood had run down the canvas, and that the skin of the painting still had not healed.