Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

A messenger enters, panting and bleeding, and falls to his knees.

“Rest now. You will forget everything I have said. All my words were spoken yesterday.”

The Old Woman imitates the breathing of the wounded man who has just reached your camp in the Veracruz sierra, while you rise slowly to your feet, zipping your trousers; you run your fingers through your hair, and with your feet scatter the night’s fire: a pyramid of ashes.

“Each of us has the right to carry a secret to the tomb.”

After entrusting your prisoner to the soldiers, you turn off the battery-powered tape recorder that throughout the night has repeated, hypnotically, a single tape, the constant sound of a funeral drum. That tape recorder is the only thing the Old Woman brought with her when she was captured. You expected to hear a message, decipher a code, find something that would implicate her. Only a tape with the sound of a mourning drum. In vain you search for the cloth — you cannot call it, as she does, a map of the jungle — the trance-induced woman fashioned before your eyes in this very hut.

You go out into the garden and you waste precious time poking through the rubbish at the base of the wall. Futile. If only you could remember the exact design of that cloth: surely it was the map of a primitive hunt, the precise composition of the zones of feathers in relation to the center of spiders, the color of the feathers, the directions signaled by the arrows. You have wasted your time. Your arms fall to your sides. You leave the garden and ask about the messenger who arrived at the camp this morning, panting and wounded.

The messenger is lying on a straw mat in the shade. He drinks awkwardly from the gourd you offer him. He tells you that the previous night he had gone to El Tajín as you had ordered to make a recount of the arms hidden inside the pyramid. He had been overtaken there by an electrical storm and had decided to spend the night in the shelter of the jutting eaves of the Totonac temple. Without close examination it is difficult to distinguish between the luxurious vegetation and the elaborate carving of the façade. Shadows of the jungle and shadows of stone integrate into an inseparable architecture. One can easily be deceived. But he swears to you that as he leaned back into one of the openings in the façade, looking for an eave under which he could take shelter, feeling his way with his hands, he touched a face.

He jerked his hand away, but then overcame his fear and played over the wall the flashlight he always carried tied to his belt. First it illuminated only the sumptuary frets of the temple. But finally, inserted in one of the hollows of the pediment that surely had served as airy tombs for royalty, he discovered what he was looking for. And he tells you that he found a strange body there with a profile eroded by time and corruption; an old, perhaps a hundred-year-old, body placed inside a basket filled with cotton and swimming in pearls; a devoured, featureless face with two staring, black, glassy eyes.

He wanted to investigate more closely; he lifted the cape soaked by the storm and devoured by insects, but two events distracted him: behind him, illuminated by lightning flashes, he saw a young Indian girl with a serene gaze and tattooed lips, barefoot, sad, luxuriously attired, her ankles scarred by shackles; as if waiting, she was sitting at the base of the pyramid: in her hands she held a cloth of feathers and arrows, and at her feet lay a circle of dead butterflies; at the same time, he heard an amazing sound, a drum seeming to advance through the jungle, announcing a future or a past execution; he thought he must be dreaming; through the parted undergrowth appeared a funeral procession composed of people of another epoch, white-coiffed nuns, monks in dark-brown hooded robes, lighted tapers, beggars, ladies gowned in brocades, gentlemen in black doublets with high white ruffs, captives with the Star of David on their breasts, other captives with Arabic features, halberdiers, pages, laborers carrying poles across their shoulders, torches and candles. Our messenger was confounded; he extinguished his flashlight and began to run. Above the sound of the drum several shots thundered in unison. The messenger felt a sting on his shoulder and on his arm. He doesn’t know how he managed to reach the camp.

Later you give a few orders, you eat the midday mess and inspect the hanging bridges that tonight will permit us to cross the barrancas, attack the flank of an enemy position, and then disappear into the jungle. We attack only by night. By day we prepare ourselves for combat and blend into the jungle and the population. We all dress like the peons of the region: we are chameleons. We eat, we sleep, we make love, we bathe in the river. If they want to exterminate us, they will have to exterminate the jungle, the rivers, the barrancas, even the ruins — the entire earth and sky.

Following the assassination of the Constitutional President and his family, your brother assumed the post of First Minister in the military regime, and he pleaded with you to join him. Freedom, sovereignty, self-determination; vain words that for defending them as if they were something more than mere words cost the President his life … You had to face reality. The government that emerged following the coup had solicited the intervention of the North American Army to help maintain order and to assure a transition to peace and prosperity. The division of the world into inviolable spheres of influence was a fact that saved us all from nuclear conflict. These are the things your brother said to you in his office in the National Palace as he pressed a series of buttons that turned on a number of television screens. A dozen apparatus were lined up along a dais; across their smoking mirrors passed scenes that your brother, redundantly, described to you. This was the brutal reality: the country could not feed its more than a hundred million persons; mass extermination was the only realistic policy; collective brainwashing was necessary to assure that human sacrifice would again be accepted as a religious necessity; the Aztec tradition of sumptuary consumption of hearts must be joined to the Christian tradition of the sacrificed God: blood on the cross, blood on the pyramid; look, he said, pointing toward the illuminated screens. Teotihuacán, Tlatelolco, Xochicalco, Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Monte Albán, Copilco; they are all in use again. With a smile, he pointed out to you that the commentary was different on each program; the public-relations experts had subtly distributed suitable commentators among the twelve channels to lend to the ceremonies a sports, religious, festive, economic, political, aesthetic, or historical emphasis; one announcer, his voice rushed and excited, was giving the scores of the contest between Teotihuacán and Uxmal: so many hearts in favor of this team, so many in favor of the opposing team; another, in an unctuous voice, was comparing the sites of sacrifice with yesteryear’s supermarkets; the sacrifice of life would directly contribute to feeding those Mexicans who escaped death; then a smiling, typically middle-class family was flashed upon the screen, the supposed beneficiary of the extermination; a third announcer was extolling the concept of the fiesta, the recovery of forgotten collective bonds; the feeling of communion these ceremonies provided; another spoke in serious tones of the world situation: cruelty and spilling of blood were in no way fatalities inherent only in the Mexican people: all nations were resorting to such practices in order to resolve problems of overpopulation, scarcity of food, and depletion of energy sources: Mexico was merely employing a solution fitting to its own sensibilities, its cultural tradition, and its national idiosyncrasy: the flint knife was proudly Mexican; and an eminent physician spoke with a solemn air about universal acceptance of euthanasia and the option — neglected because of mass ignorance and an anachronistic cult of machismo — of employing anesthesia, local or general, etc.…