Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

You open your eyes. You see the real world surrounding you and you know that you are that world and that you battle for it. It is not the first time we have fought. Your smile fades. Perhaps it is the last.

“What shall we do with the old woman, sir?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to decide.”

“Forgive me, sir, but who, if not you?”

“We could stow her away somewhere, Dusty. In some solitary, well-guarded house. How about a madhouse or a convent, Dusty?”

“Is there no superior officer who decides these things?”

“No, sir. There’s not enough time.”

“You’re right. It’s also true that we don’t have any extra men to look after prisoners…”

“Besides, they limit our mobility.”

“And as an example, Dusty, as an example. Of course she was a spy, one of the enemy. This isn’t her country.”

“Very well. Shoot her today. Over there, against the wall behind my hut.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Writing names in the dust with her finger.”

“What names?”

“Names of old bitches: Juana, Isabel, Carlota…”

Beneath the sun you walk back toward the Indian hut. You wonder whether as it appears every morning the sun sacrifices its light in honor of our need; or whether that light, in some manner sufficient to itself, spends its transparency in revealing our opacity. But the light gives form and reality to our bodies. You must shake off this nightmare. Because of the light we know who we are. Without it, we would come to invent identity antennae, detectors for the bodies we wished to touch and recognize. You wonder whether it is possible to shoot a ghost. You aren’t lying to yourself anymore, you know where you have seen before the eyes of an ancient, mutilated, armless and legless woman wrapped in black rags, the eyes of a Queen of vulnerable strength and cruel compassion. The nightmare calls you again; you were also in that painting …

You stop. Beside the entrance to the hut a young native girl with smooth, firm (you are sure) skin, tattooed lips, and scarred ankles is weaving and unraveling, with dexterity and serenity, a strange cloth of feathers. At her side, a soldier is playing a guitar, and singing. You approach the girl. In that instant, the bombardment begins anew.

The lazy dog consists of a mother bomb fabricated of light metal that bursts while still in the air and close to the ground, or when it strikes the ground. Inside the mother bomb there are three hundred metal balls, each the size of a tennis ball, which, as they are liberated from the maternal bosom, scatter independently in every direction, either exploding immediately or lying in ambush in undergrowth or dust, awaiting a child’s foot or a woman’s hand, blowing off the foot, the hand, or the head of the first woman or child who touches it. The men are all in the mountains.

REQUIEM

Recently he had been assaulted by a terrifying multitude of afflictions.

Five wounds erupted; the nuns of the palace called them wounds so as to suggest that the King’s suffering was like that of Christ himself; and Felipe accepted this blasphemy in the name of his hunger for God. One wound on the thumb of his right hand, three on the index finger of the same hand, and another on a toe of his right foot. These five suppurating points tormented him night and day; he could not bear even the contact of the sheets. Finally, the wounds healed, but he was completely incapable of movement. He was transported from place to place in a sedan chair carried, in turn, by four nuns. El Señor observed to Madre Milagros: “Any thing that enters a convent will never leave it; no person, no money, no secret. I could have chosen to be transported by four deaf-mute servants: but thus will you and your Sisters be, Milagros, deaf and mute to everything you see and hear.”

He asked them to carry him once more to the dark corner of the chapel where his mother, the one called the Mad Lady, reposed in a wall; he asked her: “Mother, what are you doing?”

Madre Milagros and Sisters Angustias, Caridad, and Ausencia knelt, frightened, and began to pray in a low voice when they discerned through the crack between the bricks the amber eyes of the ancient Queen about whom so much had been conjectured by gossips and tattlers: she had returned to absolute seclusion in the castle of Tordesillas; she had in life buried herself beside the cadaver of her most beloved husband, she had been accidentally killed during the fierce slaughter in the chapel presided over by Guzmán, she had fled to new lands with her farting dwarf and her lunatic Idiot Prince. Now they heard her voice:

“Oh, my son, how wise you were never to abandon the protection of your walls, and never to cross the seas so you might know the lands of your vast Indian empire. No one, no sovereign of our blood, had ever stepped upon the shores of the new world: they were more discreet than I. But consider, my dear son, my dilemma: my handsome husband, blond as the sun, was only second in succession; we were living in the shadow of the Emperor, Maxl’s brother, in the court in Vienna; amid the frivolity of balls and court etiquette we were living on crumbs from the imperial table, always second, never first, mere delegates, representatives in Milan and Trieste of the true power in an unredeemed and rebellious Italy subjected to the power of Austria. How could we help but hear the song of the siren? An empire, our own empire, in Mexico, our land, discovered, conquered, and colonized by our royal line, but not one royal foot had sunk into the sands of Veracruz. Maxl, Maxl, the poison of incestuous generations was more concentrated in you, my beloved, the hereditary traits, the prognathic jaw, the brittle bones, the thick, parted lips: even so, your blue eyes and your blond beard gave you the aspect of a god; but you could engender no sons. I told you that night in Miramar, if we cannot have children, we shall have an empire. The good Mexicans offered us a throne; we would be good parents to that people; but the Emperor, your brother, refuses us aid: he envies you; accept the aid of Bonaparte; his troops will protect us from the handful of rebels who oppose us. We disembarked from the Novara into the burning tropics, a sky filled with vultures, a jungle of parrots, an aroma of vanilla, orchid, and orange, we climbed to the dry plain, so like this of Castile, my son, to the site of our ancestor’s power, the conquered city, Mexico, the rebellious country, Mexico: an ancient legend, Maxl, a white, blond-haired and bearded god, the Plumed Serpent, the god of good and peace; but they did not want us, my son, they deceived us, my son, they fought to the death against us, they faded into the jungle, the mountains, the plain, they were peons by day and soldiers by night, they attacked, they fled, they lay in ambush, an invisible army of barefoot Indians; we reacted with the fury of our blood: hostages, villages burned, rebels shot, women hanged; nothing subdued them, the French Army abandoned us, first you wanted to flee with them, but I told you that one of our dynasty would never undertake cowardly flight, I would go to Paris, to Rome, I would force Napoleon to live up to his promises, I would force the Pope to protect us; they scorned me, they humiliated me, I became demented, they tried to poison me, they allowed me to spend one night in the Vatican, the first woman ever to sleep in St. Peter’s, then I went to our villa at Lake Como, I received your letters, Maxl, you, alone, abandoned, your letters: If God allows you to recover your health, and if you can read these lines, you will know in what measure I have been buffeted by adversity, one blow after another, since you went away. Misfortune dogs my footsteps and destroys all my hopes. Death seems to me a happy solution. We are surrounded. Imperial messengers have been hanged by the Republicans within sight of us, in trees across the river. The Austrian hussars have been unable to come to our aid. Our munitions and provisions are exhausted. The good Sisters bring us a little bread made from the flour of the Hosts. We eat the meat of mules and horses. We live in our last refuge, the Convent of the Cross. From its towers one can look out over the panorama of the city of Querétaro. I do not know how long we can resist. I shall comport myself to the end like a sovereign defeated but not dishonored. Farewell, my beloved. I answered him: My beloved, I think of you constantly from this land filled with the memories of our best years … Here everything speaks to me of you; your Lake Como, so dear to you, spreads before my eyes in all its azure serenity, and everything seems the same as it was before; except that you are there, so far away, so far … My letter, my son, arrived too late; the bullet-pierced body, convulsed at the base of the firing wall, refused to die. A soldier approached and fired the coup de grâce into his breast. The black tunic burst into flame. A majordomo ran and snuffed out the flame with his livery. The body was taken to a convent to be embalmed so it could be returned to the family. The carpenter, from Juárez’s army, had never seen him in his lifetime. He did not measure correctly. They brought him down from the Hill of the Bells on a caisson of the Republican Army, inside the too-small box, his legs dangling outside the coffin. Naked, the body was laid out on a table. But they had to wait a long time before taking up the scalpel and opening the body cavity. There was no disinfectant naphthaline in the convent. They found a flask of zinc chloride. This liquid was injected into his arteries and veins. The process took three days. Four bullets had penetrated his torso, three through the left breast, and one through the right nipple. A fifth bullet had burned his eyebrows and brow. Beneath the sun one eye had burst from its socket, as if throughout his life he had stared at it without blinking. They searched through the churches for eyes the color of his: blue. Saint by saint; virgin by virgin — only black eyes. Blue had fled from the gaze of that country. They clothed him in a campaign tunic of blue cloth. A row of golden buttons from waist to neck. Long breeches, tie, kid gloves. There was so little left. Barely a rushing of wind. They inserted eyes of black glass in the hollow sockets: no one could have recognized him. Exhausted gases escaped from the opened belly, bubbled in his ears, covered his lips with green spume. The body lay convulsed. A soldier fired the coup de grâce into his breast and then leaned against the adobe wall to smoke. After two weeks, the body turned black. The zinc injections had destroyed the roots of the hair. It was impossible to recognize beneath the glass of the coffin — that bald head, that beardless chin, those false eyes, that flesh first swollen and then sunken — the imperial profile known on gold medallions. The features were erased. My beloved had the face of the beaches of the new world. Again his body crossed the great ocean, on the same ship that had brought us there, the Novara. No one could recognize him. I never saw him again. Look at me, my son; I am that ancient mad doll dressed in a lace dressing gown and coiffed in silk, shut up in a Belgian castle, escaping at times to search beneath the trees of the misty meadows a nut, a little fresh water; they wish to poison me. My name is Carlota.”