Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Don Felipe’s skin was pale and transparent, his fine hair, his beard and moustache, silken snow, and this fearsome whiteness was the more startling in contrast to the black attire he had never changed from the time he had resolved to shut himself up in his palace.

After they had lanced the abscess, he ordered all those gathered there, doctors, surgeons, priests, nuns, and servants, to give thanks to God. Kneeling, they thanked God for mercy granted. With this El Señor was consoled and felt a great calm, believing he was imitating martyred saints whose pain had been alleviated as they were transported to the Passion of the One who had died to redeem them. He said he was hungry, and he was speedily brought some chicken broth. When he had drunk it he felt very cold, and from his bed he stretched out his hand and sought his faithful mastiff Bocanegra. He imagined that the hound still lay by his side, and smiling and shivering, said to him: “You see, Bocanegra? After eating, the finely bred Spaniard and his dog experience a chill.”

Nevertheless, he remained in a state of torment from which he never emerged, for every time they treated him they syringed and pressed upon the wound to remove the corruption. Between morning and evening, on occasions of most terrible pain, El Señor filled two porringers with pus.

Thin and wasted with corruption, he at times slept overlong, but at others suffered from a most grievous inability to sleep at all. At times great diligence was necessary to awaken him during the day, depending upon the extent to which the evil vapors of his rotted leg had risen to his brain, and then Madre Milagros, who was often at his bedside serving whatever the occasion demanded, would say, a little gruffly: “Do not touch the relics!”

And then El Señor, startled by this voice, would open his eyes and see the relics placed beside his bed, a bone of St. Ambrose, the leg of St. Paul the Apostle, and the head of St. Jerome; three thorns from the Crown of Christ, one of the nails from His Cross, a fragment of the Cross itself, and a shred of the tunic of the Most Holy Virgin Mary; and, supported against the bed, the miraculous staff of St. Dominic of Silos. In these relics he sought the well-being the physicians were unable to afford him; and upon awakening — thanks to the cries of the aged Madre Milagros — and seeing the relics, he was wont to comment: “For these relics alone I would call this house a thousand times blessed. I have never had nor do I desire treasure more divine.”

But as with morbid melancholy these words recalled to him the treasures arrived from the new world, he soon sank again into gloomy lethargy.

He happened to overhear some conversations between his physicians. “I do not dare open the abscesses on his chest,” Saura said to Baena. “They are too near the heart.”

The Hieronymite assented. One afternoon, this same Brother Santiago came to El Señor with a letter: a filthy sheet of paper that had been handed to him, he said, at the gates of the palace by a beggar indistinguishable from any of those who in increasing numbers gathered about the palace. But this beggar, Baena smiled, said he had been the most faithful of all El Señor’s favorites, and that El Señor owed him more than he owed the King. Such effrontery impressed the small friar with the intense iron-colored eyes and high receding forehead. “Here then, Sire, is the letter.”

Most Holy, Caesarian, and Catholic Majesty: I believed that having labored in my youth I would profit in my later years and find rest, and thus for forty years I busied myself, never sleeping, eating badly, my weapons at the ready, exposing myself to danger, spending my fortune and my youth, all in the service of God, in leading sheep to His pasture, all in lands very remote from our hemisphere, and unknown, and not recorded in our writings, and in advancing and spreading far and near the name of my King, winning for him and bringing beneath his yoke and royal scepter many great seigniories of many barbaric nations and peoples, won by my own person and at my own expense, without being aided in anything, and often obstructed by many envious men who since have burst like leeches from sucking my blood. I devoted myself fully to this undertaking of conquest and only because of it were clergy, Inquisitors, officials, and other minor clerks able to establish themselves in the new world, they who now accuse me of appropriating treasures for myself, of packing and sacking them and even secreting them on my own person, so that the correct sum, the royal one fifth owed to Your Most Holy, Caesarian, and Catholic Majesty never reached its destiny; and, further, they accuse me of excessive cruelties against the natives, as if there were other recourse when dealing with the tenacious idolatry of these savages; of living in concubinage with idolatrous Indian women, as if a man were able to choose between what there was and what did not exist; of lack of loyalty, bad governing, intrigue, and tyranny: why then, Señor, did I risk my life in my own behalf, on behalf of my King and my God, only to gain nothing for myself, only to deliver it all to the Church and Crown? I merely defended the rights you had granted me by royal decree. Today I have nothing, while in contrast the Church and Crown have everything. I find myself old and poor, in debt, I am seventy-three years old and that is not the age to be on the road, rather it is the age to pluck the fruit of my labors. Most Holy, Caesarian, and Catholic Majesty: I merely seek justice. I ask no more than the tiniest part of the world I conquered. Thanks to me, Your Majesty is master of a new world won without either danger to or exertion of Your Royal Person. Again I plead that Your Majesty be pleased to set in order, etc. etc. etc.…

El Señor skipped over the requests to read the ridiculous signature: the Most Magnificent Señor Don Hernando de Guzmán. He laughed. He laughed until he cried. The chief huntsman, the intriguer, the secretary who had far exceeded the will of his Señor. El Señor laughed for the last time. He looked severely at Friar de Baena. “Tell that Don Nobody that I do not know him.”

This was his last pleasure. As he suffered so greatly from the wound and aperture, and the mouths through which nature herself discharged her poisons, he became so racked with pain, so sensitive, that it was impossible for him to shift his weight or turn over in the bed. He was forced, night and day, to lie on his back, never turning to one or the other side.

Thus the royal bed was converted into a pestilential dung heap emitting the most evil odors: El Señor lay in his own excrement.

For thirty-three days, the duration of this illness, they could not change his clothing, nor would he tolerate it; they could not move him or raise him even slightly in order to clear away the result of his natural wants and the pus that streamed from abscesses and wounds.

“I am buried in life. And life has a foul stink.”

It being necessary one time to raise his leg slightly for the purpose of wiping away the matter collected there and cleaning beneath his knees, he felt such excessive pain that he said he absolutely could not tolerate it, and when the physicians replied they must treat him, El Señor said with great feeling: “I protest, for I shall die in torment.”

With these words they were so fully convinced of his pain that they abandoned the treatment. Many other times as they treated him, overcome by agonizing pain, he ordered them to cease and desist. Other times he broke into divine praise, commending to God his efforts. As he was limited to one position, unable to turn over, great sores appeared upon his back and buttocks; not even these parts were to escape pain.

Because of pain in his head, perpetual thirst, horrendous odors, he was unable to retain food. One day after partaking of a simple broth of fowl and sugar, he vomited forty times. And when he did not vomit he was shaken by diarrhea like that of a goat, which flooded his black sheets with greenish feces. Protesting, servants were called who, covering their noses and mouths with damp cloths, crawled beneath the bed and with knives worked a hole through the wooden planks and thin straw mattress so the mixture of excrement, urine, sweat, and pus could be drained. These lackeys fled from the room, their faces and bodies bathed in filth, and it was Madre Milagros, in an act of delicious contrition, who knelt to place a basin beneath the opened hole.