Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“I am nothing but skin and bones,” said Felipe, “but no one will bear them with more honor than I, since it is a question of dying.”

The basin filled eleven times every day, and when to all the pus and corruption was added the color of blood, El Señor asked for Extreme Unction, wishing to confess and take Communion for the last time, but the priests feared he would vomit the Host and they told El Señor that this would be a horrible sacrilege.

Then El Señor asked: “If I were well, would I not finally defecate the Host? Is it a worse offense that it be expelled through my mouth?”

But to himself he wondered whether his sinner’s body was unfitting even to receive the Saviour’s body. “Does the Devil dwell in me?”

Once again he sank into the heavy, putrid, melancholy humors that flooded through his body toward his brain; at times these humors were dank and half digested, at others less terrible, more lively. From his head they occasionally spread to the region of his heart, causing him sad assaults that greatly disquieted him. Finally he said: “The only healthy portions of my body are my eyes, my tongue, and my soul.”

The last night, nevertheless, he was awakened by an unfamiliar tickling. Madre Milagros and three nuns were sleeping on the floor of his bedchamber. Candle stubs flickered low, sputtering, slowly consuming themselves. Trembling shadows stretched across the fetid chamber. The nuns slept with their heads covered beneath cloths redolent of oil of bergamot. Again El Señor felt the tickling in his nose. Weakly he felt for a handkerchief to wipe away the mucus which like all his bodily fluids drained steadily from him. But with horror he realized this was not drainage but rather something seemingly advancing under its own power; it contracted, paused, and again advanced toward the opening of Felipe’s nostril.

He placed a waxen hand to his nose and extracted a white worm; he choked back a scream, he blew his nose on the handkerchief; a colony of tiny white eggs exploded into the cloth of fine linen, the spawn of the white worm that writhed on the palm of his hand.

He screamed. The nuns arose, the halberdiers guarding the entrance to the bedchamber, the physicians drowsing in the chapel, the monks praying before the altar, all appeared at the door. With a candle in her hand Madre Milagros approached him, and in a faltering voice El Señor said: “Come; it is the hour.”

He ordered that among them they carry him to the chapel, his pain no longer mattered, or the stench, nothing, he wished to be placed in his coffin, for since he was not worthy to receive the Body of Jesus Christ, he was at least worthy of attending his own death, so long desired, of attending his own funeral, he who in this place of corpses had granted repose to all Spanish royalty, had constructed this palace of death; he believed that he was confessing, as they carried him from the bedchamber to the chapel, suffering enormous pain, he shouted, Lord, I am not worthy, I confess, Pedro, I acknowledge my sins, Ludovico, mea culpa, Celestina, I am unworthy, Simón, forgive me, Isabel, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me; they laid him in the lead coffin which for days had awaited him before the altar, and once there he grew calm, he felt sheltered by the white silk that lined the coffin, protected by the cloth of black gold that covered the exterior, and by the cross of crimson satin and the golden nails.

Buried in his coffin, he asked that they open the panels of the Flemish triptych and that one priest read him the Apocalypse of St. John, that the nuns sing the Requiem, and that another priest note down his last will and testament:

Domine, exaudi orationen meam, Et clamor meus ad te veniat,

So he carried me away a spirit into the wilderness, and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns,

I command and order,

Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat et cum Lazaro quondam paupere aeternam habes requiem,

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colors, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls,

I would be crowned with the Gothic crown of gold, agates, sapphire, and rock crystal, the first crown of Spain, and I would wear it to my grave,

Ego sum resurrectio et vita,

Having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication with the Kings of the earth,

Where is Celestina? What became of her? Why did I forget to ask Ludovico?

Qui credit in me, etiam si mortuus fuerit, vivet,

The great Babylon, the mother of harlots;

Simón? What became of Simón? Why did Ludovico not tell me of Simón’s fate?

Et omnis qui vivit et credit in me, non morietur in aeternum,

The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues,

I command and order: Find the third bottle, there were three, I found only two, I read only two, seek the third bottle, I must read the last manuscript, I must know the last secrets,

In tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres,

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of martyrs,

I would be shaved and depilated, and I would have my teeth extracted, ground, and burned so they cannot serve witches for their evil spells,

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine,

And the woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth over the Kings of the earth.

The relics shall not be dispersed or pawned, but rather they shall be preserved and together be handed down in succession,

Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda,

And upon her forehead was a name written: MYSTERY.

I would that all papers opened or sealed, all that be found and that treat our affairs and things past, be burned,

Dies illa, dies irae, calamitatis et miseriae,

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a great voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of Heaven: Come, and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God, that ye may eat the flesh of Kings,

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,

Hear me, all of you, centuries will pass, wars will pass, hungers will pass, death will pass, but this necropolis will remain, dedicated to the eternal cult of my soul, and on the last day of the last year of the last age there will be someone praying beside my sepulcher,

Et lux perpetua luceat eis,

I would have two perpetual anniversaries, the day of my birth and the day of death, and vespers, nocturns, Mass, and responses, all sung, and I command and order that because of my devotion, and in reverence for the Most Holy Sacrament, there be two priests continually before it by night and by day, praying to God for my soul and the souls of my dead, unto the end of the centuries,

Dies illa, dies irae, calamitatis et miseriae,

And there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast,

I command and order: upon my death, I would that thirty thousand Masses be said: violence shall be done unto Heaven,

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,

Thus were blended together lugubrious chants and the mournful glow of the guttering candles, the reading of St. John and the smoke of incense, the mandates of El Señor and the concentrated light in that impenetrable Flemish triptych on the altar, the garden of delights, the millenary kingdom, the eternal Hell wherein El Señor saw all the faces of his life, his father and mother, his bastard brothers, his wife, the companions of his youth, that distant afternoon on the beach, the open sea before their eyes, the true fountain of youth, the sea, but he turned his back, he returned to the brown and arid high plain and there constructed a royal palace, monastery, and cemetery upon the quadrangle of a grill, similar to that which knew the torture of St. Lawrence, a harmony of austere lines, mortified simplicity, rejection of all sensual, infidel, and pagan ornament, a convergence of the tumult of the universe into a single center dedicated to the glory of God and the honor of Power: from his coffin, principal and witness to his own funeral exequies, he gazed at the Flemish painting as he had first gazed at it, a painting brought, it is said, from Orvieto, asking of it, demanding of it, whether these acts of his death agony were of sufficient merit to open the doors of Paradise to he who suffered them.