Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Poor Señor. He died without knowing the contents of the third manuscript contained in this bottle left by the Pilgrim in the cell from which Guzmán led him to a cruel hunt. Poor Señor. Like the whore of Babylon, upon his forehead I read the word: MYSTERY.”

“You are too compassionate, Miguel,” the astrologer said to the writer. “To assure that everyone will read what you write, you are capable of foolishly risking your head. Be content with the two books you have written in the solitude of my tower, sheltered by me and by El Señor’s apathy: the chronicle of the Knight of the Sad Countenance, which everyone will read, and the chronicle of the last years of our sovereign, which will interest no one.”

“And the manuscript contained in this bottle, Friar, who will read it? I did not write it. One of the youths brought it with him from the sea.”

“Publish it, if you wish. Let everyone read it except the Señor lying here. Look at his embalmed body, shrouded in bindings like a mummy…”

The Uranic friar gestured, his arms wide: “And then look at this marvelous triptych of the millenary kingdom painted by a humble Flemish artist, a follower of the Free Spirit, to suggest in secret all the truths of the human world, as rebellion against the Church, which claims to be the kingdom of God in all souls, and against the monarchy, which claims to be the kingdom of God upon earth. Do you think El Señor ever understood the meaning of this defiance which in spite of everything was installed here in his own chapel and seen by him every day? But El Señor is dead.”

“Must we not thank him for that?”

“Yes, for his lack of curiosity, for never coming to my tower and surprising us in our endeavors. He is dead, I tell you. My science, your literature, and this art have survived him. All is not lost. Let others weep for him, not you, not I, not the soul of the painter of Hertogenbosch.”

They disappeared.

From his coffin, Felipe spent the day scrutinizing that Flemish painting, still unable to penetrate the mysteries Brother Toribio attributed to it. To what age did that painting belong? Well, he believed he understood everything in the manuscript of Theodorus, Tiberius Caesar’s counselor, which was about the past, but he understood nothing in the manuscript of a strange war in the jungles and mountains of the new world, which was the future. And this triptych … He was unable to place it either in the past or in the future. Perhaps it belonged to an eternal present.

When night fell, he slept.

He awakened with a start in darkness. Had they already placed him in the tomb? Was he covered by a slab of marble? And were those faint sounds shovelfuls of earth? No, it had been his will to be buried here in this rotting-house beside his ancestors. Had the heretics triumphed, madmen, pagans, infidels? had they, to avenge themselves, thrown him with others into a common grave beside the corpse of Bocanegra? No, he could smell the dead wax of the chapel, the consumed incense, the metallic wind of refuse heaps that blew down the thirty-three steps …

Footsteps in the night. Night heavy. Nightmare.

A shadow fell upon his dead face.

A figure.

A phantom: he knew because he was looking at it, but the figure was not looking at him. A phantom does not look at us. For it, we do not exist. That is what frightens us.

He felt a fearful attraction toward that being standing so close beside the coffin, not looking at him, as if El Señor no longer existed either in life or in death. Felipe placed his wounded and bound hands upon the white silk of the coffin, he pushed, and sat up within the coffin, he could move, he did not feel the pain of the past years, he swung one leg outside the coffin, then the other, he emerged from the leaden box, he stood, graceful, light of foot, joyful; he looked toward the triptych on the altar: it had become an enormous mirror of three panels, and in them Felipe saw himself in triplicate: one, the youth of the day of the wedding and the crime in the castle; another, the man of middle years who had conquered the heretics of Flanders and ordered the construction of this necropolis; the third, the pale, ill old man who in life had rotted within this rotting-house.

“Choose,” said the voice of the phantom.

He turned to look, but the specter turned its back. Again he looked toward the triptych. He decided to be the young man, to relive his life, to seize the second opportunity that death offered him; the other two mirrors darkened, only the first still shone; the bindings that shrouded him unrolled of their own accord and fell to the granite floor. Felipe saw himself dressed as he had been on the day of his wedding to Isabel, magnificent, magnificent, lustrous shoes of Flemish style, rose-colored breeches, a brocaded, ermine-lined doublet, and upon his head a cap as beautiful as a jewel, and upon his breast a cross of precious stones, and, scattered on the ermine fur, orange-blossom petals. He saw in the mirror of the painting his own features at sixteen, genteel, almost feminine but marked by the stigmata of his house: prognathic jaw, thick, always parted lips, heavy eyelids. But above everything else he was aware of his young body, the body of the imaginary voyage on Pedro’s boat in search of the new world, accompanied by Simón, Ludovico, and Celestina: his skin tanned, his hair bleached by ocean gold, his muscles strong, his flesh firm.

He heard the phantom’s footsteps receding from the altar and the coffin, along the sepulcher-flanked nave. He followed, eager to be seen by the phantom, by anyone, now that he was again young, now that death offered him a second opportunity. But as he passed his coffin he paused, immobilized by a sight that raised his hackles; the ancient, shrouded King, he himself, still lay there, dead, wrapped in white bindings and crowned by the Gothic crown of gold incrusted with pearl, sapphire, agate, and rock crystal. He did not know what he did then, or why he did it; he did not know whether he felt love, hatred, or indifference for those remains; he merely experienced a passion, a necessary passion, neither homage nor profanation: a transport that determined his action. He removed his cap. He removed the crown from the body. He placed the cap on the body. He placed the crown upon his own head.

The phantom, still not looking at him, his back turned, paused at the foot of the stairway.

Then finally he turned and looked at the young Felipe. The Prince’s eyes narrowed, he tried to guess, remember, or, perhaps, foresee the phantom’s features, a youth like himself, a strange mixture of racial heritages, blond and tightly curled hair, black eyes, swarthy skin, a long, beautiful nose, sensual lips. Naked. He held out his hand, inviting Felipe to follow him. “You do not remember me? I am called Miguel in Christian lands, Michah in the Jewries, Mihail-ben-Sama in Arabic aljamas: Miguel-of-Life. You ordered me burned alive one day beneath your palace kitchens. You did not condemn me for the principal reason, but rather, the second.”

He invited Felipe to follow him: to ascend, step by step, that unfinished stairway. Felipe fell to his knees; he prostrated himself; he spread his arms wide in a cross before his victim; no, no, that stairway leads to death, I ascended it one day with my mirror in my hand, and in it saw what I never want to see again, my old age, my death agony, my death, decomposition, my return to brute matter, my metamorphoses, the transmigration of my soul, my resurrection in the form of a wolf, hunted in my own domains by my own descendants, Michah, Mihail, Miguel de la Vida, forgive my crime, honor your name, Miguel-of-Life, do not take mine from me again…”

The one called Miguel smiled. “That time, like Narcissus, you looked only at yourself in your mirror. This time, Felipe, you will see the mirror of the world. Come.”