Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The young Prince looked behind him: the sepulchers, his own lead coffin, the nuns’ choir, the altar, the triptych, the entrance to his bare bedchamber of secret pleasures and harsh penitences where without moving from his bed he could attend divine ceremonies. He thought of his father. He thought that if he turned his back to the stairway and flew toward that subterranean world he, like falcons hungry for their prey, would confuse the cloistered darkness of the chapel with the infinite space of night, he would strike against pilasters, stone arches, iron grillwork, and would be crippled, and die again.

He grasped the phantom’s burning hand.

He raised one foot and placed it on the first step of the stairway.

“This time do not look at yourself; look at your world; and choose a second time.”

Slowly Felipe climbed, holding the feverish hand of Mihail-ben-Sama.

This time he closed his eyes to avoid seeing, as he had before, himself; rather, the world; and on each step the world offered the temptation to choose anew, choices dating from the dawn of time, but always in the same, if transfigured, place: this land, land of Vespers, Spain, Terra Nostra.

And as he ascended each step he heard the double voice of Mihail-ben-Sama, one voice which was two voices, each voice precise, clear, vague, urgent, two, but one; one, but two.

Androgynous creator of a being invented in his image and likeness

Father creator of an incomplete man: where is woman?

The first being fecundates himself, multiplying himself like the earth, unstained

Man violates woman, and both offend Nature, which expels them from the sick garden

Harmony of the world of the sons prolongs the original harmony of the world of the fathers

Brother kills brother in order to possess a subjugated woman and an inhospitable earth

A diversity of peoples, tongues, and beliefs is the result of a mixing of bloods that strengthens the unity of the human genre

The domination of vanquished woman and earth sets peoples against peoples: insufficiency is exalted as superiority, necessity as reason

Everything is shared by all

Yours and mine

Ours

I must die: I shall return transformed

I must die: I shall never return to this earth

I must live: I desire death

I must die: I desire glory

I am a river

I am a shadow

Everything changes

Nothing must change

Everything remains

Everything must continue

I understand what moves

I understand only what does not move

I love what I do not understand

I despise what I do not comprehend

I recognize myself in what is different

I exterminate what is different

Let my blood be mixed with that of all other men

Let my blood be purified with leeches and cauterization

May my body be reborn enriched by mixed bloods

Let my body die impoverished by the purity of blood

I love the labor of my renewed hands: I re-create Paradise

Unworthy of my ascetic hands is the labor of slaves

I construct gardens

I erect pantheons

Fountains and sweet-scented stock

Stone and shroud

My body fuses

My body separates

Love or solitude

Honor or dishonor

Awareness of my earthly senses

Ignorance of anything that separates me from eternal salvation

Freedom of body and mind open to all fecundation

Oppression of body and mind subjected to penitence

Community

Power

Tolerance

Repression

Many

One

Christians, Moors, and Jews

Fine breeding, pure blood

The Spanish

I, the King

New world

Old world

The Alhambra

The Escorial

Doubt

Faith

Diversity

Unity

Life

Death

“Did you choose, Felipe? Were you able to choose again?”

The double voice of the burning phantom awakened El Señor from his fleeting dream. That voice faded away. He opened his eyes. He had climbed the thirty-three steps of his chapel. Sun punished his eyes. A valiant and vigorous valley lay before him. Harsh crust of stone. Vast flowering of rock. He looked toward the end of a mountain gorge where arose a compact cone of live rock. And on the summit of this rock, as if born of it, a gigantic cross of stone cast its shadow across El Señor’s face; this cross rested upon a double pediment, the first of which was backed by the figures of the four Evangelists; on the corners of the second, smaller pediment stood images of the four cardinal virtues; and to reach these pediments one had to ascend an enormous stairway carved from live rock, for a crypt had been excavated from the heart of the rock, guarded over by a railing of three bodies crowned by a battlement of angels, insignia, and pinnacles accompanying the figure of St. James the Apostle.

Disoriented in space, wounded by a sun he had not seen since in this same place he had witnessed the torture of Nuño and Jerónimo, vanquished by time, Felipe whirled away; he felt trapped, he looked for an exit: a beast trapped by fear, he did not notice the presence of a short old man with a three days’ growth of beard, wearing a uniform of rough gray cloth and a battered cap bearing a copper plate.

“May I offer my services, Señor?” asked this obsequious little man.

“Where am I … please … where…?” Felipe managed to murmur.

“Why, at the Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen.”

“What? What fallen?”

“God’s blood, man, those who fell for Spain, the monument of the Holy Cross…”

“What day is this?”

“As for the day, well, who’s the man who knows what day it is. As for the year, I know that it is the year 1999. Has the Señor never visited the Valley of the Fallen? Allow me, my card. I am a licensed guide and I can…”

Felipe stared at the enormous stone cross: “No, I have never visited it. You see, I went away more than four hundred years ago.”

The little man, until this moment obliging, if indifferent, looked for the first time at Felipe’s face, his attire, his general appearance. He stammered: “By my faith … you see, so many tourists pass this way … all alike … I always say the same things … I know the words by rote…”

And eyes rolling, he threw his cap to the ground and ran from Felipe yelling and waving his arms, his grating voice echoing through the mass of carved rock: “Come one, come all. Hark what I say! There is a man there who claims to have been gone for four hundred years! Come, come, come hear what I have to tell!”

That night, seeking protection for his terror and hunger among the stunted growth of scrub oak and juniper, blackberry and hawthorn clinging to the craggy mountainside, and listening to the always closer sound of the horns and the sputtering torches of the night hunt, the occasional sound of a gun and the unceasing barking of the mastiffs, Felipe approached a small bonfire burning in the hollow of a rock, carefully protected from the north winds.

An instinctive sense of relief and gratitude impelled him to throw himself at the feet of the man watching a battered old coffeepot, and slicing a rough loaf of bread.

The mountaineer patted Felipe’s snout, and he raised great liquid, mournful eyes to gaze into those of the man who offered him a slab of bread and a slice of ham. The eyes were black, but the hair was blond and tightly curled, the skin swarthy, the nose long and beautiful, and the lips sensual.

Snout and fang, Felipe tore at the ham and bread. Nearer and nearer came the fearful sounds of the hunt, but by the side of this young mountain man, his friend, he was no longer afraid. He even understood the words when the man, his booted feet stamping out the remains of the fire, spoke, slowly, and with a tinge of uncertainty in his words, but with the clear intent of being understood by the wolf: “Yes. The truth is this. If I speak of a place, it is because it no longer exists. If I speak of a time, it is because it has already passed. If I speak of a person, it is because I desire him.”