Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

THE LAST CITY

It must have snowed for several hours. The river has risen. The current inundates the stone Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma. Dark waters whirl about the prow of the Ile Saint-Louis. The Luxembourg is shrouded in white. The Montsouris garden recognizes itself in a desolate dawning light. A terrible white beauty blinds the Pare Monceau. Frost outlines the china-ink trees of the Montparnasse cemetery. Snow blankets the Père Lachaise cemetery like a late sacrifice. Snowy tombs of Francisco de Miranda and Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac and Porfirio Díaz. Silvery webs in gardens and pantheons.

Gilded webs on the smooth ceiling of the apartment in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal. The red suite. Flaming velvet. Outside, the snow is a melted standard and the river the lion rampant of the banner. Inside, white stucco. Vines. Cornucopias. Cherubs. Plaster sculpture. Red velvet and white plaster. Mirrors. Stained. Spotted with age. They multiply the space of the narrow apartment.

Long ago the elevator cage ceased to function. Tarnished bronze. Beveled crystal. Outside. On the other side of the double door. You have not opened it. Not in a long time. You avoid the mirrors. They are enormous, full-length, with opaque gold frames and peeling quicksilver. Others are small, hand mirrors. One is black marble, streaked with blood. Another, very small and square, covered with fingerprints. Another, round, its frame crowned with a two-headed eagle. Another, triangular. Many more. You avoid them. The Argentinian Oliveira warned you: none of them reflects the space of the place you inhabit. A string of narrow rooms: living room, bedroom, dressing room, bath, each opening onto the next. No mirror reflects your face. You touch them; you do not look at them; you do not look at yourself. You touch everything with your only hand. Buendía, the Colombian, warned you when you arrived in France: Paris seems much larger than it really is because of the infinite number of mirrors that duplicate its true space: Paris is Paris, plus its mirrors.

Late in life an aged Pierre Menard proposed that all beasts, men, and nations be apportioned a supply of mirrors that would reproduce infinitely their and other figures and their and other territories, for the purpose of appeasing for all time the imperative illusions of a destructive ambition for possession, although dominion only assures us the loss of what we have conquered as well as what is already ours. Only to a blind man could such a fantasy occur. And of course he was, in addition, a philologist.

Oliveira, Buendía, Cuba Venegas, Humberto the mute, the cousins Esteban and Sofía, Santiago Zavalita, the man from Lima who lived every minute wondering at what precise moment Peru had fucked everything up, and who had come to Paris a refugee like all the others, wondering, like all the others — with the exception of the Cuban rumba-rhythm queen — at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up. You haven’t seen them lately. If they are still alive, even today they are surely declaring, along with you, fucked-up Peru, fucked-up Chile, fucked-up Argentina, fucked-up Mexico, the whole fucked-up world. Today: the last day of the dying century. Today: the first night of the next one hundred years. Although deciding whether the year 2000 is the last year of the preceding or the first year of the coming century lends itself to infinite discussion. We are living within a shattered specter. Only Cuba Venegas, that flabby, garish old rumba queen with the swelling heart-shaped buttocks, maintained her strange Antillean optimism to the end, singing melancholy boleros in her sung-out voice in the lowest dives in Pigalle. She said, unaware of the paraphrase: “All good Latin Americans come to Paris to die.”

Perhaps she was right. Perhaps Paris was the exact moral, sexual, and intellectual point of balance between the two worlds that tear us apart: the Germanic and the Mediterranean, the North and the South, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin.

On the anniversaries of their respective deaths, Cuba Venegas carried flowers to the tombs of Eva Perón in Père Lachaise and of Ché Guevara in Montparnasse.

How long ago seemed those nights on the top floor of the old house in the rue de Savoie when everyone used to get together to drink the bitter maté prepared by Oliveira; the blond Lithuanian Valkyrie would put tangos on the record player, and serve pisco and tequila and rum, and everyone played the game of Superfuck, a card game in which the winner was the one who collected the most cards representing ignominy and defeats and horrors. Crimes, Tyrants, Imperialisms, and Injustices were the four suits of this deck, replacing clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds.

“W’ich is bes’?” inquired Cuba Venegas. “T’ree or four of de beeg business, or de rrrrrun of de ahmbassador?”

“It depends,” said Santiago, of Lima, Peru. “I have five of a kind: United Fruit, Standard Oil, Pasco Corporation, Anaconda Copper, and I.T.T.”

“‘Oh, frohm Cooba wis de music!’” cried the rumba queen. “Henry Lean U’will-son, Choel Poyn-sett, Espru-ill Bra-don, Chon Pueri-phooey, an’ Nattani-yell Debbis. W’at de fock you t’ink of dat, baybee?”

“‘My bitter heart, conceal your sorrow…’” you murmured, and turning to address the mute, Humberto: “I’ll give you an Ubico and two Trujillos for three Marmolejos.”

“Do you know how”—Oliveira commented in his unmistakable Porteño cadence as he dealt the cards—“Marmolejo came to power in Bolivia? He joined the line filing through to greet the President on the day of the celebration of national independence, and when he came to the President in the line, emptied his pistol into his belly. Then he removed the Presidential sash, fastened it across his chest, and walked out onto the palace balcony to receive the acclamation of the crowd. What do you have, Humberto?”

The mute held out his five martial cards: Winfield Scott’s squadron, Achille Bazaine’s army, Castillo Armas’s mercenaries, the “worms” of the Bay of Pigs, and Somoza’s National Guard.

“Full house!” shouted Buendía. “Masferrer’s Tigres, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes, and the Brazilian DOPs, plus an Odría and a Pinochet.”

“That’s shit, you’re wiped out, you and your momma and your papa,” Oliveira crowed triumphantly, spreading his four Prisons on the card table: the cisterns of the Fort of San Juan de Ulúa, Dawson Island, the cold plain of Trelew, and the Sexto in Lima … O.K., top that…”

“Just sweeten the pot and deal the cards again,” the Valkyrie proposed as she filled their glasses.

“Just when Santa Anna was winning the battle of San Jacinto against the Texas fifth columnists, he lost because he stopped to eat a taco and take his siesta.”

“You, Zavalita, what do you have?”

“Three of a kind, mass exterminations in the public plazas: Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in Izalco, Pedro de Alvarado at the festival of Toxcatl, and Díaz Ordáz in Tlatelolco.”

“The last two are the same things, that’s only a pair, you bastard.”

“‘Your destiny’s deceiving, I’m grieving, and leaving, to follow you forever…’” intoned Zavalita, tossing his cards face down on the table.

“What were you saying about Santa Anna?”

“When they blew off his leg he buried it after having it borne beneath a canopy to the cathedral in Mexico City. And when the Yankees captured him he sold them half the nation. Then later he sold another little piece to buy European uniforms for his guards and to construct equestrian statues of himself from Carrara marble.”

Humberto’s lips formed a silent “Son-of-a-bitching Diego.”

“And the cousins?” asked Buendía.

“Esteban and Sofía? Shhhh,” said the Valkyrie, “they’re in the bedroom.”