Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“A bust!” you exclaimed dispiritedly. “One Juan Vicente Gómez, an Indian branded by Nuño de Guzmán in Jalisco, a slave in the mines of Potosí, a slave ship in Puerto Príncipe, and a General Bulnes campaign of extermination against the Mapuche Indians.”

“ Ché, Buendía”—again the Porteño—“tell about J. V. Gómez’s two deaths.”

“Well, Juan Vicente Gómez announced his death so that his enemies would come out into the streets of Caracas to celebrate. He hid behind the drapes in a palace window and observed the celebrations through little raccoon eyes, meanwhile issuing orders to his police: throw him in jail, torture that one, shoot that one over there … When he actually did die, they had to exhibit his body in the Presidential chair, dressed in gala sash and uniform, for all the people to file by, touch, and verify: ‘It’s true, this time he’s really dead.’ What a crock!”

“I trade you dis Gómes for two of de Péres Jiménes an’ de t’rone of gold in Bati’ta’s bat’room in Kukine,” crooned the rumba queen. ‘De emeral’ green of de sea sparkles deep in your beeoutiful eyes…’”

“‘Your lips wear the blush of the blood that seeps from the coral…’”

“‘Your voice is a poem of love, a divine and inspiring chorale…’”

“‘The sun-drunken palms brush your cheeks, and echo my sighs…’”

“At Christmas Bastista ordered enormous gift boxes wrapped in bright paper and ribbons to be sent to the mothers of the young men who fought in the Sierra Maestra and in the urban underground. They opened them to find their sons’ mutilated bodies.”

“C.I.A. Poker!” shouted Oliveira, sweeping in all the chips from the center of the table.

“Farewell, Utopia…”

“Farewell, City of the Sun…”

“Farewell, Vasco de Quiroga…”

“Juárez should never have died, ay, have died…”

“Nor Martí, chico …”

“Nor Zapata, mano …”

“Nor Ché, ché …”

“Farewell, Lázaro Cárdenas…”

“Farewell, Camilo Torres…”

“Farewell, Salvador Allende…”

“‘I’ll become once again the wandering troubadour…’”

“‘Who wanders in search of his love…’”

“‘Forgotten, discarded, downtrodden…’”

“De good ol’ days, chico, de good ol’ days.” Cuba Venegas began to sob.

Slowly you wander through the succession of rooms, all linked by French doors. You touch everything. No, you do not touch the red velvet of the furniture, the curtains, and walls. You touch all the objects you have gathered together here and carefully arranged on wardrobes, consoles, commodes, cabinets, antique writing desks with wire-mesh doors, rickety eighteenth-century secretaries, night tables, glass shelves, marble tables. The black pearl. A dog’s heavy spiked collar with a device emblazoned on the iron, Nondum, Not yet. Tall green empty bottles, eternally moldy, some imperfectly sealed with cork, some stoppered with red seals after having been opened with evident haste — when? by whom? — still others sealed with an imperial seal. You open, often, the long case of Cordovan leather that houses in beds of white silk the ancient coins you love to caress, effacing even more the blurred effigies of forgotten Kings and Queens. With your only hand you withdraw papers guarded in a Boulle cabinet, thin, transparent, faded chronicles. You compare their calligraphy, the quality of the inks, their resistance to the passage of time. Documents written in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish: codices written with Aztec ideograms. Characters like spiders, like flies, like rivers, like stone … cloud glyphs.

You soon tire of reading. You never know whether to feel sad or happy that these papers, these mute voices of men of other times, survive the deaths of the men of your time. Why preserve these writings? No one will read them now because there will be no one to read, or write, or make love, or dream, or wound, or desire. Everything that is written will survive untouched, because there will be no hands to destroy it. Is this sure desolation preferable to the uncertain risk of writing only to see one’s work proscribed, destroyed, burned on great pyres while uniformed masses shout, death to Homer, death to Dante, death to Shakespeare, death to Cervantes, death to Kafka, death to Neruda? Your eyes are tired. But there is no way you can get eyeglasses. Your body is fatigued. If only you could see yourself in a mirror and know that you were seeing yourself, not other men, other women, other children, motionless or animated, repeating forever the same scenes in the theater of mirrors. You have lost count. You no longer know your age. You feel very old. But what you can see of yourself when you disrobe — your chest, your belly, your sex, your legs, your only hand and arm — is young. You cannot remember now what the arm and hand you lost in battle looked like.

Once again you begin your wanderings through the apartment. You touch everything. The greasy gauntlet, its amputated fingers dried out and stiff. The rings of red stone, and bone. The ciborium filled with teeth. The ancient boxes ornamented with rope of gold and filled with skulls, thighbones, and mummified hands. One day, laughing darkly, you fitted two of those relics to your stump: an arm and a hand not yours. Afterward, you were nauseated. You know it all so well. You can touch and describe all the objects with your eyes closed. There are days when you entertain yourself doing just that, testing your memory, fearful as you are that you will lose it completely. Even if the roof of the hotel collapsed you could enumerate, describe, and place all the objects in this apartment in the Pont-Royal. A ustorious mirror. Two stones of unequal size. A pair of tailor’s scissors, varnished black. A basket filled with pearls, cotton, and dried grains of corn. You entertain yourself thinking that one day, perhaps, you can nourish yourself from the bread of the new world and then lie down to await death, bedfast and apathetic like the Spaniards in Verdín and the Cathari dedicated to endura. But up till now they still bring you your one daily meal. Invisible knuckles rap at your door. You wait several minutes to make sure that the silent servant has retired. You open the door. You pick up the tray. You eat with great deliberation. Your movements have become old, arthritic, minimal, repetitive, futile.

Then after the meal you return to your preoccupation: reviewing the objects. Of course there is a coffer bursting with the treasures of ancient America, tufts of quetzal feathers, bronze ear ornaments, gold diadems, jade necklaces. And a dove killed with a single knife slash: you look at the wound upon the white breast, the bloodstains on the feathers. A hammer, a chisel, a hyssop, an ancient bellows, rusty chains, a jasper monstrance, an ancient marine compass.

But you receive the greatest pleasure from the maps. A faded navigational chart, an authentic medieval portolano: the outlines of the Mediterranean, the limits, the Pillars of Hercules, Cape Finisterre, Ultima Thule, the ancient names of places lovingly retained on this chart: Gebel-Tarik, Gades, Corduba, Carthago Nova, Toletum, Magerit, in Spain; Lutetia, Massilia, Burdigala, Lugdunum, in France; Genua, Mediolanum, Neapolis, in Italy; the flat earth, the unknown ocean, the universal cataract. You compare this map of Mare Nostrum with the map of the virgin jungle, the mask of green, garnet, blue, and yellow feathers with a black field of dead spiders in the center, the nervature dividing the zones of feathers, the darts that protrude from the cloth.

But the most mysterious of your maps is that of the waters, the Phoenician chart so ancient you scarcely dare touch it, so brittle it seems to wish to be immediately converted into dust and to disappear along with the mysteries it describes: the secret communication of all waters, sub-aquatic tunnels, the passageways beneath the earth where flow all the liquid channels of the world, nourishing one another, seeking a common level, rushing headlong from high mountains, bursting from deep wells, whether their origin be swamp or volcano, whether they spring from the desert or the valley, born of ice or fire: the liquid corridors from the Seine to the Cantabria, from the Nile to the Orinoco, from the Cabo de los Desastres to the Usumacinta, from the Liffey to Lake Ontario, from a deep sacrificial pool in Yucatan to the Dead Sea in Palestine: atl, the root of water, Atlas, Atlantis, Atlantic, Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent that returns along the routes of the great waters, the esoteric highways from the Tiber to the Jordan, from the Euphrates to the Schelde, from the Amazon to the Niger. Esoteric: esoterikos: I cause to enter. Maps of initiation; charts of the initiated. There is a banal inscription written in the left-hand margin of this map, in Spanish: “The nature of waters is always to communicate with one another and to reach a common level. And this is their mystery.” An amphora filled with sand.