Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

You have not opened your windows since summer. You drew the heavy drapes. You live with your lights turned on, night and day. You could no longer tolerate the smoke, the stench of burned flesh and fingernails and hair. The suffocating perfume from the chestnut and the plane trees. The smoke from the towers of Saint-Sulpice. You used to be able to see the towers from your window on the seventh floor of the hotel. You could not tolerate the rows of flagellants and penitents marching every day through the rue Montalembert toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain, or the clamor of proliferating life, new arrivals, thronging along the rue du Bac toward the Quai Voltaire and the Seine: the river boiled, the transparent Louvre exhibited itself shamelessly, spaces seemed to expand, the Gioconda was not alone, the wild ass’s skin shrank in the feverish hand of Raphaël de Valentin, Violetta Gautier lay dying in her bed of camellias, singing softly:

Sola, abbandonata

In questo popoloso deserto

Ch’appellano Parigi …

A line of barefoot men, obscured by the smoke, entered the frightful stench and rigorously programmed death of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Javert pursued Valjean through labyrinthine black waters.

You locked yourself in your apartment. You had sufficient money. The coffer overflowing with ancient Aztec, Maya, Totonac, Zapotec jewels. They told you you could use them while in exile to organize the resistance and aid those who had been banished. Guardian of the coffer, yes, but it was also your subsistence. You, too, are an exile. You read the last newspaper and flushed it down the toilet, torn into little pieces. You watched shocking headlines and judicious commentaries swirl away in a whirlpool of uselessly chlorinated water. The facts were true. But they were too true, too immediate, or too remote, compared to the real truth. That has always, you suppose, been the contemptible fascination of the news: it is its immediacy today that makes it obsolete tomorrow. Fact: the microbic world acquired immunity faster than science could neutralize each new outburst of bacterial independence: chlorine, antibiotics, all vaccines, were useless. But why, instead of taking the minimal steps for safety, did the human world feel itself so attracted, one might almost say mesmerized, by the victory of the microbic world? The ordinary justification, the commonplace, was that once all sanitary programs were abandoned, it was left to nature herself to resolve the problem of overpopulation: the five billion inhabitants of an exhausted planet that was, nonetheless, incapable of ridding itself of its acquired habits: greater opulence for a few, greater hunger for the great majority. Mountains of paper, glass, rubber, plastic, spoiled meat, wilted flowers, inflammable matter neutralized by non-inflammable matter, cigarette butts, junked automobiles, the minimum and the maximum, condoms and sanitary napkins, printing presses, tin cans and bathtubs: Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Hamburg, Teheran, New York, Zurich: museums of garbage. Epidemics furnished the desired effect. The plagues of the Middle Ages had not distinguished between man or woman, young or old, rich or poor. The modern plague was programmed: in new sterilized cities safe beneath plastic bells, a few millionaires, many bureaucrats, a handful of technicians and scientists, and the few women needed to satisfy the elect, were saved. Other cities stimulated death by offering solutions in harmony with what had formerly been called, without the least trace of irony, the national character. Mexico resorted to human sacrifice, religiously consecrated, politically justified, and offered as a sports event on television spectaculars; the spectator had a choice: certain programs were dedicated to reenactments of the War of the Flowers. In Rio de Janeiro, a military edict imposed perpetual carnival, with no time limits, until the population died of pure joy: dance, alcohol, masquerades, sex. In Buenos Aires a suburban machismo was fomented, a tightly woven intrigue of jealousy, insult, and personal drama, instigated by tangos and gauchoesque poems: the knives of vengeance gleamed, millions committed suicide. Moscow was both more subtle and more direct: millions of copies of Trotsky’s works were distributed, and then any person found reading them was ordered to be shot. No one knows what happened in China. The inhabitants of Benares and Addis Ababa, La Paz, Jakarta, Kinshasa, and Kabul simply perished of hunger.

At first, Paris accepted the recommendations of the world council on depopulation. Insofar as it was possible, the obligatory deaths would be natural: hunger and epidemic, though it would be left to each nation to find its own specific and idiosyncratic solutions. But Paris, the fountain of all wisdom, where a persuasive Devil inculcated into some few wise men a perverse intelligence, opted for a different course. Just this spring you watched the debates on television. All possible theories were expounded and criticized with Cartesian subtlety. After everyone had spoken, an aged Rumanian playwright, a member of the Académie, with the aspect of a gnome, or perhaps more exactly, and using the lingua franca of the century, of a leprechaun of the verdant bosques of Ireland: this elf, with tufts of white hair ringing his bald head, and an extraordinary gaze of candor and astuteness, proposed that they merely give equal opportunity to both life and death.

“On the one hand, increase the birth rate, and on the other, the extermination. No generality can prosper without its exception. How can everyone die if no one is born?”

“Thank you, M. Ionesco,” said the announcer.

Your only meal is always the same. The faded menu announces it to be a grillade mixte comprised of testicles, black sausage, and kidneys. When you have eaten, you open the door again. You deposit the empty tray on the hall carpet. Several hours later, silent footsteps approach. You hear noises, and then the footsteps retreat. The elevator does not function. No letters or telegrams arrive. The telephone never rings. On the television screen, always the same program, the same message you read in the last headline of the last newspaper you bought before closing yourself in here. Again you open the box holding the coins. You look at the profiles blurred by the touch of human hands. Juana the Mad, Felipe the Fair, Felipe II, called the Prudent, Elizabeth Tudor, Carlos II, called the Bewitched, Mariana of Austria, Carlos IV, Maximilian and Carlota of Mexico, Francisco Franco: yesterday’s phantoms.

You are not sure whether you sleep by day or night, wander the apartment, touching objects, avoiding objects, by day or night. Time does not exist. Nothing works. The electric lights grow more faint each day. The thirty-first of December, 1999. Tonight they will go out completely. You will wait for them to come on again, in vain. You have conquered the mirrors. They will reflect only darkness. You will not open the drapes. You know by memory the location of every object. You will not need the candle stubs hidden in a drawer beside your bed. And you have only one match left. You allow your slippers to slide from your feet. You dress in a black Tunisian caftan trimmed with gold cord. You hold the manuscripts you found in the bottles. You repeat the texts in a low voice. You know them by memory. But you perform the acts of normal reading, you turn every page after murmuring its words. You see nothing. Outside it is snowing. A procession is passing beneath your windows. You imagine it: tattered pendants, hairshirts and scythes. They must be the last. You smile. Perhaps you are the last. What will they do with you? And suddenly, as you ask yourself that question, you are unexpectedly able to tie together the loose ends of your situation and that of your readings in the darkness, you become aware of the evident, you combine the images you saw for the last time from your window before drawing the drapes, holding the old writing in your hand, those most ancient histories of Rome and Alexandria, the Dalmatian and Cantabrian coasts, Palestine and Spain, Venice, the Theater of Memory of Donno Valerio Camillo, the three youths marked with a cross on their backs, the curse of Tiberius Caesar, the solitude of the King Don Felipe in his Castilian necropolis: an opportunity is offered to all the things that could not manifest themselves in their time, an opportunity to make our time coincide fully with another, unfulfilled time; several lifetimes are needed to integrate a personality: did the press and television not repeat that to the point of nausea? Every minute a man dies in Saint-Sulpice, every minute a child is born on the quays of the Seine, only men die, only children are born, women neither die nor are born, women are merely the vehicle for childbirth, they were made pregnant by the same men who were then led immediately to their exterminations, each child was born with a cross on its back and six toes on each foot: no one explained this strange genetic mutation, you understood, you believed you understood, the triumph was of neither life nor death, life and death were not the opposing forces, gradually, in the time of the epidemics, or later, in the time of indiscriminate extermination, all the present inhabitants, all those — with the exception of the centenarians — born in this century had died; the others, those who impregnated, those who were impregnated, those born, those who continued to die, are beings from another time, the struggle has not been between life and death but between the past and the present: Paris is inhabited by mere phantoms, but how, how, how?