Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Feverishly you part the heavy drapes and open the window. Wounded feet drag through the snow. You hear a flute. From the street, eyes stare toward your window. Green, protruding eyes stare at you from the street below, summon you. You know the origin and the destination of the footsteps in the street. Each day they have been fewer. The procession used to go toward Saint-Germain. This one is headed toward Saint-Sulpice. They are the last. Then you were mistaken. Death has triumphed; many were born, but many more died. In the end, more died than were born. Perhaps there remain only these final victims who now march through the snow toward Saint-Sulpice. What will the executioners do when their task is finished? Will they kill themselves? Who are the executioners of the executioners? That flautist staring toward your window, that monk with the dark, expressionless gaze, the colorless face? That girl who…? Three persons gaze toward your window. The last. The girl with gray eyes, upturned nose, and tattooed lips. The girl whose multicolored skirts move gently, scattering shadow and light. You stare at the three. They stare at you. You know they are the last.

You summon reason to save you from extremes — the commonness of the event and the impenetrability of the mystery. You are in Paris. In Mexico you did not fully understand your Descartes; in effect, he said that reason that was sufficient unto itself, accounting only for itself, is bad reason, insufficient reason. And now you temper Descartes with Pascal: so necessarily mad is man that it would be madness not to be mad: such is the turn of the screw of reason. And thinking of Pascal, you think of your aged Erasmus and his praise of a madness that relativizes the pretended absolutes of the former world and the present world: Erasmus wrested from the Middle Ages the certainty of immutable truths and imposed dogmas; for modernity he reduces the absolute of reason and the empire of the self to ironic proportions. Erasmian madness is the checkmate of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, not by sin or the Devil. But it is also the critical consciousness of a reason and an ego that do not wish to be deceived by anyone, not even by themselves.

You ponder with sadness the fact that Erasmism could have been the touchstone of your own Spanish American culture. But Erasmism sifted through Spain defeated itself. It suppressed the ironic distance between man and the world in order to deliver itself unto the voluptuosity of a fierce individualism divorced from society, but dependent upon the external gesture, the admirable attitude, the appearance sufficient to justify — before oneself and before others — the illusion of an emancipated uniqueness. A spiritual rebellion that ends by nourishing the very things it meant to combat: honor, hierarchy, the posture of the man of breeding, the solipsism of the mystic, and the hope of a learned despot.

Looking at the street for the first time in many months, seeing the three persons who from the street are trying to see you, you wonder whether modern science can offer hypotheses other than those of immediate news, hermetic mystery, or humanist madness. You wonder: if the world has been depopulated by epidemic, hunger, and programmed extermination, with what has nature filled what it abhors, the vacuum? Antimatter is an inversion or correspondence of all energy. It exists in a latent state. It is actualized only when energy disappears. Then it takes its place, liberated by the extinction of former matter.

The overcast sky of this night of St. Sylvester in Paris prevents your seeing any refulgence. Quasars, the universe’s wandering energy sources, are born of and converted into potential matter by the collision of galaxies and antigalaxies; antimatter awaiting the extinction of something it can replace. If this is true, a whole world identical to ours — insofar as it is capable of integrally replacing, to the maximum and minimum detail, our world — awaits our deaths to occupy our places. Antimatter is the double or specter of all matter: that is, the double or specter of everything that is.

You smile. Science fiction always based its plots upon one premise: other, inhabited worlds exist, superior in force and wisdom to our own. They keep close watch over us. They threaten in silence. Someday we will be invaded by Martians. Wells/Welles: Herbert George and George Orson. But you believe you are witnessing a different phenomenon: the invaders have not arrived from another place, but from another time. The antimatter that has filled the vacuum of your present gestated, awaiting its moment, in the past. Martians and Venusians have not invaded us, rather heretics and monks from the fifteenth century, conquistadors and painters from the sixteenth century, poets and entrepreneurs from the seventeenth century, philosophers and revolutionaries from the eighteenth century, courtesans and social climbers from the nineteenth century: we have been occupied by the past.

Then are you living an epoch that is yours, or are you a specter from another time? Surely that flautist, that monk, and that girl staring at you from the snowy street ask themselves the same question: Have we been transported to a different time, or has a different time invaded our own?

Would you dare think the unthinkable as you stand and hold back the drape with your only hand? Are you looking at a transposition of the historic past into a future that will have no history?

And obsessively, because you are who you are and are from where you are, you tell yourself that if this is true, the transposition must surely be that of the least realized, the most abortive, the most latent and desiring of all histories: that of Spain and Spanish America. Then you mock yourself with a grimace of secret scorn. Would an Indonesian not say the same, a Burmese, a Mauritanian, a Palestinian, an Irishman, a Persian? Idiot: you have been thinking like a white-wigged Encyclopedist. How can one be a Persian? How, in truth, is it possible to be a Mexican, a Chilean, an Argentinian, or a Peruvian?

And you. What will they do with you? This is the first day — you suddenly realize — they have not brought your single meal. They are going to let you die from hunger. Perhaps they do not know you are there in your suite in the Hôtel du Pont-Royal. It isn’t important. The logic of extermination is imposed independently of your existence. Undoubtedly, they have killed your servant. Would it serve any purpose to speed matters up, to go down to the street, join the three beings staring toward your window? It’s all the same. Whoever the true executioners may be, these, others, you will die, ignored, no one will bring you food. You must sleep and recognize your death in dream. You wonder whether you are the only one to perish this way, like the ancient Cathari; you smile. And in that very instant you cease to believe that you are you: this is happening to someone else. Not to just anyone else. To Another. The Other.

You are overwhelmed by vertigo. In that instant, like St. Paul to the Corinthians, you would shout: “I speak as a fool. I am more.”

You return to yourself. You return to your wretched body, your blood, your guts, your feelings, your amputated arm: with your sound arm you cling to yourself as your only life preserver. You are you. You are in Paris, the night of the thirty-first of December of 1999. You passed a day before the monument to Jacques Monod, near Rodin’s statue of Balzac in the Boulevard Raspail. Chance, captured by invariability, becomes necessity. But chance alone, and only chance, is the source of all novelty, of all creation. Pure chance, absolute but blind freedom, is the very foundation of the prodigious edifice of evolution. Without the intervention of this creative chance, every thing and every being would be petrified, preserved like peaches in a can.