Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Withdrawing your only hand, you allow the curtain to fall closed. You will never again see those three survivors. The silence of the city beneath the snow tells you everything. Everyone is dead. The order of the factors does not alter the product. The men arrived from the past have died, the women of the present impregnated by them, and the children destined for the future, the newborn infants on the quays of the Seine: all Caesars, all Christs, then none a Caesar, none a Christ. Reason? Madness? Irony? Chance? Antimatter? The rules of the game have been fulfilled: every day as many died as were born. The flautist, the monk, and the girl, being the survivors, are necessarily the executioners. Now they will ascend to kill you, and then they will kill themselves.

You go to your bedroom. Lie down, dream, die. Then you hear the sound of knuckles rapping on your door.

They have come for you.

You did not have to descend to seek them.

You did not have to die dreaming.

You open the door.

The girl with the porcelain skin, the long chestnut hair, the full multicolored skirts and gypsy necklaces is looking at you with deep, gray eyes. “‘I have sung women in three cities, but it is all one.’” Women? Cities? “‘They mostly had gray eyes; I will sing of the sun.’” She stares at you, seemingly forever. Then the tattooed lips move, as many-colored as the necklaces and skirts: “ Salve. I have awaited you.”

Bedazzled heart.

“Yes.”

You disguise your amazement.

“We had a rendezvous, do you remember? Last fourteenth of July, on the bridge.”

“No, I don’t remember.”

“Pollo Phoibus.”

“‘I will sing of the sun,’” you say, not knowing what you say.

“The words written upon your breastplate gleamed, faded, and others appeared in their place…”

“‘Nothing disabuses me; the world has me bewitched,’” you say as if another spoke for you.

“You fell from the Pont des Arts into the boiling waters of the Seine.”

“‘Time is the relationship between the existent and the non-existent.’”

“For a moment I saw your only hand above the water.”

“‘And what if suddenly we all turned into someone else?’”

“I threw the sealed green bottle into the river, praying you would cling to it and be saved.”

“‘Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.’”

“May I come in, then?”

You shake your head. You emerge from your trance. “Forgive me … Excuse … my lack of courtesy … When one is alone one forgets … one forgets … the rules of conduct. Forgive me; come in, please. You are welcome.”

The girl enters the darkness of the apartment.

She takes your hand. Hers is icy. She leads you gently through the living room. In the darkness you cannot see what she is doing. You hear only the swish of her skirts and the chink of the beads of her necklace upon her breasts.

“Bocanegra’s collar … Fray Toribio’s ustorious mirror. All the mirrors … Fray Julián’s triangular mirror that Felipe was unable to destroy when the painter removed the painting from Orvieto … The round mirror Felipe held as he ascended the thirty-three steps in his chapel … The black blood-streaked mirror in which La Señora and Juan looked at themselves one night … The small hand mirror you stole in Galicia before embarking with Pedro to discover new lands … the same mirror in which the ancient of the basket of pearls saw himself … the same mirror in which you looked upon me, crowned with butterflies…”

You curb the anguish in your voice. “We’re in the dark. How do you know?”

“Only in darkness can I see myself in these mirrors,” she replies, her voice as serene as yours is altered. “Didn’t you yourself, as you opened the door, see me in this same darkness? Didn’t you see my eyes and my lips?”

She moves close to you. She smells of clove, of pepper, and aloes. She speaks into your ear: “Aren’t you tired, Pilgrim? You have traveled far since you fell from the bridge that afternoon and were lost in the waters that tossed you onto the shore of the Cabo…”

You seize her shoulder, you hold her away from you. “That isn’t true, I’ve been shut up here, I haven’t left this place, I haven’t opened my windows since summer, you are telling me things I’ve read in the chronicles and manuscripts and folios I have here in this cabinet, you’ve read the same things as I, the same novel, I’ve not moved from here…”

“Why not believe the opposite?” she asks after kissing your cheek. “Why not believe that we two have lived the same things, and that the papers written by Brother Julián and the Chronicler give testimony to our lives?”

“When? When?”

She places her hand beneath the cloth of your caftan, she caresses your chest. “During the six and a half months that passed between your fall into the river and our meeting here, tonight…”

Lifeless, you surrender, your head touches hers. “There wasn’t time … All that happened centuries ago … These are very ancient chronicles … It is impossible…”

Then she kisses you, full upon the lips; moistly, deeply, long: the kiss itself is another measure of time, a minute that is a century, an instant that is an epoch, interminable kiss, fleeting kiss, the tattooed lips, the long narrow tongue, the palate bursting with sweet pleasure, you remember, you remember, every moment of the prolongation of that kiss is a new memory, Ludovico, Ludovico, we all dreamed of a second opportunity to relive our lives, a second opportunity, to choose again, to avoid the mistakes, to repair the omissions, to offer the hand we did not extend the first time, to sacrifice to pleasure the day we had before dedicated to ambition, to give a second chance to all that could not be, to all that waited, latent, for the seed to die so the plant could germinate, the coincidence of two separate times in one exhausted space, several lifetimes are needed to integrate a personality and fulfill a destiny, the immortals had more life than their own deaths, but less time than their own lives …

You are delirious; you feel you have been transported to the Theater of Memory in the house between the Canal of San Barnaba and the Campo Santa Margherita; you draw away from the kiss of the girl with tattooed lips; you are filled with memories, Celestina has transmitted to you the memory that was passed to her by the Devil disguised as God, by God disguised as the Devil, you draw away with repugnance, you remember, you did not read it, you lived it, you lived it during the last one hundred and ninety-five days of the last year of the last century, during the past five thousand hours: there will be no more life: history has had its second chance, Spain’s past was revived in order to choose again, a few places changed, a few names, three persons were fused into two, and two into one, but that was all: differences of shading, unimportant distinctions, history repeated itself, history was the same, its axis the necropolis, its root madness, its result crime, its salvation, as Brother Julián had written, a few beautiful buildings and a few elusive words. History was the same: tragedy then and farce now, farce first and then tragedy, you no longer know, it no longer matters, everything has ended, it was all a lie, the same crimes were repeated, the same errors, the same madness, the same omissions as on any other of the true days of that linear, implacable, exhaustible chronology: 1492, 1521, 1598 …

The violence of a warrior. The acclivity of a saint. The nausea of an ill man. You feel all this in your body. Celestina caresses you, calms you, embraces you, leads you to your bedroom, tells you, yes, what you remember is true, what you do not remember also, the curse of Caesar and the salvation of Christ are inextricably blended, the elect were not one, as God and the King desired, or two, as all rival brothers feared, or three, as Ludovico and the ancient dreamed in the beautiful Synagogue of the Passing in Toledo; each and all were the elect, all the children born here, all bearers of the same signs, the cross and the six toes, all usurpers, all bastards, all anointed, all saviors, all led, scarcely born, to the extermination chambers in Saint-Sulpice, all children of the total past of man, all fertilized by a transposition of ancient semen from the deserts of Palestine, the streets of Alexandria, the devastated hearth of the astute son of Sisyphus, the beaches of Spalato, the stone squares of Venice, the funereal palace on the Castilian plain, the jungles and pyramids and volcanoes of the new world; first the children died, and then the women, the men, only at the end, with no opportunity for fecundation, and last of all, the executioners, with no one to kill, except themselves …