Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Later he walked to the stream bed that drained the quarry, where several day laborers were cutting stone from the vein and carting it out in hand barrows. Although it was not his work, Martín helped them load the rough-hewn blocks he would later chisel and polish. He nodded to Jerónimo, who was in charge of the quarry forge; better than anyone, this bearded man knew how to sharpen iron tools, how to set the wedges and sheath the iron tools with steel edges to protect them from the ruinous blast furnace. Even so, only yesterday he had been accused of oversharpening the tools. That meant the loss of a day’s wages. It doesn’t matter, Jerónimo told Martín; we just do our jobs the best we can; the supervisors do theirs by finding defects where there aren’t any; they’re parasites, that’s their condition, and if from time to time they don’t criticize some error, soon they themselves would be criticized for not doing anything.

At four-thirty in the afternoon they all ate a plate of chick-peas with salt and oil, and Martín calculated the time. It was midsummer. It was still two months before winter work hours began. Now during the long fatigue of the sun they must resign themselves to their own. From Santa Cruz in May to Santa Cruz in September a man must come to work at six in the morning and work continuously until eleven, and from one in the afternoon until four, and then, as they were now, cease work for a half hour, then return at four-thirty and continue until sunset. But in July the sun never sets, Catilinón said, laughing; he could already see himself in Valladolid with his little pouch full of wages saved to spend through the long, nightless summer, going from eating house to eating house, matching his sure pleasure against his unsure fortune. Martín spat out a mouthful of sour and masticated chick-peas at the lime worker’s feet and said that at five ducats every three months he’d be lucky if he got as far as Burgo de Osuna, where every morning the oxen left, pulling their granite-laden carts, and bearded Jerónimo rapped the clownish Catilinón on the head and told him that in addition the oxen were more sure of their food than any rapscallion dreaming of city eating houses, for the beasts had hay and straw and rye and wheat aplenty, and in addition had provisions for two years in advance, and that there was also an order to deliver two thousand bushels of bread annually to the monastery and an equal quantity for any poor that might pass by; but for them? no provision at all when this work was ended, not even if they became the homeless poor, and as for that scamp Cato, he shouldn’t get any ideas, he’d be returning to Valladolid exactly as he’d left, to live the same way he had as a child, hanging about under stairways and fighting with the dogs for scraps of food. Well, at least there’s scraps, Catilinón answered with another wink, and hunger sharpens your wits, so a man can get by; poulterers throw chicken heads and feathers into the street; butchers slaughter their animals in their shop doorways and let the blood run down the street, and lacking for wine, the blood’s not bad watered a little, and there are always pigs running loose, and fishmongers toss what they don’t sell into the street. Fishmongers, grumbled Jerónimo, toss what’s rotted into the street, what those able won’t buy, and you, Catilinón, you’re a born fool, bound to die of the Great Pox in cities swarming with madmen delirious from pure hunger, and why can’t you just be happy with your work here, Nuño added, at least we’ll be eating more than dirt and with luck the end of this job doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, maybe our sons and even our grandsons will be working on it. And Catilinón wiped a crocodile tear from his eye and said: Give me money, not counsel, and if I’m to be a fool I choose to be foolish like the fool from Perales, who while he was servant in the convent got all the nuns pregnant, and I don’t want to end up like Santa Lebrada, you know what happened to her, that sainted rabbit put on her habit and went out to do a good deed, but for all her toil she was boiled in oil, and worse, she was fricasseed, for we’re all screwed from the start and alive only by a miracle, for let’s see, now, how old was your brother, Martín, when he died, and your father, Jerónimo? and let the shortness of life console and unite us, brothers, and stinking water and damp rooms as well, for either here or in the city we live the same, here or there, a bit of light, a lot of smoke; beasts or men, there’s but the one door for us all.

“You ask about my brother,” Martín replied. “We were laborers in Navarre, in the kingdom of Aragon. The King promised us justice, the Lieges, too, who so zealously safeguarded justice — but for themselves, only to find more ways to oppress their serfs and pile so many more taxes upon our shoulders, in coin and kind, that several lifetimes wouldn’t be long enough to pay. And since my brother was the oldest of the family and couldn’t pay the debts we owed to our Liege, and as we’d contracted new debts with some of the villagers not as unfortunate as we were, the Liege demanded the debts he was owed, and he informed my brother that in these lands the Liege could treat his vassals well or badly, according to his whim, and take away their belongings when it pleased him and deprive them even of their names, and there was no King and no statute that could protect them. And as my brother could not pay he took refuge in the church, and the Liege denied him even that asylum, and when he captured him he reminded my brother that we, the poor of the land, had no rights, whereas the Liege had the right to do as he wished, kill us, and choose the manner of our death: hunger, thirst, or cold. And as a warning to the slaves, our Liege ordered my brother killed by hunger and thirst and cold, and in the worst of winter he left him upon a little hillock, naked and surrounded by troops, and after seven days my brother died on that hill — of hunger and thirst and cold. From a distance, we watched him die, and there was nothing we could do. He became like the earth, hungry, thirsty, and cold; he became one with the earth. I fled. I came to Castile. I hired out for this work. No one asked me where I came from. No one cared to know the name of my land. They urgently needed laborers for this construction. The Liege of my land orders death for all who flee. I made myself one of you, exactly like you, and hoped no one would recognize me here.”

“Fighting against the Moors and defending the frontiers, we at least earned the right to abandon our Liege, if we left him our property; thus, from the Liege’s chattel we could become the King’s villager, and the Liege cannot seize us in royal territory; that’s why I came here,” Nuño said.

“Your land was very far south,” Martín sighed.

“And yours far to the north,” smiled Nuño.

“North and south, it doesn’t matter,” murmured Jerónimo. “Our lives have very little value, for the life of a Jew is estimated at two hundred days’ salary, and that of a laborer at only one hundred.”

“I say you’re all fools,” laughed Catilinón, “and everything you say is laughable, pointless; you’ve been more concerned with your dignity than with your life, while others just like you who have been obedient and submissive have courted favor and in the end were freed, even earned their right to be called gentlemen.”

“And do you know what it cost them, churl?” Martín answered in a rage. “The Liege’s right to mount their virgins. Accepting the fact that marriage between two serfs is not permanent and that a family is not even a family — for the father has no authority, since the Liege owns our land, our lives, our honor, and our deaths. Yes, even the serf’s corpse belongs to the Liege.”