Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

What were considerations of the unusual behavior of a dog compared to those raised by this tremulous proximity to the uncompleted stone stairway? Looking up, he could count the thirty-three broad steps that connected the crypt to the flat ground of what had been the shepherds’ grove. Broad stairs, well polished, smooth. What worker had polished them? What did he look like? What were his dreams? Where did these stairs lead? He pressed a hand to his brow: outside, to the plain, to the whirling, proliferating, sweating world; to an encounter with the laborer who had constructed them. He knew that well enough. Why did he always doubt it? Why did he always rise before dawn to see with his own eyes the state of this stairway conceived with the single purpose of accommodating the procession of seignorial coffins and the corteges that would accompany them to their final resting place? Why were his orders not fulfilled? Were they constructing with all haste? And why did he himself not dare ascend those stairs, preferring to look at them from below before beginning his long daily routine of prayer, reflection, and penitence?

Why did he not dare take the first step? A lost sensation, a fire in his blood, forgotten during the imperceptible passage from youth to maturity, was born again in his loins and breast, raced through his legs, shone in the luminous excitement of a rejuvenated face. He raised one foot to climb the first step.

He made a rapid calculation; it was still not four o’clock in the morning. First he looked at his own black slipper suspended in air. Then he stared up toward the top of the stairway. A night as black as his slipper returned his gaze. He dared; he took the first step; he placed his right foot upon the first stair and immediately the cool night turned to rosy-fingered dawn; he took the second step, he placed his left foot upon the first stair; the dawn dissipated into warm melting light, morning. At that moment El Señor’s flesh, already exalted by his eagerness to achieve the next step, prickled involuntarily, and for an instant he could not distinguish between the shiver of pleasure and the shudder of fear.

Bocanegra ran from the bedchamber through the chapel toward the stairway; the thought flashed through El Señor’s mind that perhaps his momentary doubt before the sleeping dog had, in some way, stirred the depths of his dream. But now a ferocious dog, sharp teeth bared, jaws slavering, was racing forward as if his hour to defend his master had at last arrived; he ran toward his master and his master, trembling, said to himself: “He doesn’t recognize me.”

But Bocanegra stopped at the foot of the staircase, cowed before the first stair, where El Señor stood, a figure diffused in the violent light falling from overhead: a solar column of light, a column of dust motes, El Señor. First the mastiff barked with fury, and El Señor could not separate that emotion from his own fascinated innocence; did the dog or its master realize what was happening? El Señor thought, I can’t tell the difference between my trembling ignorance and the dog’s ignorant fury. Bocanegra barked, he approached the first step, he fled as if the stone were fire; worse (his master observed closely): for the dog the stairway did not exist; the dog could not see the standing El Señor, yet he smelled his presence; for El Señor was not present at the time the dog was living, but rather in a time he had encountered by chance when he stepped onto the stairway; the fire died in his entrails, he could no longer believe in the resurgence of his youthful exaltation, he cursed the notion of maturity and its identification with corruption; he cursed the blind will for action that one day had distanced him and now separated him forever from the only possible eternity: that of youth.

“The apple has been cut from the tree, its only destiny to rot.”

Then El Señor, poised upon the first step, committed the error of stretching out his hand to take Bocanegra by the spiked collar with the heraldic blazon inscribed in the iron. The dog growled, shook his head, and tried to sink first the spikes, then his canines, into the hand attempting to pull him toward the first step. The initial sensation that he was not recognized was followed in El Señor’s soul by the certainty of animosity; the bellicose dog not only did not know his master, he saw him actually as an enemy, an intruder. He refused to share the place and the instant his master had invaded on the stairway. El Señor regarded the perspective of the crypt from the first step; the chapel, from the stairway to the altar in the background to the luminous Italian painting and the jasper monstrance, was a copper engraving. Instantly he was suffused with immeasurable rage; on the day of his victory he had sworn to erect a fortress of the faith that no drunken soldier and no ravenous dog might ever profane; yet at the very entrance of the space he had chosen for his life and his death, the space constructed for him and by him, here he stood defending himself against a dog that was, in turn, resisting being pulled toward the stairway; El Señor looked toward the distant lights on the altar and, with a jerk, ripped the bandage from the dog’s head. Bocanegra howled heart-rendingly; the bandage had pulled the sandy scab from the wound.

Howling, vanquished, his head lowered and the bandage trailing between his trembling paws, Bocanegra retreated to the seignorial bedchamber. El Señor hesitated between ascending one stair more and returning to the granite floor of the chapel. He moved his right leg to ascend the second stair; but now that pleasureful lightness had once again turned to leaden weight. He was afraid; he made a half turn and placed his foot beneath the first stair, on the floor. He looked up: the sun had disappeared from the firmament, the dawn was again announcing its appearance. He moved his left leg and stepped completely from the first stair; again he looked up, toward the square of the heavens at the top of the stairway: the dawn had yielded to the night that had preceded it.

THE KISS OF THE PAGE

The page-and-drummer, dressed completely in black, descended from the dunes to the beach and knelt beside the shipwrecked young sailor. He stroked the damp head and cleaned the face: the buried half was a mask of wet sand; the cleaned half, however (murmured the page-and-drummer), was the face of an angel.

Startled, the boy awoke from his long dream; he cried out: he could not distinguish between the caresses of the page and those he believed he must have dreamed from the moment when he fell from the fore-deck into the boiling waters of the sea; dreams of encounters with women in carriages; he feared that the avid lips and sharp-filed teeth of a young Señora would again sink into his neck; he feared that the wrinkled lips and toothless gums of an old woman bundled in rags would again seek his loins. With the eyes of innocence he stared at the tattooed lips of the page-and-drummer, and imagined that in those lips — like the field and the device upon an escutcheon, like the coat of arms and the wind upon a pennant — were blended the desirous mouths of the other two women; he decided the page was the women he had dreamed of resolved into a new hermaphroditic figure; if he were half man and half woman, the page would be sufficient unto himself, he would love himself, and these caresses with which he was attempting to console and resuscitate the young sailor would be either an insignificant or an infinitely charitable act, but nothing more. And if the page were a man, the youth would accept his affection as that of the companion long desired in his solitude and mortal danger. But as the page’s tattooed lips approached his, he did not smell the heavy scent of sandalwood or fungus of the other women, but a perfume of the forest, of flaming brambles and dye baths in the open air. The page cupped the youth’s face in his hands and placed his warm soft tongue between the youth’s parted lips. Their tongues met and the youth thought: “I have returned. Who am I? I am reborn. Who are you? I have dreamed. Who are we?” He believes he must have repeated it aloud, for the page answered him, whispering into the ear he was caressing: “We have all forgotten your name. My name is Celestina. I want you to hear my story. Then you will come with me.”