Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

EL SEÑOR BEGINS TO REMEMBER

There was no anger in Guzmán’s attitude, only the profound and silent contempt of one who knows his office and who scorns the errors of others; but emphasizing El Señor’s guilt, Guzmán’s contempt was disguised in the precision with which he attempted to remedy the hurt done the dog. The master, breathing heavily and scratching his jaw, has no time to notice either these details or what they might reveal of the disparity between Guzmán’s actions and his thoughts. His attention is captured by a much more powerful fact: it is five o’clock in the morning, the sun is just rising, and the dog Bocanegra is being treated by Guzmán for an incident that had occurred one hour earlier when the sun was at its future zenith.

He glanced at the vassal, allowing him to proceed. Guzmán rubbed the dog’s wound with olive oil to soothe the pain, then applied a thick coating of stale melted hog fat; finally he bound the dog’s body to a board so he couldn’t scratch himself, and said: “It would be better now for the wound to get air; it will heal more quickly that way.”

El Señor scratched his tickling ear and looked again. Guzmán had treated the dog and was kneeling before the hearth; he laid a fire and lighted it with oakum. El Señor sat upon his curule chair beside the fire, aware that Guzmán had again divined his desire: in spite of the fact it was a summer day, El Señor was trembling with cold. The flames began to play impartially upon El Señor’s prognathic profile and the sharp angles of Guzmán’s face.

“I must remind El Señor that today is his birthday. I must apologize for not having mentioned it sooner. But because of the dog’s condition…”

“It is all right, all right,” gasped El Señor, waving aside Guzmán’s apologies. “It is I who should apologize, for my carelessness with the dog…”

“El Señor has no cause to concern himself with dogs. That is why I am here.”

“What time is it?”

“Five o’clock in the morning, Sire.”

“You are sure?”

“A good huntsman always knows the hour.”

“Tell me … Who constructed the stairway that leads from the chapel to the ground above?”

“All of them, you mean, Señor? Surely many; and none with a memorable name.”

“Why have they not completed it? Soon the funeral retinues will be arriving; how will they descend to the crypt?”

“They will have to come around, Señor, around the grounds, through the corridor, across the patio, through the dungeon, the way all of us reach the crypt.”

“You do not answer me. Why have they not completed the stairway?”

“No one dares interrupt the meditations of El Señor. El Señor spends almost the entire day kneeling or prostrate before the altar; El Señor prays; the work falls behind…”

“I pray? I meditate? Oh, yes, I recall, entire days, it all comes back to me … Guzmán … Would you wish to relive one day of your life, even one, to live it differently?”

“Each of us had dreamed of rectifying a wrong decision in the past; but not even God may change what has already taken place.”

“And if God gave me that faculty?”

“Then men would see it as the gift of the Devil.”

“… if God permitted me, at will, to walk into the past, revive what is dead, recapture what is forgotten?”

“It would not be enough to change time. El Señor would also have to change the spaces where the time occurs.”

“I would grow young…”

“And this palace, so laboriously constructed, would tumble down like dust. Remember that five years ago this was a shepherds’ grove and there was no building upon it. Ask God, rather, to speed up time; thus El Señor will know the results of his work, which are the results of his will.”

“I would see them as an old man.”

“Or dead, Señor: immortal.”

“And if old, or immortal, I would only see in the future what I would see in the past: the flat plain, a building disappeared or in ruins, destroyed by battles, envy, or indifference; perhaps abandonment?”

“El Señor, then, would have lost his illusions; but he would have gained wisdom.”

“You awakened a philosopher today, Guzmán. I prefer to maintain my illusions.”

“As El Señor wishes. But time is always a disappointment; foreseen, it promises us only the certainty of death; recaptured, it makes a mockery of freedom.”

“To choose again, Guzmán; to choose…”

“Yes, but always knowing that if we choose the same as the first time, we shall live a pleasant routine, with no surprises; and if we choose differently, we will live tortured by nostalgia and doubt: was the first choice better than the second? It was better. In any manner, we would be more enslaved than before; we would have lost forever a liberty that chooses, whether well or badly, only once…”

“You are talking more than usual, Guzmán.”

“El Señor asked me to remind him what day it is. It is his birthday. I have thought, if he will forgive me, a great deal about El Señor. I have thought that to choose twice is to mock the free will that does not forgive our abuses and that, mocked, mocks us, shows us its true face, which is the face of necessity. Let us instead, Sire, be the true masters of our past and future; let us live the present moment.”

“That moment is for me a long anguish.”

“If El Señor consistently looks behind him, he will be turned into a statue of salt. In El Señor resides a sum of power much greater than his father’s…”

“At what high price! You do not know, Guzmán. I was young.”

“El Señor has united the dispersed kingdoms; he has put down the heretical rebellions of his youth; stopped the Moor and persecuted the Hebrew; constructed this fortress that combines the symbols of faith and dominion. The usury of the cities that destroyed so many small seigniories renders homage to his authority and accepts the necessity for central power. The shepherds and laborers of these lands today are workers at the palace; El Señor has left them with no sustenance but their daily wage. And it is easier to take money from a wage than to collect bushels from a harvest, for the harvest can be seen in measurable fields, while wages are manipulated invisibly. Other great undertakings await El Señor, no doubt; he will not find them behind him, but ahead.”

“If one could begin again … if one could begin better…”

“Begin what, Sire?”

“A city. The city. The places we inhabit, Guzmán.”

“El Señor would have to employ the same arms and the same materials. These workers and these stones.”

“But the idea could be different.”

“The idea, Señor?”

“The intent.”

“However good it was, men would always make of it something different from what El Señor had intended.”

“So I believed once.”

“Forgive me, Señor, believe it still.”

“No, no … Listen, Guzmán; take paper, pen, and ink; listen to my story. I wanted this on my birthday: to leave something tangible of my memory; write: nothing truly exists if it not be consigned to paper, the very stones of this palace are but smoke if their story not be written; but what story can be written if this construction is never completed? What story! Where is my Chronicler?”

“You condemned him to the galleys, Sire.”

“The galleys? Oh, yes, yes … Then you write, Guzmán, write. Listen well to my tale…”

EL SEÑOR VISITS HIS LANDS

He arrived at dusk at the head of twenty armed men; they galloped through the mist-soaked fields, their swinging whips lopping off heads of wheat from the stalk. Some carried flaming torches and when they arrived at the hut in the middle of the plain they threw the torches on the straw-thatched roof and waited for Pedro and his two sons to be driven out like animals from a cave: light, smoke, beasts, men, all things have but one exit, El Señor had said before they rode out.