Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“But this,” the student Ludovico intervened, “would presuppose a world without God, since in the world you have each imagined, a world without power or money, with no prohibitions, with no pain or death, each man would be God, and God therefore would not be possible. He would be a lie, because His attributes would be those of every man, woman, and child: grace, immortality, and supreme good. Heaven on earth, my friend monk? Earth without God, then, since God’s proud and secret place is a heaven without earth.”

Then they all looked to young Felipe and waited in silence. But the son of El Señor said he would tell his dream only after he had interpreted in turn what the others had just imagined.

PEDRO’S DREAM

You are living in your happy commune, old man; the harvests belong to everyone and every person takes and receives from his neighbor. The commune is a great island of freedom surrounded by the seas of serfdom. One evening, as you are peacefully contemplating the sunset from your reconstructed hut, you hear a great hue and cry. A man is brought before you; he has been captured, and is accused of stealing. He must be judged. He is the first man to have broken the laws of the commune.

You lead this man before your people assembled in the granary and you ask him: “Why did you steal, if everything here is held in common?”

The man asks to be pardoned; he did not know what he was doing; the excitement of the crime was stronger than his sense of obligation to the commune. More than by greed, since everything, it is true, belongs to every man, he was motivated by the lure of danger, of adventure, of risk; how can one overcome in a day the inclinations of a lifetime? He has returned to confess his guilt and to be pardoned. He has stolen something without value, something he found in the communal storehouse: a large green bottle, old, covered with moss and spider webs and sealed with very old wax. He had stolen to experience the exciting thrill of danger. But then he felt shame and fear, and fled from the commune. He fell into the hands of El Señor’s soldiers. He was taken to the castle. And there, under torture, he revealed the existence of the commune to El Señor.

Contain your anger, old man, and disguise your fear, for you well know that your best defense has been invisibility; you know that El Señor will not visit you until the next harvest is collected, or until a wedding when he comes to take, by force, his rights as the Lord. For this reason you have forbidden anyone to marry before the harvest time, trusting that by then the commune will be sufficiently strong to confront El Señor. You ask the repentant man standing before you: Why have you returned when you could have remained with your stolen bottle under the protection of El Señor?

The thin man, his ankles raw from the torture ropes, answers you: “I have returned to do penance for my double betrayal: I have returned to fight in defense of my companions, for tomorrow the army of El Señor will march against us and will crush our dream…”

You ask him: Where is this bottle you have stolen? And he bows his head and admits that inexplicably El Señor took it from him. But he pleads: “I am a traitor and a confessed thief, but let me return and fight with you. Don’t despise my poor bones.”

You decide to pardon him. But the assembly protests: you hear voices demanding death for this man as an example to whoever might feel tempted to repeat his crimes. And there is more: many allege that if the man has returned, it is because El Señor plans to employ him as a spy within the commune. You argue heatedly, old man: not a single drop of blood must be spilled here; to yourself you say silently that, in the same way the thief and traitor could not change his instincts overnight, the multitude gathered here cannot suppress its own. The members of the commune defy you: once El Señor attacks, the spilling of blood will be inevitable; in fact, the time remaining before the fateful battle has been brutally curtailed. You point to the traitor’s ankles, still bleeding from the torture: a man replies that this is an obvious stratagem of El Señor, so that, once pardoned, the traitor can remain in the commune and continue to inform against it. They accuse you of evading the facts, and several strong men hurry outside; soon in the warm summer night you hear the sound of the hammer and the saw.

Inside the granary your community first debates, then decrees: we will live in peace only when our rules of life are accepted by everyone; in the meanwhile we must set aside our own code of brotherhood and actively destroy those who do not deserve it, our enemies. You try to calm them, old man; you say we must live in isolation and in peace, with the hope that sooner or later our good example will spread; you say we must conquer with persuasion, not with arms. Your people shout in your face: we must defend ourselves, for if we’re destroyed we can offer no example at all. You persist, weakly: we will negotiate with El Señor, we will deliver this harvest in exchange for the right to pursue our new mode of life. Then the assembly laughs openly at you.

The traitor is condemned to death and hanged that same night from the brand-new gallows erected in the middle of the commons. The people elect one of the carpenters to organize the defense; the new leader’s first orders are to raise barricades in the fields; a popular army is formed and neighbor watches over neighbor to prevent future betrayals.

Old man: you are petitioned to remain in your hut; occasionally in the evenings young girls come to bring you flowers and honor you as the founder of the commune; but you do not dare ascertain what really is happening. The new leader has warned you that if you speak again, if you again repeat the arguments you expressed during the assembly, you will be exiled, and if you persist in debate outside the commune, you will be considered a traitor and murdered in broad daylight. From your window you can see the gallows erected in the commons. It seems to you that only the hangman and you are motionless, waiting, always waiting; the rest of an incomprehensible world races by before your eyes, and your ears are filled with the chaotic sounds of running horses, of weeping, of discharged harquebuses, and of fire. What is the source of the arms the members of the commune employ in their struggle against El Señor? You find out the day you see in the square the pennants and infantry of another Liege, a rival of your oppressor. Every day, men are hanged; you no longer know, you don’t want to know, whether they are men of the commune or soldiers of El Señor. It is said (at times the sorrowing women dare communicate the rumors) that some members are opposed to the alliances that, under the guise of necessity, the new leader has effected with the noble rivals of El Señor.

Once the new leader visits you and says: “Pedro, I hope someday when we again live in peace we can raise a monument to you right here where the gallows now stands.”

CELESTINA’S DREAM

Felipe took the girl’s hand.

You’ve chosen me, isn’t that true, Celestina? And I feel I’ve chosen you. Here, let’s drink to our love. Together we’ll work with our new friends to build the old man’s ship; together we’ll voyage to a new and better land. We’ve become good friends, we five, but you and I, my love, will make love beneath the stars as the ship softly breasts the waves of the unknown sea.

Ludovico the student is also our friend now; but every night, following the day’s hard labor, as we drink and I look into your eyes he will try to hide his behind his cup; I can see my love for you reflected in his eyes.

We’ve no need for explanations, Celestina; soon every night Ludovico will lie with us beneath our covers; I love him like a brother and you love what I love; there will be no hatred, no suspicion, no jealousy, only satisfied desire, when I make love to you and then permit him to do the same.