Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

At times you are assaulted by temptation and by doubt: “I am the only woman on board. It is only natural they both love me.” But Ludovico’s passion, his tender touch, even the newly minted words so different from his usual dogmatic expression, the beauty of the pleasure he gives and receives from you, all this tells you he loves you because you are Celestina, and that he could love no other woman. You are Celestina: you are mine: Ludovico is yours.

Then I begin to believe that perhaps my friend loves you more than I, Celestina, for he loves both you and me, or me through you; and you, because of your freely given loyalty to me, fear you are becoming too close to him and more distant from me. I love him, he is my brother; you must please me by loving him always more.

During the day, old Pedro stands at the helm while the monk prays and fishes. Ludovico and I perform the exhausting tasks; we climb the mainmast and ready the sail, we scan the horizon and at the sight of storm clouds prepare the crossjack, we sound and scrub and polish, and gaze interminably at the endless ocean from whose center we seem never to move, as if we were lying to. Our shoulders and hands touch constantly; we have learned to haul the ropes as one, to know the power and grace of our common muscles, for now we even walk like twins, as if the symmetrical distribution of our bodies’ weight were essential to the equilibrium of the ship. And our bodies sweat together beneath the summer sun; our skin is dark, our hair bleached by the gold light of the sea. You, Celestina, are pale; you stand away from us during the day, in the shadows, salting down the fish and slicing the toughened loaves, alien to our active labor, alien to our cultured Latinist jests, morosely humiliated you cannot share in the wit and puns of the education we have in common, when Ludovico says to me: “Crinis flavus, os decorum cervixque candidula, sermo blandus et suavis; sed quid laudem singula?” And I reply, caressing the nape of his neck: “Totus pulcher et decorus, nec est in te macula, sed vacare castitati talis nequit formula…”

Now we come to you every night in order to be close to each other; I grow excited thinking of him, and then make love to you; he doesn’t have to tell me he does the same. The long slow nights drift by; increasingly you are the vehicle of our desire, something to be possessed so we may possess each other. Finally one night you lie alone; we are together. The muscled sunburned bodies have fulfilled their desire, but frustrated yours.

Now you know, lying huddled apart from us, that if you attempt to satisfy your own desire you will wound me or hurt my lover, my brother. You look beyond that rhythmically moving coverlet to the place where the monk lies sleeping. You go and sit at his feet, and once again begin to stitch your little cloth dolls, and you feel a dark and distant urgency; you howl, Celestina, you howl like a lost bitch, and in the phosphorescent sea dew that moistens your lips seek the kiss of your only true lover, the Devil.

SIMON’S DREAM

When Felipe ceased speaking, the monk Simón shook his head no, and said: “You are mistaken. You have begun at the end. Before there can be true peace or true love, authentic justice or pleasure, sickness and death must cease.”

Felipe looked into Simón’s clear, pained eyes and remembered his father’s dark and willful brow. And he said to the monk: “You, Brother Simón, have experienced the terrible plague you told us of today as we were eating; you saw men battle against death. But the only men who truly battled were your prisoners: they had been promised freedom. But in the perfect world that you imagine there will be no death. And without certainty of death, how can there be desire for freedom?

“Let me pause, good monk, and ask you to recall your city once again, this time without death. A child is born in the manorial castle; at the same time a child is born in one of the dark hovels of your city. All rejoice, the rich parents and the poor as well, for they all know that once their sons are born, they will live forever.

“The two male children grow. One excels in the arts of falconry, archery, hunting, and Latin; the other follows the paternal profession; he will learn to give shape to iron, to keep the ovens burning red, and to wield the powerful bellows. Let us say that the boy born and reared in the castle is called…”

“Felipe,” murmurs Celestina.

“Yes, Felipe, we shall say; and let us suppose the young smith’s name is…”

“Jerónimo,” murmurs Celestina.

“Yes, let us suppose.” Felipe continued: “Consider, monk, the iron apprentice; when he has reached his twentieth year he falls in love with a young country girl, much like Celestina, and weds her; but the night of the wedding the young Prince from the castle appears and takes the virgin for himself, invoking his inarguable seignorial right. Celestina’s melancholy resembles madness; she forbids her bridegroom to come near her. The young smith fans the fires of hatred and revenge against me, Felipe, the young Lord.

“But both are immortal. He cannot kill me. I cannot murder him.

“We must find something to replace the death that neither can inflict upon the other.

“So for death I substitute non-existence. Since I cannot kill the young smith for despising me, or you, old man, for your rebelliousness, or you, Celestina, for your sorcery, or you, Ludovico, for your heresy, I condemn each of you to death in life. For me, you do not exist, I consider you dead.

“Look now, monk; look at your city peopled by my slaves, look at your walled city surrounded by my men and arms; listen to the steps of phantoms in my vast encircled cities. I have laid siege to the city. And I have entrapped each of you; not your immortal bodies, but your souls, mortal within immortal flesh.

“For this is the weakness of your dream, monk; if the flesh cannot die, then the spirit will die in its name. Life will no longer have any value; I shall have denied men liberty; they cannot exchange their slavery for death. They no longer have the only wealth an oppressed man can offer in return for the freedom of other men: his death.

“And I, monk, I will live forever, enclosed in my castle, protected by my guards, never daring to sally forth; I fear the knowledge of something worse than my own impossible death: I fear the spark of rebellion in the eyes of my slaves. No, I am not speaking of the active rebellion that you, monk, or you, old man, know and desire, although at times I also fear the simple, irrational murmuring of the multitude, the tides of living phantoms inundating my island, my castle, who, since they cannot murder their tyrant, convert him into one more of their infinite and anonymous company. No, monk, no: I fear the rebellion that simply ceases to recognize my power.

“I have not killed them; I have only decreed they do not exist. Why should they not repay me in the same coin? This will be the young smith’s revenge; he can murder me by forgetting that I exist. You, monk Simón, walk among the spectral throngs of your city, vainly offering your useless charity and futilely seeking that spark I fear, for the immortal do not rebel unless the certainty of death is assured. They will kill me by forgetting me; my power will have no meaning.

“And so we will continue to live, you and I, I and they, repeating ceaselessly a few uncertain gestures that vaguely recall times past when we lived and fought and believed and loved and desired with the goal of either deferring or hastening death. We shall live, we shall live forever, monk, as the mountains and the heavens live, the seas and rivers, until, like them, immobilized, our faces will be lost, left to the obliterating powers of erosion and the tides.

“We shall all be sleepwalkers, you in your city, I in my castle, and finally I shall come out, I shall walk the streets and no one will remember me, no one will recognize me, as the stone fails to recognize the hill at whose feet it lies. We shall meet, you and I, but as we will both be immortal, our eyes will never meet.