Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Only our fingertips will touch, Brother Simón; and our lips will foolishly utter the word ‘flesh,’ never ‘Simón’ or ‘Felipe’; flesh, as one would say hair, stone, water, thorn.”

LUDOVICO’S DREAM

The student nodded gravely, considered, then shook his head no. No, he said to Felipe, your syllogism is false; the perfect world will depend upon my premise: a good society, good love, eternal life will be ours only when every man is God, when every man is his own immediate source of grace. Then God will not be possible because His attributes will be a part of every man. And man, finally, will be possible because he will no longer be ambitious or cruel; his grace will be sufficient unto itself, and he will love himself and love all creation.

Young Felipe spoke again, glancing from Ludovico’s worried eyes to Celestina’s somber, suspicious features. And he said:

I see you, my brother Ludovico, busy in your tiny student’s garret, filled with the grace of God, convinced you are your own God, but obliged, nonetheless, to struggle against two implacable necessities. You feel the cold of this winter night, and the fire does not warm you, for the logs have been wet by strong November rains.

You wish your grace would spread beyond your body, beyond the narrow confines of your miserable little room, that it would overflow the limits of your serene spirit and subject the fires of earth and the rains of heaven to your will: you curse the same fires, the same rains old Pedro praises as he walks through the swampy fields toward the warm coals of his hearth.

You ask yourself, Ludovico: Can one separate the satisfaction of grace from the temptation to create? You ponder this question, shivering over your damp green firewood: Isn’t grace worthless if it cannot dominate nature? God could have been content with eternal life, could have lived alone except for the companionship of His own grace; why did He feel the need to fill the void of that grace with the accidents of natural creation?

You are thinking about the Divinity before Creation. You see a solitary transparency surrounded by the black rays of that temptation to create: God imagines Adam, then declares himself insufficient. Unlike the sickly fire in your chimney, your brain is aflame, you imagine a piece of wood that would burn forever once it was lighted. Yes, that would be the material gift of grace, the practical equivalent to your divinity; then grace and creation would be one, and their name would be knowledge. Then, surely, master of gnosis, you would be God and God would be unnecessary since you could yourself convoke a new order, as God, unique, arrogant (and dangerously saddened to know He was insufficient, compelled), once did.

You learn the secrets of alchemy; you work for years, indefatigably; you grow old, stooped over dying fires, glutinous tars, and greenish oils, mixing, experimenting, coaxing the momentary flare, subduing the insistent flash, agonizing over a spark, exhilarated by a flameless aura, watching the St. Elmo’s fire from the beaches, wandering through peat fields, distilling mustards and linseed oils, polarizing and magnetizing every combustible element known to man, and still others of your own invention, until your work is ended. Ah, how true the Biblical curse; neither grace nor creation alone would have granted you knowledge; science is not gratuitous; you had to add the sweat of your brow.

You have dedicated your life to pragmatic grace and now you can proudly show the results to the honorable council in your city. Some of the priests accuse you of practicing the black arts, but the burghers, who see in your invention a necessary reconciliation of faith and utility, override this clerical vigilance, and soon you are installed in a profitable workshop near the city, from which supplies of your incandescent firewood flow to peasant huts, lords’ castles, and the ovens of the Guilds. No one need ever again feel the cold. You have triumphed over God’s careless design: allowing wood to get wet when dryness is more useful, flooding the woods with winter’s rain. The civilized world applauds you; it matters little that the vapors from your invention stain the firmament with a yellow cloud that settles into the valleys as a resinous bog. Grace, creation, and knowledge now are one in you; you have established the objective norm of truth.

Old and proud, saved by fame from the solitude and the questions that, were you alone, your forgotten grace — the original impulse to your creation and the solitary germ of your knowledge — might have posed, you ride through the countryside, basking in your renown, the gratitude of the populace, the usefulness of the gift you have bestowed upon them. That malodorous smoke issues from every chimney … from every chimney save one. Dumfounded, you dismount and enter that smokeless cottage.

There you find Celestina. She has grown old, too; she is truly a witch now, gray and wrinkled, sitting frostily before a bare hearth stitching her little dolls and stuffing them with flour. She is intoning a diabolic litany, in effect invoking the only companion to her solitude: the vacant intensity of her eyes reveals a true acquaintanceship with the being her voice is conjuring. In her solitude she too demands a contiguous presence, a shared wisdom.

Why do you not have a fire? you ask Celestina, and she replies she neither needs nor wants one; the smoke would frighten away her familiars and they would no longer come to her. You show your anger: woman, ignorant, superstitious … woman! but the truth is that your soul has now suffered the supreme insult: there is one being who fails to appreciate your offering to humanity, the tangible proof of your superior grace.

The wrinkled hag tries to read your face and finally cackles: “You know what you know; I know what you will never know. Leave me alone.”

And you, old man, proud, wise Ludovico, return slowly to the city with a leaden heart and a deepening sense of decision. You denounce Celestina before the ecclesiastical tribunal, and a few days later you go to the public square and there amidst the silent crowd you watch the halberdiers lead Celestina to the stake. The woman is bound to the wooden post and then the executioners set fire to the dry crackling wood at the feet of the recalcitrant witch. Your own invention, of course, is not utilized on this occasion.

NOWHERE

The three men and the woman sat a long while in silence after young Felipe stopped speaking. The youth himself sat staring toward the dawn sea; they had passed the night in conversation. And when the sun appeared, El Señor’s heir thought he saw in the orb of day the dead jester’s horrible grimace. Then he looked intently at Celestina and with his eyes asked her: “Please do not tell the others who I am.” Celestina bowed her head.

The student Ludovico was the first to rise; with a sudden movement he seized an ax and before anyone could stop him (but no one wished or dared to stop him) he threw himself against the skeleton of the old man’s boat and destroyed it, reduced it to splinters. Then, his face scarlet, he drove his ax into the black sands and murmured hoarsely:

“ Nowhere does not exist. We have dreamed of a different life in distant time and distant space. That time and space do not exist. Madness. We must go back. Go back to your land, your harvest, and your serfdom, old man. Go back to your plagues and your healing, monk. Woman, return to your madness and your devils. And you, Felipe, the only one of whom we know nothing, return to your unknown. And I will go back to confront the torture and death that are my destiny. The Inquisitor of Teruel was not without reason: this is our world, even though it is not the best of all possible worlds.”

Felipe remained kneeling beside the dawn waves. The others rose and walked toward the dunes. Finally Felipe ran after them and said: “Wait a moment, please. You have not asked me what my perfect world would be. Give me that opportunity.”