Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The company paused at the edge of the high sandy ground, their silence interrogating the youth. And Felipe said: “Look. Utopia is not in the future, it is not in another space. The time of Utopia is now. The place of Utopia is here.”

HERE AND NOW

And so Felipe led the mad young witch and the proud student and the honest serf and the humble monk back toward the city, and there he said to them: “There is the perfect world.”

And their eyes opened to what they already knew, to shrieking, playing children, clerics selling indulgences, to the cries of street hawkers and the dragging steps of beggars, to quarrels among rivals and disputes among students, and also to sweethearts comforting each other, couples kissing in the narrow lanes, the strong scents of gin and bacon, roasting boar and frying onion; the hotchpotch of red-gauntleted, purple-robed doctors, purple-hatted, gray-cloaked lepers, scarlet-clad whores, freed heretics with the double cross embroidered on their tunics, and Jews with the round yellow patches over their hearts; pilgrims flourishing palm leaves returning from Jerusalem; pilgrims from Rome with St. Veronica’s cloths covering their faces; pilgrims from Compostela with seashells sewn to their hats; and pilgrims from Canterbury with a drop of the blood of the priest, the turbulent Thomas a Becket, in a small vial.

But these accustomed sights, sounds, and smells were but the veil drawn across a world moving rapidly and silently from some unknown center, issuing from some subterranean force; this Felipe pointed out to his companions: the dances seemed the same happy dances, but they were different; one had only to look a little more closely to discover their secret design; clasping hands, people danced all together, the entire city tracing the patterns of a lively galliard, moving in the undulating contractions of a giant serpent, led by the fife and lute, the mandolins and psalteries and rebecs of a group of musicians; and suddenly, when the five friends joined hands to form part of that ribbon of dancers, they saw other signs of change, for monks were coming out of their monasteries and nuns from their convents and Jews from their aljamas and Moslems from their alquerías and magicians from their towers and idiots from their asylums and prisoners from their prisons and children from their homes, and men armed with garrotes and axes and lances and pitchforks joined them, and one of them approached Felipe and said: “We are here. At the time and the hour you ordained.”

Felipe nodded, and many people climbed into the carts and others took the place of oxen and pulled the carts, while a horde of men dressed in frayed sackcloth, their bodies covered with crusted filth and scabs and ulcers, barefoot and hirsute, flocked into the city, dragging themselves on their knees like wounded cats, flagellating themselves cruelly as they chanted Felipe’s words: “The time is now, the place is here.”

And Felipe placed himself at the head of the crowd and cried: “Jerusalem is near!”

And the multitude shouted and marched behind him, following him beyond the walls of the city into the fields; and as they passed, the hordes burned and leveled the fields, and a leper, reaching out his sore-covered arms to the black clouds of smoke, said: “The Parousia is near, the Coming! Christ will return for the second time to Earth. Burn! Destroy! Let not a single stone from the past remain. Let not a single affliction from the past remain. Let the new age find us naked upon a barren earth. Amen.”

Singing and dancing, the multitude advanced, scarring their knees and scourging their breasts; they attested that the river ceased to flow as they crossed it, and that its warm waters stood icy-still about their legs; that the hills flattened out before their march and the clouds visibly descended to touch the brittle crust of the earth and protect from the furies of the sun the new Crusaders of the millennium, the imitators of Christ, the prophets of the third Joachimite Age — the Age of the Holy Spirit — the exalted peoples living the last days of the Antichrist. This is what certain sweating monks proclaimed; the masses of Arabs and Jews following behind Felipe in this caravan muttered different things among themselves.

Then the singing, shouting children saw the castle resting beneath the low-hanging clouds, and they cried: “Is this Jerusalem?” But Felipe knew it was only his father’s castle. He instructed the men to prepare arms for the assault, but when they reached the castle moat they found the drawbridge already lowered, the huge doors opened wide.

Silently, they descended from their carts. Children clung to their mothers’ skirts. The flagellants dropped their scourges. Pilgrims from Rome peered from behind their Veronica cloths. Amazed, they entered the castle of El Señor, where a vast repast had been hurriedly abandoned; musicians’ instruments lay in disorder beside the cold, ashy hearth; black blood and grease seeped from the cadaver of a decapitated deer; the tapestries hung motionless, although their flat ocher figures of glittering unicorns and hunters seemed to welcome Felipe’s army. Then their amazement gave way to frenzied action; the crowd took up the wine flasks and the musical instruments, they seized the roast partridges and grape clusters; men, women, and children ran through the great halls and bedchambers and passageways, dancing, tearing down the tapestries and cloaking themselves in them, donning casques and caps and tiaras and birettas and steeple caps and airy gossamers; they adorned themselves in chains of gold and silver earrings, ceremonial medallions, even the emptied basins of oil lamps; they plundered every coffer, jewel chest, and casket that lay in their paths. Renegade monks offered indulgences to scarlet-clad whores in exchange for their favors, pilgrims from England mixed the blood of the saint with the blood of the wine, and a drunken cleric was proclaimed Dominus Festi and baptized with three pails of water, while during the height of the orgy a Brabantine heretic bellowed the catastrophes awaiting the world: war and misery, fire from the heavens and greedy abysses yawning at the feet of humanity. Only the elect would survive. Then the Jews rejected the plates of unclean suckling pig; the Moslems decided to swallow the pieces of gold they had found.

The celebration continued for three days and three nights, until everyone succumbed, overcome by love-making and lack of sleep, hysterical exaltation, bleeding wounds, by indigestion and by drunkenness. But during this frenzy — and its eventual attrition in mournful songs, renewed vows, and indolent gestures — the five friends first observed and then acted according to their own desires. Celestina and Felipe lay down together upon a soft bed of marten skins; the student Ludovico soon joined them, since in truth the three had thought of nothing else since El Señor’s son had imagined the story of their love-making on board the ship that never sailed.

The two older men, Simón the monk and Pedro the peasant, slowly left the castle. Once beyond the moat they clasped hands, then set out on different routes; Simón said the sick awaited him in other unfortunate cities; Pedro, that it was now time to return to the coast and begin to build a new boat.

As Simón and Pedro bade each other farewell, the drawbridge very slowly began to rise; the old men paused again as they heard the sound of heavy chains and creaking wooden planks, but they could not see who raised the bridge. Each sighed and continued on his way. Had they waited but a few instants more, they would have heard the violent pounding on the other side of the raised bridge, now become an impregnable barbican; they would have heard desperate cries for help, and the heart-rending weeping of the imprisoned.