Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

THE REWARD

When the slaughter had ended, El Señor’s soldiers sheathed their bloody swords and returned to the soldiers’ huts where they had been hidden during the long feast of the brief Apocalypse. Felipe had asked that the cadavers lie exposed for one whole day in the great halls and bedchambers of the castle; then, when the stench became unbearable, El Señor ordered that they all be burned upon a pyre erected in the center of the castle courtyard. Felipe also asked his father that Celestina and Ludovico be spared any punishment, because they had afforded him great pleasure.

“That pleasure is now a part of my education, Father, a part of the pedagogy not to be found in the Latin texts, the things you wanted me to learn in order to be worthy of my legacy.”

El Señor approved what his son had done, for by his actions he had shown himself worthy beyond any doubt of the power that would one day be his. Playfully, he seized his son by the nape of the neck and murmured, with a wink of the eye, that perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing that a father and a son should enjoy the same female. He laughed with prolonged pleasure and then, as a reward, he told Felipe he might have the thing he most desired.

“Father, I want to marry that young lady, our English cousin, who was reprimanded and expelled from the chapel by the vicar.”

“You could have had that wish at any time, my son. All you had to do was ask.”

“Yes, I know. But first I had to be worthy.”

THE SILENT HOUR

It was the deepest, darkest night of the year; the guards were dozing and the dogs lay exhausted from being chained all day. That day El Señor’s son had wedded his young Lady. In this silent hour Ludovico the student went to Celestina and told her to make ready, they must both flee the castle.

“Where will we go?” asked the bewitched young girl.

“First to the forest, to hide,” the student answered. “Then we will look for the old man. He has probably returned to the coast to build another boat. Or perhaps we can find the monk. He is sure to be in some afflicted city. Come, Celestina; hurry.”

“But we will fail, Ludovico, exactly as the young Liege told. I have dreamed it.”

“Yes. We will fail, once, and then again, then still again. But every failure will be a victory. Come, hurry, before the hounds awaken.”

“I do not understand you. But I will follow you. Yes, let us go. We will do what we must do.”

“Come then, my love.”

THE EXHORTATION

What do you expect of the future, my poor unhappy lad? Why did you leave your home, your distant but fertile fields where you were loved and protected? Why are you marching in this Crusade? What have they promised you? Listen, stop the dancing; do not excite yourself; why are you concerned, my son, why are you worried? Rejoin your friends; ask them to be silent, what an infernal din! No one can be rational in such circumstances, how can anything be understood; tell them to put down their fifes and bagpipes and drums and listen to me: the world is in order, it is well ordered; we struggled long and hard to emerge from the shadows; you young do not know what that was. Darkness, my children, barbarism, yes, the sacking, plundering hordes; blood, crime, and ignorance. It was with great effort that we came forth from that hell; more than once we fell back; more than once the sword of the Goth, the conflagration of the Mogul, and the horsemen of the Hun tumbled our constructs as if they were of sand. But look now: we have organized a space, we have created a stable order; look at the cultivated fields, look at the cities safe within their bastions, look at the castle on the heights and give thanks for the protection our Señor the Prince, like a good father, offers in exchange for our vassalage. Go back to your classrooms, my sons, what are you doing here? Go back to Bologna, to Salamanca, and to Paris; you will not find the truth accompanying this rabble, this mob of beggars and prostitutes and false heresiarchs: the truth lies in the teachings of the Church Fathers, and in the flower of their philosophy: the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas, who summed up for eternity all the wisdom of which the human being is capable; do not look for heaven in this orgy of sensuality and music and exultant doubts and heretical ideas, there are no heavens but those defined in the Elucidations: the corporeal heaven we see, the spiritual heaven inhabited by the angels, and the intellectual paradise where the fortunate shall stand face to face with the Holy Trinity. Young men: each of us has a well-established place on this earth; the Liege commands, the serf obeys, the student studies, the priest prepares us for the life eternal, the learned doctor propounds the inviolate truths; no, it is not true what you proclaim; it is not true that we are free because Christ’s sacrifice redeemed us from the sin of Adam; it is not true that the grace of God is within the reach of every man without the intercession of ecclesiastical powers; it is not true that redeemed human flesh may savor its own juices, its own polished smoothness, its joyful contact with other bodies, without fear of sin, we cannot put aside the fact that, as today we throw ourselves with pleasure into bed, soon others will throw us into the tomb; it is not true that the New Jerusalem can be constructed on this earth; anathema be the teachings of the heretic Pelagius, defeated, thankfully, by St. Augustine of Hippo, anathema, too, the teachings of Origen the suspect, who, surely not without some reason, culminated his thought with the atrocious act of self-castration, and the teachings of Joachim of Floris, that tenebrous Italian monk, as well, for no man obtains grace without the Church, as Pelagian heresy would have; nor will a millenary kingdom be realized in the souls of all believers, as Origen speculated, nor will there be, as prophesied in the Joachimite madness, a place in space, a third age, that will be the sabbath and the pleasure of sorrowing humanity, and in which epoch Christ and His Church will be replaced, since the spirit will reign fully in their stead; it is not true that you are the bearers of grace, accompanied by this riffraff, barefoot vagabonds who burn the lands and harvests, stables and farms, who assault and destroy monasteries, churches, and hermits’ cells, who steal food and clothing from devastated castles, who will not work, who contend they live in perfect joy, and who say they do all this to hasten the second coming of a Christ who must in truth be the Antichrist, and so a cruel and seductive tyrant — but a tyrant who may nevertheless be overcome, and for that reason one who is capable of bringing about the defeat of your millenary promise, of a kingdom-of-heaven-on-earth never to come about while Lords are masters of all and serfs masters of nothing. What confusion is this? You say the millenary kingdom will arise only upon a vacant, destroyed, and leveled earth, like that of the first day of Creation; but the Creation, my beloved children, was beyond history and thus cannot be repeated. And you add that only upon this demolished earth may the new Christ be received, a Christ who actually will be the conquerable Antichrist whose downfall will assure, oh yes, will assure that joyous era where the spirit will reign unfettered, not in an individual incarnation, but incarnate in all. But if that cruel and seductive tyrant should not be vanquished, but instead be perpetuated in a third age of weeping and terror and misery, embodying history, and with all his means enlisting those who do not understand that the act of Creation cannot be repeated, that its repetition would only disguise the original act, inscribing it forever in the same history they wish to negate, and thus provide the Antichrist the double weapon of the ability to act, masqueraded as the Creator, and also to reign with impunity as the Ruler — what then? Is this the way you say you are imitating Christ, whose reign will not be of this world, and whom we shall encounter only in Heaven when all time has come to an end, far from the earth, far from history, far from the eschatological delirium with which you are attempting to establish as a part of history everything that has no part in history? Do you truly believe that poverty erases sin, that communal property and the exaltation of sex and the sensuality of the dance and the rejection of all authority and the unrestrained life of vagabonds in the forest, on the beaches, and along the highways could supplant and even overcome the established order? Listen; stop your dancing, why do you not listen? Cease your singing, what infernal racket! How may I make myself heard? Damned sickness of St. Vitus, you are mad, you are sick; rest, go back to your homes, the carnival is over, the revelry cannot last forever: the disarmed crusades, the rebellious, aspiring soul, end in sacrifice upon funeral pyres in seignorial castles; forget your illusions, stop yearning for the impossible, accept the world as it is, stop dreaming! Yes! The Liege has the right to the first nuptial night, and his are the harvests and the honor and respect, and he is entitled to recruit for his wars and impose tributes for his luxuries; and yes, the Bishop can sell indulgences and burn witches and torture heretics who speak of Jesus Christ as if He were a purely human man, our equal … Do not doubt, do not think, do not dream, my unhappy sons; this is the world, the world ends here, there is nothing beyond the edge of the sea and whosoever embarks seeking new horizons will be but a miserable galley slave in a ship of fools: the earth is flat and this is the center of the universe; the land you seek does not exist, there is no such place! There is no such place!