Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Very early the following morning, I returned to the bramble thicket, but neither the she-wolf nor the child was there. I was afraid for them, and I cried. I prayed that the she-wolf would find a deep hidden den where she could protect the child; otherwise, both would die during the hunt the following Saturday. My father came to the place where it had happened, and when he, as I, found nothing, he said I shouldn’t fall asleep again while I was tending the flock, for I had already seen that wolves can appear in dreams, and one day while I was asleep they might really appear.

In spite of all the distractions our forests offered — even though its limits were shrinking — I never forgot that strange event. I recall that more people passed by every year of my adolescence. I met students traveling to their universities; horsemen and clerics; jugglers, minstrels, drug sellers, sorcerers, itinerant workers, freed serfs, soldiers without employ, beggars, and barefoot pilgrims carrying long staffs with hooks holding bottles; all the travelers of the routes of our Christian empire. And farmers also passed by, complaining that they had lost their lands, or that they couldn’t pay both the tribute demanded by their Liege and the taxes demanded by the cities that spread outside their walls, absorbing fields and forests for themselves. And I never stopped wondering if, in some manner as mysterious as his birth, the destiny of the child born and suckled of the she-wolf was not somehow tied to the destiny of all these people who now marched through the same brambles which had witnessed his birth.

And one day I had a new, although fleeting and incomplete, response, for it was the memory of a child who is beginning to remember. Months before the she-wolf’s whelping, just now I remembered, some of El Señor’s men rode by on horseback, announcing their presence with singing and banners and long-tailed monkeys hanging to the backs of the chargers; and among the servants of the castle, also clinging like a monkey, with his knees hooked around the saddle horn, came El Señor’s jester, with his many-colored hose and belled cap; and this buffoon was dandling a very blond and very young child, laughing at the cool branches of our forest. This child, too, had a cross between his shoulder blades. The procession passed by quickly, and when I told this to my father, he laughed, and said that I was a very fanciful little girl, and that cutting a cross upon one’s back with a dagger or branding one with a red-hot iron was an old custom of the Crusaders and a common occurrence among the pilgrims. But this was a very small child. If the buffoon and the child ever again passed through our forest, I would approach him and say, “I know him; I saw him born.”

And if the forest had been converted into a much-traveled route (and how many new things my dazzled eyes beheld: caravans laden with coffers filled with crowns and swords and coins with Arabic inscriptions, chests filled with intoxicating spices from the Orient), it also had created its own dangers. Isolated before, now we felt closed in, not only by the wolves, but by the bandits who hid in the forest thickets awaiting passing travelers; and what is worse, by horsemen in ambush, former Lords forced into the forest darkness by the debts accumulated on their former domains. This my father also told me. They carried long knives; all they had been able to salvage from their disaster.

One day El Señor visited us again; he arrived on a dun-colored horse and told my father that, from then on, the products from the land and animals we had always paid him were not enough, but my father would have to pay with money for the use of the land on which he lived and grazed his flocks and dyed his cloth. My father replied that he neither had nor used money, but instead traded one thing for another. El Señor told us that rather than ducks and onions we should demand money for our bales of wool and our honey and dyes. “Have your astonished eyes seen, serf, the chests and coffers passing through this forest? Well, their contents are delivered into the hands of the merchants of the city and to buy them, to adorn my castle and clothe my women, I need money.”

It was not this that disquieted my father, not the fact it destroyed our simple customs and confronted us with the problem of how we might procure money and the novelty of dealing with the merchants of the towns; it was the way El Señor looked at me, and the question he asked my father: “When will the girl be married?” For then he added; “Marry her soon, for noblemen are roaming this forest who have lost their lands, but not their taste for virgin girls; what’s more, they are in a mood to avenge the loss of their seignorial rights, and as the people of the cities have organized the defense of their lives and possessions, such noblemen are taking advantage of the daughters of men like you, defenseless in the forest. In any case,” laughed El Señor, “remember you must save her maidenhead for me, because I still have power, and I swear to increase it, whether at the cost of the burghers or the impoverished princes. Guard your girl from them all, shepherd; don’t let it be said afterward that you allowed her to be ruined for both you and me.”

He rode away laughing and my innocent father decided to dress me as a boy from then on, although later we learned that El Señor had died of the fever before I could marry or he could take me. Dressed in sackcloth and rough leather breeches, my hair cut like a lad’s, I continued my work of dyeing and herding, and I became a woman. Several years went by; my father grew old and our lives changed scarcely at all. Until one day there appeared armed men from the Prince Don Felipe, heir to the lands and privileges of his dead father. Their mission was to gather all the boys in the forest for service at arms and as servants; they captured me in the oak forest that from my childhood had been my protecting habitation and took me with them while I reflected upon my thankless fate: whether dressed as a man or a woman, like misfortune awaited me.

When Prince Felipe saw me dressed like a shepherd lad he did not guess my true condition, although my features seemed to awaken something disturbing in his memory. I, I swear it, had never seen him before. The new Señor assigned me to the service of his mother, where the presence of women, I then learned, was forbidden. As a young shepherdess I had learned to play the flute and I let this be known to the head steward in order to entertain myself and as a distraction in my desire to live separated from the servants and soldiers, before whom I never disrobed. I was able to live in the quarters of the musicians, who were too occupied at night and early morning in sleeping off their drunkenness to notice me, and too busy during the day taking advantage of the funereal self-absorption of the mistress of the castle, constantly kneeling before her husband’s embalmed cadaver, to steal provisions and bottles from the cellars. The mother of El Señor’s son had forbidden all gay music in her presence, and although she respected my musical talents, she ordered me to learn to play the drum, for as she was living in continuous mourning she wished to hear only funereal sounds. And thus, when the elderly Lady began her long pilgrimage with her husband’s corpse, she assigned me to the last position in the procession, dressed all in black and playing my drum, an announcement of mourning. La Señora, mother of the present Señor, does not admit women in her company because she is jealous of them all, as if her husband’s cold dead flesh were still capable of the abuses that won him fame in life and from which, by my great good fortune, I was saved, although only to fall into this miserable condition.

But I have wandered from essential things, and I wish to bring my story to a close as night falls upon this beach. Only by a mistake that the mayor and the halberdiers will pay very dearly for, we entered yesterday a convent of nuns who wanted to take possession of El Señor’s mummified body. And that is why, instead of traveling all night cloaked in the darkness the Lady prefers, we fled and are traveling by day. Thus I have found you. Now you must come with me.