Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Who am I?” asked the shipwrecked youth. “Where have I come from?”

But the page had ended her story, and did not wish to answer him. She offered both hands to the youth, but he held out only one. With the other, impelled by some inexplicable fascination, he picked up a sealed green bottle, a piece of flotsam tossed by the waves onto this Cabo de los Desastres.

EL SEÑOR SLEEPS

El Señor had faltered in the midst of his narration, after recalling the affair with Ludovico and Celestina (imagined on the ship of the ancient Pedro, but actual in the bloodstained castle; more hallucinatory, nevertheless, the dreamed than the real). Guzmán had served him a soothing potion; and now, as he finished the story, repeating the exhortation of the monk Simón faithfully transcribed for El Señor by the Court Chronicler, the master asked for a second potion; Guzmán, ever solicitous, prepared it as El Señor murmured: “This is the story I wished to record on my birthday, which will also be the day of the second burial of all my ancestors. El Señor, may he rest in glory, was my father; and my name as a youth was Felipe.”

“And the young Lady of the castle?” Guzmán inquired, as he offered the narcotic to his Prince.

“She is our Señora, who dwells here…”

His lids heavy, he repeated, “Our Señora…” but could not finish the prayer; the sleeping potion had swept him to the depths of a heavy stupor in which he imagined himself besieged by eagles and hawks deep within a valley of stone. Sluggishly, he searched for an exit; but the valley was an open prison, a vast, deep jail with steep, sheer walls. One single distant unbarred window: the blue and mottled patch of sky high above, accessible only to the birds. And these birds of prey would soar high in the sky and then dive with rage to attack an abandoned and imprisoned El Señor, more heavy-limbed than fearful. And after wounding him, the eagles and falcons again soared to the heights. Immediately, without logical transition, he dreamed he was three different men, the three a single man although possessing three different faces in three distinct times; the three, always, captive in the stony valley with no exit but the sky. Dragging himself through sharp-pointed rocks of this frozen wasteland, he peered into the pupils of the first of the men who was himself and he could see, in one of the eyes of these alter egos, Pedro’s sons mutilated by the hounds; and in the other pupil he saw himself as an adolescent protecting himself from his father’s falcons. But the face of the first man that was he, through whose pupils these scenes were projected, was no longer the youth fleeing with the sons of the serf, or the youth fearful of the falcons, but the identical face of the man who one fateful day had threaded his way among the corpses of children, women, farmers, artisans, beggars, prostitutes, lepers, Jews, mudejares, penitents, heresiarchs, madmen, prisoners, and musicians led to their slaughter in the castle so that he, Felipe, might demonstrate to El Señor that he was worthy of inheriting the power of the older man.

Why did these painful images of a fearful youth persist in the eyes of the face that was both seductive and cruel? The dreamer could not answer his own question; he fled from the first man to encounter the third; he recognized himself now in the form of an ancient man dressed in black lying upon a large flat rock, his face turned to the sun; but the sun neither illuminated nor melted the waxen visage that repelled the light, and through its facial orifices crawled worms less white than the ancient’s skin: from the ears, between the lips, through the nostrils, twisting and pullulating; and moist behind the milky concave curtain of the eyes, for behind the transparent cornea writhed a colony of tiny, threatening eggs.

He turned from the third man and lay down — he, the dreamer, the second man, the actual Señor, the prisoner of the profound sleep induced by Guzmán’s potions — face down among the rocks; he opened his arms in a cross and begged forgiveness; but his dominion over measurable time had ended; he knew he would remain there forever, prostrate, mouth agape, breathing uselessly, prisoner of this palace of shattered rock, until the swallows built their nests in his open palms, until the falcons and eagles, in a false and unbelievable spirit of love for the species, no longer dived to strike: he, too, would be an eagle — a conquered eagle, an eagle of stone. “One wolf does not bite another,” El Señor murmured in the prayer in his dream; he did not doubt the dark instinct of the relationships which in this jail of rapacious birds led him to think of other, of vulpine threats. Eagle and wolf, he murmured, wolf and lamb, swallow and eagle, spiritual lover and libertine, devout Christian and bloodthirsty criminal, punctilious student of the truth and unscrupulous manipulator of the lie, I am but one of you: a Spanish gentleman.

Lofty jail, icy sun, flesh of wax, charnel house … the dreamer sobbed: Where, my sons; to whom shall I bequeath my inheritance?

GUZMAN SPEAKS

In the tossing and turning of his nightmare, El Señor finally lay face down on the bed, arms opened in a cross. Guzmán circled about him, pacing always more nervously about the bed, as if El Señor’s relentless sleep were a test of the narcotic prepared and administered by the vassal. And nevertheless he knew no more powerful drug than this mixture of the male and female blossoms, black and white, pepper and arsenic, of the mandrake, the tree with the face of a man. Only after his master lay face down in the customary position for prayers on the chapel floor, but also (Guzmán could not know that) imitating the posture he was that instant dreaming, so the postures in life and dream coincided, only then did Guzmán tell himself that he was master of El Señor’s nightmare, as he could never be during the cruel penitential vigils. The impossible mask dropped: that of the Guzmán who knew how to cure dogs and train hawks and organize the hunt. He discarded that mask for what it was: a thin layer of flesh maintained — easily now, from habit — over his true features. Closer to the bone the true Guzmán was revealed: the expression recognized by the hounds, feared by the deer, and accepted as natural by the hawks; the rapacious profile that revealed itself to El Señor when the servant least desired: kneeling to pick up a breviary, withdrawing to fulfill a command.

Guzmán drew a long dagger from its sheath and held it over El Señor’s back.

Here am I, he said to himself (to him), master of your sleep, master of your unconscious body, even if only to see you in sleep as you can never see yourself. If the value of a man is determined by the price promised for his murder, you, Sire, are of no value: no one would pay me to kill you. If I wish to murder you, it must be done without spilling a single drop of your blood or collecting a single maravedi. But you, if you knew my desire, how much would you pay for my death, Sire? And so our roles are reversed, for although you are everything, no one would give me anything for your death; whereas I am nothing, but for my death, to avoid your own, you would give everything.

Guzmán ceased speaking only to Guzmán: as he raised his voice, Bocanegra picked up his ears: Imbecile, you do not deserve your power; you will never even know that your sin was not in murdering the innocents but in wasting the opportunity to include your father and your mother and your sweetheart in the slaughter and thus build your absolute authority upon the absolute freedom of the crime: an ascension to power without the need of dynasty and without the pathos of being who you are merely by inheritance; you could have had a power free of any debt. You botched even your crime, poor stupid Felipe; you inscribed it upon the mortal line of your succession, instead of converting it into the uncompromised basis for your absolutism; that is the reason for your dissatisfaction, not remorse, but the mutilation you wrought upon your inner self. You aged mortally in the instant you presented your crime to your father, having killed your father’s subjects. Did you want witnesses? Is that why you committed the error of pardoning the student and the witch? You will regret that; it is I, Guzmán, who tells you, you will regret that, because even an ignorant mountain bandit knows that one must never pardon an enemy, however innocent he may be; the pardon strips him of his innocence and turns him into an avenger. Did you want witnesses? You had me write your confession so that the events you recounted might come into being, because for you only what is written exists, and you understand no permanency but that of a piece of paper; bah, this very moment I could burn it; this very moment I could rewrite it, eliminate and add, write that you also murdered Ludovico and Celestina, and then you would yourself believe it, because it was so written; and if that man and woman should reappear you would only see two phantoms. Did you want witnesses? You are alone. Without witnesses, your crime would have been so absolute that only you and the world would have shared it; your witness would have been history, not the whimpering dog who hears your laments. Hear me, poor, suffering, sick little Felipe, aged before your time by your lacerating asceticism; I, Guzmán, tell you I am not what you believe or would like to believe, some upstart upon whom you can bestow minute favors that are supposed to seem enormous to me. It is I, Guzmán, who tells you this, not some bastard son of a bitch, but a Lord like you, although broken by debts. Not some scum covered with scabs and filth, but another Prince, although destitute. Not some young sneak thief from some dusty hamlet in Aragon, but a boy who like you had the opportunity to learn the arts of falconry and archery, horsemanship, and the hunt. Not some lout from Guadarrama turned highway robber, but a nobleman incapable of understanding or of holding back an invisible movement in which land, the base of all power, could be converted into insubstantial money, and where castle walls constructed for eternity would last a briefer time than winter’s swallows; I, reduced to vassalage by a power with neither fortification nor cannons by the usurers, merchants, and miserable clerks of leprous cities. My fathers and grandfathers, Sire, fulfilled before your ancestors the ceremony of homage and thus entered a pact: our service in exchange for your protection. In this way, we would all maintain the fundamental principle of our society; no Lord without land and no land without a Lord. And we were maintaining the balance between strength and need; the power of the Liege in exchange for the protection and survival of the weak. And within this major pact, we entered a lesser — although for me, Sire, one no less important, reasoned, or vital: the service of noble vassals given in exchange for your protection would assure that we nobles would always be nobles and that the lower classes would be kept in their place, for the blood of the two is not equal, nor can their destinies be equal. But see me today, Sire, born a nobleman and become a servant — the blame is yours. You did not honor the treaty. Our service continued, but not your protection. You allowed the debilitation of the power based on the land, confronted with the power of commerce based on money. You undertook costly and distant campaigns against heresy, forgetting the counsel of the ancient Inquisitor to the zealous Augustinian: rebels grow tall with attention, but are effaced by indifference. You squandered your fortune in constructing a useless, inaccessible, austere mausoleum; the common man identifies power with luxury, not with death. Your guilty conscience led you to submit your interests to religion; the astute Prince subjects religion to his interests. But behind your sterile obsessions — heresy and necrophilia — a real world is growing, agitating and transforming everything. You left your noble vassals undefended; you were too much preoccupied with persecuting heretics and building sepulchers; we had to sell our lands, assume debts, close the workshops that could not compete with the city merchants, and sell our serfs their freedom. Faced with the power of the cities, you vowed to increase yours at our expense. We paid for your crusades and your crypts; you did not exterminate the heretics, for where one martyred rebel falls, ten spring up in his place; and you will not resuscitate the corpses of your ancestors; they will not accompany you in the solitudes of your governing. You have destroyed the grades of nobiliary authority between the Liege and the cities. So today there remain only two powers; that of the minor nobleman no longer exists. I, Sire, allied myself to what destroyed me; I passed over to the enemy lines so as not to be conquered by them; and I joined your service to enable myself to participate in both powers until this battle is decided; for it will be decided, Sire, have no doubt about that; and then I shall opt for the conqueror. What I am doing is called politics; choosing the lesser, the more secure, of two undesirable solutions. I, Guzmán, tell you that I learned to speak the language of the human rubble that constructs your palaces and hunts your boars; I, Guzmán, learned to control your peasants, to threaten and gratify them in turn; it was not my destiny to cut the heart from the deer and with this ceremony adulate those rowdies; I, Guzmán, converted by necessity into a knave, an informer, and for that reason cosseted by Lords who would be incapable of knowing what was happening in their domains if a Prince among bandits did not do it for them — and receive their favors for the task. I tell you this; I, Guzmán, like you, educated for divine and unending seigniory, but forced by circumstances to know the very temporal and profane sophistries with which these new men combat inherited power; I, Guzmán, capable, like you, of crime, not in the name of dynastic providence but in the name of political history. For to your faith in the hereditary continuity that makes of you a harassed accident of birth, these new men oppose the simple will of their own persons, with neither antecedents nor descendancy, a will that is consumed in itself, and whose dispersed potency is called history. I belong to both bands, my Lord; I am impelled to vengeance against them by the recollection of my seignorial youth, by the subjugation of my destiny by men of the cities who mock destiny, for theirs flows as swiftly as their ducats pass from hand to hand; I am impelled to vengeance against you by this question that I dare ask you only while you are sleeping: last of the Lieges, corrupt and crepuscular sum of the powers you wrested from the minor nobles but could not maintain against the great burghers, will your strength be less than that of a knave? And will you know less than a knave? But without the knave could you manage to be anything but a witness to the splendiferous sunset of your power? Our Señor … the last Señor. Bah … I shall mark my time patiently, I shall cure your dogs and order your hunts so that you maintain some semblance of your power; and I shall prepare for the inevitable contest between your power and that of the new men; if my will does not weaken and if fortune favors me, I shall be arbiter between both; and someday, have no fear, I shall govern in your name as governed the stewards of the indolent Kings of France.