Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

THE DOGS

Guzmán walked around the sleeping body, still holding high the long knife, and a grieving and restless Bocanegra growled quietly; then Guzmán laughed and sheathed the dagger. He walked to the door and Bocanegra’s growl rose to a ferocious pitch; he opened the door and took the leashes of several steaming, jostling, expectant greyhounds, along with vessels containing various compounds, from the hands of the faithful hunt attendants. He led the dogs into the bedchamber; Bocanegra, bound to his board, could not move, but he barked desperately; the other dogs approached to sniff him, as Guzmán called them by name: here, Fragoso; here, Hermitaña; down, Preciada; quiet, Herreruelo; here, Blandil. He took the forepaws of the swollen Hermitaña and rubbed her dugs and engorged black teats made tender by the overdue whelping; then he threw her on the bed of the sleeping Liege; he took the vessel containing a paste of ash and watered wine and briskly anointed the bitch’s gaping genitals. Then with a burst of laughter he spoke to Preciada: “And how is my pretty little Preciada? How do you like going without food for a day? What sweet eyes she has, here … here.”

He held out a portion of leavened dough and as the ravenous bitch ate, and before she realized, he had inserted three grains of coarse salt in her anus; then he unleashed Herreruelo, who went straight for the bitch’s black hole, and excited by the trembling induced by hunger and the salt, mounted her and began pumping energetically, all on El Señor’s bed. Then Guzmán called Blandil to the bed, fed him a mixture of human excrement and goat’s milk, and the dog began to urinate on the bed while Herreruelo and Preciada fornicated, linked together like a monster with two heads and eight paws, and Hermitaña finally began to deliver her pups in her master’s bed, one after another, and each one, born in the island of silk between the contracted paws and the warm muzzle, was licked clean by the bitch, who cut the cord with her teeth and then nuzzled the pups to her pulsing teats. Bocanegra barked, incapable, now the hour had finally arrived, of defending his master: Guzmán jerked three hairs from his tail and the great mastiff stopped barking, as if he were fearful of being expelled from his own quarters. The chief huntsman took Fragoso by the collar and dragged him to El Señor’s curule chair where the master’s clothing was scattered.

“Fragoso, good Fragoso, my beast,” he murmured into the silky ear. “Smell the master’s clothing, smell it well, that’s a boy. Go get him, Fragoso, go at him, boy.” Guzmán stimulated the dog, stroking its testicles and penis, and then unleashed him, directing him at the bed, where he leaped upon the person sleeping there drugged by the heavy vapors of the mandrake. Seated upon his Liege’s wrinkled clothing in the curule chair, Guzmán observed the spectacle, laughing, master of El Señor’s infinite dream.

“I know perfectly how to cure the dogs, but not El Señor. But what are your miserable amulets, Master Felipe, compared to my ointments of excrement and hog fat. When the hour arrives, you will not be able to save yourself, my fine Prince.”

Then he looked at the crouching, suffering, confused, and resentful Bocanegra and said: “I know you, brute, and I know that you know me. You alone know what I really think, what I do, and what I plan to do. El Señor has no more faithful ally than you. Sad that you can do nothing to tell your master all you see and hear, what only you know; too bad, poor unhappy Bocanegra. Yes, we are rivals. Guard yourself well from me, for I know how to defend myself from you. You have the weapons, although not the voice, to be a menace to me. I, to combat you, have both weapons and voice.”

In the depths of the walled valley, accompanied by a youth and an ancient, El Señor murmured prayers in which he asked three things: a brief life, an unchanging world, and eternal glory.

JUAN AGRIPPA

Enclosed; condemned to hear the sounds; every day, one day after another, the expected sounds, the day filled to overflowing with repetitious sounds that paralyzed every action except waiting and listening; the yearning for the exception, the accident of chance that would interrupt the monotony of the established sounds: matins, the cock’s crow, the hammer, the wheels of the oxcarts coming from Burgo de Osuna, the smith’s bellows, the shouts of the supervisors, the laughter of the water carriers, crackling fires in the taverns, deliveries of bales of hay and straw, the murmur of the looms, the screech of slate in the quarries, the hollow sound of tiles being broken and fitted, the barking of dogs, the wings of the hawk in flight, the cautious footsteps of Guzmán, the monotonous chant of El Señor’s prayers, the orotund pealing of the evening bells. This is the accustomed, through every repetitious day; this is the first thing she would wish to interrupt, to disturb; but she comes to fear more the shock of an unexpected sound; the succession of known sounds is preferable; one can wait without waiting.

La Señora wept throughout the night; not from grief, that she would have rejected as unseemly, nor for a humiliation that she would know how to disguise with an exaggerated dignity of external bearing.

“He has been condemned. He will be burned alive beside the palace stables,” Guzmán told her.

Slowly and with sensual pleasure, La Señora looked around the isolated luxury of her bedchamber, decorated from the beginning to contrast with the mystic austerity her husband had desired — and achieved. This corner of Arabia decorated in secret by La Señora with the help of Guzmán and the painter-priest Julián was far, still very far, from her ultimate aspiration: re-creating a Court of Love like the celebrated courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Poitiers and the gallant fairs celebrated in Treviso, the court of joy and solace where a Castle of Love had been defended by noble ladies against the assault of the rival bands of noblemen of Padua and Venice, the former dressed completely in black and the Venetians completely in white. But today in this chamber redolent of Chinese ginger, carnation, pepper, camphor, and musk, a major accouterment of pleasure was missing. La Señora accepted as the flaw in the luxury that, in order to maintain it, in order to dwell in it, from time to time it was necessary to abandon it, to summon the black bearers, climb into the heavily perfumed and curtained palanquin, position the falcon on her gauntleted wrist, and travel the desert, coastal, and mountain roads seeking the reborn prisoner; without him the luxuries of the bedchamber were but theatrical trappings, a dimensionless curtain, like the silken and gold veil that had belonged to the Caliph of Córdoba, Hisham II, and now adorned one wall of her chamber. Quite different destinies, in truth, thought La Señora: hers and that of her accursed mother-in-law, El Señor’s mother; for while the one wandered hazardous roads searching for a renewed lover, the other wandered the same roads bearing the everlasting cadaver of an eternal lover.

Brother Julián, the palace iconographer, had endured many wakeful nights delicately tracing with minute brushstrokes on porcelain brooches the figure and place dreamed by La Señora: the place, the coast of the Cabo de los Desastres; the figure, a young man lying face down on the beach, naked, with a blood-red cross between his shoulder blades. Brother Julián was grateful for the potions of belladonna that La Señora furnished him to maintain his condition — lucid and dreamy, absent and present, remote and near, participant in the dream and the dream’s faithful executor — while the monk’s pale hand re-created the material lines of the dream fantasies communicated to him by La Señora. Looking at the drawing, the mistress kept to herself the ultimate meaning of the painter’s art: the identity. Brother Julián, in his drugged trance, added minuscule details to the drawing, the six toes on each foot, for example, of the man presumed to be the victim of a shipwreck.