Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

It was he. A man born thirty-seven years earlier: serene forehead, skin like wax, one cruel eye, one tender (both veiled by heavy-lidded, saurian eyelids), straight nose with flaring nostrils, as if compassionately amplified by God himself to facilitate the difficult respiration; thick lips, salient jaw, disguised both by the silken beard and moustache and by the folds of the high white ruff that hid the neck, separating the head from the trunk; above the ruff the head was poised like a captive bird.

El Señor gazed at himself and tried to recall how he had looked in his youth when he fled through the forest with the sons of Pedro and, with Celestina, reached the sea; how the wind had whipped his then curly hair and battered his bare chest; how the thorns had torn at his boots and the branches ripped his shirt; how strong his legs had been and how his sun-bronzed arms had glistened as he tugged at the ship’s sail beside the student Ludovico; ah, to be young …

No longer was he that youth, but neither was he yet this man: watching himself in the mirror, he ascended the first step; and the change, although almost imperceptible, did not escape his keen attention, his secret proposal; the mouth was a bit more open, as if the difficulty of breathing had increased. He ascended the second step: in the mirror the network of wrinkles was more finely woven about eyes a little more sunken and hollow.

He climbed the third step, indifferent to the swift and inexplicable changes of the light, attentive only to the changing image in the mirror: the front teeth were missing now, and the mesh of wrinkles about the eyes and mouth had become impenetrable. He climbed the fourth step: his beard and hair were reflected white as an August cloud, white as a January field; the mouth, now agape, sought with anguish the never sufficient air and the bloodshot eyes recalled too much — and begged clemency for what they remembered.

He reached the fifth step, and it was only with a great effort that he refrained from retreating rapidly to the lower stair: the asphyxiated face in the mirror conveyed the image of the resignation that precedes death. His neck was bandaged, pus ran from his ears, and worms filled his nostrils. Already dead? Dead in life? To ascertain, he found the courage to climb the sixth step; the face in the mirror was motionless, and the neck bandages now shrouded his jaw.

He fled from that image, ascending; now it became difficult to penetrate the shadows of the mirror, to discern, after accustoming himself to the darkness of that reflection, that the bandages had been destroyed by the slow and persistent working of the worms, and the jaw itself consumed by the humidity and weight of the earth — but the mouth, closed at last, no longer pleaded for air. On the seventh step, he seemed to see several mirrors reflected in the quicksilver of his hand mirror, for the face was multiplied in successive whitish, silvered, phosphorescent layers as the flesh relinquished its privileges to bone. Only bone was reflected at the level of the eighth step, a skull that frightened him less than the previous apparitions, for why did it have to be his? How to distinguish one skull from all the rest, if death’s booty is always the loss of one’s face? He ascended rapidly: the skull persisted through the eternity of the four steps; but on the thirteenth, the prolonged darkness surrounding a glowing center of bones was dissipated.

In its place, a strange sky, at once opaque and transparent, like the metallic domed sky of solar eclipses — as if by the addition of layer after layer of white light a dense transparency was finally formed — clouded by the oval of the mirror; only then did El Señor realize, in retrospect, that the faces had not appeared in a vacuum, but accompanied by sounds he tried not to reconstruct: there were birds, yes, and footsteps, and the rustle of cloth; there were fragments of music too swift, too evanescent to be heard or judged; there were voices so low and thunder so loud that they could be recovered only in the reconstruction of memory; there was the sound of grass growing, close, very close, too close, and in the distance, bleating, neighing, braying, lowing, barking, howling, and buzzing. Again they existed only in memory; in that moment of nothingness even sound ceased, and what El Señor most mourned was the absence of the birds.

On the following step the domed sky parted; the metallic light disintegrated; but the gusts of wind and the flashing lights, resolved into hitherto unseen globes of color, into triangles of fire and columns of phosphorus, blocks of total terror and enigmatic spirals, obstructed his ability to place himself within that total space, fleeting and infinite, with no beginning and no end; El Señor mused that if his face had still existed — even if in the form of scattered, although reconstitutable dust — it would be the face of madness contemplating something without an origin and without an end; he recalled that the palace astrologer, Brother Toribio, had once spoken to him of Eridanus, the river of luminous sands in the heavens that flows beneath the scepter of Brandenburg illuminating the ramparts of the stars and vitalizing the tomb of the Phoenix: he felt as if he were falling from that cluster of flowing stars as upon ascending the next step he saw in the mirror the lush vegetating depths of a jungle where no sun penetrated, where not even the dense, petrified, archaic foliage of a dead flower moved; the flower acquired life, became aqueous, marine, plastic, undulating, only when he stepped onto the next stair.

In the center of the liquid and fleshy vegetation, again glowed a dot that, although unrecognizable, El Señor knew was himself. The dot was a white drop; he knew it had life, and desperately he willed it to be his. He climbed; the reflection again became murky; a sea of mud in the center of the night, the obverse of all medals, the horary of the moon, a palace of ashes, a recollection of rain, the first word, animals dreaming of themselves and of other animals and thus effecting the first breath of existence; dreamed, not created; creating themselves as they dreamed themselves.

Shivering, he reached the step he had been waiting for: a whitish being, hairless, amorphous, swimming in dark liquid. Now he advanced rapidly: here, connected to the body by a delicate web of veins and nerves, two egg-like lumps, shining but dormant, dominated the unformed fetus: the eyes; higher, the white body became covered with hair; the drawn-up paws began to move, as if wishing release from their prison; he heard a ferocious howl: suddenly all the lost sounds returned, the world again was echoing with laughter and waterfalls, waves and bird song, fires and marching feet, trumpets and whistles, rustling taffeta and scraped platters, the resounding blow of the ax and the blast of the bellows; but all that was reflected in the mirror was a newly born wolf cub; El Señor paused in his feverish ascent and with a growing tremor contemplated those eyes, one cruel and the other tender, that gaping snout gasping for air, those sharp teeth. Slowly, never taking his eyes from the vision in the mirror, he climbed. The wolf was full-grown now and it was running through fields that El Señor seemed to know, pursued by arms and men with insignia that El Señor recognized as his own: Nondum, Not yet.

Terrified, he threw the mirror from the top of the stairway and it shattered against the granite flooring in the crypt. Gasping, he ran down the stairs, crowned from above by the dyssymbolic light of refractory years; pursued by the past of his future, he threw himself face down, arms opened, before the altar; the steady light originating in the clear painted space of an Italian piazza illuminated the cross on his cape; the future lay behind him, half seen, for El Señor could not again review the totality of those thirty-three steps. His exhausted body called upon memorized words: “In my weakness I beseech your aid in my struggle not to be vanquished by the importunate and astute temptations devised against me by that most ancient of Serpents. But great is the battle of love; its powerful weapons are your beneficences that spread confusion in the hearts of the ungrateful. As the Holy Spirit says, the impious one, the evildoer, flees even though he not be pursued, for he accuses himself and is rendered pusillanimous and cowardly by his own crime. Oh, God, I know that the testimony of one’s own conscience is a continual exhortation that cannot be ejected from one’s house, or stilled. According to St. Paul, that conscience serves as glorious consolation to the Just, but is a continual torment to the ungrateful. Am I to be judged ungrateful, and not just? Am I to be judged impious, am I the evildoer, is that why you reserve these visions for me in spite of my intense devotion?”