Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Prostrate, weeping, choked by feelings of confusion and guilt, he rejected these ideas; but, unconsciously, he was seeking to reject the terrible duplicate memory: from this time forward he was doomed to recall both his past and his future. And that curse could not be the work of the Most Tender Lamb.

“The Devil endeavors with rabid fury to obstruct the holy exercise of my mental prayer. To this end this wily Dragon applies whatever means and whatever confusion his persistent and indefatigable malice can contrive; but when he cannot succeed, he changes his tactics and interjects his cunning deceits into the holy exercise itself. Oh, God, do not allow the Devil to take advantage of the intense fervor of my prayer; assure me in this moment, prostrate before you, my head filled with horrible visions, that my affection is no less pure, and assure me that my present state of abjection and forlornness will not serve the Enemy of God as an opportunity to sow the seeds of his accursed dissension; do not allow him to deceive my grieving soul, openly, invading every minute, every occasion, every place, invading the holy exercise of prayer itself. I do not know, my God … I question even whether the occasion of my penitence may be the Devil’s greatest opportunity, for that venomous serpent strikes in silence; and there is nothing worse than his mind, for there is no good thought in it, and only that mind would unveil the picture of my future. You would not do so, you who have granted us the beneficence of not knowing what lies ahead, reserving for yourself that wisdom without which you would not be God. You reserve for us only the certainty of death, not the where or the how or the why. Nor would you be God if you revealed upon our births the course and the final end of our lives, nor would we be your loving creatures if we knew: such intelligence may only be the false gift of the Evil One.”

The candles sputtered, and incense suffused the crypt; El Señor gazed with passion, anxiety, doubt, and surrender at the principal figure of the painting brought from Orvieto, and to that figure he directed his prayers: “Liberate me, God, from vain complacency and hidden pride, from exaggerated pentitence, and from imaginary visions and false revelations. How may I distinguish the true interior voices, which are those of God, the supernatural and divine ecstasy and raptures in which a loving God communicates with my soul, from the methods of the Devil, who, in simian imitation of the works of God, attempts to counterfeit and mimic them? Let not my soul be deceived by imagining that God speaks to me and offers me visions when it is not God speaking but my own spirit and fevered imagination. I reject, I reject the hidden satisfaction and somber pride that leads me to believe that God is speaking to me; I accept that the Devil has feigned these raptures and ecstasies, that he has caused visions to appear to me, that he has taken advantage of the fact that my mind is but weak clay, and that if Your Majesty permits he may transform himself into the Angel of Light, appear even in the form of Jesus Christ himself. But then, oh, my God, how shall I distinguish the voices of the Creator from the voices of His Child, and these voices from the speech of the Devil we all bear within us because of the Fall of our first father, Adam? How? How? What does the doctrine offer to enable us to avoid that the moment of communication with God be converted into communication with the Devil? How do I distinguish Your visions from mine, and both of these from those of Lucifer? And how do I know whether I should accept, and suffer, and understand the Devil’s visions, his demoniac fantasies, since you have permitted them, and for some reason from Your High Omnipotence you permit the Devil to act instead of crushing him forever beneath your Divine Foot? How am I to know?”

Dragging his body forward, he approached the altar, his arms still spread in a cross; with bloodless fingers he touched the great painting; his flattened fingertips traced the outlines of the figure of the Christ without a halo preaching to the naked men in the corner of the Italian piazza.

“The Chalice you hold, God, in your powerful hand, is filled with a mixture of tribulations and consolations, and only Your Divine Majesty knows and understands to whom and when it may behoove you to bestow either one or the other; you have filled my cup, oh, Jesus, with unequal measures and although my sparse fortunes serve to cloak my enormous afflictions, they are nothing — neither fortunes nor misfortunes — compared to the desire that enslaves me: oh, Jesus, allow me to achieve true union with you, the union of the spirit purged and purified of all sentiments of the base portion of the soul; thus I would no longer need occupy myself with governing and with war, with persecution of the heretic, with symbolic hunts; let me enjoy fruitive union with you, after which nothing I ever had or did not have in this life would matter; allow me to know the exceeding joy and delight of experiencing the immediate touch of divinity, and to remain intoxicated and annihilated in that enormous sea of softness and sweetness, transported beyond myself, borne entirely in my God and Lord, in you, Jesus Christ: far from this palace that emerged from and will return to stone; far from my wife, far from the demands of my dead but living father and my living but dead mother; far from what he, my father, asked of me, power and cruelty; far from what she, my mother, asks of me, honor and death; power and cruelty, honor and death. In your mysteries, Jesus, such unwanted duties of political legitimacy are dissolved and forgotten; in you, and not — as she believes — in the satanic black hole of the very virgin Señora, my wife.”

El Señor’s eyes, at times wildly staring, occasionally suspicious — a warm gaze, a cold gaze — moved from the figure of the Christ of Orvieto to the transparent predella of the Sacrament, and from it, over his shoulder, to the rows of open sepulchers behind him awaiting the arrival of the Lords and Ladies and noble relatives, his ancestors: as each corpse would be contained within the sepulchral stone, so El Señor wished to be united with Jesus.

“I know that there are degrees within divine union, but you are free in all your works, even in regard to the Blessed, and like the spontaneous mirror you are, you may reveal yourself to a greater or lesser degree; manifest yourself to me, Jesus, in the state of passive union of the soul with God, in which are fulfilled the great mysteries written in the Holy Epistles of the dark Songs of Solomon. My happy soul longs like a bride to enter the Mystic Cellars owned by you, the Blessed Husband, where the purest and most holy love is the free-flowing wine that inflames and intoxicates hearts in sovereign love. Bestow upon me, Jesus, your most chaste and mysterious kiss, for I sigh for it like a virtuous wife. Your kiss is that precious Pearl without price. This is the innermost Kingdom of Heaven that you can communicate to me; let me know, my God, the flowery bridal chamber of the Divine Husband and the Paradise of your celestial delights. Contract binding matrimony with me in this my mortal life that you and I — that we both — may enjoy delicious consummation in the eternal felicity of Glory.”

Heavy sepulcher slabs, heavy bases in the form of truncated pyramids, carved effigies of the Señors, marble bodies of the Señoras, stone husbands and wives sleeping side by side in their beds of death, prostrate nobility awaiting the arrival of the corpses whose lives these pale statues represent, so natural they seemed hollowed from real bodies: witnesses to El Señor’s prayer.

“Grant me your divine presence and Your divine touch and the sovereign encircling arms of the Divine Husband; I can live no more apart from you; grant me a brief life to hasten my nuptials with you; my inflamed anticipation can bear no more; grant me eternal glory where I will have no need to wait longer, wait, for nothing, where I need not despair of the resolutions effected by the tyrant Time; oh, my Jesus, when will it be! Not yet, Not yet read my dynastic devices, but I pray you: allow me to quit this unchanging world, more like its initial sin and pain, more like unto itself, the more it changes, and let me join with you in the delicious variability of a promised Heaven. Come, Jesus, come to me, come, come now, now, now…”