Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Then, still imploring, El Señor raised his head and saw that the figures of the painting were moving; he turned to see whether all the inanimate figures had taken on life, but only the naked men listening to Christ who had been standing with their backs to the viewer were now turning to reveal their faces to El Señor; behind El Señor the horizontal statues, the sleeping bas-reliefs on the slabs of the sepulchers, were still blind and unmoving; and the Christ without a halo who had been facing forward, preaching, began to turn away. The naked men had enormous, tumid, erect penises, red and shining, pulsing with blood and semen, and engorged hairy testicles, iridescent with pleasure; the Christ of the shadows displayed a blood-red cross between his shoulder blades, and a thick stream of blood trickled into the cleft between his buttocks.

El Señor screamed; he stretched out his hand and taking a penitential whip began to lash his back, his hand, his face, while the statues of his ancestors stared at him with blank eyes and inviolable marble skin. El Señor was bleeding now. Then he muttered between clenched teeth: “I do not want the world to change. I do not want my body to die, to disintegrate, to be transformed and reborn in animal form. I do not want to be reborn to be hunted in my own lands by my own descendants. I want the world to stop and to release my resurrected body in the eternity of Paradise, by the side of God. When I die, I do not want — please, have mercy — I do not want to return again to the world. I want the eternal promise: to ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven and there forget the unchanging world and lose for all time the memory of the life I led, forget that there is life on earth. But in order to reach Heaven, in order for Heaven actually to exist, this, my world, must not change, for only of its infinite horror, from that contrast, may be born the infinite goodness of Heaven. Yes, yes, the necessary contrast.… And it was for that reason that as a youth, darkly, not completely aware of what I was doing, I murdered those who dared offer me Heaven on earth; that was the reason, Father, Don Felipe, not because I had promised never to disappoint you again and to make myself a worthy heir to your cruel power; this is the reason, Mother, Doña Juana, not to consummate the nuptials of honor and death; yes, this is the reason, and that is why now I am growing old, and, consciously, I encourage evil on earth so that Heaven may continue to have meaning. Let there be a Heaven, God, your Heaven; do not condemn us to a Heaven on earth, to a Hell on earth, to a Purgatory on earth, for if the earth contains in itself all the cycles of life and death, my destiny is to be an animal in Hell. Amen.”

But neither the Christ facing away from El Señor nor the men with the throbbing erections nor the sepulchral statues awaiting the corpses of the thirty phantoms, his ancestors, were listening. El Señor realized that, and in fury he raised the whip: “Devil … Devil in disguise … You Devil, assuming at will the figure of other men, of phantoms, of the One God … Oh, cruel God, bestowing or withdrawing your gifts at will, permitting that Lucifer himself usurp your figure to deceive my poor soul … Show yourself to me, my God, let me know whether it is you who touch me or whether it is the Devil … Why do you submit us Christians to the severe test of never knowing, on the mystic heights, whether we are speaking with you or with the Enemy? Oh, you bastard Jesus, show yourself to me, give us one single proof that you hear us and that you think of us, one single proof! Do not humiliate me further, do not again proffer excrement as the mirror of my life, the excrement surrounding me at my birth in the Flemish privy, the excrement that encroached upon me at your altar the day of my victory against the Adamite heretics, the excrement that fell upon me this very morning as I slept; Son of shit, God of shit, how shall I know when you speak to me! Let me enjoy mystic ascension with neither doubts nor visions, for only in this epiphany may I resolve the conflict of my poor soul, captive here below of the debt of power owed my father and the debt of honor owed my mother and the debt of sensuality owed my wife: only by your side may I leave all that behind — but you do not wish to tell me whether by sacrificing power, honor, and sex I shall know you, or whether I am embracing the Devil!”

With a strength he would have believed impossible, El Señor arose and lashed at the painted bodies with his whip, imagining he had caused the very canvas of the painting to bleed; and then with fury he turned toward the back of the Christ whose shoulders were marked with the cross, but as he attempted to strike out, his arm was paralyzed; the whip writhed in the air with its own contractions as if it had become a black serpent; and the figure of the Christ was again turning, turning back toward El Señor, and the Christ was laughing, a sovereign laughter that resounded above all the doubts, all the desires, all the anger, all the terror, and all the humiliations of the Liege frozen like a statue, looking almost like another of the thirty sepulchers in this crypt, while the figures in the painting rotated, showing an infinite variety of forms.

And as El Señor’s prognathic jaw strained forward seeking the rarefied air of the underground vault that was the center and the sum of his life, the lips of the Christ in the painting finally moved, and He said: “Many shall come in my name, saying: I am the Christ, and many will be seduced. And once again the Antichrists will emerge, and the false prophets; they will announce their coming with prodigious signs and they will execute false miracles, intending to falsely persuade the elect. The witness of St. John is true: and the Antichrists shall be many. But with the appearance of the one Antichrist, there will come many Antichrists. But only one among them will be the true Antichrist. You must recognize him. Through him you will find the salvation you have so long sought. You attempt to imitate me; the heretics you have persecuted also are inspired in the imitation of Christ. Fools! If I am God, my legend and my life on earth are unique and inimitable. But if I were merely the man Jesus, then anyone who wished might be like me. Why the devil, then, did I fall into the temptation of being born as a man and record my name in the annals of history, why did I live under the reign of Tiberius and the procuratorate of Pilate, why did I act in history and make myself its prisoner? Were it so, then more fool I, for true Gods preside over the irrepeatable origin of time, not its accidental course toward a future that has no meaning for a God. Resolve this dilemma. And furthermore, you are the bastard!”

PRISONER OF LOVE

The handsome youth gazed at her absently through dilated pupils as she moved back and forth, first arranging the perfumed pillows about his arms and beneath his head, then standing at a distance to stare at him with admiration, with gratitude; again she approached him, she kissed the sleeping nipples, trying to arouse them, her hands sought the hollow of his armpits, curling strands of blond, damp hair around her fingers; again, at a distance, she contemplated the youth lying upon her bed, completely naked, remote, surrendered to the power of the belladonna and the mandrake, unconscious of time or place or even the identity of the woman who was adoring him, who licked his navel clean with her tongue, who caressed his muscled belly, whose eyes closed as her lips kissed the bush of coppery hair crowning his dormant sex; then La Señora opened her blue eyes and hastily, timorously, with one hand she held the youth’s hands and with the other she gestured toward the bedchamber, offering it to him.

“Take it, it’s all for you; in all the pantheon constructed by my husband El Señor, this is the only luxury; and I amassed this luxury for you, waiting for you, desiring you in dreams and wakeful nights, in anger and in sadness, in deceit and in truth; I have always held you here, burning, clasped between my breasts and thighs, waiting, waiting; it is all for you, and without you it is nothing…” Her gesturing hand offered to the fair, semi-conscious boy the precious hangings covering the stone walls, the opened coffers filled with gold dinars and silver dirhems, Oriental rugs, barbaric goldwork, skins embossed with motifs from the Steppes, smoking censers, and crystal prisons enclosing gigantic flies and bees, spiders and scorpions — sterile, abulic, brutalized, sheathed in heavy copper, their shells encrusted with emeralds. She offered him this redoubt, this sumptuous lair won with deceit and bribery, won above all by the indifference of El Señor. She had pleaded: she wanted baths, she wanted to hear the song of the shepherds … He refused: the palace was a tomb of the living; she realized that, obsessed by and with death as he was, her husband would have neither time nor will to sniff out, to spy upon or pursue any living thing to its hiding place; she knew what Guzmán had told her was true: El Señor has faith only in what is written, not what is seen or told, and as long as no one records La Señora’s bedchamber, La Señora may live in peace; she gave one of her necklaces to the man in charge of all the construction and a ring to the supervisor of the laborers; behind the curtains of her bed she had constructed a splendid tiled Moorish bath, and, like the most ancient synagogues of the desert, had her floor covered with white sand. El Señor dictated to Guzmán a folio declaring that in this palace the customs of Moors or Jews would not be tolerated and that, following his grandmother’s example, every person in the palace should die wearing the shoes he had always worn. When Guzmán recounted this to La Señora she sighed; El Señor had only to consign something to paper and he believed it had an existence of its own; he would not bother again with these sensual minutiae. Beneath her pillows, La Señora had placed perfumed gloves, tiny colored pastilles, and little sacks filled with aromatic herbs.