Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The youth returned the pressure of La Señora’s hand, freed his hand, and touched her arm. He saw the white sand that covered the chamber floor and saw in it the tracks of his own feet; he imagined he still lay on the coast, on the same beach where he’d been shipwrecked, now furnished, perfumed, adorned with skins and hangings. And the sand had changed color.

The youth moved his lips: “Who are you? Where am I?”

La Señora kissed his ear; she took an earring from one of the many nearby coffers and fastened it on the boy’s earlobe; she performed this act with joy, concealing a certain perturbation welling up behind her joyful gesture; she had found him naked, dispossessed, on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres; now she was placing an eardrop on his ear; perhaps with that single, simple, pleasureful act, she was imposing upon this man a personality and a destiny that, like the sands of the coast and of her chamber, were a clean sheet of white paper upon which nothing could be written, since all signs would immediately be erased by the waves and the wind, and by other footsteps; but the earring hung now in the youth’s ear, and La Señora was telling the boy that he was in a far-off palace where all spaces and all dwellings coexisted in time, and that according to his pleasure he could imagine himself in Baghdad, Samarkand, Peking, or Novgorod, and that she was both his mistress and his slave … A series of warring emotions flashed across the face of La Señora, mistress and slave; she asked herself whether she was giving life to this man, now her captive in this rich room, or taking it away; whether she was diverting him from his true destiny by bringing him here, or whether, on the other hand, the man had been born for this moment; whether she assumed a power of creation similar to the divine; prisoners, both of them, enclosed, alone, face to face, would the young man end by being a copy of his mistress, or would she be the imitative servant of the absolute powers — until now untouched, erupted suddenly like the wings of a butterfly or an unexpected ray of light in a storm — of this young man?

She kissed the boy’s lips, she placed her arms about his waist, she sighed, moved away from him, shrugged her shoulders when he repeated: “Who are you? Where am I?”

“Pity me,” La Señora replied, and sitting on the edge of the bed, she recounted the following story:

Still a young girl, I was brought from my native country, England, to the castle of one of the great Lords of Spain, who was my uncle. I came happily, for from the cradle I had been told stories of the land of the sun where the orange trees blossom and the fogs of my land are unknown. But here I found, as if the sun were a plague and the happiness it engenders in our bodies a sin, that the sunlight was shunned, was condemned to perish in deep dungeons, that granite walls were built against it, and that simple bodily gratification was subjected to the contritions of the fast, flagellation, and ceremonial etiquette. I came to long for the noisy vulgarity of the English; there drunkenness, the dance, insults, the pleasures of food and of carnal sensuality compensate for a climate of icy mists. Every night there were bonfires and banquets in my parents’ mansion beside the river — both dead finally, he of cholera, and she from complications of childbirth. So I came to Spain; I was a proper child of English nobility with corkscrew curls and stiff white cotton petticoats. I was a little girl for a long, long time, my lover, my only entertainment dressing dolls, collecting peach pits, awakening late sleepers, and dressing up my duennas like the actors my father had taken me to see in London.

I believe I ceased to be a child one morning when I went to chapel to receive Communion; I was menstruating, and the moment the Host was placed upon my tongue it turned into a serpent; the priest reprimanded me before everyone and expelled me from the holy sanctuary. Listen carefully, my love; I still do not know how much evil that terrible event unleashed; I still do not know. Perhaps my cousin, the son of the Liege, my uncle, had loved me before that time, secretly; he has told me he watched me from afar that morning at Communion, already adoring me; I did not know. But I knew when I heard the order from the lips of his father several weeks later amid horror and crime, in the castle hall piled high with corpses that guards were dragging by the feet to a monstrous funeral pyre in the courtyard that for days infested the castle with its nauseous fumes. All I knew was that the slaughter of the rebels, the heresiarchs, the men and women who had been living communally, the Moors and Jews who had been deceived and led into a trap by the young Prince Felipe, had all been to prove something to his father: he deserved both his father’s power and my hand.

I knew then I had to obey. I was going to be the wife of the heir and our wedding would be celebrated upon an altar of spilled blood. The ceremony took place; that moment signaled an end to all my games. The serpent that had surged from my impure tongue sank its fangs into me now, wound about my hands and feet, suffocated me and wounded me. I was the slave of those serpents: my duennas and my body servants took away my dolls, hid my costumes, discovered my hidden trove of peach pits, and forced upon me an endless and excessively strict schedule of lessons: how to speak, how to walk, how to eat … everything befitting a Spanish Lady.

I yielded to their customs. I became a prisoner of an obligatory symmetry of movement and demeanor. And after ten years of speaking in phrases prepared for every occasion, of learning to walk holding myself tall, stiff, with a hawk poised upon my wrist (symmetry of movement! As the country girls walk to the fountain with a water pitcher upon their head, so moved my falcon and I), of eating very little, a few mouthfuls, taken always with precisely held fingers and head erect, after all those years I was still as full of longing as I was innocent: but my hands were never, never again to play with my dolls, my legs were never to carry me in games around the costumed duennas, or my knees to touch the earth of the garden to bury my precious peach pits. I resigned myself. It takes a very long time to perfect bearing; that is what tradition is: choosing one of the many possibilities in life, maintaining it, cherishing it, disciplining it, excluding from it everything that would be an offense or menace. In this way we of the nobility are like the people, we have both endured a long time, and neither is inclined to change our customs every year. Tradition, Lords, people; this Brother Julián, my favorite friend who is the court miniaturist, explained to me.

I had no idea to what extremes protocol was to influence my life (my body forgetting everything it had learned naturally) until one day, while my husband was absent on one of his wars against rival Princes and protectors of heretics, I returned from an outing through some nearby gardens and as I was descending from my litter lost my footing and fell flat on my back upon the paving stones of the castle courtyard.

I called for help, because lying on my back, dressed in iron hoop skirts and billowing skirts, it was impossible for me to get to my feet by myself. But none of the menservants or the alguaciles or the duennas who came in answer to my calls, none of the many nuns and chaplains, stewards and priests, bearers and halberdiers — as many as a hundred gathered around me — held out a hand to help me to my feet.

They stood in a circle looking at me, uneasy and anxious; and the chief alguacil warned: “No one may touch her. No one may help her rise, if she cannot manage it for herself. She is La Señora and only the hands of El Señor may touch her.”

In protest against such reasoning, I called to my maids: “Do you not dress and undress me every day, do you not dress and comb my hair for lice? Why can you not touch me now?” They looked at me, offended, and their injured glances said: “What happens within your chambers, Señora, is one thing, but what takes place before the eyes of the world is something quite different: ceremonial ritual.” Again, dear heart, I longed for the freedom of my country, my merrie England. And I was sure that my destiny was to be worse than that of the English women pilgrims whose bad reputation had caused St. Boniface to prohibit female pilgrimages: most of them had strayed from the path, very few arrived still pure at their destination, and there is scarcely a town in Lombardy or France without a whore or adulteress of English race. But a thousand times worse, I tell you, was my destiny: a pilgrim ruined by etiquette and chastity, for both weighed heavily on my heart.