Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

That afternoon passed; night fell, and only the most faithful chambermaids and roughest soldiers remained with me; the iron framework of my skirts creaked beneath my weight; I saw the stars move in the heavens, some more fleetingly than usual; I saw the new sun born, more slowly than on remembered days. The second day even my duennas abandoned me and only the halberdiers remained by my side, although at times they forgot who I was, or even that I was there, and they passed the time eating, urinating, and cursing there in the courtyard. I am stone, I said to myself resignedly; I am turning to stone. I ceased to count the hours. I imposed imaginary dawns upon the night, and I stained the day black. But the sun stripped the skin from my face and caused a dark fungus to erupt on my hands; it rained a night and a day, my powders and rouges ran, my hair and my skirts were soaked with rain. After the most unseemly delay, for the unforeseen event in ceremonial routine had petrified them with confusion, the duennas took turns holding great black sunshades above my head. When the sun came out again, I abandoned my modesty and loosened the ties of my bodice so my breasts might dry. And one night, mice sought lodgings in the ample cave of my tented underskirts; I could not scream, I allowed them to tickle my thighs, and to the most adventurous among them I said: “Mus, you have reached places even my own husband does not know.”

Only my husband had the right to raise me from this position, first accidental, then ridiculous, and finally pathetic. But those arms have never taken me for myself, never! To whom, in that instant, was I speaking? No, I will not deceive you, my love: I was speaking to the most faithful of the mice, he who finally established his home in the hollows of my hoop skirt, for of course I considered him a better partner in conversation than my befuddled duennas or the pompous alguaciles or the inflexible halberdiers. I recalled the melancholy face of the man who was to be my husband — harsh and melancholy — the first time he had gazed at me through the eyes of love on that long-ago morning when I’d been expelled from the chapel by the priest. But what did I know of love, Mus? A few rather brutal things: that same morning a bitch had whelped her pups in my bedchamber; I had menstruated; my duenna Azucena was shackled by a chastity belt. What else did I know? What I had secretly read in Andreas Capellanus’s book of honest lovers: that true love must be free, mutually shared, and noble; that a lowborn man, a common man, is incapable of giving or receiving such love. But above all, that love must be secret, my mouse; the lovers, in public, must not show signs of recognizing each other except in furtive gestures; the lovers must eat and drink very little; and last, I learned that love is incompatible with matrimony: everyone knows there is never any love between a husband and wife. My husband, mouse, had never touched me; was that actually proof that there is no love in marriage? So much so that husband and wife may never be united in their bridal bed? Or was it proof that like every true lover my husband loved me secretly and furtively, like you, Mus … like you, Juan? I told the mouse these sad things, and also this thought: my own mother-in-law, the mother of my husband El Señor, had known man’s work only in the dark; my Spanish uncle, the Liege, had needed her only to engender princes. And I? Not even that; I, virgin as the day I embarked from my own country, from England. I could eat and drink very little in my absurd position; I lay in a secret and furtive posture, the posture of a true and honest lover … and only the mouse visited me night after night, nibbled at me, knew me …

And so I lay there thirty-three and one half days, my love; life in the castle resumed its ordinary ways; the duennas fed me from soup ladles; they had to grind my food in mortars, for I was otherwise unable to swallow it; I drank from the crudest wineskins, for anything else trickled down my chin; and when they brought my china pot the duennas shouted and shooed away the sly and cunning guards, although many times I was unable to contain my natural necessities before the chambermaids arrived, always at the same fixed hours, with no heed for my urgencies or desires. And every night, the furtive mouse visited me; he came out from his hole in my hoop skirts to nibble a bit more at the hole of my virginity. He was my true companion in that torture.

One afternoon, when I had ceased to count time, or imagine how my unwashed face must seem, or look at my stained skirts, my husband, at the head of the victorious troop, entered the courtyard. He had been informed on the road of my misfortune. But upon entering he passed me by and went directly to the chapel to give thanks, not even pausing to glance at me. I had sworn not to reproach him for anything; I had imagined he might be dead in battle and then my destiny, with no hands worthy of touching me, would have been to await my own death, lying in the courtyard, threatened by the elements until sooner or later, ancient or still young, I myself became an element: a pile of bones and hair under the sun and storm, with no company but that of the mouse. I could be lifted only in the arms of my husband, El Señor; if he was dead, I was dead; if he was dead, only one life would accompany me to the hour of my own death: that of a tiny, wise, silky-smooth, nibbling Mus. So how could I resist giving myself to the mouse, making a covenant with him, acceding in whatever he asked of me? Forgive me, Juan, forgive me; I did not know I was to dream you, and dreaming you, to find you …

Later my husband came to me accompanied by two youths carrying between them a large, full-length mirror. At my husband’s order, the youths held the mirror before my face; I screamed, horrified to see that face I could not recognize as mine, and in that instant my thirty-three and a half days of grotesque penitence were totted up, and in addition to them, the humiliation my husband, El Señor, offered me with intentions that were mortal because they were eternal and eternal because they were mortal; in that moment, believing myself a virgin still, I lost forever my innocence.

I looked at my husband and I understood why he was doing this to me; he himself had aged, slowly, doubtlessly; but at that moment, upon his victorious return from still another war, the passage of time had become real, but something had happened of which I had not previously been aware: El Señor had returned from his last battle; I realized I was witnessing the moment of his aging, of his renunciation, of his dedication to the works of memory and death; I tried to recall, this time in vain, the visionary eyes of the slender youth in the chapel, or the cruel eyes of the man in the hall, the scene of the crime, who had felt worthy of me only because of that crime; the eyes now staring at me, as I stared at them, were those of an exhausted old man who in order that I might accompany him in his premature senescence was offering me my own altered image, dusty, without eyelashes or eyebrows, my nose sharp and trembling like that of a starving wolf, my scalp faded as gray as that of the mice who had visited me. I closed my eyes and wondered whether it was possible that from the distant fields of battle in Flanders El Señor, my husband, with the aid of the Devil and mischievous lemures, the specters of the dead, had contrived for me to stumble so ridiculously and fall on the courtyard paving stones with the purpose of making our appearances equally decadent when again we met. But El Señor’s works were not those of the Devil, but rather divine dedication to Christian fervor; and if he had chosen God as an ally so that this might befall me, then in response I would choose the Devil.

Only then, after he had shown me my image in that dark mirror of horrors, El Señor offered me his hands, but I lacked the strength to take them and pull myself up. He had to kneel and for the first time take me in his arms and assist me to my own chambers, where the maids, on their own initiative and risking El Señor’s displeasure — for him the bath was an extreme medication — had prepared a boiling bath. My husband disrobed me, helped me into the tub, and for the first time looked upon my body unclothed. I did not feel the burning temperature of the bath; I was paralyzed, numb. He told me that we would be leaving his ancient family castle and that we would construct in the high plains a new palace that would be both a mausoleum for princes and a temple of the Most Holy Sacrament. In this way, he added, he would commemorate the military victory, and also … He could not finish.