Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Slowly La Señora disrobed. Without disturbing the youth’s rest, calling him her little sleeping scorpion like the somnolent insects within the crystal boxes, murmuring that she had found her treasure of lost peaches, soft and wrinkled, the hard pits surrounded by savory, pulpous flesh, hanging like two ripe fruits from the tree of his golden skin; she licked that tree, kissed it, and when it was aroused, strong as a sword of fire and marble, burning cold, icy hot, she shifted and sat astride him, clasping him between her legs; she felt him penetrate the wall of black jungle, separate the moist lips, enter, soft and hard; so must the flames be that consume the condemned, she said to herself (to him), condemn me then, cast me into the flames of Hell, for I cannot distinguish between Heaven and Hell; if this is sin let my flesh know eternal salvation and eternal damnation; flame of flesh, devouring serpent of my black bats, son of the sea, Venus and Apollo, my young androgynous god, let me feel the pulsing of your stones beneath my parted welcoming thighs, stroke my buttocks, bury your finger, there, deep between them, part my lips wide, there, I feel it, play with my moist, silky hair, let me weave them with yours, there, I feel it, there, there, there, I die because I am not dying, there, there, strike deep your scepter, my true lord, grant me your great mandrake, my only root, be my body, and let me give you mine, give me your warm milk, yes, yes, now, give me … now …

Later, lying beside the new and handsome youth who from now on would be this room’s inhabitant, trying to forget her former lover, La Señora whispered: Look at me carefully, for I am the only person you will see; I shall take that risk — that you may tire of me — but you will never leave this chamber, nor will you see anyone, speak to anyone, or touch anyone, except me; previously I wished to be generous, I permitted the boy chosen while I was attempting to find you, while I was searching for the incarnation of my dream, I permitted him, I tell you, to wander through the palace and even to go outside; I seduced him with my own desires; I caused him to dream of a different life, free from the strict moral and social prohibitions that suffocate us here, and he carried that freedom into the stable yards, to the stables and the kitchens; that is why he is dead, that, and because of the stupidity of wanting to leave behind him in a poem more than he was able to live; you are not going to die, my beautiful mandrake, you are going to live here with me, my blond mouse, here forever, although forever is a fleeting timepiece, alone with me even though you despise me, though I repel you, and it will be useless to pretend, for I shall know at what moment I cease to inflame you, the moment you begin to long for air and different company; perhaps that will be the moment when your seed begins to grow within my belly, and believing you were chosen for pleasure you reject the chains of duty; but I tell you now: you will only leave here, Juan Agrippa, when you are dead …

La Señora fell silent, startled again by the sounds and breathing seeming to emanate from the floor of white sand; something was growing there, something was scurrying swiftly, hidden, something was watching her, and from now on would be watching them. She saw only the captive youth, his dreamlike appearance, a trackless beach, an unmarked wall, receptive, hearing everything, saying nothing, listening to the responses to his obsessive questions, who am I? who are you? where am I? The youth named Juan opened one eye, and that eye, not needing words, communicated to La Señora: a man without a past begins to live the moment he awakens, hears, and sees; for him the world is whatever he first sees, hears, and touches; you, your words; I must accept the name and destiny you give me, because without them I have nothing and I am nothing; so you have wished it: and as I come to know you, do you not fear that I may be your twin, since I know no other reality but you?

And in that innocent eye, innocence born of a new birth from the sea, La Señora saw incredulity and doubt; Señora, you have told me a great deal, but you have not told me everything, and what you do not tell me, I must live for myself.

DISASTERS AND PORTENTS

And so things happened: Martín told Jerónimo, Jerónimo told Catilinón, Catilinón told Nuño, one whispering to another, Nuño in Martín’s ear, as they were eating their chick-peas or stirring the fires or slaking the lime, wrapped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust that muted the tones of the uneasy, secretive voices sliced by the knives of the sun of these high plains. First, a very simple thing happened: one of the supervisors went to gather walnuts; he climbed the tree, was cutting a branch, and slipped; he tried to save himself by grabbing another branch, missed, and fell to his death; and then some of the laborers were working on the south façade of the great cloister when a journeyman fell from the scaffolding, and died from the fall; and then a carpenter fell from a crane in the small cloister beside the gates and was killed, Nuño, he was killed, and that makes three in as many days; be careful when you climb upon the crane, Catilinón, or your miserable little store of savings will do you no good, you’ll not be spending it some summer night in the eating houses of Valladolid; but these things aren’t just happening to people, Martín, they’re happening to things, too; it’s as if we were things ourselves, for whatever it is that’s happening draws no line between a bramble hedge and a stonemason; listen, Jerónimo, hear how the wind is rising, blowing down scaffolding, tearing tiles from the roofs, covering our meager supply of pond water with a film of dust; someday, Martín, as the day is dawning, you will sneak over to the flat hedged land where they plan to put the palace garden, and you watch La Señora look from the curtains of her room; you will know her by the glitter of her earrings that at this hour of the morning are at the level of the sun and return the sun’s dawning gaze; you will watch her looking out at the hot dry crust and you try to see her imagining a garden with cool, gurgling fountains, rosebushes and stock and lilies, imagine Martín, her desire to part those eternally drawn curtains and open her chamber windows to the early-morning scent of non-existent honeysuckle, forgotten jasmine, and longed-for honey locust, or her longing to lie upon her sweet-smelling bed hearing and sensing the nearness, the sounds, and the fragrance of the garden they promised when they brought her from her English fogs, when they wedded her to our Señor, when they took her dolls and her peach pits from her; how do you know all these things, Jerónimo? her head chambermaid Azucena told me when she came to ask me as a favor that I, being the smith on this job, unshackle the chastity belt her husband, my apprentice, had girded on her when he left on the crusade from which he never returned, and you, Jerónimo, what did you ask in exchange for that favor, eh? to play that her bosoms are two handfuls of flax to be spun and then twirl your distaff in old Azucena’s hopping bunny, eh? oh, shut up, Catilinón, why are you complaining? everyone here’s had either that old whore or her helper Lolilla, they’ve been fondled and diddled by all the workers, but they bring us gossip from inside and carry it back there from here; you’ll look at that promised garden early some morning, Martín, you poor shitass, and then run away, afraid they’ll find you in that forbidden corner of the palace we constructed for them, and you’ll hope — with an anxiety so fragile, it doesn’t seem to fit your rough body, an anguish so deep you can’t explain it as you gaze at your plaster-coated hands — that that vision in silk and fine linens, our Señora, with the hooded hawk upon her wrist, will walk by — never looking at you — in her daily journey between the chapel and her chambers; listen, Nuño, the dust is going to settle, the sun’s fatigue will find its rest; the storm is breaking on the granite peaks, it descends through mountain passes and pillars of rock, a gray and menacing figure with outstretched arms and moaning voice and avid fingers, it tears the brambles from a vineyard fence and tosses them onto the heads of the mules and horses; it demolishes a work shed where quarriers are working and kills one of them; then it drives us all away from our cranes and ovens and foundations, we abandon our pickaxes and bellows, we huddle together terrified in the tile sheds where bricks and slate and wood are stored, as if those materials could protect us against the fury of the storm and El Señor, because Guzmán suggests it, orders the Bishop to come out of his retirement, fat and old, barely able to officiate, never allowing himself to be seen; carried by palace monks in a palanquin, coughing, his hands livid, covering his face with a handkerchief, he is borne on their shoulders to the quarries, to the forges, the sheds, spitting phlegm into a batiste cloth and trying to subdue the wind with his shouts as the monks attempt to maintain the tall miter upon his head, his silver staff in his hands, the girdle of his alb about his vast, soft belly, and the dalmatic settled upon the rounded shoulders.