Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“The Devil is doing this to mislead us, but he shall not benefit from it, for we shall prevail and his wickedness will be revealed! Return to your work, men of God, my beloved flock, for the recompense of your hard labors shall be nothing less than Heaven itself! Vade retro, Satan, for you will gain nothing here! To work, to work, and then to Heaven, to Heaven!”

The Bishop raises his fingers toward the scudding clouds, and as if he had convoked it (you saw it, Jerónimo, for its light outshone your forges), a long-tailed comet appears in the sky, beautiful and great, its head pointed toward the lands of Portugal and the tail trailing toward Valencia; it races by with its long silvery mane and continues to shine in the night after the bearers have borne away the exhausted Bishop and we are still clustered together in the sheds, fearing to go out or to eat, for we don’t know what significance to attribute to these portents, and all we can hear in the great silence of the night is the howling of a dog; a doleful, menacing howling that combines both rage and pain, that frightens us more than the storm or the comet or the deaths of our companions; and not only us, Martín, tempers are rising; there, inside, a supervisor quarreled with the journeymen and the architect with the overseer, and their quarrel was so heated that the girder on which they were standing broke and the first journeyman fell and was crushed to death upon the granite paving stones below; what do we know, Jerónimo? only what reaches our ears, Catilinón, only what succeeds in penetrating the wax in our ears, that’s all, what originates in those bedchambers that we will never see and sifts through the empty crypts and icy chapels by way of the cloister and courtyards and porticos and gates of this palace where, in spite of having constructed it with our own hands, you and I, Martín, would lose our way; all we know, day after day after day, is the site of a foundation or the area of a plastered wall, and then they give us five ducats for every window without our ever knowing what one sees when looking from that window, and eighteen reales for every door without our ever knowing where it will lead when it’s opened, feeling our way with our hands, we see what we’re building like the blind, but we will never know either how the entire palace looked in the heads of those who conceived it or how it will look when it’s finished and inhabited by our Señores; I swear to you that we will never look outside from those windows, and I swear to you that we will never enter through those doors; and if someday the rosebushes that La Señora wants so much blossom in her garden, it won’t be you who sees them; and in exchange for our feelings, Catilinón, they gave us five ducats not to see and eighteen reales not to hear; you think you’re clever, Cato, but you’re blind and crippled, and I wish to hell you’d fill that blaspheming mouth of yours with chickpeas: so shit on God, you filthy churl, but your curses fall on barren ground, and what you should do is pick the wax out of your ears; we hear the words spoken inside by way of the kitchens and the stables, words heavier and harder than the iron ingots we melt down here every day: a comet in summer means drought and the death of Princes; a comet under the sign of the Crab and in the house of Mars means misfortune; that’s what Brother Toribio, the astrologer, said in there and we learned it through the passageways and stable yards and the mouths of Azucena and Lolilla, but you and I, Nuño, know only that we’re afraid, and that the dog howls as if he wanted to tell us something, what is that you say, Martín? that the dog doesn’t want to scare us? something else? warn us? what? old Jerónimo, what do you believe he wants to tell us, you who have the fire of your ovens in your eyes, and in your beard the same burning red as your coals? what does that dog say that frightens us every night running and barking through the passages and chapels, penetrating the nuns’ cloister and frightening them to death, entering even the bedchambers of El Señor and the prelate, dragging chains and horns that blow by themselves, for so swift is the course of that unseen dog that we all hear it but no one sees it, none would fear it if it could be seen, that panting, stubborn dog, with an uncannily sharp nose, racing along an old and secret scent as if it were new, yowling as if every moment were its last; listen to it, all of you; you think the dog is telling us not to be afraid? listen to what they’re telling us, Nuño; you and I know that the comet disappeared yesterday, but that the storm is still crouching there, hidden behind its own veils, to deceive us; it is still there, leaden and restless, disguised as lowering clouds, obscuring the outlines of the mountains; that we know because we can see it; and we hear the dog running every night through the deserted galleries of the palace; but now we’ve been told that on the fourth night of the dog’s forays the nuns, because they could hear it but could not see it, decided it was a phantom dog, a soul from Purgatory, the messenger of misfortune, the guide of the dead, and at midnight they gathered in the chapel beside the bedchamber — where El Señor was suffering from crushing headaches — beneath the gaze of the Italian painting and beside the sculptures of the royal sepulchers, and there they first began to pray, then chant, and finally to bark louder than the dog itself to still its voice, to trumpet louder than the horns it dragged behind it, to give themselves courage, or perhaps to be like the spectral dog, for they told us that in their raptures the pious Sisters, after crawling on their knees until they bled, began to lash each other with penitential whips and finally urinated — deathly afraid as the sound of chains grew louder — beside the columns in the sacred room, more frightened now of each other than of the dog, huddled together, clinging to one another, sniffing at each other’s armpits and beneath the voluminous skirts of their black habits, weeping and moaning in ever decreasing volume until the chains and horns and the barking of the invisible dog filled all the space left vacant by the Sisters’ fear; their mouths were still open, as if they were yawning, but no sound issued from them; the howling of the hound seemed to emanate from those gaping, benumbed, lipless mouths, raw slits in the flesh of their faces, like the mouths of vipers and mandrakes, Madre Milagros, for they say that snakes drag themselves, and they say that magic little men are born beneath the gallows, and we have an abundance of those in Spain, my happy-go-lucky Catilinón, a man who is born low will be lowborn no matter where he goes, don’t forget: in Spain the worms don’t eat the corpses, it’s the corpses that devour the worms and so everything serves to fatten the vipers that in the end eat everything; see that you cry loud and long, Nuño, if you ever die on the gallows, for then your tears will engender the mandrake and you will have our offspring, poor miserable bastard.

“No one has died! No one has died! Why are you weeping so?” Madre Milagros called to the Sisters; she did not fear the truth in their voices, rather the portent, for led by the young novitiate Inés, the Sisters had been slowly turning to face El Señor’s bedchamber that opened directly onto the chapel so that he might, if he so desired, attend the Divine Services without moving from his bed; and the nuns cried and wept, staring toward the purple curtain behind which El Señor lay in Guzmán’s arms, swooning, moaning, everything is excrement, Guzmán, it’s all around me, it was there when I was born in the Flemish privy, it was there on the altar of my victories, and now, on this altar constructed to exorcise the horrors of the human body and condemn them to extinction, I smell the urine of these nuns; human excrescence is a tidal wave that will finally engulf me, Guzmán; I say this to Guzmán as well as to you, Catilinón, that a man who is a failure in his land will be a failure when he leaves it, but you’ve seen an example of that; common men, both of you, Guzmán has maneuvered things so he now has access to seignorial bedchambers while you, Catilinón, are as poor as dirt, and while he boasts of his successes, you, you miserable pup, you who arrived in this world without so much as two coins to rub together, you’re still plotting and planning how to spend that pittance you’ve earned here, and that, you poor bastard, is what I call dressing in rags and giving away the rest to whores; and Madre Milagros exclaimed: No one is dead! and El Señor trembled more violently, for now Guzmán had left him alone, enclosed in his four walls, three covered by dark hangings, the fourth by the ocher map of a world extending only to certain timorous boundaries: the Pillars of Hercules, Cape Finisterre, the mouths of the Tagus, and this wall of wailing flesh menacing him from the other side of the curtain, for El Señor (the rumor came through passageways, galleries, kitchens, stables, smoking tile sheds) feared that if the invisible dog was not located, the maddened nuns, either from fear or on the pretext of fear, would turn into an avenging mob: you, Señor, are responsible for our being here, we sought the peace of the cloister and you brought us to this ominous, dusty, desert place where we must live our lives surrounded by rough laborers, rude supervisors, and terrible workmen who polish and chisel all day at their granite with busy, restless fingers, by exciting, sweating leadworkers who melt down their ingots wearing nothing but a leather breechclout that barely covers their shame, by mares and mules fornicating before our eyes, crossbreeding to populate this plain with sterility; oh, yes, Señor, you removed us from the tranquillity we so desired to fill our thoughts with other, frightening desires: that our cell walls, that the palace walls that separate us might fall and that we might all come together, nuns and workers, in one great bacchanal of feeling, talking, drinking, belching, pinching, thrusting, and thumping beneath this burning sun; all that separate us from such promiscuous possibilities are a few unfinished walls: let the mares pump and the mules hump and the workmen’s tools swell and the nuns be defiled; what have our eyes not seen, Madre Milagros, since you brought us to this desert of savage muleteers, far from the sheltered convents of our sweet homelands, Seville and Cádiz, Jaén and Málaga, Madre, see what happens when you bring a group of Andalusian nuns here to these arid heights, to this relentless heat, to this unremitting cold, and the most beautiful of all, Sor Inés, as beautiful as an olive grove in flames, her hair and eyes black as an olive, her skin white as a lily, her lips an overblown carnation, see her now, on her knees, howling like a bitch in heat, sniffing at armpits and peeing in the corners of the chapel — so deep and shadowed it looks more like a dungeon than a place of worship — of our Lord and Master, Liege of the Dogs, Lord of All Devils; why are we here, Madre Milagros, tell me, you who are our Superior; those terrible men who surround us by day and night, isn’t it true they make you nervous, too? the hubbub of their picks and cranes and forges and hammers drowns out our matins and hymns and vespers, our plaintive devotions; you, too, looked out of the corner of your eagle eye at the naked arms of the masons in the summer heat, the sweat trickling down their torsos, the hair of their armpits, the heavy weight of their breechclouts. Oh, Most Holy Mother Mary, cleanse us of these disturbing thoughts, quiet in our voices the howl of the phantom dog, bury in our breasts the sweet emblem of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, cover with a Carmelite scapulary our black throbbing triangles, draw a veil, Most Pious Mother, across that pagan painting that hangs above the altar of the Eucharist, we want never again to see men’s legs, we want never to dream of men’s bodies, we want never to have to gather together at night, slipping from our cells, sobbing, grievously distressed, beyond solace, knowing, but not speaking of, what is happening, seeking any pretext to remove the white starched nightclothes you apportioned us, to put on the heavy penitential hairshirts and the sackcloth that afford us the opportunity, in the exchange of clothing, to glimpse our Andalusian bodies, to divine our heavy oranges and sniff our black olives, oh, Mother, Mother Mary … Madre Milagros … what is this silence? don’t you hear? don’t you hear that there is nothing to hear? don’t you hear that the invisible dog has stopped howling? Madre! Madre! what silence … and now, Madre … what new sound is that interrupting the silence? whose loud, arrogant bootsteps are those advancing through the chapel? what is that being dragged across the granite floor? what sound is that of metal striking against stone? passageways, kitchens, stables, Azucena, Lolilla; wake up, sleepyhead Cato, you may not owe a cent to any man, but he who would slumber and doze will never wear fine clothes; listen to what Guzmán said, knowing we’d hear; he knows everything, he’s El Señor’s chief huntsman, he says there are some greedy hounds that no amount of punishment can control, and this is their flaw; as soon as their handler lets them off the chain they are prone to pick up an old trail and bark as furiously as if it were a new one; they draw all the other dogs off the scent and when they follow the greedy hound they set up an uproar that confuses the huntsmen and endangers the hunt; such is the result of the sorrow and the excessive greed of this kind of hound; they want what they can never have, and so they die mad, mad of rage, and I tell you this, Jerónimo, so that you understand me, Martín, and listen, all of you, to what happened last night; all these restive nuns were in the chapel, sweet, luscious young Andalusians all of them, but none as ripe a plum as the one they call little Inés, Inesilla, haven’t you seen her, Martín? shit, Martín only has eyes for something he can never touch, La Señora, the untouchable, the sacred, why ask him? only Nuño and I have eyes for Sister Inés, eh Nuño, for are we just to perish here, all suffering, and no whoring? well look, would you, look at this crew of bleary-eyed jackanapes and bastards, but cool down, brothers, if it’s consolation you want, remember that though the poor squire’s horse may die on him, the rich squire loses his woman; we’ve all sidled up to that courtyard and those cells to look and to be looked at, to see whether we could catch a peep while those holy Sisters from Andalusia or Bilbao … or Turkey, who the hell cares, were undressing; those black habits don’t drain the heat out of them or out of us either, especially when this cock-of-the-walk Cato raises his loincloth and flashes his stones for the little nuns; so they were all huddled together in that chapel we built beneath the earth, you remember? with the crypt or dungeon with thirty-three steps leading up to the plain above, shouting like crazy women because of the phantom dog’s howling, when Guzmán came in dragging the body of Bocanegra, El Señor’s favorite dog, on a chain, all decked out as if for the hunt, with cords and tassels for the horns, the spiked collar with the arms and device of El Señor, his claws burned, his legs swollen; they say there were wounds on his throat and head, that he was dead as a doornail and that he smelled of all the unguents with which he’d been treated in life, pine resin, alum stone, cumin and juniper, paste of ashes and kid’s milk: the dead dog smelled of all that, it had been a fierce mastiff they said, but as if he’d been infected, Catilinón, by the mortifications and sluggishness of El Señor, who always kept the dog by his side and never allowed him to go out to hunt, so he was dressed for it only then when he was dead, but instead of the hunter, he was the hunted; Guzmán stepped up onto the altar with the corpse of the dog in one hand and the still bloody blade in the other; he hung the mastiff from a railing and turned to the nuns: “There’s your phantom dog. He won’t howl again. Return to your cells. Respect El Señor’s rest.”