Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“We’ve spent our lives constructing a house for the dead!”

THE MAD LADY

Shut yourselves in your cells, said Madre Milagros, all of you, and don’t show so much as a hair of your head, bar your doors and cover your windows with cloth, El Señor’s mother, the Mad Lady, wrapped in her black rags, carrying the corpse of her husband, and accompanied by some idiotic nobleman who, according to her, is her own husband revived, father of himself or son of himself or twin of her husband, El Señor’s father, I don’t know, I don’t understand, I can’t make any sense of it, Sister Angustias, Sister Clemencia, Sister Dolores, Sister Remedios, hide yourselves, children, for the Mad Lady cannot tolerate the presence of other women, even though they be nuns and novitiates devoted to the most chaste of devotions, betrothed to Christ, having already taken their vows, that isn’t enough for her, she sees a threat in every skirt in the world, she fears that every woman has an ungovernable desire to rob her, if only for one night, of the husband who in life was so unfaithful that had he not died of fever from a catarrh he surely would have died of the French malady that poisons the blood and covers the body with chancres, is that why our Señor doesn’t have children, Madre Milagros, because he inherited the malady and can’t or because he can but fears he will transmit the infection? all of you, be quiet, shhh, it’s a heavy charge I’ve taken upon my shoulders in shepherding you Andalusian nuns, there’s a contradiction for you, nuns from Seville, why, their breasts have budded by the time they’re eleven and what they don’t know they find out and what they can’t find out they guess, shhhh, all of you, go to your cells and let me count you and bless you, you, Clemencia, and you, Remedios, and you, Dolores, and you, Angustias, and … Inesilla, my God, where’s Inés, Sister Angustias, she should be right here beside you in the cell next to yours, oh, that Inesilla, where could she be? who knows, Madre Milagros, El Señor has ordered so many Masses celebrated, Low Masses, Requiem Masses, Pontifical Masses, sermons in all the cloisters and in every corner of the palace to commemorate the second burial of his ancestors, and Inesilla is so devout, so curious, you mean, and high-spirited, she wouldn’t miss all the festivities, hush, Sister Remedios, these aren’t festivities, you Andalusian girls are so irresponsible, this is funeral reverence we celebrate, ceremonies of tears and mourning, not Sevillian fairs, but listen, do you hear? hide yourselves in your cells, do you hear the sputtering of the lighted tapers, the footsteps, the moaning? what did I tell you, little Sisters of the Lord, servants of God, brides of Christ, go hide, for here comes the Mad Lady, hear the cart squeaking? they are pushing her in her little cart, she’s making the rounds of the entire palace to see whether all the women are securely locked up, look at them, Sister Clemencia, I’m looking, Madre Milagros, here come two halberdiers with lighted tapers, and a dwarf’s pushing the little cart and within the cart is a motionless shape with yellow eyes peering out of the rags, and behind that a young man wearing a velvet cap and a fur cape — all accompanied by an icy blast of air — through the cloister, the stone galleries, the yellow plastered walls, that youth with the imbecilic air is running the tips of his fingers over the plaster bas-reliefs, the heart of Jesus, the wounds of Christ, oh, what a wind, Madre Milagros, and behind them are two priests perfuming everything with incense, and the Mad Lady looking at everything without a word, staring toward the little windows of our cells with those eyes of intense hatred, Madre, why is she in the little cart? is she crippled? shhh, daughter, shhh, the mother of El Señor has neither arms nor legs, when her husband died she lay in the center of the castle courtyard and said that a true Señora would not allow herself to be touched by anyone except her husband, and that as her husband had died, she would never again be touched by anything except the sun, the wind, the rain, and dust, for as those elements are no one, they are nothing, and there she lay for several months; her son, our Señor, said: Respect her will, give her food and water and attend her needs and keep her neat, but respect the will of La Señora, my mother, let her do as she will with her body and with her sorrow, and let this example of what the honor of a Spanish Lady is be known and praised; but she could have entered a convent, Madre, she could have flagellated herself, fasted, walked upon thorns, allowed them to pierce her hands and feet; but you are seeking logical solutions, Sister Dolores, and the Señora who is El Señor’s mother is mad, and in her madness she decided to do that penance and no other; but her legs, Madre Milagros, and her arms? you saw today, daughter, that shinbone that El Señor kissed, that member that he took from the coffer and then pressed to his lips, that is the leg of his mother, now a relic like that of a saint, conserved forever in these palace crypts alongside twelve thorns and a hair from Our Saviour’s head, the shinbone almost as sacred as the hair and the thorns, but the Mad Lady had said that no one should touch her, and men understood, but not the beasts, and one evening her dead husband’s dogs, being hungry for the hunt, for they had not been out of the palace since the death of their master, were taken for a turn by the huntsman Guzmán, as was his custom and his duty, but the mastiffs were restless, and by a stroke of bad fortune La Señora, the wife of El Señor, was having an entertainment that night, she had pleaded for it, begged her husband that they might again hear music and dissipate the long mourning in the palace, the musicians were playing horns whose sound could easily be heard through the windows opened to the spring; the hounds mistook the sound for the signal to the hunt, even for the attack, and they launched themselves, Guzmán being unable to restrain them, upon a strange quarry: it is believed that, perhaps all these things at the same time, they smelled the sweat and the flesh of their dead master in the flesh and sweat of the Lady lying in the courtyard, or that they were attracted by the scent of excrement and other filth on El Señor’s mother’s body, or that they confused the body of the Reyna with that of a trapped beast, and they fell upon her, growling and snapping, gravely wounding her extremities, while the Mad Lady, instead of screaming with pain, gave praise to God for this test and begged for the death that as a faithful Christian she could not inflict upon herself but nevertheless longed for and sought from God with the goal of being united with her very beloved husband; the gray spotted dogs were attempting to devour the mad Señora that night, incited by the horn of celebration that they thought sounded death, to the kill, until Guzmán fortunately had the idea of sounding his own horn to regroup and the mastiffs came to his call, setting the Lady free. El Señor tried to have her carried from that open-air prison, to have her tended and her wounds cured. But his mother, La Señora, insisted, she said that only her husband could touch her and thus her arms and legs wounded by the fury of the dogs began to swell, they never healed, and pus ran from her punctured, purple, pestilent limbs while the Lady mumbled prayers and prepared to commit her suffering body and contrite soul to the Creator of all things, God Our Father, shouting loudly that honor and glory are loss and not gain, voluntary sacrifice, and not avaricious hoarding, loss without possibility of recompense, loss because there is no richness in this world that can compensate for honor and glory, and that honor and glory are supreme! she shouted that every night of that spring, until El Señor, her son, our present Señor, ordered some guards to violate his mother’s, the Mad Lady’s, express will, to lift her up by force, with fury and without respect, for the Mad Lady struggled with a ferociousness equal to that of the hunting mastiffs, she bit the hands of the guards, spit blood in their faces and invoked the Evil One to strike them dead with a bolt of lightning; but to no avail, she was carried to a bedchamber and there, although the doctors applied ointments and cupping glasses to the wounds on her legs and arms, it was too late, and they decided to amputate her limbs, which took place amid frightful shrieks which I heard, my sisters, which I heard, trembling with fear, listening to the words the Lady shouted as they chopped, oh, save me, Christ my Saviour, save me from the rage of these Jewish doctors come like rats out of their alleyways and hovels to mutilate me and then make impious use of my members, they are doctors of the Hebraic faith, look, look at those unnatural stars engraved upon their chests, they will boil my limbs in oil so that all good Christians die and they, therefore, inherit our riches: listening to the words that the Lady uttered before she fainted, while the saws were slicing her putrid flesh and splintering her fragile bones, I listened to how she gave thanks to God, finally, for subjecting her to this terrible test that again placed her in extremis, as she so desired, and just before she fainted she shouted: Honor through sacrifice, the height of my nobility is sustained not upon the possession of the ephemeral things of this world but upon their total absence, and what greater sacrifice or greater loss, excepting death, than this sacrifice of half my body, especially at the hands of these detested pigs who imposed even worse sacrifice upon Christ Our Lord. She retained, nevertheless, possession of her will. Look at her beady eyes, Sisters, see how arrogantly she stares at us, see how she tells us, never uttering a word, that we would not be capable of bearing what she has borne, see how she tells us that she has returned, mutilated, dragging with her a cadaver, in possession of a new being, of a new Prince, of a new youth, see her, there she goes toward the servants’ quarters, parading her pride, telling us she has returned and that things will be as they were before, that death is deceit, that there is no possible decay when the will for loss is imposed upon the will for acquisition, she has returned; she’s returned, Azucena, she’s headed toward our corridors, she’s coming to lock us up again, she’s coming to take away the freedom that La Señora, El Señor’s wife, enclosed in her bedchamber, indifferent to our coming and going, to all our quarrels and disputes, has given us; but not any longer, the Mad Lady’s back, here she comes, pushed in her little cart, look, look, Lolilla, pushed by the dwarf Barbarica, that little monster’s come back, too, that fat-cheeked, puffy-eyed, wrinkled little dwarf, look how the tail of her dress drags the floor, she’s always insisted on wearing the old dresses of all the Señoras, even though they drag the floor and she has to roll up the sleeves on her short arms and gather them in a bunch around that belly tight as a drum! didn’t that dwarfish Barbarica dance around you, Azucena, didn’t she leap and cavort around you, farting at will, didn’t she show off in front of you wearing a cardboard crown, her face painted gold, the veins on her bare breasts painted blue, shouting “I’m a Queen, too, I’m a little Queen, a miniature Señora,” and then fire off three quick blasts of her cannon? didn’t she? they’ve come back, Azucena, they’ve come back, to our infinite bad fortune, oh, fateful day, oh, black day, this day on which the Mad Lady and her tooting dwarf returned to this palace, after we thought we’d been freed forever from that sinister pair, and look, look, Lolilla, would you look at what they have with them, a young man, he looks bewildered, as if he’d been clubbed over the head, as if they’d tossed him in a blanket till he couldn’t move, either from the pain or the muddled brain, who knows? look at him, he isn’t really ugly, but the way he moves makes him seem ugly, as if he weren’t really here, somehow, like a puppet, as if he were sick in the head, that shows, Azucena, that shows that if you try to bake your bread in a faulty oven, you can expect twisted loaves, he must be a son of St. Peter, one of those you can see right through even when he insists he’s the nephew of some priest and then is knocked silly by the drubbing the priest gives him to keep the boy from calling him “Father,” no, Lolilla, he’s not the son of a cleric, no, have you forgotten what we saw when they burned that boy down behind the kitchens? the new life from the tears of the condemned man? the mandrake, Azucena, the mandrake! and we told La Señora about it, about the tiny man born from the infamy of the stakes and gallows and racks, all the places where the men of our land die weeping, the pillory and the vile garrote, Azucena, the ashes of the boy burned alive! oh, oh, oh, I knew it would happen, I knew it wouldn’t be the young Señora who found it, but this mad old woman without arms or legs, this evil witch, she had to be the one to find it, and care for it until it grew to be a man, surely she suckled it with that Barbarica’s milk, dribbling from her teats like milk from a mad nanny goat, unchecked and uncontrolled! and what is it the Mad Lady’s mumbling, Azucena, what is she saying? where is her drummer? she needs her black-clad drummer to accompany her, announcing her mournful passage through these halls, and what does that matter to us? what matters to us is that this evil old tyrant’s returned and she’s headed toward the bedchamber of our Señora, our protector, our carefree mistress who so wanted to fill this somber place with joy and merriment, against the strict orders El Señor transmitted to us through Guzmán, to arrange gardens, to entertain herself with plays and courts of love and carrousels, who wanted the shepherds to return, to shear their sheep beneath her balcony, who wanted something entertaining to happen here, something besides our odious obligation to slick down the young Señora’s hair with saliva when she’s feeling drowsy, but now, not even that, for who knows how many days it has been since La Señora allowed us to enter her chambers, now we can’t steal anything, no, not now, we’ve been had, and the tyrant’s returned, here she comes on her little cart with her dwarf and her fool, shouting obscenities, that a true Señora has no legs,