Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Then nothing would be sacred.”

“True, exactly so, Guzmán; and you would be right, kingdoms would be ungovernable, for upon what is government founded but the unity of power? And this unitary power, upon what is it founded but its privileged possession of the unique written text, an unchanging norm that conquers, that imposes itself upon, the confused proliferation of custom? The subject, acting, exists; the Prince, acting, is; custom falls into disuse, is exhausted, is renewed and changes aimlessly and chaotically, but the law does not vary, it assures the permanency and the legitimacy of all acts of power. And upon what is that legitimacy founded?”

“The law the Prince invokes is said to be a reflection of immutable divine law, Señor; such is its legitimacy.”

“Then listen to me. You have never ascended that stairway, have you, Guzmán? You have not seen the changing reflection in a mirror … a mirror that … I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know … I do not know whether it reflects the origin or the end of all things … or whether it tells me that all things are identical in their origin and in their end … but what things, Guzmán? What things? Please tell me, do you never doubt? Do you never imagine? For even though things are namable and countable and weighable, their Creator is unknown, no one has ever seen Him and perhaps no one ever will, the Creator has no number or weight or measure; we are the ones who gave Him His name, we wrote it, He did not tell it to us, He has never written His own name, not Allah, not Yahweh, or Ra or Zeus or Baal, which are all names that men have given the Creator, not names He has told us.”

“Pardon, Señor; if what you have said is true, then may I take the liberty of believing that the name we give God cannot be sacred because it is not secret; and it cannot be secret because we need to know His name so that we may adore Him. A God worshipped in stealth is a thing of witchcraft, and that God must be a devil.”

“You may take that liberty, but you reason badly, my poor Guzmán. You know a great deal about hawks and dogs, but very little about things of the soul.”

“I am at your feet, Señor.”

“Think, rather, that the name of God will always be secret and sacred, for no one but He knows it; and then an abyss opens between that mystery and the bad game we act out here, for I am where I am, and you are at my service, Guzmán, because I believe, you believe, and my subjects believe with us, that I am Prince by divine right; that God wrote my name so I might govern in His. Does God know my name while I am ignorant of His? What blind torture is this, and what injustice?”

“You give strange names to faith, my Lord. One believes in God, he does not try to prove His existence. If it consoles you, think that even if you cannot prove the existence of God, for God it is equally difficult to prove yours.”

“Are you saying I should renounce my desire to know God?”

“I ask nothing of you, Sire; I hear you and accompany you. And I remind you that if we believe in God, God will believe in us.”

“Do you know who was my listener and my companion before, Guzmán?”

“That would be vain pretension on my part; I serve El Señor, I do not spy on him.”

“The dog Bocanegra. He heard everything that I am telling you today.”

“Thank you, Señor.”

“Write; do as I say.”

“And if what is written endures, may I, with respect, ask El Señor why he has decided that I should hear and write what before only the dog — without understanding — was permitted to hear?”

“No, no, you may not. It is better that you simply write. I asked our Bishop here, on this very spot, in this crypt, whether he knew the Creator and he said no; in answer to whether he expected to know Him, he said yes, if the good fortune of death and resurrection carried him to be seated by God’s side where he might see His face in the Paradise reserved for good Christians; now turn toward that stairway, Guzmán, look at it; I challenge you to climb it with a mirror in your hand, I challenge you; you will climb to the end and the origin of everything, but like me, you will not see the Creator in the mirror, and that absence, more than the announcement of our irremediable senescence, of our mortal death, will be what terrifies us; as you look into the mirror you, as I, will know only the most promiscuous solitude, for as I died I was alone, I did not see God, but I was not alone, if you can understand that, rather, surrounded by matter, absorbed by matter as if by a gigantic sponge; and the Being whom, according to the doctrine, I resemble, the Being who gave me life in His own divine image, did not await me at the end to guide me, to take me in and console me, to recognize me as I recognized Him, to prove finally my existence in His own, as our Bishop believes, to carry me with Him to Paradise; the Creator was not there, I was alone with living but mute matter and I did not know whether that was Heaven or Hell, eternal life or transitory death; and do you know why I have never seen Him? Because I suspect that the Father was never born, was never created; that is the question that neither our Bishop nor the learned Brother Julián nor the astrologer Brother Toribio nor our poor Chronicler, who imagined so many things, has ever been able to answer to alleviate my own imaginings and to buttress my well-tested faith: Who created the Father? Did the Father create Himself? Neither the dogma nor the Bishop nor the painter-monk’s eagerness for conciliation nor the imagination of the Chronicler nor the stars of the astrologer could answer me; I answered myself: The Father was never born, was never created; that is His secret, His distinction, and only knowing this shall we understand why He was capable of creation: so that no one would resemble Him.”

“Must I write all this, Señor?”

“Yes, and more: if you dare, as I did, ascend those stairs that do not lead, as our eyes deceitfully indicate, to the plain above but to the origins of everything, you can confirm it; yes, write, Guzmán, that there be written evidence; I have been to the beginning and I have not seen the Father born. Look upward, to the end of the stone stairs: look beyond the plain; what do you see?”

“The stormy light of this summer morning.”

“Dare to ascend; take my mirror and tell me what you see in it as you ascend, as you pause on each stair…”

“Señor, don’t ask that I repeat your sublime actions, which as they are yours are inimitable; who am I…?”

“A mortal. And for that reason, like any mortal, you may know the dwellings of the Creator; yes, you may climb as I did, with Brother Toribio our astrologer, to the highest tower to look at the heavens through the glass that his invention has polished for the purpose of penetrating with the human eye the opacities of the firmament; I searched the heavens with the magical apparatus of the Chaldean and in no corner of the dome that embraces us could I encounter the likeness of the not-born Father; and, nevertheless, looking through those lenses, hearing the names that Brother Toribio gives to the celestial mansions, and measuring the distances he calculates between body and body, star and star, dust mote and dust mote, I saw that although the Father was not visible, the sky was not empty; I told myself that those spheres and those dissimilar particles were not the Father, but that they were visible proof of his creative origins. Although I thought also, listening to the explanations of Brother Toribio, that if his science was true, then it was also limited, for if the heavens are truly infinite, as the astrologer maintains, what the lenses showed me was only a finite part of that enormity; and if the heavens were infinite, the mystery of their lack of limits did not exclude the rule of the creative principle; in some place, at some moment, the first heaven was created; and once there was the first heaven, the succeeding heavens were derived from it, similar to the first, but more and more distant from it, until the reproduction of heavens, more and more pale, more and more tenuous, as happens with repeated copies, could be seen by us. With everything, even with Brother Toribio’s lenses, we know only the last heaven, Guzmán, the most imperfect copy, the farthest removed from the original model although the closest to this earth we inhabit, and I fear that all the things of our earth are but the product of the creation closest to us but most distant from the Father who only indirectly created us, for first He created powerful angels who in turn created more and more inferior angels who in the end created us. We are the result of the uninterested caprice of a few bored angels who possessed only the strength and imagination necessary to invent human misery. But thus they fulfilled the secret design of the Creator: that man be what is farthest removed and least like the original Father.”