Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“The last act of creation was the creation of man and of the world, Señor; thus it is written in the Sacred Scriptures.”

“Which, because they are written, are; God save me from contradicting them … but not from enriching them.”

“Could God have been absent from the act with which He culminated the creation of all things?”

“You may still my voice, Guzmán; how shall you still my conscience?”

“I am writing this only because El Señor asks me…”

“Write, Guzmán; the last act of the creation was simply that, the last, not the culminating act, but an act of carelessness, of tedium, of lack of imagination; is it conceivable that the Father, being omnipotent, would have directly created this odious mockery we men are? If it were so, He would not be God, or He would be the most cruel of gods … or the most stupid. So realize that since it is we, and not God, who are the ones to give God a name, we who write His name, our sinful pride makes us believe and repeat that God created us in His image and likeness. Understand, Guzmán, what I wish is to purify totally the essence of God by freeing the Father Creator from the supreme sin, the creation of men; we cannot be His work, we cannot, no … Allow me to free God from the supreme sin that we attribute to Him: the creation of man.”

“Of whom, then, Señor, are we the work?”

El Señor was silent for an instant and then he took the hand mirror he had held as he ascended part of the thirty-three steps leading from the chapel to the plain; he looked into the sterile lake captured within the frame of satiny old gold scratched by many hands before those of El Señor, who today was its possessor without knowing how it had become part of his fortune, or who was its former owner, and he was at the point of losing himself in the rugged track of this new riddle: to return to the origin, not of the first and never seen God ignorant of the name that we give Him, of the ceremonies we perpetrate in His name, but of this object he held in his hand: this mirror, the descending line of its former owners, the maker of this beautiful utensil, useful only to see ourselves in and thus confirm our vanity or our desolation: the life of the mirror, of all the mirrors that duplicate the world, that extend it beyond all realistic frontiers, and to all that exists, mutely says: you are two. But if this mirror had an origin, it was crafted, and used, and passed from hand to hand and from generation to generation; so it retained the images of all those who had viewed themselves in it, it had a past and not only the magic of a future that El Señor had seen one morning as he ascended the stairs with the mirror in his hand.

“Look into my mirror, Guzmán,” said El Señor, and the space of the mirror was transformed, echoing from heaven to heaven like a drum that with each thump of the hand reveals an earlier skin, and then another before that, and in each space revealed in the dissolving layers of its quicksilver allows a new voice to be heard, a voice of smoke, a voice of stars …

The mirror: What can we, we who are the last angels, we who have never seen God Our Father, imagine from our impotence? This we, the most humble delegates of Heaven, asked ourselves. And one of us, one who is anonymous among us, for in this our inferior heaven it is impossible to know whether we descended from other, superior angels or whether one of us was that superior angel, the fallen Lucifer, Lucifer himself, suggested to us: “Let us invent a being that will have the presumption to believe it is made in the likeness of God the Father.”

“And so we were born, Guzmán.”

“Señor, in order to find the truth, pray that Our Lord Jesus Christ grant you His favor and grace by virtue of the death and the passion He suffered, for the Most Holy Blood that He spilled on the cross for sinners …

“Yes, Guzmán, sinners, among whose number I confess before His Divine Majesty to be the greatest, in whose Faith I have always lived; I swear to live and die as a true son of the Holy Church of Rome, for whose Faith I have constructed this palace of paradoxes; its towers and cupolas rise impotently toward the heavens, aspiring to an encounter with the Father who has hidden His face from us, its rectangular lines imposed upon a level valley, its sad gray color, its perpetual dedication to suffering and death, have as their intent mortifying the senses and reminding us that man is small and that his power is but nothing compared to the greatness of the unseen Father; here, here in this stony austerity I caused to be erected, I say: we are the sons of Lucifer, and nevertheless we aspire to be the sons of God: such is our servitude and such is our greatness; look into my mirror, Guzmán, and write, write before the Devil dries my tongue, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one true God, and doubt, Guzmán, because neither Paul, nor Luke, nor Mark, nor Matthew ever had the audacity to say that Jesus was God: look into my mirror, Guzmán, look into it if you have the eyes to see and let its shifting quicksilver transport us to that hot spring afternoon in the Levantine; penetrate these mists of crystal and you will not see your own face reflected in them, look…”

The mirror: My dog is not well and I have neither the humor nor the patience for a prolonged trial of yet another of the all too many Judean magi who parade around announcing catastrophes and portents: the end of Rome, or the freedom of the Hebrew people; no, my sick dog and these crushing dog days and one informer more, one more among the spies I have placed, placed by the hundreds, in the councils of the Jewish nation; I shall pay the accustomed thirty pieces of silver; I, Pilate, could be any other, call me Numa or Flavius or Theodorus, I could fulfill my functions as so many other procurators have fulfilled them before me and will fulfill them after me, it is normal that I, one more judge, be judging one more of the magi who for centuries have repeated the same prophecies to false followers who for centuries have denounced them before us, the authorities desirous of maintaining secular order at any cost.

“Let us be reasonable, Guzmán, and let us ask ourselves why we have accepted as truth only one series of events when we know that those events were not unique, but common; that they are ordinary, multiplicable unto infinity in a series of plots that repeat into exhaustion: look at them, look at them filing by, interminably, century after century, in the glass of my mirror. Why, among hundreds of Jesuses, and hundreds of Judases, and hundreds of Pilates, did we choose only three upon whom to base the history of our sacred Faith? But also you must doubt these explanations, Guzmán, doubt the supernatural by explaining it rationally, but doubt also that which seems natural, seeking the magical, savage, irrational explanation, for none is sufficient unto itself, and each exists side by side, in the same way a God named Christ lived beside a man named Jesus: hurry, Guzmán, look at them, the two of them together, Jesus the man and Christ the God, see them in my mirror; the smoke is covering them, their images are being swallowed by time, no one remembers…”

“Señor, I would like to demonstrate my loyalty to you. Let us burn these words, for if the Inquisition should read them, all your power would not…”

“Do I tempt you, Guzmán? Do you feel, as you hold these papers in your hands, that you could barter them for my power?”

“I insist, Señor; let us burn them; let us put an end to this doubting…”

“Quiet, Guzmán, let me delight in this my hour of power by edging toward heresy, both punishable and unpunishable; punishable because it destroys a certain order of the Faith, that which through the chance and accidents of politics according to St. Paul, a persistently subtle coalescence of compromise and intransigence, has triumphed; unpunishable, truly, because heresy collects and recalls all the rich and varied spiritual impulses of our Faith, the faith that it never denies, but on the contrary multiplies, its magnificent opportunities to be and to convince. Pelagius, the conquered, is as much a Christian as Augustine, the conqueror: Origen, the castrated debtor, as much a Christian as Thomas Aquinas, the seraphic creditor. And if the heretical theses had triumphed, today’s saints would be heretics and the heretics the saints, and none, because of it, less Christian. Let us struggle, not against heresy, but against the pagan and idolatrous abomination of the savage nations that do not believe in Christ: depending on how much they deny, they believe neither in His divinity nor in His humanity; we Christians believe in Him because we debate whether He was both divine and human, only divine, or only human; our obsession keeps Him alive, forever alive; write, Guzmán, write, erase from my mirror the monstrous image of Tiberius Caesar’s procurator, blow on the glass, Guzmán, and cover with mist my accursed mirror so that I can no longer see the face of Pontius Pilate, the true founder of our religion, and his very real dilemma…”