Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The mirror: For I was the only one who knew the rivals, the son of God and the son of Mary, both led into my presence that burning-hot afternoon in Jerusalem. How was I to distinguish between them in the darkening shadows of this room whose cool stone and white curtains isolate me from the boiling heat of the desert spring, and how was I to hear them, so near the courtyard filled with swaying palm trees and bubbling fountains? Which of the two should die, the one who is called Christ and says he is the son of God, or the one who is called Jesus and says he is the son of Mary? Christ who asserts the humanity of His divine acts, or Jesus who proclaims the divinity of his human acts? This one who promises the kingdom of Heaven, or this one who promises the kingdom of the Jews? Which is the more dangerous, which must die, which must supplant Barabbas on the cross? I must choose only one; it is equally hazardous to assassinate more than one prophet, or to liberate more than one thief; justice must be balanced so that it disguises the criminal nature of its decisions. But the one thing of which I am sure this afternoon is that my dog’s illness, the summer weight of food in the belly, the shadows gathered to combat the heat, the external distractions of the clear fountains and the date clusters falling from the prodigal arms of the date palms, all weigh too heavily on my soul. I am sleepy. I am bored, and worried about the dog; this climate is not good for making decisions; one gets drowsy; the sea and the desert; Rome has extended her boundaries too far from her center, vigilance is becoming difficult, institutions are crumbling, becoming attenuated: who is going to ask me for an accounting? Who, in Rome, could be interested in this story?

“Guzmán: was our religion founded upon an error of the Roman police system? Anathema, anathema be whosoever divides between two characters or persons the words and deeds attributed to Christ-Jesus in the Scriptures, according one part to the man and the other to the God.”

The mirror: Which of the two did I condemn? Which of the two did I present before the people, murmuring: “Here is the man…” having decided that one of them was the man and the other the God; which of the two did I judge less dangerous, which of the two did I condemn? Confronted with two identical twins, two magi identically bearded, equally intense and eloquent and ravenous, how could I help but doubt? Which of the two? How was I to know? One would die upon the cross, and when I condemned him I believed that truly, and not only symbolically, I was washing my hands of the problem. The example of the death of the one would serve as a warning to the other and also to forewarn any Jewish prophets who were tempted to imitate him. How was I to imagine the subtle trap prepared by the two called Christ and Jesus? One would die, yes, on the cross, suffering; but the other, two days later, would play his part in the comedy of the resurrection. How was I to know that? And how, then, was I to know which of them died and which lived to be reborn in the name of the dead one? I shall only confess this to myself, in secret: Christ the God was crucified, He died; for if I, Pilate, did not condemn a God to death, then my life would have no meaning; I could kill a thief in the name of Caesar, but if I killed a God, the memorable glory is mine, only mine. It was the lifeless body of the God I ordered crucified, His forever useless body, that was thrown by His followers into the waters of the Jordan, with weights tied to the neck and ankles so that when it met the waters of the Dead Sea it would not float to the surface. But they needn’t have worried, for the body disintegrated swiftly, became part of the mud and silt in the Valley of the Ghor; a hurried investigation I ordered so testified. And in exchange, Jesus the man — my spies told me: he was present at the death of his double, winking at John of Patmos and Mary his mother, and Magdalene the courtesan — was saved from the cross by a humanity that I deemed innocuous, and then he hid himself, with a handful of dates, a bottle of wine, and a large loaf of bread, in the tomb reserved for the victim, and he emerged two days later; but he could not then rejoin his mother or his lover or his disciples. This is what I had feared: that he would reappear, that he would renew his activities as prophet and agitator, mocking both the law of Rome and that of Israel, my indirect condemnation in turning him over to the Jews and the direct condemnation of the Jews in determining his crucifixion; yes, this would have broken the delicate equilibrium between the Roman and Jewish powers; yes, this simple administrative transaction, although it did not deserve to, would have come to the attention of my superiors in Rome; yes, that would have been the death blow to my career. That is what I thought two days following the death of Christ the God when His disciples announced that He had been resurrected. I was cautious; I waited before I acted. The disciples said that their master had ascended to Heaven. I breathed a sigh of relief; I had feared not an improbable miracle but the authentic continuation of the survivor’s career of agitation in the lands under my jurisdiction. But if the actor of the death on the cross was now lost in the waters of the desert, the actor of the resurrection, for the purpose of making credible his ascension into Heaven, had the good judgment to lose himself in the waterless desert. From Egypt he had come, as a child; to Egypt he returned and there for many years hid in the dog-ridden, sandy alleys of Alexandria, mute, impotent, ragged, old, a beggar, rendered forever useless by his own legend, so that his legend might live and be spread through the voices of Simon and Saul; they say that when he was very old, his only opportunity to satiate his appetite for legend to become an aged wanderer, an ancient Jew without a country, without roots, he arrived in Rome during the reign of Nero, son of Agrippina and Domitius Ahenobarbus, and there was present, in the coliseums, at the death of those who died in the name of his legend. He, too, then, I condemned to death; the testimonial death of a wanderer who only could be present, unable to speak his name, at the death of those dying in his name or against his name. Hebrew pilgrim, I know you; you are Jesus the man, condemned to live forever because you did not die at the privileged instant of Calvary. I know because I accompany you, I am always by your side; I am condemned to be something worse than your executioner: your witness. The God died. You and I live, the phantoms of Jesus the man, and Pilate the judge.

“Condemned by the cruel, not-born Father to live forever, Guzmán, as the Father condemned Christ the God to eternal death, thus saving himself from the rebellious divinity of a new Lucifer; for what Pilate — from the ocher profundities of the painting from Orvieto, now reflected in the mirror — says is true: Christ the God was crucified, He truly died, abandoned forever, once His part in the play was enacted, by the phantom Father. And this is what Pilate did not know: that the omnipotent Creator could not tolerate the return to Heaven of a possible rival, of a new Lucifer who had known the detestable mysteries and needs of fallen humanity and who might contaminate the timeless, ambitionless purity of eternal Heaven; it was the Father who condemned the Son, Guzmán, not Pilate, not the scribes and the Pharisees; the Father abandoned, murdered, His Son; the Son of God could come to earth only to die on earth. Thus the Father saved himself, I tell you, from a rebel in Heaven; but he also spared himself the necessity of showing His own face: Jesus the man would represent Him forever, in His name, throughout history. And thus you must believe with me, Guzmán, that reason is the intermediary between God and the Devil, since neither the evils of the Devil nor the virtues of God would be as they are or would affect us without the aid of reason; if we accepted evil as fact and virtue as mystery, Guzmán, we would never rise above that, and then, do you understand me? I would be born again from the belly of a wolf, I would be hunted in these same lands by my own descendants: I want the Heaven and the Hell that have been promised, Guzmán, I want to be condemned or saved for all eternity, I want that total non-existence that the Father denied the Son and the Man, Christ and Jesus, I do not want to return with claws and fangs and hunger to this world; I do not want my death to be the material guarantee of a new life, a second life, another life, but simply that: my absolute death, my absolute remission to non-existence, a hermetic absence of communication with all forms of life; this is my secret project, Guzmán, hear me: let us establish a hell on earth to assure the need for a heaven that will compensate for the horror of our lives; the horror we do and the horror that is done to us … Let us then doubt our Faith, always within that Faith, in order to deserve first hell on earth, torture, the stake, used against us as heretics, against the barbaric nations as idolaters; only in this way, by first liberating the powers of evil on earth, shall we someday deserve the beatitude of heaven in Heaven. Heaven, Guzmán: forgetting forever that we once lived … What did you do with my faithful mastiff Bocanegra?”