Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The barber, as is their custom, holds the mirror before my face after they finish bathing me and fitting on the wig. Finally I recognize myself, finally I ask myself whether that stony figure, that pale, chalky face, that bewigged specter is really I, and I recall (for tomorrow I shall have forgotten) the golden beauty of the youth in the bedchamber of La Señora, asking myself why it is so upsetting to me to imagine that the youth’s beauty might be mine.

HAWKS AND HAZARDS

Guzmán said to himself: “Something is happening that I do not understand. I must be prepared. What are my weapons? The great Lords have armies: I have only my dogs and my hawks.”

He spent several days with the hounds and the birds, reviewing them, treating their ailments, refining his knowledge of them, preparing himself and preparing them for an event he could not foresee but that sent chills down his spine and kept him awake half the night now that he was sleeping on a straw pallet in the roost of the birds of prey. He asked the huntsmen who were under his command to mingle with the workmen, sharing bread and salt with them, and he asked them to listen sharply to what was being said in the tile sheds and at the looms. He remained in the place where the hawks are brought to be trained; he told himself that there, occupied in the elementary care a young hawk that is born small and with sparse plumage requires to become a bold, full-grown bird with fine plumage, he could await with laborious tranquillity what was to happen, he could think, think in the only way he knew how to think: occupied in an exacting task. He cared for the birds that had equal need: the eyas and the haggards. He trimmed the beak and claws of the young birds, and bathed them with water before attaching the bells for the first time so that they would become accustomed to them, and also so he would be able to hear them if the young falcons, so early are their rapacious instincts awakened, left the roost, became lost, or returned injured from their first forays. To avoid their languishing in captivity, he gave them good fare and offered them wood and cork to sharpen their beaks; he released rats, and sometimes frogs, so they might hunt within the confines of the mews. He stroked the dry, warm, young birds, and because it was summer refreshed them with beakfuls of water, for the dryness could make them hoarse and harm their craws and livers; he offered them small amounts of good food: the heart of a deveined sheep, the flesh of a lean rabbit, or the tenderest heifer, and then he listened to the huntsmen who night and day came to the roost to tell him: Yes, the storm is over now, but the rain strewed the spoils of the funeral procession across the plain; yes, the workmen are picking up the black brocade flowers torn loose from the catafalques; the fools are collecting them, carrying them with them, they are attaching them to their shirts and hanging them beside the sacred images in their huts, attempting to adorn their poor devotions; but the more malicious are making cruel jokes, they are saying that now only black roses will bloom on this high plain, only funeral carnations, and when they gather together to eat their chick-peas, they recall the rockrose, the streams, and the woods, and they say that even the climate has changed, that the summer is hotter and the winter colder since the trees were cut down, the valleys dried up, and that the animals had died and would die without the rockrose bushes to protect them.

Guzmán listened silently; he continued his precise tasks, dedicating the morning to the young hawks, taking care that they were kept in rooms that were not damp, in which smoke could not enter, rooms bathed in light, for the first rule of good falconry is to avoid complete darkness, thus preventing the swiftly flying hawk from confusing darkness with the limitless space of night, crashing into walls or beams, crippling or killing itself: as he repeated this rule to himself, Guzmán recalled the day, neither recent nor very distant, when he had presented himself to offer his services to El Señor, who demanded so many services to effect the rapid construction of the palace; and in order that his merits be appreciated, Guzmán, his head bowed before the master, a panting haste in his servile voice that made no attempt — just the opposite — to hide the urgent need for employment, enumerated in rapid fire the occupations he knew, and the rules of those offices, and El Señor listened calmly, and only when Guzmán said, Señor, your young falcons are badly attended, I have walked through the mews and I have seen they are crippled because someone has allowed them to confuse the confined darkness of enclosure with the great rapacious space of the night, only then did El Señor tremble as if Guzmán had touched an open wound, a live nerve, and only then had Guzmán raised his head and looked into El Señor’s face. And Guzmán placed clods of turf in the mews for the hawks’ rest, and the huntsmen came to tell him: Yes, the accidents have continued; no, the affairs of men have not calmed like the weather; it was not enough, Guzmán, that the storm abated when El Señor’s dead were buried; it was not enough that the phantom dog was hanged from the railing in the chapel this morning; as the supervisors and the workmen were cutting stone in the quarry and removing earth to facilitate the process, an avalanche of earth from this fearful mountain fell upon them and buried them. And in the palace, asked Guzmán, in the palace, what is happening there? Nothing, silence, nothing, they replied.

In the afternoons, Guzmán attended the haggards; their talons, the bird’s principal weapon in attacking and seizing its prey, split, fall out, and get caught in the cracks of their perches; Guzmán removed one aged bird from its perch and recalled its former glory, its talons are so hungry, so greedy, can be sunk so deep, become so embedded in the flesh of the boar or the deer, and the bird may so resist releasing its grasp, Señor, that only with great expertise can the talons be loosened without pulling them from the bird; but as they grow old, Señor, their talons — without exposure to either glory or danger — simply fall out, the falcons cling to their quiet perches and Guzmán listened as with a piece of turquoise he trims the broken talons of the old hawks, the wife of one of the laborers buried by the avalanche of earth came today, with scissors Guzmán cuts back the broken claws till he reaches the quick, the woman came in her terrible poverty, weeping, more dead than alive, through those fields, and Guzmán listened as he ground comfrey and the resin of the dragon tree, she came alone, unaccompanied, weeping, and Guzmán applied the mixture to the quick of the talon and bound the wound with a cloth of fine linen, weeping for her husband’s death and attributing her misfortune to the fact that El Señor, had constructed a palace for the dead in the lands that had formerly belonged to the shepherds, and so great was the woman’s poverty that she had no one who would help her carry her husband’s body back to the village where she lived. Guzmán stroked the bandaged hawk and replaced it upon the perch. “Now you will rest there three or four days.”

A gouty hawk: his prescription, mummified flesh from the apothecary. Laborer dead in a landslide: his prescription, burial at the site of your death, said Jerónimo, for only El Señor has the right to move his dead from the place where they died and bring them, accompanied by companies of guards and prelates, to a crypt of black marble: be satisfied, woman, leave your man buried on the very spot where he was overcome by bad fortune; we’ll hold his wake right here. Who is Jerónimo? An old smith, the one who mans the forges; well, he isn’t all that old, according to what he tells us, but he looks old because of his long beard and furrowed brow and disillusioned eyes. Jerónimo. And who else, huntsmen? And what else?