Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

As he advanced along this frontier between astonishment and slyness, some old women reached out to touch our hero’s leg; he sensed that one of the ancient ladies had let it be known to her neighbor that he, the blond, handsome, if slightly crippled young man, was the unacknowledged father of the swaddled infant the old harpy was shaking in the air like a rattle. The chain of gossip was about to form, and its consequences — Pollo suspected with terror — would be unequaled. The scapegoat. The Lynch law. Nuit et brouillard. Fury. Mother Joan of the Angels. The Ox-Bow Incident. Pollo Cinémathèque. The accusing stare of the little old lady paralyzed Pollo; for an instant he imagined himself surrounded by a pack of betrayed women, the old, the mature, and finally the young, all rushing at him, kissing him first, running their fingers through his hair, pinching and scratching him, each convinced that it was with a one-armed man, only with a one-armed man, they had made love nine months earlier, invoking his mutilation as proof of a singular fertility, demanding that he acknowledge his paternity; blind, furious at his every denial, driven by the need for a propitiatory victim, tearing off his clothes, castrating him, ceremonially, communally eating his balls, hanging him from a post, claiming up to the very end that he was the one, when in all sincerity — although with great astuteness — he could only repeat: “I’m just me, just me, a poor crippled young fellow earning a difficult livelihood as a sandwich man for a neighborhood café. That is my one destiny; humbly and gratefully, I swear to you that is my only destiny.”

He had the sang-froid to return the stare of the decrepit old woman who was insinuating that he was the father of her child. Pollo’s stare transfixed the old thing, caused her to frown and sadly shake her head. Weeping and sniveling, chin trembling, she pressed the infant to her raddled lips; stupidity and terror welled in her eyes. For, without actually planning it, as he looked at her, Pollo had willed a single image, one exclusive and overwhelming image, to pass through his mind; and that vision was necessarily the opposite of the present inordinate procreation. In his mind Pollo had projected the film of a row of grease-covered, barefoot men, veiled in smoke, penetrating into the frightful stench of the church watched over by the birds of prey: Saint-Sulpice. And as he projected that image from his mind to his eyes and from his eyes to hers, he added one idea: the final solution … rigorously programmed death. Then he told himself he wasn’t sure of that, that he’d only invented it, merely remembered the unifying symbol of the film; his real intention had been to project to the old woman a terrifying image related to the immediate situation, something emanating from the earth, and pinning her down to the very sidewalk where she lay.

No one will ever know whether Pollo truly communicated anything to the old woman, but that isn’t important. What he wished was not to test his telepathic powers but to free himself from any memory or intuition about Saint-Sulpice, now converted by his imagination and cinematographic memories into a cathedral of crime, a death chamber. He felt relief at having transferred, having bequeathed, the image to the old woman, the image, perhaps the fate, of death. But he wondered, is it the young who pass death to the old, or do the old bequeath it to the young? To some few good men, disorder is the evil. Such simple convictions allow them, in exceptional situations, to find peace where none seems to exist. This concept made Pollo’s head spin: implacable order ruled at Saint-Sulpice — along with an absolute absence of good — whereas terrifying disorder reigned on the Quai Voltaire, but there was no evil there, unless life had adopted the features of death, or death the semblance of life. Facing Pollo across the sidewalk lay the Pont des Arts, an iron structure linking the quays of the Institute to those of the now transparent Louvre. The bridge stretched from the restrained tumult of this open-air maternity ward (it would be raining soon, and then what?) across the boiling, noisy anarchy of the waters. In the midst of all these signs of catastrophe the bridge stood as a lonely landmark of sanity. Impossible to know why the women crowded the other accesses to the quays and ignored this one. Some unknown rule? Free choice? Fear? The fact is that no one was crossing the Pont des Arts; consequently, that bridge shone in solitary stability.

Pollo felt the need to find the dead center of a city thrown off balance, its scale pans tipped by an excess of smoke and blood. He climbed the steps of the bridge, but could not believe his eyes; he could see the Seine, flowing toward the Ile de la Cité that split its waters; he saw the glassy outlines of the Louvre, and the corona of the storm above the truncated towers of Notre-Dame. The transformations which had seemed like ominous portents now seemed insignificant details: mist lay upon the river, veiling the ruined barges; the city’s skyline was once again visible in the crystal-clear air and glowing light, captured in a band of glass and gold between the land and the hovering storm.

A girl was sitting halfway across the bridge. From a distance, against the light (Pollo ascending the steps leading to the Pont des Arts), she was a black dot on the horizon. As he walked closer, Pollo started to fill in the outline with color: the hair caught back in a long braid was chestnut, the long smock violet, and her necklaces green. She was drawing on the asphalt surface of the bridge. She did not look up as Pollo approached, and he added to the description: firm skin delicate as a china teacup, a turned-up nose, and tattooed lips. She was drawing with colored chalk, as hundred of students had done through the years, reproducing famous paintings or inventing new ones to solicit aid from passing pedestrians to pay for their studies, or a trip, or a ticket home. In other times, one of the joys of the city had been to walk across this bridge reading the chalk letters “Thank you” written in all the languages of the world, to hear the clinking coins, and the guitars at dusk accompanying the students’ ballads of love and protest.

Now only this one girl was drawing, absorbed in the banality of her uninspired depiction: from a black circle radiated colored triangles, blue, garnet, green, yellow; Pollo tried to remember where he had only recently seen a similar design. He stopped before the girl, and the thought passed his mind that her lips were much more interesting than her drawing: they were tattooed with violet and yellow and green snakes, capricious flowing serpents that moved as her lips moved, determined by that movement and at the same time independent of it. The tattoo formed a separate mouth, a second mouth, a unique mouth, perfected and enriched by the contrasting colors exaggerating and underlining every glimmer of saliva and every line inscribed on those full lips. Beside the girl was a large green bottle. Pollo wondered whether the painted lips would drink its wine. But the bottle was made fast with an ancient, imprinted, and virgin red-wax seal.

One round drop, then a larger one, then yet another, fell upon the drawing. Pollo looked toward the dark sky, and the girl looked at him; as he watched the sky, his first thought was of the design being erased by the rain, and his second, inexplicably, of a sentence that had been running through his dreams for several days, unuttered until this very instant. The tattooed lips moved, and spoke the words he was thinking: “Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal.”

Pollo’s impulse was to flee; he looked back toward the quays: there was no one there; obviously the intensifying rain had forced the midwives and their patients to seek refuge. Staring at the sign Pollo had so ineffectually displayed all morning, the girl mouthed words as if she were reading what was written on it. The young cripple relaxed; his newfound calm changed to pride; Pollo wished his employers could see him now; if only they could see him now. No one, ever, had read with such seeming intensity and with such gray (eh?) eyes the advertisement for Le Bouquet; Pollo puffed out his chest; he had justified his wages. Then he exhaled; he’d been acting like an idiot. You had only to look at the girl’s eyes to know she wasn’t reading that innocuous advertisement. Now it was raining steadily, and the girl’s vulnerable design was trickling toward the river in spirals of dark color; surely the letters of his sign were similarly streaked; nonetheless, the girl, frowning in concentration, and with an indescribable grimace on her lips, continued to read.