Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“They will remember me, mistress, Señora?” sighed the dwarf. “May I put on my pasteboard crown and my long cape so they’ll believe that I am the Prince’s wife, the miniature Queen?” How she laughs, beside me, that wicked dwarf, and more loudly as I laugh with her; easy as you please I lift her off her feet and swing her up in the air till I can bite one breast; I clamp my teeth upon one round, blue-painted teat until she howls with pain and then with pleasure, and finally the two are indistinguishable, and I nibble and I suck, never taking my eyes from the Mad Lady, who does not intervene, who looks at me as if a new idea were forming in her head, as if she were imagining a new project as she sees us, the dwarf and me together, embraced, what a pair.

“Who was it who kissed you in the carriage, who caressed you, who tore your shirt, who removed your breeches, who formed your new face with the soft, swift touch of her tiny, moist, painted, plump, magic hands? Who? Who was it invented your second face with the paints and cosmetics she carried hidden in her little wicker trunk? Who is it who’s dying to touch you and suck your beautiful dingalingdong? Who? And please, never call me thus … dwarf, it sounds so ugly, call me what everyone else calls me, with affection, Barbarica, Barbarica…”

The dwarf whispers these words into my ear, then pulls away from my kissing and nibbling, her breasts marked by my teeth, she covers the tiny teeth marks on her blue-painted flesh, and runs from this jail, and I sit down amazed, more muddleheaded than ever, rapidly reviewing after listening to what she had said, forgive me, Barbarica, I had one face when I reached the shore, and in the carriage Barbarica had exchanged that face for another, then they had cut my hair and dressed me in a full, black, curly wig, and now the painter is imposing a fourth face upon me, renewed and different, and my true face was fading farther and farther into the distance, I have lost it forever, forever, and meanwhile Brother Julián continues his rapid painting.

My body aches. I hurt all over. Barbarica returns from ordering the meal, and climbs into the wicker trunk that serves her as a bed. Brother Julián has been impatiently waiting to begin the second portrait, and now he asks me to pose again, seriously. The priest sighs; the Mad Lady asks that he paint a third portrait of me, this time wearing the mask I had with me when I reached shore, where is it? it had appeared upon the face of her husband’s corpse, it was woven of brightly colored feathers, said the Mad Lady, with a center of dead spiders, that would be strange, new, incalculable, no one would know how to explain it, they would see my stiff, upright body, my throat and my cape and my hand upon my breast, my black breeches and my tight boots, but they would not see my face, they would have to imagine that, it would be covered by the mask of feathers I had brought with me from the sea when I was thrown upon the beach, and climbed the dunes to encounter my second destiny: the Mad Lady recalls all this, it happened a long time ago, I had already begun to forget, as tomorrow I shall have forgotten everything that has happened today; who recalls the most important moment of his life: the moment he was born? No one. I shall take care to tell that to the Mad Lady. But I speak only to myself, my words are within me, mine alone, the Mad Lady and the dwarf have never heard me speak, they probably believe I am mute, they have only seen me place bleeding doves upon my head, force the bootmaker to eat my raw boots, bite the teats of Barbarica. But where is that mask, a fifth face for me? the ultimate folly, to mask myself, considering that I was already masked in my own flesh when I arrived here. The Mad Lady moves her head from side to side, disconcerted, searching; the painter sighs. The Mad Lady says that a painting of me with the mask covering my face would intrigue the chroniclers, no doubt about it. Where is the palace Chronicler? Have them search for him, bring him here, I want him to begin to write the true chronicle of the Prince’s life. Let us establish immutability: she wants the signs of my identity to be multiplied, I, the heir, in paintings, engravings, coins, pearls, chronicles, let there be immutable awareness that I am who I am, the Heir Apparent of Spain, and no one else, least of all that blond stallion the wife of El Señor has secluded in her bedchamber.

The painter-priest sighs again; he says: “The Chronicler is not in the palace. He committed an indiscretion and was banished to the galleys. If you so desire, I can tell you his story. Then you will be less aware of the passage of time as I finish the painting.”

And this is the story Brother Julián narrated, as the servants entered and prepared the stew on which we were to dine that night.

THE CHRONICLER

Feverish and ill, he wrote through the night; reduced to a tiny space in the depths of the prow of the reserve brigantine, he heard the groaning of the ship’s skeleton, with utmost difficulty he held the inkwell upon one knee and the paper upon the other; the motion of the little stub of candle swinging back and forth before his eyes made him seasick, but he persisted in his wakeful task.

Along with the rest of the flotilla, the brigantine was sailing toward the mouth of the broad gulf, slipping among the islands. He did not know the nature of the maneuvers which the squadron was executing under the cloak of night so as to control the mouth of the gulf by dawn, thereby sealing the exit to the Turkish fleet aligned in rigorous formation far back in the gulf. But he felt certain that, whatever the agreed strategy, the following day would witness a fierce battle, frightful butchery, and little mercy for a humble oarsman like himself, removed that afternoon from the galley because of his feverish and unserviceable condition; ill or not, they would need all hands tomorrow to combat the formidable fleet of Islam, a force of a hundred twenty thousand men, including warriors and the crew of galley slaves.

One night, he thought, a single night, perhaps the last night. He was writing rapidly, the fever of his imagination adding to that of his body, made seasick by the dancing candle stub suspended before his eyes, its wax dripping upon the wrinkled parchment: a soul of wax, that I am, a soul of wax on which the continual motion of the world is imprinted, idea after idea. For the only thing that does not change is change itself, and not, as my most exalted Señores would have it, the stability that so consoles them on a medallion, in a sonnet or a palace, allowing them to believe that, everything considered, the world will end with them, that the world does not move, that the world will respect what is, without concern for what might be.

And so, simultaneously he recalled, he imagined, he thought, and he wrote, blessing the mercy accorded him in the remission of his pain. The respite granted because of his fever was not, nevertheless, gratuitous.

“No,” the commander said to the galley slaves, “rather a demonstration of good faith that the oarsmen who perform well in this encounter will be freed from the chain. On the other hand, we captains of the Christian fleet know that the lack of similar magnanimity among the Infidels will assure that many galley slaves from the enemy armada will take advantage of the confusion of the combat to jump ship and swim for shore.”

At any rate, he did not associate his night of grace with these maneuvers and calculations, nor did he differentiate his specific situation in this hour, exceptional although fleeting, from his larger destiny. Fortune had cast a heavy burden upon his frail shoulders; and to the uncertain question that he formulated as he wrote — Is it possible that a wrathful fate exceeds itself in persecuting me? — the answer, unfortunately, was as sure as it was affirmative. Of his family he remembered only oppression and debts; of his office, only lack of understanding and sleepless nights; of his masters, injustice and blindness. From all of it, necessity. Abundance, only in his imagination; too subtle to be spooned to his lips or cut with a knife. In this nocturnal hour, writing, he muttered to himself Friar Mostén’s counsel: “As you wished it, so shall it be”; for, instead of limiting himself to dedicating his fictions, with their customary laudatory epistles and prologues, to the very exalted Señores who were his patrons, he concocted a great number of things in his imagination, and from invention passed to the documentation of the events he witnessed and of the world he inhabited, reaching a moment when he could no longer differentiate between what he imagined and what he saw, and thus he added imagination to truth and truth to imagination, believing that everything in this world, after passing from his eyes to his mind, and from there to pen and paper, was fable; in the end he convinced his Señores, who desired only chimeras from his pen, that chimeras were truth, but at the same time, truth was never anything but truth. See, thus, the mystery of all written and painted things, for the more they are the product of the imagination, the more truthful you may hold them to be.