Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Nevertheless, his was a very different scheme, and tonight he was putting it into practice with feverish haste; the swift flight of the hours, guttering away like the stub of the candle, announced the fatal battle of the coming day. Fatal for him whatever its outcome, whether death in combat, capture by the Turks, or liberation from the galleys (although he had little faith in this promise, since his crime was not an ordinary one, but of the imagination, therefore more severely punished by the powers that be than the theft of a money pouch), his destiny was to be neither envied nor extolled: shadow of death, shadow of captivity, or shadow of poverty. And that shadow he had always said and written was worse than the reality of poverty itself, the explicit situation, with no misconceptions, real and spacious as the Plaza of San Salvador in Seville, where a legion of scoundrels could dedicate themselves to larceny, to contraband, to deceit and deception with no excise imposed, and with the broad satisfaction of knowing themselves to be the scum of the earth. The reality of poverty, not its shadow.

He said to himself: Then one is someone, as the farmer and the beggar are someone. In contrast, the impoverished nobleman, the surgeon’s penniless son, the stepson for a fleeting moment of the halls of Salamanca, the heir to musty volumes wherein are recounted the marvels of knight-errantry, the orphaned son of the implausible deeds of Roland and the Cid Rodrigo merely exist, they do not live, and in that such a man is doubly accursed, for knowing what it is to be, he cannot achieve being, only existence, his head filled with mirages and his platter empty, existence, not life, maintaining the appearance of a nobleman though his leggings be tattered and frayed. The heir without his inheritance, the orphan, the stepson, merely exist in the shadow … like an insect. Poverty: he who praises you has never seen you. A battered beetle, an insect lying overturned on its hard, armor-plated back, waving its numerous legs …

A different scheme, to cease to exist and to begin to be; a different scheme, paper and pen. This is what he was thinking as he wrote an exemplary novel that had everything and nothing to do with what he was thinking; paper and pen in order — at any price — to be; to impose no more or no less than the reality of the fable. The incomparable and solitary fable, for it resembles nothing and is related to nothing, unless it be the strokes of the pen upon the paper; a reality without precedents, without equal, destined to be destroyed with the papers upon which it exists. And nevertheless, because this fictitious reality is the only possibility for being, for ceasing merely to exist, one must struggle boldly, to the point of sacrifice, to the death, as great heroes and the implausible knights-errant struggled, so that others believe in it, so that one may tell the world: this is my reality, the only true and unique reality, the reality of my words and their creations.

How were they to understand this — those who, first, denounced him; second, judged him; and, finally, condemned him? He recalled, as he was writing a story for all time in the depths of the prow of a brigantine, one not-so-long-ago morning when he had walked through heaps of hay, tiles, and slate of the palace under construction, deploring, as he knew the former shepherds of the place deplored, the devastation wrought upon their oasis of rockrose and water by the necrophilic mysticism of El Señor. The Chronicler, on that not-so-long-ago morning, actually was attempting as he walked to imagine a bucolic poem that would please his Señores; nothing original, the thousandth version of the loves of Filis and Belardo; he smiled, as he walked, searching his mind for facile rhymes, flowery, bowery, rhyme, thine, sublime … and he asked himself whether his masters, when they summoned him for a new and delightful reading of the themes that were so comforting because they were so familiar, would accept the blending of the pastoral form with a singular nostalgia shared by the inhabitants of this devastated place, nostalgia that the Chronicler, because of that, considered more a temptation than a mockery; or whether, in truth, what they expected from him was not precisely that nostalgia, never accepted by them as such, but as a faithful description of an everlasting Arcadia. Did they not have, then, these Lords, eyes to see? Were they completely indifferent to the destruction that their hands wrought as their minds continued to find delight in images of clear, still streams, leafy arbors, and the trailing branch of the grapevine? Did they so mistakenly confuse nostalgia with fact, and fact with exigency? Perhaps (the Chronicler wrote) they were aware of their guilt and placated it with a secret promise: once the time of ceremony, of death, of inexorable constructing for death has passed, we shall re-create the garden; the dust shall flower, the dry stream beds will flow anew, Arcadia will again be ours.

The skeptical Chronicler shook his head and repeated quietly: “There will not be time, there will not be time … Once the flower is cut from its stalk, it never revives, but quickly withers; and if one wishes to preserve it, the best way is to press it between the pages of a book and, from time to time, try to sniff the remaining vestiges of its wasted fragrance. The tangible Arcadias are in the future, and we must learn how to deserve them. There will not be time, but they refuse to recognize that. Shoemaker…”

To your last: he returned to his quiet rhyming, and was linking the flowery with the bowery when he saw pass beneath the kitchen portico a youth whose beauty was in startling contrast to the smut and sweat that marked the other men who labored here. Not this youth, no; beautiful and golden, he was eating an orange, he displayed an extreme grace of movement that only the possession of luxury, if one is wealthy, or the contemplation of evil, if one is poor, produces; a sufficient pleasure in himself, capable of flowering either in this sylvan solitude or in the company of someone who expects, or even possesses, everything, would know when he met this youth that certain things can never be possessed unless they are fully shared. With rejoicing, the Chronicler thought he recognized in the youth who was savoring his orange the image his sterile pen required: the pastoral vision demanded by his masters, the figure of the shepherd lad crowned, like the ancient rivers of Arcadia, with salvia and verbena: the hero.

The youth passed by swiftly; happiness, wickedness, and deceit were in his gaze; he wiped his hand across his lips as he passed, perhaps because he was eating a juicy, flame-fleshed orange, or possibly because he had just kissed his beloved; either was justified by the secret satisfaction of his expression, the tempered, vibrant heat of his body. The Chronicler could at that very moment inscribe the words in his memory; he imagined a young pilgrim passing by this palace, the temple and the tomb of Princes, like a breath of young life, a carefree wanderer with that mixture of permanent astonishment and delicate disenchantment that the knowledge of other seas, other men, other hearths, gives a man; he was able to blend in the swift versifying of that instant the appearance of the sun and the appearance of this youth, naked, alone. The youth disappeared into the smoke of the palace kitchens; the Chronicler returned to his cubicle beside the stables, and sat down to write.

That was a Thursday; Saturday he read his composition before the Señores, Guzmán, and me, yes, I was there, I, the painter-priest who spent so many afternoons in the sweet, bitter, amiable, and quietly desperate company of the Chronicler, listening to his laments and interpreting his dreams: I, Julián, the gentle thief of my friend’s words. And as I listened to him that Saturday as he was reading the poem to his masters, I did not know whether to look with amazement at my lost friend or to attend the growing plea for silence and warning of punishment in the eyes of La Señora, where the ice of fear and the fire of anger flashed in swift succession, the ice quenching the fire and then the fire inflaming the ice, both born of the icy heat in the convulsive breast of my mistress, the same breasts I had with my brushes one day painted blue, following the tracery of the network of veins with the purpose of making more startling the whiteness of her skin; eat, Most Exalted Lady, stuff yourself with sausage, my gentle Barbarica, suck the pork ribs, supposed Prince; I am aware that for some time now, engrossed in your gluttony, you have not been listening, I know that I am speaking only to myself; so it has been always: you eating while something important happens, not even realizing. I admired my poor friend’s innocence, but I understood that his candor could be my ruin, for once someone pulled the loose thread the entire garment would unravel. Soul of wax, my candid friend had impressed in his poem more, much more, than he imagined; he had converted the fleeting vision of that youth, whom he had glimpsed eating an orange before disappearing in the smoke of the kitchens, into the foundation of his imagination, and upon it had raised an edifice of truth: I hear again the voice of the Chronicler, ringing with conviction, the habitual tones of despair stilled in the reading.