Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

That voice described the handsome shepherd lad with greater exactitude than my own paintings; there was no doubt that it was he, the young pilgrim born with the sun, twin of the sun, so familiarly Spanish with the orange in his hand, so distant, so strange, so foreign in his gaze of disenchanted amazement: a hero here and a hero there, ours and not ours, relative and stranger, almost, one might say, a prodigal son: through the Chronicler he sang of Arabian oases, Hebraic deserts, Phoenician seas, Hellenic temples, Carthaginian fortresses, Roman highways, dank Celtic forests, barbarous Germanic cavalcades; not an idealized shepherd, or an epic warrior, not a Belardo nor a Roland, the hero not of purity but of the impure, hero of all bloods, hero of all horizons, hero of all beliefs, having reached in his pilgrimage the bucolic carrousel of a Señora of a joyless palace, endowed with the pristine feelings that only nature, although all histories, had touched, and chosen by that Señora who, though she could have been any, could only be ours. Chosen for the pleasure of La Señora, led to a luxurious bedchamber, and there surfeited with love and other delights in exchange for his freedom to roam, at the end of the verse choosing to return to the byway, abandoning La Señora to time and oblivion.

El Señor seemed to understand none of this, experiencing, perhaps, only that vague, dreamy nostalgia the Chronicler, performing the function of his office, had wished to provoke; Guzmán suspected something, betraying himself by placing one hand on the hilt of his dagger, and nervously stroking his plaited moustache; La Señora envisioned it all, seeing herself thus depicted in a literary model, her love affair with the youth inadvertently revealed as the true model; I feared everything, but for other reasons. But the Chronicler believed only in the poetic reality of what he had created; any relationship that could not be reduced to the resolute struggle to impose his invented words as the only valid reality was as foreign to him as it was incomprehensible: candid pride, culpable innocence. And thus the strength of his conviction convinced the others of the documentary truth of what he was reading to us.

When he finished reading, the only sound to be heard was the weak and empty applause from El Señor’s pale hands. The dog Bocanegra barked, breaking the icy tension of the moment — Guzmán’s suspicion, El Señor’s lack of comprehension, La Señora’s outraged disarray, and my own fear. Only the Chronicler smiled beatifically, unaware of the passions loosed by his poem, sure only of the verbal reality created, and hoping to be congratulated for it; he was convinced that he had read us the poetic truth, he hadn’t the least intimation that he had repeated aloud to us the secret truth. I moved with haste, I denounced the youth to Guzmán, accusing him, as was true, of having base relations with some kitchen lads barely entered into puberty, but keeping silent what I knew, and knew very well, for I had been the go-between who led the strange youth to La Señora’s bedchamber, thus gaining the gratitude of my mistress on that afternoon of carnal despair after she had spent thirty-three and one half days lying in the castle courtyard with no arms worthy of assisting her, thus, in addition — except on one imperious occasion — saving myself the obligation of calming my mistress’s desires: I do not like to break my vow of chastity, no, and to have to renew it again before a knowing Bishop who as he hears my confession dares look at me with disrespectful complicity: are we not all so? do we not all do the same? is it not fortunate that this vow of purity is renewable? is not the Church magnanimous that it thus understands the weaknesses of the flesh? No, we are not all equal, nor shall I allow that the Bishop so believe. I am an artist. The pleasure of the flesh robs strength from my artistic vocation, I prefer to feel my sexual juices flow toward a painting, wash over it, fertilize it, realize it; the delights of the flesh castrate me, the delights of art satisfy me.

Yes, I concealed what I knew: that the shepherd lad who served as model for our Chronicler had alternated his sodomite afternoons with nights in the bed of La Señora. Guzmán communicated the crime against nature to El Señor, and El Señor, with no further formality, ordered the death of the youth, who was sentenced to burn at the stake beneath the kitchens of his sinful, although not unique, amours. I consulted with La Señora, convincing her that she should sacrifice her private pleasure to her public rank, and promising her, in exchange for her present sacrifice, renewed and increased pleasures in the future. “For the powers of re-creation are much more vast than those of extinction, Señora, and for every thing that dies three are born in its place.”

From the Chronicler’s cubicle, to which I had free access because of our frequent and delightful conversations, I removed some culpable papers in which my erudite friend related, mistakenly, the multiple possibilities of the judgment of Christ Our Lord at the hands of Pontius Pilate; I showed the papers to Guzmán, who did not understand their content but took me to El Señor, to whom I pointed out that in the guise of fable that narration evoked the anathematized heresies of Docetism, which affirms the phantasmal nature of the corporeal body of Christ; of the Syrian Gnosticism of Saturninus, which proclaims the unknowable and untransmissible character of a unique Father; of the Egyptian Gnosticism of Basilides, which has Simon of Cyrene supplant Christ upon the cross, and Christ becomes merely a witness to the death agonies of another; of the Judaizing Gnosticism of Cerinthus and the Ebionites, combated by the Father of the Church, Irenaeus, for declaring that Christ the God occupied only temporarily the body of Jesus the man; of the Patripassianist monarchism that identifies the Son with the Father; of the Sabellian variant that conceives of a Son who is emitted from the Father like a ray of light; of the Apollinarian heresy and of extreme Nestorianism, which attributes to two different persons the acts of Jesus and of Christ; and finally, of the doctrine of Pelagian freedom, condemned by the Council of Carthage and by the writings of the saintly Bishop of Hippo, which denies the doctrine of Original Sin.

“I shall be even more explicit, Señor; the fable is worse than the heresy it illustrates, for in one instance the most Pure Virgin, Our Lady, admits adultery with an anonymous camel driver; in another, Our Lord Jesus Christ declares that he is a simple political agitator of Palestine; and, in the most evil of these examples, our St. Joseph declares himself criminally responsible not only for having betrayed our Sweet Jesus but for having built as well the cross that served as the rack of torture that redeemed our sins. And there is more, Señor. I investigated the palace archives; my suspicions were well founded: the Chronicler is a marrano, a pig, a filthy Jew, the son of converted Jews.”

But instead of being scandalized by the crushing weight of my most careful explication, El Señor asked me to repeat it, again and again; his eyes shone, his curiosity changed to delight, but delight did not give way to shock. I requested, as was natural, that the Chronicler be handed over to the Holy Office; El Señor waited a long while, his eyes closed, before answering me; finally, he placed one hand on my shoulder and asked this most unexpected question: “Brother Julián, have you never seen an uneducated soldier vomit and defecate upon the altar of the Eucharist?”

I answered no, not understanding the sense of his question.

El Señor continued in these terms: “Should I deliver you to the Holy Inquisition for having repeated these heresies?”

Hiding my alarm, I told him I repeated them only to denounce an enemy of the Faith, but that I myself did not sustain them.