Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

As the standard was hoisted, the call to arms was also sounded, warning all the galleys; the Chronicler was aboard one of the reserve brigantines that along with the supply ships were standing at a distance so as not to obstruct the movement of the galleys, but were prepared to deliver troops and matériel to them; he heard the cannon blasts signaling the battle, and he saw how immediately both fleets moved into action, the Christian flotilla advancing toward the Turkish fleet trapped in the waters of the gulf, and the Turks advancing to the encounter with the Christians, their only alternatives to destroy the Christians, to perish, or to flee by land. The sun rose higher. The wind died down, and the gulf turned into a crystalline lake. Now the oarsmen had a less difficult task. A soft breeze was at their backs. Everyone, even those waiting in the reserve galleys and brigantines behind the central corps of the battle, knelt to receive general absolution, and to prepare to die. The flagship of the Turkish fleet fired the first cannon; kneeling, the Chronicler felt the weight of the green bottle in his pocket, and raising his eyes to Heaven he knew that one part of his life was ending and another beginning; farewell to the folly of youth, greetings to the age of extreme hazard: between the two ages, between the two moments, he found an instant to address himself to the clouds, to the sea, to the frightened ducks flying back to the brownish shores: “What Heaven has ordained, no human effort or wisdom can prevail against.”

And thus he imagined himself to be at the true hour of his death, it could be this instant, or another slightly more remote; brief, nevertheless, was the time for anxieties to mount and hopes to flag.

Six Venetian galleasses, armed with cannon mounted on all sides, advanced to throw disorder into the Turkish ranks; the drums and bugles sounded to clear the decks for action, but even these strident sounds were drowned out by the fearful cries of the Moorish throng; the beaks on the prows of the Christian galleys, sawed before the battle, were pulled down, the great firearms belched smoke, inflicting great damage upon the Turkish ships, whose salvos, aimed above the obstacle of their own beaks, passed harmlessly over the Christian galleys. The Turks did not retreat, but sent formation after formation of galleys in their attempt to rout the wings of the Christian line, attack the rear guard, and gain access to the open sea; at noon the Turks launched a ferocious attack against the left wing, attempting to breach it and force its galleys, for fear of running aground on the sandbanks near the shore, to break ranks from the closed, crescent formation. The Turks were attempting to escape through that gap, when rough hands pushed the Chronicler toward a boat and from there to one of the galleys, and from there, without transition, into the merciless struggle between two galleys locked in combat like two animals in a definitive territorial battle for food and shelter. There was a steady hail of arrows, volleys from harquebuses, and shells; many ships were sunk, and others run aground; many Christians had fallen into the pantheon of the sea and many Moorish galleymen who had attempted to swim to shore were drowned among blazing ships and shellfire; the Chronicler in his position in the galley, clinging to his section of the oar, felt the shudder of the ship under a blast from a Turkish cannon; the prow was ripped away, exposing the tightly packed galley slaves and leaving them unprotected before an assault from the Turks who swarmed on board, granting no quarter; a small squadron rapidly arrived to defend them; they boarded the besieged galley and retaliated, blow with savage blow; the Chronicler, thrown to the deck, felt the open wound in his bleeding hand; with a strength he would not have believed possible he withdrew the sealed green bottle from his breeches and threw it into the sea. He watched the bottle, less swift than the salvos from the harquebuses, trace a slow parabola through the air and disappear from his sight before splashing into the water amid the smoke and fire and cannon blasts.

“Inexorable fates,” he sighed, as he lost sight of the bottle that contained his last manuscript, the pages written under the certainty of misfortune and the uncertainty of life: inexorable fates, inexorable star, the manuscript would follow its course while the galleys were joined in combat, locked together at prow or gunwales or stern; the manuscript would float on, indifferent to the shouting, shots, fire, smoke, and laments; the bottle would be borne along in the currents of a turbulent sea, stained now with blood, the sepulcher of severed heads and arms and legs. The manuscript was this minute being washed away by the sea, master of its own eternal life, untouched by pike, lance, sword, fire, or arrow of this fearful combat; it would not perish in the holocaust, the crashing yardarms, masts, the flaming firebrands; and even the most desperate combatant, drowning this afternoon in the foaming sea, would cling to oar or trailing rope or rudder to save himself, but never to a green bottle containing a manuscript. And though its author should die at this very moment, the manuscript would never die.

“What is your name, lad?”

“What is yours, old man?”

“Miguel.”

“And mine as well.”

“It’s a common name, of humble clay.”

“You have to take the name of the land where you live, old man. Here, today, Miguel. Yesterday, in the melancholy oasis lost to us, Mihail-ben-Sama. The day before yesterday, in the tumultuous, teeming Jewish quarters, Michah. I fled the tumult before we were murdered; I fled the Andalusian oasis before we were defeated. I came to Castile to die.”

“Did you know that, lad?”

“It was written. You can’t flee the executioner forever. I thought I could avoid their persecution by living among them, that I would be invisible among them. You see that I was mistaken.”

“You call them executioners? They were merely retaking what was theirs: Andalusia.”

“What they took was ours. We created that land, we embellished it with gardens and mosques and clear fountains. Before, there was nothing. All races lived together there: look at my black eyes, old man, and my blond hair. All bloods flow in my veins. Why must I die because of only one of them?”

“Then you are dying for a lesser, not a principal, reason, lad.”

“Which is which? And why have they locked you here in this cell with me? Why are you to die?”

“I am not to die. I have been ordered to the galleys. But possibly you are right. Perhaps I, too, am condemned for a secondary, not a principal, reason. Forgive me, lad. If I hadn’t seen you one afternoon … walking amid the workmen on this job … savoring an orange … your lips so red … none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have written that accursed poem.”

“It’s all right, old man, don’t blame yourself. If I don’t die for one thing, I’ll die for another. What can I do to change my mixed blood? And someday the Christian world will make a man pay for his Jewish blood. And then those kitchen lads, younger than I … I envied them. La Señora is a little more ripe than you might think. Race … boys … La Señora … what does it matter what the reason, it’s my emotions and my pleasures that kill me, not men…”

“Do you envy youth? I envy yours.”

“You do well to do so, old man. I carry all my secrets with me. With me, they burn at the stake. What shall you do with yours? It isn’t too bad to die still thinking about what one could have been: I wouldn’t like to die knowing what I was.”

“Perhaps I shall imagine what you might have been, lad, and write about it.”

“Good luck, old man, and goodbye.”

The Chronicler moaned, touching his wounded hand, and in the midst of this fearful clamor, choking on the acrid odor of gunpowder, blinded by its murderous opacity, he saw the tattered pennants of Islam, the crescent moons, the defeated stars, and he himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of the prophets of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and gardens and patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that had been made more beautiful by man for man’s pleasure, not for his mortification, as it had been at the necropolis of El Señor Don Felipe; surrounded by the inextinguishable fires of the galleys, thinking he must die, the Chronicler repeated a mute prayer that the peoples of the three religions might love one another and know one another and live in peace, worshipping the one unique God, faceless and incorporeal, the one all-powerful God, the name of the sum of our desires, the one God, sign of the meeting and confraternity of all wisdoms, all pleasures and recreations of mind and body; and believing himself to be mortally wounded, hallucinating from the vision of Turkish heads impaled on pikes and brandished with the victory cry, he remembered that lad with whom he had shared the dungeon the night before the youth’s death and the old man’s exile, he remembered him not as he truly was but as the Chronicler imagined him, the impure hero, the hero in whom all bloods and all passions flowed; in his delirium he imagined all the endless line of impure heroes, heroes without glory, heroes only because they did not scorn their own passions but followed them to their disastrous conclusion, masters of total passion, but mutilated and imprisoned because of the cruelty and narrowness of a religious and political rationale that converted their marvelous madness, their excesses, into a crime: pride … punishable, love … punishable, madness … punishable, dreams … punishable; certain he was dying, he imagined once again all the adventures of those heroes, all the transformations of those knights with frustrated illusions, the undertakings possible only in an impossible world where the external and internal faces of men are one, without disguise, without separation, but impossible in a world that masked both, one for appearing before the world and another for fleeing from it — the world mask, simulation; the escape mask, crime, passion forever separated from appearance: madmen and dreamers, ambitious and enamored men, criminals; he imagined a knight maddened by the truth of his reading, insistent upon converting that truth into a false reality, thereby saving it, and saving himself; he imagined ancient Kings betrayed on black and stormy nights of ignorance and madness by men and women more cruel than pitiless nature itself, which is only involuntarily cruel; and he imagined young Princes enamored of pure words, incapable of provoking the action or exorcising the death that reality reserves for dreamers; he imagined a profaner of honor and sacred convention, a hero of secular passion who would pay for his pleasures in the hell of the law he had denied so often in the name of free, common, and profane pleasure; he imagined couples consumed by love that was both divine and diabolical, for divine and diabolical would be a love in which the lovers no longer distinguished between themselves, the man being the woman and the woman the man, each the other’s being, each one transfixed by a shared dream that defied the social convention of what is individual, separate, what is placed in the pigeonholes of condition, wealth, and family; he imagined a greatly ambitious man, trembling with cold, alone among the millions who populate the earth, alone, denied the presence of gods or men, separated from them, abandoned, the only channel for his energies that of attracting hatred and aversion toward the person of a nature that denies the size of his pride; and he imagined ambitious little men, resigned to their sensual mediocrity, their great dreams unachieved, already defeated, their illusions lost, wasted throughout their lives, like the traveler who leaves some part of his riches in every inn along the highway; power and riches, or murder and suicide: manners of accepting or denying a passion grown pallid; he imagined, finally, the penultimate hero, the one who realizes he is enclosed in the present, his past eclipsed, a past that no longer projects the shadow of the hero that the hero has previously called his future: Tantalus is the name of that hero, of all the heroes who have devoured their present in order to reach a dreamed-of future of madness, ambition, and love, never obtaining it because the future is a fleet phantom that will not let itself be captured; it is the hare, we the turtles; these heroes must turn their faces to the past to recapture what is most precious, what they have lost, what they cannot bring with them in the vibrant and desolate search for the passion forbidden by icy laws and demanded by fiery blood; desire possesses, possession desires, there is no exit, oh, heroic Tantalus of fragile ashes and vanquished dreams; the hero is Tantalus and his opponent is Time; the final battle: Time conquers, Time is conquered …