Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“I had a nightmare: I dreamed that I was three persons,” said El Señor.

“You and I, Juan, you and I, one couple, Juan,” said La Señora.

“I alone, trembling with cold, I alone, without the presence of gods or men,” said Guzmán …

… don’t speak, don’t look, you are blind, you are deaf; my knowledge is total, but incomplete, only you were lacking to make it complete, only you knew what I could not know, because my wisdom is that of only one world, this world, our world, the world of Caesar and Christ, a closed world, a sorrowful world, whole, seamless as a succubus, without orifices, contained within its memory of certain misfortune and impossible illusions: a world that is a flickering flame in a night of turbulent storm: of it I know everything; I knew nothing of the other world, the one that you knew, the one that has always existed knowing nothing of us, as we knew nothing of it; I saw you born, my son, I, I saw you born from the belly of a wolf; who, then, but I would be present as the circle of your life, begun one night in the brambles of a forest, closes; who but I on the beach where you awakened this morning, without memory, forgotten by everything, forgotten by everyone, except by the person who received your feet as you were born? Take your hand for one moment from my shoulder; check, do you have the map safe in your breeches, do you have the green bottle I saw you pick up on the beach? Good; again, forward; don’t look; they are looking at us; they are coming toward us; they thought that the wonders had ended, they are looking at us in amazement, a page and a shipwrecked sailor: the pair that was missing; they are looking at us; they are leaving their taverns, their tile sheds, their forges; the weeping is quieting; we are walking forward, opening a path through the smoke and dust and heat, I, dressed all in black, deceiving them, giving the impression that my sex and my condition are other, not my own; you, tattered, your feet bare and bleeding, your hair rumpled, your eyes closed, your lips covered with dust. And then that bearded man — ruddy from the glowing coals, his chest sweaty, and his gaze prematurely old — drops his bellows, looks intently at me, approaches, opens a path through the throng, looks again, this time into my eyes, does not recognize my lips, but does recognize my gaze, holds out his hands, doubts, touches my breasts, falls to his knees, embraces my legs, and murmurs my name, again and again.

STAGES OF THE NIGHT

The night in Rome had seven phases, Brother Toribio, the palace astrologer, told Brother Julián, as he scrutinized the dark heavens above the high tower reserved for him by El Señor, and the other listened gloomily: crepusculum; fax, the moment at which the torches are lighted; concubium, the hour of sleep; nox intempesta, the time when all activity is suspended; gallicinium, the cock’s crow; conticinium, silence; and aurora.

For each stage of the long night of our ancestors — so divided in order to prolong, or perhaps to shorten (it was impossible to know for absolute fact), the process of time — Brother Julián assigned one of the bedchambers of the palace still under construction to represent a different phase; in his mind, two figures, a pair, materialized in each chamber, arranged by the priest as a kind of game, or final combat, a tourney without appeal whose time would be regulated by those nocturnal phases, seven in number, a solemn, fatal, and consecrated number: “Choose seven stars from the sky, Brother Toribio…”

Seven stages of the night: seven stars? seven couples? The night is natural, the painter-priest said to himself, and its division into phases a mere convention, as are too the names of persons; a person is a name or a noun, an action is a verb, conventions; the night itself would not know to label itself “night,” even less know that it is inaugurated by dusk and closed by dawn; the stars are infinite, and to choose among them is another convention, the choice this time a matter of chance: Fornax Chemica, Lupus, Corvus, Taurus Poniatowskii, Lepus, Crater, Horologium; neither did the seven constellations from among which Brother Toribio chose seven stars for Brother Julián’s night know their names; when it came to naming seven pairs … would there be a sufficient number of men and women in this palace … in this world, to form them? For the roles of fate and convention, in matters regarding an encounter between two human beings, are insignificant beside the power of the will of passion or the passion of will. And thus the perfect symmetries conceived by intelligence never surpass the ideal of the imagination but instead succumb to the proliferating invasion of hazardous irrationality; one demands to be two in order to be perfect, but it is not long until a contingent third appears, demanding its place in the dual equilibrium, only to destroy it. But perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror; nature rejects that order, preferring instead to proceed with the multiple disorder of the certainty of freedom.

Brother Julián remembered his lost friend, the Chronicler; he would have liked at this moment to say to him: “Let others write the history of events that are apparent: the battles and the treaties, the hereditary conflicts, the amassing and dispersion of authority, the struggles among the estates, the territorial ambition that continues to link us to animality; you, the friend of fables, you must write the history of the passions, without which the history of money, labor, and power is incomprehensible.”

CREPUSCULUM

Many years later, old, alone, cloistered, El Señor would recall that this night, at the crepuscular hour, he had caressed for the last time the warm hollow of Inés’s back, where in that animated sweetness, in that soft quiet spot of her body, he had found, and held in his hand, his true pleasure; the protuberant lip kissed the curve that transformed the delicious narrowness of her waist into the magnificent fullness of her buttocks, and he moved away from the novitiate’s knowing body, a body that in spite of everything was still unknown to him; always he would ask himself — then and later, but always with the same feverish anguish, augmented perhaps by the swift passage of time that rushed toward the future while the memory of reality, of what could be verified because it had happened, ran backward, ceased to be tangible and sure to become spectral and doubtful, the past: who are you, Inesilla, a princess or a farm girl? brought to me by Guzmán, delivered by Guzmán to my pleasure: are you the daughter of a merchant, a workman, or a noble? how well the habit disguises one’s origins, how well, the moment he dons the habit, the converted Jew, the heretical doctor, the son of miserable swineherds, disguises his condition; neither the armor of the soldier nor the ermine of the emperor disguises men as well, or to such a degree makes them equal, as the tunic of devotion. What lineage have I violated: the highest or the lowest? what youth have I forever besmirched? who is this, my subject? more subjected than the peasant who delivers his harvest to me, more subjected than the vassal who pays me homage, or the worker who labors in my quarries; who is this subject of my sick flesh? the sweet depository for the silver that flows through my bones? the heir to my shameful afflictions? who? and to whom, in turn, do I deliver her that my very kingdom be overspread with that sick silver? or are we condemned, she and I, to live together from this moment, secretly bound together, hiding our love as we hide our shared illness? In you, I have sinned, I have sinned knowingly, my unknown Inés; I did not want it, I did not wish it; Guzmán divined my weaknesses, the moment my will faltered; death surrounded me, my thirty corpses were less exhausted than I, I had dictated to Guzmán that spurious testament, imagining my death, and Guzmán took advantage of my awareness of death to offer you to me; who, even I, does not weaken when surrounded by so much death? who does not fall into the temptation of affirming life, even though by so doing he poisons life, sickens it, and prepares it, though loving it, for death? you came to me, Inés, like an offering of provisional life, to make me believe that I, a phantom, could without punishment, without affliction, without body, making love to a virgin; that I could possess you, Inés, more with terror of mind than with trembling of body; that I might imagine you, lying in the bed, only to consider that as today you lie in bed someday your body will lie in the tomb; and I succeeded, didn’t I, Inés?; you have not closed your eyes one second, and to make love with one’s eyes open is already to have one foot inside the grave, it is to spy upon the lesser death, the infant death, the servile death, that lurks behind the beauty of the rose; you have not sighed all the time we have been together, you have watched me with those wide-open eyes, however, you did not desire the irrepressible heat of your own body, your body that bursts into flame in spite of your cold will to know everything, to examine everything, to give yourself to me in order to know, not to take pleasure …