Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Now she rose and walked toward Pollo through the rain. Pollo stepped back. The girl held out her hand. “ Salve. I have been waiting for you all morning. I arrived last night, but I didn’t want to inconvenience you, although Ludovico insisted on sending you the letter. Did you receive it? Besides, I preferred to wander awhile through the streets alone. I am a woman [she smiled]; I like to receive my surprises alone and the explanations later, from the lips of a man. Why do you look at me so strangely? Didn’t I tell you I would come today to meet you? We made a vow — don’t you remember? — to meet again on the bridge this very day, the fourteenth of July. Of course, the bridge didn’t exist last year; we dreamed there should be a bridge on this spot and now, you see, our wish has been fulfilled. But there are many things I don’t understand. Last year all the bridges across the Seine were of wood. Of what are they made now? No, don’t tell me yet. Hear me to the end. I’m very weary. The trip from Spain is long and difficult. The inns are crowded, and the roads are more dangerous every day. The bands of pilgrims are advancing at a rate that can be explained by only one fact: the aid of the Devil. Terror reigns from Toledo to Orléans. They’ve burned the lands, the harvest, and the granaries. They’re assaulting and destroying the monasteries, churches, and palaces. They are terrible: they kill anyone who refuses to join their crusade; they sow hunger in their wake. And they are magnificent! The poor, the vagabonds, the adventurers, and the lovers are joining them. They have promised that sins will no longer be punished, that poverty will erase all guilt. They say the only crimes are corrupting greed, false progress, and individual vanity; they say the only salvation is to rid oneself of everything one possesses, even one’s name. They proclaim that each of us is divine and therefore everything belongs to all of us. They announce the coming of a new kingdom and they say they live in perfect joy. They are awaiting the millennium that will begin this winter, not as a date, but as an opportunity to remake the world. They quote one of their eremite poets and sing with him that a people without a history is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern of timeless moments. Ludovico is their master; he teaches that the true history will be to live and to glorify those temporal instants, and not, as until now, to sacrifice them to an illusory, unattainable, and devouring future, for every time the future becomes the present instant we repudiate it in the name of a future we desire but will never have. I have seen them. They are a tumultuous army of beggars, fornicators, madmen, children, idiots, dancers, singers, poets, apostate priests, and visionary eremites; teachers who have abandoned their cloisters and students who prophesy the incarnation of impossible ideas, especially this: life in the new millennium must eradicate all notions of sacrifice, work, and property in order to instill one single principle: that of pleasure. And they say that from all this confusion will be born the ultimate community: the minimal and perfect community. At their head comes a Monk, I have seen him: an expressionless gaze and a colorless face; I have heard him: a timbreless, breathy voice; I have known him in another time: he called himself Simón. I have come to tell you of this, as I promised. Now you must explain the things I don’t understand. Why has the city changed so? What do the lights without fire mean? The carts without oxen? The women’s painted faces? The voices without mouths? The Books of Hours pasted to the walls? The pictures that move? The empty clotheslines hanging from house to house? The cages that rise and descend with no birds inside them? The smoke in the streets rising from Hell? The food warmed without fire, and snow stored in boxes? Come, take me in your arms again and tell me all these things.”

The girl knew him. Because of his occupation, Pollo was recognized every day by everyone in the district, but the girl’s recognition was different. He had never been truly recognized before. All about him, throughout the city, children were being born and men were dying: in spite of everything, each child would be baptized and each man would be laid to rest with his own name. But it was not the children being born or the men dying, or the flagellants and pilgrims and crowds at Saint-Germain, that attracted this girl’s attention, but all the normal, everyday, reasonable activities of Paris: the cages rising and descending with no birds within them. Pollo watched with fascination the calligraphy of those lips that had just spoken: this girl has two mouths, with one she speaks perhaps of love; with the other … not hatred, but mystery; love against mystery, mystery against love; idiotic to confuse mystery with hatred; one mouth would speak the words of this time; the other those of a forgotten time. Pollo took a step backward, the girl followed. Wind fluttered her violet smock and the rain bathed her face and hair, but the tattooed lips were indelible, moving silently.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you recognize me? Didn’t I tell you I would return today?”

Be he born or dying, he was Pollo; he was baptized Pollo and would be buried Pollo; the young cripple, the employee of the Cafe Le Bouquet, the sandwich man; Pollo from A to Z. Here … look … where could that book of poems be? Where does it say my name is Pollo? Written by an old madman who confused all symptoms with all causes. The Poet Libra, a Venetian phantom, Pound, exhibited in a cage, a recluse in an American asylum. Gray eyes, eh? The gray eyes of this girl recognized him; but her lips formed, soundlessly, a different name: “Juan … Juan…”

Who was being born? Who was dying? Who could recognize a cadaver in one of the newborn infants on the quays of the Seine? Who is it who’s survived to remember me? Confused, Pollo asked himself these questions; he had only one possible recourse in deciphering the enigmas. He would try to read the words written on the sandwich boards and thus find out what the girl had been reading with such intensity: but the words were written so that the public could read them, not he, and as he twisted his head to try to decipher them, fighting against the whirling wind that blew his long hair into his eyes — twice blinded, by wind and hair — fighting the threat of being engulfed in that odor of burned fingernails, fighting the tactile memory of grease and placenta, fighting against the meaningless words he had uttered, words dictated by a memory of resurrections, ego baptiso te: Iohannes Agrippa … Pollo slipped and lost his balance.

And the girl, through whose eyes had passed the same questions, the same memories, the same survivals — as detailed in her memory as generic in his — reached out to steady Pollo. How was she to know the boy had only one arm? She grasped empty air, her hand scratched by the pins of the empty sleeve … and Pollo fell.

For an instant, the sandwich boards seemed like the wings of Icarus, and a soaring Pollo saw the flaming Paris sky, as if the struggle between light and clouds were resolved in an explosive conflagration; bridges floated like ships in the fog, the black keel of the Pont des Arts, the distant stone sails of the Pont Saint-Michel, the gilded masts of the Pont Alexandre III blazing corposant. Then the blond and handsome youth plunged into the boiling Seine; his shout was muffled in the implacable, silent fog, but for an instant his only hand — white, emblematic — was visible above the water.

With one hand the girl clung to the iron railing of the bridge, and with the other she tossed the sealed green flask into the river; she prayed that Pollo’s hand would grasp the ancient bottle; she tried to peer through the almost motionless mist to the water; she hung her head.