Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

El Señor arose from the bed and wrapped himself in the dark green bedcover; he tried to hear, to see, to sense some sign of the normal passing of time. But his penetrating and avid eyes saw only proof of abnormality: the candles of the chamber instead of having burned themselves out had grown taller; the hourglass instead of having during all that time filled the lower glass showed the upper globe filled with tiny yellow grains; he looked at the vessel from which he had drunk during the long day and night of their love-making, the water that cleared the cobwebs from his throat; it was brimming full. And he thought, here am I, a man thirsting for marvels he wishes both to accept and to reject; such a disposition gives all the advantages to the marvels, for they can, as they are convoked, impose themselves, conquer, precisely because they have been summoned against the will; and magic prospers in negation.

El Señor picked up the hand mirror he had carried one morning as he ascended the thirty-three steps of the unfinished stairway, and in which on another day he interrogated the figures of the painting brought — he was assured — from Orvieto: he wished now to regard in it the man thinking these thoughts, as if the mirror might also reflect the semblance of thought, and a flicker of madness crossed his face; had not that same mirror fallen and shattered upon the stone floor of the chapel that dismal morning? how, when, why did the fragments recompose between that morning and the day when he dictated his first testament? did the shattered pieces join together by themselves, more desirous of their union in quicksilvery smoothness than El Señor himself to possess a single destiny and not a monstrous plural metamorphosis of youth into age into cadaver into dispersed, mutilated matter, dust particles formed into antagonistic matter, reintegrated, formed again in the sperm of a beast, the egg of a she-wolf, in a resurrected birth, a new desire to nourish itself, grow, kill, die, an unending circle, immortal matter … without a soul.

He staggered toward the door of the chamber, he parted the tapestry that separated the room from the chapel, he looked toward the steps leading upward to the plain; raving, he asked, why was that stairway not completed? why could his thirty corpses not descend there? it was not completed, it was supposed to have only thirty steps, it would never be completed, it already had thirty-three, he raved …

“Accursed is a man who would govern so. He will lose everything if he cannot manage to maintain — with the same extenuating strength he employs to entreat his burning fantasy — an icy lucidity. Who would not exhaust his forces?”

From the bed Inés followed El Señor’s movements with a slight movement of her head, round and thistly as the first figs of the Barbary coast, trying to deduce the meaning of El Señor’s investigations, why his uncertain steps faltered as he walked around the bedchamber, why he looked at himself in a mirror, why he stood clinging to a tapestry; he looked at her looking at him with curiosity, he saw her shaven head, and with an uncontainable surge of affection he attributed to her an innocence that could only accentuate the degree of culpability of the acts in this cloister where mirrors and rites repaired unaided their scattered fragments; stairs, completed, were forever uncompleted; candles, as they burned, grew taller; water, as it was drunk, replenished itself; and hours, as they were spent, returned. El Señor felt that his body and soul had separated; the ax that had divided them was irrational time; to which of the thus divorced moments did his body belong, and to which his soul: to this moment, the one which with all too sufficient proof was skittering backward like a crab, toward fatal origins, the total consummation his mother the Mad Lady had announced, claiming to have arrived with the son of the father who at the same time would be the father of the grandfather; or to the moment which in spite of everything, with every step El Señor took through the chamber, with every slow and questioning turn of Inés’s head, insisted on catapulting itself into the future?

“There is a clock that does not strike,” El Señor murmured.

Then Inés — concentrating upon divining El Señor’s thoughts, with no point of orientation other than his restrained curiosity as he stood before some candles, an hourglass, and a water pitcher — picked up the pitcher, contemplated it for an instant, and then poured its contents onto the stained and rumpled bed.

“What are you doing, for God’s sake!” El Señor exclaimed; and as he observed the novitiate’s action he felt that the shadow of madness flitted across his soul.

“I am cleaning the sheets, Señor; they are stained with blood.”

Without putting it into words, Inés sensed that, like cisterns, hearts are rapidly emptied, but they fill very slowly, drop by drop. Like the cistern, she felt emptied; and emptied, conquered, and transformed. Her happiness, her curiosity, her nervous, childish, Andalusian innocence belonged to a remote past; yesterday, barely yesterday, giggling and shivering, she had stood with Sister Angustias looking at the bodies of the workmen. And now she knew that she must wait a long time before her body would again be filled. Her emotions were full, but she felt unsatisfied, used, defiled, with no freedom, no curiosity, no joy; she was not herself: “My self is not my own.”

“Señor, I must go back.”

“Where, Inés?”

“Do not ask me that; do not send Guzmán for me; I shall return … when I feel filled again. Filled, Señor, needed.”

“I can send for you whenever I wish; I can order you … you cannot…”

“No; I shall come, if I come, at my own pleasure; you cannot force me; that would be a horrible sin.”

El Señor knelt beside the bed and repeatedly kissed her hand; Inés, you are the innocent proof that time is turning back; sweet Inés, beautiful, young, soft, warm Inés with the olive-black eyes and skin like crushed white lilies; my youth has returned; we have spent twenty-four hours together, the time it takes to fill the hourglass, the time it takes a tall wax taper to burn itself out, the time it takes to drain a brimming water pitcher; you entered my chamber with the dusk; with the dusk you are leaving; how old are you, Inesilla? eighteen? twenty? why were you not born earlier, ten, fifteen years earlier? then we would have met in time, when I still was young; the two of us, you and I, Inés, young; we would have fled from this place, renouncing everything, with you I would have abdicated time before crime and inheritance collected their toll, we would have fled together on the aged Pedro’s ship, we would have found a new land, together, now it is too late, because the end still has not come, how long it takes to come: there will be time only at the end, Inés, and then I shall be very old and you very different; now your presence and your youth are a mockery, a mirage that makes me believe that because I am master of this land, of labor and honor, I am also master of time, and can recover it at will, be young again, not fear death, offer my life to others, not their deaths; but that, at least now, cannot be, Inés, it cannot be; there is no salvation, for if time, instead of running forward to reveal to me the death I saw in my mirror as I climbed those unfinished steps, begins to run backward, then I shall fear not my death but my birth; then my birth will be my death; there is no salvation now, there will be none until dying I know whether I shall be born again, and once born know whether I shall again die; now there is no salvation: there is only a time that, however long it last, Inés, is never the same for two living beings, for no one is born at the precise instant another man or another woman is born; so I am alone … alone; the time of one man never coincides perfectly with that of other men; we are separated not only by years but by the unsynchronized and unique rhythm of our lives, my precious Inesilla, my beloved Inés; to live is to be different, only death is identical, only in death are we identical; and if this were not true, if death were only another form of being, then what? would our guilt and our sorrows never end? forgive me, forgive me, Inés, again, forgive me; absolve me, precious child, absolve me if you can; with you I have truly sinned; I have sinned against you; until I met you I had always asked myself, prostrate every day before the altar in my chapel, facing those carefully identified but unknown figures of the painting from Orvieto, what would be the unforgivable sin?; there must be one, one sin that will forever close to us the gates of Heaven; I wanted to know what it was, Inés, I imagined everything, every possible combination, scrabbling at the very foundations of our Faith like a devilish mole, suggesting to myself corrosive doubts that could undermine the basis of my power as it is recognized by the Faith, as a simple reflection of Faith, risking my power as I risked my Faith; I have tried by every means possible, do you understand, Inés, heresy and blasphemy, crime and cruelty, illness and culpable indifference, affirmation and negation, action and omission, to know the face of impardonable sin; to test myself, I tested everything I knew; what sin could never be pardoned?; but each of my sins found its own justification; hear me well, Inés, try to understand even though you will not listen: I killed, but power justifies that crime; I imposed my authority, but devotion is pardon enough for the sin of power; I spent hours and days in mystic humiliation, but honor, my own and that of God, excuses the sin of excessive devotion, which is in turn related to the sin of pride that engenders the crime that serves as the excuse for power that procreates devotion that seeks the pardon that, once again, culminates in honor — our salvation; by denying Faith one merely fortifies it, for Faith swells in proportion to attacks and doubts against it; one denies life, one levels a fertile plain and forces men who once earned their livings there to labor slavishly constructing a dwelling for death … and life is strengthened, finding a thousand reasons whereby it can thus assaulted affirm itself; and this very palace, constructed for death, does it not already have the life of all created things? is it not like a gigantic stone reptile binding me in its jasper and mosaic coils, does it not possess a heart beating in its basalt breast that wishes to be heard, to affirm, to live on its own account, independent of the will of the one who conceived it and of those who constructed it? On the other hand, you … you are the unforgivable sin, the sin that cannot be pardoned either by crime or power or devotion or honor or pride or blasphemy or death; kill you, subjugate you, pray you, exalt you, insult you, kill you: all in vain; as is the abominable custom of human beings I have made love to you looking into your face — beasts, more wise, do not look each other in the eye during their fornication — facing you, I have sullied you, the more you consented, the greater the violation, facing you; I am lying here beside you, and you beside me, alone, alone in the universe, stripped of customs and motivations, the only relationship our own, yours and mine, you I and I you, and I have taken from you but can give you nothing in exchange, you and I alone, facing one another; but nothing more, I give nothing of the only things I am able, or fear, or have learned to give: not death, not subjugation, not sacrifice or pride; a man and a woman alone, together, their only offering to each other the draining coming together, sufficient, swift, eternal, gratuitous, impossible to transfer to any realm not that of its own instantaneity, its own pleasure, its own misfortune: Heaven and Hell, judgment beyond appeal, infinite pain and infinite joy forever united; anyone may call me to account for my acts, witch or astrologer, farmer or student, my wife, my mother, Guzmán or Julián … for any of my acts except this one, today, with you, an act that leads to nothing, consumed in itself, here and now, sufficient unto itself, enclosed in a circle of delectable flames, an act that originates in nothing and goes nowhere, and nevertheless the greatest pleasure and the greatest worth; it does not demand of us the calculation, the anxiety, the sustained will, or time of all the undertakings that promise us a place beneath the sun, and nevertheless, undemanding as it is, it is worth more than they, and is its own immediate reward. Is this love, Inés, this act that belongs to no one and to nothing but you and me?; have we consented to evil in order to experience good, and to good in order to know evil, alone, an act that affects no one except you and me and for which no one can demand anything of us, not even we ourselves, and if this is love and if love is such, Heaven and Hell, a cause sufficient unto itself, mutual sustenance, a hermetic exchange between two people, prison of enchantment, good and evil shared, then through which rent in Heaven, through which chink in Hell, through which crevice in the prison wall, Inés, will my individual, my unforgivable sin filter? the sin that separates you from me and destroys the plentiful causes of love, linking love again to what would deny it: power and death, honor and death, devotion and death? I have given you illness in exchange for pleasure, while you have answered pleasure only with pleasure; I have involved you in the line of my corrupt blood, having denied that same evil to La Señora, my wife who is already of my blood, my cousin, out of horror of continuing a degenerate dynasty as well as nostalgia to maintain a juvenile ideal of love that may be desired but not touched; Inés, Inés, will you be what Guzmán said, new earth for my exhausted seed, will my corrupt seed be cleansed in your womb, or will my corruption impose itself upon your purity? will I infect your very entrails, ravage your skin?; may I pardon myself by arguing that before I knew you I did not know I was to make love to you, Inés?; but that is not enough, is it? that is not enough because love is like no other thing, and in no other thing may it be justified but in itself, nothing outside of love can save it although everything outside it can condemn it. Thus love is at once its own heaven and hell; but I have succeeded — knowing heaven and transforming it into hell — in separating Heaven from Hell, in giving all the powers to the abyss and denying them to Paradise, hoping, in spite of everything, that Heaven will take pity on me; do not abandon me, Inés … leave me, Inés, leave through that door that leads to my chapel and never return … never leave this chamber … go … stay … Inés …