Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Close your door and lock it, Señora. The time of appearances has ended. Disorder has arrived. There are hearers. There are ears. Even the scullery maids and the halberdiers spy, run, tell, return, repeat. That is what I came to tell you. You must take precautions. And remember always who helped you find this lad, helped bring him here, deceiving El Señor and exposing himself to the most severe punishment. Why do you think he did it?”

La Señora laughed. “Undoubtedly because you love me, Guzmán.”

“You know that?”

“It is of no importance. Anything you do out of love I accept as a service. Go ahead, denounce me, let us measure our strengths. And permit me to question yours. My lover is still alive, lying here by my side. You have not killed him. I am here, still untouched. You have not dared to take me. You talk a lot, but you do very little, you are a churl.”

Guzmán bowed his head and backed from the room; he swore to himself that whatever he did, whatever he had to do, he would never again let himself be tempted by that luminous, dark body; and that if ever he was tempted, it would be because, like El Señor, he had desired her body without seeing it or touching it, or even thinking of it. Desire it, but do not touch it; for a moment Guzmán felt himself a victim of the accursed chivalric code; no, by God, take, take without hesitation, immediately, yes, ravish what one desires. He was on the point of returning to La Señora’s bedchamber. He was stopped by the taste of gall upon his lips, as if he had in truth drunk the milk of the woman’s breasts. His soul was bitter and for a moment he hung his head, saddened and humiliated. But only the old and sick falcons would hear his pain.

“Quickly,” he said to the huntsman who awaited him outside with his torch held high. “There is no time to lose.”

CONCUBIUM

At the hour of sleep, Celestina was alone with Jerónimo in the forge, where the smith with the prematurely aged gaze, never taking his eyes from the woman, continued to forge the chains ordered by Guzmán: the ubiquitous and efficient Guzmán, who, when he was not personally attending El Señor or training hawks or curing hounds, wandered through the palace dungeons: Guzmán murmuring, stroking the plaited strands of his moustache: “Here there are luxurious marble prisons for the dreams of the dead, but not enough chains for the dreams of the living.”

Jerónimo was close to Celestina, but also distant, while outside, Martín, Catilinón, and Nuño were feeding the weakened, mute youth who had accompanied Celestina here. Jerónimo felt close because he had recognized her and knew it was she, but distant, nevertheless, because he did not really recognize her, it was not really she. No one on the plain would sleep this night. The smith Jerónimo would keep the vigil of memory; looking at Celestina, he recalled the pale young girl whose hands had circled the neck of the ruddy, robust bridegroom on the day of their wedding in the grange, before El Señor and his son, the young Felipe, arrived to destroy — coldly, unfeelingly, disdainfully, and cruelly — the modest but ample happiness of the young pair. Jerónimo laid down the chains and approached Celestina, still dressed as a page, all in black. He took her hands in his and examined them for traces of that long-ago torture by fire, when the girl raped by El Señor repeatedly thrust her hands into the fire, biting upon a rope to bear the pain. But now he could not find the scars of those remembered wounds; he thought surely that time, for once merciful, must have erased them; in contrast, those painted lips were like a wound, as if on them time, once again merciless, had there recorded his sweetheart’s pain and humiliation. He wanted to kiss those lips, but Celestina placed her hand upon his.

“It is you, Celestina; it is you, I am not mistaken?”

The youth led here from the beach, standing at the entrance to the forge illuminated by the weak fires of this late hour, watched Celestina parry the uncertain, irresolute kiss of the smith Jerónimo, who had not known whether to kiss first the ancient wounds of her hands or the new scars on the tattooed lips: he could not decide whether lips or hands more greatly merited the kisses of an old affection.

“Is it you, Celestina? Is it truly you? I am not mistaken? Many years have passed since you fled from that house, but you have not changed at all; you are the same girl I married, whereas I … look at me, I am an old man now … you are the same, aren’t you?”

The page-and-drummer’s fingertips still rested lightly upon the smith’s lips, but Jerónimo, with a leonine movement, jerked his head away, seized Celestina violently by the shoulders, and said: “I have waited too long.”

“But I was never yours.”

“God united us.”

“But I have belonged to others.”

“That doesn’t matter; I have waited years, many long years, for you; and your absence, woman, turned my waiting into patience; today it is my desire to change this humble patience into vengeance. You are Celestina, aren’t you?”

“I am and I am not; I am she; I am another. Jerónimo, I do not belong to you.”

“To whom then? That youth you brought with you?”

Celestina emphatically shook her head no, several times, and the youth moved sadly away from the threshold. Now in the hour of sleep, Celestina said no, I was not his, not in the way you believe; I thought I would possess him, but I was mistaken; when we lay together, the youth and I, one night on the mountain highway leading to this palace, naked beneath the stars, lying on the earth still warm from drinking in the July sun, impervious to the cold mantle of sudden night, I thought I would possess him; though he did not know who I was, I knew him, for I had taken advantage of the first hours of his sleep to break the seal of the green bottle and read the manuscript within, thus confirming that he was the same I had seen born, when I was a girl, from the belly of a she-wolf in the brambles of the forest; but then I fell asleep and when I awakened he had placed upon my face a mask of many-colored feathers, of bands of feathers radiating outward from a black sun, a center of dead spiders; and I knew I had discovered only half his secrets and that the other half I could know only by giving myself to him; still dressed as a page, I embraced him, fearing the passing of mountain muleteers who would see us and believe that two youths had given themselves to forbidden love, believing themselves alone in the night on the unpopulated mountain; slowly he disrobed me, slowly he covered my body with kisses, slowly he took me, made me his until my fingers clawed the cross upon his back and I cried out, from pleasure, yes, but also from horror, for I felt in the embrace of that youth a bottomless vacuum, as if when his flesh penetrated mine the two of us had hurtled into nothingness, fallen from some high cliff, were floating in air, captured in the cataract at the end of the world; my knowledge ended and his began there, in the center of the knot of love; forgive me, Jerónimo, but I must tell you everything; as I opened the windows of my flesh to him, I knew that he had been where no other man of our world had ever been; I am not sure whether I heard him speak or whether the soft pressure of his hands upon my buttocks spoke to me, or whether his warm breath in my ear recounted wordless stories, or whether in his fixed and tender and passionate gaze, when he drew his head back from mine to fully witness my pleasure, there unrolled a fragile parchment whereon were written the letters of a simple but incomprehensible message, serene in its certainty but terrifying in its novelty: voice, body, breath, gaze, probable dream, hands; everything about him was a cipher, a message, a word, the true and glorious news — not that which Christians have fruitlessly awaited century after century; no. Did I possess him? Did he possess me? I do not know, Jerónimo, and it does not matter; we were, perhaps, both possessed by the news my own body received as we made love, I and this youth found on the beach of the Cabo de los Desastres; for in love-making the youth’s memory returned and what he remembered is this, Jerónimo: we were right, our youth was not mistaken, our love was not mistaken, old Pedro was right, his ship could have carried us to a new land, the earth does not end where you and I and El Señor believed; there is another land, far beyond the ocean, a land we do not know and which does not know us; this is what the youth told me; he knows, he has been there; he knows the new world, Jerónimo …