Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

As La Señora moved closer to embrace the youth, he recalled with a rush of terror the last instant of his consciousness in the litter, when he had felt La Señora’s breath upon his throat, when a face like a silvery moon had appeared between the parted veils and between parted red lips he had seen ferocious, bloody, greedy fangs …

“Do you want to see yourself, Juan? Do you want to know what you look like and, when you see, love yourself as I love you?”

La Señora held a mirror of black marble to Juan’s face; as the youth penetrated its turbid depths he saw himself, naked; he recognized himself, and for an instant loved himself; the longer he looked, the more he loved himself, but as that love and that gaze were prolonged, a stern and rigid hatred rose from the tremors of self-love and crystallized in the form of a body; it was he, this image, this reflection, this shadow; he had no other proof of his existence, and on the beach his only certainty had been that he would become the name he was first called and the face he was first shown; it was he, his nakedness reproduced in the black mirror La Señora held before him, and that uncontestable self, always with the same features, the original face, was assuming the aspect of a woman; he saw his body, again in the same unchanging form, being clothed in La Señora’s garments and then, like La Señora, lying upon its back on the paving stones of a courtyard; rain washed the body and soaked the clothing but did not wash away the assimilated man and woman in the mirror’s image; when the sun reached its zenith the rain ceased; the shadow of Juan and La Señora’s common body — La Señora with Juan’s features, Juan with La Señora’s clothing and hair and jewels — disappeared, and Juan choked back a moan; the mirror reproduced the death tremor, the reflected figure sighed its last sigh, and La Señora, who was he, surrounded by indifferent alguaciles and uneasy duennas and inquisitive halberdiers, expired in the courtyard of her torment; they died together, Juan and La Señora, with no arms worthy to assist them, the body of love abandoned by the master engaged in Flemish lands in his last combat of arms; they died at the same instant in the mirror, two souls inhabitating the same body died only for an instant; the mouse that had in turn inhabited La Señora’s farthingale slipped swiftly between the corpse’s legs, burrowed through the tangle of black hair, entered the slippery vagina, ascended through the entrails, devoured the heart of the dead figure, climbed to the eyes, the brain, the tongue, stained them with black urine, emerged through the mouth of the corpse, and the corpse breathed again; the shadow of the body reappeared and slowly lengthened toward the west, the movement in the courtyard, temporarily suspended, was resumed; the halberdiers renewed their coarse jokes, elbowing each other slyly, the maidservants held soupspoons to the mouth of the prone figure; it all happened in an instant, death passed without being seen, almost without leaving a trace; but in the hiatus between life, death, and resurrection, that body had been possessed, that pact concluded; the mouse restored life to the woman who was La Señora with the face of Juan: what would the woman give the satanic Mus in exchange?

The image in the marble dissolved. La Señora withdrew the mirror from before the youth’s face. With a cry, he clutched his wounded neck; he imagined his own body, pallid and waxen, just as he had seen it in the mirror, dead in life, alive in death; and with a memory of lightning as dark as that at midday in the castle courtyard, a memory further awakened by the cock’s crow, he repeated to himself the story La Señora had told him his first night in this bedchamber; he opened his eyes and searched in vain for the features of the little English girl who had entertained herself in dressing up the maidservants, playing with her dolls, and burying peach stones in the garden; he saw a mature woman by his side, almost overripe, poised on the hazardous, knife-thin edge of a ripeness depicted in contrasting areas of black and white, here the impenetrable blackness of the eyelashes, there the dazzling whiteness of the skin, here again the noxious darkness of the hair; not a step farther, not a minute more lest the equilibrium be broken and this Señora who watched over him here, made love to him, nourished him but was also nourished by him, would blow away like a statue of dust, disintegrate like a spider’s web, cave in like a tunnel of sand, melt like the snows of spring, rot like fruit abandoned to the severity of the sun and rain and wind. (Do I nourish myself from you? you the one called Juan Agrippa, according to Julián the painter-priest? do I sink my teeth into your neck, suck your blood, without knowing, without will? I have wished only to love you, absorb you, touch you, kiss you, like any woman who desires her man, do only what any woman in love will do; I swear it, Juan, I did not know my fingernails and teeth do more, bite flesh, rake nerves, suck blood; for my body, for my ordinary body, Juan, what any woman wants would be enough, but my body is twofold, mine and that of my true master, the diabolical mouse that feeds from me as I from you; it kisses you through me, and through my flesh drinks your blood and through me makes love to you; poor Mus; it was so tiny and silky, so hungry, so industrious; it must envy your beauty, Juan, surely it wants to be like you: an angel …)

Like fruit abandoned … the youth remembered, again he summoned the image of La Señora lying in the castle courtyard, invaded by mice, skin peeling from the sun, body lashed by the rain, and he saw her at that moment convoking the last resort of the afflicted, the only being capable of saving her, the fallen Prince who could enter into a pact with her and promise her salvation in exchange for her submission to his mandates; he had known all this from the moment La Señora told him her story on the first day of his amorous captivity; but now, after looking into the black mirror, he knew something more: that La Señora was he himself, and that the pact effected with the Mus saved La Señora not only from her torment but from an actual although instantaneous death, fleeting because the mouse did not permit it to be prolonged into eternal death; that death, my God, was double: both hers and his; she had been saved from the torture of absurd ceremony and the anguish of unloved flesh, and saved also from death, along with the lover who was he, the young shipwrecked sailor with features identical to La Señora’s; and thus he saw file before his feverish gaze the phantoms of the other youths who had preceded or would succeed him in this bedchamber; his ears were deafened with the sound of the forgotten footsteps of youths without name or number who had passed or would pass to the stake and the gallows through La Señora’s bedchamber, where their last years had engendered or would engender new subterranean creatures torn by night from their damp tombs and brought to the oasis of the palace, to this bedchamber of white sands and heavy perfumes and brilliant tiles and sumptuous brocades; for where could this chamber lead (Juan asked his awakened and frightened imagination) but to the tomb, from the tomb to this bed, and from this bed to the tomb, the only other avenues those of Hell: repetitious fate. He heard the crowing of the cock and told himself he did not want to be but another of that number, that legion of phantoms created like wax dolls from the love and hatred and dissatisfaction and desires of La Señora.

“Guzmán, Guzmán,” Juan sighed sadly. “Guzmán, why did you not dare take her for yourself, why? Your man’s body would have broken the chain of phantoms. You could have saved me, Guzmán, I knew it, I told you, implored you in silence; you have condemned me, Guzmán, you have condemned me to be the twin of the woman who loves me so that she may love herself, and whom I love so that I may love myself; you have imprisoned me in a mirror, Guzmán … with her, like her … I am she, she is I…”