Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The first youth rescued from the sea countered La Señora’s every caress — the hands eager to insure their dominance and the passivity of the youth they possessed — with the question: Who am I?; the response was always the same: I am she, and if I am she, as I love her I love myself, and as I make love to her I make love to myself, and eventually I shall not be able to answer the question: Who am I? for this love will have forever destroyed my self, and he answered his jailer’s every repulsive kiss with the burning strophes of a litany that defined him as it delineated her: in order to differentiate himself from her, he would be her equal, she would gain nothing of his true and secret self, she would derive from his beautiful and fecund and warm body only her own qualities, herself, and he would go into the world to be what she was in this enclosed chamber, a covetous and deficient woman, envious, malicious, thieving, greedy, inconstant, the two-edged blade (Juan: “I fear, I imagine, and I try to recall my identity but I can identify only with the first thing I see upon awakening, the only thing I know outside myself: I am you because the only thing I know besides myself is you), proud, pretentious, lying, garrulous, indiscreet, curious, lustful (Isabel: “I desire and I reject, I admit and I deny: you see yourself in me and that is my triumph, you despise what you see of yourself in me, and that is my sadness, you take from me what I am so you may be you, and that is my defeat, we are identified in one another, and that is our miserable truth”), root of all evil … who will tell of your lies, your deals and exchanges, your lewdness and your tears, your tumult and your daring, your deception and forgetting, your ingratitude and coldness, your inconstancy and your attestations, your denials and reconsiderations, your presumption, your depression and madness, your disdain, your chatter and your coercion, your greed, your fear and your audacity, your ridicule and your shame? this woman, this woman (Juan: “Your hands are awakening me: I am you”), the vehicle of the Devil (Isabel: “I lie, I fear, I imagine; this youth is not I, he is you, Mus of the Devil, hymen-eater, you made use of me so that you could penetrate me and extract from me your desired image, your angel of light, your heart imprisoned within a body before the creation of the hells you inhabit”), discoverer of the forbidden tree, deserter of the law of God, inciter of men (Juan: “I am awake: I am you; am I a woman?”), seat of sin, weapon of the Devil, expulsion from Paradise, mother of sin, corrupter of the law, enemy of friendship, sorrow from which one cannot flee (Isabel: “Mouse, devil, fallen serpent who caused my fall, seek again your body of light, find the angel you one day were, possess it”), necessary evil, natural temptation, desired calamity (Juan: “I awake: I am you, are you a woman? do I reflect you or you me? are your attributes mine?”), domestic danger, sinful detriment, essence of evil (Juan: “Do you and I reflect another being?”), destroyer of manhood, tempest of the hearth, impediment to repose, jailer of life (Isabel: “But with me you would be neither you nor another; you would have neither face nor virtue nor defect; if you are not I, you are nothing except what passes through me; it is the same, regardless”), daily harm, willful dispute, sumptuous battle, invited beast, thirst for permanence, enveloping lioness (Juan: “The mirror, please, the mirror again”), embellished danger (Isabel: “Night, please, night again”), malicious animal, woman … this woman.

As he repeated the litany, the youth knew who he was: he was able to answer his own question; he identified himself with the woman; having plucked its fruit, he rejected the identification, and hoped that La Señora would do what she had to do, what he had begged and she had refused to do. La Señora took the marble mirror. Juan seized it from her grasp and held it to La Señora’s face. In the mirror, as she looked at herself, La Señora saw Juan. She saw his slim body, the pattern of muscles in the torso, chest burned by marine sun, ocher arms, white legs; monstrous beauty: six toes on each foot; mysterious beauty: a blood-red cross upon his back: Juan’s body, but from the neck emerged the head of a mouse; the crown of the body of love was the tiny, sagacious, mocking head of the Mus, darting eyes and twitching ears, gray fur and stiff whiskers, a damp, black, sensitive nose, a scarlet tongue, and greedy fangs. La Señora saw what she knew, and dropped the mirror upon the sand of the floor. He was she, and therefore other; he was other, and therefore he; he was himself.

“Everything that thinks, dares; everything that dares, thinks,” said Don Juan.

With inexorable will, he cast La Señora from him, watched her tumble, hair flying, toward the edge of the bed, feigning incomprehension, weakened by the fear and the need to hide her terrible happiness (Isabel: “If I have triumphed, I have lost; if I have lost, I have triumphed”), momentarily defenseless, questioning, incredulous, knowing what she knew but rejecting that knowledge; bursting with self-awareness, obsessed by the resonance of his name, his destiny, his adventure, Don Juan arose from the bed; a cistern long empty, he was abruptly filled with the liquid vices and froth of an identity seized from the woman whose greatest fear and greatest desire was that she might lose him (Isabel: “My triumph and my defeat”), seized also from dream, words, the remote flow of origins, a long-dormant will awakened by the cock’s crow with its faint promise of dawn and sun, a day of heat and risk, but also with its sad memory of betrayal; Don Juan walked to one of the walls; he tore from the wall a thick, opaque, luminous brocade woven of shadow and silver and wrapped it about him; he stared with mockery and scorn and pride at the Señora with the terrible lips and wild eyes, crouched like an animal, naked, on all fours upon the bed, black and white, at the point of rotting, at the point of crumbling into sand indistinguishable from the sand of the floor, contemplating the rebellion of her angel, her succubus, her vampire, with a mixture of apprehension and nostalgia, triumph and defeat, as if this was what she both expected and refused to accept, what she both feared and desired, something she remembered already, with resignation, and something more: the fatal return to this chamber, this prison and its caresses, already divined, expected. The youth walked with firm steps to the door of the bedchamber.

“Where are you going?” La Señora’s voice could not express the contradictory complexity of her emotions, her words voiced a single attitude among the hundreds the Devil had set aboil in the breast of his serf. “You cannot leave here, you cannot; life is here, by my side (No, your life is outside; carry me into the world within your skin, carry my master, the diabolic mouse, into the world; bury his stiff, hairy tail deep in all the asses he and I can never possess, go, with your archangel image, to perform the work of infernal imagination; exist, fornicate, kill, deceive, satiate yourself for him and for me, Juan; break all the chains of chastity; free us, Juan; go and tell the world it is not we women who are the instruments of the Devil and thereby to be persecuted as witches and burned at the stake; demonstrate that a man may also be the incarnation of the Devil; free us, Juan; act so they forget us and persecute you; oh, how great is my triumph, Juan, how great my revenge upon men: my husband, El Señor; Guzmán, the humbled; the bishops and Inquisitors who if they knew of my actions would burn me before the greedy eyes of the workmen who would possess me merely by watching me die; oh, what triumph, Don Juan, you hide me and save me by acting for me in the world while I serve my true master in this secret chamber; go quickly, Don Juan, do the work of the Devil and the woman you embody in the world, go now, you have been born, but fear me because you carry with you my soul and my heart, you condemn me to the pursuit of a new lover to exorcise the loneliness of my bed); you cannot abandon me, Juan; you cannot survive alone; you lack will, you are mine; the man who leaves this room will encounter only death; you will encounter death (our life, Juan), only death.”