Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Death?” queried the erectly proud young man blazing now with his own light, burning cruelty in his eyes, master of his own words. “So remote a threat?”

With long strides and a mocking laugh he left the room, closing the door firmly behind him; he breathed in the cold, enclosed air of stone passageways; he walked with gusto and pride, dominated by an arrogance that in him, and for him, transcribed and attenuated all the attributes enumerated in the litany of woman: in the room next to La Señora’s, the room where beneath loose paving stones they had hidden her dolls, peach stones, stockings, and locks of hair, Azucena and Lolilla heard the violent gust of wind — as if the brocade enveloping Juan were a sail impelling him across the seas of the palace — and peeked from behind their door; their mouths dropped open, their stares of amazement were returned by Don Juan’s stony gaze; with him they laughed, and torn between fear and desire to be part of whatever was taking place, they slammed their door just as a laughing Don Juan threw his weight against it, and continuing to laugh, his arms spread in a cross, one hand on each side of the doorframe, allowed his man’s smell, his man’s laughter to filter through the cracks of the door, inflaming both of them with this inconceivable proposal: “Open the door; La Señora’s lover can also be the servants’ stud; down with doors; no more locks; pleasure is for all, or for no one.”

He laughed again as he walked through the galleries of the palace, repeating his name to himself, Juan, Juan, Juan, desiring a mirror in which he might look at himself as a thirsty man becalmed upon the Sargasso Sea desires sweet water, wishing he could convert the granite walls of the palace into a mirror of vanities, a labyrinth of reflecting mercury; he spoke his name (and acted out before the silence and darkness of the stone the gestures and attitudes of all his names): greed and gluttony, inconstancy, two-edged blade, pride, gossip, lust, Devil’s gate, seat of sin, corrupter of law, enemy of friendship, natural temptation, desired calamity, essence of evil, destroyer of womanhood, storm of hearths, sumptuous battle, invited beast, embellished danger, malicious animal: he, Don Juan; he, usurper of all the mirrors of all the women of the world.

And then he stopped. If not the mirror, then the mirage; at the end of the gallery a girl was leaning against the wall, a woman, in spite of the fact that with her closely shaven hair she resembled a lad; barefoot, dressed in rough sackcloth that for Juan’s eyes could not disguise the fragile fullness, the round delight of her young, ripe, female form. Juan stopped. He placed one hand on his hip. He waited. She would come to him. She would come, fatefully, she would come in quest of the sumptuous battle.

CONTICINIUM

First, in the hour of silence, La Señora merely felt herself alone, abandoned, incomplete; defeated, she lay where she had been thrown upon the bed, listening to the fluttering wings of her restless falcon, thirsty — glutted with darkness — and hungry for the hunt; the sound of the wings awakened her from her lethargy; images of the hunt evoked by the hawk flashed before La Señora’s half-closed eyes; quietly, sensing that pain would become despair and that despair then would circulate through her bloodstream as desire for revenge, she said to the hawk, offering it a wrist, on which the bird of prey obediently alighted: “Let me tell you a story, hawk. Selene, the moon, fell in love with a young hunter, Endymion; and as she was the lady of the night, she caused him to sleep; covering him with her white veils, she cloaked him in darkness, and thus, as he slept, she could kiss and make love to him at will.”

The hawk’s talons, dug into its mistress’s bare arm, but she felt no pain — pain of the flesh, no, pain of the soul; and the voice of her soul told her that the falcon’s company would not be enough, but also that she could endure Juan’s absence … The mouse … The mouse slept beneath the lover’s pillow, he hid there, he crept from beneath the pillow every night to disseminate dream, desire, and hallucination. La Señora, her mouth half opened, her body swelling with expectation, fell upon the pillows with frenzy, threw them one by one onto the sand of the floor beside the accursed mirror. The frightened falcon fled from its mistress, fluttering uneasily. La Señora found the little sacks filled with aromatic herbs, the perfumed gloves, the colored pastilles. But not the familiar mouse.

“Mus … Mus…” murmured La Señora. “Mus…”

But nothing stirred in the perfumed early morning. This time the mouse did not creep out, look at her, and scurry back to its hiding place.

“Master … lover, my true lord … can you not hear me, Mus?”

Wildly, La Señora pawed through the pastilles, tore open the sacks, and strewed the herbs upon the sterile sand; as she bit the finger of each aromatic glove, she fancied she had discovered the mouse’s new hiding place.

“Mus … have you forgotten your lover? Mus, have you so soon forgotten our wedding in the courtyard, how your tiny teeth nibbled my flesh, darling mouse, how you devoured my virginity, mouse, my love? Mus, I have fulfilled my pact … I delivered to you the body of my lover, Mus, I returned to you, poor tiny, scorned beastie, the image of the angel that once was yours … Mus…”

She buried her face in the softness of the bed. She understood, and as she understood, she wept. “You went with him, is that not so? The two of you abandoned me, is that not so? You used me in order that you might enter the body and soul of that youth … filthy mouse.”

The hawk again alighted on La Señora’s wrist.

She looked with hatred at the stupid bird that had understood nothing, had proved itself incapable of defending its mistress, of attacking the youth who carried off the mouse hidden in the folds of his brocaded cape.

“But what happened when Endymion awakened? Did he stay by Selene’s side, or did he abandon her forever? I cannot remember how that legend ends, falcon.”

The hawk, so confidently clinging to its mistress’s wrist, shivered; La Señora carefully examined the rumpled sheets and found hairs from her lover’s head and fingernail trimmings, which she piled into a little heap, stirred, held to her nose and mouth; she murmured incoherent phrases, and the bird of prey, accustomed to receiving solicitous attention and giving obedience in return, trembled and fluttered its wings, confused, sensing in its smooth, lean body that the normal order of things had been reversed, that in place of mutual fidelity there was now sudden menace; it fluttered desperately and lurched from La Señora’s unsteady wrist, taking advantage of her intense concentration on the nail trimmings and strands of hair she held in the palm of one hand, the shivering bird launched into blind, nervous, suicidal but redemptive flight about the rich bedchamber, the oasis in this somber palace, striking against brocade-covered walls and ceilings embossed in Arab fashion, against closed windows and the door through which Don Juan had escaped; then La Señora rose from the bed and pursued the falcon, stretching out her arms, grunting, crouching, waiting for the bird to cripple itself as it flew into stone walls and fall upon the white sand floor; the sound of the fluttering wings sent ripples of terror through the chamber; the hawk’s increasing fear would soon be turned against the Señora; forgetting the hours of faithful company, the falcon would see in her the enemy, its prey, which it should have seen in Don Juan and the falsifying Mus; and as it perceived its prey it would swoop down upon and seize La Señora’s flesh in a fury of fear and incomprehension: its universe was crumbling; all the bird’s habits, acquired by instinct and reinforced by Guzmán’s application, faded with each thrust of frenzied wings; the hawk struck mercilessly against the windows and, wounded, fell to the floor; La Señora ran to it and the hawk pecked at its mistress, still attempting to defend itself, sinking it talons into the white flesh rejected by Don Juan; with one hand La Señora seized its beak, and with the other, covered its rapacious eyes, pushing its head into the sand, slowly, suffocating it, burying it in the sandy floor of the chamber, mercilessly strangling it as she muttered: “Domum inceptam frustra … frustrate the construction of this house … may this palace never be completed … domum inceptam frustra…”