Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

She stared down at the river for several minutes. Then she returned to the center of the bridge and sat down again, legs crossed, straight-backed, letting the wind and rain play with her hair as her spirit drifted into indifferent contemplation. Then through the storm a pale white light descended toward the bridge; the girl raised her head but immediately buried her face in her hands. The light, a white dove, settled upon her head. But the moment it alighted, its white plumage began to fade and streak in the rain; as the dove revealed its true color, the girl repeated silently, over and over:

“This is my story. I want you to hear my story. Listen. Listen. Netsil. Netsil. Yrots ym raeh ot uoy tnaw I. Yrots ym si siht.”

AT THE FEET OF EL SEÑOR

It is told:

Since the previous night his alguacil had been installed in the mountain shelter with all the accouterments. Huntsmen and hounds, carts and baggage, pikes and harquebuses, hangings and horns, lent a festive air to the inn. El Señor arose early and opened the window of his bedchamber to enjoy better the radiant sun of this July morning. The village nestled in a forest of6 live-oak trees, extending into a cool glade that disappeared at the foot of the mountains. The sleeping valley lay in shadow, but the rising sun shone between the knife-edged peaks.

Guzmán entered to tell El Señor that the plans for the hunt had been made. The hounds had been to the mountains. The tracks and signs indicated that a hart was somewhere on the ridge, a stag that had been hunted before. El Señor tried to smile. He stared at his chief huntsman, who lowered his eyes. Satisfied, El Señor placed his hand on his hip. When this man — who was both his lieutenant and his secretary — had previously come to tell him, prudently and respectfully, what game was in the forest and where the chase would lead, El Señor had found no need to feign a haughtiness that was natural to him — although it is true he used hauteur to conceal his true feelings for the sport: a mixture of aversion and indifference. But when the deputy told him they would be hunting a hart that had been run before, El Señor did not hide his feeling. Calm, and secure, he could look Guzmán in the face, smile, even sigh with a touch of nostalgia. He recalled his youth in this country. The heat would lead them, hart and hunter alike, to the most beautiful parts of the mountain, where water and shade alleviate to some degree the harshness of the sun on the open plateau.

El Señor ordered that more dogs be readied, for the summer day is long and it is the beasts that tire most quickly; he said, too, that water should be loaded onto the mules, that they should calm the ardor of the dogs and run them through the coolest, greenest places. The chief huntsman, still facing El Señor, bowed his way from the room; the Liege, as he again approached the window, immediately heard the horn summoning the gathering for the hunt.

Following the storm, the day will be clear. The receding tide laps at the shoreline. A brigantine has for a long time lain in the cleft where a dry stream bed leads to the sea. A tattered standard catches the wind and flutters between the rocks. Motionless fog lies over the water, blurring the horizon. The only beacon along the coast has been extinguished during the storm. They say its keeper embraced the dog who is his usual companion and that the two lay down beside the howling fire in the chimney.

When the horn sounded the departure for the mountain, El Señor, on horseback, joined his huntsmen. Dressed entirely in green and wearing a short hooded cape of Moorish style and making, he arrived at a light trot. His company followed on foot and on horseback, the servants with tent, spade, billhook, and pickax, should it prove necessary to spend the night in the field. El Señor told himself that all would go well: the brilliant dawn promised a swift, sure hunt, and a return to the mountain pass with the first evening shadows, followed by a well-deserved nocturnal celebration at the inn where his alguacil had already set out several kegs of red wine, and where they would sing ballads and consume the savory entrails of the hart. In their game bags his personal servants carried flint and tinder, needles, thread, and diverse curatives. In accordance with custom, El Señor murmured a prayer, and looked with affection at his favorite dog, the large white mastiff Bocanegra, who preceded the ten huntsmen. Each of the men carried a lance in one hand and with the other checked the straining dogs chained to wide iron collars displaying gleaming heraldic devices and the dynastic motto Nondum. When they reached the foot of the mountain, El Señor stopped and looked sadly at the dried vines and the surrounding basalt hills. He remembered his hopeful anticipation of the morning, the imagined ride through the green lands of his youth. It is true that every mountain has four faces, and one tends to know but one. And the saying says that even the best of leaders can lose his way, but El Señor did not dare protest in the name of nostalgia, or countermand an order under the guise of being misled; his chief huntsman was not the kind of man who made mistakes; clearly, the hart had chosen the arid face of the mountain, not the rivulets and bosky groves of El Señor’s childhood. His vision, that of the flowering landscape, was superseded by another: an arduous ride under a burning sun across the bluffs and gulleys of the mountainside, hoping that time and strength would permit them to reach the higher vantage point that promised a third prospect: a refreshing view of the sea.

Almost no one visits this area of the coast. Sun and storm, both equally cruel, dispute this domain. When the heat rules, sea spray sizzles as it splashes upon the hard-crusted earth: no man’s foot can bear the heat of the fine black sand that penetrates, and desiccates, the strongest leather breeches. The stream bed dries up like the skin of an ailing hawk, and in its meanders agonize the ruins of ancient shipwrecks. The beach is an oven with neither breeze nor shadow; to walk along it, one must fight the suffocating weight of this sun-drenched terrain. To walk this beach is to wish to escape from it, climb the baking dunes, then mistakenly believe it possible to cross on foot the desert separating the shore from the mountain range.

But the desert is as unmarked as the hands of a cadaver, all lines of destiny wiped clean. Everyone knows the stories of shipwrecked men who have perished here (for only disaster can lead a man to this remote territory), turning in hopeless circles, fighting their own shadows; inveighing against them because they do not rise from the sand; imploring them to float like cool phantoms above their owners’ heads; kneeling, finally, to straddle and strangle those implacable ghosts. The brains of the ill-fated melt in this heat, and when that butter-yellow sun no longer rules the coast, the tempest reigns in its stead to complete the task.

A world of spoils awaits the hapless man, still another man who, almost defeated by the sea, hopes to find salvation here: empty coffers and demagnetized compasses, skeletons of ships and carved figureheads recarved by wind and sun to resemble broken phalanxes of petrified squires, a desolate battlefield of statue and shadow: tillers, tattered banners, and sealed green bottles. Cabo de los Desastres, it was called in the ancient maps: the chronicles abound in notices of galleons from the Spice Islands, Cipango, and Cathay sunk with all their treasure, of ships vanished with all hands aboard, their crew of Cadizmen as well as captives of the wars against the Infidel, master and servant made equal by the catastrophes of fate. But as if to compensate they also speak of sailing vessels battered against these rocks because lovers were fleeing in them. And if not the chronicles, then superstition, often an unacknowledged source of the former, says that on stormy nights a flotilla of caravels, more spectral than the fog enveloping them, passes by here, their mainmasts flaming with St. Elmo’s fire, illuminating the livid faces of captive caliphs.