Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Thank you, true Señor, true master of my soul, murmured La Señora as she opened the window of her bedchamber, you who did not refuse my call when I needed you, you who answered in the body of a mouse, slipped between my undergarments and crinolines during the nights of my torture and humiliation in the castle courtyard, you who with your sharp fangs divested me of my virginity and introduced me to pleasures forbidden by my husband, you who sent your young representative to my bed, you who were present when as I received the Host I spit it out in the shape of a serpent, not understanding that even then you had chosen me for your black works, you, the unknown, lurking, secret, insinuating power that guided my hands when as a child I buried my peach stones in the earth and dressed my dolls; and with all her strength La Señora flung the body of the hawk from her window; the inert body, its wings broken, its beak sealed, flew above the sterile space of the promised garden and fell beyond the wall. Thank you, Lord who governs tormented and evildoing lemures and the tormented exile of the wondering spirits of the larvae that punish the living thank you, Lord who gives me power to command the manes, disturb the course of the stars, limit divine powers, command the elements and threaten the very sun: astral body, I shall envelop you in a veil of eternal shadows; thank you for making me your servant and granting me your powers; thank you, master, fallen angel, black light, now I understand you, now I forgive you, you said that first I would feel and then I would know, such was our pact, you have not betrayed it, now I understand, I have had pleasure, now I shall have knowledge, no one, not you, not even the God whom you defy, may enjoy pleasure and knowledge at the same time, thank you, fallen angel, for revealing to me that my present body is but one more transformation among the thousands that I have, unknowing, lived throughout the centuries, not knowing that I have been woman, bird and she-wolf, child, butterfly, jenny, and lion, and that now, thanks to that youth who left here with you, I am pregnant by you and by him, for both of you fertilized me with your dark semen, and from my womb will be born the future Lord of Spain.

Smiling, she closed the window and walked to the foot of the bed, where the marble mirror lay amid herbs and pillows. She picked it up. She looked at herself in it. She saw nothing but dark bloodstains running down the glossy black surface, as if the stone were bleeding.

Dispirited, she hung her head.

“Not even this, master? You also deny me your son? This is how you inform me that I am bleeding again, that my woman’s cycle has not been interrupted by the fecundation of my love-making with the youth called Juan? This is how you show me that in the period of the moon a woman’s mirror is stained with blood?”

Her lips tightened. She told herself she could endure all trials, that she would overcome them with the arts of black magic inculcated by the Mus, she would not allow herself to be defeated, she would give thanks again, thank you, master, for teaching me the words of my powers, thank you for recalling to me words forgotten during the course of my metamorphoses, the words that define me through mutable time and the exhausted spaces of the world: saga et divina, potens caelum deponere, terram suspendere, fontes durare, montes diluere, manes sublimare, deos infirmare, sidera extinguere, Tartarum ipsum illuminare, thank you … The dead falcon fell at the feet of Celestina’s companion, who stood contemplating La Señora’s window, and La Señora, on the thrust of her new wings, followed the dead hawk through the same Castilian air on the membranous wings of the body convoked through age-old words of female sages and seers in the early dawn of time; flight, eager harmony in the black lance of her head, life in her fangs and phalanges, thank you, black light, fallen angel, who taught me these words through long nights in the courtyard, you have divested me of everything except words, but now words are everything for me, I can no longer nourish my dead life with the blood of the handsome youth I fed upon for you, Mus, but because of the power of words I shall now be able to nourish myself from death itself.

The bat, the winged mouse, Mus of the skies, traced a nervous arc above the plain and sought a new entrance into the palace through the crypts; veiled in mourning, the dying night guided it and sustained it in its flight.

Slow the heavens, suspend the earth’s turning, stop the streams and dissolve the mountains, convoke the manes of Hell, defame the gods, extinguish the stars, illuminate the black regions of Tartar … invoking those powers, the blind bat, wings beating faster than the eye could perceive, guided by the proximity and remoteness of the mausoleums, entered into deep crypts reserved for El Señor’s ancestors in his own private chapel.

When it felt the marble of a tomb, the blind winged mouse reassumed the body of La Señora, naked but defended against the cold of these tombs by heat of spirit; quickly, fearing that the coming dawn would rob her of her powers, sweating, excited, La Señora pried up the heavy stones of the tombs, with her hands she broke the glass panes of the sarcophagi where the royal mummies lay, and ripped away flabby nostrils, brittle ears, frozen eyes, powdery tongues, the dried members from several remains; she murmured curses and spells still unproved, for she did not know the true extent of the forces she invoked, mute forces of demoniac powers that God had given man immediately after this creation, nor did she know whether they would be fulfilled immediately, tomorrow, or many centuries later, for the power of the Devil is circular, a sphere divided by the line of time and thus a part of time, but it is also one hemisphere above and one below time, and thus removed from time; but someday, someday … if she could withstand the difficult tests to which her true master subjected her, if she did not falter in her prayers to the mouse who had crept in between her legs, if she maintained her absolute faith in the serpent she had spit out one morning as she received the Host, all she sought would come to pass:

may all those within this palace never leave it, may it be their eternal prison and eternal tomb, or if they leave it, may they carry it with them on their backs, as the snail his shell or Cain his crime;

may all men who wish to flee from this curse be transformed into beavers and terrified by captivity, may they devour their own genitals in the belief that they lighten their bodies in preparation for flight;

may Juan, captive within the palace, find within that prison the jail he most deserves, a jail of mirrors, a windowless prison;

and may any woman made pregnant by Juan be condemned to perpetual pregnancy, like an elephant bearing throughout eternity her heavy burden within an enormously swollen belly …

“When a man and a woman set sail with Venus, the only provisions they need are a lamp filled with oil and a chalice filled with wine; you and I have not even that; may our pleasure compensate for such poverty,” Juan had said to the novitiate Inés as they lay down — the man dropping his brocaded mantle and the girl her harsh sackcloth — on a crude bed in the servant’s room nearest the place of their meeting; and the ahs and sighs of love of the young pair blended with the squabbling of the servants Azucena and Lolilla, for the murmurs sifted through the fissures of the badly mortised stone separating these miserable rooms, and through the open windows of the July night; but they were completely compensated by their pleasure; Inés told Juan who she was, and asked whether he feared the furies of Heaven, and he replied: “That is a matter between Heaven and me. But believe me when I tell you that I fear neither Heaven nor Hell, nor the lycanthrope.”