Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Not even my father who is nearby in this very palace, waiting to speak with El Señor?”

“Never fear; someday he will invite me to dine.”

“And do you not fear even El Señor?”

“Your blood is cold, Inés. El Señor was. I am. And he who says ‘I was’ is worth nothing, it is ‘I am’ that matters.”

“And me, do you not fear me?”

Juan laughed: “Unfortunate the woman who places her trust in a man! Doña Inés, it is your gain that you are the first I found; but that is no reason you should deprive other women of the rightful claims they hold upon my heart.”

“Your blood is cold, Juan.”

Juan withdrew like a lizard from Inés’s naked body, placing the palms of his hands against the wooden planks that served them as a bed and raising himself above her; through the open window they could hear the covetous giggles of the two scrubbing-girls-become-royal maidservants; Inés screamed with terror, she pushed away her lover’s body, her tensed muscles slackened, with horrified hands she covered the sex Juan had just abandoned, the wound opened by El Señor and then enjoyed by Juan the same night had closed, she was again a virgin, inexorably the opened lips had closed, the hair knitting together into a mesh like steel wire, the teeth of chastity had come together, the flower closed its petals; Juan, laughing, his head cradled on his arm and the arm propped against a wall to support a body weak with laughter, said: “If either I or El Señor have made you pregnant, Inés, you will have to give birth through your ear…”

Swirling his cape about him, Juan left the little room; he pounded on the door of the neighboring room, laughing at the excited giggling of Azucena and Lolilla.

La Señora, again transformed into a bat, flew several times from the crypts to her bedchamber, carrying each time in her mutilated phalanges a bone and an ear, a nose and an eye, a tongue and an arm, until from the parts stolen from the tombs she had formed upon the bed an entire figure of a man.

In her flight she feared the light of the coming dawn, the contrast of firmament against the increasing clarity of the sky; when her task was completed she contemplated, exhausted, her work; she admired the monstrous figure created from bits and pieces lying upon the bed: the nose of the Arian King, one ear from the Queen who stitched flags the color of her blood and tears; the other from the astrologer King who complained that God had not consulted him about the creation of the world; one dark eye from the fratricidal King, and a white one from the rebellious Infanta; the livid tongue of the cruel King who had forced the members of his court to drink the bath water of his concubine; the mummified arms of the rebel King who had risen in arms against the stepfather who had murdered his mother; the blackened torso of the King who died in flaming sheets; the skull of the Suffering and the shriveled sex of the Impotent King; one shinbone from the virgin Queen murdered by the King’s halberdier as she was praying; another from her own mother-in-law, the Mad Lady, a relic of the sacrifice the mother of the present Señor had imposed upon herself after the death of her handsome husband, the whoring Prince and violator of country girls.

La Señora lighted her fire, over it she hung a caldron and threw into it Juan’s fingernails and hair and then added the myrrh-like cáncamo, a tear shed from an Arabian tree, and the gum of the storax tree which coagulates and hardens like resin; she stirred everything together, waited until it boiled, and then poured the boiling, waxy mixture over the pieces of mummified flesh, anointing them, and joining the separate members into a human form. She waited for the wax to cool, looked at the new body, and said: “Now Spain has its heir.”

“I smell something, I smell something,” said the Mad Lady, sniffing nervously as she was wheeled in her little cart by the dwarf, who had stamped her feet and sulked and demanded to be taken to spend her wedding night in the magnificent crypt of the forebears; Barbarica and the Mad Lady, followed by a serene Idiot Prince, strangely indifferent to the two women, content with having freed the captives, an act the ancient Lady did not know whether to approve or condemn, but respected because it was the sovereign decision of the heir; nonetheless, she smelled something now that made her overlook both his idiocy and his need, an odor wafting in foul-smelling clouds through the galleries of the palace, the odor of putrescent flesh and burning bone and burned fingernails and wax that intoxicated the Mad Lady; “Where is it coming from, where is it coming from? what is that nectar of new life? who is doing these things? why have I not been informed? why do I have a service so vast and exact if no one knows to inform me of what is going on here? I must be alert, there are silent powers that may frustrate me, new blood for the banquet of time … no, old blood for the wedding with eternity, our world is now constructed to last until the end of the world, nothing must change it, I have done what needed to be done, hear me, Felipe, my son, aid your poor mother mutilated by honor and maddened by fidelity, nothing must change, not ever, you are right, Felipe, I ally myself with you, there is an heir now, banish those who would idolize nature, order the sacred tree to be burned, along with those who would search for God in nature, baptizing fountains, placing the cross upon rustic altars of branches and flowers, complete your palace, my son, enclose everything within it — sepulchers, monasteries, stones, and even the future palaces that may be constructed within yours — in a gray and infinite perspective, invent within the walls of your palace a replica of everything nature offers and enclose it all here, the double of the universe, enclose everything so that this be the true nature, not what merely passes for nature, not the nature that changes and dies, sows, germinates, grows, and flows, but a petrified nature of stone and bronze and marble that is ours, and within which our bodies are a miniature world: land, flesh; water, blood; air, breath; fire, heat; think on this, my son, in your chapel and in your bedchamber; think on this with the same intensity and pain St. Peter Martyr must have felt when the knife was buried in his skull, think on it so that our order may never change, so that things be as they have been conceived in our eternity: servitude, vassalage, exaction of taxes, homage, tribute, caprice, our sovereign will, passive obedience on the part of everyone else, that is our world, and if it changes we shall change; and if it dies, we shall die…”

At the mute explosion of the dawn the dwarf Barbarica, wrapped in her nuptial trappings, drunk and dyspeptic, farting and belching, climbing and clambering over the tombs of the forebears, shouted for the painter-priest to come record continuity: she was the Queen, only she, and upon each marble mausoleum, at the foot of each stone plinth, leaning against each bronze banister, the dwarf imitated what she imagined were the royal poses the illustrious Señores and Señoras and Princes and Bastards here buried had adopted in life.

The Mad Lady scornfully observed Barbarica’s antics, she was completely silent, absorbed in the grandeur of the crypt; her gaze was lost in the gray perspectives of domes and colonnades that with unnatural attraction retained the dark wings of night that outside were already flying in swift pursuit of the last light of the new day. Inside, in contrast, the acid of the shadows was eating into the copperplate of the royal tombs. As her eyes were exactly like engraved metal, the Mad Lady first noticed only the general appearance of the crypt; only later, after they had adjusted to that darkness, the color without color, her eyes, like two prismatic engraving styli, bit into details: then she noted that the glass of certain sarcophagi was broken, the heavy stone slabs were pulled back, the tombs profaned, and she shouted to the Idiot to push her closer, and when she saw the profanation she screamed anew: curses, my own arms, my own hands, the relics of my sacrifice, are missing, the limbs embalmed by the apothecaries and learned doctors, who filled them with aloe and quicklime and black balsam; she shouted, she wept; the dwarf continued to swing from tomb to tomb, and the Idiot Prince, with an air of infinite weariness, removed his tightly curled wig, walked to the tomb of El Señor’s father, the Mad Lady’s husband, lifted the covering copper slab and there encountered himself, or at least some remains dressed in the clothing he had worn when he emerged from the sea: a tattered strawberry-colored doublet, and dun-colored breeches still stained with sand. The dwarf cackled, the Lady shouted with indignation, and no one was watching him; he could not remember (because his memory could not retain what vanished with each sunset) that the Lady when she arrived had asked her son that the body of the shipwrecked sailor be thrown into a common grave along with the cadavers of dead dogs, nor could he appreciate that it was only by a chance accident he did not question, since he could not even imagine it, that this dead replica of himself, vaguely familiar, lay in the tomb of the handsome and whoring Señor whose identity the Idiot had imperfectly usurped, as if some formula of the double metamorphosis had failed, as if traces and scraps of one had tenaciously adhered to the other. The dwarf cackled, the Lady shouted, no one was watching him.