Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The Idiot Prince climbed into the sarcophagus, lay down upon the remains of his own body, and sank into the corrupted flesh of the sailor who was himself; once again his flesh fused with the blood-red cross that stigmatized the cold depths of the sepulcher; once inside, he allowed the stone of the tomb to fall after him, and in the darkness he closed his eyes; he felt greatly relieved, in peace at last; now he could rest, wait, a long time, with no surprises, no need to decipher the enigmas that he in his doubling as sailor and Prince, true orphan and impostor heir was incapable of resolving; no need now to make decisions, to act out an expected madness or a certainty of approaching desperation, no need to free captives or crown himself with bleeding doves or swallow black pearls; he was freed from the duties of condemning or emancipating, of constructing his power upon the foundations of caprice. He closed his eyes, and slept within the tomb.

Celestina’s companion entered the forge with the broken body of the strangled hawk in his hands. He showed it to the girl dressed as a page, and to the smith. Celestina took the dead bird and carried it to the entrance of the smithy.

“Give me hammer and nails,” she said to Jerónimo, and he obeyed her.

Celestina placed the body of the hawk against the center of the doorframe, she extended the defeated wings and nailed the body and outstretched wings to the dry wood. The three stood mutely, witnessing the crucifixion of La Señora’s bird. Then they heard muffled, dragging, infirm footsteps across the devastated plain; these steps were preceded by the plaintive strains of a flute.

AURORA

Like La Señora, Toribio, the astrologer-priest, dreaded the end of the night.

She dreaded its coming because she had still not completed animating the body that could assume or simulate life only during the hours of darkness. The astronomer dreaded it because then the stars would disappear from view, and not even the powerful telescopes he had constructed with such grave patience could return his darlings to him; for among all possible visions, he considered that of viewing the stars the one most to be trusted and desired.

La Señora, lying beside the cadaver she had only just fabricated from the skulls and scraps of the royal remains, cursed the lateness of Don Juan’s flight, as it left so few nocturnal hours for forging a revenge she imagined circular, eternal, and therefore infernal. Brother Toribio, on the other hand, was preparing to greet the aurora (when it did arrive; not yet; there was still time to prove an experiment; what he needed was a witness) with praise that united the gratitude of his Christian soul for the miracle of a new day with the satisfaction of his libido sciendi that the new day proved the circular, eternal, and therefore celestial parentage of the spheres; and this joy compensated for his nostalgia for the night.

Thus where La Señora saw evil, he saw good; and where she saw good — in the vile fabrication that lay upon the black sheets beside her — he saw evil: he had always compared the dark science of his contemporaries and secret rivals with the witchcraft of the ancient sorceresses of Thessaly, who taking feet, hands, heads, and torsos from various sepulchers, ultimately created a monstrous Prometheus with no relation to true man; plotting their concentric circles, their excentric circles, and their epicycles, these false uranographers were incapable of discovering the shape of the earth, or its measure, for they knew everything about the infinite movement of the stars except the most simple and unique truth: that movement, all movement, is regular and invariable, the same for stones thrown by the creature’s hand as for planets set in rotation by the hand of the Creator.

He was thinking these things as he fashioned a meniscus, concave on one face and convex on the other, resigning himself to postponing its use until the following night; then he would ask that fatal and eager night, never expecting she would speak or tell her own story, but hopeful that astride the mount of experience she would with a simple movement of her head sign the yes or no the priest’s hypotheses deserved. Toribio put down the meniscus, picked up a piece of heavy paper, and patted it; he was impatiently awaiting the return of his comrade Julián, the painter-priest, urgently summoned by the Mad Lady.

La Señora patted the cold members of the human form by her side and put her lips to the mummified ear affixed with cáncamo to the dissimilar skull, for while in some places the Arabic resins had formed a flesh-like gray film, in others the bone shone through opaquely, like old silver; whispering into that ear La Señora asked her true master (multiplying his names, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Elis, Azazel, Ahriman, Mephisto, Shaitan, Samael, Asmodeus, Abaddon, Apollyon) whether, in truth, in the guise of a mouse, he had granted her that night of their secret wedding in the castle courtyard the powers of magus and seer, of slowing the heavens, suspending the turning of the earth, stopping streams and dissolving mountains, of evoking the manna of Hell, and extinguishing the stars so beloved by the wise Chaldean in the tower, Brother Toribio; if so, this was the moment to put them to the test, to animate gradually the rigid members of the heir she had constructed, for she knew now that this figure was the true fruit of her union with the mouse, and that possessed by him she could not be impregnated by Don Juan: let that livid tongue speak again; fill those mismatched eyes, one light and one dark, with flecks of light; now, please, Master and Lord, chief of Tartar, sovereign of the sulphurous hole of Acheron, prince of the shadows of Hades, you, king of Avernus, you who bathe in the waters of the river of fire but not in the waters of the river of forgetfulness, do not forget me, do not forget your servant, now, before the sun undoes the work of the shadows, make these parts rot again, return them all to dust … now …

“Hold this paper, Brother Julián,” Toribio said when the painter-priest returned from his long night in the company of the Mad Lady, the dwarf, and the Idiot. “Hold this paper, punch a hole in the center with the point of this pin, and then hold the paper to your eye. Go out onto the balcony of my tower; hurry, for the dawn is coming. Look at the stars through the tiny aperture made by the pin. What do you see?”

“What do I see? That the stars have lost their aureole; they look very small…”

“And you realize, then, that their apparent size is an illusion created by their refulgence…?”

“Yes; but I am not sure of what I see, Brother Toribio: I am tired; it has been a long night.”

“Isn’t it true that nothing looks as small as a star robbed of its light? And nevertheless, many of them are larger than this earth we inhabit. Imagine, then, how our earth must look — only one star among millions of other stars — from the star most distant from us; or imagine how many stars must fill the dark space between us and the most distant star. Can you believe, Brother, that our tiny star is the center of the universe? Can you believe that?”

“What I do not dare believe is that God designed the universe in honor of our earth and the miserable, cruel, and stupid beings that inhabit it. I have learned one thing tonight: men are mad.”

The painter-priest offered several folded sheets of paper to the astrologer-priest, whose benevolent smile seemed to ask: You have only now come to that realization? although his bowed head indicated a certain fear in response to the words of his comrade: “That is a conclusion I have tried to avoid, Brother Julián. I have never wished to imply that the great expanse of the infinite diminishes either God or man. You understand, that is something they would never forgive.”