Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Julián looked at Toribio with affection; he had learned not to laugh at the slightly comic appearance of the astrologer, his tonsure encircled by wild, dark-red curls, and one perpetually wandering eye; he stood straight and tall, but lacked either grace or symmetry, and he always held one twitching shoulder higher than the other. Toribio accepted the folded manuscripts with respect; he had recognized El Señor’s seal at the bottom of each page.

“Who gave you this?”

“Guzmán, just a moment ago, on the stairway that leads to your observatory. He asked me to read them and judge them.”

Squinting his eyes, the palace astrologer approached a lamp of wax candles enclosed in smoke-blackened glass hanging from the beamed ceiling; he adjusted the light and with an eagerness belied by his outward casualness began to read the testament El Señor had dictated to Guzmán; he raised one arm and with a gesture at once forceful, gentle, and controlled he pushed the lamp, which described a wide pendulum arc above the heads of the two priests. One continued to read, while the other contemplated with exhaustion and surprise the arc described by the lamp.

“Watch carefully, and count,” murmured Toribio, never taking his eyes from El Señor’s folios, where the shadows cast by the lamp rhythmically shortened and lengthened. “Count your own pulse, Brother Julián, count carefully and you will learn, you will see, that each swing of this lamp takes exactly the same amount of time, always the same, whether the distance of the arc is great or small…”

Julián, counting his pulse, approached the astronomer: “Toribio … Brother … what can you…? Tell me, do you know of anything that will cleanse me, purify me, of this accursed night?”

Toribio continued to read. “Yes. I know that the earth is in the heavens. Does that console you?”

“No, because I know that Hell is on earth.”

“Do we ascend or descend, Brother Julián?”

“Our sainted religion affirms that we ascend, Brother Toribio, that there is no movement but that of the soul in its ascent, in search of an eternal good, which is above…”

Toribio shook his rust-red head. “Geometry knows nothing of good or evil, or of supremes or relatives, but it assures us we neither climb nor descend; we spin, we spin, I am convinced that everything is spherical and that everything spins in circles; everything is movement, incessant, circular…”

“You are describing men…”

“You have just discovered that men are mad; but mathematics is not mad; a hypothesis may be false if experience does not prove it; false, but never mad.”

“Neither can the earth be mad, although the men that inhabit it are mad, and their madness is a movement like that you describe: incessant and circular, relentlessly returning to the same exhausted point of departure while they believe they have reached a new shore; and with this movement men wish to communicate their delirium to the earth. But the earth does not move…”

“You say it does not move?”

“How can it move? We would all fall, we would all be thrown into the emptiness of space … the immobility of the earth has to be the stabilizing factor for the agitated coming and going of its maddened populace, Friar … if the earth moved — in addition to the movement of men — we would all be thrown toward the heavens, Friar…”

“Did I not, just now, tell you that we are already in the heavens?” The astrologer laughed; he rolled up El Señor’s papers and threw them on a table; he took Julián by the arm and led him to the balcony.

There Toribio picked up two stones of unequal size; he walked to the parapet and extended his hands beyond the edge, the smaller stone in his right hand and the larger in his left. “Look. Listen. I am going to drop the two stones at the same time. One is heavier. The other, lighter. Watch. Hear. Both will fall at the same velocity.”

He dropped them. But neither friar heard them strike the ground. Toribio stared uncomprehendingly at Julián, his eyes, as always, vaguely out of focus.

“I heard nothing, Brother Toribio. Was this the miracle you wished to demonstrate? That your stones fall and strike the earth without making any sound?”

The astrologer trembled. “Nevertheless, they fell at the same velocity.”

“We would have heard them strike; either one stone first, and then the other, or both at the same time; but we should have heard the sound, Brother, and we heard nothing…”

“And nevertheless, I swear to you by my Chaldean ancestors, they fell, and they fell together, at the same exact velocity, in spite of their different weights … even if they were caught by an angel! And they fell moved by the same force that moves the moon, the earth in its rotation, and all the planets and stars of the universe; should those two miserable and blessed stones not descend at a uniform velocity from this tower, then at this instant neither you nor I am alive; stones move because the moon moves around the earth, and the earth around the sun, as if in a stately celestial pavane; one impels another, one sphere affects another, indeed the entire universe, without a single imaginable fissure, without a single rupture in the chain of cause and effect; each is related to the other so that beginning with the revolution of each planet all phenomena are explainable and this correlation binds together so tightly the order and magnitude of the spheres and of their circular orbits and of the heavens themselves that nothing, Brother, do you understand me, nothing, can be changed in its place without mortally disrupting every other part, the very universe itself…”

“And you know all this because of the two stones you dropped that we did not hear fall?”

Toribio emphatically nodded yes, although his lips murmured: “I do not understand, I do not understand…”

And the rosy dawn crowned his head with pale flames but threw the bowed face of the astrologer into shadow.

“Brother Toribio: Joshua ordered the sun to stop in its course that he might gain the day in his battle.”

“The Holy Gospels preach supernatural truth. Natural truth is of a different order. Everything is simultaneously uniform movement and persistent change … Change and movement, movement and change, without which the stars would be corpses on the highways of the night.”

“El Señor, Brother Toribio, is like Joshua. Do not forget it. You have read the testament that the unlettered chief huntsman Guzmán could not have invented. You and I know how to read between the lines. El Señor desires neither movement nor change; he wants the sun to stay its course…”

“What battles can El Señor win now? Better that he invoke the powers of dusk and defeat.”

“El Señor does not want change; and we are his servants.”

“And, nevertheless, El Señor does change; and as he changes, he suffers, and as he suffers from change he decays and dies.”

“Our poor Señor. Everyone says he is no longer the man he was. They say he was a handsome youth, audacious, also cruel. He led a rebellion against his own father so that he might more easily deliver the rebels into his father’s hands. His own power is founded upon that slaughter, and because he has power he has been able to build this palace where you and I find protection and opportunity to read the stars and to paint icons … Do not forget that, Brother. Here you and I have saved ourselves from a dangerous world. What would have become of us were we not here? In what wretched workshop would you, a simple journeyman, be fashioning lenses? I would be shoveling manure in the stables where I was born. Without the shelter of our sacred order and of the seignorial power that offers us the privileges of this palace, would you and I be able to paint and study, Friar?”