Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“Do not see in our Señor anything more than you observe in other men, Friar, in the universe itself. Perhaps in that way we may save ourselves from the dangers of the adulation of the court, and of being completely forsaken. There is nothing exceptional about El Señor except the accident of his birth. Everything else is a matter of components common to every thing and every person: violence originates force, force begets joy, joy is converted into forms, forms eventually harden, cool, decay, and die. And death is the violence that reinitiates the cycle.”

“And suffering, Brother?”

“What suffering?”

“The same suffering you have been speaking of. The suffering that, as it changes, decays and dies.”

“I was speaking generally, not specifically, about El Señor.”

“Careful, Brother, nothing exists that is not made incarnate. And even in El Señor the suffering that, as you say, necessarily accompanies the passage from joyful violence to cold death must also be made incarnate. For our Señor is approaching death, the papers we have read tell us so. Death in life, it occurs to me, must be defeat and frustration, and this is the death, I suspect, that our Señor is living, although I recognize that I am incapacitated insofar as my ability to penetrate the secret motives of the decision that led him to create here in this palace and in those who inhabit it the perfect semblance of death. On the other hand, does the universe understand frustration? Tell me that, now that you are not only an astronomer but also a horoscopist.”

Toribio returned slowly to the room filled with lenses, condensers, telescopes, ustorious mirrors, charts of the heavens, compasses, and astrolabes. He stopped, followed closely by the questioning Brother Julián, beside an astrolabe; he seemed to be admiring the graduated rule, gently he stroked the sights that marked the divisions of the metal sphere: he set the device spinning.

“No, it does not know frustration. The universe functions, and fully expresses itself, always.”

“Is it pure force, then, pure realization, pure success, without the martyrdoms and beauties of joy, form, decadence and death? And if it is so, may I overcome with my painting the mortal norm El Señor imposes upon us? May I, with joy, form, decadence, death, and resurrection through martyrdom and the beauty of art, save myself from both the plenitude of the universe and the finiteness of El Señor, and thus establish the true human norm?”

Toribio spun the sphere faster and faster, murmuring: “A force that accounts for itself … a force born of the perfect equilibrium of death…”

He looked at the painter-priest. “Lightness is born of weight and weight of lightness; each expends in the same instant the benefits of its creation, each spends itself in proportion to its movement. And each, too, is simultaneously extinguished. All forces destroy themselves, but they also create each other; for them, death is mutual expiation and violent birth…”

With a deliberate, arbitrarily theatrical, gesture, the astrologer abruptly stopped the spinning of the astrolabe and added: “This is the law. Neither your painting nor my science may escape the norm. But the paradox is that, by violating it, they create it: the law exists thanks to those who oppose it with the violent exceptions of science and art.”

Julián placed one hand upon Toribio’s shoulder. “Brother, in his testament our Señor dabbles in the most detestable violations of the law of God; he combines all the anathematized heresies…”

“Heresies?” Brother Toribio’s eyebrows rose, and he laughed. “A good Spaniard is our Prince, and his heresies at times are nothing more than blasphemies…”

“Heresies or blasphemies, he discusses them, and allows them to run their course, exactly like our poor friend the Chronicler of this palace; poor Señor, too, for he cannot be sent to the galleys to expiate his sins. But I want to be charitable, Brother, and I ask myself, convinced by what you have just said, whether El Señor simply is not seeking, with pain, at a different level, the truths you say you have encountered through your telescope … Toribio, is El Señor too solitary? Could we not, you and I, for the good of all … approach him…?”

“Do not be deceived. El Señor does not seek what we seek.”

“We, Brother?”

“Yes, you, Julián, you and your painting. Do you think I cannot see? That is all I do do, poor thing that I am, poor cross-eyed Chaldean: if I can scrutinize the heavens, I am entirely able to observe a painting, quite capable of going to El Señor’s chapel and reading the signs of that painting they say was brought from Orvieto, perhaps so that the distance of the origin might also distance the painting and hide the real intentions of its creator…”

“Silence, Brother, please, silence.”

“Very well. But what I want to tell you is that there is no reason to pity El Señor, or to compare him to ourselves.”

“We have sworn obedience to him.”

“But there are many degrees of obedience, and above that of service to El Señor is the obedience you owe your art and I owe science; and above all, that we owe God.”

“Silence, please, silence; El Señor believes that to obey him is to obey God; there is no room either for your science or for my painting in the two obligations that govern us.”

“And nevertheless, in these papers El Señor doubts, and you believe that El Señor’s doubt is similar to our secular faith.”

“Yes, I believe that; obscurely, piously, I believe it … or at least I want to believe it.”

“But it isn’t true, Brother; his doubt is not doubt, his doubt is not our doubt; El Señor still lives in the old world, and truth may not be found among all those conceptual and analytical subtleties, distinctions, questions, and suppositions; these are the things you and I are going to leave behind forever: the words El Señor consigned to paper in these folios through the fervent hand of his lackey Guzmán are like a pile of bricks without cement or mortar to bind them; the least breath of air can tumble them, the cement is missing; their union is poetry and poetry is the lime, the sand, and the water of all things, poetry is logical knowledge, poetry is the fullness of human activity and creation; and poetry tells us, without El Señor’s doubts and tricks of logic, that nothing is as audacious or sinful as El Señor believes, that there is nothing that is unbelievable, and that nothing is impossible for the profound poetry that binds all things together. Poetry is cohesion and coherence; your art and my science tell us, Brother, that the possibilities we deny are merely possibilities we still do not know. Condemn those possibilities, as has El Señor, and you give them the name of evil. Open yourself to them, and you will know the solidarity of good and evil, how they mutually nourish one another, and the impossibilities of dissociating them: can you split a coin in half and still call it a ducat? The only reason El Señor examines his doubts is to conserve an order; he places his trust in the fact that the truth revealed can withstand all assaults upon it, those of reason as well as those of imagination; believe that, Brother Julián.”

“You and I, then … do we wish to destroy that order?”

“Now I am the one to say: silence, please, silence; let us simply proceed with our work, confident that the order of mathematics and the order of painting are, or in the end will be, identical to divine order.”

“In truth, you have not answered my question.”

“Allow me to answer in my fashion. Although nature, like the tormented Tantalus, has an insatiable hunger and thirst, nothing, basically, is destroyed; rather, nature creates a succession of new lives and new forms for her own nourishment; time destroys, but nature produces more rapidly than death destroys. In the depths of his soul, El Señor is opposed to nature; he opposes it, Brother, and this is the limited grandeur of his impossible combat; the earth wishes to lose life, desiring only constant reproduction: El Señor wishes to save his life, denying the increment of this holy terrestrial substance ordained by God. Not an inch further, El Señor has declared to nature, sequestering it forever within a parallel universe of stone and death: this palace. Who will denounce him for it if everyone, El Señor and you and I, are prisoners of the earliest and most ancient thoughts conceived by men in opposition to the cosmos? El Señor is the prisoner of the idea of a world designed by the Deity in a single act of immutable, irrepeatable, intransformable revelation; you and I are tributaries of the idea of a divine emanation which is in perpetual flux, realized by continual transformation … Yes, our poor Señor. He believes that, like creation itself, perfection is unfeeling, immutable, and unalterable.”