Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

The sun’s rays began to burn the papers, clustered together in the ring of the lens, a tightly bound fascine of fire. “Do not worry about Guzmán, he is an unimportant lackey; place the blame on me, Brother; say it was my carelessness, an accident…”

The smoldering, curling flames devoured the folios.

“You are right, Brother. I shall say nothing.”

“Let these condemnable papers be burned, Julián, and the volumes of my library be saved. Look at them; their pages are in Arabic and Hebrew script. They could be considered more culpable than these dark blasphemies and foolish heresies dictated by El Señor to Guzmán, and delivered to you by Guzmán … under what pretext, by the way?”

“The same I used when I gave the papers of the Chronicler to him, which was how El Señor discovered these dissident heretics that today so delight and perturb him. Go, Guzmán, I told him, let El Señor see these papers, he will understand their contents. Guzmán said the same thing to me today. That he understood nothing. That I judge.”

Julián looked at Toribio with great affection. “I shall say nothing.”

The two friars embraced, and Toribio whispered to Julián: “I shall write nothing, as the disciples of Pythagoras wrote nothing. But not because of fear, oh, no, Brother…”

“You do well; believe that my spirit is relieved, knowing your resolution.”

“But understand me: not from fear…”

And Julián, embracing his comrade, not seeing his eyes, but feeling in the encompassing embrace the trembling of the astrologer-priest, did not wish to ask: Are you weeping? is it then because of pride since it is not fear?; but Toribio himself spoke: “Because of my scorn. There are more drones than bees in this world. I shall not reveal what I know to the mockery of mediocre men. I have spent much time, much love and care, in understanding a few things that for me are beautiful: I shall not expose myself either to the scorn or the mockery of miserable charlatans … Mockery, Brother: ‘Look what this squint-eyed Chaldean has seen through his powerful crystals, with his celestial spectacles…’”

“Brother … sit down … wait … rest.”

“I shall disclose nothing; we will wait. I shall disclose nothing, but neither shall El Señor. The sun will devour both his words and mine.”

“And if El Señor himself asks an accounting of the destruction of his papers?”

“As is my courtly custom, I shall draw him a happy horoscope; there I shall demonstrate that the destructive sign of Scorpio determined the fatal loss of his testament. He will accept his unfortunate loss in exchange for the many false ventures that with eulogies and dithyrambs and comparisons to the gods and heroes of antiquity I shall announce to him. And that will be that, Brother. Come; let us go drink; let us go laugh … although he who laughs last, weeps first.”

A pilgrim without a country, the son of several lands, and therefore the forgotten orphan of all lands, Celestina’s companion, the blond youth with the blood-red cross upon his back, attempted to recognize in the feeble light of this dawn the place where he had been led; he walked to the foot of the astronomer’s tall stone tower which reminded him vaguely of other buildings similarly oriented toward the stars. The youth’s desire soared upward with that of the ascendant, supplicant tower. He looked about him; he saw the flat land of Castile, the calm dust of early morning, the even and shadowless silhouette of the mountains at dawn standing darkly against the first rays of the sun; he saw the swift passing of black horses, and the slow step of steaming oxen dragging carts heaped with straw, hay, and blocks of granite; with an early-morning flock of storks, he flew in search of a nesting site, he heard the cawing of the crows circling above the roofs of this interminable palace, he smelled the burned skin and dripping fat of a lamb roasting in some tile shed on the work site, and he listened to the first cattle bells of the day; he touched the gray stone of the tower and there, in spite of the recentness of the construction, his fingers felt an ancient and persistent sign of life, a hollow mysteriously worked in the stone, and in that sheltered place a tiny sprig of wheat was germinating. The pilgrim looked toward that land to which he had returned and asked himself whether it was so inhospitable that wheat was forced to grow in stone; and he tried to recall other fields, in another world he had known where tall green stalks grew bearing thick, flexible, hard, and yellow leaves, he thought of a different bread, the bread of the other world, the red and yellow grains.

He raised his arms above his head, he held his open palms to the sky, to the tower, not knowing as he did so whether he was praying, giving thanks, or attempting to remember; and in the instant he held his hands toward the dawn sky, two stones fell from the top of the tower, one large, the other smaller, the larger upon his left palm and the smaller on the right; the stones were cold, as if they had been all night in the cold night air; but as he closed his fists around them, the youth, excited by this miracle, quickly communicated warmth to them; the skies of Spain rained stones.

He returned to Jerónimo’s forge, drawn by the soft, sad sound of a flute being played, with closed eyes, by the stranger arrived the night before, that strange, first night the pilgrim had spent in Castilian lands, one he would always remember, when lights moved unassisted along the passageways of the dark palace, when wheat grew in stone, when dead falcons flew from windows, and bats — he had seen it — soared back and forth above his head carrying mutilated limbs, shinbones, ears, skulls; when, finally, the skies rained stones.

The youth clutched the stones as if they were two precious jewels. He reached the forge where Jerónimo, Celestina, and the blind flutist maintained their vigil. Above the strains of the plaintive flute, he heard the footsteps of an armed company approaching across the plain. Jerónimo rose to his feet. Celestina took his arm.

“It does not matter,” she said. “Let them come and take us with them. That is the reason my companion and I have come.”

The flutist ceased his playing and cleaned his instrument, wiping it upon the tatters of his ancient doublet. The pilgrim kept the two stones in his hands as the members of El Señor’s guard seized an unresisting Celestina; they approached the youth, and he, too, offered no resistance; he had known, since the night in the mountains when he had made love to the page-and-drummer with the tattooed lips, that he had come to this place in order to face a Señor and tell him what the pilgrim himself — though he knew it — was reluctant to believe.

THE SECOND TESTAMENT

“I. I … by the grace of God … knowing, according to the doctrine of St. Paul the Apostle … what comes after that, Guzmán, what are the words dictated by our testamentary tradition?”

“… how, following sin, it is ordained by Divine Providence that all men die in punishment of it. Señor, it is not time…”

“… and as the goodness of our God is so full and great … how, Guzmán? read it, read me what it says in the breviary…”

“That that same death which is punishment for our guilt is received by Him as due preparation of life, and we suffer it gladly … Señor, for God’s…”

“Gladly, Guzmán? Have you seen my preternaturally aged members, my body sapped by the excesses inherited from those mummies and skeletons that the day before yesterday we entombed here for all time, the flame of my body that in spite of everything persists in igniting, and which must then be extinguished with penitence, words of repentance, flagellation, and unending nightmares … for I have no right to contaminate Isabel; true, Guzmán?”