Terra Nostra

II. THE NEW WORLD

MORNING STAR

Sire: My story begins with the appearance over the sea of the morning star, called Venus, night’s last glimmer, but also its perpetuation in the dawn’s clear light: Venus, the sailor’s guide. One morning in a secluded spot along the coast I came upon an old man, tenacious still, but marked by fatigue. He was building a boat there by the seashore. I asked him where he planned to sail; he did not welcome my questions. I asked whether I might voyage in his company; with his fist he motioned toward a hammer and some nails and planks. I understood the arrangement he was offering, and I labored with him fourteen days and nights. When we had finished, the taciturn old man spoke: looking with pride toward his ark with the stout, weathered sails.

“At last.”

We set sail, then, with Venus one summer morning, carrying twenty casks filled with water from the nearby streams. At great risk I had gathered from the villages along the shore — and without permission of their owners — hens and large wheaten loaves, supplies of rope and other tackle, jerked beef, smoked bacon, and a bag of limes. The old man smiled when I returned with these provisions. I recounted the small adventures I had encountered in obtaining them, by night, or at the hour of siesta, slipping and sliding along tile roofs, swimming the wide mouth of a river, and always saving myself by my natural agility.

The old man smiled, I say, and asked my name. I answered by asking his; Pedro, he said, but insisted on knowing mine. I entreated him to give me a name, adding that, with neither mockery nor distrust, I must assure him I didn’t know my name.

“Sir Thief”—old Pedro laughed—“or Genteel Pirate, and with good reason: What things do you know?”

“East and west, north and south.”

“What names do you remember?”

“Very few. God, and Venus, Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum.”

A light breeze bore us swiftly away from the coast. Once out of sight of the shore, I asked instructions of Pedro, who was busying himself with the sails, so I could set the course toward our destination. But the old man had already lost his temporary good spirits, and said in a somber tone: “You tend the sails, I’ll take the helm.”

And so we sailed on; there was no sense of movement, for the summer sea was as still as glass, and the breeze so soft it raised no swell but swept away the spume and spread the seas with quicksilver. We sailed without incident, for the old man had no doubt about the course he’d set, and at first I obeyed his orders blindly. My will was becalmed; the quiet of the sea inspired similar tranquillity of body and soul. Peaceful sea, soft zephyr. There was little work to be done, so I whiled away hours on end lying on the deck and gazing at the docile passage of the fleecy clouds and the bountiful sun. We left gulls and plants behind, signs of the proximity of land. The old man had steered away from the coast, but I supposed we were never more than two days from land, for, whatever our route, like a flowing needle we’d be stitching a pattern along the widespread cloth of the shore. In itself, the sea is nothing — except the kingdom of the fishes and the tomb of the incautious — its only value that of serving as a briny road to link together the abundant harvests of our provident Mother Earth. I knew well the maps that charted the outlines of our Mediterranean Sea, and although we’d sailed away from the northern coasts, in my mind I pictured myself sailing first toward the south, then to the east, to Mare Nostrum, the sea with no secrets, our cradle, as secure as that land I praise, land our sea contains in its very name, Mediterraneum, sea of marble and olive, sea of wine and sand … my sea.

I watched the last gannets gliding above the surface of the water, eating fish from the sea, the sun occasionally glinting from their backs. And when they were no longer there to watch, I missed them. Then my half-closed eyes focused on the sun, and with a flash stronger than those burning rays my dozing reason flamed with surprise and fear. What a fool! Day after day I’d been watching that summer sun, and only now did I realize what it had been telling me: faithfully, persistently, we were following its course. The sun was our guide, a magnet more powerful than any compass; one need only follow its daily path and one can dispense with any navigational needles; we were obedient to its course, our ship was a serf, subservient to the heavenly body.

Obdurately, we were sailing from East to West. The sun rose at our backs to set before our bow. I sprang to my feet, shocked and trembling; I looked at Pedro; he returned a cold, serene, decided, mocking stare.

“You were a long while realizing, boy.”

His words broke the strange and unwarranted peace of my spirits, an inferior copy of the benign nature enveloping me; that radiant sun, that clear sky, that good air, that mirrored sea were instantly transformed into the icy certainty of disaster; the calm presaged storm, pain, and certain catastrophe: we were sailing toward the end of the world, the cataract of the ocean, that unknown sea of which only one thing was certain: those who passed the forbidden line of the beyond were claimed by death.

Terror and anger: can such contrasting emotions exist side by side? In me, at that moment, yes. I saw death in the quicksilver sea and I imagined a boiling fury where its waters tumbled precipitously over the very edge of the world. With fury and fear I looked at the old man; I hoped to surprise the gaze of madness in those deep-set eyes hidden beneath the ancient lids. I shouted that he was leading us to disaster, that he had deceived me, and that if his proposition was to put an end to his days in such a terrible manner, mine was to save myself, and not to share his wretched fate. I seized a pole and rushed at Pedro. The old man abandoned the wheel and struck me in the belly with all the frightful force of his callused fist, and in that instant the boat rolled, momentarily freed from control, and I lay groaning on the deck.

“It’s your choice, Thief … or Pirate,” Pedro murmured. “You may choose whether you’re to voyage bound hand and foot like a common thief, or standing on your feet, hands free, master, with me, of this sea and the free land we will find on the other shore.”

“Free land? Other shore?” I exclaimed. “You’re mad, old man! You’re going to perish in this mad endeavor, and drag me down to death with you!”

“What is it you reproach me for?” Pedro replied. “The fact that I’m resigned and you’re ambitious?”

“Yes. I want to live, old man, and you want to die.”

“On my life, I tell you not so. Because I’ve lived what I’ve lived, I make this voyage to go on living.”

He looked at me enigmatically, and as I didn’t understand his reasoning, but persisted in my own — he wished to die, I wished to live — he continued in a guarded tone: “Can’t you see it’s me, the old man, who has ambitions, and you, the young one, who’s resigned? I flee because I must. And you?”

He was asking me whether the events of my short life hadn’t disenchanted me with those things that denied life, not life itself.

“Why, then, did you sail with me? Why didn’t you stay behind if you don’t believe in the new land I seek? Where do you come from, Thief?”

I feared that question: I always fear it, because even as I cannot remember my name, I am more than aware of the reason for that ignorance. I answered the old man: “From everywhere.”

“From nowhere, then.”

“What I mean is, the only thing I can remember is an endless pilgrimage. Believe me, old man.”

“Then I’ll call you Pilgrim.”

“Yes, I’ve never stopped, always a wanderer. No corner of the known earth has ever claimed me, made me feel what other men feel that makes them want to put down roots — a name, a hearth, a woman and offspring, honor and property. Do you understand me, old man?”

From the helm Pedro looked at me, pondered, and said no, he couldn’t understand such meaningless words, they were too different from what he would have said to explain his own life: “All the things you never had, I had and lost. Lands and harvests: the lands burned, the harvest stolen; descendants: well, my sons were murdered; honor: my women were besmirched by the Liege. And liberty as well, or its illusion, for I came to know how the multitude can be deceived and led into slavery and death in the name of liberty. Do you know anything at all of this, Pilgrim? I think not, and that’s why I can’t understand your words.”

I tried to explain how little I understood myself, for the fleetingness of my recollections was of a different nature, and very few voices came to my aid in explanation. Visions of pale deserts and distant oases, bronzed mountains and indistinct islands, walled cities, temples of death, men’s faces, cruel or humiliated, perverse or desiring women, the muted cries of children, galloping horses, fire and flight, dogs howling beneath the moon, old men sleeping beside their camels. Could I reconstruct the memory of a life from such visions? I don’t know. I didn’t know the precise names of those places and those people any more than I knew my own name or place. Was what I then said to Pedro enough to encompass all those featureless memories?

“I’ve always lived beside Mare Nostrum. I am a Mediterranean man.”

No. It was not enough: at the moment I uttered the words, my cruel memory, unlimited but also without guideposts, dragged me backward in its impetus, backward to a distant and close memory, never making clear what came before and what came after: memory like air, lost sigh of the past and agitated breath of the present, all one. How could I explain this to the old man? Helpless before absolutes I was myself unable to penetrate, I preferred to concede this invalid but immediate argument once I had satisfied, if only temporarily, it’s true, my immediate instinct of self-preservation. I felt two principles struggling within my breast. One impelled me to survive at all cost. The other demanded mad adventure in pursuit of the unknown. Between the two, resignation reigned. For that reason, my rebelliousness quelled, the spirit of adventure latent, I said: “Since I, like you, am fleeing, although I have no motive and you say you have more than enough, I accept, old man, this voyage to death. Perhaps in death my poor enigmas will be resolved, perhaps it is my destiny to resolve them at the moment I am dying, and to know only when I am dead. It doesn’t matter, it will all have been in vain.”

Resignedly, I arose from the deck where I had been thrown by the force of Pedro’s blow and the motion of the ship, as Pedro said: “You will see, my boy, that we’re not going to our deaths but to a new land.”

“Don’t be deceived. You have many illusions for a man of your years, and I admire you. At the least, I swear to weep with you when you lose them.”

“You’d wager your life against my illusions?” Pedro laughed with a trace of bitterness. “And what will you give me if at the end of the voyage both my illusions and your life survive?”

“Nothing more than I can give you now. My company and my friendship. But I am calm. May you be, too. Believe me, old man, I accept the destiny we will share.”

Pedro sighed. “I could believe you better if you believed what I do.”

He told me then how one must believe in that other land beyond the ocean. How when the sun sinks in the west every night, it is not devoured by the earth or miraculously reborn in the east at dawn, but has circled around the earth, which must be round like the sun and the moon, for his old eyes had never seen flat bodies in the heavens, only spheres, and our earth would not be the monstrous exception.

He recounted how thousands of times at dusk, his feet planted firmly upon the dry earth of summer or sunken in the winter mud, he had gazed upon the expanse of an enormous open field, free of the accident of mountain or forest, and how whirling where he stood he had seen that the earth and the horizon traced two perfect circles and that the sun, as it nightly bade farewell to the earth, recognized itself in its sister form.

“Poor old man,” I said with increasing melancholy, “if what you say is true, then at the end of this voyage we’ll have returned to our point of departure and everything will have been in vain. I will be right. And you’ll be returning to what you remember with horror.”

“And you?”

It was difficult for me to say: “To what I have forgotten.”

“Then believe as I do,” Pedro said energetically, “that God did not create this world to be inhabited only by the men that you and I have known. There must be another, better land, a free and happy land made in God’s true image, for I believe the one we have left behind is but an abominable reflection.”

And he repeated, his voice trembling: “I don’t believe that God created this world to be inhabited only by men that you and I have known, men we have remembered or forgotten … it’s all the same. And if that is not the case, I will no longer believe in God.”

I told him I could respect his faith, but that he needed proof to sustain these questionable convictions. He asked me to bring him a lime from the sack. This I did. We knelt on the deck and he asked me to stand the lime on end. I was convinced of the old man’s madness, but again resigned myself to my bad fortune. I tried to do what he asked, but the elliptical faded green fruit again and again rolled over onto its side. I looked at Pedro in silence, not yet daring to point out his error. And as I say, I was resigned. The old man took the lime, held it high between two thick fingers, then smashed it down against the planking of the deck. The base of the lime split open, its juice ran out, but it stood on end.

Pedro handed me the lime: “Your lips are white, Pilgrim. You need to suck one of these little limes every day.”

That night neither of us slept. Some wretched suspicion kept us awake until the appearance of our early-morning star. I had nothing to fear but certain death, the fatal moment when we’d be tossed into a foaming cemetery to perish, crushed beneath the monumental opaque waters, black as the deepest rivers of Hell. Nevertheless, as the star appeared, announcing another day of heat and calm, I fancied I’d struggled against sleep to prevent Pedro’s worrying that as he slept I would take advantage of his rest to strangle him with a cord, throw him overboard, and undertake the return to the coast from which we’d set sail.

But in truth I’d also feared that as I slept, the old man, for fear of me, would do the same, would kill me with the broken knife he kept beside him at the helm, throw me to the sharks that had for days been following in the wake of the ship, and then continue alone, assured, without misgivings, his willful voyage to disaster.

The disquieting star — sister to dusk and to the dawn — glimmered, seeming to confirm in her round the old man’s circular reasoning. And it was he who resolved our fears, he the valiant one who first lay down in a corner of the deck, shaded by the canvas that protected our casks of sweet water.

“Aren’t you afraid of me, Pedro?” I shouted from the helm in my white and briny voice.

“The death you foresee for us is a worse risk,” the old man said. “If you believe so strongly we’re going to perish, why would you kill me now?” And after a brief pause he added: “I want the first person to set foot on the new land to be a young man.” And closed his eyes.

I imagined myself master of the ship, free of the old man and his fatal race toward disaster: I imagined returning to the coast we’d left behind twelve days before. And as I pictured myself there, I tried to imagine what I would do once we’d returned to the starting point. Well, Sire: I could imagine only two courses. One would carry me back to an earlier point of departure, and from there to the one before that, and so on, until I’d reached the place and time of my origins. But if I began again from that forgotten origin, what road offered itself to me but the one I’d already traveled? And that road, what could it do but lead me to the shore where I’d found Pedro, and from there, with him on this ship, to the same point we find ourselves, in this very instant, on the sea? I reflected in this way about the sad fate of a man in time, for the great abundance of the past obliged me to forget it and live only this fleeting present: but caught in the memory-less succession of the seconds, I was given no choice: my future would be as obscure as my past.

With my eyes closed I stood thinking about these things. And as I thought, the struggle between survival and risk began to trouble the quiet resignation of my soul. Pedro had closed his eyes. I opened mine.

“Guide me, star, guide me,” I fervently pleaded.

I followed the path of the sun, the will of the old man, and my fatal destiny, toward the motionless Sargasso Sea.

WATER CLOCK

And so, Sire, we measured time by water. The saltiness of the sea increased, and we consumed the sweet water in the casks, but everything, except Pedro and me and our ship, was water. We devoured a goodly portion of our provisions, but kept some of the jerked meat, and baited hooks with it, and threw them into the sea. Since sharks abound in all the seas, it wasn’t long till one took the bait, as speedy and voracious in falling into the trap of the astute as in attacking the defenseless sailor.

It was with great joy we captured the first squalus, and gaffed it and dragged it over the side; Pedro killed it by beating it on the head with the side of the ax, and with a knife I cut it into thin strips, which we hung from the rigging. We left them there three days to dry, in no hurry now, sure of food and in no way troubled to postpone our banquet. Few things bring two men closer together and force them to forget past quarrels more easily than these fraternal tasks, helping each other to confront a danger, and overcome it. Then we can see how foolish are the disputes of human wills, for nothing can be compared to the menace of nature: nature may lack will, but it abounds in a ferocious instinct for extermination. In this, nature and woman are alike. And here is their greatest danger: their beauty tends to disarm us.

On the thirtieth day of our voyage we ate the savory strips of shark meat, and we laughed heartily upon discovering that our fierce shark had a double reproductive member, that is, that he steered with two virile weapons, each as long as a man’s arm from elbow to the tip of his middle finger, and in addition we were cheered by a discussion of whether, when he coupled with the female, the shark exercised both members at one time, or one at a time, in separate couplings. Perhaps that is the reason the female of the shark is known to give birth only once during her lifetime.

I tell you now, Sire, we were completely surrounded by motionless water; I told myself we’d sailed upon the terrible Sargasso Sea, the point where all sailors become fearful and turn back. Not we. I, because I feared the turbulent catastrophe of the future more than the present calmness that delayed that fate. The old man, because neither calm nor torment weakened his confidence in our certain destination, the new world of his dreams. The delightful conversations we had then saved us from the clutches of this indolent ocean. We spoke of the sea, and when Pedro showed me the faithfully — to the extent of man’s knowledge — reproduced charts of the ports and harbors ringing our Mediterranean, I could recall, but always without the orientation of any dates, the contours of that remembered sea; but where the charts extended toward the west, marine space faded into an unknown of vague contours.

“That’s how it is, son. The mariner’s compass can tell us nothing about what lies beyond this point”—his finger touched the island of Iceland—“shown here as Ultima Thule…”

“… where the world ends,” I added.

Friends in adversity, father and son, or more accurately, grandfather and grandson, in appearance, we had not because of that ceased to maintain our opposing beliefs.

“Are you still afraid?” the old man asked me.

“No, I’m not afraid. But neither do I believe. And you?”

“I fear your name. Do you swear you’re not called Felipe?”

“Yes. Why do you fear that name?”

“Because that name is capable of carrying me to something worse than the end of the world.”

“To what, Pedro?”

“To his castle. He lives there, with death.”

These are the things the old man said when his spirit grew somber; then I would try to talk again about the sea and boats, and then old Pedro, a man of action and memories as I was one of dreams and forgetfulness, explained the observations leading him to conceive the plan of this lateen-rigged, two-masted vessel with triangular sails superior, he told me, to those on the ancient cogs, for by lying closer to the wind it took better advantage of it. And the absence of a forecastle, as well as the lightness of the wood from which the ship was built, assured greater agility and maneuverability. I saw that now: two men alone, we were able to control this small and docile ship, and we had come this far tacking with scarcely a breeze fore or aft, and were even advancing over the Sargasso, although the water was like oil. Old Pedro had shown himself to be ingenious and full of illusions.

“I must not falter now!”

He told me how, twenty-two years before, he’d tried to embark in search of the new land. “My plan was ruined by three men and a woman; their desires destroyed me, for they wanted only the deceptive promises of our old land. They destroyed me, son, but they saved themselves — although I doubt now whether that imperfect old barge would have carried us very far. So I abandoned my fields and came to the seashore; I exchanged the company of field laborers for that of sailors. It took me a long while to learn what I needed. This ship is almost perfect.”

He said that when a squadron of light ships like this were constructed, and of greater size and with larger crews, they would tame the ocean. “We must guard our secret well, though, lest all come by the route that today belongs only to you and me, my boy, where both solitude and freedom are ours.”

He spoke without lowering his voice; vast was the arched ceiling of this marine cathedral, and if I served as his confessor, those words would never cross my lips for anyone but him to hear.

We were in the fourth day of the second month on the route of the trade winds when our sails swelled and we saw the sure sign of a favorable wind in flying fish. We admired those fish, whose two wings emerge alongside the gills, a handsbreadth long, as wide as your thumb, covered with skin like the wing of a bat. Because we had some fine nets aboard, I was able to capture a few that passed very close by the starboard rail. We ate them. They tasted of smoke.

I can tell you now, Sire, that eating those flying fish was the last pleasure we were to enjoy. The following day, toward midday, the sea lay blue and the wind blew soft; the salt of those calm, even waves was the dew of the burning sun: everything, I say, was harmonious … clear, warm beauty. The sea was the sea, the sky the sky, and we were a calm and living part of it all. Then, to the north of our vessel, a tumult burst forth, the azure horizon exploded into tall, brilliant flashes of white; the sea was churned with an anger all the more impressive for being so sudden and so in contrast with the peace and silence the old man and I’d been enjoying an instant before. White waves, though still distant, approached relentlessly, swelling to ever increasing heights. Belly of glass, crowned with phosphorescent plumes, the flotillas of enormous waves devoured each other only to be born redoubled in size.

At last we saw the black tail of the fierce beast threshing the once tranquil waters; we saw it dive and then, a half league from us, shoot like a heavy arrow into the air, opening great jaws of iridescent flesh, turning slowly, diving, again emerging violently from the sea as if it detested both air and water but needed both in equal measure. Sire, first we saw the frightful lime-and-seashell-crusted back, looking like an enormous phantom ship, mysteriously propelled, its driving force the death which clung in that odious dross to the whale’s back. Then we saw its bloodshot, aqueous, flaming eye, crisscrossed with coagulated broken veins, appearing and disappearing between the slowly moving, oozing, oily lid; our safe little ship was turned into an uncontrollable raft, whipped by the chaotic, violent, and ever higher waves engendered by the leviathan.

I feared that if we received one blow from that tail we would sink, broken in two. But the ship was proving its good construction. It behaved like a cork, and the old man and I, hanging on to the same mast, my hands grasping his shoulders and his clutching mine, felt our vessel was the plaything of the tumult; but the boat did not fight the waves; rather, it bent to their hostile commands, bobbing over the crests and in this manner keeping us afloat. Pounding foam sprayed over our heads.

I saw the reason for it all. I shouted to the old man to watch the terrible combat an enormous swordfish had launched against the whale, for so close to us was the struggle that we could see every detail of the fish, the jaw filled with ferocious teeth, the hard rough sword struggling to puncture the whale’s thick hump, and it was a marvel to watch how the fish played the side of his rapier, not the point, ripping and tearing the leviathan’s best defense, the tough striated skin, seeking the opportunity to plunge his sword into the wildly rolling eye of the enemy.

I was grateful that the great fish was employing his sword against the whale and not against our ship, for he could have penetrated our bulwarks a handsbreadth deep, as now, quick as a flash, with an unexpected movement he drove his sword deep into the whale’s eye, with the same gusto and to the same depth the male thrusts into the female. I don’t know whether we shouted with surprise as we saw how the fish, precise and quivering, knew instinctively how to press his advantage in the battle, for it seemed to move with greater speed than the whale could comprehend, whether Pedro and I cried out in empathetic pain, whether the terrible moan came from the enormous jaws of the suffering, wounded giant, whether a victory cry could have been born of the silvery vibrations of the fish, or whether the ocean itself, wounded along with its most powerful monster, issued a mournful cry from the deep, a great bellow of reddish foam.

But imagine, Sire: the leviathan leaps for the last time, attempting to free itself from the fatal pike driven deep into its eye; then it sinks, perhaps also for the last time, seeking refuge in the deep, and perhaps relief from pain. And as it submerges it drags in its green wake the fish, trembling now, eager to free itself from its prey, victimized in turn by its victim, and carried by it to the silent kingdom where the whale can wait whole centuries for its wound to heal, cured by the sea’s medicines, salt and iodine, while the fish, formerly master and now slave to its body’s weapon, body and weapon inseparable, will die, its fine brittle skeleton, as silvery as its scales, deposited in crusts of lime and shell on the hide of the great whale. I must rejoice that the arms of man, staff and iron, though propelled by flesh and blood, are not part of our bodies.

There we stood, blindly clinging to the mast, rubbing our soaking shoulders and our hairy necks. When we opened our eyes, we moved apart, made sure the rudder was in good condition, the lines well secured, and that nothing indispensable had been lost. Only then did we look at the sea of blood surrounding us, the red bubbles ascending from the depths capturing the light of the sun, staining it with blood. What awaited us ahead? Drop by drop, our water clock measured the spilled blood of the wounded ocean.

WHIRLPOOL OF THE NIGHT

Life’s everyday habits must be immediately reestablished; routine boredom seems like noble perseverance when marvels — by their abundance — acquire the aspect of custom. Thus the old man and I, when we touched the hair at the back of our necks, realized that neither scissors nor blade had come near our unshorn heads for many days; nor had we consulted a mirror in more than two months.

We moved away from the stern and its red wake; who would have dared seek his image in a mirror of blood? For a better tool, I rummaged through a canvas sack for the glass I’d stolen from some sleeping household, and braced myself to look at my face. I saw where salt and sun had left their marks, white where the indication of a question, joy, or fear was wont to wrinkle the skin, but the color of polished wood where the twofold action of sun and spume had touched my face. There was little beard, a fine, golden fuzz, not at all like the gray, tangled and abundant fleece adorning Pedro, but my mane reached my shoulders. A young lion and a bear, companions in the middle of the ocean. I looked at myself, and as I looked asked my reflection: “Where do you come from? Where have you been and what have you learned that there is no trace of malice in you? Can innocence be the fruit of experience? One day, when you remember, tell me.”

I showed my aged companion his reflection; we laughed, forgetting the fish and the whale. I sat upon a keg while the old man, with shiny tailor’s scissors I’d also stolen on the shore cut my long hair; I put away the glass in my double pocket.

It was growing dusk when we exchanged positions and I performed the barber’s rites, trimming Pedro’s rough and savage neck; neither of us spoke of what truly occupied our thoughts. For more than two months we’d been sailing in a straight line from East to West, and still no sign of land nearby, no bird or vegetation or floating log or strong-scented breeze of oven or of meat or bread or excrement or stagnant water, as Pedro had hoped — nor precipitous waters and atrocious death, as I had feared. The skies were beginning to grow heavy with clouds.

“Hurry,” the old man said. “There’s little light left and a storm is threatening.”

“That’s good,” I replied. “I hope the rain will fill our empty casks.”

I recall our words, and I connect them with the familiar sound of scissors as I trimmed my friend’s neck, because those were the last words and that the last ordinary action we were to say or do. Sire: beneath my feet I felt a growing suction as if a lightning flash were issuing not from the stormy sky but from the tormented waters, a flash passing from my head to my feet; an inverted flash, so it felt to me, striking without the warning the good firmament offers us; that must be so because the sky and land look upon one another openly, while it’s different with the kingdom of the sea, which having taken the veil is to the sky and land what the nun is to man and woman.

This was a flash, I say, born of a profound eruption at the very bottom of the sea; liquid fire. The ship creaked frighteningly; the natural night was doubled in another, cyclonic darkness; the storm burst and I gave thanks that the heavens thundered like our boat, that the clouds descended to hover above the mastheads, that real lightning announced real thunderbolts. Each of us ran to a mast; we trimmed the sails, attempting to furl them and lash them down with rope, but the sudden heaving of the boat prevented us; we rolled across the deck and crashed against the bulwarks. I seized a large iron ring embedded in the starboard rail; we had voyaged, sailed, tacked, settled onto the calm Sargasso, been driven by soft trade winds, agitated by the tumult raised by the whale, but what was happening now was totally different from anything we could ever have foreseen. The wheel was uncontrollable, whirling madly at will; Pedro was helpless, his outstretched hands mercilessly drubbed by the wildly windmilling spokes and knobs. The ship wasn’t sailing, it was whirling, sucked lower and lower, the Devil’s toy, caught in a suction originating in the yawning jaws of the deep.

“Here we are at the edge of the universe,” I said to myself, “at the mercy of the cataract; this is what I have dreaded, the hour has come…”

For our ship was sinking into a sinister, invisible whirlpool; I knew that, with fear, when I no longer could see the water beneath us, but above us: the phosphorescent crests of the waves were the only light in that black tempest, and if earlier the waves had risen to swamp us, now they threatened to capsize and crush us: the swells receded from us not horizontally but vertically, in a line parallel to our heads, not our outstretched arms; the waves were above us, high over our heads, higher even than masts that no longer pointed toward the clouds. We were descending the watery walls of a bottomless whirlpool, we were a paper boat foundering in a gutter, a fly swimming in honey, we were nothing, there.

And even though I was prepared for this, for I had foreseen and feared nothing else, I observed at that moment, Sire, the vigorous tenacity of life, for I labored then as if hope were possible; my mind racing, I ran toward Pedro, who struggled in vain to control the whirling wheel; the rudder had allied itself with the whirlpool and was our enemy. I pushed Pedro, whipped and befuddled, toward the nearest mast and as best I could lashed him to the pole; the old man moaned all the while, a feeble echo returned to the roar of the storm. There is nothing I could tell you, Sire, that could reproduce the roaring of that tempest; more than a tempest, it was the end of all tempests, the frontier of hurricanes, the sepulcher of storms: a centenary combat of wolves and jackals, lions and crocodiles, eagles and crows could not engender a more piercing, shriller, greater, and more keening outcry than that dark lament of all the wind-whipped seas of the world here reunited, over and around and below us; great, terrible, and without surcease were the boundaries and pantheon of the waters, Sire.

The bound old man moaned: the sparks from his eyes told me he considered himself a prisoner and me the jailer of the ship, and in those flashing glances was perhaps disguised the terror of defeat. We had reached not the new land of his desires but the bottomless well of my fears. I didn’t stop to reflect, I acted, telling myself that if salvation was to be had it would be attained only by clinging to the iron rings or the masts, and I myself clung for an instant to the mast, looking into Pedro’s resentful eyes, vacillating between anger and sadness, when before us we saw the second mast break like a feeble reed, sucked immediately, a quiet ruin of splinters, into the circling maelstrom.

I lost all hope; the speed with which we whirled toward the belly of the maelstrom tore the ropes loose from the casks, and they began to roll with menacing and chaotic force about the deck, demolishing what remained of the boat’s equilibrium. I imagined that within a few brief instants we would founder, deep within the vortex, swept from the deck, for now we could not even see the distant sky and distant crests of the sea we’d left both behind and above us; upturned, standing on end, we looked into our destiny, the blind eye of death in the entrails of the sea.

Then stumbling and falling I ran among the tumbling barrels, thinking feverishly in what manner I might best lash them again or throw them overboard; just in time I reached my iron ring and clung to it at the very moment the most terrible of all the tremors shook the boat. Everything in it that was not lashed down, casks and rigging, hooks and canvas, chains and harpoons, chests and bags, tumbled over the sides; clinging to my iron ring, I feared I, too, would be swept overboard as I saw them sucked out of the ship by the rapid circular whiplash, the whistling trajectory, our ship traced around the liquid walls of that marine tunnel.

I looked upward; it was like looking toward the highest tower ever built or toward the mountain after the Deluge; we were captive within a cylinder of compacted, fissureless water, a tube uninterrupted to the top of the distant, chiaroscuroed peaks of phosphorescent foam. And beyond was the sky and the storm; but we were part of a space without sky or storm; we were living within the swiftly racing black cave of the whirlpool, in the tomb of the waters. I imagined what lay beneath us, a smooth, narrow, pulsating pit; the infinite well. I called upon my diminished powers of observation and again looked upward; I don’t know whether our star Venus was shining once again high above or whether certain forms of luminous waves were being regularly repeated; what is certain is that in the distance there was a point of reference, a providential, fleeting, faint luminosity that permitted me to measure with exactitude the curve of our trajectory within the whirlpool: I counted on my fingers, I counted forty seconds for every revolution — I counted, and my fingers still hurt from that counting — and I found that as I counted between thirty and thirty-six the velocity of the rotation notably diminished, our ship slipped into a calmer segment of the curve, cruelly offering a hope of remission before redoubling its fury to explode, between thirty-seven and forty of my total, with a whiplash force that at every revolution threatened to break forever the nutshell that held us. I looked at the liquid walls of our prison, and what I saw was incredible. Among the objects thrown outside the ship by the force of the whirlpool, some — heavy sacks, and chains, and the anchor — were descending into the vortex with greater velocity than that of the ship itself, while others, with equal speed, were effecting the opposite movement: I saw a yellowish cluster of shriveled limes ascending, I saw pieces of canvas rising and empty kegs and the sail we’d not managed to furl; I saw, an even greater marvel, that the pieces of the splintered mast were also ascending in regular rotation toward the surface of the sea that was our tomb, toward a meeting with the heavens that had forgotten us.

Never had a mind debated so fast and feverishly as in that instant: in every complete revolution of our boat around the circular walls of water I had exactly six seconds to move without fear of being sucked from the boat: swiftly, I reviewed the objects caught in the rigging and still remaining in the boat: strips of shark meat, some lines attached to the embedded iron rings; in vain I sought the ax with which we’d clubbed the shark to death: in the pocket of my water-soaked doublet I felt the shaving mirror, and in the belt of my breeches the black tailor’s scissors. And Pedro bound to the mast. And at the helm, the wheel, spinning wildly, weakened now, perhaps, in its precise and precious equipoise as both indicator and guide of the ship.

In the six seconds Providence granted me at each rotation, I ran to the wheel. The vibration had damaged its stability. I returned to my sure hold on the ring. I endured the trembling whiplash as the ship completed its gyration. I returned to the wheel, utilized the scissors as a lever, seized its vibrating base, and struggled like a galley slave to prize loose that wheel on which all my hopes were pinned.

Imagine, Sire, my repeated efforts during that eternal night whose only hour hands were those of my particular sequence: six seconds of feverish activity, thirty-four of obligatory and painful repose, watchful, adding my sweat to the waters that washed over me and at times blinded me, wiping away when I could the thick salt encrusted on my forehead and eyes. I ran toward the mast, waited, I began to free Pedro, waited, continued freeing Pedro, waited, I told him to run with me to the wheel, waited, we ran, I counted, I told him first to seize the base of the wheel, that he count to thirty-six and move only when I moved, now, clutching the wheel — wait, old man, now — I bound him chest and shoulders to the wheel, waited, now I grasped the wheel, wait, old man, now take the line, tie me while I hold myself pinned to the motionless base, now let go, old man, free your arms as I free mine, now we’re going to fly, old man, to fly or drown, I don’t know which: old man, you told me, didn’t you, that the novelty of this ship was its light wood? Invoke that lightness now, Pedro, for your life and mine, pray for us; I don’t know what forces of this hostile whirlpool cause certain weights to descend and others to rise, pray that your wheel be of the former, let go, old man, here comes the whiplash of this fearful curve, now …

The combined velocity of the whirlpool and the ship threw us overboard, dashed us against the smooth turbulence of the vortex, it was impossible to know whether we were upside down or right side up, we lost all orientation, twins bound to the wheel that had in its turn fallen into the claws of the maelstrom. I closed my eyes, nauseated, choking, blinded by the cataracts of black spume in this ocean tunnel, knowing that my sight was of as little use as my death, perhaps, would be. At first I closed my eyes in order not to lose consciousness, such was the rapidity of the revolutions: no one has ever known such vertigo, Sire, no one; and in that vertigo, light and dark were one, silence and clamor, my being and that of the female who gave me birth, wakefulness and sleep, life and death, all one. Finally I lost all consciousness, calculation, or hope; I was born again, again I died, and only one thought accompanied me amidst all that vertigo:

“You’ve lived this already … before … you’ve lived it … before … you knew … already,” the waters murmured in my dead ear.

For the last time, I opened my eyes, the old man and I were still bound to the wheel. I saw the upturned keel of our ship in the heart of the vortex, I heard nothing, for the drumming of the waters obliterated everything. All I saw was that husk of wood fading out of sight forever, consummating its nuptials with the sea.

THE BEYOND

Was there ever a time, Sire, you looked death in the face? Do you know the strange new geography death offers to the passive eyes and stilled hands of the dead? With no proof except that of my own death, I imagine the universe of death is different for every person. Or is the uniqueness of our deaths also wrested from us by the nameless immortal forces of sea and slime, stone and air. Farewell to an age of pride; accept now the certainty that as the senses that served us in life are dead, a new sense with dusty eyelids and waxy fingers is born in each of us in death, awaiting only that moment to lead us toward white beaches and black forests.

I say white and black in order to be understood, but I do not speak of whiteness as we know it in life, the white of bone or sheet, or of the blackness of the crow or of the night. Imagine, if you can, Sire, their simultaneous existence; side by side, at once illuminating and obscuring, the white white because the contrast of black permits it, and the black made black because white lights its blackness. In life these colors are divorced, but when at the hour of death I opened my new eyes of sand, I saw them forever united, one the color of the other, unimaginable alone: black beaches, white jungles. And the sky of death obscured by swift wings: a flock of shrieking, brightly colored birds flew overhead, their number so great they darkened the sun.

I am recounting my first impressions upon dying, as vague and uncertain as my drowsy fatigue, but as precise as the certainty that I would not be astounded by anything I saw, for I was dead, and thus I was seeing for the first time what one sees on the littoral of death. I clung to such simple facts: I had met death in the sea and we had descended into its entrails through a deep tunnel of water; the speeding vortex had led us to the island of the dead, a curious place of vague outlines, a hazy impression of white beach, black jungle, and shrieking birds that cast the veil of their wings across a spectral sun. Phantasmal island, final port of phantasmal voyagers. All of this must be accepted as truth, my will was incapable of offering any opposition; so this was the contract with death, an inability to affirm, to better, or to transform. Final port, a reality without appeal.

Had I come to this bay alone or accompanied? The eyes of the dead voyager search for new and strange directions, Sire, for he has lost the compass of his terrestrial days and cannot tell whether far is near, or near, far. With the ears of death I heard intermittent breathing; with the eyes of death I saw I was approaching a beach, accompanied by mother-of-pearl shells washed toward shore by the waves and by a soft dew that bathed both them and me. The dew was cool, the waters of the sea were warm, a green warmness warm as the water of a bath, different from the icy gray seas and cold blue waters I had known in life. I reached the shore of the other world with an armada of seashells that seemed to guide me toward the beach; my face was washed in the warm waves, I felt grainy sand beneath my hands and knees and feet; I was enveloped in crystalline green water, calm and silent as a lake.

I thought I had returned to life; I tried to shout; I tried to shout a single word: “Land!”

But instead of the impossible voice of a dead man I heard a bellow of pain; I looked and saw a floating wineskin adrift in the current of a sleepy river that emptied here into the sea; I saw an enormous monster with the body of a hairless pig, boiled or singed by fire; the monster moaned and stained the limpid waters with red; it was fat and dark and had two teats upon its breast; it was bleeding, carried toward the sea by the slow current. When I saw it, I tried desperately to grab hold of the floating shells around me; I said to myself, this is God-the-Terrible; I said, I’m looking at the very Devil, and I think I fainted from terror.

Perhaps I slipped from swoon to sleep. When I came to myself I seemed to be reclining. My head rested on the sandy beach, my body was caressed by warm waves. I managed to struggle to my feet, blinded still by fear and the acceptance of death. I looked toward the sea; the wineskin monster was drifting toward the horizon, inanimate and bleeding. I stepped onto the beach and was bathed in light. It was as beautiful as the sunset: a light slanting horizontally across the beach it bathed in a glossy grayish luster. I told myself that was the light we had in life called pearly.

I stopped looking at the light and turned to see what things it revealed. Sire: that beach of the Beyond, the beach I stood upon for the first time, was the most beautiful shore in the world; the beach in a dream, for if death were the most beautiful and desired and now the most complete of dreams, this would be the coast of the Paradise that God reserves for the blessed. A white beach of brilliant sand and thick black forests: I recognized the tree of the desert, the sighing palm. And the clearest of skies, cloudless, pure burning light born of itself, with no winged messengers to interrupt its gaze.

My damp footsteps sank into the sands of Eden. I breathed new odors, like nothing ever smelled before, sweet and juicy and heavy. I thought of the promises of the gods, but here were realities. The immense rolling white perfumed and shining beach of Paradise was a vast sandy treasure chest spilling over with a wealth of precious pearls. As far as my newly recovered and astonished sight could see, large nacreous shells and beautiful pearls covered the expanse of this providential beach. Pearls black as jet, tawny pearls, pearls yellow and scintillating as gold, thick and clustered, bluish pearls, quicksilver pearls, pearls verging upon green, some with diluted tones of paleness, others glowing in incendiary shades, pearls from all the mollusks, margarites, and minute baroques. The refracted light of all the mirrors of the world mixed with the white brilliance of the sands could not match the coruscating splendor of this pearly beach where death had thrown me. I buried my feet in the fabulous riches accumulated here, then quickly squatted to plunge my arms to the elbows in the treasure of this happy shore.

I bathed in pearls, Sire, precious pearls, pearls of all sizes, paragon pearls, graduated pearls, seed pearls; I swam among pearls, and I hungered and thirsted to eat and drink pearls, bushels of pearls, Sire, some the size of a large chestnut, hull and all, and round as all perfection, of a clear and glowing color worthy of the crown of the most powerful monarch, and smaller but no less shimmering baroque seed pearls worthy of being strung in the most divine necklace, then to preserve their pulsating life upon the palpitating breasts of a Queen.

The sea had sewn this beach in pearls, and the sea continued to strew its pearly shells upon the shore where they awaited the dew as one awaits the bridegroom, for they are conceived of the dew and impregnated by the dew, and if the dew is pure the pearls are white, and if the dew is murky, they are dark and shadowy: pearls, daughters of the sea and sky. I had emerged from their cradle and now walked among their coffers, Sire, and I asked myself heatedly whether I was seeing and touching these marvels with the senses I had lost, or through the perceptions of death, and whether when I was resuscitated I would lose them on the spot and see only sands and gull droppings where now I saw great treasures. I raised a large pearl to my mouth; I bit it, almost breaking my teeth. It was very real. Or was it real only in this land of death and dream? It didn’t matter: I told myself that whether this were the prize or the price of death, I happily accepted — reward or final end.

I picked up pearls by the fistfuls and only then did I experience the sadness of death and lament the absence of life. I moaned. The only person who would profit from these riches was one who could remember nothing, either of his life or of his death. I longed to be a living man again, Sire, a man of passions and ambitions, of pride and jealousy, for here was the wherewithal to exact the most passionate revenge against the enemies who had harmed us in life, or to confer the greatest favors upon the coldest and most inaccessible of women — or the warmest and most approachable. Neither the fortress of the warrior, nor the palace of the King, nor the portals of the Church, nor the honor of a Lady, I told myself at that moment, could possibly resist the seduction of the man who owned such opulence.

With outstretched arms, fists filled, I offered the pearls to the land of death. My shining gaze was returned by the veiled and inhospitable stares of the true masters of this beach. Only then did I see them, for their enormous carapaces blended with the color of the jungle behind them. I saw gigantic sea turtles, scattered along the verge where the sand ended and the jungle thicket began. And those sad veiled eyes reminded me of my old friend Pedro, and as I remembered him, I felt that the pearls in my hands grew soft and faded and finally died.

“Old man,” I murmured, “I was the first to set foot on the new world, as you wished it.”

And I threw the pearls back to the pearls. The sea turtles looked at me with suspicious torpor. And at that instant I would have exchanged all the treasures of the beach for the old man’s life.

RETURN TO LIFE

I slept a long time on a bed of pearls. When I awakened, I told myself that time hadn’t moved: the same light, the same warm waves, the eternal sea turtles watching me from that frontier between the beach and the forest. Everything was exactly the same, but I felt that in my sleep I had deeply penetrated the veil of an imaginary night. If this was Paradise it could not accommodate the contrasts and measures of life — night and day, heat and cold. And nevertheless, I was hungry and thirsty. I decided to investigate the shoreline of this recaptured Eden; no doubt my hunger and thirst were of a new order, not physical, and I was confusing the needs of an errant soul with the demands of a nonexistent body. Who would guide me to the water and the fruit of death?

I seemed to remember, from instinct more than any teaching, that upon our arrival at the other shore, someone waited to lead us to our eternal abode. Someone, or something: beast or angel, dog or Devil. Were the drowsing sea tortoises the guardians of death? As I walked toward them another instinct, stronger than memory, for it is called survival, caused me to put my hand to my waist. I felt the tailor’s scissors, secure in the belt of my breeches. The sea turtles’ oily eyelids slowly opened and closed: they were the image of passivity, but as I drew closer I could see what preoccupied them.

They were spawning, Sire; two dozen sea tortoises, flattened beneath verdigris shells crusted with ocean debris like that on the back of the whale, were emptying their slimy eggs into nests hollowed from the sand, but at my approach they became alarmed and began to bury their eggs in the sand, waving their short ribbed flippers, uncertain whether to hide their reptilian heads beneath those enormous shells or extend their scaly, blemished necks in challenge. Hunger commanded; I hazarded the risk. With one foot I attempted to raise one of the turtles, but its weight was excessive, it lay as heavily motionless as a rock. Then I saw the nearby river and decided to slake my thirst while I formulated a plan to move one of the sea turtles from its nest.

I walked toward the river. Its mouth was only a narrow notch in the thicket through which the jungle bled its venom. Where the river met the sea a poisonous sand bar had built up, covered with rotting leaves, reeds and slime, and corpses of the wineskin monster I’d seen dying drifting out to sea. The remains lodged on the sand bar were bits of dark, decaying flesh, and the opaque waters of the river’s mouth were covered with a thick scum of green slime. I splashed this aside and it was as if I had stirred a hornets’ nest; my action seemed to wake a fine cloud of insects from their lethargy; born from the waters or fallen from the sky, they swarmed over my head and hands, seeking out the slight wounds the storm — and the effects of clinging desperately to the ship’s wheel during my deliverance — had left on my fingers and elbows, along with deeper gouges on my knees. As I fought the flies, the insects gorged themselves on my blood, quickly glutted; as I swatted them against my skin, I noticed they were as yellow as the bloom of dyer’s woad.

I fled before that storm of mosquitoes, quickly bathed my body in the sea, and now I did not hesitate. I walked toward the sea turtles as I searched for a receptacle among the seashells on the beach. With one hand I picked up the deepest shell and in the other I firmly clutched my scissors. I approached the turtle farthest from the others; as I drew near she stretched her neck far outside her shell, at the same time hurriedly covering her eggs with sand. I straddled her carapace, grabbed the scoriaceous neck and drove in the scissors to the hilt — for I knew that these beasts have a sac filled with pure water that permits them to live a long time without thirst, like the camels in the desert. I collected the water in the concave shell and, when this was filled, pulled off parts of my clothing in order to catch even more liquid, which I could suck to satisfy my thirst. By the time I held my shirt to the turtle’s neck, only blood ran from the wound, staining it and the sand and the scattered pearls. But I didn’t complain, for the blood of the turtle is as good as water. Thus I quenched my thirst, drinking the water from the shell, then squeezing the blood from the moistened doublet onto my lips; and I had already imagined the savor of the flesh of that ageless beast, said to be as ancient as the ocean and, like it, immortal, when I became aware of the terror — a terror more terrible for being totally silent — of the other turtles that were abandoning their fecund nests in the sand and beginning to disperse across the mother-of-pearl shells toward the protective ocean where they would regain their speed and strength.

I feasted then upon a great banquet of turtle eggs, which are similar to those laid by hens except that those of the sea tortoise are covered only by a thin membrane instead of a shell. And as I was eating I watched the spectacle of that powerful squadron of turtles reentering the sea; and so vast was their company that if a large boat had been in their path, they would have slowed its course. They left behind, for my solace, the flesh of one of their companions and the seed of their children. And a beach stained with blood.

Satiated, I lay on my back in the pearly sand and tried to order my thoughts. Hunger and thirst had blinded me; only now, filled and content, could I reason that those had been real feelings, the hunger and thirst of a living body. And those nests of turtle eggs had not deceived me: they were the opposite face of the pearls, for in the pearls I saw another death image. Without the contact of living flesh, pearls grow old and their luster dims: pearls are a moribund promise; the turtle eggs, pearls of nascent life.

Troubled, I rose to my feet; my mortal reasoning was crumbling; it was inconceivable that any living being could be born in the land of death, or that the beasts of death could give birth to life in the ports of the Beyond, whether it be Paradise or Hell: such absurdity was equally foreign both to science and to legend.

“Then there’s life,” I whispered, “there’s life here … and death.” These words meant changing courses once again, losing my sense of orientation, descending into another maelstrom. There is spilled blood; therefore, there is life. There is life; therefore, I must survive. I must survive; therefore, I must find a companion.

The shining pearly beach stretched toward a distant cape on the horizon. The sea was green as young lemons; the beach a nacreous white; red, the tall palms with clusters of enormous dates much, much larger than those of the desert. Sea turtles and dates: I would not die of hunger. Pearls: I would not die poor. I laughed. Again the noisy flocks of colored birds wheeled overhead, and in the distance at the end of the beach I saw a faint rising spiral of smoke.

Then I ran. I ran, oblivious of any possible menace, indifferent to the dangers of the new and unknown, toward that sign of human life, fearing a deceptive jungle fire, a will-o’-the-wisp, anything except what I most desired, the companionship of my brother … Pedro, Pedro. The shells cut my bare feet; I ran to the edge of the sea, fearful that any odor of blood would again attract those dreadful mosquitoes; it was hot, and I took comfort from splashing in the calm waves; I was finally aware that the sun of this burning landscape was a boiling brazier fiercer than that of any known land: sweat and salt water ran down my body and sand stuck to my skin; long was the distance to that hope-giving smoke.

An hour later — measured by the clock of my belly — I reached the point on the beach, guided by the persevering, wispy column of smoke.

I fell to my knees exhausted; even more than by fatigue, I was overwhelmed by the complete serenity of the landscape, so contradictory to the urgency of my race toward something that might mean life or death to me. The first thing I saw was the upright wheel from our ship planted firmly in the sand. Then I saw a wiry-haired old man, almost nude, tough and tanned, clearing away underbrush at the edge of the jungle, his back turned to the glimmering wealth of pearls.

“Pedro!” I shouted, still on my knees. “Pedro, Pedro, it’s me!”

The old man glanced over his shoulder, looked at me without surprise, and said: “Watch the fire. The rocks are good, they spark when you strike them together. And there’s plenty of dry wood. It took me many hours to start that fire. Don’t let it die out. This is the first fire in the new world.”

A PIECE OF LAND

Fire and death were the two things the old man had fled from. Sorrow and captivity: were those the things I had fled? Now that it’s all over, and the perfect circle of my pilgrimage is completed, I think of you, Pedro, and if there is any man besides me who knew you, I ask him to remember you with me, how you were, precise, manly, a hard-working man, a man of few words. All I desired after I’d found you again was for you to tell me what had happened, how we were saved. Even though I knew you were a taciturn man, I thought surely you would answer my barrage of questions: Was the wheel lighter than the force of the vortex dragging us toward the bottom of the sea? How did we stay afloat once we’d reached the surface? How had we become separated? Did you stay bound to the wheel when I was torn loose? What force of nature allowed supreme power to be overcome by supreme lightness? Do you know where we are?

Pedro answered only my last question: “This is the new world I so desired.”

He didn’t pause for me to tell him: You were right, old man, you won the bet, I gambled my life against your illusions and you returned both of them to me, old man. Nor did he tell me those things himself. Now I understand why: what were our past adventures compared to fortune itself: standing upon the new land so desired by him, so denied and feared — yes, it’s true — by me. In the labor the old man was undertaking in this land I saw a serene but urgent decision to begin a new life, starting from nothing, to give a name and use, a place and destiny, to everything. Like God the Father, this old man covered with hair as white as a fleecy cloud was presiding over the first day of Creation, and his deep-set eyes, showing the strain of his years, said only one thing: “Hurry, I haven’t much time.”

I considered then, with warm and enduring emotion, how this man who was more than seventy years old had attempted twenty years before to make the voyage he had now completed. We must hurry. We don’t have much time.

Pedro collected the dried branches of the red palm trees that formed the wall of the jungle and asked me to strip them of their long, hard, sharp-pointed stalks to feed the fire, while he, from the stripped stalks, fashioned a variety of sharp instruments, daggers, swords, stakes, to enclose the space cleared from the jungle at the edge of the sand, and sharp spears with which he attempted to split open the enormous green dates fallen at the foot of the palm trees.

“Here,” I said, “it should be easier with my scissors.”

I picked up one of the heavy fruits; it was like a green ball with a shell so hard it was impossible to open with my bare hands. I drove the scissors into the center of the monstrous date and worked them back and forth until I broke the shell. And of all the marvels I’d seen in my wanderings, there is none greater than having found water in the heart of that fruit, clear, intoxicating water so pure it tasted like wine from Heaven, and savory, too, its white flesh. I handed the marvelous date to Pedro so he might eat and drink; he exclaimed jubilantly we would never have to fear thirst. I told him about the beach of pearls and he smiled, shaking his head.

“It isn’t wise to hold pearls in high esteem, for they grow old and their beauty fades.”

“But in the other world … I mean, in our world…”

“We will never go back.”

At his reply my blood ran cold, and the pleasure of having discovered the fruit with the limpid water and leathery flesh also cooled. Pedro returned to his labor.

With reeds and mud, shells and branches, using stones as hammers and substituting thorns for nails, the Father of this lost shore of renewed Creation was raising a house, while I, his creature, climbed the palm trees to harvest the savory dates that slaked the thirst of this burning place, and returned to the beach of pearls to collect not its treasures but eggs from the nests of its turtles. While swimming, I discovered seaweed that was good either raw or boiled. The nature of the rough stones found in the dry gullies was such that one had only to strike them together to elicit fire.

And the wheel that had saved us from death became the gate to our stockade. For after exactly six nights had passed, counted by an equal number of pearls I was gathering to mark the passage of time, Pedro had finished his house. Only then did he speak, leading me down to the edge of the sea. From there we turned and looked at the new space claimed from the jungle, cleared to the border of the sand, tight and fenced and roofed.

“Now no Liege can take away the fruit of my labor, burn my home, rape my women, and kill my sons. Now I am free. I have won.”

The old man hawked furiously and spat contemptuously into the sea; it was as if he were spitting in the face of the past, as if he hoped the insult of that saliva would be carried by the ocean currents to the shores from which we’d sailed, staining them with his scorn and proclaiming his victory.

I had watched him, night after night, observing the stars in their heavens, and, day after day, wiping his forehead and lifting his face to look at the sun.

“Do you know where we are, Pedro?”

“Very far to the west.”

“So I imagined. That was our course.”

“But not this far south. We’re so far south now, you can scarcely see the northern stars. And the sun sets very late but goes down very fast. The whirlpool must have dragged us far off our course.”

I listened to him in silence, considering the unshakable truth of the one thing I think I know, for as I heard those words I felt my destiny was sealed; return was impossible, and once again the warring motivations of adventure and security struggled within me. The old man did not want to return. I had nothing to return to. And this time resignation did not intervene in the conflict between risk and survival, neutralizing them as before; now it denied them by uniting them.

“Old man, when will we venture inland? There must be a fresh stream near here without those flies, for the lands seem well watered, and we can’t live forever from the water of the palms. Aren’t you eager to know whether we’re on an island or an isthmus or on terra firma? Don’t you want to know whether this land is inhabited, and if so, by whom?”

“No, you go alone, if you want. I won’t leave this place. I have what I’ve always wanted. My piece of land.”

He nodded emphatically, and as I bowed my head — confused because adventure and survival had become one, and resignation, once a saving grace, had become certainty that to stay here meant death — Pedro did something unexpected; he rubbed my head and then hugged me to his breast and said:

“Yes, the wheel did prove to be lighter than the terrible force dragging us toward the center of the vortex. I closed my eyes when we were thrown into it, but then tried to hold them open in spite of the fact I was blinded by the speed and the vertigo, the flood of waters, and the changing light in that whirlpool. I felt as if I were immersed in a sea of metal, my son, where every drop of water was a golden coin sparkling and shimmering before my eyes; at one moment I would see the glittering face of the coin, and the next, the shadowy cross on the reverse. My bones told me we were ascending, like the limes and the shattered mast and the sails. And then, as we burst out of the whirlpool to the level of the whitecaps, my eyes told me the same. I prayed for our salvation, for the vortex had vomited us up only to deliver us unto the will of God.

“All night long we were whipped and battered by the storm and the lines holding us grew slack; more than once I attempted to bind us both, but the ropes securing you yielded to the power of the storm and finally I had to hold you with my own hands. I clutched your arm until there was no feeling left in my own arm and I couldn’t tell whether I was holding you or not; I prayed I was, I prayed you would hold on to my arm, that it would be my arm that saved you, son, but as I prayed I was overcome by a deep and lugubrious fatigue; I gave us up for lost; I sank into the tomb of sleep. The gulls awakened me to a peaceful sea. My arms were entangled and I saw a bed of seaweed. I saw land; I moaned the word, but my parched throat prevented me from shouting it, as I wished to shout after twenty years of hope … Land! land! the new world! All I could do was turn to you to whisper it. Only then did I realize you weren’t with me. I’d been unable to save you. I wept for you. I wanted a young man to be the first to step onto the land of the new world.”

Pedro was silent a long moment as I stood, eyes closed, my head resting against his chest, imagining the scene, imagining how Pedro had saved me, imagining what it was to have a father.

Then the old man continued: “I thought you’d been swept away by the great waves of that terrible night. Now you see I could do nothing to save you. You saved yourself. And you knew that, son. For during the stormy night, bound so close together on the wheel that was keeping us afloat, you didn’t seem conscious but you murmured these words…”

“I’ve lived this before…” My eyes still closed, my head against his breast, I repeated the words with Pedro. “I knew already … I’m living this the second time … it happened long ago … two shipwrecks … two survivors … two lives … only one can be saved … one must die … so the other may live.”

The old man caressed my head again. “Yes, that’s what you said. What were you trying to tell me?”

“What did you think, then, Pedro?”

“That you’d given your life for mine, your young manhood for my old age, and it seemed a cruel fate. Didn’t you believe, when you were saved, that I had died?”

“Yes. I despised the pearls of that fabulous beach, for I’d gladly have exchanged them for your life.”

“Ah, yes, the pearls; you’d have exchanged the pearls for my life. But would you also have given your life for mine?”

I was troubled. “That doesn’t matter now, old man. We’re here together. We both survived.”

But Pedro said then with great sadness: “No, no, remember, what did you mean that night? Try to remember: you knew everything that happened before it had happened. That’s why I believe you must know what is going to happen next, what is going to happen again. Tell me: do you remember? In the end, which of us will survive here? You, or I?”

Sire, I never had the opportunity to answer.

THE EXCHANGE

Whoever lives amid sound is frightened by silence. More than darkness, silence is the terror of the night. And more than his confinement, the captive suffers the absence of the sonorous rhythms of freedom. We were surrounded by soft and regular murmurs: the warm waves of the sea, the crackling of the fire on the beach, the rustling of the palm fans.

Why did those sounds that had become customary after more than a week suddenly cease? I listened, my head still against Pedro’s breast, and heard the beating of his heart. Then, like an alert bird with eyes on each side of its head, I looked nervously from the jungle to the sea and from the sea to the jungle. I saw nothing at first: nothing to cause or justify the sudden cessation of sound.

My senses quickened. I imagined I had penetrated the forest at our back: there the green was so intense it was black. Again I looked toward the sea: the lemony-green waters, too, were growing dark, taking on the colors of the jungle: the sea, Sire, was a forest of trees.

I withdrew from the embrace of my aged father and, unable to move toward the shore, stood as if enchanted, perceiving finally that the sea was filled with tree trunks, as it had been the other day with the shells of the turtles, and that those floating trunks were advancing toward our beach. I whirled, frightened, as the fire crackling on the beach was echoed in the sound of snapping twigs and branches parted behind us in the jungle.

Stupidly, I managed to pant: “Pedro, did you bring a weapon?”

The old man shook his head, smiling. “We won’t need them here in our happy land.”

Happy or unfortunate, was it ours alone? Was it really ours? Or did it belong to the beings whose heads I could now see over the edge of the floating tree trunks? I don’t say men, Sire, because the first thing I saw were long black manes which I mistook for horses’ tails and for a moment I had a strange vision of floating trees manned by dusky centaurs. Only as that armada of trunks drew closer could I distinguish faces the color of the wood itself, and in the interior of the tree trunks I saw heads, round shields, and another forest — this time vertical — of ferocious lances.

Pedro walked tranquilly to the gate of his house and stood there, his hand upon the ship’s wheel. I whirled to look toward the woods; the noise in the thicket was increasing; the invisible force from the jungle and the visible army from the sea were marching toward an encounter.

Then thirty or more men leaped from the trunks into the water, blending with its reflected greenness; their bodies were the color of canaries, their lances red, their shields green. And other men like them, similarly armed and naked except for the cloth that concealed their shame, erupted from the jungle.

They looked at us.

We looked at them.

Our astonishment was identical, and we were equally immobilized. I could only think that what seemed to me fantastic about them — the color of their tawny skin and their straight black hair and smooth-skinned, hairless bodies — must, to creatures so different, have seemed incredible in us — my long gold mane, Pedro’s curly hair and white beard, his hirsute face and my pallid one. They looked at us. We looked at them. And from that first exchange was born a fleeting, silent question: “Have they discovered us … or did we discover them?”

The natives were the first to conquer their astonishment. Several, as if planned beforehand, ran to our small bonfire and with lances and bare feet stamped out the fire, saving only one burning branch. Then one of them, who wore a band of black bird feathers around his waist, spoke to us excitedly and angrily, pointing toward the sky, then toward the extinguished fire, then toward the expanse of the beach of pearls. Finally he raised three fingers of one hand and with the index of the other counted three times the three extended fingers. I looked at Pedro, as if I had such confidence in his wisdom that I believed him capable of understanding their language and the strange signs. An amazing language, in truth, with chirping sounds, for now the multitude of dark men had begun to speak simultaneously, and their voices seemed more like those of birds than men, and I noticed there were no r’s in their speech, but many t’s and l’s.

And since we could answer none of their arguments, the ire of the plumed man increased, and he walked toward Pedro and spoke again, pointing toward the house and the fence of branches bounding the space reclaimed by the old man in this new world. And the group of natives who had surged from the thicket began to pull up the stakes of the fence and throw them back into the forest. Pedro did not move, but blood surged to his face and veins pulsed at his throat and temples. The party of natives pulled down the fence, ripped the branches from the roof, and kicked and tore down everything the old man had built. I searched desperately for an escape, for some response, some way to reason with the savages, and at that instant, born from some miraculously recovered instinct, came an idea born of the exchange — the simple fact that first we’d exchanged looks and then been unable to exchange words, and from the mutual looks had been born an original and duplicated amazement, but only violence had come from the unanswered words.

I shouted to Pedro without thinking, as if someone else were speaking through me, using my voice: “Old man! Offer them your house! Offer them something, quickly!”

Blood glinted in Pedro’s eyes, and foam bubbled at the corner of his lips. “Never! Nothing! Not one nail! Everything here is mine!”

“Something, Pedro, something!”

“Nothing! It took me twenty years to best El Señor! Never!”

“Hurry, Pedro, give them your land as a gift!”

“Never!” he screamed like a cornered beast, clinging to the ship’s wheel that had saved us once before. “Nothing! This is my piece of land, this is my new home … Never!”

The black-plumed chieftain shouted: the natives rushed at Pedro, but the old man struggled against them; he was a hoary lion, striking furiously at the faces and bodies of his assailants; he shouted at me: “Bastard, don’t leave me alone! Fight, are you a woman!”

I pulled the scissors from my breeches and raised them to strike; they glinted darkly in the sun and the natives stopped abruptly; they stood back from Pedro as the black-plumed leader shouted something to the men from the sea who were waiting on the beach, lances poised; as one, their weapons flew toward a single target: Pedro’s heart.

I was paralyzed with fright, my scissors still in my upraised fist: like the flocks of birds, the flying lances darkened the sky; they pierced the old man’s body as one of the natives threw the burning branch onto the remains of the hut, setting fire to the dried branches of the thatching.

The old man did not cry out. His life was ended, standing by the ship’s wheel, arms open, eyes and mouth wide, engulfed in the smoke from his burning hut, his body run through by red lances; Pedro was dead, standing at the foot of his little plot of land by the beach. He had obtained what he had so long sought, but he did not keep it long.

I told myself such steadfastness deserved at least this poor glory: the first to step on the new land, the first whose blood was spilled upon it. I shut my eyes as the sound of mockery filled my ears, my own laughter echoing through unshed tears, and I could see upon a black background the cadaver and the blood of the ancient turtle I had killed with the same scissors I still grasped in my hand.

Then I heard no sound at all except the crackling of the fire consuming the pitiful remains of the hut and the body of my friend and grandfather. Slowly the quiet murmur of the waves and palms returned. I opened my eyes; I found myself surrounded by silent natives holding their shields before their breasts. Their black-plumed chieftain advanced toward me. There was nothing in his dark glance except a hope — that could change to a smile or a grimace.

I held out my hand; I opened it. I offered the chieftain the scissors. He smiled. He accepted them. He flashed them in the sun. He did not know what they were. He manipulated them clumsily. He nicked a finger. He threw the scissors upon the sand. Uneasy, he looked at the blood. Uneasy, he looked at me. With great caution he picked up the scissors, as if fearing they had a life of their own. He shouted a few words. Several men ran to one of the tree trunks beached on the sand and took something from it. He ran back to the chieftain and handed him a coarse cloth similar to that of their loincloths. The cloth held something. The chieftain clutched the scissors in one hand. With the other he handed me the small parcel. I hefted its weight in my open hands. The rough, stiff cloth fell open. In my hands lay a brilliant treasure of golden grains. My gift had been reciprocated.

My hands filled with gold, I looked toward Pedro’s body.

The warriors retrieved their lances, pulling them from the body of my old friend.

With branches and bare feet, the men from the jungle extinguished the lighted fires. I would swear there was sadness on their faces.

THE PEOPLE OF THE JUNGLE

I was placed in one of the tree trunks, which were actually long, barge-like canoes, each one hollowed from the trunk of a single tree. And as I was carried away from shore once again, I secretly named this place Tierra de San Pedro, for my poor old friend had died like a martyr, and I could still see the last flames being fed from his body.

A ring of black vultures was already circling over the beach, and I thought how Pedro had finally met the destruction and death he’d been fleeing. I asked myself whether I too was being carried toward my origins, and whether that origin might have been captivity. For if Pedro’s end had been the same as his beginning, was I an abnormal exception to a destiny that as it fulfilled itself encountered only the semblance of its genesis? And although I’d learned to love old Pedro I prayed now that I wouldn’t inherit his destiny but that his death would free me to find my own, even though it be worse than his. Since the day we’d embarked together we’d shared the same fortunes. Now our destinies would be forever separate.

The fleet of crude canoes did not put out to sea but doubled the cape, and after a short period of silent paddling we sighted the mouth of a great river whose murky waters muddied the sea for several leagues. At a shrill command from the chieftain the armada turned into this broad river flowing between widely separated dark shorelines. The black forests lining either shore were dense and tall, making invisible the source of the sounds hidden in their jungle thickness; intense and mixed, its perfumes were a blending of wild flowers and rotted foliage. The sudden flashes in the milky sky were the eternal birds of this new world, noisy, thick-beaked birds like enormous parakeets, the color of cochineal, green, red, black, and rose. They were masters of the sky; and the masters of the swampy river’s edge were the lizards watching us through drowsy-lidded eyes.

And I, Sire, was a captive with a bag of gold in my hands. We paddled upriver. I no longer remembered; I knew; and I gave thanks for the ignorance that permits us to go on living even though we know the only certainty awaiting us is loss of freedom or life. We know the nature of what is to come, we are ignorant only of the time and circumstance; glory be to God who thus alleviates our painful destiny.

We disembarked near an inhabited clearing. As the natives beached the canoes in the mud, we were surrounded by a hundredfold of old men, women, and children. Our return was greeted with the chirping voices I have already told you of, Sire, and their great excitement was engendered not only by my strange presence but also by an obvious feeling of relief. The remnants of a terror slow to disappear still lingered on the faces of the quivering old men, the uneasy young girls, and the women with nursing children pressed to their breasts. The warriors had returned. The dangers had been surmounted. They were returning with a captive: me. I noted there was not a single young male among those who came to meet us, although there were many young boys, some of whom, as old as twelve, were still suckling at their mothers’ breasts.

I again became aware of my situation when the black-plumed chieftain showed everyone the scissors and urged me to show my cloth filled with the golden grains. They all nodded enthusiastically and the nearest women smiled at me and the old men touched my shoulder with their trembling hands.

I looked about me and saw that all the houses of this jungle village were of matting laid over four-arched stakes, all of them alike, with no visible signs of superior riches or superior power. The chieftain himself unclasped his belt of black feathers and with great deference walked toward an arbor where he placed the belt in the hands of a wrinkled and shivering ancient seated within a basket woven of palm leaves and filed with balls of cotton. And thus the chieftain was no longer distinguishable from the other canary-colored men, for to me they all looked identical. The ancient, who in spite of the heat seemed to be trembling with cold, murmured something and the young man whom I had taken for the chieftain of this band explained something in reply. Then, as one would a curtain, the young man dropped the dried skins attached to the roof of the arbor, and the ancient disappeared from view.

I was offered a strange bed made of cotton netting hanging between two palm trees, and a bitter root to eat. At that, the everyday life of this village was resumed, and I decided it was greatly to my advantage to participate in it as discreetly as I could; and so for several months I occupied myself in doing the things they all did: tending the fires in the ovens, digging in the earth, gathering red ocher, mixing mortar, cutting reeds and twigs, polishing stones, and also collecting pieces of shell for cutting the fruit that grew wild in various locations in the jungle, fruit never before seen by my eyes, of several colors, flaming red, blush pink, or juicy black, with a rough outer shell, and soft and fragrantly perfumed inside. I also gathered firewood, although I noted it quickly disappeared in spite of the fact that little was used.

I rapidly learned that here everything belonged to everyone: the men hunted deer and captured turtles, the women gathered ant eggs, worms, and several kinds of lizards, and the old men were still dexterous in capturing snakes — whose flesh isn’t bad to eat; then these things were routinely divided among the whole community.

This period seemed endless, one day exactly like another; I remember this time very poorly, and see myself very poorly, as if I’d been living in the dark. I clung to one intelligible fact. My scissors had been commended to the care of the ancient secluded in his cotton-filled basket, who was also the possessor of the belt of black feathers he entrusted to a young man only in moments of active danger — as when they had discovered our presence by the smoke on the beach, or when, as on another occasion, the men carried their canoes to the river, paddled upstream and returned with more grains of gold, or descended the river to return with a cargo of pearls from that enchanted beach. Everything was stored in baskets like the one occupied by the ancient, and was carefully covered with deerskins painted with red ocher, all of them stored in the arbor where lived the ancient to whom they then returned the belt of feathers.

Apparently master of the treasures, the ancient was also custodian of my scissors; imagining them in his knotted, blemished hands, I became obsessed finally with the conviction that the gift had been sufficient to assure my peaceful acceptance into this primitive community. As I say, Sire, I clung to one certainty:

The gift had saved me. And also the fact I accepted the gift they made me.

But the more I comforted myself with that thought, the more a terrible doubt came to haunt my tranquillity. At some unforeseen moment, would they demand something more? What could I give them then? With that worry, my will redoubled to blend with these natives in their daily tasks, to be exactly like them in every way, to be an invisible stranger who assisted them in catching snakes and delivering them to the women, and then, like them, eat the communally divided rations. Because I heard it constantly, I learned something of the bird language spoken there. But as it was my intention to be unnoticed, even forgotten, I didn’t dare test my knowledge. Thus I learned to understand more than I could speak — although I confess I had a terrible temptation to go to the ancient some night and ask him everything I wanted to know. Scant consolation, Sire, were the weak suppositions I provided myself, measured against a myriad of questions for which there was no answer. Why were we attacked on the beach, and why did the fire seem to infuriate them so? Why such rage against the old man and such obsequiousness toward me in exchange for a pair of scissors? Who was the ancient guardian of the treasures, and what purpose did gold and pearls serve in this miserable land?

This curiosity was not easily reconciled with my intent to assume the color of a stone or a tree, like a lizard. That, at least, was not difficult to do; as they filtered through branches and thick treetops, the rays of the austral sun covered bodies and houses and all the objects of the inhabited area with undulating patterns of light and shadow that blended spectrally into random jungle forms.

Fool that I was, I came to believe that that phantasmal movement of light and shadow did in effect disguise me as it did the lizards, and that I could be two things at once, both curious and invisible. So one evening I approached the arbor occupied by the shivering ancient and dared pull back one of those curtains of skin I have told you of, to look inside. I had only a moment, although that was sufficient to see that certain things were stored there, the greater part of the firewood collected all these months, for example, and some large ears of fruit covered with reddish grains. I noticed also that the old man was completely surrounded with baskets similar to the one that served him perpetually as his bed, and that within them glinted grains of gold. I also saw the ancient’s basket was filled with pearls.

At that moment the old man let out a terrifying shriek, exactly like that of those enormous multicolored parakeets, and I dropped the flap and imagined the worst of possible fates. I was especially startled when I realized that the play of light and shadow that had masked me had disappeared and that my hands and body and everything around me stood out clearly in a different kind of light, gray and brilliant as the pearls in which the decrepit ancient seemed to bathe. Everything was metallic light, Sire; the sun had hidden itself, and with it its companion, shadow. I heard thunder in the sky and it began to rain as if the universal deluge were beginning, not the rain we know here, not even in a storm; no, a steady, incessant downpour, as if the heavens had opened. And the commotion and activity provoked by the torrential rainfall was so great that nobody noticed me, and I grew more calm, telling myself the ancient had shrieked because his bones felt the nearness of the rains, not me.

With a great hubbub a few natives dismantled the matting of the huts and carried them away on their backs, while others rescued the canoes from the river front, and another group dedicated themselves to transporting the ancient in his basket along with the baskets filled with gold and pearls and the piles of firewood and the reddish ears of fruit, everything covered now with skins to protect it from the deluge. So equipped, and pounded by the implacable rains, we walked to higher ground, where we were able to watch from a small tree-covered hill the frightening rise of the river that rapidly inundated the space that till then had been ours.

Then the nature of our lives changed. Every afternoon and every night it rained without interruption, filling the sky with terrible thunder and soundless lightning flashes; but during the morning the sun shone brilliantly and then the wood guarded by the ancient would be used with great care; the women would sit beside their modest fires, take those red ears, separate the grain, grind it, and mix it with water to form a white dough they patted between their palms to form a flat biscuit shape which they held over the fire; the smoke smelled of that strange bread made from the red wheat so jealously guarded by the immobile ancient for this epoch of flight and fear. Fear of hunger, Sire, for the jungle fruit had become rotten and inedible; the jungle had been razed by the enormous expanse of river, and there were months when it was difficult to gather food, months when I participated in all their efforts, hunting and scratching beneath stones in the constant rain of the season that turned all the world into a quagmire; months when I even accepted the deer droppings the women sometimes roasted. I understood then why those sparse ears of grain were so precious and why young boys nursed until they were twelve.

I understood, too, why the dry firewood was as prized as gold and pearls, for there was not a dry stick in the whole of the swampy jungle; the golden morning hours barely served to half warm ourselves, and then the afternoon deluge would drown everything once more, bringing with it the torture I had earlier encountered at the sluggish stream by the beach: mosquitoes; clouds of insects that sucked human blood, glutting themselves to the point of bursting; tiny invisible fleas that burrow into your feet and form sacs as big as a chick-pea, swollen with nits you can see when a sharp-edged shell is used to slit open the foot, as formerly it sliced fruit from the stalk. And sleepless nights, Sire, continuous scratching, rolling on the ground from pain and torment, covering your body with mud … black, swollen bodies, living fodder for the insects; saving dry wood for food and cutting wet wood to make smoke to frighten away those ferocious enemies that claimed all our attention, for to combat them meant to forget everything else, although the natives tried to survive while employing their time for two purposes: armed with coals, they burned the fields and brush to destroy cover for the mosquitoes, and at the same time the fire trapped the few tiny-horned, dark-skinned deer and facilitated digging in the ground for lizards.

Dry wood and wet wood, glowing bonfires and dank, smoking ones; we wouldn’t have survived without the fire and the smoke. Precious firewood, more useful then than all the pearls and gold in the world. Yes, Pedro and I thought that with igneous stone and dry leaves we’d invented the first fire in the new world. Now, surrounded midday to midnight by the burning fires of the jungle, I had at last found the explanation for the natives’ attack. But I also asked myself: if saving the sacred fire warranted a mortal battle against those who would squander it, what value did the pearls and gold have, for they defend no one against anything here, or offer any sustenance. Sire, I was soon to know.

WORDS IN THE TEMPLE

At first the sky crackled with dry storms: lights and drums beneath a domed ceiling the color of a dark pearl, lightning that crossed the firmament with the velocity of the flocks of birds, thunder that echoed and reechoed, receding in more distant and muted reverberations to die against the peaks of the remote mountains hooded in clouds.

Then one day the sun again shone as before, and everything seemed fresh and new. The jungle was filled with clusters of wild flowers and sweet-scented groves, and for the first time, far in the distance, I saw the white peak of a volcano. Air clear as crystal, the transparent regions.

The vultures returned before the other birds. Many old people had died in fits of coughing and some young men had died of fever, their trembling greater than the ancient’s who stayed always in the pearl-filled basket. I saw several women die after they were bitten by ticks; their feet were cut open with the sharp-edged shells, but blood crept blackly up their legs until they died. Many young boys suddenly disappeared. All the corpses, young or old, disappeared.

The sun was again the great lord of this land. But its return caused no visible signs of joy, as I would have expected. Rather, a nervous silence fell over everyone and I asked myself what new tribulations this season might portend.

One morning I noticed great activity on the hill. The mat huts were again dismantled: the canoes raised high over their heads, the people returned to the shore of the river. Nevertheless, one company of men remained on the hill, caring for the ancient and his treasures. I can tell you that now I understood this clipped, brusque bird language rather well, and thus I understood that they were asking me to remain with them.

They lifted the basket with the ancient onto their backs; they balanced the other baskets on their heads and, taking me with them, plunged into the jungle away from the river and the sea. At first I feared that the leafy forest, its foliage so augmented by the rains of many months, would devour us and that we would lose all sense of orientation. I soon realized, however, that through the banks of sensitive green plants that yielded to the touch of our fingertips, repeated footsteps had left their trace; scarcely a footpath, it was still more tenacious than the pulsating flowering of lichen, orchid, and all the glittering leaves that still held captive in their delicate silvery fuzz the most brilliant drops of the past deluge.

It was a corrupt jungle, Sire, humid and dark, where the tree trunks had never seen or never will see the light of the sun: so tall and thick are the leaves, so deep the roots, so heavily intertwined the ivies, so intoxicating the perfumes of the flowers — so melded into the mud the scattered corpses of men and serpents. So abundant, too, the song of the crickets.

We walked two days, sleeping in those cotton nets they hang between two tree trunks, stopping near strange deep wells of water almost like small lakes lost at the foot of chalky precipices, or in some clearing of the jungle where the bitter orange grows. But soon the tangled thickness reclaimed us, and the more we penetrated its darkness, the more putrid was the odor and the more intense the croaking of the vultures circling high above us.

It smelled of death, Sire, and when finally we stopped, it was because a most extraordinary edifice rose before us. I would never have seen it from afar because the masking expanse of forest seemed to hold it here in the very center of its dark humid body. This broad-based construction with sheer slimy steps and summit open to the air pulsed like the stony heart of the jungle.

For only the summit received the sun; the body of this great temple was sunken in the corrupt black jungle. Oh, my seas, my rivers; I recalled the blue course that gathers the waters of the desert and leads to the mausoleums of the ancient Kings; like those, this was a pyramid, Sire, although it smelled like a charnel house. Then I observed that it was here the vultures satiated themselves, folding their wings at the top of the pyramid and tearing great hunks of flesh decayed by rain, sun, and death. The tumult at the summit, the feast of the vultures, deafened me, and I knew where the corpses that had disappeared from the village during the long summer deluge had been carried. Deafened, I could still see: the jungle liana climbed and wound around the four sides of the temple and moss covered its steps, but this invasion of the jungle still could not hide the temple’s many sculptured sills, lavish bands of carved serpents that wound with greater vigor than the clinging roots around the terraced levels of that temple.

The barefoot men of our company effortlessly ascended the steep steps with their baskets on their backs; slipping on the moss, I followed them to one of those carved, niche-like openings. Then I saw they were sumptuous caves of human making, and the ancient was set down in one of them along with the baskets of pearls and gold. The natives left him there and told me to enter.

This grotto in the temple had caught the light, and the gold and pearls shone within the deep cavity beneath the low roof, and in one of the palm baskets, immersed in pearls, still sat the old man, my scissors in his hands — hands like the roots of the jungle. He raised one hand and gestured me to approach, to sit beside him. I squatted on my haunches. And the ancient spoke. Opaque and dead, his voice resonated among the dank walls of this at once lugubrious and resplendent chamber.

“Welcome, my brother. I have awaited you.”

THE ANCIENT’S LEGEND

Sire: as I listened to these words in the temple, and the gravity of the ancient’s tone as he spoke to me, I understood that he attributed to me the secret knowledge I had of his tongue; and as it is said of certain magicians that with a magic wand they cause water to burst forth from stone, so burst from my lips the language I had learned without speaking during my long months of living with the people of the jungle. What I do not know, however, is whether I am completely faithful to the words of the ancient man in the temple; I do not know how much I forget and how much I imagine, how much I lose and how much I add. I do not know whether it was only much later during my adventures in the new world that I completely understood everything the old man told me; perhaps it is only today that I understand and repeat it in my own style.

I looked at him, immersed in the pearls that perhaps lent him life and in turn received life from his flaccid skin, the man nourishing the pearls, and the pearls the man. I didn’t know what to say to him; he told me he had been observing me since the day of my arrival, which had been Three Crocodile day, and in that he had seen a good augury, for on such a day, he said, our mother the earth had risen from the waters.

“I was saved from the sea, my lord,” I said simply.

“And you arrived from the East, which is the origin of all life, for the sun is born there.”

He said, too, that I had arrived with the shining yellow light of dawn, with the colors of the golden sun.

“And you dared indicate your presence with fire, and on a dry day. You are welcome, my brother. You have returned home.”

With a gesture he offered me the temple, perhaps the entire jungle. I could only say: “I arrived with another man, my lord, but that man was not welcomed as I was.”

“That is because he was not expected.”

Paying no heed to my questioning glance, the ancient continued: “Furthermore, he defied us. He raised a temple for himself alone. He wished to make himself owner of a piece of the earth. But the earth is divine and cannot be possessed by any man. It is she who possesses us.” He was quiet an instant, then said: “Your friend wished only to take. He wished to offer nothing.”

I looked at the scissors in the hands of the ancient and was again convinced that it was to them I owed my life. And the ancient, gesturing with that rude contrivance I had stolen from a tailor, said something that can be translated like this: the good things belong to everyone, for what is held in common belongs to the gods, and what belongs to the gods is held in common. The words “god” and “the gods” were the first I learned among these natives, for they repeated them constantly, and their “teus” and “teo” are not unlike our “theo.”

“He was my friend,” I said in defense of old Pedro.

“He was an old man,” the ancient replied. “Old men are useless. They eat but they do not work. They are scarcely able to hunt snakes. They should die as soon as possible. An old man is the shadow of death and is unnecessary in this world.”

With amazement I looked at this ancient who surely had lived more than a hundred years, at this invalid coddled in a basket filled with pearls and balls of cotton to warm him against a cold born not of the warm humid air of the jungle but of the brittle, icy years of his bones.

I told him that all things decline and die, man and pearl alike, for such is the law of nature.

The ancient shook his head and replied that some lives are like arrows. They are shot into the air, they fly, and they fall. My friend’s life was like these. But there are other lives that are like circles. Where they seem to end, they in truth begin again. They are renewable lives. “Such as these is your life and mine and that of our absent brother. Do you know anything of him?”

Imagine, Sire, my confusion as I listened to these incomprehensible statements so familiarly expounded. And imagine, too, as I imagined, how the only thing clear to me was the feeling that my fate depended upon my replies.

I murmured: “No, I know nothing of him.”

“He will return someday, as you have returned.”

The ancient sighed and told how our absent brother, more than any other, must return, because he, more than any other, had sacrificed himself. And sacrifice is the only manner to assure renewal.

“Let us be attentive”—he spoke very quietly—“to Three Crocodile day, which returned you to this land. That is the day when all things join together and again become only one, as in the beginning.”

“We are three, my lord; you, I, and the absent one,” I murmured, unsure of what I was saying.

The old man pondered a moment and then said that all abundant things that chaotically proliferate or multiply decline; on the other hand, those things that rise toward oneness live again, and this is the difference between gods and men, for men believe that more is better, but the gods know that less is better.

As he spoke he touched his fingers rapidly, as earlier the young warrior on the beach had done, and he counted on them and gave me to understand that six are fewer than nine, and three are fewer than six.

“Three men clasping hands”—his icy fingers touched mine—“form a circle, readying themselves to be one single man, as in the beginning. Three aspire to oneness. One is perfect, the origin of everything; one cannot be divided, all things that can be divided are mortal, what is indivisible is eternal; three is the first number after one that cannot be divided, two is still imperfect since it can be cut in half; three can devolve into six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, or return to one; three is the crossing of the roads: unity or dispersion; three is the promise of unity.”

The ancient accompanied all these explanations by rapid movements of his hands; stretching an arm outside his basket, he drew parallel lines, erased them, drew some within circles hurriedly traced by his gnarled finger in the dust of this chamber illuminated by treasures whose owners feed upon snakes and ants and turtles.

I added one line in the dust: “What shall we do if we again become one, my lord?”

The ancient stared into the distance, beyond the aperture of our cave, toward the jungle, and said: “We shall become one with our opposite — mother, woman, earth — who is also one being and who awaits only our oneness to receive us in her arms. Then there will be peace and happiness, for she will not rule over us nor we over her. We will be lovers.”

I could say nothing, and he said nothing for a long while. Then he looked at me intently and told what I am now going to tell you, Sire:

First was the air and it was inhabited by gods who had no bodies.

And below the air was the sea, and no one knows how or by whom it was created.

And there was no thing in the sea.

And neither was there time in the air or in the sea, so the gods did nothing.

But one of the goddesses of the air called herself goddess of the earth and then since she saw only air and water, she began to ask what her name meant, and when the earth would be created, for that was her dwelling.

She became enamored of her name earth and so great was her impatience that finally she refused to sleep with the other gods until they would give her earth.

And the gods, eager to possess her once again, decided to grant her her whim and they lowered her from the sky to the water and for a long time, until she grew tired, she walked upon the water, and then she lay down upon the sea and fell asleep.

And the gods, desiring her, attempted to waken her, and to do with her what men will, but earth slept and it is not known whether this sleep was like death.

Angry, the gods turned themselves into great serpents and coiled about the arms and legs of the goddess and with their strength they dismembered her and then abandoned her.

And from the body of the goddess were born all things.

From her hair, trees; from her skin, grass and flowers; from her eyes, wells and streams and caverns; from her mouth, rivers; from her nostrils, valleys; and from her shoulders, the mountains.

And from the belly of the goddess was born fire.

And with her eyes the goddess looked at the sky she had abandoned and for the first time she saw the stars and the movement of the planets, for when she dwelt in the sky, she had not seen them or measured their course.

There is no time in the heavens, for in them everything is forever the same.

But the earth needs time in order to be born, to grow, and to die.

And the earth needs time in order to be reborn.

The goddess knew this because day after day she watched the setting and rising and setting of the sun, while the fruits born from the skin of the goddess fell to the ground, and with no hands to pick them they rotted, and no one drank the water of the fountains born from her eyes, and the rivers flowing from her mouth coursed swiftly to the sea, without purpose.

And so the goddess of the earth convoked three gods, one red, one white, and the third black.

And this black god was an ugly, humpbacked dwarf plagued with boils, while the other two were tall, proud young princes.

And the goddess of the earth said to these gods that one of them must sacrifice himself in order that men might be born to pick the fruit, drink the waters, tame the rivers, and make use of the earth.

The two handsome young men hesitated, for each loved himself very much.

The diseased and humpbacked dwarf did not; he neither hesitated nor did he love himself.

He threw himself into the belly of the earth goddess, which was pure fire, and there he perished.

From the flames thus nourished came the first man and the first woman; and the man was called head, or hawk; and the woman was called hair, or grass.

But from the truncated body of the monstrous god who had sacrificed himself came forth only a half man and a half woman, for they had no bodies below their chests, and to walk they hopped like magpies or sparrows, and to beget offspring the man placed his tongue in the mouth of the woman, and so were born two men and two women who were more complete, with bodies as far as their navels, and from them were born four men and four women, whole now as far as their genitals, and these coupled like gods, and their children were born whole as far as their knees, and their grandchildren were completely whole, with feet, and they were the first to be able to walk erect and they populated the world before the watchful gaze of the first lady our mother.

From earth’s belly of fire were also born the companions of men, the beasts that escaped from her pyre, and all of them bear on their skins the mark of their birth from the ashes: the spots of the snake, the dark blackish feathers of the eagle, the singed ocelot. And so, too, the wings of the butterfly and the shell of the turtle and the skin of the deer all show to this day their refulgent and shadowed origin.

Only the fishes escaped from between the legs of the goddess lying upon the sea, and for that reason they smell of woman and they are smooth, and quiver, and are the color of pleasure.

And the belly of the goddess contracted for the last time.

And from her smoking entrails rose a column of fire.

And the specter in the flame was the phantom of the humpbacked, boil-plagued god, who ascended to the sky in the form of fire and there shut out the light of the old sun that existed before time and was converted into the first sun of man: the sun of the days and the sun of the years.

Thus was the dwarf rewarded for his sacrifice.

In contrast, the red god and the white god had to bear the price of their pride.

They remained upon the earth, condemned to measure the time of man.

And they wept for their cowardice, for from the sacrifice of the black boil-plagued god were born half-formed men, men who in no way resembled the gods, men born not whole but mutilated, deformed of soul as the body of the god who sacrificed himself to give them life was deformed of body.

As he was telling all this, the ancient traced line after line in the dust of the elaborately embellished cave, before stopping and asking that I count the lines while he continued his account.

He said then that the mother goddess counted as many days as he had drawn lines in the dust, so that all the stars might complete their dance in the sky and so that the yield of all the fruits of the earth might be completed and again begin their cycle of germination.

I counted three hundred and sixty-five lines and the ancient said that this was the exact number of a complete revolution of the sun and thus it proved that there are lives that begin anew as they are ended, for the humpbacked god gave his life for man but was reborn as the sun.

And the ancient said he would tell what the goddess had then said:

I have given the fire of my belly so that men might be born.

I have given my skin and my mouth and my eyes so that men might live.

The humpbacked and boil-plagued black god gave his life so that men might be born of the fire of my belly.

Then he was turned into the sun so that my body might be fruitful and nourish mankind.

What will men give us in exchange for all this?

And as she spoke she realized that men did possess something the gods do not have, for the gods were and are and will forever be, and they owe nothing to anyone.

But man does: he owes his life.

And the debt of his life is called destiny.

And it must be paid.

And in order to direct the destiny of men, the mother earth and the father sun invented and ordained time, which is the course of destiny.

And thus as the sun had its days exactly numbered, man must know the name and the number of his days, which are different from the days of nature, which has no destiny, only purpose; but different, too, from the days of the gods, who possess neither time nor destiny, although it is true that it is they who give them to nature and to man.

With his extended hand, the old man erased five lines in the dust and looked into my questioning eyes.

And he continued to count:

The gods granted twenty days to the destiny of the names of man, calling them the day of the Crocodile, the Wind, the House, the Lizard, the Snake, the Skull, the Deer, the Rabbit, the Water, the Dog, the Monkey, the Grass, the Reed, the Ocelot, the Eagle, the Vulture, the Earthquake, the Knife, the Rain, and the Flower.

But man not only has his day and his name, but his destiny as well is inseparable from the sign of the gods to whom he must offer sacrifices to repay the debt of his life.

And so, in addition to the twenty days of the name of man, were ordained the thirteen days of the gods’ being.

And the year of destiny, which is different from the year of the sun’s voyage or of the germination of the earth, begins when the first day of the twenty coincides with the first day of the thirteen.

And this happens only when the twenty days have turned thirteen times or when the thirteen days have turned twenty times.

In this way the destinies of the arrow and of circular being are linked, the line of man and the sphere of the gods, and of this conjunction is born total time, which is neither line nor sphere, but the marriage of both.

“Look at these lines, brother, and count them to the point my finger indicates.”

As I counted, I asked: “Why twenty and why thirteen?”

“Twenty because this is the natural number of the complete man, who had that many fingers and toes. Thirteen because it is the incomprehensible number of mystery, and thus is fitting for the gods.”

I counted two hundred and sixty lines, which, it is true, are twenty times thirteen or thirteen times twenty, and I accepted the fact that for the ancient these were the days of the human year, different from the solar year, and I asked: “And why did you erase those five days from the time of the sun?”

The ancient sighed and recounted the following:

As I sigh, so sighed the goddess, our mother earth, and she wept bitterly throughout the night, imploring men to repay her for the debt of their lives.

But the only thing men could give to repay their lives was life, and the goddess knew that, and she wept, desiring to eat the hearts of men.

The men were afraid and they offered the goddess the other two things they had besides life: fruits as an offering; time as adoration.

The goddess cried out, saying that was not enough, that the fruit was in reality another gift of the earth and the sun to men, and to give something that did not belong to them was not a gift at all.

The goddess cried out, saying it was not enough, that time, too, was a gift of the earth and the sun to men, that men needed it while the earth and the sun did not, and that by giving time to men they had lost their divine eternity, and chained themselves to calendars not fitting to a god.

The goddess cried out, saying it was not enough, that the only gift man could give to the gods was life, and that she would not be stilled until they gave her blood, and she would no longer give fruit if it were not watered with human blood.

Beneath the skin of her mountains and her valleys and her rivers, earth had articulations filled with eyes and mouths: she saw everything, nothing sated her appetites, and men asked themselves whether if in order to go on living they must actually all die to feed the thirst and hunger of the earth and the sun.

Their offerings of the fruits of nature were not enough, for the earth refused to continue to give fruit and with her died the first sun of Fire and the world was covered with ice and we all perished from cold and hunger.

And the prayers of time were not enough, for the earth concerted with the sun so that time disappeared and the second sun of Wind died, when everything was destroyed by tempests and we had to abandon our temples and carry our homes on our backs.

And thus evils succeeded evils; men tried to flee, but where could they flee that was not the earth, always the earth?

“Look, brother, look outside, toward the light, toward the indomitable jungle, and see there the wounds of our sufferings, and recall with me the terrible catastrophes that beset us again and again.”

The third sun of Water died; then everything was swept away by the deluge, and it rained fire, and men burned and their cities with them.

Each sun perished because men did not want to sacrifice themselves for the gods, and the price of their refusal was destruction.

Each sun was reborn because men again honored the gods, and sacrificed themselves for them.

And in each catastrophe we lost everything and had to begin again from nothing.

“What sun is today’s sun?” I asked.

“The fourth sun, which is the sun of the Earth, which will disappear like the others, in the midst of earthquakes, hunger, destruction, war, and death, unless we keep it alive with the river of our blood.”

He said that thus it was foretold, and the destiny of each man was to procure the postponement of the fatal destiny of all men by balancing the death of some against the lives of others.

“But, my lord, I have seen no sacrifice in your land, except the ordinary ones of illness and hunger.”

With great sadness the ancient said: “No, we do not kill each other. We live in order to offer our lives to others. Wait and you will understand.”

In my fevered mind I tried to put in order the things related by the ancient, and this was my conclusion: If there is more life than death, the gods soon will see that the debt of life is repaid with widespread death; and if there is more death than life, the gods will be without the blood that nourishes them, and they will have to sacrifice themselves so that the life that vitalizes them may begin again. Thus, by dying for the gods, men postpone their total extinction, and the gods postpone their own extinction by dying so that life can begin again. I felt, Sire, poor arrow that I was, that I had penetrated a hermetic circle, both great and round, deep and high, where all the forces of men were directed toward discovering the fragile equilibrium between life and death.

And I said to myself: “Like one drop added to a cup filled to the brim with blood, I have become a part of this life and this death described by the ancient immersed in the gentle pearls and warming cotton.”

Perhaps the ancient read my thoughts, for these were his words: “You have returned, brother. You have come home. Take your place in your house. You will have as many days as the twenty days of destiny to complete your destiny. The gods were generous. As I with my hand, they erased five days from the time of the sun. Those are the masked days. Those are the faceless days, that belong neither to the gods nor to men. Your life depends upon whether you can win those days from the gods who will try to take them from you and win them for themselves. You must try to win the days and store them away against the days of your death. And when you feel death approach, say: ‘Stop, don’t touch me, I have saved one day. Let me live it. Wait.’ And you can do this five times during the life that remains to you.”

“And if I win them, will they be happy days for me, my lord?”

“No. They are five sterile and luckless days. But misfortune is still worth more than death. That will be your only argument against death.”

As the ancient said these strange things he made many gestures and motions of his hand that helped me penetrate his meaning, although my mind was at times distracted, trying to make order from this chaos of information, and from time to time I fell into pragmatic considerations, as if to compensate for the delirious magic of the ancient. He spoke much of circles, re-creating them with weak movements of his hand. As I listened to him I realized I had never seen a wheel in these lands, unless it had to do with the sun. Nor horses. Nor donkeys. Nor oxen nor cows. I found myself bedazzled by the extraordinary; I felt sudden anguish; I longed for ordinary things. And submerged in the echoes of these fabulous tales, nothing seemed more ordinary than I myself.

“Who am I, my lord?”

For the first time, the ancient smiled. “Who are we, brother? We are two of the three brothers. Our black brother died in the blaze of creation. His dark ugliness was compensated for by his sacrifice. He was reincarnated as a glowing white light. You and I, we who lacked the courage to throw ourselves into the fire, survived. We have paid for our cowardice with the tremendous obligation of maintaining life and memory. You and I. I, the red. You, the white.”

“I…” I murmured. “I…”

“You lived upon the shoulders and nose and flowing hair of the goddess, teaching about life. You planted, you harvested, you wove, you painted, you carved, and you taught. You said that work and love were enough to give in payment for the life the gods gave us. The gods laughed at you and they made fire and water rain down upon the earth. And every time the sun died you fled weeping toward the sea. And every time the sun was reborn, you returned to preach life. I thank you, brother. You have returned from the East where all life is born. The return voyage of our black brother will be more difficult, for although he shines magnificently by day, by night he descends into the depths of the West, he travels the black river of the lower regions, he is besieged by the demons of drunkenness and oblivion, for hell is the kingdom of the animal that swallows up the memory of all things. It will take him longer than it did you to be reunited with me, for by day he gives life and pleads for death, and by night he fears death and pleads for life. You are my white brother, the other founding god. You reject death and praise life.”

“And you, my lord?”

“I am he who remembers. That is my mission. I guard the book of destiny. Between life and death there is no destiny except memory. Memory weaves the destiny of the world. Men perish. Suns succeed suns. Cities fall. Power passes from hand to hand. Princes collapse along with the crumbling stone of their palaces abandoned to the fury of fire, tempest, and invading jungle. One time ends and another begins. Only memory keeps death alive, and those who must die know it. The end of memory is truly the end of the world. Black death, our brother; white life, you; and I … red memory.”

“And if what you are waiting for comes to pass, and the three of us are together?”

“Life, death, and memory: one single being. Masters of the cruel goddess who has until now governed us, given us nourishment and hunger in turn. You, I, and he: the first male princes since the reign of the female mother goddess — to whom we owe everything, but who also would take everything from us: life, death, and memory.”

For a long time he looked at me with his sad eyes as black and decayed as the jungle, as etched and hard as the temple, as brilliant and precious as the gold. He raised the scissors and worked the blades. He said he thanked me for them. I had given him the scissors. They had given me gold. I had given of my labor. He had given me memory. When he asked, finally, the light in his eyes was as implacable and as cruel as the eyes of the mother goddess must have been: “What will you give us now?”

Oh, Sire, as you hear me today, tell me, after listening to all I have recounted and without knowing what is still to tell, you who understand as I the truest truth of that world into which my misfortunes had cast me: tell me — for what I have still to tell will only serve as corroboration — how here all things were an exchange: exchange of life for death and death for life, endless exchanges of looks, objects, existences, memories, with the proposition of placating a predicted fury, of temporizing against the subsequent threat, of sacrificing one thing in order to save another, of feeling indebted to every existing thing, of dedicating both life and death to a perpetual renovating devotion. Everything the ancient had spoken until now seemed pure fantasy and legend until these words made me a participant in that fantasy and a prisoner of that legend: “What will you give us now?”

The old man was asking that I renew our alliance — for him so clear, for me so obscure — with a new offering, something of greater value than his words, as his words had held more value than my life — which I owed to him. What could I offer, wretched being that I was? The ancient spoke of heavens and its gods: my protection lay in common things. There were no wheels here or beasts of burden. Nor had I seen the one thing I still possessed. I put my hand to my breast.

There in the parchment-thin pocket of my wide sailor’s doublet I felt the small mirror Pedro and I had used, joking happily, to serve each other as barber on the ship. I took out the mirror. The ancient watched inquisitively. With a gesture of humility and respect I held the mirror to his eyes.

This was my offering; the ancient looked at himself.

I have never seen, and I hope never to see again, a more terrible expression on a human face. His black eyes bulged, the yellow eyeballs seeming to leap from their deep, wasted sockets; all the deaths of all the suns, all the burning bodies, all the destroyed palaces, all the affliction of hunger and tempests of the jungle were instantly distilled in their twin terror. And all the bitterness of recognition. The wrinkles on the ancient’s face turned into pulsing worms that devoured his face, leaving only an infernal grimace; the white tufts on his mottled skull stood up in horror; his jaw dropped open as if he were drowning, choking, in loosened strings of phlegm, and thick slobber trickled down the dark wrinkled network of his chin to stain the sparse white stubble. His lips drew back to reveal broken teeth and bleeding gums: he tried to cry out, his knotted hands clutched his hide-like neck: he tried to rise; with the movement, the basket overturned, spilling pearls and cotton balls and scissors; finally the ancient screamed and his voice drowned out the jungle accompaniment of cicadas and parrots; that shriek pierced my heart, and his head struck the dusty floor of this ornate temple chamber.

Over our heads I heard the flapping of the frightened vultures and then the voices and rapid footsteps of the young warriors.

They entered the temple chamber. They looked at me. Then they looked at the fallen ancient who stared at us with open, but lifeless, eyes.

I crouched beside him, my fatal mirror in my hand.

One of the warriors knelt beside the ancient, tenderly caressed his head, and said: “Young chieftain … youthful founder … first man…”

THE TRIBUTES

My mind was a turtle as torpid and sluggish as the one I had killed when first I stepped onto the beach of the new world. In contrast, the thoughts of the warriors raced swift as quicksilver hares; after an instant of sorrow that gave way to extreme astonishment they turned to look at me kneeling there beside the dead ancient, my mirror in my hand. In the brief instant between sorrow and amazement, my lethargic emotions could not completely absorb the meaning of those mysterious words: “Young chieftain … youthful founder … first man…”

I would need time, I told myself, to decipher that enigma: like a gust of wind blowing through my fragmentary memory arose the recollection of other pilgrimages in search of the meaning of the oracle: I tasted sea foam, I breathed the perfume of olive trees — another time, another space, not these environs where enigma was suffocated beneath fearful certainty: the warriors saw in me the murderer of their ancient father, their king of memory, perhaps their god. And in just retribution, they were preparing to kill me.

Why did they not do it? I could not answer that question. I was enveloped in the general agitation, a whirlwind of confused motion and warring lights; the warriors spoke so quickly and excitedly, and I so feared for my life, that it was difficult for me to understand what they were saying; I knew only that I was guilty of a crime, and I attributed the excitement to that knowledge, which surely was shared by the warriors. Blinded and deafened, I envisioned my death, and the only word I understood was the constantly vociferated: “Lizard … lizard…”

All the warriors were pointing toward the black dripping walls of the treasure chamber, gesticulating toward the numerous swiftly darting lizards that sometimes blended with the stone, sometimes were revealed in the metallic reflections of the gold. They seized me by the arms and legs and head, they lifted me high in the air, and my benumbed brain resigned itself to thoughts of death.

What happened, then, Sire, was something like death. They placed me in the ancient’s basket, my knees touching my chin; they poured the pearls over my body and I felt their nacreous grayness revive at contact with a skin aflame with ignorance and fear. They raised me, and also the body of the ancient, and we left the cave and went out upon the precipitous steps of the temple.

From the tumult of that moment, I tried to rescue swift impressions of what was happening. I was held in the arms of the warriors, a captive within the basket. The cadaver of the ancient was being dragged by its feet toward the summit of the pyramid. As the lifeless, inverted body ascended, its eyes stared into mine, as if trying to explain something; and when we reached the highest platform, the corpse was abandoned to the vultures, who fell upon it immediately. The body of the Lord of Memory became mixed with the putrefying flesh of the other dead, already torn by the slashing beaks of the birds of prey.

Then I looked down toward the foot of this wild temple and saw many of the women and old men and young of the jungle people standing silently there; they seemed to bleed, a thick red liquid dripped from their hair and faces, and at their feet, bathed in the same color of blood, were stones and arrows and shields. All looked up toward me; the entire jungle reverberated redly, mingled with the incessant movement of the warriors who now carried the baskets filled with pearls and grains of gold from the chamber and set them about me, distributing them on the slimy steps of the pyramid. They placed the scissors in my hands. I still held the weapon of the crime: my mirror. My cross and orb. The warrior from the beach clasped the belt of black feathers about his waist, the sign of ritual confrontation.

I waited. The devoured cadaver of the ancient at the temple summit. The festival of the vultures. The celerity of the nervous, unseen lizards. The motionless, silent, red-stained natives at the foot of the pyramid. The mound of objects, also red, at the feet of the women and old men and children. I, in the pearl-filled basket amid the other baskets of gold and pearls. I waited.

Then I saw all the butterflies of the jungle; they flew from the thick branches and fluttered over the engrossed vultures at the peak of the pyramid, and I heard a flute, Sire, and little bells, and a drum and many footsteps in the jungle; and the thick branches parted before the slow advance of a majestic bird whose brilliant blue and garnet and crocus-yellow body seemed to float over the jungle thicket as if over a lush verdant sea.

Then the leaves parted wider and I saw a man cloaked in a white mantle edged in purple, and I saw that the bird was his headdress, its plumage forming a luxurious trailing crest; and this man was followed by a motley company of musicians, and men who held scrolls beneath their arms and carried feather fans, and a company of warriors with round leather shields and ocelot and eagle masks and lances that ended in hard stone points and red-painted bows and arrows, and bearers clad only in loincloths who carried on their backs baskets and bundles wrapped in deerskin. And at the end of the procession came other similar men, naked, who bore upon their shoulders a palanquin of woven reeds covered on all four sides by worked and embossed deerskins painted with the yellow heads of plumed serpents and adorned with heavy bands and medallions of purest silver.

Seeing myself thus situated, surrounded and confronted, I prayed that the memory of the ancient who had died because he saw his face in my mirror had flown from his staring eyes and through the mirror would penetrate mine. For now I occupied his place; and I understood nothing or knew nothing, could foresee or imagine nothing. I was the prisoner of a ritual; I was its center, but was unaware of my role in it. I felt older than the ancient, more dead than he, the captive of the basket and the pearls and the mirror I still held in my hand. I tell you, Sire, I prayed for one thing: that the ancient’s last glance be captured in the mirror as I was captive in the basket. I wished to affirm my own existence in the midst of so many mysteries and I held the mirror to my face, fearing to see in its reflection the image of my own decrepitude, magically acquired in the swift exchange of glances between the ancient and myself. For if I saw an older face in the mirror, then the ancient had seen a young face and had died of that terror. I looked. And then, only then, as the mercury returned to me my own youthful semblance, I understood that the ancient had not been aware of his own age: he had seen himself for the first time as I saw him … and he had never seen a man so old.

Now the warriors descended the steps, carrying the gold- and pearl-filled baskets, and delivered them into the hands of the man with the plumed crest, and he examined the contents of the baskets and then dictated words to the men with the paper scrolls, who traced signs on them with small sharp sticks with different colored points. Then the strange bearers added the baskets of gold and pearls of the people of the jungle to their loads and the young warrior of the black feather belt asked whether all was well, and the man with the crest nodded and said yes, the Lord Who Speaks, or the Lord of the Great Voice — for thus I translated his words — would be content with the tributes of the men of the jungle and would continue to protect them. The man with the crest made a sign to one of the attendants who fanned him constantly, and this man handed the young jungle warrior several of the reddish ears of fruit and many balls of cotton; the warrior prostrated himself and kissed the sandals of the man of the crest, and this, I believed, consummated the transfer of gold and pearls in exchange for bread and cotton, and that had been the purpose of the treasures of the sea and river, and the ancient had been the guardian and executor of the pact, a fact I understood clearly when the warrior of the black feathers thanked the lord of the crest for what he had given in exchange for their proffered treasures: “We thank the lords of the mountain for the gift of the red grain and the white cotton.”

Then, sadly, he stood silent while the man of the crest waited with folded arms for him to continue, and I, submerged in my basket, reckoned the exchanges of this ceremony of tributes: the men of the river and the jungle offered gold and pearls in exchange for bread and cloth. What more, then, did the man of the crest expect in payment for grain and cotton?

The warrior of the black plumes again spoke: “In exchange for your protection, we deliver unto you our fathers and women and children gathered here.”

My clouded vision returned and I saw that the old men and women and children were painted with the red ocher that had been so laboriously collected. The lord of the crest counted them and dictated words to the scribe and said that this number was good, that it would calm the furies of the day of the Lizard, the day when all the things of the world would bleed unless the goddess of the earth — who on this day suffers bitter cold until she is sprinkled with human blood — was fed. And then the old men and women and children were rounded up by the warriors of the crested lord and he said they would return when the day of the Lizard again coincided with the day of the Last Tempest, when the beautiful goddess of the swamps of creation to whom the gold and pearls of this coast would be dedicated found rest. And he said, too, that they should always guard their treasures well and should always deliver lives on this day, and thus they would always have the fruits of the cotton and the red grain.

“And now,” the crested lord concluded, “allow me to salute your chief.”

Everyone made way to let him pass and the man of the crest ascended majestically toward the spot where I sat half hidden in my basket. And as he climbed he intoned a chant, accompanied by flutes and bells and drums, and also by the cloud of butterflies and the silence of the jungle, his eyes, constantly focused on the distant sun high above the airy cemetery on the summit of the pyramid.

He stopped before me, and only then did he look at me. I saw his ashen face; he looked at my pale visage. He had expected to encounter the ancient man as usual; he found me, and his features were transformed; the majestic gravity disappeared and in its place appeared first astonishment, and then terror. I merely repeated the words that so intrigued me: “First man…”

The crested lord lost all dignity, he turned his back to me and ran down the slimy steps, he slipped and fell, his crest rolled to the base of the temple, he rose, screaming, and scattering everyone before him — the warriors of the people of the jungle and the warriors of the mountain, the men with the fans and the men with the scrolls, bearers and prisoners — he ran to the palanquin decorated with silver and hide and serpents, he knelt beside it, speaking in a low voice, his flaming eyes constantly turning to look toward me, and from an aperture between the skins appeared an arm ringed with heavy, jangling bracelets, a hand the color of cinnamon, with long black-painted nails.

The hand gestured, the crested lord hurriedly arose and in a shrill voice issued many orders: the bearers returned the baskets of gold and pearls to the base of the pyramid, with grotesque movements the warriors freed the jungle people, the men of the feather fans hastily retrieved the ears of grain and the balls of cotton, and all those who had come from the mountain disappeared into the jungle with the swift invisible movements of the lizard.

Sire: now you find me again in the village beside the river. I am confined within my basket, along with my mirror and my scissors. How I wish these objects, the ones with which I arrived, were my only possessions. But no. My trembling body warms and revives the fading pearls. My house is the house of the dead ancient: the bower, a weak structure of reeds. I am enclosed by four deerskins that serve as walls to isolate me from the world, although not from the sounds of the excited natives: shrill conversation, plaintive songs, discussions, and crackling bonfires.

Through the branches this night I can see the black tapestry of the heavens and count its stars, locate them in the heavens, distinguish them one from another. I must accustom myself to this dialogue with the stars. I fear that from now on I shall have no friendship except this cold, brilliant, distant one. As the old man saw himself in the mirror, I shall see myself in the twin star of the dusk and the dawn, Venus, the precious reflection of itself. She will guide my voyage toward absolute immobility. She will be my calendar.

Warriors surround my prison. Again and again I think upon this singular irony. I, the man without memory, occupy the place of the Lord of Memory. I, the stranger arrived from the sea, am the founder. I, naked and dispossessed, am the young chieftain. I, the last of men, am the first.

When I tire of gazing at the stars, I sleep. I do not look at the sky during the daytime, for the sun would set aflame my white eyelashes and pallid lids and blond beard. During the daytime I stare at myself in my mirror and begin to count my wrinkles, my white hairs, my bleeding gums and broken teeth. A prisoner in my basket, I shall wait for old age to devour me, and I shall become as ancient as the old man I killed with my mirror.

Now my mirror will kill me. My fate will be to watch myself grow old and immobile in this fleeting reflection.

THE BURNING TEMPLE

The heart is the kingdom of fear. Oh, moons, suns, days, stars … shelter me; water clock, hourglass, book of hours, stone calendar, swelling seas and storms … do not abandon me, but bind me to time. Dry smoke, shouting, weeping, wailing, silence: how shall I know finally whether it is the world around me or my own heart in which these mists and sounds originate? Through the way of fear I enter the kingdom of silence. I lose count of the days of Venus, repeating to myself that the days of my destiny in this strange land can be only the number set by the ancient in the temple: the days stolen from the days of the sun, the masked days stolen from the days of my destiny. How shall I know these five sterile days I must steal away from bad fortune for the purpose of delaying the moment of my death? Which signs? Which voices? How much time, my God, has passed since then? How old am I now?

The silence grew deeper. I realized it originated not in my heart but instead enveloped the jungle village.

In vain, Sire, I freed myself from my preoccupations to listen to the sounds of the village; in vain I waited to hear the sounds of life I had once shared with these natives. No footsteps in the dust, no hands rustling grasses, no weeping of children or chanting of ancients or voices of warriors or plaints of women: nothing.

I conjectured: they have fled to another location: I don’t know what motivates the peregrinations that lead them from the river to the woods, the woods to the river, the river to a new location, carrying their mats, their baskets of useless treasure, their canoes and their lances, the precious ears from which they make their steaming bread, the balls of cotton from which they weave their beds and clothing. But now they have neither bread nor cloth, and the guilt is mine. Now they have no treasure, except for a few dry branches saved against the time of rain. I am misfortune incarnate; I have given them nothing; I have taken everything from them.

I speculated: they have abandoned me here, they have left me to the ravages of hunger and rain and mosquitoes and the rising river; I shall die, bleeding, drowning, starving. And as I asked myself why they had abandoned me, I could only answer: they fear me. And when I asked, why do they fear me? I replied: I brought bad luck to them, I killed the father of their memory, I left them without recollection, they will be like children now, no, like animals, with no sense of direction to their lives; I am bad fortune; because of me they lost what they were to receive in exchange for the pearls and gold. They have abandoned me along with their useless riches: they have fled to seek for themselves the lands of cotton and red grain.

They had abandoned me. They believed that — situated as I was in the basket beneath the bower of the dead ancient who never moved from this spot and who received water and food only from the hands of his people — I would continue in the way of my predecessor, motionless, and dependent upon them. The fires of survival and adventure sparked again in my breast. I told myself that in this land the two were always united, not, as in the lands I had left behind — how long ago? a thousand years? — separate and conflicting. There, survival is calculation, adventure is risk, resignation is the balance between the two. Here, resignation is death: I had seen it on the red-painted faces of the old men and women and children at the foot of the pyramid: captives offered to the so-called lords of the mountain and their Lord of the Great Voice.

Survival called for risk. I accepted the risk. I struggled within the narrow basket, attempting to free myself from that prison of woven branches; I rocked like a violent pendulum until the basket fell to the ground, spraying pearls and cotton balls across the ground, and I crawled out on all fours. I got to my feet. I still had the mirror and the scissors in my belt; I ventured to part the deerskin curtains.

The last of the fires were dying, almost ash, reduced now to low-hanging smoke. They seemed the only living things. In a tomb of ash and mud and blood lay all the dwellers of this village, children with slashed necks, women eviscerated by stone knives, old men run through by warriors’ lances. And the warriors themselves dead upon their shields, also felled by lances. The mat huts and canoes lay in stone-cold ashes. And from the branch of a tree, hanging from the belt of black feathers, the young warrior I had once assumed to be the chief of this wandering tribe.

It was night. I could imagine the legion of vultures already poised in the treetops, hooded by their wings, ready to fall at the first light of dawn upon the feast offered by this immolated village. I thought that as my heart was a victim of fear, the village people had been similar victims of the men of the mountain, of the man with the crest and the men with the fans and all their warriors and bearers, who had thus avenged the rupture of the pact. And as in the darkness I tried to detect the motionless outlines of the warriors and the silhouettes of those voracious vultures, I looked toward the jungle, then toward the hills, and finally toward the splendor of flames on the distant nocturnal horizon.

I did not know how to return to the ocean unless it was in one of the canoes now burned beyond repair. Return to the ocean. It was only at that moment that it occurred to me to question why the men of the mountain demanded the tribute of pearls from the jungle people; why didn’t they go directly to the sea and there loot at will the treasures of the beaches?

I didn’t know the answer, although I was looking at the evidence. All the inhabitants of this village had died. And their assailants had destroyed everything, even the canoes. Those who had destroyed this village, I told myself, wished to impede even the flight of spirits … and mine as well. I didn’t know the way through the jungle to the sea. And once on the coast, what would I find except what was before me now: death — buzzards, Pedro’s skeleton, the ashes of his poor plot of land on the shores of the new world, and the dying treasure of the beaches?

I saw that the fire in the jungle lay in the direction of the temple. It was in the temple that I had begun to learn the secrets of this land. I felt it was there I must return, and that if it was my fate to die — motionless as an idol — no better place than that pyramid locked in the heart of the jungle. There I would again be what destiny decreed.

The heir of the ancient: I repeated that to myself many times as guided by the nocturnal splendor I moved forward into the jungle, freed of the weight of treasure and mat huts and canoes that had slowed the pace of our caravan when I had for the first time traveled the route to the pyramid. Over and over I repeated that my only inheritance in this immolated, deserted, and intractable land was my relation with the ancient: what he had told me and what he had not been able to tell me, what his dead staring eyes had tried to communicate as his body was dragged toward the summit of the temple.

I slept beside one of those wide deep wells in the plains at the foot of the hills. And in my sleep flashed a new question: why did the men of the mountain kill all the inhabitants of the village by the river, respecting only my life? As if in answer to all my questions, a black spider loomed in my dream, swaying before my eyes; then, terrified, I fell into that well at whose edge I slept, and the well was deep — interminable — and I was still falling, and I would die, crushed against the chalky walls or drowned in the depths of its distant waters; and then high above me glowed the spider, and she was spinning a thread she dropped down to me; it was strong, and with its aid I climbed from the well and with a choking cry I awakened from my nightmare. In my hand I clutched a spider’s silken thread.

Trembling, I rose to my feet and guided by the spider’s thread raced into the heart of the night. I didn’t need to see anything on the wooded hill, not even the flames toward which I ran; branches whipped against my face, I trampled ferns beneath my feet; I advanced blindly, hurrying, indifferent to hissing snakes, hurry, hurry, sweating, panting, toward wherever this thread chose to lead me. Everything was in flames. Fire illuminated the night. The temple was a tall torch of stone and ivy and sculptured serpents and sacrificed lizards. I reached the end of the thread. Through the eyes of madness I saw the waiting spider; when it saw me it scurried toward the foliage that trembled in the light and shadow of the fire. I looked again. Where the spider had been, holding the end of the thread, stood a woman.

I say woman, Sire, in order to be understood by you and your company. I call woman that apparition of dazzling beauty and dazzling horror, and beautiful was her lustrous cotton raiment all embroidered with jewels, and beautiful but terrible the two strands of jewels that as if encrusted there crossed her cheeks, and terrible was the crescent moon that adorned her nose, and both beautiful and horrible the mouth painted in many colors, and only beautiful the soft shining darkness of her limbs. She wore a crown of butterflies on her head, not a reproduction, not metal or stone or any glass were they, not a garland even of dead butterflies: hers was a crown of living black and blue and yellow and green and white butterflies that wove a fluttering wreath above the head of the being I call woman. And she was that, for if I seem to describe something painted or dreamed or some carved statue, her eyes were living and the life of their gaze was directed toward me. And behind the woman, the burning temple.

She raised her arms toward me. The heavy bracelets clinked and jangled: the black fingernails I had seen the other day on this very spot between the deerskin curtains of a palanquin reached out toward me, sought me, beckoned me. How could I refuse that invitation, Sire? How could I resist, how not walk toward her, toward that embrace, how not bury myself in the folds of finespun cotton and adamantine jewels, how not join the end of my spider’s thread with hers?

Through my sweat-soaked clothing, my heat-drenched body could sense that she was naked beneath the robe, but I couldn’t look upon her body, for my eyes were hypnotized by her mouth: colored snakes that froze and slithered and undulated on the full compelling lips, and I could only imagine the body pressed against mine, which inflamed me as the temple behind us inflamed the night. I tried to imagine the nipples of those black breasts, the jungle of black hair upon the black mound of Venus — my guide, my precious twin, my black star.

Slender, heavy-braceleted arms, black-nailed hands removed my doublet and my breeches, and I was nude, erect, pressed against that terrible and beautiful body; my hands held her waist, her fingers caressed my belly and chest and thighs and buttocks, and fluttered, finally, like butterflies about my sex — stroking, coaxing, cupping, measuring, stiffening; and then with the lightness of butterflies those open, inviting legs shifted and clasped my waist, and I, Sire, sailed away on Venus; I lost all sense of sight and smell, I was mute, deaf … king and slave to pure sensation, a deep and thick and throbbing sensation that thrust against the warmest walls of the jungle and the night, for I was coupling with the black jungle; I was one with everything about me, and through the pulsing cave of the woman mounted upon me I touched everything I had feared — thirst and hunger, sorrow and death … and then, all want, all need, turned into well-being, into gift, into reward … and I was clinging to the back and neck and buttocks of my lover as another night I had clung to the wheel of the ship, knowing that my life was allied to it; now life ebbed from my useless throat and eyes and ears and mouth, flowed from my groin; I was caught in annihilating pleasure, and instead of fleeing this mortal sensation, I clung to it till I felt I was melting into the woman’s flesh and she into mine, and we were one, a spider wrapped in its own spinning, an animal captured in traps of its own making: animal pleasure, call it that, Sire: dreamed-of bliss and immediate evil: imprisoned freedom. All my being told me I must never be parted from this union, I had been born to know it, even if knowing it meant death in life. And my most fervent desire was that all my senses die, except sensation; I prayed all the others would leave my body, evaporate into air, spread afar the news I was about to die in the hands of the woman who made love to me at the foot of the burning temple — who was I, as I was she. We were one person, Sire, can you understand me? For only thus can you understand that in that mortal embrace of all earthly delights only one voice spoke, and it was mine, but it issued from her tattooed lips.

And these are the words the Lady of the Butterflies spoke in my voice, said in my name, with her mouth crushing mine, her lips caressing my ear, her teeth nibbling my neck and shoulders and nipples, her fingernails digging into my back:

“Follow the road to the volcano. Ascend. Let yourself be guided. Never look back. Forget from whence you come. Turn your back to the sea that brought you to this shore. You have arrived. Prove who you are. If you are who you are, you will overcome all the obstacles you encounter in your way. Climb. Climb. To the highest point. To the highland. I shall await you there. Do you wish to see me again? Obey me. Have you had pleasure? This night is nothing compared with those I reserve for you. Do not lose your way. Follow the spider’s thread. The spider is always by my side. She is a creature without time.”

To the possessor of my voice, for it was my voice that issued from her painted lips, I could only ask, without words: “Why did you burn the temple? Why did you order all the people beside the river killed? If I have arrived, where have I arrived? If I am, who am I?”

And with my voice on her lips she answered me: “You will travel twenty-five days and twenty-five nights before we are together again. Twenty are the days of your destiny in this land. Five are the sterile days you will save against death, though they will be similar to death. Count them well. You will not have another opportunity in our land. Count well. Only during the five masked days will you be able to ask one question of the light and one question of the darkness. During the twenty days of your destiny, it will not profit you to ask, for you will never remember what happens on those days — forgetfulness is your destiny. And during the last day you pass in our land, you will have no need to ask. You will know.”

Then, Sire, my vision grew clouded as my sight returned, my throat thickened with my returning voice, my nose smarted with returning smell, my ears roared with returning hearing. And as I again became aware of other senses my sense of touch diminished, and with every new flash of light, with every new odor, with every new crashing sound, the Lady of the Butterflies faded away, blended into the jungle as moments before she had blended into my body; she was returning — to the red flame or to verdant growth: whether she entered the smoking temple or the misty jungle, I do not know.

She disappeared.

My groping hands tried to capture the ghosts of her crown of butterflies; they grasped only air.

And feeling life, I felt loneliness, and I went to rest against the blackened stones of the temple and to the temple I swore to have that woman again.

Naked, I climbed the elevated steps where the last fires were dying, and naked, I paused at the summit strewn with incinerated cadavers. The smoking ashes burned my feet. I did not feel them. This was the chamber of the dawn. I offered to Venus my love-drenched body. The white cone of the volcano was illuminated by the light of the morning star.

So passed the days of my destiny in the new world. Of them I remember only five.

THE MOTHER AND THE WELL

I had two guides: the distant volcano and the thread the woman had dropped at the foot of the charred temple. I had two weapons: the scissors and the mirror. Many were my companions when again I plunged into the jungle, as previously I had penetrated the woman’s flesh. A brilliant sun. The fluttering butterflies, as uncertain as my soul, hidden in the thick foliage. A host of birds. I recognized the chattering birds that fill these skies, knew now the partridges and hummingbirds that ornament this warm florid jungle whose greatest marvel is a constant mist so fine it does not wet the body: an impalpable dew that surely is the nourishment of the perfumed trees that abound here, some with white flowers and aromatic seed pods, some blush pink streaked like marble, others tiger-spotted, and one with round fruit of rough brown husks. And not least, a splendid unfolding of leaves brilliant as burnished leather disseminating a smoky odor.

The lustrous little short-horned deer are plentiful in this jungle, which led me to think: “This is the first day of my new destiny. I shall call it the day of the Deer.”

Scarcely had the thought passed my mind when all the perfumes and colors floated from the flowers and birds, fruit and dew, and formed an enormous rainbow before my eyes. At the slightest touch, the forest of ferns parted to open a path for me. The spider’s thread led me to the foot of the rainbow, which was guarded by birds I had not seen before, like small peacocks but without their air of vanity: tame and beautiful birds with green feathers and long tails.

As on the beach of pearls, I could imagine a return to Paradise. But experience caused me to doubt the illusions of this forest and to move forward with caution. Appearances deceive in any land, but here the extraordinary was the rule. And so, surrounded by peace and beauty, I prepared to defend myself against sudden terror. But this brief flicker of my will was quickly defeated by the fatal nature of my journey: I was to follow the route the spider spun for me through the jungle: I would follow, whether it led me to Heaven or to Hell. For more powerful than Heaven, more powerful than Hell, was the promise that awaited me at the end of my road: the Lady of the Butterflies.

As they heard my footsteps the birds with the long green tails were startled and flew away, and in the line of their flight I glimpsed at the end of the rainbow a house washed so white with lime it seemed of polished metal; it swam like a sunlit island in a many-colored mirage of tepid mist. I approached; I touched the walls. They were of baked and painted mud. I repeated: appearances deceive, and in the new world so desired by my poor friend Pedro all that shines is not gold. The spider’s thread led into the single door: I followed.

I entered a room as warm as the jungle, clean, and heaped with provisions: ears of grain, odorous herbs, burning braziers, large earthen pots in which thick, aromatic beverages were brewing. I have never seen such cleanliness, and scarcely had my gaze adjusted to the shadow of this room when I heard the sound of a broom and saw a woman slowly sweeping the hard dirt floor. It was an old woman, the most ancient of women, who now looked up to meet my gaze; and if her eyes were as brilliant and black as the coals on the hearth, the toothless smile was as sweet as the honey stored in the green jars of her house.

She did not speak. In one hand she held her broom and with the other made a gesture of welcome, indicating I should make myself comfortable on one of the straw mats placed beside the braziers, and there, silently, smiling and stooped, the tiny old woman served me the savory smoking bread of the land, rolled and filled with deer meat and rosemary and mint and coriander, and little jugs filled with a boiling tasty liquid, thick and dark brown in color. And when I had eaten, she offered me a long thin tube of golden leaves which I began to chew. This food left an acid juice upon my tongue. The little woman laughed soundlessly, smacking her wrinkled, sunken lips which no longer bore any color of life, and she herself took one of those tubes I have described, Sire, and placed it between her lips, leaning over to the coals, and lighted it, inhaling its smoke and then expelling its intoxicating aroma through her mouth. I did as she had done. I coughed. I choked. The old woman laughed again and indicated that I should take a sip of the dark thick liquid.

We sat there a long while, sucking the roll of herbs and puffing smoke from our mouths until the roll was consumed, and then the old woman threw the end of hers into the brazier and I imitated her, and she said: “You are welcome. We have been awaiting you. You have arrived.”

“‘You have arrived.’ That’s what the ancient Lord of Memory said to me.”

“He was mad. He did not speak the truth.”

“Who, then, will tell me the truth? Why have you been awaiting me? Who am I?”

The tiny old woman shook her round head; her carefully combed bluish-white hair was pulled tightly back and wound into a knot at the back of her head and held by a delicate tortoise-shell comb.

“You can ask me only one question, my son. You know that. Why do you ask me two? Are these your questions? Choose well. You may ask only one question each day and each night.”

“Tell me then, señora, in order that I may know how to count my days, which day is this? Why did today — in this incomprehensible land usually so filled with menace — seem so peaceful?”

I am sure the old woman looked at me with compassion. Her soft and gentle hands smoothed the folds of her simple flower-embroidered white robe as she said: “It is the day of the Deer, the day of serene prosperity and peace in all homes. It is a good day. He who arrives at my house on this day will seem to have found a corner of the garden of the gods. Enjoy it. Rest and sleep. Night will come again.”

I was a fool; I had asked what I already knew, what I had already seen, what I already felt. I had wasted my only question on this my first day when there were so many questions that might clarify the mysteries of this land and my presence in it. But lulled by the food and the smoke and the journey, I rested my head upon the ancient woman’s lap. Maternally, she stroked my head. I slept.

And in my dream, Sire, I saw the Lady of the Butterflies. She was accompanied by a monstrous animal black as the night, for there was nothing about it that reflected any light; it was like a shadow on four paws, huge and hairy. In vain I looked for its eyes. Only its form was visible. It had no eyes, only a hairy coat and a yawning maw and four twisted paws, for instead of pointing forward, its paws turned backward. The woman with whom I had made love beside the ruined temples was bathed in an aureole of hazy light; the animal that was her companion began to dig in the earth, and as it dug, it growled terrifyingly. When it had completed its task, the diffuse light of my dream became an oblique golden column emanating from the very center of the heavens; it fell into the hole excavated by the beast. That intense golden light was like a flowing river and as it poured into the depths of the cavity, the animal covered it up, throwing dirt upon it with its twisted feet, and the more dirt it scratched into the hole, the more the light faded. The Lady of the Butterflies wept.

Frightened, I asked the old woman who had cradled me: “Mother, kiss me, for I am afraid…”

And she kissed my lips, as the woman of the jungle vanished weeping into the night and the animal howled with a mixture of joy and suffering.

I awakened. I reached to touch the lap and hands of the old woman who had cradled me like a baby. My head now rested upon one of the plaited straw mats. I tried to clear my mind. I heard the weeping and howling of my dream. I looked around the room. The braziers were extinguished. The old woman was gone. The jars were broken, the beverages spilled, the brooms broken, and the flowers crushed; the dirt floor had turned to dust and the corners of the hearth were thick with spider webs. My lips felt bruised and tired. I rubbed the back of my hand across them; my hand was smeared with mingled colors. An owl hooted. I picked up the end of the spider’s thread and went out of the house. Soft dark mud covered its walls.

It was night, but the spider led me. Closing my eyes, I clung to the thread; the sinister hooting of the owl was nothing compared to the far-off laments and sobs and sounds that seemed to come from the very heart of the mountains; they filled the air as if the entire earth mourned the loss of the light the dark creature in my nightmare had buried in the earth, thus condemning her to the twofold torture of burning entrails and a sightless gaze. As blind as the night, I didn’t wish to see and I didn’t wish to hear; I prayed that the peace of the day I had spent with the tiny old woman beside her hearth might be prolonged in the silence of a beneficent night.

My prayer was heeded. Total silence fell over the jungle. But now you will see, Sire, of what weak clay we men are made, for having obtained what I most desired, I now detested it. The silence was so absolute it was totally overwhelming, a menace as threatening as the vanished cries and laments. Now I longed for the return of sound, for true horror lies in the heart of silence. One sound, just one sound, would save me now. First, I was captured by silence. Then came real capture at the hands of silent men. I was already undone by my misdirected supplications for silence; I let myself be led by men I did not try to see to places I did not want to know. Lifeless, voluntarily blind, and deaf — so silent were the forest and its men — I once more resigned myself to fate. I knew the shape and form of my destiny when we stopped; I took a step forward and felt only empty space beneath my foot. Arms held me, I heard the bird-like voices. I opened my eyes. I was standing at the edge of one of those wells I have spoken of, so wide and deep that at first view they seemed to be caverns level with the ground; but in their center lie waters so deep they must be the baths of the Evil One himself.

My foot loosened a pebble from the edge of the well; I watched it fall and for many seconds — as long as it took the pebble to reach the sunken mirror of the waters — I listened in vain, and then the cavern was filled with echoes, and the voices of my captors were raised in confused debate, and again and again they repeated the word “cenote, cenote,” and then “death,” and then “night,” and then “sun,” and then “life,” and I recalled my dream, when I had slept beside one of these wells and fallen into it, and also I remembered I had the right to one nocturnal question and at the top of my lungs I shouted in the language of this land: “Why am I going to die?”

And a voice spoke over my shoulder, so close I would have sworn it was the voice of my shadow, and said: “Because you have killed the sun.”

I was not dreaming now, and the naked arms of these natives pushed me toward the well: I lost my footing; I shouted, it isn’t true! I fell … the animal with the twisted feet killed it! I fell … I saw it! I fell into the true night, not the unreal night of dreams, I fell shouting, the animal! the animal: I fell through the black night within the well … the animal! It’s true! I dreamed it! Then feet-first I struck the water and I heard the distant ringing echo of the voice that had spoken over my shoulder: “Dream now you are going to die so that this night will not be the last, the eternal, the infinite night of our fear…”

I sank into the quicksilver breast of the waters.

DAY OF THE WATER, NIGHT OF THE PHANTOM

I was bathed in light. Night reigned when I had been thrown into the well, and the fear of my executioners was like the night. As I plunged into the water, I had drawn in the last lungful of air and closed my eyes; as soon as I felt myself beneath the surface, my will to survive revived; I swam, but my efforts were to no avail: after a few strokes I came always to the circular wall of smooth, sheer rock, without any handhold. Without hope, I floated, knowing that sooner or later I would grow weak and would sink into the unknown depths of this watery prison. I decided to call this day of my certain death the day of the Water, and I wondered whether this was one of the five days I was to steal from life to hold against death, as the Lord of Memory and the Lady of the Butterflies had so often told me. How would I know? My beautiful and horrible lover had warned me I would remember only those five decisive days, forgetting the other twenty of my destiny in this land. How would I know what I lived but could not remember? And then, as I say, Sire, I was bathed in light.

An undulating brightness, shattered when I had splashed through it, covered the surface of the water; it was again smooth and calm, barely riffled by my quiet floating. First, I sought the deliverance of the thread that in my dream had rescued me from a similar situation. But now the thread was nowhere to be seen. Then I prayed that this well might be like the sea, subject to high and low tides, for then at the ebb tide I might stand on the floor of my prison. Keeping my eyes open wide, I dived into the depths of the well. There I found the reason for the astonishing brightness: the sandy floor of this pool was a burial ground of bones and skulls; and if the sands were brilliant, they were dull compared to the refulgence of the remains of those other men who had died here.

I rose to the surface: I had seen my destiny face to face, bone to bone. I dived again, again I explored the well in the illumination of that deathly light. I saw that in one corner chance had piled up a heap of skulls that formed a small submerged pyramid. I considered: “Perhaps these dead can be of service to my life. Perhaps I can build a platform of washed bones where I can stand and await my death by starvation — or the salvation that came in my dream: the spider’s thread.”

So I began to work. I swam like a fish to the grisly mound and began to dislodge the crusted skulls that seemed almost a part of the chalky rock, or the rock an extension of the death’s-heads. I used my scissors to pry the skulls from the soft stone, rising to the surface when my air was exhausted, filling my lungs, diving again to renew my task.

Thus I passed several hours of the night, resting from time to time, floating calmly on my back on my liquid bed, for more people drown from terror than from water. But in the end my pedestal of bones was still not very tall, and I reached the point where I considered giving up and abandoning myself to the sleep shared by my companions, the skeletons in this sinkhole. There I was beneath the waters, staring into the hollow eye sockets of a skull embedded in the rock. I said to myself that as the ancient Lord of Memory had died of fear upon seeing himself in my mirror, I would take this skull as my mirror; I would kiss it, caress it, press it to my breast, and thus create a compassion I had been denied. I would die embracing my own image, as final and eternal as the night so feared by my tormentors.

As captives pry stones from their dungeon walls, so I pried loose this last skull. But captives have hopes that beyond the loosened stone they will find liberty. I had no such hope. This labor I did for my death. I loosened the skull, and then, Sire, an icy thread slipped between my fingers, and if it were possible for a man to shout beneath the water, I would have shouted: “The spider’s thread!”

And, shouting, I would have thanked my loving and protective lady for saving me. But I immediately realized the thread in my hands was intangible; it was not spun by the spider, but was water … more water. And then this filament of cold water turned into a frozen torrent, and the torrent into a true subterranean cataract that scattered the shattered remains of the skulls and burst powerfully from the small hole in the rock that had been plugged only by the last skull. The liberated torrents enveloped me in foam, tumbled me over and over, lifted me from the bottom of the well with their turbulent force, dragging me upward with them toward the night, toward the jungle.

That well was filling with water, Sire, quickly and tumultuously, and I swam upward toward the edge from which I’d been pushed, fighting now to keep from being sucked toward the sunken cemetery by the churning currents of the waters freed by the accident of my labors. Fortune had allowed me to tap the very vein that fed the well, the subterranean river that was father to these deep-flowing waters.

I swam with the upsurging water, lessening now in force. The water did not overflow the top of the well, but leveled a few inches below its rim. My hands touched dry land, my fingers dug in, and I pulled myself up until I could see over the edge of the well. A red sun and a gray sky: these were the first things I saw. A sun the color of blood, blazing in its own fire, bathed in the purple of its rebirth. It, as I, had just emerged. It edged upward in a metallic sky, a sky as flat as the chalky white ground where my nighttime executioners stood staring in amazement, watching me emerge from the well filled by the rushing waters at the very instant the sun was born anew.

I emerged by my own efforts; by my own efforts I scrambled to my feet and met their expressions of amazement, gratitude, and respect. No one came near me now, no one touched me; all stood obediently at a distance. I heard the lament of a flute. The sun quickly shed its terrestrial cloak, rose higher, transformed the gray sky into a bright yellow cupola. Joy exploded. To the music of the flutes were added rattles, bells, and drums; groups of men with red ocher- and clay-painted bodies danced first around me, then preceded me, inviting me to follow them; women and children joined us, offering me small earthen jars of a thick white intoxicating liquid and roasted ears of grain sprinkled with a fiery pepper.

I ate; I followed them, and we came to the foot of a clean, low temple with beautiful ornamental frets. The people who first had wished to sacrifice me and now were honoring me formed two lines, indicating the path I must follow to the foot of the temple. I ascended the short stairway, as astonished now as my former-captors-turned-enthusiastic-hosts. I reached the flat platform of this temple, as low in profile as the bare chalky plain about us, and there, upon a strange stone throne carved in the form of spread wings, I encountered an obese and lavishly robed man wearing a dyed purple mantle, his forehead bound by a jewel-encrusted riband, fanning himself with the feathers of the beautiful tame green bird I had first seen near the home of the provident old mother.

This Fat Prince maintained an appearance of great dignity, but his nervous fanning indicated to me that he shared the reverent amazement of his people. By his side, as nervous as its master, tied to the throne by a silver chain, fretted a marvelous fowl, the largest bird I had ever seen. Its head was bald as an eagle’s; from its neck, almost touching the ground, drooped enormous, worn, reddish, inflamed dewlaps; the wings of this great fowl were covered with jewels, with emeralds and jade, and about its neck and tarsi danced beautiful golden chains and copper bracelets and coins of pure gold. The music stirred the bejeweled bird whose ornaments jangled as if in time to the rhythm of the music. This great bird’s nest was a large sheet of cotton cloth that covered part of the platform, as well as some objects beside the throne. The Fat Prince of this land rose heavily from his throne, aided by two young men and submissive girls with downcast eyes whose tight white skirts were embroidered like the tunic of the grandmother of the hearth. The obese one bowed before me and, with a gesture, ceded me his throne.

Shaking my head, I refused. The Prince glared at me, offended. The fowl shook its scoriaceous dewlaps. I remembered the fate of Pedro. I took the Prince’s place on the throne and he said: “Long-awaited Lord: you have given us back the sun. We thank you.”

Instead of asking and wasting a question, I stated: “The sun rises every day.”

The Prince sadly shook his head, and in a loud voice repeated my words to the throng at the foot of the temple. When they heard him, they wailed and shouted no, no, not so; the noise of the drums and rattles rose and with satisfaction the Fat Prince looked at his people and then at me.

“It rises for you, our Lord, when you wish it. But for us it dies. We have seen the deaths of many suns; and when the suns die, the deep rivers of our land dry up, nothing grows upon the land, animals die and princes die; the birds die. Cities return to rough stone and disappear beneath the jungle growth. We have died, and fled, and we have returned when you have deigned to return the sun to us. The sun does not die for you, for you are its master. For us it dies every night, and we never know whether it will rise again. You have proved who you are. We sacrificed you in exchange for the sun, and you returned the sun to us, and with it you returned to earth. We do you honor, Lord, on this day of the Water.”

The Fat Prince raised his fan of feathers and signaled to two young men, who rapidly climbed the temple steps. In their hands they carried two small cloth-covered earthen jars. The Prince dropped his fan and accepted the jars, holding one in each hand. He said to me: “Uncover them.”

I did, and I must tell you, Sire, those jars contained excrement, vile excrement, and with a gesture of repugnance I re-covered the jars as the obese Prince spoke: “Offer this to the bird, who is the bejeweled guaxolotl, and you will be rewarded, for this bird is the prince of the world.”

I arose from the throne and held out the two filthy jars to that fowl he called guaxolotl; the fowl shook its dewlaps and with its own beak lifted the cotton cloth that lay over the shrine and revealed to my eyes a treasure of jewels of gold and polished jade.

“See, my Lord,” murmured the Fat Prince, “the jeweled bird offers you the gold and jade, the excrement of the gods, in exchange for human excrement. With it he offers power, riches, and glory. Take it all. It is yours.”

What misery. I had before me riches enough to found an empire; but I had possessed the glory of the pearls on the beach where I had been shipwrecked, and I had received the power of gold from the natives beside the river; but I had abandoned both glorious pearls and powerful gold, I had forgotten them amid the rain and mud and mosquitoes, for I had found they could not help me survive in this land. What the obese Prince called the excrement of the gods, would it serve me in any way?

The temptation of this treasure which the fowl guarded was nothing compared to the greatest temptation of my new life: the Lady of the Butterflies, finding her again, making love to her again. And to that end my only treasure was a simple spider’s thread of greater worth than all the jade and topaz and emeralds and gold and silver I was offered in appreciation for the return of the sun. To follow the road to the volcano I must travel without any burden. And so I replied to the Fat Prince: “I accept your offering, my Prince. And having accepted, I return it to you in exchange for one question.”

The Prince looked confused, and I continued: “Tell me what I ask of you, for if you know the answer you will know how to defend yourself, and if you do not know, you will be forewarned. I look at your people and I fear that my passage among you may be as disastrous as my time with the people beside the river. Answer this single question, for I know that I may obtain only one answer on this day. Tell me: why were all the people killed who lived beside the river?”

The Fat Prince trembled: “Is my answer worth all the riches, the power, and the glory the jeweled bird-prince offers you?”

I said yes; perturbed, he answered: “They were not killed. They killed themselves. By their own hand they offered themselves in sacrifice.”

I bowed my head, as perturbed by this answer as the man who gave it. At my feet, beckoning, lay the spider’s thread.

As I left this land, walking across the white plain away from the temple and the well and the people who wished one night to sacrifice me and the next day to honor me, I pondered greatly the answer of the obese Prince. I could still hear the sad lament of their flutes, and their disappointed faces as they watched me leave were still alive in my memory. But above all else, to my feverish imaginings came the spectacle of the people beside the river.

A people immolated by its own hand. So that killing had not been a reprisal on the part of the men of the mountain but a voluntary sacrifice motivated by some other reason: perhaps the death of their Lord of Memory, and with him the death of memory itself? Did they fear their orphaned state, bereft of the knowledge demanded by that place: the sun and rain, the time to collect firewood and the time to burn it, smoke and gold, flight to the hill, the return to the river? They were a fragile, tender people too preoccupied with combating the evil of nature ever to practice human evil.

I loved that people in my memory, Sire, for as one who also lived without memory, I felt I was one of them. And I pardoned them the death of my old friend Pedro, for I understood that his intrusion, as mine, had interrupted the sacred order of things and ages; they did not hate us, they feared our presence would break the perfect cycles of an age that defended them against the evil of nature. The new world was a world of fear, of fleeting happiness and constant anguish: I trembled to think how our measures of duration and of strength, of survival and defeat and triumph, were useless here where everything was born each day only to perish again each night; I trembled to think of an encounter between our energetic concepts of continuity with these that were but a quickly withered flower of a day — uncertain expectation. I pardoned, I say, Pedro’s death. I told myself I would also pardon them mine. The intrusion of one white man in these lands was enough … no, it was too much.

Night surprised me in the midst of these cavilings, guided always by the spider’s thread. I had passed the chalky plain and was traveling a road that penetrated into a forest of tall trees covered with clusters of crescent-shaped green fruit. I also noted that the road, more arduous now, ran uphill. I was leaving rivers and jungle and sea behind. I felt hungry, and I shook one of those trees to satisfy that hunger. I was just preparing to eat when I heard the sound of someone working. I tried to identify the sound and came to the conclusion that a short distance from me someone was cutting wood. I entered deeper into the dark woods with several of the green fruit in my hand, ready to share them with the woodcutter.

In the darkness I could barely make out the stooped figure of a man standing with his back turned to me, violently attacking a tree trunk with an ax. Confidently, I approached. The man turned to face me and I cried out in horror, for the woodcutter’s face was nothing but two glowing eyes and a swinging tongue that hung from a slit of a mouth, a smooth lipless wound; and the rib cage of this phantom opened and closed like gates in the wind, and as his ribs parted they revealed a living, beating heart that glowed like the monster’s eyes. I was sure I had lost my reason, such was the contrast between my feeling of peaceful friendship and the horror of the vision: then the enormous hanging tongue spoke imperiously: “Dare … Take my heart, take it in your hand, dare to do what no one else has ever dared…”

Oh, Sire, as you hear me, recall, and sum up my adventures from the time I left your shores and tell me why upon hearing these words I would hesitate: what was seizing that palpitating heart compared to the dangers I had met in the sea, in the center of the vortex, among the warriors on the beach, and in the sacrifice of the well?

I reached out and took that sonorously beating, bloody, dripping heart in my hand. I held it with repulsion, wishing only to return it immediately to its owner — but the phantom moaned with fury, his wounded mouth filled with green spittle, and he howled these words: “Demand what you will: power, riches, glory: they are yours; they belong to he who dares take my heart.”

I replied simply: “I want nothing. Here. I return your heart to you.”

The creature, who had only eyes, mouth, and tongue, shouted again and his shouts drowned out the sound of his pounding ribs. “Then it is true!” he shouted. “You are the one who rejects all temptation; today you rejected the gifts of the jeweled bird and now you reject mine. What is it you wish?”

I stood silent, the creature’s heart in my hand. I looked with cold disdain at this forest tempter. The only thing I possessed was my desire; I would not deliver it in exchange for his heart. For I well knew the law of this land was to reply to an offering with another of greater value: what but my desire could I offer the phantom of the forest in exchange for his heart?

When his ribs, like the shutters of a window, again opened, I returned his heart and I asked the one nocturnal question to which I had a right. “Take your heart. And in exchange, tell me now: why did the inhabitants of the town beside the river kill themselves?”

I feared, Sire, I was wasting another question, and that I would hear the answer I had myself proposed: that they had gone mad when they realized they had lost their memory. I did not fear that answer; it would, at least, reaffirm my reason. But the creature with the glowing eyes raised two hands as smooth as his face (hands without fingernails or lines of fortune or love or life), and pressed those hands against his beating rib cage and said: “They sacrificed themselves for you…”

And the phantom began to laugh monstrously. “They sacrificed themselves for you…” Howling with laughter, the horrendous forest apparition repeated: “Sacrificed themselves for you … sacrificed themselves for you…” And with every burst of laughter, his body shrank; the creature hid his face between his hands, and howled: “Fear me, brother, fear me; I am your pursuing shadow; I am the voice you heard last night over your shoulder; I am…”

Suddenly the creature stood tall, looked straight into my eyes. I was looking at myself. The phantom of the forest had my face, my body; he was my exact double, my twin, my mirror.

DAY OF THE SMOKING MIRROR

I say exact, but I am inexact, Sire. For my double was my double in everything except color. My eyes were blue, his were black. My hair was the color of wheat, his the color of a horse’s mane. My skin, in spite of the time spent in these lands, was pale and quick to burn, to blister and peel to a pale rose color. My twin’s was burnished copper. But he was my twin in every other way: size, build, features, and bearing. Now I can recall the differences. That night I was impressed only by the similarity.

I was not master of my hours there. Much time must have passed between the night of the horrendous nocturnal apparition and my next memory of my voyage. The ancient of the temple and the goddess of the butterflies had warned me; I would recall only five days, those saved from the days of my destiny in this land. Now, before opening my eyes again, I could have dreamed: “One day, ten, five more, how many days had passed since that night the phantom offered me his heart and I offered him my wish in exchange?”

I did not know, and that was an advantage the new world held over me; it knew all my steps across its face, even those I actually would never forget because they were not a part of my memory. But if this was my weakness, perhaps that of the new world was having to assume the memory and responsibility for all my acts. I may have done a great deal, Sire, I may have done very little, but I did something between that night and this dawn. But if I were dreaming this dawn, I was consoled by reason: “Yesterday, only yesterday, you escaped from the well of death, following a night of superhuman labor and wakefulness; you were led to the pyramid of the Fat Prince; you rejected the power and the glory offered by the bejeweled bird; you left behind you the chalky plain; you walked through the forests of tall trees; you encountered the phantom, your dark double. You must have slept deeply, as you have never slept before. There is no body, no matter how young, that can bear so much. Your sleep has been so deep that it seems as if it were the longest of your life; no, more than that; it seems longer even than your life. But the truth is that you slept last night and you awakened today. That is all.”

My eyes contradicted my reason. I awakened suddenly, eagerly, breathing rapidly, as one awakens from a nightmare, and I saw a transformed landscape. There was nothing here to recall the warm, florid lands of the coast. It was cold, and my ripped and torn clothing served me badly. It was difficult to breathe; the air was thin and elusive. The luxuriant vegetation of the new world had died, and in its place reigned a no less luxuriant desolation. I was surrounded by a landscape of rock; tumultuous yellow and red stone, at once symmetrical and capricious in its naked shapes of knife and saw, altar and table, cloud and constellation of shattered stone, tall, smooth, sharply outlined cathedrals of sheer rock pierced by twisted thickets and dwarfed gray trees; rock crowned by enormous green-thorned candelabra never before seen by the eye of man, like cathedral organs, tall and dry and armed to defend themselves against any touch, although who would dare touch so forbidding a plant, queen of this petrous desert, whose coarse, prickly habit declared her majestic desire to live isolated in this sterile domain: a hermit plant, a stylite unto herself, O Very Christian Sire who hears me today, both pillar and penitent.

At the foot of this rocky mountain lay a valley of dust so restless and silent that at first I did not notice any life within its reaches, except for the movement of the veils of dry, white whirling dirt, swift and hostile; an icy wind was blowing; and it rent the veils of dust; before me, before my bed of rocks, rose the volcano. I had arrived. I gave thanks. Here my lover was to meet me. I looked around. At my feet was the spider’s thread.

Jubilant, I picked it up. Following it, I descended from my harsh eyrie. I no longer thought whether much or a little time had passed between my most recent recollection and this new morning, between my passage through the burning coastlands and my arrival in this cold region. Guided by the spider I descended to the plain, and holding to its thread I moved through the restless dust of the plain, and like the plain I felt crushed by the closeness of the sky and sun which at this height were almost on top of me, and I remembered how distant they had seemed on the coast. I did not understand; terrible was the heat on the beaches I first trod in this new world, and I thought then that nowhere did the blazing sun burn so close to us. Now, I remembered how high and distant it had seemed on the coast and in the jungle; and on this plain of rock and dust, beside the volcano, so nearby, its blaze was lessened. A transparent Host, the sun burned less the nearer I was to it. I realized this, to the astonishment of my body, only at that instant. And as I walked forward I discovered that the dust was also smoke.

In one hand I held the guiding thread. With the other, I tried to fan away the dust and smoke that almost prevented my seeing or breathing. I stretched out my hand before me, Sire, as blind men do, even when someone leads them. And my hand disappeared in that thick haze. My fingers touched other bodies, a swiftly moving line of human bodies hidden by the dust and smoke of this silent dawn at the foot of the volcano. Silence. Footsteps. I drew back a hand throbbing with fear and touched my chest, my face, my sex, for I needed to assure myself of my own existence; and when I knew it was I, that I was there, alive, only then did my sensations begin to float away from reality; and reality insinuated itself, Sire, with such cunning that I believed my sensations were reality. For while I was telling myself I had come into a world of dust, the reality was that the dust was smoke; and while I believed myself to be surrounded by silence, evil and cunning were the murmuring reality on this plain at the foot of the volcano.

Footsteps in the dust. Footsteps amid the smoke. Feet dancing in silence. Feet dancing to a beat not their own, but marked by a different rhythm, one imposed upon them. The spider guided me with its silvery thread. Clutching that thread I lost my fear of the smoke, the dust, and the silent dancing that surrounded me. And free of the fear I realized once again that distance is fear, and proximity, confidence. I began to perceive a persistent music, a monotonous, three-beat rhythm that set the cadence for the silent feet of the dancers; drum and rattle, I said to myself, only a rattle and a drum, but with a persistence and a will for festival, for celebration, for ritual, that converted their rhythm into the very incarnation of this time and this space: the time and the place in which both they, the dancers and the musicians, and I, the pilgrim in these lands, were living, here and now. Nothing beyond the silent dance to the beat of the continual drum and the continual rattle belonged to the reality of this invisible plain that took for a veil the dust and for a coif the smoke. And thus one sees, Sire, how our senses deceive us, thinking we may discover the whole through its parts, never imagining what great universes may be hidden behind the rhythm of a drum and a rattle.

I walked among the silent, hidden dancers of this my new morning in the new world, the third morning of the time that would be granted me here. I felt the nearness of bodies; at times my outstretched hands brushed shoulders and heads, at times feathers and paper streamers and rope touched my chest and legs, but as if they feared my touch, these contacts were fleeting. My bare feet knew only a vast expanse of dust, which is why the sudden contact of my feet with stone was so unexpected: a change of element, like stepping from water into fire, for the dust was liquid and the stone burning hot. And this stone, Sire, rose upward. For a moment I imagined that the spider had led me in an infinite and hidden circle and that I had returned to the rock where I had awakened early this morning. Instinctively I took a step backward to protect my feet from the rough stone and the sheer, hidden reefs of the mountain. But, instead, they found the sharp corners and smooth surface of carved stone.

I climbed. The stone was a stairway of rock. I began to count the steps as I ascended; the sounds of the dance grew fainter and the accompaniment of drum and rattle was fading and the double haze of dust and smoke was dissipating. Thirty-three steps I counted, Sire, not one more, not one less, and as I stepped upon the last, as is natural, I sought the next one, and when I did not find it, when my foot touched air, I was confused. I sought aid by looking upward, for until that moment my gaze had been the captive of the ground. As our senses diminish we depend upon our feet and the earth. As they increase we forget both feet and earth and again we stretch our hands toward heaven. Behind the heights to which I’d climbed, a great white gleaming cone reposed upon a motionless carriage of white clouds. Beneath the clouds, the skirts of the great mountain spread like a black shield of ash and rock protecting the pristine crown of ice, the refulgent field of tiny stars, and the white sea of sand frozen in the heavens.

The haze hovering over the land began to break, and fled, thinner and thinner, across the thirsty face of this desert. From the heights I watched the dissipation of the clouds of dust and I saw a multitude of men and women and children gathered there; I saw that the men were dancing in circles to the rhythm of the drum and the rattle, and that the children stood motionless, waiting, and that the women, kneeling, were variously occupied in pouring liquids and in roasting skinned hares and in patting the dough of the bread of their land and rolling that bread into cylinders that were then sprinkled with red powders and heated upon braziers and in puffing their smoking tubes like the ancient mother of the clean hut where I had taken shelter one night. And there were bundles of rushes there, and beds of hay, and stones like millstones, and piles of rope. I saw the steps, lined with smoking censers, up which I had just ascended, and men with tall crests and golden ear ornaments in the form of lizards sitting on the ledges with enormous conch shells held between their legs. I saw the steep stone stairway that had led me to this summit, the twin of the volcano’s peak, as the smoke and the dust, the phantom and I, were also reflections of each other. The insubstantial bodies formed a horizontal alliance, and the volcano rising before my eyes and the pyramid that reproduced its conical and suppliant structure formed a vertical unity. They were the horizontal plain; we, the vertical summit.

I employed the plural for myself before I knew there were others on the high platform of the temple. Alone, on the plain, I had felt I was many. Accompanied, on the pyramid, I felt alone. Again I sought the assurance of the surface where I stood. The sole of my left foot rested upon the hard stone of the temple; my right foot was planted in a white mound of flour or sand — when I saw my foot sunken in that strange matter I thought it one of the two; hastily I withdrew my foot and contemplated the track, the sign of my passage, there imprinted.

And if before I had been blinded by haze, now sound deafened me. Other drums joined the drum, other rattles the rattle, and pipes and bells and flutes similar to those I had heard at the other two temples: the one in the jungle and that at the well; and when I heard that music I resigned myself; destinies meet in these great stone theaters of the new world; here, in the open air, definitive performances were held, here near the life-giving sun; the pyramids were hands of stone raised to touch the sun, aspiring fingers, mute prayers. One sound reigned above all the others, a sound similar to the moan of the dying beast I had seen one day drifting, wounded, out to sea from the putrid river of the first beach I trod. At first I imagined that it rose from the very entrails of the volcano. Only now, when at last I stopped staring at the track of my foot in the white mound, only now did I see upon the steps those men with the lizard ear ornaments blowing into their enormous conch shells.

They extinguished the lighted braziers on all the steps and upon the apex of this temple. Whirling swiftly, I looked all around me. The platform was square, with steps descending on all four sides, and with two narrow troughs down the sides of each stairway. There was a large square block in the center of the platform, a stone three spans — or a little more — in height, and two spans in width. And behind this stone there was a great fire, its flame now extinguished, but its secret ardor of bubbles, oil, and hot ash unsatiated, its flames quick to rise at the touch of one of the many torches on the ground beside many black stone knives shaped much like an iron goad. I walked to where one of them lay amid the thinning smoke and picked it up: it seemed to be made of hardened volcanic ash. And I dropped it in fright when I looked up; several repulsive men were approaching me, their faces painted black and their lips glossy and sticky, as if smeared with honey; they were dressed in long black tunics and their long black hair stank even at that distance. They were singing quietly as they steadily advanced toward me like an unarmed phalanx, and they held the tails of their pleated tunics spread wide as if to hide something behind them; they sang and nervously pointed toward my footprint in the white mound.

“He appeared, he appeared…”

“Thus it was spoken…”

“Last night we spread the container of ground meal…”

“We waited in silence…”

“All night…”

“We danced in silence…”

“All night…”

“Thus it was spoken…”

“That he would this day return…”

“He who is invisible…”

“He of the air…”

“He of the shadows…”

“He who speaks only from the shadows…”

“Have mercy upon us and do not harm us…”

“We shall honor you upon this day…”

“We seek your favor…”

“We fear your evil…”

“It is You…”

“Night…”

“Arrived in the day…”

“Shadow…”

“Appeared with the sun…”

“It is You…”

“Smoking Mirror…”

“It is You…”

“So it was spoken…”

“The footprint in the ground meal…”

“The track of a single foot…”

“We will survive…”

“He has returned…”

“Smoking Mirror…”

“Has returned…”

“Star of the night…”

“Has returned…”

“By day…”

“Has returned…”

“Conquering his twin, the light…”

“Has returned…”

“Hero of the night, victim of the day…”

“Has returned…”

“Honor to the fearful god of the shadows…”

“Honor to the shadow that dares show himself by day…”

“Honor to the conqueror of the sun…”

“Smoking Mirror…”

Mirror and smoke, mirror of smoke, smoke of mirror: with difficulty I deciphered these words and I clung to their meaning as the voices of the men dressed and bedaubed in black converted them into a litany. And clearly, no combination of words could better describe the plain of dust, the cradle of rocks where that day I had awakened, the pyramid on whose summit I now found myself, with the magnificent whiteness of the tall volcano behind me. Mirror: the sky, the snow, and the rock. Smoke: the land, the music, and the people. That I understood, and as I understood I was consoled. The reason for my uneasiness was of a different origin: the words of the sorcerers had the ring of portent; they marveled at what had happened; my arrival, the testimony of my footprint in the ground meal they had sprinkled there the night before, were proof that I was the one they had waited for.

I was ringed by the malodorous sorcerers, who raised their arms like the wings of the crow; as they approached I could smell and see the blood daubed in their long hair, upon their faces, their clothing and hands. With fear I recalled the animal in the aged mother’s hut, pure shadow, a black silhouette inseparable from the night, the executioner of the sun, and I told myself that the spirit of the beast dwelt now in the bodies of these sorcerers. They feared what the beast had done. And so the beast might not kill the sun by night, they would kill the night beneath the sun. I saw my footprint in the ground meal: I was the night that they had waited to capture. In me they would hold the night captive. They surrounded me: they surrounded the mound of spilled meal bearing the mark of my foot, and the chant of those magi, Sire, was directed toward me, it was I they called “Smoking Mirror.”

They let their arms fall, and behind them I saw the woman of my desire, my lover, the Lady of the Butterflies. I say it thus, with serenity, to compensate for the disturbance her presence caused in me. To see her again I had confronted all dangers, rejected all temptations, overcome all obstacles. But now, as I looked at her, I was looking at a stranger. She was not looking at me.

It was she. And she was another. She was seated upon a throne of stone, on the skin of an ocelot. No butterflies fluttered about her head. Her head was bare and her long black hair, like the priests’, was smeared with blood. She wore a garment of jewels joined together by threads of gold with no cloth to dull the reflecting glitter of agate and topaz, amethyst and emerald; and beneath her sumptuous gown her woman’s flesh showed smooth and flowing and naked. At the foot of her throne lay mounds of yellow flowers and pullulating serpents and centipedes, creatures of caverns and dry darkness. At her side lay a broom and long branches of odorous herbs. And at the feet of this terrible lady rested the spider: I recognized her by the spider, and by my lover’s painted lips. And from between the opened thighs of the woman projected the head of a red serpent, as if the seed of my love-making in the jungle had gestated.

I looked at her, pleading: “My Lady, do you not know me?”

The woman’s cruel eyes did not return my gaze. Two of the sorcerers seized my arms and the others raised high their daggers as they walked to the steps on which were ascending, singing and softly weeping, six women led by young warriors. Sire: you can never have imagined warriors of such elegance and luxury; in all their movements, and in the opulence of their attire, they revealed a care of breeding and of destiny similar to that of the finest charger or the fiercest mastiff. Tall feather crests, copper ear ornaments worked to resemble little dogs; lip rings made from oyster shells; leather necklaces, feathers tied about their shoulders, and, to their feet, the cloven hoofs of the stag. Their faces were covered by ocelot and eagle and alligator masks; the mouths of the women were painted black and they exuded a heavy perfume, they wore no clothing but hummingbird feathers stuck to their flesh, leaving bare their shame, and they wore many bracelets and necklaces on their wrists and neck and ankles. Wailing, they were half carried by the warriors, and some stroked the men’s chests and others stared at them with a melancholy gaze and a resigned smile and sad recollection, and all of them were weeping, saddened by their abandonment. Then one of the warriors approached the stone seat where sat the Lady of the tattooed lips. And he said:

“You who cleanse our sins and devour our filth, soiling yourself so that the world may be purified, cleanse our sins; here are the whores who were chosen from among humble families of conquered peoples to satisfy our impure desire; tear that desire from our breasts and allow us to do battle without anxiety, our only desire that of serving the gods and their incarnation upon earth, our Lord of the Great Voice. Into the indecent bodies of these women we have emptied our man’s weakness and impurity so we may be strong and pure upon the field of battle. Take them. They have fulfilled their time on earth. They have served. But now they serve no purpose. We renounce the flesh to dedicate ourselves to war. Take them. We offer them to you, you who devour filth, on this day of the Smoking Mirror.”

The moment the warrior ceased speaking, the music again sifted across the plain as the dust had in the past, and with joy and great pleasure the musicians began to thump the hollow gourd rattles with their hands and to strike their sticks upon the skin of their drums, and when the sound of the drum was low in tone they whistled loudly, and dancers in richly colored green and yellow mantles holding clusters of roses and feathered fans trimmed in gold, their faces covered by feather head-coverings shaped like the heads of fierce animals, clasped hands and formed large circles, and upon the summit of the pyramid the sorcerers, at a sign from the black-nailed hand of my lover, struck their flint daggers deep into the breasts of the prostitutes, splitting them from nipple to nipple, and then upward through the breastbone, and with blood-caked hands they tore out their hearts, and finally cut off their heads and piled the mutilated bodies by the troughs beside the pyramid steps, where the women’s blood flowed to sprinkle the plain of now quiet dust where the tempo of the dance was rising and buffoons ran out feigning drunkenness or madness or pretending to be old women, evoking laughter from the watching women and children. The sorcerers tossed the heads of the warriors’ six whores down the temple steps, where they were quickly picked up by old men, who skewered them through the brains and impaled them on lances standing in a row as if in a lance rack.

The black sorcerers placed the smoking hearts of the women in a wooden dish at the feet of the lady who had been my lover. I fell to my knees, Sire, with my arms still held by two of the sorcerers of that group of murderers who were anointing their clothing and faces and hair with the blood of the whores, and I thought of my lost river people, of their simplicity and their lack of greed, of their ordinary life and their extraordinary fate: a people sacrificed by their own hands, and in my name; a people gathered beside the jungle temple to be brought to this high valley of dust and blood, their women given as whores to the warriors of the so-called Lord of the Great Voice, and then offered in sacrifice on the day of the mirror and the smoke. What kind of world was this where beauty and communal ownership of property and love of life coexisted with these ceremonies of crime? In that instant I recalled the frightful apparition in the forest: my double. As he coexisted with me, so the cult of life and the cult of death existed side by side in the new world, for reasons I had still not succeeded in understanding. I was the white god, so the ancient of the memories and the princess of the butterflies had told me: the principle of life, the teacher, the premonitory voice of love, of good and peace. The black god, the enemy, was my brother, the principle of death, of shadow and sacrifice. I thought I had vanquished my phantom twin by refusing him, because of my desire. But my desire was a woman, the woman I saw here now presiding over the pageantry of death.

The warriors knelt before the woman and removed their animal masks: their hair was cut short at the temples, shaved across their foreheads, and their temples painted yellow. They stuck thick thorns through their earlobes and then, one after another, they spoke into the ear of the devouring princess, as penitents speak, Sire, kneeling, and in a low voice. And only after each confession had ended did the woman and the warriors raise their voices, and she asked: “Who inspired your evil?”

And he replied, “You…”

“Of whom were you thinking when you gave yourself to lust?”

“You…”

“Where are lust and evil to be found?”

“In the serpent that peers from between your parted thighs.”

“Who will cleanse you of your sins?”

“You, you who devour filth, soiling yourself to purify us.”

“Who grants me these powers?”

“The smoking mirror.”

“How many times may you confess before me?”

“Once in my lifetime.”

“When?”

“When I am preparing to die.”

“Are you old?”

“I am young.”

“Why are you going to die?”

“Because I am going to war.”

“Against whom will you do battle?”

“Against the people who still refuse to submit to us.”

“Do you prefer death in war to death in old age and infirmity?”

“I prefer it. The aged and the ill die as slaves. I shall go directly to the paradise of soft mists without passing through the icy hell beneath the earth.”

“If you survive, do you know that you will never be able to confess or to cleanse yourself again?”

“I know. You hear each man only once. That is why I prefer to die in combat. I shall not survive.”

The Lady took sweet-smelling herbs and cleansed the bodies of the warriors, brushing them softly over their backs and chests and legs while the sorcerers opened baskets and cages and removed little colored birds from them, wrung their necks, and placed the small feathered bodies at the woman’s feet, and the warriors again put on their animal casques and descended the steps to the plain, where the dancers, the women, and the children had moved aside to make way for a procession led by two dancing satraps with large paper disks bound to their foreheads. Their honey-smeared, black-painted faces glistened in the sun, and they led a group of men whose bodies were stained white. The warriors who had just made their confessions to my lover advanced to meet this procession while the satraps forced the captives — only at that instant did I realize that they were captives — to climb upon some round stones resembling millstones, and they offered them clay pots from which to drink, and each captive raised his pot to the east and to the north, then to the west and to the south, as if offering it to the four corners of the earth, and each, in a plaintive voice, sang the same song:

In vain was I born,

In vain I came to this world.

I suffer, but at least I am here,

I have been born upon earth.

And once the captives were standing upon the stones, the satraps took rope that came from the center of the millstones and tied the rope to the waists of the captives, thus tying them to the stones. Then they gave each captive a lance with feathers stuck to the cutting edge, and a pine war club, and then four warriors walked forward, and they too carried lances, except that their lances had knives on the cutting edge, and two were dressed as ocelots and the other two as eagles, and they raised their round shields and their swords to the sun, and then each warrior began to battle against one captive. But there were captives who swooned and fell to the ground without taking up any weapon, as if they wanted to be killed; and these were scorned by the warriors. And others, seeing themselves tied to the stone, were dispirited, and took up their weapons as if in a trance, and then were vanquished. But others were valiant and the warriors could not subdue them and they sought aid from their companions until among the four they overcame the captive, took away his weapons, and thrusting at him with their knives, bore him to the ground.

The music and dancing burst forth anew; the bleeding captives were freed from the rope and millstone to be dragged by the warriors toward the summit while the plain below was the scene of a colorful dance danced by men wearing sumptuous miter-shaped headdresses from which issued many green feathers, like tall crests, so numerous that the air was green with them.

The warriors, dragging their captives, reached the summit, where the prisoners were taken by the high priests, who tied the prisoners’ hands behind them, and also their feet, and many had fainted and thus they were thrown into the great fire onto the heaped coals burning on the high platform; and where each fell he sank into the bed of coals and hot ash, and there in the fire the captive began to writhe and twist; and his body began to crackle like the body of some roasted animal, and great blisters rose over all his body. And at the height of this agony the sorcerers drew him from the fire with a pothook, dragged him to the stone block, and they split open his chest from nipple to nipple, threw the heart at the feet of the Lady, cut off the captive’s head and threw both head and body, thus separated, down the steps, where aged men received and quickly dragged away the bodies and pierced the heads through the brain, impaling them upon the lances.

One of the warriors walked to the edge of the platform and the voices and music and dancing ceased so that he might be heard.

“Hidden among the women and children and dancers there are many lords and spies of the peoples with whom we are waging war, who want secretly to observe our ceremonies this day. Return to your lands and let it be known what happens to our captives. Fear the power of Mexico!”

For the first time, Sire, I heard a man of this high arid plain speak the name of his nation, for as such I took it, allied as it was with the assertion of power, although it could have been the name of their greatest Lord, he of the Great Voice, or of the supreme god to whom all others owed honor. My limited knowledge of this soft tongue forced me to reduce every word to the roots I had so tortuously learned, and whether this was the name of the land, of the lord, or of the god, that name signified several things at one time: umbilicus, death, and moon; umbilicus, I said to myself, is life; and death, death; and moon, the two faces, waning and waxing, of life and death. I had no time to ponder this: in the midst of the silence the warrior who was speaking walked to the filthy high priests who had officiated here, knelt before them, and his companions imitated him and among them they washed their priests’ feet, stained with blood and melted pitch and cold ash.

The ritual of the foot washing was slow and elaborate, and in the humility of the warriors before the high priests I read another sign of the structure of this land of the navel of the moon: the fearsome warriors with eagle and ocelot headdresses owed obeisance to the celebrants of death and thus were subjected to a power higher than that of arms. Whom, in turn, must these black priests obey? What power was greater than that of this truncated pyramid of death? Numbed, I looked toward the volcano whose form the temple reproduced, and their summits were identical, ice and fire, snow and stone, ash and fire, blood and smoke; and remembering my ascent from the coast to the volcano, I told myself that this entire land lay in the form of a temple, putrid and vegetal at its base, smoking and petrous on its summit, and that I had climbed the steps of that gigantic pyramid, and that the nation that worshipped the sun and called itself moon was like a series of pyramids, one included within the other, the lesser enclosed by the greater, a pyramid within a pyramid, until the entire land was a temple dedicated to the fragile maintenance of life nourished by the arts of death.

Oh, Sire, you who hear me, the bloody rites I have related must evoke in you a horror as great as mine as I witnessed them, but I wish that you might put yourself in my place on that distant day of the Smoking Mirror, and that in spite of the horror you might share my deep desire to understand what I was seeing, and to grant to the desire for comprehension powers greater than the instinct for condemnation. Unarmed, I myself captive and witness to the fate of other captives, I rejected the temptation to condemn what I did not understand. Very limited was my intelligence of what was happening. And perhaps, I told myself, I must await the end of my pilgrimage, the fifth day of my memory and my questions and their promised answers before I could understand this land. The ceremony of the long day’s ritual had not ended, and I still had no understanding of my place in it.

The two priests who held my arms had released me in order to participate in the long and difficult ceremony of the foot washing, for the warriors in their humble task could not clean the melted pitch from the feet of the sorcerers. I decided to test my fortune. I arose, and walked toward the Lady who presided over this festival. The sorcerers looked up at me and intoned hoarse prayers; the kneeling warriors kept their heads bowed. Cautiously, I approached the woman. She, finally, looked at me. She summoned me with her gaze. Everything about her that once had been delight now was terror. There was something in her new presence that prevented me not only from touching her but from even remaining standing before her. Like the warriors before the sorcerers, I fell to my knees, my head bowed, not daring to touch the body that with such pleasure I had made mine in the jungle. I could not, however, resist the urge to question her with my eyes: for the first time that day, I scrutinized the face of my lover. From a distance, and at first glance, it was her face, the face I had known. But closer, Sire, I could note the minute changes on that unforgettable face, the imperceptible traces left on that skin by the passage of time: the faint wrinkles around the eyes, the sudden heaviness of the eyelids, the visible hardness of the lips, the slightest loosening of the flesh on her neck and beneath the still high, firm cheekbones. The passage of time: of what time, Sire? Only three nights earlier I had made love to a girl younger than I; now I was looking at a woman a little older than I, a mature woman, still beautiful, still desirable, but whose features had passed the flush of spring and suggested autumn instead. I thought: it isn’t she. The only way to prove whether or not it was she was to resort to my only legitimate weapon: my question for that day.

Impelled by the anxiety of the discovery and my doubt, and without pausing to think, I said: “My Lady, do you not know me?”

She looked at me from an icy distance. “That is the question you ask me today?”

Realizing my error, I shook my head, not daring to touch her hands, which was my desire: the question with which she answered mine was proof that this woman was my lover, the princess of the butterflies, privy to our pact. “No, my Lady, it is not…”

“You have the right to ask one question…”

“I am surrounded by so many mysteries…”

“You may ask only one question each day…”

“I know; I have fulfilled our pact during the time I have been apart from you…”

Sadly, she looked toward the plain, where activity was renewing: people were eating, women were pouring the liquors of the land into clay pots and preparing the native bread on the stone mortars, and the elders were directing the dances, holding heavy canes adorned with paper flowers soaked with incense. Smoke of the flowers, smoke of the braziers: from afar, beside my Lady, I observed them, and I rejected all temptation to comprehend the present mystery; I must respect the logical order of my questions, climb them like the steps of the pyramid and the land itself; my most profound reason told me I must not skip a single bead in the rosary of cause and effect, or the string of beads would break and scatter, would roll down the steps like the heads of the whores and captives, and I myself would be the prisoner of the day’s enigmas without having resolved those of yesterday, and I would understand nothing of what was still to come.

“My Lady,” I said finally, “why did the inhabitants of the town in the jungle sacrifice themselves for me?”

She looked at me with a touch of disdain, and strong compassion. “That is what you want to know today?”

“Yes.”

Distantly, she gazed at the mixed smokes of the plain, the braziers and the incense, the smokes of human hunger and of the divine hunger of this land. “Because you are the reason for life and we are the reason for death. Because they believed that by sacrificing themselves to you they would not be sacrificed by us. They preferred to die for you rather than be killed by us.”

I was deeply disturbed by these words, and my eyes clouded with blood, anger, and sadness; I recalled once again the quiet people of the jungle and I cursed for an instant the order of this new world that made me the cause for the death of innocents. But fear immediately overcame my sad and impotent rage. Sire: I feared that now those declarations spoken by the painted lips of my elusive lover would be inverted, and that in this day’s ceremony I would die, sacrificed. This was demanded for the equilibrium of the things of the land of the dead moon.

The ceremony of the foot washing ended and all of them, priests and warriors, saw me kneeling at the feet of the Lady. A new sound rose from the steps, accompanied by an intense aroma, and soon there appeared on the summit richly adorned dancers with long hair and with plumage of rich feathers upon their brows, and they were led by another dancer dressed like a bat, with wings and all else necessary to assure that resemblance; and these dancers whistled by placing a finger in their mouths, and each carried two sacks upon his back; and one of these sacks was filled with incense that they began to sprinkle upon the braziers on the four sides of the platform, as if on the four corners of the world, and they offered the other sacks to the priests, who took them and then approached me: they ordered me to stand.

I looked with terror at the block and the knives and I divined my fate to be that of a whore sacrificed after draining a warrior’s pleasure, or that of a captive killed to serve as an example to insubmissive peoples.

There was no time. From their sacks the high priests withdrew objects and clothing and paints, and began to stain my body and face, and to cover my head with white feathers, and to place garlands of flowers about my neck, and long streamers of flowers down my back, and hoops of gold in my ears, and strings of precious stones upon my chest. And they covered me with a rich mantle woven like a net, and covered my lower parts with a piece of richly embroidered linen, and they shod me with brightly painted ankle-high boots of soft deerskin and tied golden bells about my ankles and placed strings of precious stones upon my wrist, up to the elbow, and above the elbow golden arm bands, and again upon my chest the white ornament they call the wind jewel, and upon my shoulders a fringed and tasseled pouch-like ornament of white linen.

Thus transformed, and drenched in an icy sweat, I asked myself whether in this manner they were not preparing me for the maximum sacrifice of the day, but the high priests stood back from me, as if awed, and one of them exclaimed:

“This is, in truth, the Lord of the Night, the capricious and cruel Smoking Mirror, who lost one foot on the day of creation when he dragged our mother, the earth, from the waters, and the earth, our lady and mother, tore off his foot at the joint; this is the other, the shadow, he who always watches over our shoulders and accompanies us everywhere, he who tore the earth from the waters of creation and, exhausted and mutilated, had no time to give light to the earth, and who sees in the light an enemy who mocks his efforts and his sacrifice: the earth was born from the waters and from the shadows, and only because first there was land and then shadow could light exist, and men, and so the Smoking Mirror demands men’s deaths to remind them that they emerged from the earth and the shadow, and so castigate their pride. This is, in truth, the Lord of the Night who left one single footprint in the ground meal of the temple on this his day.”

As I heard this reasoning, I sought with feverish eyes the hard, cold gaze of my Lady, for through her I knew I possessed a different identity, one I believe destined to labor and peace and life; but as this priest’s words accorded me the opposite identity, condemned me, I suddenly realized that the horrible deaths I had witnessed here were in my honor, as the sacrifice of the inhabitants of the jungle had been, and that I would not die now since others would die for me and in my name: the Smoking Mirror. Here my name meant shadow and crime, and in the jungle, light and peace.

How ignorant, Sire, I was and I am of the keys that open the doors of understanding to that world so foreign to our own, for if among us the code of unity prevails and all things aspire to oneness, there what seemed to be one soon demonstrated the duplicity of its nature: everything there was two, two the people of the jungle, who first killed Pedro and then killed themselves for me; two the ancient of memories: ancient in my mirror and young in his recollection; two the Lady of the Butterflies, lover in the jungle and tyrant on the pyramid, devourer of filth and purifier of the world; two was the sun: beneficence and terror; two was the darkness: the executioner of the sun, the promise of the dawn; two was life: life and its death; and two death: death and its life.

As I was two: I, this person who is speaking to you, and a dark double encountered one night in the forest. I was my shadow. My shadow was my enemy. I must fulfill my own destiny as well as that of my dark double. Little I imagined, even then, of the fearful burden that this my double destiny would cast upon my weak shoulders. I barely glimpsed its horror in the words of my lover, the cruel Lady of this day, when the sorcerer ceased to speak. And this is what she spoke:

“Every year, on this day, we select one youth. For one year, we nurture and care for him, and all who look upon him have great reverence for him and pay him great obeisance. For an entire year he wanders through the land playing his flute, with his flowers and his smoking reed, free by night and day to wander throughout the land, accompanied always by eight servants who assuage his thirst and hunger. This youth will be married to a maiden who will surfeit him with pleasure through the year, for she will be the youngest and most beautiful and most wellborn in this land. And at the end of the year, having lived like a prince in the land, the young man will return on this day to this very temple, and as he lies upon the stone, bound hand and foot, the stone knife will pierce his breast, and from the open wound we will tear out his heart and offer it to the sun. This is, among us, the most honorable, the most desirable destiny our land may offer, for the chosen youth will have greater pleasure than any man, first in life and then in death. And the people will learn that those who have riches and pleasure in life must come to the end of their lives in poverty and in pain.”

The Lady was silent for a moment, staring at me, her eyes brilliant, her tattooed lips forming a smiling grimace. Finally she said: “We have chosen you, stranger, as the image of the Smoking Mirror. Yours will be the destiny I have just related.”

I closed my eyes, Sire, in a vain attempt to exorcise these words, and in the green star of my mind gratitude for the postponement shone more strongly than the certainty of my announced death. I would not die today. But within a year I would return, to die in this very place. Between the fact of my survival and the fact of my coming death, which between them were the total destiny the cruel Lady my lover had proclaimed, was insinuated the unique fact of my other destiny the same Lady had told me one night in the jungle.

“My Lady,” I replied, “I remind you that one night you promised me a different destiny: that I might have five days rescued from death.”

“You have saved them.”

“You promised that we would meet again at the foot of the volcano.”

“We have met.”

“You promised that when I found you again, you would multiply my pleasure of that night.”

“I have fulfilled my promise. I offer you a pleasure greater than any other: the certainty of one happy year and a precise death. For unhappy are the lives of men who among so many years of misfortune manage to salvage, here and there, only brief hours of happiness; and it is fearful to live without knowing either when or how death will come, for although death is certain, it does not announce its arrival, and thus plunges man into anguish and fear.”

“You promised me that on the last day saved from my destiny, I would not have to ask because I would know.”

“This is the last day, and now you know: a year of happiness and death at an appointed time await you.”

“But, my Lady, since last I saw you I have lived only two of those days…”

The woman, Sire, gazed at me with frightening intensity, and for the first time on that day she arose, trembling, burying her long fingernails in the ocelot skin covering her throne, for the first time incredulous, for the first time conquered, Sire, impotent, for the first time doubting herself and her powers. And in that instant the marks of time became more prominent upon her face, as if the years had fallen upon her from above like the pestilent vultures of this land that like my Lady fed upon the world’s offal.

I feared she would fall, so unsure was her posture and so violent the trembling of her body. Half risen, clutching the chair of stone, her voice weak and faded, at last she was able to say, the words foaming from her mouth: “Only two days…?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I have lived two days and two nights apart from you…”

“Two days and two nights…”

“Yes…”

“That is all you remember?”

“Yes…”

With fire in her throat she howled, “That is all you remember, poor miserable fool, nothing more?”

“Nothing, my Lady, nothing…”

“Of all the obstacles I placed in your path, of all the tests to which I subjected you, only four times, twice at night and twice by day, they forced you to ask your question and save your day: your life was worth only two complete days?”

“Yes, yes, yes…”

If earlier she had looked at me with disdain and compassion, now only pity illuminated her maddened eyes. “Poor fool, poor fool … It would have been better had you spent your five days and come here, today, to me, and here with me fulfilled your destiny in our land…”

“The destiny you have offered me is death.”

“Yes, following a year of happiness. Do you prefer death within two days, with no happiness at all?”

As my only answer, I said: “Yes. I still have this night and two more complete days.”

“What will you do with them, poor wretch?”

“I choose to end this day, and tonight to receive the answer to my next question.”

“Where will you go?” asked the Lady, newly impassive.

I looked about me. If I descended the steps of the temple toward the great esplanade of the valley, I would meet only the destiny she had promised; I would immediately be amid the people of this high plain who would worship me and honor me, who would give me food and drink, and who would deliver unto me their most beautiful maiden, exactly as the Lady had proclaimed, and after one year I would die on the pyramid. If I took that route, therefore, I would lose the challenges and the answers of my other destiny. If, on the other hand, I descended the steps on the side facing the volcano, if I climbed the volcano itself, if I descended into its ashy crater, the dangers that awaited me there would offer me the security of chance, and in that instant, Sire, for me chance meant liberty and well-being and life, for I already knew that the other road was fatal, I knew its outcome, and knowing the exact date of my death was not, as the Lady had said, a relief, but an unbearable burden that enslaved my soul. If, in spite of everything, I returned to this temple at the end of a year, it would not be, I told myself, without having first exposed myself to all the risks of the two remaining days of my destiny.

“To the volcano, my Lady…”

First the high priests chirped with fear, and the warriors brandished their shields, shouting hoarsely, the bat fluttered its wings, the dancers scattered their incense, and with a gaze as icy as the volcano, the Lady answered: “Fool. That is the road to hell. In one day there you may lose what I have assured you for an entire year: your life. If you go to the volcano, you will only hasten your destiny: your death.”

“I shall find my own death, my Lady.”

“Fool. There is no solitary destiny. Your death will be a common destiny, and you will return to us by way of death.”

I looked at her sadly, knowing that I would never see her again, that this time the spider’s thread would not lead me to her; now I would travel alone in search of my well-being, not, as before, in search of the redoubled pleasures this woman had promised me one night. How was I to know then that the promised pleasure would be to live one year as a prince in order to die as a slave and thus honor the god of the shadow. I looked sadly at the woman who in offering me this fate believed she offered a reward greater than a new coming together of our bodies.

“Farewell, my Lady.”

Wearing the splendid clothing in which they had dressed me here, but with my torn sailor’s clothes clinging to my shivering skin, I turned my back upon this company. I descended the steps slowly, looking toward my new goal, the volcano that in the late afternoon light seemed more distant, and as the light diminished, it turned the color of the air, as if it already rejected me, as if it were warning me: “You see, I am moving away from you, cloaked in the transparent air of dusk. You must do the same. Choose another route. Turn yourself into air, so that I not turn you into ice.”

Halfway along the road, and before the fire of sunset hid it from my sight, I stopped and turned to look for the last time toward the pyramid. A crown of red sunlight was settling upon the bloody, smoking summit. The temple was a dark beast crouching under the setting sun. Its jaws of carved stone were devouring the blood and dust of the plain.

I turned my back upon the pyramid and walked toward the volcano.

NIGHT OF THE VOLCANO

Long was my road through the plain covered with huge thorny plants, and I gave thanks for the soft boots that protected my feet from constant contact with these needles of the desert. I asked myself, looking at the desolation about me on the route toward the volcano, whether the only nourishment of the people of the arid high plain was the fruit from the jungle and the coast, and whether the reason why the inhabitants of the low areas were subjected and sacrificed was simply the hungers and needs of the inhabitants of the high plains. Something I could not precisely identify told me this was not the case, that there was something more, and that I must reach the site where the Great Lord of this world lived, he who was repeatedly called the Lord of the Great Voice, in order to know the truth about the order my strange presence violated at every step, the order confounded by the novelty of my presence.

As I walked toward the volcano and as night was rapidly descending upon me and the world about me, I kept repeating one certainty, one of the few that consoled me in the midst of so many questions:

“I am an intruder here. I am an intruder in a world unaccustomed to intrusion. A world separate from the world: how long have these people I have known on the coast and high plain lived in solitude, without contact with other peoples? Why not since the beginning of time? A world kept separate by fear; but secure in its reason for being to be able to survive surrounded as it is by portents of disaster. What a fragile balance: death in exchange for possessions, life in exchange for a pair of scissors, the scissors in exchange for gold, gold in exchange for bread, bread in exchange for life, life in exchange for the disappearance of the sun … Truly precarious, for all it takes to upset that balance is the intrusion of an unexpected being, an individual as unimportant as I.”

For now I tell you, Sire, that the men of the new world only foresee and accept catastrophic change, which in truth is not change but an end to what presently exists, and the catastrophe can be only the work of gods or of nature, but never that of a simple man. That is why, I told myself that night, in order to understand me they must see me as a god or as an element of nature.

I sought, in that dusk, my guide: Venus, the light twin to shadow and the shadow twin to light. Venus, its own twin. I had sailed for the new world, on old Pedro’s ship, guided by the morning star. I feared, Sire, that having embarked at the dawn, I would find in the dawn the final port of my destiny in these lands, thus closing a perfect, implacable circle: son of light, having arrived at the hour of light, condemned to light. But I had already seen that my other destiny, my other possibility, was no less fatal: having arrived by night, I was identified with shadow. If I had learned anything in this land, it was that nothing was more feared than the death of the sun. Nothing more feared, then, than the executioner of the sun: son of shadow, having arrived at the hour of shadow, condemned to shadow. I felt myself a prisoner of the perfect circles of a double destiny: day and night, light and shadow. But my soul sought indecision, chance, an opening toward the continuity of life that for me is linear. And who in this world, having achieved the final perfection of closing a circle, would grant me the grace of one night more of life? Having set sail at dawn, having arrived by day, and thus having appeared as the creator of the sun; or having left at dusk, having arrived by night, and so appearing to be the executioner of the sun? Fatal world, new world, where my incomprehensible man-presence was understood only in the light of superhuman forces: the terror of the night would be crushed forever between the two perfect halves of the light; the blessing of the day would be crushed forever between the two perfect halves of the shadow. There was no other final escape for this new world, Sire, and its inhabitants were prepared to honor equally light, if it triumphed, or the shadows, if they conquered. Who would grant me the grace of one hour more of life, the rupture of the miracle, the repetition of uncertainty? Thus I was prisoner of an anguishing contradiction, the most terrible of all: I owed my life to death; I would owe my death to life. The miraculous is exceptional. It must be preserved. Only the perfection of a unique instant may preserve it. That perfection is death.

Pondering these mysteries, I reached the foot of the volcano with the first shadows, and my feet touched cold rock and icy ashes, and in the distance I could see lighted fires on the mountainsides, as if compensating for the coldness of what once had been a boiling basin.

Here and there, I could see where small bonfires were being lighted, and beside them, here and there, a few old men whose fox-like profiles could be distinguished in the dim glow; they were cutting pieces of paper, trimming them and binding them together, and one ancient would take a motionless body, bind its legs, and dress and bind it with the paper, and further along, another old man would pour water over the head of another motionless body, and all about me I could see this ceremony being repeated, those lifeless bodies being shrouded in cloth and paper, and tightly bound, and I noted that around each bonfire were scattered yellow flowers with long green stalks, and youths carrying doors on their backs were approaching some deep holes dug in the ashes; they placed the doors over the holes, and then groups of women wept and strewed dried yellow flowers over those doors, and amid the women’s weeping could be heard plaintive voices saying: “Know the door of your house, and use that door to come out and visit us, for we have wept long for you. Come out a little while, come out a little while.”

And as I climbed the mountainside, more fires were lighted, and I was aware of moaning voices and increased activity. I accepted what my eyes told me; every bonfire marked the site of a dead person, an ancient tomb revisited or a recently dug sepulcher, and the groups gathered about each body, buried or still unburied, were engaged in various scrupulously observed rites: for one they placed in the winding sheets a little jug filled with water; between the waxen hands of another they secured a strand of limp cotton thread tied to the neck of a small, nervous, reddish-colored dog with bright eyes and a sharp snout; further along, they were burning piles of clothing; beyond that, jewels were being thrown into a fire, and old men were singing softly, sadly: Oh, son, you have known and suffered the travail of this life; and in taking you away our lord has been served, for life in this world knows no permanence and our life is brief, like a man who warms himself in the sun; and the women echoed in chorus, moaning: you went to that darkest of all places where there is neither light nor windows, and you will never again have to return here or leave there; do not be troubled by the childlessness and poverty in which you leave us; be strong, son, do not be bowed down by sadness; we have come here to visit you and to console you with these few words; and the ancients again began to sing, we are now the fathers, the ancients, for our lord has taken away those who were older and more ancient, those who knew better how to speak consoling words for those who mourn …

And above these words spoken all about me as I climbed towards the white cone of the volcano, among the mourners indifferent to my task, ululated one high, shrill lament, a flame of words that lay like a protective mantle over the funereal ceremony of that night: “It is not true that we lived, it is not true that we came to endure upon this earth.”

I was thankful, Sire, for the darkness, and for their indifference: here the living had voice and eyes only for death, and my painful journey toward the peak in no way disturbed their suffering; they gave no thought to the passing of my shadow amid their sorrow.

I left lamentation and fires behind me; one by one the fires were dying out, abandoning me to a night of mysterious shadow, for although the eternal snows of the volcano must be nearby, a warm lethargy was nevertheless rising from the depths of the ash in whose sandy blackness I was struggling, laboriously lifting one foot after the other, sinking up to my ankles in the extinct fire. How distant, Sire, seemed then the wild volcanos of the islands and bays of Mare Nostrum that in its waters find a mirror to their tremors and a solace for their ruins, while here, in the land of the navel of the moon, the volcanos were extinct, and their mirror was a desolation reflecting that of the moon itself: black desert on land, white dust in the heavens.

I looked up, seeking the moon, desiring its company as I penetrated into the darkness of this night; but there was nothing shining in the sky; a tapestry of black clouds obscured my guide, the evening star; I feared to lose my way, although I was guided by the rising ground. And then, Sire, as if my thoughts possessed powers of convocation, before me, from behind a rock, appeared a man with a great light upon his back.

I stopped, doubting my senses, for that luminous man appeared and disappeared among the volcanic rocks, sowing light and shadow in his passing; and when finally he came toward me, I saw that he was an old man with a great conch shell upon his back, and the light was coming from the shell, illuminating his old man’s face, lean and white, so old he seemed to be a skull shining in the night; and behind him I heard shouting and running, and young warriors darted by, hunting an invisible animal in the night, and shooting lighted arrows; and these arrows found their mark in the darkness, and the darkness wounded by the arrows had a form and was bleeding, although its form was but that of the shadows. Sire: I recognized the terrible animal I had seen in the ancient mother’s hut, the same shadowy shape, wounded, howling, digging with its back-turned paws in the volcanic ash; the animal would dig, and the old man with the conch shell on his back would laugh, and as the animal tried to bury the light cast by the old man’s shell, the old man would run and hide himself again among the rocks, and the animal would howl, enraged, searching for the rays of elusive light, wounded by the fiery arrows of the nocturnal hunters, and then the air was filled with invisible darts descending from the sky, wailing sadly and cursing, and as I looked toward that hail of darts I saw they possessed faces like skulls, not that they were truly skulls, but the mark of sadness and malediction upon their features gave them the appearance of death’s-heads, and I knew that these were the skulls of women; damned, sad voices; and the fearsome aggregate of the old man with the shell on his back, and the warriors hunting by night the animal of the shadows, and the skull of the weeping, cursing women was the proclamation of all the actions that seemed to happen simultaneously on this black side of the volcano.

The earth trembled and opened its yawning jaws, and my only sensation was one of falling through a cave of ashes. Perhaps, unaware, I had reached the highest ledge of the volcano, the mouth of the crater, and through it was slipping down into its extinguished entrails; in the distance I heard sounds, the old man’s laughter, the barking of the hunted animal, the wailing of those flying women; my mouth was filled with ashes, I tried to stop my fall but my hands grasped ashes, and as upon a different night I had been a prisoner of the ocean whirlpool, now I felt myself a captive of this black-earth vortex; and captured, I was not alone, for in my vertiginous descent into the center of the volcano there passed before my eyes dark forms that seemed to beckon me and lead me toward the most unknown of all lands: I saw a man robed in, and toying with, jewels, a man whose shouts and roars filled me with terror, for that noise was like a howl issuing from the very heart of the mountain; he beckoned to me and still falling I reached out toward him in the blackness, but at the moment I almost touched him he disappeared, and behind him, farther in the distance, appeared a different man holding a banner in one hand and upon his shoulder he carried a staff on which were impaled two hearts, and upon this man’s head was a darkness so black it was as if for one precise instant everything else — I, he himself, the sea of ash in which we were drowning — was bathed in light, and all the darkness of the world was gathered in that crown he wore; he, too, beckoned to me, but he immediately faded from view and in his stead I saw a fierce spotted ocelot in the distance devouring the stars born of this deep fertile sky: an upside-down sky, I told myself, the fearful twin, in the entrails of the earth, of the sky we know and worship in the heavens; and through this standing-on-its-head sky, choked in the deepest ashes of the world, again flew those moaning, saddened, cursing skulls, now carrying in their mouths arms and legs torn from the dead; they dropped them, and cried out:

“Where are the doors? I wave these bones before a door, and with their magic, all in the house lie sleeping so the profaner may enter. Is there a door in hell? Only an entrance. Never an exit. Once I was human. I died in childbirth. Where is the door? The profaner stole my hands and my legs. I weep, seated upon rocks by the side of the road. Do not fear me, voyager. The profaner stole my limbs. With them he harmed my children, all children, and he spread plague and pestilence. Do not believe them if they tell you that those are my arms and legs.”

And the legs and hands struck me in the face and then plummeted into the great empty space surrounding me, and the invisible women fled through the air, moaning sadly. My head struck against rock, and I lost consciousness.

A damp tongue licking my face awakened me. I was staring into the bright black eyes of a small red dog, like those I had seen on the slopes of the volcano, and by my side flowed a river of icy waters with great pieces of ice piled along its shores, and the dome above my head was of pure ice, with cold tears hanging from it, and beyond the river only white, empty space.

The dog led me to the shore and entered the waters, and as I clung to his back he swam across the icy torrent, leading me as the spider’s thread had led me before. But to whom did I owe the animal’s assistance? The Lady of the Butterflies had abandoned me, and all that remained of her was the recollection of one night, the sadness of an unfulfilled promise, the warning of the number and order of my days in this unknown land, and an endless mystery: How much time had passed between each of the days I had recalled? How many days had I lived in forgetfulness? What had happened during the time I could not remember? And why, between the memory of the temple of the jungle and the encounter upon the pyramid on the high plain, had time left the traces not of days but of years upon my lover’s face? From among these questions, I said, I must choose the one I will ask this night. Ask whom? A voiceless dog, perhaps, or women dead in childbirth, flying like arrows, nothing but face and tears, along the road to the underworld.

And thus, clinging to the swimming dog, I reached the other shore. There the whiteness was accentuated as if formerly white had not been white but simply ice and frozen caverns and the gelid river of this world beneath the volcano; this was whiteness itself: the pure color of the dawn, foreign to anything ever called white; the white of whiteness, a stranger to any other quality. And in this total whiteness, Sire, I could distinguish nothing, so that the pure brilliance was like impenetrable darkness, I felt I was drowning in milk, in snow, in gypsum.

An unbearable wind blew toward me, whipped my soaked clothes, doubling the tall plumes of my crest, lacerating my painted skin like knives, forcing me to creep forward, blinded by pure, unrelieved light. A wind like daggers. Finally its rending force revealed before my eyes two motionless figures hand in hand, pure form, erect, pure whiteness, but still the form of a man and a woman, one figure shorter than the other, one standing with icy legs planted arrogantly apart, the other with its limbs hidden beneath a skirt of snow: a shimmering white pair so identical to the white spaces surrounding them it was impossible to know whether the air, the space, the colorless color of this land were born from the double silhouette, battered by the wind and solidified by the ice, or whether they were the result of the land surrounding them. At the feet of the motionless pair I could discern the whiteness of a heap of bones.

The dog barked, his hackles rising, and turning, he raced back to the river and plunged into its white waters, swimming until he gained the other shore. I stood defenseless before the white pair, and I heard the cavernous laughter of the man as motionless as an ice statue, as resonating as the harsh wind of these deep caverns, and he said: “You have returned.”

I bit my tongue, Sire, to keep from asking a fruitless question and receiving a fruitless reply; I did not ask, Why have you awaited me? I did not ask anything, and there was no calculation in my silence, rather a sudden exhaustion, as if my soul could accommodate no further astonishment, terror, or doubt before the successive marvels of the new world, but only a passive, warm resignation, like sleep at the end of a fatiguing day. The wind had died down around the icy figure of the man speaking to me. But instead, it whirled violently, to the point of making her almost visible, about the figure of the woman standing beside the man, her hand in his. That motionless frigidity struggled against the whirling wind, until the woman spoke in tones of indomitable hatred:

“You came once before. You stole our red grains and gave them as a gift to men, and because of them men could sow, and harvest, and eat. You delayed the triumph of our kingdom. Without the red bread grains, all men would today be our subjects; the earth would be one vast lifeless whiteness and we, my husband and I, would have emerged from these deep regions to reign over the entire world. What are you seeking now? Why have you returned? This time you will not deceive us. We are warned against your tricks. Furthermore, there is nothing now to steal from us: look at this sterile land; would you steal the wind of death, the bones of death, our frozen whiteness? Do so. You will only give the gift of more death to men, and thus hasten our triumph.”

“No,” I murmured, grateful for the words of this White Lady, for her breath formed a vapor, warm in spite of its smoking whiteness, around her figure, animating mine. “No, I come only with a question, and I seek an answer of you.”

“Speak,” said the White Lord of these regions of death.

“Majesties, you see in my attire the signs of an identity that has been imposed upon me, and that I, here before you, confess I fear, for I know that it condemns me to death, blood, sacrifice, shadow, and horror…”

“You are dressed in the raiment of Smoking Mirror, who represents all you have said,” said the White Lord.

“Nevertheless, you yourselves have spoken of my other identity, that of the giver of life, educator, man of peace. I know it now: I stole the red grain so that men could live. Who am I, Majesties? That is the question to which I am entitled this night.”

The White Lady, through the icy drops on her lips and the heavy vapor of her hatred, answered, before the man could speak:

“It does not matter who you have been, but who you will be. You have come here, not understanding the warnings that accompanied you in your descent to our kingdom. You have looked upon the skull faces of the women dead in childbirth, profaners of tombs, who course through the air, moaning sadly, cursing, spreading terrible illness, and harming the children who caused their deaths. You have seen the spotted ocelot of the high rocks devouring the stars and awaiting the rising of the sun. You have seen the old man with the conch shell upon his back, which is the whiteness that shines by night, our light, the light of the darkness. You have heard the moan of the heart of the mountains that is the voice of the sun beneath the earth, condemned to disappear every night and not to know whether he will appear the next morning, and you have seen his rival, the lord who carries darkness upon his head and displays two hearts upon his battle standard — the hearts that were mine and my husband’s before we died, before the creation of the world, when there was no need for death. See us now, vanquished each time the sun leaves our caverns; little victorious, however, for scarcely does it reach its zenith in the sky when it begins to decline; it never reaches the status of perfection, eternity in the midday sky, to which it aspires each time it is born — only to lose, and sink inevitably into our kingdoms. You have seen the struggle between the life of men, partial, imperfect, condemned to be born only to die, and the life of the dead, condemned to die only to be reborn. We were at the point of triumph. Every day there were more dead and fewer living: hunger, earthquake, illness, storm, and flood were our allies. Then you arrived, stole the red grains of bread and permitted life to be prolonged. For how long, Thief? Ask yourself that, yes, how long, if men themselves, to the end of maintaining life, assist us in our deadly reconquest through war, the excess of their appetites, and the terror of sacrifice. Do battle, love, and kill to live, O Thief of life, and feel the icy wind pulsating behind your every action, warning you that even as you believe you are affirming life you are promoting the Kingdom of Death. My husband and I are patient. Finally all will end in ice. All will come to us. The sun rises, then hides itself, then rises again: half of life is already death. We shall gain the other half, because the totality of our death is life. We are slow; we are patient; our weapon is attrition. And one day, the sun will rise no more. Then we shall rise to reign over a land identical to ours.”

I feared, Sire, that the icy cataract of words from this Queen of Hell would turn me into ice, and my words into coins of snow. I spoke rapidly, savoring the warmth from my mouth, tossing my words like coals at the feet of the motionless pair: “Who am I? I have the right to one answer this night…”

I would have wished to see the eyes of the King of Death when after a perverse silence, as if the two expected that the pause would suffice to convert me to their condition, he at last spoke: “You are one in your memory. You are another in the time you cannot remember.”

And the White Lady added: “The Plumed Serpent in what you remember. The Smoking Mirror in what you forget.”

As I listened, I hid my face in my hands, and as if she herself had appeared in this deep region I again heard clearly the words of the Lady of the Butterflies, spoken on that warm night in the jungle, only three nights before the night I was now living in the nation of the dead:

“You will travel twenty-five days and twenty-five nights before we are together again. Twenty are the days of your destiny in this land. Five are the sterile days you will save against death, though they will be similar to death. Count them well. You will not have another opportunity in our land. Count well. Only during the five masked days will you be able to ask one question of the light and one question of the darkness. During the twenty days of your destiny, it will not profit you to ask, for you will never remember what happens on those days — forgetfulness is your destiny. And during the last day you pass in our land, you will have no need to ask. You will know.”

I closed my eyes and quickly I measured that promised time: I had lived twenty days without memory, and I remembered only three, for in order to save myself I had felt the need to save only three; and thus I had abused the Lady of the Butterflies, for I had succeeded in meeting her again at the pyramid with two full days left to me, two days in which I had the power to ask, to approach final wisdom, and to remember what might be remembered from the forgetfulness that seemed to be my burden, here in this land, Sire, and there in the lands I left behind.

I opened my eyes and saw superimposed upon the featureless, icy mask of the Lady of Death the semblance of my beloved wife of the jungle and the cruel tyrant of the temple; and when I saw those faces imposed upon nothingness, but simultaneously alive in their expressions of love and hatred, wedded by passion, I swore they were both speaking to me; one, the voice of warm love in the jungle; the other, the voice of the smoking sacrifice on the pyramid; and the voice of the pyramid was telling me not to be deceived further by the terrible tyrant: false was her first promise to me, the woman of the pyramid was saying, as her more recent promise was false: it is not true, you would not have lived like a prince for a year, drinking in the pleasures of the land, then to die in sacrifice; no, my years are like your minutes, stranger, and your year would have ended there, immediately, as the culmination to the bloody day of sacrifice; fear my words; I would have made you believe that the following night had lasted a year, and the next day I would have said: “I have fulfilled my promise. You have lived your year of happiness. Now you must die. This is your last day. As I told you, today you need not ask: you know.”

But while the goddess of the pyramid was speaking, the voice of the woman of the jungle, my lover, also spoke from the depths of the mask superimposed upon the featureless face of the Queen of Death, and that voice was saying, fool, dearest fool, everything I told you on the pyramid was true, the year I offered you would truly have been a complete year, our year, and the woman offered you in marriage would have been I, oh, poor fool, I myself, again your lover for more than three hundred days; that was my true promise, and you refused to take advantage of it; an entire year with me, and then death…”

Oh, Sire, these delirious debates coursed through my mind as wildly as the skull women flew through the air, and as I listened to the two voices I could only remember the Cruel Lady’s confusion when I told her that two days and two nights remained to me; her amazement, her anger, her confusion, revealed that she herself had been deceived; that a power greater than hers had allowed me to live twenty complete days without memory, but only three in memory. Two days and two nights, wrested from my destiny, remained; these days I would remember; on these days I would live guided by my own will, and on the last day I would know. But what I knew I would not know through the intercession of the Lady of the Butterflies, but because of another power superior to hers. And now I would never know what I would have known had I heard in time the voice of my lover: a year by her side, one whole year with her, one year of love, and then one day of death. I was already in the Kingdom of Death: perhaps with only two days remaining of my own will, and they would be days without love, and then, more swiftly this time, this time not to be denied, the same death my beautiful Lady had had the grace to postpone for a year.

Knowing this, Sire, was to return to my primary condition as orphan: before I had known the friendship of old Pedro, before I had embarked with him that long-ago evening; then I lost him on the beach of the new world, then I lost the people beside the river who had sheltered me, and finally, just today, I lost my lover and her promise; an orphan who had lost all affectionate companionship, all support from the warm closeness of others, father, people, friend, mother, and lover: I was an orphan in the icy, white, cold furrows of death, an orphan reliant upon the aid of an unknown power, the power that had violated the design of mortal love of the princess of the tattooed lips. I asked myself whether this power was not greater than that of these sovereigns of death, and whether I would pass the last two days of my life in their frozen kingdom, then sink forever into a whiteness without memory or time or life. I looked at the Lords of Hell, I thought of myself. And I wept.

But this I must tell you, Sire; as I wept, my tears ran down my cheeks, and from my bowed head they fell upon the heaps of white bones lying at the feet of the monarchs of this icy hell. And as my tears fell upon the bones, they turned into fire, and a wall of flame rose between the Ice Lords and me, and as their snowy raiment burst into flame they moaned and cried out and shrank back as before a living plague or a murdered beast, while the fire curled and licked and spread like red branches through the white cloister until the entire cavern flamed like the corposant of the fatidic ships that sail the seas without crew or rudder.

I obeyed my one certain impulse; I picked up those burning bones and clasped them to my breast; in an instant the clothing in which the bloody sorcerers had dressed me upon the pyramid, crests and mantle, breechclout and sandals, bags and jewels, was reduced to ashes; but see as I saw, oh, Sire, how the fire stopped as it approached my sailor’s clothing, my own clothes, those in which I had set sail from your shores, Sire, in search of these adventures, embarked, yes, because of old Pedro’s faith in the existence of a world beyond the ocean, but also because of my own triple faith in risk, survival, and the passion of man that now, though not before, linked resignation to the hazards of danger and life upon the earth; see, the flames, as if from a sacred covering, fall back as they touch my worn doublet and torn breeches.

I ran far from the flaming chamber of ice, but the entire cavern was a conflagration of red tongues and yellow lances, and the very river of Hell was a current of fire, and I ran upon it, for as long as I clutched to my chest the bones stolen from the Lords of Death, the fire did not touch me, it was solid ground, even where it flowed like water, and the bones were writhing in my embrace, and were bathed in blood, and were forming into new constellations of shapes, and finally the bones spoke, and I looked at them, incredulous: in my arms I was carrying bones that were no longer bones but covered with flesh that now had human shape and form; and they leaped from my grasp, stood, and ran ahead and behind and beside me; they led me with their hands, and guided me with their voices, they thanked me, and called me giver of life, we thank you, they told me, we thank you, do not look back, seek the Serpent of Clouds in the heavens, look upward, look toward the mouth of the volcano, do not look back, the fire has revealed the eyes of death, save yourself, save us …

I felt that powerful arms held me and soft hands caressed me and I knew that my swiftness was not my own but that of the fleeing heap of bones-become-humans who were supporting me and carrying me far away, up toward a sky that was closer every moment. I looked for the constellation that ruled the firmament: the Milky Way of lost sailors that here they call the Serpent of Clouds: the beloved constellation of well-being, the pilgrim’s faithful compass, an epistle written upon the night … And dizzily searching for the Serpent of Clouds, I thus escaped the fierce eyes of the howling ocelot, the sunken, hollow eyes of the women dead in childbirth, the banners of darkness, and the conch shell of the false light of those regions: their laments and curses whistled past my ears; my eyes were fixed on the nocturnal sky, exhausted, soon to perish, soon to cede its brilliant reign to the solitary star of morning: Venus.

And I saw Venus as I collapsed into the high snow on the volcano through whose crater we had escaped. I sat there, my head buried between my knees and my arms about my legs, not daring to look at the companions of my dream, for surely I had not entered the icy domain of death at all, but lost on the high mountain paths and overwhelmed with fatigue I had reached the summit and had passed the night here, dreaming. I looked at Venus and closed my eyes. A thousand needles prickled behind my hooded eyes. I opened them.

Sire: I was in the midst of a group of twenty young people, ten boys and ten girls, totally naked and indifferent to the cold on the peak and the intemperate dawn: masters of their own bodies, and of their bodies’ warmth. They looked at me as they caressed and kissed one another and worshipped their own nakedness, and each woman felt her pleasure in each man, and in each woman each man saw his own perfection. Young, in their prime, strong, and beautiful, these boys and girls lay in pairs around me, and smiled at me; they were as if newly born, breathing with the security that nothing could harm them. Their smiles were my reward: I understood. Their beautiful cinnamon-colored bodies, smooth, full, slim, narrow-waisted, were enough to express the gratitude that shone from them.

Smiling, they whispered among themselves: I could hear their birdlike sounds, and laughter.

One youth spoke: “Young Lord, you have been awaited. With fear by some. With hope by many more, but by no one as eagerly as by us. It was spoken. You were to come to rescue our bones and return us to life. We thank you.”

A long while I observed them in silence, not daring to speak, and even less to propose a question to which, I knew, I now had no right until the following morning.

Finally I said to them: “I do not know whether my journey ends here, or whether I must travel farther.”

“Now you will travel with us,” said one young girl.

“We will lead you where you must go,” said a young man.

“From now on, we will be your guides,” said a third.

And then they all stood and offered me their hands: I arose and followed them down the slopes, still dizzy from my experiences of this night, drunk with conflicting sensations. And suddenly, Sire, I stopped, immobilized by a marvel greater than any I had known till now, first astounded and then amused as I realized how slow I had been in reacting to this, the supreme marvel. I burst out laughing, laughing at myself really, as I realized what I had just realized: Sire, in a tone much sweeter than ours, never losing the singing-bird tones, these boys and girls born of the bones wrested from the Lords of Death, the cinnamon color of all the inhabitants of this land, from their very first words — I realized it only now — were speaking in our own tongue, the tongue, Sire, of our Spanish lands.

DAY OF THE LAGOON

Long was our road, as long as the dawn of this my fourth day, guided now not by the spider’s thread of the Lady who had abandoned me, but by my new companions, the twenty naked, cinnamon-colored young people who spoke our tongue. I did not dare, Sire, ask them the explanation of this new mystery; the hours of my time in the new world were growing short, and I preferred to ponder for myself the riddles of my pilgrimage, perhaps to resolve them in my spirit, or wait until events revealed their meaning to me rather than waste one of the few questions — only four now — to which I was entitled.

My companions did not speak, and in the early light of dawn our silent ascent was interrupted only by the sound of our feet, league after league, upon the stony earth defended by formations of strange plants grouped like the phalanxes of a vegetal army, the only growth capable of surviving on this high, arid plain, armored plants with leaves like broad sword blades beginning at the level of the ground and spreading upward like a mournful cluster of daggers searching for the light of the sun: intensely green leaves ending in sharp points from which peered the face of their own death; the points of those green daggers of the high plain were dried at the tips into yellowed, frayed, fibrous harbingers of the plant’s extinction.

As the sun grew stronger, my companions ripped from the earth rocks as sharp as the points of those desert lances and slashed the base of the plants: from the wounds flowed a thick liquid that each caught in his cupped hands; they told me to do the same; we drank. Then they plucked from the leaves of some tall, thorny shrubs a green fruit covered with fine prickly hair, peeled and ate them, and I plucked one of the same fruits. Thus we assuaged our thirst and hunger; and when we were satisfied, it was as if the senses dulled by the intensity of the night in the volcano had suddenly been awakened from sleep, as if our eyes were seeing anew. I wiped from my lips and chin the juices of that savory fruit my companions called “prickly pear,” and from the heights where we had climbed, I saw the marvel this morning held in store for me.

I saw a valley, Sire, sunken in the midst of a vast circle of bare mountains, massive stone, and quiet, extinct volcanoes. And in the center of that valley shone a silver lake. And in the center of the lake, more brilliant than the lake itself, shone a white city of tall towers and golden mists traversed by wide canals, a city of small islands, with buildings of stone and wood along the water’s edge.

I gazed in wonderment; I asked myself whether what I saw was not a dream; and as the morning mists lifted, from behind their veils appeared two snow-crowned volcanoes standing like guardians over this city. One resembled a gigantic sleeping man lying with his white head resting upon knees of black stone, and the other took the form of a reclining, sleeping woman covered by a white shroud, and in her my hallucinated eyes saw my lost lover, the princess of the butterflies, turned into icy stone.

We began our descent into the valley toward the city, and I told myself that what I was seeing was but illusion, the well-known mirage of the deserts, and my ears buzzed as if to warn me of the unreality of this new adventure, as unreal, surely, as the preceding night in the white hell in the entrails of the volcano. I did not need to ask, I knew; it was a dream. But were my naked companions also a dream, the masters of my tongue who in my infernal nightmare had been snatched from the feet of the Lords of Death and returned to life as I held them to my burning breast?

These were questions intended only for myself; let them be settled by what was to come; let my few remaining hours answer, they had no need of my questions.

Such was my silent supplication on that dawn, soon interrupted by a sequence of portents that appeared before our eyes in increasingly swift succession, as if announcing our descent from the high desert into this valley enclosed among fortresses of tall, denuded, stony, snowy mountains that stood like a mute chorus to the city lying at our feet: a tapestry of brilliant jewels.

For first there arose in the midst of the sky something I can only describe as a great thorn of fire, a blaze of fire, a second dawn, that dripped and bled as if it had pricked the dome of the sky; this fiery light was broad at its base, narrow at its apex: a pyramid of pure light; in the very center of the sky, it reached to the highest arch of the sky, shooting sparks that scintillated in such profusion it seemed to be raining stars; piercing the sky, this column had its beginnings in the earth, then grew slimmer and slimmer until it reached the sky, a pyramid whose brilliance outshone the sun.

I stopped in fear, Sire, but my young companions gently urged me forward, taking my arms, and in their eyes there was no astonishment, as if they knew, or had experienced, the vision before. And then, although there was no breeze, the lake in whose bosom this magnificent, brilliant city lay was altered; its waters boiled and foamed and rose to great heights, and the waves broke into whirling waterspouts; great was their force and height; and my astonished eyes beheld how those gigantic waves burst against the foundations of the houses by the lake shore, and many of them crumbled and sank, totally inundated.

Then even my companions paused, awaiting the end of this terrible upheaval, and I longed to know the reactions of the inhabitants of the city I had never entered but which from a distance I could see assaulted by such foreboding forces; were they weeping, were they crying out, did they feel fear, or anger? And, finally, what awaited us? For we were advancing toward that city in the midst of portents that by the very fact of their concurrence with our arrival would surely be attributed to us.

A chill ran down my back, and my companions realized it; again they gently urged me forward, as I witnessed a new calamity: a great fire fell from the sun, scattering embers and raining sparks upon the city; this comet extended across the sky, and from it were born three other comets, and all of them raced with violent force toward the east, scattering sparks behind them, until their long tails disappeared into the sky where the sun is born.

And when I turned my eyes from the heavens and looked at the ground, I saw that we were walking along an earth causeway that stretched between the land and the city; the waters had calmed and turned opaquely green, and in some places their turbulence had stirred clouds of mud, and the reeds along the shore were trembling still.

Of the first houses I saw on our approach to the city, many had been battered by the great waves, and others were burning, and lightning was flashing without the warning of thunder, setting the straw roofs on fire, and when finally my companions and I entered the city no one paid us any heed, for these shore dwellers were in a great state of agitation and confusion; people covered their mouths with their hands; some carried jugs of water to put out the fires, but the water only added to the fire, causing the flames to blaze all the higher. But then a warm, fine drizzle began to fall that gradually extinguished the fires, and a warm mist rose, mixed with the smoke from the fires and the dust of the battered houses, and my fearful eyes were incapable of fixing on details; I wanted to absorb everything, to understand everything, but I was blinded by the plethora of sensations: I allowed myself to be guided by my companions, and all I knew was that as we entered the enormous city in the middle of the lake, we became lost in the labyrinths of a market as vast as the city itself, for no matter where my bewildered feet led and no matter how far my confused eyes could see, we were completely surrounded by merchants, and a great chatter and confusion I heard among those selling gold and silver and precious stones and feathers and mantles and embroidered cloths, and those who in this enormous fair were displaying the skins of ocelots and mountain lions and nutrias, and of jackals and deer, and of other predatory animals, badgers and lynx, were importuning Heaven, and the male and female slaves brought there for sale, chained to tall stakes by collars about their necks, were staring at the ground, indifferent to any portents, and merchants were snuffing out with their hands the coals that had fallen upon the fragrant liquidambar tubes like those the old woman had offered me in the white hut at the foot of the rainbow, and upon the cochineal they offered for sale, and beneath the archways they were rapidly covering pottery of all kinds, from great earthen jars to little jugs, all exquisitely adorned in brilliant colors with little figures of ducks and deer and flowers; and there were casks filled with honey and molasses and other sweets, and wood: planks and braces and beams and blocks and benches and boats; and the salt and herb sellers spread hempen cloths over their merchandise; and the dealers in golden grains clasped their merchandise to their breasts, and the golden grains stored in the quills of the geese of this land spilled from the carelessly held containers; and equally frightened were the owners of dark brown-colored grains surely as precious as the gold, for I saw no one more assiduously protecting his property, little bags bursting with this stuff, similar to the beads of a precious rosary; and hurrying through this fair disrupted by the unexpected rain and waves and lightning and fire, in the distance we perceived — and only she stopped our hurried pace — a woman emerging from the haze who also seemed to be clothed in haze, for her rags were dingy white, and her step was hesitant and uncertain, and her weeping profound and lugubrious, and her face invisible behind the curtain of white hair, and her words were one long lament: “Oh, my sons! Oh, my sons! We are lost! Now we must travel far! Oh, my sons! Where can I take you and hide you?”

And just as she had appeared, this lamenting specter disappeared, and it seemed as if we walked through the haze of her body to find ourselves at the edge of a dark canal of stagnant waters scarcely stirred by the passage of shadowy boats that seemed less solid than the water; these vessels were rowed by two-headed monsters who accompanied their slow, silent rowing with moans: “It must have come at last; the end of the world has come; the world has consumed itself and new people will be created; the new inhabitants of the world have come.”

How well I remember those phantom voices, Sire, and the monsters rowing calmly along the canal that separated the confused multitude of the marketplace from a great circle of courtyards which we entered across a bridge, whether advancing or fleeing, I do not know, for the disorder of my flight was equal to that of the inhabitants of this confused city whose form and countenance, for such had been my bedazzlement at my entrance into it, I still had not perceived, even less now that I was lost in the labyrinthine courtyards, enclosed within walls of white stones, large and very smooth; and suddenly, Sire, I found myself in the middle of a great plaza, very white and well swept and clean.

I sought the reassuring presence of my young companions and only then did I realize I was alone in the center of that plaza, and that the twenty boys and girls who had led me from the volcano into the heart of the city on the lake had disappeared.

Desolate, I looked all about me in search of them. Then I looked at the walls of this alien fatherland, and one was formed solely of death’s-heads, and another of carved stone serpents curled back upon themselves, biting their own tails. There was a tower whose door was in the form of a fearsome, open, fanged mouth. This door was flanked by great blocks of stone depicting women with the faces of devils, with skirts of serpents, and open, lacerated hands.

And in the midst of all this, I alone.

And once again before me, a portentous stone stairway whose steps, I now knew, led to a high temple of blood and sacrifice. And to one side, a palace of rose-colored stone, at whose entrance squatted the statue of a god or prince whose face was raised to the sky; he sat with legs crossed, his arms folded across his chest, and in his lap was a bowl of yellow, flaming, smoking flowers that seemed to beckon to me.

I, poor wretch, entered, breasting the curtain of smoke from twin censers, and I walked along a low, narrow passageway until I emerged into a strange courtyard filled with sound.

I felt I was again in the jungle, but now a jungle of soft rose-colored stone with strutting peacocks, and in shining cages or upon high pedestals, staring intently at me, sat all kinds of birds, from royal eagles to very small, brilliantly colored birds. There were a great number of parrots and ducks, and in a pond stood long-limbed, motionless birds, with rose-colored body, wings, and tail feathers. And secured to stone columns by short chains and heavy collars were ocelots and wolves that did not even deign to glance at me, so engrossed were they in devouring deer, and hens, and small dogs, and in earthen jars and large water jugs were coiled many poisonous vipers and snakes with a rattle-like appendage on their tails, and in feather-filled jugs vipers were laying their eggs and tending their young.

I paused a moment; I would have believed I had entered a deserted palace were it not for the predatory beasts and the birds; then, Sire, I heard the sound of a broom and I smelled the smoke of something burning issuing through the door of one of the chambers opening onto this courtyard.

It was high noon; how much my eyes had seen since the dawn of the fourth day of my memory! I looked at the sun from where I stood in the center of the courtyard, and it blinded me. Absolute silence reigned, as if the walls of this palace might muffle, even kill, the noises from the frightened city I had left behind, but in whose very heart I believed I now found myself. Sun-dazzled, blinded by light that increased with every blinking of my eyes, and panting from the rarefied air of this high city, I entered the chamber where I thought I had detected signs of life: the sound of a broom, and the odor of burned paper.

When I first entered I saw nothing, so strong was the contrast between my dazzled gaze and the intense shadow of this long, empty chamber: narrow, deep stone nave and resounding emptiness. I walked the length of it, entreating my customary vision to return.

I do not know, not even to this day, whether it would have been better to have been blinded by smoke, or sun, or ashes than to see what finally I saw: an almost naked figure, his shame hidden by a loincloth like that worn by the poor of this land, who held, with movements sometimes slow and sometimes brusque and urgent, long pieces of papyrus to a small fire of lighted resins in one corner of the bare chamber, watching them consumed in flames, and then with the broom sweeping up the ashes, and again choosing other long pieces of paper, holding them to the fire, burning them, and sweeping away the residue. Then I noted that the broom fulfilled a double function, that this almost naked man also used it as a crutch. I recognized first his body, quivering with nervous energy one instant, placid the next: one foot was missing.

I walked toward him. He ceased his sweeping. He looked at me.

It was he, again.

It was I, the same semblance that was faithfully reproduced by the mirror I had so carefully guarded in my torn doublet. It was I, but as I had seen myself on the night of the phantom: dark, my eyes black, my hair lank and long and black as a horse’s mane. It was my pursuer, the one called Smoking Mirror, the Lord of Sacrifices, the avenger, who on the day of creation lost his foot when it was torn from him by the contortions of a mother earth who was breaking apart into mountains, rivers, valleys, jungles, craters, and precipices.

And these were his words: “Our Lord; you have fatigued yourself, you have exhausted yourself; but you have come to your own land. You have reached your city: Mexico. Here you have come to be seated upon your throne. Oh, it was but a brief time that we kept it for you.” Those black eyes, identical except in color to my own, stared at me intently, and now there was in them neither the mockery nor the anger of our former encounter, rather, sorrowful resignation.

“No, I am not dreaming, I am not rousing from a sluggish sleep; it is not in my dreams I see you, I am not dreaming you! I have seen you. My eyes are looking upon your face! You came amid clouds, amid fog. And this was what our kings had told us, our ancestors, those who ruled your city in your absence and in your name, they who are to install you upon your seat, in your place of honor … they said you would return. And now it has been accomplished, you arrived after great fatigue, you came with purpose from across the great waters, overcoming all obstacles. This is your land: come and rest; take possession of your royal houses and give comfort to your body.”

He raised his head, for all he had said had been said with his head bowed, as if he feared to look at me, and he stared at me inquisitively: “I am not mistaken? You are the awaited Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent?” As was my custom, Sire, I answered with the simplest truth: “I came from the sea. I came from the east. A storm tossed me upon these shores.”

The lame sweeper nodded several times, and hurriedly limped to one corner of the chamber. “I had only one doubt,” he said, as he raised a cotton cloth to reveal an enormous bird the color of ashes, a dead crane, and in the crown of the bird’s head there was something resembling a mirror, or a spinning bobbin, spiral-shaped and pierced in the center.

“The crane was killed by the boatmen of the lake, and brought to me here in this my black house,” added the man with the broom, “and in the mirror in its head I could see the heavens and the constellations, and the stars, and beneath the heavens the sea, and on the sea great mountains advancing across the waters, and from them descended onto the coasts a great number of people who came marching singly and in squadrons, with many weapons, wearing many adornments in the manner of men dressed for war, and these men had very white skin, and red beards, and they showed their teeth as they spoke, and they were like monsters, for half of their bodies were those of men, but the other half was that of a beast with four legs and a fearsome foaming mouth.”

He ceased speaking, and again questioned me: “You came alone?”

I told him I had.

“I thought not. I thought you came with others.”

He covered the dead bird with the cloth.

He was silent for a long while. And as if they had awaited this silence, through the narrow door of the chamber entered in a great company maidens with cloths folded over their outstretched arms, and they were dressed in elaborately embroidered gowns of white cotton, and warriors with banners whose insignia was an eagle attacking an ocelot, its feet and talons set as if to strike, and albinos who entered as I had, shielding their eyes with their hands to protect them from the sun, and upon seeing me they were grateful for the surrounding shadows, and they approached to touch me and murmured things among themselves, and frolicking dwarfs, leaping and grimacing and thus paying me their respect, and they were accompanied by stately peacocks and small, fleet, short-haired dogs with skins lustrous as a pig’s.

Then the maidens robed me in the cloths, and around my neck they placed strings of precious stones and garlands of flowers, and they tied golden bells about my ankles, and upon my arms, above my elbows, they placed golden arm bands, and ear ornaments of highly polished copper in my ears, and once again, upon my head, a crest of green plumes.

And my dark double, naked, supporting himself upon his broom, said to all assembled:

“This is truly the Plumed Serpent, the great priest from the beginnings of time, man’s creator, the god of peace and work, the teacher who taught us to plant corn, to till the earth, to weave the feather, and work the stone; this is truly the one called Quetzalcoatl, the white god, the enemy of sacrifice, the enemy of war, the enemy of blood, the friend of life who one day fled to the east with sadness and anger in his heart because his teachings had been repudiated, because the demands of hunger and power and catastrophe and terror had led men to war and to the spilling of blood. He promised to return one day by the same route from the east toward which he had fled, where the great sun rises and the great waters burst upon the shore, to restore the lost reign of peace. We did but guard his throne for his return. Now we give it to him. The signs have manifested themselves. The prophecies have been fulfilled. The throne is his, and I am his slave.”

So spoke my dark double, painfully supported by the broom that at times served as his crutch, and my ear, made sensitive by continual contrast between reality and marvel, seemed to perceive in his tones a return to those he had employed on the night of the phantom: imperceptibly, resignation was yielding to a new challenge, and behind the softness of his words was a metallic timbre that made me question his sincerity. Nevertheless, I rejected those doubts; and I did so, Sire, because in truth I did not seek the honors that this man offered me; I had little desire to reign over the great city of the towers and canals; and sadly, in that instant when a throne was offered me, I thought of only two things, everything I desire was centered in them: Pedro, a small piece of land, our own free land, on the coast of pearls would have been sufficient; my young beloved, the Lady of the Butterflies, I longed to find you again, burning and beautiful and terrible, as on the night in the jungle, and make love to you again.

But all my desires and doubts were suspended by the activity of the maidens and the warriors, the albinos and the dwarfs, the small dogs and the vain peacocks; they opened a path for me, indicating the way from this chamber, and when I reached the threshold, I looked back and saw my vanquished double, who was renewing his compelling task of burning papers and sweeping ashes. He did not look at me again.

I went out into the courtyard, and sounds and people before invisible became immediate, present, as if the entire city was reviving from its stupor, the morning’s portents annulled, the prophecies of an origin so often invoked in this land fulfilled, feared and desired, yes, as if that past was also future, beneficent at times, but also a stark presentiment of a past as cruel as that they had known formerly; I was led along corridors raised upon jasper pillars that looked down upon great gardens, each with several pools, where there were more birds, hundreds of them, and hundreds of men feeding them, and giving them grass and fish and flies and lizards; they were cleaning the pools, and fishing, and feeding, and grooming the birds, they were collecting their eggs, and treating them and clipping their feathers, and I realized that from these magnificent breeding aviaries came the feathers from which these natives made their rich mantles and shields and tapestries and crests and fans; and we passed through low-ceilinged rooms where there were many cages built of strong wooden bars, and some held mountain lions, and others ocelots, and some lynx, and others wolves; and we came to another courtyard filled with cages built of sturdy poles, and perches, where there was every imaginable species of birds of prey: lanners, kites, vultures, hawks, all species of falcons and many of eagles; and from there we passed into some high-ceilinged rooms where there were men and women and children whose hair and bodies were completely white, and dwarfs and hunchbacks, and crippled and deformed and monstrous people in great numbers, every category of these little men having its own chamber or room; and we passed by something similar to armories whose blazon was a bow and two quivers upon each door, and in these rooms there were bows and arrows, slings, lances, goads, darts, bludgeons and swords, shields and bucklers, casques, greaves and brassards, and poles dipped in pitch with sharp fish bones and rocks embedded in their tips; beyond that house we arrived in a courtyard enclosed on three sides by masonry walls and on the fourth by an enormous stone stairway.

I was led to the stairway by the maidens and warriors, the albinos and dwarfs, and, counting the steps, I climbed — there were thirty-three — and as I reached the summit, low and square like all the others of this land, I could again see, closer now than from the mountains of the dawn but with sufficient distance to perceive its contours, the magnificent city that my double, the dark prince, had just ceded me.

I looked upon the great expanse of the city of the lake, crossed by bridges and canals, and open in vast plazas, tall in thick towers, its dwellings one hundred thousand houses, and frequented by two hundred thousand boats, and I saw only what I already knew: all this splendor was maintained by my poor friends of the jungle and the river towns, it was for this homage that they had repeatedly fulfilled the cycle: pearls and gold in exchange for men, women, and children to the service of this great city and its lords ensconced upon the high lake of the high valley of thin air and transparent visions.

I stepped into the chamber that crowned this construction.

What marvels, oh, Christian Lord who hears me, had I not seen since the whirlpool of the ocean threw me upon the beach of pearls. I wish to omit nothing from my account, either seen or dreamed, even though in that land, I admit it, it was almost always impossible to separate marvel from truth, or truth from marvel. But if I am certain of anything, it is that the chamber into which I now entered was the seat of the ultimate union of fable and reality, for to enter there was to penetrate into the very heart of opulence.

Long and broad was the chamber, and its walls were of pure gold; there was accumulated an unbelievably great quantity of pearls and precious stones — agates, carnelians, emeralds, rubies, topazes — and the very floors were covered with heavy plates of gold and silver, and there were golden disks, and necklaces of idols, fine shields, nose moons of gold, greaves of gold, arm bands of gold, diadems of gold.

Into the chamber came lords and men of the guard, and servants carrying their arms, and maidens with great trays laden with fruits and meat, and some carrying vessels, and there were six ancient lords, and one group of musicians and another of dancers and athletes, and when I sat upon a low bench facing a leather cushion, the maidens offered me victuals — chicken and deer and fragrant herbs — and they served me from their vessels, pouring the sweet-scented beverages into cups of gold, and the six ancients stepped forward to taste each dish as it was served, and as a sign of their respect, they never raised their eyes to my face, and the music commenced — reed pipes, flutes, shell horns, bones and rattles — along with the songs and dances, and a few of the athletes threw themselves on the floor, twirling with their feet a pole as large as a beam, stout, polished, and smooth, tossing it into the air and catching it, and exchanging it among themselves with their feet, a thousand movements in the air so swift and so well executed that I could scarcely believe it could be done; I ate and drank to my fill, marveling at the place and its people; and then came the jesters and buffoons, the dwarfs, with their capering and cavorting, and an old man took the remains from my meal and threw them to the dwarfs and they fell upon them like starving animals.

After we had eaten, all retired from the room with lowered eyes except the maidens, and they disrobed me, bathed me with great care, and again dressed me in a rich mantle.

I held out my hand, Sire, and asked that they leave me my sailor’s clothing, my torn doublet and breeches, and what was concealed inside them: my scissors and my mirror. A maiden relaxed for an instant her mask of servitude, as a flash of anger crossed her features: “Young Lord: you must change your clothing four times a day, never wearing the same habiliment twice.”

“These are the clothes I was wearing when I was thrown upon these shores,” I said simply, but the maiden looked at me, and looked at the clothes, as if I had spoken some kind of witchcraft.

But she herself placed my tattered doublet and breeches at my feet, and along with the other maidens disappeared, leaving me alone in this chamber of treasures.

For a moment, Sire, I thought of the stone chamber of the ancient of memories, where he so zealously guarded his baskets of pearls and ears of grain; in this chamber there was not only treasure to buy a million times over what that old man had guarded, oh, no, Sire. With the treasure of this room one could buy the ransom of all the ports of our Mediterranean Sea, and the lives of all their rulers, great and small, and the love of all their women, of both high and low estate.

Only in that moment of my solitude did I come to the absolute realization that all these treasures were mine, to do with as I would. But since my two sovereign desires — to return with Pedro to the happy beach of the new world and to return with the Lady of the Butterflies to the happy night of my passion — were impossible, I looked once more around this chamber of riches, knowing that it would take more than a month simply to count the gold and silver, the pearls and precious stones, the jewels here collected, and I shouted, as if I wished everyone to hear me, I shouted, so they all would hear me, I seized handfuls of the pearls and necklaces and arm bands and earrings and bracelets and went out of the chamber onto the high terrace from which one could see the total expanse of the splendid lacustrine city, transparent now in the waning, pullulating light of the afternoon; and to the tens of thousands of boats, the open markets, the plazas, the stone towers, the golden haze, the canals of brilliant green, the two snowy peaks that guarded it all, I shouted; to them all, my hands filled with jewels, I shouted:

“Return to your true owners! Restore these treasures to those who wrested them from the jungle, the mines, the beaches, to those who worked and set and polished the stones! Restore the lives of all who died for these treasures! Revive in each pearl a girl given as a whore to a warrior, in every grain of gold revive a man sacrificed because the death of the world was feared, revive the entire world, I will water it with gold, sow it with silver, and bathe it in pearls, let everything be returned to the people, deliver everything I here possess to its true owner — my people of the jungle, my forgotten children, my violated women, my sacrificed men!”

This is what I shouted to the high city from the height of the thirty-three steps on whose summit were guarded the greatest treasures of the world. Believe me, Sire, when I tell you that the distant sounds in the canals and markets, footpaths and towers, seemed suddenly to cease, and only the fading blast of a conch shell filled that enormous vacuum of silence.

I threw the jewels and gold and pearls from the four sides of my high terrace; I watched them roll down the steps up which I had climbed; and from the second side they rolled toward a broad canal; and toward the altars and stone idols below, toward the bloodied walls and black-crusted floors, from the third; and from the fourth, toward the ossuary of death’s-heads, the rows of grinning skulls embedded in the stone.

It was to the water, to the stone, and to the bones I threw all treasures that my hands could hold, and not, I told myself, to the forever lost inhabitants of the nomadic villages of the river, the jungle, and the mountain.

Dispiritedly, I returned to my chamber.

At first I did not perceive its brilliance. It was a pool of light, dazzling, a lake of gold and silver, as if here the precious metal had reproduced in miniature the brilliance of that vast enchanted city.

I walked toward the rear of the cloister, seeking a place where I might rest. I needed to think. I seemed to have come to the end of my trials, but I knew very well I still had the remainder of this day, its night, and the following day and night to exhaust my destiny in the land of the navel of the moon. Strange: it was late afternoon and I still had not yet felt the need to ask my question for this day. Others had spoken; others had explained; my prayers had been answered that events respond to my questions. I had feared at dawn that I might waste a question; now, as night fell, I feared I would not find the opportunity to formulate it.

In this brilliant chamber my eyes sought skins, mantles, some semblance of a bed where I might lie. Brilliant chamber: the brilliance had a center and something in that center was hovering in the air, a crown of lights, a constellation of luminous wings …

Oh, Sire, how I ran then toward that center of light, how quickly I wished to penetrate the shadow that girded the human figure beneath the crown of butterflies, but I stopped, wild with joy, my heart pounding, unsure of the good fortune that had been bestowed upon me, before that figure gowned in shadow but crowned by the sign of my beloved: the fluttering scepter of the butterflies of light.

“My Lady, is it you?”

The black shadow was silent; then came the reply: “Is that your question for this day?”

It was her voice, revealing knowledge of our pact.

I threw myself upon her bosom, my arms embraced her waist, I sought her face; body and countenance were veiled in black; I grasped her hands, they were sheathed in gloves of black leather. In each hand she held a cup.

She said to me: “Drink. I swore to you we would meet again, and that when we met, your pleasure would be redoubled. You have overcome all temptations and all obstacles. You have reached the summit of power. Drink.”

I held to my lips, Sire, the heavy cup of gold she offered me; I drank a thick, fermented, intoxicating liquid that was like swallowing fire from a hearth; no more turbid beverage exists, or one more crystalline: it was like drinking fragrant mud, it was like drinking ground crystal.

I drained the cup, I threw it aside, I sank my head in the lap of my recovered lover, I thought that under the influence of the liquor I was losing my senses, and that my sight was turning to water, my flesh, my hands and knees, my bones; my Lady, my Lady, hear my question of this day, answer it: the White Lady of Death told me in the deep icy hell that I was one in memory and another in forgetfulness, Plumed Serpent in what I remember and Smoking Mirror in what I forget: what does that riddle mean, my Lady?

I don’t know how many times in my pitiful drunkenness I repeated this question; and the gloved hands of my dark lover consoled me as a mother consoles her child, as the grandmother of the clean hut had consoled me as I slept in her lap. And only when I ceased to repeat my question, when my trembling ceased, did she speak these terrible words:

“Your question has been wasted. Before the Lords of Death, you answered your own question. I said you would voyage twenty-five days and twenty-five nights before we would meet again. I promised you five days to rescue from death to enable you to come to me. You used only two. Three remained. On the pyramid I offered you the opportunity to renounce those days and once and for all to join me. Forever. In life and in death. You preferred to wager your remaining days. What a pity. Now you have found me again. But I am not the same. My time is not your time. Mine has a different measure. So much time has passed since we made love in the jungle … so much time since we saw each other on the pyramid … so much time.”

I closed my eyes and clung to her knees. “I still do not understand; you have not answered my question; I know who I was in memory, I recall the days I was able to save from death; what happened to me during the twenty days I have forgotten?”

“Ask that question of the others tonight. Now come to me.”

She caressed my head with her gloved hands. She said softly into my ear: “Remember the pyramid. Remember it is I who hear the final confession of every man, the one confession of his life, one time only, at the end of life…”

I looked up at the mask of black veils, and I cried out: “But I don’t want to die, I want to live with you, I have found you again! I asked two impossible things today as I entered this chamber of treasures, and one of them has become possible: to hold you, to make love to you again, forever! And since I cannot restore life to the man who was like my father, in his name and in the name of the happiness he sought here, I want to make love to you as long as I live…”

The Lady of the Butterflies laughed from behind her cascade of black veils. “Are you sure of what you say?”

Yes, I answered, yes, as I parted the veils covering her face, a thousand times yes, as I tore at my lover’s clothing, seeking again the cinnamon-colored skin, the black nails, the black jungle of my unrepeatable pleasure …

“My unrepeatable pleasure,” I repeated loudly, stupidly, as I unveiled the woman’s face only to discover it was covered by another mask, of garnet and green and blue feathers, a fan radiating from a center of dead spiders affixed with that resin whose scent I had noted in all the things of this land.

“Your face,” I said, “I want your face, I want to kiss you…”

“Wait. Before you remove this mask, swear one thing.”

“Yes, anything.”

“That you will keep it with you always. That, whatever happens, you will never be parted from it. It is my final gift to you. It is the map of the new world your unfortunate old friend so desired. Keep it with you. One day it will lead you back to me…”

“A map? I see only a center of spiders upon a field of feathers, how can this guide me…?”

She interrupted: “Have faith in what I say. This is the true map of the new world, not the map navigators draw, or voyagers as they travel into the mountains. Not a map that leads to visible places, but one that will one day lead you back to me, to the invisible…”

In the depths of this chamber of treasures, the two of us alone, surrounded by the infinite silence that I myself had imposed upon the city when I threw the jewels from the platform of the pyramid, I removed from the face of my beloved, with great delicacy, with all the tenderness of which I was capable, the mask of feathers and spiders.

Behind the mask appeared the last face of my lover.

I could tell you, Sire, that it was a face devoured by age, a minute network of wrinkles, a deep gaze of opaque passion from the depths of cavernous, livid sockets sunken in jutting, bare bones of forehead and cheek, thinly covered by a skin as yellow as old parchment, and I would speak the truth; I could tell you it was an infinitely ancient face, with the eternal tattoo of the lips erased and wasted by time, conquered by the deep wrinkles that were buried in her lips, that furrowed the corners of her mouth, that disappeared in her toothless gums, and I would speak the truth.

But only half the truth, Sire. For the signs of devastation on the face of my beloved were those of time, yes, but also something worse than time. My beloved, my beloved of the jungle. I looked for the crown of butterflies above the thinned white-haired, wart-covered head of my lover; I watched them fall, dry and dull, lifeless, upon the silver floor of this sumptuous chamber. And I looked at her; such antiquity was the work of illness, of the pox that marked her skin, of the leprosy that corroded her blood, of the tumefaction that burst from the mire of swollen craters, of the filth that oozed from her breasts, of the pestilent swamp of her mouth: my Lady, the devouring goddess of filth, had been devoured by that filth …

She peeled off her gloves, I felt her bony, damp, claw-like hands caressing my cheeks, my neck, my chest …

“Forever, young pilgrim, did you say forever?”

I sobbed in her lap; I am not sure that I heard clearly all she said.

“I was the young temptress, the lover of my own brother who in my arms lost himself and the kingdom of peace; I was the goddess of games of chance, of all that is uncertain, whom you knew in the jungle; in maturity, I was the priestess who absorbs sins and filth, devours them so they no longer exist; now I am but the witch, the ancient destroyer of young men, the envious one; I must be seated upon the body of a young man; that is my throne … you…”

Trembling, the ancient woman thrust me from her. “Go, flee, you still have time; you did not understand; I offered you a year in which we might be together, one year of your life as a man, which is not the equivalent of my years as a woman; you did not accept; after a year of making love to me every night you would have died; now we must wait, so long, so long; keep the map, return, look for me, in a hundred years, two hundred, a thousand years, whatever time it takes that you and I be young at the same time, two, together, at the same time, at the same instant…”

Judge, Sire, my fever, my madness, my ferocious drunkenness; I was not master of myself; I tore the remaining clothing off the foul and rotted ancient woman, I closed my eyes, I told myself, it doesn’t matter, you are drunk, what does it matter? you can have her again, close your eyes, think of the girl in the jungle, think of the woman of the pyramid, she is your only woman, your lover, your wife, your sister, your mother, enjoy the forbidden, make her yours, she is the only woman in the world, do not assess, do not compare, love, love, love…”

The ancient one trembled like a little bird, and her small, shrunken, sick body was that of a plucked sparrow; with eyes shut, I put my arms around her.

“Wait,” moaned the woman, “wait, you cannot now, oh, pity, now our times no longer coincide, too much time has passed for me since I knew you, but too little time for you, wait, one day my cycle will be complete, I will again be the girl of the jungle, we shall meet again, somewhere, now you cannot…”

I had thrown off the mantle in which they had dressed me and, naked, blind, aroused, I pressed myself against her body, my erect penis sought the sex of the ancient one, but instead met stone, flint, impenetrable rock …

I drew back, I knelt between the ancient legs, I spread them, and from her hole, Sire, from that burning hole that had been mine, emerged a stone knife, its stone sheath a carved face, and the face was that of my marvelous beloved, the girl of the jungle, the Lady of the Butterflies.

I moaned, my senses reeling, I spun through time, uncertain of the hour, abandoned to the radiance of gold and silver and pearls that like that of the shining butterflies was now reduced to the dullness of ashes; I felt ashes in my mouth, and fire at my back, and suddenly the chamber was filled with a new radiance; I rolled over: torches of fire, great explosions of fire, held on high; it was night, the night was lighted by these men; I looked at their torches, I looked at my dark double, supported on his crutch.

They looked at me.

NIGHT OF REFLECTIONS

My dark double, the lame one called Smoking Mirror, was now wearing a vest on which were painted parts of the human body — skulls, ears, hearts, guts, breasts, hands, feet; around his neck he wore an ornament of yellow parrot feathers; his mantle was the shape of nettle leaves, and was decorated with black dye and tufts of eagle down; the plugs in his earlobes were turquoise mosaic, each supporting a circle of thorns, the nose ornament was of gold set with stones, and upon his head he wore a headdress of green feathers similar to the one I had worn when I took the throne of this accursed city. His gaze was a mirror of passions, the first of the long night of reflections I now had to live: revulsion and anger, scorn and pleasure, secret defeat, inflamed deception, dark victory.

Ashamed of my own nakedness, I picked up my ragged sailor’s clothing; I dressed bashfully, clumsily, hastily; I picked up the feather mask, the strange map of the new world the ancient woman had given me, and placed it in my doublet along with my mirror and scissors. The old woman still lay on the floor, shielding her eyes with a pocked arm, her black clothing scattered upon the silver floor, her legs spread, the stone dagger still buried between her thighs.

The heavy smoke of incense invaded the treasure chamber.

The crippled prince raised one arm as he spoke, agitating the feathers of his crest; he addressed himself to the company of priests and warriors who accompanied him, rather than to the ancient woman and myself, although he looked only at us:

“See him; see the Young Lord of love and peace; see the creator of men; see the gentle and charitable teacher; see the enemy of sacrifice and war; see the creator fallen; see his naked and drunken shame; see him intoxicated, lying with his own sister, believing in the stupor of drink that she is his mother, or lying with his mother, believing she is his sister; which is the worse crime? for which of all his crimes shall we again expel him from the city: usurper, liar, as weak as the men he once created, and contaminated by human clay? Is this the one who will defend us against thunder, fire, earthquake, and shadow? Will his teachings be sufficient to placate the furies of nature that from the heights of the sky and the deepest reaches of the earth threaten us at every instant? See the creator fallen, and tell me whether from the pits of drunkenness and incest, love and peace and labor can be predicated. Go now, messengers and couriers, carry the news: the dream has ended, the god has returned, has sinned, will again flee filled with shame, our law has triumphed, remains, continues, the earth thirsts for blood that it may yield its fruits, the sun hungers for blood that it may reappear at every dawn, the Lord of the Great Voice hungers and thirsts for pearls, maize, gold, birds, the life and death of all things, to answer the challenges of the earth and the sun. You have returned, Young Lord; brief has been your stay upon the throne I yielded to you today; you will flee again; your return will again be what it has always been: a promise. With our words we shall honor that promise. We shall reject it by our acts. One cannot govern with your teachings. But one can govern only by invoking them.”

Before I could react to these incomprehensible accusations, the ancient woman moaned with fear, held out her aged arms to the man who spoke, my sumptuously attired double, the man in whom only now I recognized — separating him forever from myself — the Lord of the Great Voice, the oft-mentioned prince of these lands of the dead moon.

The Tlatoani told the woman not to despair, that everything was done well, that she would have the reward of this day and this age, the gift of the moment she was living, the promise offered every time the woman fulfilled this cycle of an always renewed existence.

“Your sister,” murmured the lame prince. “Your shame. Your mother.”

Oh, Sire, what did these prohibitions matter to me? I did not understand them, I knew them false, I was giddy, my reason whirling, my members tremulous; gorged with nightmares I threw myself at the feet of my recovered lover, I kissed her knees, her thighs, her belly. I tried to kiss her lips; her hand forbade me, sealing my lips; I cared nothing for her cruel mysteries, I would accept whatever she asked of me, one year, and then death, one day, one night, one single moment of love and my life would again have meaning; now, yes, now I would confess before her, my mother, prepared to be heard by her and thus to die for her; I pulled her hand from my lips, I told her she must listen, that my memory was returning, everything I had thought was lost forever, the memory of my life, of our lives, the memory of the world before my voyage to the new world; I saw myself as a child, before speech or memory, a newborn infant wrapped in bloody sheets, fleeing in the arms of a woman, mother, wet nurse, sister, I do not know, through portals and corridors to a stone courtyard where were piled corpses of women, men, and infants like myself, corpses whose clothing indicated their state, peasants, Jews, workmen, mudejares, whores, monks, women and children of the common people, corpses in a castle courtyard, a tumulus of bodies, cadavers heaped on firewood, a few armored guards holding their torches to the enormous pyre, dogs barking at the flames, the flames illuminating their spiked collars bearing a device inscribed in iron, Nondum, Nondum …

No, Sire, do not tremble, do not cry out like that, let me continue, hear me, she did not want to hear me, she said what you just now said, enough, enough; she pushed me away, as now you rise from your chair, not yet, not yet; wait, Sire, I wanted this time to confess before her, and I remembered death and crime and I did not know why I should confess this, shouting to the Lady of the Butterflies, you preferred me, you gave yourself to me so that I might give you a son, not knowing what I was saying, Sire, or why I was saying it, and the proud man resting on his crutch stared at us through the eyes of a black ocelot, you possessed her only after I had fled, you were always the second, not first, and you despised my sons, you murdered my sons, I said this as if I had actually lived it and was now confessing it, but she finds them again, my mother, my wife, my lover, my sister, she drinks the blood of my sons, she regains youth and life, she again makes love with me, and the ashen butterflies recovered their brilliance and their power of flight, joined together in a sparkling constellation and lighted upon the head of the ancient woman, and at that instant the Lady of the Butterflies disintegrated, fell into dust, and the guards of the Lord of the Great Voice fell upon me, shoved and kicked me to the ground, dragged me far from the remains of my mother and sister, my lover, away from the chamber of treasures onto the great terrace, to the flickering night of the city, bright bonfires, lights trembling in the canals, stilled mirrors in the black lagoon.

We descended the thirty-three steps, we passed through the rooms of the albinos and dwarfs and monsters along the dark gardens where wolves howled, lynx growled, owls hooted, to a great chamber of idols, each with a pot of incense at its stone feet, and like stone were all the visions of my long and brief pilgrimage through this land.

Look, look well, the Lord of the Great Voice, my crippled double, shouted at me, look well, his fist buried in my hair, banging my head against the stone of the idols, look well at your protectors, the powers that assure the rain and the wind and the fertility of the earth, and frighten away devastating earthquakes, droughts and floods, look well, at the eternal opposites, man and woman, light and darkness, movement and quietude, order and disorder, good and evil, the forces that impel the beneficent sun into the heart of the mountains and the forces that revive it from its nocturnal lethargy, at night, the light, shadow in the day, the omen, the double star, twin of itself, the first star at dusk, the first at dawn, world of dualities, world of oppositions, there is life only if two opposites confront each other in battle, there is no peace without war, no life without death, there is no possible unity, nothing is one, everything is two, in constant warfare, and I pretended that everything had become one, everything one, everything all things, I, my somber double shouted at me, you, the prince of unity, of good, of permanent peace, of dissolved dualities, I …

Blood rushed to my eyes.

Smoke blinded me.

I was lying upon the stone of the chapel and when I raised my head I saw only that the Lord of the Great Voice was standing before me, and that we were alone.

And these were his words: “This morning you saw me burning some papers and sweeping away the ashes. Those papers told the story of your legend. In them was the promise of your return. One day you fled toward the east. You went saddened because men had violated your codes of peace, union, and brotherhood. You said you would return one day to restore your kingdom of goodness.”

“I do not understand,” I said in a hoarse, exhausted voice, “I do not understand, why was that kingdom lost, why did men violate the laws of peace and goodness?”

My double laughed. “You are light and I am shadow. Your sons, men, were born of light. I, from the shadows, was unable to create. Night is nourished from increasing nothingness. You invented men in light and for the light. But even light needs repose, and my kingdom, that of night, shelters man’s fatigue. Your sons could be no greater than the sun itself. They, like the sun, would have to sleep, and then I, the demon of dreams, would make them mine, each night, and each night I would cause them to doubt the goodness of their creator, and in the trembling of the night give form to fear, doubt, envy, scorn, and greed, night after night, drop by drop, until I poisoned your sons, divided them, seduced them, made them choose between the temptation of the night and the habit of the day. You made a mistake, my poor brother. You made men free. You allowed them to choose. Who would not choose the delightful prohibitions of night over the insipid laws of day?”

“Even at the price of slavery?”

“They did not know then that upon the disorder of their senses would be raised the sense of my order. Without a single word they became the slaves and I the master, but both — they, to maintain the illusion of their freedom, and I, to maintain the legitimacy of my power — pretended to continue to respect your laws. You fled, saddened; you said you would return. Meanwhile, I would reign as the usurper, as a mere substitute upon your throne, with no legitimacy of my own, every instant fearing your promised return and the end of my power. Look at yourself, drunken, incestuous, unworthy, stupid. You did not resist temptation. The creator is guilty. The creator is as weak as his creatures. Look at yourself. Look…”

The Lord of the Great Voice extended to me a staff holding many mirrors. I closed my eyes so as not to see myself. I murmured an argument that suddenly flared in my memory: “The ancient Lord of Memory told me we were three, three were the creators, one of life, another of death, and the third of the memory that sustains life and death … And if he was memory, and I life, you must be death, death on earth, not the death I knew beneath the earth…”

“The old man lied. We have always been two. Only two. You, the hunchbacked, boil-plagued dwarf who dared leap into the brazier of creation; I, the well-formed and handsome prince who did not have the courage to do so. You returned whole, splendid, golden, rewarded for your sacrifice, with no sign of your former monstrosity but the six toes on each foot and the red cross upon your back: the seal of your passage through the fire, like the spots of the ocelot and the deer. I … look at me … crippled … destroyed by the vengeful contortions of our mother, the earth…”

“You and I, alone…”

“I alone, from now on. Only I, without your pursuing shadow, my double, the always present accuser, watching me over your shoulder, telling me I err, that I do evil, that my power is cruel and bloody, and also unsure and transitory, that you will return to revive the power of goodness … Look at yourself now … My legitimacy will be founded upon your failure. Never again will you disturb our order. Today I burned the papers of your legend. There is nothing more written about you. I shall begin there, I will convert your memory into ashes like those I swept away with my broom.”

I was speaking with my eyes closed. I implored: “Tell me one thing. Answer one question. I have the right to one question tonight.”

My dark double, who saw his dark double in me, waited in silence. I spit blood. I said only: “Tell me: what did I do during the twenty days I have forgotten?”

Sire: the laughter of the one called Smoking Mirror exploded like the wave that had that morning swept over the poorest houses of this city, it burst into echoes against the walls of this sacred room and washed back converted into words, and those words were an irresistible command: “Look, I tell you to look; look in the mirrors on this staff, which is the staff of our lord Xipe Totec, the flayed god, the one who gives his life for the next harvest, the one who escapes from himself as he escapes from his skin; look in the mirrors of his staff, and you will have the answer to your question.”

I opened my eyes. The Lord of the Great Voice held the staff in his left hand, supporting himself upon it. This was now his cane.

A cane of lights: each mirror glittered and every gleam was a terrible scene of death, slashed throats, conflagration, frightful war, and in each I was the protagonist, I was the white, blond, bearded man on horseback, armed with a crossbow, armed with a sword, a cross of gold embroidered upon his breast, I was that man who set fire to temples, destroyed idols, fired cannons against the warriors of this land armed only with lances and arrows, I was the centaur who devastated the same fields, the same plains, the same jungles of my pilgrimage from the coast, my mounted troops trampled whole towns, cities were reduced to dark ashes by my wrathful torches, I ordered the beheading of the festival dancers at the pyramids, I raped the women and branded the men like cattle, I denied the paternity of the sons of whores I left behind me, I charged the poor of this land with heavy burdens and at whiplash set them on their road, I melted into bars the gold, the jewels, the walls and floors of the new world, I spread pox and cholera to the inhabitants of these lands, I, I, it was I who knifed the inhabitants of the town of the jungle, this time they did not immolate themselves in my honor, to honor the god who had returned, the promise of good: this time I killed them, I ordered the hands and feet of rebels to be amputated, I, I, laden with gold and corpses and laments and shadows, I sank into the muddy swamps of a lagoon that receded a little every time a bearer defeated by his burden, a woman branded on the lips, a child born in the desert, fell dead into its waters: the lagoon was a cemetery and I emerged from it, bathed in gold and blood, to reconquer a city without inhabitants, a mausoleum of solitudes …

Terrified by these visions, bleating like an animal, pawing like a beast, I pushed away the staff of mirrors; the crippled man lost his balance and fell to the floor beside me.

His face, identical to mine, looked into mine, we were both lying upon the stone floor of the sacred room, staring at each other like animals lying in ambush, our teeth bared in a snarl, saliva dribbling from our jaws, our chests touching the floor, elbows cocked, hands pressing against stone, clawing, we were poised to leap.

“Is that what I did … what you have always done…!”

I asked it, Sire, but terror and fatigue and shortness of breath drowned out the question and offered it to my double as an affirmation.

Frothing at the mouth, he answered: “That is what you will do … The mirrors of this staff see into the future…”

I felt, Sire, as if I were going mad: the compass of my mind had lost its directional needle, my identities were spilling over and multiplying beyond all contact with minimal human reason, I was a prisoner of the most tenebrous magic, the magic represented in stone in this pantheon of all the gods and goddesses I could not conquer in this land, who with fearful grimaces mocked my oneness and imposed upon me their monstrous proliferation, destroying the arguments of unity I had meant to carry as an offering to this world, yes, and also the simple unity in which that total unity was to be maintained: my own, the unity of my person. I looked upon the faces of the idols: they did not understand what I was saying.

What proof did I have, except what I had carried from the coasts of Spain in the pocket of my doublet? Against the mirages of this land, against the fatal staff of the flayed god, against the limpid reflection in the head of the crane, against the very name of Smoking Mirror, against the incomprehensible images of the twenty days of my other destiny, the destiny forgotten because it was still to be fulfilled, or perhaps the destiny fulfilled because it was already forgotten, I had opposed my own small mirror, the one Pedro and I used on the ship that brought us here when we performed the office of barber, the mirror I had shown to the distressed ancient of memories in the temple chamber: my mirror, and my scissors.

I removed both from my doublet, stretched out there like a wild beast facing an enemy beast, my double, Smoking Mirror, the Lord of the Great Voice, also stretched out on the floor, serpents, each of us, staring at one another, lying in ambush, awaiting the next movement of the opponent.

“Do you yourself not fear what I have seen in the staff of mirrors?” I asked him.

“I do not fear what resembles me. I feared you in the forest, when you chose your desire over my heart. Today I ceased to fear you when you converted the power I gave you into desire. If you believe that my mirrors lie, look at yourself in your own.”

Sire: what that ancient of memories must have felt when I showed him his reflection, I now felt when I saw myself, for my own mirror returned to me the face of the ancient who died of terror when he found he was old: in my own mirror I saw myself burdened with time, upon the threshold of death, stricken and ruined, toothless and desiccated, pale and tremulous, immersed in the basket filled with pearls and cotton; I saw myself, Sire, and I told myself I had never moved from the basket under the bower where the men of the river had placed me one night in their town in the jungle; I told myself that the truth was what I imagined then: sitting in that basket I would wait for death to devour me, to become as ancient as the old man I had killed with my mirror; now the mirror is killing me. I had never moved from that town. Everything else, up to the present moment, I had merely dreamed. It was my destiny to see myself, motionless, grow old in this fleeting image. Moons, suns, days, stars, shelter me, water clock, hourglass, book of hours, stone calendar, tides and tempests, do not abandon me, bind me to time, I lose count of the days of Venus, repeating alone that the days of my destiny in this strange land can be only the number indicated by the ancient in the temple: the days of my destiny stolen from the days of the sun; the masked days stolen from the days of my destiny; I have imagined those five sterile days thieved from evil fortune for the purpose of winning them at the moment of my death; but today I have imagined also the twenty days of the sun stolen from the time of my destiny, the twenty days of my evil fortune, the twenty days of my forgotten death which will inevitably occur in the future. How to measure them? How to know whether one day of my time was a century of this time?

I saw myself, an ancient, in my mirror; I choked back a cry; I longed to rejoin my lover, the old woman, the witch, the atrocious female, the murderess, and be reborn with her into youth; it was not possible; our times would never coincide; she would be young again; I was racing toward old age, toward the image in the mirror, the image of the ancient of the temple; he who granted me the time of my memory and whom I killed with the time of my mirror; blindly, I was approaching the time of space and the space of time; the image of the double lay before me, transfixing me with his eyes of black glass; he had granted me the time of my premonition and I would kill him with my scissors; I raised them, and drove them into his face, ripping the face that was my face, I sliced his gaze with my fragile twin steel blades, again I raised the scissors, I struck the back of the Lord of the Great Voice, my double rolled over with a horrible spasm, and I plunged the scissors into his chest, his belly, and his black blood spread across the broad stones of the chapel, and sprinkled the flowers, insects, brooms, the feet of the stone gods.

I rose to my feet, my hands dripping blood.

Sire: I knew then that I must flee, that the twenty days of carnage of my life beneath the sun of Mexico were counted, that I had only one day to flee from that destiny, to repudiate it with my absence, to return to the sea, return to my true guide, Venus, to cling to her sails and on the sea save myself, or drown, but never to submit to the destiny I had forgotten and which the mirrors of the staff recalled to me.

For the last time I looked at the slashed body of my dark double. Again I looked at my blood-covered hands. The legend had ended. The fable would not repeat itself again. My enemy and I had killed the awaited god of peace, union, and happiness. So died the one called the Plumed Serpent. But also — I thought then — so died the one called Smoking Mirror. And with them died their secret: they were one.

DAY OF FLIGHT

Disoriented, I fled from the sacred chamber and lost myself in the stone labyrinths of the city of the lagoon. I was again the person I had been in the beginning, the castaway in tattered clothing, with three wretched possessions: a mirror, my scissors, and now a mask of feathers and spiders.

I was lost. I did not know whether the palace was the city or the city the palace, where a plaza ended and a market began, where a market ended and a causeway began; I fled clad in the armor of fear — but armed only with my bones, and combating an enormous emptiness: empty, the gardens of the birds and snakes and ferocious beasts; empty, the temples; empty, the markets; empty, the canals, the boats abandoned on the shores of the islands; I fled; the city seemed to flee with me; perhaps it had fled before me, and I was merely following in its flight toward the dawn, my last dawn in this new world where I had arrived a year, ten years, a century, before, accompanied by old Pedro who was searching for a free land, his parcel of happiness, the new world emancipated from the injustices, oppressions, and crimes of the old.

Oh, my dear old friend, you died in good hour, you were spared disappointment; all you would have known here — with different causes, with different clothing, with different ceremonies — were the same cruel powers you thought you had abandoned as you embarked with Venus, and with me, on that long-ago morning.

Hear me, Sire, hear me to the end, do not raise your hand, do not summon your guards, you must hear me: I speak in my love for the girl who succored me, I can speak only as she caresses me, love is my memory, my only memory, I know that now, for the minute we are separated, Sire, she and I, I shall return to the oblivion from which this woman’s painted lips rescued me: she is my voice, my guide, in both worlds, without her I forget everything because remembering is painful, only her love can give me the strength to resign myself to the pain of memory: in solitude I shall abandon myself forever to soothing oblivion; I do not wish to remember the old world from which I sailed, or the new one from which I have come …

I was fleeing along the causeway that joins the larger island of Mexico to the smaller island of Tlatelolco, when I saw walking toward me a group of naked youths, and in them I recognized the ten boys and ten girls who had led me from the volcano, and who spoke our tongue; they ran toward me, joy in their voices and expressions; and this was the first happy thing I had seen for a long time, contrasting violently with the melancholy silence of the city of the lagoon. They embraced me, they kissed me, but they said nothing explicit beyond the simple expressions of pleasure at meeting me.

I did not want to ask them why they had abandoned me to those terrible solitary encounters with the inhabitants of the palace; I must save my penultimate question for a moment I knew was near, and it must not be asked of them; they — my uncertain judgment and my sure heart told me — would give the final answer.

I let myself be led along the causeway toward the island of Tlatelolco; we entered a large, very clean, and deserted plaza surrounded by walls of red stone. In the plaza were a single low pyramid and several temples; a great silence reigned over all. The dawn was a pearl in the heavens. In the center of the immense plaza stood a wicker basket.

I thought I recognized it; I hurried forward, followed by the twenty young people; there was a man within it; I looked at him; I fell to my knees before him, because of a strange sacred compulsion as well as the desire to look into his face and hear his voice close to mine.

It was the ancient of memories, the same old man, guardian of the most ancient fables, who one day spoke to me in a dank chamber in the pyramid in the jungle and then died of terror when he saw himself in my mirror, who was dragged to the summit of the temple and there, I believed then, devoured by vultures.

And as before, he said to me now, but speaking our Castilian tongue: “Welcome, my brother. We have awaited you.”

I touched him with a trembling hand; he smiled; he was not a phantom. Was this old man, in truth, the owner of the secrets of this land, of all lands? But what did he know? He was welcoming me on the day of my flight: the last day of my life in the new world, at the end of the five days of memory that he himself — I was sure of it now — had granted me as an exceptional gift; five days separate from the twenty days he had forbidden to my memory, twenty days, and on this morning I still did not know whether they had been lived in the oblivion of what happened between each of the five remembered days or, as the mirrors of the staff told me, were still to be lived in an uncertain future.

The sun’s rays appeared over the walls and low summits of the pyramids of this plaza, and this was my true question — as I rejected the most immediate, closest questions, those I wished at that instant to ask on impulse, who are you, old man? did you die of terror when I showed you your true face? were you not fodder for vultures, worms, and snakes in the thick jungle where we abandoned your corpse? Instead, my question was this:

“My lord: Have I already lived the twenty forgotten days, or am I still to live them? For now I know they were, or they will be, days of death, pain, and blood, and I fear alike having lived them yesterday or living them tomorrow.”

The ancient with the mottled skull and tufts of white hair smiled a toothless smile. “You are welcome, my brother. We have awaited you. We shall always await you. You have been here before. You do not remember. What does it matter? You have been in many places, and you do not remember. How far my eyes can see. How far beyond this land born from burning seas, which rises from its decaying and abundant coast, ascends through perfumed valleys of fruit, and ends in a desert of stone and fire. I know the many cities you have founded. Beside rivers. Beside seas. In the motionless center of the deserts. Discover who founded those distant and proximate cities and always you will discover yourself, forgotten by yourself. Plumed Serpent you were called in this part of the world. You bore other names in the lands of clay and date palms, of deltas and flood tides, of vineyards and she-wolves. You were born between two rivers. You were suckled on the milk of beasts. You grew to manhood beside the blue and white father of waters. You dreamed beneath a tree. You perished on a hilltop, and were born again. You were always the first teacher, he who planted the seed, he who tilled the land, he who worked the metal, he who predicated love among men. He who spoke. He who wrote. And always you were accompanied by an enemy brother, a double, a shadow, a man who wanted for himself what you wanted for everyone: the fruit of labor, and the voice of men.” The ancient’s long bony finger emerged from the cotton that warmed him, and he pointed toward one of the entrances to the plaza of Tlatelolco.

“You will always fail. You will always return. You will fail again. You will not allow yourself to be vanquished. You know the original order of man’s life because you founded it, with men, who were not born to devour one another like beasts but to live in accord with the teachings of the dawn of day, your teachings.”

“I killed him with my own hands; I, too, am a murderer.”

“No, it is merely that you have once again killed your enemy brother. He who struggles against you. He who struggles within you. That dark twin will be reborn in you, and you will continue to struggle against him. And he will be reborn here. Once again we shall suffer beneath his yoke. Once again we shall await your return to kill him.”

“My lord: you are speaking of a fatality without end, circular and eternal. Will it never be resolved with the definitive triumph of one of the two: my double or me?”

“Never. Because what you represent will live only if it is denied, attacked, sequestered in a palace or a prison or a temple. For if your kingdom could be established without opposition it would soon be converted into a kingdom identical to the one you combat. Your goodness, my son, is kept alive only because your double refutes it.”

“And it will never be resolved?”

“Never, my brother, my son, never. Your destiny is to be pursued. To struggle. To be defeated. To be reborn from your defeat. To return. To speak. To remind men of what they have forgotten. To reign for an instant. To be defeated again by the forces of the world. To flee. To return. To remember. An endless labor. The most painful of all labors. Freedom is the name of your task. One word represented by many men.”

“Like me, always defeated, my lord?”

“Look, my brother, my son. Look…”

The plaza of Tlatelolco was teeming with life, activity, sounds, music, a thousand small and pleasurable tasks: some were shaping clay with their hands or on a potter’s wheel, some were weaving hemp, some dancing and singing; silversmiths, with dexterity and finesse, were casting silver toys: a monkey with moving head and feet that held in its hand a spindle that seemed to spin, or an apple it seemed to eat; patient workers were sorting and adjusting feathers, examining them minutely to see whether they fitted better with the grain, against the grain, or across the grain, on the right side or the reverse, perfectly fashioning a feather animal or tree or rose; children were seated at the feet of aged teachers; women suckled their babes, others were cooking the food of the land, flesh of the doe or buck, rabbit, gopher, all wrapped in the bland little cakes of bread that have the taste of smoke; scribes and poets were speaking loudly or in calm tones of friendship, of the brevity of life, the delight of love, the pleasure of flowers; their voices filled my ears, and all about me that morning, my last morning, I heard their words:

“My flowers will never cease…”

“My song will never cease…”

“I raise it…”

“We, too, raise new songs here…”

“Also, new flowers are in our hands…”

“With them delight the assemblage of our friends…”

“With them dissipate the sadness of our hearts…”

“I gather your songs; I string them like emeralds…”

“Adorn yourself with them…”

“On this earth they are your only riches…”

“Will my heart fade away, solitary as the perishing flowers?”

“Will my name one day be nothing?”

“At least, flowers; at least, songs…”

The old man watched me looking and listening. And when at last I again looked at him, I was possessed by conflicting sensations of happiness and sadness.

He asked: “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Then the ancient of memory seized my hand and leaned close to me, and his words were like carved air, written air: “You gave the word to all men, brother. And your enemy will always feel threatened because of fear of the word all men possess. He himself a prisoner. Enclosed in his palace. Imagining there is no voice but his own. Lord of the Great Voice! Hear the voices of all those in this plaza. Know that you are more defeated than all your victims.”

He addressed himself to the midday sun. It had risen above the great plaza of life and death, freedom and slavery, unending struggle, and as its light bathed each of these men and women and children who with hands and arms and voices and feet and eyes were keeping something precious present and alive — cheerful labor, friendly wisdom, bodily pleasure, secret hope — a different light, born perhaps of them, bathed me within, illuminated my blood and my bones, rose to my eyes and filled them with luminous tears.

“Have I or shall I live what I now know, my lord?”

“You have and you will live it. Why would you be removed from the conflict of all men, past or future?”

“I shall not forget your words.”

“You will not suffer if you believe, as I, that the unity I promised will be born of encounter, of the combat and combination of the two worlds. Of the collapse of the walls that separate us.”

“I believed that you lied. In your world I had experienced only signs of a petrified duality.”

“We are three, we shall always be three. Life. Death. And the memory that blends them into a single flower of three petals.”

“Yesterday?”

“Now.”

“Tomorrow?”

“The present that never ceased to be the past and is now the future. Then we shall, as I promised you, reunite with our mother the earth. We shall be one with her and we shall endure all the battles of history, the victory of your defeat, and the defeat of the victorious.”

All times were joined in the eyes of the ancient.

I knew it, but I could not read them.

He pressed my hand. “Now go with your friends. They will guide you on your return.”

He dropped my hand and sank into his basket of cotton, covering his face with his hands.

For the last time, muffled, the voice of that ancient I had believed forever dead was reborn, muffled by cotton, the basket, the sun, his hands:

“Let no one deceive you, ancient brother, newborn son. Freedom was the shore that man first trod. Paradise was the name of that freedom. Inch by inch, we lost it. Inch by inch, we shall regain it. Let no one deceive you, son, brother. You will never return to this shore. Never again will there be the absolute freedom we knew before the first death. But there will be freedom in spite of death. It can be named. And sung. And loved. And dreamed. And desired. Fight for it. You will be defeated. This is the victory I offer you in freedom’s name.”

A fearful noise followed these words. The sky filled with clouds. A muddy rain fell upon the plaza. My young companions surrounded me, as if they wished to protect me. They prevented me from seeing what was happening, they forced me to turn around:

“Do not look back…”

“Quickly, run…”

“The boat awaits you…”

I ran with them toward the causeway, while behind us the detonations continued beneath the rain, the shouting at first was stronger than the detonations, then quieter than the dark and persistent rain.

Silence triumphed.

And from the silence arose a new chorus of voices which pursued us as we ran along the causeway:

“The weeping spreads…”

“Teardrops fall here in Tlatelolco…”

“Where are we going? Oh, friends!”

“Smoke is rising…”

“Mist is spreading…”

“Water has become bitter; food, rancid…”

“Worms pullulate in streets and plazas…”

“Brains are splattered on the walls…”

“The waters run red…”

“Our water is foul, and salty…”

“Our birthright is a mesh of holes…”

“They place a price upon us…”

“A price on youth, on priesthood, on the child and the maiden…”

“Weep, my friends…”

We stopped beside a heavy boat moored to a stele and built of broad planks bound together with the bodies of serpents.

For the last time I looked at the outlines of the city. Night was falling precipitously, summoned early by the pitch-black clouds, the rain, and whirlwinds of dust that struggled against it, unquelled by the storm: a city bathed in darkness, I did not recognize its new and spectral face: its towers were taller and their infinite windows, all of mirrors, like the staff of the flayed god, glittered in the storm, its walls were cracked and crowned with flickering lights, red, white, blue, green, dust-covered lights that winked and signaled with regularity, unaffected by the fury of the elements, tenacious as the fires I had seen upon my arrival, fires the water had merely fanned.

I heard the tolling of deep bells, an impatient roaring, not merely the solitary sound of the drum and the conch, but of thousands and thousands of hoarse whistles, as if the city were invaded by an army of frogs; great was the croaking, but becoming silent beneath the pestilent gray scum overspreading the landscape, veiling the nearby volcanoes, slowly, heavily, asphyxiatingly veiling the entire valley: a shroud fell over Mexico and Tlatelolco.

It was night. It was also an imitation of night.

NIGHT OF THE RETURN

In spite of everything, conquering this avalanche of shadows, as hidden as a pin in a bog, I saw shining, reborn, distant, but at the level of my gaze, the evening star, illuminating the final night of the vast unknown of this land. Now, at last, I would know.

The serpent boat awaited me. My twenty young friends had stopped with me on the causeway between Mexico and Tlatelolco to contemplate the night of the city. One of them was untying the ropes that moored the boat to a low stone stele. A tense melancholy hovered over our group. It was the moment to say goodbye, but until this moment these youths and I had said nothing, or almost nothing. Nonetheless, I said to myself, smiling, they are the only ones here who speak the tongue of Castile, though with traces of the inhabitants of this land: sweet, singing, stripped of the brutal tones of our own accents; theirs, the trilling of birds; ours, the trampling of boots.

No, I thought immediately, disquieted, they are not the only ones; the ancient of memories, too, spoke to me in Castilian; he replied to my questions in that language … My questions. How many I had asked him, how many he had answered; why, if I had the right only to one question each day and another each night, why did he break that agreement in the center of the great plaza of Tlatelolco; why…? The question escaped my lips before I could capture it, before thinking it might be the last I could ask: “Why is that ancient with whom I spoke in the plaza still alive? I swear it: I saw him die of fear one day, and be thrown to the vultures…”

The young people looked at one another. A new kind of gaze, stamped by water. I do not know how to explain it, Sire. I had not seen such gazes here before, although, remember, in my passage through this strange land I had seen many eyes of warring passions, terror and tenderness, friendship and hatred, veneration and vengeance, yes, but never such new glances, for the first time new, theirs and mine: who minted the face of the earth? who made its field burn wordlessly?

One of the youths spoke. I understood him easily as I listened, what sadness and relief I felt: a youth, a boy, who did not speak in the name of the beginning, of legend, power, or tradition, but for himself, here, on this causeway beside the waters of the lagoon of Mexico. “I saw no one in that plaza.”

“The old man,” I murmured, frightened, “the old man in the basket…”

The youth shook his head. “No one. There was no one there but us.”

An obscure question blazed in my body: “With whom was I speaking, then? Who answered my questions?”

Now it was a young girl who spoke: “You were talking to yourself. You asked questions. You answered them. We heard you.”

If time is a hunter, in that instant I was pierced by its arrow, I fell, wounded, and the oath of my days in this land fell shattered beside me; I managed to stammer: “Then I have dreamed it all … Then none of it was true … Then I must awaken…”

“No, do not awaken,” said a youth. “You must finish your voyage, you must return to your land…”

“And return here, again and again, to be defeated, always defeated, defeated by crime if I commit a crime when I return, defeated by criminals, if I return to punish them?”

My head was whirling, Señor, words tumbled from my lips, I no longer knew where I was or what day it was … I was dreaming. But if I dreamed, where was I dreaming? how long had I been dreaming? Perhaps in that instant, dreaming that I was standing on the causeway beside a boat, surrounded by my twenty friends, I was sleeping placidly on old Pedro’s ship, becalmed in the center of the Sargasso Sea; or perhaps I was dreaming it all, dizzied by the sea, in the center of the vortex that held us captive in the great ocean; or perhaps, truly — as I had then believed — I had emerged from the sea to step upon the beaches of death, and had remained there forever, imagining the phantoms of my life; I did not know, after all, whether perhaps everything was dreamed from the moment I was placed within the basket of the ancient of memory beneath the jungle sky, surrounded by bowers and deerskins, abandoned there with no company but my mirror, destined to dream and one day to awaken and see myself as ancient as the Lord of Memory; I did not know, I did not know in what moment I had ceased to live awake and begun to live asleep; but here we were, on the causeway that joined the islands of a lagoon in a non-existent place called Mexico, the place of the navel of the moon, they and I, I and they, those I had torn from the soil of death, the bones that had come to life when I clasped them to my breast, the most unreal, the most fantastic of all my dreams …

Was this, too, a lie? were they also phantoms?

“We are here,” a different girl spoke, simply. “In truth, we exist here.”

And they spoke in turn:

“You must go.”

“You are the only one who knows of us.”

“This is your secret.”

“You must not return.”

“We shall hide.”

“We shall disappear.”

“They will not find us.”

“They will not sacrifice us.”

“We shall emerge when it is necessary.”

“Tell no one about us.”

“You need not return.”

“We shall do what you promised.”

“We shall act in your name.”

“Do not worry.”

“We are twenty.”

“We shall live the days you do not remember in your name…”

“The days you lost…”

“The days you fear…”

“Twenty days…”

“We are twenty…”

“Ten men…”

“Ten women…”

“One for each of your forgotten and feared days…”

“All together…”

“Do not return…”

“They will not forgive you for it…”

“This has been your crime…”

“You gave us life…”

“They do not know that…”

“They do not believe we exist…”

“We shall surprise them…”

“We shall hide…”

“In the mountain…”

“In the desert…”

“In the jungle…”

“On the coast…”

“Among the ruins…”

“In forgotten villages…”

“Among the magueys, cultivating the fiber and the flowing sap…”

“Beside the bells…”

“Beneath the lash…”

“Within the mine…”

“In the trapiche, grinding the sugar cane…”

“In the dungeons, prisoners again…”

“In the milpas, working the corn…”

“In all the land…”

Did time have words, did it? did space have hours, did it? What hour, what day was this? I implored them to tell me, that was my last question, Sire:

“What day is this? What hour is this?”

“A day.”

“A man.”

“A different day.”

“A woman.”

“Twenty days.”

“Ten men.”

“Ten women.”

“What does it matter?”

“A day.”

“The first morning of March.”

“Dry earth.”

“Black earth.”

“The city falls.”

“And we.”

“A different day.”

“The second night of October.”

“Wet earth.”

“Red earth.”

“The city falls.”

“And we.”

“Twenty days.”

“September.”

“The rains are dying.”

“July.”

“Burning mornings, late storms.”

“February.”

“Whirling dust.”

“March.”

“The same plaza.”

“Sun, the sun.”

“October.”

“The same plaza.”

“Water, the water.”

“Twenty days.”

“Knife and cannon blast.”

“Dogs growl.”

“Blood runs.”

“We have no weapons.”

“Stones are lofted, sticks, and shafts.”

“Many men.”

“On horseback.”

“A man.”

“Murdered.”

“The same plaza.”

“Odor of dust.”

“Tattered standards.”

“A people.”

“Enslaved.”

“A land.”

“Humiliated.”

“And we.”

“The city dies.”

“The city is reborn.”

“They kill us.”

“We are reborn.”

“Go on your way.”

“Do not return.”

“We shall be the twenty days of your dark destiny.”

“We shall live them for you.”

“My question,” I implored. “My final question…”

“Look at the sky: every star has its time.”

“All those times live side by side, in the same sky.”

“There is a different time.”

“Will you learn to measure it?”

“All times live within a single dead space.”

“There history ends.”

“History? This one, mine? the history of many? which history? I could not ask; I could not answer … Once again, these young people born of my embrace spoke as if they could divine my thoughts, as if they were I, multiplied, crossbred, mixed with everything I had seen or touched here. Humankind stood before me on the causeway, beside the lagoon, naked and proud, they spoke in their plural voices.

“The new land gave life to Pedro; in that life your friend culminated his entire existence, his dreams, his sufferings, and his labors. His life was worthwhile. The new world gave him his life, completed.”

“Pedro gave his life for you.”

“You gave the scissors.”

“They gave you gold.”

“You gave your labor.”

“They gave you memory.”

“You gave them a mirror.”

“They gave you the gift of their deaths.”

“You responded with love: to them, already dead; to a woman, still living.”

“She gave you your days.”

“The five days of the sun offered you twenty days of shadows.”

“The twenty days of the smoking mirror offered you your double.”

“Your double offered you his kingdom.”

“You exchanged power for the woman.”

“The woman gave you wisdom.”

“You gave us our lives.”

“We give you freedom.”

“Can you make a greater offering?”

“You cannot.”

“The story has ended.”

“To whom will you give your lives?” I asked.

“To the new land that gave life to Pedro.”

They embraced me.

They kissed me.

I climbed into the boat.

A youth freed it from its moorings.

The wind and the night drew me far from the causeway. I could no longer see my twenty young friends, or imagine their destinies during the twenty days they would live on my behalf; but they would be days of blood, crime, and pain, that was all I knew, I could understand nothing more of what they told me. I felt impoverished, and alone: I had lost everything, the friendship of old Pedro, the fraternal love of the people of the jungle, the love of the Lady of the Butterflies; I had gained nothing except what I wished to forget: the sacrifice and oppression incarnate in the smoking shadow that dwelt within me, and which, perhaps, I had not truly killed with my scissors. Dizzy, I clung to the single mast of this ship of serpents and saw that I was skimming rapidly across the lagoon of Mexico. But behind me I was leaving not a wake in water but a whirlwind of dust; at the contact of the keel, Sire, the lagoon was turning into earth, the water lay only before me, my stern trailed dust behind it.

I trembled: I was sailing toward a convulsed center where water and dust met, where water was dust, and dust, water; a whirlpool identical to the one I had known in the voyage to these lands, an upside-down spiral of stars, a suction of broken teeth and invisible tongues and a sound of rattles: the mouth of the serpent, I told myself, clinging to the fragile mast of my boat, the great serpent of dust and water of the Mexican lagoon is swallowing me, its coils contracting, everything is returning to the mortal embrace of the great skin spotted by the fire of creation, I closed my eyes, I fell into the pit, I dreamed I was surrounded by liquid walls, cascades of dust, and that, as in the ocean sea, the sky was quickly receding from view, I opened my eyes, Sire, and found that such was not the case, rather, my boat and I, with a movement that cannot be described, were moving in every direction, captive upon a vast subterranean river, or plowing an enormous land beneath the sea.

We were moving in every direction, so that if this was descent it was also ascent; if the boat raced to the right, my rebellious senses indicated it also danced toward the left; in one space and one time my final voyage was leading me, simultaneously, to all places and all moments: in them I found myself, hallucinated, in the center of everything that exists, a center of flaming flowers, yes, but the center was also a desert-like north, a rain of hail, a dominion of owls, a midnight at once black and white; and being in the north, I was at the same time in the south, a blue midday, a flock of parrots, fecund water that rose in warm mists to bathe the moon at its apogee; and being both in the north and the south, I was in the west, a tremulous red dusk, timorous before the nearby darkness, and I was in the east, in the heart of the mountain, on the crest of the dawn, the announcement of the morning star, and being in each of the points of the compass — and still in the center of it all — I was also above the north, watching the fire that spread from the center of the earth to the most distant star of the Pole, but beneath the north, also, in the midst of a cold and cutting storm of ice and knives; and above the south, in the eye of its deluge, but below it also, in a thick region of repugnant forgetfulness and drunkenness; and being at the Occident, I was at the same time above it, witness to the feared extinction of the sun, and beneath, looking for the last time at the forbidding animal with twisted paws that devoured it; and being at the east, I was beneath it, seeing how all hidden things emerged from the earth, how plants began to germinate, rivers to flow, beasts to couple, and men to be born, and above the orient of my simultaneous vision of all things, Venus was gleaming within reach of my hand, near my extended hand, and as at the beginning of my story, I called her morning star, night’s last glimmer, but also its perpetuation in the dawn’s clear light, the sailor’s guide: I repeated that name, the same name, the only name, the name of my destination, go where I go, sailing away from port or in return, embarked victorious or vanquished, Venus, Venus; Vésperes — evening; Vísperas — eve; Víspero — evening star; Héspero — Venus; Hesperia — the Western Land; Hespérides — daughter of the west; España, Spain; España/Hespaña/Vespaña, name of the double star, twin of itself, constant dusk and dawn, silver stele that joins the old and the new worlds and carried me from one to the other borne on her fiery train, star of evening, star of dawn, Plumed Serpent, my name in the new world was the name of the old world; Quetzalcoatl, Venus, Hesperia, Spain, identical stars, dawn and dusk, mysterious union, indecipherable enigma, but cipher for two bodies, two lands, cipher for a terrible encounter.

I tore my mirror from my doublet and turned it toward the star, to capture her, to hold in my mirror all the instants and spaces of my voyage toward the origin of my voyage: at hand, in my hand, the burning star, Venus, Hesperia, Spain, Plumed Serpent, Smoking Mirror: a single name, I clung to the fire of the trapped star, I climbed the mast to be closer to her, fire touched the tip, it burst into flame, St. Elmo’s fire, the rough slate-gray sea, heaving tortuously, sky veiled beneath scintillating light, my solitary light in flames, a mirror, a beacon, a coast, my serpent boat burst upon the rocks, I fell from the mast, falling backward, my eyes fast on the fire on the tip of the mast, the fugitive star, restored night, upside-down sky, a single place, no longer all places, a single time, no longer all times, I fell, returned …

I was awakened, Sire, by the tattooed lips of a woman dressed as a page.

I was lying face down upon the beach, arms flung wide in a cross.