Terra Nostra - Closing

Twelve o' clock did not toll in the church towers of Paris; but the snow ceased, and the following day a cold sun shone.

Terra Nostra - pg. 770

... Erasmus wrested from the Middle Ages the certainty of immutable truths and imposed dogmas; for modernity he reduces the absolute of reason and the empire of the self to ironic proportions. Erasmian madness is the checkmate of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, not by sin or the Devil. But it is also the critical consciousness of a reason and an ego that do not wish to be deceived by anyone, not even by themselves.

Terra Nostra - pg. 761

Only Cuban Venegas, that flabby, garish old rumba queen with the swelling heart-shaped buttocks, maintained her strange Antillean optimism to the end, singing melancholy boleros in her sung-out voice in the lowest dives in Pigalle. She said, unaware of the paraphrase: "All good Latin Americans come to Paris to die."
Perhaps, she was right. Perhaps Paris was the exact moral, sexual, and intellectual point of balance between the two worlds that tear us apart: the Germanic and the Mediterranean, the North and the South, the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin.

Terra Nostra - pg. 761

-- at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up. You haven't seen them lately. If they are still alive, even thoday they are surely declaring, along with you, fucked-up Peru, and who had come to Paris a refugee like all the others, wondering, like all the others -- with the exception of the Cuban rumba-rhythm queen -- at what moment Spanish America had fucked everything up. You haven't seen them lately. If they are still alive, even today they are surely declaring, along with you, fucked-up Peru, fucked-up Chile, fucked-up Argentina, fucked-up Mexico, the hwole fucked-up world.

Terra Nostra - pg. 756

Slowly Felipe climbed, holding the feverish hand of Mihail-ben-Sama.
This time he closed his eyes to avoid seeing, as he had before, himself; rather, the world; and on each step the world offered the temptation to choose anew, choices dating from the dawn of time, but always in the same, if transfigured, place: this land, land of Vespers, Spain, Terra Nostra.

Terra Nostra - pg. 752

"Close your mouth, Your Mercy, for the flies of Spain are very insolent"

Terra Nostra - pg. 739

"It is called Baroque, and it is an instantaneous flowering: its bloom so full that its youth is its maturity, and its magnificence its cancer. An art, Felipe, which, like nature itself, abhors a vacuum: it fills all voids offered by reality. Its prolongation is its negation. Birth and death are the only acts of this art: as it appears, it is fixed, and since it totally embraces the reality it selects, totally fills it, it is incapable of extension or development. We still do not know whether from this combined death and birth further dead things or further living things can be born."

Terra Nostra - pg. 732

In your imagination were superimposed other smoky images that supplanted those flashing across the screens of this walnut and brocade office in this palace of tezontle and granite that had been erected on the very site of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, the bloody hummingbird magus, and in the same plaza that had served as the seat of Aztec power: a vast Catholic cathedral erected upon the ruins of the walls of serpents, the houses of the Spanish conquistadors built on the site of the wall of skulls, a municipal palace whose foundations were laid upon the conquered palace of Moctezuma with its courtyards of birds and beasts, its chambers of albinos, hunchbacks, and dwarfs, and its rooms lined with silver and gold: the images of a tenacious struggle against all fatalities, in spite of all their defeats. Your poor people; without moving from where you stood you could re-create here on those blinking screens and outside, beyond the thick curtains of the office, on the enormous plaza of broken stone established over the slime of the dead lagoon, all the struggles against the victories of the powerful, against the fatalisms imposed upon Mexico in the name of all historic and gegraphic and spiritual destinies; television screen and plaza: peoples subjected to the power of Tenochtitlan, torn from their burning coastal lands, their fertile tropical valleys, from poor pasturing plains, from high, cold forests, to nourish the insatiable gaping jaws of Aztec theocracy, its terrible fiestas of a dying sun and the war of the flowers; screen and plaza: an invinicible dream, alive in the eyes of the slaves, the good founding god, the Plumed Serpent, will return from the East, he will restore the Golden Age of peace, labor, and brotherood; screen and plaza: from the houses that walk upon the water on the day predicted for the return of Quetzalcoatl descended the masked gods on horseback, carrying fire in their fingernails and ashes between their teeth, to impose a new tyranny in the name of Christ, a God bathed in blood, a people branded like cattle, slaves of the large estates, prioners chained in the depths of a gold mine that fed the transitory grandeur of Spain, in the end, beggars both conqueror and conquered, the haughty conquistador and the fallen Prince; screen and plaza: a tenacious dream, executioner and victim, Spanish and Indian, white and copper, a new people, a brown race, we shall preserve what our own fathers attempted to destroy, an orphan people of an unknown father and a blemished mother, sons of La Chingada, the queen of all bitches, we shall sav e the best of two worlds, a truly new world, New Spain, the Christian Saviour redeemed by the sins of history, the Plumed Serpent liberated by the distance of the legend, a people of mixed blood, founders of a new, free community; the father forgiven, the mother purified; screen and plaza: a green, white, and red flag, a victorious people vanquished by their liberators, a republic of rapacious Creoles, greedy leaders, fattened clergy, plumed tricorns, parading cavalry, shining swords, useless laws, proclamations, and speeches; an avalanche of empty words and cardboard medals buries the same ragged, enslaved people eternally bound to peonage, subjected to tazes, given in sacrifice; screen and plaza: foreign flags, the Stars and Stripes, the Napolenoic tricolor, the two-headed Austrian eagle, the crowned Mexican eagle, a land invaded, humiliated, mutilated; screen and plaza: an invincible dream, to give one;s life to vanquish death, there is no materiel with which to combat the Yankees in Churubusco and Chapultepec, the French burn all the villages and hang all their inhabitants, a dark, tenacious Indian, fearsome because he possesses all dreams and nightmares of a people, confronting a blond and dubious prince, fearful because he possesses all the ills and illusions of a dynasty; screen and plaza: the victorious people once again vanquished, their flags fallen, the barefoot soldier returns to the great estates, the wounded soldiers to the sugar-cane mill, the fleeing Indian to be stripped of his property, to extermination; oppressors from within replace those from without ; pkaza and screen: plumed hats, gold galloon, and the waltz, the ever present dictatos seated on a gunpowder throne before a theater backdrop; the learned despot and his court of aged Comtian Positivists, rich landowners, and pomaded generals; plaza and screen: the dream more stringent than the powder, the facade falls under machine-gun fire, bayonets rip the curtain and men in wide sombreros with cartridge belts strapped across their chests appear from behind it, the burning eyes of Morelos, the harsh voices of Sonors, the callused hands of Durango, the dusty feet of Chihuahua, the broken fingernails of Yucatan, a shout breaks one mask, a song the next, a laugh shatters a third mask that hid our true face behind the other two, on a bullet-pocked adobe wall appears the authentic face, bare, previous to all histories because it has been dreaming through the centuries, waiting for the time of its history: flesh indistinguishable from bone, inseparable, grimace from smile; tender fortitude, cruel compassion, deadly friendship, immediate life, all my times are one, my past, right now, my future, right now, my present, right now, not indolence, not nostalgia, not illusion, not fatality: I am the people of all histories, and I insist only -- with force, tenderness, cruelty, compassion, brotherhood, life and death -- that everything happen instantly, today:: my history, neither yesterday nor tomorrow: I want today to be my eternal time, today, today, today, today I want love and the fiesta, solitude and communion, Paraidse and Hell, life and death,, today, not another mask accept me as I am, my wound inseparable from my scar, my weeping from my laughter, my flower from my knife; screen and plaza: no one has waited so long, on one has dreamed so long, no one has so struggled against the fatality, the passivity, the ignorance other have invoked a to condemn him, as this supernatural people who a long time ago shold have died of the natural causes of injustice and the lies and scorn oppressors have heaped upon the wounded body of Mexico; screen and plaza: all for this?, you ask yourself, so many millenia of struggle and suffering and rejecting oppression, so many centuries of invincible defeat, a people risen time and time again from its own ashes, only to end like this: the same ritual extermination of their origins, the same colonial suppression of their beginnings, the happy lie at the end ... again?

Terra Nostra - pg. 727

"...No, in the end we are all the children of Mexico, because only by hatred can one measure of its love. Bells are tolling on the hill. Can you hear them, Maxl? Can you understand they are attempting to overcome the roar of the Mexican sun, the weeping of guns, the sighs of prayers, and the trembling of that dry land? Give me back the body of my beloved."

Terra Nostra - pg. 726

"We have left our homes and we must pay the price of such prodigious behavior. Exile is marvelous homage to our origins."

Terra Nostra - pg. 717

"The color of each field indicates the kind of a bird that can be hunted there. In addition, these are the actual feathers of the birds that inhabit each sector of the jungle. The quetzal, the hummingbird, the macaw, the golden pheasant, the wild duck, and the heron. Each area is irregular, do you feel it?, except for the center. That is regular; it has a perfect circumference. That is the forbidden part of the jungle. There are no feathers there;no one can derive sustenance there; there nothing can be haunted and killed to satisfy the hunger of the body; there dwell the masters of words, signs, and enchantments. Their kingdom is the field of dead spiders that I join with glue to the object you call cloth. And the limits of the cloth are those of the known world. One can go no farther. But one would like to go further. The tips of the arrows all point outward. Toward the unknown world. They are a limit; they are also invitation. The frontier between the hearth and the marvelous. This is what the Indian woman told me in her tongue as she handed me this offering the first time I came to this land."

Terra Nostra - pg. 715

She throws her shawl over her shoulders, feigning sudden cold; a shudder ascends to her ears; translucent porcelain. Then she laughs as if she were imitating herself; she repeats the boisterous laughter of a lost occasion, but now the laugh is not crystalline or audacious as it doubtlessly was once, in the time she is attempting to recover. What doubtlessly was once, in the time she is attempting to recover. What you hear now is a parody of another laugh, chained and broken: the difference between the fullness of a wave and the fragility of glass. Then, only for an instant, you imagine that the Old Woman's voice is for you what the sound of the drum is for her.

Terra Nostra - pg. 710

History was a gigantic puzzle; it had left only a few broken pieces in El Senor's transparent hands. He closed his eyes and attempted to determine how the trinitarian heresies that broke the primary unity of Christianity, the secrets recounted here in this very bedchamber by Ludovico, fitted with the key pieces of Tiberius's curse: the Cabala, the Zohar, the Sephirot, the magic number of three, and he imagined that, independent of the will of Tiberius, an invisible plot, a stratagem woven of sand and water, was being delineated throughout the confines of the Mediterraneum; a shared destiny, incarnate always in three persons, three movements, three stages, it could be read on the sheer rock faces of the island of Capri, in the meaningless meeting of the Nile and the hunger-filled alleys of Alexandria, in the spectral community of the Citizens of Heaven in he Palestine desert, in the caves and the palace on the Adriaic coast, in the illusory Venetian Theater of Memory, in this new scar of the Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic world represented by his own palace, monastery, and sepulcher, what secret thought joined the words and acts of Tiberius Caesar, the phantom of Agrippa Postumus, and the rebel slave Clemens; the invisible elect of the desert, the one-eyed magus of the Porta Argentea, and the waves of the heretics Felipe had combated in the overcast lands of Flanders?; what ruling idea inspired the construction of these edifices, at once solid and spectral, the palace of Diocletian, the Theater of Memory of Valerio Camillo, the Spanish necropolis of the King Felipe?; what identical prophecies were murmured by the voices of a Roman despot, an Egyptian fratricide, and a Greek magus?; what atrocious and ineradicable mark of the origin of humanity was signaled in those parallel histories separated by centuries and oceans, those of the two brothers and a sister - the benefactor, the murderer, and the incestuous woman - in the sands of the Egyptian river and in the jungles of the new world?; is that what the three youths marked by a cross on their backs and disfigured by hexadigitalism were enaacting in this palace: a further act of the representation of the beginning, a painful return to the memory of the first dawn, to the terrible acts of the founding of the city upon earth? Ariadne gave a thread to Perseus in the labyrinth: El Senor dreamed of a woman with tattooed lips, present in Alexandria and Spalato, absent in Capri, Palestine, and Venice, and again present here in Spain and in the Spanish domains beyond the seas - before they were conquered.

Terra Nostra - pg. 697

The slave Clemens, this very morning, was thrown from the heights of the cliffs into the sea, where a crew of sailors awaited his fall to beat him to death with oars and gaffs. I did not attend the spectacle; I am surfeited with blood; enough, enough, I feel nauseated ...

Terra Nostra - pg. 612

"My art is unsigned, Sire, and thus does not represent as affirmation of stupid individualism but an act of creation: in it matter and spirit are reconciled, and both not only live together but actually live. And before my act, they did not. You see magic in what is new, Senor. I see only what gives life to elusive spirit and inert matter: imagination. And imagination is what changes, not spirit or matter in themselves, rather the manner in what changes, not spirit or matter in themselves, rather the manner in which their union is imagined. My painting has already been here, in this chapel. It has been seen. It has seen. It is fitting now that it see and be seen in other places."

Terra Nostra - pg. 578

He laughed again, and struck his fist against his chest. "I shall declare that my reason has returned. I shall keep my secret. I shall accept that everything I have seen is a lie. I shall try to convince no one."

Terra Nostra - pg. 578

He laughed again, and struck his fist against his chest. " I shall declare that my reason has returned. I shall keep my secret. I shall accept that everything I have seen is a lie. I shall try to convince no one."

Terra Nostra - pg. 577

THE FREE SPIRIT

From province to province they advanced, at a pace that others attributed to the assistance of the Devil; they devastated the lands, destroyed churches, and burned monasteries; at their head was a young, blond heresiarch, his hair bound into three crowning golden bands, his back bared to show the sign of the elect, his feet unshod so as to astound with his twelve toes, his face painted white to glow in the night - to some, the prophet of the human millennium; to others, the Antichrist; for some, a teacher telling of a land without hunger, without oppression, without prohibitions, without false gods or false popes or false kings; entire families joined with him, apostatized monks, wpmen disguised as men, highwaymen, prostitutes, ladies of great breeding who had renounced their wealth to find salvation in poverty but ho in truth were only seeking nights of pleasure with him, with the young heresiarch, here called Tanchelm, in other places, Eudes de l'Etoile, names that others gave gave him, Baldwin, Frederick, Charlemagne, he who had no name, accompanied always by two coffins and a bling beggar who on occasion spoke for him, he stirring up the multitudes of poor who followed after him, only the poor shall achieve the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Heaven is here upon earth, seize it, each of you is Christ, Paradise is here, dissolve the monsteries, take the nuns for your women, set the monks to work, in truth I say to you: let the monks and nuns grown the vine and the wheat that sustains us, chop down the door of the rich man, and we will sup with him, persecute the clergy, let every priest hold us in such fear that he will hide his tonsure even if it is covered under cow's dung, march day and night, through all the land, from Louvain to Haarlem, from Bruges to St.-Quentin, from Ghent to Paris, though they slit our throats and throw us into the Seine, Paris is our goal, there where thought is pleasure and pleasure thought, the capital of the third age, the scene of the final battle, the last city, there where the persuasive Devil inculcated in a few wise men a perverse intelligence, Paris, fountain of all wisdom, let us march with our standards, and our candles burning in the l ight of day, we will flagellate ourselves in the streets, we shall make love in the open, the pain and the delight of the flesh,, hurry, we have but thirty-three and a half days to complete our crusade, that is the holy cipher for our processions, the number of the days of Christ upon the earth, but sufficient time to sweep away the corrupt Church of the Antichrist in Rome, there is no authority ours, our life, our experience, let us recognize nothing except that, follow me, I am but one of you, I am not the leader, do as I do, seduce women, they belong to each of us, weavers, needle sellers, rascals, beggars, Turlupins, the poorest of the poor, the same as I, nothing is mine, everything belongs to us aall, there is no sin, there was no Fall, take possession, with me, of the visible empire preparing for the end of the world, preached the young heresiarch to the accompaniment of the blng beggar;s flute, be free, the knowing man is in himself heaven and purgatory and hell, the man of free spirit does not know sin, take everything for yourself, nothing is sinful except what you imagine to be so, return with me and my blind father to the state of innocence, let us take off our clothes, take each other by the hand, kneel, swear, obediennce only to the free spirit, dissolve all other vows, matrimony, chastity, priesthood, God is free, therefore everything was created to be shared, freely, by all, everything thhe eye can see or desire, stretch out your hand and take, go into the inns, refuse to pay, beat him who would ask you for payment, be charitable, but if charity is deinied you, take it by force, women, food, money ... the hordes of Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Picardy, at their head the beggar kings, a youth with a cross upon his back, and a blind flautist: the end of the world ...

Terra Nostra - pg. 561

"Perfection, monsignore, is death."

Terra Nostra - pg. 538

There is no word that is not laden with forgetfulness and memories, colored with illusions and failures; nevertheless, there is no word that is not the bearer of imminent renovation; each word we say simultaneously announces a word we do not know because we have forgotten it and a word we do not know because we desire it.