Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  In these dreams I’m always somebody else and I always play different roles. In fact, I play so many roles in the nighttime saga of Adrian that sometimes at the beginning of the adventure I don’t recognize myself, I don’t know which role the night has assigned me. But I’m always female and always in love with him—or could be in love with him if it weren’t for the prohibition against incest or the taboo of age—but my love is never reciprocated. At best, I might be his spiritual lover. The closest we’ve ever been physically is a chaste kiss on the cheek or a friendly hug. And sometimes I don’t see myself because I don’t know which role I’m playing. There are dreams in which several women love Adrian and I can’t recognize myself as any one of them in particular; I might be several at the same time, or at one moment I might be this one, and the next another. But my identity always revolves around being in love with my Adrian.

  For some reason, in this chapter of the saga, I’m living in his house, which is why I could see the eagles’ arrival up close. Adrian is still asleep because it’s very early and the only ones in the house who are awake are the old people and the children. But then the noise made by villagers of all ages who are looking at the eagles wakes him up. “Adrian,” I say as soon as I see him, “what are those eagles doing?” My voice provokes frightful shrieks from the eagles and hastens their descent. They raise as much dust as helicopters when they land. They alight at the foot of the steps to the house, settle, and then, before our eyes, slowly turn into stone. From there, the dream follows the usual pattern of religious conversion followed by destruction typical of these dreams.

  I sometimes wonder where the dust of my Roman dream village comes from since it originated with the Indian pueblo of my childhood, which was surrounded by lush countryside. Occasionally, my dreams foretell the arrival of the one God who prohibits the continued worship of the ancient gods and in retaliation turns the area around the pueblo into desert. I’ve been told that the dust is now a reality in the pueblo because it’s been so many years since it’s rained that even the trees have dried up. This ecological disaster has exacerbated the poverty in the pueblo to an unimaginable degree. In fact, somebody told me that she recently passed by the pueblo on the new highway and that there was a line, kilometers long, of people begging on the side of the road, each with a hand extended toward the cars. It’s hard to understand why each one of these hundreds of beggars would extend their hands to people flying by at incredibly high speeds on that magnificent new highway. They couldn’t possibly expect anyone to save them; if anything, most people would be afraid of all of that neediness standing upright only by the grace of God. Perhaps they were simply stretching out their hands to feel the cold spine of death in an attempt to make its arrival slightly less bitter.

  All these dreams end the same way—destruction arrives as soon as Saint Adrian triumphs and successfully forces his one God on the entire village. Although the way it happens varies. I’ve seen wars, witnessed fires, and have even watched the entire village completely disappear before my very eyes for no apparent reason at all. Sometimes things exit the dream-space as if shot out of a cannon, spinning out of sight. Everything goes—the houses, the furniture, the people, the sky—and is hurled outward, toward emptiness, leaving nothing.

  Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Where did Hernando’s manuscript come from? As it happens, an old school friend—from the year I studied in the Indian pueblo where we lived as a missionary family in the seventies—came to the Institute to look for me. She had asked the people of the pueblo who had some relation to my family—nannies, cooks, chauffeurs, women who did the cleaning, etcetera—where I was. These were the typical “peer” relationships (“Who’s there?” asks a woman’s voice. “Nobody, señora, just me,” answers the domestic worker) engendered by Mexican generosity. She knew that I read Latin better than I read Spanish because I was constantly showing off with the missal, a breviary, and a Vulgate that my father had given me for one of my birthdays.

  We weren’t close friends. I don’t think anyone in that school was close friends with anyone else because the nuns who were in charge of the girls’ education created such a hostile environment that neither fostered friendships nor was conducive to the learning of addition and subtraction. Or maybe it wasn’t the nuns who were to blame, but rather the uniform—we wore cherry red jumpers made of a coarse fabric and white blouses with sleeves to the elbow—which was suffocating in the extreme heat of the Huasteca region. I remember that when we couldn’t bear the heat anymore, we girls would raise our skirts and fan ourselves with them. The nuns scolded us for this, but despite all their shouting, we kept right on doing it. The uniform was absurd given the heat and humidity in that region. And now that I’m thinking about the school, I have to tell a story about the onions we used to eat just outside the school. I don’t remember if it was before or after we tucked up our skirts to cool our feet in the river, but we used to stop at a little store where, for a nickel, we could buy a slice of pickled onion that was sprinkled with a pinch of salt and wrapped in a little triangle of brown paper. It was delicious. It didn’t taste like any I’ve ever made myself and I’ve tried to make them countless times in a variety of different ways. One time I even bought a glass pickling-jar—like they had at that little store—to pickle some onions, along with some large green chiles and carrots. I think the key is probably the vinegar. The fact is that however much I’ve tried, I’ve never managed to replicate the taste of those mythic onions.

  I also remember the festival tamales. They were so big that if I were to lie down next to them, they would have been bigger than me. They didn’t taste too bad either. The pastries, on the other hand, were repulsive. The worst ones were the bright-Mexican-pink sugary balls of pastry that not even a child would want to eat; in fact, they would have been too sickly sweet even for a stone.

  The call from this childhood companion not only surprised me, I was also ashamed because at first I didn’t know who she was, even after she told me her name. She brought me an extremely old manuscript that was in pretty bad shape. She explained that her family had found it in a chair they had preserved and kept safe—as if it were made of gold—in their big old house since time immemorial. They were abiding by the firmly held belief, passed down for generations, that they had to preserve that chair at all costs. And so, for generations they had been sticking little wedges here and there, adjusting a leg with a hammer, putting a little glue in the joints…One day, despite their efforts to prolong its life, the chair fell apart. They discovered that the chair had a false bottom and found this manuscript, written in Latin, hidden inside. My former schoolmate asked me to read it and tell her what it was about. A few days later, after examining it, I explained to her that, although it was in bad shape, I would like to paleograph and translate it, and that if she wanted, we might be able to sell it to a library for more than a few pesos. Instead of giving me a definite “yes” or “no” answer, she made me dizzy with the charming verbal gymnastics typical of the Indians (“How was the fiesta?” “It was nice, señora.” “Was it fun?” “Well, somewhat.”). She never returned for the manuscript, and it took her a long time to call me back. When she finally did call, she said they’d thought about it, discussed it a couple of times, and decided that they weren’t really interested in the manuscript. They had hoped it would tell them where the treasures—in which they had believed for generations—were and since that wasn’t the case, they didn’t want any more to do with it. They decided I should keep it for myself, that I should accept it as a gift from their family to mine, since they owed us so very much (although I can’t imagine what the hell for). I reminded her that they could sell it, but she didn’t seem to believe that was really possible. She hung up the phone after saying good-bye very quickly, but very kindly, while I promised her I would try to find some people who might be interested in it and that I would let her know how much they would pay.

  I have the manuscript here with me and somehow I consider it to be
mine. Even if it’s not my property, it’s my fiancé—I’ve committed myself to it. Because my grandmother used Crema Teatrical and wouldn’t let me use Nivea. Because my other grandmother, to her genealogical shame, recited the same last name five times for every twenty. Because I’m Mexican and I live as all Mexicans live—respectful of a random, yet rigid, game of social castes, despite our oft-cited Revolution, Benito Juárez, and political rhetoric praising our Indian ancestors. And because I believe our history would have been different if the Colegio de la Santa Cruz Tlatelolco hadn’t had the sad fate it did. The manuscript is important to me on a personal level. Maybe I feel partially responsible for the sin my parents committed when they went to infest an Indian pueblo with the one God, a pueblo that until then had preserved some small bit of sanity. Or because my grandmother and her relatives from Comalcalco, Pichucalco, Tuxtla, and surrounding districts considered it normal, until recently, for Indians to carry them so they wouldn’t get their shoes muddy. And because her family always married among themselves so that they wouldn’t contaminate themselves with Indian blood. Of course, we actually committed this sin on both sides of my family, so if I seem half crazy, I have a good reason; if I’m weird, it’s because of the curse of incest. And because my other grandmother—blonde and ditzy, quick to chat, gossip, and smile, playful like her brother, and very beautiful even as an old woman—secured her position by marrying a handsome, educated, but very stingy and mean Galician (his stinginess and meanness are another story and don’t come into play here).

  As rudimentary as my paleography skills might be, I don’t want to give up the manuscript because I’ve established such a profound connection to it. I’ve approached my work with it as both a very personal matter and as a trivial matter, like a game. Trivial is the only label I want to give it, because it matters so much to me that I don’t want anyone else to have it. I’ll use my sabbatical year to work on it in the Library of the College of Mexico. This is my favorite place to work because from the window I can see trees and the gardener sweeping the leaves with his traditional twig broom; because the books here are in order and there are more than sufficient resources for my research; and because they sell very good coffee in the cafeteria (I go to the students’ cafeteria instead of going to the researchers’ cafeteria). Fortunately, the coffee hasn’t been affected by the attack on the people that seems to be the modus operandi of most of the public services in the city. So, as long as they don’t attack the coffee and decide to reserve the real stuff for the privileged, leaving us with the Nescafé, I’ll happily continue working in the College library (even if the telephones at the entrance don’t work).

  Since I’m treating this work as a game, it’s important to respect its ludic nature. And since it must be trivial, I won’t show it to anyone. This game has rules, and one of those is to conceal the manuscript without destroying it, storing it where it has the best chance of surviving. So I asked the carpenter who is fixing my bookshelves at home (I’m running out of space for my books) to make a three-part housing for the manuscript with the measurements I gave him. Now I can easily move it without calling attention to it. He also made me some wedges to support it. I’m going to cover one of the private reading tables in the library from top to bottom and keep the translation locked in there until I finish. I’ll make a false bottom for the table and deposit my version of Hernando’s text, along with my own writing, inside.

  As I’ve said, the original manuscript is in pretty bad shape. As much as possible (which is not much), I’ve tried to reconstruct what is illegible. What I refuse to do, however, is to write a single line that doesn’t interest me, that isn’t important to me, even if that means skipping entire passages written in my Indian’s shaky hand. When I suspect that the incomprehensible fragments allude to times before the arrival of the Spaniards, I’ve turned to the original sources, to documents transcribed by Icazbalceta (instead of the better-known Sahagún). When the fragments refer to colonial life, I’ve done the same thing and turned to Torquemada, Motolinía, Mendieta, Mariano Cuevas’ Documentos para la historia de México, the Códice Mendieta, the Franciscan, and of course Icazbalceta (who was even more useful in this case than in the former), along with some other sources I’ve been scavenging from the shelves of my beloved library. I’ve even taken the liberty of recreating—out of my own imagination—any illegible parts that allude to the Indian himself. I’ve decided that’s the best way to do it. Why not? It’s my personal reading of a manuscript that belongs to me, that speaks to me from the sixteenth century and explains my present. Nobody else will get their hands on it (for the moment anyway), unless there’s something I didn’t account for, other than the passage of time, which might lead to its discovery inside the table. Although it came from a chair, I’ll hide it in a table because I’ve noticed that the library chairs don’t last very long; since they’re not made of wood they’re always breaking. When they repair or replace the tables, the manuscript will appear. At that point nobody will recognize my name or signature, but the name of the narrator is traceable. I found it on the list of students of the Colegio de Santa Cruz Tlatelolco. It’s his story that matters anyway.

  Since this “introduction” ended up being more of a personal justification for my translation, the reader can simply ignore it. I didn’t think of you, reader, when I wrote it. I did it only for myself—and for the table, for the inert wood that will serve as its tomb until the time comes for it to be discovered. Then the reader will only need to rip out the pages I’ve written and listen to the confession that begins on the next page.

  (Final parenthesis—I have to add a quote by José Emilio Pacheco:

  “Mexico dreamed of being modern and modernizing; she wanted to enter the unimaginable twenty-first century without first resolving the problems of the sixteenth century…The Chac Mool still lives in Filiberto’s basement, as well as our own. For him, we’re the ghosts”).

  Estela Ruiz. Mexican. Age 40.

  Slosos keston de Estelino

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  Though I am a person who lacks even a glimmer of faith, I am going to tell you a frightful story—even at the risk of writing nonsense—that I believe I must get down on paper before it dissolves into oblivion or chaos. The frightfulness of this story stems from the unbridled power of vileness and envy. And although my account runs the risk of being as unbelievable as, if not more so than, false memories—which, in order to achieve an appearance of truth, spin quite a charming farce—I will not spin lies or tell tall tales.

  Fray Andrés de Olmos convinced Viceroy Mendoza that he had found the toe bones of a giant’s foot in the Viceroy’s own palace. Based on that spurious discovery, they deduced that giants had once inhabited these lands. There are even some who say they remember that some enormous bones and teeth were once presented to the old Viceroy Velasco. Others talk about a real giant who walked in the Corpus Christi procession. I am not going to write about giants or any other type of fantastic tricks or deceptions. Let’s not ask him if he ever saw any monsters; monsters were no longer news. There is never a scarcity of terrifying creatures. I will recount only what I saw with my own eyes or heard with my own ears and believed to be true. I will write down only the things I witnessed and those that were told to me by someone who witnessed them.

  There will not be any freakish monsters other than the ones that actually exist or any nonsense other than that resulting from my own clumsiness. I will not invoke the seductive veil of lies or the light of any faith. Instead I will rely on events and make use of whatever I can that will help me tell the story.

  I will not scatter the stale and sterile seeds of a magical reality across these lands. Nor will I speculate, like an open-mouthed and dim-witted gullible fool, on the reasons or causes for the “strange properties” of these lands, or wonder if the criollo sons of the Iberians have a different quality of wit, or whether it is true that they do not live as long as those born in Europe, or why they gray early…

/>   I am going to tell you the most detailed story my old memory will allow me to tell and I will, as much as I can, anticipate any questions.

  I am not afraid of offending anyone with my story, as it will be several hundred years before anyone will lay eyes on these pages I am writing in Latin because it is the language in which I know how best to do it and because I know it is a language that will continue to live in the future, since it has resisted the passage of time. I will hide my writings so as to bequeath them to other times. Since I have already spent many hours remembering what I am recounting here in order to provide it with a shape in the form of words, I do not see any reason to run the risk of angering anyone with the truth, and thus shortening the number of days left to me before I see heaven. The innocent truth, stated without the shadow of malice, could possibly irritate somebody. The spirits reveal themselves. I can give more than one example of how the written word has caused problems in these lands. But instead I will offer just one example that took three men—Fray Pérez Ramírez, González de Eslava, and Francisco de Terrazas—down in one fell swoop for irritating Viceroy Enríquez Almanza and resulted in their imprisonment.

  It all began with a pasquín that was circulating during the festivities surrounding the investiture of Inquisitor Moya de Contreras. On the 5th of December 1574, the day Moya de Contreras was consecrated as Archbishop, Fray Pérez Ramírez presented a short pastoral comedy, titled Desposorío. Then on the 8th of December, the day the second ceremony was held to confer the archiepiscopal pallium on the new bishop, Fray Pérez Ramírez presented the Third Colloquy of Fernán González de Eslava. During the entr’actes, two farcical interludes were performed that apparently offended the viceroy. One because it was assumed that the bearded man alluded to the viceroy himself and the other, titled El Alcabalero, was considered to be rude and inopportune because the viceroy was having difficulties enforcing the new law that imposed the collection of excise taxes (“I might have excused all the other interludes, but this turned my stomach. Nobody could have approved of this because the consecration and placing of the pallium is not a farce”). All it took was for the viceroy to add the pasquín to the interludes presented during the festivities for these two situations to be combined to produce three victims. Two of them—Pérez de Ramírez and González de Eslava—I understand. But Francisco de Terrazas? Does my memory fail me or did they suggest that he was the author of one of the two interludes? Does old age now affect even my memory? I cannot believe it. I can trust my memory to any caprice—even to recite the lines González de Eslava gave to the character of New Spain in the colloquy: The being who love inflames / cold does not mortify / love will fortify / and the virtue of those who love / renews and vivifies.1 It was undoubtedly ignorance that caused Francisco de Terrazas, the son of the conquistador, to be taken into captivity (if only for a few hours) and attribute to him the authorship of the work that had irritated the viceroy. He is not only a man of quality and a gentleman of the people, but he could not have been the author of El Alcabalero because it was written in a distant land by Lope de Rueda.