It was yesterday that I happened to see Caspa and discovered her vault as a result of my own curiosity. This morning I descended by way of the Punto Calpe during the plaza’s social hours. The bright atmosphere of the stairway open to the sky is friendly and relaxing for people to exchange brief greetings. I was cordial and polite with everyone, greeting with a look, exchanging a few words, shaking hands here and there. I saw Caspa descend, rosy and smiling, radiating a serene vitality. Isn’t the face the mirror of the soul? She had her hair knotted at the nape of her neck as if she wasn’t afraid of exposing herself from pillar to post, as if she had nothing to hide. She is a beauty among beauties. Moreover, there is something in her face that invites confidence, something that no one else among us has, something I would dare to describe as maternal, even without being influenced in my word choice by my recent discovery of her secret. Caspa looks maternal and she radiates innocence. I would like someone to explain to me how someone with such a beautiful face, with such harmonious gestures, with such a graceful walk can kill—“Si mata con una mirada amarga o mientras susurra halagos, si, como el cobarde, lo hace con un beso o, como el valiente, con su espada…”
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die
Or is her crime simply fruit of innocent oblivion? Yes, fruit of innocent oblivion, only conceivable in a member of our community. It was man who murdered what he loved and lost himself, and not because he eliminated pain and death. When we submitted, long ago, to the uncomfortable and primitive cleansing of our internal organs, we were unwittingly searching for the recovery that follows pain, but not the recovery of perfect health as we had said. No: we were looking to recover our center, the soul of man. But agreeing to the pain could not provide us with that, nor does death provide it to Caspa. It was the Earth that killed man when the Earth itself died. When Mother Nature departed, she took man along with her. Devastated, she left man without a soul. Man couldn’t imagine this—he thought if we did our best to recover the fragments of Nature, we might be able to survive. We were all wrong.
Ox I saw as a child giving off steam one day under the Nicaraguan sun of burnt golds, on the flourishing hacienda, full of the harmony of the tropics; dove of the forests resonant with wind, axes, wild birds and bulls, I greet you, for you are my soul.
Who is our soul? Without the wondrous Natural World, man is no longer human. He has even lost his language. Only we are left, but we’re not human anymore. We are of another genus, one that doesn’t have a name and doesn’t want one because it rejects language.
The earth is an open grave,
…an open grave
With yawning mouth the horrid hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalte ring.
Paz says, that death is the consummation of life, that without death there would be no life? Then Caspa could have life. But Paz would agree with me: life cannot be born out of absurd crimes.
At night the alarm keeps ringing. I need a good night’s sleep. One night would relieve me of this feeling of fatigue. I haven’t received an answer regarding the clarification I’ve asked for. And I’ve asked for it daily. It’s also been three days since I asked Rosete to come so that I can send some mail, I want to send my complaint to Ramón about the issue of the alarms by him personally. “Take the bull,” men used to say, “take the bull by the horns.” I have to take this situation firmly by the horns, but I won’t betray Caspa. Her crime doesn’t affect the community. It doesn’t rob us of our energies, it doesn’t create us any problems, it only creates a problem for her. Yes, it is a crime and it concerns only her own conscience. She has to have a conscience. She has to realize what she’s doing to her children.
Slosos keston de Learo
EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO
Despite the intense pain in my back that has kept me company in my chair for the past few days, I have continued to write as quickly as my old hand can make the pen flow. But the back pain is nothing compared to last night’s terrible dream! Now that I have started to talk here about my time in this Paradise—for the friars wanted nothing more than for the first glorious years of the Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco to be Paradise, as Tula, Tlalocan, or Tamoanchan were for the ancient ones, a land of spiritual abundance, Eden—I should now describe from where these spiritual jadeites arose, but I feel I must write the dream down here because it is such an enormous torment that I cannot stop thinking about it.
I had been dead for a few days, laid out in an airy chamber filled with a sea of light. They had put a heavy piece of flagstone on my belly. I was wearing my purple cassock and had the body I had as a young man, not the ruin I live in these days. I had long hair. They had finished wetting me down with fresh water—I could even feel the water dripping on my skin, on my forehead, my chest, and my feet. Basacio, also young, as young as he was when I was his student, came close and was haranguing me in Nahuatl, telling me that it was a good thing I had died, because now I would leave behind the suffering of this world. I wanted to answer him, because it did not seem to me that was the best way to console me for having died. Basacio stayed by my side, holding my hand. Miguel, our teacher, arrived and said more or less the same thing in a few short words. He took my other hand. My mood was getting worse and worse because, even though I was dead, I was not dead, and because the water had chilled my skin under the cassock and I was cold. I felt like I was about to start shivering any moment, but I was trying to control myself, to suppress the agitation that the cold had created in my limbs. I knew I was dead (even though I was not and my eyes could see) and like a good dead man I had to remain immobile and composed.
Fray Bernardino arrived and objected to the manner in which they had prepared me for the wake:
—What’s this? The wet cassock, the stone on the chest? Is this some kind of bad joke?
—Fray Bernardino—Miguel said to him—How can you not remember if you yourself are our memory? This is the way we used to prepare our noble lords in ancient times. We dressed them in their best clothes and held a wake for them for four days. The stone on the chest is so that its coldness will slow the decay of the body and so that its weight will stop the bloating caused by death’s putrefaction process. We’ve wet him down to cool him even more.
“To cool me down!—I thought to myself—They are killing me with the cold!” But I only said this to myself because I could not talk to them.
—Fray Bernardino, Fray Arnaldo—Miguel continued—we need to proceed with the ceremony. Now, to accompany him in his final resting place, we set fire to ourselves until we are ashes, just as the closest kin of the noble lords did.
—I will not object—Sahagún said, very solemnly.
—I, Fray Arnaldo Basacio, ask that you quickly set us on a fire, that you set fire to our clothes and our persons so that we can accompany Hernando de Rivas to his final resting place—and as he spoke, they showed no pain or desperation while flames appeared on their cassocks and advanced to their flesh.
—But it seems to me—Sahagún was saying, amid the flames—that if Hernando died because of the weakness of his flesh, for ignoring that chastity is the only virtue against lust…
—Ah! Too late you’ve said this!—Basacio answered, in flames.
—Late? There was no reason to say it, no reason at all. It is, with all due respect, a tall tale—Miguel said amid the flames, before disappearing in the smoke along with his words.
They were consumed in no time at all and I felt remorse for I knew that I could not accompany them, because nobody could take the stone off my chest so that my body could begin to decay, nobody would be able to bury me, they had gone ahead so as to accompany me but, once gone, they would go on without me because I would never be able to catch up with them because the stone kept me in place. The stone then turned into a huge woman who, pressing on my chest with her weight, brought heat into my body, but not the flame
s that would reunite me with them and that I continued to hope for—not flames and not death—instead the woman was a stone that held me inside my body.
I awoke quite shaken. The boys came to get me and brought me here, and here I have wasted time writing down what did not happen except in my dream, what nobody else saw, what the shadows of the night left in this old heart. The feeling the dream left in my fragile body is more painful than the sharp stabbing pains in my back. Could it be that in this dream there was more of me that could suffer the pain, more than what is left of my old flesh today?
The afternoon is here. I have done my best for another day, but today the pain in my back has been in vain. I know I am not here to write down dreams or tall tales. That has been my approach from the beginning. Why let myself fall into this web of imaginary tribulations?
But not even after having written it down does the dream cease to have the effect of a blow to my weak old body, as if my poor old body had been in the jaws of someone who gnawed on it distractedly. Ah, the dream is gunpowder inside my chest. It is fire, a knife, a bullet, a blow, I don’t know what it is. Well, if it is true that I was not dead in the dream and that I am not dead in waking (even though only a thin thread connects me to the living), the stone, the woman, it was all true one day. How much it came to weigh on my heart! How much it came to weigh on me, how much, how much! I hate to remember it.
Against lust—I read as a child in the primer with which they taught me to read and pray in Nahuatl and Latin—against lust, there is chastity. Lust is the third of the seven capital sins, the others of which are: pride, avarice, anger, gluttony, envy, and finally, sloth. Contrary to these seven vices are the seven virtues: humility is the contrary virtue against pride; liberality, the virtue against avarice; chastity, the virtue against lust; meekness, the virtue against anger; temperance, the virtue against gluttony; brotherly love, the virtue against envy; and diligence is the contrary virtue against sloth. Next in the primer came the five bodily senses: the first is sight, the opposite of which is contemplation; the second is hearing, the opposite of which is prayer; the third is taste, the opposite of which is abstinence; the fourth is smell, the opposite of which is to think about what you are made of; and the fifth is touch, the opposite of which is good works. Beyond these, there are the three enemies of the soul: the first is the world, the second is the devil, and the third is the flesh. The latter is the most important one because we cannot throw off the flesh as we can the world and the devil.
I remember the primer line by line because I learned it by heart, even though I memorized it in Tezcoco when I had a different lineage, when my mother was mine, when I belonged to my people. But the memory in which I kept it did not provide me with the gift of chastity against lust…Ah, take the bad taste of that dream, and the memory of what happened, out of my mouth. Lift my spirits. Maybe we should think of something that will scare death away from me, to lift the stone off of me, something that will bring me back to life and allow me to write down my memories. Let’s begin with the example of Francisco de Alegrías, the friar who, taking advantage of his name and purse, which was much fatter when he departed than when he arrived,13 took four young Indian girls dressed as boys to serve in his house and in his bed when he returned to Seville. They say that this Francisco de Alegrías was of the Moorish caste and that he was extremely wrathful and wicked.14 They say that gambling cleric (whose name escapes me) escaped life in prison with the help of Pernía and is now a great gentleman in Guatemala who boasts about the fact that he said and committed condemnable heresies. For example, he said that fornication was not a sin and he killed, with his own hands, the Indian who accused him in front of Zumárraga of having taken his wife as a lover and then the next day celebrated mass without absolution or dispensation. He also whipped an Indian woman to death, raped an underage girl, who later died as a result, and then did the same thing to his own daughter, the Archbishop saw him in his bed with his own eyes. After having escaped to Seville, he had permission to return to Nueva España before the Inquisition sent him back. Wolves and false prophets—those in whom lust is a virtue next to their many great sins…And what to say about that Juan Rebollo who always had a Rebolla in Mexico and wherever he was, who committed thousands of excesses; or Cristóbal de Torres, for whose dishonesties a husband stabbed and killed his own wife, whom the Audiencia found guilty of adultery with said cleric? Vicars, clerics, and friars went out into the streets at night searching for idols,15 scandalizing everyone for they were careless about being seen entering houses where public women were.16
And what am I doing dreaming about a flagstone on my chest and suffering because I see that in the dream I am to blame for the cassocks of the friars being in flames and, even worse, why can I not let go of the uneasiness of the dream? I take the stone and the woman off my chest; the approach of my death should not be a burden for me. I deny the dream. I will avoid it in my soul and in my memory. Why have I wasted so many hours on this dream? Maybe because, for as much as the dream upsets me, it is less difficult than remembering the Colegio’s good years. Oh yes, that was paradise on earth, and it was lost too soon…!
I will not state the truth: that it opened a new world to us. We, the students of the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, were the Indian conquerors who traveled to a new land, but we did not injure anybody or carry swords, we did not steal anything or abuse anyone or sow death.
I will not even state what is known: that we learned grammar. That is not the story I am here to tell. You, reader, if you come to read this story, you will not be the teacher whose classes I might have taken in times past, nor will you be the student whom I might have taught what the Franciscans had taught me, what we would later teach to our own students who were white, not Indian, because the Indians had already been condemned to ignorance and eternal subjugation. That for which Rodrigo de Albornoz, the auditor from Spain, had petitioned the king—a general study of grammar, art, and theology to be taught to the natives of these lands—was accomplished with us and ended with us. It was not our Indian disciples Albornoz was dreaming of or who Fuenleal was thinking of. In us they educated teachers for their own, Hispanics who would aspire to the Franciscan habit.
We were all diligent students, we learned the trivium and the quadrivium in the blink of an eye, which would hopefully last a lifetime, during that time that seemed paradise. We devoured the books of the library as well as those the friars had in their trunks and some others that Fray Pedro de Gante or Zumárraga brought us on their visits. And then began the sad history that I will begin to tell tomorrow, nightmare or not; nothing should keep me from it, only the arrival of my death will interrupt that which I want to leave here, even though in order to do it I have lost time in introducing myself and my family, in talking a bit about Cortés and his group, in naming Albornoz, who was the first to dream about that which Fuenleal and Mendoza later supported, as did Sahagún for a long time. Tomorrow I will begin this history. Now all that is left of today is for me is to wait, dozing, until the boys come to pick me up: to take me, my cassock, and my two legs, back to the mat I sleep on, next to which are waiting the tamales and cup of chocolate that were left there for me to eat as night and the crust of stale sleep approach. Because that is how it is: I doze here, in my uncomfortable chair, as nightfall approaches and during the night, lying on my mat—with no writing or talking, having nothing and no one to have even the semblance of a conversation with—insomnia delights in tormenting my old bones. I wonder what is gnawing on me. What is it about me that you, insomnia, know so well that you come back to me night after night? It seems to me that what you seek from me, and my mat, is the death that consumes me day by day.
Slosos keston de Hernando
13In Spanish in the original. Estela’s note.
14In Spanish in the original. Estela’s note.
15In Spanish in the original. Estela’s note.
16In Spanish in the original. Estela’s note.
EKFLOROS K
ESTON DE LEARO
I haven’t received a single response from the Center and the damned alarm continues to bother me at night. Every morning I find generic information about the Language Reform and its upcoming implementation in my mailbox. We all receive this on a daily basis along with some lessons in the new code they’ve just finished; it’s basically just notification that the institution of the reform is approaching. It appears that some people are already using the new code among themselves to communicate and have eliminated the use of words entirely. I write, “it appears” because I don’t know what they could possibly communicate with a “language” that is so terribly primitive. The gurglings of Caspa’s newborns are richer, more expressive, and more precise than the new “code.” They’ve done away with numbers too, arguing that a number is also a word. We’ll no longer receive notifications in the form of numbers and letters that, until today, the Center has sent as a way to maintain order in L’Atlàntide. I’m not sure how far they’ll go with this reform, but maybe it’s best that they just get it over with and then, when they realize their error, they’ll return like little lambs to the lap of language. It’s obvious they’ll need it.
Despite the fact that the Center seems to have become deaf to my petitions, Rosete appeared.
For a moment I thought he had been purposefully avoiding me, but I quickly realized that wasn’t the case and that his bad mood didn’t have anything to do with me, but was rather a result of the imminent discontinuation of his position of living mail. I had already been informed that the delivery of messages was going to change, that they were definitely going to implement the Language Reform. What an atrocious mistake. Rosete will no longer convey messages. The Punto Calpe will now be the only way for the people of L’Atlàntide to “communicate” with each other. But the Center will continue to operate—it is essential, it even controls our walls made of air—and we will continue to use sounds to request necessary services from it. We will have to say “G”—“G” to lower the covers and protections to the surface of the Earth. But they won’t eliminate language from the Center entirely. They won’t erase the kestos. I calmed myself with this thought. This stupidity will only be temporary.
Heavens on Earth Page 16