Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  Zumárraga withdrew all economic support from the Colegio and petitioned the king to revoke its status as an Imperial Colegio and have it converted into a hospital, all, it seems to me, to protect himself against the accusations and avoid more attacks against the Franciscans. The king temporarily suspended the income he sent us and instead the Viceroy paid what would have been a small, although useful and generous, amount for each one of the students, which would have been enough, and we would not have found ourselves begging to support ourselves if it had been better managed by the majordomo and if he had used less of it for his own benefit.

  As for Zumárraga, it was not because he did not respect the work of the Colegio, but rather because they had used it to attack him: by using the Colegio as an argument, they had branded him a millenarian, and with that, disloyal to the Spanish Crown and His Holiness, because they said that the Franciscans wanted to use us to create an Indian Church that would separate from the one run by the Pope, that ours was the seedbed for the new Church, and that Zumárraga spoke continuously about Babylon…

  The financial problems had a solution: the matrons generously provided food, bringing us tortillas made with their own hands, boiled beans, and salsas to season whatever we harvested from what we had sown in our vegetable garden. And, needless to say, we already had books, so we desired nothing more from the world. In the case that we came across something unexpected, we would ask and that was all.

  But our danger was something else entirely. The village of Mexico had decided to do away with the Colegio de Santa Cruz, as if our knowledge exacerbated their uncontrollable desire to destroy. We whetted their appetite for evil and sharpened their bad temperament.

  One Thursday afternoon, as part of their plan to do us harm, they organized a visit from prostitutes, which had terrible consequences for two of us. They brought them, according to what I heard a little later and as I will explain here, from the famous house of Tezcoco and they left them in front of the Colegio, instructing them that they should say that they were a present sent by some friends. Without knocking on the door, they entered directly into the central courtyard and one of them began to sing, which brought us out of our rooms. They sang with such beautiful voices that we came out to see where the singing was coming from. There they were—five beautiful prostitutes, painted and bedecked to seduce even the most chaste of young men. There they were—one of them was singing, the others were gesturing for us to come down and join them. None of us took the first step because we did not understand what this visit meant or why they wanted us to come closer. We students, who were practically children, watched them with fear and fascination. Agustín began speaking, interrupting the prostitutes’ singing, telling us loudly that they were strumpets and that we should go down and enjoy ourselves, that he had already done it several times and that there was nothing better than to touch the flesh between their legs. Then we started to say among ourselves that if that is what they were, we should not go down. We should throw them out. That was when they called us by name, Martín Jacobita and myself, saying sweetly: “Martín Jacobita, come closer. Come here, come close, Hernando de Rivas, we have messages we need to give you, we are not strumpets, we are baptized women, converted to Christianity by the Franciscan fathers.”

  I asked them then:

  —So, you are not strumpets, messengers of wickedness and lasciviousness?

  —We are Christian woman and that should be enough. If you want to know more, come closer…

  —I am Hernando de Rivas. Is it true that you have a message for us?

  —Yes, we do have a message and it is very important that we deliver it so that we remain in good stead with those to whom we owe our loyalty.

  The fact that it was the two of us they called by name should have made us suspicious, but we were not in the least; we were naive like the Franciscan brothers who never taught us to acquire even the shadow of evil, and since they had called us, and we were well-mannered, we approached the center of the courtyard where they were sitting on the ground, to hear what they wanted with us, how we could serve those beauties, and not because they were beautiful, but rather because we were so naive, as I said.

  But those prostitutes were beautiful. Beautiful as only the famous ones are, the ones you have to pay in order to obtain their favors, who are not modest about revealing their charms, who make themselves beautiful to call upon the desires of young men, to awaken lust and lasciviousness. But we did not even think of lust or frivolities, only of being all ears to hear their messages. Moreover, we had never seen anything like them before and we did not know how to determine whether they were prostitutes, women of easy virtue, lewd instigators of lasciviousness, so that is why both of us, whom they had called by name, approached them and were in turn approached by them in the way they do (it is not words they normally use to talk to young men). It was just at the moment when one of them, undoubtedly the most beautiful, was doing a dance to arouse us, playing with us to make us want her, making Martín Jacobita and me blush, and causing wicked thoughts to course through us, that the Franciscans arrived after having been called by the tricksters who had thrown the prostitutes at us, and who had told the friars that we had invited these fine ladies to spend the night at the Colegio to enjoy ourselves, and who, fearing that we would throw the girls out before anything happened, had rushed to call the Franciscans, not allowing the sin time to advance too far.

  Upon seeing the beauty dancing in front of us and Martín Jacobita and me so close to her, Fray Bernardino roared with rage, cursing them with vile words I had never heard him say, and they were saying that he should not to say those things to them, that he should not treat them disrespectfully, that they had come because they had been called, that they were only doing their job, and Fray Bernardino was telling them that they were not working but rather sowing evil in the world, and they burst out laughing, and I, with the arousal their dances had awoken in me, did not know what to do or what not to do.

  Neither Fray Bernardino nor the other Franciscans wanted to hear my explanation, nor the one that my companion Martín Jacobita tried to give them. The Franciscans were more than furious with us. They decided to take back our Franciscan habits in a very sad ceremony that I will not describe because I find it completely lacking in grace and not worth remembering.

  The letter Archbishop Zumárraga sent to his Majesty the King of Spain referred to this time:

  “I ask that H.M. make known whether the hospital will have a space and which part of the church will be the hospital…and that H.M. have the mercy to allow me to leave the bell house, which is now the printing press and the prison, that I am now building, because what was a prison will now be a hospital. It seems that the religious would be better employed in the hospital than in the Colegio de Santiago since we do not know whether it will survive because the best Indian students tendunt ad nuptias potius quam ad continentiam. And if it would please H.M. to grant me the same two houses that had been mercifully given to the students of the Colegio to be part of this hospital for people ill with venereal disease. I think they would be better applied to the hospital and I think they are finished, though they know how to beg, as is usual for my order.”

  And while he was thinking about begging, which we had to do from time to time, the dreams for my life—those of my mother, my own, those of the friars—rolled around on the floor, broken.

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  38Estela quotes the phrase “in the manner of a corpse” in Latin. They are the words of Saint Francis of Assisi that prescribe discipline and obedience to superiors. Saint Ignatius of Loyola also used them in the same sense in his Constitutions. Lear’s note.

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  I followed them for days whenever they descended by way of the Punto Calpe. They never went back to draw anything, but several times one of them has appeared in his child form. The next day, the same one might appear in his adult form.

  None of them remembers anything. The right
hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. This illness began before the decree abolishing language because they were already abandoning it. Nothing has any consequences.

  I went back into the vault (which was the tomb of her children) that I discovered when I followed Caspa. The vault was different. It seemed to be more like a cave, a hollow between the rocks—I say “it seems” because in seeing a difference, it seems I was losing my powers of observation. The surprise kept me from concentrating. The bubble that had been burst open by the bombs, the walls of asphalt and cement with the altar in the middle, it was different, it was different…Piled up at one end of this geologic formation that replaced the vault I had seen in this same spot lay (like those poor children) an uncountable pile of sugarcanes. I picked one up to be sure that was what it was. At the thinnest end of the stalk there was an animal-like black bump. I picked up another stalk and it also had a bump. I picked up another. In addition to the bump, there was a little piece of fiber, like the ones that covered Caspa’s babies, hanging from its tip. I moved more stalks but I didn’t see any more marks. Putting the stalks back in their place was no problem simply because there had been no order before. I can’t put them in order because the order to which they should have belonged no longer exists.

  There’s no connecting thread at all. Things happen, but don’t remain, they’re not fixed, they don’t keep still. They aren’t entirely real. They can be erased in a single stroke.

  Any possibility of interrelation has slipped away among the holes that have been forming on the surface of our reality, the reality of all the members of my community. We can’t communicate with each other because we don’t belong to the same time. The tight mesh of reality that the men from the time of History enjoyed, and across which they began dialogues and had misunderstandings, performed actions and deeds, has broken, it has split open. Nothing I do can be perceived by another member of my community unless it’s outside of the time in which I live. We’ve already lost common time. I think we’ve lost it completely. Their language reform, the insistence on oblivion, has erased us. Now we are nothing. I’ve lost all hope that we’ll return to the time of Time.

  We can’t die.

  What I had believed to have been dreams are not, because we can’t dream either. The veil between sleep and wakefulness has ripped.

  How can I explain what’s happening here if it’s completely beyond words? What tool can I use to describe it? And what can I compare it to? There is not a single sign nearby on which we can see the absence of a syllable.

  Where would I find the word GOD cut in half so I could prove to them that this is what’s happening?

  Has the tape, on which time is recorded, finished? Are we now repeating the present by using segments recorded at other times?

  This is exactly what was happening when Ramón and I were having sex. I was living what had already been lived, by me or by someone else, and that incomplete connection left me outside, I was only attached to the present in certain instances. It’s not that we were distracted because we no longer have the tape for the luxury of distraction. To distract oneself is to squander the temporal-spatial film.

  I could say, “This is not happening now in this instant,” because between one word and the other I hear the ever-increasing crackling of absurdity.

  Nothing has consequences. It comes from nothing and it goes away. The most basic measure of history has dissolved.

  Their dream—the dream of my community—has been realized. In their dream there is no past and it’s not important to them in the least that the cost of the disappearance of the past is the loss of the future. In their memories they can’t converse with the past. I detailed the importance of memory in this very archive, but I didn’t imagine that its complete loss would have this repercussion: now nothing has any repercussions. My brothers, the beings who live with me in L’Atlàntide, have escaped time completely.

  I go down with them to the Punto Calpe; they’re punctual. Nothing they say or do will have any consequences. But now they don’t say anything. Now they don’t use words. They make their grim gestures. Now they aren’t Mother Nature’s helpers. Now they don’t clean up the debris from the great explosion. I’m not the only one who has abandoned that work. I quit to devote myself to the memory of time. They quit to abandon all types of memory. The Earth has been left alone again.

  I’m the only inhabitant of time.

  And at night, the alarm rings, and rings, and rings…

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  Three weeks—which were terrible for me because I did not have the words to convince Sahagún or Basacio of our innocence—at most had passed since the incident, when one day while I was at the market in Mexico City to pick up the woolen cloth for the cassocks of the new students at the Colegio (we had received five, along with a providential donation from the mother of one of them who had given it to us asking only that we would receive and educate the new ones), and just as I was making my transaction, the face of one of those prostitutes, who was almost unrecognizable because she did not have a drop of paint on her face, approached to greet me. My first reaction was not to have anything to do with her. She was more beautiful than the sun. She radiated an aura of innocence. “Don Hernando”—she said to me—“how good to run into you, I wanted to ask for your forgiveness and give you an explanation that might in some way help you…”

  —We Franciscans do not speak to women—I managed to reply, gathering strength from who knows where, because I did not know what to do when I looked at her.

  —But Hernando, you are not dressed as a Franciscan anymore, and I heard…

  —I continue to be in spirit—I interrupted her, full of shame.

  —In spirit? How would I know? But what I need to tell you is of the utmost importance for you—and suddenly, adjusting the tone of her voice and raising it louder, she took my side against the vendor and obtained the woolen cloth for the cassocks practically as a gift, arguing that it was not very good, that it was for the Franciscans, that it was for children, weigh and consider the Colegio de la Santa Cruz. Each one of her gestures, each of her inflections, all of the features of her face and body spoke of an innocence that disarmed me. Was she the one who danced that lascivious dance, inciting me to wickedness and moral corruption? Could it be? Her body, her face, her beautiful hair radiated purity and serenity. I remembered what that dance had been like and I did not find anything dirty about it. Watching her talking to, and arguing prices with, the vendor, it seemed to me that her dance was just that, a dance, one that was animated by the lewd voices of the others (who were undoubtedly public women, though at that moment I was doubting everything), and I didn’t know if they were angels or spirits or simply voices emitted by the stones, but it seemed lewd to us. I was so convinced of her innocence while she was talking calmly and gently, even managing to reduce the price to such a ridiculous sum that I felt a terrible shame for having been aroused by an innocent dance.

  While they cut the piece of woolen cloth that I would take from the roll (I could have taken the whole thing for the price she negotiated) she started chatting with me, talking, not like she had with the vendor with pauses and silences and with a clear and strong voice, but rapidly and in a very low voice, sweeter and still more innocent, saying to me:

  —Don Hernando, what I am saying is true—I am very distressed by the problems I have caused you. Look, I am not, like Father Sahagún shouted, a public woman. The other women I entered the courtyard of the Colegio with were, and I did wrong by going with them, but I have to feed my daughter somehow. There is no reason for me to lie to you, it is not the first time they have paid me to go some place with the others. I sing and dance, they sin. I do not want to do anything except practice my art and I do it because I believe in the beauty and the grace of our dances and in the beauty of the music of our ancestors, and I do not believe it is evil to do that, and it is not bad for them to pay me for it either. If ou
r noble lords no longer have the goods or money to pay for dances and songs, I have to dance for the Spaniards and, because they do not have our wisdom, if they have me accompany those ladies, well, I cannot refuse…I hope you understand. I never imagined what would happen. Look—she continued, taking the piece of woolen cloth they gave us—I will walk with you, they know who I am here, it will not damage your reputation. What happened that day—she continued talking, without waiting for me to say yes or no—what happened was that some of Jerónimo López’s people paid us to go to the Colegio and we never imagined they would immediately notify the friars of our visit…You all did nothing wrong, nor did I. I only did what I was told to do, and very wrongly for just a few coins. The public women did not have time to do their things with the boys, and I assure you that you would not have done them because I was there to protect your chastity. Will you let me go and explain this to Father Sahagún?

  Terrible idea! How could this woman believe that Fray Bernardino would let her get near him? Not even if he were not a Franciscan…How could I come up with a pretext for her to see him? He only had men as advisors, so I could not even imagine that he would be willing to see her.

  —Try to figure out a way to tell him, Don Hernando, I know very well the harm my behavior has done to those men. I am very ashamed…

  If it was true that she was angel, for her beauty and the illusion of purity that she radiated made her seem angelic, it was also true that she was a fallen angel because when I was walking by her side I was very well aware that her feet made a sound when they touched the ground. Guiding me by the hand through the streets of the City of Mexico, in less time than it takes to say “time” (or so it seemed to me since I did not even have time to realize it), I found myself beside her in the room she lived in. Carrying the piece of woolen cloth, I was flying with the angel who dazzled me. When I found myself inside her room, I did not have time (again time), not even for a minute, to fear any wicked intent on her part, and I did not believe that it was in her flesh that she was the fallen angel. In front of us, lying on the floor, was a little girl, a living doll lying on her back on the mat, playing with her own little hands and making some sweet little sounds with her fat cheeks.