Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  Ah, my beauties. We’ve lost everything. In the ultimate community of men and women, we were all equals, no one thought less of another because of race, sex, or appearance. Nobody was rich or poor, powerful or enslaved. We lived in harmony; we overcame disease, old age, and death. In that idyllic community that could have been eternal, our fear of the past resulted in the destruction of the species.

  But let’s write a human end to L’Atlàntide, and not the abominable one to which we have fallen, perhaps until the end of time. Let’s say that Time ultimately defeated L’Atlàntide. Let’s say that God abandoned it and ordered seven plagues to fall on it when he saw that nobody remembered him. Let’s say that the ambition to perfect the species made it embrace a suicidal cause. “O memory, wake!”

  None of this will be true. L’Atlàntide doesn’t accept the end man had imagined for it. The shining silk of the spider—sparkling in the sun, oscillating beautifully in the wind—is more like the people of L’Atlàntide are today than the men from the time of History.

  And what if I don’t understand anything? What if, free of words and time, stripped of all reality, they have found paradise?

  to live without remembering might be the secret of the gods.

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  I’ve written here, and hidden in my chair, how I sinned in the arms and between the legs of an evil angel—one of the diablomes who walks the Earth on two feet, incarnated in the body of a woman. But this was not what darkened my soul, what made my spirit go from bad to evil, from what one should do to what one should not do, from disappointment to mockery and contempt. An abyss separates that child who understood the grace and divine words found in the stories of the saints, the one who flew on the wings of faith, and me—the legless one.

  I am a person who lacks illumination, distant from the light of faith, lost in the darkness of detachment, disillusionment, and disinterest. I do not belong to anything. I am not from that time unfamiliar with the lock and key, I am not from those magnificent cities where the houses were always open, where the quequezalcoa, tlenamacac, and tlamacazqui—which were the three levels of priests (the first, “feathered serpents,” devoted to Huitzilopochtli and Tláloc, the second, “merchants of fire,” and the third, “servants”)—ruled these lands with wisdom, nor am I from over there, from the fog and heavenly clouds where my people believed they saw the first twelve Franciscans descend, nor from the cruel European lands. I do not belong to China or to the lands of the blacks.

  The years, baring their horrible fangs, expelled me from the warm bodies that my own body believed it belonged to. My dear mother: I, Hernando, your son, did not recognize the words of the ancient gods. Did I not understand the divine words that are everywhere, that all things see and all things know, and that it is so wonderful that the Earth has its kingdom here, which began at the beginning of the world and which one day wanted to bring us into its faith because we needed to be blessed? What did I have faith in? Which world did I belong to?

  One day I want to leave written here that I, Hernando, lost everything that gives a man pleasure and joy, that my life forever lost whatever meaning a man’s life has. At night, I raise my prayers so that God’s light might again envelop with light the darkness I live in. Do our lives not mean anything anymore? Will we be flung into the final river that will carry us to death, with our eyes blinded in the thief’s sack of lies? Together, inside that sack, like good stewards of the Colegio de la Santa Cruz, we will steal to see how we can profit from our victims. “If we will die, we will die: if we will perish, we will perish; the truth is that the gods die too.” But, apart from this useless sack, this not-life-not-death, nothing is allowed. “Nec vivere nec mori volumus: vitae nos odium tenet timor mortis: We do not want to live or die. We are possessed by the hatred of life and by the fear of death.”39

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  39This sounds like a Nahua song to me. Lear’s note.

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE ESTELINO

  The following appears at the end of Hernando’s words, in a different hand:

  “Here end the writings of Hernando de Rivas, one of the first boys of the Colegio Real de Santa Cruz, native of Tetzcuco, an excellent Latinist who translated anything whatsoever from Latin and Romance into the Mexican language with great facility; attending more to the meaning than to the letter, he wrote and translated a variety of things—more than thirty quires of paper for Fray Juan Bautista. He died in the year ninety-seven [1597], on the eleventh of September, and I believe Our Lord paid him for his faithful labor because he was a very good Christian Indian, loved the things of our holy Catholic faith very much and taught the Mexican language to the religious for the honor and service of Our Lord. With his help P. Fr. Alonso de Molina composed Arte y Vocabulario mexicano, P. Fr. Juan de Gaona composed Diálogos de la paz y tranquilidad del alma, P. Fr. Juan Bautista el Vocabulario Eclesiástico (a very important work for priests), and a large part of P. Estela’s las Vanidades del mundo, the Flos Sanctorum or Vidas de Santos, the Exposición del Decálogo, and many other treatises and books that I will try to bring to light, if the Majesty of God would be served in giving me life to do it, non recuso laborem.40 These quires, which I have not read, will continue to be guarded in the hidden compartment of the chair, according to Hernando’s last wishes, which I thereby respect. R.I.P.”

  I’m not sure what to say. I knew from the beginning that these pages would end at some point, and I had prolonged the arrival of the end for the sake of the story. This note, written by a man who is completely unknown to me, robs me of my Hernando (where was the end of Agustín that you promised to tell us, what is the story that made you loathsome? What happened in your life to make you lose your faith?) and forces me to live immersed in an atrocious reality, no better than Hernando’s, “where envy and lies imprisoned me.” Would it occur to you to recite these verses of Fray Luis de León?:

  Oh, now safe harbor

  for my long error!

  Oh, so desired

  for certain repair

  of my heavy, dark past,

  joyful repose, sweet, restful!

  Slosos keston de Estelino

  40These words almost coincide with those of Fray Juan Bautista in the Prologue to his Sermonario, reproduced by García Icazbalceta in his Bibliografía Mexicana del siglo XVI. Editor’s note.

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  Last night, between alarms (which I now understand don’t ring for me, but are rather a result of the reigning disorder), I saw Estela, I saw Hernando, and the three of us saw each other.

  Though his eyes were open, Hernando denied seeing me. But he did hear me and he laughed when I told him who I was. Estela looked at me, eyes bulging, and said:

  —What a priest, what a priest!—She was as excited as a gas bubble in water.

  Today I’m going to try to go back to be with them, I’ll go back in time and revive them. I want to go into the cestos to live with them.

  I can’t stay with my community anymore. I’m going to try to transform myself into words and jump into the realm I can share with Estela and Hernando. I think I can do it. The realm that books inhabit is a real place. The one I’m in no longer is. If we have lived in a fantasy—a fantasy in which there was no feces, or trees, or death—from the beginning (as I suspected in the end), misled and immersed a virtual reality that didn’t coincide with our actions, then in breaking with grammar, the community has also broken with the version of reality imposed on us. They’ve left me alone “with my feet on the ground,” and yet floating among the clouds, on the verge of disintegrating like they are.

  I will be with Estela and Hernando until the end of time. I’ll erase the announcement of Hernando’s death, I’ll take out the paragraph in which it is mentioned, I won’t let him meet his end. Nor will I allow Estela to meet her death either, the one that she would have experienced in the great explosion. I’ll bring both of them to me, we’ll share a commo
n kesto that nobody will be able to lock. The three of us will inhabit in the same realm. The three of us will belong to three distinct times, our memories will be of three distinct ages, but I will know Hernando’s, and Hernando will know mine, and we’ll share a common space where we can look each other in the eyes and we’ll establish a new community.

  Ours will be the Heavens on Earth. L’Atlàntide will belong to the past, like ancient Tenochtitlan, like Hernando’s Mexico, and Estela’s country.

  The three of us will devote ourselves to remembering. That’s how we’ll establish the beginning of time. Christ will not awaken in our shared dream, but Mohammed and Buddha, Tezcatlipócatl and the poet Nezahualcóyotl will shake hands. We’ll live our lives remembering. Our future will be spent remembering. But we won’t dissolve, we won’t fall into the trap of idiocy my community has plunged into.

  We’ll save language and the memory of man, and one day we’ll shape the hand that will tell our story, and we’ll wonder about the mystery of death, the foolish absurdity of men and women. We will feel horror, even though our bodies will experience neither cold nor pain.

  An abyss will open at our feet. Those will be the Heavens on Earth.

  Slosos keston de Learo

  TRANSLATORS NOTE

  Carmen Boullosa originally published Cielos de la Tierra in 1997, five years after the quincentenary of the so-called “discovery” of the “New World.” This was a time when many Latin American writers were reflecting on and writing about the significance of this 500th anniversary. What is so interesting is that this novel is as relevant, or perhaps even more so, now than when it was published twenty years ago, especially given the current political and cultural climate around the world where we find a resurgence of racism, intolerance, and discrimination, not to mention the damage we are doing to the environment of our earth.

  I was introduced to this novel through a presentation given by Charles Hatfield, who would soon after suggest I translate it. After reading Cielos de la Tierra, I knew it was the perfect project for me to embark on because of the subject matter and themes Boullosa treats in the novel. Little did I understand on that first quick reading the profound complexity and the great challenges I would face in bringing it into English. This was a fascinating novel to translate and I’m privileged and honored to have had the opportunity.

  The novel, whose title I’ve translated as Heavens on Earth, tells of worlds where language and speech, and consequently agency, are denied, suppressed, or obliterated and is deeply concerned with translation, literature, language, and the (re)telling of history. This is most obvious in the fact that the three main characters are all translators. However, the depth of Boullosa’s preoccupation with translation here is illustrated by the fact that all three translator-narrators work with, and leave their mark on, the same text: a history of the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Santiago Tlatelolco written by a sixteenth-century Aztec native who was educated by the Franciscans at the Colegio. Hernando, the translator-narrator from early sixteenth-century Mexico, translates the history and memories of the ancient Aztecs, which he incorporates into the history he sets out to write on the Colegio; Estela, the translator-narrator from late twentieth-century Mexico, translates Hernando’s manuscript from Latin into Spanish, incorporating her own memories and stories; and finally, the translator-narrator who is writing from the post-apocalyptic future, Lear, translates her own experiences into Spanish and transcribes Estela’s Spanish translation of Hernando’s Latin manuscript using the writing technique of her futuristic community.

  To create this novel, Boullosa makes heavy use of both attributed and unattributed quotations, which she excerpts (or paraphrases) from poetry, novels, essays, biblical stories, religious writings, Aztec legends and poetry, historical narratives, and archival documents. For example, Boullosa interweaves excerpts of poetry and prose from Álvaro Mutis, as well as excerpts taken from the poetry of Emily Brontë, Oscar Wilde, Rubén Darío, and Ramón López Velarde; excerpts of novels written by Gabriel García Márquez and Federico Gamboa; excerpts of essays written by Emilio Pacheco and Michael Krauss; excerpts from the writings of Saint Francis, Bernardino Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, Fray Juan Bautista’s Sermonario; historical works written by Joaquín García Icazbalceta; Gerónimo de Mendieta’s Historia eclesiástica indiana; Motolinía’s Historia de los indios de la Nueva España; and Torquemada’s Monarquía indiana, among many more. In Lear’s sections alone, there are excerpts from twenty-eight poems by ten different poets, which range in length from just one or two lines to several stanzas.

  Given all these layers, this novel might be best understood as sort of palimpsest whereon the traces left by others show through a parchment that has been overwritten many times. Here the three narrators become the mediators, or intermediaries, through which we hear these other voices, through which the other stories are told—each one leaving a trace on the parchment.

  All the translations of Spanish-language literary quotations and paraphrases in Lear’s section, most of which have not been translated before, are my own, with the exception of one biblical paraphrase. Though literary references are not predominant in Estela’s narrative, in one section Boullosa quotes extensively from Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, a classic work of Latin American fiction. Given that this text had already been so masterfully translated by Gregory Rabassa, one of the most iconic twentieth-century translators, I decided it would be best to use Rabassa’s translations of the quoted passages rather than to create my own. In the sections narrated by Hernando, Boullosa also quotes and paraphrases rather extensively from the Bible. Rather than translate the passages taken from the Bible in Hernando’s sections myself, I decided to use the Douay-Rheims Bible (DRB) version, which is the English translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible, which itself was translated by St. Jerome into Latin from the Greek and Hebrew texts between 382 and 405 AD. Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was the version sanctified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1546 to be the authentic and official version of the Bible. I would expect that the Latin Vulgate would be the Bible that Hernando would have read and quoted from, and so I chose the DRB as the English version most contemporary to his time. The DRB New Testament was published in 1582 by the English College at Rheims, and the DRB Old Testament was published in 1609 by the English College at Douay.

  My strategy in translating this text was to foreignize the translation enough to allow the reader to not only be aware of, but also experience and appreciate, the linguistic and cultural differences of a text originally written in another language and cultural context. To this end, I decided to use the original Spanish-language terms in the following instances: proper names, place names, loan words, and culinary terms.

  Regarding proper names, I have kept these in Spanish unless they belong to historical figures outside of the Hispanic world and for whom there are accepted English-language versions. Related to this decision of using the original Spanish for proper names is the one to retain diminutive forms, familial names, and terms of endearment in Spanish, rather than translating or Anglicizing them. I have also kept place names in Mexico in the Spanish. However, for any other locations around the globe referred to in the novel, I have used the more familiar and commonly accepted English forms as recognized in North America.

  In addition, I did not translate Spanish words that have been borrowed into the English language and can be found in the dictionary, even though they might be unfamiliar to the general English-language reader. Examples of some of these words are: acequia, cacique, cedula, cenote, comal, criollo, encomienda, mestizo, and quetzal.

  I made a similar decision with regard to leaving many culinary terms (food or kitchen items) that are specific to the Mexican or Pre-Columbian context in their original form either because Boullosa had already provided an explication in the text or because I added a bit of explication myself. An example of how I might explicate for the English language reader is this one from He
rnando’s first section: “As soon as they entered Acallan they were given the hot, thick, sweetened cornflour drink known as atole and the sweet roasted blue cornflour drink called pinole.” Here, the underlined text represents the explication. In addition, because I explicated the term atole in this instance, when it appears later in the book I simply use the Spanish term. This, then, is the strategy I employ throughout the translation: I use a foreign-language word or phrase accompanied by an explication on the first appearance in the text, and thereafter I simply use the term in the original language.

  Some of the challenges related to translating this novel in particular arise from trying to capture the narrative voice and style of the three narrators, one man and two women, each of whom is writing from his or her own perspective and living in a different time period. The eras in which two of the narrators live are so “foreign”—one being the science-fiction world of a post-apocalyptic future and the other being sixteenth-century Colonial Mexico—that they have distinct languages associated with them, namely, the futuristic science-fiction terminology, as well as the Esperanto, French, and German languages associated with the futuristic world and the now archaic languages of both the civil and religious worlds of early colonial Mexico, which includes Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl.