Scorpius, sweet purple scorpion, raceme of moist mud. She caresses you, clasps you, cups your weight.
“We have left our homes and we must pay the price of such prodigious behavior. Exile is marvelous homage to our origins.”
Her toothless mouth descends upon your belly.
“You believe that time always advances. That all is future. You want a future; you cannot imagine yourself without it. You do not want to provide any opportunity to those of us who require that time disintegrate and then retrace its steps until it come to the privileged moment of love and there, only there, stop forever.”
Her tongue slides along the burning smoothness of your penis; toothless gums imprison you; everything is viscous, dank, open; she touches the live fascine of nerves.
“It is sad that you will not live as long as I; a great pity that you cannot penetrate my dreams and see me as I see myself, eternally prostrated at the foot of tombs, eternally present at the death of Kings, insanely wandering through the galleries of palaces yet to be constructed, mad, yes, and drunk with grief before the loss that only the combination of rank and madness can support. I see myself, dream of myself, touch myself, wandering, from century to century, from castle to castle, from crypt to crypt, mother of all Kings, wife of all Kings, surviving all, finally shut up in a castle in the midst of rain and misty grasslands, weeping another death befallen in sunny lands, the death of another Prince of our degenerate blood; I see myself dry and stooped, tiny and trembling as a sparrow, toothless, whispering into indifferent ears: ‘Do not forget the last Prince, and let God grant us a sad but not odious memory…’”
You spread your legs for her mouth.
“I said to him: do not dishonor yourself, always be the Emperor, make them bow before you; a monarch is a good shepherd, a president is a mercenary; a republic is a stepmother, a monarchy a mother. You and I will be the mother and father of these people, I said to you as we were climbing from the sea, from Veracruz, toward the plateau, toward Mexico City, seeing frontiers of nopal cactus, naked and swollen-bellied children, dark impassive women wrapped in rebozos; stiff, mute men. We loved them so, didn’t we, Maxl? Do you remember, Maxl, when we hid behind the curtains at Miramar and watched how your brother’s soldiers beat and shot the rebellious Italians; when we allowed them in Trieste to whip a pregnant woman until punishment turned into a blood bath. They told me that we killed ninety thousand Mexicans. But we were their mother and father. They had no name. Only you and I had a name in this anonymous land. But now, dear Maxl, now that I imagine you alone and besieged, far away, dead, I would like to shout: in the name of those we murdered without moving a finger, in the name of those who died while we danced in Miramar and Chapultepec, for the pity we did not have for you, may you have pity on us! Punish our crimes with your pity. Let your mercy be our torture. Castigate and pierce our bodies with the intolerable humiliation of forgiveness. Do not grant us martyrdom. We do not deserve it. We do not deserve it. Are we victims of Mexico, Maxl, you and I and all our ancestors, all the kings of Flemish and Austrian and Spanish blood who first conquered this Indian land and, finally, in this place exhausted their royal line? No, in the end we are all the children of Mexico, because only by hatred can one measure love for Mexico, and only Mexico’s vengeance is measure of its love. Bells are tolling on the hill. Can you hear them, Maxl? Can you not understand that 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.”
Silence pursued. Silence personified. Spurting, bitter milk; death rattles. The Old Woman’s mouth holds you, saliva and semen blend, and now she allows the mingled liquids to return from her lips toward their origin, the exhausted testicles breathing with the rhythm of a caged animaclass="underline" you are bared to the sky.
“There is no possible exchange, my son. A true gift does not admit equal recompense; an authentic offering rises above all comparison and all price. They gave us an empire; could we repay that with simple death, with simple madness? I, poor wretch, returned to seek what I had lost. Again I plunged into these accursed jungles. I let myself be led by the map of the new world, the map of arrows and insects that allows us to abandon the known world and venture where no one has any claim on us, to the heart of the virgin forest, to the pyramid itself.”
You lie beside the adobe wall, panting beneath the sun.
“It was for nought. My place was already taken. Another woman stood on the steps of the pyramid. An Indian woman. She was adorned with necklaces of jade and turquoise, and she clasped a dagger of flint in her hand. I recognized her; it was she who when I disembarked from the Novara offered me this gift: this feather mask. Her feet trod the porous stone of the stairway and I could see the wounds of irons and chains on her ankles. I knew she was waiting for someone — perhaps a different man — to lead him a second time. To repeat the eternal journey of defeats and victories, of jungle and sea, plateau and volcano. I pitied her. I returned the map to her. Now I must reconstruct it if I wish to escape from here, to forget, to return to the penumbra that awaits me … the castle in the mists…”
A messenger enters, panting and bleeding, and falls to his knees.
“Rest now. You will forget everything I have said. All my words were spoken yesterday.”
The Old Woman imitates the breathing of the wounded man who has just reached your camp in the Veracruz sierra, while you rise slowly to your feet, zipping your trousers; you run your fingers through your hair, and with your feet scatter the night’s fire: a pyramid of ashes.
“Each of us has the right to carry a secret to the tomb.”
After entrusting your prisoner to the soldiers, you turn off the battery-powered tape recorder that throughout the night has repeated, hypnotically, a single tape, the constant sound of a funeral drum. That tape recorder is the only thing the Old Woman brought with her when she was captured. You expected to hear a message, decipher a code, find something that would implicate her. Only a tape with the sound of a mourning drum. In vain you search for the cloth — you cannot call it, as she does, a map of the jungle — the trance-induced woman fashioned before your eyes in this very hut.
You go out into the garden and you waste precious time poking through the rubbish at the base of the wall. Futile. If only you could remember the exact design of that cloth: surely it was the map of a primitive hunt, the precise composition of the zones of feathers in relation to the center of spiders, the color of the feathers, the directions signaled by the arrows. You have wasted your time. Your arms fall to your sides. You leave the garden and ask about the messenger who arrived at the camp this morning, panting and wounded.
The messenger is lying on a straw mat in the shade. He drinks awkwardly from the gourd you offer him. He tells you that the previous night he had gone to El Tajín as you had ordered to make a recount of the arms hidden inside the pyramid. He had been overtaken there by an electrical storm and had decided to spend the night in the shelter of the jutting eaves of the Totonac temple. Without close examination it is difficult to distinguish between the luxurious vegetation and the elaborate carving of the façade. Shadows of the jungle and shadows of stone integrate into an inseparable architecture. One can easily be deceived. But he swears to you that as he leaned back into one of the openings in the façade, looking for an eave under which he could take shelter, feeling his way with his hands, he touched a face.