If Esch is Luther, the novel enters the realm of the “fantastic.” The fantastic of Terra Nostra is not far from madness, but that folly (baroque folly) does not oppose the novel as an aesthetic category. On the contrary, Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist (“a Dostoevsky,” as Fuentes says) can see and say.
9
For Cervantes, history was the barely visible background of adventure.
For Balzac, it became a “natural” dimension without which man is unthinkable.
Today, at last, history appears like a monster, ready to assault each of us and to destroy the world. Or else (another aspect of its monstrousness), it represents the immeasurable, incomprehensible mass of the past — a past which is unbearable as forgetfulness (because man will lose himself), but also as memory (because its mass will crush us).
Let us read the last pages of Terra Nostra. Philip II lies in his coffin in the Escorial. As often happens in poetry marked by the baroque tradition (a tradition which is as strong in my country as in Carlos’s — another parallel between Central Europe and Latin America!), the corpse is aware of being dead. Philip of Terra Nostra lives his death. One day, he rises and leaves his coffin. He encounters a tour guide who panics and runs away. But Philip is also afraid of the guide and flees to the mountains. There he finds some peasants around a small fire. We are in the distant future. An old mountain man strokes his head and Philip is suddenly full of “a sense of comfort and gratitude.”
The encounter between Philip and the guide and the villagers is not only “beautiful like the encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine.” It makes us hear the uninterrupted dialogue between our present and humanity’s immemorial past — that dialogue which only the novel of our late epoch (of the West’s late epoch) knows how to hear and say.
Translated by David Rieff