Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  It was around the same time I saw the principal lord detained with impunity by the soldiers who were enemies of Cortés (providing me with the most faithful companion, my jewel, my treasure, the dagger that they would never have imagined would have become an Indian boy’s) that I first tasted queso de tierra, which is what the Spaniards called the blue-green algae we harvested from the shores of Lake Texcoco and formed into cakes, because the taste reminded them of cow’s milk cheese. Even to this day I associate its taste with the arrest of the noble lord—the violence and elegance, the supplication and impiety mingle in my memory with the verdant succulence of the queso de tierra. The taste of the lime from the lake (this is what they used to make the exquisite queso de tierra) evokes the memory of the dagger cutting the fabric and the gush of blood running from the nobleman’s stomach. I have not eaten it in years because it is a bodily pleasure, a call to gluttony. Because it is not corn, baked bread, minted coins, a book, a falcon or other game bird, something given for weddings, or possessions of the deceased that are distributed among the heirs, queso de tierra is exempt from taxation, as is everything sold by the Indians. And because it is a highly prized food, it is reserved for those who have a purse full of money. It is for all of the reasons listed above that I have not eaten it in years. But I have not forgotten the memory of it. The infamous arrest of the noble lord who was loyal to Cortés is also fixed in my memory in a strange way, and defending him in my imagination with my dagger reminds me of the pleasure of the taste of the queso de tierra.

  Then Cortés left Tezcoco.

  He is gone, even from my memory, and I have not even said anything about what my village was like at that time. Tezcoco was four or five leagues to the east, and on the opposite side of the salt-water lake, from Tenochtitlan-Mexico. It was the second principal city of this land, and the lord of Tezcoco was the second lord. It controlled fifteen provinces as far as Tuzpan on the coast of the North Sea. It is on an open plain between the lake and the mountain range and the big mountain called Tláloc. There is not a fast-flowing or primary river within the city, but there are many arroyos that run to the lake and almost disappear during the dry season. When I was a child, the water channels and irrigation canals that the two Nezahualcóyotl kings created to water their orchards and gardens were still well maintained, and I drank, as our grandfathers had done, the water from the wells. These kings constructed a system of waterworks—irrigation canals, wells, water channels—with so much knowledge of water management that they successfully diverted the course of one river, originating from the springs of Teotihuacan (that today is held in encomienda by don Antonio de Bezán, Chief Constable of the Holy Inquisition of New Spain), so that it would serve some of the houses of pleasure about a quarter of a league away from the city. But now the waterworks of the Nezahualcóyotls have been destroyed and the water courses in a disorderly fashion in different directions.

  Because it was a rich and important city, Texcoco had many grand buildings, gracious houses, and its main temple was taller than the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan.

  The palace of King Nezahualpilli was quite something to see. It was magnificent and could have housed an army. It was there that Ixtlilxóchitl, ally of the Spaniards and the first lord under their control in Tezcoco, lodged the three Flemish Franciscan friars—Fray Juan de Tecto, the Emperor’s confessor, Fray Juan de Ayora, and Fray Pedro de Gante—who came to our city to learn the Mexican language. They say the house is devastated now. The nearby orchard had more than a thousand incredibly beautiful cedar trees. There were also many gardens and an enormous pond, which could be reached by by way of flat-bottomed rafts through an underground canal.

  Tezcoco was so large that it measured one league in width by six in length. It was a very large city. It was very beautiful. They did not neglect the lake, but rather protected it behind some enormous reed beds and very tall, cultivated trees.

  According to Fray Andrés de Olmos, who said they showed him some paintings, the first man of Tezcoco11 was born because they say that when the sun was at nine o’clock, it shot an arrow in that direction, making a hole from which emerged the first man, who had no more of a body than shoulders, arms, and hands and then a complete woman emerged, and when they were asked how the man could have procreated, since he did not have a whole body, they said some disgusting nonsense that is not for here, and that the man was called Aculmaitl, and that this is where the name of the village of Aculma came from, because aculli means shoulder, and maitl means hand or arm, since the man was no more than shoulders and arms, or he was all shoulders and arms, because as I said, according to this piece of fiction and falsehood, the first man had no more than shoulders and arms for a body.

  —

  Now I will return to my reliable and trustworthy Latin. Someone else was spying over my shoulder, as if I were the man made only of shoulders, which did not stop him from making the woman his companion in such a dirty and unmentionable manner. As for me, they can spy on me; I will not put down my book, which does not arouse much curiosity in them because, after all, they are already convinced that I am foolishly obsessed with writing down the customs of the ancients, as I have told them I am doing whenever they have deigned to listen to me. I have explained: “I am writing because I want to leave a written account of the foolishness of those who did not know the light of God” and they do not bother to listen to me, because this has been heard quite a bit around here, and these days it is seen as a foolish and useless project. It was not like that in our better days.

  I might be wasted, or only shoulders like the first man of Tezcoco, but I will recount the memory of the light that one day shone on the Colegio as it was, and not as it is today—the refuge of a poor useless man without legs and an old, bad wing under which they do a poor job of teaching students to read the ABCs and to repeat the Creed and the Our Father without understanding them.

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  9In Spanish in the original from here. Estela’s note.

  10The text in Spanish ends here and continues in Latin. Estela’s note.

  11In Spanish in the original from here. Estela’s note.

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  Even though the dimensions of our colony are not extensive and despite the fact that there are no walls that allow us to be invisible from each other, or furniture to hide behind, or blankets to cover our faces with, or any kind of clothing, curtains, or rugs, we jealously guard our privacy.

  Our customs are rich in the art of evasion and tricks of concealment. We respect the importance of silence, as I’ve said, and we also jealously guard our solitude. The Punto Calpe is our equivalent of the public plaza. That is where we drop our custom of “I’m not looking at you” and smile at one another, we catch up on each other’s various activities (unfortunately, every day now we are using shorter and shorter utterances and filling our conversations with numbers and the names of letters), we exchange looks and gestures, we touch one another, we make dates to get together. This is where we weave the thin thread of our weak collective life.

  Obviously if you don’t want to interact with others, you don’t go to the plaza. If I’m not in the mood to see anyone, I descend much earlier or later than the others so I don’t run into anyone on the bridge, and if I do happen to meet someone during the off-hours, we just pretend not to see each other. If I really don’t want to see anyone’s face, I don’t go by way of Punto Calpe and instead descend via another route and move around on my own. This is something I do from time to time.

  That’s why I was so surprised today when somebody grabbed me by the arm while I was descending by way of the Punto Calpe during the antisocial hours. I was so completely focused on my own thoughts, so lost in thought, that for a second I didn’t recognize the person who was holding on to me.

  It’s inconceivable to see a stranger in our community. Each one of us has distinct features. Of course these features change, because faces change, but not so much that they become unrecognizabl
e. Since we’ve overcome the illness known as old age, each of our faces has had sufficient time to manifest the splendors and miseries of life. There are no strangers in L’Atlàntide. I have to add that since the founding of our colony, we have believed in the power of images and we were repeatedly and incessantly exposed to the image of each person’s face. I’m getting off topic, but since I mentioned it, I’ll spend a little time on the subject.

  When they selected us, or better said, when they selected the egg and the sperm (after having examined the genes) that would become us, they opted for the greatest diversity of physiognomies. Our community is a sampler of what Mother Nature gave to human appearance. In our colony, “race” isn’t important because each of us is our own distinct race and because the men who created us—the survivors—made each of us (aided by the Image Receptor) equally beautiful and equally worthy of respect. During the Conformación, they used the Image Receptor to transmit to us an infinite number of images of ourselves as we were at that time and how they could conjecture we would look as adults. The images were both still and moving, flat and three-dimensional. In these images, we saw ourselves in the most diverse of landscapes, visiting all the important places on Earth as they had been before the men from the time of History destroyed them. In these images we scale mountains, swim in oceans and white-water rivers, we dodge waterfalls and explore caves, we walk along many different paths, we plant trees and pick cherries and oranges, we cut sunflowers in vast fields covered with them. We made love, ate, laughed, we wore different kinds of clothing and sometimes nothing at all, and we were always beautiful. We ran through dense forests, stumbling in the semi-darkness; we dove into the translucent water of the Caribbean Sea and the reefs of the southern seas, we navigated the Amazon, traveled down the Nile, and jumped from rock to rock at the bottom of Sumidero Canyon. We saw ourselves controlling the flight of an eagle and racing an ostrich, and we rode camels, elephants, and horses. We skied the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies. We climbed up to the crater of Popocatépetl and to the top of the Himalayas; we swam in the cenotes of Mexico; we flew above wetlands and prairies and saw rugged, unusually shaped cordilleras beneath our feet; we heard the cracking of the gigantic rocks of the desert and crossed the Sahara. We did everything that would have been possible to do if Mother Nature were still alive. But we didn’t tame fire, slay a dragon, cut the head off a Gorgon, throw stones at Goliath, ride on the back of Pegasus, or create a fountain by stamping our feet—though we did, and I have no idea why, see ourselves being born from sea foam and sailing on an oyster shell toward the island of Cythera and the Peloponnese peninsula. Grass and flowers sprang up wherever we stepped and doves and sparrows accompanied us whenever we flew through the air.

  I won’t stop to write down all the images they transmitted to us with the Receptor because even though the images were of us, we never did any of those things. The images were created by the men who made us—the survivors—and have nothing to do with reality. I saw myself as an adult long before I actually became one; I saw myself at four, eight, and ten years old; I saw the Earth without a trace of the destruction we see today, when she was more than just a devastated wasteland covered with rubbish and battered by the dirty, irascible wind. Nobody would ever have guessed, without prior knowledge or an exhaustive investigation, that the globe below L’Atlàntide is the same planet that was lush and beautiful in the images. Who could have ever guessed that it would become a corpse? In the images there was no trace of humankind, its voracity and desire for self-destruction, or the stupidity that ultimately led to its annihilation and to the disaster that devastated the Earth. In the images you wouldn’t know that man had abused Mother Nature or that the atmosphere had burned one day.

  Once we were out of childhood, they stopped the continuous transmission of the images. It was no longer necessary. Each of our faces had been endowed with a soul. It was impossible to imagine that something could incite enmity, suspicion, or distrust in any of the inhabitants of L’Atlàntide because we all had the same roles to play.

  So, you can imagine how terribly confused I was when I thought I saw a stranger. This thought lasted only a second, or even less than a second. My surprise immediately grabbed hold of something firmer. Of course it wasn’t a stranger, simply because that just wasn’t possible. I was distracted and I started to chide myself, thinking: “this is too much, I am too much.” But when he saw my look of surprise, before I chided myself, Ramón asked me:

  —24, is something wrong?

  —Ramón—I replied—Ramoncito, forgive me. For a second, with the surprise of having someone take me by the arm at this time of day on the Punto Calpe, and with my thoughts somewhere else entirely, you won’t believe it, but I didn’t recognize you. I’m too much, what a bizarre feeling, Ramoncito. —I stroked his hair, fine and straight, like silk. —You look really good, Ramón.

  —You didn’t recognize me? Unbelievable…I would laugh, but it’s too absurd. Come with me, 24, I want to talk to you.

  Arms around each other, we walked down the stairs in silence. The ties that bind my community are very tight. We grew up together. We were educated together, we embarked on the road to survival, the founding of L’Atlàntide, and the creation of our way of life together. Not to mention that while we were growing up we saw each other starring in magnificent adventures on a splendid planet that our colony was trying to recover and maintain. We aren’t independent and no one is considered to be better than anyone else. When we arrived at the Jardín de las Delicias, Ramón started explaining things to me as if I were the stranger, a foreigner.

  —We’re protective of our privacy and at the same time we enjoy our life together. You know that. Even though, and because, we think very differently, we’ve managed to create a communal life that protects us from each other, and that protects all of us from ourselves. Here, no man is a slave to another…

  —Ramón, I already know all of this. Why do you feel the need to remind me when it’s not necessary to do so?—I said, as soon as he paused.

  —24, you can do whatever you want with your own time. And I don’t need to tell you that it wouldn’t hurt for you to also work for the good of the colony and the Earth, because you already know that too. And because at one time you worked very hard, you can enjoy a break if you want to take one. You can do what you want with your own time, but—here he paused and took a breath—mais— he emphasized the word, pronouncing it slowly, hitting each letter—but don’t try to harm us, 24, this is not a game.

  He looked me straight in the eye when he said, “This is not a game.” Ramón is a wonderful person and he inspires an enormous amount of confidence, but I saw something deep in his eyes that I didn’t like.

  —What do you mean by saying that this isn’t a game? I’m not playing around with the books. I take them very seriously.

  —We’re just about to finalize the Language Reform and are carefully considering the final details. You have to appreciate the importance of this, 24, understand that with this we will destroy everything that remains of the men from the time of History. This will separate us from evil forever.

  —This belief that we have to forget the men from the time of History is absurd.

  —It’s not absurd, 24, not at all.

  —Yes, it is.

  —The only thing they managed to do was to annihilate themselves and destroy the natural world.

  —They didn’t mean to destroy the Earth. It didn’t have to happen.

  —But it did happen. And it didn’t start out as a mistake, it began as a death wish. They were bent on destroying everything.

  —That’s true. But the men from the time of History were more than just that.

  —Yes, they were also slaves to other men and to Evil.

  —They were more than that.

  —“There are two Gods: Ignorance and Oblivion.”

  —Rubén Darío.

  —Let’s get back to what we were talking about. You can do whatever you want with
your own time, but you can’t do whatever you want with our time. I don’t authorize or forbid anything, as you well know. I’m not a censor. Like anyone in my position, I’m trying ensure that harmony and good reign in L’Atlàntide…

  I interrupted him. After having seen that threat in his eyes, I wasn’t in the mood for lectures.

  —I already know all that, Ramón. I know it as well as you do, you don’t need to say it again. You also know how I feel about memory and I’m not going to repeat it. And as far as books go…

  —Stop, wait a second, 24. Listen: “learn, above all, to distrust memory. What we think we remember is completely alien to, and different from, what really occurred…To live without remembering is, perhaps, the secret of the gods.”

  —Mutis. Yes, but in context…

  —No context. It’s from “The Gaviero’s Visit.”

  —I know. But books…

  Then he interrupted me.

  —Let’s not ruin the morning arguing, Cordelia.

  —My name is Lear now.

  He roared with laughter.

  —Your name is not Cordelia anymore? Now it’s Lear?—He laughed even harder. You can’t be changing your name all the time, no way! The name loses its meaning. Am I still Ramón?

  Yes, of course, I never change your names. The problem is that I need to escape from the names.