Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  Anyway, Rosete appeared. He arrived with a smile illuminating his face, a mischievous smile, like all of his were—animated, not by innocent joy, but rather by the spark of a joke.

  —I have a message for you, Cordelia.

  —Lear.

  —Cordelia, Lear, 24, as you like.

  —I’ve been calling you, Rosete, it’s so nice you’ve come.

  —Oh really? Me? First I’ve heard of it.

  —I’ve called you repeatedly. The alarm is waking me up at night. I don’t know why.

  —Oh really? I’ll check into it.

  —I would appreciate it. I’m not sleeping at all well. And another thing, I want to see Ramón.

  —Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. The message was:

  I was invited to the award ceremony for work done toward the survival of our colony, which will be celebrated immediately. Rosete and I will go there together.

  —Who will receive the awards this time?—I asked, just to say something. We had stopped awarding prizes long ago (170 years, which in theory we no longer count). I don’t know why I asked, but a better question didn’t occur to me.

  —You’re receiving one for “The Bond Between the Leaf and the Stem.”

  —Me?—I managed to say despite my surprise. The least I should have said was “again,” or “why again?”

  —Caspa is receiving one for “The Tip of Soothing Joy in Succulent Plants.” This is the most recent achievement of all. This is what she has been devoted to most recently.

  I raised my eyebrows. I opened my eyes wide in astonishment. If I could have, I would have put both my eyeballs in Rosete’s hand to show him how surprised I was. “Soothing Joy?” The last two years? And her babies, aren’t they a product of her work? He didn’t give me time to formulate all the questions that Caspa’s award raised for me before he said:

  —You didn’t know about this?

  I shook my head “no.” I was dumbstruck. I reviewed her work in my mind. It was eccentric, to say the least. I remembered seeing Caspa lying on the ground, completely stretched out. She was rubbing a cane of sugar at the point where the stalk meets the Earth, over and over on the same spot, rubbing it in a circular motion with her index finger. The cane was full of spikelets and its huge leaves radiated health. It was very tall and completely green. Caspa removed her finger from the spot she had been rubbing and revealed something that looked like a birthmark and that seemed completely animal in nature, if I can use that word in trying to describe it as precisely as possible, because I’m aware that a plant with a mammalian birthmark is ridiculous. But that’s what it was like.

  Before I could recover from the surprise, Rosete and I were already en route to the award ceremony.

  I’m going to pause here to describe the place where we celebrate solemn ceremonies in L’Atlàntide. Our important community ceremonies are held a short distance from what was once the Mediterranean Sea, near the red salt flats and the white salt flats, where the sandy desert, that appears to have no end, begins; next to the Roman ruins of the Capitoline Triad constructed in honor of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva with its magnificent, wide staircase. Behind the remains of the Capitoline are the ruins of the city wall of the medina, which is broken to pieces; its labyrinthine alleyways; the mosque, with its octagonal minaret. The columns of the slave market are still visible, its one hundred wells are still viable, and some of its doors are closed. L’Atlàntide celebrates its solemn ceremonies, in which all the members of the community participate, there, to one side of the Roman Capitoline atop a flying carpet decorated with this natural design floating above the sand near the Courtyard of the Rose on which Historical Men drew the outline of the eight-petaled rose of the desert.

  We call this place La Arena.

  Our flying carpet is firm, not soft like those of legend, and its purpose is to keep our footsteps from destroying the beautiful waves of sand on the desert’s surface while we celebrate the ceremonies encapsulated in the temporary bubble we use to protect ourselves from the whims of the desert. Supported on only a few inches of sand, our invisible carpet demonstrates that our community is not insensitive to beauty. The people of L’Atlàntide fulfill our love of ornamentation without burdening the Earth, without leaving any marks or traces that we were there.

  If, with the passage of time, we have children, anyone who wants to remember us will have to reconstruct our way of living without the use of things. If he opens our Kestos, he will know how we dominate the wind, how we work to reconstruct nature, and that will be all. Ah yes, and of course there will be these words. But most of them are not about the people of L’Atlàntide, but are rather pages I’ve managed to save from destruction—words about, or by, the men from the time of History, like Estela’s translation of Hernando’s memories. But there won’t be any children or anyone who would try to understand what we were because we will always be, so we won’t have any offspring, we won’t produce descendants, nobody will follow us on this Earth.

  I lingered here describing the place where we hold our ceremonies, but this time the awarding took place so quickly, without pause, or explanation, or temporal space for any logic whatsoever. Before I was fully aware that I was already there, they had given out the awards and Rosete and Ramón had disappeared. Although it appeared to be just exactly like all our previous ceremonies, everything took place at an abnormal speed. Or I was so far away that time felt different; I was so distracted that each sentence seemed to be missing something, as if some of the words had swallowed some syllables. But the people of L’Atlàntide seemed serene and nobody appeared to be in a hurry. I was trying to concentrate on what was taking place, but it was difficult to follow what was happening without losing the thread because some parts were missing. Everything was performed with a calm swiftness; it wasn’t done hurriedly, but at the same time, it occurred or happened at an accelerated pace. I didn’t see anyone run, or even turn quickly; in each gesture there was a ceremonious elegance, but quick, hurried, and seemingly incomplete, illogically truncated, divided, lacking continuity.

  The ceremony took place in the blink of an eye. I didn’t even have time to refuse the award (as was my intention); instead, I saw myself once again (as I had a thousand years ago) receiving an award for my work toward our survival, one that I had previously, but not now, deserved.

  Now I’m reviewing the ceremony at a comprehensible pace. I’ve reviewed the visual reports of all the awards received and behind each one of them is a monstrous, anomalous, absurd type of work, like Caspa’s that I’ve described here. That said, now mine is the one that seems to me to be the most deserved, given that it was for work that I did such a long time ago (and for the most dubious merit)—the conferring of these awards was an aberration.

  Several times a day my mailbox urgently announces that the moment of the completed Language Reform is approaching. And at night the alarm rings…

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  If they were able to, mothers, among the nobles and the plebeians alike, breastfed their children,17 and if they were not able to, they looked for another woman to nurse their young. The mothers, or the wet nurses who provided milk, did not change the way they ate when they began to breastfeed; some ate meat and others ate healthy fruits, but none of them changed their diets. They nursed the children for four years, and they were so close to their children and raised them with such love, that the women excused themselves from lying with their husbands whenever possible while they were nursing in order to avoid getting pregnant. If they were widowed and left with a child they were still nursing, it would be unthinkable for them to remarry until they had finished nursing, and if a woman did otherwise it was considered a great betrayal. In order to determine whether the milk was good, they put a few drops on a fingernail, and if it was thick and did not run, they considered it to be good.18

  —

  Another boy was looking over my shoulder and he was very disposed to observe
my work the entire morning according to what he said: “For I have so much admiration for you, maestro.” He just now left me and could scarcely stop blushing. To make him go away I had to bring out the breasts of nursing women—having them pressing hard on the nipple to make the milk drop onto a fingernail caused him to blush. The next time someone wants to see what I am writing, I will start writing about urine-based cures, so that the stream of the Medes will make him go away (since my own would not be enough). It only alienates me from myself, or, to be precise, it alienates any little pleasure I still have in myself because the joy that should have flowered at seeing me, at my age, unable to walk supported by my own bones, turns to dust with the vapors of the urine that emanate from my poor, coarse robe.

  If the Medes are not enough to make him go away, then I will turn to despicable customs that are attributed to my ancestors because there is no doubt they practiced them, but it seems there is no corner of the world that is not plagued by these evils, they have been in all latitudes since the most distant of times. Did you think Juvenal lied to us? And now that I have mentioned his name, it reminds me how, and how much, he ruminated and reflected on the fact that men would lie with other men. I do not deny that it is an evil practice, that it is a good way to scandalize people, and that it is convenient to warn against because it has been seen that whoever tries it finds it difficult to stop (from which it can be concluded that evil does not have to satisfy the body and that it is for this reason that no one should ever get close to this practice). But even so, I will not waste my pen complaining so much about this vice because envy, arrogance, killing or abusing your fellow men, and not respecting others are all far worse, but I will stop here with this list of the worst things because it will never be finished and that is not what I am endeavoring to write here and because the list of worsts in these lands would be interminably long.

  In the history I have been writing, we had just inaugurated the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. If you, reader (in case you exist one day), have paid attention to what I wrote here about the celebration of the inauguration, you will realize that I am recounting it in full detail. However, many of these details do not come from my memory, but rather from what I heard said about this celebration, or what I saw with my own eyes of other celebrations throughout the years. Because at that time, as I have already written, my attention was not focused on anything happening around me.

  Amid so much gold, so many garlands, so many triumphal arches, so many marvels and mountain dioramas, and songs and processions, only one thing shone through the watery curtain of my sad fantasies. It was the object I had carried with me since my Tezcocan fantasies, an object that I saw as the magical incarnation of something that has power over everything in the world. Not the rod of discipline, to which I had not paid the slightest attention; nor the Bishop’s scepter, about which I could not care less; but rather the dagger, and not the inert dagger or the treacherous one, but rather mine, the one that was unhappy about being in the Colegio and was irritated by the monastic environment that surrounded us both. Only this dagger connected me to the world and the world to me, keeping me company in my sad solitude, promising to take me away from the Colegio, free me from the friars, and help me to escape the noble lord whose son I supplanted, leaving the rule of his house in my hands, and from which I would evict all of the other ladies so that my mother would reign there. While the Franciscans told me about Christian virtues, the dagger managed to do what they were not able to do: it was able reach me, affect me, lodge itself in my mind and in my awareness and in my spirit. One time I paid attention to my dagger at the wrong moment.

  Before getting to that, I should say that in my fantasies, in Tezcoco and in the Colegio, I dressed myself so as to honor the dagger, I dressed myself in such a way as to be ready to brandish it: I envisioned myself wearing metal armor, like those from Castile, but painted in our style and with feathers on the shoulders. I imagined my face painted in various colors, I envisioned myself holding my father’s shield with feathers and precious gems, and the headdress of a tiger-knight on my head, my feet in gold-soled cotaras. This was in my imagination only (fortunately, because someone dressed in this way would provoke a great deal of laughter!) and, as I have already said, in the Colegio I did not have anything other than the cassock and dirt to cover my body because I did not have the opportunity of the regular bath to which my mother had accustomed me.

  But it is not the bath that I miss most about her company…what am I doing? I have returned to Mama, or her absence, because, along with my dagger, she was the other element of the story I will recount here.

  So, I went about unwashed, in my maroon robe, carrying my dagger. Nowhere else except our dormitory and the dining hall, or refectory, where we used to study with our teachers, the same one where we celebrated the first night of the inauguration with the Bishop and in which some one of us would read passages of Venegas, the Bible, Saint Jerome, Saint Basil’s letters, one or another of the texts written by Fray Francisco de Osuna, the lives of the saints, such as Saint Francis or Saint Thomas, out loud for everyone. We did not dream of talking in the refectory while we ate, much less of making jokes or laughing!

  I missed chatting. I was accustomed to spending a good part of the day in Tezcoco listening to stories here and there, taking part in the gossip and idle talk of my village, but in the Colegio there were no superfluous words. In order to teach us to refrain from talking too much, the Franciscans had us play a game. We had to count how many words we said during the day. I counted Valeriano’s, Valeriano counted mine. Pedro de Gante (the student, not the teacher, but that little one picked up and taken in by the charity of Pedro de Gante, the Franciscan) counted Juan Bedardo’s, Diego Adriano counted Martín de la Cruz’s, etcetera. We counted each other’s words and in that very difficult task we discovered how to have fun in concert with our forced silence.

  It was because of this counting game that I first pulled out my dagger. Valeriano was a naughty little devil and he did anything he could so that I would say one word extra and surpass his word count, as if he would win something. We were in our dormitory. This was a large room, like they say the nuns’ dormitories are (something I cannot verify). There were beds on wooden pallets (due to the humidity) on both sides and there was an aisle down in the middle. Each boy had a blanket and a mat, and each had his own chest with a key to keep his books and little bit of clothing. I do not remember why we were praying the Te Deum Laudamus—“We praise thee, GOD! We acknowledge thee, the only Lord to be; And as Eternal Father, all the earth doth worship thee. To thee all Angels cry, the Heavens, and all the powers therein, the cherub and the seraphin, to cry they do not lin. O holy, holy, holy Lord! Of Sabbath Lord the God”—but just when I was on the word Sabbath, the naughty little devil Valeriano whispered in my ear: “Forty-seven.”

  What was I supposed to do with his forty-seven? Instead of ignoring him, I gave in to his provocation and got mad, but since I had to remain mute, I pulled out my imaginary dagger, vanquished the dragon that held me captive in this jail, and mounting my horse, I fled. Nothing more reasonable occurred to me. I was riding on my imaginary horse, dressed, as I have already described, in Spanish armor adorned with the peculiar Indian art of my imagination, when Miguel pulled my ear, obliging me to continue with the prayer (“We trust that thou shalt come our judge,”—this was where the others were with the Te Deum Laudamus, I remember clearly—“Lord, help thy servants, whom thou hast bought with thy precious blood”). Valeriano started laughing when he saw Miguel scold me for my foolish reaction to his naughty word counting, which gained him a nice good tug on the ear as well.

  It was this same Miguel who told us on a daily basis: “In every word you exceed, sin finds an opportunity.” He was one of our best teachers and guides.

  Miguel, who was originally from Cuautitlán and was an Indian like us, had been an exceptional student of the Franciscans and was sometimes our guardian and teacher (it was he who also accompa
nied me in the story of the flagstone, the one where I was dead but alive and asleep, and that I wrote about here in one of my pseudo-histories). He fell ill in the great plague of 1545 and has been dead a long time now. I saw him leave this Earth with my own eyes. His last words were for Fray Francisco de Bustamante, who had come to hear his last confession. When Fray Francisco asked him for his sins, Miguel said to him (in Latin, of course, because that was the language he always spoke with the greatest fluency): “Oh, father, for this I am in great pain because I cannot repent for them as much as I would like.”

  Fray Francisco had scarcely finished the prayer (“May your portion this day be in peace, and your dwelling the heavenly Jerusalem. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen”) when, without a sound, Miguel offered his soul to Christ.

  “In every word you exceed, sin finds an opportunity.” And since I have already disregarded Miguel’s counsel and have been excessive in my words in these pages, I will pause on another memory, which will explain the main reason for my sadness and bad behavior. Now that I have brought it up, I must tell the story because it is about my Mama.

  Before I entered the Colegio, I had always slept next to Mama, in total darkness, of course, but still feeling her skin next to mine. I was used to her nearness, even while I slept. I was all she had, and she was everything to me. She was never hard on me. She never pierced my tongue with the spine of the nopal cactus so that a twig could be stuck through the open wound. She never raised her voice at me, or hit me with a stalk of tule. I was her jewel, and she was my treasure. Before she lay down to sleep next to me, instead of a lullaby she would comb her long hair, which was perfumed with flowers, and let it hang loose very close to my face. Was it scented with basil? It seems to me that it was, that she scented her hair with the basil flower.