Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  My dreams changed, bringing me into the arms of the monks. Dreaming about the martyred saints, I could share my spirit with them. My dream, and that of the friars, brushed up against each other, they almost touched. I became one of their most loyal students.

  Upon setting the dagger aside and opening the curtain of my tears, in addition to entering into the Colegio de la Santa Cruz and being able to see and understand where I was and what the teachers were teaching me, I had many revelations. It is difficult for me, now old and on the shore of death, to spend time on all of those revelations, some of them because simply remembering them hurts me more than I can bear, others because even though I clearly see the boy affected and touched by them, I do not understand them. I had one revelation that was pure foolishness and that I remember and can put into words: I believed I understood quite well what a sin was. It was not the same as doing something bad, like the Nahuatl word that means sin in that language. Sin was something more. Sin is something that does not necessarily accompany a verb. Sin was a sticky paste, something repugnant, always in pursuit of victims; a paste that absorbs, like the fable that runs through our pueblos says the caves of the serpent princesses do. There, where the serpent lives, the wind sucks at the passerby. There, where she lives with her court, she soaks up, absorbs anyone who goes by, taking him with her. That is the way sin works, it soaks up, absorbs. It is practically impossible not to fall victim.

  He who is a victim of, or seized by, sin must repent in order not to be punished. But he cannot procrastinate in doing so; he must do it quickly. Swift horses are necessary to pull or draw it from his soul, so that he denounces the sin before he (who carries it adhered to his soul) receives the corresponding punishment. While it is true that Franciscans are forbidden from riding horses, it is also true that some must train their souls to cross the territory where sin lives, in order to save their souls from irremediable ruin if death strikes unexpectedly.

  So, when I realized this, when the fervor was born in me, I saddled and harnessed one thousand horses to my soul. I made myself travel at a blurry, vertiginous pace upon them, simulating being in hurricane, a quick gust of wind that sweeps with it everything it encounters in its path.

  The trot of the one thousand saddled horses was imprinted on the path of my soul, to avoid the punishment that the unavoidable arrival of sin invoked, caused my fervor to be only sporadic. For in order for the flashes of fervor to come to me, it was necessary to throw the swiftness of the saddled horses overboard, to move to one side and wrap myself in the serene peace of the illumination, of the nearness to God.

  Now I do not advance or recede according to the dictates of my spirit—I am stranded in the immobile prison of my body. I am a prisoner of this bag of bones, of this handful of old flesh. Inside of me, complete immobility does not reign, my soul advances and recedes senselessly, coming and going, expressing its anger in tiny steps: it knows it is caged inside of me, in my body, in my bitter old age, in my imbecilic drooling passivity. When I close my eyes, tears fall that have nothing to do with pain or cold, but rather with my many years. Because I am old, tears run from my eyes, dribble drips from my mouth, I wet myself. I will not say any more, this is what I am: a prisoner in a pile of badly dressed bones, the quagmire in which dreams, faiths, horses, purities, punishments, and sins have stagnated.

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  The day of the abolition of words arrived. No, I’m not kidding, it arrived. Face it, Lear, it arrived! Today’s ceremony made public and formalized the decree for the abolition of language.

  Argh…I have to distract myself from my anger and anxiety with something in order to be able to talk about it…

  I need to think about something that will distance me from these vile actions, in order to somehow look at them in a way that silent uneasiness and noisy rage won’t overwhelm me. I’m looking for something, looking…Here:

  Good thing I’m not a cartographer because my maps would turn the Earth into a labyrinth. “We’ll take a route that will get us there more quickly,” Rosete said as he led us upward, taking us to a high altitude where the atmosphere becomes thin and less resistant to travel. That way we could take bigger strides and move more quickly. Since going up is the quickest way to get somewhere faraway, I would draw the Earth as concave rather than convex. L’Atlàntide would be the heart, the atmosphere would be on the inside, and the surface of the earth would be at the base. Fortunately, I’m not a cartographer; but unfortunately, the way I imagine things is somewhat true. L’Atlàntide is inside the most indomitable, unmentionable, crude, immature, unstable, burning entrails of the Earth. In L’Atlàntide, the burning heat of the Earth turns into a liquidy ice, watery solidity. If what we have supposedly tried to do over the centuries has been to respect and reconstruct nature, in my cartography (as I’m calling it), we would be the monsters underneath the sea searching for the weak points in the continental masses to separate them with monumental sierras and provoke the uprising of the seas against the Earth, the revenge of water against solid, the reigning of shadow over light. L’Atlàntide would not only be the submerged continent, but its inhabitants would be the submergers of continents.

  I’ll explain everything about the trip with Rosete to La Arena and what happened there.

  When we were about to complete our descent, we could see that chaotic winds were blowing across the desert, raising swirls of sand full of trash here and there. I descended toward the Earth in a prone position in order to get a better look. Because the bubble in which the people of L’Atlàntide gather impedes the entrance of the desert squalls, there, inside the bubble, sunlight sparkled on the sand. I saw a circle formed by all thirty-nine inhabitants of L’Atlàntide, minus three—one person, who was in the center, and the two of us were missing from the circle. When the one in the center moved, the others remained immobile; when those in the circle moved, the one in the center was as still as a statue.

  Once we were inside the bubble, though Rosete was hurrying me, I stayed a moment longer to look at them from above. The one in the center was Ramón. I went toward the circle, to find a place next to Rosete, who had already found a spot, but Ramón gestured to me and I landed next to him.

  —Lear, today is the ceremony for the abolition of language.

  —Abolition?

  —Most of the community already doesn’t use language anymore, and now you won’t use it anymore either, or at least not with any of us, because nothing can oblige you…

  I interrupted him:

  —Ramón, this is too awful. You shouldn’t do this—I repeated, facing the circle, looking from one side to the other—you shouldn’t do this!

  —It’s already been decided—added Ramón.

  —Maybe, but you shouldn’t do it. Don’t do it. I beg you. Language…

  A booing drowned out my words. A booing, which was accompanied by the most obscene, frightening, imbecilic, and abominable movements of their new communication code.

  —Enough! —Ramón yelled, accompanying the word with a kind of movement. The “Enough” was for me, the movement was directed at the others. He didn’t even have to turn around to be “understood,” because the gestures of their code are so moronic that they look the same from the front as from the back, there is no front or back, or top or bottom to them. The final words he added for me were: “I concede that the gods have been just and that everything is, finally, in order.”

  “Mutis,” I thought, “now they’re quoting Mutis,” and then I said angrily to myself, “How dare they use my Mutis like that!” I moved away from the center, but didn’t quite join the circle. In the saddest and most absolute silence, the people of L’Atlàntide went over all the gestures of their new communication code, which was made up of movements and gesticulations that I describe, impartially, as horrific, completely foolish, and totally meaningless. “Oh divine sound! / Oh sonorous sound!” Where have you gone, joyful noise, voice, song, ringing of words?


  That was the ceremony. Goodbye to those magnificent beings who one day celebrated L’Atlàntide! Now there was nothing but ugliness and the ridiculous, stupidity and obscenity, foolishness and absurdity, idiocy and nonsense. Those quasi-divine beings have become dimwits, dolts, good-for-nothings, simpletons, slow, worthless, idiots, losers, useless, jerks. I want to believe that better times will return someday, just as the famed swallows returned year after year in earlier centuries.

  As soon as the review of their code was complete (it didn’t take them long to finish on account of its poverty), Ramón gesticulated the grotesque movement that meant “done” or “that’s it” in their new code, an obscene movement that lacks grammar. Everyone present, all the people of L’Atlàntide, repeated the gesticulation that didn’t exclude any part of the body, in which the mouth, foot, buttocks, hand, and backside are indistinguishable from each other and, overtaken by an inebriated euphoria, they repeated it and repeated it (that’s it, that’s it), as if abolishing language provoked a joyful intoxication in them.

  I didn’t move a muscle, of course. I prepared to leave La Arena with my heart constricted with sadness and my body shaking with fear. I didn’t want to allow a stupid feeling like panic to grow inside of me as a result of their demonstration of uncontrollable and enormous collective enthusiasm.

  As I was leaving, I happened to notice Rosete. While he continued to make the same gesture as everyone else, he did his best to do it with beauty, exchanging some part of their moronic gestures for a certain corporeal harmony. Like when his right hand touched behind his left ear while he opened his legs to do that little jump with his eyes wide open, the determined elegance that was imprinted on all his movements until then only managed to magnify the grotesque absurdity. Rosete only succeeded in making himself more pitiful, and the pain of seeing him like that increased my terror. I quickened my step.

  From the corner of his eye, Rosete noticed me watching him and then anxiously hurry away. Because he was calmer than I, he quickly intercepted me and made another gesticulation in my direction:

  “Wait,”

  and immediately the sign that means

  “come,”

  followed by

  “bath,”

  and finally

  “oblivion.”

  Bath of oblivion? This was too much for me. I declined with a slight movement of my head, refusing to repeat the equivalent of their NO that Rosete insisted I imitate after him. Are they going to obliterate Broca’s Area now, damaging their brains in order to prevent them from speaking? Will they go further than that, completely altering the structure of their brains, and in doing so eliminating even the slightest possibility that they would have the opportunity to take refuge in language?

  I left them to their anomalous ceremony at the point of bathing themselves in oblivion, entering into the most profound darkness of the soul and of the intelligence.

  I’ll continue with the transcription of Hernando’s words. I’m not sure the most appropriate thing to do at a moment like this, but fate put this manuscript in my hands just when the saddest chapter in the life of the people of L’Atlàntide was about to begin. I’m writing and if I stop, the horrible tide of idiocy that is flooding the colony might end with me. I will cling to Hernando.

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  We never went back to see the relics kept in the Sanctuary of the Temple of San Francisco in Mexico City. Other relics arrived for this church as well as others, and at all the churches they were received with a pomp and celebration that I do not want to recount here because they have been written about more than once and because they are not relevant to my story. However, I cannot omit the arrival, somewhat recent, of the Lignum Crucis that was brought, along with other relics, by Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, as recently as 1573, when, after a long stay in Madrid, he arrived with the title of Visitador, a title that he never abused or even used because he did not consider the dispatching of visitadores to be advisable. He had accepted his powerful position so that it would not be given to another who would come to disrupt the province. They gave one part of the relic of the Lignum Crucis to the Cathedral and distributed the other parts to Augustinian temples.

  Of course, Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, founder of the Colegio de San Pablo, upon which he bestowed a collection of globes, maps, scientific instruments, and a magnificent library, was an avid reader. Every page of each one of the books in the four libraries he founded (the one mentioned here, along with those in the Augustinian convents in Mexico City, Tiripitío, and Tacámbaro) was underlined and annotated by his hand, as he had the habit of examining all the new books that arrived. They say that when the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition had taken Fray Luis de León into custody for some proposals that sounded so bad in Spain, Fray Alonso brought all the weight and deliberation and feeling that the case warranted; and regarding the case of Fray León, Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz said calmly, Well truth be told, they can just burn me if they burn him, because I feel the same way.28 And now that we have paused on Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz, I remember with absolute clarity the volumes written in his own hand, and printed by others, that we had in the library of the Colegio: Speculum Coniugiorum and Resolutio dialectica cum textu Aristotelis, the latter coming from Salamanca and the former from Mexico; but we did not have a copy of the one imprinted by Juan Pablos in 1554, and instead had the imprint of the same, signed by Ioannis Pauli Brissensis in 1556. Nor did we have a copy of his Recognitio, summularu, from Juan Pablos in 1554, nor of his Phisica, speculatio, also published by Juan Pablos in 1557.

  When Fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz left Europe for the first time, he had already been ordained to give mass and his last name was Rodríguez. He had graduated in theology and arts from the University of Salamanca, and in 1535 was the teacher to two sons of the Duque del Infantado and had a decent salary. Fray Francisco de la Cruz selected him, as a cleric and scholar, to teach arts and theology to the religious, and upon arriving in these lands he received the habit in Vera Cruz, from where he took his name, abandoning the Rodríguez of his crib: Truth be told, they can just burn me if they burn him, because I feel the same way.

  Speaking of burning, I could do that to these pages of mine. How long has it been since I proposed to tell the history of the Colegio de Santa Cruz? The days pass and pass and turn into months, and I, with my loose tongue, go jumping from line to line without fully entering into my story, without touching the line I am trying to leave here, hidden in a chair, kept safely in Latin so that it will resist time with ink and paper.

  Yes, I have already said a couple of words about our daily routine: that I learned Latin correctly, that I received various lessons in Christianity like all my friends, that I studied the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium with the additional branches of study (the four mathematical arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), and, when they thought they were preparing us to live the lives of friars, I received lectures in the Holy Scriptures and certain advanced courses in religion.