Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  But writing those few lines is the same as saying nothing. In them one does not read what kind of student I was, or that my intelligence and my spirit received a certain kind of training, or that they turned me into a wiser Hernando. These few lines are too far away from me, just as the high white clouds of this windy day are far above my head. I am going to approach the writing of those days with something that they cannot claim did not touch me—the longed-for cilice.

  When I heard the gleaming word “cilice” the first few times, it evoked nothing of pain, nothing of the penance that humiliates human pride and purges the body of worldly trappings. I will say that it even gave rise to the opposite. The word “cilice” had a special brilliance that turned the object with its name into something desired by us boys. The first who was selected to use the exalted object was Martín Jacobita, of whom I will speak more later because in addition to the fact that he was my friend for many years, and that we experienced many things together, and that the very sound of his name touches my heart, he was also the rector of the Colegio for a time. Martín Jacobita, native of Tlatelolco, the Barrio of Santa Ana to be precise, was chosen for the cilice—according to my understanding, and I believe that of the others as well—as a reward. Fray Alonso de Molina, our teacher and composer of sermons, called him aside, and, taking him by the shoulder, as if to tell him something very important and very private between the two of them, told Martín that he deserved something for being such a good student and then disappeared with him in the middle of the night, taking him to the friars’ apartment to make him the first of the students to learn the secret of the cilice. Much later, Martín Jacobita reappeared with a face that one could say practically glowed. His eyes shined (because he had cried?), his cheeks were flushed bright red, his mouth was half open, and his breathing was abnormal. He was like a fish that was taken out of the water and restrained from wiggling, having been given in exchange for his restraint the promise that he would escape death. Martín did not know how to face us after that important experience, and, running the risk of damaging the prestige earned by his impeccable humility, I will say that he was filled with pride, he boasted, he showed off because he now knew the cilice, while we were nothing but little boys, kids, young ones of little courage, not the least bit brave.

  Martín Jacobita had been the chosen one, he was the first of us to use it…What was it?—the rest of us silently wondered, not daring to ask each other…The cilice was a wide belt of bristly hair or an iron chain with sharp spikes that is worn tight on the body and right against the flesh for purposes of mortification. It was used on the waist or arm to lacerate the flesh in order to cultivate the spirit.

  Martín Jacobita wore it during the hours of sleep. On waking to sing the matins he disappeared again in the darkness of night, accompanied by Fray Alonso de Molina, to the friars’ room above the Church of Santiago, next to the Colegio, where he was stripped of the cilice, although only temporarily: it had already begun to bind with him. Martín now belonged to the “torment,” and this lent him an aura of importance, the glow of the chosen one.

  The following morning after coming back to sleep and having woken up again for morning prayers, we were sent to the friars’ vegetable garden to harvest some necessary items for the meal when Martín Jacobita, without saying a word to me and giving himself some ceremonious importance, showed me the red mark that was similar to a scrape on the elbow or the knee that children get when they are playing with their friends. Though it was beautifully distinct, it was made more beautiful by the knowledge that it had left him that, the magnificent and brutal object that the friars had put on him, choosing on him out of all of us, because his prayers and studies were exemplary. All of us wanted to have the good fortune to get close to the cruel and holy object, to the cilice. It was like a finger beckoning, it was the mark, the dream, the aspiration…

  When it was finally my turn to use the cilice, I was disillusioned. In spite of all of my hopes, it only provoked a bit of physical pain for me, not so much as to be unbearable, not so little as to be unnoticeable, but its use was not accompanied by any spiritual exaltation, it did not touch me personally, it brought me no closer to the divine Word. Instead, I can say that the effect of the cilice was the opposite, that in no way did its effect resemble what the friars hoped it would provoke, which is what I saw when my companions were wearing it. What did I think the cilice would be? What type of initiation ceremony could I have imagined I would find within its little iron chain links or with its sharp spikes tight against my flesh for mortification purposes that made me yearn so much for this thing that was so perfect and so mundanely covetable?

  It never occurred to me that the cilice around my waist or arm would have produced a pain similar to the nopal spine inserted through my tongue, which was something that I feared so much that I renounced the father that I did not have anyway. Was it because I did not have a teacher to show me the benefits of the needle-like spine for my character? At the side of the Franciscans I learned the words of the Saint:

  Know that there are things great and sublime in the sight of God, which are often considered vile and despicable by men, and there are others considered by men as very precious and important, but which God looks upon as worthless and contemptible.29

  I will respond honestly and say no, in my imagination there was not the slightest bit of wisdom in the cilice, but rather only spiritual abjectness instead. Even in our childish innocence and grace, the coveted cilice was an object of infatuation, of arrogance, or at the very least of immodesty, as the nopal spine piercing the tongue never would have been. With the nopal spine, it was clear that it was a punishment, and nobody, prior to understanding the Christian value of penance, would wish for a punishment. However, in the cilice we did not look for penance because it was an undergarment to make us more important in the eyes of others, so that they would hold us in higher esteem. A misguided value that led us in the wrong direction by infatuating us! Now, I have said that Martín Jacobita was the first chosen, and that I believe I saw something of vanity in the gesture he made in showing me his flesh marked by the cilice, but with the minimum respect to his inestimable person, I have to make clear that he was not to blame for the passive scandal that ensued. Martín Jacobita did not bring about the spiritual ruin with his deed or action; we could not blame him for anything he said or did. By coveting it and giving it a mundane value that it completely lacked, we all used the cilice in a way that reduced it and changed its significance. Even though we were children, we did not lack human nature. The Saint said it well:

  The devils did not crucify Him, but you, incited by them, have crucified Him, and still crucify Him when you delight in vice and sin. Of what then can you glory?

  And also:

  For if you were so wise and clever that you knew all things, and could interpret all languages, and penetrate all heavenly mysteries with the greatest clearness, you could not glorify in all this, for one demon knows more of heavenly, and even of earthly, things than all men put together…Again, if you were richer and more beautiful than all others, nay, even if you could work miracles and put the devils to flight, still all these things are contrary to your nature, and in no way belong to you. In all this you cannot glorify…30

  But, I repeat, I never want to speak ill of Martín Jacobita, and now even less than ever (if that is possible). The only one I want to bury is myself: I was the one who committed the sin of pride in using the cilice. It is only in my imagination that I see my companions as being prideful of the cilice, because I know very well that it was me. Saying that they demonstrated pride before penance, I interpret as a sin, but I should not pay attention to myself. My judgment of them is unreasonable, who am I to judge souls, especially when they are exquisite souls like Martín Jacobita. Of my own I can say that I sinned ab solam voluptatem (though it sounds absurd to say that here) with the cilice by egotistically seeking pleasure rather than penance, which is the natural outgrowth of such a practice. In me, it
was an approach to sin even though I could not recognize it as such as the time because I did not have the spirit of the Lord:

  The servant of God may know whether he has the spirit of God, if, when the Lord works some good through him, he is not puffed up in body or mind, knowing that in himself he is contrary to all good, but rather appears viler in his own eyes, and esteems himself more miserable than other men.31

  Neither the cilice nor the lives of the saints put me on path of true faith. Neither did rhetoric, nor dialectics (What else is dialectics—said Saint Augustine—but skill and expertise in arguing?), nor mathematics, nor astronomy, nor the prayers. All of this used to help me connect my story to that of the Colegio’s, but not my spirit to a real, firm path that would lead me somewhere else that is not this wreck of a legless body. My still-nascent religious fervor needed nourishment that my clumsy spirit could not manage to provide. This was not the fault of the wise Franciscan teachers, but was rather due to my own nature.

  Time has almost completely gotten away from me today in quoting of the words of Saint Francis. The cilice could not have been as bad as I have depicted it if evoking it brought the words of Saint Francis to me. I demonstrate every day in the slow manner I narrate my story that my firm legs (yes, they are firmly attached to the floor, I cannot lift them up) do not permit me to keep up with my memories. My mind carries the burden of my body, and it is with the mind that my hand writes. My words lack the spark of faith, as I have said from the beginning; if they came from the voice, they would be written from the depths of the soul, from the deepest part, from the eye of the soul, and my hand would fly, free of my firm legs and completely separate from my body and the bad memories, the rancor, the sacrileges, the jealousies, which I will recount from here on. What I need now are horses that might quicken my mind and hand, pulling us along without driving back the disgraceful condition of the land, so that the heat will not tire them and they will not sink into a deep, dark layer of mud. These horses, and the whips I will have to use to make them run as quickly as my thoughts (my mind is the only part of me that still runs, I feel that even my blood stagnates, gets tired of circulating through this old body), will save quill, paper, and ink once I finish using them for my purposes here. I do not have recourse to the eye of the soul because the cilice was the door through which to enter the bad memories.

  I will jump from one to the other until the weight of the years summons the end of my life. But before falling into bad memories, I will note one good one. It was not a beatific state. Since I do not belong to the perfect ones, I will say that my soul, stripped of its will, took the unitive path. Once again, what at first glance does not have the appearance of truth really was true.

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  28Hernando put this in quotation marks and is quoting from some document. Estela’s note. (Icazbalceta quotes these same words in his Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI, attributing them to Grijalva, the Augustinian friar chronicler; it might be a line inserted by Estela, rather than something originally written by Hernando. Lear’s note).

  29Hernando quotes from Saint Francis of Assisi’s The Admonitions of the Spiritual Exhortations. Lear’s note.

  30In both cases Hernando quotes from Saint Francis of Assisi, again one of the “Admonitions of his Spiritual Exhortations.” Lear’s note.

  31Hernando quotes Saint Francis again. Lear’s note.

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  When, one afternoon, I saw a member of my community crouching on all fours drinking murky water from a stagnant pond in a desolate spot on the surface of the earth, I decided not to write one more word about L’Atlàntide until they abandon their foolishness. I made the decision sadly, and with a feeling of defeat, of helplessness. I said to myself: “I won’t write about what happens here and we’ll pretend it’s not happening. I’ll keep acting like everyone from L’Atlàntide drinks the pure water that falls from our colony’s walls of air into babbling brooks.” But I can’t stop writing. I must do it. I can’t avoid it.

  I had been working on the transcription of Hernando for a bit (I’m having difficulty and making slow progress) when I heard a commotion in the distance that seemed strange to me. I closed the kesto and went to see where the unidentifiable noises were coming from.

  I approached. What seemed to me from a distance to be a commotion were sounds similar to those I believe a herd of pigs would make: nasal and chest sounds, sounds that don’t come from the palate, the teeth, or the tongue. On a barren, sandy mountaintop was a cross, and on the cross a man, and at his feet a group of my people were cursing him. I moved closer. The one on the cross was the one I once christened Ulises. Some of them were whipping him with a rope, others were spitting at him, all of them were shouting at him, if I can call that abominable screeching shouting. There were fourteen or fifteen playing that “game.”

  Suddenly, they all burst out laughing. They took him down from the cross on which they had tied him, someone massaged his legs, another his arms, and all of them kept laughing, laughing their heads off. Caspa threw herself on the ground because she couldn’t control her body for laughing. The very same Ulises joined her. In a few seconds everyone was on the ground on their backs, with their hands on their bellies, laughing so hard they were crying.

  I dropped down to where they were and asked in their stupid code something more or less the equivalent of “What’s going on?” or “What are you all up to?” to which Jeremías answered with the equivalent of “Nothing.”

  —What were you doing?

  This he couldn’t understand.

  —And the cross?—I made myself understood by pointing to where it had been and making the shape with my fingers.

  They stopped laughing and looked over there and I did the same. There wasn’t anything there. The cross wasn’t there anymore. They got up and left me, walking along the paths of the unfinished flower garden that was just on the other side of the barren hill.

  I stayed on the mountain. I looked for traces of the cross. There were clear marks in the sand. Someone had planted a post there. I searched for the cross with my eyes, but there was nothing left of it, not a splinter. And I mean not even splinter.

  I looked some more. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I walked in the garden, looking for it, but there was nothing there except their artificial flowers—flowers with symmetrical petals on top of a stem coming out of the ground—and orderly paths. They had made the cross disappear with their laughter.

  I came back here. I’m writing this without commentary. Tomorrow I’ll go back to my Hernando and Estela. I have to forget what’s happening in L’Atlàntide.

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  The celebration on the day of my birth was not for me. My father was not mine. I got my dagger by stealing it, and though it is more mine and more of a dagger because I could see it with the eyes of my imagination, nobody else would ever have been able to see it with their physical eyes. My Tezcoco was not mine because I was Tlatelolca. Tlatelolco, my homeland, did not belong to me. I became one of the students of the Colegio with a name that was not mine; another—who was not me—had been selected for that spot, I took the place of someone who had nothing to do with me. My Mama was taken away from me entirely; they did not know that the one they believed to be my mother was not mine. My first memorable sin among the Franciscans was not committed by my body, even though the gesture might have made it appear that I deserved the punishment. My first corporeal penance was nothing more than an act of arrogance and conceit. What a succession of “not mines” were assigned to my awkward life in those first years! I’ve enumerated them to clear them from this space if only momentarily, since unfortunately we will eventually come across more “not mines.”

  One night, the flickering light of the lamp that Miguel, our guardian, never extinguished, the one that was always—as I have said—the companion to our sleep, and the one that it took me a long time to get used to and be able
to fall asleep with, was agitated by a moving body. Like that flickering flame, in my sleep I felt the subtle movement of the air caused by someone who displaced it and I woke up not understanding what was happening. My sleep has always been fragile; it scampers about instead of resting on warm sand like most mortals’ sleep. I sleep fitfully, unable to find an even rhythm. During the night, I am a dog chasing prey. If I could remember my dreams, I would say that, as a dog, I chase what I fear as a person.

  The flame moved. The change in the lamplight alerted me, abruptly bringing me out of sleep, and I opened my eyes. Fray Pedro was walking toward me. He was carrying the Vulgate in his hands, opened wide, and he was crying. He moved his lips, but I could not hear what he was saying. He was reciting the passages from memory and his eyes did not see the lines he fervently held in his palms.

  Noticing me watch him, he spoke to me. His voice made its way to his lips.

  —The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say: Behold here, or behold there. For lo, the kingdom of God is within you.

  He stopped speaking, came to me, and knelt by the side of my mat where he began to speak again.

  —For as the lightening that lighteneth from under heaven, shineth unto the parts that are under heaven, so shall the Son of man be in his day.

  He paused briefly to shake me benevolently by the shoulders, as if to shake me completely from my sleep, or my ignorance, and he continued:

  —And the seventh angel sounded the trumpet: and there were great voices in heaven, saying: “The kingdom of this world is become our Lord’s and his Christ’s, and he shall reign for ever and ever.”

  That said, he put his index finger on my nose and looked me in the eyes. His own eyes shone with the radiance of candles. I perceived with complete clarity that something—something that was not him—was burning inside of him. An otherworldly fire inhabited his body.