Heavens on Earth

by Carmen Boullosa

  I did not dare move my nose away from his exalted finger because it seemed even his finger was lit by whatever was hiding inside of him. He seemed hot; I could feel the heat against my skin as he fervently continued reading the pages of the book. He pinched my nose so hard that the pulsating blood I felt could have been his or mine.

  At that moment, Miguel rang the bell to wake us up for matins. That is the only thing that could explain his absence, because he was always there, close to us, a protective guard watching over our sleep and our chastity. At the sound of the bell, Fray Pedro let go of me, and repeating the genus angelicum several times, took two hops away from my little mat. From that position, he urged my companions to get up promptly. And that is what we did, all of us. While we were singing the matins, I could not shake the feeling of his finger on my nose, or seeing him gazing into my eyes, or hearing the sound of his voice in my ears, and those three sensations guided me along a path, where I seemed to weigh nothing, a dark path that conformed to the direction I was going, that took shape as the prayer advanced—it became brighter and brighter until it blinded me. Near the end, I lost consciousness, I was not aware of myself. I could hear my voice off in the distance, singing, but I did not know where I was. The perfect and powerful light to which I had arrived kept me from seeing. It seemed I had reached the point at which one arrives without oneself, and a profound joyful peace ran through my spirit as I was singing the matins. Nevertheless, even though I was completely given over to that singular sensation that had left me blind and self-less, I perceived a certain complicity in my singing companions’ tone, and though for a moment I sensed a cowardly fear approaching me from a few steps away, the feeling completely disappeared. As we were finishing the prayers, I began to leave the unitive path to follow the illuminative way. When I saw Fray Pedro’s face, I was able to ascertain that I was flying (in a manner of speaking), that we were all flying, that even when I was in the most complete solitude, or in the most perfect form of solitude, I was also part of everyone and everyone was part of me (I am not sure how to explain this), and we shared a spiritual closeness in the absolute dissolution of our bodies. And if I could see it in Fray Pedro’s face—in his eyes, in his features, in his entire face—it is because that is the one place the footprint of mystery leaves its mark. Imprinted on his face was the truth that walking in faith led to the possibility of bodiless flight.

  I could keep writing about this here, but anyone who has not previously experienced what I am talking about will not be able to comprehend it. Time, which will accompany the archiving of these pages, will add its own explanations, in its own language. By then perhaps everyone will have seen the invisible bodies of the angels and will have conversed with them, by then perhaps there will be no one left who does not know faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But they will be unable to explain it in Latin, or in Nahuatl, or in Castilian, or in Portuguese and I fear that time will not be able to express what I am writing here either and that the angels will continue on their ethereal path without stopping to speak to humans.

  I did not open my eyes solely with the object of gazing into his face. I felt as if the floor was falling out from under me, and I confirmed that fact when I saw it beneath my feet. Martín Jacobita was beside me and I touched his hand to get his attention and feel some sense of relief in the delicate flame that enveloped me, burning me, and painfully turning me into exquisite smoke. As soon as I touched his hand, I knew that it was not his skin that I was touching, that it was not dust or flesh, but rather the spirit flowering, being delivered to me. And when Martín turned his eyes (in which I was trying to find some relief) to me, although I did find both his eyes and relief, in the refreshing sense, they inflamed me, they stirred up more smoke, they were air that enhanced the painful and exquisite, the fearsome and comforting certainty that even though we were of the world, we had cut all ties with the things of this century.

  That was what it was to attain death, the perfection of death. I went through the door. I went further, beyond myself. I quit being who I had been, who I was, who I am.

  How did I fall back into the incomplete and blind death of life? How did I return from the paradise of the intuitive and illuminative path, to the blind eyes of mortals? Who was the traitor bringing me back to myself? The cell of life extended its bars in front of us and the rapture, the exposure, the nakedness, the swoon, the exaltation—all that we had experienced—disappeared.

  And for the first time in many days, upon finding myself returned to myself, imprisoned, I slept like a log the entire night.

  During that first transcendence (how long it might have lasted, I do not know, we did not have clocks there), I did not sleep at all. We did not sleep and there were only sacred foods to eat. No cornflour, potatoes, chiles mosquito, onions, or tomatoes passed our lips, but instead a balm made of something outside of the spirit nourished us, and that, upon passing our lips, awoke the hummingbird that had approached its flower, the bee, the earthworm, the ant, and the mystery of life and the Word. The foods were also impregnated with the flowing drop of life. In one moment (though there was no time where we were, there is in my memories), Fray Pedro, exalted, took the corn tortilla and made it fly from one hand to the other and then, looking toward heaven, put it on his face, and then holding it like a veil over his face, he started to eat it from its center, in small bites, laughing softly.

  My feet did not touch the floor; I was flying without wings, floating. My body—while it was in flames—was as cold as a cloud and thin as vapor. Vapor, it was vapor and made of vapor, I looked into the eyes of Fray Pedro, who no longer had the veil of corn on his face, and I saw that he too was floating, liberated from the weight of his flesh, and realized his body was also vapor, and he saw that mine was as well. A strange wave of joy flooded us at the same time. I do not remember exactly what terms I used to ask him if he felt the same thing I did. He answered me in the infinite purity of his shining gaze (his eyes were like those of someone who had been asleep, then opened his eyelids and recounted, for a companion watching over him, the details of his dream). His voice and his eyes were one:

  —That is what it is like, Hernando; that is what it is like to experience divine love.

  Were the others feeling the same thing? It seems to me they were. The branch of an old tree creaked repeatedly in the wind, it sounded like a door opening, closing, opening…It was the door to heaven that was opening for us, that had opened. We were, in fact, on that side. Without leaving this one, we had left it.

  The fervor that we—Martín Jacobita and I—manifested convinced the friars that we were the two chosen to follow in their footsteps. They chose Martín Jacobita and me to take the path to ordination. We shared most of the lessons with our companions in the Colegio, but we stopped sleeping with them. We were taken to the friars’ rooms. We slept with them above the church and we helped them with the work that friars do, like seeing to the construction of the convent, taking care of the books in the library, accompanying them to special events. Having abandoned my body and my intellect to devote myself to the contemplation of the supreme good, having completely put myself aside so that I might be consumed and made vapor of the divine good, allowed me to reconcile that part of my own life with the one that capricious fate had chosen for me. I did not impersonate anyone when I dressed in the habit of the Franciscans. But this exact point of unique congruence, this one in which I was the same as my story, this one that defeated the destiny of impersonations and the “not-mines” to which I seemed to be condemned, this one was impossible.

  We should have realized from the beginning that the dream of ordination was not possible. We did not. We did not think badly of anyone. We ignored envy; we did not want to admit man’s enslavement of others. We plugged our ears with wax to avoid hearing the chant of a few horrific, ghastly creatures telling us the truth:

  “This will not be possible.”

  “This will not be possible.”

  “Cursed be the man that trust
eth in man,” in the words of Jeremiah.

  Slosos keston de Hernando

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE LEARO

  I was in the midst of transcribing Hernando when, out of nowhere, Ramón suddenly appeared next to me as if he had come out of a hole in the earth. He was different from the last time I saw him, so different that he didn’t seem to be himself, not only because he arrived wrapped in a grayish, stiff cloth that formed rough folds around his body, distorting him at each fold, but also because everything on his face, which was uncovered, seemed to be in a different place. I didn’t understand what was happening to him. I had time to observe him carefully, though, because he was mimicking me; he was doing what I was doing, but more. I was looking at him and he was devouring me. I was visually examining him and he was consuming me. I was analyzing him and he was cutting me into pieces. Before the people of L’Atlàntide abandoned language, this would have been enough for me scream to high heaven and take off—insulted, humiliated, infuriated. But under current circumstances, his gaze (an atrocious, unbearable, disgusting thing) was the least of it.

  While he was doing that to me with his eyes, I examined him carefully with my own eyes. What appeared to be so different about him? A mass protruded farther than all the other folds on his belly. Since there was no distance between us at all while he performed that horrific exercise with his eyes, I had the audacity to touch him, to see what he had under the largest bulge of cloth over his belly. It was just him. I discovered what had changed so much—he had fleshed out, his body was fat. What had he done to himself? I’m not going to say yet what he did when I touched him, because before he did it (slowly, like a heavy bundle), a light bulb went off in my head. “Ramón eats flesh,” I thought. “That’s why he’s fat, that’s why his skin looks like that—he eats flesh.” The idea disgusted me, of course, and what I didn’t have time to do was to measure the consequences, or of what he did in response to my examination. But what I did do in that instant was perceive his odor, and he smelled completely different than normal. The disgusting thing he did—in response to my audacity to touch his belly (yes, a member of our community has a potbelly, a real paunch)—was that he (or what was left of Ramón) stuck out his mouth (he doesn’t actually have lips anymore) and shook it in front of my mouth, trying to give me an artful kiss, one I didn’t want to receive. After looking at me with the idiotic aggression of his poor imitation of amorous desire, Ramón tried to kiss me by force. Although force, or what we consider to be force, is an exaggeration, because he didn’t have any strength left. Paunchy, bloated from eating an excess of who knows what strange things (I have no evidence that he eats flesh), Ramón had much less strength. He was like an animal at risk of extinction, debilitated, diminished, giving his last and feeble fight to stick his dick into a female. But the comparison isn’t valid because an animal wouldn’t be capable of that despicable, offensive, abusive look.

  Of course I didn’t let myself be kissed, or touched, by Ramón. I blew at him with all the force in my lungs and that was enough to push him backward, tumble him to the floor, and, as if he had forgotten that he had seen me and thought he desired me, he picked himself up with difficulty, wrapped himself back up in the cloth and started walking off somewhere else.

  I don’t think my intuition that he eats flesh was wrong. I think he does eat flesh. What flesh is out there that someone might eat? Obviously not any of the people of our colony, that doesn’t even seem possible. But I do know what flesh is out there—the flesh of Caspa’s children. They are eating children. How horrible, they’re a bunch of pigs. My divine companions—who achieved a state of perfection that exceeded the human dream—who, upon erasing words from their lives, have turned into pigs that consume the flesh of dead babies.

  Slosos keston de Learo

  EKFLOROS KESTON DE HERNANDO

  How is it that I landed here—where the fire of faith does not burn—if I was already a burning ember on the illuminative path? And, if it was already written that I was going to fall, how is it that I would not remain on the purgative path of novices? Who was any more deserving of the tireless yearning for God? Why are my words those of regret and demonstrative of loss, rather than ones that dream of recovering that magnificent vision, of reaching even for just one moment that beatific state?

  Because all the rage of these latitudes was unleashed against us. We climbed Jacob’s ladder in the opposite direction—we descended to the things of the world when a brutal attack against the Franciscans and their work disrupted the order of the Colegio de la Santa Cruz.

  The Colegio de Santa Cruz had been operating officially for three years, and the Franciscans had been teaching there almost four years, when Carlos Ometochtzin (called Yoyontzin y Mendoza in the Castilian language)—el Chichimecatécotl, which is the title given to the lords of Tezcoco, the grandson of the sage and poet Netzahualcóyotl, son of the severe and prudent Netzahualpilli, and nephew of Talchachi—was accused of heresy, among other things. His accusation was like a ball of dry grass burning in the courtyard of the Colegio and in the center of my heart for two different reasons. The first, which has to do with the Colegio, was because none among our enemies forgot that Don Carlos had been educated by the Franciscans and, in their eyes, accusing him turned that malicious warning—“It is very good for them to know the doctrine, but reading and writing is as dangerous as the devil”—into wisdom. And in my heart because they will remember that I replaced the accused, Don Carlos, at the Colegio de Tlatelolco in the name of my village, Tezcoco, and in the name of the son of the other “Don” Hernando. It is true that he did not take as good care of their language as he should have, and maybe that is why they launched their savage attack against him, or maybe it was because of a woman he took who belonged to another, or because he carefully managed what belonged to him, or because (and this is what I believe) he was good, wise, prudent (less so in his words), and a jokester. Moreover, the matter, which smelled of the devil’s smoke, upset the order in my heart because I thought: “They brought one Tezcocan here to replace another Tezcocan, and even though I am not the one who should have been the student of these Franciscans, with my luck it would fall to me to replace the first in whatever happens next.” But I will set aside my own fears to recount the sad business of Carlos Ometochtzin.

  Even though from a distance, and at first glance, it might seem absurd, the accusation was a pretext to launch an attack against Bishop Zumárraga. Accusing Don Carlos, who had been a student of the Franciscans, meant accusing Fray Juan Zumárraga. To blame a former student of his order—when he had insisted on the harmlessness of educating the Indians, when he had said himself that he was in favor of Indian studies and especially of the maintenance and improvement of the level of education at the Colegio de Santa Cruz—was to attack him. It was for this reason that Bishop Zumárraga decided to listen to the recriminations without defending Don Carlos before he took the enemies’ side completely and cruelly attacked Don Carlos himself while pretending to pursue fairness and justice, loyalty to the Crown, and fidelity to the word of Christ. What he was trying to do was to save the work of the Franciscans from attack and save his own skin. By turning himself into an accuser, he was evading the accusation that was directed against him, the Franciscans, and their work. Poor Don Carlos Ometochtzin was martyred to save the Franciscans from this attack. Though Don Carlos cannot be called “poor” because it does not fit his temperament, his intelligence, his beauty, or his charm. Allied with those envious of him, those opposed to the Franciscans, and the haters of the Indians, Zumárraga launched a cruel attack on Don Carlos, who was then a lord of Tezcoco.

  Those who testified against Don Carlos might have spoken some truths, but there is no doubt that they told some lies, like the one about the son they attributed to him. They said that Don Carlos’s “son” was between ten and eleven years old and that he did not know how to make the sign of the cross or know anything of the Christian Doctrine because the accused had been opposed to teaching him. Bu
t this child could not be his son because of simple common sense—at the time of trial, Don Carlos was little more than twenty years old, and this is an exaggeration because I cannot even prove twenty. As much as he might have been in a hurry, I do not believe that Mother Nature would have permitted him to father a child at seven years of age.

  During Lent, someone accused the good and wise Don Carlos of digging up the remains of terrible practices from the base of one of the crosses in the pueblo of Chiautla in Tezcoco. The authorities had the bases of the crosses dug up and found things related to sacrifices: papers with blood, flint in the shape of sacrificial knives for extracting hearts, little pebbles and different kinds of beads, including some copal, and three or four paper mats and other kinds of mantillas, as well as figures of idols carved in the rocks. If they were there under the crosses or whether they were put there when they dug around the bases of the crosses, this we will never know, but their discovery, whether it was real or fake, led to the trial against Don Carlos Ometochtzin, el Chichimecatécotl.

  Since I had set aside my fears to explain what this situation was about, I am going to return to them. It is not at all pleasant to remember the injustice of so many people launching a savage attack against the good and wise Don Carlos Ometochtzin simply because they hated him. It is true that a cowardly fear caused me to practically feel the flames of their cruel bonfire, but it was a brave fear when I saw the face of their viciousness against the Indians and against whatever was wholesome and good in them. In a way, I identified with him; I was him. In a way, I achieved martyrdom through his punishment, but it was a martyrdom that went against martyrological rhetoric, one that shattered the principles because it was not burnt at the stake or allowed to fall from everything the Christians—not the heretics—had built. The angels did not come to see him die, nor did he levitate before being burned. He was tortured, beaten, and abused, and his torturers, batterers, and abusers had holy words on their lips. Inasmuch as I saw this and knew it, something I could not completely accept galled me, and my child’s soul did not know that I was tasting, for the first time, the revenge and envy that are so abundant in these lands.