It smelled of death, Sire, and when finally we stopped, it was because a most extraordinary edifice rose before us. I would never have seen it from afar because the masking expanse of forest seemed to hold it here in the very center of its dark humid body. This broad-based construction with sheer slimy steps and summit open to the air pulsed like the stony heart of the jungle.
For only the summit received the sun; the body of this great temple was sunken in the corrupt black jungle. Oh, my seas, my rivers; I recalled the blue course that gathers the waters of the desert and leads to the mausoleums of the ancient Kings; like those, this was a pyramid, Sire, although it smelled like a charnel house. Then I observed that it was here the vultures satiated themselves, folding their wings at the top of the pyramid and tearing great hunks of flesh decayed by rain, sun, and death. The tumult at the summit, the feast of the vultures, deafened me, and I knew where the corpses that had disappeared from the village during the long summer deluge had been carried. Deafened, I could still see: the jungle liana climbed and wound around the four sides of the temple and moss covered its steps, but this invasion of the jungle still could not hide the temple’s many sculptured sills, lavish bands of carved serpents that wound with greater vigor than the clinging roots around the terraced levels of that temple.
The barefoot men of our company effortlessly ascended the steep steps with their baskets on their backs; slipping on the moss, I followed them to one of those carved, niche-like openings. Then I saw they were sumptuous caves of human making, and the ancient was set down in one of them along with the baskets of pearls and gold. The natives left him there and told me to enter.
This grotto in the temple had caught the light, and the gold and pearls shone within the deep cavity beneath the low roof, and in one of the palm baskets, immersed in pearls, still sat the old man, my scissors in his hands — hands like the roots of the jungle. He raised one hand and gestured me to approach, to sit beside him. I squatted on my haunches. And the ancient spoke. Opaque and dead, his voice resonated among the dank walls of this at once lugubrious and resplendent chamber.
“Welcome, my brother. I have awaited you.”
THE ANCIENT’S LEGEND
Sire: as I listened to these words in the temple, and the gravity of the ancient’s tone as he spoke to me, I understood that he attributed to me the secret knowledge I had of his tongue; and as it is said of certain magicians that with a magic wand they cause water to burst forth from stone, so burst from my lips the language I had learned without speaking during my long months of living with the people of the jungle. What I do not know, however, is whether I am completely faithful to the words of the ancient man in the temple; I do not know how much I forget and how much I imagine, how much I lose and how much I add. I do not know whether it was only much later during my adventures in the new world that I completely understood everything the old man told me; perhaps it is only today that I understand and repeat it in my own style.
I looked at him, immersed in the pearls that perhaps lent him life and in turn received life from his flaccid skin, the man nourishing the pearls, and the pearls the man. I didn’t know what to say to him; he told me he had been observing me since the day of my arrival, which had been Three Crocodile day, and in that he had seen a good augury, for on such a day, he said, our mother the earth had risen from the waters.
“I was saved from the sea, my lord,” I said simply.
“And you arrived from the East, which is the origin of all life, for the sun is born there.”
He said, too, that I had arrived with the shining yellow light of dawn, with the colors of the golden sun.
“And you dared indicate your presence with fire, and on a dry day. You are welcome, my brother. You have returned home.”
With a gesture he offered me the temple, perhaps the entire jungle. I could only say: “I arrived with another man, my lord, but that man was not welcomed as I was.”
“That is because he was not expected.”
Paying no heed to my questioning glance, the ancient continued: “Furthermore, he defied us. He raised a temple for himself alone. He wished to make himself owner of a piece of the earth. But the earth is divine and cannot be possessed by any man. It is she who possesses us.” He was quiet an instant, then said: “Your friend wished only to take. He wished to offer nothing.”
I looked at the scissors in the hands of the ancient and was again convinced that it was to them I owed my life. And the ancient, gesturing with that rude contrivance I had stolen from a tailor, said something that can be translated like this: the good things belong to everyone, for what is held in common belongs to the gods, and what belongs to the gods is held in common. The words “god” and “the gods” were the first I learned among these natives, for they repeated them constantly, and their “teus” and “teo” are not unlike our “theo.”
“He was my friend,” I said in defense of old Pedro.
“He was an old man,” the ancient replied. “Old men are useless. They eat but they do not work. They are scarcely able to hunt snakes. They should die as soon as possible. An old man is the shadow of death and is unnecessary in this world.”
With amazement I looked at this ancient who surely had lived more than a hundred years, at this invalid coddled in a basket filled with pearls and balls of cotton to warm him against a cold born not of the warm humid air of the jungle but of the brittle, icy years of his bones.
I told him that all things decline and die, man and pearl alike, for such is the law of nature.
The ancient shook his head and replied that some lives are like arrows. They are shot into the air, they fly, and they fall. My friend’s life was like these. But there are other lives that are like circles. Where they seem to end, they in truth begin again. They are renewable lives. “Such as these is your life and mine and that of our absent brother. Do you know anything of him?”
Imagine, Sire, my confusion as I listened to these incomprehensible statements so familiarly expounded. And imagine, too, as I imagined, how the only thing clear to me was the feeling that my fate depended upon my replies.
I murmured: “No, I know nothing of him.”
“He will return someday, as you have returned.”
The ancient sighed and told how our absent brother, more than any other, must return, because he, more than any other, had sacrificed himself. And sacrifice is the only manner to assure renewal.
“Let us be attentive”—he spoke very quietly—“to Three Crocodile day, which returned you to this land. That is the day when all things join together and again become only one, as in the beginning.”
“We are three, my lord; you, I, and the absent one,” I murmured, unsure of what I was saying.
The old man pondered a moment and then said that all abundant things that chaotically proliferate or multiply decline; on the other hand, those things that rise toward oneness live again, and this is the difference between gods and men, for men believe that more is better, but the gods know that less is better.
As he spoke he touched his fingers rapidly, as earlier the young warrior on the beach had done, and he counted on them and gave me to understand that six are fewer than nine, and three are fewer than six.
“Three men clasping hands”—his icy fingers touched mine—“form a circle, readying themselves to be one single man, as in the beginning. Three aspire to oneness. One is perfect, the origin of everything; one cannot be divided, all things that can be divided are mortal, what is indivisible is eternal; three is the first number after one that cannot be divided, two is still imperfect since it can be cut in half; three can devolve into six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, or return to one; three is the crossing of the roads: unity or dispersion; three is the promise of unity.”