Survival called for risk. I accepted the risk. I struggled within the narrow basket, attempting to free myself from that prison of woven branches; I rocked like a violent pendulum until the basket fell to the ground, spraying pearls and cotton balls across the ground, and I crawled out on all fours. I got to my feet. I still had the mirror and the scissors in my belt; I ventured to part the deerskin curtains.
The last of the fires were dying, almost ash, reduced now to low-hanging smoke. They seemed the only living things. In a tomb of ash and mud and blood lay all the dwellers of this village, children with slashed necks, women eviscerated by stone knives, old men run through by warriors’ lances. And the warriors themselves dead upon their shields, also felled by lances. The mat huts and canoes lay in stone-cold ashes. And from the branch of a tree, hanging from the belt of black feathers, the young warrior I had once assumed to be the chief of this wandering tribe.
It was night. I could imagine the legion of vultures already poised in the treetops, hooded by their wings, ready to fall at the first light of dawn upon the feast offered by this immolated village. I thought that as my heart was a victim of fear, the village people had been similar victims of the men of the mountain, of the man with the crest and the men with the fans and all their warriors and bearers, who had thus avenged the rupture of the pact. And as in the darkness I tried to detect the motionless outlines of the warriors and the silhouettes of those voracious vultures, I looked toward the jungle, then toward the hills, and finally toward the splendor of flames on the distant nocturnal horizon.
I did not know how to return to the ocean unless it was in one of the canoes now burned beyond repair. Return to the ocean. It was only at that moment that it occurred to me to question why the men of the mountain demanded the tribute of pearls from the jungle people; why didn’t they go directly to the sea and there loot at will the treasures of the beaches?
I didn’t know the answer, although I was looking at the evidence. All the inhabitants of this village had died. And their assailants had destroyed everything, even the canoes. Those who had destroyed this village, I told myself, wished to impede even the flight of spirits … and mine as well. I didn’t know the way through the jungle to the sea. And once on the coast, what would I find except what was before me now: death — buzzards, Pedro’s skeleton, the ashes of his poor plot of land on the shores of the new world, and the dying treasure of the beaches?
I saw that the fire in the jungle lay in the direction of the temple. It was in the temple that I had begun to learn the secrets of this land. I felt it was there I must return, and that if it was my fate to die — motionless as an idol — no better place than that pyramid locked in the heart of the jungle. There I would again be what destiny decreed.
The heir of the ancient: I repeated that to myself many times as guided by the nocturnal splendor I moved forward into the jungle, freed of the weight of treasure and mat huts and canoes that had slowed the pace of our caravan when I had for the first time traveled the route to the pyramid. Over and over I repeated that my only inheritance in this immolated, deserted, and intractable land was my relation with the ancient: what he had told me and what he had not been able to tell me, what his dead staring eyes had tried to communicate as his body was dragged toward the summit of the temple.
I slept beside one of those wide deep wells in the plains at the foot of the hills. And in my sleep flashed a new question: why did the men of the mountain kill all the inhabitants of the village by the river, respecting only my life? As if in answer to all my questions, a black spider loomed in my dream, swaying before my eyes; then, terrified, I fell into that well at whose edge I slept, and the well was deep — interminable — and I was still falling, and I would die, crushed against the chalky walls or drowned in the depths of its distant waters; and then high above me glowed the spider, and she was spinning a thread she dropped down to me; it was strong, and with its aid I climbed from the well and with a choking cry I awakened from my nightmare. In my hand I clutched a spider’s silken thread.
Trembling, I rose to my feet and guided by the spider’s thread raced into the heart of the night. I didn’t need to see anything on the wooded hill, not even the flames toward which I ran; branches whipped against my face, I trampled ferns beneath my feet; I advanced blindly, hurrying, indifferent to hissing snakes, hurry, hurry, sweating, panting, toward wherever this thread chose to lead me. Everything was in flames. Fire illuminated the night. The temple was a tall torch of stone and ivy and sculptured serpents and sacrificed lizards. I reached the end of the thread. Through the eyes of madness I saw the waiting spider; when it saw me it scurried toward the foliage that trembled in the light and shadow of the fire. I looked again. Where the spider had been, holding the end of the thread, stood a woman.
I say woman, Sire, in order to be understood by you and your company. I call woman that apparition of dazzling beauty and dazzling horror, and beautiful was her lustrous cotton raiment all embroidered with jewels, and beautiful but terrible the two strands of jewels that as if encrusted there crossed her cheeks, and terrible was the crescent moon that adorned her nose, and both beautiful and horrible the mouth painted in many colors, and only beautiful the soft shining darkness of her limbs. She wore a crown of butterflies on her head, not a reproduction, not metal or stone or any glass were they, not a garland even of dead butterflies: hers was a crown of living black and blue and yellow and green and white butterflies that wove a fluttering wreath above the head of the being I call woman. And she was that, for if I seem to describe something painted or dreamed or some carved statue, her eyes were living and the life of their gaze was directed toward me. And behind the woman, the burning temple.
She raised her arms toward me. The heavy bracelets clinked and jangled: the black fingernails I had seen the other day on this very spot between the deerskin curtains of a palanquin reached out toward me, sought me, beckoned me. How could I refuse that invitation, Sire? How could I resist, how not walk toward her, toward that embrace, how not bury myself in the folds of finespun cotton and adamantine jewels, how not join the end of my spider’s thread with hers?
Through my sweat-soaked clothing, my heat-drenched body could sense that she was naked beneath the robe, but I couldn’t look upon her body, for my eyes were hypnotized by her mouth: colored snakes that froze and slithered and undulated on the full compelling lips, and I could only imagine the body pressed against mine, which inflamed me as the temple behind us inflamed the night. I tried to imagine the nipples of those black breasts, the jungle of black hair upon the black mound of Venus — my guide, my precious twin, my black star.
Slender, heavy-braceleted arms, black-nailed hands removed my doublet and my breeches, and I was nude, erect, pressed against that terrible and beautiful body; my hands held her waist, her fingers caressed my belly and chest and thighs and buttocks, and fluttered, finally, like butterflies about my sex — stroking, coaxing, cupping, measuring, stiffening; and then with the lightness of butterflies those open, inviting legs shifted and clasped my waist, and I, Sire, sailed away on Venus; I lost all sense of sight and smell, I was mute, deaf … king and slave to pure sensation, a deep and thick and throbbing sensation that thrust against the warmest walls of the jungle and the night, for I was coupling with the black jungle; I was one with everything about me, and through the pulsing cave of the woman mounted upon me I touched everything I had feared — thirst and hunger, sorrow and death … and then, all want, all need, turned into well-being, into gift, into reward … and I was clinging to the back and neck and buttocks of my lover as another night I had clung to the wheel of the ship, knowing that my life was allied to it; now life ebbed from my useless throat and eyes and ears and mouth, flowed from my groin; I was caught in annihilating pleasure, and instead of fleeing this mortal sensation, I clung to it till I felt I was melting into the woman’s flesh and she into mine, and we were one, a spider wrapped in its own spinning, an animal captured in traps of its own making: animal pleasure, call it that, Sire: dreamed-of bliss and immediate eviclass="underline" imprisoned freedom. All my being told me I must never be parted from this union, I had been born to know it, even if knowing it meant death in life. And my most fervent desire was that all my senses die, except sensation; I prayed all the others would leave my body, evaporate into air, spread afar the news I was about to die in the hands of the woman who made love to me at the foot of the burning temple — who was I, as I was she. We were one person, Sire, can you understand me? For only thus can you understand that in that mortal embrace of all earthly delights only one voice spoke, and it was mine, but it issued from her tattooed lips.