I feared, Sire, that the icy cataract of words from this Queen of Hell would turn me into ice, and my words into coins of snow. I spoke rapidly, savoring the warmth from my mouth, tossing my words like coals at the feet of the motionless pair: “Who am I? I have the right to one answer this night…”
I would have wished to see the eyes of the King of Death when after a perverse silence, as if the two expected that the pause would suffice to convert me to their condition, he at last spoke: “You are one in your memory. You are another in the time you cannot remember.”
And the White Lady added: “The Plumed Serpent in what you remember. The Smoking Mirror in what you forget.”
As I listened, I hid my face in my hands, and as if she herself had appeared in this deep region I again heard clearly the words of the Lady of the Butterflies, spoken on that warm night in the jungle, only three nights before the night I was now living in the nation of the dead:
“You will travel twenty-five days and twenty-five nights before we are together again. Twenty are the days of your destiny in this land. Five are the sterile days you will save against death, though they will be similar to death. Count them well. You will not have another opportunity in our land. Count well. Only during the five masked days will you be able to ask one question of the light and one question of the darkness. During the twenty days of your destiny, it will not profit you to ask, for you will never remember what happens on those days — forgetfulness is your destiny. And during the last day you pass in our land, you will have no need to ask. You will know.”
I closed my eyes and quickly I measured that promised time: I had lived twenty days without memory, and I remembered only three, for in order to save myself I had felt the need to save only three; and thus I had abused the Lady of the Butterflies, for I had succeeded in meeting her again at the pyramid with two full days left to me, two days in which I had the power to ask, to approach final wisdom, and to remember what might be remembered from the forgetfulness that seemed to be my burden, here in this land, Sire, and there in the lands I left behind.
I opened my eyes and saw superimposed upon the featureless, icy mask of the Lady of Death the semblance of my beloved wife of the jungle and the cruel tyrant of the temple; and when I saw those faces imposed upon nothingness, but simultaneously alive in their expressions of love and hatred, wedded by passion, I swore they were both speaking to me; one, the voice of warm love in the jungle; the other, the voice of the smoking sacrifice on the pyramid; and the voice of the pyramid was telling me not to be deceived further by the terrible tyrant: false was her first promise to me, the woman of the pyramid was saying, as her more recent promise was false: it is not true, you would not have lived like a prince for a year, drinking in the pleasures of the land, then to die in sacrifice; no, my years are like your minutes, stranger, and your year would have ended there, immediately, as the culmination to the bloody day of sacrifice; fear my words; I would have made you believe that the following night had lasted a year, and the next day I would have said: “I have fulfilled my promise. You have lived your year of happiness. Now you must die. This is your last day. As I told you, today you need not ask: you know.”
But while the goddess of the pyramid was speaking, the voice of the woman of the jungle, my lover, also spoke from the depths of the mask superimposed upon the featureless face of the Queen of Death, and that voice was saying, fool, dearest fool, everything I told you on the pyramid was true, the year I offered you would truly have been a complete year, our year, and the woman offered you in marriage would have been I, oh, poor fool, I myself, again your lover for more than three hundred days; that was my true promise, and you refused to take advantage of it; an entire year with me, and then death…”
Oh, Sire, these delirious debates coursed through my mind as wildly as the skull women flew through the air, and as I listened to the two voices I could only remember the Cruel Lady’s confusion when I told her that two days and two nights remained to me; her amazement, her anger, her confusion, revealed that she herself had been deceived; that a power greater than hers had allowed me to live twenty complete days without memory, but only three in memory. Two days and two nights, wrested from my destiny, remained; these days I would remember; on these days I would live guided by my own will, and on the last day I would know. But what I knew I would not know through the intercession of the Lady of the Butterflies, but because of another power superior to hers. And now I would never know what I would have known had I heard in time the voice of my lover: a year by her side, one whole year with her, one year of love, and then one day of death. I was already in the Kingdom of Death: perhaps with only two days remaining of my own will, and they would be days without love, and then, more swiftly this time, this time not to be denied, the same death my beautiful Lady had had the grace to postpone for a year.
Knowing this, Sire, was to return to my primary condition as orphan: before I had known the friendship of old Pedro, before I had embarked with him that long-ago evening; then I lost him on the beach of the new world, then I lost the people beside the river who had sheltered me, and finally, just today, I lost my lover and her promise; an orphan who had lost all affectionate companionship, all support from the warm closeness of others, father, people, friend, mother, and lover: I was an orphan in the icy, white, cold furrows of death, an orphan reliant upon the aid of an unknown power, the power that had violated the design of mortal love of the princess of the tattooed lips. I asked myself whether this power was not greater than that of these sovereigns of death, and whether I would pass the last two days of my life in their frozen kingdom, then sink forever into a whiteness without memory or time or life. I looked at the Lords of Hell, I thought of myself. And I wept.