The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

  "We should thank you…for having thought of us," she answered in her lowest voice.

  He opened his hand to caress Catalina's hair. "You understand, don't you? You are going to live by my side. You'll have to forget many things…I promise to respect what is yours…You must promise me that never again…"

  She raised her eyes, narrowing them with a hatred she had never felt before. Her mouth was dry. Who was this monster? Who was this man who knew everything, who took everything, who destroyed everything?

  "Don't say it…" said the girl as she eluded his embrace.

  "I've already had a talk with him. He's a weakling. He didn't really love you. He was frightened from the start."

  With her hand the girl cleansed the places he'd touched on her face. "Of course, he's not strong like you…He's not an animal, like you…"

  She wanted to scream when he took her by the arm, smiled, and made a fist. "Your little Ramón is leaving Puebla. You'll never see him again…"

  He released her. She walked toward the brightly colored cages in the patio: that trill of the birds. One by one, as he looked on, motionless, she opened the painted doors. A robin peeked out and then flew away. The mockingbird hesitated, accustomed to his water and seed. She took him up on her pinkie, kissed his wing, and sent him off. She closed her eyes when the last bird had gone, and allowed the man to take her arm, to lead her to the library, where Don Gamaliel was waiting patiently.

  I feel hands that take me under my arms and raise me to make me more comfortable on the smooth cushions, and fresh linen that is like a balm for my body, which is both hot and cold. I feel all this, but when I open my eyes I see before me that newspaper hiding the face of the reader. I think that Vida Mexicana is there, will always be there every day, will come out every day, and there will be no human power to stop it. Teresa—who is reading the newspaper—drops it in alarm.

  "Is something wrong? Do you feel sick?"

  I have to calm her with my hand, and she picks up the newspaper. No. I feel content, perpetrator of a gigantic joke. Perhaps. Perhaps the master stroke would be to leave behind a special will the newspaper would publish, a testament in which I would tell the truth about my honest enterprise in the area of freedom of the press…No. I've excited myself and brought back the shooting pain in my stomach. I try to reach out to Teresa, to ask for help, but my daughter is immersed in the newspaper again. Earlier, I had seen the day extinguished beyond the windows and had heard the merciful noise of curtains. Now, in the half light of the bedroom with its high ceilings and oak closets, I can't make out the people standing farthest away. The room is very large, but she's there. She must be sitting stiffly, with her lace handkerchief in her hands, her face devoid of make up. Perhaps she doesn't hear me when I whisper: "That morning I waited for him happily. We crossed the river on horseback."

  The only one listening to me is this stranger I've never seen before, with his smoothly shaven cheeks and black eyebrows. He's asking me to say an act of contrition; I'm thinking about the carpenter and the Virgin, and he's offering me the keys to heaven.

  "Well, what would you say…in a situation like this…?"

  I've caught him by surprise. And Teresa has to ruin everything by shouting: "Leave him alone, Father, leave him alone! Don't you see that there's nothing we can do! He wants to go to hell and die just as he's lived, cold, mocking everything…"

  The priest holds her back with one arm as he brings his lips close to my ear, almost kissing me: "They don't have to hear us."

  And I manage to grunt: "Okay, then, be a man and get these bitches out of here."

  He stands up amid the indignant voices of the women and takes them by the arm, and Padilla comes closer. But they don't want that.

  "No, counselor, we can't allow that."

  "It's customary…for years, ma'am."

  "Will you take responsibility?"

  "Don Artemio…I've brought you everything we recorded this morning…"

  I nod. I try to smile. The same as every day. A man you can count on, this Padilla.

  "The outlet is next to the bureau."

  "Thanks."

  Yes, of course, that's my voice, the voice I had yesterday—yesterday? I can't tell the difference anymore—and I ask Pons, my managing editor—ah, the tape is screeching; adjust it, Padilla, I listened to my voice in reverse: it screeches like a cockatoo's. There I am:

  "What do you think about this business, Pons?"

  "It's bad, but it'll be a cinch to handle, at least for now."

  "Then now's the time to get the paper moving on it, no holds barred, okay? Hit them where it hurts. Don't hold back."

  "You're the boss, Artemio."

  "Good thing we've prepared our readers for this one."

  "They've been talking about it for years now."

  "I want to see all the editorials and page one…Bring it all over to my house, any time of day or night."

  "You know what to do, the same slant for every story. A brazen red plot. Alien infiltration totally foreign to the essence of the Mexican Revolution…"

  "The good old Mexican Revolution!"

  "…leaders controlled by foreign agents. Tombroni's really got to give it to them; Blanco is to blast them with a column in which he equates the leader with the Antichrist, and the cartoons have to be scathing…How are you feeling?"

  "Not good. The usual thing. It'll pass. We'd all like to be the men we used to be, right?"

  "The men we used to be…right."

  "Tell Mr. Corkery to step in."

  I cough on the tape. I hear the hinges on a door opening and closing. I feel nothing moving in my stomach, nothing, nothing, the gases don't move, no matter how I strain…But I see them. They've come in. The mahogany door opens, closes, and the footsteps on the thick rug are soundless. They've closed the windows.

  "Open the windows."

  "No, no. You could catch cold and complicate everything…"

  "Open them."

  "Are you worried, Mr. Cruz?"

  "I am. Sit down, and I'll explain why. Would you like a drink? Wheel the cart over. I don't feel very well."

  I hear the little wheels, the clink of the bottles.

  "You look okay."

  I hear ice falling into the glass, the pressure of soda being siphoned out.

  "Look, I'll tell you what's at stake here, in case your people haven't grasped it. Tell the central office that if this so-called union clean-up campaign goes over, we might as well do as the bullfighters do and cut off our pigtails…"

  "Pigtails?"

  "I'll put it as plainly as I can. We're fucked…"

  "Turn that off!" shrieks Teresa, running over to the tape recorder. "Where do you think you are, don't you have any manners at all?"

  I manage to wave my hand, make a face. I miss a few words on the tape.

  "…what these railroad leaders are proposing?"

  Someone nervously blows his nose. Where?

  "…explain it to the companies. God forbid they should be so naïve as to think this is a democratic movement—try to see my point of view—aimed at getting rid of some corrupt union bosses. It isn't that."

  "I'm all ears, Mr. Cruz."

  That's right, it must be the gringo who sneezes. Ah-ah-ah.

  "No. No. You could catch cold and complicate everything."

  "Open them."

  I and not only I, other men, could sniff the breeze for the perfumes of other lands, the aromas drawn out of other noons by the wind. I sniff, I sniff. Far from me, far from this cold sweat, far from these inflamed gases. I made them open the window. I can smell whatever I like, amuse myself by choosing the smells the wind carries: yes, autumn forests; yes, leaves burning; oh, yes, ripe plums; yes, yes, the rotten tropics; yes, hard salt flats, pineapples split open with a machete, tobacco drying in the darkness, the smoke from locomotives, waves on the open sea, pine trees covered with snow; ah, metal and guano. How many tastes that everlasting movement brings and takes away. No, no, they won'
t let me live: they sit down again, they get up and walk and sit down again together, as if they were a single shadow, as if they couldn't think or act on their own. They sit down again, at the same time, with their backs to the window, to block the movement of air toward me, to suffocate me, to make me close my eyes and remember things and no longer let me see things, touch things, smell things. The damned pair of them, how long will it take them to bring in a priest, speed up my death, wrench confessions out of me? There he is still, on his knees, with his scrubbed face. I try to turn my back on him. The pain in my side stops me. Aaaay. It's almost over. I'll be free. I want to sleep. Here it comes again. Here it is. Aaah-ay. And the women. No, not these women. The women. The ones the love. What? Yes. No. I don't know. I've forgotten the face. By God, I've forgotten that face. No. I shouldn't forget it. Where is it? Ay, it was so pretty, that face, how could I ever forget it. It was mine, how could I ever forget it. Aaah-ay. I loved you, how can I forget you. You were mine, how can I forget you? What did you look like, please, what did you look like? How shall I invoke you? What? Why? Another injection? What? Why? No no no, something else, quick, I remember something else; that hurts, aaah-ay, that hurts, that puts me to sleep…that…

  You will close your eyes, conscious of the fact that your eyelids are not opaque, that even though you close them the light reaches the retina: the sunlight that will stop, framed by the open window, at the same height as your closed eyes, your closed eyes that erase details from vision, that alter brilliance and color but do not eliminate vision itself—the light from the copper penny which will melt in the west. You will close your eyes and think you see more. You will see only what your brain wants you to see, more than what is offered by the world. You will close your eyes and the exterior world will no longer compete with your imaginative vision. You will lower your eyelids, and that immobile, unchanging, constant sunlight will create behind your eyelids another world in movement, light in movement, light that fatigues, frightens, confuses, makes you happy, sad. Behind your closed eyelids, you will know the intensity of a light that penetrates to the depth of that small, imperfect plaque to arouse sentiments contrary to your will, your condition. Nevertheless, you will close your eyes, feign deafness; stop touching something, even if it's the air, with your fingers, imagine an absolute insensibility; halt the flow of saliva across your tongue and palate, overcome the taste of your own self; impede your labored breathing, which will go on filling your lungs, your blood with life, choose a partial death. You will always see, always touch, always taste, always smell, always hear: you will have screamed when they pierced your skin with that needle filled with tranquilizer; you will scream before you feel any pain. The announcement of pain will travel to your brain before your skin actually feels the pain: it will travel to warn you about the pain you will feel, to put you on guard so that you will be aware, so that you will feel the pain more acutely, because awareness weakens us, turns us into victims when we realize that the powers will not consult us, will not take us into account.

  There it is: the organs of pain, though slower, will overcome those of reflexive prevention.

  And you will feel divided, a man who will receive and a man who will act, sensor man and motor man, man constructed of organs that feel, transmit feeling to the millions of minuscule fibers that spread toward your cerebral cortex, toward that surface on the upper half of the brain which for seventy-one years receives, stores, expends, denudes, returns the colors of the world, the feel of flesh, the tastes of life, the smells of the earth, the noises of the air: returning them to the frontal motor, to the nerves, muscles, and glands that will transform your body and the fraction of the exterior world that falls to you.

  But in your half sleep the nerve fiber that carries the light impulse will not connect with the zone of vision. You will hear color, and you will touch sound, see smells, smell taste. You will stretch out your arms so as not to fall into the pit of chaos, to recover the order of your whole life, the order of the received fact, transmitted to the nerve, returned to the nerve transformed into an effect and once again into a fact. You will stretch out your arms and behind your closed eyes you will see the colors of your mind and finally you will feel, without seeing it, the origin of the touch that you hear: the sheets, the light touch of the sheets between your clenched fingers; you will open your hands and feel the sweat on your palms and perhaps you will remember that you were born without lifelines on your hand, without fortune, life, or love: you were born, you will be born with a smooth palm, but all you have to do is be born; after a few hours, that blank surface will be filled with signs, lines, portents. You will die with your dense lines worn out, but all you have to do is die for all trace of your destiny to disappear from your hands after a few hours.

  Chaos has no plural.

  Order, order: you will cling to the sheets and repeat in silence, within yourself, the sensations your brain houses, clarifies. With effort, you will mentally locate the places that alert you to thirst and hunger, perspiration and chills, balance and falling. You will find them in the lower brain, the servant, the domestic who carries out immediate functions and frees the other, the upper brain, for thought, imagination, desire: child of artifice, necessity, or chance, the world will not be simple; you cannot know it passively, allowing things to happen to you; you must think so that a combination of dangers does not defeat you, imagine so that mere guessing doesn't negate you, desire so that the web of uncertainty doesn't devour you: you shall survive.

  You will recognize yourself.

  You will recognize others and allow them—her—to recognize you; and you will know that you oppose every individual because each will be one more obstacle keeping you from reaching the objects of your desire.

  You will desire: how you would like your desire and the object desired to be the same thing; how you will dream about instant gratification, about the total identification of desire and what is desired.

  You will rest with your eyes closed, but you will not stop seeing, you will not stop desiring: you will remember, because that way you will make the desired thing yours: back, back, in nostalgia, you will make yours whatever you desire: not forward, back.

  Memory is satisfied desire.

  Survive through memory before it's too late.

  Before chaos keeps you from remembering.

  (1913: December 4)

  He felt the moist crook of the woman's knee next to his waist. Her perspiration was always like that, light and fresh: whenever he took his arm from around her waist, he felt the moisture of that crystalline liquid. He stretched out his hand to rub her back slowly and thought he fell asleep: he could stay that way for hours, just caressing Regina's back. When he closed his eyes, he grasped the infinite love in that young body embracing his: a lifetime would not be enough to travel and chart it, he thought, to explore that smooth, undulating geography with its black and pink irregularities. Regina's body waited, and he, without voice or vision, was spread out on the bed, touching its iron bars first with the tips of his fingers and then with his toes; he tried to touch both ends at the same time. They dwelled within this black crystal: dawn was still far off. The mosquito netting, weighing nothing, isolated them from everything outside their own bodies. He opened his eyes. Regina's cheek came close to his; his matted beard scratched her skin. The darkness was not enough. Regina's slanted eyes glowed, half open, like luminous black scars. She took a deep breath. The girl's hands clasped behind the man's neck, and once more their profiles joined. The heat of their thighs fused into a single flame. He breathed: a bedroom of blouses and starched skirts, quinces cut open on the walnut table, an extinguished bedside lamp. Closer to him, the briny smell of the moistened, soft woman. Her nails made a cat's claw sound on the sheets; her light legs rose again to entwine the man's waist. Her lips sought out his neck. Her nipples trembled joyfully when he touched them with his lips, laughing, pushing aside her long, tangled hair. Did Regina speak? He felt her breath close to him and he sealed her li
ps with his hand. Without tongue or eyes: only mute flesh abandoned to its own pleasure. She understood him. She snuggled closer to the man's body. Her hand descended to the man's sex; his hand felt for the hard, almost hairless sex: he remembered her standing there naked, young and firm when still but undulating and soft as she began to walk: when she went to bathe in privacy, when she closed the curtains, when she fanned the coals in the brazier. They fell asleep again, each one possessed by the center of the other. Only their hands, one hand, moved in sleep, in their smiling sleep.

  "I'll follow you."