The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

  When they dismounted, a guard detachment approached and Colonel Zagal pointed to the Yaqui. "Lock him up. You come with me, Cruz."

  The colonel wasn't laughing now. He opened the door of the whitewashed office, and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. He loosened his belt and sat down. The prisoner stood there, staring at him.

  "Pull up a chair, Captain, and let's have a nice little chat. Care for a cigarette?"

  The prisoner took one, and the flame from the match brought their faces together.

  "Well now"—Zagal smiled again—"it's a simple deal. You tell us the plans of the troops chasing us and we'll set you free. I'm talking to you man to man now. We know we're done for, but even so we're going to put up a defense. You're a good soldier and understand what I mean."

  "Sure. That's why I won't tell you anything."

  "Of course. But actually you wouldn't have to tell us very much. You and all those dead guys back in the canyon were on a scouting mission—anybody could see that. Which means that the rest of your force couldn't be too far away. You even smelled out the route we've been following back north. But since you don't know that pass through the mountain, you would have had to cross the flatland and that takes a few days. Well then: How many men are behind us? Are there troops who've gone ahead by train? What kind of supplies do you have? How much artillery did you bring along? What are your plans? Where are the separate brigades trailing us going to rendezvous? See? I'm not asking for that much. You tell me what I want to know and you go free. Word of honor."

  "Since when have you been giving out guarantees?"

  "Damn it, Captain, we're going to lose this thing no matter what. I'm being straight with you. The Northern Division has collapsed. It's broken down into small bands that will get lost in the mountains, and even the bands are thinning out, because, as we go along, the men are deserting, going back home to their towns and farms. We're tired. We've been fighting for a long time, ever since we took up arms against Don Porfirio. Then we fought for Madero, then against Orozco and his reds, then Huerta's ragpickers, then you Carranza guys. A lot of years. We're worn out. Our people are like lizards, they're turning the same color as the dirt, they're going back to the shacks they came from, they dress like field hands and wait for the time to start fighting again, even if they have to wait a hundred years. They know we've lost this one, the same way Zapata's men know it down south. You have won. Why should you die when your side's already won? Let us go down fighting. That's all I'm asking. Let us lose with a little honor."

  "Pancho Villa's not in this town."

  "No. He's up ahead. The men are deserting in droves; there are only a few of us left."

  "What kind of guarantees can you give me?"

  "We'll leave you here—alive—in the jail until your pals rescue you."

  "Sure, if we win. If not…"

  "If we win, I'll give you a horse so you can get away."

  "So you can shoot me in the back when I go."

  "Come on…"

  "No. I've got nothing to say."

  "We've got your friend the Yaqui in jail, along with a lawyer named Bernal, some kind of envoy from Carranza. You can wait with them until the order for your execution comes through."

  Zagal stood up.

  Neither one took the matter personally. Their feelings had been worn away, effaced by everyday events, by the relentless grind of their blind struggle. They had spoken mechanically, without revealing their true emotions. Zagal asked for information and offered him the opportunity to choose between freedom and execution; the prisoner refused to supply the information. They spoke not like Zagal and Cruz but like gears in two opposed war machines. For that reason, the prisoner received the information about his execution with absolute indifference. An indifference, of course, that obliged him to realize the monstrous tranquillity with which he accepted his own death. Then he, too, stood and set his jaw.

  "Colonel Zagal, we've both been following orders for a long time, without giving ourselves the chance to do something like—how can I put it?—something that would say: I'm doing this as Artemio Cruz; I'm doing this on my own, not as an officer in the army. If you have to kill me, kill me as Artemio Cruz. You've already said that all this is coming to an end, that we're all tired. I don't want to die as the last sacrifice in a winning cause, just as you don't want to die as the last sacrifice in a losing cause. Be a man, Colonel, and let me be one. Let's shoot it out with pistols. Draw a line down the patio, and we'll both come out of opposite corners. If you shoot me before I cross the line, you get to finish me off. If I cross it without getting hit, you let me go."

  "Corporal Payán!" shouted Zagal, with a glint in his eye. "Take him to his cell."

  Then he turned to face the prisoner. "You will get no advance notice of when the execution will take place, so be ready. It might be an hour from now, it might be tomorrow, or even the day after. Just think about what I told you."

  The setting sun came through the barred window and outlined in yellow the silhouettes of the other two men, one standing, the other on his back. Tobias tried to murmur a greeting; the other, who paced nervously, came up to him as soon as the cell door screeched and the keys of the corporal of the guard scraped in the lock.

  "You're Captain Artemio Cruz? I'm Gonzalo Bernal, envoy of our commander, Venustiano Carranza."

  He was wearing civilian clothes, a coffee-colored twill suit whose countrified jacket had a false belt sewn onto it. Artemio looked at him as he looked at all the civilians who tried to come close to the sweaty nucleus of those who did the fighting—he looked at him with a rapid glance of mockery and indifference, until Bernal, wiping his high forehead and blond mustache with a handkerchief, went on: "The Indian is in a bad way. His leg is broken."

  The captain shrugged. "For the time he's going to last, it doesn't much matter."

  "What do you know?" asked Bernal. He kept the handkerchief over his lips, and his words were muffled.

  "They're going to shoot us all. But they won't say when. Did you think we'd be dying of colds?"

  "There's no hope our troops will get here first?"

  Now it was the captain who stopped—he'd been turning, peering at the roof, the walls, the tiny barred window, the dirt floor: an instinctive search for a means to escape. He looked at the new enemy: the informer planted in the cell.

  He asked: "Isn't there any water?"

  "The Yaqui drank it all."

  The Indian moaned. Cruz approached the coppery face resting against the stone head of the bench that served as both bed and chair. His cheek was next to Tobias's when for the first time, with a force that made him step back, he felt the existence of that face, which had never been more than dark clay, one of the troops, more recognizable in the nervous, rapid wholeness of his warrior's body than in this serenity, this pain. Tobias did have a face; he saw it. Hundreds of white lines—lines of laughter and rage and eyes squinting into the sun—covered the corners of his eyelids and inscribed squares on his wide cheekbones. His thick, protruding lips smiled gently and in his gray narrow eyes there was something like a well of turbid, enchanted ready light.

  "So you made it, too," said Tobias in his own language, which the captain had learned in his daily contact with the troops from the Sinaloa mountains.

  He squeezed the Yaqui's sinewy hand. "Yes, Tobias. It's better that you know it now, once and for all: they're going to shoot us."

  "It had to be that way. You'd do the same thing."

  "Yes."

  They remained silent as the sun disappeared. The three men got ready to spend the night together. Bernal paced slowly around the cell: he got up and then sat down on the dirt to scratch some lines in the floor. Outside, in the hall, an oil lamp went on, and they could hear the movement of the jaws of the corporal of the guard. A cold wind sprang up over the desert.

  On his feet again, he went to the cell door: thick slabs of rough-cut pine, and a small opening at eye level. On the other side, the plume of smok
e from the cigar the corporal was lighting floated up. He closed his hands on the rusty bars and observed his guardian's flat profile. Tufts of black hair sprouted out of his canvas cap and only stopped at his square, beardless cheekbones. The prisoner caught his eye, and the corporal answered by rapidly moving his head and free hand to express a silent "What do you want?" His other hand clutched his carbine in the usual style of those engaged in this kind of work.

  "Got your order about tomorrow yet?"

  The corporal looked at him with long, yellow eyes. He didn't answer.

  "I'm not from these parts. What about you? What kind of place is it?"

  "What place?"

  "Where they're going to shoot us. What can you see from there?"

  He stopped and waved, so the corporal would bring the lamp over.

  "What can you see?"

  Only then did he remember that he'd always looked ahead, beginning with the night when he'd crossed the mountain and escaped from the old ruined house in Veracruz. From that day on, he'd never looked back. From that day on, he'd willed to know he was alone, with no strength other than his own…And now…He couldn't resist asking that question—what's it like, what can you see from there—which perhaps was his way of disguising the anxiety of memory, the slope toward an image of leafy ferns and slow rivers, tubular flowers over a shack, a starched skirt and soft hair that smelled of quince…

  "They'll just take you to the patio out behind here," the corporal was saying, "and what you can see—what did you think it'd be?—is a damn high wall, all pockmarked with bullet holes. We shoot so many people…"

  "But the mountains. Can't you see the mountains?"

  "You know, I swear I don't remember."

  "Seen a lot of executions, eh?"

  "You said it."

  "Maybe the guy who does the shooting can see what's going on better than the guys being shot."

  "You mean you've never been in a firing squad?"

  (Yes, I've been in firing squads, but without thinking about what the other guy might feel, or that someday it might be my turn. That's why I have no right to ask you anything, right? Like me, you've only killed, without noticing. That's why no one knows what the other guy might feel and no one can tell about it. If the other guy could come back, if he could tell all about hearing shots and feeling them hit his chest and face. If he could tell the truth about all that, it might be that we wouldn't dare to kill anyone ever again; or it might be that dying wouldn't matter to anyone ever again…It might be terrible…but it might be just as natural as being born…What do you and I know?)

  "Listen, Captain, you won't be needing your insignia anymore. Give it to me."

  The corporal stuck his hand through the bars, and he turned his back on him. The soldier laughed a stifled screech.

  Now the Yaqui was whispering in his language. He dragged his feet over to the hard headrest to touch the Indian's fevered brow with his hand and to hear his words. They ran along in a gentle singsong.

  "What's he saying?"

  "He's telling things. How the government took away the land where his people had always lived, to give it to some gringos. How they fought for their land; how the federal troops came, cut off the men's hands, and chased them into the hills. How they took the Yaqui chiefs up to a bluff, loaded them down with weights, and threw them into the sea."

  The Yaqui spoke with his eyes shut. "Those of us who were left were dragged into a long line and from there, from Sinaloa, they made us walk all the way to the other end, to Yucatán."

  "How they had to march to Yucatán and the women and the old people and the kids in the tribe were dying. Those who made it to the hemp plantations were sold as slaves, and husbands were separated from wives. How they made the women sleep with the Chinese workers, so they'd forget their language and give birth to more workers…"

  "I came back, I came back. As soon as I heard the war had started, I came back with my brothers to fight against the evil."

  The Yaqui laughed softly, and Artemio Cruz felt the need to urinate. He stood up, opened the fly of his khaki trousers, found a corner, and listened to the splashing on the dirt. He frowned, thinking of the usual end for brave men, who die with a wet spot on their uniform trousers. Bernal, who had his arms crossed, seemed to be looking through the high bars for a moonbeam on this cold, dark night. Sometimes a persistent hammering from the town reached them; the dogs howled. A few lost, meaningless conversations managed to penetrate the walls. He slapped the dust off his tunic and went to the young lawyer.

  "Got any cigarettes?"

  "Yes…I think so…They're somewhere."

  "Offer one to the Yaqui."

  "I already did. But he doesn't like mine."

  "Does he have any of his own?"

  "It seems he ran out."

  "Maybe the soldiers have cards."

  "No. I couldn't concentrate. I think I wouldn't be able to…"

  "Sleepy?"

  "No."

  "You're right. There's no need to sleep."

  "Think you'll be sorry?"

  "What?"

  "Sorry, I mean, for ever having slept…"

  "That's a good one."

  "Right. So it's better to remember. They say it's good to remember."

  "There's not much life behind."

  "Why not? That's the Yaqui's advantage. Maybe that's why he doesn't like to talk."

  "Right. No, I don't get you."

  "I mean, the Yaqui has a lot to remember."

  "Maybe in his language they don't remember the same way we do."

  "That march, from Sinaloa. What he told us just now."

  "Yes."

  "…"

  "Regina…"

  "What…"

  "Nothing. I was just saying names."

  "How old are you?"

  "I'm just turning twenty-six. What about you?"

  "Twenty-nine. I don't have much to remember either. Even though life got pretty hectic all of a sudden."

  "When do people start remembering, for instance, their childhood?"

  "That's true; it's hard."

  "Know something? Just now, while we were talking…"

  "Yes?"

  "Well, I said a few names to myself. Know something? They don't mean anything to me anymore, nothing."

  "Sun's coming up."

  "Don't take any notice."

  "The sweat's pouring down my back."

  "Pass me a cigarette. What happened?"

  "Sorry. Here. Maybe you don't feel anything."

  "That's what they say."

  "Who says that, Cruz?"

  "The ones who do the killing."

  "Does it matter much to you?"

  "Well…"

  "Why don't you think about…"

  "What? That everything's going to be the same even if they kill us?"

  "No. Don't think ahead; think back. I think about all those who've already died in the Revolution."

  "Right. I remember Bule, Aparicio, Gómez, Captain Tiburcio Amarillas…just a few."

  "I'll bet you can't even remember twenty. And not only them. What are the names of all those who died? Not only in this Revolution but in all the wars, and even those who died peacefully, in their beds. Who remembers them?"