"Go over to him, child…so he can recognize you…Tell him your name…"
She smells good. She smells pretty. Oh yes, now I can make out the blush on her cheeks, her shining eyes, her young, graceful body, which approaches my bed in short steps.
"I…I'm Gloria…"
I try to whisper her name. I know they don't listen to what I say. For that at least I have to be thankful to Teresa: for having brought her daughter's young body close to me. If only I could make out her face more clearly. If only I could see the expression of disgust on her face. She must be aware of this stench of dead scales, vomit, and blood; she must see this sunken chest, this gray, matted beard, these waxy ears, this fluid I can't keep from pouring out of my nose, this dry saliva on my lips and chin, these unfocused eyes that will have to try to take another look, these…
They take her away from me.
"Poor thing…She was upset…"
"What?"
"Nothing, Papa, just rest."
Someone said she was going out with Padilla's son. How he must kiss her, what words he must say to her, ah, yes, what a blush. They come and go. They touch my shoulder, they nod, they whisper words of encouragement, yes, they don't know that I'm listening in spite of everything: I hear even the remotest conversations, the talk that takes place in the corners of the room, but I don't hear what they say nearby, the words spoken into my ear.
"How does he look to you, Mr. Padilla?"
"He looks bad, very bad."
"He's leaving behind a veritable empire."
"Yes."
"So many years he's spent running his businesses!"
"It'll be hard to find someone to take his place."
"I'll tell you what: the only person fit to fill his shoes is you…"
"Yes, I've been so close to him…"
"And who would take your place, in that eventuality?"
"Oh, there are so many qualified people."
"So you think there will be quite a few promotions?"
"Certainly. A whole new redistribution of responsibilities."
"Ah, Padilla, come closer. Did you bring the tape recorder?"
"You'll take responsibility?"
"Where Artemio…Here it is…"
"Yes, sir."
"Be ready. The government is going to intervene in a big way, so you have to be ready to take charge of the union."
"Yes, sir."
"Let me warn you in advance that quite a number of old foxes are getting ready. I've already hinted to the authorities that you're the man we know we can count on. Wouldn't you like a little something to eat?"
"No, thanks, I already ate. Much earlier."
"All right, then, get cracking. Go shake some hands, over in the Ministry of Labor and the Confederation of Mexican Workers—you know what I mean…"
"I'll get right on it, boss. You can count on me."
"See you soon, Campanela. Keep a low profile. Be careful. On your toes. Let's go, Padilla…"
There. It's finished. Ah. That was everything. But was it? Who knows. I don't remember. I haven't listened to the voices in that recorder for a long time. I've been playing dumb for a while now. Who's touching me? Who is that so close to me? How useless, Catalina. I tell myself: How useless, what a useless caress. I ask myself: What are you going to say to me? Do you think you've finally found the words you never had the courage to say? Ah, so you did love me? Why didn't we ever say it? I loved you. I don't remember anymore. Your caress makes me see you and I don't know, I don't understand why, sitting next to me, you share this memory with me at the end, and this time, without a reproach in your eyes. Pride. Pride saved us. Pride killed us.
"…for a miserable salary, while he shames us with that woman, while he rubs our noses in his money, he gives us what he gives us as if we were beggars…"
They didn't understand. I did nothing for them. I didn't even take them into account. I did it for myself. I'm not interested in these stories. I don't want to remember Teresa and Gerardo. They mean nothing to me.
"Why didn't you demand that he give you your rightful place, Gerardo? You're as responsible as he is…"
I have no interest in them.
"Calm down, Teresita, how about trying to understand my point of view? You don't hear me complaining."
"Personality, that's all you needed, but not even that…"
"Let him rest."
"Don't start siding with him now! He made no one suffer as much as he made you…"
I survived. Regina. What was your name? No. You, Regina. But what was your name, soldier without a name? Gonzalo. Gonzalo Bernal. A Yaqui. A poor little Yaqui. I survived. You died.
"He made me suffer, too. How can I forget it. He didn't even come to the wedding. My wedding, his daughter's wedding…"
They never got the point. I didn't need them. I created myself by myself. Soldier. Yaqui. Regina. Gonzalo.
"He destroyed even the things he loved, Mama, and you know it."
"Just stop talking, for God's sake, just stop…"
The will? Don't worry: it exists, an officially stamped, notarized document. I don't leave anyone out: why should I leave anyone out, hate anyone? Wouldn't you have secretly thanked me for hating you? Wouldn't it give you pleasure to know that even at the end I thought about you, even if it was to play a trick on you? No, I remember all of you with the indifference of a cold bureaucratic formality, my dear Catalina, my charming daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law: I'm doling out a strange fortune to you, a wealth which you will all ascribe—in public—to my efforts, my tenacity, my sense of responsibility, my personal qualities. Please do so. And remain calm. Forget that I earned that wealth by risking my skin without knowing it in a struggle I didn't try to understand because it wouldn't have helped me to define, to understand, because only those who didn't expect anything from their sacrifices could know and understand it. That's what sacrifice is—am I correct?: to give everything in exchange for nothing. If it isn't, then what should we call giving everything in exchange for nothing? But they didn't offer everything to me. She offered me everything. I didn't take it. I didn't know how to take it. What could her name be?
"Okay. The picture's clear enough. Say, the old boy at the Embassy wants to make a speech comparing this Cuban mess with the old-time Mexican Revolution. Why don't you lay the groundwork with an editorial…"
"Yes, yes. We'll do it. How about twenty thousand pesos?"
"Seems fair enough. Any ideas?"
"Sure. Tell him to show the sharp differences between an anarchic, bloody movement that destroys private property and human rights and an orderly, peaceful, legal revolution like Mexico's, a revolution led by a middle class that found its inspiration in Jefferson. After all, people have bad memories. Tell him to praise Mexico."
"Fine. So long, Mr. Cruz, it's always…"
Oh, what a bombardment of signs, words, and stimuli for my tired ears. Oh, how tired I am. They will probably not understand my gestures, because I can barely move my fingers: turn it off, it's boring me, what does it have to do with me now? What a bother, what a bother…
"In the name of the Father, of the Son…"
"That morning I waited for him with pleasure. We crossed the river on horseback."
"Why did you take him away from me?"
I'll bequeath to them all the vain useless deaths, the lifeless names of Regina, the Yaqui…Tobias, now I remember, his name was Tobias…Gonzalo Bernal, a soldier without a name. And the woman? The other one.
"Open the window."
"No. You might catch cold and make everything worse."
Laura. Why? Why did everything have to happen this way? Why?
You will survive: you will run your finger over the sheets and know that you have survived, despite time and the movements that hem in your fortunes with every passing instant. The line of life is located between paralysis and debauchery. Adventure: you will imagine the greater security, never to move. You will imagine yourself immobile, safeguarded from all d
anger, chance, uncertainty. Your quietude will not stop time, which runs without you, although you invent it, measure it, time that denies your immobility and submits you to its own danger of extinction: adventurer, you will measure your velocity with the speed of time.
The time you will invent in order to survive, to create the illusion of greater permanence on earth: the time your brain will create by perceiving that alternation of light and darkness on the clock face of dreams; by retaining those images of placidity threatened by the amassing of concentrated black clouds announcing a thunderclap, the posterity of lightning, the whirlwind discharge of rain, the certain appearance of a rainbow; by listening to the cyclical calls of animals in the forest; by screaming out the signs of time: the howl of wartime, the howl of mourning time, the howl of party time; finally, by saying time, speaking time, thinking the nonexistent time of a universe that knows no time because it never began and will never end: it had no beginning, will have no end, and does not know that you will invent a measure of infinity, a reserve of reason.
You will invent and measure a time that doesn't exist.
You will know, discern, judge, calculate, imagine, foresee, end up thinking that which will have no other reality than that created by your brain, you will learn to control your violence in order to control the violence of your enemies. You will learn to rub two sticks together until they catch fire, because you will have to throw a torch out of your cave to frighten off the beasts which will not make an exception of you, which will not differentiate your flesh from that of other beasts, and you will have to construct a thousand temples, set down a thousand laws, write a thousand books, adore a thousand gods, paint a thousand paintings, construct a thousand machines, dominate a thousand nations, split a thousand atoms in order to throw your flaming torch out of the entrance to your cave again.
And you will do all that because you think, because you will have developed a cluster of nerves in your brain, a thick network capable of obtaining and transmitting information from front to rear. You will survive, not because you are the strongest, but because of the dark luck of an ever colder universe in which only those organisms that know how to maintain their body temperature when that of the environment falls will survive, those organisms that concentrate that frontal mass of nerve tissue and can foresee danger, search for food, organize their movement, direct their swimming in the circular, proliferating ocean teeming with origins. The dead and lost species will stay at the bottom of the sea, your sisters, millions of sisters that did not emerge from the water with their five contractile stars, their five fingers sunk into the other shore, terra firma, the islands of the dawn. You will emerge crossed with amoeba, reptile, and bird, the birds which will launch themselves from the new peaks to smash in the new abysses, learning in failure, while the reptiles already fly and the land grows colder: you will survive with the birds, protected by feathers, clothed in the speed of their heat, while the cold reptiles sleep, hibernate, and finally die, and you will sink your hooves into the hard land, into the islands of dawn, and you will sweat like a horse, and you will climb up the new trees with your constant temperature and descend with your differentiated brain cells, your autonomic nervous system, your constant levels of hydrogen, sugar, calcium, water, and oxygen: free to think beyond your immediate senses and vital necessities.
You will descend with your ten thousand million brain cells, with your electric battery in your head, plastic, mutable, to explore, to satisfy your curiosity, to set yourself goals, to achieve them with a minimum of effort, to avoid difficulties, foresee, learn, forget, remember, connect ideas, recognize forms, to add degrees to the margin left open by necessity, to turn your will away from the attractions and rejections of the physical environment, to seek favorable conditions, to measure reality using the minimum as your criterion, even though you secretly desire the maximum, and not expose yourself to the monotony of frustration.
You will accustom yourself, mold yourself to the requirements of communal life.
You will desire: desire that your desire and the object desired be the same thing; dream of immediate gratification, of the fusion, without division, of desire and that which you desire.
You will recognize yourself.
You will recognize others and allow them to recognize you; and know that you are opposed to each individual because each individual is just one more obstacle between you and your desire.
You will choose, in order to survive you will choose, choose among the infinite mirrors one only, one only, one that will reflect you irrevocably, that will fill other mirrors with a dark shadow, kill them before offering you, once again, those infinite roads of choice.
You will decide, you will choose one of the roads, you will sacrifice the others. You will sacrifice yourself as you choose, will stop being all the other men you might have been, you will wish other men—another man—to carry out for you the life you cut off when you chose: when you chose yes, when you chose no, when you let, not your desire, identical to your freedom, but your intelligence, your self-interest, your fear, and your pride, lead you to a labyrinth.
That day you will fear love.
But you will be able to recover it. You will rest with your eyes
closed, but you will not cease to see, not cease to desire, because that is how you will make the desired object yours.
Memory is satisfied desire.
Today, when your life and your destiny are one and the same.
(1934: August 12)
He took a match, struck it, stared into the flame, and touched it to the end of his cigarette. He closed his eyes. He inhaled the smoke. He stretched out his legs and lolled in the armchair. He ran his free hand over its velvet and breathed in the aroma of the chrysanthemums in the crystal vase. He listened to the slow music coming from the phonograph behind him.
"Almost ready."
His free hand felt for the album, which was on the small walnut table to his right. He touched the album cover, read Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, and heard the majestic entrance of the cello that faded, reasserted itself, and finally overtook the violin refrain, relegating it to the chorus's secondary line. He stopped listening. He straightened his tie and for a few seconds caressed its rich silk, which rustled under the touch of his fingers.
"Would you like me to fix you a drink?"
He walked to the low liquor cart, replete with bottles and glasses, picked out a bottle of Scotch and Bohemian crystal tumbler. He poured out a jigger of whiskey, dropped in an ice cube, and added a splash of water.
"Whatever you're having."
He repeated the operation, picked up both glasses, swished them around to blend the whiskey and water, and went to the bedroom door.
"One minute more."
"Did you choose it because of me?"
"Yes. Don't you remember?"
"Yes."
"Sorry I'm so slow."
He went back to the armchair. He picked up the album cover once again and rested it on his knees. Werke von Georg Friedrich Handel. They both went to concerts in that overheated hall; by chance they were seated next to each other, and by chance she had heard him comment in Spanish to a friend about how hot the place was. He asked her in English for the program and she said certainly in Spanish. They both smiled. Concerti grossi, opus 6.
They made a date for the following month, when they both had to be in that city, to meet in a café on rue Caumartin, near the Boulevard des Capucines, which he would try to revisit years later without her, and not be able to find it—wishing he could see it again, order the same things—a café he remembered having a red-and-sepia decor, with Roman-style banquettes, and a long bar of reddish wood, not an open-air café, but an open café, without doors. They drank créme de menthe and water. He ordered it again. She said that September was the best month, the end of September, the beginning of October. Indian summer. The end of vacation. He paid the check. She took him by the arm, laughing, taking deep breaths, and they crossed the courtyards of th
e Palais Royal, walking through the galleries and courtyards, stepping on the first dead leaves, accompanied by pigeons, and they walked into the restaurant with small tables and red backrests and painted walls with inset mirrors: old paint and old varnish—gold, blue, and sepia.
"All ready."
He looked over his shoulder and watched her walk out of the bedroom fastening her earrings to her earlobes, smoothing her soft, honey-colored hair. He held her drink out to her, and she took a sip, wrinkling her nose. She sat in the red chair and crossed her right leg over her left as she raised the glass to eye level. He imitated her movements and smiled at her as she shook something off the lapel of her black suit. The clavichord led the central refrain of that descent, accompanied by the violins. He imagined it as a descent from a height, not as a march forward: a slight, almost imperceptible descent, which, when it touched the earth, became the contrapuntal joy of the low and high tones of the violins. The clavichord, as if it were wings, had only served as a means to descend and touch the earth. Now that the music was on earth, it danced. They looked at each other.
The Death of Artemio Cruz Page 21