The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

  He moved the machine gun so he could fire at the hidden enemy gun, and the sun fell behind the mountains. The machine gun, shook his entire body, and Miguel whispered, "Balls just aren't enough. Those blond Arabs over there have better weapons."

  Because over their heads airplane motors began to buzz.

  "The Caproni are here."

  They fought side by side, but it was so dark they couldn't see each other. Miguel reached out and touched his shoulder. For the second time that day, the Italian planes were bombing the town.

  "Let's get out of here, Lorenzo. The Caproni are back."

  "Where to? Wait. What about the machine gun?"

  "What good is it? We don't have any more ammo."

  The enemy machine gun had also fallen silent. Below them, a group of women ran by. They couldn't see them, but they could hear them, because they were singing in loud voices despite the fighting:

  With Lister and Campesino, With Galán and Modesto,

  With Commander Carlos as our guides,

  The army of the people is so brave

  It will surely turn the tide…

  The voices sounded strange, mixed in with the noise of the bombs, but they were stronger than the bombs: the bombs fell sporadically but the singing never stopped. "And it isn't as if they were warlike voices either, Papa, but the voices of women in love. They were singing to the Republican fighters as if they were their lovers, and up on the roof Miguel and I accidentally touched hands and thought the same thing. That they were singing to us, to Miguel and Lorenzo, and that they loved us…"

  Then the facade of the bishop's palace collapsed, and they threw themselves on the ground, covered with dust. He thought about Madrid when he'd first arrived, about the cafés filled with people until two or three in the morning, when all they talked about was the war, and how euphoric they all felt and how absolutely sure they'd win, and he thought how Madrid was still holding out and how the women of Madrid made curlers out of bomb fragments…They crawled to the stairway. Miguel was unarmed. He dragged his rifle along. He knew there was only one for every five soldiers. He decided not to leave it behind.

  They walked down the spiral staircase.

  "I think a baby was crying in one of the rooms. I'm not sure, I might have mistaken the air-raid sirens for wailing."

  But he imagined the baby there, abandoned. They felt their way down in the darkness. It was so dark that when they came out on the street it looked like broad daylight. Miguel said, "They shall not pass," and the women answered: "They shall not pass!" The night blinded them, and they must have become disoriented as they walked along, because one of the women ran after them, saying, "Not that way. Come with us."

  When they got used to the light of night, they found themselves face down on the sidewalk. The collapsed building shielded them from the enemy machine guns: he breathed in the dust, but he also inhaled the sweat from the girls stretched out next to him. He tried to see their faces. All he saw was a beret and a wool cap, until the girl who'd thrown herself down at his side raised her face and he saw her loose chestnut hair whitened by the plaster from the building, and she said:

  "My name's Dolores—Lola."

  "I'm Lorenzo. This is Miguel."

  "Miguel, that's me."

  "We're separated from our group."

  "We were in the Fourth Corps."

  "How do we get out of here?"

  "We'll have to take the long way round and cross the bridge."

  "Do you know this place?"

  "Miguel knows it."

  "Right, I know it."

  "Where are you from?"

  "I'm Mexican."

  "Ah, so it won't be hard to understand each other."

  The planes left, and they stood up. Nuri with her beret and María with her wool cap told them their names and they repeated theirs. Dolores was wearing trousers and a jacket; the other two women, overalls and knapsacks. They walked single file down the deserted street, hugging the walls of the tall houses, under dark balconies with their windows open, as if on a summer day. They could hear the interminable sniping, but they didn't know where it came from. A dog barked from an alley, and Miguel tossed a stone at it. An old man, a scarf wrapped around his head, was sitting in his rocker. He didn't look at them as they passed, and they could not understand what he was doing there: was he waiting for someone to come home, or was he waiting for the sun to come up, or what. He didn't look at them.

  He breathed deeply. They left the town behind and reached an open field with some bare poplars in it. That autumn no one had raked up the dry leaves and they crackled under their feet. He noticed that the leaves closest to the ground had already turned black from the rains, and he glanced back at the soaking-wet rags wrapped around Miguel's feet. Once again he wanted to offer him his boots, but his comrade was striding along so resolutely on his strong, slim legs that he realized how useless it would be to offer what wasn't needed. In the distance, those dark slopes awaited them. Perhaps then he'd need the boots. Not now. Now the bridge was there, and beneath it ran a turbulent, deep river. They stopped to stare at it.

  "I hoped it would be frozen over"—he gestured angrily.

  "Spanish rivers never freeze over," murmured Miguel. "They always run."

  "Why did you want it to be frozen?" Dolores asked him.

  "Well, that way we could have avoided the bridge."

  "Why would we want to do that?" said María, and the three women, the question in their eyes, looked like curious little girls.

  "Because bridges are usually mined," said Miguel.

  The small group did not move. The swift white river swirling at their feet hypnotized them. They stood stock-still. Until Miguel raised his face, looked toward the mountains, and said: "If we cross the bridge, we can get to the mountains and from there to the border. If we don't cross, we'll be shot…"

  "Well?" said María, holding back a sob. For the first time, the two men could see her glassy, weary eyes.

  "We lost!" shouted Miguel. He clenched his empty fists and walked around as if looking for a rifle on the ground carpeted with blackened leaves. "There's no going back! We've got no planes, no artillery, nothing!"

  He did not move. He stood there staring at Miguel until Dolores, Dolores's hot hand, the five fingers she had just taken out of her armpit, clasped the young man's five fingers, and he understood. She sought his eyes, and he saw hers, also for the first time. She blinked, and he saw that her eyes were green, as green as the sea near our land. He saw her with uncombed hair and no makeup, her cheeks red from the cold, her lips full and dry. The other three didn't notice. They walked, she and he, holding hands, and stepped onto the bridge. For a moment, he doubted. She did not. The ten fingers they clasped gave them warmth, the only warmth he'd felt in all those months.

  "…the only warmth I felt in all those months of retreat toward Catalonia and the Pyrenees…"

  They heard the noise of the river below, and the creak of the bridge's wooden planks. If Miguel and the girls shouted from the other bank, they did not hear them. The bridge grew longer and longer, it seemed to be spanning an ocean and not this rampaging river.

  "My heart was beating fast. She must have felt the pounding in my hand, because she put in on her breast, where I could feel the strength of her heart…"

  Then they walked side by side, and the bridge grew shorter.

  On the other side rose something they hadn't seen a huge, bare elm, beautiful and white. It wasn't covered with snow but with glittering ice. It was so white it glowed like a jewel in the night. He felt the weight of the rifle on his shoulder, the weight of his legs, his leaden feet on the planks; the elm waiting for them seemed so light, luminuous, and white.

  "I closed my eyes, Papa, and I opened them, afraid that the tree wouldn't be there anymore…"

  Then their feet touched earth, they stopped, they did not look back, both ran toward the elm, without paying attention to the shouts of Miguel and the two girls, without hearing the running fe
et of their comrades on the bridge, they ran and embraced the naked trunk, white and covered with ice, they shook it, and pearls of cold fell on their heads. They touched hands, embracing it, and they wrenched themselves from their tree to brow and she his neck. She stepped back, so he could see her moist green eyes better, her half-open mouth, before she buried her head in the boy's chest, raised her face to give him her lips, before their comrades surrounded them, but not hugging the tree as they had…

  "…how warm, Lola, how warm you are, and how much I already love you."

  They made camp in the foothills, below the snow line. Miguel and Lorenzo gathered wood and made a fire. Lorenzo sat next to Lola and held her hand once more. María took a dented cup out of her knapsack, filled it with snow, and let the snow melt over the fire. Then she took out a chunk of goat cheese. Nuri pulled some wrinkled Lipton tea bags out of her bosom, and everyone laughed at the face of the English yachtsman smiling on the labels.

  Nuri told how they'd packed the tobacco and condensed milk sent by the Americans before Barcelona fell. Nuri was plump and jolly and had worked before the war in a textile factory, but then María started talking, recalling the days when she'd studied in Madrid and lived in the Student Residence and went out on strike against Primo de Rivera and wept at each new play by García Lorca.

  "I'm writing to you with the paper resting on my knees as I listen to these girls talk, and I try to tell them how much I love Spain, and the only thing I can think to talk about is my first visit to Toledo, a city I imagined to be the way EI Greco painted it—enveloped in a thunderstorm, with lightning flashes and greenish clouds, set over a wide Tagus, a city—how shall I put it?—at war against itself. And I found a city bathed in sunlight, a sunny, silent city with its old fortress bombed out, because El Greco's picture—I try to tell them—is all of Spain, and if the Tagus in the real Toledo is narrower, the Tagus of Spain splits the country apart. That's what I've seen here, Papa. That's what I try to tell them…"

  That's what he told them, before Miguel told now he'd joined Colonel Asencio's brigade and how hard it had been for him to learn to fight. He told them that everyone in the Republican army was very brave, but they needed more than bravery to win. They had to know how to fight. And amateur soldiers take a long time to understand that there are rules about security and that it's better to go on living so as to go on fighting. Moreover, once they learned how to defend themselves, they still had to learn how to attack. And when they learned all that, they still had to learn the hardest lesson of all, how to master themselves, overcome their habits, their need for comfort. Miguel criticized the anarchists because, he said, they were defeatists, and criticized the arms merchants who promised weapons to the Republic they'd already sold to Franco. He said his greatest sorrow, the one he'd carry to his grave, was that all the workers of the world had not taken up arms to defend Spain, because if Spain lost, it was as if al of them lost. He said that and broke a cigarette in half, giving part of it to the Mexican. They both smoked, he next to Dolores, and he passed his to her so she could smoke, too.

  They heard heavy artillery in the distance. From their campsite, they could see a yellowish glow, a fan of dust rising in the night. "Figueras," said Miguel. "They're shelling Figueras."

  They looked out toward Figueras. Lola was next to him. She didn't speak to all them. Only to him, in a low voice, as they watched the far-off dust and listened to the noise. She said she was twenty-two, three years older than he, so he pretended to be even older and said he'd already turned twenty-four. She said she was from Albacete and that she'd gone to war to be with her boyfriend. They'd studied together—chemistry—and she followed him, but Franco's Moroccan troops had shot him at Oviedo. He told her he was from Mexico, and that he lived where it was hot, near the sea, a place full of fruit. She asked him to tell her about tropical fruits and laughed at the names she'd never heard and told him that mamey sounded like a poison and guanábana like a bird. He told her he loved horses and when he first came he'd been in the cavalry, but now there were no more horses, or anything else, for that matter. She told him she'd never been on a horse; he tried to explain the pleasure of horseback riding, especially on the beach at dawn, when the air smells of iodine and the north wind is letting up but it's still raining lightly and the foam raised by the horse's hooves mixes with the drizzle, and how he'd ride shirtless, his lips caked with salt. That she liked. She said that maybe he still had the taste of salt on his mouth, and kissed him. The others had gone to sleep next to the fire, which was dying out. He got up to stir it, with Lola's taste fresh in his mouth. He saw that the others had fallen asleep hugging one another to keep warm, and he went back to Lola. She opened his sheepskin-lined jacket, and he clasped his hands around her back, over her rough work shirt, and covered his back with the jacket. She whispered that they should choose a place to meet in case they were separated. He told her they'd meet in a café he knew near the statue of Cybele when they liberated Madrid, and she answered that they'd see each other in Mexico, and he said yes, in the main plaza in the port of Veracruz, under the arches, in the Parroquia Café. They would have coffee and crabs.

  She smiled and so did he, and he said he wanted to mess her hair and kiss her and she beat him to it, snatching off his cap and tangling his hair while he slipped his hands under her shirt, caressed her back, sought her unfettered breasts and then he didn't think about anything and neither did she, certainly not, because her voice didn't say words, emptying all her thoughts into that continuous murmur that was thank you I love you don't ever forget me…

  They clamber their way over the mountain, and for the first time Miguel walks with difficulty, but not because of the climb, even though it's steep. The cold has gotten to his feet, a cold with sharp teeth they all fell in their faces. Dolores leans on her lover's arm, and if he catches a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye, he can see she's worried, but if he looks her in the eye, she looks back with a smile. All he asks—all any of them asks—is that it now snow. He's the only one with a weapon, and he has only two bullets. Miguel has told them they have nothing to worry about.

  "I'm not afraid. The border's on the other side. Tonight we'll be in France, in a house and in bed. We'll have a nice hot meal. I remember you and I think you wouldn't be ashamed, you would have done the same thing I'm doing. You fought, too, and you'd be proud to know that there's always one who goes to war. I know you'd be proud. But now this fight's coming to an end. As soon as we cross the border, this late arrival to the international brigades calls it quits and begins a new life. I'll never forget this one, Papa, because I learned everything I know here. It's simple. I'll tell you everything when I get back. Just now I can't think of the right words."

  With one finger, he touched the letter in the inside pocket of his shirt. He couldn't open his mouth in this cold. He was panting. White steam seeped between his clenched teeth. They were moving so slowly. The column of refugees was so long they couldn't see the far end of it. Ahead of them were the carts full of wheat and sausages the peasants were taking to France; the women carrying mattresses and blankets, the men carrying paintings, chairs, pitchers, mirrors. The peasants said they would plant crops in France. They moved forward slowly. There were children as well, some just infants. The land up in the mountains was dry, harsh, thorny, full of scrub. They were scrabbling their way over the mountain. He felt Dolores's fist at his side and also felt that he had to save her, protect her. He loved her more than he did last night. And he knew that tomorrow he'd love her more than he did today. She loved him as well. There was no need to say it. They liked each other. That's it. We like each other. They already knew how to laugh together. They had things to tell each other.

  Dolores left him and ran to María, who had stopped by a boulder, holding her hand to her forehead. She said it was nothing. She suddenly felt so tired. They had to get out of the way of the red faces, the frozen hands, the heavy carts. María repeated that she suddenly felt a little dizzy. Lola took her
by the arm, and they started walking again. It was then, yes, then that they heard the noise of a motor coming closer. They stopped. They couldn't find the plane. Everyone looked for it, but the sky was milky. Miguel was the first to see the black wings, the swastika, and the first to shout, "Down! Everybody down!"

  Everyone hit the dirt, squeezed between rocks, under the carts. Everyone—except that rifle which still had two bullets in it. And it doesn't fire, rusty damn piece of junk, it doesn't fire no matter how hard he squeezes the trigger, standing there in plain view, until the noise passes over their heads, fills them with that swift shadow and the fusillade that spatters on the ground and ricochets off the rocks…

  "Down, Lorenzo, get down, you damn fool Mexican!"

  Down, down, down, Lorenzo, and those new boots on the dry earth, Lorenzo, and your rifle in the dirt, damn fool Mexican, and a vertigo inside your stomach, as if you were carrying the ocean in your guts, and your face already in the dust with your open green eyes and half asleep, between sun and night, as she screams and you know that, after all, your boots will be of some use to poor old Miguel with his blond beard and white wrinkles, and in a minute Dolores will throw herself on you, Lorenzo, and Miguel will tell her it's useless, crying for the first time, they had better keep going, life is on the other side of the mountains, life and freedom, because that's the way it is, those were the words he wrote: they took the letter with them, they took it out of his stained shirt, she squeezed it in her hands, what heat!, if the snow falls, it will bury him, when you kissed him again, Dolores, clinging to his body, and he wanted to bring you to the sea, on horseback, before touching his own blood and falling asleep with you in his eyes…how green…don't forget…