The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

  He shook his head and again caressed her hand.

  I wake up…again…but this time…yes…in this car, in this coach…no…I don't know…it runs without any noise…it must be that I'm not fully conscious…no matter how wide I open my eyes, I can't make out…the objects, people…white, luminous ovals spinning around in front of my eyes…a wall of milk separates me from the world…and the things we touch and the voices of other people…I'm apart…I'm dying…I'm parting…no, an attack, an old man my age can have an attack…not death, not separation…I don't want to say it…I want to ask it…but I'm saying it…if I tried…yes…now I heard the superimposed noises of the siren…it's the ambulance…of the siren and my own throat…my tight and closed throat…my saliva drips through it…toward a bottomless pit…parting…a will?…ah, don't worry…there's a paper all signed, sealed, witnessed before a notary…I didn't forget anyone…why would I forget any of you, forgive any of you…?…isn't it delightful for you to think that right down to the last minute I thought about you to have my little joke?…ah, what a laugh, ah, what a joke…no…I remember you with the indifference of a cold transaction…I dole out this wealth they'll say came from my hard work…my tenacity…my sense of responsibility…my personal abilities…do it…calm down…just forget that I earned that wealth, that I risked it, that I earned it…now I give it all in exchange for nothing…isn't that right?…what do you call giving everything in exchange for everything?…call it whatever you like…they came back, they didn't give up…right, when I think about it, I smile…I mock myself, I mock all you…I mock my life…haven't I earned the right?…isn't this the appropriate, the only time to do it?…I couldn't mock myself while I was alive…now I can…my right…I'll leave you my testament…I'll bequeath you those dead names…Regina…Tobias…Páez…Gonzalo…Zagal…Laura, Laura…Lorenzo…so you won't forget me…separated…I can think it and ask myself…without knowing it…because these last ideas…I know it, too…I think, dissimulate…run out of my control, ah, yes…as if my brain, my brain…asks…the answer comes to me before the question…probably…they're the same thing…living is another separation…with that mulatto, next to the shack and the river…with Catalina, if we had ever spoken…in that jail, that morning…don't cross the sea, there are no islands, i t ' s n o t t r u e , I t r i c k e d y o u … f r o m t h e teacher…Esteban?…Sebastián?…I don't remember…he taught me so many things…I don't remember…I left him and went north…ah, yes…yes…yes…yes, life would have been different…but only that…different…not the life of this dying man…no, not dying…I'm telling you no no no…an attack…an old man, an attack…convalescence, that's it…another life…the life of another man…different…but also apart…oh, what a trick…neither life nor death…oh, what a trick…on the man's land…hidden life…hidden death…a fixed period of time…no meaning…my God…ah, that might be the last piece of business…who's putting his hands on my shoulders?…believe in God…yes, a good investment, why not…who's making me lie back, as if I wanted to get up out of here?…is there any other possibility to believe that we go on being even when we don't believe in it?…God God God…all you have to do is repeat a word a thousand times for it to lose its meaning, be nothing more than a string…of empty…syllables…God God…how dry my lips are…God God…illuminate those who are left…make them think of me once…in a while…make my memory…last…I think…but I don't see them clearly…I don't see them…men and women mourning…that black egg of my sight…cracks and I see…that they go on living…they go back to their jobs…idleness…intrigues…without remembering…the poor dear man…who hears the shovels digging the moist…earth…on h i s f a c e … t h e s i n u o u s advance…sinuous…sinuous…sinuous…yes…sensual…of those worms…my throat…drips into me like a sea…a lost voice that…wants to revive…revive…go on living…get on with life where it was cut off by the other…death…no…start over from the beginning…revive…choose again…revive…choose again…no…how icy my temples feel…what blue…nails…what a swollen…stomach…what nausea…from shit…don't die senselessly…no no…ah, bitches…impotent bitches…who have had every object money can buy…and a head full…of mediocrity…if at least…you had understood what those objects…were good for…how to use…these…things…but not even that…while I had it all…do you hear me?…everything…money can buy and…everything it can't buy…I had Regina…do you hear me?…I loved Regina…her name was Regina…and she loved me…loved me without money…followed me…gave me life…down below…Regina, Regina…how I love you…how I love you today…without having to have you near me…how you fill my chest with this warm…satisfaction…how…you flood me…with your old, forgotten…perfume, Regina…I remembered you…see?…look carefully…I remembered you before…I could remember you…just as you are…as you love me…as I loved you in the world…that no one can take away from us…Regina, the world…that I carry with me and save…protecting it with my two hands…as…if it were a fire…a small, living fire…that you gave to me…you gave to me…you gave to me…I may have taken…but I gave to you…oh black eyes, oh dark, aromatic skin, oh black lips, oh dark love I cannot touch, name, repeat: oh your hands, Regina…your hands on my neck and…the oblivion of finding you…the oblivion…of all that existed…outside you and me…oh Regina…without thinking…without speaking…existing in the dark thighs…of timeless abundance…oh my unrepeatable pride…the pride of having loved you…the unanswered challenge…what can the world tell us…Regina…what could it add to that…what logic could speak…to the madness…of our love?…what?…dove, carnation, convolvulus, foam, clover, key, chest, star, ghost, flesh: how shall I name you…love…how shall I bring you close to…my breath…how shall I beg you…to give yourself…how shall I caress…your cheeks…how shall I kiss…yours ears…how shall I breathe you in…between your legs…how shall I say…your eyes…how shall I touch…your taste…how shall I abandon…the solitude…of myself…to lose myself in…the solitude …of ourselves…how shall I repeat…that I love you…how shall I exile…your memory so I can wait for your return?…Regina Regina…that stabbing pain is coming back, Regina, I'm waking up…from that half sleep the sedative induced…I'm waking up…with the pain…in the center…of my guts, Regina, give me your hand, don't abandon me, I don't want to wake up and not find you next to me, my love, Laura, my adored wife, my saving memory, my percale skirt, Regina, it hurts, my unrepeatable tenderness, my turned-up little nose, it hurts, Regina, I realize it hurts: Regina, come, so I can survive again; Regina, exchange your life for mine again; Regina, die again so I can live; Regina. Soldier. Regina. Embrace me, both of you. Lorenzo. Lilia. Laura. Catalina. Embrace me, all of you. No. What ice I feel in my temples…Brain, don't die…reason…I want to find it…I want…I want…land…nation…I loved you…I wanted to go back…reason of unreason…contemplate from a very high place the life I've lived and then see nothing…and if I don't see anything…what reason to die…why die…why die suffering…why not go on living…the dead life…why pass…from the living nothingness to the dead nothingness…it runs out…it runs out panting…the screech of the siren…pack of dogs…the ambulance stops…tired…couldn't be more tired…land…the light enters my eyes…another voice…

  "Dr. Sabines is operating."

  Reason? Reason?

  The stretcher slides out of the ambulance. Reason? Who goes there? Who goes there?

  You couldn't be more tired, couldn't possibly be more tired; it's because you've traveled so far, on horseback, on foot, in the old trains, and the country just never ends. Will you remember the country? You will remember it, but it isn't only one country. It's a thousand countries with a single name. You will know that. You will bring with you the red deserts, the steppes of prickly pears and maguey, the world of the nopal, the belt of lava and frozen craters, the walls with golden church cupolas and stone battlements, the cities of stone and mortar, the cities of red tezontle, the towns of adobe, the villages of reed
huts, the paths of black mud, the roads of drought, the lips of the sea, the thick, forgotten coasts, the sweet valleys of wheat and corn, the northern pastureland, the lakes of the Bajío region, the tall, slender forests, the branches laden with moss, the white peaks, the black plains, the ports with their malaria and their whorehouses, the calcareous husk of the henequen, the lost, rushing rivers, the gold and silver tunnels, the Indians without a common tongue, Cora tongue, Yaqui tongue, Huichol tongue, Pima tongue, Seri tongue, Chontal tongue, Tepehuana tongue. Huastec tongue, Totonac tongue, Nahua tongue, Maya tongue, the flute and the drum, the contredanse, the guitar and the harp, the feathers, the fine bones of Michoacán, the diminutive flesh of Tlaxcala, the light eyes of Sinaloa, the white teeth of Chiapas, the short-sleeved huipil blouses, the bow-shaped combs, the Mixtec tresses, wide tzotzil belts, Santa María shawls, Pueblo marquetry, Jalisco glass, Oaxaca jade, the ruins of the serpent, the ruins of the black head, the ruins of the great nose, the tabernacles and the retables, the colors and reliefs, the pagan cult of Tonantzintla and Tlacochaguaya, the old names of Teotihuacán and Papantla, Tula and Uxmal: you carry them with you and they weigh you down, they are very heavy stones for one man to carry: they don't budge and you have them slung around your neck: they weigh you down and they've gotten into your guts…they are your bacteria, your parasites, your amoebas…

  Your land

  You will think that there is a second discovery of the land in the hustle and bustle of war, a first footstep over the mountains and canyons that are like a challenging fist in the face of the desperate, slow advance of roads, dams, rails, and telegraph posts. This nature which refuses to be shared or ruled, which wants to go on being in its sharp solitude and gives men for their pleasure only a few valleys, a few rivers—she goes on being the sullen owner of smooth and unreachable peaks, of the flat desert, of the jungles and the abandoned coast. And men, fascinated by that haughty power, stand there with their eyes fixed on her power. If inhospitable nature turns her back on men, men turn their back on the wide, forgotten sea, rotting in its hot fecundity, boiling with lost riches.

  You will inherit the land.

  You will never again see those faces you saw in Sonora and Chihuahua, faces you saw sleepy one day, hanging on for dear life, and the next furious, hurling themselves into that struggle devoid of reason or palliatives, into that embrace of men which is broken by other men, into that declaration, here I am and I exist with you and with you and with you, too, with all hands and all veiled faces: love, strange, common love that wears itself out on itself. You will say it to yourself, because you lived through it and you didn't understand it as you lived it. Only in dying will you accept it and openly say that, even without understanding it, you feared it each of your days of power. You will fear that the amorous impulse will burst again. Now you will die and will not fear it any longer, because you will not see it. But you will tell the others to fear it: fear the false calm you bequeath them, fear the fictitious concord, the magical patter, the sanctioned greed, fear this injustice that doesn't even know what it is.

  They will accept your testament: the respectability you won for them, the respectability. They will give thanks to the lowlife Artemio Cruz because he made them respectable. They will thank him because he did not resign himself to living and dying in a Negro shack. They will thank him because he went forth to risk his life. They will vindicate you because they will no longer have your vindication; they will no longer be able to invoke the battles and the chiefs, as you did, and shield themselves with those battles and leaders to justify plunder in the name of the Revolution and their own glory in the name of the glory of the Revolution. You will think and be astounded: What justification will they find? What obstacle will they overcome? They will not think of it, they will reap the benefits of what you leave them for as long as they can; they will live happily, will put on grieving and grateful faces—in public, you will not ask more of them—while you wait, six feet of dirt on your body; you wait until you feel the rush of feet over your dead face and then you will say:

  "They came back. They did not give up."

  And you will smile. You will mock them, mock yourself. It's your privilege. Nostalgia will tempt you: that would be the way to beautify the past; you will not do it.

  You will bequeath the useless deaths, the dead names, the names of all those who fell, dead, so that your name might live; the names of the men stripped so that your name would have possessions; the names of the men forgotten so that your name would never be forgotten.

  You will bequeath this country. You will bequeath your newspaper, the nudges and adulation, the people's awareness lulled by the false speeches of mediocre men. You will bequeath mortgages, you will bequeath a class without class, a power without greatness, a consecrated stupidity, a dwarfed ambition, a clownish commitment, a rotten rhetoric, an institutional cowardice, a clumsy egoism.

  You will bequeath them their thieving leaders, their submissive unions, their new latifundia, their U.S. investments, their jailed workers, their monopolizers and their great press, their field hands, their hit men and secret agents, their foreign bank accounts, their slick speculators, their servile congressmen, their adulatory ministers, their elegant subdivisions, their birthdays and commemorations, their fleas and wormy tortillas, their illiterate Indians, their fired laborers, their despoiled mountains, their fat men armed with scuba gear and stocks, their thin men armed with fingernails. Take your Mexico: take your inheritance.

  You will inherit the sweet, disinterested faces with no future because they do everything today, say everything today, are the present and exist in the present. They say "tomorrow" because tomorrow doesn't matter to them. You will be the future without being it; you will consume yourself today thinking about tomorrow. They will be tomorrow because they live only today.

  Your people.

  Your death. You are an animal that foresees its death, sings its death, says it, dances it, paints it, remembers it before dying its death.

  Your land.

  You will not die without returning.

  This village at the foot of the mountain, inhabited by three hundred people and barely visible except for some glimpses of roof tiles among the leaves, which, as soon as the stone of the mountain fixes itself in the earth, curl on the smooth hillside that accompanies the river in its course to the nearby sea. Like a green half-moon, the arc from Tamiahua to Coatzcoalcos will devour the white face of the sea in a useless attempt—devoured in its turn by the misty crest of the mountains, origin and frontier of the Indian plateau—to link itself to the tropical archipelago of graceful undulations and broken flesh. The languid hand of dry Mexico, unchanging, sad, the Mexico of stone cloisters and locked-in dust on the high plateau, the half-moon of Veracruz will have another history, tied by golden strings to the Antilles, the ocean, and, beyond, to the Mediterranean, which in truth will only be conquered by the battlements of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Where the volcanoes join and the silent insignia of the maguey rise up, a world will die which in repeated waves sends its sensual crests from the parting of the Bosporus and the breasts of the Aegean, its splashing of grapes and dolphins from Syracuse and Tunis, its deep wail of recognition from Andalusia and the gates of Gibraltar, its salaam made by a bewigged black courtier from Haiti and Jamaica, its bits and pieces of dances and drums and silk-cotton trees and pirates and conquistadors from Cuba. The black land absorbs the tide. The distant waves will fix on the cast-iron balconies and in the portals of the coffee plantations. The effluvia will die on the white columns of the rural porticoes and on the voluptuous undulations of the body and the voice. There will be a frontier here; then the somber pedestal of the eagles and flints will rise. It will be a frontier no one will defeat—not the men from Extremadura and Castile, who exhausted themselves in the first foundation and were then conquered, without knowing it, in their ascent to the forbidden platform that allowed them only to destroy and deform appearances: victims, after all, of the concentrated hun
ger of statues made of dust, of the blind suction of the lake which has swallowed the gold, the foundations, the faces of all the

  conquistadors who have raped it; not the pirates who loaded their brigantines with shields thrown with a bitter laugh from atop the Indian mountain; not the monks who crossed the Pass of the Malinche to offer new disguises to unshakable gods who had themselves represented in destructible stone but who inhabited the air; not the blacks, brought to the tropical plantations and softened by the depredations of Indian women who offered their hairless sex as a redoubt of victory against the black race; not the princes who disembarked from their imperial galleons and let themselves be fooled by the sweet landscape of palms and nut trees and ascended with their baggage laden with lace and cologne to the plateau of bullet-pocked walls; not even the leaders wearing three-cornered hats and epaulets who in the mute opacity of the highland found, finally, the exasperating defeat of reticence, of mute mockery, of indifference.

  You will be that boy who goes forth to the land, finds the land, leaves his origins, finds his density, today, when death joins origins and destiny and between the two, despite everything, fixes the blade of liberty.

  (1903: January 18)

  He woke up when he heard the mulatto Lunero mutter, "Drunk again, drunk again," when all the roosters (birds in mourning, decadent, fallen to the status of rustic servants, their abandoned yards once the pride of this hacienda, where more than half a century earlier they did battle with the fighting cocks of the region's political boss) announced the swift tropical morning, which was the end of the night for Master Pedrito, of yet another solitary drinking bout on the colored-tile terrace of the old, ruined mansion. The master's drunken singing could be heard as far as the palm-roofed shack where Lunero was already up and about, sprinkling the dirt floor with water from a pitcher made somewhere else, whose ducks and painted flowers once boasted a shiny lacquer finish. Lunero quickly lit a fire in the brazier to heat up the charal-fish hash left over from the previous day; poking around the fruit basket, he picked out the blackest fruit to eat right away, before rot, the sister of fecundity, softened them and filled them with worms. Later, when the smoke welling up from under the tin plate finally awakened the boy, the phlegmy singing stopped. They could still hear the drunkard's stumbling footsteps, as they moved farther and farther away, until the final slam of the door, prelude to a long morning of insomnia: face down on the canopied mahogany bed with its bare, stained mattress, tangled up in the mosquito net, in despair because his supply of rotgut liquor had run out. Before, Lunero recalled, patting the tousled head of the boy, who approached the fire, his too-short undershirt revealing the first shadows of puberty, when the property was big, the shacks stood far from the house and no one would ever know what went on inside unless the fat cooks and young half-breed women who swept up and starched shirts carried their tales to the other world of men roasted in the tobacco fields. Now everything was close, and all that was left of the hacienda, reduced by the speculators and by the political enemies of the old, dead master, was the windowless house and Lunero's shack. Inside the house, only the memory of the sighing servants, kept alive by skinny old Baracoa, who went on looking after the grandmother, locked in the blue room in back; in the shack, there was just Lunero and the boy, the only workers left.