The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

  The mulatto sat down on the flattened floor and divided the fish, emptying half into the clay bowl and leaving half on the tin plate. He offered the boy a mango and peeled a banana. They began to eat in silence. When the small mound of ashes was finally cold, a thick cloud of perfume from the convolvulus Lunero had planted years before to cover the gray adobe of the walls and to surround the shack with the nocturnal aroma of tuberous flowers drifted through the only opening—door, window, refuge for sniffing dogs, frontier for the red ants held back by a line of lime. They didn't speak. But the mulatto and the boy felt the same happy gratitude at being together, a gratitude they would never mention, never even express in a shared smile, because they weren't there to talk or smile but to eat and sleep and go out together every daybreak, always silent, always weighed down by the tropical humidity, to do the work necessary to go on passing the days and to hand over to the Indian Baracoa the items that each week paid for both grandmother's food and Master Pedrito's jugs. Those big blue jugs, safeguarded from the heat by woven straw covers and leather handles, were beautiful: potbellied, with short, narrow necks. Master Pedrito would line them up at the entrance to the house, and each month Lunero would go to the village at the foot of the mountain with the pole used on the hacienda to carry pails of water and return with it balanced on his shoulders, the jugs tied on and dangling—the mule they once had was dead. This village at the foot of the mountain was the only center. 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 mountains fixes itself in the earth, curl on the smooth hillside that accompanies the river in its course to the nearby sea.

  The boy ran out of the shack and down the path through the ferns in the mango grove. The muddy slope took him, under the sky hidden by red flowers and yellow fruit, to the riverbank where Lunero was clearing a work site with his machete at the spot where the river, still turbulent, began to widen. The mulatto came over to him, buttoning up his denim bell-bottom trousers, a memory of some forgotten sailor fashion. The boy picked up his blue shorts, which had spent the night drying on the circle of rusty iron that Lunero was now approaching. Mangrove bark was lying about, open and smooth, its mouth in the water. Lunero stopped for a moment, his feet sunk in the mud. As it neared the sea, the river breathed more easily and caressed the growing masses of fern and banana. The brush looked higher than the sky because the sky was flat, shimmering low. They both knew what to do. Lunero took the sandpaper and went on smoothing the bark with a strength that danced in the thick sinews of his forearms. The boy brought over a broken, rotten stool and placed it inside the iron circle, which was hanging from a central wooden pole. Out of the ten openings punched through the circle hung ten wicks made of string. The boy spun the circle and then bent over to light the fire under the pot. The melted wax bubbled thickly; the circle spun; the boy poured the wax into the holes.

  "Purification Day is coming," said Lunero, through the three nails he held in his teeth.

  "When?"

  The small fire under the sun brightened the boy's green eyes.

  "On the second, Cruz, my boy, on the second. Then we'll sell my candles, not only to the neighbors but to people from farther away. They know our candles are the best."

  "I remember last year."

  Sometimes the hot wax would spit; the boy's thighs were covered with tiny round scars.

  "That's the day the groundhog looks for his shadow."

  "How do you know?"

  "It's a story that comes from somewhere else."

  Lunero stopped and reached for a hammer. He furrowed his dark brow. "Cruz, my boy, could you make canoes all by yourself?"

  A big white smile flashed on the boy's face. The green reflections off the river and the moist ferns accentuated his sharp, pale, bony features. Combed by the river, his hair was plastered on his wide forehead and dark nape. The sun gave it copper highlights, but its roots were black. The tones of green fruit ran through his thin arms and strong chest, made for swimming against the current, his teeth shining in the laugh of his body refreshed by the river with its grassy bed and slimy banks. "Yes, I know how. I've watched how you do it."

  The mulatto lowered his eyes, which were naturally low, eyes that were serene but searching. "If Lunero goes away, can you take charge of everything?"

  The boy stopped turning the iron wheel. "If Lunero goes away?"

  "If he has to go."

  I shouldn't have said anything, thought the mulatto. He wouldn't say anything, he would just go, the way his kind always went, without saying anything, because he knows and accepts destiny and feels an abyss of reasons and memories between that knowledge and that acceptance and the rejection or acceptance of other men, because he knows nostalgia and wandering. And even though he knew he shouldn't say anything, he knew that the boy—his constant companion—had been very curious, his little head turned to one side, about the man wearing the frock coat who came looking for Lunero yesterday.

  "You know, selling candles in town and making more when Purification Day comes; carrying the empty bottles back every month and leaving Master Pedrito his liquor at the door…Making canoes and bringing them downriver every three months…and handing the gold over to Baracoa, you know, keeping some for yourself, and fishing right here…"

  The little clearing by the river no longer pulsed with the hiss off the rusty circle or the mulatto's somnambular hammering. Boxed in by the green, the murmur of the swift water grew, water carrying bagasse, trees struck by lightning in nocturnal storms, and grass from the fields upstream. The black-and-yellow butterflies fluttered around as they, too, headed for the sea. The boy dropped his arms and asked the mulatto's fallen face: "You're going away?"

  "You don't know everything about this place. In another time, all the land from here to the mountain belonged to these people. Then they lost it. The grandfather master died. Master Atanasio was ambushed and killed, and little by little they stopped planting. Or someone else took their land. I was the last one, and they left me in peace for fourteen years. But my time had to come."

  Lunero stopped, because he didn't know how to go on. The silver ripples of water distracted him, and his muscles asked him to get on with his work. Thirteen years before, when they gave him the boy, he thought of sending him down the river, cared for by the butterflies, the way they did with that old king in the white folks' story, and then waiting for him to come back, big and powerful. But the death of Master Atanasio let him keep the boy without even having to fight about it with Master Pedrito, who was incapable of thinking of anything or arguing; without fighting with the grandmother, who lived already locked away in that blue room with lace and chandeliers that tinkled when it stormed, and who would never find out about the growing boy a few yards from her sealed-up madness. Yes, Master Atanasio died at just the right time; he would have had the boy killed; Lunero saved him. The last few tobacco fields passed into the hands of the new master, and all they had left was this little bit of river edge and thickets and what was left of the old house, which was like an empty, cracked pot. He saw how all the workers went over to the lands of the new master and how new men began to come, brought from upstream, to work the new fields, and how men were brought from other towns and hamlets, and he, Lunero, had to invent this work of candles and canoes to earn enough to keep them alive. He began to think that no one would ever take him from that unproductive patch of land, just a tiny plot between the ruined house and the river, because no one would ever notice him, lost among these vegetal ruins with the boy. It took the master fourteen years to notice, but at some time or other his fine-toothed search of the region was bound to turn up this needle in a haystack. And so, yesterday afternoon, the master's agent had ridden up, suffocating in his frock coat, the sweat dripping down his face, to tell Lunero that tomorrow—meaning today—he was to go to the hacienda of the gentleman to the south of the estate, because good tobacco workers were scarce and Lunero had spent fourteen year
s living off the fat of the land, taking care of a crazy old lady and a drunk. And Lunero did not know how to tell this to young Cruz, he thought the boy would never understand. The boy had known only work on the bank of the river, the coolness of the water before lunch, trips to the coast, where they gave him fresh crayfish and crabs, and the town nearby, inhabited by Indians who never spoke to him. But in truth the mulatto knew that if he started pulling on one thread in the story, it would all come unraveled and he'd have to start from the beginning and lose the boy. And he loved him—the long-armed mulatto kneeling by the sanded-down bark said to himself. He'd loved him ever since they ran his sister Isabel Cruz off the property and gave him the baby and Lunero fed him in the shack, fed him milk from the old nanny goat, all that remained of the Menchacas' stock, and he drew those letters in the mud that he'd learned when he was a boy, when he served the French in Veracruz, and he taught him to swim, to judge and taste fruit, to handle a machete, to make candles, to sing the songs Lunero's father had brought from Santiago de Cuba when the war broke out and the families moved to Veracruz with their servants. That was all Lunero wanted to know about the boy. And perhaps it was unnecessary to know more, except that the boy also loved Lunero and didn't want to live without him. Those lost shadows of the world—Master Pedrito, the Indian Baracoa, the grandmother—were coming forth like the blade of a knife to part him from Lunero. They were what was alien to the life he shared with his friend, what would part them. That was all the boy thought and all he understood.

  "Look, we're running out of wax; the priest will be mad," said Lunero.

  A strange breeze made the hanging wicks collide; a startled macaw shrieked out her midday alarm.

  Lunero stood up and waded into the river; the net was set halfway into the current. The mulatto dove under and came up with the little net draped over one arm. The boy slipped off his shorts jumped into the water. As never before, he felt the coolness on every part of his body. He went under and opened his eyes: the crystalline undulations of the first layer of water ran swiftly over a muddy, green bottom. And above, and back—he let himself be carried along like an arrow by the current—was the house he had never entered in all his thirteen years, where the man he'd only seen from a distance and the woman he only knew by name lived. He raised his head from the water. Lunero was already frying the fish and cutting open a papaya with his machete.

  Midday had barely passed: the rays of the sun in decline passed through the roof of tropical leaves like water through a sieve, pelting down hard. The time of paralyzed branches, when even the river seemed not to flow. The naked boy stretched out under the solitary palm tree and felt the heat of the sun's rays as they cast the shadow of the trunk and the crown of leaves farther and farther. The sun began its final race; even so, its oblique rays seemed to rise, illuminating his entire body, pore by pore. First his feet, when he leaned back against the naked pedestal. Then his spread legs, his dormant sex, his flat stomach, his chest hardened by the water, his long neck, and his square chin, where the light was opening two deep clefts, like two bows aimed at his hard cheekbones, which framed the clarity of his eyes, lost that afternoon in a deep and tranquil siesta. He was sleeping, and nearby, Lunero, stretched out, face down, was drumming with his fingers on the black frying pan. A rhythm was taking hold of him. The seeming languor of his body at rest was actually the contemplative tension of his dancing arm as it drew concentrated tones out of the utensil. He began to murmur, as he did every afternoon, having recovered the memory of a rhythm that grew ever more rapid, the memory of childhood song, of a life he no longer lived, when his ancestors crowned themselves, around the silk-cotton tree, with caps decorated with bells and rubbed their arms with liquor: a man would be seated in a chair with his head covered by a white cloth, and everyone drank the mixture of corn and bitter orange down to its black sugar lees. Children were taught that they shouldn't whistle at night:

  All Yeyé's daughters

  like husbands…that belong to other women… all of Yeyé's daughters like husbands that belong

  to other women

  Allyeyé'sdaughterslike

  They rhythm was taking control of him. He stretched out his arms and touched the edge of the muddy bank, and went on pounding his fingers against it and rubbing his stomach in it and a huge smile flowered on his face and broke his cheeks, which s e e m e d s t u c k t o t h e w i d e b o n e s : likehusbandsthatbelongtootherwomen…The afternoon sun fell on his round, woolly head like hot lead, and he couldn't rise from that position, the sweat pouring off his forehead, his ribs, between his thighs, and his canticle became more silent and deep. The less he heard it, the more he felt it, and the more he glued himself to the earth, as if he were fornicating with it. Allyeyésdaughters: his smile was going to explode, the memory of the man with the black frock coat, the one who was going to come that afternoon, which is already this afternoon; and Lunero was lost in his song and his prostrate dance, which reminded him of the tomb, which reminded him of the French tomb and the women forgotten in the prison of this burnt-out mansion.

  Behind, the branches and the ruin of the hacienda mansion he dreams about, dreaming away, the boy bathed in sunlight. Those blackened walls set on fire when the Liberals passed through in the final campaign against the Empire, Maximilian already dead, and found the family which had lent its bedrooms to the Field Marshal of the French forces and opened its larders to the Conservative troops. At the Cocuya hacienda, Napoleon III's troops took on supplies, to go out, their mules loaded with canned food, beans, and tobacco, and destroy Juárez's guerrilla forces. From the mountains, the bands of outlaws harried the French encampments in the flatland and in the forts they held throughout the state of Veracruz. And in the neighborhood of the hacienda, the Zouaves found little bands with guitars and harps that sang Balajú went off to war and wouldn't bring me along, cheering up their nights, as did the Indian and mulatto women, who soon gave birth to fair haired mestizos, mulattos with blue eyes and dark skin named Garduño and Alvarez, who, in fact, should have been called Dubois and Garnier. Yes, on that same afternoon, prostrate in the heat, old Ludivinia, locked forever in the bedroom with its absurd chandeliers—two hanging from the whitewashed ceiling, one left in a corner next to the bed with its fluted posts—and curtains made of yellowed lace, fanned by the Indian Baracoa, who lost her original name only to get this slave name from the plantation's blacks, a name completely incongruous with her aquiline profile and greasy hair: old Ludivinia, her eyes wide open, hums that damned song which, even if she realized she was doing it, she would not remember, but which nevertheless she must enjoy, because it mocks General Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, who was at first a friend of the house and an intimate of the deceased Ireneo Menchaca, Ludivinia's husband, and part of the satanic court. Later, when the Savior of Mexico and great protector of the Menchacas—their lives, their haciendas—tried to come back from the last of his myriad exiles and disembarked and was recovering from an attack of dysentery, he renounced his old loyalties, and Ireneo had him arrested by the French and shipped out again: San Juan de Nepomuceno: The Bare Truth. Ludivinia remembers Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, son of the thousand poxy women of the priest Morelos, and she twists her toothless, sucked-in mouth when she remembers the burlesque words of that damned song the followers of Juárez sang when they humiliated General Santa Anna to death:…and what would you think if some thieves in the night took your old lady and pulled down her drawers…Ludivinia cackles out her laugh and gestures to the Indian to fan her more rapidly. The faded, whitewashed bedroom smelled of the shut-in tropics, disguised as cold. The old lady liked the moisture stains on the wall because they made her think of other climates, those of her childhood before she married Lieutenant Ireneo Menchaca and linked her life and fortune to those of General Antonio López de Santa Anna and received from his hand the rich black lands along the river, as well as other extensive contiguous holdings adjacent to the mountains and the sea. Over the sea in France, diddy-dee-diddy-dee-diddydum,
Benito Juárez died, and so did our freedom. And now her grimace pursed in disgust, and her entire face collapsed into a thousand powdered layers, all held together by a fine net of blue veins. Ludivinia's trembling claw dismissed Baracoa with another gesture and shook her black silk sleeves and shredded lace cuffs. Lace and crystal, but not only that: carved poplar tables with heavy marble tops on which rested clocks under glass domes, with heavy cabriole feet clutching a glass ball; on the brick floor, wicker rockers covered with bustles she never wore again, beveled card tables, bronze nailheads, chests with inset panels and iron keyholes, oval portraits of unkown Creoles—rigid, varnished, with puffy sideburns, chests held high, and tortoiseshell combs—tin frames for the saints and the Holy Child of Atocha—he in old, moth-eaten needlepoint which barely retained the first layer of gold leaf—the bed with its silver foliage and fluted posts, repository of the bloodless body, nest of concentrated smells, of sheets stained by running sores, of tufts of stuffing that poked their way through the splitting mattress.