The Death of Artemio Cruz

by Carlos Fuentes

  The fire hadn't reached here. Neither did the news of the lost

  lands, the son killed in ambush, or the boy born in the Negro shacks: the news didn't, but the premonitions did.

  "Indian, bring a pitcher of water."

  She waited until Baracoa left and then broke all the rules: she parted the curtains and squinted to get a glimpse of what was happening outside. She had seen that unknown boy grow up; she had spied on him from the window, from the other side of the lace. She had seen those green eyes and cackled with joy, knowing herself to be in another young body, she who had etched into her brain the memories of a century, and in the wrinkles of her face disappeared layers of air, earth, and sun. She persisted. She survived. It was difficult for her to get to the window; she practically crawled, eyes fixed on her knees, hands squeezed against her thighs. Her head, covered with patches of white hair, had sunk between her shoulders, which were sometimes higher than the top of her head. But she survived. She was still here, trying, from her unkempt bed, to replicate the gestures of the young, fair-skinned beauty who opened the doors of Cocuya to the long parade of Spanish prelates, French traders, Scots and English engineers, bond salesmen, speculators, and anti-Spanish guerrillas, who all passed through here on their way to Mexico City and the opportunities the young, anarchic nation had to offer: her baroque cathedrals, her gold and silver mines, her tezontle and carved-stone palaces, her ecclesiastical businessmen, her perpetual political carnival and her perpetually indebted government, her customs concessions easily arranged for glib foreigners. Those were glorious days for Mexico, when the Menchacas left the hacienda in the hands of their oldest son, Atanasio, so that he might become a man by dealing with workers, bandits, and Indians. They made their way to the central plateau to glitter in the fictitious court of His Most Serene Highness. How was General Santa Anna going to get along without his old pal Manchaca—now Colonel Menchaca—who knew all about fighting cocks and pits and could pass an entire night drinking and recalling the Casamata Plan, the Barradas expedition, the Alamo, San Jacinto, the War of the Cakes, even the defeats perpetrated by the invading Yankee army, to which the Generalissimo alluded with a cynical hilarity, pounding the floor with his wooden foot raising his glass, and caressing the black hair of Flor de México, the child-bride he'd brought to the nuptial bed when his wife's death rattle was still echoing in the air? There were also days of grief, when the Generalissimo was expelled from Mexico by the Liberals, and the Menchacas went back to their hacienda to defend their property: the thousands of acres heaped on them by the crippled tyrant addicted to cock fighting—acres appropriated without leave from native peasants who either had to stay on as field hands or move to the foot of the mountains; lands cultivated by the new black—and cheap—workers imported from the Caribbean islands, lands swollen by mortgages imposed on all the small landowners in the region. Tomb-like shacks for drying tobacco. Carts piled high with bananas and mangoes. Herds of goats set out to pasture on the low slopes of the Sierra Madre. And in the center of it all, the one-story mansion, with its pink belvedere and stables alive with whinnying, with boats and carriage outings. And Atanasio, the green-eyed son, dressed in white on his white horse, another gift from Santa Anna, galloping over the fertile land, his whip in his hand, always ready to impose his decisive will, to satisfy his voracious appetites with the young peasant women, to defend his property, using his band of imported Negroes, against the ever more frequent incursions of the Juárez forces. Above all, long live Mexico, long live our Nation, death to the foreign prince…And during the final days of the Empire, when old Ireneo Menchaca was informed that Santa Anna was coming back from exile to proclaim a new Republic, he boarded his black carriage and went to Veracruz, where a boat was waiting for him at the dock. From the deck of the Virginia, Santa Anna and his German pirates were signaling Fort San Juan de Ulúa, but no one answered. The port garrison was on the side of the Empire and mocked the fallen tyrant as he paced back and forth under the pennants, desperate; spouting obscenities from his fleshy lips. The sails filled again, and the two old friends played cards in the Yankee captain's cabin; they sailed over a torrid, languid sea, from which they could barely make out the coastline, which was lost behind a veil of heat. From the side of the ship in full dress, the dictator's furious eyes saw Sisal's white silhouette. And the crippled old man walked down the gangplank, followed by his old pal. He issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Yucatán and once again lived his dream of greatness. Maximilian had just been sentenced to death in Querétaro, and the Republic had a right to count on the services of its natural, its true leader, its monarch-without-a-crown. It was all told to Ludivinia: how they were captured by the commander of Sisal, how they were sent to Campeche and paraded through the streets with their hands in chains, beaten like common criminals by the guards. How they were thrown into a dungeon in the fortress. How that summer, without latrines, swollen with foul water, old Colonel Menchaca died, while newspapers in the United States reported that Santa Anna had been executed by Juárez, as was the innocent Prince of Trieste. A lie: only the cadaver of Ireneo Menchaca was buried in the cemetery opposite the bay, the end of a life of chance and spins of the wheel of fortune, like that of the nation itself. Santa Anna, wearing the permanent grin of an infectious madness, again went into exile.

  Atanasio told her, recalled old Ludivinia this hot afternoon, and from that day on, she never left her room. She had them bring her finest possessions there, the dining-room chandelier, the metal-encrusted chests, the most highly varnished pictures. All to wait for a death her romantic mind judged imminent but which had taken thirty-five lost years—nothing for a woman ninety-three years old, born the year of the first revolt, when a riot of clubs and stones was raised by Father Hidalgo in his parish of Dolores and her mother gave birth to her in a house in which terror had bolted the doors. She'd lost her calendars, and this year of 1903 was for her merely a time purloined from the rapid death from grief which should have followed that of the colonel. As if the fire of 1868 never existed: the flames extinguished just as they were reaching the door of the sealed bedroom, while her sons—there was a second, not only Atanasio, but she loved only him—shouted for her to save herself and she piled chairs and tables against the door and coughed in the thick smoke pouring through the cracks. She never wanted to see anyone ever again, only the Indian woman, because she needed someone to bring her food and stitch up her black clothing. She did not want to know more, but only to remember the old times. And within these four walls, she lost track of everything, except the essentials: her widowhood, the past, and, suddenly, that boy who was always running in the distance, right on the heels of a mulatto she didn't recognize.

  "Indian, bring a pitcher of water."

  But, instead of Baracoa, a yellow specter appeared at the door.

  Ludivinia screamed soundlessly and shrank to the back of the bed: her sunken eyes opened wide in horror, and all the husks that made up her face seemed to turn to dust. The man stopped at the threshold and raised a trembling hand. "I'm Pedro…"

  Ludivinia did not understand. Her trembling kept her from speaking, but her arms managed to wave, to exorcise, to deny in a flutter of black rags, while the pale ghost walked toward her with his mouth open. "Uh…Pedro…uh…" he said, rubbing his sparsely bearded, stained chin, his eyelids blinking nervously. "Pedro…"

  The paralyzed old woman did not understand what this sluggish man stinking of sweat and cheap alcohol was saying: "Uh…There's nothing left, you know?…All of it…gone to the devil…And now…" he muttered, with a dry sob, "they're taking away the black; but, Mama, you don't know…"

  "Atanasio…"

  "No…Pedro." The drunk threw himself on the rocking chair, spreading his legs, as if he'd reached his final port. "They're taking away the black…who gives us food…yours and mine…"

  "Not a black; a mulatto; a mulatto and a boy…"

  Ludivinia was listening, but she did not look at the ghost who had come in to s
peak to her; no voice which let itself be heard inside the forbidden cave could have a body.

  "All right. A mulatto, and a boy…"

  "Sometimes the boy runs over there, far off. I've seen him. He makes me happy. He's a boy."

  "The agent came to tell me…He woke me up at dawn…They're taking the black away…What are we going to do?"

  "There're taking a black away? The hacienda is full of blacks. The colonel says they're cheaper and work harder. But if you want one so much, offer a little more for him."

  And there they stood, statues of salt, thinking what later they would have wanted to say, when it would be too late, when the boy was no longer with them. Ludivinia tried to focus her gaze on the presence she refused to admit: who could he be, this man who for this purpose, just today, had dusted off his best suit to take the forbidden step? Yes: the batiste shirtfront, stained with mold from its storage in the tropics, the narrow trousers, too tight, too narrow for the small potbelly of that exhausted body. The old clothes did not tolerate the truth of the customary sweat—tobacco and alcohol—and his glassy eyes denied all the affirmation and bearing his clothes presupposed: the eyes of a drunkard without malice, remote from all human contact for more than fifteen years. Ah, sighed Ludivinia, perched on her disarranged bed, admitting at last that this voice did have a face, that isn't Atanasio, who was in his virility the extension of his mother. That is the mother, but with whiskers and testicles—dreamed the old woman—not the mother as she might have been as a man, as Atanasio was; and for that reason she loved one son and not the other—she sighed again—she loved the son who lived firmly rooted in the place assigned to them on earth, and not the one who, even after the defeat of their cause, wanted to go on profiting, up there, in the palaces, from what no longer belonged to them. She was certain: while everything was theirs, they had the right to impose their presence on the entire nation; she doubted: now that nothing was theirs, their place was within these four walls.

  The mother and son contemplated each other, with the wall of a resurrection between them.

  Have you come to tell me that there is no more land or greatness for us, that others have taken advantage of us as we took advantage of the original owners of all this? Have you come to tell me what I've known in my heart of hearts since my wedding night?

  I've come on a pretext. I've come because I no longer want to be alone.

  I'd like to remember you as a small boy. I loved you then; when she's young, a mother should love all her children. When we get old, we know better. We have to have a reason for loving someone. Blood is not a reason. The only reason is blood loved without reason.

  I wanted to be strong, like my brother. I've used an iron hand to deal with the mulatto and the boy. I've forbiddenthem to enter the big house. Just as Atanasio did, remember? But in those days there were so many workers. Today, only the mulatto and the boy are left. The mulatto is going.

  You've been left alone. You've come looking for me so you won't be alone. You think I'm alone; I see it in your pitying eyes. Fool, always, and weak: not my son, who never asked anyone for pity, but my own image as a young bride. Now it can't be, not now. Now I have my whole life for company, so I can stop being an old woman. It's you who are old if you think the world's come to an end, with your gray hairs and your drunkenness, and your lack of will. Now I see you, now I see you, shitass! You're just the same as when you went to the capital with us; the same as when you thought our power was an excuse to expend it on women and liquor and not a reason to add to it and make it stronger and use it like a whip; the same as when you thought our power had passed without any loss and so you thought you could stay up there without our support when we had to come back down to this burning land, to this fountain of everything, to this hell from which we rose and into which we had to fall…It stinks! There's a smell stronger than horse sweat or fruit or gunpowder…Have you ever stopped to smell the coupling of a man and a woman? That's what the earth here smells like, the sheets of love, and you never knew it…Listen, oh, I caressed you when you were born and gave you my milk and said you were mine, my son, and all I was remembering was the moment when your father made you with all the blindness of a love that was not meant to create you but to give me pleasure: and that's what's left; you have disappeared…Out there, listen to me…

  Why don't you speak? All right…all right…Don't say a word, just seeing you there looking at me like that is something; something more than a bare mattress and all those sleepless nights…

  Are you looking for someone? And that boy there outside, isn't he alive? I'm suspicious of you; you probably think I don't know anything, that I don't see anything from here…As if I couldn't sense that there is flesh of my flesh prowling out there, an extension of Ireneo and Atanasio, another Menchaca, another man like them, out there, listen to me…Of course he's mine, even though you haven't sought him…Blood answers blood without having to come near…

  "Lunero," said the boy when he woke up from his siesta and saw the mulatto lying there, worn out, on the muddy ground. "I want to go into the big house."

  Later, when everything would be over, old Ludivinia would break her silence and go out, like a wingless crow, to scream along the avenues of fern, her eyes lost in the underbrush and lifted, finally, to the Sierra; she would raise her arms toward the human form she hoped to find behind every branch that slashes her face furrowed with lifeless veins, blinded by the night she's unaccustomed to in her cloister of permanently burning candles. And she would smell that conjunction of the earth and would shout in a hoarse voice the names she'd forgotten and just recently learned, she would bite her pale hands out of rage, because in her heart something—years, memory, the past that was her life—would tell her that there would still exist a margin of life beyond her century of memories: a chance to live and love another being of her blood: something that had not died with the death of Ireneo and Atanasio. But now, with Master Pedrito before her, in the bedroom she hadn't left in thirty-five years, Ludivinia thought she was the center that yoked memory to the beings now around her. Master Pedrito rubbed his unshaven chin and spoke again, this time aloud. "Mama, you don't know…"

  The old lady's eyes froze the son's voice in his throat.

  What? That nothing could last? That their strength was all show, based on an injustice that had to die at the hands of another injustice? That the enemies we had shot so wecould go on being the masters, or the ones whose tongues were cut out or whose hands were cut off on your father's orders so that he could go on being the master, that the enemies from whom your father stole land so he could begin to be the master were victorious one day and set our house on fire and took away what wasn't ours, what we had by force and not by right? That, despite everything, your brother refused to accept loss and defeat and went on being Atanasio Menchaca, not up there, far from the scene, like you, but down here, alongside his servants, facing up to danger, raping mulattas and Indians, and not, like you, seducing willing women? That, of your brother's thousand careless, swift, ferocious couplings, there would remain one proof, one, one, of his having passed through this land? That, of all the children scattered by Atanasio Menchaca over our possessions, one would be born close by? That the same day his son was born in a Negro shack—as he should be born, downward, to show once again the strength of the father—who was Atanasio…

  Master Pedrito could not read these words in Ludivinia's eyes. The old woman's gaze, having left her worn-out face, wafted like a marble wave over the liquid heat of the bedroom. The man in the tight clothes did not have to hear Ludivinia's voice.

  Don't reproach me for anything. I'm your son, too…My blood is the same as Atanasio's…so why, that night…? All I was told was: "Sergeant Robaina, from the old Santa Anna troops, has found what you've been looking for for so long, Colonel Menchaca's body, in the Campeche cemetery. Another soldier, who saw where they buried your father with no marker, told the sergeant when he was ordered to the port garrison. And the sergeant, outwitting th
e commanders, stole Colonel Menchaca's remains at night. Now he's being transferred to Jalisco and is passing through here and wants to give you the remains. I'll wait for you and your brother tonight, after eleven, inthe clearing about a mile from town, the place where they had the gallows for hanging rebel Indians." Clever, wasn't it? Atanasio believed him, as I did; his eyes filled with tears, he never questioned the message. Why did I ever come to Cocuya that season? Because I was starting to run out of money in Mexico City, and Atanasio never refused me anything. He even preferred that I be far away, he wanted to be the only Menchaca in the area, your only guardian. The red moon that shines in the hottest time of the year was up when we got there. There was Sergeant Robaina. We remembered him from when we were kids. He was leaning against his big horse, his teeth glowing like white rice, just like his white mustache. We remembered him from when we were kids. He'd always accompanied General Santa Anna and was famous as a horse breaker; he'd always laughed like that, as if he were part of a huge joke. And there, on the big horse's back, was the filthy sack we were hoping for. Atanasio hugged him, and the sergeant laughed as he'd never laughed, he even whistled with laughter, and that's when the four men came out of the thicket, glowing in the moonlight, because they were all wearing white. "All souls in heaven!" shouted the sergeant in his jolly voice. "Souls in heaven right here for those who aren't satisfied with having lost a man and go around wanting to get him back!" And then his face changed, and he went for Atanasio, too. No one took any account of me, I swear. They just walked forward, looking at my brother, as if I didn't exist. I don't even know how I managed to get on my horse and break through that damned circle of four men walking with machetes in hand, while Atanasio shouted to me in a hoarse but calm voice: "Go home, brother, and remember what you take with you." And I felt the butt bouncing off my knee, but I could no longer see the four men surrounding Atanasio, how they first slashed open his legs and then cut him to pieces, there under the moon, so it could take place in silence. Where could I go for help on the haciendawhen I knew he was dead and gone, and besides, he'd been killed by the men who worked for the new headman in the district, who sooner or later had to kill Atanasio to be headman for certain? And from then on, who was going to oppose him? After that, I didn't want to know about the new fence, put up the next day by the man who had defeated us on our own land. What for? The workers went over to him without a word; he couldn't be worse than Atanasio. And as if to warn me to keep my mouth shut, a detachment of federal troops spent a week standing guard over the new boundaries. And for some reason or other, a month later, General Porfirio Díaz visited the new big house in the area. And they didn't even bother to omit their little joke. Along with Atanasio's mutilated body, they gave me some cow bones, a huge skull with horns—which is what the sergeant had in his sack. All I did was hang that shotgun over the door of the house, who knows? maybe as a kind of tribute to poor Atanasio. Really, that night…I didn't even realize that I had it on my saddle, even though the butt kept hitting me on the knee on that long gallop, Mama, I swear, it was so long…