Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

"What do you think about this business, Pons?"

"It's bad, but it'll be a cinch to handle, at least for now."

"Then now's the time to get the paper moving on it, no holds barred, okay? Hit them where it hurts. Don't hold back."

"You're the boss, Artemio."

"Good thing we've prepared our readers for this one."

"They've been talking about it for years now."

"I want to see all the editorials and page one…Bring it all over to my house, any time of day or night."

"You know what to do, the same slant for every story. A brazen red plot. Alien infiltration totally foreign to the essence of the Mexican Revolution…"

"The good old Mexican Revolution!"

"…leaders controlled by foreign agents. Tombroni's really got to give it to them; Blanco is to blast them with a column in which he equates the leader with the Antichrist, and the cartoons have to be scathing…How are you feeling?"

"Not good. The usual thing. It'll pass. We'd all like to be the men we used to be, right?"

"The men we used to be…right."

"Tell Mr. Corkery to step in."

I cough on the tape. I hear the hinges on a door opening and closing. I feel nothing moving in my stomach, nothing, nothing, the gases don't move, no matter how I strain…But I see them. They've come in. The mahogany door opens, closes, and the footsteps on the thick rug are soundless. They've closed the windows.

"Open the windows."

"No, no. You could catch cold and complicate everything…"

"Open them."

"Are you worried, Mr. Cruz?"

"I am. Sit down, and I'll explain why. Would you like a drink? Wheel the cart over. I don't feel very well."

I hear the little wheels, the clink of the bottles.

"You look okay."

I hear ice falling into the glass, the pressure of soda being siphoned out.

"Look, I'll tell you what's at stake here, in case your people haven't grasped it. Tell the central office that if this so-called union clean-up campaign goes over, we might as well do as the bullfighters do and cut off our pigtails…"

"Pigtails?"

"I'll put it as plainly as I can. We're fucked…"

"Turn that off!" shrieks Teresa, running over to the tape recorder. "Where do you think you are, don't you have any manners at all?"

I manage to wave my hand, make a face. I miss a few words on the tape.

"…what these railroad leaders are proposing?"

Someone nervously blows his nose. Where?

"…explain it to the companies. God forbid they should be so naïve as to think this is a democratic movement-try to see my point of view-aimed at getting rid of some corrupt union bosses. It isn't that."

"I'm all ears, Mr. Cruz."

That's right, it must be the gringo who sneezes. Ah-ah-ah.

"No. No. You could catch cold and complicate everything."

"Open them."

I and not only I, other men, could sniff the breeze for the perfumes of other lands, the aromas drawn out of other noons by the wind. I sniff, I sniff. Far from me, far from this cold sweat, far from these inflamed gases. I made them open the window. I can smell whatever I like, amuse myself by choosing the smells the wind carries: yes, autumn forests; yes, leaves burning; oh, yes, ripe plums; yes, yes, the rotten tropics; yes, hard salt flats, pineapples split open with a machete, tobacco drying in the darkness, the smoke from locomotives, waves on the open sea, pine trees covered with snow; ah, metal and guano. How many tastes that everlasting movement brings and takes away. No, no, they won't let me live: they sit down again, they get up and walk and sit down again together, as if they were a single shadow, as if they couldn't think or act on their own. They sit down again, at the same time, with their backs to the window, to block the movement of air toward me, to suffocate me, to make me close my eyes and remember things and no longer let me see things, touch things, smell things. The damned pair of them, how long will it take them to bring in a priest, speed up my death, wrench confessions out of me? There he is still, on his knees, with his scrubbed face. I try to turn my back on him. The pain in my side stops me. Aaaay. It's almost over. I'll be free. I want to sleep. Here it comes again. Here it is. Aaah-ay. And the women. No, not these women. The women. The ones the love. What? Yes. No. I don't know. I've forgotten the face. By God, I've forgotten that face. No. I shouldn't forget it. Where is it? Ay, it was so pretty, that face, how could I ever forget it. It was mine, how could I ever forget it. Aaah-ay. I loved you, how can I forget you. You were mine, how can I forget you? What did you look like, please, what did you look like? How shall I invoke you? What? Why? Another injection? What? Why? No no no, something else, quick, I remember something else; that hurts, aaah-ay, that hurts, that puts me to sleep…that…

You will close your eyes, conscious of the fact that your eyelids are not opaque, that even though you close them the light reaches the retina: the sunlight that will stop, framed by the open window, at the same height as your closed eyes, your closed eyes that erase details from vision, that alter brilliance and color but do not eliminate vision itself-the light from the copper penny which will melt in the west. You will close your eyes and think you see more. You will see only what your brain wants you to see, more than what is offered by the world. You will close your eyes and the exterior world will no longer compete with your imaginative vision. You will lower your eyelids, and that immobile, unchanging, constant sunlight will create behind your eyelids another world in movement, light in movement, light that fatigues, frightens, confuses, makes you happy, sad. Behind your closed eyelids, you will know the intensity of a light that penetrates to the depth of that small, imperfect plaque to arouse sentiments contrary to your will, your condition. Nevertheless, you will close your eyes, feign deafness; stop touching something, even if it's the air, with your fingers, imagine an absolute insensibility; halt the flow of saliva across your tongue and palate, overcome the taste of your own self; impede your labored breathing, which will go on filling your lungs, your blood with life, choose a partial death. You will always see, always touch, always taste, always smell, always hear: you will have screamed when they pierced your skin with that needle filled with tranquilizer; you will scream before you feel any pain. The announcement of pain will travel to your brain before your skin actually feels the pain: it will travel to warn you about the pain you will feel, to put you on guard so that you will be aware, so that you will feel the pain more acutely, because awareness weakens us, turns us into victims when we realize that the powers will not consult us, will not take us into account.

There it is: the organs of pain, though slower, will overcome those of reflexive prevention.

And you will feel divided, a man who will receive and a man who will act, sensor man and motor man, man constructed of organs that feel, transmit feeling to the millions of minuscule fibers that spread toward your cerebral cortex, toward that surface on the upper half of the brain which for seventy-one years receives, stores, expends, denudes, returns the colors of the world, the feel of flesh, the tastes of life, the smells of the earth, the noises of the air: returning them to the frontal motor, to the nerves, muscles, and glands that will transform your body and the fraction of the exterior world that falls to you.

But in your half sleep the nerve fiber that carries the light impulse will not connect with the zone of vision. You will hear color, and you will touch sound, see smells, smell taste. You will stretch out your arms so as not to fall into the pit of chaos, to recover the order of your whole life, the order of the received fact, transmitted to the nerve, returned to the nerve transformed into an effect and once again into a fact. You will stretch out your arms and behind your closed eyes you will see the colors of your mind and finally you will feel, without seeing it, the origin of the touch that you hear: the sheets, the light touch of the sheets between your clenched fingers; you will open your hands and feel the sweat on your palms and perhaps you will remember that you were born without lifelines on your hand, without fortune, life, or love: you were born, you will be born with a smooth palm, but all you have to do is be born; after a few hours, that blank surface will be filled with signs, lines, portents. You will die with your dense lines worn out, but all you have to do is die for all trace of your destiny to disappear from your hands after a few hours.