Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

Chaos has no plural.

Order, order: you will cling to the sheets and repeat in silence, within yourself, the sensations your brain houses, clarifies. With effort, you will mentally locate the places that alert you to thirst and hunger, perspiration and chills, balance and falling. You will find them in the lower brain, the servant, the domestic who carries out immediate functions and frees the other, the upper brain, for thought, imagination, desire: child of artifice, necessity, or chance, the world will not be simple; you cannot know it passively, allowing things to happen to you; you must think so that a combination of dangers does not defeat you, imagine so that mere guessing doesn't negate you, desire so that the web of uncertainty doesn't devour you: you shall survive.

You will recognize yourself.

You will recognize others and allow them-her-to recognize you; and you will know that you oppose every individual because each will be one more obstacle keeping you from reaching the objects of your desire.

You will desire: how you would like your desire and the object desired to be the same thing; how you will dream about instant gratification, about the total identification of desire and what is desired.

You will rest with your eyes closed, but you will not stop seeing, you will not stop desiring: you will remember, because that way you will make the desired thing yours: back, back, in nostalgia, you will make yours whatever you desire: not forward, back.

Memory is satisfied desire.

Survive through memory before it's too late.

Before chaos keeps you from remembering.

He felt the moist crook of the woman's knee next to his waist. Her perspiration was always like that, light and fresh: whenever he took his arm from around her waist, he felt the moisture of that crystalline liquid. He stretched out his hand to rub her back slowly and thought he fell asleep: he could stay that way for hours, just caressing Regina's back. When he closed his eyes, he grasped the infinite love in that young body embracing his: a lifetime would not be enough to travel and chart it, he thought, to explore that smooth, undulating geography with its black and pink irregularities. Regina's body waited, and he, without voice or vision, was spread out on the bed, touching its iron bars first with the tips of his fingers and then with his toes; he tried to touch both ends at the same time. They dwelled within this black crystal: dawn was still far off. The mosquito netting, weighing nothing, isolated them from everything outside their own bodies. He opened his eyes. Regina's cheek came close to his; his matted beard scratched her skin. The darkness was not enough. Regina's slanted eyes glowed, half open, like luminous black scars. She took a deep breath. The girl's hands clasped behind the man's neck, and once more their profiles joined. The heat of their thighs fused into a single flame. He breathed: a bedroom of blouses and starched skirts, quinces cut open on the walnut table, an extinguished bedside lamp. Closer to him, the briny smell of the moistened, soft woman. Her nails made a cat's claw sound on the sheets; her light legs rose again to entwine the man's waist. Her lips sought out his neck. Her nipples trembled joyfully when he touched them with his lips, laughing, pushing aside her long, tangled hair. Did Regina speak? He felt her breath close to him and he sealed her lips with his hand. Without tongue or eyes: only mute flesh abandoned to its own pleasure. She understood him. She snuggled closer to the man's body. Her hand descended to the man's sex; his hand felt for the hard, almost hairless sex: he remembered her standing there naked, young and firm when still but undulating and soft as she began to walk: when she went to bathe in privacy, when she closed the curtains, when she fanned the coals in the brazier. They fell asleep again, each one possessed by the center of the other. Only their hands, one hand, moved in sleep, in their smiling sleep.

"I'll follow you."

"Where will you live?"

"I'll slip into each town before you take it. And I'll wait for you there."

"You'll leave everything behind?"

"I'll bring some clothes. You'll give me money to buy fruit and food, and I'll wait for you. When you get into town, I'll already be there. All I need is something to wear."

That skirt hanging over the chair in the rented room. When she's awake, he likes to touch her and also touch her things: her combs, her little black shoes, her small earrings left on the table. In those moments, he wishes he could give her something more than these days of separation and difficult reunions. An unforeseen command, having to track the enemy, a defeat that forced them to retreat north, had already separated them for weeks on other occasions. But she, like a sea gull, seemed able to read the ebb and flow of the revolutionary tide through the thousand shifts in the fighting and the fortunes of war: if she didn't turn up in the town they'd agreed on, she'd appear, sooner or later, in another. She would go from town to town, asking for his battalion, listening to the answers of the women and the old men left there.

"It's been about two weeks since they passed through here."

"They say there's not a one of them still alive."

"Who knows. They might come back. They forgot a few cannons when they left."

"Watch out for the federales , they shoot anyone who helps the rebels."

And they'd end up finding each other again, just as they did now. She would have the room ready with fruit and food, her skirt tossed over a chair. She would wait for him like that, ready, as if she did not want to waste a minute on unnecessary things. But nothing is unnecessary. Seeing her walk, make the bed, loosen her hair, then take off the rest of her clothes, kissing her whole body as she stood there, he kneels, outlines her body with his lips, enjoys the taste of her skin and her fine hair, the moisture of her seashell: gathering in his mouth the tremors of the standing girl who will finally take the man's head in her hands to make him rest, to keep his lips in one place. And, still standing, she will let herself go, squeezing his head with a broken sigh until he feels she is finished and he carries her in his arms to the bed.

"Artemio, will I ever see you again?"

"Never ask that question. Pretend that we've only just met."

She never asked again. She was ashamed of having done it, even once, of having thought that her love could come to an end or be measured by the time used to measure other things. She had no reason to remember where or why she had met this young man, twenty-four years old. It was unnecessary to burden herself with anything more than love and their meetings during the few days of rest, when the troops, having taken one plaza, stopped to heal their wounds, secure their position in the territory wrested from the dictatorship, locate supplies, and plan the next offensive. That was how the two of them decided it, without ever saying anything. They never thought about the danger of war or the time they were apart. If one of them did not show up at the next meeting place, they would go their separate ways without a word: he south, to the capital; she north, to the coasts of Sinaloa, where she had met him and where she let herself be loved.

"Regina…Regina…"

"Do you remember that rock that stuck out of the sea like a boat of stone? It must still be there."

"That's where I met you. Did you go there often?"

"Every afternoon. A little pool forms between the rocks and you can see yourself in the clear water. I'd go there to look at myself, and one day your face appeared next to mine. At night the stars were reflected in the sea. During the day, you could see the sun burning in it."

"I didn't know what to do that afternoon. We'd been fighting, and suddenly everything stopped: the federales gave up, but I was used to living like a soldier. Then I began to remember other things and I found you sitting on that rock. Your legs were wet."