Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

in order to continue the battle of pride. You've conquered everything else; the only thing left is to conquer yourself. Your enemy will surge forth from the mirror to fight the last battle: the enemy nymph, the nymph of thick breath, daughter of gods, mother of the goatish seducer, mother of the only god to die during the time of man. From the mirror will emerge the mother of the Great God Pan, the nymph of pride, your double, once again your double: your ultimate enemy on the earth whose population has been effaced by your pride. You will survive. You will discover that virtue may well be desirable but only pride is necessary. Yet the hand that at this moment is caressing your brow will reach the end and with its small voice silence the shout of challenges, remind you that only at the end, even if it is at the end, pride is superfluous and humility is necessary. Her pale fingers will touch your feverish brow, will try to ease your pain, will try to say to you today what they did not say to you forty-three years ago.

He didn't hear her say it when she awoke from her fitful sleep. "I let myself go." Lying at his side, her chestnut hair covering her face; and in every fold of her flesh she felt weary moisture, the fatigue of summer. She covered her mouth with her hand and foresaw the new day's vertical sun, the afternoon thundershower, the evening transition from suffocating heat to coolness. She did not want to remember what happened during the night. She buried her face in the pillow and said again: "I let myself go."

The cold, clear dawn erased the pride of the night and came through the half-open window of the bedroom. Once again it defined the details the darkness had confused in a single embrace.

"I'm young. I have a right…"

She put on her nightgown and fled from the man before the sun could rise over the line of mountains.

"I have a right. It has the blessing of the Church."

Now, from her bedroom window, she saw in the distance how

the sun crowned Citlaltépetl Mountain. She cuddled the child in her arms and stayed by the window.

"What weakness. Always when I wake up, this weakness, this hatred, this disdain I don't really feel…"

Her eyes met those of the smiling Indian coming through the garden gate. He took off his hat and bowed…

"…whenever I wake up and see his body asleep next to mine…"

His white teeth gleamed, especially when he was near her.

"Does he really love me?"

The boss tucked his shirt into his tight trousers, and the Indian turned his back on the woman's window.

"Five years have gone by…"

"What brings you here so early, Ventura?"

"I let my ears lead me around. Mind if I fill my gourd?"

"Is everything ready in town?"

Ventura nodded, walked to the well, sank his gourd into the water, took a drink, and filled it again.

"Maybe he himself has forgotten why we were married…"

"And where do your ears lead you?"

"To the news that old Don Pizarro hates the sight of you."

"That I already knew."

"My ears also tell me he's going to take advantage of the goings-on today to get even…"

"and now he really loves me…"

"Blessed be your ears, Ventura."

"Blessed be my mother, who taught me always to keep them clean and free of wax."

"You know what has to be done."

"…and loves me and admires my beauty…"

The Indian laughed soundlessly, fingered the brim of his tattered hat, and looked toward the terrace with its tile-covered roof, where that beautiful woman was sitting in her rocking chair.

"…my passion…"

Ventura remembered her from years back, always sitting that way, sometimes with her stomach round and huge, at other times thin and silent, always detached from the hustle and bustle of the carts filled with grain, the bawling of the branded bulls, the dry splat of the plums that in summer fell in the orchard planted by the new master around the hacienda's main house. "…what I am…"

She watched the two men the way a rabbit would measure the distance between itself and a pair of wolves. Don Gamaliel's death left her naked, bereft of the proud defenses she had had during their first months together: her father represented continuity, the old order, hierarchy. Her first pregnancy justified her modesty, her aloofness, her warnings to herself.

"My God, way can't I be the same at night as I am during the day?"

And he, as his eyes turned to follow the Indian's eyes, found his wife's immobile face and thought that during those first years he had been indifferent to her coldness. He himself lacked the will to pay close attention to that secondary world which could not manage to integrate itself, assume its proper form, find its name, feel itself before saying its name.

"…at night as I am during the day?"

Another Indian, speaking with even more urgency, sought him out.

("The government don't care nothing for us, Mr. Artemio, sir, so we come to ask you please to lend us a hand."

"Boys, you came to the right man. You're going to have your road, I swear it to you, but on just one condition: that you don't bring your corn to Don Cástrulo Pizarro's mill anymore. Can't you see that the old man refused to give up even an inch of land for reform? Why do him any favors? Bring everything to my mill, and let me market it for you."

"We know you're right, sir, but the problem is that Don Pizarro'll kill us if we do what you say."

"Ventura: give these boys some rifles so they can learn to protect themselves.")

She rocked slowly back and forth. She remembered, counted days, often months, when she never spoke to him. "He's never reproached me for my coldness to him during the day."

Everything seemed to be moving without her taking part in it, and the strong man who got off his horse, his fingers callused, his forehead streaked with dust and sweat, gave her a wide berth as he walked by, whip in hand, to collapse in bed so that he could wake again before dawn and set out, as he did every day, on the long route of fatigue around the land that had to produce, yield, consciously be his pedestal.

"The passion I receive him with at night seems to satisfy him."

Corn-producing land, in the narrow river valley that included the remains of the old Bernal, Labastida, Pizarro haciendas; land that grows the maguey that yields the pulque , the place where the dry sod begins again.

("Hear any complaints, Ventura?"

"Not to my face, boss, because, as bad as things are, these people are better off now than before. But they realize that you gave them land only good for dry-farming and kept the watered land for yourself."

"What else do they say?"

"That you go on charging interest on the loans you made them, just like Don Gamaliel did before."

"Look, Ventura. Go and explain to them that I'm charging the big landowners like Pizarro and the shop-owners really high interest. But if they feel my loans are hurting them, we can stop doing business right now. I thought I was doing them a favor…"

"No, they don't want that…"

"Tell them that in a little while I'm going to foreclose on Pizarro's mortgages, and then I'll give them the bottomland I take from the old man. Tell them to hang on and have faith in me, they'll see.")

He was a man.

"But that fatigue, that worry kept him apart. I never asked for that hasty love he gave me every once in a while."

Don Gamaliel, enamored of the city of Puebla, its society, its comforts, and its plazas, forgot the farmhouse and let his son-in-law take care of everything as he saw fit.

"I accepted, just as he wanted me to. He asked me to set aside all my doubts and arguments. My father. I was bought and had to stay here…"

As long as her father was alive, she would make the trip to Puebla every two weeks and spend some time with him, fill his cupboards with his favorite sweets and cheeses, go to Mass with him at the Church of San Francisco, kneel before the mummified body of the Blessed Sebastián de Aparicio, scour the Parián market with him, stroll around the main plaza, cross herself at the great holy-water fonts in front of the cathedral built in Herrera's style, or simply watch her father putter around in the patio library…