Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

"But when we're apart, when we sleep, when we begin a new day, I lack whatever it is, the gestures, the way of showing things, that can extend the night's love into everyday life."

He could have told her, but one explanation would have required another, and all explanations would have led to a single day and a single place, a jail cell, one October night. He wanted to avoid that return. He knew that he could do it only by making her his without words; he told himself that flesh and tenderness would speak without words. Then another doubt assailed him. Would this girl understand everything he wanted to say when he took her in his arms? Would she understand the tenderness of his intention? Wasn't her sexual response excessive, fraudulent, learned somewhere? Wasn't any promise of real understanding lost in this woman's involuntary theatrics?

"Perhaps it was modesty. Perhaps it was a desire that this love in the dark be something exceptional."

But he did not have the courage to ask, to speak. He was sure the facts would eventually take control: habit, fatality, need also. Where could she turn? Her only future was at his side. Perhaps that simple fact would make her forget the beginning. He slept next to the woman with that desire, by now a dream.

"I ask forgiveness for having forgotten in pleasure the reasons for my rancor…My God, how can I respond to this strength, the glow of these green eyes? What of my own strength, once that ferocious, tender body takes me in its arms, not asking permission, not begging my pardon for what I could throw in his face…Ah, it's terrible beyond words; things happen before a word exists for them…"

("It is so silent tonight, Catalina…Are you afraid of breaking the silence? Does it speak to you?"

"No…Don't talk."

"You never ask me for anything. Sometimes I'd like…"

"I let you talk. You know-the things-that…"

"Yes. There's no need to talk. I love you, I love you…I never thought…")

She would let herself go. She would let herself be loved; but when she woke, she would again remember it all and oppose her silent rancor to the man's strength.

"I won't tell you. You conquer me at night. I conquer you during the day. I won't tell you. That I never believed what you told us. That my father knew how to hide his humiliation behind his courtliness, that courteous man, but I can avenge him in secret and for the rest of my life."

She would get up, braiding her hair without glancing at the disarrayed bed. She would light the lamp and pray in silence, the same way that she would quietly show during the sunlit hours that she had not been conquered, although the night, her second pregnancy, her large belly, would say the opposite. And only in moments of true solitude, when neither the rancor of the past nor the shame of pleasure occupied her thoughts, was she able to tell herself with honor that he, his life, his strength,

"…offer me this strange adventure that fills me with fear…"

It was an invitation to adventure, to plunge into an unknown future in which procedure would not be sanctioned by the sanctity of custom. He invented and created everything from below, as if nothing had happened before, Adam without a father, Moses without the Tablets of the Law. Life wasn't like that, the world ordered by Don Gamaliel wasn't like that.

"Who is he? How did he rise out of himself? No, I don't have the courage to accompany him. I have to control myself. I mustn't weep when I remember my life as a girl. That nostalgia."

She compared the happy days of her childhood with this incomprehensible gallop of hard faces, ambition, fortunes that collapsed or were created from nothing, overdue mortgages, decayed fortunes, pride forced into submission.

("He has reduced us to misery. We cannot see you socially; you are part of what he is doing to us.")

It was true. This man.

"I am hopelessly in love with this man, this man who perhaps really does love me, this man to whom I don't know what to say, this man who brings me from pleasure to shame, from the most depressing shame to pleasure that is most, most…"

This man had come to destroy them: he had destroyed them already. She saved her body, but not her soul, by selling herself to him. She passed long hours at the window facing the open fields, lost in contemplation of the shaded valley, sometimes rocking the baby's cradle, waiting for her second child to come, imagining the future this adventurer could offer them. He entered the world the way he entered his wife's body-by overcoming modesty with joy and breaking the rules of decency with pleasure. He sat those men down at his own table, his overseers, peons with shining eyes, people who knew nothing about good manners. He abolished the hierarchy embodied in Don Gamaliel. He turned the house into a stable full of ruffians who talked endlessly about incomprehensible, tedious, unamusing things. He began to receive commissions from his neighbors, to hear himself described in terms of adulation. He should go to Mexico City, to the new congress. They would put him up for office. Who better to represent them? If he and his wife cared to visit the towns in the area on Sunday, they would see how much they were loved and what a shooin he would be for the congress.

Ventura bowed his head again before putting on his hat. The peon drove the coach right up to the porch; he turned his back on the Indian and walked to the rocking chair where the pregnant woman was sitting.

"Or is it may obligation to nurture the rancor I feel until the day I die?"

He offered her his hand, and she took it. The rotten fruit burst under their feet; the dogs barked, running around the carriage; and the branches of the plum trees wafted the cool dew. As he helped her into the coach, he squeezed her arm and smiled. "I don't know if I've offended you in some way, but if I have, I beg your forgiveness."

He waited for a few seconds. If only she had shown herself even slightly moved. That would have been enough: a gesture, even if evincing no affection, which would have revealed the barest weakness, the smallest sign of tenderness, of a desire for protection.

"If I could make up my mind, if only I could."

Just as he had at their first meeting, he now moved his hand toward her palm. Once again he touched flesh devoid of emotion. He took the reins; she sat down next to him, opened her blue parasol, and never looked at her husband.

"Take care of the baby."

"I've divided my live into night and day, as if to satisfy two ways of living. For God's sake, why can't I just choose one?"

He stared fixedly toward the east. The road passed by cornfields crisscrossed by lines of water the peasants channeled by hand toward the freshly seeded patches to protect the tiny mounds where the seed was hidden. Hawks soared off in the distance; the green scepters of the maguey shot up; machetes labored at cutting incisions in their trunks: sap. Only a hawk high above could make out the moist, fertile stain that marked the outline of the lands of the new master, lands that had once belonged to Bernal, Labastida, and Pizarro.

"Yes: he loves me, he must love me."

The silvery saliva of the creeks soon ran out, and the exception gave way to rule: the chalky maguey soil. As the coach passed, the workers dropped their machetes and hoes, the drivers whipped their burros; the clouds of dust rose over another kind of earth, suddenly dry. Ahead of the coach, like a black swarm of bees, walked a religious procession which they quickly caught up to.

"I should give him every reason to love me. Doesn't this passion please me? Don't his words of love, his daring, and the proof of his pleasure please me? Even now. Even now that I'm pregnant, he won't leave me alone. Yes, yes, it all pleases me."

The slow advance of the pilgrims stopped them: children dressed in white tunics with gold hems, sometimes with halos of silver paper and wire wobbling over their black heads, holding hands with the women wrapped in rebozos , with red cheekbones and glassy eyes, crossing themselves and muttering the ancient litanies-on their knees, feet bare, hands, clasped to their rosaries-who held up the man with ulcerated legs who was carrying out his vow, whipping the sinner who rejoiced to receive the lashes on his naked back, his waist cinched with a strap of thorns. The crowns of thorns opening wounds in dark foreheads; the nopal scapularies on hairless chests. The whispers in native language did not rise from the road spattered with red drops which the slow feet flattened and quickly hid: feet with hard soles, callused, accustomed to carrying a second layer of muddy skin. The carriage could not move forward.