Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

"But you are my wife."

"Don't come any closer. I won't deprive you. After all, that belongs to you. It's part of your winnings."

"Yes, and you'll have to put up with it for the rest of your life."

"I know what my consolation is. With God on my side, with my children, I'll never lack for solace…"

"Why should God be on your side, you fraud?"

"Your insults don't matter to me. I know what my consolation is."

"And just why is it you need consolation?"

"Don't walk away. I need consolation for knowing I live with the man who humiliated my father and betrayed my brother."

"You're going to be sorry, Catalina Bernal. You're making me think I ought to remind you of your father and brother every time you spread your legs for me…"

"Nothing you can say can hurt me."

"Don't be so sure."

"Do whatever you like. The truth hurts, doesn't it? You killed my brother."

"Your brother didn't give anyone time to betray him. He wanted to be a martyr. He didn't want to save himself."

"He died and you're here, safe and sound, enjoying his rightful inheritance. That's all I know."

"Well, then, burn. And think about the fact that I'll never give you up, not even when I die, but remember, too, that I know how to humiliate. You're going to be sorry you didn't realize it…"

"Do you think I couldn't see your animal face when you said you loved me?"

"I never wanted you to be separated from me. I wanted you to be part of my life…"

"Don't touch me. That's something you will never be able to buy."

"Forget what's happened today. Remember that we're going to live the rest of our live the rest of our lives together."

"Stay away from me. Yes. I think about that. About all those years ahead of us."

"Forgive me, then. I ask you again."

"Will you forgive me?"

"I have nothing to forgive you for."

"Will you forgive me for not being able to forgive you for the oblivion the other man is consigned to, the man I really loved? If I only could remember his face clearly…If only I'd had that first love, I could say that I'd lived…Try to understand; I hate him more than I hate you, because he let you intimidate him and he never came back…Perhaps I'm telling you this because I can't tell it to him…Yes, tell me that it's cowardly to think this way…I don't know, I…I'm weak…And you, if you want, can love lots of women, but I'm tied to you. If he had taken me by force, I wouldn't have to remember him and hate him today without being able to recall his face. I was left unsatisfied forever, do you understand me?…Listen to me now, don't walk away…Since I don't have the courage to blame myself for everything that's happened, and since I don't have him close by to hate, I blame you for everything, and I hate you, you who are so strong, because you put up with anything…Tell me if you can forgive me that, because I will never forgive you as long as I can't forgive myself and the man who ran away…Such a weakling. But I don't even want to think, I don't want to talk. Let me live in peace and ask God's forgiveness, not yours…"

"Calm down. I liked your sullen silences better."

"Now you know how things stand. You can hurt me as much as you like. I've even given you the weapon. Now, suddenly, because I want you to hate me, and so all our illusions die all at once…"

"It would be simpler to forget everything and start over from scratch."

"That's not the way things work."

The immobile woman remembered her first decision, when Don Gamaliel had told her what was happening. To lose with power. To let herself be victimized and then take her revenge.

"Nothing can stop me, see? Just name one thing that can stop me."

"It's only natural. It just pours out of me."

"No need to nurture it and care for it. It just comes naturally."

"Leave me alone!"

She stopped looking at her husband. The absence of words obliterated the nearness of that tall, dark man with his thick mustache, who felt his brow and his nape weighed down by a pain of stone. That closed mouth, with its grimace of dissimulated scorn, spewed the words it could never say right into his face.

"Do you really think that, after doing all you've done, you still have a right to love? Do you really think that the rules of life can change just so you can get that reward in addition to everything else? You lost your innocence in the outside world. You can't recover it here inside, in the world of feelings. Maybe you once had your garden. I had mine, my little paradise. Now we've both lost it. Try to remember. You can't find in me what you've already sacrificed, what you lost forever by your own actions. I don't know where you come from. I don't know what you've done. I only know that in your life you lost what you made me lose later: dreams and innocence. We'll never be the same."

He tried to read those words in his wife's immobile face. Involuntarily, he felt close to the thought she did not express. Words regained their occult power. Cain: that horrendous word should never, ever have burst from the woman's lips; even if she'd lost all hope of love, she would still be a witness-a mute, suspicious witness-to love in the years to come. He locked his jaw. Only one act could perhaps rend this knot of separation and rancor. Only a few words, spoken now or never. If she accepted them, they could forget and begin again. If she didn't accept them…

"Yes, I am alive and here at your side because I let others die for me. I can talk to you about the ones who died because I washed my hands of them and shrugged. Accept me as I am, with these sins, and look at me as a man in need…Don't hate me. Take pity on me, Catalina. I love you: put my sins on one side of the scale and my love on the other, and you'll see that my love is much greater…"

She didn't dare. She wondered why she didn't dare. Why didn't she demand the truth from him-even if he was incapable of telling the truth, conscious as she was that his cowardice distanced them even more and made him also responsible for their failed love-so the two of them could be cleansed of the sin this man ached to share in order to be redeemed?

"I can't do it alone, alone I just can't do it."

During that brief, intimate minute of silence…

"Now I'm strong. My strength is to accept this destiny without fighting."

…he also accepted the impossibility of going back, of returning…She got up, murmuring that the baby was asleep alone in the bedroom. He was left alone, and he imagined her, on her knees before the ivory crucifix, carrying out the final act that would detach her completely

"from my destiny and my sin, clinging to your personal salvation, rejecting this, which should have been ours, even if I offered it to you in silence; now you will not return…"

He crossed his arms and walked out into the country night, lifting his head to greet the brilliant company bestowed upon him by Venus, the first star in the celestial vault, now quickly filling with stars. On another night he had looked toward the stars; remembering it gained him nothing. He was no longer that boy, nor were the stars the same ones his boy's eyes had contemplated.

The rain had stopped. The orchard gave off a deep aroma of guava and sloe, plum and apple. He had planted the trees in the garden. He had raised the wall that separated the house and the garden, his intimate domain on the farm.

As his boots sank into the moist earth, he stuck his hands into his pockets and walked slowly toward the gate. He opened it and walked toward the nearby houses. During his wife's first pregnancy, that young Indian girl had occasionally received him with an inert silence and a total absence of questions or demands.

He walked in without knocking, suddenly opening the door of the cabin made of scarred adobe. He took her by the arm, awakening her out of a sound sleep, already feeling the heat of her dark, sleeping body. The frightened girl stared at the master's twisted face, his curly hair falling over his glassy eyes, his thick lips surrounded by disordered, harsh whiskers.