Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

And tomorrow? We'll be dead, Congressman Cruz. Let those who follow us make their own deals.

Domine, non sum dignus. Domine, non sum dignus : yes, a man can speak painfully with god, a man who can forgive sin because he as committed sin, a priest who has the right to be priest because his human misery allows him to act out redemption in his own body before granting it to others. Domine, non sum dignus.

You reject guilt. You will not be guilty of sins against a morality you did not create, which you found already made. You would have wanted

wanted

wanted

wanted

oh, how happy those days were with your teacher Sebastián,

whom you will not want to remember anymore. You sat at his knee, learning those simple things with which you must begin in order to be a free man, not a slave of commandments written without your even being consulted. Oh, how happy those apprenticeship days were, learning the tasks which he taught you so you could earn a living: days at the forge with the hammers, when your teacher Sebastián would return tired but begin classes only for you, so that you could be something in life and make your own rules, you the rebel, you free, you unique and new. You will not want to remember him. He ordered you, you went to the Revolution: this memory does not leave me, it will not reach you.

You will have no answer for the opposing, imposed codes,

you innocent,

you will want to be innocent,

you did not choose on that night.

His green eyes turned toward the window, and the other man asked him if he wanted anything; he blinked and kept his green eyes on the window. The other man, who had been very, very calm until then, tore his pistol out of his belt and slammed it on the table. He felt the shaking of glasses and bottles and reached out his hand, but before he could give a name to the physical sensation that brusque gesture caused in the pit of his stomach-the impact of the pistol on the table, and its effect on the blue glasses and white bottles-the other man was already smiling. An automobile roared down the street, to a chorus of jeers and curses, its headlights illuminating the other man's round head. The other man spun the cylinder in the revolver and showed him that it contained only two bullets; he spun it again, pulled back the hammer, and pointed the barrel directly at his temple. He tried to avert his eyes, but the small room gave him no place to fix his attention: naked walls painted indigo blue, ark tezontle -stone floor, tables, two chairs, two men. The other man waited until the green eyes stopped wavering around the room and returned to his hand, the revolver, his temple. The other man smiled, but he was sweating. So was he. In the silence he listened for the tick, tick, tick of the watch he'd put in the right-hand pocket of his vest. Perhaps it was making less noise than his heart, but it was all the same, because the detonation of the pistol was already in his ears, beforehand. At the same time, the silence was dominated over all sound, even the possible-not yet actual-sound of the revolver. The other man waited. He watched. The other man squeezed the trigger, and a dry, metallic click was lost in the silence, and, outside, the night went on, uniform and moonless. The other man stood there with the weapon aimed at his temple and began to smile, to laugh aloud: his fat body shook from within, like custard, from within, because outwardly it was motionless. Both remained frozen for some seconds. Again, he breathed the smell of incense that had followed him everywhere since morning; through that imaginary smoke, he made out the other man's face. The other man was still laughing inwardly as he put the pistol back on the table and slowly pushed the weapon toward him with short, yellowed fingers. The turbid mirth in the other man's face might reflect the tears he was holding back; he didn't try to find out. The memory, not yet a memory, of the other man with the gun to his head, the fear in that obese figure, the fear kept him from speaking. If he was found here in this room with the fat man dead, and if charges were pressed against him, it would be all over. He'd recognized his own pistol, which he kept in the dresser drawer; he realized that the fat man was pushing it toward him with his short fingers, its butt wrapped in a handkerchief which might perhaps have slipped out of the other man's hands if he had…But even if it didn't slip off, it was a clear case of suicide. Clear to whom? A police commander dies in an empty room, sitting opposite his enemy. Who was getting rid of whom? The other man loosened his belt and drank off his drink in one gulp. Sweat stained his armpits, ran down his neck. The other man's fingers, which looked as though thay'd been cropped, insistently pushed the pistol nearer. What would he say? That they had checked him out completely. He'd never squeal, would he? He asked just what it was they'd checked out about him, and the other man said he was fine, that he'd passed; if there was dying to do, he wouldn't falter, but he wasn't going to waste him time going over the same ground again and again, and that was how things stood. If this didn't convince him, well, he didn't know what would. It was proof-the other man told him-that he should come over to their side; or did he think anyone from his side would risk his life to show him how much they wanted him on their side? He lit a cigarette and offered the other man one; the other man lit his own; he brought his lighted match right to the coffee-colored face of the fat man, and the fat man blew it out. He felt surrounded. He balanced his cigarette precariously on the edge of his glass, without noticing that the ashes were falling into the tequila, setting to the bottom. He picked up the pistol. He pressed the muzzle to his temple and felt it had no temperature whatever, although he imagined it should feel cold as he recalled that he was thirty-eight years old, but that fact didn't matter to anyone, not to the fat man and much less to himself.

That morning he had dressed standing in front of the full-length oval mirror in his bedroom, and the incense had reached his nose. He pretended not to smell anything. From the garden, there wafted an odor of chestnuts over the earth, which was dry and clean that month. He saw the strong man with his strong arms, flat stomach, no fat, solid muscles around a dark navel, where the fine hair from his pubis and his stomach ended. He ran his fingers over his cheeks, over his broken nose, and smelled the incense again. He chose a clean shirt from the dresser and did not realize that the revolver was no longer there, and finished dressing and opened the bedroom door. "I don't have time; really, I don't have time. I'm telling you I don't have time."

The garden had been planted with decorative shrubs arranged in horseshoe and fleur-de-lis patterns, with rosebushes and hedges, and a green fringe surrounded the one-story house, built in Florentine style, with slender columns and stucco friezes above the portal. The exterior walls were pink, and as he passed through the rooms the uncertain morning light isolated the gilt profiles of the chandeliers, the marble statuary, the velvet curtains, the high-backed, brocaded armchairs, the display cabinets, and the gold fillets on the love seats. But he stopped by the side door at the rear of the salon, his hand on the bronze knocker; he did not want to open the door and walk down.

"It belonged to people who went to live in France. We didn't pay anything for it, but restoring it cost a fortune. I said to my husband, I said let me do it all, leave it to me, I know how…"

The fat man jumped up from his chair, light, filled with air, and brushed aside the hand that held the pistol: no one heard the shot, it was late and they were alone, yes, perhaps that's why no one heard it, and the bullet lodged in the blue wall while the commander laughed and said that was enough fooling around for now, dangerous fooling around especially. Why bother, when everything could be fixed so easily? So easily, he thought; it's about time for things to be fixed easily; will I ever live a quiet life?