Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

"Open the window."

"No. You might catch cold and make everything worse."

Laura. Why? Why did everything have to happen this way? Why?

You will survive: you will run your finger over the sheets and know that you have survived, despite time and the movements that hem in your fortunes with every passing instant. The line of life is located between paralysis and debauchery. Adventure: you will imagine the greater security, never to move. You will imagine yourself immobile, safeguarded from all danger, chance, uncertainty. Your quietude will not stop time, which runs without you, although you invent it, measure it, time that denies your immobility and submits you to its own danger of extinction: adventurer, you will measure your velocity with the speed of time.

The time you will invent in order to survive, to create the illusion of greater permanence on earth: the time your brain will create by perceiving that alternation of light and darkness on the clock face of dreams; by retaining those images of placidity threatened by the amassing of concentrated black clouds announcing a thunderclap, the posterity of lightning, the whirlwind discharge of rain, the certain appearance of a rainbow; by listening to the cyclical calls of animals in the forest; by screaming out the signs of time: the howl of wartime, the howl of mourning time, the howl of party time; finally, by saying time, speaking time, thinking the nonexistent time of a universe that knows no time because it never began and will never end: it had no beginning, will have no end, and does not know that you will invent a measure of infinity, a reserve of reason.

You will invent and measure a time that doesn't exist.

You will know, discern, judge, calculate, imagine, foresee, end up thinking that which will have no other reality than that created by your brain, you will learn to control your violence in order to control the violence of your enemies. You will learn to rub two sticks together until they catch fire, because you will have to throw a torch out of your cave to frighten off the beasts which will not make an exception of you, which will not differentiate your flesh from that of other beasts, and you will have to construct a thousand temples, set down a thousand laws, write a thousand books, adore a thousand gods, paint a thousand paintings, construct a thousand machines, dominate a thousand nations, split a thousand atoms in order to throw your flaming torch out of the entrance to your cave again.

And you will do all that because you think, because you will have developed a cluster of nerves in your brain, a thick network capable of obtaining and transmitting information from front to rear. You will survive, not because you are the strongest, but because of the dark luck of an ever colder universe in which only those organisms that know how to maintain their body temperature when that of the environment falls will survive, those organisms that concentrate that frontal mass of nerve tissue and can foresee danger, search for food, organize their movement, direct their swimming in the circular, proliferating ocean teeming with origins. The dead and lost species will stay at the bottom of the sea, your sisters, millions of sisters that did not emerge from the water with their five contractile stars, their five fingers sunk into the other shore, terra firma, the islands of the dawn. You will emerge crossed with amoeba, reptile, and bird, the birds which will launch themselves from the new peaks to smash in the new abysses, learning in failure, while the reptiles already fly and the land grows colder: you will survive with the birds, protected by feathers, clothed in the speed of their heat, while the cold reptiles sleep, hibernate, and finally die, and you will sink your hooves into the hard land, into the islands of dawn, and you will sweat like a horse, and you will climb up the new trees with your constant temperature and descend with your differentiated brain cells, your autonomic nervous system, your constant levels of hydrogen, sugar, calcium, water, and oxygen: free to think beyond your immediate senses and vital necessities.

You will descend with your ten thousand million brain cells, with your electric battery in your head, plastic, mutable, to explore, to satisfy your curiosity, to set yourself goals, to achieve them with a minimum of effort, to avoid difficulties, foresee, learn, forget, remember, connect ideas, recognize forms, to add degrees to the margin left open by necessity, to turn your will away from the attractions and rejections of the physical environment, to seek favorable conditions, to measure reality using the minimum as your criterion, even though you secretly desire the maximum, and not expose yourself to the monotony of frustration.

You will accustom yourself, mold yourself to the requirements of communal life.

You will desire: desire that your desire and the object desired be the same thing; dream of immediate gratification, of the fusion, without division, of desire and that which you desire.

You will recognize yourself.

You will recognize others and allow them to recognize you; and know that you are opposed to each individual because each individual is just one more obstacle between you and your desire.

You will choose, in order to survive you will choose, choose among the infinite mirrors one only, one only, one that will reflect you irrevocably, that will fill other mirrors with a dark shadow, kill them before offering you, once again, those infinite roads of choice.

You will decide, you will choose one of the roads, you will sacrifice the others. You will sacrifice yourself as you choose, will stop being all the other men you might have been, you will wish other men-another man-to carry out for you the life you cut off when you chose: when you chose yes, when you chose no, when you let, not your desire, identical to your freedom, but your intelligence, your self-interest, your fear, and your pride, lead you to a labyrinth.

That day you will fear love.

But you will be able to recover it. You will rest with your eyes

closed, but you will not cease to see, not cease to desire, because that is how you will make the desired object yours.

Memory is satisfied desire.

Today, when your life and your destiny are one and the same.

He took a match, struck it, stared into the flame, and touched it to the end of his cigarette. He closed his eyes. He inhaled the smoke. He stretched out his legs and lolled in the armchair. He ran his free hand over its velvet and breathed in the aroma of the chrysanthemums in the crystal vase. He listened to the slow music coming from the phonograph behind him.

"Almost ready."

His free hand felt for the album, which was on the small walnut table to his right. He touched the album cover, read Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft , and heard the majestic entrance of the cello that faded, reasserted itself, and finally overtook the violin refrain, relegating it to the chorus's secondary line. He stopped listening. He straightened his tie and for a few seconds caressed its rich silk, which rustled under the touch of his fingers.

"Would you like me to fix you a drink?"

He walked to the low liquor cart, replete with bottles and glasses, picked out a bottle of Scotch and Bohemian crystal tumbler. He poured out a jigger of whiskey, dropped in an ice cube, and added a splash of water.

"Whatever you're having."

He repeated the operation, picked up both glasses, swished them around to blend the whiskey and water, and went to the bedroom door.

"One minute more."

"Did you choose it because of me?"

"Yes. Don't you remember?"

"Yes."

"Sorry I'm so slow."

He went back to the armchair. He picked up the album cover once again and rested it on his knees. Werke von Georg Friedrich Handel . They both went to concerts in that overheated hall; by chance they were seated next to each other, and by chance she had heard him comment in Spanish to a friend about how hot the place was. He asked her in English for the program and she said certainly in Spanish. They both smiled. Concerti grossi, opus 6.