Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

He stood on the flat roof, a rifle in his hands. He was remembering how the two of them went out to the lake to hunt. But the rifle in his hands was rusty, no good for hunting. From the flat roof, the façade of the bishop's palace was clearly visible. All that remained was the façade, a shell without floors or roof. The bombs had destroyed all the rest. Half buried in the rubble, a few old pieces of furniture were also visible. Up the street, a man wearing a butterfly collar and two women dressed in black walked toward them. They were squinting, carrying bundless in their hands, and they took astonished steps as they passed the façade. All he had to do was see them to know they were enemies.

"You there, on the other side of the street!"

He shouted to them from that place on the roof. The man raised his face and the sun on his glasses blinded him. He waved his arm to signal them to cross the street to avoid the dangerous façade, which seemed about to collapse. They crossed, and in the distance the salvos of Fascist artillery resounded-they were hollow when they fell into the depths between mountains and high-pitched when they whistled through the air. Later he sat down on a sandbag. Miguel was next to him. Under no circumstance would he abandon the machine gun. From the roof they saw the town's deserted streets. There were shell holes in the streets, broken telephone poles, and tangled wires-the interminable echo of the salvos and the pam-pam-pam of sporadic small-arms fire, the dry, cold roof tiles: only the façade of the ancient bishop's palace was standing on that street.

"Only one belt left for the machine gun," he informed Miguel, and Miguel responded, "Let's wait until this afternoon. After that…"

They leaned back against the wall and it cigarettes. Miguel wrapped his scarf around his face until it hid his blond beard. The mountains in the distance were covered with snow; the snow had gone down the slopes even though the sun shone brightly. In the morning light, the peaks stood out, seeming to advance toward them. Later, in the afternoon, they would retreat; the trails and pines would disappear. At day's end, there would be only a distance purple mass.

But, that midday, Miguel looked at the sun, squinted, and said, "If it weren't for the artillery and he sniping, you'd say we were at peace. These winter days are beautiful. Look how far down the mountain the snow has come."

He looked at deep white creases that ran from Miguel's eyelids to his bearded cheeks, like snow drifting down his face. He would never forget those eyes, because in them he'd learned to see joy, courage, rage, and serenity. There had been times when they'd won and then been thrown back again. Sometimes they'd just lost. But the attitude they should all have was already in the creases in Miguel's face before they won or lost. He learned a lot from Miguel's face. The only thing he'd never seen Miguel do was weep.

He crushed his cigarette on the floor and it sent out a shower of sparks. He asked Miguel why they were losing, and Miguel pointed to the mountains on the frontier and said, "Because our machine guns didn't come from over there."

Then Miguel put out his cigarette, too, and began to murmur a song:

The four generals, the big four generals,

The big four generals, oh Mama,

Who've attacked us old and young…

And he answered, still leaning back on the sandbags:

By Christmas Eve, oh Mama, They'll surely have been hanged…

They sang to kill time. There were many hours like this one in which they stood guard and nothing happened. So they sang. They never had to say, "Let's sing." And no one ever felt embarrassed to sing in front of the others. Exactly as they laughed for no reason, wrestled, or sang along with the fishermen on the beach near Cocuya. Except that now they sang to bolster their courage, even if the words of the song were a bad joke, because the four generals not only hadn't been hanged but had them surrounded in this town with the mountain frontier in their faces. They had no place to go.

The sun began to fade early, at about four in the afternoon, and he hugged his old rifle with its yellow butt and put on his cap. Like Miguel, he wrapped himself up in his scarf. For the past few days he'd been wanting to suggest something to him. Even though his boots were worn, they were still holding up; all Miguel had was an old pair of sandals he'd wrapped with rags and bound up with string. He wanted to say they could take turns with the boots: he one day, Miguel the next. But he didn't have the nerve. The wrinkles in that face said he shouldn't. Now they blew on their fingers, because they knew only too well what it meant to spend a night on an open roof. Then, from the far end of the street came a soldier, one of ours, a Republican running toward us as if he'd popped out of one of the shell holes. He waved his arms and finally fell, face down. Behind him came more Republican soldiers, boots slapping the pockmarked streets. The artillery salvo, which had seemed so far off, suddenly was closer, and from the street below, one of the soldiers shouted: "Weapons, please, give us some guns!"

"Don't stop!" shouted the man leading the soldiers. "Don't make yourself an easy target!"

They passed by at a run, below them, and Miguel and Lorenzo aimed the machine gun at the last of their own soldiers, thinking the enemy would be right on their heels.

"They should be here any time now," he said to Miguel.

"All right, Mexican, do a good job now," said Miguel, holding up the last cartridge belt.

But another machine gun fired first. Two or three blocks away, another hidden machine-gun nest, a Fascist one, had waited for the men to fall back, and now it was raking the street, killing the soldiers. But not their leader, who hit the dirt, shouting: "Get down! You'll never learn!"

He moved the machine gun so he could fire at the hidden enemy gun, and the sun fell behind the mountains. The machine gun, shook his entire body, and Miguel whispered, "Balls just aren't enough. Those blond Arabs over there have better weapons."

Because over their heads airplane motors began to buzz.

"The Caproni are here."

They fought side by side, but it was so dark they couldn't see each other. Miguel reached out and touched his shoulder. For the second time that day, the Italian planes were bombing the town.

"Let's get out of here, Lorenzo. The Caproni are back."

"Where to? Wait. What about the machine gun?"

"What good is it? We don't have any more ammo."

The enemy machine gun had also fallen silent. Below them, a group of women ran by. They couldn't see them, but they could hear them, because they were singing in loud voices despite the fighting:

With Lister and Campesino, With Galán and Modesto,

With Commander Carlos as our guides,

The army of the people is so brave

It will surely turn the tide…

The voices sounded strange, mixed in with the noise of the bombs, but they were stronger than the bombs: the bombs fell sporadically but the singing never stopped. "And it isn't as if they were warlike voices either, Papa, but the voices of women in love. They were singing to the Republican fighters as if they were their lovers, and up on the roof Miguel and I accidentally touched hands and thought the same thing. That they were singing to us, to Miguel and Lorenzo, and that they loved us…"

Then the facade of the bishop's palace collapsed, and they threw themselves on the ground, covered with dust. He thought about Madrid when he'd first arrived, about the cafés filled with people until two or three in the morning, when all they talked about was the war, and how euphoric they all felt and how absolutely sure they'd win, and he thought how Madrid was still holding out and how the women of Madrid made curlers out of bomb fragments…They crawled to the stairway. Miguel was unarmed. He dragged his rifle along. He knew there was only one for every five soldiers. He decided not to leave it behind.