Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

They walked down the spiral staircase.

"I think a baby was crying in one of the rooms. I'm not sure, I might have mistaken the air-raid sirens for wailing."

But he imagined the baby there, abandoned. They felt their way down in the darkness. It was so dark that when they came out on the street it looked like broad daylight. Miguel said, "They shall not pass," and the women answered: "They shall not pass!" The night blinded them, and they must have become disoriented as they walked along, because one of the women ran after them, saying, "Not that way. Come with us."

When they got used to the light of night, they found themselves face down on the sidewalk. The collapsed building shielded them from the enemy machine guns: he breathed in the dust, but he also inhaled the sweat from the girls stretched out next to him. He tried to see their faces. All he saw was a beret and a wool cap, until the girl who'd thrown herself down at his side raised her face and he saw her loose chestnut hair whitened by the plaster from the building, and she said:

"My name's Dolores-Lola."

"I'm Lorenzo. This is Miguel."

"Miguel, that's me."

"We're separated from our group."

"We were in the Fourth Corps."

"How do we get out of here?"

"We'll have to take the long way round and cross the bridge."

"Do you know this place?"

"Miguel knows it."

"Right, I know it."

"Where are you from?"

"I'm Mexican."

"Ah, so it won't be hard to understand each other."

The planes left, and they stood up. Nuri with her beret and María with her wool cap told them their names and they repeated theirs. Dolores was wearing trousers and a jacket; the other two women, overalls and knapsacks. They walked single file down the deserted street, hugging the walls of the tall houses, under dark balconies with their windows open, as if on a summer day. They could hear the interminable sniping, but they didn't know where it came from. A dog barked from an alley, and Miguel tossed a stone at it. An old man, a scarf wrapped around his head, was sitting in his rocker. He didn't look at them as they passed, and they could not understand what he was doing there: was he waiting for someone to come home, or was he waiting for the sun to come up, or what. He didn't look at them.

He breathed deeply. They left the town behind and reached an open field with some bare poplars in it. That autumn no one had raked up the dry leaves and they crackled under their feet. He noticed that the leaves closest to the ground had already turned black from the rains, and he glanced back at the soaking-wet rags wrapped around Miguel's feet. Once again he wanted to offer him his boots, but his comrade was striding along so resolutely on his strong, slim legs that he realized how useless it would be to offer what wasn't needed. In the distance, those dark slopes awaited them. Perhaps then he'd need the boots. Not now. Now the bridge was there, and beneath it ran a turbulent, deep river. They stopped to stare at it.

"I hoped it would be frozen over"-he gestured angrily.

"Spanish rivers never freeze over," murmured Miguel. "They always run."

"Why did you want it to be frozen?" Dolores asked him.

"Well, that way we could have avoided the bridge."

"Why would we want to do that?" said María, and the three women, the question in their eyes, looked like curious little girls.

"Because bridges are usually mined," said Miguel.

The small group did not move. The swift white river swirling at their feet hypnotized them. They stood stock-still. Until Miguel raised his face, looked toward the mountains, and said: "If we cross the bridge, we can get to the mountains and from there to the border. If we don't cross, we'll be shot…"

"Well?" said María, holding back a sob. For the first time, the two men could see her glassy, weary eyes.

"We lost!" shouted Miguel. He clenched his empty fists and walked around as if looking for a rifle on the ground carpeted with blackened leaves. "There's no going back! We've got no planes, no artillery, nothing!"

He did not move. He stood there staring at Miguel until Dolores, Dolores's hot hand, the five fingers she had just taken out of her armpit, clasped the young man's five fingers, and he understood. She sought his eyes, and he saw hers, also for the first time. She blinked, and he saw that her eyes were green, as green as the sea near our land. He saw her with uncombed hair and no makeup, her cheeks red from the cold, her lips full and dry. The other three didn't notice. They walked, she and he, holding hands, and stepped onto the bridge. For a moment, he doubted. She did not. The ten fingers they clasped gave them warmth, the only warmth he'd felt in all those months.

"…the only warmth I felt in all those months of retreat toward Catalonia and the Pyrenees…"

They heard the noise of the river below, and the creak of the bridge's wooden planks. If Miguel and the girls shouted from the other bank, they did not hear them. The bridge grew longer and longer, it seemed to be spanning an ocean and not this rampaging river.

"My heart was beating fast. She must have felt the pounding in my hand, because she put in on her breast, where I could feel the strength of her heart…"

Then they walked side by side, and the bridge grew shorter.

On the other side rose something they hadn't seen a huge, bare elm, beautiful and white. It wasn't covered with snow but with glittering ice. It was so white it glowed like a jewel in the night. He felt the weight of the rifle on his shoulder, the weight of his legs, his leaden feet on the planks; the elm waiting for them seemed so light, luminuous, and white.

"I closed my eyes, Papa, and I opened them, afraid that the tree wouldn't be there anymore…"

Then their feet touched earth, they stopped, they did not look back, both ran toward the elm, without paying attention to the shouts of Miguel and the two girls, without hearing the running feet of their comrades on the bridge, they ran and embraced the naked trunk, white and covered with ice, they shook it, and pearls of cold fell on their heads. They touched hands, embracing it, and they wrenched themselves from their tree to brow and she his neck. She stepped back, so he could see her moist green eyes better, her half-open mouth, before she buried her head in the boy's chest, raised her face to give him her lips, before their comrades surrounded them, but not hugging the tree as they had…

"…how warm, Lola, how warm you are, and how much I already love you."

They made camp in the foothills, below the snow line. Miguel and Lorenzo gathered wood and made a fire. Lorenzo sat next to Lola and held her hand once more. María took a dented cup out of her knapsack, filled it with snow, and let the snow melt over the fire. Then she took out a chunk of goat cheese. Nuri pulled some wrinkled Lipton tea bags out of her bosom, and everyone laughed at the face of the English yachtsman smiling on the labels.

Nuri told how they'd packed the tobacco and condensed milk sent by the Americans before Barcelona fell. Nuri was plump and jolly and had worked before the war in a textile factory, but then María started talking, recalling the days when she'd studied in Madrid and lived in the Student Residence and went out on strike against Primo de Rivera and wept at each new play by García Lorca.

"I'm writing to you with the paper resting on my knees as I listen to these girls talk, and I try to tell them how much I love Spain, and the only thing I can think to talk about is my first visit to Toledo, a city I imagined to be the way EI Greco painted it-enveloped in a thunderstorm, with lightning flashes and greenish clouds, set over a wide Tagus, a city-how shall I put it?-at war against itself. And I found a city bathed in sunlight, a sunny, silent city with its old fortress bombed out, because El Greco's picture-I try to tell them-is all of Spain, and if the Tagus in the real Toledo is narrower, the Tagus of Spain splits the country apart. That's what I've seen here, Papa. That's what I try to tell them…"