Carlos Fuentes: The Death of Artemio Cruz

conquistadors who have raped it; not the pirates who loaded their brigantines with shields thrown with a bitter laugh from atop the Indian mountain; not the monks who crossed the Pass of the Malinche to offer new disguises to unshakable gods who had themselves represented in destructible stone but who inhabited the air; not the blacks, brought to the tropical plantations and softened by the depredations of Indian women who offered their hairless sex as a redoubt of victory against the black race; not the princes who disembarked from their imperial galleons and let themselves be fooled by the sweet landscape of palms and nut trees and ascended with their baggage laden with lace and cologne to the plateau of bullet-pocked walls; not even the leaders wearing three-cornered hats and epaulets who in the mute opacity of the highland found, finally, the exasperating defeat of reticence, of mute mockery, of indifference.

You will be that boy who goes forth to the land, finds the land, leaves his origins, finds his density, today, when death joins origins and destiny and between the two, despite everything, fixes the blade of liberty.

He woke up when he heard the mulatto Lunero mutter, "Drunk again, drunk again," when all the roosters (birds in mourning, decadent, fallen to the status of rustic servants, their abandoned yards once the pride of this hacienda, where more than half a century earlier they did battle with the fighting cocks of the region's political boss) announced the swift tropical morning, which was the end of the night for Master Pedrito, of yet another solitary drinking bout on the colored-tile terrace of the old, ruined mansion. The master's drunken singing could be heard as far as the palm-roofed shack where Lunero was already up and about, sprinkling the dirt floor with water from a pitcher made somewhere else, whose ducks and painted flowers once boasted a shiny lacquer finish. Lunero quickly lit a fire in the brazier to heat up the charal-fish hash left over from the previous day; poking around the fruit basket, he picked out the blackest fruit to eat right away, before rot, the sister of fecundity, softened them and filled them with worms. Later, when the smoke welling up from under the tin plate finally awakened the boy, the phlegmy singing stopped. They could still hear the drunkard's stumbling footsteps, as they moved farther and farther away, until the final slam of the door, prelude to a long morning of insomnia: face down on the canopied mahogany bed with its bare, stained mattress, tangled up in the mosquito net, in despair because his supply of rotgut liquor had run out. Before, Lunero recalled, patting the tousled head of the boy, who approached the fire, his too-short undershirt revealing the first shadows of puberty, when the property was big, the shacks stood far from the house and no one would ever know what went on inside unless the fat cooks and young half-breed women who swept up and starched shirts carried their tales to the other world of men roasted in the tobacco fields. Now everything was close, and all that was left of the hacienda, reduced by the speculators and by the political enemies of the old, dead master, was the windowless house and Lunero's shack. Inside the house, only the memory of the sighing servants, kept alive by skinny old Baracoa, who went on looking after the grandmother, locked in the blue room in back; in the shack, there was just Lunero and the boy, the only workers left.

The mulatto sat down on the flattened floor and divided the fish, emptying half into the clay bowl and leaving half on the tin plate. He offered the boy a mango and peeled a banana. They began to eat in silence. When the small mound of ashes was finally cold, a thick cloud of perfume from the convolvulus Lunero had planted years before to cover the gray adobe of the walls and to surround the shack with the nocturnal aroma of tuberous flowers drifted through the only opening-door, window, refuge for sniffing dogs, frontier for the red ants held back by a line of lime. They didn't speak. But the mulatto and the boy felt the same happy gratitude at being together, a gratitude they would never mention, never even express in a shared smile, because they weren't there to talk or smile but to eat and sleep and go out together every daybreak, always silent, always weighed down by the tropical humidity, to do the work necessary to go on passing the days and to hand over to the Indian Baracoa the items that each week paid for both grandmother's food and Master Pedrito's jugs. Those big blue jugs, safeguarded from the heat by woven straw covers and leather handles, were beautiful: potbellied, with short, narrow necks. Master Pedrito would line them up at the entrance to the house, and each month Lunero would go to the village at the foot of the mountain with the pole used on the hacienda to carry pails of water and return with it balanced on his shoulders, the jugs tied on and dangling-the mule they once had was dead. This village at the foot of the mountain was the only center. Inhabited by three hundred people and barely visible except for some glimpses of roof tiles among the leaves which, as soon as the stone of the mountains fixes itself in the earth, curl on the smooth hillside that accompanies the river in its course to the nearby sea.

The boy ran out of the shack and down the path through the ferns in the mango grove. The muddy slope took him, under the sky hidden by red flowers and yellow fruit, to the riverbank where Lunero was clearing a work site with his machete at the spot where the river, still turbulent, began to widen. The mulatto came over to him, buttoning up his denim bell-bottom trousers, a memory of some forgotten sailor fashion. The boy picked up his blue shorts, which had spent the night drying on the circle of rusty iron that Lunero was now approaching. Mangrove bark was lying about, open and smooth, its mouth in the water. Lunero stopped for a moment, his feet sunk in the mud. As it neared the sea, the river breathed more easily and caressed the growing masses of fern and banana. The brush looked higher than the sky because the sky was flat, shimmering low. They both knew what to do. Lunero took the sandpaper and went on smoothing the bark with a strength that danced in the thick sinews of his forearms. The boy brought over a broken, rotten stool and placed it inside the iron circle, which was hanging from a central wooden pole. Out of the ten openings punched through the circle hung ten wicks made of string. The boy spun the circle and then bent over to light the fire under the pot. The melted wax bubbled thickly; the circle spun; the boy poured the wax into the holes.

"Purification Day is coming," said Lunero, through the three nails he held in his teeth.

"When?"

The small fire under the sun brightened the boy's green eyes.

"On the second, Cruz, my boy, on the second. Then we'll sell my candles, not only to the neighbors but to people from farther away. They know our candles are the best."

"I remember last year."

Sometimes the hot wax would spit; the boy's thighs were covered with tiny round scars.

"That's the day the groundhog looks for his shadow."

"How do you know?"

"It's a story that comes from somewhere else."

Lunero stopped and reached for a hammer. He furrowed his dark brow. "Cruz, my boy, could you make canoes all by yourself?"

A big white smile flashed on the boy's face. The green reflections off the river and the moist ferns accentuated his sharp, pale, bony features. Combed by the river, his hair was plastered on his wide forehead and dark nape. The sun gave it copper highlights, but its roots were black. The tones of green fruit ran through his thin arms and strong chest, made for swimming against the current, his teeth shining in the laugh of his body refreshed by the river with its grassy bed and slimy banks. "Yes, I know how. I've watched how you do it."