Carlos Fuentes: The Death of Artemio Cruz

The mulatto lowered his eyes, which were naturally low, eyes that were serene but searching. "If Lunero goes away, can you take charge of everything?"

The boy stopped turning the iron wheel. "If Lunero goes away?"

"If he has to go."

I shouldn't have said anything, thought the mulatto. He wouldn't say anything, he would just go, the way his kind always went, without saying anything, because he knows and accepts destiny and feels an abyss of reasons and memories between that knowledge and that acceptance and the rejection or acceptance of other men, because he knows nostalgia and wandering. And even though he knew he shouldn't say anything, he knew that the boy-his constant companion-had been very curious, his little head turned to one side, about the man wearing the frock coat who came looking for Lunero yesterday.

"You know, selling candles in town and making more when Purification Day comes; carrying the empty bottles back every month and leaving Master Pedrito his liquor at the door…Making canoes and bringing them downriver every three months…and handing the gold over to Baracoa, you know, keeping some for yourself, and fishing right here…"

The little clearing by the river no longer pulsed with the hiss off the rusty circle or the mulatto's somnambular hammering. Boxed in by the green, the murmur of the swift water grew, water carrying bagasse, trees struck by lightning in nocturnal storms, and grass from the fields upstream. The black-and-yellow butterflies fluttered around as they, too, headed for the sea. The boy dropped his arms and asked the mulatto's fallen face: "You're going away?"

"You don't know everything about this place. In another time, all the land from here to the mountain belonged to these people. Then they lost it. The grandfather master died. Master Atanasio was ambushed and killed, and little by little they stopped planting. Or someone else took their land. I was the last one, and they left me in peace for fourteen years. But my time had to come."

Lunero stopped, because he didn't know how to go on. The silver ripples of water distracted him, and his muscles asked him to get on with his work. Thirteen years before, when they gave him the boy, he thought of sending him down the river, cared for by the butterflies, the way they did with that old king in the white folks' story, and then waiting for him to come back, big and powerful. But the death of Master Atanasio let him keep the boy without even having to fight about it with Master Pedrito, who was incapable of thinking of anything or arguing; without fighting with the grandmother, who lived already locked away in that blue room with lace and chandeliers that tinkled when it stormed, and who would never find out about the growing boy a few yards from her sealed-up madness. Yes, Master Atanasio died at just the right time; he would have had the boy killed; Lunero saved him. The last few tobacco fields passed into the hands of the new master, and all they had left was this little bit of river edge and thickets and what was left of the old house, which was like an empty, cracked pot. He saw how all the workers went over to the lands of the new master and how new men began to come, brought from upstream, to work the new fields, and how men were brought from other towns and hamlets, and he, Lunero, had to invent this work of candles and canoes to earn enough to keep them alive. He began to think that no one would ever take him from that unproductive patch of land, just a tiny plot between the ruined house and the river, because no one would ever notice him, lost among these vegetal ruins with the boy. It took the master fourteen years to notice, but at some time or other his fine-toothed search of the region was bound to turn up this needle in a haystack. And so, yesterday afternoon, the master's agent had ridden up, suffocating in his frock coat, the sweat dripping down his face, to tell Lunero that tomorrow-meaning today-he was to go to the hacienda of the gentleman to the south of the estate, because good tobacco workers were scarce and Lunero had spent fourteen years living off the fat of the land, taking care of a crazy old lady and a drunk. And Lunero did not know how to tell this to young Cruz, he thought the boy would never understand. The boy had known only work on the bank of the river, the coolness of the water before lunch, trips to the coast, where they gave him fresh crayfish and crabs, and the town nearby, inhabited by Indians who never spoke to him. But in truth the mulatto knew that if he started pulling on one thread in the story, it would all come unraveled and he'd have to start from the beginning and lose the boy. And he loved him-the long-armed mulatto kneeling by the sanded-down bark said to himself. He'd loved him ever since they ran his sister Isabel Cruz off the property and gave him the baby and Lunero fed him in the shack, fed him milk from the old nanny goat, all that remained of the Menchacas' stock, and he drew those letters in the mud that he'd learned when he was a boy, when he served the French in Veracruz, and he taught him to swim, to judge and taste fruit, to handle a machete, to make candles, to sing the songs Lunero's father had brought from Santiago de Cuba when the war broke out and the families moved to Veracruz with their servants. That was all Lunero wanted to know about the boy. And perhaps it was unnecessary to know more, except that the boy also loved Lunero and didn't want to live without him. Those lost shadows of the world-Master Pedrito, the Indian Baracoa, the grandmother-were coming forth like the blade of a knife to part him from Lunero. They were what was alien to the life he shared with his friend, what would part them. That was all the boy thought and all he understood.

"Look, we're running out of wax; the priest will be mad," said Lunero.

A strange breeze made the hanging wicks collide; a startled macaw shrieked out her midday alarm.

Lunero stood up and waded into the river; the net was set halfway into the current. The mulatto dove under and came up with the little net draped over one arm. The boy slipped off his shorts jumped into the water. As never before, he felt the coolness on every part of his body. He went under and opened his eyes: the crystalline undulations of the first layer of water ran swiftly over a muddy, green bottom. And above, and back-he let himself be carried along like an arrow by the current-was the house he had never entered in all his thirteen years, where the man he'd only seen from a distance and the woman he only knew by name lived. He raised his head from the water. Lunero was already frying the fish and cutting open a papaya with his machete.

Midday had barely passed: the rays of the sun in decline passed through the roof of tropical leaves like water through a sieve, pelting down hard. The time of paralyzed branches, when even the river seemed not to flow. The naked boy stretched out under the solitary palm tree and felt the heat of the sun's rays as they cast the shadow of the trunk and the crown of leaves farther and farther. The sun began its final race; even so, its oblique rays seemed to rise, illuminating his entire body, pore by pore. First his feet, when he leaned back against the naked pedestal. Then his spread legs, his dormant sex, his flat stomach, his chest hardened by the water, his long neck, and his square chin, where the light was opening two deep clefts, like two bows aimed at his hard cheekbones, which framed the clarity of his eyes, lost that afternoon in a deep and tranquil siesta. He was sleeping, and nearby, Lunero, stretched out, face down, was drumming with his fingers on the black frying pan. A rhythm was taking hold of him. The seeming languor of his body at rest was actually the contemplative tension of his dancing arm as it drew concentrated tones out of the utensil. He began to murmur, as he did every afternoon, having recovered the memory of a rhythm that grew ever more rapid, the memory of childhood song, of a life he no longer lived, when his ancestors crowned themselves, around the silk-cotton tree, with caps decorated with bells and rubbed their arms with liquor: a man would be seated in a chair with his head covered by a white cloth, and everyone drank the mixture of corn and bitter orange down to its black sugar lees. Children were taught that they shouldn't whistle at night: