Carlos Fuentes - The Death of Artemio Cruz

"No one goes in there," Lunero said, coming out of his dance of terror and anguish, his silent farewell on his last afternoon with the boy. It was probably five-thirty, and the agent wouldn't be late.

"Try running inland," he had said yesterday. "Just try. We've got something better than bloodhounds: all those poor bastards who'd rather turn in a runaway than know that somebody saved himself from their fate."

No: Lunero, imprisoned, after all, by terror and nostalgia, was thinking about the coast. How big the mulatto seemed to the boy when he stood up and looked at the rapid flow of the river toward the Gulf of Mexico! How tall his thirty-three years of cinnamon-colored flesh and pink palms! Lunero's eyes were on the coast, and his eyelids seemed to be painted white, not because of age, which lightens the eyes of people of his race, but out of nostalgia, which is another form of growing old, more ancient, going back. There was the sandbar that broke the flow of the river and stained the first frontier of the sea brown. Farther out, the world of the islands began, and then came the continent, where someone like him could lose himself in the jungle and say he'd returned. He did not want to look back. He breathed deeply and looked toward the sea, as if toward a dream of liberty and plenitude. The boy lost his modesty and ran toward the mulatto. His embrace only reached up to Lunero's ribs.

"Don't go, Lunero…"

"Cruz, boy, for God's sake, what else can I do?"

The distressed mulatto patted the boy's hair and could not avoid that moment of happiness, the gratitude, the pain he'd always feared. The boy lifted his face: "I have to speak to them, tell them you can't go…"

"Inside?"

"Yes, inside the big house."

"They don't want us there, Cruz. Don't ever go there. Come on, let's get back to work. I won't go for a long time. Who knows if I'll have to go at all."

The murmuring afternoon river received Lunero's body. He dove in to avoid the words and the touch of the boy who had been with him his entire life. The boy went back to candle making and smiled again when Lunero, swimming upstream, imitated the flailing of a drowning man, shot up like an arrow, did a somersault in the water, came up again with a stick in his teeth, and then, on the bank, shook, making funny noises, and finally sat down behind the boy, with the smooth pieces of bark in front of him, and picked up his hammer and nails. He had to consider it again: the agent wouldn't be long. The sun was going down behind the treetops. Lunero fought off thinking what he should be thinking; the edge of bitterness cut through his happiness, now lost.

"Bring me more sandpaper from the shack," he ordered the boy, certain that those were his parting words.

Could he go like that, wearing his everyday shirt and trousers? Why take more? Now that the sun was going down, he would keep watch at the entrance to the house road, so the frock-coated man wouldn't have to go near the shack.

"Yes," said Ludivinia, "Baracoa tells me everything. How we live from the work of the boy and the mulatto. Would you care to acknowledge that? That we eat thanks to them. And you don't know what to do?"

The old lady's real voice was hard to understand; she was so used to muttering to herself that it flowed out with the stillness and gravity of a sulphurous spring.

"…What your father or brother would have done, gone out to defend the mulatto and the boy, keep them from being taken away…If necessary, give up your life so they won't trample us into the dust…Are you going to do it, or shall I go, shitass?…Bring me the boy!…I want to speak to him…"

But the boy couldn't distinguish the voices, not even the faces: only the silhouettes behind the lace veil, now that Ludivinia, in a gesture of impatience, ordered Master Pedrito to light the candles. The boy moved away from the window and, walking on tiptoe, sought out the front of the big house, with its columns smeared with soot, with its forgotten terrace, where the hammock of Master Pedrito's bacchanals was hanging. And something else: above the lintel, held up by two rusty hooks, the shotgun Master Pedrito carried on his saddle that night in 1889, which he'd kept ever since, oiled and ready: here in the citadel of his cowardice, because he knew he'd never use it.

The twin barrels shone brighter than the white lintel. The boy crossed by it. What had been the main hall of the hacienda had lost its flooring and roof; the green light of the first hours of evening poured in, illuminating the grass and soot where a few frogs croaked, where pools of rainwater stood stagnant in the corners. From the opposite end of the house-what was left of the old kitchen-appeared the Indian Baracoa, with incredulous eyes. The boy hid his face in the shadow of the hall. He went out on the terrace and brought back a few adobe bricks, which he piled up to reach the shotgun. The voices grew louder. They reached him as a mix of thin fury and stuttered excuses. Finally, a tall shadow left the bedroom: the tails of his frock coat snapped in agitation, and his leather boots thundered on the tiles of the corridor. The boy didn't wait. He knew which path those feet would take; he ran, with the shotgun in his arms, along the path that led to the shack.

And Lunero was already waiting, far from the big house and the shack, in the spot where the red-dirt roads crossed. It was probably seven o'clock. He wouldn't be long in coming now. He peered up and down the highway. The agent's horse would raise a raging dust cloud. But not that distant roar, that double explosion Lunero heard behind him, which for an instant kept him from moving or thinking.

The boy crouched behind the branches with the shotgun in his hands, afraid the steps would find him. He saw the tight boots pass, the lead-colored trousers, and the tails of the frock coat-the same one he'd seen yesterday: he had no doubts when that faceless man walked into the shack and shouted, "Lunero!" And in that impatient voice the boy discerned the irritation and menace he'd noticed yesterday in the attitude of the frock-coated man looking for the mulatto. Who would be looking for the mulatto unless he was going to take him away by force? And the shotgun weighed heavy, with a power that prolonged the boy's silent rage: rage because now he knew that life had enemies and that it was not any longer the uninterrupted flow of river and work; rage because now he would know separation. The trouser-covered legs and the lead-colored frock coat emerged from the shack, and he took aim along the barrel and squeezed the trigger.

"Cruz! Son!" shouted Lunero as he neared Master Pedrito's shattered face, the shirtfront stained red, the false smile of sudden death. "Cruz!"

And the boy, as he came out of the bushes, trembling, had no way to recognize the face drenched in blood and dust, the face of a man he'd always seen from afar, almost undressed, with a jug tipped up and a torn undershirt over a hairless, pale chest. This man was not the other, just as he wasn't the gentleman who came down from Mexico City, elegant and neat: the one Lunero remembered; just as he wasn't the child caressed, sixty years before, by the hands of Ludivinia Menchaca. It was only a face without features, a blood-soaked shirtfront, a stupid grimace. Only the cicadas moved: Lunero and the boy stood still. But the mulatto understood. The master had died for him. And Ludivinia opened her eyes, moistened her index finger on her lips, and put out the candle on her night table. Almost on her knees, she walked to the window. Something had happened. The chandelier had tinkled again. Something had happened. For all eternity. Shaken by the double report. She heard the faraway voices until they faded and the insects started their chorus again. Only the cicadas. Baracoa crouched down in the kitchen; she let the fire go out and trembled to think that the time of gunpowder had returned. Ludivinia, too, stood still, until, in the silence, she was overcome by that thin fury and no longer fit in the enclosed bedroom. She went out stumbling, made smaller by the night sky that appeared through the holes in the burned-out great house-a small worm, white and wrinkled, stretching out her arms in hope of touching a human form that for thirteen years she knew to be close but which only now did she wish to touch and call by name instead of nurturing in thought alone: Cruz, Cruz without a real first or last name, baptized by the mulattoes with the syllables of Isabel Cruz or Cruz Isable, the mother who was run off by Atanasio: the first woman on the property to give him a son. The old woman was unfamiliar with the night; her legs shook, but she insisted on walking, on dragging herself along with her arms spread, ready to find the last embrace of life. But only a sound of hooves and a cloud of dust approached. Only a sweaty horse which stopped with a whinny when Ludivinia's hunchback form crossed the road, and the agent shouted from the saddle: "Where did the boy and the black go, you stubborn old bitch? Tell me where they went, or I'll set the dogs and men on you!"