The Death of Artemio Cruz Read online

  You will go further and will penetrate into the nave of the ship, its Castilian exterior conquered by the macabre, smiling plenitude of this Indian heaven of saints, angels, and indigenous gods. A single, enormous nave will run toward the altar of gilt foliage, somber opulence of masked faces, lugubrious and festive prayer, always urgent, for this freedom, the only one granted, to decorate a temple and fill it with tranquil astonishment, with sculpted resignation, with the horror of emptiness, the terror of the dead times, of those who prolonged the slow deliberateness of free labor, the unique instants of autonomy in color and form, far from that exterior world of whips and branding irons and smallpox. You will walk to the conquest of your new world through a nave devoid of blank spaces: angel heads, luxuriant vines, polychrome flowers, red, round fruits captured in trellises of gold, white saints in chains, saints with astonished faces, saints in a heaven invented by Indians in their own image and likeness: angels and saints wearing the face of the sun and the moon, with the hand to protect harvests, with the index finger of the hounds, with the cruel, unnecessary, alien eyes of the idol, with the rigorous face of the cycles. The faces of stone behind the pink, kindly, ingenuous masks, masks that are, however, impassive and dead: create the night, fill the black sails with wind, close your eyes, Artemio Cruz…

  (1919: May 20)

  His story of Gonzalo Bernal's final moments in the Perales prison opened the doors of the house to him.

  "He was always so pure," said Don Gamaliel Bernal Gonzalo's father. "He always thought that, unless clear thinking determines it, action contaminates us and leads us to betray ourselves. I think that's why he left this house. Well, I believe it in part, because this hurricane swept everyone away, even those of us who never left home. No, what I'm trying to say is that, for my son, moral obligation meant participating in order to explain, to offer coherent ideas, yes, I think he participated to keep this cause from caving in under the test of action, the way all the others have. I don't know, his ideas were very complicated. He preached tolerance. I'm happy to know he died bravely. I'm happy to see you here."

  He hadn't simply walked in one day to visit the old man. Beforehand, he had made inquiries in several Puebla towns, spoken with several people, found out what he had to find out. For that reason, he could know listen to the old man's worn-out arguments without blinking an eye, as the old man leaned his head against the polished leather of his chair back, turning his profile into the yellowish light that held the thick dust suffusing the air of the enclosed library. The shelves were so high that Don Gamaliel used a ladder on wheels, which over time had scratched the ocher floors, to reach the tall, thick volumes, French and English texts on geography, fine arts, and natural sciences. To read them, Don Gamaliel had to use a magnifying glass, the one he now held motionless in his silky hands, not noticing that the oblique light passed through the glass and concentrated, burning into the crease of his striped, carefully pressed trousers. Artemio Cruz, on the other hand, did notice it. An uncomfortable silence separated them.

  "Please forgive me. May I offer you something? Better yet: stay for dinner."

  He opened his hands in a sign of invitation and pleasure, and the magnifying glass fell on the lap of this thin man with flesh stretched over brittle bones, with skull, jowls, and lips spotted with the yellow marks of age.

  "I'm not shocked at what's happening," he'd said before, his voice always precise and courteous, sonorous when within those terms, otherwise flat. "What use would all my reading have been to me"—he gestured with the reading glass toward the shelves of books—"if it didn't teach me to understand the inevitability of change? Things change their appearance, whether we like it or not. Why should we stubbornly refuse to see them or long for the past? How much less tiresome it is to accept the unforeseeable! Or should I call it something else? You, Mr.…excuse me, I've forgotten your rank…yes, Lieutenant Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel…I mean, I don't know where you're from, what your profession is…I esteem you because you shared my son's final hours…Well, you did act, but could you foresee everything? I didn't act and I couldn't either. Perhaps our action and our passivity converge in that, in that both are quite blind and impotent. Although there certainly is a difference…don't you think? Ah, well…"

  He never lost sight of the old man's amber eyes, which were all too intent on creating an atmosphere of cordiality, too self-confident behind that mask of paternal sweetness. Perhaps those aristocratic hand movements, that fixed nobility of his profile, his bearded chin, that attentive cocking of his head, were all natural to him. He thought that even naturalness can be feigned; at times, a mask disguises too well the expressions of a face that does not exist either outside or under it. And Don Gamaliel's mask looked so much like his real face that it was disconcerting to think about the dividing line, the impalpable shadow that might separate them. He thought all this, and also that one day he might be able to say it right to the old man's face.

  All the clocks in the house chimed at the same instant, and the old man stood up to light the acetylene lamp on the rolltop desk. He slowly pushed the top back and fumbled through some papers. He picked one up and half turned toward his visitor's armchair. He smiled, furrowed his brow, and smiled again as he deposited the paper on top of the others. Gracefully he raised his index finger to his ear: a dog was barking and scratching on the other side of the door.

  He took advantage of the fact that the old man had turned his back toward him to scrutinize him secretly. Not one of Don Gamaliel's character traits broke the harmonious nobility of his full-length portrait. Seen from the rear, he walked elegantly, bolt-upright; longish white hair crowned the old man walking toward the door. Gamaliel Bernal was troubling—he grew nervous as he thought about it again—because he was too perfect. It was possible that his courtesy was nothing more than a natural complement to his naïveté. The thought annoyed him. The old man made his slow way to the door; the dog was barking: the fight would be too easy, could not be savored. But suppose the friendliness was merely a mask for the old man's cunning?

  When the tails of his frock coat stopped swinging and his white hand had grasped the copper doorknob, Don Gamaliel looked at him over his shoulder with those amber eyes. His free hand stroked his beard. His look seemed to read his unknown visitor's thoughts, and his slightly twisted smile recalled that of a magician about to complete a totally new trick. If in the old man's gesture the unknown visitor could understand and accept an invitation to silent complicity, Don Gamaliel's movement was so elegant, so artful, that he never gave his accomplice the chance to return the look and seal the tacit agreement.

  Night had fallen and the uncertain light of the lamp barely revealed the golden spines of the books and the silver trimming of the wallpaper that covered the library walls. He remembered, from when the door of the house had been opened to him, a long string of rooms that came into view beyond the old Puebla mansion's main vestibule and went all the way to the library, with room after room opening onto the patio with its majolica and its tiles. The mastiff jumped for joy and licked his master's hand. Behind the dog appeared the girl dressed in white, a white that contrasted with the crepuscular light stretching out behind her.

  She stopped for a second at the threshold, while the dog leapt toward the unknown man and sniffed at his feet and hands. Don Gonzalo laughed, took the dog by his red collar, and muttered a vague excuse. His visitor didn't understand it. He stood up, buttoning his jacket with the precise movements of military life, straightening it as if he were still wearing a uniform; he remained still before the beauty of this young woman, who had not yet passed through the doorway.

  "My daughter, Catalina."

  She did not move. The long, smooth chestnut hair that cascaded down her long, warm neck (even at that distance, he could see the luster of her nape), her eyes, simultaneously hard and liquid, with a trembling stare, two glass bubbles: amber like those of her father but franker, less accustomed to feigning with naturalness, reproduced in the other
dualities of that slim but well-rounded body, in her moist, slightly parted lips, in her high, taut breasts. Eyes, lips, hard, smooth breasts alternated between helplessness and rage. She held her hands together over her thighs and her narrow waist as she walked, fluttering the white muslin of her dress, cut full around her solid hips and buttoned down the back, ending near her thin calves. Toward him walked a flesh of pale gold, which even now revealed the faded chiaroscuro of the entire body in its forehead and cheeks, and she held out her hand, in whose touch he sought, without finding it, the moisture that would have revealed her emotion.

  "He was with your brother during his final hours. I spoke about him to you."

  "You were fortunate, sir."

  "He told me about the two of you, asked me to visit you. He was a brave man, to the very end."

  "He wasn't brave. It's just that he loved all…this too much."

  She touched her bosom and then quickly withdrew her hand to trace an arc in the air.

  "An idealist, yes, very much an idealist," murmured the old man, sighing. "The gentleman will dine with us."

  The girl took her father's arm, and he, with the mastiff alongside, followed them through the narrow, damp rooms crammed with porcelain vases and stools, clocks and display cabinets, waxed furniture and large religious paintings of little value. The gilt feet of the chairs and the side tables rested on painted wooden floors devoid of rugs, and the lamps remained unlit. Only in the dining room a grand cut-glass chandelier illuminated the heavy mahogany table and sideboards and a cracked still life in which the pottery and brilliant fruit of the tropics glowed. Don Gamaliel shooed away the mosquitoes flying around the real fruit bowl, less abundant than the one in the painting. Pointing a finger, he invited him to sit down.

  Sitting opposite her, he could finally stare directly into the girl's unmoving eyes. Did she know why he was visiting? Did she see in the look in his eyes that sense of triumph, made complete by the woman's physical presence? Could she detect the slight smile of luck and self-assurance? Did she feel his barely disguised intention to possess her? Her eyes expressed only that strange message of hard fatality, seeming to show that she was ready to accept everything but that she would nevertheless transform her acceptance into an opportunity to triumph over the man who in this silent and smiling way had begun to make her his own.

  She was surprised at the strength with which she succumbed, the power of her weakness. Immodestly, she raised her eyes to observe the strong features of the stranger. She couldn't avoid a clash with his green eyes. He was not good-looking, certainly not handsome. But the olive skin of his face, which lent his entire body the same linear, sinuous energy as his thick lips and the prominent nerves in his temples, promised something desirable to the touch, because unknown. Under the table, he stretched out his foot until he touched the tip of her feminine slipper. The girl lowered her eyelids, looked at her father out of the corner of her eye, and moved her foot back. The perfect host smiled with his usual benevolence, running his fingers over his glass.

  The entrance of the old Indian maid with the rice broke the silence, and Don Gamaliel observed that the dry season was ending a bit late this year. Fortunately, the clouds had begun to gather over the mountains, and the harvest would be good—not as good as last year, but good. It was odd, he said, how this old house was always damp, a dampness that stained the shadowed corners and nurtured the fern and the bright colors in the patio. It was, perhaps, a good omen for a family that grew and prospered thanks to the fruit of the land: established in the valley of Puebla—he was eating the rice, gathering it on his fork with precise movements—since the beginning of the nineteenth century and stronger, true enough, than all the absurd vicissitudes of a country incapable of tranquillity, enamored of convulsion.

  "Sometimes I think the absence of blood and death throws us into despair. It's as if we feel alive only when we're surrounded by destruction and executions," the old man went on in his cordial voice. "But we shall go on, go on forever, because we have learned to survive, always…"

  He picked up his guest's glass and filled it with full-bodied wine.

  "But there is a price to be paid for surviving," said the guest dryly.

  "It's always possible to negotiate the most convenient price…"

  As he filled his daughter's glass, Don Gamaliel caressed her hand. "It's the finesse with which the negotiations are carried out that matters most. There is no need to frighten anyone, no need to wound sensitive souls…Honor should be kept intact."

  He felt again for the girl's foot. This time she did not pull her foot back. She raised her glass and stared at the unknown guest without blushing.

  "It's important to know how to make distinctions," murmured the old man as he wiped his lips with his napkin. "For example, business is one thing, and religion is something completely different."

  "See him there so nice and pious, taking Communion every day with his little girl? Well, that same man stole everything he has from the priests, back when Juárez auctioned off Church property and anybody with a little cash could buy huge tracts of land…"

  He had spent six days in Puebla before visiting Don Gamaliel Bernal's house. President Carranza had disbanded the troops, and it was then he remembered his conversation with Gonzalo Bernal in Perales and set out on the road to Puebla: a matter of pure instinct, but also the confidence which says that knowing a name, an address, a city in the shattered, chaotic world left by the Revolution is to know a lot. The irony that he should be the one returning to Puebla and not the executed Bernal amused him. It was in a way a masquerade, a sleight-of-hand, a joke that could be played with the greatest seriousness; but it was also proof of being alive, of a capacity to survive and strengthen one's own destiny at the expense of others. When he reached Puebla, when, from the Cholula road, he could make out, scattered over the valley, the red-and-yellow mushrooms that were the church domes, he was entering doubled, with Gonzalo Bernal's life added to his own, with the destiny of the dead man added onto his, as if Bernal in dying had delegated the possibilities of his unfulfilled life to him. Perhaps the death of others prolongs our life, he thought. But he hadn't come to Puebla to think.

  "This year he hasn't even been able to buy seed. His debts have been piling up since last year, when the peasants went in for rebelling and planted the fallow land. They told him that if he didn't give them the land that wasn't being planted, they wouldn't work the land that was. And out of sheer pride he refused, so he was left with no harvest. Before, the Rural Guard would have put the rebels in their place, but now…well, another day has dawned.

  "And not only that. Even the people who owe him money are getting out of hand. They don't want to pay him another cent. They say that with all the interest he's already charged them they've paid more than enough. See now, Colonel? They all believe things are going to change.

  "Ah, but the old man is as stubborn as ever, won't give an inch. He'd rather die than give up whatever it is someone owes him."

  He lost the last round of dice and shrugged. He gestured to the bartender for drinks all round, and they all thanked him.

  "Who owes money to this Don Gamaliel, then?"

  "Well…It would be easier to tell you who doesn't, I think."

  "Is he friendly with anyone around here? Is there someone he's close to?"

  "Sure. Father Páez, right around the corner."

  "But didn't he buy all the Church land?"

  "Sure…but the Father grants eternal salvation to Don Gamaliel and Don Gamaliel grants salvation on earth to the Father."

  The sun blinded them as they stepped into the street.

  "Blood will tell, they say. And that gal's sure got good blood."

  "Who is that woman?"

  "Can't you guess, Colonel? That's our hero's little girl."

  Staring at the toes of her shoes, she walked along the old streets laid out like a chessboard. When he could no longer hear the echo of her heels on the paving stones and his steps had raised a
could of dry, gray dust, he looked toward the walls of the ancient fortress-temple and the almond-shaped stones in its battlements. He crossed the wide esplanade and entered the silent nave. Once again, the footsteps echoed. He walked toward the altar.