Carlos Fuentes The Death of Artemio Cruz (pdf)

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your gray hairs and your drunkenness, and your lack of will. Now
I see you, now I see you, shitass! You re just the same as when you
went to the capital with us; the same as when you thought our power
was an excuse to expend it on women and liquor and not a reason
to add to it and make it stronger and use it like a whip; the same as
when you thought our power had passed without any loss and so
you thought you could stay up there without our support when we
had to come back down to this burning land, to this fountain of
everything, to this hell from which we rose and into which we had
to fall& It stinks! There s a smell stronger than horse sweat or fruit
or gunpowder& Have you ever stopped to smell the coupling of a
man and a woman? That s what the earth here smells like, the sheets
of love, and you never knew it& Listen, oh, I caressed you when you
were born and gave you my milk and said you were mine, my son,
and all I was remembering was the moment when your father made
you with all the blindness of a love that was not meant to create you
but to give me pleasure: and that s what s left; you have
disappeared& Out there, listen to me&
Why don t you speak? All right& all right& Don t say a word,
just seeing you there looking at me like that is something; something
more than a bare mattress and all those sleepless nights&
Are you looking for someone? And that boy there outside, isn t he
alive? I m suspicious of you; you probably think I don t know
The Death of Artemio Cruz 253
anything, that I don t see anything from here& As if I couldn t sense
that there is flesh of my flesh prowling out there, an extension of
Ireneo and Atanasio, another Menchaca, another man like them,
out there, listen to me& Of course he s mine, even though you haven t
sought him& Blood answers blood without having to come near&
Lunero, said the boy when he woke up from his siesta and
saw the mulatto lying there, worn out, on the muddy ground. I
want to go into the big house.
Later, when everything would be over, old Ludivinia would
break her silence and go out, like a wingless crow, to scream along
the avenues of fern, her eyes lost in the underbrush and lifted,
finally, to the Sierra; she would raise her arms toward the human
form she hoped to find behind every branch that slashes her face
furrowed with lifeless veins, blinded by the night she s
unaccustomed to in her cloister of permanently burning candles.
And she would smell that conjunction of the earth and would
shout in a hoarse voice the names she d forgotten and just recently
learned, she would bite her pale hands out of rage, because in her
heart something years, memory, the past that was her
life would tell her that there would still exist a margin of life
beyond her century of memories: a chance to live and love another
being of her blood: something that had not died with the death
of Ireneo and Atanasio. But now, with Master Pedrito before her,
in the bedroom she hadn t left in thirty-five years, Ludivinia
thought she was the center that yoked memory to the beings now
around her. Master Pedrito rubbed his unshaven chin and spoke
again, this time aloud. Mama, you don t know&
The old lady s eyes froze the son s voice in his throat.
What? That nothing could last? That their strength was all show,
based on an injustice that had to die at the hands of another
injustice? That the enemies we had shot so wecould go on being the
masters, or the ones whose tongues were cut out or whose hands were
cut off on your father s orders so that he could go on being the master,
that the enemies from whom your father stole land so he could begin
to be the master were victorious one day and set our house on fire
and took away what wasn t ours, what we had by force and not by
right? That, despite everything, your brother refused to accept loss
The Death of Artemio Cruz 254
and defeat and went on being Atanasio Menchaca, not up there, far
from the scene, like you, but down here, alongside his servants, facing
up to danger, raping mulattas and Indians, and not, like you,
seducing willing women? That, of your brother s thousand careless,
swift, ferocious couplings, there would remain one proof, one, one,
of his having passed through this land? That, of all the children
scattered by Atanasio Menchaca over our possessions, one would be
born close by? That the same day his son was born in a Negro
shack as he should be born, downward, to show once again the
strength of the father who was Atanasio&
Master Pedrito could not read these words in Ludivinia s eyes.
The old woman s gaze, having left her worn-out face, wafted like
a marble wave over the liquid heat of the bedroom. The man in
the tight clothes did not have to hear Ludivinia s voice.
Don t reproach me for anything. I m your son, too& My blood is
the same as Atanasio s& so why, that night& ? All I was told was:
Sergeant Robaina, from the old Santa Anna troops, has found what
you ve been looking for for so long, Colonel Menchaca s body, in the
Campeche cemetery. Another soldier, who saw where they buried
your father with no marker, told the sergeant when he was ordered
to the port garrison. And the sergeant, outwitting the commanders,
stole Colonel Menchaca s remains at night. Now he s being
transferred to Jalisco and is passing through here and wants to give
you the remains. I ll wait for you and your brother tonight, after
eleven, inthe clearing about a mile from town, the place where they
had the gallows for hanging rebel Indians. Clever, wasn t it?
Atanasio believed him, as I did; his eyes filled with tears, he never
questioned the message. Why did I ever come to Cocuya that season?
Because I was starting to run out of money in Mexico City, and
Atanasio never refused me anything. He even preferred that I be far
away, he wanted to be the only Menchaca in the area, your only
guardian. The red moon that shines in the hottest time of the year
was up when we got there. There was Sergeant Robaina. We
remembered him from when we were kids. He was leaning against
his big horse, his teeth glowing like white rice, just like his white
mustache. We remembered him from when we were kids. He d
always accompanied General Santa Anna and was famous as a horse
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