The Death of Artemio Cruz

  Ventura nodded, walked to the well, sank his gourd into the water, took a drink, and filled it again.

  "Maybe he himself has forgotten why we were married…"

  "And where do your ears lead you?"

  "To the news that old Don Pizarro hates the sight of you."

  "That I already knew."

  "My ears also tell me he's going to take advantage of the goings-on today to get even…"

  "and now he really loves me…"

  "Blessed be your ears, Ventura."

  "Blessed be my mother, who taught me always to keep them clean and free of wax."

  "You know what has to be done."

  "…and loves me and admires my beauty…"

  The Indian laughed soundlessly, fingered the brim of his tattered hat, and looked toward the terrace with its tile-covered roof, where that beautiful woman was sitting in her rocking chair.

  "…my passion…"

  Ventura remembered her from years back, always sitting that way, sometimes with her stomach round and huge, at other times thin and silent, always detached from the hustle and bustle of the carts filled with grain, the bawling of the branded bulls, the dry splat of the plums that in summer fell in the orchard planted by the new master around the hacienda's main house. "…what I am…"

  She watched the two men the way a rabbit would measure the distance between itself and a pair of wolves. Don Gamaliel's death left her naked, bereft of the proud defenses she had had during their first months together: her father represented continuity, the old order, hierarchy. Her first pregnancy justified her modesty, her aloofness, her warnings to herself.

  "My God, way can't I be the same at night as I am during the day?"

  And he, as his eyes turned to follow the Indian's eyes, found his wife's immobile face and thought that during those first years he had been indifferent to her coldness. He himself lacked the will to pay close attention to that secondary world which could not manage to integrate itself, assume its proper form, find its name, feel itself before saying its name.

  "…at night as I am during the day?"

  Another Indian, speaking with even more urgency, sought him out.

  ("The government don't care nothing for us, Mr. Artemio, sir, so we come to ask you please to lend us a hand."

  "Boys, you came to the right man. You're going to have your road, I swear it to you, but on just one condition: that you don't bring your corn to Don Cástrulo Pizarro's mill anymore. Can't you see that the old man refused to give up even an inch of land for reform? Why do him any favors? Bring everything to my mill, and let me market it for you."

  "We know you're right, sir, but the problem is that Don Pizarro'll kill us if we do what you say."

  "Ventura: give these boys some rifles so they can learn to protect themselves." )

  She rocked slowly back and forth. She remembered, counted days, often months, when she never spoke to him. "He's never reproached me for my coldness to him during the day."

  Everything seemed to be moving without her taking part in it, and the strong man who got off his horse, his fingers callused, his forehead streaked with dust and sweat, gave her a wide berth as he walked by, whip in hand, to collapse in bed so that he could wake again before dawn and set out, as he did every day, on the long route of fatigue around the land that had to produce, yield, consciously be his pedestal.

  "The passion I receive him with at night seems to satisfy him."

  Corn-producing land, in the narrow river valley that included the remains of the old Bernal, Labastida, Pizarro haciendas; land that grows the maguey that yields the pulque, the place where the dry sod begins again.

  ("Hear any complaints, Ventura?"

  "Not to my face, boss, because, as bad as things are, these people are better off now than before. But they realize that you gave them land only good for dry-farming and kept the watered land for yourself."

  "What else do they say?"

  "That you go on charging interest on the loans you made them, just like Don Gamaliel did before."

  "Look, Ventura. Go and explain to them that I'm charging the big landowners like Pizarro and the shop-owners really high interest. But if they feel my loans are hurting them, we can stop doing business right now. I thought I was doing them a favor…"

  "No, they don't want that…"

  "Tell them that in a little while I'm going to foreclose on Pizarro's mortgages, and then I'll give them the bottomland I take from the old man. Tell them to hang on and have faith in me, they'll see." )

  He was a man.

  "But that fatigue, that worry kept him apart. I never asked for that hasty love he gave me every once in a while."

  Don Gamaliel, enamored of the city of Puebla, its society, its comforts, and its plazas, forgot the farmhouse and let his son-in-law take care of everything as he saw fit.

  "I accepted, just as he wanted me to. He asked me to set aside all my doubts and arguments. My father. I was bought and had to stay here…"

  As long as her father was alive, she would make the trip to Puebla every two weeks and spend some time with him, fill his cupboards with his favorite sweets and cheeses, go to Mass with him at the Church of San Francisco, kneel before the mummified body of the Blessed Sebastián de Aparicio, scour the Parián market with him, stroll around the main plaza, cross herself at the great holy-water fonts in front of the cathedral built in Herrera's style, or simply watch her father putter around in the patio library…

  "Oh yes, of course, he protected me, he has my support."

  …the arguments in favor of a better life were not totally lost on her, and the world she was used to and loved, her childhood years, had sufficient reality to allow her to return to the country, to her husband, without grief.

  "With no voice in the matter, with no point of view, bought, just a mute witness to what he did."

  She could imagine herself a casual visitor in that alien world, plucked out of the mud by her husband.

  Her real world was in the shady Puebla plaza, in the pleasures of cool linen spread over a mahogany table, the feel of hand-painted china, the silverware, the aroma.

  "…of sliced pears, quince, peach preserves…"

  ("I know you ruined Don León Labastida. Those three buildings of his in Puebla are worth a fortune."

  "Look at it from my point of view, Pizarro. All Labastida does is ask for one loan after another, never taking the interest into account. I gave him the rope, but he hung himself."

  "You must get some pleasure, seeing all this ancient pride tumble down. But you won't pull the same trick on me. I'm not a Puebla dandy like Labastida."

  "You always pay on time and you never borrow beyond what you can reasonably pay back."

  "Nobody's going to break me, Cruz. I swear it to you.")

  Don Gamaliel felt the proximity of death, and he himself arranged his funeral in every detail and with every luxury. His son-in-law could not refuse him the thousand-pesos cash he demanded. His chronic cough worsened, became like a boiling glass bubble set out in the sun, and soon his chest tightened and his lungs could bring in only a thin, cold breath of air that managed to wend its way through the cracks in that mass of phlegm, irritation, and blood.

  "Oh yes, the object of his occasional pleasure."

  The old man ordered a coach decorated with silver, covered with a canopy of black velvet, and pulled by eight horses with silver fittings and black plumes. He ordered that he be brought in a wheelchair to the window where he could see the coach and the caparisoned horses pass by, back and forth, before his feverish eyes.

  "A mother? What birth takes place without joy and pain?"

  He told the young bride to take the four large gold candelabra out of the cabinet and polish them: they were to be set around him both at the wake and at the Mass. He asked her to shave him, because the beard went on growing for several hours after death: only his throat and cheeks, and a few snips with the scissors on his beard and mustache. He should be wearing his starched shirt
and his frock coat, and they should poison his mastiff.

  "Immobile and mute; out of pride."

  He left his land to his daughter and named his son-in-law usufructuary and administrator. It was only in the will that he mentioned him. Her he treated, more than ever, as the little girl who grew up at his side and never once spoke of the death of his son or of his son-in-law's first visit. Death seemed an opportunity piously to set aside all those things and, in a final act, restore the lost world.

  "Do I have the right to destroy his love, if his love is true?"

  Two days before he died, he gave up the wheelchair and took to his bed. Supported by a mass of pillows, he maintained his elegant erect posture, his silky, aquiline profile. Sometimes he stretched out his hand to make sure his daughter was nearby. The mastiff whimpered under the bed. Finally, his thin lips opened in a spasm of terror, and his hand could no longer reach out. It stayed there, immobile, on his chest. She stood, contemplating that hand. It was the first time she'd witnessed death. Her mother had died when she was very young. Gonzalo had died far away.

  "So it's this quietude that's so close, this hand that does not move."

  Very few families accompanied the grand coach as it rolled first to the Church of San Francisco and then to the cemetery. Perhaps they were afraid of meeting her husband. He rented out the Puebla house.

  "How helpless I felt then. Not even the boy helped. Not even Lorenzo. I began thinking what my life might have been with the man behind bars, the life he cut off."

  ("Ah, there's old Pizarro sitting in front of the main house of his hacienda with a shotgun in his hands. All he's got left is the house."

  "That's right, Ventura. All he's got left is the house."

  "He's also got a few boys left who are supposed to be good and who will be loyal to him to the death."

  "Right, Ventura. Don't forget their faces." )

  One night, she realized she was unintentionally spying on him. Imperceptibly, he began to forget her unaffected indifference during their first years, and she began to seek out her husband's eyes during the gray hours of the afternoon, the slow movements of the man who stretched his legs over the leather hassock or who bent down to light the wood in the old fireplace when it was cold.

  "Ah, it must have been a weak look, full of self-pity, begging pity from him; nervous, yes, because I could not control the sadness and helplessness I was left with when my father died. I thought that nervousness was mine alone…"

  She did not realize that at the same time a new man had begun to observe her with new eyes, eyes of repose and confidence, as if he wanted her to understand that the hard times were over.

  ("Well, sir, everyone's wondering when you're going to divide up Don Pizarro's land."

  "Tell them to hold on for a while. Can't they see that Pizarro hasn't given up yet? Tell them to hold on and keep their rifles ready in case the old man tries something. When things calm down, I'll divide up the land."

  "I'll keep your secret. I know you've been making deals with outsiders to trade Don Pizarro's good land for lots in Puebla."

  "The small landowners will give work to the peasants, Ventura. Here, take this, and get some rest…"

  "Thanks, Don Artemio. I hope you understand that I…")

  And now that the foundation for their well-being was laid, another man emerged, ready to show her that his strength could also be used for acts of happiness. The night in which their eyes finally stopped to grant each other an instant of silent attention, she thought for the first time in ages about how her hair looked and she brought her hand to her nape with its chestnut tresses.

  "…as he smiled at me, standing by the fireplace, with that, that candor…Do I have the right to deny myself the possibility of happiness…?"

  ("Ventura, tell them to return the rifles to me. They don't need them anymore. Now each one of them has his parcel of land, and most of it belongs either to me or to people who work for me. They have nothing to fear anymore."

  "Of course, sir. They agree, and they thank you. Some had dreamed of getting much more, but they'll go along with you; they say won't bite the hand that feeds them, just to give it a reason to starve them."

  "Pick out ten or twelve of the toughest and give them rifles. We don't want malcontents on either side.")

  "Afterwards I resented it. I let myself go…And I liked it. I felt ashamed."

  He wanted to efface all trace of the start of their life together, to be loved without a memory of the act that forced her to take him for a husband. Lying next to his wife, he asked silently—this she knew—that the fingers they entwined at that moment be something more than a temporary response.

  "Perhaps I would have felt something more with the other one; I don't know; I only knew my husband's love; ah, he gave himself with a demanding passion, as if he couldn't live another moment unless he knew I felt the same…"

  He reproached himself, thinking that appearances were proof against him. How could he make her believe that he'd loved her from the moment he saw her pass by on a street in Puebla, even before he knew who she was?

  "But when we're apart, when we sleep, when we begin a new day, I lack whatever it is, the gestures, the way of showing things, that can extend the night's love into everyday life."

  He could have told her, but one explanation would have required another, and all explanations would have led to a single day and a single place, a jail cell, one October night. He wanted to avoid that return. He knew that he could do it only by making her his without words; he told himself that flesh and tenderness would speak without words. Then another doubt assailed him. Would this girl understand everything he wanted to say when he took her in his arms? Would she understand the tenderness of his intention? Wasn't her sexual response excessive, fraudulent, learned somewhere? Wasn't any promise of real understanding lost in this woman's involuntary theatrics?

  "Perhaps it was modesty. Perhaps it was a desire that this love in the dark be something exceptional."

  But he did not have the courage to ask, to speak. He was sure the facts would eventually take control: habit, fatality, need also. Where could she turn? Her only future was at his side. Perhaps that simple fact would make her forget the beginning. He slept next to the woman with that desire, by now a dream.

  "I ask forgiveness for having forgotten in pleasure the reasons for my rancor…My God, how can I respond to this strength, the glow of these green eyes? What of my own strength, once that ferocious, tender body takes me in its arms, not asking permission, not begging my pardon for what I could throw in his face…Ah, it's terrible beyond words; things happen before a word exists for them…"

  ("It is so silent tonight, Catalina…Are you afraid of breaking the silence? Does it speak to you?"

  "No…Don't talk."

  "You never ask me for anything. Sometimes I'd like…"

  "I let you talk. You know—the things—that…"

  "Yes. There's no need to talk. I love you, I love you…I never thought…")

  She would let herself go. She would let herself be loved; but when she woke, she would again remember it all and oppose her silent rancor to the man's strength.

  "I won't tell you. You conquer me at night. I conquer you during the day. I won't tell you. That I never believed what you told us. That my father knew how to hide his humiliation behind his courtliness, that courteous man, but I can avenge him in secret and for the rest of my life."

  She would get up, braiding her hair without glancing at the disarrayed bed. She would light the lamp and pray in silence, the same way that she would quietly show during the sunlit hours that she had not been conquered, although the night, her second pregnancy, her large belly, would say the opposite. And only in moments of true solitude, when neither the rancor of the past nor the shame of pleasure occupied her thoughts, was she able to tell herself with honor that he, his life, his strength,

  "…offer me this strange adventure that fills me with fear…"

  It was an invita
tion to adventure, to plunge into an unknown future in which procedure would not be sanctioned by the sanctity of custom. He invented and created everything from below, as if nothing had happened before, Adam without a father, Moses without the Tablets of the Law. Life wasn't like that, the world ordered by Don Gamaliel wasn't like that.

  "Who is he? How did he rise out of himself? No, I don't have the courage to accompany him. I have to control myself. I mustn't weep when I remember my life as a girl. That nostalgia."

  She compared the happy days of her childhood with this incomprehensible gallop of hard faces, ambition, fortunes that collapsed or were created from nothing, overdue mortgages, decayed fortunes, pride forced into submission.