He didn't hear her say it when she awoke from her fitful sleep. "I let myself go." Lying at his side, her chestnut hair covering her face; and in every fold of her flesh she felt weary moisture, the fatigue of summer. She covered her mouth with her hand and foresaw the new day's vertical sun, the afternoon thundershower, the evening transition from suffocating heat to coolness. She did not want to remember what happened during the night. She buried her face in the pillow and said again: "I let myself go."
The cold, clear dawn erased the pride of the night and came through the half-open window of the bedroom. Once again it defined the details the darkness had confused in a single embrace.
"I'm young. I have a right…"
She put on her nightgown and fled from the man before the sun could rise over the line of mountains.
"I have a right. It has the blessing of the Church."
Now, from her bedroom window, she saw in the distance how
the sun crowned Citlaltépetl Mountain. She cuddled the child in her arms and stayed by the window.
"What weakness. Always when I wake up, this weakness, this hatred, this disdain I don't really feel…"
Her eyes met those of the smiling Indian coming through the garden gate. He took off his hat and bowed…
"…whenever I wake up and see his body asleep next to mine…"
His white teeth gleamed, especially when he was near her.
"Does he really love me?"
The boss tucked his shirt into his tight trousers, and the Indian turned his back on the woman's window.
"Five years have gone by…"
"What brings you here so early, Ventura?"
"I let my ears lead me around. Mind if I fill my gourd?"
"Is everything ready in town?"
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 invitation 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.
("He has reduced us to misery. We cannot see you socially; you are part of what he is doing to us.")
It was true. This man.
"I am hopelessly in love with this man, this man who perhaps really does love me, this man to whom I don't know what to say, this man who brings me from pleasure to shame, from the most depressing shame to pleasure that is most, most…"
This man had come to destroy them: he had destroyed them already. She saved her body, but not her soul, by selling herself to him. She passed long hours at the window facing the open fields, lost in contemplation of the shaded valley, sometimes rocking the baby's cradle, waiting for her second child to come, imagining the future this adventurer could offer them. He entered the world the way he entered his wife's body-by overcoming modesty with joy and breaking the rules of decency with pleasure. He sat those men down at his own table, his overseers, peons with shining eyes, people who knew nothing about good manners. He abolished the hierarchy embodied in Don Gamaliel. He turned the house into a stable full of ruffians who talked endlessly about incomprehensible, tedious, unamusing things. He began to receive commissions from his neighbors, to hear himself described in terms of adulation. He should go to Mexico City, to the new congress. They would put him up for office. Who better to represent them? If he and his wife cared to visit the towns in the area on Sunday, they would see how much they were loved and what a shooin he would be for the congress.
Ventura bowed his head again before putting on his hat. The peon drove the coach right up to the porch; he turned his back on the Indian and walked to the rocking chair where the pregnant woman was sitting.
"Or is it may obligation to nurture the rancor I feel until the day I die?"
He offered her his hand, and she took it. The rotten fruit burst under their feet; the dogs barked, running around the carriage; and the branches of the plum trees wafted the cool dew. As he helped her into the coach, he squeezed her arm and smiled. "I don't know if I've offended you in some way, but if I have, I beg your forgiveness."
He waited for a few seconds. If only she had shown herself even slightly moved. That would have been enough: a gesture, even if evincing no affection, which would have revealed the barest weakness, the smallest sign of tenderness, of a desire for protection.
"If I could make up my mind, if only I could."
Just as he had at their first meeting, he now moved his hand toward her palm. Once again he touched flesh devoid of emotion. He took the reins; she sat down next to him, opened her blue parasol, and never looked at her husband.
"Take care of the baby."
"I've divided my live into night and day, as if to satisfy two ways of living. For God's sake, why can't I just choose one?"
He stared fixedly toward the east. The road passed by cornfields crisscrossed by lines of water the peasants channeled by hand toward the freshly seeded patches to protect the tiny mounds where the seed was hidden. Hawks soared off in the distance; the green scepters of the maguey shot up; machetes labored at cutting incisions in their trunks: sap. Only a hawk high above could make out the moist, fertile stain that marked the outline of the lands of the new master, lands that had once belonged to Bernal, Labastida, and Pizarro.
"Yes: he loves me, he must love me."
The silvery saliva of the creeks soon ran out, and the exception gave way to rule: the chalky maguey soil. As the coach passed, the workers dropped their machetes and hoes, the drivers whipped their burros; the clouds of dust rose over another kind of earth, suddenly dry. Ahead of the coach, like a black swarm of bees, walked a religious procession which they quickly caught up to.
"I should give him every reason to love me. Doesn't this passion please me? Don't his words of love, his daring, and the proof of his pleasure please me? Even now. Even now that I'm pregnant, he won't leave me alone. Yes, yes, it all pleases me."
The slow advance of the pilgrims stopped them: children dressed in white tunics with gold hems, sometimes with halos of silver paper and wire wobbling over their black heads, holding hands with the women wrapped in rebozos, with red cheekbones and glassy eyes, crossing themselves and muttering the ancient litanies-on their knees, feet bare, hands, clasped to their rosaries-who held up the man with ulcerated legs who was carrying out his vow, whipping the sinner who rejoiced to receive the lashes on his naked back, his waist cinched with a strap of thorns. The crowns of thorns opening wounds in dark foreheads; the nopal scapularies on hairless chests. The whispers in native language did not rise from the road spattered with red drops which the slow feet flattened and quickly hid: feet with hard soles, callused, accustomed to carrying a second layer of muddy skin. The carriage could not move forward.
"Why haven't I learned to accept all this without feeling a strange weight on my heart, without reservation? I want to understand it as proof that he cannot resist the attraction of my body, and I can only understand it as proof that I have triumphed over him, that I can wrench that love out of him every night and scorn him the next day with my coldness and distance. Why can't I decide? Why do I have to decide?"
The sick pressed slices of onion to their temples or allowed themselves to be stroked by the holy branches the women were carrying: hundreds, hundreds. Only an uninterrupted howl broke the silence beneath their murmuring. Even the slavering dogs with the mangy fur panted softly, running between the legs of the slow-moving crowd that waited for the pink-chalk towers to appear in the distance, the porch tiles, the cupolas with their yellow mosaics. The gourds rose to the thin lips of the penitents, and down their chins ran the thick phlegm of pulque. Sightless, wormy eyes, faces stained by ringworm; the shaved heads of sick children; noses pocked by smallpox; eyebrows obliterated by syphilis: the conquistadors' mark on the bodies of the conquered, who moved forward on their knees, crawling, on foot, toward the shrine erected in honor of the god of the god-men, the teules. Hundreds, hundreds: feet, hands, signs, sweat, lamentations, bruises, fleas, mud, lips, teeth: hundreds.
"I must decide; I have no other possibility in life than being this man's wife until the day I die. Why not accept him? Yes, it's easy to think it. But not so easy to forget the reasons for my rage. God. God, tell me if I am destroying my own happiness, tell me if I should choose him over my duty as sister and daughter…"
The carriage made its difficult way along the dusty road, amid bodies that did not know what haste was, that moved along on their knees, on foot, crawling toward the shrine. The maguey planted along the road prevented them from taking a detour, and the white woman protected herself from the sun with the parasol she held in her fingers. She was rocked softly by the shoulders of the pilgrims: her gazelle eyes, her pink earlobes, the even whiteness of her skin, the handkerchief that covered her nose and mouth, her high breasts behind the blue silk, her big belly, her small, crossed feet, and her velvet slippers.
"We have a son. My father and brother are dead. Why do things past hypnotize me? I should look ahead. I don't know how to decide. Am I going to let events, luck, things beyond my control decide for me? It's possible. God. And I'm expecting another child…"
Hands stretched out toward her: first the callused limb of an old, gray-haired Indian, then, quickly, the arms naked under the rebozos of the women; a low murmur of admiration and tenderness, a longing to touch her, high-pitched syllables: "Mamita, mamita." The coach stopped, and he jumped up, waving the horsewhip over their dark heads, shouting at them to get out of the way: tall, dressed in black, with his gold-braided hat pulled down to his eyebrows…
"…God, why did you put me in this predicament?…"
She took up the reins and drove the horse off to the right, knocking down the pilgrims, until the horse whinnied and reared, breaking clay pots, the crates crammed with squawking hens, which fluttered away. The horse kicked the heads of the Indians on the ground, spun completely around, shining with sweat, the nerves in its neck stretched taut and its eyes bulging out of its head: she felt on her body the sweat, the sores, the muted screams, the vermin, the rising stench of the pulque. Standing up, balanced by the weight of her stomach, she snapped the reins over the animal's back. The crowd made way, with tiny shrieks of innocence and shock, arms raised, bodies pressed to the wall of maguey, and she sped home.
"Why have you given me this life in which I must choose? I wasn't born for this…"
Panting, far now from the pilgrims, they headed for the house lost in the reverberating heat, hidden by the swift height of the fruit trees he'd planted.
"I'm a weak woman. All I ever wanted was a quiet life and for others to make choices for me…I can't…I can't…"
The long tables were set up near the shrine right out in the sun. Dense squadrons of flies flew over the pots of beans, the hard tacos piled up on a tablecloth of newspaper. The pitchers of pulque laced with cherries, the dry ears of corn, and the tricolor almond marzipan contrasted sharply with the darkness of the food and the clay pots. The president of the municipality stepped up to the podium, introduced him, praised him to the skies, and he accepted the nomination for the federal congress, arranged months earlier in Puebla and Mexico City with a government that recognized his revolutionary merits, the fact that he'd set a good example by retiring from the army to carry out the mandate of agrarian reform, as well as the excellent service he'd rendered in volunteering to stand in for the not yet reestablished public authority in the region, restoring order at his own cost and risk. The dull, persistent murmur of the pilgrims entering and leaving the shrine was all around them. The pilgrims cried out to their Virgin and their God, they wailed, they listened to the speeches and they drank from the jugs of pulque. Someone shouted. Several shots rang out. The candidate never lost his composure, the Indians chewed tacos, and he yielded the floor to another learned colleague from the area, while the Indian drum saluted him and the sun hid behind the mountains.
"Just as I told you," whispered Ventura when the drops of rain began punctually to pelt his hat. "Don Pizarro's killers were there, taking aim at you as soon as you stepped up to the podium."
Hatless, he slipped the coat of corn leaves over his head. "Where are they now?"
"Pushing up daisies." Ventura smiled. "We had 'em surrounded before the speeches began."
He put his foot in the stirrup. "Make sure Pizarro gets some souvenirs."
He hated her when he walked into the whitewashed, naked house and found her alone, rocking, wrapped in her arms, as if the arrival of the man filled her with an intangible chill, as if the man's breath, the dried sweat on his body, the feared tone of his voice all heralded a frozen wind. Her thin, straight nose trembled: he threw his hat on the table and his spurs scarred the brick floor as he walked.
"They…frightened me…"
He didn't speak. He took off his corn-leaf coat and laid it out near the fireplace. The water hissed, running down the roof tiles. It was the first time she had ever tried to justify herself.
"They asked about my wife. Today was important for me."
"Yes, I know…"
"How can I put it…We all…we all need witnesses of our lives in order to live them…"
"Yes…"
"You…"
"I didn't choose my life!" she shouted, clutching the arms of the rocker. "If you force people to do your bidding, don't demand gratitude, too, or…"
"So you did my bidding against your will? Why do you like it so much, then? Why do you moan for it in bed, when all you do is mope around with a long face afterwards? Who can figure you out?"
"Wretch!"
"Go on, you hypocrite, answer me that, why?"
"It would be the same with any man."
She raised her eyes to face him. She had said it. She preferred to cheapen herself. "What do you know? I close my eyes and give you another face and another name."
"Catalina…I've always loved you…This isn't my fault."
"Leave me alone. I will be in your hands forever. You've got what you wanted. Take what you've got and don't ask for the impossible."
"Why do you reject me? I know you like me when…"
"Leave me alone. Don't touch me. Don't throw my weakness in my face. I swear to you I'll never let myself go with you again…"
"But you are my wife."
"Don't come any closer. I won't deprive you. After all, that belongs to you. It's part of your winnings."
"Yes, and you'll have to put up with it for the rest of your life."
"I know what my consolation is. With God on my side, with my children, I'll never lack for solace…"
"Why should God be on your side, you fraud?"
"Your insults don't matter to me. I know what my consolation is."
"And just why is it you need consolation?"
"Don't walk away. I need consolation for knowing I live with the man who humiliated my father and betrayed my brother."
"You're going to be sorry, Catalina Bernal. You're making me think I ought to remind you of your father and brother every time you spread your legs for me…"
"Nothing you can say can hurt me."
"Don't be so sure."
"Do whatever you like. The truth hurts, doesn't it? You killed my brother."
"Your brother didn't give anyone time to betray him. He wanted to be a martyr. He didn't want to save himself."
"He died and you're here, safe and sound, enjoying his rightful inheritance. That's all I know."
"Well, then, burn. And think about the fact that I'll never give you up, not even when I die, but remember, too, that I know how to humiliate. You're going to be sorry you didn't realize it…"
"Do you think I couldn't see your animal face when you said you loved me?"
"I never wanted you to be separated from me. I wanted you to be part of my life…"
"Don't touch me. That's something you will never be able to buy."
"Forget what's happened today. Remember that we're going to live the rest of our live the rest of our lives together."
"Stay away from me. Yes. I think about that. About all those years ahead of us."
"Forgive me, then. I ask you again."
"Will you forgive me?"
"I have nothing to forgive you for."
"Will you forgive me for not being able to forgive you for the oblivion the other man is consigned to, the man I really loved? If I only could remember his face clearly…If only I'd had that first love, I could say that I'd lived…Try to understand; I hate him more than I hate you, because he let you intimidate him and he never came back…Perhaps I'm telling you this because I can't tell it to him…Yes, tell me that it's cowardly to think this way…I don't know, I…I'm weak…And you, if you want, can love lots of women, but I'm tied to you. If he had taken me by force, I wouldn't have to remember him and hate him today without being able to recall his face. I was left unsatisfied forever, do you understand me?…Listen to me now, don't walk away…Since I don't have the courage to blame myself for everything that's happened, and since I don't have him close by to hate, I blame you for everything, and I hate you, you who are so strong, because you put up with anything…Tell me if you can forgive me that, because I will never forgive you as long as I can't forgive myself and the man who ran away…Such a weakling. But I don't even want to think, I don't want to talk. Let me live in peace and ask God's forgiveness, not yours…"
"Calm down. I liked your sullen silences better."
"Now you know how things stand. You can hurt me as much as you like. I've even given you the weapon. Now, suddenly, because I want you to hate me, and so all our illusions die all at once…"
"It would be simpler to forget everything and start over from scratch."
"That's not the way things work."
The immobile woman remembered her first decision, when Don Gamaliel had told her what was happening. To lose with power. To let herself be victimized and then take her revenge.
"Nothing can stop me, see? Just name one thing that can stop me."
"It's only natural. It just pours out of me."
"No need to nurture it and care for it. It just comes naturally."
"Leave me alone!"
She stopped looking at her husband. The absence of words obliterated the nearness of that tall, dark man with his thick mustache, who felt his brow and his nape weighed down by a pain of stone. That closed mouth, with its grimace of dissimulated scorn, spewed the words it could never say right into his face.
"Do you really think that, after doing all you've done, you still have a right to love? Do you really think that the rules of life can change just so you can get that reward in addition to everything else? You lost your innocence in the outside world. You can't recover it here inside, in the world of feelings. Maybe you once had your garden. I had mine, my little paradise. Now we've both lost it. Try to remember. You can't find in me what you've already sacrificed, what you lost forever by your own actions. I don't know where you come from. I don't know what you've done. I only know that in your life you lost what you made me lose later: dreams and innocence. We'll never be the same."
He tried to read those words in his wife's immobile face. Involuntarily, he felt close to the thought she did not express. Words regained their occult power. Cain: that horrendous word should never, ever have burst from the woman's lips; even if she'd lost all hope of love, she would still be a witness-a mute, suspicious witness-to love in the years to come. He locked his jaw. Only one act could perhaps rend this knot of separation and rancor. Only a few words, spoken now or never. If she accepted them, they could forget and begin again. If she didn't accept them…
"Yes, I am alive and here at your side because I let others die for me. I can talk to you about the ones who died because I washed my hands of them and shrugged. Accept me as I am, with these sins, and look at me as a man in need…Don't hate me. Take pity on me, Catalina. I love you: put my sins on one side of the scale and my love on the other, and you'll see that my love is much greater…"
She didn't dare. She wondered why she didn't dare. Why didn't she demand the truth from him-even if he was incapable of telling the truth, conscious as she was that his cowardice distanced them even more and made him also responsible for their failed love-so the two of them could be cleansed of the sin this man ached to share in order to be redeemed?
"I can't do it alone, alone I just can't do it."
During that brief, intimate minute of silence…
"Now I'm strong. My strength is to accept this destiny without fighting."
…he also accepted the impossibility of going back, of returning…She got up, murmuring that the baby was asleep alone in the bedroom. He was left alone, and he imagined her, on her knees before the ivory crucifix, carrying out the final act that would detach her completely
"from my destiny and my sin, clinging to your personal salvation, rejecting this, which should have been ours, even if I offered it to you in silence; now you will not return…"
He crossed his arms and walked out into the country night, lifting his head to greet the brilliant company bestowed upon him by Venus, the first star in the celestial vault, now quickly filling with stars. On another night he had looked toward the stars; remembering it gained him nothing. He was no longer that boy, nor were the stars the same ones his boy's eyes had contemplated.
The rain had stopped. The orchard gave off a deep aroma of guava and sloe, plum and apple. He had planted the trees in the garden. He had raised the wall that separated the house and the garden, his intimate domain on the farm.
As his boots sank into the moist earth, he stuck his hands into his pockets and walked slowly toward the gate. He opened it and walked toward the nearby houses. During his wife's first pregnancy, that young Indian girl had occasionally received him with an inert silence and a total absence of questions or demands.
He walked in without knocking, suddenly opening the door of the cabin made of scarred adobe. He took her by the arm, awakening her out of a sound sleep, already feeling the heat of her dark, sleeping body. The frightened girl stared at the master's twisted face, his curly hair falling over his glassy eyes, his thick lips surrounded by disordered, harsh whiskers.
"Come on, don't be afraid."
She raised her arms to put on her white blouse and reached out to pick up her rebozo. He led her out. She lowed softly like a lassoed calf. And he raised his face toward the sky, covered tonight with all its lights.
"Do you see that great big star shining over there? Looks like you could touch it, right? But even you know that you'll never touch it. We've got to stay no to the things we can't touch with our hands. Come on; you're going to live with me in the big house."
The girl came into the orchard with her eyes lowered.
Washed by the thunderstorm, the trees glowed in the darkness. The fermented earth filled with heavy odors, and he breathed deeply.
Upstairs in the bedroom, she left the door ajar and got into bed. She lit the night-light. She turned her face to the wall, crossed her arms so her hands were on her shoulders, and tucked up her legs. An instant later, she stretched out her legs and felt for her slippers. She got up and walked the length of the room, raising and lowering her head. Without realizing it, she lulled the child sleeping in his crib. She caressed her stomach. She went back to bed and waited to her the man's footsteps in the hall.
I let them do what they want, I can't think or desire anymore; I'm getting used to this pain; nothing can last forever without becoming normal. The pain I feel below my ribs, around my navel, in my intestines, is now my pain, a pain that gnaws: the taste of vomit in my mouth is my taste; the swelling of my stomach is my baby, I compare it to giving birth; it makes me laugh. I try to touch it. I run my hand from my navel to my pubis. New. Round. Doughy. But the cold sweat gives way. That colorless face that I manage to see in the asymmetrical mirrors on Teresa's handbag, which passes next to my bed, she never puts down her bag, as if there were thieves in the room. I suffer that collapse. I just don't know. The doctor's gone. He said he was going to get other doctors. He doesn't want to be responsible for me. I just don't know. But I see them. They've walked in. The mahogany door opens and closes, and their footsteps make no noise on the thick carpet. They've closed the windows. With a hiss, they've pulled back the gray curtains. They've entered. Ah, there is a window. There is a world outside. There is this strong plateau wind that shakes the thin black trees. We've got to breathe…
"Open the window…"
"No, no. You might catch cold and make things worse."
"Open…"
"Domine, non sum dignus…"
"Fuck God…"
"You curse Him because you believe in Him…"
Very clever. That was very clever. It calms me down. I don't think about those things anymore. Yes, why would I insult Him if He didn't exist? That does me some good. I'm going to admit all this because if I rebel I concede that those things exist. That's what I'll do. I don't know what I was thinking of. Sorry. The priest understands me. Sorry. I'm not going to let them have their way by rebelling. That's better. I should wear an expression of boredom. That's most appropriate. How much importance all this gets. An event that for the person most concerned, namely me, signifies the end of importance. Yes. That's the way to do it. That's it. When I realize that all of it will cease to have any importance, the others try to make it into the most important thing: pain itself, the salvation of someone's soul. I make this hollow sound through my nose and let them go about their business and I cross my arms over my stomach. Oh, get out, let me listen. Now we'll see if they understand me. Now we'll just see if they don't understand an arm bent like this…
"…they allege that those same cars can be made here in Mexico. But we're not going to allow it, right? Twenty million pesos is a million and a half dollars…"
"Plus our commissions…"
"The ice isn't going to do that cold of yours any good."
"Just hay fever. Well, I'll be…"
"I'm not finished. Besides, they say that the fees charged by the mining companies for freight from the center of Mexico to the frontier are extremely low, that it costs more to ship vegetables than the minerals from our companies…"
"Nasty, nasty…"
"Of course. You understand that if the fees go up, working the mines won't be cost-efficient…"
"Less profit, sure, lessprofitsure, lesslessless…"
"Padilla, what's wrong? Padilla. What is that racket? Padilla."
"The tape ran out. Just a second. I'll just turn it over and play the other side."
"He's not listening, Mr. Padilla."
Padilla must be smiling his smile. Padilla knows me. I'm listening, all right. I sure am. Ah, that noise fills my brain with electricity. The noise of my own voice, my reversible voice, yes, there it goes, it screeches again and runs backward, squeaking like a squirrel, but it's my voice, and my name, which has only eleven letters and can be written a thousand ways: Amuc Reoztrir Zurtec Marzi Itzau Erimor, but there's a key to that code, a model: Artemio Cruz, ah, my name, I hear my screeching name, it stops, now it runs the other way:
"Mr. Corkery, would you be so kind as to communicate this information to all interested parties in the United States. They should stir up the newspapers against the Communist railroad workers in Mexico."
"Sure, if you say they're Commies. I feel it's my duty to uphold by any means our…"
"Sure, sure. It's wonderful that our ideas and our interests are the same, isn't that right? And one other thing: have a talk with your ambassador, so that he will put some pressure on the Mexican government, which is just taking power and is still a little green."
"Oh, we never intervene."
"I'm sorry, I was too brusque. Suggest he study the matter calmly and then offer his objective opinion, given his natural concern for the interests of U.S. citizens here in Mexico. He should explain that we must maintain a climate favorable to investment, and that with this agitating…"
"Okay, okay."
Oh, what a bombardment of signs, words stimulants for my tired ears. Oh, what exhaustion, oh, what language without language. Oh, but I said it, it's my life, I have to listen to it. Oh, they won't understand my gesture, I can barely move my fingers: I want them to turn it off now, I'm bored, what difference can it make, what a nuisance, what a nuisance…I have something to tell them:
"You dominated him and stole him away from me."
"That morning I waited for him with pleasure. We crossed the river on horseback."
"I blame you. You. You're to blame."
Teresa drops the newspaper. Catalina, coming closer to the bed, tells her, as if I can't hear her: "He looks very bad."
"Did he say where it is?" asks Teresa in a lower voice.
Catalina shakes her head. "The lawyers don't have it. It must be handwritten. But he would be capable of dying intestate, anything to make our lives difficult."
I listen to them with my eyes closed, and I dissimulate, dissimulate.
"The priest couldn't get anything out of him?"
Catalina must have shaken her head. I sense that she's on her knees near the head of the bed and that she says in a low, broken voice, "How do you feel?…Don't you want to talk a little?…Artemio…There's a very serious matter…Artemio…We don't know if you've made out your will. We'd like to know where…"
The pain is passing. They don't see the cold sweat pouring down my forehead or my tense immobility. I hear their voices, but it's only now that I can once again make out their silhouettes. Everything's coming back into normal focus, and I can see both of them perfectly, their faces and gestures, and I want the pain to come back to my stomach. I tell myself, I tell myself lucidly that I don't love them, that I never loved them.
"…We'd just like to know where…"
All right, then, bitches, just imagine you're standing in front of a shopkeeper who doesn't give credit, that you're being evicted, that you're up against shyster lawyer, a thieving doctor, imagine you're from the shitty middle class, bitches, standing on line to buy adulterated milk, to pay property taxes, to get an audience, to get a loan, standing on line to dream you'll do better someday, envying the wife and daughter of Artemio Cruz as they cruise by in their car, envying a house in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, envying a mink coat, an emerald necklace, a trip abroad, imagine yourselves in a world in which I was virtuous, in which I was humble: down below, where I came from, or up above, where I am. Only in those two places, let me tell you, is there any dignity, not in the middle, not in the envy, the monotony, the lines. Everything or nothing: know how I play the game? understand how? everything or nothing, put it all on the black or all on the red, you need balls, see? Balls, putting it all on the line, shooting the works, running the risk of being shot either by the ones on top or by the ones at the bottom. That's what it means to be a man, which is what I've been, not the way you would have wanted, half a man, a man with his little temper tantrums, intemperate shouts, a whorehouse, a saloon man, a postcard macho, no! no! not me! I didn't have to shout at you, I didn't have to get drunk to scare you, I didn't have to smack you around to show you who was boss, I didn't have to humiliate myself to beg your tenderness: I gave you wealth without expecting anything back, tenderness, understanding, and because I didn't demand anything from you, you haven't been able to abandon me, you latched onto my wealth, cursing me probably the way you'd never curse my poor pay packet, but forced to respect me the way you'd never have respected my mediocrity-ah, assholes, conceited bitches, impotent bitches, who had everything money could buy and who still have mediocre minds. If at least you had taken advantage of what I gave you, if at least you had understood what luxury items are for, how they're used: while I had everything, do you hear me? everything that can be bought and everything that can't be bought. I had Regina, do you hear me? I loved Regina, her name was Regina, and she loved me, she loved me without money, she followed me, she gave me life, down below, do you hear me? I heard you, Catalina, I heard what you told him one day:
"Your father; your father, Lorenzo…Do you think…? Do you think anyone could approve of…? I don't know, about holy men…real martyrs…"
Dominie, non sum dignus…
In the depth of your pain, you will smell that incense which lingersand lingers and you will know, behind your shut eyes, that the windows have been closed as well, that you no longer breathe the cool afternoon air: only the stench of the incense, the trace left behind by the priest who will come to give you absolution, a last rite which you will not request, but which you will nevertheless accept, just so as not to gratify them with your rebelliousness in your last moments. You will want all of this to take place so you won't owe anything to anyone, and you will want to remember yourself in a life that owes nothing to no one. She will stop you, her memory-you will name her: Regina; you will name her: Laura; you will name her: Catalina; you will name her: Lilia-which will summarize all your memories and will oblige you to acknowledge her. But you will transform even that gratitude-you know it, behind each scream of sharp pain-into pity for yourself, in a loss of your loss. No one will give you more in order to take away more from you than that woman, the woman you loved with her four different names: who else?
You will stand fast. You've probably made a secret vow: not to acknowledge your debts. You will have wrapped Teresa and Gerardo in the same oblivion, an oblivion you will justify because you know nothing about them, because the girl will grow up at her mother's side, far from you, you who will have life only for your son, because Teresa will marry that boy whose face you can never fix in your memory, that vague boy, that gray man who will not waste or occupy the grace period granted to your memory. And Sebastián: you will not want to remember those square hands which pull you by the ears, which spank you with a ruler. You will not want to remember your painful knuckles, your fingers white with chalk dust, the hours standing at the blackboard learning to write, to multiply, to draw elementary things-houses and circles. You will not want to: that is your debt.
You scream and arms hold you down: you want to get up and walk to ease your pain.
You smell the incense.
You smell the enclosed garden.
You think that it's impossible to choose, that no one should choose, that you didn't choose on that day. You let things happen, you weren't responsible, you didn't create either of the moral codes which made their claim on you that day. You couldn't be responsible for options you didn't create. You dream, away from your body which screams and twists, away from the machete jabbed into your stomach until it forces out your tears. You dream about that ordering of life that you yourself created, that you will never be able to reveal because the world will not give you the chance, because the world will offer you only its established tables, its codes in conflict, which you will not dream of, which you will not think about, which you will not live.
The incense will be a smell with time, a smell that talks.
Father Páez will live in your house, will be hidden in the cellar by Catalina: it will not be your fault, it will not be your fault.
You will not remember what you say, you and he, that night in the cellar. You will not remember if he, if you say it. What's the name of the monster who voluntarily dresses up as a woman, who voluntarily castrates himself, who voluntarily gets drunk on the fictitious blood of a God? who will say that? but who loves, I swear it, because the love of God is great indeed and inhabits all bodies, justifies them. We have our bodies by the grace of God and with his benediction, to give them the minutes of love which life would like to strip from us. Don't feel ashamed, don't feel anything; instead, forget your troubles. It can't be a sin, because all the words and all the acts of our short, hasty love, of today and never of tomorrow, are only a consolation that you and I give each other, an acceptance of the necessary evils of life which later justifies our contrition. After all, how could there be real contrition without the recognition of the real evil in us? How can we understand sin, pardon for which we are to beg on our knees, if beforehand we don't commit sin? Forget your life, let me put out the light, forget everything, and later we will pray together for forgiveness and we will say a prayer that will erase our minutes of love. In order to consecrate this body which was created by God and which says God in every desire, unsatisfied or satisfied, which says God in every secret caress, says God in the gift of the semen God planted between your thighs.
To live is to betray your God. Every act in life, every act that affirms us as living beings, requires that the commandments of your God be broken.
In a whorehouse that night, you will speak with Major, Gavilán, with all your old comrades, and you will not remember what they said that night, you will not remember if they say it, if you say it, with the cold voice that will not be the voice of the men, the cold voice of power and self-interest: We want the greatest good for the nation, as long as it's compatible with our personal well-being. Let's be intelligent: we can go far. Let's do what's necessary, not the impossible. Let's determine once and for all all the acts to power and cruelty that will be useful to us, in order not to have to repeat them. Let's scale the benefits so that the people enjoy every taste they get. We can make a revolution very quickly, but tomorrow they'll demand more and more and more, and then we'll have nothing to give if we've already done and given everything-except, perhaps, our personal sacrifice. Why die if we aren't going to see the fruits of our heroism? Let's always keep something in reserve. We are men, not martyrs; everything will be allowed us if we hold on to power. Lose power and they'll screw you. Just think how lucky we are: we're young but we're haloed, wearing the halo of the armed, triumphant Revolution. Why did we fight? to die of hunger? When it's necessary, force is just. You don't share power."
And tomorrow? We'll be dead, Congressman Cruz. Let those who follow us make their own deals.
Domine, non sum dignus. Domine, non sum dignus: yes, a man can speak painfully with god, a man who can forgive sin because he as committed sin, a priest who has the right to be priest because his human misery allows him to act out redemption in his own body before granting it to others. Domine, non sum dignus.
You reject guilt. You will not be guilty of sins against a morality you did not create, which you found already made. You would have wanted
wanted
wanted
wanted
oh, how happy those days were with your teacher Sebastián,
whom you will not want to remember anymore. You sat at his knee, learning those simple things with which you must begin in order to be a free man, not a slave of commandments written without your even being consulted. Oh, how happy those apprenticeship days were, learning the tasks which he taught you so you could earn a living: days at the forge with the hammers, when your teacher Sebastián would return tired but begin classes only for you, so that you could be something in life and make your own rules, you the rebel, you free, you unique and new. You will not want to remember him. He ordered you, you went to the Revolution: this memory does not leave me, it will not reach you.
You will have no answer for the opposing, imposed codes,
you innocent,
you will want to be innocent,
you did not choose on that night.