Burnt Water

Author’s Note

I own an imaginary apartment house in the center of Mexico City. The penthouse is occupied by an old revolutionary turned profiteer, Artemio Cruz. In the basement lives a ghostly sorceress, Aura. On the eleven intermediary floors you will find the characters of the stories that are now collected here. True, some have fled to the countryside, others are living abroad, some have even been evicted and now wander in the internal exile of the “belt of misery” surrounding this great, cancerous stain of a smog-ridden, traffic-snarled metropolis of seventeen million people. By the end of the century it will, fatally, be the largest city in the world: the capital of underdevelopment.

My imaginary building is sinking into the uneasy mud where the humid god, the Chac-Mool, lives. There, a birth is recalled, that of the oldest city in the Americas, Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325 by the wandering Aztecs on a high lagoon guarded by sparkling volcanoes, and conquered in 1521 by the Spanish, who there erected the viceregal city of Mexico on the burnt water of the ancient Indian lake. Burnt water, atl tlachinolli: the paradox of the creation is also the paradox of the destruction. The Mexican character never separates life from death, and this too is the sign of the burnt water that has presided over the city’s destiny in birth and rebirth.

CARLOS FUENTES

Princeton, June 1980