The Death of Artemio Cruz

(1903: January 18)

He woke up when he heard the mulatto Lunero mutter, "Drunk again, drunk again," when all the roosters (birds in mourning, decadent, fallen to the status of rustic servants, their abandoned yards once the pride of this hacienda, where more than half a century earlier they did battle with the fighting cocks of the region's political boss) announced the swift tropical morning, which was the end of the night for Master Pedrito, of yet another solitary drinking bout on the colored-tile terrace of the old, ruined mansion. The master's drunken singing could be heard as far as the palm-roofed shack where Lunero was already up and about, sprinkling the dirt floor with water from a pitcher made somewhere else, whose ducks and painted flowers once boasted a shiny lacquer finish. Lunero quickly lit a fire in the brazier to heat up the charal-fish hash left over from the previous day; poking around the fruit basket, he picked out the blackest fruit to eat right away, before rot, the sister of fecundity, softened them and filled them with worms. Later, when the smoke welling up from under the tin plate finally awakened the boy, the phlegmy singing stopped. They could still hear the drunkard's stumbling footsteps, as they moved farther and farther away, until the final slam of the door, prelude to a long morning of insomnia: face down on the canopied mahogany bed with its bare, stained mattress, tangled up in the mosquito net, in despair because his supply of rotgut liquor had run out. Before, Lunero recalled, patting the tousled head of the boy, who approached the fire, his too-short undershirt revealing the first shadows of puberty, when the property was big, the shacks stood far from the house and no one would ever know what went on inside unless the fat cooks and young half-breed women who swept up and starched shirts carried their tales to the other world of men roasted in the tobacco fields. Now everything was close, and all that was left of the hacienda, reduced by the speculators and by the political enemies of the old, dead master, was the windowless house and Lunero's shack. Inside the house, only the memory of the sighing servants, kept alive by skinny old Baracoa, who went on looking after the grandmother, locked in the blue room in back; in the shack, there was just Lunero and the boy, the only workers left.

The mulatto sat down on the flattened floor and divided the fish, emptying half into the clay bowl and leaving half on the tin plate. He offered the boy a mango and peeled a banana. They began to eat in silence. When the small mound of ashes was finally cold, a thick cloud of perfume from the convolvulus Lunero had planted years before to cover the gray adobe of the walls and to surround the shack with the nocturnal aroma of tuberous flowers drifted through the only opening-door, window, refuge for sniffing dogs, frontier for the red ants held back by a line of lime. They didn't speak. But the mulatto and the boy felt the same happy gratitude at being together, a gratitude they would never mention, never even express in a shared smile, because they weren't there to talk or smile but to eat and sleep and go out together every daybreak, always silent, always weighed down by the tropical humidity, to do the work necessary to go on passing the days and to hand over to the Indian Baracoa the items that each week paid for both grandmother's food and Master Pedrito's jugs. Those big blue jugs, safeguarded from the heat by woven straw covers and leather handles, were beautiful: potbellied, with short, narrow necks. Master Pedrito would line them up at the entrance to the house, and each month Lunero would go to the village at the foot of the mountain with the pole used on the hacienda to carry pails of water and return with it balanced on his shoulders, the jugs tied on and dangling-the mule they once had was dead. This village at the foot of the mountain was the only center. Inhabited by three hundred people and barely visible except for some glimpses of roof tiles among the leaves which, as soon as the stone of the mountains fixes itself in the earth, curl on the smooth hillside that accompanies the river in its course to the nearby sea.

The boy ran out of the shack and down the path through the ferns in the mango grove. The muddy slope took him, under the sky hidden by red flowers and yellow fruit, to the riverbank where Lunero was clearing a work site with his machete at the spot where the river, still turbulent, began to widen. The mulatto came over to him, buttoning up his denim bell-bottom trousers, a memory of some forgotten sailor fashion. The boy picked up his blue shorts, which had spent the night drying on the circle of rusty iron that Lunero was now approaching. Mangrove bark was lying about, open and smooth, its mouth in the water. Lunero stopped for a moment, his feet sunk in the mud. As it neared the sea, the river breathed more easily and caressed the growing masses of fern and banana. The brush looked higher than the sky because the sky was flat, shimmering low. They both knew what to do. Lunero took the sandpaper and went on smoothing the bark with a strength that danced in the thick sinews of his forearms. The boy brought over a broken, rotten stool and placed it inside the iron circle, which was hanging from a central wooden pole. Out of the ten openings punched through the circle hung ten wicks made of string. The boy spun the circle and then bent over to light the fire under the pot. The melted wax bubbled thickly; the circle spun; the boy poured the wax into the holes.

"Purification Day is coming," said Lunero, through the three nails he held in his teeth.

"When?"

The small fire under the sun brightened the boy's green eyes.

"On the second, Cruz, my boy, on the second. Then we'll sell my candles, not only to the neighbors but to people from farther away. They know our candles are the best."

"I remember last year."

Sometimes the hot wax would spit; the boy's thighs were covered with tiny round scars.

"That's the day the groundhog looks for his shadow."

"How do you know?"

"It's a story that comes from somewhere else."

Lunero stopped and reached for a hammer. He furrowed his dark brow. "Cruz, my boy, could you make canoes all by yourself?"

A big white smile flashed on the boy's face. The green reflections off the river and the moist ferns accentuated his sharp, pale, bony features. Combed by the river, his hair was plastered on his wide forehead and dark nape. The sun gave it copper highlights, but its roots were black. The tones of green fruit ran through his thin arms and strong chest, made for swimming against the current, his teeth shining in the laugh of his body refreshed by the river with its grassy bed and slimy banks. "Yes, I know how. I've watched how you do it."

The mulatto lowered his eyes, which were naturally low, eyes that were serene but searching. "If Lunero goes away, can you take charge of everything?"

The boy stopped turning the iron wheel. "If Lunero goes away?"

"If he has to go."

I shouldn't have said anything, thought the mulatto. He wouldn't say anything, he would just go, the way his kind always went, without saying anything, because he knows and accepts destiny and feels an abyss of reasons and memories between that knowledge and that acceptance and the rejection or acceptance of other men, because he knows nostalgia and wandering. And even though he knew he shouldn't say anything, he knew that the boy-his constant companion-had been very curious, his little head turned to one side, about the man wearing the frock coat who came looking for Lunero yesterday.

"You know, selling candles in town and making more when Purification Day comes; carrying the empty bottles back every month and leaving Master Pedrito his liquor at the door…Making canoes and bringing them downriver every three months…and handing the gold over to Baracoa, you know, keeping some for yourself, and fishing right here…"

The little clearing by the river no longer pulsed with the hiss off the rusty circle or the mulatto's somnambular hammering. Boxed in by the green, the murmur of the swift water grew, water carrying bagasse, trees struck by lightning in nocturnal storms, and grass from the fields upstream. The black-and-yellow butterflies fluttered around as they, too, headed for the sea. The boy dropped his arms and asked the mulatto's fallen face: "You're going away?"

"You don't know everything about this place. In another time, all the land from here to the mountain belonged to these people. Then they lost it. The grandfather master died. Master Atanasio was ambushed and killed, and little by little they stopped planting. Or someone else took their land. I was the last one, and they left me in peace for fourteen years. But my time had to come."

Lunero stopped, because he didn't know how to go on. The silver ripples of water distracted him, and his muscles asked him to get on with his work. Thirteen years before, when they gave him the boy, he thought of sending him down the river, cared for by the butterflies, the way they did with that old king in the white folks' story, and then waiting for him to come back, big and powerful. But the death of Master Atanasio let him keep the boy without even having to fight about it with Master Pedrito, who was incapable of thinking of anything or arguing; without fighting with the grandmother, who lived already locked away in that blue room with lace and chandeliers that tinkled when it stormed, and who would never find out about the growing boy a few yards from her sealed-up madness. Yes, Master Atanasio died at just the right time; he would have had the boy killed; Lunero saved him. The last few tobacco fields passed into the hands of the new master, and all they had left was this little bit of river edge and thickets and what was left of the old house, which was like an empty, cracked pot. He saw how all the workers went over to the lands of the new master and how new men began to come, brought from upstream, to work the new fields, and how men were brought from other towns and hamlets, and he, Lunero, had to invent this work of candles and canoes to earn enough to keep them alive. He began to think that no one would ever take him from that unproductive patch of land, just a tiny plot between the ruined house and the river, because no one would ever notice him, lost among these vegetal ruins with the boy. It took the master fourteen years to notice, but at some time or other his fine-toothed search of the region was bound to turn up this needle in a haystack. And so, yesterday afternoon, the master's agent had ridden up, suffocating in his frock coat, the sweat dripping down his face, to tell Lunero that tomorrow-meaning today-he was to go to the hacienda of the gentleman to the south of the estate, because good tobacco workers were scarce and Lunero had spent fourteen years living off the fat of the land, taking care of a crazy old lady and a drunk. And Lunero did not know how to tell this to young Cruz, he thought the boy would never understand. The boy had known only work on the bank of the river, the coolness of the water before lunch, trips to the coast, where they gave him fresh crayfish and crabs, and the town nearby, inhabited by Indians who never spoke to him. But in truth the mulatto knew that if he started pulling on one thread in the story, it would all come unraveled and he'd have to start from the beginning and lose the boy. And he loved him-the long-armed mulatto kneeling by the sanded-down bark said to himself. He'd loved him ever since they ran his sister Isabel Cruz off the property and gave him the baby and Lunero fed him in the shack, fed him milk from the old nanny goat, all that remained of the Menchacas' stock, and he drew those letters in the mud that he'd learned when he was a boy, when he served the French in Veracruz, and he taught him to swim, to judge and taste fruit, to handle a machete, to make candles, to sing the songs Lunero's father had brought from Santiago de Cuba when the war broke out and the families moved to Veracruz with their servants. That was all Lunero wanted to know about the boy. And perhaps it was unnecessary to know more, except that the boy also loved Lunero and didn't want to live without him. Those lost shadows of the world-Master Pedrito, the Indian Baracoa, the grandmother-were coming forth like the blade of a knife to part him from Lunero. They were what was alien to the life he shared with his friend, what would part them. That was all the boy thought and all he understood.

"Look, we're running out of wax; the priest will be mad," said Lunero.

A strange breeze made the hanging wicks collide; a startled macaw shrieked out her midday alarm.

Lunero stood up and waded into the river; the net was set halfway into the current. The mulatto dove under and came up with the little net draped over one arm. The boy slipped off his shorts jumped into the water. As never before, he felt the coolness on every part of his body. He went under and opened his eyes: the crystalline undulations of the first layer of water ran swiftly over a muddy, green bottom. And above, and back-he let himself be carried along like an arrow by the current-was the house he had never entered in all his thirteen years, where the man he'd only seen from a distance and the woman he only knew by name lived. He raised his head from the water. Lunero was already frying the fish and cutting open a papaya with his machete.

Midday had barely passed: the rays of the sun in decline passed through the roof of tropical leaves like water through a sieve, pelting down hard. The time of paralyzed branches, when even the river seemed not to flow. The naked boy stretched out under the solitary palm tree and felt the heat of the sun's rays as they cast the shadow of the trunk and the crown of leaves farther and farther. The sun began its final race; even so, its oblique rays seemed to rise, illuminating his entire body, pore by pore. First his feet, when he leaned back against the naked pedestal. Then his spread legs, his dormant sex, his flat stomach, his chest hardened by the water, his long neck, and his square chin, where the light was opening two deep clefts, like two bows aimed at his hard cheekbones, which framed the clarity of his eyes, lost that afternoon in a deep and tranquil siesta. He was sleeping, and nearby, Lunero, stretched out, face down, was drumming with his fingers on the black frying pan. A rhythm was taking hold of him. The seeming languor of his body at rest was actually the contemplative tension of his dancing arm as it drew concentrated tones out of the utensil. He began to murmur, as he did every afternoon, having recovered the memory of a rhythm that grew ever more rapid, the memory of childhood song, of a life he no longer lived, when his ancestors crowned themselves, around the silk-cotton tree, with caps decorated with bells and rubbed their arms with liquor: a man would be seated in a chair with his head covered by a white cloth, and everyone drank the mixture of corn and bitter orange down to its black sugar lees. Children were taught that they shouldn't whistle at night:

All Yeyé's daughters

like husbands…that belong to other women… all of Yeyé's daughters like husbands that belong

to other women

Allyeyé'sdaughterslike

They rhythm was taking control of him. He stretched out his arms and touched the edge of the muddy bank, and went on pounding his fingers against it and rubbing his stomach in it and a huge smile flowered on his face and broke his cheeks, which s e e m e d s t u c k t o t h e w i d e b o n e s: likehusbandsthatbelongtootherwomen…The afternoon sun fell on his round, woolly head like hot lead, and he couldn't rise from that position, the sweat pouring off his forehead, his ribs, between his thighs, and his canticle became more silent and deep. The less he heard it, the more he felt it, and the more he glued himself to the earth, as if he were fornicating with it. Allyeyésdaughters: his smile was going to explode, the memory of the man with the black frock coat, the one who was going to come that afternoon, which is already this afternoon; and Lunero was lost in his song and his prostrate dance, which reminded him of the tomb, which reminded him of the French tomb and the women forgotten in the prison of this burnt-out mansion.

Behind, the branches and the ruin of the hacienda mansion he dreams about, dreaming away, the boy bathed in sunlight. Those blackened walls set on fire when the Liberals passed through in the final campaign against the Empire, Maximilian already dead, and found the family which had lent its bedrooms to the Field Marshal of the French forces and opened its larders to the Conservative troops. At the Cocuya hacienda, Napoleon III's troops took on supplies, to go out, their mules loaded with canned food, beans, and tobacco, and destroy Juárez's guerrilla forces. From the mountains, the bands of outlaws harried the French encampments in the flatland and in the forts they held throughout the state of Veracruz. And in the neighborhood of the hacienda, the Zouaves found little bands with guitars and harps that sang Balajú went off to war and wouldn't bring me along, cheering up their nights, as did the Indian and mulatto women, who soon gave birth to fair haired mestizos, mulattos with blue eyes and dark skin named Garduño and Alvarez, who, in fact, should have been called Dubois and Garnier. Yes, on that same afternoon, prostrate in the heat, old Ludivinia, locked forever in the bedroom with its absurd chandeliers-two hanging from the whitewashed ceiling, one left in a corner next to the bed with its fluted posts-and curtains made of yellowed lace, fanned by the Indian Baracoa, who lost her original name only to get this slave name from the plantation's blacks, a name completely incongruous with her aquiline profile and greasy hair: old Ludivinia, her eyes wide open, hums that damned song which, even if she realized she was doing it, she would not remember, but which nevertheless she must enjoy, because it mocks General Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, who was at first a friend of the house and an intimate of the deceased Ireneo Menchaca, Ludivinia's husband, and part of the satanic court. Later, when the Savior of Mexico and great protector of the Menchacas-their lives, their haciendas-tried to come back from the last of his myriad exiles and disembarked and was recovering from an attack of dysentery, he renounced his old loyalties, and Ireneo had him arrested by the French and shipped out again: San Juan de Nepomuceno: The Bare Truth. Ludivinia remembers Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, son of the thousand poxy women of the priest Morelos, and she twists her toothless, sucked-in mouth when she remembers the burlesque words of that damned song the followers of Juárez sang when they humiliated General Santa Anna to death:…and what would you think if some thieves in the night took your old lady and pulled down her drawers…Ludivinia cackles out her laugh and gestures to the Indian to fan her more rapidly. The faded, whitewashed bedroom smelled of the shut-in tropics, disguised as cold. The old lady liked the moisture stains on the wall because they made her think of other climates, those of her childhood before she married Lieutenant Ireneo Menchaca and linked her life and fortune to those of General Antonio López de Santa Anna and received from his hand the rich black lands along the river, as well as other extensive contiguous holdings adjacent to the mountains and the sea. Over the sea in France, diddy-dee-diddy-dee-diddydum, Benito Juárez died, and so did our freedom. And now her grimace pursed in disgust, and her entire face collapsed into a thousand powdered layers, all held together by a fine net of blue veins. Ludivinia's trembling claw dismissed Baracoa with another gesture and shook her black silk sleeves and shredded lace cuffs. Lace and crystal, but not only that: carved poplar tables with heavy marble tops on which rested clocks under glass domes, with heavy cabriole feet clutching a glass ball; on the brick floor, wicker rockers covered with bustles she never wore again, beveled card tables, bronze nailheads, chests with inset panels and iron keyholes, oval portraits of unkown Creoles-rigid, varnished, with puffy sideburns, chests held high, and tortoiseshell combs-tin frames for the saints and the Holy Child of Atocha-he in old, moth-eaten needlepoint which barely retained the first layer of gold leaf-the bed with its silver foliage and fluted posts, repository of the bloodless body, nest of concentrated smells, of sheets stained by running sores, of tufts of stuffing that poked their way through the splitting mattress.

The fire hadn't reached here. Neither did the news of the lost

lands, the son killed in ambush, or the boy born in the Negro shacks: the news didn't, but the premonitions did.

"Indian, bring a pitcher of water."

She waited until Baracoa left and then broke all the rules: she parted the curtains and squinted to get a glimpse of what was happening outside. She had seen that unknown boy grow up; she had spied on him from the window, from the other side of the lace. She had seen those green eyes and cackled with joy, knowing herself to be in another young body, she who had etched into her brain the memories of a century, and in the wrinkles of her face disappeared layers of air, earth, and sun. She persisted. She survived. It was difficult for her to get to the window; she practically crawled, eyes fixed on her knees, hands squeezed against her thighs. Her head, covered with patches of white hair, had sunk between her shoulders, which were sometimes higher than the top of her head. But she survived. She was still here, trying, from her unkempt bed, to replicate the gestures of the young, fair-skinned beauty who opened the doors of Cocuya to the long parade of Spanish prelates, French traders, Scots and English engineers, bond salesmen, speculators, and anti-Spanish guerrillas, who all passed through here on their way to Mexico City and the opportunities the young, anarchic nation had to offer: her baroque cathedrals, her gold and silver mines, her tezontle and carved-stone palaces, her ecclesiastical businessmen, her perpetual political carnival and her perpetually indebted government, her customs concessions easily arranged for glib foreigners. Those were glorious days for Mexico, when the Menchacas left the hacienda in the hands of their oldest son, Atanasio, so that he might become a man by dealing with workers, bandits, and Indians. They made their way to the central plateau to glitter in the fictitious court of His Most Serene Highness. How was General Santa Anna going to get along without his old pal Manchaca-now Colonel Menchaca-who knew all about fighting cocks and pits and could pass an entire night drinking and recalling the Casamata Plan, the Barradas expedition, the Alamo, San Jacinto, the War of the Cakes, even the defeats perpetrated by the invading Yankee army, to which the Generalissimo alluded with a cynical hilarity, pounding the floor with his wooden foot raising his glass, and caressing the black hair of Flor de México, the child-bride he'd brought to the nuptial bed when his wife's death rattle was still echoing in the air? There were also days of grief, when the Generalissimo was expelled from Mexico by the Liberals, and the Menchacas went back to their hacienda to defend their property: the thousands of acres heaped on them by the crippled tyrant addicted to cock fighting-acres appropriated without leave from native peasants who either had to stay on as field hands or move to the foot of the mountains; lands cultivated by the new black-and cheap-workers imported from the Caribbean islands, lands swollen by mortgages imposed on all the small landowners in the region. Tomb-like shacks for drying tobacco. Carts piled high with bananas and mangoes. Herds of goats set out to pasture on the low slopes of the Sierra Madre. And in the center of it all, the one-story mansion, with its pink belvedere and stables alive with whinnying, with boats and carriage outings. And Atanasio, the green-eyed son, dressed in white on his white horse, another gift from Santa Anna, galloping over the fertile land, his whip in his hand, always ready to impose his decisive will, to satisfy his voracious appetites with the young peasant women, to defend his property, using his band of imported Negroes, against the ever more frequent incursions of the Juárez forces. Above all, long live Mexico, long live our Nation, death to the foreign prince…And during the final days of the Empire, when old Ireneo Menchaca was informed that Santa Anna was coming back from exile to proclaim a new Republic, he boarded his black carriage and went to Veracruz, where a boat was waiting for him at the dock. From the deck of the Virginia, Santa Anna and his German pirates were signaling Fort San Juan de Ulúa, but no one answered. The port garrison was on the side of the Empire and mocked the fallen tyrant as he paced back and forth under the pennants, desperate; spouting obscenities from his fleshy lips. The sails filled again, and the two old friends played cards in the Yankee captain's cabin; they sailed over a torrid, languid sea, from which they could barely make out the coastline, which was lost behind a veil of heat. From the side of the ship in full dress, the dictator's furious eyes saw Sisal's white silhouette. And the crippled old man walked down the gangplank, followed by his old pal. He issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Yucatán and once again lived his dream of greatness. Maximilian had just been sentenced to death in Querétaro, and the Republic had a right to count on the services of its natural, its true leader, its monarch-without-a-crown. It was all told to Ludivinia: how they were captured by the commander of Sisal, how they were sent to Campeche and paraded through the streets with their hands in chains, beaten like common criminals by the guards. How they were thrown into a dungeon in the fortress. How that summer, without latrines, swollen with foul water, old Colonel Menchaca died, while newspapers in the United States reported that Santa Anna had been executed by Juárez, as was the innocent Prince of Trieste. A lie: only the cadaver of Ireneo Menchaca was buried in the cemetery opposite the bay, the end of a life of chance and spins of the wheel of fortune, like that of the nation itself. Santa Anna, wearing the permanent grin of an infectious madness, again went into exile.

Atanasio told her, recalled old Ludivinia this hot afternoon, and from that day on, she never left her room. She had them bring her finest possessions there, the dining-room chandelier, the metal-encrusted chests, the most highly varnished pictures. All to wait for a death her romantic mind judged imminent but which had taken thirty-five lost years-nothing for a woman ninety-three years old, born the year of the first revolt, when a riot of clubs and stones was raised by Father Hidalgo in his parish of Dolores and her mother gave birth to her in a house in which terror had bolted the doors. She'd lost her calendars, and this year of 1903 was for her merely a time purloined from the rapid death from grief which should have followed that of the colonel. As if the fire of 1868 never existed: the flames extinguished just as they were reaching the door of the sealed bedroom, while her sons-there was a second, not only Atanasio, but she loved only him-shouted for her to save herself and she piled chairs and tables against the door and coughed in the thick smoke pouring through the cracks. She never wanted to see anyone ever again, only the Indian woman, because she needed someone to bring her food and stitch up her black clothing. She did not want to know more, but only to remember the old times. And within these four walls, she lost track of everything, except the essentials: her widowhood, the past, and, suddenly, that boy who was always running in the distance, right on the heels of a mulatto she didn't recognize.

"Indian, bring a pitcher of water."

But, instead of Baracoa, a yellow specter appeared at the door.

Ludivinia screamed soundlessly and shrank to the back of the bed: her sunken eyes opened wide in horror, and all the husks that made up her face seemed to turn to dust. The man stopped at the threshold and raised a trembling hand. "I'm Pedro…"

Ludivinia did not understand. Her trembling kept her from speaking, but her arms managed to wave, to exorcise, to deny in a flutter of black rags, while the pale ghost walked toward her with his mouth open. "Uh…Pedro…uh…" he said, rubbing his sparsely bearded, stained chin, his eyelids blinking nervously. "Pedro…"

The paralyzed old woman did not understand what this sluggish man stinking of sweat and cheap alcohol was saying: "Uh…There's nothing left, you know?…All of it…gone to the devil…And now…" he muttered, with a dry sob, "they're taking away the black; but, Mama, you don't know…"

"Atanasio…"

"No…Pedro." The drunk threw himself on the rocking chair, spreading his legs, as if he'd reached his final port. "They're taking away the black…who gives us food…yours and mine…"

"Not a black; a mulatto; a mulatto and a boy…"

Ludivinia was listening, but she did not look at the ghost who had come in to speak to her; no voice which let itself be heard inside the forbidden cave could have a body.

"All right. A mulatto, and a boy…"

"Sometimes the boy runs over there, far off. I've seen him. He makes me happy. He's a boy."

"The agent came to tell me…He woke me up at dawn…They're taking the black away…What are we going to do?"

"There're taking a black away? The hacienda is full of blacks. The colonel says they're cheaper and work harder. But if you want one so much, offer a little more for him."

And there they stood, statues of salt, thinking what later they would have wanted to say, when it would be too late, when the boy was no longer with them. Ludivinia tried to focus her gaze on the presence she refused to admit: who could he be, this man who for this purpose, just today, had dusted off his best suit to take the forbidden step? Yes: the batiste shirtfront, stained with mold from its storage in the tropics, the narrow trousers, too tight, too narrow for the small potbelly of that exhausted body. The old clothes did not tolerate the truth of the customary sweat-tobacco and alcohol-and his glassy eyes denied all the affirmation and bearing his clothes presupposed: the eyes of a drunkard without malice, remote from all human contact for more than fifteen years. Ah, sighed Ludivinia, perched on her disarranged bed, admitting at last that this voice did have a face, that isn't Atanasio, who was in his virility the extension of his mother. That is the mother, but with whiskers and testicles-dreamed the old woman-not the mother as she might have been as a man, as Atanasio was; and for that reason she loved one son and not the other-she sighed again-she loved the son who lived firmly rooted in the place assigned to them on earth, and not the one who, even after the defeat of their cause, wanted to go on profiting, up there, in the palaces, from what no longer belonged to them. She was certain: while everything was theirs, they had the right to impose their presence on the entire nation; she doubted: now that nothing was theirs, their place was within these four walls.

The mother and son contemplated each other, with the wall of a resurrection between them.

Have you come to tell me that there is no more land or greatness for us, that others have taken advantage of us as we took advantage of the original owners of all this? Have you come to tell me what I've known in my heart of hearts since my wedding night?

I've come on a pretext. I've come because I no longer want to be alone.

I'd like to remember you as a small boy. I loved you then; when she's young, a mother should love all her children. When we get old, we know better. We have to have a reason for loving someone. Blood is not a reason. The only reason is blood loved without reason.

I wanted to be strong, like my brother. I've used an iron hand to deal with the mulatto and the boy. I've forbiddenthem to enter the big house. Just as Atanasio did, remember? But in those days there were so many workers. Today, only the mulatto and the boy are left. The mulatto is going.

You've been left alone. You've come looking for me so you won't be alone. You think I'm alone; I see it in your pitying eyes. Fool, always, and weak: not my son, who never asked anyone for pity, but my own image as a young bride. Now it can't be, not now. Now I have my whole life for company, so I can stop being an old woman. It's you who are old if you think the world's come to an end, with 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 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 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 breaker; he'd always laughed like that, as if he were part of a huge joke. And there, on the big horse's back, was the filthy sack we were hoping for. Atanasio hugged him, and the sergeant laughed as he'd never laughed, he even whistled with laughter, and that's when the four men came out of the thicket, glowing in the moonlight, because they were all wearing white. "All souls in heaven!" shouted the sergeant in his jolly voice. "Souls in heaven right here for those who aren't satisfied with having lost a man and go around wanting to get him back!" And then his face changed, and he went for Atanasio, too. No one took any account of me, I swear. They just walked forward, looking at my brother, as if I didn't exist. I don't even know how I managed to get on my horse and break through that damned circle of four men walking with machetes in hand, while Atanasio shouted to me in a hoarse but calm voice: "Go home, brother, and remember what you take with you." And I felt the butt bouncing off my knee, but I could no longer see the four men surrounding Atanasio, how they first slashed open his legs and then cut him to pieces, there under the moon, so it could take place in silence. Where could I go for help on the haciendawhen I knew he was dead and gone, and besides, he'd been killed by the men who worked for the new headman in the district, who sooner or later had to kill Atanasio to be headman for certain? And from then on, who was going to oppose him? After that, I didn't want to know about the new fence, put up the next day by the man who had defeated us on our own land. What for? The workers went over to him without a word; he couldn't be worse than Atanasio. And as if to warn me to keep my mouth shut, a detachment of federal troops spent a week standing guard over the new boundaries. And for some reason or other, a month later, General Porfirio Díaz visited the new big house in the area. And they didn't even bother to omit their little joke. Along with Atanasio's mutilated body, they gave me some cow bones, a huge skull with horns-which is what the sergeant had in his sack. All I did was hang that shotgun over the door of the house, who knows? maybe as a kind of tribute to poor Atanasio. Really, that night…I didn't even realize that I had it on my saddle, even though the butt kept hitting me on the knee on that long gallop, Mama, I swear, it was so long…

"No one goes in there," Lunero said, coming out of his dance of terror and anguish, his silent farewell on his last afternoon with the boy. It was probably five-thirty, and the agent wouldn't be late.

"Try running inland," he had said yesterday. "Just try. We've got something better than bloodhounds: all those poor bastards who'd rather turn in a runaway than know that somebody saved himself from their fate."

No: Lunero, imprisoned, after all, by terror and nostalgia, was thinking about the coast. How big the mulatto seemed to the boy when he stood up and looked at the rapid flow of the river toward the Gulf of Mexico! How tall his thirty-three years of cinnamon-colored flesh and pink palms! Lunero's eyes were on the coast, and his eyelids seemed to be painted white, not because of age, which lightens the eyes of people of his race, but out of nostalgia, which is another form of growing old, more ancient, going back. There was the sandbar that broke the flow of the river and stained the first frontier of the sea brown. Farther out, the world of the islands began, and then came the continent, where someone like him could lose himself in the jungle and say he'd returned. He did not want to look back. He breathed deeply and looked toward the sea, as if toward a dream of liberty and plenitude. The boy lost his modesty and ran toward the mulatto. His embrace only reached up to Lunero's ribs.

"Don't go, Lunero…"

"Cruz, boy, for God's sake, what else can I do?"

The distressed mulatto patted the boy's hair and could not avoid that moment of happiness, the gratitude, the pain he'd always feared. The boy lifted his face: "I have to speak to them, tell them you can't go…"

"Inside?"

"Yes, inside the big house."

"They don't want us there, Cruz. Don't ever go there. Come on, let's get back to work. I won't go for a long time. Who knows if I'll have to go at all."

The murmuring afternoon river received Lunero's body. He dove in to avoid the words and the touch of the boy who had been with him his entire life. The boy went back to candle making and smiled again when Lunero, swimming upstream, imitated the flailing of a drowning man, shot up like an arrow, did a somersault in the water, came up again with a stick in his teeth, and then, on the bank, shook, making funny noises, and finally sat down behind the boy, with the smooth pieces of bark in front of him, and picked up his hammer and nails. He had to consider it again: the agent wouldn't be long. The sun was going down behind the treetops. Lunero fought off thinking what he should be thinking; the edge of bitterness cut through his happiness, now lost.

"Bring me more sandpaper from the shack," he ordered the boy, certain that those were his parting words.

Could he go like that, wearing his everyday shirt and trousers? Why take more? Now that the sun was going down, he would keep watch at the entrance to the house road, so the frock-coated man wouldn't have to go near the shack.

"Yes," said Ludivinia, "Baracoa tells me everything. How we live from the work of the boy and the mulatto. Would you care to acknowledge that? That we eat thanks to them. And you don't know what to do?"

The old lady's real voice was hard to understand; she was so used to muttering to herself that it flowed out with the stillness and gravity of a sulphurous spring.

"…What your father or brother would have done, gone out to defend the mulatto and the boy, keep them from being taken away…If necessary, give up your life so they won't trample us into the dust…Are you going to do it, or shall I go, shitass?…Bring me the boy!…I want to speak to him…"

But the boy couldn't distinguish the voices, not even the faces: only the silhouettes behind the lace veil, now that Ludivinia, in a gesture of impatience, ordered Master Pedrito to light the candles. The boy moved away from the window and, walking on tiptoe, sought out the front of the big house, with its columns smeared with soot, with its forgotten terrace, where the hammock of Master Pedrito's bacchanals was hanging. And something else: above the lintel, held up by two rusty hooks, the shotgun Master Pedrito carried on his saddle that night in 1889, which he'd kept ever since, oiled and ready: here in the citadel of his cowardice, because he knew he'd never use it.

The twin barrels shone brighter than the white lintel. The boy crossed by it. What had been the main hall of the hacienda had lost its flooring and roof; the green light of the first hours of evening poured in, illuminating the grass and soot where a few frogs croaked, where pools of rainwater stood stagnant in the corners. From the opposite end of the house-what was left of the old kitchen-appeared the Indian Baracoa, with incredulous eyes. The boy hid his face in the shadow of the hall. He went out on the terrace and brought back a few adobe bricks, which he piled up to reach the shotgun. The voices grew louder. They reached him as a mix of thin fury and stuttered excuses. Finally, a tall shadow left the bedroom: the tails of his frock coat snapped in agitation, and his leather boots thundered on the tiles of the corridor. The boy didn't wait. He knew which path those feet would take; he ran, with the shotgun in his arms, along the path that led to the shack.

And Lunero was already waiting, far from the big house and the shack, in the spot where the red-dirt roads crossed. It was probably seven o'clock. He wouldn't be long in coming now. He peered up and down the highway. The agent's horse would raise a raging dust cloud. But not that distant roar, that double explosion Lunero heard behind him, which for an instant kept him from moving or thinking.

The boy crouched behind the branches with the shotgun in his hands, afraid the steps would find him. He saw the tight boots pass, the lead-colored trousers, and the tails of the frock coat-the same one he'd seen yesterday: he had no doubts when that faceless man walked into the shack and shouted, "Lunero!" And in that impatient voice the boy discerned the irritation and menace he'd noticed yesterday in the attitude of the frock-coated man looking for the mulatto. Who would be looking for the mulatto unless he was going to take him away by force? And the shotgun weighed heavy, with a power that prolonged the boy's silent rage: rage because now he knew that life had enemies and that it was not any longer the uninterrupted flow of river and work; rage because now he would know separation. The trouser-covered legs and the lead-colored frock coat emerged from the shack, and he took aim along the barrel and squeezed the trigger.

"Cruz! Son!" shouted Lunero as he neared Master Pedrito's shattered face, the shirtfront stained red, the false smile of sudden death. "Cruz!"

And the boy, as he came out of the bushes, trembling, had no way to recognize the face drenched in blood and dust, the face of a man he'd always seen from afar, almost undressed, with a jug tipped up and a torn undershirt over a hairless, pale chest. This man was not the other, just as he wasn't the gentleman who came down from Mexico City, elegant and neat: the one Lunero remembered; just as he wasn't the child caressed, sixty years before, by the hands of Ludivinia Menchaca. It was only a face without features, a blood-soaked shirtfront, a stupid grimace. Only the cicadas moved: Lunero and the boy stood still. But the mulatto understood. The master had died for him. And Ludivinia opened her eyes, moistened her index finger on her lips, and put out the candle on her night table. Almost on her knees, she walked to the window. Something had happened. The chandelier had tinkled again. Something had happened. For all eternity. Shaken by the double report. She heard the faraway voices until they faded and the insects started their chorus again. Only the cicadas. Baracoa crouched down in the kitchen; she let the fire go out and trembled to think that the time of gunpowder had returned. Ludivinia, too, stood still, until, in the silence, she was overcome by that thin fury and no longer fit in the enclosed bedroom. She went out stumbling, made smaller by the night sky that appeared through the holes in the burned-out great house-a small worm, white and wrinkled, stretching out her arms in hope of touching a human form that for thirteen years she knew to be close but which only now did she wish to touch and call by name instead of nurturing in thought alone: Cruz, Cruz without a real first or last name, baptized by the mulattoes with the syllables of Isabel Cruz or Cruz Isable, the mother who was run off by Atanasio: the first woman on the property to give him a son. The old woman was unfamiliar with the night; her legs shook, but she insisted on walking, on dragging herself along with her arms spread, ready to find the last embrace of life. But only a sound of hooves and a cloud of dust approached. Only a sweaty horse which stopped with a whinny when Ludivinia's hunchback form crossed the road, and the agent shouted from the saddle: "Where did the boy and the black go, you stubborn old bitch? Tell me where they went, or I'll set the dogs and men on you!"

"Shitass," she said to the face she couldn't quite see high up on the saddle. "Shitass," she repeated with the snort of the horse near her raised fist.

The whip crossed her back, and Ludivinia fell to the ground as the horse whirled around, covering her with dust, galloping far off from the hacienda.

I know they've pierced my forearm with that needle; I scream before I feel any pain; the herald of that pain travels to my brain before my skin feels it…oh…to warn me of the pain I will feel…to put me on guard so that I realize what's happening…so that I feel the pain more intensely…because…realize…weakens…turns me into a victim…when I realize…the powers that will not consult me…will not take me into account…any longer: the pain organs…slower…overcome my reflex organs…pain which is no longer…that of the injection…but the same one…I know…that they're touching my stomach…carefully…my swollen stomach…doughy…blue…they touch it…I can't stand it…they touch it…with that soapy hand…that razor that shaves my stomach, my pubis…I can't stand it…I scream…I must scream…they hold me down…arms…shoulders…I shout to them to let me…let me die in peace…don't touch me…I will not allow you to touch…that inflamed stomach…sensitive…like a wounded eye…I will not allow…I don't know…they stop me…they support me…my intestines don't move…don't move, now I feel it, now I know…the gases build up, don't escape, are paralyzed…those liquids that ought to flow don't flow anymore…they swell me up…I know it…I have no temperature…I know it…I don't know where they're taking me, whom I can ask for help, directions, so I can get up and walk…I strain…I strain…the blood doesn't come…I know it doesn't get to where it should…it should have come out my mouth…out of my anus…it doesn't come out…they don't know…they're guessing…they palpate me…they palpate my pounding heart…they touch my pulseless wrist…I double up…I double up…they take me by the armpits…I'm going to sleep…I tell them…I ought to tell them before I go to sleep…I tell them…I don't know who they are…"We crossed the river…on horseback"…I smell my own breath…fetid…they lay me back…the door opens…the windows open…I run…they push me…I see the sky…I see the blurred lights that pass in front of my eyes…I touch…I smell…I see…I taste…I hear…they bring me…I pass next to…next to…along a corridor…decorated…they bring me…I pass, touching, smelling, tasting, seeing, smelling the sumptuous carvings-the opulent marquetry-the moldings made of stucco and gold-the dressers inlaid with bone and tortoiseshell-the metal plates and door handles-the paneled chests with iron keyholes-the aromatic benches of ayacahuite wood-the choir seats-the baroque crowns and skirts-the bowed seatbacks-the bronze nailheads-the worked leather-the cabriole claw-and-ball feet-the damask chairs-the chasubles of silver thread-the velvet sofas-the refectory tables-the cylinders and amphorae-the beveled card tables-the canopied, linen-covered beds-the fluted posts-the shields and orles-the merino-wool rugs-the iron keys-the paneled paintings-the silk and cashmere-the wools and taffeta-the crystal and the chandeliers-the handpainted china-the burnished beams-they will not touch that…that will not be theirs…my eyelids…I must raise my eyelids…open the windows…I turn over…big hands…enormous feet…I sleep…the lights that pass before my raised eyelids…the lights of heaven…open up the stars…I don't know…

You will be there, on the first ridges of the mountains behind you, which grow steadily in height and expanse…At your feet, the slope descends, still cloaked in leafy branches and nocturnal screeching, until it blends in with the tropical plain, the blue carpet of the night which will rise, round and encompassing…You will stop on the first platform of rock, lost in the nervous incomprehension of what has happened, of the end of a life which you secretly thought eternal…The life of the shack covered over by bell-shaped flowers, of swimming and fishing in the river, of candle-making, of the company of the mulatto Lunero…But facing your internal convulsion…one needle piercing your memory, another piercing your intuition of the future…this new world of the night and the mountain will open, and its dark light will begin to make its way in your eyes, also new, and dyed by what has ceased to be life in order to become memory, the memory of a boy who will now belong to the untamable, to something different from his own powers, to the wideness of the earth…Liberated from the fatality of a single place and birth…enslaved to another destiny, a new, unknown destiny which looms behind the mountain lit by stars. Sitting down, catching your breath, you will open to the vast, immediate panorama: the light of the sky crowded with stars will reach you constantly and forever…The earth will spin in its uniform course around its own axis and a controlling sun…the earth and moon will revolve around each other, around the opposite body, and both around the shared field of their weight…The entire royal court of the sun will move within its white belt and the stream of liquid dust will move before the external conglomerations, around this clear vault of the tropical night, in the perpetual dance of entwined fingers, in dialogue without direction and within the frontiers of the entire universe…and the winking light will go on bathing you, the plain, the mountain with a constancy alien to the movement of the star and the turning of the earth, its satellite, other heavenly bodies, the galaxy, the nebula; alien to the frictions, the cohesions, and the elastic movements that unite and compress the power of the world, of the rock, of your own united hands that night in a first exclamation of astonishment…You will want to fix your eyes on a single star and gather all its light, that cold light, as invisible as the widest band of light from the sun…but that light doesn't allow itself to be felt on human skin…You will squint your eyes, and in the night, as during the day, you will not see the true color of the world, forbidden to human eyes…You will become confused, distracted, in the contemplation of the white light that penetrates your pupil with a cutting, discontinuous rhythm…From all its springs, all the light of the universe will begin its swift, curved flight, bending itself around the fugitive presence of the sleeping bodies of the universe itself…By means of the mobile concentration of the tangible, the arcs of light will come together, separate, and create in their rapid permanence the complete contour, the framework…You will feel the lights arrive, and at the same time…the insignificant tastes of the mountain and the plain: myrtle, papaya, the huele-de-noche and the nightshade, the dwarf pineapple, the tulip-laurel, vanilla, the tecotehue, the wild violet, the mimosa, the tiger lily…you will clearly see them recede, all of them, farther and farther into the background, in a dizzying ebb of frozen islands…ever more distant from the first opening and the first shot…The light will run to your eyes; will run at the same time toward the most distant edge of space…You will dig your hands into the seat of rock and close your eyes…You will again hear the noise of the cicadas close by, the bleating of a lost flock…Everything in that eyes-closed instant will seem to move simultaneously forward, backward, and downward to the ground that holds it up…the flying buzzard linked to the pull of the deepest turn of the Veracruz River, then later poised on the immobility of a peak, ready for the flight that will rend the constancy of the stars in dark waves…And you will feel nothing…Nothing seems to move in the night: not even the buzzard will interrupt the quiet…The race, the spin, the infinite agitation of the universe will not be felt in your quiet eyes, feet, and neck…You will contemplate the sleeping earth…All the earth: rocks and mineral veins, the mass of the mountain, the density of the plowed fields, the river's current, men and houses, animals, birds, unknown strata of subterranean fire, they will all oppose the irreversible and imperturbable movement, but they will not be able to resist it…You will play with a chunk of rock as you wait for Lunero and the mule: you will toss it down the hill so that for a minute it will possess a swift, energetic life of its own-a small, wandering sun, a diminutive kaleidoscope of double lights…Almost as swift as light which gives it contrast; almost immediately a lost speck at the foot of the mountain, while the illumination of the stars continues streaming from its origins, imperceptibly, in absolute speed…Your ability to see fades in that lateral precipice into which the stone rolls…You will rest your chin on your fist, and your profile will lie on a line with the night horizon…You will be the new element of the landscape which will quickly disappear to seek the other side of the mountain, the uncertain future of its life…But here life will already have begun the next phase, ceasing to be the past…Innocence will perish, not at the hands of guilt, but at the hands of amorous astonishment…So high, so high, you've never been so high…You've never seen treetops from this angle…The accustomed nearness of the world hugging the river will be only a fraction of this unsuspected immensity…And you will not feel small as you contemplate and contemplate, in the serene idleness of uncertainty, the distant cloud banks, the undulating plane of the earth, and the vertical ascent of the sky…You will feel better…orderly and distant…You will not know yourself to be on new ground, emerged barely a few hours ago from the sea, to smash mountain chain against mountain chain and crumple itself like a piece of parchment squeezed by the powerful hand of the third epoch…You will feel tall at the top of the mountain perpendicular to the fields, parallel to the line of the horizon…And you will sense yourself in the night, in the lost angle of the sun: in time…There, far away, are those constellations really the way they look to the naked eye, one next to the other? Or does an uncountable time separate them?…Another planet will revolve above your head, and the time of the planet will be identical to itself: the obscure, distant rotation consummates itself, perhaps, in that instant, the only day of the only year, a mercurial measurement forever separated from the days of your years. Now that time will not be yours, just as the present of the stars you will contemplate again, seeing the past light of a different, perhaps dead, time, will also not be yours…The light your eyes will see will be only the ghost of the light that began its journey countless years ago, countless centuries: is that star still alive?…It will live as long as your eyes see it…And you will only know that it was already dead as you looked at it, the future night in which it ceases to reach your eyes-if it still exists-the light that really burst forth, in the now of the star, when your eyes contemplated the ancient light and thought to baptize it with your eyes…Dead in its origin what will be alive in your senses…Lost, burnt out, the wellspring of light that will go no traveling, now without origin, toward the eyes of a boy in a night in another time…In another time…Time that will be filled with life, actions, ideas, but never be the inexorable flow between the first milestone of the post and the last of the future…Time that will exist only in the reconstruction of isolated memory, in the flight of isolated desire, which will be lost once the chance to live is used up, incarnate in this singular individual that you are, a boy, already a moribund old man, who this night links together, in a mysterious ceremony, the tiny insects climbing the stones on the slope and the immense stars that spin silently above the infinite depth of space…Nothing will happen in the silent minute of earth, firmament, and you…Everything will exist, move, separate in a river of change which in that instant will dissolve it, age, and corrupt everything without a single voice to sound the alarm…The sun is burning itself alive, iron is crumbling into dust, aimless energy is dissipating in space, masses are wearing out in radiation, the earth is cooling into death…And you will wait for a mulatto and an animal, to cross the mountain and begin to live, to fill time, execute the steps and gestures of a macabre game in which life will advance as life dies; a dance of madness in which time will devour time and no one alive can halt, the irreversible course of death…The boy, the earth, the universe: in those three, someday there will be no light, on heat, on life…There will be only total, forgotten oneness, nameless, without a man to give it a name: space and time, matter and energy all fused into one…And all things will have the same name…None…But not yet…Men are still being born…You will still hear Lunero's long "Helloooo" and the sound of horseshoes on the the stone…Your heart will still beat in an accelerated rhythm, because you are conscious that after today the unknown adventure begins, the world is opening, offering you its time…You exist…You are standing on the mountain…You answer Lunero with a whistle…You are going to live…You are going to be the meeting point, the universal order's reason for being…Your body has a reason for being…Your life has a reason for being…You are, you will be, you were, the universe incarnate…For you, the galaxies will light up and the sun will burn…All so that you can love and live and be…So that you will find the secret and die without being part of it, because you will possess it only when your eyes close forever…You, standing there, Cruz, thirteen years old, at the edge of life…You, green eyes, thin arms, hair made coppery by the sun…You, friend of a forgotten mulatto…You will hear Lunero's long "Helloooo"…You will compromise the existence of the infinite, bottomless freshness of the universe…You will hear the horseshoes on the stone…In you, the star and the earth touch…You will hear the report of the rifle after Lunero's shout…Above your head will fall, as if returning from a voyage without origin or end in time, the promises of love and solitude, of hatred and effort, of violence and tenderness, of friendship and disillusion, of time and oblivion, of innocence and surprise…You will hear the silence of the night without Lunero's shout, without the echo of the horseshoes…In your heart, open to life, this night; in your open heart…