CHAPTER III

THE REVOLUTION OF 1910 AND ITS AFTERMATH: LA MUERTE DE ARTEMIO CRUZ

One of the most profound novels in Latin America and in contemporary world literature, La muerte de Artemio Cruz stands as one of Fuentes's greatest works. Artemio Cruz is the most complex character in modern Hispanic American fiction; he is developed as individual, as symbol of Mexico, and finally as Everyman, as an anguished being confronting the finality of death. His character is presented as a fusion of opposites, just as is that of Citizen Kane, the 1941 film directed by Orson Welles that is one of the basic inspirations for Fuentes's novel: Never have you been able to think in terms of black and white, or good or bad, or God and the Devil; admit that always, even when it seemed to be the contrary, you have encountered in the blackness the germ, the reflection of its opposite: your own cruelty, when you have been cruel, wasn't it marked with a certain tenderness? You know that every extreme contains its own opposition: cruelty tenderness, cowardice bravery, life death . . . and that you have not been either good or bad, generous nor selfish, faithful or traitorous.
1

Even on his deathbed, Cruz is portrayed as a conglomeration of warring selves. The split in his identity is underscored by the very structure of the novel. Instead of being portrayed as a coherent whole, Cruz's identity is fragmented into three narrative voicesfirst-, second-, and third-person segments. The physical disintegration of the protagonist as well as his spiritual dissolution, his incapacity to master himself by integrating ego and conscience, self-serving ambition and sense of social responsibility, are underscored in that throughout the narrative the three voices keep alternating, but always remain separate. Each narrative voice, which constitutes an inner double of the protagonist, reflects a different aspect of Cruz's paradoxical character. His anguished, dying self is expressed through the fragmented and chaotic style of the first-person monologue; his conscience and subconsciousness through the authoritative, convoluted style of the second-person narration; and his outer life of the past through terse third-person accounts. These diverse aspects of self are fused only negatively, at the end of the narrative, as all three condense and collapse, abolished by death: "the three of us ... will die ... you .. . will die ... you have died .. . I will die" (316). The fusion of self and internal double is a 48 sudden, irreversible, brutal one, as Cruz one day suffers an attack from which he will never recover. Although the seventy-one-year-old Cruz has defeated all of his external enemies, he is conquered by his inner double, the physiological self which, given powerful life in the second-person voice, imposes itself violently upon the protagonist just as he throughout his life has imposed himself upon others. Here the double reflects the truth of self. It forces Cruz to confront himself not as the invincible magnate that he self-deludedly thinks he is but as helpless and putrefying. The isolated third-person segments jump from a focus on a confrontation in the 1940s when Cruz is depicted selling out Mexican sulfur deposits to foreign entrepreneurs, to his encounter with the aging porfirista Don Gamaliel Bernal in 1919, as the victorious revolutionary Cruz bargains with the defeated hacendado to restore the old man's fortune in exchange for marrying his daughter Catalina; and from 1913, at the outset of the Revolution, which depicts Cruz's idyllic love with Regina whom he later finds hanged by the soldiers of Huerta, to the mere pretense of married life with the sullen and vengeful Catalina, as Cruz devotes most of his time to defeating the surrounding landowners and appropriating their lands for himself. Cruz cynically acts to enlist the aid of the peasants in wresting the land holdings from the hacendados. Although Cruz pretends to act in the name of the Revolution, he does not distribute these lands to the peasants, but instead secretly sells off the best lands

in exchange for building lots in Mexico City. Rapidly enriching himself, Cruz betrays the goals of the Revolution as well as his personal dream to become a small landowner and dwell in peace. These third-person sections, whose chronological sequence reflects the associational functioning of Cruz's delirious psyche, constitute a voluntary double. They are the product of Cruz's conscious effort to expand the self inwardly, through memory, in order to defy death and achieve renewal. Deprived forever of a true future, Cruz must attempt to construct a future out of the mere shards of the past. But intervening between the first and the third-person segments, between consciousness and voluntary memory, is the second-person voice of involuntary recall that underscores the impossibility of redemption. It subjects Cruz to remorseless scrutiny and reproaches him for his moral failings. The power of the second-person voice is indicated stylistically by its ponderousness, its sweeping prose rhythms, thought pyramiding and rhetorical tone. In contrast with the weak, repetitious, and incoherent first-person narrative that conveys Cruz's pain and delirium, the second-person is articulate and highly conceptual. It is at once part of Cruz and yet superior to him. Its aloofness is reflected both through a contrast in style and through the change in grammatical person. In contrast with the emotional and often faltering first-person voice, the secondperson narrative is controlled and authoritative. As it undercuts Cruz's vaunted courage and false pride, the second-person voice becomes one of judgment and condemnation of the protagonist. It represents inalterable fate, not an external

49
determinism, but one that Cruz bears within himself. It also emphasizes the biological limitations on human life that Cruz can no longer negate, even though in his egomania Cruz attempts to bargain with God, promising to believe in Him in exchange for being granted terrestrial immortality. The second-person voice acts as a mental mirror that projects the truth not only of Cruz's physiologically defective, but also his morally corrupt self. As such it contrasts with the other voices, in which the self-deifying myth of Cruz is trumpeted. For example, although Cruz as revolutionary has betrayed his men by running from the battlefield and allowing them to be massacred, when he returns to camp he is greeted as a valiant hero. It is this legend of Cruz as military victor that will be augmented, disseminated throughout Mexico by the newspaper which Cruz owns, and even heralded after Cruz's death. Ironically, so powerful does the legend of Cruz become that even his own son believes it and dies valiantly in the Spanish Civil War in order to live up to the image of his father as valiant hero which he has strongly internalized. In one of the stories included hi Constancia, entitled "El prisionero de Las Lomas," ("The Prisoner of Las Lomas"), Fuentes continues his expose of this revolutionary mythmaking, as he evokes the dying General who seems to be Prisciliano Nieves, the one who at the battle of Santa Eulalia had defied the order of his commander to execute both the landowners and their Indian servants, exclaiming that revolutionary soldiers do not kill the people. The development of the story reveals that these soldiers, ordered by the commander to fire upon the Nieves who has dared to question an order, first kill Nieves and then the draconian commander. One of the wily and opportunistic soldiers later assumes the identity of the defiant Nieves and enriches himself at the expense of the very pueblo to which the real Nieves was so devoted. In order to keep his legend intact, the dying, counterfeit Nieves signs over his entire estate, including his palatial neocolonial mansion, to the crafty lawyer Nicolas Sarmiento, who has learned the truth about what happened at Santa Eulalia. Yet this is a narrative of constant shifts in fortune by which the descendants of the followers of Zapata reap a just reward: they invade Sarmiento's mansion after one of their number is imprisoned for murder and refuse to leave until he is released. At the end, the protagonist and narrator, who has attempted several means of expelling the invaders, finally accepts them and even protects them. Once Sarmiento has discovered that they know the truth about the fate of the real Prisciliano Nieves, and thus his elaborate simulacrum and his immense fortune are threatened, he uses his considerable influence to keep the murderer of his lover confined for an

unlimited time, waiting for his trial. Thus once again in Fuentes as in Azuela's ironically entitled short novel Andres Perez, maderista, in which the cowardly and apolitical Andres is mistaken for a supporter of Francisco Madero come to the country to plot strategies and foment rebellion, it is the lie that predominates. In La muerte de Artemio Cruz, the second-person voice of conscience indicates that the responsibility for Cruz's fate is his own. Although Cruz has 50 been given the freedom to choose, his own fearnot only of death but of love makes him destroy that freedom. Cruz himself continually negates the opportunities for deliverance. In order to feel secure, the protagonist chooses to create a world in which everyone around him will be an image of himself instead of reaching out to transcend the self through a genuine commitment to others, one that demands the sacrifice of self-interest. La muerte de Artemio Cruz combines history and myth, as do La region mas transparente and Terra nostra. What grants extraordinary intensity to La muerte is that all epochs of Mexican history are fused in a single individual. Thus Cruz, in a self-exalting dream, is portrayed as Hernan Cortes, boldly and arrogantly striding down the nave of a New World Cathedral. And, in the third-person segment of December 31, 1955, Cruz is evoked in terms of an ancient Aztec Emperor, specifically, Moctezuma. Just as Moctezuma forced the sons of nobility to become his house servants, so too does Cruz summon once a year one hundred guests to his lavish mansion, a restored Hieronymite monastery in Coyoacan, the oldest part of Mexico City, whose very name, "Place of the Coyotes," alludes to the presence of the ancient indigenous civilization. Cruz both lavishly entertains his socially prominent guests and humiliates them, first by not allowing any of them to approach him, as he sits aloof on his throne as if he were an Emperor, and second by ordering them to dance for him. His guests take vengeance through their sotto voce mutterings, referring to him sarcastically as "the mummy of Coyoacan," and indeed despite his attempts to defy time and old age, Cruz has succeeded in preserving only a wizened husk of a self. Flashbacks to the time of Cruz's birth evoke the era of Santa Anna and the family of the Menchaca who violently erected a land empire for themselves on the coast, in Veracruz. As in many of Fuentes's narratives, the ending is the beginning; the recluse Ludivinia, the indomitable grandmother of Cruz who after a fire destroys most of her mansion barricades herself in the bedroom that has miraculously been left standing and obstinately defies fate, adumbrates the resistance that Cruz will manifest, as he dies reciting a litany of all of his treasures. Cruz's career, like that of the ex-Revolutionary Robles, reflects the fatalistic cyclical time that Fuentes sees as operating over Mexico. Although he initially had dreamed of constructing a small house for himself and laboring as a farmer after the violent phase of the Revolution is over, Cruz does just the opposite, emulates the fallen hacendados, and even reconstructs the ruined family home in Cocuya, thus explicitly affirming his identity with the father, the hacendado Atanasio Menchaca. And just as the vicious father had desired to kill the illegitimate son as soon as he was born, so too does Cruz send his own son off to war and martyrdom. The cycle of Cainismo, of betrayal by one brother of the other, begun when the cowardly Pedro, instead of defending his brother Atanasio with the gun that Pedro carries, flees and allows him to be butchered, is later extended by Cruz, who will allow the revolutionary soldier who so resembles him to die on the battlefield, who will concoct a false story about

51
Gonzalo Bernal's heroic death in a Parral jail when Cruz had decided to abandon him to the Villistas. Self-delusion and reality, will and fate are constantly contrasted in this narrative. La muerte de Artemio Cruz portrays the quest of the individual for salvation through the construction of an earthly paradise and the frustration of that search, the impossibility of redemption through the glorification of the self. In the final anguished hours of his existence, the members of his family, Catalina and Teresa, cluster around his bedside, not to provide him with affection and consolation but primarily to ascertain the whereabouts of his will. In her

desperation, Catalina even gropes on her hands and knees for the will, suspecting that Cruz will cheat her. Not only in his old age but throughout his life, Cruz struggles to preserve the self in the face of death that has always hovered close to him. At the very moment of his birth, Cruz is threatened with extinction by his own father, Atanasio, who approaches the hut where his mulatto lover Isabel Cruz is giving birth in order to kill the illegitimate child. Violent death is an ever-present danger for Cruz the soldier in the Mexican Revolution, and after the death of Regina, perhaps to expiate his guilt over not being present to defend her, Cruz makes a suicidal charge against the enemy. Once his economic power and political position have been consolidated, however, Cruz seems impervious to death. He has destroyed or rendered ineffective all of his enemies except time. Although he attempts to live with the self-delusion of terrestrial immortality, buttressed by the sumptuous world of Coyoacan, his delusion is one-day shattered from within by his devastating attack. It is ironic that Cruz on his deathbed should perceive his whole universe in terms of metallic sensations. He has become a wizened Midas. The elaborate and desperate attempt of the aging Cruz to prolong his life physically is a defensive reaction against his inability to gain spiritual renewal. Early in his life Cruz suffers the death of his idealism and of his capacity to love. He is expelled from the natural paradise within the hell world of war that he shares but briefly with Regina, and from the illusion of redemptive unity that he seeks with the hostile Catalina. Cruz's primary response to protect himself against the threat of further frustration and hurt is to retreat into a self-made and self-sustained world in which he can feel secure, just as his domination of the foreign investors by compelling them to pay him instead of his investing his funds with them is to make him feel not their superior, but merely their equal. For the spiritual paradise of love that he has been denied, like the titanic protagonist of Orson Welles's powerful epic film Citizen Kane, Cruz substitutes a material paradise that seems to proclaim his invincibility. But his sudden attack leads to his expulsion from this paradise as well, as he is taken from Coyoacan and brought to Catalina's home in Las Lomas, the facade of a home where Cruz's clothing and artifacts are kept to maintain the impression that he still dwells there. Finally, on his deathbed, Cruz for the last time struggles against fate in an attempt to restore his lost kingdom through the only means now possible to him, 52 through the force of his imagination. It is extremely ironic that although Cruz is spiritually vapid, and he cannot even recall the visage of his own son, at the very end the images of his art objects and expensive furnishings pass through his consciousness in exquisite and exact detail. Redemption for the paralyzed Cruz can come only through the mental reliving of the past as both present and future, as he attempts to thwart the chronological time that signifies separation and loneliness, physical and spiritual disintegration. For this reason, much of the second-person narration is in the future tense, even though it focuses on the past. Yet the worlds through which Cruz seeks redemption prove to be only false or ephemeral paradises. Cruz's agonized consciousness takes him back to the remote past, to the world of Veracruz, the selvatic world that represents innocence, life in harmony with nature, and contentment for the young boy. Cruz's first-person monologue reiterates obsessively the image of the convolvulus or moon flower, a highly poetic image that nonetheless is disconnected and looms surrealistically in the midst of the first-person narrative but which is at the end explained as part of the lost paradise world. Yet this world is a land ruled by violence, wrested from the original Indian inhabitants by the Menchacas who have been granted it by Santa Anna, rich lands that become the object of incessant power struggles that result in the death of Cruz's own father. That Cruz himself should become enveloped by the violence is thus inevitable. His idyllic life on the remnants of the estate inhabited by himself, his uncle Lunero, and the last two survivors, Pedro and Ludivinia, bearing the Menchaca name is one day shattered by death. The emboldened Cruz, in desperate defense of Lunero, who represents the only father, and the only happiness he has ever known, kills the person whom he believes has come to

take Lunero away, the person whom he believes is the agent of the new cacique or boss of the region in a desperate but futile defense of his Edenic world. Instead of the agent, Cruz has mistakenly slain his own uncle, Pedro. He and Lunero are forced to flee Cocuya, and when Lunero is killed, presumably by the bullet of the agent who is tracking them, Cruz is, for the first time in his life, left utterly alone. Although Cruz's career as cacique and industrial magnate is one of constant struggle for power and wealth, he will inwardly throughout his life cling to the memory of his youth, and, bring his only son to Cocuya to ensure that his youth will be shared by Lorenzo. Yet Cruz never succeeds in recapturing the security and happiness that it represents. With the young girl Regina consciously as with Lunero unconsciously, Cruz succeeds in transcending self to establish a genuine bond with another person. Regina's memory will also remain with Cruz throughout his life. Yet once more, as with the surrogate father Lunero, the paradise that is created around Cruz by Regina's love is an ironic and ephemeral one, one that violence and death make impossible to sustain. Regina's creation of a romantic myth surrounding her encounter with Cruz on a beach is itself an idyllic vision that is false; it is used to mask the sordid reality of her having been

53
seized and violated by Cruz, the soldier of fortune. Only later does she grow to love him. The vision serves not only to restore her own innocence but that of Cruz as well, who prompts her to envelop him within her lyric fantasy. Once more, as at Veracruz, the image of the sea appears, symbolic of renewal, as it will be for the enervated characters in Cambio de piel, who are on a journey from Mexico City to Veracruz and the sea, the ocean that they will never reach. Yet it is significant that the sea is now only an illusion shared by Cruz and Regina. Salvation is impossible for Cruz. Cruz attempts to gain from Catalina Bernal what he has lost by Regina's deaththe redemptive love of a woman, through which he can transcend his moral weakness and absolve his deep sense of inadequacy and guilt, which have now been compounded through his failure to intervene to save the life of Catalina's brother Gonzalo, another idealist who is sacrificed, this time to a Villista firing squad, while Cruz gives false information to the commander to save his own life. The protagonist cynically exploits his knowledge of the execution of Bernal to gain access to the confidence of Don Gamaliel. Cruz later attempts to achieve a reconciliation with Catalina, the daughter whom Gamaliel ruthlessly sacrifices to Cruz as part of a bargain, in exchange for Cruz's restoration of his wealth. Although Cruz wishes to confess his moral weakness to Catalina and to ask her forgiveness, his pride and his fear of being humiliated if he prostrates himself before her keep him from his confession, which he makes only on the mental level, as he confronts her in silence. The attempts made by Catalina to rebel against her dehumanization prove to be futile. In La muerte de Artemio Cruz as in the case of Rosenda Pola in La region, vilified by her own brothers for being pregnant even though she is married, because she is perceived as alone and abandoned by her husband and therefore an object of male scorn rather than compassion, the married woman is stifled by the overwhelming weight of tradition, of family pressure, and religious dogma. Catalina's social and economic identity depends first entirely on her father and then solely on Cruz; thus she essentially has no choice but to submit to the tyranny of both of them. Catalina can defy Cruz only passively, through a withdrawal of her love and a retreat into pride, although she does not deny him her body and later suffers shame for having enjoyed the sexual encounter. Only one of the many women in the life of Artemio Cruz, Laura Riviere, has both the integrity and the courage to rebel against him. Catalina also becomes a victim of her own obsessive self-doubts and self-recriminations. She is capable of defining herself only negatively, through her resentment and hostility. She even nurtures her humiliated state, using it as a weapon against Cruz, but finally crippling herself. She poisons Teresa against Cruz, using her daughter as a pawn in her quest for vengeance and creating a spiteful Teresa who becomes even more intense in her hostility and

vindictiveness toward Cruz than Catalina herself.

54
It is ironic that the most ringing defense of the machismo code is given not by a male but a female. The haughty and demented Ludivinia reserves her love for only one of her sons, the bold, violent hacendado Atanasio. A recluse in her burnt-out mansion, unable herself to hold the family dominions against the growing power of the new usurpers, Ludivinia denies her helpless womanhood by identifying totally with the macho Atanasio, the dead son who would have maintained the family's wealth and power. She withholds her love from her other son, the spineless Pedro, who in a time of crisis has come to her for solace, contemptuously rejecting him as unfit to continue the domineering Menchaca line. Like Regina, Catalina at least initially succumbs to the charisma of Cruz the dynamic and self-assured machoin a pattern that is also reiterated throughout Pedro Paramo, as the ruthlessness and violence of the cacique are contrasted with the passivity of the woman, to the extreme that the ingenuous Ana allows herself to be seduced by Miguel, Paramo's son, the very person who had murdered her father. Catalina's capitulation to Cruz on the sexual level corresponds to her father Don Gamaliel's surrender to the revolutionary whom he hates and yet, ironically, is the strong and aggressive son whom he has always wanted, instead of the dreamy and soft-spoken and idealistic Gonzalo, the real son whom Gamaliel rejects. The awe in which Ludivinia holds the macho is reflected in the reactions of both Catalina and Don Gamaliel to the man who, having first broken their power, will now sustain and augment it as he rapidly moves from Revolutionary to latifundista, exploiting the campesinos just as Don Gamaliel had done. For Catalina, fatalistic in attitude, socialized from childhood to be dependent on male authority figures, bereft of a maternal model, as no mention is ever made of Gamaliel's wife, Cruz is the forceful, protective male for whom the decrepit Ludivinia longs and whom Catalina has sought but been unable to find either in her introspective and self-doubting brother or in her pusillanimous suitor Ramon, who is easily intimidated by Cruz and who swiftly abandons her. Regina never succeeds in creating an independent self; she derives identity only through her relationship with Cruz. She lives and dies for him. Even on the symbolic level, her identity is controlled by that of Cruz. She symbolizes Cruz's early Revolutionary ideals, which in turn reflect those of the supporters of Francisco Madero. Her death, which coincides temporally with the vicious betrayal and assassination of Francisco Madero and Vice-President Pino Suarez, marks the death of those ideals. Regina becomes a victim of blood sacrifice to ensure the survival of Cruz; Catalina is forced to become a victim of spiritual sacrifice to him as Don Gamaliel exploits to the hilt her filial devotion and bargains her away to Cruz in order to ensure the comfort of his remaining years. Catalina is reduced to a mere pawn, as Gamaliel, outwardly deferent but inwardly tyrannical, orders her to appear on cue in a provocative dress in order to arouse the interest of Cruz. Don Gamaliel is a master at masking his cruelty behind a facade of paternalism and even gentility, a technique that the brutal

55
Cruz never succeeds in mastering. Gamaliel's exploitation of Catalina is continued by Cruz, who claims her as part of the spoils of war. Cruz wrenches his new wife away from the protective confines of her life in aristocratic Puebla and isolates her on the country estate of Don Gamaliel. Yet Catalina's greatest oppressor is not Cruz, who finally leaves her to live openly with his mistress Lilia, but her own self. Catalina lacks the courage to take responsibility for her own life. She is incapable of making the decision either to accept Cruz or divorce him. Instead, she remains mired in self-pity, vacillation, and anguish. On the one hand she is tempted to correspond to the love that Cruz offers her. After her own cherished aristocratic world has been swept away, she is challenged by Cruz to re-create her identity in the new postRevolutionary world just as he has done. Yet she is also prey to feelings of guilt and self-loathing because she submits to Cruz physically and takes enjoyment in their sexual relationship. She despises Cruz for having humiliated her father,

intimidated Ramon, and betrayed her brother. Catalina does overtly rebel against the role of dutiful and devoted wife that Cruz seeks to impose on her, when she refuses to attend a political rally at which her husband, like Don Gamaliel before him, has wished to put her on exhibit. Cruz requires that she be there hi order to confirm his social and moral legitimacy, so that his election as regional deputy can be facilitated. In her successful defiance of Cruz's dictum, Catalina contrasts with most of the male adversaries of Cruz, who are forced to capitulate to his will, and also with the great number of persons who, as Cruz becomes more and more powerful, voluntarily surrender their integrity in order to become minions in his empire, as does the obsequious Padilla. Yet Catalina does not have the strength of will to remain firm to her convictions. Openly condemning Cruz, she secretly and persistently longs for a reconciliation with him. Yet Catalina cannot forgive her husband because she cannot forgive herself for her own weakness. Even when Cruz is dying, she cannot resolve her inner conflict. Her desires to express tenderness, compassion, even forgiveness, are kept in check, because she fears that any attempt on her part for a reconciliation will be interpreted by Cruz as an act of abasement to his will. The irresolute Catalina always prefers that others make decisions for her. Throughout her life she surrounds herself with persons whom she needs in order to bolster herself in her resolve to deny Cruz her love. Thus she meets frequently and surreptitiously with a priest hi the basement of the home of the rabidly anticlerical Cruz. Even the death of Cruz will not free her from a basically subordinate role; the domination that her husband has exercised over her is merely replaced by the tyranny of her embittered daughter Teresa, who berates her for wanting to forgive Cruz. Despite her separation from Cruz, divorce for Catalina is unthinkable, not only because of the severe religious sanctions against it but also because of the social respectability and the vast material benefits that she derives from the marriage. One of the major ironies of the narrative is that Catalina goes about

56
restoring her aristocratic heritage bit by bit, as does Pimpinela in La region using the fortune acquired by an ex-Revolutionary to do it! In contrast with the hypocritical Catalina, who prefers to cling to the mere simulacrum of a marriage with Cruz, Laura, the woman whom Cruz meets in New York, has sufficient courage to defy traditional bourgeois morality and to divorce her first husband rather than suffer through a loveless marriage. Within the highly deterministic world of La muerte de Artemio Cruz, Laura is the only woman who succeeds in emancipating herself both from the external constrictions on the behavior of the female summed up in the Hispanic proverb, "Mujer en casa y con la pieraa quebrada" ("Woman to be confined to the house with her leg broken") and from the paralyzing conflicts and self-condemnation that victimize women like Catalina. As he had done with both Regina and Catalina, Cruz attempts to restructure the life of Laura to conform exclusively to his desires. Although he genuinely loves her, he does not have the courage to sever his relationship with Catalina in order to marry her. Perhaps Cruz fears that the resulting social scandal will injure him professionally or politically; perhaps he fears to commit himself totally to Laura because of the hurt that he had suffered when he devoted himself to Regina and then lost her. But the independent Laura is unwilling to continue in the role of Cruz's mistress. She makes a reasonable demand on Cruz that he resolve their relationship, and when Cruz balks at making that decision, she herself decides by terminating their affair. Laura genuinely loves Cruz but sacrifices that love in order to maintain her dignity and her self-respect. Lilia, the last woman in Cruz's life, despises him and is unfaithful to him from the start, yet finally debases herself by remaining with him as his mistress. Superficially, she seems to attest to the continued authority of Cruz the macho, who even in his old age can command the devotion of a glamorous and sensual woman. Yet, ironically, his association with Lilia serves only to increase Cruz's anxiety. Although she initially has been brought by Cruz as a vacation companion and her services paid for in advance, she deserts him for a younger and handsomer man. She later returns to Cruz, but her

infidelity leaves him with permanent feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. She has forced him to recognize his aging and debilitated self that he had previously refused to confront. In order to restore his self-confidence and provide him with the illusion that he is in control of her, Cruz imposes strict controls on Lilia's behavior. He prohibits her from leaving their mansion and from having even female friends. The oppressed Lilia finally becomes, both physically and morally, a grotesque reflection of Catalina. Both women cling to Cruz primarily for material comfort. Like Catalina, Lilia remains incarcerated both within the role that Cruz has imposed on her and within her own self. As she grows older and uglier, Lilia is afflicted by deep feelings of insecurity over the rapid loss of the sole basis of her identityher desirability to the male. In her abject dependence on the very person who continually victimizes her, Lilia mirrors the weakness of Cruz himself, who under the facade of imperial strength and 57
versttning frn engelska till spanska

Lilia, la ltima mujer en la vida de Cruz, le desprecia y no es fiel a l desde el principio, pero finalmente se degrada, permaneciendo con l como su amante. Superficialmente, parece dar fe de la continua autoridad de Cruz del macho, que incluso en su vejez puede ordenar la devocin de una mujer glamorosa y sensual. Sin embargo, irnicamente, su asociacin con Lilia slo sirve para aumentar la ansiedad de Cruz. A pesar de que inicialmente ha sido interpuesto por Cruz como compaero de vacaciones y sus servicios pagados por adelantado, que los desiertos l un hombre ms joven y guapo. Ms tarde regresa a Cruz, pero su infidelidad lo deja con sentimientos de inseguridad permanente y de insuficiencia. Ella lo ha obligado a reconocer su envejecimiento y debilitados auto que haba previamente se neg a confrontar. Con el fin de restaurar la confianza en s mismo y le facilitar la ilusin de que est en control de ella, Cruz impone controles estrictos a Lilia comportamiento. l le prohbe salir de su mansin y de tener incluso amigas. Los oprimidos Lilia finalmente se convierte, tanto fsica como moralmente, un reflejo grotesco de Catalina. Ambas mujeres se aferran a Cruz principalmente para la comodidad material. Al igual que Catalina, Lilia permanece encarcelado, tanto en la papel que Cruz ha impuesto en ella y dentro de ella misma. A medida que crece y ms feo, Lilia se ve afectada por profundos sentimientos de inseguridad por la prdida rpida de la nica base de su identidad, su conveniencia para el macho. En su extrema dependencia de la misma persona que continuamente victimiza a ella, Lilia refleja la debilidad de la Cruz a s mismo, que bajo la fachada de la fuerza imperial y
57

Lilia es la ltima mujer de

supreme aloofness is gripped by the fear that he will again be deserted by Lilia and left alone in his own age, without the ability to attract even a concubine. Just as Cruz toward the end of his life is forced to live with the mere pretense of love, so also, having lost his real son, is Cruz compelled to confront the false son, the shrewd and cynical successor of his professional mask, of his vaunting ambition, avarice, and lust for power, in the person of Jaime Ceballos. The audacious Ceballos defies Cruz's own dictum and approaches him to begin a conversation. The aggressiveness of Ceballos parallels the boldness of the young Cruz, who insinuated himself into the favor not of a fellow Revolutionary, as did Federico Robles, but into the protection of his former enemy. Yet Cruz's participation in the conversation that Ceballos has forced upon him is only perfunctory. As in many of the scenes of this multitemporal and multispatial novel, simultaneously with the external discourse there occurs an interior dialogue, a dialogue with self, as the stricken Cruz relives through memory and imagination the last day that he spent with his beloved son Lorenzo. This inner dialogue, one that foreshadows the narrative process as a whole, reveals the tenacious remnants of his idealistic self that has been all but obliterated by the mask of power. Once again the poetic image of the sea appears, but significantly, not as a shared mythic experience, as with Regina, nor even as a potentiality for

renewal, as at Acapulco with Lilia, but now only as a pathetic memory. And the last time that water is evoked, it is in the mind of Cruz as dying protagonist, linked with Catalina, and symbolic of narcissism and drowning. Ironically, Cruz's true successor, Lorenzo, the only one whom he considers worthy enough to assume the mantle of his power, has been sacrificed by Cruz himself, on the altar of his pride and guilt. Here again Cruz becomes linked with the ancient Aztec gods who demanded the sacrifice of their subjects in order parasitically to renew their power. Now, just as the external life of Cruz has been frozen into a limited number of essentially meaningless patterns and rituals, like the feast of Coyoacan, the feast of San Sylvester which ostensibly heralds the New Year and new life but which has degenerated within Cruz's sadistic mind into a death ritual celebrating the triumph of a mummy in a grandiose mausoleum, so also has his inner, spiritual life become congealed into a series of painfully reiterated memories. Artemio himself must become the successor, the child of his son, by keeping alive his memory. Ceballos, who can only stutter a feeble reply to Cruz's direct challenge to his impudence and his raising of the image of true heroism, gained not through insolence nor by obsequiousness or ingratiation but through true courage to the point of sacrificing one's life for one's ideals, which only Lorenzo is capable ofis arrogantly dismissed. Artemio's most precious illusion, his desire for self-fulfillment and selfrenewal through the expiation of his inadequacy and guilt, is paradoxically both achieved and frustrated by Lorenzo's martyrdom. The death of Lorenzo fighting on the liberal side in the Spanish Civil War is depicted in the third-person

58
narrative of February 3, 1939. It is the only third-person segment that does not constitute a literal part of Cruz's own life. Spiritually, however, it represents the ironic culmination of that life. This is the martyrdom that Cruz could have chosen, on the Mexican battlefield, or in the jail cell with Bernal and the Yaqui, but which his cowardice prevents him from accepting. Through carefully instilling his son with his own unactualized idealism, just as Catalina infuses their other child, Teresa, with her resentment and hatred, Cruz attempts to relive his life and to affirm his heroic potential. Yet the death of Lorenzo also leads to the increased bitterness and recriminations of Catalina, who has sought to keep Lorenzo under her protection, and thus Cruz's guilt is increased and his opportunity to achieve even a deathbed reconciliation with Catalina rendered almost impossible. Although Cruz at Coyoacan resents the attempts of the upstart Ceballos to usurp the place consecrated in the name of his son, it is poetic justice that the corrupt Artemio should be forced to confront the embodiment of his selfishness, greed, and hypocrisy. Even the lavish banquet is but a glittering mask. Underneath the forced gaiety and the baroque splendor of the celebration is the presence of death, personified by the emaciated, rachitic figure of Cruz himself. Instead of toasting the renewal of life at the New Year festival, the guests herald only the figure of death-in-life that Cruz has become. Also undercutting the festive opulence of the setting are the morbid thoughts of Cruz himself. He now withdraws entirely into his twisted imagination, projecting the image of Coyoacan as an immense torture chamber and tomb. As he watches the drunken revelers, he sadistically envisions the swift, violent attack on them by the enormous rats that lie in wait in the beams of the ancient monastery. Gloating over the control he exerts over his guests, he imagines them converted into both celebrants and victims of his megalomaniacal desire for the ultimate power, the victory over death. The irony is that the grisly images of infection and pain that he imagines are those that he himself will soon experience. The epigraph to the narrative, a quotation from Montaigne, "The premeditation of death is the premeditation of freedom," becomes ironic, because Cruz on his deathbed will suffer only increased incarcerationin his own body, in the home of Catalina that he detests, in his increasing pain and delirium, surrounded by the priest whose ministerings he rejects. Cruz's morbid vision on New Year's Eve is an extension of his

vindictive thoughts against Lilia, who is evoked as radiant with energy and life, the day at Acapulco. The vision of collective blood sacrifice commanded by the "Emperor Cruz" is another indication of his fusion with the ancient Aztec gods and adumbrates his demand, on his deathbed, that those who have given their lives for him in the past, including his beloved Regina, the unknown soldier, Bernal, and Lorenzo, die again so that his life may be once more prolonged. Cruz's mental transformation of his palace at Coyoacan into a scene out of Bunuel's macabre El angel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, 1962), in

59
which the upper-class guests at a lavish dinner party who engage in frivolous and absurd conversations are also imprisoned in the mansion, forced to the ultimate extreme of the quarantined elitist existence that they have been living, converts the New Year's Eve celebration into a grotesque danse macabre, a grisly antithesis of the paradise that Cruz has continually sought but now irremediably forfeited. As in Bunuel's grotesque vision, in which an immense bear is let loose in the mansion and devours the symbols of the angelic, the sheep that also inhabit the palace turned hell world, in La muerte de Artemio Cruz the transcendental has also been usurped by the demonic: In his sensitive ear heard the secret shuffle of immense rats, black fanged and sharp muzzled . . . and that waited, in the darkness, above the heads and beneath the feet of the dancers, by the hundreds and thousands waited, perhaps, for the opportunity to take them by surprise, infect them with fevers and aches, nausea and palsy, hard painful swellings at groin and armpit, black splotches, bloody vomit . . . and then his retinue would find themselves obliged to remain with him, unable to abandon ship, forced to join him in sprinkling the corpses with vinegar and lighting perfumed faggots, in hanging rosaries of thyme around their necks, in brushing away the green buzz of flies, while he commanded them, compelled them, to dance, dance, live, live, drink.
2

Although within his first-person monologue Cruz attempts to exalt the self, the second-person voice becomes his internal conqueror, mocking Cruz's desperate attempts to halt the flow of time. Cruz's illusions of glory and power and immortality are rendered symbolically through his dream, in which, ironically, he envisions himself not as glorious revolutionary but again in terms of the past, as Hernan Cortes taking possession of his domain. But this vision of earthly power and grandeur as Cruz strides down the nave of the cathedral, is undercut, and, as occurs so often in the world of Fuentes, the conqueror is conqueredCruz is silently mocked by the impassive stone idols of the cathedral, the statues that the Indian artisans were compelled to make in the image of Christian saints, but inside of which they insert their own idols and who now demand vengeance against the conquistador who walks arrogantly but unwarily beneath them. Instead of salvation, the stone idols represent retribution against the twentieth-century conquistador who resides in Coyoacan, the very district in which Cortes made his headquarters. Indeed, Cruz's main rival after the Revolution is over is a hacendado significantly named Pizarro; his wife's first name is the same as that of Catalina Xuarez, the wife who followed Cortes to Mexico from Cuba, apparently jealous over his attentions to La Malinche and who quarreled with him incessantly one evening and later was found strangled to death, with the greatest suspicion falling on Cortes himself. The last name of the

60
wife of Cruz is Bernal, another allusion to the epoch of the Conquest, to the soldier of Cortes who later wrote the memoirs of his adventures in Mexico, Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Thus at many points in this work seemingly dedicated to the creation of a New Man and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, a new society, we see the fatalistic re-emergence of the old, stifling, and repressive patterns. There is an unreality about Regina, Bernal, Lorenzo, and Laura, an unreality indicative of their intense spiritual nature. They hover on the borderline of abstractions. Catalina remembers her brother as a wraithlike person with "a

nervous body that seemed at times to exist outside of reality." (52). Lorenzo, who is derealized twice, first by being evoked through the imagination of the dying Cruz and second through his indirect testimony, in the form of his last letter to Cruz, speaks almost exclusively in terms of heroic self-sacrifice. As Regina speaks of the intermingling of the reflections of herself and Cruz in the water, she becomes more of a spiritual essence of love, and Laura addresses Cruz in the hauntingly beautiful verses of Calderon. She is constantly linked with the world of music, poetry, and painting. Cruz's decision to abandon Laura in order to keep in place the mask of marital respectability hides a growing spiritual emptiness. Cruz's unhappiness and his desire to reverse his decision are indicated by his subsequent trip back to Paris, where he met her, an attempt to relive his life as a past-made-present. But Laura has remarried. Once having made a choice, Cruz cannot undo it. Will cedes to fate as he is condemned to remain for the rest of his life with the false existence that he has chosen. His return to Paris and to the past adumbrates the equally futile attempts he will make on his deathbed to create an alternative existence out of the shards of the past. It is ironic that although a whole series of alternate existences are posited for Cruz, some of which, if he had the opportunity to relive his life, he might have chosen, these alternatives are not articulated until the very day of his death, when there is no longer any chance of their ever being actualized. In this fantasy life, Cruz renounces his taking of Lorenzo and converting him, as Luis Cervantes does to Demetrio Macias in Los de abajo, into a golem. Ironically, Lorenzo's valiant sacrifice saves the life of his lover Dolores, thus also expiating Cruz's guilt over not being with Regina to protect her from the federales. Cruz imagines himself as accepting Laura's conditions; as rejecting Lilia, as pleading with Catalina for forgiveness, as remaining for the rest of his life with Lunero in Cocuya or with his anticlerical teacher Sebastian. Yet all of the soul-searching in which Cruz engages leads nowhere; the moment of his death brings him no illumination, no reconciliation with his wife and child, no conviction that he has misspent his life. A hallmark of the contemporary novel is the elevation of the status of the reader from a mere passive recipient of the vision of an omniscient author, such as occurs in the nineteenth-century novel, to the role of dynamic co-creator of the novel. As with so many contemporary novels, deliberately fragmented

61
structurally and stylistically, such as Rulfo's Pedro Paramo (1955), Cortazar's Rayuela (Hopscotch; 1963), and Fuentes's own works like Cambio de piel and Terra nostra, the reader of La muerte de Artemio Cruz is encouraged to become an active participant in the novel and to reconstruct the life of the protagonist from mere fragments of narrative thought and action. Although Cruz affirms his life as an exclamation point, the total impression to the reader is one of a question mark. What significance does the Mexican Revolution have for contemporary Mexico? Throughout the work there is reiterated Cruz's continued betrayal of the ideals for which the Revolution was fought and the continued deaths of the idealists. As in the mordant works of Azuela such as Los de abajo and Andres Perez, maderista, only the consummate temporizer and opportunist survives and prospers. Yet there is, at the very end of Artemio Cruz, a spectral vision of future victory, a postulation that the idealists who opposed Cruz in the past will one day reunite and rise up again to smash what seems at first to be Cruz's iron legacy of continued exploitation and oppression. Yet it is significant that no real alternative to Cruz, just as no alternative to Robles/Regules or in Cristobal nonato no alternative to Inclan/Robles Chacon is posited, and thus the ultimate vision is one of pessimism. In an interview, Fuentes has stated that he deliberately develops a negative vision of Mexican reality so as to awaken the conscience of his readers to the problems, and thus we may see the result of this fatalism as optimistic in its ultimate intent. Is Cruz to be condemned or, ultimately, to be exonerated for his actions? And, on the universal level, what is the meaning of an individual life on the day of his death? How is death to be confronted, with calm resignation and an elaborate rehearsal of his own luxurious funeral, even to the extent of lying in

his coffin, the way that the morbid and resigned Gamaliel does, or with a staunch affirmation of life, of sensuous pleasures, even the luxurious feel of the bedsheets against his skin, and refusal to succumb, the way that Cruz responds? Fuentes's acerbic vision of post-Revolutionary Mexican society examines these problems from many distinct perspectives, and instead of imposing a single value judgment, allows the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions concerning both Cruz and modern Mexico. La muerte de Artemio Cruz functions on the individual, the national, and the universal levels. Cruz's self-incarceration becomes symbolic of the selfimposed isolation of Mexico, which Fuentes in La region mas transparente as well as in Cristobal nonato has depicted as a conglomeration of classes permanently divided. It is significant that the only time that the plural form, denoting unity, is used in La muerte de Artemio Cruz is in the flashbacks to the time when Cruz and Lorenzo rode their horses together across the river. Yet even here the unity is a transitory one, for Cruz is preoccupied not with the development of Lorenzo but only in his son as mirror of Cruz's own unexpiated past. With Cruz and Catalina, although on both sides there is a groping toward unity, each finally retreats into a tower of individualism.

62
The gigantic chasm separating the Indian Mexico from the middle and upper classes is poignantly depicted by Fuentes in La region mas transparente as Norma with condescending noblesse oblige stands by the gate to her mansion and hands out her cast-off clothing to the multitude of beggars who surround the entrance, a vision that depresses Zamacona who sees in it the centuries old burden of anguish and poverty. The scene in La cabeza de la hidra when the privileged upper middle class Felix Maldonado first views a painting of the Indian presence in Mexico by the contemporary artist Ricardo Martinez also exemplifies the abyss between the indigenous and the criollo worlds. Felix is entranced by the idol-like, mythic Indian forms painted by Martinez, mist swirling about them, ponderous and immobile, gigantic and yet powerless, suspended in a limbo world. After he emerges from the elegant home of Rossetti, Fe'lix sees the living equivalents of Martinez's enigmatic presences, clad in huaraches and on foot in an age of mechanized transport, and senses the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between himself and these spectral forms, still after five hundred years suspended in time and space, unintegrated into modern Mexican society. This gap seems to have been bridged at least temporarily by the Mexican Revolution, which Fuentes evokes in La region mas transparente as a single moment of transcendental unity that instead of being consolidated as a permanent revolution gave way only to a reafFirmation of the old order, becoming stagnant and oppressive. Following the anti-Revolutionary stance of his predecessors, including Azuela, Guzman, Jose Ruben Romero, and Juan Rulfo, Fuentes interprets the Revolution of 1910 not as a continuing process, as it is represented by official propaganda, but only as a single, brief, glorious moment of national unity and transcendence of classes before the nation once again sinks back into dispersion and alienation among its extremely diverse components, a disintegration reflected in the chaotic, fragmented narrative of the dying Cruz. Structurally, this single moment of national unity that quickly and seemingly, irremediably disintegrates into a welter of rivalries, conflicting ideologies, power struggles, is symbolized by that single phrase, the one that remains enigmatic and haunting for the reader until the very end of La muerte de Artemio Cruz, "We crossed the river on horseback." This is an insistently repeated allusion to one of the most precious moments in Cruz's life, the moment when he and his son were united in their courage and idealism and love, the moment when the battle-scarred and guilt-ridden Cruz genuinely experienced a cambio de piel, a redemptive self-renewal that neither he nor Mexico could sustain. Yet once again, structure is important. The phrase appears isolated in Cruz's delirious consciousness to symbolize that this idyllic unity is ephemeral. Crossing the river, a memory that obsesses Cruz, adumbrates Lorenzo's crossing the ocean, but alone, and his subsequent fighting and dying in Spain. It is

significant that although Cruz carefully nurtures his son's idealism and desire for adventure by removing him from the overly protective care of Catalina and

63
bringing him to the shores of the sea at Veracruz, Cruz proves too cowardly to accompany his son on this fateful crossing, other than in his imagination. The specter of Cain pollutes the life of Artemio Cruz. Cainismo falls as a generational curse over the Menchaca line from which Cruz descends, and, symbolically, as a seemingly indelible curse over the whole of Mexican history, which is evoked by Fuentes in this and other works as a series of betrayals, beginning with that of Moctezuma, continuing with those of Iturbide and Maximilian and ending with those of Porfirio Diaz, Victoriano Huerta, the revolutionaries themselves and ominous persons like the Director General in La cabeza de la hidra, who in the seventies is evoked in terms of Huerta, as seeking to subvert the government from within. In La region mas transparente, the theme of betrayal is seen in the figure of Gervasio Pola, who twice betrays his companions, first by refusing to maintain the protective unity of the four prisoners who have escaped from the federates, ordering them to split up, and second for informing the federal soldiers of their whereabouts because he does not wish to die alone. His treachery adumbrates the self-betrayal of Rodrigo Pola, who sells out his idealism and his talent. Betrayal of confidence is evident in all of the interactions of Ixca Cienfuegos and perhaps indicates why his own people, the lower classes, are inherently suspicious of him. In La muerte de Artemio Cruz, Cruz's recklessly machista father Atanasio is ambushed and killed after he is deserted by his own brother, Pedro. Pedro's cowardly abandonment of his brother adumbrates a whole series of betrayals by Artemio of his revolutionary "brothers" both on and away from the battlefield. Although Cruz participates in a conspiracy to assassinate a revolutionary general who has become president, presumably an allusion to Obregon, once the plot is discovered he immediately rushes to the new president to pledge his unconditional obedience. Yet Cruz does have the capacity for self-awareness and for selfcriticism. The complexity of his character is indicated in the constant internal battles between ego and conscience, between his selfish, even egomaniacal self asserted by the first-person narrative and his collective, morally responsible self affirmed by the second-person voice. In the first-person narrative, the iconoclastic Cruz defiantly maintains his anticlericalism, concocting blasphemous versions of the Immaculate Conception, as he posits a lascivious Joseph who in effect violates his bride. Here again is a perception of biblical reality in terms of Cruz's own violent, machista response toward Regina. Yet, on the subconscious level, the second-person voice recites the De profundis clamavi, indicating Cruz's deep-rooted beliefs in God and his desperate pleadings for forgiveness of sin and for salvation. The very name of the protagonist, "Cruz," refers to him not only as a blending of cultures and of historical tunes and figures, but also to the many moments in his life that are crossroads, where he is compelled to make a decision, and also to his life as a martyrdom that he refuses to accept, assigning

64
that role again and again to others. On his deathbed, suddenly forced into confrontation with the scheming and ruthless Cruz of the past, with Cruz the power broker, demagogue, and robber baron, with the exploitative Cruz who has now been reduced to but a voice on the tape recorder brought to his bedside by the ever loyal Padilla, Cruz is finally brought to an admission of the hollowness of the role that he has so thoroughly mastered.

NOTES
1. Carlos Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Mexico; Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1962.) Pp. 33-34. The translation is my own. 2. Carlos Fuentes, op. cit. The translation is from The Death of Artemio Cruz, translated by Sam Hileman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964), p. 253.

65