Mexico.
A place of contradictions, of borderlands, where beauty mingles with corruption, freedom with
imprisonment, tradition and rituals with the thirst of a better future, from
the fights of Porfirio Diaz for the reform to his days of dictatorship, a
country which is looking across the borders that always defined it – the
borders with the United States, the borders between a glorious past and a
corrupted present, the borders of mestizos and mestizas, of keeping their culture alive, inside an era of globalization.
Artemio
Cruz. A man of contradictions, who at the beginning of the novel you simply
loathe. He is the representation of the Mexican Revolution, of how and why
things started and how they ended. Artemio starts fighting for the haciendas,
for the freedom of the people. Instead of achieving this, he begins to fall
fast into the other world, building his empire on treachery, bribery, and
crimes. The only person that matters for him is himself, his well-being, and
his life succumbed into pleasures. The other people around him – women that he
raped, the woman that he married, women that he shared his bed with, born
daughters and sons – do not matter.
“my
only love has been to possess things, their sensual property? That’s what I love.
The sheet I embrace. And all the rest, what is now passing before my eyes. A floor
made of Italian marble, veined in green and black. The bottles that store up
the summer of those places.”
“Who
will you fuck over today in order to exist? Who tomorrow? Who will you use: the
sons of the fucked mother are these objects, these beings that you will
transform into objects for your own use, your pleasure, your domination, your
disdain, your victory, your life.”
Artemio
Cruz fascinates. I have always believed that being humane does not mean the
good things that you do, the kindness, the nice gestures, but the elements
which makes us vulnerable, the aspects which, paradoxically enough, get us
closer to the animal world, and also the thirst of life found in the mundane.
It is that “optical democracy” that defines us as a human being, in this world.
So Artemio’s memories wander around sensuality, around beautiful, young women
who accept him for his money, and luxurious parties, so different from the
place in which he was born and raised. At the same time, as we go deeper into
his thoughts, we find bits of remorse, of hints of unconfessed love, memories
and thoughts which contradict one another – the strong, undefeated man becomes
a puppet in the hands of destiny.
[…]
days in which your destiny will pursue you like a bloodhound, will find you,
will charge you dearly, will incarnate you with words and acts, complex,
opaque, adipose matter, woven forever with the other, the impalpable, the
substance of your spirit absorbed by matter
“He
ordered you, you went to the Revolution: this memory does not leave me, it will
not reach you. You will have no answer for the opposing, imposed codes, you
innocent, you will want to be innocent, you did not choose on that night.”
But
he did. The right and the wrong, the words that we say, the gestures that we
do, the way we let our past define us – in a good or in a bad matter – he, and
we alike, choose. That is why Artemio’s final thoughts gravitate also around
the idea of free will vs. destiny, of things already planned for him. This is
why I don’t see in him a courageous man, but a coward one – coward because he
blames destiny for his actions, coward because he isn’t able to confess (and
nurture) his love, coward because he runs away from suffering, hiding into his
grandeur, his affairs and his illegal businesses, coward because he doesn’t
take a stand in the Revolution and betrays everyone who once believed in him,
because for him “Revolution’s all about, nothing else: being loyal to the
leaders.”. And slowly, this disgust that you felt at the beginning is
transformed into pity. From the moment he tragically loses the only person(s)
who he loved, Artemio’s line between selfishness as a way of living and
sociopathy gets blurred, the key moments where moral values fall one by one,
like in a cards of dominos, letting behind an unscrupulous, hideous, and most
of all, lonely person, in the immensity of his own empire.
“how
shall I abandon… the solitude… of myself… to lose myself in… the solitude… of
ourselves…”
I
believe that Carlos Fuentes here writes a powerful, intense, masculine book, an
attack to the Mexican society and the world of abuses that have taken place in
this country. It is no wonder that this book is representative for the Latin
American boom from the 1960s-1970s, in which we can find writers like Julio
Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges, and of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is not
the main character that fascinated me the most, but Fuentes’ style and technique of writing,
splitting a single perspective into echoes of past memories, where the reader
should be aware that “Memory is satisfied desire.”, of faces that gets
blurred one into another, and the use of stream of consciousness that he uses,
creating thus sometimes powerful, lyrical paragraphs. It gives another portrait
of Mexico’s quest of identity, of wealth, while moral values fall one by one.
“You
will hear color, and you will touch sound, see smells, smell taste.”
“After
all, how could there be real contrition without the recognition of the real
evil in us? How can we understand sin, pardon for which we are to beg on our
knees, if beforehand we don’t commit sin? Forget your life, let me put out the
light, forget everything, and later we will pray together for forgiveness.”
“To
live is to betray God. Every act in life, every act that affirms us as living
beings, requires that the commandments of your God be broken.”
