The Death of Artemio Cruz

“Your own cruelty, when you’ve been cruel, hasn’t it always been tinged with its own tenderness? You know that all extremes contain their opposites: cruelty and tenderness, cowardice and bravery; life, death.”

This quote exhibits Cruz’s desire to comfort himself and rationalize his actions as he struggles to make peace with his life. This philosophical second-person internal dialogue contrasts starkly with the third-person narrative, which presents Cruz as crude, selfish, and materialistic.

“In any case, you just have to learn something about social differences, you can’t shake hands with everyone you meet.”

This quote demonstrates the extent to which social class dominates everyday life in mid-20th-century Mexico. Catalina is counselling Teresa against making friends with the shop attendant who has helped the mother and daughter with their package. In addition to establishing the dominating nature of social class, this quote portrays Catalina as an upper-class woman who is careful about asserting and protecting her status as a member of Mexico’s aristocracy.

“You admire their efficiency, their comforts, their hygiene, their power, their will, and you look around you and the incompetence, the misery, the filth, the languor, the nakedness of this poor country that has nothing, all seem intolerable to you.”

Cruz speaks these words in his hospital bed while reflecting on events in his life in the second person. Cruz is describing how he imposed his will on others to achieve success. The object of his discussion is the aristocracy: Despite Cruz’s material success, he resents and distains Mexico’s privileged classes.

“Sometimes I think the absence of blood and death throws us into despair. It’s as though we only feel alive when we’re surrounded by our destruction and execution.”

Gamaliel Bernal speaks these lines during Cruz’s first visit to his home. Bernal is pontificating about his life since his son’s death and speculates about why his idealistic son may have chosen to fight in the revolution. The passage exemplifies the paradoxes of life during wartime and, more broadly, the paradox of human nature that Fuentes explores throughout the novel.

“[The priest] had already taken it upon himself, with all his powers, to point out from the pulpit and in each confession that he heard: it is a sin, a grave sin against the Holy Spirit, to refuse to receive the gifts of heaven; no one can plot against the intentions of Providence, and Providence has ordered things as they are, and thus people should accept all things; everyone should go out and work the fields, bring in the crops, deliver the fruits of the earth to their legitimate owner, a Christian owner who pays for the obligations.”

The priest symbolizes the hypocrisy of religion when those in power wield it as a tool of oppression. In these lines, the priest uses religious tenets to justify the status quo and convince ordinary people to submit to injustice. Fuentes portrays the priests as an extension of the power of the upper classes.

“Artemio Cruz. So that was the name of the new world rising out of the civil war; that was the name of those who had come to take his place.”

This quote is from Bernal’s internal monologue during Cruz’s first visit to his home. Though Bernal is kind and receptive to Cruz, internally he is aware that Cruz is part of the strong new generation that the war has produced. Bernal acknowledges that he is an aging man who represents the old way of life in pre-revolution Mexico.

“The old man imagined himself the final product of a peculiarly Creole civilization, a civilization of enlightened despots. He took pleasure in thinking of himself as a father, sometimes a hard father, but always the repository of a tradition of good taste, courtesy and culture.”

This quote continues Bernal’s internal monologue while he thinks about his son’s death. Like Cruz in the first chapter, Bernal is looking back on his life to portray himself in a way that accords with his sense of himself as an enlightened patriarch. Just as Cruz skirts the “cruelties” he committed during his life, so does Bernal skim over the ways he was a “hard” father, preferring to accentuate what he considers his positive qualities.

“Nevertheless, you will close your eyes, feign deafness; stop touching something, even if it’s the air, with your fingers, imagine an absolutely insensibility; halt the flow of saliva across your tongue and palate, overcome the taste of your own self; impede your labored breathing, which will go on a filling your lungs, your blood with life, choose a partial death.”

Cruz employs the construct of second-person narration to address himself as if from the past, distancing himself from his present condition. The tone of this section is confessional; he admits to occasionally pretending to be deaf, an act of which his daughter accuses him later in the novel. These lines also reveal the level of astuteness with which Cruz perceives his own body as it decays and, at the same time, his psychological need separate himself from the dying process.

“Memory is satisfied desire. Survive through memory before it’s too late. Before chaos keeps you from remembering.”

This quote is taken from the end of Cruz’s musings about Regina. While Cruz is keenly aware of the pain overtaking his body, he counterbalances that pain with idealized memories of Regina, though they are fragmented and not always fully contextualized for the reader. This quote encapsulates the novel’s premise, as it explains Cruz’s desire to use his memories as a final means of wish-fulfillment before death.

“In every town they passed through, the general would investigate working conditions, reduce the workday to eight hours by public decree, and distribute land to the peasants.”

These lines highlight the revolution’s straightforward method of socializing private property and improving conditions for the peasant class. However, such changes were untenable because there was no one to enforce the general’s decrees. In these words lie the contradictions inherent in the Mexican Revolution.

“His love for Regina would compensate for the guilt of abandoning the soldier. That’s the way it should be. He lowered his head and thought that for the first time he was experiencing shame.”

One of the great moments of shame in Cruz’s life is when he was mistaken as having rescued an abandoned soldier, when he was in fact retrieving water for himself. Again, Cruz compensates for his shame by elevating his brief affair with Regina to the level of an epic romance. He understands emotions as transactional, which is the way he has lived in all other areas of his life.

“He clutched Regina’s starched skirt with a broken, choked sound: it was the first time he’d cried since becoming a man.”

Finding Regina’s body hanged in the village crushes Cruz’s fantasy of their romance and reveals the stark realities of war. This moment embitters him and makes him question his cause; this questioning foreshadows his abandonment of his convictions and his decision to live by acquiring wealth.

“The gourds rose to the thin lips of the penitents, and down their chins ran the thick phlegm of pulque. Sightless, wormy eyes, faces stained by ringworm; the shaved heads of sick children; noses pocked by smallpox; eyebrows obliterated by syphilis, the conquistadors’ mark on the bodies of the conquered, who moved forward on their knees.”

Cruz observes the condition of the peasants on Bernal’s land after he marries Catalina and inherits Bernal’s estate. In these lines, the devastation the conquistadors wrought upon Mexico’s native population is still visible. The lines further suggest that the Mexican Revolution did not liberate the oppressed in the way the early idealists intended.

“To live is to betray your God. Every act in life, every act that affirms us as living beings, requires that the commandments of your God be broken.”

These lines are part of a second-person self-reflection during Cruz’s visit to a brothel. These lines seem to suggest that Cruz distains religion; however, he takes comfort in its contradictions, as he sees sinning as an opportunity for redemption.

“You will reject guilt. You will not be guilty of sins against morality you did not create, which you found already made.”

At the brothel, Cruz turns a priest over to the authorities, resulting in his political advancement. Cruz tries to convince himself not to feel guilty for this act, and these lines mark a turning point in Cruz’s life as he learns to pass the blame for his actions on to others. Here, the second-person voice is giving him an imperative, rather than passively describing the future.

“Fuck and the world fucks with you…I fucked him out of a thousand pesos….The boss fucked me over…You could fuck up a free lunch…Whaddya say we get up fucked up….The Indians really got fucked over….The Spaniards fucked us up….The gringos give me a fucking headache...Viva Mexico, motherfuckers!!!!!”

As often happens in the novel’s second-person portions, Cruz muses aimlessly in a stream of consciousness. These lines represent Cruz’s linguistic exploration of semantic range of the verb “to fuck” (chingar). The overuse of the expletive conveys humor but also anger. It is a demonstration of the ways Cruz believes Mexico to be both responsible for oppression (of the Indigenous people) as well as the victim of oppression (of the Spaniards).

“She said she liked the awful tin roof and opaque windows on the Gare Saint-Lazate in Monet’s painting a great deal, those were the things she liked about this city, where objects taken separately or examined in detail might not be beautiful, but are irresistible taken as a whole.”

Laura and Cruz are admiring a Monet painting that hangs in Laura’s apartment. Laura’s appreciation for European art and her ability to comment on it signal her high social status to the reader. In likening the disparate elements that comprise a city to the painting, the lines make a trenchant observation about the collective nature of urban life.

“The shouting of the New Year burst forth: glasses smashed on the floor and arms hugged, squeezed, rose up to celebrate this feast of time, this funeral, this pyre of memory, this fermented resurrection of all facts.”

The frenetic atmosphere of the New Year’s Eve party and the imagery of feasts, funerals, and pyres create a scene akin to a ritual sacrifice. Using images of smashing glass and the movement of arms rather than of people, Fuentes gives the celebration an unhinged feeling that mirrors Cruz’s fear of the inevitability of death. This passage shows Fuentes’s skill in creating powerful imagery by combining opposites. In this case, he pairs something physical—the feast, pyre, resurrection—with something abstract—time, memory, facts. The result emphasizes that the new year is a celebration of death on a metaphysical level.

“Will you remember the country? You will remember it, but it isn’t only one country. It’s a thousand countries with a single name.”

Cruz addresses himself in the second person, this time offering an incisive commentary on the condition of contemporary Mexico. On one hand, Cruz acknowledges that Mexico is far from unified. This pessimistic appraisal of the Mexican Revolution is shared by others both within the novel and in popular scholarly opinion. On the other, he is commenting on Mexico’s infinite cultural and historical complexity that can never be summed up in a single name.

“You are an animal that foresees its death, sings its death, says it, dances it, paints it, remembers it before its death. Your land. You will not die without returning.”

As Cruz draws closer to death, the stream of consciousness of his narration intensifies. The imperative to return to his land foreshadows the next chapter’s flashback to Cruz’s childhood. These memories are buried deep in Cruz’s subconscious because they represent the poverty that he worked so hard to erase, and only the extremity of his situation will allow his mind to return to them.

“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 at daybreak, always silent, always weighted down by the tropical humidity, to do the work necessary to go on passing the days and hand over to the Indian Baracoa the items that each week paid for both the grandmother’s food and Master Pedrito’s jugs.”

These lines finally reveal the circumstances of Cruz’s childhood, which are in stark contrast to his adult life as a man of wealth and influence. The late revelation shows that Cruz’s impoverished childhood is his core wound and the source of the novel’s dramatic tension.

“You don’t know everything about this place. In another time, all the land from here to the mountain belonged to the people. They lost it. The grandfather master died. Master Atanasio was ambushed and killed, and little by little they stopped planning. 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.”

These lines are some of the few spoken by Lunero, the biracial servant and brother of Cruz’s birth mother. These lines are both an exposition of Lunero’s present circumstances as well as a commentary on the tragic history of Mexico’s Indigenous people.

“The afternoon sun fell on his round, wooly 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 was fornicating with it.”

These lines are taken from the only chapter in which Lunero, Cruz’s early mentor, is described in any detail. This excerpt exhibits the motif of the land as female, which the word “fornicate” suggests. The text also presents the depth of Lunero’s relationship to the land—a relationship similar to that of other peasants who relied on the land’s produce for their survival.