You will bequeath the useless deaths, the dead names, the names of all those who fell, dead, so that your name might live; the names of the men stripped so that your name would have possessions; the names of the men forgotten so that your name would never be forgotten.
You will bequeath this country. You will bequeath your newspaper, the nudges and adulation, the people's awareness lulled by the false speeches of mediocre men. You will bequeath mortgages, you will bequeath a class without class, a power without greatness, a consecrated stupidity, a dwarfed ambition, a clownish commitment, a rotten rhetoric, an institutional cowardice, a clumsy egoism.
You will bequeath them their thieving leaders, their submissive unions, their new latifundia, their U.S. investments, their jailed workers, their monopolizers and their great press, their field hands, their hit men and secret agents, their foreign bank accounts, their slick speculators, their servile congressmen, their adulatory ministers, their elegant subdivisions, their birthdays and commemorations, their fleas and wormy tortillas, their illiterate Indians, their fired laborers, their despoiled mountains, their fat men armed with scuba gear and stocks, their thin men armed with fingernails. Take your Mexico: take your inheritance.
You will inherit the sweet, disinterested faces with no future because they do everything today, say everything today, are the present and exist in the present. They say "tomorrow" because tomorrow doesn't matter to them. You will be the future without being it; you will consume yourself today thinking about tomorrow. They will be tomorrow because they live only today.
Your people.
Your death. You are an animal that foresees its death, sings its death, says it, dances it, paints it, remembers it before dying its death.
Your land.
You will not die without returning.
This village at the foot of the mountain, 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 mountain fixes itself in the earth, curl on the smooth hillside that accompanies the river in its course to the nearby sea. Like a green half-moon, the arc from Tamiahua to Coatzcoalcos will devour the white face of the sea in a useless attempt-devoured in its turn by the misty crest of the mountains, origin and frontier of the Indian plateau-to link itself to the tropical archipelago of graceful undulations and broken flesh. The languid hand of dry Mexico, unchanging, sad, the Mexico of stone cloisters and locked-in dust on the high plateau, the half-moon of Veracruz will have another history, tied by golden strings to the Antilles, the ocean, and, beyond, to the Mediterranean, which in truth will only be conquered by the battlements of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Where the volcanoes join and the silent insignia of the maguey rise up, a world will die which in repeated waves sends its sensual crests from the parting of the Bosporus and the breasts of the Aegean, its splashing of grapes and dolphins from Syracuse and Tunis, its deep wail of recognition from Andalusia and the gates of Gibraltar, its salaam made by a bewigged black courtier from Haiti and Jamaica, its bits and pieces of dances and drums and silk-cotton trees and pirates and conquistadors from Cuba. The black land absorbs the tide. The distant waves will fix on the cast-iron balconies and in the portals of the coffee plantations. The effluvia will die on the white columns of the rural porticoes and on the voluptuous undulations of the body and the voice. There will be a frontier here; then the somber pedestal of the eagles and flints will rise. It will be a frontier no one will defeat-not the men from Extremadura and Castile, who exhausted themselves in the first foundation and were then conquered, without knowing it, in their ascent to the forbidden platform that allowed them only to destroy and deform appearances: victims, after all, of the concentrated hunger of statues made of dust, of the blind suction of the lake which has swallowed the gold, the foundations, the faces of all the
conquistadors who have raped it; not the pirates who loaded their brigantines with shields thrown with a bitter laugh from atop the Indian mountain; not the monks who crossed the Pass of the Malinche to offer new disguises to unshakable gods who had themselves represented in destructible stone but who inhabited the air; not the blacks, brought to the tropical plantations and softened by the depredations of Indian women who offered their hairless sex as a redoubt of victory against the black race; not the princes who disembarked from their imperial galleons and let themselves be fooled by the sweet landscape of palms and nut trees and ascended with their baggage laden with lace and cologne to the plateau of bullet-pocked walls; not even the leaders wearing three-cornered hats and epaulets who in the mute opacity of the highland found, finally, the exasperating defeat of reticence, of mute mockery, of indifference.
You will be that boy who goes forth to the land, finds the land, leaves his origins, finds his density, today, when death joins origins and destiny and between the two, despite everything, fixes the blade of liberty.
(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 beautifuclass="underline" 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.