FUENTES, Carlos

Terra Nostra

…..
Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.

…..
The mystery of other individuals, señor caballero, is ordinarily grief we neither share nor understand.

…..
First of all, señor caballero, I shall tell you this: long centuries of exhortation have taught us that we can trust only in our five senses. Ideas flourish and swiftly fade, memories are lost, hopes are never fulfilled, sentiments are inconstant. The senses of smell, touch, hearing, sight, and taste are the only sure proofs of our existence and of the reflected reality of the world.

…..
My design, the ancient man said, sucking his lips, is not to win battles with words but to convince the head and the heart of man that we must accept the world as it is, and peacefully; the world we live in is well ordered and offers rewarding riches to those who accept their place in it without protest.

…..
He himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and the gardens and the patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that has been made more beautiful by man for man's pleasure, not for his mortification.
…..


La muerte de Artemio Cruz

…..
Time… 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…

…..
Midday had barely passed: the rays of the sun in decline passed through the root of tropical leaves like water through a sieve, pelting down hard. The time of paralyzed branches, when even the river seemed not to flow.

…..
Yes: the priest kneels next to me. He whispers his words. Padilla plugs in the recorder. I hear my voice, my words. Ay, a shout. Ay, I shout. Ay, I survived. There are two doctors standing in the doorway. I survived. Regina, it hurts, it hurts, Regina, I realize that it hurts. Regina. Soldier. Hug me; it hurts. Someone has stuck a long, cold dagger into my stomach; there is someone, there is someone else who has stuck a blade into my guts: I smell that incense and I’m tired. I let them do as they please. I let them lift me up heavily as I groan. I don’t owe my life to you. I can’t, I can’t, I didn’t choose, the pain bends my waist, I touch my frozen feet, I don’t want those blue toenails, my new blue toenails, aaaah ayyyy, I survived. What did I do yesterday? If I think about what I did yesterday, I’ll stop thinking about what’s happening to me now. That’s a good idea. Very good. Think yesterday. You aren’t so crazy; you aren’t in so much pain; you were able to think that. Yesterday yesterday yesterday. Yesterday Artemio Cruz flew from Hermosillo to Mexico City. Yes. Yesterday Artemio Cruz…Before he got sick, yesterday Artemio Cruz…No, he didn’t get sick. Yesterday Artemio Cruz was in his office and he felt very sick.

…..
You will no longer know: you will not experience your open heart, tonight, your open heart…They say "Scalpel, scalpel"…I listen to it, I who go on knowing when you no longer know, before you know…I who was he, will be you…I listen, in the bottom of the glass, behind the mirror, deep inside, underneath, on top of you and him…"Scalpel"…They open you up…They cauterize you…They open your abdominal walls…The thin, cold, precise knife part them…They find that liquid in your stomach…They part your iliac fossa…They find that cluster of irritated, swollen, intestinal loops tied to your mesentery, which is hard and shot through with blood…They find that circular plaque of gangrene…bathed in a liquid of fetid stench…They say, they repeat…"Infarct"…"mesentery infarct"…They look at your dilated, bright-red, almost black intestines…They say…they repeat, "Pulse"…"Temperature," "perforation"…Eat, gnaw…The hemorrhaged substance runs out of your open stomach…They say, repeat…"Useless"…"useless"…all three…the coagulation wrenches itself from the black blood…will run, will stop…stopped…your silence…your open eyes…which cannot see…your frozen fingers…which cannot feel…your black, blue nails…your shuddering jaws…Artemio Cruz…name…"Useless"…"Heart"…"Massage"…"Useless"…You will no longer know…I carried you within and I shall die with you…all three…We shall die…You…are dying…have died…I shall die.

…..


Gringo Viejo

…..
What is the strongest pretext for loving?...If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext , gives us the measure of our loss.

…..
“And the frontier in here?" the North American woman had asked, tapping her forehead. "And the frontier in hear?" General Arroyo had responded, touching his heart. "There's one frontier we only dare to cross at night," the old gringo said. "The frontier of our differences with others, of our battles with ourselves.

…..


Los años con Laura Díaz

…..
Returning to the past meant entering an empty, interminable corridor where one could no longer find the usual things or people one wanted to see again... As if they were playing with both our memory and our imagination, the people and things of the past challenged us to situate them in the present, not forgetting they had a past and would have a future although that future would be, precisely, only that of memory, again, in the present.

…..