The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

First published:La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: 1889-1959

Locale: Mexico

Principal characters

• Artemio Cruz, a dying tycoon
• Catalina, his wife
• Lorenzo, his son, who is killed in the Spanish Civil War
• Teresa, his daughter
• Gloria, his granddaughter
• Gerardo, his son-in-law
• Don Gamaliel Bernal, his father-in-law
• Gonzalo Bernal, a young lawyer executed by Villistas
• Father Paez, a priest
• Regina, a dead woman Artemio had loved
• Lilia and Laura, Artemio’s mistresses
• Padilla, Artemio’s secretary
• Lunero, a mulatto peon

The Story:

Artemio Cruz is on his deathbed, stricken by a gastric attack upon his return from a business trip to Hermosillo on April 9, 1959. As he lies in his mansion in a fashionable section of Mexico City, the stench in his nostrils is as much from the moral corruption of his life as from the processes of decay already at work in his body. Disregarding Cruz’s protests, who abandoned the church years before, an officious priest tries to administer the last sacrament. Doctors subject him to indignities with their instruments as they examine his body. In the background stands his estranged wife and the daughter who despises him. Although they pretend concern for the dying man, their greatest anxiety concerns his will, and he refuses to tell them where he put it. His only hold on reality is a tape recording with an account of business deals and proposed transactions, which his secretary, Padilla, plays for him. While the people jostle about in his room, Artemio drifts between past and present in a series of flashbacks tracing the events that brought him to his present state.

In 1919, he was an ambitious young veteran of the revolution arriving at the home of the Bernal family in Perales. Ostensibly he was there to bring to a bereaved father and sister an account of Gonzalo Bernal’s death before a Villista firing squad. In reality, he meant to insinuate himself into the confidence of the old hacendado, marry his daughter, Catalina, and get possession of the Bernal estates. After he married Catalina, however, his wife never realized that Artemio really fell in love with her; influenced by Father Paez, the family priest, she believed that she paid with her soul for her father’s security, and she hated herself for the passion to which Artemio could move her at night. Husband and wife ended up despising each other, and she blamed him when their son, whom he removed from her control, was killed while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Before Catalina, Cruz loved Regina, a camp follower who was taken hostage by Villa’s troops and hanged. After her death, there were other women, including Lilia, the young mistress he took on a holiday in Acapulco and who betrayed him there, and Laura, who later married someone else.

In addition to his adventures with women, Artemio recalls ruining his neighbors at Perales and getting possession of their lands, using bribery and blackmail to buy his first election as a deputy, giving lavish parties, negotiating business deals, ruining competitors, and all the while preparing himself for the loneliness and desolation he would feel when his time came to die.

Two episodes throw light on the later years of Artemio’s career. One is the story of his capture by a Villista troop. Sentenced to death, he decided to give information to the enemy. Although he later killed the officer to whom he promised betrayal, he was guilty by intent. Some justification for his deed came from Gonzalo Bernal, the disillusioned idealist who nevertheless went bravely to his death, who declared that once a revolution is corrupted by those who act only to live well and to rise in the world, battles may still be fought and won but the uncompromising revolution is lost.

In the last episode, Artemio returns to his beginnings. He was born on the petate, the mat symbolic of the peon’s condition, son of a decayed landowner and a half-caste girl. His only friend during his early years was Lunero, a mulatto who served the needs of Artemio’s half-crazed old grandmother and his lazy, drunken uncle. After the boy accidentally shot his uncle, he ran away to Veracruz. There, a schoolmaster tutored Artemio and prepared him for the part he would play in the revolution before he lost his ideals and chose betrayal and the rejection that ultimately led him to the corrupting use of power over other men’s lives and the spiritual ruin of his own.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Carlos Fuentes’ “The Death of Artemio Cruz.” New York: Chelsea House, 2006. Collection of essays that analyzes various aspects of the novel, including its structure, theme, point of view, and depiction of fathers, sons, memory, and time.

Boldy, Steven. The Narrative of Carlos Fuentes: Family, Text, Nation. Durham, England: University of Durham Press, 2002. Analyzes The Death of Artemio Cruz, describing how this book and Fuentes’s other early novels used the genre of the family drama to address broader issues of Mexican identity, history, and intellectual traditions.

Faris, Wendy B. Carlos Fuentes. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. Fine overview of Fuentes’s works with considerable detailed analysis. Includes a twenty-two-page chapter that focuses solely on The Death of Artemio Cruz, discussing the novel’s plot, theme, and presentation.

Guzmän, Daniel de. Carlos Fuentes. New York: Twayne, 1972. Excellent overview of Fuentes’s life and career through the 1960’s. Discusses initial critical reception of The Death of Artemio Cruz, presents a description of the narrative and a plot summary, and considers the significance of the novel in Fuentes’s evolution as a writer.

Gyurko, Lanin A. Lifting the Obsidian Mask: The Artistic Vision of Carlos Fuentes. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 2007. Designed as a guidebook for students of Latin American literature, this book provides analysis of all of Fuentes’s work.

Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin American Writers. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Includes a chapter entitled “Carlos Fuentes, or the New Heresy,” which provides an interview-based discussion of Fuentes and his works and includes considerable background on post-revolutionary Mexican society and literature.

Sommers, Joseph. After the Storm: Landmarks of the Modern Mexican Novel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968. A twelve-page discussion of The Death of Artemio Cruz treats the novel’s tone, structure, point of view, and treatment of time, followed by more detailed consideration of the work’s theme and its literary quality. Includes some comparison to Fuentes’s earlier novel Where the Air Is Clear.

Vázquez Amaral, José. The Contemporary Latin American Narrative. New York: Las Américas, 1970. A brief chapter on The Death of Artemio Cruz, part overview and part review, compares Fuentes’s novel and Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (1915, serial; 1916, book) as novels of the Mexican Revolution.