“They are sleepwalkers,” the old woman shouted. “I’ll wake them.”
“They are destiny,” murmurs Ezekiel, and he begins an even higher flight that leaves behind the grave where Antigua Concepción lies, shouting all is lost, don’t deceive Josué, don’t tell lies, don’t weep and moan, look to your own house, leave another’s alone…
The voice was dying out surrounded by smog and motors.
I insisted: “Lucha Zapata?” as if to dissipate the events that were suffocating me.
Then Ezekiel picked me up by the back of my neck and said she, she was your good demon, your companion, he said when we left the mountains behind and reached the height of the meseta and Mexico City stretched into infinity, brilliant in the lights of dusk as it was gray in the light of day, and Ezekiel murmured the words of God I will pursue your blood, blood will pursue you, blood will not hate you, and Lucha Zapata will be your avenging angel, Lucha Zapata is the only person who never betrayed you, now she will avenge you, look at her from on high, look at her go into the Utopia building without shouting, without naming you with each pulse of her heart and each beat of her lungs, at last sowing terror in the building, no one stops her, not even Ensenada de Ensenada, this breaks all the rules, this is not foreseen, Lucha is pulled in by the wind, no one can distinguish her from the air though everyone feels the fire of the hurricane until Lucha Zapata, breaking glass and splintering doors, enters the sanctuary of Asunta Jordán and surprises her with her nose in the computer and Asunta does not have time to resist the stab of a knife and another and another and another, stab of ice stab of dream stab of desperate wakefulness stab tearing the air to drive into the neck back breasts eyes of Asunta Jordán who resists by waving her arms, covers her skirt as if the stab had reached her sex, tries to clean herself off and falls facedown onto the computer that transmits a senseless prayer with no addressee…
They rush at Lucha Zapata.
They take her.
Don’t look anymore, Josué. Don’t look. Your destiny on earth has been fulfilled. The exterminating arrows have been shot. The names of the ghosts have been pronounced. Endure the crimes of the city. Prophesy against the city. And now, Josué, forget the great noise at your back and take a roll of paper to recount an incomplete narration…
These are the names of the tribes: They are spoken from the Aragón prison by your brother Miguel Aparecido, who still lives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CARLOS FUENTES, Mexico’s leading novelist, was born in Panama City in 1928 and educated in Mexico, the United States, Geneva, and various cities in South America. He has been his country’s ambassador to France and is the author of more than ten novels, including The Eagle’s Throne, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, The Years with Laura Diaz, Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, and Inez. His nonfiction includes The Crystal Frontier and This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life. He has received many awards for his accomplishments, among them the Mexican National Award for Literature in 1984, the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and the Légion d’Honneur in 1992. He was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
EDITH GROSSMAN, the winner of a number of translating awards, most notably the 2006 PEN Ralph Manheim Medal, is the distinguished translator of works by major Spanish-language authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, and Alvaro Mutis as well as Carlos Fuentes. Her translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote was published to great acclaim in 2003. She received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, the same year in which she held a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2010 she published the book Why Translation Matters.
Carlos Fuentes
