You will go further and will penetrate into the nave of the ship, its Castilian exterior conquered by the macabre, smiling plenitude of this Indian heaven of saints, angels, and indigenous gods. A single, enormous nave will run toward the altar of gilt foliage, somber opulence of masked faces, lugubrious and festive prayer, always urgent, for this freedom, the only one granted, to decorate a temple and fill it with tranquil astonishment, with sculpted resignation, with the horror of emptiness, the terror of the dead times, of those who prolonged the slow deliberateness of free labor, the unique instants of autonomy in color and form, far from that exterior world of whips and branding irons and smallpox. You will walk to the conquest of your new world through a nave devoid of blank spaces: angel heads, luxuriant vines, polychrome flowers, red, round fruits captured in trellises of gold, white saints in chains, saints with astonished faces, saints in a heaven invented by Indians in their own image and likeness: angels and saints wearing the face of the sun and the moon, with the hand to protect harvests, with the index finger of the hounds, with the cruel, unnecessary, alien eyes of the idol, with the rigorous face of the cycles. The faces of stone behind the pink, kindly, ingenuous masks, masks that are, however, impassive and dead: create the night, fill the black sails with wind, close your eyes, Artemio Cruz…
(1919: May 20)
His story of Gonzalo Bernal's final moments in the Perales prison opened the doors of the house to him.
"He was always so pure," said Don Gamaliel Bernal Gonzalo's father. "He always thought that, unless clear thinking determines it, action contaminates us and leads us to betray ourselves. I think that's why he left this house. Well, I believe it in part, because this hurricane swept everyone away, even those of us who never left home. No, what I'm trying to say is that, for my son, moral obligation meant participating in order to explain, to offer coherent ideas, yes, I think he participated to keep this cause from caving in under the test of action, the way all the others have. I don't know, his ideas were very complicated. He preached tolerance. I'm happy to know he died bravely. I'm happy to see you here."
He hadn't simply walked in one day to visit the old man. Beforehand, he had made inquiries in several Puebla towns, spoken with several people, found out what he had to find out. For that reason, he could know listen to the old man's worn-out arguments without blinking an eye, as the old man leaned his head against the polished leather of his chair back, turning his profile into the yellowish light that held the thick dust suffusing the air of the enclosed library. The shelves were so high that Don Gamaliel used a ladder on wheels, which over time had scratched the ocher floors, to reach the tall, thick volumes, French and English texts on geography, fine arts, and natural sciences. To read them, Don Gamaliel had to use a magnifying glass, the one he now held motionless in his silky hands, not noticing that the oblique light passed through the glass and concentrated, burning into the crease of his striped, carefully pressed trousers. Artemio Cruz, on the other hand, did notice it. An uncomfortable silence separated them.