Inez: A Novel by Carlos Fuentes Page A

demand on the new musical planet that had emerged from this most atrocious of wars, a conflict that produced the greatest number of dead in all of history. And because of that he would demand of this Mexican chorus—which should at the least have memories of deaths during their civil war, as well as in daily life—that they sing Faust as if they too had witnessed the endless chain of extermination and torture and tears and desolation that were like the signature of the world at mid-century; as if they had seen a naked baby screaming at the top of its lungs amid the ruins of a bombed-out
railway station in Chungking; as if they had heard the mute cry of Guernica as Picasso painted it, not a cry of pain but a cry for help, answered only by the whinny of a dead horse, a horse useless in the aerial warfare overhead, the war of Berlioz’s black birds beating their wings against the faces of the singers, obliging the horses to moan and tremble, and to take flight, manes flowing, like Pegasuses of death, in order to escape the great cemetery the earth was becoming.
    In the Bellas Artes production, during the final ride to the abyss, Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara planned to project the film of the discovery of mass graves in the death camps; the terrible, apocalyptic evocation of Berlioz would become visible, skeletal cadavers stacked up by the hundreds, starved, lewd, skin, bone, indecent baldness, obscene wounds, shameful sexes, embraces of intolerable eroticism, as if even in death desire endured: I love you, I love you, I love you …
    “Cry out as if you were going to die loving the very thing that kills you!”
    The authorities forbade running the film of the death camps. “A cultivated and very respectable class of Mexican comes to the Bellas Artes,” a stupid official who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his parrot-shit-colored jacket had said. “They don’t come here to be offended.”
    On the other hand, “Berlioz’s work is really impressive,” was the opinion of a young Mexican musician who attended the rehearsals with the never explicit, though obvious, purpose of checking out this conductor with the reputation for being a rebel, in any case a foreigner, and as such suspicious in the eyes of Mexican bureaucracy. “Let the composer speak to us of the horror of hell and the end of the world in his own way,” said the musician-bureaucrat with the particularly Mexican quiet voice
and delicacy of manners that were as distant as insinuating. “Why push so hard, maestro? In short, why would you want to illustrate?”
    Atlan-Ferrara berated himself and agreed with the affable Mexican. He was putting down his own argument. Hadn’t he told Inez just last night that an opera’s visibility consists in hiding certain objects from view so the music can evoke them without degenerating into simple thematic painting, or into further, though futile, degradation into a “chimerical ensemble” in which conductor and composer mutually torture one another?
    “The opera isn’t literature,” said the Mexican, sucking his gums and teeth in a genteel effort to extract the remains of some succulent and suicidal meal. “It isn’t literature, although its enemies would have it so. Let’s not make them think they’re right.”
    Gabriel did tell his cordial bureaucrat that he was right. Whatever kind of musician he might be, he was a good politician. What was Atlan-Ferrara thinking? Did he want to teach the Latin Americans who had escaped the European conflict a lesson? Did he want to shame them by comparing historical violences?
    The Mexican discreetly swallowed the tiny piece of meat and tortilla that had been lodged between his teeth. “The cruelty of war in Latin America is fiercer, maestro, because it’s invisible and has no time frame. Besides, we’ve learned to hide our victims and bury them at night.”
    “Are you a Marxist?” Atlan-Ferrara inquired, amused now.
    “If you mean that I don’t seem to be participating in