Now who will see you, who will pay attention to you, who will understand your anguished call, the call that will finally be torn from your throat as you run uphill, beckoned by the height of the stone cliff, closing your eyes to relieve the duration and the pain of the climb?
A cry will stop you.
You will open your eyes and you will see that you are at the edge of a precipice with empty space at your feet, a deep ravine, and, on the other side, on an outcropping of stone, you will see a figure who will shout to you, who will wave his arms, who will say with every movement of his body but most of all with the strength of his voice, Stop, don’t fall, danger …
He will be naked, as naked as you.
The nakedness will identify you, and he will be the color of sand, all over, skin, body hair, the hair on his head.
The pale man will call to you, Stop, danger.
You will understand the sounds eh-dé, eh-mé, help, love, swiftly being transformed into something that only in that moment, as you shout to the man on the other shore, you will recognize in yourself: he is looking at me, I am looking at him, I am shouting to him, he is shouting to me, and if there were no one there where he is, I would not have shouted the way I did, I would have shouted to frighten away a flock of black birds or from fear of a beast crouching nearby, but now I am shouting to ask something or to thank this other person, who is like me but different from me, now I am shouting not out of necessity but desire, eh-dé, eh-mé, help me, love me …
He will come down from the rock with a pleading gesture that you will imitate with cries, unable to avoid reverting to grunting and howling, but both feeling in the swift trembling of your bodies that you will run to hasten the meeting so desired now by you both, you will revert to the earlier cries and gestures until you meet and embrace.
Now, exhausted, you will sleep together in the streambed at the bottom of the precipice.
Between your breasts will hang the crystal seal that he will have given you before he makes love to you.
That will be the good part, but you will also have done something terrible, something forbidden.
You will have given another moment to the moment you are living and to the moments you are going to live; you have perverted time; you have opened a forbidden field to what happened to you before.
But now there is no warning, there are no fears.
Now there is the fullness of love in the instant.
Now whatever may happen in the future must await, patient and respectful, the next hour of the reunited lovers.
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, JANUARY 2000
I have lost, living among humans,
My successive destinies may be read here.
To whom shall I entrust the telling of wondrous successions?
CAO XUEQUIN
The Dream of the Red Pavilion, 1791
BOOKS BY CARLOS FUENTES
Aura
Distant Relations
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins
Terra Nostra
The Campaign
The Old Gringo
Where the Air Is Clear
The Death of Artemio Cruz
The Good Conscience
Burnt Water
The Hydra Head
Christopher Unborn
Diana: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone
The Orange Tree
Myself with Others
The Buried Mirror
A New Time for Mexico
The Years with Laura Díaz
Copyright © 2000 by Carlos Fuentes
Translation copyright © 2002 by Margaret Sayers Peden
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Originally published in 2001 by Alfaguara, Mexico, as Instinto de Inez
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Abby Kagan
First eBook Edition : September 2011
First American edition, 2002
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuentes, Carlos.
[Instinto de Inez. English]
Inez / Carlos Fuentes ; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.
p. cm.
I. Peden, Margaret Sayers. II. Title.
PQ7297.F793 16713
963’.64—dc21
2002020589