Free Inez: A Novel by Carlos Fuentes

are raked by thorns, you are panting as you come out onto a new barren clearing, you run uphill, summoned by the heights of a rock cliff, you close your eyes to relieve the length and the pain of the climb, and then a cry will stop you, you will open your eyes, and what will you see at the edge of the precipice? The cliff sliced away, with emptiness at your feet. A deep ravine, and on the other side, on a high white stony shelf, a figure that will shout to you, that will wave both arms in the air, that will jump
up and down to catch your attention, that will say with every movement of his body but especially with the strength of his voice: Stop, don’t fall, danger …
    He will be naked, as naked as you. Something will happen to you for the first time. You will see another moment in which both of you will be covered, but not now, now nakedness will identify you, and he will be the color of sand, all over, skin, body hair, the hair of his head; a pale man will shout to you, Stop, danger, and you will understand the sounds— eh-dé, eh-mé, aidez, aimez, help, love—that are rapidly transformed in your look and your gestures and your voice into something that only in this moment, as you call to the man on the other side, you will recognize in yourself: He is looking at me, I am looking at him, I am calling to him, he is calling to me, and if there were no one there where he is standing I would not have cried out, I would have shouted to frighten a flock of black birds or out of fear of a beast lurking in ambush, but now I will call for the first time to ask something of or thank that other being like me but different from me, and now he will not call out of necessity, he will call because he wants to, eh-dé, eh-mé, help me, love me …
    You will want to thank him for the cry that kept you from falling into empty space and crashing onto the rock mass at the bottom of the cliff, but since your voice does not carry to him if you do not shout and you do not know how to call the man who will save you, you will have to call more loudly if he is to hear you from the other side of the void, but the sound that will come from your breast, your throat, and your mouth to thank him is a sound you will never have heard during all those moons and suns that spill over you suddenly at the sound of your voice, your solitary wandering finally ended thanks to a cry that you yourself
would be slow to call a “cry” if cry were only an immediate reaction to pain, surprise, fear, hunger …
    Now, when you shout, something unforeseen will happen. Now you will not raise your voice because you need something but because you want something. Your cry will no longer be an imitation of what you will have always heard: reeds rustling in the river, a wave breaking, a monkey announcing its location, a bird preparing to leave the cold far behind, deer bawling as leaves begin to fall, bisons molting when the suns last very long, the rhinoceros easing the folds of its hide into the water, or the boar devouring the remains of carcasses discarded by the lion …
    Farther and further, you will know that he will answer with very brief sounds, not like the warbling of the birds or the bellowing of the aurochs— ah aaaaah, o, oooooh, em emmmm, e, eeeeee —but you will feel a warmth in your breast, you will first call it “feel you are more than him,” then “same as what he can come to be,” you put together the short sounds ah-o, ah-em, ah-nel, ah-nel, that simple cry across the void, above the animal skeletons lying at the bottom of the cliff in the cemetery on the rocks; you will cry out, but now your cry will be something else, it will not be the need of before, there will be something new, ah-nel , that simple cry joined to a simple gesture that will consist of opening your arms and then folding them across your breast with your hands open, and then offering those extended hands to the man on the other side, ah-nel, ah-nel, and of that voice and that