el Bernal is of the old school in more ways than one; the point is, he sees in the young man he realizes is likely to become his son in law the impulse toward corruption that will characterize a revolution that he has always found distasteful and realizes will develop into an outright fraud. Don Gamaliel may lose his own access to power (he has seen his son join the revolutionaries), but he has prescience enough to see that Mexico, too, will lose her very soul to such men as Artemio.
Artemio Cruz. So that was the name of the new world that had
risen from the ashes of civil war. So that was the name of
the newcomers who had appeared to dispossess the old order.
Unfortunate land, said the old man to himself as he walked
slowly back to the library, unfortunate land where each
generation must destroy its masters and place them with new
masters equally ambitious and rapacious. The old man thought
of himself as the final product of a peculiarly indigenous
culture: that of illustrious despots; a
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