Chapter IV
Characters
The people a dying man remembers
Artemio Cruz
The Dying Man
The protagonist. A man lying on his deathbed, reliving his sixty years. He began as a revolutionary soldier, fighting alongside the peasant armies. He ended as a millionaire, a newspaper baron, a power-broker — richer and more corrupt than the landlords he once fought against. In his dying moments, his conscience (the "You" voice) judges him mercilessly. But the judgment is not simple. Cruz is not a cartoon villain — he is what the revolution produced: a man who learned that survival required ruthlessness, and then learned that ruthlessness could be profitable. He is the revolution's betrayal in human form.
Catalina
The Wife
Cruz's wife, married for money and position, not love. She comes from an old landowning family that survived the revolution by adapting. Her marriage to the upstart Cruz is a transaction — her family's social credentials for his wealth and political protection. Their marriage is a war of attrition waged in silence and polite hatred. She is Catholic, conservative, and trapped in a domestic hell of her own choosing — she could leave, but chooses the moral superiority of staying and suffering. She is the novel's embodiment of the old order: defeated but still present, still dignified, still corrosive.
Teresa
The Daughter
Cruz's daughter, living in his massive shadow. She is privileged, resentful, and unable to escape her father's gravitational pull — he has made her entirely dependent on him, and she hates him for it while also craving his approval. Her life is the luxury that her father's corruption bought, and she knows it. She is educated, self-aware, and trapped — the perfect symbol of a generation that inherited the revolution's spoils without its ideals.
Regina
The Lost Love
The young woman Cruz loved — perhaps the only person he ever truly loved. She is associated with the revolution's idealism and youth, with a time before corruption, when Cruz was still a soldier who believed in something. Her death during the revolution marks the moment his soul begins its long decay. She is the moral yardstick against which his entire later life is measured — and found wanting. In his dying consciousness, she returns to him as a figure of pure, irretrievable loss.
Laura
The Mistress
Cruz's mistress — a modern woman, independent, intellectual, and professional. Everything Catalina is not: free, sensual, unwilling to be owned. She represents the possibility of genuine intimacy that Cruz's life of power has foreclosed. She also sees through him more clearly than anyone else. She eventually leaves him, because she understands that a man who has spent his life using people cannot stop. Her departure is one of the novel's quiet tragedies — the moment when a different kind of life becomes definitively impossible.
Gonzalo Bernal
The Accuser
A revolutionary comrade who represents the path Cruz did not take — the path of integrity. Bernal refuses to compromise, refuses to profit from the revolution, and refuses to forgive those who do. His judgment of Cruz is the novel's most damning: he tells Cruz that he is a traitor to the revolution not because he became rich, but because he became the kind of man who uses people — the kind of man who can look at his former comrades and see only assets to be managed or obstacles to be removed. Bernal dies for his integrity; Cruz lives for his corruption. The novel forces the reader to ask which is the better fate.