A 71-year-old Artemio Cruz wakes on his deathbed in a hospital, surrounded by his wife Catalina, daughter Teresa, and secretary Padilla.

Cruz rides in a limousine to a meeting where he successfully coerces American businessmen into paying bribes for access to Mexican resources.

Cruz visits the wealthy Bernal family in Puebla and announces their son Gonzalo's death with carefully feigned grief.

Cruz meets Catalina Bernal for the first time at her father's dinner table, flirting with her secretly beneath the tablecloth.

Cruz meets Regina in a village where his battalion is stationed and begins a romantic relationship with her.

Cruz returns from battle to discover Regina's body hanging from a tree alongside other executed villagers.

Catalina grieves her father Gamaliel's death while reflecting bitterly on five years of loveless marriage to Cruz.

Cruz plays a form of Russian roulette with an anonymous political operative who pressures him to switch his political allegiance.

Cruz surrenders a priest hidden inside a brothel to be executed by the authorities and receives land as his reward.

Cruz is captured by the Villista lieutenant Zagal and thrown into prison alongside a Yaqui soldier and Gonzalo Bernal.

Cruz betrays Carranza's military plans to buy his freedom and abandons a violently beaten Gonzalo Bernal to die in prison.

Cruz's extramarital affair with the upper-class woman Laura ends abruptly after she demands he choose between her and Catalina.

Lorenzo Cruz is killed by an enemy plane the morning after crossing a bridge to fight fascists in Spain.

Cruz throws an extravagant New Year's Eve party at his Cocuya estate and sits alone with his mastiffs, ignoring every guest.

Cruz dies in the hospital as his fragmented consciousness and its three narrative voices dissolve into silence.

Artemio Cruz lies dying in a Mexico City hospital, attended by a wife who despises him and a daughter who wants his inheritance. As a young soldier, Cruz fought with conviction in the Mexican Revolution and fell deeply in love with a village woman named Regina, only to lose her to a brutal execution. He then manipulated his way into wealth by marrying Catalina Bernal, whose family's land he coveted after her brother died in prison. Cruz rose to become a powerful congressman, newspaper tycoon, and real-estate magnate through bribery, extortion, and political betrayal. His only son, Lorenzo, inherited Cruz's youthful idealism and died fighting fascists in Spain, while Cruz lived on into a corrupt and lonely old age. His story ends as it began—with his three narrative voices dissolving simultaneously as death finally claims him.

The rise and fall of a corrupt Mexican revolutionary

Teresa holds her father's own newspaper open in front of her face at his bedside, avoiding any real interaction with him.

Catalina and Teresa shop together for Teresa's upcoming wedding while Cruz conducts business separately, ignoring the family preparations entirely.

A priest informs Cruz that the wealthy Bernal family has a marriageable daughter and has accumulated serious land debts.

Cruz abandons a wounded soldier during a federales ambush and is later mistakenly praised by his battalion as the soldier's rescuer.

Cruz invites an enslaved woman he regularly takes as a lover to move into the main house alongside himself and Catalina.

Cruz attends a covert meeting at Saturno's brothel with the corrupt Colonel Gavilán and several political operatives to discuss switching sides.

Cruz notices unmistakable signs of aging on his face in the bathroom mirror while Lilia sleeps peacefully beside him in Acapulco.

Cruz watches Lilia openly flirt with the young Xavier on a yacht and returns to their hotel room to find her gone.

Cruz takes Zagal prisoner after Carranza's forces raid the prison and ultimately shoots him rather than granting a formal duel.

Cruz's granddaughter Gloria visits him in the hospital, and Cruz reflects on Padilla's unwavering decades of loyal service.

Lorenzo reveals to Cruz at the seaside that he has already booked passage to fight in Spain's civil war in ten days.

Lorenzo and the Spanish rebel Dolores make love after their group safely crosses a suspected minefield bridge in Madrid.

Catalina and Teresa openly accuse Cruz from his hospital bedside of having caused Lorenzo's death by sending him away.

Lunero recalls that he considered sending the newborn Cruz down the river to save him from his murderous biological father.

Lunero delivers the infant Cruz alone in a barn, cuts the umbilical cord, and hears footsteps approaching from outside.

Around the edges of Cruz's grand story lie smaller but revealing scenes that illuminate his character more clearly than any headline event. A priest who tips Cruz off about the Bernal family's debts exposes how cynically he pursued Catalina, while his treatment of women—from enslaved servants to the bored Lilia—reveals his deep chauvinism. The corrupt men Cruz meets in Saturno's brothel and the deal he strikes with Zagal show the moral compromises that fueled his rise. His son Lorenzo secretly books passage to Spain, and his doomed romance with the rebel Dolores captures the idealism that Cruz himself long ago abandoned. These events trace the full sweep of a life from deathbed to origins, ending with the raw moment of Cruz's birth in a barn as Lunero hears footsteps approaching from outside.

The hidden moments that reveal who Cruz really was

Cruz repeatedly refuses to reveal the location of his will to Catalina and Teresa, openly mocking their transparent greed.

Cruz recalls charging desperate peasants high-interest loans on stolen land and using his newspaper to destroy political enemies.

It is revealed that Cruz did not meet Regina romantically but raped her after a battle, though both later maintained a comforting fiction.

Cruz recalls discovering that Catalina has been secretly sheltering the priest Father Paéz in the basement of their family home.

An anonymous operative persuades Cruz that a man must always align himself with the most powerful side in order to survive.

The reader learns for the first time that Cruz's persistent memory of crossing a river on horseback involves his son Lorenzo.

Gonzalo Bernal tells Cruz about his wealthy father Gamaliel and his sister Catalina while the two men share a prison cell.

Cruz violently beats Gonzalo Bernal unconscious after Gonzalo's crude remarks about sex trigger an overwhelming memory of Regina.

Cruz's affair with Laura is interrupted when Catalina unexpectedly calls Laura's apartment while Cruz is there with her.

Doctors hovering over Cruz discuss the danger of administering morphine and whisper their suspicions about the onset of gangrene.

Cruz silently regrets abandoning the wounded soldier, rejecting Laura's proposal, and sending Lorenzo away to the Cocuya hacienda.

An acute surge of pain pulls Cruz back to half-consciousness as a doctor announces that an operation will soon be necessary.

The narrator reveals that Cruz was born of the rape of Lunero's sister Isabel by the landowner Atanasio Manchaca.

Young Cruz shoots the drunken estate owner Pedro from the bushes, believing him to be the man who will take Lunero away.

Cruz's dissolving consciousness lists the sensory memories of his lifetime and insists, for the last time, that his life had reason for being.

Beneath the public story of Artemio Cruz lies a series of private revelations that reframe everything the reader thinks they know. The tender romance with Regina is unmasked as a violent rape, and Cruz's celebrated moment of military courage is exposed as a cowardly deception he never corrected. An anonymous operative delivers the creed that will define Cruz's entire life—always side with power—while Gonzalo Bernal unknowingly hands Cruz the key to his future fortune. Cruz's doctors whisper of gangrene and morphine as his body collapses, and Cruz himself confesses in his own interior voice the choices he most regrets making. The pool ends not with death but with a final, fragmented affirmation: even as his mind dissolves and his memories scatter, Cruz insists that his life had reason for being.