Perhaps my effort is wasted and it is too late to begin this memoir; death surrounds me and I don’t know how much time remains. I understand now that I should have begun before, when I might have been able to do something about this death, besides these memoirs which I write for mankind, for the good of the human race and, having completed them, is not something I would have wanted to do: I never counted myself a member of that absurd organization. Rather, I considered myself a superior being, its enemy and victim, full of desire for vengeance and possessing enough power to carry it out.

Now, abandoned by all that granted me my vast power, I return to human feeling, a man like any other, fearful before the annihilation awaiting me and overcome with an irrational desire for immortality, to live beyond this pitiful clay. This is my reason for writing this memoir, despite knowing it will have served no purpose in the brief period left to me of this life. My only hope is, through it, to live beyond my death in the memory of those I've helped.

Truthfully, I've harmed no man; I’ve only caused offense through thought and desire and, if that's a sin, it's one of omission, from not devoting myself to the greater good that any man might fulfill. Because I could have been something like another Pasteur, but my hatred (which I now see was pointless) and my thirst for power led me down other roads. I've certainly never received any benefit from man and even now, with death undeniably near, I can't if I did right or wrong and I feel no repentance for having done what I did. When I arrived at the moment of deciding between compassion and my own ambition, I felt driven by hatred for society, by the resentment I carried within, by memory of all the sorrow and selfishness I've seen and suffered among men. Even now, so close to death, stripped of all my power, feeling like a new person, I am unable to say I love mankind. I find not a single reason in all my past for loving men, despite being one of them and arising from their world. And so I sit here waiting for death, in the dismal lamplight, while the jungle outsides trembles and howls; and I write this memoir knowing full well I've only done so out of an innate sense of human solidarity and a fervent desire to immortalize myself in the memory of those I have condemned.

If my sole interest were goodwill for mankind, I would tell my adventure in a precise manner, indicating the danger that weighs so heavily on the human race, suggesting its remedy and saying nothing of my own particular life. But, I don't write out of a charitable impulse: I write because I want to be known and never forgotten; I write so my name, the one I've placed on the first page of this book, survives in this world. The security of a long survival through my work calms a bit the terrible fear that invades me as I wait for death.

The important part of my life is very brief: only 4 years, from my 45th until my current 49. Everything prior to this was only an instruction in sorrow; and this sorrow is the reason, the motive, behind all of my actions during these four crucial years. But I don't want to recount what happened before. I've put my name and country on the cover of this notebook, and it's well enough if the scholars reconstruct my life until they lose themselves in the swamp of that jungle. It's enough to say that in 44 years of previous life, I only reaped sorrow. Sorrow and hate.

Leaving in search of a more complete solitude, I crossed the mountains until I came to the filthy banks of the Usumacinta at San Quintin, a place of hate and death, encircled by jungle, where disgusting and feverish men sought for the precious wood and rubber they'd bring to the cities, equally repugnant; and so they carried this decay in their souls and, wherever they go, they'll never find more more than what they carry inside.

There, I came to know the real jungle and delved into its thickets, traversing its muddy streams in my lonely canoe, looking for some mode of life that would enable me to preserve my solitude, that would save me from horrifying contact with man. There I learned of the Destroyer Jungle, the Enemy Jungle -- the jungle that sweats death but better, more gracefully and more sweetly, than the cities. Jungle, shelterer of disgrace, hider of sorrows and hate, holy jungle. To live in it, one must make themselves subject to its laws and reconcile oneself to being a mere idolater among so much magnificence, agreeing to leave at one side human arrogance, a mere admirer, a humble servant, growing in the shade of the jungle's benevolence.

I lived thusly on the banks of the sluggish Usumacinta, inside a lowly palm hut with nothing more than a hammock, rifle, and a number of old books, eaten away by humidity and time. Sometimes I went to the village to sell tiger skins and heron feathers I'd collected in my exploits and, with the profits, purchase a few rounds of ammunition and bottles of liquor with which I'd withdraw by some stream to my hut, devoting myself to drinking and forgetting my shameful human condition. Life was, in this way, bearable. My sole torment were the mosquitoes that fattened themselves during the night on my blood and, by day, asechaban [lurked] among the shade of the trees, forcing me to head in the direction of the exposed beaches where the sun, plummeting across my back, ached like an immense whiplash. During these endless nights of insomnia, I'd recite the verse of some poet in my head, who had also endured this unbearable agony, a poet awash in the jungle's sorrow, in its horror and slow death:

I do not know where the jungle learned
the art of tears;
I know of this anguish,
the machete's impotence
against the murderous and fertile earth
laying awake in this starless night
cast out beside the river,
beneath this shroud resonant with mosquitoes.

Perhaps the best solution would have been to die. I remember one morning while trying to awaken from a drunken night in the streets of Tumbalá, a man, prodding me with his foot, said:

“To live as you live, it would be better to die."

His words imbedded themselves in me, attacking during the night, when the mosquitoes would torment me and I didn’t have beside me the consoling force of alcohol. Many times I came close to the shores of the river and meditated on the ease of walking into its depths until the current took me in its cold arms. But the coleteo [swish] of some alligator, as if predicting my thoughts, would fill me with such terror that I'd run to hide in my hammock, where daybreak found me sobbing. Other times I meditated on the simplicity of a bullet, but fear, the terrible fear of not being, having never been anything, restrained my hand, already pressed upon the rifle’s trigger.

Throughout my tragedies, those I haven't spoken of, my drunkenness, my hate and sorrow, I had preserved this terrible desire to exist which compels me now to take up the pen in order to present my secret to the world. When I was young, I dreamed of glory gained in battle, and my childhood dreams were filled with heroism. Later, I wanted a name and place in the world of letters, but all doors closed to me, although I know well that in my alienated spirit held the soul of a man who could write wondrous things. How strange that now, after so many years, tragedies and disasters, so much grandiosity and power, here, in the muddy banks of the Metasboc, with death digging in its claws – “Put your foot in the stirrup already," Cervantes might have said – I once more entrust my immortality to the pen.

For four years I lived the life of a hunter, having lost the desire to leave the jungle, not out of love, because I had become accustomed to its obscure life, nor because I had resigned myself to this slow death, but rather because the alcohol and the anxiety, the malaria and the moral misery, had robbed me of all ability to desire and act. I was like the stream water that flows slowly toward the river: filthy, dead, without volition.

I wandered five years through the Usumacinta jungle, delving into its thickets, reaching places unknown to the white man, going far past the mysterious Metasboc, until coming to the ponds of Petén, where I later returned to the villages with my cargo of pelts, feathers, and misery.

Sometimes I set up my canopy beside a Caribbean tribe of unfortunate Lacandon Indians, forgotten at the center of the jungle, who knew little more of civilization than liquor's demons and the continual robbery of merchants. There I met Yellow Parrot and Night Raccoon, two venerable chiefs of the tribe, great shamans of I-don’t-know-what already forgotten gods, the only true friends I ever had.

Already there is nothing left to say of these five years of idleness among the streams and foul-smelling lagoons. They should be lost along with my irrelevant previous years. Time is short and it is best to speak of what matters.