Destiny and Desire (43 page)

WILL
VALENTÍN
PEDRO
Carrera go to Max Monroy’s offices and residence in the Utopia building on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga? Or would Max Monroy again go to the president’s residence and office in Los Pinos?

“Let him come,” advised the novice María del Rosario Galván.

“Why?” asked Carrera, prepared to admire the young woman’s beauty in exchange for excusing her errors and disregarding her opinions.

“Well, because you are … the president …”

Carrera smiled. “Do you know what ancient kings did to exercise their rights?”

“No.”

“Every year they went from village to village. They didn’t ask the village to come to see them. They went to the village, do you understand what I’m saying, beautiful?”

“Of course.” She attempted to recover her composure. “If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad goes to the mountain.”

“Exactly right, babe.”

The president smiled indulgently and went to the neutral territory approved by his representatives and Max Monroy’s. The Castle of Chapultepec, now the National Museum of History and the setting for Boy Heroes, Hapsburg Empires, and Porfirista Dictatorships. Monroy acceded to arriving first and viewing the tawny panorama of the city from the heights as if he were viewing non-existence itself. Why pretend to be master of nothing when one was master of everything? On the other hand, the president came to the esplanade of the palace as if he were a boy hero about to throw himself into the void, wrapped in the flag. As if the throne of the dynasty that ruled Mexico the longest (more than two centuries)—the Hapsburgs—were waiting for him. As if he were prepared to govern for three decades because listen, María del Rosario, you have to
come here thinking you’re eternal, if not, you lose your six years the first day …

To see or not to see the arrival of the powerful entrepreneur Max Monroy? Act distracted, be surprised, greet each other, embrace?

“Ah!”

The embrace of the two men was recorded by cameras and microphones before Valentín Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy walked ten paces to distance themselves from publicity and bodyguards. María del Rosario Galván and Asunta Jordán, practically identical in their professional attire of tailored suit, dark stockings, and high heels, blocked the press and held off the guests.

“Truce, my dear Max?” The president’s smile dissipated the capital’s smog. “A meeting of two souls?
Primus inter pares?
Or pure show, my esteemed friend? An Embrace of Acatempan ending the wars of independence?”

“No, my dear president. Another battle.” Monroy did not smile.

“If you divide you don’t rule,” Carrera reflected, trying to catch Monroy’s eye.

“And if you rule by force, you divide but govern the parts.”

“Each to his own philosophy.” Carrera almost sighed. “The good thing is that when there’s danger, we know how to come together.”

“Understand it in terms of mutual convenience,” Monroy said with great suavity.

“Does this mean I can count on you, Max?”

“You can always count.” Monroy managed to smile. “What you don’t understand, Valentín Pedro, is that my policies are part of your power. Except your power lasts six years. My policies do not occur every six years.”

“And so?” the president said, halfway between amiable and falsely surprised.

“And so everything ends up contracting, understand that. The six-year term contracts. A life contracts. An era contracts.”

“What?” Carrera exclaimed in surprise (or pretending to be surprised). “Look how my belly’s growing and my hair’s falling out. Don’t kid me.”

“Of course,” Monroy continued, very calm. “With my policies I
achieve what you’re missing. If we stayed only with your policies, we’d stay with half-measures. You believe in circuses without the bread. I believe in bread with the circuses. I believe in information and try to communicate that to the majority. You believe in conspiracy reserved for a minority. That’s why I believe that, in the long run, I can manage without you but you can’t get along without me.”

“Monroy, listen—”

“Don’t interrupt. You and I never see each other. I’ll use the occasion to say a person has to deserve my respect.”

“And admiration?”

“For superstars.”

“And esteem?”

“I’m a patient man. Everyone has gone. And those who remain ask me for favors. Our individual histories don’t count. Who remembers President Lagos Cházaro? Who could have been Secretary of Finance under Generalísimo Santa Anna?”

What a strange look the politician directed at the businessman.

“We’re part of the collective aggregate. Don’t go around thinking anything else.”

“What are you saying, Max?”

“Why am I telling you this? Well, we don’t see each other very often.”

Asunta—who tells me the preceding to the degree she heard something, guessed more, and read lips—says that Carrera sighed as if Monroy’s words sealed a previously mentioned reality. The president wasn’t going to change his policies of national distraction only because his official operative, Jericó, had betrayed him by taking advantage of the opportunity to find his own power base that turned out to be perfectly illusory, and Monroy would not abandon his of giving information media to citizens. The crisis perhaps demonstrated that the better informed the citizen, the fewer opportunities demagogic illusion would have.

“Or official carnivals?” asked Carrera, as if he had read (Asunta believes he did) Monroy’s mind.

“Look, Mr. President: What you and I have in common is possible control of the real communication media in this day and age. Insurgents
once believed that by taking the central telephone offices they would take power. Do you know something? My telephone operators are all blind. Blind, you understand? In this way they hear better. Nobody hears better than a blind man. On the other hand, a thousand eyes are in thousands of cellular devices, the mobile phones that replace television, radio, the press. I am giving all Mexicans, whether or not they can read and write, a message, a family, a past, an inheritance. They constitute the real national and international information network.”

“You may be right,” Carrera went on. “Just whistle once so the bird can hear you.”

“You underestimate people.” Monroy didn’t bother to look at him. “It’s your eternal error.”

“When there’s no paper, you clean yourself with whatever’s at hand.” Carrera made a vulgar gesture, like someone using a medieval
torche-cul
.

Monroy didn’t look at him. “Just don’t ignore what you need to survive.”

Carrera raised his shoulders. “You see, it wasn’t necessary to fire a single shot.”

“The fact is the fortress was empty.” Monroy threw cold water on his spirits.

“No, the truth is you’re very clever. You just hide it.” Carrera let his admiration for Max show. Max looked at Carrera with a flattering lie.

“This poor boy … your collaborator …”

“Don’t fuck with me, Max.” The president did not stop smiling. “We both win if you don’t fuck around.”

“Fine, your employee. His name is …?”

“Jericó.”

“Jericó.” Monroy did not smile. “Who knows what old-fashioned manual he read.”

(
Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution
by Curzio Malaparte, murmured María del Rosario Galván at a distance: Napoleon, Trotsky, Pilsudski, Primo de Rivera, Mussolini …)

“Let’s not be afraid of a gang insurrection like this one, Mr.
President, or an impossible revolution like earlier ones. You should be afraid of the tyrant who comes to power through the vote and turns into an elected dictator. That’s the one to fear.”

(I thought, of course, of Antigua Concepción, Max Monroy’s mother, and her epic, revolutionary version of a history—was it buried along with her?)

“Dishonor,” murmured Max Monroy.

“What?” The president heard only what he wanted to hear.

“Dishonor,” Monroy repeated, and after pretending to admire the landscape: “Let’s not engage in minor intrigues. Let’s exercise irony.”

“What?”

“Irony. Irony.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I mean it’s very difficult under any circumstances to maintain power.”

“Isn’t that what I’m telling you?”

“You don’t say.”

An intolerant minority, Jericó told me, that’s the key for coming to power, you have to energize the base with the example of an energetic minority, you have to favor the prejudices of the resentful, you have to demonize power: Saints don’t know how to govern.

What did Jericó expect? The president, quite simply, made use of the army. Soldiers occupied highways, bridges, large houses, food depositories, munitions depositories, major intersections, banks: The army surrounded Jericó’s followers as if they were mice in a trap. They prevented them from leaving, they gave them an ephemeral empire around the Zócalo that did not even interrupt the work of Filopáter and the other scribes on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Fireworks, smoke, folk dances, an exceptional holiday, an obligatory alliance between Monroy and Carrera, as ephemeral as Jericó’s frustrated rebellion.

The groups gathered together by Jericó were isolated in the center of the capital between the Zócalo and Minería, they never managed to communicate with the supposedly rebellious and certainly wronged masses, Jericó had operated on the basis of a fantastic ideology
and a revocable power: the ideology decanted from his readings and his position inside the ogre’s mouth: the office of the president.

Now I listened, thought, saw, and felt a profound sadness, as if Jericó’s defeat were mine. As if the two of us had lived a great intellectual dream that, in order to exist, did not tolerate the test of reality. In the final analysis, were my friend and I barely hangers-on of anarchy, never makers of revolution? Did ideas we had read, heard, assimilated lose all value if we put them into practice? Was our confusion of ideas and life so great? Didn’t those ideas resist the breath of life, collapsing like statues made of dust as soon as reality touched them? Were we becoming illusions?

The gang of the Mariachi and Sara P., Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas returned to the San Juan de Aragón Prison. Miguel Aparecido was waiting for them there.

The president withdrew first from the Castle, muttering to himself (Asunta heard him), “In the old days the hangman sold the boiled flesh of his victims,” and Max, who followed seconds later, remarked to Asunta: “It’s one thing to be based in reality. It’s another to create reality.”

And right after that: “Let’s go, the sun’s very strong and in the light of day one makes many mistakes.”

The president simply sighed: “Making decisions is very boring. I swear …”

He was on his way out.

“MISERABLE
OLD
FOOL
. Useless old bastard. Damn mummy.”

Miguel Aparecido punched the wall of his cell, speaking in a wounded, vengeful tone of voice, sonorous and stifled, as if rather than words coming out of his mouth there were animals: insects, rodents, turkeys, grebes, bustards, and mandrakes, so intimate to his mind was the word and so desperate was it to find ways out, similes, survivals.

“Lock up a man whose hands are tied with a cat, then ask him to defend himself.”

He looked at me with ferocity.

“He’ll defend himself with his teeth. There’s no other way.”

What had disturbed him so much? He had won. The criminals released through Jericó’s influence were back behind bars and I wouldn’t guarantee their future. Jericó’s transient power—his whim—had done something more than free a gang of bandits. It had violated the will of Miguel Aparecido, the master of the prison, the top dog, the big fucker inside these walls. Miguel felt mocked.

Still, there was something in his rage that went beyond Jericó, the flight from and return to prison of the criminals, the mockery of the very will of the man with the olive skin and yellow eyes and self-willed muscles, kept hard and flexible thanks to the discipline of imprisonment, as if the days and months and years of prison counted in a rogue’s exercises, his knee flexions, air punches, arms extended in extremely hard flexion against prison walls, imaginary jump ropes, like a boxer who prepares for the big fight, overcoming through an act of will the noise of the city that filters through the corridors and catacombs of the prison.

He grabbed the newspaper. “Look,” he said, poking at the image of Max Monroy and, in passing, that of the president. “Look.”

I looked.

“Do you know he’s never allowed his picture to be taken?”

“The president? He’s always in the papers, on television, in displays … All that’s left for him is to announce the lottery.”

“Monroy,” said Miguel, as if all the bitterness in the world were concentrated in that name. A yellowish saliva ran along the prisoner’s lips. The tiger devoured by other bloodthirsty beasts in the Chapultepec zoo appeared, duplicated, in his eyes. “Monroy … motherfucker, at least he used to be discreet enough not to be photographed, the decency not to let himself be seen, the old bastard son of a bitch mother …”

I confess my discretion. Or my cowardice. I didn’t jump to the defense of my old friend from the graveyard, the “bitch mother” of Max Monroy, Antigua Concepción.

“And worse, even worse,” Miguel said syllable by syllable, “even worse is that son of the great bitch whore, Max Monroy’s son.”

“Who is he?” I said, innocent (but uneasy?).

This is the story Miguel Aparecido told me that afternoon in a cell in the San Juan de Aragón Prison, after going on a while longer in his diatribe, the asked-for explanation and the unasked-for one as well. I felt a strange emotion: Miguel Aparecido seemed like an hourglass anxious to empty the contents of one hour into another, though anguished by the fatal flight of time. The flight of time was the evasion in his narrative and if I was his privileged listener, at that moment I still did not know to what degree, so intense, so personal, Miguel’s narration concerned me.

I thought at first he vacillated between emptiness and incoherence. I wanted to believe that at the end of the story both of us, he who was talking and I who was listening to him without saying a word, could find in ourselves something resembling compassion and from there pass on to comprehension. Now this was merely a desire (even an intention) of mine. Miguel Aparecido’s discourse took another direction.