In the presence of all the members of the permanent commission and following the initiative of Paulina Tardegarda, congressional representative of the state of Hidalgo, the members of the commission have unanimously voted in favor of you, Nicolás Valdivia, currently serving as interior secretary, to assume the functions of the chief executive of the country, in the capacity of acting president.
The Congress of the Union, which I have convened in an extraordinary session in its faculty as electoral college, has unanimously ratified the aforementioned decision and, as such, you, don Nicolás Valdivia, are hereby invested as Acting President of the United Mexican States effective as of this date and until the date of the constitutional change of powers on the first day of December of the year 2024.
I would like to extend my congratulations to you, as well as my invitation to assume your position in a solemn ceremony on the fifth day of May of this year at five in the afternoon. I would also like to take the opportunity, Mr. President, to offer the assurance of my highest esteem and my best wishes for the success of the appointment that the nation has bestowed upon you.
Onésimo Canabal
PRESIDENT, HONORABLE CONGRESS OF THE UNION
61
JESÚS RICARDO MAGÓN TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA
Mission accomplished, Mr. President. With the authority you lend me, I find all doors wide open. Even the doors of a fortress like the one at San Juan de Ulúa, that castle to which you sent me because you can trust me, because I answer only to you, because I hold your secrets and because if I betray you I betray myself.
“Only you can do me this immense favor,” you said to me, Nicolás. “There’s no one else I can trust.”
With sadness I looked at your sadness. It was almost as if you were saying to me, “This is the last favor I’ll ask of you. After this, if that’s what you want, we won’t see each other again! . . .”
Instead, you said, “You’re going to drink from the most bitter chalice of all.”
You looked at me with an intolerable air of philosophical complicity. (Oh, how I have begun to identify and despise your tics.)
“Drink it down to the bottom. This act is the culmination of the political education I promised you on your pigeon-infested rooftop. Do you remember? Set off on your own path, if you want. Go back to being a long-haired anarchist, if that’s what you want. Your paideia is complete.”
If only you’d sent me alone, Nicolás. That was my one consolation. I’ll do what he asks me, I said to myself. When I accepted the pact with this devil disguised as an angel, which you are, Nicolás Valdivia, I knew in my heart of hearts I couldn’t avoid a final test, that “test of God” to which the old Norse heroes were subjected. Afterward I’d leave in a Viking ship. Even if the ship burned like a funeral pyre and I were the sacrificial victim. . . .
I was going to a funeral. But it was my own funeral. You’ve tested my loyalty to the point of making me a murderer. Your armed thug. And despite everything, look at how things are, look at what twins you and I’ve become, in the way we speak, walk, dress. . . . You Pygmalionized me completely, Nicolás Valdivia, you turned me into the mirror that you needed in order to feel secure, to feel that you, too, were young, intelligent, beautiful, rebellious. I’ve been your clone—in the way I talk, the way I walk . . . and now, in the way I kill.
“Is it necessary?” I dared to ask you, recovering some of that old rebelliousness that you crushed with equal measures of passion and tyranny. . . .
“We can’t go on living with a ghost.”
“No. You can’t go on living with a ghost, Nicolás. Don’t generalize.”
“All right. I can’t live with a ghost.”
You chewed on those words like a bull until you belched in my face, “A restless ghost.”
You made me believe that I was going to the Ulúa dungeon alone. “Nobody will know but the two of us.”
You didn’t have to say any more. You and I always keep our secrets.
One by one, the prison guards opened the heavy metal doors for me, each one closing behind me like a symphony of iron, like in those old black-and-white James Cagney films that we loved to watch late at night, you and I. A melody of metal that I heard for the first and last time.
But it was just me. Me, with my own name, Jesús Ricardo Magón, son of an archivist and a baker; sole inhabitant of a utopia of pigeons and words; avid reader of Rousseau and Bakunin and Andreyev; the Anarchist of the Clouds; the Tarzan of the Rooftops; long hair and no more clothes than a pair of torn jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt. Stained.
There I was, the pure young man who was going to depose all the corrupt tyrants, standing in front of the prison cell of Tomás Moctezuma Moro inside the San Juan de Ulúa Castle—the purest hero, the incorruptible politician who was so very irritating to everyone, and intolerable to you. A restless ghost, did you say? So restless that he could turn you into a scheming, weak person—one more over-ambitious, vulgar political arriviste. Is that why you feared Moro, because of the brutal contrast between his personality and yours? Was he such a threat to you, even in prison?
Tell me, have you thought about it? Even dead, might he still be a threat to you, my love?
And there I was, standing in front of the door to Moro’s cell, almost agreeing with what you said: “There’s no such thing as an anarchist who doesn’t eventually turn into a terrorist. Your language is impotent, so you compensate with criminal action. Quod erat demonstratum.”
I accepted it. It’s a crime, but a crime of state. Weren’t all the anarchists’ acts of terror against the kings, presidents, and empresses of the Belle Epoque? Don’t smile. Haven’t you read Conrad’s Under Western Eyes?
“Women, children, and revolutionists hate irony.”
Anarchists don’t have the right to humor. Not even black humor, Mr. President?
I stopped in front of Tomás Moctezuma Moro’s cell. I was about to go in, to kill that symbol of legitimacy and purity that so many people find uncomfortable.
That was when, just behind me, I heard faint steps, as light as a butterfly. The cell door opened and I turned away from the infernal stench, as if that subterranean tunnel were the road to hell itself, the meeting place of all demons, this underground tunnel beneath the Castle of San Juan de Ulúa, its ceilings dripping not just with saltwater but liquefied blood, blood so old that it had become part of the universal currents of the oceans, the blood of hungry dogs and drowned sharks and hanged pirates and mermaid whores, and in that tunnel were vast jungles of seaweed and tightly shut oysters with baroque pearls. All this I felt pounding inside my head, Nicolás. The sunken, watery crypt of Ulúa, and I was going to have to walk through it alone, no one else would have this wretched experience but me.
No one but you and I would know what happened on that evening in May in the dungeons under the Ulúa Castle.
“Good evening, young man,” the greasy creature said to me. His presence engulfed me, like the smell of rancid pig’s fat. He was breathing in and out, in a stinking gasp, his voice both sleepy and threatening, like the voice of a sleepwalker who doesn’t know what he’s doing. . . .
A fetid odor emanated from his body, even from his sickly eyes— and from his insolent hand brazenly holding a Colt .45 automatic that seemed like a natural extension of his arm.
He wore black gloves.
Even in the darkness of the tunnel his raccoon eyes blazed with insanity.
“Come on, what are you waiting for, you idiot?” he called out, shoving the barrel of the gun into my ribs.
“I . . . I thought I was alone,” I stammered.
“Alone? The crabs in Tecolutilla—now, they’re alone, and they walk backward. But me and you, my friend, we’re going to walk forward now.”
“I don’t want witnesses,” I said, summoning up my courage. “I thought it was just supposed to be me.”
“Yeah, so did I,” laughed the legendary strongman from Tabasco, Humberto Vidales, also known as “Dark Hand”—as if yo
u, Nicolás, didn’t know he was going to be my partner in crime. “But the new president’s clever, he wants two witnesses for every crime. Even if both of them are guilty. That way, he says, one cancels out the other. As if murderers were marbles—same color, same size—that you could just swap, one for the other,” he said, laughing monstrously and expelling another gust of that sickly breath that could have awakened the dead.
Vidales opened the door to the cell.
Tomás Moctezuma Moro was asleep.
The famous nopal mask covered his face.
“He never takes it off, not even to sleep,” the obliging warden had said to me.
He didn’t want anyone to be able to tell what he was feeling, to detect tenderness or passion, to see the “still life” of his inner world, Nicolás, the “cold wounds,” as we put it one day here in Veracruz—but in very different circumstances.
Vidales sensed what I was feeling.
“Don’t be sentimental. I know what you’re thinking. It’s better like this, while he’s sleeping, don’t you think? He won’t even know. More charitable, wouldn’t you say?”
He cackled.
“Only nuns are charitable. That’s what my old mentor Tomás Garrido always said, governor like me of Tabasco. He’s got his memorial stone in the Arch of the Revolution. You and me, boy, we’ll be lucky if we get ourselves a little brick in the Arch of the Transition, in the service of Lady Democracy. . . .”
Again he laughed in his sinister way and nudged the back of the sleeping Tomás Moctezuma Moro with his foot. As quick as lightning, the Man in the Nopal Mask was awake and on his feet, peering out at us through the terrible slit in the mask that was like a metal gash. Moro stood still, like a heroic statue. Serene and unshakable. A statue—it was frightening, as if he were dead before he’d died.
Vidales fired.
Moro didn’t speak.
He fell on his face, as it were.
There was no display of emotion.
He didn’t cry, “Murderers!”
He didn’t beg for mercy.
He didn’t say a word.
We heard the dry sound of the iron mask hitting the floor.
That was how Tomás Moctezuma Moro died for the second time.
That, Mr. President, is how the ghost of Banquo was laid. Only it wasn’t Macbeth who occupied the empty seat of power. Because although it ended as it did in the Shakespeare play, this drama smacked of Veracruz, Mexico City, and Tabasco, as “Dark Hand” Vidales pointed out.
“Very clever, this new president,” he said, smiling and offering me a cigar. “I don’t turn you in and you don’t turn me in, right?”
He gave me an ugly look.
“Don’t forget—if anything happens to me I’ve got my dynasty of Nine Evil Sons to take revenge. Who’ve you got, smartass?”
Now he smiled.
“Go on, take it. It’s a Cumanguillo. I don’t go around offering these cigars to just anybody.”
He glanced down at Moro’s bleeding body.
“Get out of here. And don’t forget: this didn’t happen and neither of us was here. I’m in Villahermosa celebrating Son Number Eight’s eighteenth birthday. What about you, you little bastard?”
He closed the cell door and we were out in the eternal cold of the Ulúa labyrinth. There was no end to his conversation.
“You know who committed this crime?”
I shook my head, disquieted.
“One-Eyed Filiberto and don Chencho Abascal.”
“Who?” I asked idiotically.
Dark Hand laughed.
“One-Eyed Filiberto and don Chencho. They commit all my crimes. They’re invisible. No one will find them, because I made them up.” He stopped laughing.
“Don’t you forget. I’m not just the governor, I’m the boss. And when I die, I told you, I’ve got Nine Evil Sons to carry on the killing. We’re a dynasty, and we have our own motto: ‘Stone by stone and hit by hit, the Vidales men win with grit and spit.’ ”
And he went, leaving behind an aroma of Cumanguillo cigar and narcotic weed.
Don Jesús Reyes Heroles was right when he said that barbaric Mexico dozes but never dies, and wakes up furious at the slightest provocation.
Thank you, dear president, for making me see that with my own eyes.
Thank you for letting me be the person I was before I met you.
Thank you for proving to me that the anarchist always, inevitably, becomes a terrorist in the end.
Thank you for making me see that the doctrinaire rebel will inevitably make his insurrection a reality.
And watch out, Nicolás Valdivia, because now I’m a murderer.
And my next victim will be you.
62
NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN
My beautiful lady, I don’t want to seem insistent, but I do feel it’s time for you to honor the promise you made to me when we first met. I am what I am and that was your condition, wasn’t it?
“Nicolás Valdivia: I’ll be yours when you’re president of Mexico.” That’s why I’m at your window. I adore your coquettish ways. Before you open the doors of your house to me will we be repeating our initial rite? That’s fine. I’ll go along with your whims. You have the right to ask what you want of me. Your prophecy came true. I’ve arrived, as you so boldly foretold in January. Or should I say promised.
I realize that I owe my position not to María del Rosario Galván, but rather to a chain of events that nobody could have predicted at the beginning of this fateful (or very fortunate) year. Once again, need is a matter of chance. Don’t think that I’m any less grateful for that. On the contrary. I came to you with no commitments, pure and free. I have you to thank for my political education. I’m the star student who has come to give his teacher her prize. Might I now complete my erotic education in her bed?
I’ll follow your instructions. Tonight I’ll return to the woods surrounding your house and from there I’ll watch you take off your clothes in front of the lit window. Give me a sign. Turn off the other lights, light a candle, as if you were in one of those old mystery films—and I’ll come to the “beds of battle, soft field.”
Anxiously yours, N.
63
MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA
“In the dark night, a beautiful stranger . . .” as the song goes. You, a stranger? Someone I don’t know? You’re my creation, my clay, my male Galatea. Yes, you do owe me. A lot. Everything, I’d say. Everything. Except the final prize. The jackpot. You owe that to people less significant. You used the dwarfs to get where you are. Why? Were you afraid of me? Were you afraid that if you owed me everything I’d turn you into nothing?
You’ve learned a lot, apart from knowing whom to trust. All we can do, Nicolás, is study character as much if not more than actions. What did Gregorio Marañón say about Tiberius? That power corrupted him. No! He was always evil. But, you see, the light of power is so powerful that it reveals what we’ve always been but have kept hidden in the shadows.
Your power and my power reveal our true selves. A couple of opportunists. Gangsters. Blackmailers. Predators. Criminals. Surely both of us know that the most ambitious person is always the one who dramatizes himself the least.
Be careful, then, of the least conspicuous. I told you this at the beginning so that you wouldn’t be taken in by Tácito de la Canal’s pretensions—he was the most transparent politician I’ve ever known. The only thing you could trust was his untrustworthiness. How could a hypocrite like Tácito have become president, a man who pretended to be on the brink of abject poverty so that one of us would rescue him?
And poor Seneca—he was the anti-Tácito. He wore his intelligence on his sleeve. He was what the fastidious English most deplore. Too clever by half. Too much brilliance blinds those who live in the shadows of mediocrity. Seneca offended people with his intelligence, just as Tácito offended people with his hypocrisy.
Seneca criticized himself: “My principles
are solid, but my practice is terrible. All I can do now is grow old and cynical.”
No. He committed suicide. Despite not being married, marriage being the surest path to suicide.
César León. There you have him, discreet with the people who were useful to him, but brutally indiscreet with those he despised. Indiscretion won out. In his heart, he was a sentimental person. Outside politics, though, he felt displaced. As if the land he lived in as president was the only land that existed. In a play this would have been his closing speech: “I spoke to Destiny like an equal. I defied Fortune. I said: I dare you, bitch. I’m invulnerable to goodness. And better still, I’m invulnerable to evil.”
Did you know he always carries a miniature guillotine in his pocket, and that he plays with it the way other men play with their penises?
President Lorenzo Terán, on the other hand, was too discreet. He said very little or nothing at all. Yes, he did have perfect muscular reflexes. That was why he was so good at handling public relations. He knew that in Mexico the forces of nature are on our side. If it isn’t an earthquake, it’s a flood. Or a drought or a hurricane. In Mexico natural disasters get turned into public profits. All a president has to do is make an appearance at the site of a disaster and disappear again. That’s how he avoids having to deal with the deeper issues.
But tell me, has there ever been anyone more inconspicuous than Onésimo Canabal, president of Congress, that fugitive of the public rest rooms? Mediocre, submissive, embarrassed by his ugly physique and humble background. But wasn’t Jesus born in a stable? Nobody would ever imagine that the real kingmaker of this succession would be poor old Onésimo Canabal.
Nor did anyone know that he was conspiring with your good friend Paulina Tardegarda, a viper capable of repainting paradise with the colors of hell. And I thought it was I who was the double of Madame de Maintenon, the princes’ tutor who ended up marrying the king! Is that what I should do, retire like Louis XIV’s other lover, Madame de Montespan, to a convent to train young nuns to be better courtesans than I? Or do you think that with your current power, Nico, you can somehow prevent the succession process, the 2024 elections that I swear will take Bernal Herrera to the presidency? Yes, Bernal Herrera. For the good of the country, Nicolás. Because Bernal is discreet—that is, if the word “discretion” means prudence, caution, tact, good judgment as well as the measured, intelligent use of uncontested force.