We’re going to fight, you and I, Nicolás Valdivia, because you can’t fool me. You’ve become merely a substitute president until 2024. Did you think I couldn’t sense your ambition? You can’t succeed yourself. But you can immortalize yourself. That’s what I fear. A colossal scheme of yours to stay in power.
You have an arsenal of pretexts. The economic crisis, internal revolutionary uprisings, foreign invasion, power vacuums. What won’t you do to keep yourself in power! Everything short of aspiring to the Nobel Peace Prize. And that ambition will wound you irredeemably, for sure. That aside, I fear you. This is the struggle now. Bernal Herrera and I will do whatever is necessary to make you relinquish the presidency in 2024. Whatever is necessary—even the impossible. Just as you will do all that is necessary and even impossible to stay on the Eagle’s Throne forever.
You’re not Lorenzo Terán, a good and democratic man who was not in love with power. Ah, we always need a dignified, noble figure who can redeem the wretchedness of the rest of us. Now that man is Bernal Herrera, as it was Lorenzo Terán before, but he was ill. You think you’ll go on forever. You do have one virtue, I admit. You stand for new blood. But you’ll be old soon enough—as soon as you begin to spill the blood of others, something you’ll do if you want to stay in power. But remember the price of blood. Tlatelolco, October 2, 1968. It lasted one night but cast a long shadow.
Today you’re lauded for being young and clean. A reason for hope. Worthy of your position. But power will corrupt you in the end. Take it from me. You don’t know how to resist temptation. I know you. You don’t know when to stop. And you’ve proven as much, efficiently and perhaps a bit hastily, ever since you became president. You got rid of Tácito, César León’s back in exile, Cícero Arruza has been assassinated, Andino Almazán publicly cuckolded, and Moro put to rest forever with a lying-in-state, his body riddled with bullets from that little episode in Veracruz that robbed the Old Man of his raison d’être because without the Moro secret he’s just a pathetic old man playing dominoes. However, you still have to face the cabinet you inherited from Lorenzo Terán. And the local bosses in the rest of the country. Let’s see how you do—I’ll be watching.
You know, Nicolás, a man can cease to act in politics, but the consequences of his political actions are there to stay. You do know—and that will be your dilemma. You’ll cover the holes of your mistakes (and your crimes?) but for every hole you cover up, three more will be exposed. That’s what they call “consequences.” That explains President Terán’s passivity. He didn’t want “consequences.” He wanted to retire and live in peace. Then he got blood cancer, leukemia combined with pulmonary emphysema. And yet he still always feared that the “consequences” of his actions—or his inaction, which is also a kind of action, perhaps the most dangerous kind of all—would plague him far beyond his days on the Eagle’s Throne. Destiny intervened. We’ll have to wait and see how he goes down in history.
History. You haven’t made much yet, Valdivia. Remember that you’ll be governing a destructive country that protects itself and deceives itself with false psychology and a sensitivity, born of suffering, to art and death. You tried to court the middle ground. You had no other choice when you were a nobody. But now you harbor, and I admit I encouraged it, what the Germans call the dunker-instinkt, the much-misunderstood but profound desire to have power and exercise it with style.
Style makes the man, they say. Style is everything.
And beauty? Is that part of style? No. Only fools believe that. Beauty, like style, is a question of will. Beauty is also power. Look at me, my conquered one. Do you think I don’t look at myself in the mirror every morning? Without makeup? Do you think I deceive myself? I’m a coquette: I do my best to deceive the rest of the world. Did I tell you that I’m forty-five, forty-seven? I can’t remember. It’s not true. I’m forty-nine. The fact is, I have to recreate my beauty every morning, like someone painting a picture, creating a design, or perhaps more pejoratively, shaping an advertisement. Whether I’m convincing or not, I want to be admired so that I can get what I want. Admired but untouchable. I’d like to be a statue.
Do you know what a lover of mine once said to me? “The trouble with you is that you’re so beautiful on the outside, you must be appalling on the inside.”
“No,” I replied. “The trouble with beauty is that it condemns you to sex, and the trouble with sex is that even though it’s a pleasure it can’t turn bad news into good news.”
“But maybe it saves you, despite the bad things,” he said.
“I want to save myself despite all the good things,” I told him, confusing him forever and forcing him to run away from everything he didn’t understand, which was a lot.
Do you understand me, my poor little Nicolás? Look at me properly. Age is a woman’s unpunished murderer. You’re younger than I. I bet you thought you could enjoy the benefits of my maturity and perhaps be my last good fuck.
Were you stripped of your illusions yesterday, my stupid little sweetheart?
I saw you the day you were sworn in as president at San Lázaro. And I saw a dangerous smile I’d never seen before. You frightened me. It was more a smile of deception than power. The smile of a real-life villain. A smile that said, “I’ve fooled them all.” That’s when I decided to make you suffer for all that I’ve suffered, though not because you’ve done me any harm.
I decided to make you the reason for all the bad things I’d ever experienced—you were to be the bag into which I’d put my suffering, even though you weren’t the cause.
As I watched you fasten the sash with the eagle and the serpent, I realized, “Nicolás Valdivia has become great. But his love is small. He’s a man who doesn’t know how to love.”
I read you in an instant, like an open book. There’s no love in your life. Father, mother, family. Girlfriends. Lovers. You’re like an island in the middle of a huge river. Preoccupied by ambition, never creating a deep connection with anyone. Licked by the waters of the river but unable to bathe in them.
Tell me if you know of an absence of love that can’t be healed by the experience of being loved. That was my promise. I showed you the path that led to me. But you went off course. You postponed things. You humiliated me. You separated “achieving power” from “achieving power because she allowed me to.” Do you think I can forgive you for that?
I want you to suffer how I’ve suffered. See how truthful I am? See how I debase myself? See how I let myself get carried away out of passion, against the calm, better judgment of my true soul mate, Bernal Herrera? But understand one thing. I want you to suffer for all that I’ve suffered since I was born, not because you’ve done me harm. Nor because I believe for an instant that you ever loved me, or that I ever loved you.
You kept to our arrangement, our rendezvous in front of my window, just as you did in January.
Did it hurt to see me last night in the window?
Did it hurt to see me naked again?
Did it hurt to see me in the arms of another man?
Did you hear, confused with the weeping of the trees, my sighs of orgasm, my moans of pleasure?
You postponed things. Forgive me. You always told me how much you liked him. You shouldn’t have. I took him away from you. You played your cards well—all of them except that one.
Should I thank you for having introduced me to the best, most beautiful lover I’ve ever known, someone who shamelessly licks my ass, my clitoris, puts his fingers inside, and makes me come twice, with his tongue and with his cock, crying out to me, begging me to stroke his anus, which is what all men secretly wish for, to help them come faster and harder—the anus, closest to the prostate, the hole of the most secret, least confessed, least demanded pleasure.
He asks me for it.
“Your finger. Up my ass, María del Rosario. Please, make me come. . . .”
Dark, tall, muscular, tender, rough, passionate, and young . . .
What a marvelous lover you gave me, Nico
lás! From the beginning he spoke to me in the familiar!
But be very wary of him.
Jesús Ricardo Magón is convinced that you want to kill him.
This is my final piece of advice. I think you’re the one who should make sure that he doesn’t kill you.
Crimes committed out of the fear of being killed are far more common than crimes committed from a desire to kill.
Forget about me as your lover. Fear me as your political rival.
And go. You’re searching in vain for a crack in my soul. You’ll never find it because it doesn’t exist. Am I different from everyone else? Who is master of his own soul? The man who believes he is is only deluding himself. We can’t be. We are in the process of being. We don’t submit ourselves to reality. We create it. Go, little creature, mon choux. . . .
64
MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO BERNAL HERRERA
I know there’s a hint of mockery in your smile, Bernal, but there’s affection in your eyes, an affection we’ve always shared. By “always” I mean since we were young.
Since then we’ve never hidden anything from each other, you and I. We know each other’s personal history and family history, which in the end are one and the same. In fact—you know this better than anyone—the most mysterious thing, and perhaps the most exciting, is that ever since childhood we’ve learned to create an interior world, and we’ve developed a kind of double commitment: to our objective environment and to our subjective one. The exterior world changes and so does the interior. On the one hand, there are the things that are outside us and contain us; on the other are the things inside us that we contain. All of life is a struggle between these two forces. Sometimes it’s harmonious, as it’s been mostly for you. Other times it’s an uphill battle, like swimming upstream, difficult as mine’s been.
How lucky we were to have met when we were young, and to have known instantly that we each gave what the other lacked. Your steadfast nature comes from your parents. You’re the son of humble and honest social activists, Bernal and Candelaria Herrera,3 labor organizers at a factory up in the north. You owe them your solidarity with the people who most need to know that they too count and that they have the shelter of a political roof. That is the mission of the eternal left, you say, to tell people, “You’re not alone. You have a roof here.”
From your parents you also understood that purity of ideals is not enough in itself. That in order to gain half of what we want, sometimes we have to sacrifice the other half. Your parents never accepted that compromise. They were heroes of the labor movement and their sacrifice was surely not in vain. Who deceived them? Who made them cross the Rio Grande by night, making them believe they were saving a group of illegal immigrants, only to fall into the hands of the U.S. immigration service? They were shot in the back as they fled and subjected to the “Fleeing Fugitives Law,” Bernal—the unjust and searing lie—you who knew your parents, Bernal and Candelaria, so well. They never ran from anyone. They never turned their backs on anyone.
The “Fleeing Fugitives Law.” How can they call such an abominable act a law?
When we met in Paris, you told me all about your life and about how your parents had been sacrificed because of a sinister conspiracy hatched by the drug traffickers in the north, the corrupt politicians on both sides of the border—Chihuahua and Texas—and the corruptible forces of law and order in Mexico and the United States.
You told me, “I’m not going to be a pure idealist like my parents. I’m going to be able to tell the difference between the lesser evil and the greater good. I’ll serve the greater good by making concessions to the lesser evil.”
I envy you those parents, Bernal. I said it then and I’ll say it again now as I look back on the farce and tragedy that was my family life. I wasn’t born into poverty like you. I didn’t have to escape hardship as you did. On the contrary. I had to overcome wealth. The table was set. I was born into privilege. My father made me a rebel; I had to oppose him, be different from him, ignore his cynical tirades, his rather admirable lack of hypocrisy as he openly talked of his frauds, his illegal schemes, his business acumen. In politics, one must pretend. In business, one can be openly brutal and cynical.
My father frightened me so much I had to spy on him if I wanted to see him at all. I began listening in on his telephone conversations from a phone in the hall.
“Sell the fleet of old trucks to the Ascent to Heaven Company for the highest price you can. . . .”
“But Ascent to Heaven is our company, sir.”
“Exactly. We claim the capital profit as earnings and then sell shares at the highest price possible.”
“The Herreras are stirring up trouble in the north, demanding legislation for job security in your factories, sir. . . .”
“Well, let’s do the same as we did when they wanted to save that ecological mountain site full of birds and ocelots. No laws protecting the environment, no laws protecting job security, Domínguez. Buy as many legislators as you have to.”
“Buy?”
“All right, persuade. Pardon my brutality.”
“There is one legislator, pretty stubborn, who wants to pass a law that sanctions lawsuits against fraudulent investments. . . .”
“Look, Ruiz, you just worry about inflating the value of those bull-shit shares so that we can sell them and make a profit. That’s our business. Don’t confuse the issue.”
“The company in Mérida is reporting losses, sir.”
“No company of mine reports losses if I don’t want it to. With Mérida, hide them by selling the subsidiary at a high price.”
“Who is going to want to buy it?”
“We will, stupid, the company in Quintana Roo. . . .”
“How is that going to happen?”
“With a loan from us. That way we keep it in the family, our companies finance one another, we hide the losses and attract more investors. . . .”
“And what happens when we can’t do that anymore?”
“Look, Silva, only when we’ve made ten times our personal holdings, only then will we declare bankruptcy and let the shareholders take the hit. Meanwhile, I need you to make everyone think that we’re doing just terrific, take the idea and stretch it like chewing gum, as far as it’ll go, so that the shareholders keep on investing, so they don’t catch on that we’re about to go bankrupt. Understood?”
“You’re a genius, sir. . . .”
“No. My mother was the genius—she was the one who came up with the brilliant idea of giving birth to me!”
“What are we going to do with the executive bonuses this year, sir?”
“Maximize them, Rodríguez. Maximize them with share options and hide the expense so the investors don’t get wind of it. Never record options as expenses. You hold on to your millions.”
“What about the employees?”
“Fuck ’em.”
“I should warn you that Quique, your speechwriter, is getting a little out of line, he’s been going around and saying that he gives you all your ideas, sir.”
“Get rid of that ass-kissing bastard now. Take his things out of the office and put them out on the street.”
“He has been a faithful employee for twelve years. . . .”
“There’s always work out there for a good ass-kisser. . . .”
“And the investors?”
“They can go to hell.”
“And the prosecutors?”
“Don’t you go worrying about them. Don’t say a word. Nobody’s going to send us to jail. There are too many people out there who depend on us.”
My mother was better. Just like my father, she always wore black.
“I’m in mourning for Mexico. Eternal mourning,” he used to say. And so she imitated him and went even further with that funereal severity by wearing a long black skirt all the time.
Do you think you can picture me as a little girl, sitting at the dinner table between my father and mother, both wearing black from head to toe,
eating their meal without exchanging a word?
He stared at her with his wildcat eyes.
She never looked up from her plate.
The servants had learned not to make a noise.
And yet there was more hatred in my mother’s downcast eyes than in my father’s fierce scrutiny.
If there was affection it was there in my father’s yellow eyes as he looked at me—but it was guilty, cagey. Over and over again, I’d hear him rebuking my mother behind closed doors.
“You couldn’t give me an heir. You’re completely useless.”
“You may be everyone’s boss, Barroso Junior, but you can’t give orders to God. It was God’s will that she should be a girl.”
It was as if the Virgin Mary were apologizing to the Holy Spirit for having given birth to a girl.
My father’s resentment, though, ended up working in my favor. He had no male heir. The doctors had advised my mother, Casilda Galván, not to risk a second pregnancy. It made them both bitter. My father decided to educate me as if I were a boy, thinking that one day I would inherit his fortune and run his businesses. That was why I was able to study in Paris, meet you, and fall in love with you, Bernal. I was the rich little Mexican girl who went to study at the University of Paris, all expenses paid, so that I could hang on to all those millions my father would eventually leave me. And you were the government’s young scholarship student, a protégé that Mexico sent to France almost as a compensation for the death of your parents and the injustices you suffered for having the same name as your father.