All I said was, “From now on, this is what Doris will wear to work.”
“And who the hell are you?”
“I’m her employer, madam, and if you want your daughter to bring a salary home and look after you, Doris better turn up to work looking like this, because if not, I might just kidnap her and take her to come and live with me. . . .”
The old lady began to scream and suddenly I had one of those revelations, like a little thunderbolt flashing through the brain. “And I’d be very careful about saying anything about this to that lowlife Tácito de la Canal. The game is over, madam. If you continue pimping your daughter I’ll put you in jail.”
The old lady started to shriek in earnest now, and the cat jumped up, meowing with a vengeance, as if defending its mistress. I kicked the bloody cat in the ass and when Doris saw that her mother was defeated she smiled for the first time. Ever since then, she’s come to the office dressed like a woman her own age.
Penélope winks at me and gives me the thumbs-up for that one.
But Tácito looks at me with true hatred. He knows I’ve read him like a book, from top to bottom. Servile with the powerful. Contemptuous with the weak. In what intermediate position have I placed myself ? I look him straight in the eye. He has no choice but to stare right back at me. But I smile. He does not. And when he calls Doris into his office, I say, “Sorry, sir. Doris is working on a very urgent matter for me.”
If the bastard had any hair, it would stand on end.
12
BERNAL HERRERA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN
Are you certain that your strategy is the right one? If your protégé Nicolás Valdivia is working with Tácito de la Canal, it isn’t just to gain experience. Not even to gain firsthand knowledge of our adversary. He’s there to uncover Tácito de la Canal’s weak spot, the truth that will undo him, the act that will condemn him. We already know that Tácito’s a lowlife. But how many other lowlifes have you met in politics who still enjoy their ill-gotten wealth with impunity? What we must do is catch Tácito red-handed. What has Valdivia discovered? Not much. Things we already knew. That Tácito is servile. That he’s cruel. That in dealing with people he kisses up and kicks down. That he lets the president treat him like a used napkin. That perhaps the president needs a servant to fawn over him. That perhaps the president needs a guard dog with a spiked collar to defend him from inopportune visitors.
Nothing new. Our most exalted leader needs the security of a yes-man, someone who will agree with everything he says. As you can see, our president is following the age-old custom, observed by the likes of Frederick of Prussia and Catherine the Great, of bringing the French Enlightenment to his court. In our case, the roles of Voltaire and Diderot are played by our good friend Xavier Zaragoza, our very own Seneca. Even so, Frederick still had his valet Fredersdorf to lick his boots, and Catherine still had Potemkin to lick something else entirely. And Lorenzo Terán has Tácito de la Canal.
I’m not satisfied, my friend. Time is ticking away, and in politics timing is at least half the battle. If we can’t eliminate Tácito within six months, he’ll use his position as a springboard for a presidential bid. And you know what? The idea of running against Tácito de la Canal not only disgusts me. It humiliates me. If I win the 2024 elections against a worm like Tácito, my victory will be as grand as that of a man who has squashed a cockroach underfoot. It will be a hollow victory. And if he were to beat me thanks to his influence with the president, it would mean the end of my political career.
María del Rosario, you know that I’m not a coward and that I assume my own responsibility in this. But life has made us more than just friends: You and I are allies. Our destinies are inextricable. I need you because you’re a woman—but not just because of your female instincts. I need you because in addition to instinct you have exceptional political skill. You know how to see what’s invisible. You know how to read between the lines. You notice things that escape me. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know (or that I haven’t already told you). Without you I can never get ahead. You’re the person who helps me endure the unpalatable aggression of politics. You’ve taught me something indispensable in politics: the ability to manage groups of insecure men. You know how to do it, and I’ve seen it for myself. Somehow you’re able to make the most inept cabinet member (and there are several) feel like Aristotle and Bonaparte wrapped up in one. And with the confidence you instill in them, you let them know that you represent me, that you follow my instructions. You are a magnificently talented woman, but you’re not a free agent. You are forever tied to Bernal Herrera.
What I mean is that everyone knows you give them all that support and advice because I’ve asked you to. The agriculture secretary, Epifanio Alatorre, came in to thank me personally for informing him about the imminent decline in sugar prices that he, stupidly stockpiling sugar as if it were gold, never would have predicted. Secretary Alatorre doesn’t realize that the United States’ and the European Union’s agricultural policies will ultimately shut out agricultural exports from the poorer countries: We sell little and cheaply, and we don’t gain anything by hoarding our stash in the hopes that prices will eventually go up. There will never be a dearth of anything in the developed world. There will only be munificence toward the beggars, that’s all. Handouts. The secretary for public works, Antonio Bejarano, owes me his life because you told him about the contractor Bruno Levi and his ties with the company that was Bejarano’s competition during his days as a private businessman—which, by the way, are not quite over yet since he still owns shares through a bunch of false proxies. How I wish we could discover that Tácito is involved in a sleazy deal like that. But Bejarano is irrelevant, politically speaking. He can be as corrupt as he wants. And yet we’re the ones who’ll exert power over him when the opportunity arises. Without me—without you, that is—his downfall is only a matter of time.
I could go on and on, my dearest lady. But the biggest fish of all, my only visible rival in the 2024 elections, doesn’t owe either of us a thing. That’s our huge weakness. I don’t believe in Tácito’s great intelligence, but I know that when it comes to politics he’s a sly dog, a Mexican Machiavelli whose capacity for manipulation and cunning is as inexhaustible, my dear friend, as our own capacity for mutual gratitude and affection. We should assume that every secretary of state owes Tácito as many favors as they owe us. Not for nothing is he the holder of the keys to the Holiest of Holies, the president’s inner sanctum, our very square “Oval Office.”
In any case, we ought to think of it as a fight among equals. Now, will your protégé Valdivia, embedded as he is in Tácito’s bureaucracy, be able to come up with the one secret that can ruin him, something more damaging than Tácito’s habit of seducing secretaries?
Poor results, María del Rosario, very poor. If we don’t produce solid evidence soon to bring Tácito de la Canal down, he and I will start the fight with equal strength. I cannot tolerate that. I want to have an indisputable advantage. What will it be? I can only count on your well-deserved reputation as a woman who is intelligent, intuitive . . . and seductive.
13
NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN
So, my beloved and admired lady, I’ve yet again followed your instructions (which you euphemistically call suggestions) and traveled to the port of Veracruz in the interest of “earning points” and “polishing my political education,” as you put it. I arrived with the letter of introduction you gave me for the Old Man.
There he was, just as you said he’d be, sitting at a table under the great colonnade of the Café de la Parroquia, cane in hand and with a steaming cup of coffee in front of him. He still looks exactly as you and I and the rest of the country remember him. The noble head atop the fragile body. Broad forehead, receding hairline as wide as a boulevard, perfectly clipped and well-combed salt-and-pepper hair. (I don’t know why but he gave me the impression of having been combed from head to toe.) And of cours
e, the most arresting thing about him, his gaze: as absentminded as a sparrow and as keen as a hawk! He really is an eagle, though, in every sense of the word, no matter how intense or distracted his perfectly calculated gaze may be. No other president of the republic has embodied such a perfect symbiosis of the person and the symbol. When he sat on the Eagle’s Throne, the Old Man was the original eagle.
Now he’s known to all as “the Old Man Under the Arches.” Although he may change his name and lie about his age, the deep, dark rings that make his eyelids look like two great black curtains remain, softened only by his wide eyebrows. They say that some mountains are covered by “perpetual snow.” The Old Man Under the Arches has “perpetual darkness” in those eyebrows that would almost seem diabolical if they didn’t contrast so starkly with the petrified smile across his thick lips, rosy for someone so advanced in years, framed and accentuated by deep lines on either side. And in between mouth and eyes, his straight but flat nose, discreet but for the broad, flared nostrils like a bloodhound’s.
I’m describing someone you’re more than familiar with in order to confirm my own impression of the Old Man. Because that’s how he’s known around here: the Old Man under the Arches, sitting all day long at one of the Café de la Parroquia’s outdoor tables, sipping the aromatic coffee from Coatepec in between sips of mineral water, a copy of La Opinión spread out on his lap. Dressed to the nines, as always, in his dark gray pinstriped suit, white shirt, the inevitable polka-dotted bow tie, his cuff links bearing the image of the eagle and the serpent, his flecked socks, and his well-polished black shoes.
I introduced myself, gave him your letter and, just as you warned me, the Old Man Under the Arches launched into a litany of political definitions and recommendations like a priest reciting the Creed. The Old Man doesn’t lack a sense of humor. He knows full well that he is an old, old man and that the younger generation condemned him a long time ago to death by oblivion.
“Some people think it would be humane to hasten my journey to the grave,” he said, laughing without laughing—a habit of his, it seems. “I won’t give them that pleasure. I’ll continue to be what some people call ‘a political nuisance.’ ”
Then, without missing a beat (just as you said he would and just as he knew you would tell me he would), he began spewing out his famous sayings, now so old and universally known that they’re part of our political folklore. But as I said before, the Old Man doesn’t lack a sense of humor, nor is he incapable of deadpan self-criticism.
“Let’s get through all those sayings attributed to me, so we don’t have to go over them again. . . .”
“I’m one of the young people who wouldn’t mind that, Mr. President. Everything about you is new to me.”
“What do you mean, ‘about me’? And don’t call me ‘Mr. President.’ Remember, I’m not president anymore.”
“It’s my French education, Mr. President. In France, nobody is ex-anything. That would be considered rude.”
“Another Frenchman in Veracruz!” he exclaimed without smiling. “Those damn Frogs again!”
“What I was going to say is that I studied at l’École Nationale d’Administration in Paris. . . .”
“French battleships disembarked here, you know, during the Pastry War.”
“The what . . . ?” I asked, revealing my scant knowledge of Mexican history.
“Yes,” he said, sipping his coffee. “A French pastry chef by the name of Remortel in Mexico City complained that during a riot the rabble had destroyed his éclairs and croissants, and so in 1838 the French deployed a fleet to bomb Veracruz and demand payment for the ruined pastries. How about that, then? Haven’t you ever seen the movie with Mapy Cortés?”
“Mapy . . .”
“A Puerto Rican beauty, oh, yes. A knockout. Thighs so perfect you could cry. She danced a conga called the pim-pam-pum,” he said, and took another sip.
“Of course,” I replied in an attempt to recover a bit of my bruised credibility, realizing now that Mapy Cortés and her pim-pam-pum were more important than l’École Nationale d’Administration. “Of course— the whole world has come to Mexico via Veracruz, ever since Hernán Cortés arrived on these shores in 1519. . . .”
“And the French came back in 1862 to help defend the empire of Maximilian and Carlota.” Nostalgia brought a momentary sparkle to his hooded eyes. “Just picture the troop of Belgians, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, men from Prague, Trieste, Marseilles, the Zouaves, Bohemians, Flemish, who landed here with their flags held high, my little friend, and every last flag had an eagle, two-headed eagles, crowned eagles, heraldic eagles, and here we were with one poor little eagle of our own—but what an eagle, my little friend Valdivia, a bloody fine eagle, incomparable, its talons perched atop a nopal and devouring a serpent. Those Europeans weren’t expecting that, now, were they?”
“I suppose not, sir.”
“Oh, and the trail of dark-skinned blue-eyed children those imperial troops left behind in Veracruz. Did you ever see the film Imperial Cavalry?”
“No, but I read a marvelous novel, News from the Empire, by Fernando del Paso.”
“Thank goodness,” he said, with a note of pity in his voice. “At least you know something.”
He looked into the distance toward the sea and the San Juan de Ulúa fortress, an imposing, uninviting gray mass on a forbidding island. The Old Man saw me watching and seemed to know what I was thinking.
I spoke as if he’d asked me something.
“Forgive me, Mr. President. . . . It’s just that when I was a child there was a breakwater that connected the castle to the mainland.”
“I had the breakwater removed. It was a blight on the landscape,” he said, as the waiter, arm raised high above his head, poured steaming coffee with perfect aim straight into our glass coffee cups.
The Old Man kept talking.
“That’s why I sit here, looking out at the port of Veracruz, so that I can give warning should any foreign enemy dare to profane our land with his soles, as our national anthem puts it.”
I began to think that the Old Man Under the Arches was nothing but a raving monomaniac going on and on with his litany of wrongs suffered by Mexico over the centuries.
“And the gringos, son, the gringos who’ve sucked the brains out of Mexico’s youth. They dress like gringos, dance like gringos, think like gringos—they wish they could be gringos.”
He then made an obscene gesture with his left hand as he raised his cane with his right.
“By Santa Anna’s lost leg, those gringos can come and kiss my ass! Here they landed in 1847, then again in 1914 . . . When will they be back?”
He readjusted his dentures, which had slipped out of place from all the excitement, and returned to the topic at hand.
“Listen, son, just so you don’t leave here disappointed, let me give you some of my legendary maxims. . . .”
And he recited them. Seriously, almost as a meditation, all the while stirring the sugar in his coffee cup.
“Politics is the art of swallowing frogs without flinching.”
He didn’t laugh. All he did was bite down hard on his dentures to fix them squarely in his gums.
“In Mexican politics, even cripples can pull off a high-wire act.” He took advantage of my feigned laughter to ask the waiter for a mollete.
“Refried beans and melted cheese in a hot bread roll. Good for the digestion,” he said. “Look, the simple truth is that the presidency is a roller coaster. The expression on your face when they send you off is the expression that stays with you forever.”
He took a big bite of his mollete.
“That’s why you always see me with the same look on my face, exactly the same as my very first day in office.”
He continued, María del Rosario, with a slightly macabre smile.
“What nobody knows is that my arsenal of unpublished sayings knows no end.”
I gave him a courteously quizzical look.
And then, wit
h a sound like a death knell from the back of his throat, he said, “Make no mistake. I’m immune to bullets and to colds.”
I fell silent after that resounding maxim, waiting for him to say something else, wondering what I was really doing there, my lovely lady, aside from simply following your instructions: “Talk to the Old Man Under the Arches. Be patient and learn from him.”
“You know what, son? Before becoming president, a man has to suffer and learn. If not, he’ll suffer and learn during his presidency, at the country’s expense.”
Could this mean that María del Rosario Galván—yes, you, my dear lady—had informed the old ex-president of her daring promise to deliver me to the Eagle’s Throne, and explained that I was in Veracruz to learn from him? If the thought crossed my mind, I didn’t say it out loud, of course.
I merely dared to point out: “Cárdenas became president at the age of thirty-six, Alemán at thirty-nine, Obregón at forty-four, Salinas at forty. . . .”
“I’m not talking about age, Mr. Valdivia. I haven’t said a word about age, which is a taboo subject for this old man. I was referring to suffering and learning. I was referring to experience. All the men you mention were young, but they were experienced. Are you?”
I shook my head. “Mr. President, I admit I’m a novice. But one morning with you is enough to teach me everything I didn’t learn at the ENA in Paris.”
He shook his head very slightly, as if he were afraid that all the parts inside it might become unhinged, that the screws would come loose.
“Right,” he said, sipping his coffee. “You do know that every president finishes where the next one should start. That is, where he himself should have started. Am I being clear? The outgoing president speaks to his successor without having to use a single word. That’s the experience I’m talking about.”
“Except that the successor tends to be deaf to his predecessor.”
I thought he would warm to my graceful wit. Instead, his dark-ringed gaze grew even darker.