“How could you understand? You’re the man whose table is always set for him. You don’t know what it is to fight, to get out of the hole…”
“Diana…”
“You should have told him you knew all about it, don’t you understand? You should have told him you saw the film, that he was stupendous, that the picture is a success everywhere, and that it’ll be coming to Santiago soon to shut his friends up…”
“But that’s an illusion…”
“Movies are illusion!” Her eyes shouted louder than her voice.
“I refuse to give these people false hopes. It’s worse that way. I swear it’s worse. The fall is disastrous.”
“Well, I think you’ve got to give a hand to the person who needs it. We all need a hand…”
“Charity, you mean.”
“Okay, charity…”
“So they never stop being beggars. I hate charity, philanthropy…”
She moved away from me, as if I were burning her, as if she herself were freezing cold.
“Tomorrow I’m going to look for that boy first thing.”
“You’re going to leave him worse off than ever, I’m telling you.”
“I’m going to look for the film, I’m going to bring it here, and I’m going to show it to the boy, his family, his friends…”
“Who will hate him more than ever. They’ll be jealous of him, Diana, and there won’t be any sequels. He won’t make any more pictures…”
“You have no imagination. I’m telling you, no imagination, and no compassion whatsoever…”
“For you, it’s all Italian toothpaste…”
We turned our backs on each other, staring attentively at a landscape devoid of interest, abolished, erased.
XVIII
“You left the door open.”
“You’re mistaken. Look at it. It’s tight shut.”
“I mean the bathroom door.”
“Yes. It’s open. So what?”
“I asked you always to keep it closed.”
“Well, it so happens that at this particular time I’m going in and out a lot.”
“Why?”
“What’s it to you? Because I’ve just come down with a case of Montezuma’s revenge, because…”
“You’re lying. You Mexicans never get that. You reserve that for us…”
“Diarrhea recognizes neither frontiers nor cultures. Didn’t you know that?”
“How can you be so horribly vulgar?”
“Why’s it such a big deal whether the bathroom door is open or closed?”
“I’m asking it as a favor.”
“How delicate we are. At least you’re not giving me a direct order. After all, I am living in your house.”
“I never said that. All I’m asking is that you respect…”
“Your manias?”
“My insecurity, stupid. I’m very sensitive to things that are open or closed. I’m afraid. Help me, respect me…”
“So our relationship is going to depend on whether I close the bathroom door or leave it open?”
“It’s such a little thing. And since you put it that way, yes, you are in my house…”
“And you’re in my country.”
“Eating shit, that’s true.”
“We could go back to Iowa and eat fried chicken in cellophane or dog-meat hamburgers. I’m ready when you are…”
“Since you don’t respect my vulnerability, you can use another bathroom and let me have this one…”
“I can also sleep in a different bedroom.”
“I’m asking you to do me the tiniest favor. Close the bathroom door. Open bathroom doors scare me, okay?”
“But it doesn’t bother you to sleep with the bedroom curtains open?”
“I like that.”
“Well, I don’t. The sun comes blazing in early and I can’t sleep.”
“I’ll lend you an American Airlines sleep mask.”
“You get up at dawn, so you’re fine. But I end up with a fucking migraine.”
“You’ll find all the aspirin you need at the drugstore.”
“Why do you insist on sleeping with the curtains open?”
“I’m waiting.”
“For whom? Dracula?”
“There are beautiful nights when the moon invades a bedroom, transforms it, and transports you to another moment in your life. Maybe that will happen again.”
“Again?”
“Right. Moonlight inside a bedroom, inside an auditorium, it transforms the world—that’s something you really can believe in.”
“You told me not to believe in your biography.”
“Just believe in the images I offer you from time to time.”
“Please excuse me. I’ll leave the door closed. I wouldn’t want a single moonbeam to escape.”
“Thank you.”
“Assuming one does arrive some night.”
“It will. My life depends on it.”
“I think you really mean, my memory.”
“Don’t you remember any night you’d like to recapture?”
“Lots of them.”
“No, it can’t be ‘lots of them.’ Only one or none at all.”
“I’d have to think about it.”
“No. Imagine it.”
“Tell me what props I’d need, O Duse.”
“Don’t laugh.”
“Duse Medusa.”
“You’d need snow.”
“Here?”
“Snow all the time. Snow all four seasons of the year. I can’t imagine it without snow. Snow outside. A circle. A circular theater. An auditorium. A skylight. Night. Me stretched out on the stage. The two of us alone. Him on top of me. Searching with his hand. Lifting my little skirt.”
“Like this?”
“Exploring me with a marvelous tenderness no other man has ever known how to give me.”
“Like this?”
“He’s patient, exploring, lifting my little skirt, sliding his hand under my panties, searching in the darkness…”
“Like this.”
“Until the moon rises and the light floods over us, the moonlight shines on my first night of love, my love…”
“Like this, like this…”
“Like this. Please, quickly.”
“But there’s no moon. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“There’s no moon here. We’ll have to wait. Or if you’d like, I could buy a paper moon and hang it over the bed.”
“You have no imagination, I told you already.”
“Listen, don’t cry. It’s no big deal.”
“Almost. You almost made it. What a shame.”
“Here.”
“What are you doing? What is this?”
“A present. In exchange for the toothpaste.”
“You killed my imagination. You don’t have any right to do that.”
“It’s three o’clock in the morning. You’ve got to get up very early. Want anything else?”
“Get up and close the bathroom door, please.”
“Good night.”
XIX
The Santiago authorities hosted a banquet in honor of the film crew. One of the patios of the colonial-era town hall was set up with tables and chairs and decorated with crepe and paper lanterns. The functionaries were distributed equitably: the governor with the director, the municipal president with the leading man and his girlfriend, the commander of the military zone, a general of strikingly Oriental appearance, with Diana and me.
They say the French general Maxime Weygand was the bastard son of Empress Carlota by a certain Colonel López, Maximilian’s aide-de-camp. López betrayed the Emperor twice: first with the empress, and then during the Republican siege of Querétaro, when he opened the way for Juárez’s troops to capture the Austrian Emperor. By then, Carlota had already gone back to Europe to beg help from Napoleon III, another traitor, and Pope Pius IX. She went mad in the Vatican, and was the first woman (officially) to spend
the night in the pontifical bedrooms.
Did she go crazy or was that merely a pretext to cover up her pregnancy and delivery? She never again left the seclusion of her castle, but the royal government of Belgium supplied young cadet Weygand, born in 1867 in Brussels, with tuition at St. Cyr. He became chief of Foch’s general staff during World War I and supreme commander when World War II broke out. In France, the Manchu face—high cheekbones, Mayan nose, lips as thin as a knife blade and crowned by a sparse, very fine mustache, barely a shadow—must have caused some comment. Short, small-boned, with a rather stiff bearing, his black hair shaved at the temples: I’m describing General Weygand only to describe General Agustín Cedillo, commander of the Santiago military zone. I associate him with the empire imposed on Mexico by Napoleon III because, physical parallels aside, there survived on one of the balconies of the patio, surely a Republican oversight, the arms of the empire: the eagle and serpent but with a crown above and, at the foot of the cactus, the motto EQUITY IN JUSTICE.
Sitting opposite me and next to Diana, General Cedillo, curious, looked us over out of the corner of his eye, as if he kept a direct gaze in reserve for great occasions. I imagined that those could only be challenges and death. I had no doubt whatsoever: this man would look with perfect equanimity directly at a firing squad whether giving it orders to shoot or receiving its bullets. He would take care, on the other hand, not to look directly at anyone in daily life, because in our country, among men, a direct stare is a challenge and provokes one of two reactions. The coward lowers his eyes—lower your head and step aside, as the song says. The brave man endures the stare of the other to see who will lower his eyes first. The situation moves to another plane when one brave man pronounces the ritual words “What are you looking at me for, mister?” The violence increases if the “mister” is excluded: “What are you looking at me for?” And there’s no way out if a direct insult is substituted: “What are you looking at me for, stupid, asshole, son of a bitch?”
Familiar with the protocol of eyes in Mexico, I looked at General Cedillo out of the corner of my eye the same way he was looking at Diana and me. Glancing around the patio, I saw that the same look was being repeated at each table. Everyone except the innocent gringos avoided one another’s eyes. The governor peered surreptitiously at the commander and likewise at the governor; the mayor tried to avoid the eyes of both of them, and I saw in a corner of the patio a group of young people just standing there, among them the boy who’d approached me in the plaza to propose we talk, the boy with the Zapata mustache and languid eyes named Carlos Ortiz, my namesake.
The commander noticed my glance and asked me, without turning his head, “Do you know the students here?”
I told him I didn’t, only by accident, that one of them had read my books.
“There are no bookstores here.”
“How terrible. And how shameful.”
“That’s what I say. Books have to be brought in from Mexico City.”
“Ah, they’re exotic import products,” I said, flashing my friendliest smile but slipping into the humorous, mischievous vein that conversations with authority figures invariably provoke in me. “Subversive, perhaps.”
“No. Whatever we know here, we find out by reading the newspapers.”
“Then you must not know much—the local papers are very bad.”
“I mean the common folk.”
That old-fashioned expression made me laugh and forced me to think about the commander’s social origins. His appearance, I admit, was an enigma. Class differences in Mexico are so brutal that it’s easy to pigeonhole people: Indian, peasant, worker, lower middle class, etcetera. What’s interesting are people who can’t easily be categorized, people who not only rise socially or become refined but, in rising, bring with them another kind of refinement, secret, extremely ancient, inherited from who knows how many lost ancestors—princes perhaps or shamans, or warriors in one of the thousand archaic nations of old Mexico.
If that weren’t the case, where would such people get their reserves of patience, stoicism, dignity, and discretion, which contrast so strikingly with my country’s noisy, vain, ostentatious, and cruel plutocracies? In reality, Mexico’s two classes are composed, one, of people who allow themselves to be seduced by Western models that are alien, lacking as they do a culture of death and the sacred, and who become the vulgar, stupid middle class and, two, a group that preserves the Spanish and Indian heritage of aristocratic reserve. There’s nothing more pathetic in Mexico than the vulgar middle-class joker, situated between the Indian aristocracy and the Western bourgeoisie, who says hello by poking his finger in your belly button or runs on by without turning his face and shouts, “That guy with the little tie,” “That guy with the little hat,” “That guy with the little mustache…”
General Cedillo (so very similar to Maxime Weygand) seemed to come from these same depths as General Joaquín Amaro, who left the Yaqui mountains of Sonora, a red kerchief on his head and an earring hanging from one ear, to join the Northwest Division of Álvaro Obregón (a blond young man with blue eyes who, as a child, delivered milk to my maternal grandmother in Alamos) but who, thanks to his beautiful Creole wife, became a polo player and a most elegant martial figure and, by virtue of his own intelligence, the creator of the modern Mexican Army, which emanated from the revolution.
It was from that mold, it seemed to me, that General Cedillo came. He lacked the colorful touches of General Amaro, who had only one eye and spoke impeccable French. But in 1970, it wasn’t hard to imagine General Cedillo in the ranks of the revolution. He would have been a very young boy when he joined up, true, but he was also very old because he inherited centuries of refined peasant taciturnity. Diana stared at him, fascinated, admitting without saying so that she didn’t understand him. I, thinking I did understand him, kept to myself, ceding to the general a margin of impenetrable mystery but also feeling the writer’s inevitable urge: to mock authority.
“Did you have problems with the students in 1968?” I suddenly asked, trying to provoke him.
“The same as everywhere else. It was a movement of discontent that honored the kids who took part in it,” he answered, surprisingly.
I felt outflanked by the general and didn’t like it one bit.
“They were rebels,” I said, “just as you were when you were young, General.”
“They’ll give it up,” he responded, taking the lead I’d involuntarily given him. “He who isn’t a rebel as a boy becomes one as an old man. And an old rebel is ridiculous.”
He was about to use another, cruder term, but he glanced at Diana and lightly bowed his head, like a mandarin entering a pagoda.
“Was all that blood necessary?” I asked point-blank.
He looked over at the governor’s table with a spark of scorn in his eyes. “During the first demonstration, there were those who asked me to call out the troops and put it down. All I said was, Gentlemen, blood’s going to flow here, but not yet. Just wait a bit.”
“You have to choose the right moment for repression?”
“You have to know when what the people want is order and security, my friend. People get fed up with disorder. The party of stability is the majority party.”
That friendly allusion was in itself a challenge, its intent to put me in an inferior position vis-à-vis the man of power. And that power was the power of knowledge, of information. Inwardly, I laughed: first he talked about books and newspapers, only to let me know that true information, the kind that matters when you have to take political action, does not come from what Spaniards call the “black stuff,” printed words on paper.
A sumptuous regional dish was served then, interrupting the talk. It was pork rump with enmoladas, and I hoped to heaven I would not have to witness the stereotyped reaction on the Yankees’ faces—the shock, repugnance, terror, and incredulity. To eat or not to eat? That was the justified dilemma of the gringo in Mexico. I gave Diana a significant look, urging her to try the h
ot dish, begging her not to succumb to the stereotype. I’d already told her, I eat everything in your country or in my own, and I deal with getting sick there or here. You give a pathetic impression of helplessness when a dish of Mexican food is put in front of you. Why is it that we can have two cultures and you only one, which you comfortably expect to find wherever you go?
Diana tried the enmoladas, and next to her the governor laughed as if barking, as he watched the movie star taste the dish that embodied local pride.
“There are people who are novices in politics who get ahead of events and ruin everything,” said the general, less circumspectly but with growing scorn. He avoided looking at the governor, though he had to listen to the strange noises the man was making. The sounds could be explained either as culinary euphoria or because that moment the inevitable mariachi band entered, playing their inevitable anthem, the song of the Black Woman. “My little black-skinned sweety, eyes like fluttering paper,” intoned the jolly governor.
“But you could have avoided those errors by seizing power,” I said provocatively.
“Who do you mean?”
“You. The military.”
For the first time, General Cedillo opened his eyes and raised the folds on his forehead where his nonexistent eyebrows should have been.
“Not a chance. Don Benito Juárez would be spinning in his grave.”
I remembered the shepherd boy who’d been in the English film.
“Do you mean that the Mexican Army is not the Argentine Army, that you respect republican institutions come what may?”
“I mean that we are an army that emanated from the revolution, a people’s army…”
“That nevertheless fires on the people if necessary.”
“If it’s ordered by the constituted authority, civilians,” he said without so much as a blink, but I sensed that I’d wounded him, that I’d touched an open sore, that the memory of Tlatelolco was shameful to the army, which wanted to forget the episode and did not speak about it. But at the same time I was to understand what Cedillo was telling me: We only obeyed orders, our honor is intact.
“You shouldn’t have done the work of the police or the hawks,” I said, and immediately regretted it, not on my account but for my American friends, for Diana. I was breaking my own rule, the one I’d explained to the student Carlos Ortiz: I have no right to compromise them politically.