“Dead leaves!” Sanginés exclaimed when the servant came in carrying a platter of rice with fried bananas, and as he offered it to me, he said respectfully:
“Good evening, Señor Josué.”
I looked up and recognized the old waiter from Errol Esparza’s house who had been fired by the second and now overthrown wife, Señora Sarita Pérez.
“Hilarión!” I recognized him. “How nice!”
He said nothing. He leaned over. I served myself. I looked at Sanginés out of the corner of my eye. As if nothing had happened. The servant withdrew.
“Rumors began to circulate,” my host went on. “The president does not preside. He inaugurates public works. He makes vague remarks. He smiles with a face more florid than a carnation. The unfailing evil tongues begin to speak of a cursed term. They even insinuate, in the second year of the government, that longevity in office is fatal to the reputation of the leader.”
“And to his health as well.”
Guided by a mad compass, Carrera dipped his big toe into foreign policy, the traditional refuge of a president of Mexico without a domestic policy. It turned out badly. The North Americans increased the armed guards along the northern border with increasing deaths of migrant workers. The Guatemalans opened the southern border for an invasion of Mexico by Central American workers. All that was left for the president to do was to stroll through the Davos Forum dressed as an Eskimo and give a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations attended by no one except the delegates from Black Africa, who are very courteous.
“ ‘It was an unlucky moment for me when Clarita died!’ ” the president exclaimed one night.
“ ‘What you need is for half your cabinet to die,’ ” I dared to tell him. “ ‘Their incompetence reflects on you, Mr. President.’ ”
“ ‘What do you advise, Sanginés?’ ” he asked me with a desolate expression.
“ ‘New blood,’ ” I said. “The result”—and he liquidated the last fried plantain without making a sound—“is Jericó’s presence in the office of the president.”
“What a good idea,” I said with sincerity but no conviction, trying to guess at the hidden intentions of Don Antonio Sanginés, a truly astute puppeteer and know-it-all, I realized at that moment, in our lives. Jericó’s and mine.
“Shall I tell you what your friend has done at Los Pinos.”
It wasn’t a question. In any event, I agreed.
“He brought together functions scattered among various secretaries at the suggestion of the president. Appointments, the need to render accounts, consult with the executive before taking action, meet in a council of ministers presided over by Valentín Pedro Carrera, make periodic reports. And as for the president, to move ahead of the ministers in relationships with unions, management, universities, the fourth estate, the governors, the congress: Day after day Jericó took charge of everything, establishing a network of presidential control that made each leader or sector of activity understand that their responsibility was to the head of state, and that the other members of the cabinet were not autonomous agents or authorized voices but merely confidential employees of the president from whom he could withdraw his confidence at any moment just as he could grant it to them for a specific period of time.”
“Mr. President,” Jericó would say to him, “remember that as the opposition you could be pure. Now, in power, you have to learn to be less pure.”
“To dirty my hands?”
“No, Señor. To make compromises.”
“I was elected by the hope of our citizens.”
“Now it is time for you to pass from the electoral light into the shadow of experience.”
“Boy, you talk like an eager priest.”
“I talk so you’ll understand me.”
“What do you want me to understand?”
“That I’m here to serve you and that I serve you by strengthening you.”
“How?”
Once the immediate official apparatus was set in motion, Jericó asked the president for authority to attend to an absolutely key matter.
“What can that be, young man?”
“Youth, old man,” Jericó dared to reply, and he understood what would happen, what could be, if the president of the republic, in that small detail (“Youth, old man”) acknowledged the power of his young aide-de-camp and opened to the action Jericó was offering to him with enormously compromising words: “I’m doing it for you, Mr. President. I’m doing it for the good of the country.”
“Doing what, kid?”
“What I’m proposing, Señor,” said Jericó, reverting to respect.
“IF WE’RE GOING to spend time together,” Asunta said to me one lazy afternoon, “it’s better if I tell you about my life. I want you to know who I am because I told you about it, instead of having rumors coming up here from ten stories down.”
“And what obliges me to believe you?” I said with a touch of irony, just to protect myself from the dark surge of her gaze and respiration filled with vague nocturnal perfumes that were beginning to surround us. I liked this woman. She bored me, she frightened me, and I liked her.
The truth is that before talking about herself, Asunta talked to me about Max Monroy and I, more fool me, did not realize right away that this was her way of telling me, Look, Josué, this is who I am, the woman who talks to you about Max Monroy is the woman who talks to you about herself. You can hold on to the certainty I talked only about him and you’d be wrong. I’m letting you know in time. I don’t know any other way to tell you about my life than to tell you about my life with the man who determines my life.
“Max Monroy: You, who are writing a thesis on Machiavelli under my direction,” Maestro Sanginés said to me, “know that the end does not always justify the means. Max Monroy decided from the very beginning that the way to obtain the best ends is to forget about them and act as if the means were the ends. Thanks to this philosophy, he strengthened his own business to the maximum. A man of means, Max valued ends, convinced they were as separate from means as day is from night. He distrusted ultimate solutions: They’re always bad, he says, because they classify you forever and close the doors of renovation to you. Even worse: If the ultimate solution fails, you have to begin all over again. On the other hand, if a means doesn’t produce results, you have at hand a repertoire of other means that aren’t ultimate but partial, as disposable as a Kleenex. Though if you’re successful, they appear as ends. This is what Max Monroy rejects. Never ends. He never celebrates the success of an end but rather the viability of a means. Listen carefully to this, Josué. Everything Max Monroy accomplishes is only a means to achieving the next means, never an end. He says the word END serves only to conclude a film, turn up the lights, and ask the audience, courteously, to withdraw with no need to pick up the bottles of Coca-Cola or carry to the trashcan the popcorn scattered on the floor.”
“The Max Monroy film, Josué, ignores the word END. In this way, you understand, he never admits failure. Some endeavors are successful. Others are not. He abandons these in time. Sometimes he finds himself obliged to proclaim victory after a failure: a program that did not succeed with the public, an innovation that was soon surpassed by the competition. Max changes the subject, he does not refer to what happened, he goes on to the next topic. In this way he leaves no rancor behind him. No one thinks he is the loser. No one considers himself the winner. But the cash register does not stop ringing,” Asunta said to me the other day.
“Monroy is famous for having said that thanks to him we abandoned the abacus. He walked new ground just to open even newer ground. What I mean is that he’s careful to have his successes not be failures paid for in exchange for success. Max is seen as an invulnerable entrepreneur who has to be stopped or eliminated. He navigates in silence over the waters of fortune. He is a master of the silent accomplishment, the stealthy success. He accepts his power. He tries not to allow envy to turn into idle conversation or an airplane without a motor destined
to wander from airport to airport,” Antonio Sanginés confirmed on another night.
(I thought of my afflicted and dearly loved Lucha Zapata. My sincere though distrustful Asunta Jordán continued her discourse while her eyes gleamed even more, as if to keep at a distance approaching night.)
“Max Monroy is like the serpent. He coils around himself. He is a self-sufficient circle. When he looks out from the top floor of this building, he acknowledges that the city’s danger surrounds us. At the same time, he listens to the sound of the street and says that traffic is the music of business.”
“Capitalism’s symphony?”
Asunta laughed. Did she say it? Did Sanginés? Did I say it to myself? The discourse on Monroy in my head is unitary, like a fan that has one piece of cloth and many ribs. “To talk about capitalism is to think something can replace it. Max calls it one-worldism, globalization, internationalism. It’s a question of a planetary phenomenon, corrected if possible by social enlightenment. Max has always been ahead of his time. He acknowledges that in Mexico there are classes, abysmal differences between poor and rich. His utopia—we’re in the district of Tata Vasco and Thomas More, remember?—is for there to be increasingly fewer differences and for us to become a single river, with constant tides and a single current flowing to the sea, if not with greater equality, at least with greater opportunities. In this he differs from conventional politicians. Max wants to create the need in order to create the agency. Politicians create the agency and forget about the need. It’s what Max opposes in our president.”
(They tell me that with Jericó transformed into a presidential adviser?)
“Because this is what happens, Josué,” Asunta, Sanginés, and I myself continued in identical reflections without divisions, attracted by the personality of Max Monroy: “Max asks those who believe the world is already made what needs to be done, and moves ahead by doing it. His daily slogan is Never think there’s nothing left to do. Ask yourselves how much you’ve done and how much you found done or allowed to be done. That, Max clenches his fist, is what needs to be done.”
“And with people, Asunta? Is Max Monroy the machine you’ve described? Doesn’t he deal with human beings? Does he live shut away like an eagle without wings up there in his aerie?”
I myself, Sanginés, and Asunta laughed again, as if my questions were tickling us. “Max Monroy knows how to use masks. They say he has a lifelong poker face. He knows how to pretend. He approaches, threatening. He becomes cordial again. But anyone who saw him threatening does not forget the threat. He knows the price of silence. He wounds no one without making that person believe that he himself will close the wound. And sometimes, if it suits him, he lets it be known that the wound will never close. He doesn’t flatter anyone. And he doesn’t allow himself to be flattered. He says the flatterer, the fawner, puts the intelligence of the flattered person to sleep. Max does favors when necessary. But he tells me constantly that for each favor he’ll have one ingrate and a hundred enemies. He doesn’t say a word about business. Let the politicians talk. Let them make compromises. Let them make mistakes. Max Monroy, zipper-mouthed. Max Monroy, close-mouthed.”
“Doesn’t he feel guilty for anything?”
“He says the angels will take care of discussing his vices and virtues. Why try to anticipate heaven?” said the collective voice about Max.
“Doesn’t he ever ask for anything? Deference? Privileges?”
“Respect. That’s what he gave me,” said Asunta, opening her eyes wide and looking straight at me. “You asked about me? I answered with Max? Do you know who I am thanks to Max? Can you imagine me, Josué, my little Josué, before Max? Can you imagine a girl from the dry province, from the thorny north, with parents who wanted to turn her into a completely useless, completely supported girl, what could I be? Can you see me trapped in a family governed by three unbearable rules? ‘We don’t talk about that. Errors are not corrected. We don’t regret anything, child.’ Not anything? Where did my parents come up with the idea that everything they did was allowed, knowing they didn’t do anything worth disallowing? The north, the desert, the emptiness, the highways going nowhere, the mountains in the distance, the desert close at hand, the ocean a pious lie, the weather always undecided between suffocation and dawn. A desert husband. Quick, we don’t want the girl left behind with us. Is he the best? No. Is he the worst? Not that either. Who is he? He sells cars. Buses. Trucks. Is he in love? Is he calculating? Do we have more than he does? Does he have more than we do? Where did Tomás González come from? Where did Asunta López Jordán come from? Who’s better, the Gonzálezes or the Lópezes? Who presumes what, just tell me that? Who boasts of their cactus, their desert, their rock, their paving stone or tortilla, just tell us that? Why does he presume so much, what is the presumptuous man presumptuous about? Why on your wedding night does he show you his penis and say, Baby, let me introduce you to King Kong, from now on he’s going to sleep with us? Why is he presumptuous about everything except you? Why does he talk about you, Asunta López Jordán, as his ball and chain? Why does he presume with his friends that you take care of the house but he is a macho who needs broads livelier and sexier than you, Ernestina and Amapola and Cross-eyed Malva and Sweetass, all the whores of the north plus some from Arizona and Texas when he goes, as they say, to buy spare parts, sure, damn it, is that what they call it now? Why do you begin to pester him too, Asunta López de González, why do you tell him shave, you scratch when you make love to me, use deodorant, play golf, do something, stick King Kong in his cage?
“The gorilla’s cage,” Asunta Jordán said to me with no other commentary, “and I a pneumatic doll … pneumatic, but thanks to my neura attentive, alert, and for that reason dangerous: attentive, alert thanks to the horror of my husband and my family, convinced that these virtues of mine, in provincial society, were defects, I was dangerous, but perhaps in another society being violent and unpredictable was a virtue. In my town I unleashed negative reactions. When Max Monroy came fifteen years ago for the opening of the automotive factory, and I went to the reception afterward with my husband, Max Monroy looked out and saw a flock of contented women and a herd of presumptuous men and saw one woman who was discontented, that was me, and humiliated, that was me, and proud, that was me, and different, that was me, and that same night I left with him and here I am.”
“You were saying that a woman is a luxury.”
“No. A trophy.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s inconvenient. Where do you put an Oscar? He takes me away. For saying the wrong thing. For not wanting to make a good impression.”
“Max Monroy saw that in you?”
“That’s why he’s Max Monroy.”
(She stopped, alone in the middle of the dance floor. Her husband, Tomás, had gone off without saying goodbye. Couples danced. Families sat on three sides of the floor. The orchestra animated the entire nation from the fourth side. Couples danced. She stopped alone in the center of the floor. She didn’t look at anyone. She didn’t know if anyone was looking at her. She didn’t care anymore. Then Max Monroy approached and took her by the waist and hand without saying a word.)
MY AGREEABLE (though disturbing) work in the Santa Fe office was interrupted (and it wouldn’t be the last time) by Licenciado Antonio Sanginés. I wondered if my debt to the professor would be eternal. The heretics cited by another professor, Filopáter, said that the final proof of God’s mercy would be forgiving all the damned and emptying out hell in one stroke. Not that my debt to Sanginés was hellish. On the contrary. I’m a grateful man. I was (and am) very conscious of everything I owed the maestro. Still, I couldn’t help asking myself: How long will I be paying my debts—studies, thesis direction, meals at Coyoacán, admittance to the Prison of San Juan de Aragón, interviews with the prisoner Miguel Aparecido, even news about the destiny of my friend Jericó in the offices of the presidency—to Professor and Licenciado Don Antonio Sanginés?
A question without an imm
ediate response, which still obliged me, no doubt because I did not have an answer, to suspend my work in the Vasco de Quiroga office and at the side of my platonic love Asunta Jordán and ask myself: Where was Sanginés’s strategy leading with respect to the San Juan de Aragón Prison and the prisoner Miguel Aparecido? What, in essence, did Sanginés want when he opened the cell blocks of the penitentiary to me with a master key? Because I went into the prison and was made to feel right at home, with all kinds of facilities and even special considerations like this: Leaving me alone in the cell with Miguel Aparecido, a strong man focused on a personal resolve whose origin and fate I did not know: to remain imprisoned even though he completed his sentence; and if he ever was released, to commit a new crime that would keep him in prison.
A new crime. What was the first crime, the original crime, the offense Miguel Aparecido wanted to pay for eternally, since the ultimate solution of this enigma was to die in prison? Still, was this conclusion of mine, so easy and melodramatic, correct? Did a final point exist that would conclude Miguel’s punishment in Miguel’s mind, allowing him finally to leave his cell? Knowing this meant knowing everything. From the beginning. The origin of the story. The resolution of the mysteries I’ve been stitching together here and the conversion of mystery into destiny. Truths the prisoner did not seem disposed to reveal.
Least of all today. I went into the cell. His back was turned. The high, distant barred light drew lines on his body that were not part of his gray uniform: It was as if only the sun wore the striped uniform of the old prisons.
I went in and Miguel did not turn to look at me. It would have been better for me if he had. Because when he did, he revealed the face of a terrifying beast. His hair was wild, his cheeks scratched, his eyes as red as an ominous sunset, his nose wounded, his lips and teeth bloody.