Destiny and Desire

  “And all of this for what?” I interrupted her because her exaltation of Max was beginning not only to annoy me but, in particular, to make me jealous. It fell upon me to learn about Max Monroy through the love of his dear dead mama. I was irritated by the admiration, as repetitive as a record, as unrestrained as an orgasm, of this woman who was more and more awful and perhaps, for that reason, more and more desired. Or, just the opposite …

  “Why?” she said, disconcerted.

  “Or for whom,” I said, not daring to throw up to her the lack of sincerity: Everything she had said to me seemed learned, like a lesson that had to be memorized and repeated by the loyal servant of Max Monroy.

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “Max controls demand with what supply can provide,” she said like a jukebox.

  “For what, for whom?” I tossed a coin on the piano.

  “It would have been enough for him to inherit, Josué, with no need to increase his inheritance …”

  “For whom?” I said in my best bolero voice.

  A tremor of anger fought in Asunta’s body against the sorrow of a resignation that seemed too satisfied.

  “For you?” I grabbed her shoulders. “Will you be the heir?”

  “He has no descendants,” she moaned, surprised, “he had no children …”

  “He has a lover, what the hell …”

  Asunta detached herself from my growing weakness. I thought desire would strengthen me. She was undermining me: the longing to love her. The longing, nothing more.

  “What joins the two of you? He’s an old man. What is it that joins you, Asunta?”

  To my surprise she said that smell joined them. What smell? Many smells. Now, the strange smell of an old man, the smell of an animal in a cave. Earlier, the smell of the countryside, where we met. I laughed a lot. Perhaps all that joins us is the smell of cow, chicken, burro, and shit, she said, serious but with a good deal of humor.

  She looked at me with a fixity suspended between love and defiance.

  “Mexico poor and provincial, mediocre and envious, hostile …”

  She threw her arms around my neck.

  “I don’t want to go back there. Not for anything in the world.”

  She told me this in a whisper. I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling. This was serious. She took my hand. She looked at it. She said my hands were beautiful. I smiled. I wasn’t going to enumerate the charms of Asunta.

  “Please, understand me,” she said. “I owe everything to Max Monroy. Before, my life was very frustrated. Now, I’m a guided force.”

  “Like a missile?” I said with misplaced humor, as if I hadn’t guessed something more serious in her embrace.

  She looked at me again.

  “Please, don’t distract me.”

  I woke before dawn. Everyone was asleep. I anticipated the surprise of waking beside Asunta Jordán. I already felt the suffering that awaited me as punishment for obtaining what I most desired. Now everyone else was sleeping. What is there outside?

  THE SECOND ROYAL Tribunal of the City of Mexico met in 1531 and made it clear that enslavement of the Indians favors miners and encomenderos, the colonists who hold Indian labor. Yes, but at the expense of the Indians, disagrees Vasco de Quiroga, member of the Tribunal. The labor of the Indians is the sinew of the land, the Tribunal maintains. The prosperity of the land depends on respect for indigenous traditions, responds Quiroga, and he moves from words to deeds. He frees his slaves. He becomes a priest. He founds in Santa Fe—here, where you are, Josué—the Republic of the Hospice, dedicated to saving indigenous children by teaching them Castilian along with the Otomí language; to singing and officiating and also preaching Christianity to their parents, without discrediting the native sacred tradition, but fusing Christianity with innate religiosity; to celebrating, without candles, without consecration, the “Plain Mass” as a cordial invitation to shared spirituality. Quiroga evokes a time common to all, Spaniards and Indians: a Golden Age that renews the mythic spirit of the Otomís and also the faith of the early Christian church: The Indians, Quiroga writes, are simple, gentle, humble, obedient, they lack pride, ambition, and greed. They were not born to be slaves. They are rational beings. If some are vagabonds, they must be taught to work. And if some are indolent, it is because the fruits of this earth are offered too easily. Indians and Christians can be today what they were yesterday and in this way become what they will be tomorrow. From Santa Fe, Vasco de Quiroga expands to Michoacán and founds the Hospice of Santa Fe on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro. He respects the Tarasco language as he teaches the Spanish language. He is inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia. The Indians should organize communally, for they are adrift in societies shattered into a thousand pieces by the savage conquest that speeds like a lightning flash from the Gulf to the Pacific, from the land of the Otomís to the land of the Purépechas, from Oaxaca to Xalisco, today’s history faster than yesterday’s, tomorrow’s history broken too if the Indians are not given a language and a roof, care and doctrine, work and dignity. Tata Vasco, Papa Quiroga, Father Vasco the Indians call him, and he gives them collective ownership of the land, a six-hour workday, assigning the fruits of their labor to the necessities of life. He forbids luxury. He organizes every four families under a Principal. Vasco de Quiroga, in whose shadow you work, Josué, teaches that social organization requires a practical economy, that the European world must learn to live in harmony with Indian customs. What will be born of this teaching and this mutual respect? Is it worth wagering that the simple life, work and education, will create a new Mexican community without conquerors or conquered but protected by liberty and law?

  “Does happiness have a price?” you, Josué, ask of the statue of Fray Vasco de Quiroga, Tata Vasco, that you pass by every day.

  “Yes,” the friar affirms. “The Indians have to be recruited by force so they can learn to be happy …”

  “And the reward?” you ask Tata Vasco.

  “Christian rebirth.”

  “And the method?”

  “Using tradition to …”

  “To dominate?”

  Fray Vasco doesn’t hear you. There was a drought in Michoacán. Quiroga strikes a rock with his staff. Water pours out of the stone when the crook of the bishop’s crosier touches it. Is the miracle enough for you, Josué? Do you need something more than a miracle?

  The savage soldiers of Nuño de Guzmán the conquistador come down from Xalisco, burn villages, take prisoners, demand tributes, spices, labor, give themselves extensive and abundant lands and water. Utopia isn’t good for a race of porters and vassals, Utopia doesn’t allow forced labor in the mines or company stores on the haciendas. Silver, cattle, seized lands, alcohol for weddings and funerals: The Indian flees the utopia of Tata Vasco, subjugated by the swords and horses of Nuño de Guzmán, takes refuge on the latifundios: It’s the lesser of two evils … What can we do.

  Every morning Josué questions the statue of Fray Vasco de Quiroga, Tata Vasco, in the district of Santa Fe in México, D.F.

  “I am the father of your culture,” Tata Vasco tells Josué one day.

  Josué wonders if his mission consists in maintaining or changing it.

  “GO ON, ANDALE, ándale.”

  Order, greeting and farewell, communication, familiarity and alienation, this Mexican verbal expression lends itself to as many interpretations as its national insularity permits: No one outside Mexico says “ándale,” and a Mexican reveals himself when he says it, the lawyer Antonio Sanginés told me one winter night in his house in the Coyoacán district.

  This time, the garland of mischievous children was not climbing around his neck, and on the maestro’s face I observed a seriousness at once customary and unusual. I mean, he almost always was very serious. Except this time—I read it in his face—he was serious only for me. And this only for me excluded the other person with whom I had visited Sanginés on previous occasions. My old buddy Jericó.

  “How long has it been since you?
??ve seen each other?”

  “A year.”

  “Ándale.”

  As usual, Sanginés the pedagogue began by evoking a series of allusions to his dealings with President Valentín Pedro Carrera. He prized his role as court adviser to the powerful: in government and in business. He knew them both, in the office building in Santa Fe and in the political encampment at Los Pinos. This is how he defined it, with complete simplicity.

  While Max Monroy presided over a permanent empire in Santa Fe, at Los Pinos Valentín Pedro Carrera was the transient foreman of a six-year-long ranch. The occupier of the presidency knew he was temporary. The head of the firm aspired to permanence. How did these two powers get along?

  Sanginés did not have to tell me. He valued being the intermediary between the political executive and the business executive, between Valentín Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy. Confirming this, Sanginés looked at me without blinking, his chin resting on his hands, and enumerated—yes, enumerated—his recommendations to President Carrera, like a local Machiavelli (I wouldn’t say a neighborhood Florentine, no, I wouldn’t say that, because after all, Maestro Sanginés had directed my professional thesis on the diabolical Niccolò):

  Don’t exaggerate expectations.

  Don’t attempt to lengthen the six-year term or seek reelection.

  Longevity in office is fatal to one’s reputation.

  Remember that presidents begin in the light of hope and end in the shadow of experience.

  In opposition, purity.

  In power, compromise.

  Prepare yourself in time to leave office, Mr. President.

  You will be seen as a good president only if you know how to be a good ex-president.

  Pause. I never saw a more bitter expression on Antonio’s face than at that moment.

  Exaggerate.

  Lengthen.

  Illuminate the nation.

  Don’t commit to anything.

  Remain in office.

  Don’t leave.

  I’m here.

  Ándale, Jericó, ándale.

  I suspected that Sanginés felt very bitter, that in the past year Jericó had taken possession of the presidential ear, reducing Sanginés to the most absolute marginality.

  Why had he called me now?

  With the habitual circumlocution of a lawyer from New Spain, Antonio Sanginés launched into a narrative that occupied us for a good part of the night. He evoked. He reproduced. He accelerated. He lingered.

  “The times of the hero are over,” Jericó told Carrera (just as Sanginés had told Carrera). A revolutionary state legitimizes itself. Washington, Lincoln, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Madero—Carranza—Obregón—Calles—Cárdenas. Even Tlatelolco and delegitimization by way of crimes against the pure, simple movement that ought to accompany the revolutionary state to accredit it as such. Halt the movement of the state: The movement of society supplants it. The United States is master of silent renovation: Its most reactionary groups appropriate rebellion. The Daughters of the American Revolution are a group of ultraconservative old women who still use pince-nez and wear chokers and color their hair sky blue.

  “The times of the hero are over. Government, state, and revolution are no longer the same. The old revolutionary state has lost all legitimacy. You have to give new legality to the new reality,” declaimed Jericó.

  “Count on me,” Sanginés told the president.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Jericó told Carrera and added: “In your name, of course.”

  Something unites us, Sanginés said with a sigh, something unites your friend Jericó and me. We have exercised more power the more distance we have maintained from power. Except my distance, compared to Jericó’s, was disinterested.

  He said he advised keeping watch over the country.

  “And Jericó?” I asked.

  He looked at me sadly but did not respond. Still, there can be no doubt that the detail illuminates the life. Just as a small dog enlivens the stiff portrait of an aristocrat, a gesture by Sanginés spoke volumes to me about his thinking. The most banal gesture: taking a crumb of bread and transforming it into a ball that, finally, in an unusual act for a man so well bred, he tossed to the floor and flattened with his shoe.

  Only then did he resume speaking.

  “I’ve always known Valentín Pedro Carrera. I’ll summarize his career for you. He was a young idealist. He ran his presidential campaign while his wife was sick. Cynicism or compassion? He made the electorate cry. Doña Clarita died soon after Carrera won the election. She died in time. Carrera got a second wind thanks to grief and solitude. Except that grief ends and solitude doesn’t. Then the fires spring up: arbitrariness, abuse of power, a kind of revenge against the destiny that raised him so high just to strip him of what power gives in abundance—appearance, the use of appearing, the abuse of being present … My advice, Josué, was born of a desire to control these extremes and employ the affliction of power to benefit power …”

  I didn’t know what Sanginés was drinking from an empty cup.

  “I believe I have discovered the great flaw in power. The powerful man does not want to know what is done in his name. The great secular criminal, an Al Capone, knows and orders everything. But even the most fearsome tyrant opens the floodgates of a violence he himself cannot control. Who assassinated Mateotti, the last opposition deputy who served as a democratic excuse for Mussolini, leaving him no option other than dictatorship? Did Himmler itemize the concentration camp horror beyond Hitler’s insane, abstract desire, concentrating it into mountains of suitcases, hair, eyeglasses, dentures, and broken dolls in Auschwitz? Did Stalin do anything other than follow the tyrannical desire of the revolutionary who died in time, Lenin the lay saint, I understand him better than his democratic followers, Bukharin, Kamenev …? Not Trotsky, who was as hard as Stalin, but to his misfortune an educated man …”

  My attentive gaze was a question: And Valentín Pedro Carrera?

  Sanginés told me anecdotes. Carrera is a man in love with his own words. He can speak without stopping for hours. It is absolutely necessary to interrupt him from time to time. To help him. So he can take a breath. So he can have a drink. We all knew that this president needed official interrupters. We presidential lackeys took turns interrupting him.

  “What gives? Do they think everything they say is interesting? Or are they afraid to be quiet and give someone else the floor? Are they afraid of being contradicted? What happens?” I asked with intense ingenuousness.

  “I tell you, it’s an art knowing how to interrupt the president. Jericó’s acumen consists in never interrupting. Carrera realized it: ‘You never interrupt me, Jericó. Thank you for that. But tell me why.’ ”

  Sanginés was present. Jericó, he says, did not respond. Why was Sanginés there? What would Jericó have said to Carrera in the absence of a witness?

  “The president is garrulous. I’m telling you because he told me. He also is master of a kind of pedantic indecisiveness. I mean, he is not an indecisive man like Hamlet, who weighs and tests his options. His indecision is a kind of farce. It’s a way of saying, paradoxically, I have the power not to make any decision at all and to say whatever occurs to me.”

  I repeat: Sanginés’s cup was empty.

  “That was Jericó’s astuteness, I realize it now. He knew Carrera did not act out of pure vanity and arrogance. On both counts Jericó acted for him. Carrera did and did not realize it, and he thanked Jericó for relieving him of an unwanted responsibility: Making decisions is the queen bee of power; it can also be its dead fly of feigned meekness.”

  What did the president want? The impossible: “Give me easy solutions to difficult problems.”

  “Ça n’existe pas,” Sanginés murmured. “Jericó’s wickedness …”

  I raised my eyebrows. Sanginés sighed. He made it clear that he knew what he was talking about, that his was not the voice of a resentful man removed from the favors of power. He wanted to remain a loyal counselor. Not to me
ntion a responsible citizen. I let my eyebrows drop. I accused myself of sentimentality. Because I owed a great deal to Sanginés. Because of my old friendship with Jericó. Because I was still, by comparison, an innocent …

  “Think technical. Talk agrarian. Long live liberty. Down with equality. Count on me. Don’t trust too many counselors. You prepare the mole, too many cooks spoil the sauce. Send your enemies to distant embassies. And your friends too.”

  With these and similar words, Jericó was insinuating himself into the president’s confidence, alarming him at times (“You’ve taken the wolf by the ears, you can’t let him go but you can’t hold him forever either”), encouraging him at others (“Don’t worry too much, equality is the most unequal thing that exists”), cutting him off on occasions (the classic symbolic knife slitting his throat), warning him on others (the no less classic eye opened by the right index finger on the lid), elaborating justifications (“politics can be soft, interests are always hard”). The president gave him simple tasks. Read the papers, Jericó. Keep me informed. At night I’ll read whatever seems important.

  “What did your pal do?” Sanginés asked rhetorically. “What do you think?”

  He gave me an ugly look. I gave him a beatific one.

  “He selected items from the press. He cut out whatever suited him whenever it suited him. News of general tranquillity and happiness and prosperity under the leadership of Valentín Pedro Carrera: A president becomes more and more isolated and eventually believes only what he wishes to believe and what his lackeys make him believe—”

  I interrupted. “Jericó … I think that … he’s …”

  “The complete courtier, Josué. Don’t be deceived.”

  “And you, Maestro?” I tried to irritate him.

  “I repeat: a loyal counselor.”

  Ándale, ándale, ándale.

  “DON’T OPEN YOUR mouth. Don’t say anything.”

  And I who had my romantic phrases prepared, my sentimental allusions derived from a potpourri of musical boleros, recollections of Amado Nervo, dialogues from North American movies (Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars), everything refined, nothing vulgar, though fearing my good manners would disappoint her in bed, perhaps she desired more brutal treatment, coarser words (you’re my whore, whore, I adore your tight little cunt), no, I didn’t dare, only pretty phrases, and as soon as I had said one, the first one, when I was on top of her, she came out with that brutal “Don’t open your mouth. Don’t say anything.”