“The dogma of the Trinity is not incompatible with reason?” I asked, because I wanted to push Filopáter’s words to a proposition that wasn’t a conclusion but a confrontation. His current state told me clearly that something serious had occurred to make him abandon teaching, which had been his vocation since his youth, when he taught the Pizarro Leongómez brothers at the Javeriana in Bogotá and then, when the rough tides of Colombian politics washed him up in Mexico, he landed in our secondary school.
“No,” he said with renewed energy. “It isn’t. But that is the truth clerical intolerance can employ against a person if he attempts to reconcile the truth of faith and the reason of truth. It is not only easier”—did I detect an unusual disdain in the priest’s voice?—“it is more cowardly. For as long as we maintain that faith is true though it may not be factual, you will be protected by a dogma that is a paradox we owe to Tertullian: ‘It is certain because it is impossible.’ A definition of faith …”
The coffee was bad, with milk it was worse. Filopáter sipped it almost as a sacrifice. He was Colombian.
“If you wager, on the other hand, on the rationality of faith, you expose yourself to the censure of those who prefer to deny reason to religion only because they wouldn’t know how to explain their faith rationally, and therefore opt for a blind faith, an ignorant faith.”
Filopáter became excited.
“No.” He banged on the table and knocked over the glass bowl of sugar, spilling it. “One must sustain the mystery with reason and fortify reason with mystery. Faith does not exclude reason and reason does not destroy faith. Saying this exposes the dogmatic man, the passive man, the man who wants to impose a truth like the Inquisitors beneath whose walls you found me sitting this morning, or hides behind the wall denying the work of God—”
“What is it?” I asked with a certain impertinence. “The work of God, what is it?”
“The redemption of the world by means of the wearisome affirmation of human reason.”
The glass sugar bowl had rolled off the table onto the floor, where it shattered, granulating the floor like a snowstorm that has lost its way in the tropics.
The owner of the café hurried over, alarmed, annoyed, a woman submissive to patrons.
“Pro vitris fractis,” Filopáter said solemnly. “Impose a surcharge for the broken glass, Señora.”
MOVE LIKE TIGERS. Study the sites. They walk through public offices. They find out. Where are the telephone and telegraph installations? Which seem the places of least resistance? The Zócalo? The Paseo de la Reforma? The distant shantytowns, Los Remedios, Tulyehualco, San Miguel Tehuizco? The government ministries of state, post offices, private businesses, apartment houses? Study them all. Tell me which ones you like. Recruit in the penitentiaries. I, Jericó, will see to it that by my order Maxi Batalla, Sara Pérez, Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas are released, an order from the office of the president, signed by me, is enough, and the president will never know. Let the criminals join up with the laborers who can’t get across the border; promise them good jobs in California; promise the unemployed in Mexico City, the unsatisfied workers, that they’ll be rich and won’t have to work; promise: promise the migrant workers thrown out of the United States, their families who will no longer receive dollars every month, those who can’t find work in Mexico and see only a horizon of hunger: promise. Begin with work stoppages, slowdowns, stealing parts, voluntary accidents, intentional fires, until the city is set on fire and comes to a halt. You, Mariachi Maxi, go from business to business; you, Brillantinas, print up some fake passes; you, Siboney, go to funerals and see who you can recruit; you, Gomas, go from barbecue to barbecue, inventing rumors, the government is falling, there’s repression, there are strikes, where? there? go on! arm and recruit impoverished young men, give them love, tell them now they’ll have respect because of their pistols. Rancor. Rancor. Rancor is our weapon. Exalt rancor. Mexican resentment is the fertilizer of our movement. Ask each boy: Do you want to ruin somebody, do you want to take revenge on somebody, do you want to get what you deserve, what is denied to you by injustice, wickedness, envy, inequality, your parents, your bosses, these young millionaires, these corrupt politicians? Rancor. The damned tradition of rancor. The most constant Mexican tradition. Take the pistol I’m going to give you, take the Uzi, take the club, the bludgeon, the lasso, they’re all good for attacking, make lists, boys, who do you want to ruin, who do you want to pay for their faults? Make lists! Find the places of least resistance, the most vulnerable, hospitals, pharmacies, commercial centers. Do you think we can take the airport? Ha-ha-ha, make yourselves invisible, don’t look at one another until it’s time for the attack, cut off the water, gas, electricity, isolate the districts in the city, isolate the center, the middle-class districts, the nameless ghost settlements where the city dies: feel united and don’t give up. Personal vendettas allowed.
“Do you really believe the masses will follow you, Jericó?”
“Distinguish between rhetoric and reality. I have to invoke the masses to justify myself. I need only a shock corps to triumph. A small, determined group. All of that about a class in the vanguard is late-night Marxist rhetoric. If you wait for the masses to act, Josué, you’ll wait till the cows come home.”
Once again, his world of North American sayings and references surprised me. Wait till the cows come home. Espera a que las vacas regresen.
“All the people,” I said to introduce an idea (let’s see if it sticks). “The mass of workers.”
“All the people are too much.”
“Who then?”
“A small group,” said Jericó, “a small, cold, violent group for insurrectionary tactics.”
“The mass of workers …”
“I don’t need them!” Jericó exclaimed. “An assault group is enough. The assault group represents the mass of the dissatisfied. Do you realize that half a million workers have returned to Mexico from the United States and don’t find anything but poverty and unemployment?”
“Detachments?”
“Armed. It’s enough for me to say from Los Pinos: Distribute weapons to defend the chief of state.”
I repressed my laughter. I transformed it into doubts. I managed to say: “They won’t pay attention to you.”
He turned red. Enraged. I saw something crazy in his eyes. As if saying to himself and saying to me, They are going to obey me.
“A few people,” he said as if he were praying. “Limited terrain. Clear objectives, the vanguard forward, the masses back.”
In the meantime, I should say that more than the insurrectionary tactics foreseen by Jericó, Jericó himself interested me, his evolution, his ambition. Should I have been surprised? Hadn’t he been my first friend? Wasn’t Jericó the one who gave me his hand in school, protecting me against the damned bullies? Wasn’t Jericó the one who took me to his apartment when “the House of Usher” fell on Calle de Berlín? Wasn’t he the one who introduced me to fundamental readings? Didn’t we argue together with Father Filopáter? Didn’t we see each other naked in the shower? Didn’t we fuck as a team the whore with the bee on her buttock? Weren’t we Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, founders of cities, Argonauts equal to Jason and the archer Phalerus and Lynceus the lookout and Orpheus the poet, and the herald, son of Hermes, and the courier of Lapida who had been a woman and Atalanta of Calydon, who still was: Argonauts plowing the seas in search—you Jericó and I Josué—of the Golden Fleece that hangs in a distant olive grove, guarded night and day by a sleepless dragon? I looked intently at Jericó, as if a direct gaze were still the guarantee of truth, the beacon of certitude, as if the most malicious men in the world had not understood—from the very beginning—that the direct gaze associated with frankness, humility, understanding, and friendship is the mask of falsehood, pride, intransigence, and enmity. I should have known it. I didn’t want to know it. Until this very moment when I’m narrating what happened, I insisted on evoking our youth as stude
nts as the most valuable part of our past, the friendship that was the reason for being, the watchword, the birth certificate of the relationship between Josué and Jericó. A reality that had to be expressed thoroughly and to the very last moment—I told myself—under penalty of losing my soul.
My references to the ideas and images that united us were only a way of telling myself and telling Jericó: “Every friendship rests on a myth and represents it.”
I asked: “In addition to the fleece, whom did the beast guard?” I answered myself: “A ghost. The specter of an exiled king whose return would bring peace to the kingdom.
“Recovering a ghost in order to sacrifice a republic,” I murmured then, and Jericó simply asked me: “What was more interesting, recovering the fleece or bringing back the ghost?”
“Crowning a specter?”
I understand now that this question has hung over our destinies because Jericó and I were Castor and Pollux, part of the eternal expedition in search of desire and destiny, a mere pretext, however, for recovering a specter and bringing him back home.
“Did you see this?” I handed him the newspaper across the table.
“What?”
“What happened at the zoo.”
“No.”
“A tiger died after being attacked by four other tigers.”
“Why?”
“They were hungry.”
I pointed.
“They ate his entrails. Look.”
Perhaps I just wanted to indicate that he and I became friends because of a debt. That brought us together. We established a lifetime alliance on the basis of that debt.
WILL VALENTÍN PEDRO Carrera go to Max Monroy’s offices and residence in the Utopia building on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga? Or would Max Monroy again go to the president’s residence and office in Los Pinos?
“Let him come,” advised the novice María del Rosario Galván.
“Why?” asked Carrera, prepared to admire the young woman’s beauty in exchange for excusing her errors and disregarding her opinions.
“Well, because you are … the president …”
Carrera smiled. “Do you know what ancient kings did to exercise their rights?”
“No.”
“Every year they went from village to village. They didn’t ask the village to come to see them. They went to the village, do you understand what I’m saying, beautiful?”
“Of course.” She attempted to recover her composure. “If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad goes to the mountain.”
“Exactly right, babe.”
The president smiled indulgently and went to the neutral territory approved by his representatives and Max Monroy’s. The Castle of Chapultepec, now the National Museum of History and the setting for Boy Heroes, Hapsburg Empires, and Porfirista Dictatorships. Monroy acceded to arriving first and viewing the tawny panorama of the city from the heights as if he were viewing non-existence itself. Why pretend to be master of nothing when one was master of everything? On the other hand, the president came to the esplanade of the palace as if he were a boy hero about to throw himself into the void, wrapped in the flag. As if the throne of the dynasty that ruled Mexico the longest (more than two centuries)—the Hapsburgs—were waiting for him. As if he were prepared to govern for three decades because listen, María del Rosario, you have to come here thinking you’re eternal, if not, you lose your six years the first day …
To see or not to see the arrival of the powerful entrepreneur Max Monroy? Act distracted, be surprised, greet each other, embrace?
“Ah!”
The embrace of the two men was recorded by cameras and microphones before Valentín Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy walked ten paces to distance themselves from publicity and bodyguards. María del Rosario Galván and Asunta Jordán, practically identical in their professional attire of tailored suit, dark stockings, and high heels, blocked the press and held off the guests.
“Truce, my dear Max?” The president’s smile dissipated the capital’s smog. “A meeting of two souls? Primus inter pares? Or pure show, my esteemed friend? An Embrace of Acatempan ending the wars of independence?”
“No, my dear president. Another battle.” Monroy did not smile.
“If you divide you don’t rule,” Carrera reflected, trying to catch Monroy’s eye.
“And if you rule by force, you divide but govern the parts.”
“Each to his own philosophy.” Carrera almost sighed. “The good thing is that when there’s danger, we know how to come together.”
“Understand it in terms of mutual convenience,” Monroy said with great suavity.
“Does this mean I can count on you, Max?”
“You can always count.” Monroy managed to smile. “What you don’t understand, Valentín Pedro, is that my policies are part of your power. Except your power lasts six years. My policies do not occur every six years.”
“And so?” the president said, halfway between amiable and falsely surprised.
“And so everything ends up contracting, understand that. The six-year term contracts. A life contracts. An era contracts.”
“What?” Carrera exclaimed in surprise (or pretending to be surprised). “Look how my belly’s growing and my hair’s falling out. Don’t kid me.”
“Of course,” Monroy continued, very calm. “With my policies I achieve what you’re missing. If we stayed only with your policies, we’d stay with half-measures. You believe in circuses without the bread. I believe in bread with the circuses. I believe in information and try to communicate that to the majority. You believe in conspiracy reserved for a minority. That’s why I believe that, in the long run, I can manage without you but you can’t get along without me.”
“Monroy, listen—”
“Don’t interrupt. You and I never see each other. I’ll use the occasion to say a person has to deserve my respect.”
“And admiration?”
“For superstars.”
“And esteem?”
“I’m a patient man. Everyone has gone. And those who remain ask me for favors. Our individual histories don’t count. Who remembers President Lagos Cházaro? Who could have been Secretary of Finance under Generalísimo Santa Anna?”
What a strange look the politician directed at the businessman.
“We’re part of the collective aggregate. Don’t go around thinking anything else.”
“What are you saying, Max?”
“Why am I telling you this? Well, we don’t see each other very often.”
Asunta—who tells me the preceding to the degree she heard something, guessed more, and read lips—says that Carrera sighed as if Monroy’s words sealed a previously mentioned reality. The president wasn’t going to change his policies of national distraction only because his official operative, Jericó, had betrayed him by taking advantage of the opportunity to find his own power base that turned out to be perfectly illusory, and Monroy would not abandon his of giving information media to citizens. The crisis perhaps demonstrated that the better informed the citizen, the fewer opportunities demagogic illusion would have.
“Or official carnivals?” asked Carrera, as if he had read (Asunta believes he did) Monroy’s mind.
“Look, Mr. President: What you and I have in common is possible control of the real communication media in this day and age. Insurgents once believed that by taking the central telephone offices they would take power. Do you know something? My telephone operators are all blind. Blind, you understand? In this way they hear better. Nobody hears better than a blind man. On the other hand, a thousand eyes are in thousands of cellular devices, the mobile phones that replace television, radio, the press. I am giving all Mexicans, whether or not they can read and write, a message, a family, a past, an inheritance. They constitute the real national and international information network.”
“You may be right,” Carrera went on. “Just whistle once so the bird can hear you.”
“You underestimate people.” Monro
y didn’t bother to look at him. “It’s your eternal error.”
“When there’s no paper, you clean yourself with whatever’s at hand.” Carrera made a vulgar gesture, like someone using a medieval torche-cul.
Monroy didn’t look at him. “Just don’t ignore what you need to survive.”
Carrera raised his shoulders. “You see, it wasn’t necessary to fire a single shot.”
“The fact is the fortress was empty.” Monroy threw cold water on his spirits.
“No, the truth is you’re very clever. You just hide it.” Carrera let his admiration for Max show. Max looked at Carrera with a flattering lie.
“This poor boy … your collaborator …”
“Don’t fuck with me, Max.” The president did not stop smiling. “We both win if you don’t fuck around.”
“Fine, your employee. His name is …?”
“Jericó.”
“Jericó.” Monroy did not smile. “Who knows what old-fashioned manual he read.”
(Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution by Curzio Malaparte, murmured María del Rosario Galván at a distance: Napoleon, Trotsky, Pilsudski, Primo de Rivera, Mussolini …)
“Let’s not be afraid of a gang insurrection like this one, Mr. President, or an impossible revolution like earlier ones. You should be afraid of the tyrant who comes to power through the vote and turns into an elected dictator. That’s the one to fear.”
(I thought, of course, of Antigua Concepción, Max Monroy’s mother, and her epic, revolutionary version of a history—was it buried along with her?)
“Dishonor,” murmured Max Monroy.
“What?” The president heard only what he wanted to hear.
“Dishonor,” Monroy repeated, and after pretending to admire the landscape: “Let’s not engage in minor intrigues. Let’s exercise irony.”
“What?”
“Irony. Irony.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I mean it’s very difficult under any circumstances to maintain power.”
“Isn’t that what I’m telling you?”