“We don’t even have a cake; I don’t know how to make cakes,” mooed Doña Lucha. “Do you, miss?”
Ponderosa triumphantly said she did not: “But here in the fine print it says: Birthday cakes specially made by Baby Ba.”
“But who runs this organization? Does it belong to anyone we know?”
“It says here the president of the company is named Angel Palomar y Fagoaga…”
“Labastida Pacheco y Montes de Oca!” exclaimed Doña Lucha, who knew the Mexican Gotha by heart: “The best families of D.F., Puebla, and Guadalajara!”
“If you say so,” Ponderosa commented dryly. She withdrew—without turning her back on the mistress.
2
Like a ghost, Ulises López wandered through his darkened house in Las Lomas del Sol. During the day, ablaze with mercury vapor lamps, incandescent spots, and multicolored strobes, the mansion looked like the Duty-Free Shop in any international airport. Every one of the mementos of petroseventies opulence was piled up there for all the world to see: French perfumes, German cameras, Japanese computers, Yankee recorders, Swiss watches, Italian shoes. All of it, felt Doña Lucha, should be on display, because, as she never tired of saying:
“My money is my money and I have absolutely no reason to hide it from envious eyes. I do as I please!”
But at four in the morning the owner of the house flitted like a phantom from his severe mahogany-furnished bedroom with velveteen-covered walls to the preposterous Guggenheim staircase, to the cement garden, to the pool in the shape of the map of the U.S.A., with the stars and stripes painted on its bottom, from there into the private casino and to the cockfighting pit, muttering to himself about his career and his fortune, without knowing that Federico Robles Chacón, his archrival, had given the cook Médoc d’Aubuisson a farm with fruit orchards and a shooting range in Yautepec in exchange for which Médoc would put a tiny grain of sugar into Don Ulises’s breakfast papaya every day. The grain of sugar was actually the last word in computers invented in
— — — — — — ( (Pacífica) ) — — — — — —
Once ingested, it registers a person’s murmurs and most secret thoughts for twenty-four hours, transmitting them to a data bank in the office of Robles Chacón, where they are deciphered and processed by a Samurai computer, providing Minister Robles Chacón with infinite delight and inside information. However: since the microchip enters with the papaya, it also leaves with the papaya, so it must be replaced every day. Médoc will not scant his duties just because he’s going on vacation in order not to have to feed five hundred parvenus. Into the ear of Ms. Ponderosa, Médoc has whispered his promise that she will abandon, if not her virginity (of which she was deprived a long time ago by a powerful Spanish Civil Guard), then at least her current solitude as soon as he (Médoc) returns
TUGUEDER (flashes the neon sign in the Ponderosa noggin)
if she will slip the daily grain of sugar into the master’s papaya.
In a solitary cockpit at four in the morning, we find a sleepless Ulises López, who can only vent his rage against Federico Robles Chacón through a sentimental review of his own career: he was born a poor boy on the Pacific coast of Guerrero, but even then he was thrifty, a pack rat of a boy who saved everything, who found a use for everything, and that’s how he made his way: When no one else had toothbrushes—call Ulises! When someone needed a top—call Ulises! When a bus needed a nut—call Ulises! When a nicely stuffed box of votes for the PRI would win an election for the Party—call Ulises! And when Ulises requested admission to high school in Acapulco, law school at Chilpancingo, the doctoral program at the National University, and postgraduate study at USC, he got what he wanted because Ulises López always had something someone else needed: that was his secret, and that was his way to the top:
“I made my money following the national rules of the game,” he would say, and no one ever doubted the truth of that statement. From low-level jobs he rose to high-level jobs, but in all, low or high, he maintained or solidified his power base. Guerrero, where he achieved favorite-son status, was indispensable to him; then national private enterprise; foreign relations—U.S. finance and business; then national government and the PRI. All this was well known and fairly normal. The difference was that Ulises embodied this pattern at a unique moment in Mexican history—between 1977 and 1982, when more foreign money entered the country than had come in during the previous 155 years of our independence. During the oil boom, everything was expensive in Mexico except the dollar. Ulises realized that before anyone else. He founded the famous Theta Group (of which he was the only member) and took over banks in order to lend himself cheap money he used to import the torrent of consumer goods he sold at inflated prices in the status-conscious middle-class market; he deposited hundreds of millions in rival banks and then abruptly withdrew the money, causing his competition to collapse; he created financial empires within Mexico and abroad, vast labyrinths of paper within pyramids of noninsured credits and companies backed only by documents based on the country’s oil promise, taking advantage of low interest rates, petrodollar loans, and the rise in the cost of raw materials; he deposited carloads of profits in European and U.S. banks, but he was the first to stand up and cheer when López Portillo nationalized the banks and denounced the money exporters in 1982. What the hell: the people he denounced were standing right there with him, wildly applauding a denunciation the President—in a theatrical act unprecedented since Santa Anna staged a coup d’état against himself—directed toward other people and himself. Eventually, Ulises said to himself, and he said it with full confidence, I’ll be paid back for the loss of my banks and then I’ll send my money safe and sound to Grand Cayman; and that’s just how it happened. Now a cayman is a crocodile, but even a crocodile (like Don Ulises) can suffer the odd setback: he took a nasty hit because of his paper speculations, but by 1989 his 1982 losses had been paid back. Smack in the middle of the crisis, he realized that the foreign shareholders in his Mexico Black Gold Mutual Fund (a dummy subsidiary of the Theta Group) had bought ten million shares at twelve dollars per share in 1978; now they were worth two dollars each. To compensate for that loss, he became the first Latin American to enter into the greenmail racket—green, green: how I love you green, green cells, green stocks, green dollars, and green dolors: the loans that broke us were asshole loans made by asshole banks to asshole governments, said Ulises; we could have broken the international banking system by suspending payments, but we didn’t dare; they screwed us because we were honorable men and we forgot that the United States never paid its astronomical debt to English banks in the nineteenth century. I’m delighted—Ulises jumped for joy, clicking his heels (I’m faithful to capital, not to the fatherland!). Transformed into a greenmailer, Don Ulises was the star of a kind of financial fraud that worked like this: he’d buy a huge amount of stock in a famous transnational corporation, announce that he was about to take it over, thus sending its value into the multinational stratosphere and thereby forcing the company to buy—at a very high price—the stocks belonging to Ulises López in order to retain control over the corporation and to silence speculation. Using this method, our astute Guerrero magnate earned $40 million free and clear in one shot and could thus repair his fortune, damaged by the collapse of the paper empires—well, not damaged all that much, muttered the squatty, rapidly pacing Napoleon of the business world, after all, as Don Juan Tenorio was heard to say, time does eventually run out on you, and therefore there is no debt that can’t be negotiated so that you don’t have to pay in propeller-driven pesos what you contracted to buy in supersonic dollars; we’ve got lots of things to sell in Mexico, beginning with twelve hundred miles of elastic and continuous frontier, then moving on to revalued earthquaked property expropriated by the government in 1985 and renegotiated by Ulises in 1989.
Don Ulises López’s principal task during the Crisis of 1990, when he was named superminister, to supervise (from a very advantageous position) the de facto dismem
berment that de jure disguised itself as condominiums, trusts, limited concessions, and temporary cedings, in which the Yucatán was handed over to Club Med, the Chitacam Trusteeship was created for the Five Sisters, the existence of Mexamerica was sanctioned, and no attention whatsoever was paid to what was going on in Veracruz or on the Pacific coast north of Ixtapa.
Nothing brought more fame to Ulises López than these deals, disguised in euphemisms like “realistic acceptance of interindependence,” “patriotic adaptation to dominating forces,” “a step forward in nationalistic, revolutionary concentration,” “patriotic contribution to peaceful coexistence,” etc., and whatever the individual’s party affiliations, there was something for everyone.
For his many efforts, Don Ulises was rewarded during the Crisis of the Year ’90 with the portfolio of SEPAFU (Secretariat of Patriotism and Foreign Undertakings); some people said that his business successes were balanced by his disastrous tour as minister, while others said he was rewarded with a brilliant portfolio for his business disasters. Our brave Ulises remained undaunted: from the Super Economic Secretariat he announced his market philosophy through all the media:
In public: “It does not matter who makes money, just as long as everyone pays taxes.”
In private: “I’m willing to lose all the money in the world, as long as it isn’t my money.”
In public: “Public service is the only justification for holding power.”
In private: “Like sex, power can only be enjoyed when it needs no justifications.”
In public: “We are all involved in production.”
In private: “This country is divided into producers and parasites. I had nothing in Guerrero. I made myself into what I am today out of nothing. No one ever gave me a free tortilla.”
In public: “When all of us get our fair share, production goes up.”
In private: “The government should only help the rich.”
In public: “The glory of our nation is forged by one hundred million Mexicans.”
In private: “The glory of Ulises López is forged by one hundred million assholes.”
In public: “As the poet says, no one should have too much when someone doesn’t have enough.”
In private: “Who needs a Jaguar or a Porsche to survive? I do! For whom is having a thirty-ounce bottle of Miss Dior a matter of life or death? Do I really have to answer that?”
Publicly or privately, Ulises and his policies were an open secret: Ulises and his pals got rich because the nation got poor; he made money thanks to bad government; oil ruined us but it set Ulises up; the government is tearing the country to pieces; foreign banks are tearing the government to pieces; Ulises tears all of them to pieces.
“Put me in jail for theft!” Ulises shouted with haughty bitterness at the invisible roosters that night he paced the empty cockpit. “Cut me down! And then wait for someone with my genius to pop up! All aspects of human nature are reborn, demand to exist, to grow, to bear fruit: ALL OF THEM!”
But, in a flash, the nefarious Robles Chacón usurped all the wisdom, the capacity for intrigue, the talent for scheming, the rhetorical skill, the balanced exchange of favors, and, in the same way, replaced the contradictions and the discredit, the lack of results and the animosity of the people toward Ulises López’s administration with a politics of symbols: Mamadoc, the contests, Circus and Circus, all with such spectacular results that Ulises, locked away in his mansion, sleeplessly pacing his cockpit, drinking coffee at all hours of the day and thinking how to take revenge on Robles Chacón, on that monster Mother and Doctor, on his former financial rivals who had accommodated themselves to the new situation. Ulises López believed in self-affirmation, and his shout into the night was this:
“I was a shark and I’ll be a shark again!”
All of the above meant absolutely nothing to Ulises’s distinguished wife, Lucha Plancarte de López—as long as it did not affect her lifestyle, which for her was everything. An essential part of that style was foreign travel, and when her husband announced that from then on they would only travel to Querétaro and Taxco, the lady almost had a fit:
“Why? Why?”
“We just can’t offend the middle classes, who are unable to travel because they have no foreign currency.”
“Well I, thank God, am not middle-class.”
“But you will be unless you watch out. The time is just not right for conspicuous consumption, Lucha. I’m not a cabinet minister anymore, and I don’t want to give Robles Chacón any pretexts to get even with me.”
“Maybe you should be thinking about getting even with him, dummy.”
Doña Lucha López was tall, outspoken, dark, with a good figure, curly-haired wherever she had hair, with an ass like Narcissus’ pond—deep enough to drown in, her husband said when he met her—and Tantalus tits—because they always bounced away when his fingers came too close. She had been known as a femme fatale in the city of Chilpancingo when the two of them went out dancing during their courtship, and Ulises had to protect himself from the train of punks and would-be Don Juans who would follow Lucha’s silhouette to the movies, to cabarets, on vacation, and when they went out for a snack. But Ulises made his first million before the others and that determined her choice: she tall and graceful, he short and nervous. They didn’t waste time on a honeymoon: he de-femme-fatalized her; she de-Don-Juanized her Chilpancingo lover boy and then they de-sisted. She put on weight, but always maintained—Ulises would say to himself—“a divine skull.” As long as she lived, she knew how to sit as if she were posing for a portrait by Diego Rivera. She was involved, even though her husband knew all about them, in a series of compensatory escapades, the price, he admitted, he had to pay, as he ate his daily papaya, for his own escapades with power and money:
“I only use those who would use me or who do use everyone else. If I exploit them, it’s because they also exploit; if I’m tricky, it’s because everyone’s tricky. Everyone wants exactly what you and I want. Power, sex, and money.”
“But not in equal quantities, dearie.”
She wanted sex and money, power she didn’t care about. As long as she felt young, she made herself the leading lady in a labyrinth of illicit love affairs, secret meetings, motels, threats, escapes, daily excitement, and above all the adventure of knowing she was being followed by a dozen or so thugs and private detectives working for her husband and none of them could ever find her or bring proof to poor Ulises. That captain of industry decided not to take revenge until the time was ripe; in the meanwhile, he would enjoy the disinterest of their sexual relations and the interest both said they had in their daughter and in her place in Mexican society.
The crisis ruined everything. Lucha never forgave Ulises for having given up on the trips abroad. Neither the mansion in Las Lomas del Sol nor the cook from Le Grand Vefour could compete with the emotion Lucha felt when she walked into a great department store in a foreign country.
“Are we or are we not wealthy Mexicans?” she asked in murderous tones as he ate his daily ration of papaya with sugar and lemon—without which the diminutive tycoon suffered dyspepsia and intestinal irregularity.
He did not respond to this recrimination, but he did share it. Ulises López’s reward to himself for his childhood in Guerrero and his dynamic ascent in Mexico City was a dream populated by waiters and maîtres d’, restaurants, hotels, first-class plane tickets, European castles, beach houses on Long Island and Marbella: oh, to enter and be recognized, greeted, kowtowed to, in the Plaza-Athénée and the Beverly-Wilshire, to call the maître d’ at Le Cirque by his first name … For Don Ulises, these compensations, nevertheless, put him in a state of perpetual schizophrenia: how to be cosmopolitan in Rome and a hometown boy in Chilpancingo? he didn’t want to lose either his provincial power base (without it, he would have no political support) or his international standing (without it, he’d have no reward of any kind for his labors).
Our little Lucha, on the other hand, had fewer refinem
ents than her husband: for her there existed nothing beyond stores, stores, and more stores, especially U.S. malls; the reward for being proudly rich and Mexican was to spend hours obsessively patrolling the Galleria in Houston, Trump Tower in New York, the Hancock in Chicago, the Rodeo Collection in Los Angeles, and Copley Place in Boston: hours and hours, from the moment they opened until closing time, Lucha Plancarte de López walked more miles through those commercial corridors than a Tarahumara Indian through his mountains.
“That’s why we made the money in the first place! And now what happens? I hate your guts!”
With these words skiing over the fissures and grooves in his cerebral cortex, Ulises went back into his bedroom, laid himself down, and instead of counting sheep, repeated: I did lots of favors, lots of favors were done for me, returned to me, there was never a contradiction between my interests and the interests of the nation, it’s all favors, I do the nation a favor, the nation does one for me, I’ll do it back, how will I get even with Robles, how will I get even with, how will I get zzzzzzzzzzzzz and Lucha, on her side, was trying to get to sleep by reading, at her husband’s entreaty, López Velarde’s Sweet Fatherland. Learn something, honey, he’d say, don’t always look so dumb, you’re Ulises López’s wife, don’t forget that, and all that seemed true to the lady, but what stuck in her craw was that line about “The Christ Child bequeathed you a stable,” an idea that instead of making her relax set her to hopping around, subliminally reminding her that Christ was the God born in a manger (they always pop up where you least expect them!) and literally reminding her that a mob of squatters left over from the earthquake were building mangers on her property. Bullshit, said Doña Lucha Plancarte de López, wife of the eminent financier and minister, stables for Christmas Eve, fine, God bequeathed to me my house in Las Lomas del Sol, 15,000 square feet, a tennis court, black marble toilets, the bedrooms lined with lynx to rub up against cozily before making whoopee on the water bed with a melodious musical background by the great composer Mouseart piped in and my televised scale that electronically tells me my weight and the image of the ideal figure to which I get a little closer every day: size 12 here, girls, so drop dead! Besides, think of all we did for our little Princess Penny to make her existence cute: a heart-shaped Jacuzzi, a ballroom right here with three hundred of the latest cassettes, a little casino where her friends can have fun with backgammon tables, roulette wheels, a screening room done in red velvet, a stable of ponies to pull cute little coaches when Penny rides around the garden dressed up as Marie Antoinette, she says, although to me she looks like an elegant little shepherdess, and a track for dog racing, a cockpit, a little heated pool in the shape of the States, a modest copy of the first floor of Bloomingdale’s, modest because we don’t want to cause any fuss, what with the crisis, and we almost never travel anymore, but it does have shopgirls imported directly from the U.S. and a perfume counter that, my God! makes my, my … my nose twitch! So have a good time with your stable! Me, I’ll take my cash, my property, my little girl who speaks English, my greenbacks to travel with once in a while even if it’s to Mexamerica, my little group of girls to laugh with and have a good time with and a few drinks, or more than a few—who’s counting? Stables: not for this filly!