THE MONGOLIAN
CONSPIRACY
Rafael Bernal
Translated by Katherine Silver
Introduction by Francisco Goldman
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
Contents
Introduction by Francisco Goldman
THE MONGOLIAN CONSPIRACY
A note about the author by Cocol Bernal
Introduction
Filiberto García, the protagonist of The Mongolian Conspiracy, the sixty-year-old Mexico City police hitman, or pistolero, or guarura, as they are called nowadays, says “¡Pinche!” a lot, which Katherine Silvers translates as “Fucking!” Pinche past! Pinche furniture! Pinche gringo! Pinche Tame Tiger! Pinche professor! Pinche goddamned captain! Pinche jokes! Those are just the pinches found in the novel’s first three pages. Mexican profanities, such as chingar, are famously variable, their meanings subject to context and tone and conjugation, and pinche can be used in lots of ways in Mexican Spanish, for example even relatively genteel parents might say, “Pinche brats, go to bed,” but probably very few of their English-speaking American counterparts say, “Fucking brats, go to bed.” But “fucking!” is certainly the best possible translation of the pinches in García’s inner monologue, an explosive expression of rancor and mockery — including of himself — sarcasm, humiliation, bafflement, defiance, weary or bitter sorrow and resignation, all of which barely suggests the full range of his pinches. Let’s just take a look at what the “fucking” “pinches” of those first three pages tell us about Filiberto García:
“Fucking past!” García has a sordid job and knows it, called upon by his police and politician superiors — who claim to be repulsed by killing and to belong to the modern world of legality and laws — whenever they want someone rubbed out. But García got his start as a killer as a youth in the Mexican Revolution, fighting with Pancho Villa and “the Centaurs of the North,” when killing was manly and served a noble cause. “Here [in Mexico] all they teach us is how to kill,” Filiberto García reflects later in the novel. “Or maybe not even that. They hire us because we already know how to kill.” García was “born in the gutter,” the son of an unknown father and La Charanda, perhaps a prostitute: and poverty and the instinct and struggle to survive, as with so many Mexicans, carved his course in life and made it seem almost predetermined. Better to kill than to be killed; killing was what he was good at, and so a hired killer is what he became. Filiberto García, terse and hard-boiled as he seems, is tormented by the past, the distant memory of the betrayed Revolution and the great generals he fought for, but most of all, he is haunted by all the people he’s killed, usually men, but also women, and even a priest. His memories are like a cemetery in which all the corpses were put there by him, and those corpses take turns sitting up, as it were, intruding into his consciousness, forcing him to momentarily grapple with them before slamming the coffin lid shut again with a well placed ¡Pinche!
“Fucking furniture!” “He’d often thought about this furniture — his only belongings besides his car and the money he’d saved. He bought them when he moved out of the last of the many rooming houses he’d always lived in; they were the first ones they showed him at Sears, and he left everything exactly where they’d been set down by the deliveryman, who’d also hung up the curtains. Fucking furniture. But if have an apartment, you have to have furniture, and when you buy an apartment building, you have to live in it.” Filiberto García has done pretty well for himself, paid to kill for the police and probably illicitly helping himself along the way to the cash that comes his way in the course of his “police work.” He owns the building that he lives in. But his material pride is as sparsely furnished as his apartment. Only one other time in the novel is his landlord status even alluded to, many pages later, when, needing to remove the corpse of a man he’s slain from his apartment, “All my tenants live quiet lives.”
“Fucking gringo!” One of those intruding dead men from the past. In the mirror, Filiberto adjusts his red silk tie, the black Yardley-cologne scented handkerchief in his suit pocket. “The only thing he couldn’t fix was the scar on his cheek, but the gringo who’d made it couldn’t fix being dead, either. Fair is fair. Fucking gringo! Seems he knew how to handle a knife, but not lead.”
“Fucking tame tiger!” “His dark face was inexpressive, his mouth almost always motionless, even when he spoke. Only his big, green, almond-shaped eyes had any life in them. When he was a kid, in Yurécuaro, they called him The Cat, and a woman in Tampico called him My Tame Tiger. Fucking tame tiger! His eyes might suggest nicknames, but the rest of his face, especially his slight sneer, didn’t make people feel using any.” Filberto García doesn’t stand for teasing anymore than he does for jokes. That woman in Tampico is certainly one of the very few, the reader will see, who could have been inspired to treat this hard predatory macho, who has always considered “bitches” as little more than “holes,” with such teasing and ironical tenderness. “Out there in San Andrés Tuxtle, I killed a man then fucked his wife, right there in the same room, I raped her.” But in this novel Filiberto García falls in love with Marta, a twenty-five-year-old half-Chinese woman, in a manner that will baffle, humiliate, transform and even redeem him. A good part of The Mongolian Conspiracy’s almost sly and eccentric greatness resides in this love story, one of the most moving and unlikely in Mexican literature — and, without a doubt, the saddest.
“‘Who would ever marry a man like me, Marta? With my . . . profession?’
“‘Many women. You don’t know how good you are, the good you do in the world.’”
“Fucking professor! Fucking goddamned captain!”
“The doorman downstairs greeted him with a military salute:
“‘Good evening, Captain.’
“That chump calls me Captain because I wear a trench coat, a Stetson, and ankle boots. If I carried a briefcase, he’d call me professor. Fucking professor! Fucking goddamned captain!”
His own air of respectability, the fawning it inspires, galls Filiberto, who has no delusions about what he does for a living. It’s of a piece with the societal moral hypocrisy and corruption, the “lawyerocracy” of the modern Mexico that employs him, fueling his relentless rancor.
“Fucking jokes!” “Killing isn’t a job that takes a lot of time, especially now that we’re doing it legally, for the government, by the book. During the Revolution, things were different, but I was just a kid then, an orderly to General Marchena, one of so many second-rate generals. A lawyer in Saltillo said he was small-fry, but that lawyer is dead. I don’t like jokes like that. I don’t mind a smutty story, but as for jokes, you have to show respect, respect for Filiberto García, and respect for his generals. Fucking jokes!” “What’s to laugh about in this goddamned fucking life?” “People who knew him knew he didn’t like jokes. His women learned it fast.” Only his friend, an alcoholic and impoverished criminal lawyer who spends his days cadging tequilas in cantinas, the only friend Filberto García has in the novel, dares to crack jokes at his expense. When the atom bomb was dropped on Japan, the lawyer turned and with a straight face asked García, “As a fellow professional, what do you think of President Truman?” Nobody else in the cantina laughs, only this drunken lawyer, who doesn’t fear death but, according to García, doesn’t necessarily have “balls” either, who in his dipsomaniacal ruination is a sole figure of integrity because he never expresses hypocritical reverence for “laws” and “legality” and he dares to rib this professional killer.
Pinche Rafael Bernal, he wrote so fucking well, especially in The Mongolian Conspiracy, and probably also in the other fifteen or so books he published in his life, mostly novels, some non-fiction, history, a volume of poetry, though alm
ost all of those books are now out of print, all but this one, published in 1969, three years before the end of his life, and for years nearly impossible to find even in second-hand bookstores. Bernal, born in Mexico City in 1915, worked most of his professional life as a television and movie scriptwriter and as a diplomat in Mexico’s foreign service. He is reputed to have been at least until the 1950s a right-wing Christian nationalist, even a Synarchist, and reputedly many of his novels were platforms for the didactic airing of his views, especially regarding his religious beliefs and the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution by the country’s political, military, and oligarchic classes. He was also, in other novels, a costumbrista, a realist writer of local color and customs, obsessively portraying the jungle as a corrupter of the human spirit and morality, and the ocean as its healthy and invigorating opposite. In a 1990 interview, his wife, Idalia Villarreal, who was fourteen years younger, described Bernal as a voracious reader of detective novels, by Agatha Christie and the like, and said that his first forays into the detective novel or policier before The Mongolian Conspiracy show the influence of Chesterton. She also described him as a serious reader of ancient and medieval history. The favorite books of his youngest daughter Cocol are Bernal’s Un muerto en la tumba “where a geeky archaeologist turns detective after a fresh corpse is found in an ancient Monte Albán tomb” and Su numbre era muerta: “It is based on my father’s experiences in the jungle and concerns a man who lives in a Lacandón village in the jungle of Quintana Roo and learns to communicate with mosquitos. I believe he wrote it when we were in Venezuela in the late 1950s.” Yuri Herrera, the terrific young Mexican novelist, also admires Su nombre era muerte, which he describes as being about an alcoholic who retreats to the jungle, stops drinking, observes and studies mosquitoes and discovers their language, and then conceives of a plot to dominate the world with the help of the insects.
So how did Bernal produce The Mongolian Complot, this revered cult masterpiece that, though it didn’t garner much attention when it was first published, has ever since so greatly influenced subsequent generations of Mexican writers? Writing it, Bernal seems to have thrown out everything that had previously characterized him as a writer, his approach to the novel itself and certainly the didactic expression of his convictions and beliefs — there is no trace of conscious Christian morality or devotion in Filiberto García, who, as we see at the novel’s end, doesn’t know a single prayer. Apparently nobody in Mexico had ever placed a character such as García, a pistolero, working for the police, one of the country’s most notorious institutions, a denizen of Mexico City’s lower-depths, at the center of a literary novel. (If anyone else did, nobody seems to remember that book.) In that character, Bernal created an unforgettable antihero hero. This seems all the more remarkable when one considers that Bernal, apparently a man of the right, published this book in 1969, a turbulent time when nearly every other literary person, writers and readers, in Mexico identified with the left, when the corruption of the political culture that had grown from the Mexican Revolution had been garishly exposed to the world, one year after the authoritarian governing PRI had massacred as many as 400 student protestors and others in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, a seminal event which haunts Mexico and underlies its politics to this day, and in which many of the assassins who took part must have been order-following government gunmen of the Filberto García type, maintaining a stone-faced indifference to whether victims on the right or on the left. Bernal must have feared, or perversely expected, that García would repulse his contemporary Mexican readers, and that they would put the book down well before reaching the violent climax that, perhaps ambiguously, redeems him. For there comes a moment in The Mongolian Conspiracy when Filiberto García finally disobeys his superiors and fulfills his dark heroic journey with an act of sorrowful rage and vengeance through which he adds some final corpses to his memory cemetery — so maybe he hasn’t changed that much, after all. But those killings are almost secondary to the narrative of his intimate transformation, which has another source, his relationship with Marta.
On the one hand this is a novel of suspense and detection, cleverly satiric, with a devastating political knockout punch, but even more memorably, it is a novel of the heart, and of a consciousness. The story is full of intrigue and violence, but the real action springs from its language. The Mongolian Conspiracy is narrated in the third person, while constantly, with beguiling agility, sliding into the verbal torrent of Filiberto García’s inner monologue and commentary in a way that never impedes the taut unfolding of the story. It often feels like a first-person narration, until it suddenly reverts to a screen-filling image of García, as when, in Mexico City’s little Chinatown speaking to Marta in the place of her employ, “García’s eyes shone in the half-light of the shop,” and we grasp the poignant vulnerability of that aging hard man’s smitten gaze. The inner voice that Bernal created for his pistolero had rarely, if ever, been encountered in Mexican literature before, though anyone living in Mexico City who got around a bit would have heard it everywhere if she or he was paying attention, the voice of the urban barrio, of the cantinas, of harsh, violent deep Mexico, sardonic, fierce, profane, hilarious, pained, defiant, relentless, inventive, and aphoristic — “Fucking memories! They’re like hangovers . . . But the trick is to be like an old drunk and carry your Alka-Seltzer around inside you.” It’s a voice that reveals something essentially and enduringly Mexican, an embattled voice of daily and wily struggle against desperation and humiliation, and also one possessing a grandeur that isn’t always delusionary; a voice filled with the bitter lessons of moral solitude imposed by life in the Mexican labyrinth of an extremely unjust society rife with mendacity, hypocrisy, corruption and danger at every turn, but also redolent of that unquenchable and paradoxical gift for “feeling” that one of the novel’s Chinese characters tells Filiberto García, with biting irony, that his elderly and doomed compatriot, Mr. Liu, has absorbed from so many years of living among Mexicans. Nobody, not Carlos Fuentes, only Rafael Bernal, had ever brought that Mexican urban voice so vividly to life before, one that younger Mexican writers, in their various ways, have been mining ever since. When Bernal was writing this novel, he was serving as a diplomat for a sordid Mexican government in Peru. What an antidote Filbert García’s voice must have been to the deracinated, often inevitably duplicitous language of the diplomatic report and the bureaucratese of an embassy. Speaking with my friend the Mexican novelist Martin Solares about the novel the other day, he speculated that perhaps in Lima Bernal had a Mexican chauffeur-guarura with a past in the police and who spoke like Filiberto García. Maybe, but I also suspect that as with an old drunk’s Alka-Seltzer, Bernal carried that voice within him, and that he identified with his irascible gunman more than a little. His widow described him as “sarcastic, with an extraordinary sense of humor.” Bernal was working as a diplomat in Switzerland when he died in 1972, three years after publishing The Mongolian Conspiracy, and was buried in Geneva. Borges, another supremely different master of the occasional detective narrative, died and was buried in Geneva too, rather than in his native Buenos Aires, and had his own nostalgic, complexly personal and even “literary” reasons for choosing that city as his resting place. According to Bernal’s widow, he chose not to have his remains returned to Mexico, “Because he had the idea that it was horrible to transport a dead person from one far place to another. He told me, ‘It’s horrible to shovel the dead around like that.’” Add a “¡Pinche shoveling around!” and it would sound just like Filberto García.
While the pungent crunchiness of Filiberto García’s language could not be more authentic, it would be a stretch to call The Mongolian Conspiracy a realistic novel of police investigations and international and political intrigue. The plot mixes Cold War “Dr. Strangelove” satiric goofiness with convincing Mexican Machiavellian political ruthlessness and duplicity in a manner that makes its riveting coherence seem almost accidentally sui generis. A Russian embassy source has re
ported to the Mexican government that there is a possible conspiracy underway, emanating from Communist China, to assassinate the President of the United States during his visit to Mexico. The life of the President of Mexico and “world peace” are also endangered. The rumor was first picked up in Outer Mongolia. The terrorists, who are not Chinese, have passed through Hong Kong on their way to Mexico, where they are supposed to make contact with a Chinese man. So have half a million dollars worth of fifty-dollar bills. The Cubans will play a role in the plot as well. It is exquisitely comical that Bernal centers this international conspiracy threatening world peace in Mexico City’s very tiny Chinatown, on Dolores Street, a few restaurants that serve poor people’s Chinese food to poor people, and a few shops, “one street lined with old houses and a scrawny alleyway trembling with mysteries.” Filiberto García is a regular denizen of these cheap eateries, where the Chinese play their “forever silent and ghastly game of poker.” Like these Chinese immigrants, he values keeping to oneself and keeping one’s mouth shut. “There are things you don’t talk about, or better, there’s nothing you do talk about.” Because his superiors know García is familiar with this marginal Chinese population, he is called into the investigation to find the Chinese man, and verify the conspiracy. That is ostensibly why he is given this crucial assignment in an international conspiracy. The real reason is because at least some of his superiors expect him to be a dupe, and for his “investigation” to leave a false trail of inevitable corpses. García is told that he will have to work with Graves, an American agent from the FBI, and with Laski, a Russian from the KGB. “You three will have to figure out how you’re going to work together.” This scenario, which might seem to offer broad farce of a Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov sort, is actually handled by Bernal with great cleverness, insight and compelling, if essentially satiric, humanity. The mutually mistrustful FBI and the KGB men are “experts,” highly trained and learned spies, fluent in languages, and politically knowledgeable. Naturally, they condescend to Filiberto García, if often jovially. “Seems like in the international crowd it’s in fashion to be full of smiles. We’ll have to see if they’d keep laughing with a bullet in their bellies.” But the three men also know, for all their differences, that they are all in the very same business. “They know judo, karate, and how to strangle people with silk cords. The gringo uses a .38 special. The Russian a Luger.” Laski tells the American, “One cannot govern without killing, Graves, my friend. All governments have learned this by now. That’s why we exist.” And Filberto García reflects, “I’m on Hitler and Stalin and Truman’s team. Hey, you guys, how many dead have you got? But I’m very Mexican about it, which means I’m old fashioned. As you know, we’re kind of underdeveloped. Just bullets for us.” The most nefarious of García’s superiors says, just before removing him from the case, precisely because he senses García is coming close to solving it, “Mr. García is not an expert in international intrigue. The truth is, he is not even an expert in police investigations.” “Fucking international intrigue!” “Fucking Outer Mongolia!” After all, they are in Mexico City, which Filiberto García, not the FBI or the KGB man, knows how to read and decipher. García is the novel’s detective, who methodically unravels the conspiracy, or rather its several parallel “conspiracies,” though in one instance devastatingly too late.
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