“I have the features of an ascetic and the ways of a libertine.”
That was the first thing you said to me, you slug. That was your calling card. I had to hold back the laughter. I was ready to play all my cards. With the general, so that he would declare Terán incompetent, push him out of office, and name Andino interim president. Then we’d just leave him there as a puppet while Arruza and I ruled the country together. You were the second option in case you made it to the presidency “on your own merits” (after all, in this life anything is possible) or Congress named you president and Andino only interim. How long would you last? As long as the general and I wanted, no more than that.
Or at worst, you, as the interim president, would have backed Andino for president, with Arruza ruling from behind the throne.
You see, it was a game of chess in which I was the queen, Arruza the king, Andino the bishop, and you the bloody pawn.
Goodbye, my poor Tácito. You crawled out of a hole and now you’re going straight back to where you came from. And tell Nicolás Valdivia that ideals aren’t important, that convictions aren’t worth a fucking thing. Tell us whose side you’re on. That’s what matters.
Oh—by the way, Valdivia has banned you from entering any government office. FYI.
56
DULCE DE LA GARZA TO THE OLD MAN UNDER THE ARCHES
Mr. President, I can no longer bear my joy and my sadness, which is why I’m writing to you. I don’t know if I’d dare look you in the eye, you who have caused me so much pain and who now give me back an impossible happiness that I stopped dreaming about long ago. You summoned me to the café by the port. I knew that Tomás respected you immensely. How many times did he tell me that you were more than his mentor, that you were like his father; and like a father you always advised him not to be so good, to be tougher.
“The worst enemy of power is the innocent,” you said to Tomás, and those words are engraved on my heart, like everything my love told me. “Up until now you’ve been a docile pre-candidate, which is as it should be. Now you want to be a reformer. Wait. Don’t be too eager. Don’t start your day in the middle of the night. Make your reforms when you’re sitting on the Eagle’s Throne, like I did. Take advantage of my experience.”
Yes, I know Tomás was brave, that he never held back, that he threw himself into the ring. Yes, I know that all the powerful people in Mexico saw him as a threat. That’s why they killed him.
I’ve endured eight years—I was twenty-one then, and I’m twenty-nine, nearly thirty now, “in the flower of my youth,” isn’t that what they say? Eight years of suffering, Mr. President. At least my pain was solid, real. Now, all of a sudden you appear and plunge me into a pit of desperation and misery worse than before.
Yes, Tomás is alive. And you have the nerve to tell me what you told my love when you—and nobody but you is to blame—took him away from me. . . .
“Tomasito, think of yourself as a privileged prisoner. Think of life as ugly and dangerous and cruel. Look, my boy, close the door to the world for a little while, and come back rejuvenated. Wait for your moment: It hasn’t arrived yet. It will come. I swear.”
You didn’t have the courage to go to that cell yesterday. Instead you sent Tomás a written message via me. I have it here:
I wanted to give you power. I wanted to give you the chance to do the things I couldn’t do because in my day the system was different. I’m so sorry, truly sorry, Tomasito. You didn’t understand. You didn’t know how to judge the moment. What I did, I did for you. It was neither the first nor the last time I would offer you my good counsel and try to shield you from your idealistic impulses. Now your time has come. Now the country wants legitimacy, symbols, drama, hope. Not since the Resurrection of Christ has there been a resurrection like yours, my son. I who shun publicity will have an army of photographers and reporters waiting for you when you come out. From Ulúa? God, I’m better than that. Listen to me, Tomás: You were never in Ulúa. You got lost in the jungle, you were kidnapped, disoriented by torture and peyote—you got lost in the goddamn jungle. A witch from Catemaco buried your fingernails and your hair underneath a ceiba tree. You’ve been under a spell for eight years, Tomás, lost in the natural world, part of the jungle yourself, no different from the vanilla creeper, the pepper plant, the prickly pear, the hawthorn, the jonote tree, the sugarcane, the vast, abundant natural world of Veracruz that was there before we were born, Tomás, that enveloped you like a splendid cloak, that swallowed you up and made you part of it. . . . Don’t forget, Tomasito, you are under a spell. You sleep sitting down because if you lie down the sea breeze won’t blow over you. You sleep with the windows open so that the rain from the Gulf of Mexico soaks your skin. And if you die, they can just say that the “North Wind” was an accomplice in the crime. You thought you were dead, Tomás. And now your girl Dulce has appeared to rescue you, to tell you, “We’ve found you at last! You got lost in the jungle.”
Oh, Mr. President. What were you thinking? Do you really believe what you said to me?
“Everything in Mexico requires symbolism. If they can turn an amnesiac, impressionable, ignorant Indian like Juan Diego into a saint, why not make Moro president at the right moment, which is the year 2020—not 2012! Miracle, miracle! Miracles, faith, trust—what motivates Mexico more? A president-elect lost in the jungle, amnesiac like a saint, who reappears to reclaim nothing less than the Eagle’s Throne! A sensation, Miss de la Garza! And what a sensation if you, his saintly girl-friend, are the one who rescues him and delivers him back to his rightful place. A love story! Love and miracles, my dear! Who could be opposed to that? It is my masterpiece. Now I can die in peace, I can leave behind the sealed envelopes, ‘the concealed one,’ the electoral racket, the carousel voting, the ballot tricks, all those dead people’s votes, everything else that went on when I was president. This is the culmination of my political career: I’ve given Mexico the right president at the right moment, I’ve resurrected him just like God the Father resurrected his son Jesus Christ. I’ve brought him steeped in mystery back to the world. All the ingredients are there: cloak-and-dagger adventures, mystical ascensions, inevitable pain, melodrama, lovers reunited . . . Miss Dulce, sweet lady, can’t you sense the emotion in my voice, my recovered strength, my masterpiece completed?”
Yes, Mr. President, I feel it and I feel sorry for you, and I feel hatred for you, as well. Shame on you. I think you’ve gone mad. You’re deranged, a senile monster who plays with the lives and emotions of others without any humanity. . . . You were right to send me to Tomás, and I went happily, but I was scared to death, too; my heart was pounding because I didn’t know what I’d find.
They led me down those dark tunnels that smelled like the forgotten dead. A filthy rat looked at me as if it wanted to seduce me. Saltwater dripped from the ceiling, and the whole castle creaked as if offended by my footsteps. I’m telling you this so that you can see the eloquence that took hold of my head and my tongue, preparing me for the most intense emotion of my life. . . .
He was wearing his mask when I entered the cell.
“Tomás, my love, it’s me. . . .”
Nothing but silence. The longest of my life, long enough for me to remember how Tomás and I first met, at the museum in Monterrey, and then to remember every moment of our love.
“Tomás, my love, it’s me. . . .”
He turned his back on me.
Then, he scribbled something on the wall with a piece of chalk, something he’d written a thousand times before, as the cell was covered with those white marks, fading in the humid air:
BREAD. TIME. PATIENCE.
I embraced him. He freed himself from me with a violent shrug of the shoulders. It threw me—it was like being struck by lightning. I sank to my knees and held his legs.
“Tomás, I’m back, it’s me. . . .”
I looked at him, imploring him.
He remained silent.
I caressed him, still down on my knees, and then
I looked up, imploring him.
“Take off your mask. Let me see you again.”
He laughed, Mr. President. Never in my life have I heard laughter like that, and I hope I never hear it again. It was as if he had chains in his throat, iron instead of words. My own voice began to tremble, as if death were my lover, as if I had risen from the grave that I visited for eight years, taking flowers to it, sometimes crying, sometimes refusing to let my tears fall onto that gravestone. My own voice trembled, as if I were a lover who, having resigned herself to disappearing, was now back to court death, because that man you cruelly deceived, imprisoned, and perversely—yes, perversely—manipulated is no longer mine.
He is another man, and I don’t know what to call him or how to speak to him.
He didn’t respond to my words. I pulled at his mask, I tried to pry it open like a can. He only laughed. Then a voice escaped, stifled, indistinct, a voice that I didn’t recognize, asking me who I was, what I was doing there, how I dared enter the place that was his and no one else’s.
“Your face . . . let me see your face, Tomás. . . .”
He told me not to be an idiot, that I wouldn’t want to see the face beneath the mask because why would he be wearing it, if not to hide something awful, the face of a monster, an eagle’s head, snake’s eyes, and a dog’s mouth? Is that what I wanted to see, idiot that I was, a man with the face of a lunatic, smothered by his beard and unable to speak properly, so that even the guards couldn’t bear to look at him when they took off his mask to feed him? They’d put the mask back on and he’d just let them, not even putting up a fight. He’d gotten used to the mask—“bread, time, patience”—and he’d go completely insane in the daylight. Reality wasn’t outside, it was here inside, and he’d believe that until he died. He was a prisoner, yes, but free from the shams, the lies, the illusions, and the dreams of the outside world.
“This is my house: truth, peace, time, patience.”
What he said hurt me. He spoke without recognizing me, or he pretended not to recognize me, I don’t know, but he refused to look me in the face, and his voice was muffled by the huge clump of hair, as thick and dense as that jungle you cruelly invented, the voice shut in behind the mask, and then those bizarre words: “Wake the dead, since the living are asleep. . . .”
He didn’t recognize me. But I tell you, and I knew Tomás Moctezuma Moro better than anyone: He’s found his home inside those four frozen walls. He can’t even see the water or feel the sea spray down in that hole at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. San Juan de Ulúa is the only reality he knows, or wants to know. And that, Old Man, is your cruel and evil accomplishment.
How did I know it was him?
That voice was unmistakable, even distorted.
How could I tell he was alive?
From the fear in his eyes, which were visible through the slits in the mask.
From the fear in his eyes, Mr. President. A fear that I can’t imagine, not even in my worst nightmares, a fear of everything, do you understand? A fear of remembering, loving, desiring, living, dying . . . The fear that you put there, Mr. President, and may the devil bury you in the deepest pit in hell the day you die. And I’d pray for that day to come soon, but I know that your life is already a living hell.
It was all in vain. You sacrificed the man I love for nothing. Tomás Moctezuma Moro will never leave Ulúa. Neither alive nor dead. That cell is impenetrable. It’s his womb. He wouldn’t recognize any other home.
Your home is a house of shame. Or perhaps—and this would be even worse from your point of view—the house of lost opportunity. I think this must be the first time things haven’t come out the way you hoped. You sicken me. But most of all I pity you.
I have only one thing to ask of you. Keep on bribing the cemetery guards so that I can open Tomás Moctezuma Moro’s false grave, as I did before.
57
TÁCITO DE LA CANAL TO “LA PEPA” ALMAZÁN
Don’t worry about me, my love. I’ve lost everything. Except the most intimate refuge of my soul, which is my love for you. I don’t care if you mock me, insult me, push me away forever. I don’t care. I’ve come back to the safest harbor. I want you to know that. It’s neither a triumph nor a defeat. You reproach me for my servility and vanity. You humiliate me and I deserve it. Everything I thought was fortune has suddenly, instantly, changed.
Yes, I’m the man to whom the president could say, “Tácito. Jump out the window.” And I would reply, “With your permission, sir, I’ll gladly jump from the roof.”
I had a premonition, you know, the day a foreign head of state came to Los Pinos to see the president. I was waiting for him at the door, and he handed me his raincoat as if I were a servant. That’s what he thought I was. I should have crossed my hands behind my back, like British royalty do, to indicate politely that I was not a palace servant. But since that was, in fact, exactly what I was, I took the man’s raincoat, bowed my head, and ushered him into the office. He didn’t even glance at me. And there I was, clutching the president of Paraguay’s raincoat, as he walked away from me remarking, “It’s so cold here in Mexico!”
I was definitely the servant. And again I asked myself what I’d asked when I started working for President Lorenzo Terán. “What the hell do they want from me? I’m nobody.”
You’ll say, “Sure, now that you’re no one you can play at false humility.”
Believe me. Don’t believe me. What does it matter? I’m writing to you for the last time, Pepona. I’ll never write to you again, I swear. I only want you to know how and where I’ve ended up, and I want you to know that I accept it with genuine humility.
My father lives in a tiny, isolated house in the Desierto de los Leones. It’s a modest, decent little house, very hidden away. The only way to get there is by taking those very steep, winding roads from where you can see Ajusco. My father is very old. I call him my AP, my “Aged Parent,” as a tribute to something I read in a novel by Dickens when I was young. Yes, I was young once, my Pepa, hard as it may be for you and the rest of the world to believe. I was young, I studied, I read, I prepared for the future. I was driven by ambition and by something else: my father’s destiny. Not to repeat it, to be precise. I couldn’t bear to be like him.
For three consecutive six-year cycles, the AP was a significant influence on Mexican politics. He went from one government ministry to the next, always wielding his power from the shadows, always as a political operator working for the big payoff—that is, getting the PRI to put his minister on the presidential ticket, and then push him into office. He never managed to do it, and so he always gained the winner’s trust. Nothing gains people’s trust quite like losing. Always in the shadows. Always a secret operator. He couldn’t hope for anything more than that because he was born in Italy of Italian parents, the Canalis of Naples. That was why people could trust him: His ambitions were thwarted by the law. He himself could never be president. Three six-year periods. But then the day came when he had too many secrets under his hat. That was the problem. So many secrets, in fact, that nobody believed they could possibly all be true because secrets are, by nature, contradictory and ambiguous, and what is inevitable for A is nonsense for B, what is virtue for X is vice for Z, and so on. In other words, everything my father knew, everything he knew too much about, turned against him in the end.
“A” reproached him for keeping a secret when it could have been useful to expose it.
“B” pounced on him because he didn’t understand that my father’s silence protected him, while what B really wanted was for his secret to get out and become a political threat.
“X” wanted my father sacrificed precisely because of his secrecy: The secrets he kept were crimes of state.
And “Z” reproached him, on the other hand, for a series of supposed indiscretions. . . .
Yes, he was pulling strings on too many puppets and the theater of his life was a house of cards.
My father was clever. Too clever. Too cleve
r for his own good. He overdid it. He forgot to purge those who purge. He forgot that the best way to secure your enemy’s life is by killing him. He forgot the immortal lessons of the longest dictatorships: Invisible service to the powerful can bring reward but also punishment. After a time my father knew so many secrets that people began to fear him, and he became famous. His silence didn’t save him. On the contrary, they decided to bury him before he could open his mouth.
How did they destroy him? With flattery, my Pepa. Heaping praise on him. Dragging him out of the shadows that were his natural habitat. Showing him off and applauding him at the political circus, trotting him around the ring. My poor father suffered—he couldn’t decide if he should stay in the shadows or revel in his public adulation. He forgot the cry of one of Stalin’s close collaborators: “Please! Don’t flatter me! Don’t send me to Siberia!”
Yes, my AP had too much applause. Not the public kind, which doesn’t matter, but the private: the applause of the president, which inspires people to feel envy and spite for the president’s favorite. . . .
In short: He spent too much time being both the light of the house and the darkness of the streets.
They say that public figures are condemned to live in constant anguish but must never show it. And yet sometimes anguish must be translated into action. Stalin was terrified of dentists. He preferred to let his teeth rot rather than risk going to the dentist. In other words, one believes that loyalty, not ability, is what gets rewarded in the end. Laugh at me if you want, remember all my despicable acts, mock me for my vanity. And take pity on my defeat. It is simply act two of my own father’s downfall.
It had been years since I’d last seen him. I always sent him money, but I was afraid to go near him. Failure is contagious, and I didn’t want to end up like him. I was going to succeed where he failed. I was going to make it to the Eagle’s Throne. Bernal Herrera, María del Rosario, my great enemies, you, the woman who betrayed me, the little enemies that one should never underestimate, the little snakes inside my own office: Dorita with her sky-blue ribbons; Penélope with her hulking frame and dark skin; and the true architect of my downfall, Nicolás Valdivia, who is now interior secretary, the man who thought up the scheme that cost me my power, those damned documents kept by that imbecile archivist Cástulo Magón, those documents that I signed only because President César León asked me to, a request that was an order and a consolation:
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