Destiny and Desire (48 page)

“Nicole Kidman,” I intervened just to say something, when I should have paid attention to the platter of shellfish the Danubio waiter had placed in front of me. “Errol Flynn,” I added, unusual for me, in memory of Baldy, our friend, but also with a certain mockery, as if Sanginés were teaching me what I already knew and I, out of respect, was pretending I was still learning, as I did when I was his student at the law school.

“We have created a society,” Sanginés continued while, as was his custom, he made little balls out of bread crumbs, “which for the most part wants to move up, have things, cars, women, clothes, sun, and if you press me, an education for the children, life insurance, social security, hospital and television insurance.”

“Bread isn’t enough,” I tried to interject like a French monarch. “They want cake.”

Sanginés smoothed the tablecloth as if to rid it of wrinkles or crumbs—and to avoid paying attention to me.

“There are also desperate ways out,” he argued so as not to withdraw. “Go as a migrant worker to the United States, defy the guards’ bullets, the barbed wire, the walls, the truck in which the coyotes can abandon you or leave you to suffocate …”

Did the restaurant tablecloth, white and bare, resemble a desert along the border? Were the salt and pepper shakers beacons that would guide the position of our dishes, already ordered, on their way, bean soup, ceviche, fillet of beef with mashed potatoes …?

Sanginés looked at me somberly. He maintained a silence that prolonged unbearably the wait and increased hunger with no immediate hope of deliverance. Rarely have I seen him so pessimistic. He didn’t want to look at me. He dared to look at me.

“The border is going to close. The United States, our Northern Wall, will be worse than the Berlin Wall. One was dictated by Communist ideology and Soviet paranoia. The wall that will run from the Pacific to the Gulf, from San Diego–Tijuana to Brownsville-Matamoros, is dictated by irrational racism. They need workers the North American market doesn’t have. But they have to be kept out because they’re dark, they’re poor, they work hard, solve problems, and expose discrimination in mortal combat with necessity …”

I felt like wiping up my plate with a tortilla: Sanginés’s words, which should have taken away my appetite, made me hungry.

“You also have to consider that Gringo businessmen pay low wages to migrant workers and don’t want to pay high salaries to local labor,” I argued, because Sanginés liked that.

He was served bean soup. I had ordered an Acapulcan ceviche. He dipped his large spoon. I used my small fork. We ate.

“That isn’t the problem. The United States is being left behind. It has a workforce from the time of the Industrial Revolution. The smokestack cities are dying. Detroit, Pittsburgh are dying. Carnegie and Rockefeller died. Gates and BlackBerry were born. But the North Americans don’t renounce the great industrial dream that founded them as a power. Chinese and Indians graduate from North American universities. Chicanos graduate.”

“Except the Chinese go back to China and advance it and the Mexicans go back to Mexico and nobody even wants them, Maestro …”

Without meaning to I knocked over the saltshaker. Sanginés, cordial, put it back. I, without thinking twice, cupped my hand, gathered the spilled salt, and held it. I didn’t know where to put it.

“Max Monroy understands this,” I said without thinking. “Valentín Pedro Carrera doesn’t. Max looks for long-term solutions. Carrera feels the six-year term concluding and wants to postpone the end with a swindle. His festivals, his jokes …”

Did Sanginés grimace? Or were the beans more bitter than he had expected? Like an idiot I emptied the salt on my ceviche. I ate without looking at him. If you begin by selecting fish, you end up with olives.

I said that he, Antonio Sanginés, was lawyer to them both, to Carrera and Monroy. I asked him to analyze them for me, the president and the magnate, the two poles of power in Mexico (and in Iberoamerica). He gave me a look that announced: I don’t want to say the words of misfortune. I won’t be the one …

Well, I interrupted, I was still preparing the professional thesis he himself had suggested,
Machiavelli and the Modern State
, so our talks were, in a way, like part of the course, weren’t they?

I looked for his friendly, approving smile and didn’t find it.

“We can all feel jealousy, hatred, or suspicion. The powerful man should eliminate jealousy, which leads him to want to be someone else, and in the end he becomes less than himself. He should avoid hatred, which clouds judgment and precipitates irreparable actions,” Sanginés declaimed.

A bean was caught in his teeth that I only now suspected might be false. He extracted it and disposed of it carefully on the bread plate.

“But he should cultivate suspicion. Is it a defect? No, because without suspicion one doesn’t gain political or economic power. The guileless man does not endure in the city of Pericles or in the city of Mercury.”

“How long does the man endure who only suspects?”

“He would like to be eternal,” Sanginés said with a smile.

“Even though he knows he isn’t?” I returned the smile with an ironic gesture.

“A politician’s capacity for self-deception is in-fi-nite. The politician believes he is indispensable and permanent. The moment arrives when power is like a car without brakes on a highway with no end. You’re no longer concerned with putting on the brakes. You don’t even care about steering. The vehicle has reached its own velocity—its cruising speed—and the powerful man believes that now nothing and no one can stop him.”

“Except the law, Maestro. The principle of nonreelection.”

“The nightmare of those who wanted to be reelected and couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”

“They were not permitted to by a cabinet.”

“Alvaro Obregón was assassinated for being reelected.”

“Others were forbidden reelection by insurrectionist cabinets. Or a false belief that if one chose one’s successor, he would be a docile puppet in the hands of his predecessor. What happened was just the opposite. Today’s ‘stand-in’ destroyed yesterday’s monarch because the new king had to demonstrate his independence from the one who named him his successor.”

“Adventures of the Mexican six-year monarchy,” I remarked, watching as our empty plates were withdrawn like ex-presidents.

Sanginés said he found it astonishing that the lesson had not been learned.

“From the first day, I advised Carrera: Imagine the last day. Remember that we are subject to the laws of contraction. The president wants to ignore political syneresis. We all say right now. He says maybe later, as if he were asking God: Holy God, give me six more years …”

“
Now,
” I said in English with a smile and a paleological intention, “
now now now.
”

“It’s the terror of knowing there is an afterward.” Sanginés received the thick, succulent fillet with an involuntary salivation of his mouth and a liquid gratitude in his eyes, as if this were his last meal. Or his first? Because in any event, he and I had never met to converse in so conclusive a manner, as if a chapter of our relationship were closing here and another one, perhaps, were beginning. I was no longer the inexperienced young law student. He was no longer the
magister
placed above the fray but a zealous, intriguing, influential gladiator, a boxing manager with a champion in each corner of the ring and, I saw it clearly, a sure bet: No matter who loses, Sanginés wins …

“He should not be underestimated,” he said very seriously, though with a touch of arrogance. “I’ve seen him act up close. He possesses a tremendous instinct for survival. He really needs it, knowing as he knows (or should know) that a leader arrives with history and then leaves when history has left him behind or goes on without him. He refuses to know, however, that mistakes are paid for in the end. Or perhaps he knows and for that reason doesn’t want to think about his exit.”

He looked at me with intense melancholy.

“Don’t judge him severely. He’s not a superficial man. He just has a different idea of political destiny. He wants to create, Josué, politics with joy. It is his honor. It is his perdition. He carries in his genes the omnipotence of the Mexican monarch, Aztec, colonial, and republican. Everything that happened before, if it’s good, ought
to justify him. Nothing of what occurs afterward, if it’s bad, concerns him. And if the good he did is not recognized, it’s sheer ingratitude. He prefers evoking to naming. He sneezes with a smile and smiles sneezing, to deceive others … They are his masks: laughing, sneezing.”

“Is he deceiving himself, Maestro?” I sopped up the mix of juice from the meat and mashed potatoes with a piece of bread.

I don’t know if Sanginés sighed or if he did so only in my imagination. He said at times Valentín Pedro Carrera becomes lost in thought, joining his knotty hands at his forehead as if his head were hurting. At those moments he seemed old.

Sanginés looked at me intently.

“I believe he says something like ‘too late, too late,’ but reacts by taking out his portable, picking at keys, and consulting, or pretending to consult—”

“And Max Monroy?” I interrupted so Sanginés wouldn’t fall into pure melancholy.

“Max Monroy.” I don’t know if Sanginés permitted himself a sigh. “Let’s see, let’s see … They’re different. They’re similar. I’ll explain …”

He looked in vain for a dish that didn’t come because he hadn’t ordered it. He picked up an empty glass. He avoided looking at me. He looked at himself. He continued.

“Power wearies men, though in different ways. Carrera becomes exasperated at times and then I see his weariness. He has unacceptable outbursts. He says inconsequentially violent things. For example, when he passes the Diego Rivera frescoes in the Palace, ‘You don’t paint a mural with lukewarm water, Sanginés,’ and when I sit down to work: ‘We’ll open a credit column for Our Lord Jesus Christ, because I’m going to fill out the debit column right now.’ He tries to avoid violence but can be disparaging and even vulgar when he refers to ‘the street pox.’ He prefers the government to function in peace. But it’s difficult for him to admit change. He prefers doing what he did: inventing popular festivals to entertain and distract people. Then he transformed the Zócalo into an ice skating rink. And then he opened children’s pools in areas with no water. People
were hurt in the rinks. They drowned in the pools. It didn’t matter: Circuses without bread.”

“Have a good time, kids,” I added without too much sense, suspecting that by talking about the president, Sanginés avoided talking about Max Monroy.

Sanginés nodded. “When I tell him all this doesn’t solve problems, Carrera replies: ‘The country is very complex. Don’t try to understand it.’ In the face of that, Josué, I am left speechless. Injustice, intolerance, resignation? With these facts our leader makes his bed and night after night lies down with these paradigmatic words: ‘Making decisions is boring.’ ”

“Does it console him to know that some day he’ll be seen naked?”

“Naked? His skin is his gala outfit.”

“I mean without memory.”

Sanginés ordered an espresso and looked at me attentively.

Certainly it attracted his attention that I equated “nakedness” and “memory.” I do realize that in my imagination memory is like a seal in which wax retains the image without any need to pour it. My conversation with Sanginés placed before me the dilemma of memory. Immediate memory: ordering an espresso and not remembering it. Intermediate memory: When all was said and done, would I keep it?

“A man without memory has only action as a weapon,” said Sanginés.

“Did the president’s patience come to an end?” I insisted.

“Your friend Jericó ended it for him.”

He wasn’t going to let me talk. And I didn’t want to talk.

“Jericó tricked the president. He offered loyalty and gave him betrayal. This is what Carrera didn’t forgive. Everything else I’ve told you this afternoon was left behind, it collapsed, and the president was left alone with only the black tongue of ingratitude, and of solitude, which is even more bitter.”

The coffee tasted less bitter than his account. I felt that interrupting him was something worse than foolishness: it was lack of respect.

“He’s clever. He realized that to crush Jericó the forces of law and order were not enough, though I can tell you he used them. Jericó gave the president the opportunity to demonstrate his social power, his ability to represent the nation. And for that he needed Max Monroy.”

“Monroy doesn’t like Carrera. I know, Maestro, I saw it myself. Monroy humiliated Carrera.”

“What serious politician hasn’t eaten shit, Josué? It’s part of the profession! You eat toads and don’t make faces. Bah! Carrera needed Monroy to demonstrate unity in the face of an attempted rebellion. Monroy needed Carrera to give the impression that without Monroy the republic can’t be saved.”

“A pact between thieves.” I tried to be ironic.

Sanginés ignored me. He said I should understand Max Monroy. I said I had never underestimated him (including his sex life, which I had learned about and never would reveal out of respect for myself).

“It’s difficult not to admire a man who never allows himself to be flattered. He knows the best men lose their way in flattery …”

He looked at me with something resembling sincerity: “In Mexico we have a word that is categorical, juicy, and insuperable:
lameculos
. The person who flatters to obtain favors. In my day we talked about the UFA. United Front of Asskissers. Today it would be the UFT, United Front of Traitors.”

“And Monroy?” I said in order not to reveal I didn’t know what he was talking about. The UFA! The Stone Age!

“Monroy.”

“He can’t bear a flatterer. It’s his great strength in the midst of the national milieu of political, professional, and entrepreneurial asskissers.”

“But …” I interrupted and didn’t dare continue. The name and figure of Miguel Aparecido were on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I came up with a question: “And Jericó?”

“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés answered without looking at me. He said it in a categorical, almost disagreeable way.