him that business has to be big business. Dear Don Aspirin, he was a small-time player.
He poured two fingers of Chivas Regal into a heavy cut crystal tumbler, took a sip, and went on.
“I’m going to make sure you’re well connected, Santiago, don’t you worry. We all have to begin young, but the hard thing is to last it out. Look, the politicians also begin young, but most of them don’t last. We businessmen begin young and last a lifetime. No one chooses us, and as long as we don’t say anything in public, we’re neither seen nor criticized. You don’t have to make a splash. Publicity and self-promotion are forms of rebellion in our system. Forget that stuff. Don’t ever risk yourself by saying something you’ll be sorry for the next day. Your thoughts, keep them for yourself. And no witnesses.”
Santiago accepted the glass his father handed him and emptied it in one swallow.
“That’s what I like to see,” laughed Danton. “You have everything. Be discreet. Don’t take chances. Put money on all the horses, but stay close to the winner when the big race comes around, the presidential succession. Loyalty means nothing, being attentive and courteous does. Take advantage of the first three years of the six-year term to make deals. Then come the falling-off, the craziness, the dreams of being reelected or winning the Nobel Prize. And Presidents go nuts. You have to accommodate yourself to the successor, who, even if the incumbent chose him, will tear his predecessor apart, along with his family and friends, the moment he sits on the presidential throne. Sail in silence, Santiago. We’re the secret continuity. They’re the noisy divisiveness-and sometimes ruinous, of course.”
He should take this girl out dancing, and that one out to dinner. This Perengana’s papa is one of Don Danton’s partners and has a modest fortune of fifty million dollars, but Loli Parada’s papa has around two hundred million, and even though he’s less manipulable than the partner, he adores his daughter and would give her everything…
Everything? Santiago asked his father. What do you call everything, Father? Shit, you don’t even follow your own advice, Papa asshole, you leave too many papers around, even if you do hide them well, your files are full of evidence you’ve been storing up to blackmail the people you did favors for and refresh the memories of those you owe favors to; both ways you were corrupt, you old bastard, don’t look at me like that, I’m not going to be cautious, fucker, I have photocopies of all your stinking maneuvers, I know by heart every bribe you got from a Secretary of State to take care of a public matter as if it were private, every commission you got for being an intermediary and straw man in an illegal real estate deal in Acapulco, every check you received for being a front for gringos investing in activities from which foreigners are barred, every peso you banked for taking over community lands of Indians who were evicted while peasants were murdered so that a President and his partners could develop tourism there; I know about the murder of independent union leaders and of stubborn agrarian leaders, you were paid for it all and you paid everybody, my father, you son of a bitch, you haven’t committed a legal act in your fucking life, you live off the system and the system lives off you, you’re proven guilty by the evidence you needed to condemn everyone who either served you or was served by you, but the secret’s out now, old bastard, I have copies of everything, don’t worry, I’m not going to give anything to the newspapers, what would I get from that? I’m not going to say a word, unless you go crazier than you already have, asshole, and have me killed, and in that case everything’s set to see the light of day, and not here, where you pay off the press, shitty corrupter that you are, but in the United States, where it will really hurt you, where you’ll be ruined, son of a bitch, because you launder money for Yankee and Mexican criminals, because you break the sacred laws of the sacred American democracy, you bribe their bankers, you send little presents to their congressmen, motherfucker, you even have your own personal lobby in Washington, I swear I actually admire you, Papa, you’re better than Willie Mays, you touch all the bases, I also swear I have even more contempt for the fucking system you’ve helped to build than I do for you, you and those like you are rotten to the core, from the President to the last policeman you’re rottener than a piece of dry shit that you’ve divided up among yourselves for forty years and you’ve been feeding us all, go fuck yourself Don Danton Lopez- Diaz! I don’t want to eat shit, I don’t want a cent from you, I don’t want to see your fucking face ever again in my life, I don’t want to see a single one of your partners, or any leaders of the CTM, or redeemers of the CNC, or bankers saved from ruin by the government, not a single one… I swear, I’m going to fight against all of you, and if something happens to me, something worse is going to happen to you, Papa dear.
Santiago threw the copies of the papers into his father’s face, Danton mute, trembling, his cramped fingers reflexively poised over the alarm buttons though he couldn’t move, reduced to the brutal impotence his son wanted for him.
“Remember. There’re copies of every single document. In Mexico. In the United States. In a safe place. You’d better protect me, Papa, because you have no other protection than your disobedient son. Fuck you!”
And Santiago embraced his father, embraced him and whispered into his ear, I love you, Papa, you know that despite everything I love you, you old bastard.
Laura Diaz presided over the table that Christmas night of 1966. She sat at the head of the table, the two couples on either side. She felt secure, perfected in some way by the symmetry of love between her grandchildren on one side and her friends on the other. She was no longer alone. On her right, her grandson Santiago and his girlfriend Lourdes announced they would be getting married on New Year’s Eve, he would look for a job, and meanwhile…
“No,” Laura interrupted him. “This is your house, Santiago. You and your wife should stay here and bring joy to the life of an old woman…”
Because having the third Santiago with her was like having the other two, the elder and the younger, brother and son. They should have their child, Santiago should finish his studies. For her it was a party, filling the house with love, noise…
“Your Uncle Santiago never shut his bedroom door.”
To fill the house with happy love. Right from the start, Laura wanted to protect the young, handsome couple, perhaps because on her left was sitting the couple who had waited thirty years to reunite and be happy.
Basilio Baltazar had gone gray, but he still had the dark, precisely outlined gypsy profile of his youth. Pilar Mendez, on the other hand, showed the ravages of a life of bad luck and deprivation. Not physical deprivation, she hadn’t gone hungry, but an internal desolation: her face was etched with the doubts, the divided loyalties, the constant obligation to choose and then to bind up with love the wounds caused by family cruelty, so factious and also fantastic. The woman with the ash-blond hair and bad teeth, beautiful still with her Iberian profile, with all the mixed encounters-Islamic and Goth, Jew and Roman-carried on her face like a map of her homeland, also still bore the signs of those hard words, declaimed as if in an ancient tragedy staged opposite the classical background of the Roman gate to Santa Fe.
“The greater fidelity consists in disobeying unjust orders.”
“Save her in the name of honor.”
“Have mercy.”
“Heaven is full of lies.”
“I’m dying so that my father and mother will hate each other forever.”
“She must die in the name of justice.”
“What part of pain doesn’t come from God?”
Laura said to Pilar that the grandchildren, Santiago and Lourdes, had a right to hear about the drama that had taken place in Santa Fe in 1937.
“It’s a very old story,” said Pilar.
“There’s no story of the past that’s not repeated in our time.” Laura caressed the Spanish woman’s hand. “I really mean that.”
Pilar said she hadn’t complained when facing death hack then, and she wouldn’t do so now. Complaint only augments pain. Enough is enough.
“We thought she’d been shot at dawn outside the city walls,” said Basilio. “We thought so for thirty years.”
“Why did you believe it?” asked Pilar.
“Because that’s what your father told us. He was one of us, the Communist mayor of Santa Fe, so of course we believed him.”
“There’s no better fate than to die unknown,” said Pilar, looking at the young Santiago.
“Why is that, ma’am?”
“Because if you’re identified, Santiago, you have to apologize for some people and condemn others and you end
