Although he didn’t answer his own question, he did supply us with some antecedents. Sangines had handled several matters for Esparza, especially the testamentary situation caused by the demise of Dona Estrellita, who had brought her own fortune to a marriage with a division of property and an inheritance provision between the surviving spouses, while the matrimonial contract with Senorita Sara Perez Ubico provided for community property, that is, upon Don Nazario’s death, his second wife would come into possession of two fortunes: her husband’s and Dona Estrellita’s.
“Don Nazario should take good care of himself,” Sangines said with a sigh, interlacing his fingers in front of his chin.
“The Mariachi Batalla is a killer,” Miguel Aparecido told me in prison. “I don’t know who put him in here and why I wasn’t able to stop him.”
He too carried his hands to his lips and from there to his nose.
“I can almost always smell out guys like that because of my network of informants, and then I can have them thrown out of here. I don’t know how this one got away from me. Something didn’t work right.” Miguel Aparecido frowned. “What? Who? How?”
“Thrown out?” I remarked as if I suspected an impulse natural in the person I was studying for my thesis on Machiavelli.
“You understand me,” Miguel Aparecido said with a sinister subtext. “The fact is that when he’s free, Maximiliano Batalla can commit any excess. I already told you about his antecedents.”
“What makes you think he acted in concert with Sara P.?”
“Who’s the porter she was fucking?”
Who was the porter?
This was the least of the mysteries. It took Sangines no time to learn that the false porter in the airport was Maximiliano Batalla: an opportune disguise that my discovery linked to Don Nazario Esparza’s dishonest wife, implicated for that reason in Maxi’s crimes.
Like a Pandora’s box, the sum of events opened to reveal one mystery after another. Who had gotten Maximiliano Batalla out of prison? What, besides sex, joined Nazario’s wife to the Mariachi Batalla? Were they accomplices? If so, in what, and why, and to what end?
These were the hypotheses spread before me by the legalistic mind of Antonio Sangines, pursuing in an unexpected way my juridical education, overly practical until then, which implied, first of all, recovering our friend Errol Esparza and arriving together, as I announced at the beginning of this chapter, at his family’s house in Pedregal de San Angel.
IN THE MEANTIME, based on the presumption of importance that is also a part of being young and of a certain natural impatience to know more, I suggested to my apparent boss and secret love, Asunta Jordan, that she talk to me about the great man himself, Max Monroy, without ever revealing-this was tacit proof of my discretion and the growing conviction that some things should not be known-that I had spoken to the tycoon’s mother in the cemetery where the sainted senora lay buried.
“I understood about his businesses,” I said to her one morning. “You don’t need to expand on that. You can stop now.”
She laughed. “You have no idea how Max Monroy expands.”
“Tell me.”
“From the beginning?”
“Why not?”
I knew Asunta was going to tell me what I already knew, boring me to death. But what is love for a woman but an obsession independent of the foolishness she may repeat like a broken record? I was resigned.
Asunta told me in English that Max Monroy was not a “self-made man” (I reflected on the fact that one does not talk about modern business without introducing Anglo-Saxonisms) but the heir to one volatile fortune and another durable one. His father, the general, had “carranzaed,” as it was called in the time of official corruption in the era of revolutionary combat under the command of the chief executive Venustiano Carranza: He had stolen. But that was like stealing chickens in a henhouse without touching the rooster or disputing his control. A little ranch here, a little house there, a tame flock here, a rough herd there, since things were easy to obtain and just as easy to lose. On the other hand, Max’s mother had a crystal ball and was always ahead of events. Always a step or two ahead of the law and the government, she was on good terms with the second and consolidated the first: communications, real estate, industries, banks, credit, construction companies, until she exhausted the possibilities of the small Mexican industrial revolution and the concomitant role of intermediary to invent companies out of nothing, receiving funds by using different names, and avoiding final solutions. Max Monroy’s career has been an example of fluidity, Asunta added. He doesn’t marry anything forever. He observes what’s coming down the pike. He’s ahead of everybody. He excludes no one. He’s not a monopolist. On the contrary, he believes monopoly is the disease that kills capitalist development. This, says Max, is what beginning capitalists don’t understand: They think they’ve invented hot water though they’re often second generation and their parents are the ones who boiled it.
“Take a look at the list of Max Monroy’s businesses, Josue. You’ll see he hasn’t monopolized anything. But he has moved everything forward.”
He believes final solutions are almost always bad. They only postpone and deceive. On the other hand, partial solutions are much better. Among other reasons, because they don’t pretend to be final.
“Didn’t he ever take sides?”
“No. He told me: ‘Asunta, life isn’t a matter of sides or chronology. It’s a question of knowing what forces are at play at any given moment. Good or bad. Knowing how to resist them, accept them, channel them.’
“ ‘Channel them, Max?’
“ ‘As a conclusion it’s desirable. But no matter how much will and foresight you bring to an issue, dear lady, chance always plays a hand. Being prepared for the unexpected, welcoming fortune-good or bad-and inviting her to dinner, like Don Juan with the Comendador, that-’
“ ‘Don Juan went to hell, Max.’
“ ‘Who’s to say he didn’t arrive in hell and transform it to his image and likeness?’
“ ‘Perhaps he already was living his own hell in the world.’
“ ‘It’s possible. People live, or invent, their heavens and hells on earth.’ ”
“ ‘Thy Heaven Doors are my Hell Gates,’ wrote William Blake,” I recited, and added, pretentiously: “It’s poetry.”
I winked at Asunta and immediately regretted it. She looked at me gravely. How did you fight this bull? Because she was a bull, not a cow. Or was she a clever ram that is a ewe?
“I don’t believe Max Monroy reads poetry. But he knows very well the gates of heaven and the walls of hell in the world of business.”
I let Asunta know I was prepared to learn.
“ ‘The position of the stars is relative,’ Max always tells me, and I think that’s why he’s never said ‘Do this,’ but only ‘It would be better if…’ ”
“Then you don’t feel inferior or subject to him, like a simple employee of Max Monroy?”
If Asunta was offended by my words, she didn’t show it. If she intended to be offended, she smiled back at me.
“I owe everything to Max Monroy.”
She looked at me in a forbidding manner. I mean: Her eyes told me Go no further. Stop there. Still, I detected something in them that asked me to postpone, only postpone, the matter. She moved her body in a way that let me know her spirit’s willingness to answer my questions, she was asking only for time, time for us to know each other better, to become more intimate… That’s what I wanted to believe.
I mean: That’s what I read in her posture, in her way of moving, turning away from me, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, sketching a sad smile that would give promise and grace to a bygone, serious tale.
“The interesting thing about Max Monroy is that even though he could have established himself at the top from the very beginning, he preferred to go step by step, almost like an apprentice to the guild of finance. He knew the danger facing him was to sit at a table prepared ahead of time, when the butler named Destiny orders: Eat.”
Did Asunta smile?
“Instead, he went out to hunt the stag, butchered it himself, took out the innards, cooked the meat, served it,
