“
As usual, Sangines the pedagogue began by evoking a series of allusions to his dealings with President Valentin Pedro Carrera. He prized his role as court adviser to the powerful: in government and in business. He knew them both, in the office building in Santa Fe and in the political encampment at Los Pinos. This is how he defined it, with complete simplicity.
While Max Monroy presided over a permanent empire in Santa Fe, at Los Pinos Valentin Pedro Carrera was the transient foreman of a six-year-long ranch. The occupier of the presidency knew he was temporary. The head of the firm aspired to permanence. How did these two powers get along?
Sangines did not have to tell me. He valued being the intermediary between the political executive and the business executive, between Valentin Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy. Confirming this, Sangines looked at me without blinking, his chin resting on his hands, and enumerated-yes, enumerated-his recommendations to President Carrera, like a local Machiavelli (I wouldn’t say a neighborhood Florentine, no, I wouldn’t say that, because after all, Maestro Sangines had directed my professional thesis on the diabolical Niccolo):
Don’t exaggerate expectations.
Don’t attempt to lengthen the six-year term or seek reelection.
Longevity in office is fatal to one’s reputation.
Remember that presidents begin in the light of hope and end in the shadow of experience.
In opposition, purity.
In power, compromise.
Prepare yourself in time to leave office, Mr. President.
You will be seen as a good president only if you know how to be a good ex-president.
Pause. I never saw a more bitter expression on Antonio’s face than at that moment.
Exaggerate.
Lengthen.
Illuminate the nation.
Don’t commit to anything.
Remain in office.
Don’t leave.
I’m here.
I suspected that Sangines felt very bitter, that in the past year Jerico had taken possession of the presidential ear, reducing Sangines to the most absolute marginality.
Why had he called me now?
With the habitual circumlocution of a lawyer from New Spain, Antonio Sangines launched into a narrative that occupied us for a good part of the night. He evoked. He reproduced. He accelerated. He lingered.
“The times of the hero are over,” Jerico told Carrera (just as Sangines had told Carrera). A revolutionary state legitimizes itself. Washington, Lincoln, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Madero-Carranza-Obregon-Calles-Cardenas. Even Tlatelolco and delegitimization by way of crimes against the pure, simple movement that ought to accompany the revolutionary state to accredit it as such. Halt the movement of the state: The movement of society supplants it. The United States is master of silent renovation: Its most reactionary groups appropriate rebellion. The Daughters of the American Revolution are a group of ultraconservative old women who still use pince-nez and wear chokers and color their hair sky blue.
“The times of the hero are over. Government, state, and revolution are no longer the same. The old revolutionary state has lost all legitimacy. You have to give new legality to the new reality,” declaimed Jerico.
“Count on me,” Sangines told the president.
“I’ll take care of it,” Jerico told Carrera and added: “In your name, of course.”
Something unites us, Sangines said with a sigh, something unites your friend Jerico and me. We have exercised more power the more distance we have maintained from power. Except my distance, compared to Jerico’s, was disinterested.
He said he advised keeping watch over the country.
“And Jerico?” I asked.
He looked at me sadly but did not respond. Still, there can be no doubt that the detail illuminates the life. Just as a small dog enlivens the stiff portrait of an aristocrat, a gesture by Sangines spoke volumes to me about his thinking. The most banal gesture: taking a crumb of bread and transforming it into a ball that, finally, in an unusual act for a man so well bred, he tossed to the floor and flattened with his shoe.
Only then did he resume speaking.
“I’ve always known Valentin Pedro Carrera. I’ll summarize his career for you. He was a young idealist. He ran his presidential campaign while his wife was sick. Cynicism or compassion? He made the electorate cry. Dona Clarita died soon after Carrera won the election. She died in time. Carrera got a second wind thanks to grief and solitude. Except that grief ends and solitude doesn’t. Then the fires spring up: arbitrariness, abuse of power, a kind of revenge against the destiny that raised him so high just to strip him of what power gives in abundance- appearance, the use of appearing, the abuse of being present… My advice, Josue, was born of a desire to control these extremes and employ the affliction of power to benefit power…”
I didn’t know what Sangines was drinking from an empty cup.
“I believe I have discovered the great flaw in power. The powerful man does not want to know what is done in his name. The great secular criminal, an Al Capone, knows and orders everything. But even the most fearsome tyrant opens the floodgates of a violence he himself cannot control. Who assassinated Mateotti, the last opposition deputy who served as a democratic excuse for Mussolini, leaving him no option other than dictatorship? Did Himmler itemize the concentration camp horror beyond Hitler’s insane, abstract desire, concentrating it into mountains of suitcases, hair, eyeglasses, dentures, and broken dolls in Auschwitz? Did Stalin do anything other than follow the tyrannical desire of the revolutionary who died in time, Lenin the lay saint, I understand him better than his democratic followers, Bukharin, Kamenev…? Not Trotsky, who was as hard as Stalin, but to his misfortune an educated man…”
My attentive gaze was a question: And Valentin Pedro Carrera?
Sangines told me anecdotes. Carrera is a man in love with his own words. He can speak without stopping for hours. It is absolutely necessary to interrupt him from time to time. To help him. So he can take a breath. So he can have a drink. We all knew that this president needed official interrupters. We presidential lackeys took turns interrupting him.
“What gives? Do they think everything they say is interesting? Or are they afraid to be quiet and give someone else the floor? Are they afraid of being contradicted? What happens?” I asked with intense ingenuousness.
“I tell you, it’s an art knowing how to interrupt the president. Jerico’s acumen consists in never interrupting. Carrera realized it: ‘You never interrupt me, Jerico. Thank you for that. But tell me why.’ ”
Sangines was present. Jerico, he says, did not respond. Why was Sangines there? What would Jerico have said to Carrera in the absence of a witness?
“The president is garrulous. I’m telling you because he told me. He also is master of a kind of pedantic indecisiveness. I mean, he is not an indecisive man like Hamlet, who weighs and tests his options. His indecision is a kind of farce. It’s a way of saying, paradoxically, I have the power not to make any decision at all and to say whatever occurs to me.”
I repeat: Sangines’s cup was empty.
“That was Jerico’s astuteness, I realize it now. He knew Carrera did not act out of pure vanity and arrogance. On both counts Jerico acted for him. Carrera did and did not realize it, and he thanked Jerico for relieving him of an unwanted responsibility: Making decisions is the queen bee of power; it can also be its dead fly of feigned meekness.”
What did the president want? The impossible: “Give me easy solutions to difficult problems.”
“
I raised my eyebrows. Sangines sighed. He made it clear that he knew what he was talking about, that his was not the voice of a resentful man removed from the favors of power. He wanted to remain a loyal counselor. Not to mention a responsible citizen. I let my eyebrows drop. I accused myself of sentimentality. Because I owed a great deal to Sangines. Because of my old friendship with Jerico. Because I was still, by comparison, an
