spoke to the head of state.
“It’s better if we clarify where we stand right away, Mr. President.”
“Of course, Monroy. I’m already standing,” Carrera said with his peculiar humor.
“Well, let’s hope you don’t fall down.”
“I would be at your feet…”
“I’m not a lady, Mr. President. I’m not even a gentleman.”
“Then, you are…?”
“A rival.”
“In love?” said Carrera in a sarcastic, even vengeful tone, though without looking at Asunta, while Jerico and I observed each other, I uncertain as to my function in this soap opera, Jerico pensive and even cynical-it’s not a contradiction-in his.
Both witnesses. Of the scene and, perhaps, of our own lives.
“Do you know, Mr. President? It took centuries to move from the ox to the horse and another long time to free the horse from the yoke and chest strap that choked him.”
Did Monroy lick his lips, did he close his eyes?
“Only at the beginning of the last millennium before Christ, about nine hundred B.C., was the horse collar invented, freeing the animal from pain and increasing his strength.”
“And?” interjected the president, perplexed or pretending to be perplexed behind a mask of seriousness.
“And we’re at the point of staying with the ox or moving on to the horse and immediately deciding if we’re going to mistreat the horse by choking him with a strap across the chest or free him thanks to a collar.”
“And?”
“You must think, as Mexican political elites have always thought, that in the end ability is measured with a peso sign, concluding that the rich are rich because they’re better and the poor are poor because they’re worse.”
“You must be rich, Monroy.” The president almost laughed out loud.
“I’m an old-style rich man,” Monroy interrupted. “You’re new rich, Mr. President.”
“As your family was at the beginning.” Carrera began to be defensive.
“Read my biography more carefully. Being at the top, I refused to begin at the top. Being at the top, I began at the bottom. Do you understand me?”
“I’m trying to, Don Max.”
“I mean that ability isn’t measured by a bank account.”
“And?”
“From the ox to the horse, I tell you, and from the horse in a yoke to a liberated charger.”
“Explain what you mean, I beg you.”
“You, with your celebrations, want us to continue in the age of the ox because you treat us like oxen, Valentin Pedro. You think that with village fairs you’ll put off discontent and even worse, bring us happiness. Do you really believe that? God’s truth?”
Max Monroy’s freezing gaze passed like a bolt of lightning from Carrera to Jerico, who tried to look back at the magnate. Jerico lowered his eyes immediately. How do you look at a tiger that in turn is looking at us?
“We are all responsible for the social unrest,” Carrera ventured. “But our solutions conflict with one another. What’s yours, Monroy?”
“Communicating with the people.”
“Very lyrical,” the president said with a smile, leaning against the edge of a table almost as an act of defiance.
“If you don’t understand you’re not only a fool, but perverse. Because your solution-governing by entertaining-only postpones well-being and perpetuates poverty. The curse of Mexico has been that with ten, or twenty, or seventy, or a hundred million inhabitants, half always live in poverty.”
“What do you want, we’re rabbits.” Carrera repeated his irony, as if with sarcastic blows he could stop Max Monroy. “So then, distribute condoms.”
“No, Mr. President. We stopped being agrarian barely half a century ago. We became industrialized and wasted time as if we could compete with the United States or Europe or Japan. We’ve remained behind in the technological revolution, and if I’m here speaking harshly to you, it’s because at the end of my life I don’t want us to come late to this banquet too, when it’s time for dessert, or never.”
The president sighed cynically. “To be bored, as they say… People want distractions, my dear Max!”
“No,” Monroy responded energetically. “To inform, as they say. You’ve chosen national festivals, rodeos, cockfights, mariachis, cut paper banners, balloons, fried food stands to entertain and benumb. I’ve chosen information to liberate. That’s what I’ve come to tell you. My goal is for every citizen of Mexico to have a device, only a handheld device to educate, orient, and allow communication with other citizens, to help them understand problems and resolve them, alone or with help, but eventually resolve them. How to plant crops better. How to harvest. What equipment is needed. What friends you can count on. How much credit you need. Where to get it. What employment is available. Campesinos. Indians. Manual laborers and white-collar workers, clerks, bureaucrats, technicians, professionals, administrators, professors, students, journalists, I want everyone to communicate with everyone else, Mr. President, I want each person to know his or her interests and how they coincide with the interests of the rest, how to act on the basis of those personal interests and the interests of society and not remain forever stranded in the ridiculous fiesta you are offering them, the eternal Mexican hat dance.”
I believe Monroy took a breath. I did, of course.
“I’ve come here to notify you. That’s why I came in person. I don’t want you to find out what I’m doing through third parties, through newspapers, through malicious gossip. I’m here to face you, Mr. President. So you’re not deceived. We’re going to defend not only opposite interests but antagonistic methods. We’ll see whom you can count on: I already have my people. I’m going to see that an increasing number of Mexicans have in hand the little device that will defend them and communicate with them so they act freely and to their own benefit, not a political elite’s.”
“Or an economic one,” Valentin Pedro Carrera said with irritated sarcasm.
“No elite survives if it doesn’t adapt to change, Mr. President. Don’t be the head of a kingdom of mummies.”
If Carrera looked sardonically at the defiant octogenarian who stood, refusing Asunta’s hand, bowed to Carrera, and went to the door, Monroy was not aware of it, because he had already turned his back on the president.
I WON’T DENY that Asunta’s diffidence-her disinterest, her lack of amorous confidence-was worse than her indifference-neither affection toward nor rejection of my person. Our relationship, after everything I’ve narrated, returned to a cold, professional channel, like a river that freezes but doesn’t overflow its banks. Does the water run beneath the crust of ice? Having listened to the filthy words of love with which Asunta gave pleasure to Max Monroy, I knew not only that I could never aspire to that “melody” but that having heard it deprived me forever of my stupid romantic illusion. Asunta would never be mine “for sentimental reasons,” in the words of an old fox-trot that Jerico sometimes hummed, for no apparent reason, while he was shaving.
Deprived of love with Asunta, witness to her sexual vulgarity in bed with Max, my spirit filled with a kind of wounded discontent. I knew what I wanted and now I recognized only what I would have wanted. And both resolved into a categorical negation of my illusions. Not Elvira, or Lucha, or finally Asunta would redeem me from lost loves and open up for me a reasonably permanent horizon, for no matter how much we think of ourselves as Don Juans, don’t we aspire to a permanent, fruitful relationship with one woman? What is Don Juan essentially looking for but a constant woman, a long-term shelter of tenderness and peace?
My having thought Asunta Jordan was that woman is the greatest proof of my ingenuousness. I know there is a good deal of naivete in me, and if Voltaire’s subtitle is
What takes us from the loss of amorous illusion to the carnal consolation of the brothel? I don’t know how to answer if I don’t bear witness first to my plunge into the sexual pleasure of the famous house of La Hetara, where Jerico and I together fucked the whore with the bee on her buttock who ended up being the damned widow of Nazario Esparza, stepmother to Errol, and head of the criminal gang of the Mariachi Maxi. You, gentle readers, can
