each other, embrace?
“Ah!”
The embrace of the two men was recorded by cameras and microphones before Valentin Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy walked ten paces to distance themselves from publicity and bodyguards. Maria del Rosario Galvan and Asunta Jordan, practically identical in their professional attire of tailored suit, dark stockings, and high heels, blocked the press and held off the guests.
“Truce, my dear Max?” The president’s smile dissipated the capital’s smog. “A meeting of two souls?
“No, my dear president. Another battle.” Monroy did not smile.
“If you divide you don’t rule,” Carrera reflected, trying to catch Monroy’s eye.
“And if you rule by force, you divide but govern the parts.”
“Each to his own philosophy.” Carrera almost sighed. “The good thing is that when there’s danger, we know how to come together.”
“Understand it in terms of mutual convenience,” Monroy said with great suavity.
“Does this mean I can count on you, Max?”
“You can always count.” Monroy managed to smile. “What you don’t understand, Valentin Pedro, is that my policies are part of your power. Except your power lasts six years. My policies do not occur every six years.”
“And so?” the president said, halfway between amiable and falsely surprised.
“And so everything ends up contracting, understand that. The six-year term contracts. A life contracts. An era contracts.”
“What?” Carrera exclaimed in surprise (or pretending to be surprised). “Look how my belly’s growing and my hair’s falling out. Don’t kid me.”
“Of course,” Monroy continued, very calm. “With my policies I achieve what you’re missing. If we stayed only with your policies, we’d stay with half-measures. You believe in circuses without the bread. I believe in bread with the circuses. I believe in information and try to communicate that to the majority. You believe in conspiracy reserved for a minority. That’s why I believe that, in the long run, I can manage without you but you can’t get along without me.”
“Monroy, listen-”
“Don’t interrupt. You and I never see each other. I’ll use the occasion to say a person has to deserve my respect.”
“And admiration?”
“For superstars.”
“And esteem?”
“I’m a patient man. Everyone has gone. And those who remain ask me for favors. Our individual histories don’t count. Who remembers President Lagos Chazaro? Who could have been Secretary of Finance under Generalisimo Santa Anna?”
What a strange look the politician directed at the businessman.
“We’re part of the collective aggregate. Don’t go around thinking anything else.”
“What are you saying, Max?”
“Why am I telling you this? Well, we don’t see each other very often.”
Asunta-who tells me the preceding to the degree she heard something, guessed more, and read lips-says that Carrera sighed as if Monroy’s words sealed a previously mentioned reality. The president wasn’t going to change his policies of national distraction only because his official operative, Jerico, had betrayed him by taking advantage of the opportunity to find his own power base that turned out to be perfectly illusory, and Monroy would not abandon his of giving information media to citizens. The crisis perhaps demonstrated that the better informed the citizen, the fewer opportunities demagogic illusion would have.
“Or official carnivals?” asked Carrera, as if he had read (Asunta believes he did) Monroy’s mind.
“Look, Mr. President: What you and I have in common is possible control of the real communication media in this day and age. Insurgents once believed that by taking the central telephone offices they would take power. Do you know something? My telephone operators are all blind. Blind, you understand? In this way they hear better. Nobody hears better than a blind man. On the other hand, a thousand eyes are in thousands of cellular devices, the mobile phones that replace television, radio, the press. I am giving all Mexicans, whether or not they can read and write, a message, a family, a past, an inheritance. They constitute the real national and international information network.”
“You may be right,” Carrera went on. “Just whistle once so the bird can hear you.”
“You underestimate people.” Monroy didn’t bother to look at him. “It’s your eternal error.”
“When there’s no paper, you clean yourself with whatever’s at hand.” Carrera made a vulgar gesture, like someone using a medieval
Monroy didn’t look at him. “Just don’t ignore what you need to survive.”
Carrera raised his shoulders. “You see, it wasn’t necessary to fire a single shot.”
“The fact is the fortress was empty.” Monroy threw cold water on his spirits.
“No, the truth is you’re very clever. You just hide it.” Carrera let his admiration for Max show. Max looked at Carrera with a flattering lie.
“This poor boy… your collaborator…”
“Don’t fuck with me, Max.” The president did not stop smiling. “We both win if you don’t fuck around.”
“Fine, your employee. His name is…?”
“Jerico.”
“Jerico.” Monroy did not smile. “Who knows what old-fashioned manual he read.”
(
“Let’s not be afraid of a gang insurrection like this one, Mr. President, or an impossible revolution like earlier ones. You should be afraid of the tyrant who comes to power through the vote and turns into an elected dictator. That’s the one to fear.”
(I thought, of course, of Antigua Concepcion, Max Monroy’s mother, and her epic, revolutionary version of a history-was it buried along with her?)
“Dishonor,” murmured Max Monroy.
“What?” The president heard only what he wanted to hear.
“Dishonor,” Monroy repeated, and after pretending to admire the landscape: “Let’s not engage in minor intrigues. Let’s exercise irony.”
“What?”
“Irony. Irony.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I mean it’s very difficult under any circumstances to maintain power.”
“Isn’t that what I’m telling you?”
“You don’t say.”
An intolerant minority, Jerico told me, that’s the key for coming to power, you have to energize the base with the example of an energetic minority, you have to favor the prejudices of the resentful, you have to demonize power: Saints don’t know how to govern.
What did Jerico expect? The president, quite simply, made use of the army. Soldiers occupied highways, bridges, large houses, food depositories, munitions depositories, major intersections, banks: The army surrounded Jerico’s followers as if they were mice in a trap. They prevented them from leaving, they gave them an ephemeral empire around the Zocalo that did not even interrupt the work of Filopater and the other scribes on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Fireworks, smoke, folk dances, an exceptional holiday, an obligatory alliance between Monroy and Carrera, as ephemeral as Jerico’s frustrated rebellion.
The groups gathered together by Jerico were isolated in the center of the capital between the Zocalo and Mineria, they never managed to communicate with the supposedly rebellious and certainly wronged masses, Jerico had operated on the basis of a fantastic ideology and a revocable power: the ideology decanted from his readings and his position inside the ogre’s mouth: the office of the president.
