irreparably harming the ancient fraternity of Josue and Jerico, Castor and Pollux.
Cain and Abel.
Did Asunta realize what she had unleashed? Perhaps her egotism became confused with her true satisfaction, the cliff’s edge of happiness to which she believed she had a right, even at the cost of a fratricidal war that in her eyes was, perhaps, barely a genteel war, one of those waged as if it were a game, with no real risk… And the abyss?
She didn’t realize. I felt a kind of compassion for Asunta Jordan and a destiny she valued, perhaps, only by comparison. It was in reality a destiny, I thought then, that was despicable, deceptively liberated, in fact alienated.
“Who was your friend Jerico with before all this?”
“Who was he with?”
“Women.”
“Whores. Only whores.”
“The imbecile fell in love with me.”
I didn’t believe it and didn’t interrupt her.
“He told me he was falling in love with a woman for the first time.”
“What did you say to him?”
“You already know. That I belonged to you, Josue.”
And immersed again in her papers, she added:
“You have nothing to worry about. We have him in a safe place.”
I DON’T KNOW if memory is a form of incarnation. In any case, it must be a stimulus for the spirit that by means of recollection manages to revive. Though perhaps memory consists only in holding on to an instant and immediately returning movement to the moment. Is memory barely a scar? Is it the past I myself don’t recognize? Though if I don’t know it, how can I remember it? Is memory a mere simulation of recalling what we have already forgotten or, what’s worse, have never lived?
I would have liked to give to memory the surname of imagination. Sangines did not permit me to. In that slow trip from the Danubio on Calles de Uruguay to my cloistered garret on Calle de Praga, the lawyer said what he said because what occurred had occurred. The fraternity of Castor and Pollux had been transformed into the rivalry, the hatred of Cain and Abel. Passing memories, a different script, what was the difference, the profound difference, not the obvious, computable one?
I will try to reproduce, in my own words, from the scar of my memory, what Sangines told me that afternoon when the rain made everything vanish like a sleeve of water on an immobile mirror.
I knew the history of Miguel Aparecido, which he himself recounted behind bars in San Juan de Aragon Prison along with terrible evocations of his grandmother, Antigua Concepcion, that surfaced like an earthquake from the hidden grave where the not very venerable senora lay, creator of the Monroy fortune, despite her husband the general’s violent frivolity, for the sake of her pampered son Max Monroy, whom the deceased manipulated as she chose, to the extreme of marrying him at the age of forty to an adolescent in order to appropriate the girl’s lands, with no consideration at all of the feelings or desires of the innocent Sibila Sarmiento or of Max himself, unmarried until that moment through the power and grace of his mother’s implacable will: will and destiny associated like a single figure in the mind of Antigua Concepcion. She operated with both when she bought real estate with the Monroy fortune and passed it on to her son. The condition was that, he, Max, would submit to his mother’s will in order to inherit. And if an intrusive, unpleasant, punishable, irritating, ungrateful necessity should filter down between them, the old matriarch in her Carmelite habit would bow before it with a gesture of repugnance, holding her nose, certain her son Max would thank her one day for the necessity in the name of his fortune.
The helpless Sibila Sarmiento locked away in an asylum, the son of Max and the madwoman abandoned to grow up fighting on the besieged, murderous streets of the capital: I travel with Sangines through the city of the moon, if the moon had a city. Or better yet, if the moon were a city, it would not only be
The Mercedes is driven by a chauffeur. Sangines raises the glass that separates us from the driver and continues: “A moment arrived when the powerful matriarch decided her son Max could walk alone without maternal props, with his own destiny, freed of the necessity she assumed without thinking about it twice, though the third time she said to herself:
“In exchange for necessity I’ll leave Max my desire and my destiny.”
Desire and destiny, murmured Antonio Sangines.
Max Monroy.
“He is master,” Sangines began his tale during our slow progress from the Historical Center to the Zona Rosa, “of a self-assurance that is in no way ostentatious. It is invisible. You saw him when he met with President Carrera in the Castle of Chapultepec. Where does it come from? He didn’t inherit it from his mother, who was like a cross between the devouring Aztec goddess Coatlicue and the national patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. He had to pass, however, through a period of becoming detached. Inheriting from his mother but distancing himself from her. Only the death of his mother Dona Conchita eventually allowed him to do that. Before then, like her, in order to prove himself to her-I tell you so you’ll know-he allowed corruption. He had to submit to political chiefs and bosses, just as his mother had. He didn’t kill them. He bought them. Energetically. Astutely. He knew they were for sale. He permitted them to steal but on the pretext that when they did-just listen to the national paradox-they were building, creating. He understood his mother’s lesson: They had to be transformed into revolutionaries without a revolution. What are they afraid of? The middle class won the revolution just as they had in France and the United States. There is no revolution without the middle class and Mexico was no exception. The revolution that excludes the middle class is not a proletarian revolution. It is a dictatorship ‘of the proletariat.’ In Mexico, the heroes died young. The survivors grew old and became rich. Max Monroy bought, suggested, insinuated, threatened, and also built and knew where to walk. He guessed the future faster than the rest and deceived the rest by making them believe the present was the future.”
How to know if Sangines sighed when the rain turned into hail, striking the roof and windows of the car like the drum of God?
Political bosses. Governors. Entrepreneurs. How did Monroy win? By hating what they did but beating them at their own game. Before the boss of San Luis acted on his own, Max sent him an army general to take charge of the plaza “for your own security, Governor.” When the cacique of Tabasco was preparing to buy legal decisions in the capital to build the highway fifty-fifty, Max got ahead of him by acquiring the construction company that gave the costly gov only twenty-five percent. Etcetera. I’ll make it brief. In this way Max was transformed into an intermediary, a creator of coalitions (
In order not to become lost in Sangines’s memory-filled account, was it the Academy de las Vizcainas, a refuge for poor girls and rich widows, that obliged me to think of Esparza’s two wives, Dona Estrellita the saint and the dirty whore Sara P., both from real or apocryphal convents like this one, whose oculi and pinnacles became invisible in the rainy twilight? Did I want to think about this, about them, because I was afraid, for no obvious reason, of what Professor Sangines’s words would reveal to me?
Didn’t I want to think about another extension of prison, about the asylum where Sibila Sarmiento, the mother of Miguel Aparecido, had been locked away?
Sangines continued. Broker. Agent. Intermediary, and his mother’s heir. I imagined a young Max Monroy, hiding the public secret of his inherited fortune in order to act as an ambitious beginner: Wasn’t this what the fearsome Concepcion wanted, to have her son earn his inheritance from the bottom, with effort, compromising himself, getting dirty if need be, just like everyone else?
“He invented companies out of nothing,” Sangines continued. “For each one he received capital that he invested in other new companies. He shuffled the names of businesses. He justified himself by telling himself- telling me, Josue-the country of misery had to be left behind, Mexico’s closed shop had to be broken, markets created, price fixing broken, communiques communicated, modernity brought to the country.”
Modernity opposed to the closed shop. Communicating. The wrinkled parchment of mountains and precipices,
