Christopher Unborn (66 page)

The colonel stalked ominously out, and Federico made his point once more to the President. The chain of crimes must be broken: we need imagination and memory. I offered a symbol as a sacrament between memory and hope, said Robles to the President: were they the saviors? What do you think, Mr. President? Didn't we win the game down in Acapulco when those asshole kids saved our butts from the Guerrero political crisis or when we liquidated Ulises López's (may God have mercy on his soul) power and the colonel's mom? News travels fast. Power remains. Or it should remain. Mr. President, be careful. This is a key play.

They didn't speak for a long while, and then the minister said: I don't know if you understand me, sir, and frankly I don't care. I have to talk. I have to say something: one thing in particular. Almost seven years ago, I was a young volunteer during the September 19 earthquake. We didn't need the PRI, a president, or anything else. We organized almost by instinct, I mean, all the young people in the neighborhood, or several neighborhoods. We took scooters, vans, pickups, whatever we could find, shovels, picks, bandages, one guy joined up with us carrying a bottle of Mercurochrome. What moved us that day? The sense of solidarity, a humanitarian feeling, the need to save our neighbors. We realized they were our neighbors! Do you understand me, sir? That morning, the man next to me was my fellow man. I was another fellow man. We went beyond institutions. But once the heroic moment passed, we went back to wondering what moved us that day. And our answer was something else. We acted because we were a generation of educated Mexicans, forty years of education, of reading, going to films, talking with everyone, studying Mexican history, whatever; it all came to the surface that painful morning. Civil society transcended the state. But it was the state that created civil society. That is our political conundrum, sir. We owe too much to the revolution to trade it in, no matter how old, smelly, or ugly it's become, for adventure, whim, nothing. They say the system coopted me. I was a volunteer facing up to what was judged to be the disorder of a fearful government devoid of imagination. Today I'm Minister of State in a government that is neither better nor worse than all the others: your government. Our country's history is its frustrated youth. But, despite everything, that's what a mature country is: a corrupt country. And yet, sir, no matter how much I justify myself honestly, because you listen so to me patiently, sir, because you were a friend of my father, I want to tell you that the only good thing I ever did in my life I did that morning of the earthquake. I would exchange all my current power for the satisfaction of digging at a mountain of rubble and pulling out a little girl buried there alive and only a week old.

7

This—but these are not his exact words—is what Minister Federico Robles Chacón said to the Ayatollah Matamoros Moreno when they brought him to Robles Chacón's office at the intersection of Insurgentes, Nuevo León, and the Viaduct:

“It all depends on you—we can postpone death and fulfill our destiny. Look, Mr. Holy Man, you're not the first of your kind around here, don't believe it for a minute, and all of you end up the same way. Open your eyes: you reach into your hat for a paradise and you pull out a hell.”

Matamoros looked at him with that carbonizing gaze, like a black diamond, the one that had proven so effective on stage. But the rational Robles Chacón decided that Bela Lugosi's cinematic stare was much worse: where does he get off with this Dracula bit? At the same time, he did not want to laugh at Matamoros; Federico Robles Chacón did not laugh at losers, especially when they still had direct control over a mob on the loose all over the city. Besides, why plead with him? What the Mexican Ayatollah had to understand was that the surprise effect of his movement had passed, the spontaneous fiesta was over, the López family had been murdered in exemplary fashion taking the rap for all the families of government functionaries who'd gotten rich in the past seventy years.

The cops who should have been hung had been hung.

The supermarkets that should have been looted had been looted.

The permissive instant had passed, and now—the minister gestured toward the city—now look, Mr. Holy Man, and don't play dumb: there are five helicopters flying over your divine mobs; each chopper contains two machine guns; the elite battalions of the presidential guard are posted on every corner, surrounding every plaza, standing guard on every rooftop with their M-16s in their hands. Take a good look at how long an insurrection can last in Mexico, Mr. Holy Man! But you've managed to wake up a savage Mexico and what I'm offering you is the chance to be useful and glorious as opposed to being useless and dead. Look, Mr. Holy Man, I'm making you a proposition: let's talk it over. You give me something, I give you something. What do you say?

How many chances do I have to give you the right answer? asked the Ayatollah, bruised and blackened by the flames, but smiling like an idiot, his teeth arranged like corn-on-the-cob, and bound up with who knew how much myth, fable, and atavism.

Three, smiled the Secretary of State, nowhere nearly as charismatic but far more astute.

I want the entire cabinet to parade through the streets, from the Zócalo to La Villa, each minister carrying a cross and singing the hymn to the Blessed Sacrament.

Okay, said Robles Chacón. You, in turn, will have to use your people to kidnap all those who have drained the country of dollars and hold them until they return the $300 billion they've taken out of Mexico since 1975. He said it affably.

I'll go along with that, muttered Matamoros Moreno with a sly sparkle in his eye, a gesture of craftiness that the Chilean María Inez, Dolly, Concha, Galvarina would not have allowed him to make had she been there next to him, dangerous, dearest, don't go too far, don't stretch your luck too far, it would be damn silly to … But the Ayatollah had already allowed that other man he had within to push his way out and fulfill his destiny. For a fleeting instant he saw himself from outside, as if he were looking at someone else, and he did not see two men, only one, although he could see a wider destiny than that allotted him by circumstance: he was an orphan, and that already meant having half a destiny or a destiny like no other, Matamoros said to himself. He never knew his father or mother, only the orphanage, his scholarship, the Heroes of '82 school, his frustrated literary vocation, his early love affair with a woman who was as anonymous as he was (he could no longer remember her face) in a dark place and the woman always in the dark, saying don't try to see me, don't ever try to see me, because if you do I'll stop being excited: an intensely anonymous woman, no, there will be no melodramatic revelations here, Colasa Sánchez is the daughter of Anónima Sánchez, Nobody, Personne, the Daughter of Sánchez, no one had a daughter with her, he always knew that the daughter would be his and with him, a young stud of a father at fifteen years of age, a writer frustrated by the envy of Angel Palomar, a man hallucinated by the idea of myth as immediate substitute for imagination. Myth is ready-to-wear imagination, as his Chilean girlfriend jokingly said: the tribe's imagination. His daughter Colasa incarnated it, she was no fantasy, myths lived and Colasa had a vagina dentata. She should have, to be transformed from an invalid into a valid political and economic asset. They should have made a fortune with that thing. It didn't turn out that way, but there can be no doubt the idea illuminated Matamoros Moreno's imagination. From a hilltop outside Acapulco, he saw the anarchic destruction of the port, and he told Colasa: “Not that way, not that way.” Myths were something else, not anarchy but love, the desire for order, morality, knowing what could be counted on, understanding that the oldest traditions were the only ones that had survived and that could unite this people and make it love itself, make it feel noticed, respected, the center of its own history. Traveling around the country with his gang of workers, he of all people reduced to such a thing in the Mexico of the nineties, totally devoid of direction, when it was every man for himself and survival was the name of the game, one day here, the next somewhere else, juggler, or bricklayer, what did it matter as long as you had something to eat today, who knew what tomorrow would bring?

Matamoros Moreno fixed his terrible eyes on Federico Robles Chacón, who trembled less under those eyes than he had hearing the laughter of the mad monk on the radio and who felt that mass of people behind him, agitated, furious, gathered at the intersection where the SEPAFU offices were located, under the interminable acid rain, in the morning that always looked, as it did now, afternoon and he told him what he had to tell him in order that he carry his destiny one step beyond, one step forward. One more step had to be taken in order to fulfill Matamoros Moreno's duplicated destiny, Matamoros, the screwed orphan who stood Columbus's egg on its end: one hundred and thirty million Mexicans are Catholics, not Communists, not PRIists, not PANists, but Guadalupeans, and thousands of people had followed him who were just waiting for someone to tell them that and to lead them.

*   *   *

Federico Robles Chacón scrutinized the man opposite him (he didn't dare think of him as his prisoner: Mexico was not Jerusalem and this man was not the Nazarene, nor was the minister, God forbid! Pontius Pilate) and tried to read his thoughts, to guess his feelings in that instant in which he awaited the second demand of the Mexican Ayatollah, who had invaded and interrupted Robles Chacón's project of national symbolization, his creation in the lab of a symbolic form that would replace the need for repression, sublimating it. That's why he had invented Mamadoc. He believed deeply in the ability of an enlightened minority to govern Mexico. He had no illusions, what little this country had achieved was due to a series of elites that had drawn the line, forced into submission or defeated the savage majority, that majority without direction, that barbarous majority, so much so that when they triumphed they put minorities as obscurantist and brutish as themselves in power: the anarchic ghost of Santa Anna, the nation's leading man, the cockfighter, the lady's man, the stud, transformed into a plebeian dictator, a clod, grotesque, a lackey to foreign powers, he haunted the history of Mexico like an evil omen that was constantly to be taken into account: keep the plebes out of power, no matter how noble a Zapata or a Villa might look, to preclude a reincarnation of Santa Anna. Enlightened minorities, always, right- or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Lucas Alamán or Dr. Mora, the men of the Reform: a liberal minority; the men of the Porfirio Díaz regime: a positivist minority; the men of the Revolution: a meritocracy that was much more broadly based than its predecessors, more porous, more permeable: Robles Chacón and his father, who in past centuries would have been peons chained to peasant debt, the hacienda system, and the whip, if they'd been born in 1700 or 1800, in … But instead they were born with the Revolution, they made it, they inherited it, and they governed instead of being governed. The price they paid was becoming themselves an enlightened minority. If they had been an anarchic majority, they would never have governed.

And now they found themselves face-to-face with the newly resurrected masses, who were once again on the move. Not for the first time, recalled Robles Chacón, not the first and not the last, but this time it was he who had to face them and the Ayatollah Matamoros. Robles Chacón knew it only too well; he read Matamoros's theatrical wink, so dramatic that it had to communicate his intention: that was his strength and his weakness as well. Matamoros Moreno was going to act out—to the death if necessary—the role he had created for himself, the role the mob had conferred upon him. He would take his chances, he wouldn't come to terms without some sort of drama, he wouldn't accept negotiation without some tragedy. Robles, son of Robles, knew it because of his millennial Mexican genes, he knew it and it tasted like bile to him because this necessary drama was going to force him to do what he did not want to do, it was going to put Mexican history to an unnecessary test, but one that was absolutely necessary for the Mexican Ayatollah's melodrama and for sacralized violence.

What I want to know, said Matamoros, is if you are really capable of murdering my people. That's my second question.

It was asked with impavid security.

The minister lowered his eyes, closed them, prayed that these things weren't really happening, that some dramatist somewhere was dictating these words to his character Matamoros, but that they weren't really his words and that he'd take them back, have second thoughts instantly. But the Ayatollah repeated, I want to know if you are capable of massacring my people, all those people supporting me down there on the street. He said it because that's what his character was supposed to say and he wouldn't have said it if that hadn't been his role.

Is that your second demand? said Robles Chacón, in total calm.

Matamoros nodded his head, still wrapped in the red kerchief, which was soiled with ash and fresh blood.

Robles Chacón simply placed his left hand on his right wrist and pressed one of the golden buttons on his wristwatch. Button, button who's got the button? he thought, mournfully and unconsciously leaving every level of his consciousness open to what was going to take place despite him, despite all his philosophy and politics.

Like a thunderclap in reverse, the staccato buzz of the machine guns preceded the flash of the fire burst of death and blood. Matamoros, shouting, hurling himself against the windows in the minister's office, smearing his fingerprints all over the blue glass that filtered the corrupt glare of the sun in the city “where the air is clear,” saw his people rising up down there in the crowded intersection of Insurgentes, Nuevo León, and the Viaduct, his people! those who had followed him and who were there shouting freedom for our guide set Matamoros free! He saw them fall silently like flies, the noise more and more distant, echoing through the valley morning, and the fire, by contrast, growing, mustard-colored, spreading throughout Colonia Hipódromo, toward Tacubaya and Lomas Altas, down Baja California and Colonia de los Doctores, along Parque Delta and Xola and Colonia del Valle, up Patriotismo and Colonia Nápoles, blotting out the high rose-colored sunglasses of the Hotel de México and the glass temples of the Mexican National Airline Building, fogging over Siqueiros's acrylic murals: the brownish scum hid the dying from Matamoros Moreno, the long-haul truckers and the devout little old ladies, the angry young men, the unemployed office workers, the bankrupt store owners, the deinstitutionalized lunatics—all invisible, machine-gunned, dead, their destinies now complete, at least more so than those of Matamoros Moreno and Federico Robles Chacón.