Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

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.

The minister didn’t blink an eye. The Ayatollah shouted, save my girlfriend! save my daughter! save…!

Robles Chacón just laughed. So many requests! The lover, the daughter, what about that albino truck driver, a lost grandma, who was Colasa’s mother? who were Matamoros Moreno’s parents? the poor little orphan boy, son (of a bitch) of the morning, do you suppose that his unknown parents might be among the dead? Did he think that before he opened the doors to this bastard of a country, this savage Mexico, this sleeping tiger, did he think about that and about all those who, in addition to his daughter and his lover, came to his mind? Did he dare to condemn the albino, for example? Or was Matamoros Moreno incapable of thinking about death in the singular, was he incapable of saying “Colasa’s death,” “Galvarinaconchadollymanés’s death,” “the albino’s death,” was that it? That’s what Robles Chacón icily said to him as he imagined all those victims. But Robles Chacón did not fool himself for an instant: he, Federico Robles, fils, was the principal victim of this day of blood, just one more on a long list of bloodstained days, wasn’t that right? Can you only imagine collective death, the death you asked me for, you bastard?