Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Then (an event that changed the course of Mexican history forever) Robles Chacón, doubtless because he happened to be talking about a woman, intuitively looked for a woman in the interministerial meeting room. He looked at her and his words died right in his mouth.

This … is … what we did … with … our … oil

He stared at her intensely, stared at her wilted flowers, her tricolor ribbons, and their funerary letters; he snapped his fingers as if he were about to start dancing flamenco, and out of a nearby closet came a tiny little man, who sprang to attention like a soldier, wearing a tuxedo and patent-leather pumps with black bows on them.

“Okay,” said Robles Chacón, “give me the gross national product figures per capita…”

“Well now,” the man replied in a faint voice, “if we observe the parameters of the increase in the GNP in global terms of 300 billion pesos, in relation to consumables imported at the rate of 75 percent of exports, but without overlooking the increase in salaries at the rate of 49 percent and prices adjusted according to the indices of real inflation, which occurred at the rate of 150.7 percent, and if…”

“Okay,” interrupted the minister, “now describe the same situation in Guinea-Bissau…”

“… at the rate of 296.8 percent, we come to the conclusion,” said the man from the closet without stopping, “that the foreseeable increase in the demand for work will be on the order of approximately two million new jobs, while their incidence in the demand for goods and services will fluctuate sharply, as long as it does not necessarily coincide with the need of infrastructures valued according to classic parameters with a public expenditure deficit on the order of…”

Robles Chacón slammed his fist down on the table with such force that his thick aviator glasses almost fell off. “This proves, gentlemen, that there’s a liar hiding behind each one of these statistics. The only truth unspoken in all of what you’ve just heard is that the vast majority of the people in Mexico and Guinea-Bissau are screwed. ”

The statistician, like a sleepwalker, went back to his closet, but Minister-for-Life Ulises López, head of the Secretariat for Patriotism and Foreign Undertakings (SEPAFU), stood up in a rage and said that Dr. Robles Chacón’s zeal to disparage the science of economics in favor of old-fashioned gunslinger politics was all too well known.

“The obvious truth about Mexico,” Robles Chacón responded without looking at him, “is that one system is falling apart on us, but we have no other system to put in its place.”

“Yes, we do,” said López, his entire being pomaded, bald, brushed, and gray, “we have a system of economic and scientific competence that will never fall apart, because, after all, economics is an exact science.”

Robles Chacón, who was, after all, Professor Horacio Flores de la Peña’s favorite disciple, took no notice. “The cemeteries are full of statistics. But since you can’t eradicate discontent with statistics, we’ll have to do it with action. But since action is hard to take and since, moreover, actually doing something can lead to chaos, I suggest we utilize neither action nor statistics and use imagination and symbols instead.”

Ulises López said aloud that he would come back to the interministerial meetings when dreamers and people who didn’t have their feet planted firmly on the ground, poets, what have you, were kept out of them. He furiously tossed a mint Life Saver in his mouth and walked out of the meeting room pounding his heels into the floor like an angry flamenco dancer.

But Robles Chacón didn’t even blink. He looked at her again. He perched his glasses on the tip of his nose. He pointed a finger at her, which made her tremble with fear as she had never trembled before, except when she saw the titanic courage of Superminister Ulises López, with his experience and his years facing down the insolence of the young upstart Dr. Robles, so she dropped her pad and pencil out of pure fright when the minister exclaimed: “Look at that girl. Do you see her? What do you see? A miserable secretary. Well, I see the same thing Bishop Juan de Zumárraga saw four centuries ago. I see a little Mexican virgin.”

She blushed. “Oh dear, sir, I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re saying.”

But he was already on his feet, dark and tense, nervous and thin, a kind of bureaucratic Danton: at age thirty-nine, the youngest minister in the regime of President Jesús María y José Paredes (fifty-five years old), haranguing the cabinet with a conviction that demolished his own personal ideas in favor of the system that, devoid of ideas, served the collectivity. He had predicted all the catastrophes: loan after loan to pay the interest on a debt that grew and grew because of the new loans which never put a dent in the principal; devaluation after devaluation, export agriculture to pay off a bit of some other debts in a declining world market; lack of hard currency to import food for a growing population; a money printing machine with inflation at Brazilian, Argentine, at Blue Angel levels; pressures, dismemberments, and finally — he collapsed in his chair, exhausted — the need to save something, whatever could be saved.

“Are we going to be a Weimar without democracy or a utopia with symbols?”

Robles Chacón maintained a religious silence for an instant. She said she believed she actually crossed herself and covered her eyes. But the minister broke the silence with a roar, again pointing to her, my God a thousand times over, at her, at her, so modest in her pants suit from the Iron Palace, with her ribbons in her hair, the ones her boyfriend from the funeral par …

“I say it again: look at her. Look at that girl.”

“At me? At me, sir? Why look at me?”

“What do you see, fellow ministers? Don’t bother telling me. A secretary from the pool. I know. But take a good look at her braids, her tricolor ribbons. What do you see written on them? I know. Don’t bother telling me. You blind men see RIP. But I, maligned though I may be, I see PRI.”

He breathed deeply. “For starters, we’re going to make her queen of the office. We’ve got to do all this without haste but without pause. But remember one thing. The only thing this country is interested in is the symbolic legitimization of power.”

They never left her alone from that moment on. In the office they changed her funerary ribbons for those of the party, they brought her by Mercedes to a new house surrounded by walls in the Pedregal district, a house for forgetting, she told herself, because she recognized nothing there, wanted nothing there, and everything she touched she forgot: white walls, built-in furniture, white just like the walls, as if they’d put her inside an egg, a house made for white forgetting, yes, they sent Leoncito off to sell coffins in Empalme Escobedo, she never saw him again, they disappeared her into this white shell in El Pedregal, they never let her see anyone, talk to anyone, only hear boleros all day long through a loudspeaker system reaching all over the house, even the bathroom, even her pillow, listening to boleros so she would know she was dominating and not dominated by the world of the machos, only in the bolero were women triumphant, punishing, inflicting pain, dominating, and beating down the whimpering macho who passed from his little mommy to his little Virgin, to his little whore, it’s all in a bolero, if you know how to make it fit, so that she would be told, subliminally, through the loudspeakers, day and night, sending the message directly to her subconscious as if to compensate for her being locked up, a man singing to her from the invisible heights of the romantic heaven of celebrity and love and security where it’s the women who have power and the men who are impotent: