Carlos Fuentes - Christopher Unborn

Don Ulises López’s principal task during the Crisis of 1990, when he was named superminister, to supervise (from a very advantageous position) the de facto dismemberment that de jure disguised itself as condominiums, trusts, limited concessions, and temporary cedings, in which the Yucatán was handed over to Club Med, the Chitacam Trusteeship was created for the Five Sisters, the existence of Mexamerica was sanctioned, and no attention whatsoever was paid to what was going on in Veracruz or on the Pacific coast north of Ixtapa.

Nothing brought more fame to Ulises López than these deals, disguised in euphemisms like “realistic acceptance of interindependence,” “patriotic adaptation to dominating forces,” “a step forward in nationalistic, revolutionary concentration,” “patriotic contribution to peaceful coexistence,” etc., and whatever the individual’s party affiliations, there was something for everyone.

For his many efforts, Don Ulises was rewarded during the Crisis of the Year ’90 with the portfolio of SEPAFU (Secretariat of Patriotism and Foreign Undertakings); some people said that his business successes were balanced by his disastrous tour as minister, while others said he was rewarded with a brilliant portfolio for his business disasters. Our brave Ulises remained undaunted: from the Super Economic Secretariat he announced his market philosophy through all the media:

In public: “It does not matter who makes money, just as long as everyone pays taxes.”

In private: “I’m willing to lose all the money in the world, as long as it isn’t my money.”

In public: “Public service is the only justification for holding power.”

In private: “Like sex, power can only be enjoyed when it needs no justifications.”

In public: “We are all involved in production.”

In private: “This country is divided into producers and parasites. I had nothing in Guerrero. I made myself into what I am today out of nothing. No one ever gave me a free tortilla.”

In public: “When all of us get our fair share, production goes up.”

In private: “The government should only help the rich.”

In public: “The glory of our nation is forged by one hundred million Mexicans.”

In private: “The glory of Ulises López is forged by one hundred million assholes.”

In public: “As the poet says, no one should have too much when someone doesn’t have enough.”

In private: “Who needs a Jaguar or a Porsche to survive? I do! For whom is having a thirty-ounce bottle of Miss Dior a matter of life or death? Do I really have to answer that?”

Publicly or privately, Ulises and his policies were an open secret: Ulises and his pals got rich because the nation got poor; he made money thanks to bad government; oil ruined us but it set Ulises up; the government is tearing the country to pieces; foreign banks are tearing the government to pieces; Ulises tears all of them to pieces.

“Put me in jail for theft!” Ulises shouted with haughty bitterness at the invisible roosters that night he paced the empty cockpit. “Cut me down! And then wait for someone with my genius to pop up! All aspects of human nature are reborn, demand to exist, to grow, to bear fruit: ALL OF THEM!”

But, in a flash, the nefarious Robles Chacón usurped all the wisdom, the capacity for intrigue, the talent for scheming, the rhetorical skill, the balanced exchange of favors, and, in the same way, replaced the contradictions and the discredit, the lack of results and the animosity of the people toward Ulises López’s administration with a politics of symbols: Mamadoc, the contests, Circus and Circus, all with such spectacular results that Ulises, locked away in his mansion, sleeplessly pacing his cockpit, drinking coffee at all hours of the day and thinking how to take revenge on Robles Chacón, on that monster Mother and Doctor, on his former financial rivals who had accommodated themselves to the new situation. Ulises López believed in self-affirmation, and his shout into the night was this:

“I was a shark and I’ll be a shark again!”

All of the above meant absolutely nothing to Ulises’s distinguished wife, Lucha Plancarte de López — as long as it did not affect her lifestyle, which for her was everything. An essential part of that style was foreign travel, and when her husband announced that from then on they would only travel to Querétaro and Taxco, the lady almost had a fit:

“Why? Why?”

“We just can’t offend the middle classes, who are unable to travel because they have no foreign currency.”

“Well I, thank God, am not middle-class.”

“But you will be unless you watch out. The time is just not right for conspicuous consumption, Lucha. I’m not a cabinet minister anymore, and I don’t want to give Robles Chacón any pretexts to get even with me.”

“Maybe you should be thinking about getting even with him, dummy.”

Doña Lucha López was tall, outspoken, dark, with a good figure, curly-haired wherever she had hair, with an ass like Narcissus’ pond — deep enough to drown in, her husband said when he met her — and Tantalus tits — because they always bounced away when his fingers came too close. She had been known as a femme fatale in the city of Chilpancingo when the two of them went out dancing during their courtship, and Ulises had to protect himself from the train of punks and would-be Don Juans who would follow Lucha’s silhouette to the movies, to cabarets, on vacation, and when they went out for a snack. But Ulises made his first million before the others and that determined her choice: she tall and graceful, he short and nervous. They didn’t waste time on a honeymoon: he de-femme-fatalized her; she de-Don-Juanized her Chilpancingo lover boy and then they de-sisted. She put on weight, but always maintained — Ulises would say to himself—“a divine skull.” As long as she lived, she knew how to sit as if she were posing for a portrait by Diego Rivera. She was involved, even though her husband knew all about them, in a series of compensatory escapades, the price, he admitted, he had to pay, as he ate his daily papaya, for his own escapades with power and money:

“I only use those who would use me or who do use everyone else. If I exploit them, it’s because they also exploit; if I’m tricky, it’s because everyone’s tricky. Everyone wants exactly what you and I want. Power, sex, and money.”

“But not in equal quantities, dearie.”

She wanted sex and money, power she didn’t care about. As long as she felt young, she made herself the leading lady in a labyrinth of illicit love affairs, secret meetings, motels, threats, escapes, daily excitement, and above all the adventure of knowing she was being followed by a dozen or so thugs and private detectives working for her husband and none of them could ever find her or bring proof to poor Ulises. That captain of industry decided not to take revenge until the time was ripe; in the meanwhile, he would enjoy the disinterest of their sexual relations and the interest both said they had in their daughter and in her place in Mexican society.

The crisis ruined everything. Lucha never forgave Ulises for having given up on the trips abroad. Neither the mansion in Las Lomas del Sol nor the cook from Le Grand Vefour could compete with the emotion Lucha felt when she walked into a great department store in a foreign country.

“Are we or are we not wealthy Mexicans?” she asked in murderous tones as he ate his daily ration of papaya with sugar and lemon — without which the diminutive tycoon suffered dyspepsia and intestinal irregularity.

He did not respond to this recrimination, but he did share it. Ulises López’s reward to himself for his childhood in Guerrero and his dynamic ascent in Mexico City was a dream populated by waiters and maîtres d’, restaurants, hotels, first-class plane tickets, European castles, beach houses on Long Island and Marbella: oh, to enter and be recognized, greeted, kowtowed to, in the Plaza-Athénée and the Beverly-Wilshire, to call the maître d’ at Le Cirque by his first name … For Don Ulises, these compensations, nevertheless, put him in a state of perpetual schizophrenia: how to be cosmopolitan in Rome and a hometown boy in Chilpancingo? he didn’t want to lose either his provincial power base (without it, he would have no political support) or his international standing (without it, he’d have no reward of any kind for his labors).