Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

“The worst of them all, sir,” says the very diligent Don Jenaro, “is a murderer of old ladies who has senselessly killed a dozen random little old ladies she stole nothing from. She kills for the joy of killing, and she argues that her victims were decrepit, already too prone to lying in bed, and are happier dead than alive.

“The most interesting inmate is Comandante Caramelo, a fat girl whose mouth is always stuffed with candy, who heads a group of criminal women who don’t come, Mr. Gorozpe, from the lower depths of poverty. No, all of them were typists, bank employees, store clerks, nannies for rich kids, all women who were unsatisfied, not because of their poverty, but owing to the scarcity of their wealth, and wanting, Caramelo told me, to rise quickly in a society that promises everything but doesn’t specify when that promise will be fulfilled.

“‘We were in a hurry,’ Caramelo said. ‘We could have resigned ourselves to working in an office or in a pharmacy. But you know what, Counselor? What they promise us, others — a select few — already have, and they aren’t going to let it go, and the life we’re promised in ads, you know, we already know that’s pure hope, and that we won’t get any part of it, not even on the installment plan.’” Caramelo brought another piece of caramel to her mouth. She dropped the wrapper on the floor. One of the dynamiters picked it up and carried it off to the trash can.

And then, “Are you surprised, sir, that we are making our own luck?” Caramelo had asked, stunning my envoy, Don Jenaro, whose disguise had been useless.

I admit that all of these reports leave me very dissatisfied. It is as if a thousand-headed hydra had stationed itself in front of my office on the fortieth floor overlooking Bosque de Chapultepec Park, and I bravely went out to cut off one of its heads only to see that two more heads had grown in its place.

We struggle against a polymorphous monster, and the solutions that I come up with — and that I present to my associates — are inadequate, temporary, or at best would only yield long-term benefits. To legalize drugs, a little at a time, beginning with marijuana. To know that the United States will not accompany us, even in the name of individual freedom, in allowing anyone to poison himself and others. To understand that this is a global problem in a global age: cut off two hydra heads and they are replaced by four heads. .

My associates stare at me with skepticism from behind their black sunglasses. I imagine their stares anyway. Are they reproachful? Well then, they can propose something. One of them dares to speak up.

“Adam —”

“Hey now, don’t get cheeky.”

“No, not you, sir,” he continues, “Adam Góngora .”

“He’s a murderer.”

“And what else do criminals deserve, but a criminal who is more criminal than they are? With all due respect.”

I have dinner with my brother-in-law Abelardo Holguín. He tells me about his disappointments in literary circles and of his opportunity to enter instead the world of television as a writer of soap operas.

He tells me about his conversation with the chief executive honcho of the Tetravision network, the elderly Rodrigo Pola, whom I have heard a lot about because his career was recorded in a prehistoric novel. Pola was the son of Rosenda Zubarán and Gervasio Pola, an officer of the Revolution executed by a firing squad in 1913 along with the comrades he snitched on so that he wouldn’t die alone—“to die together” shouting “Viva Madero!” After all that, Rodrigo married Pimpinela de Ovando, an aristocrat whose family went back to the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. (Does anybody remember those distant times?) He entered the new world of television, where he rose to become a chief executive officer, a powerful media business mogul.

Abelardo admits that he abused the privileges implicit in the name of his father in order to get to Don Rodrigo Pola. Pola didn’t need to know that Abelardo was estranged from his famous father the King of Bakery any more than that he had been exiled from the republic of letters by the literary pope.

Luckily the magic surname Holguín opened doors to the young man, whose appearance, moreover, was already a calling card.

Abelardo Holguín had not given in to the youthful fashions that compel one to dress like a railroad worker or a beggar; rather, an enthusiast of Hollywood films from the thirties and forties, he dressed conservatively, with a jacket and tie, like Cary Grant. Abelardo and I had in common this love for old movies and that lost era, which survives only on film. Sometimes Priscila used to walk in on our conversations, which she suspected were conducted in some sort of code:

“Thomas Mitchell, in the year 1939 alone,” Abelardo reminded me, “appears in Only Angels Have Wings, Gone With The Wind, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , and Stagecoach , for which he won the Oscar for best supporting actor.”

“ Stagecoach ,” I said, picking up the thread, “is an adaptation of Boule de Suif , the short story by Maupassant, and Norman Foster brought it to the screen in Mexico with Esther Fernández and Ricardo Montalbán.”

“Who was Foster’s wife’s brother-in-law: they were both married to Blaine sisters, the most famous of which was Loretta Young.”

“Who had a secret lovechild with Clark Gable, conceived during the shooting of The Call of the Wild , based on the Jack London novel—”

“Which enjoyed many screen adaptations, notably The Sea Wolf with John Garfield and Ida Lupino.”

“And the rest of that cast. That actor, you know, that one who was introduced with such pomp and circumstance. What was his name? And then he just disappeared.”

“I don’t remember. Ask Carlos Monsiváis.”

“Or José Luis Cuevas.”

“Or as a last and best resort, Natalio Botana.”

That Priscila had been eavesdropping on us from the dining room next door, hidden behind a curtain, became apparent when Don Celestino stormed in to reproach Abelardo, as usual, and me as well, which was less usual.

“What are you and your brother-in-law secretly discussing in the living room?”

“It’s no secret. They’re classic movies.”

“Movies?” Don Celes becomes agitated. “Did you say moo-vies? A secret code made from movies, I reckon. So what are you and Adam whispering about? What are you up to? What are you plotting against your sister? And who is this Norman Foster character anyway?”

I hear the slap that Priscila, upon hearing these words, unleashes on the maid who is taking clean laundry up to the bedroom.

“Father, Norman Foster is a film director.”

“Sure. A di-rec-tor, huh? That’s all you’re going to fess up to?”

“He directed Journey into Fear .”

“Okay, now the cat’s out of the bag. So that’s the password. Journey into fear?”

“Starring Dolores del Río—”

“Don’t change the subject, rascal, scoundrel.”

I find it amusing that old-man Holguín uses the same expressions as the old lady who beat up that youthful mugger with an umbrella on the Salto-del-Agua-to-Ciudadela-to-Rayón bus.

“Congratulations,” I tell Abelardo with a laugh, now that we are having lunch at El Danubio on República de Uruguay Street. “You’ve freed yourself from Don Celestino.”

“But you’re still there,” Abelardo said without malice.

“There is nothing quite like being seen to render a person invisible,” I said with a smile.

Don Rodrigo Pola, who must almost be a centenarian, received Abelardo Holguín, as I said, in his sacrosanct office on Insurgentes, stuffed inside what seemed to be a wicker basket full of cotton that supposedly conserves his energies and provides him with the warmth that he lacks or returns his warmth and energy to him, in essence poisoning himself. How much heat does an almost hundred-year-old crow generate? That’s not just a physical question, but a philosophical one: why are there people who survive beyond the “normal” life span — seventy or eighty years? — losing, true, many faculties, but maintaining or perhaps gaining other, previously unknown ones? It’s sad to see men who were vigorous, quarrelsome, even fighters, reduced to muteness and the wheelchair, depending on the wives whom they mistreated, cheated on, and despised throughout their marriages, to help them eat, piss, sleep, and to wheel them back and forth. Wouldn’t it be preferable to die rather than to be so thoroughly humiliated?