Carlos Fuentes: Adam in Eden

Priscila Holguín represented the golden mean. She was anything but ugly. She was even a little beautiful. She was what is known as a pleasant-looking woman. Her looks neither offended ugly women nor brought unwanted competition to beauties. That made her the perfect girlfriend. She was a threat to no one. And this absence of danger made her more enticing than the man-eaters or the notso-hot tamales.

Her talent was that she not only reigned over useless ceremonies, but that, as though she suspected the pointlessness of her monarchy, she adorned those ceremonies with snatches of songs. And so, after being crowned Queen of This or Princess of That, she would conclude the ceremony by singing, “Keep lying to me, because your wickedness makes me happy” or “out on the big ranch, out where I used to live” or “there are no doormen or neighbors” or “on the bank of the blue lagoon of Ipacaraí.”

The songs were not requirements listed in the job description for queen or princess, but everybody expected Priscila’s signature flourish, as if that closing ditty was proof that her right to reign was not based solely on her beauty (which was slight) but was instead a prize for her talent (at singing pop songs). Or maybe the other way around: Priscila was first and foremost a singer, and her crown was incidental, a kind of trophy she received in recognition of her achievement in the art of singing. Or to return to the first way around: the ditty would make up for her lack of traffic-stopping beauty, allowing a plain Jane to attract attention.

No wonder — I would read, I would laugh — Priscila was courted by the richest kids in town, the heirs apparent of the captains of industry: the pretty-faced boys, the Maserati drivers, the smooth talkers. Wasn’t Priscila a constant passenger of convertible sports cars and Acapulco yachts, a regular in ringside seats at the bull-fights? Was she not inaccessible, except through the medium of the Club Reforma social pages? How might someone without access to the proper channels arrange an audience?

One day she was advertised as the Godmother of the Auto Show. All the big European and Japanese carmakers were on display (not the Americans, whose past glories were segregated in a museum-like display, and whose clunky late models were relegated to the category of all-terrain vehicles): Mercedes Benz, Audi, Alfa Romeo, Citroën, BMW, Lexus. I entered the exhibition space, blinded by the glaring profusion of dazzling metals, luxuriously designed bodies, expectant headlights, and tires of shiny black polished rubber, vaguely doubting that these flashy cars could drive around with impunity through Mexico City without being exposed to potholes, ridicule, the scrape of a key, maybe a car-jacking, vengeful destruction following the cry of resentment for the power projected onto that object: why you but not me, dickhead?

I knew then that I had to mask any sign of the resentment I shared with the many have-nots toward the few haves-lots.

Can a luxury car incite a revolution? Let them eat cake? Let them drive a Maserati? I had no desire to put my suspicions to the test. Instead, walking through the exhibition that would be reigned over by the Empress of the Steering Wheel (aka Priscila Holguín), I repeated to myself the saying: “Smooth talker trumps pretty face, and Maserati trumps smooth talker.”

Priscila’s Pretty-faced Maserati-driving Smooth talkers (P.M.S.) surrounded her to make sure that she would be everybody’s or nobody’s. I suddenly grasped the situation. The court of suitors surrounded her not because of who she was but because of what she represented; she could endorse a brand because she herself was also a brand: Priscila-approved Maserati or Priscila’s Corn-Flakes or Coca-Cola as drunk by Priscila. To approach her was to be beside not a luminous being, but a familiar status symbol. The pretty-faced, Maserati-driving, smooth-talking boys wanted to show her off, not to win her heart. Whomever she chose to go out with got the prize, was photographed with the Queen, Princess, and Godmother; he would never see her again, because once was enough for him to have obtained the endorsement testified to by having gone out with Priscila, and Priscila never went out twice with the same young man, lest her public imagine that the display was genuine, that she was his girlfriend or wife: nuh-uh, no way baby. I saw her, I understood her. Priscila had to be young, single, available, but never anybody’s partner, because being somebody’s partner meant excluding all her other suitors, leaving each of them without the hope of becoming anything more than a P.M.S., without the hope of becoming a new suitor, boyfriend, husband, and thus the one who would sacrifice all the other young men, mirabile dictum , preventing them from obtaining the reward that eligible bachelors would get for having gone out, having been seen, with the Queen of And-So-On. Therefore — as I imagined correctly — in the end Priscila Holguín was the bait that gave an aura of irresistible attraction to whomever went out with her, preparing him to choose, with infinite patronizing and a trace of disdain, the young woman who would become his life partner, the mother of his children, the Pyrrhic victor over the Princess of Princesses.

At the center of the Auto Show, I saw Priscila just as she was: an invention of marketing, a young woman who did not endanger the prospective girlfriend or wife of the eligible bachelors who besieged her around a vintage Cadillac. I slipped past my competitors — as I considered them at the moment. I reached Priscila, took her by the hand, and said:

“Let’s blow this pop stand. I’ll buy you a coffee at Sanborns.”

As always, I assembled my colleagues for a meeting on the day after the Feast of the Three Kings. Today, few countries celebrate the Epiphany, the arrival in Bethlehem of the Magi Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar bearing gifts for the newborn baby Jesus. I suppose that in Mexico we commemorate the Magi to celebrate the end of our only real holiday season, which begins with las posadas , the nine days before Christmas, and continues into the New Year until Three Kings Day. Then we scatter little holidays here and there such as the Feast of The Presentation of the Lord in February, Benito Juárez’s birthday and the anniversary of the expropriation of oil in March, more of the same in April, Mother’s Day in May. We take comfort in the fact that the only reason Spaniards have more saints, and therefore more holidays, than we Mexicans do is that they had a head start on us. We’re playing catch-up. That’s only difficult because we don’t invoke such Aztec gods as, say, Saint Huichilobos.

While getting all spiffed up and thinking about the holiday, I’m getting off subject. I, your humble narrator, have little to celebrate this January 6, when I walk into the boardroom to deal with matters of the utmost urgency with my business associates: I know them extremely well; I do not hire strangers; I want my entire team to be trustworthy and not just, as the tongues wag, inferior to the boss, to me, as though a superior man — or woman — could, somehow, even slightly diminish the image that I have of myself, an image that is no way presumptuous. My career proves that I’ve achieved all I have through my own efforts, which now gives me the right to choose whomever I please to work with.

The gossip is that my associates are deferential and meek. The gossips say that I won’t admit anyone smarter than I am into my inner circle. That type of accusation has only been made by those left outside of what one columnist has called “the magic circle that surrounds Adam Gorozpe.” I knew there was a reason I kept that columnist on my payroll.