Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

Now more than ever I count on my ironic disposition as I confront Góngora’s malice , his coarse winks, and his brazen vulgarity. Can I defeat him with the paradoxical weapon of irony, which subverts any pretense of absolute power — personified by Góngora — without running the risk of identifying myself with him because neither he — malicious — nor I — ironic — take anything too seriously? I trust that my irony will defeat Góngora’s malice by employing, better than he can, three ways of being.

Greed. Rebellion. Pride.

Filopáter’s words echoed in Adam’s (my) mind with the resonance of a moral commandment. Greed, the desire to earn and to keep, didn’t only refer to money, but also to personality, to worldly station. And this, one’s station, was not inherited: it was earned thanks to the revolt against facts, against fate, against the place assigned by the lotteries of family, fortune, race, and geography. Pride consists in overcoming all those hardships to build a world of one’s own, in which success cancels out the sin of greed and forgives the offense of rebellion.

All those ideas certainly crossed the mind of Adam Gorozpe (me, the one who is narrating, the one who is not me, but who I once was) at the speed of thought combined with the speed of the anticipated act of thrusting his (my) penis into the not-sovirginal-as-all-that Zoraida. This mixture of sex and thought was nowhere near as extraordinary as what happened next, without any intervention from Zoraida or (me) Adam.

The earth moved. What happened next was the great earthquake of September 19, 1985, during which a large part of Mexico City was destroyed, mostly the areas built over ancient lakes and canals, which that morning, while I lay with Zoraida, returned and reasserted their buried flow. Lamps, ceilings, and furniture shook; hangers in closets rattled; images of the Virgin of Guadalupe in this room and all the other rooms of this Durango Street bordello crashed to the floor; china and vaginas rumbled; outside the whorehouse, bridges and roads vanished; and beyond, the city awoke astonished with itself, eyes opening to everything that the metropolis was and had been, as if the past were Mexico’s sleeping ghost, the great Water God, who returns to life every so often, but, finding no outlet, no channel, becomes frantic and shakes his body, trapped between cement and adobe, until he slips through drains and rises from sewers, leaving a trail of destruction, which is just a cry of impotence from the memory of his ancient power, and, having completed his destructive work, he returns to his deep riverbed of dusty peace.

The fact is that, while fucking a beautiful young girl with blue-green eyes and loose hair, I, Adam Gorozpe, became trapped inside her vagina.

You heard me: trapped . Zoraida’s vagina tightened out of fear and the basic feeling that something strange was going on, and I became a prisoner locked inside her box.

I don’t know what happened. I felt the twin terror of an earthquake and a prison. I was not the master of my virility. Nor was Zoraida of her femininity. Realizing that my man’s body and the body of a woman were stuck together like those of two stray dogs unable to escape their attachment, I was overcome with dread. Would I be attached forever to the beautiful Zoraida? Would I see her grow old, put on weight, become white-haired, and die before my eyes? Would death be the only possible escape from this carnal union? And Zoraida, would she also watch me grow old until I died in her arms?

Sure, these were macho fantasies. No erection lasts a lifetime.

Yet in that moment, this terror coexisted with a feeling of infinite pleasure, stretched out until the end, not just of the moment, but of time itself. My pleasure inside the woman would be, will be, eternal. Eternity would be pleasure, and who could hope for a better paradise. .?

Then three things happened.

The earth stopped quaking, and our bodies separated with a sigh, I know not whether of relief or regret. Either way, with agony.

I rose from the bed and drew the curtains to see air filled with dust, and to hear wailing sirens and a faraway cry.

Outside I saw that there had been an earthquake, and that now a heavenly body was passing across the sky. The morning had been violated by an earthquake and redeemed by a comet that followed the orbit of the rising sun. The comet’s luminous tail spanned the city, the country, the whole wide world. But it pointed away from the sun in whose orbit it moved. It wanted to free itself from the sun.

I stepped away from the window.

Zoraida had gotten up.

She looked at my naked body, first with a sleepy sort of approval.

Then she screamed.

Adam Góngora continues what the marvelous Rosario Castellanos would call his shadowy trade. He has emptied the prisons that he only just filled with lowlifes, beggars, cripples, and petty thieves.

“On the outside,” he declares, “they’re less dangerous.”

But he leaves the innocent middle-class workers locked up.

“To set an example. The privileged are no longer so privileged, huh? How do you like that?”

Still the real criminals are free to do as they please, while Góngora numbs public opinion and his conscience (his what?), locking up and releasing all the innocent lumpen and the sex workers (I wonder what happened to the beautiful Zoraida) to create an image of efficient activity, which is deceptive, useless, and expeditious, for the public security forces. The awful problem is most people believe that, because Góngora does so many things, he must be doing something right. That’s not the case. He’s putting on one big farce.

How could I unmask Góngora?

Don’t think, reader, that what I want to do to Góngora stems from a desire to take revenge on my damned namesake for seducing my wife. No, I am against Góngora because he has deceived the country. His repression doesn’t affect the guilty. In fact, it protects them. As long as petty criminals are sent to prison, major criminals, now forgotten, are free to kidnap, to traffic in narcotics, and to murder.

How can I unmask Góngora? Above all, how can I punish him for his pervasive criminal farce without seeming to take revenge on him for having seduced my wife? This is a difficult problem that I am unable to solve until Góngora himself unintentionally offers me the answer.

Here’s the problem: Góngora yields to the temptation of wielding power. For the record, he already has power. What I need to find out and prove is this: as powerful as a police czar might be, is there a power greater still?

Góngora is immersing himself in the deep and treacherous waters of politics. I suppose, given the enormous corruption of law enforcement, thanks to which half of the police officers are criminals, and half of the criminals are police officers, their various “jobs” interchangeable tasks, Góngora believes that by elevating this little game to the highest public level, he can seduce me and force me out of my very safe place as an influential corporate lawyer with no official position. I am already ideally situated. I don’t know if Góngora is too crude to understand the advantages of my position, because one fine morning he shows up to offer me a partnership —his word — to install me (God have mercy!) as the president of the republic.

All the politicians, he tells me, are finished. They’re useless. They have no idea how to govern. They don’t know how to administer. He emphasizes each syllable: ad-min-is-ter, a verbal tic that I am more than familiar with from the speeches of my father-in-law, Don Celes.

“I have an idea,” Góngora says from his unbelievable squatness.

“Oh!” I exclaim.