Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

I describe my relationship with L. I do so in a tone unheard of for me, almost confessional, the tone introduced by Job himself, who confesses before God and in doing so writes his autobiography, which turns life into fiction to better impress God as well as, incidentally, the mundane audience to which he claims he doesn’t aspire and to whom, however, he implicitly appeals: Listen to me, I am Job, the soul of pain and patience.

How to make a confession to the world? Shouting? Articulating? Imagining it? Letting others do the job?

I read Lucretius with Filopáter and learned that if God exists, he is not in the least interested in human beings. (Filopáter paid a high price for saying this, and for adding Plato’s heresy: that if God exists, we lose hope because the gods only favor humanity when it loses its mind).

A crazy god and a sinner, what a pair! “The soul is too small to contain itself,” says Saint Augustine. That is why it must create a chamber in the amplified expressive form called the confession , an unthinkable genre for the Greeks who preceded him and who sought the harmony of truth, not its willful distortion by a harried heart like mine. For that, Saint Augustine chooses memory, a bitter and uncertain memory, to recover — he says — what he has forgotten.

That is why I’m not a saint. I have chosen to have no memory, and it is high time that the reader learned this. I don’t want what I remember. I don’t remember what I want. Why? Perhaps because the purpose of all biographies, as Filopáter one day told me, is to appear to be something real rather than fictitious. The biography would be the work of reason, not feeling, a storm the biographer must leave behind.

Saint Augustine’s city is the City of God. It was Father Filopáter’s city. I live in the City of Man, where a policeman known as Adam Góngora kneels before my wife, Priscila Holguín, both of them trying to throw me off the trail on which I would only find out what I already know. The heart has its reasons, and reason ignores those reasons. The heart wants to break free of its prison, and Góngora lives in the prison of the most banal rationality, a real equivalent of the prisons of San Juan de Aragón and of Santa Catita, which contain the prisoners of a disciplinary neogongorism that doesn’t know that the heart has its own history and so can’t know that this personal history cannot be exhausted by biography, philosophy, or politics, because its purpose, as incredible and impossible as it seems, is nothing more and nothing less than to regain paradise.

Paradise Regained.

L’s love regained.

How do you like that?

tale of the comet In the ongoing dispute about comets, Father Güemes (who finally revealed his name) claims that each passing of the asteroid has been a fateful sign: 1965, the beginning of the end of the PRI (Party of Revolutionary Institutions) and presidential arrogance; 1957, the end of the “Mexican miracle” and the loss of the last revolutionary illusions; 1910, during the revolution, need I say more, Madero enters Mexico City, there is an earthquake, and the comet passes; 1908, in the tower of Chapultepec Castle, the old dictator Porfirio Díaz, watching the passing of the comet, announces that Mexico is ripe for democracy and leaves his extravagant moustache to soak; 1852, the passing of the comet coincides with the end of Santa Anna’s dictatorship and the start of the liberal revolution; 1758, the comet is the portentous light of the still-to-come revolution for independence from Spain; 1682, the viceroy of La Laguna, Count of Paredes, will soon order the hanging of Antonio Benavides, a seafaring pirate whose life ended on the dry plateau, in the small square of El Volador, all because he deliriously gave himself the nickname “the Hidden,” proof positive, because surprise candidates in presidential elections were called “hidden candidates,” that every past contains its future; 1607, this time the comet, alleges Güemes, prefigures and celebrates good government, when Luis de Velasco, the younger, in his second term as viceroy of New Spain, enforces the abolition of Indian slavery, but fights along Río Blanco Road against Yanga and the other runaway black slaves, whom he would later pardon and to whom he would give a new city in Veracruz to be called San Lorenzo de los Negros; in contrast, in 1553, the comet coincides with the catastrophic flooding of Mexico City, proving that its crossing of the sky equally celebrates joys and announces tragedies; and in 1531 (the man of faith now reaching the end of his reoccurring sermon), the comet and the Virgin appear at the same time, heralding the end of paganism; “Faith has prevailed, my esteemed Don Vizarrón,” and the scientist Vizarrón who didn’t want to be outdone by the prelate and so revealed his name, too, answered, “Yes, but in 1508, when there was no Christianity in Mexico nor prudes of your sort, my dear Don Güemes, the meteor arrived with thunderbolts, the Aztec temples burned, the commotion troubled its waters, the wind mingled its lamentations with those of The Weeping Woman, La Llorona, who roamed the streets of the city every night screaming, Oh my children, oh my children. . ”

“That just goes to prove what I was saying,” explains the preacher.

“The comet was a sign that Christ was already on his way.”

“That’s cheating,” Vizarrón laughs, “pure sophistry. What do all the comets have in common? I’ll tell you: it’s not history, it’s physics. The comet travels in an elliptic orbit of the sun. It is made, my dear sir, of ice and rock. It generates a gaseous exterior. It tail stretches millions of miles. It ejects stellar particulates. The comet is a product of the sun. But it doesn’t reflect sunlight. It reflects solar radiation, which is different; it emits its own light. Fleeting light, my good man. When the comet nears the sun, it vaporizes. It ceases to exist.”

“But it coincides with historical events. It is an outward manifestation of the coincidence of faith with facts.”

“You’re the one who mixes history and miracle, miracle and comet. You might like to know that nine comets pass each year. What have you got to say to that? What are you going to tell me now?”

Nothing could answer that but the voice of Adam Gorozpe’s gardener (that’s mine, the narrator’s gardener) concentrating on his work:

Oh, comet, if you’d only known

What you’d come to herald

You never would have shown

Lighting up the heavens.

Nobody would blame you.

Not God, who sent him to you.

While trying to devise a plan to defeat Góngora, a simple visit gives me the answer.

The diminutive janissary is coming to see me on some evil errand. I consult with one of my business advisors whom I have asked to attend our meeting, which ought to let Góngora know that there are no secrets between us. If he wants to propose something to me, he can say it in front of a witness. I’ve had enough of his petty palace intrigues: that we’ll both govern, who’s going to be number one and who’s going to be number two, that either number one is going to be the figurehead for number two or we are going to treat each other as equals, only I, a civilian, am much more convincing as Chief of State than a soldier, militarism being over, the president has to be a civilian, and so on and so on and on. Let’s see if Góngora dares to propose any of his crooked plots in the presence of a third party.

On entering the meeting room, the Lilliputian conceals his displeasure at the presence of another person.

“Don Diego Osorio,” I introduce my associate, as he removes his sunglasses. “Don Adam Góngora.”