Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

And they nearly destroyed our love.

Will I be able to reinvent it?

P.S. #2: I called Abelardo’s office at the network.

They answered: “He doesn’t work here anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t say.”

“Where did he go?”

“Who knows?”

Now I know Adam Góngora’s secret: he’s afraid of fire. He doesn’t know my secret. He’ll never see me naked. I must begin my siege of him while doubts still besiege me. Why should I get rid of Góngora when he is doing me the favor of distracting Priscila, rejuvenating her, and flirting with her — abilities I lost a while back? If the sole function of the other Adam were to do what this Adam doesn’t want to and can’t do (seduce Priscila), I would leave him alone.

Unfortunately Góngora is not only Priscila’s lover-boy, but also the guardian of order, and the order that he protects is a monstrous lie. He accuses the innocent and protects the guilty. He locks up petty offenders and rich people and businessmen. But he doesn’t touch — not even with the proverbial ten-foot pole — the gang and cartel leaders, the gunrunners, and the criminals who extort and kidnap.

It’s painful to accept his tactics, but public opinion, hungry for action, applauds action of any kind, action for action’s sake. All of Góngora’s proclamations bring forth massive rallies of white-clad people demanding the punishment of criminals. Góngora appeases and pleases them by jailing the indigent and, on occasion, one or two millionaires. To set an example. And what about the newly disenfranchised middle class? They’re off to the Gorozpevilles .

Under this public security administration, real criminals are left in peace, and that gives me a chance to act against Góngora, which his stupid courtship of my wife Priscila wouldn’t justify.

I’ll try a ruse to get him to drop his defenses.

I play dumb. I summon Góngora to my office, and I tell him that I agree with his plan: to see if we can take power with Adam (me) in the presidential seat and Adam (him) as the power behind the throne.

Góngora smiles with a crooked mouth worthy of Dick Cheney.

“The truth, oh my namesake,” I tell him as I get close enough to smell his hellish breath. “The truth is that my wife, Priscila, has fallen in love with you.”

I would have liked to photograph Góngora’s face: feigned surprise, intense satisfaction, and the tics of a sinister lady-killer. And candid caution.

“You don’t say. Really?”

“I’m telling you — and look, I won’t be the one to come between you. .”

“What are you saying?”

“No, not me. I don’t have a problem with the two of you as a couple. The only one who’d be a problem for you would be my father-in-law, Don Celestino Holguín.”

“A problem?”

“Yeah, a problem.”

Góngora’s laugh is awfully grave. “I don’t know the meaning of the word problem . How do you like that?”

“Don Celes is a daily-communion-taking, breast-beating Catholic.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“No, that’s bad. He’s never going to allow his daughter to divorce.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I tried.”

“I know that you don’t satisfy Priscila. How do you like that?”

“Nor does Priscila satisfy me. There you have it. The problem is that my father-in-law won’t allow a divorce. He likes to say that ‘marriage is forever’ and or at least ‘until death do us part.’”

Pregnant pause.

“Góngora, have you seen the bedroom of Priscila’s mother, the late Doña Rosenda?”

“Priscila was kind enough to—”

“So you see the cult of marriage that Don Celes professes? Even after death. You understand, don’t you? He’ll never allow his only daughter to get a divorce.”

“Of course he will. Sometimes he passes through the living room while I’m taking tea with Pris—”

“Get behind me, Satan, because there’s nothing here for you.”

“That’s it,” Góngora said, trying to hold me in his moist gaze. “That’s exactly what he says. What the hell does that mean anyway?”

“My good Mr. Góngora, that means our common enemy goes by the name of Don Celestino Holguín.”

“Your father-in-law,” Góngora says with an appropriateness that must have rubbed off on him from Priscila. “How do you like that?”

“But not yours,” I say interrupting Góngora’s daydream.

“Let’s see, let’s see how to handle this,” my namesake says, leaning in while I, as though not interested, light a match in his face.

P.S. #3: Abelardo leaves me a message. “Lunch tomorrow at half-past two at the Bellinghausen.”

In the midst of this growing tension between truth and lies, between comedy and drama, I wonder if what I’m doing is changing into what I ought to do in order to save the families, to save their food, their houses, and their belongings, on which I’ve made, I realize, my fortune .

Because what I am doing is not a personal favor or some random act. I know what’s going on. The physical presence of Adam Góngora is proof of what’s going on and puts me under the gun, because I have to stop him.

But how?

Perhaps by doing the opposite of what he does.

Though I am disgusted by the prospect, I need to employ some of the tactics Góngora uses and take them to an extreme. To defeat Góngora I must deceive him, first with arguments as childish as those I just offered him about Don Celes’s opposition to divorce. Then I will need to carry out actions that Góngora could not equal, let alone surpass, in their brutality.

Ours is a country of recently made fortunes. In colonial times the clergy and landowners, perhaps, took extra large slices of the domestic pie, but they always left the people’s table with more than just crumbs. But after Independence, that table lost its legs. Without the protection of the Spanish Crown, the new republic became a Donnybrook nation, a pilgrimage to hell in a handbasket in honor of the Amozoc Virgin of Rosario, a chienlit , a bordello, a disaster area, or an orchestra whose sole music was the clicking prosthetic footsteps of the dictator Santa Anna. Juárez and the liberals defeated the conservative order, Maximilian’s empire, and the French occupation. Ever since, Mexico has struggled to reconcile order and movement, institutions and ascent. The millionaires of my childhood were paupers compared to the today’s millionaires, but the new ones live in a very diverse, very large society of more than a hundred million people fighting to move up in the world and, by hook or by crook, to take their place in the sun.

I’m a lawyer and an investor. I am familiar with the work of doctors, jurists, architects, teachers, scientists, journalists, businessmen, and even a politician or two who are a credit to our country. But I also know about the eternal rites of national corruption from the top to the bottom, from the lion to the coyote, from the eagle to the serpent it eats on the national seal. Big or bite-size bribes are the currency in the accumulation of influence, winks and offers “that you can’t refuse.” From the bribe for the police officer to the bribe from the minister. The first, so that he won’t send you to the slammer. The second, so that you won’t send him to the slammer. Man, this country is screwed up!

No, what’s perverse and awful here is just the new criminal class that is slowly usurping power, beginning at the northern border then moving to the interior, first corrupting the illiterate police officer, then the educated politician, all without personal intermediaries. Where do these new criminals come from? They aren’t from the peasant- or working- or middle-class. They belong to a separate class: the criminal class, born, like Venus, from the foam of the sea, or in their case, from the foam of a warm beer spilled in a seedy cantina. They are the children of the comet. They corrupt, seduce, blackmail, threaten, and end up taking over a town, a state, and one day the entire country. .