Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

Alas, sometimes, to safeguard what is good one must resort to the worst.

And that’s what I must do now.

I find myself, ladies and gentlemen, between a need and a requirement. Allow me to distinguish between those two. A need can be postponed. A requirement cannot. The way I see it, there is a need for a better, more just society. To achieve this, I am required to execute a brutal plan that will draw attention to and obviate Adam Góngora’s own brutal actions.

The stinky little man inadvertently provides me with an excuse. In the back of my mind, there was already this warning: Góngora is very clever, more than clever. And he might just be too clever.

He was.

The master plan of the other Adam (that is, Góngora) consists of occupying empty political spaces, spaces ceded by local governments. He takes over those spaces fast, with the power of law enforcement. When local governments become paralyzed because of crime, arms- and drug-trafficking, or the plain and simple absence of authority, Góngora sends armed occupiers to patrol public buildings, sets machine gun nests on the rooftops, and — I fear — intends to dissolve Congress, to line up and execute the innocent and the petty criminals, and then to set the dangerous ones free to join him and his men to form — I might as well call it what it is — a fascist army.

Is Góngora’s plan the solution to our worst problems? Is it folly or reason? Am I guessing or am I foreseeing?

How much do I really know, and how much do I merely imagine? Let’s say that the seen and the foreseen share in the truth. But Góngora, hungry for power— measured power — beats around the bush of a floral temple more baroque than Tonantzintla and perpetrates a crime that, in one fell swoop, kills two birds with one stone.

This is where his intelligence, clouded by love, fails.

He thinks he’s uncovered my weakness. He believes that I hate my father-in-law Don Celes, the King of Bakery. My father-in-law alone is in the way of Góngora and Priscila’s union and Priscila and my separation. Don Celes doesn’t want to know about divorce. Get behind me , as he likes to say.

For his and my benefit, Góngora is preparing to do away with Don Celes.

But Góngora doesn’t know that there is no such thing as a perfect crime. I know. That is the difference between an educated man (myself, if I may say so) and an ignorant brute like Góngora (a donkey that plays the flute while conducting an orchestra).

Here is Góngora’s criminal plan, and where it goes wrong.

Góngora orders his henchman Big Snake, provisionally released from jail thanks to Góngora’s intervention, to murder Don Celes while, carefree and indulging his sweet-tooth, he makes his weekly rounds of his pastry shops. But Big Snake, instead of killing Don Celes, murders the wrong baker, one who makes the same rounds as the boss, and, realizing his mistake, Big Snake lies to Góngora, saying that he fulfilled his part of the bargain and killed Don Celes, and that now Góngora should make good on his word and free him once and for all from the dark prison of San Juan de Aragón.

Don Góngora arrives at the Lomas Virreyes house dressed in black to offer his condolences to his alleged girlfriend, my wife Priscila. He is unnerved at the absence of black bunting at the entrance of the Catholic home, and he practically goes apoplectic when the door is answered by Don Celestino Holguín himself, alive and kicking and with a scowl on his face.

“Come in, Janissary,” he says not very politely to a perplexed Adam Góngora. “Move it, before the tea gets cold, and don’t trip over the rugs. They’re genuine Persians.”

I meet Abelardo Holguín for lunch at the Bellinghausen. He’s reserved a table for four, which only he and I will sit at, in the restaurant’s upper level, from where we can see and be seen but not hear or be heard. (The owner refuses to divide the restaurant into cubicles appropriate for the clients he refers to as los fumanchú .)

There’s something different about Abelardo. Something flamboyant about him. He’s always been an elegant young man. Now, his elegance dazzles and puzzles me. It’s not like him. The discretion he had exhibited at Don Celes’s house seems diminished and replaced by a strange sort of glow. I suppose that working in television has given him the idea that he must have his own look, so I try to ignore it. But when I called his company, they assured me that he no longer worked there.

“Did you change jobs?” I ask him.

“No,” he smiles, “the job changed me.”

I respond with my please-explain look.

He offers a lengthy explanation that manages to showcase the breadth of his talent for literary discourse. I have met young writers who wander about lost, taking baby steps without much success, until one day they realize that though they won’t take off in literature, their facility for literary rhetoric gives them wings to fly away to other less demanding but better endowed nests. Abelardo’s explanation has to do with the state of the republic, a subject that I know something about, as do you, especially if you’ve read this story so far. The nation is adrift. We have lost our faith in everything. The government can’t tell an A from a windmill. The political parties are too busy fighting each other to propose any solutions to our problems. The halls of parliament have become places to take a nice siesta, to assault speakers, and to display banners. Several state governments are controlled by drug traffickers, and others are subject to Adam Góngora’s armed forces. Tourists have been scared away. The price of oil is falling. At the border migrants can no longer migrate, and there are no indispensable jobs for them in Mexico despite the need everywhere for construction and reconstruction: highways, ports, dams, development of the tropics, agricultural development, urban renewal. .

I nod. He asks the perpetual question: what can we do to fix our country?

I start to answer, case by case, industry, commerce, and so on.

He interrupts me with innocence and disdain.

“Projects and more projects, Adam. We know them all. Every project is left unfinished. Good intentions are frustrated by apathy, greed, carelessness. If I already have what’s mine, why should I care about others. .? That’s how my father thinks, and don’t tell me he doesn’t.”

He gives me a harsh look.

“And what about you, Adam?”

I answer him that I am a lawyer and a businessman who generates wealth and offers jobs, savings, and pensions, and I—

“But what about our soul, Adam? The spirit of this country?”

I don’t know how to answer him. I already spoke my mind. I believe in investment, work, progress, what. .?

“And the soul?” Abelardo again insists. “What will become of our soul?”

Because the answer to this question must be serious, I will need to think it through. The soul. . Well. . There’s still time for that. . All eternity, after all?

Unlike the fate of the nation’s soul, my situation at home needs urgent attention.

I have to deal with Priscila: Abelardo’s sister, Don Celestino’s daughter, Góngora’s (likely) lover, and my wife before man and God.

Enmeshed as I have been in the puzzling dramas described here, it’s been ages since I’ve been alone with my wife. She’s been constantly courted by Góngora, and except as relates to him, she hasn’t been on my mind much. I suppose things will continue this way until they reach some sort of a natural conclusion.

But Priscila confronts me later in the afternoon.

“Does it surprise you that I love an ugly man?”

“No,” I respond calmly, “in spite of appearances, the ugly ones seem to have more luck than the good-looking ones.”