Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

ANOTHER RELATED ARTICLE

An ice cream parlor in las heras, Buenos Aires, near anchorena—

Tomás Eloy Martínez proposes the Kakabsa, or Cacasa, affair as the subject for a novel. Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramírez interrupts his habitual sobriety with an unexpected, wide, and joyful smile. Kakabsa is not Cacasa; he’s Sacasa. And Ramírez relates that in Nicaragua there lived a compulsive liar crazed by the incest implied by those few family names distributed among so many citizens — why so many Chamorros, Coronels, and Debayles?

It’s not kinship, Sergio explains. In Nicaragua last names are what the names of saints are in other Hispanic countries: they attest to one’s existence, they are proof of baptism. That’s why it is impossible to know if Sacasa was one of the Sacasas or just a compulsive liar and native of El Bluff who first misappropriated a name of the Nicaraguan ruling class to conceal his countless pranks, such as:

Writing fake manuscripts by the poet Rubén Darío and then burning them in public, defying the collective rage of an audience that considers Darío to be Nicaragua’s reason for existing: poor country, rich in poetry. He was imprisoned for disrespect and released soon after.

Demanding that Nicaraguan dictators have their buttocks branded with a hot iron — a gothic D — for two reasons: for them, a sign of distinction; for the public, an identifying letter. Somoza gave Sacasa a taste of his own medicine, or rather a dose of indelible Gentian violet: he had his buttocks branded with an I for imbecile , which Sacasa announced was an I for imperial . Go figure. .

He distributed missals to children with pictures from Playboy inserted between the pages, eliciting jesting giggles during the otherwise stiff mass. The priests confiscated the missals and guarded them jealously in their frocks. Sacasa boasted of perverting not the children with their healthy curiosities, but the priests with their unhealthy repression. He wanted to be known, Ramírez pointed out, as Sacasa the Liberator.

“So,” Tomás Eloy Martínez deduced, “your Sacasa is our Sikasky, a criminal mastermind from Buenos Aires whose mo included the unusual practice of remaining at the scene of the crime, mute and calm, as though he were a simple bystander of the murder that had just been committed and that the police never pinned on him because he never fled. The military dictatorship employed Sikasky as their perfect murderer. The police always accused the crime’s victims while Sikasky climbed the ladder of success, which put him in danger of being caught, because his technique was to be the criminal who was present, visible, and therefore not guilty.”

“But he got away. I came across him having dinner, not so far from here, in Vicente López.”

“Of course he got away. He denounced the criminals of the military regime. And very effectively at that. He gave all the gory details. He sent his bosses to prison.”

“And now, Tomás Eloy.”

“He gazes with great melancholy from his table in front of Recoleta Cemetery and regrets that none of his victims are there, among oligarchs’ tombs built on cows and grain, but they’re all in the La Chacarita cemetery. .”

“La Chacarita, where Carlos Gardel is buried.”

“Sikasky can’t stand the competition.”

“So, tell me, Tomás Eloy, is your Sikasky my Sacasa?”

“Tell me, Sergio, is your Nicaraguan Sacasa the Viennese Kakabsa?”

“Tell me, Tomás Eloy, is the Viennese Kakabsa the Cacasa killer of Mexican whores?”

“Tell me, Sergio, something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Can a reader take on an identity in literature the way an actor can in movies? That man who says he is Domingo Sarmiento is really the actor Enrique Muriño.”

“No, not really, no, Raskolnikov can be Peter Lorre or Pierre Blanchar, but neither Lorre nor Blanchar can be Raskolnikov. They are images. Raskolnikov is word, syllable, name, literature. .”

“We imagine literature and only see cinema?”

“No, not exactly, we give any image we like to literature.”

“But not to cinema?”

“Only when we turn off the light and close our eyes.”

“A dulce-de-leche ice cream.”

“In Argentina, we don’t say cajeta .”

“In her madness, remembering both her husband (whom she always believed to be alive) and the Mexican sweet (which nobody had the charity to bring to her), the Empress Carlota cried out, ‘Max, cajeta .’ ”

“And what does all of this have to do with Adam in Eden , the novel you’re reading?”

“Everything and nothing. The associative mysteries of reading.”

“A need to postpone endings?”

“There is no ending. There is reading. The reader is the ending.”

“The reader recreates or invents the novel?”

“An interesting novel is one that escapes from the writer’s hands. Rather. .”

“Where in the novel are you?”

“In Adam in Eden ? The part where Adam Gorozpe and his brother-in-law, Abelardo Holguín, are trading boxing trivia.”

“What do they say?”

“Let me read it to you.

“‘Who established the rules of boxing?’

“‘Jack Broughton in approximately 1747, and the marquis of Queensberry in 1867. .’

“‘Who was the first professional boxer?’

“‘An English Jew by the name of Dan Mendoza. That was before boxing gloves caught on.’

“‘Who was the first to wear gloves?’

“‘The very same Jack Broughton. But it was the English pugilist Jem Mace who popularized gloves.’

“‘On the other hand, John L. Sullivan preferred to fight with his bare fists.’

“‘Socially speaking, what is boxing good for?’

“‘Boxers rise above poverty. From being an ignorant Irishman or a guy out of an Italian-American slum or a black slave. .’

“‘Joe Louis, champion from 1937 to 1949.’

“‘He wound up as a doorman, penniless with cauliflower ears.’

“‘Can we divert social climbing through crime to boxing?’

“‘By way of guerrilla fighters: the Filipino boxing champion of 1923 went by the name Pancho Villa.’

“‘1923: the same year that our Mexican Pancho Villa was murdered.’

“‘Don’t get your hopes up, my dear brother-in-law. When you fight without gloves, don’t move your feet.’ ”

L calls me, sounding desperate. I don’t understand. My associates look at me — or not, who knows? — from behind their black sunglasses. I rush off to L’s apartment. The driver drops me off at Bellinghausen, at London Street near the corner of Insurgentes, my regular watering hole. Nobody suspects. I walk from London Street to Oslo. I mustn’t seem to be in a hurry. Nor like a distracted patient. I hope that I’m not recognized, not stopped for a chat.

I arrive at the front door of L’s apartment building with my key out, but the door is already open. I climb the stone steps to the second floor, to L’s apartment.

The door is wide open.

From the hall I can see the chaos.

Nothing is in its place. Lamps knocked on the floor. Rugs bunched up. Chairs upended. Sofas stained with a cloudy, smelly liquid. Smashed crockery. The TV screen with an additional empty space. The walls scratched and scuffed.

And from the bedroom, helpless sobs, tender, abrupt, and intermittent.

I run to L whom I find in a half-open robe, sitting at the edge of the bed, crying, then calming down in my arms.

“They broke down the door and came in armed with I don’t know what weapons, I don’t know anything about that, but they were deadly weapons, threatening weapons, I hid in the bathroom trembling, but they didn’t want anything from me, just to shout through the door while they wrecked everything in the place, they didn’t hurt me, I swear they didn’t see me, I swear, they shouted, they said that they were going to hurt you, that the message was for you not to make a fool out of them again, not to go around killing the living, to take care of yourself, because it didn’t matter whether your father-in-law lived or died, but whether you lived or died, you scheming dog, that’s what they said, not to try to pull a fast one, Adam, not to hit them below the belt, to forget about your father-in-law and worry about yourself, because your turn is next, not your father-in-law’s, take care, this is just a warning; we pried open your saintly little asshole, this is just a warning, we’ll be back, but next time we won’t be so gentle. .”