Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

The Boy said, “I don’t need them, mom. I’m just a schoolboy, not a god.”

“What do you want from me?” I said, jumping ahead of my guards, again imposing myself.

“I don’t give orders, sir. I’m just a kid. I go to school. Ask my mom. She knows.”

“But publicly you say that you obey an inner order, an order from your heart,” I said, remembering L’s description.

The Boy removed the wig of blond curls, revealing a thick black head of hair.

“I’m just a schoolboy,” he repeated in the darkness below the castle, a space only he illuminated. “I’m not pulling anybody’s leg, sir.”

“In public you deceive, you pretend to be someone else, a messenger,” I blurted out, urgently trying to retain the young messenger. “Whose messenger? Someone’s. . God’s?”

“I am both people,” he said with great simplicity. “I am a schoolboy. I am also God’s messenger to warn. .”

“What are you warning us about?” I said, trying to control the impatience in my voice. “What?”

“The time is nigh,” he said with great sweetness.

“The time for what, kid?”

“The time of the soul.”

“What time is that?”

“Now.”

“What is the soul?”

“Don’t tell him, don’t tell him anything!” Sagrario shouted with a fearful voice — afraid of what? Of the Boy telling the truth, telling a lie, or worse, saying something stupid? “Don’t say anything!”

The Boy continued unperturbed.

“I do what I have to do.”

“Who sent you?” I asked insistently.

“Nobody.”

“Why do you do what you do?”

“It’s the only thing. .” the Boy all but sighed, and he disappeared in silence, like wine.

As a lawyer and businessman in our globalized era, I am in professional contact not only with governments and companies, but also with security forces and thus their political intrigue. I have business in both Americas, in the Far East, and in both Europes. I say both Europes because, for my practical purposes, Eastern and Western Europe have yet to be fully integrated. Consider this: the German Democratic Republic existed from 1945 to 1988 as Moscow’s ally and external border; there, along the line that goes from the Baltic Sea to Dresden, began the Soviet Empire and its vanguard — its islet — was Berlin, the Reich’s old capital divided into four zones (Russian, British, French, and North American) when the hot war was over, and into just two (East and West) when the conflict chilled. Only in 1988, when Soviet hegemony collapsed, did the two Germanys become unified, although the “unity” took a long time to consolidate. One side, the Western, was already one of Europe’s and the world’s most important industrial powers. The other, the Eastern, was subject to the backwardness imposed by Moscow’s power (the German Democratic Republic was as much a satellite as Bulgaria) and by the anachronism of the industrial politics of another era, perpetuated by the writings of historical materialism, so sacred that they transcended their own time and always applied, as though history didn’t exist for them.

The most important fact about this recent history — at least for the purpose of this narrative in which the reader accompanies me — is that many institutions from the communist regimes survived its fall, prolonged themselves in sometimes vegetative ways, sometimes monstrously active though displaced. The latter included intelligence agencies and general repression, made obsolete by democratic laws but perpetuated by authoritarian tradition. Spying and repression were not, of course, invented by the gdr or the ussr. These repressive intelligence agencies dated back to the beginnings of the First Reich and achieved their most punitive forms during the Nazi regime: the Security Service and the Reich Security Head Office (rsha) absorbed the secret police of the State, the Gestapo, which in the Communist republic was later transformed and disguised by the acronym stasi that, as much as it tried, couldn’t house all the Third Reich’s organs of espionage, denunciation, and force under an acceptable bureaucratic roof.

I knew this — it was common knowledge — although I never took wrongful advantage of what I knew. Now, faced with the violent situation that I have described here and the challenges (of all kinds) posed by the sinister Adam Góngora, I had no choice but to turn to my German contacts. In Mexico I couldn’t count on the police or the army, not only for reasons of plausible deniability but — worse — because of the unreasonableness of their illegal actions.

So I had a fierce troop brought here, so fierce that no legal organization in Germany — now or before — could assimilate or legally justify it. I dare not mention the name of this secret organization, not even its acronym. The reader should know that its members were not — could not be — members of the repressive groups I have mentioned. They didn’t need to be. In them dwelled a ferocity that was greater for being contained. Like eagles in the zoo impatient for their cage doors to open so that they might fly and prey, the troops waited until they could once again rape and kill, giving full flight to their eagerness to act against any designated enemy, employing the most terrible weapons and tactics. Their great disguise was the ability to submit to the master, the great lord, the protector of the group’s deeds. Yes, they were as beasts reigned in by a shady and disturbing loyalty to the master, to the leader who was superior to them and therefore worthy of their obedience. It goes without saying that in a democratic society of renewable powers, such a Führer was impossible. That was the source of the neglect and désoeuvrement or unwelcome idleness of these brave super soldiers with enough intelligence to not join the small groups of skinheads and Black Jackets, teenage gangsters who would end up as bakers in their old age, which is, of course, not a reference to my father-in-law.

The strike team — I’ll call them the Siegfrieds — preferred to stay in the shadows, on standby, resorting to action only when action was required.

I explained to Berlin and Frankfurt, in communications encrypted by the Palm Pre, that I required such an action.

The Germans agreed to let these violent mastiffs loose every now and then, especially when prolonged times of peace and prosperity deprived them of action, and these days they faced neither internal nor external enemies.

They’d acted, I knew that, at the request of interested parties in Iraq and Palestine, in Pakistan and Malaysia. And so the Siegfrieds were the only force capable of doing serious damage to the Mexican mastiffs of violence: my namesake Góngora, the escaped convict Big Snake, and company.

I said eagles . I said beasts . I remembered my visit to the Chapultepec Zoo. I should have said tigers . I met them at the airport in Toluca, where they made the air tremble. On the highway I saw them run over animals and peasants — leaving nothing alive in their wake. Like tigers, the Siegfrieds acted on pure instinct. Unlike tigers, the Siegfrieds had memory.

The reader will notice that everything is coming together, as in a chorus, at the end of my story. Góngora has invaded my private life on two fronts. He seduces Priscila and harasses L. He also undermines my working life. He creates situations in which nothing favors me. His policy of simultaneously attacking and seducing the middle class (by punishing some, which pleases the ones he doesn’t punish) extends to the repression of unimportant and anonymous people and to the murder of “false positives” (innocent and poor young men). Góngora acts in order to warn us: “Administrations come and go, but the armed forces are here to stay.”