Carlos Fuentes - Adam in Eden

“I would like to hear my own voice,” I said naïvely.

Maximino Sol abstained from laughing. He said seriously:

“The ‘I’ is an ‘us’ or it is not.”

In my turn, I abstained from laughing at the sophism, but the poet continued: “Our group, our magazine, we constitute a chorus. Outside of it, Abelardo, all is cacophony.”

“Abelardo,” he repeated, tilting his head as though to excuse himself, “may I call you that?” There was only one step left: he would address me in the familiar tú . For some reason, I felt repugnance toward any familiarity with him, and especially toward the assistant who, standing, exchanged glances of infinite patience with his boss. I never saw a less desperate person than that man. In him, waiting was everything, but what was he waiting for? I thought of him, in spite of his appearance, as The Desperate One. But even that — desperation — was taken away from him, with the quick and fractured imagination that accompanied this interview, by the literary pope who was taking shape, this time slowly and seamlessly, before my very eyes. However, the relationship between the two — Maximino Sol and his secretary — seemed perfectly normal to me in the hierarchy of subordination, until the man slightly wider at the waist dared to say to me:

“Don’t be a total idiot, tú . Maximino Sol, no less, offers you glory, and you reject it. Do you imagine that you’ll get anywhere in Mexico without him?”

“Are you saying that you depend on him completely?” I answered. “Well, I don’t.”

“Shut up,” Sol said to him as a prelude to a tantrum and a symphony of facial tics that momentarily paralyzed the secretary.

“No, maestro, it’s just that this guy in no way deserves to be here, nor is he worthy of your even looking at him. I don’t know why you insist on casting pearls before—”

“I said shut up!” repeated the poet, this time with a full show of furious authority.

“Okay, maestro, just don’t yell at me.”

“I will yell at you as much as I wish,” said the poet, now very cool and calm with his angelic smile, this time directed at me.

I understood that this charade consisted in showing me what my future would be if I did not accept the offer of protection in exchange for submission that I was being offered.

I stood up and was about to turn my back on them and walk out, but in Maximino Sol’s light-colored eyes, aged rivals of my own, I read such hatred and confusion that I knew, as Sol spoke to me, I would need to speak up for myself.

“Young man, I have a voice. You are right, at least about that. I will survive those whom you consider my flatterers. I have a voice,” he repeated, whether to convince me or to convince himself, I don’t know.

I was able to say what I wanted to say: “Because you hear other voices.”

“Well, you know, there are a lot of deaf people in this world.”

“Maybe you’re one of them, if you’re unaware that the voice you hear is also heard by, I don’t know, a driver, a baker, a housewife.”

“Your populism moves me. Offer it to the late Mr. Neruda. A baker or a driver doesn’t create poetry.”

“But at least they create something.”

I was going to say, they lulled a child to sleep, they insulted an arrogant person, they loved a woman, but I recalled the more intimate, and therefore more public tones, of Maximino Sol’s poetry, the tenderness of his violence, the strangeness of the unfinished symbols that he pitted against all the finished religious, political, and economic signs in the world, and I pleaded, dear God, let me be like that man’s poetry, but not like the man himself; dear father, don’t let me sacrifice everything to literary opportunism and glory; give me a corner, dear mother, where I can value a son, a wife, and a friend more than all the laurels of the earth; save me from the bootlickers, Lord, and help me acquire my youth with age, instead of losing it with time.

When I left the office, closing the door and entering a vestibule with purplish leaded windows, I heard Maximino Sol’s prickly, temperamental, exalted voice, without low tones, scolding his secretary. I couldn’t make out the words, but I thought it would be funny to come back with a blank book and offer it to the shrewdness of this man condemned to the treachery of his flatterers and blind to the independence of his friends. Please, I prayed again, don’t let me grow old like that. Let me depend on a woman, a son, and a friend, not on literary ties and vanity. Glory is the mask of death. It has no progeny.

Abelardo fell silent.

I only remarked: “Read the writers, but don’t get to know them in person.”

You know that strip of land underneath the bridge, Mr. Gorozpe? You ought to pay a visit. I bet you’d recognize some of the people camping there. Some of them, they used to go to parties or even get their picture in the newspapers, you know, the style pages. Graduations. Saint Days. Sporting events. Vacations in Acapulco, Tequesquitengo, or at the very least, in Nautla. Now look at them in their tents. See how the wind lashes the canvas. See how the rain leaks through. Just look at them now. Thank goodness they brought portable toilets. Just look. Chamber pots, they’ve always been around. Before, only people on their last legs wound up out here. Now people live here who used to vacation in Acapulco, or at the very least Nautla. They all used to be in the newspapers; now they lie down on gutted sofas. They used to chill cans in their fridges. Now they collect cans, supposedly for recycling, but they sell bags full of cans for scrap. Same difference. You ought to see for yourself. Gutted sofas. Remember that family? Now they’re all alcoholics. Out of total desperation. To numb themselves. To forget. To. . But not everybody lets themselves go to seed, you know? Even down there, some of them show a little initiative. They defend themselves with kidnapped dogs, pit bulls mostly. Spiked collars. Chained beasts. Set free only to defend them. The more enterprising ones built a fence out of chains. They try to defend themselves and all those who have also fallen. Old colleagues. Family. Friends. Then one day: poor. Camped out here, you know, in Taco Flats? That’s what they named the place: Taco Flats! They put up the chain barrier to defend themselves, to maintain the illusion that, although they’re down, they are defending themselves behind a chain barrier, just like the old days when they built walls around their houses. They couldn’t, Mr. Gorozpe, they just couldn’t put up any resistance. They thought they could keep out others who were even more downtrodden than they were, mark the boundaries of their own exclusive community of misery, misery reserved for them alone. But Mr. Gorozpe, they couldn’t, they just couldn’t pull it off. Yesterday’s poor were already there. Only today’s poor didn’t notice them. They just arrived. They drew a line around a zone of misfortune. They set up tents, toilets, dogs, gutted sofas. But they didn’t look carefully. The people who were already down and out were already there. But the new poor, the new down-and-out, didn’t even look at them, and only after they locked themselves in behind their chain barrier with their dogs did they realize that none of their initiative would do them any good. Because the old poor were already there. Only the new poor hadn’t seen them. They were already inside , do you follow me?”

“Why are you talking in the plural?”

“Why am I what, sir?”

“Yes, of course, you are. You sound like you’re talking about a lot of people.”

“It’s just that—”

“It’s just that nothing. I only gave you orders to ruin the family of—”