Carlos Fuentes - Diana the Goddess Who Hunts Alone

Familiar with the protocol of eyes in Mexico, I looked at General Cedillo out of the corner of my eye the same way he was looking at Diana and me. Glancing around the patio, I saw that the same look was being repeated at each table. Everyone except the innocent gringos avoided one another’s eyes. The governor peered surreptitiously at the commander and likewise at the governor; the mayor tried to avoid the eyes of both of them, and I saw in a corner of the patio a group of young people just standing there, among them the boy who’d approached me in the plaza to propose we talk, the boy with the Zapata mustache and languid eyes named Carlos Ortiz, my namesake.

The commander noticed my glance and asked me, without turning his head, “Do you know the students here?”

I told him I didn’t, only by accident, that one of them had read my books.

“There are no bookstores here.”

“How terrible. And how shameful.”

“That’s what I say. Books have to be brought in from Mexico City.”

“Ah, they’re exotic import products,” I said, flashing my friendliest smile but slipping into the humorous, mischievous vein that conversations with authority figures invariably provoke in me. “Subversive, perhaps.”

“No. Whatever we know here, we find out by reading the newspapers.”

“Then you must not know much — the local papers are very bad.”

“I mean the common folk.”

That old-fashioned expression made me laugh and forced me to think about the commander’s social origins. His appearance, I admit, was an enigma. Class differences in Mexico are so brutal that it’s easy to pigeonhole people: Indian, peasant, worker, lower middle class, etcetera. What’s interesting are people who can’t easily be categorized, people who not only rise socially or become refined but, in rising, bring with them another kind of refinement, secret, extremely ancient, inherited from who knows how many lost ancestors — princes perhaps or shamans, or warriors in one of the thousand archaic nations of old Mexico.

If that weren’t the case, where would such people get their reserves of patience, stoicism, dignity, and discretion, which contrast so strikingly with my country’s noisy, vain, ostentatious, and cruel plutocracies? In reality, Mexico’s two classes are composed, one, of people who allow themselves to be seduced by Western models that are alien, lacking as they do a culture of death and the sacred, and who become the vulgar, stupid middle class and, two, a group that preserves the Spanish and Indian heritage of aristocratic reserve. There’s nothing more pathetic in Mexico than the vulgar middle-class joker, situated between the Indian aristocracy and the Western bourgeoisie, who says hello by poking his finger in your belly button or runs on by without turning his face and shouts, “That guy with the little tie,” “That guy with the little hat,” “That guy with the little mustache …”

General Cedillo (so very similar to Maxime Weygand) seemed to come from these same depths as General Joaquín Amaro, who left the Yaqui mountains of Sonora, a red kerchief on his head and an earring hanging from one ear, to join the Northwest Division of Álvaro Obregón (a blond young man with blue eyes who, as a child, delivered milk to my maternal grandmother in Alamos) but who, thanks to his beautiful Creole wife, became a polo player and a most elegant martial figure and, by virtue of his own intelligence, the creator of the modern Mexican Army, which emanated from the revolution.

It was from that mold, it seemed to me, that General Cedillo came. He lacked the colorful touches of General Amaro, who had only one eye and spoke impeccable French. But in 1970, it wasn’t hard to imagine General Cedillo in the ranks of the revolution. He would have been a very young boy when he joined up, true, but he was also very old because he inherited centuries of refined peasant taciturnity. Diana stared at him, fascinated, admitting without saying so that she didn’t understand him. I, thinking I did understand him, kept to myself, ceding to the general a margin of impenetrable mystery but also feeling the writer’s inevitable urge: to mock authority.

“Did you have problems with the students in 1968?” I suddenly asked, trying to provoke him.

“The same as everywhere else. It was a movement of discontent that honored the kids who took part in it,” he answered, surprisingly.

I felt outflanked by the general and didn’t like it one bit.

“They were rebels,” I said, “just as you were when you were young, General.”

“They’ll give it up,” he responded, taking the lead I’d involuntarily given him. “He who isn’t a rebel as a boy becomes one as an old man. And an old rebel is ridiculous.”

He was about to use another, cruder term, but he glanced at Diana and lightly bowed his head, like a mandarin entering a pagoda.

“Was all that blood necessary?” I asked point-blank.

He looked over at the governor’s table with a spark of scorn in his eyes. “During the first demonstration, there were those who asked me to call out the troops and put it down. All I said was, Gentlemen, blood’s going to flow here, but not yet. Just wait a bit.”

“You have to choose the right moment for repression?”

“You have to know when what the people want is order and security, my friend. People get fed up with disorder. The party of stability is the majority party.”

That friendly allusion was in itself a challenge, its intent to put me in an inferior position vis-à-vis the man of power. And that power was the power of knowledge, of information. Inwardly, I laughed: first he talked about books and newspapers, only to let me know that true information, the kind that matters when you have to take political action, does not come from what Spaniards call the “black stuff,” printed words on paper.

A sumptuous regional dish was served then, interrupting the talk. It was pork rump with enmoladas, and I hoped to heaven I would not have to witness the stereotyped reaction on the Yankees’ faces — the shock, repugnance, terror, and incredulity. To eat or not to eat? That was the justified dilemma of the gringo in Mexico. I gave Diana a significant look, urging her to try the hot dish, begging her not to succumb to the stereotype. I’d already told her, I eat everything in your country or in my own, and I deal with getting sick there or here. You give a pathetic impression of helplessness when a dish of Mexican food is put in front of you. Why is it that we can have two cultures and you only one, which you comfortably expect to find wherever you go?

Diana tried the enmoladas, and next to her the governor laughed as if barking, as he watched the movie star taste the dish that embodied local pride.

“There are people who are novices in politics who get ahead of events and ruin everything,” said the general, less circumspectly but with growing scorn. He avoided looking at the governor, though he had to listen to the strange noises the man was making. The sounds could be explained either as culinary euphoria or because that moment the inevitable mariachi band entered, playing their inevitable anthem, the song of the Black Woman. “My little black-skinned sweety, eyes like fluttering paper,” intoned the jolly governor.

“But you could have avoided those errors by seizing power,” I said provocatively.

“Who do you mean?”

“You. The military.”

For the first time, General Cedillo opened his eyes and raised the folds on his forehead where his nonexistent eyebrows should have been.

“Not a chance. Don Benito Juárez would be spinning in his grave.”

I remembered the shepherd boy who’d been in the English film.

“Do you mean that the Mexican Army is not the Argentine Army, that you respect republican institutions come what may?”