Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Who are you?” I asked, lying there with no physical strength.

“How good that you’ve asked me,” answered the voice of the grave. “I am Antigua Concepción.”

My eyes showed not fear but an interrogating amazement for which she, Antigua Concepción, must have been grateful because she continued speaking from the depths of the earth.

I am Antigua Concepción.

I have waited in vain for someone to visit my grave.

No one comes here.

Do you know where you are?

No, I replied, except someplace in the city.

Then I won’t tell you where you are. Promise.

I promise.

Keep my story to yourself. It is this. My name is Antigua Concepción because when I was born they baptized me Inmaculada Concepción de María but ended up calling me “Concha” and what is worse, “Conchita.” Conchita, the name of a fake flamenco dancer, Concepción, the name of an afflicted virgin ignorant of who made her pregnant and when, we’re almost in Pénjamo now! Its great variety of birds! Inmaculada is the name of a sanctified and blessed ass, bah! Concepción is worse, the name of a Paraguayan who has never seen the ocean, ha! a damn Concepcionista nun serving the Panchos (the holy Franciscans, not the trio of singers). Conceiving or saying ingenious stupidities. No dogmas for me, young man! I am etymologically a he-re-tic: I choose, not she choos-es, not is chos-en, and least of all now, at a depth of one me-ter.

She sighed and the earth seemed to tremble just a little.

From the time I was a little girl I rebelled against diminutives. “Diminutives diminish,” I shouted, making a fuss, you won’t call a Julio Julito or a Rafael Falito or my Concepción Conchita. Concha cunt, motherfucker! she exclaimed with a strange guffaw.

And “Antigua”?

At the age of twenty I already knew what I wanted to be. I had no aptitude other than mystery and more mystery than greatness.

I married and assumed my eternal form.

I stopped being Conchita.

I stopped being Concepción Martínez, a decent unmarried girl. I became Concepción Martínez de Monroy, a married woman.

I wore my hair pulled back in a severe style and put a nun’s wimple on my head.

I dressed in a Carmelite habit.

I kept my key rings in the deep pockets of the habit.

I never had to wear underclothes again. I sat on cottons.

No one saw my bodily forms again, and whoever imagined them was clearly mistaken.

I occupied a throne with no insignias.

With a hole in the seat my human necessities fell into a porcelain basin with the portrait of the president in power.

Don’t ask. Whichever one you like least.

I was born in 1904, seven years before Don Francisco Madero, Apostle of the Revolution, became president and was betrayed and killed by the usurper Victoriano Huerta in 1913. Like Allende and the little traitor Pinochet with his faggot’s voice. I was thirteen when the Constitution was proclaimed. Eighteen, when the president was General Alvaro Obregón, the one-handed man who lost his arm in Celaya beating the shit out of Pancho Villa, and nineteen when they treacherously killed Villa, and only fifteen when they treacherously killed Emiliano Zapata, and twenty-four when a right-winger dispatched Obregón with a bullet to the head as the general ate toasted tortillas in a restaurant in the southern part of the capital. More totopos ! Those were his final, memorable words. I married my husband General Maximiliano Monroy because I knew they wouldn’t kill him because he was one of the top dogs who invented the revolution, the ones who shot first and asked questions later.

My husband Don Maximiliano was a real Don Juan as a young man. I took advantage of his evil ways to become strong and independent, with no need of him. I barely knew him long enough to make a baby. He was thirty years older than me. I tell you he began as a womanizer and ended up pathetic. I didn’t care. I’m just telling you about it. A person comes out of a revolution either very smart or damn stupid but never undamaged. My husband came out an absolute asshole. He took part in the last military uprising in 1936, I think just out of the habit of always being in revolt. I’m telling you, an absolute idiot. He didn’t notice that times had changed, that the revolution was becoming an institution, that the guerrillas were getting down from their horses and into Cadillacs, that the only agrarian reform was the sale of residential lots in Las Lomas, that the freedom to work eventually meant unionized workers under the control of shameless leaders, that freedom of the press would be conferred by a paper monopoly operated by our compadre Artemio Cruz, heroic times, kid! If you don’t concede you can’t succeed, living and not playing the game is living in error, and if you don’t appear in a photograph at a cocktail party, even one given by a shady character like Nazario Esparza, you’re a lost cause, you’re nobody, and if you don’t marry your daughter in a squandering of floral, ecclesiastical, banquetish, photographic, and faggotish millions, then the girl is a whore and her father’s poor and a poor politician is a poor politician, somebody dixit…

She heaved a sigh like an earthquake.

Once there were years, boy, of a vast, really vast displacement of fortunes, from the old patriarchal world of haciendas and peonage, from the usurpation of Benito Juárez’s liberal victory by the personal dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the exploitation of the free market so the land would pass from the hands of the clergy into the hands of the huge landowners and for the original owners, the campesinos, a thumb to the nose and a go fuck your mother, my lad: here’s your agrarian reform.

I was terrified. I mean, an obscene finger rose from the earth.

I’m telling you this so you’ll know what’s buried here with me: the history of the country, our past as incarnated in my husband General Maximiliano Monroy, an actor at every stage of this national melodrama, the civil war that lasted twenty years and cost us a million lives, not on the battlefield but in cantina shootouts, according to a really lovely gov, González Pedrero, ha!

A great guffaw came rumbling out of the depths of the earth and the finger returned to its place.

A million dead in a country of fourteen million inhabitants. How many of us are there now?

One hundred twenty million, I whispered into the grave as if it were the ear of the woman I loved. (Do I imagine myself telling the nurse Elvira Ríos listen, love me a lot, look, I’m one of a hundred twenty million Mexicans? Or the whore with the bee on her buttock, let yourself be fucked by a hundred twenty million Nahuatlacas? Or the defenseless Lucha Zapata just think, you’re not alone, you’re surrounded by a hundred twenty million citizens, my love?)

A hundred twenty million! exclaimed the voice from the grave. But what happened?

Health. Food. Sports. Education. I was going to say all that. It seemed like a sacrilege to introduce statistics into a conversation with death, though she soon refuted me: Death is the Queen of Statistics, though wars tend to overburden her accounting…

It is the country of betrayal, that’s Mexico’s worst account, Doña Antigua insisted. In 1910, Madero betrayed Don Porfirio, who thought he was president for life. In 1913, Huerta had Madero killed. In 1919, Carranza had Zapata killed. In 1920, Obregón had Carranza killed. In 1928, Calles pretended to be distracted while they murdered Obregón. Only General Lázaro Cárdenas put an end to the assassinations.

But he killed your husband, Señora.

He was executed for being an asshole, she said very pleasantly. Whoever gives the order… He deserved it…

But-

But nothing, fool, don’t kid yourself. It has all been betrayal, lies, cruelty, and vengeance. You simply try to anticipate it. Follow my example. You have to create economic powers prior to the decisions of the government. And you have to fear yes-men. These are the two rules of Antigua Concepción. I have finished speaking. Become powerful on your own and to hell with flatterers. I have finished speaking.