Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“A bloodless etcetera: the principle of nonreelection saves us from succession by assassination, though not from ungrateful successions of heirs who in the end owe power to their predecessor.” Sanginés finally tasted his cold consommé.

“The obligation to liquidate the predecessor who gave power to his successor,” I completed the thought.

“Rules of the Hereditary Republic.”

Sanginés smiled before continuing, having tasted with that spoonful my elementary political knowledge due, as you all know, to the secret information Antigua Concepción gave me in a nameless graveyard.

Many jokes were made about the presidential couple. Doña Clara loves the president and the president loves himself. They have that in common. And the black humor was profitable. In La Merced they sold dolls of the president run through with pins by his wife, with the legend: You die first .

Which is what really happened. Without the amulet of his dying wife, and as the memory of Clara Carranza, the martyr of Los Pinos, and the concomitant sorrow of Valentín Pedro Carrera began to fade, he was left without his saving grace, which consisted of living through the agony of waiting. At times you could say the president would have wanted to live the agony of Doña Clarita himself, make certain she continued to suffer, continued to serve him politically and not constantly threaten him:

“Valentín Pedro, I’m going to kill myself!”

“Why, my love, what for…”

“The fact,” Sanginés continued, putting aside the consommé, “is that the weaknesses of Valentín Pedro Carrera wasted no time in appearing, like cracks in a wall of sand. Issues came up that required the decision of the executive. Promulgating and executing laws. Appointing officials. Naming army officers. Conducting foreign policy. Granting pardons and privileges and authorizing exemptions and import duties. Carrera let them slide. At most, he passed them on to his ministers of state. When he didn’t, the ministers acted in his name. At times what one minister did contradicted what another said, or vice versa.”

“We’re negotiating.”

“Enough negotiations. We must be firm.”

“We have an agreement with the union.”

“Enough coddling of the union.”

“Oil is a possession of the state.”

“Oil has to be opened to private initiative.”

“The state is the philanthropic ogre.”

“Private initiative lacks initiative.”

“There will be a highway from Papasquiaro to Tangamandapio.”

“Let them travel by burro.”

“Let us collaborate with our good neighbors.”

“They’re the neighbors. We’re the good ones.”

“Between Mexico and the United States, the desert.”

The truth, Sanginés continued, is that the president made the mistake of forming a cabinet composed only of friends or people of his generation. This formula had fatal results. Friends became enemies, each one protecting his small plot of power. The generational idea did not always get along with the functional one. Being from a generation is not a virtue: it is a date. And you don’t play with dates, because none possesses intrinsic virtues beyond its presence-no matter how fleeting-on the calendar.

“Dead leaves!” Sanginés exclaimed when the servant came in carrying a platter of rice with fried bananas, and as he offered it to me, he said respectfully:

“Good evening, Señor Josué.”

I looked up and recognized the old waiter from Errol Esparza’s house who had been fired by the second and now overthrown wife, Señora Sarita Pérez.

“Hilarión!” I recognized him. “How nice!”

He said nothing. He leaned over. I served myself. I looked at Sanginés out of the corner of my eye. As if nothing had happened. The servant withdrew.

“Rumors began to circulate,” my host went on. “The president does not preside. He inaugurates public works. He makes vague remarks. He smiles with a face more florid than a carnation. The unfailing evil tongues begin to speak of a cursed term. They even insinuate, in the second year of the government, that longevity in office is fatal to the reputation of the leader.”

“And to his health as well.”

Guided by a mad compass, Carrera dipped his big toe into foreign policy, the traditional refuge of a president of Mexico without a domestic policy. It turned out badly. The North Americans increased the armed guards along the northern border with increasing deaths of migrant workers. The Guatemalans opened the southern border for an invasion of Mexico by Central American workers. All that was left for the president to do was to stroll through the Davos Forum dressed as an Eskimo and give a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations attended by no one except the delegates from Black Africa, who are very courteous.

“ ‘It was an unlucky moment for me when Clarita died!’ ” the president exclaimed one night.

“ ‘What you need is for half your cabinet to die,’ ” I dared to tell him. “ ‘Their incompetence reflects on you, Mr. President.’ ”

“ ‘What do you advise, Sanginés?’ ” he asked me with a desolate expression.

“ ‘New blood,’ ” I said. “The result”-and he liquidated the last fried plantain without making a sound-“is Jericó’s presence in the office of the president.”

“What a good idea,” I said with sincerity but no conviction, trying to guess at the hidden intentions of Don Antonio Sanginés, a truly astute puppeteer and know-it-all, I realized at that moment, in our lives. Jericó’s and mine.

“Shall I tell you what your friend has done at Los Pinos.”

It wasn’t a question. In any event, I agreed.

“He brought together functions scattered among various secretaries at the suggestion of the president. Appointments, the need to render accounts, consult with the executive before taking action, meet in a council of ministers presided over by Valentín Pedro Carrera, make periodic reports. And as for the president, to move ahead of the ministers in relationships with unions, management, universities, the fourth estate, the governors, the congress: Day after day Jericó took charge of everything, establishing a network of presidential control that made each leader or sector of activity understand that their responsibility was to the head of state, and that the other members of the cabinet were not autonomous agents or authorized voices but merely confidential employees of the president from whom he could withdraw his confidence at any moment just as he could grant it to them for a specific period of time.”

“Mr. President,” Jericó would say to him, “remember that as the opposition you could be pure. Now, in power, you have to learn to be less pure.”

“To dirty my hands?”

“No, Señor. To make compromises.”

“I was elected by the hope of our citizens.”

“Now it is time for you to pass from the electoral light into the shadow of experience.”

“Boy, you talk like an eager priest.”

“I talk so you’ll understand me.”

“What do you want me to understand?”

“That I’m here to serve you and that I serve you by strengthening you.”

“How?”

Once the immediate official apparatus was set in motion, Jericó asked the president for authority to attend to an absolutely key matter.

“What can that be, young man?”

“Youth, old man,” Jericó dared to reply, and he understood what would happen, what could be, if the president of the republic, in that small detail (“Youth, old man”) acknowledged the power of his young aide-de-camp and opened to the action Jericó was offering to him with enormously compromising words: “I’m doing it for you, Mr. President. I’m doing it for the good of the country.”