Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

Let’s say then that on the twelve floors permitted to me in the Utopia building, I tried to be a model of circumspection and affability, without any familiarity, cronyism, fake intimacies, or vulgar winking. On the other hand, my sentimental soul, wounded by Asunta’s disdain, searched for the lowest, most falsely compensatory comfort: the return to the brothel of my adolescence, but this time only to be taken in and muddied up to my ears. I made a move toward the past in Hetara’s house, where Jericó took me for the first time as a teenager and I fornicated with the woman with the bee on her buttock who one day reappeared as the second Señora de Esparza and then as the lover and partner of the gang leader Maxi Batalla, eventually becoming a prisoner and then a fugitive. Where were they now, she and the Mariachi? What surprises were they preparing for us?

I have left for the end my most laudatory thoughts about Max Monroy and his enterprise. I say this to purge myself of my sins and reappear before all of you in a dignified light. Many excellent young Mexicans, scholarship students, were educated in foreign universities. They attend centers of learning such as Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Caltech. They acquire formidable scientific knowledge. They return to Mexico and cannot find a position. The large national firms import technology, they don’t generate it. The young people educated in Europe and the United States stay and cannot find work or leave again.

I have to give Max Monroy credit-to give you the most complete version possible of what I saw and did in his company-for keeping young scientists and mathematicians educated abroad in Mexico. Monroy realized something: If we don’t generate technology and science, we will always be at the tail end of civilization. He put Salvador Venegas, a graduate of Oxford, and José Bernardo Rosas, an alumnus of Cambridge, at the head of the technoscientific team, while Rodrigo Aguilar, who studied at the London School of Economics, coordinated the project dedicated not only to gathering and applying technologies but to inventing them.

The business team was guided by one norm: giving greater importance to research than to innovation. Venegas, Rosas, and Aguilar proposed taking the formative leap from computing and communications based on Max Planck’s quantum theory. The unity of all things is called energy. The proof of energy is light. Light is emitted in discrete quantities. On the basis of this theory (science is a hypothesis not verified or denied by facts; literature is a fact that is verified without having to prove anything, I told myself), the young scientists apply thought to practice, perfecting a pocket simputer capable of immediately converting text to word and thereby giving information access to the rural, illiterate population of Mexico in accordance with Ortega y Gasset’s exclamation when he interviewed an Andalusian campesino: “How erudite this illiterate man is!” Reducing the distances between economic vanguards and rearguards. Attacking an elite’s monopoly of knowledge. Less bureaucratic statism. Less antisocial capitalism. More community organization. Less distance among the economic area, the popular will, and political control. Bringing technology to the agrarian world. Giving weapons to the poor. Julieta Campos’s book What Shall We Do with the Poor? was something like the gospel of the intellectuals who worked in the Utopia building.

“What marching orders were we given?” Aguilar asked himself. “Activating citizen initiatives.”

“Municipalities. Local solutions to local problems,” Rosas added.

“Cooperation of urban universities with the rural interior,” Aguilar continued.

“Putting an end to the nepotism, patrimonialism, and favoritism that have been the plagues of our national life,” added Venegas.

The dark young scientist, focused, serious, and brilliant, concluded: “Either we create a model of orderly growth with local autonomy or fatally deepen the divide between the two Mexicos. Those who grow become rich and diversify. And those who remain behind remain as they have been for centuries, sometimes resigned, other times rebellious, and always disillusioned…”

I looked at the extensive series of buildings that continued the power of Max Monroy along the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, the horizontal honeycomb of laboratories, factories, workshops, hospitals, garages, offices, and underground parking lots.

I thought again that Vasco de Quiroga established Thomas More’s Utopia in New Spain in 1532 in order to provide a refuge for Indians, orphans, the sick, and the old, only to give way later to a powder factory, a municipal garbage dump, and now, the modern utopia of business: the kingdom of Max Monroy, long, high, glass-enclosed… resistant to earthquakes? The nearby volcanoes seemed to both threaten and protect.

The reader will forgive my narrative sluggishness. If I pause at these persons and these considerations, it is because we need-you and I-a contrast-a positive one?-to the willful dramas, false affections, and frozen positions that occurred in the months following this, my year and some months of virtue and good fortune in the bosom of the small working community on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga.

Which I shall tell you about now.

I WANTED TO interrupt the account of the meeting between Max Monroy and President Valentín Pedro Carrera in the office at Los Pinos not for reasons of narrative suspense but in order to situate myself inside what José Gorostiza calls the site of the epidermis: “filled with myself, besieged in my epidermis by an ungraspable God who strangles me…”

The God strangling me was, in the long run, myself. Now, however, I was present at a duel between divinities, the supreme being of national politics and the civic deity of private enterprise. I’ve already recounted how Max Monroy came into the office of the president and how he ordered the head of the nation to remain standing while Monroy occupied a straight chair and sat in it even straighter than the chair itself. We have already seen how the president continued to stand and asked his aide to leave.

“Have a seat,” Carrera said to Monroy.

“I will. Not you,” replied Monroy.

“Pardon me?”

“This isn’t a question of pardoning.”

“Pardon me?”

“This is a question of listening to me carefully. While you’re on your feet.”

“On what?”

“On your feet, Mr. President.”

I was ignorant of the reasons-long-standing debts, equally old loyalties, the age difference, dissimilar powers, unspeakable complexes, I don’t know-that explain why the president of the republic obeyed the order to remain on his feet before a seated Max Monroy. The rest of us-Asunta, Jericó, and I-also remained standing while Monroy spoke to the head of state.

“It’s better if we clarify where we stand right away, Mr. President.”

“Of course, Monroy. I’m already standing,” Carrera said with his peculiar humor.

“Well, let’s hope you don’t fall down.”

“I would be at your feet…”

“I’m not a lady, Mr. President. I’m not even a gentleman.”

“Then, you are…?”

“A rival.”

“In love?” said Carrera in a sarcastic, even vengeful tone, though without looking at Asunta, while Jericó and I observed each other, I uncertain as to my function in this soap opera, Jericó pensive and even cynical-it’s not a contradiction-in his.

Both witnesses. Of the scene and, perhaps, of our own lives.

“Do you know, Mr. President? It took centuries to move from the ox to the horse and another long time to free the horse from the yoke and chest strap that choked him.”

Did Monroy lick his lips, did he close his eyes?

“Only at the beginning of the last millennium before Christ, about nine hundred B.C., was the horse collar invented, freeing the animal from pain and increasing his strength.”