Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“Does this mean I can count on you, Max?”

“You can always count.” Monroy managed to smile. “What you don’t understand, Valentín Pedro, is that my policies are part of your power. Except your power lasts six years. My policies do not occur every six years.”

“And so?” the president said, halfway between amiable and falsely surprised.

“And so everything ends up contracting, understand that. The six-year term contracts. A life contracts. An era contracts.”

“What?” Carrera exclaimed in surprise (or pretending to be surprised). “Look how my belly’s growing and my hair’s falling out. Don’t kid me.”

“Of course,” Monroy continued, very calm. “With my policies I achieve what you’re missing. If we stayed only with your policies, we’d stay with half-measures. You believe in circuses without the bread. I believe in bread with the circuses. I believe in information and try to communicate that to the majority. You believe in conspiracy reserved for a minority. That’s why I believe that, in the long run, I can manage without you but you can’t get along without me.”

“Monroy, listen-”

“Don’t interrupt. You and I never see each other. I’ll use the occasion to say a person has to deserve my respect.”

“And admiration?”

“For superstars.”

“And esteem?”

“I’m a patient man. Everyone has gone. And those who remain ask me for favors. Our individual histories don’t count. Who remembers President Lagos Cházaro? Who could have been Secretary of Finance under Generalísimo Santa Anna?”

What a strange look the politician directed at the businessman.

“We’re part of the collective aggregate. Don’t go around thinking anything else.”

“What are you saying, Max?”

“Why am I telling you this? Well, we don’t see each other very often.”

Asunta-who tells me the preceding to the degree she heard something, guessed more, and read lips-says that Carrera sighed as if Monroy’s words sealed a previously mentioned reality. The president wasn’t going to change his policies of national distraction only because his official operative, Jericó, had betrayed him by taking advantage of the opportunity to find his own power base that turned out to be perfectly illusory, and Monroy would not abandon his of giving information media to citizens. The crisis perhaps demonstrated that the better informed the citizen, the fewer opportunities demagogic illusion would have.

“Or official carnivals?” asked Carrera, as if he had read (Asunta believes he did) Monroy’s mind.

“Look, Mr. President: What you and I have in common is possible control of the real communication media in this day and age. Insurgents once believed that by taking the central telephone offices they would take power. Do you know something? My telephone operators are all blind. Blind, you understand? In this way they hear better. Nobody hears better than a blind man. On the other hand, a thousand eyes are in thousands of cellular devices, the mobile phones that replace television, radio, the press. I am giving all Mexicans, whether or not they can read and write, a message, a family, a past, an inheritance. They constitute the real national and international information network.”

“You may be right,” Carrera went on. “Just whistle once so the bird can hear you.”

“You underestimate people.” Monroy didn’t bother to look at him. “It’s your eternal error.”

“When there’s no paper, you clean yourself with whatever’s at hand.” Carrera made a vulgar gesture, like someone using a medieval torche-cul .

Monroy didn’t look at him. “Just don’t ignore what you need to survive.”

Carrera raised his shoulders. “You see, it wasn’t necessary to fire a single shot.”

“The fact is the fortress was empty.” Monroy threw cold water on his spirits.

“No, the truth is you’re very clever. You just hide it.” Carrera let his admiration for Max show. Max looked at Carrera with a flattering lie.

“This poor boy… your collaborator…”

“Don’t fuck with me, Max.” The president did not stop smiling. “We both win if you don’t fuck around.”

“Fine, your employee. His name is…?”

“Jericó.”

“Jericó.” Monroy did not smile. “Who knows what old-fashioned manual he read.”

( Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution by Curzio Malaparte, murmured María del Rosario Galván at a distance: Napoleon, Trotsky, Pilsudski, Primo de Rivera, Mussolini…)

“Let’s not be afraid of a gang insurrection like this one, Mr. President, or an impossible revolution like earlier ones. You should be afraid of the tyrant who comes to power through the vote and turns into an elected dictator. That’s the one to fear.”

(I thought, of course, of Antigua Concepción, Max Monroy’s mother, and her epic, revolutionary version of a history-was it buried along with her?)

“Dishonor,” murmured Max Monroy.

“What?” The president heard only what he wanted to hear.

“Dishonor,” Monroy repeated, and after pretending to admire the landscape: “Let’s not engage in minor intrigues. Let’s exercise irony.”

“What?”

“Irony. Irony.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I mean it’s very difficult under any circumstances to maintain power.”

“Isn’t that what I’m telling you?”

“You don’t say.”

An intolerant minority, Jericó told me, that’s the key for coming to power, you have to energize the base with the example of an energetic minority, you have to favor the prejudices of the resentful, you have to demonize power: Saints don’t know how to govern.

What did Jericó expect? The president, quite simply, made use of the army. Soldiers occupied highways, bridges, large houses, food depositories, munitions depositories, major intersections, banks: The army surrounded Jericó’s followers as if they were mice in a trap. They prevented them from leaving, they gave them an ephemeral empire around the Zócalo that did not even interrupt the work of Filopáter and the other scribes on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Fireworks, smoke, folk dances, an exceptional holiday, an obligatory alliance between Monroy and Carrera, as ephemeral as Jericó’s frustrated rebellion.

The groups gathered together by Jericó were isolated in the center of the capital between the Zócalo and Minería, they never managed to communicate with the supposedly rebellious and certainly wronged masses, Jericó had operated on the basis of a fantastic ideology and a revocable power: the ideology decanted from his readings and his position inside the ogre’s mouth: the office of the president.

Now I listened, thought, saw, and felt a profound sadness, as if Jericó’s defeat were mine. As if the two of us had lived a great intellectual dream that, in order to exist, did not tolerate the test of reality. In the final analysis, were my friend and I barely hangers-on of anarchy, never makers of revolution? Did ideas we had read, heard, assimilated lose all value if we put them into practice? Was our confusion of ideas and life so great? Didn’t those ideas resist the breath of life, collapsing like statues made of dust as soon as reality touched them? Were we becoming illusions?

The gang of the Mariachi and Sara P., Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas returned to the San Juan de Aragón Prison. Miguel Aparecido was waiting for them there.

The president withdrew first from the Castle, muttering to himself (Asunta heard him), “In the old days the hangman sold the boiled flesh of his victims,” and Max, who followed seconds later, remarked to Asunta: “It’s one thing to be based in reality. It’s another to create reality.”