Carlos Fuentes - Destiny and Desire

“We have created a society,” Sanginés continued while, as was his custom, he made little balls out of bread crumbs, “which for the most part wants to move up, have things, cars, women, clothes, sun, and if you press me, an education for the children, life insurance, social security, hospital and television insurance.”

“Bread isn’t enough,” I tried to interject like a French monarch. “They want cake.”

Sanginés smoothed the tablecloth as if to rid it of wrinkles or crumbs-and to avoid paying attention to me.

“There are also desperate ways out,” he argued so as not to withdraw. “Go as a migrant worker to the United States, defy the guards’ bullets, the barbed wire, the walls, the truck in which the coyotes can abandon you or leave you to suffocate…”

Did the restaurant tablecloth, white and bare, resemble a desert along the border? Were the salt and pepper shakers beacons that would guide the position of our dishes, already ordered, on their way, bean soup, ceviche, fillet of beef with mashed potatoes…?

Sanginés looked at me somberly. He maintained a silence that prolonged unbearably the wait and increased hunger with no immediate hope of deliverance. Rarely have I seen him so pessimistic. He didn’t want to look at me. He dared to look at me.

“The border is going to close. The United States, our Northern Wall, will be worse than the Berlin Wall. One was dictated by Communist ideology and Soviet paranoia. The wall that will run from the Pacific to the Gulf, from San Diego-Tijuana to Brownsville-Matamoros, is dictated by irrational racism. They need workers the North American market doesn’t have. But they have to be kept out because they’re dark, they’re poor, they work hard, solve problems, and expose discrimination in mortal combat with necessity…”

I felt like wiping up my plate with a tortilla: Sanginés’s words, which should have taken away my appetite, made me hungry.

“You also have to consider that Gringo businessmen pay low wages to migrant workers and don’t want to pay high salaries to local labor,” I argued, because Sanginés liked that.

He was served bean soup. I had ordered an Acapulcan ceviche. He dipped his large spoon. I used my small fork. We ate.

“That isn’t the problem. The United States is being left behind. It has a workforce from the time of the Industrial Revolution. The smokestack cities are dying. Detroit, Pittsburgh are dying. Carnegie and Rockefeller died. Gates and BlackBerry were born. But the North Americans don’t renounce the great industrial dream that founded them as a power. Chinese and Indians graduate from North American universities. Chicanos graduate.”

“Except the Chinese go back to China and advance it and the Mexicans go back to Mexico and nobody even wants them, Maestro…”

Without meaning to I knocked over the saltshaker. Sanginés, cordial, put it back. I, without thinking twice, cupped my hand, gathered the spilled salt, and held it. I didn’t know where to put it.

“Max Monroy understands this,” I said without thinking. “Valentín Pedro Carrera doesn’t. Max looks for long-term solutions. Carrera feels the six-year term concluding and wants to postpone the end with a swindle. His festivals, his jokes…”

Did Sanginés grimace? Or were the beans more bitter than he had expected? Like an idiot I emptied the salt on my ceviche. I ate without looking at him. If you begin by selecting fish, you end up with olives.

I said that he, Antonio Sanginés, was lawyer to them both, to Carrera and Monroy. I asked him to analyze them for me, the president and the magnate, the two poles of power in Mexico (and in Iberoamerica). He gave me a look that announced: I don’t want to say the words of misfortune. I won’t be the one…

Well, I interrupted, I was still preparing the professional thesis he himself had suggested, Machiavelli and the Modern State , so our talks were, in a way, like part of the course, weren’t they?

I looked for his friendly, approving smile and didn’t find it.

“We can all feel jealousy, hatred, or suspicion. The powerful man should eliminate jealousy, which leads him to want to be someone else, and in the end he becomes less than himself. He should avoid hatred, which clouds judgment and precipitates irreparable actions,” Sanginés declaimed.

A bean was caught in his teeth that I only now suspected might be false. He extracted it and disposed of it carefully on the bread plate.

“But he should cultivate suspicion. Is it a defect? No, because without suspicion one doesn’t gain political or economic power. The guileless man does not endure in the city of Pericles or in the city of Mercury.”

“How long does the man endure who only suspects?”

“He would like to be eternal,” Sanginés said with a smile.

“Even though he knows he isn’t?” I returned the smile with an ironic gesture.

“A politician’s capacity for self-deception is in-fi-nite. The politician believes he is indispensable and permanent. The moment arrives when power is like a car without brakes on a highway with no end. You’re no longer concerned with putting on the brakes. You don’t even care about steering. The vehicle has reached its own velocity-its cruising speed-and the powerful man believes that now nothing and no one can stop him.”

“Except the law, Maestro. The principle of nonreelection.”

“The nightmare of those who wanted to be reelected and couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”

“They were not permitted to by a cabinet.”

“Alvaro Obregón was assassinated for being reelected.”

“Others were forbidden reelection by insurrectionist cabinets. Or a false belief that if one chose one’s successor, he would be a docile puppet in the hands of his predecessor. What happened was just the opposite. Today’s ‘stand-in’ destroyed yesterday’s monarch because the new king had to demonstrate his independence from the one who named him his successor.”

“Adventures of the Mexican six-year monarchy,” I remarked, watching as our empty plates were withdrawn like ex-presidents.

Sanginés said he found it astonishing that the lesson had not been learned.

“From the first day, I advised Carrera: Imagine the last day. Remember that we are subject to the laws of contraction. The president wants to ignore political syneresis. We all say right now. He says maybe later, as if he were asking God: Holy God, give me six more years…”

“ Now, ” I said in English with a smile and a paleological intention, “ now now now. ”

“It’s the terror of knowing there is an afterward.” Sanginés received the thick, succulent fillet with an involuntary salivation of his mouth and a liquid gratitude in his eyes, as if this were his last meal. Or his first? Because in any event, he and I had never met to converse in so conclusive a manner, as if a chapter of our relationship were closing here and another one, perhaps, were beginning. I was no longer the inexperienced young law student. He was no longer the magister placed above the fray but a zealous, intriguing, influential gladiator, a boxing manager with a champion in each corner of the ring and, I saw it clearly, a sure bet: No matter who loses, Sanginés wins…

“He should not be underestimated,” he said very seriously, though with a touch of arrogance. “I’ve seen him act up close. He possesses a tremendous instinct for survival. He really needs it, knowing as he knows (or should know) that a leader arrives with history and then leaves when history has left him behind or goes on without him. He refuses to know, however, that mistakes are paid for in the end. Or perhaps he knows and for that reason doesn’t want to think about his exit.”