Rafael Bernal: The Mongolian Conspiracy

Filiberto García, the protagonist of The Mongolian Conspiracy, the sixty-year-old Mexico City police hitman, or pistolero, or guarura, as they are called nowadays, says “¡Pinche!” a lot, which Katherine Silvers translates as “Fucking!” Pinche past! Pinche furniture! Pinche gringo! Pinche Tame Tiger! Pinche professor! Pinche goddamned captain! Pinche jokes! Those are just the pinches found in the novel’s first three pages. Mexican profanities, such as chingar, are famously variable, their meanings subject to context and tone and conjugation, and pinche can be used in lots of ways in Mexican Spanish, for example even relatively genteel parents might say, “Pinche brats, go to bed,” but probably very few of their English-speaking American counterparts say, “Fucking brats, go to bed.” But “fucking!” is certainly the best possible translation of the pinches in García’s inner monologue, an explosive expression of rancor and mockery — including of himself — sarcasm, humiliation, bafflement, defiance, weary or bitter sorrow and resignation, all of which barely suggests the full range of his pinches. Let’s just take a look at what the “fucking” “pinches” of those first three pages tell us about Filiberto García:

“Fucking past!” García has a sordid job and knows it, called upon by his police and politician superiors — who claim to be repulsed by killing and to belong to the modern world of legality and laws — whenever they want someone rubbed out. But García got his start as a killer as a youth in the Mexican Revolution, fighting with Pancho Villa and “the Centaurs of the North,” when killing was manly and served a noble cause. “Here [in Mexico] all they teach us is how to kill,” Filiberto García reflects later in the novel. “Or maybe not even that. They hire us because we already know how to kill.” García was “born in the gutter,” the son of an unknown father and La Charanda, perhaps a prostitute: and poverty and the instinct and struggle to survive, as with so many Mexicans, carved his course in life and made it seem almost predetermined. Better to kill than to be killed; killing was what he was good at, and so a hired killer is what he became. Filiberto García, terse and hard-boiled as he seems, is tormented by the past, the distant memory of the betrayed Revolution and the great generals he fought for, but most of all, he is haunted by all the people he’s killed, usually men, but also women, and even a priest. His memories are like a cemetery in which all the corpses were put there by him, and those corpses take turns sitting up, as it were, intruding into his consciousness, forcing him to momentarily grapple with them before slamming the coffin lid shut again with a well placed ¡Pinche!

“Fucking furniture!” “He’d often thought about this furniture — his only belongings besides his car and the money he’d saved. He bought them when he moved out of the last of the many rooming houses he’d always lived in; they were the first ones they showed him at Sears, and he left everything exactly where they’d been set down by the deliveryman, who’d also hung up the curtains. Fucking furniture. But if have an apartment, you have to have furniture, and when you buy an apartment building, you have to live in it.” Filiberto García has done pretty well for himself, paid to kill for the police and probably illicitly helping himself along the way to the cash that comes his way in the course of his “police work.” He owns the building that he lives in. But his material pride is as sparsely furnished as his apartment. Only one other time in the novel is his landlord status even alluded to, many pages later, when, needing to remove the corpse of a man he’s slain from his apartment, “All my tenants live quiet lives.”

“Fucking gringo!” One of those intruding dead men from the past. In the mirror, Filiberto adjusts his red silk tie, the black Yardley-cologne scented handkerchief in his suit pocket. “The only thing he couldn’t fix was the scar on his cheek, but the gringo who’d made it couldn’t fix being dead, either. Fair is fair. Fucking gringo! Seems he knew how to handle a knife, but not lead.”

“Fucking tame tiger!” “His dark face was inexpressive, his mouth almost always motionless, even when he spoke. Only his big, green, almond-shaped eyes had any life in them. When he was a kid, in Yurécuaro, they called him The Cat, and a woman in Tampico called him My Tame Tiger. Fucking tame tiger! His eyes might suggest nicknames, but the rest of his face, especially his slight sneer, didn’t make people feel using any.” Filberto García doesn’t stand for teasing anymore than he does for jokes. That woman in Tampico is certainly one of the very few, the reader will see, who could have been inspired to treat this hard predatory macho, who has always considered “bitches” as little more than “holes,” with such teasing and ironical tenderness. “Out there in San Andrés Tuxtle, I killed a man then fucked his wife, right there in the same room, I raped her.” But in this novel Filiberto García falls in love with Marta, a twenty-five-year-old half-Chinese woman, in a manner that will baffle, humiliate, transform and even redeem him. A good part of The Mongolian Conspiracy’s almost sly and eccentric greatness resides in this love story, one of the most moving and unlikely in Mexican literature — and, without a doubt, the saddest.

“‘Who would ever marry a man like me, Marta? With my. . profession?’

“‘Many women. You don’t know how good you are, the good you do in the world.’”

“Fucking professor! Fucking goddamned captain!”

“The doorman downstairs greeted him with a military salute:

“‘Good evening, Captain.’

“That chump calls me Captain because I wear a trench coat, a Stetson, and ankle boots. If I carried a briefcase, he’d call me professor. Fucking professor! Fucking goddamned captain!”

His own air of respectability, the fawning it inspires, galls Filiberto, who has no delusions about what he does for a living. It’s of a piece with the societal moral hypocrisy and corruption, the “lawyerocracy” of the modern Mexico that employs him, fueling his relentless rancor.

“Fucking jokes!” “Killing isn’t a job that takes a lot of time, especially now that we’re doing it legally, for the government, by the book. During the Revolution, things were different, but I was just a kid then, an orderly to General Marchena, one of so many second-rate generals. A lawyer in Saltillo said he was small-fry, but that lawyer is dead. I don’t like jokes like that. I don’t mind a smutty story, but as for jokes, you have to show respect, respect for Filiberto García, and respect for his generals. Fucking jokes!” “What’s to laugh about in this goddamned fucking life?” “People who knew him knew he didn’t like jokes. His women learned it fast.” Only his friend, an alcoholic and impoverished criminal lawyer who spends his days cadging tequilas in cantinas, the only friend Filberto García has in the novel, dares to crack jokes at his expense. When the atom bomb was dropped on Japan, the lawyer turned and with a straight face asked García, “As a fellow professional, what do you think of President Truman?” Nobody else in the cantina laughs, only this drunken lawyer, who doesn’t fear death but, according to García, doesn’t necessarily have “balls” either, who in his dipsomaniacal ruination is a sole figure of integrity because he never expresses hypocritical reverence for “laws” and “legality” and he dares to rib this professional killer.