“Don’t hate yourself. There are better things to hate. Look at that house. Look at that store. Look at that car. Why don’t they belong to you? It’s up to you. Take them!”
“Blessed are those that walk the face of the earth in its dangerous moments!”
“Mexico should drown herself in the ocean of confusion in order that it be reborn on the beach of hope.”
“I want a world in which prayers come true! Come with me, old woman, pray as you walk, pray.”
They believed everything because he believed it: in bed with Concha, he let the other penetrate him while he penetrated the woman. His body resists. His body tells him that it is going to go mad just so that the other man inhabiting him can come out of him. He resists: his skin has always been his own, there was nothing behind it, nothing more inside. Yes: another man is emerging from within him, but his body resists and his mind resists even more: you will not be a saint, you will be a criminal and a madman. But the other man is already his spirit. He didn’t realize that the spirit within him also had a body. This didn’t matter to the body of the other man: he fed on the environment, on tension, on fear, on the frustration, self-loathing, disillusion: all this fed the spirit of the other within him, and the funniest thing is that it transformed bad tensions into good tensions. During the long nights of cabaret and sex with Concha Toro, when, after the pleasure of music and sex, they prepared the cassettes that Colasa—terribly diligent, animated (perhaps more so than her father) by a desire for vengeance against that fop Angel Palomar (an object of terrible hatred, you’ve turned out, oh, padre mío!)—brought early every morning to the Trucking Center, whence they were scattered all over what remained of the Honorable Republic of Mexico, the tension of resentment, frustration, the colossal screwing that was Mexico and Mexicans humiliated and handed over to disgrace from birth until death, became passion, dream, hope, movement. Only one thing remained the same; the spirit moves because of the tension surrounding it: it yearns for catastrophe.
Matamoros Moreno let the other come out to fuse with him in body and soul. That’s how the Ayatollah Matamoros was born.
He was born to impress and defeat my defeated and insignificant father, Angel Palomar. Dear Dad, what’s happened to you? Why don’t we share our imagination any longer, you and I? When are we going to get together again, dear old Dad?
Thus he dragged all of us into his passionhope.
* * *
That same man, whatever he might be and however he might be, was now in a brilliant space of lights and reflections from silver and crystal, holding down a girl on the perfume counter in a replica of Bloomingdale’s seeing herself reflected in the thousand mirrors and the thousand eyes of that night. This ritual was expected of him, the spiritual guide was the carnal guide, the revolution did not exalt the spirit at the expense of the flesh: sex was part of the passion and the hope of the revolution for all, in which the perennially frustrated desires of Mexicans would be gloriously brought to fruition: Screw the boss’s daughter! Fuck the unreachable princess! Nail Don Ulises López’s daughter! Bring the impossible close to the possible in one ferocious and vibrant blow! Matamoros Moreno owed it to himself and owed this to all those who stared at him that August night in Las Lomas del Sol: to take off his cape, unbutton his fly, take out his rod, and bring it closer to the open legs of the valley-girl princess, who managed to murmur at the edge of the deaf-mute idiocy that would afflict her from then on:
“You can look but you can’t touch. You’re ugly, poor, and a prole. I’m not for you.”
That I’m not for you was the code murmured and repeated by everyone, which made everyone participate vicariously in Matamoros’s pleasure taken on Penny, who began to scream more, more, more, don’t take it out, don’t come, wait for me, more, more, more, she staring and the luminous guide looking at my father, the terrible joke jabbing him like a spear is the stare of my father hugged, naturally, by Uncle Homero Fagoaga, giggling: “A penis for Penny!”
6
Colonel Inclán raised his fingers, knotty as mesquite roots, to his eyes, threatening everyone with something no one had ever seen: the eyes he always hid behind those pitch-black glasses. Neither Secretary Federico Robles Chacón nor President Jesús María y José Paredes had ever seen Colonel Inclán’s eyes and the two of them trembled slightly at the prospect. The mere idea of facing his gaze frightened them, and the colonel knew it. With a smile like a death’s-head, he dropped his clenched hand: If not now, when? Hadn’t he told the President that the time still hadn’t come? Well, now it had! The damn bodyguards weren’t worth a shit, they’d all either run away or joined up with the Coca-Cola or aymapepper or whatever that faith healer was calling himself, but they’d been killing the colonel’s best people, there were cops hanging off the lampposts, goddamn it! How far were they willing to let this thing go before they started shooting, how far, Mr. President, how far?
Colonel Inclán and Federico Robles Chacón exchanged ugly looks: Robles Chacón quietly stated that his generation had grown up in a flood of unpunished crimes that undermined the very thing they were attempting to strengthen: the Mexican State, the Party of the Revolution, and the controlled working class. The public image of the president, the PRI, the CTM, turned to dust just as their power was turned to mush by the memory of October 2, 1968, when the students were killed in the Tlateloco massacre, or by Corpus Christi in 1972, when they were again slaughtered on the Alvarado Bridge, or by May 10, 1990, when the strike by Mexican mothers was broken up when the Perisur mall was turned into a free fire zone. All that had to be paid for, said Robles, because the system no longer knew how to do with the opposition what it had always done, namely, to coopt it and to incorporate it into the system. These failures were very costly because they were debilitating both internally and externally: the mutilated fatherland was the price they paid for internal political inability and was not the result of external diplomatic ability.
“You’re a fast talker and you think a lot,” said the colonel, “but I want to know what to do with my machine guns now that the time is ripe to use them.”
“You go out and get hold of that Matamoros guy,” said Robles Chacón.
“What are you going to do, son?” exclaimed the President, who saw in Federico Junior the resurrection of Federico Senior, the man who had launched Paredes’s political and financial career back in the forties.
Inclán answered for him: “I’ll bring you your nut, and then I’m going to go to bed, hugging the pillow where my mom—may she rest in peace—laid her head down for the last time before she died. All right: calm down, gentlemen, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Let me sleep on it. But…”
The colonel stalked ominously out, and Federico made his point once more to the President. The chain of crimes must be broken: we need imagination and memory. I offered a symbol as a sacrament between memory and hope, said Robles to the President: were they the saviors? What do you think, Mr. President? Didn’t we win the game down in Acapulco when those asshole kids saved our butts from the Guerrero political crisis or when we liquidated Ulises López’s (may God have mercy on his soul) power and the colonel’s mom? News travels fast. Power remains. Or it should remain. Mr. President, be careful. This is a key play.
They didn’t speak for a long while, and then the minister said: I don’t know if you understand me, sir, and frankly I don’t care. I have to talk. I have to say something: one thing in particular. Almost seven years ago, I was a young volunteer during the September 19 earthquake. We didn’t need the PRI, a president, or anything else. We organized almost by instinct, I mean, all the young people in the neighborhood, or several neighborhoods. We took scooters, vans, pickups, whatever we could find, shovels, picks, bandages, one guy joined up with us carrying a bottle of Mercurochrome. What moved us that day? The sense of solidarity, a humanitarian feeling, the need to save our neighbors. We realized they were our neighbors! Do you understand me, sir? That morning, the man next to me was my fellow
man. I was another fellow man. We went beyond institutions. But once the heroic moment passed, we went back to wondering what moved us that day. And our answer was something else. We acted because we were a generation of educated Mexicans, forty years of education, of reading, going to films, talking with everyone, studying Mexican history, whatever; it all came to the surface that painful morning. Civil society transcended the state. But it was the state that created civil society. That is our political conundrum, sir. We owe too much to the revolution to trade it in, no matter how old, smelly, or ugly it’s become, for adventure, whim, nothing. They say the system coopted me. I was a volunteer facing up to what was judged to be the disorder of a fearful government devoid of imagination. Today I’m Minister of State in a government that is neither better nor worse than all the others: your government. Our country’s history is its frustrated youth. But, despite everything, that’s what a mature country is: a corrupt country. And yet, sir, no matter how much I justify myself honestly, because you listen so to me patiently, sir, because you were a friend of my father, I want to tell you that the only good thing I ever did in my life I did that morning of the earthquake. I would exchange all my current power for the satisfaction of digging at a mountain of rubble and pulling out a little girl buried there alive and only a week old.
7
This—but these are not his exact words—is what Minister Federico Robles Chacón said to the Ayatollah Matamoros Moreno when they brought him to Robles Chacón’s office at the intersection of Insurgentes, Nuevo León, and the Viaduct:
“It all depends on you—we can postpone death and fulfill our destiny. Look, Mr. Holy Man, you’re not the first of your kind around here, don’t believe it for a minute, and all of you end up the same way. Open your eyes: you reach into your hat for a paradise and you pull out a hell.”
Matamoros looked at him with that carbonizing gaze, like a black diamond, the one that had proven so effective on stage. But the rational Robles Chacón decided that Bela Lugosi’s cinematic stare was much worse: where does he get off with this Dracula bit? At the same time, he did not want to laugh at Matamoros; Federico Robles Chacón did not laugh at losers, especially when they still had direct control over a mob on the loose all over the city. Besides, why plead with him? What the Mexican Ayatollah had to understand was that the surprise effect of his movement had passed, the spontaneous fiesta was over, the López family had been murdered in exemplary fashion taking the rap for all the families of government functionaries who’d gotten rich in the past seventy years.
The cops who should have been hung had been hung.
The supermarkets that should have been looted had been looted.
The permissive instant had passed, and now—the minister gestured toward the city—now look, Mr. Holy Man, and don’t play dumb: there are five helicopters flying over your divine mobs; each chopper contains two machine guns; the elite battalions of the presidential guard are posted on every corner, surrounding every plaza, standing guard on every rooftop with their M-16s in their hands. Take a good look at how long an insurrection can last in Mexico, Mr. Holy Man! But you’ve managed to wake up a savage Mexico and what I’m offering you is the chance to be useful and glorious as opposed to being useless and dead. Look, Mr. Holy Man, I’m making you a proposition: let’s talk it over. You give me something, I give you something. What do you say?
How many chances do I have to give you the right answer? asked the Ayatollah, bruised and blackened by the flames, but smiling like an idiot, his teeth arranged like corn-on-the-cob, and bound up with who knew how much myth, fable, and atavism.
Three, smiled the Secretary of State, nowhere nearly as charismatic but far more astute.
I want the entire cabinet to parade through the streets, from the Zócalo to La Villa, each minister carrying a cross and singing the hymn to the Blessed Sacrament.
Okay, said Robles Chacón. You, in turn, will have to use your people to kidnap all those who have drained the country of dollars and hold them until they return the $300 billion they’ve taken out of Mexico since 1975. He said it affably.
I’ll go along with that, muttered Matamoros Moreno with a sly sparkle in his eye, a gesture of craftiness that the Chilean María Inez, Dolly, Concha, Galvarina would not have allowed him to make had she been there next to him, dangerous, dearest, don’t go too far, don’t stretch your luck too far, it would be damn silly to … But the Ayatollah had already allowed that other man he had within to push his way out and fulfill his destiny. For a fleeting instant he saw himself from outside, as if he were looking at someone else, and he did not see two men, only one, although he could see a wider destiny than that allotted him by circumstance: he was an orphan, and that already meant having half a destiny or a destiny like no other, Matamoros said to himself. He never knew his father or mother, only the orphanage, his scholarship, the Heroes of ’82 school, his frustrated literary vocation, his early love affair with a woman who was as anonymous as he was (he could no longer remember her face) in a dark place and the woman always in the dark, saying don’t try to see me, don’t ever try to see me, because if you do I’ll stop being excited: an intensely anonymous woman, no, there will be no melodramatic revelations here, Colasa Sánchez is the daughter of Anónima Sánchez, Nobody, Personne, the Daughter of Sánchez, no one had a daughter with her, he always knew that the daughter would be his and with him, a young stud of a father at fifteen years of age, a writer frustrated by the envy of Angel Palomar, a man hallucinated by the idea of myth as immediate substitute for imagination. Myth is ready-to-wear imagination, as his Chilean girlfriend jokingly said: the tribe’s imagination. His daughter Colasa incarnated it, she was no fantasy, myths lived and Colasa had a vagina dentata. She should have, to be transformed from an invalid into a valid political and economic asset. They should have made a fortune with that thing. It didn’t turn out that way, but there can be no doubt the idea illuminated Matamoros Moreno’s imagination. From a hilltop outside Acapulco, he saw the anarchic destruction of the port, and he told Colasa: “Not that way, not that way.” Myths were something else, not anarchy but love, the desire for order, morality, knowing what could be counted on, understanding that the oldest traditions were the only ones that had survived and that could unite this people and make it love itself, make it feel noticed, respected, the center of its own history. Traveling around the country with his gang of workers, he of all people reduced to such a thing in the Mexico of the nineties, totally devoid of direction, when it was every man for himself and survival was the name of the game, one day here, the next somewhere else, juggler, or bricklayer, what did it matter as long as you had something to eat today, who knew what tomorrow would bring?
Matamoros Moreno fixed his terrible eyes on Federico Robles Chacón, who trembled less under those eyes than he had hearing the laughter of the mad monk on the radio and who felt that mass of people behind him, agitated, furious, gathered at the intersection where the SEPAFU offices were located, under the interminable acid rain, in the morning that always looked, as it did now, afternoon and he told him what he had to tell him in order that he carry his destiny one step beyond, one step forward. One more step had to be taken in order to fulfill Matamoros Moreno’s duplicated destiny, Matamoros, the screwed orphan who stood Columbus’s egg on its end: one hundred and thirty million Mexicans are Catholics, not Communists, not PRIists, not PANists, but Guadalupeans, and thousands of people had followed him who were just waiting for someone to tell them that and to lead them.
* * *
Federico Robles Chacón scrutinized the man opposite him (he didn’t dare think of him as his prisoner: Mexico was not Jerusalem and this man was not the Nazarene, nor was the minister, God forbid! Pontius Pilate) and tried to read his thoughts, to guess his feelings in that instant in which he awaited the second demand of the Mexican Ayatollah, who had invaded and interrupted Robles Chacón’s project of national symbolization, his creation in the lab of a symbolic form that would replace the need for re
pression, sublimating it. That’s why he had invented Mamadoc. He believed deeply in the ability of an enlightened minority to govern Mexico. He had no illusions, what little this country had achieved was due to a series of elites that had drawn the line, forced into submission or defeated the savage majority, that majority without direction, that barbarous majority, so much so that when they triumphed they put minorities as obscurantist and brutish as themselves in power: the anarchic ghost of Santa Anna, the nation’s leading man, the cockfighter, the lady’s man, the stud, transformed into a plebeian dictator, a clod, grotesque, a lackey to foreign powers, he haunted the history of Mexico like an evil omen that was constantly to be taken into account: keep the plebes out of power, no matter how noble a Zapata or a Villa might look, to preclude a reincarnation of Santa Anna. Enlightened minorities, always, right- or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Lucas Alamán or Dr. Mora, the men of the Reform: a liberal minority; the men of the Porfirio Díaz regime: a positivist minority; the men of the Revolution: a meritocracy that was much more broadly based than its predecessors, more porous, more permeable: Robles Chacón and his father, who in past centuries would have been peons chained to peasant debt, the hacienda system, and the whip, if they’d been born in 1700 or 1800, in … But instead they were born with the Revolution, they made it, they inherited it, and they governed instead of being governed. The price they paid was becoming themselves an enlightened minority. If they had been an anarchic majority, they would never have governed.
And now they found themselves face-to-face with the newly resurrected masses, who were once again on the move. Not for the first time, recalled Robles Chacón, not the first and not the last, but this time it was he who had to face them and the Ayatollah Matamoros. Robles Chacón knew it only too well; he read Matamoros’s theatrical wink, so dramatic that it had to communicate his intention: that was his strength and his weakness as well. Matamoros Moreno was going to act out—to the death if necessary—the role he had created for himself, the role the mob had conferred upon him. He would take his chances, he wouldn’t come to terms without some sort of drama, he wouldn’t accept negotiation without some tragedy. Robles, son of Robles, knew it because of his millennial Mexican genes, he knew it and it tasted like bile to him because this necessary drama was going to force him to do what he did not want to do, it was going to put Mexican history to an unnecessary test, but one that was absolutely necessary for the Mexican Ayatollah’s melodrama and for sacralized violence.