Have your last words ready, Nicolás. “Light, more light,” at one extreme. “Après moi, le deluge,” at the other. The words of a humanist and the words of a monarch. But don’t end up like the aforementioned Álvaro Obregón, the best military officer in the history of Mexico (why didn’t we have him in 1848 instead of that one-legged traitor Santa Anna!), Obregón, the man who vanquished Pancho Villa, the brilliant strategist and politician, killed at a banquet by a religious fanatic just as he stretched out his hand to say, “More tortilla chips, please. . . .”
More tortilla chips. Don’t let these be your last words. Why did they kill Obregón? Because he wanted to be reelected. You need to be able to say, “Light, more light,” if you win and “ Après moi, le deluge,” if you lose. But never, and I mean never say, “More tortilla chips.” It would be such a disappointment to me. I’d hate to see you in the back streets of Marseilles again. I’d say what Bernanos said about Hitler: Mexico has been raped by a criminal while it slept.
Eliminate your tortilla chip, Nicolás. My information is thorough. In 2011, the military attaché of the Mexican embassy in France was General Mondragón von Bertrab. He gave you your official identity papers. He invented your life history. He forged your documents. Everything is in my safe deposit box in Congress.
You have eliminated the little tortilla chips. Tácito de la Canal. Andino Almazán. Pepa, his wife. General Cícero Arruza. The Old Man. That weeping woman of the cemeteries of Veracruz, little Miss Monterrey, Dulce de la Garza. And the phantom of this opera, Tomás Moctezuma Moro. It’s just you and me now, Nicolás. And a shadow over our lives. General Mondragón von Bertrab.
We have to act quickly. Early to bed, early to rise. True enough, if you’re a baker. A politician has to wake up as early as the night before sometimes, otherwise he—or she—might be the victim of a very rude awakening.
Rest assured that everything we’ve discussed is between the two of us. Gypsies don’t tell one another’s fortunes, as they say. And anyway, I’m unconvinced by all these reports on you. Pure fantasy. I trust you. I give no credence to your enemies. It’s all conjecture. And if any of it comes to light, we’ll simply accuse María del Rosario Galván and Bernal Herrera of libel and slander. Remember what the ex, César León, said to his enemies: “I’m not going to punish you. I’m going to vilify you.”
Count on my loyalty. And don’t stop calculating the cost–deceit ratio.
66
GENERAL MONDRAGÓN VON BERTRAB TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA
For the very reason it’s no longer necessary, I’m writing you this letter. You may surmise that my desire is not to communicate but to leave documentary evidence. Everyone has told you about my military education at very demanding schools of exceedingly high intellectual caliber. The Hochschule der Bundeswehr in Germany is excellent in that sense. Nobody leaves there without having read Julius Caesar and Clausewitz (obviously), but the students are also made to read Kant so that they learn how to think, and Schopenhauer so that they learn how to doubt. The Honorable Military Academy of Mexico is also an excellent institution. While in Germany one learns to strive for victory, in Mexico one learns to endure defeat.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves, however. There are still men like Arruza around. Survivors of Mexico and its barbaric past, harbingers of a barbaric future. They dwell in our country’s subterranean depths.
Educated Mexican officers are something else entirely, but every bit as real as the savages. In every human relationship there’s a battle between truth and lies. We could never answer the question “What is truth, what are lies?” if we didn’t apply both absolute and relative criteria. For example, in military strategy courses the first thing they teach you is to question the information you receive.
Are you familiar with an old corrido song from the revolutionary days, “Valentín de la Sierra”?
El coronel le pregunta,
cuál es la gente que guías?
Son ochocientos soldados
que trae por la sierra Mariano Mejía.4
True or false? Should the colonel in question accept the confession of the captured officer, or should he question it? How will the truth be known? Truth can be stubborn, cautious, as the corrido reveals in the following lines:
Valentín, como era hombre
de nada les dio razón.5
So Valentín gives out no information and the other man claims that there are eight hundred men under Mariano’s command. Ah, but Valentín, to make his quatrain rhyme, adds something even more confusing to the mix:
Y soy de los meros hombres
que han inventado la Revolución . . .6
What does the officer do with all this information? If he really believes the “Mariano” story, he must prove it or expose himself to failure. He can interpret Valentín’s silence as proof that “Mariano” is a fabrication. But “Valentín” gives the information an unexpected ideological twist when he says that he is one of the true men who “invented the Revolution.”
True or false, the information must mean something. The poor officer asking the questions might assume that the “Mariano” truth is an objective one in the sense of using a singular proposition to speak of the other person, “Mariano Mejía.” But Valentín de la Sierra doesn’t do that. He speaks of the proposition itself: He is one of the true men who invented the Revolution.
Therein lies the difficulty of making decisions, Nicolás, by adhering to the solid basis of what is true and what is false. Those of us who are military officers, fortunately, are beholden to a code that dictates our conduct. Up to a certain point, of course. Because even when you obey the written code down to the letter, the paradox of the lie is that what we say is only true if it is a lie.
This is what I want you to understand, Nicolás. In this letter I shall confess my lie only to justify my truth.
Perhaps the criteria for speaking the truth should be a question.
“If I tell the truth, will I be a source of pain or relief?”
A lie is true because it has meaning. Things that have no meaning cannot even be false. For that reason, the meaning of the truth is only one part of what the truth conceals beneath its surface. Lies are one half truth. Truth is one half lies. Because all that we say and do, Nicolás, is part of a relationship that cannot exclude its opposite. For example, as an intellectual I can say that everything created is true. Even lies.
But as a military man I cannot grant myself that luxury. I can only conceive of the truth as coherence, as conformity to the rules that govern us. But even when I obey the rules down to the letter—that is, as the rule book establishes—I still have a doubt, a secret, a fissure in my soul. The truth cannot be reduced to the verifiable. Truth is the name we give to what is, ultimately, a correspondence between me and another person. That correspondence makes my truth relative.
Turn it around and consider these questions from the opposite angle:
When are lies justified?
When, instead of causing harm, do lies bring relief?
Every existence is its own truth, but always in correspondence with the truth of the other. And every lie can be its own truth, if it is protected by the other’s supreme truth, which is his life. . . .
When you were born in a clinic in Barcelona (not Marseilles as the unfortunate Paulina Tardegarda believed) on December 12, 1986, I was stationed at the military zone of Ciudad Juárez, far away from your mother. She was already married, but everyone knew that her husband was impotent and her elderly lover was an invalid. Her son therefore must have been fathered by a third man. She was treated according to the customs of upper-class Mexican society—as if she were an unmarried young woman who’d gotten herself pregnant. Before the birth she stayed in a maternity home run by nuns in Sarrià.
I wasn’t able to be with her. I was very young. More cowardly than irresponsible. And more in love than irresponsible. I had to comply with military discipline in Chihuahua. That was my excuse. That was my cowardice. I should have be
en at your mother’s side in Barcelona, I should have picked you up, I should have made you mine from the very first day. . . . Judge me, condemn me, but let me make up for the lost time between us, let me wring the neck of destiny and reclaim now all that could have been, but never was.
Your mother’s family was extremely dangerous. The Barroso clan controlled the northern border from Mexicali to Matamoros. The Barroso family, Leonardo Barroso and all his descendants, including his granddaughter María del Rosario Barroso Galván. Now she is just Galván, like her mother, because she was so disgusted by the last name of her father and grandfather, old Barroso, who turned your mother Michelina Laborde into more than just a lover. She was his sexual slave. His imprisoned odalisque. He made her marry his own son—a sensitive, shy boy who people said was a bit simple. Bad blood. He never touched Michelina. He lived all alone in the country, on a ranch filled with deer and pacuaches, those “erased Indians” from Chihuahua.7 Leonardo Barroso the elder kept that stunningly beautiful woman— your mother, Nicolás—all to himself, more beholden than ever to the Barroso millions after an attempt was made on the old man’s life on the bridge between Juárez and El Paso.
He was given up for dead. He ended up a paraplegic, the bottom half of his body useless. Condemned to vegetate in a wheelchair for the rest of his days, just like his brother, Emiliano Barroso, the communist leader. What poetic justice!8 Leonardo an invalid in a wheelchair, with all the perverse energy in his brain focused on humiliating his son, despising his wife, and keeping his mistress locked away. He did have another descendant—Leonardo Jr., a child from his wife’s first marriage who became his second son. This adopted child was the father of your friend María del Rosario Galván. And Barroso Sr. was so evil that he urged your mother to become Leonardo Jr.’s mistress as well, so that he could spy on them and enjoy the vicarious thrill. . . .
So doesn’t it make sense that thirty-five years ago your mother would seek and find solace and passion in a young, attractive military officer like me?
I want you to understand, I want you to know, I want you to ask yourself, “At what point does absence become more powerful than presence?” What is it about absence that sparks our passions to the point of driving us mad?
On the other hand, at what point do social pressures force us to abandon the light of love and descend into darkness, filth, and vice? And finally, why is it that instead of reaching a golden mean these extremes of passion—the hunger of presence, the vice of abandonment— come to rest at an evil mean in the middle of oblivion? Or worse, indifference?
Michelina Laborde was unable to return to the bosom of the powerful Barroso family, who were all somebodies, with the child of a nobody like me. And so she went back to the border with her secret protected by family conventions. She had been “on vacation” in Europe. Visiting museums.
I never saw her again. She died shortly afterward. I think she died of sadness, and of that nostalgia for the impossible that you sometimes feel when you know that what you desired could have been possible.
You were handed over to a Catalan family by the name of Lavat. The Barrosos gave them a certain amount of money for your education, though they didn’t use it for that but for the pursuit of their mediocre lives, and sent you out onto the streets and into a life of crime, which was your real education, Nicolás. It began when you were a child in Barcelona, and continued in Marseilles, where the Lavats, who were migrant workers, moved when you were ten.
And nevertheless, something in you, perhaps that nostalgia for the impossible, drove you from an early age toward risk, but also to want to sharpen your mind, your wits, your ambition, to be more than you were, as if your blood were crying out for a heritage, inevitable, obscure, at once strangely luminous and scarcely formed in your mind’s eye. You educated yourself in squalor, on the streets, in crime, with a discipline that was second only to your need for survival, and with the profound conviction that not only would you one day be someone, but that you already were someone, a disinherited son, a child stripped of his legacy. Algo. Something. Hijo de algo. Son of something. Hidalgo. A man of noble birth.
You were no blind criminal. You were a lost child with your eyes wide open to a destiny that was different—not unlucky—a destiny forged by your unknown heritage and the future that you yearned for.
I didn’t forget about you, my son. I didn’t know who you were. I knew that my lovely Michelina had had a child in Europe. When she went back to Chihuahua, she managed to scribble me a little note:
We had a child, my love. He was born on December 12, 1986, in Barcelona. I don’t know what they named him. He was placed in the hands of workers, I know that. Forgive me. I will always love you—M.
Finding you was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. My professional ambitions, my career in the armed forces, prevailed. My positions both inside and outside Mexico. And then I was appointed military attaché of the embassy in Paris, which had jurisdiction over Switzerland and the Benelux countries. That was when a certain file found its way to my desk, a file about a young man who claimed he was Mexican and who had been sent to prison in Geneva for supposedly plotting with a gang of bank robbers.
I visited you at that prison in Geneva. You had long hair then. I stopped cold in my tracks. I was seeing your mother with a man’s body. Darker than she was, but with the same long, straight black hair. Perfectly symmetrical features. The classic criollo face. Skin with a shadow of the Mediterranean, of olives and refined sugar. Large black eyes (in your case green, my contribution). Dark circles under your eyes, high cheekbones, restless nostrils. And one tiny detail that was your mother’s signature: the dimpled chin. The deep cleft beneath your bottom lip.
Who else but me would have noticed such details? Who else but your father? Who else but your mother’s sleepless lover, trying to make up for lost time by lying awake and remembering her sleeping face?
I interrogated you, trying to maintain my composure. I pieced things together. It was you. Your birthdate, your physical appearance, everything fit. I declared that you were Mexican and I paid your bail. Very solemnly I began to look after you, but I asked you—as payment for my testimony—to agree to a period of study at the University of Geneva. But the Swiss are bloodhounds. They expelled you because your previous documents were found to have been forged.
Once again I intervened, driven by my heart but trying to keep a cool head. You see, I’ve never wanted to compromise my position. Isn’t that important, to be able to exercise some influence? I brought you with me to Paris and registered you as a student at the ENA and I told you to read everything, to learn all you could about Mexico, and we’d sit up for hours together late at night, and you would listen to all my stories about Mexico, our country, our history, our customs, our economic, political, and social realities, who was who, speeches, songs, folklore, everything.
With what you read about and learned from me, you returned to Mexico more Mexican than the Mexicans. That was the danger—that your imitation would be detected. I sent you to the border, to Ciudad Juárez, for five years. With the help of the authorities there, I doctored your papers, changing your birthplace from Catalonia to Chihuahua. It’s all there in the public records office of Ciudad Juárez: son of a Mexican father and a North American mother. The documents for your imaginary parents were easy to forge, too. As you know, everyone does it in Mexico. If you don’t deceive you don’t achieve.
When I became secretary of defense under Lorenzo Terán, I felt more sure of things and so I brought you in, I put you into circulation, sent you to deliver my messages, especially to the interior office. That was where you met María del Rosario Galván. What happened next was inevitable. María del Rosario is a fool for attractive young men. And if she thinks she can groom them politically, an affair is inevitable. She’s a natural Pygmalion in a skirt.
She knew the president was suffering from terminal leukemia. And as the head of national security, I knew as well. It was my obligation to kn
ow. Both of us played our respective games. She made you think that she was putting her money on you for president. Now you know the truth. President, yes, but only for a brief period after Terán’s death, just enough time to prepare Herrera’s campaign and election. In order to do that, we had to eliminate a formidable cast of characters. The “usual suspects,” as they say in the movies. Tácito de la Canal, César León, Andino Almazán, General Cícero Arruza. We had to outfox that other ex-president in Veracruz and defuse the plot he hatched involving his secret prisoner in the Ulúa Castle. We had to see to the sentimental accidents of the sniveling woman of the port, Dulce de la Garza; but calming women down is so easy, especially when they’re simpleminded and smitten like Dulce de la Garza, idiotically scheming and crassly licentious like Josefina Almazán, or intelligent—perhaps too intelligent for their own good—like Paulina Tardegarda, a woman you’ll never hear from again, I assure you. One personal, perhaps even romantic detail: Paulina’s only possible companions now, as she’s chained by the legs to her safe deposit box, are the sharks at the bottom of the sea.
No, she’s not short of water now, your dubious friend Paulina Tardegarda, keeper of too many secrets—which turned you into the perfect blackmail victim. Learn not to trust. Don’t even trust me, your own father, Nicolás. And don’t cry for Paulina. The sharks in the Gulf of Mexico will eat her, but her heart will survive. The advantage of a poisoned heart is that it’s immune to fire and water. If it’s any consolation, think of how her heart will survive, like a cocoon of blood at the bottom of the sea.
There are still some loose ends, my son, lest you’ve forgotten. Your protégé, Jesús Ricardo Magón, is so disillusioned that he has no anarchist or homicidal tendencies left. I had him deported under charges of drug trafficking. He’s in prison in France. As he stepped off the plane he was detained by certain members of the Surété with whom I am connected. Don’t worry. I paid for his ticket, first class. His parents, don Cástulo and doña Serafina, think he’s gone to Europe to study. He’s so young! They keep thanking me for the “scholarship” that I got for him as per your orders. And Miss Araceli now has a lifetime subscription to ¡Hola! magazine. She’s since married (or rather, I made sure she married) Hugo Patrón, who’s thrilled with the disco-bar he now runs in Cancún.