I was terrified. I mean, an obscene finger rose from the earth.
I’m telling you this so you’ll know what’s buried here with me: the history of the country, our past as incarnated in my husband General Maximiliano Monroy, an actor at every stage of this national melodrama, the civil war that lasted twenty years and cost us a million lives, not on the battlefield but in cantina shootouts, according to a really lovely gov, González Pedrero, ha!
A great guffaw came rumbling out of the depths of the earth and the finger returned to its place.
A million dead in a country of fourteen million inhabitants. How many of us are there now?
One hundred twenty million, I whispered into the grave as if it were the ear of the woman I loved. (Do I imagine myself telling the nurse Elvira Ríos listen, love me a lot, look, I’m one of a hundred twenty million Mexicans? Or the whore with the bee on her buttock, let yourself be fucked by a hundred twenty million Nahuatlacas? Or the defenseless Lucha Zapata just think, you’re not alone, you’re surrounded by a hundred twenty million citizens, my love?)
A hundred twenty million! exclaimed the voice from the grave. But what happened?
Health. Food. Sports. Education. I was going to say all that. It seemed like a sacrilege to introduce statistics into a conversation with death, though she soon refuted me: Death is the Queen of Statistics, though wars tend to overburden her accounting…
It is the country of betrayal, that’s Mexico’s worst account, Doña Antigua insisted. In 1910, Madero betrayed Don Porfirio, who thought he was president for life. In 1913, Huerta had Madero killed. In 1919, Carranza had Zapata killed. In 1920, Obregón had Carranza killed. In 1928, Calles pretended to be distracted while they murdered Obregón. Only General Lázaro Cárdenas put an end to the assassinations.
But he killed your husband, Señora.
He was executed for being an asshole, she said very pleasantly. Whoever gives the order… He deserved it…
But-
But nothing, fool, don’t kid yourself. It has all been betrayal, lies, cruelty, and vengeance. You simply try to anticipate it. Follow my example. You have to create economic powers prior to the decisions of the government. And you have to fear yes-men. These are the two rules of Antigua Concepción. I have finished speaking. Become powerful on your own and to hell with flatterers. I have finished speaking.
But Concepción, Conchita, Antigua Concepción, had not finished speaking. Now she continued talking to tell me that her husband the general was a real revolutionary huckster who served Villa as easily as Obregón, Obregón as Carranza, Calles as Cárdenas, and when Don Lázaro ended insurrections through the power of institutions, General Maximiliano did not give up, he “rose up” on the border proclaiming the Plan of Matamoros, but he was the only dead Moor, strangled by a drunk and without a single bullet hole in a Texas cantina in Brownsville, where the stupid prick took refuge…
I didn’t know if I should feel sorry for her because of these uxorial misfortunes. She didn’t give me time. She was already on another track.
My husband the general was thirty years older than me. But he was a baby compared to me. All I had to do (you a young boy and I a young girl) was take a look at what was happening to make a decision: I would anticipate the future. I’d do first what would come later: Do you understand me, youngster? I had inherited haciendas in Michoacán and Jalisco. I divided them up among the peasants before the agrarian law demanded it or, more important, put it into practice. I told myself the country was going to emigrate from the provinces without will, impoverished by two decades of revolution, to the capital, the center. At the right time I bought empty lots in the Federal District, Morelos, and the State of Mexico, whose value has increased a thousandfold. And kid, I asked myself where they’d place the highways they’d need? I bought lots, level ground covered in huizache plants, mountains of pine, walls of basalt, whatever, because now it was important to get to the sea fast, to the borders, to the heart of the sierra in trucks filled with comestibles and combustibles that I organized into national fleets carburized for oil whose nationalization in 1938 I anticipated, when I was thirty years old, by acquiring strips of probable potential wealth in the Gulf, which had been mine, Mexican, since 1932 and that I later ceded, my lad, just think about it and get ready, to the government and Petróleos Mexicanos, along with my damn wedding ring to contribute to the cost of expropriation, a piece of jewelry I should have buried, if truth be told, in the grave of my by then deceased and decrepit husband General Don Maximiliano Monroy-R.I.P.
I believe she winked at me from the bottom of her grave.
Don’t think I’m a cynic or an opportunist, she said. Everything I’ve told you was possible because thousands and thousands of people moved, the isolation ended that had been imposed by a geography of volcanoes and deserts, mountains and swamps, coasts strangled in mangroves, impassable cordilleras: It ended, children, women, and cows, trains, horses, and guerrillas moved, boy, in all directions, from Sonora to Yucatán, from Río Santiago to Río Usumacinta, from Nogales to Tapachula, from Gringolandia to Guatepeor, through dry fields and lost harvests, leaving orphans and widows strewn everywhere, creating new wealth beside eternal poverty, because you know, my little chick, only when fortunes change, only then do we recognize ourselves and know who we are…
I don’t know if her buried gaze asked me: And what about today?
Today we’re exploding as citizens of the Narconation, I declared. She had stopped at a point in the past. She didn’t understand me.
Did you hear, dear readers, a sigh from the grave? Listen to it now. It seems it’s not serious but, perhaps, humorous. It seems it isn’t deep but, when it reaches the crust of the earth, superficial.
Antigua Concepción continued:
I anticipated the industrialization that could occur thanks to nationalized oil and the campesino labor freed by agrarian reform. But I no longer anticipate anybody because in 1958 Don Adolfo Ruiz Cortines left the presidency and I said to myself, this is the best president we’ve had, a mature man, severe but with a sense of humor, slyer than a spider, hidden behind an uncompromising, austere, penetrating mask with dark circles under the eyes to disguise the irony that is the artery of true intelligence, and above all, the head of a Greco-Roman wise man strangled by a bow tie with white polka dots, the president who could swallow a baked potato without making faces, the apparent cripple who walked the six years of the presidential high wire over the void and set the example of good sense, serenity, irony, and tolerance his country needs: We have more than enough inspired ideologues, ignorant ranchers, machos castrated by their harem of magpies, acrobats from the political circus, Machiavellis in huaraches, curly-haired Don Juans in Maseratis, ugly people who can’t look at themselves in the mirror without declaring war on the world and going out to kill, and above all the thugs, the ones who rob our revolution of its legitimacy and hand us over, my little fool, to the madmen of democracy, ay!
I supposed her ay! expressed the unworthiness of democracy and her nostalgia for enlightened authoritarianism, but I said nothing. It was her business. She really was “Antigua.”
She went on: You must remember, boy, that once there was a president who dispensed justice, heard complaints, received petitions. The Old King!
And now the exclamation was prolonged, plaintive, in the air for a period of time that Antigua Concepción interrupted with these words:
Look, that was when I retired to my front row seat and passed things on to my only child, Max Monroy.
She paused, satisfied.
I’m happy with him. As you’ll see, he’s like me though less folkloric. He anticipates events. He knows what has to be done before anybody else. He knows when to buy and how to sell. He’s discreet. His life is not the object of writeups or gossip. He has never appeared in the magazine ¡Hola! He has never been sponsor at the wedding of rock-and-rollers. He has never been fond of the sun. (He isn’t albino!) He resembles the night. He lives in a tower in Santa Fe, to the west of the city. Find him. That’s a good thing for you to do.