“Does happiness have a price?” you, Josué, ask of the statue of Fray Vasco de Quiroga, Tata Vasco, that you pass by every day.
“Yes,” the friar affirms. “The Indians have to be recruited by force so they can learn to be happy…”
“And the reward?” you ask Tata Vasco.
“Christian rebirth.”
“And the method?”
“Using tradition to…”
“To dominate?”
Fray Vasco doesn’t hear you. There was a drought in Michoacán. Quiroga strikes a rock with his staff. Water pours out of the stone when the crook of the bishop’s crosier touches it. Is the miracle enough for you, Josué? Do you need something more than a miracle?
The savage soldiers of Nuño de Guzmán the conquistador come down from Xalisco, burn villages, take prisoners, demand tributes, spices, labor, give themselves extensive and abundant lands and water. Utopia isn’t good for a race of porters and vassals, Utopia doesn’t allow forced labor in the mines or company stores on the haciendas. Silver, cattle, seized lands, alcohol for weddings and funerals: The Indian flees the utopia of Tata Vasco, subjugated by the swords and horses of Nuño de Guzmán, takes refuge on the latifundios: It’s the lesser of two evils… What can we do.
Every morning Josué questions the statue of Fray Vasco de Quiroga, Tata Vasco, in the district of Santa Fe in México, D.F.
“I am the father of your culture,” Tata Vasco tells Josué one day.
Josué wonders if his mission consists in maintaining or changing it.
“GO ON, ANDALE, ándale.”
Order, greeting and farewell, communication, familiarity and alienation, this Mexican verbal expression lends itself to as many interpretations as its national insularity permits: No one outside Mexico says “ándale,” and a Mexican reveals himself when he says it, the lawyer Antonio Sanginés told me one winter night in his house in the Coyoacán district.
This time, the garland of mischievous children was not climbing around his neck, and on the maestro’s face I observed a seriousness at once customary and unusual. I mean, he almost always was very serious. Except this time-I read it in his face-he was serious only for me. And this only for me excluded the other person with whom I had visited Sanginés on previous occasions. My old buddy Jericó.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen each other?”
“A year.”
“Ándale.”
As usual, Sanginés the pedagogue began by evoking a series of allusions to his dealings with President Valentín Pedro Carrera. He prized his role as court adviser to the powerfuclass="underline" in government and in business. He knew them both, in the office building in Santa Fe and in the political encampment at Los Pinos. This is how he defined it, with complete simplicity.
While Max Monroy presided over a permanent empire in Santa Fe, at Los Pinos Valentín Pedro Carrera was the transient foreman of a six-year-long ranch. The occupier of the presidency knew he was temporary. The head of the firm aspired to permanence. How did these two powers get along?
Sanginés did not have to tell me. He valued being the intermediary between the political executive and the business executive, between Valentín Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy. Confirming this, Sanginés looked at me without blinking, his chin resting on his hands, and enumerated-yes, enumerated-his recommendations to President Carrera, like a local Machiavelli (I wouldn’t say a neighborhood Florentine, no, I wouldn’t say that, because after all, Maestro Sanginés had directed my professional thesis on the diabolical Niccolò):
Don’t exaggerate expectations.
Don’t attempt to lengthen the six-year term or seek reelection.
Longevity in office is fatal to one’s reputation.
Remember that presidents begin in the light of hope and end in the shadow of experience.
In opposition, purity.
In power, compromise.
Prepare yourself in time to leave office, Mr. President.
You will be seen as a good president only if you know how to be a good ex-president.
Pause. I never saw a more bitter expression on Antonio’s face than at that moment.
Exaggerate.
Lengthen.
Illuminate the nation.
Don’t commit to anything.
Remain in office.
Don’t leave.
I’m here.
Ándale, Jericó, ándale.
I suspected that Sanginés felt very bitter, that in the past year Jericó had taken possession of the presidential ear, reducing Sanginés to the most absolute marginality.
Why had he called me now?
With the habitual circumlocution of a lawyer from New Spain, Antonio Sanginés launched into a narrative that occupied us for a good part of the night. He evoked. He reproduced. He accelerated. He lingered.
“The times of the hero are over,” Jericó told Carrera (just as Sanginés had told Carrera). A revolutionary state legitimizes itself. Washington, Lincoln, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Madero-Carranza-Obregón-Calles-Cárdenas. Even Tlatelolco and delegitimization by way of crimes against the pure, simple movement that ought to accompany the revolutionary state to accredit it as such. Halt the movement of the state: The movement of society supplants it. The United States is master of silent renovation: Its most reactionary groups appropriate rebellion. The Daughters of the American Revolution are a group of ultraconservative old women who still use pince-nez and wear chokers and color their hair sky blue.
“The times of the hero are over. Government, state, and revolution are no longer the same. The old revolutionary state has lost all legitimacy. You have to give new legality to the new reality,” declaimed Jericó.
“Count on me,” Sanginés told the president.
“I’ll take care of it,” Jericó told Carrera and added: “In your name, of course.”
Something unites us, Sanginés said with a sigh, something unites your friend Jericó and me. We have exercised more power the more distance we have maintained from power. Except my distance, compared to Jericó’s, was disinterested.
He said he advised keeping watch over the country.
“And Jericó?” I asked.
He looked at me sadly but did not respond. Still, there can be no doubt that the detail illuminates the life. Just as a small dog enlivens the stiff portrait of an aristocrat, a gesture by Sanginés spoke volumes to me about his thinking. The most banal gesture: taking a crumb of bread and transforming it into a ball that, finally, in an unusual act for a man so well bred, he tossed to the floor and flattened with his shoe.
Only then did he resume speaking.
“I’ve always known Valentín Pedro Carrera. I’ll summarize his career for you. He was a young idealist. He ran his presidential campaign while his wife was sick. Cynicism or compassion? He made the electorate cry. Doña Clarita died soon after Carrera won the election. She died in time. Carrera got a second wind thanks to grief and solitude. Except that grief ends and solitude doesn’t. Then the fires spring up: arbitrariness, abuse of power, a kind of revenge against the destiny that raised him so high just to strip him of what power gives in abundance-appearance, the use of appearing, the abuse of being present… My advice, Josué, was born of a desire to control these extremes and employ the affliction of power to benefit power…”