I didn’t know what Sanginés was drinking from an empty cup.
“I believe I have discovered the great flaw in power. The powerful man does not want to know what is done in his name. The great secular criminal, an Al Capone, knows and orders everything. But even the most fearsome tyrant opens the floodgates of a violence he himself cannot control. Who assassinated Mateotti, the last opposition deputy who served as a democratic excuse for Mussolini, leaving him no option other than dictatorship? Did Himmler itemize the concentration camp horror beyond Hitler’s insane, abstract desire, concentrating it into mountains of suitcases, hair, eyeglasses, dentures, and broken dolls in Auschwitz? Did Stalin do anything other than follow the tyrannical desire of the revolutionary who died in time, Lenin the lay saint, I understand him better than his democratic followers, Bukharin, Kamenev…? Not Trotsky, who was as hard as Stalin, but to his misfortune an educated man…”
My attentive gaze was a question: And Valentín Pedro Carrera?
Sanginés told me anecdotes. Carrera is a man in love with his own words. He can speak without stopping for hours. It is absolutely necessary to interrupt him from time to time. To help him. So he can take a breath. So he can have a drink. We all knew that this president needed official interrupters. We presidential lackeys took turns interrupting him.
“What gives? Do they think everything they say is interesting? Or are they afraid to be quiet and give someone else the floor? Are they afraid of being contradicted? What happens?” I asked with intense ingenuousness.
“I tell you, it’s an art knowing how to interrupt the president. Jericó’s acumen consists in never interrupting. Carrera realized it: ‘You never interrupt me, Jericó. Thank you for that. But tell me why.’ ”
Sanginés was present. Jericó, he says, did not respond. Why was Sanginés there? What would Jericó have said to Carrera in the absence of a witness?
“The president is garrulous. I’m telling you because he told me. He also is master of a kind of pedantic indecisiveness. I mean, he is not an indecisive man like Hamlet, who weighs and tests his options. His indecision is a kind of farce. It’s a way of saying, paradoxically, I have the power not to make any decision at all and to say whatever occurs to me.”
I repeat: Sanginés’s cup was empty.
“That was Jericó’s astuteness, I realize it now. He knew Carrera did not act out of pure vanity and arrogance. On both counts Jericó acted for him. Carrera did and did not realize it, and he thanked Jericó for relieving him of an unwanted responsibility: Making decisions is the queen bee of power; it can also be its dead fly of feigned meekness.”
What did the president want? The impossible: “Give me easy solutions to difficult problems.”
“Ça n’existe pas,” Sanginés murmured. “Jericó’s wickedness…”
I raised my eyebrows. Sanginés sighed. He made it clear that he knew what he was talking about, that his was not the voice of a resentful man removed from the favors of power. He wanted to remain a loyal counselor. Not to mention a responsible citizen. I let my eyebrows drop. I accused myself of sentimentality. Because I owed a great deal to Sanginés. Because of my old friendship with Jericó. Because I was still, by comparison, an innocent…
“Think technical. Talk agrarian. Long live liberty. Down with equality. Count on me. Don’t trust too many counselors. You prepare the mole, too many cooks spoil the sauce. Send your enemies to distant embassies. And your friends too.”
With these and similar words, Jericó was insinuating himself into the president’s confidence, alarming him at times (“You’ve taken the wolf by the ears, you can’t let him go but you can’t hold him forever either”), encouraging him at others (“Don’t worry too much, equality is the most unequal thing that exists”), cutting him off on occasions (the classic symbolic knife slitting his throat), warning him on others (the no less classic eye opened by the right index finger on the lid), elaborating justifications (“politics can be soft, interests are always hard”). The president gave him simple tasks. Read the papers, Jericó. Keep me informed. At night I’ll read whatever seems important.
“What did your pal do?” Sanginés asked rhetorically. “What do you think?”
He gave me an ugly look. I gave him a beatific one.
“He selected items from the press. He cut out whatever suited him whenever it suited him. News of general tranquillity and happiness and prosperity under the leadership of Valentín Pedro Carrera: A president becomes more and more isolated and eventually believes only what he wishes to believe and what his lackeys make him believe-”
I interrupted. “Jericó… I think that… he’s…”
“The complete courtier, Josué. Don’t be deceived.”
“And you, Maestro?” I tried to irritate him.
“I repeat: a loyal counselor.”
Ándale, ándale, ándale.
“DON’T OPEN YOUR mouth. Don’t say anything.”
And I who had my romantic phrases prepared, my sentimental allusions derived from a potpourri of musical boleros, recollections of Amado Nervo, dialogues from North American movies (Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars), everything refined, nothing vulgar, though fearing my good manners would disappoint her in bed, perhaps she desired more brutal treatment, coarser words (you’re my whore, whore, I adore your tight little cunt), no, I didn’t dare, only pretty phrases, and as soon as I had said one, the first one, when I was on top of her, she came out with that brutal “Don’t open your mouth. Don’t say anything.”
I proceeded in silence. I came, censuring my mouth, the mouth I wasn’t to open, obeying her categorical instructions. And I’m not complaining. She gave me everything, except words. I was left in doubt. Are words intrusive in love? Or is love without words only partial, incomplete in its sentimental formulation? I shouldn’t think that. She had given me everything. She had permitted me everything. As if in her, in this act, lay the culmination of half-complete loves with the nurse Elvira Ríos, tormented ones with Lucha Zapata, venal ones with the whore with the bee who ended up married to Errol Esparza’s father, jailed as the presumed killer of Don Nazario, and escaped from prison despite the vigilance (unhealthy, obsessive, I now told myself) of Miguel Aparecido.
Asunta Jordán…
Preambles to love, Cupid’s broken arrows that finally gave me the great pleasure of a complete sexual act, at once instinctive and calculated, demanding and permissive, natural and artificial, pure and perverse: What was there in the provincial body of Asunta Jordán that gathered everything into a single woman and a single act? Everything I’ve said and nothing. Nothing, in the sense that she expressed the words of the act, which did not encounter the verbal separation that I (that every man) wants to give it, though later he may repent of, or forget, the words he exclaimed, sighed, shouted when he came abundantly.
Were words necessary? Was Asunta telling me that the act was sufficient in itself, that words cheapened it because they were inferior to pleasure, verbal placebos, derivations of the bolero, of poetry, of the impossible analogy between the act and the language of love…?
“Don’t touch my face.”
No. No. No. All the negations of the moment diluted the fiesta though the fiesta had been memorable and I was an imbecile who had no reason to complain. I did something wrong since, as satisfied as a god that creates love, the prohibition against speaking diminished the completeness of the act. I was mistaken. One could be mute from birth and enjoy the woman with no possibility of uttering a word. Why did I attempt to verbalize, give speech to the act that had culminated without the need for any words at all? And why did she forbid language in so categorical and severe a manner: Don’t open your mouth. Don’t say anything?