“You may be right,” Carrera went on. “Just whistle once so the bird can hear you.”
“You underestimate people.” Monroy didn’t bother to look at him. “It’s your eternal error.”
“When there’s no paper, you clean yourself with whatever’s at hand.” Carrera made a vulgar gesture, like someone using a medieval torche-cul.
Monroy didn’t look at him. “Just don’t ignore what you need to survive.”
Carrera raised his shoulders. “You see, it wasn’t necessary to fire a single shot.”
“The fact is the fortress was empty.” Monroy threw cold water on his spirits.
“No, the truth is you’re very clever. You just hide it.” Carrera let his admiration for Max show. Max looked at Carrera with a flattering lie.
“This poor boy… your collaborator…”
“Don’t fuck with me, Max.” The president did not stop smiling. “We both win if you don’t fuck around.”
“Fine, your employee. His name is…?”
“Jericó.”
“Jericó.” Monroy did not smile. “Who knows what old-fashioned manual he read.”
(Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution by Curzio Malaparte, murmured María del Rosario Galván at a distance: Napoleon, Trotsky, Pilsudski, Primo de Rivera, Mussolini…)
“Let’s not be afraid of a gang insurrection like this one, Mr. President, or an impossible revolution like earlier ones. You should be afraid of the tyrant who comes to power through the vote and turns into an elected dictator. That’s the one to fear.”
(I thought, of course, of Antigua Concepción, Max Monroy’s mother, and her epic, revolutionary version of a history-was it buried along with her?)
“Dishonor,” murmured Max Monroy.
“What?” The president heard only what he wanted to hear.
“Dishonor,” Monroy repeated, and after pretending to admire the landscape: “Let’s not engage in minor intrigues. Let’s exercise irony.”
“What?”
“Irony. Irony.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I mean it’s very difficult under any circumstances to maintain power.”
“Isn’t that what I’m telling you?”
“You don’t say.”
An intolerant minority, Jericó told me, that’s the key for coming to power, you have to energize the base with the example of an energetic minority, you have to favor the prejudices of the resentful, you have to demonize power: Saints don’t know how to govern.
What did Jericó expect? The president, quite simply, made use of the army. Soldiers occupied highways, bridges, large houses, food depositories, munitions depositories, major intersections, banks: The army surrounded Jericó’s followers as if they were mice in a trap. They prevented them from leaving, they gave them an ephemeral empire around the Zócalo that did not even interrupt the work of Filopáter and the other scribes on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Fireworks, smoke, folk dances, an exceptional holiday, an obligatory alliance between Monroy and Carrera, as ephemeral as Jericó’s frustrated rebellion.
The groups gathered together by Jericó were isolated in the center of the capital between the Zócalo and Minería, they never managed to communicate with the supposedly rebellious and certainly wronged masses, Jericó had operated on the basis of a fantastic ideology and a revocable power: the ideology decanted from his readings and his position inside the ogre’s mouth: the office of the president.
Now I listened, thought, saw, and felt a profound sadness, as if Jericó’s defeat were mine. As if the two of us had lived a great intellectual dream that, in order to exist, did not tolerate the test of reality. In the final analysis, were my friend and I barely hangers-on of anarchy, never makers of revolution? Did ideas we had read, heard, assimilated lose all value if we put them into practice? Was our confusion of ideas and life so great? Didn’t those ideas resist the breath of life, collapsing like statues made of dust as soon as reality touched them? Were we becoming illusions?
The gang of the Mariachi and Sara P., Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas returned to the San Juan de Aragón Prison. Miguel Aparecido was waiting for them there.
The president withdrew first from the Castle, muttering to himself (Asunta heard him), “In the old days the hangman sold the boiled flesh of his victims,” and Max, who followed seconds later, remarked to Asunta: “It’s one thing to be based in reality. It’s another to create reality.”
And right after that: “Let’s go, the sun’s very strong and in the light of day one makes many mistakes.”
The president simply sighed: “Making decisions is very boring. I swear…”
He was on his way out.
“MISERABLE OLD FOOL. Useless old bastard. Damn mummy.”
Miguel Aparecido punched the wall of his cell, speaking in a wounded, vengeful tone of voice, sonorous and stifled, as if rather than words coming out of his mouth there were animals: insects, rodents, turkeys, grebes, bustards, and mandrakes, so intimate to his mind was the word and so desperate was it to find ways out, similes, survivals.
“Lock up a man whose hands are tied with a cat, then ask him to defend himself.”
He looked at me with ferocity.
“He’ll defend himself with his teeth. There’s no other way.”
What had disturbed him so much? He had won. The criminals released through Jericó’s influence were back behind bars and I wouldn’t guarantee their future. Jericó’s transient power-his whim-had done something more than free a gang of bandits. It had violated the will of Miguel Aparecido, the master of the prison, the top dog, the big fucker inside these walls. Miguel felt mocked.
Still, there was something in his rage that went beyond Jericó, the flight from and return to prison of the criminals, the mockery of the very will of the man with the olive skin and yellow eyes and self-willed muscles, kept hard and flexible thanks to the discipline of imprisonment, as if the days and months and years of prison counted in a rogue’s exercises, his knee flexions, air punches, arms extended in extremely hard flexion against prison walls, imaginary jump ropes, like a boxer who prepares for the big fight, overcoming through an act of will the noise of the city that filters through the corridors and catacombs of the prison.
He grabbed the newspaper. “Look,” he said, poking at the image of Max Monroy and, in passing, that of the president. “Look.”
I looked.
“Do you know he’s never allowed his picture to be taken?”
“The president? He’s always in the papers, on television, in displays… All that’s left for him is to announce the lottery.”
“Monroy,” said Miguel, as if all the bitterness in the world were concentrated in that name. A yellowish saliva ran along the prisoner’s lips. The tiger devoured by other bloodthirsty beasts in the Chapultepec zoo appeared, duplicated, in his eyes. “Monroy… motherfucker, at least he used to be discreet enough not to be photographed, the decency not to let himself be seen, the old bastard son of a bitch mother…”
I confess my discretion. Or my cowardice. I didn’t jump to the defense of my old friend from the graveyard, the “bitch mother” of Max Monroy, Antigua Concepción.
“And worse, even worse,” Miguel said syllable by syllable, “even worse is that son of the great bitch whore, Max Monroy’s son.”
“Who is he?” I said, innocent (but uneasy?).
This is the story Miguel Aparecido told me that afternoon in a cell in the San Juan de Aragón Prison, after going on a while longer in his diatribe, the asked-for explanation and the unasked-for one as well. I felt a strange emotion: Miguel Aparecido seemed like an hourglass anxious to empty the contents of one hour into another, though anguished by the fatal flight of time. The flight of time was the evasion in his narrative and if I was his privileged listener, at that moment I still did not know to what degree, so intense, so personal, Miguel’s narration concerned me.