Why go on? Politics is simply the public relationship among human beings. Freedom is the regularization of power. Men are mad and want to see the origin of power in sacred revelation, in nature, in race, in a social contract, in revolution, and in law. To them I say no. Power is simply the exercise of necessity, the mask of virtue, and the chance of fortune. Unbearable. Do you know, to restore my spirits, sometimes I return to the countryside and change clothes. I put on togas and medallions, gold sandals and laurel wreaths, and then, alone, I converse with the ancients, with the Greeks and Romans, my peers…
It is a great lie: a fiction. The truth is I need the city. I love the city, its works, its plazas, its stones, its markets, its bodies. The sweetness of a face allows me to forget my sorrows. The heat of sex invites me to leave my family, making them think I have died. Madness!
And still, here I am back in office, serving the Prince, remembering perhaps that love is mischievous and escapes from the liver, the eyes, the heart. Only the administration of the city-politics, the polis-saves me, Josué, from the suicidal ardor of sex and the onerous imagination of the historical past as I wait for my trip to hell, a much more amusing place than heaven.
Understand, then, my smile. Understand the portrait of me by Santi di Tito in the Palazzo Vecchio. Do you see now why I smile? Do you realize there are only two comparable smiles, the Giaconda’s and mine? She was the Mona Lisa. Will I be the Mono Liso, Smooth Monkey? There is no risk. If you like, call me, in Mexican, Machiavelli, Chango Resbaloso, Slippery Monkey.
“JERICÓ’S MISTAKE,” SANGINÉS remarked during this new lunch, now in the Danubio on the Calles de Uruguay, “consisted in believing a dissatisfied mass would follow a revolutionary vanguard. He didn’t see two essential things: First, that the revolutionary masses are an invention of the revolutionary vanguard. Second, that when the masses have moved it’s because they have reached the end of their patience. That doesn’t happen here-or hasn’t happened yet. Most people believe they can achieve a better situation. People make promises to themselves. People, if you like, deceive themselves. Go away. Fine. The worker goes as a migrant to California, Oregon, the Carolinas. Fine. But people see the ads and what they want is to be like that, like the ad. Have a car, their own house, go on vacation, whatever, fuck the ‘Classy Blonde.’ Have you seen, Josué, the faces of people when they come out of a movie, imitating-unconsciously, no doubt-the star they’ve just seen?”
“Nicole Kidman,” I intervened just to say something, when I should have paid attention to the platter of shellfish the Danubio waiter had placed in front of me. “Errol Flynn,” I added, unusual for me, in memory of Baldy, our friend, but also with a certain mockery, as if Sanginés were teaching me what I already knew and I, out of respect, was pretending I was still learning, as I did when I was his student at the law school.
“We have created a society,” Sanginés continued while, as was his custom, he made little balls out of bread crumbs, “which for the most part wants to move up, have things, cars, women, clothes, sun, and if you press me, an education for the children, life insurance, social security, hospital and television insurance.”
“Bread isn’t enough,” I tried to interject like a French monarch. “They want cake.”
Sanginés smoothed the tablecloth as if to rid it of wrinkles or crumbs-and to avoid paying attention to me.
“There are also desperate ways out,” he argued so as not to withdraw. “Go as a migrant worker to the United States, defy the guards’ bullets, the barbed wire, the walls, the truck in which the coyotes can abandon you or leave you to suffocate…”
Did the restaurant tablecloth, white and bare, resemble a desert along the border? Were the salt and pepper shakers beacons that would guide the position of our dishes, already ordered, on their way, bean soup, ceviche, fillet of beef with mashed potatoes…?
Sanginés looked at me somberly. He maintained a silence that prolonged unbearably the wait and increased hunger with no immediate hope of deliverance. Rarely have I seen him so pessimistic. He didn’t want to look at me. He dared to look at me.
“The border is going to close. The United States, our Northern Wall, will be worse than the Berlin Wall. One was dictated by Communist ideology and Soviet paranoia. The wall that will run from the Pacific to the Gulf, from San Diego-Tijuana to Brownsville-Matamoros, is dictated by irrational racism. They need workers the North American market doesn’t have. But they have to be kept out because they’re dark, they’re poor, they work hard, solve problems, and expose discrimination in mortal combat with necessity…”
I felt like wiping up my plate with a tortilla: Sanginés’s words, which should have taken away my appetite, made me hungry.
“You also have to consider that Gringo businessmen pay low wages to migrant workers and don’t want to pay high salaries to local labor,” I argued, because Sanginés liked that.
He was served bean soup. I had ordered an Acapulcan ceviche. He dipped his large spoon. I used my small fork. We ate.
“That isn’t the problem. The United States is being left behind. It has a workforce from the time of the Industrial Revolution. The smokestack cities are dying. Detroit, Pittsburgh are dying. Carnegie and Rockefeller died. Gates and BlackBerry were born. But the North Americans don’t renounce the great industrial dream that founded them as a power. Chinese and Indians graduate from North American universities. Chicanos graduate.”
“Except the Chinese go back to China and advance it and the Mexicans go back to Mexico and nobody even wants them, Maestro…”
Without meaning to I knocked over the saltshaker. Sanginés, cordial, put it back. I, without thinking twice, cupped my hand, gathered the spilled salt, and held it. I didn’t know where to put it.
“Max Monroy understands this,” I said without thinking. “Valentín Pedro Carrera doesn’t. Max looks for long-term solutions. Carrera feels the six-year term concluding and wants to postpone the end with a swindle. His festivals, his jokes…”
Did Sanginés grimace? Or were the beans more bitter than he had expected? Like an idiot I emptied the salt on my ceviche. I ate without looking at him. If you begin by selecting fish, you end up with olives.
I said that he, Antonio Sanginés, was lawyer to them both, to Carrera and Monroy. I asked him to analyze them for me, the president and the magnate, the two poles of power in Mexico (and in Iberoamerica). He gave me a look that announced: I don’t want to say the words of misfortune. I won’t be the one…
Well, I interrupted, I was still preparing the professional thesis he himself had suggested, Machiavelli and the Modern State, so our talks were, in a way, like part of the course, weren’t they?
I looked for his friendly, approving smile and didn’t find it.
“We can all feel jealousy, hatred, or suspicion. The powerful man should eliminate jealousy, which leads him to want to be someone else, and in the end he becomes less than himself. He should avoid hatred, which clouds judgment and precipitates irreparable actions,” Sanginés declaimed.