they were saved to tell a mirage,
they were given turquoises and sumptuous skins torn from the backs of the strange gray cattle of the plains, the buffalo, they glimpsed the seven cities of gold of Cibola,
they heard word of the incalculable wealth of Quivira, they propagate the illusion of Eldorado, another Mexico, another Peru, beyond the río grande, río bravo,
an immortal dream of wealth, power, gold, happiness that compensates for all our sufferings, for the thirst, the hunger, and the shipwrecks and the Indian attacks,
they survived in order to lie,
death would have fused them with the truth of the desert,
poor, hostile, underpopulated lands,
life gave them the opulent wealth of lies,
they can fool everyone because they survived:
río grande, río bravo, frontier of mirages from then on
where men survive so that they can lie
Mr. Stud, that’s what they called him from the time he was a kid because of his shiny black hair like patent leather and his long eyelashes, but he called himself Mr. Shit because that’s how he always felt, growing up surrounded by the mountains of garbage in Chalco, dedicated since childhood to digging around in the disfigured mass of rotten meat, vomited beans, rags, dead cats, scraps of unrecognizable existence, giving thanks when something kept its form — a bottle, a condom — and could be brought home. An acrid cloud accompanied Serafín from his earliest days, and when he left the cloud of refuse, the smell was so sweet, so pure, that it made him dizzy and even a little nauseated: his country was the mud streets, the puddles, the children with screwed-up knees, unable to walk properly, stray dogs fucking, affirming their lives, telling us in barks that everything can survive despite everything, despite the pushers who get eight-year-old kids started on drugs, despite the extortionist cops who kill at night and then turn up by day to count the bodies and add them to the gigantic rolls of urban death, forever overcome by the fertility of the bitches, the rats, the mothers. Everything can survive because the government and the party organize corruption, allow it to flourish a bit, and then organize it as improvement so everyone will accept the notion that it’s the PRI or anarchy, which do you prefer? By the time hair had sprouted in Serafín’s armpits, he already knew everything about the evil of the city, no one could teach him anything. The problem was survival. How do you survive? By giving in to the masters of thievery, voting for the PRI, attending meetings like a jerk, seeing how the kings of the garbage got rich — what the fuck — or by saying no and joining a rock band that dares to sing about what a pisser it is to live in Mexico, D.F., in an underground network of rebel kids, or by speaking up even louder, refusing to vote for the PRI, and running the risk, as he and his family did, of having to take refuge in a half-built school, almost a thousand of them huddled together there, their shacks demolished by the cops, their miserable possessions stolen by the cops, all because they said, We’re going to vote the way we feel like voting?
At the age of twenty, Serafín headed north. He told his people, Get out of here, this country is beyond salvation, the PRI alone is more than enough reason to leave Mexico. I swear I’ll figure out a way to help you up north. I’ve got relatives in Juárez, guys, you’ll hear from me …
On this night of clenched fists and arms opened in a cross, Serafín, now twenty-six, expects nothing from anyone. He’s spent two years organizing the gang that crosses the border almost every night, thirty armed Mexicans who pile up wooden boxes, old scrap iron, roof tiles, and abandoned car bodies on the tracks of the Southern Pacific in New Mexico, change the switches, stop the train, steal everything they can to sell it in Mexico, then fill the cars with Mexican illegals. How many nights like this does Serafín Romero remember as he drives off in his truck from the train stopped in the desert, the truck filled with stolen goods, the train filled with peasants who need work, the stolen goods all brand-new, still in their packages, shiny — washing machines, toasters, vacuum cleaners, all brand-new, none turned yet to garbage that will end up on a mountain of trash in Chalco … Now he really is Mr. Stud, now he really has stopped being Mr. Shit. And Serafín Romero thought, leaving the stopped train behind, that the only thing missing for him to be a hero was a whinnying stallion … and oh yes, the night air of the desert was so dry, so clean.
no one lives more opulently in opulent Mexico City than Juan de Oñate, son of the conquistador Cristóbal of the same name, who discovered the Zacatecas mines, infinite hives of silver, a man who reached the Villa Rica de la Veracruz without a doubloon and now is able to bequeath to his son one of the greatest fortunes in the Indies, an inexhaustible vein of silver that allows Juan de Oñate to be named price regulator in the capital of New Spain, to roll through that city in the best carriages, surrounded by the best women, the best pages, to be attended in his palace by squads of majordomos and priests praying all the livelong day so Oñate will end up in heaven:
why does this man leave all his luxury, shake off his indolence, and go off to the unknown territories of the río grande, río bravo?
was he so stuffed with old silver that he wanted new gold?
did he want to owe nothing to his father?
did he want to begin like him, poor and defiant?
or did he want to show that there is no greater wealth than that which we cannot attain?
look at Juan de Oñate plant his black boot on the brown bank of the río rande, río bravo:
he’s fat, bald, moustachioed, a turtle with an iron shell and Dutch lace frills at his neck and wrists, a robust potbelly and weak feet and between the two the indispensable sac of his scrotum so he can pee whenever he pleases amid the conquests and battles, his indispensable silver helmet, topped off with a crest, proclaims:
he comes to the rio grande with a hundred and thirty soldiers and five hundred settlers, women, children, servants:
he founds El Paso del Norte and claims Spanish dominion over all things, from the leaves on the trees to the rocks and sand in the river: nothing stops him, the founding of El Paso is merely the springboard for his grand imperial dream,
fat, bald, moustachioed, fortified by steel and softened by lace, Juan de Oñate is a private contractor, a businessman who believed Cabeza de Vaca’s lies and paid no heed to the expeditions of Pray Marcos de Niza or to the death of the ill-fated, stubborn black Estebanico, who disappeared in a quest for his own lie, the cities of gold: Onate came not to find gold but to invent it, to create wealth, to discover what’s left to discover of the new world, the mines yet to find, the empires yet to be founded, the passage to Asia, the ports in both oceans: to realize his dream he embarks on a campaign of death, he reaches Acama, the center of the Indian world (center of creation, navel of the universe), and there he destroys the city, kills half a thousand men, three hundred women and children, and takes the rest captive: the boys between twelve and twenty will be servants: the twenty-five-year-old men will have a foot chopped off in public:
this is a matter of founding, in truth, a new world, of creating, in truth, a new order, where Juan de Oñate rules as he pleases, capriciously, not owing anyone anything, intent on losing everything as long as he’s infinitely free to impose his will, to be his own king and perhaps his own creator: here there was nothing before Oñate arrived, here there was no history, no culture: he founded them