He slept until noon. Music from an organ-grinder out in the street woke him up, and he did not bother to identify the song. The silence of the previous night-or his mercy of the night and the silence-imposed long-dead moments that cut through the melody, and then, quickly, the slow, melancholy rhythm would begin again to seep through the half-open window before that memory without sound interrupted it once more. The telephone rang, and he picked it up and heard the restrained laughter of the other man, and said:
"Hello."
"We've got him down at the station, Congressman."
"Really?"
"The President has been informed."
"Then…"
"You know. A gesture. A visit. No need to say anything."
"When?"
"Come over at about two."
"See you then."
She heard him from the adjacent bedroom and began to weep, clinging to the door, but then she heard nothing and dried her cheeks before sitting down in front of her mirror.
He bought a paper from a newsboy and tried to read it as he drove, but he could only glance at the headlines, which spoke about the execution of those who had made an attempt on the life of the other leader, the candidate. He remembered him in the great moments, the campaign against Villa, during his presidency, when all of them swore their loyalty to him, and he looked at that photo of Father Pro, with his arms wide open to receive the volley of bullets. Passing by him in the street were the white roofs of new automobiles; on the sidewalk, the short skirts and cloche hats of the women, and the balloon trousers of today's lounge lizards, and the shoeshine boys sitting on the ground around the fountain with its ornamental frogs. But it wasn't the city that ran before his glassy, fixed eyes, but the word. He tested it and saw it in the rapid glances from the sidewalks that met his own; he saw it in the attitudes, the winks, the fleeting gestures, in the bent-over men, in obscene finger signals. He felt dangerously alive, clutching the steering wheel, dizzied by all the faces, gestures, finger-penises on the street, between two swings of the pendulum. He had to do it because, inevitably, the guys who got screwed today would end up screwing him tomorrow. A reflection off the windshield blinded him and he shaded his eyes with his hand: he'd always known how to choose the biggest motherfucker, the emerging leader against the fading leader. The immense square of the Zócalo opened before him with its stands set in the arcades, and the Cathedral bells sounded the deep bronze of two o'clock in the afternoon. He showed his identification card to the guard at the entrance to the Moneda. The crystalline winter of the plateau outlined the ecclesiastical silhouette of old Mexico, and groups of students, now taking exams, walked down Argentina and Guatemala Streets. He parked the car in the patio. He rode the grillwork elevator. He walked through the rosewood-paneled rooms with their shining chandeliers and sat down in the waiting room. Around him, the low voices only rose to utter, as unctuously as possible, those two words:
"Mister President."
"Misser Prisdent."
"Mishter Praisident."
"Congressman Cruz? Please step this way."
The fat man opened his arms to him, and the two of them clapped each other on the back, the waist, rubbed their hips, and the fat man laughed from within, as usual, and outwardly as well, and with his index finger pretended to shoot himself in the head, and laughed again voicelessly, with a silent shaking of belly and dark cheeks. He buttoned-with some difficulty-the collar of his uniform and asked if he'd seen the news, and he said yes, that now he understood the game but that none of it was of the least importance and that he'd come to reiterate his offer of support for the President, his unconditional support, and the fat man asked if he wanted anything, and he talked about some vacant lots on the outskirts of the city that weren't worth much today but that might, in time, be subdivided, and the other man promised to arrange it because, after all, now they were pals, brothers, and the congressman had, wow!, been fighting since 1913, and had a right to live in security, outside the ups and downs of politics. That's what he said to him, and he patted him gently on the arm and again on the back and hips to seal their friendship. The door with gilt handles opened from the other office emerged General Jiménez, Colonel Gavilán, and other friends who just last night had been at Saturno's and who walked by without seeing him, their heads bowed; and the fat man laughed again and told him that lots of his friends had come to put themselves at the service of the President in this hour of unity, and he ushered him out with a sweeping gesture of his arm.
In the rear of the office, he saw under a greenish light those eyes that had been screwed into the depths of the cranium, those eyes of a tiger on the prowl, and he bowed and said: "I'm at your disposal, Mr. President…To serve you unconditionally, I assure you, Mr. President…"
I smell that old oil they use to muck up my eyes, my nose, my lips, my cold feet, my blue hands, my thighs, near my sex, and I ask them to open the window: I want to breathe. I push this hollow sound out through my nostrils and I let them do what they wish and I cross my arms over my stomach. The linen of the sheet, its coolness. That is something important. What do they know, Catalina, the priest, Teresa, Gerardo?
"Leave me alone…"
"What does the doctor know? I know him better. It's another trick."
"Don't say anything."
"Teresita, don't contradict your father…I mean, your mother…Don't you see that…"
"Ha. You're just as responsible as he is. You because you're weak and a coward, he because…because…"
"Enough, enough."
"Good afternoon."
"Come this way."
"Enough, for God's sake."
"Keep it up, keep it up."
What was he thinking about? What was he remembering?
"…like beggars, why does he make Gerardo work?"
What do they know, Catalina, the priest, Teresa, Gerardo? What will their grief, hysterics, or the expressions of sympathy that will appear in the papers matter? Who will have the honesty to say, as I say now, that my only love has been to possess things, their sensual property? That's what I love. The sheet I embrace. And all the rest, what is now passing before my eyes. A floor made of Italian marble, veined in green and black. The bottles that store up the summer of those places. Old pictures with chipped varnish: in a single blotch, they pick up sun- or candlelight and allow us to wander slowly through them with our eyes and our sense of touch as we sit on a white-leather sofa decorated with gold fillet, with a glass of cognac in one hand and a cigar in the other, wearing a light silk tuxedo, our patent-leather slippers resting on a thick, silent carpet made of merino wool. There a man can take possession of landscape and the faces of other men. There, or sitting on the terrace facing the Pacific, watching the sunset and reiterating with his senses, the most tense, yes, the most delightful, the ebb and flow, the friction of those silver waves on the moist sand. Land. Land that can translate itself into money. Square plots of land in the city on which the forest of construction timbers begins to rise. Green and yellow property in the country, always the best, near the reservoirs, passed over by the roar of the tractor. Vertical property of mountain mines, gray treasure boxes. Machines: that tasty smell of the rotary press as it vomits out its pages in an accelerated rhythm…