You should also be careful not to trust the communications secretary, Felipe Aguirre. You’ll notice that his face is the same color as his socks, a sure sign of a vile nature. Or at least a lack of imagination. His famous adage about marriage just about sums it up: “Want to become an old man? Then spend your whole life with the same old woman.”
While the advice may be amoral, his conduct is not. He’s grown old with the same old woman, a voluminous matron who inspires terror in all who cross her path because she walks with her eyes closed, like a fat vampire blinded by the sun. Proof that our head of communications communicates best via silence and darkness, and by awarding contracts that provide him with some very lucrative commissions. Now, why does the president tolerate him if he knows that the secretary sees nothing and steals everything? A singular and ancient theory, my dear Nicolás: No government functions without the grease of corruption.
Corruption lubricates, but look at the pained face of our national oil company’s chairman, don Olegario Santana. He welcomes U.S. capital without denationalizing the industry, but when we defend the price of oil, the U.S. government penalizes us, thus penalizing its own investors. That’s Washington’s eternal contradiction, caught between the sweeping international claims and the small local interests: The textile factory in North Carolina will always win out over the Brazilian factory and the World Trade Organization, since the latter two don’t vote in U.S. elections. As you’ll see, the chairman has got the expression of someone who goes around raping ten-year-old girls. How can he allow himself to appear in public with such a guilty look on his face? He is a man to be pitied.
Now turn your attention to the two military officers sitting together. The one who looks like a Prussian Junker is, as you know, the defense secretary, Mondragón von Bertrab. Educated at the Hochschule der Bundeswehr, the German military academy, he has an excellent relationship with the Pentagon and has read and memorized all there is to know about the campaigns of Caesar in Gaul and Bonaparte in Italy, he can recite Clausewitz by heart, and there isn’t a single page in Tacitus’ Germania or Livy’s History that he hasn’t studied closely. He’s the finest example of the kind of educated, responsible, serious, and loyal officer that the heroic military academy has been turning out for generations. But don’t rush to stick your neck out for him, my dear Nicolás Valdivia. Precisely because of his education and professional competence, von Bertrab is a disciplined automaton who fulfills his obligations down to the letter: loyalty to the president, as long as the president remains loyal to the institutions of the republic, but he’s more loyal to the spirit of the nation — whatever that means — than to the president himself if he thinks the president hasn’t fulfilled his mandate to the nation. And we know exactly what that means! Nevertheless, our admirable local Junker never soils his hands, Nicolás, he leaves that to the vicious individual seated at his side, Cícero Arruza, chief of the federal police.
Be very careful with this one, I mean it. Von Bertrab is the friendly face of force. Arruza is the despicable one. His motto is “Blood, death, and fire.” He’s a wolf in wolf ’s clothing. His only obstacle is von Bertrab, who said of Cícero, “Giving Arruza any power is like putting a pyromaniac in charge of a fire department.”
And yet nobody — and I mean nobody—has any doubt that Arruza can be utterly indispensable at the right moment. He knows it, and he anticipates that moment with the stealth of a panther in the jungle. They say that General Cícero Arruza could have forced Benito Juárez to confess that he was working as a double agent for the French. I’m not saying that Arruza isn’t constructive, it’s just that for him being constructive means turning intimidation into a public service.
I believe I can dispose of the housing secretary, Efrén Iturbide, in a few short sentences. They say he’s the best-dressed idiot in the world. He boasts about being the descendant of that preposterous emperor we had at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Agustín I. This is not true. Our dear Efrén uses his looks to falsify his pedigree. Naturally, one can’t have such translucent skin without belonging to the “decent people.” Decent, my friend? This is what public opinion has to say about him and his position: “Efrén Iturbide is the secretary of state for the housing of Efrén Iturbide.”
That’s precisely it. He’s built but one house: his own.
That man with the dumbfounded look on his face is Juan de Dios Molinar, secretary for information and media, who, thanks to the work of our powerful neighbors, has been effectively stripped of his informative capacity, apart from being able to write letters, as I have decided to do (and may they all follow my example). Look at him, how badly designed he is, poor thing: saturnine air, timid smile, the eyes of a tiger, the hands of a carpenter, and the torso of an Italian tenor. Mother Nature can be such a bitch sometimes! And to top it all off, mouth shut like a padlock. He’s the living image of moronic stupor and I feel sorry for him. My friend Herrera says it’s better this way. Since the secretary for information doesn’t inform, the interior secretary can manipulate the news as he sees fit.
In contrast, look at the smiling attorney general, Paladio Villaseñor, who goes around saying “That’s great, that’s great” to everyone. It’s no wonder he’s nicknamed “Mr. That’s Great,” but I think he’s a lot sharper than he seems and that his reputation as a fool saves him from making crucial decisions or publicly offending the people he screws under the table. As you can see, that has its virtues and its drawbacks. Not for nothing, depending on the circumstances, can he be an eel or a clam.
And now, my darling Nicolás, come the serious players. The treasury secretary, Andino Almazán, is a steely technocrat who refuses to budge an inch from his convictions about the economy. He’s a theologian of Economics with a gothic and capital “E.” For Andino, devaluing our currency would be like having a prostitute for a daughter. What the poor man doesn’t know is that his wife, whom everyone calls “La Pepa,” is a slut who cheats on him day and night. But more about that later, darling.
I am anxious to get to the worst, to end this presentation with naked horror itself, the most inexplicable voice in this republican choir: President Lorenzo Terán’s chief of staff, the fawning, despicable, grotesque Tácito de la Canal. Look closely: He shouldn’t be seen in daylight. His head is like one big scar, from chin to occiput, both areas covered with prickly stubble that does little to hide his egg of a bald skull. Look at how he rubs his hands together in an effort to appear humble. He cultivates the look of the perpetually destitute, as if always on the point of begging. He’s the doormat, the paillason, the president’s rug in every sense. He controls access to the executive office and volunteers to clean the president’s soles before the chief executive sets foot in the Office of Offices. Tácito de la Canal is the kind of man who looks as though he’s never breathed fresh air in his life. That’s what they say about him. But I know better. Tácito de la Canal is the man who watches me from a certain spot in the woods every night as I take off my clothes. He’s the voyeur who beat you to my window, the repulsive peeping tom you saw the other night. .
That is the cast of characters in this little show. I’ll wait for a better time to give you the lowdown on another singular group of characters: the third-rate legislators, the congressmen and senators who, pulverized into tiny minority factions, leave the management of Congress in the hands of the inept president of Congress, Onésimo Canabal, while preventing the passing of essential laws, which forces the president and Secretary Herrera to act with a pragmatism that is occasionally legal, occasionally not, but occasionally, like now (Colombia, the oil issue), one that must invoke principle as a way of making up for the pragmatism forced upon them by Congress’s fragmentation, which they have had to accept as part and parcel of the system.