And now the good news, my beautiful prince of the night. My very close friend, Interior Secretary Bernal Herrera, has asked the president for a personal favor: to appoint you adviser to the presidential office at Los Pinos, where you’ll be working for none other than Tácito de la Canal.
Am I giving you a poisoned chalice? No. I’m giving you the opportunity, my love, to bring me a golden apple from the very heart of a subverted Eden. Make the most of it, Valdivia. Any questions?
8. XAVIER “SENECA” ZARAGOZA TO PRESIDENT LORENZO TERÁN
Oh, Mr. President! How could I ever forget what you said to me twenty-four hours after entering office?
“They swear you in as president, Seneca, they place the tricolor sash over your chest, you take your seat on the Eagle’s Throne and — you’re off! It’s like being on a roller coaster, they send you down, you grab hold of the chair as best you can and a shocked expression etches itself onto your face, a tight grimace that quickly turns into a mask that you can’t remove. The expression on your face that day will stay there for six years, no matter how many different ways you may try to smile or look serious, pensive, angry — you’ll always be stuck with the look that was on your face that terrifying moment when you realized, my friend, that the presidential seat, the Eagle’s Throne, is nothing more and nothing less than a seat on the roller coaster that we call the Republic of Mexico.”
From the moment you said those words to me, Mr. President, both of us understood that you had called me to your side because you wanted someone who would be honest with you, who would offer you objective advice, and who would help you hide the bewildered look on your face that comes from the feeling of being thrown into the void from the steep slope of that fairground ride known as the presidency of the republic.
“They elect you, Seneca. From that moment on, you lose all real contact with people. Not even your best friends are willing to criticize you anymore.”
Very well, I’ve tried to prove myself worthy of your trust and, though my advice may not always be the best, you always have the right to consider opposing points of view — and there is no dearth of them in the editorial pages and the political cartoons. My duty (at least as I understand it) is to tell you what I think with total candor. Now, a few days after you have completed your third year in office, Mr. President, my sincere criticism is that you’re perceived as a little ineffectual. People don’t see you as a man who makes things happen. They see you as a man who lets things happen to him. I know what your philosophy is: We’re past the age of authoritarianism, when the president’s will was the only thing that mattered, from Sonora to the Yucatán, like the hats by Tardán that are back in fashion now. How things come and go!
Now we know that the PRI’s soft dictatorship was tempered by a certain degree of tolerance for the Mexican elite and their generally ill-informed opinions, criticism, and scorn. Poets, novelists, the occasional journalist, circus clowns, cartoonists, our ineffable muralists — all of them were allowed to say, write, and draw more or less what they wanted. It was a case of the intellectual elite criticizing the governmental elite, a very necessary escape valve that even extended to comedians — from Soto to Beristaín to Cantinflas and Palillo, they were all granted this very gracious concession. Filmmakers, however, were not, nor were most journalists, to say nothing of the independent trade unions. But then what about governors, small-time mayors, provincial military authorities, the police force in general, even lowly customs officers? A multitude of local powers, Mr. President, acting with corrupt, willful impunity. Only those who were corrupt were free. We created a culture of illegality, even when the president himself worked within the boundaries of the law or launched moral crusades.
For God’s sake, Mr. President! Even in colonial times people in Madrid talked about the unto mexicano, the Mexican unguent, and about mordida—corruption, payoffs and bribes that were used and continue to be used to “influence” people. You know what they say: “He who doesn’t deceive, doesn’t achieve.”
What, then, has happened to you, a pure man who came from the opposition to clean the stables of Augeas? You’ve turned out to be a democratic Hercules who trusts society’s power to do a cleanup job that the mythical Hercules performed with brute force, just as that other divine Hercules — Jesus Christ — drove the merchants out of the temple with lashes.
Morally speaking, Mr. President, you’re to be admired. Let society clean itself up. Let the impure among us be purged by the pure — or let them purge themselves. Once again, forgive me for being blunt, Mr. President, and allow me to qualify my criticisms. You yourself are aware that certain areas of Mexican reality are so dark that only people with dirty hands can effectively control them. At the same time, you’ve gone to great pains to promote honest government officials who can give your regime a pretty public face. Take your defense secretary, a military officer of proven integrity, General Mondragón von Bertrab. Or the interior secretary, Bernal Herrera, an honorable professional who obeys the law but also understands the Latin maxim dura lex sed lex. The law is tough, but it’s the law. But then, on the other hand, both you and von Bertrab know perfectly well that the chief of police, Cícero Arruza, is a violent thug who won’t hold back when it comes to exercising repression with or without justification.
A necessary evil? Perhaps. But there’s another case, Mr. President, that you refuse to consider, and I’m referring to your cabinet chief, Tácito de la Canal. Now I know that by saying this I’m going out on a limb: I accuse and yet I have no proof. Very well. I’ll limit myself, then, to a simple moral observation. Can someone as ingratiating as Tácito de la Canal possibly be an honest man? Don’t you suspect that a deep well of hypocrisy lies beneath his servile fawning? Don’t you think that Tácito de la Canal merits a bit more caution on your part? Or shall I assume that you’re playing dumb on purpose and allowing Tácito to be your disagreeable, sycophantic guard just so that you can live in peace, flattered by your slave and defended by your dog? Believe me when I say that I fully understand the need for a shifty-looking dwarf at the door to the castle to keep the bothersome, the undesirable, and the ambitious at bay. But you might want to consider that the guard dog you put out for show might also be driving away the honest counselor, the loyal friend, the useful technocrat, the concerned intellectual, simply because he rightly believes that they, even more than all the other shameless attention seekers, are his greatest rivals in the battle for the president’s attention.
I repeat, Mr. President, please pardon the occasionally brutal honesty with which I advise you, but that’s why you took me on: to tell you the truth. I warned you of this from the very first day. A politician can pay an intellectual, but he can never trust him. The intellectual will eventually, inevitably, disagree with the politician, and for the politician this will always be construed as a betrayal. Malicious or ingenuous, Machiavellian or utopian, the powerful man always thinks he’s right, and the person who opposes him is either a traitor, or at least dispensable.