Pinche Rafael Bernal, he wrote so fucking well, especially in The Mongolian Conspiracy, and probably also in the other fifteen or so books he published in his life, mostly novels, some non-fiction, history, a volume of poetry, though almost all of those books are now out of print, all but this one, published in 1969, three years before the end of his life, and for years nearly impossible to find even in second-hand bookstores. Bernal, born in Mexico City in 1915, worked most of his professional life as a television and movie scriptwriter and as a diplomat in Mexico’s foreign service. He is reputed to have been at least until the 1950s a right-wing Christian nationalist, even a Synarchist, and reputedly many of his novels were platforms for the didactic airing of his views, especially regarding his religious beliefs and the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution by the country’s political, military, and oligarchic classes. He was also, in other novels, a costumbrista, a realist writer of local color and customs, obsessively portraying the jungle as a corrupter of the human spirit and morality, and the ocean as its healthy and invigorating opposite. In a 1990 interview, his wife, Idalia Villarreal, who was fourteen years younger, described Bernal as a voracious reader of detective novels, by Agatha Christie and the like, and said that his first forays into the detective novel or policier before The Mongolian Conspiracy show the influence of Chesterton. She also described him as a serious reader of ancient and medieval history. The favorite books of his youngest daughter Cocol are Bernal’s Un muerto en la tumba “where a geeky archaeologist turns detective after a fresh corpse is found in an ancient Monte Albán tomb” and Su numbre era muerta: “It is based on my father’s experiences in the jungle and concerns a man who lives in a Lacandón village in the jungle of Quintana Roo and learns to communicate with mosquitos. I believe he wrote it when we were in Venezuela in the late 1950s.” Yuri Herrera, the terrific young Mexican novelist, also admires Su nombre era muerte, which he describes as being about an alcoholic who retreats to the jungle, stops drinking, observes and studies mosquitoes and discovers their language, and then conceives of a plot to dominate the world with the help of the insects.
So how did Bernal produce The Mongolian Complot, this revered cult masterpiece that, though it didn’t garner much attention when it was first published, has ever since so greatly influenced subsequent generations of Mexican writers? Writing it, Bernal seems to have thrown out everything that had previously characterized him as a writer, his approach to the novel itself and certainly the didactic expression of his convictions and beliefs — there is no trace of conscious Christian morality or devotion in Filiberto García, who, as we see at the novel’s end, doesn’t know a single prayer. Apparently nobody in Mexico had ever placed a character such as García, a pistolero, working for the police, one of the country’s most notorious institutions, a denizen of Mexico City’s lower-depths, at the center of a literary novel. (If anyone else did, nobody seems to remember that book.) In that character, Bernal created an unforgettable antihero hero. This seems all the more remarkable when one considers that Bernal, apparently a man of the right, published this book in 1969, a turbulent time when nearly every other literary person, writers and readers, in Mexico identified with the left, when the corruption of the political culture that had grown from the Mexican Revolution had been garishly exposed to the world, one year after the authoritarian governing PRI had massacred as many as 400 student protestors and others in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, a seminal event which haunts Mexico and underlies its politics to this day, and in which many of the assassins who took part must have been order-following government gunmen of the Filberto García type, maintaining a stone-faced indifference to whether victims on the right or on the left. Bernal must have feared, or perversely expected, that García would repulse his contemporary Mexican readers, and that they would put the book down well before reaching the violent climax that, perhaps ambiguously, redeems him. For there comes a moment in The Mongolian Conspiracy when Filiberto García finally disobeys his superiors and fulfills his dark heroic journey with an act of sorrowful rage and vengeance through which he adds some final corpses to his memory cemetery — so maybe he hasn’t changed that much, after all. But those killings are almost secondary to the narrative of his intimate transformation, which has another source, his relationship with Marta.
On the one hand this is a novel of suspense and detection, cleverly satiric, with a devastating political knockout punch, but even more memorably, it is a novel of the heart, and of a consciousness. The story is full of intrigue and violence, but the real action springs from its language. The Mongolian Conspiracy is narrated in the third person, while constantly, with beguiling agility, sliding into the verbal torrent of Filiberto García’s inner monologue and commentary in a way that never impedes the taut unfolding of the story. It often feels like a first-person narration, until it suddenly reverts to a screen-filling image of García, as when, in Mexico City’s little Chinatown speaking to Marta in the place of her employ, “García’s eyes shone in the half-light of the shop,” and we grasp the poignant vulnerability of that aging hard man’s smitten gaze. The inner voice that Bernal created for his pistolero had rarely, if ever, been encountered in Mexican literature before, though anyone living in Mexico City who got around a bit would have heard it everywhere if she or he was paying attention, the voice of the urban barrio, of the cantinas, of harsh, violent deep Mexico, sardonic, fierce, profane, hilarious, pained, defiant, relentless, inventive, and aphoristic — “Fucking memories! They’re like hangovers. . But the trick is to be like an old drunk and carry your Alka-Seltzer around inside you.” It’s a voice that reveals something essentially and enduringly Mexican, an embattled voice of daily and wily struggle against desperation and humiliation, and also one possessing a grandeur that isn’t always delusionary; a voice filled with the bitter lessons of moral solitude imposed by life in the Mexican labyrinth of an extremely unjust society rife with mendacity, hypocrisy, corruption and danger at every turn, but also redolent of that unquenchable and paradoxical gift for “feeling” that one of the novel’s Chinese characters tells Filiberto García, with biting irony, that his elderly and doomed compatriot, Mr. Liu, has absorbed from so many years of living among Mexicans. Nobody, not Carlos Fuentes, only Rafael Bernal, had ever brought that Mexican urban voice so vividly to life before, one that younger Mexican writers, in their various ways, have been mining ever since. When Bernal was writing this novel, he was serving as a diplomat for a sordid Mexican government in Peru. What an antidote Filbert García’s voice must have been to the deracinated, often inevitably duplicitous language of the diplomatic report and the bureaucratese of an embassy. Speaking with my friend the Mexican novelist Martin Solares about the novel the other day, he speculated that perhaps in Lima Bernal had a Mexican chauffeur-guarura with a past in the police and who spoke like Filiberto García. Maybe, but I also suspect that as with an old drunk’s Alka-Seltzer, Bernal carried that voice within him, and that he identified with his irascible gunman more than a little. His widow described him as “sarcastic, with an extraordinary sense of humor.” Bernal was working as a diplomat in Switzerland when he died in 1972, three years after publishing The Mongolian Conspiracy, and was buried in Geneva. Borges, another supremely different master of the occasional detective narrative, died and was buried in Geneva too, rather than in his native Buenos Aires, and had his own nostalgic, complexly personal and even “literary” reasons for choosing that city as his resting place. According to Bernal’s widow, he chose not to have his remains returned to Mexico, “Because he had the idea that it was horrible to transport a dead person from one far place to another. He told me, ‘It’s horrible to shovel the dead around like that.’” Add a “¡Pinche shoveling around!” and it would sound just like Filberto García.