While the pungent crunchiness of Filiberto García’s language could not be more authentic, it would be a stretch to call The Mongolian Conspiracy a realistic novel of police investigations and international and political intrigue. The plot mixes Cold War “Dr. Strangelove” satiric goofiness with convincing Mexican Machiavellian political ruthlessness and duplicity in a manner that makes its riveting coherence seem almost accidentally sui generis. A Russian embassy source has reported to the Mexican government that there is a possible conspiracy underway, emanating from Communist China, to assassinate the President of the United States during his visit to Mexico. The life of the President of Mexico and “world peace” are also endangered. The rumor was first picked up in Outer Mongolia. The terrorists, who are not Chinese, have passed through Hong Kong on their way to Mexico, where they are supposed to make contact with a Chinese man. So have half a million dollars worth of fifty-dollar bills. The Cubans will play a role in the plot as well. It is exquisitely comical that Bernal centers this international conspiracy threatening world peace in Mexico City’s very tiny Chinatown, on Dolores Street, a few restaurants that serve poor people’s Chinese food to poor people, and a few shops, “one street lined with old houses and a scrawny alleyway trembling with mysteries.” Filiberto García is a regular denizen of these cheap eateries, where the Chinese play their “forever silent and ghastly game of poker.” Like these Chinese immigrants, he values keeping to oneself and keeping one’s mouth shut. “There are things you don’t talk about, or better, there’s nothing you do talk about.” Because his superiors know García is familiar with this marginal Chinese population, he is called into the investigation to find the Chinese man, and verify the conspiracy. That is ostensibly why he is given this crucial assignment in an international conspiracy. The real reason is because at least some of his superiors expect him to be a dupe, and for his “investigation” to leave a false trail of inevitable corpses. García is told that he will have to work with Graves, an American agent from the FBI, and with Laski, a Russian from the KGB. “You three will have to figure out how you’re going to work together.” This scenario, which might seem to offer broad farce of a Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov sort, is actually handled by Bernal with great cleverness, insight and compelling, if essentially satiric, humanity. The mutually mistrustful FBI and the KGB men are “experts,” highly trained and learned spies, fluent in languages, and politically knowledgeable. Naturally, they condescend to Filiberto García, if often jovially. “Seems like in the international crowd it’s in fashion to be full of smiles. We’ll have to see if they’d keep laughing with a bullet in their bellies.” But the three men also know, for all their differences, that they are all in the very same business. “They know judo, karate, and how to strangle people with silk cords. The gringo uses a.38 special. The Russian a Luger.” Laski tells the American, “One cannot govern without killing, Graves, my friend. All governments have learned this by now. That’s why we exist.” And Filberto García reflects, “I’m on Hitler and Stalin and Truman’s team. Hey, you guys, how many dead have you got? But I’m very Mexican about it, which means I’m old fashioned. As you know, we’re kind of underdeveloped. Just bullets for us.” The most nefarious of García’s superiors says, just before removing him from the case, precisely because he senses García is coming close to solving it, “Mr. García is not an expert in international intrigue. The truth is, he is not even an expert in police investigations.” “Fucking international intrigue!” “Fucking Outer Mongolia!” After all, they are in Mexico City, which Filiberto García, not the FBI or the KGB man, knows how to read and decipher. García is the novel’s detective, who methodically unravels the conspiracy, or rather its several parallel “conspiracies,” though in one instance devastatingly too late.
Filberto García’s heart is a greater mystery, to himself. Marta has fled to his apartment, and is staying there under his protection. Why?”Could it be that Marta wants me to kill someone?” “Is Miss Fong an agent for one of the groups involved?” “Might be pure love, might be pure distrust.” Even when she makes it obvious that she is romantically available, García treats her with chaste and considerate tenderness, like a “father. Fucking fathers!” His unacknowledged yet clearly inhibiting scruples about their age difference, and his own anxieties about the failing virility that comes with aging, torment him. “Fucking faggot!” he repeatedly taunts himself. “I didn’t take advantage of her when she was afraid and now I’m not taking advantage of her when she’s grateful.” For the first time in his life, Filiberto García learns to feel unconditional love, and even how to merit it in return, and close to the novel’s end, he actually seems on the verge of the most unexpected late happiness. “All I know is how to start down this road, how to live carrying my solitude. Fucking solitude!”
In this very dire, unprecedentedly violent and corrupt moment now in Mexico’s history, Filiberto García’s voice feels more urgent and more necessary than ever. Not silence but the voice within: it’s the essential antidote, defiance, survival, the inexpungible road out of the past, where we can discover what we might be strong enough to finally give.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN
MEXICO CITY, JULY 2013
The Mongolian Conspiracy
I
At six o’clock in the evening he got up from bed and put on his shoes and a tie. In the bathroom, he rinsed his face and combed his short, black hair. He didn’t need to shave; he’d never had much of a beard, and one shave lasted three days. He splashed on a little Yardley cologne, returned to the bedroom, and took his.45 out of the drawer of the nightstand. He checked that the magazine was in place and that there was a cartridge in the chamber. He wiped it carefully with a chamois and slipped it into his shoulder holster. He picked up his switchblade, opened and closed it, then slid it into his pants’ pocket. Then he put on his beige trench coat and Stetson hat. Fully dressed, he went back to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. The coat was new, and the tailor had done a good job; you could barely see the bulge of the gun under his arm and over his heart. Standing there looking at his reflection, he unconsciously lifted his hand and touched the gun through his coat. He felt naked without it. Once, at La Ópera cantina, the professor said that was because of his inferiority complex, but the professor, as usual, was drunk, and anyway — the professor can go to hell! That.45 was a part of him, part of Filiberto García, as much as his name and his past. Fucking past!
He went from the bedroom into the living room. His small apartment was immaculate, its Sears furniture almost brand new. Not brand-new time-wise — brand-new wear-wise, because so few people visited and nobody ever used them. It could have been anybody’s room or a room in a cheap but decent hotel. There was not a single personal item: no pictures on the walls, no photographs, no books, not one armchair more worn out than another, no cigarette burns or rings on the coffee table in the middle of the room. He’d often thought about this furniture — his only belongings besides his car and the money he’d saved. He bought them when he moved out of the last of the many rooming houses he’d always lived in; they were the first ones they showed him at Sears, and he left everything exactly where they’d been set down by the deliveryman, who’d also hung up the curtains. Fucking furniture. But if you have an apartment, you have to have furniture, and when you buy an apartment building, you have to live in it. He stopped in front of the mirror on the console in the dining area and straightened his shiny red silk tie, then did the same with the black silk handkerchief in his chest pocket, the handkerchief that always smelled of Yardley. He examined his perfectly trimmed and polished nails. The only thing he couldn’t fix was the scar on his cheek, but the gringo who’d made it couldn’t fix being dead, either. Fair is fair. Fucking gringo! Seems he knew how to handle a knife, but not lead. His day had come in Juárez. Or, rather, his night. And let that be a lesson not to wake people up in the middle of the night, because the early bird doesn’t always get the worm but the worms got that gringo.