The professor was dozing off in the living room.
“Where’s the deceased, Cap’n?”
“Come with me.”
They went into the bedroom. The light from the window shone on the bed and the inscrutable shape of the corpse under the sheet. García pulled two chairs up to the foot of the bed. He told the professor to sit down in one of them. Then he went into the kitchen and brought two glasses, filled them with cognac, and gave one to the professor. He sat down, holding the other one.
“Thank you,” the professor said.
“Say a prayer, Professor.”
“What prayer? I can’t remember any. .”
“I’m asking you as my friend. Just pray, even if there aren’t any candles.”
The professor began to recite something, like he used to when he was an altar boy. The words came out all mixed up, slurred from the booze.
“Requiem eternam dona eis Domine.”
García took a long slug. The gun pressed against his heart. Fucking wake! Fucking solitude!
A note about the author
While working on this translation, Katherine Silver, with the kind help of Francisco Prieto, got in touch with the author’s offspring. Bernal’s youngest daughter, Cocol, offered insights into her father’s idiosyncratic use of certain terms and turns of phrase and also generously shared some family lore. New Directions asked if her stories could be added as an afterword to The Mongolian Conspiracy. Cocol agreed, “with the caveat that I am speaking from the myopic perspective of a fifteen-year-old, tinged by family history, interpretation of memories, and some stories my Aunt Lola (a very creative woman), my dad (also very creative), and my Uncle Luis (a lawyer — not so creative) told me. I am conscious that my reality is very much my own, from a very narrow vantage point. Just some loose insights that anyone is welcome to. Or as the Italians say: Si non e vero e ben trovato. (If it’s not true, it’s a good find.)” Asked about her father’s political affiliations, his philias or phobias, as del Valle asked Feliberto, Cocol replied, “It’s a complicated story.”
My family, on my father’s mother’s side, were ultra-right-wing monarchists and devout Catholics. In the mid-1800’s, my great-great grandfather, the historian Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta, who owned seven sugar haciendas in Morelos (of which Santa Ana de Tenango still remains in the family), made a bet with a cousin that he could turn a healthy profit while treating his workers decently — even giving them above-average wages, their own land, medical care, and no company store. The experiment was a success and he made a profit. He didn’t convince anyone else to try it as he had hoped, but as a result the family is still very respected in the village of Tenango. He saw this as his social and Christian duty. He later came afoul of the Church when the bishop ordered him to write a historical account of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He complied but told the bishop that faith and history do not mix and although in his heart he believed in the Virgin, the historian in him could not justify her existence other than as a myth. He wrote that there was absolutely no historical proof of the apparition. I believe he was excommunicated, and I do know that most of his friends deserted him.
Partly as a result of this and to regain acceptance into Mexican society, my great grandfather, Don Luis García Pimentel, became an almost fanatical right-wing Catholic. His daughter, my grandmother, Doña Rafaela Garcia Pimentel y Elguero, even gave our best hacienda (Santa Clara de Montefalco) to the Opus Dei. Anyway, Don Joaquín’s experiment has been a source of great pride in the family.
The Bernals were very very rich landowners from Tlaxcala who came to save the decaying García Pimentel family from penury: although they went along with it, the Bernals did not particularly share the García Pimentels’ enthusiasm for Catholicism — my grandfather, Rafael Bernal y Bernal, being a bon vivant of great proportions.
Then, in the third year of my grandparents’ Paris honeymoon, the revolution started and their world was completely turned upside down. The García Pimentels lost most of their lands and, later, so did the Bernals. There was hunger followed by the disillusionment of the post-revolution period.
My father grew up with a devout mother and a hedonistic father who adored each other and traveled constantly. My father became a mix of both: an intellectual who devoured Nietzsche and Sartre, spoke Latin fluently, and was a devout Catholic, too. He was big in the Sinarquista movement of the ’40s and ’50s — he was actually very proud of having been in jail eighteen times for “disolución social.” He was fiercely opposed to Benito Juárez, believing that the separation of church and state robbed the nation of its soul. He was also a supporter of Franco. So you can say he was very right wing. At the same time, with my uncle Ignacio Bernal (a famous archaeologist), he made a lot of money out of cheating foreigners at bridge and paraded a series of very elegant and expensive mistresses.
Not sure what exactly happened in the ’50s, but he left Sinarquismo and wrote a poem repudiating his support of Franco. He went to trial for defacing the statue of Juárez on the Alameda (he hired mountain climbers to drape a hood and a noose over Juárez) and was pardoned by Miguel Alemán (a pardon which he refused on the basis that he hadn’t done anything illegal). Then, in 1956, he met my mother, who was a young divorcee working in radio, and that was it. He left the Church (and his current mistress, the Princess Agatha of Ratibor) in order to marry her.
I was born in 1957 in Caracas to an atheist father, who was by then left-leaning, and an agnostic mother, both of whom proudly had me baptized in the cathedral in the very font where Simón Bolivar had been baptized. So. . go figure.
He remained a searching man, struggling between his beliefs, family loyalties, his own deep intellectual curiosities, and an openness to new ideas, which did not, however, extend to accepting my brother’s pink shirts.
He really believed in women’s rights. I never heard him say that I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. On the contrary, he pushed me to read and write, and I just had to mention a book, and the next day it would be mine. Any intellectual pursuit was encouraged. He expected from me the same as from my brothers.
I asked him once whether he was left or right. He said that what had once been left was now right. At fourteen I was not going to say that I had no idea what he meant, so I inquired no further.
I think that being a diplomat freed him from having to declare political affiliations. He represented the government and he did that well. Within these parameters, he did manage to express himself quite freely intellectually. He was a man who, given a good reason, was not afraid to change his mind and he did so often.
Then, at the end of his life, in 1971, he did go back to the Church. I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I think he was reaching for comfort before death.
Around the time my father was writing El complot mongol, we lived in Lima. The military coup that toppled Belaunde’s first administration had just happened and the military junta was in power. My dad hated the military (any military) with passion. He thought they were subhuman.
My dad wrote El complot mongol in about a month, taking a break from writing a history of the Pacific Ocean, El gran oceano, which he had been working on for over twenty years. (El gran oceano was published by El Fondo de Cultura Económica: it’s about the cultural exchanges along the Pacific throughout the centuries.)
When El complot mongol came out in 1968, my dad was First Secretary at the Mexican Embassy in Lima. A lot of junior bureaucrats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Mexico City had read the book and were calling for my father’s head on a platter, because they were convinced that del Valle was meant to be Minister Carrillo Flores. My dad, summoned to Mexico, gave Carrillo Flores a copy of the book. Carrillo Flores loved the book and gave it to all his friends for Christmas. Dad summed it up with one of his sayings — Al que le quede el saco, que se lo ponga. (More or less: If the shoe fits, wear it.)