The opportunity to defend a legally constituted government, which for the moment consisted of some old archives and a desk on wheels.
I don’t think our fatherland was ever so poor or so beloved by Mexicans as it was then. Have you seen, sweetheart, how ugly this country becomes whenever it is wealthy and arrogant? Well, you would have seen it beautiful in my dream.
What did I have to say in those days, honey? Nothing: I was a poker-faced lancer protecting the President, who one day decided to redistribute the Church’s wealth, to make people respect the laws of men so they’d be better at respecting the laws of God, and to take privileges away from the Army and the aristocracy. Just like that, the roof fell in, and all the furies in heaven and hell were loosed on the land. He defeated the conservatives, but the conservatives left him saddled with a foreign debt of fifteen million pesos, which was the price of some bonds bought by French bankers in exchange for a pound of Mexican flesh. The bonds had no real value. The debt, for which France demanded payment, did. Juárez suspended payments. Napoleon III responded with an invasion and an Empire. Looking at Don Ben, you could see he was so serious, so worthy of his position, so — how to put it? Susanita, he was, well, so sure of his role in history. And since he didn’t doubt for a minute that despite all its sorrow Mexico would end up being an independent and democratic country, he never doubted it was his job to make it so, no more, no less. I really wanted to ask him, listen, Don Benito, and if you’re not here, will this country collapse, will it go on fighting, or what? I don’t know how he would have answered. Lots of people thought they did know: that he thought himself indispensable. And since he was heroic, poor, and a firm believer in the law, there was no one who could argue with him. There was something else: he was a model husband and father. He protected his family; he sent them to the United States to be safe; he wrote his wife and children, punctually and lovingly. Excuse me, Susy, but I was starting to get upset: I saw him sitting like an idol inside his carriage, imperturbable, dressed all in black, frock coat, trousers, vest, a Zapotec idol dressed up — as what?
From looking at him so much, I ended up saying to myself, listen to me now, sweetie, that this man was disguised as something he loved and hated at the same time. Why was he so different? Sometimes he’d let it out in conversation; he’d been an Indian boy, a shepherd in Oaxaca, illiterate and without the Castilian language until he was twelve; between the twelfth and the twentieth year, just imagine, my dove, that farm boy, dispossessed heir to a spectral culture, as old as it was dead, Susana, that boy, lost in the light of a magic simplicity, learns to look on his past as an irrational night, can you imagine that, honey? A horror from which he’d have to save all Mexicans: in ten years he learns to speak Spanish, learns to read and write, becomes a liberal lawyer, an admirer of European revolutions, of U.S. democracy, of the law-loving French bourgeoisie, marries a white bourgeois lady, dresses up as a Western professional man, and just when he finds himself armed with all the writings and laws of Western civilization, boom! Susy, that same world he admires so much turns against him, denies him the right to modernize Mexico, denies Mexico her independence, and I wept for Benito Juárez, I swear I did, angel, when I understood that: the man was sad, divided, masked by his great contradiction, which from then on would belong to all of us, to all Mexicans: we would feel uncomfortable with our past, but even more so with our present. We would be in permanent disharmony with our modernity, which was supposed to make us happy in a flash and which only brought us disasters. How Mr. Juárez stared sadly on that desert he was rapidly leaving behind, where nothing was his, not a cactus, not a yucca.
And there I was wanting to tell him, let yourself go, Don Ben, don’t hold it all in, I, your most screwed-up lancer, tell you this because I love you and I spend my time looking at you through the window of your carriage, I look at you as I bounce along to the lean and hungry trot of my horse and you lurch along to the broken and violent rhythm of your carriage; the ink spills, Mr. President, the papers are covered with blots, your top hat slides over on your head, but you are impassive, as if you were presiding over a court in Poitiers when you’re right here with us, surrounded by mesquite and Apache feathers; just look over there, look at what Durango is, what Coahuila is … Christ!
The first time I saw him break down just a little bit was when common sense told him, listen here, you simply cannot go on carrying the archives of the Republic from the presidency of Guadalupe Victoria to yesterday as if they were nothing more than a bundle of love letters: Don Benito, we’re talking about tons of paper here, even if you think paper creates reality, as do all the blessed shysters of our Holy Roman juridical tradition, there is a limit to human patience: the papers are going to drown us, are we going to lose the paper war the way we lost the War of the Cakes in ’38 against these selfsame frogs? I swear his mask cracked a bit when he resigned himself to leaving the archives hidden in a cave in the Sierra del Tabaco, over in Coahuila. He bade farewell to those papers as if they were his own children: as if he had just buried each and every piece of paper, each of which for him had a soul.
He never closed his door. It was one of his principles: the door would always be open so that anyone who wanted to see him could come in. Also so that people would always see he had nothing to hide.
He was as clear as crystal. At times he went so far as to take the liberty of sitting down to write with his back to the shacks, the old ruined mission buildings, the houses of friends of his that happened to be on this road which we thought was the road of exile — but no, he’d say, it was merely the desert, which is not the same thing. The point is that for a lancer under orders to protect him, he made my life very difficult because of his self-conscious acts of bravado, fitting for a national leader destined to be immortalized in marble.
On one occasion, right in the Chihuahua desert, he got tired of writing all night and watched me guarding the open door that faced the desert, me half asleep because it was just coming on dawn, but leaning on my lance, which was firmly stuck into that hard earth. He smiled and said that the gray brush surrounding us was wiser than men. That at dawn I should look over the rise punctuated by bushes spaced out perfectly with an almost legal symmetry, like that of a good civil code, he said. Did I know why it was laid out that way? I didn’t. And he said that the bushes kept their distance from each other because their roots are highly poisonous. They would kill any plant that grew next to them. We’ve got to keep our distance in order to respect each other and to survive. That is the foundation of peace, he said, and he quickly walked over to sit down again, to write something rapid, short, and assuredly lapidary.
No, I would have wanted to say to him, it isn’t that I want to see you going to the bathroom, wiping yourself, or expelling a gas, Don Benito, or even picking your nose, Mr. President, nothing like that, but something that would not harm your dignity or mine, that’s it, I would like to see you brush your teeth, Mr. Juárez, or shine your boots, because don’t tell me you don’t do it yourself, here we are rolling around among cactus and scrub and you don’t have a valet, as Maximilian does, but you always have shoes shinier than those of any Austrian archduke: how do you do it? Would you lose some of your dignity if you let yourself be seen shining your shoes, sir?
We celebrated Columbus Day, October 12, 1864, in the city of Chihuahua, and President Juárez spent it reading back issues of newspapers written in English that had arrived from New Orleans, God knows how, but he had memories of that port in Louisiana where he’d been exiled by the dictator Santa Anna and had earned his living by rolling cigars in a tobacco factory (oh, Lord, and now his beloved papers were all rolled up in the Sierra del Tabaco, he thought ironically) and he learned English, just as his children were learning it now in schools in New York.