THERE IS NO NATION!
and he told them
WE WANT A NATION!
WE WANT A COUNTRY!
all culminating in the phrase
LESS CLASS AND MORE NATION
and they shouted back what he said in chorus and now he asked them: Where are we? What should be our idea? And they supplied the slogan that would link the nation to its Prophet:
WE ARE ALL HERE!
We are all here, the long-haul truckers roared, gathered in the bullring and proud of having invented this unifying slogan, and their “We are all here” was a “We already exist” and “There is a country” and “There will be a nation” and “The Virgin will come to help us so that we, Brothers, can help the country”: Go out over all Mexico, organize those you find in the name of the Nation of Guadalupe and the Ayatollah Matamoros, who is, listen carefully now, the YOUNGER BROTHER OF JESUS CHRIST, who wants for our Mexico
Guadalupan nationalism! Your kind!
Catholic morality! Your kind!
Holy Little Mother! Your kind!
New energy! Everybody’s kind!
New Faith! Our kind!
shouted the Ayatollah and all answered in chorus, on foot, inflamed by the mission. No one had given a hoot about them before, no one had ever preached to them before, except some Protestant missionaries who gave them decals that said I DRIVE WITH JESUS, but they forgot to include the Little Mother. That’s why they all carried their polychromed picture of Mamadoc, most loving Mother of all our appetites. But who was this holy woman standing next to the Ayatollah, this hatchet-faced Indian woman, hair pulled straight back, a severe bun, without a speck of makeup: savagely melancholy eyes, lips as straight as an arrow, like a blessing, like a promise, dressed in black, no shape, her head a shiny porcelain skull, her body a furrow of age-old suffering, early deaths, lost children, absent husbands, hands simultaneously cold and boiling, red from washing so much, from grinding so much, dry and yellow from burying so much, from praying so much?
The August rain poured down, but they all went on chanting the slogans with the Ayatollah in the center, his arms spread wide, and the rain running off his face like tears and the voice of the Woman, of the Mother, she never wept, begging her sons:
Organize and move the nation of Guadalupe!
Carry the message! Carry the message!
One hundred and thirty million Mexicans!
One hundred and thirty million sons and lovers of mine!
Follow the Mexican Ayatollah!
Who am I? asked Concha Toro with a trace of skepticism and a degree of shock as she sat before her dressing-room mirror, rapidly transforming her “look” and her makeup (actually: her lack of “look” and cosmetics, her Gothic and Araucanian nakedness) into her usual character, the Chilean bolero singer, in order to stand before the nocturnal audience, but already imagining, day after day, her reappearance as Galvarina Donoso, the sorceress, the mother of the Ayatollah.
Damn fool idea! It surprised her to see in the mirror how easily her Basque and Irish ancestors disappeared from her face and how the essential Araucanian face of Chile reappeared.
However, she did feel that something was missing from what she saw. As she scrutinized the mirror in front of her and was surprised not to see the number of the beast 666 appear, or the seventh cup filled with the wine of God’s vengeance, or the gathering (in the bullring, in the cabaret, on the highways) of the One Hundred and Forty-four Thousand just men called for by St. John on Patmos.
That frightened her.
However, she did see a lost but serene woman clearly reflected in the center of the jungle.
2. The Ayatollah Matamoros’s first order
The Ayatollah Matamoros’s first order was: NO MORE MONEY! He put his power to the test: he triumphed: the carts Made in Whymore full of devalued paper money (the Mexican peso plummeted to 25,000 per dollar in August) were exchanged for barrels of oysters made in Guaymas: all it took was for the long-haul drivers to refuse to accept money in exchange for goods in the markets of MonteKing, GuadalaHarry, or Makesicko City.
“I’ll give you this load of Sheetrock for a load of pineapples.”
“I don’t want your hardware. How about you take my wire and give me your steers?”
The pineapple sellers and the owners of the steers exchanged the wire and the Sheetrock for a delivery bike or for labor to build an outhouse, the drivers ate some of the pineapples and slaughtered a couple of steers, but they exchanged the rest for bricks, which they brought from Pachuca, where they had too many, to Zihuatanejo, where they didn’t have enough: Federico Robles Chacón realized what was happening, a political genius had organized the most mobile sector of the Mexican populace, the long-haul truckers, and in one stroke had eliminated the money economy and restored the barter system: Why? The minister was scratching his head in his SEPAFU office: Why? before asking himself Who? From the terrace of his ministry he could see the bonfires of paper money burning all over the city, people of every class throwing bills of all denominations into the fire, but the poor more than the rich, the poor having no doubt whatsoever about the worthlessness of the paper, which wasn’t even good for wrapping things: yesterday’s newspaper, a brown paper bag — these were worth more than currency; the poor knew the value of the barter system better than the rich, they knew how to set it up and how to present things as if they were sumptuous gifts and do it all by means of an incredibly swift army, the nation’s truckers. Why didn’t it occur to me before! Federico Robles Chacón slapped himself across the face to release his fury, and the official statistician hidden in the closet heard that sadistic slap-slap and decided to stay right where he was, so those slaps wouldn’t reach him, and besides, he didn’t understand what was going on, not only in the city but in what was left of the country.
From his office, Federico Robles Chacón could see the desperate outskirts of the city and observe the repetition of the nightmare that every millionaire, government functionary or not, and every government functionary, millionaire likely as not, had been having obsessively for over a decade: on the fringes of the suffering city, the outskirts of the lost city’s garbage dump and the sand dumps and the caves and cardboard houses of the anonymous cities inhabited by millions of people as anonymous as the places in which they lived, the shit city where seven million animals and three million human beings defecated right out in the open so that thirty million people could breathe the shit dust, an army of the miserable was waiting for the order to march on the downtown fortresses of power and money. No one had anticipated a Zapata-style agrarian revolution, never again; and yet it would have been easier — said Minister Robles Chacón to President Paredes as the President distractedly played with a new kind of ball-and-cup game made of a tiny barrel of oil and a drilling rig with a hole in it — to manipulate peasants than these marginalized urban masses: the peasant had a history, a culture, his past was known, as was his face, his little wiles; but these new people had no history, no culture, no face to recognize: they were the forgotten, and no one had ever had to fight with them, manage them, defeat them while making them think they’d won, the way the agrarian rebels had been taken care of. What are we going to do?