Matamoros Moreno let the other come out to fuse with him in body and soul. That’s how the Ayatollah Matamoros was born.
He was born to impress and defeat my defeated and insignificant father, Angel Palomar. Dear Dad, what’s happened to you? Why don’t we share our imagination any longer, you and I? When are we going to get together again, dear old Dad?
Thus he dragged all of us into his passionhope.
* * *
That same man, whatever he might be and however he might be, was now in a brilliant space of lights and reflections from silver and crystal, holding down a girl on the perfume counter in a replica of Bloomingdale’s seeing herself reflected in the thousand mirrors and the thousand eyes of that night. This ritual was expected of him, the spiritual guide was the carnal guide, the revolution did not exalt the spirit at the expense of the flesh: sex was part of the passion and the hope of the revolution for all, in which the perennially frustrated desires of Mexicans would be gloriously brought to fruition: Screw the boss’s daughter! Fuck the unreachable princess! Nail Don Ulises López’s daughter! Bring the impossible close to the possible in one ferocious and vibrant blow! Matamoros Moreno owed it to himself and owed this to all those who stared at him that August night in Las Lomas del Soclass="underline" to take off his cape, unbutton his fly, take out his rod, and bring it closer to the open legs of the valley-girl princess, who managed to murmur at the edge of the deaf-mute idiocy that would afflict her from then on:
“You can look but you can’t touch. You’re ugly, poor, and a prole. I’m not for you.”
That I’m not for you was the code murmured and repeated by everyone, which made everyone participate vicariously in Matamoros’s pleasure taken on Penny, who began to scream more, more, more, don’t take it out, don’t come, wait for me, more, more, more, she staring and the luminous guide looking at my father, the terrible joke jabbing him like a spear is the stare of my father hugged, naturally, by Uncle Homero Fagoaga, giggling: “A penis for Penny!”
6. Colonel Inclán raised his fingers
Colonel Inclán raised his fingers, knotty as mesquite roots, to his eyes, threatening everyone with something no one had ever seen: the eyes he always hid behind those pitch-black glasses. Neither Secretary Federico Robles Chacón nor President Jesús María y José Paredes had ever seen Colonel Inclán’s eyes and the two of them trembled slightly at the prospect. The mere idea of facing his gaze frightened them, and the colonel knew it. With a smile like a death’s-head, he dropped his clenched hand: If not now, when? Hadn’t he told the President that the time still hadn’t come? Well, now it had! The damn bodyguards weren’t worth a shit, they’d all either run away or joined up with the Coca-Cola or aymapepper or whatever that faith healer was calling himself, but they’d been killing the colonel’s best people, there were cops hanging off the lampposts, goddamn it! How far were they willing to let this thing go before they started shooting, how far, Mr. President, how far?
Colonel Inclán and Federico Robles Chacón exchanged ugly looks: Robles Chacón quietly stated that his generation had grown up in a flood of unpunished crimes that undermined the very thing they were attempting to strengthen: the Mexican State, the Party of the Revolution, and the controlled working class. The public image of the president, the PRI, the CTM, turned to dust just as their power was turned to mush by the memory of October 2, 1968, when the students were killed in the Tlateloco massacre, or by Corpus Christi in 1972, when they were again slaughtered on the Alvarado Bridge, or by May 10, 1990, when the strike by Mexican mothers was broken up when the Perisur mall was turned into a free fire zone. All that had to be paid for, said Robles, because the system no longer knew how to do with the opposition what it had always done, namely, to coopt it and to incorporate it into the system. These failures were very costly because they were debilitating both internally and externally: the mutilated fatherland was the price they paid for internal political inability and was not the result of external diplomatic ability.
“You’re a fast talker and you think a lot,” said the colonel, “but I want to know what to do with my machine guns now that the time is ripe to use them.”
“You go out and get hold of that Matamoros guy,” said Robles Chacón.
“What are you going to do, son?” exclaimed the President, who saw in Federico Junior the resurrection of Federico Senior, the man who had launched Paredes’s political and financial career back in the forties.
Inclán answered for him: “I’ll bring you your nut, and then I’m going to go to bed, hugging the pillow where my mom — may she rest in peace — laid her head down for the last time before she died. All right: calm down, gentlemen, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Let me sleep on it. But…”
The colonel stalked ominously out, and Federico made his point once more to the President. The chain of crimes must be broken: we need imagination and memory. I offered a symbol as a sacrament between memory and hope, said Robles to the President: were they the saviors? What do you think, Mr. President? Didn’t we win the game down in Acapulco when those asshole kids saved our butts from the Guerrero political crisis or when we liquidated Ulises López’s (may God have mercy on his soul) power and the colonel’s mom? News travels fast. Power remains. Or it should remain. Mr. President, be careful. This is a key play.
They didn’t speak for a long while, and then the minister said: I don’t know if you understand me, sir, and frankly I don’t care. I have to talk. I have to say something: one thing in particular. Almost seven years ago, I was a young volunteer during the September 19 earthquake. We didn’t need the PRI, a president, or anything else. We organized almost by instinct, I mean, all the young people in the neighborhood, or several neighborhoods. We took scooters, vans, pickups, whatever we could find, shovels, picks, bandages, one guy joined up with us carrying a bottle of Mercurochrome. What moved us that day? The sense of solidarity, a humanitarian feeling, the need to save our neighbors. We realized they were our neighbors! Do you understand me, sir? That morning, the man next to me was my fellow man. I was another fellow man. We went beyond institutions. But once the heroic moment passed, we went back to wondering what moved us that day. And our answer was something else. We acted because we were a generation of educated Mexicans, forty years of education, of reading, going to films, talking with everyone, studying Mexican history, whatever; it all came to the surface that painful morning. Civil society transcended the state. But it was the state that created civil society. That is our political conundrum, sir. We owe too much to the revolution to trade it in, no matter how old, smelly, or ugly it’s become, for adventure, whim, nothing. They say the system coopted me. I was a volunteer facing up to what was judged to be the disorder of a fearful government devoid of imagination. Today I’m Minister of State in a government that is neither better nor worse than all the others: your government. Our country’s history is its frustrated youth. But, despite everything, that’s what a mature country is: a corrupt country. And yet, sir, no matter how much I justify myself honestly, because you listen so to me patiently, sir, because you were a friend of my father, I want to tell you that the only good thing I ever did in my life I did that morning of the earthquake. I would exchange all my current power for the satisfaction of digging at a mountain of rubble and pulling out a little girl buried there alive and only a week old.