ELECTIONS COME EVERY SIX YEARS,
BUT MISFORTUNE IS ALWAYS WITH US
Sixty-three years, my dear niece and nephew, what do you think of that, and no end in sight, said Uncle Fernando: not Hitler, not Perón, not even Franco, only the U.S.S.R. beats us and now not even them because now we have a PAN president, which allows the PRI to blame the opposition for everything and to govern with more power than ever, and for that very reason Don Homero Fagoaga adjusts the microphone to the height of his multiple chins, warms up his delivery, the crowds gather, curious, trucked in, bribed, a hundred pesos, a taco, lemonade, a beer, a brass band, you name it, things might get screwed up if you don’t come, let’s see now about your property-line suit, let’s see, let’s sue, let’s sewer: with a great sense of satisfaction, Homero scanned the multitude of Mixtec citizens spread out in front of him, standing there on the pavement stones next to the sickly pines and laurels near the church and beyond the gates out to the unpaved street and the market tents of opulent misery. He looked at the heads of the multitude of varnished straw hats, the heads of the women crowned with green, blue, and scarlet silk, their tresses tied up with orange and lilac wool, four thousand, five thousand heads carrying traditional offerings, with earthenware pots balanced on their heads, heads offering tomatoes and herbs, grasshoppers and onions, and the nervous little heads of the children, first running like porcupines but finally they too, the happy children in the land of sad grownups, captured by the sinuous words of Don Homero Fagoaga, who was comparing the Guerrero sierra “to Italic Latium and Hellenic Attica, glorious sites of humanistic honor, cradles of democracy, crucibles of society where a metaphysical tremor made men and mountains, children and stones all speak in one voice to repeat with the immortal tribune, quaestor, and consul, my model in action and speech, Don Marcus Tullius Cicero, of Arpino, mens cuisque is est quisque, which in the glorious language we speak thanks to the Hispanic Motherland, to, of course, no discredit to the Autochthonous Motherland, which I see here exemplified in its roots of impassioned telluric tremor, means the spirit is the true being and where, oh citizens of Guerrero, would that truth be more profoundly true and scientifically rational and precise than here in the Mixtec homeland, ever fertile cradle of the glorious motherland — MEEXXXIIICCCOOO: Civis Romanum sum, the glorious tribune exclaimed with pride but without arrogance and here we can repeat, Civis Guerrerensis sum, because if indeed the uncle of Augustus declared his modest and for being modest moving preference to be first a son of his village and second a son of Rome, it was not merely for that reason that he stood a model for legions of his admirers then and now, but above all looking forward to, anticipating, the Mexican meritocracy that our Revolutionary Institutional Party offers with equal opportunities for all, for each and every one of you, to rise, as the Well-Deserving Don Benito Juárez rose, from illiterate shepherd to the Presidential Throne, from being first in place of honor in Rome and saying to his people: You have Caesar and his fortune with you!”
He cleared his throat, was offered a turbid glass of tepache, his microphone, which the vibrations of his mighty word and the pulsation of his potbelly had pushed far away, was readjusted, a little old drunk raised his bottle of Corona Extra and shouted out Long Live Don Porfirio Díaz and Homero: oh, fellow sons and daughters of Guerrero, let it at least be said of Homero Fagoaga that he serves both you and Our Lord in Heaven (pregnant pause): there is, fellow voters, fellow citizens, friends, brothers in the Lord (significant pause), and coreligionists of the Revolution (hasty conclusion: con brio), no corner of the world that smiles on us more than this one, as the ancient bard Horace said of his native Venosa.
Uncle Homero paused with a distant but fierce blaze in his eyes: irritated at the stupidity of the people hired to plaster the walls of Igualistlahuaca with posters and how they’d confused the hour, the name, the theme, and the message of his sacrorevolutionary oratory with a vulgar wrestling match between Batman and Robin, and what, by the way, could be further from his five thousand listeners, Homero suddenly said to himself, the Match or Cicero? No matter, he sighed: a Mexican can make do with anything because he can be anything: the PRI not only allows it but makes certain he can. But in that briefest of instants in which the local Party hierarchs thought some things and the candidate thought others and Uncle Fernando, my dad, and my mom, and I inside her (a mere figment of the collective unconscious inside the spirals of history, the vicious circle) felt ourselves pushed, first pressured secretly, then little by little pressed by a human, incomprehensible power that could not be located in any one individual and even less attributable to that grand no one which is everyone, finally trampled, tossed by the multitude of Mixtecs who moved forward with impassive faces, devoid of laughter, devoid of hatred, devoid of tears, with their unmoving terra-cotta features, as Uncle H. would say from his bandstand, with a blind determination and an enthusiasm that was frightening precisely because of its silence, a quiet horde of Mixtec Maenads moving toward the bandstand occupied by Uncle Homero and the Sixty-three Hierarchs: can you guess what happened next? They didn’t applaud, they didn’t throw tomatoes or grasshoppers at the distinguished personages on the dais: they just moved, advanced, my father later said, in the same way the waves, the clouds, all the beautiful and terrible things in this world, move, as Homero opened his arms to receive the love of the masses which would waft him on to a senatorial bench, from this dump to SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW! oh, my Uncle H., in what moment did you realize what the Sixty-three PRI Hierarchs had begun to guess, the worst, seeing that silent mass, hardhearted, devoid of emotion, moving toward him with the fatality of the six-year term, with an imperturbable resolution that was open to any and all interpretations, and Homero asked the young coffee-cup-sized orator on his left, whose name was Tezozómoc Cuervo, LL.D.:
“Did they like it?”
“My dear sir, see for yourself.”
Homero sighed in the face of this native political dexterity and turned to the hierarch on his right, an old man with a pear-shaped body and loose suspenders, famous in local circles as the first and foremost supporter of President Calles in the state of Guerrero, Don Bernardino Gutiérrez:
“Tell me: why don’t they clap?”
“They don’t know how.”
“Then why don’t they throw tomatoes and onions if they don’t like my speech?”