“Like this, like this…”
“Like this. Please, quickly.”
“But there’s no moon. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“There’s no moon here. We’ll have to wait. Or if you’d like, I could buy a paper moon and hang it over the bed.”
“You have no imagination, I told you already.”
“Listen, don’t cry. It’s no big deal.”
“Almost. You almost made it. What a shame.”
“Here.”
“What are you doing? What is this?”
“A present. In exchange for the toothpaste.”
“You killed my imagination. You don’t have any right to do that.”
“It’s three o’clock in the morning. You’ve got to get up very early. Want anything else?”
“Get up and close the bathroom door, please.”
“Good night.”
XIX
The Santiago authorities hosted a banquet in honor of the film crew. One of the patios of the colonial-era town hall was set up with tables and chairs and decorated with crepe and paper lanterns. The functionaries were distributed equitably: the governor with the director, the municipal president with the leading man and his girlfriend, the commander of the military zone, a general of strikingly Oriental appearance, with Diana and me.
They say the French general Maxime Weygand was the bastard son of Empress Carlota by a certain Colonel López, Maximilian’s aide-de-camp. López betrayed the Emperor twice: first with the empress, and then during the Republican siege of Querétaro, when he opened the way for Juárez’s troops to capture the Austrian Emperor. By then, Carlota had already gone back to Europe to beg help from Napoleon III, another traitor, and Pope Pius IX. She went mad in the Vatican, and was the first woman (officially) to spend the night in the pontifical bedrooms.
Did she go crazy or was that merely a pretext to cover up her pregnancy and delivery? She never again left the seclusion of her castle, but the royal government of Belgium supplied young cadet Weygand, born in 1867 in Brussels, with tuition at St. Cyr. He became chief of Foch’s general staff during World War I and supreme commander when World War II broke out. In France, the Manchu face — high cheekbones, Mayan nose, lips as thin as a knife blade and crowned by a sparse, very fine mustache, barely a shadow — must have caused some comment. Short, small-boned, with a rather stiff bearing, his black hair shaved at the temples: I’m describing General Weygand only to describe General Agustín Cedillo, commander of the Santiago military zone. I associate him with the empire imposed on Mexico by Napoleon III because, physical parallels aside, there survived on one of the balconies of the patio, surely a Republican oversight, the arms of the empire: the eagle and serpent but with a crown above and, at the foot of the cactus, the motto EQUITY IN JUSTICE.
Sitting opposite me and next to Diana, General Cedillo, curious, looked us over out of the corner of his eye, as if he kept a direct gaze in reserve for great occasions. I imagined that those could only be challenges and death. I had no doubt whatsoever: this man would look with perfect equanimity directly at a firing squad whether giving it orders to shoot or receiving its bullets. He would take care, on the other hand, not to look directly at anyone in daily life, because in our country, among men, a direct stare is a challenge and provokes one of two reactions. The coward lowers his eyes — lower your head and step aside, as the song says. The brave man endures the stare of the other to see who will lower his eyes first. The situation moves to another plane when one brave man pronounces the ritual words “What are you looking at me for, mister?” The violence increases if the “mister” is excluded: “What are you looking at me for?” And there’s no way out if a direct insult is substituted: “What are you looking at me for, stupid, asshole, son of a bitch?”
Familiar with the protocol of eyes in Mexico, I looked at General Cedillo out of the corner of my eye the same way he was looking at Diana and me. Glancing around the patio, I saw that the same look was being repeated at each table. Everyone except the innocent gringos avoided one another’s eyes. The governor peered surreptitiously at the commander and likewise at the governor; the mayor tried to avoid the eyes of both of them, and I saw in a corner of the patio a group of young people just standing there, among them the boy who’d approached me in the plaza to propose we talk, the boy with the Zapata mustache and languid eyes named Carlos Ortiz, my namesake.
The commander noticed my glance and asked me, without turning his head, “Do you know the students here?”
I told him I didn’t, only by accident, that one of them had read my books.
“There are no bookstores here.”
“How terrible. And how shameful.”
“That’s what I say. Books have to be brought in from Mexico City.”
“Ah, they’re exotic import products,” I said, flashing my friendliest smile but slipping into the humorous, mischievous vein that conversations with authority figures invariably provoke in me. “Subversive, perhaps.”
“No. Whatever we know here, we find out by reading the newspapers.”
“Then you must not know much — the local papers are very bad.”
“I mean the common folk.”
That old-fashioned expression made me laugh and forced me to think about the commander’s social origins. His appearance, I admit, was an enigma. Class differences in Mexico are so brutal that it’s easy to pigeonhole people: Indian, peasant, worker, lower middle class, etcetera. What’s interesting are people who can’t easily be categorized, people who not only rise socially or become refined but, in rising, bring with them another kind of refinement, secret, extremely ancient, inherited from who knows how many lost ancestors — princes perhaps or shamans, or warriors in one of the thousand archaic nations of old Mexico.
If that weren’t the case, where would such people get their reserves of patience, stoicism, dignity, and discretion, which contrast so strikingly with my country’s noisy, vain, ostentatious, and cruel plutocracies? In reality, Mexico’s two classes are composed, one, of people who allow themselves to be seduced by Western models that are alien, lacking as they do a culture of death and the sacred, and who become the vulgar, stupid middle class and, two, a group that preserves the Spanish and Indian heritage of aristocratic reserve. There’s nothing more pathetic in Mexico than the vulgar middle-class joker, situated between the Indian aristocracy and the Western bourgeoisie, who says hello by poking his finger in your belly button or runs on by without turning his face and shouts, “That guy with the little tie,” “That guy with the little hat,” “That guy with the little mustache …”
General Cedillo (so very similar to Maxime Weygand) seemed to come from these same depths as General Joaquín Amaro, who left the Yaqui mountains of Sonora, a red kerchief on his head and an earring hanging from one ear, to join the Northwest Division of Álvaro Obregón (a blond young man with blue eyes who, as a child, delivered milk to my maternal grandmother in Alamos) but who, thanks to his beautiful Creole wife, became a polo player and a most elegant martial figure and, by virtue of his own intelligence, the creator of the modern Mexican Army, which emanated from the revolution.
It was from that mold, it seemed to me, that General Cedillo came. He lacked the colorful touches of General Amaro, who had only one eye and spoke impeccable French. But in 1970, it wasn’t hard to imagine General Cedillo in the ranks of the revolution. He would have been a very young boy when he joined up, true, but he was also very old because he inherited centuries of refined peasant taciturnity. Diana stared at him, fascinated, admitting without saying so that she didn’t understand him. I, thinking I did understand him, kept to myself, ceding to the general a margin of impenetrable mystery but also feeling the writer’s inevitable urge: to mock authority.