“Did you have problems with the students in 1968?” I suddenly asked, trying to provoke him.
“The same as everywhere else. It was a movement of discontent that honored the kids who took part in it,” he answered, surprisingly.
I felt outflanked by the general and didn’t like it one bit.
“They were rebels,” I said, “just as you were when you were young, General.”
“They’ll give it up,” he responded, taking the lead I’d involuntarily given him. “He who isn’t a rebel as a boy becomes one as an old man. And an old rebel is ridiculous.”
He was about to use another, cruder term, but he glanced at Diana and lightly bowed his head, like a mandarin entering a pagoda.
“Was all that blood necessary?” I asked point-blank.
He looked over at the governor’s table with a spark of scorn in his eyes. “During the first demonstration, there were those who asked me to call out the troops and put it down. All I said was, Gentlemen, blood’s going to flow here, but not yet. Just wait a bit.”
“You have to choose the right moment for repression?”
“You have to know when what the people want is order and security, my friend. People get fed up with disorder. The party of stability is the majority party.”
That friendly allusion was in itself a challenge, its intent to put me in an inferior position vis-à-vis the man of power. And that power was the power of knowledge, of information. Inwardly, I laughed: first he talked about books and newspapers, only to let me know that true information, the kind that matters when you have to take political action, does not come from what Spaniards call the “black stuff,” printed words on paper.
A sumptuous regional dish was served then, interrupting the talk. It was pork rump with enmoladas, and I hoped to heaven I would not have to witness the stereotyped reaction on the Yankees’ faces — the shock, repugnance, terror, and incredulity. To eat or not to eat? That was the justified dilemma of the gringo in Mexico. I gave Diana a significant look, urging her to try the hot dish, begging her not to succumb to the stereotype. I’d already told her, I eat everything in your country or in my own, and I deal with getting sick there or here. You give a pathetic impression of helplessness when a dish of Mexican food is put in front of you. Why is it that we can have two cultures and you only one, which you comfortably expect to find wherever you go?
Diana tried the enmoladas, and next to her the governor laughed as if barking, as he watched the movie star taste the dish that embodied local pride.
“There are people who are novices in politics who get ahead of events and ruin everything,” said the general, less circumspectly but with growing scorn. He avoided looking at the governor, though he had to listen to the strange noises the man was making. The sounds could be explained either as culinary euphoria or because that moment the inevitable mariachi band entered, playing their inevitable anthem, the song of the Black Woman. “My little black-skinned sweety, eyes like fluttering paper,” intoned the jolly governor.
“But you could have avoided those errors by seizing power,” I said provocatively.
“Who do you mean?”
“You. The military.”
For the first time, General Cedillo opened his eyes and raised the folds on his forehead where his nonexistent eyebrows should have been.
“Not a chance. Don Benito Juárez would be spinning in his grave.”
I remembered the shepherd boy who’d been in the English film.
“Do you mean that the Mexican Army is not the Argentine Army, that you respect republican institutions come what may?”
“I mean that we are an army that emanated from the revolution, a people’s army …”
“That nevertheless fires on the people if necessary.”
“If it’s ordered by the constituted authority, civilians,” he said without so much as a blink, but I sensed that I’d wounded him, that I’d touched an open sore, that the memory of Tlatelolco was shameful to the army, which wanted to forget the episode and did not speak about it. But at the same time I was to understand what Cedillo was telling me: We only obeyed orders, our honor is intact.
“You shouldn’t have done the work of the police or the hawks,” I said, and immediately regretted it, not on my account but for my American friends, for Diana. I was breaking my own rule, the one I’d explained to the student Carlos Ortiz: I have no right to compromise them politically.
I was sorry for another reason. By comparing the army to cops and hired assassins, I had insulted it unnecessarily, I thought to myself, just because I was playing around, just because I, too, was a provocateur. But as always happens with me, the more I swore I wouldn’t get involved in politics, the more politics got involved with me.
“You were very critical of what happened in ’68, I know,” he said, wiping the pork-rump sauce off his lips.
“I didn’t say even half of what I wanted to,” I answered, now out of control, all but foaming at the mouth.
“Tell your girlfriend to be careful,” said the Mexican samurai, suddenly transformed into a genuine warlord, owner of the lives gathered that evening around his will, his whim, his mystery.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Tell your girlfriend to be careful? Is that what the general said? As if to remove any doubts, Cedillo then did what I feared he’d do: he looked at Diana. He stared directly at her, with no disguise, no reticence, a savage glint in his eyes, where I discerned, along with terror, lust, and death, an instinct tamed for centuries the more easily to leap on its prey, a prey already overwhelmed in that “right moment” the general had mentioned when we talked about 1968. He wanted her, he was threatening her, he hated me — he hated both of us, Diana and me. The commander’s eyes communicated to us in that moment an intense social hatred, an implacable class opposition, a resentment I felt in waves, and the intensity of that soldier’s stare (usually veiled) communicated it to the others at the table — the mayor, the governor, the local bigwigs, the bodyguards. Those brutes watched Cedillo like people receiving the Host at Communion who feel their bodies and souls full of the Lord. They stirred, moved around, regrouped, advanced slightly, raised their hands to the secret guns in their armpits — until the general’s eyelids lowered and the order to stand at ease was conveyed to them by those eyes so accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed without hesitation, from afar, blindly, if it came to that.
It was like being caught in a sudden undertow; the tide went out, the instant of tension went no further, the bodyguards went back to smoking and standing around in Masonic circles, the governor, the idiot, played the fool, the mayor ordered the coffee served. But within me the alarm the general aroused continued. His threat hadn’t dissipated; I knew it would be with me, much to my regret, for the rest of my time in Santiago, screwing up my love, my work, my tranquillity …
“Don’t get involved in anything in Mexico,” I told Diana after I had used her as an excuse to say good-bye. She had a 5:00 a.m. call, so we rose and slowly left the patio. “You get involved, and you’ll never get out of it.”
She gave me a determined look, as if I’d insulted her by recommending caution.
I was pleased to see the group of students in a corner of the patio and to realize I could easily tell them apart from the bodyguards. There was no way to confuse the two. Carlos Ortiz was very different from the general and his bodyguards. Knowing the students were different and new saved the evening for me — perhaps they themselves were saved … Even so, my anxiety about Diana because of what the general said prevailed over any desire for satisfaction. What did he mean? How could a Hollywood actress bother, interfere with, provoke a general in the Mexican Army?