9. MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO BERNAL HERRERA
I realize, Bernal, that you must carry out a full security check before allowing a complete unknown like Nicolás Valdivia into the inner sanctum of the presidency. I’ve read with great care the dossier you sent me. Born December 12, 1986, in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Mexican father, American mother. Both worked in El Paso, Texas, but were Mexican residents. Nicolás’s birth certificate can be found in the public records office of Ciudad Juárez. Parents killed in a car accident when Valdivia was fifteen.
Then there’s a very large gap until Valdivia reappears in Paris, a student at the same college you and I attended. I tested him out. He’s very familiar with the subjects and the teachers there. At the Mexican embassy in France he met General Mondragón von Bertrab, at the time the military attaché to the mission. Von Bertrab used the young ENA student for writing up reports, collecting information, etc. It was the general who brought him back to Mexico, where Valdivia spent five years studying on his own in his native state of Chihuahua.
What happened to him between the age of fifteen and twenty-two? I’ve asked our current defense secretary, von Bertrab, for information. He simply smiled. What can one really know about the life of a teenage orphan forced to earn a living all on his own?
Von Bertrab assuaged my fears. If you need confirmation, just ask him. Nicolás was a bit of a vagabond: working on Mexican tankers and Dutch freighters that often dropped anchor at Tampico, reading a lot, studying when he could find the time, finishing off the subjects he needed for his degree. And then finally, he got himself accepted at the ENA thanks to the intervention of the general, who backed the application with all the necessary documents attesting to Valdivia’s unusual and difficult education, his hard work, his tremendous efforts. You know — a youth straight out of a story by Jack London or Ernest Hemingway. .
Can you ask for a better recommendation, Bernal? Perhaps he has some mistakes buried in his past, but I must ask you once again to trust my feminine intuition. Nicolás Valdivia looks at me with the face of an angel. He tells me he loves me. And I let him love me. But I’ve also seen that other look, surreptitious, the one he has when he thinks I’m not looking. That “lean and hungry” look that Shakespeare portrayed in Julius Caesar. The look of ambition. A little devil with the face of an angel? What else could we possibly ask for if not this, dear friend, to defeat Tácito de la Canal? Let Valdivia owe us everything, and give us everything, too. My intuition tells me that he’s our ideal agent. You yourself have always told me that in politics new blood is necessary, even if it’s dangerous.
Darling, let me be the one to take the risk and pay the price for the damage, if any. You and I are playing a game of political realism. Idealistic at times, like our president was, so disastrously on January 1. But in the end, we must be realists, because we must deal with de facto responses to our de jure behavior. The good thing about realpolitik is that you can do an about-face and still keep your basic principles intact. Nicolás Valdivia is an accident of realpolitik, yours and mine. We can get rid of him as easily as we’ve furthered his career.
Believe it or not, I’ve gone so far as to tell him that when he makes it to the presidency I’ll be his, sexually. And I think he believed me! Or at least my proposal sparked his imagination and his desire.
Be that as it may, we needed to get one of our own into the tarantula’s cave. If our little ant Valdivia gets stung and dies, tant pis pour lui. We’ll just replace him with someone else. For the moment, he’s our man in Los Pinos. Leave it to me, I’ll take care of duping and manipulating him as I see fit. And rest assured, if he’s smart, he’ll be a faithful servant.
When I said to him, “You’ll be the president of Mexico,” young Valdivia didn’t even flinch. He showed no astonishment. Perhaps he thought just what you’re thinking now: What if he betrays us, what if his indiscretion or ambition gets the better of him and he reveals our plan?
I think this boy is very intelligent. He knows how to read people’s eyes. He read mine: If you betray me, nobody will believe you. They’ll just think you’re an ambitious little operator and perhaps a very big fool. I don’t need you as a victim. I need you as an ally. A little Lucifer like you is exactly what I need.
He’s as vain as he is astute. He believes me. We will, however, run into problems when he’s stripped of his illusions. He may react vindictively. We must make very sure that our victims have no weapons for revenge.
10. “LA PEPA” ALMAZÁN TO TÁCITO DE LA CANAL
My love, my precious baldy, how could I possibly mind writing letters to you since writing letters is, in fact, all I’ve done since the day we became lovers, and I’ve been careful enough, now more than ever, my dearest love, not to mention your sacred name in writing? You know how I feeclass="underline" I’d love it if one day, after many years have passed, someone were to open the old trunk that once belonged to my grandmother from the Yucatán and chance upon my bundle of love letters, which by then will no longer be the letters of an unfaithful wife but of a romantic, passionate lover, which is what I am to you, my chubby little baldy, my “better-than-nothing” as the nasty gossipmongers call you simply because they’ve never been lucky enough to know your scrumptious, delectable tongue, long and soft when you kiss me all over my body, my body as perfect as that of an alabaster Venus, as you like to say. . But enough of these pleasures, my anonymous lover, let’s get to the point, which is the ever-increasing chumminess between that scheming MR and your rival, Secretary BH. You’re too good sometimes, my saintly little sweetheart: Your loyalty to the P blinds you to the people who want to bring you down, calling you an unscrupulous ass-kisser. That’s exactly what that diabolical little duo is up to: They want to make you look like another amoral ass-kisser who uses his proximity to the P to rise in the ranks hoping to become P himself at the next election. Let’s not play dumb, my darling T, we’re past the third year of the “period” (and I’m not referring to my heavenly hormones), and the only thing that matters now is the succession of the P.
This is how I see things. MR has allied herself with BH, whose strength is his alleged serenity and equanimity, his reputation as an honest man in a nation of thieves. He leaves all the dirty work to MR, who commands the P’s attention, since the P, as you already know, is a grateful man, and when they were nobodies MR was his sweetheart and taught him all the tricks of the political trade. The good and bad thing about the P is that he’s a grateful man. So find a way, my handsome, of making him more grateful to you than to anyone else. Things are getting hairy (sorry, sweetheart, that wasn’t a dig at you, my beautiful baldy), and if we really want to get what we’re after, you and I will have to find that diabolical little couple’s weak spot. We have an advantage that also happens to be a disadvantage. My admirable husband is like the Rock of Gibraltar. Nothing makes him budge; he’s boring but safe. Now, were he to hear about some shady move on the part of our little couple, he’d go straight to the P with the information, as sure as Moses appeared on the Mount armed with the Ten Commandments.
My husband is a genius when it comes to making people feel guilty. We all know that the P can’t bear to feel guilty. The only thing my husband needs to do, then, to make the P doubt, is reveal one of BH’s slipups. Believe me, my adorable tortilla, the best way to get the P on our side is by planting the seed of doubt in his mind. You know he’s a man who needs security, security, always more security. Let’s not fool ourselves. He’s even willing to tolerate corruption as long as it’s safe— that is, predictable and reliable. Take the case of our communications secretary, Felipe Aguirre. We all know, as does the P, that for every contract he authorizes he takes a cut tastier than a rumba dancer’s ass. The P knows it and doesn’t care, he’s got that theory of his about corruption as a lubricant, which to me sounds like getting done up the ass (I suppose!). The communications secretary is a swine. It’s well-known, accepted, understood, however you want to put it.