How old are you? Fifty? Fifty-two? And me, sixty-four, sixty-five? The record books are a little sketchy in the tiny village where I was born, in the state of Hidalgo — that is, if you can say that Hidalgo exists and wasn’t just an invention to separate Mexico City from dangerous rival states like Michoacán and Jalisco. Hidalgo is the Uruguay of Mexico, but poor and without any records. Anyhow, General, my point is that you and I are in our prime, as my granny would have said. But to youngsters we’re old. They want a young leader. Young like Madero, Calles, Obregón, Villa, and Zapata were when they threw themselves into the Revolution — all of them under thirty.
Keep your eyes peeled, Mr. Secretary. Where’s our fresh-faced leader? How old is that ass-kisser Tácito de la Canal? Fifty-two like you? And his opponent, Bernal Herrera, isn’t he in his early fifties, or maybe late forties? Do you think today’s kids trust them at all? Do you think those millions of kids who cruise on their motorcycles as if their Harley-Davidsons were Pancho Villa’s horse, old Siete Leguas himself, and those half-naked party animals who spend all night clubbing, and those DJs who fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Honolulu for twenty-five thousand dollars a pop to play CDs, and the children of serial millionaires who’ve been inheriting fortunes passed down since 1941, will trust any of us?
That’s what the elite are saying in the newspapers, General. But what about the middle-class kid who has had to watch how every six years his parents lose their car, their house, and their washing machine because they can’t keep up with the monthly payments? Or students who can’t even study because public universities are constantly paralyzed by strikes and private universities cost a fortune?
Look at them, General — they wanted to be engineers, lawyers, big shots, but look at them now — they’re driving taxis, delivering pizzas, working as ushers in movie theaters, browbeaten into making a living parking other people’s cars. They’re broken people who should have become something better, and now all they get are kicks in the ass. And all the sweet young things who only dreamed of becoming decent, middle-class housewives? They’re out there working as typists, sales girls, and waitresses — if they’re lucky. Otherwise it’s lap dancing and the brothel. And don’t even get me started on the stories of the little farm girls who find work in factories and dream that some gringo will one day want to marry them, the stupid idiots, and then the factory goes under or moves to China, where the workers make 10 percent of what Mexican workers earn, and they’re back out on the street again begging, or back in their villages eating nopalitos, with their babies bundled up in their shawls, wanting to cross the border and become gringos like so many young men and women trying to find work on the other side of the fence — even if it means drowning in a river or suffocating in some trafficker’s truck or dying of thirst in the desert or getting shot full of holes, like a sieve, by the gringo border patrol’s bullets. Tell me, General, what can those seventy million kids look forward to? Who will they look to? Think about it while there’s still time, General.
And remember, in these matters you have to act quickly.
24. NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN
So, my lovely and demanding lady, you warned me from the start that everything is politics with you, but I had my doubts the day you told me to come to the woods outside your house at night and watch you undress. As if that weren’t enough, I was beaten to it (surely through my beautiful lady’s doing) by Tácito de la Canal. Is that politics, too, or is it just sex? Oh, my good lady María del Rosario, how many other secrets do you keep that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with that region of “the heart that has its reasons” that reason (or politics) doesn’t understand?
Well, I’ve learned another lesson, though perhaps more of a human one than a political one. After all, in our country, can politics exist without that thing we call endurance? As I mentioned to you the other day, I’ve become quite friendly with one of the archivists in the presidential office, an old man I described to you a while back. He was kind enough to invite me to his house. Well, it isn’t exactly a house, it’s an apartment, a third-floor flat with a little terrace roof, in the Vallejo area, near the Monumento a la Raza.
You enter the place through a little shop between the front door and the stairway. I couldn’t describe the building to you even if I tried. It’s a place, my dear lady, that slips from the memory the minute one lays eyes on it. Some events, some people, some places are like that — as much as you try to remember them, they simply refuse to appear in the mind’s eye. And it’s sad not to remember them, until you realize that the memory has no room for the unremarkable. There are some people, though, that we can never forget, my dear lady, because the only possessions they have are the impressions they leave in other people’s minds, and their eyes are none other than those of the people who see them.
Do you understand what I mean? For me it was something of a revelation precisely because they asked nothing of me and yet I found myself fascinated, drawn to the pleas of these people who wanted nothing. What pleas am I talking about? you may ask. The archivist is a man named Cástulo Magón, who told me, when I noted the connection between their last names, that he is indeed distantly related to the revolutionaries Ricardo and Jesús Flores Magón, the anarchist brothers who languished away during Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship inside the San Juan de Ulúa fortress at Veracruz, which I saw the other day when you sent me to visit the Old Man Under the Arches. Well, don Cástulo is almost sixty and has been an archivist for nearly forty years, since the time of the López Portillo government. He married late because it took him a while to put the money together for a wedding and to find a woman who suited him and who was willing to work to make ends meet every month.
Don Cástulo has that tired, dreary look of the classic archivist and, as I said before, he even wears the ubiquitous green eyeshade and arm garters that make him look like the typical minor bureaucrat, straight out of a soap opera. Archives are dark places — perhaps out of fear that the papers might grow faded and illegible if exposed to sunlight, or perhaps simply to allow the documents to fall into oblivion as they lie in their yellow folders in gunmetal gray tombs. Perhaps, my scornful mistress, so that they may be exorcised of all, shall we say, luminous content. Yes, don Cástulo is the phantom of the archives. Just like the character dreamed up by Gaston Leroux who lived in the subterranean bowels of the Paris Opera, Cástulo Magón lives beneath the offices of the president of the republic.
His face is gray and his eyes, while not tired, convey a sense of resignation. But his fingers, María del Rosario, are astonishingly nimble— you should see the speed and precision with which he flips through the different files! At that moment his age, his tired, careworn appearance, and his exhausted body are transfigured and Cástulo becomes something like the alchemist of the public records office. He knows where everything is but even more importantly he also knows where to find everything that shouldn’t be there, those things he was told to destroy. Cástulo, not out of disobedience, but simply because he’d never really thought about it, you see, archived the unarchivable according to an eccentrically Mexican filing system: He didn’t file by name (Galván, María del Rosario, or Herrera, Bernal), nor by section (Ministry of the Interior, Congress) but by reference.
Arcane references. Where would you think I, for example, might be found in the archives at Los Pinos? Under my name, “Valdivia, Nicolás”? Under my position, “Chief of Cabinet, Assistant to”? “Presidency of the Republic, Office of ”? No, my dear María del Rosario. As it turns out, I appear in a file entitled “ENA.” Now, what is ENA? you might ask. École Nationale d’Administration, Paris. In other words, the college I went to. Take note, madam! If you’re looking for a labyrinth of solitude, this takes the cake. And our friend the archivist Cástulo Magón can find his way around the files using those hands of his, like the hands of a blind pianist, more blind than Hipólito in Santa. The fact that his economic status in no way reflects his professional abilities is almost tautological. Cástulo receives a meager salary, some 500 dollars a month, which, given the cost of living these days, is barely enough to spruce up the white locks framing his temples and whip them up into a slick bridge from left to right across his head to hide the balding pate. (For what? From whom? Tell me — after all, you’re a woman who knows so much about human vanity, especially that of the dispossessed and humiliated like myself, your hapless soupirant .) Don Cástulo, believe it or not, still uses homemade hair pomade, even though it went out of fashion about a hundred years ago. I believe it to be the only evidence of his vanity in the tiny bathroom largely taken over by his family: his wife, Serafina, his daughter, Araceli, and his son, Jesús Ricardo, named after the aforementioned heroes of Ulúa, the Flores Magón brothers.