“Managers, obligations, and corrections,” you respond cleverly.
“And how will that society, without any visible power structure, place limits on itself? How will that society manage itself, fulfill its obligations, correct itself?” I ask you in a tone of voice that you can’t mistake for anything other than affectionate.
“By abolishing property,” you spit out at me, like a newspaper editorial, a slogan, a banner, a slap in the face.
“All that is superfluous belongs by right to the people who have nothing,” I say, and I’m not trying to show off — perhaps you like this about me, that I’m direct, that all I want is to be honest with you. .
“Exactly, Nicolás. If you distribute wealth equitably and give each person his due, then we’ll have equality and peace.”
I look into your intense, provocative eyes. I doubt that peace is what you’re after. Maybe equality. But not peace.
“Who would do the managing?” I repeat.
“Everyone. Each person would govern himself. An unalienated collective.”
“Is that possible in a society born out of violence and crime?” challenges Nicolás Valdivia, your devil’s advocate.
“It isn’t a crime if it leads to the creation of a society without crime, a republic of equals.”
How could I pass up the opportunity to dazzle you with a great quote?
“ ‘Ruthlessly slash the throats of tyrants, patricians, millionaires, all the amoral people who could oppose our common happiness.’ ”
“You’re a walking quotation book, Nicolás!” you exclaim with remarkably good humor.
“It’s just part of my rooftop Socratic method, my young friend.” How nice of you to offer me a smile.
“OK, thank you for citing my hero, Gracchus Babeuf. You saved me the trouble.”
I swear to you that you smiled, you who are always so solemn, my darling Jesús Ricardo Magón.
“Get me up to speed, Magón. Anarchism was born in the nineteenth century to fight the industrial machine. What are you going to fight? Computers? Didn’t Marcos already stage a little mini-revolution on the Internet?”
This time you definitely let out a cackle.
“You can borrow my pigeons, Nicolás. I know you have no other form of messenger.”
“True enough. I will have to be my own messenger. I will have to deliver my letters in person, but I can never receive one from you — it’s just as if you were a politician from the PRI days: Nothing in writing.”
I interrogated with my eyes before saying, “And do you know the message I plan to send with your little pigeons?” I answered my own question emphatically as soon as I’d asked it: “That there is no such thing as an anarchist who doesn’t end up a terrorist. That the rejection of authority, and millenarianism, are very beautiful ideas until you start acting on them.”
Your face lit up, millenarian that you are.
“You can’t deny the beauty of revolt,” you said, serious once more.
“Even if the results are horrifying?” I replied with that verbal foil you force me to brandish every time we spar.
“Do you find equality horrifying?” you asked humorlessly.
“No. I can only repeat that the great problem of equality is not overcoming the pride of the rich, but rather overcoming the egotism of the poor.”
“Do you know what I like about you? You get angry without swearing. You nurse your rage inside. That’s why I find you more dangerous than someone who explodes with violence, verbal or physical.”
You look at me and you know I know. I understand you. And if I’m repeating our conversation back to you it’s only because, despite our political differences, you and I have a common faith in the word.
Wherein lies the greatness, I ask you, of Plato’s dialogues, which serve as the basis for all human discourse in a Western world freed from Oriental despotism? In the fact that they set the stage for you and me talking on a rooftop in Mexico City in the year 2020. The Socrates— Plato duo transforms two random interlocutors into companions in a place and at a time that otherwise — i.e., without the word — would never exist. If we didn’t have this time and place to share, we’d know nothing about each other. In fact, we wouldn’t even know the other existed. We would be alien to each other, like ships crossing in the night, strangers walking past each other on the great boulevard of the silent.
What is it that unites this time and place we share, Jesús Ricardo?
The word, the word brings us together one minute and then tears us apart the next, the word that, whether friend or enemy, in the end acquires an independent meaning. And it’s that transience that drives us, my young and beloved friend, in this hopelessly polluted stoa covered in pigeon shit, to utter the next word, knowing that it too will slip from our grasp and enter into the great realm of reason that engulfs us.
“Don’t ever stop talking. Don’t ever say the last word.”
Plato said that writing was parricide because it continues to signify in the absence of the interlocutor. As long as I write to you, then, it will be fratricide. And only on the day — distant if not altogether impossible — that you write to me, can we begin to speak of parricide. Parricide: Scarcely nine years separate us. And I’m already playing the role of a perverse Mephistopheles, offering the young Faust his chance to be old. To grow up.
Have you read Gombrowicz’s marvelous Ferdydurke, the great twentieth-century Polish novel? For him, growing up is tantamount to growing corrupt. We kill the advantages of adolescence by becoming adults. We kill the inconsolable youth by corrupting him with maturity. But since we are, inevitably, not alone in our youth, we end up creating one another, running the risk of creating ourselves from the outside, deformed and inauthentic. “To be a man means never to be oneself.” If that’s how you want to view our relationship, so be it. Let yourself get a bit corrupted.
“Being partly corrupt is like being partly a virgin,” you say.
And I tell you the same thing over and over again.
You can’t reject what you don’t know. Put your ideas to the test. That’s the only measure of the intellectual integrity you preach. You don’t have to commit to anything. Come and work with me in the president’s office — that’s where you’ll see “the belly of the beast,” as José Martí said when living in the United States. You don’t have to sacrifice your ideas. In fact, you’ll see how resilient they are. All you have to sacrifice is your appearance. You can’t work in Los Pinos with that Tarzan hair of yours. You’ll have to cut it. And you can’t go to work in blue jeans. But you don’t need to go overboard, either. Don’t dress in that vulgar middle-class office-worker style like Hugo Patrón, your sister’s little boyfriend. Let Armani be your best friend. I’ll see to that. Make up your mind, you heir to utopia. Stick with me. Let me save you from your impotent language that can only lead to criminal action when desperation sets in.
I ask this of you as a double test.
First of all, a test of your ideas. You’re an ideological coward if you don’t put your ideas to the challenge.
Second, a test of my friendship, which deepens with each passing day. I love and desire you for who you are — you know that. But also because I see myself in you. Not a duplicate of myself but a similar, separate being. I admit that to love you is to love myself. To love myself as I would like to be. I like women. I love them as intensely as I love you. In women I’m always shocked to see the person that I’m not. I see the other and it dazzles me. That’s why I adore women and fall, time and time again, into the abyss of passion for women. The passion for all that’s different. With you, Jesús Ricardo, I feel that I can love myself as I would like to be loved by me.
Consider my offer. This gate, unlike the one in the Bible, is not a narrow one.