Tell me if that isn’t enough to make you despair and want to give up altogether. What’s stopping me? you might ask. A vague, philosophical hope. I may have my shortcomings, but if I’m not there, someone worse — much worse — will take my place. I am the Shimon Peres of the presidential mansion. As bitter as my defeats may be, at least I can sleep at night: I offer my advice honestly. It’s not my fault if they don’t take it. There are far too many voices claiming our leader’s attention. Some sediment of my truth must have gotten into President Lorenzo Terán’s spirit. But on occasions like this, my dear friend, the president would have been better off listening to my enemies, instead of me.
3. MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO NICOLÁS VALDIVIA
You’re so insistent, my beloved and handsome Nicolás. I see that my letter failed to convince you. My lack of persuasiveness troubles me more than your lack of intelligence. That’s why I don’t blame you. I must be thick, clumsy, inarticulate. I tell you my reasons directly, and still you, such a clever boy, fail to understand me. The blame, I repeat, must lie with me. Nevertheless, I must admit that I’m not indifferent to your passion, which almost makes me want to go back on my word. Now, don’t think that with your fervent prose you’ve knocked down the walls of my sexual fortress — as you put it. No, the drawbridge is still up and the chains on the gate are padlocked. But there’s a window, my lovely young Nicolás, one that lights up every night at eleven o’clock.
There, a woman you desire slowly undresses as if being observed by a witness more human and warm than the cold surface of her mirror. That woman is seen by nobody and yet she undresses with a sensual slowness as if she were being watched. That creature is delectable, Nicolás. And she finds it delectable to undress before a mirror with the slow deliberate movements of an artist of the stage or the court (a fanciful image, I know), pretending that eyes more avid than those of the mirror are looking at her with desire — the burning desire you convey, you wicked boy, you mischievous young thing, desirable object of my desire only because you can be deferred. For the price of consummated desire — don’t you know yet? — is subsequent virtue or, even worse, indifference.
You’ll say that a woman of almost fifty is entitled to fend off the youthful and ardent but perhaps frivolous and transient passions of a garçon barely over the age of thirty. Believe that if you wish. But don’t detest me. I’m perfectly willing to delay your hatred and encourage your hope, my almost but no longer quite so naïve little friend. Tonight, at eleven o’clock, I will proceed with my déshabiller. I will leave my bedroom curtains wide open. The lights will be on so I might be wise, modest, and titillating in equal measure.
We have a date, my dear. For the moment, I can’t offer you more.
4. ANDINO ALMAZÁN TO PRESIDENT LORENZO TERÁN
Mr. President, if anyone is suffering from the recent restrictions on communication it is I, your trusted servant. You know that my time-honored habit is to put all my advice to you in writing. “Opinions” are what some members of your cabinet, my colleagues, like to call those recommendations, as if the science of economics were a question of mere opinion. “Dogma” is what my enemies within the cabinet call them, proof of the insufferable, pontifical certainty of the treasury secretary, Andino Almazán, your loyal servant, Mr. President. But are laws the same thing as dogmas? Was the apple that fell onto Newton’s head and revealed the law of gravity dogmatic? And was it merely Einstein’s opinion that energy is equal to mass multiplied by the speed of light squared?
Likewise, it is not my idea, Mr. President, that prices determine the volume of resources employed, or that profits depend on monetary flow, or that the productivity of an employee will determine his demand in the labor market. But you already know what my enemies — I mean colleagues — call my “old song and dance.” And yet, Mr. President, today more than ever, given the situation that we are now up against, a situation you have wisely chosen to confront with populist measures (which your critics, I should warn you, will call useless posturing and your friends, like me, will call tactical concessions), today more than ever, I must reiterate my gospel for the economic health of this country.
First, avoid inflation. Don’t allow anyone to turn on those little bank-note machines under the pretext of a “national emergency.” Second, raise taxes to defray the costs of the emergency without sacrificing services. Third, keep salaries low in the name of the emergency itself: More work for less money is, if you know how to present it, the patriotic formula. And finally, fix prices. Do not tolerate — rather, severely punish — anyone who dares to raise prices in the middle of this national emergency.
You once said to me that economics has never stopped history, and maybe you’re right. But it’s equally true that economics can certainly make history (even though it may not be history). You’ve decided to adopt two policies that will ensure you popular support (though nobody knows for how long) and international conflict (with the greatest superpower in the world). As for popular support, I ask you once again: How long can it last? As for the international tension, just so you see that I’m not as dogmatic as my enemies claim, I won’t tell you that it will outlast the short-lived patriotic support that we earn when we stand up to the gringos without assessing the consequences. Instead, I’ll now turn the other cheek and tell you, Mr. President — and call me cynical if you must — that Mexico and Latin America will advance only if they concentrate on creating problems.
Mexico and Latin America are important precisely because we don’t know how to manage our finances. We are important because we create problems for everyone else.
I anxiously await your address to Congress tomorrow, and remain, as always, at your service.
5. NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN
I don’t know what to admire more, my dear lady, your beauty or your cruelty. Beauty has but one name, no synonym can do it justice. To what can I compare the incomparable? Please don’t think me innocent, or blind. I’ve seen many (perhaps too many?) women in the nude. Yet I’d never truly seen a woman stripped of all her clothes until I saw you.
I’m not referring to your beauty, my dear lady — I’ll discuss that in due course — but to the obscene totality of your nudity. Nor do I wish to play word games here (you think my knowledge precocious, but in reality I possess only the most meager collection of erudite references), but when I say that, I am saying that your nudity is ob-scene, off-scene, incomparable and invisible, and unfathomable if it did not materialize beyond the stage of your — and my — ordinary existence, your — our— everyday life, beyond the realm in which you dress and carry yourself in the normal world. . When you’re nude, o f-scene, ob-scene, and menacing, you are another woman and yet you are the same, do you understand me? You’re the same and yet you are transfigured, as if by taking off your clothes, my dear lady, you hinted at a final beauty, the beauty of a death that lives on eternally. A charming paradox. The way I saw you, that is how you will always be, until your death.
No, let me amend that. I should have said “Even in death” or “Only in death.” Since the day I met you, I sensed you’d give me extraordinary pleasure, the greatest sensuality I’d ever known, not comparable to anything I’d experienced or imagined before. What an undeserved reward to spy on you from the woods while in front of the one lit window in the house you removed your black cocktail dress, and then, arms stretched behind your back, unhooked your black bra in an equally dark and audacious movement, revealing those two cups filled to overflowing, and you lifted up the front part of the bra and freed your breasts with a double caress, and there you were in nothing but your black panties, which you removed as you sat on the edge of a bed that seemed — forgive me for saying so — too cold and lonely, absurdly so, and instantly you rose, my lady, in all the splendor of your sexual maturity, white all over, twice pink, once black, facing me before turning your back to me so that I could admire that ass, the ass of Venus Callipyge, adored until she sank into the earth with trembling buttocks, so I could have what you spoke of the other day, the vision of a pleasure I must conquer at a price— I laugh at myself, madam — that is very possibly beyond my reach.