“The constitution’s clear on that,” says Herrera of the interior office. “If we’re left without a president during the last four years of his term (as would be the case now), Congress names an acting president to finish the term and then calls for new elections. That’s the law, and it’s crystal clear.”
“The constitution could be changed, and we could have a vice president,” Tácito de la Canal remarks. “But that would require the vote of two thirds of all present congressmen and the approval of the majority of the state legislature. How long do you think that might take?”
He scratches his bald head and answers his own question.
“One, two, three years. It’s irrelevant to our situation.”
“Why don’t you have a vice president like we do?” the U.S. ambassador, Cotton Madison, asks me. “Kennedy gets shot, Johnson takes over. Nixon resigns, Ford takes over. No problem.”
I try to explain to him that, during the nineteenth century, when we had vice presidents in Mexico, these fine, upstanding characters spent most of their time undermining and overthrowing the presidents they served, starting with the revolt of Nicolás Bravo against Guadalupe Victoria in 1827. And then Santa Anna, “the immortal leader from Cempoala,” according to our national anthem, struck out against his own vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías, even though old “Fifteen Nails” (that’s the one-legged Santa Anna, Paulina) actually managed to overthrow his own government in the end, a maneuver that the sinister Hugo Chávez, admirer that he is of Bolívar, imitated to perfection not twenty years ago.
I could give you a laundry list of disloyal vice presidents — Anastasio Bustamante against Vicente Guerrero, for one. And I could also tell you about generals who preferred to strike out against their leaders rather than defend the country from foreign invaders, which is what happened with the traitor Paredes Arrillaga during the war against the Americans. That’s a depressing story, no doubt, but it’s one worth keeping in mind, my discreet friend, if you want to keep all the cards in your hand and don’t want to be surprised in the middle of a siesta, like Santa Anna was by the gringos at the Battle of San Jacinto, which cost us Texas.
As I said before, you’re going to want to know the opinions of local bosses like Cabezas in Sonora, Delgado in Baja California, Maldonado in San Luis, and the fearsome Vidales in Tabasco. Without a doubt they’ll lie to you.
Sonora: “Our problem is creating assembly plants, not conspiracies,” Cabezas will say.
Baja California: “We’ve got enough problems with the waters of the Colorado and dealing with the drug traffic in Tijuana,” Delgado will say.
San Luis Potosí: “The only thing we’re concerned with around here is protecting foreign investment,” Maldonado will say.
Tabasco: “In this state, the buck stops with me,” Vidales will say.
So they say, so they say, so they say. . Lies, all of it. But they won’t (forgive me) try to seduce you. No. Let us, then, interpret the lies in reverse to find out the truth. The seduction will not take place because, in the first place, let’s just say you inspire more respect than that magistrate’s wife, doña Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, heroine of our independence, and secondly (I’ll say it again) because you’re from Hidalgo, and Hidalgo’s a state that doesn’t register on Mexico’s political radar.
Keep me informed, my dear and respected friend.
44. NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN
I’m back because you asked me. I’m back in Veracruz, in the port’s main plaza under the arches. I’m back in the Café de la Parroquia to meet the Old Man again.
The famous déjà vu. The parrot perched on the Old Man’s shoulder. This time the Old Man is not wearing his bow tie. Today he’s wearing a guayabera. It seems appropriate given the sticky, humid, suffocating heat beneath an umbrella of black clouds heralding a storm that refuses to break and clear the melancholy tropical air. The Old Man’s still there, with his coffee in front of him and his dominoes in an asymmetrical ivory pattern on the table.
I think he’s taking his afternoon siesta. I’m wrong. The minute I stop in front of him, he opens an eye. One single dark-ringed eye. The other one stays shut. The parrot shouts, or chirps, or does whatever it is parrots do: “NO RE-ELECTION! EVERY VOTE COUNTS!”
The Old Man opens the other eye and gives me a dark look. He doesn’t hide it. He doesn’t want to hide it. He wants me to know that he knows. He wants me to know that he knows I’m no longer the novice that came to visit him in January. He wants me to know that he knows I’m the former undersecretary now in charge of the office of the interior because Bernal Herrera has resigned as interior secretary to become a pre-candidate for the presidency. He wants me to know that he knows that I’m now the head of domestic affairs in our country.
Nevertheless, I feel like I’m meeting someone who behaves as if nothing at all has happened in Mexico since 1950. He acts and speaks as if we lived in the past. As if the bonfires of the Revolution were still burning. As if Pancho Villa were still on his horse. As if all the country’s generals didn’t drive around in Cadillacs. As if the Mexican Revolution (as was acknowledged half a century ago) hadn’t ended in the suburban Lomas de Chapultepec.
And nevertheless (oh, the endless number of cependants I hang from your lovely ears, my wise lady), I can’t fail to notice that the Old Man is aware of my political youth — interior secretary at thirty-five — and that he wants to warn me, with his Veracruz wisdom plucked from Lampedusa’s The Leopard, that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, that I shouldn’t harbor dreams of radical change, miraculous transformation, etc. That there’s a permanent substratum, a bedrock, not only of Mexican politics but of politics tout court.
Tiens, for some reason (our secret French-speaking alliance? An evocation of the shared world of our studies? A form of code, now that French is out of use?) I use French expressions that couldn’t be farther from the world of the Old Man Under the Arches.
“So is this what Mexico’s much-vaunted democratic transition has come to?” he asks me without moving a muscle of his famous mummy face.
“What do you mean, Mr. President?”
“Ah,” he says, his smile falling apart like a mask made of sand. “I forgot that you studied with the Frogs. Monsiour le Presidan!”
He pauses to sip his coffee.
“You know, sometimes, in an effort to keep up my education (since they say education never ends), I play dominoes here in the plaza with a group of Mexican intellectuals who were educated in Germany. Chema Pérez Gay, for example, meets me here, and I say to him, ‘Talk to me in German, even if I don’t understand a damn thing you say. I like that guttural noise. It has an authoritarian ring to it. And anyway it makes me feel philosophical.’ Well, the last time Pérez Gay was here, he said, ‘When the Weimar Constitution opened the door to democracy in Germany for the very first time in 1919, after centuries of authoritarian rule, the Germans stopped wide-eyed at the threshold, like peasants invited into a castle. . ’ ”
There was no mimicry in the old man’s words. He maintained his somber, penetrating gaze, the circles deep and dark beneath his eyes.
“Well, let me just say that the same thing has happened in Mexico. We’ve stood here wide-eyed, not knowing what to make of democracy. From the Aztecs to the PRI, we’ve never played that game here.”