When the president died, I peered into the mirror of my soul and it trembled. My emotions were in flux. My spirit was wavering between life and death.
It was the immense unfulfillment of my love, a hollow between life and death. My love for you, María del Rosario. It was my desire to possess you, never expressed, forever silenced, a prisoner of my dreams. And I’m sure you never guessed.
In the end, it was the absolute certainty that my interior life was the only reality. The untouchable fortress of my inner self. My freedom to decide whether that should remain in the world or be left behind. It meant — it means, María del Rosario — that rational thought will never take root in Mexico. Time after time we’ve done it, and we’ll go on doing it, killing the hen that lays the golden eggs — after stealing the eggs. It means that, though he said it in 1800, Humboldt was right: “Mexico is a beggar sitting on top of a mountain of gold.”
In a detective novel, we don’t know who the criminal is until the end. But in Mexico, everyone knows who the criminal is in advance. And the victim is always the country itself. Oh, my dear friend, ignore the demagogues who promise salvation, our Mahatma Propagandis. But be careful of the comedians who are the repressors, our Robespierrots.
Listen to the desperate.
Listen to the rumors in Mexico City, where everyone knows what goes unsaid. Write it all down. Nobody will believe you.
Keep your mouth shut. They’ll find out.
Yes, my more than valued friend. If I were a politician I’d betray them all. Just as well I’m only an intellectual and know that the politicians will betray me.
Yes, my beautiful and enlightened lady, nothing has any value outside the inner life, the silent self. Don’t talk to anyone about it. They won’t understand.
I go in the knowledge that our life is in our dreams. Nothing is more real than our Utopia. There’s no other reality, you see. Only a suicidal man would dare say this. They’re not my final words. I’m not asking for them to be inscribed on my tombstone.
HERE LIES XAVIER ZARAGOZA
KNOWN TO ALL AS SENECA
1982–2020
IN MEXICO, ALL THOUGHT IS
CONTRABAND
I’ll tell you in secret that there’s no mystery after death. The dead man doesn’t know we’re alive. What it amounts to is that before birth and after death we experience our own untouchable worlds.
My farewell sentence, María del Rosario, is much simpler.
“I am leaving before the sky above Mexico City disappears forever.”
And I reproach myself for leaving with rage, without serenity. .
I go with rage because I allowed myself to be seduced by politics. I discovered that the art of politics is the lowest form of art.
I go with rage because I was unable to convince the president that the head of state can’t matter more than the people, or the times.
I go with rage because I was unable to stop the six-year cycle of political madness that appropriates all of Mexican history and reinvents it every six years. What madness.
I go with rage because it’s my fault that the president listened to me when I gave him good advice. It’s my fault, not his.
I go with rage because my reason and logic were unable to defeat the propaganda, which is the food of fanatics.
I go with rage because I never learned how to grow magueys.
I go with rage because where once I was provocative I’m now an irritation.
I go with rage because I preached morality from the top of a mountain made of sand.
I go with rage because I was never able to say to you, I love you.
I go with rage because I envy only the dead.
51. NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO JESÚS RICARDO MAGÓN
Darling, it’s very hard to trust anyone else. Who knows what the consequences will be of the information you gave to María del Rosario? She used to be my regular correspondent. . but I’m not sure about her now. Too many crossed wires. Too many interweaving stories. Should I just keep my mouth shut? That would be the safest thing, but I’m terrified of taking the secret with me to my grave. I trust you enough to tell you that. My feelings for you have deepened since I first saw you on the roof and we started working together. At last I’ve found a kindred spirit, someone who reads the same books and who thinks as I do. I feel you very close to me and I want to keep you there.
My secret is your secret, but then you and I are one and the same.
I’m warning you that knowing what I know is dangerous — for me and for whoever hears me. Destroy the tape after listening to it. It will be delivered to you by your father don Cástulo, the safest messenger I can think of.
I went back to Veracruz to talk to the Old Man because he asked me to. There he was, as always, wearing his double-breasted suit and bow tie, with the little parrot on his shoulder and the dominoes laid out on the table, and the waiter, artful as an acrobat, pouring his steaming coffee.
“Sit down, Valdivia,” the Old Man said.
He could tell from my eyes, from the way I moved my head, from my hands open in supplication, that I wanted to meet in private, not in full view in the plaza in Veracruz.
“Sit down, Valdivia. When you do things openly you don’t arouse suspicion. It’s secrecy that wakes up the wolves. We’re not drawing attention to ourselves here under the arches. Look: The vultures are flying over Ulúa Castle again. That’s what people are going to notice, not you and me sitting together over a cup of coffee.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask anything. I knew the Old Man was going to talk. By the look on his face I could tell that everything that was going to happen had already happened. I went cold as I realized this. The Old Man was a sorcerer, I knew it, and he understood, Jesús Ricardo, those subtle but significant changes in time and space that affect us all. That was the wisdom he’d gained from living so long. Space and time. How to read them, endure them, and find ourselves in them. Whether we like it or not, space belongs to the order of things that coexist, whereas time belongs to the realm of things that happen. What unites the two is their effect on what already is and on what is possible, what can happen. In themselves, they’re abstract notions. They need the concrete here-and-now to have substance.
Didn’t Susan Sontag say that years ago? “Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once. Space exists so that it all doesn’t happen to you.”
In political life, strictly speaking, can we say that chance, sequence, and recurrence belong to the world of the everyday, just as the intensity, simultaneity, and harmony of personal, internal time, yours and mine, my darling, are properties of the soul?
Now, you know what joy it is for me to have a companion whose mind works like mine. Whom else but you can I talk to about things like this? Who else could possibly understand me when I say that the time we’re living in now isn’t just an abstract idea but a useful way of understanding life and that politics is one way of making time a reality?
I want to believe that the Old Man read my thoughts. Not literally, of course, but through his intuition — though in his case you’d call it something else, malice, even perversity. . He’s a sly old dog.