“If I tell the truth, will I be a source of pain or relief?”
A lie is true because it has meaning. Things that have no meaning cannot even be false. For that reason, the meaning of the truth is only one part of what the truth conceals beneath its surface. Lies are one half truth. Truth is one half lies. Because all that we say and do, Nicolás, is part of a relationship that cannot exclude its opposite. For example, as an intellectual I can say that everything created is true. Even lies.
But as a military man I cannot grant myself that luxury. I can only conceive of the truth as coherence, as conformity to the rules that govern us. But even when I obey the rules down to the letter — that is, as the rule book establishes — I still have a doubt, a secret, a fissure in my soul. The truth cannot be reduced to the verifiable. Truth is the name we give to what is, ultimately, a correspondence between me and another person. That correspondence makes my truth relative.
Turn it around and consider these questions from the opposite angle:
When are lies justified?
When, instead of causing harm, do lies bring relief?
Every existence is its own truth, but always in correspondence with the truth of the other. And every lie can be its own truth, if it is protected by the other’s supreme truth, which is his life. .
When you were born in a clinic in Barcelona (not Marseilles as the unfortunate Paulina Tardegarda believed) on December 12, 1986, I was stationed at the military zone of Ciudad Juárez, far away from your mother. She was already married, but everyone knew that her husband was impotent and her elderly lover was an invalid. Her son therefore must have been fathered by a third man. She was treated according to the customs of upper-class Mexican society — as if she were an unmarried young woman who’d gotten herself pregnant. Before the birth she stayed in a maternity home run by nuns in Sarrià.
I wasn’t able to be with her. I was very young. More cowardly than irresponsible. And more in love than irresponsible. I had to comply with military discipline in Chihuahua. That was my excuse. That was my cowardice. I should have been at your mother’s side in Barcelona, I should have picked you up, I should have made you mine from the very first day. . Judge me, condemn me, but let me make up for the lost time between us, let me wring the neck of destiny and reclaim now all that could have been, but never was.
Your mother’s family was extremely dangerous. The Barroso clan controlled the northern border from Mexicali to Matamoros. The Barroso family, Leonardo Barroso and all his descendants, including his granddaughter María del Rosario Barroso Galván. Now she is just Galván, like her mother, because she was so disgusted by the last name of her father and grandfather, old Barroso, who turned your mother Michelina Laborde into more than just a lover. She was his sexual slave. His imprisoned odalisque. He made her marry his own son — a sensitive, shy boy who people said was a bit simple. Bad blood. He never touched Michelina. He lived all alone in the country, on a ranch filled with deer and pacuaches, those “erased Indians” from Chihuahua.7 Leonardo Barroso the elder kept that stunningly beautiful woman— your mother, Nicolás — all to himself, more beholden than ever to the Barroso millions after an attempt was made on the old man’s life on the bridge between Juárez and El Paso.
He was given up for dead. He ended up a paraplegic, the bottom half of his body useless. Condemned to vegetate in a wheelchair for the rest of his days, just like his brother, Emiliano Barroso, the communist leader. What poetic justice!8 Leonardo an invalid in a wheelchair, with all the perverse energy in his brain focused on humiliating his son, despising his wife, and keeping his mistress locked away. He did have another descendant — Leonardo Jr., a child from his wife’s first marriage who became his second son. This adopted child was the father of your friend María del Rosario Galván. And Barroso Sr. was so evil that he urged your mother to become Leonardo Jr.’s mistress as well, so that he could spy on them and enjoy the vicarious thrill. .
So doesn’t it make sense that thirty-five years ago your mother would seek and find solace and passion in a young, attractive military officer like me?
I want you to understand, I want you to know, I want you to ask yourself, “At what point does absence become more powerful than presence?” What is it about absence that sparks our passions to the point of driving us mad?
On the other hand, at what point do social pressures force us to abandon the light of love and descend into darkness, filth, and vice? And finally, why is it that instead of reaching a golden mean these extremes of passion — the hunger of presence, the vice of abandonment— come to rest at an evil mean in the middle of oblivion? Or worse, indifference?
Michelina Laborde was unable to return to the bosom of the powerful Barroso family, who were all somebodies, with the child of a nobody like me. And so she went back to the border with her secret protected by family conventions. She had been “on vacation” in Europe. Visiting museums.
I never saw her again. She died shortly afterward. I think she died of sadness, and of that nostalgia for the impossible that you sometimes feel when you know that what you desired could have been possible.
You were handed over to a Catalan family by the name of Lavat. The Barrosos gave them a certain amount of money for your education, though they didn’t use it for that but for the pursuit of their mediocre lives, and sent you out onto the streets and into a life of crime, which was your real education, Nicolás. It began when you were a child in Barcelona, and continued in Marseilles, where the Lavats, who were migrant workers, moved when you were ten.
And nevertheless, something in you, perhaps that nostalgia for the impossible, drove you from an early age toward risk, but also to want to sharpen your mind, your wits, your ambition, to be more than you were, as if your blood were crying out for a heritage, inevitable, obscure, at once strangely luminous and scarcely formed in your mind’s eye. You educated yourself in squalor, on the streets, in crime, with a discipline that was second only to your need for survival, and with the profound conviction that not only would you one day be someone, but that you already were someone, a disinherited son, a child stripped of his legacy. Algo. Something. Hijo de algo. Son of something. Hidalgo. A man of noble birth.
You were no blind criminal. You were a lost child with your eyes wide open to a destiny that was different — not unlucky — a destiny forged by your unknown heritage and the future that you yearned for.
I didn’t forget about you, my son. I didn’t know who you were. I knew that my lovely Michelina had had a child in Europe. When she went back to Chihuahua, she managed to scribble me a little note:
We had a child, my love. He was born on December 12, 1986, in Barcelona. I don’t know what they named him. He was placed in the hands of workers, I know that. Forgive me. I will always love you — M.
Finding you was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. My professional ambitions, my career in the armed forces, prevailed. My positions both inside and outside Mexico. And then I was appointed military attaché of the embassy in Paris, which had jurisdiction over Switzerland and the Benelux countries. That was when a certain file found its way to my desk, a file about a young man who claimed he was Mexican and who had been sent to prison in Geneva for supposedly plotting with a gang of bank robbers.
I visited you at that prison in Geneva. You had long hair then. I stopped cold in my tracks. I was seeing your mother with a man’s body. Darker than she was, but with the same long, straight black hair. Perfectly symmetrical features. The classic criollo face. Skin with a shadow of the Mediterranean, of olives and refined sugar. Large black eyes (in your case green, my contribution). Dark circles under your eyes, high cheekbones, restless nostrils. And one tiny detail that was your mother’s signature: the dimpled chin. The deep cleft beneath your bottom lip.