(You know that I admire you for what others despise in you.)
(Don’t torment yourself. Think of all the things we didn’t say to each other.)
Let’s not be tempted at this difficult moment to rekindle our passion. After all, it’s not as though we’ve broken up. We’ve just untied things. What do we have in common? We are powerless over love, and we are powerless over power if we’re not together.
I want to reaffirm our pact.
Remember that you and I could destroy each other. Better to stick together. Let there be peace between us. Our pleasure was too tempestuous. Now more than ever, let us proceed calmly.
Never forget that you and I have always been able to reach agreements even when we haven’t technically been in agreement.
Resign yourself as I have resigned myself. Surrender to my imagination, just as I surrender to yours. There, inside our minds, we can experience our passion forever.
I do have to admit, however, that right now the doors that open on to my mind are like the doors of a saloon: They swing open, they close, they slam shut. . But there is one thing I know: We have to find Nicolás Valdivia’s weak spot. The wound that makes him bleed. His most shameful, shamefaced secret. That’s our only hope of defeat. If we want to prevent Nicolás Valdivia from staying in power, we’re going to have to put our heads together.
And in the final analysis, remember — a little bad luck is the best antidote for the bitterness that has yet to come. And the greatest bitterness is that of those who wield absolute power. Nothing satisfies them, they always want more, and that’s where they lose. We identify Nicolás Valdivia’s weakness and we’ll have the key to his downfall.
69. MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN TO BERNAL HERRERA
I’ve walked a long way this morning, Bernal, in search of a high, open spot from which to look out onto our Valley of Mexico and renew my hope. The seedy, garish city that horrified (and prematurely killed) the great poet Ramón López Velarde. It is the “Valley of Mexico, opaque mouth, lava of spittle, crumbling throne of rage” that Octavio Paz whipped with a fury that saved him. Or perhaps it is the exact, balanced image of José Emilio Pacheco, the poet of intelligent serenity whose eighty-second birthday we’ve recently celebrated, when he allows himself to be carried along by the facts, and sing in a wounded voice of the “Twilight of Mexico, in the mournful mountains to the west. .”
Allí el ocaso
es tan desolador que se diría:
la noche así engendrada será eterna.9
Mexico of eternal seasons, “immortal spring”. .
The rainy season has begun, washing away the eternal night, the opaque mouth, the seedy, garish look. . Settling the dust. Clearing the air. It’s true that on rainy afternoons, between shower and downpour, even from our disastrous highway, the Anillo Periférico, you can make out the sharp, clear outline of the mountains.
I decided to climb up to Chapultepec Castle so that I could look out over the city and the valley from a height that seemed more human, intermediate, where I could see the mountains whose names I know— Ajusco, Popocatépetl, Iztaccíhuatl — in the intimate light that I want to rediscover, Bernal, at the end of this episode in our lives.
Do you realize that we’ve lived through this story in confinement, as if we’ve been acting on the stage of a prison? A story completely divested of nature. Pacheco was right: “Are stones the only things that dream?. . Is the world nothing but these immutable stones?” That’s what I’m doing here now, trying to remember the natural world that slipped away from us, lost in a wood of words, buried in a swamp of speeches, cut down by a knife of ambition. .
Before I went outside I looked at myself in the mirror without makeup, without illusions. I have managed to keep my figure, but my face has begun to betray me. I now realize that I was a natural beauty when I was young. Today, the beauty I have left is an act of pure will. It’s a secret between me and my mirror. I say to the mirror, “The world knows of me. But the world no longer tastes of me.”
Why do we waste our youth and beauty? I see how I handed over my youth and my sex to men who turned to dust or statues. I touched my body this morning. Nothing wounds the body quite like desire. And I haven’t been able to satisfy mine — I admit that to you, since you are the one, true man of my life. Nothing has ever satisfied me, Bernal. Why? Because I have presided over too many altars where God was absent. My altars are the kind that cause hearts to age prematurely. Fame and power. But I am a woman. I refuse to surrender to the evidence of time. I convince myself that my sexual appeal is unaffected by age. That I don’t have to be young to be desirable.
I look back on the people, the places, the situations since the crisis began in January, and I find that there’s no sense of taste in my mouth. I wish I could summon sweetness, or bile — or even vomit. But my tongue and palate taste of nothing at all.
I consult my other senses. What do I hear? A cacophony of empty words. What do I smell? The excrement that ambition leaves in its wake. What do I touch? My own skin, every day less elastic, more vulnerable, grown thin. What do I touch with? Ten fingernails like knives that lash out at me. Not only do they fail to caress me. Not only do they scratch me. They sink into me and ask, what will become of my skin, how much longer will it last, what wasted pleasure awaits it? Nothingness.
I have my eyes. This afternoon, I shall become pure vision. Everything else betrays me, turns me into someone I don’t know. I retain nothing but my gaze and I discover, with shock, Bernal, that my eyes are filled with love. I don’t need a mirror to prove it. I look out from Chapultepec and I feel love, for the city and for the Valley of Mexico.
A loving gaze. That is my gift to my city and to my time. I have nothing else to give Mexico but my loving gaze on this luminous May afternoon after the rain, when the bougainvillea are the patient ornaments of urban beauty, and for one glorious instant the city is crowned by the lavender color of the jacaranda trees. The valley has such powerful light at this time of day, Bernal, that it transports me out of myself and then abandons me on the great terrace of the Alcázar with its black-and-white marble surface, and then transports me as if on a magic carpet around the city, high above the clusters of multicolored balloons sold on the avenues, and allows me to caress the heads of little children in parks, to walk in the muddy waters of the reservoir in Chapultepec Forest, and to continue walking, now in the hyacinth waters of Xochimilco, as if my bare feet were trying hard to become clean, Bernal, in the lost canals of what was once the Venice of the Americas, a city that embraced water and life, a city that slowly grew dry until it died of thirst and suffocation.
But not this afternoon, Bernal — this afternoon on which I’ve chosen to be reborn is a miracle, for it is a liquid afternoon, it has rained and all the avenues have become canals, all the limestone deserts have become lakes, all the sewer pipes have become cascading waterfalls. .
With my newborn eyes, I survey the city that your namesake Bernal Díaz del Castillo surveyed in 1519, resurrected through the force of desire, and I leave behind all the political melodrama you and I have lived through, and I resuscitate the old city, fanning out into boulevards made of gold and silver, rooftops of feathers and walls of precious stones, cloaks made from the skins of jaguars, pumas, otter, and deer. I walk past the Indian pharmacopoeia of remedies made of snakeskin, shark teeth, funeral candles, and the seeds known as “deer’s eyes.” I walk into the plazas painted with cochineal and I breathe in the aroma of liquidambar and fresh tobacco, coriander and peanut and honey. I stop in front of the stalls selling jicama, cherimoya, mamey, and prickly pears. I rest upon seats made of wooden boards and beneath tiled canopies, listening all the while to the concert of hens, turkeys, ducklings. .