Adam in Eden

Chapter 16

I have dinner with my brother-in-law Abelardo Holguín. He tells me about his disappointments in literary circles and of his opportunity to enter instead the world of television as a writer of soap operas.

He tells me about his conversation with the chief executive honcho of the Tetravision network, the elderly Rodrigo Pola, whom I have heard a lot about because his career was recorded in a prehistoric novel. Pola was the son of Rosenda Zubarán and Gervasio Pola, an officer of the Revolution executed by a firing squad in 1913 along with the comrades he snitched on so that he wouldn’t die alone—“to die together” shouting “Viva Madero!” After all that, Rodrigo married Pimpinela de Ovando, an aristocrat whose family went back to the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. (Does anybody remember those distant times?) He entered the new world of television, where he rose to become a chief executive officer, a powerful media business mogul.

Abelardo admits that he abused the privileges implicit in the name of his father in order to get to Don Rodrigo Pola. Pola didn’t need to know that Abelardo was estranged from his famous father the King of Bakery any more than that he had been exiled from the republic of letters by the literary pope.

Luckily the magic surname Holguín opened doors to the young man, whose appearance, moreover, was already a calling card.

Abelardo Holguín had not given in to the youthful fashions that compel one to dress like a railroad worker or a beggar; rather, an enthusiast of Hollywood films from the thirties and forties, he dressed conservatively, with a jacket and tie, like Cary Grant. Abelardo and I had in common this love for old movies and that lost era, which survives only on film. Sometimes Priscila used to walk in on our conversations, which she suspected were conducted in some sort of code:

“Thomas Mitchell, in the year 1939 alone,” Abelardo reminded me, “appears in Only Angels Have Wings, Gone With The Wind, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Stagecoach, for which he won the Oscar for best supporting actor.”

“Stagecoach,” I said, picking up the thread, “is an adaptation of Boule de Suif, the short story by Maupassant, and Norman Foster brought it to the screen in Mexico with Esther Fernández and Ricardo Montalbán.”

“Who was Foster’s wife’s brother-in-law: they were both married to Blaine sisters, the most famous of which was Loretta Young.”

“Who had a secret lovechild with Clark Gable, conceived during the shooting of The Call of the Wild, based on the Jack London novel—”

“Which enjoyed many screen adaptations, notably The Sea Wolf with John Garfield and Ida Lupino.”

“And the rest of that cast. That actor, you know, that one who was introduced with such pomp and circumstance. What was his name? And then he just disappeared.”

“I don’t remember. Ask Carlos Monsiváis.”

“Or José Luis Cuevas.”

“Or as a last and best resort, Natalio Botana.”

That Priscila had been eavesdropping on us from the dining room next door, hidden behind a curtain, became apparent when Don Celestino stormed in to reproach Abelardo, as usual, and me as well, which was less usual.

“What are you and your brother-in-law secretly discussing in the living room?”

“It’s no secret. They’re classic movies.”

“Movies?” Don Celes becomes agitated. “Did you say moo-vies? A secret code made from movies, I reckon. So what are you and Adam whispering about? What are you up to? What are you plotting against your sister? And who is this Norman Foster character anyway?”

I hear the slap that Priscila, upon hearing these words, unleashes on the maid who is taking clean laundry up to the bedroom.

“Father, Norman Foster is a film director.”

“Sure. A di-rec-tor, huh? That’s all you’re going to fess up to?”

“He directed Journey into Fear.”

“Okay, now the cat’s out of the bag. So that’s the password. Journey into fear?”

“Starring Dolores del Río—”

“Don’t change the subject, rascal, scoundrel.”

I find it amusing that old-man Holguín uses the same expressions as the old lady who beat up that youthful mugger with an umbrella on the Salto-del-Agua-to-Ciudadela-to-Rayón bus.

“Congratulations,” I tell Abelardo with a laugh, now that we are having lunch at El Danubio on República de Uruguay Street. “You’ve freed yourself from Don Celestino.”

“But you’re still there,” Abelardo said without malice.

“There is nothing quite like being seen to render a person invisible,” I said with a smile.

Don Rodrigo Pola, who must almost be a centenarian, received Abelardo Holguín, as I said, in his sacrosanct office on Insurgentes, stuffed inside what seemed to be a wicker basket full of cotton that supposedly conserves his energies and provides him with the warmth that he lacks or returns his warmth and energy to him, in essence poisoning himself. How much heat does an almost hundred-year-old crow generate? That’s not just a physical question, but a philosophical one: why are there people who survive beyond the “normal” life span — seventy or eighty years? — losing, true, many faculties, but maintaining or perhaps gaining other, previously unknown ones? It’s sad to see men who were vigorous, quarrelsome, even fighters, reduced to muteness and the wheelchair, depending on the wives whom they mistreated, cheated on, and despised throughout their marriages, to help them eat, piss, sleep, and to wheel them back and forth. Wouldn’t it be preferable to die rather than to be so thoroughly humiliated?

I tell myself — and I don’t tell Abelardo — that I would rather die while I still have the full use of my faculties and am still strong and active, before I’m ever subjected to forgetfulness or pity, or cause sorrow to this young man visiting the old coot whom he once admired and who served as his role model, now reduced to drooling and speaking nonsense from a wicker basket. .

Perhaps for all of these reasons, Don Rodrigo Pola, who’s still sharp as a tack, has not given in to the usual supports required by old age — wheelchair, crutches, the sickbed itself — but has opted to station himself inside a wicker basket lined with cotton.

That’s how he greets Abelardo, giving him a passive but eloquent welcome from that cottony throne where he preserves and recovers the strength that remains with an elegant gesture of resignation and a sort of performance — Abelardo believes — for which he has mustered all the strength of his advanced age and physical weakness to conjure an atmosphere of imperial twilight.

“Like the High Lama in Lost Horizon.”

“Played by Sam Jaffe.”

“And directed by Frank Capra.”

“Dad, Daddy,” Priscila would say, “Abelardo and Adam are speaking in code. They’ve got something up their sleeves. It must be a plot against me. Expose them, Daddy, defend your daughter. Twelve o’clock and all is well.” And then she’d slap the maid in the face.

What kind of conspiracy would she imagine if she heard the media czar, old man Rodrigo Pola, talking to young Abelardo Holguín, explaining to him the secrets of soap operas?

Pola addresses Abelardo ceremoniously as “sir.” He doesn’t call him “young man,” “kid,” or even “Abelardo,” but “sir,” establishing right away a respectful relationship, appropriate for work. As Abelardo explained to me, Pola is saying, I greet you as you are, Holguín, son of the King of Bakery, but don’t think that being part of an illustrious family gives you power beyond just being greeted by me here in the upper echelons of our television station. Then Pola thinks again, Abelardo tells me, and says, “Perhaps your membership in Mexico’s circle of privilege counts for something. You are part of the one hundred, two hundred families that count, that share the businesses, the financial and political jobs, the invitations to weddings, dinners, vacations, and so on. Isn’t that enough? Then wake up sir, and realize that we are being threatened.”

Perhaps at this moment Don Rodrigo Pola sighs, and Abelardo becomes alarmed thinking that each of the old man’s hiccups could be his last. But he speaks again, to Abelardo’s youthful admiration, when Abelardo asks, “Threatened?”

Don Rodrigo looks to the right and the left with suspicion, half-submerged in cotton.

“Look, sir, you have to realize something. My father was a revolutionary in 1910. I was born in 1909. I was left alone with my mother, Doña Rosenda, may she rest in peace. I wanted to be a writer. After a while, I became disillusioned. I dedicated myself to what was coming, not what had gone before. That is your task, sir. To understand what it is that remains and not what has gone before. When a country goes broke and its elite disappear, another country emerges in its place, and in this new country, it’s hard to tell who the new elite is. President Madero was the son of landowners, Carranza had been a senator during the Porfirio Díaz administration. But Obregón was a farmer, Calles a teacher, and well, Villa and Zapata, imagine. .”

Did Rodrigo Pola sigh while telling you, Abelardo, what you already knew?

“But all of them were political men, the intellectuals as well as the ignoramuses. In other words, they wanted power in order to transform the country. And they did it. A modern, industrial society was created, sure, one with way too much social backwardness, a backwardness that for better or for worse we have tried to amend. But now, my dear sir, Abelardo Holguín. .”

Don Rodrigo widened his big eyes from within his cotton shroud.

“Now it is not the revolutionaries who are coming. The ones who are coming are the criminals, the drug traffickers, the whores who accompany them, the bodyguards, and as usual, the government officials with Swiss bank accounts of unknown origin.

“An entire race of vicious people, people of an inconceivable vulgarity, sir, people without class. They’re not townspeople, nor middle class, nor any class. They are the underclass, lumpen, empowered by crime. They are the kidnappers of society, the most sinister, cruel, and voracious social climbers, without any ideals, ready to murder, exploit, corrupt. .”

He sighed one last time.

“Are we going to fight back with soap operas?”

Abelardo says that the old man smiled. It was hard to be sure, as he was underneath a lot of cotton.

“Well, yes, sir. We are going to gamble on the fact that a lot of people are going to attach themselves to their television sets instead of going out into the streets to pursue a career in crime. And even in the homes of the criminals, who knows if one of our dramas will touch one or two little hearts and show them the path to virtue?”

This time the smile was sour. Pola cleared his throat (everything about him seemed final, blunt), and he sat up as best as he was able to inside the basket.

“You told me you want to be a writer? Well you can choose. There are different styles of soap operas. The worst are the Venezuelan shows. They’re full of people with too many names. Half of the running time is taken up with them calling each other Francisco Edelmiro Bolívar or Edelmira Scarlett Miroslava, and nothing happens because they’re all too busy saying their long names. The Brazilian ones are the best, though not in a style available to us. Too much politics. Too much nudity. Too much hanky-panky. In Colombian soaps, however, a kind of national prudery exists despite the intrusion of crime and drugs.”

Abelardo expressed, he tells me, anticipation.

“In Mexico, my dear sir, Don Abelardo Holguín, we won’t admit a single controversial theme in our soap operas. There are the good guys and the bad guys. There are powerful and evil men. There are manipulative women. There are families with mixed children, good and bad. But there is — it is indispensable — the modest and honorable little maid with whom the well-to-do boy, the baby of the family, falls in love.”

Abelardo said he did not recognize the noise that emerged from the basket. Was it the laughter of old man Rodrigo Pola? Or his particular way of expiring?

“Don’t go beyond those parameters, sir. Everything is encoded in that discourse: country, family, religion, and state.”

“And the ending?” asked Abelardo.

“The maid marries the well-to-do boy.”

“And the inheritance?” he thought to ask.

“First he loses it,” Pola said, shifting around in his pre-deathbed. “But then the hero makes another fortune, this time by his own hard work and individual initiative. He doesn’t inherit it, and he doesn’t lose the girl he chose from the servile cattery.”

Abelardo says that the old man, upon saying this, sucked on his own gums, making the sound of a death rattle.

“Anyway,” he said to Abelardo, “let’s have a toast to the success of your work. Pour yourself a glass of wine. Drink. I can assure you that this wine has never seen the light of day.”