Adam in Eden

Chapter 28

Adam Góngora continues what the marvelous Rosario Castellanos would call his shadowy trade. He has emptied the prisons that he only just filled with lowlifes, beggars, cripples, and petty thieves.

“On the outside,” he declares, “they’re less dangerous.”

But he leaves the innocent middle-class workers locked up.

“To set an example. The privileged are no longer so privileged, huh? How do you like that?”

Still the real criminals are free to do as they please, while Góngora numbs public opinion and his conscience (his what?), locking up and releasing all the innocent lumpen and the sex workers (I wonder what happened to the beautiful Zoraida) to create an image of efficient activity, which is deceptive, useless, and expeditious, for the public security forces. The awful problem is most people believe that, because Góngora does so many things, he must be doing something right. That’s not the case. He’s putting on one big farce.

How could I unmask Góngora?

Don’t think, reader, that what I want to do to Góngora stems from a desire to take revenge on my damned namesake for seducing my wife. No, I am against Góngora because he has deceived the country. His repression doesn’t affect the guilty. In fact, it protects them. As long as petty criminals are sent to prison, major criminals, now forgotten, are free to kidnap, to traffic in narcotics, and to murder.

How can I unmask Góngora? Above all, how can I punish him for his pervasive criminal farce without seeming to take revenge on him for having seduced my wife? This is a difficult problem that I am unable to solve until Góngora himself unintentionally offers me the answer.

Here’s the problem: Góngora yields to the temptation of wielding power. For the record, he already has power. What I need to find out and prove is this: as powerful as a police czar might be, is there a power greater still?

Góngora is immersing himself in the deep and treacherous waters of politics. I suppose, given the enormous corruption of law enforcement, thanks to which half of the police officers are criminals, and half of the criminals are police officers, their various “jobs” interchangeable tasks, Góngora believes that by elevating this little game to the highest public level, he can seduce me and force me out of my very safe place as an influential corporate lawyer with no official position. I am already ideally situated. I don’t know if Góngora is too crude to understand the advantages of my position, because one fine morning he shows up to offer me a partnership—his word — to install me (God have mercy!) as the president of the republic.

All the politicians, he tells me, are finished. They’re useless. They have no idea how to govern. They don’t know how to administer. He emphasizes each syllable: ad-min-is-ter, a verbal tic that I am more than familiar with from the speeches of my father-in-law, Don Celes.

“I have an idea,” Góngora says from his unbelievable squatness.

“Oh!” I exclaim.

“What if you and I, my namesake, support an impossible candi-date for the country’s presidency? How do you like that?”

“How do you like that?” I reply. “You’re saying you could improve the wheel by making it round.”

“No, I’m serious, what if you, who are the economic force, and I, who am law enforcement, come together to back an impossible candidate? How do you like that?”

I doubt that I’ll like the plan. “What do you mean impossible?” I ask. “Impossible because the candidate is a blockhead, dishonest, or. .?”—I have to think before I can conclude my question—“Or because he is unthinkable?”

Góngora tries to smile. He can’t say what he’s thinking. He runs his hand over his head, adjusting his borrowed hair.

“No, impossible only so the possible one can thank him. How do you like that?”

I admit that Góngora’s mental carousel makes me dizzy. When I recover my senses, I also recover logic.

“And who, then, would be the possible one?”

“Whoever is the power behind the throne. How do you like that?”

“You know, Góngora, we already had a Maximato, and back then the president lived in the Palace and the guy in charge lived across the street.”

“Sure. Calles was the Supreme Boss, and the presidents were his puppets.”

“So, history repeats itself? Is that what you believe?”

“Nuh-uh, counselor. Not at all. Because this time whoever occupies the chair owes it not just to one Supreme Boss, but to two. How do you like that?”

Pregnant pause!

“To you and me. You are the impossible one so that we can both be possible. . How do you like that?”

“And who will be the president?”

“You, of course, my dear counselor. It couldn’t be otherwise. How do you like that? I’m not trying to trick you.”

Góngora leaves, imagining that he has, if not convinced me, at least intrigued me enough that I will consider his proposition. He’s dead wrong. In less than two minutes I figure out that this idiot thinks he’s smart, that he has become drunk on the sweet nectar of power, that he has no idea with whom he’s dealing — Adam Gorozpe — and that perhaps, this stone-age Don Juan believes that forming an alliance with me transforms his love affair with Priscila into, I don’t know, a ménage-à-trois, which would not stop it anyway from being a ridiculous burlesque.

P.S. I invite Abelardo Holguín to lunch at the Bellinghausen. He arrives, as usual. But there is something different about him, something about him that I don’t recognize.