Adam in Eden

Chapter 34

In the midst of this growing tension between truth and lies, between comedy and drama, I wonder if what I’m doing is changing into what I ought to do in order to save the families, to save their food, their houses, and their belongings, on which I’ve made, I realize, my fortune.

Because what I am doing is not a personal favor or some random act. I know what’s going on. The physical presence of Adam Góngora is proof of what’s going on and puts me under the gun, because I have to stop him.

But how?

Perhaps by doing the opposite of what he does.

Though I am disgusted by the prospect, I need to employ some of the tactics Góngora uses and take them to an extreme. To defeat Góngora I must deceive him, first with arguments as childish as those I just offered him about Don Celes’s opposition to divorce. Then I will need to carry out actions that Góngora could not equal, let alone surpass, in their brutality.

Ours is a country of recently made fortunes. In colonial times the clergy and landowners, perhaps, took extra large slices of the domestic pie, but they always left the people’s table with more than just crumbs. But after Independence, that table lost its legs. Without the protection of the Spanish Crown, the new republic became a Donnybrook nation, a pilgrimage to hell in a handbasket in honor of the Amozoc Virgin of Rosario, a chienlit, a bordello, a disaster area, or an orchestra whose sole music was the clicking prosthetic footsteps of the dictator Santa Anna. Juárez and the liberals defeated the conservative order, Maximilian’s empire, and the French occupation. Ever since, Mexico has struggled to reconcile order and movement, institutions and ascent. The millionaires of my childhood were paupers compared to the today’s millionaires, but the new ones live in a very diverse, very large society of more than a hundred million people fighting to move up in the world and, by hook or by crook, to take their place in the sun.

I’m a lawyer and an investor. I am familiar with the work of doctors, jurists, architects, teachers, scientists, journalists, businessmen, and even a politician or two who are a credit to our country. But I also know about the eternal rites of national corruption from the top to the bottom, from the lion to the coyote, from the eagle to the serpent it eats on the national seal. Big or bite-size bribes are the currency in the accumulation of influence, winks and offers “that you can’t refuse.” From the bribe for the police officer to the bribe from the minister. The first, so that he won’t send you to the slammer. The second, so that you won’t send him to the slammer. Man, this country is screwed up!

No, what’s perverse and awful here is just the new criminal class that is slowly usurping power, beginning at the northern border then moving to the interior, first corrupting the illiterate police officer, then the educated politician, all without personal intermediaries. Where do these new criminals come from? They aren’t from the peasant- or working- or middle-class. They belong to a separate class: the criminal class, born, like Venus, from the foam of the sea, or in their case, from the foam of a warm beer spilled in a seedy cantina. They are the children of the comet. They corrupt, seduce, blackmail, threaten, and end up taking over a town, a state, and one day the entire country. .

Alas, sometimes, to safeguard what is good one must resort to the worst.

And that’s what I must do now.

I find myself, ladies and gentlemen, between a need and a requirement. Allow me to distinguish between those two. A need can be postponed. A requirement cannot. The way I see it, there is a need for a better, more just society. To achieve this, I am required to execute a brutal plan that will draw attention to and obviate Adam Góngora’s own brutal actions.

The stinky little man inadvertently provides me with an excuse. In the back of my mind, there was already this warning: Góngora is very clever, more than clever. And he might just be too clever.

He was.

The master plan of the other Adam (that is, Góngora) consists of occupying empty political spaces, spaces ceded by local governments. He takes over those spaces fast, with the power of law enforcement. When local governments become paralyzed because of crime, arms- and drug-trafficking, or the plain and simple absence of authority, Góngora sends armed occupiers to patrol public buildings, sets machine gun nests on the rooftops, and — I fear — intends to dissolve Congress, to line up and execute the innocent and the petty criminals, and then to set the dangerous ones free to join him and his men to form — I might as well call it what it is — a fascist army.

Is Góngora’s plan the solution to our worst problems? Is it folly or reason? Am I guessing or am I foreseeing?

How much do I really know, and how much do I merely imagine? Let’s say that the seen and the foreseen share in the truth. But Góngora, hungry for power—measured power — beats around the bush of a floral temple more baroque than Tonantzintla and perpetrates a crime that, in one fell swoop, kills two birds with one stone.

This is where his intelligence, clouded by love, fails.

He thinks he’s uncovered my weakness. He believes that I hate my father-in-law Don Celes, the King of Bakery. My father-in-law alone is in the way of Góngora and Priscila’s union and Priscila and my separation. Don Celes doesn’t want to know about divorce. Get behind me, as he likes to say.

For his and my benefit, Góngora is preparing to do away with Don Celes.

But Góngora doesn’t know that there is no such thing as a perfect crime. I know. That is the difference between an educated man (myself, if I may say so) and an ignorant brute like Góngora (a donkey that plays the flute while conducting an orchestra).

Here is Góngora’s criminal plan, and where it goes wrong.

Góngora orders his henchman Big Snake, provisionally released from jail thanks to Góngora’s intervention, to murder Don Celes while, carefree and indulging his sweet-tooth, he makes his weekly rounds of his pastry shops. But Big Snake, instead of killing Don Celes, murders the wrong baker, one who makes the same rounds as the boss, and, realizing his mistake, Big Snake lies to Góngora, saying that he fulfilled his part of the bargain and killed Don Celes, and that now Góngora should make good on his word and free him once and for all from the dark prison of San Juan de Aragón.

Don Góngora arrives at the Lomas Virreyes house dressed in black to offer his condolences to his alleged girlfriend, my wife Priscila. He is unnerved at the absence of black bunting at the entrance of the Catholic home, and he practically goes apoplectic when the door is answered by Don Celestino Holguín himself, alive and kicking and with a scowl on his face.

“Come in, Janissary,” he says not very politely to a perplexed Adam Góngora. “Move it, before the tea gets cold, and don’t trip over the rugs. They’re genuine Persians.”