Adam in Eden

Chapter 35

I meet Abelardo Holguín for lunch at the Bellinghausen. He’s reserved a table for four, which only he and I will sit at, in the restaurant’s upper level, from where we can see and be seen but not hear or be heard. (The owner refuses to divide the restaurant into cubicles appropriate for the clients he refers to as los fumanchú.)

There’s something different about Abelardo. Something flamboyant about him. He’s always been an elegant young man. Now, his elegance dazzles and puzzles me. It’s not like him. The discretion he had exhibited at Don Celes’s house seems diminished and replaced by a strange sort of glow. I suppose that working in television has given him the idea that he must have his own look, so I try to ignore it. But when I called his company, they assured me that he no longer worked there.

“Did you change jobs?” I ask him.

“No,” he smiles, “the job changed me.”

I respond with my please-explain look.

He offers a lengthy explanation that manages to showcase the breadth of his talent for literary discourse. I have met young writers who wander about lost, taking baby steps without much success, until one day they realize that though they won’t take off in literature, their facility for literary rhetoric gives them wings to fly away to other less demanding but better endowed nests. Abelardo’s explanation has to do with the state of the republic, a subject that I know something about, as do you, especially if you’ve read this story so far. The nation is adrift. We have lost our faith in everything. The government can’t tell an A from a windmill. The political parties are too busy fighting each other to propose any solutions to our problems. The halls of parliament have become places to take a nice siesta, to assault speakers, and to display banners. Several state governments are controlled by drug traffickers, and others are subject to Adam Góngora’s armed forces. Tourists have been scared away. The price of oil is falling. At the border migrants can no longer migrate, and there are no indispensable jobs for them in Mexico despite the need everywhere for construction and reconstruction: highways, ports, dams, development of the tropics, agricultural development, urban renewal. .

I nod. He asks the perpetual question: what can we do to fix our country?

I start to answer, case by case, industry, commerce, and so on.

He interrupts me with innocence and disdain.

“Projects and more projects, Adam. We know them all. Every project is left unfinished. Good intentions are frustrated by apathy, greed, carelessness. If I already have what’s mine, why should I care about others. .? That’s how my father thinks, and don’t tell me he doesn’t.”

He gives me a harsh look.

“And what about you, Adam?”

I answer him that I am a lawyer and a businessman who generates wealth and offers jobs, savings, and pensions, and I—

“But what about our soul, Adam? The spirit of this country?”

I don’t know how to answer him. I already spoke my mind. I believe in investment, work, progress, what. .?

“And the soul?” Abelardo again insists. “What will become of our soul?”

Because the answer to this question must be serious, I will need to think it through. The soul. . Well. . There’s still time for that. . All eternity, after all?

Unlike the fate of the nation’s soul, my situation at home needs urgent attention.

I have to deal with Priscila: Abelardo’s sister, Don Celestino’s daughter, Góngora’s (likely) lover, and my wife before man and God.

Enmeshed as I have been in the puzzling dramas described here, it’s been ages since I’ve been alone with my wife. She’s been constantly courted by Góngora, and except as relates to him, she hasn’t been on my mind much. I suppose things will continue this way until they reach some sort of a natural conclusion.

But Priscila confronts me later in the afternoon.

“Does it surprise you that I love an ugly man?”

“No,” I respond calmly, “in spite of appearances, the ugly ones seem to have more luck than the good-looking ones.”

“Rumba is more pleasant than son,” she continues, seemingly at random.

“What’s that? Be more coherent, for the love of—”

“That I love an ugly, dirty man. That I’ve had it up to here with your cleanliness. Everything about you is clean and washed. In Jalisco they want good, clean elections. .”

“That’s your business,” I say, trying to bring down the curtain on this theater of the absurd.

“‘I am the winner!’ ‘Along the tropical trail!’”

“You’re a poor imbecile,” I blurt out.

“I am the Queen of Spring restored to my throne! Cantinflas!”

“Well, as the song goes, ‘dead leaves gather in oblivion. .’” “You can no longer defeat me,” Priscila says, expanding like a male peacock. “Because you can’t defeat your rival, ‘over at the big ranch, where I used to live. .’”

“You realize, don’t you, that Góngora is just using you?”

“He loves me. He says he wishes I was his birthday piñata.”

“So he could break you open with a stick?”

“No, to fill me up with candy.”

“To fill you up alright.”

“‘I am on the bridge of my caravel, with my soul tied fast to the rudder.’ ‘The Martians have arrived. .’ He loves me.”

“His love for you is part of his plan to take me down. ‘Wake up, my darling, wake up: can’t you see that the day has dawned?’ ”

There is an electric tension between us as we move closer to each other, and she doesn’t know whether to back down or to stand up to me, and that’s why she starts singing the Mexican national anthem. .

“He’s seducing you to learn the family secrets. He’s manipulating you, and he’ll throw you out like a used Kleenex. .”

“You’re jealous! ‘The road to Guanajuato!’ ”

“Jealous of what? Of you?”

“The ugly guy is more handsome. The ugly guy is more powerful. The ugly guy loves me.”

“What about you?”

“‘In my delightful jade eyes you can see that I am in love.’ ”

How can I respond to her?

Can I reveal to her that Góngora tried to murder Don Celestino Holguín? Can I tell her that the idiot failed in the attempt and instead killed a poor pastry salesman who covered the same route as Don Celes?

I don’t reveal this because she wouldn’t believe me.

I don’t reveal this because I know that Don Celes wouldn’t allow her to get a divorce.

I don’t reveal this because it occurs to me that, having failed once in his attempt to kill Don Celes so he could marry Priscila, the little stinkeroo won’t screw up a second time.

And so I must hurry.

The disastrous conclusion of Góngora’s plans quickly approaches. I receive the first indication of the plans from my gardener, Xocoyotzín Pereda, whom I find crying inconsolably while he pushes a lawnmower, descending from the heights of my father-in-law’s mansion and disappearing into a ravine, which has been strangled by our obliviousness that under our feet the weeds grow and the dead lie. .

“What’s the matter, Don Xocoyotzín?” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder, touching antiquity.

“Nothing, Señor Gorozpe, nothing,” he answers with his usual sad expression to which a new melancholy has been added.

“Go on, tell me.”

“Little Xocoyotzín,” he moans. “Little Xocoyotzín.”

“Your grandson?” I ask, knowing who he means. “It’s not true, sir.”

“What? You mean your grandson isn’t your grandson?”

“No, I mean yes, he was my grandson,” he cries. “He was my grandson.”

“Calm down Xocoyotzín. Tell me what happened.”

He doesn’t stop. He pushes the lawnmower around the vast property, so to hear him, I must follow closely.

He tells me what happened. He was summoned to identify the body of his grandson, little Xocoyotzín Pereda Ramos, on the outskirts of the prison of Aragón. There were about twenty bodies on display for the bereaved to come and collect. Each body had an ID tag tied to the big toe of the left foot.

“The left foot?”

“All of them, Boss. There was my grandson, little Xocoyontzín, wearing nothing but his underpants and with a tag hanging from the big toe of his left foot.”

“Didn’t they offer you some explanation?”

“Oh sure, they said the boys were guerrillas fighting for a narcotics cartel, caught and killed in Michoacán and now returned to their families here in Mexico City.”

“What was your grandson doing in Michoacán?”

“Oh, sir, little Xocoyontzín was never in Michoacán in his entire life. .”

“So. .?”

“He was with me at his little sister’s piñata party on the day they said he was in Michoacán.”

“So then. .?”

“All lies, Señor Gorozpe. They accused my grandson of a crime he didn’t commit. He was neither in Michoacán nor was he a guerrilla. He spent all his time in his workshop repairing broken furniture!”

In Colombia there were the cases of so-called “false positives,” extrajudicial killings of young men presented as guerrillas with the deadly statistical purpose of proving that law enforcement was efficiently combating the guerrilla insurgency. When they didn’t capture guerrillas, the corpses of innocent young men were substituted and presented as “guerrillas”—then they were returned to their families because they were so poor. Who was going to complain? Who was going to sue? Nor was my gardener likely to get his grandson posthumously exonerated.

“All I want is for them to give me back my dead boy.”

I don’t know if I had some kind of a revelation or if the pieces of the board game simply fell into place so I could see that Góngora needed to justify his position with a body count, even if the bodies belonged to innocent young men. If to this I added — my mind was going supersonic — the punishment meted out to innocent middle class people and the usual suspects — street clowns, streetwalkers, street singers, as well as petty thieves, bums, and beggars — I came to the conclusion that even if Góngora incarcerated terrible people such as the men of San Juan de Aragón and the women of Santa Catita, he did hardly anything to fight crime. Instead he gave the impression that he was fighting crime. By choosing “select” victims, he courted public opinion while leaving intact criminal organizations, their bosses and their. .

I saw the light. I realized what I had to do to defeat Góngora.

And that something had to be just as perverse as, or more perverse than, any action attributable to Góngora.

Except that I would act in the cause of justice.