Adam in Eden

Chapter 41

The reader will notice that everything is coming together, as in a chorus, at the end of my story. Góngora has invaded my private life on two fronts. He seduces Priscila and harasses L. He also undermines my working life. He creates situations in which nothing favors me. His policy of simultaneously attacking and seducing the middle class (by punishing some, which pleases the ones he doesn’t punish) extends to the repression of unimportant and anonymous people and to the murder of “false positives” (innocent and poor young men). Góngora acts in order to warn us: “Administrations come and go, but the armed forces are here to stay.”

I understand all this, which is why I’ve brought to the battle a brigade of German Siegfrieds commanded by Zacharias Werner, a Romantic poet who publishes verse to conceal his true vocations of espionage and violence.

I say that I understand all this, but I don’t understand the small detour I must unexpectedly take from my road on behalf of my brother-in-law Abelardo Holguín. What has happened to this young man, Priscila’s brother, Don Celestino’s son? How has he gone from being a boy from a good family to a failed poet to a writer of soap operas to. .?

I don’t know how to define him now that, having introduced me to the Holy-Boy of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo, Abelardo agrees to see me again at that Sanborns on Insurgentes.

I take a seat across from him and wait for the inky coffee that they serve Mexicans, who avoid the watered-down brew that North Americans demand.

I smile at him. I like him. He’s nutty. And he surprises me.

“Adam, my bro-in-law, I need to hit you up for some dough.”

I put on the expression of a likeable relative who nevertheless demands an explanation. I know all too well that he won’t get any dough from his father, the King of Bakery, and I know that he hasn’t been able to hold down a job with a steady salary. I remember him in the catacomb of Chapultepec. . but I don’t pass judgment. What does he want with the money?

“Adam, you’ve seen what’s going on.”

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Everything, my brother-in-law, is falling apart. There’s no harmony. The forces of order only create more disorder. There’s no authority. The criminals mock the government. The criminals become, where they can, government. They’re like Al Capone, they offer the choice of submission or death. They’re taking over the country.”

“That’s possible. Who knows? What exactly are you proposing?”

Abelardo seems to go into a trance. He looks up at the sky (as if the Sanborns had a sky), and instead of ordering some creamy Swiss enchiladas, he serves up an Aztec enchilada: Mexico is a country in love with failure; all revolutionaries end badly, the counterrevolution-aries only disguise their failure, there is vast deception in all of this, my brother-in-law; sometimes we believe that only revolutionary violence will save us; other times we believe that only the fake counterrevolutionary peace will restore our health; see what happens, we employ violence without revolution, peace without security, democracy with violence. Adam, how do we escape from this vicious circle?

“You tell me.”

“On a spiritual level.”

“Go on,” I say, concealing my skepticism.

“Everything fails,” Abelardo insists. “Everything is suspect: the State, the parties, democracy itself. Everything contaminates us, drugs, crime, violence with impunity. What can save us?”

“Okay, what?” I ask.

“The soul.”

“How?” I ask.

As before, he talks with a sort of calm, almost religious excitement about the nation’s soul, the people’s religious spirit, what has always saved us: faith, respect for religion and its symbols and its holy men, women, and children.

“Holy?” I ask him, hiding behind a petty skepticism that doesn’t offend Abelardo.

“You’ve seen him. The Holy-Boy. In a world of disappointment and so many lies, the Holy-Boy, he’s someone you can believe in. You know how he brings people together at the intersection of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo? He used to be there every Sunday, and now he’s there every evening, and every evening the people come together. My brother-in-law, you’ve seen how the people he gathers put behind them everything that threatens us?”

The reader should appreciate that I raise an objection: “What guarantee is there that the Holy-Boy can address and solve our country’s problems?”

“The Virgin of Guadalupe,” Abelardo answers.

To play down the importance he gives to this answer, I remind him of the argument in the press between the atheist scientist Don Juan Antonio Vizarrón and the pious clergyman Don Francisco Güemes.

“That just goes to prove,” Abelardo says, “the persistence of the religious subject. Who still talks about the chorus girl María Conesa, the White Kitty? Who remembers the presidential pre-candidacy of General Arnulfo R. Gómez? Let’s go back further in time: who remembers when El Rosario, the town in Sinaloa, was founded? When gold was first coined at the mint? When we won the battle of Limonada, huh? That in 1665 the Popocatépetl Volcano erupted, uh-huh? That during the earthquake of July 28, 1957, the Angel of Independence fell? That comets regularly fly across the Mexican sky — a comet in 1965, in 1957, in 1910, in 1852, in. .?”

(My attention fades as I remember being stuck inside Zoraida, experiencing every male’s greatest fear, castration, even at the moment of greatest pleasure. .)

“But in almost five hundred years, none of us has ever forgotten the Virgin of Guadalupe, my brother-in-law Adam Gorozpe. She is present in the midst of so much forgetting.”

I smile. “But she doesn’t exist. It’s a superstition.”

“She does exist. Look at the street, Adam.”

At the intersection of Insurgentes and Quintana Roo, people were gathered for the daily appearance of the Holy-Boy. He arrived punctually, making his way through the respectful crowd. But this time he was not alone. I mean, he brought someone along.

I recognized her by the black habit covering her from head to toe, except for her old-lady hands and sleepy gaze. She lifted the Boy onto the soapbox-pulpit from which he delivers his daily sermons. The woman climbed up next to him.

“This is my mother,” the Boy announced.

The woman removed her dark cape and revealed herself, dark-skinned, brunette, and sweet, covered with a blue cloak of stars, otherwise dressed in white, her hands, her ancient hands, clasped in prayer.

Nobody shouted “it’s a miracle, it’s a miracle!” because miracles, Sancho, rarely happen, and consequently they have to be certified with lengthy audiences, investigations, and suspicions of fraud before being publicly declared: what you have seen here is opus sensibile, which transcends nature because it is an act of God, who chooses to appear in this way, and not the result of popular ignorance, which becomes joyful and amazed when the Boy and his mother appear, but these emotions take a while to surface, as if the crowd at first wavered between the positions of the atheist Vizarrón and the believer Güemes in the daily media debate.

All doubts are dispelled, however, when the ten- or eleven-year-old Boy takes his mother, lifts her up in the air, and keeps her there, over his head, as the crowd stirs, exclaims, and finally shouts:

“It’s a miracle, it’s a miracle!”

And Abelardo, sitting next to me at the coffee shop, shows his rationalist’s and baker’s pedigree, when he explains:

“The thing about miracles is that you can’t attribute them to nature, but to God, and God is not nature nor is he subject to society’s rules. God acts directly, you understand, without having to go through natural causes.”

“And?” I ask with growing skepticism.

“The cause of the Boy and the Virgin requires not only faith, my brother-in-law, but also money. Dough. Cash. Pesos and cents to spread the word. God, alas, does not provide that.”

He looks at me, and I can’t deny it, with a certain affection.

“That’s why we need you to help us out. My brother-in-law.”