The Eagle's Throne

23. GENERAL CÍCERO ARRUZA TO GENERAL MONDRAGÓN VON BERTRAB

General, you and I are in constant and amicable communication. You know that I’ve always acknowledged your superiority and, above all else, above you and me, the superiority of the president of the republic, commander in chief of the armed forces. Well, General, with my usual frankness I must warn you that this goddamn country is getting out of control. Sure, we’re all so damn proud of the fact that in Mexico there are seventy million people under the age of twenty. A country full of kids. Have you ever heard them? Have you ever put your ear to the ground? How do you think those kids see the old mummies that govern them?

How old are you? Fifty? Fifty-two? And me, sixty-four, sixty-five? The record books are a little sketchy in the tiny village where I was born, in the state of Hidalgo — that is, if you can say that Hidalgo exists and wasn’t just an invention to separate Mexico City from dangerous rival states like Michoacán and Jalisco. Hidalgo is the Uruguay of Mexico, but poor and without any records. Anyhow, General, my point is that you and I are in our prime, as my granny would have said. But to youngsters we’re old. They want a young leader. Young like Madero, Calles, Obregón, Villa, and Zapata were when they threw themselves into the Revolution — all of them under thirty.

Keep your eyes peeled, Mr. Secretary. Where’s our fresh-faced leader? How old is that ass-kisser Tácito de la Canal? Fifty-two like you? And his opponent, Bernal Herrera, isn’t he in his early fifties, or maybe late forties? Do you think today’s kids trust them at all? Do you think those millions of kids who cruise on their motorcycles as if their Harley-Davidsons were Pancho Villa’s horse, old Siete Leguas himself, and those half-naked party animals who spend all night clubbing, and those DJs who fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City to Honolulu for twenty-five thousand dollars a pop to play CDs, and the children of serial millionaires who’ve been inheriting fortunes passed down since 1941, will trust any of us?

That’s what the elite are saying in the newspapers, General. But what about the middle-class kid who has had to watch how every six years his parents lose their car, their house, and their washing machine because they can’t keep up with the monthly payments? Or students who can’t even study because public universities are constantly paralyzed by strikes and private universities cost a fortune?

Look at them, General — they wanted to be engineers, lawyers, big shots, but look at them now — they’re driving taxis, delivering pizzas, working as ushers in movie theaters, browbeaten into making a living parking other people’s cars. They’re broken people who should have become something better, and now all they get are kicks in the ass. And all the sweet young things who only dreamed of becoming decent, middle-class housewives? They’re out there working as typists, sales girls, and waitresses — if they’re lucky. Otherwise it’s lap dancing and the brothel. And don’t even get me started on the stories of the little farm girls who find work in factories and dream that some gringo will one day want to marry them, the stupid idiots, and then the factory goes under or moves to China, where the workers make 10 percent of what Mexican workers earn, and they’re back out on the street again begging, or back in their villages eating nopalitos, with their babies bundled up in their shawls, wanting to cross the border and become gringos like so many young men and women trying to find work on the other side of the fence — even if it means drowning in a river or suffocating in some trafficker’s truck or dying of thirst in the desert or getting shot full of holes, like a sieve, by the gringo border patrol’s bullets. Tell me, General, what can those seventy million kids look forward to? Who will they look to? Think about it while there’s still time, General.

And remember, in these matters you have to act quickly.