Vlad

Chapter 1

“I wouldn’t trouble you, Navarro, if Dávila and Uriarte were available. I’m not going to call them your inferiors—subordinates sounds better — but neither will I forget that you are a senior partner, primus inter pares, and so are higher ranked in this firm. I am entrusting this task to you because, first and foremost, I consider this a matter of utmost urgency. .”

Weeks later, when the awful adventure had ended, I recalled that, at its beginning, I had chalked up the absence of Dávila and Uriarte to luck. Dávila was off on his honeymoon in Europe, and Uriarte was tied up in a judicial embargo. As for me, I was neither going away on a wedding trip, nor would I have ordinarily accepted the work, appropriate for a lawyer just out of school, that our boss had delegated to our indefatigable Uriarte.

But I respected the decision of my elderly employer and appreciated the meaningful intimacy of his trust. He had always been an uncompromising man whose decisions were final. He was not in the habit of asking anyone for advice. Although he was tactful enough to listen attentively to his co-workers’ points of view, he replied with orders. And yet, in spite of what I just said, how could I ignore the peculiar circumstances by which he’d acquired his fortune? His status as a rich man was recent enough for him still to be considered “new money,” but even that new money, thanks to the gravitas of its owner, felt every bit as old as his eighty-nine years and tied to the history of an already buried century. His wealth was largely a result of the obsequiousness (or the moral flexibility) with which he had served (and risen in his service of) successive governmental administrations during his long years in Mexico. Suffice it to say he was an “influential man.”

I must confess that I never saw my boss behave submissively to anyone. I could only guess at the inevitable concessions that his haughty gaze and already curved spine had been forced to make — over the course of his career — to politicians who could hardly be said to exist at all beyond the six-year span of a president’s term. He knew perfectly well that political power was fleeting; the officials did not. They prided themselves on having been named ministers for six years, after which they would be forgotten for the rest of their lives; whereas the admirable thing about the distinguished Don Eloy Zurinaga, Esq., was that for sixty years he had known how to slither from one presidential administration to the next while always landing on his feet. His strategy was quite simple. Throughout his career, he never fell out with politicians because he never once let them glimpse the inevitability of their political greatness dwindling to a future of insignificance. Few saw past the superficial courtesy and empty praise of Eloy Zurinaga’s ironic smile.

As for his attitude toward me, I quickly accepted that if it did not behoove him to display any new loyalties, this was because he never demonstrated any lasting affection to anyone or to anything. That is, his official conduct was professional: honest and efficient. It can only remain a matter of conjecture whether that honesty was genuine and that efficiency just a type of tyranny, and whether both qualities combined into a mask necessary for survival in the swamp of political and judicial corruption. If Licenciado Zurinaga never quarreled with a government official, that was probably because he’d never much liked any of them. He didn’t need to say this. His life, his career, even his dignity confirmed it.

A year had passed since Mr. Zurinaga, my boss, had become housebound. In all that time, nobody at the firm ever dared imagine that the physical absence of the man in charge allowed for slack behavior, tardiness, or idle jokes. On the contrary, in his absence, Zurinaga felt all the more present. He seemed to have issued a warning: “Be careful. At any moment I might show up and surprise you. Watch out.”

More than once during the past year, Mr. Zurinaga had telephoned to announce his imminent arrival in the office. Although he never showed up, on each occasion a holy terror put the entire staff on high alert, leaving us all on our best behavior. And then, one morning, an individual who seemed identical to the boss came into, and a half hour later left, the office. The only reason we knew it wasn’t really him was that in the course of that half hour, Mr. Zurinaga telephoned a few times to issue instructions. On the phone that morning, he spoke in a decisive, almost dictatorial way, without entertaining a single question, remark, or response. Then, without allowing for so much as an acknowledgment, he hung up. Word spread that the individual in the office couldn’t be the boss after all, and yet, when he walked out, seen from behind, he was tall and stooped over, just like the absent lawyer. He was dressed in an old polo coat with its lapels lifted to his ears and a totally out-of-fashion black-and-brown felt hat from which two uncontrolled white tufts of hair burst like the wings of a bird.

The walk, the cough, and the clothing were all the boss’s, but this visitor, who entered the sancta sanctorum of the office with such nonchalance that nobody stopped him, was not Eloy Zurinaga. The joke — if it even was a joke — didn’t leave any of us laughing. Quite the opposite. The appearance of this double, specter, or look-alike — whatever he was — only made us feel unease and anxiety.

Because he no longer came into the office, my meetings with the lawyer Eloy Zurinaga, my boss, took place at his home. From the street, a skimpy and miserable garden led to an equally miserable, collapsing set of stairs to the great house. He lived in one of the last remaining Porfirian mansions, as they’re called, in reference to the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz, specifically the period from 1884 to 1910, our pretend belle époque. For some unknown reason, no one had torn down the mansion, unlike the rest of the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, which has been razed to make way for office buildings, condominiums, and shops. One needed only enter the large, ramshackle two-storied house, crowned with a mansard roof and atop an inaccessible cellar, to understand that the lawyer’s entrenchment was not a matter of will so much as one of gravity. Zurinaga had accumulated so many papers, books, case files, pieces of furniture, bibelots, dishes, paintings, rugs, tapestries, folding screens, and especially memories in that residence that to change locations would have been for him like changing his life and accepting, even hastening, his death.

To demolish the house would be to demolish his entire existence.

Zurinaga’s obscure origins (or his cold reasoning, devoid of sentimental concessions) excluded from the gray stone mansion any reference to family. The interior lacked any pictures of women, parents, children, or friends. Instead, the house was crammed with an overabundance of old-fashioned decorative objects that gave the place the feeling of an antiques warehouse: Sèvres vases, Dresden figurines, bronze nudes and marble busts, flimsy chairs with gilded backrests, Biedermeier-style tables, heavy armchairs of burnished leather, along with the intrusion here and there of art-nouveau lamps. . This was a house without the slightest hint of feminine grace.

Instead, hanging on the red velvet-lined walls were artistic treasures that, seen up-close and taken together, revealed a shared macabre quality: disturbing engravings by the Mexican Julio Ruelas of heads drilled by monstrous insects; phantasmagoric paintings by the Swiss Henry Füssli, whose specialty was the depiction of nightmares, of distortions, the marriage of sex and horror, females and fear. .

“Just imagine,” the attorney Zurinaga smiled. “Füssli was a cleric who fell out with an ecclesiastical judge. The judge defrocked him, and that’s what pushed Füssli toward art. .”

Zurinaga brought his fingers together beneath his chin.

“Sometimes, I would like to have been a judge who expelled himself from the judiciary and so is condemned to art. . Too late,” he sighed. “For me, life has become a long parade of corpses. . My only comfort is to count those who have not yet left, those who age with me. .”

Sunken in his leather wing chair worn from years of use, Zurinaga caressed its arms the way another man might caress the arms of a woman. His long white fingers took such deliberate pleasure from this that the lawyer seemed to be saying: “The flesh decays; the chair endures. Take your pick: one skin or the other.”

Zurinaga was seated near a fireplace that was lit day and night, even in warm weather, as if cold were a state of mind, something like the spiritual temperature of the boss’s soul.

His pale face revealed a network of blue veins, giving him a translucent though healthy appearance in spite of the minute web of wrinkles that spread between his balding cranium and his well-shaved chin, forming tiny eddies of old flesh around his lips and thick curtains above his gaze that, in spite of everything, was penetrating and watchful — even more so, perhaps, because his aged flesh had caused his pitch-black eyes to sink deep into his skull.

“So, how do you like my house, counselor?”

“Very much, Don Eloy.”

“A dreary mansion, large beyond all need. .” the old lawyer recited in a strange trance. He was a rare bird, considering his species — I thought as I listened to him — a Mexican lawyer who quoted English poetry. The old man smiled again.

“So you see, my dear Yves Navarro, the advantage of living a long life is the opportunity to learn more than one’s circumstances alone would allow.”

“Circumstances?” I asked in good faith, not certain what Zurinaga was talking about.

“Sure,” he said as he brought together his long pale fingers. “You descend from a great family; I ascend from an unknown tribe. You have forgotten what your ancestors knew. I have learned what mine never knew.”

He extended his hand and again caressed the beautiful worn leather of his comfortable armchair. I laughed: “Don’t be so sure. Being a wealthy landowner in the nineteenth century in no way guaranteed a cultivated mind. More likely the opposite! My forefathers had a hacienda in Querétaro where they grew maguey and fermented it to make pulque liquor. That sort of operation wouldn’t have been especially conducive to the enlightenment of its owners, that’s for sure.”

The light from the burning logs played on our faces like murky remains of sunlight.

“My ancestors were not interested in knowing,” I added, “just in owning.”

“Have you ever asked yourself, Licenciado Navarro, why the so-called ‘upper classes’ in Mexico never hang on to their stations long?”

“It must be a sign of the country’s health, Don Eloy. It means that there’s social mobility in Mexico, movement, the possibility of bettering one’s position: a permeability of class boundaries. Those of us who lost everything during the Revolution — and we had a lot to lose — not only accepted it, we applauded the fact.”

Eloy Zurinaga rested his chin on his clasped hands and looked at me with understanding.

“The problem is that, in the Americas, we are all colonials. Here only the Indians can be true aristocrats. The European conquistadors, the colonizers, were commoners, the hoi polloi, ex-cons. . On the other side of the ocean, the Old World bloodlines prolong themselves, not only because they date back centuries, but also because they don’t depend, like we do, on immigration. Take Germany. No Hohenstaufen had to cross the Atlantic to make his fortune. Think of the Balkans, of Central Europe. . The Hungarian Arpads date back to 886, for Saint Stephen’s sake! The great Župan Vladimir brought the Serbian tribes together in the ninth century, and beginning in 1196 the Numantian Dynasty ruled from the Zeta plain to the region of Macedonia. None of them needed to come to America to make a new start. .”

Every conversation with Don Eloy Zurinaga was interesting. Yet I knew from experience that the lawyer never spoke without a specific ulterior motive, stealthily approached through far-flung references. I’ve already mentioned that he was never curt with anyone, neither with his inferiors nor with his superiors; however, being so very superior himself, Zurinaga didn’t admit that there could be anyone above him. In any case, it was true: he paid polite attention to those of us who were beneath him, allowing us all to say our piece.

But when, following this pleasant introduction, my boss got to the point, I wasn’t at all surprised at the direction our conversation took.

“Navarro,” he said, “I want you to take care of a very important matter.”

I nodded in assent.

“We were talking about Central Europe, about the Balkans.”

I nodded again.

“An old friend of mine, displaced by wars and revolutions, has lost his estate along the Hungarian-Romanian border. He had extensive lands strewn with castles in ruins. The thing is,” said Zurinaga with a touch of melancholy, “the war only exterminated what was already dead.”

I looked at him in hope of an explanation.

“As you know, it’s preferable to be the master of your own downfall rather than to find yourself the victim of forces beyond your control. . Suffice it to say that my good friend was the master of his own fall from nobility, and that now, between the fascists and the communists, he’s been stripped of his lands and his castles and his. .”

For the first time in our relationship, I felt that Don Eloy was hesitating. I even noticed a nervous twitch in his left temple.

“Forgive me, Navarro. These are the recollections of an old man. My friend and I are of the same generation. Imagine, we studied together at the Sorbonne back when law, like good manners, was learned in French. Before l’anglais corrupted everything,” he concluded with bitterness.

He looked at the flames in the fireplace as if to temper his own gaze, and continued with his usual voice, a voice that sounded like a river churning up rocks.

“It just so happens that my old friend has decided to settle in Mexico. You see how easily generalizations fade. My friend’s ancestral estate has been his, his family’s, since medieval times, and yet, here you have him in Mexico City, seeking a roof over his head.”

“How may I be of service, Don Eloy?” I asked hastily.

The old man stared at his trembling hands as he moved them closer to the fire. Then he laughed.

“Would you believe it? Usually, the person who takes care of such matters as these would be Dávila, who, as we know, is away fulfilling more pleasant duties at the moment. And as for Uriarte, between you and me, ne s’y connaît pas trop. . Anyway, the fact is that I am going to entrust you with finding a house for my immigrant friend. .”

“Only too happy to help, sir, but I. .”

“No, no. I am not just asking you for a simple favor. I’ve taken into account that you have a French mother, that you speak the language, and that you are familiar with the culture of the Hexagon. I could not have hoped for a more perfect match for my friend.”

He paused and gave me a friendly look.

“Can you imagine? We were students together at the Sorbonne. That means we’re of the same generation. He comes from an old Central European family. They owned a great deal of land in the Balkans, between the Danube and the Bistrica neighborhood of Novi Sad, before the devastation of the great wars. .”

For the first time, staring off as though he was in a sort of trance, Zurinaga had repeated himself. He had only just told me more or less the same thing. I didn’t call attention to this excusable symptom of old age.

“Sir,” I was quick to say, “I have always followed your instructions.”

He stroked my hand. His hand was, in spite of the fire, ice.

“Please, don’t think of this as an order,” he smiled. “It’s more like a happy coincidence. How is Asunción?”

Once again, Zurinaga had disconcerted me. I hadn’t expected him to mention my wife.

“Fine, sir, fine.”

“What a happy coincidence,” the old man repeated. “You are a lawyer in my firm. She has a real estate agency. Huzzah! as they used to say. Huzzah! Between the two of you, my friend’s housing problem is already solved.”