The Shadow of the Shadow (16 page)

"Don't look at me, I couldn't agree with you more," said the
lawyer Verdugo, throwing the flowers into the wastebasket, and
the water back into the washbasin so he could use the vase for an
ashtray.

Tomas, sitting on the bed recently vacated by the deceased
hod carrier, stared out dreamily at the late-night traffic filling the
street below. With his left hand, he scratched the fuzz above his
upper lip.

"You growing a mustache, Tomas?" asked the journalist.

The Chinaman nodded and flashed the quickest of smiles.

"I didn't think you people could grow a mustache," said the poet, dragging the small night table in between the two beds.

"By this time I think you should have figuled out that I'm a
lathel apochlyphal Chinaman. The kind of Chinaman who leads
Celvantes, Tolstoi, Blasco Ibanez, and Balzac. If I wele you, I
might stalt asking myself if youl domino paltnel wasn't a spy for
Alfonso XIII."

"The fact of the matter is, at this point I'm ready to believe just
about anything... except that," said the poet.

"Like I said, it's a hell of a country!" sighed Verdugo.

"Now gentlemen, let's not start blaming the country for all our
problems. The truth is, she's somewhat the worse for wear after so
many years of bullets and blood, but it's certainly not her fault."

"The problem isn't too much bullets, but not enough," said the
poet. "That's what happens with these halfway revolutions. They're
like a tree without any leaves. The country's suffered for it, hell,
we all have. When you come right down to it, it's all a matter of
hope..."

"If that's where this conversation's going, you can count me out.
I'm too much of a cynic to be able to handle that rot," said Verdugo,
pulling the box of dominoes out of the pocket of his gabardine
coat (English-made, and purchased at the Correo Espanol with
forty pesos won in a dice game). He spilled the bones out onto
the night table, but it was too small to hold them all. Tomas got
up, took a picture down from the wall, a Diirer reproduction, and
laid it on top of the bedside table. The bones slid along the glass
a fraction of an inch above the surprised faces of the apostles and
the leftovers from the Last Supper.

"The winners were the ones with the most resistance, the
guys with the thickest skins, the hardest shells," said the reporter,
unwilling to leave the poet hanging alone in the Revolutionary
balance. "Obregon won in the end because, if you don't count the
time he was military governor in Mexico City and had the priests
out sweeping the streets, he was always the most adaptable, he was
always the one who could find himself a place inside the system."

"Of course. That's what it took to come out on top. The
Revolution was lost long before it was over. It was lost as soon as
the generals decided it was better to get married to the landlords'
daughters than to rape them."

"I'm sorry to say I don't agree," said Verdugo, taking a pack of
cigars out of his jacket pocket and offering them around. Only the
journalist took one. "Obregon and his officers would much rather
have them as their whores and mistresses. That's one of the great
moral advances of the Revolution. The aristocracy has taught them
how to do business, not how to sit at table. They've simply learned
how to turn power into money, not into good manners."

"You really believe that the generals won the Revolution?" asked
the poet, slapping the double-six down on top of Diirer's apostles.
"Well, they didn't. The licenciados, the professionals, lawyers and
the like, were the ones who won it in the end... these newfangled
creatures crawling out from under the rocks everywhere you look.
Lawyers... jolly types, with a little bit of education under their
belts.. .but not too much, of course... And every one of them's
got their own personal little story about the Revolution to whip
out just in case.. .field secretary to some general, author of this or
that treaty or subparagraph of the constitution; ex-quartermasters,
organizing troop trains from who knows where, editing some
newspaper somewhere..."

The reporter rapped his knuckles on the glass tabletop, passing
the hand.

"What are you passing for?" the poet interrupted himself.
"Looks like that busted leg of yours has affected your brain."

"Listen, poet, the only bad bones I've got to worry about right
now are these ones sitting here on the table in front of me."

Then Tomas knocked on the picture frame, passing to the
lawyer Verdugo who laughed out loud.

"Now you've done it, Fermin. That's what you get for badmouthing lawyers when you've got one sitting right next to you."

The poet stopped to think. He had two sixes left, meaning that Verdugo had the other four. It was going to take a bit of
maneuvering to get out of this one.

"I didn't mean anything personal, you understand," said the
poet.

"Of course not. And if I beat your pants off, I'm sure you'll
understand it's got nothing to do with my professional pride."

"It's all part of the game."

The metallic clatter from the streetcar yard drifted in through
the window. Then it started to rain, the soft drops slapping against
the glass and muffling the sounds from outside.

"My problem's always been that I never really believed," said
the reporter. "I liked Ricardo Flores Magon, but he was always
too far away. The Villistas and Zapatistas were my type all right,
but they always moved too fast and shot too much, so that I either
never had the chance or never wanted to get too close. I suppose
it's got something to do with my being a reporter, always too
caught up in the details, the little stories, not with the big ideas.
Always the observer, always watching from outside. Of course
there were individuals I liked well enough, the way they went
into the Revolution and when it was over came out the other side
without selling out. Colonel Mugica in'17, de la Huerta when he
was provisional president, Lucio Blanco in '15, Ramirez Garrido
when he was chief of police. Hell, I never thought I'd be partial
to a police chief, but Ramirez Garrido's a good man. He made
the cops join the union, protected the prostitutes, and organized
cooperative kitchens in the jails."

"What's Ramirez Garrido up to now?" asked the poet. After
two more rounds, the lawyer had turned the game back to sixes,
and he had no choice but to play one of his.

"I think he wants to be governor of Tabasco or something
like that. Pass," said Pioquinto Manterola. Besides his abominable
hand and the fact that he'd gone and gotten himself thinking about
his tangled and foggy relationship with the Mexican Revolution,
it suddenly dawned on him that he was in love.

Verdugo watched the Chinaman play a five, blocking off his
sixes, and forcing him instead to play a four, giving the poet a brief
respite.

"I'm still a Villista at heart," said the poet, setting the four/two
down on the glass. "I'll always remember how the world changed
with every charge of Villa's cavalry, how the whole world became
undone somehow. We were fury on horseback, the destruction of
the old order. What'd they call Attila the Hun? The scourge of
God? I used to make up poems on horseback, riding alongside
illiterate peons, traveling photographers, ex-cattle rustlers... Do
you understand? In front of us, the federales, the machine guns, the
men with their shiny buttons, falling down like toy soldiers.

"A revolution's fought with ideas and violence. We had plenty
of violence but not too many ideas. That's what made me doubt
all along. I hated things the way they were as much as the next
guy, but I didn't know how to turn that hate into something else.
Maybe it's just that I didn't really want to change things, I just
wanted them to stay the way they were, only with different people
running the show."

"Well, if that's what you wanted, Verdugo, that's what you got.
All we have today is a sort of modernized version of the same
thing as before, full of words, and graves you've got to go visit every
Sunday," said the journalist. "But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe what
really happened is that we opened the doors of change. Maybe
what all those years of war were about was to just open the door a
little bit, so the changes could start to happen. They've given land
to the campesinos, haven't they? We've got a new constitution, don't
we? They took the power away from the Church, they outlawed
the company store."

"You'le wasting youl bleath, fliends.lhat levolution did what
it had to do. Now comes the second one, the leal one, the wolkel's
levolution."

"I'd like to believe, you, Tomas," said Verdugo, playing his last
six and losing control of the game. "But faith is something you've got to nourish to keep it alive. It's been too long now since I turned
into a sort of a beggar of the heart and mind, living like a parasite
on borrowed ideas."

"If General Villa rises up again, I might just go and join him
for another go-round."

"I suppose that sooner or later a man's got to stop being an
observer and take a stand. Although maybe there is such a thing as
an active observer, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have somebody
around to tell what happened," said the reporter, turning the game
to threes, making everybody pass, and then going out with the
double-threes and the three/one.

"Well, will you look at that? Maybe you don't know too much
about levolution, Newsman, but you sule do know how to play
dominoes."

"A man's got to be good at something..."

I N T H E WAIT I N G R 0 0 M outside the company president's
office, Fermin Valencia sat and wrote with a pencil stub inside the
little notebook he always carried with him: I stitch my soul to my
skin/overcome with despair/life bleeds white/and still/no Singer was
ever made that could mend it/ with fine needlework/ while I lament/
these things in me/I've lost/left/behind.

Fermin's notebook was filled with short poems, and every now
and then some friend would take one and get it published in the
newspaper or in one of the many magazines that had begun to
appear in Mexico City since the Revolution. It made him proud
to receive recognition as a poet and there wasn't anything else he'd
rather do with his time than write poetry, but all the same every
time he wrote a poem he felt like a poacher, like the perpetrator of
some criminal act, an outlaw. So when the secretary came out of the
office and told him to go inside, he hid the notebook behind his back
in embarrassment, almost as if she'd caught him masturbating.

Henry Peltzer's office was lined with photographs of automobiles and full of shiny new rubber tires on pedestals, reflecting the
light with their capricious geometric tread.' he German-GringoMexican entrepreneur sat behind an enormous mahogany desk,
smoking an oversized cigar and playing with his gold watch chain.
Peltzer was a living caricature of the new industrial bourgeoisie,
as though he'd modeled his own image on Robinson's drawings of
porcine bosses that illustrated John Reed's articles in Metropolitan
Magazine.

"Mr. Valencia, good to see you. I sincerely hope our relationship
will bring us as prosperous results as before."

"I sincerely hope so too, mister. What've you got for me?"

"What I have got, Valencia? What I have got? New Mexican
tire, very soon, exceptional sales opportunity. Real good, real nice
one.

"Well, I'll need more than that to work with. What's so special
about it, how's it different, what's it cost?"

"A wonderful tire, just wonderful. Absolutely. Best tire in
Mexico. Fits every car, every make, every model, good for all.
Peltzer model 96-C. We call it THE ONLY ONE."

"The only one?"

"THE ONLY ONE."

"Okay. So what's the deal? Does it cost less, last longer?"

"No, costs more, lasts less. But very good tire, excellent tire.
Imagine a car floating on air... Have a cigar."

"No thanks."