Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [64]
“At the price of one delay after another?” Andrés protested, sitting on his father’s left, naturally.
“Democracy makes slow progress. Authoritarianism is faster. It’s better to settle for a slow democracy,” Roberto said with an air of smugness.
“Fastest of all is revolution, brother,” Andrés said irritably. “If democracy doesn’t resolve matters by peaceful means, the left will be forced to take to the mountains again.”
General Miles, the mediator between his sons, had a longer memory than they did. He remembered the history of uprisings and bloodshed in Mexico, and his gratitude for seventy years of one party and peaceful successions that in 2000 had allowed it to achieve a democratic alternation.
“Alternation, yes. Transition, no,” Andrés said energetically, refraining from banging the teaspoon against his cup of coffee as he turned toward his brother. “Don’t close the doors on us. Don’t badger us with legal trickery. Don’t underestimate us in your arrogance. Don’t send us back to the mountains.”
Andrés was in the mountains now, at the head of an army of shadows that attacked only at dawn and at sunset, vanishing at night into the sierra and disappearing during the day among the men in the mountain villages. Impossible to pick out a rebel leader from a hundred identical campesinos. Andrés Miles knew very well that to city eyes, all peasants were the same, as indistinguishable as one Chinese from another.
That was why they had treacherously chosen him, General Miles. He would be able to recognize the leader. Because the leader was his own son. And there is no mimetic power in the gray, thorny, steep, trackless, overgrown tracts of land—the great umbrella of the insurrection—that could disguise a son in an encounter with his father.
Under his breath, General Marcelino Miles cursed the stupidity of the right-wing government that had closed, one after the other, the doors of legitimate action to the left, persecuting its leaders, stripping them of immunity on the basis of legalistic deceptions, encouraging press campaigns against them, until they had the leftists cornered with no option except armed insurrection.
So many years of openness and conciliation ruined at one stroke by an incompetent right, drowning in a well of pride and vanity. The growing corruption of the regime broke the chain at its weakest link, and Andrés declared to his father:
“We have no recourse but violence.”
“Be patient, son.”
“I’m only one step ahead of you,” Andrés said with prophetic simplicity. “At the end of the day, when we’ve run out of political options, you generals will have no choice but to take power and put an end to the passive frivolity of the government.”
“And along the way I’ll have to shoot you,” the father said with severity.
“So be it,” Andrés said and bowed his head.
Marcelino Miles was thinking of this as they climbed the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur. He would do his duty, but it was against his will. As the troops advanced, using machetes to cut their way through lianas in the impenetrable shadow of amates and ficuses intertwined with papelillo trees and embraced by climbing vines, in his mind, love for his son and military duty similarly fought and were entwined. Perhaps Andrés was right, and once again, the sacrifice of the rebel would be the price of peace.
Except what peace? General Miles thought (since one had to think about everything or nothing to triumph over the arduous ascent of an unconquerable mountain, watchword and symbol of a country as wrinkled as parchment) that Mexico didn’t fit into the closed fist of a mountain. When it opened its hand, out of the wounded skin poured thorns and quagmires, the green teeth of nopal, the yellow teeth of puma, streaked rock and dried shit, acrid odors of animals lost in or habituated to the sierras of Coatepec, La Cuchilla, and La Tentación. At each step, always within reach, they sought the intangible—the revolutionary army—and what they found was something