Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [85]
5. Sitting at his desk with the tricolor flag planted behind him like a parched nopal, President Justo Mayorga read the urgent communiqué. The agrarian leader Joaquín Villagrán had occupied the federal Congress with an army of workers carrying machetes and demanding—nothing less—radical policies on all fronts to bring the country out of its endemic poverty. There were no insults on their banners. Only demands. Education. Security. Honest judges. From the bottom. Everything from the bottom. Jobs. Work. From the bottom. No waiting for investments from the top. No asking for loans and canceling debts. School and work, from the bottom. Sharecroppers, day laborers, trade unionists, artisans, members of village communes, Indians, workers, small contractors, poor ranchers, village merchants, rural schoolteachers.
And the movement’s flag. An Indian sitting on a mountain of gold. “Mexico is the country of injustice,” said Humboldt in 1801, the president recalled. The Indian, the campesino, the worker had joined together and taken over the seat of Congress. Who would get them out? How? With guns? Congress is surrounded by the army, Mr. President. Because in Mexico no one governs without the army, but the army is institutional and obeys only the president.
“While the president represents the state,” the secretary of defense, Jenaro Alvírez, informed Justo Mayorga. “Because we soldiers know how to distinguish between transitory governments and the state that endures.”
He stared at Mayorga. “If, on the other hand, the president stops representing the state and defends only his own government . . .” He smiled affably. “We Mexicans are like a large extended family . . .”
General Alvírez hurled his suspension points like bullets. And Justo Mayorga closed the folder with the day’s information and gave free rein to his interior murmur, I don’t do business with my conscience, I’ll do whatever I have to do, right now I don’t know what I should do, the situation is serious and I won’t resolve it the way I have other times by firing secretaries of state, removing functionaries, blaming others, letting it be known that I’ve been deceived by disloyal colleagues, the usual Judases, the fact of the matter is I don’t have any colleagues left I can blame, the ball stopped on my number on the roulette wheel, it’s not a day for distractions, it’s a day for internal courage, I must be strong in my soul to be strong in my body, outside, on the street, I have to repeat to myself that being president is not owing anybody anything and being grateful for even less in order to appear in public as if I were the dream of the man in the street which is to be president of Mexico, what every Mexican thinks he deserves to be, the chief, this is a country of chiefs, without chiefs we wander around more disoriented than a parakeet at the North Pole, that’s the truth, I have to be cold inside to be heated in my external performance and it irritates me that my son’s frivolity now seems like a fly in a storm, the idea that keeps coming back pains me, my son is my worst enemy, not the leader Joaquín Villagrán who’s taken over the Congress, not the army under the command of General Jenaro Alvírez surrounding the Palace of San Lázaro and waiting for my orders,
“Remove the agitators,”
my good-for-nothing son and his friend Richi Riva have draped themselves in the middle of my mind and I want to get them out so I can think clearly. I can’t be the mental prisoner of a couple of frivolous kids, I don’t want anybody to say how will he govern the country if he can’t govern his son, ah you pissant little bastard, you’re giving me