What Country Is This, Agripina?
The title of this essay comes from a question in “Luvina,” a marvelous short story by Juan Rulfo. In the story, Agripina is the wife of an ex–rural teacher who, drinking beer after beer, narrates to another man, possibly another visitor to Luvina, how he lost his life and his dreams when he moved there, to that sad, rocky town located on the Crude Stone Hill, where relentless gusts of black wind don’t even allow bittersweet grow.
According to the man who tells the story of his time in Luvina, and for whom telling it is a sort of camphor rinse for his head, one fine day he found himself there along with his family. Then, clearly overwhelmed by the town’s strangeness, perhaps foreshadowing both his future and our own, the man asks his wife:
“What country are we in, Agripina?”1
And it’s there, in the town plaza—a word that comes from the Latin plattea and that indeed once meant, according to the Real Academia Española dictionary, “wide and spacious place within a town, toward which various streets tend to flow,” but now we know well that it means something quite different—that Agripina gives her succinct, mute, monumental response:
“And she shrugged her shoulders.”2
I am part of a generation that was born just after the so-called Mexican miracle, and that grew up—itself a miracle—over the following decades: years of crisis and insolence, rampant corruption and decline. I even lived through, for example, the devaluation that doubled the peso from 12.50 to one American dollar to 25. Not to mention all the other devaluations, witnessing how exchange rates and prices reached laughable sums that included more zeros than you could count. Purely by chance, I attended a free concert that Rockdrigo, then just a strange little man, gave on my college campus for a small group of students to whom he made all the sense in the world. I was there, in every meaning of the word, when the 1985 earthquake ravaged Mexico City hours later. I learned, with rage and frustration, about the selective repressions mandated under the Salinas administration, and I continue to follow the deaths of journalists and social activists today. Like many in the mideighties, I emigrated north because, for a graduate of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with a degree in sociology, the prospects for a life in a country clearly turning toward neoliberalism were few. To put it mildly, the violence of our contemporary history has never been foreign to me. Nevertheless, during all those years, it rarely occurred to me to ask the question that the narrator poses to Agripina, his wife, barely a moment after arriving in Luvina.
But years pass (as narrators tend to observe), and reality (voracious and unjust, as it has always been) has become increasingly strange for me. In light of the students murdered with impunity in Ciudad Juárez, and more recently in Monterrey, the same question: What country are we in, Agripina? In light of an illegitimate war organized by a president who values his political legitimization more than the well-being and safety of the civil population, the same question: What country are we in, Agripina?
In Juan Rulfo’s story, Agripina shrugs her shoulders once more after leaving a church that she entered simply to pray. Then, slowly, between swallows of beer, the ex–rural teacher starts to describe Luvina: it is a sad place, that we already know, where only “old people … and those who aren’t yet born”3 live—and the dead, of course, our dead. Later, about to start in on some mezcal, the man recalls the only time he saw the people of Luvina smile. It was when he suggested they look for a better place to live and he told them that the government would even help them do so. Far from shrugging their shoulders, they let out a chilling laugh and answered:
“We know it [the government], too. It so happens that we do. What we know nothing about is the government’s mother.”4
This phrase speaks volumes. But here I am, in the middle of another plaza where everything swirls around me and exposes the open. There is the open. Here it is. I do not write as a political analyst, because I am not one. I write from further within. I write as what I manage to sometimes be: a writer. What country is this, Agripina? you ask me from so far away. It is the country we became, Juan. Perhaps by staying silent. Perhaps by not listening to the voices of the dead. Perhaps by looking away. Perhaps our name is Indolence.