Fake it

“Fake it” is Nora’s compact counsel to Juan Parada when he admits that he is thinking of quitting because he is no longer sure he believes. Its meaning then widens beyond religious doubt: in Parada’s later negotiation with Girolamo Antonucci, the phrase becomes a method of appearing to submit while privately pursuing his own objective. The expression connects faith, power, and performance, making outward conviction a tool in a contest where neither apparent sincerity nor apparent surrender can be taken at face value.

Advice in a Crisis of Belief

The phrase first appears in an intimate exchange about Parada’s vocation. He tells Nora, “I’m not sure I believe anymore,” and she answers with a shrug: “Fake it.” His immediate repetition, “Fake it?”, registers the gap between his uncertainty and her brisk certainty. Nora does not offer a theological argument or tell him that his doubts are mistaken. She presents pretending as an available response to doubt, then grounds the advice in her own experience: “It’s easy,” she says. “I do it all the time.” The casual admission makes performance sound practiced rather than exceptional.

Parada’s question is not merely whether he can imitate belief; he asks why he should imitate anything. Nora’s one-word answer is “Power,” and she develops the point through his position: “An archbishop must be pretty powerful, right?” The exchange recasts the problem. What begins as a crisis of belief becomes a question about what a role can do, even when the person occupying it feels uncertain. Nora’s advice is practical and unsentimental: the usefulness of a public identity may survive a private loss of conviction. The phrase therefore carries both an ethical unease and a pragmatic force. It does not resolve Parada’s doubt; it gives him a way to act while doubt remains.

From Counsel to Political Performance

The later recurrence occurs in Parada’s confrontation with Antonucci. Parada challenges the transfer being arranged for him and threatens to call Rome and the newspapers, making clear that he is willing to expose the reason for it. Antonucci’s cheeks redden, but he regains his composure, setting down the receiver and returning to a self-satisfied smile. The scene turns on competing appearances: Parada has made a threat, Antonucci has recovered his calm, and neither man’s visible manner fully discloses his position.

Parada answers with a confidence he does not feel. He says he will lead a relief effort, launder Church money so as not to embarrass the government, and help bring the Church back to Mexico. Antonucci recognizes the proposal as a bargain and asks for the corresponding benefit; Parada names it plainly: “The Vatican will make me a cardinal.” The exchange gives “Fake it” a concrete political application. Parada speaks as though he has accepted Antonucci’s terms, but the words also assert his own price and ambition. His promise is not simply an expression of belief or loyalty: it is part of a negotiation in which public language performs agreement while arranging advantage.

The Hidden Audience of the Phrase

After the two men reach an understanding, Parada privately reads Antonucci’s reaction as a misreading of the bargain. He imagines Antonucci seeing him as a cat who has swallowed the canary and supposing that Parada has sold his soul for ambition. The thought makes the performance’s structure explicit: Parada knows that Antonucci believes he has understood what the deal means, while Parada knows that this apparent understanding may itself be useful. His decisive private response is, “Good, let him think it.”

The recalled advice follows directly: “Fake it, the lovely American prostitute had said.” Parada then confirms its practical lesson to himself: “She’s right—it’s easy.” The recurrence changes the force of Nora’s original words without discarding them. In their first setting, they answer uncertainty about belief; in the later one, they describe the management of another person’s belief about Parada. Nora’s casual instruction becomes an instrument of political self-presentation. The scene does not establish that Parada has recovered religious conviction, or that his bargain is sincere in every respect. Instead, it shows him using an appearance of accommodation while allowing Antonucci to mistake that appearance for surrender.

The Expression’s Dramatic Function

The phrase gains significance through repetition and changed circumstance. Nora first directs it to Parada, and he initially hears it as a proposition that needs explanation. Later, he remembers it without her present and applies it to a high-stakes negotiation. The movement from spoken advice to inwardly recalled rule marks a change in how he uses the idea: what sounded to him like a simple, perhaps embarrassing tactic has become a method he can deploy deliberately.

That method depends on an audience. Parada’s confidence is explicitly described as something he does not feel, and his private thoughts disclose a purpose Antonucci is not meant to see. The disparity between performance and inward calculation supplies the scene’s irony: the bargain appears to confirm Antonucci’s interpretation of Parada, while Parada’s thought, “Good, let him think it,” preserves room for a different one. Set at Tijuana in 1985, the recurrence binds Nora’s earlier counsel to Parada’s later negotiation without claiming that the phrase settles the moral or religious questions behind either scene. “Fake it” is less an answer to doubt than a way of continuing to act—and of shaping what a powerful observer believes he sees.