Destiny and Desire

Part One. Castor and Pollux

Permit me to introduce myself. Or rather: introduce my body, violently separated (you know this already) from my head. I speak of my body because I’ve lost it and will not have another opportunity to introduce it to all of you, gentle readers, or to myself. In this way I can indicate, once and for all, that the following narration has been dictated by my head and only my head, since my detached body is nothing more than a memory: one that can be transmitted and left in the hands of the forewarned reader.

Forewarned indeed: The body is at least half of what we are. Still, we keep it hidden in a verbal closet. For the sake of modesty, we do not refer to its invaluable and indispensable functions. Forgive me: I will speak in detail about my body. Because if I don’t, very soon my body will be nothing but an unburied corpse, a slaughtered fowl, an anonymous loin. And if you, being very well bred, don’t want to know about my bodily intimacies, skip this chapter and begin your reading with the next one.

I am a twenty-seven-year-old man, one meter seventy-eight centimeters tall. Every morning I look at myself naked in my bathroom mirror and caress my cheeks in anticipation of the daily ceremony: Shave my beard and upper lip, provoke a strong response with Jean-Marie Farina cologne on my face, resign myself to combing black, thick, untamable hair. Close my eyes. Deny to my face and head the central role my death will be certain to give them. Concentrate instead on my body. The trunk that is going to be separated from my head. The body that occupies me from my neck to my extremities, covered in skin the color of pale cinnamon and tipped with nails that will continue to grow for hours and days after death, as if they wanted to scratch at the lid of the coffin and shout I’m here, I’m still alive, you made a mistake when you buried me.

This is a purely metaphysical consideration, as is terror in its passing and permanent forms. I ought to concentrate here and now on my skin: I ought to rescue my physical being in all its completeness before it’s too late. This is the organ of touch that covers my whole body and extends inside it with acts of anal mischief both modest and permissible if I compare them to the female gender’s major jokes, the incessant entering and leaving of foreign bodies (notoriously the male’s penis and sacredly the body of a child, while from my masculine wrappings only semen and urine come out in front and in back, just like chez la femme, shit and in cases of constipation, the deep communion of the suppository). Now I hum: “The bullock shits, so does the bird, and the best-looking babe will drop her turd.” Broad, generous entrances and exits in the woman. Narrow, mean ones in the man: the urethra, the anus, urine, shit. The names are clear and brutal, the nicknames obscure and laughable: Bellini’s duct, Henle’s loop, Bowman’s capsule, Malpighi’s glomerulus. Dangers: anuria and uremia. No urine. Urine in the blood. I avoided them. In the end, everything in life is avoidable except death.

I used to sweat. In life my entire body would sweat except for my eyelids and the edge of my lips. My sweat was clean, salty, with no bad odor, though sweating and urinating were human products distinguishable by the different quality of their smell. I never needed deodorants. I had noble, clean armpits. My urine did smell bad, of abandoned hovels and lightless caves. My shit varied according to circumstances, depending especially on diet. Mexican food brings us dangerously close to diarrhea, North American to stomach cramps, British to constipation. Only Mediterranean cuisine assures us of a healthy balance between what comes in at the mouth and what goes out through the asshole, as if olive oil and vinegar from Modena, the produce of the gardens of Southern Europe, peaches and figs, melons and peppers, knew beforehand that the pleasure of eating should be balanced by the pleasure of shitting, very much in accordance with Quevedo’s lines: “I love you more than a strong desire to take a shit.”

In any case-in my case-shit is almost always firm and brown, sometimes artfully coiled like the clay turds sold in the markets, sometimes diluted and tortured by our hot national spices: O shit of mine. And rarely (above all when I travel) reticent and ugly-looking.

I know that with these diversions, my dear survivors, I am putting off what is most important. Getting to my head. Telling you what my face was like after making it clear that the buttocks, as everyone knows, are man’s second face. Or are they the first?

I’ve already indicated, when combing my hair, that I have a good Indian thatch of dark hair, more deeply rooted than a maguey. I have to say that my eyes are dark and set deep in the sockets of a bony facial structure that would be almost transparent if not for the dark mask of my skin. (Dark skin hides feelings better than white. That’s why when they are revealed, they are more brutal though less hypocritical.) In short, I have invisible eyebrows, a pleasant, slender mouth, almost always smiling for no reason other than courtesy. Ears neither large nor small, barely adequate to my extremely thin face, skin adhering to bone, the roots of my hair springing up like nocturnal thickets that grow without light.

And I have a nose. It isn’t just any nose but a large proboscis, slender, fortunately, but long and thin, like a periscope of the soul that precedes the eyes to explore the landscape and find out if it’s worth disembarking or if it’s better to remain withdrawn deep in the sea of existence.

The wide Sargasso of anticipated death.

The sea that ascends in small waves, obliging me to swallow it before it reaches the orifices of my large nose, jutting out between the beach and the dawn tide.

I am a body. I will be a soul.

BIG BEAK. MONSTER schnoz. Elephant honker. Anteater snout. Pinocchio. Tapir. Dumbo (despite normal ears). The uproar in the schoolyard showed no preference among the epithets hurled at me by the mob of identical snot-noses in their uniforms of white shirt and blue tie, always badly knotted, as if not using the top button at the collar were a universal sign of rebellion controlled in the long run by the double discipline of teacher and religion. Blue sweater, gray trousers. Only at the extremities did this gang of schoolboys display their indolence and brutality. Leather shoes scuffed by the habit of kicking, kicking balls in the schoolyard, kicking desks in the classroom, kicking trees on the street, using kicks to demonstrate that though it might be without words they were protesting, they were born to protest, they were not conformists. Should I have been grateful to be the only thing they attacked with words and not blows?

I don’t know. The jeering ferocity of their faces was such that, in spite of my esthetic intention to single out from the ugliest not the best-looking-there were none of those-but the least “ferocious,” when they attacked I saw a single beast, a single face with bared teeth and eyes with metallic lids, as if they were protecting a strongbox of unspeakable emotions behind prison bars, for I never lost sight of the fact that these same assholes who were assaulting me on account of my big nose would be praying later with heads bowed and singing the national anthem, chins trembling with pride.

At the Jalisco school, so named since revolutionary liberalism prohibited the teaching of religion and revolutionary conservatism turned a blind eye and permitted it, but only if the schools proclaimed not their faith but their historical or geographical patriotism: Columbus, Bolívar, Homeland, Mexico were transformed into pseudonyms for schools run by Jesuits, Marists, Christian Brothers, and, in the case of the academy I was sent to, Catholic Presbyters, and therefore, among ourselves, the school was known as the Presbytery and not as Jalisco. It was a way of mocking the shared hypocrisy of the government and the clergy. Jalisco on the outside. Presbytery on the inside.

Big Beak, Pinocchio, Monster Schnoz, the insults rained down on me, obliging me to retreat as they moved forward like a column of troops led by a horrible kid with a shaved head, piggy eyes, a beet-red mouth, ears stuck to his skull, and the attitude of a great highwayman, a forward-thrusting stance, a posture of defiance not only toward me but toward the world: He was the most nonconformist of nonconformists; his tie was knotted on his chest and wrapped around his neck, accentuating his air of a bandit. It was strange. This being the apparent head of the mob of schoolboys, a feeling whose origin I could not determine told me the guerrilla leader was waging war not against me and my nose but against something else, something closer to him that made my presence disappear as soon as the bell rang and recess was over-or as soon as one of the teachers intervened who, until that moment, had not even noticed what was happening to me, as if assaulting a student, even verbally, were not very different from playing basketball, telling jokes, or eating a piece of cake.

I gave instructions to my spirit. “Hold on, Josué. Don’t give in. Don’t return their insults. Arm yourself with patience. Defeat them with your self-control. Don’t even think about hitting anybody. Whoever gets angry loses. Stay serious and calm. They’ll end up respecting you, you’ll see.”

Until the day my good advice was betrayed by my evil impulses and I hauled off and socked the baldest of the bald. The conflict of San Quintín broke out (students of history: In this battle, Philip II defeated France and was covered in glory) in the midst of a colossal confusion that eventually turned into defeat, and also recalled Rosario de Amozoc, when a free-for-all dissolved all doubts in a brawl worthy of saloon fights in westerns. Or a donnybrook, the British version of a brawl, fracas, mêlée, brouhaha, uproar, tumult, hullabaloo, pandemonium, charivari, turmoil, logomachy, and, in general, chaos pure and simple. That is, the bald kid fell back against his comrades, who threw him back at me, though the guerrilla fighter had slipped and hit his face on the paving tiles in the yard, which provoked an argument between two, then four, then seven comrades about who had made the champion fall, and then another boy boldly stood at my side, faced the crowd of schoolboys, and shouted that the next blow would be struck not at me but at him.

The self-assurance of my defender was transformed into authority over a herd that counted its own strength in numbers and not in courage. The professorial whistle for order finally sounded that afternoon, which otherwise was stormy because the morning sun was leaving to bathe in cataracts of punctual twilight rain.

“It’s the rainy season,” said my smiling defender, resting his hand on my shoulder.

I thanked him. He said he could not stand cowards who fight only in a gang. He became distracted and offered his hand to the bald kid to help him up.

“Don’t be late for class, asshole,” he said.

The bald kid wiped the blood from his nose, turned his back on us, and ran away.

Together my new friend and I walked the length of the large yard, a space surrounded by two floors of classrooms and auditoriums, with a frontón court at the end.

“If they were a little more educated, they’d have called you Cyrano.”

“They’re sons of bitches. Don’t give them any ideas. They’d call me Sir Anus.”

“And if you were lame, Nureyev.”

My savior stopped and looked at me astutely.

“You don’t have a big nose. It’s only a long nose. Don’t let that bunch of bums get to you. What’s your name?”

“Josué.”

I was going to add the standard “at your service” that dates from colonial Mexican courtesy, when my protector threw back his head and began to laugh.

That’s how I always want to remember him, the way he was at that moment. My height, but the reverse side of my coin. A face tending to plumpness, with the cheeks of an infant not yet weaned. Yes, the mouth of a nursing baby, and eyes so tender and bright they almost demanded a pacifier. His body, on the other hand, was vigorous, his walk decisive, perhaps too sure of his strong step and firm forward motion, while my movements tended to slip away from me, subtle and even a little hesitant, as if they weren’t sure if at my feet they would find earth or the void, solid ground or swamp, light or mud…

It was the first thing I noticed. My uncertain, short steps. The martial, even imperious walk of my friend.

I realized he hadn’t told me his name. I introduced myself again.

“Josué,” I said, still walking.

He stopped like a mock statue. I looked at him with some surprise.

“Josué. Josué,” I repeated, somewhat uncomfortable. “Josué Nadal.”

My friend convulsed. Laughter seized him, doubled him over, eventually it obliged him to raise his head, look at the increasingly cloudy sky, then look at my astonished face, laugh even more when he saw me, and provoke in me a certain feeling of annoyance at not being in on the joke, a pleasantry that was somewhat unpleasant for me.

“And you?” I managed to say to him, hiding my irritation.

“Je… Je…” he in turn managed to say between outbursts of laughter.

I was becoming angry: “Listen, I don’t find the joke…”

He took me by the shoulder: “It’s not laughter, compadre… It’s surprise…”

“Then stop laughing.”

“Jericó. My name is Jericó,” he said, suddenly serious.

“Jericó what?” I insisted.

“Just Jericó. No last name,” said my new friend with an abrupt, definitive air, as if in the act of opening a book the entire text had disappeared, leaving only the first name of the author but not his last.

“Jericó… We’ll get along like clockwork.”

THE RIVER OVERFLOWS its banks at harvest time. Now it is dry and the tribes can cross over. But first spies must be sent out to reconnoiter the area. Joshua crosses the Jordan disguised as a merchant and hides in a brothel in the city. The harlot lives there with her family. She is a simple woman and a generous one. With her body, her affection, her protection. She is accustomed to hiding fugitives, antagonistic husbands, drunkards who need time to recuperate. Impotent men who linger and wish to demonstrate the virility recovered with the affection and patience only a whore can offer because it is her vocation and not merely her profession. Does the harlot know that Joshua and his men are members of a wandering tribe halted on the banks of the Jordan, searching for the promised land? The whore, whose name is Hetara, does not believe there are promised lands or lost paradises. She knows about the madness of Israel and its prophets. They all want to leave the land that offers them hospitality and move on to the next nation of promise. But when they reach it, they immediately begin to dream of the next promised land and so on and so forth until they become exhausted in the desert and die of thirst and hunger. The great whore of Jericho does not want her city to be the final port of the tribes of Israel. Not because she despises them. On the contrary, she loves them because she loves the wandering vocation of Israel and does not want them to stay here only so they can go forward in fulfilling their interminable destiny.

Because she knows these things, the brothel’s clients consult her and she recounts fables. Some she has dreamed. Others she has remembered. But most of them she improvises in the heat of the visitors she receives. She is a sorceress, say her intimates who, like abandoned dogs, seek shelter in her sensual charity; she amazes whoever speaks to her and tells the fortune of her clients only on the basis of who those clients are. She is a realist. She would never give a man a destiny not already found in that man’s future. Because all she needs is a hint of each client’s past to imagine his future with certainty. She is not a cruel woman. She is prudent. When the future appears happy, she decreases the joy because she knows that any change in a life can unexpectedly darken it. When, on the contrary, the future is unhappy, she interjects a small dose of optimism, slips in a joke, shrugs her shoulders, and passes from prognostication to prostitution: her flesh, her mouth, her legs, these are the future…

Joshua came to Jericho with a pure intention: to explore the city and then take it in order to continue the reconquest of the land of Israel begun by Moses, whom Joshua served as a son and to whom he promised, at the hour of his death, to continue the tenacious path from the plains of Moab to the mountains of Nero to the summit of Pisgah. To conquer all the visible land from Gilead to Dan, the lands of Efrain and Manassas and the land of Judea to the sea. But first the city in view had to be vanquished, the first city, the city of palm trees: Jericho. Which is why Joshua was there, his purpose to reconnoiter the land and conquer it the next day. He felt protected in the generous brothel, with its pungent odors of sweat and excrescence, spilled wine, fried food, burned animal hair, smoke from slow fires, red roofs. He recalled, however, the admonition of Moses, his protector and guide, against the pleasures of sex and the orgiastic cult of Balaam. But the caresses of the great whore of the desert told him that thanks to her, her disloyalty, her protection, the city of Jericho would fall and the Jewish people could continue to follow their path of strength with justice and justice with strength. Joshua asked the prostitute what was at play that night, love or war. And she said that in each coupling in the world life and death were at play, pure, gratuitous pleasure alongside the obligation to give birth to the product of the coupling, the temporary suspension of obligation in the name of pleasure and its fatal resumption when the erotic couple separates and the world’s law is imposed. And beyond that? asked an eager Joshua, already captured between the legs of Hetara, which is what he decided to call her, in the fire of his pleasure and with the understanding that here, in the bed of this woman, he was preparing as much for victory as for defeat.

Would he attribute one or the other to this hour of pleasure? Would the victim forgive him his fleeting lust? Would it cost him dearly at the hour of defeat? Joshua hurried the act and Hetara felt authorized, sitting with her legs crossed on the straw pallet, to tell him, Joshua, you will win the battle but will not exhaust your fate. Your people will debate forever either remaining in one place or the promise of the next place to conquer, a place better than the previous one. And on and on forever. The exodus will be endless. And new. In their successive exiles, your descendants will enrich the land they walk on. They will be doctors and heal. They will be artists and create. They will be lawyers and defend. They will be successful and envied. They will be envied and persecuted. They will be persecuted and suffer the worst tortures. The great weeping of your people in which, for one tragic, happy moment, all the men, women, and children in the world will recognize themselves. All this I see, Joshua. I also see your people immobile, certain they have found a country and have no obligation to move on. That will be a deception. Israel is condemned to migrate, move, occupy lands in the same way you, tomorrow, will occupy mine. Our bodies have joined just as tomorrow my land and yours will be joined.

Think, Joshua: How will you return my land to me? How will you avoid making my destiny tomorrow the one that is yours forever? Will you occupy my land only in order to forget that no one gave you one of your own?

Joshua listened attentively to Hetara and told himself that this night of forbidden pleasure was the price of permitted victory. Hetara knew everything and forgave nothing. Joshua saw it in her dark eyes, he pulled the red ribbon from her dark hair and said:

“Do me one last favor. Hang the red ribbon from the roof of your house.”

“Will my family be saved, and my clients?”

“Yes, you will be saved. I swear it.”

In this way Joshua justified his night with the whore of Jericho, returned to the mountain, and told the Jews: Truly, Jehovah has delivered the land into our hands. And they all followed him to the banks of the Jordan and shouted with a great shout, convinced that God had promised them victory in battle, and the priests sounded the trumpets. Then the walls of Jericho fell with a great noise, as if the voices and the trumpets were the arms of God, and the Jews entered Jericho and destroyed the city, put men, women, and children to the sword, old people, oxen, sheep, and asses, respecting only Joshua’s order:

“Do not touch Hetara the prostitute.”

And Hetara went to live among the Jews and learned that her city would never be seen again, because Joshua decreed that whoever rebuilt it would be cursed in the eyes of the Lord.

THIS WAS HOW Jericó and I became friends. We discovered everything we had in common. Our age. Sixteen and seventeen years old. Books we had read, not only as children but those we shared now, though he had a year’s advantage on me, which in adolescence is a great deal. He lent me-annotated-books he had already read. We commented on them together. And a similar attitude in and out of school. Being independent. We discovered that we would not permit anyone to inculcate in us opinions that weren’t ours or had not at least been screened by our own critical sense. Further, we thought our opinions were not opinions alone but doubts as well. This was the firmest ground of our friendship. Almost instinctively, Jericó and I understood that each line we read, each idea we received, each truth we affirmed, had its opposite, as day had night. In that final year of secondary school, we did not allow a single line, idea, or truth to pass without submitting it to judgment. We had not yet calculated how much this attitude would help us-or hurt us-when we were out in the world, away from the sheltered nest of school. For now, being dissidents inside it distinguished us with a still adolescent, pedantic, excessive air from the student mob that surrounded us and then, after Jericó’s defense of me and the bloodied nose of the bald aggressor, stopped interfering with me or my nose and looked for new odious marks to fight, as long as they could isolate the victim and present themselves as an unidentifiable and consequently unpunishable mass.

Eventually even the famous bald kid approached us with an amusing false piece of news.

“They’re saying you two are always together because you’re fags. I want to be your friend and see if they dare to say that about me too.”

He accompanied his words with terrible grimaces of ill will and the torpid agility of a budding champion.

We asked him with false astonishment if he was safe from all aggression and he said yes. Why? we insisted. Because I’m very rich and don’t brag about it. He pointed, his hand perpetually bloodied or covered with scabs, to the street:

“Do you see a black Cadillac parked there at the exit?”

Sure. By now it was part of the landscape.

“Have you seen me get into it?”

No, we had seen him waiting for the bus at the corner.

“Well, it’s my father’s car. It comes for me every afternoon. The chauffeur sees me come out and he gets out and opens the door for me. I go to the bus stop and the Cadillac goes home empty.”

I thought about the useless waste of gasoline but said nothing, thinking that for now the boy deserved all our curiosity. He placed his hands on his hips and looked at us with an appealing-or perhaps pathetic-need for approval. Lacking our applause, he gave in and introduced himself.

“I’m Errol.”

Now Jericó and I did smile, and our friendly smile was a request: Explain that to us.

“My mother has been a fan of Errol Flynn her whole life. Now nobody even remembers Errol Flynn. He was a very famous actor when my mother’s mother was young. She told her she never missed an Errol Flynn movie. She said he was very handsome and “nonchalant,” that’s what they called him in movie magazines. He was Robin Hood, and he swung from tree to tree dressed in green, as camouflage, ready to steal from the rich and give to the poor, an enemy of tyranny. And my mother inherited her mother’s taste.”

A dreamy look passed over the eyes of the aggressive bald kid who was introducing himself now as Errol Esparza and offering us both his friendship and a summary of his life, the three of us sitting on the steps of the schoolyard during the final year of our secondary education, ready to assume the duties (and the airs) of the preparatory school in this same building, with the same professors and classmates, no longer identical to themselves but to the changing mirror of early youth, when a thousand insistent signs of childhood persist in obstructing the face that struggles to break through and tell us: We’ve grown up. Now we’re men.

That is why the final year of secondary seemed so long and the first of preparatory so uncertain and distant. Not because of essential realities in one or the other level of education, but because of the accidental facts that we were ourselves: chubby-cheeked Jericó, bald Errol, and me, skinny Josué, the three of us surprised at the changes our bodies and souls were experiencing, though all three, each in his own way, pretended to accept the transformations without amazement, with natural dispassion, even with a certain indifference, as if we knew beforehand what we would be in the coming year and remained overwhelmingly ignorant of what we still were.

Errol suggested the real pitfall. He invited us to his house. It was an invitation made with a strange air of irony mixed with indulgence concealing a poorly disguised embarrassment. Implicitly, he was expecting to be invited to our houses, believing that our friendship would last only if we knew a sixteen-year-old boy’s worst secret: his family. With this trauma overcome, we could move on to the next stage. Being adults and being friends.

The good Errol’s good faith-not to call it innocence-was beyond any doubt. I knew that everything unsaid by the boy with the shaved head did not live in the basement of bad faith. Errol behaved honorably. In any case, Jericó and I were the ones walking twisted paths.

“Errol Esparza.”

“Josué Nadal.”

“Jericó.”

You who survive me can imagine that when I became Jericó’s friend, I asked him what his last name was and he replied Just Jericó, no last name. I wasn’t satisfied, I felt curious, I went to the admissions secretary at the school and asked outright,

“What’s Jericó’s last name?”

The secretary was a young, attractive man who seemed out of place in the small records office, behind a corrugated glass panel near the school entrance, where half his face and an entire hand would appear, upon request, to attend to the public. He hastily withdrew hand and face and his voice acquired a neutral but forced tone.

“That’s Jericó’s name: Jericó.”

Although it was during office hours, the secretary closed the small window. Soon afterward I sensed both an offensive and defensive attitude in my friend Jericó. I attributed it to the secretary’s indiscretion, though I had no proof. The fact is that Jericó, letting a few days pass through the sieve of an unaccustomed seriousness in our dealings with each other, which I attributed to my own indiscretion as well as the secretary’s (a position normally filled by embittered women in their forties with no hope of finding a husband), asked me to go with him to the café on the corner, and once we were seated in front of two tepid, tasteless, decaffeinated concoctions, he gave me an intense look and said that during the past semester he and I had naturally cemented a friendship that he wanted to know was solid and lasting.

“Do you agree, Josué?”

With a good amount of enthusiasm, I told him I did. Nothing in my past-my very brief past, I said with a laugh-promised a friendship as close as the one Jericó and I had created in the past few months. His concern seemed to me unnecessary, though welcome. We were sealing a pact between comrades. I wished that instead of Nescafé we each had a glass of champagne. I felt the warmth of satisfaction that as adolescents we discover in the friendship of a kindred spirit who rescues us from the solitude reserved, without pity, for the incomprehensible boy who stops being a child overnight and no longer fits into the careful world his parents prepared for him under the illusion that a child so indulged would never grow up.

That wasn’t my case. Then Jericó said that between the ages of seventeen, which we already had reached, and twenty-one, which was yet to come, he and I ought to establish a project for life and study that would make us close forever. Perhaps there would be separations, trips, women, for example. The important thing was to seal, right here, an alliance for the rest of our lives. Knowing that he would always come to my aid, and I would come to his. Knowing which values we shared. What things we rejected.

“It’s important to make a list of obligations…”

“Sacred ones?”

Jericó agreed energetically. “For us, yes.”

Where would we begin?

First, with a shared decision to reject frivolity. My friend took a gossip magazine out of his backpack and leafed through it with displeasure and disgust.

“Look at this succession of idiocies in full color on glossy paper. Are you interested in knowing that the rock-and-roller Tarcisia married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks, on the Playa del Carmen, and that the guests began the day dancing to hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning, when they gorged on a savory tripe stew in honor of the bride’s father, who is a native of Sonora? Would you have liked to be a guest? Would you have accepted an invitation? Answer me.”

I said no, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being-

He interrupted me. “Not even if it was your own wedding?”

No, now I smiled, I thought that taking the matter as a joke was the best thing and I admired Jericó’s intense ability to take life very, very seriously.

“Do you swear never to go to a quinceañera, a thé dansant, a baptism, or grand openings of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university alumni, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zócalo? Do you promise to despise a couple who have their picture taken in color and published in the paper when she is eight months pregnant and wearing a bikini with the proud husband caressing her belly and announcing the imminent arrival, baptism, and sanctification of Raulito in the midst of a storm of flashbulbs (which is why they were announcing the emotional event now)?”

I made the mistake of laughing. Jericó slammed his fist down on the table. The coffee cups rattled. The waitress came over to see what was going on. The hostility in my friend’s eyes frightened her away. The café began to fill up with patrons thrown up after a day of work that perhaps differed for each one but still imposed an identical fatigue on all of them. Public or private offices, businesses large or small, the merciless traffic of Mexico City, the nonexistent hope of finding happiness when they reached home, the weight of what was not. All that began to come into the café. It was seven in the evening. We had begun talking at five-thirty, when the place was empty.

And together we had agreed on a plan for a shared life. Did we speak only of avoiding the stupidities of social and political festivities and celebrations? Not at all. Before what Jericó contemptuously called “the herd of oxen” came in.

“Oxen,” Jericó repeated. “Never say ‘oxes.’ ”

“Oxen?”

“No. Oxes. Never say oxen are oxes.”

“Why?”

“So as not to give in to the vulgarity, stupidity, and camouflaging of mental poverty by means of deadly buffoonery.”

We settled on a plan of readings, of selective and rigorous intellectual self-improvement, which, survivors, you will not find out about today because at that moment Errol Esparza walked into the café and reminded us, boys, today’s the day you visit my house. Let’s go.

“Like clockwork,” Jericó said, as usual.

THE ESPARZA FAMILY lived in the Pedregal de San Angel, an ancient volcanic bed, a remnant of the eruptions of Xitle, on whose dark, bulky foundations the architect Luis Barragán attempted to create a modern residential district based on strict rules. First, that volcanic rock be used to build the houses. Second, that they would assume the monastic forms of the Barragán style. Unadorned straight lines, clean walls, with no variant other than the colors, evocative of folklore, associated with Mexico: indigo blue, sour-cherry red, and sun yellow. Flat roofs. No visible water tanks as in the rest of a chaotic city where so many styles cohabitate that in the end there is no style unless it is the triumphal repetition of squat houses, one-story businesses, paint shops, auto repair shops, tire shops, garages, parking lots, and miscellaneous candy stores, taverns, and retailers of all the daily necessities of this strange society of ours, always controlled from the top by very few and always capable of organizing itself from the bottom, with the majority living independently.

I have said all of this because the pure order desired by the architect did not last as long as a snowball in hell. Barragán had closed the Pedregal with symbolic sentry boxes and gates, as if to dictate a public anathema: Vade retro, Partagás, you will not pass.

Impure disorder in the name of the false freedom of residents and their accommodating architects-all of them subject to another tyranny, the tyranny of bad taste and assimilation of the worst in the name of a robot’s autonomy-finished off the fleeting effort to give at least one metropolitan residential district the unity and beauty of a district in Paris, London, or Rome. So that in the midst of the naked beauty of the original framework there erupted like malignant chancres fake Colonial, Breton, Provençal, Scotch, and Tudor residences, not to mention the inconceivable California ranch and the nonexistent tropical “adobe hacienda.”

Still, the Esparza family had not brought to Pedregal the architecture of their previous districts. They had accepted the severity of the original monastic design. At least on the outside, Barragán triumphed. Because once Jericó and I walked into the home of our new friend, Errol Esparza, what we found was a baroque disorder inside a neobaroque chaos inside a post-baroque clutter. In other words, one horror did not suffice in Esparza’s house. The bareness of the walls was a summons that could not be denied to cover them with calendar art, mostly still lifes, picture after picture, not merely contiguous but incestuous, as if leaving a centimeter of empty wall were proof of barefaced miserliness or the crude rejection of an invitation. Articles of furniture also fought for the prize of space. Massive sofas from cheap furniture stores designed to fill large empty spaces: six griffin claws, three cushions of embossed velvet for the back, tables with dragon feet and surfaces covered with ashtrays taken from various hotels and restaurants, rugs with Persian intentions and the appearance of straw sleeping mats contrasted with salons of a Versaillesque nature, Louis XV chairs with brocade backs and deer feet, glass cabinets with untouchable souvenirs of Esparzan visits to Versailles and Gobelin tapestries of recent manufacture. Everything indicated that the first room, with its gigantic television screen, was where the Esparzas lived and the “French” room where, in the evenings, they received.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” the good Errol said without a hint of irony. “I’ll let my mother know we’re here.”

We were looking at the shaggy purple rug whose obvious intention was to grow like an interior, crepuscular lawn, when Errol reappeared leading a “simple” woman who announced her simplicity with her old-fashioned hairdo-I think it was called a “permanent”-down to her low-heeled shoes with black buckles and moving-now upward-to her cotton stockings, one-piece flowered dress, short apron on which the lady listlessly rubbed her red hands, as if drying them after a domestic flood, to pale, barely made up features. Her face was the blank canvas of an artist undecided whether to conclude it or leave it, with impatient relief, unfinished.

The lady looked at us with a mixture of candor and suspicion, still drying her hands like a domestic Pontius Pilate, and said in a dull voice, Estrella Rosales de Esparza, at your service…

“Tell them, mother,” Errol said brusquely.

“Tell them what?” Doña Estrellita asked with no pretense of surprise.

“How we got rich.”

“Rich?” the lady said with authentic confusion.

“Yes, mother,” the bald kid continued. “My friends must be amazed at so much luxury. Where did it all come from, this… junk?”

“Oh, son.” The lady lowered her head. “Your father has always been very hardworking.”

“What do you think about papa’s fortune?”

“I think it’s fine.”

“No, its origins.”

“Oh, son, how can you be-”

“Be what?”

“Ungrateful. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.”

“Efforts? Is that what we call crime now?”

His mother looked at him defiantly.

“What crime? What are you talking about?”

“Being a thief.”

Instead of becoming angry, Doña Estrellita maintained an admirable composure. She looked at Jericó and me with patience.

“I haven’t welcomed you. My son is a very impetuous boy.”

We thanked her. She smiled and looked at her son.

“He insults me because I’m not Marlene Dietrich. As if that were my fault! He isn’t Errol Flynn either.”

She turned her back, bending her head, and went back to the mysterious place she had come from.

Errol burst into laughter.

He told us his father had been a carpenter, first in one of the poorest districts in the city. Then he began to make furniture. Soon he was selling beds, chairs, and tables to several hotels. Then he established a furniture store downtown, near the Avenida 20 de Noviembre. With so much furniture on his hands, the only thing he could do was put up a hotel, and then another, and yet another, and since the guests wanted entertainment close by-television was still in diapers, that is, black-and-white-he took an old movie house in San Juan de Letrán and turned it into a live-performance theater, decorated in the style of a Chinese pagoda just like the one in Los Angeles, and since man does not live by art alone, he opened a furniture store and then another and another and yet another until he had a chain of hotels and that’s what we live on.

Errol sighed while Jericó and I-and certainly all of you who can hear me-put on a polite face and listened without blinking to this lightning account of a career that culminated in this shambles of a house in the Pedregal de San Angel with a boy who refused to get into the Cadillac driven by a uniformed chauffeur and delighted in humiliating a defenseless mother and attacking an absent father.

“He hired gangs of bums to put mice inside rival movie houses, break his enemies, and take over their theaters.”

“How nice,” I dared to say, but Errol, enveloped in the cloud of his own rhetoric, didn’t hear me.

“He sent salesmen to distract employees in the businesses of his rivals.”

“Very smart,” Jericó said with a smile.

“He sent evangelists to convert them to Protestantism.”

“The religion of capitalism, Errol,” I said for the sake of saying something.

“Have you read Protestantism and the Modern World by Ernst Troeltsch?” Jericó commented, increasing the aberrations of the conversation. “Without Protestantism there is no capitalism. In the opinion of Saint Thomas, capitalists went to hell. Consequently, all capitalists are Protestants.”

I swear it hurt me to see Errol’s bewilderment when right after that Jericó and I looked at each other, thanked him, and left the walled house through a garden with no trees where workers were raising something like a statue onto a pedestal.

“Let the chauffeur drive you home.”

We agreed and left. Relieved, but without saying a word and exchanging a complicit glance that said: He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.

Were we talking to ourselves, Jericó? Didn’t we leave the Esparza house secretly thinking that all this horror, this inanity, this dissatisfaction, this grief, takes place en famille, it occurs because a family exists-like a tray of rotten fruit, a cup of poison, a sewer capable of receiving it all, digesting it, purifying it, bringing it back to life from a near-death final injury?

You and I avoided looking at each other, Jericó, when we left the residence in Pedregal. Neither of us had a family. We were what we are because we were, are, will be orphans. What is orphanhood? No doubt not the mere absence of father or mother or family but inclemency, the ruination of the sheltering roof for reasons that sometimes are clearly attributable to abandonment, to death, to simple indifference. Except that you and I did not know any of these reasons. Perhaps you do, but you’ve kept them to yourself. And my situation was equivocal, as I’ll recount later.

He’s our friend. We won’t stop talking to him.

Although perhaps, privately, we envied Errol his family situation no matter how violent or pathetic it was.

“He didn’t need to say what he said,” was the secret message Jericó sent me when I got out at Calle de Berlín.

“That’s true. He didn’t,” I remarked, more to confirm our friendship than for any other reason.

ON THE OTHER hand, months later, when we graduated from secondary to preparatory, we found not a pretext but an opportunity to speak for hours on end with a new instructor who had just joined the faculty. Until then we had not felt admiration or scorn for the group of teachers who, with far too much discretion for our demanding spirits, taught not very imaginative classes based on acts of serial (like a crime) memorization of history, geography, and natural sciences. The biology instructor was amusing because of the subterfuges he summoned and the rough terrain he walked in order to sublimate the facts of nature by means of an explicit final reference, the crown of his reiterated discourse, to the act of divine creation, the origin and destiny of our physical realities and transcendent mortality.

There were, no doubt, other excesses that broke the gray neutrality of our classes. The headmaster, an irascible Frenchman with unpronounceable Breton family names, whom we called “Don Vercingetorix,” regularly opened the school year by standing on a dais with a gladiolus in his hand. After perusing the assembled student body with a severe look worthy of Torquemada, he would proclaim, “This is a young Christian before he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Immediately afterward he would throw the flower on the floor and stamp on it in a kind of holy can-can until he had pulverized the innocent flower, which he would then pick up from the floor and show us the vegetable tatters in his hands, concluding: “And this is a Catholic boy after he goes to a dance and kisses a girl.” Of the moribund gladiolus, all that survived, with a symbolism surely not desired by the enraged Vercingetorix, was the erect stem. A pregnant silence and a final warning: “Think. Confess your sins. Break ranks.” All that was missing was for him to warn, “And don’t break into laughter,” though the formal severity of the school lent itself not to jokes but to a kind of Christian resignation when we got ready in the locker room to play basketball, knowing that at the opportune moment Professor Soler would come in, saying “Let’s see, let’s see, everybody ready?” as a pretext to look at us before we pulled on our shorts and approach, “let’s see, let’s see,” to adjust the jockstraps needed to protect our sex from blows on the court, to heft with touching reverence, on his knees or bending over, the testicles of each student to check that we were well protected as we went out to athletic encounters and, if we were lucky, sexual combat.

We students forgave this innocent pleasure of Father Soler, whose red face was the product not of any shame but of an inheritance that can give to the product of the mixing of Indians and blonds a sanguine appearance very apt for disguising the blushes of embarrassing emotion. In other words: Collectively the students forgave the life both of the ostentatious Vercingetorix and the silent Soler, considering that they did not have many opportunities to express themselves in public, subject as they were to long hours of prayers and rosaries, early suppers, fleeting breakfasts… They would have put out the sun with the smoke of incense.

Everything changed when the new philosophy instructor came on the scene.

Father Filopáter (that’s how he was announced and how he introduced himself) was a small, agile man. He moved with a combination of juvenile athleticism and spiritual animation, as if in order to demonstrate one you had to celebrate the other. He walked with varying rhythms. Very quickly when he went from one task to another. Very slowly when he strolled around the yard accompanied by one or two students to whom he listened with intense concentration, offering the paradoxical idea of a short man who grew as he thought, as if his ideas-for he seemed to think more than to talk-were flying over him, creating an unusual halo, not round but long, though always shining.

It goes without saying, you who are still alive and can contradict me with no risk or confirm everything I say out of curiosity, that Jericó and I immediately fixed on the new arrival and imagined how we could approach him and determine who he was-in addition to being a philosophy instructor-by what he thought and said. He was ahead of us.

Always together, he said, approaching with his quickest step, like Castor and Pollux.

The mythological allusion did not escape us, and both Jericó and I instantly looked at each other, knowing he spoke of the twins born of the same egg, for their father was a god disguised as a swan. Always together, the twins took part in great expeditions, like the exploits of the Argonauts under the command of Jason, searching for the as yet undiscovered soul they called the Golden Fleece.

Filopáter read in our glances that we already knew the legend, though neither he nor we had the courage, on that sunlit October afternoon, to conclude the story of the young twins. A legend can end badly, but the conclusion should not be anticipated at the beginning of life (Jericó and Josué) or what soon would become a friendship (with Father Filopáter). And yet how could it not illuminate for me, no matter how tacitly, the suspicion of an ending that was, if not desired, ultimately fatal? Perhaps the affinity born immediately between the instructor and ourselves was due to a kind of shared respect thanks to which we knew the outcomes but held them off with friendship, ideas, in short, life, since for friendship the outcome always was ideas, life, and the death of the real dialogists. If Socrates survives thanks to Plato, Saint Augustine, and Rousseau because they confessed, and Dr. Johnson because he had Boswell as his secretary and clerk, what opportunity for survival did we three-Father Filopáter, Jericó, and I-have beyond a luminous October afternoon in the Valley of Mexico? Would we be capable, like poets and novelists, of surviving thanks to works that, though they are ours, escape us and become the property of everyone, especially the reader not yet born? This was the challenge that began to filter, like a pure breeze separating us from the overwhelming pollution of the traffic, the smog, the movement in the street of desolate bodies, the mere proximity, here in the schoolyard, of noisy students at recess. No, the breeze was not pure. It was an illusion of our affinity.

Jericó and I were not (I must inform you) beings separate from the school community. On the contrary, knowing ourselves (as we knew ourselves) superior to the gregarious collectivity of the institution, fortuitous companions in earlier readings perhaps well thought out and digested, our meeting owed a great deal to chance, which is accidental, but also to destiny, which is disguised will. In cafés and classes, on long walks through the Bosque de Chapultepec or the Viveros de Coyoacán, we two had compared ideas, evoked readings, each one filling in the lapses of the other, recalling a book, condemning an author, but in the end assuming an inheritance that eventually we shared with the unrepeatable joy of intellectual awakening that is a fact in every society, but especially in ours, in which true creativity is rewarded less and less while economic success, celebrity, television appearances, sex scandals, and political clownishness are valued more and more.

The difference between us, I admit right now, was one of exigency and rigor. I also admit, for the eternal record, that in our relationship I was more indolent or passive, while Jericó was more alert and demanding.

“Demand more of yourself, Josué. Until now we’ve moved forward together. Don’t lag behind me.”

“Don’t you lag either,” I replied, smiling.

“It’s hard,” he responded.

After gym, which was required, we all showered in the long, cold, solitary bathrooms in the school. Unlike the nuns’ schools, where girls have to wash dressed in gowns that turn them into cardboard statues, in schools for boys, showering naked was normal and attracted no one’s attention. An unwritten law dictated that in the shower we men would keep our eyes at face level and no one, under penalty of suspicion of unhealthy curiosity or simple vulgarity, would look at a classmate’s sex. Naturally, this rule was overseen by the one who observed it least: timid, impertinent Father Soler, who would walk up and down the bathroom with the mixed gaze of an eagle and a serpent-very appropriate to our nation-and in his hand a threatening, symbolic rod that he never, as far as we knew, used on the boys’ wet backs and lustrous buttocks.

Those who are still alive and reading me will agree that I am telling them something as unusual for them as it was for us. Jericó decided that the temptation of our looking at each other naked existed, but the way to overcome it was not by physical effort but by expressing ourselves intellectually. For that, he said, let’s choose two thoughts that are opposite and therefore complementary and invoke them in the shower-which was icy, those who still enjoy their senses should know, for that was demanded by our mentors’ code of physical rigor and aspirations to sanctity.

It still causes astonishment, as well as sensual delight, to remember that by common agreement, when it was time to shower, standing side by side, not looking at each other, soaking wet and naked, with the incessant drip of delicious water falling on our heads, one would repeat aloud the constituent, formal ideas of Catholic philosophy as if they were at once dogmas and anathemas, while the other recited the theory of their absolute negation. Jericó maintained that the Christian philosophy of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas was the basis of the authoritarian, oppressive system of the Iberian nations. The ancient dispute between Saint Augustine and the British heretic Pelagius in the fourth or fifth century set the pattern. The heretic proclaimed the freedom to approach God by means of our own sensibility and intelligence. Saint Augustine stated that there is no personal freedom without the filter of the ecclesiastical institution. The Church is the indispensable intermediary between individual faith and divine grace. By contrast, the heretic claimed that grace is within reach of everyone. Grace, the saint responded, requires the power of the institution to be granted. From this ancient dispute in ruined oracles between a child of Roman Africa and an obscure northern monk grew, said Jericó in the rain of the shower, first the division between Catholics and Protestants and then the difference between Latin Americans and North Americans: We had the Middle Ages, Augustinian and Thomistic, and they didn’t; they had Pelagianism brought up to date by Luther and the imperatives of capitalism, and we didn’t. For North Americans, history begins with them and the past was invented by Cecil B. DeMille with the help of Charlton Heston. For us, the past is so old that it has to be lived again.

If enunciating medieval Catholic contentions in the shower was a singular but unifying act between two naked eighteen-year-old boys, it was no less demanding to make the nihilistic argument in its Nietzschean dress (or in this case, nakedness), for it was up to me to allege that there is no freedom if we don’t emancipate ourselves from faith and from every foundation or acquired rationale, lifting the veil of appearances and adopting the impulse toward the truth, whose first step…

“Is the recognition that nothing is true.”

I said these words “in the rain,” and I confess I felt desolate and in those moments wanted to possess the certainties enunciated by Jericó, for not only did the stream of water on my head blind me, but so did the grief of the loss of all certainty. Still, my role in this fraternal dialogue, which distanced us from false modesty or unhealthy curiosity, was that of a transformer of values by means of false values, saving my dear, my beloved friend Jericó from Christian culture, which is the culture of renunciation.

“And when have you ever seen a Catholic renounce pleasure if in the end it’s enough to confess to a priest to free yourself of all guilt?”

“Or money, something that once was the occupation of Jews or Protestants?”

“Or fame, as if modern sanctity was granted by the magazine Hola?”

We left the bathroom laughing, happy to have surmounted sexual temptation, proud of our intellectual discipline, prepared to exchange roles the next time, when I’d be Catholic, he’d be nihilist, and in this way we’d sharpen our weapons for the inevitable encounter-it would be the greatest dispute of our early youth-with a man-the only man-capable of challenging us: the recently arrived Father Filopáter.

WE RETURNED TO Errol’s house. Because of Jericó’s permanent curiosity and, in my case, not only for that reason but because of something I haven’t mentioned yet and that profoundly affected my life.

The fact is that the Esparzas were entertaining that night. Don Nazario had acquired a chain of hotels in Yucatán and was celebrating with a party. Our classmate the bald kid (though I should say the ex-bald kid, since Errol had let a mane of hair grow that, he told us, was the sign of rebellious youth in the sixties) invited us, as he remarked, to inspect the flora and fauna. Conforming to manners they deemed “distinguished,” Errol’s parents welcomed their guests at the entrance to the Versailles salon. Don Nazario, whom we had never seen, was a florid man, tall, red-faced, with eyes that were someplace else. He seemed full of bonhomie, distributing embraces and smiles, but looking off into the distance, almost fearful that something forgotten, menacing, or ridiculous would appear. He wore green gabardine and a large Hawaiian tie lavish with palm trees, waves, and girls dancing the hula. He looked like a man in costume. He dressed in accordance with his origins (carpentry, furniture, hotels, movie houses) and not with his destiny (a mansion in Pedregal and a bank account safe from bruising). Was it an act of sincerity and pride in his humble past to display himself as he had been, or the cleverest disguise of all, almost a challenge: Look at me, all of you, I reached the top but I’m still the humble, easygoing man I always was?

He greeted us as if we were his oldest friends, with great embraces and mistaken references, since, with his heart in his hand, he thanked us for the “service,” that is, the favor or favors we had done him, which, of course, were nonexistent, leading us to one of two conclusions: Either Don Nazario was out-and-out wrong, or he was treating us in a manner that would not offend but did save him from the possible mistake of owing us something and having forgotten it.

In any event, the confusion passed as rapidly as the speed with which Señor Esparza, radiating cordiality, pushed us forward and repeated the ceremony of the joyous, grateful embrace with the guests behind us, freeing us from the welcome of his wife, Doña Estrellita, who was there, no doubt about that, we saw her, we greeted her, though at the same time she was absent, hidden by the powerful presence of her husband as well as by a desire for invisibility that duplicated, in a certain sense, the desire to disappear altogether.

Was the attire of the mistress of the house the result of her own taste or an imposition by her husband? If the second, we were approaching uxoricide. The lady seemed dressed, if not to go to heaven or hell, then to inhabit a gray limbo, as gray as her mouse-colored tailored suit, her eternal cotton stockings replaced by old-style nylons, her low-heeled shoes by ones of patent leather with ankle straps. Her discomfort at standing on line and receiving in public was so evident that it immediately classified her husband as a sadist who, when he saw her from time to time, would say with a ferocious look, utterly foreign to his affability as host:

“Laugh, you idiot! Don’t make me look bad!”

Patently clear because Señora Estrella gave forced smiles and looked for approval in the eyes of a husband who did not need to look at her: He dominated her, we realized, through pure anticipatory habit. Doña Estrellita knew that if she didn’t do one thing or another, she would have to pay dearly when the guests had left.

I confess that my understandable fascination with the couple separated me from the rest of the crowd, which was dissolving behind a veil of noises, inaudible conversations, the clink of glasses, and the passing of canapés offered by a short, dark-skinned waiter costumed in a striped shirtfront. I could not help admiring the discipline of Errol’s mother in playing the part of the present absent woman. In her fixed, dead eyes there appeared from time to time a lightning flash that commanded her:

“Obey.”

I don’t believe it was difficult for her to do so. She knew she was easy to ignore, and I suppose that from the time she was young her comments, timid in and of themselves, were extinguished to the beat of her husband’s brutal orders, shut up, don’t play the fool, you’re always out of place. Why worry about it?

“Leave the zoo, guys. Let’s go to the den,” said Errol. “My refuge.”

The “den” was the disordered room we had already seen. Errol took off his jacket and invited us to do the same.

“After what you’ve seen, do you feel capable of betting everything on art and philosophy?”

I think we laughed. Errol didn’t give us the chance to respond. Sprawled on the most comfortable armchair in his shirtsleeves, legs spread, he freed himself of tasseled loafers and seized a guitar as if it were the willing waist of an obedient woman.

“You’d be better off getting into politics. Let’s hope you can find a path between what you want to be and what society permits you.”

I was going to answer. Errol did not allow himself to be interrupted.

“Or are you suddenly going to wager on destiny?”

He held up a hand to silence us.

“Just imagine, I’ve already bet on a destiny.”

He observed us; we were polite and interested.

He told us, without our asking, that even though we didn’t believe him, once-a long time ago-Nazario and Estrellita might have loved each other. At what moment did they stop? What would you call the night he no longer desired her, or didn’t see her as young anymore, and she knew he was watching her grow old? In the beginning everything was very different, Errol elaborated, because my mother Estrella was a convent girl and my father wanted a wife without blemish-that’s what it’s called-because in his life he had known only sluts, and whores know how to deceive. With Estrella there was no doubt. She traveled from the convent to the bed of her lord and master, who used her up in one night, demonstrating to her that he didn’t care a fig about convents-that was his outmoded expression-and it would be better if his wife, being chaste, behaved like a whore to please a macho like Nazario Esparza.

Her family handed over Estrellita, received a check and some properties, and never concerned themselves about her again. Who were they? Who knows. They charged a good price to give her, chaste and pure, to a voracious, ambitious husband. The passion ended, though sometimes he looked at her with an intense absence. It wasn’t enough to avoid the repetition of the same battle every night, when Estrella still retained a shred of courage and dignity that served only to infuriate Nazario. The same battle every night until they found the reason for the next dispute, which was to postpone the obligation of sex that she needed not only as something new but because of the chaste obligation of the matrimonial sacrament and that he, perhaps, wanted to put off because of a strange feeling that in this way he was honoring the virginity of his wife, though it was clear to him that Estrella had come to the marriage bed intact and if she was impure, he had been the reason. None of this endured or had too much importance. He was plunging into a gross vulgarity, which Jericó and I had observed that night and Errol now expanded on for us.

“I loved her ten thousand enchiladas ago” was the husband’s response.

She took refuge in the renunciation of sex in the name of religion and set up a pious little shrine in the matrimonial bedroom that Nazario wasted no time in getting rid of with a swipe of his hand, leaving Estrellita resigned to finally seeing herself one night as her husband saw her. She no longer looked young to herself and was certain she looked like an old woman to him.

“Ten thousand enchiladas ago, while she prayed on her knees: ‘Neither for vice nor fornication. It is to make a child in Thy holy service.’ ”

She replaced the saints with pictures of Errol Flynn, whose erotic proclivities were unknown to both Estrellita and Nazario.

“Do you know what?” Errol continued. “I bet I can have a destiny that lets me overthrow my father. Do you like that word? Don’t we hear it every day in history class? Tom took up arms and overthrew Dick hoping that Harry would overthrow somebody else and so forth and so on. Is that history, dudes? A series of overthrows? Maybe so.”

He seemed to take a breath and say: “Maybe so. Maybe not…”

Without letting go of the guitar, he raised his glass: “I bet I can have a destiny that overthrows my father’s. Overthrowing a destiny, as if it were a throne. Maybe so! Suddenly! Or maybe not…”

He stretched out his arm and played the guitar, beginning to sing, very appropriately, the ballad of the disobedient son:

“Out of the way, father, I’m wilder than a big cat, don’t make me fire a bullet that’ll go straight through your heart…”

Voices rose, angry and gruff, in the hall between the Versailles salon and the refuge where we were sitting.

“Are you crazy? Give me that camera.”

“Nazario, I only wanted-”

“It doesn’t matter what you wanted, you’ve made me look ridiculous taking pictures of my guests! That’s all I needed!”

“Our guests, it’s also my party-”

“It’s also your nothing, you old idiot.”

“You’re to blame. I don’t like receiving. I don’t like standing on that line. You do it just to-”

“If you did it well, you wouldn’t humiliate me. You’re the one who makes me look ridiculous. Taking pictures of my guests!”

“What does-?”

“You can blackmail somebody with a photograph. Don’t you realize?”

“But they all appear on the society pages.”

“Yes, you moron, but not in my house, not associated with me.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Well, you should, you fool!”

Errol stood up and hurried to the hallway. He put himself between Nazario and Estrella.

“Mama, your husband is a savage.”

“Shut up, you bum, don’t butt into what doesn’t-”

“Drop it, son, you know how-”

“I know, and I can smell the vomit in the mouth of this old bastard. He stinks like a cave-”

“Shut up, go back to your asshole friends and keep drinking my champagne free of charge. Damn freeloaders! Dummies!”

“Leave us alone. This is between your father and me.”

Nazario Esparza’s eyes were as glassy as the bottom of a bottle. He put his hand in his pocket and took out (why?) a ring with dozens of keys.

“Get out, you’re a curse,” he said to Errol.

“I’d like to imagine you dead, Papa. But not yet a skeleton. Slowly being devoured by worms.”

These words not only silenced Don Nazario. They seemed to frighten him, as if his son’s curse resonated with an ancient, prophetic, and in the end a placating voice. Doña Estrella put her arms around her husband as if to protect him against their son’s threat.

Errol returned to the room and his parents dimmed like an empty theater. Jericó and I followed with wooden faces.

“You see,” said Errol. “I grew up like a plant. I’ve lived outdoors, like a nopal.”

It was obvious: Tonight was his and he wasn’t going to let us slip in a word.

He was as insistent as a rainstorm.

“Do you know the secret? My father wants to get rid of himself. That’s why I behaved the way I did. I have him all figured out and he can’t stand it. He’d like to be the product of his own past, denying what happened earlier but taking advantage of the results. Understand?”

I said no. Jericó shrugged.

“Who were those people?”

“Ah!” Errol exclaimed. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Do you know why my father forbids photographs at the parties he gives at home?”

“I have no idea,” said Jericó.

“You can’t imagine. Why do you think he gets all these people together, offers them champagne, but bans photographs? I can tell you because I secretly go through his papers and tie up loose ends. It just so happens that Don Nazario deducts-that’s what I said-he deducts these so-called ‘parties’ from his taxes. He classifies them as entertainment expenses and ‘office expenses,’ business meetings disguised as ‘cocktail parties.’ ”

“Who comes to a cocktail party to be ‘deducted’?” I insisted, interested in not having my sentimental education cut short.

“Everybody,” Errol said with a laugh. “But only my father is so clever that he bans publicity and closes the deal.”

His laughter sounded hollow and sad.

“I’ve got the old man by the balls! The old fucker!”

I managed to squeeze in a question: “Do you think you’re going to negate your father’s offenses?”

“No.” He shrugged. “I only want to push my differences with him to the limit. Understand? I’m rich, you’re poor, but I have more misery to overcome.”

He emptied his glass in one swallow.

“You should know you’re born with privilege. You don’t make it.”

And he looked at us with an intensity we had never seen in him before.

“Everything else is robbery.”

I TOLD YOU, my dear survivors, I went to the Esparza house that night to avoid my own home, if it can be called that. Dysfunctional and all the rest of it, Errol’s family was in the have column, if Cervantes was right-and he is-when he quoted his grandmother: There are only two families in the world, the one you have and the one you don’t have. Now, how do you quantify familial possession or dispossession? People’s opinion of the fair is based on whether they had a good time. I ought to explain-I owe it to those who are still alive and gather in cities, neighborhoods, families-that I grew up in a gloomy house on Calle de Berlín in Mexico City. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the country seemed to settle down after decades of upheaval (though it traded anarchy for dictatorship, perhaps without realizing it), the capital city began to spread beyond the original perimeter of Zócalo-Plateros-Alameda. The “colonias,” as the new neighborhoods were called, chose to display mansions in various European styles, especially the Parisian and another, more northern one whose origins lay somewhere between London and Berlin and its destiny in a district patriotically called Juárez, though devoted to baptizing streets with the names of European cities.

My first memory is of Calle de Berlín and a three-story house with parapets and towers proclaiming its lineage, a meager stone courtyard, no plants, and only two residents: the woman who took care of me from my infancy, and myself. My name is Josué Nadal, something that readers have known since my decapitated head began to ramble, resting like a coconut and lapped at by the waves on a beach in Guerrero. The name of the woman who cared for me from infancy was María Egipciaca del Río, a name with Coptic resonances that should not be surprising in a country where baptisms are a fertile part of the popular imagination: In Mexico there is an abundance of Hermengildos, Eulalios, Pancracios, Pánfilos, Natividades, and Pastoras, Hilarias, and Orfelinas.

Her name being María Egipciaca and mine Josué should not attract any particular attention if we recall the biblical names that North Americans had from the very beginning: Nathaniel, Ezra, Hepzibah, Jedediah, Zabadiel, not to mention Lancelot, Marmaduke, and Increase.

Attribute this nomenclature, if you like, to the naming vocation of the New World, baptized once at the dawn of time with indigenous names and rebaptized with Christian and African ones throughout its history.

I’m saying all this to situate María Egipciaca in a sovereign territory of proper names that go beyond the designations “mother,” “stepmother,” “grandma,” “aunt,” “guardian,” or “godmother,” which I didn’t dare use for the woman at whose side I grew up, but whose identity she always hid from me, tacitly forbidding me to call her “mother,” “godmother,” or “stepmother” because the mixture of attention and distance in María Egipciaca was like an alternating current: When I displayed mistrust indulgence overflowed from her, and when I showed affection it provoked a hostile response. I’m explaining this game since there is something ludic in every close, solitary relationship that constantly has to choose between amity and enmity; it became clearly established only as I grew and situated in my surroundings this small, severe woman, always dressed in black with a belt and a wide, starched white collar, though her hair was styled coquettishly with short reddish curls in what used to be called a “permanent” (and was repeated like a temporal oracle on the head of Errol’s mother). The severe dress did not go well with the high-heeled shoes María Egipciaca wore to disguise her short stature, though this was more than compensated for by the energy she displayed in the huge house on Calle de Berlín, which was like an elephant’s cage occupied by two mice, for it had three floors but she and I lived only in a space bounded by the vestibule at the entrance, the living room, the kitchen, then two bedrooms on the second floor and a kind of mysterious ban on the third floor, where neither one of us went, as if the madwoman in the attic lived there and not the odds and ends left by previous residents in the course of a century.

Furthermore, the house on Berlín had suffered a great deal in the 1985 earthquake and no one had bothered to repair the cracked walls or restore the airy garret that served as the mirador and crown of the residence. So that when I came to live there, while I was still an infant, forgotten, forgetful, and forgettable (I suppose), its condition was not so much abandoned or forgotten as adrift, as if a house were a stream lost in the great tide of a city that had always been ravaged by military destruction, poverty, inequality, hunger, and revolt, and in spite of, or because of, so much catastrophe, determined to come back more chaotic, energetic, and brazen than ever: Mexico City would give a gigantic finger to the rest of the country, which was attracted to it like the proverbial fly to the spider’s web where it will be trapped forever.

Were there two María Egipciacas? I don’t remember the moment my life began in the light green mansion on Calle de Berlín, because no one remembers the moment of my birth, and lacking other references, we situate ourselves in the environment where we grew up. Unless in a fit of sincerity or imaginary health, the person who shelters us says:

“You know something? I’m not your mother, I adopted you right after you were born…”

María Egipciaca never did me a favor like that. And yet I recall her with the passing affection that gratitude imposes. It’s one thing to be grateful for something and another to be grateful forever. The first is virtue, the second stupidity; favors can be renewed but gratitude is lost if it doesn’t turn into something else: love that is a highflying bird or friendship that is not (Byron) a bird “without his wings” but a fowl less fleeting than love, with its high passionate flight and its low carnal passion. María Egipciaca was part of my childhood landscape. She fed me and had the peculiarity of offering me the spoon accompanied by incomplete proverbs, as if she were waiting for the Holy Spirit of Homilies to descend and illuminate my childish brain:

“No matter how early you wake up…”

“If you eat and sing…”

“Let it rain, let it rain…”

“A closed mouth…”

“An old woman died…”

I believe that whatever the real identity of María Egipciaca, for her, mine was that of perpetual infancy. As a little boy I didn’t dare ask her Who are you? since I had adjusted, in the gloomy solitude of this greenish house, to where I was though I didn’t know who I was. The fact is she never called me “son,” and if she said it by accident, it was in the way someone says “listen,” “boy,” or “kid.” I was an asterisk in the daily vocabulary of the woman who took care of me without ever explaining or clarifying her relationship to me. I didn’t feel worried, I was used to it, I nullified any question about María Egipciaca’s status and was sent to the public school on Calzada de la Piedad, where I made some friends-not many-whom I never invited to my house, and I was never invited to theirs. I suppose I had a forbidding aura, I was “strange,” what others intuitively know about-a family, a home-did not stand behind me. I was, in fact, the orphan who, like the mailman, comes and goes punctually, without provoking a response to what would later, in secondary school, be my watchword: my large nose, or as Jericó, the friend who came to fill all the loneliness of my childhood, would say, “You don’t have a big nose. Your nose is long and thin, not big. Don’t let that bunch of bastards get to you.”

Since the nose is the advance guard of the face and goes before the body, announcing the other features, I began to smell that something was changing in my relationship to María Egipciaca when, fatally, she discovered my shorts stiff with semen in the hamper. My alarming first ejaculation was involuntary, as I was glancing casually at an American magazine at the stand on the corner, which I acquired with embarrassment and leafed through with excitement. I thought I was sick (until on subsequent occasions alarm was transformed into pleasure) and didn’t know what to do with my dirty underwear except toss it in the hamper as naturally as I tossed in shirts and socks, and with the certainty that the laundress who came to the house once a week was not very concerned about finding signs of one kind of filth or another in underwear: that’s why it was “under.”

What I didn’t know is that before handing it over to the laundress, María Egipciaca carefully went over each item. She didn’t have to say anything to me. Her attitude changed and I couldn’t attribute the change to anything but my stained shorts. I imagined that a mother, without any need to refer to the fact, would have come to me affectionately and said something like “My little boy is a man now” or some similar foolishness, would never have referred to the concrete fact, much less with a desire to punish. That’s how I knew María Egipciaca was not my mother.

“Pig. Dirty pig,” she said with her most sour face. “You make me ashamed.”

From that moment on, my jailer, for I could no longer view her any other way, did not stop attacking me, isolating me, cornering me, and eventually arming me with total indifference in the face of the expert fire of her censure.

“What are you going to do with your life?”

“What are you preparing for?”

“What goals do you have in mind?”

“If only you were more practical.”

“Do you think I’m going to take care of you forever?”

“What do you want all those books for?”

This culminated in a nervous ailment that in fact signified the collapse of my corporeal defenses before a reality that held me under siege without offering a way out, a great wall of enigmas about my person, my goals, my sexuality, my family origins, who my father and mother were, what good it did to read all the books shown me by the secondhand book dealers with whom I was friendly for a while, and knew later, thanks to Professor Filopáter.

The doctor diagnosed a crisis of nerves associated with puberty and said I had to rest for two weeks under the care of a nurse.

“I know how to take care of him,” María Egipciaca interjected with so much bitterness that the doctor cut her off abruptly and said that starting tomorrow a nurse would come to care for me.

“All right,” María Egipciaca said with resignation. “If the señor pays…”

“You know the señor pays for everything, he pays well and he pays on time,” the doctor said with severity.

That was how Elvira Ríos came into my life, the young, brown-skinned, short, affectionate nurse who immediately became the object of the concentrated hatred of Doña María Egipciaca del Río, for reasons not far removed from the similarity of their fluvial last names and in spite of the fact that my caretaker was singular and my nurse a true delta.

“Look at her, so dark and dressed all in white. She looks like a fly in a glass of milk.”

“Ay, there’s no lack of idiots!” the little nurse responded with inconsequential speed.

But now, to be more grateful than ungrateful, I should return to Father Filopáter and his teachings.

FILOPÁTER DIXIT:

The philosopher Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) Spinoza (Amsterdam 1632-The Hague 1677) attentively observes the spiderweb spread like an invasive veil over a corner of the wall. A single spider dominates the space of the web that, if Spinoza remembers correctly, did not exist a few months ago, has existed for only a very short time, going unnoticed, and now demanding attention as a principal element in a monastic room, bare and perhaps barren for someone, like Spinoza, who does not have a vocation for superior detachment.

There is nothing but a cot, a writing table with papers, pens, and ink, a washbasin, and a chair. There is no mirror, not for lack of means or an absence of vanity. Or perhaps for both reasons. Books thrown on the floor. A window opens on a stone courtyard. And the spiderweb ruled by the patient, slow, persevering insect that creates its universe without help from anyone, in an almost astral solitude that the philosopher decides to break.

He brings in from the street a spider (they abound in Holland) identical to the one in the bedroom. Identical, but an enemy. It is enough for Spinoza to place the street spider delicately on the web of the domestic spider for it to declare war on the intruder, for the stranger to let it be known that its presence is not peaceable either, and for a battle between the spiders to begin that the philosopher observes, engrossed, not really knowing which one will triumph in the war for living space and prolonged survival: The life of an arachnid is as fragile as the silk its spittle produces when it makes contact with the air, and as long as its probable patience. But the introduction of an identical insect into its territory is enough to transform the intruder into the Nemesis of the original spider and unleash the war that will end in a victory that interests no one after a war that concerns no one.

But in fact, not lacking in imagination (whoever says he is?), the philosopher adds strife to strife by tossing a fly onto the spiderweb. Immediately the spiders stop fighting each other and walk with a patient, dangerous step to the place where the immobilized fly lies captive in unfamiliar territory that imprisons its wings and lights up its greenish eyes (green like the walls of the house on Berlín), as if it wanted to send an SOS to all the flies in the world so they would save it from an inexorable end: to be devoured by the spiders that, once they satisfy their hunger to kill the intruder by their poisonous endeavors, will devour each other. That is death: an unfortunate encounter. That is a spider: an insectivore useful to man the gardener.

Spinoza laughs and returns to the work that feeds him. Polishing lenses. Cutting glass for spectacles and for the magic of the microscope invented a short time earlier by the Dutchman Zacharias Jaussen, master of the brilliant idea of joining two convergent lenses, one for seeing the real image of the object, the other for the augmented image. In this way we consider the immediate image of things and at the same time the deformed image, augmented or simply imagined, of itself. The philosopher thinks that just as there is a world immediately accessible to the senses, there is another, imaginary world that possesses all the rights of fantasy only if it does not confuse the real with the imaginary. And what is God?

Spinoza is very conscious of the period in which he lives. He knows that Uriel de Aste was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities in 1647. His crime: denying the immortality of the soul and the revelation of the world, because everything is nature and what nature does not give, neither the Pope nor Luther will lend. He knows that in 1656 Juan de Prado was excommunicated for affirming that souls die in their bodies, that God exists only philosophically, and that faith is a great obstacle to a full life on earth.

Baruch himself, a Jew descended from the Portuguese expelled in the name of the political madness of Iberian unity, an Israelite by birth and religion, wasn’t he thrown out of the synagogue because he did not repent of his philosophical heresies that-the rabbis were correct-led to the negation of the dogma of the doctors and opened the way to what was most dangerous for orthodoxy: free thought, without doctrinal bonds?

No: Spinoza was expelled because he wanted to be expelled. The rabbis pleaded with him to repent. The philosopher refused. The rabbis tried to keep him. They offered him a pension of a thousand florins, and Spinoza replied that he was not corrupt and not a hypocrite but a man searching for the truth. The fact is that Spinoza felt dangerously seduced by Israel and, threatened by that seduction, turned his back on the synagogue. This was how the chief rabbi declared Spinoza nidui, cherem, and chamata, separated, expelled, extirpated from among us.

Which is what the philosopher wanted in order to postulate an independence that would not let itself be seduced, in retaliation, by the rational liberalism of the new Protestant bourgeoisie of Europe. A rebel before Israel, Spinoza would also be a rebel before Calvin, Luther, the House of Orange, and the Protestant principalities. In any case, he told his friends: Keep my ideas secret. Which did not prevent a fanatic one night from attempting to assassinate him with the ragged stab of a knife. The philosopher placed the cape ripped by the knife in a corner of his room.

“Not everyone loves me.”

He did not accept positions, sinecures, or chairs. He lived in furnished rooms, without things, without ties. He did not accept a single compromise. His ideas depended on a dispossessed life, his survival on modest manual work, badly paid and solitary. Thought must be free. If it is not, all oppression becomes possible, all action blameworthy.

And in that isolated solitude, polishing lenses and performing the historical drama of the spider that kills the spider and the spiders that join together to devour the fly and the big fish that eats the small one and the crocodile that eats them both and the hunter who kills the crocodile and the hunters who kill one another for the skin that will crown the helmets of soldiers in battle and the death of thousands of men in wars and the extension of the crime to women and children and old people and the selection of the crime applied to Jews, Muslims, Christians, rebels, libertines, those who, heretics all, choose: eso theiros, I choose: heresy, freedom…

What is everything, in the end, but an optical effect? Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) asks himself as he bends over his lenses, convinced a man is a philosopher only if, like him, he gives himself up to asceticism, humility, poverty, and chastity.

But isn’t this the greatest sin of all? Isn’t the rebellion of Lucifer in its high degree of humility the most awful of crimes: being better than God?

Baruch Spinoza shrugs. The spider devours the fly. Death is no more than an unfortunate encounter.

Thus spake Filopáter.

A SHORT WHILE after that terrible family scene in the mansion in Pedregal, Errol left home. We found out because he left school in the first year of preparatory at the same time, and we decided to call at his house, as curious as we were concerned about a boy whose destiny seemed so different from ours that, in the end, it represented what Jericó and I could have been.

That afternoon the house in Pedregal seemed dismal, as if its extreme bareness of austere lines had become overloaded with the internal accumulation of things I’ve already described. As if the simple contrast of sun and shadow-a taurine architecture, after all, an essential reduction of the ritual-had ceded light to a somber sunset so that the interior of the house infected the exterior despite its resistance.

We didn’t have time for the front door to be opened for us. It opened and on the doorstep a young, robust woman appeared accompanied by the weak-looking, dark-skinned waiter we had met at the reception. Each carried a suitcase, though the woman also had, pressed to her bosom, a small porcelain statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They were not alone. Behind her appeared Errol’s mother, Señora Estrellita, drying her hands on her apron, looking at the servants with a passionate intensity we did not recognize and enduring the downpour of insults from her husband Don Nazario, dressed for the beach in shorts and leather sneakers.

It was like a cataract of hatreds and recriminations on feedback; turbid waters, contaminated with urgencies and excrescences that had their muddy source in the words of the father, were calmed in those of the mother and eventually found a strange backwater of silence in those who should have been angriest, the two servants dismissed by Señora Estrella to shouts of good-for-nothings, scoundrels, you’ve abused my confidence, get out, I don’t need you, I can run the house and prepare the meals better than you, lazy Indian beggars, go back to the mountains, and unaware of our presence, she hurled a misguided domestic fury at the pair of servants but it turned back on Jericó and me, the invisible spectators, and her husband, Don Nazario, a kind of distant but omnipotent Jupiter dressed to go jogging who, in fact, was running around his wife as he stepped on the toes of his employees, whose obstinate silence, stony glances, and immobile postures bore witness to their passive resistance and announced an accumulated rage that, without the mitigation of daily release, would spill over in one of those collective explosions that the Esparzas perhaps could not imagine or perhaps believed they had warded off for long periods of time with the rules of obedience and submission to the master, or it may be they desired it as one desires an emotional purge that sweeps away indecisiveness, secret guilt, the omissions and faults of those who hold power over the weak.

Doña Estrella shoved the dismissed employees. Don Nazario insulted Doña Estrella. The servants, instead of picking up their suitcases and walking away-she praising the Virgin-remained stoic, as if they deserved the storm of insults raining down on them or enjoyed without smiling those the master directed at the mistress in a kind of chain of recriminations that most resembled eternity as a prison sentence.

“Where was the Chinese vase?”

“Stupidities are celebrated in a girl and even forgiven…”

“Admit that you two broke it!”

“… not in an old woman.”

“And the canary?”

“You were a fool when you were young…”

“Why did it die?”

“… but you were cute…”

“Why did you leave it dead in its cage?”

“You were pretty, you moron!”

“Why was the cage door open?”

“What happened to you?”

“Are you trying to drive me crazy?”

“What frightens you more?”

“Don’t stand there like lumps.”

“Living alone or staying on with me?”

“Move away, I’m telling you.”

“Don’t be stupid, tell them to come back. In a minute you’ll-”

Doña Estrella whirled to face, with mouth open and eyes closed, her husband. She stepped to one side. Don Nazario turned his back. The servants walked back into the house, as if they knew this play all too well. They returned armed with the dagger of the insults the master had directed at the mistress. They would hang them, like trophies, in the damp, dark back room, always reserved for the staff, with a wall, it did have that, so they could tack up the print of the Virgin and, as a kind of curse, the photo of the Esparzas.

How long, how long! Errol would exclaim the next day when we went to see him in his tiny apartment: barely two rooms on Calle del General Terán, in the shadow of the Monumento de la Revolución. The dark-skinned servant gave us our friend’s new address, swearing us to silence because young Errol’s parents didn’t know where he was living.

“When did he leave?”

“Ten days ago.”

“How did he leave?”

“Like a soul chased by the Devil.”

“Why did he leave?”

“Please, ask him.”

It didn’t surprise us that he had gone. We were interested in his reasons. The small apartment in the shadow of the great revolutionary gas station was bare of furniture, just a mattress on the floor, a table, two chairs, a bathroom with the door half open, our friend Errol, whom we sometimes envied and sometimes felt sorry for. The guitar we already knew. A new drum set, a neglected saxophone.

Did rage drive him away? he asked us rhetorically, sitting on the floor, his arms crossed, with his long hair and shortsighted eyes. No, fear drove him away, no matter how justified his anger with his parents. Fear of becoming, in the company of his family, what his father and mother already were: two backward, spectral, avaricious beings. Two enemy ghosts who left a dead smell behind them. Estrellita with that eternal face of someone going to a wedding who does not renounce the happy ending regardless of all evidence to the contrary. Her inconsequential bliss. Her weeping out of sheer habit. The imaginary coffin waiting for her in the hallway to the bedroom. Yes, what’s my mother good for? Distrusting the servants? Is that her only affirmation? Weeping when she imagines the death of others, a vague others, in order to put off mine?

“But I’m here, Mama.”

He strummed the guitar.

“When my father scolds her, she goes into the bathroom and sings.”

Her only devotions are to death, the only certain thing in life, and the Virgin. She doesn’t consider the fact that faith brings her closer to the despised maid. How is it possible to be a Christian and despise believers who have the same faith but are socially inferior to us? How do you reconcile these extremes, shared faith and separate social position? Who is more Christian? Who will enter heaven through the eye of the camel? Who through the lock of the strait gate?

Jericó and I looked at each other. We understood that Errol needed us in order to give external words to his internal torment, which transcended his relationship with his parents and settled, eventually, in the relationship of Errol to Errol, of the boy to the man, the sheltered to the homeless, the artist he wanted to be to the rebel that, perhaps, was all he could be: a rebel, never an artist, because personal insurrection is not a sign of esthetic imagination. And he immediately referred to his father.

“What can you think of a man who travels abroad with a money belt filled with silver pesos around his waist to make certain no one steals them? A man who travels with a special case filled with chiles to season insipid French cooking?”

He was silent for a moment. He didn’t invite us to comment. It was clear his diatribe had not yet ended.

“Do you remember when I told you how my father made his way? The man of action, the faithful husband, the strong head of the family? First a carpenter, in a poor district of the city. A furniture maker. Selling chairs, beds, and tables to various hotels. Furniture stores, hotels, movie houses. Remember? The modern Saint Joseph, except that his Virgin Mary didn’t give birth to a savior but to an informer. I didn’t tell you everything that time. I skipped over the link that joins the chain of my revered father, like the key ring in his pocket that he rattles with so much authority. Between the furniture store and the hotels are the brothels. The first chain of my fortune is made of whorehouses. That’s where the mattresses went, that’s where the beds were used, that’s where the Catholic, bourgeois, and respectable fortune of a couple who insult their servants and ignore their son was founded. In a brothel.”

What could we say? He didn’t expect anything. His confession didn’t affect us. It was his business. For him, obviously, it had been transformed into an open wound, and that was when we knew that because of our disinterest in this matter, the value Jericó and I shared with regard to the geographies of families or the supposed “crimes” of individuals, it did not concern us. Right then Jericó and I confirmed something we already knew, the necessary product of our readings assimilated to the philosophical and moral leap that the instructive friendship of Father Filopáter signified. A lesson for us, for him the recognition of losses and gains in the ancestral game between parents and children, forebears and descendants. About whom could I speak except women who weren’t related to me, María Egipciaca, my nemesis, and Elvira Ríos, my nurse? And Jericó, who remained silent about family antecedents about which he may have been completely ignorant? And about whom except ourselves could we speak, he and I, Jericó and Josué, regarding the familial relationship that in our lives was ultimately identical to the relationship between friends? This apparent solitude was the condition of our absolute solidarity. The small saga of Errol and his family confirmed in Jericó and me the fraternity that was a sure sign of the orientation of our lives. Brothers not in blood but in intelligence, and knowing this, we realized (at least I did), joined us early on but perhaps put us to the test for the rest of our lives. Would we always be the intimate friends we were now? What would the twelve strokes of noon leave us? And what the prayer murmured at the end of the day?

Perhaps it was unfair to call us what Filopáter named us-Castor and Pollux-simply in contrast to the real orphanhood of our friend Errol Esparza, voluntarily estranged from his parents though perhaps more devoted than we were to the eternal struggle between talent and solitude.

Then he came out of the bathroom, naked, his head wet, the young man who greeted us and sat in front of the drum set while Errol picked up the guitar and the two of them began their rock version of “Las Golondrinas.”

A few mariachis to the wise.

I ALWAYS KNEW she would spy on us. The presence of Elvira Ríos was offensive to María Egipciaca, even before the nurse set foot in the house adrift on Calle de Berlín. In the mind of my caretaker, this enormous residence had room for only two people, her and me, in the chastely promiscuous relationship I have already told you about. It was as if two enemy animals occupied, with no other companion, an entire forest, and one fine day a third animal appeared to throw into confusion a couple that in fact did not love each other. Was there hatred between my guardian and me? I suppose there was, if the perpetual dissimilarity of affections and sympathies determines an antagonism that moves people in conflict to do what they have to do only so the other, as soon as he is aware of what is going on, will occupy the adversarial position. If I complained or woke up in a bad mood, María Egipciaca lost no time in asking what is it? what’s wrong? what can I do for you? If, on the other hand, I woke brighter than the sun, she hurried to wield a poisoned rapier, it’s clear you don’t know what the day holds in store, have you thought about your assignments for today, why didn’t you finish them yesterday? now you’ll have more obligations and since you lack not only time but also talent, you won’t get anywhere: you’ll always be a raté… Where María Egipciaca had gotten this French word led me to wonder what kind of education my caretaker had received, since I never saw her reading a book, not even a newspaper. She didn’t go to the movies or the theater, though she did have the radio on day and night, until the day itself became a kind of annex to the programming of XEW, “The Voice of Latin America from Mexico.” That the poor woman learned something is evident because on the day, at the crack of dawn, that the nurse Elvira Ríos appeared, María Egipciaca remarked:

“How silly. That’s the name of a bolero singer.”

“Isn’t it just that you’re Del Río and she’s Ríos? Does that irritate you?”

“From current to current, let’s see who drowns first.”

The days preceding the arrival of the nurse were perhaps the worst of a confinement that previously, at least, had doors open to the street and school. Now, confined by doctor’s orders and waiting for the imminent arrival of the nurse, my “stepmother’s” manias were exacerbated to the point of cruelty. She found a thousand ways to make me feel useless. She prepared meals making so much noise it could be heard all through the house, she came up to my bedroom with the tray resounding like a marimba orchestra, she sighed like a tropical hurricane, deposited the meal outside my door with a groan of cardiac exertion, picked it up, came in without knocking as if she wanted to catch me at the solitary vice that, since the incident of my undershorts, had fixed her opinion of my impure person. If she didn’t drop the tray on my lap it was because her vocation of service would have obliged her to pick up and clean without asking me to do the same, since that would have denied María Egipciaca’s sacrificial function in this house where, however, all the dirt accumulated for seven days until the competent maid came in once a week, drew the curtains, opened the windows, aired out and let in the sun, washed and ironed, filled the dispensers for the necessities of the next few days, and left as she arrived, without saying a word, as if her work did not depend in any way on the apparent mistress of the house, María Egipciaca. On only one occasion did the cleaning woman speak to my caretaker to say:

“I know a nurse is coming to take care of the boy. If you like, I’ll bring some flowers.”

“There’s no need,” María Egipciaca replied severely. “Nobody died.”

“It’s to cheer up this tomb a little,” the servant said in a bad humor and left.

I must admit to those who survive that my taking to a sickbed made me very happy. I saw it as an opportunity first of all to devote myself to “the unpunished vice,” reading, and second, to oblige María Egipciaca to serve me with no pleasure, irritated, making an unnecessary racket but obliged, beyond any other consideration, to tend to me for reasons that had nothing to do with the affection or duty a mother owes her child, but merely to remain in the good graces of “the señor,” that mysterious patron to whom the doctor had referred with unqualified severity and categorical words.

I should confess that the allusion to “the señor,” which I heard for the first time on that occasion, produced a conflicted feeling in me. I realized that María Egipciaca was not the source of my material existence or physical comfort but simply followed the orders of a person who had never been mentioned before in this house. Was the physician’s indiscretion really an indiscretion? Or had the good doctor intentionally put María Egipciaca in her place, revealing that far from being the lady of the house, she too, like the weekly maid, was an employee? I wanted to gauge the effects of this revelation on my guardian’s attitude. She was careful not to vary in the slightest the behavior I already knew. If I was sick and sentenced to rest, she would heighten, without modifying in its essentials, her irreproachable conduct as a señora charged with lodging me, feeding me, dressing me, and sending me to school.

But since at the same time the doctor had announced that the nurse would come to take care of me on the instructions of the señor who “pays for everything, pays well, and pays on time,” María Egipciaca had on the horizon of her suspicions a new and weaker propitiatory victim. The nurse and I. I and the nurse. The order of factors etcetera. The outcome foreseen by María Egipciaca was a relationship that excluded her from her good governance of the house and care of my person. How to reaffirm one and prolong the other? Sometimes the questions that pierce our spirits escape through our eyes, just as my encephalic mass spills out of my skull today, when I woke up dead on a Pacific beach.

Fourteen years ago Elvira, if she did not prevent my death, did renew my life. My routine as an early adolescent in secondary school promised, in my young but limited imagination, to repeat itself into infinity. It is curious that at a time of such great physical changes, the mind insists on prolonging childhood, since the belief that adolescence itself will be eternal is only the mirror of the tacit conviction (and convention) of childhood: I’ll always be a little girl, a little boy, even though I know I won’t. But I’ll be an adolescent with the mentality of a little boy, that is, of a survivor. In the end, what age belongs to us more than childhood, when we truly depend on others? Everything is longer when we are children. Vacations seem deliciously eternal. And class schedules too. Though subject to school and especially the family, at that time of life we have more freedom with regard to what binds us than at any other period. It seems to me this is because in childhood freedom is identical to imagination, and since here everything is possible, the freedom to be something more than the family and something more than school flies higher and allows us to live more separately than at the age when we must conform in order to survive, adjust to the rhythms of professional life, submit to rules inherited and accepted by a kind of general conformity. We were, as children, singular magicians. As adults, we will be herd animals.

Can’t we rebel against the gray sadness of this fatality? I evoke this feeling because I believe it is what joined Jericó and me as brothers. And I’m also of this opinion because it was the nurse Elvira Ríos who came before anyone else to break the habitual formations enclosing me in the house on Calle de Berlín under the tutelage of María Egipciaca. It isn’t that the nurse had proposed to “free me” or anything like that. It was simply a question of a presence different from everything I had known until then. María Egipciaca constantly praised the Caucasian race, the “whiteys,” almost assigning to them the destiny of the world or, at least, the monopoly on intelligence, beauty, and strength. She suffered from an unfortunate mental confusion that led her to say things like “If whites governed us, we’d be a great country”; “Indians are our burden”; “See, the Americans killed the Indians and that’s why they could be a great nation”; “Those blacks are only good for dancing.” When she leafed through my history books, she would sigh over the blond Emperor Maximiliano de Habsburgo and deplore the triumph of “that Indian” Juárez. She didn’t know much about the war of 1846-48 with the United States, though her prejudices were enough for her to wish that North Americans had taken over the entire Mexican territory once and for all. When I dared to remark that then we would be a Protestant country, she was confounded for the moment and not until the next day did she come up with an answer: “The Virgin of Guadalupe would have converted them to religion,” because for her, Protestantism was, at most, “a heresy.”

The arrival of the nurse Elvira Ríos, very dark-skinned and dressed in white with a black valise in her hand and an active professional disposition that would not tolerate insolence or interruptions or jokes, became a challenge to Doña María Egipciaca. I felt it from the moment the nurse prohibited my jailer from entering my room.

“And the tray with his food?” María Egipciaca said haughtily.

“Leave it outside.”

“Better yet, you carry it up.”

“With pleasure.”

“And if you like, cook it too.”

“That’s no trouble, Señora.”

Each of Elvira’s responses seemed to corner María Egipciaca a little more, and in the end she prepared the meals and brought them to the door of my bedroom, attempting to cross the threshold, not counting on the nurse’s will.

“The patient needs rest.”

“Listen, Señorita, I’m not going to-”

“That’s an order.”

“We’ve lived together his whole life!”

“That’s why he has a nervous ailment.”

“You’re arrogant!”

“Just professional. My job is to protect the young man from any nervous disturbance and restore his tranquillity.”

“It’s my house!”

“No, Señora. You’re only an employee here, like me. Please close the door.”

“Arrogant! Presumptuous Indian!”

From this delicious exchange (which avenged all the years of tension in the house on Berlín) was born my admiration for the small, agile, slender nurse. I attempted to converse with her in a less professional manner. She wouldn’t allow it. She was here to take care of me and restore me to health, not to chat. I looked at her with a look I did not recognize but the mirror confirmed as “the eyes of a lovesick calf.”

My gaze obtained only one response: Elvira placed a thermometer in my mouth with a gallant gesture.

The truth is that this agile, self-assured presence in a young, small body excited me more than if Elvira had shown herself naked. I learned right then, during the first few days of my nerve cure, first to guess at and then immediately to desire the flesh hidden behind the nurse’s snow-white uniform. What would she be like naked? What kind of underclothes would a señorita like her wear? Was she still a señorita? Did she have a boyfriend? Was she married? And as young as she was, did she have children? All these questions resolved, eventually, into a single image. Elvira naked. My eyes stripped her of clothing, and she did not resemble the paper dolls in the magazines that had first excited me. I understood one thing: Seeing her dressed, all in white, moved me more than seeing her without clothes, because the uniform stimulated my imagination more than nudity.

The earlier routine disappeared. It was replaced by a new routine joined to the presence of the nurse, my imagination whirling between her slender hips and the succession of thermometers, pills, checks of blood pressure, and conversations that revealed my juvenile lack of experience and vague desire to prolong childhood without showing my dread of adulthood.

She seemed to observe it all with an intelligent gaze that María Egipciaca, intruding from time to time, called (from behind the door, like a ghost that no longer frightened me) “black squirrel eyes,” or “her with the little mouse eyes,” words that did not disturb the young professional, no doubt accustomed to things worse than a muttering, rabid old woman displaced by the facts of life from her customary dominant position. I was grateful to Elvira that her presence had translated into my liberation. The house would not be the same again. The tyranny of my childhood lost its powers with every passing hour.

“Wakes earlier.”

“Gets up crazy.”

“No flies come in.”

“Shuffling.”

Elvira completed the interrupted proverbs of María Egipciaca, who listened to them hiding behind the door, betrayed by a moth-eaten sigh. She was defeated.

A week went by. Ten days went by. The period of my convalescence was growing short, and one night, when the famous peace of the graveyard reigned, Elvira said to me:

“Young man, you need only one thing to settle your nerves.”

And immediately she undressed in front of me and I could bear witness to my own imagination. What one thinks can be superior or inferior to reality. I feared, when Elvira unfastened her shirt, that her breasts would not be as I had imagined them. That her belly, her pubis, her buttocks, would contradict my fantasy. This was not the case. Reality surpassed fiction. Elvira’s silence during our fifteen minutes of love was barely broken by an earthly little sigh from her and a prolonged ay! from me, which she stifled, with delight, by covering my mouth with her hand.

Better than my pleasure was the feeling that I had given it to her. No matter how Elvira picked up again not only her clothes but her nurse’s attitudes, I knew from then on that I could give pleasure to a woman and believed at that moment it was the greatest wisdom in life and everything I learned from then on would not be better or wiser than this, although this, I also found out, would never be repeated exactly the same way. There would be in my life loves that were longer, shorter, more or less important, but none would replace my sexual dawning in the arms of Nurse Elvira, healer of my youth and quadrant of my maturity.

And so it happened that on the same day I got up from bed and Elvira very seriously said goodbye, I went into the bedroom of my almost forgotten jailer Doña María Egipciaca and found an unmade bed and an abandoned mattress.

FATHER FILOPÁTER HONORED us with his friendship. Of all the assholes running loose in the schoolyard, he selected Jericó and me to talk, discuss, and think with him. We knew it was a privilege. We didn’t, however, want to be seen as something exceptional, enviable, or, by the same token, laughable or open to ridicule by the mass of students more interested in dozing or kicking a ball than in demonstrating that man is a being who thinks when he walks. Because our conversations with Filopáter were all peripatetic. With absolutely no desire to evoke Aristotle, Filopáter made it clear that in the act of walking, one establishes an active friendship without the hierarchies implied when we sit at a table or receive the lesson from the altar-civil or religious-of the teacher-priest (or as Filopáter would say, not without a touch of pedantry, the magister-sacerdos).

I suppose that speaking while walking was the intuitive way in which the teacher put himself on our level and invited us to speak without his looking down at us from on high. Sometimes we stayed after class in the yard. Other times we walked the streets of Colonia Roma. Rarely did we reach the Bosque de Chapultepec. The truth is that in the act of holding a dialogue, the city tended to disappear, changing into a kind of agora or academy shared through the word. And the word, what was it? Reason or intuition? Conviction or faith? Provable faith? Rational intuition?

The first thing Father Filopáter set forth for us was what he considered a danger. He knew about our readings and intellectual enthusiasms. From the very first, he warned us:

“Be careful of extremes.”

The invitation to debate was formulated from the moment the priest proposed that we talk to him. We respected him enough-and I suppose we respected ourselves enough-not to question his right to think, ours to refute him, and his to respond. Moreover, I confess that Jericó and I wanted and needed this, I at the age of eighteen and he at nineteen, and both of us fertile ground for receiving another’s seed in the mental fields we had been cultivating at least since sixteen and seventeen with impassioned readings, debates between ourselves, and a feeling of enormous emptiness: Why did we think, for whom did we think, who would dispute our proud youthful knowledge, who would put it to the test?

Because nothing inspires pride comparable to that of a young person’s intellectual awakening. The darkness dissipates. Day dawns. Night is left behind. Not because the earth moves around the sun, but because we are the sun, the earth is ours. We knew it.

“Drinking from the same fountain, you and I can be left dry, Josué, we can turn into intolerant individuals without someone to put us up against the wall and make us doubt ourselves…”

I am transcribing and fixing these words of Jericó’s because I will have occasion to invoke them very often in the future.

Now, as if he had read our thoughts and deciphered our disquiet, Filopáter approached us in the schoolyard, tacitly asked us to join him in his slow walk among the arches of the building, without attracting attention, with pensive references to the weather, the changing light in the city, the quality of the day, the ability to hear and take pleasure in urban music, and thought.

“I’m not mistaken if I say you’re very involved in two authors.”

He saw our books, hidden sometimes in our book bags, sometimes displayed defiantly on our desks or read with youthful ostentation at recess, when the presence of my friend Jericó defended me against the old assaults on my innocent nose and we were both consigned to a kind of student limbo. We were “strange” and didn’t know how to get a ball into a hoop.

The two authors were Saint Augustine and Friedrich Nietzsche. In an intuitive and reasoned way, Jericó and I, like iron unattached to a magnet, had headed for opposing thinkers. We wanted, more accurately, to learn to think on the basis of extremes. Our purpose was transparent to someone like Father Filopáter and his rapid attraction to an unoccupied center: for us and, in contrast to what we could imagine, for himself.

“It matters a great deal to you to think as you choose, doesn’t it?”

“And also to express freely what we think, Father.”

“Authority has no right to intervene?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not when it’s a question of a religious institution? Or never?”

“We want it never to interfere if it’s a question of a secular state.”

“Why?”

“Because the state is secular in order to dispense justice, and justice is not a question of faith.”

“And charity?”

“It begins at home,” I allowed myself to joke, and Filopáter laughed along with me.

He began by situating our extremes. He clarified that Jericó and I chose two authors who would teach us to think, not two filiations who would oblige us to believe and defend what we believed. In this we agreed with him. It was the basis of our dialogues. We weren’t wedded to our philosophers except insofar as we read and discussed them. Was Filopáter tied to the dogmas of his Church? Thinking this was our initial advantage. We were mistaken. In any event, our thinking was opposed to faith and wagered on the clash of ideas. Our decision was that these ideas were diametrically opposed, and Filopáter situated them in a pellucid manner.

We read Saint Augustine: God creates all things and He alone sustains them. Evil is only the absence of a good we could have. When it fell, humanity lost its original values. Recovering them requires divine grace. Grace is inaccessible to human beings, fallen and in disgrace, on their own. The Church is the intermediary of grace. Without the Church, we remain joined to the dis-grace of the human mass, which is massa peccati.

Saint Augustine defended these ideas and fought without respite the heretic Pelagius, for whom salvation was possible without the Church: You can be saved by yourself.

At the other extreme of these youthful ideas, Nietzsche proposed freeing us from all metaphysical belief, abandoning any acquired truth, and accepting with bitterness a nihilism that rejects a Christian culture impoverished by the need for renunciation and yet masked by false values that consecrate appearances and hinder the impulse toward truth.

“What truth?”

“The recognition of the absence of any truth.”

Father Filopáter was not lacking in astuteness and I don’t believe he suspected, beyond a couple of peripeteias, that his religious investiture would lead him to instruct us in the virtues of faith and the error of our deviations. Today merely thinking that makes me ashamed, and I let that kind of suspicion fall useless to the sand where my decapitated head lies. Filopáter did not condemn Nietzsche or praise Saint Augustine. And he did not pull another Catholic theologian from his sleeve. We should not have been surprised, in short, that the lesson he set aside for us would bear the name and imprint of a thinker condemned as a heretic by both his original Hebrew community and eventual Christian one.

Therefore, before expounding the philosophy of Baruch (Benedetto, Benito, Benoît) Spinoza, Filopáter, as he placed on his head not a biretta or a cap but a black zucchetto, reminded us of the origin of the word “heretic,” which was the Greek eso theiros, which means “I choose.” The heretic is the one who chooses. Heresy is the act of choosing.

“Then heresy is freedom,” Jericó hastened to say.

“Which obliges us to think, what is freedom?” the priest shot back.

“Fine. What is it?” I came to my friend’s assistance.

To obtain an approximate answer, Filopáter asked us to retrace the path of the heretic Spinoza.

“You have just told me you believe in freedom of thought.”

“That’s true, Father.”

“Is the thought of believing in God free?”

We said it was.

“Then, can faith be free?”

“If it isn’t consumed in obedience,” said Jericó.

“If it affirms justice,” I added.

Filopáter adjusted the black calotte.

“If it doesn’t, if it doesn’t… Don’t be so negative. Do you believe in the will? Do you believe in intelligence?”

Again, we said we did.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Demonstrate it to us, Father,” Jericó said, arrogantly, brazenly.

“No, seriously, boys. If God exists, He is a God who does not demand obedience and offer justice, but a God positively intelligent and possessing will.”

“Our differences aside, I would say I agree,” I affirmed.

The priest playfully pulled my ear and placed the zucchetto on my head.

“Well, you’re mistaken. God is not intelligent. God has no will.”

I laughed. “You’re more of a heretic than we are!”

He removed the zucchetto.

“I am the most serious of orthodox believers.”

“Explain yourself,” said the very haughty Jericó.

“Believing that God has intelligence and will is to believe that God is human. And God is not human. I do not say with vulgarity ‘He is divine.’ Only that He is other. And we gain nothing by turning Him into a mirror of our virtues or a negation of our vices. God is God because He is not us.”

“Why?”

“Because God is infinitely creative.”

“Isn’t that what we humans are, individually, collectively, or traditionally?”

“No, because our creativity is free. God’s is necessary.”

“What do you mean?”

“That God is the cause of Himself and of the finite beings-you, me, everything that exists-derived from Him. God is active not because He is free but because all things necessarily originate in Him.”

“Then he isn’t the bearded man in the sky?”

“No, just as light isn’t the light of a candle or a lightbulb.”

“And Jesus, His son?”

“He is a human form among the infinite forms of God. A form. Just one. He could have chosen others.”

“Why?”

“To let us see Him.”

“And then return to nothing?”

“Or to everything, Jericó.”

“What do you mean?”

“That God is vast, not intelligent. God is infinite, not divisible.”

“But He can be human, material…” I apostrophized.

“Yes, because the body is one thing and matter another. We are only body, the stone is only matter. But God, who can be body-Jesus-can also be matter-creation, seas, mountains, animals, plants, etcetera, and also everything we don’t even know or perceive. What we do manage to see and know, touch and smell, imagine or desire, are for God only modalities of His own infinite extension.”

I believe he saw us looking somewhat perplexed because he smiled and asked:

“Do you subscribe to a theory of the creation of the universe? In reality, there are only three. The one of the divine fiat. The one of the original explosion, which derives from the theory of evolution. Or the one of the infinite universe, without beginning or end, without an act of creation or apocalypse. Pascal’s vast sidereal night. The infinite silence of the spheres. Earth as a passing accident whose origin and extinction are equally lacking in importance.”

I don’t know if Filopáter was proposing to us a kind of menu of the origin of the universe, and if he expected us to subscribe to one or the other of his three theories he was mistaken and knew it. He wanted only to force us to think on our own, and in the course of our talks we realized our initial error. Filopáter did not want to convert us to any orthodoxy, not even his own. And I confess I ended up wondering what, then, if not religious faith, the philosophical reasoning of our teacher could be.

What was he saying to us?

“If you don’t believe in God, believe in the universe. Except that the universe is identical to God. It has no beginning and no end. That is why God alone can see a thousand-year-old tree grow.”

In the admonitory reference to Spinoza, however, we encountered a personal resonance that Filopáter could not, or would not, let us hear. Spinoza was not expelled from Judaism because of persecution. He expelled himself because of love of solitude, and he loved solitude-Filopáter explained-in order to think. He wanted to be expelled from the Hebrew community to demonstrate that religious believers care more about authority than about truth.

“What do you think?”

After consulting with each other, Jericó and I told the priest he would have to answer the question himself. We were disrespectful.

“If what you want, Father, is to set a trap for us so we commit today to what we won’t commit to tomorrow, we believe the one who has been trapped is you.”

“Why?” the cleric said with great, with real humility.

How to tell him that whatever happened, whatever he thought, Filopáter would never renounce his religious fidelity? He would be faithful to it no matter how heretically he might think-no matter how much he might choose.

Perhaps he guessed the answer we didn’t give to his “why” loaded with responsibilities for two young students who were alert but immature.

“Why?”

He looked at us with the gratitude, confidence, and affection we would always have for him.

“Listen, don’t be satisfied with telling me what I might want to hear. And don’t challenge me out of mere negativity. Be serious. Don’t exaggerate.”

It was another way of telling us he had chosen a path but it was up to us to choose our own. He said it in the indirect way I’m saying it now. He left us with a permanent feeling for the unavoidable difficulties in living life seriously. Spinoza engaged in rebellion and scandal intentionally, in order to be expelled and be independent. Filopáter had not done the same. In the light of his experience, was the venerated Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) a coward who, instead of breaking with his Church, looked for the way in which his Church would break with him? And was Filopáter another coward who knew a good many intellectual options outside the Church and settled for the protective cupola of the ecclesiastical dome?

“I avoid rebellion and scandal,” he told us the last time we saw him, Jericó and I both knowing that when we left school we would not visit Filopáter again, or the students, Professor Soler and his restless hands, Director Vercingetorix and his trampled gladioluses. Why? Because it was simply a rule of life that the attachments of adolescence are lost in order to become adults, without weighing the loss of value this can signify. Filopáter would become the object of our self-satisfied contempt because his instruction consisted of teaching the thought of others, with no contribution of his own.

But wasn’t the inquiry itself, the ability to ask and to ask ourselves, an indispensable part of the education that would allow us to be “Jericó” and “Josué”? Only later, much later, did we learn that Filopáter resembled Baruch more than we had imagined at school.

“He did not accept his family’s inheritance. He died in poverty because that is what he wanted. He left with nothing.”

“Nature is happy with very little. So am I.”

The candles drip wax on a barrel filled with blood.

MARÍA EGIPCIACA’S EMPTY bed became the symbol of my being abandoned inside the mansion on Calle de Berlín. Nurse Elvira had disappeared, I suppose forever. The imperious doctor had no need to return. Now the lawyer named Don Antonio Sanginés put in an appearance. I wanted to solve the mysteries that surrounded me. Where was my warden, María Egipciaca? What did the empty bed and rolled-up mattress mean? Where were her clothes, her cosmetics (if she had any), her basic possessions: dentifrice and toothbrush, hairpins, brush, comb? The bathroom was as empty as her bedroom. There were no towels. And no toilet paper. It was as if a ghost had lived in the room of a woman whose physical reality was obvious to me.

The mystery of her absence was no greater than my sense of it, except that the enigma of the woman never became anything else, while in my own case, absence signified solitude. It was strange. The customary presence of Señora María Egipciaca somehow filled the empty spaces of this mansion untouched by reversals or novelty. It wasn’t a beautiful house, or historic, or evocative. It was huge, and I had to admit that the occasionally amiable though almost always hateful presence of my jailer filled all the spaces that now were not only empty but solitary, for hollowness as sidereal as the universe evoked by Father Filopáter is not the same as a disappearance of the concrete and customary, no matter how odious it may have seemed to us. I imagine the worst injustices, the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazi regime, and try to imagine something that might have been a consolation. Suffering with others. The prisoner in Auschwitz, Terezin, or Buchenwald could see his death in the eyes of other prisoners. Perhaps that is the mercy no one could tear away from that group of victims.

How could I, wretch that I was, compare my insignificant abandonment in the mansion on Berlín to the fate of a victim of Nazi racism? Was my vanity so great it placed my minuscule abandonment above the gigantic abandonment of the millions of men and women whom no one could or wished to help?

Well, yes. You can attribute it, now that I, a victim myself, am nothing more than a severed head lapped by the waves of the Southern Sea, to the failings of self-pity, the rupture of the customary, even a certain nostalgia for the presence, odious or amiable but at least habitual and constant, of my old guardian, to calibrate the solitude that invaded me at the time with a sense of being abandoned that brought me dangerously close to the sin of believing that the world was my perception of the world, that my particular image of things was as momentous as the injustice committed against an entire people, religion, or race.

I’m being sincere with you and make no apology for my absurd anguish but do criticize my narrow perception and arrogant presumption in believing that because I was solitary I was persecuted. But who, in a situation comparable to mine, does not project his personal misery onto a greater screen, a collective experience that saves us from the sadness of the trivial and insignificant? Perhaps, looking back, I realize that what I perceived was inside me, and what lay outside was so small that to endure it I had to sketch it on our time’s large collective screen of grief, abandonment, and despair.

Forgive me for saying what I have just said, you who still live and give definitive value to your existence. I do it to punish myself and situate the small crises of my youth within their real limits, which are limits only because we first extended them to the entire universe, turned our small problems into matters of universal transcendence, and compared ourselves, grotesquely, to Anne Frank or, more modestly, David Copperfield. All this is to say that the disappearance of María Egipciaca, preceded by my illness, the incident with Nurse Elvira, and the suspicion I was not who I believed myself to be, confused my existence and left me, like a shipwrecked sailor, wanderering in the solitude of the mansion on Berlín. Waiting for a solution to this new stage of my life, fearful it wasn’t a stage but an insurmountable condition. What would become of me? Following my guardian, would I disappear too? Would I be expelled? How long would a wait continue that was a torment and brought me to the ludicrous extreme of comparing myself to a victimized Jewish girl or an abandoned English boy?

The attorney, Licenciado Don Antonio Sanginés, appeared one Saturday morning to explain the situation to me. Which was what it had always been. Except that Señora María Egipciaca would no longer look after me.

“Why?” I dared to ask in the unyielding presence of the lawyer, a tall, imperturbable man who looked at me without seeing me, so heavy were his eyelids and so meager the light that came in or went out through those curtains.

“That’s the way it is,” was his only response.

“Did she die? Move away? Was she dismissed? Did she grow tired of the work?”

“That’s the way it is,” Licenciado Sanginés repeated and proceeded to lecture me about my new situation, as if nothing had happened.

I would continue to live in the house on Calle de Berlín until I finished my preparatory studies. Then I could select my course of study and stay in the house until I completed it. At that time, new instructions would be given to me. I would receive a stipend sufficient to my needs. Matters would be arranged in accordance with those needs.

The lawyer read the document containing these instructions, folded it, placed it in the jacket pocket of his blue pinstripe suit, and rose to his feet.

“Who will look after me?” I said, alarmed at not having anyone to fix my food, make my bed, prepare my bath, and ashamed at having to admit to this catalogue of requirements.

“That’s the way it is,” Sanginés repeated and left without saying goodbye.

I asked myself if I could live with so many unanswered questions. I saw myself lost in the big old house, left to my own devices and the question Sanginés had posed: What were my needs?

As soon as the lawyer had left, the usual maid came in and, without saying a word, began her work. I believe it was this resumption of custom in the midst of an unaccustomed situation that disconcerted me more than anything else. The attempt to mollify me by assuring me everything would be the same did not resolve the mysteries I found troubling. Who was María Egipciaca? Where was she? Had she died? Had she been dismissed? Would I see Nurse Elvira again? Who was I? Who was supporting me? Who was the owner of the house I lived in? How did those proverbs end?

“… does dawn come earlier.”

“… wakes up crazed.”

“… the old woman’s in the cave.”

“… lets in no flies.”

“… shuffling the deck.”

Jericó completed the proverbs María Egipciaca had left dangling and gave me an order:

“Come live in my apartment.”

“But the lawyer-”

“Pay no attention to him. I’ll arrange it.”

“And if you can’t?”

“That can’t happen. You have to learn to rebel.”

“And be left without-”

“You won’t lack for anything. You’ll see.”

“You’re pretty rash, Jericó.”

“Sometimes you have to take a risk and ask yourself: Who needs whom? Do they need me or do I need them?”

“Us?”

He looked with contemptuous eyes at the empty rooms in the house on Berlín.

“You’ll go crazy here. It’ll be like clockwork.”

JERICÓ LIVED ON the top floor of a crumbling building on Calle de Praga. The green tide of the Paseo de la Reforma could be heard in perpetual conflict with the gray traffic of Avenida Chapultepec. In any event, living on the seventh floor of an apartment building with no elevator had something about it that isolated us from the city, and since on the other floors there were only offices, after seven in the evening the building was ours, as if to compensate for the cramped arrangement of a living room integrated with the kitchen-stove, refrigerator, pantry-separated only by the high counter we used as a table, integrated in turn by two high stools that resembled the racks where they placed heretics, to the derision of the people, and the punished, to the mockery of their masters.

What else? Two bedrooms-one smaller than the other-and a bathroom. Jericó offered me the larger room. I refused to displace him. He suggested changing beds every seven days. I accepted, not understanding the reasoning behind the offer.

We also shared the closet, though I brought from Berlín to Praga (from Döblin to Kafka, one might say) more clothing than the very few items my friend had.

And we shared women. I should say, a single woman in a single house on Calle de Durango, the brothel of La Hetara, a name of ancient lineage, according to my friend, for at the dawn of Mexican time two women fought for control of whoredom in the city: La Bandida, a famous madam celebrated in boleros and corridos and, much more discreet, La Hetara, to whose house Jericó took me one night.

“You’re like a lamb going to slaughter, and I know why. You fell in love with the nurse Elvira Ríos. You didn’t realize that the nurse, the doctor, the entire house on Berlín, and of course your jailer Doña María Egipciaca were all passing illusions, phantoms of your childhood and early youth, destined to disappear as soon as you reached the ‘age of reason.’ ”

“How do you know that?” I asked without too much surprise, since to me the speed of my friend’s associations and conundrums was already proverbial.

“Aaaah. The fact is your case is mine… I believe…”

With growing perplexity I asked him to explain. I had grown up in a mansion in the care of a strict tyrant and he, apparently, had been freer than the wind, giving the impression-underscored by his apartment, his vital ease in speaking, living, going to see whores, walking between the Zona Rosa and Colonia Roma as if there were no (were there any?) urban frontiers-that he had appeared in the world totally prepared, with no need for family, antecedents… or a last name.

All the entrance bells at the building on Praga had the names of individuals, companies, legal offices. The top floor said only PH-Penthouse. Ever since school, and above all after the incident with the young administrator whom I asked about Jericó’s last name, I did not have the courage to investigate any further. It cost the administrator his job. After my question we didn’t see him again, not even hidden behind his officious little window. I deduced that just as the school secretary had vanished, I could disappear too if I inquired about the last name and therefore the origins of my straightforward though mysterious friend Jericó.

And yet, here we were together in the garret (penthouse) on Calle de Praga between Reforma and Chapultepec, sharing roof, bathroom, meals, readings, and, finally, women. Or rather, woman. Just one.

Jericó pushed aside the beaded curtain and moved easily among the twenty or so girls gathered in the parlor of La Hetara. He told me-noticing my glances-to close my eyes. Why? Because we were going directly to the room where our friend was waiting for us. Friend? Our? Our whore, Josué. Our? Mine is yours. I forbid you to choose. I already chose for you, he went on, opening the door of a bedroom that had a thick, mixed aroma (perfume, sweat, starch) slathered on the walls, which no one and nothing, except the collapse of the house, could eliminate.

It was a room overloaded with heavy curtains on the walls, an effort at the kind of Oriental luxury I would later appreciate in the paintings of Delacroix crowded with silks, draperies, carpets, incense burners, fans, odalisques, and eunuchs… except in this room everything was sensually olfactory and barely visible, so great was the pileup of pillows, carpets, poufs, mirrors with no reflection, and the smell of cat piss and fast food, as if, when the act was over, the prostitute’s solitude was compensated for only by an appetite contrary to the insatiable hunger that is the rule for the modern woman, molded by models who look like broomsticks and lead the daughters of Eve to bounce back and forth between bulimia and anorexia.

What awaited us? Was she fat or thin? Because in the darkness of the room, which was not even half-lit, it was difficult to find the dependable object of Jericó’s desire transformed, with fraternal tyranny, into my own.

I allowed myself to be led. I recognized my position as student with barely one flower in my buttonhole, the deflowered and lamented Elvira, while Jericó strolled through this brothel like a sheikh in his harem with an unpleasant self-assurance that owed a good deal to his nineteen years. He was the sultan, the qaid, the chief, the top dog. Would his age humble him or exalt him even more on this, my first night as an eighteen-year-old adolescent in a whorehouse?

With a dramatic gesture, Jericó took a heavy silk bedspread and pulled it aside, revealing the woman protecting herself beneath and behind this large scenic device.

How much was revealed to me? Very little. The woman was still covered from the waist down, only her bare back gleamed, in the dusky light, like a forgotten moon, and her face was covered by a veil that concealed her from nose to shoulder. The only things visible were the eyes of a winged beast, black, large, cruel, mindless, and indifferent, as mysterious as the hidden half of her face, almost as if from the nose down this woman had an appearance that denied the great unknown of her gaze with a vulgarity, simplicity, or stupidity unworthy of her enigmatic eyes.

I didn’t see much more, as I say, because as soon as we were undressed, the woman disappeared amid Jericó’s kisses and my timid caresses, the two of us naked without any previous order or decision, naturally stripped of everything except our skin, avid to kiss the woman, touch her, in the end possess her.

And never speak to her. The veil that covered her mouth also sealed it. She did not allow a sigh, a moan, a reply to escape. She was the object-woman, something volunteered, made for the pleasure-that first night-only of Jericó and Josué, Castor and Pollux, here and now again the children of Leda, whore to the swan, born in this instant of the same egg, the Dioscuri in the act of being born, crushing the flowers and grass, shattering the eggs of the swan so that from her would be born love and conflict, power and intelligence, the tremor in the thighs, the fire on the roofs, the blood in the air.

We followed each other in love.

Only later did I try to reconstruct in memory what existed outside my body, as if in the act itself any impression other than pleasure would extinguish it. The woman behind the veil was inanimate though endowed with a labored indolence. She adopted mechanical poses that left the initiative to the two of us. Even so, my love was abrupt, spasmodic, obliging me to imagine Elvira’s lack of haste.

“Can you say something to her that will make her tremble?” Jericó whispered in my ear, he and I facing each other with the woman between us, the two friends head to head, panting, trying in vain to smile, naked in our carnal blindness, our hands resting on the woman’s waist, fingers touching, I looking out of the corner of my eye at the bee tattooed on one of the whore’s buttocks, our mouths joined by respiration that was shared, yearning, suspicious, shy, ardent.

“Can you imagine all the men who’ve had her? Doesn’t it excite you to know the road of her body has been traveled by thousands of cocks? Does it bother you, interest you, repel you? Only you and I become emotional? Are we going to find our pleasure separately or at the same time?”

I would like to believe, at a distance, that those nights at La Hetara on Calle Durango sealed forever the fraternal complicity (that had already existed since school, since our readings, since our conversations with Filopáter) between Jericó and me.

Still, there was something else. Not only the postcoital sadness I didn’t feel with Elvira and did now, but an ugliness, a vulgarity that Jericó himself took care to point out to me.

“Do you want to believe?” He coughed with a caricatured, pompous cough while the woman lay facedown in the bed. “Do you want to believe that sex is like a great baroque poem whose exterior is the insidious ornamentation on limpid profundity?”

He made a disagreeable face so I would laugh.

“Then take a look at Hetara at dawn, without the night’s makeup. What will you see? What will it taste of? A roll dipped in perfume. And what will you find if you tear off the veil? A revolting face.”

He indicated the woman’s backside. She had a queen bee tattooed on her left buttock. He didn’t know I had seen it, which is why he pointed it out to me.

“Everything’s varnish, my dear Josué. Lose your illusions and say an affectionate goodbye to the veiled woman.”

Only later did I remember that when I made love to her I closed my eyes, knowing that he, Jericó my friend, made love with his eyes open and came without making noise. Even though he came. She did not.

“Like clockwork.”

WHEN WE GRADUATED from prep school, we would matriculate in the Faculty of Law. We took that for granted.

Our earlier philosophical meanderings-the reading of Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, the discussions with Father Filopáter, the magnet of Spinoza-convinced us that the framework of ideas was like the skeleton in a body that now required the flesh of experience. And without having read Spinoza, experience could be had by a bus driver or a cook. We-Jericó and I-ran the risk of believing that ideas were enough in themselves: splendid, eloquent, astral, and sterile. To give reality to our thoughts, we decided to study law as the option closest to our shared intellectual vocation.

Because we could share a woman or an apartment. This was almost child’s play compared to the brotherhood of thoughts-Castor and Pollux, children of the swan, the Dioscuri born of the same ovary, causing flowers and grasses to burst forth in the world, attending the birth of love and conflict, power and intelligence. Because they were so united, they decided our next step: to be lawyers in order to give reality to our ideas.

I was certain about our shared purpose. Still, I noticed in my friend, during the months of vacation between our leaving prep and matriculating at the university, a growing disquiet manifested in isolated phrases when we ate, showered, walked through the neighborhood, went into one of the increasingly rare bookstores in the city, and invaded (or allowed ourselves to invade) spaces devoted to popular music, videos, and gadgetry. There was no lack of street life on the way to our old prep school. Vast, swarming, moving like an undisciplined army of ants, the street gave an accounting of increasingly greater differences of class. There was an abyss between the motorized world and the world on foot or even between those in cars and those on a bus. The Mexican contrast, far from ebbing, increased, as if the country’s “progress” were an optical illusion, calculated on the number of inhabitants but not the sum total of their welfare.

The working-class city increased its numbers. The privileged city isolated itself like a pearl in the urban oyster (cloister). Jericó and I went to a cineclub and saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with its two rigidly separated universes. Above, a great penthouse of games and gardens. Below, an enormous underground cave of mechanized workers. Superficially gray, at bottom black. Or rather, without light.

In our city, the young who were neither poor nor rich rubbed elbows with the wealthy in discotheques and wandered solitary and joyless through the commercial centers, the large groupings of stores, movie houses, and cafés under the common roof of provisional protection. Outside, an option was waiting for the young in stylish clothes: Move up, move down, or stay where you are forever.

For all these reasons, Jericó and the one who is narrating this story to you, gentle survivors, felt privileged. I had lived in protected comfort in the house on Berlín. Now, I shared the apartment on Praga with my friend. I hadn’t known the source of Jericó’s income. Now I had a suspicion that I didn’t have the courage to share with him. On the fifteenth of every month an envelope appeared in the mailbox with a check made out to me. I confess I cashed it in secret and didn’t tell Jericó. But I imagined that periodically he received similar assistance and even went so far as to think, with no proof at all, that the source of our controlled income might be the same. The truth is that the amount I had at my disposal was enough for my immediate needs and nothing more.

Since my friend and I led twin lives, I supposed his income was not very different from mine. What we did share was the mystery.

I was saying that during the months of vacation, Jericó began to let slip phrases without precedent or consequence. They seemed directed at me, though at times I considered them mere expressions in viva voce of my friend’s thoughts and concerns.

In the shower: “What do we fear, Josué?”

At breakfast: “Never leave yourself open to an ambush.”

Having lunch at three o’clock: “Don’t let anyone impose opinions on you. Be independent.”

Walking together through the neighborhood: “Don’t feel superior or inferior to anybody. Feel equal.”

Back in the apartment: “We have to make ourselves equal to everything around us.”

“No,” I replied. “We have to make ourselves better. What makes us better also challenges us.”

Then we fell into a frequent debate, our elbows leaning on the table, my hands supporting my head, his open in front of me, at times he and I in the same posture, both joined by a fraternity that, for me, was our strength… as we drank beer.

“What undermines a man? Fame, money, sex, power?”

“Or, on the contrary, failure, anonymity, poverty, impotence?” I hurried to say between sips of brew.

He said we ought to avoid extremes, though in case of necessity-and he smiled cynically-the first was preferable to the second.

“Even at the cost of corruption, dishonesty, lies? I give up!”

“That’s the challenge, dude.”

I took his hand affectionately.

“Why did we become friends? What did you see in me? What did I see in you?” I asked, returning with a certain dreamy melancholy to our first meeting, when we were both almost children, in the school officially named Jalisco and in reality Presbytery.

Jericó didn’t answer. He remained silent for several days, almost as if speaking to me were a form of treason.

“How to avoid it?” he murmured at times. “I give up!”

I smiled as I said, so the conversation would not be sidetracked in the usual way: Either you learn a trade or you end up a highway robber.

He didn’t smile. He said with punctual indifference (that’s how he was) that at least the criminal had an exceptional destiny. The terrible thing, perhaps, was to give in to the fatality of the evasive, the conformity of the common and ordinary.

He said the vast masa pauperatis of Mexico City had no choices but poverty or crime. Which did he prefer? Criminality, no doubt about it. He stared at me, as he had when we made love to the tattooed woman. Poverty could be a consolation. The worst commonplace of sentimentality, he added, removing his hands from mine, was to think the poor are good. It wasn’t true: Poverty is a horror, the poor are damned, damned by their submission to fatality and redeemable only if they rebel against their misery and become criminals. Crime is the virtue of poverty, Jericó said on that occasion I have not forgotten, looking down and taking my hands again before shaking his head, looking at me now with a restrained happiness:

“I believe that youth consists of daring, don’t you agree? Maturity, on the other hand, consists of dissimulating.”

“Would you dare, for example, to kill? To kill, Jericó?”

I pretended terror and smiled. He went on with a somber air. He said he feared necessity, because hunting for the necessary meant gradually sacrificing the extraordinary. I said that all of life, for the mere fact of being, was already extraordinary and deserving of respect. He looked at me, for the first time, with a wounding contempt, lowering me to the condition of the commonplace and lack of imagination.

“Do you know what I admire, Josué? Above all things I admire the man who murders what he loves, the thief who steals what he likes. This is not necessity. This is art. It is will that is free, supposedly free. It is the opposite of the herd of complaining, stupid, bovine, directionless people, the ones you pass every day in the street. The filthy herd of oxen, the blind herd of moles, the thick cloud of green flies, capeesh?”

“Are you telling me it’s better to have the extraordinary destiny of a criminal than the common destiny of an ordinary citizen?” I said without too much emphasis.

“No,” he replied, “what I’m praising is the capacity for deceit, disguise, dissimulation of the citizen who murders in secret and turns his victims into strawberry marmalade!”

He laughed and said we wouldn’t matriculate together at the Faculty of Law in the Ciudad Universitaria. Next week Jericó was going to France on a scholarship.

That’s how he told me, without preambles, amiable but cutting, with no warning and no justification. That’s how Jericó was, and at that very moment I should have put myself on guard against his surprising nature. But since our friendship was, by this time, old and deep, I thought the reappearance of my friend’s Nietzschean “brutalities,” contrasting the world with the perception of the world, was merely a momentary return of the options that mark youth, similar to a circular plaza from which six different avenues emerge: We have to take only one, knowing we sacrifice the other five. Will we know one day what the second, third, fourth, or fifth roads held in store? Do we accept this, thinking it didn’t matter which one we chose because we carry the true path inside us and the different avenues are mere accidents, landscapes, circumstances, but not the essence of ourselves?

Did my friend Jericó understand this when he abandoned me so suddenly in search of a destiny he could separate from me, but even more, from himself?

Or was he taking an indispensable step so Jericó could find Jericó, and to do that it didn’t matter to him-or in the end, to me-if his trip to Europe distanced him forever or brought him closer than ever to me? I didn’t know the answer then. Only now, cut down, on a remote Pacific beach, do I return to that moment of our shared youth, trying to resume life itself, beyond our personalities, as a premonition of postponed horror: a youth of external violence and internal desolation. An age that disappeared, fragile but perhaps beautiful.

My absurd preoccupation was different then, different.

What name would Jericó travel with?

What last name would be displayed, of necessity, on his passport?

PROFESSOR ANTONIO SANGINÉS stood out, in every sense, in the Faculty of Law. Tall, distinguished, endowed with an aquiline profile, melancholy brows, and eyes at once serious, cynical, mocking, and tolerant under heavy lids, he appeared in class immaculately dressed, always in three-piece suits (I never saw him combine an unmatched sports jacket and trousers), double-breasted, buttoned to emphasize the high, stiff collar, the monochrome tie, and his only concessions to fantasy, light brown shoes and cuff links won at raffles or bought with love, for it was not impossible to imagine Licenciado Sanginés buying cuff links decorated with the figure of Mickey Mouse.

I do not need to add that a figure like his made a devilish contrast with the increasingly popular style of our time. The young dress the way beggars or railroad workers once did: torn jeans, old shoes, threadbare jackets, shirts with announcements and slogans (KISS ME, INSANE, I NEED A GIRLFRIEND, TEXAS LOST, I LIKE TO FUCK, I’M ABANDONED, MY PORK RINDS CRACKLE, MÉRIDA METROPOLIS), sleeveless T-shirts, and baseball caps worn backward and all the time, even in class. Even sadder was the sight of mature, not to say old, men and women who assumed a borrowed youth with the same sports caps, Bermuda shorts, and Nike sneakers.

With it all, Professor Sanginés’s elegance was seen as an anachronistic eccentricity, and he repaid the compliment by viewing the style of the young as decadence unaware of itself. He liked to quote the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and his famous dialogue between Death and Fashion:

FASHION: Madame Death, Madame Death.

DEATH: Wait until the right time, and you will see me without having to call.

FASHION: Madame Death!

DEATH: Go to the Devil. I will be ready when you are not.

FASHION: Don’t you know me? I am Fashion, your sister.

This was what, with a certain macabre, decadent air, attracted me to this teacher who taught the class in International Public Law with a degree of meticulousness far above the abilities of the students, for he, far from filling us with facts, expounded on two or three ideas and supported them with reference to a couple of fundamental texts, inviting us to read them seriously though convinced-a glance at the flock was enough-no one would follow his advice. That is: He did not order, he suggested. It did not take him long to realize I not only listened to him but for the next month responded to his questions in class-until then simply a cry in the desert-with respectful alacrity. Sanginés suggested The Prince. I read Machiavelli. Sanginés indicated The Social Contract. I immersed myself in Rousseau.

First he invited me to walk with him through the Ciudad Universitaria, then later to go to his house in Coyoacán, an old residence from the colonial period, only one floor but very extensive, where in room after room, books supported, in a manner of speaking, the wisdom, if not of the ages, then of the end of the world. He noticed my delight and also my nostalgia. The encounter with Professor Sanginés reminded me of our conversations with Father Filopáter. It also brought to mind the absence of my friend Jericó and the lonely need we sometimes feel to share what we see and do with a brotherly friend. I don’t know if Jericó felt in Europe what I felt in Mexico. The pleasure would have doubled with his presence. We would have been able to comment on Antonio Sanginés’s lessons, compare them with those of Father Filopáter, and proceed, as we had done then, with our intellectual formation on the solid foundation of our friendship.

Professor Sanginés’s residence breathed the air shared by the man and his books. Both were joined in an internationalist ethic very much opposed to the new global laissez-faire. Globalization was a fact and its momentum swept away old frontiers, laws, and discourses, antiquated habits and defenses of sovereignty. The teaching of Antonio Sanginés did not deny this reality. It merely pointed out, with elegant emphasis, the dangers (for everyone) of a world in which international decisions were made without competent authority, just cause, juridical intention, or proportionality, and with war as the first, not the final, recourse. The catastrophic intervention of the United States in Iraq was the probative example of Sanginés’s theories. The authority had been nonexistent, fragile, and usurped. The cause, a true potpourri of lies: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, overthrowing the dictator was not the reason behind the resolution, the dictator fell and terror made its entrance, the region passed from maximum order (tyranny) to maximum chaos (anarchy), and the catastrophe did not ensure the flow of oil or confirm the lowering of prices. The little match on the Potomac became the conflagration in Mesopotamia.

“The only ones who win,” Sanginés concluded, “are the mercenaries who profit from the beginning and ending of wars.”

If this was Antonio Sanginés’s practical lesson in class, in private I discovered that his condemnation of international crime merely reflected his interest in crime tout court. I was discovering that half his library dealt not with the noble thoughts of Vitoria and Suárez, Grotius and Pufendorf, but with the obscure though profound examinations by Beccaria and Dostoyevsky of crime and criminals and, even more somber, the books of Butterworth on the police and of Livingstone and Owen on prisons.

When he explained the prison system, Sanginés offered details about subjects like security, living conditions, recognized privileges, health, access to the outside world, correspondence, legal contacts, family and conjugal visits, repatriation, internal discipline, punishments, segregation, cells, life sentences, and discretionary sentencing.

“Prison is like a mummy bandaged from head to toe in laws and institutions. The prison authorities, for the most part, behave, for good and for evil, in accordance with ‘regulations.’ Except there are so many ‘regulations’ that they allow great discretion in applying them and even in ignoring or violating them, creating a set of unwritten laws that, especially in the case of Mexico, eventually replace written law.”

I don’t know if he sighed: “Throughout Latin America homage is paid to the law only to violate it more thoroughly. Prisons in Mexico are no worse than the ones in Brazil. In Colombia the guerrillas impose their own prison law, mocking national statutes. In Central America, the disasters of war have created so many de facto situations that the legal code is a dead letter.”

The professor’s three little boys came in and, dressed as pirates and shouting about boarding and blood, they climbed on his head, his shoulders, his chest, making him laugh, and as soon as he had affectionately freed himself, he made a final comment as he adjusted his jacket and tie.

“Everything I tell you, Josué, about theory and laws does not matter if you do not observe life in our prisons up close.”

He looked at me in a sly manner I hadn’t seen until then, for our relationship had always been as direct as the association of a student with his teacher can be. I believe Sanginés attempted to dim the gleam in his eyes without waking my suspicions by lowering his lids-which he naturally did when he thought-and remarking that among the classes in the jurisprudence curriculum, one was required as a course but elective as to subject: forensic practice. It was up to me to decide the field in which I wanted to do this practice. Commercial or civil suits. Divorces, evictions, estates, seizures, bankruptcies, mergers, land boundaries, jurisdictions, appraisals, all of this the professor enumerated without referring to the internationalist subject of his class and, eventually, anchoring in prison law.

Did he sigh? Did he command?

The fact is that, motivated by Don Antonio Sanginés, I requested and secured permission to do my class in forensic practice in prison.

And not in any prison but in the most feared, most famous, but most unknown, visible in its strange name but invisible in its even gloomier (I supposed) interior. The grave of the living. The house of the dead, yes. The Mexican Siberia, a wasteland within a wasteland, a cave within another cave, a labyrinth with many entrances and no exit, an altar of consecrated blasphemies and profanations. The black hole. The metaphor of our life imprisoned in the womb at first, in a shroud at the last, in the deepest secrets of the domestic prison between tango and tomb. The prison built with the stones of the law. Hope, the prison of Zechariah. Liberation, the hope of Isaiah.

And so, with these thoughts, I commenced the conclusion of my law studies at the Palacio Negro de San Juan de Aragón, built underground in the bed of the old Río del Consulado, beneath the footsteps of the urban crowd which, I never suspected, could be heard as one more torture in the depths of this prison of prisons.

LA CHUCHITA APPROACHED and, with tears in her eyes, gave me her hand. In the other she carried a small mirror into which she looked from time to time with a mixture of serenity and alarm. Dress me, she said. I replied that she was already dressed. The girl cried out and began to pull off her clothing, I mean the long nightshirt of coarse homespun worn by all the girls imprisoned in the depths of San Juan de Aragón. I hate it, she screamed, tearing at her tangled hair flattened by grime, I hate seeing myself naked. You’re dressed, I said innocently. She leaped at me, trying to scratch me. They have to dress me, she screamed, they have to dress me. Then she bowed her head and withdrew while a blue boy, at her side, bent over the cement floor picking up something invisible, and a little farther on, another adolescent scratched incessantly at his back and complained of the pimples that itched, that burned, that never healed no matter how his bloodied nails scratched at dark skin.

The girl Isaura had a fixed idea: the volcano Popocatépetl. I sat beside her for a while. She spoke of nothing else. She repeated the name of the mountain over and over again, smiling, savoring the syllables. Po-po-ca-té-pel. I corrected her. Po-po-ca-té-petl. The word was Nahua-I corrected myself, wanting her to understand me: Aztec. She repeated: Po-po-ca-té-pel. I insisted: té-petl. She looked at me with sustained, inexplicable fury, as if I had violated a secret chamber, a sacred corner of her existence. I would have preferred the girl to attack me physically. She merely observed me with a distance that wanted to wound me and the entire world, the world that had sent her here, the empty swimming pool of children imprisoned in San Juan de Aragón. What would I say to her? There was no open pathway between my presence and her release. When she walked away repeating Po-po-ca-té-pel, she no longer was looking at me.

I wasn’t told the name of the next creature I approached. Its sex was indecipherable. It couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, but something had been engraved on its face. Indeterminacy, or rather, a gentle, undefined astonishment. Who was it? Alberto. A boy. No. Albertina. A girl. It looked at me with tears in its eyes.

Another boy of about fifteen showed off a scar at his waist. I say “showed off” because he displayed it with a self-satisfied mixture of misfortune and valor, pointing at it with his index finger, look at me, touch me, just try…

I was distracted by a boy with a very sad face. I didn’t dare ask him his name. He couldn’t have been more than eleven, but in his gaze an ancient guilt was revealed in small lines between his eyebrows, a grimacing mouth, the defiance suggested by very white teeth in a filthy mouth from which the remains of a tortilla and scrambled eggs were dangling. Like a flash of lightning, sadness transformed into aggression when he realized I was observing him.

“Félix,” he shouted. “Felicity.”

He threw himself at me. Only the intervention of a guard stopped the charge.

Others were more eloquent. Ceferino told me he wasn’t guilty of anything. The crime lay in being abandoned. He was abandoned in a wretched neighborhood where not even the dogs could find anything to eat in the garbage dump. He wanted to eat a dog to see what it tasted like. It would have been better if he had eaten the parents who abandoned him in the neighborhood of the garbage dump. He looked for them. No way. Where did they go? The city is enormous. What did they leave behind? The tag on his overalls. The name of the store where they bought him overalls. There they told him where his papa and mama had gone. He walked an entire day from neighborhood to neighborhood, searching until he found them at a little stand on the Xalostoc road, there on the highway to Pachuca, that is, right on the fucking road. Papa, mama, I was going to say to them. It’s me, your son, Pérez. He realized as soon as he looked at them that they had abandoned him because the child was a burden, another mouth to feed, a hindrance, and now, in their small business, his papa and mama had forgotten him completely. They believed-he believed-that if they had prospered just a little it was because they didn’t have to feed a boy named Pérez. He looked at them, if not smiling then satisfied, self-satisfied. Not free of guilt. Just forgetful of everything that happened before they emigrated from the neighborhood and found a suitable way to survive. They were unaware of his existence. They didn’t know he was there, at the age of eleven, ready to attack them with an ice pick, stab out their eyes, leave them there screaming and bleeding, and end up in the prison for minors at San Juan de Aragón.

Did they survive?

I wish they had, so they would never see the world again and have to find another way to live, feeling themselves scorned, fucked, gone all to hell, assholes, sons of bitches.

Merlín was a mentally deficient boy. Not completely, but sufficiently so. Shaved head, the mischievous gaze of a happy imbecile, his mouth hanging open, snot dripping; the jailer who accompanied me explained that this boy was part of the bands of idiots criminal gangs used to commit offenses. They placed bombs in cars. They were a distraction during criminal acts. They served as decoys. They acted as false abductees. The smartest ones were spies. Almost all of them were given to the gangs by their families in exchange for money, and sometimes just to get rid of the runty little bastards.

Others, the amiable guard helping me to complete the course in forensic practice pointed out, had more talent but were born into the most absolute marginality, with lives close to those of dogs or pigs. Their only way out-he traced a wide arc with his arm and open hand-was crime or prostitution. He implied, to my amazement, that this black lake was in a way a place of seduction. Instead of a deadly fate, the kids who swarmed here, like phantoms, alone or arm in arm, all dressed in their sad caftans of coarse cloth, barefoot, scratching their shaved heads as if nits were their only consolation, picking at their companion’s navel, scratching their balls and their armpits, blowing their nose with their hand, shitting and pissing at will, all together in the great underground cement pool in the obscene guts of the Federal District, all possessed a jailhouse destiny.

That was implied in the jailer’s gaze, at once indifferent and obscure. Albertina said she had been kidnapped in a restaurant in Las Lomas, no less, when she went to the bathroom and disappeared while her parents looked for her and she, drugged, left the place in the arms of her kidnappers, except dressed as a boy, her curls cut off, her hair dyed black, and a pallor that did not leave her in the stupor of never knowing again who she was or who she had been, trained only to steal, to slip between security bars and end up behind prison bars, completely disoriented forever.

What do you want us to do?

I don’t know how to get dressed by myself! screamed La Chuchita.

The boy with the scar on his back had been kidnapped in order to remove his kidney and sell it to the Gringos who require replacement organs. Thank your saints they didn’t take both of them, asshole. He dedicated himself to finding who kidnapped him, drugged him, and operated on him. Since he didn’t find them, he decided to cross the border and go from hospital to hospital destroying with a colorful cane from Apizaco the jars where other people’s kidneys were resting. Broken glass, spilled fluids, kidneys that the boy picked up, cooked, and ate, wrapped in tortillas, like great Gringo tacos devoured by a vengeful Mexican. He was expelled from California, contrary to the United States policy of detaining Mexicans, especially those suspected of not speaking English. Catarino-that was his name-turned out to be too dangerous, even behind the bars of Alcatraz: He was capable of eating them all, like Hannibal Lecter.

Justice triumphed.

“Do you know how to swim?” said the jailer, whose face I looked at for the first time, having been so attentive to the small juvenile hell in the cement swimming pool.

He didn’t give me time to answer.

Four streams of water came from the top of the sides of the tank-prison, splashing against the bodies and heads of the children and young people trapped in this pit, in the midst of shouting that was savage, happy, agonizing, surprising, under this downpour of rough, muddy liquids, channeled here from a dead river that emerged into life to subdue the children and young people who rapidly were floating, waving their arms, moving their heads, shouting, crying. The agitation of that small prison sea obliged me to swim, fully dressed, as the water rose, and I noted, in the confusion, that while some children swam, others, the smaller ones, it’s true, sank, were trapped, and drowned with a howl at once personal and collective.

“This is how we force them to bathe,” said the guard.

“And those who don’t know how to swim?”

“This is how we control the excess penal population.”

“What do you have to say about it?”

“I say too bad for them.”

“Are you a demographer, Señor?”

Who offers up Mexico’s prayers at the foot of the altar to its children?

DEAR SURVIVORS: I would be lying if I told you that the departure of my friend Jericó condemned me to irremediable solitude. I’ve mentioned that his absence coincided with the years of my university studies, culminating in the guardianship of Don Antonio Sanginés and my ghastly visit to the juvenile pit at San Juan de Aragón in the name of “forensic practice.”

I haven’t lied. I’ve omitted. I should remedy the fault. In my spirit, I tried to associate the absence of Jericó with a willed, ideal solitude, which reality took care of proving false as soon as I said goodbye to my friend in the airport. I can deceive the living. Who among all of (or the few of) you can disprove what I’m recounting here? Everything I’ve said may be pure invention on my part. You, Señor, Señora, Señorita who read me, there is no proof I’m telling you the truth. There isn’t even proof I exist outside of these pages. You can believe me if I declare that my sex life, without the usual company of Jericó, was a desert without salt or even sand: an emptiness comparable to the children’s pit, so deep, desolate, and cruel, a Sahara of cement… Imagine, if you wish, that I looked for and found the nurse Elvira Ríos, that I became her lover even though she was married, that I didn’t become her lover because she was married, that she turned me down because she had sex only with the sick to console them, and I seemed as healthy as socialist realism in a poster from the Stalinist era whose pop art was on display, at the time, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. You can deny it if I tell you I went back to the brothel on Avenida Durango a few more times to fuck the whore with the veiled face and the bee on her buttock. The truth? A lie? I didn’t know her name. She was gone, she had left, “retired,” according to the chaste expression of the madam and whoremistress Doña Evarista Almonte, alias La Hetara.

I could, then, deceive discreet readers and still ask them, as an act of faith in me, my life, my book, to believe that in the very act of saying goodbye to Jericó in Terminal One of the Mexico City Airport, in the midst of the infernal din characteristic of that elephantiastic building that extends in all directions, exits, entrances, cafés, restaurants, liquor stores, sarapes, trinkets, mariachi hats, books and magazines, pharmacies, silverware shops, sweets shops, sports shoes, baby clothes, and the life you live from day to day, like a lottery ticket, my country, admitting and expelling thousands of national and foreign tourists, the curious, pickpockets, cabdrivers, porters, police, customs officials, airline employees, in uniform, out of uniform, until in that enormous bowl of oats a second, simultaneously local and foreign city was formed, and I encountered an accident that changed my life.

In an instant a clamor was added to the aforementioned din, which I’ll tell you about now. That’s what happens at the airport, everyone’s city: You think you’re there for one thing and it turns out you were there for something very different. You think you know the direction, the route of your destination within the belly of the aerial ogre, and suddenly the unexpected erupts without requesting permission. You think you have everything with you, and in an instant madness takes the place reserved for reason.

The fact is I was walking calmly though sadly back to the Metro that would take me to my neighborhood, when a person fell into my arms. I don’t say man, I don’t say woman, because this individual was all leather-at least that’s what I felt as I embraced without wishing to the person whose face was hidden behind goggles-or rather, aviator glasses that came down from the leather helmet covering the head of the person who kicked, embraced me in order to escape the police who were holding her, and screamed so they would know her sex. A woman’s piercing voice shouted insults, called the police pricks, pigs, bums, dogs, half-breeds, brutes, sons of the original great whore, first among whores, Mother Evarista, Matildona in person (the name sounded familiar), bastards of all bastardom and of bastardly bastardhood, to make a long story short.

I embraced her. The police had their hands on her back.

“Let her go, please,” I said, carried away by an instinct for sympathy.

“Do you know her?”

“She’s my wife.”

“Well, take better care of her, young man.”

“Lock her up in La Castañeda,” said the oldest and most outdated of the policemen.

“My colleague meant to say she’s crazy.”

“What did she do?” I summoned the courage to ask while the woman clutched at me as if I were a pillar in a storm.

“She wanted to take off in her own small plane on the runway reserved for the Er Franz flight.”

Which was my friend Jericó’s flight to Paris.

“What happened?”

“We stopped her in time.”

“We confiscated the plane.”

“Aren’t you going to charge her?”

“I’m telling you we confiscated the plane.”

I’m not sure if the policeman winked when he said this. His eyes with no cornea, the eyes of an idol, did not move, his lips traced an unwanted complicity. I did not have enough money for a “taste,” and bribery repelled me morally though not philosophically. They made my life easier. All they wanted was to get rid of the woman, and the gods of the Aztec Subterranean, Airport stop, had sent me. I couldn’t imagine, as the Untouchables turned their backs on me, the fate of the requisitioned plane, the tribal division of spoils.

“My name’s Lucha Zapata.”

I embraced her and moved away through the crowd at the air marketplace. I exchanged glances with another woman walking behind a young porter who made gallant gestures, as if pushing a cart of luggage in an airport were the most glamorous piece of acting imaginable. I didn’t know why this modern, young, nimble, elegant woman who moved like a panther, like an animal restlessly tracking the porter, looked at me with such fleeting and intense interest.

“My name’s Lucha Zapata,” my companion repeated. “Take me with you.”

I stopped looking at the elegant girl. I was conquered by minimal solidarity.

THE ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD of San Juan de Aragón, at least from Oceanía to Río Consulado, had been razed in a joint action of the City and the Federation in order to erect right there, in the heart of the capital and a few blocks from the lawless district of Ciudad Neza, the largest penitentiary in the republic. It was an act of defiance: The law would not go to distant wastelands where new prison cities with their own regulations are formed. It was a provocation: The law would be installed in the center of the center, within reach, so criminals would know once and for all that they are not a race apart but citizens of prison, with ears that hear the movement of traffic, with noses that smell the aroma of frying food, with hands that touch the walls of the nation’s ha-ha history, with feet a few meters from extinct rivers and the dead lagoon of México-Tenochtitlán.

I understood, continuing my pragmatic forensics course, that minors were kept between life and death in the great subterranean pool, left to the accident of death by water or a Tarzanesque survival. Now I learned that older criminals were confined on the upper floor, with devices that meticulously picked up the sounds of the city outside, a true metropolis of liberties and joy compared to the Dantesque city of sorrow-the cittá dolente-that awaited me on the upper floor, where it was difficult to hear the voices of the convicts over the snare of urban sounds, horns, motors, the squeal of tires, insults, the shouts of vendors, the silences of beggars, offers of sex, sighs of love, childish songs, school choruses, kneeling prayers, all amplified by perverse loudspeakers intent on torturing the prisoners with the memory of freedom.

I armed myself with courage to complete not only the requirements of the university course-“forensic practice”-but also to honor the decision of my respected teacher Sanginés. The upper prison of San Juan de Aragón, above the children’s pool, was a large space on one floor. “Here nobody empties chamber pots down on us,” said the unsmiling guard who was my guide now, but on whose shoulders a polished and repolished cleanliness shone with a faint perfume of shit.

Siboney Peralta was a Cuban mulatto about thirty years old with long hair arranged in twisted braids, naked to his navel with the clear intention not only to display his musculature but to frighten or forestall with the power of his biceps, the profound throb of his pectorals, and the menacing hunger of his guts. He wore no shoes and his trousers were rags wrapped around an indistinct sex that could just as easily have been a long hose or a little knob. His crime was not one of passion. It was, according to Siboney, an enigma, a mystery, chico.

“A small mystery?”

“No, very big, chico.”

Siboney didn’t know why he was in prison. He loved music, so much it turned his head, he said, flexing all his muscles, to the point where he couldn’t help doing what the music said.

“I’m a child of the bolero, compay.”

Siboney obeyed the bolero. If the words said “Look at me” and the woman didn’t look at him, Siboney filled with holy rage and strangled her. If the song indicated “Tell me if you love me as I adore you” and the woman didn’t turn around to look at him, the least she received was a Siboneyera beating. If he asked her at a distance if she had a thought for him and if at a distance she remained silent, the mulatto attacked with chairs, windows, plates, flowerpots, what he found at hand in the silent universe of his desire.

“And knowing your trouble, can’t you control it?” I asked uncertainly.

Siboney bellowed with laughter that meant it isn’t my trouble, it’s my joy, my pleasure. What is? I told myself it was nothing less than believing in the words of songs, as I at this moment believe in what I am writing and transmitting to you, curious reader, with all the unpunished fatality of Siboney Peralta strangling the innocent women who did not take his songs literally.

Brillantinas and Gomas were placed in the same cell with the perverse intention of having them argue over the jars of brilliantine and envelopes of gum tragacanth that were the criminal obsession of the pair. Each one, not yet knowing the other, robbed pharmacies and beauty salons to obtain the scarcer brilliantines and ancient envelopes of gum for the hair that was their uncontrolled and uncontrollable fetish. The jailer explained to me that the original intention of the penitentiary’s authorities was to bring together the two rivals to argue about the object of their desires until they annihilated each other over a jar of pomade. This was, he added, the guiding principle of the prison of San Juan de Aragón: to provoke the convicts into killing one another, thereby reducing the prison population.

“Each time one dies, one less mouth to feed, Licenciado,” using the formal title for a lawyer.

“I’m not-”

“Licenciado.”

He looked at me with his sewer eyes.

“Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

However, Gomas and Brillantinas agreed not to argue but to coexist peacefully, smearing repulsive unguents on their hair.

“Can you suggest a way to have them kill each other?”

“Shave their heads,” I said in an evil humor.

The jailer had a good laugh. “They’d put brilliantine on their balls and under their armpits, Licen.”

Speaking of licenciados, I was introduced into the cell of the attorney Jenaro Ruvalcaba, whom I knew by name as a penologist of some fame in the Faculty of Law. When he saw me come in he stood and did his best to smooth his prison uniform: gray short-sleeved shirt and trousers far too big for the licenciado’s small stature.

“He says he’s committed no crime,” the jailer remarked with a wink.

“It’s true,” Jenaro said calmly.

“So you say,” the guard replied, mocking him.

Jenaro shrugged. I knew right away that asking him why are you here, what crime are you accused of, meant entering a labyrinth, with no exit, of excuses and injustices. Jenaro himself must have understood this-he was a slim, blond man about forty years old-when he sat down on the cot and patted it gently, inviting me to have a seat.

He said very calmly that the prison was filled with querulous, stupid people who want their freedom but wouldn’t know what to do on the outside. Resignation? No, adaptation, said Jenaro. The punishment of prison, my young friend (that’s me) consists in separating you from the world and then one of two things happens: either you die of despair or you invent new relationships inside what the Gringos call the Big House, which is what it is, after all, a house, a different kind of home but yours as much as the one you left.

“How do you manage?” I asked from behind my mask of a disciplined student.

“I accept what prison gives me.” Ruvalcaba shrugged.

He saw the query in my eyes.

“Once you disregard what you shouldn’t do,” he continued, “in order not to be humiliated.”

He anticipated my question.

“For example: Don’t accept visitors. They come because they have to. They’re always looking at their watch, they want to get away as soon as they can.”

“In Mexico we have conjugal visits.”

His smile was somewhere between cynical and bitter.

“You can be certain your wife has already found a lover-”

“Yes, but in any case she comes to-”

Jenaro raised his voice but grumbled.

“They’ll both betray you so you’ll stay in prison.”

Crazed, he shouted and stood, clutching at his head with both hands, tearing at his ears, closing his eyes.

He came at me, arms flailing. The guard clubbed him on the back of his neck and the licenciado fell, weeping, on the cot.

El Negro España and La Pérfida Albión were two homosexuals incarcerated in San Juan de Aragón for the crime of solicitation exacerbated by robbery and murder. The institutional powers had not obliged them to reestablish their undesired masculinities. On the contrary, both had at their disposal makeup, tweezers, rouge, false eyelashes, and lipstick, which allowed them to feel comfortable and at the same time serve as a vice-ridden and contemptible example for the guards, who are all…

“Full-fledged hypocrites,” said El Negro España, applying a false beauty spot to his cheek and adjusting his expensive comb.

He pointed at it. “I got this when I went to the Feria in Sevilla.”

“Years ago,” murmured La Pérfida Albión, an Englishman, I supposed, colorless, with very short hair, whose only mark of identity was the portrait of Queen Elizabeth stuck to his chest.

The flamenco dancer said that at first they had wanted to put them in separate cells in the hope the “normals” would beat them to a pulp. Except that just the opposite occurred. The most macho prisoners succumbed to the charms of La Negra España and La Pérfida Albión when they shouted “Lover,” and though they called them, when they caressed, “Priscila” or “Encarnación,” that only excited the men more, for which reason, the Englishman interjected, the authorities were resigned to putting them together again so they’d “do harm” only to each other.

They burst into laughter, caressing each other without shame, La Pérfida crooning arias from Madrid operettas in honor of La Negra, and La Negra, to please La Pérfida, singing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan.

“Who protects us?” they sang together.

“We protect ourselves on our own,” they signed off.

Ventanas, whose name came from his predilection for robbing by liberating windows, laughed a great deal when I asked him the reason for his incarceration. He had no teeth.

“I gave my teeth to the public welfare. I love philanthropy. I go even further, boy. I not only love all men, I love their possessions. For that you don’t need teeth.”

He guffawed between showers of saliva and thunderous coughs. He must have been sixty. He looked as if he were a hundred, and his hands did not tremble. He moved his fingers constantly, with the artfulness of a pianist.

He realized what he was doing.

“They called me Chopin. I would answer: Chofuckyomama.”

This was his story:

“There are thieves who don’t know how to get out of the house they’re robbing. I was always very aware that the problem wasn’t only getting in but getting away with no noise, no trace, not even a smell. And for that you have to work alone or with kids under ten so they can squeeze between the bars and open the windows for you.”

He gave a distorted belly laugh, like the impossible music of a piano with no keys or only the black ones, so great was the depth of his throat, made even deeper by his lack of teeth.

“I always worked alone, for years and years, not carrying unnecessary baggage, light as one of those birds they call Phoeniz, and even if you burn them they’re born again. Except they never burned me. What can you do?”

He sighed with breath like a squall. He was a solitary thief. Until the ailments of age obliged him to hire a boy of twenty to facilitate matters.

“Yes, he was agile, young, and an asshole. He knew how to get in. He didn’t know how to get out, Señor Licenciado. He couldn’t find the exit. After such a nice, clean entrance. After such an efficient robbery, the idiot got confused, he lost his way and led me from here to there and from there to here until the alarms went off, the lights went on, and the two of us were standing there, our spirits naked, surrounded by the police of Pedregal de San Angel, cursing the Esparza family and their damn security system.”

“And your young accomplice?”

“I killed him in the paddy wagon on the way to prison.”

“How?”

He raised his hands and let them fall on an imaginary nape of the neck.

I set down these facts because they had a decisive influence on how I saw society, the nation, and its people.

LUCHA ZAPATA. WAS it an announcement or a call? A proposal or a memory? Mein Kampf, Mi lucha or Lucha of mine? Lucha Zapata tonight at the Arena México. There was nothing of the fighter in her, I told myself when I rescued the presumed aviator and put her in a taxi, tremulous and diminished, curled up against me in a gesture that was not childlike. It was a declaration: Protect me.

From what?

From myself.

Words were not necessary to understand what she wanted. Her utterly helpless gaze, her radical lack of protection, delivered her into my hands. Not to my charity, because on the basis of compassion only the transient is constructed, to which is added resentment. Perhaps pity, only a little, the mercy that has been the emotional weapon of Christianity and the stage setting for the irresistible melodrama of Calvary. Was Lucha Zapata wearing a cross that hung between her breasts? The impenetrable leather top prevented certainty and condemned me to guesses. Everything I’ve said ought to convince your excellencies my readers that I have never once abused sentimentality. Instead, I’ve tried to be simple, direct, reducing myself from the beginning to this double visiting card: a decapitated head and a naked, unprotected skin. This, someone wrote a long time ago, is not serious: Tragedy is forbidden to the modern world. For us everything turns into melodrama, soap opera, newspaper serials, cowboy movies. The success of westerns (the modern epic, Alfonso Reyes would say, the saga of the plains, no longer of the sea) is the direct simplicity with which the spectator distinguishes Good from Evil. Evil wears black. Good wears white. The villain has a mustache. The hero is clean-shaven. The good guy brushes his teeth. The bad guy spits foul breath. The hero looks straight at you. The bad guy squints out of the corner of his eye.

The readings of the Greek classics that Jericó and I did as boys impressed on us a certain idea of tragedy as a conflict of values, not an opposition of virtues. Both Antigone and Creon are right. She has the values of the family. He has those of society. The law of the family demands the burial of the dead, the law of the state forbids it.

“Then,” Jericó remarked, “tragic balance isn’t quite as just as you say.”

I asked him why.

“Because the law of the family will survive while the law of the city is temporary and revocable, isn’t it?”

I recalled all this in the rattletrap taxi that drove the “rescued” woman and me to a destination I didn’t know.

“Where to, chief?”

Where to? It was enough to look outside the car at the vast desert of the Anillo Periférico, the outer beltway that foreshadows the funeral that awaits us if we don’t choose to turn ourselves into ashes first. Sacrificed after all, we die on the cement perimeter that reflects and celebrates a new city that has shed its old skin, its lacustrian sensuality, its igneous sacredness, displaced first by another beauty, baroque, name of the pearl beyond price, the misshapen jewel of the unborn oyster that Mexico City ostentatiously displays in its second foundation of volcanic rock, marble, smiling angels and demons even more jovial as if to compensate for the tears of blood (this isn’t a bolero) of its tortured Christs in adjoining chapels so that the altar will be occupied by the tears that are pearls of his mother the Virgin who floats above the horns of the Iberian bull, our sacred animal. Sacred and for that reason, necessarily, syllogistically, sacrificial. Patient tombs and banished waters opening in avenues of pepper tree and willow, ascending mountains of pine and snow, proclaiming itself that region where the air is clear. Until it lands here, on the Periférico, an indecent sausage of funereal cement, scaffold and grave of two million broken-down taxis, materialist trucks, secondhand Volkswagens, insulting Alfa Romeos losing their way in the great urban tunnel, buses invisible under clusters of passenger flies, at once stoic and desperate, hanging any way they can from the armpits of the conveyance.

How was so much naked ugliness adorned? With advertisements. Commercial announcements were the only decoration on the Periférico. A world of gratifications, if not within reach, then within view of the consumer. A succession of images of desire, because none of them corresponded to the physical reality or economic possibility or even the psychic makeup of residents of the capital. The Periférico where I drove that night in a taxi with a defenseless and, I believe, valiant woman, her arms around my chest, looking out of the corner of my eye at a succession of invariably blond women used for everything: They advertise beer, cars, underwear, bathing suits, condominiums on the coast, films, audiovisual devices. Advertisements. Waiting for the uncommon but fatal catastrophe: One day, a small plane crashed into a vehicle filled with purebred horses. Nobody remembers the pilots. Only in advertisements of seaside vacations and sales in distant residential districts did the Mexican family appear, a happy grouping of the father in shirtsleeves, the modest, neat little wife, and two children-male and female-rosy-cheeked, smiling, happy to have found paradise in Satellite City, a guarded prison they will never leave, not in the advertisement and not in life…

Where would I go with my solitary companion? To the high-floor apartment on Praga? Didn’t she have her own place?

I asked her.

She curled up more and more into my chest, not speaking.

She smelled of leather. Of alcohol. Of burned pot.

I raised her goggles and everything became concentrated, the taxi driving us, the speeding tomb of cement, the fixed, successive smiles of my compatriots happy because they had a terrific house in Colonia Lindavista, beach vacations without light or water, noisy cereals at breakfast, underwear that guaranteed sexual ecstasy, where? where? on the mattress, the mattresses that made the fortune of the Esparza family and built a huge residence in Pedregal, the stony and glassy mansion of mattresses… At this moment of enemy voices, visual offenses, commercial distractions, and cemented realities, I was the human mattress of the woman who, at the intersection where we finally left the Periférico, murmured her name in my ear:

“Lucha Zapata.”

She looked at me with eyes so transparent and so clouded at the same time, so ravaged by age, declaring themselves as young as I wished, as old as I desired, that the fragility of the body embracing mine was transformed, by the art of sudden affection, into my own body of a (relatively) vigorous young man of twenty-four. I’m trying to say that whatever her fragilities and my strengths, at that moment in the taxi she got under my skin through the sorcery of her gaze and I got under hers, I confess, through the not very magical temptation of touching her breasts and finding there an immediate responsive promise, as if the nipples I caressed that night in the darkness of the damn dilapidated taxi had been waiting for me a long time and were, from now on, mine alone no matter how many other hands had caressed them before.

How could I find out about Lucha Zapata’s past? Should I even try? Was it forbidden to me? Wasn’t she demanding it: Find out about my past? Or was she affirming, in her extreme helplessness, in the worshipful abandonment of a little street dog, take care of me, you, whatever your name is, I’m exhausted, take me wherever you like, save me today and I promise to save you tomorrow.

I carried her like a rag doll up the stairs. Her head sheathed in the aviator helmet rested on my chest. Her swooning bird’s arm hung inertly around my neck. Her jacketed torso smelled of damp. Her damaged legs hung from my arms. Her shoes were falling off. I did nothing to retrieve them. It was urgent for me to carry her upstairs, lay her down, care for her, protect her.

The shoes would still be there tomorrow. It was Sunday.

MIGUEL APARECIDO LOOKED me up and down, hiding a smile that was not quite contemptuous but not indifferent either. I responded with my own gaze, meant to be bolder than his, among other reasons because I would leave the prison of San Juan de Aragón and lose myself in the tumult of the city and my occupations, while he-Miguel Aparecido-would remain here with his strange blue-black eyes flecked with yellow framing a look of violence tempered by melancholy, as if his life before prison was so turbulent that now he could compensate for it only with a kind of sadness that still shunned compassion. His bushy eyebrows joined in a scowl that would have been diabolical if his eyes had not provided a ray of light. The brightness I detected in him had to do with the way he stood, upright, without a trace of deference or, what is worse, defiance as a disguise for rancor. There were no external signs in this man of dejection or impatience. Only a way of standing that was serene though on the offensive, leaning forward. All this marked by his virile, square-jawed face, shaved too meticulously-I’m not a prisoner, it proclaimed-and with a light olive skin typical, my forgettable overseer María Egipciaca would say, of “a decent person.” He was, however, a confirmed criminal. Appearances, my teacher Sanginés would add, deceive. Above all if, as in the case of Miguel Aparecido, the resemblance is to the actor Gael García Bernal and the singer Erwin Schrott.

Miguel Aparecido’s nose seemed to sniff at me when I was admitted to his cell. I want to believe that a nose so straight and slender and therefore so immobile had to display some alert, impatient, defiant movement, everything the prisoner’s almost Roman profile, similar to statues in a history textbook, did not betray, I don’t know if in volitional defense or as a simple expression of his own nature. I played, when I met him, with the prisoner’s Roman appearance, accentuated by the barely dissimulated smile of willful lips that wanted, it seemed at the time, to complete the quasi-imperial distinction of graying hair, combed forward but curly in the back.

Professor Sanginés had warned me: Miguel Aparecido is a strong man. Don’t underestimate him.

I learned this when he gave me his hand in the Roman style, clasping my forearm and displaying a naked power that ran from his hand to his shoulder, where a kind of red toga hung that moved me to imagine he was a madman who had been locked in the prison for a very long time. In his personal lunatic asylum he was perhaps the Emperor Augustus. I still didn’t know if in our national lunatic asylum he would behave like Caesar or like Caligula.

“Twenty years,” Sanginés had told me.

“For what reason, Maestro?”

“Murder.”

“Is it a life sentence?”

“In principle, yes. But Miguel Aparecido has been released twice: for good conduct the first time, in an amnesty the second. On both occasions he refused to leave prison.”

“Why? How did he manage that?”

“The first time he organized a riot. The second, it was by his own wish.”

“I repeat. Why?”

“That’s why he’s an interesting individual. Ask him.”

Ask him. As if it were that easy to oppose my small humanity as a law student, small fornicator in brothels, small companion of boys perhaps smaller than me, small pupil of priests who may have been perverse, small hanger-on in a house of other people’s mysteries I didn’t understand, small slave of a tyrannical government, this small “I” confronting all the concentrated, powerful, iron strength (untouchable body, a gaze of such savage serenity it obliged me to lower my eyes and avoid his touch) of the imprisoned man who was saying to me now:

“How do you know who is guilty?”

I didn’t know how to respond. He looked at me without mercy or irony. He was impenetrable.

“Do the law codes tell you?”

“We live under written law,” I replied with my confused pedantry.

“And we die by the law of habit,” the prisoner added, observing me constantly.

“One thing is true: The fucked-up thing is that they put you here and separate you from the world. Then you have to invent your own world, and the world requires connections to others,” he continued.

“That’s the fucked-up thing,” he said, and smiled for the first time.

He was giving me a small class. He invited me to sit beside him on the cot. I was afraid to lose the effect of his terrible gaze. I observed him out of the corner of my eye. I believe he knew why Sanginés had sent me here. He owed the professor something. He didn’t want to defraud him. He didn’t want me to leave with hands as empty as my poor vacant head, scorned from the very beginning by the criminal.

“You have to invent new connections for yourself. That’s fucked up,” he repeated without looking at me.

“Does anybody protect you?” I dared to address him informally, using tú and taking advantage of our not looking in each other’s eyes.

His answer surprised me:

“The first thing you learn here is to protect yourself on your own. There are people in prison who wouldn’t know what to do on the outside.”

I told him I didn’t understand. If some convicts didn’t know what to do out of prison, why did he stay here since he undoubtedly knew what to do on the outside?

He smiled. “They’re whining, stupid people, without direction.”

“Who?”

“Think,” he murmured severely.

“Your prison companions,” I insisted on gaining audacity’s ground. “The others.”

He turned to look at me and his eyes told me he had no friends here, no companions. And therefore? His arrogance did not permit him to praise himself. That he was different seemed obvious to me. That he was superior perhaps was his secret. He was open with me, frank. I’m certain his relationship with Sanginés included an inviolable pact: If I send you someone, Miguel Aparecido, talk, speak to him, don’t leave him hungry. Remember. You owe me something.

Why did he commit another crime to stay in prison? Why did he refuse amnesty?

He didn’t answer me directly. With a paraphrase that revealed the interior of his vast conspiracy to remain imprisoned, in spite of friendships and good conduct, without allowing me to understand the heart of the matter: Why did Miguel Aparecido want to remain imprisoned? For how long? Was there some reason that kept him from desiring freedom?

He said the first time they imprison you (he did not say, the distracted reader should note, “they imprisoned me”), anger explodes in your chest. You are blinded by a longing to take your revenge on the person who put you here (who put him here, wasn’t it the law, was it an individual?). Then rage gives way to astonishment at finding yourself here, at knowing you are here, knowing (or believing, lying to yourself?) that you are innocent. This is the moment when you give up or begin to grow. You learn to create a scab, to cover the open wound with a mental or physical scab. If you don’t, you go all to hell, you’re defeated, surrounded as you are, you know? by the great wail of prison-he looked directly at me, with an infernal vision of desire in his eyes-the wails of the fistfighters, the shouts of the pitiless, the silence of the tortured. And the debilitating sound of the city, out there.

“There was a reporter here. A real bastard, very rebellious. He threatened: ‘When I get out of here I’ll denounce you all, you bunch of assholes. You’ll see. As soon as I get out.’ They broke his hands. ‘Let’s see what you write now, you son of a bitch.’ It didn’t occur to them that when he got out he could dictate with broken hands. The jailers are in jail, you know? It doesn’t occur to them that there’s life outside these walls. They really think the world ends here. And it’s true. They don’t read what an ex-con may write. It doesn’t matter to them. They go on with their routine. The prison warden perhaps reads or receives complaints. I’ll bet you, your name’s Josué? (my name’s Josué) that if he doesn’t file them away, even when he acknowledges their receipt, he does nothing, what’s called absolutely nothing, you understand me, asshole? Nothing.”

He gave a sudden guffaw, as if freed of a commitment to himself not to express extreme emotions. If not a statue he was a stoic, I thought then, when I still didn’t know the mystery of Miguel Aparecido’s crimes.

It was his opinion that, as a young attorney, I ought to understand the rule of justice: Everybody’s for sale, everybody can be bought. Sell the torturer, sell the pickpocket. No matter how clean he is when he arrives, the next one will also steal, also torture.

“Remind the prof of that, let’s see what he tells you.”

He took a deep breath, as if he were concluding. But that wasn’t the case. He inhaled in order to go on. He was paying, I was convinced, a debt he owed the professor. It would take me some time to find out what Sanginés had done for this prisoner, strange in his serenity, vigorous in his determination to continue here and not obtain his freedom. Why?

“A man was tortured here and the idiot threatened to inform on the torturer when he got out of prison.”

He paused so I would look at him and perhaps (I was beginning to observe) so I would admire him. He seemed to forget that I already knew what he was telling me. (What does prison do to one’s memory?)

“The torturer simply told him: You’ll never get out, asshole.”

He looked at me with those eyes I’ve mentioned, blue-black with flashes of the plumage of a canary imprisoned in a liquid cage.

“He never got out.”

I left and don’t know if I really heard or imagined, along the eternal corridor that led away from Miguel Aparecido, the horrible chorus of curses, anathemas, and fulminations that descended from the forbidden heaven of San Juan de Aragón down to the pool of the cursed children. In my bones I felt something I didn’t want to feel: the fury of failure, resentment like a sickness, anger like a probable salvation, and the final words Miguel Aparecido said to me.

“How do you know who is guilty? Above all, how do you know if you’re innocent?”

I LEFT THE question unresolved. Had Miguel Aparecido performed a play for only one spectator: myself? If that was true, did he do it with the complicity of Antonio Sanginés? What united the prisoner and the professor beyond the relationship of accused-defender? Was my visit to the cells of the prison merely a part of my course in forensic practice, prepared by my professor with a dramatic, almost operatic example of perverse criminality? Because, after all, what keeps Miguel Aparecido imprisoned? Only his desire to remain behind bars? Or a secret maneuver, part of a web of interests I wouldn’t dare to imagine because I lacked both data and experience?

I could not permit these circumstances to distance me from an immediate obligation, which was to look after the woman who had fallen so accidentally into my arms at the airport.

I tended to her the best I could. She was a doll without will, dependent on me. The incident on the airfield had wiped her out, as if in the decision to take control of a small plane and compete for a runway with the Air France jet she had abandoned that portion of will we all accumulate and portion out in installments until we die. Lucha Zapata was exhausted because she had left on the runway all the energy her spirit had possessed until then. Now on account of simply passing by, I was obliged to undress her, bathe her, lay her down in Jericó’s bed, offer her a meal she barely tasted and vomited up before the food reached her stomach.

How to describe her?

She was a bird. A wounded bird who happened to nest in my garret. Which bird? We live in a country of birds. Two hundred sixty species in the Yucatec lagoons of Río Lagartos. Almost seven hundred species embalmed in the Saltillo museum. They are part of the great tropical coasts of the country and ascend like eagles to the highest peaks. They survive, who knows how, the deadly smoke of the city. That is to say, I had plenty to choose from when I determined a resemblance between them and Lucha Zapata. She was like a pink (tending to red) flamingo in a fishing village in Yucatán, a bird withdrawn into itself and its sacred, almost sepulchral silence. Noise must be avoided: A motor, for example, is a resonant catastrophe that obliges the bird to fly away. Silence is required to see it. And if I kept a single bird, it was in spite of the physical appearance of the woman who lay in Jericó’s bed.

Lucha Zapata was a flamingo. Which is a bird, the dictionary says, with “very long bill, neck, and legs, white plumage on neck, chest, and abdomen, and intense red on head, tail, feet, back, and bill.” But this woman was small, withdrawn, lying in a fetal position in bed, and her arms were injured, pecked at as if other birds, raptors, had constantly assaulted her throughout her life. There was, in spite of everything, something vibrant in the small body I had seen in extreme action, struggling with the police after an audacious, frustrated attempt to fly. Did she even know how to pilot a plane? Had she managed only to climb into the machine and drive it down the runway as if it were an automobile? Did she even get it out of the hangar?

I didn’t dare ask her anything because between us loomed an invisible barrier that was in no way perverse. It was an untroubled boundary where, in implicit fashion, I offered her protection and she was grateful for it. Her nakedness was pathetic and at the same time natural and devout. What I mean is that Lucha Zapata was not embarrassed at her nakedness because she was without sin that needed to be forgiven. She lay in Jericó’s bed like a newborn, needing care and affection, completely removed from a lust she did not offer or expect from me, as I did not expect it from her.

Why do I compare her to a flamingo? She was not pink. Her extremities were not long. Her tints, however, were reddish, for the hair on her head and her pubis shone like a bird’s plumage. And if the body is our carnal plumage, hers was as pale as an early dawn, as wounded as a precipitate night. Lucha Zapata’s pale skin was pecked from head to toe. Red wounds glistened on her arms and legs, especially on her wrists and ankles.

She opened her eyes and looked at me looking at her.

I knew, and she told me without words, that her wounds were caused by no one but herself.

Why, in spite of everything, do I compare her to what she was not: a flamingo lost in a distant Mayan lagoon? Because of the fright in her. Not a common, ordinary fear but a vocation for solitude that withdraws from contact, including the visual contact of another person’s gaze, too often guilty of unhealthy curiosity and offensive prejudice.

Lucha Zapata looked at me and did not see evil in my eyes.

She simply extended her hand to take mine and said Dress me, Savior, pick me up and take me back to my house. My things are there. My medicines. Hurry. It’s urgent.

What was I to do, compassionate readers, except satisfy the desires of this helpless woman who from now on-my head and heart told me so, even my respiration, the involuntary panting with which I picked up the defeated body wrapped in a sarape-would be my responsibility? I carried her down to Calle de Praga, hailed a taxi, and repeated the address she had just given to me with a sigh: “Cerrada de Chimalpopoca beside the Metro in Colonia de los Doctores.”

I became accustomed to having two addresses. One on Calle de Praga, where punctually every month I received the check that allowed me to live without determining who sent it to me or asking at the bank for the name of a person who undoubtedly did not wish to be known or have the bank reveal his or her identity. The other on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca: the modest, bare little house of my friend Lucha Zapata. An old entrance, a courtyard with dead flowers, in the rear an unfurnished retreat with mats on the floor, a Japanese eating table, a pillow or two, and a rod where half a dozen skirts and trousers were hanging. Behind the improvised closet a tiny bathroom with a tub and shower. A variety of pharmaceutical products. I recognized some names but didn’t know most of them. The towels were very old.

“Stay. Don’t leave me.”

How could I abandon her, I who longed to be responsible for someone since I couldn’t be responsible for unknown relatives (who had been, in my opinion, humiliatingly, generously, shamefully responsible for me), or occasional though respected teachers (Filopáter, Sanginés), or transitory friends (Errol Esparza), or healers who were both generous and aloof (Elvira Ríos), much less jailers as odious as María Egipciaca? What remained? Jericó’s friendship, firm and constant since the days of secondary school. But Jericó wasn’t here.

And now this fragile woman, inert in bed one day and the next as vibrant as an unattached electrical cable. At first in the little house in Colonia de los Doctores (symbol of a lost city, generous and ordered in the name of medical science, with one-story buildings and discreet façades, and an occasional gray residence built of stone) Lucha Zapata lived with me regaining her strength. I was afraid that when she recovered her stamina she would undertake adventures like the battle in the airport, for which I did not feel qualified. But for the moment, delicate and sweet, sometimes shaping unassuming movements, lying on the mat with a blue pillow under her head, Lucha Zapata told me, recalling our encounter, that if she went to the airport, exposing herself to danger, it was because aviation teaches us to be fatalistic, which gives me a reason for living in spite of the fatality all around us.

I talked to her, sharing the gourd of yerba maté Lucha always had in her hand and expounding on the openings or bases she constantly supplied, ideas about the fated as opposed to the voluntary, the free, and the virtuous, a distinction that pleased her a great deal, and she would ask me to explain: What I want can be good or bad, I told her, but it expresses my will. Does that mean that whether it’s good or evil, what I do is free? How do I make my freedom not only free but virtuous? Freedom for evil? Or is evil not free precisely because it is evil?

“Don’t get all excited,” Lucha said with a laugh. “Whatever you do, things are going to happen with or without you.”

“And so?”

“Don’t get all excited. Let life happen, Savior.”

That’s how she spoke to me, with affection and a dose of simplification that could not demolish my theoretical constructions but solidified them even more. I mean to say, reader, that Lucha’s “common sense” was necessary for my “theoretical sense” and both of them joined, perhaps, in an “esthetic sense” that was nothing other than the art of living: how one lives, why, and to what end. Big questions. Small realities. She, with a certain mystery, confronted my abstractions and I, with fewer shadows, confronted her mysteries.

Because I had no doubt that in Lucha Zapata was a mystery she did not guard zealously. She did not guard it: she canceled it. It was not possible to penetrate, in conversation with Lucha, the veil of a past revealed, perhaps, in the scars on her graceful, long-suffering body, but never in reminiscence. Lucha did not refer to her past. And I asked myself whether this wasn’t the most eloquent way to unveil it. I mean: Because of everything she did not say, I could imagine whatever I wanted and create a biography of Lucha Zapata for my own use. A piece of foolishness that, in view of the silent curtains of her nakedness, revealed her to my complete pleasure.

I believe she guessed my strategy because in the afternoons, seeing me deep in thought, she would say: “With women you never know.”

You never know… I was young and understood that youth consists of choosing what was at hand or deferring it in favor of the future. This reflection made no sense for Lucha for the simple reason that when she erased the past from her life she also eliminated the future and installed herself, as if on her mat, in an eternal present. I knew this was how she lived now: letting herself be carried along by the minute hand of life, by everything occurring in the present moment, though with references to the immediate past (the incident on the airfield, her relationship with me, so important she gave me the undeserved and somewhat absurd name of “Savior,” “Salvador”), and timid incursions into the future (“What do you want to eat, my Savior?”).

When we were lying on the mat at dawn, I liked to ask her half-captious questions to see if I could make her fall into remembering or looking ahead. What other airports have you assaulted, Lucha? Toluca, Querétaro, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes? The airport of the sun, Savior, she would reply. Didn’t you ever have a job, Lucha? I’m at leisure. I don’t need to work. Don’t you feel somehow excluded from society? I can invade society before society invades me. Do you feel an internal conflict, Lucha? I have a quarrel with the world. What do you reproach society for? I don’t want to be a perpetual debtor. That’s what you are in society. An eternal debtor.

My affection for Lucha Zapata, which by this time should be evident to the least clever reader, did not make me blind. She did everything I didn’t like. She was, let us say, a poly-drug user. Tobacco, heroin, cocaine, alcohol. When I met her she had well-stocked hiding places, so it wasn’t necessary to go out to buy anything. How had she obtained this treasure? The nugatory pact regarding the past kept me from asking what she wasn’t going to tell me. On the other hand, I came to appreciate deeply her domestic simplicity, her physical helplessness, and the mystery of her spiritual complexity.

In this way two years passed…