Once upon a time a man went down to hell and was received by a blond hostess wearing a miniskirt and a little blue cap with the English phrase WELCOME TO HELL. The hostess led the new arrival to a luxury suite with a king-size bed, marble bath, Jacuzzi, and a summer wardrobe for night and day, with labels from Madison Avenue, Calle Serrano, and Via Condotti, and sumptuous patent leather shoes, sandals, and moccasins. From there, the new arrival was led to a recreation area with an open bar and five-star restaurants along a tropical beach planted with palm trees, overflowing with stands of coconut palms and towel service.
“I was expecting something else,” said the new arrival.
The hostess smiled and led him to a spot hidden in the luxuriant growth where there was a heavy iron door that the girl lifted up, allowing to escape a terrible sudden burst of flame and the vision of a lake of fire where thousands of naked creatures writhed as they were tortured by red devils with sharp-pointed tails who taunted the damned, piercing them with pitchforks and reminding them that this prison was eternal with no possible remission: the lake, the darkness, the site of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 25:30), the place of “the fire that never shall be quenched” (Mark 9:43). Whoever enters here does not leave, despite heretical theories of a final redemption of souls thanks to God’s universal mercy. For if God is infinite love, eventually He has to pardon Lucifer and free the souls condemned to hell. Anathema, let it be anathema. To the devil with anyone who believes in God’s mercy.
This is the hell for Catholics, said the hostess, closing the metal door.
It isn’t true.
I, who am dead, attest to that.
What happens, then? You, readers caught in the web of my novelistic intrigue, will have to wait for the last page to find out. I, Josué, who live in another dimension, can continue the interrupted story and ask for the help of one of my new friends, Ezekiel, whom I found playing with a Spanish deck of cards in a place whose name I have forgotten and that is clearly not of this world. I asked him to move from solitaire to tute, he agreed, he lost, and as payment I requested (since dollars, euros, and pounds are not in circulation there) that he lend me a pair of wings so I could fly over the world and in this way go on with my suspended tale.
Ezekiel, who’s a real pal (a good guy, but draped in togas, that is, sheets with Grecian borders like the ones James Purefoy wears on the television series Rome), asked to go with me because, he said, his territory had been ancient Jerusalem and he had never crossed the borders of Moab, Philistia, Tivia, and Sidon, all enemies of Israel, and the deserts that lead to Riblah, a city Yahweh promised to exterminate in order to demonstrate who was top dog in the Old Testament (in the New, Jesus Christ is the superstar).
Of course he wanted to see Mexico City, a place the most ancient chronicles don’t mention, even though in questions of legends all of them end up resembling one another: Cities are founded, expand, grow, reach their high point, and fall into decadence because they were not faithful to the promise of their creation, because they wear themselves out in battles lost before they’re started, because the horse was not shod in time, because the queen bee died and the caste of drones perished with her… Because the fly flew away.
Yes, I told my new friend the prophet Ezekiel, I’ll take you to a city that goes out of its way to destroy itself but cannot succeed. It changes a great deal but never dies. Its foundation is peculiar: a lagoon (which has dried out), a rock (which was turned into a residential neighborhood), a nopal cactus (which is used to prepare lamb’s quarters and stuffed chiles), an eagle (a species on the verge of extinction), and a serpent (the only thing that survives).
I shouldn’t have said that. Ezekiel exclaimed that the serpent was the protagonist of paradise, the star of Eden, the most historic reptile in history, there are two thousand seven hundred species of serpents gathered, to simplify matters, into ten family groups, they crawl but listen, Josué, are you listening to me? the serpent is an animal that hears, it has auricular openings, eardrums, tympani, cochleae that sing and pick up the vibration of the earth: They know when there will be an earthquake, they count the shovels of earth at burials, they endure being covered over with asphalt superhighways, they survive everything and wait for us blinking, with eyes of glass. They don’t taste with their tongues, those fuckers: They detect odors, serpents have a sense of smell, Josué, in their tongues, they swallow everything because they can extend their lower jaw and catch an eagle, yes, take revenge on the flying animal that has the criminal astuteness of the animal that crawls on the ground.
Ezekiel looked at me half amused and half amazed.
“They have a double penis. Hermipenes, they’re called.”
I didn’t laugh. He became impatient.
“What am I good for?”
“For flying, Prophet.”
I showed him-like this, with my hand raised and the cards fanned out-my winning hand: angel poker, four angels, four faces, four wings, faces of a man, a lion, a bull, an eagle, and the four wings with their four faces joined together as in a nervous fan ready to escape my hands, taking flight with Ezekiel clutching my heels, discovering that the marvelous wings of the cards not only had faces but men’s hands to open the sky (which is a constellation of eyes, in case you didn’t know) and let us be carried by a tempestuous wind until we flew over a valley smothered in mists of burnt-out gas, surrounded by eroded mountains. A place difficult to distinguish though I knew it all too well. A noisy receptacle of fiery arrows calling from the glowering sky we pierced with our wings. Ezekiel and I, the prophet growing more and more animated, in his element, a lame biblical demon capable, I guessed, of raising the roofs of rotting tiles in Mexico Federal District Titlán de Tenoch Palaces city of the besieged City Das Kapital of the Commonwealth, Res Publica, public bull, Confined Bull, listening to the thundering voice of the not very optimistic prophet Ezekiel, move away from the appearance of your city,
go beyond your face, Josué,
scratch in the earth, my son,
get to the lost place,
scratch until you find the dirty sanctuary,
sit on top of the scorpions,
cook your impure bread on excrement,
enter the sanctuary profaned by man,
poverty, pestilence, and violence,
observe the desolation of the temples,
look at the corpses thrown at the feet of the idols,
take it, Josué, take the roll of paper,
eat the paper
in order to recount the histories of rebel houses
endure their faults
prophesy with me against the mad-
dened tribes of Mexico
stop being the enemy of your own person
for a moment, stop
they’ll put obstacles in your path
wait
your spirit rebels
they are on their guard
you endure, Josué
close off the memory of the brothel of La Hetara
(Durango between Sonora and Plaza Miravalle)
close your eyes to the misery in the house of Esparza
(somewhere between Coapa and Culhuacán)
forget forever the house of María Egipciaca
(Berlín between Hamburgo and Marsella)
forget the solitude in the house of Lucha Zapata
(Chimalpopoca to the south of Río de la Loza)
forget the faults of the great house of Aragón
(beneath the Río Consulado)
anticipate the faults of the house of Monroy
(Santa Fe de los Remedios)
and above all, Josué, absolve the faults of the youth-
ful days of Jericó…
(Praga between Reforma and Hamburgo).
Carried away by his prophetic passion (professional and innate in him), Ezekiel exclaimed they are rebel houses, founded on scorpions, they are thrones of dust, they will set obstacles before you, be on guard, endure the fault of the city, do not anticipate ruin and ignominy, rather live and let live but one day let them know the abominations of their parents, the names of the mobs, take out your roll of paper and write, Josué…
Ezekiel seized me by the back of my neck and then dropped me into the void.
I fell on my face.
I heard his voice: Lock yourself in your house.
I thought: I’m going to disobey you, Prophet.
I couldn’t because my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth.
Then I heard the sound of wings, the great noise that moved away behind me, and though I was prostrate, I felt something that called itself spirit enter me as Ezekiel returned to heaven where prophets write, like novelists, the history of what could have been.
I had paper in my mouth. And I did not remember the face of the prophet.
I HAD PAPER and I had earth. I fell flat on my face where Ezekiel threw me: a gravestone. Blood ran from my lips onto the grave and washed off the writing. If the prophet commanded me “Write,” present circumstances now told me “Read.”
It took me some time to understand. The night was a dark fire like the aforementioned hell of the Catholics, though the light that fell where I lay foretold the coming dawn and the imminent sun urged me to be, for a few minutes, the thief of the night that the great poem of the world, written by the living for the dead but also by the dead for the living, confuses with sleep.
Look at me, readers, read with me as the dawn with its long-nailed fingers tears away the nocturnal veil and the wind of the plateau carries away the dust that covers the grave where I lie, facedown, scratching to read with difficulty the inscription that says, finally,
ANTIGUA CONCEPCIÓN
and under that, in smaller letters
Born and Died with No Date
The mystery of this stone was enough in itself. If that was the instruction of the dead woman, I immediately disputed it. The dry announcement on the grave of the so-called Antigua Concepción (was “Ancient Conception” a name, a title, an attribute, a promise, a memory?) woke in my spirit, agitated by the adventure with Ezekiel, a continuity of mystery. The prophet had placed the seed there… the “Antigua Concepción” made a tree grow in my chest. Who was it?
“Who are you?” I asked, lying there with no physical strength.
“How good that you’ve asked me,” answered the voice of the grave. “I am Antigua Concepción.”
My eyes showed not fear but an interrogating amazement for which she, Antigua Concepción, must have been grateful because she continued speaking from the depths of the earth.
I am Antigua Concepción.
I have waited in vain for someone to visit my grave.
No one comes here.
Do you know where you are?
No, I replied, except someplace in the city.
Then I won’t tell you where you are. Promise.
I promise.
Keep my story to yourself. It is this. My name is Antigua Concepción because when I was born they baptized me Inmaculada Concepción de María but ended up calling me “Concha” and what is worse, “Conchita.” Conchita, the name of a fake flamenco dancer, Concepción, the name of an afflicted virgin ignorant of who made her pregnant and when, we’re almost in Pénjamo now! Its great variety of birds! Inmaculada is the name of a sanctified and blessed ass, bah! Concepción is worse, the name of a Paraguayan who has never seen the ocean, ha! a damn Concepcionista nun serving the Panchos (the holy Franciscans, not the trio of singers). Conceiving or saying ingenious stupidities. No dogmas for me, young man! I am etymologically a he-re-tic: I choose, not she choos-es, not is chos-en, and least of all now, at a depth of one me-ter.
She sighed and the earth seemed to tremble just a little.
From the time I was a little girl I rebelled against diminutives. “Diminutives diminish,” I shouted, making a fuss, you won’t call a Julio Julito or a Rafael Falito or my Concepción Conchita. Concha cunt, motherfucker! she exclaimed with a strange guffaw.
And “Antigua”?
At the age of twenty I already knew what I wanted to be. I had no aptitude other than mystery and more mystery than greatness.
I married and assumed my eternal form.
I stopped being Conchita.
I stopped being Concepción Martínez, a decent unmarried girl. I became Concepción Martínez de Monroy, a married woman.
I wore my hair pulled back in a severe style and put a nun’s wimple on my head.
I dressed in a Carmelite habit.
I kept my key rings in the deep pockets of the habit.
I never had to wear underclothes again. I sat on cottons.
No one saw my bodily forms again, and whoever imagined them was clearly mistaken.
I occupied a throne with no insignias.
With a hole in the seat my human necessities fell into a porcelain basin with the portrait of the president in power.
Don’t ask. Whichever one you like least.
I was born in 1904, seven years before Don Francisco Madero, Apostle of the Revolution, became president and was betrayed and killed by the usurper Victoriano Huerta in 1913. Like Allende and the little traitor Pinochet with his faggot’s voice. I was thirteen when the Constitution was proclaimed. Eighteen, when the president was General Alvaro Obregón, the one-handed man who lost his arm in Celaya beating the shit out of Pancho Villa, and nineteen when they treacherously killed Villa, and only fifteen when they treacherously killed Emiliano Zapata, and twenty-four when a right-winger dispatched Obregón with a bullet to the head as the general ate toasted tortillas in a restaurant in the southern part of the capital. More totopos! Those were his final, memorable words. I married my husband General Maximiliano Monroy because I knew they wouldn’t kill him because he was one of the top dogs who invented the revolution, the ones who shot first and asked questions later.
My husband Don Maximiliano was a real Don Juan as a young man. I took advantage of his evil ways to become strong and independent, with no need of him. I barely knew him long enough to make a baby. He was thirty years older than me. I tell you he began as a womanizer and ended up pathetic. I didn’t care. I’m just telling you about it. A person comes out of a revolution either very smart or damn stupid but never undamaged. My husband came out an absolute asshole. He took part in the last military uprising in 1936, I think just out of the habit of always being in revolt. I’m telling you, an absolute idiot. He didn’t notice that times had changed, that the revolution was becoming an institution, that the guerrillas were getting down from their horses and into Cadillacs, that the only agrarian reform was the sale of residential lots in Las Lomas, that the freedom to work eventually meant unionized workers under the control of shameless leaders, that freedom of the press would be conferred by a paper monopoly operated by our compadre Artemio Cruz, heroic times, kid! If you don’t concede you can’t succeed, living and not playing the game is living in error, and if you don’t appear in a photograph at a cocktail party, even one given by a shady character like Nazario Esparza, you’re a lost cause, you’re nobody, and if you don’t marry your daughter in a squandering of floral, ecclesiastical, banquetish, photographic, and faggotish millions, then the girl is a whore and her father’s poor and a poor politician is a poor politician, somebody dixit…
She heaved a sigh like an earthquake.
Once there were years, boy, of a vast, really vast displacement of fortunes, from the old patriarchal world of haciendas and peonage, from the usurpation of Benito Juárez’s liberal victory by the personal dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and the exploitation of the free market so the land would pass from the hands of the clergy into the hands of the huge landowners and for the original owners, the campesinos, a thumb to the nose and a go fuck your mother, my lad: here’s your agrarian reform.
I was terrified. I mean, an obscene finger rose from the earth.
I’m telling you this so you’ll know what’s buried here with me: the history of the country, our past as incarnated in my husband General Maximiliano Monroy, an actor at every stage of this national melodrama, the civil war that lasted twenty years and cost us a million lives, not on the battlefield but in cantina shootouts, according to a really lovely gov, González Pedrero, ha!
A great guffaw came rumbling out of the depths of the earth and the finger returned to its place.
A million dead in a country of fourteen million inhabitants. How many of us are there now?
One hundred twenty million, I whispered into the grave as if it were the ear of the woman I loved. (Do I imagine myself telling the nurse Elvira Ríos listen, love me a lot, look, I’m one of a hundred twenty million Mexicans? Or the whore with the bee on her buttock, let yourself be fucked by a hundred twenty million Nahuatlacas? Or the defenseless Lucha Zapata just think, you’re not alone, you’re surrounded by a hundred twenty million citizens, my love?)
A hundred twenty million! exclaimed the voice from the grave. But what happened?
Health. Food. Sports. Education. I was going to say all that. It seemed like a sacrilege to introduce statistics into a conversation with death, though she soon refuted me: Death is the Queen of Statistics, though wars tend to overburden her accounting…
It is the country of betrayal, that’s Mexico’s worst account, Doña Antigua insisted. In 1910, Madero betrayed Don Porfirio, who thought he was president for life. In 1913, Huerta had Madero killed. In 1919, Carranza had Zapata killed. In 1920, Obregón had Carranza killed. In 1928, Calles pretended to be distracted while they murdered Obregón. Only General Lázaro Cárdenas put an end to the assassinations.
But he killed your husband, Señora.
He was executed for being an asshole, she said very pleasantly. Whoever gives the order… He deserved it…
But-
But nothing, fool, don’t kid yourself. It has all been betrayal, lies, cruelty, and vengeance. You simply try to anticipate it. Follow my example. You have to create economic powers prior to the decisions of the government. And you have to fear yes-men. These are the two rules of Antigua Concepción. I have finished speaking. Become powerful on your own and to hell with flatterers. I have finished speaking.
But Concepción, Conchita, Antigua Concepción, had not finished speaking. Now she continued talking to tell me that her husband the general was a real revolutionary huckster who served Villa as easily as Obregón, Obregón as Carranza, Calles as Cárdenas, and when Don Lázaro ended insurrections through the power of institutions, General Maximiliano did not give up, he “rose up” on the border proclaiming the Plan of Matamoros, but he was the only dead Moor, strangled by a drunk and without a single bullet hole in a Texas cantina in Brownsville, where the stupid prick took refuge…
I didn’t know if I should feel sorry for her because of these uxorial misfortunes. She didn’t give me time. She was already on another track.
My husband the general was thirty years older than me. But he was a baby compared to me. All I had to do (you a young boy and I a young girl) was take a look at what was happening to make a decision: I would anticipate the future. I’d do first what would come later: Do you understand me, youngster? I had inherited haciendas in Michoacán and Jalisco. I divided them up among the peasants before the agrarian law demanded it or, more important, put it into practice. I told myself the country was going to emigrate from the provinces without will, impoverished by two decades of revolution, to the capital, the center. At the right time I bought empty lots in the Federal District, Morelos, and the State of Mexico, whose value has increased a thousandfold. And kid, I asked myself where they’d place the highways they’d need? I bought lots, level ground covered in huizache plants, mountains of pine, walls of basalt, whatever, because now it was important to get to the sea fast, to the borders, to the heart of the sierra in trucks filled with comestibles and combustibles that I organized into national fleets carburized for oil whose nationalization in 1938 I anticipated, when I was thirty years old, by acquiring strips of probable potential wealth in the Gulf, which had been mine, Mexican, since 1932 and that I later ceded, my lad, just think about it and get ready, to the government and Petróleos Mexicanos, along with my damn wedding ring to contribute to the cost of expropriation, a piece of jewelry I should have buried, if truth be told, in the grave of my by then deceased and decrepit husband General Don Maximiliano Monroy-R.I.P.
I believe she winked at me from the bottom of her grave.
Don’t think I’m a cynic or an opportunist, she said. Everything I’ve told you was possible because thousands and thousands of people moved, the isolation ended that had been imposed by a geography of volcanoes and deserts, mountains and swamps, coasts strangled in mangroves, impassable cordilleras: It ended, children, women, and cows, trains, horses, and guerrillas moved, boy, in all directions, from Sonora to Yucatán, from Río Santiago to Río Usumacinta, from Nogales to Tapachula, from Gringolandia to Guatepeor, through dry fields and lost harvests, leaving orphans and widows strewn everywhere, creating new wealth beside eternal poverty, because you know, my little chick, only when fortunes change, only then do we recognize ourselves and know who we are…
I don’t know if her buried gaze asked me: And what about today?
Today we’re exploding as citizens of the Narconation, I declared. She had stopped at a point in the past. She didn’t understand me.
Did you hear, dear readers, a sigh from the grave? Listen to it now. It seems it’s not serious but, perhaps, humorous. It seems it isn’t deep but, when it reaches the crust of the earth, superficial.
Antigua Concepción continued:
I anticipated the industrialization that could occur thanks to nationalized oil and the campesino labor freed by agrarian reform. But I no longer anticipate anybody because in 1958 Don Adolfo Ruiz Cortines left the presidency and I said to myself, this is the best president we’ve had, a mature man, severe but with a sense of humor, slyer than a spider, hidden behind an uncompromising, austere, penetrating mask with dark circles under the eyes to disguise the irony that is the artery of true intelligence, and above all, the head of a Greco-Roman wise man strangled by a bow tie with white polka dots, the president who could swallow a baked potato without making faces, the apparent cripple who walked the six years of the presidential high wire over the void and set the example of good sense, serenity, irony, and tolerance his country needs: We have more than enough inspired ideologues, ignorant ranchers, machos castrated by their harem of magpies, acrobats from the political circus, Machiavellis in huaraches, curly-haired Don Juans in Maseratis, ugly people who can’t look at themselves in the mirror without declaring war on the world and going out to kill, and above all the thugs, the ones who rob our revolution of its legitimacy and hand us over, my little fool, to the madmen of democracy, ay!
I supposed her ay! expressed the unworthiness of democracy and her nostalgia for enlightened authoritarianism, but I said nothing. It was her business. She really was “Antigua.”
She went on: You must remember, boy, that once there was a president who dispensed justice, heard complaints, received petitions. The Old King!
And now the exclamation was prolonged, plaintive, in the air for a period of time that Antigua Concepción interrupted with these words:
Look, that was when I retired to my front row seat and passed things on to my only child, Max Monroy.
She paused, satisfied.
I’m happy with him. As you’ll see, he’s like me though less folkloric. He anticipates events. He knows what has to be done before anybody else. He knows when to buy and how to sell. He’s discreet. His life is not the object of writeups or gossip. He has never appeared in the magazine ¡Hola! He has never been sponsor at the wedding of rock-and-rollers. He has never been fond of the sun. (He isn’t albino!) He resembles the night. He lives in a tower in Santa Fe, to the west of the city. Find him. That’s a good thing for you to do.
I believe she concluded:
Don’t do any wishful thinking. Just try to anticipate catastrophes a little…
Later I would remember these words of Antigua Concepcion:
The state is a jealous work of art, enemy of the free individual and economic power. Remember what I’ve taught you: You have to create economic powers prior to the decisions of the government.
I HAVE MENTIONED, forgetful reader, that once a month an envelope with the previously mentioned check for my maintenance came to the mailbox of the building on Praga. I had become so accustomed to this punctuality that the favor no longer moved me. Whoever my obliging and invisible patron might be, time resolved two matters. Gratitude, if reiterated, would be unpleasant. And the donor, because unknown, proved to be agreeable, comfortable, and forgettable.
Except on this day, when I stopped at Praga to change my clothes, take a look around, and pick up the check on the usual date, the check wasn’t in the box. Since it was a certified document, I wasn’t alarmed. I simply didn’t know where to go or whom to see to claim it. It occurred to me that if things became awkward, I could speak to Professor Sanginés.
I was thinking all this as I climbed the first thirty-nine (or was it forty) steps to our parrot cage and found the door open and the envelope with the check staring me in the face, held up by two hands I recognized immediately.
He had come back!
Enlightened or darkened by experience, the prodigal brother was here. The other Dioscuro, my twin, the other son of the swan, my companion on the great expedition of the Argos to Ponto Euxino to recover the Golden Fleece, sign and destiny of our lives, symbol of the soul in search of itself: of truth.
He dropped the check and embraced me, I don’t know if with emotion but certainly with force. We were embracing our shared past. As well as the future that always united us, though time and distance might separate us. Paris, London, Florence, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, the postcards allowed me to follow the route of his travels, though his permanent residence was the Rue Poissonnière in the Deuxième Arrondissement in Paris.
Could he be carrying all those cities, all those addresses, in his young twenty-five-year-old gaze?
He was slimmer. The permanently plump cheeks of the childhood that is not completely resigned to abandoning our features had, in defeat, ceded his facial structure to a slender fiction of adolescence, as if time had a chisel that keeps sculpting the face we will eventually have and for which, at a certain point, we become responsible. He did not have a beard or mustache. And his head was shaved like an army recruit’s. Perhaps because of that facial nudity his light eyes shone more than ever, playing the principal role in an appearance not distinguished by his snub nose or thin lips. A shaved skull. Brilliant eyes, the same but different, guardians of both a youthful past and a mature future.
He embraced me and I smelled the remembered sweat.
Jericó had come back.
“You look like a poor fool in an asylum,” I told him.
“Punched in,” he said in English, and immediately afterward, as if recalling and correcting: “It’ll go like clockwork.”
I CONFESS THAT the return of Jericó produced contrary feelings in me. After his absence, we were both entering our mid-twenties with a separation that put our youthful friendship to the test. In principle this impinged on any other consideration, though he and I-I imagined-were not strangers to the usury of time. The second consideration, however, had to do with my closeness to Lucha Zapata and the daily, vital question of knowing where I would brush my teeth, in the apartment on Praga, with him, or the little house in Chimalpopoca, with her.
At first I didn’t permit the choice between them to be a problem that would interfere with my joy. Seeing Jericó again not only renewed my own youth but, in particular, rescued and prolonged it, though with a bittersweet anticipation that I would also begin to lose it. Until the moment of his departure, my friend was what you already know because you read it here: the independent, audacious boy who gave me my place in secondary school, saving me from being the scapegoat of the gang of bastards who were going to feed on me and my prominent nose as they would have taken advantage of somebody who was cross-eyed or crippled. Jericó stood firm “in the middle of the arena,” obliged the “good-for-nothings,” as Doña María Egipciaca would have called them, to respect me. We initiated the comradeship that now, after our separation, his return would put to the test.
I admit as well that a series of ambivalent impressions followed one another in my mind on the day I found my friend back in the apartment on Praga. His physical appearance was different. I don’t know if it was better. Yes, he had lost some of the persistent baby fat on his face. He looked more angular, more tense, more reserved. I don’t know if his shaved head suited him or not. I could lean toward the side of fashion and accept it as one of the many ways of making a statement with one’s hair at the time: long manes, shaved heads, multicolored locks, afros, Mohawks, Roman consuls, rebel dreadlocks, except that the combination of his shaved head and slender face emphasized the strangeness of his naked gaze. His eyes, blue, round, fixed, immeasurably enlarged by the nakedness of his entire head, created a contradictory impression in me. I saw in those unprotected eyes an unusual innocence transformed with a mere blink into a cynical, threatening, and wise gaze. I confess I marveled at that instantaneous transition of a psychological profile, not only the next one but its opposite.
The strange thing (or is it reasonable?) is that his words when he returned to Mexico also blinked, passing from an ingenuousness that seemed out of place in the cynical, daring man I had known, to a gravity it took me a while to identify with the actual name of ambition. Could we reestablish our intimacy?
He recounted naïve things to me, for example that when he arrived at the Place de la Concorde he kneeled and kissed the ground. I laughed: As an act of freedom? Not only that, he replied: As an act of fidelity to the best in the Old World (I hid a nervous twitch of disapproval: Who would ever call Europe “the Old World”?) and above all, he continued, to France and the French ability to appropriate everything by redeeming the crime in culture.
“There’s a Napoleon brandy. Can you imagine a Hitler brandy?”
I wasn’t going to discuss the enormous difference between the “good” Bonapartist tyrant and the “bad” Nazi tyrant because in his tirade Jericó was already immersed in an amusing comparison of national European profiles and the clichés that went with them (the French have a sex life, the English have hot water bottles), leading to feverish amazement at having heard “all the languages we see at the movies” and the enumeration of Rue Lepique, Abbey Road, Via Frattina, Puerta del Sol, and above all the streets, the squares of Naples where, he said, he identified with the possibility of being corrupt, immoral, a killer, a thief, and a poet without consequences, as part of custom and perhaps the landscape of a liberty so habitual it leaves no trace of mortality, surviving, he said, in tradition.
“Why can’t we be Neapolitans?” he exclaimed with a certain grandiloquence, appropriate to the friend who faced me with the arrogance of a Byron that I viewed as an antipoetic pose and, what is worse, as simple-minded, naïve, unworthy. Why are we, in Europe, nothing but Comanches, mariachis, or bullfighters?
He laughed, redeeming himself. “We ought to guard against being part of the national folklore.”
This was Jericó, my old companion, passed through the sieve of an experience that he wanted, as I understood it, to share with me at a level of exaltation and camaraderie that would lead him to tear off his shirt, gesticulate, and assume the caricature of a bedazzlement that ought to end-I knew Jericó-with an excessive, ironic action, one that in a certain sense flagellated his own ego.
“On my knees in the Concorde,” he repeated, kneeling in the middle of the living room with his arms stretched wide in an act at once grotesque and tender, and which I understood without understanding it, like a farewell to youth, a stripping away of the vestments of a tourist, the rustic skin that covers the traveler in transit, the soul of the “Argentine we all carry inside us”: the superego.
Knowing Jericó, this display as part of his weaknesses did not fail to surprise me. Perhaps he wanted to indicate that beneath the appearance of return was a companion who had never left. Or, on the contrary, knowing it was impossible, he was asking for help in getting rid of distance and his experiences and returning to the point at which we had separated. We were the same but different. I had experienced studying at UNAM, the tutelage of Sanginés, the visit to San Juan de Aragón, the mysterious encounter with Miguel Aparecido, the strange, committed relationship with Lucha Zapata. What did Jericó have to offer, aside from the postcard he had just given me?
“Freedom,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts.
“Freedom is kneeling down to give thanks in the Place de la Concorde?” I said, not very pleasantly.
He nodded, his eyes lowered.
“What shall we do?” he said then, and our life changed.
Jericó changed it as he himself, his physical attitude, his appearance changed in the next moment, when he let fly the issues he wanted to communicate after his prologue on the stage of touristic minimization and mental abandon.
What shall we do? he repeated. There are many possibilities for success. Which are yours and mine? Or rather, Josué, which success is worthy of you and me?
I wasn’t going to answer with the reasons I’ve just given you, which can be summarized in the word “experience,” for only on that basis did my expectations, though still vague, begin to take shape. I knew Jericó would not share much in the recounting of his European experiences, which (I was beginning to realize) he would never reveal beyond the brief tour he had just offered. His years of absence were going to be a mystery, and Jericó didn’t even challenge me to penetrate it. There was in this attitude I’ve called Byronic a wager: The past has died and the future begins today. Make whatever guesses you like.
As a consequence, I changed my attitude. Instead of asking about his past, I proposed sharing our future.
“What do we want?” he repeated, and added: “What are we afraid of?”
He continued saying that he and I knew-or ought to know-what we could be or do. He recalled an earlier conversation about “not ever going to a quinceañera, a thé dansant, a baptism, the opening of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university classes, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zócalo.” Never being interested in the rock-and-roller Tarcisia who married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks and guests who welcomed the dawn dancing hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning.
“Now, Jericó, how did they serve the stew to honor the father of the bride-”
“Who is a native of Sonora. Did you turn down the invitation?”
“No, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being-”
“Not even if it’s your own wedding?”
I smiled, or tried to. I remembered how I had admired Jericó’s capacity for taking life very seriously.
I said I felt I had gone past those tests, didn’t he? I refrained for the moment from mentioning Lucha Zapata, Miguel Aparecido, the children in the sinister pool at San Juan de Aragón. Perhaps Jericó responded indirectly, saying it wasn’t enough not doing what we didn’t do. Now we ought to decide what we were actually going to do. He stood and grasped my shoulders. He looked at me with his Delftware eyes. We didn’t have, that was apparent, a talent for music, literature, tennis, water- or downhill skiing, racing cars, or directing films, we didn’t have the soul of actuaries, accountants, real estate agents, porters, and all the sad people who accept their small destinies… he said.
“What do we have left?”
I told him to tell me. I didn’t know.
“Politics, Josué. It’s self-evident, brother. When you’re no good as a street sweeper or a composer, when you can’t write a book or direct a movie or open a door or sell socks, then you devote yourself to politics. It’ll go like clockwork.”
“That’s what we’re going to do?” I said, with false astonishment.
Jericó laughed and let go of my shoulders.
“Politics is the last resort of intelligence.”
He winked. In Europe he had learned, he said, that the mission of the intellectual was to torment power with words.
“Then what do you want to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. Something huge. Give me time.”
I thought without saying so that freedom is uncertainty. That is something I had learned.
He didn’t read my thoughts:
“There can be many attempts at success. Which is worthy of you and me?”
I didn’t know what to say. I was held back by another feeling. Above and beyond the words and attitudes, that morning of our reunion in the garret on Calle de Praga remains in my mind, especially now that I’ve died, as a moment of terror. Could we resume our intimacy, the common respiration that had joined us when we were young? Could we feel again the primary emotion of youth? Was everything we had lived only a prologue, a preparation for a goal we didn’t really know yet how to define? Was our friendship the sole, poor shelter of our future?
Jericó embraced me and said in English, as if responding to all my questions, Let’s hug it out, bitch.
STUNNED BY AERIAL excursions on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel and landings in the deep earth where Doña Antigua Concepción lies, exhausted by so much sky and so much history, disheartened by great promises, I walked very slowly toward Colonia Juárez and the apartment on Calle de Praga without knowing where I was coming from or the location of the secret grave that soon dissipated in the noise of engines, exhaust fumes, the ring-ring of bicycles, and thunder in the clouded sky, trying to leave behind the experience I had gained and concentrate on particular accidents, the personal inadequacies and small vices and virtues of men and women with their own names though lacking a historic surname.
Drunk on the chronological history of Antigua Concepción and inebriated by the undated apocalypse of the prophet Ezekiel, with infinite patience and humility I climbed the stairs of the house on Praga, prepared to focus my humanity again on Jericó’s friendship and my care of Lucha. These were my priorities, soon dissolved by Jericó’s urgent expression when he greeted me.
“Let’s go to Pedregal. Errol’s mother has died.”
Years had gone by without our returning to the ultramodern mansion turned into a neobaroque mess by the dictatorial bad taste of Don Nazario Esparza. “Act as if you haven’t seen anything” was Errol’s recommendation to us, referring either to the arguments of his parents or the Transylvanian horror of his house. I remembered the lack of any initiative on our friend’s part once he had provoked an altercation between his parents. Or perhaps I was misremembering. It had been six, seven years since I had seen my old classmate or visited his house.
Now, from the entrance door, black crepe announced the family’s mourning. I thought the house had always been in mourning, locked with padlocks of avarice, lack of compassion, suspicion, meager love, scant serenity. Except that as I approached the coffin of Doña Estrellita de Esparza, with Jericó ahead of me, I felt that compassion and serenity, at least, had in fact inhabited this lugubrious mansion but were virtues that lived waiting for the death, and only in the submissive, preoccupied presence, of Doña Estrellita.
I looked at her corpse. Her waxen face had been blurred even more by the cold hand of Death, the Ashen-Faced, and caricatured by the rouge and lipstick the funeral director (or damned Don Nazario) had smeared on the grayish features. Doña Estrellita wore a hairdo that looked false, very 1940s, very Joan Crawford, high and full. Her ghostly hands rested on her chest. With a start, I realized the Señora had on her housewife’s, maid’s, and cook’s apron, and this, I wanted to say to Jericó, this definitely was a final mockery by the sinister Don Nazario, prepared to send off his wife as maid to Eternity and celestial housewife. Don Nazario received without emotion or even the blink of an eye the condolences of his previously mentioned clientele, who expressed their sympathy and then dissolved again behind a veil of murmurs, inaudible conversations, and the passing of canapés, with the collective obsequiousness of a relative and the singularity of dissimilar manners and fashions, for those who had known him since his humble beginnings and those who acknowledged him at his present heights ranged from the owners of transient hotels to managers of hotel chains.
I looked at Doña Estrellita in order not to look at the crowd.
In spite of everything, the body continued to display a simulation of beatitude and the perpetual smile of someone going to a wedding of people she doesn’t care about but who deserve courtesy. In death, Doña Estrella was confident in her boredom, and if she had lost the habit of crying, the fault was not hers. There was only one dissonant detail, because the apron was like a uniform. The Señora had a bright scarf tied around her neck.
Ruddy, tall, florid, Don Nazario received the customary condolences. I would have liked to avoid it. I couldn’t escape the line of mourners. Jericó was ahead of me, his face composure itself though with a sarcastic line along his upper lip. Don Nazario extended his hand without glancing at me. I gave him mine without glancing at him. I looked for Errol.
“He isn’t here,” Jericó murmured.
“What do you think of that?” I asked.
“Were you expecting him to come?”
“To tell you the truth, yes,” said my feelings and not me. “She was his mother…”
“Not me,” Jericó declared over and above my opinion.
We made our way through the crowd of mourners. You could see it in their faces: No one loved this family. Not Don Nazario and not Doña Estrella. Much less Errol, the dispensable rock-and-roller fag. They were all there out of obligation and necessity. They all owed something to Nazario Esparza. Don Nazario controlled them all. There was no love. No grief. No hope. What did we expect? my eyes asked Jericó as we walked through the crowd, all of them surrounded by the forest of funeral wreaths that turn Mexican funerals into a boon for florists. Become a florist and make your fortune: We are all passing through.
In the middle of the funeral forest I bumped into a woman and offered my excuses. Out of place, she was carrying a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. She bumped into me, the ash fell onto my lapel and a downpour of La Veuve onto my tie. The woman stopped and smiled. I made a useless effort to recognize her or to ask myself, Where have I seen her before? never addressing her directly, “Where have we seen each other?” because of a kind of tacit precept I couldn’t explain to myself and that did not correspond to the amiability of the beautiful woman who approached like a panther, a predatory animal. A fake blonde, light tan touched with sun in her hair, and artificially moist lips.
“Listen,” she ordered a waiter, “bring a drink for the Señor.”
“Excuse me. This isn’t the time,” I said.
“A drink,” she gave the order again, and the waiter inquired as if he hadn’t heard her clearly:
“Pardon me, Señora?”
“A drink, I said. Go on.”
The waiter didn’t answer. He looked at me and Jericó, who was behind me now, understanding less than I did about the new scenario in the Esparza mansion.
The waiter said: “Welcome, Don Jericó, Don Josué. You’re always welcome here.”
And he went for the drinks ordered by the Señora, who already had champagne in her hand, a cigarette in her mouth, and the Chanel uniform of a black dress. She looked at us with a mix of charm and irony.
“Are you looking for Errol?” said this cunning woman.
We nodded.
“Look for him in a cheap cabaret on the streets of Santísima. He plays the piano there. It’s your ass, Barrabás!”
She aimed an artificial laugh at us and, turning her back, hummed as she moved through the mourners, who instinctively made way for her, as if they already knew her and, what is more, respected her, and what is worse, feared her…
My friend and I looked at each other with unspoken questions. At a distance, Don Nazario was receiving condolences with his bottle-bottom eyes. From a distance, he smelled of vomit. From a distance, one could hear the jangle of his key ring.
We passed the wall of bodyguards protecting entrances and exits, recalling Doña Estrella thanks to a tacit memory: No one, except her son and the waiter, perhaps, remembered her for the many details that now, in her honor (and ours) we evoked as if we were sharing them with our pal Errol, the bald kid from secondary school.
She never laughed at jokes because she didn’t understand them.
She believed everyone forgave her for her life.
Her husband had said once that as a young woman she was stupid but charming.
She guarded this phrase as if it were a treasure.
For the rest of it she always felt she was out of place.
She didn’t understand the word “superfluous.”
She didn’t even know how to mistrust the maids (the opposite was obvious to us).
When she was reprimanded, she sang as if she were involved in something else.
“What do you think of papa’s fortune?” “Very nice.” “No, its origins.” “Oh, son, don’t be that way.” “What way?” “Ungrateful. It’s why we eat.” “Shit.” “Don’t be vulgar. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.” “Efforts? Is that what they call crime now?” “What crime, son?” “Papa is a pimp, a lenón.” “A león, a lion?” “No, a musician, John Lennon.” “I don’t understand.” “Or a revolutionary, Lenin.” “Son, you’re making my head spin.”
When we were on the street, cold and empty that night, Jericó asked:
“Listen, what does that red scarf mean that they put around her neck?”
I didn’t know, and on Calle del Pedregal there were only long lines of luxury cars and bored chauffeurs.
WHEN JERICÓ RETURNED I didn’t know whether to reveal to him my relationship with Lucha Zapata or keep it a secret. I opted for discretion. Ever since school, my friend and I had shared everything, ideas as well as whores, focusing on a fairly ascetic life of intensive studies and still unformed goals we didn’t dare call ambitions. Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, sons of a god and a bird, two mortals worshiped as divinities, though they were not. Famous for their valor and skill. Exiled by Zeus to live alternate days in heaven and in hell.
The reader knows to what degree the fraternal union of Castor and Pollux, of Josué and Jericó, excluded many relationships common in boys our age. No family, no girlfriends, no friend except Errol and the shared teachings of Filopáter. Now, however, we were separated by years in which I acted without him and so could let myself be guided by Antonio Sanginés, penetrate the prison of San Juan de Aragón, interview the convicts, allow myself to be impressed by Miguel Aparecido’s diabolical personality and, above all, take responsibility for Lucha Zapata.
I decided to keep to myself the existence of the red-haired woman who lived beside the Metro.
Telling Jericó about it would have put me at the disadvantage of letting him know my business without the reciprocity of learning almost anything about his. Because the superficial humor with which my friend recounted his European experience did not suit his conflictive, penetrating, bold, and ironic personality. I came to think that Jericó was lying to me, that perhaps he hadn’t spent years in Europe, that someone else had sent the postcards in his name… How strange. All this came to mind because when he returned, as you remember, Jericó said a sentence in English that sounded strange to me,
Let’s hug it out, bitch,
a sentence I didn’t understand and couldn’t translate, but that didn’t fit into either European or Latin American culture. By elimination-I deduced, thinking like Filopáter-it could only be North American.
I didn’t attribute too much importance to this, even though the matter remained suspended in my mind waiting for a clarification that would or would not come, because what Quixote says to Sancho about miracles-they rarely happen-can be transferred to mysteries-when they are revealed, they cease to exist-and I confess here and now that I wanted Jericó to have a truth hidden from me, since I had one hidden from him, and her name was Lucha Zapata.
I’m not ignoring the fact that Zapata’s character put me to the test, at times making me want to leave her or at least share the burden and with whom but Jericó. I’m saying I kept the secret because not only my own dignity before my friend but the very essence of my relationship with her demanded it. This is another way of saying that in recent months, Lucha Zapata had come to depend more and more on me, and that had never happened to me before. Once I had depended on others. Now, a helpless woman, constricted into herself and emerging from that constriction only because of my presence (I thought then), depended on me for salvation.
I urged her to stop using drugs. She continued consuming narcotics until her hidden stash was used up. Then she drank more than usual. Except that alcohol did not completely replace the essential amphetamines. I felt she was approaching a critical point and decided to become strong for her and endure everything-her shouts, insults, depressions, collapses-in the name of her eventual health. In short: I took charge. And if I now summarize the things she said during this time, it is, perhaps, to announce the things she did. Except that these, in the end, refuse to remain under the rug (the mat, in the case of Lucha Zapata) and dominate the words, reducing them to the ashes of mere prattle.
“I want happiness for myself and for everybody,” she would say in her moments of exaltation, as if she were stealing a plane again from a hangar in the international airport and was prepared to drop flyers on the city from the air, condemning all of us to joy.
“I can’t tolerate poverty,” she exclaimed immediately afterward. “It offends me that half my people are destitute, begging, stealing, without hope, exploited by the powerful, deceived by politicians, abandoned to the fatality of having always been and why not, tell me Josué, why not go on being destitute forever, tell me or I’ll die right here…”
It was with this passion that Lucha Zapata evoked a past-that of our people, always oppressed-that she rarely applied to herself. Sometimes I set traps for her so she would talk about her life before our meeting. I never got her past-or almost never, actually-the evocation of our moment in the airport and her aerial view of a collective misfortune that, for her, was eternal, beyond time: Mexico had always been oppressed and would be so forever, inevitably…
“I want happiness for myself and for everybody. I can’t tolerate poverty. What can I do, Savior?”
Sometimes she became violent and banged her head against the walls, as if she wanted to expel from her skull a brain that had been, she said, abducted. Why, by whom? I asked without receiving an answer other than a deep moan that was like hearing the protest of her lungs blackened by tobacco and drugs.
Then she would embrace me without defenses, like an old pillow, like a defeated ghost that knows it is divorced forever from a visible body, and say, “They threw me out because I use drugs, I’m an addict, if I had cancer they wouldn’t throw me out, they’d take care of me, isn’t that right, Savior?” She’d look at me with eyes so forsaken I simply held her even tighter, as if I feared that at those moments of extreme tenderness she’d leave me forever, freeing herself from life with a sigh that at the next moment would turn into a flare-up that burned my neck. I moved her away. She looked at me with intense hatred, accused me of keeping her locked up here, I’d open the door to the courtyard and invite her to go out, she called me horrible, an authoritarian type made in the image of power, a persecutor, an enemy and not a savior as she had believed.
“All of you, let me live my life!” she shouted in despair, tearing at her short hair and scratching her cheeks.
I stopped her by force, grasping her fists, bringing them up to my own face.
“Go on, Lucha, if you want to scratch, scratch me, go on…”
Then she would say Savior, don’t be so bossy, and she would caress my cheeks and sing the usual song, “I’m a poor little deer that lives in the mountains and since I’m not very tame I don’t come down to the water by day, by night little by little and in your arms, my darling.”
I already knew that this song about the “poor little deer” was the code for love. In this way, Lucha would invite me to culminate the day’s action, whatever it may have been, with an erotic moment that could be the quiet after a squall or the announcement of a coming storm, the gentle slope of peace recovered for a moment or a prelude to the tranquillity that, to be honest, she and I wanted to achieve and share without knowing exactly how to do it.
All of this occurred in the middle of her effort to stop using drugs and replace them with alcohol until I realized that tequila didn’t give the same high as amphetamines, then she’d go back to drugs and discover, ay, ay, ay, that her hidden drugs were being consumed and tobacco and alcohol were no substitute and I was to blame for everything.
I knew very well that any person with Lucha Zapata would be “to blame” for a situation for which she was responsible. Asking her to take responsibility was like asking pears of an elm tree, as the unvanquished and sententious María Egipciaca would say. Lucha Zapata needed someone else to blame. Me, someone else, it didn’t matter. But never herself. Herself, never. And I made note of her accusations and acts of violence for the simple reason that I’ve already indicated: I wanted to be responsible for a person.
Until the day she couldn’t take any more.
But first she sang: “I’d like to be a fine pearl in your shiny earrings and nibble at your ear and kiss your cheeks.”
I’LL SAY THAT Jericó never showed curiosity about my prolonged absences from the apartment we shared on Calle de Praga. It didn’t surprise me and I didn’t thank him for it. I didn’t meddle in his life either.
I had my doubts.
How had Jericó traveled? What kind of passport did he have? Where was his passport? What was his name, after all?
Jericó what? I realized that deep-rooted gratitude for the protection the schoolyard champion gave the defenseless big-nosed kid kept me from seeing my friend in any light other than what is called in Roman law amicus curiae.
One of the great temptations when two people live together is rummaging through the affairs of the other. The temptation to open drawers, read personal diaries and correspondence, pry into closets, move like a cockroach under beds to see what the other has hidden under the mattress, in jacket pockets…
I don’t need to tell you, you who are reading me and are all, without exception, decent people, that your author with the good memory Josué Nadal-I-never stooped to being a snoop. This did not stop me from cultivating certain doubts, all of them so unverifiable that they died before birth.
What was Jericó’s last name?
Had he really spent four years in Europe, with Paris as his base?
Was his evocation of Europe a farce, theatrical and elementary? Kneeling on the Place de la Concorde, sure, not even Gene Kelly did that accompanied by George Gershwin’s music, and if Jean Gabin or Jean-Paul Belmondo passed by, they didn’t even blink.
Why didn’t Jericó ever use those common expressions in ordinary French speech I knew only from old movies of the nouvelle vague? Ça alors. A merveille. Quand même. Raison d’être. Savoir-faire. Laissez-faire. Franglais.
Why, on the other hand, did North American sayings slip out? Shove it. Amazing. Let’s hug it out, bitch.
And above all, unfamiliar allusions to youthful musicians-Justin Timberlake-or local television programs-Entourage. Let’s hug it out, bitch.
I say I didn’t inquire, but I suspected with no proof and no desire either to break the commitment to discretion, though I did consult the Entertainment section of Reforma to find out about Justin Timberlake and what Entourage was.
Other much more important concerns were set forth by Jericó with his customary mental speed and a certain childish audacity, firing them at me at times when I returned with no explanations from a night with Lucha Zapata: Who are we, Josué? How are we? Why are we? To what end are we? without obtaining more from me than an undulating smile and the urgent need to bathe, shave, make myself presentable after an exhausting session of guard duty at Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I suspected that Jericó welcomed me with this salvo of abstract questions in order not to ask more concrete ones: Where are you coming from? Where did you spend the night? Why do you smell so strange?
The questions remained unresolved because of a new development.
It seems our garret, so bare at the beginning, was filling up with gadgets that came to our door in delivery trucks and then were carried up to our nest by dark men with strong backs and sparse mustaches.
Who sent us a laser fax machine, a television set with a 46 (or 52 or 70) inch screen? Who replaced our useless old black telephone with a white one from an Italian movie and then presented us with a couple of Sony Walkman portables and then-Creative Zen, Samsung YP-T9-others even more modern, with music, movies, calendars, and addresses? The last particularly interested me. What addresses did I have except for mine and Lucha Zapata’s? It didn’t take long for the light to go on. Or rather, the Sony Walkman with the name on the little screen of Maestro Antonio Sanginés and the phone numbers of his residence, his house in Coyoacán, and his offices on the Paseo de la Reforma.
Right there the message appeared that said:
I EXPECT YOU BOTH AT MY HOME ON JULY 2 AT 6:00 PM.
LIC. ANTONIO SANGINES.
I expect you both. Not I expect you. You both. Plural.
Now I waited for Jericó. He came in with his head high, laughing.
So then, once again, the two of us.
The maestro received us in his big old house in Coyoacán, surrounded as always by his noisy progeny, little children racing on tricycles, flying with arms spread, making engine noises, and eventually climbing on the professor’s wingback chair, lying peacefully on his lap, or threatening a catastrophe from the top of the chair.
“Outside, boys,” said Sanginés, laughing, and looked at Jericó and me when, in the same breath, he said:
“Come in, boys.”
He wanted to position us immediately in what Roman law calls capitis diminutio, a kind of diminution of personality, due to the loss-Rudolph Sohm dixit-of the legal rule of freedom, of citizenship, or because of the minimal alteration of being expelled from the family.
More than enough for me. I was his student in the law faculty, he was my adviser in reading and my professional mentor. He sent me to do the famous “forensic practice” in the prison of San Juan de Aragón. He was directing my professional thesis. But Jericó? What relationship could he have with Sanginés? I tried to determine this in the form of greeting, always so revelatory in a country of embraces, pats, diminutives and augmentatives, remote suspicions, dissimulated gloating: Iberian America is also Italic America, a land of elegant appearances, the cult of the bella figura, and the memory of serial Machiavellianisms modulated to remember debts or forget grievances.
The fact is that Sanginés said only “Come in, boys,” with an implicit “take a seat” in two leather chairs facing our host’s wingback. We were simply two students subject to a certificate of proficiency examination.
The children left. The students sat down. I’ll cut the message short: Sanginés believed we had completed an apprenticeship. With which I felt I was on the rungs of a medieval guild asking myself if this relationship was not, in fact, a transcription, though within the university, of the medievalism that is the watchword and perhaps the pride of Latin America, a continent that, unlike the United States of America, a nation with no antecedent more powerful than itself, did have a Middle Ages and as a consequence has-we have-from Mexico to Peru, mental categories that exclude a will not arbitrated by the Church or state. The Gringos are Pelagians without knowing it, descendants of the heretic who postulated individual freedom without the need for institutional filters, as opposed to his conqueror Augustine of Hippo, for whom grace was not individually achievable without the intervention of the Church. The North Americans, who don’t have Pelagius or the Middle Ages, do have Luther, the Reformation, Puritanism, Calvinism, and all the heresy (I repeat: choos-ing) necessary to dictate with a very wide margin rules of conduct at the edge of institutions. We do not. Though the reader will note the constant benefit of Father Filopáter’s lessons in preparatory school.
I believe Sanginés read my thoughts, because he immediately decided my destiny. I would finish the course of study (I needed only a year and a couple of classes I could pass in a proficiency exam) and conclude forensic practice in the prison of San Juan de Aragón.
“Begin to prepare your thesis. The subject is Machiavelli and the creation of the state,” he pronounced, adding: “It is necessary for you to conclude your interview with Miguel Aparecido,” before turning to Jericó and saying: “You have refused to follow a career. You believe experience is the best university. I am going to test you. Tomorrow go to the offices of the Presidency of the Republic in Los Pinos. They are expecting you.”
And returning to me.
“And they are expecting you, Josué, in the office of Don Max Monroy in the building in Colonia-I should say the new city-of Santa Fe.”
He sighed, as if longing for a modest city that could not exist again, rose to his feet, and brought the interview to an abrupt end, leaving me with a certain bad taste in my mouth; I didn’t know whether to attribute it to an attitude unlike the normally amiable behavior of Professor Sanginés, or, more seriously, to a melancholy very similar to the sadness of goodbyes, as if a period in my life had just ended.
Jericó and I walked, looking for a taxi, toward Avenida Universidad, and were distracted as we crossed the Viveros de Coyoacán Park, breathing deeply, with no set purpose, because we were in one of the few lungs of an asphyxiated metropolis.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Well,” I shrugged. “I’ll be doing the same things.”
“No, the one who’ll change is you. Max Monroy is a very powerful man.”
“Bah. I may never even get to meet him.”
Then I added: “Knowing you, Jericó, I think you’ll not only get to meet the president-”
He interrupted: “He’ll know me even if he doesn’t see me,” and added: “Look, hurry up and finish your degree. We’re twenty-five years old. We can’t go on waiting. We need a position. We can’t give as an occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ We have to be and do.”
I smiled in return. “One can always turn into a perpetually young old man, like Jelly Roll Morton, Compay Segundo, or Mick Jagger.”
The reader will note that I wanted to test the connection I had suspected in Jericó with North American pop culture instead of a pretended French affiliation that, as I’ve already told you, seemed suspect to me. The problem is, if you talk about jazz and rock, of necessity you land in Anglo-American territory. France loves jazz but doesn’t give it anything but love.
Jericó paid no attention to me. Who are we? What do we have? Name, occupation, status? Are we a vacant lot?
“Terrain vague,” I said with my comic suspicions.
Jericó was unfazed. “A garbage dump of what could have been? A catalogue of debits and losses? Even the bottom of the barrel? So what’s going on? I like it!”
“A hoarse-voiced basket where things accumulate?” I added, quoting Neruda but thinking of tasks I still had to do, not only the course of study in law, not only the mysterious prisoner Miguel Aparecido, but in particular my unspeakable commitment to a woman who required protection, whom I could not leave alone, at large, helpless…
“Lucha Zapata” was the name on the tip of my tongue like a bird in an open cage who doesn’t really know whether his well-being depends on flying away or remaining locked up and at the mercy of birdseed.
Jericó didn’t go any further. There was in him, when we left the large Jardín de los Coyotes, a new, atypical reserve that undoubtedly had to do with the position Sanginés had just offered him and that now occupied our minds. Though in retrospect, I wondered if the maestro’s unusual coldness was due to the unpublished presence of Jericó, which had skewed his behavior and evoked in my heart a dual feeling of nostalgia for the attention my teacher had previously paid me and reproach for his current manner.
Without saying goodbye, Jericó jumped on a moving bus with dangerous agility and I hailed a taxi to return to Lucha Zapata’s house, undecided now as to my home and real address.
Unless, I smiled, it was the penitentiary where Miguel Aparecido-who knows to what end-was waiting for me.
“It’s going like clockwork,” Jericó shouted from the bus. “Hug it out!”
I NOTICED THAT Lucha Zapata was nervous, strange, different, and distant when I returned that night to the house on Cerrada Chimalpopoca next to the noisy Metro de los Doctores. She was involved in the ecstatic movements of preparing lunch, not looking at me as she cut the avocados in two, heated the tortillas, smeared them with the green flesh of a buttery fruit that relieves the acidity of Mexican corn. She knew I admired-and marveled at-this homemaking “professionalism” in my friend. She possessed a kind of domestic discipline contrary to the disorder of her life as an alcoholic and drug addict. She was an excellent cook and I arranged to have her cupboard always stocked with all the pleasures of the market that transform Mexican food into a gift of the gods for a country of beggars.
My mouth waters: jalapeño chile, habanero chile, saffron, jitomate, huitlacoche fungus, epazote tea, machaca dried beef, cochinita pork, chotes, chicharrón cracklings, oregano. I bought them at La Merced very early in the morning, assisted by a lively old woman with a straw-colored braid, Doña Medea Batalla. She appeared before me with her black cherry eyes and said: “Let me help you, Licenciado.” “How do you know?” I said with a look. She touched one eye. “I know you all, Licenciado. You can spot a licenciado a mile away… just the way I can smell out villains.”
I confined myself to placing produce in the basket. Lucha would transform it into blind mason’s sauce, soup of corn ears and roasted chiles, uchepos or Michoacán corn tamales, Morelian enchiladas, enchiladas de plaza, and stuffed chayotes. I admired her concentration and skill, which contrasted so strongly with her life’s disorder, wondering if asking her where she had learned to cook was the pretext for controverting the forgetfulness on which she insisted.
She defended herself. Her memory was locked away and her cuisine, she gave me to understand, was part of an atavistic, popular wisdom that wasn’t taught. One is born, in Mexico, knowing how to cook. That was why I took pains to bring her the best produce, with the implicit hope that one day, eating well, she would remember something and live better.
It was a thin hope, not to mention a vain one.
“Did you bring beer?” she asked, standing, tottering.
“I forgot,” I said, having just come from the interview with Sanginés and Jericó.
“Poor devil,” she smiled with twisted lips. She laughed. “Beer makes you cold inside,” she added for no reason.
I asked her to be calm, to lie down, what did she want? knowing that asking a person like her for “calm” was the same as telling her: You’re crazy.
She said with sudden sweetness that she had a weakness for avocados. I told her I’d go out and buy a good supply right away. I regretted it. Lucha needed me there. She was helpless, a step away from death…
“What do you want from me?” she spoke from inside an internal cave.
I said nothing.
“My past. You’re hungry for my past. You’re a snoop,” she said, reproaching me for what I wasn’t, as my life with Jericó demonstrates. “A snoop. A meddler. You stick your big nose in.”
She attacked my nose violently. It wasn’t difficult for me to push her hand away. She fell onto the mat. She looked at me with immense sorrow and even greater resentment, not free of that great pretext for Mexican failure: feeling defeated, always being the loser, and obtaining salvation, perhaps, thanks to the blessing of defeat. We don’t celebrate success except as a passing announcement of eventual defeat in everything.
“You see,” she murmured. “You’re the powerful one, the arbitrary one. You push me. You throw me to the floor. Do you see why I live the way I live? Because power is arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary…”
“Capricious,” I said in a stupid eagerness to find synonyms for defeat.
“A caprice?” Lucha Zapata twisted what I said. “Do you think that living and dying is just a caprice?”
“I didn’t say that.” Clumsily I tried to apologize, standing while she knelt on the mat, looking up at me from the floor.
“Then what?” she asked in a voice at once defeated and victorious, ardent and dry.
I didn’t say anything and she embraced my knees murmuring Love me Savior, I have only you, don’t leave me, what do you need to love me more? what do you need to know I need you?
She looked at me as I believe one kneels and really looks at the “Savior,” as she called me.
Did I want to know about her past? Like in the song, only if I got her what she needed, “Savior, I depend on you, I don’t want to go out on the street, I’m here with you but you have to give me what I need, please, Savior, help me recover the good and leave the bad behind, first I need relief, then I swear I’ll settle down, I’ll be good, I won’t hurt myself anymore, Savior, Salvador, go out and get me what I need and I swear I’ll reform, understand that I have two I’s like the cartoon El Señor Merengue, and the other I commands more than I do myself, what am I leaving behind? help me recover my soul, Savior, you know I’m good, don’t think I have a taste for what’s bad, don’t think I like what’s ugly, it’s in spite of myself, I want to be good, look, I want to have a baby with you, Savior, make me a baby right now so I’m redeemed…”
She fell asleep. I already knew her sleep was a foretaste of death. I went out to get what she wanted. I came back. I watched over her. I spent the night watching. At six in the morning, Lucha Zapata woke, looked at me in anguish from the bare mat, and I soothed the entreaty in her eyes right away, giving her the injection and the syringe, helping her tie up her arm, watching her travel from hell to heaven and fall back to sleep.
I came back that night. She was sitting in one of those little Mexican chairs with a straw seat and brightly colored back, like a little girl being punished. I smiled at her. She looked up. A venomous sky struggled between her lids. She hugged herself with contained violence.
“You want me to repent just to give you pleasure,” she spat at me. “You’re like everybody else.”
I caressed her head. She moved away contemptuously.
“You think you can control me?” She laughed. “Not even love controls me. Falling in love is submitting. I’m independent.”
“No,” I said without sadness. “You depend on drugs. You’re a poor slave, Lucha, don’t pretend to be independent. Don’t make me laugh. You make me sad.”
She let out an animal shout, the authentic howl of a wounded beast, arbitrary, arbitrary, she began to shout, you think habit can control, nothing controls me, where did you put my aviator helmet? only flying pacifies me, take me to the airport, give me a plane, let me fly like a free bird…
She stood and embraced me.
“Do it for your sweet mamacita.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Then for charity.”
“I don’t have any.”
“What do you have?”
“Love and compassion.”
“Have compassion for yourself, asshole.”
And the demon of consequences, what about him?
MY DISTINGUISHED READERS will say that going from Lucha Zapata’s house to the prison of Miguel Aparecido was like passing from one hell to another. Not at all. Compared to the house on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca, the San Juan de Aragón prison was barely a purgatory.
I had the pass Professor Sanginés had given me. I went from grating to grating until I reached Miguel Aparecido’s cell. The prisoner stood when he saw me. He didn’t smile, though in his face I saw an unusual amiability. We exchanged glances before I went into the cell. It was evident we wanted to please each other. What did he want from me? I, from him, wanted only more information for my thesis, though now that Sanginés had decided the topic-Machiavelli and the creation of the state-I wondered what the Florentine thinker had to do with the Mexican prisoner.
It didn’t take me long to find out.
Miguel Aparecido had a certain manner that really consisted of a series of digressions, intended perhaps to educate me. His strong, masculine figure, possessed of an aura of fatality together with an appearance of will, stood as he received me, his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up, revealing arms covered with hair that was almost blond in the uncertain light of the cell, in contrast to the criminal’s Gypsy air, olive skin, and his eyes: blue-black with yellow flecks.
“He doesn’t want to leave prison,” Sanginés had told me. “The day he completed his first sentence and left, he immediately committed a crime so he could return.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea! I’m confused.”
“Are you his attorney, Maestro?” I asked with a certain audacity.
“He has given me instructions to save him from freedom.”
“Why?”
“Ask him.”
I did, and Miguel Aparecido gave me an obscure smile.
“So, kid, why do I like prison? I could tell you things like this. Because I’m free of appearances. Here inside I don’t have to pretend I’m what I’m not or that I’m what other people want me to be. Here I can laugh at all the conventions of courtesy, the how are things, how nice, at your disposal, at your service, let’s make a date to get together, how’s everybody at home, where are you going on vacation? how much did that beautiful watch cost? I’m not holding you up, am I?”
I laughed without wanting to and he became serious.
“Because I’m free of belonging to any class but especially the middle class we all aspire to. They want to be free, imagine. I want to be a prisoner.”
“There are many classes in the middle class,” I dared again. “Whom do you wish to be free of?”
He smiled. “Use tú with me or I’ll kick your ass right here.”
He said it in a savage tone. I didn’t let myself be intimidated. I don’t know what I had on my side. The assignment from Professor Sanginés. My differences with Jericó. The daily, fortifying trial of tending to Lucha Zapata. Or a recent confidence in my own superiority as a student, a free man, a citizen capable of confronting a recidivist criminal whose stake in the terrain of greatness was the decision to remain in prison. Forever? For how long?
Miguel Aparecido did not take long to return fire even before I could open the first document. He said I was very young but perhaps I hadn’t fully understood something. What? That youth consists of daring. Growing old means losing one’s audacity, he continued.
“What did you dare to do?” I asked, using tú, difficult with a person as forbidding as he was.
“I killed,” he said with simplicity, aplomb, and finality.
I didn’t dare to continue with a “why?” or a “whom?” which from the first had no answer. I concluded then and there that Miguel Aparecido left this question hanging because answering it meant knowing the fatality of the plot and I-who had just moved from usted to tú-had a right only to the prolegomena.
“Do you know what’s fucked up in prison?” he resumed. “Here you’re not anything anymore. First, you’re not anybody. You’re separated from the world. You have to invent another world and then make a new relationship for yourself with a world that matters only if you’ve created it yourself, you know, boy?”
“Licenciado,” I said with dignity.
He laughed. “Fine, Lic. You come here and first you ask yourself, who’s protecting me? After a while, after humiliations, blows, lies, unkept promises, solitudes, tortures, punches, moans and you can’t tell if they’re from taking a shit or jerking off, the arrogance of the guards, the sadism of the other prisoners, you learn to protect yourself. How?”
He took me by the shoulders. I was afraid. He did it only to move me over and stare right into my eyes, not accepting any evasion in my gaze. If my life ended with my being smacked by the undertow on a Guerrero beach, I should add that in this scene with the ill-tempered Miguel Aparecido, I truly began to drown far beyond any previous circumstance in my life.
“Are you imprisoned unjustly?” said the classicist in my heart.
He replied that in a certain way yes, but in the long run, not really.
He read the serious questioning in my face.
“I’m here because of a great injustice,” he said.
“But you’re still here because you want to be,” I added unemphatically.
He shook his head a little. “No. Because of my will.”
“I don’t understand.”
He took a few steps in a circle. “First it makes you angry. You’re suffocating.”
He was timing his words to his turns around the cell, and these movements frightened me more than his words. He squared his jaw. His straight nose quivered.
“Then you’re stunned at being here and surviving the initial horror and your permanent impotence, asshole… I mean, Licenciado.” He smiled, looking at me. “Right after that you feel defeated, absolutely fallen into misfortune.”
He stopped and gave me a very ugly look.
“Finally you go back to anger, but this time in order to take your revenge.”
“On which people?” I said, about to fall into the trap of the Count of Monte Cristo.
“On which person, asshole, just one person. Only one.”
I looked at him expectantly. We both knew there were no premature answers and this would be the code of “honor” between us: Nothing before its time.
As I had thought of Edmond Dantés earlier, now I tended toward Doctor Mabuse, the prisoner who directs his crimes from a Berlin cell. Is there anything new in these prison stories? Looking at Miguel Aparecido, I told myself there was. The plots resemble one another because they are part of the same destiny: lost freedom. In prison, more than anywhere else, we realize there is no freedom because we live day by day, because our goals are futile, fragile, and in the end unattainable, because death takes responsibility for canceling our contract and when we’re dead we’re not aware of what has survived us, what has perished with us, and, at times, before us. It’s enough to walk down a busy street and attempt, in vain, to give transcendence to the lives passing by on their way to death, anticipating it, trying to deny it, all subject to disappearing into a vast, collective anonymity. Except the musician, the writer, the artist, the philosopher, the architect? Even them, how long will they endure? Who, recognized today, will be unknown tomorrow? Who, ignored today, will be discovered tomorrow? Few political and military figures survive. Who was Elizabeth I’s chamberlain when Shakespeare was writing, who the North American secretary of state at the time of the obscure sailor and scrivener Herman Melville, who the secretary general of the National Peasant Union when Juan Rulfo wrote Pedro Páramo? Eheu, eheu: transient, I learned in the famous class on Roman law: transience is our destiny but freedom is our ambition, and it will take us a long time-I understood this in a flash looking at the prisoner-to comprehend that the only freedom is the struggle for freedom.
Then why did this man refuse to be free, perpetuate his prison, and almost boast of being a prisoner? It was enough for me to look at him to understand that Miguel Aparecido did not deliver his truths just like that. It was enough to see how he looked at me to know I needed to respond with patience to his mystery, and this pawned a portion of my future and my own freedom to the life of this strange individual who finally, once the time periods imposed by life imprisonment were understood, told me something concrete and asked me for something explicit.
“You leave here for only three reasons. Because you die. Because you complete your sentence. Or because you escape.”
If I looked at him in a questioning way, it was unintentional.
“And again, you escape only if you don’t die, or because you’re a badass for running away, or because you have powerful connections,” he continued. “Yesterday a convict left here only because of his connections. And that makes me very angry.”
I believe that if the Devil exists, at that moment Miguel Aparecido appeared to me as Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, the Prince of Darkness enveloped in the shadows of an immense history of accumulated vengeances, violent desires, delayed wishes, arbitrary destinies, and nights without light.
“The man and the woman who freed him unjustly must be punished.”
I still don’t know how I survived that morning in the diabolical presence of Miguel Aparecido.
“Find your friend Errol Esparza. Tell him he ought to take his revenge.”
The order resounded for me in the vast hollowness of prison silences.
“He ought to take his revenge.”
“On whom?”
“The man is Nazario Esparza. The woman is Sara Pérez, Sarape, she used to be a whore in La Hetara’s house.”
THE VENDETTA ORDERED by Miguel Aparecido was postponed because of other pressing matters. Sanginés sent Jericó to Los Pinos as a young aide in the presidential office. And me he directed to collaborate in the management of the powerful Max Monroy’s enterprises, out toward Santa Fe, in a new border area of a troglodytic Mexico City.
The distances between remote neighborhoods of the capital can involve as much as two hours of travel. The distance from the apartment on Praga to Cerrada de Chimalpopoca and now to my unexpected destination of Santa Fe was the same as the distance from Rotterdam to The Hague and from The Hague to Amsterdam, without taking into account my visits to San Juan de Aragón prison.
What could I do? My bewilderment suggested a way out: another visit to the señora buried in the nameless grave, whose location I did not know, to ask her for advice. The dead don’t have schedules. Unless eternity is the clock without hands where time melts.
I said these words to myself as I walked along Paseo de la Reforma, hesitant about my destination or destinations, when the sky darkened, the angel flew down from the top of the Columna de la Independencia, grasped me by the collar, rose up with a howl or sob or sigh-all at the same time-and taunted me as he asked, breaking my concentration:
“Do you know the sex of angels?”
I wanted to reply they have none, that’s why they can be angels, except that the creature carrying me through the air silenced my words and spoke to me in a man’s voice, and I recognized that voice, it belonged to my old friend Ezekiel, the prophet enveloped in a turbulent wind that flew me over castles and skyscrapers, magnificent slopes and bare hills, neighborhoods of mud and gardens of roses, stating his recommendations as we flew: be on your guard, don’t fear them, speak to them even though they don’t listen, fast, inform them a prophet will come among them, tell them to listen to the voices of the multitude, and I heard a great laugh when the prophet Ezekiel, who was also, in his free time and when he had a yen for transvestism, the Angel of Independence, let me go, and I saw that one of his feet gleamed but it was a calf’s foot.
The storm steered my fall. A sudden ground blocked it. Green foliage softened it.
I fell on my face.
In front of me, once again the grave of
ANTIGUA CONCEPCIÓN
And the familiar voice:
Walk around my grave three times, Josué. Thank you for coming alone. We live in a guarded world. Nobody moves without a bodyguard. They say it’s for security. Pure potatoes. It’s pure fear. We live in fear. We tighten our asshole, to put it politely.
Her sigh made the earth tremble.
Not you, she continued. You’re not afraid. That’s why you come to see me alone. I’m grateful. Alone with your soul. Because even though you don’t believe it, you have a soul, my boy. Take care of it. Don’t trade it for a plate of lentils or bean soup.
“Señora,” I said, “I’m going to work in the office of Max Monroy. Your son, Señora…”
I know that.
“Who told you?”
The earth trembles. It’s her way of speaking. I receive messages each time it trembles.
“Ah!”
I suppressed my own astonishment and quickly added:
“What kinds of messages, Señora?”
That you’re going to enter a new world, silly. Before, in the world I knew, it was the president of the republic who dispensed justice, listened to complaints, and received petitions, the old king! Once I came with my complaints and petitions to President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, the last president. He didn’t even look at me. All he said was: Don’t bother me. Then, I answered, don’t be president. He looked up and in his eyes drunk with the sun I saw what power was: a tiger’s gaze that made you lower your eyes and feel fear and shame.
I believe at that moment the earth where the señora was buried was the enormous eye of a hurricane.
She must have read my mind.
Don’t be an asshole, she said with the arrogant vulgarity I was already familiar with. If you’re going to work with my son, be careful. Max Monroy is my heir. He’s another breed of creature. Mine. Earlier millionaires are beggars beside Max Monroy. Look, I knew them all. They became rich thanks to the revolution, which raised them up from nothing, opening opportunities for them that had once been denied to those at the bottom. Federico Robles fought in Celaya with Obregón against Villa, and from then on One-arm pampered him, directing him into politics, and when politics became dangerous or stopped producing, he guided him into business, which was then virgin territory, or as Robles himself said-a strong but sentimental man who decided to build on desolate battlefields, and even to stain his conscience-one had to sacrifice ideals to build a country, to feel that one had a right to everything for having made the revolution, established the foundations of capitalism, created a stable middle class, and invented true Mexican power, which “consists,” Federico Robles would say, “of nothing but grabbing the country by the back of the neck” and being “one big badass,” and that same man, she declares, was capable of portraying a woman he loved, respecting her, loving her without raising her up or sinking her, offering her a sweet brutality, the strength that a woman-she, Hortensia Chacón-needed in order to love and deserve her life. This I know. Or the case of Artemio Cruz, another millionaire who came from nothing, from a miserable hovel, and made a fortune changing sides, moving at just the right time from one faction to another, betraying thousands to take over a newspaper and dedicate himself to making a fortune by serving the powerful man on duty at the time… who was, when all was said and done, himself, Artemio Cruz and no one else…
Another seismic sigh.
Ay! And yet he was a man, had loves, lost them, Artemio Cruz had a wound, kid, do you have any? I don’t see scars on your body…
“Then what do you see, Señora?”
Ay, I see ignorance about yourself. You don’t know who you are. You still don’t know. Artemio Cruz had an open love wound and spent his life trying to close it. He failed. And it was his own fault he failed. That’s all. He had a brave son. He lost him. On the other hand, that caliph of the northern border, Leonardo Barroso, that one has no excuse. He was a thug who never had a day of compassion, not even for his own impaired son, he took his wife away and prostituted her, are you listening to me? one Michelina Laborde, one of those little society whores sold to the highest bidder with no shame at all because in order to feel shame you have to have some smarts, just a little bit of brain, that’s all, and these little society ninnies move their necks and you hear a marble rolling around though their eyes blink like calculators. Leonardo Barroso was a miserable asskisser to the Gringos, father of another cruel, misogynistic son, son and grandson of incest with the aforementioned Michelina but grandfather to a brave, astute, and perverse woman, María del Rosario Galván, whom you will suddenly meet in your new life. Generation after generation, degeneration!
I questioned in silence. She read the silence.
You know, my boy? Sometimes I feel… well, nostalgia for times gone by. Except we no longer have gold coins, like in the old days, to memorialize what we have lived. We have photos, we have movies, we have TV. That was our memory: photographable, filmable, archivable. Now everything has changed, and here comes the story of my son Max Monroy. The fruit doesn’t fall far, etcetera. Except Max is no fruit. He’s a trunk. He’s like the Tree of Tule in Oaxaca, a gigantic cedar forty meters high and forty-two meters around and two thousand years old. And though Max Monroy is only in his eighties, it’s as if he incarnated two millennia because he’s so sharp and such a bad fucker though he’s my son and that’s the way he is because fortunately he inherited nothing from his father except the vague memory of a country destroyed by its own epic, kid, you can’t live on that forever, I mean on an epic, and in Mexico the epic of the revolution justified everything, progress and backwardness, construction and corruption, peace and politics. Everything in the name of the revolution. Until the Tlatelolco Square massacre left the revolution stripped bare. Stripped bare but shitting blood, of course.
“How do you compete with an epic?”
The señora’s voice trembled, and in it she did not hide a certain satisfaction with herself, about herself.
By moving ahead-she affirmed from the grave-as I did. I’ve already told you about that. I moved ahead of everything and that’s why I could leave my son Max Monroy an independent fortune not subject to presidential favor or political changes. That exhausted my miserable husband. The general lived in a world of torments, tormented by insults, physical challenges, excessive praise, toadies, eventual guilt-when they were alone, do you think all the sons of bitches we’ve had in Mexico never felt guilty, do you think that?
Max Monroy, his invisible but indefatigable mother exclaimed from the grave, Max Monroy!
And then in a very low voice and jumbling together eras, dead dry fields, lost harvests, orphaned children, everyone to the mountains, always fleeing, children, women, cows, to the mountains, the mountains, the mountains… One day we had to be still, resigned, obedient… The nation was worn out. Or it was worn out by the marriage of indigence and injustice. Who knows?
The voice was fading.
The señora was lost in memories of what she wanted to forget.
It was all unpredictable…
“It still is, Señora,” I dared to contribute.
Death, harvests, descendants…
“Do you want me to tell your son anything? A message?”
The sepulchral silence was followed by vast laughter.
Our souls hover like vampires…
When they cross the river, the dogs stay behind the soldiers…
The soldiers skinning goats, roasting pigs, it’s over!
My tits swelled for a whole year.
To nurse my son.
Go on, three times around my grave.
I WOKE ON the mat in Lucha Zapata’s house and looked, bewildered, at the light of dawn. My immediate memory did not hold the cemetery or the address or zip code of where I came from but only a nonexistent river on this desolate, dry, and stifled mesa. A river like a truncated finger pointing the way to the sea.
You, who already know my end, may think I’m inventing a posteriori the events of the past. I swear to you I’m not. And the reason is this: At dawn there was a recurrence of astonishing continuities between my hours at Antigua Concepción’s grave and my waking in Lucha Zapata’s house.
As if the voice of Max Monroy’s dead mother continued in the voice of the living lover of Josué Nadal, who is myself, the narrator of this tale, Lucha Zapata, in a white nightgown, walked barefoot from the mat to the kitchen and back to the mat describing, evoking, as dazed as a sleepwalker, an encounter on an old forgotten street, sordid and dissolute. Lucha finds in a corner of the night (that’s what she said, now these are her words, not mine) a man in rags and covered by newspapers. It is very dark. The man’s eyes are very black and shining. Everything about him is exhausted except his gaze.
They look at each other. He gives his hand to Lucha. He stands without saying a word and leads her along the streets of the night. They stop in front of a lighted window. Inside people are holding a party. It is probably a family occasion. A girl of about eight or nine entertains the others by prancing about, telling jokes, and singing songs. Lucha seems charmed, she opens the door (which was already ajar) and goes in, moving toward the little girl who is the center of attention. Lucha approaches. The girl looks at her and retreats, farther and farther back, into a dark corner of the room.
When Lucha has her cornered, the girl sits down on a hard chair. She looks as if she were being punished. Lucha tells me the little girl is there, though in reality she is very far away. She hugs a stuffed bear and covers herself with her security blanket.
“Who are you?” the girl asks Lucha. “What are you doing here? We don’t want you. Go away.”
Lucha tries to say something but can’t get the words out. Lucha doesn’t understand the reason for the girl’s rejection. She feels humiliated. She runs out. She trips over a white tricycle decorated with a flowered basket. She gets up and in the street she falls into the arms of the dark man who leads her far away.
The road descends abruptly. A gigantic night surrounds them, as irresistible as a carnival: Lucha allows her thoughts to carry her along, her thoughts carry her very far from the place where she is. The night is transforming her-she says, she tells me this morning-leading her to a world where her senses enjoy peace and sufficiency at the same time they are cruelly stirred, demanding more, always more…
Suddenly she addresses me. “You know, Savior? Pleasure is a little pride and another little bit of self-hatred. A feeling of desperation. Along with a childish sensation of eternal life…”
She says she was a member of a gang that protected her and gave her what she needed. She compared her earlier solitude and forgot the familial warmth. Now she was part of a gang.
She gave names: “Maxi Batalla. El Florido. El Tasajeado. El Cacomixtle. El Sabor de la Tierra.”
They meant nothing to me. She knew that and went on.
“You become part of a legion of outsiders, of strange people or strangers, whatever you prefer. Your life belongs to no one. During the day you sleep.”
One night-she continues-from that anonymous, faceless group, an individual emerges. A dark boy, tall and slim. She says that between the two of them a feeling is born of love, tenderness, and mutual appreciation. An attraction.
“I’m no longer a face in the nocturnal crowd, Josué.”
I don’t say anything. For the first time, she is remembering. I wouldn’t interrupt her for anything in the world. I leave assembling the pieces of the puzzle for another time. I don’t say she has met a man twice for the first time. Dreams have their own logic, and we don’t understand it. She is also wrong to call a group “anonymous” whose names she “remembers.”
“Yes.”
She said that with him she felt totally free and open. He offered her a way out. Not a return to conventional values but a movement toward her own thoughtful, creative values.
“I wanted to be sincere with him. I wanted to return with him to the lighted window in the house.”
Lucha Zapata opened her eyes and I realized that everything she had told me she had said without seeing.
“He understood. He understood where I was coming from. He understood how much of myself I had left behind and how much I owed to what I denied with so much rebellious zeal… One night, sleeping side by side, he woke and drew me to him. I don’t know if it was dawn or dusk. But I did understand that after going with me to the lighted house, he was ready to be like me, do you understand? as much as he could. He made love to me and when I came I understood that with him I could reach a compromise. We wouldn’t go back to the world I had left or the world where he found me. Together we would create our own world.”
She said that was the concession. Together the two of them would leave the desolate city. That was Lucha’s concession. His was to share with her one last night in the artificial paradise, evoking Baudelaire, “aflame with love of beauty, I cannot give my name to the abyss that will be my tomb,” because what neither of them realized was that his body, which belonged to her sexually, no longer was hers organically.
“I tried to wake him,” Lucha shouted on this morning. “I shook him, Savior. I touched him. He was the icy statue of death… And what did I do then, Savior? I abandoned him. I abandoned the corpse in the hotel room. I went down to the street. I fell into the center of the night wanting to die if that would bring him back.”
I tried to get up from the mat to seize her waving arms and the hands that scratched at her eyes and she shouted to leave her alone, she had to tear off her own skin, her own identity, savage, blind, violent, searching for death-I gave her a tight embrace-courting death-I grasped her hands-closing the curtain of nothingness over any creative purpose that could deflect her from a life more and more and forever more reckless.
She hung from my neck.
“Savior, I’m the dead sweetheart of a living memory. There’s no tomorrow tomorrow. You lose all sense of time. Each day is identical to the one that came before and the one that follows. What a fuckup, Savior!”
“If you want,” I said to her, “don’t put off your death anymore, Lucha Zapata.”
“I’m not putting it off,” she replied. “I’m speeding it up.”
NO ONE WILL deny, Brother Angelo, my good intentions. I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a creator. I’m Venetian. I look at the tremulous light of Tiépolo. I embody it in the luminous architecture of Palladio. That light and this architecture populate the north of Italy: we have light and we have form. Being an architect after Palladio. Illuminating after Tiépolo. Brother Angelo: both things were denied me. I traveled from Venice to Rome-I was twenty years old-in the retinue of Francesco Vernier, ambassador of the city of Venice to the Pontiff. I looked at the eternity of its ruins. I looked at the fugacity of Rome in its papacy. The Pope dies. The court changes. Rome fills with new families clamoring for positions, favors, commissions. Eternal City? Fleeting, transitory city. Eternal City? Only the mute stone endures.
For that reason I wanted to be an architect, Brother. I saw the inert world and wanted to animate it with architecture. I wanted to create. The inertia of the world told me: No. There are enough works already from yesterday and today. Nobody needs another architect. Don’t think about the works you won’t be able to make. No? Ah! Then I’ll think about the works I won’t be able to make.
I did not find a Maecenas. Without a Maecenas nothing is done. And so I found a Maecenas. The city of Rome, asking me, Piranesi, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, I will be your Maecenas, I, Rome, with my ruins, my unknown corners, my scavenged garbage, my devastated sarcophagi, I offer myself to you, Piranesi, on the condition that you don’t reveal my secrets, don’t show me in the light of day but in the most obscure depths of mystery…
They demand, Why don’t you study the nude more? Why do you insist on depicting hunchbacks, the maimed, cuadroni magagnazi, sponcherati storpi? Why don’t you show esthetic truth? Why?
Because I wager on esthetic infidelity. Even if it’s ugly? No. Because it possesses another beauty. The beauty of the horrible? If horror is the condition for acceding to beauty that is unknown, latent, about to be born, if-Then do you scorn ancient beauty? No, I find the place that refuses to be ancient. And what place is that? Is there any place that doesn’t age?
I gather together my guardians. Invoke my witnesses, Brother Angelo. Stone lions, looks. Stone bridges, sighs. Stone walls, confinement. Stone blocks, prisons.
I will introduce machines and chains, ropes and stairs, towers and banners, rotting crossbars and sickly palm trees into the space of the prison. A scenography. Invisible smoke. Deceptive sky. What do we breathe, Brother? What sky illumines us? Veils. There are the sky and the smoke. But they are uncertain, untouchable, part of the scene, passing distractions, theatrical illuminations: smoke and light for a prison with no entrances or exits, the perfect prison, the prison within the prison within the prison. A profusion of escapes: They lead nowhere. What enters stays here forever. What is alive dies. It becomes excrescence. And excrescence becomes ruin.
The world is a prison? The prison is a world?
The prison frees itself from itself in the earlier design of my stewardship? I, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, say this. Or is my own image the one that imprisons the prison?
There are no human beings here. But there is the human question regarding the origin of light. And if there is no light other than the question, the question becomes the negation of destiny, as somber as these prisons, sepulchral chambers of a heaven in eternal dispute. There are no human beings in the lost heaven. There are prisoners. The prisoner is you.
They poisoned me, Fra Angelo, the acids I use for etching. My art killed me. Will my prisons survive? I believe so. Why? Because they are the works I could not make: they are the ruins of the buildings I could not construct.
Still, I died with the ambition of designing a new universe. Except no one asked me to and I had to depart with one anguished question: How does one imprison life in order to destroy death?
I ask you, my brother Angelo Piranesi, because you are a Trappist monk and cannot speak.
NO DAD, NO mom, not even a little barking dog softened the guardian of my childhood and adolescence, Doña María Egipciaca, which signified my insignificance in the vast order of human relationships, beginning with the family. Destiny, if not virtue, later provided me with relationships that were fleeting (with the nurse Elvira Ríos), more or less permanent (with the tormented Lucha Zapata), and very vulgar and at the same time mysterious (as with the whore who had a bee tattooed on her buttock).
Now, the decision (apparently unappealable) of Maestro Antonio Sanginés led me to the doors of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the brand-new, prosperous district of Santa Fe, an old abandoned wasteland on the road to Toluca, full of sandy precipices and white chalk barrens, that overnight, driven by the great bursting heart of the Mexican metropolis, was flattened out first only to have erected immediately afterward, in a vast valley of cement and glass, vertical skyscrapers, horizontal supermarkets, underground parking garages, all of it always guarded by sentries of glass and cement that were like the raised eyeglasses of an imposing sun determined to avenge the challenge of a Scandinavian architecture made to admit the sun in a country-ours-where ancestral wisdom demands thick walls, long shadows, sounds of water, and hot coffee to combat the damaging effect of excessive sunlight.
The strange thing-I told myself as I approached the Vasco de Quiroga building-is that in Santa Fe the Spanish prelate of that name founded a utopia intended to protect the recently conquered indigenous population and offer them a society-another society-inspired in the ideas of Thomas More: a utopia of equality and fraternity but not liberty, since its rules were as strict and confining as those of any project that proposes to make us all equal.
In front of the building, the white statue of the prelate, standing and caressing the bowed head of an Indian child. Inside the building, an entrance watched over by classic bodyguards with shaved heads, white shirts, old bow ties, black suits and shoes, and jackets bulging with the unavoidable tools of the trade. The guards looked indifferently at the statue of the protector of the Indians without understanding anything, although, perhaps, they were certain that being gunmen who protected politicians, potentates, and even prelates in the Mexico of immense insecurity in the twenty-first century was a remunerated form of utopia. The truth is that behind the large black glasses of the guards and at the feet of their ward-robelike physical proportions, there was no reflection and no basis for any kind of utopia.
I complied with security requirements. I passed through the triumphal arches of universal suspicion. I rang for the elevator and got out on the twelfth floor of the building. A very short, very dark girl adorned, like an announcement of the loves of Pierrot and Columbine, with large glasses that had black-and-white frames, above whose glasses fell the light shower of the uniform hairdos of various secretaries, nurses, and saleswomen, which dance above the brows as if fleeing the skull, who said the often repeated “This way, Señor,” and I followed the triumphal clicking of her heels (it announced her salvation from who knows what fate worse than death: I imagined her cornered, raped, beaten, hungry, why not? a toss of destiny’s coin, heads or tails? was enough) with the fatal certainty I was walking behind the permitted spoils of war. One centimeter more and the señorita-
“Ensenada, at your service.”
“Last name or first?”
“All that and more. I was born there, Señor,” my small guide said pertly in the corridors of entrepreneurial power.
“Ensenada de Ensenada from Ensenada de…” I said with feigned astonishment.
She didn’t like that. She opened a door and left me there, in the hands of the next woman, without even saying goodbye. I gave my name to woman number two, an affable matron with extensive concerns. She stood, opened a cedar door, and invited me into an aquarium.
I’ve spoken accurately. The lights of the office where I found myself swam, without betraying their origin, when they met the light that came in, filtered by aquamarine glass, and when both lights embraced-the invisible one inside and the filtered one outside-they created an atmosphere of subdued power. I don’t know if the expression is stronger and less fortunate than the reality. What I mean is that the illumination in this office was a creation that took advantage of both natural and artificial light to create a visual space and could not be merely decorative, or even a symbol of an unemphatic function or power.
It did not take me long to understand that the space that received me had not been invented for me or anyone except the woman who got up from the easy chair located next to a revolving desk and who spent almost as many hours here as a fish in an aquarium. The office was hers, not mine. I felt like an intruder. She stood. I had a vague paideia of Hispano-Mexican courtesy: Women have no reason to stand when a man comes in.
The fact is that Asunta Jordán-which is how she introduced herself-was not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill woman but what the lights and their symbology had led me to realize. Not a woman with power or of power, though she was a powerful woman.
I knew beforehand that I was stepping onto the lands of the great Max Monroy, an octogenarian, strong, extremely rich, and the son of my ghostly friend Antigua Concepción who lay buried in a mysterious grave. But if at any moment I harbored the fantasy that my relationship with the mother assured me of immediate access to the son, Asunta Jordán now appeared, blocking the way, asking me courteously to have a seat and immediately and in vain initiating an instructive monologue, as if I, deep in this platonic cave where the lights of the real city were vague wavering shadows on the office ceiling, were paying attention to anything other than this woman of medium height, tending to tall, possessor of a vigorous, punctual, professional body all of which I was disposed to guess at, beginning with her black, fairly high-heeled shoes, with a low-cut vamp where I could detect the beginning (the origin, the birth) of her breasts, before ascending her crossed legs that she relaxed when (I believe) she saw me looking at them with their flesh-colored stockings that led to the skirt (which she instinctively pulled down, moving the hand with a watch, a throbbing, silent pulse, to her thighs) and jacket of the tailored dark blue pinstripe suit over a wine-colored blouse. She wore pearls around her neck, a single diamond in each ear, and then there was her head with the chin raised, as if that gesture announced the tranquil challenge of parted lips, darkened eyes, alert nose, forehead without questions or answers, and short, streaked, carefully casual hair.
I examined the reality and the mystery of this woman, realizing immediately that the reality was a mystery and she guarded it jealously, as if anyone looking at her could believe the reality was merely that: reality. Looking at Asunta Jordán for the first time, I summarized my earlier experience with female matters by telling myself that when people talk-and they talk a great deal-about the “mystery” of a woman, in fact they are transferring to the female sex a series of vices in order to emphasize the virtues of the male or, just the opposite, attributing to the woman virtues that tacitly indicate our masculine vices. Who, for example, keeps a secret better: they or us? Who is more stoic in the pristine sense (Filopáter dixit) of “living in harmony with nature,” which lends itself to all interpretations because it supports all the vices and virtues that are in accord with nature? And is there anything that nature excludes from its kingdom, from mystic heights to moral depths, from saintliness to sex?
I admit that in the presence of Asunta Jordán all this came to mind not in a premeditated way but instantaneously, dissolving my dual questioning into a single unitary affirmation: Asunta Jordán’s façade was one of duty, which accounted for her attire, her voice, her position-despite her office of aquatic tides, more appropriate to a siren than an executive secretary. Wasn’t it all something more than a concession to the senses, wasn’t it an invitation more than a whim?
I stopped at her gaze hidden (like that of the guards) by dark glasses, which she suddenly removed, revealing eyes that would have been beautiful if they hadn’t been so hard, inquisitive, imperious and that were-beautiful-in spite of everything I’ve said.
“You’re not listening to me, Señor.”
“No,” I replied, “I was looking at you.”
“Discipline yourself.”
“I believe that looking at you carefully is the primary discipline in this place.”
I don’t know if she smiled or became angry. Her mouth allowed for any number of readings. Her deep black eyes betrayed the artificiality of her sun-streaked hair and solicited-I thought then-more intimate investigations.
LET NO ONE tell you I speak incessantly or don’t listen to advice. Let that person search for balance. Bring a little harmony to the country. Give Mexico a triumphal air. And above all, not spend all his time, Mr. President, in demonizing his predecessor or doing favors for those who supported him.
Jericó told me that the President of the Republic, Don Valentín Pedro Carrera, received him in the formal office at Los Pinos with these concepts and asked him to have a seat in a chair conspicuously lower than the chief executive’s as the president caressed with his long fingers the busts of the heroes-Hidalgo, Juárez, Madero-that adorned his vast, bare desk. In addition to heroes, there were a good number of telephones and behind Jericó’s seat three television sets with the sound off but transmitting constant images.
He told Jericó he was always looking for new blood, for new ideas. Licenciado Sanginés had recommended Jericó as an intelligent, very cultured boy, educated abroad and with no political experience.
“Just as well,” laughed the president. “Correct me in time, Jericó,” he said with the heartiness of informal address immediately authorized by the difference in their ages: Valentín Pedro Carrera was close to fifty but said jokingly that “after forty-one you can’t walk, you have to run.
“So you’re very cultured, right? Well, take good care of me because I’m not. Don’t hold back, correct me in time, don’t let me talk about the Brazilian female novelist Doña Sara Mago or the Arabic female philosopher Rabina Tagora.”
He guffawed again, as if wanting to ease tensions and put Jericó at his ease and receptive to what Mr. President Carrera intended to tell him.
“My philosophy, young man, is that there should be a rotation of individuals here, not classes. And it’s necessary to rotate individuals because otherwise the classes become agitated seeing the same faces. Those at the bottom become agitated because the permanence of those at the top reminds them of the absence of those at the bottom. Those at the top become agitated because they’re afraid a gerontocracy will perpetuate itself and the young will never get beyond subsecretary, or high-ranking official, or out-and-out mediocrity.”
He narrowed his eyes until he looked like a Chinese-Aryan, since his Spanish features were crossbred with swarthy skin and both of them with an Asian gaze.
“I called you after talking to my old adviser Sanginés so you can give me a hand with a project I have in mind.”
He smoothed his reddish, graying mustache.
“I’ll explain my philosophy. The Mexican plateau is not only a geographical fact. It is a historical one. It is a flat height, or a high flatland, which allows us to look at the stature of time.”
Jericó half-closed his eyes in order not to yawn. He expected a complete oratorical exercise. That did not happen.
“But to get to the point, Jero… May I call you that?”
What was “Jero” going to say except simply to nod his consent. He says he didn’t feel intimidated and didn’t stoop to “Whatever you like, Mr. President.”
That individual proceeded to explain that man does not live by bread alone but also by festivals and illusions.
“You have to invent heroes and bequeath them,” said Carrera as he caressed the innocent heads of the bronzed leading men of the nation. “You have to invent ‘the year’ of something that distracts people.”
“No doubt,” said Jericó, boldly. “People need distraction.”
“There you go,” the president continued. “Look.” He caressed the three heads, one after the other. “For me Independence, Reform, and Revolution passed me in the night. I am a child of Democracy, I was elected and am accountable only to my electors. But I repeat, democracy does not live by ballot boxes alone, and here and in China memorable dates have to be created that give pride to the people, memory to amnesiacs, and a future to the dissatisfied.”
He didn’t say “I have finished speaking,” but let’s pretend he did. Jericó says he sent the chief executive a quietly interrogative look.
“Commemorative dates are born of unimportant dates,” my friend ventured and realized, taking his measure, that the president did not like anyone to see him disconcerted.
“In other words,” Carrera continued, “a president has to be a hedonometer.”
Jericó feigned an idiotic face. Presidential vanity was restored.
“The pleasure, happiness, joy of the people must be measured. You’re so cultured”-the tail end of irony appeared-“do you think a science of happiness exists? How much happiness does the average Mexican need? A lot, not much, none at all? Listen carefully. The voice of experience is talking to you, you can count on it!”
Though his gaze revealed the most perverse brutality.
“This country has always lived in miserable poverty. Always, a mass of the fucked and we, a minority of fuckers, are over them. And believe me, Jero, if we want it all to continue, we have to make the fucked believe that even though they’re fucked they’re happier than you and me.”
His face became serene.
“In other words, my good Jero: I don’t want Mexicans to be rich. I want them to be happy. Just look at the Gringos. Look at what prosperity has done for them! They work constantly, eat badly, you can bet they fuck in a hurry, a straight suburban quickie, they don’t have vacations, they don’t have social welfare, they retire at fifty and die beside a lawn mower. A lot of work, a lot of money, and not much satisfaction… Some happiness! In Mexico, at least, there’s always been a certain, what shall I call it? pastoral well-being, you’re happy with your tortilla here, your tequilas there…”
Once again the ogre.
“That’s over, young man. Too much information, too many appetites, too much envy. Max Monroy with his handheld devices has brought information to the most remote corners. Once you could govern almost in secret, people believed in the annual report on September first, they believed that the more statistics there were, the happier they would be, but damn it all to hell, Jero! No more. People are informed and they don’t conform and it’s my job to fill in the gaps at the patriotic festival, the commemorative parade, the ceremonies that replace the imagination and appease their spirits, their thirst and hunger.”
He gave Jericó a small, friendly slap.
“I need young blood. New people, with ideas, with education. Like you. Sanginés endorses you. That’s more than enough for me. The good lic has never failed me, and if I’m here I owe it in great measure to Don Antonio Sanginés. Well, well,” he said with a sigh. “This country is divided into cream, watery milk, yogurt, and the infamous dulce de leche. You choose.”
He looked at Jericó as one looks at a man condemned to death who has just been pardoned.
“Think positively, my young collaborator. Think about the efficacy of the parade and the festival. A ceremony is the cloak of dignity everyone can place around their shoulders, hiding their rags. Bring me ideas. Let’s celebrate sports and athletes, songs and singers, brands of beer, and national sweets, let’s even celebrate ex-governors. Invent reputations, boy. Create museums and more museums. Parades and more parades. Lots of music, lots of trombones. Lots of ‘Marcha Zacatecas.’ And don’t underestimate the political transcendence of what the assignment means. Ask yourself: Do people know their own interests? Max Monroy wants them to. I think they’re not unaware of them, they just replace them with commemorations. In the long run, Monroy wants to transform luxury into necessity. He wants people to take for granted that they deserve what they once had to pay for. If he succeeds, Jero, power is over, undone by critical exigency. If wealth is transformed into necessity, power becomes unnecessary because people are satisfied only with what others don’t have and power is satisfied only with what others already have. Otherwise tell me, what the hell are we promising?”
He stood and extended a robust hand. His rings hurt Jericó. The president stared at him. Like a tiger with its prey.
“Don’t even imagine that I’m talking more than I should.”
“No, Mr. President.”
“If you repeat it, nobody will believe you but I’ll make you pay.”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
“Don’t even think you can begin your political career by beating me.”
“If you think that, fire me.”
The president gave a loud laugh, reverting to the familiar tú.
“Don’t worry. I’ll give you a pension. And something else.”
“Tell me, Señor.”
“Don’t make a fool of me.”
The telephone rang. The president walked over to answer it. He listened. Between silences he said:
“I won’t forget what you’re saying… Be sure to call my secretary… I hope we see each other again… Let’s see when…”
“I don’t know,” Jericó said to me, “why each of those anodyne phrases sounded like a threat.”
Especially when the president said goodbye to Jericó, asking him to be discreet, not to make a false move, and not to make himself noticeable.
“Be discreet, don’t make any false moves, don’t make yourself noticeable.”
And Jericó simply thought, What did we agree to?
I’M A LOYAL man, Miguel Aparecido told me on the day I returned to the San Juan de Aragón prison, impelled by circumstances.
“I’m here because I want to be,” he added, and I agreed because I already knew that.
His expression did not change. If he repeated this psalm, it was because he considered it necessary. Perhaps it was only a preamble.
“I’m here to serve a sentence imposed on me by life, not the law.”
I made it clear I was listening attentively.
“I’m still here because of loyalty, I want you to understand this, Josué my friend. I’m still here by my own wish. Because if I were to leave here, I’d kill the person I should love the most.”
“Should?” I dared to say.
He said no one obliged him to be here except himself. He said if he left here he would commit an unforgivable act. He spoke as if the penitentiary were his salvation. I believed him. Miguel Aparecido was a sincere man. A caged tiger with sleeves perpetually rolled up, stubbornly kneading his forearms covered with almost blond hair, as if they were the weapons of a solitary warrior afraid to be victorious in battle.
“I tell you this, Josué, so you can understand my dilemma. I’m here because I want to be. I like prison because prison protects me from myself. I like prison because here I have a world I understand and that understands me.”
He gave me a capo’s smile but didn’t frighten me (if that was his intention) because I wasn’t a prisoner or subject to any mafia. Because I, ladies and gentlemen, was free-or thought I was.
He only laughed. “Ask any prisoner. Talk to Negro España or Pérfida Albión. Consult with Siboney Peralta. You haven’t done that, old friend? They’re like a tomb. Don’t go to any trouble. But if you talk to them on my behalf, they’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you. In the prison of San Juan de Aragón there’s an interior empire and I’m its head. Nothing happens here, boy, that I don’t know about, nothing I don’t want or can’t control. You should know: Even occasional riots are the work of my will alone.”
He rubbed his hands over his face. It sounded like sandpaper. He was lying to me.
He said he could smell the air and when it became very heavy, a huge fight was needed to clear the atmosphere. When they’re needed, he said, there are serious riots here, a chaos of broken chairs smashing against the walls, dining room tables in smithereens, scratches on metal doors, injured police, some even dead. Violations, abuses, sexual pleasures disguised as punishments, understand? Here we bite locks open.
Why was he lying to me?
“And then the smoke clears. A few ashes remain. But we are at peace again. Peace is necessary in a prison. Many innocents pass through here.” He looked at me with a kind of religious passion that disturbed me. “They have to be respected. You’ve seen the children in the pool. Do you think they should have a life sentence? Well, I’ll tell you that if this prison were like almost all the rest, I mean, concentration camps where jailers are the worst criminals, where police traffic in drugs and sex and are guiltier than the worst criminal, then I’d commit suicide, kid, because if there were chaos here it would be because I was powerless to establish the necessary order. Necessary, Josué, just that, no more and no less; the order that’s indispensable so the San Juan de Aragón prison isn’t heaven or hell, no, but just, and it’s a lot, a fucking purgatory.”
He was out of breath, which surprised me. In my opinion, Miguel Aparecido was a man of steel. Perhaps because in reality I didn’t know who he was. Was he lying to me?
He took me by the shoulders and looked at me as a tiger must look at its dying prey.
“When something happens here that slips out of my hands, it makes me furious.”
He repeated it syllable by syllable.
“Fu-ri-ous.”
He took a breath and told me that an individual turned up here, and at first Miguel did not attribute the slightest importance to him. Instead he laughed at him a little. He was a mariachi who then became a cop or vice versa, it doesn’t matter, but he was a born crook. It seems this mariachi or cop or whatever he was took part in a neighborhood disturbance a few years ago when the police themselves, charged with maintaining order, created disorder where there had been none, because the people in the district governed themselves and dealt with their own crimes without harming anyone. They gave a phenomenal beating to the cop or mariachi when neighbors and the “guardians of law and order” faced one another one tragic night when the police were sacrificed by the crowd, burned, stripped, hung by the feet as a warning: Don’t come back to the neighborhood, we govern ourselves here. Well, it seems the mariachi or cop or complete ass, his name was Maximiliano Batalla, pretended to be mute and paralyzed just so his mama, a very clever but sentimental old woman named Medea Batalla, would take care of him, feed him, and take him in his wheelchair to pray to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.
“Go on, Maxi, sing, don’t you see that Our Lady is asking you to?”
“And Maxi sang,” Miguel Aparecido continued. “He sang rancheras so well he deceived his poor mama, passing himself off as mute and crippled while his comrades-in-arts-mariachis and police and potheads and thugs-visited him, and Maxi organized them for a series of urban crimes ranging from the innocence of stealing mail from the United States because workers are sometimes so ignorant they send dollars in a letter, to attacking pregnant women to rob them at intersections when there’s a confusion of streetlights, traffic police, and racing engines.”
The Mariachi’s Gang-as it came to be known-invaded commercial centers for the sheer pleasure of sowing panic, without stealing anything. It permeated the city with an army of beggars simply to put two things to the test: that nothing happens to a criminal disguised as a beggar but everyone believes beggars are criminals.
“It’s a gamble,” Miguel Aparecido said very seriously. “A risk,” he added almost as if he were saying a prayer. “The plain truth is that the Mariachi’s Gang alternated its serious crimes with sheer fooling around, spreading confusion in the city, which was its intention.”
Maxi’s gang was organized to swindle migrants beyond the simple stealing of dollar bills in letters. They were very perverse. They organized residents of the neighborhoods where the workers came from to stone those who returned, because without them the districts no longer received dollars and in Mexico-I looked at Miguel when Miguel wasn’t looking at me-the poor die without dollars from the migrants, the poor produce nothing…
“Except workers,” I said.
“And grief,” Miguel added.
“So then”-I wanted to speed up the story-“what did Maximiliano Batalla do that you couldn’t forgive?”
“He killed,” Miguel Aparecido said very serenely.
“Whom?”
“Señora Estrella Rosales de Esparza. Errol Esparza’s mother. Nazario Esparza’s wife.”
Then Miguel Aparecido, as if it had no importance, moved on to other subjects or returned to earlier ones. I was stunned. I remembered Doña Estrellita’s body laid out in the Pedregal house on the day of the wake. I remembered the sinister Don Nazario and knew him capable of anything. I evoked the new lady of the house and did not know what she was capable of. My truest, most tender memory was of Errol, our old buddy from secondary school, with his head like an egg. I repressed my feelings. I wanted to listen to the prisoner of San Juan de Aragón.
“Do you know what hope means?” he asked.
I said I didn’t.
“You’re right. Hope brings nothing but sorrow, trouble, and disappointment.”
I thought I was going to see him being sentimental for the first time. I shouldn’t have had false hopes.
“What would happen if you were to escape?” I dared to ask him.
“Here, chaos. Outside, who knows. Here, people wither. But if I weren’t here, the streets would be filled with corpses.”
“More? I don’t follow.”
“Don’t look at the moon’s ass, prick.”
I was a law clerk. I was a young employee in the companies of Max Monroy. I was bold.
“I’d like to free you.”
“Freedom is only the desire to be free.”
“Free of what, Miguel?” I asked, I confess, with a feeling of growing tenderness toward this man who, without either one of us wanting it, was becoming my friend.
“Of the furies.”
The fury of success. The fury of failure. The fury of sex. The fury of resentment. The fury of anger. The fury of love. All this passed through my head.
“Free, free.”
With an impulse I would call fraternal, the prisoner and I embraced.
“The Mariachi has left here, free. Nazario Esparza’s influence freed him. Maximiliano Batalla is a dangerous criminal. He shouldn’t be walking around.”
He sneezed.
“You know, Josué? Among the criminals in San Juan de Aragón, there aren’t only thieves, there aren’t only innocents, or kids who must be saved, or old men who die here or are killed by a violence I sometimes can’t control. They fill the pool without letting me know. Some kids drown. My power has limits, boy.”
The tiger looked at me.
“There are also killers.”
He tried to look down. He couldn’t.
“They’re killers because they have no other recourse. I mean, if you examine the circumstances, you understand they were obliged to kill. They had no other way out. Crime was their destiny. I accept that. Others kill because they lose the ability to endure. I’m being frank. They put up with a boss, a wife, a crying baby, damn it, listen to me, what I’m telling you is terrifying, I know, laugh, Josué, you tolerate a bitch of a mother-in-law but one day you explode, no more, death urges them on: Kill and death itself appears just behind them. I understand the attraction and horror of crime. I live with crime every day. I don’t dare condemn the man who kills because he has no other recourse. There are those who kill because they’re hungry, don’t forget that…”
His pause frightened me. His entire body quivered without weakness. That’s what made me afraid.
“But not the gratuitous crime. The crime that doesn’t involve you. The crime they pay you for. The crime of Judas. Not that. Absolutely not that.”
He looked at me again.
“Maximiliano Batalla came here and I couldn’t read his face. His face of a criminal on the payroll of a millionaire coward. I reproach myself for that, kid. I entrust you with it.”
“How did you find out?”
“A prisoner came in who knew him. He told me. In the end I control everything. The Mariachi doesn’t even control his own dick. He’s an asshole. But a dangerous asshole. He has to be done away with.”
Then Miguel Aparecido stripped away any shred of tenderness or serenity and presented himself to me as a true exterminating angel, filled with sacred rage, as if he were looking into an abyss where he did not recognize himself, as if obedience were lacking in the cosmos, as if a demon had been born in him who demanded form, only that, the form that would permit him to act.
“The criminal left without my permission.”
He looked at me and changed suddenly, became imploring.
“Help me. You and your friends.”
I felt exasperated.
“If you left here, you could take revenge yourself, Miguel. I don’t know for what. You could take action.”
And his final words that day were at once a defeat and a victory.
“I’m a loyal man only if I remain here. Forever.”
THE SECRET OF Max Monroy-Asunta gave me a class as she sat backlit in her office aquarium, seated so her super-legs would distract me, her most reliable test-is knowing how to anticipate.
“Just like his mother,” I said only to be meddlesome.
“What do you know about that?”
“What everybody knows, don’t be so mysterious.” I returned her smile. “History exists, you know?”
“Max was ahead of everybody.”
Asunta proceeded to give me a class on what I already knew from the mouth of Antigua Concepción. Except that what was spontaneous and lively in Max Monroy’s mother was, in the mouth of Asunta, Max Monroy’s executive secretary, contrived and dull, as if Asunta were repeating a class for beginners: me.
I decided, however, to be a good pupil for her (I admit it), the most attractive woman I had ever met. Elvira Ríos, the whore with the bee, my current ball-and-chain, Lucha Zapata, paled in comparison with this woman-object, this beautiful thing, attractive, sophisticated, elegant, and supremely desirable, giving me little classes on the businessman’s genius. I realized she was repeating a lesson she had memorized. I forgave her because she was good-looking.
What did Max Monroy do? asks an Asunta whose mind, I observe, bursts into flame when she mentions super-boss.
“What has Max Monroy’s secret been?”
According to Asunta, there is not just one secret but rather a kind of constellation of truths. He was not the first, she tells me, to put the modern telephone within reach of everyone. He was the first to foresee a possible clogging of lines because of short supply and excess demand, opening the possibility of buy now pay later but on condition you sign up with us, the companies of Max Monroy.
“Why? Not only because Max Monroy offered in one package telephone, computer, Vodafone, O2, the entire package, Josué, but without deceptive contracts or onerous clauses. Max didn’t care about hiding costs, he didn’t want to exploit or add clauses in illegible print. Everything in big letters, understand? Instead of high prices and high utilities, he proposed low prices and constant utilities with a gesture of freedom, understand? Max Monroy is who he is because he respects the consumer’s freedom, that’s the difference. When Max asked the consumer to abandon networks established earlier, his offer was freedom. Max told each consumer: Choose your own basic monthly package. I’ll give it to you at a fixed price. I’ll permit you to use whatever you want from our network, films, telephone, information, whatever you like and the way you like it. Max addressed specific groups offering them a fixed price in exchange for a constellation of services, assuming the operating costs and subsidizing operations when necessary.”
Asunta adjusted the navy blue pinstripe jacket that was her uniform, which must have moved her to say that Max Monroy was a great tailor.
I laughed.
She didn’t: “A great tailor. Listen carefully. Max Monroy never offered the same communication service to everybody. He promised each client: ‘This is for you alone. This is yours. It’s your suit.’ And he kept his promise. We offer each client individual tailoring.”
I think she looked with critical coolness at my classic attire of gray suit and tie. She looked at me as one looks at a mouse. Her eyes requested, without saying anything, “More contrast, Josué, a red or yellow tie, a thinner belt or some striking suspenders, look handsome, Josué, when you take off your jacket to work or make love, don’t dress like a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance when you come to the office, how do you usually dress at home? Look for a modern mix of elegance and comfort. Go on.”
“Sans façon,” she said very quietly. “Charm-casual.”
“Excuse me?” I said, guessing at the mimetic talent of Asunta Jordán.
“Nothing. Max Monroy invented individual tailoring for each consumer and each consumer felt special and privileged when he used our services.”
“Our?” I permitted myself a raised eyebrow.
“We’re a big family,” she had to say, disappointing me with the cliché and returning me, for an instant, to my old nostalgia for our philosophical talks with Father Filopáter.
“Other companies put on pressure. Competition is intense. Until now we’ve beaten the others because all our activity is always directed to as many sectors as we can manage, as many consumers as we can imagine. Our strategy is multisegmentary. Growth with utility. Just imagine. What do you think?”
Asunta’s discourse kept fading until it turned into a distant echo. She continued speaking about Monroy, his enterprises, our companies. I became more and more lost in contemplation of her. Words were lost. Life as well. I don’t know why at that moment, before this woman, for the first time, I had the sensation that until then childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood were like a long, slow river flowing with absolute certainty to the sea.
Now, looking at her as I embarked on this new occupation dictated by the lawyer Sanginés-and I didn’t know then whether to thank or reproach him for his attentions and painstaking care toward me and Jericó-I felt that, far from rowing peacefully to the sea, I was moving upstream, against nature, in a cascade of short, abrupt movements, violating the laws that had so far ruled my existence in order to escape into a vital-or was it fatal?-velocity that moved backward but in reality flowed toward an unfortunate tomorrow, toward a growing brevity that, as it approached its origin physically and violently, was, in reality, announcing to me the brevity of my days as of today. We all come to know this. I learned it now.
Was Asunta the person who would, when she touched me, at least give sense and tranquillity to the “great event,” Henry James’s “important” thing: death? I don’t know why I thought these things as I sat across from Asunta this morning in an office in Santa Fe. Did the feeling of fatality authorize another, apparently opposite one, the desire I began to feel in front of her?
Had my conversation with Miguel Aparecido the night before been prolonged into this morning of leaden sun? Against my will my mood darkened because of the mission the prisoner had charged me with: avenging the mother of our buddy Bald Errol Esparza.
I was silent. One does not speak of these things here, under pain of being irrelevant to Max Monroy’s great entrepreneurial machine, because if I intuited anything with certainty it was that the entrepreneurial world into which Licenciado Sanginés had thrust me, taking me out of a childish, studentish, irksome, brothel-going, crepuscular semiseclusion in a middle class that had abandoned its values to let itself be carried along by the current-I was thinking of Lucha-this “new world” excluded everything that was not self-referential: the enterprise as origin and purpose of all things.
And Antigua Concepción? I asked myself then. Was she a madwoman or a super-magnate? Or both?
Asunta, as I have said, was sitting so I could not avoid an occasional, discreet glance at her legs. I began to believe it was on the basis of those extremely beautiful, long, depilated extremities, encased in flesh-colored stockings, silky to mortal eyes, that my feeling of passion was born.
I say passion. Not affection, or love, or gratitude, or responsibility, but passion, the freest, least bound of obligations, the most gratuitous. A feeling that flowed from Asunta’s legs to my falsely distracted, deceptively discreet gaze…
The world is transformed by desire. While she continued to enumerate the companies of Max Monroy for which I would begin to work starting now, all the times of my life-past, present, future, along with the prestigious names of the emotion: memory and desire, recollection and premonition-engaged with one another now and in the person of this woman.
I thought that life goes by rapidly. I never had thought that before. Now I did, and associated fugacity with fear and fear with attraction. Never, I admitted, had a female attracted me as much as Asunta Jordán did at that moment. And the dangerous thing was that passion and the woman who provoked it were, without my permission, beginning to transform my own desire, which in some way was no longer mine but was not yet-would it ever be?-hers.
From now on-I already knew it-my entire future would reside in that question. Asunta was turning me, without wanting to, into an inflamed man. Careful, careful! I told myself, to no avail. I felt conquered by the attraction of this woman and at the same time, without wanting to, without realizing it, I knew my life with the helpless Lucha Zapata was coming to an end.
The attraction of Asunta Jordán was inexplicable. It was instantaneous. Mea culpa? Because while she seemed desirable to me, she also seemed tiresome.
WAS LUCHA ZAPATA a fortune-teller? I didn’t say anything to her when I returned that night to Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I found her dressed as an aviator again. I noticed her resemblance to the celebrated Amelia Earhart, the valiant Gringa lost forever in a flight without a compass over the South Pacific. I hadn’t realized it. They were alike in something. Amelia Earhart was freckled and smiling, like those North American fields of wheat that laugh at the sun. She wore her hair very short, I suppose in order to fly better and set the aviator’s helmet firmly on her head. She wore pants and a leather jacket.
Just like Lucha Zapata now.
“Take me to the airport.”
I hailed a taxi and we both got in.
I let her talk.
“Don’t ask me anything.”
“No.”
“Remember what I told you one day. In this society you’re in perpetual debt. Whatever you do, you always end up losing. Society makes certain you feel guilty.”
I didn’t say what I was thinking. I didn’t correct her or indicate that in my opinion people were what they did, not what they were obliged to do. She was who she was, I thought at that moment, through her own will, not because a cruel, perverse, villainous society had determined it.
“What will you choose, Savior?” she asked suddenly, as if to exorcise the implacable ugliness of the city crumbling along the length of its cement escarpments.
“It depends. Between what and what?”
“Between the immediate and what you leave for another day.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t look outside. Look at me.”
I looked at her.
“What do you see?”
I felt an unexpected desire to cry. I controlled myself.
“I see a woman who wants to fly again.”
She squeezed my arm.
“Thank you, Savior. Do you know what I’m going to do?”
“No.”
“I’m free and I can choose. A ranchera singer? A poet?”
“You decide.”
“Do you know I’ve been invited to be on a reality show?”
“No. What’s that?”
“You have to show the most humiliating aspect of your character. You ask to eat on your knees. You fall down drunk.”
El Salto de Agua. Los Arcos de Belén. José María Izazaga. Ancient domes. Modern ruins. Nezahualcóyotl. La Candelaria.
“You pretend,” Lucha Zapata continued. “Don’t pretend. It’s like living in a Nazi concentration camp. That’s television. An Auschwitz for masochists. You deprive yourself. You animalize yourself. You eat rancid food. Your towels are smeared with shit. Your clothes are infested with bugs. They don’t let you sleep. Ambulance sirens sound day and night.”
She shouted: “They turn night into day!”
The driver didn’t stop driving but turned to look at me.
“What’s wrong? Is the señora all right?”
“It’s nothing. She’s just sad.”
“Ah,” the driver said with a sigh. “She’s going on a trip.”
He whistled some of “Beautiful, adored Mexico, I die far from you.”
I calmed her. I caressed her.
“You know? In the United States they call women a ‘number.’ What’s my number, do you think?”
“I don’t know, Lucha.”
It seemed useless to talk. She, dressed as an aviator, looked very tired, very disillusioned, like Dorothy Malone in 1950s films.
“I don’t know how to reason anymore.”
“Easy, Lucha, take it easy.”
From Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza we drove onto the long avenue that leads to the airport.
“I don’t want to end up a fly in a bar.”
“A what?”
“A barfly, Savior,” she said in English.
The driver whistled, “Let them say I’m sleeping and have them bring me here…”
We arrived. The lines of taxis and private cars made me think that heaven was far too small for so many passengers.
I helped her out.
She adjusted her helmet and goggles.
“Where shall I take you?”
“With women you never know.” She smiled.
“Shall I wait for you to come back?” I said as if I hadn’t heard her.
“Aviation teaches you to be fatalistic,” she concluded, and began walking away alone, hugging herself, and she staggered a little. I moved forward to help her. She turned to look at me with a negative gesture and moved her fingers tenderly, saying goodbye.
She became lost in the crowd at the airport.
And once again, as in one of those dreams that recur and dissolve into oblivion only to be sketched out in the second repetition, my eyes met those of a woman walking behind a young porter whose movements were gallant, as if transporting luggage inside the airport were the ultimate glamorous theatrical act. This woman, modern, young, swift, elegant, with the movements of a panther, an animal of prey, worriedly followed the porter.
I looked at her just as before. Except this time I recognized her.
It was the new Señora Esparza. La Sarape. The hostess at the wake of Nazario Esparza’s first wife. The successor to the mother of our old buddy Errol. But now, when I saw her again, I knew something thanks to the prisoner in San Juan de Aragón, Miguel Aparecido.
The woman was a killer.
It’s possible I vacillated for an instant. It’s possible that when I “vacillated” I lingered too long on the word that among Mexicans acquires the meaning of rowdiness, anarchy, mockery, disorder: vacile (fun), vacilador (carouser), vacilón (spree), a verbal avenue that leads directly to the plaza of “dissipation” and its side streets “dissolute” and “disorderly,” which reduce the world to chaos, ridicule, and senselessness, leaving behind another paraphrase, “hazard,” whose straight meaning is chance or risk but in recurrent Mexican speech is a play on words with double and triple meanings, don’t fuck with my asshole, then don’t be a freeloader, then don’t jerk off so much, will you pass me the pan? pancho’s fucking tonight, don’t fuck around, no ticket no fucking, no fucking way, and fuck you very much, ay Sebastián! done, which tests street ingenuity because in the salons it is dangerous and can lead to violent quarrels, duels, and assassinations.
“Do you see that woman going into the bar? Well, in the old days she couldn’t get enough of my dick.”
“Listen, that’s my wife.”
“Ay, how she’s grown…”
I’ve said all this so survivors can understand why I wasted precious minutes after seeing Nazario Esparza’s second wife following a porter, knowing she had killed Errol’s mother according to the more than reliable version of Miguel Aparecido in the San Juan de Aragón pen and being immediately obliged to stop her by force, drive out any fear the porter would defend his customer (why did something so improbable occur to me?), confront her, if not with facts then with my sheer physical strength (would it be superior to hers?), and take her to the security office in the airport, denounce her, bring justice to my pal Bald Errol and his dear deceased mama, all this crossed my mind at the same time that a mariachi band interposed itself between my vacillation and my haste, six characters dressed as charros, striped trousers and black jacket, silver buttons and six roof-size hats embroidered in waves of gold, hiding faces I didn’t have the slightest desire to see, perhaps fearing I’d recognize the famous Maximiliano Batalla escaped or freed unjustly from the previously mentioned prison and the presumptive killer of the similarly cited Doña Estrella de Esparza…
The criminal Sara P. disappeared among the mariachis who advanced (as if their outfits and hats were not enough) with the resonant outrage of their instruments, far from their historical origins as wedding bands, musique pour le mariage of the occupation troops of the French, Austro-Hungarian, Czech, Belgian, Moravian, Lombard, and Triestine Empire who contracted matrimony with pretty Mexican girls to the sound of the marriage-mariachi and now were passing by, interfering with the justice of my desire to apprehend the presumed or proven criminal, made impossible by the stanzas bellowed out by the musical advance of the band as it sang:
Out walked the torero in
his canary and silver suit,
handsome, anointed, valiant
flaunting his great good looks
to welcome the slim man, smiling though melancholy, with a fresh scar on his cheek, his hair plastered with gum tragacanth, lifted high by the mob of admirers who carried him shouting “torero, torero” while the above-mentioned bullfighter seemed to doubt his own fame, scattering it with an airy wave of his hand as if he were prepared to die the next time, as if he were laughing sadly at the glory given him by the aficionados who carried him and the mariachis who now attempted to play an out-of-tune pasodoble while the bullfighter reluctantly waved and rather than celebrating a victory seemed to be bidding farewell to the world at the opportune time to the uncomprehending astonishment of the flocks of tourists, Gringo, Canadian, German, Scandinavian? tanned, immune to climate changes, who formed into groups of young people and old people who wanted to be young, in beach sandals, T-shirts with the names of hotels, clubs, places of origin, colleges, first, second, third, and no ages confused in the forced gaiety of having enjoyed vacations, coming from a country, the USA, miserly in granting them, fatiguing its workers with the challenge of crossing an interminable continent that extends from sea to shining sea, while the Europeans formed a line as if they were receiving a well-deserved prize and a summer consolation won, without their knowing it, by the French government of the Popular Front and Léon Blum (who was Léon Blum?) in 1936, when paid vacations were first granted.
I made my way through mariachis, tourists, fans and the torero, in an intuitive search for an oasis of peace, since the object of my persecution had disappeared forever in the cloud of rank food and tepid drinks emanating from the transient dining rooms like foul air that had never seen the sun: The immense tunnel of an airport identical to all the other airports on earth exuded sweat, grease, flatulence, evacuations from the strategically placed WCs, but everything made sanitary thanks to large, intermittent gusts of manufactured air with subtle fragrances of mint, camomile, and violet to receive and support the next stampede of schoolgirls going on a collective vacation, not yet identified by their diminutive bikinis but still by their navy blue jumpers, flat shoes, heavy stockings, straw hats with a ribbon, the emblem of the school recorded on their cardigans. They smelled of sweet childish perspiration, of mouths irrigated by bean soup, of teeth tempered by Adams gum. They made an infernal racket because of the clear obligation to show their joy at the prospect of a European vacation, for all their faces said “Paris” and none said “Cacahuamilpa.”
This wave was followed by one of boys in soccer shirts who sang at the top of their lungs incomprehensible slogans, partisan codas older than they were, sicketybooms, bimbombams, rahrahrahs, reminding me of secondary school, the start of my life of connection to Father Filopáter, Bald Errol Esparza, and my soul brother Jericó with no last name: The tumult of young people brought me closer to the past but I was established in the most present of present times when a group of boys grabbed me from behind, stripped off my jacket, and put me in one of the red shirts of the team, school, sect, league, union, alliance, federation, band, clan, tribe, order, brotherhood, guild, club, squad, firm, division, branch, chapter, and common market of the strongest and fastest of nations: Club Youth, which is a kick in the ass and a delirium of the soul, believing you are immortal and knowing you are a badass, in possession of everything and owner of nothing, irrelevance of the passing, celebration of the moment, seminal potency, lost opportunities, rivers in the sand, ocean of the future, sirens that weep: I saw them and I saw myself, all the days of a youth that was dying, harassed, came back to me surrounded by a mariachi band, a melancholy torero, some young girls on vacation, some adolescents in soccer shirts, and a lost woman whose residence, however, I knew. It was enough to go to the house on Pedregal with an arrest warrant arranged by the lawyer Sanginés to have the shameless Nazario Esparza and his consecrated concubine shit volcanic rock.
On the other hand, I was captive to the huge crowds coming in and going out of an airport with only two runways for twenty million locals and who knows how many foreigners. I stopped counting. The useless anarchy defeated me. The secret tremor of self-destruction. The chaos that appeared with no exit, drowning me in its mere existence.
I wanted to urinate.
I went into the strategic bathroom, asking myself How did I get here?
I produced my usual kidney beer.
I washed my hands.
I looked in the mirror.
Was it me?
Behind me, someone was sitting on the toilet.
He hadn’t closed the door.
His trousers eddied around his ankles.
His shirt covered his noble parts.
I looked at his face reflected in the mirror.
He looked at me with great melancholy.
It was the face of a sad clown.
He looked at me asking me without speaking: How do we respond to a senseless world?
It was the voice of a sick clown.
An undulating light fell on his head.
I felt ill.
I wanted to throw up.
I made a mistake.
I opened the door of a closet instead of the door to a stall.
I was stunned.
In the closet, a dark, good-looking young man, his pants around his ankles as if he were going to take a shit, was fucking a woman with her skirt bunched around her waist and her panties entangled in the high heels of her shoes.
She looked at me with a strange start, as if she were expecting to be caught and liked the idea of a third person seeing her fornicate.
She was a modern woman, young, with the attitude of an animal of prey, but she no longer had the elegance I had once attributed to her.
I looked at her buttock. She had a bee tattooed on it.
I took off the soccer club’s red shirt.
WHEN WE ENTERED the house on Pedregal de San Angel together-Errol, Jericó, and I-we didn’t know what awaited us.
Sara was detained there. I had the advantage over Jericó of having seen the bee on her buttock. I said nothing to him because at that moment there was a certain tension between us. And besides, “circumstances” push us to keep some secrets without really distrusting each other. I abandoned the house on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca, uninhabitable without the life I had shared with Lucha Zapata. I took the liberty of going and leaving the door open, as if chance would be the next inhabitant of the modest little house of the woman who had filled me with so much passion. Passion becomes diseased if it counts only on an empty house for commemoration, as if past love were a phantom. I decided that the intensity of my relationship with Lucha required a final act that would not be like a stage curtain. She had left. I was going. The house would remain open, as if summoning a new couple. As if the destiny of our “nest” was to call to future birds.
I don’t know. Only when she left did I realize how much I needed her, how much I loved her. There was a certain cynical disloyalty in this feeling, since, with admitted ingenuousness, I had already decided to fall in love with the svelte, elegant Asunta Jordán. What I couldn’t foresee is that the trio of women who concerned me would eventually join another ghost from a past in some sense remote, for between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five a galaxy intervenes.
“Operation Sara”-for it was an entire operation-implied deciding first between returning to the prison to speak with Miguel Aparecido so he could enlighten me, or consulting with the lawyer Sanginés so he could orient me, or looking for Errol in some cabaret in the center of the city, or consulting with Jericó since in our erotic life we had shared the whore with the bee on her buttock.
This last proposition was the most difficult. I’ve already recounted how my life with Lucha Zapata had moved me away from Jericó and the apartment on Calle de Praga. The situation seemed to suit both of us on the basis of this premise: Jericó didn’t ask me about my constant absences and I didn’t inquire into his activities when he returned to Mexico. Except now my absences had become presences. Without the house on the Cerrada (without Lucha), I returned to my normal life (in the apartment on Praga). Except now I was living again with a Jericó who had taken advantage of my absence to envelop his presence in a mystery that daily life threatened to dispel.
To the preceding I should add that I multiplied my activities as an employee of Max Monroy’s company in Santa Fe and as a law clerk obliged to write a thesis on Machiavelli, while Jericó had entered the presidential residence of Los Pinos, where the president himself, in an act that could appear to me as unusual or irrelevant, had given my friend-he told me about it without moving a muscle in his face-the responsibility of organizing something like festivals, commemorations, and national entertainments for a “depoliticized” youth. Was it important? Was it trivial? As Jericó didn’t ask about my activities, I didn’t look into his. The fact is that the arrest of Nazario Esparza’s second wife obliged us to locate our old comrade the formerly bald Errol who, according to the presumptive criminal, played drums in a dive in the oldest section of the city.
His having told me that he had gone into the president’s office and received the assignment placed me in a circumstance of disloyalty. Jericó trusted me. And what was I going to tell him? My relationship with Lucha was mine alone, it was something almost sacred, it couldn’t be talked about by me or pawed over by other people, not even my fraternal friend Jericó. Was I betraying him with my secret? Should I open up to him? Was I inviting him to betray me as well? In fact, Jericó had told me he was collaborating at Los Pinos, something I already knew because Sanginés had told us so, and he already knew I was working for Max Monroy. Jericó didn’t know about Lucha Zapata. Now he didn’t know about Asunta Jordán. I had two advantages over him in the persons of two women. Was I the disloyal partner in our old friendship? Or was he not telling me more than I knew about or more than I was hiding from him?
With this kind of suspicion I realized, thanks to small signs (attitudes, greetings, goodbyes, calculations that raised their heads then disappeared like small snakes in our shared domestic life), that our friendship was being muddied and I sincerely lamented it: Jericó was half of my life and his companionship was a way of expunging myself from my own past…
The incident in the airport and my decision to report the woman and the porter fornicating so happily in the men’s bathroom in reality created the opportunity for me to reconcile with Jericó and avoid a break, and for the two of us together to reinitiate a search that meant, in the long run, reknotting a lasso, tying up a thread before it broke, and coming together at the point where we had left the story: the burial of Señora Esparza and Errol’s truncated destiny.
“Where is Nazario Esparza?” was Don Antonio Sanginés’s first and logical question when we told him about a case whose precedents he knew better than we did and possibly its consequences as well.
Although he didn’t answer his own question, he did supply us with some antecedents. Sanginés had handled several matters for Esparza, especially the testamentary situation caused by the demise of Doña Estrellita, who had brought her own fortune to a marriage with a division of property and an inheritance provision between the surviving spouses, while the matrimonial contract with Señorita Sara Pérez Ubico provided for community property, that is, upon Don Nazario’s death, his second wife would come into possession of two fortunes: her husband’s and Doña Estrellita’s.
“Don Nazario should take good care of himself,” Sanginés said with a sigh, interlacing his fingers in front of his chin.
“The Mariachi Batalla is a killer,” Miguel Aparecido told me in prison. “I don’t know who put him in here and why I wasn’t able to stop him.”
He too carried his hands to his lips and from there to his nose.
“I can almost always smell out guys like that because of my network of informants, and then I can have them thrown out of here. I don’t know how this one got away from me. Something didn’t work right.” Miguel Aparecido frowned. “What? Who? How?”
“Thrown out?” I remarked as if I suspected an impulse natural in the person I was studying for my thesis on Machiavelli.
“You understand me,” Miguel Aparecido said with a sinister subtext. “The fact is that when he’s free, Maximiliano Batalla can commit any excess. I already told you about his antecedents.”
“What makes you think he acted in concert with Sara P.?”
“Who’s the porter she was fucking?”
Who was the porter?
This was the least of the mysteries. It took Sanginés no time to learn that the false porter in the airport was Maximiliano Batalla: an opportune disguise that my discovery linked to Don Nazario Esparza’s dishonest wife, implicated for that reason in Maxi’s crimes.
Like a Pandora’s box, the sum of events opened to reveal one mystery after another. Who had gotten Maximiliano Batalla out of prison? What, besides sex, joined Nazario’s wife to the Mariachi Batalla? Were they accomplices? If so, in what, and why, and to what end?
These were the hypotheses spread before me by the legalistic mind of Antonio Sanginés, pursuing in an unexpected way my juridical education, overly practical until then, which implied, first of all, recovering our friend Errol Esparza and arriving together, as I announced at the beginning of this chapter, at his family’s house in Pedregal de San Angel.
IN THE MEANTIME, based on the presumption of importance that is also a part of being young and of a certain natural impatience to know more, I suggested to my apparent boss and secret love, Asunta Jordán, that she talk to me about the great man himself, Max Monroy, without ever revealing-this was tacit proof of my discretion and the growing conviction that some things should not be known-that I had spoken to the tycoon’s mother in the cemetery where the sainted señora lay buried.
“I understood about his businesses,” I said to her one morning. “You don’t need to expand on that. You can stop now.”
She laughed. “You have no idea how Max Monroy expands.”
“Tell me.”
“From the beginning?”
“Why not?”
I knew Asunta was going to tell me what I already knew, boring me to death. But what is love for a woman but an obsession independent of the foolishness she may repeat like a broken record? I was resigned.
Asunta told me in English that Max Monroy was not a “self-made man” (I reflected on the fact that one does not talk about modern business without introducing Anglo-Saxonisms) but the heir to one volatile fortune and another durable one. His father, the general, had “carranzaed,” as it was called in the time of official corruption in the era of revolutionary combat under the command of the chief executive Venustiano Carranza: He had stolen. But that was like stealing chickens in a henhouse without touching the rooster or disputing his control. A little ranch here, a little house there, a tame flock here, a rough herd there, since things were easy to obtain and just as easy to lose. On the other hand, Max’s mother had a crystal ball and was always ahead of events. Always a step or two ahead of the law and the government, she was on good terms with the second and consolidated the first: communications, real estate, industries, banks, credit, construction companies, until she exhausted the possibilities of the small Mexican industrial revolution and the concomitant role of intermediary to invent companies out of nothing, receiving funds by using different names, and avoiding final solutions. Max Monroy’s career has been an example of fluidity, Asunta added. He doesn’t marry anything forever. He observes what’s coming down the pike. He’s ahead of everybody. He excludes no one. He’s not a monopolist. On the contrary, he believes monopoly is the disease that kills capitalist development. This, says Max, is what beginning capitalists don’t understand: They think they’ve invented hot water though they’re often second generation and their parents are the ones who boiled it.
“Take a look at the list of Max Monroy’s businesses, Josué. You’ll see he hasn’t monopolized anything. But he has moved everything forward.”
He believes final solutions are almost always bad. They only postpone and deceive. On the other hand, partial solutions are much better. Among other reasons, because they don’t pretend to be final.
“Didn’t he ever take sides?”
“No. He told me: ‘Asunta, life isn’t a matter of sides or chronology. It’s a question of knowing what forces are at play at any given moment. Good or bad. Knowing how to resist them, accept them, channel them.’
“ ‘Channel them, Max?’
“ ‘As a conclusion it’s desirable. But no matter how much will and foresight you bring to an issue, dear lady, chance always plays a hand. Being prepared for the unexpected, welcoming fortune-good or bad-and inviting her to dinner, like Don Juan with the Comendador, that-’
“ ‘Don Juan went to hell, Max.’
“ ‘Who’s to say he didn’t arrive in hell and transform it to his image and likeness?’
“ ‘Perhaps he already was living his own hell in the world.’
“ ‘It’s possible. People live, or invent, their heavens and hells on earth.’ ”
“ ‘Thy Heaven Doors are my Hell Gates,’ wrote William Blake,” I recited, and added, pretentiously: “It’s poetry.”
I winked at Asunta and immediately regretted it. She looked at me gravely. How did you fight this bull? Because she was a bull, not a cow. Or was she a clever ram that is a ewe?
“I don’t believe Max Monroy reads poetry. But he knows very well the gates of heaven and the walls of hell in the world of business.”
I let Asunta know I was prepared to learn.
“ ‘The position of the stars is relative,’ Max always tells me, and I think that’s why he’s never said ‘Do this,’ but only ‘It would be better if…’ ”
“Then you don’t feel inferior or subject to him, like a simple employee of Max Monroy?”
If Asunta was offended by my words, she didn’t show it. If she intended to be offended, she smiled back at me.
“I owe everything to Max Monroy.”
She looked at me in a forbidding manner. I mean: Her eyes told me Go no further. Stop there. Still, I detected something in them that asked me to postpone, only postpone, the matter. She moved her body in a way that let me know her spirit’s willingness to answer my questions, she was asking only for time, time for us to know each other better, to become more intimate… That’s what I wanted to believe.
I mean: That’s what I read in her posture, in her way of moving, turning away from me, looking at me out of the corner of her eye, sketching a sad smile that would give promise and grace to a bygone, serious tale.
“The interesting thing about Max Monroy is that even though he could have established himself at the top from the very beginning, he preferred to go step by step, almost like an apprentice to the guild of finance. He knew the danger facing him was to sit at a table prepared ahead of time, when the butler named Destiny orders: Eat.”
Did Asunta smile?
“Instead, he went out to hunt the stag, butchered it himself, took out the innards, cooked the meat, served it, ate it, and placed the horns over the fireplace in the dining room. As if none of it really mattered.”
Asunta said this with a kind of administrative sincerity that irritated me a good deal. As if her admiration for another man, even though he was her boss and she “owed him everything,” took away from me the position, perhaps a small one, that I wanted to obtain.
“Doesn’t Max Monroy ever make mistakes?” I asked, very stupidly.
“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the truth. It isn’t that he makes or doesn’t make mistakes. Max Monroy knows how to escape the demands of the moment and see farther than other people.”
“He’s perfect,” I remarked, marinating my own attraction to Asunta in more and more stupidities.
She didn’t take offense. She didn’t even doubt my intentions, irritating me even further. Did this woman consider me incapable of an insult?
“He escapes the exigencies of the moment. He moves forward. You understand that, don’t you?” she asked, and I realized that with her question she was telling me she knew what I was attempting and, incidentally, didn’t care. Max Monroy anticipates.
Asunta looked at me seriously.
“He moves ahead of the times.”
“And what happens if you change over time?”
“You’re defeated, Josué. Time defeats you.”
“ ‘Think, Asunta, of the speed of things. Just in my lifetime Mexico has moved from being an agricultural country to an industrialized one. Once the cycles were very slow. A cycle of centuries (Max likes alliterations, Josué) for the agricultural country. A dozen decades for the industrialized one. And now, Asunta, now…’ ”
An exceptional gesture: Max Monroy slams his fist into the open palm of his other hand.
“ ‘And now, Asunta, a time of speed, a global race without borders, without flags, without nations, to the world of technology and information. China, Japan, even India, even Russia…’-he didn’t mention the United States, it would have been redundant-‘The global world is a techno-informational world, and whoever doesn’t get on the train in time will have to walk barefoot and arrive at his destination late.’ ”
“Or not travel,” I commented.
“Or at least buy a pair of huaraches,” she said with a smile.
“ ‘Asunta, there are things I don’t say but that you know. Understand them and we’ll get along very well. Let’s work together. In Mexico, in all of Latin America, we mistake rhetoric for reality. Progress, democracy, justice. It’s enough for us to say them to believe they’re true. That’s why we go from failure to failure. We indicate a goal for Mexico, Brazil, Argentina… We convince ourselves that with words, favorable laws, the ribbon cut, and immediate forgetfulness we’ve achieved what we said we wanted… We say words that mock reality. In the end, reality mocks our words.’ ”
“Max Monroy wins out over reality?”
“No, he anticipates reality. He admits no pretexts.”
“Only texts,” I stated clearly.
“What he doesn’t admit is the madness of the simulations our governments and some entrepreneurs are so fond of.”
Asunta was telling me that Max Monroy was everything Max Monroy distanced himself from, and what he distanced himself from was the illusion and daily practice of Latin American politics.
“He moves ahead of his times,” the woman I desired said with irritating admiration.
“His times never defeat him?”
“How?” she said with feigned surprise. “Just watch my lips. Let’s see, with what? Please, just tell me that.”
With old age, I said, with death, I said, with rage, more magnetized by the desire to love Asunta than by the respect I owed Antigua Concepción, my radical interlocutor, that is, the root of my possible wisdom, my fortune, my destiny.
And in your mind, boy, do you think you can visit my grave with impunity?
“No, Señora, I don’t think that, forgive me.”
Then respect my son and don’t rush things, asshole.
Was I the secret emissary of Antigua Concepción in the world her son Max inherited and strengthened? I asked myself about my part in this soap opera, and what disturbed me most was my carnal desire for a woman who bored me: Asunta Jordán.
I’M GOING TO let Sara Pérez speak, Sara P., Nazario Esparza’s second wife. I confess her vocabulary offends me, though less than the facts the words ostentatiously display. Ostentatious: Sara P. takes pride in her virtues: The ones that stand out are vulgarity, cynicism, ignorance, perhaps black humor, possibly a hidden desire for seduction, I don’t know…
First of all, I’ll correct my previous affirmation. Jericó begged off accompanying us to the Esparzas’ house. “I don’t have time” was the message he sent to Sanginés and me. “The president’s office is very demanding. Besides, I don’t know what I can contribute… Sorry.”
We couldn’t find Errol. Sanginés sent a real expeditionary force to all the old nightclubs in the city and to the new ones in outlying neighborhoods, the tony ones and the dives: Our friend couldn’t be found anywhere, he had vanished, the city was very large, the country larger still, the borders porous. Errol could have been in any city in the United States or Guatemala. You’d have to be a new Cabeza de Vaca to go out and find him. And in our century there was no El Dorado as there had been in the sixteenth, except for the name of some casino in Las Vegas.
In short: Only Sanginés and I showed up, escorted by the police and the court secretaries to hear Sara Pérez de Esparza’s statement. She was seated on a kind of throne placed in the center of the reception room that I remembered in another time, presided over by the timid chastity of Esparza’s first wife, Errol’s mother, and now by the female I could not help associating, in retrospect, with an act of coarse sexuality in the closet of a men’s room in the Benito Juárez International Airport; with a hurried walk, preceded by a porter and dressed like Judith on her way to Bethulia, “for a chat,” along the immense, crowded corridors of that airport; with a sorrowful day in memory of her predecessor Doña Estrellita; with another walk through the airport on the day I ran into Lucha Zapata for the first time; and finally, with the night on which Jericó and I fucked this same woman in La Hetara’s brothel.
But back then she wore a veil and I could identify her only by the bee tattooed on her buttock, which I saw again during the absurd scene in the airport bathroom.
Now, Sara Pérez de Esparza was seated on her semi-Gothic and pseudo-Versaillesque throne, appropriate to her strange mixture of omnivorous tastes, for I was beginning to think everything could be found in this woman, the worst and the best, the most vulgar and the most refined, the most desirable and the most repugnant, without passing through any nuance of common sense. Seated on her throne, scratching at her forearms with silvered nails as long as scimitars, dressed like a star in La Dolce Vita in 1960s palazzo pajamas, black and gold with dolphins swimming between her bosom and her back, between her knee and her coccyx: the strangely out-of-fashion outfit with a loose shirt to generously display her breasts, and wide sailor’s pants. Barefoot, though she had rings on four toes of each foot, a brilliant little jewel encrusted in each small toe, and several slave bands around her ankles, matching the entire metallic orchestra sounding at her wrists and competing with the sepulchral silence of her heavy rings and everything contrasting with the bareness of her neck, as if Sara wanted nothing to distract from the attention due her décolletage, the pride she took in her tits, boobs, melons, jugs, knockers, who knows what she herself called those enormous, immobile tubercles that peeked out, fixed like a double gravestone where lay buried the natural sensuality of this artificial being, similar to a mechanical doll that had to be wound up each morning with a gold key: Sara P. had, mounted on top of her corporeal extravaganza, a relatively small head made larger by the curls of blond hair that ascended like mountain ranges to a smooth forehead, lifted for its crown of black pearls, giving the terrifying impression that the jewels were eating her hair, all of it to sanctify a rigid, tightened face, beautiful in a vulgar, obvious way, like a farewell sunset in the movies, like a garage calendar, like the picture of a soldier, a cabdriver, a mechanic, or a teenage anarchist.
The firm gaze fixed, the full mouth like a paralyzed cherry. The uncontrollable nose nervous. Ears buried by the heavy weight of tri-colored earrings: strange, obvious, unpleasant pendants in the colors of the national flag. For the first time I saw her up close, in detail.
She was a camouflaged woman. Smells. Wrinkles. Laughter. Everything was controlled, rigid, remade as if by enchantment.
She spoke, and from the beginning I sensed her words were at once the first and final ones of her life. Both a baptismal and sepulchral discourse.
Doña Hetara, the madam of the bordello on Durango, ministered to the tastes of her clients and the fortunes of her girls. She wasn’t one of those brothel owners who simply run a business with whores. Much abused, Doña Hetara. Lots of bluster. Nothing of the fool about her. She would always say: Di-ver-si-fy. And so she managed not only a whorehouse but a nuns’ school where Doña Hetara, who was very charitable, sent the old hookers to dress as religious and pretend to educate the young hookers who were looking for husbands. Because basically there is no whore who does not aspire to matrimony. It infuriates them that men don’t call them “women” but “broads.” Being a “broad” is being a whore, trash, tamale wrapper, mole pot. Being a “woman” is being a girlfriend who can become a wife and mother.
After a period of time to toughen her up in the brothel on Calle de Durango, Sara was sent to the aforementioned nuns’ school to be refined, and there Don Nazario Esparza met her, for he was always on the lookout for new sensations and fresh meat for his “insatiable appetite” or, in other words, what good were all the furniture stores, hotels, movie houses, and commercial centers, what good were beds if he couldn’t use them to have fun with a good “broad”?
“Don’t trouble yourself, Don Nazario. Search no further, I’ll take care of everything. Don’t torture yourself. Take it slow. Buy into the idea that you’re still a great lover. You’re in great shape, that’s the truth. A real cocksman.”
And so the millionaire was seduced by the convent girl Sarita, who lived in a monastery where her parents had abandoned her.
“They abandoned her, Señora?”
“Let’s say they made a present of her.”
“Haven’t they seen her again?”
“Don’t worry, Don Nazario. We demanded a tidy sum for accepting the present and didn’t let them see her again. Sarita is all alone. She’ll have only you, Señor.”
According to what he himself said and his son Errol told us.
You and a motley band of mariachis, thieves, bums, crazies, drug addicts, pimps, bongo players, and all those she hadn’t met but imagined, for more men passed through her head than there were in an army, those who had fucked her and those who would have fucked her if they had known the tricks lodged in the well-disposed body of Sara P. Like a beautiful butterfly that could turn into a caterpillar of pleasure, imitate to perfection the manners of the upper class, and engage in all the wicked lower-class vices. I saw her as a funereal hostess on the day of Doña Estrellita’s obsequies, she was refined but sham refined, something was out of place in her gestures, her dress, above all in the way she gave orders and treated the servants, the arrogant contempt, the lack of courtesy, the essential bad upbringing of Sara P. exposed with a disdain that assimilated her into what the stupid woman believed she despised.
Of course Sara came to the mansion on Pedregal with her virginity intact, and Don Nazario enjoyed the privilege of deflowering her. She was a Scotch tape virgin, astutely fabricated by the false nuns of the dissolute convent, who restored maidenheads as easily as they cooked mole. How could Don Nazario know? He hadn’t fornicated with a virgin in his whole damn life except for the chaste but narrow Señora Estrellita, who had a psychic padlock between her legs, and since Sarita gave him that unheard-of pleasure, from then on he became a slave to his wife the false nun. Nazario, who was a Roman emperor accustomed to tossing coins into the crowd. Nazario, who demanded to be the center of attention. Nazario of the choleric temperament and blind rage. Transformed into a poodle, a lapdog, a plaything of the whorish, sensual, voracious, impassive Sarita: the pontiff vanquished by the unaccustomed lechery of the false priestess who gradually bared her soul, provoked lust, vomited filthy words, demanded animal positions, Make me the lioness, Nazario, make me what all men like, tiger, not just you, enjoy my cunt, I want to enjoy it, I want everybody to enjoy it, the mariachi, the porter, the cabdriver, the potter: Shape me, Nazario, like I was your flowerpot.
Did this repel Don Nazario? Did he care when she said she was giving him what everybody liked, not just her husband? She laughed at him, telling him about sexual experiences that she said were only imaginary and now she was demanding them of the increasingly dazed, distracted old man, bewildered by so much excitation, so much novelty, not realizing that she, even in their closest intimacy, saw him from a distance, scornfully, as if she were reading him, as if he were the day before yesterday’s newspaper or an advertisement on the Periférico. But she didn’t realize she wasn’t humiliating him. She merely excited him more and more, fired his imagination. Esparza saw Sara in every conceivable position, imagined her fornicating with other men, enjoyed this vicarious sex more and more.
She hated him-she says-but he held her as if she were a dog. Eventually he desired his penis to be always inside her. She felt like castrating him. She told him that the more lovers who enjoyed her, the more semen he’d have stored up inside. Imagine, Nazario, imagine me fucking men you’ve never met.
“I’m just telling you. Whores: You take them by the ass, they’re the cheapest. If they sit on top of the man, they’re more expensive.”
Except, at the same time, her marriage to the ridiculous old man made her more and more afraid. She started seeing herself as she wasn’t, greedy, uncultured, spectral. She fervently desired the death of the man who loved, her, desired her, and at the same time kept her cornered by luxury and ambition.
That was when Nazario did her the favor of becoming paralyzed following an energetic sixty-nine. The old man became overly excited and was left half-rigid with a hemiplegia that kept him from speaking beyond a milky-rice mewling. Then she felt again the temptation to castrate him and even put his flaccid penis in his mouth. But she had a better idea. Gradually she scaled a policy of humiliations that began by parading bare-breasted in front of the paralyzed man. Then confused him by walking past his idiot’s gaze, dressed in mourning one day, for a cocktail party the next, finally as a nurse, taking him out in the wheelchair to the Pedregal courtyard without shade so he’d roast a little, hours and hours in the sun to see if he dies of sunstroke, and Nazario Esparza encased in wool pajamas and a plaid bathrobe, without shoes, trying to avoid the direct gaze of the sun and observe how his yellowish toenails were growing…
Alone? Sara laughed a long while, at times with the manners of a modest señorita, at other times with whorish guffaws, what the hell, I brought into the house all the men I only mentioned before, mariachis, bums, my buddies the towel boys from the brothel who brought me warm cloths after lovemaking, bongo players who played tropical music while I danced for the rigid old man, pimps who did everything for him, cooked and served the food. They took the useless old thing out in the midday sun of the damn central plain, like a roast pig, though she pampered him too, put him in the bed and toyed with him, said into his ear Go on, do the nasty to me, whispered Mummies are so tender, and if he stretched out his trembling fingers she slapped him and said Quiet, poison and then stripped and made love with the Mariachi before the astonished, desperate, illogical gaze of Nazario Esparza, who signaled wildly for her to get into bed with him.
“In your bed, Nazario? In your bed all you do is piss.”
It culminated, she recounts, with what she calls “everybody gets to fuck her.” The entire cast of servants and parasites who gathered in the house in Pedregal staged the collective violation of Sara P. in front of Esparza. She exaggerated her poses, her screams of pleasure, her orders to action, she even exaggerated the fakery with orgasms that echoed on the mummified face of Nazario Esparza like a mirage of life, a lost oasis of power, a desert resembling death.
Which came to him, she declared, in the middle of the last staged orgy. It was verified by the bongo player, who could gauge from a distance the beats of the tropical world. It was testified to by the pachuco who searched men who died suddenly in houses of prostitution. Nobody saw him die. Though the Mariachi, who was embracing Sara at the time, says he heard, as in a song of farewell, the words of “The Ship of Gold”:
I’m leaving now… I’ve come just to say goodbye.
Goodbye woman… Goodbye, forever goodbye.
Is it true, or is it poetry?
Where was he buried? asked Sanginés, on whose face a displeasure appeared that contrasted, I must admit, with my own fascination: the rocambolesque, surreal, indescribable tale of this woman stripped of any moral notion, enamored of her mere presence on earth, possessed of incalculable vanity, enveloped in an idiotic glory, with no more reality than that of her actions with no connection to one another, which only form a chain of servitudes that escape the individual’s consciousness, all of it, in that instant, closed a stage of my youth that began in the brothel on Calle de Durango when together with Jericó we enjoyed the female with the bee tattooed on her buttock, and ended now, with the female seated on a prop throne, sex painted on her face so she would have a mouth and speak.
I THOUGHT, OVER the next few days, that my relationships with women never really concluded, they ended abruptly and lacked something that at my age was beginning to intrude as a necessity. Duration. A lasting relationship.
In preparatory school Jericó and I had read Bergson and because of that reading, the subject of duration reappeared at times in our conversations. Bergson makes a very clear distinction between duration we can measure and another kind that can’t be captured with dates because it corresponds to the intimate flow of existence. What we have lived is indivisible. It contains the past as memory and announces the future as desire. But it is not past or future separate from the moment. Consequently each moment is new though each moment is the past of memory and longing for the future.
(One understands why Bergson’s philosophy was the weapon of intellectuals at the Ateneo de la Juventud-José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Caso-against the Comtean Positivism that had been transformed into the ideological mask of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship: Everything is justified if in the end there is progress. At the Palace of Mining in Mexico City, a modern goddess, with the brilliance and opacity of leaded windows, is proclaimed a divinity of industry and commerce. She was the courtesan of the dictatorship.)
What does this movement of the moment contain that embraces what we were and what we will be? On the one hand, instinct. On the other, intelligence. People confronted by the creative act, confronted by Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Beethoven or Bach, Shakespeare or Cervantes, speak of inspiration. Wilde said that creation is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. In other words, creating supposes work, and both Jericó and I believe the production of frustrated talents in Latin America is as great as the production of bananas because our geniuses are waiting for inspiration and wear out chairs waiting for it in cantinas and cafés. Ten percent, however, wait patiently beside the ninety that can appear, why not, in a bar or café, though it is better received in a room as empty as possible, with a pen, a typewriter, or a computer close at hand and a concentrated effort that otherwise can be made in an airplane, at a hotel, or on a beach. The text admits no pre-text.
Intention and intelligence. I believe my friend and I, in a long relationship begun in the schoolyard of a religious academy, did not need to pronounce those words to comprehend and live them. They weren’t the only basis of our understanding, affirmed the day I went to live with him on Calle de Praga. Today, however, two or three days after hearing the damned (or was she blessed in her compassion?) Sara Pérez de Esparza, Jericó came into our shared apartment and said point-blank that the time had come for us to live apart.
I didn’t change my expression. “I’ll leave today.”
Jericó had the grace to lower his head. “No. I’m the one who’s leaving. You stay here. It’s just”-he looked up-“I’ll be traveling a lot around the country.”
“And?”
“And I’ll be receiving all kinds of visitors.”
“You have an office.”
“You understand what I’m saying.”
I didn’t want to linger over the obvious and think that Jericó needed to move to have greater erotic freedom. Perhaps he’d already had it while I was devoted to Lucha Zapata and now, without her, the promise of my constant presence had cost him a couple of “romances.”
I realized there was something more when Jericó said abruptly, “Nothing obliges me to live against myself.”
“Of course not,” I agreed with gravity.
“Against my own nature.”
It didn’t even occur to me that my friend was going to reveal homosexual inclinations. Images return to my memory of the shared shower at school and, more provocatively, our eroticism with the woman who had the posterior bee. I also recalled what he said when he returned from his years of study in Europe, a trip planned with as much mystery as his return, a mystery deepened by a certain falsity I intuited-I didn’t know, I only intuited-in the Parisian references of a young man who didn’t know French argot but did use American slang, as he did now:
“Look, as Justin Timberlake sings: ‘Daddy’s on a mission to please.’ Don’t be offended.”
“Of course not, Jericó. You and I have had the intelligence never to contradict each other, knowing that each of us has his own ideas.”
“And his own life,” my friend said exultantly.
I said that was true and looked at him without any expression, asking him rhetorically: “His own nature?”
I didn’t say it trying to trap him, or with ill will, or deceitfully, but really wanting him to explain to me what “his own nature” was.
“We’re not the same,” he said in response to my tacit question. “The world changes and we change along with it. Do you remember what I said, right here, when I came back to Mexico? I asked you then, What do we have? A name, an occupation, status? Or are we a wasteland? A garbage dump of what might have been? A canceled register of debits and credits? Not even the bottom of the stewpot?”
I stopped him with a movement of my hand. “Take a breath, please.”
“We need a position, Josué. We can’t give as our occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ ”
“We can turn into young old men, like some musicians, Compay Segundo or the Rolling Stones, why not? didn’t I warn you?”
“Don’t joke around. I’m serious. The time has come for us to apply ourselves to action. We have to act.”
“Even though we betray our ideas?” I said with no mean-spirited intention.
He didn’t take it badly. “Adapting ourselves to reality. Reality is going to demand things in line with our talents though opposed to our ideals.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do, I’m going to act in accordance with necessity and try, as far as possible, to maintain my ideals. What do you think?”
“And if your ideals are bad ones?”
“I’ll be a politician, Josué. I’ll try to make them less bad.”
I smiled and told my friend we really were faithful to our Catholic education and the morality of the lesser evil when it’s necessary to choose between two demons. Were we Jesuits?
“And besides, the Jesuit goes where the Pope orders him to, without protest, without delay.”
“But that order was to save souls,” I said with the irony his words provoked in me.
“And souls aren’t saved passively,” he replied with conviction. “You must have absolute faith in what you’re doing. Your ends must be clear. Your actions, overpowering. A country isn’t built without implacable acts. In Mexico we’ve lived too long on compromise. Compromise only delays action. Compromise is wishy-washy.”
He was agitated, and I looked at him with distress, almost out of the corner of my eye.
He said that in every society there are the dominant and the dominated. The unbearable thing is not this but when the dominant don’t know how to dominate, abandoning the dominated to a fatal or vegetative existence.
“One must dominate to improve everyone, Josué. Everyone. Do you agree?”
Smiling, I accused him of elitism. He answered that elites were indispensable. But it was necessary to unite them with the masses.
“A more mass-oriented elite,” Jericó declared, moving like a caged animal around a place, ours until then, that he apparently was transforming now into a prison ready to be abandoned. “Do you think you’re immortal?” he asked.
I laughed. “Not at all.”
He waved his finger in my face. “Don’t lie. When we’re young we all think we’re immortal. That’s why we do what we do. We don’t judge. We invent. We don’t give or take advice. We do two things: We don’t accept what’s already been done. We renovate.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
Me too-I said to myself-I think I’m going to live forever, I feel it in my soul though my head tells me otherwise.
“Do you think it’s legitimate for the old to control everything, power, money, obedience? Do you?”
“Ask me that on the day I become old.” I tried to be amiable with a friend whose belligerent face, so impassioned it changed color, distanced him from me by the minute.
Jericó realized I was looking at him and judging him. He tried to calm down. He made a sacrilegious joke.
“If you believe in the Immaculate Conception, why not believe in the Maculate Conception?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, a little shocked in spite of myself.
“Nothing, pal. Only that life offers us a million possibilities on every corner. Or rather, on every plaza.”
His eyes were shining. He said to imagine a circular plaza-
“A rond-point?” I asked deliberately.
“Yes, a circle out of which, say, four or six avenues emerge-”
“Like the Place de l’Etoile in Paris.”
“Ecole,” he said enthusiastically. “The point is, which of the six avenues are you going to take? Because when you choose one, it’s as if you’ve sacrificed the other five. And how do you know you’ve made the right choice?”
“You don’t know,” I murmured. “Except at the end of the avenue.”
“And the bad thing is you can’t go back to the starting point.”
“To the original plaza. La Concorde,” I said with a smile and, unintentionally, with irony.
He kept looking at me. With affection. With defiance. With an unspoken plea: Understand me. Love me. And if you love and understand me, don’t try to find out any more.
There was a silence. Then Jericó began to pack his things and the conversation resumed its usual colloquial tone. I helped him pack. He told me to keep his records. And his books? Those too. But then he looked at me in a strange way I didn’t understand. The books were mine. And him, what was he going to read from now on?
“Let’s be baroque,” he said with a laugh, shrugging his shoulders, as if that definition would transform the history of Mexico and the Mexicans into chicken soup.
“Or let’s be daring,” I said. “Why not?”
“Why not?” he repeated with a light laugh. “Life is getting away from us.”
“And to hell with the consequences.” I considered the unpleasant scene to be over. I touched my friend’s shoulder.
I offered to help him carry down the two suitcases.
He refused.
I PROPOSED SHOWING indifference to beauty, health, and fortune. I wanted to transform my indifference into something distant from vice and virtue. I was afraid to fall into solitude, suicide, or the law. I wanted, in short, to avoid the passions, considering them a sickness of the soul.
The deafening failure of these, my new intentions (my doubt), had to do with the mere presence of Asunta Jordán. From nine to two, from six to nine, from the afternoon to midnight, I was never far from her during my period of initiation in the offices of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the Santa Fe district. The building itself consisted of twelve floors for work and another two for the residence of the president of the enterprise, Max Monroy, in addition to a flat roof for the helicopter.
“And you?” I asked Asunta with a mixture of boldness and stupidity. “What floor do you live on?”
She looked at me with her eyes of an overcast sea.
“Repeat what you just said,” she ordered.
“Why?” I said, more fool me.
“So you’ll realize your stupidity.”
I admitted it. This woman, with whom I had fallen in love, was educating me. She led me through the twelve permitted floors, from the entrance on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, greeting the guards, the concierge, the elevator operators, and from there to the second, third, and fourth floors, where female secretaries had abandoned typing and stenography for the tape recorder and the computer, where male secretaries signed or initialed correspondence with a flourish and also dictated it, where file clerks transferred the old, dusty correspondence of a company founded by Max Monroy’s mother (my secret interlocutor in a nameless graveyard) almost ninety years ago onto tapes, diskettes, and now iPods, blogs, memory sticks, USB drives, external disks, and from there to the fifth floor, where an army of accountants was at work, to the sixth, offices of the lawyers in the service of the enterprise, to the seventh, from which Max Monroy’s cultural concerns-opera, ballet, art editions-radiated outward, to the eighth, a space dedicated to invention, to the ninth and tenth, the floors where practical ideas were devised for modern technologies.
On the eleventh floor I worked with Asunta Jordán and an entire executive army, one floor below the thirteenth and fourteenth floors inhabited, as far as my imagination could tell, by Bluebeard and his disposable women.
Was Asunta one of them?
“You’re not a seminarian or a tutor,” she said as if she could sense in me a hero of a nineteenth-century novel as embodied by Gérard Philipe. “You’re not an ordinary run-of-the-mill employee because you were sent here by Licenciado Sanginés, whom Max Monroy loves and respects. And you’re not socially inferior, though you’re not actually socially superior either.”
She looked me over from head to toe.
“You have to dress better. And something else, Josué. It’s better not to have been born than to be ill bred, do you understand? Society rewards good manners. Appearances. Speaking well. Good form. Form is part of our power, even if we’re surrounded by fools or perhaps for that very reason.”
She elaborated-from floor to floor-speaking about the Mexican cultivation of form.
“We’re the Italians of America, more than the Argentines,” she said in the elevator, “because we were a viceroyalty and above all because we descended from the Aztecs, not from boats.”
“An old joke,” I dared to say. Asunta seemed to be repeating something she had learned.
She laughed, as if in approval. “Since you’re none of that, it’s right for you to learn to be what you’re going to be.”
“And what I want to be?”
“From now on, that’s no longer different from what you’re going to be.”
To that effect-I suppose-Asunta took me to social functions she considered obligatory, in other offices and hotels, with powerful and sometimes pretentious people with a yearning for elegance, a subject that awakened in Asunta’s gaze and facial expression a series of reflections that she communicated to me in a very quiet voice, both of us surrounded by the rapid sound of the social hive, as she tasted the glass of champagne in which she only wet her lips without ever drinking from it: When she set down the glass, the level of the drink was always the same.
“What is luxury?” she would ask me on those occasions.
Surrounded by clothes, aromas, poses, strategies, Hispanic canapés and Indian servers, I didn’t know how to answer.
“Luxury is having what you don’t need,” she declared, her eyes hidden behind her raised glass. “Luxury is poetry: saying what you feel and think, without paying attention to the consequences. But luxury is also change. Styles change. Tastes change. Luxury tries to move ahead or at least catch up with style, creating and inviting it…”
She spoke of luxury not as if she had invented it but because she was inaugurating it.
“ ‘Luxury does not know that style and death are sisters,’ ” I said, citing Leopardi and testing her.
“It’s possible.” Asunta’s expression did not change, and I recalled old conversations with Jericó and Filopáter.
“And because style is change, it affects our business. What do we offer the consumer? The most modern, the most advanced, at times the most useless, because tell me, if you already have a black telephone, why do you want a white one? I’ll tell you: Because choosing between two phones today is choosing among a hundred phones tomorrow. Do you see? Luxury creates necessity, necessity creates luxury, and we produce and win. There is no end to it! There’s no reason for it ever to end! Ha!”
She didn’t say these words as an exclamation. Her behavior at these social events was very distinctive. She knew she was looked at and even guessed at. Over and above the conversations, the clink of glasses, the scent of lotions and perfumes, the taste of sausages and quesadillas, Asunta Jordán circulated in a kind of light, as if a theatrical spot were following her, always looking for the best angle, making her hair shine, resting like an insolent bee on her plump red lips à la Joan Crawford, hot or cold? That was the question others asked as they watched her go by, does Asunta Jordán kiss hot or cold? murmuring in secret to Josué, exciting the curiosity of the guests, Ask yourself, Josué, who’s looking at you, where are they looking at you from? Ask yourself but don’t look at anybody, act in public as if you had a secret and wanted them to guess what it is.
She offered no opening. She let them look at her. She imposed silence as she passed. And if she held my arm, it was as if I were a cane, a walking puppet, a theatrical prop. She needed me to circulate through the reception with no need to speak with anyone, exciting everyone’s curiosity each time she said something to me in a quiet voice, smiling or very, very serious. I was her support. A straight man.
In the real world (for me these excursions into society were almost imaginary) Asunta brought me up to date on my duties with rapid efficiency. There existed a national and global market of young people between twenty and thirty-five, Generation Y, given this name because they succeeded Generation X, who were now past forty and even though everybody adjusts to the customary until they fear that the newest thing will bite them, the twenty-year-olds are the primary target of consumer advertising. They want to make their debut. They want to be different. They want brand-new objects. They need technologies they can control immediately and that are (at least in their youthful imaginations) forbidden to “the older generation.”
The notable thing-Asunta continued-is that in the developed world each generation of the young is smaller than the one before because of the decline in population. New families, more divorce, more homosexual couples, fewer children. On the other hand, in the world of poverty-ours, the Mexican world, Josué, don’t kid yourself-the population increases but so does poverty. How can we combine demography and consumption? This is the problem set forth by Max Monroy, and your job, my young friend, is to solve it. How to increase consumption in an impoverished population?
“By making them less impoverished,” I dared to remark.
“And how do we do that?” the queen bee insisted.
I opened my eyes to think clearly. “By taking the initiative? By opening limited credit for them and giving them short-term cards? By educating. Preparing. Communicating.”
“Communicating,” she moved ahead. “Letting them know they can live better, that they deserve credit, cards, consumption, just like the rich…”
I tried to look intelligent. She moved ahead of me like an Alfa Romeo passing a Ford.
“And how do we do that?” she said again.
Asunta was enthusiastic, dazzling me because I desired her, but I understand now that to have her I would have to respect her for what she was, an executive woman, an arm in the enterprises of Max Monroy that, like the goddess Kali, has as many arms as it has needs.
I was content with two, ready to love, caress, strangle me. She looked at me, confusing my desire with ambition. They’re not the same thing.
“I’ll tell you how,” and she snapped her fingers, on the offensive. “Move ahead. Give them the medium of communication. Send an army of our employees from village to village, settlement to settlement. Bring in trucks loaded with handheld devices. Like tire salesmen did when the first highways and cars were promoted by Doña Concha, Max’s mother, in the 1920s. Like the Christian missionaries did, so long ago, when they brought the Gospel to the conquered Indians. Now, Josué, we’re going to bring in the medium of communication, the tiny device, call it Creative Zen, YP-Tq, LGs, whatever you like, the toy, show it to the poorest campesino, the most isolated Indian, the illiterate and the semiliterate, who by touching this button can express their desires and by pressing the other receive a concrete response, not dead promises but the living announcement: Tomorrow we’ll install what you asked for, we’ll give you a cellphone, an iPod so you can hear already programmed music, we know your tastes, an iPhone so you can communicate with your friends, and by God, Josué, break the isolation in which your, our, compatriots live, and once you give them the devices free of charge you’ll see how demand is born, credit is given, a habit is created…”
“And generations will be in debt to us,” I said with healthy skepticism.
“And so?” She managed to smile despite herself. “You and I will be dead.”
“And while we’re alive?” I said, not expecting a reply, since Asunta Jordán’s program seemed to run out in this life, not the next.
Still, when I thought this, it occurred to me that at the age of eighty-three, Max Monroy had already considered the future, had already made a will. Who would be his heirs? What would Asunta obtain in Max’s will, if in fact Max left her anything? And to whom else could Max leave his fortune? I laughed to myself. Public welfare. The National Lottery. An old age home. His own business, recapitalizing it. His loyal collaborator Asunta Jordán?
I digress.
I OUGHT TO have imagined, oh woe is me, that in a fashion parallel to my technosentimental education at the hands of the beautiful, crepuscular Asunta Jordán in the fiefdoms of Max Monroy, my old friend Jericó must have been receiving political instruction at the hacienda of our joker president.
Maestro Don Antonio Sanginés informed me that Jericó was still working in the presidential offices at Los Pinos. One night he invited me to supper at his mansion in San Angel, and after the previously mentioned patrol of children-they were already in their pajamas-he sent them away and sat me down to a meal not only of dishes of food but of biographies, as if, since he was the conductor of the destinies allotted to me and Jericó, it was now time for him to turn to a new function: the president’s biography.
“How much do you know about President Valentín Pedro Carrera?” he asked before attacking a consommé with sherry.
“Very little,” I replied, my spoon at rest. “What I read in the papers.”
“I’ll tell you about him. So you’ll know where and with whom your friend Jericó is working: Valentín Pedro Carrera won the presidential election with the invaluable assistance of his wife, Clara Carranza. In the pre-election debates, each candidate boasted of his marvelous family life. The children were a delight”-Sanginés’s eyes gleamed, and from the top floor we could still hear the prenocturnal tumult of his youngsters-“his wife was the ideal woman, a loving mother, a disinterested colleague, a First Lady because she was already his first companion (relatives had to be hidden).”
All the candidates fulfilled these well-known formalities. But only Valentín Pedro Carrera could swallow with difficulty, suppress a fat tear, take out a large colored handkerchief, blow his nose vigorously, and announce:
“My wife, Clara Carranza, is dying of cancer.”
At that instant, our current leader won the election.
Who will vote, perhaps not for the candidate but no doubt for the health, agony, and probable death of Doña Clara, elevated to a combined sainthood and martyrology by that television moment when her husband dared say what no one knew and, if they did, had kept hidden in the old closets of discretion?
The candidate is married to a heroic, stoic, Catholic woman who may very well die before the election-vote for widower Carrera-after the election-what will happen first, the funeral or the inauguration?-during the ceremony-how brave Doña Clara was, she got out of her bed to support her husband when he rendered his affirmation that he would protect the Constitution and the laws emanating thereof!-or in the first months of the new government-she clutches at life, she doesn’t die so as not to discourage the president-or when, at last, the señora gave up the ghost and Valentín Pedro Carrera transformed personal grief into national mourning. There was no church without a requiem, no avenue without posters with photographs of the transient First Lady, no office without a black bow in the window, no barracks without its flag at half-mast, no private residence without its crepe.
Virtuous, intelligent, charitable, devoted, loyal, what virtue did not come to rest, like a pigeon on a statue, on the spiritual eaves of Doña Clara Carranza de Carrera? What sorrow was not drawn on the distressed though ecstatic face of the commander in chief of the nation? What Mexican did not weep seeing on TV the repeated images of a saintly life dedicated to doing good and dying better?
A stupid woman, ignorant, foolish, and ugly, from whom unpleasant odors emanated. A strange, unintelligible woman because of her mania for always speaking in profile. A spur, however, to a mediocre, neurotic man like Valentín Pedro Carrera.
“What memories do you have, you dummy?” she would say at the private dinners Sanginés attended.
“I have a longing to be a nobody again,” he would respond.
“Don’t kid yourself. You are a nobody. Nobody, nobody!” the lady would begin to shriek.
“You’re dying,” he would reply.
“Nobody, nobody!”
Sanginés explained the obvious. The lust for power leads us to hide defects, feign virtues, exalt an ideal life, put on the little masks of happiness, seriousness, concern for the people, and always find, if not the phrases then the appropriate attitudes. The fact is that Valentín Pedro Carrera exploited his wife, and she allowed herself to be exploited because she knew she would not have another opportunity to feel famous, useful, and even loved.
Neither one was sincere, and this confirms that in order to achieve power, a lack of sincerity is indispensable.
“Valentín Pedro Carrera was elected on a corpse.”
“Nothing new, Maestro,” I interrupted. “It was the rule in Mexico: Huerta kills Madero, Carranza overthrows Huerta, Obregón eliminates Carranza, Carranza ascends on the corpse of Obregón, etcetera,” I repeated like a parakeet.
“A bloodless etcetera: the principle of nonreelection saves us from succession by assassination, though not from ungrateful successions of heirs who in the end owe power to their predecessor.” Sanginés finally tasted his cold consommé.
“The obligation to liquidate the predecessor who gave power to his successor,” I completed the thought.
“Rules of the Hereditary Republic.”
Sanginés smiled before continuing, having tasted with that spoonful my elementary political knowledge due, as you all know, to the secret information Antigua Concepción gave me in a nameless graveyard.
Many jokes were made about the presidential couple. Doña Clara loves the president and the president loves himself. They have that in common. And the black humor was profitable. In La Merced they sold dolls of the president run through with pins by his wife, with the legend: You die first.
Which is what really happened. Without the amulet of his dying wife, and as the memory of Clara Carranza, the martyr of Los Pinos, and the concomitant sorrow of Valentín Pedro Carrera began to fade, he was left without his saving grace, which consisted of living through the agony of waiting. At times you could say the president would have wanted to live the agony of Doña Clarita himself, make certain she continued to suffer, continued to serve him politically and not constantly threaten him:
“Valentín Pedro, I’m going to kill myself!”
“Why, my love, what for…”
“The fact,” Sanginés continued, putting aside the consommé, “is that the weaknesses of Valentín Pedro Carrera wasted no time in appearing, like cracks in a wall of sand. Issues came up that required the decision of the executive. Promulgating and executing laws. Appointing officials. Naming army officers. Conducting foreign policy. Granting pardons and privileges and authorizing exemptions and import duties. Carrera let them slide. At most, he passed them on to his ministers of state. When he didn’t, the ministers acted in his name. At times what one minister did contradicted what another said, or vice versa.”
“We’re negotiating.”
“Enough negotiations. We must be firm.”
“We have an agreement with the union.”
“Enough coddling of the union.”
“Oil is a possession of the state.”
“Oil has to be opened to private initiative.”
“The state is the philanthropic ogre.”
“Private initiative lacks initiative.”
“There will be a highway from Papasquiaro to Tangamandapio.”
“Let them travel by burro.”
“Let us collaborate with our good neighbors.”
“They’re the neighbors. We’re the good ones.”
“Between Mexico and the United States, the desert.”
The truth, Sanginés continued, is that the president made the mistake of forming a cabinet composed only of friends or people of his generation. This formula had fatal results. Friends became enemies, each one protecting his small plot of power. The generational idea did not always get along with the functional one. Being from a generation is not a virtue: it is a date. And you don’t play with dates, because none possesses intrinsic virtues beyond its presence-no matter how fleeting-on the calendar.
“Dead leaves!” Sanginés exclaimed when the servant came in carrying a platter of rice with fried bananas, and as he offered it to me, he said respectfully:
“Good evening, Señor Josué.”
I looked up and recognized the old waiter from Errol Esparza’s house who had been fired by the second and now overthrown wife, Señora Sarita Pérez.
“Hilarión!” I recognized him. “How nice!”
He said nothing. He leaned over. I served myself. I looked at Sanginés out of the corner of my eye. As if nothing had happened. The servant withdrew.
“Rumors began to circulate,” my host went on. “The president does not preside. He inaugurates public works. He makes vague remarks. He smiles with a face more florid than a carnation. The unfailing evil tongues begin to speak of a cursed term. They even insinuate, in the second year of the government, that longevity in office is fatal to the reputation of the leader.”
“And to his health as well.”
Guided by a mad compass, Carrera dipped his big toe into foreign policy, the traditional refuge of a president of Mexico without a domestic policy. It turned out badly. The North Americans increased the armed guards along the northern border with increasing deaths of migrant workers. The Guatemalans opened the southern border for an invasion of Mexico by Central American workers. All that was left for the president to do was to stroll through the Davos Forum dressed as an Eskimo and give a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations attended by no one except the delegates from Black Africa, who are very courteous.
“ ‘It was an unlucky moment for me when Clarita died!’ ” the president exclaimed one night.
“ ‘What you need is for half your cabinet to die,’ ” I dared to tell him. “ ‘Their incompetence reflects on you, Mr. President.’ ”
“ ‘What do you advise, Sanginés?’ ” he asked me with a desolate expression.
“ ‘New blood,’ ” I said. “The result”-and he liquidated the last fried plantain without making a sound-“is Jericó’s presence in the office of the president.”
“What a good idea,” I said with sincerity but no conviction, trying to guess at the hidden intentions of Don Antonio Sanginés, a truly astute puppeteer and know-it-all, I realized at that moment, in our lives. Jericó’s and mine.
“Shall I tell you what your friend has done at Los Pinos.”
It wasn’t a question. In any event, I agreed.
“He brought together functions scattered among various secretaries at the suggestion of the president. Appointments, the need to render accounts, consult with the executive before taking action, meet in a council of ministers presided over by Valentín Pedro Carrera, make periodic reports. And as for the president, to move ahead of the ministers in relationships with unions, management, universities, the fourth estate, the governors, the congress: Day after day Jericó took charge of everything, establishing a network of presidential control that made each leader or sector of activity understand that their responsibility was to the head of state, and that the other members of the cabinet were not autonomous agents or authorized voices but merely confidential employees of the president from whom he could withdraw his confidence at any moment just as he could grant it to them for a specific period of time.”
“Mr. President,” Jericó would say to him, “remember that as the opposition you could be pure. Now, in power, you have to learn to be less pure.”
“To dirty my hands?”
“No, Señor. To make compromises.”
“I was elected by the hope of our citizens.”
“Now it is time for you to pass from the electoral light into the shadow of experience.”
“Boy, you talk like an eager priest.”
“I talk so you’ll understand me.”
“What do you want me to understand?”
“That I’m here to serve you and that I serve you by strengthening you.”
“How?”
Once the immediate official apparatus was set in motion, Jericó asked the president for authority to attend to an absolutely key matter.
“What can that be, young man?”
“Youth, old man,” Jericó dared to reply, and he understood what would happen, what could be, if the president of the republic, in that small detail (“Youth, old man”) acknowledged the power of his young aide-de-camp and opened to the action Jericó was offering to him with enormously compromising words: “I’m doing it for you, Mr. President. I’m doing it for the good of the country.”
“Doing what, kid?”
“What I’m proposing, Señor,” said Jericó, reverting to respect.
“IF WE’RE GOING to spend time together,” Asunta said to me one lazy afternoon, “it’s better if I tell you about my life. I want you to know who I am because I told you about it, instead of having rumors coming up here from ten stories down.”
“And what obliges me to believe you?” I said with a touch of irony, just to protect myself from the dark surge of her gaze and respiration filled with vague nocturnal perfumes that were beginning to surround us. I liked this woman. She bored me, she frightened me, and I liked her.
The truth is that before talking about herself, Asunta talked to me about Max Monroy and I, more fool me, did not realize right away that this was her way of telling me, Look, Josué, this is who I am, the woman who talks to you about Max Monroy is the woman who talks to you about herself. You can hold on to the certainty I talked only about him and you’d be wrong. I’m letting you know in time. I don’t know any other way to tell you about my life than to tell you about my life with the man who determines my life.
“Max Monroy: You, who are writing a thesis on Machiavelli under my direction,” Maestro Sanginés said to me, “know that the end does not always justify the means. Max Monroy decided from the very beginning that the way to obtain the best ends is to forget about them and act as if the means were the ends. Thanks to this philosophy, he strengthened his own business to the maximum. A man of means, Max valued ends, convinced they were as separate from means as day is from night. He distrusted ultimate solutions: They’re always bad, he says, because they classify you forever and close the doors of renovation to you. Even worse: If the ultimate solution fails, you have to begin all over again. On the other hand, if a means doesn’t produce results, you have at hand a repertoire of other means that aren’t ultimate but partial, as disposable as a Kleenex. Though if you’re successful, they appear as ends. This is what Max Monroy rejects. Never ends. He never celebrates the success of an end but rather the viability of a means. Listen carefully to this, Josué. Everything Max Monroy accomplishes is only a means to achieving the next means, never an end. He says the word END serves only to conclude a film, turn up the lights, and ask the audience, courteously, to withdraw with no need to pick up the bottles of Coca-Cola or carry to the trashcan the popcorn scattered on the floor.”
“The Max Monroy film, Josué, ignores the word END. In this way, you understand, he never admits failure. Some endeavors are successful. Others are not. He abandons these in time. Sometimes he finds himself obliged to proclaim victory after a failure: a program that did not succeed with the public, an innovation that was soon surpassed by the competition. Max changes the subject, he does not refer to what happened, he goes on to the next topic. In this way he leaves no rancor behind him. No one thinks he is the loser. No one considers himself the winner. But the cash register does not stop ringing,” Asunta said to me the other day.
“Monroy is famous for having said that thanks to him we abandoned the abacus. He walked new ground just to open even newer ground. What I mean is that he’s careful to have his successes not be failures paid for in exchange for success. Max is seen as an invulnerable entrepreneur who has to be stopped or eliminated. He navigates in silence over the waters of fortune. He is a master of the silent accomplishment, the stealthy success. He accepts his power. He tries not to allow envy to turn into idle conversation or an airplane without a motor destined to wander from airport to airport,” Antonio Sanginés confirmed on another night.
(I thought of my afflicted and dearly loved Lucha Zapata. My sincere though distrustful Asunta Jordán continued her discourse while her eyes gleamed even more, as if to keep at a distance approaching night.)
“Max Monroy is like the serpent. He coils around himself. He is a self-sufficient circle. When he looks out from the top floor of this building, he acknowledges that the city’s danger surrounds us. At the same time, he listens to the sound of the street and says that traffic is the music of business.”
“Capitalism’s symphony?”
Asunta laughed. Did she say it? Did Sanginés? Did I say it to myself? The discourse on Monroy in my head is unitary, like a fan that has one piece of cloth and many ribs. “To talk about capitalism is to think something can replace it. Max calls it one-worldism, globalization, internationalism. It’s a question of a planetary phenomenon, corrected if possible by social enlightenment. Max has always been ahead of his time. He acknowledges that in Mexico there are classes, abysmal differences between poor and rich. His utopia-we’re in the district of Tata Vasco and Thomas More, remember?-is for there to be increasingly fewer differences and for us to become a single river, with constant tides and a single current flowing to the sea, if not with greater equality, at least with greater opportunities. In this he differs from conventional politicians. Max wants to create the need in order to create the agency. Politicians create the agency and forget about the need. It’s what Max opposes in our president.”
(They tell me that with Jericó transformed into a presidential adviser?)
“Because this is what happens, Josué,” Asunta, Sanginés, and I myself continued in identical reflections without divisions, attracted by the personality of Max Monroy: “Max asks those who believe the world is already made what needs to be done, and moves ahead by doing it. His daily slogan is Never think there’s nothing left to do. Ask yourselves how much you’ve done and how much you found done or allowed to be done. That, Max clenches his fist, is what needs to be done.”
“And with people, Asunta? Is Max Monroy the machine you’ve described? Doesn’t he deal with human beings? Does he live shut away like an eagle without wings up there in his aerie?”
I myself, Sanginés, and Asunta laughed again, as if my questions were tickling us. “Max Monroy knows how to use masks. They say he has a lifelong poker face. He knows how to pretend. He approaches, threatening. He becomes cordial again. But anyone who saw him threatening does not forget the threat. He knows the price of silence. He wounds no one without making that person believe that he himself will close the wound. And sometimes, if it suits him, he lets it be known that the wound will never close. He doesn’t flatter anyone. And he doesn’t allow himself to be flattered. He says the flatterer, the fawner, puts the intelligence of the flattered person to sleep. Max does favors when necessary. But he tells me constantly that for each favor he’ll have one ingrate and a hundred enemies. He doesn’t say a word about business. Let the politicians talk. Let them make compromises. Let them make mistakes. Max Monroy, zipper-mouthed. Max Monroy, close-mouthed.”
“Doesn’t he feel guilty for anything?”
“He says the angels will take care of discussing his vices and virtues. Why try to anticipate heaven?” said the collective voice about Max.
“Doesn’t he ever ask for anything? Deference? Privileges?”
“Respect. That’s what he gave me,” said Asunta, opening her eyes wide and looking straight at me. “You asked about me? I answered with Max? Do you know who I am thanks to Max? Can you imagine me, Josué, my little Josué, before Max? Can you imagine a girl from the dry province, from the thorny north, with parents who wanted to turn her into a completely useless, completely supported girl, what could I be? Can you see me trapped in a family governed by three unbearable rules? ‘We don’t talk about that. Errors are not corrected. We don’t regret anything, child.’ Not anything? Where did my parents come up with the idea that everything they did was allowed, knowing they didn’t do anything worth disallowing? The north, the desert, the emptiness, the highways going nowhere, the mountains in the distance, the desert close at hand, the ocean a pious lie, the weather always undecided between suffocation and dawn. A desert husband. Quick, we don’t want the girl left behind with us. Is he the best? No. Is he the worst? Not that either. Who is he? He sells cars. Buses. Trucks. Is he in love? Is he calculating? Do we have more than he does? Does he have more than we do? Where did Tomás González come from? Where did Asunta López Jordán come from? Who’s better, the Gonzálezes or the Lópezes? Who presumes what, just tell me that? Who boasts of their cactus, their desert, their rock, their paving stone or tortilla, just tell us that? Why does he presume so much, what is the presumptuous man presumptuous about? Why on your wedding night does he show you his penis and say, Baby, let me introduce you to King Kong, from now on he’s going to sleep with us? Why is he presumptuous about everything except you? Why does he talk about you, Asunta López Jordán, as his ball and chain? Why does he presume with his friends that you take care of the house but he is a macho who needs broads livelier and sexier than you, Ernestina and Amapola and Cross-eyed Malva and Sweetass, all the whores of the north plus some from Arizona and Texas when he goes, as they say, to buy spare parts, sure, damn it, is that what they call it now? Why do you begin to pester him too, Asunta López de González, why do you tell him shave, you scratch when you make love to me, use deodorant, play golf, do something, stick King Kong in his cage?
“The gorilla’s cage,” Asunta Jordán said to me with no other commentary, “and I a pneumatic doll… pneumatic, but thanks to my neura attentive, alert, and for that reason dangerous: attentive, alert thanks to the horror of my husband and my family, convinced that these virtues of mine, in provincial society, were defects, I was dangerous, but perhaps in another society being violent and unpredictable was a virtue. In my town I unleashed negative reactions. When Max Monroy came fifteen years ago for the opening of the automotive factory, and I went to the reception afterward with my husband, Max Monroy looked out and saw a flock of contented women and a herd of presumptuous men and saw one woman who was discontented, that was me, and humiliated, that was me, and proud, that was me, and different, that was me, and that same night I left with him and here I am.”
“You were saying that a woman is a luxury.”
“No. A trophy.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s inconvenient. Where do you put an Oscar? He takes me away. For saying the wrong thing. For not wanting to make a good impression.”
“Max Monroy saw that in you?”
“That’s why he’s Max Monroy.”
(She stopped, alone in the middle of the dance floor. Her husband, Tomás, had gone off without saying goodbye. Couples danced. Families sat on three sides of the floor. The orchestra animated the entire nation from the fourth side. Couples danced. She stopped alone in the center of the floor. She didn’t look at anyone. She didn’t know if anyone was looking at her. She didn’t care anymore. Then Max Monroy approached and took her by the waist and hand without saying a word.)
MY AGREEABLE (though disturbing) work in the Santa Fe office was interrupted (and it wouldn’t be the last time) by Licenciado Antonio Sanginés. I wondered if my debt to the professor would be eternal. The heretics cited by another professor, Filopáter, said that the final proof of God’s mercy would be forgiving all the damned and emptying out hell in one stroke. Not that my debt to Sanginés was hellish. On the contrary. I’m a grateful man. I was (and am) very conscious of everything I owed the maestro. Still, I couldn’t help asking myself: How long will I be paying my debts-studies, thesis direction, meals at Coyoacán, admittance to the Prison of San Juan de Aragón, interviews with the prisoner Miguel Aparecido, even news about the destiny of my friend Jericó in the offices of the presidency-to Professor and Licenciado Don Antonio Sanginés?
A question without an immediate response, which still obliged me, no doubt because I did not have an answer, to suspend my work in the Vasco de Quiroga office and at the side of my platonic love Asunta Jordán and ask myself: Where was Sanginés’s strategy leading with respect to the San Juan de Aragón Prison and the prisoner Miguel Aparecido? What, in essence, did Sanginés want when he opened the cell blocks of the penitentiary to me with a master key? Because I went into the prison and was made to feel right at home, with all kinds of facilities and even special considerations like this: Leaving me alone in the cell with Miguel Aparecido, a strong man focused on a personal resolve whose origin and fate I did not know: to remain imprisoned even though he completed his sentence; and if he ever was released, to commit a new crime that would keep him in prison.
A new crime. What was the first crime, the original crime, the offense Miguel Aparecido wanted to pay for eternally, since the ultimate solution of this enigma was to die in prison? Still, was this conclusion of mine, so easy and melodramatic, correct? Did a final point exist that would conclude Miguel’s punishment in Miguel’s mind, allowing him finally to leave his cell? Knowing this meant knowing everything. From the beginning. The origin of the story. The resolution of the mysteries I’ve been stitching together here and the conversion of mystery into destiny. Truths the prisoner did not seem disposed to reveal.
Least of all today. I went into the cell. His back was turned. The high, distant barred light drew lines on his body that were not part of his gray uniform: It was as if only the sun wore the striped uniform of the old prisons.
I went in and Miguel did not turn to look at me. It would have been better for me if he had. Because when he did, he revealed the face of a terrifying beast. His hair was wild, his cheeks scratched, his eyes as red as an ominous sunset, his nose wounded, his lips and teeth bloody.
“For God’s sake, Miguel…”
I walked forward to embrace him, with a natural instinct to provide relief. He did not want help. He repulsed me brutally. I looked away, knowing he looked at me without affection.
Then something inside me said, “Don’t look away. Look directly at him. Look at him as if you’ve seen him before. Like a vulnerable, bewildered human being in pain who rejects your affection only because he needs it, because he has no other support but you, just you, my poor Josué, double of himself.”
I thought this and felt what we all know but never say aloud, because it is both a mystery and self-evident. I looked at Miguel Aparecido and saw myself reflected in him not as in a mirror but only in a question: We are body, we are soul, and we will never know how flesh and spirit are joined.
I looked at the unaffectionate eyes of Miguel Aparecido, feverish with the terror of the day, and for an instant I saw myself in them… I saw that both of us, I a free man, he a prisoner, were concerned with the same dilemma: Did we all deserve to be punished for the crime of a single man? Could the soul be saved if the body wasn’t saved too? Could our body commit offenses without punishing the soul? Could the soul sin and the body remain free of transgression?
When I say I saw all this in Miguel Aparecido’s gaze, I mean I was seeing it in the reflection that returned to my eyes from his. I recalled Filopáter and his reading of Saint Augustine: Sooner or later, human misery always requires the solace, the relief, the consolation religion offers through the promise of the resurrection of the flesh and the world with the promise of freedom in this life. Looking again (I don’t know if for the first time) at Miguel Aparecido this afternoon, I thought religion and freedom resemble each other inasmuch as they believe in the unbelievable: the resurrection of the flesh or the autonomy of the individual. Perhaps the second is the greater mystery. Because we cannot know if we are going to be resurrected, we accept the secret of faith. But knowing we can be free, the absence of freedom opens before us an entire hand of anguished possibilities: to struggle for freedom or to renounce it; to act or abstain; to dirty one’s hands or use gloves… If we choose one card, we sacrifice the rest. In life there is no change in cards. If you get four aces, you fucking win. If you get a weak hand, you’re fucked. Though at times you win the game and save your life with a pair of fives. You play the hand you’re dealt, and if you think you can ask for a different one, you’re mistaken. Whoever deals the cards does it only once. We have to play the weak or winning hand destiny gave us.
Did I see in this man wounded both externally and internally the fatality of an existence I really had not known until now? Miguel Aparecido appeared (so to speak) to me like a strange but always serene being, master of a secret and comfortable with his own mystery, jealous of what he kept hidden in his bosom, intolerant when he was offered freedom, enigmatic when he decided to be a prisoner.
This was my idea of the man. I looked at what I saw before me when I entered the cell.
The earlier Miguel was not the present one and I could no longer wager on the truth. Was Miguel the severe, fatalistic man of yesterday? Or was he the destructive, beaten animal of today?
It is strange how, when a human being is set loose from acquired habits and customary masks are removed, barbaric feelings spring up, not in the usual sense of savagery or atrocity, but in the fuller meaning of existing earlier than convention, limits, and above all, the idea of the person. That was this Miguel Aparecido, a man earlier than himself, as if everything the world (and I) knew about him was a great deception, pure appearance, the skin of a phantom whose concealed body and soul belonged to someone else. This man.
Looking at him with great intensity, I thought of his decisive words. He counted on the loyalty of the other prisoners. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta. El Negro España and La Pérfida Albión. Then he had told me, boy, nothing happens here that I don’t know about, and nothing I don’t want to or can’t control.
“Know this: even unexpected riots are the work of my will.”
He had told me earlier he could smell the air and when the atmosphere in the prison became very heavy, a great internal fight was needed to clear the air. There were serious riots here when necessary, and then peace returned. Because peace, he said, was a necessity in prison.
“Many innocents come through here. They have to be respected.”
I had seen the children in the swimming pool. They shouldn’t be in prison forever.
“But if chaos did exist here, that would be because I am powerless to assure the order indispensable for the San Juan de Aragón Prison not to be heaven or hell but, and it’s saying a lot, a goddamn purgatory.”
On that occasion he had taken me by the shoulders, looking at me as if he were a tiger.
“When something happens here that slips through my fingers, it makes me furious.”
Furious. The riot of broken chairs banging against the walls. The tables in the dining room smashed to pieces. Injured, dying, dead police. Padlocks first filed, then opened. Filed clean away.
Maximiliano Batalla. The Mariachi’s Band. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta, who strangles and sings. Even La Pérfida Albión and El Negro España. Above all Sara P., the widow of Nazario Esparza and killer, along with Maxi Batalla, of Doña Estrella de Esparza, Errol’s mama…
All of them. All of them. They escaped San Juan de Aragón. This time Miguel Aparecido did not provoke or control the riot. Maxi and Sara learned the lesson, they unleashed the barely contained fury of the criminal population, got the prisoners together, organized the riot, wreaked destruction, escaped.
“Who?” I asked, enraged by him, like him, Miguel Aparecido.
He looked at me like a dead man who has not lost the hope of resurrection.
“You, Josué.”
No, I shook my head, astonished, not me.
“You, Josué, you have to find out what happened. How Maxi Batalla and Sara the whore were able to organize the escape. Why my allies abandoned me. Who organized them, who helped them, who opened the doors for them?”
He looked at me in an enlightened, perverse way, passing on to me the obligation that he, from prison, could not carry out, granting him a kind of vengeful halo with the desire to deceive me, make me believe that if I discovered the truth outside these walls it would also reveal the truth that remained here, confined, not so much inside the walls of the prison as inside the walls of Miguel Aparecido’s head.
I could not see the weakness of the tiger that looked at me with the dissatisfaction of not having eaten because it had not killed. I could not see that the real menace of Miguel Aparecido consisted in telling the truth.
I understood only that it was not the flight of Sara P. and the Mariachi, or even-and this was worse-of Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney and Ventanas, Albión and España that drove me mad, but the collapse of my illusion: Miguel was not, as he believed, the overseer of the penitentiary, the top dog, the sheikh. That is what infuriated him: the collapse of his jailhouse authority. The loss of the kingdom created by the sacrifice of his freedom. Being the head of the interior empire of the prison.
“I’m here because I want to be.
“I’m the head.
“When something happens here that slips through my fingers, I become furious.
“Fu-ri-ous.”