Destiny and Desire

Part Three. Max Monroy

A year went by following the events I have narrated so far. Perhaps things occurred in all the chapters of my life. I didn’t return to Antigua Concepción in the nameless burial ground. I never heard from my increasingly sentimentalized Lucha Zapata, who flew away with the fugacity of a bird with a damaged wing. I had completely forgotten about my sinister jailer María Egipciaca. I knew that Elvira Ríos, my nurse, was barely a decisive though fleeting traffic accident. Doña Estrellita de Esparza lay buried, her despicable husband Don Nazario had been roasted alive in his own courtyard by the very incarnation of immorality, the vile and ridiculous Sara P., the Lady Macbeth of Mariachiland imprisoned after a macabre, imbecilic confession in the San Juan de Aragón Prison together with her partenaire in mischief, the immortal Mariachi Maxi, who escaped with this same Sarape and an entire gang of criminals, to the rage and despair of the presumptive capo of the penitentiary, my friend Miguel Aparecido, mocked by a band of thugs and thrown into a physical and moral anguish whose dimensions (I guessed) I would never know, no matter how, from his eyes of a caged tiger, a secret would peer out, veiled with difficulty by his bluish eyelids. Licenciado Antonio Sanginés, source of so much news and guidance in my life, had absented himself (for the moment) and the truth is that none of what I’ve just said mattered to me very much for a simple reason.

I was in love.

I could fail in sincerity with you, patient readers, both absent and present (present if you are kind enough to read me, absent if you do not and at times even when you do), and tell you whatever I feel like. In the course of a year, twelve months, three hundred sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours, five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, thirty-one million five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds, what can’t an individual do, especially if he is author and protagonist of a novel dictated from and for death? What action is forbidden to him in my tale? What lie does not overcome my memory? What recollection of the past, what desire for the future? Don’t you see: I persist, to my own despair (and, with luck, to yours), I am here, writing away, desiring the past at the same time I remember the future.

Desiring the past.

Remembering the future.

This, I assure you, is the paradox of death. Except that you have to die to know it.

What I want to say now is that for an entire year, dedicated to working in the offices of Max Monroy in the noble (but resurrected) region of Santa Fe, ancient seat of the Renaissance utopia of Fray Vasco de Quiroga in New Spain, I too was reborn. Reborn to love. I fell madly in love with Asunta Jordán. And from this fact my story hangs.

I have already recounted the experience of my training to be worth something in the business empire of Max Monroy. At first, desiring to show my energy and goodwill, I ran (two steps at a time) from floor to floor. Gradually I learned the lessons of the business, its phrasing, its designations: verbs, adjectives, and especially adverbs, not only endless but without end: The suffix “-ly,” I realized very quickly, was not used in these offices. One said “recent” but not “recently”; “patient” without “-ly” and “original,” “definitive,” “occasional,” or “formal” with no lymology at all. But don’t think the elimination of the ending was the death of adverbial agency-rather, it was its elevation to the level of the implicit. By eliminating the adverb, all its protagonistic quality was given to the verb: to define, occasion, form, patient, and if not “to recent,” then at least to bring everything to a today pregnant with tomorrow and sterilized and free of useless, nostalgic yesterdays, mere commemorations.

“Yesterday” did not register on the office calendars. It was as if Monroy’s power expanded to turn to ash the pages of the past, convincing everyone that everything was today (and never the rhetorical today-today-today of an incinerated past), only the today of today, the instant with all its promises of the future so a well-made today would disappear in a fog denser than any forgetting.

And therefore everything was innovation in this business. And innovation consists in constantly expanding what was done today to what is done tomorrow. The miniaturized blog would end up hidden in a woman’s handbag. Personal cameras transformed us all into instant paparazzi. MySpace, mySimon, and Deal Pilot pages allow us to compare prices, products, and possibilities instantly, and the multiplications of acronyms and headings-KDDI, XAML (the Facebook entry), ebXML, Oracle, Novell-would in the end be deciphered, like the Egyptian name of RosettaNet, into a single designation.

Everything, a great paradox, was destined to accentuate the greatest privacy as it transformed us all into public personages. Once we had entered the blogosphere, who could ever be an enigma again? If our lives are being filmed, what secrets can we keep? Was this the greatest challenge of Max Monroy and his industries? To strip us to the point where our essential privacy would be revealed and protected?

Was this a paradoxical invasion of private life intended to isolate and protect the most secret part of ourselves, the part that could resist any public notification? Our souls? Or would this combination of innovations and mysteries go into the public, popular sphere, guaranteeing each citizen direct access to the information once reserved to governments and managed by elites?

In short, was Max Monroy the emblem of the most inflexible authoritarianism or the most expansive democracy?

It would not take long to find out.

Everything is known. Everything is seen. There will be no more closets, much less skeletons in them. We ought to take the best possible care of the remains of our private life, invaded by the eye of the camera that is today-the camera-the Grand Inquisitor. And what does Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor do? He protects faith with what offends it. Uses the weapons of the most material power to defend the most spiritual: faith.

Faith-I remembered the old talks with Father Filopáter-consists in saying and thinking: “It is true because it is incredible.” Then can there be a faith that proposes being credible thanks to the natural existence of objects that prove it? But doesn’t this faith subscribe to the concept of progress as a guarantee of universal life? We constantly move forward, nothing can stop us, human development is inevitable and ascendant. Even though a crematorium oven, a concentration camp, an Auschwitz, a Gulag, an Abu Ghraib, a Guantánamo, demonstrate the opposite… How I longed, in moments of doubt like this, to count on the voice of Father Filopáter and recover, in dialogue with him, my youthful camaraderie with my brother Jericó! To be again the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, the founding brothers, two luminous phantoms that gave victory to the Roman Republic in the battle of Lake Regillus.

A limited hero, as I’ve said, who at first, filled with the professional ardor of the novice, ran up and down stairs. Eventually I decided to take the elevator. Only to the twelfth floor, as I’ve stated, since the two top floors were prohibited. There, as in fairy tales, resided the Ogre, perhaps a benevolent Bluebeard who, having eliminated his earlier women (how many “broads” in a decade, or on average, did a man past eighty come into contact with? what’s the ratio? what’s the compensation?) resided, or dwelled, though I don’t believe he had “settled,” with a single woman and she was my own beloved enemy, Asunta Jordán.

Professional relationships can begin coldly and end with warmth, or at least congeniality. They can also begin cordially and end with hatred-or indifference. In any case, seeing each other’s masks every day is something paid for one way or the other. My relationship with Asunta had no temperature. It was exemplary in its tepidness. Neither hot nor cold. She had the obvious mission of demonstrating and explaining to me the functioning of the great corporate elephant called, impersonally, “Max Monroy,” with the purpose, no doubt, of preparing me to carry out functions: as a lowly nut and bolt, a perpetual stepping-stone, a midlevel official or, finally, as a chief, a functionary, a dignitary? Asunta’s expressionless face gave me no answer.

Except that her perfect representation of the professional woman, her “official” permanent façade, without openings or windows (let’s not even speak of doors), excited my curiosity. And since my curiosity turned out to be inseparable from my desire, inseparable in turn from my erotic will to possess Asunta Jordán, no matter how, I took the first step toward the forbidden.

During work hours I penetrated the darkness of Asunta’s bedroom.

Nothing impeded me except the command of fables: Do not enter. But is there anything in a fairy tale that inflames more curiosity than a prohibition, anything more encouraging to the decision to violate the secret and break the imaginary lock than the warning: If you enter you will be punished? If you enter you will not come out again? If you enter you will be a cold corpse if things go well for you, an eternal prisoner if they go badly?

I called up some excuse to leave at twelve noon. I went up to the thirteenth floor, where Asunta Jordán had her rooms. I passed from the light of the living room to the darkness of the bedroom. I noticed there were no windows, as if the sleeping beauty of my dreams did not leave a single chink open to the curiosity of others, including the solar orb. I avoided looking at the bed. King-size, a marvelous size for a queen, queen-size. My eyes, my sense of smell, my desire, led me to the even darker area of clothing hung according to the seasons-touch allowed me to caress cottons, silks, cashmere, furs, and if I raised my hand a little, I touched hats of felt and straw, of mink and fox, baseball caps, visors, the unmistakable texture of a Panama, picture hats (from every wedding except hers and mine… ay…). None of that interested me. My fingers guided my eyes, and my eyes guided my sense of smell. At last my avid nose (long, pointed, my gentle readers will remember) came upon the perfume it was searching for.

I opened the drawer where Asunta Jordán’s underthings were arranged. Dazzled, I closed my eyes and gave myself up first of all to the voluptuosity of smell, though my avid hands did not resist the desire to touch what I smelled, and in the combat between my nose and my hands, there was a delightful mixing of the aroma of lavender and the lace on panties, the scent of petals and breast cups, drops of anonymous perfumes and panties with Asunta’s name, silk camisoles and padded bras, thongs, bikinis, all the forms of interior-exteriority that was my only possible approximation to the body of my beloved, perhaps more powerful than the nakedness that not only eluded me but did not even invite me, did not even forbid me. Lace, nylon, silk. Half-slips. Garter belts.

And so the interdiction flew over my excited approach to the drawers where Asunta’s intimate apparel lay in innocent demise. I believe at that moment my physical and mental exaltation was so huge that I began to desire this erotic consummation and not another, not a physical one, which undoubtedly would be less intense than the approach, essentially modest though mentally vehement and shameless, violating Asunta’s intimacy to incorporate it not into my own intimacy but into the vast territory of nameless desire.

I learned in that secret, sacred instant that desire moves us farther from and closer to obtaining the object of desire. I learned that we desire what we do not have and when we obtain it, just for ourselves, we desire to dominate what we have, deprive it of its freedom, and subject it to the laws of our ambition.

I closed my eyes. I breathed deeply. I closed the drawers, fearing to possess Asunta beyond this secret violation of intimacy. Fearful, above all, of myself, of my own desire and the limits or lack of limits that only desire could show me by inviting me, as it did at this moment, to be content with the objects I touched and smelled or take the step beyond the place where they intertwine and complicate the subjects of desire.

Asunta’s maid suddenly turned on the lights in the room.

“And what do you think you’re doing up here?”

WHAT HAVE I left in the inkwell? I mean, regarding my relationship with Jericó. Who defended me against the bullies at school, beginning with Errol Esparza in his earlier incarnation. Who took me in when I lost my orphan’s home with María Egipciaca (and much more). Jericó taught me to drive a car. He opened my ears to the classical music he collected in the attic on Praga. He opened my eyes to reproductions of the great paintings of the past he assembled on postcards. He pushed me to examine the philosophical seeds planted by Filopáter in our flowerpots. He extended our joint readings to Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Beckett. He even taught me to dance, though with a warning at once ironic and forbidding.

One night he invited me to a cabaret, and instead of leading me into the dance hall he took me to a kind of office from which you could observe the couples dancing but not hear the music. I was disconcerted for a minute. Then I suffered an attack of laughter watching the poses, the contortions, the senseless, graceless comedy of couples captured in an aquarium by dancing they obviously deemed charming, gallant, sophisticated, sensual, liberated, and libertine: heads gyrating, eyes closed dreamily or open in false amazement, hands shaking as if to throw or catch invisible balls, shoulders in grotesque calisthenics, legs freed of all control, halfway between prayer and defecation. And the feet, cockroaches in shoes to avoid death by Flit, two-toned men’s shoes, cowboy boots, pointy-toed stiletto heels for the women, an occasional tennis shoe, all given over to the silent dance, the grotesque ritual of bodies deceiving themselves, feigning elegance, sensuality, good humor, which, stripped of accompanying sounds, reduced the dancers to a macabre imitation of an anticipated dance of death.

I thought that friendship was something fundamentally indecipherable. Pride, generosity, tenderness, accepted inadequacies, quiet reserves, the courage memory keeps acquiring-or the bitter absolution of its loss: everything united as in a chorus at once present and very distant, more eloquent in memory than in actuality, though with each gleam it brings the announcement of a future as unpredictable as a pistol going off at a piano concert.

“Let’s be independent,” Jericó fired at me. “Let’s not have opinions imposed on us.”

If the words surprised me, it was because they contained a tacit truth in our relationship. We had always been independent, I replied to my friend. He said I hadn’t: I had lived in a mansion like the prisoner of a tyrannical nanny and saved myself by coming to live with him.

“And you?” I asked. “Have you always been independent?”

Jericó looked at me with a kind of compassionate tenderness.

“Don’t ask me a question you could answer or be quiet about yourself, old pal. We’re independent? First ask yourself: Who has supported us for as long as we can remember?”

I interrupted him. “Lawyers. Licenciado Sanginés, the-”

He interrupted me: “Were they sent? All of them, servants, sent by someone else?”

“Physically or morally?” I attempted to lighten the unusual conversation; we hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, and this meeting in our old den on Calle de Praga was taking place on his initiative.

He ignored me. “We’ve assumed we have no past, that we live in the present, that the lawyers will provide and if we ask indiscreet questions, we’ll break the spell and wake up no longer princes in the bedroom but frogs in the ditch… and with no way out.”

I told him he was right. We had never inquired beyond the immediate situation. We received a monthly check. At times Sanginés led us to the doors of a mystery, but he never opened them. It was as if the two of us-Jericó, Josué-feared knowing more than we already knew: nothing. I suggested, before the ironic gaze of my friend, that perhaps our negligence had been our salvation. What or who would have answered our questions: Who are we, where do we come from, who are our parents, who supports us?

“Who supports us, Jericó?” I looked at him as if he were a mirror. “Are we innocent pimps? Are we better than La Hetara on Durango or the whore with the bee on her buttock?”

He remained silent, refusing to be surprised by my brusque remarks.

“Do you remember Father Filopáter when we were at school?”

I nodded. Of course.

Jericó said, after looking at the floor, that we had never understood-he spoke for the two of us-whether Filopáter pretended to be a false heretic to make faith palatable, like the false unbeliever who takes us down the path that leads to belief.

“Because Filopáter did two things, Josué. On one hand, he made us see the mindlessness of religion in the light of reason. But he also revealed the foolishness of reason in the light of faith.”

“Reason compromises faith and faith compromises reason,” I added without thinking too much about it, almost as a fatal, exact conclusion, that is, as dogma.

“Dogma.” Jericó read my mind. We were Castor and Pollux again, the mystic twins, the Dioscuri. The inseparable pair.

“Listen, who decides that a dogma is a dogma?” I asked, stepping back from the abyss of fraternity.

“Authority.”

“Force?”

“If you think so.”

I didn’t know where or by what route he wanted to take me. I said force isn’t enough. Force requires authority to be forceful.

“And authority without force?” Jericó asked.

“Is morality,” I took a risk with my words.

“And morality?”

“I won’t tell you it’s certainty, because then morality and faith would be the same.”

“Then, morality can be uncertain.”

“Yes. I believe the only certainty is uncertainty.”

“Why?”

“If you agree, Jericó, I’ll only ask you not to feel superior or inferior. Feel equal.”

“Do you remember when we were young we’d ask ourselves: What invalidates a man, what strips him of value?”

I nodded.

“Answer me now,” he said with a certain pugnacity.

“You and I are each embarked on his attempt at success. I sincerely think we haven’t defined ourselves yet. We’re always someone else because we’re always in the process of becoming.”

“I have.” Jericó intensified the conflict another degree.

“I haven’t.” I shrugged. “I don’t believe you, bro.”

“Do you want me to prove it to you?”

I looked at him with as much spirit (adverse, perverse, diverse?) as he showed looking at me.

“Sure, of course. I’ll envy you because I’m not as sure as you are. It’ll do me good.”

I waited for him to speak. We understood each other too well. He hesitated for an instant. Then he observed, smiling this time, that to be coherent, he would respond with actions, not words. I returned the smile and folded my arms. It was a spontaneous gesture but it indicated a certain permanence on my part at this time and in this place we had shared since we were nineteen years old.

“Don’t stop when you’re halfway there,” he said suddenly.

“You make the path as you walk, says the song.”

“You understand me.”

“Because I’m sitting here and you’re over there. All we have to do is change places and all the truth we’ve just said collapses, goes all to hell, becomes doubt.

“And also memory,” I insisted. “Let’s remember where we were before.”

“Though we don’t know where we’ll be afterward.”

“We can predict.”

“And if we’re struck by lightning?”

“We live or we die,” I said with a smile.

“We survive.” He looked at me with eyes half closed and then opened wide as if by orders of an internal sergeant.

“Alive or dead?” I hesitated.

“Alive or dead, we’re only survivors. Always.”

I shook my head.

“We have no father,” said Jericó.

“And?”

“If we did, we’d grow up to honor him so he’d be proud of us.”

“And since we don’t…”

“We can exist for ourselves.”

“On condition we honor ourselves?” I smiled.

“Don’t get lost when you’re halfway there.”

I detected a certain internal disturbance in my friend when he repeated: “Halfway there. There’s more. Something more than you and me. Our country. Our nation.”

I laughed out loud. I told him he didn’t have to justify his job, his position at Los Pinos. I wanted to liven and lighten the situation.

“It all depends,” I said. “What’s the objective?”

“To be superior to all those who challenge us.” He took another breath.

“Wouldn’t it be enough just to be equal?”

“You’re joking. I don’t want them to say about us: They’re like everybody else, they’re the usual ones, the customary ones, the ones in the crowd. Agreed?”

I said probably, if my friend’s words indicated that self-improvement was necessary, of course… Agreed…

“Are we different, you and I?” I said after Jericó’s obstinate silence.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you and I didn’t have to survive. We always had food on the table.”

“Like everybody else? Do you think I did?”

I took a step I hadn’t wanted to take: “I suspect you did.”

In that suspicion were summarized the doubts you already know about regarding the character called just “Jericó,” with no last name, not even the past afforded me by the house on Berlín, the care of María Egipciaca, and the nurse Elvira Ríos, before my destiny and Jericó’s converged like two rivers of fire, Castor and Pollux. I was Josué Nadal.

Jericó, without family names, who traveled without a name on his passport, who perhaps traveled without a passport, who perhaps-everything my affection for him had hidden was now suddenly revealed-had not been in France or the United States or anywhere except the hiding place of his soul… And wasn’t it enough, I exclaimed to myself, to have a soul where you could take refuge? Wasn’t that sufficient?

“Alive or dead… Survivors.”

At this moment, when I heard these words, I felt that a stage in our lives (and consequently in our friendship) had closed forever. I understood that from now on he and I would have to be responsible for our own lives, breaking the fraternal pact that until then not only had united us but allowed us to live without asking ourselves questions about the past, as if, being friends, it was enough for us say and do things together to complement the absences of our earlier life.

It was as if life had begun when he and I became friends in the schoolyard. It was as if, when we stopped being friends, a barefoot death had begun to approach us.

“MAX MONROY,” Asunta Jordán tells me tonight, “has two rules of conduct. The first is never to respond to an attack. Because there are so many, you know? You can’t be as prominent as he is without being attacked, above all in a country where it’s difficult to forgive success. Lift your head, Josué, and they immediately assault you and, if they can, decapitate you.”

“Rancors in this country are very old and very deep,” I remarked, and added Socratically, because I didn’t want to disagree with her: “Mexico is a country where everything turns out badly. There’s a reason we celebrate the defeated and despise the victorious.”

“Even though we stay with our idols. If you become an idol, an idol of the ranchera, the bolero, the soap opera, sports, your life is pardoned,” Asunta said with her style of popular humor.

“Idolatry here is very old.” I smiled, continuing my adulatory tactic. “We believe in God but we worship idols.”

Asunta shook off this ideological confetti with an elegant movement of her head. “But the fact of not responding to an attack is a terrible weapon. You don’t give the attacker a moment of untroubled sleep. Why doesn’t Max respond? When does Max respond? How does Max respond-if he does respond? What weapons will Max use to respond?

“In this way,” Asunta continued, “Max doesn’t need to do anything to answer those who assault him. The fact of not doing anything provokes terror and in the end defeats the attacker, who doesn’t understand why he isn’t answered, then doubts the efficacy or ferocity of the attack, immediately feels completely worthless because he doesn’t deserve a response, and in the end aggression and aggressor are forgotten and Max Monroy goes on, as cheerful…”

“As Johnnie Walker.” I laughed then.

She wasn’t too happy with this joke. Asunta was already embarking on the second example she wanted to give to complete the picture of Max Monroy’s conduct. A rancorous cloud passed over her gaze, evoking, without looking at me, those who tried to become famous by attacking the fame of Max Monroy. Lesson learned: They succeeded only in increasing it. They were forgotten.

“And the second case?”

Asunta came back as if from a dream.

“Max Monroy is a cautious man.” She smiled with a certain bitter nostalgia that did not escape my attention. The second example was that Max, who naturally is a cautious man, becomes even more cautious when he receives an improper or unexpected favor.

“Improper?”

If Asunta hesitated it was only for a second. Then she said: As improper as having imprisoned a dangerous man only as a favor to the great Max Monroy.

I searched in vain for a rictus of laughter, an ironic intention, an angry emphasis in Asunta’s voice, her gaze, her posture. She had spoken as a statue would speak-if a statue could speak.

“Favors are paid for, I think,” I continued so our talk would not die, as it could have died, right there, since I was trying to tie up loose ends and bring together what I knew with what I didn’t know…

“Favors have a price, and then we realize the mistake it is to grant them and go mad trying to find an action to wipe out the obligation we have acquired to the person who did us the favor,” she went on. “Do you see?”

“Death?” I asked with the innocent face I have practiced most in front of the mirror.

“Death?” she replied with an incredulous affirmation on the point of becoming a question.

“Death,” she continued calmly, though with a certain pleading tone.

“Whose?” I didn’t let her go.

Perhaps she hesitated for a moment. Then she said: “The death of the one who did us the favor.”

“Improper?”

Or unexpected. Unexpected?

“The one who did the favor died.”

“The advantages of being old,” I said with an erotic calculation doomed, I knew beforehand, to fail. She did not appear to understand. On the contrary, she stressed that Max Monroy was a self-made man, but only in part. He inherited a great deal (I remained silent about my relationship, valid only if secret, with Max’s mother, Antigua Concepción.)

If she spoke like his mother Doña Conchita (with reason she changed her name, refusing the diminutive in exchange for voluntary antiquity) she would say: Agrarian reform benefited him as much as it did his mother. It was the end of the old haciendas as big as all of Benelux. It took two days by train to travel the lands of William Randolph Hearst in Chihuahua and Sonora. “Citizen Kane,” I interjected, and she continued, not understanding the allusion. She repeated the lesson: “Thirty-five percent of Mexico’s territory in the hands of Gringos. The hacienda was broken, the system of communal lands was created-all for all, sure-agrarian law was violated, now small properties were accumulated and campesino lands stolen to construct hotels on the beaches, the campesinos didn’t receive a thank you, or a whiskey, or a swim in the kidney-shaped pools, but most fled to the cities, above all ‘dissipated and painted’ Mexico City and the new industrial sectors created by the expropriation of the petroleum industry. Max’s good fortune: first, agrarian repartition; second, the system of communal lands; third, small farmsteads; fourth, communal landowners without credit or machinery, subject to the law of the market, without protection or even a five-centavo piece, and fifth-lucky five-the campesino flight to industry, creation of a domestic market, saturation in demand, inequality, unemployment, the flight of labor to the United States, money returned by workers to their old communities, the explosion of cheap consumerism.”

“And Monroy taking advantage of it all?”

“He isn’t a thief.” Asunta looked at me without affection. “He has today’s money just as he had yesterday’s. He has built a fortune on the earlier one, his mother’s. He has multiplied Doña Conchita’s goods” (please: Antigua Concepción, more respect for the dead!), “imposed very severe rules of discipline, justice, independence, knows the gulf that separates reputation from personality, protects the second, scorns the first, is implacable in getting rid of incompetents at the highest levels, occupies the center of the center, governs himself in order to govern others better, does not overstimulate the public…”

“And all of this for what?” I interrupted her because her exaltation of Max was beginning not only to annoy me but, in particular, to make me jealous. It fell upon me to learn about Max Monroy through the love of his dear dead mama. I was irritated by the admiration, as repetitive as a record, as unrestrained as an orgasm, of this woman who was more and more awful and perhaps, for that reason, more and more desired. Or, just the opposite…

“Why?” she said, disconcerted.

“Or for whom,” I said, not daring to throw up to her the lack of sincerity: Everything she had said to me seemed learned, like a lesson that had to be memorized and repeated by the loyal servant of Max Monroy.

She went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “Max controls demand with what supply can provide,” she said like a jukebox.

“For what, for whom?” I tossed a coin on the piano.

“It would have been enough for him to inherit, Josué, with no need to increase his inheritance…”

“For whom?” I said in my best bolero voice.

A tremor of anger fought in Asunta’s body against the sorrow of a resignation that seemed too satisfied.

“For you?” I grabbed her shoulders. “Will you be the heir?”

“He has no descendants,” she moaned, surprised, “he had no children…”

“He has a lover, what the hell…”

Asunta detached herself from my growing weakness. I thought desire would strengthen me. She was undermining me: the longing to love her. The longing, nothing more.

“What joins the two of you? He’s an old man. What is it that joins you, Asunta?”

To my surprise she said that smell joined them. What smell? Many smells. Now, the strange smell of an old man, the smell of an animal in a cave. Earlier, the smell of the countryside, where we met. I laughed a lot. Perhaps all that joins us is the smell of cow, chicken, burro, and shit, she said, serious but with a good deal of humor.

She looked at me with a fixity suspended between love and defiance.

“Mexico poor and provincial, mediocre and envious, hostile…”

She threw her arms around my neck.

“I don’t want to go back there. Not for anything in the world.”

She told me this in a whisper. I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling. This was serious. She took my hand. She looked at it. She said my hands were beautiful. I smiled. I wasn’t going to enumerate the charms of Asunta.

“Please, understand me,” she said. “I owe everything to Max Monroy. Before, my life was very frustrated. Now, I’m a guided force.”

“Like a missile?” I said with misplaced humor, as if I hadn’t guessed something more serious in her embrace.

She looked at me again.

“Please, don’t distract me.”

I woke before dawn. Everyone was asleep. I anticipated the surprise of waking beside Asunta Jordán. I already felt the suffering that awaited me as punishment for obtaining what I most desired. Now everyone else was sleeping. What is there outside?

THE SECOND ROYAL Tribunal of the City of Mexico met in 1531 and made it clear that enslavement of the Indians favors miners and encomenderos, the colonists who hold Indian labor. Yes, but at the expense of the Indians, disagrees Vasco de Quiroga, member of the Tribunal. The labor of the Indians is the sinew of the land, the Tribunal maintains. The prosperity of the land depends on respect for indigenous traditions, responds Quiroga, and he moves from words to deeds. He frees his slaves. He becomes a priest. He founds in Santa Fe-here, where you are, Josué-the Republic of the Hospice, dedicated to saving indigenous children by teaching them Castilian along with the Otomí language; to singing and officiating and also preaching Christianity to their parents, without discrediting the native sacred tradition, but fusing Christianity with innate religiosity; to celebrating, without candles, without consecration, the “Plain Mass” as a cordial invitation to shared spirituality. Quiroga evokes a time common to all, Spaniards and Indians: a Golden Age that renews the mythic spirit of the Otomís and also the faith of the early Christian church: The Indians, Quiroga writes, are simple, gentle, humble, obedient, they lack pride, ambition, and greed. They were not born to be slaves. They are rational beings. If some are vagabonds, they must be taught to work. And if some are indolent, it is because the fruits of this earth are offered too easily. Indians and Christians can be today what they were yesterday and in this way become what they will be tomorrow. From Santa Fe, Vasco de Quiroga expands to Michoacán and founds the Hospice of Santa Fe on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro. He respects the Tarasco language as he teaches the Spanish language. He is inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia. The Indians should organize communally, for they are adrift in societies shattered into a thousand pieces by the savage conquest that speeds like a lightning flash from the Gulf to the Pacific, from the land of the Otomís to the land of the Purépechas, from Oaxaca to Xalisco, today’s history faster than yesterday’s, tomorrow’s history broken too if the Indians are not given a language and a roof, care and doctrine, work and dignity. Tata Vasco, Papa Quiroga, Father Vasco the Indians call him, and he gives them collective ownership of the land, a six-hour workday, assigning the fruits of their labor to the necessities of life. He forbids luxury. He organizes every four families under a Principal. Vasco de Quiroga, in whose shadow you work, Josué, teaches that social organization requires a practical economy, that the European world must learn to live in harmony with Indian customs. What will be born of this teaching and this mutual respect? Is it worth wagering that the simple life, work and education, will create a new Mexican community without conquerors or conquered but protected by liberty and law?

“Does happiness have a price?” you, Josué, ask of the statue of Fray Vasco de Quiroga, Tata Vasco, that you pass by every day.

“Yes,” the friar affirms. “The Indians have to be recruited by force so they can learn to be happy…”

“And the reward?” you ask Tata Vasco.

“Christian rebirth.”

“And the method?”

“Using tradition to…”

“To dominate?”

Fray Vasco doesn’t hear you. There was a drought in Michoacán. Quiroga strikes a rock with his staff. Water pours out of the stone when the crook of the bishop’s crosier touches it. Is the miracle enough for you, Josué? Do you need something more than a miracle?

The savage soldiers of Nuño de Guzmán the conquistador come down from Xalisco, burn villages, take prisoners, demand tributes, spices, labor, give themselves extensive and abundant lands and water. Utopia isn’t good for a race of porters and vassals, Utopia doesn’t allow forced labor in the mines or company stores on the haciendas. Silver, cattle, seized lands, alcohol for weddings and funerals: The Indian flees the utopia of Tata Vasco, subjugated by the swords and horses of Nuño de Guzmán, takes refuge on the latifundios: It’s the lesser of two evils… What can we do.

Every morning Josué questions the statue of Fray Vasco de Quiroga, Tata Vasco, in the district of Santa Fe in México, D.F.

“I am the father of your culture,” Tata Vasco tells Josué one day.

Josué wonders if his mission consists in maintaining or changing it.

“GO ON, ANDALE, ándale.”

Order, greeting and farewell, communication, familiarity and alienation, this Mexican verbal expression lends itself to as many interpretations as its national insularity permits: No one outside Mexico says “ándale,” and a Mexican reveals himself when he says it, the lawyer Antonio Sanginés told me one winter night in his house in the Coyoacán district.

This time, the garland of mischievous children was not climbing around his neck, and on the maestro’s face I observed a seriousness at once customary and unusual. I mean, he almost always was very serious. Except this time-I read it in his face-he was serious only for me. And this only for me excluded the other person with whom I had visited Sanginés on previous occasions. My old buddy Jericó.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen each other?”

“A year.”

“Ándale.”

As usual, Sanginés the pedagogue began by evoking a series of allusions to his dealings with President Valentín Pedro Carrera. He prized his role as court adviser to the powerful: in government and in business. He knew them both, in the office building in Santa Fe and in the political encampment at Los Pinos. This is how he defined it, with complete simplicity.

While Max Monroy presided over a permanent empire in Santa Fe, at Los Pinos Valentín Pedro Carrera was the transient foreman of a six-year-long ranch. The occupier of the presidency knew he was temporary. The head of the firm aspired to permanence. How did these two powers get along?

Sanginés did not have to tell me. He valued being the intermediary between the political executive and the business executive, between Valentín Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy. Confirming this, Sanginés looked at me without blinking, his chin resting on his hands, and enumerated-yes, enumerated-his recommendations to President Carrera, like a local Machiavelli (I wouldn’t say a neighborhood Florentine, no, I wouldn’t say that, because after all, Maestro Sanginés had directed my professional thesis on the diabolical Niccolò):

Don’t exaggerate expectations.

Don’t attempt to lengthen the six-year term or seek reelection.

Longevity in office is fatal to one’s reputation.

Remember that presidents begin in the light of hope and end in the shadow of experience.

In opposition, purity.

In power, compromise.

Prepare yourself in time to leave office, Mr. President.

You will be seen as a good president only if you know how to be a good ex-president.

Pause. I never saw a more bitter expression on Antonio’s face than at that moment.

Exaggerate.

Lengthen.

Illuminate the nation.

Don’t commit to anything.

Remain in office.

Don’t leave.

I’m here.

Ándale, Jericó, ándale.

I suspected that Sanginés felt very bitter, that in the past year Jericó had taken possession of the presidential ear, reducing Sanginés to the most absolute marginality.

Why had he called me now?

With the habitual circumlocution of a lawyer from New Spain, Antonio Sanginés launched into a narrative that occupied us for a good part of the night. He evoked. He reproduced. He accelerated. He lingered.

“The times of the hero are over,” Jericó told Carrera (just as Sanginés had told Carrera). A revolutionary state legitimizes itself. Washington, Lincoln, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Madero-Carranza-Obregón-Calles-Cárdenas. Even Tlatelolco and delegitimization by way of crimes against the pure, simple movement that ought to accompany the revolutionary state to accredit it as such. Halt the movement of the state: The movement of society supplants it. The United States is master of silent renovation: Its most reactionary groups appropriate rebellion. The Daughters of the American Revolution are a group of ultraconservative old women who still use pince-nez and wear chokers and color their hair sky blue.

“The times of the hero are over. Government, state, and revolution are no longer the same. The old revolutionary state has lost all legitimacy. You have to give new legality to the new reality,” declaimed Jericó.

“Count on me,” Sanginés told the president.

“I’ll take care of it,” Jericó told Carrera and added: “In your name, of course.”

Something unites us, Sanginés said with a sigh, something unites your friend Jericó and me. We have exercised more power the more distance we have maintained from power. Except my distance, compared to Jericó’s, was disinterested.

He said he advised keeping watch over the country.

“And Jericó?” I asked.

He looked at me sadly but did not respond. Still, there can be no doubt that the detail illuminates the life. Just as a small dog enlivens the stiff portrait of an aristocrat, a gesture by Sanginés spoke volumes to me about his thinking. The most banal gesture: taking a crumb of bread and transforming it into a ball that, finally, in an unusual act for a man so well bred, he tossed to the floor and flattened with his shoe.

Only then did he resume speaking.

“I’ve always known Valentín Pedro Carrera. I’ll summarize his career for you. He was a young idealist. He ran his presidential campaign while his wife was sick. Cynicism or compassion? He made the electorate cry. Doña Clarita died soon after Carrera won the election. She died in time. Carrera got a second wind thanks to grief and solitude. Except that grief ends and solitude doesn’t. Then the fires spring up: arbitrariness, abuse of power, a kind of revenge against the destiny that raised him so high just to strip him of what power gives in abundance-appearance, the use of appearing, the abuse of being present… My advice, Josué, was born of a desire to control these extremes and employ the affliction of power to benefit power…”

I didn’t know what Sanginés was drinking from an empty cup.

“I believe I have discovered the great flaw in power. The powerful man does not want to know what is done in his name. The great secular criminal, an Al Capone, knows and orders everything. But even the most fearsome tyrant opens the floodgates of a violence he himself cannot control. Who assassinated Mateotti, the last opposition deputy who served as a democratic excuse for Mussolini, leaving him no option other than dictatorship? Did Himmler itemize the concentration camp horror beyond Hitler’s insane, abstract desire, concentrating it into mountains of suitcases, hair, eyeglasses, dentures, and broken dolls in Auschwitz? Did Stalin do anything other than follow the tyrannical desire of the revolutionary who died in time, Lenin the lay saint, I understand him better than his democratic followers, Bukharin, Kamenev…? Not Trotsky, who was as hard as Stalin, but to his misfortune an educated man…”

My attentive gaze was a question: And Valentín Pedro Carrera?

Sanginés told me anecdotes. Carrera is a man in love with his own words. He can speak without stopping for hours. It is absolutely necessary to interrupt him from time to time. To help him. So he can take a breath. So he can have a drink. We all knew that this president needed official interrupters. We presidential lackeys took turns interrupting him.

“What gives? Do they think everything they say is interesting? Or are they afraid to be quiet and give someone else the floor? Are they afraid of being contradicted? What happens?” I asked with intense ingenuousness.

“I tell you, it’s an art knowing how to interrupt the president. Jericó’s acumen consists in never interrupting. Carrera realized it: ‘You never interrupt me, Jericó. Thank you for that. But tell me why.’ ”

Sanginés was present. Jericó, he says, did not respond. Why was Sanginés there? What would Jericó have said to Carrera in the absence of a witness?

“The president is garrulous. I’m telling you because he told me. He also is master of a kind of pedantic indecisiveness. I mean, he is not an indecisive man like Hamlet, who weighs and tests his options. His indecision is a kind of farce. It’s a way of saying, paradoxically, I have the power not to make any decision at all and to say whatever occurs to me.”

I repeat: Sanginés’s cup was empty.

“That was Jericó’s astuteness, I realize it now. He knew Carrera did not act out of pure vanity and arrogance. On both counts Jericó acted for him. Carrera did and did not realize it, and he thanked Jericó for relieving him of an unwanted responsibility: Making decisions is the queen bee of power; it can also be its dead fly of feigned meekness.”

What did the president want? The impossible: “Give me easy solutions to difficult problems.”

“Ça n’existe pas,” Sanginés murmured. “Jericó’s wickedness…”

I raised my eyebrows. Sanginés sighed. He made it clear that he knew what he was talking about, that his was not the voice of a resentful man removed from the favors of power. He wanted to remain a loyal counselor. Not to mention a responsible citizen. I let my eyebrows drop. I accused myself of sentimentality. Because I owed a great deal to Sanginés. Because of my old friendship with Jericó. Because I was still, by comparison, an innocent…

“Think technical. Talk agrarian. Long live liberty. Down with equality. Count on me. Don’t trust too many counselors. You prepare the mole, too many cooks spoil the sauce. Send your enemies to distant embassies. And your friends too.”

With these and similar words, Jericó was insinuating himself into the president’s confidence, alarming him at times (“You’ve taken the wolf by the ears, you can’t let him go but you can’t hold him forever either”), encouraging him at others (“Don’t worry too much, equality is the most unequal thing that exists”), cutting him off on occasions (the classic symbolic knife slitting his throat), warning him on others (the no less classic eye opened by the right index finger on the lid), elaborating justifications (“politics can be soft, interests are always hard”). The president gave him simple tasks. Read the papers, Jericó. Keep me informed. At night I’ll read whatever seems important.

“What did your pal do?” Sanginés asked rhetorically. “What do you think?”

He gave me an ugly look. I gave him a beatific one.

“He selected items from the press. He cut out whatever suited him whenever it suited him. News of general tranquillity and happiness and prosperity under the leadership of Valentín Pedro Carrera: A president becomes more and more isolated and eventually believes only what he wishes to believe and what his lackeys make him believe-”

I interrupted. “Jericó… I think that… he’s…”

“The complete courtier, Josué. Don’t be deceived.”

“And you, Maestro?” I tried to irritate him.

“I repeat: a loyal counselor.”

Ándale, ándale, ándale.

“DON’T OPEN YOUR mouth. Don’t say anything.”

And I who had my romantic phrases prepared, my sentimental allusions derived from a potpourri of musical boleros, recollections of Amado Nervo, dialogues from North American movies (Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars), everything refined, nothing vulgar, though fearing my good manners would disappoint her in bed, perhaps she desired more brutal treatment, coarser words (you’re my whore, whore, I adore your tight little cunt), no, I didn’t dare, only pretty phrases, and as soon as I had said one, the first one, when I was on top of her, she came out with that brutal “Don’t open your mouth. Don’t say anything.”

I proceeded in silence. I came, censuring my mouth, the mouth I wasn’t to open, obeying her categorical instructions. And I’m not complaining. She gave me everything, except words. I was left in doubt. Are words intrusive in love? Or is love without words only partial, incomplete in its sentimental formulation? I shouldn’t think that. She had given me everything. She had permitted me everything. As if in her, in this act, lay the culmination of half-complete loves with the nurse Elvira Ríos, tormented ones with Lucha Zapata, venal ones with the whore with the bee who ended up married to Errol Esparza’s father, jailed as the presumed killer of Don Nazario, and escaped from prison despite the vigilance (unhealthy, obsessive, I now told myself) of Miguel Aparecido.

Asunta Jordán…

Preambles to love, Cupid’s broken arrows that finally gave me the great pleasure of a complete sexual act, at once instinctive and calculated, demanding and permissive, natural and artificial, pure and perverse: What was there in the provincial body of Asunta Jordán that gathered everything into a single woman and a single act? Everything I’ve said and nothing. Nothing, in the sense that she expressed the words of the act, which did not encounter the verbal separation that I (that every man) wants to give it, though later he may repent of, or forget, the words he exclaimed, sighed, shouted when he came abundantly.

Were words necessary? Was Asunta telling me that the act was sufficient in itself, that words cheapened it because they were inferior to pleasure, verbal placebos, derivations of the bolero, of poetry, of the impossible analogy between the act and the language of love…?

“Don’t touch my face.”

No. No. No. All the negations of the moment diluted the fiesta though the fiesta had been memorable and I was an imbecile who had no reason to complain. I did something wrong since, as satisfied as a god that creates love, the prohibition against speaking diminished the completeness of the act. I was mistaken. One could be mute from birth and enjoy the woman with no possibility of uttering a word. Why did I attempt to verbalize, give speech to the act that had culminated without the need for any words at all? And why did she forbid language in so categorical and severe a manner: Don’t open your mouth. Don’t say anything?

And why, silenced and confused, did I try to replace the forbidden word with an amatory and affectionate gesture? (The two things are not the same: The amatory is passion, affection is concession.) Or with good manners, gratitude, and why not, the brief prologue to seduction…

We know we have spent many hours together, at the office, at times in a café as a distraction from our obligations, often at working lunches, rarely at social dinners, more often at cocktail parties where she made her appearance as part of Max Monroy’s power, the visible, tangible, desirable power of a man as famous as he is mysterious: A year in the office in Santa Fe and I still hadn’t seen, not even glimpsed, the top dog, the chief, the bossman, the qaid.

Knowing she had constant access to him and all I knew about him I knew through her (and, in secret, through the informed, interred voice of Antigua Concepción, but this I could not repeat)… At the office, no one on the ten lower floors and the two top ones had met the chief executive, Max Monroy. I began to imagine he was a fiction created and maintained to make people believe in an untouchable power and to uphold the authority of the enterprise. I would have believed this if, from time to time, Asunta had not descended to the world of mortals to share with me something said or done by Monroy-his work a constant reference; his words a frequent one; his current life never mentioned.

My relationship with Asunta, therefore, had been purely professional. With the exception of my adventure in her boudoir, guessing at, touching, and smelling her underclothes, something only I and the maid who caught me in the act knew about. Had the servant told Asunta or was she so discreet-or fearful-that she kept quiet? I couldn’t know and couldn’t ask. If Asunta knew, she behaved as if she didn’t, and in either case my sexual excitement increased: If she knew, how exciting it was to share that fact as a secret. If she didn’t know, it was even more moving to have a sensation that made me solitary master of her underthings when they were not covering her body. And in any event-emotion, enthusiasm-what delight was produced in me by the memory of those bras, panties, garters, stockings, arranged like a small army of the libido in their ordered bureau drawers.

How could I approach her beyond our daily working relationship? By imagining her reality or realizing her imagination?

I tried to approach her by approaching those who worked in the Vasco de Quiroga building, as if the undesired origin of the desired woman would come alive in the origin of Monroy’s employees in the Utopia building. As if on knowing them, I would see a lessened Asunta, still without power. As if, in my mean-spirited rancor, I desired to see her expelled from Olympus and returned to the minihell of anonymous work.

I WAS RESTING, my arms crossed above me and my hands forming a kind of pillow, when I heard footsteps on the stairs and identified them with Jericó. They were phantom steps that sent back to me an echo of my best friend and, perhaps, my best years. Everything was thrown into turmoil (for nostalgia should not last too long) by the sensation that Jericó not only had reached the apartment on Calle de Praga we once shared but was opening the door with the key we also had shared.

I felt a certain uneasiness: I was the one who lived here now, and this was the place I left to go to work at the San Juan de Aragón Prison or the Santa Fe offices. For the first time, I was the master of the house. Jericó’s key going into the lock on the door was like a physical and spiritual violation. He came in and made himself right at home. He had told me, from the beginning, that the place needed his noise even though he shared it with me, the newcomer, the stone guest, the Tancredo of bullfighting.

“Wake up, Josué,” he said from the door, raising his hand to his forehead in a kind of pseudomilitary salute.

“I am awake,” I said reluctantly, looking at the advancing shadow out of the corner of my eye.

“Did you eat yet?” he persisted and didn’t allow me to answer. “Because I ask you, pal, who digests better: the man who sleeps after a banquet or the one who goes out to hunt?”

I shrugged. Jericó was interrupting a daydream dedicated to Asunta, what she was like, how I could have her, would she love me again, or was our encounter only a passing quickie, informal, without consequences?

I was recalling and consecrating it, Asunta’s body, and now Jericó proceeded with anatomical brutality: “Are you going out to hunt, are you coming home to sleep? How do you know?”

He poked my navel and drew a line between my ribs.

“By opening up your belly.”

He laughed.

“There’s the proof.”

I emerged from my lethargy. I sat on the edge of the bed. Jericó prepared coffee. He had taken possession of something that, I told myself, offended, he had never left. I was the intruder. I was practically the vagrant.

“What do you want?” I said, longing to annoy him.

His expression didn’t change: “I want you.” He offered me a steaming cup of instant coffee.

“Why?”

He launched into a discourse that seemed interminable. Who were we? Two people shipwrecked from paternal authority. That’s what makes us brothers. We lack a family. We didn’t have an old man. We were abandoned, liberated, set adrift.

“Whatever you like.”

“And?”

“That obliges us to know our internal limits. You realize that the majority of human beings never seriously ask themselves: Who am I? What are my limits? Why? Because family and society have marked out the path and boundaries for them. Here, kid, don’t step off the path, look as far ahead as you like, but don’t look right or left. Eyes fixed on the horizon we presented to you because we think about you, son, and want the best for you, don’t think about anything, everything’s been thought about in advance, my boy, it’s for your own good, don’t stray, don’t venture anything, don’t turn away from a destiny you don’t deserve to know independently, why would you, boy, if we’ve already prepared it for you? We prepared the future for you the way you make a bed, here are the pillows, here are the covers, get in and sleep, baby, don’t disturb the bed, after all, it took a lot for us to arrange it for you and have it ready so you can sleep peacefully, sleep and sleep and sleep, youngster, kid, baby, boy, son, and not worry about a thing.”

He made a nasty face and then burst into laughter.

“Wake up, Josué, arise and walk!”

I told him I was listening. He didn’t expect any words from me. He had brought his own speech and my job was to listen to him and not make a sound.

“I continue: You and I weren’t born for domesticity. Consider your sexual life. From pillar to post, here a vagabond, there a whore, here a nurse, there a secretary…”

“I do better than you, a really solitary plainsman,” I grumbled, angry that he knew what I thought he was unaware of.

“We have no friends,” he said, somewhat disconcerted.

“Do you think we’re part of a vanished civilization?”

“We’re always obliged to correct the errors in our destiny, whatever it may have been, Josué. So it’s more than the truth…”

“A different destiny? How?”

“By getting together with people. Organizing the people. Taking a bath with the masses, like the showers you and I used to take together, but now with millions of human beings who want to be redeemed.”

“Won’t they be redeemed better on their own?”

“No,” Jericó almost shouted. “What’s needed is the head, the leader!”

“The Duce, the Fuehrer,” I said with a skeptical smile.

“The country is ripe,” Jericó asserted, corrected his course, and returned to him and me.

“Yes, I swear to you, God’s truth, only you, and only I, we weren’t born to be husbands or fathers or even faithful lovers. You and I, Josué, were born for freedom, without ties, the road cleared to be and act without reporting to anyone, do you understand? We are free, old friend, free as the air, the rain, the sea, the birds!”

“Until a hunter shoots you, and you fall and become supper. Sure…”

“Risks,” Jericó said with a laugh, “and the air can be disturbed by a cyclone, the rain can be stormy, the sea rough, and the bird, with luck, unconquered and flying toward freedom.”

“An old bird, you mean,” I said to harmonize with the jubilation of my old companion. I even sang: “Wounded bird of the dawn…”

“In other words, Josué, do you believe you and I have a special mission, since love, home, marriage are forbidden to us?”

“Friendship would be enough,” I murmured with no desire to offend or even inquire.

He slammed one fist with the other. It was a gesture of action, of virtue, of energy, of a voluntary desire to lead. To lead me to him and himself to me as well.

He said the country was not advancing. Why? The president is weak. He hasn’t governed with energy. We did everything halfway. You and I? No. Those who governed us. Everything halfway, everything mediocre. We though we were king of the world because we had oil. We sold it for a lot of money. With the profits, we bought nothing but trinkets. A luxury six-year term. We behaved like nouveaux riches. There was no “tomorrow.” The price went down. Debts remained. A new horizon. Commerce. A quick treaty, to deck out another six-year term. Things are free to move about. Not people. Currency, stocks, objects move. Workers remain stationary, though they’re needed in the USA. Come because we need you. But if you come, we’ll kill you. Okay? Fair enough? Since then we simply fill in one hole before the next one opens. We’re like the little Dutch boy in the story, his finger stuck in the hole in the dike to avoid the inevitable flood. But we only put our finger deep in our asshole. And it smells bad.

Theatrically, my friend Jericó pulled aside the curtain in the room to reveal, from our high perch, the omnipresent urban chaos of Mexico City, the great deep pyramid of Cementos Tolteca and Seguros América and Avenidas Cuauhtémoc, the fragmented pyramid sunk in primeval mud and asphyxiated in secondary air, the clogged traffic, the overflowing buses, the streets numerous but uncountable: the lines of workers at five in the morning waiting to go to their job and return at seven at night in order to return at five… Six hours for working. Eight for commuting. Life.

“Do you realize?” Jericó exploded and I saw him this way, now, in shirtsleeves, his shirt open to his navel, his hairless chest demanding the heroism of bronze, the childish cheeks, subtly stripped of baby fat, of a face consumed by the heroic gesture and the intense brilliance of his pale eyes.

Did I realize? he asked rhetorically, pointing down and into the distance, a country of more than a hundred million inhabitants that cannot provide work, food, or schooling to half the population, a country that does not know how to employ the millions of workers it needs to build highways, dams, schools, housing, hospitals, to preserve forests, enrich fields, construct factories, a country where hunger, ignorance, and unemployment lead to crime, a criminality that invades everything, the police are criminal, order disintegrates, Josué, the politicians are corrupt, the canoe has sprung a leak, we live in a Xochimilco with no Dolores del Río or Pedro Armendáriz or pigs to save us: The canals are filled with garbage, they were choked by filth, abandonment, thorns, the corpses of piglets, chicken bones, the remains of flowers…

He came up to me but didn’t touch me.

“Josué. This year I’ve traveled the country from one end to the other. The president gave me the job of forming groups for celebrating fiestas. I betrayed him, Josué. I’ve gone from village to village to form combat groups, organizing immigrants who find no way out, campesinos ruined by the Free Trade Agreement, discontented workers, inciting all of them, my brother, to slowdowns, to boycotts, to stealing parts, to self-inflicted accidents, to arson and murder…”

I listened to him with a mixture of fascination and horror, and if one impelled me to distance him, the other led me to an embrace, a mixture that was idiotic but explicable of what in me refused and what in me desired. From village to village, he repeated, recruiting at funerals, churches, dances, barbecues…

“Following the orders of El Señor Presidente, you understand? preparing the festivities that matter to him so much in order to distract, deceive, put blinders on the mule, Josué, without realizing that here we have a gigantic force for action, a force of people who are fed up, forsaken, desperate, ready for anything…”

I asked without saying a word: Anything?

“For submission and abandonment, because that has been the rule for centuries,” he continued, reading the question in my gaze. “For the festive deceit, which is what the president wants.”

“And you?” I managed, finally, to squeeze in a word.

I didn’t have to say what I was going to say.

And you?

“If you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question,” said Jericó.

“DON’T TOUCH MY face.” “Don’t open your mouth.” “Don’t say anything.” All these prohibitions from Asunta excited my imagination and I reproached myself, wondering if I could be so boorish that I was not satisfied with her sex but demanded of her a chatter that was, barely, a complement to my own “lyric poetry”: the words that in my sentimental fictions corresponded to physical love. I felt in me a fountain of poetic chivalry that I wanted to accompany the more bestiarium, the animal custom that sex is, with a verbal reduction something like the musical accompaniment to a bolero, or the background music in a film… in any case, more angelicarum.

And Asunta asked for silence. She cut off my words and left me perplexed. I didn’t know if the demand for silence was the condition of a promise: Be quiet and you’ll see me again. Or a condemnation: Be quiet because you won’t have me again. Was this the sublime coquetry of the woman, the doubt that left me hanging and allowed me to guess at the worst and the best, repeated delight or exile from pleasure, heaven with Asunta and hell without her?

I wanted to believe I was a ludic subject of the enchantress, that I would return to her bed, her graces, her blessing, on a night when I least expected it. That, in a sense, she would put me to the test. That my virility had seduced her forever. That in secret she would tell herself, I want more, Josué, I want more, though her coquetry (or her discretion) moved her to circumspection in order to transform the wait into pleasure not only renewed but multiplied… It was enough for me to believe this in order to arm myself with patience and, with patience, to obtain many favors. The first, the gift of virtue. I deserved her love because I was faithful and knew, like an ancient knight, how to wait and not despair, stand vigil over the weapons of sex, respond calmly to the call of my lady. This idea of chaste love hampered my imagination for a few days. I launched into the reading and rereading of Don Quixote, above all reading aloud the passages of love and honor dedicated to Dulcinea.

I’ll tell you, this mania did not last very long, because my flesh was impatient and my heart less strong than I had thought, so Asunta stopped being Dulcinea-Iseult-Heloise and became a base fetish, to the extent that her photograph at the head of my bed occupied a quasivirginal spot, and I say “quasi” because on a few nights I did not resist the temptation to masturbate looking at her face (upside down, it’s true, given that my jerking off occurred while I was lying in bed and Asunta’s image hung vertically, held up by a tack) and surrendering, in the end, to solitary pleasure, forgetting Asunta, reproaching myself for my weakness though repeating that line about “Things are known to Onan unknown to Don Juan.”

Don Juan! I loved Mozart’s opera though I was astounded that in it the seducer seduces no one: not the disdainful Doña Ana, or the peasant Zerlina, or his former lover Doña Elvira, bent now on revenge.

Stripped of literary, oneiric, onanist, fetishist, etcetera words and opportunities, what remained for me, I ask the reader, but to return to the attack, be brave, take the citadel by force? In other words, have the audacity to return at midnight to the Castle of Utopia, the palace inhabited by Asunta on the thirteenth floor, where one day I had ventured to contemplate and touch and smell my lady’s underthings, risking ridicule at entering her bedchamber and taking her by dint of strength-or the success of being accepted because, ladies and gentlemen, this was what she secretly hoped for from me: audacity, risk, daring, boldness, all the synonyms you like to supplant and sustain the pure, simple desire of tasting the flesh and dominating the body of a woman named Asunta.

I had, thanks to my administrative duties in the company, master keys. I could go into Asunta’s apartment and move around like a thief who has cased the terrain, even my beauty’s bedroom. On the way I grew accustomed to the darkness, so when I reached the bedroom I was aware of Asunta’s absence. The bed was perfectly made. No proof existed that she had slept here.

This simple fact unleashed in me a storm of jealousy and aberrant suppositions. If she wasn’t here, where could she be gallivanting at one-thirty in the morning? I rejected the more obvious explanations. She was at a dinner. Why hadn’t she told me about it? Because she had absolutely no obligation to let me know about her social activities. Had she gone on vacation? Impossible. I knew her schedule better than my own. Asunta was a workaholic who did not miss a single minute of her work schedule. Ah, the bathroom… Not there either. I opened the door and saw a dry, clean place free of humanity (or rather, the humanity I longed for). I had the sensation of how similar an empty bathroom was to a morgue. I lost my mind. No doubt Asunta was hiding under the bed to mock me. No. She went into her closet because, perversely, she liked to smell and feel herself enveloped by the clothing that once, when she was a little provincial wife, she could not have. Not at all. Behind a curtain, hiding from herself? Ridiculous.

What was left to explore? My exalted spirit, my jealousy coming in vague waves, my desire in tempestuous agitation, my loss of all common sense, were manifested in the uncontrollable movement of my body, the sweat that ran down my neck and armpits, the nerves roused in my arms and legs, the mute excitation of my sex, tense in secret repose, saving itself for the great fiesta of love waiting for me, I was certain, in some corner of this false utopia in Santa Fe.

“Max Monroy is a strong, secure man, Josué. So much so that he never locks the door of his apartment, up on the fourteenth floor.”

I knew that on the roof of the building there was a helicopter waiting for Max’s orders and a wing for the services and rooms of his cooks, bodyguards, servants, and pilots. Also, I repeat, I knew his immense self-confidence (the vanity of the powerful man) kept open the doors of his apartment, which I now penetrated with the supreme audacity of a desire that drove away any feeling of danger as I blindly crossed what I supposed was a living room: The TV screens shone solitary in the night, as if they could not resign themselves to being turned off and would continue transmitting day and night commercial announcements, soap operas, political commentary, news, old movies, with an innocent longing, failed from the start, to find a conclusion.

I left out the dining room with its twelve chairs. The library with the gleaming backs of its books. The illuminated paintings of Zárraga, Soriano, and Zurbarán (I respected them as if they were a trio of singers). I dared to approach a door that announced repose and isolation.

I opened it.

They ignored me.

What I heard when I opened the door, Asunta’s words of love for Max, readers must imagine…

I CLIMBED INTO the helicopter behind Asunta. She sat in the back of the craft, beside a shadow named Max Monroy. I had no time to greet him. I took a seat next to the pilot as the propellers made the sound of a hurricane and conversation-even the most elementary, like good morning-became impossible.

The helicopter made an alarming vertical ascent that seemed to pierce the sky and eternity for a vague instant before the low, dangerous, turbulent flight, difficult and problematic, that carried us from Santa Fe to Los Pinos, the offices of the honorable president of the republic Don Valentín Pedro Carrera, that is, to a bare, paved-over space surrounded by squat, reinforced buildings and protected, at the exit, by a blur of mastiffs howling so loudly they eclipsed-and almost demanded silence from-the helicopter’s engines.

I got out before anyone else and saw Max Monroy for the first time. Asunta climbed down and offered her hand to the spectral being at the back of the craft who appeared before me like a shadow, perhaps because that is what Max Monroy had been-had always been-for me until then, so that his physical presence affected me as if my own soul had been revealed to me, as if this phantom, upon becoming corporeal, gave me a physical reality I had not known in myself before.

Asunta offered him her arm. Monroy refused with an energetic chivalry verging on rudeness. He walked along the pavement without looking at anyone but looking straight ahead, as if for him terrestrial accidents did not exist. Asunta was at his side, with a visible, irritating preoccupation very inferior to the serious-not to say severe-care the nurse Elvira Ríos had offered me. I walked behind the pair. Preceding all of us was an army officer-I couldn’t read his rank-but I had eyes only for Max Monroy, dressed in black with a white shirt and a blue bow tie with white dots.

He walked upright, not saying a word. His head rested on his shoulders like a pumpkin on dark soil. He had no neck. His clothes were at once too short and too long, obliging me to wonder about his height. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He was as ambivalent as his attire, clothes that could seem stripped of personality if they hadn’t been worn and therefore personalized by this precise human being who consequently seemed at that moment a man in disguise, but disguised as himself, as if he were crossing the stage of the great theater of the world knowing it was a theater, while the rest of us believed we were in and living with reality.

Knowing the world is a theater and giving it the advantage of knowing itself to be reality though we know it isn’t… I wonder to this very day why, seeing Max climb out of the helicopter and advance along the landing strip with the firm though mortal step of a man in his eighties, my own clothing didn’t make me laugh, along with the clothes of Asunta and the pilot who remained on the strip looking at us with a smile I chose to judge as skeptical. And the smile of the presidential guard ahead of us, leading the way. For in Monroy’s body, his way of being and walking forward, I guessed at the multiple paradox of our knowing we were disguised not when we go to a carnival but when we dress every day to attend to our jobs, our loves, our diversions, our sorrows and joys. And when we see ourselves naked? Isn’t this the primeval disguise, the toga of external skin that masks our organic dispersion of brain, bones, viscera, unattached muscles, like the contents of a shopping basket spilling out on the floor if not for the corporeal container?

The mastiffs barked. As Max approached, they maintained a silence of slavering lower jaws, allowed us to pass, retreated. No doubt the presidential guard walking ahead of us quieted them. It didn’t fail to attract my attention, however, that Monroy had not, even for an instant, slowed his pace or looked at the dogs, moving forward at the speed he had settled on as if obstacles or dangers did not exist. Have I invented what I’m saying? Does it obey a reality and not my interpretation of reality? And wasn’t this the dilemma Max Monroy had put in my hands: the eternal problem of knowing the line between reality and fantasy, or rather, between reality and a perception of reality? Was all of reality a fantasy in which a man like Max Monroy, in possession of the central character in the drama, assumes as true his own fantasy and leads the rest of us into being phantoms of a phantom, the cast that is secondary to the star of an auto sacramental pompously called Life?

In this state of mind, how could I not recall my youthful reading of Calderón de la Barca and his Great Theater of the World: The protagonist humanity waits impatiently behind the scenes until the supreme director of the drama, God himself, invents humankind and says: “Action! On stage!” But since “humanity” is an abstraction, what God really does is assign a role to each and every one of his creatures-Max Monroy, Asunta Jordán, Jericó, me… the entire extensive cast of this novel that well could be a short film of the superproducer God, Inc., L.L.P.

A preview. A trailer. But with a warning: The star is named Max Monroy. The rest are secondary roles and even extras. We who carry the spears. The ones in the chorus. The ones in the crowd.

Then who was this man who advanced between hidden weapons, silenced dogs, and a minimum escort: the officer, Asunta, and me? If he was a man in disguise, was the immense dignity with which he climbed the stairs to the president’s office, his clenched jaw, his closed mouth with tight, invisible lips also a disguise? He walked forward and entered the office of the president, who was accompanied only by Jericó, not looking at Jericó and looking at the president with deep eyes, and when Valentín Pedro Carrera welcomed him and offered his hand, Max Monroy did not return the greeting, and when the president invited us to take a seat and he himself sat down, Max Monroy looked at him with that deep gaze filled with memory and foresight.

“Remain standing, Mr. President.”

If Carrera was disconcerted, he hid it very well.

“As you choose. Do you prefer to speak standing?”

Monroy settled into a chair.

“No. I sit. You stand, Señor.”

We looked at one another for a moment. Jericó looked at me and I at him. Asunta at the president and the president at Monroy. Max looked at no one. And not as proof of crushing pride but, on the contrary, as if it pained him to see and be seen, obliging me to realize, at that moment, why he never allowed himself to be seen. The gaze of others hurt him. It wounded him to see and be seen. His kingdom was one of absence. And yet, and this was the greatest paradox, his business was sight, sound, spectacle: He lived by what he was not; by what perhaps, repelled him.

For a moment I lost track of what was going on. Monroy was humiliating the president of the republic, whose only response as he remained standing before a seated Monroy was to order the officer who had brought us here:

“You may withdraw, Captain.”

LEAVING BEHIND MY fraternal relationship with Jericó, a double movement impelled me both forward and back.

Forward: my fairly fleeting contact with other workers in the office of Max Monroy. Since I had grown up in the well-provided isolation of the house on Berlín, with no company other than the severe María Egipciaca and no friendships but those at school-Errol and Jericó-my contact with other young people had been, if not nonexistent, then barely sporadic. I don’t know, vigilant readers, if when I have exercised the right of the narrator-an amiable authoritarian-to select the stellar scenes in my life, I have left in novelistic limbo the other persons who surrounded me at schools, in offices, on the streets.

I have already recounted the intense desires that carried me, at a given moment, from the house on Berlín to the apartment on Praga to the prison at San Juan de Aragón to the Cerrada de Chimalpopoca to the office of Max Monroy. But since I had been in that office for almost two years (and though my primary relationship was with Asunta Jordán and, through her, with a Max Monroy who assumed in my imagination the hazy trappings of a phantom), I could not fail to observe, though to a lesser degree than what I’ve said here, my colleagues at work and how I got along with them.

I should indicate here that my anxieties and concerns, enigmas and humiliations sought an outlet on two very distinct levels-contrary, I should say.

I spent some time ingratiating myself with my colleagues. Please remember that Jericó and I were brought up in a kind of hothouse, I with very little contact beyond the house on Berlín and my jailer María Egipciaca, and he in the enclosure of the garret on Praga. And this happened not because of a predetermined plan but in a natural way. I’ve already told how, at school, Jericó and I gravitated toward each other to the exclusion of the “high-spirited boys” more interested than Jericó and I in sports, tiresome jokes, and, in any case, family life, and we were soon connected by intellectual curiosity and the tutoring of Filopáter. We were closer to Nietzsche and Saint Thomas than to our classmates Pecas and Trompas, and our contact with the other teachers occurred only in class or when the innocent pervert Soler hefted our balls before we played sports.

Errol Esparza had been our only contact with a family life that, to judge by his, it was better not to have. Living domestically, as Errol did with Don Nazario and Doña Estrellita, was a hymn to the benefits of orphanhood. Though being an orphan may mean being abandoned to the expectation of recovering lost parents or a habitual resignation to never seeing them again.

I don’t know if these ideas crossed the minds of those who one day compared themselves to Castor and Pollux, the mythical offspring of a queen and a swan. I lost sight of Jericó for years and still don’t know for certain where he lived and what he did, since his memories of his time in France were patently illusory: There was no City of Light in his tale except as a reference so literary and cinematic that the contrast was obvious to the North American references he knew about. Jericó’s Baedeker reached as far as the United States and did not cross the Atlantic. I came to this conclusion but never wanted to test it directly. As I’ve said, I didn’t ask Jericó anything so he wouldn’t ask me anything either.

On the other hand, a good deal had happened to me. Lucha Zapata and the little house in the district of Los Doctores. Miguel Aparecido and the penitentiary of San Juan de Aragón. I realized all this experience was in no way ordinary. Lucha was a lost, weak woman, while Miguel and the prison population were, by definition, marginal and eccentric beings. That gave rise to my decision to visit, floor by floor, office by office, the employees in the building on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in the Santa Fe District, seat of Max Monroy’s empire: Who were the others?

It was difficult to classify them. Except for the architects, who generally came from families with money and sometimes with a pedigree. The profession sheltered many scions of old, half-feudal nineteenth-century families who had disappeared with the revolution and were anxious to recover the stature they had lost by having their sons and grandsons follow a career “for decent people,” which was the general view of architecture. You should note that the beach, country, and city houses of the new rich were the work of architects who were the children of the old rich (or the new poor). Those lodged in Monroy’s offices were no exception. Their tailors had adorned them with elegantly cut suits, their shirts were discreet, rarely white, their ties had a foreign label, their shoes were Italian loafers, their hair was cut with a razor.

They were the exception. The lawyers in the company, the accountants, the secretaries, were the children of other lawyers, accountants, or secretaries, but their variety fascinated me: I visited them to learn about and be amazed at the upward mobility available to a part of our society. Drinking coffee, asking for a favor, receiving a report, going up and down the honeycomb of the Utopia building like a bumblebee, I met the son of the shopkeeper, the shoemaker, the mechanic, and the dentist, the daughter of the dressmaker, the receptionist, and the employee of the beauty salon and again the children of clerks at Sears, minor bureaucrats, and peddlers. Offspring of Ford, of Volkswagen of Mexico, of the Ceranoquistes of Guanajuato, of Millennium Perisur, of tourist agencies and hospitals, armed with Nivada watches and Gucci shoes, Arrow shirts and Ferragamo ties, driving their Toyotas bought with a down payment of three thousand pesos, taking their family on vacation in an Odyssey minivan, using credit from Scotiabank, celebrating festive occasions with a basket of imports from La Europea, they were men and women of all sizes: tall and short, fat and thin, blond, brunet, dark-skinned and chestnut-haired, no one younger than twenty-five or older than fifty: a young group, modern, stylish, embedded in the social life of national capitalism (sometimes neocolonial and often globalized), possessing generally good manners, though at times the women demonstrated a certain chewing-gum vulgarity in their fishnet stockings and high heels (like my never carefully considered Ensenada de Ensenada de Ensenada), most of them with a professional appearance, tailored suits, and severe hairstyles, as if copying the model of the principal Lady of the Enterprise, Asunta Jordán. And the men generally courteous, well-spoken, and even relishing their innate amiability, though as soon as they found themselves only with men they reverted to the vulgar language that certifies friendship among Mexican machos (among other reasons, in order to dispel any suspicion of homosexuality, above all in a country where greetings between men consist of an embrace, an unusual act for a Gringo and one repellent to an Englishman).

Let’s say then that on the twelve floors permitted to me in the Utopia building, I tried to be a model of circumspection and affability, without any familiarity, cronyism, fake intimacies, or vulgar winking. On the other hand, my sentimental soul, wounded by Asunta’s disdain, searched for the lowest, most falsely compensatory comfort: the return to the brothel of my adolescence, but this time only to be taken in and muddied up to my ears. I made a move toward the past in Hetara’s house, where Jericó took me for the first time as a teenager and I fornicated with the woman with the bee on her buttock who one day reappeared as the second Señora de Esparza and then as the lover and partner of the gang leader Maxi Batalla, eventually becoming a prisoner and then a fugitive. Where were they now, she and the Mariachi? What surprises were they preparing for us?

I have left for the end my most laudatory thoughts about Max Monroy and his enterprise. I say this to purge myself of my sins and reappear before all of you in a dignified light. Many excellent young Mexicans, scholarship students, were educated in foreign universities. They attend centers of learning such as Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Caltech. They acquire formidable scientific knowledge. They return to Mexico and cannot find a position. The large national firms import technology, they don’t generate it. The young people educated in Europe and the United States stay and cannot find work or leave again.

I have to give Max Monroy credit-to give you the most complete version possible of what I saw and did in his company-for keeping young scientists and mathematicians educated abroad in Mexico. Monroy realized something: If we don’t generate technology and science, we will always be at the tail end of civilization. He put Salvador Venegas, a graduate of Oxford, and José Bernardo Rosas, an alumnus of Cambridge, at the head of the technoscientific team, while Rodrigo Aguilar, who studied at the London School of Economics, coordinated the project dedicated not only to gathering and applying technologies but to inventing them.

The business team was guided by one norm: giving greater importance to research than to innovation. Venegas, Rosas, and Aguilar proposed taking the formative leap from computing and communications based on Max Planck’s quantum theory. The unity of all things is called energy. The proof of energy is light. Light is emitted in discrete quantities. On the basis of this theory (science is a hypothesis not verified or denied by facts; literature is a fact that is verified without having to prove anything, I told myself), the young scientists apply thought to practice, perfecting a pocket simputer capable of immediately converting text to word and thereby giving information access to the rural, illiterate population of Mexico in accordance with Ortega y Gasset’s exclamation when he interviewed an Andalusian campesino: “How erudite this illiterate man is!” Reducing the distances between economic vanguards and rearguards. Attacking an elite’s monopoly of knowledge. Less bureaucratic statism. Less antisocial capitalism. More community organization. Less distance among the economic area, the popular will, and political control. Bringing technology to the agrarian world. Giving weapons to the poor. Julieta Campos’s book What Shall We Do with the Poor? was something like the gospel of the intellectuals who worked in the Utopia building.

“What marching orders were we given?” Aguilar asked himself. “Activating citizen initiatives.”

“Municipalities. Local solutions to local problems,” Rosas added.

“Cooperation of urban universities with the rural interior,” Aguilar continued.

“Putting an end to the nepotism, patrimonialism, and favoritism that have been the plagues of our national life,” added Venegas.

The dark young scientist, focused, serious, and brilliant, concluded: “Either we create a model of orderly growth with local autonomy or fatally deepen the divide between the two Mexicos. Those who grow become rich and diversify. And those who remain behind remain as they have been for centuries, sometimes resigned, other times rebellious, and always disillusioned…”

I looked at the extensive series of buildings that continued the power of Max Monroy along the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, the horizontal honeycomb of laboratories, factories, workshops, hospitals, garages, offices, and underground parking lots.

I thought again that Vasco de Quiroga established Thomas More’s Utopia in New Spain in 1532 in order to provide a refuge for Indians, orphans, the sick, and the old, only to give way later to a powder factory, a municipal garbage dump, and now, the modern utopia of business: the kingdom of Max Monroy, long, high, glass-enclosed… resistant to earthquakes? The nearby volcanoes seemed to both threaten and protect.

The reader will forgive my narrative sluggishness. If I pause at these persons and these considerations, it is because we need-you and I-a contrast-a positive one?-to the willful dramas, false affections, and frozen positions that occurred in the months following this, my year and some months of virtue and good fortune in the bosom of the small working community on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga.

Which I shall tell you about now.

I WANTED TO interrupt the account of the meeting between Max Monroy and President Valentín Pedro Carrera in the office at Los Pinos not for reasons of narrative suspense but in order to situate myself inside what José Gorostiza calls the site of the epidermis: “filled with myself, besieged in my epidermis by an ungraspable God who strangles me…”

The God strangling me was, in the long run, myself. Now, however, I was present at a duel between divinities, the supreme being of national politics and the civic deity of private enterprise. I’ve already recounted how Max Monroy came into the office of the president and how he ordered the head of the nation to remain standing while Monroy occupied a straight chair and sat in it even straighter than the chair itself. We have already seen how the president continued to stand and asked his aide to leave.

“Have a seat,” Carrera said to Monroy.

“I will. Not you,” replied Monroy.

“Pardon me?”

“This isn’t a question of pardoning.”

“Pardon me?”

“This is a question of listening to me carefully. While you’re on your feet.”

“On what?”

“On your feet, Mr. President.”

I was ignorant of the reasons-long-standing debts, equally old loyalties, the age difference, dissimilar powers, unspeakable complexes, I don’t know-that explain why the president of the republic obeyed the order to remain on his feet before a seated Max Monroy. The rest of us-Asunta, Jericó, and I-also remained standing while Monroy spoke to the head of state.

“It’s better if we clarify where we stand right away, Mr. President.”

“Of course, Monroy. I’m already standing,” Carrera said with his peculiar humor.

“Well, let’s hope you don’t fall down.”

“I would be at your feet…”

“I’m not a lady, Mr. President. I’m not even a gentleman.”

“Then, you are…?”

“A rival.”

“In love?” said Carrera in a sarcastic, even vengeful tone, though without looking at Asunta, while Jericó and I observed each other, I uncertain as to my function in this soap opera, Jericó pensive and even cynical-it’s not a contradiction-in his.

Both witnesses. Of the scene and, perhaps, of our own lives.

“Do you know, Mr. President? It took centuries to move from the ox to the horse and another long time to free the horse from the yoke and chest strap that choked him.”

Did Monroy lick his lips, did he close his eyes?

“Only at the beginning of the last millennium before Christ, about nine hundred B.C., was the horse collar invented, freeing the animal from pain and increasing his strength.”

“And?” interjected the president, perplexed or pretending to be perplexed behind a mask of seriousness.

“And we’re at the point of staying with the ox or moving on to the horse and immediately deciding if we’re going to mistreat the horse by choking him with a strap across the chest or free him thanks to a collar.”

“And?”

“You must think, as Mexican political elites have always thought, that in the end ability is measured with a peso sign, concluding that the rich are rich because they’re better and the poor are poor because they’re worse.”

“You must be rich, Monroy.” The president almost laughed out loud.

“I’m an old-style rich man,” Monroy interrupted. “You’re new rich, Mr. President.”

“As your family was at the beginning.” Carrera began to be defensive.

“Read my biography more carefully. Being at the top, I refused to begin at the top. Being at the top, I began at the bottom. Do you understand me?”

“I’m trying to, Don Max.”

“I mean that ability isn’t measured by a bank account.”

“And?”

“From the ox to the horse, I tell you, and from the horse in a yoke to a liberated charger.”

“Explain what you mean, I beg you.”

“You, with your celebrations, want us to continue in the age of the ox because you treat us like oxen, Valentín Pedro. You think that with village fairs you’ll put off discontent and even worse, bring us happiness. Do you really believe that? God’s truth?”

Max Monroy’s freezing gaze passed like a bolt of lightning from Carrera to Jericó, who tried to look back at the magnate. Jericó lowered his eyes immediately. How do you look at a tiger that in turn is looking at us?

“We are all responsible for the social unrest,” Carrera ventured. “But our solutions conflict with one another. What’s yours, Monroy?”

“Communicating with the people.”

“Very lyrical,” the president said with a smile, leaning against the edge of a table almost as an act of defiance.

“If you don’t understand you’re not only a fool, but perverse. Because your solution-governing by entertaining-only postpones well-being and perpetuates poverty. The curse of Mexico has been that with ten, or twenty, or seventy, or a hundred million inhabitants, half always live in poverty.”

“What do you want, we’re rabbits.” Carrera repeated his irony, as if with sarcastic blows he could stop Max Monroy. “So then, distribute condoms.”

“No, Mr. President. We stopped being agrarian barely half a century ago. We became industrialized and wasted time as if we could compete with the United States or Europe or Japan. We’ve remained behind in the technological revolution, and if I’m here speaking harshly to you, it’s because at the end of my life I don’t want us to come late to this banquet too, when it’s time for dessert, or never.”

The president sighed cynically. “To be bored, as they say… People want distractions, my dear Max!”

“No,” Monroy responded energetically. “To inform, as they say. You’ve chosen national festivals, rodeos, cockfights, mariachis, cut paper banners, balloons, fried food stands to entertain and benumb. I’ve chosen information to liberate. That’s what I’ve come to tell you. My goal is for every citizen of Mexico to have a device, only a handheld device to educate, orient, and allow communication with other citizens, to help them understand problems and resolve them, alone or with help, but eventually resolve them. How to plant crops better. How to harvest. What equipment is needed. What friends you can count on. How much credit you need. Where to get it. What employment is available. Campesinos. Indians. Manual laborers and white-collar workers, clerks, bureaucrats, technicians, professionals, administrators, professors, students, journalists, I want everyone to communicate with everyone else, Mr. President, I want each person to know his or her interests and how they coincide with the interests of the rest, how to act on the basis of those personal interests and the interests of society and not remain forever stranded in the ridiculous fiesta you are offering them, the eternal Mexican hat dance.”

I believe Monroy took a breath. I did, of course.

“I’ve come here to notify you. That’s why I came in person. I don’t want you to find out what I’m doing through third parties, through newspapers, through malicious gossip. I’m here to face you, Mr. President. So you’re not deceived. We’re going to defend not only opposite interests but antagonistic methods. We’ll see whom you can count on: I already have my people. I’m going to see that an increasing number of Mexicans have in hand the little device that will defend them and communicate with them so they act freely and to their own benefit, not a political elite’s.”

“Or an economic one,” Valentín Pedro Carrera said with irritated sarcasm.

“No elite survives if it doesn’t adapt to change, Mr. President. Don’t be the head of a kingdom of mummies.”

If Carrera looked sardonically at the defiant octogenarian who stood, refusing Asunta’s hand, bowed to Carrera, and went to the door, Monroy was not aware of it, because he had already turned his back on the president.

I WON’T DENY that Asunta’s diffidence-her disinterest, her lack of amorous confidence-was worse than her indifference-neither affection toward nor rejection of my person. Our relationship, after everything I’ve narrated, returned to a cold, professional channel, like a river that freezes but doesn’t overflow its banks. Does the water run beneath the crust of ice? Having listened to the filthy words of love with which Asunta gave pleasure to Max Monroy, I knew not only that I could never aspire to that “melody” but that having heard it deprived me forever of my stupid romantic illusion. Asunta would never be mine “for sentimental reasons,” in the words of an old fox-trot that Jericó sometimes hummed, for no apparent reason, while he was shaving.

Deprived of love with Asunta, witness to her sexual vulgarity in bed with Max, my spirit filled with a kind of wounded discontent. I knew what I wanted and now I recognized only what I would have wanted. And both resolved into a categorical negation of my illusions. Not Elvira, or Lucha, or finally Asunta would redeem me from lost loves and open up for me a reasonably permanent horizon, for no matter how much we think of ourselves as Don Juans, don’t we aspire to a permanent, fruitful relationship with one woman? What is Don Juan essentially looking for but a constant woman, a long-term shelter of tenderness and peace?

My having thought Asunta Jordán was that woman is the greatest proof of my ingenuousness. I know there is a good deal of naïveté in me, and if Voltaire’s subtitle is Optimism, I ought to assess my own great hopes by the experience of lost illusions.

What takes us from the loss of amorous illusion to the carnal consolation of the brothel? I don’t know how to answer if I don’t bear witness first to my plunge into the sexual pleasure of the famous house of La Hetara, where Jericó and I together fucked the whore with the bee on her buttock who ended up being the damned widow of Nazario Esparza, stepmother to Errol, and head of the criminal gang of the Mariachi Maxi. You, gentle readers, can imagine how my brush with those too-solid ghosts of evildoing brought me back to the brothel on Calle de Durango to explore the earth as in the biblical commandment, but also to explore the body, overcoming cowardice and the heart’s dismay beneath the roof of sexual mercy that gives everything and asks for nothing.

I’m La Bebota, face of an angel, breasts of honey, hot kisses, ardent anal sex, I’m La Fimia, I give massages on the couch, I’m little and wild, I’ll eat you up with kisses, I have a magnificent ass, I’m La Emperatriz, I like everything, you won’t be sorry, the best ass, ask me for whatever you want, oral with no rubber, VIP level, I’m La Choli, a sexy little doll, an infernal butt, missionary with a deep throat, I’m La Reina, I raise your energies, I’m ardent and dominating, everything’s fine with me, I’m stunning, dare to know me, down with timidity. I’ll give you tail, get soft without fear, I’m La Lesbia, wet and clawing, look no further, sweet thing, I have no limits in bed, I’m Emérita, I came back with all my medals, you get everything with my rump sex, fantasies, sink into my breasts and enjoy without limits, I’m La Faria, only for the demanding, I don’t give kisses on the mouth because I lose my head, I’m La Malavida, total goddess, I trade roles, double penetration and my name is Olalla, I’m a blond doll, hot and multiorgasmic, everything’s fine by ass, I’m La Pancho Villa, because of my pistols, love among the cactus, I challenge you to extreme pleasure, shoot me, love, I’m La Lucyana, a real schoolgirl, I fuck in uniform, I already miss you, big boy, I’m La Ninón, new to the capital, perky little tail, horny, addicted to you, I’m La Covadonga, give me back my virginity, let’s see if you can, I only accept demanding men, are you one?

Was I?

Could I close my eyes and see Asunta?

Could I open my eyes and feel her absence?

La Pancho Villa warned me:

“All the others come from Río de la Plata, Argentina exports all kinds of skin. Only I have an authentic Mexican ass. Come and find it. Ah! Sex goes with us and doesn’t step aside.”

Lunch, la comida, is a great ceremony in Mexico City. You could say it is the ceremony of the workday. In Spain and Spanish America it is called almuerzo. The verb is almorzar. In Mexico, it is comer. One eats la comida with an ancestral verbality that would be cannibalistic if it were not domesticated by a variety of foods that summarize the wealth of poverty. The food of destitution, Mexican cuisine transforms the poorest elements into exotic luxury recipes.

None is greater than the use of worms and fish eggs to create succulent dishes. That is why this afternoon (a respectable Mexican lunch does not begin until 2:30 in the afternoon or end before 6:00 P.M., at times with supper and cabaret extensions) I am sharing a table in the immortal Bellinghausen Restaurant on Calle de Londres, between Génova and Niza, with my old teacher Don Antonio Sanginés, enjoying maguey worms wrapped in hot tortillas plastered with guacamole and waiting for a dish of fried lamb’s quarters in guajillo chile sauce.

I am going to contrast (because they complement each other) this lunch at three o’clock in the afternoon with the nocturnal meeting on the open terrace of the top floor of the Hotel Majestic facing the Zócalo, the Plaza de la Constitución, where traditional appetizers do not mitigate the acidic perfumes of tequila and rum, nor does the immensity of the Plaza diminish Jericó’s presence.

Don Antonio Sanginés arrived punctually at the Bellinghausen. I got up from the table to greet him. I tried to be even more punctual than he was, in a country where P.M. means puntualidad mexicana, that is, a guaranteed, expected, and respected lack of punctuality. Some people, Sanginés first of all, followed by the presidents-the attorney because of good manners, the leaders because the general staff imposes manu militari-are always on time, and I had allowed myself to reserve a table for three in the hope Jericó would join us as stated in the invitation I left for him at Los Pinos. The end-of-year holidays were approaching, and something in the extremely formal and conventionally friendly spirit of the season led me to hope our teacher and his two students would get together to celebrate.

I hadn’t seen Jericó since the tense meeting at Los Pinos between President Carrera and my bosses Max Monroy and Asunta Jordán, whom I had seen then for the first time since the nocturnal digressions I have already recounted, which left me in such poor standing with myself as a peeping tom, that is, an immoral and sexual unfortunate to the sound of a bolero. “Just One Time,” like the widows whose groom dies on their wedding night. And so I appeared with my best wooden face, like a little monkey that does not see, hear, or say anything. I knew on that same night Jericó had made a date with me at the Hotel Majestic downtown. My spirit insisted on waiting for him at lunchtime, for the sake of resurrecting the most cordial memories and hopes that year after year throw us into the arms of Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men. “The Infant Jesus deeded you a stable,” wrote López Velarde in La suave patria. And added, to qualify his irony: “and oil wells come from the Devil.” I ought to tell you in advance I came to lunch with the first stanza, suspecting the second would be imposed at night.

“And Jericó?” I said innocently as I took my seat in the restaurant.

“This is about him,” replied Sanginés. He remained silent, and after ordering the meal he grew more animated.

Days earlier the lawyer had been at a meeting in the presidential residence with Jericó and Valentín Pedro Carrera. While Sanginés advised prudence in response to Max Monroy’s actions, Jericó invited him to retaliate against the businessman.

“I was looking for a point of agreement. The fiestas ordered by the president served a purpose.”

“Circuses without bread,” Jericó interrupted.

I went on. “Politics is a harmonizing of factors, a synthesis, the use of one sector’s advantageous ideas by the other. We live in an increasingly pluralistic country. You must concede a little in order to gain something. The art of negotiation consists in coming to agreements, not out of courtesy but by taking into account the legitimate interests of the other sector.”

“Following that course of action, the only thing you achieve is stripping the government of legitimacy,” Jericó said petulantly.

“But the state gains legitimacy,” countered Sanginés. “And if you had attended my classes at the university, you would know that governments are transitory and the state is permanent. That’s the difference.”

“Then we have to change the state,” Jericó added.

“Why?” I asked with feigned innocence.

“So that everything will change,” Jericó said, turning red.

“To what end, in what sense?” I insisted.

Jericó stopped addressing me. He turned to the president.

“The question is knowing what forces, good or bad, are at work at a given moment. How to resist them, accept them, channel them. Are you aware of those forces, Mr. President, do you believe they’ll be content with the diversions of the carousel and the wheel of fortune you’re offering them?”

“Ask yourself, I’ve asked Carrera,” continued Sanginés, “how ready these forces are for compromise.”

“Compromise, compromise!” Jericó exclaimed that night as we ate at the restaurant on the Hotel Majestic roof. “Compromise isn’t possible anymore. President Carrera is a coward, a superficial man who squanders opportunities.”

I smiled. “You’re helping him, buddy, with your famous popular festivals.”

He looked at me with a certain swaggering air and then burst into laughter.

“You believe that story?”

I said I didn’t but apparently he did.

Jericó stretched his arm out from the table on the terrace toward the immense Zócalo of the capital.

“Do you see that plaza?” he asked rhetorically.

I said I did. He went on. “We’ve used it for everything, from human sacrifice to military parades to ice skating rinks to coups d’état. It’s the plaza of a thousand uses. Any clown can fill it if he yells long and loud. That’s the point.”

I agreed again, without asking the tacit question: “And now?”

“Now,” said Jericó in a tone I didn’t recognize, “now look at what you don’t want to see, Josué. Look at the adjoining streets. Look at Corregidora. Look at 20 de Noviembre. Look to the sides. Look at the Monte de Piedad. Look at the Central Post Office.”

I tried to follow his urban guide. No, don’t stop to look, don’t distract me. Now look farther, at Correo Mayor, Academia, Jesús María, Loreto, Leona Vicario. What did I see?

“The same as always, Jericó. The streets you’ve mentioned.”

“And the people, Josué, the people?”

“Well, passersby, pedestrians…”

“And the traffic, Josué, the traffic?”

“Well, focusing a little, it’s very light, not many cars, a lot of trucks…”

“Now put it all together, Josué, put together the people scattered along the streets around the Zócalo, close off the plaza with the trucks, have armed guards climb down from the trucks, together with police and the people who are my people, Josué, do you understand what I’m saying? People placed by me at the four corners of the plaza, armed with pistols and studded clubs and brass knuckles and bludgeons, put them together with the people climbing down from the trucks armed with magnums, Uzis, and carbines. Look at the machine gun posts at the Monte de Piedad, City Hall, right here at the hotel. Try to listen to the cathedral bells. Don’t you hear anything?”

I said I didn’t, trying to penetrate the delirium of his discourse but insistent on humoring my enemy.

“They’re mute. The tongues have been tied so they don’t ring.”

“Forever?” I wanted to follow his thread, as if he were a child, a madman.

“No. They’ll ring again when we take power.”

“We? Are there a lot?” I said with a wooden face, à la Buster Keaton, attempting serene impartiality in the face of my friend’s intense, increasingly heated polemic.

“Yes,” Jericó said feverishly. “A lot. A great many. And you? Can I count on you?” he said with passion.

“What about me, buddy?”

“With us or against us?”

“I told the president,” Sanginés confided to me at lunch at the Bellinghausen, “that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

“Let’s see, Toño, who can do more, Monroy or me,” the president said as if he were boasting.

“Don’t be so sure the enemy’s only outside the house.”

“So there’s an enemy on the inside?” Carrera raised his eyebrows. “My good licenciado, you are so suspicious. Don’t torture yourself.”

“Yes.” I looked straight at him. “But that’s not the problem.”

“What can be worse?” Carrera seemed unconcerned, as he did in the good times.

“The enemy outside. The discontent to which Monroy referred, Mr. President.”

“Aren’t the fiestas enough to distract them?” Carrera asked, falling back into frivolity.

“The fiestas are turning into something else entirely.”

“Into what, Sanginés? Don’t be so mysterious.”

“Into brigades. Into shock troops. Into threats to the established order.”

“And what about Jericó?”

“He organized them.”

“Jericó? Where? How?”

“From here, my amiable Don Valentín Pedro Carrera. From this office. Right under your nose.”

“Who told you that?”

“Cherchez la femme.”

“Don’t hand me that French shit.”

“Monroy came with his adviser, Asunta Jordán.”

“A good-looking broad.” Carrera licked his lips. “Raise her salary.”

“She doesn’t work for you.”

“Ah! Still, a good-looking broad.”

“I’ve brought you the answer.”

“Whose answer?”

“Your answer, Mr. President. Your answer to Max Monroy and Asunta Jordán. A young woman, with fresh ideas, a graduate of the Sorbonne.”

“Oh, those Frenchies. Oh là là!”

“We need help. The enemy has come in. Don’t stay alone in the house with the viper. Because you can be very stubborn, but you should fear vipers.”

Sanginés walked to the door. He opened it. A young woman came in, serious but amiable, elegant, beautiful, and with a gleam of power in her eyes, the swing of her hair, the severity of her tailored suit, the elegance of her shoes, and the flash of her legs.

“Mr. President, let me introduce your new assistant, Señorita María del Rosario Galván.”

“Ahnshantay, Mamwahzel.” Carrera bent to kiss her hand while still looking at her.

So I knew now what Sanginés knew about Jericó. And I resisted believing it, above all because I believed in the friendship that had joined my friend and me since we were in school.

THE CENTER OF Mexico City is like the country itself: A surface serves only to hide the previous one, which hides the one that follows. If the country is structured in ascending levels from the tropical coasts to the temperate zones to the high valleys and an unequal distribution of deserts, plains, and mountains, the city masks a vertical cut that carries it from the capricious modernities of our time to a copy of the boulevards and mansard roofs we inherited from the Empress Carlotta of Belgium, “Carlotita” to her intimate friends, and from a flagrant colonial baroque to a Spanish city constructed on the ruins of the Aztec metropolis, Tenochtitlán. Mexico City, as if wanting to protect a mystery everyone knows, disguises itself in many ways: its cantinas, cabarets, brothels, parks, avenues, its luxury restaurants, popular eateries, churches, its mansions protected by high walls and electrified barbed wire, vast shantytowns and one-story hovels with flat roofs, its paint shops, grocery stores, car repair shops, its mothers wrapped in rebozos with a baby in their arms, child beggars, lottery ticket sellers, its armada of parrot-colored taxis, black armored vans, supply trucks carrying rods, bricks, bags of cement, roofs, and gratings for a capital in perpetual construction and reconstruction, the city forever unfinished, as if in this lack of a conclusion resided the virtue of permanence… Mexico City like a vast lunch box where the first dish is always the last. “Dry soup” or stew, wet soup, chicken mole, sweet potatoes…

And so I walked, ruminating and enumerating with a chaos that reflected the chaos of the city, looking for the streets Jericó had mentioned with mysterious emphasis during our encounter on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic. It was dark then, and lights beautified the empty space. Now it is noon, and I don’t want the Historic Center to disguise itself anymore. I want to recognize the Calles de Correo Mayor, Academia, Jesús María, Corona, la Santísima and its bell tower that resembles a patriotic tiara, the Plaza de Santo Domingo and its temple sinking into the placenta of the old Indian lagoon, perhaps nostalgic for its canoes and canals and causeways that have disappeared forever: Mexico City is its own unburied, irrevocable phantom.

There were noble façades of tezontle and marble, large street doors of carved wood, jalousied windows, courtyards filled with flowers: I could see nothing. Sidewalk commerce hid street after street, twenty thousand vendors offered me radios, clothing, costume jewelry, even a television set was suddenly placed in front of my nose so I could see myself reflected in its silvery-gray surface: I thought, seeing my face both surprised and distant, that what the twenty thousand peddlers were selling here, the merchants guided by the long nose of the god that precedes them with a sheaf of staves and dollars, were all versions of my own life, of the faces I could have had, of the bodies that might have been mine, of the odors that might have emanated from my mouth, my armpits, my buttocks, my feet, and now were confused, were part of and emanations from the crowd that pushed me, offered me things, brushed me with charm, touched me with vulgarity, pushed and pulled me where? what was I looking for? the gang evoked by Jericó? could my less and less old friend-more and more my new nemesis-really believe he could mobilize this entire Hugoesque world of mischievous crime, survival by a wink, fierce independence when faced with the powers mocked here, subjected here to the simple law of survival? Could Jericó transform them into an army formulated to take power? Could Sanginés be right? Was I wandering here to confirm the truth? To find out whether Jericó was right or not, whether he believed he could control this hissing serpent slipping from street to street, market to market, favor to favor?

The thousand-headed hydra of Mexico City. In any event, if not a hydra an octopus, and Jericó believed the octopus had only one eye. It’s enough to see it, knowing it isn’t Medusa and can’t petrify us with a glance, because the octopus isn’t concerned with looking. It wants embraces. It has tentacles.

As if searching for respite, I walked through the crowd confirming that México D.F. has twenty-two million inhabitants, more than all of Central America, more than the Republic of Chile, along whose street I walked now toward the temple of Santo Domingo, protected by the Dominican priest Father Julián Pablo from postponable disasters and sometimes from ones that couldn’t be postponed. I saved myself from the fake bullfighters who zigzagged with merchandise in their hands like assault weapons, and in Santo Domingo I encountered the resurrected profession of “evangelists,” men and women sitting on low wooden chairs in front of old Remington typewriters, listening to the dictation of illiterate men and women who wanted to send to a distant village, to families in the countryside, the mountains, the provinces, their regrets, their words of love and sometimes of hate, which these clerks set down on paper and charge for; double if, as safety advises, the “evangelists” themselves are the ones who address the envelope and buy the stamp, promising to drop the letter in the mail.

“Sometimes, Josué, they give us the wrong address, or one that doesn’t exist, the letter never arrives, and then things as sad as forgetting can happen, or as violent as wreaking vegeance on the scribe responsible for the letter’s not reaching its destination-even if it didn’t really have any destination at all.

“And what is destination, or destiny?” continued the voice I tried to locate, to recognize, in the row of people’s scribes sitting in front of the old building of the Inquisition. “It isn’t fate. It is simply disguised will. The final desire.”

Then I was able to unite voice and eyes. A small man, bald but in a borrowed hairdo, his bones brittle and his hands energetic, white-skinned though tending to a yellowish pallor, for a couple of Band-Aids covered tiny cuts on one cheek and his neck, dressed in an old black suit with gray stripes, a shirt with a too-large collar unbuttoned at his throat and adorned by a wide, out-of-fashion tie that actually looked more like the covering for a defeated, emaciated chest, mortified by blows of contrition. Borrowed apparel. Secondhand clothes.

Our eyes met and I recognized old Father Filopáter, the guide of generous meticulousness during the early youth of Castor and Pollux, Josué and Jericó. I held back my tears, took Filopáter’s hands, and was about to kiss them. I don’t know what held me back. Shyness or distrust of his nails that in spite of being cut short showed signs of grime at the corners. Though this, perhaps, was due only to his work on an old typewriter and an apparently rebellious two-color ribbon, for when Filopáter pressed a key thoughtlessly, the entire ribbon unrolled into something resembling infinity.

“Maestro,” I murmured.

“The maestro is you,” he replied, smiling.

He accepted my invitation. We sat down in a café on Calle de Brasil, Filopáter with his heavy typewriter (as big as his head) under his arm and eventually occupying a chair at our table, mute now but invited.

He looked at the typewriter. “Do you know? Each word you write strikes a blow against the Devil.”

I wanted to laugh, amiably. He extended his hand and stopped me.

“As always, I listen to you with respect, Maestro.”

I shouldn’t call him that, he replied with a moment of annoyance. He was only a scribe and that, he said, was enough (he wanted to hurry on to two things) to explain his history. When we were served our coffee, he evoked Saint Peter, “If you cannot be pure, be careful,” and concluded with the words of Saint Thomas, “Only virginity can make a man equal to an angel.”

“What do you want to tell me, Father?”

He resigned himself to my calling him that as long as I forgot about “Maestro.” He was about to sigh. He looked at me like someone picking up an old conversation. As if no calendars had intervened between today’s and yesterday’s words.

“I would like to have been a Trappist,” he said with a smile. “The brothers of La Trappe can communicate only with feet or hands, gestures and whistles. On the other hand, look at me. If not a Trappist then trapped in the trammels of the word…”

“You taught us not to be afraid of words,” I recalled with good intentions.

“But there are those who do fear the word, Josué, and I say this intentionally. Jesus said ‘I am the Word’ and he meant several things-”

“He meant that he was part of the Trinity,” I recalled and repeated with a kind of red-faced enthusiasm, as if not only my youth depended on this memory but my farewell to it: The reencounter with our teacher indicated to me that a cycle was ending but the next one was slow in showing itself.

“I mean that the Trinity is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit… and the Word is an attribute of the Spirit but is shared in by the Father, the Son…”

I wanted to see admiration in Filopáter’s eyes. I found only compassion. Because he knew what I meant, he was going to say the same thing, and we felt sorry for each other for knowing and saying it, as if we could be not only pre-Christians but true pagans, absent from faith in Christ because we were ignorant of it, but condemned to being absent even if we did know about it.

“The Trinity is a mystery,” he began to speak again. “It cannot be known by reason. It is a revealed truth. It puts faith to the test. Either you believe, Josué, or you don’t believe.”

I wasn’t going to tell him I had stopped believing because he knew I had never believed. That’s why he immediately said: “The surprising thing is that, at the same time, the Trinity, the Word, transcends reason but is not at war with reason.”

“The dogma of the Trinity is not incompatible with reason?” I asked, because I wanted to push Filopáter’s words to a proposition that wasn’t a conclusion but a confrontation. His current state told me clearly that something serious had occurred to make him abandon teaching, which had been his vocation since his youth, when he taught the Pizarro Leongómez brothers at the Javeriana in Bogotá and then, when the rough tides of Colombian politics washed him up in Mexico, he landed in our secondary school.

“No,” he said with renewed energy. “It isn’t. But that is the truth clerical intolerance can employ against a person if he attempts to reconcile the truth of faith and the reason of truth. It is not only easier”-did I detect an unusual disdain in the priest’s voice?-“it is more cowardly. For as long as we maintain that faith is true though it may not be factual, you will be protected by a dogma that is a paradox we owe to Tertullian: ‘It is certain because it is impossible.’ A definition of faith…”

The coffee was bad, with milk it was worse. Filopáter sipped it almost as a sacrifice. He was Colombian.

“If you wager, on the other hand, on the rationality of faith, you expose yourself to the censure of those who prefer to deny reason to religion only because they wouldn’t know how to explain their faith rationally, and therefore opt for a blind faith, an ignorant faith.”

Filopáter became excited.

“No.” He banged on the table and knocked over the glass bowl of sugar, spilling it. “One must sustain the mystery with reason and fortify reason with mystery. Faith does not exclude reason and reason does not destroy faith. Saying this exposes the dogmatic man, the passive man, the man who wants to impose a truth like the Inquisitors beneath whose walls you found me sitting this morning, or hides behind the wall denying the work of God-”

“What is it?” I asked with a certain impertinence. “The work of God, what is it?”

“The redemption of the world by means of the wearisome affirmation of human reason.”

The glass sugar bowl had rolled off the table onto the floor, where it shattered, granulating the floor like a snowstorm that has lost its way in the tropics.

The owner of the café hurried over, alarmed, annoyed, a woman submissive to patrons.

“Pro vitris fractis,” Filopáter said solemnly. “Impose a surcharge for the broken glass, Señora.”

MOVE LIKE TIGERS. Study the sites. They walk through public offices. They find out. Where are the telephone and telegraph installations? Which seem the places of least resistance? The Zócalo? The Paseo de la Reforma? The distant shantytowns, Los Remedios, Tulyehualco, San Miguel Tehuizco? The government ministries of state, post offices, private businesses, apartment houses? Study them all. Tell me which ones you like. Recruit in the penitentiaries. I, Jericó, will see to it that by my order Maxi Batalla, Sara Pérez, Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas are released, an order from the office of the president, signed by me, is enough, and the president will never know. Let the criminals join up with the laborers who can’t get across the border; promise them good jobs in California; promise the unemployed in Mexico City, the unsatisfied workers, that they’ll be rich and won’t have to work; promise: promise the migrant workers thrown out of the United States, their families who will no longer receive dollars every month, those who can’t find work in Mexico and see only a horizon of hunger: promise. Begin with work stoppages, slowdowns, stealing parts, voluntary accidents, intentional fires, until the city is set on fire and comes to a halt. You, Mariachi Maxi, go from business to business; you, Brillantinas, print up some fake passes; you, Siboney, go to funerals and see who you can recruit; you, Gomas, go from barbecue to barbecue, inventing rumors, the government is falling, there’s repression, there are strikes, where? there? go on! arm and recruit impoverished young men, give them love, tell them now they’ll have respect because of their pistols. Rancor. Rancor. Rancor is our weapon. Exalt rancor. Mexican resentment is the fertilizer of our movement. Ask each boy: Do you want to ruin somebody, do you want to take revenge on somebody, do you want to get what you deserve, what is denied to you by injustice, wickedness, envy, inequality, your parents, your bosses, these young millionaires, these corrupt politicians? Rancor. The damned tradition of rancor. The most constant Mexican tradition. Take the pistol I’m going to give you, take the Uzi, take the club, the bludgeon, the lasso, they’re all good for attacking, make lists, boys, who do you want to ruin, who do you want to pay for their faults? Make lists! Find the places of least resistance, the most vulnerable, hospitals, pharmacies, commercial centers. Do you think we can take the airport? Ha-ha-ha, make yourselves invisible, don’t look at one another until it’s time for the attack, cut off the water, gas, electricity, isolate the districts in the city, isolate the center, the middle-class districts, the nameless ghost settlements where the city dies: feel united and don’t give up. Personal vendettas allowed.

“Do you really believe the masses will follow you, Jericó?”

“Distinguish between rhetoric and reality. I have to invoke the masses to justify myself. I need only a shock corps to triumph. A small, determined group. All of that about a class in the vanguard is late-night Marxist rhetoric. If you wait for the masses to act, Josué, you’ll wait till the cows come home.”

Once again, his world of North American sayings and references surprised me. Wait till the cows come home. Espera a que las vacas regresen.

“All the people,” I said to introduce an idea (let’s see if it sticks). “The mass of workers.”

“All the people are too much.”

“Who then?”

“A small group,” said Jericó, “a small, cold, violent group for insurrectionary tactics.”

“The mass of workers…”

“I don’t need them!” Jericó exclaimed. “An assault group is enough. The assault group represents the mass of the dissatisfied. Do you realize that half a million workers have returned to Mexico from the United States and don’t find anything but poverty and unemployment?”

“Detachments?”

“Armed. It’s enough for me to say from Los Pinos: Distribute weapons to defend the chief of state.”

I repressed my laughter. I transformed it into doubts. I managed to say: “They won’t pay attention to you.”

He turned red. Enraged. I saw something crazy in his eyes. As if saying to himself and saying to me, They are going to obey me.

“A few people,” he said as if he were praying. “Limited terrain. Clear objectives, the vanguard forward, the masses back.”

In the meantime, I should say that more than the insurrectionary tactics foreseen by Jericó, Jericó himself interested me, his evolution, his ambition. Should I have been surprised? Hadn’t he been my first friend? Wasn’t Jericó the one who gave me his hand in school, protecting me against the damned bullies? Wasn’t Jericó the one who took me to his apartment when “the House of Usher” fell on Calle de Berlín? Wasn’t he the one who introduced me to fundamental readings? Didn’t we argue together with Father Filopáter? Didn’t we see each other naked in the shower? Didn’t we fuck as a team the whore with the bee on her buttock? Weren’t we Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, founders of cities, Argonauts equal to Jason and the archer Phalerus and Lynceus the lookout and Orpheus the poet, and the herald, son of Hermes, and the courier of Lapida who had been a woman and Atalanta of Calydon, who still was: Argonauts plowing the seas in search-you Jericó and I Josué-of the Golden Fleece that hangs in a distant olive grove, guarded night and day by a sleepless dragon? I looked intently at Jericó, as if a direct gaze were still the guarantee of truth, the beacon of certitude, as if the most malicious men in the world had not understood-from the very beginning-that the direct gaze associated with frankness, humility, understanding, and friendship is the mask of falsehood, pride, intransigence, and enmity. I should have known it. I didn’t want to know it. Until this very moment when I’m narrating what happened, I insisted on evoking our youth as students as the most valuable part of our past, the friendship that was the reason for being, the watchword, the birth certificate of the relationship between Josué and Jericó. A reality that had to be expressed thoroughly and to the very last moment-I told myself-under penalty of losing my soul.

My references to the ideas and images that united us were only a way of telling myself and telling Jericó: “Every friendship rests on a myth and represents it.”

I asked: “In addition to the fleece, whom did the beast guard?” I answered myself: “A ghost. The specter of an exiled king whose return would bring peace to the kingdom.

“Recovering a ghost in order to sacrifice a republic,” I murmured then, and Jericó simply asked me: “What was more interesting, recovering the fleece or bringing back the ghost?”

“Crowning a specter?”

I understand now that this question has hung over our destinies because Jericó and I were Castor and Pollux, part of the eternal expedition in search of desire and destiny, a mere pretext, however, for recovering a specter and bringing him back home.

“Did you see this?” I handed him the newspaper across the table.

“What?”

“What happened at the zoo.”

“No.”

“A tiger died after being attacked by four other tigers.”

“Why?”

“They were hungry.”

I pointed.

“They ate his entrails. Look.”

Perhaps I just wanted to indicate that he and I became friends because of a debt. That brought us together. We established a lifetime alliance on the basis of that debt.

WILL VALENTÍN PEDRO Carrera go to Max Monroy’s offices and residence in the Utopia building on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga? Or would Max Monroy again go to the president’s residence and office in Los Pinos?

“Let him come,” advised the novice María del Rosario Galván.

“Why?” asked Carrera, prepared to admire the young woman’s beauty in exchange for excusing her errors and disregarding her opinions.

“Well, because you are… the president…”

Carrera smiled. “Do you know what ancient kings did to exercise their rights?”

“No.”

“Every year they went from village to village. They didn’t ask the village to come to see them. They went to the village, do you understand what I’m saying, beautiful?”

“Of course.” She attempted to recover her composure. “If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad goes to the mountain.”

“Exactly right, babe.”

The president smiled indulgently and went to the neutral territory approved by his representatives and Max Monroy’s. The Castle of Chapultepec, now the National Museum of History and the setting for Boy Heroes, Hapsburg Empires, and Porfirista Dictatorships. Monroy acceded to arriving first and viewing the tawny panorama of the city from the heights as if he were viewing non-existence itself. Why pretend to be master of nothing when one was master of everything? On the other hand, the president came to the esplanade of the palace as if he were a boy hero about to throw himself into the void, wrapped in the flag. As if the throne of the dynasty that ruled Mexico the longest (more than two centuries)-the Hapsburgs-were waiting for him. As if he were prepared to govern for three decades because listen, María del Rosario, you have to come here thinking you’re eternal, if not, you lose your six years the first day…

To see or not to see the arrival of the powerful entrepreneur Max Monroy? Act distracted, be surprised, greet each other, embrace?

“Ah!”

The embrace of the two men was recorded by cameras and microphones before Valentín Pedro Carrera and Max Monroy walked ten paces to distance themselves from publicity and bodyguards. María del Rosario Galván and Asunta Jordán, practically identical in their professional attire of tailored suit, dark stockings, and high heels, blocked the press and held off the guests.

“Truce, my dear Max?” The president’s smile dissipated the capital’s smog. “A meeting of two souls? Primus inter pares? Or pure show, my esteemed friend? An Embrace of Acatempan ending the wars of independence?”

“No, my dear president. Another battle.” Monroy did not smile.

“If you divide you don’t rule,” Carrera reflected, trying to catch Monroy’s eye.

“And if you rule by force, you divide but govern the parts.”

“Each to his own philosophy.” Carrera almost sighed. “The good thing is that when there’s danger, we know how to come together.”

“Understand it in terms of mutual convenience,” Monroy said with great suavity.

“Does this mean I can count on you, Max?”

“You can always count.” Monroy managed to smile. “What you don’t understand, Valentín Pedro, is that my policies are part of your power. Except your power lasts six years. My policies do not occur every six years.”

“And so?” the president said, halfway between amiable and falsely surprised.

“And so everything ends up contracting, understand that. The six-year term contracts. A life contracts. An era contracts.”

“What?” Carrera exclaimed in surprise (or pretending to be surprised). “Look how my belly’s growing and my hair’s falling out. Don’t kid me.”

“Of course,” Monroy continued, very calm. “With my policies I achieve what you’re missing. If we stayed only with your policies, we’d stay with half-measures. You believe in circuses without the bread. I believe in bread with the circuses. I believe in information and try to communicate that to the majority. You believe in conspiracy reserved for a minority. That’s why I believe that, in the long run, I can manage without you but you can’t get along without me.”

“Monroy, listen-”

“Don’t interrupt. You and I never see each other. I’ll use the occasion to say a person has to deserve my respect.”

“And admiration?”

“For superstars.”

“And esteem?”

“I’m a patient man. Everyone has gone. And those who remain ask me for favors. Our individual histories don’t count. Who remembers President Lagos Cházaro? Who could have been Secretary of Finance under Generalísimo Santa Anna?”

What a strange look the politician directed at the businessman.

“We’re part of the collective aggregate. Don’t go around thinking anything else.”

“What are you saying, Max?”

“Why am I telling you this? Well, we don’t see each other very often.”

Asunta-who tells me the preceding to the degree she heard something, guessed more, and read lips-says that Carrera sighed as if Monroy’s words sealed a previously mentioned reality. The president wasn’t going to change his policies of national distraction only because his official operative, Jericó, had betrayed him by taking advantage of the opportunity to find his own power base that turned out to be perfectly illusory, and Monroy would not abandon his of giving information media to citizens. The crisis perhaps demonstrated that the better informed the citizen, the fewer opportunities demagogic illusion would have.

“Or official carnivals?” asked Carrera, as if he had read (Asunta believes he did) Monroy’s mind.

“Look, Mr. President: What you and I have in common is possible control of the real communication media in this day and age. Insurgents once believed that by taking the central telephone offices they would take power. Do you know something? My telephone operators are all blind. Blind, you understand? In this way they hear better. Nobody hears better than a blind man. On the other hand, a thousand eyes are in thousands of cellular devices, the mobile phones that replace television, radio, the press. I am giving all Mexicans, whether or not they can read and write, a message, a family, a past, an inheritance. They constitute the real national and international information network.”

“You may be right,” Carrera went on. “Just whistle once so the bird can hear you.”

“You underestimate people.” Monroy didn’t bother to look at him. “It’s your eternal error.”

“When there’s no paper, you clean yourself with whatever’s at hand.” Carrera made a vulgar gesture, like someone using a medieval torche-cul.

Monroy didn’t look at him. “Just don’t ignore what you need to survive.”

Carrera raised his shoulders. “You see, it wasn’t necessary to fire a single shot.”

“The fact is the fortress was empty.” Monroy threw cold water on his spirits.

“No, the truth is you’re very clever. You just hide it.” Carrera let his admiration for Max show. Max looked at Carrera with a flattering lie.

“This poor boy… your collaborator…”

“Don’t fuck with me, Max.” The president did not stop smiling. “We both win if you don’t fuck around.”

“Fine, your employee. His name is…?”

“Jericó.”

“Jericó.” Monroy did not smile. “Who knows what old-fashioned manual he read.”

(Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution by Curzio Malaparte, murmured María del Rosario Galván at a distance: Napoleon, Trotsky, Pilsudski, Primo de Rivera, Mussolini…)

“Let’s not be afraid of a gang insurrection like this one, Mr. President, or an impossible revolution like earlier ones. You should be afraid of the tyrant who comes to power through the vote and turns into an elected dictator. That’s the one to fear.”

(I thought, of course, of Antigua Concepción, Max Monroy’s mother, and her epic, revolutionary version of a history-was it buried along with her?)

“Dishonor,” murmured Max Monroy.

“What?” The president heard only what he wanted to hear.

“Dishonor,” Monroy repeated, and after pretending to admire the landscape: “Let’s not engage in minor intrigues. Let’s exercise irony.”

“What?”

“Irony. Irony.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I mean it’s very difficult under any circumstances to maintain power.”

“Isn’t that what I’m telling you?”

“You don’t say.”

An intolerant minority, Jericó told me, that’s the key for coming to power, you have to energize the base with the example of an energetic minority, you have to favor the prejudices of the resentful, you have to demonize power: Saints don’t know how to govern.

What did Jericó expect? The president, quite simply, made use of the army. Soldiers occupied highways, bridges, large houses, food depositories, munitions depositories, major intersections, banks: The army surrounded Jericó’s followers as if they were mice in a trap. They prevented them from leaving, they gave them an ephemeral empire around the Zócalo that did not even interrupt the work of Filopáter and the other scribes on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Fireworks, smoke, folk dances, an exceptional holiday, an obligatory alliance between Monroy and Carrera, as ephemeral as Jericó’s frustrated rebellion.

The groups gathered together by Jericó were isolated in the center of the capital between the Zócalo and Minería, they never managed to communicate with the supposedly rebellious and certainly wronged masses, Jericó had operated on the basis of a fantastic ideology and a revocable power: the ideology decanted from his readings and his position inside the ogre’s mouth: the office of the president.

Now I listened, thought, saw, and felt a profound sadness, as if Jericó’s defeat were mine. As if the two of us had lived a great intellectual dream that, in order to exist, did not tolerate the test of reality. In the final analysis, were my friend and I barely hangers-on of anarchy, never makers of revolution? Did ideas we had read, heard, assimilated lose all value if we put them into practice? Was our confusion of ideas and life so great? Didn’t those ideas resist the breath of life, collapsing like statues made of dust as soon as reality touched them? Were we becoming illusions?

The gang of the Mariachi and Sara P., Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas, Gomas, and Ventanas returned to the San Juan de Aragón Prison. Miguel Aparecido was waiting for them there.

The president withdrew first from the Castle, muttering to himself (Asunta heard him), “In the old days the hangman sold the boiled flesh of his victims,” and Max, who followed seconds later, remarked to Asunta: “It’s one thing to be based in reality. It’s another to create reality.”

And right after that: “Let’s go, the sun’s very strong and in the light of day one makes many mistakes.”

The president simply sighed: “Making decisions is very boring. I swear…”

He was on his way out.

“MISERABLE OLD FOOL. Useless old bastard. Damn mummy.”

Miguel Aparecido punched the wall of his cell, speaking in a wounded, vengeful tone of voice, sonorous and stifled, as if rather than words coming out of his mouth there were animals: insects, rodents, turkeys, grebes, bustards, and mandrakes, so intimate to his mind was the word and so desperate was it to find ways out, similes, survivals.

“Lock up a man whose hands are tied with a cat, then ask him to defend himself.”

He looked at me with ferocity.

“He’ll defend himself with his teeth. There’s no other way.”

What had disturbed him so much? He had won. The criminals released through Jericó’s influence were back behind bars and I wouldn’t guarantee their future. Jericó’s transient power-his whim-had done something more than free a gang of bandits. It had violated the will of Miguel Aparecido, the master of the prison, the top dog, the big fucker inside these walls. Miguel felt mocked.

Still, there was something in his rage that went beyond Jericó, the flight from and return to prison of the criminals, the mockery of the very will of the man with the olive skin and yellow eyes and self-willed muscles, kept hard and flexible thanks to the discipline of imprisonment, as if the days and months and years of prison counted in a rogue’s exercises, his knee flexions, air punches, arms extended in extremely hard flexion against prison walls, imaginary jump ropes, like a boxer who prepares for the big fight, overcoming through an act of will the noise of the city that filters through the corridors and catacombs of the prison.

He grabbed the newspaper. “Look,” he said, poking at the image of Max Monroy and, in passing, that of the president. “Look.”

I looked.

“Do you know he’s never allowed his picture to be taken?”

“The president? He’s always in the papers, on television, in displays… All that’s left for him is to announce the lottery.”

“Monroy,” said Miguel, as if all the bitterness in the world were concentrated in that name. A yellowish saliva ran along the prisoner’s lips. The tiger devoured by other bloodthirsty beasts in the Chapultepec zoo appeared, duplicated, in his eyes. “Monroy… motherfucker, at least he used to be discreet enough not to be photographed, the decency not to let himself be seen, the old bastard son of a bitch mother…”

I confess my discretion. Or my cowardice. I didn’t jump to the defense of my old friend from the graveyard, the “bitch mother” of Max Monroy, Antigua Concepción.

“And worse, even worse,” Miguel said syllable by syllable, “even worse is that son of the great bitch whore, Max Monroy’s son.”

“Who is he?” I said, innocent (but uneasy?).

This is the story Miguel Aparecido told me that afternoon in a cell in the San Juan de Aragón Prison, after going on a while longer in his diatribe, the asked-for explanation and the unasked-for one as well. I felt a strange emotion: Miguel Aparecido seemed like an hourglass anxious to empty the contents of one hour into another, though anguished by the fatal flight of time. The flight of time was the evasion in his narrative and if I was his privileged listener, at that moment I still did not know to what degree, so intense, so personal, Miguel’s narration concerned me.

I thought at first he vacillated between emptiness and incoherence. I wanted to believe that at the end of the story both of us, he who was talking and I who was listening to him without saying a word, could find in ourselves something resembling compassion and from there pass on to comprehension. Now this was merely a desire (even an intention) of mine. Miguel Aparecido’s discourse took another direction.

He said he was imprisoned by order of Max Monroy. He quickly cut me off: Of course judicial requirements had been met. Of course he had a trial. Of course testimony was heard and a sentence was announced. “Of course I was condemned to thirty years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit… three decades of confinement starting at the age of twenty,” he remembered, but in the voice of someone who, when recalling, also commemorates.

He looked at me with a defiant air. “I behaved well, Josué. I swear I made an effort. I intended to be the best inmate in the pen. Punctual, hardworking, obliging. All of it contrary to my own character: cleaning toilets, removing excrement, mopping up vomit… All of it to get out of here. Get out for only one purpose.”

He was about to lower his eyes.

He didn’t.

“To kill. I wanted to get out to murder Max Monroy. For having accused me falsely. Of attempted murder. Now I wanted to deserve the accusation. I got out. I prepared for the act, and now I was serious. I haunted the Utopia building. I imagined a thousand ways to eliminate the son of a bitch. Suddenly he intuited it, he didn’t find out, he just smelled that something was going on because he knew I was free. He had to have thought: What do I do to lock up this bastard again? Because he had to have realized that in this second round, either he’d kill me or I’d kill him…”

Miguel Aparecido was making a great effort to keep his gaze fixed on me, eyes wide open, as yellow as those of a canid race, Miguel-wolf with the jaw as strong as a padlock, arms and legs imprisoned but longing to get out and race toward his prey, but sad, afflicted by the confinement he had imposed on himself, he reveals to me now, he stopped prowling around the offices of Max Monroy, returned to prison, asked for the help of Antonio Sanginés, I want to go back to the pen, Licenciado, please have them take me back into jail, I beg you for your mother’s sake, please, save me from the crime, I don’t want to kill my father, if you really love Max Monroy return me to the pen, Lic, you can do it, you have influence, do me this favor, save me from sin by locking me up right away, accuse me of whatever you like, get me out of freedom, take away my desire to kill, save me from myself, put the chains of my freedom on me…

“I returned to prison, Josué. Sanginés invented some crime for me. I don’t know which. I don’t remember anymore. I think he revived the earlier sentence for reasons that escape me. Sanginés is a shyster. He knows all the tricks. He can resurrect the dead. He can get water from a stone. But he can’t erase the memory you drag behind you whether you’re free or in prison…”

SIBILA SARMIENTO WAS twelve years old when they decided she should be married. They all agreed that matrimony was very desirable but it would be better to wait for the girl to grow. For her first menstruation. For hair to grow under her arms. All of that. Sibila still played with dolls and sang children’s songs. Matrimony was desired. It was also premature, said the girl’s family.

The mother of the presumptive groom became enraged. An offer of marriage in the name of her son was not something you turned down. Marriage was not a question of hair or periods. It was an act of convenience. Sibila Sarmiento’s family knew perfectly well that only the wedding of their children, right now, without delay, would join the names and properties of the Sarmientos and the Monroys and the great unity and productivity of their lands-Michoacán, Jalisco, Zacatecas-would triumph in hard cold liquidity before the law of the market and succession divided them into parcels, or an act of reiterated demagoguery gave them to the campesinos, transformed them into communal lands, and threw us all into poverty.

“Do you know the song? ‘Just four milpas are left…’ Well, unite the children so the lands can be united, and when the inevitable fragmentation comes we’ll have something more than four cornfields left… After the storm…”

The squall was nothing less than the extension of the cities, urban sprawl, an exploding population, but Antigua Concepción persisted in her vocabulary at once revolutionary and feudal, agrarian and suspicious of the cities: She was crazy! She said another agrarian storm, recurrent in Mexico, was coming. They would declare null and void all appropriations of lands, water, and forests belonging to villages, settlements, congregations, or communities made by the previous power in violation of the law and abolished by the new power in confirmation of the law. She became confused. That’s the bad thing about living so many years. And still, she had a witch’s reasoning: She guessed with metaphors. The migrants were returning to Mexico and didn’t find land or work. Gringo corn was wiping out the Mexican milpa. Villages were dying. Living in the past, Antigua Concepción prophesied the present. Like all prophets, she contradicted herself and became confused.

“The land would pass from few hands to fewer hands, passing through many hands, according to her,” Sanginés explained. “Exempted was control exercised over no more than fifty hectares and for more than ten years. This reasoning was invoked by Señora Concepción, who was possessed by a kind of ravening madness in which past and future times, agrarian reform and the urban explosion, the place of inheritance and the will to begin again, mature sex and infantile sex were all mixed together: She imposed herself on her son because at heart she desired her son and wanted to castrate him by marrying him to a prepubescent child, incapable of giving or receiving satisfaction… Just to annoy…”

By uniting the Sarmiento and Monroy patrimonies, forty-nine hectares were joined, those remaining were deeded to agrarian communities, one came out well with God and the Devil and offered an example of social solidarity by sacrificing something in order to save something, and the condition was the consolidation of protected lands through the marriage of a twelve-year-old girl, Sibila Sarmiento, and a forty-three-year-old man, Max Monroy, by means of matrimonial documents that could be disputed given the age of one contracting party but existed by virtue of the dishonesty of civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the desolate fields of central Mexico and, above and beyond everything else, even though one contracting party was a minor, the union of fortunes was consummated and the foresight of Doña Concepción, Antigua Concepción, proved correct: “I have what I want: The lands are ours and we can parcel them out; the marriage is theirs and let them arrange things the best they can. Get down to fucking, as they say.”

“You didn’t know my grandmother,” said Miguel, and I didn’t dare contradict him. “She was a witch, she had a pact with the Devil, she proposed something and achieved it, no matter who fell, she was insatiable, she never had enough money, if she had a lot she thought it was a little and wanted more, using every deception, the most sinister schemes, the most corrupt pacts as long as she not only preserved but augmented her power. And all of that with no reference to historical and political reality. She lived in her own time, the time of her making. Sibila Sarmiento was indispensable for mocking all the laws: childhood, marriageable age, agrarian law, even the personality of her son, in order to obtain what she wanted: another piece of earth. And I say ‘earth’ and not ‘land’ because each piece of land my damn grandmother acquired was for her the earth, the entire world, a universe embodied in every inch of earth, the earth was her flesh, it embodied her, and though I don’t know where she was buried, I suspect, Josué, that for her the grave is another ranch she wants to own. And listen, never for her own benefit but for the sake of ‘the revolution,’ the entelechy she believed she was promoting by associating her desire with her destiny. That’s how they were.” I believe Miguel Aparecido sighed. “That’s how they built our country. Telling themselves: If it’s good for me, it’s good for Mexico. Tell me, what conscience isn’t salved if this credo is repeated until you believe your own lie? Isn’t this the great Mexican lie: I steal, I kill, I imprison, I amass a fortune, and I do it in the name of the country, my benefit is the nation’s, and therefore the nation ought to thank me for my pillaging?”

Miguel Aparecido looked down, away from me, as I looked away from him during this discourse.

Miguel continued: “Her voracity went mad on this subject: acquiring properties, adding land, as if the secular tradition of basing one’s fortune on owning land depended on this alone, as if she had already foreseen the moment when the great fortunes no longer depended on owning land but also on factories and now communications: This was,” Miguel said in summary, “Max Monroy’s conclusion. Not to be like his mother. To change the orientation of his wealth. Abandon the countryside and industry. Dedicate himself to communications. Build an empire of the future, far from the land and the factory, an almost impalpable universe barring his mother’s way, a world of cellphones and the Internet that offered, instead of mudholes and smoke, videos, webs, music, games, and above all information along with the right to two hundred free messages and half an hour unlimited calling to each owner of a Monroy mobile.”

And Sibila?

Imagine night falling on a face. Night fell on the face of Miguel Aparecido. He tried to rescue his account interrupted by all kinds of emotions, stammering and therefore unusual in him, even alien to the man I knew.

Sibila Sarmiento, a mother at fourteen. Deprived of her child at fifteen. Condemned to wander like a ghost, without understanding what had happened, through an abandoned ranch house stripped of furniture, in the care of absent servants who did not say a word to her. Did her husband, Max Monroy, understand what had happened? Or did he too absent himself from a situation that was nothing but the coarse, powerful whim of his mother, the monstrous old matriarch enamored of her own desire, her ability to show her own power at every opportunity so she would compare favorably to her husband the general, an irresolute womanizer, to believe she was ahead of events and mistress of the crystal ball, that reality did as she ordered because she did not endure reality, she created it, her caprice was law, the most capricious caprice, the most gratuitous cruelty, the least trustworthy desire, the most irrational reason: Now I’ll take over the Sarmiento lands, now I’ll marry my forty-year-old bachelor son to a twelve-year-old girl, now I’ll declare the kid crazy and have her locked up at the Fray Bernardino because the poor idiot doesn’t distinguish between the solitude of a ranch house and the helplessness of a lunatic asylum, rot there, imbecile, die there without realizing it, let’s see who can do anything against the desire, the power, the caprice of a woman who has overcome every obstacle with the strength of her will, a female who rids herself of any unnecessary obligation; the child’s mother to the funny farm; the child to the street, let him manage on his own, without help, let him become a little man without anybody’s protection, let’s see how he does, damn brat, if he has the right stuff he’ll get ahead, if not, well then he can go to hell: all for you, Max, all so you can grow up and assert yourself without ballast, without family obligations, without children to take care of, without a wife to annoy you, nag at you, weigh you down, you’ll be free, my son, you’ll owe supreme thanks to the will of your magnificent mother Antigua Concepción, not Concha, not Conchita, no, but the mother of will, of whim, of caprice, of creation itself, of determination… The mistress of destiny. The overseer of chance.

“I made myself in the street, Josué. I grew up however I could. Perhaps I’m even grateful for being abandoned. I’m grateful for it but don’t forgive it. I’ll defend myself with my teeth.”

I RETURNED WITH Father Filopáter to the Santo Domingo arcades. I wondered what brought me back. I guessed at some reasons: My interest in him and his ideas. The mystery surrounding his exclusion from teaching and from his religious order. Above all (because Filopáter was something like the final recollection of my youth), the memory of the moment when I learned to read, to think, to discuss my ideas, to feel, if not superior to then independent of the afflictions of childhood: subjection to a domineering housekeeper and especially ignorance of my origins. María Egipciaca was not my mother. My bones knew it. My head knew it when my confidence was withdrawn from the tyrannical housekeeper on Calle de Berlín. This did not resolve, of course, the enigma of my origins. But that mystery allowed me to uproot my life on the basis of an initiative determined by me, by my freedom.

Jericó was the symbol of my independence, of my promise of personal independence. But in the fraternal equation of Castor and Pollux, Father Filopáter, Trinitarian, intervened. He precipitated our intellectual curiosity, offered a port and a haven in what might have been aimless sailing regardless of the solidarity between the young navigators. If I had rediscovered Filopáter now, the event acquired an explanation: Jericó’s distance returned me to the priest’s proximity. Because if my friend and I had a “father” in common, it was this teacher at the Jalisco School, the priest who revealed to us the syntax of dialectic, the ludic element (in order not to be ridiculous) of ideological and even theoretical positions. To pit the philosophy of Saint Thomas against the thought of Nietzsche was an exercise, for Jericó and I were not Thomists or nihilists. The interesting thing is that Filopáter would find in Spinoza the equilibrium between dogma and rebellion, asking us, in a straightforward way, to be sure the ideology of knowledge did not precede knowledge itself, making it impossible.

“The truth is made manifest without manifestos, like light when it displaces dark. Light does not announce itself ideologically. Neither does thought. Only darkness keeps us from seeing.”

Had Filopáter’s position regarding dogma been what eventually excluded him from the religious community? Did the priest distance himself too much from the principles of faith in order to establish himself in the proofs of faith? These were the questions I asked myself when the chaotic or fatal events I have recorded here combined and broke the ties that until then had bound me to friendship (Jericó), sexual desire (Asunta), ambition (Max Monroy), and unspoiled charity (Miguel Aparecido).

What did I have left? The chance encounter with Filopáter appeared to me like a salvation, if by salvation you understand not a favorable judgment in the tribunal of eternity but the full realization of our human potential. To be what we are because we are what we were and what we will be. The question of transcendence beyond death is left hanging during the age of salvation on earth. Does the second determine the first? Does what happens to us after death depend on what we accomplish in life? Or ultimately, independent of our actions, is a final redemption valid when it is stimulated by confession, repentance, final awareness of the truth that pursued us from the beginning and which we believe only when we die?

Filopáter’s reply (and perhaps the reason for his exclusion) was that each human being was granted individual value independent of belonging to a group, party, church, or social class. The individual inalienable being could, in fact, affiliate with a group, party, class, or church as long as this radical personal value was not lost. Was this what the religious order could not forgive in Filopáter: the stubborn affirmation of his person without discrediting his membership in the clergy, his refusal to hand his personality over to the herd, disappearing gratefully into the crowd of the city, the monastery, the party? He had been faithful to what he taught us. He was the favorite son of Baruch (Benoît, Benedetto, Benito, Bendito) Spinoza, excommunicated from Hebrew orthodoxy, irreducible to Christian orthodoxy, a heretic to both, convinced that faith is consumed in obedience and expands in justice.

Back at Santo Domingo and in conversation with Filopáter, I expected what he offered as we walked from the plaza to Calle de Donceles along República de Brasil, a continuation of our earlier talk, though part of my attention was devoted to crossing the crowded streets, keeping the good father from being run down by trucks, cars, bicycles, or peddlers’ carts.

“I don’t want you going around in circles about the reasons for my exclusion,” he said then, and I understood that the miracle of his existence was not to die by being run down. “My crime was to maintain that Jesus is not a proxy for the Father. Jesus is God because he is incarnate and the Father does not tolerate that. Anathema, anathema!” Filopáter struck his emaciated chest, making the ancient tie fly up while I helped him cross the street. “And my conclusion, Josué. If what I say is true, God appears only to the most unworthy of men.”

“The most unbelieving?” I said, impelled by Filopáter’s words.

“I don’t believe in a totalitarian God. I believe in the self-contradictory God incarnated in Jesus. Thou hast had my soul even unto death, said Jesus the man in Gethsemane. And if he said Father, why hast thou forsaken me, what wouldn’t he say to all of us? Men, why have you forsaken me? Don’t you see I am only a helpless man, condemned, fatal, with no providence at all, just like you? Why don’t you recognize yourselves in me? Why do you invent a Father and a Holy Spirit for me? Don’t you see that in the Trinity I, the man, Jesus the Christ, disappear when made divine?”

When we finally walked through the large street door of number 815, Calle de Donceles, to a covered alleyway smelling of moss and rotting roots, Filopáter led me to a room at the rear of the crowded courtyard, avoiding with a glance I imagined as fearful the stairway that led to the residential floor, as if a ghost lived there.

Filopáter’s room was in reality a workshop with tables prepared for precise work: grinding lenses. A table, two chairs, a cot, bare walls unadorned except for the crucifix over the bed. Since I looked longer than I should have at the bed, Filopáter took me by the arm and smiled.

“A woman doesn’t fit in my bed. Imagine. Celibacy has been obligatory for priests since the Lateran Council of 1139, except that Henri, bishop of Liège in the thirteenth century, had sixty-one children. Fourteen in twenty-two months.”

“A woman,” I said just to say something, not imagining the consequences.

“Your woman,” Filopáter said to my enormous surprise.

He saw the astonishment followed by incomprehension on my face; before my eyes passed the gaze of Asunta Jordán, in my ears the voice of the nurse Elvira Ríos, in my nose the smell of Señora Hetara’s whores, but my sealed mouth did not pronounce the name Filopáter made himself responsible for saying:

“Lucha Zapata.”

And then he murmured: “Perhaps the voice of Satan said to Jesus on Calvary: ‘If thou be God, save thyself and come down from the cross.’ ”

I WAS AFRAID as I walked up to the apartment on Calle de Praga. On each stair a false step threatened me. In each corner an enemy lurked. I went up slowly, accompanied by a legion of demons unleashed by the visit to Filopáter’s hiding place in the center of the immense city. In the shadows, succubi adopted the intangible forms of women to seduce and condemn me. Worse were the incubi who offered themselves to me as satanic male lovers. And the horror of my ascent was that the incubi were men with the face of Asunta and the succubi women with Jericó’s features, as if I wanted to erase from my vision Lucha Zapata’s face, evoked by my visit with Filopáter on Calle de Donceles. Then I knew it was all a premonition.

I opened the door to the apartment nervously, hurriedly. I put the keys in my pocket and before I turned on the lights Jericó’s voice asked me-ordered me-from the darkness: “No light. Don’t turn on the light. Let’s talk in the dark.”

I accepted the invitation. Little by little, as usual, my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and Jericó’s shadow was outlined with greater clarity.

But not much. The man, my friend, set aside an area of his own darkness that protected him from a world turned hostile. As if I didn’t know. The arrest order had come from the office of the president with the fury reserved for a traitor.

From then on “Judas” would be the presidential term used to refer to Jericó, “Judas.”

Now Jericó Iscariot was hiding in the most obvious and therefore most concealed place: our apartment on Calle de Praga.

“Do you remember Poe? We read him together. The purloined letter is in sight of everyone and therefore nobody sees it.”

“You’re taking a risk,” I said with a reverberation of affection from my heart but not daring to say: Run away. I didn’t want him, a fugitive, to feel expelled as well. What would I do except respect Jericó’s desire, even knowing I might seem like his accomplice, his harborer?

“Get away. Don’t compromise me.”

I didn’t dare say that.

He said it for me.

He saved me the grief.

“You know, old pal. We wanted so much in life, we read, studied, discussed so much, and ended up only being worth what you pay an informer.”

I became angry. “I’m no Judas.”

He became angry. “That’s what they call me in the president’s office.”

“I had nothing to do…” I stammered. “I’m not a traitor. I don’t work in the government.”

“Then are you my accomplice?”

“I’m your friend. Not a traitor and not an accomplice.”

I asked him without words to understand me. I didn’t want to ask him to leave. Where would he go? He knew I wouldn’t turn him in. He took advantage of our friendship. Did he sacrifice it? I rejected this idea, seeing Jericó cornered by shadows, failed in his illusory takeover of power, the act of an inopportune fascist fascination impossible in our time, the product of an imagination, as I now understood it, exalted by itself, by the past, by a feverish, perversely idealistic intelligence. My friend Jericó with no last name. Like kings. Like sultans. Like Asian dictators.

“Thanks, Monroy. Your monitoring has allowed us to keep an eye on all of Judas’s preparations.”

Max Monroy didn’t tell the president that having access to all the strands of information was useful for something.

Valentín Pedro Carrera couldn’t help making a joke.

“You kept the information till pretty late, Don Max. This Judas almost had his way and turned us into Christ, damn it.”

Monroy shook his head, sunk deep into his shoulders.

“Nobody has his way anymore,” he declared. “Everything’s on file. There’s no subversive movement that isn’t known. If I was late in informing you, it’s because most of these revolutions abort right away. They last as long as Indian summer. Why add to your worries, Mr. President? You have enough with preparations for your popular festivals.”

The president did not respond to the blow. He owed Monroy too much. Monroy felt just a little embarrassed, as if he had abused his own power.

“When it’s a question of serious matters, I’m at your disposal, Mr. President.”

“I know, Don Max, I know and I appreciate it. Believe me.”

Hadn’t Jericó, dressed in shadows, known what I knew in Monroy’s office thanks to Asunta’s information?

“Were we in the wrong age?” I asked with no irony.

He went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Were we born in time or out of time?”

He said it was important for him to know that.

He evoked our childhood and early youth, both of us brought up without a family, without knowing our parents, without even knowing if we had parents, never knowing who supported us, paid for our schools, clothes, food…

“Because somebody supported us, Josué, and if we didn’t find out who for the sake of convenience pure and simple, because it was totally awesome to receive everything and owe nothing, we didn’t ask and nobody asked us either, our table was set, and did we deserve it, champ? Didn’t the moment come to rebel against a destiny others had made for you and go out and create your own destiny?”

I didn’t know what to say to him, except that his presence at that moment was for me like a tribute to the past he and I had shared. It was a way of telling him I had doubts about our friendship in the future. This was, after all, a moment of melancholy.

Jericó wasn’t a fool. He grasped my words at once and adapted them to his own situation, he was here and was the friend I avoided in order not to harm him and he, now, was seizing his neck as the rebellious poet seized the swan “with deceitful plumage.” Jericó wanted to twist his own neck, that was his dramatic vocation.

“Do you remember our first meeting, Josué? Remember it and then add on the facts of our relationship. Do you agree I was always the one who pushed you to act? Against school authority, against conventions of thought, against good manners, do you agree I always pushed you toward the path my life was opening for us?”

“It’s possible,” I replied, testing the shifting ground that spread before me.

“No,” he said fiercely. “Not possible. True. That’s how it was. I always went first, of course I did.”

“To a point.” I wanted to play along because I didn’t want the stormy confrontation Jericó’s gaze was sending out to me from the darkness.

“Believe it even if you don’t believe it.”

He laughed. I don’t know if he laughed at the situation, at me, or at himself.

“You stopped, Josué. You didn’t follow me to the end of the road.”

“The fact is there was a cliff at the end of the road,” I said with no desire to condemn him.

He took it differently. “You didn’t have the courage to walk with me to the end of the road. You didn’t cross the frontier with me, Josué. You didn’t have the courage to explore the evil in yourself. Because both of us always knew that just as we did good, we could do evil. Even more: the ‘better’ we were, the less complete we would be. Each action in our lives means roads to the edge of the abyss. One precipice is good. The other is evil. Don’t be confused, brother. You and I did not fall into good or evil. We simply walked along the street of ambiguity, both yes and no… A decision had to be made. There’s a moment that demands definition from us. Does it depend on where we are, whom we’re with, what influences us? Sure, I found myself at the center of political power. And from there, Jericó, my only option to be myself, to not turn into a puppet of power, was to oppose power with power, power of another kind, Jericó, the power of evil, because look, the power of good, where has it brought us? To a democracy that resembles a wheel with a mouse inside that runs and runs and doesn’t get anywhere. And did I opt for a different action? And did that action lead to the stigma of evil? Reclaim it for me, if you like. Go on. Ándale.”

He breathed like a tiger. “Yes. That’s what I did. Explored the evil in myself. I descended to the depths of my own evil and discovered that evil is the only valid enemy for a brave man. Evil as valor, do you understand? Evil as proof of your manhood.”

I reacted with modest annoyance.

“I don’t want the killing to go on, that’s all. I don’t want to smell more blood after the century we were born into, Jericó, the time of evil carried to the extreme of knowing itself as evil and celebrating evil as the great good of desire and destiny… It makes me sick, what about you, you bastard?”

(Before my open eyes passed the corpses in the trenches of the Marne and the camps of Auschwitz, in the blood-filled river of Stalingrad and the blood-filled jungle of Vietnam, the juvenile corpses of Tlatelolco and the victims in Chile and Argentina, the tortures of Abu Ghraib and the justifications, also corpselike, of Nazis and Communists, brutal soldiers and terrified presidents, Gringos maddened by the incomprehensible difference of not being like everyone else and French rationalists applying “the question” in Algeria: Now I told myself the probable summary of history is that we could analyze in detail and clarify the cultural modalities of the time but did not know how to avoid its evil. In the life of Jericó and Josué, how much was it worth to exalt the knowledge of good as a barricade against the preference for evil? Was our “culture” the dike against the Devil’s flood? Without us, would we all have drowned in the sea of evil? Or, with or without us, would the evil of the time have been manifest in measures that did not matter in the light of just one little girl screaming naked, burned forever, on a path in the jungle of Indochina? Of one little Jewish boy forced out of the Warsaw ghetto with his hands raised, the star on his coat and his destiny in his eyes?)

“I don’t want the killing to go on,” I said then in a way that may seem irrelevant. Just then it was the only response dictated to me by the situation. “I want us to go on being Castor and Pollux, the brothers who were friends.”

“Shall we be Cain and Abel, the brothers who were enemies?”

“That depends on you.”

“You didn’t have the courage. You didn’t go with me,” he insisted in a way that seemed desolate and lugubrious.

“I think you were wrong, Jericó. You misread the situation and acted accordingly. You acted badly.”

“Badly? Something had to be done,” he said in a tone of sudden modesty, fairly unexpected and chimerical in him.

“You can do something. You can’t do everything,” I responded with growing humility and blamed myself for treating a friend in a condescending way without meaning to. This was insulting. I was sure he didn’t realize it. Was I wrong?

There was no time to reply. We clearly heard footsteps on the stairs. It was midnight, and in this building, aside from our apartment, there were only offices that closed at seven. For an instant I thought Jericó was going to hide in the closet. He moved. He stopped. He listened. I listened. We listened. The footsteps were ascending. They belonged to a woman. The click of high heels revealed that. Both of us, separated by a couple of meters, waited. There was nothing to do except, for an instant, separate as if only one would have to die, alone.

The door opened. Asunta Jordán looked at us as if the two meters of separation did not exist. She looked at us as if we were one, Castor and Pollux, fraternal twins, not Cain and Abel, the brothers who were enemies.

She turned off the flashlight in her hand. It wasn’t necessary. The lights were on now. The purloined letter was in plain sight for everyone to see.

Outside, the Gothic statues of the Church of the Santo Niño de Praga did not give us their white smiles.

“I DIDN’T FINISH telling you,” said Lucha Zapata in the letter she dictated to Filopáter that the priest handed to me now.

She didn’t finish? She didn’t even begin. And I never asked her: Tell me about your past. Not out of negligence. Out of love. Lucha Zapata gave me and asked for an affection in which memories were superfluous. This was how our relationship was established, without recollections but not amnesiac, because the absence of the past was a radical way of taking root in the present, love as the root of instant passion that remembers nothing and foresees nothing because it is self-sufficient.

This was the very mark of my relationship with Lucha Zapata, and if she was writing to me now she did so, I’m certain, in the name of chance and freedom. She did not betray herself. She was tossing a bottle into the sea. Would I read these pages? It would not depend so much on my desire as on my destiny. If I had not walked the streets of the Historic Center in search of clues to what Jericó was preparing (and wasn’t this, no matter how I disguised it as official duty, a sickly form of disloyalty to a friend?) I would not have run into Father Filopáter on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. He could have rejected my approaching him. Out of a sense of decency. Because his new life was a break from his former one. Because I had no right to resurrect the past.

It didn’t happen that way. He received me, recognized me, remembered me, led me to his poor lodgings at the rear of a poisonous garden on Calle de Donceles where Filopáter imitated the life of Spinoza, grinding lenses.

This matter could have ended there. If I hadn’t seen my old teacher for eleven years, why wouldn’t I have left him forever following our brief, accidental meeting? This is the question and no one is shielded from it. We met. We didn’t meet. If we didn’t meet, what things would not have happened? What opportunities would have been lost? What dangers avoided? But if we did meet, what things would happen? What opportunities would present themselves? What dangers would be realized?

Jericó was right: Perhaps we’re always at a great crossroads, a circular plaza with avenues radiating from it, each one leading in turn to other plazas from which other avenues radiate. Six, thirty-six, two hundred sixteen, infinite plazas, infinite avenues for a finite life guaranteed a direction only by what we make with our hands, our ideas, our words, forms, colors, sounds, not what we do with sex, social relationships, family life: These evaporate and no one remembers anyone after the third or fourth generation. Who was your great-grandfather, what was the name of your great-great-grandfather, what face did your most remote ancestor have, the one who lived before photography, the one who wasn’t lucky enough to be painted by Rubens or Velázquez? We are part of the distribution of the great collective forgetting, a telephone book with no numbers, a dictionary of blank pages where not even the fingerprints of those who turned them remain…

Why, then, did Lucha Zapata leave me this letter-confession in which she detailed her criminal life with individuals I came to know through the brothel life of my early youth, my visits to the Esparza house and the San Juan de Aragón Prison? Why did Lucha break the silence, the music of our love affair, with a criminal tale? Here Lucha Zapata appeared training in crime, first as one of the gangs of beggars, false blind men, cripples, the destitute, the incurable, whatever they desire, whatever destiny grants us. Lucha eating the bread of affliction on busy corners, from Avenida Masaryk to the road to the airport, her hand outstretched, reciting prayers, doggerel, God bless you, whatever Your Grace can spare, praise God, simulating bloody sores at the entrance to churches, hernias at the entrance to hospitals, fevers at the entrance to restaurants, allying herself in an ascending scale with thieves, thugs, pimps, houseboys who specialize in robbing houses, the pious who steal in churches, apostles who know how to use picklocks and open doors, bullfighters who steal from pedestrians in the light of day; hoodlums, paid killers, experts in knife fights, panderers, boys who work in brothels, aimless young people and old criminals as well who have no recourse but crime, old soldiers, ruined pensioners, those hounded by bankruptcy, late payments, overdue mortgages, devaluated currency, evaporated savings, discontinued jobs, nonexistent insurance, you see, Josué, how intertwined are virtue and destiny, chance and necessity, innocence and guilt in the legion of those who rob out of necessity because others, you know? need to steal or steal without need, as others kill for pleasure and others unnecessarily and others because they need to kill, are you charitable, do you understand, do you have enough charity to forgive if you know, Josué, or can you love only if you don’t know? Can you love Lucha Zapata only if you know nothing about Lucha Zapata?

Yes, she was a vision, an aviator expelled from the airfield for attempting to steal a twin-engine plane from a hangar, a specter in a cap and goggles and leather jacket who fell by chance into my arms when I said goodbye to Jericó who was flying off to study in France and I saw Sara P. pass by preceded by a false porter who turned out to be the bandit and mariachi Maxi Batalla. Was this the truth? Everything else fiction? The mariachi wasn’t beaten and mute as his poor mother thought but alive and well? Sara P. was part of the criminal gang organized by Jericó to attack power with violence because legality seemed useless to him and he confused revolutionary action with a police problem, which is what he received in return: disaster, flight, prison?

Everything eventually tied in a bundle that gathered up the threads of the plot in this chance encounter with Filopáter and the reading, even more fortuitous, of a letter Lucha Zapata wrote to me without losing hope I would read it one day? “You don’t remember me” was the refrain of the letter. And again: “You gave me the pulse of happiness,” and once again: “I had to suffer to love you.”

A letter dictated to Filopáter by Lucha.

Why? What did she know?

Couldn’t she write without needing an amanuensis?

Did Filopáter have to be the scribe of our destiny?

Or was this a way to confess what she never would have told me in person, since our dealings with each other, you remember, went beyond all reference to the past? But the element of chance prevailed over Lucha’s desire. Perhaps I would never have walked through the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Perhaps I would never have seen Filopáter again. This was the point at which our desire-Lucha’s and mine-and chance coincided. Dictating a letter to a public scribe in the hope I would find him and he would give me the letter to read. Like now, fulfilling a prophecy more than engaging in a coincidence, I did it, I read the letter.

At the beginning of everything, was there a kindergarten? Was there a hostile mother, embittered because youth is a seduction that doesn’t last, because her daughter felt sad and solitary and wanted to expel the shadows and the mother told her Don’t show your breasts and she told her mother I hate how you dress and they said things to each other like love is when things turn out well so the mother would return to her responsibility, didn’t I tell you, didn’t I say you could only live at your mother’s side? And Lucha wanted to preserve a moment, just one, precisely the one when mother and daughter were admired together, at the same time, what a nice pair, they look like sisters, expelling the shadows, the threat, the deception, Didn’t I tell you you could only live with your mother? before throwing herself out on the street, into voluntary beggary, crime, the company of Maxi Batalla and Sara P. and Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas and Gomas, the roguish and violent licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba of sad memory in this my course in criminality subject to the prison control of Miguel Aparecido but free, outside prison, free as a pack of hungry beasts, fangs sharpened, mouths slavering, eyes reddened by unwanted wakefulness, by Jericó’s political ambition.

I was part of all this history. I knew the distribution of desire and also of destiny. I had loved this woman who saved herself from crime and punishment thanks to her chance encounter with me in the airport and thanks to our life together, uneven, a real roller coaster of emotions, alcohol and drugs, good food and better sex: What did I have to complain about if I knew how to avoid the vices and enjoy the virtues? What?

ASUNTA JORDÁN CAME into the apartment on Calle de Praga with all the authority of her bold gestures, imperiously clicking high heels, uniform of a high-level employee, ill-tempered face, eyes that managed to see my friend and me at the same time. She was peremptory and there was nothing to say. An armored car was waiting downstairs escorted by two more cars carrying armed people. I resigned myself. Jericó had a nervous reflex like that of a trapped animal. She played for a moment with my resignation and his fatal rebelliousness.

It wasn’t what we feared. Jericó was protected by Max Monroy from the presidential decision to annihilate him. Judas. Jericó was driven to Max’s building on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, in the direction of Santa Fe. Asunta was in charge of the operation. Jericó, until he heard otherwise, would be hidden in an apartment in the Utopia building next to the one occupied by Asunta. I, with a bitter taste in my mouth, decided to remove myself, go to Filopáter’s house, spend a week in that corner at the rear of the covered garden on Calle de Donceles and then return, perhaps purified, to the Santa Fe building. I read Lucha Zapata’s letter.

On my return I entered a rarefied atmosphere.

Asunta received me in her office without looking up from the computer that distracted her.

“He’s in the apartment on the thirteenth floor, next to mine. Take the keys.”

She tossed me a key ring and I picked it up, trying to guess her intention. I didn’t need keys. Max Monroy had a yen to live with open doors: “I have nothing to hide.”

It was his best disguise, I had understood that. The fact that the probable presence of Jericó required keys and locked doors alarmed me as we may be alarmed by the presence in our house of a ferocious animal we feed so it will survive but that we keep locked up so it doesn’t kill us.

I recalled the news item from the zoo. A tiger killed by the bites of other hungry tigers. Five tigers. Why was the devoured tiger attacked, why that tiger and not any of the four attackers? What united the aggressors against an animal of their own kind? Was it pure chance, the bad luck of the fifth tiger? Could the victim have been the killer of another tiger?

The image of a caged Jericó produced in me the memory of an invisible figure, mobile in the extreme, my friend, who came and went in the city and the world without explanation, without identity papers, without even a second name: just Jericó, the perfect symbiosis of desire and destiny, free as the wind, without family ties, without known loves. Almost, if he weren’t so tangible in our familiarity, a phantom: my spectral brother, half of Castor and Pollux, the fraternal duality inconceivable in separation… Who had imprisoned the wind? Who had the free spirit under lock and key?

I knew the answer. Max Monroy. And the answer was added to the legion of questions I was asking myself at this time. What interest did Max Monroy have in rescuing Jericó and bringing him here, to the bosom of the large family, enterprise and home of Utopia? I imagined for a second it was all a ruse of Monroy’s to defy the president, demonstrating where real power was to be found. Did Monroy plant Jericó in the offices at Los Pinos only so my friend would deceive the president, making him believe in a false loyalty and using the springboard of power to stage an unsuccessful, ridiculous coup, failed beforehand, as Monroy expected, proving to the president that he, Monroy, possessed the information leading to the crisis, and by possessing the information he possessed real power: calibrating the threat, letting ambushes pass when they had no future, suffocating rebellions in the cradle, and cutting off their heads if they arose? Had it all been Monroy’s great masquerade for Carrera, a demonstration of where real power was to be found?

Or had Jericó’s actions been independent of Monroy? Had my friend acted, unsuccessfully, on his own, caught up in a dead illusion of revolt, impossible in the modern world of information and power, omnipresent under all circumstances, Orwell’s 1984 staged every day, without drama, without unnecessary symbols, without totalitarian cruelties, but disguised in the most absolute normality and accustomed to the technique of white-gloved castration?

Asunta Jordán did not look at me. Her complete attention was dedicated to reading the digital print, skipping the password, depending on two gigabytes of memory, connecting with the wireless net, showing me without even looking at me that the ideological world inhabited by poor Jericó was an illusion of the past, something as ancient as the pyramids.

“Older than a forest,” Max Monroy said about himself.

But if Jericó was an agent removed from both Carrera’s presidential and Monroy’s entrepreneurial power, whom did he represent? Himself, only that? You are aware of the mutual respect my friend and I had for each other. He did not inquire into my personal life and I did not try to find out about his. The question that remained shrouded was, of course, Jericó’s life during the obscure years of his absence. I acted in good faith. I loved my friend. I loved our old friendship. If he said he had been in France during that time, I believed him, no matter how false his French culture seemed to me and how conclusive his pop cultural references to the North American world. Did Jericó let slip Gringo exclamations intentionally-Let’s hug it out, bitch-and never French ones? Did he want me to know I was deceived, did his old habit of playing with reality get the better of him, deceiving to amuse, masking to reveal? Did he want to seduce me, put me in the position of asking about him, transform him into my own mystery, transfer to Jericó the questions I did not ask myself? Did he know perhaps that my mysteries were nonexistent? Did he know what I’ve recounted here, everything you know: my affair with Lucha Zapata, my relationship with Miguel Aparecido, my employment in Max Monroy’s enterprise, the recent revelation of Miguel Aparecido’s relationship to Monroy, my secret talks with Monroy’s mother, Doña Antigua Concepción, and finally my infatuation with Asunta Jordán, the pleasure of the night and the humiliation of the next morning, the fugacity of my pleasure with her, and Asunta’s brazen, frightening giving of herself in her relationship of gratitude with the ancient tribal chief: Max Monroy?

Perhaps, with these questions, I disguised my own mystery, my origins prior to my life with María Egipciaca in the mansion on Berlín.

I felt I had voluntarily erased all memory before the age of seven, though I also think before that age we have no memory at all except what our parents tell us. I had no parents. Jericó, apparently, didn’t either. I’ve already recounted how he and I would congratulate ourselves on not having a family if the family was like that of our friend Baldy Errol. This was one more disguise, perhaps the most sophistic of all. The fact is Jericó had no second name because he had renounced it. His example led me to mention only very occasionally the one I had in school, at the university, at work. Josué Nadal. Perhaps I rejected it to emulate Jericó. Perhaps a last name with no known ancestry made me uncomfortable. Perhaps he and I preferred to be Castor and Pollux, legendary brothers, without last names.

In this gigantic puzzle, where was Jericó? Who was Jericó? I had the anguished feeling, located in the pit of my stomach, that I absolutely did not know the person I thought I knew better than anyone: my brother Jericó, protector of the fraternity of Castor and Pollux, Argonauts destined for the same adventure. Retrieving the Golden Fleece…

The naked man, the animal that received me in the secret apartment in Utopia, was on all fours on a rumpled bed.

I remembered him in the same posture, defiant but smiling, sure of himself, master of a future as mysterious as it was certain, in La Hetara’s whorehouse: Who knows what would happen, but it would happen for him, for Jericó, thanks to his desire and his destiny. And necessity? Could my friend exclude the necessary from the desired and the destined? I thought of him now as he was earlier, the day he announced his departure, moving like a caged animal around the space we shared, which had changed into a prison he was going to leave-without even imagining he would end up here, once more on all fours but this time really caged, shut in, a prisoner now as perhaps he always had been, of himself: Jericó under guard, mapping the prison of his bed.

His whitish body ended in a furious, disheveled head with bloodshot eyes, enraged lips, and murderous teeth, as if he had just devoured the tiger at the zoo. His body looked grotesque, elongated, in distorted perspective behind the blond head that encapsulated Jericó’s entire person then, as if everything pulsating in him, guts and testicles, heart and skeleton, were concentrated in a monstrous, aggressive head that was intestines, balls, claws, and blood of the animal walking on the bed on all fours, fixed on me, taking pride in his verbal ferocity, his feverish dialect, there are men loved by many women, Josué you bastard, there are men no woman loves, but I love just one, you’ve had them all, I love only one, let me have her, damn it, let me have her or I swear I’ll have you killed! Do you think you have a right to everything I didn’t have? You’re wrong, motherfucker! I’ll give you everything, like always, but let me have this woman, just one woman, why do you fuck with me, Josué you bastard, why don’t you let me have the only woman I desire, the only woman who’s made me feel like a man, the woman who captured me and mastered me and tore away from me mystery and the power to question, the woman who refuses to be mine because she says she’s yours and Asunta rejects me saying she belongs to you, she can’t be anybody else’s, you bastard motherfucker, free her you son of a bitch, let her go for my balls, aren’t we like brothers? Don’t we share whores? Why do you want Asunta all to yourself, damn miser, stop stabbing yourself, fucking pig, fix yourself up, Okay, that’s enough…

And he let out a savage shout:

“I’m going to kill you, you fucking pig, either you let me have that broad or I swear you’ll be pushing up daisies!”

He said this in so horrible a way, on all fours, naked on the bed, his testicles bouncing between his legs, his face that of a ferocious animal, as if everything truly Jericó had come out to be depicted on the threatening face that no longer belonged to the valiant companion Pollux but to the murderous brother Cain.

A naked Jericó slavered, in a bestial posture and concentrating on me, I realized, the frustrations so contrary to a life that took place on the stages of success, from school until today. Jericó the bold, the sharp, the triumphant, the protector, the mysterious, the one who didn’t show his cards and won the game with a poker face, was showing his cards now and he had nothing: not even a miserable pair of fives, not even when the lower numbers had been eliminated. It was this naked feeling-physically, morally naked-that concentrated the hatred of my brother Cain against me, and when Asunta appeared behind Jericó’s bed and I looked at her, I understood her perverse game. Whatever the motives of Max Monroy in saving Jericó from the president’s vengeance and bringing him to the shelter of Utopia, Asunta’s game, no matter how tangential to Monroy’s intentions, was what had mortally wounded Jericó.

I looked at Asunta at the rear of the bedroom, her arms crossed over her chest, the executive figure disguising her origin as a provincial wife dominated by an unhappy macho, and I knew she was victorious, in possession of the plot. Subject to Max’s design but independent of him: Asunta had made Jericó believe she was my lover, that in this building the only Utopia was the erotic satisfaction she and I gave each other and I, beyond the nurse Elvira Ríos and the abandoned Lucha Zapata, had fulfilled my sexual life in nights of ecstasy with Asunta Jordán. Fuck me!

Asunta told this to Jericó. In this way Jericó’s treason was avenged, even though Monroy had been the author of his salvation, which still needed to be demonstrated.

None of it mattered.

My world collapsed with Jericó’s murderous look. I didn’t want to believe that behind our long and proven fraternal friendship, disdain was the mask of the hatred that was the real face of our relationship. Because concentrated hatred is what gleamed around the maw of a Jericó animalized by defeat, by Asunta’s erotic disdain, by Monroy’s probable deception, by the political triumph of President Carrera, by the humiliation of knowing that if not for Asunta’s appearance in the apartment on Calle de Praga, he, Jericó, would have been a victim of the fugitive law, shot in the back as he tried to escape, or locked up in San Juan de Aragón with his miserable conspirators. Exposed to the implacable vengeance of Miguel Aparecido.

I feared for him.

I should have feared for myself.

SO YOU’RE GOING to write your thesis on me, Josué? What do you plan to say? Are you going to repeat the same clichés? Niccolò Machiavelli, calculating, hypocritical, the icy manipulator of the power he never wielded, only advised? Are you going to talk about my mainstays, necessity, virtue, fortune? Are you going to write that necessity is the stimulus for political action though in its name there is also betrayal and ambition? Are you going to repeat that virtue is a manifestation of free will though it can also be the mask of the hypocrite? And, finally, are you going to say that I compare fortune to feminine inconsistency, capricious and inconstant, concluding that the man who depends on it least endures longest?

Machiavelli the misogynist! Didn’t I marry Marietta Corsini to obtain, in a single hymen, both virginity and fortune? Ah, Josué, don’t repeat the tired phrases that pursue me from century to century. Be bolder. Have the audacity, my young friend, to penetrate my true biography, not the one by “serious” historians, no, but the one about my real, vulgar, crude, lustful existence: Niccolò Machiavelli says it aloud so everyone can hear: “I don’t know anything that gives more happiness, doing it, thinking about it, than fornication. A man can philosophize all he wants, but this is the truth.” That’s what I wrote, and now I repeat it to you. Everybody understands it. Few say it. You can quote me. It irritates me that people are ignorant of my taste for women and sex. Let them be ignorant! What difference does it make! But if you’re going to write truthfully about me, you’ll repeat with me: Sweet, trifling, or weighty, sex creates a network of feelings without which, it seems to me, I could not be happy.

Look at them: One is named Gianna, another Lucrecia, still another La Tafani. I’ll tell you something beyond their names: Desire responds only to nature, not morality. La Riccia was a prostitute well known all around Florence? That does not diminish in the least the pleasure she gave me. She was my lover for ten years. It didn’t matter to her when my fortunes changed. She didn’t change. Friends changed. She did not. And La Tafani? Charming, refined, noble, I can never praise her as she deserves. Love entangled me in her web. They were nets woven by Venus, my young friend, soft and sensitive… Until the day the nets harden and imprison you and you can’t undo the knots and don’t care about the punishment. Don’t forget, Josué, all love is pardoned and pardonable if it gives you pleasure. I had relations with women and also with men. It was another time. Homosexuality was common in Florence.

In general, all my love had sweetness, because loved flesh gave me delight and because when I loved I forgot my troubles, so much so that I preferred the prison of love to having freedom, yes freedom, ay! granted to me.

I remember and savor all this because The Prince, the work you’re studying on the instructions of your Professor Sanginés, was received in 1513 as the work of the Devil (Niccolò Machiavelli, Old Nick, the Demon, the double of Beelzebub, Belial, Azazel, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus, Satan, the Deva, the Cacodemon, the Evil One, the Tempter, and more familiarly, not only Old Nick but also Old Harry, Old Ned, the Dickens, Old Scratch, the Prince of Darkness), all because I brought light to the business of politics, deceived no one, told them this is the way things are, like it or not, it isn’t a moral judgment of mine, these are our political realities, read me seriously, I am inspired not by darkness but by light, learn that a good government is in accord only with the nature of the time and a bad government is opposed to the spirit of the time, learn that old governments are secure and manageable and new governments dangerous because they displace the authorities of previous governments and leave their own followers dissatisfied because they thought with power they would obtain everything that can be given only with an eyedropper in the tension between the legitimacy of its origin, which in no way assures the legitimacy of its exercise…

Why go on? Politics is simply the public relationship among human beings. Freedom is the regularization of power. Men are mad and want to see the origin of power in sacred revelation, in nature, in race, in a social contract, in revolution, and in law. To them I say no. Power is simply the exercise of necessity, the mask of virtue, and the chance of fortune. Unbearable. Do you know, to restore my spirits, sometimes I return to the countryside and change clothes. I put on togas and medallions, gold sandals and laurel wreaths, and then, alone, I converse with the ancients, with the Greeks and Romans, my peers…

It is a great lie: a fiction. The truth is I need the city. I love the city, its works, its plazas, its stones, its markets, its bodies. The sweetness of a face allows me to forget my sorrows. The heat of sex invites me to leave my family, making them think I have died. Madness!

And still, here I am back in office, serving the Prince, remembering perhaps that love is mischievous and escapes from the liver, the eyes, the heart. Only the administration of the city-politics, the polis-saves me, Josué, from the suicidal ardor of sex and the onerous imagination of the historical past as I wait for my trip to hell, a much more amusing place than heaven.

Understand, then, my smile. Understand the portrait of me by Santi di Tito in the Palazzo Vecchio. Do you see now why I smile? Do you realize there are only two comparable smiles, the Giaconda’s and mine? She was the Mona Lisa. Will I be the Mono Liso, Smooth Monkey? There is no risk. If you like, call me, in Mexican, Machiavelli, Chango Resbaloso, Slippery Monkey.

“JERICÓ’S MISTAKE,” SANGINÉS remarked during this new lunch, now in the Danubio on the Calles de Uruguay, “consisted in believing a dissatisfied mass would follow a revolutionary vanguard. He didn’t see two essential things: First, that the revolutionary masses are an invention of the revolutionary vanguard. Second, that when the masses have moved it’s because they have reached the end of their patience. That doesn’t happen here-or hasn’t happened yet. Most people believe they can achieve a better situation. People make promises to themselves. People, if you like, deceive themselves. Go away. Fine. The worker goes as a migrant to California, Oregon, the Carolinas. Fine. But people see the ads and what they want is to be like that, like the ad. Have a car, their own house, go on vacation, whatever, fuck the ‘Classy Blonde.’ Have you seen, Josué, the faces of people when they come out of a movie, imitating-unconsciously, no doubt-the star they’ve just seen?”

“Nicole Kidman,” I intervened just to say something, when I should have paid attention to the platter of shellfish the Danubio waiter had placed in front of me. “Errol Flynn,” I added, unusual for me, in memory of Baldy, our friend, but also with a certain mockery, as if Sanginés were teaching me what I already knew and I, out of respect, was pretending I was still learning, as I did when I was his student at the law school.

“We have created a society,” Sanginés continued while, as was his custom, he made little balls out of bread crumbs, “which for the most part wants to move up, have things, cars, women, clothes, sun, and if you press me, an education for the children, life insurance, social security, hospital and television insurance.”

“Bread isn’t enough,” I tried to interject like a French monarch. “They want cake.”

Sanginés smoothed the tablecloth as if to rid it of wrinkles or crumbs-and to avoid paying attention to me.

“There are also desperate ways out,” he argued so as not to withdraw. “Go as a migrant worker to the United States, defy the guards’ bullets, the barbed wire, the walls, the truck in which the coyotes can abandon you or leave you to suffocate…”

Did the restaurant tablecloth, white and bare, resemble a desert along the border? Were the salt and pepper shakers beacons that would guide the position of our dishes, already ordered, on their way, bean soup, ceviche, fillet of beef with mashed potatoes…?

Sanginés looked at me somberly. He maintained a silence that prolonged unbearably the wait and increased hunger with no immediate hope of deliverance. Rarely have I seen him so pessimistic. He didn’t want to look at me. He dared to look at me.

“The border is going to close. The United States, our Northern Wall, will be worse than the Berlin Wall. One was dictated by Communist ideology and Soviet paranoia. The wall that will run from the Pacific to the Gulf, from San Diego-Tijuana to Brownsville-Matamoros, is dictated by irrational racism. They need workers the North American market doesn’t have. But they have to be kept out because they’re dark, they’re poor, they work hard, solve problems, and expose discrimination in mortal combat with necessity…”

I felt like wiping up my plate with a tortilla: Sanginés’s words, which should have taken away my appetite, made me hungry.

“You also have to consider that Gringo businessmen pay low wages to migrant workers and don’t want to pay high salaries to local labor,” I argued, because Sanginés liked that.

He was served bean soup. I had ordered an Acapulcan ceviche. He dipped his large spoon. I used my small fork. We ate.

“That isn’t the problem. The United States is being left behind. It has a workforce from the time of the Industrial Revolution. The smokestack cities are dying. Detroit, Pittsburgh are dying. Carnegie and Rockefeller died. Gates and BlackBerry were born. But the North Americans don’t renounce the great industrial dream that founded them as a power. Chinese and Indians graduate from North American universities. Chicanos graduate.”

“Except the Chinese go back to China and advance it and the Mexicans go back to Mexico and nobody even wants them, Maestro…”

Without meaning to I knocked over the saltshaker. Sanginés, cordial, put it back. I, without thinking twice, cupped my hand, gathered the spilled salt, and held it. I didn’t know where to put it.

“Max Monroy understands this,” I said without thinking. “Valentín Pedro Carrera doesn’t. Max looks for long-term solutions. Carrera feels the six-year term concluding and wants to postpone the end with a swindle. His festivals, his jokes…”

Did Sanginés grimace? Or were the beans more bitter than he had expected? Like an idiot I emptied the salt on my ceviche. I ate without looking at him. If you begin by selecting fish, you end up with olives.

I said that he, Antonio Sanginés, was lawyer to them both, to Carrera and Monroy. I asked him to analyze them for me, the president and the magnate, the two poles of power in Mexico (and in Iberoamerica). He gave me a look that announced: I don’t want to say the words of misfortune. I won’t be the one…

Well, I interrupted, I was still preparing the professional thesis he himself had suggested, Machiavelli and the Modern State, so our talks were, in a way, like part of the course, weren’t they?

I looked for his friendly, approving smile and didn’t find it.

“We can all feel jealousy, hatred, or suspicion. The powerful man should eliminate jealousy, which leads him to want to be someone else, and in the end he becomes less than himself. He should avoid hatred, which clouds judgment and precipitates irreparable actions,” Sanginés declaimed.

A bean was caught in his teeth that I only now suspected might be false. He extracted it and disposed of it carefully on the bread plate.

“But he should cultivate suspicion. Is it a defect? No, because without suspicion one doesn’t gain political or economic power. The guileless man does not endure in the city of Pericles or in the city of Mercury.”

“How long does the man endure who only suspects?”

“He would like to be eternal,” Sanginés said with a smile.

“Even though he knows he isn’t?” I returned the smile with an ironic gesture.

“A politician’s capacity for self-deception is in-fi-nite. The politician believes he is indispensable and permanent. The moment arrives when power is like a car without brakes on a highway with no end. You’re no longer concerned with putting on the brakes. You don’t even care about steering. The vehicle has reached its own velocity-its cruising speed-and the powerful man believes that now nothing and no one can stop him.”

“Except the law, Maestro. The principle of nonreelection.”

“The nightmare of those who wanted to be reelected and couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”

“They were not permitted to by a cabinet.”

“Alvaro Obregón was assassinated for being reelected.”

“Others were forbidden reelection by insurrectionist cabinets. Or a false belief that if one chose one’s successor, he would be a docile puppet in the hands of his predecessor. What happened was just the opposite. Today’s ‘stand-in’ destroyed yesterday’s monarch because the new king had to demonstrate his independence from the one who named him his successor.”

“Adventures of the Mexican six-year monarchy,” I remarked, watching as our empty plates were withdrawn like ex-presidents.

Sanginés said he found it astonishing that the lesson had not been learned.

“From the first day, I advised Carrera: Imagine the last day. Remember that we are subject to the laws of contraction. The president wants to ignore political syneresis. We all say right now. He says maybe later, as if he were asking God: Holy God, give me six more years…”

“Now,” I said in English with a smile and a paleological intention, “now now now.”

“It’s the terror of knowing there is an afterward.” Sanginés received the thick, succulent fillet with an involuntary salivation of his mouth and a liquid gratitude in his eyes, as if this were his last meal. Or his first? Because in any event, he and I had never met to converse in so conclusive a manner, as if a chapter of our relationship were closing here and another one, perhaps, were beginning. I was no longer the inexperienced young law student. He was no longer the magister placed above the fray but a zealous, intriguing, influential gladiator, a boxing manager with a champion in each corner of the ring and, I saw it clearly, a sure bet: No matter who loses, Sanginés wins…

“He should not be underestimated,” he said very seriously, though with a touch of arrogance. “I’ve seen him act up close. He possesses a tremendous instinct for survival. He really needs it, knowing as he knows (or should know) that a leader arrives with history and then leaves when history has left him behind or goes on without him. He refuses to know, however, that mistakes are paid for in the end. Or perhaps he knows and for that reason doesn’t want to think about his exit.”

He looked at me with intense melancholy.

“Don’t judge him severely. He’s not a superficial man. He just has a different idea of political destiny. He wants to create, Josué, politics with joy. It is his honor. It is his perdition. He carries in his genes the omnipotence of the Mexican monarch, Aztec, colonial, and republican. Everything that happened before, if it’s good, ought to justify him. Nothing of what occurs afterward, if it’s bad, concerns him. And if the good he did is not recognized, it’s sheer ingratitude. He prefers evoking to naming. He sneezes with a smile and smiles sneezing, to deceive others… They are his masks: laughing, sneezing.”

“Is he deceiving himself, Maestro?” I sopped up the mix of juice from the meat and mashed potatoes with a piece of bread.

I don’t know if Sanginés sighed or if he did so only in my imagination. He said at times Valentín Pedro Carrera becomes lost in thought, joining his knotty hands at his forehead as if his head were hurting. At those moments he seemed old.

Sanginés looked at me intently.

“I believe he says something like ‘too late, too late,’ but reacts by taking out his portable, picking at keys, and consulting, or pretending to consult-”

“And Max Monroy?” I interrupted so Sanginés wouldn’t fall into pure melancholy.

“Max Monroy.” I don’t know if Sanginés permitted himself a sigh. “Let’s see, let’s see… They’re different. They’re similar. I’ll explain…”

He looked in vain for a dish that didn’t come because he hadn’t ordered it. He picked up an empty glass. He avoided looking at me. He looked at himself. He continued.

“Power wearies men, though in different ways. Carrera becomes exasperated at times and then I see his weariness. He has unacceptable outbursts. He says inconsequentially violent things. For example, when he passes the Diego Rivera frescoes in the Palace, ‘You don’t paint a mural with lukewarm water, Sanginés,’ and when I sit down to work: ‘We’ll open a credit column for Our Lord Jesus Christ, because I’m going to fill out the debit column right now.’ He tries to avoid violence but can be disparaging and even vulgar when he refers to ‘the street pox.’ He prefers the government to function in peace. But it’s difficult for him to admit change. He prefers doing what he did: inventing popular festivals to entertain and distract people. Then he transformed the Zócalo into an ice skating rink. And then he opened children’s pools in areas with no water. People were hurt in the rinks. They drowned in the pools. It didn’t matter: Circuses without bread.”

“Have a good time, kids,” I added without too much sense, suspecting that by talking about the president, Sanginés avoided talking about Max Monroy.

Sanginés nodded. “When I tell him all this doesn’t solve problems, Carrera replies: ‘The country is very complex. Don’t try to understand it.’ In the face of that, Josué, I am left speechless. Injustice, intolerance, resignation? With these facts our leader makes his bed and night after night lies down with these paradigmatic words: ‘Making decisions is boring.’ ”

“Does it console him to know that some day he’ll be seen naked?”

“Naked? His skin is his gala outfit.”

“I mean without memory.”

Sanginés ordered an espresso and looked at me attentively.

Certainly it attracted his attention that I equated “nakedness” and “memory.” I do realize that in my imagination memory is like a seal in which wax retains the image without any need to pour it. My conversation with Sanginés placed before me the dilemma of memory. Immediate memory: ordering an espresso and not remembering it. Intermediate memory: When all was said and done, would I keep it?

“A man without memory has only action as a weapon,” said Sanginés.

“Did the president’s patience come to an end?” I insisted.

“Your friend Jericó ended it for him.”

He wasn’t going to let me talk. And I didn’t want to talk.

“Jericó tricked the president. He offered loyalty and gave him betrayal. This is what Carrera didn’t forgive. Everything else I’ve told you this afternoon was left behind, it collapsed, and the president was left alone with only the black tongue of ingratitude, and of solitude, which is even more bitter.”

The coffee tasted less bitter than his account. I felt that interrupting him was something worse than foolishness: it was lack of respect.

“He’s clever. He realized that to crush Jericó the forces of law and order were not enough, though I can tell you he used them. Jericó gave the president the opportunity to demonstrate his social power, his ability to represent the nation. And for that he needed Max Monroy.”

“Monroy doesn’t like Carrera. I know, Maestro, I saw it myself. Monroy humiliated Carrera.”

“What serious politician hasn’t eaten shit, Josué? It’s part of the profession! You eat toads and don’t make faces. Bah! Carrera needed Monroy to demonstrate unity in the face of an attempted rebellion. Monroy needed Carrera to give the impression that without Monroy the republic can’t be saved.”

“A pact between thieves.” I tried to be ironic.

Sanginés ignored me. He said I should understand Max Monroy. I said I had never underestimated him (including his sex life, which I had learned about and never would reveal out of respect for myself).

“It’s difficult not to admire a man who never allows himself to be flattered. He knows the best men lose their way in flattery…”

He looked at me with something resembling sincerity: “In Mexico we have a word that is categorical, juicy, and insuperable: lameculos. The person who flatters to obtain favors. In my day we talked about the UFA. United Front of Asskissers. Today it would be the UFT, United Front of Traitors.”

“And Monroy?” I said in order not to reveal I didn’t know what he was talking about. The UFA! The Stone Age!

“Monroy.”

“He can’t bear a flatterer. It’s his great strength in the midst of the national milieu of political, professional, and entrepreneurial asskissers.”

“But…” I interrupted and didn’t dare continue. The name and figure of Miguel Aparecido were on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I came up with a question: “And Jericó?”

“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés answered without looking at me. He said it in a categorical, almost disagreeable way.

We left.

Outside the Danubio it was raining. Lottery sellers pursued us. Sanginés’s driver got out of the Mercedes, offered us an umbrella, and opened the door.

“Where can I drop you, Josué?”

I didn’t know how to answer.

Where did I live?

I got into the Mercedes like an automaton, removed from the intense activity of Mexico City. I lived in the Zona Rosa, transformed once more into the bohemian district, an oasis from the surrounding violence of the city and, in any case, from the latent menace that was more the rule than the exception. I tried to comfort myself with that idea…

What Sanginés and I talked about in the car is too important and I’ll leave it for another time.

ASUNTA JORDÁN RECEIVED me again in her office and didn’t raise her head. She reviewed papers. She signed letters. She initialed documents. She told me Jericó was “in a safe place.” What does that mean? That he won’t bother anyone anymore. Is he dead? I asked, getting right to the point. He’s in a safe place. Did she mean he wouldn’t cause any more trouble?

I tried to control conflicting impulses. In a safe place? What did the formula signify? I remembered it from my studies of law. Especially Roman law. The verb recaudar means to collect money. It also means to watch over or guard. And finally, to achieve what you want through entreaties. The scholarly tome says all this. To be in safety. Miguel Aparecido is, voluntarily, in his cell in San Juan de Aragón. Maxi Batalla and the shameless Sara P. are, against their will, in the same prison. Where is Jericó? A fraternal impulse that refused to die disturbed my breast. My friend Jericó. My brother Jericó. Castor and Pollux yesterday. Cain and Abel today. And the woman who knew everything didn’t tell me anything. She reviewed papers, not as a way to disguise her feelings or distance herself from the situation but as part of the daily work of an office that had to function. The Utopia office on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in the extensive district of Santa Fe in an interminable Mexico City.

Asunta Jordán.

“Why did you make Jericó believe you and I were lovers?”

“Aren’t we?” she said without raising her head from the papers.

“Only once.” I tried to hide my bad feelings.

“But intense, wasn’t it? Don’t say it was a quickie, all right?”

She meant resign yourself: only once, but enough for a lifetime. Is that what she wanted to tell me? I don’t know. She didn’t want to say what she was thinking. Asunta told Jericó she was my lover because in that way…

“I told him I was yours alone and couldn’t be his.”

“In other words, you used me.”

“If that’s what you think.”

“Whom do you love?” I asked insolently.

She looked at me at last and in her eyes I saw something like triumph in defeat, a victorious failure. Passing through Asunta’s eyes were her provincial childhood, her marriage to the odious and despicable owner of King Kong, her fortuitous meeting with Max Monroy, and the simple, available nakedness of Asunta, the innocence with which she stood in the middle of the dance floor and waited for the inevitable, yes, but also for the evitable, what could be and what could not be. Waited for Max Monroy to approach, take her by the waist, and never let her go again.

I believe that in the most profound depths of Asunta’s inner life, that instant defined everything. Max took her by the waist and the past became just that, a stony preterit, something that never happened. Max took her by the waist and she gave herself completely, without reservation, to what she desired most at that moment: a strong man, a protector who would shelter her from the miserable mediocrity of her destiny. But the woman I knew (and ay! knew only once, biblically) owed everything to Max Monroy, which humiliated her in a certain sense, made her inferior to herself, placed her in a situation of obligatory gratitude with Max but of obligatory dissatisfaction with herself, with her desire for independence.

At that moment I understood Monroy’s intelligence. The man who saved her did not demand banal gratitude from her. It was he who demonstrated total confidence in Asunta. He didn’t need to stress his age. He didn’t need to ask Asunta to give him what he needed from her. Constant professional rigor and sporadic erotic rigor. I was witness to both. Was there something else? Of course. Max gave Asunta power and sex. He also gave her independence. He let her love whomever she liked, on two conditions. He was not to find out anything about it. She could love another man knowing she could count on Max Monroy’s acceptance.

Jericó was one of many. But she knew Jericó had to be destroyed. And his destruction consisted in not only denying him sex but telling him her sex belonged to me, his brother Josué. In this way her obligation to Max and her personal freedom were satisfied, I understood it, but at the price of Jericó’s mortal enmity toward me. Castor became Cain.

She knew he would hate me. Jericó said it, on all fours and naked like an animal, there on the bed: He had always given me everything, he preceded me in everything, ever since we met, first him, then me. With Asunta he was second, not first. How would his infinite vanity tolerate that? A vanity, I knew, identical to blindness. The moral, political, human blindness of Jericó… I saw it only now. I swear I never suspected it before. How many things does the most intimate friendship conceal?

“But that isn’t true,” I said with brutality. “You belong to Max Monroy.”

She didn’t look up. “I belong to myself. I belong only to Asunta Jordán. Ta-dum. Curtain.”

It debilitated me, disconcerted me, infuriated me that she would say these things without looking at me, signing papers again, reviewing memos, marking dates on her calendar…

“And Monroy?” I asked with the blind vision of the coarse and bestial, compassionate and senile, artificial and devout love between Asunta and Max, buried in my obligatory silence, in my ridiculous sense of discretion…

That did oblige her to look at me again for an instant before returning to her papers. The look told me: “I belong to Monroy. I owe him everything. Besides, I’m like him. I’m also Max Monroy because Max Monroy made me what I am. I’m Asunta Jordán because this is what Max Monroy decided and wanted. Max Monroy took me out of the provinces and raised me to where I am now. You may think an administrative job, no matter how privileged, in Max’s huge organization, is minor in the general scheme of things, but learning to talk, to dress, to conduct myself with intelligence, coldness, and the necessary disdain… that’s something you can never pay for.”

She said it with a show of sincerity, though with a poorly disguised arrogance. She looked down. For her, being where she sat now was utopia, yes, the place of imaginary happiness, a satisfaction in the end comparative with respect to something earlier, which one left behind and to which one does not wish to return. Looking at her sitting there, immersed in her work, almost pretending I was not standing in front of her, made it difficult for me to separate Asunta’s person from Asunta’s function, and between the two, with the slim edge of a razor, I introduced the idea of happiness. Because when all was said and done, why did she work, why did this woman dress, style her hair, act, and lie except to maintain a position, yes, a position that assured her the minimum of happiness to which she had a right, above all comparatively. I thought of her history. The wife subjected to the vulgar, noisy machismo, hereditary and without direction, of a poor, unaware, difficult devil, her husband. Her destiny in the middle class of the arid society of the northern deserts. Mexico along the border, so smug about being the most prosperous part of the country, the industrial north, without Indians, without the extreme poverty of Chiapas or Oaxaca, bourgeois Mexico, self-satisfied in contrast to the outstretched hand of the beggar south. Mexico energetic and proud of it in contrast to the great devouring capital city, fat, dissipated, heavily made up, the urban gorilla of D.F. squashing the rest of the nation with its shameless buttocks…

But the same north from which Asunta came was south of the border with Yankee prosperity, it was “south of the border, down Mexico way,” the wealth of the Mexican north was the poverty of the North American border. The passage of clandestine workers through Arizona and Texas. The barbed wire fence. The coyote’s truck. The border guard’s bullet. The maquila in Ciudad Juárez. The drug dealer from Tijuana to Laredo. Gangrene. Pus. What Sanginés always recalled when we got together.

And from all this, she extracted a semblance of happiness. And what was happiness? I asked myself this morning, standing in front of Asunta’s desk, her own border facing the subordinate employee or the occasional lover. Was happiness an internal fact, a satisfaction, or was it an external fact, a possession? I didn’t see in Asunta a semblance of bliss if by bliss one understands happiness. Was happiness synonymous with destiny? Perhaps. To a certain extent. But in Asunta Jordán I saw a destiny too dependent on things that weren’t hers. For example, Max Monroy’s desire, origin of Asunta Jordán’s “happiness” in the sense of power, well-being. And inheritance? What would Max’s will say about Asunta’s destiny? And while we’re on the subject, would Max remember his son Miguel Aparecido, the voluntary prisoner in San Juan de Aragón? Would he remember?

She told me once: “I have alert sleep. I also have dreamy wakefulness. You should know that. God’s truth. Do you understand?”

“And what else?” I insisted so as not to give her the last word by giving it to her.

“Before I break my chains myself, Max frees me from them. But he gives me the keys so I have hope.”

I looked at Asunta. Had she succeeded in uprooting desire and fear? Was this true happiness, not to desire, not to fear? Was this serenity? Or was it simply the disguise of a passivity that counts happiness as the absence of fear and the absence of desire? If ataraxia signified serenity, perhaps the price was passivity. Asunta’s calm, I knew, I learned, was the result of a forced and forceful desire. It was a satisfaction that rewarded her for having overcome the mediocrity of her matrimonial past. It was also a dissatisfaction that in the name of gratitude to Max distanced itself from the free enjoyment of love chosen by her.

Did she love me?

She read my mind. “I hope you don’t have any hopes, my poor Josué.”

I said I didn’t, lying.

“If I went to bed with you,” she didn’t look up, “it was because Max allowed me to. Max allows me sexual pleasure with young men. He knows the limitations of his, well, his third age. He lets me have pleasure. The pact with him is permanent. With the others, it’s temporary.”

It occurred to me there was certainty in her mind: Max knew about her loves, he permitted them, he respected them. Perhaps he even enjoyed them, as long as they didn’t interfere with her professional relationship. Perhaps the proof of her love for Max consisted in being unfaithful to him, certain that for him this was part of love. I believe I understood, thinking about Max and Asunta, that loving each other a great deal and getting along well can lead to indifference and hatred. Max Monroy must tolerate Asunta’s “betrayals” because he wants and needs them.

“Solamente una vez,” I managed to sing: “Only once,” as if the words to a bolero could sublimate all our emotions.

“Exactly. Like in the song.”

“And Jericó?”

“What about Jericó?”

Why did Asunta present herself to him as my lover, unleashing a mortal hatred that was, in the end, more than my lack of solidarity with his political project, the thing that ended our longstanding friendship?

“Why?”

She refused to look at me. This time I understood the reason. Before, she didn’t look at me because she was haughty and powerful. Now her absent gaze was shameful and shamefaced. Then she had the courage to raise her head and look straight at me.

“I belong to Max Monroy. I owe him everything. It’s shit to owe everything to one person. It’s shit.”

When I heard her say this, I knew Asunta was both happy and unhappy. Her passion disturbed me more than her indifference. With me, she made love with her eyes open.

That’s why she didn’t need to explain anything else to me. I understood Asunta lied to Jericó when she told him I was her lover, and to me when she told me only one night was mine to win, my God, I understood, it hurt me, it stripped my life bare to understand it, to gain a position of freedom before Max without harming Max but irreparably harming the ancient fraternity of Josué and Jericó, Castor and Pollux.

Cain and Abel.

Did Asunta realize what she had unleashed? Perhaps her egotism became confused with her true satisfaction, the cliff’s edge of happiness to which she believed she had a right, even at the cost of a fratricidal war that in her eyes was, perhaps, barely a genteel war, one of those waged as if it were a game, with no real risk… And the abyss?

She didn’t realize. I felt a kind of compassion for Asunta Jordán and a destiny she valued, perhaps, only by comparison. It was in reality a destiny, I thought then, that was despicable, deceptively liberated, in fact alienated.

“Who was your friend Jericó with before all this?”

“Who was he with?”

“Women.”

“Whores. Only whores.”

“The imbecile fell in love with me.”

I didn’t believe it and didn’t interrupt her.

“He told me he was falling in love with a woman for the first time.”

“What did you say to him?”

“You already know. That I belonged to you, Josué.”

And immersed again in her papers, she added:

“You have nothing to worry about. We have him in a safe place.”

I DON’T KNOW if memory is a form of incarnation. In any case, it must be a stimulus for the spirit that by means of recollection manages to revive. Though perhaps memory consists only in holding on to an instant and immediately returning movement to the moment. Is memory barely a scar? Is it the past I myself don’t recognize? Though if I don’t know it, how can I remember it? Is memory a mere simulation of recalling what we have already forgotten or, what’s worse, have never lived?

I would have liked to give to memory the surname of imagination. Sanginés did not permit me to. In that slow trip from the Danubio on Calles de Uruguay to my cloistered garret on Calle de Praga, the lawyer said what he said because what occurred had occurred. The fraternity of Castor and Pollux had been transformed into the rivalry, the hatred of Cain and Abel. Passing memories, a different script, what was the difference, the profound difference, not the obvious, computable one?

I will try to reproduce, in my own words, from the scar of my memory, what Sanginés told me that afternoon when the rain made everything vanish like a sleeve of water on an immobile mirror.

I knew the history of Miguel Aparecido, which he himself recounted behind bars in San Juan de Aragón Prison along with terrible evocations of his grandmother, Antigua Concepción, that surfaced like an earthquake from the hidden grave where the not very venerable señora lay, creator of the Monroy fortune, despite her husband the general’s violent frivolity, for the sake of her pampered son Max Monroy, whom the deceased manipulated as she chose, to the extreme of marrying him at the age of forty to an adolescent in order to appropriate the girl’s lands, with no consideration at all of the feelings or desires of the innocent Sibila Sarmiento or of Max himself, unmarried until that moment through the power and grace of his mother’s implacable will: will and destiny associated like a single figure in the mind of Antigua Concepción. She operated with both when she bought real estate with the Monroy fortune and passed it on to her son. The condition was that, he, Max, would submit to his mother’s will in order to inherit. And if an intrusive, unpleasant, punishable, irritating, ungrateful necessity should filter down between them, the old matriarch in her Carmelite habit would bow before it with a gesture of repugnance, holding her nose, certain her son Max would thank her one day for the necessity in the name of his fortune.

The helpless Sibila Sarmiento locked away in an asylum, the son of Max and the madwoman abandoned to grow up fighting on the besieged, murderous streets of the capital: I travel with Sanginés through the city of the moon, if the moon had a city. Or better yet, if the moon were a city, it would not only be like this one. It would be this one. The dolorous city (malodorous city?) through which Antonio Sanginés’s Mercedes drives me: the trip of postponed recollection, the expedition of memory as an unrenounceable past.

The Mercedes is driven by a chauffeur. Sanginés raises the glass that separates us from the driver and continues: “A moment arrived when the powerful matriarch decided her son Max could walk alone without maternal props, with his own destiny, freed of the necessity she assumed without thinking about it twice, though the third time she said to herself:

“In exchange for necessity I’ll leave Max my desire and my destiny.”

Desire and destiny, murmured Antonio Sanginés.

Max Monroy.

“He is master,” Sanginés began his tale during our slow progress from the Historical Center to the Zona Rosa, “of a self-assurance that is in no way ostentatious. It is invisible. You saw him when he met with President Carrera in the Castle of Chapultepec. Where does it come from? He didn’t inherit it from his mother, who was like a cross between the devouring Aztec goddess Coatlicue and the national patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. He had to pass, however, through a period of becoming detached. Inheriting from his mother but distancing himself from her. Only the death of his mother Doña Conchita eventually allowed him to do that. Before then, like her, in order to prove himself to her-I tell you so you’ll know-he allowed corruption. He had to submit to political chiefs and bosses, just as his mother had. He didn’t kill them. He bought them. Energetically. Astutely. He knew they were for sale. He permitted them to steal but on the pretext that when they did-just listen to the national paradox-they were building, creating. He understood his mother’s lesson: They had to be transformed into revolutionaries without a revolution. What are they afraid of? The middle class won the revolution just as they had in France and the United States. There is no revolution without the middle class and Mexico was no exception. The revolution that excludes the middle class is not a proletarian revolution. It is a dictatorship ‘of the proletariat.’ In Mexico, the heroes died young. The survivors grew old and became rich. Max Monroy bought, suggested, insinuated, threatened, and also built and knew where to walk. He guessed the future faster than the rest and deceived the rest by making them believe the present was the future.”

How to know if Sanginés sighed when the rain turned into hail, striking the roof and windows of the car like the drum of God?

Political bosses. Governors. Entrepreneurs. How did Monroy win? By hating what they did but beating them at their own game. Before the boss of San Luis acted on his own, Max sent him an army general to take charge of the plaza “for your own security, Governor.” When the cacique of Tabasco was preparing to buy legal decisions in the capital to build the highway fifty-fifty, Max got ahead of him by acquiring the construction company that gave the costly gov only twenty-five percent. Etcetera. I’ll make it brief. In this way Max was transformed into an intermediary, a creator of coalitions (non sanctas, if you like) between the federal and local governments, keeping the lion’s share, not only financially but politically. Becoming indispensable to everyone.

In order not to become lost in Sanginés’s memory-filled account, was it the Academy de las Vizcaínas, a refuge for poor girls and rich widows, that obliged me to think of Esparza’s two wives, Doña Estrellita the saint and the dirty whore Sara P., both from real or apocryphal convents like this one, whose oculi and pinnacles became invisible in the rainy twilight? Did I want to think about this, about them, because I was afraid, for no obvious reason, of what Professor Sanginés’s words would reveal to me?

Didn’t I want to think about another extension of prison, about the asylum where Sibila Sarmiento, the mother of Miguel Aparecido, had been locked away?

Sanginés continued. Broker. Agent. Intermediary, and his mother’s heir. I imagined a young Max Monroy, hiding the public secret of his inherited fortune in order to act as an ambitious beginner: Wasn’t this what the fearsome Concepción wanted, to have her son earn his inheritance from the bottom, with effort, compromising himself, getting dirty if need be, just like everyone else?

“He invented companies out of nothing,” Sanginés continued. “For each one he received capital that he invested in other new companies. He shuffled the names of businesses. He justified himself by telling himself-telling me, Josué-the country of misery had to be left behind, Mexico’s closed shop had to be broken, markets created, price fixing broken, communiqués communicated, modernity brought to the country.”

Modernity opposed to the closed shop. Communicating. The wrinkled parchment of mountains and precipices, forests and deserts, valleys and volcanoes that with a blow of his fist Cortés the Conquistador described to Carlos the Emperor: A wrinkled parchment, that’s what Mexico is. How to smooth it out?

“He was animated, Josué, by the dream and desire to found a collective kingdom together with a private empire. Is it possible?”

The capricious hail returned, like a purely nominal reality, to the Salto del Agua Fountain beside the Chapel of the Inmaculada Concepción, and I imagined a country filled with thirst as a condition of purity. A parchment country.

“I don’t know, Maestro…”

He ignored me.

“A collective kingdom. A private empire. Ah! Impossible, my dear Josué, without the necessary final submission to political power. Except Max guessed what the change in Mexico would consist of: from a bourgeoisie dependent on the state to a state dependent on the bourgeoisie.”

“Without realizing,” I dared to interject, “that private empires are built on quicksand?”

I saw Sanginés smile. “You had to count on incalculable factors…”

“And fame? How did Monroy administer his fame?”

Now Sanginés burst into laughter. “A great reputation is worse than a bad one, which is better than no reputation at all. You must realize that Max Monroy opted for divine imitation. Like God, he is everywhere, and no one can see him.”

I caught the double meaning of the phrase. I abstained from commenting. I fought against the comfort of the Mercedes whose springs were putting me to sleep. I had said enough when I suggested Max didn’t know that the foundations of all power are pure illusion. The emperor has no clothes. We are the ones who dress him. And then, when we demand that he return them, the monarch becomes angry: The clothes belong to him.

“Max Monroy,” continued Sanginés, “realized something. His peers, adversaries, accomplices, subjects, did not read and were not thoroughly informed, they navigated by trusting in pure instinct. Max transformed Unamuno into a kind of personal Bible that gave him, like an aureole of the spirit, the tragic sense of life. From this repeated reading he drew certain conclusions that differentiate and guide him, Josué. The worst vices are purity and presumption. Sharing sorrows is no consolation. And the question is this: How can we master our passions without sacrificing them?”

Behind the blurred windows of the car, the equally blurred forbidden images returned of Max Monroy and Asunta Jordán joined in the darkness of sex, blacker than the darkness in the bedroom, and when I once again expelled this vision from my mind, Sanginés was commenting, as if he had read my indecent thoughts, that Max Monroy does not permit ambition and lust to impose on his reason.

“They can impose on his virtue. Not his reason.”

I remarked with audacity that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something else entirely, evoking the figures of Asunta Jordán and Lucha Zapata side by side.

“He doesn’t attempt to correct the errors of others,” Sanginés said with a smile, “and he rejects well-known pleasures. Do you know something? Monroy has never gone to Aspen, where our wealthy feel they’re from the first world because there’s snow and they go skiing. He has never gone to Las Vegas, where our politicians return to chance what they seize from necessity.”

“What makes him happy, then?” I said as if I didn’t know, and emboldened, for no reason other than the severity of the words, by the name of Arcos de Belén that redeemed me from the anonymity of the nearby Plaza of Capitán Rodríguez M. beside the Registry Office. This enigma shifted my thoughts languorously: Who was Captain Rodríguez M., who could he have been to deserve his own plaza?

I don’t believe Sanginés left his own question unanswered. He guessed it in my ignorance, and knowing it gave me a strange, quieter emotion. The lawyer went off on a tangent. He told me the penthouse occupied by Monroy in the Utopia building was the entrepreneur’s own utopia, as far as possible from what he called “the damn streets,” these same arteries along which Sanginés and I were now driving, the “damn” streets Monroy saw from above with those eyes of broken glass.

“ ‘I forget the names of the streets,’ is what Max Monroy says from his vantage point. And it’s true.”

Sanginés took my hand and immediately let it go.

“He’s beginning to be distracted. At times, I confess, he becomes incoherent…”

His words shocked me. “Why are you telling me this?”

“He says he no longer drinks because alcohol causes mental lapses and he doesn’t want to neglect his life and legacy. Things like that.”

“Asunta is his heir?” I asked, impertinent.

“He says old age is like a smuggler who puts ideas that aren’t yours into your head. He says his organs get ahead of his death.”

“Asunta is his heir?” I insisted.

I didn’t want to see Sanginés’s twisted smile.

“At times he’s delirious. He says he’s walking alone and naked and crazy through a large empty plaza. That’s when Asunta protects him from himself.”

“You haven’t answered-”

“I heard him say to Asunta, ‘Will you live without me?’ ”

“What did she say?” I asked avidly, as if, when Max died, Asunta would really be bequeathed to me.

“She says, ‘Yes, but I won’t be able to love again without you.’ ”

The car braked at a green light because the opposite light was also green and cars screeched to a halt, blowing impotent horns.

“The end of life is sudden and inexplicable,” Sanginés managed to say over the noise.

“Of power or of force?” I said in a voice so quiet he perhaps didn’t hear me, because he continued unperturbed.

“Believe me that one lives a final moment in which one’s life slips away in taking more and more pills, not for relief, not even to survive, Josué, but just to urinate. Like a-”

“An animal,” I interrupted brutally.

“The thing is… The thing…” murmured Sanginés as if he doubted what he would say next. “The thing is…”

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t want to look at me. I obstructed his gaze.

“Miguel Aparecido isn’t an animal. He isn’t a thing. He’s the son of Max Monroy. Why don’t you talk to me about that, Maestro? That abandonment, that irresponsibility, just tell me this: Doesn’t that abandonment condemn Max Monroy’s entire life, doesn’t it disqualify him as a man and as a father?”

The noise of maddened car horns, police whistles, furious voices did not mitigate my own inflamed voice, as if, in the name of my friend Miguel Aparecido, I had acquired a recriminatory tone stronger than all the city’s cacophony, the din that penetrated in dissipated form all the way to Miguel Aparecido’s cell, as if México D.F. would not grant peace even to prisoners-or the dead.

He decided to look at me. I wish I had avoided that. Because in Antonio Sanginés’s gaze, when he and I were enclosed in a car stopped at the intersection of Chapultepec and Bucareli, I saw my own postponed truth, my own destiny deflected and eventually recovered, the lost origin of a child who lived on Calle de Berlín in the care of a tyrannical governess…

Sanginés said calmly: “An entire life looking for one’s own place, one’s personal position. That’s what Max says. And he adds: I don’t want to give anything to anybody. Let them struggle. Let them stand on their own feet.”

“Who?”

“His sons,” said Sanginés with a certain repentant brutality.

“His son, Miguel Aparecido,” I corrected him spontaneously.

“The hope that the courage and will demonstrated by him are repeated in his sons. That’s what you mean.”

“His son,” I repeated. “That’s what I mean-”

“Otherwise, the silver platter is the same as the silver bridge your enemy runs away on,” he insisted.

“I’ve visited Miguel Aparecido. You know that, Maestro. You allowed me to enter the Aragón prison. I know Miguel’s story. I know his father treated him with contempt and cruelty. I know Miguel left prison prepared to kill Monroy. I know he returned to prison in order not to do it, to distance himself from the temptation of parricide… I understand him, Don Antonio, I understand Miguel, I swear I do.”

“Instead”-I don’t know if Sanginés smiled or if the play of lights turned on suddenly along the avenue feigned the smile-“let the boys stand on their own feet. Let them know difficulties. Let them achieve happiness and power on their own. But don’t let the destiny of Miguel Aparecido be repeated, the abandonment and crime determined by my powerful, invincible mother, Doña Concepción.

“Do not let it be repeated,” Sanginés said two or three times. “Let my sons be formed alone but not forsaken. Let them count on everything, house, servants, monthly allowances, but not with the deadly cushioning of a rich father, not with lassitude, abandon, frivolity, the unfortunate security of not having to do anything in order to have everything. Let them have something in order to have something. I’ll put them to the test. You send them the money each month, Licenciado. Let them lack for nothing. But not have too much of anything. I want their own life for my sons, without guilt or hatred…”

Clearly Sanginés, for the first time, confronted his emotion, abandoned the upright gravity of a discreet lawyer and prudent adviser, freed himself for a kind of catharsis that moved more quickly than the car when it left the traffic circle at Insurgentes to take Florencia to the Paseo de la Reforma.

I looked at him with amazement. He wanted to abandon discretion, gravity, not simply rein them in.

“He left them free, without the intolerable pressures and distorted affections of a mother,” Sanginés said in his new emotional tessitura.

“He left them? Who?” I tried unsuccessfully to clarify. “Them…? Who…?”

“He left them free so they could be themselves and not a projection of Max Monroy…”

“Free? Who, Maestro? Who is it you’re talking about?” I insisted, calmly.

“Let my sons not repeat my life…”

“My sons? Who, please? Who?”

“Let them create their life and not be content with inheriting it. Let them never believe there is nothing left to do…”

The Mercedes stopped in front of the apartment building on Calle de Praga. A feeling of malaise, of uneasiness, together with a humiliating sensation of having been used, impelled me out of the car.

“Goodbye, Maestro…”

Sanginés got out too. I took out the key and opened the door. Sanginés followed me, disturbed and nervous. I began to climb the stairs up to the top floor. Sanginés followed warily, impatiently, with something resembling pain. I didn’t recognize him. I imagined his actions were driven by a duty perhaps not his own. Actions driven by someone else. Such was the nervous preoccupation of his behavior.

The stairway was dark. On my floor the light was not turned on. Everything was shadows and reflections of shadows, as if total darkness did not exist and our eyes, don’t they eventually become accustomed to the blackness, in the end denying its dominion?

“He didn’t want to leave them adrift in crime, like Miguel Aparecido,” Sanginés said urgently.

I didn’t reply. I began to walk up. He came behind me, like an unexpected ghost in need of the attention I denied him, perhaps because I feared what he was telling me now and could reveal to me later. But there was no later, the lawyer wanted to talk now, he pursued me from step to step, he didn’t leave me alone, he wanted to snatch away my peace…

“They let Max Monroy into the asylum.”

“The asylum?” I managed to say without stopping, compelled to reach the sanctuary of my garret, astonished by the lack of logical continuity in a man who taught the theory of the state with the precision of a Kelsen.

“He maintained the asylum, he gave them money.”

“I understand.” In spite of everything, I wanted to be courteous.

“They let him in. They left him alone with the woman.”

“Who? With whom?”

“Sibila Sarmiento. Max Monroy.”

I was going to stop. The name halted my movements but hurried my thoughts. Sibila Sarmiento, Max Monroy’s young bride, locked away in the madhouse by the wickedness of Antigua Concepción.

“Miguel Aparecido’s mother…” I murmured.

Sanginés took my arm. I wanted to pull away. He didn’t let me.

“The mother of Jericó Monroy Sarmiento one year and of Josué Monroy Sarmiento the next.”

“HE’S IN A safe place.” The phrase repeated by Sanginés and Asunta regarding Jericó’s destiny tormented me now. It referred to my brother. It brought up huge questions associated with memories of our first meeting at the Jalisco School, El Presbiterio… Was that encounter prepared beforehand too, wasn’t it simple chance that brought my brother and me together? To what extent had Max Monroy’s desire directed our lives? Beyond the monthly allowances each of us received without ever finding out where they came from. Who argues with good luck? Beyond the coincidences we didn’t want to question because we took them as a natural part of friendship. Through my memory passed all the acts of a fraternity that, I knew now, were spontaneous in us but watched over and sponsored by third parties. And this was a violation of our freedom. We had been used by Max Monroy’s feelings of guilt.

“Believe me, Josué, Max felt responsible for the destiny of Miguel Aparecido, Miguel threatened him with death, Max knew the fault lay with Doña Concepción, he didn’t want to blame her, he wanted to make himself responsible, and the way to take on the obligation was to take charge of you and Jericó, making certain you wouldn’t lack necessities but that extravagance wouldn’t make you slack, this was his moral intuition: You should be free, make your own lives, not feel grateful to him…”

Sanginés said this to me in the stairwell.

“Did he intend to reveal the truth to us one day?” I became confused and was angry with Sanginés. “Or was he going to die without telling us anything?”

I regretted my words. When I said them I understood I had associated fraternally with Jericó, and I knew if Sanginés revealed Max’s secrets it was because Max had already exiled Jericó, as if he had tested us all our lives and only now Jericó’s gigantic, crucial mistake gave me primogeniture. Jericó-it was the sentence without reason or absolution-had been put in a safe place… What did it mean? My uneasiness, at that moment, was physical.

There was an anxious pulse similar to a heartbeat in Sanginés’s words. “Max allowed desire and luck to play freely in order to form destiny-”

“And necessity, Maestro? And damned necessity? Can there be desire or destiny without necessity?” I looked at him again without really making him out in the gloom, believing my words were now my only light.

“You didn’t lack for anything…”

“Don’t tell me that, please. I’m speaking of the necessity to know you are loved, needed, carnal, warm. Do you understand? Or don’t you understand anything anymore? God damn!”

“You didn’t lack for anything,” Sanginés insisted as if he would continue, to the last moment, fulfilling his administrative function, denying the emotions revealed by his avid, nervous, anxious figure, I don’t know, distant from what he was but also revealing what he was.

“And Jericó?” I stopped, photographed in front of myself like a being of lights and fugitive shadows.

“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés repeated.

The phrase did not calm the vivid but painful memory of my fraternity with Jericó, the intense moments we had together, reading and discussing, assuming philosophical positions at the request of Father Filopáter. Jericó as Saint Augustine, I as Nietzsche, both led by the priest to the intelligence of Spinoza, transforming the will of God into the necessity of man. Were we, in the end, loyal to necessity in the name of will? Was this what my brother and I desired as a goal when we loved each other fraternally? Did our great rapport consist of this, associating necessity with will?

One scene after another passed through my mind. The two of us united at school. The two of us convinced not having a family was better than having a family like the Esparzas. We had signed a pact of comradeship. We felt the warm teenage satisfaction of discovering in friendship the best part of solitude. Together we made a plan for life that would bring us together forever.

“Maybe there will be, you know, separations, travel, broads. The important thing is to sign right now an alliance for the rest of our lives. Don’t say no…”

For the rest of our lives. I remember those afternoons in the café after school and the other side of the coin gleams opaquely. An alliance for the rest of our lives, a plan for life to keep us together forever. But on that occasion, hadn’t he proposed obligations all imposed by him? Do this, don’t do the other, turn down frivolous social invitations. And you’ll also despise “the herd of oxen.” But let’s also make a “selective, rigorous” plan for reading, for intellectual self-improvement.

That’s how it was, and now I’m grateful for the discipline he and I imposed on ourselves and deplore the docility with which I followed him in other matters. Though I congratulate myself because, when we lived out our destinies, he and I respected our secrets, as if part of the complicity of friendship included discretion about one’s private life. He didn’t find out about Lucha Zapata and Miguel Aparecido, or I knew nothing about Jericó’s life during his-how many were they?-years somewhere else. Europe, North America, the Border? Today I couldn’t say. Today I’ll never know if Jericó told me the truth. Today I know nothing about Jericó’s identity except the blinding truth of my fraternal relationship with him. I couldn’t blame him for anything. I had hidden as much about myself as he did. The terrible thing was to think that, “put in a safe place,” Jericó would never be able to tell me what he didn’t know about himself, what, perhaps, he would dare tell me if he knew, as I did, that we were brothers.

Understanding this filled me with rancor but also with sorrow. Once, when he had returned to Mexico, I wondered if we could take up again the intimacy, the shared respiration joining us when we were young. Was all we had lived merely an unrepeatable prologue? I insisted on thinking our friendship was the only shelter for our future.

It was hard and painful for me to think our entire life had resolved into terms of betrayal.

And too, as if to soften the pain, the moments returned of a strange attraction that did not lead to the encounter of bodies because a tacit, equally strange prohibition stopped us at the brink of desire in the shower at school, in the whore’s bed, in our cohabitation in the garret on Praga…

Had friendship stopped at the border of a physical relationship subject to all the accidents of passion, jealousy, misunderstanding, and attribution of unproven intentions that torment yet attract lovers? In mysterious ways, the desire felt under the shower or in the brothel was subject to this mysterious prohibition, as strong as the desire itself. A desire that, seen from a distance, is the first passion, the passion for cohabitation and contiguity, while the incestuous desire is confused with these virtues and therefore prohibited with a strength that can deny fraternity itself…

What could we do then, he and I, except feel like forbidden gods? We had the permanent possibility of violating the commandment regarding a prohibition only the gods can transgress against without sin. Who prevented us? How easy it would be for me today, after everything that has happened, to imagine it was the “call of the blood” holding us back. The feeling in the deepest part of ourselves that we were brothers without ever knowing it… Or perhaps he and I had no reason to turn to incest, since incest between siblings is a rebellion against the parents (says Sigmund from the couch) and we did not have father or mother.

The truth, I tell myself now, is that time and circumstances moved us away from all temptation: When Jericó returned from his absence (Europe? the United States? the Border?), facts themselves gradually divided us, doubts began to appear, perhaps Jericó’s Naples wasn’t Naples, Italy, but Naples, Florida, and his Paris was in Texas… Elective affinities emerged first with cordiality, then with growing antagonism in our workplaces, in my slow apprenticeship in the Utopia tower while he ascended rapidly in the Palace of La Topía. I was an open book. Jericó was a message in code. Perhaps this was what I wanted. Wasn’t my life a secret to everyone except me, and if it no longer was it’s because now I’m telling and writing it. Perhaps Jericó, like me, is the author of a secret book like mine, the book I knew nothing about as he knew nothing of mine. The sum of secrets, however, did not abolish the remainder of evidence. Jericó had wielded a real influence on presidential power. He had felt authorized to go beyond the power granted him to the power he wanted to grant himself. He made a mistake. He thought he would deceive power but power deceived him. And when he found out about it, my poor friend, cornered by the reality his illusions disdained, the only recourse he found to save his personality was to fall in love with Asunta… He wanted to defeat me in the final territory of triumph, which is love. And even there, Asunta handed me the victory. She defeated Jericó by telling him she was my lover.

Why did she lie? What caused her to give the coup de grâce to the large animal, the living, palpitating thing beyond all logic, the carnal and cruel, aflame and affectionate thing that is friendship between two men? Two men who are brothers though they don’t know it and move into fierce enmity perversely incited by Asunta Jordán: For the first time, my brother Jericó desired a woman and that woman, in order to humiliate and paralyze Jericó, declared she was my lover, awarding me a sexual laurel I did not deserve. Asunta presented to her Jehovah, Max Monroy, Abel-Josué’s harvest and Cain-Jericó’s, and since the terrestrial God preferred mine to his, Jericó the fratricide was prepared to kill me. I believe now the failure of his political insurrection, the way in which he deceived himself about the desire and the number of his followers, was identical to his blindness: Jericó could not distinguish between the reality of reality and the fiction of reality. Now I understand, finally, that this, the fiction, was imposed on reality because it came closest to my brother’s fratricidal desire: His war perhaps was not against the world but against me. A latent war that had gone on forever, put off perhaps because Jericó’s personality was stronger than mine, his triumphs more apparent, his capacity for intrigue greater, his alliance with the secret more covert: personality, success, imagination, mystery.

These were my brother’s weapons, except he couldn’t use them against me because… Why? Now as I enter San Juan de Aragón Prison thanks, once more, to the good offices of Licenciado Antonio Sanginés, now as I pass the cells from which they look at me like caged animals: the Cuban mulatto Siboney Peralta, the thieves Gomas and Brillantinas, the Mariachi, and Sara P., all of them behind bars, I look down, toward the swimming pool of imprisoned children, deficient Merlín with the shaved head, and Albertina who was a boy who was a girl, and the eloquent Ceferino guilty of being abandoned, and Chuchita looking at her tears in the mirror, and the girl Isaura dreaming about a volcano, and Félix the very sad happy boy, and right there Jericó and Josué passed like phantoms, and now I ask myself why, if we were so fraternal, so protected after all, so far from the ruined destinies of these children of Aragón, why weren’t we Félix and Ceferino and Merlín, abandoned children, helpless like our brother Miguel Aparecido? In this strange prison counterpoint, the figure of Asunta Jordán abruptly appears in my head like a sudden revelation. Asunta, Asunta, she prevented the repetition of the biblical verdict and at the same time guaranteed it. Jericó, once Castor, did not kill me, his brother Pollux, because this time Cain did not kill Abel, I found out now, just today, thanks to her, thanks to the woman, thanks to Asunta Jordán who deflected the destiny of the deadly, ancient story: Jericó did not destroy Josué, Cain did not kill Abel thanks to the woman, the seer, the priestess, the enchantress emerged from a desert on the border between life and death, rescued from mediocre obscurity by a man who recognized in her, by simply taking her by the waist during a provincial dance, an earthly strength, the power that he, subject to the voracious whims of his mother, did not have: Would she, the woman desired, admired, feared, censured by me, be the author of my salvation? She condemned my enemy brother. She, on the pretext of saving him from Carrera’s revenge, took him to the mansion of Utopia and exhibited him there to me, degraded him in my presence, in my presence put him naked on all fours and took away from him the fratricidal destiny of killing me on the pretext of jealousy…

Pre-text. Ah, then what will be the text?

IF I SEND you someone, Miguel Aparecido, tell, talk, don’t leave him unfed. Remember.

He was the same. But different. The blue-black eyes flecked with yellow. A violent gaze tempered by melancholy. A sadness that rejected compassion. Very heavy eyebrows. A dark scowl and eyes flashing light. A virile face, square-jawed, carefully shaved. Light olive skin. An inquisitive nose, straight and thin. Graying hair, combed forward, curly in the back.

He was the same. But he was my brother.

Did he know? For how long? Did he not know? Why?

He shook hands in the Roman style, clasping my forearm and showing me once again a naked power that ran from his hand to his shoulder.

“Twenty years.”

“Why?”

“Ask him.”

How could I demand a reply to something that went beyond us and defined us? Children of the same father and mother. I saw Miguel Aparecido’s face, immobile and defiant. I was troubled by the image of our father Max Monroy and his abominable droit de seigneur in the asylum. I imagined him at night, or by day, what difference did it make, going to the asylum to visit our mother Sibila Sarmiento. She was locked away. I don’t know if she looked forward to Monroy’s arrival as a possible salvation or as a confirmation of her sentence. Perhaps she knew only that this man, father of her three children, desired her with fury, stripped her without asking permission, gave in to the passion she inspired in him and that both of them, Max and Sibila, shared, she because even though in the fleeting moments of Max’s visits, she felt loved and needed, free to see herself naked with pleasure, overcome by the passion of the man who tore at her hair and kissed her mouth and excited her nipples and caressed her pubis, clitoris, and buttocks with an irresistible force that freed her from this prison to which her own lover had condemned her, because Sibila Sarmiento was pleasure when captive and danger when free. And Max Monroy loving Sibila physically, freely, and not by order of his tyrannical mother, had no other way to take his revenge-with no filial unease-on damned Concepción.

Miguel Aparecido’s tiger-eyes told me he understood. He asked me to accept that Sibila our mother won the love of Max our father. This was enough compensation for her imprisonment in the hospital. She could receive Max’s love and be satisfied, almost grateful because she had the love of the world without its pitfalls. Eventually, receiving Max and making love to him was the same as being free without the dangers of life, the city, the world, which surrounded her like a gigantic threat dissipated only by the man’s visits and then by successive months of waiting: the birth of a son, and much later another, and soon after that a third, and all at the same time.

Miguel Aparecido. Jericó. Josué.

The Immaculate Conception descended on Sibila Sarmiento’s womb intermittently, unpredictably. For her-I imagine now-the instant was eternal, everything happened at the same time, there was no real time between the visits of the man who deflowered her at the age of twelve and the man who impregnated her after that, then again, and then a third time: I believe for her everything happened at the same moment, the act of love was always the same, the pregnancy a single one, the child the only one, not Miguel, not Jericó, not Josué, a single child being born forever, prepared to leave the enclosure, the prison, the asylum, the womb, in the name of Sibila Sarmiento. Born in a cell, and therefore worthy of freedom. Born in misery and therefore destined for good fortune. Engendered in impotence and therefore heirs to power.

My brother Miguel gave me his arm in the Roman fashion and did not have to say anything. The fraternal pact was sealed. Pain was another name for memory. We looked at each other with depth in our eyes. What we had to say about the past had been said. It was time for us to speak about the future. The syntony, in this regard, was total.

There were a few minutes of silence.

We looked in each other’s eyes.

Discord did not take long to break out.

He said he felt content that Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney Peralta, and the whole damn troop who accompanied Sara P. and the Mariachi Maximiliano Batalla in their catastrophic attempt at rebellion were back in prison.

I told him I had seen them in passing, behind bars, as I came to see him now.

“Well, take a good look at them, my brother, because you won’t be seeing them again.”

He looked at me in a way that meant I couldn’t avoid the cold at my back. At that moment I knew the gang of Sara P. and the Mariachi wouldn’t leave jail except feetfirst.

“And Jericó?” I dared to say, abruptly.

“They were his people,” replied Miguel Aparecido. “He got them out of prison from the office of the presidency. He organized them. They were his people.”

He looked at me with those blue-black eyes I’ve mentioned, and the yellow flecks acquired their own life of never-satisfied intelligence.

“He didn’t calculate. He didn’t realize. He had a half-baked idea that if a vanguard acts, the masses will follow. He was wrong. He believed that by penetrating as he did the offices of power, he himself could rise to power. Very smart, sure… It’s your ass, Barrabás!”

I said it was an old sickness to believe power is contagious… He didn’t realize that power doesn’t commit hara-kiri. Power protects itself.

“Understand what the public meeting of President Carrera and the magnate Monroy in Chapultepec meant,” Sanginés had said to me. “Neither went to see the other for pleasure. They’re rivals. But each understands that the other has his own dynamite factory, and dynamite factories have to be placed at a distance so they don’t blow one another up. Each part-Carrera, Monroy, power, business-has a kind of veto over the other. They join together when they feel threatened by a third exogenous force, a stranger to the inbreeding of power. Power originates in power, not outside it, just as a cell forms inside another. This is what Jericó didn’t understand. He believed he could head a popular force that would carry him to the top. He didn’t understand that the movement of the people, when it occurs, is necessary, not artificial, not a product of a messianic desire.”

“Revolutions also create elites,” I noted.

“Or elites head them.”

“Though they also erupt from the people.”

“Yes,” Sanginés acknowledged. “The ruling classes have to be renewed in order not to be annihilated. They can do it peacefully, as has occurred in Mexico. They can do it violently, as has also occurred in Mexico. The revolutionary knows when he can and when he cannot. His political talent consists in that: when to and when not to.”

“If all of you knew that, I mean, Carrera as well as Monroy, why didn’t you let Jericó fade away all by himself with no followers except this gang of hoodlums imprisoned here? Why?”

Sanginés replied with the wisest of his smiles, the one I remembered from his classes at the law school, far from the awful grimace that deformed his spirit when he followed me in the darkness up the staircase on Praga. The smile I admired.

“I have confidence in both houses, the house of political power and that of entrepreneurial power,” he continued.

He closed his eyes blissfully. I already knew that.

“And do you know why they trust me?”

I didn’t want to answer with some offensive joke.

“No.”

“Because they know I possess all the information and don’t trouble anyone with what I know.”

“And what’s that?” I wasn’t pretending innocence: I was innocent.

He said in Mexico, in each Latin American country, rebellions are being forged day and night, in the hope of marking an until here and a from now on as, let’s say, Bolívar or Castro did. He said he wouldn’t go into the reasons why it was difficult for revolutions “like the ones in the old days” to occur again. Present-day power is more sophisticated, better informed, societies have higher expectations, the left is familiar with electoral routes, but the right will have to have its innate voraciousness limited from time to time by a little fear.

“It seemed to me, Josué, that Jericó’s little adventure, so secondary, so minimal, so directed toward failure, ultimately so lacking in danger, offered me the opportunity to alert power without undue cost and give the right a shock. And in passing, to deflate the grotesque vision the extremely ambitious Jericó had acquired of himself.”

Sanginés’s smile was very offensive.

“He read Malaparte and Lenin. He felt like a little local Mussolini. Poor kid!”

“But in reality there was no danger,” I insisted, moved, in spite of myself, by a feeling for Jericó that went beyond fraternity and simply called itself friendship.

Sanginés knew how to disguise his smiles. “Exactly. Because there wasn’t, we could pretend there was.”

“I don’t understand, damn it.”

Sanginés didn’t celebrate his small logical triumph. “The greatest threats are fought in secret. The lesser ones should be denounced as a warning to the greater ones that we know what they want and control what they do. And to let the public know they are, at the same time, both threatened and safe.”

I looked at Sanginés with unaccustomed fury.

“He’s my brother, Maestro, he’s worthy of a little respect-some compassion-a-”

Sanginés continued as if he had heard nothing.

“Carrera and Monroy may be rivals, but they won’t be each other’s victims. Stopping Jericó is effective proof of this. At the moment of danger, the two powers unite.”

“He’s my brother,” I insisted.

And he was Monroy’s son.

Sanginés looked at me with burning coldness.

“He was Cain.”

Was Cain our brother? I wanted to ask Miguel Aparecido in the cell in Aragón and didn’t dare. There was a prohibition in his blue-black gaze. If Jericó was Cain, he and I were not Abel.

“Was he Cain?” I insisted to Sanginés.

“He was your brother,” the lawyer Sanginés agreed with salutary cruelty, telling me there was no better example than this to teach a probative lesson regarding the futility of rebellion and the cowardice of a response without balls. The winners were the Statesman and the Entrepreneur, like that, capitalized.

Cain and Abel.

I read this with vast, indescribable clarity in the gaze of my brother Miguel. We were not Abel. We hadn’t saved ourselves skillfully from either the curse or the good fortune. We had assumed, without fully realizing it, the responsibility of caring for our brother. Wasn’t Jericó our brother?

“He was Cain,” said Miguel Aparecido.

I didn’t have to ask for explanations. I remembered the curse Jericó had hurled at me from Asunta’s bed, with a murderous look and a disdain revealed by the mask of hatred. Jericó naked on all fours, a captured animal, threatening me-I’m going to kill you, fucking cocksucker-slavering, frustrated. The concentrated hatred of my brother Cain. And my painful doubt: Had the hatred he showed me the last time always been inside Jericó? Did he “patronize” me when we were young, look down on me, despise my independence and my supposed sexual triumph with Asunta?

Was this the end of the story? No. I didn’t know what had happened to Jericó. The question ate through my entire body like a restless acid concentrating in my heart only to flee my soul and remind me, my soul, that it was captive in a body.

I knew Miguel Aparecido’s response before he gave it. It seemed to be the answer agreed on by all of them, by Sanginés, by Asunta, by Miguel.

“Where is Jericó? What has happened to Jericó?”

“He’s been put in a safe place,” Miguel Aparecido replied.

In spite of this definitive statement, I knew the story would never end.

I wanted to assuage my own fears by saying: Just like Sara and the Mariachi and Gomas and Siboney? Put in a safe place? All of them imprisoned? All of them at peace?

Then Miguel Aparecido looked at me with a strange mixture of contempt and compassion.

IN SPITE OF this categorical statement, I knew the story never ended.

“The worst one of all is walking around free,” said Miguel Aparecido, and I didn’t want to put a name to anyone I knew, because my spirit could not tolerate more guilt, more shame, more capitulation.

“Who?” I said in haste. “Everything’s in-”

He cut me off with a forgotten name: Jenaro Ruvalcaba.

With an effort the scoundrel I met once during my first visits to the San Juan de Aragón Prison returned to my memory. Licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba was a criminal lawyer of scant renown. He received me courteously in his cell. He was agile and blond, about forty years old. He told me the prison population consisted of complaining, stupid people who didn’t know what to do with freedom.

“And how do you manage?”

“I accept what prison gives me.” He shrugged and proceeded to a reasonable analysis of how to behave in prison: Don’t accept visitors who came out of obligation, doubt the fidelity of the conjugal visit…

“Both will betray you,” he shouted suddenly.

“Who?”

“Your wife and her lover.” He stood and put his hands to his head. “Traitors!”

He closed his eyes, pulled at his ears, and attacked me with his fists before the guard hit him with his club on the back of the neck and Ruvalcaba fell, weeping, on the cot.

“He’s free?” I said to Miguel without hiding my terror, for this attorney was a proven menace.

“He’ll never be free,” remarked Miguel Aparecido. “He’s the prisoner of himself.”

Then he told me the following story.

Ruvalcaba did not lack talent. He was shaped by misfortune. A criminal gang kidnapped his father, his mother. They killed his father. They let her go, so she would suffer. The mother was a brave woman, and instead of sitting down to cry, she decided to educate her son Jenaro and give him a career as a criminal attorney so he would defend society against criminals like those who killed his father. Jenaro studied law and became a penologist. Except as he was preparing to defend the law he wanted to be a martyr to the law. He felt equal admiration and revulsion for both his father and those who killed him.

“The old prick, how could he let himself be kidnapped and murdered by that gang…? Fuck me…

“My father was a brave man who let himself be killed so my mother could go free… Fuck me…”

And so between admiration and contempt the divided, schizoid character of Jenaro Ruvalcaba was formed, at once defender and violater of the law: a poisoned fruit constantly fragmenting into inimical pieces.

Miguel said to make a long story short, a division was created in Ruvalcaba’s mind between the forbidden and the permitted, which eventually resolved into a situation worthy of farce. Ruvalcaba sublimated his psychological schism by molesting women. His vice consisted in boarding public transport-the Metro, buses, collective taxis-and harassing women. Don’t ask me why he found in this activity the reconcilation of his contrary tendencies. The fact is his maniacal pleasure was to take the Metro or the bus and first look at women with an intensity that was troubling because more than anything else, it was intrusive. He leaned against the female passengers. He recriminated them if they gave him dirty looks. He put his hands on their hips. He pawed their buttocks. He went straight to the nipple with his fingers. At times it was furtive, at times aggressive. If they reproached him or complained about him, Ruvalcaba would say: “She’s an old flirt. She led me on. I’m a criminal lawyer. I know about these things. Old women in heat! Frustrated old women! Let’s see if anybody will do them a favor!”

Ruvalcaba derived supplementary delight when the women began to defend themselves. Some stuck him with pins, others with hairpins. A few had rings with a cutting edge. All of this excited Ruvalcaba: He saw it as a counterpart to his own actions, a recognition of his own audacity, an involuntary conspiracy between victim and aggressor. The women liked to have their buttocks touched, their pubis rubbed, their breasts caressed. They were his accomplices. His accomplices, he would repeat, excited, my accomplices.

“That was the reason,” Miguel continued, “for his astonishment at the inauguration of what was called ‘pink transport’ only for women. The sign ‘Ladies Only’ excited him in the extreme. Ruvalcaba disguised himself as a woman in order to ride on the Metro with impunity, causing a phenomenal disturbance when, made up and in a blond wig, he put his hand on a fat passenger and a commotion began that led to a free-for-all, a brawl that ended at the Metro stop and the collective turning over of Jenaro Ruvalcaba to the police.”

As the scoundrel was an attorney, he convinced the judge that his disguise had as its object to make certain the law was fully complied with and that women, if threatened, were capable of defending themselves. The judge, because of machista prejudice, pardoned Ruvalcaba, but, feeling like a magistrate in a Cantinflas movie as guided by a play of Lope’s, he ordered him exiled to the western part of the country, where the indiscreet and duplicitous Ruvalcaba lost no time in establishing an association with the owner of an avocado plantation, a front for a drug trafficking operation presided over by Don Avocado himself, who was delighted to count on a shyster as skilled in deceptions as Lic. Jenaro.

From the plantation in Michoacán, Ruvalcaba performed great services for Don Avocado by supervising drug shipments, money laundering, loans, investments in transport, and the constant reconstruction of the plantation so it would continue to be viewed as an emporium of avocado trees and not a rat’s market. Ruvalcaba took care of everything for Don Avocado: buying protection, relationships with Gringo buyers, the loading and unloading of high-speed launches, the acquisition of magnum revolvers and AR-15 assault rifles. He learned to kill. He shot numerous rivals of the drug dealer and developed a special liking for cutting off their heads after killing them.

He did everything until Don Avocado told him things were turning ugly since in this business there were plenty of snitches and especially assholes who wanted to rise at the expense of the powerful man in charge, you know, get out of my way and let me in…

“The upshot, my dear Jenarito, is that they have more on us than an old whore’s fart, and if we want to continue in this business our only choice is to change our face, I mean, put a knife to our puss, I mean, the plastic surgeon is waiting for us.”

“You change your face, Don Avocado, you’re uglier than a fasting motherfucker, and don’t mess with my movie-star profile. What would my dear mama say, God rest her soul?”

With these words Jenaro Ruvalcaba fled Michoacán and came back to Mexico City, where his deferred vice-putting his hand on women in Metro cars and buses-flourished in the most dangerous routine of collecting fares from and pinching women in collective taxis, counting at times on the complicity of the driver, at times running the risk that the driver would put him off because of his riders’ protests, searching for farcical ways out disguised as a woman or a boy sailor from whose short pants charms peeked out that were hardly a child’s.

Until the vengeance of Don Avocado extended from Michoacán to D.F. and, denounced as a murderer, a trafficker, and worst of all, a transvestite and pedophile, Jenaro Ruvalcaba ended up in the Aragón prison.

“Where I met him,” I said with troubled innocence.

“And which he left thanks to the imprudence of our… Jericó,” Miguel Aparecido said with a certain uneasiness, for he had not resigned himself to sharing fraternity with either Jericó or me. It was as if his singularity as the son of Max Monroy had been in some way violated by the truth, and although he had esteemed me earlier, he was not inclined to extend his affection to a man who like Jericó did not need (it was the tombstone Miguel Aparecido erected for him) to be a glutton of his own ego.

“You and I, on the other hand”-he embraced me-“we’ll eat from the same plate.”

And he pulled away from me.

“Take care, brother. Take care. Not everybody’s in a safe place.”

HOW LONG SINCE I had eaten at the home of Don Antonio Sanginés?

Now as I return to the mansion in Coyoacán, I’m doing so, of course, at my teacher’s invitation and with the clear awareness that this time my brother Jericó would not be there and had not been invited. I didn’t have the courage to ask about him. I knew the answer formulated ahead of time and transformed into a slogan:

“In a safe place…”

The ambiguity of the expression troubled me. It meant precaution and care: a verbal “alert” that referred to being secure or watched over. The disturbing thing about the words was their not saying clearly if someone “put in a safe place” was secure, yes, taken care of, that too, locked in, perhaps, cared for, perhaps, by whom? to what end? With an involuntary shudder I imagined my old friend, recent enemy, and everlasting brother Jericó Monroy Sarmiento handed over to the perfect custody of death, the security of the sepulchre, the precaution of eternity.

If this was what brought me back to Sanginés’s colonial house filled with books, ornaments, and antique furniture, he did not seem ready to fall into the repetition-exceedingly banal-of “in a safe place.” Soon the reason for his companionship appeared, and when I arrived, Sanginés led me to the breakfast area decorated in Pueblan tiles and came right to the point, saying, “The dream has ended.”

The question surrounding my life authorized him to go on. The seventy years of moderate dictatorship in Mexico, beginning in 1930, had assured economic and social growth without democracy, but with security. Sanginés welcomed democracy. He lamented the lack of security because it identified democracy with crime…

He looked at me with a strange dreaminess that spoke clearly of Sanginés’s decades of service as a professor of law, court adviser to presidents of the republic, member of the boards of directors of Monroy’s private enterprises. An entire career based on judicious opinion and opportune warning, on objective counsel and advice, with no interest other than the reconciliation of public and private concerns on behalf of the nation.

He didn’t need to say it. I knew it. His eyes communicated it to me. But the sour expression on his face not only gave the lie to all I’ve just said: It misdirected, disputed, and desired it in spite of regrets. In spite of what could be viewed as accommodation, opportunism, flattery, the counselor’s vices stopped at the shore of the courtier to take on, in short, the adviser’s virtues of objective intelligence and reason indispensable to the good governance of the individual and the state, business and society. There was nothing to apologize for. If I didn’t know the rules of the game, it was time I learned them. If I didn’t want to learn them, I’d be left out in the cold, adrift. I thought of Sanginés imploring, uncharacteristically pleading for comprehension of Monroy in the stairwell on Praga. This supper at his house, I understood immediately, erased that scene on the stairs. As if it hadn’t occurred.

I understood all this because Sanginés communicated it to me indirectly, by means of expressions, qualities, and solicitations that undoubtedly summarized the long journey we had taken together, converging at a point in his long life and my short one.

I grew up, he said, in a society in which society was protected by official corruption. Today, he continued categorically but with a trace of both criticism and resignation, society is protected by criminals. The history of Mexico is a long process of leaving behind anarchy and dictatorship and reaching a democratic authoritarianism… He asked me, after a pause, to forgive the apparent contradiction: not so great if we appreciated the freedom of artists and writers to savagely criticize its revolutionary governments. Diego Rivera, right in the National Palace, describes a history presided over by political hierarchs and corrupt, lying clerics. Orozco uses the walls of the Supreme Court to paint a justice that laughs at the law from the gaudily painted mouth of a whore. Azuela, in the middle of the revolutionary struggle, writes a novel about the revolution as a stone rolling down an abyss, bare of ideology or purpose. Guzmán tells of a revolution in power interested only in power, not in revolution: They all order one another murdered in order to continue in the presidency, the great cow that gives milk, dulce de leche, cheese, a variety of butters, and security without democracy: a comforting lowing.

“Today, Josué, the great drama of Mexico is that crime has replaced the state. Today the state dismantled by democracy cedes its power to crime supported by democracy.”

Perhaps I knew this, to a point. I had never admitted it with Sanginés’s painful clarity.

“Just yesterday,” Sanginés continued, “a highway in the state of Guerrero was blocked by uniformed criminals. Were they fake police? Or simply real police dedicated to crime? What happened on that highway happens everywhere. The drivers of the blocked buses and cars were brutally interrogated and pistol-whipped. The travelers were obliged to get out. Their cellphones were thrown onto a garbage pile. Among the travelers were individuals working for the criminals. Confusion reigned. It turns out some police believed in good faith they were intercepting narcotics and counterfeit money. They were soon disabused of that idea by their superiors and urged to join the criminal gang or be stripped and stranded there as imbeciles and assholes.

“Inexperienced police. Corrupt police. To whom do you turn?”

The prisons are full. There’s no more room, he said, for the criminals.

“You saw San Juan de Aragón Prison. An agreement was reached there between jailhouse sadism and the minimal order guaranteed by Miguel Aparecido. That isn’t the rule, Josué. The prisons in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru can’t hold more criminals. They’re released right away so new malefactors can come in. It’s a never-ending story. Recidivist offenders. Detentions without a trial. Defense made impossible. Badly paid attorneys incapable of defending the innocent. Judges paralyzed by fear. Improvised judges. Courts incapable of functioning. False testimonies. No consistency. No consistency…” the lawyer lamented and almost exclaimed: “How long do you think Latin American democracy will last under these circumstances? How long will it take for the dictatorships to return, applauded by the people?”

I didn’t recall hearing a sigh from Sanginés. Now I saw an air of fatality more than resignation in his sour expression.

“Pages and more pages.” He made a large gesture, graceful at the end, with his hand. “We are drowning in paper-”

“And in blood.” I dared to intervene for the first time.

“Papers soaked in blood,” Sanginés intoned, almost like a priest singing the requiem aeternam.

“And do you prefer the law to be defiled by government and not crime?”

“I would like a little more pity,” the licenciado said as if he hadn’t heard me.

“For whom?” I prompted.

“For the poor and the ambitious who have lost their way and their faith in others. Especially for them.”

I thought of Filopáter and his own forsaken priesthood. At that moment, the group of three little boys laughed behind the door of the tiled kitchen and Sanginés put on an astonished face. The children ran to him, climbed on his lap, his shoulders, mussed his hair, and they all laughed.

I realized, thanks to my prolonged absence, that these three children were still between four and seven years old. Just like the last time. Just like every time.

Sanginés caught the surprise in my gaze.

He laughed.

“Look, Josué: Every couple of years I renew my offspring. Three children I manage to rescue from the Aragón prison. You saw the subterranean pool where these poor kids play and sometimes are thrown into the water and sometimes swim and save themselves and sometimes drown, reducing the prison population…”

He saw the horror in my eyes. His begged me to understand the pity that allowed him, every two or three years, to save two or three children from the horror.

“And then?” I asked.

“Another destiny,” he said summarily.

“And Jericó’s destiny?” I dared to say angrily.

“In a safe place.”

He took my hand. “I’ve never married. I appreciate your discretion. Have a good trip…”

“What?” I was surprised. “To where?”

“Aren’t you going to Acapulco?” Sanginés feigned a not very credible surprise.

I DREAMED. AND in dreams, as everyone knows, figures enter and leave with no explicable order, voices are superimposed, and the words of one follow on the tail of another before beginning again, in a different tone, in another voice, other voices…

The space I inhabit (or that I only think or dream) is as transparent as water, as solid as a diamond. It is a frozen space, in every sense of the word: You have to move your arms vigorously to advance, you have to let yourself be carried by the current, to get anywhere you have to touch bottom knowing it doesn’t exist… The near and the far succeed each other like a single reality and I don’t know to whom to attribute the voices I haven’t quite defined because they join in and vanish in the blink of an eye.

The voices speak in the peremptory tones of a lawyer or judge but dissipate with the advance of the whitish figure with the large, bald head sunk into his shoulders, similar to a self-portrait of Max Beckmann in which the light of the face barely reflects the external shadow that illuminates it: bald, with heavy eyelids and an inexplicable smile, Beckmann wants to reflect in his face the constant theme of his work: cruelty, the trenches and corpses of war, the erratic sadism of men against men. What does Max Monroy reflect?

At this moment in my dream, the self-portrait of Max Beckmann assumes the form of Max Monroy, fleeting, gray, slave to uncertain displacements, seized by a physical pain that has set him between movement and repose, possessed of a dignity in brutal contrast to the parrot chatter of the other fleeting figures in the dream, were they Asunta Jordán, Miguel Aparecido, Antigua Concepción affirming, interrogating me, discordant, accusatory, vulgar voices, so different from the quasi-ecclesiastical dignity of the gray figure of Max Monroy? asking me questions, blaming this man who had been revealed as my father, accusing him as if to tell me not to believe in him, not to approach him, no matter how the present dignity of the man and my oneiric proximity to his figure appeared to be the scenario of the encounter we both, father and son, required, interrupted by the voices.

Do you believe Max Monroy is a generous individual? Do you believe he visits his wife Sibila Sarmiento out of pure charity? Or because the measure of his sadism fills to overflowing when he fucks a prisoner, a woman with no will who is also the mother of his three sons? What do you think? Do you think that out of pure beneficence Max kept his other two sons, Jericó and you, at a distance, supposedly so you’d grow on your own, with only the help that was absolutely necessary, free of the burden of being the sons of Max Monroy, rich kids with a Jaguar and a plane, broads and travel, contempt and bribes, you and he making yourselves with your own efforts, your own talents? Do you believe that? No way! He did it because he’s a miserable man, like an entomologist who puts his spiders down in the courtyard to run around just to see what they can think of to survive, to see if they save themselves by scurrying along the walls, to see if a shoe doesn’t squash them, to see, to see… He plays, Max plays with destinies. And do you know why? I’ll tell you: Because that’s how he takes his revenge on his dear old mother Antigua Concha, takes his revenge for how the old bitch manipulated him, imposed her will on him, handled him like a puppet at a fair, one of those from the old days with pink stockings and a bullfighter’s costume that are still seen at village fiestas. I try to view Max Monroy’s life like a long, very long revenge against his mother, the revenge he couldn’t take while Doña Concepción was alive and filled the world with an imperious will, tall and strong and unpredictable like a gigantic wave made of skirts and scapularies and broken nails and the sandals of a feverish nun, Antigua Concepción: Who can endure being conceived not once and for all but all the time, conception after conception, born morning noon and night, the imposed obligation not only to love or even venerate his sainted mother but to obey her, you hear me? even in what she didn’t command. Obliged to imagine what his sainted mother asked of him even when she wasn’t asking anything. Do you believe when Antigua Concepción died Max Monroy freed himself of her influence? Well, don’t go around thinking that. At times I surprise him muttering to himself, as if he were speaking to an invisible being. And when I spell out his words I know he’s talking to her, he asks forgiveness for disobeying her, he admits she would have done things better or in another way or wouldn’t have done anything at all, she would have known when to act and when to do nothing, letting the entourage pass without hearing the band, as hypocritical as a scorpion before it strikes and then Max Monroy behaves as if the insect had bitten him, except he differs from his mother in that she was a showy creature, as ostentatious as a band of clownish mariachis, and he, by way of contrast, is serene, calm to the point of perversity, astute, still, as if only in this way, as you have seen, he could differentiate himself from his mother without offending his parent’s sainted memory, be himself without turning against her… “One makes haste slowly.”

“Do you know where the señora is buried?” I asked with an air of innocence.

“Nobody knows,” the voice of voices continued. “Not even Max. He handed the body of Señora Concepción to a group of criminals he got out of prison with the promise to free them and told them to bury Concepción’s corpse wherever they liked, but never to tell him about it… or anyone else. It goes without saying.”

“What trust in-”

“None at all. Instead of freeing them, he abducted them. Nobody knows where they ended up. They were never heard from again. Just imagine.”

“But Miguel’s there, he’s in prison…”

“Miguel Aparecido is the only person Max Monroy couldn’t handle. Miguel Aparecido chose to remain locked in a cell in San Juan de Aragón as a precaution against his own desire to get out and murder his father, and his father accepted his release, or his imprisonment, as a compromise between two certainties: his and Miguel’s. Max didn’t liquidate Miguel and Miguel didn’t annihilate Max. But Max served an infinite sentence, worse than death itself, and Miguel lived his life creating an empire inside prison.”

“He didn’t control the sadists who killed the children…”

“It was part of the compromise.”

“What compromise?”

“Between Miguel and the authorities. I’ll give you this in exchange for that. A swap.”

“Are you telling me the jailers have the right to kill a few kids and Miguel has the right to save them?”

“He’s the big boss.”

“How do they choose?” I said with no horror in my oneiric voice, losing the order of the acts, the words attributable to Asunta, to Miguel, to Antigua Concepción, I don’t know…

“They choose at random. Eagle or sun. Heads or tails. This one stays in prison. That one drowns in the pool. The ones who don’t cross themselves are really lucky!”

“And the ones who know how to swim?” I said without much relevance.

“They’re saved too.”

The voice in my dream went on: “The worst criminals get away, led by the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee, the damned Sara P… Not everything turns out the way we want, isn’t that right?”

“They’ve been put in a safe place,” the chorus repeated the sacramental phrase.

“In a safe place?”

“They belong to Miguel. I don’t guarantee their well-being.”

“Just like my brother? Just like Jericó?”

“We don’t talk about that.”

“In a safe place? What? How? Isn’t anybody going to-?”

“I can show you.”

“What? Not in…?”

The voices dissipated. They dissipated. Dissipated. They were insignificant voices that bring dreams to distract us from what wants to summon us and we can scarcely guess at.

On the other hand, the figure of Max Monroy advances toward me, shoulders high, head sunk into his body, defiant, as if wanting to tell me that insults, physical abuse, praise and blame did not even graze a man of action who was also a solitary man: Action and solitude, solitude and action, joined, are never used up, said Monroy’s voice in the dream, the record of a man’s motives is huge, there is avarice, desire, rancor, rarely complete satisfaction, Josué, if you fulfill a desire the desire engenders another desire and so on until sorrows flourish because the sun did not come out and we cannot understand that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something very different and in order to obtain what is desired you must separate it from all loyalty immediately, my son, without harming anyone. That is what those who detest, envy, or accuse me do not understand: I did not have to harm anyone to be who I am…

He advances toward me preceded by that strange odor of an animal recently emerged from a cave that Asunta evoked one day.

“Being old does not mean having impunity,” said the shade of Monroy. “Or immunity.”

In the logic of the dream, he launched into a list of his ailments and the medicines he took to alleviate them. I’m old, he said, the old feel threatened by the young. I’m ossifying. Go on, touch my bones. Go on. Ándale.

I didn’t dare. Or I experienced the illogical transitions in the dream. Max Monroy was saying things separated by the oneiric instincts that dissolve the concretion of things, new enterprises disturb the old order, the old resist them, I create them, I am my own opposition…

“I admit that advanced age develops greater doses of cynicism, a measure of skepticism, a degree of pessimism. Why?”

I said I didn’t know.

“You have to know how to say no.”

“Ah.”

“Being old does not mean having impunity. Or immunity,” he repeated. “You have to know how to look deep into my eyes to know who I am. Who I was.”

The voice resonated as if it were traveling the length of a gallery of mirrors.

He said his joints ached.

He said: “There are things I don’t want to know.”

I asked Asunta Jordán: “Why do you appear almost naked at parties and with me only in the dark?”

“Why is your penis so long?” I believe she asked him.

“To cool off my semen,” responded Monroy.

“What does it mean to be put in a safe place? Wait just a minute…”

“And what does it mean to go to bed with Max, like you do, Asunta?”

“What do you know-”

“I’ve heard you.”

“Have you seen us?”

“It was very dark. Don’t fuck around.”

“Black. It was black, you spying bastard!”

“Go on, don’t play dumb, answer me.”

“Don’t be a busybody, I’m telling you. What a meddler you are!”

This reproof, which seemed to come from Asunta, in fact was directed at me by Antigua Concepción: I felt the outrage of her wrinkled hand weighed down with heavy rings, almost in the posture, rather than attacking me, of defending her son Max, who advanced like a ghost, white as chalk, surrounded by the tolling of deep bells, disconcerted, with eyes that said,

“I feel like sleeping…”

Max Monroy came toward me, expecting to be interrupted, wanting it, anticipating it.

The bell rang with a muffled sonority.

Max said to me: “What, who is it tolling for?”

I had the courage to respond: “Who stopped destiny?”

“Your stopping mine or my stopping yours?” he said in a voice desperate with unwanted concern before the entire dream vanished…

THOSE WHO HAVE accompanied me throughout this… What to call it? Agony? Mental anguish, aching passion? Those who accompany me (you, semblance, brother, hypocrite, etcetera) know my internal chats all strive to be dialogues with Your Graces, efforts of desperate appearance and agonizing reality to escape the site of my epidermis and tell you what I tell myself, without the certainty of truth, with the insecurity of doubt.

How was the person of Jericó, put “in a safe place,” not going to return constantly to my soul as I walk slowly from the apartment on Praga to an uncertain destination? A pedestrian of the air, because while my feet trod the sidewalks of Varsovia, Estocolmo, and Amberes, my head had no compass. Or rather: North was Jericó, in more than one sense. The cardinal point of my life, the wind that cools it, pole star, guide, direction, and above all frontier, the limit of something more than territories, a frontier of exiles, distances, separations that the life of Jericó made irremediable…

Did our life end before our youth?

At what moment?

I loved and admired this man, my brother. Now I summarized my life with him in a question: Everything that happened to us, did it happen to us freely? Or, in the end, were we only a sum of fatalities? Did we rebel against particular destinies-masculine sex, orphans, aspirants to intelligence, I’ll say! translators of intellectual talent to practical life-We won’t be doctors or mechanics, Josué, we’ll be political men, we’ll influence the life of the city… the city he described to me from the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, lengthening it with a gesture of his arm, denying we were puppets of fatality, only to arrive, exhausted, at our destiny chosen as a compromise, as our personal will, to discover at the end of the road that all destiny is fatal, gets away from us, closes life like an iron door and says to us: This was your life, you have no other, and it wasn’t what you wanted or imagined. How long will it take us to learn that no matter how much will we have, destiny cannot be foreseen, and insecurity is the real climate of life?

And in spite of everything, Jericó, wasn’t there a certain equilibrium, an ultimate harmony, an involuntary measure in all you and I did and said? Necessity on one side, chance on the other, they go beyond us and place us, eventually, on the crest of a wave, at the brink of death, conscious that if we don’t know our destinies, at least we’re conscious of having one…

How was our shared destiny revealed to the extent it was not shared but chosen by each of us on his own, knowing we were inseparable: Castor and Pollux, even before we knew we were brothers: Cain and Abel? And I don’t know whether as boys we fought not against each other but against the necessity that seemed to impose itself on us. How did we lose our way? Judge me if you wish. I don’t judge you. I merely confirm that gradually, in the apartment on Praga, seeing the Zócalo from the Hotel Majestic, gradually your face gave way to your mask only to reveal that your mask was your true face… We spoke of the tiger in the zoo devoured by the other four caged tigers. Why that tiger and not one of those that attacked it?

“Use force as if it were an animal you release so it can do harm and then return to its domestic enclosure.”

You released it, Jericó. You couldn’t control it. The tiger didn’t return to the zoo. You turned yourself into the animal, my brother. You believed that from power you would defeat power and turn yourself into power. You told me: Be violent, be arrogant, they’ll respect you in the end and even come to adore you. You believed it was enough to assign a destiny to the mass of people to have them follow you with no motive of their own, only because you were you and no one could resist you. And when you failed, you accused them of treason: the masses who ignored you, Max Monroy because he didn’t consult with you, Valentín Pedro Carrera because he got ahead of you, Antonio Sanginés because he read you in time, Asunta because she preferred me.

I stopped on Calle de Génova, at the entrance to the tunnel that leads to the Glorieta de Insurgentes. The darkness of the urban cave gave me a sense of agony, that word in which accountability and death are associated as they laugh at us and mock our challenges, inspirations, powers…

What was the sin, Jericó? I go onto the plaza filled with young Mexicans disguised as what they are not in order to stop being what they are, and it comes to me like a revelation: your lack of interest in others, your inability to penetrate another’s mind, your pride, Jericó, your rejection of those who are unwanted in the world, which is the immense majority of people. The mobocracy, you said once, the massocracy, the demodumbocracy, la raza, that raza incarnated now, when I penetrate the darkness of the tunnel, in a scuffle, a shove that joins my lips to other lips, a fortuitous kiss, unexpected, dry, unknown, accompanied by a smell I try to recognize, a stink, a sweat, something sticky, an incense of marijuana and bait, the urban smell of tortilla and gasoline…

Rapid, fleeting, the kiss that joins us separates us, the tunnel brightens with its own light and we see each other’s faces, Errol Esparza and I, Josué once Nadal from Nada, now Monroy of a kingdom…

I EMBRACED ERROL, Baldy Esparza, as if he were my past, my adolescence, my precocious thought, everything I was with Jericó and that Errol returned to me now, in a diminished though nostalgic version, thanks to a fortuitous encounter on the Glorieta de Insurgentes.

What did he say to me? What did he show me? Where did he take me? He couldn’t take me to the emo clubs because only young guys went there and not uptight ones like me, dressed to go to an office (a funeral, a wedding, a quinceañera dance, a baptism, everything forbidden by Jericó?), and on the plaza, congregating in silent groups, adolescent girls and boys with no gaze because they covered their eyes with bangs, wore extensions at the back of the neck, dressed in black, with self-inflicted wounds on their arms, drawings tattooed on their hands, very skinny, more dark than dark-skinned, sitting on the flower boxes, silent, abruptly moved to kiss, decorated with stars, perforated from head to foot, I felt impelled to look and avoid their gaze, suspicious of the danger and drawn by an unhealthy curiosity until Errol, my guide through this small parainferno or infereden, placed like a navel in the center of the city, said to me,

“They like it if you look at them.”

A tribe of skinny dark bodies, stars, skulls, perforations, how could I not compare them to the tribes on the Zócalo that Jericó trusted to attack power and where Filopáter earned his living typing at Santo Domingo? Never, with Jericó, had I approached this universe where I was walking now guided by Errol, who had become the Virgil of the new Mexican tribe that he, in spite of his age-which was mine-seemed to know, perhaps because, skinny and long-haired, dressed in black, he didn’t seem to be his age and had penetrated this group to the degree that he approached a girl and kissed her deeply and then her companion, who asked me:

“Do you smooch?”

I looked at Errol. He didn’t return my look. The dark boy kissed me on the mouth and then asked if I had a vocation for suffering.

I tried to answer. “I don’t know. I’m not like you.”

“Don’t stigmatize me,” answered the boy.

“What did he mean?” I asked Errol.

That I shouldn’t distinguish between reason and sentiment. They viewed me as a thinking type who controlled his feelings, Errol said, that’s how they view every outsider. They wanted you to free your emotions. My emotions-wasn’t I going over them again and again on my walk through the Zona Rosa? What other extreme, what externalization of my emotions could I add to the internalization I’ve narrated here? A generational abyss opened before me. At that instant, on Insurgentes, with Errol, surrounded by the tribe of emos, perhaps I stopped being young, the eternally young Josué, the apprentice to life, graduated and moved a step away from retirement by this Bedouin tribe of adolescents determined to separate from me, from us, from the nation I have described, analyzed, and constantly evoked here, with Jericó and Sanginés, with Filopáter and Miguel Aparecido. A secession.

Now, on the Glorieta de Insurgentes, at dusk on this Wednesday of my life, I felt the country no longer belonged to me, it had been appropriated by children between fifteen and twenty years old, millions of young Mexicans who didn’t share my history and even denied my geography, creating a separate republic in this minimal utopia on a plaza in Mexico City, another in Guadalajara, another in Querétaro: the other nation, the threatening and threatened nation, the rejected and rejecting country. It was no longer mine.

Did Errol read my gaze that afternoon as we strolled around the sunken plaza of Insurgentes?

“They’re only trying to substitute one pain for another. That’s why they cut their arms. That’s why they pierce their ears.”

Substitute one pain for another? I would have liked to tell my friend I too had a tribal esthetic, had nonconformity, had depressions, couldn’t stop falling in love (Lucha Zapata, Asunta Jordán) and suffering. Was it only my esthetic that was distant, not my sentiments? This sudden need to identify with the young people on the square was doomed, I knew, to failure. It had value on its own, I thought, it had value as an effort at identification, even though physically I could never be part of the new, ultimately romantic nation of darkness longing to die in time, to save itself from maturity… from corruption…

They were romantics, I said to myself, and to Errol I said: “They’re romantics.”

I sensed the personal excitement, the desire to leave the great shadow of poverty and mediocrity and become visible, free the emotions forbidden by the family, religion, politics…

“Don’t stigmatize me.”

“What are they called?”

Darketos. Metaleros. Skatos. Raztecos. Dixies. They form groups, crews. They help each other. They defend themselves. They’re grateful. They’re emos.

Suddenly, the peace-passivity-of the emo world was shattered with a violence Errol himself didn’t expect, and he took me by the shoulders to lead me off the Glorieta. The Génova, Puebla, and Oaxaca entrances were closed by the invasion of young men shouting assholes, fuckers, get them, throwing stones while the emos covered their faces and said-they didn’t shout-equality, tolerance, respect, and offered their arms to be wounded by the aggression until the skateboarders took the initiative and chased the aggressors with their boards and a kind of peace returned followed by a slow nocturnal migration to other corners of a restless city that both was and was not mine.

“I want to kill Maxi Batalla and Sara P.,” Errol said when we sat down to drink beers at a café on the Glorieta. “They killed my mother.”

“Somebody got there first,” I told him.

“Who? Who did?” There was slaver on my friend’s lips.

“My brother Miguel Aparecido.”

“Where? Who?”

“In the San Juan de Aragón Prison.”

“What? He killed them?”

I didn’t know how to answer him. I knew only that the Mariachi Maxi and the whore with the bee on her buttock were “in a safe place,” and with that, perhaps, the history of my time closed and a new history opened, the history of the kids on the plaza who one day, I reminded Errol, would grow up and be clerks, businessmen, bureaucrats, fathers as rebellious as their own fathers had been, pachucos and tarzans, hippies and rebels without a cause, gangs and the unemployed, generation after generation of insurgents eventually tamed by society…

“Do you understand, Errol, why, if there are five tigers in a cage, four get together to kill just one?”

“No, old buddy, plain and simple, no.”

We agreed to see each other again.

“YOU NEED A vacation,” Asunta Jordán told me when I returned to the office on Santa Fe. “You look a wreck. It’s time for a rest.”

For the sake of my mental health, I rejected the idea of a conspiracy. Why did everyone want to send me on vacation? I looked in the mirror. “A wreck”: vitiated, damaged. Ruined by evil companions? Their distribution in my life flashed through my mind: María Egipciaca, Elvira Ríos, Lucha Zapata, Filopáter, Max Monroy, Asunta herself, Jericó… Evil or good companions? Responsible for my being a “wreck”? I had enough honor left to say that I alone-and no one else-was responsible for the “damage.”

I looked in the mirror. I seemed healthy. More or less. Why this insistence on sending me away for a rest?

“To Acapulco.”

“Ah.”

“Max Monroy has a nice house there. On the way to La Quebrada. Here are the keys.”

She tossed them, with a contemptuous gesture though with a friendly smile, on the table.

It was a house on the way to La Quebrada, Asunta explained. It dated from the late 1930s, when Acapulco was a fishing village and there were only two hotels: La Marina, in the middle of town, and Hotel de La Quebrada, which came down from the hills and settled on a terrace where one could admire intrepid divers who waited for the right waves and then threw themselves into the narrow inlet of water between steep, craggy cliffs.

Now Acapulco had grown until it had millions of inhabitants, hundreds of hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, beaches polluted by the uncontrolled discharge from the aforementioned hotels, restaurants, and condominiums, and increasing sprawl to the south of the city, from Puerto Marqués to Revolcadero and even as far as Barra Vieja, in search of what Acapulco used to offer like a baptismal certificate: limpid water, tended beaches, paradise lost…

I arrived at Max Monroy’s house at La Quebrada on a solitary Monday with one suitcase and the books I wanted to reread to see if one day I would present my lawyer’s thesis, Machiavelli and the Modern State. Erskine Muir, who explains the Florentine by means of his time, the Italian city-states, Savonarola, the Borgias; or Jacques Heers, who sees a not very rigorous but passionate historian, poet, and author of courtly plays and carnival songs whose literary imagination was applied to reasons of state, making generations believe that carnival is serious and curiosity the law. Maurizio Piral, who questions the famous smile of Niccolò as the female author of the book Niccolò did not write: the book about life, its paradox, its uncertainty. A misinterpreted man, insists Michael White: his mental lucidity forgotten, his duplicity and ambition codified. Sebastián da Grazia sends Niccolò to the hell made up, of course, of his contemporaries. Franco Fido studies the paradox of an author who writes “The bible of his own enemies,” from the transformation of Niccolò by Elizabethan dramatists into “Old Nick,” the Devil in person, to his vulgar rhetorical invocation by Il Duce Mussolini. The Jesuits, the ignorant, Fichte: Who has not been concerned with the “most famous Italian in Europe,” especially the Italians themselves, who reduced him to municipal, confessional, and academic boundaries?

All this was in my knapsack. The indispensable commentaries. Above all, those of the statesman speaking to Machiavelli power to power: Napoleon Bonaparte feels he is the Machiavellian incarnation of the New Prince as opposed to the Hereditary one, but is anxious to endure in power: to be succeeded, as the New Prince, by his descendants, who will be the Heirs…

I say all the preceding so the reader can know my good-magnificent-intentions when I withdrew to Acapulco loaded down with Machiavellian literature and with a touch of melancholy, an inevitable residue of my recent personal history, not imagining that the true Machiavellianism wasn’t in my knapsack but waiting for me in the house at La Quebrada, which you reached by ascending the mountainous curves over the bay until you reached a rocky height and entered a mansion that rushed, with no distinction of style beyond a vague “Californian” from the 1930s, past the kitchens, bedrooms, and sitting rooms to the reward of a huge terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean and, farther down, the narrow private beach. In its entirety, it was like one of those white porcelain dinner pails my guardian María Egipciaca prepared for me with five little stacked plates, from wet soup to dry soup to chicken to vegetables to dessert… the works.

“Max Monroy built it for Sibila Sarmiento,” Asunta Jordán told me surprisingly when I reached the terrace and she came toward me, highball in hand, barefoot, dressed in palazzo pajamas I knew from rooting through her closet. Loose blouse. Wide pants. Black with gold trim and edges.

She offered me the drink. I feigned casualness. She didn’t tell me too much. It wasn’t the first surprise this woman had given me. She looked at the ocean.

“But Sibila Sarmiento never got to live in it. Well, in fact, she didn’t even get to see it…”

She saw me. She didn’t look at me. She saw me there: like a thing. A necessary but awkward thing.

Asunta laughed in her fashion: “Max had illusions that one day he’d be able to bring the mother of his three sons here, to Acapulco, and offer her a quiet life by the ocean. Well. What a hope!”

Her gaze became cynical.

One more of Max’s illusions. He imagined that one day Doña Concha would free him from the maternal dictatorship to which she kept him subjected.

“A man at once complicated and simple,” she went on, “it’s difficult for Max Monroy to digest. Everything takes him time. He never belches, you know? There are things he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want… And another thing. Between utility and revenge, he always chooses the useful.”

She raised her glass. She almost winked at me.

“I’m just the opposite…”

She laughed. “Then he strikes like a bolt of lightning.”

She indicated that I should sit in a wicker chair. I remained standing. At least in this I could rebel against what I felt was the implicit dictatorship of Asunta Jordán. She didn’t care.

“Max Monroy!” she exclaimed as if she were invoking the sunset. “A civilized man, right? A reasonable man, don’t you think? He always asks for suggestions. He’s open to suggestions. Ah, but not to criticism. Suggesting is one thing. Criticizing is another. Criticizing him means thinking he can’t think for himself, that he requires orientation, another’s opinion… False. The suggestions should stop halfway between two hateful extremes, Josué, my good Josué: flattery and criticism.”

She told me she would criticize, for example, this useless, uninhabited house… a mansion for a ghost, for a madwoman. Or for a ghostly madwoman.

She smiled. “Imagine Sibila Sarmiento wandering here, not knowing where she is, not even looking at the ocean, distant from the moon and the sun, prisoner of nothingness or of a hope as crazy as she is. The hope Max will return and rescue her from the asylum. Or at least make her another son. Another heir!

“Thank me, Josué… I flew here to prepare the house for you so you’ll be comfortable. It was sealed tight, as if with a cork. And in this heat? Air it all out, dust off the furniture, smooth out the sheets, put out towels and soap, just look, everything to receive you as you deserve…”

Who knows what she imagined in my gaze that obliged her to say: “Don’t worry. All the servants have gone. We’re alone. All, all alone.”

She caressed my cheek. I didn’t move.

She said not everything was ready.

“Look. The pool is empty and full of leaves and trash. There’s an air of abandon in spite of all my efforts. The grass is uncut. The palm trees are gray. And Max always said things like ‘I want to be buried here.’ How curious, don’t you think? To be buried in a place he never visited…”

“Nobody looks forward to the cemetery,” I dared to say.

“How true!” the voice declared. “Didn’t I always tell you? You’re smart, you asshole Josué, you’re really smart, good and smart.”

And she threw the contents of the whiskey glass at my chest.

“Just don’t get too smart.”

I maintained my calm. I didn’t even raise my hand to my chest. I looked, distracted, at the setting sun. She resumed the air of a tropical hostess.

“I don’t want neighbors,” Max had said.

She made a panoramic gesture.

“And he did it, Josué. There’s nobody here. Only a high mountain and the open sea.”

“And a beach down there,” I added, not to leave anything out, and I sensed Asunta becoming uncomfortable.

“Don’t expect anyone to stop there,” she said in a rude tone.

I tried to be frivolous. “Your company’s enough for me, Asunta. That’s all I ask.”

The shirt stuck to my chest.

“You can have champagne for breakfast,” she said in a tone between diversion and menace. “In any case,” she sighed and turned her back on the sea, “enjoy the luxury. And think of just one thing. Luxury is acquiring what you don’t need. On the other hand, you need your life… Right?”

She laughed. Her soul was being laid bare, little by little. Not all at once, because I had been observing her since I first met her, disdainful and absent, walking through cocktail parties with her cellphone glued to her ear, imposing silence, not entering into conversation with anyone. I had to understand her as she was and for what she was. An attentive woman and for that reason dangerous. Because extreme attention can unleash violent, unexpected reactions: It’s the price of being aware, of being overly aware.

If, like an adolescent, I fell in love one day with this woman and her visible attributes, if she ever had them, she had been losing them gradually until she played the sinister game of presenting herself as my lover to Jericó and driving my brother mad with the first great passion of his strange life of austerity without purpose, lust without enthusiasm, a lover without love. I knew Asunta’s malice exceeded both my capacity for loving and Jericó’s icy ambition. We were, in some way, pawns in a vast chess game that led to the solution, apparently ritualized, of “putting in a safe place.”

“And Jericó?” I insisted. “In a safe place as well?”

“We don’t speak of that.”

“In a safe place? What? How? Isn’t anybody going to tell me?”

“I can show you.”

“What? Not in…?”

“What it is to be put in a safe place? Wait just a little…”

“And what it is to go to bed with Max, like you?”

“What do you know-”

“I heard you.”

“Did you see us?”

“It was very dark. Don’t fuck around.”

“Black. It was black, you spying bastard!”

“Go on, don’t play around, answer me.”

“Don’t be a snoop, I’m telling you. Big nose!”

“All that not to go back to the hellhole in the desert, Asunta, the town in the north where you were nobody and put up with a macho, presumptuous, hateful husband? All that out of gratitude to the man who took you away from there and put you on your little peak of business and influence…?”

“I would have left there with or without him,” Asunta said, her face extremely tense.

“I don’t doubt it. You have a lot of guts.”

“I have smarts. I have a very clever brain. But Max was a stroke of luck that came to me. There would have been other opportunities.”

“How can you trust in chance?”

“Necessity, not luck. I would have found the means to escape.”

Mistress of the game? Even of the great Max Monroy? These questions teemed in my mind during this twilight facing the Mexican Pacific.

As if she had read my thoughts, she exclaimed: “Nobody blessed me. Nobody chose me. I made myself on my own. I think-”

“You’re the creation of Max Monroy,” I said, taking her by surprise.

“Nobody blessed me. I made myself on my own!” She grew angry.

“I can see you now, abandoned in Torreón without Max Monroy, damn dissatisfied provincial…”

I don’t know if this defense of my father came from some corner of my soul, though I realized Asunta would come at me and scratch my eyes out… I restrained her. I lowered her arms. I obliged her to leave them hanging by her hips. I kissed her with some passion, some disdain; in any case, an uncontrollable mixture of my own feelings, which may not have been very different from the emotion any man can feel if he is embracing a beautiful woman, no matter how much of an enemy she may be, no matter how…

For a moment I suspended my reason and liberated my senses. We all have a heart that doesn’t reason, and I didn’t care that Asunta didn’t respond to my omnivorous kisses, that her arms didn’t embrace me, that I forgot myself before repenting of my actions, before thinking she was responsible and that in this entire situation-I felt this as I was chewing the lipstick on her lips-we had all been concealing the most secret secret of our souls…

Because a personal emotion let loose like an animal, even though it isn’t returned, can abolish for an instant the customary hierarchies of love, power, and beauty. Why did Asunta let herself be kissed and groped without responding but allowing me to continue?

I moved her away, imagining she would say something. She said it.

“I have the bad habit of being admired,” she informed me with a cynical, even happy air of self-sufficiency. “It’s useful…”

“Sure. The bad thing is your appearance doesn’t manage to disguise your real desires. I believe-”

“What are they?” She stopped me. “What are they? my desires?”

“Serving Max Monroy and being independent of Max Monroy. Impossible.” I affirmed my own intelligence in the matter, I defended it as if it had been cornered.

“Max protects me from myself,” was her reply. “He saves me from bad luck. From my bad luck, you’re right, the misfortune of my previous life…”

“There are people who are like screens for other people. You’re Max’s screen. You don’t exist.” I spat the words at her with a kind of frivolous rage, as if wanting to bring the scene to an end, get away, conclude the farce, pick up my suitcase and my books and get away forever from the spider’s web woven by Asunta around a man, Max Monroy, who had been revealed as my father and, I told myself confusedly, whom I ought to honor, know and honor, get close to instead of Machiavelli, damn it, what was I thinking of? I thanked her, Asunta Jordán, for shaking me, taking me out of the vast juvenile illusion that I could go on with my life as if nothing had happened, write my thesis, graduate… And then, and then?

I got out of this illusion by telling myself duty is independent of desire. Bad luck. But that’s the way it is.

Who knows what Asunta read in my gaze. I saw her with a background of sudden madness.

“You’re too intelligent to be loved,” I told her as a logical consequence of my own thoughts. “What does Max Monroy think of that?”

She began to speak with unusual nervousness, as if the answers to my question were, all at the same time, an invocation to the sun to disappear immediately and leave us in the most profound darkness, yes, though they were also disconnected phrases, disguised words I had forgotten because eventually Asunta returned to her implacable, affirmative logic.

The madwoman Sarmiento was locked away forever in the asylum, she said, and the end of the day resonated in her voice.

Your brother Jericó has been put in a safe place, she said, and an armada of dark clouds announced the coming night.

Your brother Miguel Aparecido languishes in an Aragón cell and won’t come out because he’s afraid of killing his father Max Monroy.

“And Max Monroy, what about him?”

“I’ve already told you there are things Max Monroy doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know he’s going to die. Sanginés has prepared a will for him in which the heirs are Sibila Sarmiento, Miguel Aparecido, Jericó Monroy Sarmiento, and Josué Monroy Sarmiento…”

“And you, Asunta?” I asked without too much premeditation.

“I’m at the tail end,” said the poor girl from the north, the provincial I saw now disguised as an important executive, without her palazzo pajamas, her omnipresent cellphone, the glass in her hand: I saw her in a little percale dress, flat shoes, permanent-waved hair, rouged face, porcelain earrings, and a gold tooth.

That’s how I saw her and she knows I saw her that way.

My imagination had stripped her and returned her to the desert.

“And you, Asunta?”

“Don’t you dare mock me,” she said with icy fury. “I’m always at the tail end. I inherit only a handout.”

“And do you want to inherit it all?”

“Because I deserve it all. Because no one has done as much as I have for Max Monroy.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I want to inherit it all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You know.”

“You won’t dare. I know what you want. I’ll speak to Max. I’ll…”

No, she shook her head, agitated, her gaze cold, nobody will say anything to Max, nobody, because there won’t be anybody, nobody but me, she kept saying with a maddened desire and a gaze of the most terrible evil, radical egotism, the certainty that the world is there to serve us along with the frightful uncertainty that the world might leave us out in the cold, a handful of dust in a chalky desert instead of the leafy paradise that was and had been the face of Asunta, two gardens in one or a single fierce wasteland of her youthful imagination… The face of Asunta Jordán. I don’t know if the dying light of day gave her the almost mythological air of a great avenger: a Medea maddened not by sexual jealousy but by monetary jealousy, the yearning to be the heir to the vast amount, not knowing that money belongs to no one, it circulates, is consumed, and will end up in the immense ocean of trash. Perhaps because she knew this, she elevated herself from a jealous Medea to an enveloping Gorgon of power, queen of an empire that would slip from her hands if she did not endow herself with bloody eyes, a terrifying face, and hair made of serpents, crowned by this sunset and this ocean. Loved by Poseidon, possessed by our father Monroy, did she have to be killed so that from her blood would be born a gold dagger that would kill her before she killed me, Miguel Aparecido, Sibila Sarmiento, and Max Monroy himself, as she had perhaps already killed Jericó? In the flashing darkness of Asunta Jordán’s eyes I saw the simplicity of destiny and the complexity of ambition. Or would Asunta Jordán have time to look at me and turn me into stone? And wasn’t it true that…?

“Even if you kill me, I’ll go on looking at you,” she said with a whiskey and lipstick breath when I moved away from her, called by the sound of footsteps on branches that increased behind me, giving way to the face of Jenaro Ruvalcaba, agile and blond, followed by a confused gang of sweating dark people, all armed with machetes, and Ruvalcaba himself swung his machete at the back of my neck, sending me with a bleeding head into the well of the empty pool surrounded by empty bottles and the grass that grew in a jumble from cracks in the cement…