Destiny and Desire (11 page)

“…  wakes up crazed.”

“…  the old woman’s in the cave.”

“…  lets in no flies.”

“…  shuffling the deck.”

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

“Come live in my apartment.”

“But the lawyer—”

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

“And if you can’t?”

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

“And be left without—”

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

“You’re pretty rash, Jericó.”

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

“Us?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We followed each other in love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He made a disagreeable face so I would laugh.

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

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

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

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

“Like clockwork.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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