Destiny and Desire (15 page)

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

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

I asked him why.

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

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

“Where to, chief?”

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

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

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

I asked her.

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

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

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

“Lucha Zapata.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Twenty years,” Sanginés had told me.

“For what reason, Maestro?”

“Murder.”

“Is it a life sentence?”

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

“Why? How did he manage that?”

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

“I repeat. Why?”

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

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

“How do you know who is guilty?”

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

“Do the law codes tell you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His answer surprised me:

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

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

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

“Who?”

“Think,” he murmured severely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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