Destiny and Desire (19 page)

The strange thing (or is it reasonable?) is that his words when he returned to Mexico also blinked, passing from an ingenuousness that seemed out of place in the cynical, daring man I had known, to a gravity it took me a while to identify with the actual name of ambition. Could we reestablish our intimacy?

He recounted naïve things to me, for example that when he arrived at the Place de la Concorde he kneeled and kissed the ground. I laughed: As an act of freedom? Not only that, he replied: As an act of fidelity to the best in the Old World (I hid a nervous twitch of disapproval: Who would ever call Europe “the Old World”?) and above all, he continued, to France and the French ability to appropriate everything by redeeming the crime in culture.

“There’s a Napoleon brandy. Can you imagine a Hitler brandy?”

I wasn’t going to discuss the enormous difference between the “good” Bonapartist tyrant and the “bad” Nazi tyrant because in his tirade Jericó was already immersed in an amusing comparison of national European profiles and the clichés that went with them (the French have a sex life, the English have hot water bottles), leading to feverish amazement at having heard “all the languages we see at the movies” and the enumeration of Rue Lepique, Abbey Road, Via Frattina, Puerta del Sol, and above all the streets, the squares of Naples where, he said, he identified with the possibility of being corrupt, immoral, a killer, a thief, and a poet without consequences, as part of custom and perhaps the landscape of a liberty so habitual it leaves no trace of mortality, surviving, he said, in tradition.

“Why can’t we be Neapolitans?” he exclaimed with a certain grandiloquence, appropriate to the friend who faced me with the arrogance of a Byron that I viewed as an antipoetic pose and, what is worse, as simple-minded, naïve, unworthy. Why are we, in Europe, nothing but Comanches, mariachis, or bullfighters?

He laughed, redeeming himself. “We ought to guard against being part of the national folklore.”

This was Jericó, my old companion, passed through the sieve of an experience that he wanted, as I understood it, to share with me
at a level of exaltation and camaraderie that would lead him to tear off his shirt, gesticulate, and assume the caricature of a bedazzlement that ought to end—I knew Jericó—with an excessive, ironic action, one that in a certain sense flagellated his own ego.

“On my knees in the Concorde,” he repeated, kneeling in the middle of the living room with his arms stretched wide in an act at once grotesque and tender, and which I understood without understanding it, like a farewell to youth, a stripping away of the vestments of a tourist, the rustic skin that covers the traveler in transit, the soul of the “Argentine we all carry inside us”: the superego.

Knowing Jericó, this display as part of his weaknesses did not fail to surprise me. Perhaps he wanted to indicate that beneath the appearance of return was a companion who had never left. Or, on the contrary, knowing it was impossible, he was asking for help in getting rid of distance and his experiences and returning to the point at which we had separated. We were the same but different. I had experienced studying at UNAM, the tutelage of Sanginés, the visit to San Juan de Aragón, the mysterious encounter with Miguel Aparecido, the strange, committed relationship with Lucha Zapata. What did Jericó have to offer, aside from the postcard he had just given me?

“Freedom,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts.

“Freedom is kneeling down to give thanks in the Place de la Concorde?” I said, not very pleasantly.

He nodded, his eyes lowered.

“What shall we do?” he said then, and our life changed.

Jericó changed it as he himself, his physical attitude, his appearance changed in the next moment, when he let fly the issues he wanted to communicate after his prologue on the stage of touristic minimization and mental abandon.

What shall we do? he repeated. There are many possibilities for success. Which are yours and mine? Or rather, Josué, which success is worthy of you and me?

I wasn’t going to answer with the reasons I’ve just given you, which can be summarized in the word “experience,” for only on that basis did my expectations, though still vague, begin to take shape. I
knew Jericó would not share much in the recounting of his European experiences, which (I was beginning to realize) he would never reveal beyond the brief tour he had just offered. His years of absence were going to be a mystery, and Jericó didn’t even challenge me to penetrate it. There was in this attitude I’ve called Byronic a wager: The past has died and the future begins today. Make whatever guesses you like.

As a consequence, I changed my attitude. Instead of asking about his past, I proposed sharing our future.

“What do we want?” he repeated, and added: “What are we afraid of?”

He continued saying that he and I knew—or ought to know—what we could be or do. He recalled an earlier conversation about “not ever going to a
quinceañera
, a thé dansant, a baptism, the opening of restaurants, flower shops, supermarkets, bank branches, the celebration of university classes, beauty contests, or meetings at the Zócalo.” Never being interested in the rock-and-roller Tarcisia who married the Russian millionaire Ulyanov, both of them barefoot, with Hawaiian leis around their necks and guests who welcomed the dawn dancing hip-hop on the sand at seven in the morning.

“Now, Jericó, how did they serve the stew to honor the father of the bride—”

“Who is a native of Sonora. Did you turn down the invitation?”

“No, Jericó, not at all, I’m not interested in being—”

“Not even if it’s your own wedding?”

I smiled, or tried to. I remembered how I had admired Jericó’s capacity for taking life very seriously.

I said I felt I had gone past those tests, didn’t he? I refrained for the moment from mentioning Lucha Zapata, Miguel Aparecido, the children in the sinister pool at San Juan de Aragón. Perhaps Jericó responded indirectly, saying it wasn’t enough not doing what we didn’t do. Now we ought to decide what we were actually going to do. He stood and grasped my shoulders. He looked at me with his Delftware eyes. We didn’t have, that was apparent, a talent for music, literature, tennis, water- or downhill skiing, racing cars, or
directing films, we didn’t have the soul of actuaries, accountants, real estate agents, porters, and all the sad people who accept their small destinies … he said.

“What do we have left?”

I told him to tell me. I didn’t know.

“Politics, Josué. It’s self-evident, brother. When you’re no good as a street sweeper or a composer, when you can’t write a book or direct a movie or open a door or sell socks, then you devote yourself to politics. It’ll go like clockwork.”

“That’s what we’re going to do?” I said, with false astonishment.

Jericó laughed and let go of my shoulders.

“Politics is the last resort of intelligence.”

He winked. In Europe he had learned, he said, that the mission of the intellectual was to torment power with words.

“Then what do you want to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet. Something huge. Give me time.”

I thought without saying so that freedom is uncertainty. That is something I had learned.

He didn’t read my thoughts:

“There can be many attempts at success. Which is worthy of you and me?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was held back by another feeling. Above and beyond the words and attitudes, that morning of our reunion in the garret on Calle de Praga remains in my mind, especially now that I’ve died, as a moment of terror. Could we resume our intimacy, the common respiration that had joined us when we were young? Could we feel again the primary emotion of youth? Was everything we had lived only a prologue, a preparation for a goal we didn’t really know yet how to define? Was our friendship the sole, poor shelter of our future?

Jericó embraced me and said in English, as if responding to all my questions, Let’s hug it out, bitch.

STUNNED
BY
AERIAL
excursions on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel and landings in the deep earth where Doña Antigua Concepción lies, exhausted by so much sky and so much history, disheartened
by great promises, I walked very slowly toward Colonia Juárez and the apartment on Calle de Praga without knowing where I was coming from or the location of the secret grave that soon dissipated in the noise of engines, exhaust fumes, the ring-ring of bicycles, and thunder in the clouded sky, trying to leave behind the experience I had gained and concentrate on particular accidents, the personal inadequacies and small vices and virtues of men and women with their own names though lacking a historic surname.

Drunk on the chronological history of Antigua Concepción and inebriated by the undated apocalypse of the prophet Ezekiel, with infinite patience and humility I climbed the stairs of the house on Praga, prepared to focus my humanity again on Jericó’s friendship and my care of Lucha. These were my priorities, soon dissolved by Jericó’s urgent expression when he greeted me.

“Let’s go to Pedregal. Errol’s mother has died.”

Years had gone by without our returning to the ultramodern mansion turned into a neobaroque mess by the dictatorial bad taste of Don Nazario Esparza. “Act as if you haven’t seen anything” was Errol’s recommendation to us, referring either to the arguments of his parents or the Transylvanian horror of his house. I remembered the lack of any initiative on our friend’s part once he had provoked an altercation between his parents. Or perhaps I was misremembering. It had been six, seven years since I had seen my old classmate or visited his house.

Now, from the entrance door, black crepe announced the family’s mourning. I thought the house had always been in mourning, locked with padlocks of avarice, lack of compassion, suspicion, meager love, scant serenity. Except that as I approached the coffin of Doña Estrellita de Esparza, with Jericó ahead of me, I felt that compassion and serenity, at least, had in fact inhabited this lugubrious mansion but were virtues that lived waiting for the death, and only in the submissive, preoccupied presence, of Doña Estrellita.

I looked at her corpse. Her waxen face had been blurred even more by the cold hand of Death, the Ashen-Faced, and caricatured by the rouge and lipstick the funeral director (or damned Don Nazario) had smeared on the grayish features. Doña Estrellita wore
a hairdo that looked false, very 1940s, very Joan Crawford, high and full. Her ghostly hands rested on her chest. With a start, I realized the Señora had on her housewife’s, maid’s, and cook’s apron, and this, I wanted to say to Jericó, this definitely was a final mockery by the sinister Don Nazario, prepared to send off his wife as maid to Eternity and celestial housewife. Don Nazario received without emotion or even the blink of an eye the condolences of his previously mentioned clientele, who expressed their sympathy and then dissolved again behind a veil of murmurs, inaudible conversations, and the passing of canapés, with the collective obsequiousness of a relative and the singularity of dissimilar manners and fashions, for those who had known him since his humble beginnings and those who acknowledged him at his present heights ranged from the owners of transient hotels to managers of hotel chains.

I looked at Doña Estrellita in order not to look at the crowd.

In spite of everything, the body continued to display a simulation of beatitude and the perpetual smile of someone going to a wedding of people she doesn’t care about but who deserve courtesy. In death, Doña Estrella was confident in her boredom, and if she had lost the habit of crying, the fault was not hers. There was only one dissonant detail, because the apron was like a uniform. The Señora had a bright scarf tied around her neck.

Ruddy, tall, florid, Don Nazario received the customary condolences. I would have liked to avoid it. I couldn’t escape the line of mourners. Jericó was ahead of me, his face composure itself though with a sarcastic line along his upper lip. Don Nazario extended his hand without glancing at me. I gave him mine without glancing at him. I looked for Errol.

“He isn’t here,” Jericó murmured.

“What do you think of that?” I asked.

“Were you expecting him to come?”

“To tell you the truth, yes,” said my feelings and not me. “She was his mother …”

“Not me,” Jericó declared over and above my opinion.

We made our way through the crowd of mourners. You could see it in their faces: No one loved this family. Not Don Nazario and not
Doña Estrella. Much less Errol, the dispensable rock-and-roller fag. They were all there out of obligation and necessity. They all owed something to Nazario Esparza. Don Nazario controlled them all. There was no love. No grief. No hope. What did we expect? my eyes asked Jericó as we walked through the crowd, all of them surrounded by the forest of funeral wreaths that turn Mexican funerals into a boon for florists. Become a florist and make your fortune: We are all passing through.

In the middle of the funeral forest I bumped into a woman and offered my excuses. Out of place, she was carrying a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. She bumped into me, the ash fell onto my lapel and a downpour of La Veuve onto my tie. The woman stopped and smiled. I made a useless effort to recognize her or to ask myself, Where have I seen her before? never addressing her directly, “Where have we seen each other?” because of a kind of tacit precept I couldn’t explain to myself and that did not correspond to the amiability of the beautiful woman who approached like a panther, a predatory animal. A fake blonde, light tan touched with sun in her hair, and artificially moist lips.

“Listen,” she ordered a waiter, “bring a drink for the Señor.”

“Excuse me. This isn’t the time,” I said.

“A drink,” she gave the order again, and the waiter inquired as if he hadn’t heard her clearly:

“Pardon me, Señora?”

“A drink, I said. Go on.”

The waiter didn’t answer. He looked at me and Jericó, who was behind me now, understanding less than I did about the new scenario in the Esparza mansion.

The waiter said: “Welcome, Don Jericó, Don Josué. You’re always welcome here.”