Destiny and Desire (20 page)

And he went for the drinks ordered by the Señora, who already had champagne in her hand, a cigarette in her mouth, and the Chanel uniform of a black dress. She looked at us with a mix of charm and irony.

“Are you looking for Errol?” said this cunning woman.

We nodded.

“Look for him in a cheap cabaret on the streets of Santísima. He plays the piano there. It’s your ass, Barrabás!”

She aimed an artificial laugh at us and, turning her back, hummed as she moved through the mourners, who instinctively made way for her, as if they already knew her and, what is more, respected her, and what is worse, feared her …

My friend and I looked at each other with unspoken questions. At a distance, Don Nazario was receiving condolences with his bottle-bottom eyes. From a distance, he smelled of vomit. From a distance, one could hear the jangle of his key ring.

We passed the wall of bodyguards protecting entrances and exits, recalling Doña Estrella thanks to a tacit memory: No one, except her son and the waiter, perhaps, remembered her for the many details that now, in her honor (and ours) we evoked as if we were sharing them with our pal Errol, the bald kid from secondary school.

She never laughed at jokes because she didn’t understand them.

She believed everyone forgave her for her life.

Her husband had said once that as a young woman she was stupid but charming.

She guarded this phrase as if it were a treasure.

For the rest of it she always felt she was out of place.

She didn’t understand the word “superfluous.”

She didn’t even know how to mistrust the maids (the opposite was obvious to us).

When she was reprimanded, she sang as if she were involved in something else.

“What do you think of papa’s fortune?” “Very nice.” “No, its origins.” “Oh, son, don’t be that way.” “What way?” “Ungrateful. It’s why we eat.” “Shit.” “Don’t be vulgar. We owe everything to your father’s efforts.” “Efforts? Is that what they call crime now?” “What crime, son?” “Papa is a pimp, a
lenón.
” “A
león
, a lion?” “No, a musician, John Lennon.” “I don’t understand.” “Or a revolutionary, Lenin.” “Son, you’re making my head spin.”

When we were on the street, cold and empty that night, Jericó asked:

“Listen, what does that red scarf mean that they put around her neck?”

I didn’t know, and on Calle del Pedregal there were only long lines of luxury cars and bored chauffeurs.

WHEN
JERICÓ
RETURNED
I didn’t know whether to reveal to him my relationship with Lucha Zapata or keep it a secret. I opted for discretion. Ever since school, my friend and I had shared everything, ideas as well as whores, focusing on a fairly ascetic life of intensive studies and still unformed goals we didn’t dare call ambitions. Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, sons of a god and a bird, two mortals worshiped as divinities, though they were not. Famous for their valor and skill. Exiled by Zeus to live alternate days in heaven and in hell.

The reader knows to what degree the fraternal union of Castor and Pollux, of Josué and Jericó, excluded many relationships common in boys our age. No family, no girlfriends, no friend except Errol and the shared teachings of Filopáter. Now, however, we were separated by years in which I acted without him and so could let myself be guided by Antonio Sanginés, penetrate the prison of San Juan de Aragón, interview the convicts, allow myself to be impressed by Miguel Aparecido’s diabolical personality and, above all, take responsibility for Lucha Zapata.

I decided to keep to myself the existence of the red-haired woman who lived beside the Metro.

Telling Jericó about it would have put me at the disadvantage of letting him know my business without the reciprocity of learning almost anything about his. Because the superficial humor with which my friend recounted his European experience did not suit his conflictive, penetrating, bold, and ironic personality. I came to think that Jericó was lying to me, that perhaps he hadn’t spent years in Europe, that someone else had sent the postcards in his name … How strange. All this came to mind because when he returned, as you remember, Jericó said a sentence in English that sounded strange to me,

Let’s hug it out, bitch
,

a sentence I didn’t understand and couldn’t translate, but that didn’t fit into either European or Latin American culture. By elimination—I deduced, thinking like Filopáter—it could only be North American.

I didn’t attribute too much importance to this, even though the matter remained suspended in my mind waiting for a clarification that would or would not come, because what Quixote says to Sancho about miracles—they rarely happen—can be transferred to mysteries—when they are revealed, they cease to exist—and I confess here and now that I wanted Jericó to have a truth hidden from me, since I had one hidden from him, and her name was Lucha Zapata.

I’m not ignoring the fact that Zapata’s character put me to the test, at times making me want to leave her or at least share the burden and with whom but Jericó. I’m saying I kept the secret because not only my own dignity before my friend but the very essence of my relationship with her demanded it. This is another way of saying that in recent months, Lucha Zapata had come to depend more and more on me, and that had never happened to me before. Once I had depended on others. Now, a helpless woman, constricted into herself and emerging from that constriction only because of my presence (I thought then), depended on me for salvation.

I urged her to stop using drugs. She continued consuming narcotics until her hidden stash was used up. Then she drank more than usual. Except that alcohol did not completely replace the essential amphetamines. I felt she was approaching a critical point and decided to become strong for her and endure everything—her shouts, insults, depressions, collapses—in the name of her eventual health. In short: I took charge. And if I now summarize the things she said during this time, it is, perhaps, to announce the things she did. Except that these, in the end, refuse to remain under the rug (the mat, in the case of Lucha Zapata) and dominate the words, reducing them to the ashes of mere prattle.

“I want happiness for myself and for everybody,” she would say in her moments of exaltation, as if she were stealing a plane again
from a hangar in the international airport and was prepared to drop flyers on the city from the air, condemning all of us to joy.

“I can’t tolerate poverty,” she exclaimed immediately afterward. “It offends me that half my people are destitute, begging, stealing, without hope, exploited by the powerful, deceived by politicians, abandoned to the fatality of having always been and why not, tell me Josué, why not go on being destitute forever, tell me or I’ll die right here …”

It was with this passion that Lucha Zapata evoked a past—that of our people, always oppressed—that she rarely applied to herself. Sometimes I set traps for her so she would talk about her life before our meeting. I never got her past—or almost never, actually—the evocation of our moment in the airport and her aerial view of a collective misfortune that, for her, was eternal, beyond time: Mexico had always been oppressed and would be so forever, inevitably …

“I want happiness for myself and for everybody. I can’t tolerate poverty. What can I do, Savior?”

Sometimes she became violent and banged her head against the walls, as if she wanted to expel from her skull a brain that had been, she said, abducted. Why, by whom? I asked without receiving an answer other than a deep moan that was like hearing the protest of her lungs blackened by tobacco and drugs.

Then she would embrace me without defenses, like an old pillow, like a defeated ghost that knows it is divorced forever from a visible body, and say, “They threw me out because I use drugs, I’m an addict, if I had cancer they wouldn’t throw me out, they’d take care of me, isn’t that right, Savior?” She’d look at me with eyes so forsaken I simply held her even tighter, as if I feared that at those moments of extreme tenderness she’d leave me forever, freeing herself from life with a sigh that at the next moment would turn into a flare-up that burned my neck. I moved her away. She looked at me with intense hatred, accused me of keeping her locked up here, I’d open the door to the courtyard and invite her to go out, she called me horrible, an authoritarian type made in the image of power, a persecutor, an enemy and not a savior as she had believed.

“All of you, let me live my life!” she shouted in despair, tearing at her short hair and scratching her cheeks.

I stopped her by force, grasping her fists, bringing them up to my own face.

“Go on, Lucha, if you want to scratch, scratch me, go on …”

Then she would say Savior, don’t be so bossy, and she would caress my cheeks and sing the usual song, “I’m a poor little deer that lives in the mountains and since I’m not very tame I don’t come down to the water by day, by night little by little and in your arms, my darling.”

I already knew that this song about the “poor little deer” was the code for love. In this way, Lucha would invite me to culminate the day’s action, whatever it may have been, with an erotic moment that could be the quiet after a squall or the announcement of a coming storm, the gentle slope of peace recovered for a moment or a prelude to the tranquillity that, to be honest, she and I wanted to achieve and share without knowing exactly how to do it.

All of this occurred in the middle of her effort to stop using drugs and replace them with alcohol until I realized that tequila didn’t give the same high as amphetamines, then she’d go back to drugs and discover,
ay, ay, ay
, that her hidden drugs were being consumed and tobacco and alcohol were no substitute and I was to blame for everything.

I knew very well that any person with Lucha Zapata would be “to blame” for a situation for which she was responsible. Asking her to take responsibility was like asking pears of an elm tree, as the unvanquished and sententious María Egipciaca would say. Lucha Zapata needed someone else to blame. Me, someone else, it didn’t matter. But never herself. Herself, never. And I made note of her accusations and acts of violence for the simple reason that I’ve already indicated: I wanted to be responsible for a person.

Until the day she couldn’t take any more.

But first she sang: “I’d like to be a fine pearl in your shiny earrings and nibble at your ear and kiss your cheeks.”

—

I’LL
SAY
THAT
Jericó never showed curiosity about my prolonged absences from the apartment we shared on Calle de Praga. It didn’t surprise me and I didn’t thank him for it. I didn’t meddle in his life either.

I had my doubts.

How had Jericó traveled? What kind of passport did he have? Where was his passport? What was his name, after all?

Jericó what? I realized that deep-rooted gratitude for the protection the schoolyard champion gave the defenseless big-nosed kid kept me from seeing my friend in any light other than what is called in Roman law
amicus curiae
.

One of the great temptations when two people live together is rummaging through the affairs of the other. The temptation to open drawers, read personal diaries and correspondence, pry into closets, move like a cockroach under beds to see what the other has hidden under the mattress, in jacket pockets …

I don’t need to tell you, you who are reading me and are all, without exception, decent people, that your author with the good memory Josué Nadal—I—never stooped to being a snoop. This did not stop me from cultivating certain doubts, all of them so unverifiable that they died before birth.

What was Jericó’s last name?

Had he really spent four years in Europe, with Paris as his base?

Was his evocation of Europe a farce, theatrical and elementary? Kneeling on the Place de la Concorde, sure, not even Gene Kelly did that accompanied by George Gershwin’s music, and if Jean Gabin or Jean-Paul Belmondo passed by, they didn’t even blink.

Why didn’t Jericó ever use those common expressions in ordinary French speech I knew only from old movies of the
nouvelle vague
?
Ça alors. A merveille. Quand même. Raison d’être. Savoir-faire. Laissez-faire. Franglais
.

Why, on the other hand, did North American sayings slip out?
Shove it. Amazing. Let’s hug it out, bitch
.

And above all, unfamiliar allusions to youthful musicians—Justin Timberlake—or local television programs—
Entourage
. Let’s hug it out, bitch.

I say I didn’t inquire, but I suspected with no proof and no desire either to break the commitment to discretion, though I did consult the Entertainment section of
Reforma
to find out about Justin Timberlake and what
Entourage
was.

Other much more important concerns were set forth by Jericó with his customary mental speed and a certain childish audacity, firing them at me at times when I returned with no explanations from a night with Lucha Zapata: Who are we, Josué? How are we? Why are we? To what end are we? without obtaining more from me than an undulating smile and the urgent need to bathe, shave, make myself presentable after an exhausting session of guard duty at Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I suspected that Jericó welcomed me with this salvo of abstract questions in order not to ask more concrete ones: Where are you coming from? Where did you spend the night? Why do you smell so strange?

The questions remained unresolved because of a new development.

It seems our garret, so bare at the beginning, was filling up with gadgets that came to our door in delivery trucks and then were carried up to our nest by dark men with strong backs and sparse mustaches.

Who sent us a laser fax machine, a television set with a 46 (or 52 or 70) inch screen? Who replaced our useless old black telephone with a white one from an Italian movie and then presented us with a couple of Sony Walkman portables and then—Creative Zen, Samsung YP-T9—others even more modern, with music, movies, calendars, and addresses? The last particularly interested me. What addresses did I have except for mine and Lucha Zapata’s? It didn’t take long for the light to go on. Or rather, the Sony Walkman with the name on the little screen of Maestro Antonio Sanginés and the phone numbers of his residence, his house in Coyoacán, and his offices on the Paseo de la Reforma.