Destiny and Desire (24 page)

There are no human beings here. But there is the human question regarding the origin of light. And if there is no light other than the question, the question becomes the negation of destiny, as somber as these prisons, sepulchral chambers of a heaven in eternal dispute. There are no human beings in the lost heaven. There are prisoners. The prisoner is you.

They poisoned me, Fra Angelo, the acids I use for etching. My art killed me. Will my prisons survive? I believe so. Why? Because they are the works I could not make: they are the ruins of the buildings I could not construct.

Still, I died with the ambition of designing a new universe. Except no one asked me to and I had to depart with one anguished question: How does one imprison life in order to destroy death?

I ask you, my brother Angelo Piranesi, because you are a Trappist monk and cannot speak.

NO
DAD
,
NO
mom, not even a little barking dog softened the guardian of my childhood and adolescence, Doña María Egipciaca, which signified my insignificance in the vast order of human relationships, beginning with the family. Destiny, if not virtue, later provided me with relationships that were fleeting (with the nurse Elvira Ríos), more or less permanent (with the tormented Lucha Zapata), and very vulgar and at the same time mysterious (as with the whore who had a bee tattooed on her buttock).

Now, the decision (apparently unappealable) of Maestro Antonio Sanginés led me to the doors of the Vasco de Quiroga building in the brand-new, prosperous district of Santa Fe, an old abandoned wasteland on the road to Toluca, full of sandy precipices and white chalk barrens, that overnight, driven by the great bursting heart of the Mexican metropolis, was flattened out first only to have erected immediately afterward, in a vast valley of cement and glass, vertical skyscrapers, horizontal supermarkets, underground parking garages, all of it always guarded by sentries of glass and cement that were like the raised eyeglasses of an imposing sun determined to avenge the challenge of a Scandinavian architecture made to admit the sun in a country—ours—where ancestral wisdom demands thick walls, long shadows, sounds of water, and hot coffee to combat the damaging effect of excessive sunlight.

The strange thing—I told myself as I approached the Vasco de Quiroga building—is that in Santa Fe the Spanish prelate of that name founded a utopia intended to protect the recently conquered indigenous population and offer them a society—another society—inspired in the ideas of Thomas More: a utopia of equality and fraternity but not liberty, since its rules were as strict and confining as those of any project that proposes to make us all equal.

In front of the building, the white statue of the prelate, standing and caressing the bowed head of an Indian child. Inside the building, an entrance watched over by classic bodyguards with shaved heads, white shirts, old bow ties, black suits and shoes, and jackets bulging with the unavoidable tools of the trade. The guards looked indifferently at the statue of the protector of the Indians without understanding anything, although, perhaps, they were certain that being gunmen who protected politicians, potentates, and even prelates in the Mexico of immense insecurity in the twenty-first century was a remunerated form of utopia. The truth is that behind the large black glasses of the guards and at the feet of their ward-robelike physical proportions, there was no reflection and no basis for any kind of utopia.

I complied with security requirements. I passed through the triumphal arches of universal suspicion. I rang for the elevator and got out on the twelfth floor of the building. A very short, very dark girl adorned, like an announcement of the loves of Pierrot and Columbine, with large glasses that had black-and-white frames, above whose glasses fell the light shower of the uniform hairdos of various secretaries, nurses, and saleswomen, which dance above the brows as if fleeing the skull, who said the often repeated “This way, Señor,” and I followed the triumphal clicking of her heels (it announced her salvation from who knows what fate worse than death: I imagined her cornered, raped, beaten, hungry, why not? a toss of destiny’s coin, heads or tails? was enough) with the fatal certainty I was walking behind the permitted spoils of war. One centimeter more and the señorita—

“Ensenada, at your service.”

“Last name or first?”

“All that and more. I was born there, Señor,” my small guide said pertly in the corridors of entrepreneurial power.

“Ensenada de Ensenada from Ensenada de …” I said with feigned astonishment.

She didn’t like that. She opened a door and left me there, in the hands of the next woman, without even saying goodbye. I gave my
name to woman number two, an affable matron with extensive concerns. She stood, opened a cedar door, and invited me into an aquarium.

I’ve spoken accurately. The lights of the office where I found myself swam, without betraying their origin, when they met the light that came in, filtered by aquamarine glass, and when both lights embraced—the invisible one inside and the filtered one outside—they created an atmosphere of subdued power. I don’t know if the expression is stronger and less fortunate than the reality. What I mean is that the illumination in this office was a creation that took advantage of both natural and artificial light to create a visual space and could not be merely decorative, or even a symbol of an unemphatic function or power.

It did not take me long to understand that the space that received me had not been invented for me or anyone except the woman who got up from the easy chair located next to a revolving desk and who spent almost as many hours here as a fish in an aquarium. The office was hers, not mine. I felt like an intruder. She stood. I had a vague
paideia
of Hispano-Mexican courtesy: Women have no reason to stand when a man comes in.

The fact is that Asunta Jordán—which is how she introduced herself—was not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill woman but what the lights and their symbology had led me to realize. Not a woman with power or of power, though she was a powerful woman.

I knew beforehand that I was stepping onto the lands of the great Max Monroy, an octogenarian, strong, extremely rich, and the son of my ghostly friend Antigua Concepción who lay buried in a mysterious grave. But if at any moment I harbored the fantasy that my relationship with the mother assured me of immediate access to the son, Asunta Jordán now appeared, blocking the way, asking me courteously to have a seat and immediately and in vain initiating an instructive monologue, as if I, deep in this platonic cave where the lights of the real city were vague wavering shadows on the office ceiling, were paying attention to anything other than this woman of medium height, tending to tall, possessor of a vigorous, punctual,
professional body all of which I was disposed to guess at, beginning with her black, fairly high-heeled shoes, with a low-cut vamp where I could detect the beginning (the origin, the birth) of her breasts, before ascending her crossed legs that she relaxed when (I believe) she saw me looking at them with their flesh-colored stockings that led to the skirt (which she instinctively pulled down, moving the hand with a watch, a throbbing, silent pulse, to her thighs) and jacket of the tailored dark blue pinstripe suit over a wine-colored blouse. She wore pearls around her neck, a single diamond in each ear, and then there was her head with the chin raised, as if that gesture announced the tranquil challenge of parted lips, darkened eyes, alert nose, forehead without questions or answers, and short, streaked, carefully casual hair.

I examined the reality and the mystery of this woman, realizing immediately that the reality was a mystery and she guarded it jealously, as if anyone looking at her could believe the reality was merely that: reality. Looking at Asunta Jordán for the first time, I summarized my earlier experience with female matters by telling myself that when people talk—and they talk a great deal—about the “mystery” of a woman, in fact they are transferring to the female sex a series of vices in order to emphasize the virtues of the male or, just the opposite, attributing to the woman virtues that tacitly indicate our masculine vices. Who, for example, keeps a secret better: they or us? Who is more stoic in the pristine sense (Filopáter dixit) of “living in harmony with nature,” which lends itself to all interpretations because it supports all the vices and virtues that are in accord with nature? And is there anything that nature excludes from its kingdom, from mystic heights to moral depths, from saintliness to sex?

I admit that in the presence of Asunta Jordán all this came to mind not in a premeditated way but instantaneously, dissolving my dual questioning into a single unitary affirmation: Asunta Jordán’s façade was one of duty, which accounted for her attire, her voice, her position—despite her office of aquatic tides, more appropriate to a siren than an executive secretary. Wasn’t it all something more
than a concession to the senses, wasn’t it an invitation more than a whim?

I stopped at her gaze hidden (like that of the guards) by dark glasses, which she suddenly removed, revealing eyes that would have been beautiful if they hadn’t been so hard, inquisitive, imperious and that were—beautiful—in spite of everything I’ve said.

“You’re not listening to me, Señor.”

“No,” I replied, “I was looking at you.”

“Discipline yourself.”

“I believe that looking at you carefully is the primary discipline in this place.”

I don’t know if she smiled or became angry. Her mouth allowed for any number of readings. Her deep black eyes betrayed the artificiality of her sun-streaked hair and solicited—I thought then—more intimate investigations.

LET
NO
ONE
tell you I speak incessantly or don’t listen to advice. Let that person search for balance. Bring a little harmony to the country. Give Mexico a triumphal air. And above all, not spend all his time, Mr. President, in demonizing his predecessor or doing favors for those who supported him.

Jericó told me that the President of the Republic, Don Valentín Pedro Carrera, received him in the formal office at Los Pinos with these concepts and asked him to have a seat in a chair conspicuously lower than the chief executive’s as the president caressed with his long fingers the busts of the heroes—Hidalgo, Juárez, Madero—that adorned his vast, bare desk. In addition to heroes, there were a good number of telephones and behind Jericó’s seat three television sets with the sound off but transmitting constant images.

He told Jericó he was always looking for new blood, for new ideas. Licenciado Sanginés had recommended Jericó as an intelligent, very cultured boy, educated abroad and with no political experience.

“Just as well,” laughed the president. “Correct me in time, Jericó,” he said with the heartiness of informal address immediately authorized by the difference in their ages: Valentín Pedro Carrera
was close to fifty but said jokingly that “after forty-one you can’t walk, you have to run.

“So you’re very cultured, right? Well, take good care of me because I’m not. Don’t hold back, correct me in time, don’t let me talk about the Brazilian female novelist Doña Sara Mago or the Arabic female philosopher Rabina Tagora.”

He guffawed again, as if wanting to ease tensions and put Jericó at his ease and receptive to what Mr. President Carrera intended to tell him.

“My philosophy, young man, is that there should be a rotation of individuals here, not classes. And it’s necessary to rotate individuals because otherwise the classes become agitated seeing the same faces. Those at the bottom become agitated because the permanence of those at the top reminds them of the absence of those at the bottom. Those at the top become agitated because they’re afraid a gerontocracy will perpetuate itself and the young will never get beyond subsecretary, or high-ranking official, or out-and-out mediocrity.”

He narrowed his eyes until he looked like a Chinese-Aryan, since his Spanish features were crossbred with swarthy skin and both of them with an Asian gaze.

“I called you after talking to my old adviser Sanginés so you can give me a hand with a project I have in mind.”

He smoothed his reddish, graying mustache.

“I’ll explain my philosophy. The Mexican plateau is not only a geographical fact. It is a historical one. It is a flat height, or a high flatland, which allows us to look at the stature of time.”

Jericó half-closed his eyes in order not to yawn. He expected a complete oratorical exercise. That did not happen.

“But to get to the point, Jero … May I call you that?”

What was “Jero” going to say except simply to nod his consent. He says he didn’t feel intimidated and didn’t stoop to “Whatever you like, Mr. President.”

That individual proceeded to explain that man does not live by bread alone but also by festivals and illusions.

“You have to invent heroes and bequeath them,” said Carrera as
he caressed the innocent heads of the bronzed leading men of the nation. “You have to invent ‘the year’ of something that distracts people.”

“No doubt,” said Jericó, boldly. “People need distraction.”

“There you go,” the president continued. “Look.” He caressed the three heads, one after the other. “For me Independence, Reform, and Revolution passed me in the night. I am a child of Democracy, I was elected and am accountable only to my electors. But I repeat, democracy does not live by ballot boxes alone, and here and in China memorable dates have to be created that give pride to the people, memory to amnesiacs, and a future to the dissatisfied.”

He didn’t say “I have finished speaking,” but let’s pretend he did. Jericó says he sent the chief executive a quietly interrogative look.

“Commemorative dates are born of unimportant dates,” my friend ventured and realized, taking his measure, that the president did not like anyone to see him disconcerted.

“In other words,” Carrera continued, “a president has to be a hedonometer.”

Jericó feigned an idiotic face. Presidential vanity was restored.

“The pleasure, happiness, joy of the people must be measured. You’re so cultured”—the tail end of irony appeared—“do you think a science of happiness exists? How much happiness does the average Mexican need? A lot, not much, none at all? Listen carefully. The voice of experience is talking to you, you can count on it!”