Destiny and Desire (25 page)

Though his gaze revealed the most perverse brutality.

“This country has always lived in miserable poverty. Always, a mass of the fucked and we, a minority of fuckers, are over them. And believe me, Jero, if we want it all to continue, we have to make the fucked believe that even though they’re fucked they’re happier than you and me.”

His face became serene.

“In other words, my good Jero: I don’t want Mexicans to be rich. I want them to be happy. Just look at the Gringos. Look at what prosperity has done for them! They work constantly, eat badly, you can bet they fuck in a hurry, a straight suburban quickie, they don’t
have vacations, they don’t have social welfare, they retire at fifty and die beside a lawn mower. A lot of work, a lot of money, and not much satisfaction … Some happiness! In Mexico, at least, there’s always been a certain, what shall I call it? pastoral well-being, you’re happy with your tortilla here, your tequilas there …”

Once again the ogre.

“That’s over, young man. Too much information, too many appetites, too much envy. Max Monroy with his handheld devices has brought information to the most remote corners. Once you could govern almost in secret, people believed in the annual report on September first, they believed that the more statistics there were, the happier they would be, but damn it all to hell, Jero! No more. People are informed and they don’t conform and it’s my job to fill in the gaps at the patriotic festival, the commemorative parade, the ceremonies that replace the imagination and appease their spirits, their thirst and hunger.”

He gave Jericó a small, friendly slap.

“I need young blood. New people, with ideas, with education. Like you. Sanginés endorses you. That’s more than enough for me. The good lic has never failed me, and if I’m here I owe it in great measure to Don Antonio Sanginés. Well, well,” he said with a sigh. “This country is divided into cream, watery milk, yogurt, and the infamous dulce de leche. You choose.”

He looked at Jericó as one looks at a man condemned to death who has just been pardoned.

“Think positively, my young collaborator. Think about the efficacy of the parade and the festival. A ceremony is the cloak of dignity everyone can place around their shoulders, hiding their rags. Bring me ideas. Let’s celebrate sports and athletes, songs and singers, brands of beer, and national sweets, let’s even celebrate ex-governors. Invent reputations, boy. Create museums and more museums. Parades and more parades. Lots of music, lots of trombones. Lots of ‘Marcha Zacatecas.’ And don’t underestimate the political transcendence of what the assignment means. Ask yourself: Do people know their own interests? Max Monroy wants them to. I think they’re not unaware of them, they just replace them with commemorations.
In the long run, Monroy wants to transform luxury into necessity. He wants people to take for granted that they deserve what they once had to pay for. If he succeeds, Jero, power is over, undone by critical exigency. If wealth is transformed into necessity, power becomes unnecessary because people are satisfied only with what others don’t have and power is satisfied only with what others already have. Otherwise tell me, what the hell are we promising?”

He stood and extended a robust hand. His rings hurt Jericó. The president stared at him. Like a tiger with its prey.

“Don’t even imagine that I’m talking more than I should.”

“No, Mr. President.”

“If you repeat it, nobody will believe you but I’ll make you pay.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Don’t even think you can begin your political career by beating me.”

“If you think that, fire me.”

The president gave a loud laugh, reverting to the familiar
tú
.

“Don’t worry. I’ll give you a pension. And something else.”

“Tell me, Señor.”

“Don’t make a fool of me.”

The telephone rang. The president walked over to answer it. He listened. Between silences he said:

“I won’t forget what you’re saying … Be sure to call my secretary … I hope we see each other again … Let’s see when …”

“I don’t know,” Jericó said to me, “why each of those anodyne phrases sounded like a threat.”

Especially when the president said goodbye to Jericó, asking him to be discreet, not to make a false move, and not to make himself noticeable.

“Be discreet, don’t make any false moves, don’t make yourself noticeable.”

And Jericó simply thought,
What did we agree to?

I’M
A
LOYAL
man, Miguel Aparecido told me on the day I returned to the San Juan de Aragón prison, impelled by circumstances.

“I’m here because I want to be,” he added, and I agreed because I already knew that.

His expression did not change. If he repeated this psalm, it was because he considered it necessary. Perhaps it was only a preamble.

“I’m here to serve a sentence imposed on me by life, not the law.”

I made it clear I was listening attentively.

“I’m still here because of loyalty, I want you to understand this, Josué my friend. I’m still here by my own wish. Because if I were to leave here, I’d kill the person I should love the most.”

“Should?” I dared to say.

He said no one obliged him to be here except himself. He said if he left here he would commit an unforgivable act. He spoke as if the penitentiary were his salvation. I believed him. Miguel Aparecido was a sincere man. A caged tiger with sleeves perpetually rolled up, stubbornly kneading his forearms covered with almost blond hair, as if they were the weapons of a solitary warrior afraid to be victorious in battle.

“I tell you this, Josué, so you can understand my dilemma. I’m here because I want to be. I like prison because prison protects me from myself. I like prison because here I have a world I understand and that understands me.”

He gave me a capo’s smile but didn’t frighten me (if that was his intention) because I wasn’t a prisoner or subject to any mafia. Because I, ladies and gentlemen, was free—or thought I was.

He only laughed. “Ask any prisoner. Talk to Negro España or Pérfida Albión. Consult with Siboney Peralta. You haven’t done that, old friend? They’re like a tomb. Don’t go to any trouble. But if you talk to them on my behalf, they’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you. In the prison of San Juan de Aragón there’s an interior empire and I’m its head. Nothing happens here, boy, that I don’t know about, nothing I don’t want or can’t control. You should know: Even occasional riots are the work of my will alone.”

He rubbed his hands over his face. It sounded like sandpaper. He was lying to me.

He said he could smell the air and when it became very heavy, a huge fight was needed to clear the atmosphere. When they’re needed, he said, there are serious riots here, a chaos of broken chairs smashing against the walls, dining room tables in smithereens, scratches on metal doors, injured police, some even dead. Violations, abuses, sexual pleasures disguised as punishments, understand? Here we bite locks open.

Why was he lying to me?

“And then the smoke clears. A few ashes remain. But we are at peace again. Peace is necessary in a prison. Many innocents pass through here.” He looked at me with a kind of religious passion that disturbed me. “They have to be respected. You’ve seen the children in the pool. Do you think they should have a life sentence? Well, I’ll tell you that if this prison were like almost all the rest, I mean, concentration camps where jailers are the worst criminals, where police traffic in drugs and sex and are guiltier than the worst criminal, then I’d commit suicide, kid, because if there were chaos here it would be because I was powerless to establish the necessary order. Necessary, Josué, just that, no more and no less; the order that’s indispensable so the San Juan de Aragón prison isn’t heaven or hell, no, but just, and it’s a lot, a fucking purgatory.”

He was out of breath, which surprised me. In my opinion, Miguel Aparecido was a man of steel. Perhaps because in reality I didn’t know who he was. Was he lying to me?

He took me by the shoulders and looked at me as a tiger must look at its dying prey.

“When something happens here that slips out of my hands, it makes me furious.”

He repeated it syllable by syllable.

“Fu-ri-ous.”

He took a breath and told me that an individual turned up here, and at first Miguel did not attribute the slightest importance to him. Instead he laughed at him a little. He was a mariachi who then became a cop or vice versa, it doesn’t matter, but he was a born crook. It seems this mariachi or cop or whatever he was took part in a
neighborhood disturbance a few years ago when the police themselves, charged with maintaining order, created disorder where there had been none, because the people in the district governed themselves and dealt with their own crimes without harming anyone. They gave a phenomenal beating to the cop or mariachi when neighbors and the “guardians of law and order” faced one another one tragic night when the police were sacrificed by the crowd, burned, stripped, hung by the feet as a warning: Don’t come back to the neighborhood, we govern ourselves here. Well, it seems the mariachi or cop or complete ass, his name was Maximiliano Batalla, pretended to be mute and paralyzed just so his mama, a very clever but sentimental old woman named Medea Batalla, would take care of him, feed him, and take him in his wheelchair to pray to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.

“Go on, Maxi, sing, don’t you see that Our Lady is asking you to?”

“And Maxi sang,” Miguel Aparecido continued. “He sang rancheras so well he deceived his poor mama, passing himself off as mute and crippled while his comrades-in-arts—mariachis and police and potheads and thugs—visited him, and Maxi organized them for a series of urban crimes ranging from the innocence of stealing mail from the United States because workers are sometimes so ignorant they send dollars in a letter, to attacking pregnant women to rob them at intersections when there’s a confusion of streetlights, traffic police, and racing engines.”

The Mariachi’s Gang—as it came to be known—invaded commercial centers for the sheer pleasure of sowing panic, without stealing anything. It permeated the city with an army of beggars simply to put two things to the test: that nothing happens to a criminal disguised as a beggar but everyone believes beggars are criminals.

“It’s a gamble,” Miguel Aparecido said very seriously. “A risk,” he added almost as if he were saying a prayer. “The plain truth is that the Mariachi’s Gang alternated its serious crimes with sheer fooling around, spreading confusion in the city, which was its intention.”

Maxi’s gang was organized to swindle migrants beyond the simple stealing of dollar bills in letters. They were very perverse. They organized residents of the neighborhoods where the workers came from to stone those who returned, because without them the districts no longer received dollars and in Mexico—I looked at Miguel when Miguel wasn’t looking at me—the poor die without dollars from the migrants, the poor produce nothing …

“Except workers,” I said.

“And grief,” Miguel added.

“So then”—I wanted to speed up the story—“what did Maximiliano Batalla do that you couldn’t forgive?”

“He killed,” Miguel Aparecido said very serenely.

“Whom?”

“Señora Estrella Rosales de Esparza. Errol Esparza’s mother. Nazario Esparza’s wife.”

Then Miguel Aparecido, as if it had no importance, moved on to other subjects or returned to earlier ones. I was stunned. I remembered Doña Estrellita’s body laid out in the Pedregal house on the day of the wake. I remembered the sinister Don Nazario and knew him capable of anything. I evoked the new lady of the house and did not know what she was capable of. My truest, most tender memory was of Errol, our old buddy from secondary school, with his head like an egg. I repressed my feelings. I wanted to listen to the prisoner of San Juan de Aragón.

“Do you know what hope means?” he asked.

I said I didn’t.

“You’re right. Hope brings nothing but sorrow, trouble, and disappointment.”

I thought I was going to see him being sentimental for the first time. I shouldn’t have had false hopes.

“What would happen if you were to escape?” I dared to ask him.

“Here, chaos. Outside, who knows. Here, people wither. But if I weren’t here, the streets would be filled with corpses.”

“More? I don’t follow.”

“Don’t look at the moon’s ass, prick.”

I was a law clerk. I was a young employee in the companies of Max Monroy. I was bold.

“I’d like to free you.”

“Freedom is only the desire to be free.”

“Free of what, Miguel?” I asked, I confess, with a feeling of growing tenderness toward this man who, without either one of us wanting it, was becoming my friend.

“Of the furies.”

The fury of success. The fury of failure. The fury of sex. The fury of resentment. The fury of anger. The fury of love. All this passed through my head.

“Free, free.”

With an impulse I would call fraternal, the prisoner and I embraced.

“The Mariachi has left here, free. Nazario Esparza’s influence freed him. Maximiliano Batalla is a dangerous criminal. He shouldn’t be walking around.”

He sneezed.

“You know, Josué? Among the criminals in San Juan de Aragón, there aren’t only thieves, there aren’t only innocents, or kids who must be saved, or old men who die here or are killed by a violence I sometimes can’t control. They fill the pool without letting me know. Some kids drown. My power has limits, boy.”

The tiger looked at me.

“There are also killers.”

He tried to look down. He couldn’t.

“They’re killers because they have no other recourse. I mean, if you examine the circumstances, you understand they were obliged to kill. They had no other way out. Crime was their destiny. I accept that. Others kill because they lose the ability to endure. I’m being frank. They put up with a boss, a wife, a crying baby, damn it, listen to me, what I’m telling you is terrifying, I know, laugh, Josué, you tolerate a bitch of a mother-in-law but one day you explode, no more, death urges them on: Kill and death itself appears just behind them. I understand the attraction and horror of crime. I live with
crime every day. I don’t dare condemn the man who kills because he has no other recourse. There are those who kill because they’re hungry, don’t forget that …”