Destiny and Desire (29 page)

In short: Only Sanginés and I showed up, escorted by the police and the court secretaries to hear Sara Pérez de Esparza’s statement. She was seated on a kind of throne placed in the center of the reception room that I remembered in another time, presided over by the timid chastity of Esparza’s first wife, Errol’s mother, and now by the female I could not help associating, in retrospect, with an act of coarse sexuality in the closet of a men’s room in the Benito Juárez International Airport; with a hurried walk, preceded by a porter and dressed like Judith on her way to Bethulia, “for a chat,” along the immense, crowded corridors of that airport; with a sorrowful day in memory of her predecessor Doña Estrellita; with another walk through the airport on the day I ran into Lucha Zapata for the first time; and finally, with the night on which Jericó and I fucked this same woman in La Hetara’s brothel.

But back then she wore a veil and I could identify her only by the bee tattooed on her buttock, which I saw again during the absurd scene in the airport bathroom.

Now, Sara Pérez de Esparza was seated on her semi-Gothic and pseudo-Versaillesque throne, appropriate to her strange mixture of omnivorous tastes, for I was beginning to think everything could be found in this woman, the worst and the best, the most vulgar and the most refined, the most desirable and the most repugnant, without passing through any nuance of common sense. Seated on her throne, scratching at her forearms with silvered nails as long as scimitars, dressed like a star in
La Dolce Vita
in 1960s palazzo pajamas, black and gold with dolphins swimming between her bosom and her back, between her knee and her coccyx: the strangely out-of-fashion outfit with a loose shirt to generously display her breasts, and wide sailor’s pants. Barefoot, though she had rings on four toes of each foot, a brilliant little jewel encrusted in each small toe, and several slave bands around her ankles, matching the entire metallic orchestra sounding at her wrists and competing with the sepulchral silence of her heavy rings and everything contrasting with the bareness of her neck, as if Sara wanted nothing to distract from the attention due her décolletage, the pride she took in her tits, boobs, melons, jugs, knockers, who knows what she herself called those enormous, immobile tubercles that peeked out, fixed like a double gravestone where lay buried the natural sensuality of this artificial being, similar to a mechanical doll that had to be wound up each morning with a gold key: Sara P. had, mounted on top of her corporeal extravaganza, a relatively small head made larger by the curls of blond hair that ascended like mountain ranges to a smooth forehead, lifted for its crown of black pearls, giving the terrifying impression that the jewels were eating her hair, all of it to sanctify a rigid, tightened face, beautiful in a vulgar, obvious way, like a farewell sunset in the movies, like a garage calendar, like the picture of a soldier, a cabdriver, a mechanic, or a teenage anarchist.

The firm gaze fixed, the full mouth like a paralyzed cherry. The uncontrollable nose nervous. Ears buried by the heavy weight of tri-colored earrings: strange, obvious, unpleasant pendants in the colors of the national flag. For the first time I saw her up close, in detail.

She was a camouflaged woman. Smells. Wrinkles. Laughter. Everything was controlled, rigid, remade as if by enchantment.

She spoke, and from the beginning I sensed her words were at once the first and final ones of her life. Both a baptismal and sepulchral discourse.

Doña Hetara, the madam of the bordello on Durango, ministered to the tastes of her clients and the fortunes of her girls. She wasn’t one of those brothel owners who simply run a business with whores. Much abused, Doña Hetara. Lots of bluster. Nothing of the fool about her. She would always say: Di-ver-si-fy. And so she managed not only a whorehouse but a nuns’ school where Doña Hetara, who was very charitable, sent the old hookers to dress as religious and pretend to educate the young hookers who were looking for husbands. Because basically there is no whore who does not aspire to matrimony. It infuriates them that men don’t call them “women” but “broads.” Being a “broad” is being a whore, trash, tamale wrapper,
mole
pot. Being a “woman” is being a girlfriend who can become a wife and mother.

After a period of time to toughen her up in the brothel on Calle de Durango, Sara was sent to the aforementioned nuns’ school to be refined, and there Don Nazario Esparza met her, for he was always on the lookout for new sensations and fresh meat for his “insatiable appetite” or, in other words, what good were all the furniture stores, hotels, movie houses, and commercial centers, what good were beds if he couldn’t use them to have fun with a good “
broad”?

“Don’t trouble yourself, Don Nazario. Search no further, I’ll take care of everything. Don’t torture yourself. Take it slow. Buy into the idea that you’re still a great lover. You’re in great shape, that’s the truth. A real cocksman.”

And so the millionaire was seduced by the convent girl Sarita, who lived in a monastery where her parents had abandoned her.

“They abandoned her, Señora?”

“Let’s say they made a present of her.”

“Haven’t they seen her again?”

“Don’t worry, Don Nazario. We demanded a tidy sum for accepting
the present and didn’t let them see her again. Sarita is all alone. She’ll have only you, Señor.”

According to what he himself said and his son Errol told us.

You and a motley band of mariachis, thieves, bums, crazies, drug addicts, pimps, bongo players, and all those she hadn’t met but imagined, for more men passed through her head than there were in an army, those who had fucked her and those who would have fucked her if they had known the tricks lodged in the well-disposed body of Sara P. Like a beautiful butterfly that could turn into a caterpillar of pleasure, imitate to perfection the manners of the upper class, and engage in all the wicked lower-class vices. I saw her as a funereal hostess on the day of Doña Estrellita’s obsequies, she was refined but sham refined, something was out of place in her gestures, her dress, above all in the way she gave orders and treated the servants, the arrogant contempt, the lack of courtesy, the essential bad upbringing of Sara P. exposed with a disdain that assimilated her into what the stupid woman believed she despised.

Of course Sara came to the mansion on Pedregal with her virginity intact, and Don Nazario enjoyed the privilege of deflowering her. She was a Scotch tape virgin, astutely fabricated by the false nuns of the dissolute convent, who restored maidenheads as easily as they cooked
mole
. How could Don Nazario know? He hadn’t fornicated with a virgin in his whole damn life except for the chaste but narrow Señora Estrellita, who had a psychic padlock between her legs, and since Sarita gave him that unheard-of pleasure, from then on he became a slave to his wife the false nun. Nazario, who was a Roman emperor accustomed to tossing coins into the crowd. Nazario, who demanded to be the center of attention. Nazario of the choleric temperament and blind rage. Transformed into a poodle, a lapdog, a plaything of the whorish, sensual, voracious, impassive Sarita: the pontiff vanquished by the unaccustomed lechery of the false priestess who gradually bared her soul, provoked lust, vomited filthy words, demanded animal positions,
Make me the lioness, Nazario, make me what all men like, tiger, not just you, enjoy my cunt, I want to enjoy it, I want everybody to enjoy it, the mariachi, the
porter, the cabdriver, the potter: Shape me, Nazario, like I was your flowerpot
.

Did this repel Don Nazario? Did he care when she said she was giving him what everybody liked, not just her husband? She laughed at him, telling him about sexual experiences that she said were only imaginary and now she was demanding them of the increasingly dazed, distracted old man, bewildered by so much excitation, so much novelty, not realizing that she, even in their closest intimacy, saw him from a distance, scornfully, as if she were reading him, as if he were the day before yesterday’s newspaper or an advertisement on the Periférico. But she didn’t realize she wasn’t humiliating him. She merely excited him more and more, fired his imagination. Esparza saw Sara in every conceivable position, imagined her fornicating with other men, enjoyed this vicarious sex more and more.

She hated him—she says—but he held her as if she were a dog. Eventually he desired his penis to be always inside her. She felt like castrating him. She told him that the more lovers who enjoyed her, the more semen he’d have stored up inside. Imagine, Nazario, imagine me fucking men you’ve never met.

“I’m just telling you. Whores: You take them by the ass, they’re the cheapest. If they sit on top of the man, they’re more expensive.”

Except, at the same time, her marriage to the ridiculous old man made her more and more afraid. She started seeing herself as she wasn’t, greedy, uncultured, spectral. She fervently desired the death of the man who loved, her, desired her, and at the same time kept her cornered by luxury and ambition.

That was when Nazario did her the favor of becoming paralyzed following an energetic sixty-nine. The old man became overly excited and was left half-rigid with a hemiplegia that kept him from speaking beyond a milky-rice mewling. Then she felt again the temptation to castrate him and even put his flaccid penis in his mouth. But she had a better idea. Gradually she scaled a policy of humiliations that began by parading bare-breasted in front of the paralyzed man. Then confused him by walking past his idiot’s gaze, dressed in mourning one day, for a cocktail party the next, finally as
a nurse, taking him out in the wheelchair to the Pedregal courtyard without shade so he’d roast a little, hours and hours in the sun to see if he dies of sunstroke, and Nazario Esparza encased in wool pajamas and a plaid bathrobe, without shoes, trying to avoid the direct gaze of the sun and observe how his yellowish toenails were growing …

Alone? Sara laughed a long while, at times with the manners of a modest señorita, at other times with whorish guffaws, what the hell, I brought into the house all the men I only mentioned before, mariachis, bums, my buddies the towel boys from the brothel who brought me warm cloths after lovemaking, bongo players who played tropical music while I danced for the rigid old man, pimps who did everything for him, cooked and served the food. They took the useless old thing out in the midday sun of the damn central plain, like a roast pig, though she pampered him too, put him in the bed and toyed with him, said into his ear Go on, do the nasty to me, whispered Mummies are so tender, and if he stretched out his trembling fingers she slapped him and said Quiet, poison and then stripped and made love with the Mariachi before the astonished, desperate, illogical gaze of Nazario Esparza, who signaled wildly for her to get into bed with him.

“In your bed, Nazario? In your bed all you do is piss.”

It culminated, she recounts, with what she calls “everybody gets to fuck her.” The entire cast of servants and parasites who gathered in the house in Pedregal staged the collective violation of Sara P. in front of Esparza. She exaggerated her poses, her screams of pleasure, her orders to action, she even exaggerated the fakery with orgasms that echoed on the mummified face of Nazario Esparza like a mirage of life, a lost oasis of power, a desert resembling death.

Which came to him, she declared, in the middle of the last staged orgy. It was verified by the bongo player, who could gauge from a distance the beats of the tropical world. It was testified to by the pachuco who searched men who died suddenly in houses of prostitution. Nobody saw him die. Though the Mariachi, who was embracing Sara at the time, says he heard, as in a song of farewell, the words of “The Ship of Gold”:

Is it true, or is it poetry?

Where was he buried? asked Sanginés, on whose face a displeasure appeared that contrasted, I must admit, with my own fascination: the rocambolesque, surreal, indescribable tale of this woman stripped of any moral notion, enamored of her mere presence on earth, possessed of incalculable vanity, enveloped in an idiotic glory, with no more reality than that of her actions with no connection to one another, which only form a chain of servitudes that escape the individual’s consciousness, all of it, in that instant, closed a stage of my youth that began in the brothel on Calle de Durango when together with Jericó we enjoyed the female with the bee tattooed on her buttock, and ended now, with the female seated on a prop throne, sex painted on her face so she would have a mouth and speak.

I
THOUGHT
,
OVER
the next few days, that my relationships with women never really concluded, they ended abruptly and lacked something that at my age was beginning to intrude as a necessity. Duration. A lasting relationship.

In preparatory school Jericó and I had read Bergson and because of that reading, the subject of duration reappeared at times in our conversations. Bergson makes a very clear distinction between duration we can measure and another kind that can’t be captured with dates because it corresponds to the intimate flow of existence. What we have lived is indivisible. It contains the past as memory and announces the future as desire. But it is not past or future separate from the moment. Consequently each moment is new though each moment is the past of memory and longing for the future.

(One understands why Bergson’s philosophy was the weapon of intellectuals at the Ateneo de la Juventud—José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Caso—against the Comtean Positivism that had been transformed into the ideological mask of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship: Everything is justified if in the end there is progress. At
the Palace of Mining in Mexico City, a modern goddess, with the brilliance and opacity of leaded windows, is proclaimed a divinity of industry and commerce. She was the courtesan of the dictatorship.)

What does this movement of the moment contain that embraces what we were and what we will be? On the one hand, instinct. On the other, intelligence. People confronted by the creative act, confronted by Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Beethoven or Bach, Shakespeare or Cervantes, speak of inspiration. Wilde said that creation is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. In other words, creating supposes work, and both Jericó and I believe the production of frustrated talents in Latin America is as great as the production of bananas because our geniuses are waiting for
inspiration
and wear out chairs waiting for it in cantinas and cafés. Ten percent, however, wait patiently beside the ninety that can appear, why not, in a bar or café, though it is better received in a room as empty as possible, with a pen, a typewriter, or a computer close at hand and a concentrated effort that otherwise can be made in an airplane, at a hotel, or on a beach. The text admits no pre-text.