Destiny and Desire (34 page)

I have already recounted the experience of my training to be worth something in the business empire of Max Monroy. At first, desiring to show my energy and goodwill, I ran (two steps at a time) from floor to floor. Gradually I learned the lessons of the business, its phrasing, its designations: verbs, adjectives, and especially adverbs, not only endless but without end: The suffix “-ly,” I realized very quickly, was not used in these offices. One said “recent” but not “recently”; “patient” without “-ly” and “original,” “definitive,” “occasional,” or “formal” with no lymology at all. But don’t think the elimination of the ending was the death of adverbial agency—rather, it was its elevation to the level of the implicit. By eliminating the adverb, all its protagonistic quality was given to the verb: to define, occasion, form, patient, and if not “to recent,” then at least to bring
everything to a today pregnant with tomorrow and sterilized and free of useless, nostalgic yesterdays, mere commemorations.

“Yesterday” did not register on the office calendars. It was as if Monroy’s power expanded to turn to ash the pages of the past, convincing everyone that everything was today (and never the rhetorical
today-today-today
of an incinerated past), only the today of today, the instant with all its promises of the future so a well-made today would disappear in a fog denser than any forgetting.

And therefore everything was innovation in this business. And innovation consists in constantly expanding what was done today to what is done tomorrow. The miniaturized blog would end up hidden in a woman’s handbag. Personal cameras transformed us all into instant paparazzi. MySpace, mySimon, and Deal Pilot pages allow us to compare prices, products, and possibilities instantly, and the multiplications of acronyms and headings—KDDI, XAML (the Facebook entry), ebXML, Oracle, Novell—would in the end be deciphered, like the Egyptian name of RosettaNet, into a single designation.

Everything, a great paradox, was destined to accentuate the greatest privacy as it transformed us all into public personages. Once we had entered the blogosphere, who could ever be an enigma again? If our lives are being filmed, what secrets can we keep? Was this the greatest challenge of Max Monroy and his industries? To strip us to the point where our essential privacy would be revealed and protected?

Was this a paradoxical invasion of private life intended to isolate and protect the most secret part of ourselves, the part that could resist any public notification? Our souls? Or would this combination of innovations and mysteries go into the public, popular sphere, guaranteeing each citizen direct access to the information once reserved to governments and managed by elites?

In short, was Max Monroy the emblem of the most inflexible authoritarianism or the most expansive democracy?

It would not take long to find out.

Everything is known. Everything is seen. There will be no more closets, much less skeletons in them. We ought to take the best possible
care of the remains of our private life, invaded by the eye of the camera that is today—the camera—the Grand Inquisitor. And what does Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor do? He protects faith with what offends it. Uses the weapons of the most material power to defend the most spiritual: faith.

Faith—I remembered the old talks with Father Filopáter—consists in saying and thinking: “It is true because it is incredible.” Then can there be a faith that proposes being credible thanks to the natural existence of objects that prove it? But doesn’t this faith subscribe to the concept of progress as a guarantee of universal life? We constantly move forward, nothing can stop us, human development is inevitable and ascendant. Even though a crematorium oven, a concentration camp, an Auschwitz, a Gulag, an Abu Ghraib, a Guantánamo, demonstrate the opposite … How I longed, in moments of doubt like this, to count on the voice of Father Filopáter and recover, in dialogue with him, my youthful camaraderie with my brother Jericó! To be again the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, the founding brothers, two luminous phantoms that gave victory to the Roman Republic in the battle of Lake Regillus.

A limited hero, as I’ve said, who at first, filled with the professional ardor of the novice, ran up and down stairs. Eventually I decided to take the elevator. Only to the twelfth floor, as I’ve stated, since the two top floors were prohibited. There, as in fairy tales, resided the Ogre, perhaps a benevolent Bluebeard who, having eliminated his earlier women (how many “broads” in a decade, or on average, did a man past eighty come into contact with? what’s the ratio? what’s the compensation?) resided, or dwelled, though I don’t believe he had “settled,” with a single woman and she was my own beloved enemy, Asunta Jordán.

Professional relationships can begin coldly and end with warmth, or at least congeniality. They can also begin cordially and end with hatred—or indifference. In any case, seeing each other’s masks every day is something paid for one way or the other. My relationship with Asunta had no temperature. It was exemplary in its tepidness. Neither hot nor cold. She had the obvious mission of demonstrating and explaining to me the functioning of the great
corporate elephant called, impersonally, “Max Monroy,” with the purpose, no doubt, of preparing me to carry out functions: as a lowly nut and bolt, a perpetual stepping-stone, a midlevel official or, finally, as a chief, a functionary, a dignitary? Asunta’s expressionless face gave me no answer.

Except that her perfect representation of the professional woman, her “official” permanent façade, without openings or windows (let’s not even speak of doors), excited my curiosity. And since my curiosity turned out to be inseparable from my desire, inseparable in turn from my erotic will to possess Asunta Jordán, no matter how, I took the first step toward the forbidden.

During work hours I penetrated the darkness of Asunta’s bedroom.

Nothing impeded me except the command of fables: Do not enter. But is there anything in a fairy tale that inflames more curiosity than a prohibition, anything more encouraging to the decision to violate the secret and break the imaginary lock than the warning: If you enter you will be punished? If you enter you will not come out again? If you enter you will be a cold corpse if things go well for you, an eternal prisoner if they go badly?

I called up some excuse to leave at twelve noon. I went up to the thirteenth floor, where Asunta Jordán had her rooms. I passed from the light of the living room to the darkness of the bedroom. I noticed there were no windows, as if the sleeping beauty of my dreams did not leave a single chink open to the curiosity of others, including the solar orb. I avoided looking at the bed. King-size, a marvelous size for a queen, queen-size. My eyes, my sense of smell, my desire, led me to the even darker area of clothing hung according to the seasons—touch allowed me to caress cottons, silks, cashmere, furs, and if I raised my hand a little, I touched hats of felt and straw, of mink and fox, baseball caps, visors, the unmistakable texture of a Panama, picture hats (from every wedding except hers and mine … 
ay …
). None of that interested me. My fingers guided my eyes, and my eyes guided my sense of smell. At last my avid nose (long, pointed, my gentle readers will remember) came upon the perfume it was searching for.

I opened the drawer where Asunta Jordán’s underthings were arranged. Dazzled, I closed my eyes and gave myself up first of all to the voluptuosity of smell, though my avid hands did not resist the desire to touch what I smelled, and in the combat between my nose and my hands, there was a delightful mixing of the aroma of lavender and the lace on panties, the scent of petals and breast cups, drops of anonymous perfumes and panties with Asunta’s name, silk camisoles and padded bras, thongs, bikinis, all the forms of interior-exteriority that was my only possible approximation to the body of my beloved, perhaps more powerful than the nakedness that not only eluded me but did not even invite me, did not even forbid me. Lace, nylon, silk. Half-slips. Garter belts.

And so the interdiction flew over my excited approach to the drawers where Asunta’s intimate apparel lay in innocent demise. I believe at that moment my physical and mental exaltation was so huge that I began to desire this erotic consummation and not another, not a physical one, which undoubtedly would be less intense than the approach, essentially modest though mentally vehement and shameless, violating Asunta’s intimacy to incorporate it not into my own intimacy but into the vast territory of nameless desire.

I learned in that secret, sacred instant that desire moves us farther from and closer to obtaining the object of desire. I learned that we desire what we do not have and when we obtain it, just for ourselves, we desire to dominate what we have, deprive it of its freedom, and subject it to the laws of our ambition.

I closed my eyes. I breathed deeply. I closed the drawers, fearing to possess Asunta beyond this secret violation of intimacy. Fearful, above all, of myself, of my own desire and the limits or lack of limits that only desire could show me by inviting me, as it did at this moment, to be content with the objects I touched and smelled or take the step beyond the place where they intertwine and complicate the subjects of desire.

Asunta’s maid suddenly turned on the lights in the room.

“And what do you think you’re doing up here?”

—

WHAT
HAVE
I
left in the inkwell? I mean, regarding my relationship with Jericó. Who defended me against the bullies at school, beginning with Errol Esparza in his earlier incarnation. Who took me in when I lost my orphan’s home with María Egipciaca (and much more). Jericó taught me to drive a car. He opened my ears to the classical music he collected in the attic on Praga. He opened my eyes to reproductions of the great paintings of the past he assembled on postcards. He pushed me to examine the philosophical seeds planted by Filopáter in our flowerpots. He extended our joint readings to Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Beckett. He even taught me to dance, though with a warning at once ironic and forbidding.

One night he invited me to a cabaret, and instead of leading me into the dance hall he took me to a kind of office from which you could observe the couples dancing but not hear the music. I was disconcerted for a minute. Then I suffered an attack of laughter watching the poses, the contortions, the senseless, graceless comedy of couples captured in an aquarium by dancing they obviously deemed charming, gallant, sophisticated, sensual, liberated, and libertine: heads gyrating, eyes closed dreamily or open in false amazement, hands shaking as if to throw or catch invisible balls, shoulders in grotesque calisthenics, legs freed of all control, halfway between prayer and defecation. And the feet, cockroaches in shoes to avoid death by Flit, two-toned men’s shoes, cowboy boots, pointy-toed stiletto heels for the women, an occasional tennis shoe, all given over to the silent dance, the grotesque ritual of bodies deceiving themselves, feigning elegance, sensuality, good humor, which, stripped of accompanying sounds, reduced the dancers to a macabre imitation of an anticipated dance of death.

I thought that friendship was something fundamentally indecipherable. Pride, generosity, tenderness, accepted inadequacies, quiet reserves, the courage memory keeps acquiring—or the bitter absolution of its loss: everything united as in a chorus at once present and very distant, more eloquent in memory than in actuality, though with each gleam it brings the announcement of a future as unpredictable as a pistol going off at a piano concert.

“Let’s be independent,” Jericó fired at me. “Let’s not have opinions imposed on us.”

If the words surprised me, it was because they contained a tacit truth in our relationship. We had always been independent, I replied to my friend. He said I hadn’t: I had lived in a mansion like the prisoner of a tyrannical nanny and saved myself by coming to live with him.

“And you?” I asked. “Have you always been independent?”

Jericó looked at me with a kind of compassionate tenderness.

“Don’t ask me a question you could answer or be quiet about yourself, old pal. We’re independent? First ask yourself: Who has supported us for as long as we can remember?”

I interrupted him. “Lawyers. Licenciado Sanginés, the—”

He interrupted me: “Were they sent? All of them, servants, sent by someone else?”

“Physically or morally?” I attempted to lighten the unusual conversation; we hadn’t seen each other for more than a year, and this meeting in our old den on Calle de Praga was taking place on his initiative.

He ignored me. “We’ve assumed we have no past, that we live in the present, that the lawyers will provide and if we ask indiscreet questions, we’ll break the spell and wake up no longer princes in the bedroom but frogs in the ditch … and with no way out.”

I told him he was right. We had never inquired beyond the immediate situation. We received a monthly check. At times Sanginés led us to the doors of a mystery, but he never opened them. It was as if the two of us—Jericó, Josué—feared knowing more than we already knew: nothing. I suggested, before the ironic gaze of my friend, that perhaps our negligence had been our salvation. What or who would have answered our questions: Who are we, where do we come from, who are our parents, who supports us?

“Who supports us, Jericó?” I looked at him as if he were a mirror. “Are we innocent pimps? Are we better than La Hetara on Durango or the whore with the bee on her buttock?”

He remained silent, refusing to be surprised by my brusque remarks.

“Do you remember Father Filopáter when we were at school?”

I nodded. Of course.

Jericó said, after looking at the floor, that we had never understood—he spoke for the two of us—whether Filopáter pretended to be a false heretic to make faith palatable, like the false unbeliever who takes us down the path that leads to belief.

“Because Filopáter did two things, Josué. On one hand, he made us see the mindlessness of religion in the light of reason. But he also revealed the foolishness of reason in the light of faith.”

“Reason compromises faith and faith compromises reason,” I added without thinking too much about it, almost as a fatal, exact conclusion, that is, as dogma.