Destiny and Desire (37 page)

With these and similar words, Jericó was insinuating himself into the president’s confidence, alarming him at times (“You’ve taken the wolf by the ears, you can’t let him go but you can’t hold
him forever either”), encouraging him at others (“Don’t worry too much, equality is the most unequal thing that exists”), cutting him off on occasions (the classic symbolic knife slitting his throat), warning him on others (the no less classic eye opened by the right index finger on the lid), elaborating justifications (“politics can be soft, interests are always hard”). The president gave him simple tasks. Read the papers, Jericó. Keep me informed. At night I’ll read whatever seems important.

“What did your pal do?” Sanginés asked rhetorically. “What do you think?”

He gave me an ugly look. I gave him a beatific one.

“He selected items from the press. He cut out whatever suited him whenever it suited him. News of general tranquillity and happiness and prosperity under the leadership of Valentín Pedro Carrera: A president becomes more and more isolated and eventually believes only what he wishes to believe and what his lackeys make him believe—”

I interrupted. “Jericó … I think that … he’s …”

“The complete courtier, Josué. Don’t be deceived.”

“And you, Maestro?” I tried to irritate him.

“I repeat: a loyal counselor.”

Ándale, ándale, ándale
.

“DON’T
OPEN
YOUR
mouth. Don’t say anything.”

And I who had my romantic phrases prepared, my sentimental allusions derived from a potpourri of musical boleros, recollections of Amado Nervo, dialogues from North American movies (Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars), everything refined, nothing vulgar, though fearing my good manners would disappoint her in bed, perhaps she desired more brutal treatment, coarser words (you’re my whore, whore, I adore your tight little cunt), no, I didn’t dare, only pretty phrases, and as soon as I had said one, the first one, when I was on top of her, she came out with that brutal “Don’t open your mouth. Don’t say anything.”

I proceeded in silence. I came, censuring my mouth, the mouth
I wasn’t to open, obeying her categorical instructions. And I’m not complaining. She gave me everything, except words. I was left in doubt. Are words intrusive in love? Or is love without words only partial, incomplete in its sentimental formulation? I shouldn’t think that. She had given me everything. She had permitted me everything. As if in her, in this act, lay the culmination of half-complete loves with the nurse Elvira Ríos, tormented ones with Lucha Zapata, venal ones with the whore with the bee who ended up married to Errol Esparza’s father, jailed as the presumed killer of Don Nazario, and escaped from prison despite the vigilance (unhealthy, obsessive, I now told myself) of Miguel Aparecido.

Asunta Jordán …

Preambles to love, Cupid’s broken arrows that finally gave me the great pleasure of a complete sexual act, at once instinctive and calculated, demanding and permissive, natural and artificial, pure and perverse: What was there in the provincial body of Asunta Jordán that gathered everything into a single woman and a single act? Everything I’ve said and nothing. Nothing, in the sense that she expressed the words of the act, which did not encounter the verbal separation that I (that every man) wants to give it, though later he may repent of, or forget, the words he exclaimed, sighed, shouted when he came abundantly.

Were words necessary? Was Asunta telling me that the act was sufficient in itself, that words cheapened it because they were inferior to pleasure, verbal placebos, derivations of the bolero, of poetry, of the impossible analogy between the act and the language of love …?

“Don’t touch my face.”

No. No. No. All the negations of the moment diluted the fiesta though the fiesta had been memorable and I was an imbecile who had no reason to complain. I did something wrong since, as satisfied as a god that creates love, the prohibition against speaking diminished the completeness of the act. I was mistaken. One could be mute from birth and enjoy the woman with no possibility of uttering a word. Why did I attempt to verbalize, give speech to the act that
had culminated without the need for any words at all? And why did she forbid language in so categorical and severe a manner: Don’t open your mouth. Don’t say anything?

And why, silenced and confused, did I try to replace the forbidden word with an amatory and affectionate gesture? (The two things are not the same: The amatory is passion, affection is concession.) Or with good manners, gratitude, and why not, the brief prologue to seduction …

We know we have spent many hours together, at the office, at times in a café as a distraction from our obligations, often at working lunches, rarely at social dinners, more often at cocktail parties where she made her appearance as part of Max Monroy’s power, the visible, tangible, desirable power of a man as famous as he is mysterious: A year in the office in Santa Fe and I still hadn’t seen, not even glimpsed, the top dog, the chief, the bossman, the
qaid
.

Knowing she had constant access to him and all I knew about him I knew through her (and, in secret, through the informed, interred voice of Antigua Concepción, but this I could not repeat) … At the office, no one on the ten lower floors and the two top ones had met the chief executive, Max Monroy. I began to imagine he was a fiction created and maintained to make people believe in an untouchable power and to uphold the authority of the enterprise. I would have believed this if, from time to time, Asunta had not descended to the world of mortals to share with me something said or done by Monroy—his work a constant reference; his words a frequent one; his current life never mentioned.

My relationship with Asunta, therefore, had been purely professional. With the exception of my adventure in her boudoir, guessing at, touching, and smelling her underclothes, something only I and the maid who caught me in the act knew about. Had the servant told Asunta or was she so discreet—or fearful—that she kept quiet? I couldn’t know and couldn’t ask. If Asunta knew, she behaved as if she didn’t, and in either case my sexual excitement increased: If she knew, how exciting it was to share that fact as a secret. If she didn’t know, it was even more moving to have a sensation that made me
solitary master of her underthings when they were not covering her body. And in any event—emotion, enthusiasm—what delight was produced in me by the memory of those bras, panties, garters, stockings, arranged like a small army of the libido in their ordered bureau drawers.

How could I approach her beyond our daily working relationship? By imagining her reality or realizing her imagination?

I tried to approach her by approaching those who worked in the Vasco de Quiroga building, as if the undesired origin of the desired woman would come alive in the origin of Monroy’s employees in the Utopia building. As if on knowing them, I would see a lessened Asunta, still without power. As if, in my mean-spirited rancor, I desired to see her expelled from Olympus and returned to the minihell of anonymous work.

I
WAS
RESTING
, my arms crossed above me and my hands forming a kind of pillow, when I heard footsteps on the stairs and identified them with Jericó. They were phantom steps that sent back to me an echo of my best friend and, perhaps, my best years. Everything was thrown into turmoil (for nostalgia should not last too long) by the sensation that Jericó not only had reached the apartment on Calle de Praga we once shared but was opening the door with the key we also had shared.

I felt a certain uneasiness: I was the one who lived here now, and this was the place I left to go to work at the San Juan de Aragón Prison or the Santa Fe offices. For the first time, I was the master of the house. Jericó’s key going into the lock on the door was like a physical and spiritual violation. He came in and made himself right at home. He had told me, from the beginning, that the place needed his noise even though he shared it with me, the newcomer, the stone guest, the Tancredo of bullfighting.

“Wake up, Josué,” he said from the door, raising his hand to his forehead in a kind of pseudomilitary salute.

“I am awake,” I said reluctantly, looking at the advancing shadow out of the corner of my eye.

“Did you eat yet?” he persisted and didn’t allow me to answer. “Because I ask you, pal, who digests better: the man who sleeps after a banquet or the one who goes out to hunt?”

I shrugged. Jericó was interrupting a daydream dedicated to Asunta, what she was like, how I could have her, would she love me again, or was our encounter only a passing quickie, informal, without consequences?

I was recalling and consecrating it, Asunta’s body, and now Jericó proceeded with anatomical brutality: “Are you going out to hunt, are you coming home to sleep? How do you know?”

He poked my navel and drew a line between my ribs.

“By opening up your belly.”

He laughed.

“There’s the proof.”

I emerged from my lethargy. I sat on the edge of the bed. Jericó prepared coffee. He had taken possession of something that, I told myself, offended, he had never left. I was the intruder. I was practically the vagrant.

“What do you want?” I said, longing to annoy him.

His expression didn’t change: “I want you.” He offered me a steaming cup of instant coffee.

“Why?”

He launched into a discourse that seemed interminable. Who were we? Two people shipwrecked from paternal authority. That’s what makes us brothers. We lack a family. We didn’t have an old man. We were abandoned, liberated, set adrift.

“Whatever you like.”

“And?”

“That obliges us to know our internal limits. You realize that the majority of human beings never seriously ask themselves: Who am I? What are my limits? Why? Because family and society have marked out the path and boundaries for them. Here, kid, don’t step off the path, look as far ahead as you like, but don’t look right or left. Eyes fixed on the horizon we presented to you because we think about you, son, and want the best for you, don’t think about anything, everything’s been thought about in advance, my boy, it’s for
your own good, don’t stray, don’t venture anything, don’t turn away from a destiny you don’t deserve to know independently, why would you, boy, if we’ve already prepared it for you? We prepared the future for you the way you make a bed, here are the pillows, here are the covers, get in and sleep, baby, don’t disturb the bed, after all, it took a lot for us to arrange it for you and have it ready so you can sleep peacefully, sleep and sleep and sleep, youngster, kid, baby, boy, son, and not worry about a thing.”

He made a nasty face and then burst into laughter.

“Wake up, Josué, arise and walk!”

I told him I was listening. He didn’t expect any words from me. He had brought his own speech and my job was to listen to him and not make a sound.

“I continue: You and I weren’t born for domesticity. Consider your sexual life. From pillar to post, here a vagabond, there a whore, here a nurse, there a secretary …”

“I do better than you, a really solitary plainsman,” I grumbled, angry that he knew what I thought he was unaware of.

“We have no friends,” he said, somewhat disconcerted.

“Do you think we’re part of a vanished civilization?”

“We’re always obliged to correct the errors in our destiny, whatever it may have been, Josué. So it’s more than the truth …”

“A different destiny? How?”

“By getting together with people. Organizing the people. Taking a bath with the masses, like the showers you and I used to take together, but now with millions of human beings who want to be redeemed.”

“Won’t they be redeemed better on their own?”

“No,” Jericó almost shouted. “What’s needed is the head, the leader!”

“The Duce, the Fuehrer,” I said with a skeptical smile.

“The country is ripe,” Jericó asserted, corrected his course, and returned to him and me.

“Yes, I swear to you, God’s truth, only you, and only I, we weren’t born to be husbands or fathers or even faithful lovers. You and I, Josué, were born for freedom, without ties, the road cleared to be
and act without reporting to anyone, do you understand? We are free, old friend, free as the air, the rain, the sea, the birds!”

“Until a hunter shoots you, and you fall and become supper. Sure …”

“Risks,” Jericó said with a laugh, “and the air can be disturbed by a cyclone, the rain can be stormy, the sea rough, and the bird, with luck, unconquered and flying toward freedom.”

“An old bird, you mean,” I said to harmonize with the jubilation of my old companion. I even sang: “Wounded bird of the dawn …”

“In other words, Josué, do you believe you and I have a special mission, since love, home, marriage are forbidden to us?”

“Friendship would be enough,” I murmured with no desire to offend or even inquire.

He slammed one fist with the other. It was a gesture of action, of virtue, of energy, of a voluntary desire to lead. To lead me to him and himself to me as well.

He said the country was not advancing. Why? The president is weak. He hasn’t governed with energy. We did everything halfway. You and I? No. Those who governed us. Everything halfway, everything mediocre. We though we were king of the world because we had oil. We sold it for a lot of money. With the profits, we bought nothing but trinkets. A luxury six-year term. We behaved like nouveaux riches. There was no “tomorrow.” The price went down. Debts remained. A new horizon. Commerce. A quick treaty, to deck out another six-year term. Things are free to move about. Not people. Currency, stocks, objects move. Workers remain stationary, though they’re needed in the USA. Come because we need you. But if you come, we’ll kill you. Okay? Fair enough? Since then we simply fill in one hole before the next one opens. We’re like the little Dutch boy in the story, his finger stuck in the hole in the dike to avoid the inevitable flood. But we only put our finger deep in our asshole. And it smells bad.

Theatrically, my friend Jericó pulled aside the curtain in the room to reveal, from our high perch, the omnipresent urban chaos of Mexico City, the great deep pyramid of Cementos Tolteca and Seguros
América and Avenidas Cuauhtémoc, the fragmented pyramid sunk in primeval mud and asphyxiated in secondary air, the clogged traffic, the overflowing buses, the streets numerous but uncountable: the lines of workers at five in the morning waiting to go to their job and return at seven at night in order to return at five … Six hours for working. Eight for commuting. Life.