Destiny and Desire (38 page)

“Do you realize?” Jericó exploded and I saw him this way, now, in shirtsleeves, his shirt open to his navel, his hairless chest demanding the heroism of bronze, the childish cheeks, subtly stripped of baby fat, of a face consumed by the heroic gesture and the intense brilliance of his pale eyes.

Did I realize? he asked rhetorically, pointing down and into the distance, a country of more than a hundred million inhabitants that cannot provide work, food, or schooling to half the population, a country that does not know how to employ the millions of workers it needs to build highways, dams, schools, housing, hospitals, to preserve forests, enrich fields, construct factories, a country where hunger, ignorance, and unemployment lead to crime, a criminality that invades everything, the police are criminal, order disintegrates, Josué, the politicians are corrupt, the canoe has sprung a leak, we live in a Xochimilco with no Dolores del Río or Pedro Armendáriz or pigs to save us: The canals are filled with garbage, they were choked by filth, abandonment, thorns, the corpses of piglets, chicken bones, the remains of flowers …

He came up to me but didn’t touch me.

“Josué. This year I’ve traveled the country from one end to the other. The president gave me the job of forming groups for celebrating fiestas. I betrayed him, Josué. I’ve gone from village to village to form combat groups, organizing immigrants who find no way out, campesinos ruined by the Free Trade Agreement, discontented workers, inciting all of them, my brother, to slowdowns, to boycotts, to stealing parts, to self-inflicted accidents, to arson and murder …”

I listened to him with a mixture of fascination and horror, and if one impelled me to distance him, the other led me to an embrace, a
mixture that was idiotic but explicable of what in me refused and what in me desired. From village to village, he repeated, recruiting at funerals, churches, dances, barbecues …

“Following the orders of El Señor Presidente, you understand? preparing the festivities that matter to him so much in order to distract, deceive, put blinders on the mule, Josué, without realizing that here we have a gigantic force for action, a force of people who are fed up, forsaken, desperate, ready for anything …”

I asked without saying a word: Anything?

“For submission and abandonment, because that has been the rule for centuries,” he continued, reading the question in my gaze. “For the festive deceit, which is what the president wants.”

“And you?” I managed, finally, to squeeze in a word.

I didn’t have to say what I was going to say.

And you?

“If you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question,” said Jericó.

“DON’T
TOUCH
MY
face.” “Don’t open your mouth.” “Don’t say anything.” All these prohibitions from Asunta excited my imagination and I reproached myself, wondering if I could be so boorish that I was not satisfied with her sex but demanded of her a chatter that was, barely, a complement to my own “lyric poetry”: the words that in my sentimental fictions corresponded to physical love. I felt in me a fountain of poetic chivalry that I wanted to accompany the
more bestiarium
, the animal custom that sex is, with a verbal reduction something like the musical accompaniment to a bolero, or the background music in a film … in any case,
more angelicarum
.

And Asunta asked for silence. She cut off my words and left me perplexed. I didn’t know if the demand for silence was the condition of a promise: Be quiet and you’ll see me again. Or a condemnation: Be quiet because you won’t have me again. Was this the sublime coquetry of the woman, the doubt that left me hanging and allowed me to guess at the worst and the best, repeated delight or exile from pleasure, heaven with Asunta and hell without her?

I wanted to believe I was a ludic subject of the enchantress, that
I would return to her bed, her graces, her blessing, on a night when I least expected it. That, in a sense, she would put me to the test. That my virility had seduced her forever. That in secret she would tell herself, I want more, Josué, I want more, though her coquetry (or her discretion) moved her to circumspection in order to transform the wait into pleasure not only renewed but multiplied … It was enough for me to believe this in order to arm myself with patience and, with patience, to obtain many favors. The first, the gift of virtue. I deserved her love because I was faithful and knew, like an ancient knight, how to wait and not despair, stand vigil over the weapons of sex, respond calmly to the call of my lady. This idea of chaste love hampered my imagination for a few days. I launched into the reading and rereading of
Don Quixote
, above all reading aloud the passages of love and honor dedicated to Dulcinea.

I’ll tell you, this mania did not last very long, because my flesh was impatient and my heart less strong than I had thought, so Asunta stopped being Dulcinea-Iseult-Heloise and became a base fetish, to the extent that her photograph at the head of my bed occupied a quasivirginal spot, and I say “quasi” because on a few nights I did not resist the temptation to masturbate looking at her face (upside down, it’s true, given that my jerking off occurred while I was lying in bed and Asunta’s image hung vertically, held up by a tack) and surrendering, in the end, to solitary pleasure, forgetting Asunta, reproaching myself for my weakness though repeating that line about “Things are known to Onan unknown to Don Juan.”

Don Juan! I loved Mozart’s opera though I was astounded that in it the seducer seduces no one: not the disdainful Doña Ana, or the peasant Zerlina, or his former lover Doña Elvira, bent now on revenge.

Stripped of literary, oneiric, onanist, fetishist, etcetera words and opportunities, what remained for me, I ask the reader, but to return to the attack, be brave, take the citadel by force? In other words, have the audacity to return at midnight to the Castle of Utopia, the palace inhabited by Asunta on the thirteenth floor, where one day I had ventured to contemplate and touch and smell my lady’s underthings, risking ridicule at entering her bedchamber
and taking her by dint of strength—or the success of being accepted because, ladies and gentlemen, this was what she secretly hoped for from me: audacity, risk, daring, boldness, all the synonyms you like to supplant and sustain the pure, simple desire of tasting the flesh and dominating the body of a woman named Asunta.

I had, thanks to my administrative duties in the company, master keys. I could go into Asunta’s apartment and move around like a thief who has cased the terrain, even my beauty’s bedroom. On the way I grew accustomed to the darkness, so when I reached the bedroom I was aware of Asunta’s absence. The bed was perfectly made. No proof existed that she had slept here.

This simple fact unleashed in me a storm of jealousy and aberrant suppositions. If she wasn’t here, where could she be gallivanting at one-thirty in the morning? I rejected the more obvious explanations. She was at a dinner. Why hadn’t she told me about it? Because she had absolutely no obligation to let me know about her social activities. Had she gone on vacation? Impossible. I knew her schedule better than my own. Asunta was a workaholic who did not miss a single minute of her work schedule. Ah, the bathroom … Not there either. I opened the door and saw a dry, clean place free of humanity (or rather, the humanity I longed for). I had the sensation of how similar an empty bathroom was to a morgue. I lost my mind. No doubt Asunta was hiding under the bed to mock me. No. She went into her closet because, perversely, she liked to smell and feel herself enveloped by the clothing that once, when she was a little provincial wife, she could not have. Not at all. Behind a curtain, hiding from herself? Ridiculous.

What was left to explore? My exalted spirit, my jealousy coming in vague waves, my desire in tempestuous agitation, my loss of all common sense, were manifested in the uncontrollable movement of my body, the sweat that ran down my neck and armpits, the nerves roused in my arms and legs, the mute excitation of my sex, tense in secret repose, saving itself for the great fiesta of love waiting for me, I was certain, in some corner of this false utopia in Santa Fe.

“Max Monroy is a strong, secure man, Josué. So much so that
he never locks the door of his apartment, up on the fourteenth floor.”

I knew that on the roof of the building there was a helicopter waiting for Max’s orders and a wing for the services and rooms of his cooks, bodyguards, servants, and pilots. Also, I repeat, I knew his immense self-confidence (the vanity of the powerful man) kept open the doors of his apartment, which I now penetrated with the supreme audacity of a desire that drove away any feeling of danger as I blindly crossed what I supposed was a living room: The TV screens shone solitary in the night, as if they could not resign themselves to being turned off and would continue transmitting day and night commercial announcements, soap operas, political commentary, news, old movies, with an innocent longing, failed from the start, to find a conclusion.

I left out the dining room with its twelve chairs. The library with the gleaming backs of its books. The illuminated paintings of Zárraga, Soriano, and Zurbarán (I respected them as if they were a trio of singers). I dared to approach a door that announced repose and isolation.

I opened it.

They ignored me.

What I heard when I opened the door, Asunta’s words of love for Max, readers must imagine …

I
CLIMBED
INTO
the helicopter behind Asunta. She sat in the back of the craft, beside a shadow named Max Monroy. I had no time to greet him. I took a seat next to the pilot as the propellers made the sound of a hurricane and conversation—even the most elementary, like good morning—became impossible.

The helicopter made an alarming vertical ascent that seemed to pierce the sky and eternity for a vague instant before the low, dangerous, turbulent flight, difficult and problematic, that carried us from Santa Fe to Los Pinos, the offices of the honorable president of the republic Don Valentín Pedro Carrera, that is, to a bare, paved-over space surrounded by squat, reinforced buildings and protected,
at the exit, by a blur of mastiffs howling so loudly they eclipsed—and almost demanded silence from—the helicopter’s engines.

I got out before anyone else and saw Max Monroy for the first time. Asunta climbed down and offered her hand to the spectral being at the back of the craft who appeared before me like a shadow, perhaps because that is what Max Monroy had been—had always been—for me until then, so that his physical presence affected me as if my own soul had been revealed to me, as if this phantom, upon becoming corporeal, gave me a physical reality I had not known in myself before.

Asunta offered him her arm. Monroy refused with an energetic chivalry verging on rudeness. He walked along the pavement without looking at anyone but looking straight ahead, as if for him terrestrial accidents did not exist. Asunta was at his side, with a visible, irritating preoccupation very inferior to the serious—not to say severe—care the nurse Elvira Ríos had offered me. I walked behind the pair. Preceding all of us was an army officer—I couldn’t read his rank—but I had eyes only for Max Monroy, dressed in black with a white shirt and a blue bow tie with white dots.

He walked upright, not saying a word. His head rested on his shoulders like a pumpkin on dark soil. He had no neck. His clothes were at once too short and too long, obliging me to wonder about his height. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He was as ambivalent as his attire, clothes that could seem stripped of personality if they hadn’t been worn and therefore personalized by this precise human being who consequently seemed at that moment a man in disguise, but disguised as himself, as if he were crossing the stage of the great theater of the world knowing it was a theater, while the rest of us believed we were in and living with reality.

Knowing the world is a theater and giving it the advantage of knowing itself to be reality though we know it isn’t … I wonder to this very day why, seeing Max climb out of the helicopter and advance along the landing strip with the firm though mortal step of a man in his eighties, my own clothing didn’t make me laugh, along with the clothes of Asunta and the pilot who remained on the strip looking at us with a smile I chose to judge as skeptical. And the
smile of the presidential guard ahead of us, leading the way. For in Monroy’s body, his way of being and walking forward, I guessed at the multiple paradox of our knowing we were disguised not when we go to a carnival but when we dress every day to attend to our jobs, our loves, our diversions, our sorrows and joys. And when we see ourselves naked? Isn’t this the primeval disguise, the toga of external skin that masks our organic dispersion of brain, bones, viscera, unattached muscles, like the contents of a shopping basket spilling out on the floor if not for the corporeal container?

The mastiffs barked. As Max approached, they maintained a silence of slavering lower jaws, allowed us to pass, retreated. No doubt the presidential guard walking ahead of us quieted them. It didn’t fail to attract my attention, however, that Monroy had not, even for an instant, slowed his pace or looked at the dogs, moving forward at the speed he had settled on as if obstacles or dangers did not exist. Have I invented what I’m saying? Does it obey a reality and not my interpretation of reality? And wasn’t this the dilemma Max Monroy had put in my hands: the eternal problem of knowing the line between reality and fantasy, or rather, between reality and a perception of reality? Was all of reality a fantasy in which a man like Max Monroy, in possession of the central character in the drama, assumes as true his own fantasy and leads the rest of us into being phantoms of a phantom, the cast that is secondary to the star of an
auto sacramental
pompously called
Life
?

In this state of mind, how could I not recall my youthful reading of Calderón de la Barca and his
Great Theater of the World:
The protagonist humanity waits impatiently behind the scenes until the supreme director of the drama, God himself, invents humankind and says: “Action! On stage!” But since “humanity” is an abstraction, what God really does is assign a role to each and every one of his creatures—Max Monroy, Asunta Jordán, Jericó, me … the entire extensive cast of this novel that well could be a short film of the superproducer God, Inc., L.L.P.