Destiny and Desire (45 page)

What did I have left? The chance encounter with Filopáter appeared to me like a salvation, if by salvation you understand not a favorable
judgment in the tribunal of eternity but the full realization of our human potential. To be what we are because we are what we were and what we will be. The question of transcendence beyond death is left hanging during the age of salvation on earth. Does the second determine the first? Does what happens to us after death depend on what we accomplish in life? Or ultimately, independent of our actions, is a final redemption valid when it is stimulated by confession, repentance, final awareness of the truth that pursued us from the beginning and which we believe only when we die?

Filopáter’s reply (and perhaps the reason for his exclusion) was that each human being was granted individual value independent of belonging to a group, party, church, or social class. The individual inalienable being could, in fact, affiliate with a group, party, class, or church as long as this radical personal value was not lost. Was this what the religious order could not forgive in Filopáter: the stubborn affirmation of his person without discrediting his membership in the clergy, his refusal to hand his personality over to the herd, disappearing gratefully into the crowd of the city, the monastery, the party? He had been faithful to what he taught us. He was the favorite son of Baruch (Benoît, Benedetto, Benito, Bendito) Spinoza, excommunicated from Hebrew orthodoxy, irreducible to Christian orthodoxy, a heretic to both, convinced that faith is consumed in obedience and expands in justice.

Back at Santo Domingo and in conversation with Filopáter, I expected what he offered as we walked from the plaza to Calle de Donceles along República de Brasil, a continuation of our earlier talk, though part of my attention was devoted to crossing the crowded streets, keeping the good father from being run down by trucks, cars, bicycles, or peddlers’ carts.

“I don’t want you going around in circles about the reasons for my exclusion,” he said then, and I understood that the miracle of his existence was not to die by being run down. “My crime was to maintain that Jesus is not a proxy for the Father. Jesus is God because he is incarnate and the Father does not tolerate that. Anathema, anathema!” Filopáter struck his emaciated chest, making the ancient tie fly up while I helped him cross the street. “And my conclusion,
Josué. If what I say is true, God appears only to the most unworthy of men.”

“The most unbelieving?” I said, impelled by Filopáter’s words.

“I don’t believe in a totalitarian God. I believe in the self-contradictory God incarnated in Jesus.
Thou hast had my soul even unto death
, said Jesus the man in Gethsemane. And if he said
Father, why hast thou forsaken me
, what wouldn’t he say to all of us? Men, why have you forsaken me? Don’t you see I am only a helpless man, condemned, fatal, with no providence at all, just like you? Why don’t you recognize yourselves in me? Why do you invent a Father and a Holy Spirit for me? Don’t you see that in the Trinity I, the man, Jesus the Christ, disappear when made divine?”

When we finally walked through the large street door of number 815, Calle de Donceles, to a covered alleyway smelling of moss and rotting roots, Filopáter led me to a room at the rear of the crowded courtyard, avoiding with a glance I imagined as fearful the stairway that led to the residential floor, as if a ghost lived there.

Filopáter’s room was in reality a workshop with tables prepared for precise work: grinding lenses. A table, two chairs, a cot, bare walls unadorned except for the crucifix over the bed. Since I looked longer than I should have at the bed, Filopáter took me by the arm and smiled.

“A woman doesn’t fit in my bed. Imagine. Celibacy has been obligatory for priests since the Lateran Council of 1139, except that Henri, bishop of Liège in the thirteenth century, had sixty-one children. Fourteen in twenty-two months.”

“A woman,” I said just to say something, not imagining the consequences.

“Your woman,” Filopáter said to my enormous surprise.

He saw the astonishment followed by incomprehension on my face; before my eyes passed the gaze of Asunta Jordán, in my ears the voice of the nurse Elvira Ríos, in my nose the smell of Señora Hetara’s whores, but my sealed mouth did not pronounce the name Filopáter made himself responsible for saying:

“Lucha Zapata.”

And then he murmured: “Perhaps the voice of Satan said to
Jesus on Calvary: ‘If thou be God, save thyself and come down from the cross.’ ”

I
WAS
AFRAID
as I walked up to the apartment on Calle de Praga. On each stair a false step threatened me. In each corner an enemy lurked. I went up slowly, accompanied by a legion of demons unleashed by the visit to Filopáter’s hiding place in the center of the immense city. In the shadows, succubi adopted the intangible forms of women to seduce and condemn me. Worse were the incubi who offered themselves to me as satanic male lovers. And the horror of my ascent was that the incubi were men with the face of Asunta and the succubi women with Jericó’s features, as if I wanted to erase from my vision Lucha Zapata’s face, evoked by my visit with Filopáter on Calle de Donceles. Then I knew it was all a premonition.

I opened the door to the apartment nervously, hurriedly. I put the keys in my pocket and before I turned on the lights Jericó’s voice asked me—ordered me—from the darkness: “No light. Don’t turn on the light. Let’s talk in the dark.”

I accepted the invitation. Little by little, as usual, my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and Jericó’s shadow was outlined with greater clarity.

But not much. The man, my friend, set aside an area of his own darkness that protected him from a world turned hostile. As if I didn’t know. The arrest order had come from the office of the president with the fury reserved for a traitor.

From then on “Judas” would be the presidential term used to refer to Jericó, “Judas.”

Now Jericó Iscariot was hiding in the most obvious and therefore most concealed place: our apartment on Calle de Praga.

“Do you remember Poe? We read him together. The purloined letter is in sight of everyone and therefore nobody sees it.”

“You’re taking a risk,” I said with a reverberation of affection from my heart but not daring to say: Run away. I didn’t want him, a fugitive, to feel expelled as well. What would I do except respect Jericó’s
desire, even knowing I might seem like his accomplice, his harborer?

“Get away. Don’t compromise me.”

I didn’t dare say that.

He said it for me.

He saved me the grief.

“You know, old pal. We wanted so much in life, we read, studied, discussed so much, and ended up only being worth what you pay an informer.”

I became angry. “I’m no Judas.”

He became angry. “That’s what they call me in the president’s office.”

“I had nothing to do …” I stammered. “I’m not a traitor. I don’t work in the government.”

“Then are you my accomplice?”

“I’m your friend. Not a traitor and not an accomplice.”

I asked him without words to understand me. I didn’t want to ask him to leave. Where would he go? He knew I wouldn’t turn him in. He took advantage of our friendship. Did he sacrifice it? I rejected this idea, seeing Jericó cornered by shadows, failed in his illusory takeover of power, the act of an inopportune fascist fascination impossible in our time, the product of an imagination, as I now understood it, exalted by itself, by the past, by a feverish, perversely idealistic intelligence. My friend Jericó with no last name. Like kings. Like sultans. Like Asian dictators.

“Thanks, Monroy. Your monitoring has allowed us to keep an eye on all of Judas’s preparations.”

Max Monroy didn’t tell the president that having access to all the strands of information was useful for something.

Valentín Pedro Carrera couldn’t help making a joke.

“You kept the information till pretty late, Don Max. This Judas almost had his way and turned us into Christ, damn it.”

Monroy shook his head, sunk deep into his shoulders.

“Nobody has his way anymore,” he declared. “Everything’s on file. There’s no subversive movement that isn’t known. If I was late
in informing you, it’s because most of these revolutions abort right away. They last as long as Indian summer. Why add to your worries, Mr. President? You have enough with preparations for your popular festivals.”

The president did not respond to the blow. He owed Monroy too much. Monroy felt just a little embarrassed, as if he had abused his own power.

“When it’s a question of serious matters, I’m at your disposal, Mr. President.”

“I know, Don Max, I know and I appreciate it. Believe me.”

Hadn’t Jericó, dressed in shadows, known what I knew in Monroy’s office thanks to Asunta’s information?

“Were we in the wrong age?” I asked with no irony.

He went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Were we born in time or out of time?”

He said it was important for him to know that.

He evoked our childhood and early youth, both of us brought up without a family, without knowing our parents, without even knowing if we had parents, never knowing who supported us, paid for our schools, clothes, food …

“Because somebody supported us, Josué, and if we didn’t find out who for the sake of convenience pure and simple, because it was totally awesome to receive everything and owe nothing, we didn’t ask and nobody asked us either, our table was set, and did we deserve it, champ? Didn’t the moment come to rebel against a destiny others had made for you and go out and create your own destiny?”

I didn’t know what to say to him, except that his presence at that moment was for me like a tribute to the past he and I had shared. It was a way of telling him I had doubts about our friendship in the future. This was, after all, a moment of melancholy.

Jericó wasn’t a fool. He grasped my words at once and adapted them to his own situation, he was here and was the friend I avoided in order not to harm him and he, now, was seizing his neck as the rebellious poet seized the swan “with deceitful plumage.” Jericó wanted to twist his own neck, that was his dramatic vocation.

“Do you remember our first meeting, Josué? Remember it and then add on the facts of our relationship. Do you agree I was always the one who pushed you to act? Against school authority, against conventions of thought, against good manners, do you agree I always pushed you toward the path my life was opening for us?”

“It’s possible,” I replied, testing the shifting ground that spread before me.

“No,” he said fiercely. “Not possible. True. That’s how it was. I always went first, of course I did.”

“To a point.” I wanted to play along because I didn’t want the stormy confrontation Jericó’s gaze was sending out to me from the darkness.

“Believe it even if you don’t believe it.”

He laughed. I don’t know if he laughed at the situation, at me, or at himself.

“You stopped, Josué. You didn’t follow me to the end of the road.”

“The fact is there was a cliff at the end of the road,” I said with no desire to condemn him.

He took it differently. “You didn’t have the courage to walk with me to the end of the road. You didn’t cross the frontier with me, Josué. You didn’t have the courage to explore the evil in yourself. Because both of us always knew that just as we did good, we could do evil. Even more: the ‘better’ we were, the less complete we would be. Each action in our lives means roads to the edge of the abyss. One precipice is good. The other is evil. Don’t be confused, brother. You and I did not fall into good or evil. We simply walked along the street of ambiguity, both yes and no … A decision had to be made. There’s a moment that demands definition from us. Does it depend on where we are, whom we’re with, what influences us? Sure, I found myself at the center of political power. And from there, Jericó, my only option to be myself, to not turn into a puppet of power, was to oppose power with power, power of another kind, Jericó, the power of evil, because look, the power of good, where has it brought us? To a democracy that resembles a wheel with a mouse inside that runs
and runs and doesn’t get anywhere. And did I opt for a different action? And did that action lead to the stigma of evil? Reclaim it for me, if you like. Go on.
Ándale.
”

He breathed like a tiger. “Yes. That’s what I did. Explored the evil in myself. I descended to the depths of my own evil and discovered that evil is the only valid enemy for a brave man. Evil as valor, do you understand? Evil as proof of your manhood.”

I reacted with modest annoyance.

“I don’t want the killing to go on, that’s all. I don’t want to smell more blood after the century we were born into, Jericó, the time of evil carried to the extreme of knowing itself as evil and celebrating evil as the great good of desire and destiny … It makes me sick, what about you, you bastard?”

(Before my open eyes passed the corpses in the trenches of the Marne and the camps of Auschwitz, in the blood-filled river of Stalingrad and the blood-filled jungle of Vietnam, the juvenile corpses of Tlatelolco and the victims in Chile and Argentina, the tortures of Abu Ghraib and the justifications, also corpselike, of Nazis and Communists, brutal soldiers and terrified presidents, Gringos maddened by the incomprehensible difference of not being like everyone else and French rationalists applying “the question” in Algeria: Now I told myself the probable summary of history is that we could analyze in detail and clarify the cultural modalities of the time but did not know how to avoid its evil. In the life of Jericó and Josué, how much was it worth to exalt the knowledge of good as a barricade against the preference for evil? Was our “culture” the dike against the Devil’s flood? Without us, would we all have drowned in the sea of evil? Or, with or without us, would the evil of the time have been manifest in measures that did not matter in the light of just one little girl screaming naked, burned forever, on a path in the jungle of Indochina? Of one little Jewish boy forced out of the Warsaw ghetto with his hands raised, the star on his coat and his destiny in his eyes?)