Destiny and Desire (46 page)

“I don’t want the killing to go on,” I said then in a way that may seem irrelevant. Just then it was the only response dictated to me by
the situation. “I want us to go on being Castor and Pollux, the brothers who were friends.”

“Shall we be Cain and Abel, the brothers who were enemies?”

“That depends on you.”

“You didn’t have the courage. You didn’t go with me,” he insisted in a way that seemed desolate and lugubrious.

“I think you were wrong, Jericó. You misread the situation and acted accordingly. You acted badly.”

“Badly? Something had to be done,” he said in a tone of sudden modesty, fairly unexpected and chimerical in him.

“You can do something. You can’t do everything,” I responded with growing humility and blamed myself for treating a friend in a condescending way without meaning to. This was insulting. I was sure he didn’t realize it. Was I wrong?

There was no time to reply. We clearly heard footsteps on the stairs. It was midnight, and in this building, aside from our apartment, there were only offices that closed at seven. For an instant I thought Jericó was going to hide in the closet. He moved. He stopped. He listened. I listened. We listened. The footsteps were ascending. They belonged to a woman. The click of high heels revealed that. Both of us, separated by a couple of meters, waited. There was nothing to do except, for an instant, separate as if only one would have to die, alone.

The door opened. Asunta Jordán looked at us as if the two meters of separation did not exist. She looked at us as if we were one, Castor and Pollux, fraternal twins, not Cain and Abel, the brothers who were enemies.

She turned off the flashlight in her hand. It wasn’t necessary. The lights were on now. The purloined letter was in plain sight for everyone to see.

Outside, the Gothic statues of the Church of the Santo Niño de Praga did not give us their white smiles.

“I
DIDN’T
FINISH
telling you,” said Lucha Zapata in the letter she dictated to Filopáter that the priest handed to me now.

She didn’t finish? She didn’t even begin. And I never asked her: Tell me about your past. Not out of negligence. Out of love. Lucha Zapata gave me and asked for an affection in which memories were superfluous. This was how our relationship was established, without recollections but not amnesiac, because the absence of the past was a radical way of taking root in the present, love as the root of instant passion that remembers nothing and foresees nothing because it is self-sufficient.

This was the very mark of my relationship with Lucha Zapata, and if she was writing to me now she did so, I’m certain, in the name of chance and freedom. She did not betray herself. She was tossing a bottle into the sea. Would I read these pages? It would not depend so much on my desire as on my destiny. If I had not walked the streets of the Historic Center in search of clues to what Jericó was preparing (and wasn’t this, no matter how I disguised it as official duty, a sickly form of disloyalty to a friend?) I would not have run into Father Filopáter on the Plaza de Santo Domingo. He could have rejected my approaching him. Out of a sense of decency. Because his new life was a break from his former one. Because I had no right to resurrect the past.

It didn’t happen that way. He received me, recognized me, remembered me, led me to his poor lodgings at the rear of a poisonous garden on Calle de Donceles where Filopáter imitated the life of Spinoza, grinding lenses.

This matter could have ended there. If I hadn’t seen my old teacher for eleven years, why wouldn’t I have left him forever following our brief, accidental meeting? This is the question and no one is shielded from it. We met. We didn’t meet. If we didn’t meet, what things would not have happened? What opportunities would have been lost? What dangers avoided? But if we did meet, what things would happen? What opportunities would present themselves? What dangers would be realized?

Jericó was right: Perhaps we’re always at a great crossroads, a circular plaza with avenues radiating from it, each one leading in turn to other plazas from which other avenues radiate. Six, thirty-six, two hundred sixteen, infinite plazas, infinite avenues for a finite
life guaranteed a direction only by what we make with our hands, our ideas, our words, forms, colors, sounds, not what we do with sex, social relationships, family life: These evaporate and no one remembers anyone after the third or fourth generation. Who was your great-grandfather, what was the name of your great-great-grandfather, what face did your most remote ancestor have, the one who lived before photography, the one who wasn’t lucky enough to be painted by Rubens or Velázquez? We are part of the distribution of the great collective forgetting, a telephone book with no numbers, a dictionary of blank pages where not even the fingerprints of those who turned them remain …

Why, then, did Lucha Zapata leave me this letter-confession in which she detailed her criminal life with individuals I came to know through the brothel life of my early youth, my visits to the Esparza house and the San Juan de Aragón Prison? Why did Lucha break the silence, the music of our love affair, with a criminal tale? Here Lucha Zapata appeared training in crime, first as one of the gangs of beggars, false blind men, cripples, the destitute, the incurable, whatever they desire, whatever destiny grants us. Lucha eating the bread of affliction on busy corners, from Avenida Masaryk to the road to the airport, her hand outstretched, reciting prayers, doggerel, God bless you, whatever Your Grace can spare, praise God, simulating bloody sores at the entrance to churches, hernias at the entrance to hospitals, fevers at the entrance to restaurants, allying herself in an ascending scale with thieves, thugs, pimps, houseboys who specialize in robbing houses, the pious who steal in churches, apostles who know how to use picklocks and open doors, bullfighters who steal from pedestrians in the light of day; hoodlums, paid killers, experts in knife fights, panderers, boys who work in brothels, aimless young people and old criminals as well who have no recourse but crime, old soldiers, ruined pensioners, those hounded by bankruptcy, late payments, overdue mortgages, devaluated currency, evaporated savings, discontinued jobs, nonexistent insurance, you see, Josué, how intertwined are virtue and destiny, chance and necessity, innocence and guilt in the legion of those who rob out of necessity because others, you know? need to steal or steal without
need, as others kill for pleasure and others unnecessarily and others because they need to kill, are you charitable, do you understand, do you have enough charity to forgive if you know, Josué, or can you love only if you don’t know? Can you love Lucha Zapata only if you know nothing about Lucha Zapata?

Yes, she was a vision, an aviator expelled from the airfield for attempting to steal a twin-engine plane from a hangar, a specter in a cap and goggles and leather jacket who fell by chance into my arms when I said goodbye to Jericó who was flying off to study in France and I saw Sara P. pass by preceded by a false porter who turned out to be the bandit and mariachi Maxi Batalla. Was this the truth? Everything else fiction? The mariachi wasn’t beaten and mute as his poor mother thought but alive and well? Sara P. was part of the criminal gang organized by Jericó to attack power with violence because legality seemed useless to him and he confused revolutionary action with a police problem, which is what he received in return: disaster, flight, prison?

Everything eventually tied in a bundle that gathered up the threads of the plot in this chance encounter with Filopáter and the reading, even more fortuitous, of a letter Lucha Zapata wrote to me without losing hope I would read it one day? “You don’t remember me” was the refrain of the letter. And again: “You gave me the pulse of happiness,” and once again: “I had to suffer to love you.”

A letter dictated to Filopáter by Lucha.

Why? What did she know?

Couldn’t she write without needing an amanuensis?

Did Filopáter have to be the scribe of our destiny?

Or was this a way to confess what she never would have told me in person, since our dealings with each other, you remember, went beyond all reference to the past? But the element of chance prevailed over Lucha’s desire. Perhaps I would never have walked through the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Perhaps I would never have seen Filopáter again. This was the point at which our desire—Lucha’s and mine—and chance coincided. Dictating a letter to a public scribe in the hope I would find him and he would give me the
letter to read. Like now, fulfilling a prophecy more than engaging in a coincidence, I did it, I read the letter.

At the beginning of everything, was there a kindergarten? Was there a hostile mother, embittered because youth is a seduction that doesn’t last, because her daughter felt sad and solitary and wanted to expel the shadows and the mother told her Don’t show your breasts and she told her mother I hate how you dress and they said things to each other like love is when things turn out well so the mother would return to her responsibility, didn’t I tell you, didn’t I say you could only live at your mother’s side? And Lucha wanted to preserve a moment, just one, precisely the one when mother and daughter were admired together, at the same time, what a nice pair, they look like sisters, expelling the shadows, the threat, the deception, Didn’t I tell you you could only live with your mother? before throwing herself out on the street, into voluntary beggary, crime, the company of Maxi Batalla and Sara P. and Siboney Peralta, Brillantinas and Gomas, the roguish and violent licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba of sad memory in this my course in criminality subject to the prison control of Miguel Aparecido but free, outside prison, free as a pack of hungry beasts, fangs sharpened, mouths slavering, eyes reddened by unwanted wakefulness, by Jericó’s political ambition.

I was part of all this history. I knew the distribution of desire and also of destiny. I had loved this woman who saved herself from crime and punishment thanks to her chance encounter with me in the airport and thanks to our life together, uneven, a real roller coaster of emotions, alcohol and drugs, good food and better sex: What did I have to complain about if I knew how to avoid the vices and enjoy the virtues? What?

ASUNTA
JORDÁN
CAME
into the apartment on Calle de Praga with all the authority of her bold gestures, imperiously clicking high heels, uniform of a high-level employee, ill-tempered face, eyes that managed to see my friend and me at the same time. She was peremptory and there was nothing to say. An armored car was waiting downstairs escorted by two more cars carrying armed people. I
resigned myself. Jericó had a nervous reflex like that of a trapped animal. She played for a moment with my resignation and his fatal rebelliousness.

It wasn’t what we feared. Jericó was protected by Max Monroy from the presidential decision to annihilate him. Judas. Jericó was driven to Max’s building on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, in the direction of Santa Fe. Asunta was in charge of the operation. Jericó, until he heard otherwise, would be hidden in an apartment in the Utopia building next to the one occupied by Asunta. I, with a bitter taste in my mouth, decided to remove myself, go to Filopáter’s house, spend a week in that corner at the rear of the covered garden on Calle de Donceles and then return, perhaps purified, to the Santa Fe building. I read Lucha Zapata’s letter.

On my return I entered a rarefied atmosphere.

Asunta received me in her office without looking up from the computer that distracted her.

“He’s in the apartment on the thirteenth floor, next to mine. Take the keys.”

She tossed me a key ring and I picked it up, trying to guess her intention. I didn’t need keys. Max Monroy had a yen to live with open doors: “I have nothing to hide.”

It was his best disguise, I had understood that. The fact that the probable presence of Jericó required keys and locked doors alarmed me as we may be alarmed by the presence in our house of a ferocious animal we feed so it will survive but that we keep locked up so it doesn’t kill us.

I recalled the news item from the zoo. A tiger killed by the bites of other hungry tigers. Five tigers. Why was the devoured tiger attacked, why that tiger and not any of the four attackers? What united the aggressors against an animal of their own kind? Was it pure chance, the bad luck of the fifth tiger? Could the victim have been the killer of another tiger?

The image of a caged Jericó produced in me the memory of an invisible figure, mobile in the extreme, my friend, who came and went in the city and the world without explanation, without identity papers, without even a second name: just Jericó, the perfect symbiosis
of desire and destiny, free as the wind, without family ties, without known loves. Almost, if he weren’t so tangible in our familiarity, a phantom: my spectral brother, half of Castor and Pollux, the fraternal duality inconceivable in separation … Who had imprisoned the wind? Who had the free spirit under lock and key?

I knew the answer. Max Monroy. And the answer was added to the legion of questions I was asking myself at this time. What interest did Max Monroy have in rescuing Jericó and bringing him here, to the bosom of the large family, enterprise and home of Utopia? I imagined for a second it was all a ruse of Monroy’s to defy the president, demonstrating where real power was to be found. Did Monroy plant Jericó in the offices at Los Pinos only so my friend would deceive the president, making him believe in a false loyalty and using the springboard of power to stage an unsuccessful, ridiculous coup, failed beforehand, as Monroy expected, proving to the president that he, Monroy, possessed the information leading to the crisis, and by possessing the information he possessed real power: calibrating the threat, letting ambushes pass when they had no future, suffocating rebellions in the cradle, and cutting off their heads if they arose? Had it all been Monroy’s great masquerade for Carrera, a demonstration of where real power was to be found?

Or had Jericó’s actions been independent of Monroy? Had my friend acted, unsuccessfully, on his own, caught up in a dead illusion of revolt, impossible in the modern world of information and power, omnipresent under all circumstances, Orwell’s
1984
staged every day, without drama, without unnecessary symbols, without totalitarian cruelties, but disguised in the most absolute normality and accustomed to the technique of white-gloved castration?