Destiny and Desire (51 page)

“Who?”

“His sons,” said Sanginés with a certain repentant brutality.

“His son, Miguel Aparecido,” I corrected him spontaneously.

“The hope that the courage and will demonstrated by him are repeated in his sons. That’s what you mean.”

“His son,” I repeated. “That’s what I mean—”

“Otherwise, the silver platter is the same as the silver bridge your enemy runs away on,” he insisted.

“I’ve visited Miguel Aparecido. You know that, Maestro. You allowed me to enter the Aragón prison. I know Miguel’s story. I know his father treated him with contempt and cruelty. I know Miguel left prison prepared to kill Monroy. I know he returned to prison in order not to do it, to distance himself from the temptation of parricide … I understand him, Don Antonio, I understand Miguel, I swear I do.”

“Instead”—I don’t know if Sanginés smiled or if the play of lights turned on suddenly along the avenue feigned the smile—“let the boys stand on their own feet. Let them know difficulties. Let them achieve happiness and power on their own. But don’t let the destiny of Miguel Aparecido be repeated, the abandonment and crime determined by my powerful, invincible mother, Doña Concepción.

“Do not let it be repeated,” Sanginés said two or three times. “Let my sons be formed alone but not forsaken. Let them count on everything, house, servants, monthly allowances, but not with the deadly cushioning of a rich father, not with lassitude, abandon, frivolity, the unfortunate security of not having to do anything in order to have everything. Let them have something in order to have something. I’ll put them to the test. You send them the money each month, Licenciado. Let them lack for nothing. But not have too much of anything. I want their own life for my sons, without guilt or hatred …”

Clearly Sanginés, for the first time, confronted his emotion, abandoned the upright gravity of a discreet lawyer and prudent adviser, freed himself for a kind of catharsis that moved more quickly than the car when it left the traffic circle at Insurgentes to take Florencia to the Paseo de la Reforma.

I looked at him with amazement. He wanted to abandon discretion, gravity, not simply rein them in.

“He left them free, without the intolerable pressures and distorted affections of a mother,” Sanginés said in his new emotional tessitura.

“He left them? Who?” I tried unsuccessfully to clarify. “Them …? Who …?”

“He left them free so they could be themselves and not a projection of Max Monroy …”

“Free? Who, Maestro? Who is it you’re talking about?” I insisted, calmly.

“Let my sons not repeat my life …”

“My sons? Who, please? Who?”

“Let them create their life and not be content with inheriting it. Let them never believe there is nothing left to do …”

The Mercedes stopped in front of the apartment building on Calle de Praga. A feeling of malaise, of uneasiness, together with a humiliating sensation of having been used, impelled me out of the car.

“Goodbye, Maestro …”

Sanginés got out too. I took out the key and opened the door. Sanginés followed me, disturbed and nervous. I began to climb the stairs up to the top floor. Sanginés followed warily, impatiently, with something resembling pain. I didn’t recognize him. I imagined his actions were driven by a duty perhaps not his own. Actions driven by someone else. Such was the nervous preoccupation of his behavior.

The stairway was dark. On my floor the light was not turned on. Everything was shadows and reflections of shadows, as if total darkness did not exist and our eyes, don’t they eventually become accustomed to the blackness, in the end denying its dominion?

“He didn’t want to leave them adrift in crime, like Miguel Aparecido,” Sanginés said urgently.

I didn’t reply. I began to walk up. He came behind me, like an unexpected ghost in need of the attention I denied him, perhaps because I feared what he was telling me now and could reveal to me
later. But there was no later, the lawyer wanted to talk now, he pursued me from step to step, he didn’t leave me alone, he wanted to snatch away my peace …

“They let Max Monroy into the asylum.”

“The asylum?” I managed to say without stopping, compelled to reach the sanctuary of my garret, astonished by the lack of logical continuity in a man who taught the theory of the state with the precision of a Kelsen.

“He maintained the asylum, he gave them money.”

“I understand.” In spite of everything, I wanted to be courteous.

“They let him in. They left him alone with the woman.”

“Who? With whom?”

“Sibila Sarmiento. Max Monroy.”

I was going to stop. The name halted my movements but hurried my thoughts. Sibila Sarmiento, Max Monroy’s young bride, locked away in the madhouse by the wickedness of Antigua Concepción.

“Miguel Aparecido’s mother …” I murmured.

Sanginés took my arm. I wanted to pull away. He didn’t let me.

“The mother of Jericó Monroy Sarmiento one year and of Josué Monroy Sarmiento the next.”

“HE’S
IN
A
safe place.” The phrase repeated by Sanginés and Asunta regarding Jericó’s destiny tormented me now. It referred to my brother. It brought up huge questions associated with memories of our first meeting at the Jalisco School, El Presbiterio … Was that encounter prepared beforehand too, wasn’t it simple chance that brought my brother and me together? To what extent had Max Monroy’s desire directed our lives? Beyond the monthly allowances each of us received without ever finding out where they came from. Who argues with good luck? Beyond the coincidences we didn’t want to question because we took them as a natural part of friendship. Through my memory passed all the acts of a fraternity that, I knew now, were spontaneous in us but watched over and sponsored by third parties. And this was a violation of our freedom. We had been used by Max Monroy’s feelings of guilt.

“Believe me, Josué, Max felt responsible for the destiny of
Miguel Aparecido, Miguel threatened him with death, Max knew the fault lay with Doña Concepción, he didn’t want to blame her, he wanted to make himself responsible, and the way to take on the obligation was to take charge of you and Jericó, making certain you wouldn’t lack necessities but that extravagance wouldn’t make you slack, this was his moral intuition: You should be free, make your own lives, not feel grateful to him …”

Sanginés said this to me in the stairwell.

“Did he intend to reveal the truth to us one day?” I became confused and was angry with Sanginés. “Or was he going to die without telling us anything?”

I regretted my words. When I said them I understood I had associated fraternally with Jericó, and I knew if Sanginés revealed Max’s secrets it was because Max had already exiled Jericó, as if he had tested us all our lives and only now Jericó’s gigantic, crucial mistake gave me primogeniture. Jericó—it was the sentence without reason or absolution—had been put in a safe place … What did it mean? My uneasiness, at that moment, was physical.

There was an anxious pulse similar to a heartbeat in Sanginés’s words. “Max allowed desire and luck to play freely in order to form destiny—”

“And necessity, Maestro? And damned necessity? Can there be desire or destiny without necessity?” I looked at him again without really making him out in the gloom, believing my words were now my only light.

“You didn’t lack for anything …”

“Don’t tell me that, please. I’m speaking of the necessity to know you are loved, needed, carnal, warm. Do you understand? Or don’t you understand anything anymore? God damn!”

“You didn’t lack for anything,” Sanginés insisted as if he would continue, to the last moment, fulfilling his administrative function, denying the emotions revealed by his avid, nervous, anxious figure, I don’t know, distant from what he was but also revealing what he was.

“And Jericó?” I stopped, photographed in front of myself like a being of lights and fugitive shadows.

“He’s in a safe place,” Sanginés repeated.

The phrase did not calm the vivid but painful memory of my fraternity with Jericó, the intense moments we had together, reading and discussing, assuming philosophical positions at the request of Father Filopáter. Jericó as Saint Augustine, I as Nietzsche, both led by the priest to the intelligence of Spinoza, transforming the will of God into the necessity of man. Were we, in the end, loyal to necessity in the name of will? Was this what my brother and I desired as a goal when we loved each other fraternally? Did our great rapport consist of this, associating necessity with will?

One scene after another passed through my mind. The two of us united at school. The two of us convinced not having a family was better than having a family like the Esparzas. We had signed a pact of comradeship. We felt the warm teenage satisfaction of discovering in friendship the best part of solitude. Together we made a plan for life that would bring us together forever.

“Maybe there will be, you know, separations, travel, broads. The important thing is to sign right now an alliance for the rest of our lives. Don’t say no …”

For the rest of our lives. I remember those afternoons in the café after school and the other side of the coin gleams opaquely. An alliance for the rest of our lives, a plan for life to keep us together forever. But on that occasion, hadn’t he proposed obligations all imposed by him? Do this, don’t do the other, turn down frivolous social invitations. And you’ll also despise “the herd of oxen.” But let’s also make a “selective, rigorous” plan for reading, for intellectual self-improvement.

That’s how it was, and now I’m grateful for the discipline he and I imposed on ourselves and deplore the docility with which I followed him in other matters. Though I congratulate myself because, when we lived out our destinies, he and I respected our secrets, as if part of the complicity of friendship included discretion about one’s private life. He didn’t find out about Lucha Zapata and Miguel Aparecido, or I knew nothing about Jericó’s life during his—how many were they?—years somewhere else. Europe, North America, the Border? Today I couldn’t say. Today I’ll never know if Jericó told
me the truth. Today I know nothing about Jericó’s identity except the blinding truth of my fraternal relationship with him. I couldn’t blame him for anything. I had hidden as much about myself as he did. The terrible thing was to think that, “put in a safe place,” Jericó would never be able to tell me what he didn’t know about himself, what, perhaps, he would dare tell me if he knew, as I did, that we were brothers.

Understanding this filled me with rancor but also with sorrow. Once, when he had returned to Mexico, I wondered if we could take up again the intimacy, the shared respiration joining us when we were young. Was all we had lived merely an unrepeatable prologue? I insisted on thinking our friendship was the only shelter for our future.

It was hard and painful for me to think our entire life had resolved into terms of betrayal.

And too, as if to soften the pain, the moments returned of a strange attraction that did not lead to the encounter of bodies because a tacit, equally strange prohibition stopped us at the brink of desire in the shower at school, in the whore’s bed, in our cohabitation in the garret on Praga …

Had friendship stopped at the border of a physical relationship subject to all the accidents of passion, jealousy, misunderstanding, and attribution of unproven intentions that torment yet attract lovers? In mysterious ways, the desire felt under the shower or in the brothel was subject to this mysterious prohibition, as strong as the desire itself. A desire that, seen from a distance, is the first passion, the passion for cohabitation and contiguity, while the incestuous desire is confused with these virtues and therefore prohibited with a strength that can deny fraternity itself …

What could we do then, he and I, except feel like forbidden gods? We had the permanent possibility of violating the commandment regarding a prohibition only the gods can transgress against without sin. Who prevented us? How easy it would be for me today, after everything that has happened, to imagine it was the “call of the blood” holding us back. The feeling in the deepest part of ourselves that we were brothers without ever knowing it … Or perhaps he
and I had no reason to turn to incest, since incest between siblings is a rebellion against the parents (says Sigmund from the couch) and we did not have father or mother.

The truth, I tell myself now, is that time and circumstances moved us away from all temptation: When Jericó returned from his absence (Europe? the United States? the Border?), facts themselves gradually divided us, doubts began to appear, perhaps Jericó’s Naples wasn’t Naples, Italy, but Naples, Florida, and his Paris was in Texas … Elective affinities emerged first with cordiality, then with growing antagonism in our workplaces, in my slow apprenticeship in the Utopia tower while he ascended rapidly in the Palace of La Topía. I was an open book. Jericó was a message in code. Perhaps this was what I wanted. Wasn’t my life a secret to everyone except me, and if it no longer was it’s because now I’m telling and writing it. Perhaps Jericó, like me, is the author of a secret book like mine, the book I knew nothing about as he knew nothing of mine. The sum of secrets, however, did not abolish the remainder of evidence. Jericó had wielded a real influence on presidential power. He had felt authorized to go beyond the power granted him to the power he wanted to grant himself. He made a mistake. He thought he would deceive power but power deceived him. And when he found out about it, my poor friend, cornered by the reality his illusions disdained, the only recourse he found to save his personality was to fall in love with Asunta … He wanted to defeat me in the final territory of triumph, which is love. And even there, Asunta handed me the victory. She defeated Jericó by telling him she was my lover.

Why did she lie? What caused her to give the coup de grâce to the large animal, the living, palpitating thing beyond all logic, the carnal and cruel, aflame and affectionate thing that is friendship between two men? Two men who are brothers though they don’t know it and move into fierce enmity perversely incited by Asunta Jordán: For the first time, my brother Jericó desired a woman and that woman, in order to humiliate and paralyze Jericó, declared she was my lover, awarding me a sexual laurel I did not deserve. Asunta presented to her Jehovah, Max Monroy, Abel-Josué’s harvest and Cain-Jericó’s, and since the terrestrial God preferred mine to his, Jericó
the fratricide was prepared to kill me. I believe now the failure of his political insurrection, the way in which he deceived himself about the desire and the number of his followers, was identical to his blindness: Jericó could not distinguish between the reality of reality and the fiction of reality. Now I understand, finally, that this, the fiction, was imposed on reality because it came closest to my brother’s fratricidal desire: His war perhaps was not against the world but against me. A latent war that had gone on forever, put off perhaps because Jericó’s personality was stronger than mine, his triumphs more apparent, his capacity for intrigue greater, his alliance with the secret more covert: personality, success, imagination, mystery.