Destiny and Desire (52 page)

These were my brother’s weapons, except he couldn’t use them against me because … Why? Now as I enter San Juan de Aragón Prison thanks, once more, to the good offices of Licenciado Antonio Sanginés, now as I pass the cells from which they look at me like caged animals: the Cuban mulatto Siboney Peralta, the thieves Gomas and Brillantinas, the Mariachi, and Sara P., all of them behind bars, I look down, toward the swimming pool of imprisoned children, deficient Merlín with the shaved head, and Albertina who was a boy who was a girl, and the eloquent Ceferino guilty of being abandoned, and Chuchita looking at her tears in the mirror, and the girl Isaura dreaming about a volcano, and Félix the very sad happy boy, and right there Jericó and Josué passed like phantoms, and now I ask myself why, if we were so fraternal, so protected after all, so far from the ruined destinies of these children of Aragón, why weren’t we Félix and Ceferino and Merlín, abandoned children, helpless like our brother Miguel Aparecido? In this strange prison counterpoint, the figure of Asunta Jordán abruptly appears in my head like a sudden revelation. Asunta, Asunta, she prevented the repetition of the biblical verdict and at the same time guaranteed it. Jericó, once Castor, did not kill me, his brother Pollux, because this time Cain did not kill Abel, I found out now, just today, thanks to her, thanks to the woman, thanks to Asunta Jordán who deflected the destiny of the deadly, ancient story: Jericó did not destroy Josué, Cain did not kill Abel thanks to the woman, the seer, the priestess, the enchantress emerged from a desert on the border between life and
death, rescued from mediocre obscurity by a man who recognized in her, by simply taking her by the waist during a provincial dance, an earthly strength, the power that he, subject to the voracious whims of his mother, did not have: Would she, the woman desired, admired, feared, censured by me, be the author of my salvation? She condemned my enemy brother. She, on the pretext of saving him from Carrera’s revenge, took him to the mansion of Utopia and exhibited him there to me, degraded him in my presence, in my presence put him naked on all fours and took away from him the fratricidal destiny of killing me on the pretext of jealousy …

Pre-text. Ah, then what will be the text?

IF
I
SEND
you someone, Miguel Aparecido, tell, talk, don’t leave him unfed. Remember.

He was the same. But different. The blue-black eyes flecked with yellow. A violent gaze tempered by melancholy. A sadness that rejected compassion. Very heavy eyebrows. A dark scowl and eyes flashing light. A virile face, square-jawed, carefully shaved. Light olive skin. An inquisitive nose, straight and thin. Graying hair, combed forward, curly in the back.

He was the same. But he was my brother.

Did he know? For how long? Did he not know? Why?

He shook hands in the Roman style, clasping my forearm and showing me once again a naked power that ran from his hand to his shoulder.

“Twenty years.”

“Why?”

“Ask him.”

How could I demand a reply to something that went beyond us and defined us? Children of the same father and mother. I saw Miguel Aparecido’s face, immobile and defiant. I was troubled by the image of our father Max Monroy and his abominable droit de seigneur in the asylum. I imagined him at night, or by day, what difference did it make, going to the asylum to visit our mother Sibila Sarmiento. She was locked away. I don’t know if she looked forward
to Monroy’s arrival as a possible salvation or as a confirmation of her sentence. Perhaps she knew only that this man, father of her three children, desired her with fury, stripped her without asking permission, gave in to the passion she inspired in him and that both of them, Max and Sibila, shared, she because even though in the fleeting moments of Max’s visits, she felt loved and needed, free to see herself naked with pleasure, overcome by the passion of the man who tore at her hair and kissed her mouth and excited her nipples and caressed her pubis, clitoris, and buttocks with an irresistible force that freed her from this prison to which her own lover had condemned her, because Sibila Sarmiento was pleasure when captive and danger when free. And Max Monroy loving Sibila physically, freely, and not by order of his tyrannical mother, had no other way to take his revenge—with no filial unease—on damned Concepción.

Miguel Aparecido’s tiger-eyes told me he understood. He asked me to accept that Sibila our mother won the love of Max our father. This was enough compensation for her imprisonment in the hospital. She could receive Max’s love and be satisfied, almost grateful because she had the love of the world without its pitfalls. Eventually, receiving Max and making love to him was the same as being free without the dangers of life, the city, the world, which surrounded her like a gigantic threat dissipated only by the man’s visits and then by successive months of waiting: the birth of a son, and much later another, and soon after that a third, and all at the same time.

Miguel Aparecido. Jericó. Josué.

The Immaculate Conception descended on Sibila Sarmiento’s womb intermittently, unpredictably. For her—I imagine now—the instant was eternal, everything happened at the same time, there was no real time between the visits of the man who deflowered her at the age of twelve and the man who impregnated her after that, then again, and then a third time: I believe for her everything happened at the same moment, the act of love was always the same, the pregnancy a single one, the child the only one, not Miguel, not Jericó, not Josué, a single child being born forever, prepared to leave
the enclosure, the prison, the asylum, the womb, in the name of Sibila Sarmiento. Born in a cell, and therefore worthy of freedom. Born in misery and therefore destined for good fortune. Engendered in impotence and therefore heirs to power.

My brother Miguel gave me his arm in the Roman fashion and did not have to say anything. The fraternal pact was sealed. Pain was another name for memory. We looked at each other with depth in our eyes. What we had to say about the past had been said. It was time for us to speak about the future. The syntony, in this regard, was total.

There were a few minutes of silence.

We looked in each other’s eyes.

Discord did not take long to break out.

He said he felt content that Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney Peralta, and the whole damn troop who accompanied Sara P. and the Mariachi Maximiliano Batalla in their catastrophic attempt at rebellion were back in prison.

I told him I had seen them in passing, behind bars, as I came to see him now.

“Well, take a good look at them, my brother, because you won’t be seeing them again.”

He looked at me in a way that meant I couldn’t avoid the cold at my back. At that moment I knew the gang of Sara P. and the Mariachi wouldn’t leave jail except feetfirst.

“And Jericó?” I dared to say, abruptly.

“They were his people,” replied Miguel Aparecido. “He got them out of prison from the office of the presidency. He organized them. They were his people.”

He looked at me with those blue-black eyes I’ve mentioned, and the yellow flecks acquired their own life of never-satisfied intelligence.

“He didn’t calculate. He didn’t realize. He had a half-baked idea that if a vanguard acts, the masses will follow. He was wrong. He believed that by penetrating as he did the offices of power, he himself could rise to power. Very smart, sure … It’s your ass, Barrabás!”

I said it was an old sickness to believe power is contagious … 
He didn’t realize that power doesn’t commit hara-kiri. Power protects itself.

“Understand what the public meeting of President Carrera and the magnate Monroy in Chapultepec meant,” Sanginés had said to me. “Neither went to see the other for pleasure. They’re rivals. But each understands that the other has his own dynamite factory, and dynamite factories have to be placed at a distance so they don’t blow one another up. Each part—Carrera, Monroy, power, business—has a kind of veto over the other. They join together when they feel threatened by a third exogenous force, a stranger to the inbreeding of power. Power originates in power, not outside it, just as a cell forms inside another. This is what Jericó didn’t understand. He believed he could head a popular force that would carry him to the top. He didn’t understand that the movement of the people, when it occurs, is necessary, not artificial, not a product of a messianic desire.”

“Revolutions also create elites,” I noted.

“Or elites head them.”

“Though they also erupt from the people.”

“Yes,” Sanginés acknowledged. “The ruling classes have to be renewed in order not to be annihilated. They can do it peacefully, as has occurred in Mexico. They can do it violently, as has also occurred in Mexico. The revolutionary knows when he can and when he cannot. His political talent consists in that: when to and when not to.”

“If all of you knew that, I mean, Carrera as well as Monroy, why didn’t you let Jericó fade away all by himself with no followers except this gang of hoodlums imprisoned here? Why?”

Sanginés replied with the wisest of his smiles, the one I remembered from his classes at the law school, far from the awful grimace that deformed his spirit when he followed me in the darkness up the staircase on Praga. The smile I admired.

“I have confidence in both houses, the house of political power and that of entrepreneurial power,” he continued.

He closed his eyes blissfully. I already knew that.

“And do you know why they trust me?”

I didn’t want to answer with some offensive joke.

“No.”

“Because they know I possess all the information and don’t trouble anyone with what I know.”

“And what’s that?” I wasn’t pretending innocence: I was innocent.

He said in Mexico, in each Latin American country, rebellions are being forged day and night, in the hope of marking an
until here
and a
from now on
as, let’s say, Bolívar or Castro did. He said he wouldn’t go into the reasons why it was difficult for revolutions “like the ones in the old days” to occur again. Present-day power is more sophisticated, better informed, societies have higher expectations, the left is familiar with electoral routes, but the right will have to have its innate voraciousness limited from time to time by a little fear.

“It seemed to me, Josué, that Jericó’s little adventure, so secondary, so minimal, so directed toward failure, ultimately so lacking in danger, offered me the opportunity to alert power without undue cost and give the right a shock. And in passing, to deflate the grotesque vision the extremely ambitious Jericó had acquired of himself.”

Sanginés’s smile was very offensive.

“He read Malaparte and Lenin. He felt like a little local Mussolini. Poor kid!”

“But in reality there was no danger,” I insisted, moved, in spite of myself, by a feeling for Jericó that went beyond fraternity and simply called itself friendship.

Sanginés knew how to disguise his smiles. “Exactly. Because there wasn’t, we could pretend there was.”

“I don’t understand, damn it.”

Sanginés didn’t celebrate his small logical triumph. “The greatest threats are fought in secret. The lesser ones should be denounced as a warning to the greater ones that we know what they want and control what they do. And to let the public know they are, at the same time, both threatened and safe.”

I looked at Sanginés with unaccustomed fury.

“He’s my brother, Maestro, he’s worthy of a little respect—some compassion—a—”

Sanginés continued as if he had heard nothing.

“Carrera and Monroy may be rivals, but they won’t be each other’s victims. Stopping Jericó is effective proof of this. At the moment of danger, the two powers unite.”

“He’s my brother,” I insisted.

And he was Monroy’s son.

Sanginés looked at me with burning coldness.

“He was Cain.”

Was Cain our brother? I wanted to ask Miguel Aparecido in the cell in Aragón and didn’t dare. There was a prohibition in his blue-black gaze. If Jericó was Cain, he and I were not Abel.

“Was he Cain?” I insisted to Sanginés.

“He was your brother,” the lawyer Sanginés agreed with salutary cruelty, telling me there was no better example than this to teach a probative lesson regarding the futility of rebellion and the cowardice of a response without balls. The winners were the Statesman and the Entrepreneur, like that, capitalized.

Cain and Abel.

I read this with vast, indescribable clarity in the gaze of my brother Miguel. We were not Abel. We hadn’t saved ourselves skillfully from either the curse or the good fortune. We had assumed, without fully realizing it, the responsibility of caring for our brother. Wasn’t Jericó our brother?

“He was Cain,” said Miguel Aparecido.

I didn’t have to ask for explanations. I remembered the curse Jericó had hurled at me from Asunta’s bed, with a murderous look and a disdain revealed by the mask of hatred. Jericó naked on all fours, a captured animal, threatening me—I’m going to kill you, fucking cocksucker—slavering, frustrated. The concentrated hatred of my brother Cain. And my painful doubt: Had the hatred he showed me the last time always been inside Jericó? Did he “patronize” me when we were young, look down on me, despise my independence and my supposed sexual triumph with Asunta?

Was this the end of the story? No. I didn’t know what had happened
to Jericó. The question ate through my entire body like a restless acid concentrating in my heart only to flee my soul and remind me, my soul, that it was captive in a body.

I knew Miguel Aparecido’s response before he gave it. It seemed to be the answer agreed on by all of them, by Sanginés, by Asunta, by Miguel.

“Where is Jericó? What has happened to Jericó?”

“He’s been put in a safe place,” Miguel Aparecido replied.

In spite of this definitive statement, I knew the story would never end.

I wanted to assuage my own fears by saying: Just like Sara and the Mariachi and Gomas and Siboney? Put in a safe place? All of them imprisoned? All of them at peace?

Then Miguel Aparecido looked at me with a strange mixture of contempt and compassion.