Destiny and Desire (53 page)

IN
SPITE
OF
this categorical statement, I knew the story never ended.

“The worst one of all is walking around free,” said Miguel Aparecido, and I didn’t want to put a name to anyone I knew, because my spirit could not tolerate more guilt, more shame, more capitulation.

“Who?” I said in haste. “Everything’s in—”

He cut me off with a forgotten name: Jenaro Ruvalcaba.

With an effort the scoundrel I met once during my first visits to the San Juan de Aragón Prison returned to my memory. Licenciado Jenaro Ruvalcaba was a criminal lawyer of scant renown. He received me courteously in his cell. He was agile and blond, about forty years old. He told me the prison population consisted of complaining, stupid people who didn’t know what to do with freedom.

“And how do you manage?”

“I accept what prison gives me.” He shrugged and proceeded to a reasonable analysis of how to behave in prison: Don’t accept visitors who came out of obligation, doubt the fidelity of the conjugal visit …

“Both will betray you,” he shouted suddenly.

“Who?”

“Your wife and her lover.” He stood and put his hands to his head. “Traitors!”

He closed his eyes, pulled at his ears, and attacked me with his fists before the guard hit him with his club on the back of the neck and Ruvalcaba fell, weeping, on the cot.

“He’s free?” I said to Miguel without hiding my terror, for this attorney was a proven menace.

“He’ll never be free,” remarked Miguel Aparecido. “He’s the prisoner of himself.”

Then he told me the following story.

Ruvalcaba did not lack talent. He was shaped by misfortune. A criminal gang kidnapped his father, his mother. They killed his father. They let her go, so she would suffer. The mother was a brave woman, and instead of sitting down to cry, she decided to educate her son Jenaro and give him a career as a criminal attorney so he would defend society against criminals like those who killed his father. Jenaro studied law and became a penologist. Except as he was preparing to defend the law he wanted to be a martyr to the law. He felt equal admiration and revulsion for both his father and those who killed him.

“The old prick, how could he let himself be kidnapped and murdered by that gang …? Fuck me …

“My father was a brave man who let himself be killed so my mother could go free … Fuck me …”

And so between admiration and contempt the divided, schizoid character of Jenaro Ruvalcaba was formed, at once defender and violater of the law: a poisoned fruit constantly fragmenting into inimical pieces.

Miguel said to make a long story short, a division was created in Ruvalcaba’s mind between the forbidden and the permitted, which eventually resolved into a situation worthy of farce. Ruvalcaba sublimated his psychological schism by molesting women. His vice consisted in boarding public transport—the Metro, buses, collective taxis—and harassing women. Don’t ask me why he found in this activity the reconcilation of his contrary tendencies. The fact is his maniacal pleasure was to take the Metro or the bus and first look at
women with an intensity that was troubling because more than anything else, it was intrusive. He leaned against the female passengers. He recriminated them if they gave him dirty looks. He put his hands on their hips. He pawed their buttocks. He went straight to the nipple with his fingers. At times it was furtive, at times aggressive. If they reproached him or complained about him, Ruvalcaba would say: “She’s an old flirt. She led me on. I’m a criminal lawyer. I know about these things. Old women in heat! Frustrated old women! Let’s see if anybody will do them a favor!”

Ruvalcaba derived supplementary delight when the women began to defend themselves. Some stuck him with pins, others with hairpins. A few had rings with a cutting edge. All of this excited Ruvalcaba: He saw it as a counterpart to his own actions, a recognition of his own audacity, an involuntary conspiracy between victim and aggressor. The women liked to have their buttocks touched, their pubis rubbed, their breasts caressed. They were his accomplices. His accomplices, he would repeat, excited, my accomplices.

“That was the reason,” Miguel continued, “for his astonishment at the inauguration of what was called ‘pink transport’ only for women. The sign ‘Ladies Only’ excited him in the extreme. Ruvalcaba disguised himself as a woman in order to ride on the Metro with impunity, causing a phenomenal disturbance when, made up and in a blond wig, he put his hand on a fat passenger and a commotion began that led to a free-for-all, a brawl that ended at the Metro stop and the collective turning over of Jenaro Ruvalcaba to the police.”

As the scoundrel was an attorney, he convinced the judge that his disguise had as its object to make certain the law was fully complied with and that women, if threatened, were capable of defending themselves. The judge, because of machista prejudice, pardoned Ruvalcaba, but, feeling like a magistrate in a Cantinflas movie as guided by a play of Lope’s, he ordered him exiled to the western part of the country, where the indiscreet and duplicitous Ruvalcaba lost no time in establishing an association with the owner of an avocado plantation, a front for a drug trafficking operation presided over by
Don Avocado himself, who was delighted to count on a shyster as skilled in deceptions as Lic. Jenaro.

From the plantation in Michoacán, Ruvalcaba performed great services for Don Avocado by supervising drug shipments, money laundering, loans, investments in transport, and the constant reconstruction of the plantation so it would continue to be viewed as an emporium of avocado trees and not a rat’s market. Ruvalcaba took care of everything for Don Avocado: buying protection, relationships with Gringo buyers, the loading and unloading of high-speed launches, the acquisition of magnum revolvers and AR-15 assault rifles. He learned to kill. He shot numerous rivals of the drug dealer and developed a special liking for cutting off their heads after killing them.

He did everything until Don Avocado told him things were turning ugly since in this business there were plenty of snitches and especially assholes who wanted to rise at the expense of the powerful man in charge, you know, get out of my way and let me in …

“The upshot, my dear Jenarito, is that they have more on us than an old whore’s fart, and if we want to continue in this business our only choice is to change our face, I mean, put a knife to our puss, I mean, the plastic surgeon is waiting for us.”

“You change your face, Don Avocado, you’re uglier than a fasting motherfucker, and don’t mess with my movie-star profile. What would my dear mama say, God rest her soul?”

With these words Jenaro Ruvalcaba fled Michoacán and came back to Mexico City, where his deferred vice—putting his hand on women in Metro cars and buses—flourished in the most dangerous routine of collecting fares from and pinching women in collective taxis, counting at times on the complicity of the driver, at times running the risk that the driver would put him off because of his riders’ protests, searching for farcical ways out disguised as a woman or a boy sailor from whose short pants charms peeked out that were hardly a child’s.

Until the vengeance of Don Avocado extended from Michoacán to D.F. and, denounced as a murderer, a trafficker, and worst of all,
a transvestite and pedophile, Jenaro Ruvalcaba ended up in the Aragón prison.

“Where I met him,” I said with troubled innocence.

“And which he left thanks to the imprudence of our … Jericó,” Miguel Aparecido said with a certain uneasiness, for he had not resigned himself to sharing fraternity with either Jericó or me. It was as if his singularity as the son of Max Monroy had been in some way violated by the truth, and although he had esteemed me earlier, he was not inclined to extend his affection to a man who like Jericó did not need (it was the tombstone Miguel Aparecido erected for him) to be a glutton of his own ego.

“You and I, on the other hand”—he embraced me—“we’ll eat from the same plate.”

And he pulled away from me.

“Take care, brother. Take care. Not everybody’s in a safe place.”

HOW
LONG
SINCE
I had eaten at the home of Don Antonio Sanginés?

Now as I return to the mansion in Coyoacán, I’m doing so, of course, at my teacher’s invitation and with the clear awareness that this time my brother Jericó would not be there and had not been invited. I didn’t have the courage to ask about him. I knew the answer formulated ahead of time and transformed into a slogan:

“In a safe place …”

The ambiguity of the expression troubled me. It meant precaution and care: a verbal “alert” that referred to being secure or watched over. The disturbing thing about the words was their not saying clearly if someone “put in a safe place” was secure, yes, taken care of, that too, locked in, perhaps, cared for, perhaps, by whom? to what end? With an involuntary shudder I imagined my old friend, recent enemy, and everlasting brother Jericó Monroy Sarmiento handed over to the perfect custody of death, the security of the sepulchre, the precaution of eternity.

If this was what brought me back to Sanginés’s colonial house filled with books, ornaments, and antique furniture, he did not seem ready to fall into the repetition—exceedingly banal—of “in a
safe place.” Soon the reason for his companionship appeared, and when I arrived, Sanginés led me to the breakfast area decorated in Pueblan tiles and came right to the point, saying, “The dream has ended.”

The question surrounding my life authorized him to go on. The seventy years of moderate dictatorship in Mexico, beginning in 1930, had assured economic and social growth without democracy, but with security. Sanginés welcomed democracy. He lamented the lack of security because it identified democracy with crime …

He looked at me with a strange dreaminess that spoke clearly of Sanginés’s decades of service as a professor of law, court adviser to presidents of the republic, member of the boards of directors of Monroy’s private enterprises. An entire career based on judicious opinion and opportune warning, on objective counsel and advice, with no interest other than the reconciliation of public and private concerns on behalf of the nation.

He didn’t need to say it. I knew it. His eyes communicated it to me. But the sour expression on his face not only gave the lie to all I’ve just said: It misdirected, disputed, and desired it in spite of regrets. In spite of what could be viewed as accommodation, opportunism, flattery, the counselor’s vices stopped at the shore of the courtier to take on, in short, the adviser’s virtues of objective intelligence and reason indispensable to the good governance of the individual and the state, business and society. There was nothing to apologize for. If I didn’t know the rules of the game, it was time I learned them. If I didn’t want to learn them, I’d be left out in the cold, adrift. I thought of Sanginés imploring, uncharacteristically pleading for comprehension of Monroy in the stairwell on Praga. This supper at his house, I understood immediately, erased that scene on the stairs. As if it hadn’t occurred.

I understood all this because Sanginés communicated it to me indirectly, by means of expressions, qualities, and solicitations that undoubtedly summarized the long journey we had taken together, converging at a point in his long life and my short one.

I grew up, he said, in a society in which society was protected by official corruption. Today, he continued categorically but with a
trace of both criticism and resignation, society is protected by criminals. The history of Mexico is a long process of leaving behind anarchy and dictatorship and reaching a democratic authoritarianism … He asked me, after a pause, to forgive the apparent contradiction: not so great if we appreciated the freedom of artists and writers to savagely criticize its revolutionary governments. Diego Rivera, right in the National Palace, describes a history presided over by political hierarchs and corrupt, lying clerics. Orozco uses the walls of the Supreme Court to paint a justice that laughs at the law from the gaudily painted mouth of a whore. Azuela, in the middle of the revolutionary struggle, writes a novel about the revolution as a stone rolling down an abyss, bare of ideology or purpose. Guzmán tells of a revolution in power interested only in power, not in revolution: They all order one another murdered in order to continue in the presidency, the great cow that gives milk, dulce de leche, cheese, a variety of butters, and security without democracy: a comforting lowing.

“Today, Josué, the great drama of Mexico is that crime has replaced the state. Today the state dismantled by democracy cedes its power to crime supported by democracy.”

Perhaps I knew this, to a point. I had never admitted it with Sanginés’s painful clarity.

“Just yesterday,” Sanginés continued, “a highway in the state of Guerrero was blocked by uniformed criminals. Were they fake police? Or simply real police dedicated to crime? What happened on that highway happens everywhere. The drivers of the blocked buses and cars were brutally interrogated and pistol-whipped. The travelers were obliged to get out. Their cellphones were thrown onto a garbage pile. Among the travelers were individuals working for the criminals. Confusion reigned. It turns out some police believed in good faith they were intercepting narcotics and counterfeit money. They were soon disabused of that idea by their superiors and urged to join the criminal gang or be stripped and stranded there as imbeciles and assholes.

“Inexperienced police. Corrupt police. To whom do you turn?”

The prisons are full. There’s no more room, he said, for the criminals.

“You saw San Juan de Aragón Prison. An agreement was reached there between jailhouse sadism and the minimal order guaranteed by Miguel Aparecido. That isn’t the rule, Josué. The prisons in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Peru can’t hold more criminals. They’re released right away so new malefactors can come in. It’s a never-ending story. Recidivist offenders. Detentions without a trial. Defense made impossible. Badly paid attorneys incapable of defending the innocent. Judges paralyzed by fear. Improvised judges. Courts incapable of functioning. False testimonies. No consistency. No consistency …” the lawyer lamented and almost exclaimed: “How long do you think Latin American democracy will last under these circumstances? How long will it take for the dictatorships to return, applauded by the people?”