Destiny and Desire (56 page)

I say all the preceding so the reader can know my good—magnificent—intentions when I withdrew to Acapulco loaded down with Machiavellian literature and with a touch of melancholy, an inevitable residue of my recent personal history, not imagining that the true Machiavellianism wasn’t in my knapsack but waiting for me in the house at La Quebrada, which you reached by ascending the mountainous curves over the bay until you reached a rocky height and entered a mansion that rushed, with no distinction of style beyond
a vague “Californian” from the 1930s, past the kitchens, bedrooms, and sitting rooms to the reward of a huge terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean and, farther down, the narrow private beach. In its entirety, it was like one of those white porcelain dinner pails my guardian María Egipciaca prepared for me with five little stacked plates, from wet soup to dry soup to chicken to vegetables to dessert … the works.

“Max Monroy built it for Sibila Sarmiento,” Asunta Jordán told me surprisingly when I reached the terrace and she came toward me, highball in hand, barefoot, dressed in palazzo pajamas I knew from rooting through her closet. Loose blouse. Wide pants. Black with gold trim and edges.

She offered me the drink. I feigned casualness. She didn’t tell me too much. It wasn’t the first surprise this woman had given me. She looked at the ocean.

“But Sibila Sarmiento never got to live in it. Well, in fact, she didn’t even get to see it …”

She saw me. She didn’t look at me. She saw me there: like a thing. A necessary but awkward thing.

Asunta laughed in her fashion: “Max had illusions that one day he’d be able to bring the mother of his three sons here, to Acapulco, and offer her a quiet life by the ocean. Well. What a hope!”

Her gaze became cynical.

One more of Max’s illusions. He imagined that one day Doña Concha would free him from the maternal dictatorship to which she kept him subjected.

“A man at once complicated and simple,” she went on, “it’s difficult for Max Monroy to digest. Everything takes him time. He never belches, you know? There are things he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want … And another thing. Between utility and revenge, he always chooses the useful.”

She raised her glass. She almost winked at me.

“I’m just the opposite …”

She laughed. “Then he strikes like a bolt of lightning.”

She indicated that I should sit in a wicker chair. I remained
standing. At least in this I could rebel against what I felt was the implicit dictatorship of Asunta Jordán. She didn’t care.

“Max Monroy!” she exclaimed as if she were invoking the sunset. “A civilized man, right? A reasonable man, don’t you think? He always asks for suggestions. He’s open to suggestions. Ah, but not to criticism. Suggesting is one thing. Criticizing is another. Criticizing him means thinking he can’t think for himself, that he requires orientation, another’s opinion … False. The suggestions should stop halfway between two hateful extremes, Josué, my good Josué: flattery and criticism.”

She told me she would criticize, for example, this useless, uninhabited house … a mansion for a ghost, for a madwoman. Or for a ghostly madwoman.

She smiled. “Imagine Sibila Sarmiento wandering here, not knowing where she is, not even looking at the ocean, distant from the moon and the sun, prisoner of nothingness or of a hope as crazy as she is. The hope Max will return and rescue her from the asylum. Or at least make her another son. Another heir!

“Thank me, Josué … I flew here to prepare the house for you so you’ll be comfortable. It was sealed tight, as if with a cork. And in this heat? Air it all out, dust off the furniture, smooth out the sheets, put out towels and soap, just look, everything to receive you as you deserve …”

Who knows what she imagined in my gaze that obliged her to say: “Don’t worry. All the servants have gone. We’re alone. All, all alone.”

She caressed my cheek. I didn’t move.

She said not everything was ready.

“Look. The pool is empty and full of leaves and trash. There’s an air of abandon in spite of all my efforts. The grass is uncut. The palm trees are gray. And Max always said things like ‘I want to be buried here.’ How curious, don’t you think? To be buried in a place he never visited …”

“Nobody looks forward to the cemetery,” I dared to say.

“How true!” the voice declared. “Didn’t I always tell you? You’re smart, you asshole Josué, you’re really smart, good and smart.”

And she threw the contents of the whiskey glass at my chest.

“Just don’t get too smart.”

I maintained my calm. I didn’t even raise my hand to my chest. I looked, distracted, at the setting sun. She resumed the air of a tropical hostess.

“I don’t want neighbors,” Max had said.

She made a panoramic gesture.

“And he did it, Josué. There’s nobody here. Only a high mountain and the open sea.”

“And a beach down there,” I added, not to leave anything out, and I sensed Asunta becoming uncomfortable.

“Don’t expect anyone to stop there,” she said in a rude tone.

I tried to be frivolous. “Your company’s enough for me, Asunta. That’s all I ask.”

The shirt stuck to my chest.

“You can have champagne for breakfast,” she said in a tone between diversion and menace. “In any case,” she sighed and turned her back on the sea, “enjoy the luxury. And think of just one thing. Luxury is acquiring what you don’t need. On the other hand, you need your life … Right?”

She laughed. Her soul was being laid bare, little by little. Not all at once, because I had been observing her since I first met her, disdainful and absent, walking through cocktail parties with her cellphone glued to her ear, imposing silence, not entering into conversation with anyone. I had to understand her as she was and for what she was. An attentive woman and for that reason dangerous. Because extreme attention can unleash violent, unexpected reactions: It’s the price of being aware, of being overly aware.

If, like an adolescent, I fell in love one day with this woman and her visible attributes, if she ever had them, she had been losing them gradually until she played the sinister game of presenting herself as my lover to Jericó and driving my brother mad with the first great passion of his strange life of austerity without purpose, lust without enthusiasm, a lover without love. I knew Asunta’s malice exceeded both my capacity for loving and Jericó’s icy ambition. We
were, in some way, pawns in a vast chess game that led to the solution, apparently ritualized, of “putting in a safe place.”

“And Jericó?” I insisted. “In a safe place as well?”

“We don’t speak of that.”

“In a safe place? What? How? Isn’t anybody going to tell me?”

“I can show you.”

“What? Not in …?”

“What it is to be put in a safe place? Wait just a little …”

“And what it is to go to bed with Max, like you?”

“What do you know—”

“I heard you.”

“Did you see us?”

“It was very dark. Don’t fuck around.”

“Black. It was black, you spying bastard!”

“Go on, don’t play around, answer me.”

“Don’t be a snoop, I’m telling you. Big nose!”

“All that not to go back to the hellhole in the desert, Asunta, the town in the north where you were nobody and put up with a macho, presumptuous, hateful husband? All that out of gratitude to the man who took you away from there and put you on your little peak of business and influence …?”

“I would have left there with or without him,” Asunta said, her face extremely tense.

“I don’t doubt it. You have a lot of guts.”

“I have smarts. I have a very clever brain. But Max was a stroke of luck that came to me. There would have been other opportunities.”

“How can you trust in chance?”

“Necessity, not luck. I would have found the means to escape.”

Mistress of the game? Even of the great Max Monroy? These questions teemed in my mind during this twilight facing the Mexican Pacific.

As if she had read my thoughts, she exclaimed: “Nobody blessed me. Nobody chose me. I made myself on my own. I think—”

“You’re the creation of Max Monroy,” I said, taking her by surprise.

“Nobody blessed me. I made myself on my own!” She grew angry.

“I can see you now, abandoned in Torreón without Max Monroy, damn dissatisfied provincial …”

I don’t know if this defense of my father came from some corner of my soul, though I realized Asunta would come at me and scratch my eyes out … I restrained her. I lowered her arms. I obliged her to leave them hanging by her hips. I kissed her with some passion, some disdain; in any case, an uncontrollable mixture of my own feelings, which may not have been very different from the emotion any man can feel if he is embracing a beautiful woman, no matter how much of an enemy she may be, no matter how …

For a moment I suspended my reason and liberated my senses. We all have a heart that doesn’t reason, and I didn’t care that Asunta didn’t respond to my omnivorous kisses, that her arms didn’t embrace me, that I forgot myself before repenting of my actions, before thinking she was responsible and that in this entire situation—I felt this as I was chewing the lipstick on her lips—we had all been concealing the most secret secret of our souls …

Because a personal emotion let loose like an animal, even though it isn’t returned, can abolish for an instant the customary hierarchies of love, power, and beauty. Why did Asunta let herself be kissed and groped without responding but allowing me to continue?

I moved her away, imagining she would say something. She said it.

“I have the bad habit of being admired,” she informed me with a cynical, even happy air of self-sufficiency. “It’s useful …”

“Sure. The bad thing is your appearance doesn’t manage to disguise your real desires. I believe—”

“What are they?” She stopped me. “What are they? my desires?”

“Serving Max Monroy and being independent of Max Monroy. Impossible.” I affirmed my own intelligence in the matter, I defended it as if it had been cornered.

“Max protects me from myself,” was her reply. “He saves me from bad luck. From my bad luck, you’re right, the misfortune of my previous life …”

“There are people who are like screens for other people. You’re Max’s screen. You don’t exist.” I spat the words at her with a kind of frivolous rage, as if wanting to bring the scene to an end, get away, conclude the farce, pick up my suitcase and my books and get away forever from the spider’s web woven by Asunta around a man, Max Monroy, who had been revealed as my father and, I told myself confusedly, whom I ought to honor, know and honor, get close to instead of Machiavelli, damn it, what was I thinking of? I thanked her, Asunta Jordán, for shaking me, taking me out of the vast juvenile illusion that I could go on with my life as if nothing had happened, write my thesis, graduate … And then, and then?

I got out of this illusion by telling myself duty is independent of desire. Bad luck. But that’s the way it is.

Who knows what Asunta read in my gaze. I saw her with a background of sudden madness.

“You’re too intelligent to be loved,” I told her as a logical consequence of my own thoughts. “What does Max Monroy think of that?”

She began to speak with unusual nervousness, as if the answers to my question were, all at the same time, an invocation to the sun to disappear immediately and leave us in the most profound darkness, yes, though they were also disconnected phrases, disguised words I had forgotten because eventually Asunta returned to her implacable, affirmative logic.

The madwoman Sarmiento was locked away forever in the asylum, she said, and the end of the day resonated in her voice.

Your brother Jericó has been put in a safe place, she said, and an armada of dark clouds announced the coming night.

Your brother Miguel Aparecido languishes in an Aragón cell and won’t come out because he’s afraid of killing his father Max Monroy.

“And Max Monroy, what about him?”

“I’ve already told you there are things Max Monroy doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know he’s going to die. Sanginés has prepared a will for him in which the heirs are Sibila Sarmiento, Miguel Aparecido, Jericó Monroy Sarmiento, and Josué Monroy Sarmiento …”

“And you, Asunta?” I asked without too much premeditation.

“I’m at the tail end,” said the poor girl from the north, the provincial I saw now disguised as an important executive, without her palazzo pajamas, her omnipresent cellphone, the glass in her hand: I saw her in a little percale dress, flat shoes, permanent-waved hair, rouged face, porcelain earrings, and a gold tooth.

That’s how I saw her and she knows I saw her that way.

My imagination had stripped her and returned her to the desert.

“And you, Asunta?”

“Don’t you dare mock me,” she said with icy fury. “I’m always at the tail end. I inherit only a handout.”

“And do you want to inherit it all?”

“Because I deserve it all. Because no one has done as much as I have for Max Monroy.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I want to inherit it all.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You know.”

“You won’t dare. I know what you want. I’ll speak to Max. I’ll …”

No, she shook her head, agitated, her gaze cold, nobody will say anything to Max, nobody, because there won’t be anybody, nobody but me, she kept saying with a maddened desire and a gaze of the most terrible evil, radical egotism, the certainty that the world is there to serve us along with the frightful uncertainty that the world might leave us out in the cold, a handful of dust in a chalky desert instead of the leafy paradise that was and had been the face of Asunta, two gardens in one or a single fierce wasteland of her youthful imagination … The face of Asunta Jordán. I don’t know if the dying light of day gave her the almost mythological air of a great avenger: a Medea maddened not by sexual jealousy but by monetary jealousy, the yearning to be the heir to the vast amount, not knowing that money belongs to no one, it circulates, is consumed, and will end up in the immense ocean of trash. Perhaps because she knew this, she elevated herself from a jealous Medea to an enveloping Gorgon of power, queen of an empire that would slip from her
hands if she did not endow herself with bloody eyes, a terrifying face, and hair made of serpents, crowned by this sunset and this ocean. Loved by Poseidon, possessed by our father Monroy, did she have to be killed so that from her blood would be born a gold dagger that would kill her before she killed me, Miguel Aparecido, Sibila Sarmiento, and Max Monroy himself, as she had perhaps already killed Jericó? In the flashing darkness of Asunta Jordán’s eyes I saw the simplicity of destiny and the complexity of ambition. Or would Asunta Jordán have time to look at me and turn me into stone? And wasn’t it true that …?