Destiny and Desire (57 page)

“Even if you kill me, I’ll go on looking at you,” she said with a whiskey and lipstick breath when I moved away from her, called by the sound of footsteps on branches that increased behind me, giving way to the face of Jenaro Ruvalcaba, agile and blond, followed by a confused gang of sweating dark people, all armed with machetes, and Ruvalcaba himself swung his machete at the back of my neck, sending me with a bleeding head into the well of the empty pool surrounded by empty bottles and the grass that grew in a jumble from cracks in the cement …

Epilogue

H
ere is my decapitated head, lost like a coconut at the edge of the Pacific Ocean on the Mexican coast of Guerrero.

My head not only misses my body. I don’t know where I ended up from the neck down. Perhaps my headless corpse has also been put “in a safe place.” Perhaps, however, the sacrifice of the body has been the condition for my soul to be liberated from a purely vegetative existence and assume a new life of connection. A life of connection: Isn’t this the life typical of the animal? Is it wishful thinking to believe that now that my body is lost, my spirit will ascend to a region inhabited only by anima? And, to begin with, isn’t anima animal?

Anima. How curious, how unexpected, the way the mind, if it does not return to, at least approaches knowledge acquired years before, the youthful readings I have mentioned so often in this my manuscript of salt and foam! Matter and form. Potentiality and act. Only death confirms for me that now I am no more than a potential act, matter in pursuit of its own form. Now I feel my soul as the promise of a restored sense, but without content now and therefore ready to receive all contents. I am something possible, I tell myself in this extremity of my existence. I do not yet exist. Even if I am, perhaps, immortal because of the paradox of having died, only for that reason …

Soul anima animal: My head lies on the beach, bathed by the tepid waves of the Southern Sea. I no longer know if I’m confused,
if I speak of my anima and speak at the same time of my animal. But if I have once again become anima of animal, that means I have returned to the embryo, to the formation of animal and man, to the instant of similarity between species: their brotherhood.

I will stop there because the idea is enough to accelerate my mind and send me to an evolutionary aftermath I don’t desire because I feel it moves me away from an obscurely recovered fraternity with the world, yes, but with my brothers as well. What were their names? How many were we? Two, three …? The great ocean transforms my decapitated head into a seashell and repeats ancient stories to me that the sea alone preserves and the waves murmur … Two brothers … Their faces return, their bodies return, their names return in each beat of the benevolent, brutal surf that impels forward and drives back the entire movement of the universe …

An insane idea crosses my mind. Castor and Pollux. My brother Jericó and I enjoyed immortality only on alternate days. I feel terror. Can I keep immortality more than one day and consequently deny it to my brother? Can he do the same and leave me abandoned forever, adrift without one more day of life? I express this horrible thought looking at a mad rush of horses galloping over the waves shouting for water, water, though water surrounds them, you will not drink this water, you will gallop rapidly the length of this water, you will cut through the sea and protect the sailor with the fire of your memory setting the top of the mast ablaze, we, you and your brother, will give each other the emotion of life, love, combat, power, glory, the abduction of women, we will grasp the mast of fire and the steeds of the sea will drag us to a destiny I can see on the same beach I came to, already being there …

A pelican totters near the coast.

Its voice reaches me.

“The worm is an error,” it says.

And these words are enough to return me to the site where I find myself and the terrible loss of life, the endless holocaust of the inexplicable death of us all, of human beings … And then not alternative immorality, or the horses of the sea, or the mast of fire, or the fear of killing or being killed when I am no longer immortal, none of
that is present, only this lying here, a head cut off by a machete, and the thing that is not here, a lost body, a trunk of hollow cavities divided by the diaphragm, the mortal depository of the heart, lungs, pleura, antechamber of the stomach, liver, bladder, intestines, kidneys, what’s left?

Aaaaah! I am satisfied. I am master of my head, no matter how decapitated it may be. Splenius, trapezius, trachea. The hyoid bone continues to hold up my tongue. My face has a mouth. My skull contains the encephalon. My brain, my brain lying here still has a cortex of gray matter that escapes through my nostrils, no longer encloses the white matter that comes out through my eyes. What happened to the cerebellum that controlled the movement of what I have lost: my body? What posture, no balance at all?

To breathe. Circulate. Sleep. What sorrow to have lost everything. What an illusion to believe new areas of my head can be lost only to give active life to the older ones … Skin. Orifices. Head. Trunk. Extremities. They were me. At first I saw myself in my bathroom mirror. I am twenty-seven years old. I caress my cheeks. I shave my chin and upper lip. I remember I must rescue my appearance before it is too late. I close my eyes. I imagine my face. An Indian thatch of black hair. Dark eyes sunk into the sockets of an almost transparent facial skeleton. Invisible eyebrows. A pleasant mouth. Thin. Smiling. Ears neither large nor small. A skinny face. Skin stuck to the bone. Hair sprouting like nocturnal thickets that grow at the bottom of the sea with the small amount of light that penetrates to the depths.

The great Sargasso of anticipated death.

The sea that ascends in brief surges, obliging me to swallow before it reaches the orifices of my large nose, big-nose, beak, snout, schnozz …

THEN
THE
IMMENSE
black seaweed emerged at the same time from the sea and the sky and the miracle occurred: In the air, my unattached head and body reunited and the voice I already knew and recognized told me heaven is opening, the time of exile is over, the tempestuous winds carry us away, do you remember me? I am
Ezekiel, the prophet who joins the wings of the world and saves man from the fire and the waves, returning you, Josué, to the air that belongs to you and where you will have new companions: What a mistake, what a huge mistake to believe souls go to heaven or to hell, to new cloisters of cloud or flame! Souls do not fit into heaven or hell, which are enclosed spaces. Souls inhabit infinite space. Listen to the sound of my wings, listen to the voices of all that has existed. I will speak to you but you will see, Josué. You will see hard faces and unyielding hearts. You will see your rebel house. Your father. Your brothers. The whore of Babylon. They do not know there is a prophetess who watches them and protects you. They are seated on scorpions. They eat paper and believe it is ambrosia. They do not listen to you because they do not want to. Speak to them even though they do not listen to you. You are the great rumor, you are the great warning. The city is dying, you warn them, Josué, on the wings of the prophet Ezekiel who I am, the city will place obstacles before you, the city will be on guard because the spirit has entered you and therefore you disobeyed, you did not submit to the house of order, ambition, promotion, advantage, compromise, Josué, you did not lock yourself in your house, you did not cleave your tongue to your palate, you fasted, you saw the sanctuary defiled by plague and war, ruin and ignominy, crime, the desolation of the temples, the living corpses prostrate before idols, look, Josué, look from the air at the dolorous city, malodorous city, do you believe you have abandoned it forever? Do you believe you have left your house without finishing its construction? Ah, Josué, only death allows us to see the future; if we lived forever we would be the future and not know, if we continued on earth we would continue to believe in our individuality and not see the truth that accompanies us: the truth is another person, perhaps other persons, but undoubtedly there is one person, delegated by Providence, designated by the gods, made by Nature, the person who watches over you, not like an angel but like a good demon, the presence that accompanies you, the little devil you saw and did not see, knew and did not know, embraced and abandoned, the woman who gave herself completely to you, tested and proved you as a man and left you when it was necessary for you to draw
near alone, as we all draw near, above all prophets like me, to the angels, to our destiny … She left. She lied to you so you would not miss her. She always guessed your necessity, Josué, your reason for waging war in the lands of Judea from the mountains of Nero and Pisgah to the edge of the sea, your personal war, Josué, the war of your unrepeatable but not solitary individuality, you have had a companion, Josué, the close assistance of the only person you really loved and who really loved you, with surrender, with rebelliousness, perhaps with vexation, always with passion and it was this, the passion that is a passage through life, suffering, enduring reversals, suffering disease, moving the soul to pleasure and to pain, desiring, becoming passionate, who was the demon of your passion?

Lost in the daily passage of life, perhaps you did not realize, Josué, that someone met you and from then on accompanied you, even in absence, invisible but always present: your woman-demon, your personal she-devil … Because when you lived, violence and habit, habit interrupted by violence, or vice versa, Josué, prevented you from distinguishing, until very late, until the final hour of your life, between the good and evil demon. Your ruthless guardian María Egipciaca, your fleeting nurse Elvira Ríos. Your contradictory, wise, and accommodating teacher Antonio Sanginés. Your dark brother Miguel Aparecido, imprisoned by himself and in himself. Your other brother Jericó, whom you loved so well, hated so well, and who in the midst of it all served you so well in measuring the infinite degrees of a man between love and hate. Your unknown mother Sibila Sarmiento to whom you can dedicate only the requiem of pity. Your distant father Max Monroy, so impenetrable because he is his own political party, the only party, so sure of never losing, turning lies into truth and truth into lies in order to move from there and affirm the power of the old, fearful the young threaten them, turning upside down the proven origin of all the things they created: This is what Max feared, he did not put you and your brother to the test to see if you waged war counting on all the comforts except that of knowing who you were, not because he wanted to avoid the brutal, inhuman destiny he imposed on Miguel Aparecido, no, but because of his fear of you if he set you free without the ties that eventually,
with crumbling sophistry, he imposed on you: I will give you everything to live except what threatens me. Asunta knew this, you know? She knew the old man was afraid of you and perhaps, if she annihilated the two of you so you would not inherit, Max would understand it as another act of her loyalty: not so you would not inherit, only so you would not present yourselves as what you were and Jericó once was: the sons of Monroy whom Monroy did not put in prison, because in Miguel Aparecido’s destiny you and your brother Jericó must see not what did not happen to you but what could happen: fathers and sons devour one another, the rebel house will sit on scorpions, desolate hearths will be extinguished, corpses will bow before idols, and houses will be beacon lights …

“And Lucha Zapata?”

We were flying over the mountains of Mexico, destination unknown. The waters rushed from the hills to the sea, laying waste to the high mesetas. I looked at salt marshes and swamps. I saw the birds fleeing and the herds of bulls in the valleys and she-goats on the rocks, we flew over a valley of bones, and Ezekiel said to himself, prophesy upon these bones, such is the command of God, enveloped in a fierce sound of thunder and lightning, flying over the mountains: prophesy, Josué, prophesy that all these bones will be your house, and I rebelled, even at the cost of my life, because Ezekiel could let me go and I didn’t want to die twice without repeating:

“Lucha Zapata.”

Perhaps it was a response to my plea—for Lucha Zapata was now my final prayer—: in a cumulus of clouds I could see people I knew; approaching me on our flight, I saw Alberto-Albertina returned to her condition as girl: naked, with the languid V of her thighs displaying the limpid ↓ of her sex, she recognized me, greeted me, and was joined by the waving hands of the children drowned in the pool in San Juan de Aragón, naked Chuchita, delighted not to have to dress anymore, Merlín who was part of the band of idiots used to sneak into affluent houses, his head shaved, an idiot now but happy, his mouth half-open and the snot running, Félix with the sad face, stripped now of the ancient guilt I saw in his face when I
walked through the prison, but with his teeth always full of the remains of tortilla and egg. They greeted me with rejoicing, as if celebrating that I would be joining them, their condition still mysterious to me, though the rapid transformation of the cumulus clouds into luminous, dying cirrus clouds like a sunset and the announcement of the dispersal of the clouds into strata indicated that the angelic vision would not be seen here, that this sky was deceptive, that in the end clouds are only ice in suspension, water vapor ready to return to its origin and destiny, which is the immense embrace of the sea, from which I come, which I no longer know if I left, and to which I don’t know if I will return.