Destiny and Desire (7 page)

“No matter how early you wake up …”

“If you eat and sing …”

“Let it rain, let it rain …”

“A closed mouth …”

“An old woman died …”

I believe that whatever the real identity of María Egipciaca, for her, mine was that of perpetual infancy. As a little boy I didn’t dare ask her Who are you? since I had adjusted, in the gloomy solitude of this greenish house, to
where
I was though I didn’t know
who
I was. The fact is she never called me “son,” and if she said it by accident, it was in the way someone says “listen,” “boy,” or “kid.” I was an asterisk in the daily vocabulary of the woman who took care of me without ever explaining or clarifying her relationship to me. I didn’t feel worried, I was used to it, I nullified any question about María Egipciaca’s status and was sent to the public school on Calzada de la Piedad, where I made some friends—not many—whom I never invited to my house, and I was never invited to theirs. I suppose I had a forbidding aura, I was “strange,” what others intuitively know about—a family, a home—did not stand behind me. I was, in fact, the orphan who, like the mailman, comes and goes punctually, without provoking a response to what would later, in secondary school, be my watchword: my large nose, or as Jericó, the friend who came to fill all the loneliness of my childhood, would say, “You don’t have a big nose. Your nose is long and thin, not big. Don’t let that bunch of bastards get to you.”

Since the nose is the advance guard of the face and goes before the body, announcing the other features, I began to smell that something was changing in my relationship to María Egipciaca when, fatally,
she discovered my shorts stiff with semen in the hamper. My alarming first ejaculation was involuntary, as I was glancing casually at an American magazine at the stand on the corner, which I acquired with embarrassment and leafed through with excitement. I thought I was sick (until on subsequent occasions alarm was transformed into pleasure) and didn’t know what to do with my dirty underwear except toss it in the hamper as naturally as I tossed in shirts and socks, and with the certainty that the laundress who came to the house once a week was not very concerned about finding signs of one kind of filth or another in underwear: that’s why it was “under.”

What I didn’t know is that before handing it over to the laundress, María Egipciaca carefully went over each item. She didn’t have to say anything to me. Her attitude changed and I couldn’t attribute the change to anything but my stained shorts. I imagined that a mother, without any need to refer to the fact, would have come to me affectionately and said something like “My little boy is a man now” or some similar foolishness, would never have referred to the concrete fact, much less with a desire to punish. That’s how I knew María Egipciaca was not my mother.

“Pig. Dirty pig,” she said with her most sour face. “You make me ashamed.”

From that moment on, my jailer, for I could no longer view her any other way, did not stop attacking me, isolating me, cornering me, and eventually arming me with total indifference in the face of the expert fire of her censure.

“What are you going to do with your life?”

“What are you preparing for?”

“What goals do you have in mind?”

“If only you were more practical.”

“Do you think I’m going to take care of you forever?”

“What do you want all those books for?”

This culminated in a nervous ailment that in fact signified the collapse of my corporeal defenses before a reality that held me under siege without offering a way out, a great wall of enigmas about my person, my goals, my sexuality, my family origins, who my
father and mother were, what good it did to read all the books shown me by the secondhand book dealers with whom I was friendly for a while, and knew later, thanks to Professor Filopáter.

The doctor diagnosed a crisis of nerves associated with puberty and said I had to rest for two weeks under the care of a nurse.

“I know how to take care of him,” María Egipciaca interjected with so much bitterness that the doctor cut her off abruptly and said that starting tomorrow a nurse would come to care for me.

“All right,” María Egipciaca said with resignation. “If the señor pays …”

“You know the señor pays for everything, he pays well and he pays on time,” the doctor said with severity.

That was how Elvira Ríos came into my life, the young, brown-skinned, short, affectionate nurse who immediately became the object of the concentrated hatred of Doña María Egipciaca del Río, for reasons not far removed from the similarity of their fluvial last names and in spite of the fact that my caretaker was singular and my nurse a true delta.

“Look at her, so dark and dressed all in white. She looks like a fly in a glass of milk.”

“Ay, there’s no lack of idiots!” the little nurse responded with inconsequential speed.

But now, to be more grateful than ungrateful, I should return to Father Filopáter and his teachings.

FILOPÁTER DIXIT:

The philosopher Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) Spinoza (Amsterdam 1632–The Hague 1677) attentively observes the spiderweb spread like an invasive veil over a corner of the wall. A single spider dominates the space of the web that, if Spinoza remembers correctly, did not exist a few months ago, has existed for only a very short time, going unnoticed, and now demanding attention as a principal element in a monastic room, bare and perhaps barren for someone, like Spinoza, who does not have a vocation for superior detachment.

There is nothing but a cot, a writing table with papers, pens, and
ink, a washbasin, and a chair. There is no mirror, not for lack of means or an absence of vanity. Or perhaps for both reasons. Books thrown on the floor. A window opens on a stone courtyard. And the spiderweb ruled by the patient, slow, persevering insect that creates its universe without help from anyone, in an almost astral solitude that the philosopher decides to break.

He brings in from the street a spider (they abound in Holland) identical to the one in the bedroom. Identical, but an enemy. It is enough for Spinoza to place the street spider delicately on the web of the domestic spider for it to declare war on the intruder, for the stranger to let it be known that its presence is not peaceable either, and for a battle between the spiders to begin that the philosopher observes, engrossed, not really knowing which one will triumph in the war for living space and prolonged survival: The life of an arachnid is as fragile as the silk its spittle produces when it makes contact with the air, and as long as its probable patience. But the introduction of an identical insect into its territory is enough to transform the intruder into the Nemesis of the original spider and unleash the war that will end in a victory that interests no one after a war that concerns no one.

But in fact, not lacking in imagination (whoever says he is?), the philosopher adds strife to strife by tossing a fly onto the spiderweb. Immediately the spiders stop fighting each other and walk with a patient, dangerous step to the place where the immobilized fly lies captive in unfamiliar territory that imprisons its wings and lights up its greenish eyes (green like the walls of the house on Berlín), as if it wanted to send an SOS to all the flies in the world so they would save it from an inexorable end: to be devoured by the spiders that, once they satisfy their hunger to kill the intruder by their poisonous endeavors, will devour each other. That is death: an unfortunate encounter. That is a spider: an insectivore useful to man the gardener.

Spinoza laughs and returns to the work that feeds him. Polishing lenses. Cutting glass for spectacles and for the magic of the microscope invented a short time earlier by the Dutchman Zacharias Jaussen, master of the brilliant idea of joining two convergent lenses, one for seeing the real image of the object, the other for the
augmented image. In this way we consider the immediate image of things and at the same time the deformed image, augmented or simply imagined, of itself. The philosopher thinks that just as there is a world immediately accessible to the senses, there is another, imaginary world that possesses all the rights of fantasy only if it does not confuse the real with the imaginary. And what is God?

Spinoza is very conscious of the period in which he lives. He knows that Uriel de Aste was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities in 1647. His crime: denying the immortality of the soul and the revelation of the world, because everything is nature and what nature does not give, neither the Pope nor Luther will lend. He knows that in 1656 Juan de Prado was excommunicated for affirming that souls die in their bodies, that God exists only philosophically, and that faith is a great obstacle to a full life on earth.

Baruch himself, a Jew descended from the Portuguese expelled in the name of the political madness of Iberian unity, an Israelite by birth and religion, wasn’t he thrown out of the synagogue because he did not repent of his philosophical heresies that—the rabbis were correct—led to the negation of the dogma of the doctors and opened the way to what was most dangerous for orthodoxy: free thought, without doctrinal bonds?

No: Spinoza was expelled because he wanted to be expelled. The rabbis pleaded with him to repent. The philosopher refused. The rabbis tried to keep him. They offered him a pension of a thousand florins, and Spinoza replied that he was not corrupt and not a hypocrite but a man searching for the truth. The fact is that Spinoza felt dangerously seduced by Israel and, threatened by that seduction, turned his back on the synagogue. This was how the chief rabbi declared Spinoza
nidui, cherem
, and
chamata
, separated, expelled, extirpated from among us.

Which is what the philosopher wanted in order to postulate an independence that would not let itself be seduced, in retaliation, by the rational liberalism of the new Protestant bourgeoisie of Europe. A rebel before Israel, Spinoza would also be a rebel before Calvin, Luther, the House of Orange, and the Protestant principalities. In
any case, he told his friends: Keep my ideas secret. Which did not prevent a fanatic one night from attempting to assassinate him with the ragged stab of a knife. The philosopher placed the cape ripped by the knife in a corner of his room.

“Not everyone loves me.”

He did not accept positions, sinecures, or chairs. He lived in furnished rooms, without
things
, without
ties
. He did not accept a single compromise. His ideas depended on a dispossessed life, his survival on modest manual work, badly paid and solitary. Thought must be free. If it is not, all oppression becomes possible, all action blameworthy.

And in that isolated solitude, polishing lenses and performing the historical drama of the spider that kills the spider and the spiders that join together to devour the fly and the big fish that eats the small one and the crocodile that eats them both and the hunter who kills the crocodile and the hunters who kill one another for the skin that will crown the helmets of soldiers in battle and the death of thousands of men in wars and the extension of the crime to women and children and old people and the selection of the crime applied to Jews, Muslims, Christians, rebels, libertines, those who, heretics all, choose:
eso theiros
, I choose: heresy, freedom …

What is everything, in the end, but an optical effect? Baruch (Benoît, Benito, Benedetto) asks himself as he bends over his lenses, convinced a man is a philosopher only if, like him, he gives himself up to asceticism, humility, poverty, and chastity.

But isn’t this the greatest sin of all? Isn’t the rebellion of Lucifer in its high degree of humility the most awful of crimes: being better than God?

Baruch Spinoza shrugs. The spider devours the fly. Death is no more than an unfortunate encounter.

Thus spake Filopáter.

A SHORT WHILE
after that terrible family scene in the mansion in Pedregal, Errol left home. We found out because he left school in the first year of preparatory at the same time, and we decided to call
at his house, as curious as we were concerned about a boy whose destiny seemed so different from ours that, in the end, it represented what Jericó and I could have been.

That afternoon the house in Pedregal seemed dismal, as if its extreme bareness of austere lines had become overloaded with the internal accumulation of things I’ve already described. As if the simple contrast of sun and shadow—a taurine architecture, after all, an essential reduction of the ritual—had ceded light to a somber sunset so that the interior of the house infected the exterior despite its resistance.

We didn’t have time for the front door to be opened for us. It opened and on the doorstep a young, robust woman appeared accompanied by the weak-looking, dark-skinned waiter we had met at the reception. Each carried a suitcase, though the woman also had, pressed to her bosom, a small porcelain statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They were not alone. Behind her appeared Errol’s mother, Señora Estrellita, drying her hands on her apron, looking at the servants with a passionate intensity we did not recognize and enduring the downpour of insults from her husband Don Nazario, dressed for the beach in shorts and leather sneakers.

It was like a cataract of hatreds and recriminations on feedback; turbid waters, contaminated with urgencies and excrescences that had their muddy source in the words of the father, were calmed in those of the mother and eventually found a strange backwater of silence in those who should have been angriest, the two servants dismissed by Señora Estrella to shouts of good-for-nothings, scoundrels, you’ve abused my confidence, get out, I don’t need you, I can run the house and prepare the meals better than you, lazy Indian beggars, go back to the mountains, and unaware of our presence, she hurled a misguided domestic fury at the pair of servants but it turned back on Jericó and me, the invisible spectators, and her husband, Don Nazario, a kind of distant but omnipotent Jupiter dressed to go jogging who, in fact, was running around his wife as he stepped on the toes of his employees, whose obstinate silence, stony glances, and immobile postures bore witness to their passive resistance and announced an accumulated rage that, without the mitigation
of daily release, would spill over in one of those collective explosions that the Esparzas perhaps could not imagine or perhaps believed they had warded off for long periods of time with the rules of obedience and submission to the master, or it may be they desired it as one desires an emotional purge that sweeps away indecisiveness, secret guilt, the omissions and faults of those who hold power over the weak.