Destiny and Desire (8 page)

Doña Estrella shoved the dismissed employees. Don Nazario insulted Doña Estrella. The servants, instead of picking up their suitcases and walking away—she praising the Virgin—remained stoic, as if they deserved the storm of insults raining down on them or enjoyed without smiling those the master directed at the mistress in a kind of chain of recriminations that most resembled eternity as a prison sentence.

“Where was the Chinese vase?”

“Stupidities are celebrated in a girl and even forgiven …”

“Admit that you two broke it!”

“…  not in an old woman.”

“And the canary?”

“You were a fool when you were young …”

“Why did it die?”

“…  but you were cute …”

“Why did you leave it dead in its cage?”

“You were pretty, you moron!”

“Why was the cage door open?”

“What happened to you?”

“Are you trying to drive me crazy?”

“What frightens you more?”

“Don’t stand there like lumps.”

“Living alone or staying on with me?”

“Move away, I’m telling you.”

“Don’t be stupid, tell them to come back. In a minute you’ll—”

Doña Estrella whirled to face, with mouth open and eyes closed, her husband. She stepped to one side. Don Nazario turned his back. The servants walked back into the house, as if they knew this play all too well. They returned armed with the dagger of the insults the
master had directed at the mistress. They would hang them, like trophies, in the damp, dark back room, always reserved for the staff, with a wall, it did have that, so they could tack up the print of the Virgin and, as a kind of curse, the photo of the Esparzas.

How long, how long! Errol would exclaim the next day when we went to see him in his tiny apartment: barely two rooms on Calle del General Terán, in the shadow of the Monumento de la Revolución. The dark-skinned servant gave us our friend’s new address, swearing us to silence because young Errol’s parents didn’t know where he was living.

“When did he leave?”

“Ten days ago.”

“How did he leave?”

“Like a soul chased by the Devil.”

“Why did he leave?”

“Please, ask him.”

It didn’t surprise us that he had gone. We were interested in his reasons. The small apartment in the shadow of the great revolutionary gas station was bare of furniture, just a mattress on the floor, a table, two chairs, a bathroom with the door half open, our friend Errol, whom we sometimes envied and sometimes felt sorry for. The guitar we already knew. A new drum set, a neglected saxophone.

Did rage drive him away? he asked us rhetorically, sitting on the floor, his arms crossed, with his long hair and shortsighted eyes. No, fear drove him away, no matter how justified his anger with his parents. Fear of becoming, in the company of his family, what his father and mother already were: two backward, spectral, avaricious beings. Two enemy ghosts who left a dead smell behind them. Estrellita with that eternal face of someone going to a wedding who does not renounce the happy ending regardless of all evidence to the contrary. Her inconsequential bliss. Her weeping out of sheer habit. The imaginary coffin waiting for her in the hallway to the bedroom. Yes, what’s my mother good for? Distrusting the servants? Is that her only affirmation? Weeping when she imagines the death of others, a vague
others
, in order to put off mine?

“But I’m here, Mama.”

He strummed the guitar.

“When my father scolds her, she goes into the bathroom and sings.”

Her only devotions are to death, the only certain thing in life, and the Virgin. She doesn’t consider the fact that faith brings her closer to the despised maid. How is it possible to be a Christian and despise believers who have the same faith but are socially inferior to us? How do you reconcile these extremes, shared faith and separate social position? Who is more Christian? Who will enter heaven through the eye of the camel? Who through the lock of the strait gate?

Jericó and I looked at each other. We understood that Errol needed us in order to give external words to his internal torment, which transcended his relationship with his parents and settled, eventually, in the relationship of Errol to Errol, of the boy to the man, the sheltered to the homeless, the artist he wanted to be to the rebel that, perhaps, was all he could be: a rebel, never an artist, because personal insurrection is not a sign of esthetic imagination. And he immediately referred to his father.

“What can you think of a man who travels abroad with a money belt filled with silver pesos around his waist to make certain no one steals them? A man who travels with a special case filled with chiles to season insipid French cooking?”

He was silent for a moment. He didn’t invite us to comment. It was clear his diatribe had not yet ended.

“Do you remember when I told you how my father made his way? The man of action, the faithful husband, the strong head of the family? First a carpenter, in a poor district of the city. A furniture maker. Selling chairs, beds, and tables to various hotels. Furniture stores, hotels, movie houses. Remember? The modern Saint Joseph, except that his Virgin Mary didn’t give birth to a savior but to an informer. I didn’t tell you everything that time. I skipped over the link that joins the chain of my revered father, like the key ring in his pocket that he rattles with so much authority. Between the furniture store and the hotels are the brothels. The first chain of my fortune is made of whorehouses. That’s where the mattresses went, that’s
where the beds were used, that’s where the Catholic, bourgeois, and respectable fortune of a couple who insult their servants and ignore their son was founded. In a brothel.”

What could we say? He didn’t expect anything. His confession didn’t affect us. It was his business. For him, obviously, it had been transformed into an open wound, and that was when we knew that because of our disinterest in this matter, the value Jericó and I shared with regard to the geographies of families or the supposed “crimes” of individuals, it did not concern us. Right then Jericó and I confirmed something we already knew, the necessary product of our readings assimilated to the philosophical and moral leap that the instructive friendship of Father Filopáter signified. A lesson for us, for him the recognition of losses and gains in the ancestral game between parents and children, forebears and descendants. About whom could I speak except women who weren’t related to me, María Egipciaca, my nemesis, and Elvira Ríos, my nurse? And Jericó, who remained silent about family antecedents about which he may have been completely ignorant? And about whom except ourselves could we speak, he and I, Jericó and Josué, regarding the familial relationship that in our lives was ultimately identical to the relationship between friends? This apparent solitude was the condition of our absolute solidarity. The small saga of Errol and his family confirmed in Jericó and me the fraternity that was a sure sign of the orientation of our lives. Brothers not in blood but in intelligence, and knowing this, we realized (at least I did), joined us early on but perhaps put us to the test for the rest of our lives. Would we always be the intimate friends we were now? What would the twelve strokes of noon leave us? And what the prayer murmured at the end of the day?

Perhaps it was unfair to call us what Filopáter named us—Castor and Pollux—simply in contrast to the real orphanhood of our friend Errol Esparza, voluntarily estranged from his parents though perhaps more devoted than we were to the eternal struggle between talent and solitude.

Then he came out of the bathroom, naked, his head wet, the young man who greeted us and sat in front of the drum set while
Errol picked up the guitar and the two of them began their rock version of “Las Golondrinas.”

A few mariachis to the wise.

I ALWAYS KNEW
she would spy on us. The presence of Elvira Ríos was offensive to María Egipciaca, even before the nurse set foot in the house adrift on Calle de Berlín. In the mind of my caretaker, this enormous residence had room for only two people, her and me, in the chastely promiscuous relationship I have already told you about. It was as if two enemy animals occupied, with no other companion, an entire forest, and one fine day a third animal appeared to throw into confusion a couple that in fact did not love each other. Was there hatred between my guardian and me? I suppose there was, if the perpetual dissimilarity of affections and sympathies determines an antagonism that moves people in conflict to do what they have to do only so the other, as soon as he is aware of what is going on, will occupy the adversarial position. If I complained or woke up in a bad mood, María Egipciaca lost no time in asking what is it? what’s wrong? what can I do for you? If, on the other hand, I woke brighter than the sun, she hurried to wield a poisoned rapier, it’s clear you don’t know what the day holds in store, have you thought about your assignments for today, why didn’t you finish them yesterday? now you’ll have more obligations and since you lack not only time but also talent, you won’t get anywhere: you’ll always be a
raté …
Where María Egipciaca had gotten this French word led me to wonder what kind of education my caretaker had received, since I never saw her reading a book, not even a newspaper. She didn’t go to the movies or the theater, though she did have the radio on day and night, until the day itself became a kind of annex to the programming of XEW, “The Voice of Latin America from Mexico.” That the poor woman learned something is evident because on the day, at the crack of dawn, that the nurse Elvira Ríos appeared, María Egipciaca remarked:

“How silly. That’s the name of a bolero singer.”

“Isn’t it just that you’re Del Río and she’s Ríos? Does that irritate you?”

“From current to current, let’s see who drowns first.”

The days preceding the arrival of the nurse were perhaps the worst of a confinement that previously, at least, had doors open to the street and school. Now, confined by doctor’s orders and waiting for the imminent arrival of the nurse, my “stepmother’s” manias were exacerbated to the point of cruelty. She found a thousand ways to make me feel useless. She prepared meals making so much noise it could be heard all through the house, she came up to my bedroom with the tray resounding like a marimba orchestra, she sighed like a tropical hurricane, deposited the meal outside my door with a groan of cardiac exertion, picked it up, came in without knocking as if she wanted to catch me at the solitary vice that, since the incident of my undershorts, had fixed her opinion of my impure person. If she didn’t drop the tray on my lap it was because her vocation of service would have obliged her to pick up and clean without asking me to do the same, since that would have denied María Egipciaca’s sacrificial function in this house where, however, all the dirt accumulated for seven days until the competent maid came in once a week, drew the curtains, opened the windows, aired out and let in the sun, washed and ironed, filled the dispensers for the necessities of the next few days, and left as she arrived, without saying a word, as if her work did not depend in any way on the apparent mistress of the house, María Egipciaca. On only one occasion did the cleaning woman speak to my caretaker to say:

“I know a nurse is coming to take care of the boy. If you like, I’ll bring some flowers.”

“There’s no need,” María Egipciaca replied severely. “Nobody died.”

“It’s to cheer up this tomb a little,” the servant said in a bad humor and left.

I must admit to those who survive that my taking to a sickbed made me very happy. I saw it as an opportunity first of all to devote myself to “the unpunished vice,” reading, and second, to oblige María Egipciaca to serve me with no pleasure, irritated, making an unnecessary racket but obliged, beyond any other consideration, to tend to me for reasons that had nothing to do with the affection or
duty a mother owes her child, but merely to remain in the good graces of “the señor,” that mysterious patron to whom the doctor had referred with unqualified severity and categorical words.

I should confess that the allusion to “the señor,” which I heard for the first time on that occasion, produced a conflicted feeling in me. I realized that María Egipciaca was not the source of my material existence or physical comfort but simply followed the orders of a person who had never been mentioned before in this house. Was the physician’s indiscretion really an indiscretion? Or had the good doctor intentionally put María Egipciaca in her place, revealing that far from being the lady of the house, she too, like the weekly maid, was an employee? I wanted to gauge the effects of this revelation on my guardian’s attitude. She was careful not to vary in the slightest the behavior I already knew. If I was sick and sentenced to rest, she would heighten, without modifying in its essentials, her irreproachable conduct as a señora charged with lodging me, feeding me, dressing me, and sending me to school.

But since at the same time the doctor had announced that the nurse would come to take care of me on the instructions of the señor who “pays for everything, pays well, and pays on time,” María Egipciaca had on the horizon of her suspicions a new and weaker propitiatory victim. The nurse and I. I and the nurse. The order of factors etcetera. The outcome foreseen by María Egipciaca was a relationship that excluded her from her good governance of the house and care of my person. How to reaffirm one and prolong the other? Sometimes the questions that pierce our spirits escape through our eyes, just as my encephalic mass spills out of my skull today, when I woke up dead on a Pacific beach.

Fourteen years ago Elvira, if she did not prevent my death, did renew my life. My routine as an early adolescent in secondary school promised, in my young but limited imagination, to repeat itself into infinity. It is curious that at a time of such great physical changes, the mind insists on prolonging childhood, since the belief that adolescence itself will be eternal is only the mirror of the tacit conviction (and convention) of childhood: I’ll always be a little girl, a little boy, even though I know I won’t. But I’ll be an adolescent
with the mentality of a little boy, that is, of a survivor. In the end, what age belongs to us more than childhood, when we truly depend on others? Everything is longer when we are children. Vacations seem deliciously eternal. And class schedules too. Though subject to school and especially the family, at that time of life we have more freedom with regard to what binds us than at any other period. It seems to me this is because in childhood freedom is identical to imagination, and since here everything is possible, the freedom to be something more than the family and something more than school flies higher and allows us to live more separately than at the age when we must conform in order to survive, adjust to the rhythms of professional life, submit to rules inherited and accepted by a kind of general conformity. We were, as children, singular magicians. As adults, we will be herd animals.