Destiny and Desire (21 page)

Right there the message appeared that said:

I expect you both. Not I expect
you
. You
both
. Plural.

Now I waited for Jericó. He came in with his head high, laughing.

So then, once again, the two of us.

The maestro received us in his big old house in Coyoacán, surrounded as always by his noisy progeny, little children racing on tricycles, flying with arms spread, making engine noises, and eventually climbing on the professor’s wingback chair, lying peacefully on his lap, or threatening a catastrophe from the top of the chair.

“Outside, boys,” said Sanginés, laughing, and looked at Jericó and me when, in the same breath, he said:

“Come in, boys.”

He wanted to position us immediately in what Roman law calls
capitis diminutio
, a kind of diminution of personality, due to the loss—Rudolph Sohm dixit—of the legal rule of freedom, of citizenship, or because of the minimal alteration of being expelled from the family.

More than enough for me. I was his student in the law faculty, he was my adviser in reading and my professional mentor. He sent me to do the famous “forensic practice” in the prison of San Juan de Aragón. He was directing my professional thesis. But Jericó? What relationship could he have with Sanginés? I tried to determine this in the form of greeting, always so revelatory in a country of embraces, pats, diminutives and augmentatives, remote suspicions, dissimulated gloating: Iberian America is also Italic America, a land of elegant appearances, the cult of the
bella figura
, and the memory of serial Machiavellianisms modulated to remember debts or forget grievances.

The fact is that Sanginés said only “Come in, boys,” with an implicit “take a seat” in two leather chairs facing our host’s wingback. We were simply two students subject to a certificate of proficiency examination.

The children left. The students sat down. I’ll cut the message short: Sanginés believed we had completed an apprenticeship. With which I felt I was on the rungs of a medieval guild asking myself if
this relationship was not, in fact, a transcription, though within the university, of the medievalism that is the watchword and perhaps the pride of Latin America, a continent that, unlike the United States of America, a nation with no antecedent more powerful than itself, did have a Middle Ages and as a consequence has—we have—from Mexico to Peru, mental categories that exclude a will not arbitrated by the Church or state. The Gringos are Pelagians without knowing it, descendants of the heretic who postulated individual freedom without the need for institutional filters, as opposed to his conqueror Augustine of Hippo, for whom grace was not individually achievable without the intervention of the Church. The North Americans, who don’t have Pelagius or the Middle Ages, do have Luther, the Reformation, Puritanism, Calvinism, and all the heresy (I repeat:
choos-ing
) necessary to dictate with a very wide margin rules of conduct at the edge of institutions. We do not. Though the reader will note the constant benefit of Father Filopáter’s lessons in preparatory school.

I believe Sanginés read my thoughts, because he immediately decided my destiny. I would finish the course of study (I needed only a year and a couple of classes I could pass in a proficiency exam) and conclude forensic practice in the prison of San Juan de Aragón.

“Begin to prepare your thesis. The subject is Machiavelli and the creation of the state,” he pronounced, adding: “It is necessary for you to conclude your interview with Miguel Aparecido,” before turning to Jericó and saying: “You have refused to follow a career. You believe experience is the best university. I am going to test you. Tomorrow go to the offices of the Presidency of the Republic in Los Pinos. They are expecting you.”

And returning to me.

“And they are expecting you, Josué, in the office of Don Max Monroy in the building in Colonia—I should say the new city—of Santa Fe.”

He sighed, as if longing for a modest city that could not exist again, rose to his feet, and brought the interview to an abrupt end, leaving me with a certain bad taste in my mouth; I didn’t know whether to attribute it to an attitude unlike the normally amiable
behavior of Professor Sanginés, or, more seriously, to a melancholy very similar to the sadness of goodbyes, as if a period in my life had just ended.

Jericó and I walked, looking for a taxi, toward Avenida Universidad, and were distracted as we crossed the Viveros de Coyoacán Park, breathing deeply, with no set purpose, because we were in one of the few lungs of an asphyxiated metropolis.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Well,” I shrugged. “I’ll be doing the same things.”

“No, the one who’ll change is you. Max Monroy is a very powerful man.”

“Bah. I may never even get to meet him.”

Then I added: “Knowing you, Jericó, I think you’ll not only get to meet the president—”

He interrupted: “He’ll know me even if he doesn’t see me,” and added: “Look, hurry up and finish your degree. We’re twenty-five years old. We can’t go on waiting. We need a position. We can’t give as an occupation ‘I think’ or ‘I am.’ We have to be and do.”

I smiled in return. “One can always turn into a perpetually young old man, like Jelly Roll Morton, Compay Segundo, or Mick Jagger.”

The reader will note that I wanted to test the connection I had suspected in Jericó with North American pop culture instead of a pretended French affiliation that, as I’ve already told you, seemed suspect to me. The problem is, if you talk about jazz and rock, of necessity you land in Anglo-American territory. France loves jazz but doesn’t give it anything but love.

Jericó paid no attention to me. Who are we? What do we have? Name, occupation, status? Are we a vacant lot?

“
Terrain vague,
” I said with my comic suspicions.

Jericó was unfazed. “A garbage dump of what could have been? A catalogue of debits and losses? Even the bottom of the barrel? So what’s going on? I like it!”

“A hoarse-voiced basket where things accumulate?” I added, quoting Neruda but thinking of tasks I still had to do, not only the course of study in law, not only the mysterious prisoner Miguel
Aparecido, but in particular my unspeakable commitment to a woman who required protection, whom I could not leave alone, at large, helpless …

“Lucha Zapata” was the name on the tip of my tongue like a bird in an open cage who doesn’t really know whether his well-being depends on flying away or remaining locked up and at the mercy of birdseed.

Jericó didn’t go any further. There was in him, when we left the large Jardín de los Coyotes, a new, atypical reserve that undoubtedly had to do with the position Sanginés had just offered him and that now occupied our minds. Though in retrospect, I wondered if the maestro’s unusual coldness was due to the unpublished presence of Jericó, which had skewed his behavior and evoked in my heart a dual feeling of nostalgia for the attention my teacher had previously paid me and reproach for his current manner.

Without saying goodbye, Jericó jumped on a moving bus with dangerous agility and I hailed a taxi to return to Lucha Zapata’s house, undecided now as to my home and real address.

Unless, I smiled, it was the penitentiary where Miguel Aparecido—who knows to what end—was waiting for me.

“It’s going like clockwork,” Jericó shouted from the bus. “
Hug it out!
”

I
NOTICED
THAT
Lucha Zapata was nervous, strange, different, and distant when I returned that night to the house on Cerrada Chimalpopoca next to the noisy Metro de los Doctores. She was involved in the ecstatic movements of preparing lunch, not looking at me as she cut the avocados in two, heated the tortillas, smeared them with the green flesh of a buttery fruit that relieves the acidity of Mexican corn. She knew I admired—and marveled at—this homemaking “professionalism” in my friend. She possessed a kind of domestic discipline contrary to the disorder of her life as an alcoholic and drug addict. She was an excellent cook and I arranged to have her cupboard always stocked with all the pleasures of the market that transform Mexican food into a gift of the gods for a country of beggars.

My mouth waters: jalapeño chile, habanero chile, saffron, jitomate, huitlacoche fungus, epazote tea, machaca dried beef, cochinita pork, chotes, chicharrón cracklings, oregano. I bought them at La Merced very early in the morning, assisted by a lively old woman with a straw-colored braid, Doña Medea Batalla. She appeared before me with her black cherry eyes and said: “Let me help you, Licenciado.” “How do you know?” I said with a look. She touched one eye. “I know you all, Licenciado. You can spot a licenciado a mile away … just the way I can smell out villains.”

I confined myself to placing produce in the basket. Lucha would transform it into blind mason’s sauce, soup of corn ears and roasted chiles, uchepos or Michoacán corn tamales, Morelian enchiladas, enchiladas de plaza, and stuffed chayotes. I admired her concentration and skill, which contrasted so strongly with her life’s disorder, wondering if asking her where she had learned to cook was the pretext for controverting the forgetfulness on which she insisted.

She defended herself. Her memory was locked away and her cuisine, she gave me to understand, was part of an atavistic, popular wisdom that wasn’t taught. One is born, in Mexico, knowing how to cook. That was why I took pains to bring her the best produce, with the implicit hope that one day, eating well, she would remember something and live better.

It was a thin hope, not to mention a vain one.

“Did you bring beer?” she asked, standing, tottering.

“I forgot,” I said, having just come from the interview with Sanginés and Jericó.

“Poor devil,” she smiled with twisted lips. She laughed. “Beer makes you cold inside,” she added for no reason.

I asked her to be calm, to lie down, what did she want? knowing that asking a person like her for “calm” was the same as telling her: You’re crazy.

She said with sudden sweetness that she had a weakness for avocados. I told her I’d go out and buy a good supply right away. I regretted it. Lucha needed me there. She was helpless, a step away from death …

“What do you want from me?” she spoke from inside an internal cave.

I said nothing.

“My past. You’re hungry for my past. You’re a snoop,” she said, reproaching me for what I wasn’t, as my life with Jericó demonstrates. “A snoop. A meddler. You stick your big nose in.”

She attacked my nose violently. It wasn’t difficult for me to push her hand away. She fell onto the mat. She looked at me with immense sorrow and even greater resentment, not free of that great pretext for Mexican failure: feeling defeated, always being the loser, and obtaining salvation, perhaps, thanks to the blessing of defeat. We don’t celebrate success except as a passing announcement of eventual defeat in everything.

“You see,” she murmured. “You’re the powerful one, the arbitrary one. You push me. You throw me to the floor. Do you see why I live the way I live? Because power is arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary …”

“Capricious,” I said in a stupid eagerness to find synonyms for defeat.

“A caprice?” Lucha Zapata twisted what I said. “Do you think that living and dying is just a caprice?”

“I didn’t say that.” Clumsily I tried to apologize, standing while she knelt on the mat, looking up at me from the floor.

“Then what?” she asked in a voice at once defeated and victorious, ardent and dry.

I didn’t say anything and she embraced my knees murmuring Love me Savior, I have only you, don’t leave me, what do you need to love me more? what do you need to know I need you?

She looked at me as I believe one kneels and really looks at the “Savior,” as she called me.

Did I want to know about her past? Like in the song, only if I got her what she needed, “Savior, I depend on you, I don’t want to go out on the street, I’m here with you but you have to give me what I need, please, Savior, help me recover the good and leave the bad behind, first I need relief, then I swear I’ll settle down, I’ll be good, I
won’t hurt myself anymore, Savior, Salvador, go out and get me what I need and I swear I’ll reform, understand that I have two I’s like the cartoon El Señor Merengue, and the other I commands more than I do myself, what am I leaving behind? help me recover my soul, Savior, you know I’m good, don’t think I have a taste for what’s bad, don’t think I like what’s ugly, it’s in spite of myself, I want to be good, look, I want to have a baby with you, Savior, make me a baby right now so I’m redeemed …”

She fell asleep. I already knew her sleep was a foretaste of death. I went out to get what she wanted. I came back. I watched over her. I spent the night watching. At six in the morning, Lucha Zapata woke, looked at me in anguish from the bare mat, and I soothed the entreaty in her eyes right away, giving her the injection and the syringe, helping her tie up her arm, watching her travel from hell to heaven and fall back to sleep.

I came back that night. She was sitting in one of those little Mexican chairs with a straw seat and brightly colored back, like a little girl being punished. I smiled at her. She looked up. A venomous sky struggled between her lids. She hugged herself with contained violence.

“You want me to repent just to give you pleasure,” she spat at me. “You’re like everybody else.”

I caressed her head. She moved away contemptuously.

“You think you can control me?” She laughed. “Not even love controls me. Falling in love is submitting. I’m independent.”

“No,” I said without sadness. “You depend on drugs. You’re a poor slave, Lucha, don’t pretend to be independent. Don’t make me laugh. You make me sad.”

She let out an animal shout, the authentic howl of a wounded beast, arbitrary, arbitrary, she began to shout, you think habit can control, nothing controls me, where did you put my aviator helmet? only flying pacifies me, take me to the airport, give me a plane, let me fly like a free bird …