Destiny and Desire (26 page)

His pause frightened me. His entire body quivered without weakness. That’s what made me afraid.

“But not the gratuitous crime. The crime that doesn’t involve you. The crime they pay you for. The crime of Judas. Not that. Absolutely not that.”

He looked at me again.

“Maximiliano Batalla came here and I couldn’t read his face. His face of a criminal on the payroll of a millionaire coward. I reproach myself for that, kid. I entrust you with it.”

“How did you find out?”

“A prisoner came in who knew him. He told me. In the end I control everything. The Mariachi doesn’t even control his own dick. He’s an asshole. But a dangerous asshole. He has to be done away with.”

Then Miguel Aparecido stripped away any shred of tenderness or serenity and presented himself to me as a true exterminating angel, filled with sacred rage, as if he were looking into an abyss where he did not recognize himself, as if obedience were lacking in the cosmos, as if a demon had been born in him who demanded form, only that, the form that would permit him to act.

“The criminal left without my permission.”

He looked at me and changed suddenly, became imploring.

“Help me. You and your friends.”

I felt exasperated.

“If you left here, you could take revenge yourself, Miguel. I don’t know for what. You could take action.”

And his final words that day were at once a defeat and a victory.

“I’m a loyal man only if I remain here. Forever.”

THE
SECRET
OF
Max Monroy—Asunta gave me a class as she sat backlit in her office aquarium, seated so her super-legs would distract me, her most reliable test—is knowing how to anticipate.

“Just like his mother,” I said only to be meddlesome.

“What do you know about that?”

“What everybody knows, don’t be so mysterious.” I returned her smile. “History exists, you know?”

“Max was ahead of everybody.”

Asunta proceeded to give me a class on what I already knew from the mouth of Antigua Concepción. Except that what was spontaneous and lively in Max Monroy’s mother was, in the mouth of Asunta, Max Monroy’s executive secretary, contrived and dull, as if Asunta were repeating a class for beginners: me.

I decided, however, to be a good pupil for her (I admit it), the most attractive woman I had ever met. Elvira Ríos, the whore with the bee, my current ball-and-chain, Lucha Zapata, paled in comparison with this woman-object, this beautiful thing, attractive, sophisticated, elegant, and supremely desirable, giving me little classes on the businessman’s genius. I realized she was repeating a lesson she had memorized. I forgave her because she was good-looking.

What did Max Monroy do? asks an Asunta whose mind, I observe, bursts into flame when she mentions super-boss.

“What has Max Monroy’s secret been?”

According to Asunta, there is not just one secret but rather a kind of constellation of truths. He was not the first, she tells me, to put the modern telephone within reach of everyone. He was the first to foresee a possible clogging of lines because of short supply and excess demand, opening the possibility of buy now pay later but on condition you sign up with us, the companies of Max Monroy.

“Why? Not only because Max Monroy offered in one package telephone, computer, Vodafone, O2, the entire package, Josué, but without deceptive contracts or onerous clauses. Max didn’t care about hiding costs, he didn’t want to exploit or add clauses in illegible print. Everything in big letters, understand? Instead of high prices and high utilities, he proposed low prices and constant utilities with a gesture of freedom, understand? Max Monroy is who he is because he respects the consumer’s freedom, that’s the difference. When Max asked the consumer to abandon networks established earlier, his offer was freedom. Max told each consumer: Choose your own basic monthly package. I’ll give it to you at a fixed
price. I’ll permit you to use whatever you want from our network, films, telephone, information, whatever you like and the way you like it. Max addressed specific groups offering them a fixed price in exchange for a constellation of services, assuming the operating costs and subsidizing operations when necessary.”

Asunta adjusted the navy blue pinstripe jacket that was her uniform, which must have moved her to say that Max Monroy was a great tailor.

I laughed.

She didn’t: “A great tailor. Listen carefully. Max Monroy never offered the same communication service to everybody. He promised each client: ‘This is for you alone. This is yours. It’s your suit.’ And he kept his promise. We offer each client individual tailoring.”

I think she looked with critical coolness at my classic attire of gray suit and tie. She looked at me as one looks at a mouse. Her eyes requested, without saying anything, “More contrast, Josué, a red or yellow tie, a thinner belt or some striking suspenders, look handsome, Josué, when you take off your jacket to work or make love, don’t dress like a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance when you come to the office, how do you usually dress at home? Look for a modern mix of elegance and comfort. Go on.”

“
Sans façon,
” she said very quietly. “
Charm-casual.
”

“Excuse me?” I said, guessing at the mimetic talent of Asunta Jordán.

“Nothing. Max Monroy invented individual tailoring for each consumer and each consumer felt special and privileged when he used our services.”

“Our?” I permitted myself a raised eyebrow.

“We’re a big family,” she had to say, disappointing me with the cliché and returning me, for an instant, to my old nostalgia for our philosophical talks with Father Filopáter.

“Other companies put on pressure. Competition is intense. Until now we’ve beaten the others because all our activity is always directed to as many sectors as we can manage, as many consumers as we can imagine. Our strategy is multisegmentary. Growth with utility. Just imagine. What do you think?”

Asunta’s discourse kept fading until it turned into a distant echo. She continued speaking about Monroy, his enterprises, our companies. I became more and more lost in contemplation of her. Words were lost. Life as well. I don’t know why at that moment, before this woman, for the first time, I had the sensation that until then childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood were like a long, slow river flowing with absolute certainty to the sea.

Now, looking at her as I embarked on this new occupation dictated by the lawyer Sanginés—and I didn’t know then whether to thank or reproach him for his attentions and painstaking care toward me and Jericó—I felt that, far from rowing peacefully to the sea, I was moving upstream, against nature, in a cascade of short, abrupt movements, violating the laws that had so far ruled my existence in order to escape into a vital—or was it fatal?—velocity that moved backward but in reality flowed toward an unfortunate tomorrow, toward a growing brevity that, as it approached its origin physically and violently, was, in reality, announcing to me the brevity of my days as of today. We all come to know this. I learned it now.

Was Asunta the person who would, when she touched me, at least give sense and tranquillity to the “great event,” Henry James’s “important” thing: death? I don’t know why I thought these things as I sat across from Asunta this morning in an office in Santa Fe. Did the feeling of fatality authorize another, apparently opposite one, the desire I began to feel in front of her?

Had my conversation with Miguel Aparecido the night before been prolonged into this morning of leaden sun? Against my will my mood darkened because of the mission the prisoner had charged me with: avenging the mother of our buddy Bald Errol Esparza.

I was silent. One does not speak of these things here, under pain of being irrelevant to Max Monroy’s great entrepreneurial machine, because if I intuited anything with certainty it was that the entrepreneurial world into which Licenciado Sanginés had thrust me, taking me out of a childish, studentish, irksome, brothel-going, crepuscular semiseclusion in a middle class that had abandoned its values to let itself be carried along by the current—I was thinking of
Lucha—this “new world” excluded everything that was not self-referential: the enterprise as origin and purpose of all things.

And Antigua Concepción? I asked myself then. Was she a madwoman or a super-magnate? Or both?

Asunta, as I have said, was sitting so I could not avoid an occasional, discreet glance at her legs. I began to believe it was on the basis of those extremely beautiful, long, depilated extremities, encased in flesh-colored stockings, silky to mortal eyes, that my feeling of passion was born.

I say passion. Not affection, or love, or gratitude, or responsibility, but passion, the freest, least bound of obligations, the most gratuitous. A feeling that flowed from Asunta’s legs to my falsely distracted, deceptively discreet gaze …

The world is transformed by desire. While she continued to enumerate the companies of Max Monroy for which I would begin to work starting now, all the times of my life—past, present, future, along with the prestigious names of the emotion: memory and desire, recollection and premonition—engaged with one another now and in the person of this woman.

I thought that life goes by rapidly. I never had thought that before. Now I did, and associated fugacity with fear and fear with attraction. Never, I admitted, had a female attracted me as much as Asunta Jordán did at that moment. And the dangerous thing was that passion and the woman who provoked it were, without my permission, beginning to transform my own desire, which in some way was no longer mine but was not yet—would it ever be?—hers.

From now on—I already knew it—my entire future would reside in that question. Asunta was turning me, without wanting to, into an inflamed man. Careful, careful! I told myself, to no avail. I felt conquered by the attraction of this woman and at the same time, without wanting to, without realizing it, I knew my life with the helpless Lucha Zapata was coming to an end.

The attraction of Asunta Jordán was inexplicable. It was instantaneous. Mea culpa? Because while she seemed desirable to me, she also seemed tiresome.

—

WAS
LUCHA
ZAPATA
a fortune-teller? I didn’t say anything to her when I returned that night to Cerrada de Chimalpopoca. I found her dressed as an aviator again. I noticed her resemblance to the celebrated Amelia Earhart, the valiant Gringa lost forever in a flight without a compass over the South Pacific. I hadn’t realized it. They were alike in something. Amelia Earhart was freckled and smiling, like those North American fields of wheat that laugh at the sun. She wore her hair very short, I suppose in order to fly better and set the aviator’s helmet firmly on her head. She wore pants and a leather jacket.

Just like Lucha Zapata now.

“Take me to the airport.”

I hailed a taxi and we both got in.

I let her talk.

“Don’t ask me anything.”

“No.”

“Remember what I told you one day. In this society you’re in perpetual debt. Whatever you do, you always end up losing. Society makes certain you feel guilty.”

I didn’t say what I was thinking. I didn’t correct her or indicate that in my opinion people were what they did, not what they were obliged to do. She was who she was, I thought at that moment, through her own will, not because a cruel, perverse, villainous society had determined it.

“What will you choose, Savior?” she asked suddenly, as if to exorcise the implacable ugliness of the city crumbling along the length of its cement escarpments.

“It depends. Between what and what?”

“Between the immediate and what you leave for another day.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t look outside. Look at me.”

I looked at her.

“What do you see?”

I felt an unexpected desire to cry. I controlled myself.

“I see a woman who wants to fly again.”

She squeezed my arm.

“Thank you, Savior. Do you know what I’m going to do?”

“No.”

“I’m free and I can choose. A ranchera singer? A poet?”

“You decide.”

“Do you know I’ve been invited to be on a reality show?”

“No. What’s that?”

“You have to show the most humiliating aspect of your character. You ask to eat on your knees. You fall down drunk.”

El Salto de Agua. Los Arcos de Belén. José María Izazaga. Ancient domes. Modern ruins. Nezahualcóyotl. La Candelaria.

“You pretend,” Lucha Zapata continued. “Don’t pretend. It’s like living in a Nazi concentration camp. That’s television. An Auschwitz for masochists. You deprive yourself. You animalize yourself. You eat rancid food. Your towels are smeared with shit. Your clothes are infested with bugs. They don’t let you sleep. Ambulance sirens sound day and night.”

She shouted: “They turn night into day!”

The driver didn’t stop driving but turned to look at me.

“What’s wrong? Is the señora all right?”

“It’s nothing. She’s just sad.”

“Ah,” the driver said with a sigh. “She’s going on a trip.”

He whistled some of “Beautiful, adored Mexico, I die far from you.”

I calmed her. I caressed her.

“You know? In the United States they call women a ‘number.’ What’s my number, do you think?”

“I don’t know, Lucha.”

It seemed useless to talk. She, dressed as an aviator, looked very tired, very disillusioned, like Dorothy Malone in 1950s films.

“I don’t know how to reason anymore.”

“Easy, Lucha, take it easy.”

From Calzada Ignacio Zaragoza we drove onto the long avenue that leads to the airport.

“I don’t want to end up a fly in a bar.”

“A what?”

“A barfly, Savior,” she said in English.

The driver whistled, “Let them say I’m sleeping and have them bring me here …”

We arrived. The lines of taxis and private cars made me think that heaven was far too small for so many passengers.

I helped her out.

She adjusted her helmet and goggles.

“Where shall I take you?”

“With women you never know.” She smiled.