Destiny and Desire (33 page)

A question without an immediate response, which still obliged me, no doubt because I did not have an answer, to suspend my work in the Vasco de Quiroga office and at the side of my platonic love Asunta Jordán and ask myself: Where was Sanginés’s strategy leading with respect to the San Juan de Aragón Prison and the prisoner Miguel Aparecido? What, in essence, did Sanginés want when he
opened the cell blocks of the penitentiary to me with a master key? Because I went into the prison and was made to feel right at home, with all kinds of facilities and even special considerations like this: Leaving me alone in the cell with Miguel Aparecido, a strong man focused on a personal resolve whose origin and fate I did not know: to remain imprisoned even though he completed his sentence; and if he ever was released, to commit a new crime that would keep him in prison.

A new crime. What was the first crime, the original crime, the offense Miguel Aparecido wanted to pay for eternally, since the ultimate solution of this enigma was to die in prison? Still, was this conclusion of mine, so easy and melodramatic, correct? Did a final point exist that would conclude Miguel’s punishment in Miguel’s mind, allowing him finally to leave his cell? Knowing this meant knowing everything. From the beginning. The origin of the story. The resolution of the mysteries I’ve been stitching together here and the conversion of mystery into destiny. Truths the prisoner did not seem disposed to reveal.

Least of all today. I went into the cell. His back was turned. The high, distant barred light drew lines on his body that were not part of his gray uniform: It was as if only the sun wore the striped uniform of the old prisons.

I went in and Miguel did not turn to look at me. It would have been better for me if he had. Because when he did, he revealed the face of a terrifying beast. His hair was wild, his cheeks scratched, his eyes as red as an ominous sunset, his nose wounded, his lips and teeth bloody.

“For God’s sake, Miguel …”

I walked forward to embrace him, with a natural instinct to provide relief. He did not want help. He repulsed me brutally. I looked away, knowing he looked at me without affection.

Then something inside me said, “Don’t look away. Look directly at him. Look at him as if you’ve seen him before. Like a vulnerable, bewildered human being in pain who rejects your affection only because he needs it, because he has no other support but you, just you, my poor Josué, double of himself.”

I thought this and felt what we all know but never say aloud, because it is both a mystery and self-evident. I looked at Miguel Aparecido and saw myself reflected in him not as in a mirror but only in a question: We are body, we are soul, and we will never know how flesh and spirit are joined.

I looked at the unaffectionate eyes of Miguel Aparecido, feverish with the terror of the day, and for an instant I saw myself in them … I saw that both of us, I a free man, he a prisoner, were concerned with the same dilemma: Did we all deserve to be punished for the crime of a single man? Could the soul be saved if the body wasn’t saved too? Could our body commit offenses without punishing the soul? Could the soul sin and the body remain free of transgression?

When I say I saw all this in Miguel Aparecido’s gaze, I mean I was seeing it in the reflection that returned to my eyes from his. I recalled Filopáter and his reading of Saint Augustine: Sooner or later, human misery always requires the solace, the relief, the consolation religion offers through the promise of the resurrection of the flesh and the world with the promise of freedom in this life. Looking again (I don’t know if for the first time) at Miguel Aparecido this afternoon, I thought religion and freedom resemble each other inasmuch as they believe in the unbelievable: the resurrection of the flesh or the autonomy of the individual. Perhaps the second is the greater mystery. Because we cannot know if we are going to be resurrected, we accept the secret of faith. But knowing we can be free, the absence of freedom opens before us an entire hand of anguished possibilities: to struggle for freedom or to renounce it; to act or abstain; to dirty one’s hands or use gloves … If we choose one card, we sacrifice the rest. In life there is no change in cards. If you get four aces, you fucking win. If you get a weak hand, you’re fucked. Though at times you win the game and save your life with a pair of fives. You play the hand you’re dealt, and if you think you can ask for a different one, you’re mistaken. Whoever deals the cards does it only once. We have to play the weak or winning hand destiny gave us.

Did I see in this man wounded both externally and internally the
fatality of an existence I really had not known until now? Miguel Aparecido appeared (so to speak) to me like a strange but always serene being, master of a secret and comfortable with his own mystery, jealous of what he kept hidden in his bosom, intolerant when he was offered freedom, enigmatic when he decided to be a prisoner.

This was my idea of the man. I looked at what I saw before me when I entered the cell.

The earlier Miguel was not the present one and I could no longer wager on the truth. Was Miguel the severe, fatalistic man of yesterday? Or was he the destructive, beaten animal of today?

It is strange how, when a human being is set loose from acquired habits and customary masks are removed, barbaric feelings spring up, not in the usual sense of savagery or atrocity, but in the fuller meaning of existing earlier than convention, limits, and above all, the idea of the person. That was this Miguel Aparecido, a man earlier than himself, as if everything the world (and I) knew about him was a great deception, pure appearance, the skin of a phantom whose concealed body and soul belonged to someone else. This man.

Looking at him with great intensity, I thought of his decisive words. He counted on the loyalty of the other prisoners. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta. El Negro España and La Pérfida Albión. Then he had told me, boy, nothing happens here that I don’t know about, and nothing I don’t want to or can’t control.

“Know this: even unexpected riots are the work of my will.”

He had told me earlier he could smell the air and when the atmosphere in the prison became very heavy, a great internal fight was needed to clear the air. There were serious riots here when necessary, and then peace returned. Because peace, he said, was a necessity in prison.

“Many innocents come through here. They have to be respected.”

I had seen the children in the swimming pool. They shouldn’t be in prison forever.

“But if chaos did exist here, that would be because I am powerless
to assure the order indispensable for the San Juan de Aragón Prison not to be heaven or hell but, and it’s saying a lot, a goddamn purgatory.”

On that occasion he had taken me by the shoulders, looking at me as if he were a tiger.

“When something happens here that slips through my fingers, it makes me furious.”

Furious. The riot of broken chairs banging against the walls. The tables in the dining room smashed to pieces. Injured, dying, dead police. Padlocks first filed, then opened. Filed clean away.

Maximiliano Batalla. The Mariachi’s Band. Brillantinas and Gomas. Ventanas. Siboney Peralta, who strangles and sings. Even La Pérfida Albión and El Negro España. Above all Sara P., the widow of Nazario Esparza and killer, along with Maxi Batalla, of Doña Estrella de Esparza, Errol’s mama …

All of them. All of them. They escaped San Juan de Aragón. This time Miguel Aparecido did not provoke or control the riot. Maxi and Sara learned the lesson, they unleashed the barely contained fury of the criminal population, got the prisoners together, organized the riot, wreaked destruction, escaped.

“Who?” I asked, enraged by him, like him, Miguel Aparecido.

He looked at me like a dead man who has not lost the hope of resurrection.

“You, Josué.”

No, I shook my head, astonished, not me.

“You, Josué, you have to find out what happened. How Maxi Batalla and Sara the whore were able to organize the escape. Why my allies abandoned me. Who organized them, who helped them, who opened the doors for them?”

He looked at me in an enlightened, perverse way, passing on to me the obligation that he, from prison, could not carry out, granting him a kind of vengeful halo with the desire to deceive me, make me believe that if I discovered the truth outside these walls it would also reveal the truth that remained here, confined, not so much inside the walls of the prison as inside the walls of Miguel Aparecido’s head.

I could not see the weakness of the tiger that looked at me with the dissatisfaction of not having eaten because it had not killed. I could not see that the real menace of Miguel Aparecido consisted in telling the truth.

I understood only that it was not the flight of Sara P. and the Mariachi, or even—and this was worse—of Brillantinas and Gomas, Siboney and Ventanas, Albión and España that drove me mad, but the collapse of my illusion: Miguel was not, as he believed, the overseer of the penitentiary, the top dog, the sheikh. That is what infuriated him: the collapse of his jailhouse authority. The loss of the kingdom created by the sacrifice of his freedom. Being the head of the interior empire of the prison.

“I’m here because I want to be.

“I’m the head.

“When something happens here that slips through my fingers, I become furious.

“Fu-ri-ous.”

A
year went by following the events I have narrated so far. Perhaps things occurred in all the chapters of my life. I didn’t return to Antigua Concepción in the nameless burial ground. I never heard from my increasingly sentimentalized Lucha Zapata, who flew away with the fugacity of a bird with a damaged wing. I had completely forgotten about my sinister jailer María Egipciaca. I knew that Elvira Ríos, my nurse, was barely a decisive though fleeting traffic accident. Doña Estrellita de Esparza lay buried, her despicable husband Don Nazario had been roasted alive in his own courtyard by the very incarnation of immorality, the vile and ridiculous Sara P., the Lady Macbeth of Mariachiland imprisoned after a macabre, imbecilic confession in the San Juan de Aragón Prison together with her
partenaire
in mischief, the immortal Mariachi Maxi, who escaped with this same Sarape and an entire gang of criminals, to the rage and despair of the presumptive capo of the penitentiary, my friend Miguel Aparecido, mocked by a band of thugs and thrown into a physical and moral anguish whose dimensions (I guessed) I would never know, no matter how, from his eyes of a caged tiger, a secret would peer out, veiled with difficulty by his bluish eyelids. Licenciado Antonio Sanginés, source of so much news and guidance in my life, had absented himself (for the moment) and the truth is that none of what I’ve just said mattered to me very much for a simple reason.

I was in love.

I could fail in sincerity with you, patient readers, both absent and present (present if you are kind enough to read me, absent if you do not and at times even when you do), and tell you whatever I feel like. In the course of a year, twelve months, three hundred sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours, five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, thirty-one million five hundred thirty-six thousand seconds, what can’t an individual do, especially if he is author and protagonist of a novel dictated from and for death? What action is forbidden to him in my tale? What lie does not overcome my memory? What recollection of the past, what desire for the future? Don’t you see: I persist, to my own despair (and, with luck, to yours), I am here, writing away, desiring the past at the same time I remember the future.

Desiring the past.

Remembering the future.

This, I assure you, is the paradox of death. Except that you have to die to know it.

What I want to say now is that for an entire year, dedicated to working in the offices of Max Monroy in the noble (but resurrected) region of Santa Fe, ancient seat of the Renaissance utopia of Fray Vasco de Quiroga in New Spain, I too was reborn. Reborn to love. I fell madly in love with Asunta Jordán. And from this fact my story hangs.