Destiny and Desire (35 page)

“Dogma.” Jericó read my mind. We were Castor and Pollux again, the mystic twins, the Dioscuri. The inseparable pair.

“Listen, who decides that a dogma is a dogma?” I asked, stepping back from the abyss of fraternity.

“Authority.”

“Force?”

“If you think so.”

I didn’t know where or by what route he wanted to take me. I said force isn’t enough. Force requires authority to be forceful.

“And authority without force?” Jericó asked.

“Is morality,” I took a risk with my words.

“And morality?”

“I won’t tell you it’s certainty, because then morality and faith would be the same.”

“Then, morality can be uncertain.”

“Yes. I believe the only certainty is uncertainty.”

“Why?”

“If you agree, Jericó, I’ll only ask you not to feel superior or inferior. Feel equal.”

“Do you remember when we were young we’d ask ourselves: What invalidates a man, what strips him of value?”

I nodded.

“Answer me now,” he said with a certain pugnacity.

“You and I are each embarked on his attempt at success. I sincerely
think we haven’t defined ourselves yet. We’re always someone else because we’re always in the process of becoming.”

“I have.” Jericó intensified the conflict another degree.

“I haven’t.” I shrugged. “I don’t believe you, bro.”

“Do you want me to prove it to you?”

I looked at him with as much spirit (adverse, perverse, diverse?) as he showed looking at me.

“Sure, of course. I’ll envy you because I’m not as sure as you are. It’ll do me good.”

I waited for him to speak. We understood each other too well. He hesitated for an instant. Then he observed, smiling this time, that to be coherent, he would respond with actions, not words. I returned the smile and folded my arms. It was a spontaneous gesture but it indicated a certain permanence on my part at this time and in this place we had shared since we were nineteen years old.

“Don’t stop when you’re halfway there,” he said suddenly.

“You make the path as you walk, says the song.”

“You understand me.”

“Because I’m sitting here and you’re over there. All we have to do is change places and all the truth we’ve just said collapses, goes all to hell, becomes doubt.

“And also memory,” I insisted. “Let’s remember where we were before.”

“Though we don’t know where we’ll be afterward.”

“We can predict.”

“And if we’re struck by lightning?”

“We live or we die,” I said with a smile.

“We survive.” He looked at me with eyes half closed and then opened wide as if by orders of an internal sergeant.

“Alive or dead?” I hesitated.

“Alive or dead, we’re only survivors. Always.”

I shook my head.

“We have no father,” said Jericó.

“And?”

“If we did, we’d grow up to honor him so he’d be proud of us.”

“And since we don’t …”

“We can exist for ourselves.”

“On condition we honor ourselves?” I smiled.

“Don’t get lost when you’re halfway there.”

I detected a certain internal disturbance in my friend when he repeated: “Halfway there. There’s more. Something more than you and me. Our country. Our nation.”

I laughed out loud. I told him he didn’t have to justify his job, his position at Los Pinos. I wanted to liven and lighten the situation.

“It all depends,” I said. “What’s the objective?”

“To be superior to all those who challenge us.” He took another breath.

“Wouldn’t it be enough just to be equal?”

“You’re joking. I don’t want them to say about us: They’re like everybody else, they’re the usual ones, the customary ones, the ones in the crowd. Agreed?”

I said probably, if my friend’s words indicated that self-improvement was necessary, of course … Agreed …

“Are we different, you and I?” I said after Jericó’s obstinate silence.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you and I didn’t have to survive. We always had food on the table.”

“Like everybody else? Do you think I did?”

I took a step I hadn’t wanted to take: “I suspect you did.”

In that suspicion were summarized the doubts you already know about regarding the character called just “Jericó,” with no last name, not even the past afforded me by the house on Berlín, the care of María Egipciaca, and the nurse Elvira Ríos, before my destiny and Jericó’s converged like two rivers of fire, Castor and Pollux. I was Josué Nadal.

Jericó, without family names, who traveled without a name on his passport, who perhaps traveled without a passport, who perhaps—everything my affection for him had hidden was now suddenly revealed—had not been in France or the United States or anywhere
except the hiding place of his soul … And wasn’t it enough, I exclaimed to myself, to have a soul where you could take refuge? Wasn’t that sufficient?

“Alive or dead … Survivors.”

At this moment, when I heard these words, I felt that a stage in our lives (and consequently in our friendship) had closed forever. I understood that from now on he and I would have to be responsible for our own lives, breaking the fraternal pact that until then not only had united us but allowed us to live without asking ourselves questions about the past, as if, being friends, it was enough for us say and do things together to complement the absences of our earlier life.

It was as if life had begun when he and I became friends in the schoolyard. It was as if, when we stopped being friends, a barefoot death had begun to approach us.

“MAX
MONROY,”
Asunta Jordán tells me tonight, “has two rules of conduct. The first is never to respond to an attack. Because there are so many, you know? You can’t be as prominent as he is without being attacked, above all in a country where it’s difficult to forgive success. Lift your head, Josué, and they immediately assault you and, if they can, decapitate you.”

“Rancors in this country are very old and very deep,” I remarked, and added Socratically, because I didn’t want to disagree with her: “Mexico is a country where everything turns out badly. There’s a reason we celebrate the defeated and despise the victorious.”

“Even though we stay with our idols. If you become an idol, an idol of the ranchera, the bolero, the soap opera, sports, your life is pardoned,” Asunta said with her style of popular humor.

“Idolatry here is very old.” I smiled, continuing my adulatory tactic. “We believe in God but we worship idols.”

Asunta shook off this ideological confetti with an elegant movement of her head. “But the fact of not responding to an attack is a terrible weapon. You don’t give the attacker a moment of untroubled sleep. Why doesn’t Max respond? When does Max respond? How
does Max respond—if he does respond? What weapons will Max use to respond?

“In this way,” Asunta continued, “Max doesn’t need to do anything to answer those who assault him. The fact of not doing anything provokes terror and in the end defeats the attacker, who doesn’t understand why he isn’t answered, then doubts the efficacy or ferocity of the attack, immediately feels completely worthless because he doesn’t deserve a response, and in the end aggression and aggressor are forgotten and Max Monroy goes on, as cheerful …”

“As Johnnie Walker.” I laughed then.

She wasn’t too happy with this joke. Asunta was already embarking on the second example she wanted to give to complete the picture of Max Monroy’s conduct. A rancorous cloud passed over her gaze, evoking, without looking at me, those who tried to become famous by attacking the fame of Max Monroy. Lesson learned: They succeeded only in increasing it. They were forgotten.

“And the second case?”

Asunta came back as if from a dream.

“Max Monroy is a cautious man.” She smiled with a certain bitter nostalgia that did not escape my attention. The second example was that Max, who naturally is a cautious man, becomes even more cautious when he receives an improper or unexpected favor.

“Improper?”

If Asunta hesitated it was only for a second. Then she said: As improper as having imprisoned a dangerous man only as a favor to the great Max Monroy.

I searched in vain for a rictus of laughter, an ironic intention, an angry emphasis in Asunta’s voice, her gaze, her posture. She had spoken as a statue would speak—if a statue could speak.

“Favors are paid for, I think,” I continued so our talk would not die, as it could have died, right there, since I was trying to tie up loose ends and bring together what I knew with what I didn’t know …

“Favors have a price, and then we realize the mistake it is to grant them and go mad trying to find an action to wipe out the obligation
we have acquired to the person who did us the favor,” she went on. “Do you see?”

“Death?” I asked with the innocent face I have practiced most in front of the mirror.

“Death?” she replied with an incredulous affirmation on the point of becoming a question.

“Death,” she continued calmly, though with a certain pleading tone.

“Whose?” I didn’t let her go.

Perhaps she hesitated for a moment. Then she said: “The death of the one who did us the favor.”

“Improper?”

Or unexpected. Unexpected?

“The one who did the favor died.”

“The advantages of being old,” I said with an erotic calculation doomed, I knew beforehand, to fail. She did not appear to understand. On the contrary, she stressed that Max Monroy was a self-made man, but only in part. He inherited a great deal (I remained silent about my relationship, valid only if secret, with Max’s mother, Antigua Concepción.)

If she spoke like his mother Doña Conchita (with reason she changed her name, refusing the diminutive in exchange for voluntary antiquity) she would say: Agrarian reform benefited him as much as it did his mother. It was the end of the old haciendas as big as all of Benelux. It took two days by train to travel the lands of William Randolph Hearst in Chihuahua and Sonora. “Citizen Kane,” I interjected, and she continued, not understanding the allusion. She repeated the lesson: “Thirty-five percent of Mexico’s territory in the hands of Gringos. The hacienda was broken, the system of communal lands was created—all for all, sure—agrarian law was violated, now small properties were accumulated and campesino lands stolen to construct hotels on the beaches, the campesinos didn’t receive a thank you, or a whiskey, or a swim in the kidney-shaped pools, but most fled to the cities, above all ‘dissipated and painted’ Mexico City and the new industrial sectors created by the expropriation of the petroleum industry. Max’s good fortune: first,
agrarian repartition; second, the system of communal lands; third, small farmsteads; fourth, communal landowners without credit or machinery, subject to the law of the market, without protection or even a five-centavo piece, and fifth—lucky five—the campesino flight to industry, creation of a domestic market, saturation in demand, inequality, unemployment, the flight of labor to the United States, money returned by workers to their old communities, the explosion of cheap consumerism.”

“And Monroy taking advantage of it all?”

“He isn’t a thief.” Asunta looked at me without affection. “He has today’s money just as he had yesterday’s. He has built a fortune on the earlier one, his mother’s. He has multiplied Doña Conchita’s goods” (please: Antigua Concepción, more respect for the dead!), “imposed very severe rules of discipline, justice, independence, knows the gulf that separates reputation from personality, protects the second, scorns the first, is implacable in getting rid of incompetents at the highest levels, occupies the center of the center, governs himself in order to govern others better, does not overstimulate the public …”

“And all of this for what?” I interrupted her because her exaltation of Max was beginning not only to annoy me but, in particular, to make me jealous. It fell upon me to learn about Max Monroy through the love of his dear dead mama. I was irritated by the admiration, as repetitive as a record, as unrestrained as an orgasm, of this woman who was more and more awful and perhaps, for that reason, more and more desired. Or, just the opposite …

“Why?” she said, disconcerted.

“Or for whom,” I said, not daring to throw up to her the lack of sincerity: Everything she had said to me seemed learned, like a lesson that had to be memorized and repeated by the loyal servant of Max Monroy.

She went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “Max controls demand with what supply can provide,” she said like a jukebox.

“For what, for whom?” I tossed a coin on the piano.

“It would have been enough for him to inherit, Josué, with no need to increase his inheritance …”

“For whom?” I said in my best bolero voice.

A tremor of anger fought in Asunta’s body against the sorrow of a resignation that seemed too satisfied.

“For you?” I grabbed her shoulders. “Will you be the heir?”

“He has no descendants,” she moaned, surprised, “he had no children …”

“He has a lover, what the hell …”

Asunta detached herself from my growing weakness. I thought desire would strengthen me. She was undermining me: the longing to love her. The longing, nothing more.

“What joins the two of you? He’s an old man. What is it that joins you, Asunta?”

To my surprise she said that smell joined them. What smell? Many smells. Now, the strange smell of an old man, the smell of an animal in a cave. Earlier, the smell of the countryside, where we met. I laughed a lot. Perhaps all that joins us is the smell of cow, chicken, burro, and shit, she said, serious but with a good deal of humor.

She looked at me with a fixity suspended between love and defiance.

“Mexico poor and provincial, mediocre and envious, hostile …”

She threw her arms around my neck.

“I don’t want to go back there. Not for anything in the world.”

She told me this in a whisper. I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling. This was serious. She took my hand. She looked at it. She said my hands were beautiful. I smiled. I wasn’t going to enumerate the charms of Asunta.

“Please, understand me,” she said. “I owe everything to Max Monroy. Before, my life was very frustrated. Now, I’m a guided force.”