Destiny and Desire (44 page)

He said he was imprisoned by order of Max Monroy. He quickly cut me off: Of course judicial requirements had been met. Of course he had a trial. Of course testimony was heard and a sentence was announced. “Of course I was condemned to thirty years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit … three decades of confinement starting at the age of twenty,” he remembered, but in the voice of someone who, when recalling, also commemorates.

He looked at me with a defiant air. “I behaved well, Josué. I swear I made an effort. I intended to be the best inmate in the pen. Punctual, hardworking, obliging. All of it contrary to my own character: cleaning toilets, removing excrement, mopping up vomit … All of it to get out of here. Get out for only one purpose.”

He was about to lower his eyes.

He didn’t.

“To kill. I wanted to get out to murder Max Monroy. For having accused me falsely. Of attempted murder. Now I wanted to deserve the accusation. I got out. I prepared for the act, and now I was serious. I haunted the Utopia building. I imagined a thousand ways to eliminate the son of a bitch. Suddenly he intuited it, he didn’t find out, he just smelled that something was going on because he knew
I was free. He had to have thought: What do I do to lock up this bastard again? Because he had to have realized that in this second round, either he’d kill me or I’d kill him …”

Miguel Aparecido was making a great effort to keep his gaze fixed on me, eyes wide open, as yellow as those of a canid race, Miguel-wolf with the jaw as strong as a padlock, arms and legs imprisoned but longing to get out and race toward his prey, but sad, afflicted by the confinement he had imposed on himself, he reveals to me now, he stopped prowling around the offices of Max Monroy, returned to prison, asked for the help of Antonio Sanginés, I want to go back to the pen, Licenciado, please have them take me back into jail, I beg you for your mother’s sake, please, save me from the crime, I don’t want to kill my father, if you really love Max Monroy return me to the pen, Lic, you can do it, you have influence, do me this favor, save me from sin by locking me up right away, accuse me of whatever you like, get me out of freedom, take away my desire to kill, save me from myself, put the chains of my freedom on me …

“I returned to prison, Josué. Sanginés invented some crime for me. I don’t know which. I don’t remember anymore. I think he revived the earlier sentence for reasons that escape me. Sanginés is a shyster. He knows all the tricks. He can resurrect the dead. He can get water from a stone. But he can’t erase the memory you drag behind you whether you’re free or in prison …”

SIBILA
SARMIENTO
WAS
twelve years old when they decided she should be married. They all agreed that matrimony was very desirable but it would be better to wait for the girl to grow. For her first menstruation. For hair to grow under her arms. All of that. Sibila still played with dolls and sang children’s songs. Matrimony was desired. It was also premature, said the girl’s family.

The mother of the presumptive groom became enraged. An offer of marriage in the name of her son was not something you turned down. Marriage was not a question of hair or periods. It was an act of convenience. Sibila Sarmiento’s family knew perfectly well that only the wedding of their children, right now, without delay, would join the names and properties of the Sarmientos and the Monroys
and the great unity and productivity of their lands—Michoacán, Jalisco, Zacatecas—would triumph in hard cold liquidity before the law of the market and succession divided them into parcels, or an act of reiterated demagoguery gave them to the campesinos, transformed them into communal lands, and threw us all into poverty.

“Do you know the song? ‘Just four
milpas
are left …’ Well, unite the children so the lands can be united, and when the inevitable fragmentation comes we’ll have something more than four cornfields left … After the storm …”

The squall was nothing less than the extension of the cities, urban sprawl, an exploding population, but Antigua Concepción persisted in her vocabulary at once revolutionary and feudal, agrarian and suspicious of the cities: She was crazy! She said another agrarian storm, recurrent in Mexico, was coming. They would declare null and void all appropriations of lands, water, and forests belonging to villages, settlements, congregations, or communities made by the previous power in violation of the law and abolished by the new power in confirmation of the law. She became confused. That’s the bad thing about living so many years. And still, she had a witch’s reasoning: She guessed with metaphors. The migrants were returning to Mexico and didn’t find land or work. Gringo corn was wiping out the Mexican
milpa
. Villages were dying. Living in the past, Antigua Concepción prophesied the present. Like all prophets, she contradicted herself and became confused.

“The land would pass from few hands to fewer hands, passing through many hands, according to her,” Sanginés explained. “Exempted was control exercised over no more than fifty hectares and for more than ten years. This reasoning was invoked by Señora Concepción, who was possessed by a kind of ravening madness in which past and future times, agrarian reform and the urban explosion, the place of inheritance and the will to begin again, mature sex and infantile sex were all mixed together: She imposed herself on her son because at heart she desired her son and wanted to castrate him by marrying him to a prepubescent child, incapable of giving or receiving satisfaction … Just to annoy …”

By uniting the Sarmiento and Monroy patrimonies, forty-nine
hectares were joined, those remaining were deeded to agrarian communities, one came out well with God and the Devil and offered an example of social solidarity by sacrificing something in order to save something, and the condition was the consolidation of protected lands through the marriage of a twelve-year-old girl, Sibila Sarmiento, and a forty-three-year-old man, Max Monroy, by means of matrimonial documents that could be disputed given the age of one contracting party but existed by virtue of the dishonesty of civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the desolate fields of central Mexico and, above and beyond everything else, even though one contracting party was a minor, the union of fortunes was consummated and the foresight of Doña Concepción, Antigua Concepción, proved correct: “I have what I want: The lands are ours and we can parcel them out; the marriage is theirs and let them arrange things the best they can. Get down to fucking, as they say.”

“You didn’t know my grandmother,” said Miguel, and I didn’t dare contradict him. “She was a witch, she had a pact with the Devil, she proposed something and achieved it, no matter who fell, she was insatiable, she never had enough money, if she had a lot she thought it was a little and wanted more, using every deception, the most sinister schemes, the most corrupt pacts as long as she not only preserved but augmented her power. And all of that with no reference to historical and political reality. She lived in her own time, the time of her making. Sibila Sarmiento was indispensable for mocking all the laws: childhood, marriageable age, agrarian law, even the personality of her son, in order to obtain what she wanted: another piece of earth. And I say ‘earth’ and not ‘land’ because each piece of land my damn grandmother acquired was for her the earth, the entire world, a universe embodied in every inch of earth, the earth was her flesh, it embodied her, and though I don’t know where she was buried, I suspect, Josué, that for her the grave is another ranch she wants to own. And listen, never for her own benefit but for the sake of ‘the revolution,’ the entelechy she believed she was promoting by associating her desire with her destiny. That’s how they were.” I believe Miguel Aparecido sighed. “That’s how they built our country. Telling themselves: If it’s good for me, it’s good for
Mexico. Tell me, what conscience isn’t salved if this credo is repeated until you believe your own lie? Isn’t this the great Mexican lie: I steal, I kill, I imprison, I amass a fortune, and I do it in the name of the country, my benefit is the nation’s, and therefore the nation ought to thank me for my pillaging?”

Miguel Aparecido looked down, away from me, as I looked away from him during this discourse.

Miguel continued: “Her voracity went mad on this subject: acquiring properties, adding land, as if the secular tradition of basing one’s fortune on owning land depended on this alone, as if she had already foreseen the moment when the great fortunes no longer depended on owning land but also on factories and now communications: This was,” Miguel said in summary, “Max Monroy’s conclusion. Not to be like his mother. To change the orientation of his wealth. Abandon the countryside and industry. Dedicate himself to communications. Build an empire of the future, far from the land and the factory, an almost impalpable universe barring his mother’s way, a world of cellphones and the Internet that offered, instead of mudholes and smoke, videos, webs, music, games, and above all information along with the right to two hundred free messages and half an hour unlimited calling to each owner of a Monroy mobile.”

And Sibila?

Imagine night falling on a face. Night fell on the face of Miguel Aparecido. He tried to rescue his account interrupted by all kinds of emotions, stammering and therefore unusual in him, even alien to the man I knew.

Sibila Sarmiento, a mother at fourteen. Deprived of her child at fifteen. Condemned to wander like a ghost, without understanding what had happened, through an abandoned ranch house stripped of furniture, in the care of absent servants who did not say a word to her. Did her husband, Max Monroy, understand what had happened? Or did he too absent himself from a situation that was nothing but the coarse, powerful whim of his mother, the monstrous old matriarch enamored of her own desire, her ability to show her own power at every opportunity so she would compare favorably to her husband the general, an irresolute womanizer, to believe she was
ahead of events and mistress of the crystal ball, that reality did as she ordered because she did not endure reality, she created it, her caprice was law, the most capricious caprice, the most gratuitous cruelty, the least trustworthy desire, the most irrational reason: Now I’ll take over the Sarmiento lands, now I’ll marry my forty-year-old bachelor son to a twelve-year-old girl, now I’ll declare the kid crazy and have her locked up at the Fray Bernardino because the poor idiot doesn’t distinguish between the solitude of a ranch house and the helplessness of a lunatic asylum, rot there, imbecile, die there without realizing it, let’s see who can do anything against the desire, the power, the caprice of a woman who has overcome every obstacle with the strength of her will, a female who rids herself of any unnecessary obligation; the child’s mother to the funny farm; the child to the street, let him manage on his own, without help, let him become a little man without anybody’s protection, let’s see how he does, damn brat, if he has the right stuff he’ll get ahead, if not, well then he can go to hell: all for you, Max, all so you can grow up and assert yourself without ballast, without family obligations, without children to take care of, without a wife to annoy you, nag at you, weigh you down, you’ll be free, my son, you’ll owe supreme thanks to the will of your magnificent mother Antigua Concepción, not Concha, not Conchita, no, but the mother of will, of whim, of caprice, of creation itself, of determination … The mistress of destiny. The overseer of chance.

“I made myself in the street, Josué. I grew up however I could. Perhaps I’m even grateful for being abandoned. I’m grateful for it but don’t forgive it. I’ll defend myself with my teeth.”

I
RETURNED
WITH
Father Filopáter to the Santo Domingo arcades. I wondered what brought me back. I guessed at some reasons: My interest in him and his ideas. The mystery surrounding his exclusion from teaching and from his religious order. Above all (because Filopáter was something like the final recollection of my youth), the memory of the moment when I learned to read, to think, to discuss my ideas, to feel, if not superior to then independent of the afflictions of childhood: subjection to a domineering housekeeper
and especially ignorance of my origins. María Egipciaca was not my mother. My bones knew it. My head knew it when my confidence was withdrawn from the tyrannical housekeeper on Calle de Berlín. This did not resolve, of course, the enigma of my origins. But that mystery allowed me to uproot my life on the basis of an initiative determined by me, by my freedom.

Jericó was the symbol of my independence, of my promise of personal independence. But in the fraternal equation of Castor and Pollux, Father Filopáter, Trinitarian, intervened. He precipitated our intellectual curiosity, offered a port and a haven in what might have been aimless sailing regardless of the solidarity between the young navigators. If I had rediscovered Filopáter now, the event acquired an explanation: Jericó’s distance returned me to the priest’s proximity. Because if my friend and I had a “father” in common, it was this teacher at the Jalisco School, the priest who revealed to us the syntax of dialectic, the ludic element (in order not to be ridiculous) of ideological and even theoretical positions. To pit the philosophy of Saint Thomas against the thought of Nietzsche was an exercise, for Jericó and I were not Thomists or nihilists. The interesting thing is that Filopáter would find in Spinoza the equilibrium between dogma and rebellion, asking us, in a straightforward way, to be sure the ideology of knowledge did not precede knowledge itself, making it impossible.

“The truth is made manifest without manifestos, like light when it displaces dark. Light does not announce itself ideologically. Neither does thought. Only darkness keeps us from seeing.”

Had Filopáter’s position regarding dogma been what eventually excluded him from the religious community? Did the priest distance himself too much from the principles of faith in order to establish himself in the proofs of faith? These were the questions I asked myself when the chaotic or fatal events I have recorded here combined and broke the ties that until then had bound me to friendship (Jericó), sexual desire (Asunta), ambition (Max Monroy), and unspoiled charity (Miguel Aparecido).