Destiny and Desire (47 page)

Asunta Jordán did not look at me. Her complete attention was dedicated to reading the digital print, skipping the password, depending on two gigabytes of memory, connecting with the wireless net, showing me without even looking at me that the ideological world inhabited by poor Jericó was an illusion of the past, something as ancient as the pyramids.

“Older than a forest,” Max Monroy said about himself.

But if Jericó was an agent removed from both Carrera’s presidential
and Monroy’s entrepreneurial power, whom did he represent? Himself, only that? You are aware of the mutual respect my friend and I had for each other. He did not inquire into my personal life and I did not try to find out about his. The question that remained shrouded was, of course, Jericó’s life during the obscure years of his absence. I acted in good faith. I loved my friend. I loved our old friendship. If he said he had been in France during that time, I believed him, no matter how false his French culture seemed to me and how conclusive his pop cultural references to the North American world. Did Jericó let slip Gringo exclamations intentionally—
Let’s hug it out, bitch
—and never French ones? Did he want me to know I was deceived, did his old habit of playing with reality get the better of him, deceiving to amuse, masking to reveal? Did he want to seduce me, put me in the position of asking about him, transform him into my own mystery, transfer to Jericó the questions I did not ask myself? Did he know perhaps that my mysteries were nonexistent? Did he know what I’ve recounted here, everything you know: my affair with Lucha Zapata, my relationship with Miguel Aparecido, my employment in Max Monroy’s enterprise, the recent revelation of Miguel Aparecido’s relationship to Monroy, my secret talks with Monroy’s mother, Doña Antigua Concepción, and finally my infatuation with Asunta Jordán, the pleasure of the night and the humiliation of the next morning, the fugacity of my pleasure with her, and Asunta’s brazen, frightening giving of herself in her relationship of gratitude with the ancient tribal chief: Max Monroy?

Perhaps, with these questions, I disguised my own mystery, my origins prior to my life with María Egipciaca in the mansion on Berlín.

I felt I had voluntarily erased all memory before the age of seven, though I also think before that age we have no memory at all except what our parents tell us. I had no parents. Jericó, apparently, didn’t either. I’ve already recounted how he and I would congratulate ourselves on not having a family if the family was like that of our friend Baldy Errol. This was one more disguise, perhaps the
most sophistic of all. The fact is Jericó had no second name because he had renounced it. His example led me to mention only very occasionally the one I had in school, at the university, at work. Josué Nadal. Perhaps I rejected it to emulate Jericó. Perhaps a last name with no known ancestry made me uncomfortable. Perhaps he and I preferred to be Castor and Pollux, legendary brothers, without last names.

In this gigantic puzzle, where was Jericó? Who was Jericó? I had the anguished feeling, located in the pit of my stomach, that I absolutely did not know the person I thought I knew better than anyone: my brother Jericó, protector of the fraternity of Castor and Pollux, Argonauts destined for the same adventure. Retrieving the Golden Fleece …

The naked man, the animal that received me in the secret apartment in Utopia, was on all fours on a rumpled bed.

I remembered him in the same posture, defiant but smiling, sure of himself, master of a future as mysterious as it was certain, in La Hetara’s whorehouse: Who knows what would happen, but it would happen for him, for Jericó, thanks to his desire and his destiny. And necessity? Could my friend exclude the necessary from the desired and the destined? I thought of him now as he was earlier, the day he announced his departure, moving like a caged animal around the space we shared, which had changed into a prison he was going to leave—without even imagining he would end up here, once more on all fours but this time really caged, shut in, a prisoner now as perhaps he always had been, of himself: Jericó under guard, mapping the prison of his bed.

His whitish body ended in a furious, disheveled head with bloodshot eyes, enraged lips, and murderous teeth, as if he had just devoured the tiger at the zoo. His body looked grotesque, elongated, in distorted perspective behind the blond head that encapsulated Jericó’s entire person then, as if everything pulsating in him, guts and testicles, heart and skeleton, were concentrated in a monstrous, aggressive head that was intestines, balls, claws, and blood of the animal walking on the bed on all fours, fixed on me, taking pride in
his verbal ferocity, his feverish dialect, there are men loved by many women, Josué you bastard, there are men no woman loves, but I love just one, you’ve had them all, I love only one, let me have her, damn it, let me have her or I swear I’ll have you killed! Do you think you have a right to everything I didn’t have? You’re wrong, motherfucker! I’ll give you everything, like always, but let me have this woman, just one woman, why do you fuck with me, Josué you bastard, why don’t you let me have the only woman I desire, the only woman who’s made me feel like a man, the woman who captured me and mastered me and tore away from me mystery and the power to question, the woman who refuses to be mine because she says she’s yours and Asunta rejects me saying she belongs to you, she can’t be anybody else’s, you bastard motherfucker, free her you son of a bitch, let her go for my balls, aren’t we like brothers? Don’t we share whores? Why do you want Asunta all to yourself, damn miser, stop stabbing yourself, fucking pig, fix yourself up, Okay, that’s enough …

And he let out a savage shout:

“I’m going to kill you, you fucking pig, either you let me have that broad or I swear you’ll be pushing up daisies!”

He said this in so horrible a way, on all fours, naked on the bed, his testicles bouncing between his legs, his face that of a ferocious animal, as if everything truly Jericó had come out to be depicted on the threatening face that no longer belonged to the valiant companion Pollux but to the murderous brother Cain.

A naked Jericó slavered, in a bestial posture and concentrating on me, I realized, the frustrations so contrary to a life that took place on the stages of success, from school until today. Jericó the bold, the sharp, the triumphant, the protector, the mysterious, the one who didn’t show his cards and won the game with a poker face, was showing his cards now and he had nothing: not even a miserable pair of fives, not even when the lower numbers had been eliminated. It was this naked feeling—physically, morally naked—that concentrated the hatred of my brother Cain against me, and when Asunta appeared behind Jericó’s bed and I looked at her, I understood
her perverse game. Whatever the motives of Max Monroy in saving Jericó from the president’s vengeance and bringing him to the shelter of Utopia, Asunta’s game, no matter how tangential to Monroy’s intentions, was what had mortally wounded Jericó.

I looked at Asunta at the rear of the bedroom, her arms crossed over her chest, the executive figure disguising her origin as a provincial wife dominated by an unhappy macho, and I knew she was victorious, in possession of the plot. Subject to Max’s design but independent of him: Asunta had made Jericó believe she was my lover, that in this building the only Utopia was the erotic satisfaction she and I gave each other and I, beyond the nurse Elvira Ríos and the abandoned Lucha Zapata, had fulfilled my sexual life in nights of ecstasy with Asunta Jordán. Fuck me!

Asunta told this to Jericó. In this way Jericó’s treason was avenged, even though Monroy had been the author of his salvation, which still needed to be demonstrated.

None of it mattered.

My world collapsed with Jericó’s murderous look. I didn’t want to believe that behind our long and proven fraternal friendship, disdain was the mask of the hatred that was the real face of our relationship. Because concentrated hatred is what gleamed around the maw of a Jericó animalized by defeat, by Asunta’s erotic disdain, by Monroy’s probable deception, by the political triumph of President Carrera, by the humiliation of knowing that if not for Asunta’s appearance in the apartment on Calle de Praga, he, Jericó, would have been a victim of the fugitive law, shot in the back as he tried to escape, or locked up in San Juan de Aragón with his miserable conspirators. Exposed to the implacable vengeance of Miguel Aparecido.

I feared for him.

I should have feared for myself.

SO
YOU’RE
GOING
to write your thesis on me, Josué? What do you plan to say? Are you going to repeat the same clichés? Niccolò Machiavelli, calculating, hypocritical, the icy manipulator of the
power he never wielded, only advised? Are you going to talk about my mainstays, necessity, virtue, fortune? Are you going to write that necessity is the stimulus for political action though in its name there is also betrayal and ambition? Are you going to repeat that virtue is a manifestation of free will though it can also be the mask of the hypocrite? And, finally, are you going to say that I compare fortune to feminine inconsistency, capricious and inconstant, concluding that the man who depends on it least endures longest?

Machiavelli the misogynist! Didn’t I marry Marietta Corsini to obtain, in a single hymen, both virginity and fortune? Ah, Josué, don’t repeat the tired phrases that pursue me from century to century. Be bolder. Have the audacity, my young friend, to penetrate my true biography, not the one by “serious” historians, no, but the one about my real, vulgar, crude, lustful existence: Niccolò Machiavelli says it aloud so everyone can hear: “I don’t know anything that gives more happiness, doing it, thinking about it, than fornication. A man can philosophize all he wants, but this is the truth.” That’s what I wrote, and now I repeat it to you. Everybody understands it. Few say it. You can quote me. It irritates me that people are ignorant of my taste for women and sex. Let them be ignorant! What difference does it make! But if you’re going to write truthfully about me, you’ll repeat with me: Sweet, trifling, or weighty, sex creates a network of feelings without which, it seems to me, I could not be happy.

Look at them: One is named Gianna, another Lucrecia, still another La Tafani. I’ll tell you something beyond their names: Desire responds only to nature, not morality. La Riccia was a prostitute well known all around Florence? That does not diminish in the least the pleasure she gave me. She was my lover for ten years. It didn’t matter to her when my fortunes changed. She didn’t change. Friends changed. She did not. And La Tafani? Charming, refined, noble, I can never praise her as she deserves. Love entangled me in her web. They were nets woven by Venus, my young friend, soft and sensitive … Until the day the nets harden and imprison you and
you can’t undo the knots and don’t care about the punishment. Don’t forget, Josué, all love is pardoned and pardonable if it gives you pleasure. I had relations with women and also with men. It was another time. Homosexuality was common in Florence.

In general, all my love had sweetness, because loved flesh gave me delight and because when I loved I forgot my troubles, so much so that I preferred the prison of love to having freedom, yes freedom,
ay!
granted to me.

I remember and savor all this because
The Prince
, the work you’re studying on the instructions of your Professor Sanginés, was received in 1513 as the work of the Devil (Niccolò Machiavelli, Old Nick, the Demon, the double of Beelzebub, Belial, Azazel, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus, Satan, the Deva, the Cacodemon, the Evil One, the Tempter, and more familiarly, not only Old Nick but also Old Harry, Old Ned, the Dickens, Old Scratch, the Prince of Darkness), all because I brought light to the business of politics, deceived no one, told them this is the way things are, like it or not, it isn’t a moral judgment of mine, these are our political realities, read me seriously, I am inspired not by darkness but by light, learn that a good government is in accord only with the nature of the time and a bad government is opposed to the spirit of the time, learn that old governments are secure and manageable and new governments dangerous because they displace the authorities of previous governments and leave their own followers dissatisfied because they thought with power they would obtain everything that can be given only with an eyedropper in the tension between the legitimacy of its origin, which in no way assures the legitimacy of its exercise …

Why go on? Politics is simply the public relationship among human beings. Freedom is the regularization of power. Men are mad and want to see the origin of power in sacred revelation, in nature, in race, in a social contract, in revolution, and in law. To them I say no. Power is simply the exercise of necessity, the mask of virtue, and the chance of fortune. Unbearable. Do you know, to restore my spirits, sometimes I return to the countryside and change
clothes. I put on togas and medallions, gold sandals and laurel wreaths, and then, alone, I converse with the ancients, with the Greeks and Romans, my peers …

It is a great lie: a fiction. The truth is I need the city. I love the city, its works, its plazas, its stones, its markets, its bodies. The sweetness of a face allows me to forget my sorrows. The heat of sex invites me to leave my family, making them think I have died. Madness!

And still, here I am back in office, serving the Prince, remembering perhaps that love is mischievous and escapes from the liver, the eyes, the heart. Only the administration of the city—politics, the
polis
—saves me, Josué, from the suicidal ardor of sex and the onerous imagination of the historical past as I wait for my trip to hell, a much more amusing place than heaven.

Understand, then, my smile. Understand the portrait of me by Santi di Tito in the Palazzo Vecchio. Do you see now why I smile? Do you realize there are only two comparable smiles, the Giaconda’s and mine? She was the Mona Lisa. Will I be the Mono Liso, Smooth Monkey? There is no risk. If you like, call me, in Mexican, Machiavelli, Chango Resbaloso, Slippery Monkey.

“JERICÓ’S
MISTAKE,”
SANGINÉS
remarked during this new lunch, now in the Danubio on the Calles de Uruguay, “consisted in believing a dissatisfied mass would follow a revolutionary vanguard. He didn’t see two essential things: First, that the revolutionary masses are an invention of the revolutionary vanguard. Second, that when the masses have moved it’s because they have reached the end of their patience. That doesn’t happen here—or hasn’t happened yet. Most people believe they can achieve a better situation. People make promises to themselves. People, if you like, deceive themselves. Go away. Fine. The worker goes as a migrant to California, Oregon, the Carolinas. Fine. But people see the ads and what they want is to be like that, like the ad. Have a car, their own house, go on vacation, whatever, fuck the ‘Classy Blonde.’ Have you seen, Josué, the faces of people when they come out of a movie, imitating—unconsciously, no doubt—the star they’ve just seen?”