Destiny and Desire (5 page)

We students forgave this innocent pleasure of Father Soler, whose red face was the product not of any shame but of an inheritance that can give to the product of the mixing of Indians and blonds a sanguine appearance very apt for disguising the blushes of embarrassing emotion. In other words: Collectively the students forgave the life both of the ostentatious Vercingetorix and the silent Soler, considering that they did not have many opportunities to express themselves in public, subject as they were to long hours of prayers and rosaries, early suppers, fleeting breakfasts … They would have put out the sun with the smoke of incense.

Everything changed when the new philosophy instructor came on the scene.

Father Filopáter (that’s how he was announced and how he introduced himself) was a small, agile man. He moved with a combination of juvenile athleticism and spiritual animation, as if in order to demonstrate one you had to celebrate the other. He walked with varying rhythms. Very quickly when he went from one task to another. Very slowly when he strolled around the yard accompanied by one or two students to whom he listened with intense concentration, offering the paradoxical idea of a short man who grew as he thought, as if his ideas—for he seemed
to think
more than
to talk
—were flying over him, creating an unusual halo, not round but long, though always shining.

It goes without saying, you who are still alive and can contradict
me with no risk or confirm everything I say out of curiosity, that Jericó and I immediately fixed on the new arrival and imagined how we could approach him and determine who he was—in addition to being a philosophy instructor—by what he thought and said. He was ahead of us.

Always together, he said, approaching with his quickest step, like Castor and Pollux.

The mythological allusion did not escape us, and both Jericó and I instantly looked at each other, knowing he spoke of the twins born of the same egg, for their father was a god disguised as a swan. Always together, the twins took part in great expeditions, like the exploits of the Argonauts under the command of Jason, searching for the as yet undiscovered soul they called the Golden Fleece.

Filopáter read in our glances that we already knew the legend, though neither he nor we had the courage, on that sunlit October afternoon, to conclude the story of the young twins. A legend can end badly, but the conclusion should not be anticipated at the beginning of life (Jericó and Josué) or what soon would become a friendship (with Father Filopáter). And yet how could it not illuminate for me, no matter how tacitly, the suspicion of an ending that was, if not desired, ultimately fatal? Perhaps the affinity born immediately between the instructor and ourselves was due to a kind of shared respect thanks to which we knew the outcomes but held them off with friendship, ideas, in short, life, since for friendship the outcome always was ideas, life, and the death of the
real
dialogists. If Socrates survives thanks to Plato, Saint Augustine, and Rousseau because they confessed, and Dr. Johnson because he had Boswell as his secretary and clerk, what opportunity for survival did we three—Father Filopáter, Jericó, and I—have beyond a luminous October afternoon in the Valley of Mexico? Would we be capable, like poets and novelists, of surviving thanks to works that, though they are ours, escape us and become the property of everyone, especially the reader not yet born? This was the challenge that began to filter, like a pure breeze separating us from the overwhelming pollution of the traffic, the smog, the movement in the street of desolate
bodies, the mere proximity, here in the schoolyard, of noisy students at recess. No, the breeze was not pure. It was an illusion of our affinity.

Jericó and I were not (I must inform you) beings separate from the school community. On the contrary, knowing ourselves (as we knew ourselves) superior to the gregarious collectivity of the institution, fortuitous companions in earlier readings perhaps well thought out and digested, our meeting owed a great deal to chance, which is accidental, but also to destiny, which is disguised will. In cafés and classes, on long walks through the Bosque de Chapultepec or the Viveros de Coyoacán, we two had compared ideas, evoked readings, each one filling in the lapses of the other, recalling a book, condemning an author, but in the end assuming an inheritance that eventually we shared with the unrepeatable joy of intellectual awakening that is a fact in every society, but especially in ours, in which true creativity is rewarded less and less while economic success, celebrity, television appearances, sex scandals, and political clownishness are valued more and more.

The difference between us, I admit right now, was one of exigency and rigor. I also admit, for the eternal record, that in our relationship I was more indolent or passive, while Jericó was more alert and demanding.

“Demand more of yourself, Josué. Until now we’ve moved forward together. Don’t lag behind me.”

“Don’t you lag either,” I replied, smiling.

“It’s hard,” he responded.

After gym, which was required, we all showered in the long, cold, solitary bathrooms in the school. Unlike the nuns’ schools, where girls have to wash dressed in gowns that turn them into cardboard statues, in schools for boys, showering naked was normal and attracted no one’s attention. An unwritten law dictated that in the shower we men would keep our eyes at face level and no one, under penalty of suspicion of unhealthy curiosity or simple vulgarity, would look at a classmate’s sex. Naturally, this rule was overseen by the one who observed it least: timid, impertinent Father Soler, who would walk up and down the bathroom with the mixed gaze of an
eagle and a serpent—very appropriate to our nation—and in his hand a threatening, symbolic rod that he never, as far as we knew, used on the boys’ wet backs and lustrous buttocks.

Those who are still alive and reading me will agree that I am telling them something as unusual for them as it was for us. Jericó decided that the temptation of our looking at each other naked existed, but the way to overcome it was not by physical effort but by expressing ourselves intellectually. For that, he said, let’s choose two thoughts that are opposite and therefore complementary and invoke them in the shower—which was icy, those who still enjoy their senses should know, for that was demanded by our mentors’ code of physical rigor and aspirations to sanctity.

It still causes astonishment, as well as sensual delight, to remember that by common agreement, when it was time to shower, standing side by side, not looking at each other, soaking wet and naked, with the incessant drip of delicious water falling on our heads, one would repeat aloud the constituent, formal ideas of Catholic philosophy as if they were at once dogmas and anathemas, while the other recited the theory of their absolute negation. Jericó maintained that the Christian philosophy of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas was the basis of the authoritarian, oppressive system of the Iberian nations. The ancient dispute between Saint Augustine and the British heretic Pelagius in the fourth or fifth century set the pattern. The heretic proclaimed the freedom to approach God by means of our own sensibility and intelligence. Saint Augustine stated that there is no personal freedom without the filter of the ecclesiastical institution. The Church is the indispensable intermediary between individual faith and divine grace. By contrast, the heretic claimed that grace is within reach of everyone. Grace, the saint responded, requires the power of the institution to be granted. From this ancient dispute in ruined oracles between a child of Roman Africa and an obscure northern monk grew, said Jericó in the rain of the shower, first the division between Catholics and Protestants and then the difference between Latin Americans and North Americans: We had the Middle Ages, Augustinian and Thomistic, and they didn’t; they had Pelagianism brought up to date by
Luther and the imperatives of capitalism, and we didn’t. For North Americans, history begins with them and the past was invented by Cecil B. DeMille with the help of Charlton Heston. For us, the past is so old that it has to be lived again.

If enunciating medieval Catholic contentions in the shower was a singular but unifying act between two naked eighteen-year-old boys, it was no less demanding to make the nihilistic argument in its Nietzschean dress (or in this case, nakedness), for it was up to me to allege that there is no freedom if we don’t emancipate ourselves from faith and from every foundation or acquired rationale, lifting the veil of appearances and adopting the impulse toward the truth, whose first step …

“Is the recognition that nothing is true.”

I said these words “in the rain,” and I confess I felt desolate and in those moments wanted to possess the certainties enunciated by Jericó, for not only did the stream of water on my head blind me, but so did the grief of the loss of all certainty. Still, my role in this fraternal dialogue, which distanced us from false modesty or unhealthy curiosity, was that of a transformer of values by means of false values, saving my dear, my beloved friend Jericó from Christian culture, which is the culture of renunciation.

“And when have you ever seen a Catholic renounce pleasure if in the end it’s enough to confess to a priest to free yourself of all guilt?”

“Or money, something that once was the occupation of Jews or Protestants?”

“Or fame, as if modern sanctity was granted by the magazine
Hola
?”

We left the bathroom laughing, happy to have surmounted sexual temptation, proud of our intellectual discipline, prepared to exchange roles the next time, when I’d be Catholic, he’d be nihilist, and in this way we’d sharpen our weapons for the inevitable encounter—it would be the greatest dispute of our early youth—with a man—the only man—capable of challenging us: the recently arrived Father Filopáter.

—

WE RETURNED TO
Errol’s house. Because of Jericó’s permanent curiosity and, in my case, not only for that reason but because of something I haven’t mentioned yet and that profoundly affected my life.

The fact is that the Esparzas were entertaining that night. Don Nazario had acquired a chain of hotels in Yucatán and was celebrating with a party. Our classmate the bald kid (though I should say the ex-bald kid, since Errol had let a mane of hair grow that, he told us, was the sign of rebellious youth in the sixties) invited us, as he remarked, to inspect the flora and fauna. Conforming to manners they deemed “distinguished,” Errol’s parents welcomed their guests at the entrance to the Versailles salon. Don Nazario, whom we had never seen, was a florid man, tall, red-faced, with eyes that were someplace else. He seemed full of bonhomie, distributing embraces and smiles, but looking off into the distance, almost fearful that something forgotten, menacing, or ridiculous would appear. He wore green gabardine and a large Hawaiian tie lavish with palm trees, waves, and girls dancing the hula. He looked like a man in costume. He dressed in accordance with his origins (carpentry, furniture, hotels, movie houses) and not with his destiny (a mansion in Pedregal and a bank account safe from bruising). Was it an act of sincerity and pride in his humble past to display himself as he had been, or the cleverest disguise of all, almost a challenge: Look at me, all of you, I reached the top but I’m still the humble, easygoing man I always was?

He greeted us as if we were his oldest friends, with great embraces and mistaken references, since, with his heart in his hand, he thanked us for the “service,” that is, the favor or favors we had done him, which, of course, were nonexistent, leading us to one of two conclusions: Either Don Nazario was out-and-out wrong, or he was treating us in a manner that would not offend but did save him from the possible mistake of owing us something and having forgotten it.

In any event, the confusion passed as rapidly as the speed with which Señor Esparza, radiating cordiality, pushed us forward and repeated the ceremony of the joyous, grateful embrace with the guests behind us, freeing us from the welcome of his wife, Doña Estrellita,
who was there, no doubt about that, we saw her, we greeted her, though at the same time she was absent, hidden by the powerful presence of her husband as well as by a desire for invisibility that duplicated, in a certain sense, the desire to disappear altogether.

Was the attire of the mistress of the house the result of her own taste or an imposition by her husband? If the second, we were approaching uxoricide. The lady seemed dressed, if not to go to heaven or hell, then to inhabit a gray limbo, as gray as her mouse-colored tailored suit, her eternal cotton stockings replaced by old-style nylons, her low-heeled shoes by ones of patent leather with ankle straps. Her discomfort at standing on line and receiving in public was so evident that it immediately classified her husband as a sadist who, when he saw her from time to time, would say with a ferocious look, utterly foreign to his affability as host:

“Laugh, you idiot! Don’t make me look bad!”

Patently clear because Señora Estrella gave forced smiles and looked for approval in the eyes of a husband who did not need to look at her: He dominated her, we realized, through pure anticipatory habit. Doña Estrellita knew that if she didn’t do one thing or another, she would have to pay dearly when the guests had left.

I confess that my understandable fascination with the couple separated me from the rest of the crowd, which was dissolving behind a veil of noises, inaudible conversations, the clink of glasses, and the passing of canapés offered by a short, dark-skinned waiter costumed in a striped shirtfront. I could not help admiring the discipline of Errol’s mother in playing the part of the present absent woman. In her fixed, dead eyes there appeared from time to time a lightning flash that commanded her:

“Obey.”

I don’t believe it was difficult for her to do so. She knew she was easy to ignore, and I suppose that from the time she was young her comments, timid in and of themselves, were extinguished to the beat of her husband’s brutal orders, shut up, don’t play the fool, you’re always out of place. Why worry about it?

“Leave the zoo, guys. Let’s go to the den,” said Errol. “My refuge.”