Destiny and Desire (50 page)

I would have liked to give to memory the surname of imagination. Sanginés did not permit me to. In that slow trip from the Danubio on Calles de Uruguay to my cloistered garret on Calle de Praga, the lawyer said what he said because what occurred had occurred. The fraternity of Castor and Pollux had been transformed into the rivalry, the hatred of Cain and Abel. Passing memories, a different script, what was the difference, the profound difference, not the obvious, computable one?

I will try to reproduce, in my own words, from the scar of my memory, what Sanginés told me that afternoon when the rain made everything vanish like a sleeve of water on an immobile mirror.

I knew the history of Miguel Aparecido, which he himself recounted behind bars in San Juan de Aragón Prison along with terrible evocations of his grandmother, Antigua Concepción, that surfaced like an earthquake from the hidden grave where the not very venerable señora lay, creator of the Monroy fortune, despite her husband the general’s violent frivolity, for the sake of her pampered son Max Monroy, whom the deceased manipulated as she chose, to the extreme of marrying him at the age of forty to an adolescent in order to appropriate the girl’s lands, with no consideration at all of the feelings or desires of the innocent Sibila Sarmiento or of Max himself, unmarried until that moment through the power and grace of his mother’s implacable will: will and destiny associated like a single figure in the mind of Antigua Concepción. She operated with both when she bought real estate with the Monroy fortune and passed it on to her son. The condition was that, he, Max, would submit to his mother’s will in order to inherit. And if an intrusive, unpleasant, punishable, irritating, ungrateful necessity should filter down between them, the old matriarch in her Carmelite habit would bow before it with a gesture of repugnance, holding her nose, certain her son Max would thank her one day for the necessity in the name of his fortune.

The helpless Sibila Sarmiento locked away in an asylum, the son of Max and the madwoman abandoned to grow up fighting on the besieged, murderous streets of the capital: I travel with Sanginés through the city of the moon, if the moon had a city. Or better yet,
if the moon were a city, it would not only be
like
this one. It would
be
this one. The dolorous city (malodorous city?) through which Antonio Sanginés’s Mercedes drives me: the trip of postponed recollection, the expedition of memory as an unrenounceable past.

The Mercedes is driven by a chauffeur. Sanginés raises the glass that separates us from the driver and continues: “A moment arrived when the powerful matriarch decided her son Max could walk alone without maternal props, with his own destiny, freed of the necessity she assumed without thinking about it twice, though the third time she said to herself:

“In exchange for necessity I’ll leave Max my desire and my destiny.”

Desire and destiny, murmured Antonio Sanginés.

Max Monroy.

“He is master,” Sanginés began his tale during our slow progress from the Historical Center to the Zona Rosa, “of a self-assurance that is in no way ostentatious. It is invisible. You saw him when he met with President Carrera in the Castle of Chapultepec. Where does it come from? He didn’t inherit it from his mother, who was like a cross between the devouring Aztec goddess Coatlicue and the national patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. He had to pass, however, through a period of becoming detached. Inheriting from his mother but distancing himself from her. Only the death of his mother Doña Conchita eventually allowed him to do that. Before then, like her, in order to prove himself to her—I tell you so you’ll know—he allowed corruption. He had to submit to political chiefs and bosses, just as his mother had. He didn’t kill them. He bought them. Energetically. Astutely. He knew they were for sale. He permitted them to steal but on the pretext that when they did—just listen to the national paradox—they were building, creating. He understood his mother’s lesson: They had to be transformed into revolutionaries without a revolution. What are they afraid of? The middle class won the revolution just as they had in France and the United States. There is no revolution without the middle class and Mexico was no exception. The revolution that excludes the middle class is not a proletarian revolution. It is a dictatorship ‘of the proletariat.’
In Mexico, the heroes died young. The survivors grew old and became rich. Max Monroy bought, suggested, insinuated, threatened, and also built and knew where to walk. He guessed the future faster than the rest and deceived the rest by making them believe the present was the future.”

How to know if Sanginés sighed when the rain turned into hail, striking the roof and windows of the car like the drum of God?

Political bosses. Governors. Entrepreneurs. How did Monroy win? By hating what they did but beating them at their own game. Before the boss of San Luis acted on his own, Max sent him an army general to take charge of the plaza “for your own security, Governor.” When the cacique of Tabasco was preparing to buy legal decisions in the capital to build the highway fifty-fifty, Max got ahead of him by acquiring the construction company that gave the costly gov only twenty-five percent. Etcetera. I’ll make it brief. In this way Max was transformed into an intermediary, a creator of coalitions (
non sanctas
, if you like) between the federal and local governments, keeping the lion’s share, not only financially but politically. Becoming indispensable to everyone.

In order not to become lost in Sanginés’s memory-filled account, was it the Academy de las Vizcaínas, a refuge for poor girls and rich widows, that obliged me to think of Esparza’s two wives, Doña Estrellita the saint and the dirty whore Sara P., both from real or apocryphal convents like this one, whose oculi and pinnacles became invisible in the rainy twilight? Did I want to think about this, about them, because I was afraid, for no obvious reason, of what Professor Sanginés’s words would reveal to me?

Didn’t I want to think about another extension of prison, about the asylum where Sibila Sarmiento, the mother of Miguel Aparecido, had been locked away?

Sanginés continued. Broker. Agent. Intermediary, and his mother’s heir. I imagined a young Max Monroy, hiding the public secret of his inherited fortune in order to act as an ambitious beginner: Wasn’t this what the fearsome Concepción wanted, to have her son earn his inheritance from the bottom, with effort, compromising himself, getting dirty if need be, just like everyone else?

“He invented companies out of nothing,” Sanginés continued. “For each one he received capital that he invested in other new companies. He shuffled the names of businesses. He justified himself by telling himself—telling me, Josué—the country of misery had to be left behind, Mexico’s closed shop had to be broken, markets created, price fixing broken, communiqués communicated, modernity brought to the country.”

Modernity opposed to the closed shop. Communicating. The wrinkled parchment of mountains and precipices, forests and deserts, valleys and volcanoes that with a blow of his fist Cortés the Conquistador described to Carlos the Emperor: A wrinkled parchment, that’s what Mexico is. How to smooth it out?

“He was animated, Josué, by the dream and desire to found a collective kingdom together with a private empire. Is it possible?”

The capricious hail returned, like a purely nominal reality, to the Salto del Agua Fountain beside the Chapel of the Inmaculada Concepción, and I imagined a country filled with thirst as a condition of purity. A parchment country.

“I don’t know, Maestro …”

He ignored me.

“A collective kingdom. A private empire. Ah! Impossible, my dear Josué, without the necessary final submission to political power. Except Max guessed what the change in Mexico would consist of: from a bourgeoisie dependent on the state to a state dependent on the bourgeoisie.”

“Without realizing,” I dared to interject, “that private empires are built on quicksand?”

I saw Sanginés smile. “You had to count on incalculable factors …”

“And fame? How did Monroy administer his fame?”

Now Sanginés burst into laughter. “A great reputation is worse than a bad one, which is better than no reputation at all. You must realize that Max Monroy opted for divine imitation. Like God, he is everywhere, and no one can see him.”

I caught the double meaning of the phrase. I abstained from
commenting. I fought against the comfort of the Mercedes whose springs were putting me to sleep. I had said enough when I suggested Max didn’t know that the foundations of all power are pure illusion. The emperor has no clothes. We are the ones who dress him. And then, when we demand that he return them, the monarch becomes angry: The clothes belong to him.

“Max Monroy,” continued Sanginés, “realized something. His peers, adversaries, accomplices, subjects, did not read and were not thoroughly informed, they navigated by trusting in pure instinct. Max transformed Unamuno into a kind of personal Bible that gave him, like an aureole of the spirit, the tragic sense of life. From this repeated reading he drew certain conclusions that differentiate and guide him, Josué. The worst vices are purity and presumption. Sharing sorrows is no consolation. And the question is this: How can we master our passions without sacrificing them?”

Behind the blurred windows of the car, the equally blurred forbidden images returned of Max Monroy and Asunta Jordán joined in the darkness of sex, blacker than the darkness in the bedroom, and when I once again expelled this vision from my mind, Sanginés was commenting, as if he had read my indecent thoughts, that Max Monroy does not permit ambition and lust to impose on his reason.

“They can impose on his virtue. Not his reason.”

I remarked with audacity that our desires are one thing and our loyalties something else entirely, evoking the figures of Asunta Jordán and Lucha Zapata side by side.

“He doesn’t attempt to correct the errors of others,” Sanginés said with a smile, “and he rejects well-known pleasures. Do you know something? Monroy has never gone to Aspen, where our wealthy feel they’re from the first world because there’s snow and they go skiing. He has never gone to Las Vegas, where our politicians return to chance what they seize from necessity.”

“What makes him happy, then?” I said as if I didn’t know, and emboldened, for no reason other than the severity of the words, by the name of Arcos de Belén that redeemed me from the anonymity of the nearby Plaza of Capitán Rodríguez M. beside the Registry Office.
This enigma shifted my thoughts languorously: Who was Captain Rodríguez M., who could he have been to deserve his own plaza?

I don’t believe Sanginés left his own question unanswered. He guessed it in my ignorance, and knowing it gave me a strange, quieter emotion. The lawyer went off on a tangent. He told me the penthouse occupied by Monroy in the Utopia building was the entrepreneur’s own utopia, as far as possible from what he called “the damn streets,” these same arteries along which Sanginés and I were now driving, the “damn” streets Monroy saw from above with those eyes of broken glass.

“ ‘I forget the names of the streets,’ is what Max Monroy says from his vantage point. And it’s true.”

Sanginés took my hand and immediately let it go.

“He’s beginning to be distracted. At times, I confess, he becomes incoherent …”

His words shocked me. “Why are you telling me this?”

“He says he no longer drinks because alcohol causes mental lapses and he doesn’t want to neglect his life and legacy. Things like that.”

“Asunta is his heir?” I asked, impertinent.

“He says old age is like a smuggler who puts ideas that aren’t yours into your head. He says his organs get ahead of his death.”

“Asunta is his heir?” I insisted.

I didn’t want to see Sanginés’s twisted smile.

“At times he’s delirious. He says he’s walking alone and naked and crazy through a large empty plaza. That’s when Asunta protects him from himself.”

“You haven’t answered—”

“I heard him say to Asunta, ‘Will you live without me?’ ”

“What did she say?” I asked avidly, as if, when Max died, Asunta would really be bequeathed to me.

“She says, ‘Yes, but I won’t be able to love again without you.’ ”

The car braked at a green light because the opposite light was also green and cars screeched to a halt, blowing impotent horns.

“The end of life is sudden and inexplicable,” Sanginés managed to say over the noise.

“Of power or of force?” I said in a voice so quiet he perhaps didn’t hear me, because he continued unperturbed.

“Believe me that one lives a final moment in which one’s life slips away in taking more and more pills, not for relief, not even to survive, Josué, but just to urinate. Like a—”

“An animal,” I interrupted brutally.

“The thing is … The thing …” murmured Sanginés as if he doubted what he would say next. “The thing is …”

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t want to look at me. I obstructed his gaze.

“Miguel Aparecido isn’t an animal. He isn’t a thing. He’s the son of Max Monroy. Why don’t you talk to me about that, Maestro? That abandonment, that irresponsibility, just tell me this: Doesn’t that abandonment condemn Max Monroy’s entire life, doesn’t it disqualify him as a man and as a father?”

The noise of maddened car horns, police whistles, furious voices did not mitigate my own inflamed voice, as if, in the name of my friend Miguel Aparecido, I had acquired a recriminatory tone stronger than all the city’s cacophony, the din that penetrated in dissipated form all the way to Miguel Aparecido’s cell, as if México D.F. would not grant peace even to prisoners—or the dead.

He decided to look at me. I wish I had avoided that. Because in Antonio Sanginés’s gaze, when he and I were enclosed in a car stopped at the intersection of Chapultepec and Bucareli, I saw my own postponed truth, my own destiny deflected and eventually recovered, the lost origin of a child who lived on Calle de Berlín in the care of a tyrannical governess …

Sanginés said calmly: “An entire life looking for one’s own place, one’s personal position. That’s what Max says. And he adds: I don’t want to give anything to anybody. Let them struggle. Let them stand on their own feet.”