Destiny and Desire (6 page)

The “den” was the disordered room we had already seen. Errol took off his jacket and invited us to do the same.

“After what you’ve seen, do you feel capable of betting everything on art and philosophy?”

I think we laughed. Errol didn’t give us the chance to respond. Sprawled on the most comfortable armchair in his shirtsleeves, legs spread, he freed himself of tasseled loafers and seized a guitar as if it were the willing waist of an obedient woman.

“You’d be better off getting into politics. Let’s hope you can find a path between what you want to be and what society permits you.”

I was going to answer. Errol did not allow himself to be interrupted.

“Or are you suddenly going to wager on destiny?”

He held up a hand to silence us.

“Just imagine, I’ve already bet on a destiny.”

He observed us; we were polite and interested.

He told us, without our asking, that even though we didn’t believe him, once—a long time ago—Nazario and Estrellita might have loved each other. At what moment did they stop? What would you call the night he no longer desired her, or didn’t see her as young anymore, and she knew he was watching her grow old? In the beginning everything was very different, Errol elaborated, because my mother Estrella was a convent girl and my father wanted a wife without blemish—that’s what it’s called—because in his life he had known only sluts, and whores know how to deceive. With Estrella there was no doubt. She traveled from the convent to the bed of her lord and master, who used her up in one night, demonstrating to her that he didn’t care a fig about convents—that was his outmoded expression—and it would be better if his wife, being chaste, behaved like a whore to please a macho like Nazario Esparza.

Her family handed over Estrellita, received a check and some properties, and never concerned themselves about her again. Who were they? Who knows. They charged a good price to give her, chaste and pure, to a voracious, ambitious husband. The passion ended, though sometimes he looked at her with an intense absence.
It wasn’t enough to avoid the repetition of the same battle every night, when Estrella still retained a shred of courage and dignity that served only to infuriate Nazario. The same battle every night until they found the reason for the next dispute, which was to postpone the obligation of sex that she needed not only as something new but because of the chaste obligation of the matrimonial sacrament and that he, perhaps, wanted to put off because of a strange feeling that in this way he was honoring the virginity of his wife, though it was clear to him that Estrella had come to the marriage bed intact and if she was impure, he had been the reason. None of this endured or had too much importance. He was plunging into a gross vulgarity, which Jericó and I had observed that night and Errol now expanded on for us.

“I loved her ten thousand enchiladas ago” was the husband’s response.

She took refuge in the renunciation of sex in the name of religion and set up a pious little shrine in the matrimonial bedroom that Nazario wasted no time in getting rid of with a swipe of his hand, leaving Estrellita resigned to finally seeing herself one night as her husband saw her. She no longer looked young to herself and was certain she looked like an old woman to him.

“Ten thousand enchiladas ago, while she prayed on her knees: ‘Neither for vice nor fornication. It is to make a child in Thy holy service.’ ”

She replaced the saints with pictures of Errol Flynn, whose erotic proclivities were unknown to both Estrellita and Nazario.

“Do you know what?” Errol continued. “I bet I can have a destiny that lets me overthrow my father. Do you like that word? Don’t we hear it every day in history class? Tom took up arms and overthrew Dick hoping that Harry would overthrow somebody else and so forth and so on. Is that history, dudes? A series of overthrows? Maybe so.”

He seemed to take a breath and say: “Maybe so. Maybe not …”

Without letting go of the guitar, he raised his glass: “I bet I can have a destiny that overthrows my father’s. Overthrowing a destiny, as if it were a throne. Maybe so! Suddenly! Or maybe not …”

He stretched out his arm and played the guitar, beginning to sing, very appropriately, the ballad of the disobedient son:

“Out of the way, father, I’m wilder than a big cat, don’t make me fire a bullet that’ll go straight through your heart …”

Voices rose, angry and gruff, in the hall between the Versailles salon and the refuge where we were sitting.

“Are you crazy? Give me that camera.”

“Nazario, I only wanted—”

“It doesn’t matter what you wanted, you’ve made me look ridiculous taking pictures of my guests! That’s all I needed!”

“
Our
guests, it’s also my party—”

“It’s also your nothing, you old idiot.”

“You’re to blame. I don’t like receiving. I don’t like standing on that line. You do it just to—”

“If you did it well, you wouldn’t humiliate me. You’re the one who makes me look ridiculous. Taking pictures of my guests!”

“What does—?”

“You can blackmail somebody with a photograph. Don’t you realize?”

“But they all appear on the society pages.”

“Yes, you moron, but not in my house, not associated with
me.
”

“I don’t understand …”

“Well, you should, you fool!”

Errol stood up and hurried to the hallway. He put himself between Nazario and Estrella.

“Mama, your husband is a savage.”

“Shut up, you bum, don’t butt into what doesn’t—”

“Drop it, son, you know how—”

“I know, and I can smell the vomit in the mouth of this old bastard. He stinks like a cave—”

“Shut up, go back to your asshole friends and keep drinking my champagne free of charge. Damn freeloaders! Dummies!”

“Leave us alone. This is between your father and me.”

Nazario Esparza’s eyes were as glassy as the bottom of a bottle. He put his hand in his pocket and took out (why?) a ring with dozens of keys.

“Get out, you’re a curse,” he said to Errol.

“I’d like to imagine you dead, Papa. But not yet a skeleton. Slowly being devoured by worms.”

These words not only silenced Don Nazario. They seemed to frighten him, as if his son’s curse resonated with an ancient, prophetic, and in the end a placating voice. Doña Estrella put her arms around her husband as if to protect him against their son’s threat.

Errol returned to the room and his parents dimmed like an empty theater. Jericó and I followed with wooden faces.

“You see,” said Errol. “I grew up like a plant. I’ve lived outdoors, like a nopal.”

It was obvious: Tonight was his and he wasn’t going to let us slip in a word.

He was as insistent as a rainstorm.

“Do you know the secret? My father wants to get rid of himself. That’s why I behaved the way I did. I have him all figured out and he can’t stand it. He’d like to be the product of his own past, denying what happened earlier but taking advantage of the results. Understand?”

I said no. Jericó shrugged.

“Who were those people?”

“Ah!” Errol exclaimed. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Do you know why my father forbids photographs at the parties he gives at home?”

“I have no idea,” said Jericó.

“You can’t imagine. Why do you think he gets all these people together, offers them champagne, but bans photographs? I can tell you because I secretly go through his papers and tie up loose ends. It just so happens that Don Nazario deducts—that’s what I said—he deducts these so-called ‘parties’ from his taxes. He classifies them as entertainment expenses and ‘office expenses,’ business meetings disguised as ‘cocktail parties.’ ”

“Who comes to a cocktail party to be ‘deducted’?” I insisted, interested in not having my sentimental education cut short.

“Everybody,” Errol said with a laugh. “But only my father is so clever that he bans publicity and closes the deal.”

His laughter sounded hollow and sad.

“I’ve got the old man by the balls! The old fucker!”

I managed to squeeze in a question: “Do you think you’re going to negate your father’s offenses?”

“No.” He shrugged. “I only want to push my differences with him to the limit. Understand? I’m rich, you’re poor, but I have more misery to overcome.”

He emptied his glass in one swallow.

“You should know you’re born with privilege. You don’t make it.”

And he looked at us with an intensity we had never seen in him before.

“Everything else is robbery.”

I TOLD YOU
, my dear survivors, I went to the Esparza house that night to avoid my own home, if it can be called that. Dysfunctional and all the rest of it, Errol’s family was in the
have
column, if Cervantes was right—and he is—when he quoted his grandmother: There are only two families in the world, the one you have and the one you don’t have. Now, how do you quantify familial possession or dispossession? People’s opinion of the fair is based on whether they had a good time. I ought to explain—I owe it to those who are still alive and gather in cities, neighborhoods, families—that I grew up in a gloomy house on Calle de Berlín in Mexico City. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the country seemed to settle down after decades of upheaval (though it traded anarchy for dictatorship, perhaps without realizing it), the capital city began to spread beyond the original perimeter of Zócalo-Plateros-Alameda. The “colonias,” as the new neighborhoods were called, chose to display mansions in various European styles, especially the Parisian and another, more northern one whose origins lay somewhere between London and Berlin and its destiny in a district patriotically called Juárez, though devoted to baptizing streets with the names of European cities.

My first memory is of Calle de Berlín and a three-story house with parapets and towers proclaiming its lineage, a meager stone courtyard, no plants, and only two residents: the woman who took care of me from my infancy, and myself. My name is Josué Nadal, something that readers have known since my decapitated head began to ramble, resting like a coconut and lapped at by the waves on a beach in Guerrero. The name of the woman who cared for me from infancy was María Egipciaca del Río, a name with Coptic resonances that should not be surprising in a country where baptisms are a fertile part of the popular imagination: In Mexico there is an abundance of Hermengildos, Eulalios, Pancracios, Pánfilos, Natividades, and Pastoras, Hilarias, and Orfelinas.

Her name being María Egipciaca and mine Josué should not attract any particular attention if we recall the biblical names that North Americans had from the very beginning: Nathaniel, Ezra, Hepzibah, Jedediah, Zabadiel, not to mention Lancelot, Marmaduke, and Increase.

Attribute this nomenclature, if you like, to the naming vocation of the New World, baptized once at the dawn of time with indigenous names and rebaptized with Christian and African ones throughout its history.

I’m saying all this to situate María Egipciaca in a sovereign territory of proper names that go beyond the designations “mother,” “stepmother,” “grandma,” “aunt,” “guardian,” or “godmother,” which I didn’t dare use for the woman at whose side I grew up, but whose identity she always hid from me, tacitly forbidding me to call her “mother,” “godmother,” or “stepmother” because the mixture of attention and distance in María Egipciaca was like an alternating current: When I displayed mistrust indulgence overflowed from her, and when I showed affection it provoked a hostile response. I’m explaining this game since there is something ludic in every close, solitary relationship that constantly has to choose between amity and enmity; it became clearly established only as I grew and situated in my surroundings this small, severe woman, always dressed in black with a belt and a wide, starched white collar, though her hair was styled coquettishly with short reddish curls in what used to be called
a “permanent” (and was repeated like a temporal oracle on the head of Errol’s mother). The severe dress did not go well with the high-heeled shoes María Egipciaca wore to disguise her short stature, though this was more than compensated for by the energy she displayed in the huge house on Calle de Berlín, which was like an elephant’s cage occupied by two mice, for it had three floors but she and I lived only in a space bounded by the vestibule at the entrance, the living room, the kitchen, then two bedrooms on the second floor and a kind of mysterious ban on the third floor, where neither one of us went, as if the madwoman in the attic lived there and not the odds and ends left by previous residents in the course of a century.

Furthermore, the house on Berlín had suffered a great deal in the 1985 earthquake and no one had bothered to repair the cracked walls or restore the airy garret that served as the mirador and crown of the residence. So that when I came to live there, while I was still an infant, forgotten, forgetful, and forgettable (I suppose), its condition was not so much abandoned or forgotten as adrift, as if a house were a stream lost in the great tide of a city that had always been ravaged by military destruction, poverty, inequality, hunger, and revolt, and in spite of, or because of, so much catastrophe, determined to come back more chaotic, energetic, and brazen than ever: Mexico City would give a gigantic finger to the rest of the country, which was attracted to it like the proverbial fly to the spider’s web where it will be trapped forever.

Were there two María Egipciacas? I don’t remember the moment my life began in the light green mansion on Calle de Berlín, because no one remembers the moment of my birth, and lacking other references, we situate ourselves in the environment where we grew up. Unless in a fit of sincerity or imaginary health, the person who shelters us says:

“You know something? I’m not your mother, I adopted you right after you were born …”

María Egipciaca never did me a favor like that. And yet I recall her with the passing affection that gratitude imposes. It’s one thing to be grateful for something and another to be grateful forever. The first is virtue, the second stupidity; favors can be renewed but gratitude
is lost if it doesn’t turn into something else: love that is a highflying bird or friendship that is not (Byron) a bird “without his wings” but a fowl less fleeting than love, with its high passionate flight and its low carnal passion. María Egipciaca was part of my childhood landscape. She fed me and had the peculiarity of offering me the spoon accompanied by incomplete proverbs, as if she were waiting for the Holy Spirit of Homilies to descend and illuminate my childish brain: