Swift as Desire (4 page)

As he sent telegraph messages, he invariably thought of the way his fingers would caress the intimate recesses of Lucha’s body. The way they would play with her clitoris and send her messages in Morse code, which, though she didn’t completely understand them, were sufficiently explicit for her to respond with frenzied passion. Júbilo’s mind simply couldn’t be completely diverted away from his work, but nor could his work be separated from his loving. He argued that this was because these two activities were intimately linked.

To begin with, both needed an electric current in order to function. The telegraph machines obtained it from power lines, but in small pueblos where there was no electricity, the telegraph still functioned thanks to glass cylinders about fifteen inches tall and about six inches in diameter, which were filled with chunks of sulfur and water. A copper coil with two contacts would be placed in the top of the jar: one was for the water and the other for the copper coil, one positive and the other negative. The jars worked like Volta batteries and grouped together they provided the necessary voltage. Júbilo’s theory was that the vagina functioned in a similar way, it contained fluid and was of an adequate size to produce, upon entering into contact with the male member (which could be compared to a sophisticated
copper coil), a strong electrical current, just like a battery. The good, or bad, thing, depending upon how one looked at it, was that the battery only lasted a short while for Júbilo, and he regularly needed to plug himself back in to recharge his batteries. Lucha and he would rise early and make love, then Júbilo would go to work, send a few messages, and return to eat lunch. After eating, he would make love, then return to work. In the afternoon, he would transmit more messages, then go home again. In the evening, they would go out for a walk, have dinner, and before going to sleep they would make love again. Now that they were in Veracruz, the only variation in their routine was that they took time each day to go to the beach. But that was basically their entire life as newlyweds.

Though things had started to change a bit lately. That is not to say that the time between amorous interludes had grown longer, or that his wife’s pregnancy had interfered with their sex life. Yet Júbilo felt there was an interference that disturbed the exchange of energies between them. He didn’t know how to explain it, but he sensed that Lucha was hiding something from him. It was a thought she didn’t dare to express and that Júbilo was unable to read, but he could feel it in his veins. This is best explained if one takes into account that a thought is an electric current, and water is one of the best conductors of electricity. Since there is an abundance of this element pumping through our bloodstream, it wasn’t at all difficult for Júbilo to “feel” his wife’s thoughts during the
exchange of energies produced by their sexual intercourse. His wife’s womb was his energy receptacle, as well as his power company, and lately he had suffered a change in voltage. It made Júbilo despondent, but when he questioned Lucha about it, she denied anything was wrong. Since he didn’t have a device like a telegraph machine at hand to capture her hidden thoughts, he was forced to speculate about them. Of course, instead of guessing, he would have loved to be able to convert those electrical impulses into words. If only he could find a way to do that! If he could somehow invent a thought decoder. To his way of thinking, thoughts were entities that existed from the moment they originated in the mind; they consisted of waves of energy that traveled silently and invisibly through space until they were captured by some sort of receiving apparatus and converted into sounds, written words, or even images. Júbilo was convinced that some day an apparatus would be invented that would be able to convert the thoughts of others into images. There was nothing to prevent it. Meanwhile, he would have to keep using the only reliable receiving system he had at hand, which was himself. Maybe he only needed to fine-tune his perception a bit to capture the more subtle wavelengths, allowing him to expand his ability to communicate with the world around him.

Júbilo firmly believed that everything in the universe had a soul, that every single thing had feelings, thoughts—from the tiniest flower to the farthest galaxy. Everything had a particular way of vibrating and of
saying, “Here I am.” So it could be said that the stars talked, that they were capable of sending signals to indicate their most intimate thoughts. The ancient Mayans believed the stars were linked to the mind of the sun, and that if one managed to establish contact with the king of the stars, it was possible to perceive not only the sun’s thoughts, but also its desires. And Júbilo, as a worthy descendant of that wonderful race, liked to open his consciousness and widen his sensibilities to embrace the sun, the stars, and a galaxy or two, trying to find a signal, a message, a meaning, a pulsing vibration that would speak to him.

How sad it would be if no one received those impulses! If no one understood them! If the emitted signals wandered aimlessly through the darkness of time. There was no thought that could disturb Júbilo more than a message that finds no receiver. Being such a wonderful listener, and having been born with the ability to interpret any kind of communication, he would feel depressed when a message languished without a response, floating there in space, unnoticed. Like a caress that never touches skin, or a freshly fallen fig which is ignored, uneaten, and ends up rotting on the ground. There was nothing worse, thought Júbilo, than the idea of countless messages that never knocked on a door and just languished in space, disoriented, wandering, unclaimed. How many of these pulsating, invisible, inaudible presences were spinning around a person, a planet, or the sun? This simple thought filled Júbilo with
guilt. It made him miserable, as if it were his responsibility to receive messages for all those who couldn’t. He would have loved to tell everyone that he was able to perceive their signals, that he valued them and, most important, that they were not sent in vain. Over the years he found the best way to acknowledge the signals of others was by fulfilling their most intimate desires, by doing them an honest act of service.

Perhaps this sentiment was born one distant day when his grandmother took him into the jungle, to a secret place, a hidden Mayan stela still undiscovered by archaeologists. To the eyes of a small boy, it seemed like a colossal monument, difficult to take in at first. Just as great was its power of attraction. The hieroglyphics carved into the stone instilled a tremendous fascination in all those who gazed upon it. Doña Itzel and Júbilo studied it for a long time while the old woman smoked a cigarette. It was one she had fashioned herself, the tobacco wrapped in a corn husk. We’re talking about a whole leaf of the husk, so it was quite a cigarette and took doña Itzel a long time to finish. During this time, Júbilo concentrated on the hieroglyphics.

“What does it say,
abuela?
” he asked.

“I don’t know, child. Apparently, some very important dates are written on this stela, but no one has been able to interpret them.”

Young Júbilo was horrified. If the Mayans had bothered to spend so much time carving this stone to leave the dates inscribed on it, it was because they considered
them to be truly important. How was it possible that they had been forgotten? He just couldn’t believe it.

“But tell me,
abuela
, isn’t there anyone who knows the numbers?”

“That’s not the problem, Che’ehunche’eh Wich. We can read the numbers, what we don’t know is the corresponding dates on our calendar, because the Mayan calendar was different, and we’re missing the key that would allow us to interpret them.”

“And who has it?”

“No one, it was lost during the
conquista.
As I have told you, the Spaniards burned many, many codices, so there are many things we will never know about our ancestors.”

As doña Itzel took a long puff of her cigarette, a tear ran down young Júbilo’s cheek. He refused to believe that so much had been lost. It couldn’t be true. This stone slab spoke to him, and although he was unable to understand it, he was sure he could decipher its mystery, or at least he was going to try.

He spent days learning the Mayan number system, which is based on the number twenty and employs dots and lines for its written expression. Curiously, this training helped him, years later, when it came to learning Morse code. But at the time, he had no idea he was going to be a telegraph operator and his only concern was to find the hidden key that would allow him to decipher the Mayan dates. Nothing could have made doña Itzel happier. To see her grandson so completely absorbed in the culture of the ancient Mayans filled her with pride and
satisfaction. And more important, I think that was what allowed her to die in peace, since she realized that her legacy on earth was assured in a member of the family. She was now certain that Júbilo would not forget his Mayan roots. She died peacefully, smiling. And while Júbilo was saddened by her death, he could find some comfort in it too. His grandmother died at the right time, before modern development could scandalously overtake Progreso, her quiet pueblo. It was indeed ironic that his grandmother had lived in a town named Progreso, because although she was an active woman with liberal ideas, she in no way shared the urge for progress that was so common at the time. She accepted that women could smoke and fight for their rights, she even supported the 1916 movement to regulate abortion in the Yucatán. But she was adamantly opposed to the advent of the telegraph, the telephone, the train, and all other modern technological advances, which in her mind only caused people’s heads to fill with noise, made them live more frenetically, and distracted them from their true interests.

In some way, his grandmother saw all these advances as crude successors of the positivist thought that defined the
Científicos
, a group of misguided characters who had kept President Porfirio Díaz in power for many years. It was during Díaz’s dictatorship, in 1901, that the book
Mexico: Its Social Evolution
was published. Written by the positivist doctor Porfirio Parra, the book was a clear testimony of what the day’s most respected and refined authorities really thought about Mexicans. In a single
stroke, this book disowned Mexico’s Indian heritage, leaving it out of the story completely. Parra claimed that before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Indians only knew how to count up to twenty, and that their mathematical knowledge only extended to life’s bare necessities and was never used for scientific investigation. According to Parra, the origins of Mexican science lay in the facts imported by the conquistadores, not in any native knowledge. It was a history charged with racist undertones, not to mention ignorance, and it justified doña Itzel’s fear that all these recent technological advances would obscure the fight to break away from
Cientificismo
’s legacy and to return to true Mexican, Indian, values being mounted by great Mexicans, like José Vasconcelos, Antonio Caso, Diego Rivera, Martín Luis Guzmán, and Alfonso Reyes.

For doña Itzel, it was clear that the real question surrounding the issue of the train lay not in whether one would be able to reach his destination more quickly, but in why he would want to. The danger she saw was that technological advances served no purpose if they were not accompanied by an equivalent spiritual development. Even though they had gone through a revolution, Mexicans had not acquired any greater consciousness of who they were. And now, living even faster than before, how were they to connect with their past? When were they going to stop wanting to be what they weren’t?

His grandmother died without finding the answer to these questions, and Júbilo, though visibly affected by her
death for quite some time, never stopped trying to decipher the enigma of the hieroglyphics. His mathematical studies finally led him to the key to the Mayan calendar. All the wisdom achieved by the amazing Mayan astronomers was locked within thirteen numbers and twenty symbols. The Mayans were acutely aware of the skies that surrounded them and the movement of the planets. Not only could they predict eclipses with great precision, but they could also calculate Earth’s orbit around the sun with an accuracy to within a thousandth of a decimal point of the calculations of modern science. How could this be explained in a civilization that didn’t have modern instruments of measurement? That hadn’t even reached the point of discovering the use of the wheel as a means of transportation?

Júbilo arrived at the conclusion that it was because the Mayans were able to establish an intimate connection with the universe that surrounded them. They used the term
Kuxán Suum
to define the way we are connected with the galaxy.
Kuxán Suum
translates as “The Way to the Sky That Leads to the Universe’s Umbilical Cord”—a line that extends from the solar plexus of each man and passes through the sun until it reaches the
Hunab-Kú
, which translates as “The Beginning of Life Beyond the Sun.” For the Mayans, the universe was not separated or atomized. They believed that a subtle web of fibers maintained a constant connection between certain bodies. In other words, that the galaxy was integrated in a resonating matrix, within which the transmission of information
occurred instantaneously. And that any individual who had the necessary sensitivity to perceive the resonance of specific objects could connect with them and enjoy immediate access to all cosmic knowledge. He could perceive the resonance of objects. Of course, when the
Kuxán Suum
became obscured we could not connect with anything, since our own resonance was diminished, and although the sun could be right in front of us, it wouldn’t say anything to us.

It was very interesting to imagine the galaxy as a resonating box. To resonate means to echo. And to echo means to vibrate. The whole universe pulses, vibrates, echoes. Where? In objects equipped to receive energy waves. Júbilo discovered that pointed objects were more efficient for receiving energy than rounded objects. So the construction of pyramids by his ancestors, as well as the raising of telegraph posts by his contemporaries, seemed completely logical to him.