Destiny and Desire

  The professor’s three little boys came in and, dressed as pirates and shouting about boarding and blood, they climbed on his head, his shoulders, his chest, making him laugh, and as soon as he had affectionately freed himself, he made a final comment as he adjusted his jacket and tie.

  “Everything I tell you, Josué, about theory and laws does not matter if you do not observe life in our prisons up close.”

  He looked at me in a sly manner I hadn’t seen until then, for our relationship had always been as direct as the association of a student with his teacher can be. I believe Sanginés attempted to dim the gleam in his eyes without waking my suspicions by lowering his lids—which he naturally did when he thought—and remarking that among the classes in the jurisprudence curriculum, one was required as a course but elective as to subject: forensic practice. It was up to me to decide the field in which I wanted to do this practice. Commercial or civil suits. Divorces, evictions, estates, seizures, bankruptcies, mergers, land boundaries, jurisdictions, appraisals, all of this the professor enumerated without referring to the internationalist subject of his class and, eventually, anchoring in prison law.

  Did he sigh? Did he command?

  The fact is that, motivated by Don Antonio Sanginés, I requested and secured permission to do my class in forensic practice in prison.

  And not in any prison but in the most feared, most famous, but most unknown, visible in its strange name but invisible in its even gloomier (I supposed) interior. The grave of the living. The house of the dead, yes. The Mexican Siberia, a wasteland within a wasteland, a cave within another cave, a labyrinth with many entrances and no exit, an altar of consecrated blasphemies and profanations. The black hole. The metaphor of our life imprisoned in the womb at first, in a shroud at the last, in the deepest secrets of the domestic prison between tango and tomb. The prison built with the stones of the law. Hope, the prison of Zechariah. Liberation, the hope of Isaiah.

  And so, with these thoughts, I commenced the conclusion of my law studies at the Palacio Negro de San Juan de Aragón, built underground in the bed of the old Río del Consulado, beneath the footsteps of the urban crowd which, I never suspected, could be heard as one more torture in the depths of this prison of prisons.

  LA CHUCHITA APPROACHED and, with tears in her eyes, gave me her hand. In the other she carried a small mirror into which she looked from time to time with a mixture of serenity and alarm. Dress me, she said. I replied that she was already dressed. The girl cried out and began to pull off her clothing, I mean the long nightshirt of coarse homespun worn by all the girls imprisoned in the depths of San Juan de Aragón. I hate it, she screamed, tearing at her tangled hair flattened by grime, I hate seeing myself naked. You’re dressed, I said innocently. She leaped at me, trying to scratch me. They have to dress me, she screamed, they have to dress me. Then she bowed her head and withdrew while a blue boy, at her side, bent over the cement floor picking up something invisible, and a little farther on, another adolescent scratched incessantly at his back and complained of the pimples that itched, that burned, that never healed no matter how his bloodied nails scratched at dark skin.

  The girl Isaura had a fixed idea: the volcano Popocatépetl. I sat beside her for a while. She spoke of nothing else. She repeated the name of the mountain over and over again, smiling, savoring the syllables. Po-po-ca-té-pel. I corrected her. Po-po-ca-té-petl. The word was Nahua—I corrected myself, wanting her to understand me: Aztec. She repeated: Po-po-ca-té-pel. I insisted: té-petl. She looked at me with sustained, inexplicable fury, as if I had violated a secret chamber, a sacred corner of her existence. I would have preferred the girl to attack me physically. She merely observed me with a distance that wanted to wound me and the entire world, the world that had sent her here, the empty swimming pool of children imprisoned in San Juan de Aragón. What would I say to her? There was no open pathway between my presence and her release. When she walked away repeating Po-po-ca-té-pel, she no longer was looking at me.

  I wasn’t told the name of the next creature I approached. Its sex was indecipherable. It couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, but something had been engraved on its face. Indeterminacy, or rather, a gentle, undefined astonishment. Who was it? Alberto. A boy. No. Albertina. A girl. It looked at me with tears in its eyes.

  Another boy of about fifteen showed off a scar at his waist. I say “showed off” because he displayed it with a self-satisfied mixture of misfortune and valor, pointing at it with his index finger, look at me, touch me, just try …

  I was distracted by a boy with a very sad face. I didn’t dare ask him his name. He couldn’t have been more than eleven, but in his gaze an ancient guilt was revealed in small lines between his eyebrows, a grimacing mouth, the defiance suggested by very white teeth in a filthy mouth from which the remains of a tortilla and scrambled eggs were dangling. Like a flash of lightning, sadness transformed into aggression when he realized I was observing him.

  “Félix,” he shouted. “Felicity.”

  He threw himself at me. Only the intervention of a guard stopped the charge.

  Others were more eloquent. Ceferino told me he wasn’t guilty of anything. The crime lay in being abandoned. He was abandoned in a wretched neighborhood where not even the dogs could find anything to eat in the garbage dump. He wanted to eat a dog to see what it tasted like. It would have been better if he had eaten the parents who abandoned him in the neighborhood of the garbage dump. He looked for them. No way. Where did they go? The city is enormous. What did they leave behind? The tag on his overalls. The name of the store where they bought him overalls. There they told him where his papa and mama had gone. He walked an entire day from neighborhood to neighborhood, searching until he found them at a little stand on the Xalostoc road, there on the highway to Pachuca, that is, right on the fucking road. Papa, mama, I was going to say to them. It’s me, your son, Pérez. He realized as soon as he looked at them that they had abandoned him because the child was a burden, another mouth to feed, a hindrance, and now, in their small business, his papa and mama had forgotten him completely. They believed—he believed—that if they had prospered just a little it was because they didn’t have to feed a boy named Pérez. He looked at them, if not smiling then satisfied, self-satisfied. Not free of guilt. Just forgetful of everything that happened before they emigrated from the neighborhood and found a suitable way to survive. They were unaware of his existence. They didn’t know he was there, at the age of eleven, ready to attack them with an ice pick, stab out their eyes, leave them there screaming and bleeding, and end up in the prison for minors at San Juan de Aragón.

  Did they survive?

  I wish they had, so they would never see the world again and have to find another way to live, feeling themselves scorned, fucked, gone all to hell, assholes, sons of bitches.

  Merlín was a mentally deficient boy. Not completely, but sufficiently so. Shaved head, the mischievous gaze of a happy imbecile, his mouth hanging open, snot dripping; the jailer who accompanied me explained that this boy was part of the bands of idiots criminal gangs used to commit offenses. They placed bombs in cars. They were a distraction during criminal acts. They served as decoys. They acted as false abductees. The smartest ones were spies. Almost all of them were given to the gangs by their families in exchange for money, and sometimes just to get rid of the runty little bastards.

  Others, the amiable guard helping me to complete the course in forensic practice pointed out, had more talent but were born into the most absolute marginality, with lives close to those of dogs or pigs. Their only way out—he traced a wide arc with his arm and open hand—was crime or prostitution. He implied, to my amazement, that this black lake was in a way a place of seduction. Instead of a deadly fate, the kids who swarmed here, like phantoms, alone or arm in arm, all dressed in their sad caftans of coarse cloth, barefoot, scratching their shaved heads as if nits were their only consolation, picking at their companion’s navel, scratching their balls and th
eir armpits, blowing their nose with their hand, shitting and pissing at will, all together in the great underground cement pool in the obscene guts of the Federal District, all possessed a jailhouse destiny.

  That was implied in the jailer’s gaze, at once indifferent and obscure. Albertina said she had been kidnapped in a restaurant in Las Lomas, no less, when she went to the bathroom and disappeared while her parents looked for her and she, drugged, left the place in the arms of her kidnappers, except dressed as a boy, her curls cut off, her hair dyed black, and a pallor that did not leave her in the stupor of never knowing again who she was or who she had been, trained only to steal, to slip between security bars and end up behind prison bars, completely disoriented forever.

  What do you want us to do?

  I don’t know how to get dressed by myself! screamed La Chuchita.

  The boy with the scar on his back had been kidnapped in order to remove his kidney and sell it to the Gringos who require replacement organs. Thank your saints they didn’t take both of them, asshole. He dedicated himself to finding who kidnapped him, drugged him, and operated on him. Since he didn’t find them, he decided to cross the border and go from hospital to hospital destroying with a colorful cane from Apizaco the jars where other people’s kidneys were resting. Broken glass, spilled fluids, kidneys that the boy picked up, cooked, and ate, wrapped in tortillas, like great Gringo tacos devoured by a vengeful Mexican. He was expelled from California, contrary to the United States policy of detaining Mexicans, especially those suspected of not speaking English. Catarino—that was his name—turned out to be too dangerous, even behind the bars of Alcatraz: He was capable of eating them all, like Hannibal Lecter.

  Justice triumphed.

  “Do you know how to swim?” said the jailer, whose face I looked at for the first time, having been so attentive to the small juvenile hell in the cement swimming pool.

  He didn’t give me time to answer.

  Four streams of water came from the top of the sides of the tank-prison, splashing against the bodies and heads of the children and young people trapped in this pit, in the midst of shouting that was savage, happy, agonizing, surprising, under this downpour of rough, muddy liquids, channeled here from a dead river that emerged into life to subdue the children and young people who rapidly were floating, waving their arms, moving their heads, shouting, crying. The agitation of that small prison sea obliged me to swim, fully dressed, as the water rose, and I noted, in the confusion, that while some children swam, others, the smaller ones, it’s true, sank, were trapped, and drowned with a howl at once personal and collective.

  “This is how we force them to bathe,” said the guard.

  “And those who don’t know how to swim?”

  “This is how we control the excess penal population.”

  “What do you have to say about it?”

  “I say too bad for them.”

  “Are you a demographer, Señor?”

  Who offers up Mexico’s prayers at the foot of the altar to its children?

  DEAR SURVIVORS: I would be lying if I told you that the departure of my friend Jericó condemned me to irremediable solitude. I’ve mentioned that his absence coincided with the years of my university studies, culminating in the guardianship of Don Antonio Sanginés and my ghastly visit to the juvenile pit at San Juan de Aragón in the name of “forensic practice.”

  I haven’t lied. I’ve omitted. I should remedy the fault. In my spirit, I tried to associate the absence of Jericó with a willed, ideal solitude, which reality took care of proving false as soon as I said goodbye to my friend in the airport. I can deceive the living. Who among all of (or the few of) you can disprove what I’m recounting here? Everything I’ve said may be pure invention on my part. You, Señor, Señora, Señorita who read me, there is no proof I’m telling you the truth. There isn’t even proof I exist outside of these pages. You can believe me if I declare that my sex life, without the usual company of Jericó, was a desert without salt or even sand: an emptiness comparable to the children’s pit, so deep, desolate, and cruel, a Sahara of cement … Imagine, if you wish, that I looked for and found the nurse Elvira Ríos, that I became her lover even though she was married, that I didn’t become her lover because she was married, that she turned me down because she had sex only with the sick to console them, and I seemed as healthy as socialist realism in a poster from the Stalinist era whose pop art was on display, at the time, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. You can deny it if I tell you I went back to the brothel on Avenida Durango a few more times to fuck the whore with the veiled face and the bee on her buttock. The truth? A lie? I didn’t know her name. She was gone, she had left, “retired,” according to the chaste expression of the madam and whoremistress Doña Evarista Almonte, alias La Hetara.

  I could, then, deceive discreet readers and still ask them, as an act of faith in me, my life, my book, to believe that in the very act of saying goodbye to Jericó in Terminal One of the Mexico City Airport, in the midst of the infernal din characteristic of that elephantiastic building that extends in all directions, exits, entrances, cafés, restaurants, liquor stores, sarapes, trinkets, mariachi hats, books and magazines, pharmacies, silverware shops, sweets shops, sports shoes, baby clothes, and the life you live from day to day, like a lottery ticket, my country, admitting and expelling thousands of national and foreign tourists, the curious, pickpockets, cabdrivers, porters, police, customs officials, airline employees, in uniform, out of uniform, until in that enormous bowl of oats a second, simultaneously local and foreign city was formed, and I encountered an accident that changed my life.

  In an instant a clamor was added to the aforementioned din, which I’ll tell you about now. That’s what happens at the airport, everyone’s city: You think you’re there for one thing and it turns out you were there for something very different. You think you know the direction, the route of your destination within the belly of the aerial ogre, and suddenly the unexpected erupts without requesting permission. You think you have everything with you, and in an instant madness takes the place reserved for reason.

  The fact is I was walking calmly though sadly back to the Metro that would take me to my neighborhood, when a person fell into my arms. I don’t say man, I don’t say woman, because this individual was all leather—at least that’s what I felt as I embraced without wishing to the person whose face was hidden behind goggles—or rather, aviator glasses that came down from the leather helmet covering the head of the person who kicked, embraced me in order to escape the police who were holding her, and screamed so they would know her sex. A woman’s piercing voice shouted insults, called the police pricks, pigs, bums, dogs, half-breeds, brutes, sons of the original great whore, first among whores, Mother Evarista, Matildona in person (the name sounded familiar), bastards of all bastardom and of bastardly bastardhood, to make a long story short.

  I embraced her. The police had their hands on her back.

  “Let her go, please,” I said, carried away by an instinct for sympathy.

  “Do you know her?”

  “She’s my wife.”

  “Well, take better care of her, young man.”

  “Lock her up in La Castañeda,” said the oldest and most outdated of the policemen.

  “My colleague meant to say she’s crazy.”

  “What did she do?” I summoned the courage to ask while the woman clutched at me as if I were a pillar in a storm.

  “She wanted to take off in her own small plane on the runway reserved for the Er Franz flight.”

  Which was my friend Jericó’s flight to Paris.

  “What happened?”

  “We stopped her in time.”

  “We confiscated the plane.”

  “Aren’t you going to charge her?”

  “I’m telling you we confiscated the plane.”

  I’m not sure if the policeman winked when he said this. His eyes with no cornea, the eyes of an idol, did not move, his lips traced an unwanted complicity. I did no
t have enough money for a “taste,” and bribery repelled me morally though not philosophically. They made my life easier. All they wanted was to get rid of the woman, and the gods of the Aztec Subterranean, Airport stop, had sent me. I couldn’t imagine, as the Untouchables turned their backs on me, the fate of the requisitioned plane, the tribal division of spoils.

  “My name’s Lucha Zapata.”

  I embraced her and moved away through the crowd at the air marketplace. I exchanged glances with another woman walking behind a young porter who made gallant gestures, as if pushing a cart of luggage in an airport were the most glamorous piece of acting imaginable. I didn’t know why this modern, young, nimble, elegant woman who moved like a panther, like an animal restlessly tracking the porter, looked at me with such fleeting and intense interest.

  “My name’s Lucha Zapata,” my companion repeated. “Take me with you.”

  I stopped looking at the elegant girl. I was conquered by minimal solidarity.

  THE ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD of San Juan de Aragón, at least from Oceanía to Río Consulado, had been razed in a joint action of the City and the Federation in order to erect right there, in the heart of the capital and a few blocks from the lawless district of Ciudad Neza, the largest penitentiary in the republic. It was an act of defiance: The law would not go to distant wastelands where new prison cities with their own regulations are formed. It was a provocation: The law would be installed in the center of the center, within reach, so criminals would know once and for all that they are not a race apart but citizens of prison, with ears that hear the movement of traffic, with noses that smell the aroma of frying food, with hands that touch the walls of the nation’s ha-ha history, with feet a few meters from extinct rivers and the dead lagoon of México-Tenochtitlán.