She looked at me as I believe one kneels and really looks at the “Savior,” as she called me.
Did I want to know about her past? Like in the song, only if I got her what she needed, “Savior, I depend on you, I don’t want to go out on the street, I’m here with you but you have to give me what I need, please, Savior, help me recover the good and leave the bad behind, first I need relief, then I swear I’ll settle down, I’ll be good, I won’t hurt myself anymore, Savior, Salvador, go out and get me what I need and I swear I’ll reform, understand that I have two I’s like the cartoon El Señor Merengue, and the other I commands more than I do myself, what am I leaving behind? help me recover my soul, Savior, you know I’m good, don’t think I have a taste for what’s bad, don’t think I like what’s ugly, it’s in spite of myself, I want to be good, look, I want to have a baby with you, Savior, make me a baby right now so I’m redeemed …”
She fell asleep. I already knew her sleep was a foretaste of death. I went out to get what she wanted. I came back. I watched over her. I spent the night watching. At six in the morning, Lucha Zapata woke, looked at me in anguish from the bare mat, and I soothed the entreaty in her eyes right away, giving her the injection and the syringe, helping her tie up her arm, watching her travel from hell to heaven and fall back to sleep.
I came back that night. She was sitting in one of those little Mexican chairs with a straw seat and brightly colored back, like a little girl being punished. I smiled at her. She looked up. A venomous sky struggled between her lids. She hugged herself with contained violence.
“You want me to repent just to give you pleasure,” she spat at me. “You’re like everybody else.”
I caressed her head. She moved away contemptuously.
“You think you can control me?” She laughed. “Not even love controls me. Falling in love is submitting. I’m independent.”
“No,” I said without sadness. “You depend on drugs. You’re a poor slave, Lucha, don’t pretend to be independent. Don’t make me laugh. You make me sad.”
She let out an animal shout, the authentic howl of a wounded beast, arbitrary, arbitrary, she began to shout, you think habit can control, nothing controls me, where did you put my aviator helmet? only flying pacifies me, take me to the airport, give me a plane, let me fly like a free bird …
She stood and embraced me.
“Do it for your sweet mamacita.”
“I don’t know her.”
“Then for charity.”
“I don’t have any.”
“What do you have?”
“Love and compassion.”
“Have compassion for yourself, asshole.”
And the demon of consequences, what about him?
MY DISTINGUISHED READERS will say that going from Lucha Zapata’s house to the prison of Miguel Aparecido was like passing from one hell to another. Not at all. Compared to the house on Cerrada de Chimalpopoca, the San Juan de Aragón prison was barely a purgatory.
I had the pass Professor Sanginés had given me. I went from grating to grating until I reached Miguel Aparecido’s cell. The prisoner stood when he saw me. He didn’t smile, though in his face I saw an unusual amiability. We exchanged glances before I went into the cell. It was evident we wanted to please each other. What did he want from me? I, from him, wanted only more information for my thesis, though now that Sanginés had decided the topic—Machiavelli and the creation of the state—I wondered what the Florentine thinker had to do with the Mexican prisoner.
It didn’t take me long to find out.
Miguel Aparecido had a certain manner that really consisted of a series of digressions, intended perhaps to educate me. His strong, masculine figure, possessed of an aura of fatality together with an appearance of will, stood as he received me, his arms crossed and his sleeves rolled up, revealing arms covered with hair that was almost blond in the uncertain light of the cell, in contrast to the criminal’s Gypsy air, olive skin, and his eyes: blue-black with yellow flecks.
“He doesn’t want to leave prison,” Sanginés had told me. “The day he completed his first sentence and left, he immediately committed a crime so he could return.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea! I’m confused.”
“Are you his attorney, Maestro?” I asked with a certain audacity.
“He has given me instructions to save him from freedom.”
“Why?”
“Ask him.”
I did, and Miguel Aparecido gave me an obscure smile.
“So, kid, why do I like prison? I could tell you things like this. Because I’m free of appearances. Here inside I don’t have to pretend I’m what I’m not or that I’m what other people want me to be. Here I can laugh at all the conventions of courtesy, the how are things, how nice, at your disposal, at your service, let’s make a date to get together, how’s everybody at home, where are you going on vacation? how much did that beautiful watch cost? I’m not holding you up, am I?”
I laughed without wanting to and he became serious.
“Because I’m free of belonging to any class but especially the middle class we all aspire to. They want to be free, imagine. I want to be a prisoner.”
“There are many classes in the middle class,” I dared again. “Whom do you wish to be free of?”
He smiled. “Use tú with me or I’ll kick your ass right here.”
He said it in a savage tone. I didn’t let myself be intimidated. I don’t know what I had on my side. The assignment from Professor Sanginés. My differences with Jericó. The daily, fortifying trial of tending to Lucha Zapata. Or a recent confidence in my own superiority as a student, a free man, a citizen capable of confronting a recidivist criminal whose stake in the terrain of greatness was the decision to remain in prison. Forever? For how long?
Miguel Aparecido did not take long to return fire even before I could open the first document. He said I was very young but perhaps I hadn’t fully understood something. What? That youth consists of daring. Growing old means losing one’s audacity, he continued.
“What did you dare to do?” I asked, using tú, difficult with a person as forbidding as he was.
“I killed,” he said with simplicity, aplomb, and finality.
I didn’t dare to continue with a “why?” or a “whom?” which from the first had no answer. I concluded then and there that Miguel Aparecido left this question hanging because answering it meant knowing the fatality of the plot and I—who had just moved from usted to tú—had a right only to the prolegomena.
“Do you know what’s fucked up in prison?” he resumed. “Here you’re not anything anymore. First, you’re not anybody. You’re separated from the world. You have to invent another world and then make a new relationship for yourself with a world that matters only if you’ve created it yourself, you know, boy?”
“Licenciado,” I said with dignity.
He laughed. “Fine, Lic. You come here and first you ask yourself, who’s protecting me? After a while, after humiliations, blows, lies, unkept promises, solitudes, tortures, punches, moans and you can’t tell if they’re from taking a shit or jerking off, the arrogance of the guards, the sadism of the other prisoners, you learn to protect yourself. How?”
He took me by the shoulders. I was afraid. He did it only to move me over and stare right into my eyes, not accepting any evasion in my gaze. If my life ended with my being smacked by the undertow on a Guerrero beach, I should add that in this scene with the ill-tempered Miguel Aparecido, I truly began to drown far beyond any previous circumstance in my life.
“Are you imprisoned unjustly?” said the classicist in my heart.
He replied that in a certain way yes, but in the long run, not really.
He read the serious questioning in my face.
“I’m here because of a great injustice,” he said.
“But you’re still here because you want to be,” I added unemphatically.
He shook his head a little. “No. Because
of my will.”
“I don’t understand.”
He took a few steps in a circle. “First it makes you angry. You’re suffocating.”
He was timing his words to his turns around the cell, and these movements frightened me more than his words. He squared his jaw. His straight nose quivered.
“Then you’re stunned at being here and surviving the initial horror and your permanent impotence, asshole … I mean, Licenciado.” He smiled, looking at me. “Right after that you feel defeated, absolutely fallen into misfortune.”
He stopped and gave me a very ugly look.
“Finally you go back to anger, but this time in order to take your revenge.”
“On which people?” I said, about to fall into the trap of the Count of Monte Cristo.
“On which person, asshole, just one person. Only one.”
I looked at him expectantly. We both knew there were no premature answers and this would be the code of “honor” between us: Nothing before its time.
As I had thought of Edmond Dantés earlier, now I tended toward Doctor Mabuse, the prisoner who directs his crimes from a Berlin cell. Is there anything new in these prison stories? Looking at Miguel Aparecido, I told myself there was. The plots resemble one another because they are part of the same destiny: lost freedom. In prison, more than anywhere else, we realize there is no freedom because we live day by day, because our goals are futile, fragile, and in the end unattainable, because death takes responsibility for canceling our contract and when we’re dead we’re not aware of what has survived us, what has perished with us, and, at times, before us. It’s enough to walk down a busy street and attempt, in vain, to give transcendence to the lives passing by on their way to death, anticipating it, trying to deny it, all subject to disappearing into a vast, collective anonymity. Except the musician, the writer, the artist, the philosopher, the architect? Even them, how long will they endure? Who, recognized today, will be unknown tomorrow? Who, ignored today, will be discovered tomorrow? Few political and military figures survive. Who was Elizabeth I’s chamberlain when Shakespeare was writing, who the North American secretary of state at the time of the obscure sailor and scrivener Herman Melville, who the secretary general of the National Peasant Union when Juan Rulfo wrote Pedro Páramo? Eheu, eheu: transient, I learned in the famous class on Roman law: transience is our destiny but freedom is our ambition, and it will take us a long time—I understood this in a flash looking at the prisoner—to comprehend that the only freedom is the struggle for freedom.
Then why did this man refuse to be free, perpetuate his prison, and almost boast of being a prisoner? It was enough for me to look at him to understand that Miguel Aparecido did not deliver his truths just like that. It was enough to see how he looked at me to know I needed to respond with patience to his mystery, and this pawned a portion of my future and my own freedom to the life of this strange individual who finally, once the time periods imposed by life imprisonment were understood, told me something concrete and asked me for something explicit.
“You leave here for only three reasons. Because you die. Because you complete your sentence. Or because you escape.”
If I looked at him in a questioning way, it was unintentional.
“And again, you escape only if you don’t die, or because you’re a badass for running away, or because you have powerful connections,” he continued. “Yesterday a convict left here only because of his connections. And that makes me very angry.”
I believe that if the Devil exists, at that moment Miguel Aparecido appeared to me as Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, the Prince of Darkness enveloped in the shadows of an immense history of accumulated vengeances, violent desires, delayed wishes, arbitrary destinies, and nights without light.
“The man and the woman who freed him unjustly must be punished.”
I still don’t know how I survived that morning in the diabolical presence of Miguel Aparecido.
“Find your friend Errol Esparza. Tell him he ought to take his revenge.”
The order resounded for me in the vast hollowness of prison silences.
“He ought to take his revenge.”
“On whom?”
“The man is Nazario Esparza. The woman is Sara Pérez, Sarape, she used to be a whore in La Hetara’s house.”
—
THE VENDETTA ORDERED by Miguel Aparecido was postponed because of other pressing matters. Sanginés sent Jericó to Los Pinos as a young aide in the presidential office. And me he directed to collaborate in the management of the powerful Max Monroy’s enterprises, out toward Santa Fe, in a new border area of a troglodytic Mexico City.
The distances between remote neighborhoods of the capital can involve as much as two hours of travel. The distance from the apartment on Praga to Cerrada de Chimalpopoca and now to my unexpected destination of Santa Fe was the same as the distance from Rotterdam to The Hague and from The Hague to Amsterdam, without taking into account my visits to San Juan de Aragón prison.
What could I do? My bewilderment suggested a way out: another visit to the señora buried in the nameless grave, whose location I did not know, to ask her for advice. The dead don’t have schedules. Unless eternity is the clock without hands where time melts.
I said these words to myself as I walked along Paseo de la Reforma, hesitant about my destination or destinations, when the sky darkened, the angel flew down from the top of the Columna de la Independencia, grasped me by the collar, rose up with a howl or sob or sigh—all at the same time—and taunted me as he asked, breaking my concentration:
“Do you know the sex of angels?”
I wanted to reply they have none, that’s why they can be angels, except that the creature carrying me through the air silenced my words and spoke to me in a man’s voice, and I recognized that voice, it belonged to my old friend Ezekiel, the prophet enveloped in a turbulent wind that flew me over castles and skyscrapers, magnificent slopes and bare hills, neighborhoods of mud and gardens of roses, stating his recommendations as we flew: be on your guard, don’t fear them, speak to them even though they don’t listen, fast, inform them a prophet will come among them, tell them to listen to the voices of the multitude, and I heard a great laugh when the prophet Ezekiel, who was also, in his free time and when he had a yen for transvestism, the Angel of Independence, let me go, and I saw that one of his feet gleamed but it was a calf’s foot.
The storm steered my fall. A sudden ground blocked it. Green foliage softened it.
I fell on my face.
In front of me, once again the grave of
ANTIGUA CONCEPCIÓN
And the familiar voice:
Walk around my grave three times, Josué. Thank you for coming alone. We live in a guarded world. Nobody moves without a bodyguard. They say it’s for security. Pure potatoes. It’s pure fear. We live in fear. We tighten our asshole, to put it politely.
Her sigh made the earth tremble.
Not you, she continued. You’re not afraid. That’s why you come to see me alone. I’m grateful. Alone with your soul. Because even though you don’t believe it, you have a soul, my boy. Take care of it. Don’t trade it for a plate of lentils or bean soup.
“Señora,” I said, “I’m going to work in the office of Max Monroy. Your son, Señora …”
I know that.
“Who told you?”
The earth trembles. It’s her way of speaking. I receive messages each time it trembles.
“Ah!”
I suppressed my own astonishment and quickly added:
“What kinds of messages, Señora?”
That you’re going to enter a new world, silly. Before, in the world I knew, it was the president of the republic who dispensed justice, listened to complaints, and received petitions, the old king! Once I came with my complaints and petitions to President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, the last president. He didn’t even look at me. All he said was: Don’t bother me. Then, I answered, don’t be president. He looked up and in his eyes drunk wi
th the sun I saw what power was: a tiger’s gaze that made you lower your eyes and feel fear and shame.
I believe at that moment the earth where the señora was buried was the enormous eye of a hurricane.
She must have read my mind.
Don’t be an asshole, she said with the arrogant vulgarity I was already familiar with. If you’re going to work with my son, be careful. Max Monroy is my heir. He’s another breed of creature. Mine. Earlier millionaires are beggars beside Max Monroy. Look, I knew them all. They became rich thanks to the revolution, which raised them up from nothing, opening opportunities for them that had once been denied to those at the bottom. Federico Robles fought in Celaya with Obregón against Villa, and from then on One-arm pampered him, directing him into politics, and when politics became dangerous or stopped producing, he guided him into business, which was then virgin territory, or as Robles himself said—a strong but sentimental man who decided to build on desolate battlefields, and even to stain his conscience—one had to sacrifice ideals to build a country, to feel that one had a right to everything for having made the revolution, established the foundations of capitalism, created a stable middle class, and invented true Mexican power, which “consists,” Federico Robles would say, “of nothing but grabbing the country by the back of the neck” and being “one big badass,” and that same man, she declares, was capable of portraying a woman he loved, respecting her, loving her without raising her up or sinking her, offering her a sweet brutality, the strength that a woman—she, Hortensia Chacón—needed in order to love and deserve her life. This I know. Or the case of Artemio Cruz, another millionaire who came from nothing, from a miserable hovel, and made a fortune changing sides, moving at just the right time from one faction to another, betraying thousands to take over a newspaper and dedicate himself to making a fortune by serving the powerful man on duty at the time … who was, when all was said and done, himself, Artemio Cruz and no one else …
Another seismic sigh.